The Censorship Grievance Industrial Complex: Part 1 - The Conservative Media Paradox

S Peter Davis

Sep 28, 2024 — 10 min read

All right, so Matt Walsh has another deplatformed documentary out that you’re not allowed to see.

This one is in cinemas, too, so it’s even more widely unavailable than his previous film, What Is a Woman?, which was so blacklisted that Elon Musk, the new owner/operator of Twitter, did a little trickery to force it into every user’s feed which resulted in Walsh eagerly counting it as one of the most viewed films in human history because logging into Twitter at any point during that time counted as a view of the entire film even if it was for less than one second.

Still, if you haven’t heard of Am I Racist?, the second movie Walsh titles with a question he already knows the answer to, it’s because Walsh is being censored in a different way – the mainstream press isn’t going out and seeing the movie and reviewing it. Ergo, the mainstream media is afraid of the truth and is trying to bury the film.

Now, Matt Walsh is being kind of disingenuous here as he is about most things, because the essence of his philosophy and that of his allies is that lying in the service of winning is always justified because people who disagree with him are ontologically evil and you can’t sin against evil. He doesn’t really care if liberals or critics or serious people don’t see his movie because they’re not the target audience. People who already agree with Walsh’s premise and conclusions won’t even pay much attention to the movie but they will go out and buy 12 tickets each for it.

This is because Walsh has a hack for being profitable that takes less effort than being rigorous or correct or even convincing, and that is being, ostensibly, censored.

Being censored in the modern day is a complex and contentious concept, ophanimous Venn diagrams of wheels within wheels featuring those who either do or do not know what censorship actually means, those who embrace it, and those who want to stamp it out. Some people say or maybe even think they want to stamp it out but don’t because it’s crucial to their business model.

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