Tuesday open thread: White supremacy is a hell of a drug
Although I'm not commenting much on Bluesky, in an effort to not completely lose my shpadoinkle, I do pop on to promote this blog and to briefly scroll to get ideas for new pieces. And this post was on my timeline:
Well, Mr. Guttenberg, it's quite simple. As a friend of mine on that platform says with regularity, people voted "white instead of right". Republican voters, the vast majority of them white, would rather that the United States become a backwater as long as they can live in a white supremacist dictatorship. The non-whites who voted for this are mostly white-adjacent, and thought they would not be impacted by this regime. (I'm staring daggers into the backs of my fellow Latin men.)Listening to the pussy grabbing EPSTEIN accomplice wife cheater during this press conference has me questioning how in the world America voted this sewer dwelling dipshit into office & how America seems incapable of putting a stop to his destruction of our Democracy and economy.
— Fred Guttenberg (@fredguttenberg.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 8:41 AM
And I hold this view equally for the ankle-biters on the left who vote for "revolution", who are mostly white, granola-munching motherfuckers and despite their revolutionary zeal know that they'll survive because of their skin color.
All our other ills—misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, and so on—stem from this. As Lee Atwater said, after the 1960s you couldn't say "N-word, n-word, n-word." It was gauche. So you changed the language. You talked about "school bussing", you talked about women's liberation, you talked about gay rights, you talked about immigration. But make no mistake: All of those issues had their genesis in the right's decision to use the white backlash against Black civil rights to win power. And now on the white left you have people like Bernie Sanders saying that Democrats should eschew "identity politics". Because obviously being white is no such thing; it just is. It's normal and rational. Those of us who assert our non-white, non-heterosexual identities are the ones preventing the glorious revolution.
You cannot solve a problem until you name it. And right now white America has cotton in its ears and is loudly singing off-key to avoid acknowledging the elephant in the room. We're in the state we are because of white America. Periodt. If even 5% of the GOP electorate had a come-to-Jesus moment and realized their terrible error, the Republican Party would disappear. But at this moment I don't see that happening. Yes, things are bad and getting worse. But the graphic heading this piece still obtains.
That people in the so-called "resistance" insist on blaming anyone but the voters who put us in this mess is telling. Again, until you name the problem, you cannot solve it. This pertains across the political spectrum. Blaming the Democratic Party for white racism is not naming the problem. It's a deflection. This country did not "de-Nazify" the Confederate stain, because those from the North who supposedly fought to free the Black slaves had racial attitudes not much different from their cousins in the South. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act, there was an attempt to finally deal with these blinkered views; but men like Atwater knew that was a fool's errand, and swooped in to take advantage of that racial animus.
Why does America seem incapable of putting a stop to this? Because this state of affairs still has no impact on the majority of white America. Unless and until that happens, we will continue on this ridiculous and deadly merry-go-round.