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Viral ‘Last Breath Of The Confederacy’ Speech Puts Louisiana Man On Political Map
(www.huffpost.com)
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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Maybe if we stop inventing terms for literally everything a white man could ever say or do and then turning it into yet another reason to manufacture outrage, then we'll stop pushing vast swathes of every generation of young adults into echo chambers where they get radicalized into these hateful extremist camps.
Don't get me wrong, I hate maga, fascists, white supremacy, and evangelical nationalism. If you read this as a defense of those camps then you're missing my point entirely.
I'm just saying that I might easily be labeled as an "angry white man" if I'm ever forced into a situation where I have to choose between standing up for myself or rolling over and taking it in the ass. And then once you get that label, suddenly no progressive people will be your friend, so it's not surprising that so many impressionable and dejected young people wind up in toxic right-wing spaces.
I'll admit, it gets fucking frustrating. There's always a word for whatever it is, whether it's "performative," or "white saviorism," or "virtue signaling" whenever you're trying to do something good; "mansplaining" whenever you're passionate about something, "fragility" whenever you get upset and let it show, etc.
Like, I get it, other demographics have it bad and in many cases worse. But nobody else has to put up with this particular type of shit. I'm pretty progressive and I despise machismo culture, so I try to let that stuff roll off my back, and I'll never personally wind up in right-wing spaces. But man it gets fucking lonely when literally no one will respect you or even permit you to insist on having basic self-respect, except in the only places where you're accepted (at least until you make it known that you're a socialist), where you refuse to hang out anyway because they're primarily full of toxic right-wing white men who only think you're "a good ole boy" because you look like them.
Fuck maga. Fuck fascism. Fuck white supremacy, and fuck evangelical nationalism.
But also, fuck broad generalizations that lump everyone of a certain demographic into one category based on immutable characteristics.
White America has never truly come to terms with its legacy of slavery and genocide, which left a deep and lasting scar on the psyche of the nation. Those on the “left” at least recognize that those crimes were perpetrated, and that they benefit from them today to the continued detriment of the victims. But broadly speaking, most are unwilling or unable to actually do the work of integrating that trauma and overcoming it.
So instead they react with purity tests, identity politics, and performative displays of White Guilt.
I honestly don’t know how our society can move past this, but until we actually engage with our legacy with serious intention of healing the wound, well-intentioned people will continue to act like total idiots who think they are gatekeepers of the Truth.
Obviously some people can see through this, but since most of them are socialists, their voices get ignored in favor of the propaganda that the slavers and genociders of the world have been pumping out for centuries.
This is such a vague thing to say though. What does "do the work" actually mean? Because back in 2020 during BLM and all that I tried reading up on all the stuff that I was supposed to know, tried to do everything that they said I was supposed to do to pass their "not-racist" test. And guess what? They still called me racist! Even sometimes for saying or doing the exact things that they said anti-racists are supposed to do.
Why? Because I'm white. That's literally the reason they would give every time, and if I tried to dispute it they would just double down and say that if I wasn't racist then I wouldn't have to say I'm not racist. So apparently the only way to avoid being called racist was to avoid interacting with black people at all (which is what I thought would be actually racist, but I'm just a white guy so what do I know?).
So if my whiteness is this inescapable thing where any time I encounter a non-white person they're going to assume I'm racist unless I somehow do enough performative gestures to convince them that I'm not racist, then 1). I'd basically be trying to be accepted as "one of the good ones", 2) I'd be living the rest of my life that way because there are always new strangers that I'd have to prove myself to, 3). No one deserves to live with that level of self-degradation just for the way they were born, and 4). That would all be performative anyway, so in the end it would still be called racist!
So it's really not surprising that people stopped fucking caring. What the fuck else did you expect them to do? Even the well-intentioned people who wanted to do the right thing weren't given any legitimate options for how to fulfill this apparent obligation we supposedly have. It was a wild goose chase, and apparently people caught on and stopped playing.
What other option was there? Literally, it was basically being demanded that we do exactly those things and nothing else. But even when we did our best to do those things, we could never outrun this idea that "you white, that means you racist." (A literal quote that has been directed at me).
And even mentioning the issues or frustrations we were facing was met with indignation. There was no room for nuanced or well-reasoned discussions. No opportunity to raise legitimate concerns. We weren't even allowed to have basic self-respect, or to expect basic consideration from others. Why? Because we were white. And how is that not racism?
Like, I get it, racial divides need to be mended and disparities need to be addressed. But using every well-intentioned white person as a punching bag just because they let you walk on them so they don't seem fragile is not the way to do it.
🙄
That's a lot of words to say "I'm still WAY more committed to seeing myself as 'good' than to spending more than ten seconds examining how whiteness shapes my thinking."