Dispatches from the Race War Podcast

In this commentary, I discuss both the long and absurd history of white victimhood (reverse discrimination) claims, which stretch back to 1866, as well as the real source of all that white anxiety. While, obviously, for many, these claims are just a bad-faith way to hijack the push for equality and maintain existing advantages, for others, they also demonstrate what happens when one’s privilege insulates you from having to think about your identity, and then—thanks to social, demographic, or cultural changes, or perhaps even the mildest diversity efforts at work or school—you are forced to think about these matters for the first time. Rather than seeing such change or new information as enriching or mind-expanding, it is experienced as a threat, an attack, against one’s very identity. When race becomes salient, those for whom it has always been largely a silent signifier (at least for themselves) feel exposed, threatened, and become likely to lash out. This, combined with the status threat posed, ostensibly, by progress made by people of color, then generates notions of victimization, much of which we are seeing now.

In addition to the historical and analytical discussion, I briefly discuss two cases in which I was involved (one ongoing) as an expert witness for institutions being sued by white employees claiming they were victims of hostile environments due to DEI efforts. These cases demonstrate how easy it is for people who have in no way been victims to see themselves as such, due to their prior privileged status insulating them from the real world, from conversations about these issues, and from engagement with racial diversity in their workplaces.

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Christa Pike, whom the state of Tennessee tried twice to kill last week, is now conscious and speaking, which begs the question as to what will happen next. The horrific botched execution presents us with an opportunity to reflect not merely on her case and the cruel and unusual nature of trying twice — and now perhaps a third time to lethally inject a condemned prisoner — but on the larger question of what we are trying to prove with capital punishment. Is it how much we respect life? Because surely all we really teach with the death penalty is that life is disposable: ironically, the very same mentality that animated Pike’s own thinking on the day she committed the murder for which she was sent to death row in the first place. For the state to ratify that mentality is hardly the best bet for public safety.

At a rally political circle jerk yesterday, Donald Trump joked that Iran could take out Los Angeles or San Diego and that would be fine — a small price to pay for peace. In doing so, he committed treason by giving aid and comfort to the enemy (seeing as how he launched a war against Iran, thereby making them such, at least in his mind and for the moment…

In the last few days, several voices, including some among progressive commentators, have voiced concern about the “online mobs” exposing the Cornell 7 and subjecting them to doxing, loss of jobs, and various forms of harassment, given the fact that they are “innocent until proven guilty.” In this commentary, I note the odd hypocrisy of this argument, given how quickly many of these same voices presume guilt in other cases involving other alleged offenders (bankers, corporate executives accused of financial wrongdoing, etc.), and then discuss the difference between a legal standard of proof and a discussion about what we already know. And what we know is that:

* The men engaged in dehumanizing, objectifying language about Jane Doe

* Other men in the Snapchat said nothing and did nothing to object

* There was some form of sexual contact with a woman who was clearly intoxicated

* Clearly intoxicated people are incapable of truly consenting to sexual activity

* Thus, the men who engaged in that contact — whether or not their actions rise to the level of criminal sexual assault under New York law (the issue for which a presumption of innocence applies) — are horrible human beings who sexually abused another human being.

* People like that deserve to be exposed.

Due process doesn’t protect them from our judgment about their behavior as people.

Let them suffer.

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In this commentary, I explore a recent podcast episode of Rufo and Lomez — the podcast of the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo and reactionary troll, Jonathan Keeperman — in which they defend the racist tweet of Texas political candidate Bo French, which bashed South Asian students at the University of Texas. Rufo and Keeperman suggested that, however impolitic French may have been, ultimately his statement wasn’t bigoted but merely indicated a normal, healthy preference for a “high-trust” homogeneous society, which immigration, especially of Indians, makes impossible. Keeperman suggests all Indians should be expelled from the country unless they fully assimilate to American norms (which he leaves undefined), and that to ensure their assimilation they should be subjected to vicious racist hazing rituals in order to force Indian habits out of them. Only then can they stay.

I explain the absurdity of the claim that homogeneity is a normal or natural instinct, or that America has ever been a homogeneous society in the first place; then note the ridiculousness of the notion that the UT students were unassimilated, given their presence at a football game, wearing cowboy hats in Texas — perhaps the most American and Texan thing one could possibly do. I then ask which other groups would fail Keeperman and Rufo’s assimilation test and why they don’t call for those groups to also be expelled (like Orthodox Jews), though I think I know why (hint: they just hate brown people, and they don’t have the political guts, frankly)

In the wake of the rape allegations involving the Cornell 7, lots of men on social media have been attempting to thread the needle between condemning the alleged rapists and still blaming the alleged victim for her supposed “irresponsibility” (going to a frat house, getting drunk, and doing drugs). They appear to believe that this “two things can both b…

In this commentary, I discuss the case of the seven men accused of rape at Cornell, and the men currently defending them on social media by blaming the alleged victim for going to their fraternity house and getting drunk. As I explain, aside from how generally disgusting it is to rationalize the behavior we have proof of, even before the case is adjudicated, the fact is that sex with a clearly intoxicated person is the very definition of non-consensual sexual activity, in any honest assessment. And by defending men who engage in such behavior, especially by blaming the woman for getting drunk at their frat house, since, after all, “what did she expect would happen?” they are basically making the case that, indeed, all men are, at their core, rapists. After all, if no men could possibly resist raping a drunk woman in that situation, then all men are essentially rapists just waiting for the right opportunity. No wonder women choose the bear, in other words.

Wilber Garces Perez, the DoorDash driver recently shot by an ICE agent in Austin, Texas, has now been charged with assault for ostensibly clipping the agent with the sideview mirror on his vehicle. There is, of course, no video or eyewitness evidence of this, and much contrary evidence to suggest it did not happen, as Garces was shot from behind. Garces now faces 20 years in prison because ICE agents are not only brutal thugs but also liars—all of them. As I explain in this commentary, we should presume that all cops, not just ICE, are lying when they shoot civilians, unless there is video evidence or non-cop eyewitness testimony that exculpates them. Simply put, cops have no incentive to ever tell the truth if a shooting is bad, and every incentive to lie. Even if individual police officers are decent individuals, if they screw up, they will seek to cover their asses, and this means lying to justify a bad shooting. In the court of public opinion, they should always be assumed to be liars first, until proved otherwise.

In this commentary, I offer a two-part thought experiment (two separate scenarios, actually) to test the hypothesis that many (probably most) white folks don’t actually think Black life is equal to white life. Unless one is willing to endorse the notion that enslaved persons had the absolute moral right to kill their enslavers and their entire families …

Right-wingers are mad because, in her recent re-election campaign ad, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders chose to laud her welfare reform legislation by portraying a prototypical welfare cheat as a white male and not the Black female they believe to be far more typical of such persons—as Matt Walsh put it, someone named Shaniqua.

In this commentary, I discuss the real problem with the ad: not the racial choice made for the spot, but the whole idea that welfare fraud, either for cash benefits or Medicaid benefits, is a significant problem to begin with. As I note, in 2025, only 484 adults in Arkansas received cash aid. As for Medicaid, benefits are paid to providers, not recipients, so it’s not as if people sit around on the sofa hoping to get sick so they can get all that free care. Without publicly financed care, they would simply do without. It’s not as if Medicaid actually put more money in their pockets.

The entire ad controversy just shows how America loves to scapegoat and bash poor people and disabled people (a large chunk of the Medicaid recipient community) even when it doesn’t specifically racialize them, and how dishonesty in the name of ginning up this kind of voter resentment is still a common trope in American politics.