Cover photo by James McNellis

The demise of Elizabeth Warren should have been a wake-up call. While not the most formally leftist candidate—that distinction goes to Bernie Sanders—Elizabeth Warren was the most “woke”: the campaigner who couldn’t say the word “woman” without “trans and cis” qualifiers; who told a 9-year old that they could veto her choice for the Secretary of Education; who insistently employed the academic-progressive term Latinx despite some hostility to the word in the actual Hispanic community; who constantly stated her obvious pronouns and offered all the other superficial tributes to the woke gods.

When the campaign was suspended and the curtain raised, it turned out that all that pandering did little to excite actual minorities. Elizabeth Warren’s support was almost entirely white. She was the first choice of white college graduates and Democrats with postgraduate degrees—the same demographic who, in another era, filled the ranks of the spirited “white saviors.”

As it turns out, “wokeness” is often parallel to education, class, and yes, whiteness. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign was emblematic of the “white left,” who have a “different electoral lens” than the electorate they claim to represent. As The Economist reveals: “whereas white progressives have moved to the left, non-whites remain moderate, skeptical and often conservative—especially on the sexual-liberty issues that energizes the left.”

“Wokeness”—the language that kids leave their hometowns and go into debt attending private universities to learn—and its attendant values of sexual liberty, agnosticism, renunciation of tradition, and deconstruction of gender isn’t indicative of many original cultures’ actual values towards sex, gender, God, and family. Removing political context, contemporary Asian, African, Muslim, Hispanic, and other immigrant cultures skew conservative.

This irony can beget the appalling sight of white radicals, on behalf of “ending white supremacy,” attempting to silence people of color who defend traditional values. For example, white leftists seeking to cancel Kanye West or Dave Chappelle—men who, by most measures, have lived their lives in service of minorities. In the 2020 primary, Beto O’ Rouke—an affluent white man who “failed upward” his whole life—declared he would revoke tax-exempt status for religious institutions that prohibited same-sex marriage. In practice, would financially ruin Orthodox Jewish synagogues, Islamic mosques, and African-American churches. But, as they say, progress is messy.

Before I continue, I want to clarify that I’m not speaking about white liberals: the concerned suburban mom, the staunch unionist, the learned barista who detests Trump and dislikes political correctness. Nor do I mean the fervent Democratic Socialists who eschew racial politics in favor of class solidarity.

This essay is about the worst of the white leftists: “the punishers.” These people are not hard to find—you can spot them like vultures flocking to social media wokestorms, click and cringe at their Twitter bios, scroll down and see the expulsion of the bitter pills they’ve swallowed. I am talking about the angry white man with the “itchy cancelling finger”; the vindictive white woman who Tweeted a rape article about Kobe Bryant while his and his daughter’s bodies were still smoldering; the “pronoun enforcer” who celebrates the interminable suffering of Jordan Peterson and his family; the humorless turd who tries to stop Asian people from making Asian jokes.

Social media is like a boysenberry bush to these whites. Twitter gives them a place to prove that they’re an ally—that they, in fact, love Lizzo, hate Trump, and agree that some Jewish conservative is a literal Nazi. Social media is a hermetic hamster wheel; it is the perfect instrument to enact modern “white saviorism”; to look good instead of do good.

Not to say that white people shouldn’t be interested in ending racism or promoting social justice. Malcolm X, at the end of his autobiography, urged whites to educate other whites on prejudice. Perhaps he meant in their kitchens, their taverns, and their cars—in the private, white-only spaces where meaningful conversations might happen.

But social media gives a similar psychological effect to being on camera, causing people to act inauthentically and over-the-top, as if on a reality show. For whites who constantly perform wokeness online, I suspect that they are less animated by their support of minority values than they are by white guilt. Their unsolicited rejoinders are a way to redirect the spotlight—to show they’re one of the “good whites.” In short, their intentions are more about them and less about us.