Oh dear, such a dramatic title. But this white psychodrama is very real. Today I’m going to share with you my theory about why white people—specifically white liberals—are so ‘effing crazy. Thanks to them, midwifery organizations can no longer talk about delivering babies out of the vaginas of “women” or “mothers,” but must talk about “birthing parents.” Beating up women in the street has apparently become acceptible, too, so long as the beaten women have “incorrect” politics (here are three separate recent examples). Public libraries now even display weapons intended explicitly to be used to beat women as “art.” So long as the women clubbed by these weapons hold political views that are “incorrect,” apparently it’s all a-ok.

This is the story of how it is that left-liberals came to create a weird, authoritarian cult around ideas of “social justice,” which they now use to run actual brown and black people out of their movements and generally harrass each other and the rest of the world.

It all has to do with how white people as a group subjectively experienced the civil rights and feminist movements. The gains made on behalf of women and black people in the 20th century were ruptures not just in American history, but among white people as a group. They passed down their collective emotional memory of it to their children and, spoiler alert, this memory—like all memories, really—is subjective & twisted as fuck.

The first thing you need to know about white people is that they were born and raised into a culturally authoritarian society. This cultural authoritarianism holds that hierarchies are necessary and good, and that fulfilling one’s proper role inside of them is normal and natural. Cultural authoritarianism is simply one of the building blocks of western culture, passed down through centuries of hierarchical Judeo-Christian religion, patriarchal values, Greco-Roman philosophical and political culture, and the demands of industrial capitalism.

Hm. What a strange, gross brew.

The important thing to know is that, because they were raised in an authoritarian culture, white people as a group experience everything through the same lens: one of domination and submission. This lens caused white people to experience the women’s and civil rights movements as the meting out (from above) of dictates which they were compelled to carry out and follow (from below). This is the authoritarian dynamic, no matter the context. Domination. Submission.

When one is raised in an authoritarian culture, the authoritarian dynamic is layered over every interaction, no matter the context. This dynamic of dominance and submission can be “right” (God), it can be “sexy” (BDSM), it can be “necessary” (parenting), it can be heroic (war), and it can even be “natural” (base Darwinism / Machiavellianism). For the average white person, who may or may not dream of someday becoming an authority figure, life is nothing but endless power struggles, endless dominating and submitting within hierarchies of power, in everything and everywhere.

Thus is the emotional life of the authoritarian footsoldier.

The key point is that white people as a class experienced the civil rights and women’s liberation movements as wars over who gets to dominate and who has to submit. They did not experience them as about some transformation in their own hearts and minds.

Because change did in fact occur (women and blacks did gain civil rights), the story white people tell themselves tends to gloss over the uncomfortable middle bits and jump to the end, you know, the part where white people aren’t enslaving and oppressing people legally. The fact that it took civil war, mass protests, hunger strikes, prison sentences, court battles, and forced desegregation to make that happen is usually glossed over.

In their group memory, white people’s submission was not only fairly quick but, more importantly, an actually skilled application of a new set of complex rules. And, like good footsoldiers in a culturally authoritarian context, that means they did what they were told. They submitted to new rules and regulations. They did the right things and they did them “correctly.” They produced correct behavior. And so emotionally they feel like, hey don’t we deserve some credit for all that?



White people believed we were asking them to do something familiar and bearable, that is to dominate and/or submit, but we were actually asking them to do something deeply just, with spiritual engagement and creativity. Sadly, that bit went right over their heads. Instead of doing what was right because it was right, they submitted to the authority of America/God/USA. In the process they buried many truths about why and how this change occurred, in order to install the new narrative that America had always been on the side of rights for all.

Again, the glossing-over here is gargantuan—ignore those dead soldiers, piles of lynched bodies, and changes to the constitution behind the curtain!

As black scholars have shown, the narrative mechanism that allows this fever-dream of a glossing-over is the idea that the women’s and civil rights movements were really just the fulfillment of the already-existing “goodness” of our country. In this view, Martin Luther King’s work was not visionary, a radical departure from the status quo, but actually a conservative force. What happened during civil rights was just our country’s founding ideas of liberty and democracy, that were always there, “further developing.” In other words, during the civil rights movement America supposedly “lived up to” its own foundational values.

This is, of course, a profoundly conservative and blinkered version of a history of radical reform. This reform did, in fact, have to involve the death of 620,000 soldiers, mass lynching, police brutality, imprisonment, desegregation efforts enforced by the US Army, assassinations, and amendments to the constitution.

But all that be damned! In looking back at this crucial episode in our history, the only thing that can pass through the lens of white people’s cultural authoritarianism is that when a new set of rules came into town—issued from on high and to be carried out by the average white footsolidier—white people had to adapt their behavior. And adapting might not have been easy but goddamn it if they didn’t actually do it.

A further detail about the authoritarian dynamics at play is that white people experienced the imposition of this new complex set of rules from the perspective of the footsoldiers, not authority figures—specifically, white people felt that they had no choice but to implement these rules and no entitlement to fully understand, internalize, or “pass judgment” on them.

“Swallowing” your thoughts and feelings, and refusing to use your own judgment is a big part of soldier mentality. Ever notice how obsessed white people are with never “judging”? This is a symptom of how steeped in authoritarian attitudes and assumptions they are. In their view, using your judgment is only for those with some sort of “authority” to do so.

Notice that “new rules,” from the white footsolider perspective, were not about what white people should feel, understand, believe, or internalize. The rules weren’t ethics homework, a personal growth program, a history lesson, or an education in anything. What they were about was behavior. Correct behavior. The difference may seem trivial, but it’s a difference that strikes at the core of what a liberation movement is, especially from the POV of the oppressor or beneficiary class—is it a move towards justice for justice’s sake, or is it simply a new set of rules about what constitutes correct behavior?

Luckily for white people, they were used to always aiming at one sort of “correct” behavior or other. The old rules said to treat black people like animals and women like rock quarries, so they had. The new rules said things like, “don’t say the n-word in public anymore,” “don’t publicly murder black people anymore” “don’t be matter-of-fact about beating and raping the women in your family anymore” “hold your composure as women vote in the booth next to you,” etc. Things like that. And although, at the time, white people were only vaguely obedient to these dictates, in their cultural memory white people snapped to pretty quick. They learned not to call black people n*ggers or grab women’s asses at work. They got on board with this whole “englightened” thing. They slurped from whatever fountains they were told to, sat their white asses on whatever toilet seat they were given, no matter what color asses had been there before theirs. They “gave” blacks their freedom because their leaders, being so magnanimous, had seen that it was “the right thing to do” (not because, as humans, they had used their ethical judgment to determine that it was the right thing to do—remember, what “right” means in the authoritarian mindset is “correctly” following the rules, which requires no sense of justice or ethics at all).

Ironically, in actual fact it took the Holocaust to get white leaders in America to recognize that the bad optics of Jim Crow at home could not be maintained, and should be abolished principally for reasons related to foreign policy. They may have grumbled about PC culture (in the ’90s) or unleashed a renewed campaign of terror through lynching after reconstruction, but gosh darn it the point is “look at where we are now!”—that proves that they “did it.”

All white people struggle with white guilt. White conservatism seeks to solve the problem of the possibility of racial guilt by going backwards, back to when “America was great” (c. 1950 just before the Civil Rights Movement). Meanwhile white liberalism seeks to solve the problem of racial guilt by going forwards, into to the future.

The guilt is the bellows that fans this flame of crazy identity politics. The guilt is what causes white people to virtue signal like they just did a line of cocaine. The guilt fuels white people to do all the work it takes to be the first of their group to know the new “woke” vocabulary and to “call out” others harshly when they do not produce correctly “woke” behaviors and words.

White liberals carry a guilt of oceanic proportions. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard a white person remark that their political views put them “on the right side of history.” The unspoken context is that their political views are motivated by a desire to be on the right side of history this time, in order to cancel out the sins of the past. Their monomaniacal mad dash to “correctness” is fueled by guilt from ever having been on the wrong side of history in the first place. You know, back when white people instituted slavery, fought a civil war over it, and then instituted Jim Crow laws when they lost. Back when white people committed genocide under the banner of God-given “manifest destiny,” and then continued to occupy the land of their victims even once everyone admitted that it was stolen land. Because of course, white oppression and guilt mark the history of this continent and the passage of time right up until this very moment. Right up until this second, day, and year… in which white people suddenly believe with mad desperation in their eyes that they can, RIGHT NOW, take action and flip it all on its head so as to be those white people on the right side of history: RIGHT and CORRECT and FREE OF GUILT.

The cutting edge of wokeness that liberals believe they can achieve through the authoritarian application of identity politics is, for them, an opportunity to move forward to a place after white guilt. In that place all will be well for them, and they will have landed on their feet without having to pay a personal price for the crimes of white supremacy.

So, we now understsand the motivation for pursuing correct identity politics at all costs, but how can we undertsand the fact that they pursue it in the very specific shrill, rigid, and authoritarian way that they do?

Social justice culture today looks and feels a lot like living in an abusive relationship, cult, or Maoist party: members who truly believe in and are dedicated to the cause are nonetheless harangued and “called out,” taught to repeat thought-stopping clichés and slogans, and walk on eggshells lest they “say the wrong thing”. The emotional experience of percieved submission is at the core of why social justice culture looks and feels like this. It’s easy to see how white people might think that domination/submission/rules-following must actually BE what the liberation process IS when the two most significant processes of achieving gains for women and racial minorities was, to them, a rules-following event characterized by their submission.



White people have instituted an authoritarian, group-thinkey, cultish, and rigid “social justice” culture because instituting arbitrary rules, and enforcing them with threat of social exclusion & physical violence, is what white people believe liberation movements do. Definitionally. Because that is how they experienced the only ones they lived through.

What that looks like now is the genderist (transactivist) haranguing you about pronouns, proliferating Orwellian slogans, libfems demanding that you call prostituted women and children “sex workers,” and a mainstream “feminist” cottage-industry of books, like Roxane Gay’s recent Bad Feminist, which assume that feminism is a rule-based system in which individual women are evaluated for how well they produce correct behavior according to The Rules of Feminism.

How did white people & third-wave identity politicking turn something good, like the movements for the liberation of black people and women, into something so noxious?

An interesting distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism is, as the scholar Radu Cinopes writes, that “authoritarianism is not animated by utopian ideals in the way totalitarianism is.” As we have argued in a past blogpost, utopianism is part of a true radical vision. That is to say, it takes real imagination to think oneself out of every framework one has ever known, to hope for more, and to envision the many possibilities for living. It takes a radical talent for dreaming, inventing, imagining, and doing load-bearing exercise with one’s ethical judgment.

Unfortunately, the current dominant strain of popular liberal politics is authoritarian to a T. It rejects ethical judgment and promotes rigid moralizing (aka rules-following). This is a system in which feminism “will be identitarian and authoritarian or it will be bullshit.” Hm. Well, it’s not bull shit, exactly, because that stuff nourishes the soil and comes from an amazing place—it’s actually just toxic waste, the ethical equivalent of a warehouse full of $2 pairs of shoes made of off-gassing plastics drop-shipped from China.



Institutionalized (political) power imbalances themselves are wrong. And while the word authoriarianism might bring to mind images of life under a totalitarian regime, it’s important to recognize that authoritarianism often manifests in much more mundane ways. It is, in fact, a core feature of our culture, that is, Western culture. And despite the fact that we’ve been convinced by technophiles that the internets have wiped the slate clean and begun a totally different, new, individualzed, and “progressing” era, the truth is that like all beings we are 99% where we came from. As Westerners, you and I are the products of Judeo-Christian culture, the Greco-Roman tradition, and the entire gamut of technologization and industrialization, starting with agriculture (10,000 BC) and literacy (800 BC), and ending with globalized industrial capitalism.

Industrialization’s intimate relationship with slavery, including racialized slavery and female enslavement inside the nuclear family, means that we cannot endorse a notion of “progress” defined in terms of increasing industrialization, globalization, or the spread of liberal democracy. This is the notion of progress that liberals want to believe in, and the one they back with spittle-a-flying. The fact that the only way they can conceive of how to get there is through cult-like applications of groupthink, social pressure, and the grinding down of their neighbors’ will to argue with them, is exasperating and scary.

The drive to be a good footsoldier, to follow a set of rules well, and to produce correct behavior and say correct words—this is absolutely an Orwellian version of the pursuit of happiness, freedom, or “justice.”

In the end, if your worldview is defined by correct rule-following, all categories like freedom/control, happiness/unhappiness, right/wrong, justice/injustice, collapse into each other. As categories they’re all content-less and formally identical; “correct” will then characterize behavior not because of what is right, good, or fair, but simply because it was produced according to the rules. Ethics never comes into it at all. And this, my friends, is moralism… the kind that liberals claimed they escaped when they rejected the unreflective Christianity of their youths, joined Reddit, and declared themselves skeptics/atheists/freethinkers. The sad part is that they truly have escaped nothing. The cloaked moralism of “the church of social justice” is as insidious as the naked religiosity of the right liberals so despise.

All of the unexamined values, conceptual frameworks, and norms of white Western culture are the problem. Getting jacked on uppers and applying this sickening emetic tea-shit logic to our society’s very real problems of “social justice” is never going to create anything good.

As Mary Daly writes:

The symbols of christian and prechristian patriarchy permeate Western culture and are actively promoted by Western technocracy. […] the christian church prepared the way for postchristian mental/moral dismemberment by morally co-ercing its members to believe the blatantly bizarre. The descendents of christians…have been trained to believe the unbelievable.” (89, GynEcology)