The brilliance of the White Women/Men for Kamala Zoom calls

It’s taken me a week to fully comprehend the genius of “White Women for Kamala” and “White Dudes for Harris.”

One thing right-wingers love is to complain that you can only have affinity groups for blacks and other minorities. Whites sometimes feel like they’re being held to…

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) August 2, 2024

It's taken me a week to fully comprehend the genius of "White Women for Kamala" and "White Dudes for Harris."

One thing right-wingers love is to complain that you can only have affinity groups for blacks and other minorities. Whites sometimes feel like they're being held to double standards and treated unfairly.

Along comes the Kamala campaign and says it's ok to be white. That is, as long as you're a good person, which means supporting reproductive freedom, not being "weird," and voting Democrat. We're all in this together.

It seems "woke" on the surface, but it's actually a sign that liberals are moving away from woke. In 2020, something like this wouldn't have even been possible. Talk of "whites" in left-coded spaces only occurred in the context of flogging them for their sins. In 2024, you can be a white dude for Kamala and it's totally cool. The symbol for "White Dudes for Harris" is a trucker hat, showing self-deprecating humor and membership in a movement that is not at all weird or neurotic about race.

White people receive the message that Democrats do not consider you the problem. You're welcome into the coalition. There's even a Zoom call you can join, and don't worry, it won't be just Robin DiAngelo telling you how much you suck. Kamala has made clear that she's only considering white men for VP, and there couldn't be a clearer signal that we're past peak woke.

DEI therefore doesn't always mean anti-white! Now you White Dudes get your own DEI pick, like everyone else.

Republicans have been caught flat-footed. Conservatives want to portray these events as a kind of 2020 DEI struggle session, and they can find clips backing up that view, but people who have attended say that there was actually very little of that.

What else can conservatives say in response? I've seen a little bit of "why can't we have a whites for Trump thing?" Well, who's stopping you? It's a free country. Organize "whites for Trump" and see what happens. Democrats have given you permission. Zoom can't accuse you of violating the terms of service if you schedule the exact same event just with the parties switched.

There will be no "Whites for Trump" event because the campaign would never allow it, understanding it would be a PR nightmare. "Whites for Trump" would draw sewer dwellers, instead of the nice, seemingly normal people that came out for Harris. The Vance pick has only reinforced this message, with the signal that the Trump campaign is standing with the most dysfunctional and least sympathetic whites. Most whites do not feel like they have much in common with overweight Appalachians blaming China for taking their jobs when they're too lazy and dysfunctional to just move to a region with more opportunity, which every generation of Americans has managed to do since the founding. Vance's comments that we'll pay any price as long as one American gets to make toasters communicates how the GOP ticket is running to represent the truly hopeless.

All of this contributes to the overall message that Democrats are not the anti-white party. They're the party of the civilized half of the white race, the ones who believe in science and reject conspiracy theories. The whites who aspire to do something other than make a toaster, complain about immigrants, and investigate the miscarriages of strangers.

We can now all see the hopelessness and stupidity of white nationalism, which wants to argue that the 220 million American whites who are at each other's throats over social issues and values should unite under one umbrella because they share the same interests. The only way white identitarianism would have had any hope is if liberalism stayed in summer of Floyd mode indefinitely, where you push anti-white rhetoric so blatantly and aggressively that it causes a natural reaction.

Whites for Kamala completely defuses any hope of building a broad white identitarian coalition. It exposes white nationalism, whether explicit or the implicit kind taking over the right, as at bottom a movement for maladjusted whites most of their betters want nothing to do with.

The thing about Republicans ruining Thanksgiving dinner hits home, because most whites who have achieved some level of success in life, or at least aspire to do so, have aggressively stupid catturd-type relatives they want to avoid. They define themselves in opposition to such people.

This is how the left wins.