Will stancil promises to mandate section 8 housing in nice neighborhoods in an attempt to make people vote for him

Oh buddy. Ohhhh, buddy. Anyone looking to study the Good White Man must feel, upon coming across Will Stancil's Twitter feed, like the first Western archaeologists to encounter Machu Pichu. Entire books could be written about this young gentlemen's rabid effort to be seen as the world's last decent being. In fifteen years of writing about politics online I can genuinely not think of a single individual who was more nakedly self-promoting in their basic approach to politics. I think Stancil's headstone will read “At Least I Wasn't Matt Yglesias!”

There's this particular kind of precious white guy who now haunts media, academia, and nonprofits, a kind of “may I have a crumb of kitty?” quisling who worms around and complains and is obsessed with who likes him and who doesn't and who needs the higher-ups to know that the new project was his idea, even though he's really rude on the whole idea of bosses, man, and also late capitalism, because he indicts the whole fricking system, man. That's Stancil. He's a radical, man. He thinks Democrats should press the case and really lean into Joe Manchin, which is sure to actually work, for some reason. He hates, hates, hates white dudes, man. He can't stand them. He wants nothing to do with white dudes, who hold the party back and work their terrible work and keep the marginalized down. Man.

The trouble is that he sees white dudes every time he looks in the mirror. For most of us, frustration and anger over the conduct of people who look like us simply inspires us to be better people ourselves, makes us take note and try to be a kinder human being, which is all any of us can do. For Good White Men like Will Stancil, such feelings inspire the urge to product differentiation; they have to make sure that everyone else understands that they're not one of the bad ones. But of course, to admit that there are exceptions merely serves to underline the fact that the whole notion of condemning an entire race & gender class makes no sense. People like Stancil constantly invoke the categorical but demand that you acknowledge them, specifically, as individuals. White men are bad, but I'm good. I don't know. There's a lot of weird Freudian shit going on in dudes like this. In life, you are things you never chose to be. A healthy approach is to say “this is what I am bound to be, thanks to the hand of the universe, and thus I will endeavor to be the best of this thing I can be.” But a remunerative approach, in this day and age, is to attempt to dissociate yourself from that which you can't help being, to try and simultaneously condemn that whole class while you carve out a righteous subclass to which you belong. Seems like a lot of work. By the age of 35 guys like Stancil either grillpill, register Republican, or get really into crystals.

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