The Good White Man Roster
a database of progressive white men who are thirsty for credit
You could be forgiven for thinking that we’re witnessing the end of the era of the white man. Headlines saying such are not hard to come by, after all, and media and academia are captivated by the notion that we white men must soon give way to women and people of color and, like, gray ace demisexuals or some such. So funny, then, and so profoundly American, that some of the most successful self-marketers of the 21st century are white men. They are, in fact, Good White Men.
These are the guys who have carefully crafted personas as ALLIES, as the good ones, as the right kind of white guy. These are the dudes whose every engagement on social media functions to let you know how very sorry they are, but always seem to come out on top in doing so. These are the guys who always stand behind women, ready to catch them when they fall, which they will inevitably do because of fucking patriarchy, man, and if people would just read their bell hooks maybe we’d be getting somewhere!, please like share and subscribe. These are the guys who think all complaints about identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture are just the dying gasp of reactionary old men, which is why they lie awake at night praying to god that they never get canceled. These are the guys who put their pronouns in their bios in hopes that doing so might get them a little pussy. These are the guys who will harangue you about how white dudes do this and white dudes do that, speaking to you from their blameless white dude mouths in their righteous white dude faces. These are the guys who look at the discourse about white supremacy and patriarchy and see market opportunity.
There’s nothing wrong with being a white man who wants to do good. I am one, after all. The trouble is that the Good White Men believe that white men in general have some sort of inherent badness, that at the very least white men bear a special burden of helping to end injustice and to “center” women, people of color, and other minority groups, to step back and let others speak. Good White Males think whiteness and maleness are problems to be solved. The trouble here is twofold. First, simply by nature of being Good White Men, by the very act of endlessly talking about the sinful nature of other white men, the Good White Men exonerate themselves from the very critique they advance. Constantly complaining about the evil done by white men inherently and invariably functions to contrast themselves with other, worse white men. Being the white man who talks about the poor character of most white men cannot help but shine your own character. No matter how reflexively you chant that you realize that you yourself are part of the problem, no matter how insistently you say that you’re included in your own critique, you aren’t. You can’t be. To be the one who makes the critique inevitably elevates you above it.
He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.
Second, standing up and demanding that everyone pay attention to someone else sure is a good way to monopolize attention for yourself. If you go on your podcast, blog, cable news show, or social network as a white man and tell other white men they need to shut up and listen, you are definitionally not shutting up and listening - and, of course, doing so in such a way as to receive credit for doing it. Put another way, Good White Men constantly tell other men and white people to step back and listen but absolutely never shut the fuck up themselves. Each of these guys could walk the talk by just unplugging and no longer filling the airwaves with their opinions, and in so doing cede space to POC and women and whoever else. That they don’t is the most damning indictment of their project.
For white men who simply want to do good and contribute to a progressive political project, there is no conflict; they don’t assume that there’s anything inherently more malign about white men than any other kind of person, and correspondingly there is nothing inherently noble about people from minority groups, and thus there is no hypocrisy. But the Good White Man can only exist in contrast to the assumed nefarious nature of other white men. He cannot derive the credit he lusts after if he’s simply good. He must be better. Better, specifically, than you, you and me.
Now, an important disclaimer. This post does not represent a doxxing of anyone. It will not include any private information about any of the indexed Good White Men. I will link only to the publicly-available social media accounts and publication pages of the offenders and include photographs culled from professional sources. I insist that you not do anything to facilitate the harassment or doxxing of these Good White Men in response to their inclusion here, and if you engage with them on social media I hope that you will be respectful.
Davidson, Adam
Twitter NPR Strange “Storytelling” Grift Built on Stock Wordpress Theme
The first listed alphabetically and honestly maybe the GOAT of the genre. No one else so effortlessly combines self-aggrandizement, weepy apologia, and total shamelessness as Adam Davidson. Peep this.
I could give you the context to this tweet, but honestly… do I have to? Would it matter? This is it, here, this is the goods; this is the Good White Man in his Platonic form. Davidson here is engaged in an act of supposed self-criticism - it turns out that this is somehow about Jeffrey Epstein and thus also about rape culture, or whatever other abstraction is hot right now - that in fact functions to lionize Adam Davidson and advance his brand. He’s so very sorry, everybody, and it cannot escape your notice that he’s more sorry than everyone else; that’s what an advanced being he is. He apologizes, but only in the context of referring to some earlier, fallen self, and in doing so he inescapably valorizes his current self. Hey, you guys, you know who else is like that earlier Adam Davidson who didn’t care enough about child trafficking or whatever the fuck? You. That’s right. Adam Davidson is better than you, and he has the apologies to prove it. Such a strange quality, apologies have - the lower you stoop, the higher you climb. Useful, that. I bet Adam is crying in front of some waiter right now as he explains why he shouldn’t have to pay for his meal. Adam: if you’re receiving thousands of digital strokes for making an apology, it’s not a real apology.
He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted. Adam Davison humbleth himself more relentlessly than any person in media that I know of, and for this he believes that he should be exalted.
Froomkin, Dan
That photo about sums it up. Big innocent face, ringed with a halo of white curls, beatific smile, utter absence of self-knowledge or shame. Currently haranguing a more important and talented reporter for not centering Black bodies in a story about whether index funds distort the market.
LADIES YOU GOT AN ALLY IN FROOMKIN
Hayes, Chris
Twitter Podcast Little-Viewed Cable News Program
MSNBChris! The only man who talks more about Donald Trump than Donald Trump himself, the living picture of the media liberal who’s compelled to outwardly disdain Trump but whose continued professional existence depends on him. I already said most of what I need to say about MSNBChris, but I would like to underline that he was once a genuinely interesting lefty writer who was willing to skewer liberals (and even identity politics!) when he felt compelled to by principle. Here’s 74 pages of writing by a man who had not yet been bought off with carriage fee money and invitations to black-tie fundraisers. Now Chris flatters people who have a favorite “podcatcher” app for a living, telling the world’s Sarah Lawrence graduates that when they feel better than everyone else, they’re right. He’s a living, breathing laundromat for the post-collegiate elite’s ugly feelings of superiority, reassuring them every day on his show that their snobbery and self-obsession are justified thanks to their superior moral virtue. (Politics, for Good White Men, is always assumed to be perfectly coterminous with moral hygiene.) This is the basic financial transaction of the Good White Man, selling back to his audience their own feelings of smug righteousness through the unconvincing application of desultory political framing.
This is a remarkably succinct demonstration of MSNBChris’s fundamental cowardice. Free speech is a cherished left-wing value; its recent monstering has been committed by people who are not in fact left-wing at all but who have adopted certain left-wing signifiers for professional and social gain. And I believe, based on the writing that he did when he was not a man who lived in perpetual fear, that Hayes has positive feelings towards free speech. But we’ll never know, because to come out and say “I support free speech and think it’s a principle society should defend” would be to take a risk, and a man who was only spared from being fired because his network never got around to it can’t take any risks. Hey Chris: is free speech good? Are constant liberal attacks on free speech good, either substantively or as politics? Can it really be true that there’s genuinely nothing wrong with that “woke mob,” that it represents the first and only political tendency in the history of the republic to have no problems, to never make a mistake? I suppose it must be, given that MSNBChris hasn’t breathed a word against them since he’s been employed by the network that sells Raytheon Pride flags to affluent Democrats who roll up the window in their Volvos when they drive through the poor parts of town. Instead, we have this weasely, cheap, utterly pointless digression about the hypocrisy of a vague “crew” that Chris knows to have no supporters among his elite media coterie, a totally soft target. I may never have Chris Hayes’s reach or his wallet, but strike me dead before I become this shiftless and cowardly. Strike me dead.
I genuinely cannot remember the last time this man made an argument on his show that risked offending subscribers to the New York Times. He has tweeted 160,000 times; I challenge you to find one that dares to be anything less than perfectly anodyne to the median suburban liberal Democrat. This is what Hayes has done with his very rare opportunity as a cable news host, fixated relentlessly on Big Orange in order to juice ratings sufficiently to afford his affluent Brooklynite lifestyle. Otherwise, he’s simply avoided giving offense like it was the plague, specifically to the NPR tote bag set who keep him solvent. Imagine climbing your way up the totem pole in media and, having reached the top, using your perch to tell Montgomery County soccer parents that yes, the problem with our country is poor white people, and doncha wish we could all vote for Obama a third time? Sorry about that townhouse, brother. You’ll get ‘em next time.
Higgins, Eoin
Twitter (only Twitter)
It’s pronounced OOO-win.
One of the weird little elements of 21st-century politics is that “socialism” became popular without most of its new adherents being able to define the term. To be a socialist, from about 2015 onwards, was only to be to the left of Hillary Clinton, and not even that in particularly specific or coherent terms. And thus you have guys like Higgins here, a journalist (of vague type) with anticapitalist politics (of some vague dimension) who works in opposition to the forces of reaction (in some vague sense). What he lacks in any specificity or particular knowledge of the texts to which he often gestures he makes up for in sheer shit-eating shameless bravado. He’s nominally an enemy of empire, but thinks Glenn Greenwald is worse; he thinks a white supremacist movement is taking over the United States, but would rather fixate on Michael Tracey; he would like to oppose the forces of reaction, but complaining about Substack bros is more remunerative. In all of this Higgins is a quintessential 21st-century American liberal, whatever his branding: his ostensible target is the conservative neofascist movement, but he pays the bills making fun of Jimmy Dore; he fashions himself a radical, but he has the politics of David Brock. Fighting against actual conservatives is boring and rarely accomplishes anything. Far better to once again equate dissident leftists with the alt-right. Nice work if you can get it.
There are a lot of people competing for the “most ardent supporter of a totally undertheorized and substance-free vision of an ostensibly post-capitalist future” crown these days, but Higgins is not going to be outworked on that score. Dialectics. False consciousness. Defund the police, or abolish ICE, or whatever. Let’s uh build the exceptionally vague society of our dreams. Also he lists his literary agent in his Twitter bio, which I find truly amazing.
Hobbes, Michael
Twitter Podcast Wordpress Straight Out of 2011
Hello! Would you like a sneering shithead to condescendingly inform you that the dead center of witless corporate liberal opinion is in fact the utterly spotless expression of the transcendent truth, delivered with total conviction by someone who spent fifteen minutes reading Quora answers to arrive at his position? Buddy, have I got a pundit for you!
The name of Hobbes's podcast is You're Wrong About, but of course what its fans really hear is “you're right about.” Like most podcasts, what You're Wrong About sells as its fundamental market proposition is reassurance to its listeners that they're already in superior possession of wisdom, virtue, and taste. It’s a numbingly repetitive program in which he and his endlessly-droning cohost pretend to confront some thorny issue… only to find it was never thorny at all! Would you believe that the Valerie-from-Human-Resources-approved limp-dick inoffensive straight-down-the-middle Vox.com narrative is always the right one? Believe it! I genuinely don’t know why they bother to record the show, other than that their audience needs to pass the time on their commute to being the Chief Diversity Officer at a factory farming conglomerate. Why go through the rigamarole of pretending to investigate if your investigations always conclude that heteronormativity did it? You’d think that they’d say “perhaps the woke position is not 100% correct this time” every 50 episodes or so. But no.
(If you’d like to enjoy a symphony of duplicity in the service of protecting liberal feelings, please listen to their episode about Matthew Shepard, in which they fail to honestly repeat a single point made by people who complicated the original narrative. They’re too busy smirking to do much else.)
I think Hobbes says something about just what it means to be a “liberal,” for lack of a better term, these days. Liberalism has in recent years sloughed off whatever remaining status it had as a coherent political project - an effort by temporary allies to join together despite philosophical differences to achieve a specific and material purpose. Instead, liberalism now functions ontologically, as a form of Being, and specifically of Being Good. The quintessential 2022 liberal is someone who does not want to achieve anything, but rather to be something - an ally, a friend to the movement, one of the good ones. Achieving is beyond the point; the point is to occupy a space of existential goodness. For people like Hobbes, politics is not a thing you do but a thing you are. And what Hobbes is, naturally, is a guy who already knows the answer to every question. In reality, politics is amoral, being right has absolutely no inherent function in the world, and achieving actual moral ends requires precisely the kind of compromise that Hobbes sees as below his exalted station, but no matter. Being Good is Being Good.
So while he would no doubt tell you that there are a million things that he would change about the world, Hobbes’s political project is over. It has already been accomplished. Since there is nothing in politics but to be correct, and Hobbes is already correct about everything, an impossible advanced being who shames us all with his shining example, there is no politics. There’s only being Michael Hobbes, feeling the vast weight of knowing everything and being right about it all, and waiting for the Patreon deposit to hit.
I too have heard the word “heuristic” before, Michael.
Johnston, Angus
Twitter Misleadingly Titled Homepage
We all get old and we all feel bad about it. Some of us respond by getting married and having kids. Some channel this energy into creative work. Angus doggedly defends college kids from any criticism whatsoever in an attempt to steal their lifeforce like the Skeksis in Dark Crystal. Fun fact, Angus: almost everyone you yell at (all day long, every day, repetitively, on and on, season after season, year after year, without purpose or end) was once a college student themselves. I’d like to tell Angus that mindlessly lionizing abstract groups of people is not respecting them - some college students are assholes, Angus, and if you’re unwilling to say so then your praise of the good ones means nothing - but he’s too busy jacking off to the Protests of 68 Wikipedia page to listen.
“studentactivism” lol
Katz, Jonathan
This man is the basic bitch of Good White Men, a computer-generated NPC of a Noble Ally. Everything about his performance (and, if you’ll forgive me, his face) is so perfectly in the center of Good White Manness, I half suspect he’s been created by a creepy machine learning algorithm designed to mimic embittered social studies teachers who always told themselves they were destined for more. Everything about this dude is so bland and so utterly dedicated to not giving offense that I’ve forgotten what exactly it was that he was bitterly droning on about recently to inspire his inclusion in this list. Suffice to say that his tasteful crewneck and Warby Parkers are indeed emblematic of his politics, which amount to an NPR tote bag brought to life by a mischievous wizard that dreadfully recites tiresome woke cliches about standpoint theory and constantly says “my fellow white people, listen up!”
Roberts, Dr. David
The good doctor himself. I’ll give this to Roberts: he’s a survivor. I’m genuinely trying not to be personally insulting in these little bios, but I must confess that I struggle to identify a single thing Roberts does well. And yet he has carved out a niche for himself, mostly by haranguing people so relentlessly that they hire him in order to give him tasks that will momentarily tear him away from TweetDeck. Hey, buddy - they don’t hand out doctorates in Grist Studies to just anyone.
He’s the white Jeet Heer, a tweetstorm brought to life by a mischievous genie, a meandering and self-aggrandizing answer to a question no one asked. Did you know the fossil fuel industry epitomizes rape culture? Did you know Bernie’s hand gestures revictimize gay conversion therapy survivors? If DailyKos became sentient and created a robot body for itself that resembled a white woman with dreadlocks it would take Dr. Grist for its mate. Typically Doc here will begin writing a 40-tweet thread about how Republican opposition to hanging a Rosa Parks painting in the Sbarro’s on the Capitol Hill mall shows they’re like Sauron from Lord of the Rings and by the end of it he’s just writing “I am good, others are bad, I am good, others are bad” over and over again. Some of these dudes carefully machine their good white manness with military precision, but Roberts just sort of blunders along like a kid brother who’s being allowed to play Tails in Sonic 2. Dr. Vox is too dim to really give offense; he’s the himbo of Good White Men, the Forrest Gump of digital media. I kind of like him! I would wish him well but guys like this always land on their feet anyhow. I’m sure he’s cooking up an endless jeremiad about how most dudes just don’t know how it feels to be a woman, man. He would almost be charming if he didn’t use “white dude” as an insult so habitually. Doctor, heal thyself - I have never seen a whiter man than you.
Stancil, Will
Twitter Whatever Weird Little Nonprofit He Shuffles Paper For
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 pussy?” 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 fucking 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.
Stancil, by the way, is one of those white male allies whose practice betrays a very low opinion of women and people of color. For example, he is someone who hates the terms “woke,” “politically correct,” “identity politics,” and related, but refuses to proffer a superior alternative. And I suspect the reason why is that because, deep in his benevolent bleeding heart, he assumes that women and people of color can’t defend themselves and their politics. He forbids discussion of the politics held by those he ostensibly speaks for because he does not in fact believe that they can speak for themselves. A conservative he will argue with; a member of a “marginalized group,” he must save from the horror of argument.
(“No, seriously, ladies, I tell off David Shor every day, hahaha, I’m like the anti-popularist, fight the power, pro-Black people and women guy, that’s my whole bag, haha I’m such an ally, oh god please tell me I’m cool, I am begging -
Stanley, Jason
I AM A MAJOR FUCKING PHILOSOPHER AND I TEACH AT YALE
Strangio, Chase
Twitter Slate.com The Sad Decaying Husk of What Was Once the ACLU
Growing up around activists, I’ve known white dudes like Strangio my whole life - perpetually aggrieved on a personal level but who forever try to fob off their complaints on a political level. Like, the kind of guy who can’t get laid and insists that the problem is society’s ongoing embrace of rigid gender roles or something. The kind of guy who discovers body positivity only after his metabolism slows down at 24 and suddenly he can’t lose his beer gut. The kind of guy who develops a keen interest in Thatcher's depravity during the Troubles while taking a semester abroad in Dublin surrounded by cute girls with republican sentiments and potentially-accessible vaginas. The basic impulse to only understand the political through the personal is forgivable, as this condition is a basic part of being human. But the healthy thing to do is to just eat shit a little sometimes, you know what I’m saying? To simply accept that not everything that’s ever made you unhappy was inherently a moral crime. You take the universe on the chin and you don't stomp around demanding that everything that has ever happened to you that you didn't like is injustice. You grow to understand that constantly viewing the world of oppression through the prism of your own petty interests dulls your ability to put others before yourself, and putting others before yourself is the core of left politics. Strangio and people like him never really grew up in that way, is my 2-cent psychoanalysis.
The goal is to have the personal lead you to the structural - to look around at your life and its little indignities and through that form a deeper and less selfish and wiser understanding that the world is made up only of injustices, that injustice is fractal, that injustice is the most elemental masonry of the human condition, and that in such a context your own complaints must become sad and ridiculous even in your own perspective. It’s only by really and truly sublimating your own problems to the vast edifice of human injustice generally that your self-motivated squabbling becomes something deeper and more beautiful. White men like Strangio work the other way around; they perceive the whole tapestry of human despair and go hunting for the single thread that constitutes their own life. You’re supposed to work from the particular to the general, but guys like Strangio always go the opposite direction, learning more and more about the nature of oppression only to flatter their self-image as the most deeply oppressed. In his final form, he becomes Chase Strangio Esquire, professor emeritus of Chase Strangio Studios at the Chase Strangio Institute. Some people operate as their own black hole.
It is of course entirely right and fitting that Strangio be offended by the oppressions he faces, which I imagine are abundant. But you can reach out or you can reach in, and the tragedy of the social justice ideology is that it’s convinced people that only the latter amounts to taking your own pain seriously.
Literally a lawyer, Strangio appears to believe that he’s currently cross-examining Chad from the memes at all times, acting as prosecutor for the entire wing of the human race that’s considered marginalized, which if you’re paying attention is like literally 92% of all of us. (But who’s counting!) Like all prosecutors, Strangio is fundamentally a cop; the fact that he (probably) puts ACAB in his dating profiles doesn’t change the fact that like all of the Good White Men he walks the beat, swinging a nightstick, hoping to catch some evildoer. What the “defund the police” types never seem to grok is that their rabid dedication to rooting out unbelievers reveals them to be the police, that being a cop has nothing to do with actually getting handed a badge and everything to do with wanting to stand in righteous judgment of others and lead them off in handcuffs to meet their fate. Strangio here was born to crack skulls. May he live long enough to discover that he was always the most vicious inquisitor of all.
Wilkinson, Will
Twitter New York Times Some Kind of Weirdass Bitcoin Mumbo Jumbo
An archetypal pundit rebrand. Wilkinson spent the majority of his professional life as a self-parodic sneering libertarian shitheel, the kind of guy who was always ready to let you know that he had calculated the utilons long ago and could comfortably assure you that raising the minimum wage ten cents an hour in Boise would somehow cause shipbreakers in Bangladesh to lose their livelihoods, so who’s the real friend to the poor, huh? In a world in which everybody who didn’t intern at Mother Jones in college is now assumed to be on Peter Thiel’s payroll, it’s always nice to be reminded of how many people just directly and unambiguously had their rents paid by the Koch brothers. Julian Sanchez, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
But now! But now, friends! Things have changed. Now Will is some kind of staffy for the New York Times, and brother they don’t just hand out those appointments like candy. To get yourself into the pages of the Grey Lady you’ve got to go out into the salt mines and spread some “white men are bad mkay” takes around, and by god, Wilkinson spreads it. His self-regard seems to grow in equal step with his hair; he’s kind of like Samson, in that way, except Samson’s hair made him incredibly strong while Wilkinson’s increases his skill as a dungeon master. Like all the rest he complains about white men and their ignorance, never seeming to grasp that he looks like the sensitive keyboard player from a beloved local Omaha emo band and is thus a white dude deep in his soul. Look: in this political life of ours, you can say that a particular group is inherently or intrinsically or immutably privileged and should be quiet, and you can theatrically complain about that group as a means to burnish your progressive credentials. But if you are a member of that group, and you do both, your behavior is self-contradictory: your complaints about the space white men take up are an example of white men taking up space. Like, obviously. Even if you work for the august New York Times.
(Or maybe he’s a blockchain dude now? I don’t know man. This cat’s got nine lives. I respect the hustle.)
I feel a little bad about this one because I think Wilkinson was mostly blown to this spot by the same mild wind that has sent so many white men tumbling into obligatory intersectionality. Among all of these GWM, Wilksinson’s current identity is most obviously self-interested; I think his sudden self-aggrandizing liberalism is fundamentally a response to a changing media social culture, an unwelcoming marketplace for right-leaning writing, and the burden of living with a more talented wife. In that straightforward selfishness, he remains quintessentially libertarian.
deBoer, Freddie
Yes, yes. Good show, great effort. Help yourself to water and orange slices. By skewering the self-regard and self-exoneration inherent to performative white male guilt, you make a profound political point of great social importance - but in doing so, you prove yourself the most guilty of them all! Hypocrite that you are, you play a game of 11th-dimensional chess where your own attempts to do right by our current political situation, your white male efforts to do good, exist at some sort of ironic distance from those of the white men you skewer, and in so doing create enough confusion that you might escape unskewered yourself. You, who derides cleverness! You, who worships sincerity! You, who in this very document criticizes declaring yourself one who sees but who cannot be seen!
At least the Good White Men have the courage to actually just hang themselves out there and embarrassingly seek the approval of the not-white, not-male Other. You, on the other hand, seek that approval deceptively, by not appearing to seek it; you sidle up to supporting the cause of the marginalized by critiquing the way others seek it uncomplicatedly, continuing your career-long obsession with addressing in ellipses those injustices which can only be confronted with full and direct attention. Yes, the men on this list are pathetic in their relentless self-flagellation and attendant inevitable self-celebration. But who are you to judge at all, you, who refuses to put your values on the line, defenseless before God and the subaltern you speak for by not speaking? Who are you, if not the most credit-seeking, most cowardly, most abject of all? What could be more redolent of the Good White Man ethos but to beg the world to see you as the savviest, funniest, most clever white man, the Good White Man apart from other Good White Men, the white man who cannot be named in their number? Vanity, vanity, vanity.
You are cooler than they are, though. And better looking.
Any Good White Man who feels that their appearance on this roster is an injustice can easily be removed. They need only follow their ideology to its logical ends by shutting the fuck up.
Jesus, Freddie. Leave something for their families to bury next time.
This is pure genius. It should be a whole book. As a gen-xer it's horrifying to watch this idea that women are now wilting fragile flowers. I am particularly disturbed by Chris Hayes. Now granted, Twitter does weird things to the human brain. We can't process what it means to be tribal on that app and growing lots of followers must really mess with your head, all of those likes and support. The converted republicans, for instance, like Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt getting all of that attention online. There is a version of "good white woman" too - they remind me of the born-again Christians of the 1970s, all ruddy cheeked and glassy-eyed, ready to convert you.
I think that this is part of the utopia built under Obama and that these guys really do see themselves, in some fashion, as the Church's high priests who are "good." Unfortunately, it's mostly wrecked all areas the liberal left controls - Hollywood, publishing, journalism. "Goodness" has wrecked everything.