American Politics
The White People Crisis
What do you do when the majority of your peers are insane?
If you are a white person like me, you might want to know that well over half of the people in your caucasian peer group you meet or talk to on a daily basis when Covid-19 finally lets us all hang out again are insane.
How do I know this, the inquiring mind wants to know?
Simple math.
A clear majority of white people, 58%, voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
That’s almost 60%.
Of all white people.
Voted for Trump.
This means that if you are a white person reading this article, you probably voted for Trump, and if not, someone close to you did. Maybe your husband or wife. Your dad, probably, for sure. There’s an awfully good chance that mom did, too.
This, given all that we knew about Trump before the recent deadly little hissy fit in the nation’s capital.
How does one cope with that on a personal basis? How do I carry on sensible conversations with people who are guided in such a way that they decided that, after all we have learned about Trump, they thought it would be a good idea to bring him back for round two?
How do I trust the decision making of people I meet professionally, if they are white, knowing there is a 60% chance they enthusiastically made a decision that directly threatened the existence of democracy in the United States?
Am I supposed to trust these people with my finances? Or with strategic business decisions that require cognitive thinking?
What if I need open-heart surgery?
Can I trust that if a white surgeon comes at me with a scalpel, he isn’t getting his latest information on surgical techniques from some wacky web site that says many of us are lizard people?
Don’t laugh. Ben Carson was a brain surgeon once. Not a white one, but you get the point.
Do we give them a quiz?
The United States has split into two groups. Two factions. One faction understands how to obtain facts.
The other faction is impervious to facts. It uses malignant Facebook feeds, 4Chan, QAnon, and other fact-free sources as its source material, thus relying on creative fiction that has made the uproarious and zany imaginings of Ignatius J. Reilly seem not so funny anymore.
Here’s an ugly truth. Ignatius wasn’t as crazy as most modern white people these days. His conspiracy theories seem tame compared to the stuff we see today.
I’m of the mind of asking my fellow white people to take a quiz before I am willing to speak with them. Especially white men my age.
61 percent of white men voted for Trump. And I haven’t even hit my age group (over 60) yet in this little statistical analysis.
What should the quiz consist of? I don’t even know where to start. I guess I could start with, “Who is Kazakhstan’s Greatest Journalist?” and see where they go with it.
Mostly, though, I want to know how all this happened.
How did almost 60 percent of the white people in America decide that they are no longer willing participants in science, facts, information gathering, and cognitive thinking?
Did eBook readers have a mass breakdown and I missed the news story? Are all the books in the world out of print and nobody told me? Have my fellow white people forgotten how to solve puzzles or think for themselves?
When I meet a pal for coffee, should I screen him somehow first? After all, 60 percent of white people voted for Trump. So the odds are, he did, too.
If they are white evangelicals, I should skip the coffee completely. 76% of them voted for Trump. Praise the Lord.
If you’re tempted to say, “Nah, it’s just those uneducated rural voters that voted for him,” think again.
48% of white college graduates voted for Trump. That’s, you know, basically half, statistically speaking.
So then you might think — it’s just those poor people in the rural areas. They’re very distressed these days.
Rural voters are indeed distressed. But nope, that’s not it, either. 54% of people making $100,000 or more voted for Trump.
Okay, you may reason, but everyone is stressed out over money. These people are angry!!!
Umm, no, sorry, that’s not in the statistics, either:
In fact, most of the people who describe their financial situation as worse or about the same as four years ago voted for Biden. More than two-thirds of voters who said they are in better shape financially voted for Trump.
So that explodes two common narratives about his voters. One, that they are poor disaffected white people. And two, that they are really mad about their financial situation.
In a way, this last stat makes more sense than any other. People whose personal financial condition is worse normally do vote for the other guy (and gal, hopefully someday soon). Bill Clinton’s old adage, “It’s the economy, stupid,” still holds.
The Power of Repeated Lies
96% of his voters strongly approve of the job he is doing as president.
99% of his voters would have felt excited about his re-election.
Does that mean 99% of them were excited about the Capitol Building insurrection? We need to ask them.
If you go out for a cup of coffee with a white guy, it’s okay to ask him who he voted for. If he says “Trump,” get up and leave, and let him pay for the coffee.
I recently wrote a comment on an article Umair Haque wrote singling out “white liberals” for being, well, white liberals. I agree with 99% of what he says, but I said in my comment that I didn’t appreciate the stereotyping.
Then I got to thinking. He’s being too kind in his generalizations towards white people.
White people have lost it. Nearly 60% have abandoned thought and reason. The rest of us aren’t calling them out on it. Not really. Not enough to make a difference.
So how do we cope with this on a personal level? I can’t look someone in the eyes and feel any respect for them if they voted for Trump and can condone what has happened, not just at the Capitol Building, but during the last four years.
The Capitol Building riot was not a one-off.
It was the culmination of years of manipulation that people I supposedly need to frequently interact with fell for.
If you believe the lies, you’re just lazy, and this makes me crazy.
I am not willing to deal with intellectually lazy people. I’m not saying everyone needs to be as smart as I am, because who am I to even say I’m smart, or not? But I do read a lot. I want to be around others who do, too.
Reading cures stupidity.
I need to know who they are before I decide to participate in any activities with white people, especially white men. These kinds of people, who I must stereotype myself now because of the existential crisis they have created, can’t do my accounting, or lawyering, or book editing, or take care care of my medical needs, should I have any, if they voted for Trump.
I need to screen them out. Why? Because their vote demonstrates that they are in an intellectual crater.
This isn’t some silly revenge or shame thing. Voting for Trump means the majority of white people can’t be trusted to think for themselves.
And if they can’t do basic cognitive reasoning, if they can’t think for themselves, why should I trust them with the things that are important to me on a business or personal level?
This inability to think for themselves is a form of insanity. And it’s leading to a national mental health crisis. It’s making all of us crazy, not just them.
Even after the events of January 6, Trump has a 40% approval rating according to FiveThirtyEight. Thanks to my fellow white people.
To be fair, if you take out the usually pro-Trump Rasmussen poll you’d probably see a drop in his approval rating to about 34%, but to be fair again, that’s before Trump finds a way to get his propaganda machine back in gear. The 40% has been consistent for the last four years and is likely to remain so over the long run.
So the next time you hang out with your white friend, consider the fact that his or her cognitive skills are essentially broken.
Realize that their debate points are lifted from the alt-right propaganda machine powered by Breitbart, QAnon, Alex Jones, Sean Hannity and other Fox celebrity anchors, OAN, 4Chan, 8Chan, and God knows what other Chans that specialize in the dissemination of fictions that are wilder than anything John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius ever invented.
I know, it sucks, if you are a white person who didn’t vote for Trump.
But we can’t argue with these folks.
We’ve tried.
I can’t tell you what to do but I know what I’m going to do.
I’m going to boycott them.
Where to start?
I’ve been a hardcore diehard Cubs fan for 50 plus years:
I’m moving to the South Side of baseball.
Notes
Exit polling sources are all derived from:
For some background on conspiracy theories, check out this Frontline video:
