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THE MUELLER REPORT OF THE OBAMA ERA
White men have enjoyed an era of unparalleled privilege in our country since it was founded. This is why it will take a white man of our own to finally end it.
White men have enjoyed an era of unparalleled privilege in our country since it was founded. This is why it will take a white man of our own to finally end it.
1/ There is a darkness inside of us as Americans that Donald Trump has exploited to great effect. It won't be enough to send our strongest or smartest champion into battle against this monster if we're not fully aware of every aspect of this nightmare we're trying to escape.
2/ The right president for this moment is the one that provides the clearest contrast between Trump and themselves. A good leader sets the example, and doesn’t need to brag about his achievements and constantly inflate his own perception of himself.
3/ The conventional wisdom is that the Dem nominee must be anything but a white male. This is exactly backwards. We need someone demographically similar to Trump to nullify the despicable white identity politics he has so gleefully feasted on for years.
4/Obama's presidency showed us it doesn’t matter how brilliant, inspirational or transcendent a candidate is--we could still lose all we have worked for. Hate is stronger than love, fear is stronger than pride, & there are fewer good people in the world than we wanted to believe.
5/ President Obama's only transgression against the voting public was being a black man with the unrepentant audacity to be a better person than most white men believed themselves to be. Immediately after his historic victory, we took even more historic losses.
6/ The heavy losses we took during President Obama's tenure weren't because he didn't work hard enough. Barack Obama worked harder for the people than any white president in my lifetime, but repeatedly we were pulverized electorally for it.
7/ But we powered through, and we took the losses from landslide after landslide. We thought that after eight punishing years we had finally endured & made some progress. In 2016 we believed that despite some temporary setbacks, we wouldn't lose everything we loved to vile hate.
8/ In 2016 we tried again. We chose the most eminently qualified & capable person to ever seek the office. Confident, sharp, unbreakable. A truly respected, well known public servant with a lifetime of success in a power structure that was stacked against good people.
9/ The 2016 contest was a slam dunk. Our nominee faced a petulant, dishonest, vile, childish, hateful, illiterate, sociopathic, cruel, racist, misogynistic bloviating gasbag. It was impossible the race would even be close--there was simply no easier choice to make.
10/ We had such hope, such excitement. We endured years of mocking derision of sincere belief in a better world--the vision of a leader so admirable & morally pure he might as well have been a unicorn. Finally, we thought, the arc of the moral universe was bending toward justice.
11/That night in 2016 our worst fears came to life when we as a nation chose to reject shared prosperity & investment in the future of our children, instead declaring support for the contemptible tormentors that wished only to punish us for the sin of dreaming of a better world.
12/ So what egregious mistake did we make to merit this tragic outcome? Due to what insufferable hubris did we deserve to be punished in the eyes of the universe? We simply dared to support a woman who tried to take something that white men felt belonged rightfully to them.
13/ I have never experienced such crushing sadness as I did that autumn night in 2016. It was the moment the fog of my own privilege as a white man in this country lifted from my eyes. It would become one of the most formative moments of my life.
14/ I thought most other white men were like me. I thought they cared about others. I thought they valued hard work and celebrated competence. I thought they were motivated by compassion, personal integrity, and honorable dignity. I was wrong.
15/I had always aspired to be a better man, believing it my responsibility to help create a better world for those who didn't win the cosmic lottery like I did. It was then I realized that among people who looked like me, my soul was standing alone...and had been my entire life.
16/ After that moment, I saw casual misogyny and abstract racism for what they were--not harmless byproducts of a society uncomfortable with change, but as weapons used constantly to retain the dominant privilege of people who looked like me. I saw the subtlety, the deceit.
17/ Until then, advocacy for women's rights, racial equality & countless other efforts to stop the powerful from preying on the ones below them had been a dull murmur in the background of my privileged life. After that night it became a siren. My eyes opened like never before.
18/ Please note that while plenty of white men surely believe in our shared ideals as I do, most of them don't. It is this majority group in particular I am referring to when I generalize about "white men" here. This is where we must strategize.
19/ A white man's power permanently erodes only when he is convinced to remain silent, mollified that the world is sufficiently subservient to his righteous place at the top of the social hierarchy. These aren't people we can reason with or win over with better ideas.
20/The most difficult thing about white men strategically is that they become *obscenely powerful* when they're angry or defensive, far beyond what their demographic representation would suggest. The second most difficult thing is how easily they *become* angry or defensive.
21/Because white men believe they have a rightful place at the top of the social hierarchy, they are willing to support policies & ideology they *know* will harm them--and be entirely willing to endure that pain--if they believe it will hurt a "lesser" group even more than them.
22/ Trump's ridiculous tariff war with China is an obvious example. Farmers are willing to tolerate senseless financial trauma wrought by an economically illiterate circus clown simply because he looks like them. This disproves all legitimacy of an "economic anxiety" argument.
23/ This is the code white men hear from their fellow leader: "as long as *those people* are hurt worse, any amount of pain I inflict on you will preserve your status at the top". As long as it's a white man kicking them around, they'll happily keep paying for his new shoes.
24/ Let's introduce a new element: a Democrat offers these struggling white men what the party is known for--respite from the financial torment they are forced to endure from the Donald Trumps of the world, through direct aid and commonsense government assistance programs.
25/ Sensible government assistance programs have immense economic and societal benefits felt by everyone, particularly the masses of poorly educated whites in every state who make up the bulk of the poor population in America.
26/ But there's a problem. It would be politically impossible & downright immoral to offer govt assistance only to poor whites so instead of seeing good & morally just govt functions that help people like them, they see programs that help "those people" more than it helps *them*.
27/ The perverse paradox here is that technically they're correct. When a program helps *everyone*, the ones at the very bottom will necessarily receive a proportionally greater benefit than those above. Poor whites understand that even just among the poor, they're still on top.
28/ There is no moral justification to support the outcomes the vastly powerful white male demographic desires: racially discriminatory govt aid & penalty; or direct harm to themselves & others which on balance preserves the social position they sincerely believe they deserve.
29/ To oversimplify centuries of American history for a moment, there is nothing more destructive to progressive change than white men who fear the erosion of their overwhelming dominance within our social order.
30/ Because white men react almost blindly in defense of the one and only goal of protecting their privilege, they are at their *strongest* when directly confronted, and their weakest when we *subvert* the disproportionate power they wield.
31/ White men's burning rage and massive numbers makes a confrontational strategy extremely unwise. Their numbers are indeed dwindling, but directly confronting them now in a way that makes them feel their privilege is being threatened would result in a Pyrrhic victory at best.
32/ We might win the presidency w any Dem (our base is bigger), but they are so efficiently distributed across the country there's *no chance* we'd secure the congressional majorities we also need in order to have any hope of undoing the damage they have inflicted on us all.
33/ Subversion is the better choice. An army of sneering white men will protect their privilege with unrelenting ferocity, but this also blinds them to smaller, more sustained progressive change. The 2018 midterm election was a clear demonstration of the power of this strategy.
34/ Once white men safely "returned" the country's highest office to the right type of person (despite that person being laughably unqualified for the position and immensely destructive to our standing in the world), they got *rolled* in the House by progressives of all types!
35/ In 2018 we elevated Democratic women and people of color to historic levels of representation in government. Congress is where real progressive change happens--achieved as a group, not by presidential decree. This is how Democrats operate best.
36/ Democrats don't take our marching orders from one leader like Republicans do. We cooperate with each other, judge each action on its merits, and arrive independently at similar conclusions. This is because we are bound together by our ideals, not by our leaders as they are.
37/ The Democratic president we need is one who is exactly this type of well-known team player. One whose most important test in the eyes of history will be their ability to sign everything a progressive Democratic Congress puts on their desk.
38/ Importantly, our nominee must also protect the progress we will have made by avoiding (or significantly softening) the predictably ferocious conservative backlash in the following midterm elections against that very progress we fought so hard to achieve.
39/ We can accomplish great things, but we need a strategy to actually make it happen. We won't get anywhere if our intent is to simply roll in and declare the end of white male dominance. They're too powerful for that to work just yet. They must be weakened first.
40/ We can weaken white men's sordid support of Donald Trump in this election by subverting their outsized electoral strength, but we must recognize what kind of personal sacrifice that will actually require from many of us. It will reveal the true test of #VoteBlueNoMatterWho.
41/ While it's certainly foolish to sacrifice any part of the existing Democratic coalition by offering resistant white men a genuine conservative to vote *for*, it's a strategic masterstroke to offer them a candidate that makes them want to stay home instead of voting *against*!
42/ A good white man as our nominee would be our greatest subversive asset in this war. He would be our Trojan horse we would deliver to our enemy's strongholds in the Midwest and the eastern borderlands.
43/ We would know the true beliefs inside that familiar-looking horse, but our enemies won't. That is our key to not just electoral college victory, but to ensuring a blue tidal wave crashes down across the interior of the country as well as the coasts!
44/ A Trojan horse would powerfully subdue their otherwise rabid thirst for a belligerent right-wing blowhard to protect them from all the scary multiculturalisms. For reasons I'll discuss elsewhere, white men only seem to have this widespread visceral reaction to the presidency.
45/ Successfully pacified by the mere sight of one of "them" in the White House, white men then fail to muster the existential fear of "others" in virtually every position of power below that *one* white man. This is the key to their strength that we can weaponize against them.
46/ Every Democrat is *seething* at the chance to vote Trump out of office for good & the larger the victory, the more cowardly sycophantic racists go with him. *None of us* will stay home because we didn't nominate a black woman or young man or sufficiently liberal policy wonk.
47/Meanwhile, a white man would nullify every "threatening" identity difference Trump would otherwise successfully exploit against us. Instead of white men feeling the need to rise up against us, they kick their feet back in the (false) belief it all worked out for them as usual.
48/ To be clear, the goal here is *not* to lure Trump supporters into voting Democrat by offering them a genuine conservative. The *real* goal is to trick them into thinking their delicate white male sensitivities wouldn't be threatened under good old president Whitey McGee.
49/ Barack Obama was a fantastic president, and yet Democrats took countless losses over and over during his tenure because white men hated the fact he was black more than we loved the fact he was competent.
50/ In 2016 we nominated the most qualified & capable candidate imaginable, someone I was proud to celebrate as a role model for my infant daughter. White men again mobilized their overpowered strength against us. We didn't value her competence more than they hated her womanhood.
51/ These repeated electoral losses since 2010 were devastating to the Democratic party, as well as later we'd find out, the very rule of law. We routinely are now forced to accept an alternate reality than what we see with our own eyes, a reality redefined by insecure white men.
52/We learned a very painful & tragic lesson from those elections. The quality of our character & the extent of our experience didn't matter. If our headliner's racial & gender identity wasn't white & male, Democrats would predictably be met with repeated electoral catastrophe.
53/ Candidates neither white nor male face a bleak reality. We're still the same group of bigots who just 3 years ago couldn't decisively choose between a repulsive sewer gorilla & an intelligent, tough female role model. Its entire appeal was its race & presumption of a penis.
54/ Worse yet, our enemies now know that Trump's model of hatred *works*. We are condemning millions to further tragedy if we foolishly charge once again into a head-on confrontation with empowered white male hatred while it is still so widely spread across the electorate.
55/ Energizing our base with direct advocacy of progressive ideals using any vessel other than a white man is not yet strong enough to overpower the enraged energy it pumps directly into our enemies.
56/ Quite honestly I am *horrified* to imagine what kind of nightmare goblin we'd be forced to sacrifice our firstborn children to in 2024 because such qualified & capable candidates dared to dream of serving as the leader of such an irredeemably misogynistic and racist society.
57/ This was a harsh realization that truly broke my heart to admit to myself bc it forced me to acknowledge that for everyone who didn't look like me, sometimes it just didn't matter how hard they worked, how smart they were, or how inspiring they would be to future generations.
58/ This was such a tragic realization for me because it was that very privilege as a white man in a country built for my benefit that had prevented me from seeing until then what was plainly obvious to everyone else. The sadness I feel over this realization isn't "white guilt".
59/White guilt is broadly an expression of self pity that although a person was born into privileged position, they have no comprehension of how to contribute to ending systemic racism beneficial to themselves beyond sacrificing a bit of their personally expendable time or money.
60/ I'm not ashamed I'm a white man. I'm disappointed my guiding beliefs--altruism toward the disadvantaged & responsibility to protect the welfare of all people--aren't shared by most others who look like me. I feel no guilt using my moral & intellectual capacities against them.
61/ While humans tend to perceive moral choices *made by others* in terms of good & evil, nearly all humans--even ones generally regarded as unquestionably evil--convince themselves in their own mind that what they're doing is right and good. Even Donald Trump is no different.
62/ Humans have developed an insatiable desire to perceive of ourselves as the heroes of our own story regardless of what decisions need to be made to do so. From the point of view of animals lower on the food chain, nearly every human is a psychopath toward all non-human life.
63/ I prefer to view morality on a scale between altruism & egotism. Pure altruism is motivated entirely by the desire to help others regardless of personal cost, while pure egotism is motivated entirely by the desire to sacrifice all in service of the self.
64/ I'll save you the time reading an unnecessary deconstruction of what we all already know: Donald Trump is the purest manifestation of egotism I have seen in my lifetime, what I consider the very worst of human existence. In a sense, true evil.
65/The ideal Dem nominee would be as far away from the driving motivation of egotism as possible. At the same time, strategically nominating a white man would remove the identity-related variables Trump has successfully exploited to ascend in influence, then win & hold power.
66/ After we willingly allowed the worst evil we could have imagined over the most qualified and well-prepared candidate anyone could have ever hoped for, the inescapable question now looms over us all: as a nation, who are we?
67/ By removing every identity-related variable between our nominee & Trump, we leave only a decision on moral character...their places on the altruism vs. egotism scale. This represents the starkest contrast of choice, affirming exactly who we as a society have chosen to be.
68/ Are we a beacon of light, a symbol of freedom to the huddled masses of the world — or are we a nation that gleefully oppresses its most vulnerable communities?
69/ Are we noble and righteous leaders of the free world, where justice is ensured for all — or are we an evil empire denying justice to the powerless as we cruelly take all that is not willingly given?
70/ Are we benevolent stewards of Earth’s most precious resources, inspiring others to emulate our ideals and success — or are we corrupt and cynical tyrants whose death will be met with cheers and sighs of relief?
71/ This is the choice we deserve as citizens of the world. The result of this choice is the bedrock upon which we will rebuild our fractured nation, and only overwhelming and undeniable victory can confirm we made the right choice.
72/ It is no real victory at all to wage the political fight of our lives with another candidate if, as a result, it sparks a new decade of racist recrimination and spiteful misogyny from an unending parade of permanently triggered right-wing psychopaths.
73/ As a thought experiment, imagine winning the 2020 presidential election with *any* candidate who wasn't a white man. Hooray, we removed Trump! Sure, we're proud of whatever cultural milestone their election represents. But that's not where it ends--so much more horror awaits.
74/ First, our victory would accompany a failure to retake the Senate; our performance in 2018 proved an immutable divide between rural and urban states. As a result, absolutely no meaningful progressive legislation would be achieved during the President's *entire first term*.
75/ Therefore, our election of a white woman or [any non-white ethnicity] [man or woman] should be understood to be in itself the only significant progressive achievement we can plausibly expect for at least the next 4 years (we certainly wouldn't make Senate gains in 2022).
76/ In exchange for that *one* progressive victory, we'd be forced to suffer incessant commentary from "serious" pundits preening in unbearably smug yet bizarrely acceptable language why President [white woman or non-white man] is struggling to connect with "Joe Six-Pack".
77/ At the same time pumping out article after article undermining their constitutional authority because they were [ethnicity]/[gender]. Mainstream media commentary would focus extensively on nonsensical standards a white man would never be expected to concern himself with.
78/ If the President were a woman we could expect constant discussion of her weight, wall-to-wall coverage of any change in her wardrobe, tone & pitch of her voice, & volatile (and somehow withering) emotional state, presented with the utmost seriousness by mainstream networks.
79/ In the darker corners of the media cesspool, right-wing sites would generate tons of content & attention spewing an endless stream of sewage about things like her "fuckability" and her "rightful place" place in our society. An intractable jihad inflicted upon us by white men.
80/ Beyond their offensive and loathsome efforts to subjugate her actual political authority, we would be forced to endure an endless barrage of grotesque rape and revenge fantasies targeting her explicitly because she was the Commander in Chief of the United States.
81/ If the President were a non-white man...well, we already know exactly what to expect. God help us if the President were non-white *and* female. It would be a nonstop cavalcade of horror and suffering entirely for the ability to say "we finally put a ____ in the White House."
82/ The thought of such predictable outcomes as essentially our *best case* scenarios makes me sick to my stomach. Even in victory, such an outcome wouldn't inflict a fraction of the damage that this malignant tumor on our soul deserves.
83/As appalling as it is, Trump is not the source of the corruption in the Republican party. The corruption is in the very core of their ideology itself. Nothing will change unless they are washed out together. It's not enough just to beat Trump. This election needs to HURT THEM.
84/ Democrats, liberals, & progressives do not follow the same social rules and organizational structures that Republicans, conservatives, and right-wingers enforce upon themselves.
85/ We cannot collectively thrive under a centralized command structure, because each of us individually *becomes* a leader when the moment calls for it. Each of us is driven by that same desire to build a better world for ourselves and our society, and it calls on us to step up.
86/ You can see it in every new #resist account, who, if they're like me, joined Twitter for the sole purpose of expressing my outrage at our Russia-installed illegitimate wannabe dictator and every terrible part of humanity that he revels in exploiting.
87/ The country itself is at stake, & all Democrats have heard the alarm. It's that sense of shared responsibility and duty that drives ordinary people like me to spend hours writing missives like this in the hope I might help make the world just a tiny bit better by sharing it.
88/ I share these thoughts openly despite knowing full well it's likely to have no more impact on the world than had I simply screamed it into the void. Ordinary people like me are now fully activated because of Trump. Twitter outrage like this is just the tip of the iceberg.
89/ Republicans have absolutely no concept of this. Without being constantly triggered by their sole purpose in life--to protect their power and privilege at all costs--they have no collective goals, and no inner call to service to orient their moral compass.
90/ In fact, that's how Trump was able to hold his party to merely *historic* midterm losses, rather than *inconceivable* losses in 2018. They need a leader to dictate their purpose, and that's exactly what his constant stream of rage and grievance gives them.
91/ Republicans need a powerful leader to dominate them, because in their twisted minds, the strength of their unquestioned leader allows each of them to hide the true extent of their own weaknesses as individuals.
92/ Democratic-aligned groups are rarely afforded this luxury. We are routinely punished intensely at the ballot box for daring to dream of making this world a better place for our loved ones and for future generations.
93/ When you are a racial, ethnic, even ideological minority surrounded on all sides by a vast and unsympathetic (and frequently cruel) majority, you know simply calling Daddy for help isn't going to make your problems go away. Only the privileged class gets away with that.
94/ Connecting with our friends, family or even just like-minded people we've never met in real life is what gives us our collective purpose. As strong as I know many of you are individually, we are vastly stronger together.
95/ Only by working together to the best of each of our unique abilities--each of us in the roles that best support our collective strength--can we hope to triumph over the darkness in our souls that Donald Trump has revealed was always there.
96/ Trump is not going to be removed from office early, and even if he was, an even more dangerous sycophant would quickly take his place, and we would be even more powerless to stop him in our currently weakened state.
97/Our only hope is to cunningly pretend to play their tilted game for a bit longer until the looming political cataclysm of the younger generations reaches critical strength to wash them all out. The very *moment* Boomers slip, Democrats will take unified control of everything. 
98/True wisdom knows no age. We all have a stake in the future. This is how the older and younger generations can work together to fight the Hitler of our time. This is how we not only choose better heroes, but ensure they get into power and stay there as long as we need them to.
99/ In the eyes of history, will Barack Obama have been proven right for believing in us — or is this all we can ever be?
100/100 We must either prove in 2020 that Barack Obama was right to believe in us, or we must begin to adapt to the reality that there is no hope for this world. This is the showdown America deserves.
FYI: this thread is a full 100 tweets, not 30. To read further, Twitter forces you to either hit “show more replies”, or you can do it the easy way and go right to no. 31 here 👇
