Some of the blowback is disingenuous, but some folks seem to be actually confused about why I have zero tolerance for white dude dirtbags using "white women" rhetoric to couch their bashing of, well, white women.

Hint: it isn't about denying white women's complicity in racism.

White women are *absolutely* complicit in dudes' racism and also active perpetrators of racism.

Racism is structural, it privileges white people, and anytime white people-- including women-- are not actively working to counter that structure, we are reinforcing it.

Gender oppression does not undo racial privilege and complicity.

Intersectionality is about geometry, not arithmetic or bridge.

You can't add or subtract privileges from each other.

There are no oppression trump cards.

That's the lie behind white feminism.

Also, civility discourse that punishes or censures oppressed people for using language of anger and/or violence in speaking to the frustrations of oppression is in and of itself an oppression.

Anti-oppression work is about resistance, and resistance isn't a peaceful thing.

That's why men don't get to police women saying "men are fucking rapists." It may not be literally true, but it's a callout of the pervasiveness of rape culture & the fact that all men not only perpetuate it but benefit from it.

It's provocative & angry, as resistance often is.

White people (including white women) don't get to police POC for saying "kill all white women."

It's a callout of the pervasiveness of racism and the way that white women benefit from and enable racism while often assuming our gender gives us a free pass to behave oppressively.

Is there a conversation to be had about whether it's misogynist for POC folks to joke about "kill all white women"?

Well, that's not my lane. It's a callout of whiteness, and white women don't have any role in that conversation unless invited to it by POC. (Even then? Dicey.)

That phrase means something VERY different in the mouth of a white dude, though.

When a white dude jokes about "killing all white women," he's joking about killing a whole class of people more oppressed than he is.

THAT is unadulterated and violent misogyny.

The "kill all white women" thing is more extreme than the "Karen" shit, but the core problem is the same.

When POC say "kill all white women" or call a woman "Karen," they are actively resisting a specific mode of racial oppression performed against them by white women.

The relationship of critiquer to critiqued is context that fundamentally determines the meaning of the critique itself.

When POC people critique white people (inc. white women specifically), the core power dynamic is oppressed (POC) critiquer to oppressor (white) critiqued.

When a white man makes a critique of specifically white women, though, that core power dynamic is very different.

There's equity along the racial axis, which means that the primary power differential at work occurs along the gender axis.

As someone replying to one of these threads yesterday:
a white man calling out "white women" is punching down.

Whatever the man's intention, he is leveraging his male privilege to put a women in a place of less-than.

That is the core power dynamic in that scenario.

Whatever the white dude's intention, that will always be the power dynamic when he comes for "white women."

It will always be oppressive, because saying "women" brings the gender axis into play, and that's where the unequal power dynamic occurs between critiquer and critiqued.

Does that mean that white dudes can't critique white women when we're racist?

No, of course not.

They can, and they should. That's part of the daily antiracism all white people should be performing.

But the critique has to be rooted in whiteness, not in gender.

When white men attack or critique or otherwise come for "white women," they are being oppressive, whatever their intentions.

White people can and should critique each other when they perform whiteness oppressively.

White women can generally critique white women on gendered performance of racism, assuming other identity axes aren't implicitly at play in problematic ways.

(An example of an implicit identity axis in play: a cis white woman critiquing the "white womanhood" of a white trans woman for a specific performance of white femininity has the potential to be problematic, because "femininity" can have complicated connotations in this context)

Unless you're punching up on at least one axis of identity, you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT be punching down on any other.

It doesn't matter how many axes of equity you throw in there.

They do not change the math.

So, a white dude making "ironic" remarks about "kill all white women" or even just "Karens" is bringing two axes into play, race and gender.

One-- race-- he has equity with his target on.

The other-- gender-- he's punching down on.

There's no punching up.

It's oppressive.

Best case scenario, these white dudes are attempting to perform allyship to POC by mimicking POC critiques of white women. They're trying to be antiracist and being accidentally misogynist.

That is, again, the BEST CASE SCENARIO here.

These dirtbag leftists are NOT the best case scenario.

They are disingenuous assholes who have repeatedly made it very clear that they don't give a rat's ass about racial liberation or intersectionality.

They don't give a fuck about racism, white women's or otherwise.

They aren't inadvertently performing sexism in service of an attempt to amplify POC critiques of white lady racism.

They DO NOT CARE about the oppression of people of color.

They are just cynically affecting race critique in a bid to disguise their deep and virulent misogyny.

As best I can tell, the biggest practical distinction between the alt-reich and dirtbag "leftists" is their choice of how to balance their hatreds.

They're both cults of white male victimhood.

The alt-reich focuses its hate on non-whites, the Dirtbag "leftists" on women.

(Deep ableism is pretty much intrinsic to both, though the Dirtbags are a little less likely to be quite as explicit about the joys of eugenics)

The alt-reich and dirtbag left both have utter contempt for POC and women.

The core difference is which group they're more willing to give lip service to and/or disingenuously appeal to the protection of in order to try and find license to voice their hatred of the other.

The alt-reich prioritizes their hatred of non-whites, and they're willing to dress that hatred up as in the interests of women as long if it gives them cover to inject their racism into mainstream discourse.

Molyneux's take on "Karen" is a great example.

He famously hates women, but even he will piggyback on this TERF's broad condemnation of "Karen" as sexist if he can leverage that gender-based critique in service of pushing racist talking points about "Karen" being anti-white.

White dirtbag dudes, meanwhile, have been full-on "YOU WILL TAKE THE WORD KAREN FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS, KAREN" in my replies for like a month now, because they understand that the word's racial connotations are a powerful disguise for what is actually just simple misogyny.

Again, in the mouth of POC, "Karen" operates as a racial critique that punches upwards.

When a POC dude says "Karen," it's generally read as a critique of Karen's racism *as it plays out* through her gender.

It's race-focused critique and still a punch up.

When white dirtbag dudes who literally never talk about dude racism go around calling white women "Karen," that's a very different dynamic.

They're punching down on the gender axis, and also they very obviously do not give a fuck about racial equity or racial justice.

There's no punching up when a white dude calls a white woman "Karen."

And when it's a dirtbag doing the Karen-calling, it's extremely clear that to the extent that there's any lateral punch on the axis of race, it's just a perfunctory cover for his misogyny.

A dirtbag dude calling a woman "Karen" is just a sexist racist who is focused enough on performing virulent misogyny that he's willing to do a lazy pretense of racial wokeness as long as it means he can get away with his misogyny.

When Menaker tweets irony-poisoned misogyny about which women he'd like to see dead & frames it in terms of "kill white women" memes, it's just a half-assed appropriation of a punch-up meme for the purpose of clothing his hatred for women in lazily-feigned racial wokeness.

The issue isn't that all "kill white women" or "Karen" memes are fundamentally misogynist.

Context fucking matters.

The problem isn't POC using these memes to punch up.

The problem is white dude dirtbags using these memes to pretend their misogyny is racial wokeness.

And like, it's not just a disguise.

It's all this big anti-wokeness meta-joke for them, too.

The in-joke is, they have nothing but contempt for anyone who would speak to any issue of oppression outside of class, much less demand its remedy.

They're implicitly mocking the POC who use these memes to name and resist racial oppression, even as they co-opt those memes as a way of appropriating that aura of antiracism and using it to get away with violent and overt misogyny.

When you see some dirtbag leftist dude joking about "kill all white women" or "Karens," be very clear that what they are doing is 1) stealing jokes meant to name racism and cynically using those connotations to get away with misogyny, & 2) making fun of racial justice discourse.

People think it's absurd when I compare dirtbags to the alt-reich, but honestly?

They're both just online movements of alienated, irony-poisoned white guys enraged that they never received the economic/social success they thought their white guy-ness entitled them to.

It's not about justice for either group.

They're all just mad that they didn't end up at the top of the heap.

The only "injustice" they recognize is the fact that they were never specially recognized and specially compensated as the Great White Men they think themselves to be.

The Chapo Trap House crew bring in a cool $1.8 million a year.

They couldn't even be bothered to meet the $2.8k individual campaign donation limit for Bernie Sanders 2020, their supposed raison d'etre.

The dirtbag "left" is animated by the same toxic, destructive spirit of white dude rage, entitlement, and resentment that powers the alt-reich.

That's clear from their overt misogyny, their snide and substanceless co-option of memes mean to critique race, their deep ableism.

There's a very popular bit of advice antifascists share when they see comrades engaging with Nazis in good faith.

That advice is, stop.

Rule number one of engaging with Nazis in good faith is, don't.

Nazis never engage in good faith.

Nothing they ever say is said in good faith.

They will play word games and sea lion trying to get you to twist yourself in knots.

They do it to entertain themselves.

Dirtbags use the same bad faith strategies and are motivated by the same snickering, barely-concealed rage that drives Nazi trolls.

Any time they appeal to justice discourse, it is naive to assume it is being done in anything other than bad faith.

When you see white dude dirtbags pulling out "Karen" and "white women" discourse, what you are seeing is them validating themselves through misogyny and entertaining themselves by tricking "SJWs" into believing they care at all about racial oppression or calling out whiteness.

It's hateful bullshit, and it's as much (though not as transparently) about their contempt for POC as it is about their hatred of women.

They are entertaining themselves & protecting class reductionist leftism by sowing discord within leftist intersectional community.

Don't fall for it.

Don't let them get away with it.

Don't give them the benefit of the doubt, and never assume good faith.

Their culture and their business model is rooted in reactionary hatred.

Give it no quarter.

(the end.)