White Liberals Can’t Say No

It has reached comical proportions but our cities and nation suffer

I can still recall the lecture halls of 2011, my sophomore year, where the seeds of my departure from the Democratic Party were sown. Back then, I was a newly registered Democrat but called myself a progressive to fit in. I voted for Obama’s hope and change, thinking he would jail bankers. I even went to an OWS rally. That was my most leftward point, and it ended quickly. Something felt off in those classrooms and opposite of the goal of cleaning out corruption and economic change. The buzzwords thrown around like “privilege,” “microaggressions,” “systemic oppression” were not just tools for analysis. They were dogma. Professors and students alike tiptoed around certain truths, especially when black voices spoke. To question was to be labeled a bigot. By the time I graduated in 2013, I was uneasy and current events kept pushing me away. It was not just an event itself but the analysis and framework that accompanied it. Every debate, every policy, every campaign ad was filtered through a lens of racial deference that stifled honest discussion. I walked away, not because I loved the Republicans, but because I could no longer stomach a party paralyzed by its own kryptonite. White liberals’ refusal to challenge black voices kills not just debate but policy.

This kryptonite, as I’ve come to call it, is not just a quirk of campus culture gone wild. It’s a pathology that has hollowed out the Democrats’ ability to govern. By 2024, the party I was raised to consider for us as my parents explained was unrecognizable. Its spine softened by years of performative guilt. Inflation was creeping, borders were a mess, and cities were grappling with crime waves, yet the left’s loudest voices fixated on symbolic gestures like tearing down statues, policing language, or elevating narratives that brooked no dissent. White liberals, desperate to prove their virtue, deferred to black activists and intellectuals at every turn, refusing to engage in the tough debates needed to address a fracturing nation. Those activists then pull every issue into their wheelhouse and force one to address their pet concerns first. The party could not see past its sacred cows. This deference did not empower anyone. It infantilized black thinkers by shielding them from scrutiny and turned white liberals into gelded enablers. By 2025, as I cast my vote for Trump who at least acknowledged borders and jobs, I laughed at the Democrats forced to “nominate” an unqualified woman elevated throughout her career solely for being part black.

Take the recent furor over Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “One Battle After Another.” I caught it in a half-empty theater in Brooklyn last week, expecting the usual Hollywood gloss on radical chic. What I got was something messier, a Pynchon adaptation that dared to humanize revolutionaries without turning them into saints. At the center is Perfidia, a black militant leader whose name literally means “treachery.” She is no hero. She cheats on her lover, betrays her comrades to the Man, and abandons her own daughter for the thrill of the fight. The film does not flinch from her flaws. There are many from her hyper-sexualized defiance, her selfish power plays, to her willingness to gaslight allies with revolutionary jargon when it suits her. It is a portrait of a scumbag who gets her kicks from larping as a revolutionary. Anderson, a white liberal director with a mixed race wife, could have sanded down those edges to appease woke critics. Instead, he leaned in, making Perfidia a force of nature who is as destructive to her own side (her own family) as she is to the system.

You would think this complexity would spark robust discussion. After all, cinema thrives on takes. But white liberal film reviewers? They could not muster a single sharp word against Perfidia. They praise the portrayal and skip over her faults as if acknowledging a black woman’s agency to be a horrible character was somehow reactionary. She sells out her crew, and they end up dead. Reviewers and online comments speak of her firing guns while extremely pregnant as cool and fierce. They all kind of tiptoe around her terrible character as if afraid to bruise the sacred skin of black representation. Why? Because challenging a black character’s flaws risks the scarlet letter of insensitivity.

It is a blip on the cultural radar but mirrors a broader pattern we all have watched unfold since the 2010s, one that sapped the entire media of its intellectual spine. The left avoided challenging Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essays, even when his focus on “plunder” as America’s sole lens ignored class or cultural factors. These were poorly written whine-fests. By 2020, this dynamic had eaten the Democrats whole. The 1619 Project, led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, reframed American history around slavery’s legacy. This was to remake the founding myth. When historians pointed out factual errors, white liberals did not engage. They branded critics as defenders of white supremacy, shutting down debate. The New York Times issued quiet corrections and moved on. No one would ask, “how did this even get published?”

This deference bled into policy, too. Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracism framework, with its rigid racist-or-antiracist binary, became scripture. He received over $40 million for his antiracism institute. White liberals in think tanks and Congress parroted it, even as it stifled nuance on more and more issues. Challenge Kendi? Unthinkable. It might mean admitting that not every disparity is malice, that other variables matter, too. Instead, the party pushed equity audits and DEI mandates. When the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023, white liberals wailed without grappling with how it outright discriminated against other groups. Kendi’s donor money is gone in a mysterious case of mismanagement, but wait for it, Harvard employs him now.

The white liberals are incapable of saying no. Ezra Klein’s recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates is a perfect snapshot of this kryptonite. Klein hosted Coates to discuss the left’s persuasion tactics in a post-Trump world. Klein just wants better messaging to win, but Coates just spewed his no debate drivel. Klein couldn’t even get him to consider debate with the other side. The episode ended with praise for Coates’s craft, not a debate but a therapy session.

Klein is not alone. They all do it. In the most disgusting ways they make ridiculous statements like “Wish black women were in charge or everything” or immediately use self-deprecating anti-white jokes or comments. White liberals are the last group in America that does not only see black and think moral superiority but still provides it credibility and currency as our nation faces a myriad of issues to fix. It is beyond white guilt and has reached the mindkill phase. They see black, connect it to slavery and shut down. If you witness this mindkill or the self-deprecating act, you’ve likely caught others who just glare at them or look slightly annoyed. As time marches on, this will change to verbal confrontations and insults. That type of self-deprecation is comical when a supermajority, but is a cowardly and lame form of submission now. It’s a strategy of losers. It’s a big loser when applied to a political entity.

Klein knows this; his columns beg for broader coalitions. Yet he deferred, boxed in by the fear of seeming to offend an ally. This is why people who never would have expected to vote red now. It is not out of love, but necessity. Criminals need to face consequences. There are only so many dollars to go around. Not every interaction is racist. The Democrats’ deference cripples them, turning away millions, and it ruins things for the rest of us. The media already laughs at Pete Buttigieg receiving 0% of the black primary vote. He is mocked, and no one questions if blacks are being unfair. We cannot even debate if black women are out of step with the nation when they vote 99-1% for Democrats. America needs debate, not dogma. It needs fixes, not phony validations. It starts with small steps. Admit Perfidia’s horrible behavior and treachery as a fictional character. Grill Coates on his ignorance and whining about victimhood on a simple podcast. Admit there needs to be accountability. We have much bigger issues to tackle, but just say no to the little ones first. Democrats won’t, and America will turn to those who will.