Man, you look beat. You look drained. You look like what happens if Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani spent the night at a hookah bar with Steve Bannon’s liver and a pile of meth-laced Fentanyl.
Aren’t you tired, White Men?
The last time I saw you was on my feed. I forget what you wrote, but it was something like, “AOC socialism / mainstream media evil / WHY WERE THEY SO NASTY TO BRETT KAVANAUGH/ 1619 project bad / Obama unmasking coup scandal / something something George Soros Hunter Biden/ Antifaarghghgrghrhghbghbgrh.” It was something like that. It’s hard to remember the specifics because you never make sense.
Anyway, you were expressing your opinion, which you thought was very important, and that’s something you invariably do all the time, virtually and in real life, always and forever in perpetuity.
Aren’t you tired of it, though?
Aren’t you done with being the lone demographic that supports and defends a president the rest of us hate? When I say “us,” I mean “We, the people” — women, Black people, Latinx, Asian, LGBTQ, Native Americans, young people, and even a few good white men. All of us understand that Donald is venal and the embodiment of what’s wrong with our country. We had his number years ago. Well, we white women didn’t! But even most of us Karens and Beckys see the truth now, and that leaves you all alone; the solitary confederate flag-bearer of this pussy-grabbing lunatic. Aren’t you weary?
Isn’t it humiliating, having white dudes like you throw hissy fits and plot coups because they were outraged over gym closures? Gym closures! People are suffering and dying, and children got ripped away from their parents by your leader, and those guys couldn’t handle a month of home HIIT workouts? Aren’t you fatigued by it all?
And don’t you feel depleted, being the only ones who deny that climate change and racism and misogyny exist?
Is it not sapping to have to defend this indefensible president? Because it’s always you, isn’t it? It’s so reliably you, that if the rest of us could mute you, the world would seem like a pretty welcoming, positive place, without all the Hannities and the Limbaughs and the Alex Jones’s ruining it for everyone else.
I mean, aren’t you just a teensy bit ashamed that the Senate majority is so white, male, and unrepresentative? No? Not ashamed at all? Okay.
Someone once said that your greatest fear is being laughed at, and I have to tell you, you’re a figure of ridicule at the moment. Isn’t it a drag sheepling after a guy who doesn’t seem to understand the simplest concepts about how infections spread? Don’t you ever wish you had a leader with intelligence and knowledge and an actual plan? Someone who rose in the world because of merit rather than from the infantilizing experience of getting handouts from his rich dad?
Oh, I see. A meritocracy is something you fear. I understand. Even still, it must be exhausting.
Aren’t you wiped out?
Wouldn’t you like to give it a rest?
Wouldn’t it be great if you weren’t clutching onto this dumdum idea anymore? You know the one — the idea that there’s a superior Judeo-Christian civilization that enslaved black people and called gayness an abomination and says women should be subservient wives. You remember it now? You should. You’ve gone on and on and on about it. You’ve used it justify cruelty and even now are vomiting these ideas by inflicting religious-fundamentalist judges on the rest of us.
But what if you didn’t have to do it anymore?
What if, instead of holding on for dear life, you let it go?
I know. It can be scary to let go. I promise it’s going to be okay. Once you understand that you’re not put on this earth to control other people and grab all the wealth and suppress other voices and feel entitled to everything from attention to sex to deference, you too can connect meaningfully with other people and not end up like Chuck Woolery. You can do it!
And won’t it be a relief? Don’t you want to join us here, on the other side, where people can just be, instead of conforming to some obtuse and regressive definition of what it means to be a “man”? Because you’re not fooling anyone. We see your deepest vulnerability. You think this makes you weak, but really it just makes you human. It’s only a problem when you bury weakness beneath layers of aggression, selfishness, and spray tan, the way you do now.
Okay, I’m glad we had this talk. I know you’ll probably forget it a minute from now when something distracts you, like Kamala’s facial expressions or Hillary’s emails. But maybe, just maybe, you’ll remember this. Maybe you’ll even remember when you fill out your ballot.