ANS -- It’s True — The Problem is Always White Men

Here is an interesting article with interesting ideas.  Maybe controversial.  What do you think?  (no, not ALL white men....)

Find it here:  https://kikimay.medium.com/its-true-the-problem-is-always-white-men-17c71b289bad 

--Kim

It's True — The Problem is Always White Men

When male dominance is no longer guaranteed by law, tradition, or economic realities, it reasserts itself through authoritarian politics.

Kate Cassidy

5 min read

·

Jan 23, 2026

I recently participated in a small "Free America" walkout in suburban Philadelphia. The protest was organized in opposition to Trump's ongoing reign of fascist terror, with specific attention to the immoral and illegal deployment of ICE in our streets.

There were about 40 of us gathered on a busy street corner, defiantly holding signs with glove-covered hands, hoping to catch the attention of oncoming traffic. As cars sped by, I took stock of the drivers and their reactions. People of all ethnicities, ages, and socioeconomic backgrounds (an assumption, based on their vehicles) honked and showed solidarity with waves, thumbs ups, and fist pumps. We cheered in recognition of our shared fight, but also, in celebration — each new expression of support, however small, fueling tiny glimmers of hope that building a better tomorrow might be possible with the help of our neighbors, friends, and coworkers.

Then there were the dissenters.

Cars with drivers who gleefully gave us the finger, others with a simple thumbs down, and one who eagerly put down his window to scream "I LOVE ICE!"

I was both amused and enraged by each of these encounters — an odd mix of emotions, I know, but it's because of the pattern that began to emerge among these "counter protestors." Out of hundreds of cars that drove by that afternoon, how surprised would you be to learn that 100% of fascism's supporters were white middle aged men? How about the fact that 90% percent of them drove trucks, were bald, and had some sort of neck beard?

You can't make this shit up!

These pathetic excuses for humans looked exactly like you would expect — a bunch of sorry old men whose eternal struggle in life has been trying to get someone — anyone — to fuck them.

And I guess that explains how often I've been accosted by them on streets, in bars, and stores…really anywhere where they can use their beady little eyeballs to see me. They're just so angry at the lack of control they have over women — whose bodies they believe they're entitled to access — that they will inflict harm just to feel something akin to power, however fleeting that feeling may be.

Recently, I went on a trip to Ireland with my partner and we made some single-serving friends on a night out. One of them grew extremely tedious as the night wore on, his love for putting people down and pretending it's all just "joking in good fun" did not take long to piss me off.

But wouldn't you know it…the second my partner stepped away to use the bathroom, his negging suddenly changed. "I think you're the hottest woman alive"… "I'd suck a fart right out of your arse if you let me…" were just some of the words of pure poetry he wetly whispered into my ear before I felt him grind into me from behind and grab my breasts firmly with both hands. His male friend stood by, a witness to it all, eventually apologizing and making excuses…he'd "done too much cocaine" (what year is it?)…he wouldn't "remember this in the morning"…"he's one of those friends that you just keep because you've known them for so long"…etc.

And that, my friends, is the reality of most women's lives, and hardly the first time something like that has happened to me in my 39 years on this planet. It's all about encountering the men who do the abusing and those who do the excusing, day-in and day-out. Men who yell out their windows about loving kidnappers and rapists, and those in tech vests and collared shirts who observe, but do nothing — unwilling to delay their business lunches and gym sessions.

And I know it's tempting to write this off as anecdotal — just a few assholes, a few ugly trucks, a few entitled men. But this isn't random. This is patriarchy in its late-stage form — when male dominance is no longer guaranteed by law, tradition, or economic realities, it reasserts itself through authoritarian politics. The ways in which sexual entitlement mirrors political entitlement are hard to miss.

Think about how much fascist movements have historically fetishized masculinity. They showcase men being fathers, defenders, and protectors (oh, the irony) who use force to preserve or restore patriarchal systems and institutions — what they conceptualize as the "natural order of things." And yet, they never stop to question why something "natural" requires force to maintain.

Just look at the type of imagery used to recruit Nazis during WWII compared to ICE recruitment ads now.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

They all feature some or all of the same characteristics — traditional conceptions of hyper-idealized male bodies, warrior symbolism, romantic notions of violence and sacrifice, feminists and minorities as threats to Christian white male power and culture. It's all the same old obsessions with hierarchy and harm, repurposed for today's modern day slave catchers.

The reality is, the same men who cheer for state violence against immigrants are the men who feel entitled to women's bodies. The same men who excuse sexual assault excuse police brutality, deportation raids, and fascist policies. It's all rooted in one core belief: that some people exist to be controlled.

When people fail to give in easily to that control, the heightened white male grievance that results gives rise to movements like MAGA. The more social dominance they lose, the more appealing authoritarian regimes that restore control seem. So many of us keep pretending these are disconnected problems: immigration raids, misogyny, harassment, authoritarian politics, but they're not. They are expressions of the same entitlement — the belief that power, bodies, and nations belong to white men by default. Until we name that, we'll keep treating symptoms instead of the disease.

Ultimately, I know there will be outrage at the title of this piece alone, but I invite it. When every system of domination in this country, from immigration enforcement to reproductive control and sexual violence has been architected, enforced, and defended almost exclusively by white men, what other title would suffice?

Feminism

Misogyny

Patriarchy

Ice

Politics

Written by Kate Cassidy

745 followers

·45 following

Your friendly neighborhood leftist socialist feminist. 17+ Year Media & Communications Professional M.A. in Communication - Focus: Gender & Politics

ANS -- Robert Mueller died last night.

Here is along sad piece, grieving for Robert Mueller and Robert's Mueller's America.  The one with integrity, hope, and promise. I'm not sure who wrote it. 

--Kim

Obama Is My Choice

Suggested for you ·ropesoStnd7m6hf1741fhmtta9ft91ua1g880h6f69lil25l3mh1gcfu1h3l ·

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones...

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam.

He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbors. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honor. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away

Gandalv /

@Microinteracti1 on X