I remember getting very, very stern lectures from white people, including some Democrats, sadly, if you dared to suggest that America had a serious racism problem. Besides, Obama was elected, and that ended racism.
These were stated with all the confidence of someone who didn’t want to talk any more about something because they found it tiresome, and that can be some of the most staunch confidence you will ever hear. Unfortunately, here we are, in 2026.
NEW: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military, according to nine U.S. officials familiar with the process.
I know that it’s very divisive to believe Professional Stinkin’ Drunk Pete Hegseth, who leads something called the Department of War, is a racist, but I was also told that nothing can ever be racist, because racism was dead. The very smart reactionary centrists and other Republicans who had a fit if you dare suggested that Trumpism was a White Nationalist project are having to work a little harder to prove that Trump isn’t really a racist.
Perhaps they should try hiding who they actually are a little bit better. Or maybe they don’t care anymore.
A viral clip posted to X on Thursday showed Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback blowing up at a Black voter and telling him he should be "lynched" for asking about the allegations of inappropriate behavior with teenagers.
Stuff like this is what they want. They love it, they eat it up. And it’s not just a rando Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate who is neck-deep in gutter racism. Overnight, the president himself indulged in some.
Nothing I could say about the GOP base is as illustrative as the fact that Trump understands that posting black people in what his audience considers a “white space” will make them incandescently angry bsky.app/profile/atru…
— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) 2026-04-06T12:49:20.208Z
These are just samples of the deep, unfiltered racism that comes out of the Trump administration, of course. I didn’t even mention Actual Nazi Stephen Miller. Unfortunately for the Superior Race, things are not going well for the White Nationalist President.
There’s a certain genre of armchair imperial strategist, recently upgraded to actual advisory roles, that seems to believe the age of empire ended because everyone got too “woke” to conquer each other properly. Trump deeply agrees with this.
Conquerors, in their minds, never lose because colonized people spent a century making imperialism violently unsustainable, or because modern technology made territorial control an inefficient way to project power. No, the problem was a lack of sufficient brutality and confidence in one’s own supposed genetic superiority. The theory was simple: blast a lot of shit into pieces, believe hard enough, and as long as you didn’t care about silly things like war crimes or caring about other human life, countries like Iran would fold. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, reality, for starters. It turns out brutality is not a cheat code. It comes with tradeoffs, blowback, and the inconvenient tendency to strengthen resistance instead of dissolving it. Watching this theory collapse in real time has produced a very specific kind of fury.
It is the anger of people who are not just losing, but being embarrassed by those they had already dismissed as inferior. Of course, they will never admit the framework itself is broken. It is always execution, never premise, never that your superior white Christian brain came up with a deeply stupid premise. But when your worldview depends on the idea that entire populations are inherently lesser, every failure becomes a very public demonstration that maybe the whole thing is nonsense.
And that nonsense does not stay confined to foreign policy. It is the same logic behind years of rhetoric about the supposed inferiority of “third world” immigrants, now awkwardly applied to international relations with predictable results. Racism does not just make you cruel. It makes you stupid, strategically and empirically.
This leads me to part of the overall project of turning America lily-white, the attempt to end birthright citizenship. Based on several of the conservative Supreme Court justices’ questions and responses to the answers, Trump’s attempt to end it and basically destroy the 14th Amendment will fail by something like 7-2. But this should have never made it to the Supreme Court in the first place!
Which is why the broader lesson feels painfully obvious. What happens if we put all the racists in charge is not a question that should require a live demonstration. Yet here we are, with a media ecosystem still spending enormous energy pretending this worldview is a reasonable disagreement, and legal debates that try to invent ambiguity where the Constitution is actually clear. At some point, treating bad faith arguments as thoughtful inquiry stops being civility and starts being complicity.
Complicity with an all-white viewpoint, based on violence and hate.
The last word goes to Alicia Keys.