What To Do When the Foolish Start To Flinch
Some bros stumbled on their conscience. How should we respond?
HERE WE ARE!
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What To Do When the Foolish Start To Flinch
In an interesting turn, Joe Rogan & Andrew Schulz—those thick-necked podcast goons—have begun to step back. A shift in tone. A slackening of posture. The first faint suggestion that the house they helped build might be smoldering. They are backing away from the Trump administration.
There will be no real reckoning for them, of course. They surround themselves with paid cheerleaders who laugh at their jokes, pat them on the back and call them "free thinkers". What interests me is not the theatrics of reversal, but the space between conviction and discomfort. How they are unable to stomach the reality of what they campaigned for.
What do we do with that?
Like, really—what’s the protocol?
I don’t trust these guys.
Not yet. Almost certainly, not ever.
They helped build a megaphone that turned a grunting pile of cruelty and ego into a political ideology. They confused being wrong with being brave. They made money off of being smug and loud and just smart enough to sound convincing to the very bored and the very angry and those too disillusioned or scared to face the mirror of their own complicity in the state of our world.
And now they’re—what—rethinking things?
Give me a break.
No, really. Give me a break. I’m exhausted.
What we want to do, many of us, is slam the door in their faces as they turn back around. We want to shout, “Too late!” We want to rake them across the coals of their own past platforms—the ways they humored fascists and race scientists and proudly stupid conspiracies; the audiences they emboldened; the harm they enabled; the profit they reaped from edge-lording for attention.
We want the receipts to matter. And they do matter. Absolutely they do.
But what about when—whether out of strategic calculation, PR, moral awakening, or even just vibes—they begin to shift?
What do we do when the Nazi sympathizers become less sympathetic to the Nazis? What about when they truly waver? I don’t have a definitive answer. But I know this is the direction I want things to go. My instinct is to encourage them to keep going and go quickly.
There’s this thought I keep coming back to, that returns to me like an urgent whisper from a more patient version of myself:
Keep calling racists racist. Keep calling fascists fascist. But when they waver, when they doubt themselves, us white folk need to help them pull at those threads until it all unravels.
Which I think means: Always tell the truth. Always name the thing.
But also: don’t mistake someone tugging nervously at their red hat as a reason to yell "I told you so" louder at them—it might be the moment they finally take it off.