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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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Why doesn't "what if the roles were reversed" ever work? I mean it works for me. I actually am convinced when people bring up that argument. But it never works when conservatives say it to progressives.

Why I'm bringing this up is that recently Abdul El-Sayed's wife appeared on stage wearing something not dissimilar to an outfit from "Handmaid's Tale".

https://x.com/FedPoasting/status/2118389760070725932

What if the roles were reversed? What if Mike Pence or Mitt Romney or J.D. Vance of Pete Hegseth showed up like this?

I have a hard time explaining why this line of reasoning just does not land at all with progressives. To me it seems like a slam dunk. What am I missing? And is there a conservative equivalent to this, i.e. a meta role reversal where conservatives are the one being hypocrites?

Because white progressives are unironically white supremacists. I don’t mean this in the DR3 way. They don’t think these people are a threat at all. A white person doing something a tenth as conservative would be seen as way scarier to them. White supremacists and immigration restrictionists actually see the threat these people pose and give them their due. It’s why they also don’t care about DEI and support it. They think they are so smart and privileged that it won’t affect them. They have no idea they will be discarded as soon as they don’t need them.

I often joke about who the real white supremacists are. The people we call "white supremacists" believe that whites should be supreme but are actually oppressed and downtrodden. Meanwhile the most vehement progressives essentially believe that whites should be oppressed but are actually supreme and unassailable. For example, in the latter case it's literally impossible to be racist towards whites because of their actual supremacy in all things no matter what. It's very much like the German Jew reading the Nazi newspapers for all thee good news about Jews running the world. The average white supremacist could only hope that whites were actually as supreme as the progressive implies.

I always find the comments like this interesting because they do seem to show that the woke progressive and the white supremacist share a very similar worldview. When this is pointed out it's usually to criticise the progressive ("don't you realise how racist your position is?"), but the same also applies in reverse, where I'm inclined to say to the white supremacist, "don't you realise how progressive you are?"

The funny part is that both sides can accuse the other of a hypocrisy while ignoring the fact that their own position entails the same hypocrisy.