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Salon has a doozy of an article out today, preaching to us that America is supposedly having a wake-up call. White people are finally realizing the government can be heavy-handed. Law enforcement can be rough. History has ugly chapters. And suddenly, after decades of comfortable living, they are shocked. Shocked!
Salon took a woman comparing America to Nazi Germany and turned it into a serious moment of moral clarity.
Hours after Pretti was killed on Jan. 24, hundreds of people protested near the site in Minneapolis where he died. There, an older white woman told a reporter that “the government is not supposed to be doing these horrible things to the American people. It is unbelievable. This is something like Nazi Germany or Russia.”
I yelled at the television. “What d**n country do you live in?”
But her sentiments are common among people who are gathering at protests, community meetings and town halls all across the country.
Like many other white Americans, and too many Black and brown Americans, she seemed willfully ignorant of her own country’s history, which includes genocide and land theft against First Nations; white-on-Black chattel slavery; Jim and Jane Crow; the Black Codes; the Red Scare; violent social and political repression of LGBTQ Americans; the Palmer Raids; mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, to name just a few examples.
And then there is the language. When many protesters insist that “regular people,” “good people” and “citizens” should not be treated this way, what they often mean — consciously or not — is middle- and upper-class white people like themselves. – Salon
The full-of-himself Salon writer, Chauncey DeVega, in his little article, is treating this moment like a moral awakening. White Americans, he says, are finally seeing the truth about power, violence, and oppression. What black and brown communities have always known, the rest are now discovering.
Apparently, slavery just ended on its own. Abraham Lincoln must have slipped the author’s mind. So did the hundreds of thousands of mostly white soldiers who died fighting to end it.
And according to Chauncey, this version of the Civil Rights Movement must have been a solo act as well, with no white Americans marching, no white activist beaten or jailed, and no federal troops ordered in by white presidents to enforce desegregation.
Funny how all of that disappears when it gets in the way of a good guilt narrative.
The Salon article isn’t some sudden burst of clarity. It’s what happens when years of guilt politics finally hit their intended target.
White liberals showing up to protests isn’t new. Being emotionally herded into the streets by outrage culture is.
This is the move. The writer doesn’t just describe what happened in Minneapolis. He assigns a moral meaning to it, then hands readers a role to play. If you feel horrified, you are “awake.” If you hesitate, you are part of the problem. And if you want to prove you are one of the “good” ones, you already know the next step.
I have a friend who lives in Minneapolis.
He told me the vast majority of protestors are white liberals. Not Muslims. Not Hindus. Not Hispanics. Not blacks. White liberals.
They are fighting for foreign illegals who hate them.
It truly is suicidal empathy.
— Dale Partridge (@dalepartridge) January 25, 2026
🚨 JUST IN: A BUNCH of mostly White liberal women have turned a Minnesota Church service into a COMMUNIST, ANTI-ICE “singing protest”
The Twin Cities have a HUGE self-hating White women problem
Translated(partly): “Together we will LIBERATE ourselves!”🙄 pic.twitter.com/StUW2Cazgw
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) January 29, 2026
To say this is a spontaneous awakening is absurd. What really is happening here is a payoff from years of guilt politics. The target audience is older white liberals, especially the ones who have spent the last decade being told they are complicit unless they are publicly performing their virtue.
What’s being sold as a “wake-up call” looks more like the final stage of a long conditioning program.
For years, whites have been told they benefit from oppression. That silence is violence, or neutrality is complicity. And if they are not actively protesting something, then they are part of the problem.
They sat through DEI seminars at work. Watched endless coverage of the George Floyd protests. And they absorbed the message that guilt equals virtue. Now, the graduation ceremony has arrived.
Outrage culture needed new recruits. It found them in retirees and suburban liberals who finally decided it was time to hit the streets. They didn’t suddenly discover injustice. They finally acted on the guilt they’ve been carefully taught to feel.
Some people take up pickleball in retirement. Others take up activism.
They clutch cardboard signs like “Abolish ICE” and yell about authoritarianism while standing in the middle of a country that allows them to do exactly that.
The irony is lost on them.
The article portrays these scenes as an expression of noble solidarity.
In reality, it often looks like people who watched one too many dramatic news segments and decided they were part of a historic movement.
Feature Image: AI-generated.
Jack says: Mr. DeVega also seems unaware that slavery is still going on in the predominantly Arab/muslim countries.
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