Racists Are Up To Their Eyeballs in Shame and a Small Push Can Provoke a Collapse

In the wake of this horrific, dystopian year, my wife and I made the mutual decision to stop watching the news. That’s why, in 2025, we enjoy our morning coffee while watching The Brady Bunch.My wife grew up in Peru, so she never heard of this show. I knew it existed, I just avoided it when I was a kid.For the most part, The Brady Bunch helps keep my blood pressure down. But yesterday I saw an episode that left me raging. One of the boys attempted to defend his sister from a bully. The bully got in the boy’s face and demanded, “Why don’t you make me?”The moment he said that, it was like a switch flipped in my brain. I stood up and took two steps toward the television before my wife said, “Uh, what are you doing?”It’s a weird thing to stumble into deeply buried trauma. I’m not a violent person. I go out of my way to make sure other people do not feel intimidated by me. I’m not some toxic male with a fragile ego who has to cover himself with guns and pickup trucks to feel like a man.But the second that kid said, “Make me,” I felt a strong impulse to do just that.One of the fundamental lessons I learned as a child was that the beatings aren’t going to stop until you make them stop. So, when a bully says, “Make me” I taught myself to respond. After all, that’s not a taunt, it’s an invitation.If you try to respond to a bully with kindness, you’re going to get beat to a pulp. That’s exactly what happened in The Brady Bunch. The kid determined he couldn’t “be like the bully,” and the bully repaid his decency with a black eye.Television doesn’t always get the story right, but in this case it was accurate. You either stand up to a bully, or you submit to becoming a victim. If there is a “center” position, it’s when you decide to become a groveling bully apologist.We have those in our society too.I’ve often posted reflections about growing up in a culture that was steeped in the toxic ideology of white supremacy. From a very young age, you’re conditioned to accept a perverted view of the world that does not match reality. At some point you grow into enough power where you stop allowing bullies, and bully apologists, to make you stop asking questions about all the contradictions.“Now’s not the time for that,” they say.We have complex mechanisms that are stacked upon each other to protect the bully mindset and which make decent people question their own motives.Lately, I’ve encountered a lot of people who make a critical error when it comes to their assumptions about bullies. I’ve often heard people say, “Lecturing them doesn’t do any good because they have no shame.”That is incorrect.Bullies and white supremacists do feel shame. In fact, they’re up to their necks in shame. They have an unhealthy relationship with shame. That’s why they constantly try to shame everyone else while insisting they must be held exempt.Shame is why they can’t practice accountability. They can’t even admit a small mistake because to do so would threaten to collapse their entire self-image.I know this because that’s the way I was raised. I know what it feels like to go through life feeling absolute abject terror over the threat of shame. I know what it’s like to think your entire identity is based on a structure of absurd beliefs, and if you question them you won’t have any idea who you are or where you belong.This is why I get ornery when people say, “It’s no use calling a white supremacist out on his awful behavior. He has no shame. He’ll never change.”First of all, that’s wrong.Second of all, I don’t want him to “change.” I want to push his flawed personal ideology into collapse.This is something anti-racism activists have to learn. You’re not dealing with a piece of metal that will bend but not break. What you’re dealing with is more like carbon fiber. It will withstand more force than the metal. For a while, it might even appear to be stronger. But when the breaking point happens, the result is catastrophic.You get complete collapse. The whole structure comes crashing down.I’m telling you, this is the only way to deal with a bully. If you try to dismantle their own personal structure with kindness, they’ll just laugh at you. In fact, they’ll wait until you get close, inflict agony upon you, and then ridicule you for being so stupid.This is why they say, “Empathy is a weakness.” It’s basic reverse psychology. They depend on people treating them with empathy in order to retain their power.We’ve got to stop doing it. We’ve got to push them into narcissistic collapse and watch them crumble. It takes more effort than what we’ve been using until now, but it takes a lot less than what you might realize. If Kamala Harris had pushed just a little harder during that debate, she might have had her opponent in tears.Just like when the bully came on The Brady Bunch, I stood up during several moments during that debate and screamed, “Come on! Do it! Do it! Come on Kamala!”But decorum prevailed. All the whispers of “We can’t be like them” prevailed. In the end, she showed empathy, and the bully laughed and continued on his reign of destruction and terror.What I’m trying to convey is that we have to stop listening to the bullies, and listening to the bully apologists. We have to stop playing nice. It doesn’t make us “like them” to stand up for truth and justice and demand accountability for evil people.Somehow our culture has gotten all twisted. There’s this idea that we can’t examine guilt. We’re supposed to look away from the guilt of others and feel shame ourselves. It’s like blaming the child for the sins of the parents. It’s time to stand up and say, “Hell no. You did it. You can feel bad about it.”Take a second and look at the labors of white supremacy with different eyes. Everything they do is designed to deflect their guilt and their shame onto other people. I understand how people might look at that and think, “Well, they have no shame.” But it’s also true to look at it and recognize that they simply can’t bear to be in the presence of shame.It’s toxic to them. It hurst them. It threatens to destroy the illusion of their personal mythology. Shame deflection and shame avoidance is how they can continue to hurt people. They take the shame they should feel and they force their victims to carry it.Get this… WE’VE LET THEM!All we have to do is stop. Let’s stop allowing criminals to claim they are being wrongfully persecuted. Let’s stop liars from claiming it’s unfair when they’re accused of perverting the truth. Let’s demand that the deplorable men who prey on the innocence of children are held accountable, incarcerated, and stripped of all their assets.We’ve got to quit believing in a distorted version of empathy. We have no obligation to show extreme compassion to abusers, even as we denounce the complaints of the oppressed.That’s backwards.Yes, I understand that decent people can take more pain than evil ones can. I understand that when you force somebody into narcissistic collapse, it’s traumatic for them. They are left vulnerable. They have no idea who they are.But you’re overlooking one critical component.Forcing a racist, a misogynist, a white supremacist, or a child rapist into narcissistic collapse is the only way to ensure they will never hurt anyone ever again. That’s the moment when we can show compassion. You don’t show compassion before the threat has been removed and the teeth have been pulled.Imagine if we cared about the feelings of children more than we cared about the feelings of deplorable, a*****e, child raping white supremacists. That’s the world I want to work for.Now, are you seriously going to try and tell me that I’m wrong? Please don’t. That’s not a taunt, it’s an invitation.You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year.Upgrade at 30% offUpgrade at 40% offUpgrade at 50% offUpgrade at 60% offI’m so happy you’re here, and I’m looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.My CoSchedule referral linkHere’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).I'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe