The Unfuck America Tour Is Why The Left Is Fucked

In the words of BARPOD, "the unfuck America tour gets fucked"

This is the most fucks I’ve ever had in a title, but I give no fucks (pun intended)!

Dean Withers is a Gen-Z political commentator whom I’ve never been much impressed by. He’s irritatingly abrasive and bombastic in conversation and seems to be interested only in gotchas. I remember at one point tuning into one of his debates on abortion and hearing him make an argument so bad that it has been permanently blotted from my mind out of cringe. Even worse, he immediately rushed to throw his friends under the bus when they were embroiled in scandal, so as to save his own skin. I find such behavior quite repulsive—if you immediately disown your friends when they attract controversy, that’s very strong evidence that you’re a disloyal pile of human debris.

But Withers is pretty good at what he does. He’s good at generating gotchas, good at sounding like he’s winning an argument if you’re not listening too carefully, good at rhetorically dominating arguments with stupid people, and convincing people on his side that he’s crushing objections to his views. He’s sort of a left-wing version of Charlie Kirk, but slightly smarter and considerably more spineless.

As a result of his rhetorical capacity and physiological caucacity, Dean was seen as a potential tool for shoring up the Democratic vote share among young white guys (it’s like the people hoping for a liberal Joe Rogan don’t even know that Bentham’s newsletter has an occassional podcast). As a result, the unfuck America tour was born. Spoiler alert: this is unlikely to shore up Democrats vote share among young white guys!

The tour involved young liberals, like Dean, who were good at debating going to college campuses and speaking up about bad conservative ideas. For much of the tour, they simply showed up to wherever Charlie Kirk was speaking, called him a coward for not debating Dean, and had Dean and his friend Parker (a similarly spineless promulgator of liberal talking points) fight with MAGAs.

But recently, Dean and the unfuck America tour were at the epicenter of a massive scandal. This scandal was the pinnacle of left-wing meltdowns—and shows, in a deep way, why the left is doing poorly among young men and why many people find the left insufferable.

(Note: many of the points I’m making here have been made by the Blocked and Reported podcast. So watch that if you want to hear a similar perspective).

Like most of the world’s ills, it began with a TikTok space.

This TikTok space lasted many hours, and involved various people complaining about the unfuck America tour. Some complained that they had not been invited, others complained that BIPOC femmes had been invited into the tour too late, and still others worried that it was disorganized. Relevant bit of context: most of the people in the livestream were black.

At one point, Zee, one of the tour’s organizers, joined the livestream where people were criticizing the tour. Other bit of context: Zee is white. Zee came in a bit hostile, claiming that the others who were criticizing the tour didn’t know how much work went into the tour and how complicated the logistical details were behind the tour. She claimed that the people on the livestream shitting on the tour were devaluing the work that went into the tour—much of which was done by “people of color.”

The people on the livestream took great offense to this! They claimed they had every right to criticize things that were “harmful,” and bad for the left. Who was harmed? Why was this bad for the left? It’s not quite clear! Other piece of context: all the people other than Zee are deeply insufferable, while the jury is still out about Zee.

Zee stood up for herself and for the tour, arguing that the tour was really difficult to organize, it had been done well, none of the people talking shit knew anything about the difficulty of this kind of behind-the-scenes organizing. She also mentioned someone who had yelled at a third person, which everyone took as very racist, even though the person accused of yelling didn’t dispute the characterization, but merely said her yelling had been warranted. Apparently if a person yells and is black, and you note that fact, this makes you deeply racist.

This, however, was enough to trigger a monumental internet firestorm. Huge numbers of people claimed that Zee’s statements were utterly beyond the pale and that she should resign immediately. Dean continued the tour for a brief period, but then the tour ended (I think because of the controversy?)

Afterwards Dean, having seen the way the political winds were blowing, decided to throw Zee under the bus. He said that he’d considered quitting the tour in response to Zee’s HORRIFYING remarks, but decided against it because people had bought plane tickets for it, and it would be shitty to cancel the tour last minute. He accused Zee of “having been microaggressive against black women,” which in liberal space is basically like being accused of child rape.

Dean then apologized profusely for not quitting the tour earlier, and groveled before the audience, saying he should have demanded that either Zee be fired or that he would resign. He also declared “this apology isn’t for you if you are white,” “white people need to be uncomfortable a little bit more often,” and complained about people “invalidating the grievances and hurt,” that people faced from hearing Zee criticize people who criticized the tour. I’m sure this will really help Democratic popularity among young white men. Dean ended the livestream saying he’d need to take time alone to reflect on the monumental weight of his sins.

As part of Dean’s livestream, he brought on many other people who accused still more people of racism. One of the accused was someone named Johnny, who groveled and begged for forgiveness for not allowing a discussion about Medicaid cuts to be derailed by discussion of Zee’s war crimes. Various black members of the livestream claimed that they should be deferred to on account of their race, and some complained that the tour had white people Dean and Parker at its head.

One person, not content with claiming Zee had engaged in a microaggression, referred to her behavior as “microaggression and just straight up aggression,” as if Zee had, unbeknownst to anyone, invaded Poland. She also said “if a conversation is not making white people uncomfortable, then it’s not a good conversation,” which would seem to imply that conversations about how to cure cancer are not good, but white people being mugged are potential candidates for good conversation.

Each of the white people talked the way white liberals often do when they’re tiptoeing around discussions of race, sounding like their every sentence was approved by an HR firm before they uttered it. There was lots of talk about honoring lived experience, the nature of “this space,” and everything else that the most sycophantic social justice warrior might say. One of the people on the livestream also decided to say Zee’s full legal name, quite explicitly with the purpose of directing a harassment campaign against her. Also, hilariously, half of the people in the situation have internet monikers like “Mermaid.”

This insanity gave rise to three factions: the sane people, who thought Zee hadn’t done anything wrong and the cancellation attempt was seriously idiotic, the slightly insane people who thought that Dean had behaved fine in his apology but that Zee had behaved badly, and the deeply insane people who thought that Dean was still problematic because he hadn’t been quick enough or zealous enough in throwing Zee—presumably a former friend—under the bus.

While we’re dropping F-bombs, I have just one question: what the fuck?

One person said that black people who were verifiably raising their voices to a considerable degree were yelling. This is no different from about half of disputes where one person raises their voice. This was seen as so grotesquely immoral that large numbers of people demanded the entire tour be called off and this woman, who’d successfully headed the tour and raised large sums of money for it, be removed.

This is the height of insane internecine leftist infighting. You can’t convince people that you’re the party of normal people if every person you choose to represent you is insane, conniving, viperous, and willing to throw their friends under the bus for 30 pieces of silver if their friends are deemed problematic.

One of the main reasons the right made inroads with young men is that they were not preachy or censorious. Sure, they support policies that deport people for constitutionally protected speech, but at least they don’t seem, personality wise, like a bunch of narcs. They’re not going to be uptight prudes or try to get you fired over a joke you made.

Even if we grant that Zee committed a microaggression, the entire point of microaggressions is they’re supposed to be minor. They’re the sorts of things one does without thinking, like asking where someone is from, when you only ask that because they have an accent. They make people feel slightly uncomfortable, are the kinds of things worth being aware of, but aren’t particularly egregious. One doesn’t need to look beyond the prefix “micro” in microaggression to realize that they’re not supposed to be capital offences.

One major reason people like Trump is that he’s funny! He doesn’t seem like he has a stick up his butt. While he is uniquely devoid of both morals and cognitive competence, he seems like he’d be fun to get a beer with.

In contrast, each of the people in this story seems utterly deranged. You could never trust them, for they’d disown you in an instant if they thought you’d broached some social justice line. If you spoke to them, you’d have to be constantly walking on eggshells. Any utterance deemed offensive, no matter how minor, could be your downfall. In these communities everyone is constantly surveiling each other, making it so that outside censors are not needed.

One unfortunate result of this is that it brings about actual racism. It makes people hyper fixated on race. If you know that you can be hung for any negative statement made about a black person (provided they’re left-wing that is—such people are fine joking about how hilarious Herman Cain’s death was), then every time you interact with a black person, you’re constantly thinking about their race. If black people are treated as some unique class of person—both fragile and worthy of deference—then they’re not seen as people. Is it any wonder that white liberals talk down to black people more than conservatives do?

Watching these idiotic fights, where each side immediately rushes to condemn the other over slight disagreements, is like reading about particularly fraught periods in Church history, where over some mild linguistic dispute, each side declares that the other is populated with heretics who will burn in hell forever. Being a reasonable adult is about treating people based on their pattern of behavior, not rushing to execute them for mildly infelicitous utterances.

The meltdown of the unfuck America tour is not unique. Similar things happen constantly to other activist groups because left-wing activists are the most insane, race and sex obsessed, theatrical, and disloyal brood of vipers one could imagine. A socialist friend of mine described a similar meltdown at his local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America. They’re willing to eat their own over minuscule perceived infractions. If they ever interacted with normal non-activists, they’d know that such people commit infractions ten times as significant on a daily basis.

Zee was, by all accounts, quite a good organizer. She raised a very large amount of money and organized dozens of people trekking from state to state. But this was not enough to save her. Nothing, in these spaces, will save you. Once a few people come for you, once there is generic bad karma associated with your name, you’ll have few defenders.

If the unfuck America people want to unfuck the left, they would be advised to stop acting like narcs and crazy people. Stop eating your own and treating mere disagreement as if it is in some way problematic. So long as the activist left remains this prone to cancelling its own, they will never seem remotely sane to anyone normal. If you want to bring young men back into the Democratic coalition, at the very least stop acting like schoolmarmish bureaucrats working for the Ministry of Censorship. You won’t win back young men simply by having activists who are young men, so long as those activists act like exactly the sorts of people young men most hate. If you want to win, stop acting like fucking crazy people.