Dear White Men:
You are being grifted.
Other white men are lying to you about the pain you feel because it makes them money. They use deception to distract you from the fact that the titans of industry are hoarding more and more of the money that your labor produces. These grifters are primarily white men. They point their finger in your chest and tell you that you are lazy and that is why you don’t have anything. Then they lovingly put their arm around you and tell you if you buy my book, buy my course, listen to my podcast, read my articles on Medium, join my Discord, subscribe to my Youtube channel, join my Mastermind and I will get you to live up to your potential. They are scamming you.
In America, we have been taught that this is a meritocracy society. If we work hard enough we can achieve the American Dream. I am black and I know that is not true. It is one of the myths that we tell ourselves. It is propaganda so we don’t pay attention to a financial system that has been rigged for the rich and powerful while the rest of us sustain ourselves off of crumbs from their table. They have tricked you.
Self-hacking, self-improvement, self-help, get-rich/personal finance, and the productivity genre of books, podcasts, and Youtube videos have betrayed white men. These books have made you shallow, selfish, and susceptible to grift. For the past decade, I have wondered why the white guys I went to high school and college with are so stunted and angry.
Then I concluded that they have been bamboozled by self-help gurus. I accept that some of my white male classmates are in pain. Their pain has caused them to lash out at everyone who is different from them, while they cower from introspection. These white men had been told that they were great and the American Dream was their birthright. They believed in the manifest destiny of the white man in America.
Instead of riches, they found meaningless toil. Divorce and estranged children sapped them of their vigor. Others believed they were entitled to women who had the same or similar appearance to those who had covered the Playboys that had provided them release during their adolescence. Now they are facing 50 without ever being married or having children. Many lost their powerful physiques from subsiding on fast food and Coors Light. Failed stints as a real estate investor, stock trader, professional poker player, crypto investor, NFT investor, Forex trader, and a variety of other doomed business ventures have left them defeated. Their defeat fuels their grievances, which powers their rage.
Social media is funny because it allows us to interact with the world on our own terms. We can present the best parts of ourselves. We can edit our photos so that we look better than we do in real life. We can show off our kids, our boat, our fish, our amazing vacation, our new car, etc. We are in control. Yet, when I go through my white male classmates I find ruin and despair. All I can locate on their pages are a few friends and even more regret.
What they choose to share are lifelines for connection. Unfortunately, the most durable communities they can create are those centered around the politics of white rage, white grievance, and white victimhood. They have traveled too far on the road of perdition for a childhood schoolmate to rescue them. They are condemned and that haunts me.
I write this to you because I cannot save my friends from my youth. Where I once saw vitality I see dried-up husks of men. The smiles that use to radiate a room have been replaced with scowls.
I am trying to talk some sense into you because seeing my former friends like this hurts me. Knowing that they champion bigots and hatemongers hurts our nation. I am trying, as arrogant as it might seem, to intervene so that you do not wander too far down this road. I am trying to save you. I am trying to save U(nited)S(tates).
Iam sorry, but you are being grifted.
You listened to the financial gurus on Youtube who told you to invest in NFTs and crypto. They told you to place all of your holdings in FTX. They got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so, if not millions. Yet, you are the one who has lost your money. They will give you a tepid apology and shill the next shady sponsor on you to keep grifting you and your brothers even harder.
Creating the perfect morning routine consisting of meditation, exercise, bullet journaling, time blocking your day, writing down your goals, making your bed, taking a cold shower, saying your daily affirmations, and not looking at any social media or email until the day begins will not make you rich. This morning ritual they sell you is not going to land you the woman or man you lust after. It is only going to separate you from more of your money. They will insist because you are not getting the results you deserve you need to pay for their course.
They preach that the reason you are not in the top one percent is that you do not have the right good habits. They share some psychobabble about it takes a minimum of 30 days to form a habit. They teach you to stack habits or introduce new habits between two old habits. They promise you that you can achieve what they have achieved only if you have the right habits and that the pain you feel will subside once you have these habits. They are lying to you.
“Do you believe in me? Are you deceiving me?
Could I let you down easily, is your heart where it need to be?” — Mortal Man by Kendrick Lamar
Perhaps they tell you, you lack will. That if you are able to develop and increase your willpower you will be able to summit Mount Olympus and take your rightful place in the pantheon of gods. They stress to you that will is a muscle and that like any muscle you must flex it or it will atrophy. You must practice mindfulness or meditation to achieve the necessary amount of willpower to take over the world. Chapters of books are dedicated to retelling the marshmallow experiment that was used on children. These gurus lionize the kids who had the willpower to resist the temptation of the marshmallow. They cite how those kids evolved into world-beaters. On the other hand, they demonize the children who acted like children and impulsively devoured the tasty confection. They inform you that these kids were doomed to a lifetime of mediocrity. Obtaining and building willpower, they preach, is the only way to become who you are destined to be. Then they state you must learn it from them.
They tell you, you need to ditch all of your friends unless they are talking about starting and growing multiple diverse streams of income. They tell you that it is ok to be alone. They create reels on Instagram about a loner dude, who is waking up, making his bed, eating breakfast, hitting the gym, working from home, and then relaxing. Never do we see them with friends. All they have is their routine and their work. They tell you to seek out like-minded people who can easily be found on their pay-gated discord or in their expensive Mastermind group. They tell you that your friends are betas and you are an apex predator because you are reading their book, watching their Youtube video, or have landed on their splash page. You believe them and jettison your lifelong friends in the pursuit of becoming leet.
They label you a simp for consuming news content. They ask you why are you wasting your time and affecting your emotions by reading the newspaper or listening to or watching the news. These gurus inform you that anything important that you need to know will make it to you through your interactions with the world. In this world that they have created knowing what is happening in your community is for the weak. Having empathy for your neighbors is not for the strong. That the world is full of predators and they prey on the weak, injured, and slow. You are told that you must get rid of everything that does not propel you toward your goal and the knowledge of what is occurring in your community is deemed superfluous.
These white men have lied to you in order to fuel your pain and make them rich and keep them in power.
Inthe process of listening to their nonsense, you have become an insufferable person who brags instead of a person who listens. You are now isolated because you got rid of all of your friends for same-minded shallow people who only reside on the internet. You are not tethered to your community in any tangible way. You are only focused on your pain and your self-created victimhood instead of the harm being done to your neighbors.
Women don’t want to date you, because you only see them as objects to show off and validate your status. Each woman is to be upgraded as you garner more success. Accordingly, the women you attract see you as another income stream to maintain their lifestyle.
The truth is this: the system is rigged. That does not mean that you stop fighting. It does not mean that you give up. What it means is that you go into all of this with clear eyes. Your pain and the anger that it generates are being used by the worst elements in our society to keep the system rigged and you in pain.
Here are the hard truths: all the garbage you have been told about your racial superiority was and is a lie. If hard work was the only thing that mattered then slaves would have been billionaires, but they were improvised and so are many of their descendants. I am not telling you to quit working and work less. I am telling you that no black person or person of color has systematically kept you from getting a job. People of color have not shipped your job or your parents’ jobs overseas. Nonwhite people have never initiated a hostile takeover only to strip the company to its barebones and rob you or your loved ones of their pension. It is those in the one percent who want you to believe that someone coming across the border is the cause of all of your hardship. It is a lie. We must confront that lie, together and unrig the system.
All the trash you have been told about your gender superiority were lies. Women have the same innate ability that you have. It is the society that has created unequal laws that oppress them. For their own safety, some women have adapted defenses to protect their lives. Feminism is not your enemy. Your enemy is the system that allows you to assume your superiority over someone based on what you have between your legs. You must work to dismantle it.
They have lied about you being better than someone because they choose to love someone of the same gender. Too many of you are raging against your own sexuality. I have seen so many white men wearing MAGA hats only two years later to be wearing a rainbow shirt and sauntering in a Pride parade.
What you are searching for is human connection.
You have read all of the big books in this self-improvement genre, but have you read The Bell Jar, East of Eden, Man’s Fate, She Came To Stay, Beloved, Sula, Midnight’s Children, Things Fall Apart, The Beautiful Struggle, Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, A Visit From The Goon Squad, The Color Of Law, or Catch 22? Have you read these since you were required to read them once you left university or high school? Have you explored what it means to be human?
Do you even know who your state representatives are? People are afraid, mostly because your pain has allowed you to foist it onto everyone else. You have callously elected dividers and liars to satiate your anger if you even vote. Yet, how has that worked? Has your anger subsided? Have the lies they told you ever come true? You have been grifted.
I am shaking you because our rights and freedom are at risk.
I would argue 95% of all of these charlatans that you take advice from: relationship, medical, health, financial, investment, productivity, spiritual, etc. all support Republicans. The majority of these people are conservatives. Think about this: they are conservative but they are teaching you how to progress. The act of teaching is an act of sharing. It is a radical act of giving something to someone else. You are not conserving your knowledge, you are providing it to others. That is why most college professors are considered politically progressive or Democrats.
The information these gurus are teaching you is garbage because they are keeping (or conserving) the best parts for themselves and their friends. Don’t believe me: Robert Kiyosaki; Grant Cardone; Brian Tracy; Jordan Peterson; and others are all conservatives. The act of giving or moving forward is antithetical to the notion of conservatism.
These books gas you up on half-baked theories like vision boards and the law of attraction. If you create the perfect vision board and you hang it up in the right place you will be able to manifest it in your life. They convince you that if you are bold enough to speak your desires, dreams, and your wants into the universe you shall receive what your heart desires.
They feel your head with nostalgia about how a man could work and support his family on his wages. He could afford a home, two cars, and a vacation every year. Now, only a few professions/vocations provide this type of economic comfort. Furthermore, many women — like my wife and mother — found purpose in their work. However, these enlightened self-help white men tell us that women working is emasculating and you believe them. Yet, they ignore that this nostalgic folklore was only made possible when the marginal tax rates were almost double what they are now. If you want that world back, tax the rich.
White men, your inability to deal with the root cause of your distress has put our Republic in jeopardy. You have accepted the flawed teachings in these books, videos, and podcasts as orthodoxy. Instead, these fake panaceas have confused and distracted you. They promised you that you would become resilient, they have left you defenseless. Rather than healing you, they have made you vulnerable. Where you hoped to find virility, you were presented with impotence.
The riches, women, power, and body the charlatans promise you are an illusion. Healthy and well-adjusted people do not have to stand in front of the mirror and recite affirmations to themselves. They already believe that they are more than enough for the world. Making your bed each morning is not the magic bullet that will allow you to unlock your potential to be the next Elon Musk (who is actually a ruthless grifter who has convinced you that he is a genius).
For the sake of our Republic, I need you to get your $h!+ together and join the rest of us as we demand that our systems are unrigged and start working for all of us.
In Community:
GAME
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Garrick McFadden's work on Medium.