Puerto Rico Isn't Trump's Katrina; It's Worse

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

That line has got to be the single most defining moment of Bush's presidency. The reality-denial of incompetence so over the top it sounded like a Marx Brothers movie if 1,800 people had died making one. Today, barely 12 years later, Hurricane Maria's leveling of Puerto Rico is being compared as a similar defining moment for Trump. But it's not; it's way the fuck worse.

See, the Katrina response was sheer incompetence. Then-President Bush, then-Governor Blanco, and then-FEMA Director Brown had no idea what they were doing. Katrina was the first disaster on that scale that any of them had witnessed. And then they had to figure out how to respond to it. People were outraged. For the first time, the suffering and deaths of hundreds of brown people drew the empathy and attention of white people. And as a result, shit got done. This time, it's worse. Once again, the suffering of an island full of brown folk has drawn the attention of white folk. Once again, there is pressure and outrage. But unlike in 2005, shit ain't getting done.

Because in 2005, Bush's problem was ignorance and incompetence. Trump's problem is indifference.

Shit got done after white people all around the country made a big enough ruckus because for all his faults, Bush still saw the people of Louisiana and Mississippi as fellow citizens and as human beings in need of relief and help:

Trump sees the inhabitants of Puerto Rico as neither American citizens (which they are, and have been for a fucking century) nor as people:

And not just because they're brown. He doesn't view the inhabitants of Houston as people or fellow citizens, either:

Trump...really doesn't view other people as humans. Period.

He is, as Twitter user @HoarseWhisperer has observed, a severe sociopathic narcissist. The short version is that everything he does serves two purposes, and only two: gain positive attention, and deflect shame. He has the mentality of every screaming toddler at Wal-Mart the week before Christmas. And there is nothing that exposes a narcissist of Trump's level like a humanitarian crisis.

When we see pictures from Puerto Rico -- people who have lost everything, people covered in mud, standing in waist-deep floodwater, looking like they haven't slept or eaten in days -- we feel for them. Even those of us who have never been through a major disaster can at least imagine what going without food, water, electricity, and sanitation for weeks and months on end would be like, and therefore we at least attempt to understand how they feel. That's what empathy is. Being able to recognize and understand the emotions of other people.

A sociopathic narcissist is incapable of empathy. It's part of the disorder. They do not feel emotions except on a superficial level, therefore they can't recognize them in others. More than anything, a humanitarian crisis -- a crisis of human suffering -- requires empathy in order to deal with effectively. It requires recognizing the needs of the suffering people, and meeting those needs as quickly and efficiently as possible.

When the Bush Administration failed spectacularly at the start of the Katrina relief effort, it was still able to recognize what went wrong and took steps to fix it. Because for all of his other shortcomings, George W. Bush is still a human being capable of empathy. He is still capable of recognizing the needs and feelings of others and prioritizing them. He was just a complete fucking moron about it. But in the end, he did care about getting it right and helping the people.

Trump, by contrast, is dragging his feet to help Puerto Rico and its citizens because he doesn't give a shit. He has no properties there (anymore), and Puerto Ricans on the island can't vote for him. He has no reason to bother. Even if public opinion were to pressure him, he has no incentive to do more than the bare minimum. And even then, it's just easier to invent some other crisis to distract people with and deflect shame from this absolute clusterfuck.

So when you get a narcissist forced into a situation where empathy is required, and for which they haven't had time to rehearse their act, you get a floundering, incoherent mess like Trump. While I have no doubt whatsoever that he has some form of Alzheimer's, this is not what you're seeing when he talks about Puerto Rico. You are watching a kid get called on in history class to answer a question and he hasn't been paying attention all year.

Trump is a 100% cold-blooded sociopath. A soulless, reptilian predator trying to convince you he's one of you. And his human suit is starting to itch.

White Supremacists Are Scared of Their Own Mediocrity, Part 1

Special Note: I'm well aware that there are mediocre white women who are just as dangerous. I'll get to them in Part 2. I'm concentrating on white men for this part, because the people who marched on Charlottesville and murdered a woman with a car were by and large not women. Men have historically been the face and engine of the movement for a reason.

After the horror in Charlottesville this weekend, I've noticed way too many people -- not gonna mince words, here, it's literally all white people -- expressing shock that this could be happening in 2017. And as a fellow white person, this is the part where if I were from the South, I'd be going "bless your hearts, you sweet summer children." Because it's obvious by your shock that you don't realize that a mediocre white man is the most dangerous creature on earth.

See, you'll never find a white supremacist who is confident, self-assured, and good at what he does. He would not be a white supremacist otherwise. Because white supremacy -- the belief that being white makes you automatically superior -- is logically the position of the man who is such a generic, formless pile of nothing that whiteness and the privilege that comes with it are all he's got to define himself by. Like a sad lump of dried bird shit on the windshield of society.

These are the guys you'll find on 4chan and Reddit bitching that they can't get a job and can't get laid because brown people are being given too much of an unfair leg up and white guys like them are getting deliberately ignored because "libtards ruin errything." The reality, of course, is that guys like them are so utterly, insufferably dull that as the playing field with people of color gets more even and fair -- that is, as whiteness matters less and less -- it becomes obvious that being born with the advantage of white skin is all these milktoasts have going for them. And thus, the only thing they can feel superior about.

These are men who are so painfully, invisibly mediocre that you'd find it impossible to pick any one of them out of a police lineup with any real certainty. They all look the same. They all sound the same. They all use the same buzzwords. Wear the same popped collars. Have the same stupid haircut. And they all offer the same boring, banal, old-hat excuses for why their lives are meaningless trains to absolutely nowhere.

These are the men who have been able to so thoroughly coast through life on being white that they were never pressured to develop any useful skills or foster any unique talents. "White" was all they needed. Life is graded on a curve and as long as they could maintain roughly the same level of average, they didn't need to do anything more. The bare minimum was enough.

But that's the thing about grading curves; all it takes is one person far enough outside the curve to fuck the entire system up.

For people of color who have been conditioned to be twice as good just to achieve the bare minimum that white men have been riding the brake on? Removing or at least diminishing the race component makes their hard work and qualifications stand out in stark relief against the sea of flat, boring, dull, nondescript mediocrity of your average white male.

As far as white supremacists are concerned, brown people who have been working hard all their lives have wrecked the curve. The black kid from the projects who's had to fight tooth and nail to make people see past his skin just got 100%, so now the white guy's 50% is flunking rather than average.

And damned if a lazy, average white guy is going let society tell him he needs to study harder in order to achieve what the black kid has now. Being above black people is his right and proper place as a white guy, and nobody's going to tell him otherwise.

That is where white supremacy comes from. Mediocre white men who have gotten soft and lazy due to being handed everything that non-white people have fought for, now realize they're so in over their heads that it's not even a competition anymore. Their whiteness is not an advantage any longer, and literally everything else about them sucks. When forced to stare their own mediocrity in the face, the white supremacist, being lazy as shit, knows it's just easier to beat up the black kid than to open a book.

And it wasn't just Donald Trump that tapped this well of hatred and resentment and self-loathing. Bernie Sanders went just as hard after these voters. Even going so far as to claim common ground with Trump barely a week into the nation's mourning and reeling after the election. It's no accident at all that many of the deep red states that Sanders took in the Democratic Primary -- particularly West Virginia, Indiana, and Michigan -- went overwhelmingly for Trump. It's also no accident that many of these areas are white supremacist strongholds. Since they didn't get the "Free College" Guy, they went for the "Kick Out All the Illegals" Guy. And this makes perfect sense when you realize what the root of their hatred is: if they can't crack the books, they'll crack the black kid's skull.

They're not economically anxious, and they never have been. Poor? Sure. Poverty is as pervasive in the Rust Belt and Appalachia as it is in the inner cities of Detroit, NYC, and Toledo. The difference between rural white poverty and urban brown poverty is that those in urban brown poverty never had a privileged existence to fall from; rural white poverty is the result of the loss of high-paying jobs to automation, outsourcing, and the changing needs and wants of the market; rural white people used to have it good and now they don't, so white supremacy takes root easily by giving them a convenient scapegoat. They're not economically anxious; they're culturally anxious because the world has increasingly little use for whiteness, God, or guns. The ways they've always been allowed to behave are becoming unacceptable. White supremacy is the spoiled teenage brat throwing a tantrum because his parents took away the PlayStation after he called the neighbors The N Word. Trump and Sanders are like the subversive grandpa who promises to buy them the next model if they reject their parents hard enough.

This is further amplified when you throw women into the mix. Because when you get right down to it, what all this fear of mediocrity goes back to is the inability to attract a mate and make more white babies with her. Why yes, I'm totally saying that the core of white supremacy is men who are too incorrigibly boring to be fuckable, because it's not 1950 anymore and women don't need men's permission to support themselves. Simply having a dick and a paycheck isn't enough to guarantee white men a mate, nevermind a gaggle of women desperate for their attention so they can leave their parents' house by age 25.

There is a direct correlation between white supremacy and the hatred of women, particularly women seen as independent in any way. From r/TheRedPill to GamerGate to r/Incel to /pol/, you'll find plenty of documented overlap between white supremacists and hating women who won't make babies with them. And if that isn't enough for you? Besides poor hygiene and a racist worldview, Steve Bannon, Alexandre Bissonnette, Jeremy Joseph Christian, and countless other white supremacists all have something else in common: a history of violence toward women, or at least violent rhetoric. It's a feature, not a bug; white supremacy aims to elevate white men above all other creatures, and that sure as fuck includes women.

And if you need more recent proof? Heather Heyer, the victim of the violence in Charlottesville, was subject to a vicious screed on the white supremacist website Daily Stormer (which had served as a hub to organize the riot). Because obviously a white woman who isn't busy making white babies has no value to white men who can't get laid in the first place.

Really, white supremacy is a complete misnomer. It's a movement of men who are anything but "supreme"; fragile, cowardly, insecure, lazy, unmotivated nondescript white men who are literally so goddamn worthless that the thought of having to do anything more than the bare minimum is so terrifying, they can only cope with it by waving the traitorous flags and screaming the slogans of history's most spectacular losers.

Especially when they still use mommy's Uber account.