The online race war has made a $1 million escalation. And now, some on the Right argue that they should start to play the worst of the racial-essentialist Left’s game.
After 17-year old Karmelo Anthony was charged with murder for stabbing a fellow Texas student to death at a high school track meet, a mob rallied around Anthony to donate more than half a million dollars to his GiveSendGo, not because supporters maintain Anthony is innocent but rather in celebration that the victim, the late Austin Metcalf, was white.
“And I hope we help you raise [one million dollars],” one early donor to Anthony’s campaign wrote. “These white people can die mad like they ancestors did [sic].”
Anthony’s family, which has since relocated from their nearly $1 million home in a gated community, has bragged that the GiveSendGo revenue doesn’t just go to Anthony’s legal defense but also to “transportation, counseling, and other security measures.”
Now, a new front in the viral race war has emerged, with a rival GiveSendGo started by Shiloh Hendrix, a Minnesota woman confronted on video after a man at the park accused her of calling a 5-year-old black child the N-word. The video begins after the alleged initial slur directed at the child, but when confronted, Hendrix gleefully doubles down, calling both the black man filming the video and the child, whom she brands the perpetrator for allegedly rummaging through her diaper bag, the N-word multiple times.
Hendrix immediately started her own fundraiser for assistance “in protecting my family.” While she doesn’t actually need a legal defense, she maintains that she merely “called the kid out for what he was.”
Hendrix has now raised $700,000 from fans cheering on “white pride” and Adolf Hitler in the comments.
“We are all Austin Metcalf and Shiloh,” one donor said. “NO MORE!!!”
In essence, the dueling donation sprees for Anthony and Hendrix are nothing more than proxy fronts of an online race war. But the problem with race wars is not just that they’re immoral. Rather, they’re functionally races to the bottom. Anyone who chooses to participate immediately loses and thus becomes a loser themselves, if they weren’t already.
Conservative commentators Wesley Yang and Matt Walsh, who are pretty evidently not racists, have posited that the financial success of Hendrix’s campaign is arguably a good thing for those of us who have despised the last decade-plus of cancel culture crusades, racial agitating, and a disproportionately left-wing offensive to imbue racial essentialism back into a 21st century America that was otherwise moving on from the racism of the past.
“While incentivizing bad behavior (calling a five-year [old] the N-word is indisputably very bad behavior) is wrong, popular action (even when it’s by avowed racists, as the comments in the Hendrix fundraiser leave no doubt are included in those who participated) to remove the incentive to hijack the news cycle with racial drama could end up having a salutary effect on racial relations,” Yang wrote on X. “That Hendrix, who behaved deplorably and deserves to be criticized, should be the beneficiary whose case could usher out this media practice while others who were punished unjustly by the mob and employers who bent to their will is one of those sad but familiar ironies underscoring the element of luck in the world’s affairs.”
But contrary to the assumption Yang seems to be making here, making both factions of the race war overnight celebrities for the worst people on the internet won’t make one side stop. Lionizing Hendrix rather expands and escalates this whole stupid race war.
Let’s consider this in basic game theory terms. There are two options when either an anti-white agitator or an anti-black agitator is thrust into the spotlight. The respective left wings and right wings can either ignore these cases or turn them into the latest cause célèbre. Yang and Walsh correctly maintain that in the decade-plus of cancel culture, racial essentialism, or whatever catch-all term you want to use to account for the campaigns against the likes of Nick Sandmann and Kyle Rittenhouse, the racial essentialist Left always strikes first, impugning the since-acquitted Daniel Penny for defending a subway car from a mentally ill vagrant while lionizing Karmelo Anthony.
While Yang and Walsh assume that strategic rallying around Hendrix would beat the Left at its own game, it actually only escalates it, especially if the Left begins to bake in the assumption that the Right will replicate the pattern and rally around whoever next gets caught on camera using racial slurs as a grift. Not only is this absolute political poison that severely damages the broader Republican brand, especially right as President Donald Trump has recouped historic gains among Hispanic and black men, but also, the Stackelberg or “sequential” leader-follower model of game theory indicates that the first mover — the Left, under Yang and Walsh’s correct assumption — has an inherent advantage that is only maximized if the Right accepts the rules of the game and mimics the Left’s behavior. Rather than break the model, turning Hendrix into the right-wing Karmelo Anthony reinforces the rules, tightens the timeline of new rounds, and raises the stakes. (Stakes that, frankly, nobody is supposed to be able to afford in this economy.)
Game theory at this level is more precisely applied to corporate investment strategy than culture wars, but the underlying dynamic of first-mover advantage still applies, meaning that for the Right to disincentivize the Left’s first strikes entirely, the payoff of left-wing cancel culture hit jobs or championing the likes of Anthony needs to change. This means either ignoring first strikes when ignoring them would make them less profitable (this would apply in the case of Anthony) or raising the cost of first strikes systemically. Ironically enough, the latter is exactly what Trump is doing as it pertains to university students: Student visa holders who engage in racial agitation, especially as it pertains to left-wing Hamas supporters, are now at credible risk of deportation, while the colleges that let themselves become a petri dish for the worst of anti-white or antisemitic or anti-Asian wrangling may lose their federal funding entirely.
In the simplest terms, sequential game theory indicates that the Right automatically loses by even participating in the Left’s rules of the race war. The only way to win is not to play, not to create an equal and opposite but even more lucrative reaction.
There are other solid rationales independent of economics to refuse to play the Left’s race game, the first of which is how indefensibly dumb it has become to honest brokers on both sides.
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Unlike in the case of Daniel Penny, Karmelo Anthony’s response to being allegedly shoved by Austin Metcalf was so obviously not an act of self-defense that none of Anthony’s supporters have ever even adopted the pretense that it was self-defense. And recall the original cancel culture crusades saw acts as anodyne as a celebrity chef mildly criticizing competitors and a Chipotle manager refusing to serve a customer who refused to pay falsely smeared as racist, and the victims were immediately fired as a result. Hendrix hasn’t been falsely smeared as a racist, instead doubling down on using a racial slur against a child. Even her GiveSendGo campaign concedes this is a cash grab rather than to make up for income lost from being fired. (There’s no digital evidence this woman is employed at all — Hendrix’s fundraising plea vaguely claims she’s being doxxed and that “even where I exercise has been exposed.”)
But there’s also the obvious selfish reason not to give Hendrix your money: Unless you are a loser, you should have much better uses for your money. The rationalists of the effective altruist movement would have you give your money to charities such as the Malaria Consortium that maximize the number of lives saved with each dollar spent. But even the most irrational actor should be made orders of magnitude happier by giving $50 to their church or spending $50 on a gift for a friend. And if you don’t have a church or a friend on which you’d rather spend your money than on some seemingly unemployed racist who calls random children racial slurs, you probably are, by definition, a loser. Which I suppose, makes sense, considering that agreeing to play by the Left’s rules and join the race war at all is the ultimate losing move.