I've been a bit simplistic in some of my responses because I didn't have the time to give this 5,000+ words when shit needed doin over the weekend. What I and Dahobbs and others have been pretty clear about though, I think, is that we are willing to believe that some young white men have been discriminated against by silly employment policies, but that it isn't a real widespread issue. There's reams of data backing up the fact that it isn't really a widespread issue. It's certainly not as severe an issue as Republicans pretend it is. That means that many, and I believe most, young white men who believe they've been discriminated against are wrong in that belief. Now I can empathize with why they wrongly think that. I grew up in a conservative family surrounded by conservative families. I remember the whispered racial grievances of the 90s and 2000s. We were all too good and too respectable to be racist; that was for white trash. But my mom and tons of friends' parents would talk about how it wasn't fair that underperforming black kids were taking our spots in college and that reverse racism was the only real racism left in America.
It's easy to start believing that shit and if you start believing it might be true you'll start spotting things that you think reinforce it as you progress through life, because the world is a big place with a lot of people in it and many of those people make mistakes and some of those people are just shitty people who do bad things. I was a shitty student from a middle class home at a very diverse high school full of high-achieving minority students. I absolutely could've gone down that path. I like to think I'm smart enough that I never would've fallen for it, but if I had been born ten years later and Trump was mainstreaming unapologetic racism again at the time I was becoming an adult and politically aware, I could see an alternate timeline where a version of 19-year-old me bought into the racial grievances.
I think about that alternate me and I wonder: would it help turn him away from that path to have a liberal tell him that those peddling the racism were right about him being screwed over to help some dumber black kid or whatever? Fucking of course not. "Even the liberal [centrist pundit] agrees with us that the left has gone too far" is some of the most effective conservative rhetoric. The idea that reinforcing that rhetoric would result in liberal political gains is insane.
Of the white boys and young men who've bought into these false racial grievances, some are undoubtedly open to persuasion. Those who are a little smarter than most of the others, those who have some liberal friends, those who stumble onto a lefty podcast that starts to make sense to them, etc. But persuading all those young white men requires convincing them that their racial grievances are mistaken.
And for the very select few who might've been unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and actually did get shafted for being white, we can say "shit man, that sucks and shouldn't have happened, but you can't let that experience poison you." Using me as an example again, my dad died from medical malpractice when I was a teenager. That experience has undoubtedly impacted how I feel about our healthcare system. If that had happened now to alternate me, with frauds peddling woo healthcare bullshit from the White House, I could see him buying into it. But I didn't buy into it, even though I was pretty familiar with all of that woo bullshit 20 years ago, because I wasn't surrounded by people saying "well you know RFK Jr. is right that there are a lot of problems with the healthcare system!" It was still the type of thing only kooks bought into and that helped me look at their bullshit critically.
If we were talking about healthcare rather than discrimination, Bozo's proposal to reach me would've meant indulging my worst feelings and most wrong beliefs. It would've meant telling me something like "you're right to be angry, they killed your dad for money." But that's not what happened; what happened was that a doctor who was by most accounts a good doctor made a horrible mistake, because he's a person and people make mistakes. I'm very glad Bozo wasn't there to tell me comforting lies when I was at my worst; I'd be a worse person today if he had.