Whitesplaining Is Cool Again

Or, how the Democratic Socialists of America introduced me to a great local bakery.

Remember whitesplaining? In the mid-2010s, one of the worst things you could do as a white person was to describe the minority cultural experience to a member of that minority on the presumption that you could articulate it better than they could. “Like with other forms of privileged explaining,” explained Everyday Feminism in 2016, “including mansplaining, people who whitesplain have been conditioned to believe that they’re somehow more qualified to speak about a marginalized group than a person who belongs to that group.”

In 2015, an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney asked rhetorically, “Have you ever had an experience where someone is explaining to you, maybe in a lot of detail, something you actually already know quite a lot about? Possibly about your own life? It’s frustrating. But it’s not a random occurrence, and it’s often about power. There’s a word for it: ‘whitesplaining’.”

But like so much of the vacuous grift that is contemporary “anti-racism,” it doesn’t apply to the Jews. Non-Jewish progressives can lecture Jews all day long about the Jewish experience of anti-Jewish prejudice, and even the meaning of Judaism itself. I took this photo on Saturday, outside a bakery in downtown Manchester, New Hampshire. It pictures a white protester holding a sign making several bold claims about Zionism, Judaism, Israel, and “Palestine.” We know that the protester isn’t Jewish because he cannot spell Judaism.

I don’t think that keffiyeh is tight enough.

Nor antisemitism. Several years before the emergence of whitesplaining, there were multiple roundups of egregiously misspelled protest signs hoisted aloft by the Tea Party movement. One was “‘Get a Brain! Morans’: The Meta-Discourse of Misspelled Tea Party Signs,” which was unusually hifalutin’ but typical in its condescension. The language became known as Teabonics, and supposedly indicated general conservative hebetude, in contrast to progressive thoughtfulness, love of learning, and kindness, supposed just as vigorously.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Palebonics.

The protest was organized by a regional chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the party with which the newly elected mayor of New York City is affiliated. As of 2025, the DSA is so viciously anti-Israel that its charter declares that the organization may expel members for stating that Israel has a right to defend itself.

They hung flyers around Manchester accusing a local baker of war crimes. The basis of this charge is that he served in the Israeli Defense Forces sometime between the emergence of Teabonics and that of whitesplaining. Since IDF service and subsequent reservist status are mandatory for most Israelis, this characterization would criminalize millions of Israelis¹ and impugn any Jew who wants the state of Israel to continue to exist, which is most of them. This is how the racists at the DSA get around having to proclaim their Judenhass expressly.

It’s hard to describe just how stupid and evil this is. It would be like accusing every American who ever registered for the draft of complicity in Operation Southern Spear.

We replied by showing up to the protest with intentions to buy doughnuts from the bakery in question, Dishon, and eat them in audible distance of the protesters, saying, “Mmmm, you can taste the Zionism. Delicious.” We couldn’t, because by the time we arrived, an outpouring of more than a hundred customers with a similar idea beat us to it. They were lined up outside at one point, waiting for an opportunity to buy something, anything, and then bought gift cards when the stock was cleared.² In the freezer case, we found a loaf of gingerbread to bring to a Hanukkah party later that evening.

As for the protest, it was attended by eight people, if you can call them that. There were also two of Manchester’s finest present, who had obviously instructed them to gather in a tight group, maximally far from the entrance on the sidewalk. At the request of a local rabbi who alerted the community about the protest earlier in the week, we didn’t interact with the protesters. That was wise; you can’t reach abject bigots like that via dialogue. Instead, we had lovely conversations with people inside and outside the bakery, made some friends, thanked the cops for being there, and went to lunch. One hopes faintly that one of the protesters will see community and conviviality demonstrated, the surviving chunk of his soul will whisper to him that he has beclowned himself, and he will start finding excuses to miss future DSA potlucks in which one member brings a bag of tortilla chips and everyone else comes empty-handed and freeloads off of him.³

Coverage is here, but I took a few more shots of my own.

A female bisexual friend to whom I sent this last photo replied, “‘Lesbians’ like that are why I had to stop going to gay bars.” She meant this specimen.

If you inhale deeply, you can smell the pronouns.

This protester will forever be my image of the typical contemporary socialist: green hair, ironic old-lady eyeglasses, an actual German Democratic Republic ushanka, lipsticked perma-scowl, performative gender vagueness, and obvious access to disposable income—sipping six-dollar barista-crafted coffee while attending a protest against a local Jewish-owned business for clout among the collectivist herd. Yes, I noticed the JEWS 4 A FREE PALESTINE sign that he/she/it/them was holding. I’d bet a mortgage payment that this is a disaffected WASP with a Cluster B disorder, getting off on telling us actual Jews how to be. Call it a hunch. Besides, truth means nothing to this crowd.

For the record, the gingerbread loaf was delicious.

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1. Including hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Israelis, notably great numbers of Druze, who are bound by their tradition to serve the nation in which they reside. That’s why the IDF came to the Druze’s aid when Bedouins started killing them en masse in Sweida in July, with the blessing of what passes for the Syrian government. 2,000 people died in a week of unambiguous ethnic cleansing, with around a hundred times that number displaced, and reports of multiple cases of rapes followed by executions. Oh, you didn’t hear about it? Of course you didn’t.

2. Barbara Streisand, call your office.

3. At least that’s what I assume happens at DSA potlucks. Marx’s solution to the free-rider problem was an unalloyed fantasy in which “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want” (See “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” 1875). These slimebags can’t even bother to make their own coffee.