New Republic looks at how white Vietnam vets worked to cast themselves as an aggrieved minority

Here’s a pretty hot take from The New Republic on “the white men who wanted to be victims.” The author looks at the political landscape of the era, including the civil rights movement, and how white Vietnam vets decided they wanted to be part of the action, fashioning “their own new brand of therapeutically inflected grievance politics.”

The piece is written by Chris Lehmann but leans heavily on the work of Joseph Darda, author of “How White Men Won the Culture Wars.”

.@lehmannchris on how, from the Vietnam war to the present, aggrieved men cast themselves as a discriminated-against minority: https://t.co/uUZFxnqYjJ

— The New Republic (@newrepublic) May 26, 2021

Lehmann writes:

Another potent channel of this emerging dynamic of white blamelessness was the Prisoner of War/Missing in Action movement, which also managed to transmute a cross-racial vets’ issue into a politics of white grievance…. “The whiteness of the Operation Homecoming vets, the most visible and distinguished former prisoners of war, made the POW/MIA movement a vehicle for white racial grievance,” Darda writes, “and the POW/MIA flag has been a common sight at white supremacist rallies ever since. When a 1985 Newsweek headline declared ‘We’re Still Prisoners of War,’ some readers, whether conscious of it or not, would have taken that ‘we’ to mean white America.”

How about these Vietnam vets and prisoners of war trying to achieve some sort of victim status? Even John McCain “built a political career on the idea that his sacrifice and suffering were emblematic of his generation of veterans” — a “lily-white, mediagenic presentation of returning prisoners of war.”

They have lost their minds.

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 26, 2021

You’re so mind numbingly lacking in empathy and reason that it makes it hard to know how to approach. I mean the cruelty through which this is cast on men who were drafted, killed and received nothing but contempt and scorn for their trouble.

This is just gross and inhuman.

— FrankY in DFW (@FrankYTheLand) May 26, 2021

White Vietnam veterans who came home physically and mentally damaged in an ugly war are just privileged crybabies. 😑

— Sandra N. (@SandraHelena39) May 26, 2021

This is horrible. Who could even write this nonsense? I mean, what does it take to be that person?

— Jackie #FreeAssange McCaffrey (@jackiemccaffrey) May 26, 2021

Quite the take…..

— Lord Acton-A-Fool (@LordActonAFool) May 26, 2021

It really shouldn't be this hard to not be completely insane.

— Billy&TheCloneasaurus (@rubock) May 26, 2021

So you're going to attempt to prove them wrong by having a majority of people belittle them and discriminate against them.

While they fought, did and saw things that you would never dare.

— Tet (@Tet_Kitty) May 26, 2021

pic.twitter.com/PsWkFxKMPu

— I Might Be Donna (@Crypsis12) May 26, 2021

This is a joke, right?

— Al (@AlBeachGuy) May 26, 2021

Delete this.

— silent echo (@SilentEchoSeven) May 26, 2021

Did a person with no testosterone write this

— That One Guy Who Is Always Right (@RickLazzarini) May 26, 2021

Attacking wounded vets because of their “whiteness” to own the cons. Classy.

— not Calvin Coolidge (@AmericaFirst125) May 26, 2021

Guys that were forced to go fight a war are not the target you are looking for.

— Dog guy (@Catsorange1) May 26, 2021

AOC ain’t even white, why would you do her like this? pic.twitter.com/yy12M6t5sq

— GoshuAAAA (@Skipper1913) May 26, 2021

You have lost your minds.

— Gigi Kay (@GigiKay84) May 26, 2021

Wow. This is a level of scumbaggery inconceivable to normal humans.

— Jimmy DeMarco – Erik Kain Doesn't Like Me (@JimmyDeMarco3) May 26, 2021

Many brown and black men fought and were killed and maimed in that war. My ex husband for one. Visit the grave markers and you'll see no color only brotherhood. Morons.

— Teresa † ن (@BlackIrishI) May 26, 2021

Related:

‘Shameful’: New Republic gets a bipartisan hammering for ‘repulsive’ tweet about Joni Ernst and her Senate career https://t.co/vfqeuezPdU

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) September 17, 2020