"Enough." So were the words of one queer person who responded to my question on what they thought of cishet white men. They were, in fact, the only person to respond to my question, which was not surprising considering I spent a grand total of 45 seconds looking for queer people to answer my question. Despite the apparent lack of depth of my study group, I believe I have produced a good approximation of the opinions of most queer people. I have not taken the time to conduct deeper research, perhaps because I felt it was unnecessary. Indeed, you might ask one math teacher to verify your answer, but you would never ask a second. Once you have got the expert voice confirming what you know to be an obvious truth, there is no more need to seek out any more confirmation, only a fool would engage in such unnecessities.

 

But that is enough of me trying to spin my idiotic opening joke so that it fits into the broader narrative development of this article. I could write circles around my own writing for a thousand years if I wished to, mind you, but there is no point in that, and I find a dry transition into the meat of the article a more humorous follow-up. Anyhow, If you have been around for about more than 10 years, you will know that people of color, women, and queer people are kind of fed up with cishet white men. There is a lot of historical precedent to this, of course, but I feel that that line of argumentation is often used to cast the suffering of POC, women, and GSRM folk back into some unspecified past period that is subtly made out to be an infinite time ago, and therefore, unimportant. One can then follow up from that position by claiming that since there are no legal or overt cases of approved racism/misogyny/homophobia anymore, all that remains of past oppression is some nutjobs being bigoted. Ergo, you are justified in calling people who fight for justice "SJW cucks" since there is no institutional oppression anymore, so they must be sensitive snowflakes looking for a handout because they are a minority. There is a lot wrong with that line of thinking, but that is the topic of another, presumably more serious, article. For our purposes here, it will suffice to say that historically, cishet white men have been very bad. They do not get any candy, and I will be confiscating their phones for a week, they might even be sent to the principal's room, I am afraid.

 

So, OK, these people have been very bad, and other people have had enough. What implication does this have for them now? Well, the scales seem to be tipping against them right now, no? The previous paragraph contained a passage which contained a statement claiming that humanity had done away with legal or otherwise overt forms of oppression. Well, if that really happened, and there still are hordes of people claiming to fight oppression, surely a new step in these developments could be the oppression of the previous oppressors. Are those cishet white men we have been talking about afraid of this possibility then? Since I did include the opinion of a queer person at the beginning of this article, perhaps I should also get some input from a few cishet white men about whether they really do fear being oppressed in the future, or perhaps if they think they are being oppressed right now. If there really are such fears, then we can evaluate these fears and maybe see if there is any legitimate threat towards them. That should ultimately help us see whether cishet white men are "going down" or staying in their historical high seats.

 

Since it would not be very productive to go around and ask people if they were afraid of minorities, I instead compiled instances of cishet white men claiming that they were being oppressed by some institutionalized conspiracy. First of these is the Great Replacement, a theory popularized by French author Renaud Camus, in which he claims that there is some conspiracy by some influential secret group of people, who usually happen to be Jewish. (1) Another great theory is that secret chemical treatments are being used to turn people gay over time. This theory has taken on many forms, with people having blamed chemtrails, water treatment centers, and sometimes GMOs. The most famous instance of the conspiracy is when Alex Jones talked about it, claiming along the way that the government was poisoning the water with chemicals that were turning the frogs gay. (2) The last of our examples is Gamergate, wherein gamers, primarily those who were cishet white men, claimed that "SJWs'' were using "cancel culture" in order to shoehorn women and minorities into video games. (3) Supposedly, this is oppression.

 

So let us try to give a serious go at evaluating all these claims, well, as serious as one can be trying to do that, I suppose. The gist of the Great Replacement theory is that due to "them", a group that a less tasteful author might have put in triple parentheses, people are being replaced in their own countries by people of other ethnicities, in the space of one or two generations. The typical example is how the EU's "lax" immigration policies have allowed Muslims to settle in the EU more than ever and how this will allow the white people in Europe to be replaced by brown immigrants. Unfortunately for Camus, the data does not back this one up. Muslims are projected to be only 10% of the population of Europe in 2050 (4) (which is farther away than a generation, if you will notice), and the EU is more populous than the Arab League, so unless there is some serious immigration (like, say, 120% of the AL moving into the EU), white people are not being replaced. The second one is a lot harder to respond to. That is to be expected, most people do not have conversations about frogs being turned gay, and would probably rather not waste time with such a topic. In case you have not noticed, I am people. Responding with data to this is hard, because where do you even get data about homosexuality in frogs? Well, where you get the data is your problem, since the burden of proof is on you; if you are making such a claim, that is. But let me say outright that you will not find the data you search for, whether you are looking for data of chemicals making people gay, or data of increasing homosexuality in frogs. Lastly, no, there is no "SJW" conspiracy to add more women and minorities into your video games. Video games are simply a very young medium of art, so it has taken them until nowadays to catch up on the representation of women and minorities. Besides, people on Twitter do not have more power over games than the developers actually making them. Do you feel that developers (who are mostly cishet white men still) would go along with this trend if it really were against themselves? Lastly, you can only say that legal and overt oppression has ended if you do not consider any country to the east of Austria or so, and even then you have to ignore a lot of things, like, say, trans people.

 

You may now be thinking that these are obviously theories of nutjobs and that the common cishet white men should not be judged on those. Firstly, I am not very sure of that when crowds of these people flooded the U.S Capitol following QAnon lies. Secondly, the point was not to judge people based on these fears, but to make an overarching point using these examples as a stepping stone. The worries themselves may be stupid, but that does not matter. They are lies specifically constructed to be sold to an audience when the audience is at their most vulnerable. That is why they all target common fears. The fear of being replaced, or being turned gay, or your "enemies" desecrating your sacred spaces, are the selling points of such theories. The point of all of them, however, is to fool the common white man, and to use him to further the gains of the creators of these lies. And no, I do not mean Jewish people. Cishet white men are not becoming a minority any time soon, but that does not mean you cannot trick them into thinking that way. And if you do, then you will only benefit from infighting among the common people. Cishet white men might be privileged, but their privilege only extends so far as it does not threaten the privileges of the 1%.  And the elite will use every method available to them to protect their privilege. We have already mentioned creating infights, but they also control the media, the banks, large parts of the government, and so on. The system is rigged in their favor, and so long as the system remains, their success is all but guaranteed.

 

So what is the fate of cishet white men, then? Well, we know that they will not become an oppressed minority, that is for sure. Yet, as other people gain more power as time passes, the white man will be reduced to a position of equality. It goes without saying that being reduced to equality is not oppression, in fact, it is the dismantling of oppression. But equal does not automatically mean good. Unless we do away with the system, the common people will only be equal in their exploitation. That is the true crossroad of the common cishet white man. Either he succeeds in dismantling the system oppressing him, or he lives forever oppressed. You might have noticed that this article only concerns the Western world for the most part, at least if the title is anything to go by, yet I believe that all dominant groups of people within their societies will arrive at the same crossroad, even if a little later. The actual villain is unchanging. If we hope to accomplish progress, the global system has to change. It is a little unfashionable to make these statements openly and publicly, yet I will still go on to say that, for the sakes of the queer, and the women, and the people of color, and the silenced, and even for the sakes of cishet white men, we have to overthrow global capitalism.