A Modern Blood Libel: James Talarico and the Virus of Whiteness

I thought America was over this “white privilege” nonsense. I was wrong. Apparently, all white people are still wearing Peggy McIntosh’s “invisible knapsack” (I criticized this concept in a 1919 essay Debunking a Sacred Text in the Church of Identitarianism; see also my 2021 essay Is There Systemic Anti-White Racism?). James Talarico, a Texas Democrat about whom I expressed my concerns in yesterday’s essay (James Talarico and Drinking the Woke Progressive Kool-Aid: Jim Jones at Scale), enjoys support from progressive Democrats despite advancing this pernicious ideology. Indeed, Talarico is a personification of the ideology.

To be sure, when Hitler referred to Jews as a “virus” (or “bacillus”), he was speaking metaphorically. But he used the metaphor to depict Jews as a disease. He held this ethnic group (the subject of an ancient and enduring hatred) responsible for sins he imagined had afflicted Germany for generations—and for what he believed Jews were doing in his own time through their words, their actions, and their institutions. He used the metaphor of “public health” to advance a campaign to eradicate “Jewishness” from the population.

Hitler was not speaking about Judaism as a religion, but about something he believed was essential to Jews themselves. Talarico’s standpoint, which he shares with millions of Americans, is no different. This pernicious ideology rests on the primitive notion that every individual within a group carries the essential characteristics of that group—a group to which he did not choose to belong but must belong because of those supposed characteristics. A white man can escape his whiteness no more than a man can escape his maleness. A white man may say he has rejected his whiteness, but he is who he is; he cannot reject what he is, as he wears it on his skin—what Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman called “tribal stigma.”

The ideology of white privilege holds that a white man is responsible not only for what his ancestors did but also for something of which he is by default guilty: the crime or sin of being white. He is, of course, not guilty of something he did not do (no man can be), yet the demand is still made that he atone not only for his father’s sins but also for the supposed sins he commits simply by being white.

If we take Talarico’s tweets and swap out “whites” with “Jews,” what he said may become more obvious. Imagine Talarico were a self-loathing Jew who said: “Jewishness gives me and every other Jewish American immunity from the virus. But we spread it wherever we go—through our words, our actions, our systems. We don’t have to show symptoms to be contagious. The only cure is diagnosing the virus within ourselves and taking dramatic action to contain the spread.” Or imagine a black man saying the same thing about “blackness.”

Sounds racist, doesn’t it? Yes—because it is. The Jewish American or the black American uttering such words would have internalized anti-Jewish or anti-black loathing. In the cause of whiteness, Talarico and many of his ilk weaponize that self-loathing—I suspect many who advance this argument do not truly believe it (indeed, even Talarico attempts to escape it in another tweet by resorting to special pleading)—to promote a political ideology.

We have to be direct about this: Talarico is advancing anti-white bigotry. It is not merely that his view holds all white people guilty of a crime or sin they could not all have committed; rather, all whites are guilty by default. Their crime is simply that of being white. Talarico thus subscribes to a racist ideology that blames the situation of nonwhites—while ignoring, for example, many Asian populations whose demographic averages often surpass those of the white aggregate—on all whites. Talarico explicitly says he is not talking about white hoods or Confederate flags. In his formulation, all whites are guilty of spreading the virus.

Beyond anti-white bigotry, the tweets are irrational. Talarico is not alone in this mode of thinking; the irrationality is inherent in woke progressive ideology (though this ideology, unlike race, can be escaped). Progressive ideology, corrupted by postmodernist rot, is profoundly anti-scientific. We can see this, for example, in the quasi-religious belief that a female identity can be born in a male body. The belief that all whites spread a virus is of the same quality of thought.

Those who advance the argument of white privilege commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. They falsely attribute the average situation—always an abstraction—of certain nonwhite groups to “white privilege,” treating every concrete white person as though he were the personification of those abstract group averages.

Under this logic, the poor white man living under a bridge possesses the same racial privilege as the wealthy white man living in a penthouse—even though millions of black Americans are better off than the man under the bridge (and tens of millions of others who share his skin color). Meanwhile, blacks as a group have enjoyed for decades literal racial privileges in the form of affirmative action and other types of preferential treatment.

The only systemic racism in America today is that promulgated and institutionalized by progressive Democrats—harming not only whites but tens of millions of blacks as well (consider the conditions of many “blue cities,” marked by rampant crime, disorder, and family disintegration). The reality is that some whites—and some blacks who have become collaborators—bear responsibility for the conditions affecting some black communities. These individuals are progressives of both races. Ideologies are not native to any racial group; such a reification is intrinsically racist.

I have previously criticized rhetoric that describes people or ideas as “viruses.” In an essay I published in December 2024 about the notion of progressive memes as “woke mind viruses” (a concept developed by Canadian psychologist Gad Saad), I wrote that “to describe such memes as ‘mind viruses,’ as we hear in the rhetoric from some on the libertarian right, is to my ears problematic.” I also criticized the claim that the social contagion of cultural memes is comparable to genetic transmission, an assumption implicit in the rhetoric of racial identitarians like Talarico.

In that essay (On the “Woke Mind Virus”), I cite Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi in A General Theory of Crime, who show that, even if we generously suppose some genetic inheritance of criminality, the variance explained—even in very large samples—is effectively zero. What little variance appears is statistical noise.

Regarding the “virus” metaphor, I argue that the problem lies in the metaphor itself. Conceptualizing memetics as a kind of germ—propagating despite fact, logic, and truth—may lead to dangerous conclusions, just as an earlier fixation on genetic inheritance led to eugenics.

Let us be charitable and suppose that Talarico is referring to implicit racial bias. This does not help his case. A key problem with the concept of implicit bias is falsifiability. A theory is falsifiable if there are clear observations that could prove it wrong. But claims about implicit bias shift to accommodate any outcome: if a person displays biased behavior, it is taken as evidence of implicit bias; if a person does not display bias, the bias is said to exist but be masked, situationally inactive, or suppressed. Bias becomes like gravity: it is everywhere, all the time, even if objects aren’t falling.

The concept of implicit racial bias is therefore infinitely rationalizable—which is precisely why it functions as an ideological tool and why it is favored by progressives. Because the bias is defined as unconscious and potentially latent, negative evidence is dismissed as not counting against the theory. Those who make this claim cannot specify the conditions under which the statement “this person has implicit racial bias” could be definitively disproven. Yet when a white man denies he is racist, he is accused of being “in denial.” This is a form of gaslighting.

Finally, returning to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: differences in group averages across demographic categories cannot be treated as prima facie evidence of systematic racism. To do so assumes that the outcome is its own cause. There are many reasons why blacks, on average, trail the average white person across certain indices.

One I have already noted: the conditions prevalent in many blue cities. This is not the result of whites as a group but of particular policies advanced by some whites and their black collaborators. Another reason is cultural. Cultural features are observable, measurable, and capable of being incorporated into predictive causal models. Yet when culture is invoked to explain group differences, progressives often conflate race with culture and declare any appeal to culture itself to be racist.

James Talarico’s rhetoric—framing “whiteness” as an inherent, contagious virus from which white people are immune yet perpetually spread—mirrors the dehumanizing logic that historical tyrants once employed against Jews and other groups, recasting collective identity as an inescapable moral contagion demanding eradication or radical self-abnegation. This is not a mere critique of privilege or systemic issues; it is a form of essentialist bigotry that assigns ineradicable guilt based on immutable traits, rendering every white individual complicit regardless of individual action, personal character, or circumstance.

Such thinking collapses under its own contradictions: it defies falsifiability, conflates statistical abstractions with individual culpability, ignores countervailing realities like affirmative action and class disparities (which are, unlike race, material), and ultimately poisons discourse by substituting moral narrative for reasoned evidence.

Talarico’s words, whether born of genuine conviction or cynical posturing, exemplify a strain of contemporary ideology that revives the worst impulses of collectivist scapegoating under the guise of “social justice.” To preserve a society grounded in individual dignity, equality before the law, and genuine inquiry, this poisonous worldview must be rigorously rejected—not debated on its own terms, but exposed for what it is and consigned to the margins where ideas that treat human beings as vectors of inherent evil belong: the dustbin of history.