Few could have predicted it, but Shiloh Hendrix delivered one of the greatest blows against cancel culture yet. Hendrix was made famous by a mob of leftists baying for blood after she was filmed uttering ‘the N word’ to a man filming her in a public park. This is now a ritual of modern America, where a White person who is filmed by a person of colour violating one of the taboos of anti-racism then suffers an onslaught of cancellation, doxxing and intimidation. Only this time, White Americans in their thousands decided to draw a line in the sand, establishing a GiveSendGo fundraiser for Shiloh that raised over $700,000.
Shiloh’s fundraiser was an excellent way to flip the script on cancel culture. Talk is cheap, and offering rhetorical support for someone like Shiloh as tens of thousands are actively working to ruin her life only means so much. The next time someone rushes to whip out their phone and film an uppity White person to feed to the digital mob, they will know there is the possibility they are about to make that detestable racist a millionaire.
The response may seem surprising, but it came shortly after the shocking spectacle of over half a million dollars being raised for Karmelo Anthony, a Black teen who stabbed 17-year-old Austin Metcalf to death over a trivial dispute. Seeing the outpouring of support from the Black community seems to have been the final straw for many White people.
Politically, a major cause for optimism about this event is how far across the spectrum of the right the campaign received support. In recent years Matt Walsh has become one of the most influential voices on the American right, and while his Daily Wire colleague Ben Shapiro condemned the fundraiser, Walsh came out strongly in support of the initiative:
Sometimes people just get sick of watching nobodies get their lives wrecked for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.
Yes, Shiloh said something offensive. No one’s excusing it. But she didn’t deserve to be treated like a domestic terrorist. And that’s what her supporters understood. That’s why they gave. Because they weren’t just donating to a person — they were drawing a line in the sand. They saw the pitchforks coming out again and decided it was time to start swinging back.
It’s a positive development that the anti-woke trend on the right is moving on from lower-hanging fruit like transgender issues to address the anti-White norms of Western society. Heavy hitters like Walsh, Charlie Kirk, and Tucker Carlson regularly address this, and all have in some way acknowledged the demographic realities of White decline. This isn’t because they’re radical trailblazers — the comments sections of these creators now abound with defences of White identity, opposition to the Great Replacement, and anger at the disenfranchising of White people. Most conservative commentators discussing these issues are simply responding to audience demand.
If the backlash to the Shiloh Hendrix and Austin Metcalf stories really are part of a broader trend of White Americans standing up for their racial interest, what comes next? The Shiloh saga is a brilliant counterpunch, but it’s a reaction to symptoms, not the disease. It’s not realistic to expect people to keep the same generosity for future fundraisers, and public support can only achieve so much against the system anyway. People like Walsh galvanising conservative opposition to the transgender agenda actually translated to some real legislative pushback, but what’s a realistic legislative end goal for those now pushing back against the anti-White agenda?
To strike at the root of cancel culture, the anti-woke movement must confront the legal and cultural framework that empowers it: the civil rights regime. By targeting this framework, conservatives can begin to dismantle the machine that fuels wokeness and restore the freedoms gutted by a half-century of federal overreach.
The Civil Rights Regime
In The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, Christopher Caldwell argues that political correctness and the extreme polarisation of American politics today can be traced to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a law that promised equality but delivered a radical new order that prioritised group identity and equality over individual freedom.
Crafted in the context of the Jim Crow South, where racial segregation was enforced by law, the Act addressed a specific historical imbalance. But its sweeping provisions, designed to dismantle all forms of state-sanctioned segregation, no longer fit a nation where such overt systems have long been eradicated. Instead, the Act has developed into a tool for punishing dissent and enforcing an increasingly nebulous notion of “equality”.
The Act, Caldwell argues, so comprehensively overrode American constitutional rights to property and freedom of association, that it effectively became America’s new, second constitution:
The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at the core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible—and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out.
The civil rights regime that resulted, using the sweeping powers of civil rights law to enforce desegregation, affirmative action and diversity, became a legal and cultural juggernaut that encouraged the crusade against all forms of discriminatory attitudes and shredded the liberties enshrined in America’s original Constitution.
Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was sold as a response to the moral urgency of the civil rights movement. Some of the Act’s key provisions included banning segregation in public accommodations like hotels and restaurants (Title II); prohibiting discrimination in federally funded programs (Title VI); outlawing workplace discrimination based on race, sex or national origin (Title VII).
The Act’s sweeping powers and ability to infringe on traditional property rights turned it into a sword for social engineering. Title VII, for example, gave rise to affirmative action through bureaucratic mandates, requiring employers to meet racial quotas or face legal consequences. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), established to enforce the Act, became a powerful engine for reshaping workplaces. By the late 1960s, federal agencies were interpreting “non-discrimination” as a mandate for proactive diversity, compelling companies to hire or promote based on race to avoid lawsuits. The logic implied in the legislation of the civil rights regime is that any disparity in outcomes must stem from systemic bias, a legislative presumption that became the seedbed of later wokeism.
This shift had profound consequences. The Civil Rights Act undermined the original Constitution’s emphasis on limited government and personal liberty. The First Amendment’s protections for free speech and association, for instance, clashed with Title VII’s anti-discrimination rules, which could penalise employers for “hostile work environments” based on subjective complaints. A manager’s offhand remark, a business’s hiring preferences, or even a private club’s membership rules could trigger federal scrutiny. Rather than the classical liberal ideal of “equality” meaning equal treatment under the law, the civil rights regime made equality something that needed to be sustained through enforced ideological conformity, through social engineering.
The Act’s enforcement also eroded popular sovereignty. Rather than reflecting broad democratic consensus, it was driven by elite mandates — activist judges, federal bureaucrats, and progressive lawmakers — who imposed their vision on reluctant communities. In the 1970s, White working-class neighbourhoods in cities like Boston and Chicago erupted in protests against federal busing mandates tied to civil rights enforcement, seeing their cohesion dismantled by unelected authorities. These weren’t just racial conflicts but battles over self-determination: who decides how a community lives? Caldwell contends that the Civil Rights Act answered decisively: Washington, not the people. By blurring the line between public and private spheres, it turned private decisions like who to hire, associate with, and what to say, into battlegrounds for the federal government.
Recent efforts have begun to strike at this edifice. Trump’s executive order repealing affirmative action in federal hiring was an example of how conservative leadership could undo elements of the civil rights regime. Vox recently ran a story titled ‘The man whose tweets helped kill DEI’, referring to the influential work of Richard Hanania on discussing the role of Civil Rights law in promoting DEI schemes. If Hanania’s modest Substack discussing this issue could be influential enough to lead to executive orders rolling back DEI hiring practices, that’s cause for optimism that a broader right-wing push against civil rights norms could deliver even greater change. Realistically though, while Trump can undo some of the worst elements of the regime with his executive orders, actually repealing the Civil Rights Act and walking back decades of the norms it has enforced would be a monumental task politically.
A more realistic goal would be targeting a critical pillar of the regime: the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Rushed through in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the Act aimed to ban discrimination in housing based on race, religion, or national origin. But like the 1964 Act, it went beyond preventing overt bias, becoming a tool for federal overreach that obliterated community autonomy. The Department of Housing and Urban Development used the Act to mandate affirmative action in housing, forcing neighbourhoods to meet diversity quotas or face lawsuits. A 2015 Supreme Court decision cemented “disparate impact,” deeming policies discriminatory if they produced unequal outcomes, even if race-neutral. Zoning laws favouring single-family homes? Racist, if they limit minority access. Landlords preferring stable tenants? Biased, if they affect certain groups disproportionately. In effect, the Fair Housing Act turned neighbourhoods into laboratories for state diversity experiments.
Going after this Act would be a good target, because for conservatives and libertarians opposed to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, the Fair Housing Act is the preeminent example of such an initiative. Targeting it for its sweeping infringement on property rights and role in state-enforced diversity should be uncontroversial for those committed to basic civil liberties. For White identitarians, restoring the restrictive covenants that were outlawed by the Act would allow them the freedom to build their own race-based communities again. As the opposition to diversity and the anti-White mood of modern society accelerates, it would allow them to offer a real-world alternative to frustrated Whites, facilitating the flowering of likely thriving White collectives in a country increasingly suffering the effects of White decline on a national level.
Conservatives should pitch the repeal as a simple restoration of freedom of association for all groups. The proposal would appeal to libertarians and populists alike, whether as a principled defence of property rights or a punch back against elite overreach. Moderate conservatives who will try to argue against this will have to argue for having federal bureaucracy enforce diversity in neighbourhoods, and try to show some harm is being done by like minded people choosing to live together and form their own community. If repealing the Act is yet too high a bar to set, an amendment could be made to at least protect restrictive covenants on new developments, allowing racial, religious and ethnic communities to create their own spaces in a way that can’t be argued to infringe on the civil rights of others.
Many conservatives and anti-woke activists are now willing to state their opposition to anti-White racism on a principle of equality, but as long as they support anti-White civil rights law, this is empty rhetoric. If a proposal like abolishing the Fair Housing Act gained momentum on the right, everyone would have to take a side — either support rolling back anti-White legislation or defend anti-White legislation. When it becomes clear how indefensible the latter position is for anyone that claims to hold classical liberal principles, the entire right will be dragged to supporting a civil rights rollback, and those that don’t will lose credibility to their audience. How would someone like James Lindsay or Christopher Rufo make the case for DEI in housing without sounding like woke Marxists? This is a very realistic metapolitical goal which could eventually deliver the kind of legislative change that would totally shift the current paradigm of race relations in America.
The Shiloh Hendrix fundraiser was a defiant middle finger to cancel culture, proving many White Americans are done bowing to the woke inquisition. But symbolic victories won’t save the West. As long as the civil rights regime remains intact, opponents of White guilt and champions of free association remain handcuffed.
If free association in housing could be restored, growing opposition to wokeness in its manifestation as anti-White hate could have a two-pronged approach, with conservatives further pushing for reform of the civil rights infrastructure, and identitarians building and advertising communities that can offer a real escape from its consequences. It’s time for the right to get serious about offering Whites a way out of the diversity nightmare.
This article originally appeared on Keith Woods’ Substack and is republished by The Noticer with permission.
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