White Twerkers
Confederate Flag Wavers and the decline of White America
One knew going into this documentary it was going to be bad. Bad in the sense of what it portrayed, either from deliberate manipulation or the fact that in reality things are bad. The plight of the white rural working class is known but not well understood. Certainly not by me. I live in an affluent middle upper class area, have no real connection to “the South” and certainly not to the rural white working class of that area. So as I said you go into a documentary like this knowing it’s going to be bad in some way but what kind of bad.
As tempting as it would be to blame the directors here I think they aren’t the cause for the bad. The bad is on display without them. No doubt their edits are strung together during certain montages to highlight the public sexual depravity that now plagues these redneck gatherings but they are for the most part just documenting the decline and fall. It’s raw real life and it shows just how far this section of the white working class has fallen.
Red, White, & Wasted is mainly about Pat - a mudding enthusiast. Mudding is driving your truck around the swamps of Florida, having fun. Building impressive trucks and testing them out. Pat’s been filming for an age, it is his obsession. He lives with his two daughters, both just older than 18, both with their own struggles and no hope. His wife is divorced but makes an appearance later when one of his daughters gets pregnant and has a baby, a baby who will have no father because he was an abusive and disappearing other white guy. At times this feels scripted. Is this really just a documentary? If this were fiction the writing feels too on the nose - right up to the point the other daughter (addicted to weed) ditches her white redneck boyfriend to shack up with a 38 year old black.
He gets called a nigger by the spurred lover - a bumbling cheery lost white guy who proudly describes as redneck. Chase. Chase of course it as pains to point out he’d be more ok if it was a better off black guy, not some lose with four kids from four women living at home with his momma. Race is a part of this film. Kira the other daughter of Pat nervously jokes multiple times about how she is a racist, or isn’t, or is only a little bit. Her ire seems more directed at the Hispanics though, that’s who is moving in and displacing them. Perhaps it’s the acceptable kind of racism left for them? Or is it just the most pressing threat. As I said it feels almost parody like, a bad SNL skit in real life - and yes that is my own cultural bias and upbringing showing. Pat our protagonist is scraping by, and in truth doesn’t seem a bad father in some degrees. Just a man caught up in an obsession and a world of escape. The swamp offers freedom.
Directors of a documentary get this narrative choice and the allure of the mudding is where this documentary starts out. We learn over time places have been shut down. Orlando is closing in on the wilderness. In truth they are real environmentalists, Kira with her public middle school education laments the destruction of the forest. She likes the idea of Trump and his promise to bring jobs back and deport foreigners but truly worries about the preserve of these wild space in which she grew up with her father and the mudding community. A place to be in nature with mans creations tearing up the mud. It might startle and offend the leave no tracers reading this who think of nature as a kind of museum but the swamp areas they went to to race their trucks, that is their engagement with nature. Indeed there is no real talk of religion in this entire film. God seems absent and gone, something that Charles Murray would point out - that these poor white communities have collapsed as institutional units like the Church have. Weird though because no doubt faith is there, Pat and his daughters intense opposition to abortion appears - they just know it as wrong.
As the last mud pit closes in Orlando Pat is pushed by his daughter to go to the more commercial and huge event. RedNeck Yacht Club. A huge party on private land, paid entry. He’s hesitant. He likes him and his friends going to the swamp, small scale organic mayhem but controlled mayhem. Not that there wasn’t untoward things going on. He alludes to it being safer and more kid friendly in one breath but in the next is showing the documentary makers his VHS videos of mudding at night where casual nudity and sex are beginning to appear. He even muses that perhaps these videos were some reason for his divorce. This kind of becomes the moralizing tale of the film. No doubt the documentary makers might have had bad intentions - there are a few choice one off interviews with young white men with no hope. You know the kind, where the guy says two things : how much he loves guns and shows them off and the other where he discusses what he can’t discuss - anti-white racism by way of special treatment of the black underclass.
You here reading this are an intellectual to some degree. These people aren’t. They are however on the front lines. They feel and experience what we write about, in different ways, often in more visceral ones. They know they are hated, they know blacks are getting special treatment. They know Hispanics are displacing them. Yet they have no one to turn to, Trump is the only one. His flag and presence looms in the film. The savior that ultimately fails them. Here we really see how far these people have fallen. That final night of the Red Neck Yacht Club we are caught up with Pat and the hedonistic excesses. White women behaving like blacks - they are all twerking in that hideous fashion. Ass licking and worship are on display. It’s truly debased. It’s truly from the black culture that surrounds them and has influenced them. There is this stunning moment in amidst the filming of all this a golf cart of white guys drives past and the driver cheekily says “White Power”. It is white power to some extent - this mudding event is almost all entirely white. I glimpsed maybe one token black friend and perhaps a few hispanics. These people are surrounded by their own but the culture to me looks anything but white.
As the Confederate Battle Flags fly all over you wonder. What would their recent ancestors think of all this? Stalwart hard working men who went to Church weekly. Who married young, had children in wedlock. Men who no doubt let their hair down and drank, perhaps even went to a brothel. They certainly fought, we know of that stereotype. Yet there was a sense of order tying it together. An owned sense of identity that was defined and held in place. Structure and order. That is what is gone. Disappeared. They are wasted not just from the alcohol meth and drugs but culturally. It’s degenerating in a weird way alongside this ingenuity. It would be remiss not to touch on the trucks themselves, something the documentary makers ignore completely. They are marvels of engineering in their own right. A mix of innovation and self ownership. A creative outlet requiring raw intelligence to maintain and run.
This film is bleak. It is bad. As I said there is always an apologist element we are tempted to lean into “Oh the selective editing" but things are just bad for these people. Living tough lives with few outlets. In essence these muddings are rebellions - self contained ones. They are poisoned continually through everything around them - a bad public education system, racial anti-white discrimination, the loss of moral mores and standards. It is no wonder they are where they are. I’ve written about natural elitism before, not out of some pretentious would be air. I’m not one of those idiots who pretends to be of aristocratic stock - just regular old middle class sensibilities here. It’s difficult to watch and see how fallen some of our kind really are. All the harder because you see the goodness in them. People get out of control at times, let down steam of course. Pat himself seems conflicted at this increase in sexuality, talking to the camera how crazy it is. It seems more extreme and different to what he knew which was smaller scale groups of men testing their machines in the swamps.
The external pressures are hard on these people. Pressure makes diamonds. Pressure also collapses walls. That is what feels like is going on here. In certain areas diamonds are forming in others the walls have collapsed. It is bad, no easy solutions here. The future for these people seems more chaotic, one wonders how much worse it has gotten. This mainly seems to have been filmed in 2019/2020. We’ve had high inflation and a worsening economy and the bottom are always hit hardest. It’s hard to recommend this documentary it’s bleak and it is easy to question the motives of the makers. Yet that doesn’t change reality of what it depicts. This isn’t an elaborate AI fake. It is real and raises real questions about decline and collapse.