Another Win for Hot, White Men. Neat.

Welcome back to Saturday Night Social.

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Warning: Spoilers for the season finale of The Traitors below. 

The 1971 Stanford Prison experiment gave us unprecedented insight into the human condition by boiling our society down into a concentrated and controlled environment. Participants assumed roles without question, devolving into their basest selves and illustrating how people will treat each other when given fake stakes to uphold. Famously, it was cut short after the “guards” turned sadistic and abusive. Scientists agreed: creating a microcosm of society to see how quickly individuals will turn against each other may never be done successfully—certainly not with a group of Real Housewives, Olympians, and the gay Bachelor, and definitely not on national TV.

Alan Cumming (and the Producers at Studio Lambert, Peacock, and the BBC) said, hold my beer. 

The fourth season of The Traitors wrapped on Thursday with a finale the streets are calling a graphic retraumatization of anyone who ever blindly followed a hot man, hanging on to his every word, only to get absolutely dogwalked.

Rob Rausch, of Love Island USA—and a lot of people’s vivid dreams where he saves you from a snake and then bounces on it crazy-style on his farm—fame, played a dominant game as a Day 1 traitor. His strategy was objectively excellent, and Alan Cumming declared him the best traitor the castle has seen. We all should have known. 

Rausch is charming and withholding at the same time, flawlessly executing the formula pioneered by both your manipulative boyfriend and you emotionally absent father. This demeanor, combined with being a hot white guy, set him up as a born traitor. Maura Higgins, fellow Islander, was bewitched from the jump—she defended him and went on flirty helicopter rides with him any chance she got. This did not pan out well for her.

Watching Rob scam seasoned game players in ways no one else could pull off is a hard reminder that Traitors—and society!—has bias baked in. When you drop a bunch of very different people in a castle and ask them to figure out who can’t be trusted with almost no evidence, it’s gonna get real implicit-bias-y, real fast.

At one roundtable, Michael Rappaport—a faithful aspiring to become the mayor of New York City and learn how to eat food off a plate like a real boy (ambitious)—stuck his foot in his mouth when he suggested Colton Underwood’s time in the closet might make him a perfect traitor. (The roundtable…and the public…did not like this.) Contestants less deranged than Rappaport usually frame bias-motivated accusations as “a feeling they can’t put their finger on”; but Rappaport’s read less like someone bravely confronting his own prejudices and more like a mouth that could physically not be shut. And so the castle promptly banished him.

Rob is what happens when you make prison-experiment-adjacent reality TV. Contestants are more metaphors than people. If Traitors is a microcosm of society, Rob is an unwitting mascot of every man with a charmed life that has you shaking your fist at God because he just keeps winning. Another needless reminder to us all that a hot white man can get away with literally anything. Even (obviously) murrrrrderrrrr.

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