At first glance, it’s easy to focus on the Trump Administration’s attacks on historically marginalized minority communities: the incessant and increasingly violent war it is now raging on immigrants, on people with brown skin, on the queer community, on women, on Muslims, on people with disabilities.
Understandably, our collective attention is drawn to those who are clearly vulnerable right now, those whose freedoms and safety are evaporating, those facing the bruises and the bullets.
What is less obvious but equally alarming is the way that this regime is targeting straight white men.
Republicans have successfully played the long game in their efforts to indoctrinate them:
continually generating propaganda against a nonexistent “wokeness” that has supposedly oppressed them,
perpetuating the myth of dark-skinned foreigners taking away the opportunities that should apparently be their birthright,
relentlessly trafficking in a misogyny and homophobia that press into their insecurities, ratify their prejudices, and convince them that physical domination is the way that strong men show their worth.
Charlie Kirk’s entire platform in life and his martyrdom following his death have been the fruit of a movement that centers young, straight white guys, who, despite being the beneficiaries of every advantage and opportunity, still manage to imagine themselves the victims, still believe they are the downtrodden underdogs.
The proliferation of Right-wing dudebro podcasters and influencers, the Evangelical rebranding of Jesus as a compassionless, gun-toting alpha male, and the desperate tough guy posturing of Pete Hegseth are all part of a coordinated and consistent effort to exploit the fragile masculinity of young guys in America—and it’s working.
ICE is the culmination of decades of straight white male indoctrination.
As we watch with disbelief as Gestapo-esque gangs of heavily-armed, unidentified, masked thugs flooding our city streets, ripping people from bicycles, kidnapping citizens, zip-tying children, pepper spraying unarmed women, viciously beating people of color, gleefully dispensing unthinkable brutality on this nation; what becomes clear is that this only happens because the cowards and frauds beneath the face coverings and army man cosplay have stepped from the shadows of computer screens and into the neighborhoods in which we live to make their internal grievances tangible.
Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, and the cadre of ghouls around them, aren’t able to terrorize this nation in the manner in which they are right now without a massive army of manipulated, weaponized white guys they can wield as a hammer against the rest of us.
They are only now able to meet their demand for willing instruments of their monstrous plans because they have so successfully generated the supply on the way here.
If we’re ever going to prevail against the authoritarian regime we’re now being brutalized by, we’re going to need to figure out how to reverse the damage the Right has done to a good portion of the young men of America.
In the conversations we have around the dinner table, in the environments we curate in schools and athletics, in our public discourse on social media, and in the political arena, we must find a way to dismantle the seductive lie of white male oppression.
More than that, we’re going to need to raise a generation of men who do not grow up so addled by hatred and so saturated with contempt that they easily abandon humanity and decency, and violently attack a world they have been fooled into believing has wronged them.
Yes, young, straight, angry white men have been victimized, but it’s not by whom they think.
