Kevin Williamson: Angry White Boys

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hat is it these white boys are so angry about?

You don’t go to a protest because you’re happy. You go to a protest because you are mad about something or, in my case, because it is your job. I suppose I have been to something close to a hundred of them over the years.

I have also been the target of a couple. The idiot children of Yale protested a conference on freedom of speech at which I was speaking in 2015, part of a larger kerfuffle about Halloween costumes: A professor had criticized the university’s advice to avoid “cultural appropriation” as part of a larger trend toward transforming campuses into “places of censure and prohibition.” She was censured and, eventually, prohibited — pressured into resigning her job. The Yale kids were spitting mad, or at least a few of them were. I talked to a few future investment bankers after the conference, and, while they did not have any obvious sympathy for my political views, they were embarrassed by their fellow students. They rightly understood the protest to be a form of play-acting, a game of make-believe for young adults who should have grown out of it.

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What do these angry white boys in Virginia want?

There is some value in taking them at their word, or the 14 of them that make up the basic creed of the white-nationalist movement: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Well, all right. I suppose there are a few campus radicals who oppose the existence of white people, though so far as I can tell this is mainly rhetoric rather than a plan of action. The angry white boys talk about “white genocide,” a concept that is as conveniently vague and amorphous as “white privilege,” of which “white genocide” of course is only the rhetorical obverse. If they are outlandish in generality, they are muddy in specificity. They complain that white men are blamed for all of society’s troubles, that racial and ethnic pride is permitted to everyone except whites (no one has informed the Irish Americans of this), and that they are being “displaced” by immigrants.

A Charlottesville protester named Nicholas J. Fuentes, raging against the “rootless transnational elite,” vows: “You will not replace us.” I have reviewed the passenger manifest of the Mayflower, and there is not a single “Fuentes” to be found. Indeed, the rowdier white-power element in Texas, where I live, would very much like to see every man bearing the name “Fuentes” set down on the southerly side of a muddy little river that runs through Laredo. Peter Cvjetanovic, the 20-year-old rage-monkey bellowing in one of the now-famous photos of the tiki-Nazi procession in Virginia, complains: “I’m not the angry racist they see in that photo.” One hopes not: “Cvjetanovic” is a Croat name. Not a whole lot of Slavs on the Mayflower, either, and the originators of that swastika flag the angry white boys in Virginia like to fly would have put every Cvjetanovic they could lay hands on in a camp, eventually. Benito Mussolini reported that he himself had been impressed by a protest against “Jugo-Slav” immigrants in Italy. Fuentes? Cvjetanovic? As Rachel Dolezal knows, white people just ain’t what they used to be.

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“A girlfriend,” comes the mocking answer, and there’s probably more to that than mockery. The proprietor of one of the nation’s premier websites for neo-Nazi knuckleheads advised his colleagues in Charlottesville that, after the protest — which included a murder — “random girls will want to have sex with you.” I ran this proposition past a few random girls, and I suspect that the apfelstrudelführers are going to go home disappointed. There are many shades of white, and Mom’s-basement white is the least popular crayon in the box.

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Maybe too good: A great many of these young men have an interest in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary sociology — they like to think of themselves as “alpha males,” as though they were living in a chimpanzee troop — but it never occurs to them to consider their own status as rejects and failed men in that context. Online fantasy lives notwithstanding, random girls do not want to have sex with them. How do we know this? Because they are carrying tiki torches in a giant dork parade in Charlottesville. There’s no prom queen waiting at home. If we credit their own sociobiological model, they are the superfluous males who would have been discarded, along with their genetic material, by the pitiless state of nature. The fantasy of proving that they are something else is why they dream of violence and confrontation. They are the products of the soft liberal-democratic society they hold in contempt — and upon which they depend, utterly. James Alex Fields Jr. is angry at the world, and angry at his mother, probably for the same reason.

What does an angry white boy want? The fact that they get together to play dress-up — to engage in a large and sometimes murderous game of cowboys and Indians — may give us our answer. They want to be someone other than who they are. That’s the great irony of identity politics: They seek identity in the tribe because they are failed individuals. They are a chain composed exclusively of weak links. What they are engaged in isn’t politics, but theater: play-acting in the hopes of achieving catharsis. Their online personas — knights, Vikings, reincarnations of Charles Martel — will be familiar enough to anybody with a Dungeons and Dragons nerd in his life. But sometimes, role-playing around a card table isn’t enough: Sometimes, you need a stage and an audience. In the theater, actors and audience both can forget ourselves for an hour or two. Under the soft glow of the tiki torches, these angry white boys can be something else — for a night.

In the morning, they wake up with the same faces. And there is something in the faces. James Alex Fields Jr. has more than a little whiff of Dylann Roof about him, and we know what Dylann Roof wanted: to murder black people. Sometimes, it is worth taking angry white boys at their word.

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