Angry Young White Men

Another day, another mass shooting by an angry white male. This time it was at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California. The shooter, by name of  Santino William Legan, was of Italian and Iranian descent. By the racialist logic that so many people have embraced, he might have been considered a person of color. Nonetheless, for the sake of her argument Maureen Callahan labels him white and throws him in with the other angry white male mass murderers.

One understands that newspaper columnists do not have the time or the expertise to do a deep dive into the different motives for these killings, but lumping them all together under the heading: angry white males, does not do it justice. We will not belabor a point we have emphasized on many occasions, but many of these killers suffered from severe and untreated psychiatric disorders. Some are psychopaths. Some are schizophrenics. These are not the same thing.

Callahan explains:

Little is known yet about this shooter’s history — and I refrain from using his name, since infamy is part of what these shooters seek — but so far, he fits the profile of those who’ve come before, the rage-induced young men we first encountered through Columbine and later Sandy Hook, Aurora, Charleston, Virginia Beach, the STEM school shooting in Colorado, Charlotte, the Poway synagogue shooting in California, the Louisiana shootings in two parishes, the Sebring shootings in Florida (those last six this year alone), the Mercy Hospital shooting, the Thousand Oaks shooting, the Tallahassee yoga studio shooting, the Jacksonville Landing shooting, the Art All Night shooting in New Jersey, the Santa Fe HS (Texas) shooting, the Nashville Waffle House shooting, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS shooting — and far too many more to mention, but all with one thing in common.

One might mention, as a sidelight, that white people are not leading the nation in crime. I know that when a person of color kills a person of color, the media pretends that it's the fault of white police officers... but still.

Since Callahan considers angry white males to be the nation's biggest threat, she ought to have considered the threat posed by non-white male crime. She did not, sadly for her.

Besides, haven't we been told that climate change is the nation's biggest threat? Where's climate change when we need it?

One hesitates to mention the obvious fact, but, despite the mindless recent rant by Rep. Ilhan Omar, white people are far less likely to commit crimes than people of color. So fixated is the Democratic Party on white people that we are within our rights to imagine that they are running this con in order to exonerate the real perpetrators. Of course, if you exonerate the real perpetrators you are telling them that they have the right to riot and to rob and to kill. Didn't Rev. Al Sharpton provoke a pogrom in Brooklyn? Didn't he denounce the manager of a fashion shot for being Jewish... provoking a bombing that cost six people their lives?

For his degenerate behavior, Rev. Al is embraced by Democratic political candidates. He was welcomed to the Obama White House dozens of times.

And we also know that when people of color commit crimes, the correct response is compassionate understanding. They are oppressed and they are rebelling against their oppression. After all, didn’t everyone’s favorite young imbecile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declare, just yesterday, that Palestinians are so oppressed that they must riot against the criminal Israeli regime. Crime is not crime when it is undertaken to advance a leftist cause... and to kill Jews.

I offer these examples to note, if only in passing, that white males are targets of a great deal of venomous hatred. They have become the new Jews.

After all, white people are the scourge of human civilization. They are the worst of the worst. Women and people of color are going to take what is rightfully theirs… and so on. So considering how angry people are with white males, do you think that this is producing a cohort of resentful angry white males. Consider how much rage was directed against white males by the #MeToo movement. Then, you might have an idea why some of these people are angry. 

If it is OK for one side to consume itself with anger, with anger against Trump, with anger against Bret Kavanaugh, against every white male who has ever trod the planet, then anger becomes America’s emotional currency. Ergo….

Better yet, we have a therapy culture that has proclaimed full self-expression to be therapeutic. This culture and its psycho practitioners have told everyone to get in touch with their feelings and to express them fully. Aren’t these angry white males doing just that?

Callahan continues:

From those mass shooters who have attacked the innocent before, we know it’s a specific strain of anger — deep, repressed, biblically vengeful — felt most commonly by young men, almost always white, who report feeling alienated, dispossessed, misunderstood, victimized and all too often rejected by women.

Their chosen outlet is the mass slaughter of innocents, carnage at places the rest of us once deemed safe — schools, hospitals, places of work and worship, concerts, carnivals — all meant to hold us hostage, in fear of the next reprisal we’re not responsible for and won’t see coming.

When people of color rebel, they are defended for being righteous. Why would these angry white males not think the same. Besides, if you ask yourself what white people have contributed to civilization, even to America, you will find yourself with a very long list.

Aside from the fact that there are many different kinds of white people, from Anglo-Saxons to Scandinavians, to Southern Europeans to Slavs, if we limit ourselves to the Anglo-Saxon tribe-- as Joel Kotkin labelled them in his book Tribes, written before tribalism became a bad thing-- we can remark that these white people produced the Industrial Revolution, free enterprise, parliamentary democracy, human rights and a multitude of scientific discoveries. This Anglo-Saxon tribe was instrumental in defeating fascism, Nazism and Communism. Heck, it even shut down the slave trade. 

In return, we are flooded with insipid nonsense about white privilege. The discourse imagines that white people have never accomplished anything, have never contributed anything to world civilization. It imagines that if people confer more respect on some groups than on others the reason can only be that the respected groups lied, cheated and stole their way to their privileges. And that they oppressed, abused and brutalized all non white people. You know, the people of color who are flooding across our Southern border to take what is rightfully theirs.

For its pains the Anglo-Saxon tribe is often denounced as an organized criminal conspiracy. It is denied the pride that would accrue to those who have contributed to civilization. Those who have contributed far less are pretending that their righteous anger against white people confers something resembling moral superiority. They are most appalled, as are the Palestinians, to see another group succeed where they failed.

Callahan fails to remark that the moon landing, which was an achievement, but not one of humanity’s greatest achievements, was mostly the work of white males. Thus, it could not really be celebrated, because the landing craft was insufficiently diverse. 

Last week, the nation celebrated one of humanity’s greatest triumphs — the moon landing, something once commonly believed couldn’t be done. Perhaps our next moon shot should, paradoxically, be more earthbound: a collective dedication, from the White House on down, to figuring out why young men in the world’s greatest, most prosperous country are so goddamn angry.

The rage for diversity has placed white males at a disadvantage. Besides, has anyone noticed that, what with the mania about white privilege, the students who are doing the best in America’s high schools and colleges are most often Asian.