America's white male meltdown starts with Taylor Swift and ends with Justin Mohn [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/taylor-swift-justin-mohn-toxic-masculinity-20240201.html

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https://archive.li/AcMIm

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As horrific as Mohn’s act of alleged patricide was, it could have been much worse. Fast work by law enforcement used the pings from Mohn’s cell phone to track him down 100 miles away at the Fort Indiantown Gap National Guard outpost, where this self-styled revolutionary, armed with a handgun, had breached the security fence and was roaming near the main office. We’ll never know if the quick arrest of this murder suspect prevented yet another mass shooting by a young, alienated white man in a 21st century America that specializes in producing them.

In the history of human civilization, Mohn’s long descent into some sort of mental illness — marked before Tuesday by his sporadic work history that included, according to one of his lawsuits, losing an insurance job for kicking a door — is, unfortunately, nothing new. What is new is the broadband multiverse of voices bombarding this Levittown young man — not the voices in his head, but a pyramid of paranoia that starts with penny-seeking bottom feeders on social media and ends with the bloviation of national broadcasters and politicians who should know better.

I keep coming back to something that Mohn said in his beheading video, when he declared that the flood of desperate refugees crossing the Rio Grande is actually “an invasion from third world countries. They’re coming here with health issues, they’re uneducated, unemployed, and all they do is commit crime on the streets.”

Oh wait, I’m sorry — that wasn’t the Bucks County beheader. That was the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, who was speaking this week on Fox News and spouting the kind of rhetoric that might inspire a “Mohn militia” — blaming all of America’s problems on some Other, whether it’s refugees or Black Lives Matter or the federal bureaucrats overseeing your student loan. The hateful blather is an effort to politically hijack the real moral panic among young white American men: that the safety net of white privilege and patriarchy that long served as an insurance policy against personal failure is collapsing on top of them.

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