America’s white male meltdown starts with Taylor Swift and ends with Justin Mohn

When famed developer William Levitt, “the father of the American suburb,” chose the farmland of Bucks County in 1952 for his second Levittown, the maze of modest, look-alike ranch houses was marketed as the postwar American Dream — albeit a dream he tried to codify as whites only.

A white utopia is nevertheless a fairy tale that lived on in the warped mind of a young man named Justin Mohn, who retreated into Levittown’s labyrinth, inside his parents’ home on Upper Orchard Drive, when his 2014 degree in agribusiness management from Pennsylvania State University only resulted in a series of occasional McJobs: call centers, cubicle farms, a Jersey Mike’s sub shop. Over that decade, Mohn made it clear what he blamed for the struggles that kept him living in his parents’ house into his 30s: affirmative action, which he believed meant he couldn’t succeed as an “overeducated white man.”

Overeducated or not, Mohn apparently did his own research in an increasingly online existence that included a failed effort to launch a national militia in a YouTube video. In his most recent 14-plus minute production, Mohn ranted against a variety of usual right-wing suspects: Black Lives Matter, antifa, an invasion of immigrants at the southern border, LGBTQ activists, and an overreaching, all-powerful federal government. You know, the same kind of stuff you’d hear on the Fox News Channel in prime time.

The only real difference was that Mohn started his screed Tuesday night by holding aloft the just-severed head of his father, Michael Mohn, a retired engineer from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers whose service for the federal government apparently branded him as an enemy in the 32-year-old’s increasingly disturbed mind.

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 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 loans. 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.

Like any virus, the fever of misogynistic male angst comes in many varieties. In a few extreme cases, like Mohn and his late father, the disease can prove fatal. Much more common is the lower-grade fever, which can produce a cold sweat and the bizarre delusion that Taylor Swift is the diabolical architect of a modern-day The Da Vinci Code that binds her once-in-a-century pop superstardom with an intricate plot to rig the NFL to reelect President Joe Biden in November.

In the far-right freakout that’s launched a thousand hot takes, an army of conservative commenters has seized on Swift’s blooming romance with Kansas City Chiefs star tight end Travis Kelce, the Chiefs’ looming return to the Super Bowl, and Swift’s fairly anodyne young-successful-female-millennial (yet rarely voiced) liberal views as proof that the world is somehow conspiring against them.

The remarkable ability of the American right to believe that everything today is rigged, from pro football to presidential elections — except for the things that actually are rigged (legacy college admissions, or the U.S. tax code) — was dramatized not by some rando YouTuber in his mom’s basement, but by a high-profile recent GOP presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy. He implied in a post on X/Twitter that the Super Bowl is already fixed for the Chiefs “[a]nd I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.”

I’ve read a ton of Tay takes over the last couple of days and many — like the Washington Post political horse race analysis that pretends there’s no cultural context — missed as badly as a Carson Wentz third-down pass. Philly’s own Amanda Marcotte, writing in Salon, was much closer to the truth when she said convincing young men that the popularity of Swift, or even the NFL itself, is “fake” breeds the brand of cynicism that creates a cult around Donald Trump. “By telling adherents that everything around them is fake, rigged, or otherwise more sinister than what it seems,” Marcotte wrote, “the leaders convince their disciples to distrust everyone and everything — except, of course the beloved MAGA figureheads.”

But why is Taylor Swift the ideal vessel for this? You don’t need a doctorate in the fast-disappearing field of sociology to see how it’s not just her success, but her sisters-are-doing-it-for-themselves message that terrifies Dude-Bro Nation. Her sermon for America’s female majority is — in the words of her master chronicler, Taffy Brodesser-Akner — that their relationship to those dude-bros is “only the smallest parts of a woman’s life, no matter what the movies tell you. The ways that our trust and loyalty are weaponized against us is also the dominion of femaledom.” In a nation where Swift is queen, a last-throes army of Scooter Brauns is lashing out.

How else to explain the much more consequential freakout against all forms of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on college campuses or in the workplace? Right-wingers have even pushed the fact-free claim that the recent midair blowout aboard a Boeing-manufactured jet — the result of a cost-cutting culture led by white CEOs — is somehow the result of Black pilots. Never mind the reality that it was not a white man but a female pilot who calmly guided that Alaska Airlines jet to a safe landing. It’s the persistent longing for an Eisenhower-era Levittown — a fantasy that whitewashes the reality that an angry mob tried to run the first Black family out of their home in 1957.

The tragedy here is that the crisis of the young American male is real, just complicated. Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case have chronicled the surge in deaths of despair — from suicide, drugs, or alcohol — among middle-class white men who look a lot like Justin Mohn. For every murder victim like Michael Mohn, there are hundreds more who died from a revolver or a vial of pills. And society is partly to blame — from the decades of outsourcing good-paying middle-class jobs to make billionaire investors a quick buck, or the slow death of vocational education.

But the bigger problem is an unwillingness to surrender the cultures of patriarchy and white privilege to the majority of Americans they’ve locked out. A MAGA-flavored backlash of massive resistance looks ridiculous when it’s railing against Swift and the unfairness of the Billboard charts or the AFC championship game. But it’s also this warped mindset that craves a Trump “Red Caesar” dictatorship, to end their losing streak in the culture wars. And the occasional spasm of deadly violence, from a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, to a Black supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., to a Levittown bathtub, is just the collateral damage.

» READ MORE: Can we stop mass shootings if we won’t talk about the crisis of America’s young men? | Will Bunch

We don’t talk nearly enough about the things we could do to end some of the unfairness in American society — the broken system of educating, or not educating, our young people when they turn 18, and the loss of good job opportunities for those who don’t win the college lottery — that could bring true equity and reduce the fever among angry young white men. But we also don’t talk enough about how politicians like Dan Patrick block solutions because demagoguery is easier.

In the end, the person who bears full responsibility for killing Michael Mohn is his son. But the people who stood behind Justin Mohn whispering all kinds of nonsense — for clicks or votes or whatever they need to prop up their own mediocrity — are splattered with the blood.

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter