I see scared people.

There’s a niche panic rising across America right now, a collective desperation among an increasingly jittery demographic who call this place home; people who, up until recently, have been continually handed limitless opportunity and prosperity without ever needing to do much beyond the bare minimum of showing up.

This pigment-specific terror shows up in a myriad of ways: in bottom-feeding dudebro podcast rants, in antagonizing racist influencers, in performative banners at baseball games, in violent xenophobic town hall tirades. You can see the distinct male-pattern hysteria in shamefully gerrymandered maps, in DEI program elimination, in truck and bicep overcompensation, in sky-is-falling megachurch sermons, and in shocking civil rights rollbacks.

Throughout this ever-diversifying land, mediocre white men are petrified, and for good reason: America is passing them by, and they know it. As you can imagine, they’re not taking it well, either.

Recently, I was contacted by a staff member at one of my host churches in advance of a speaking date there.

She’d received a call from a man with a thick southern drawl, who said he wanted to know why they’d invited someone like me to their congregation, saying, “You know he supports white genocide, right?”

Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

After my emotional, anonymous Aryan admirer was rightly dismissed, I wondered if the call soothed him at all. I wonder if it stopped the sinking feeling in his gut that he carries around every day, if it quelled his rising and quite warranted sense of Imposter Syndrome, if it quieted the ubiquitous rage always bedeviling him and men like him.

Something tells me it didn’t help. He’s likely beyond real comfort at this point. Most of these guys are. They’ve watched more and more people gain access to what they’ve been assured all their lives was their sole birthright, and this progress feels like persecution.

And so, rather than leveling up, widening their understanding of the world, or, God forbid, looking in the mirror, they’ve created a new coping narrative that tells them everyone else is the problem. It’s the immigrants. It’s their black and brown neighbors. It’s transgender people. It’s women. It’s Muslims. It’s the Liberals. It’s the media. It’s the ever-present ghost of President Obama residing rent-free in their heads. Convinced that the entire world has conspired against them, they are responding with a steady torrent of emotional outbursts and mindless violence.

In fact, living in the United States right now is what I imagine is what it would have been like observing dinosaurs in the days leading up to their extinction: seeing a frantic-but-surely-doomed species wildly thrashing and flailing about, all while being rapidly obscured by the shadow of a massive meteor of evolution plummeting toward them.

Uninteresting, nondescript, base-level white guys who, for the past 250 years, have been the beneficiaries of every privilege and advantage their pigmentation and pronouns afford, are watching time, progress, and the inexorable demographic changes coming to swallow them up.

Entitled, builder-grade man-children who’ve had the run of the house since exiting the birth canal into a land their great-great-grandaddies stole, subjugated, and murdered for, are starting to read the room and recognize that they are perilously close to losing their free pass to prosperity.

After having failed up from the day they were born, they are facing the grim prospects of finally having to participate in a meritocracy, and they’re looking to drive everyone else out so as not to be humiliated by just how poorly they measure up when competition appears.

It turns out that spending every waking moment buffered by privilege rots your brain, steals your ambition, and renders you incapable of doing the work to grow, evolve, or improve, which is why generations of low-melanin underachievers are now scrambling to cram for an exam they’ve always been handed the answers to.

Having spent decades in the cloistered cocoon of white American maleness, these emotionally stunted, barely literate, Chud The Builder acolytes never learned how to apply themselves, never needed to do any real introspection, and certainly never were expected to earn their keep. This is why these Confederacy nostalgics are trying to resuscitate Jim Crow, scapegoat immigrants, and rewind the clock to a nation where their numbers ensured their dominance, but it’s all gonna be for not.

If free and fair midterm elections happen here, the shifting populations and changing mores will prove their worry was justified, and the balance of power here may tip away from them for good. But even if a final, violent campaign of malfeasance and illegality allows them a few more days with the unearned spoils of this land, it will only be postponing the inevitable.

As the playing fields here level and the pool of participation widens, they are naturally becoming obsolete, proven to have little to offer a world that no longer falls in line or bows in reverence. The days when this nation was their participation trophy are coming to an end, and instead of lashing out, they should turn inward. Instead of picking up protest signs and arms, they should try picking up a book. Instead of playing the victim, they should ask themselves why educated, hardworking human beings feel like a threat.

This white fright isn’t unwarranted, but it is misplaced. It isn’t a targeted attack; it’s a self-inflicted wound. There is no coordinated effort to replace unremarkable white men in the United States, but an evolving, increasingly diverse nation is transcending them.

And they have no one to blame but themselves.

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