SLR: Beware the quiet fury of the 15-year-old white boy
Key topics:
Middle-class white teens emerging as politically right-wing in 2025
Youth questioning university, DEI, government policies, and privilege
Cultural and generational shifts fuelling unrest, addiction, and family strain
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Local transgender activist Max du Preez was extremely upset this week, delaying some activities related to his annual octogenarian nudist summit – he was hosting a Swiss couple this year – to accuse certain Afrikaans groups of bleeding pre-1994 ideas into the national body politic.
Instead of leading the naturalists on a coastal walk where he guaranteed no encounters with far-right people, a break for a group pubic weave, followed by liberation songs in the obscene Esperanto language (EU) and a discussion on just how much vibrancy Turkish neon vape shops have added to Europe’s village streets, he reluctantly grabbed a kaftan for a Newzroom Afrika interview and complained about things that offend him.
When I was fifteen, I was drinking brandy and smoking Chesterfields with a Muslim painter contracted to decorate my school dormitory, badgering him to bring me some of that mandrax stuff from Lavender Hill where he lived. Forced into labour shortly after to atone for other mischief, I discovered that I loved working and would have happily left school to continue, but I couldn’t claim it as intentional. Nowadays, I don’t know a fifteen-year-old who isn’t working.
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This profile ̶ the middle teen, white middle-class boy ̶- is emerging as the most right-wing in the English-speaking world, in what is quite possibly the most unusual discovery of 2025, if not the most ominous.
In addition to working, they’re doing something else. Being quiet. Contemplating. Friends with fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys are unnerved. When the boys ask questions, they’re direct and icy.
One friend, who previously stood – successfully – on two occasions as a member of parliament, was recently interrogated by his fifteen-year-old son with regard to policies he’d championed during elections but failed to deliver.
“What spooked me the most was that he wasn’t using many words,” he told me.
Intractable webs
They’re asking about the point of university, or why so many white people call other white people racist on television, why the government insists on defying the Supreme Court by experimenting with puberty-blockers on vulnerable kids younger than they are, or about the intractable webs of debt every country apparently owes another.
In response, people like Max du Preez and media editors and diversity counsellors sneer and lament “the Andrew Tate / technology matrix radicalization complex”. They could not be more deluded: this is not an influence consequence. It’s the nascent stage of reflex.
Even normies are noticing. Some months ago, a writer in the Spectator remarked on his son’s attitude to Gaza Cola, a product afforded luxury belief status by centrist dads. The boy didn’t just not want to drink the stuff, but expressed genuine sympathy for the attention-seeking originators – as if something like that makes even remote sense.
Another writer called Jacob Savage has written possibly the most breathtaking article of the year in CompactMag on an adjacent issue. A generation of white writers in the US was excluded by other white creative executives…because they were white. Savage’s reporting prompts a sequence of uncontainable emotions, from amazement to devastation to infuriation. One group of white people – boomers and early gen x’ers – was burning the ladder behind them for another group…to feel better about themselves and their concepts of privilege? It is the cultural revolution we’ve missed or slept through.
What is so shocking about Savage’s reporting is that supporters of appointing people on the sole criterion of immutable characteristics are so convinced of their own righteousness, and therefore so far gone that one feels only a bloody revolution will be capable of emphasising the law prohibiting these practices (affirmative action is technically illegal in the UK). And even more unbearable is that race-based exclusions are genuinely received now as moral imperatives, viciously defended – even after having initially been derided.
So to the implications: the disintegration of the white working-class family on one side and a fertility crisis on another, then the darkest of them all: the sudden spikes in middle-age addiction and suicide.
DEI industrial complex
In 2024, we were told that the return of Donald Trump would herald the termination of all that had gone wrong – unhinged climate hysteria contaminating policy and making things so expensive, the spectacle of men calling themselves women and beating up or raping women, many of those in places like prisons. But most of all we were told that the DEI industrial complex would be subjected to a paralysing agent that would course through its veins.
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To an extent, some of these things came true. But most have yet to change. Through our fifteen-year-old on the other hand, we can start assessing as the actual response, the sweeping reflex which grew up in the shadow of lockdowns, witnessed monumental corruption – much of which involved intentionally undermining or diminishing the boy’s prospects and subsequently exists under no illusion as to how hard his life could be – and his own ideas about how to treat people who’ve squandered their inheritance or created fads to feel better about themselves.
When this guy reaches political maturity and participation – roughly in ten to twelve years’ time – the likes of Max du Preez, and centrist dad Liberal Democrats, and admirers of Mark Carney and left-wing mayors who deliberately turn their cities to ashes as some sort of weird tribute to supranational institutions, will probably wish to exist in another solar system. And so they should.
*Simon Lincoln Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014. In South Africa, he wrote a weekly column for Business Day, then later Biznews.com. Today he is a partner at a London-based litigation funder, a trustee of an educational charity, and a member of the advisory board of the Free Speech Union of South Africa. He travels frequently between California, the UK, and South Africa. All on his green passport.
This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission