'A fantasy of manhood': Are frat boys the new Proud Boys?

Two weeks into the surge of pro-Palestine protests that swept college campuses across the United States, a new, heroic archetype captured the imagination of right-wing media influencers: throngs of casually attired “frat bros” who jeered and laughed at activists, and in one case, a solitary Black woman.

Fraternities — whose reputations have taken repeated hits for sexual assault, hazing deaths, drug dealing and alcohol abuse — are being lionized by prominent conservatives who celebrate them as a cultural counter-force to liberals whose anti-Israel protests and encampments have roiled dozens of American college campuses this spring.

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Together, these conservative influencers, led by the likes of Donald Trump advocate Charlie Kirk, have quickly moved to promote, exploit and otherwise co-opt frat boy belligerence against pro-Palestinian protesters. Doing so provides them fodder for advancing broader goals, such as attacking higher education’s diversity initiatives and boosting Trump’s prospects in the November presidential election among like-minded conservatives.

Richard Hanania, a former white nationalist who has successfully reinvented himself as a conservative academic, has also recognized the value of counter-protesters to advancing conservative aims, while expressing appreciation for fraternity brothers.

“One thing to realize about protest movements is that they rely on the other side laying down,” he wrote on X “As soon as there are counter-protests, people fight and then authorities cry public safety and shut things down.”

Consider a situation at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where members of at least three fraternities protected an American flag that Interim Chancellor Lee Roberts had restored after protesters raised a Palestinian flag in its place on April 30. Supporters hailed them “a platoon of American heroes” in a GoFundMe campaign to “throw ’em a rager” raised more than $500,000 in just a couple days.

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Two days after the flag action at UNC Chapel Hill, a mob of white frat boys, including one Phi Delta Theta member who made monkey noises and gestures, heckled a Black woman at the University of Mississippi — Ole Miss to most — before police shut down the pro-Palestine protest.

Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), approvingly re-posted the video on X, commenting, “Ole Miss taking care of business.”

Hanania, who called the video of the white student at Ole Miss making monkey noises at a Black woman “beautiful,” celebrated “frat bros” at the University of Washington in Seattle who challenged black-clad, masked anti-fascists — colloquially known as “black bloc” — to a push-up contest as evidence of a spontaneous groundswell of reaction.

“Something is happening here,” Hanania wrote. “There is more on the ground spontaneous resistance to these protests than all others in recent years put together. They’re inspiring a disgust reflex in normal people.”

Republican megadonor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel congratulated Hanania — author of The Origins of Woke, a book published by HarperCollins last September — for arguing that “we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcize the diversity demon.”

Conservative strategy to focus attention on campus chaos

Hanania is part of an interlocking circle of conservative intellectuals, operatives and media performers that are, in the moment, focused on demonizing the pro-Palestine encampments on college campuses across the country.

These encampments, largely populated by left-wing activists, have sought to raise awareness about the estimated 34,000-plus Gaza residents killed during Israel’s seven-month war on Hamas, the militarized ruling entity of the occupied territory that’s responsible for terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 that killed more than 1,200 Israelis.

But the pro-Palestine protests have also provided these conservative influencers a platform to advance a broader anti-diversity agenda that, in some cases, elevates “frat bros” to the status of reactionary vanguard.

The informal network also includes Kirk, media provocateur Jonathan Choe, Founders Fund Chief Marketing Officer Michael Solana and Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Rufo is largely credited with creating conservative moral panic around “critical race theory.”

Critical race theory is a decades-old legal concept, largely relegated to the halls of college-level academia.

But Rufo and others have helped turn critical race theory into shorthand to attack educational efforts at any level that promote diversity. This has fueled protests at school boards across the nation. It’s also been used by conservatives against pro-Palestine campus activism to advance a larger effort to reshape academia, which they consider hopelessly beholden to liberal causes, theories and sensibilities. (Rufo has praised Hanania as “a daring and engaging writer who cuts to the heart of the modern civil rights regime, which has had a profound but often hidden impact on American life.”)

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“Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic decolonization in the public mind,” he wrote on X in October. “Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them. Make them political untouchables.”

Seven months later, Rufo has only doubled down. Last week, he revisited the recommendation, writing. “Americans now see the elite university campus as the natural home of the pro-Hamas left.” Rufo wrote with satisfaction that elite center-left outlets such as the New York Times, Atlantic and New Yorker have “caught up” with him, adding, “That’s how the argument moves from right to left. Now, it’s time for the squeeze.”

In an essay published last month, Rufo observed that the “encampment escalation divides the left, alienates influential supporters, and creates a sense of chaos that will move people against it.” He advised that “the correct response from the right is to create the conditions for these protests to flourish in blue cities,” adding that by keeping the public focused “on the disorder overrunning left-wing jurisdictions — culminating, perhaps, in coalitional discord at the Democratic convention — it will move public opinion in our direction.

“Make the left own its pro-Hamas faction, or, alternatively, force the left to deal with it — by breaking up the encampments, punishing the wrongdoers, and restoring order, at whatever political cost this may exact,” he advised.

Neither Rufo nor Hanania could be reached for this story.

The presence of counter-protesters, including fraternity brothers, at pro-Palestine encampments elevates tensions, and increases the likelihood of police crackdown, according to a recent study.

The overwhelming majority of student demonstrations in support of Palestine since Oct. 7, 2023 have remained peaceful, according to a recent report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. But the same report found that “police have arrested demonstrators and physically dispersed crowds much more frequently at demonstrations with counter-demonstrators,” while noting that pro-Palestine demonstrations were five times more likely to elicit police intervention than pro-Israel mobilizations in cases where no opposition materialized.

Meanwhile, the backlash appears to have emboldened the governing body of at least one university to accelerate efforts to dismantle internal diversity, equity and inclusion policies — commonly known as “DEI” — and ramp up policing.

Two weeks after police cleared the pro-Palestine encampment and protesters raised the Palestinian flag at UNC Chapel Hill, the university’s Board of Trustees voted to abolish DEI funding and divert the funds to public safety and campus law enforcement.

Erika K. Wilson, a professor of law and director of the Critical Race Lawyering Clinic at UNC Chapel Hill, saw a backlash that had been building long before the encampment went up.

“UNC diverting DEI funds to police sends one helluva symbolic message,” she wrote on X. “The summer of 2020 ‘racial reckoning’ cost way more than we received in return. The backlash is leading to a bona fide police state and unearthing virulent anti-blackness.”

Charlie Kirk: ‘We go into enemy territory’

Enter the “frat bros.”

Rufo’s strategy got a demonstration run on May 7, when Kirk visited the University of Washington in Seattle, where a pro-Palestine encampment has been in place since late April.

While Kirk debated students on the Quad near the encampment and later spoke to a capacity crowd, Jonathan Choe, a former journalist enlisted by Turning Point USA — Kirk’s flagship advocacy organization — roamed the campus with a documentary crew and the nonprofit’s hired security.

They mocked protesters, filmed them against their wishes and demanded that Washington Gov. Jay Inslee call in the National Guard to dismantle the encampment.

Choe is a former journalist with KOMO News in Seattle who was fired in 2022 for issuing a Twitter (now X) thread celebrating the far-right group the Proud Boys.

Since then, he’s morphed into a right-wing media provocateur who has twice faced accusations of assaulting activists who attempted to block him from filming them. Choe is employed as a “senior fellow and journalist” by the Discovery Institute, a conservative, Seattle-based nonprofit that formerly employed Rufo as director of its Center on Wealth & Poverty.

Earlier this month, Choe began posting videos with the “Frontlines TPUSA” watermark showing scenes from the University of Washington encampment.

Choe promoted fraternity brothers as the core of the counter-protest, and inevitably — considering his previous run-ins — supplied footage of himself scuffling with protesters, fulfilling the right-wing “chaos” narrative.

During Kirk’s visit to campus, the Frontlines TPUSA’s account posted a video on X that was captioned, “Frat boys are the new vanguard of America.” It shows Choe striding between a half-dozen members of the “black bloc” huddling behind umbrellas and a line of young men casually dressed in slacks and sweatshirts.

“I would say the frat boys of America will save this country,” Choe says in the video. “They’re the only ones stepping up against these antifa types. It’s unbelievable what’s happening here on these college campuses in America. We’ve got these red-blooded Americans stepping up against the soy boys. America’s going to be saved by the frat boys. Unbelievable.”

During his visit to UW, Kirk wasted no time in pushing out media that portrayed the pro-Palestine encampment as a den of left-wing violence and chaos. Posting a Frontlines TPUSA video on X, he wrote that Choe “and his security guard have just been attacked by ANTIFA thugs as they were reporting near the UW encampment.”

The edited footage shows Choe standing on the outside of a violent scrum that included two of his security guards and members of the “black bloc,” and then Choe being chased and taking a swing at his pursuer.

One of the security guards emerged from the fight bleeding from his cheek while the other received a cut on his finger, according to an incident report provided to Raw Story by UW Police. The police investigated the incident as an assault, but closed it because they were unable to identify the suspects.

What the Frontlines TPUSA footage doesn’t show is how the fight started, and independent reporting by a student journalist cautions that their video “cannot verify who threw the first punch.”

But an earlier incident captured on Frontlines TPUSA video that was released the following day shows one of the security guards throwing a pro-Palestine protester to the ground.

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Raw Story was unable to find any instance of Kirk mentioning the security guard shoving the pro-Palestine protestor to the ground in his recent public comments, but he appears to confirm that Choe’s security team was working for Turning Point USA at the time.

Commenting on the video showing the alleged “antifa” attack against Choe, Kirk said on his podcast: “Not exactly sure what’s happening in this video, but there’s one of our security guys got bloodied up by antifa — just otherwise known as another day at the farm in Seattle. Shoutout to Dan and the team. They did a great job of protecting me. I felt very protected the entire time.”

Kirk could not be reached for comment for this story.

The pro-Palestine protesters and university administration at UW Seattle appear to have so far thwarted Rufo’s aim of magnifying “focus on the disorder overrunning left-wing jurisdictions.”

As the audience members left Kirk’s speech, protest supporters formed a three-layered defensive wall with a “bike brigade” in front, “black bloc” in the middle and hundreds of chanting protesters behind them to prevent them from entering the encampment, The Stranger reported.

Five days later, when a group of pro-Israel activists and Christian evangelicals attempted to march through the encampment, they were repelled by police in riot gear.

Unlike their counterparts at Columbia University and countless other universities across the country, UW’s leadership refrained from using police force to dismantle the encampment, and on Friday, the protesters announced that they would voluntarily disband.

University President Ana Mari Cauce has said the university joins “in calls by national and international leaders for a ceasefire that will include an end to all military operations” in Gaza, but refused to entertain protesters’ demands for an academic boycott of Israel and to cut ties with Boeing and other military contractors that provide weapons to Israel.

‘The men of this country are going to take the streets back’

The scene in Washington state is an apparent microcosm of a bigger, more national play for Kirk and company.

While assuring his listeners that his security team was more than adequate, Kirk took time in his podcast to praise “the frat boys” who “rose up to protect our tabling event yesterday” and “voluntarily went right up to antifa” to taunt them.“And look at these frat boys: They’re like, ‘Come on, let’s go,’” Kirk said. “That’s the energy that we need. That is the revolutionary spirit that is being reborn in this country. Going up to these maniac losers, who say, ‘We run these streets.’ No, you don’t. The men of this country are going to take the streets back.”

In his podcast, Kirk mentioned “frat boys” interchangeably with Generation Z men — a demographic he hopes to cultivate as a voting bloc to support Trump, a Republican, in the November election, where he'll face a rematch of four years ago with President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

“There’s something noticeable happening,” he said, echoing Hanania. “The young men are rising. Gen Z men are ascendant. And of course we are seeing the revolution of the broletariat.”

Kirk quickly credited the “broletariat” phrase to Michael Solana, the chief marketing officer of the Founders Fund, the San Francisco-based venture capital fund led by Thiel, among others. Kirk commended Solana’s essay, entitled “Revolution of the Broletariat.”

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“On campuses across the country,” Solana marveled, “America was mesmerized by a battle of young chads and tent-dwelling gender goblins, with the chad impulses — laughter in the face of hysteria, boyish overconfidence, patriotism — adopted well beyond the frat house.”

Like Hanania’s X posts, Solana’s essay reveals an obsession with the protesters’ gender expression and body types. There’s little examination of the reasons why protesters support Palestine and demand that universities divest from companies doing business with Israel.

By positively contrasting “frat bros” with the pro-Palestinian protesters, conservative influencers appear to be leaning into a long-standing habit of elevating masculine protagonists as defenders of American patriotism and decency.

Like the Proud Boys, an extremist group that emerged during Trump’s first presidential campaign and crested with the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, the “frat bro” ideal is hypermasculine, irreverent and celebrates excessive alcohol consumption.

But since the group’s founding in 2016, the Proud Boys brand has lost much of its shine. The group’s often beer-bellied members are pushing into middle age, and their mirthful aura has dissipated under the strain of Jan. 6 prosecutions. Its senior leadership is serving lengthy prison terms for seditious conspiracy.

Whether conservative frat boys fill a vacuum left behind by the Proud Boys remains to be seen.

“I don’t think frat bros are the new shock troops,” Jared Holt, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who monitors U.S. hate and extremist movements, told Raw Story. “The prototypical frat guy embodies a fantasy of manhood that conservatives perpetuate, so they will of course cheer for them. They see them as a possible constituency.”

Two fraternities reached by Raw Story declined to specifically comment on the overtures from conservative influencers. They provided general statements downplaying political partisanship as a feature of their respective organizations.

Jonathan M. Pierce — a spokesperson for the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi International, or AEPi, whose members at UNC Chapel Hill protected the American flag — told Raw Story the organization’s goal is to give undergraduate brothers “the tools and techniques they need to become stronger advocates for Israel and the global Jewish community.”

Pierce described AEPi as “an apolitical organization” while framing advocacy for Israel as transcending partisan politics.

Phi Delta Theta likewise ignored a request for comment on portrayals of frat culture by Kirk, Hanania and Solana, but referred Raw Story to a previous statement announcing the removal of the Ole Miss student who made monkey noises at the Black pro-Palestine protester. Without naming the student, the fraternity international said his conduct was “offensive, outside the bounds of [respectful] discourse, and contradictory to our values.”

Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC), for his part, cheered them. “Right on!” he wrote on X, with American flag and muscle emojis over a photo of the students holding the flag.

Trump himself posted a video to his Truth Social account — sponsored by his presidential campaign — that could fairly be described as a hype reel for the UNC Chapel Hill frat bros and others across the country.

A concerted push to wipe away DEI

While elevating “frat bro” culture and painting progressive college campuses as cesspools of chaos, Kirk, Hanania and other conservative culture warriors have steadily and insistently pressured elected officials and university administrators to dismantle campus diversity initiatives.

Kirk, who once championed standard free-market conservatism while downplaying race, has increasingly gravitated toward white nationalist talking points.

Under Kirk’s leadership, Turning Point USA rapidly expanded by aligning with Trump after he secured the Republican nomination during the 2016 election. Addressing Turning Point USA last year, Trump congratulated Kirk for building “one of the most incredible grassroots organizations in the entire nation.” Meanwhile, the alliance with Trump has helped turn the 30-year-old Kirk into a wealthy man.

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On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Kirk launched a frontal attack on the legacy of the revered civil rights leader, posting on X that “the deification of MLK and his proto-DEI ideology marks the exact moment that the progress of black America goes sideways.”

Speaking on his podcast last month, Kirk took aim at the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement: the 1965 Civil Rights Act. President Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation into law after televised coverage of Alabama state troopers attacking hundreds of marchers with whips, nightsticks and teargas at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma turned public opinion against segregation.

“The Civil Rights Act, let’s be clear, has created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon,” Kirk said during his podcast on April 17.

In the same podcast, Kirk observed that “the country’s getting less white” and asked his guest to comment on “the consequences of the great replacement,” which is a white supremacist conspiracy theory that has been cited by mass shooters who targeted Muslims in New Zealand, Latinos in El Paso, Texas, and African Americans in Buffalo, N.Y.

Kirk, who is a close friend of Donald Trump Jr. and is leading a multimillion-dollar effort to turn out the vote in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin for the elder Trump, took credit for mainstreaming discussion about dismantling the legal framework of civil rights.

“This topic would have been even more forbidden four or five years ago,” he said. “Now, it’s becoming more and more mainstream.”

During America Fest 2023, Turning Point USA’s annual gathering in Phoenix last December, Kirk hailed an order by Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt to prohibit state agencies, including public universities from funding DEI programs, and forcefully called for their elimination across the country.

“It’s amazing,” Kirk said. “I think every red-state governor should follow suit. Anybody in power should get rid of DEI immediately.”

Across the country, DEI programs have come under attack from Republican governors and legislatures.

In March 2023, Rufo stood alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis as he signed legislation banning DEI initiatives at public colleges in Florida, which led to eliminating employee positions and ending contracts at the state’s flagship university in Gainesville. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott followed suit in June 2023, and campuses across the University of Texas system duly slashed hundreds of DEI-related positions.

Gov. Spencer Cox signed an anti-DEI bill in January, and the University of Utah announced that it will eliminate its Division of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion on July 1.

Other states are moving in the same direction.

Bert Ellis, who as a student reportedly invited a proponent of eugenics to speak at the University of Virginia in the 1970s, was appointed to the Board of Visitors by Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Ellis wrote a blog post: “This is our opportunity to change/reverse the path to Wokeness that has overtaken our entire university.”

While Republican-controlled states and universities use policy levers to dismantle diversity initiatives, Kirk is attempting to shepherd a cultural transformation on campus by stoking white male backlash.

“Why are the young men so energized?” Kirk asked during his podcast, while recapping his visit to UW and riffing on the so-called “broletariat.”

“They are exhausted, and they are done with being blamed for every societal ill simply for existing,” he said. ‘Oh, you’re a white male? You’re the reason why there’s so much suffering.’ ‘Oh, you’re a white male? Toxically masculine.’ Oh, you’re a white male? You better not mis-pronoun me.’

“They’ve had enough!” Kirk concluded. “And they’re looking for a counter-revolutionary force, and they found a home in the conservative movement.”