I told my son straight out that the educational system does not have his best interests in mind. Regurgitate what they want to hear, get your grade, but don't internalize it.
Women run education and the system is designed to uplift girls. I always flash on a quote from Nietzsche: In revenge and in love, a woman is more barbarous than a man. At its base, wokeness isn't about justice; it is about revenge.
I was taught that envy was just like jealousy, but it’s actually much worse: it is sorrow at another’s good, and joy over their misery. That is demonic, and that is wokeness.
The crazy thing is it’s about revenge for things that never happened to THEM. I understand “hell hath no fury” like a woman actually scorned by a particular man, but revenge on male children who weren’t alive for largely mythologized crimes against women is insane.
Our high school gets a financial kickback for every student that passes an AP course. Girls are easier to educate thai boys, so more make it it to college prep courses, so the school takes the most efficient route to the money.
As long as schools take a "college or bust" attitude, boys will be at a disadvantage.
Boys have a natural maturity deficit of around two years by age 18. This used to be made up by military service and only having the most eligible quarter of all males go to college in the first place. Now that most states have targets of 60+% of both sexes going into college, it should come as no surprise that so many young men (boys, really) are failing to graduate.
Wokeness is essentially the Nuremberg laws for white people. That had disastrous consequences the last time Critical Race Theory was tried, in 1930s Germany, so how could they imagine that reinventing Nazism was going to work out this time around? Same cartoon thinking, same malevolence dressed as unassailable virtue.
First, don’t quote a man pretending to understand women. You lot have believed that you know what’s better for us than we know for ourselves for Millenia and it’s exhausting. That you get 50% rights over our children when your part in the ordeal requires seconds that you center your lives around while we do the rest of it, all much less pleasurable than your little spurt, AND without you is proof that men are not especially maligned. While I do agree with the points made in this article, I do not agree it’s about revenge for anybody. I see it all as a pendulum swinging; the pendulum swung from stupid superior white men for a while to stupid superiority for everybody else for a while. In the middle, we all love each other, but it’s not like the momentum is going to bring us to center any time soon. Which is why Trump is President. But watching all you boys victimizing yourselves here bodes poorly for our future.
Wow! You have been thoroughly indoctrinated into an ideology that teaches bitterness, spite, and incurable victimhood. No wonder men are avoiding women.
You can’t avoid us. You need us, there ain’t no synthetic womb. We, however, could cull every man on the planet and repopulate with the stores of sperm plentifully available. I’m sorry, but I’d be more worried about the handyman’s tale than the handmaids tail were I man.
Humanity has only peaked its head out of the age of women being a womb. But how on earth did you come to this conclusion from what I proposed? It’s the seed spillers that have become obsolete, women have the womb and the ability to do all “man” stuff to boot. Men are needed for war… with other men. What else exactly? Innovation? Wow, great innovation we’ve got here, everyone feeling so happy and free. No, it’s just a bunch of man children who need a time out. It’s Lord of the Flies out there, and it’s boring.
You can't say it's about revenge, women all bat for Team Woman after all and that would make them look bad. What is the abuse of the Duluth Model if not an implicit act of revenge?
As Dads we have to counter the attack on them. I first became aware when I encountered the book a mom wrote called "Save the Males" right before my kids were born.
But one statement everyone seems to side step is this. We are not dealing with the GOP, TRUMP, Democrats, Liberals, Progressives. We are dealing with something our great grand parents spoke about and fought 100 years ago. Communism. The Mayors of NY, LA and Chicago are trained marxist that trained all over the world.
Communism. We are facing Commies who will burn this place down to usher in the Communist Utopia. I dont care if they call themselves "National Socialists" (NAZI) or "International Socialist" (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) commies, they are both bad and we as Americans had a Constitutional Republic for as long as we can keep it.
"The right wing patriarchy runs K-12 public ed in America"
Amazing. Absolutely amazing. You guys simply can not recognize your own W's can you? Probably how you've gained more and more power continually for the last century.
Thank you for writing this. I'm a father of a teenage white male and your writing acknowledges "what radicalized you". Like you, I first voted in 1992 and was, more or less, a liberal voter, supporting fair play, civil rights and social safety nets. But, now, I'm a radical reactionary, forced to focus solely on my narrow self-interest and that of my offspring. Like you, I'm no fan of Trump or other self-serving demagogues, but they are the (much) lesser of the evils given as a voting choice.
My wife and most of her friends from Thailand think they are progressives. By Thai standards, they are progressives.
But you talk to them about politics here in America, they are the most dyed in the wool conservative people you've ever met by "America 2025" standards. Because the American left went to crazy town, and has zero interest in returning.
You seem to be the same way. You view yourself as progressive. If we were still in the '90s or early 2000's you would still BE progressive. But there isn't room for you in that tent anymore. Like it or not, you are a right winger now. The American left, as currently constructed, will not allow you to be on their side.
Agreed, and that is another factor in the mix. The “Overton Window” of acceptable political discourse has shifted a long way leftward.
On aggregate (i.e. as a cohort: there will inevitably be numerous outliers), studies show female respondents as moving substantially leftward over the same timeframe in which male respondents have made at most a much modest rightward shift. Overall, the girls moved with the tide, the boys far less so.
It’s tempting to theorise that the propensity to seek group consensus and cohesion drives this difference among the female respondents compared with the males. Other commentators have said as much and maybe some clever psychologists have some interesting data - I don’t know.
It’s interesting to see though that, as usual, males are being blamed when in fact it’s far less so they who have had an attitudinal adjustment than have females. But then, as is repeatedly pointed out, that’s the script.
As an aside, my 14 year old son considers both Andrew Tate and Donald Trump to be douches (his self-formed opinion). At the same time, he has opinions which he’s learned to hide, lest he be sent for reeducation. None of these opinions would’ve raised an eyebrow 20 years ago, probably won’t in a few years’ time, but right now, they’re kryptonite.
He also understands pretty well that it’s not ok to victimise people and he doesn’t want to be the asshole in the room. He’s empathetic in a healthy way and to a healthy extent, but he’s got a good bullshit detector. His friends are the same. They actually give me hope. But all of them have targets on them now, so they clam up. Behaviour which will inevitably be labeled as “uncommunicative” and “toxic”.
The only thing for which I lack a working paradigm in all of this is what exactly led ANYONE to think all this was a good idea. Because it was never just a few cranks.
My wife and stepson are also Thai. Through them I have gotten to know other Thai immigrants. When my wife and the other Thais came to the US they thought they were going to be liberals and get along with all races. Nope. They are race realists.
in Eastern Asia, pattern recognition is not considered evil. For the Asian immigrants I have I met, the American dream is to make enough money to move away from blacks and not have to deal with them.
Now in Thailand before Thais move to the US, the other Thai kids warm then about blacks.
Their outlook can be summed up by an Iraqi Uber driver when I asked him if he liked living in his area of town. "It is wonderful! There are no blacks so there is no crime!"
Matt - Now I am curious. What makes your wife and her friends "progressives"? From my US perspective, "progressive" is mostly about alphabet people and ending capitalism for a glorious rent free apartment in a tony section of Brooklyn.
That has certainly been "progressives" since the early 2010's. For them it is support for a form of universal Healthcare (in Thailand's case that means crappy free Healthcare for everyone, but very high quality private Healthcare if you're willing and able to pay up... they just think that everyone should have access, even if it isn't great), government protections for consumers from predatory practices, mass transit and quality city services, institutionalization for the mentally ill, quality public schools (ie public schools that educate students well), actual equal rights for women (which they have on paper in Thailand, but not in reality) etc. You know, what progressives were in favor of decades ago here in America.
What they think is batshit:
1. The whole "trans women are women" thing and associated policies. And remember, they're Thai... ladyboys are a thing there. They aren't against ladyboys/trans people, but they think what the left says we should allow is nuts.
2. Transing children. Their reaction to that is "what the actual fuck?"
3. Not jailing and punishing criminals.
4. Civil disorder (ie homeless people accosting them in cities in public was extremely shocking, when we were watching the BLM and CHAZ/CHOP coverage from Thailand when it was happening I often got asked from a lot of Thai people, including my then girlfriend/now wife, "what is going on in America?").
5. Public hard drug use (fentanyl zombies, open air drug markets in major cities... also extremely shocking).
6. Just allowing anyone into the country who claims asylum. In her words, "why have a country if you don't control who you allow in?"
Things they understand but are against, and view being "progressive" as being against:
1. The everything bagel style of "development" that means either nothing ever gets built, or it comes in decades late and way over budget. When I was describing the obstacles (permitting, endless environmental review, requirements that certain favored groups be given special treatment when it comes to handing out contracts) to building high speed rail and affordable housing here in America my wife literally said, "oh, like corruption but it is legal." Thailand is a very corrupt country, so she gets it, but that is how we look to someone new here.
2. Censorship. The difference is that the list of things that could get you in trouble in America when she and I discussed this when we moved here (2021 was when we both moved to the US from Thailand... I had been living there for a few years) was long and continually changing. In Thailand it is fairly short and consistent... mostly amounting to don't diss the monarchy.
These are all things she and I have talked about, but I'm sure there are others... bottom line, her views align pretty well with a normie 1990's Democratic voter. Not the modern Democratic party.
Thanks for the detailed response. I share all their views. That's what makes me Nazi Fascist! in the US. One twist on censorship in the US: it's not so much government censorship, although governments keep trying. It's social censorship. Can you imagine going on Blusky and saying that you are against 6. just allowing anyone into the country who claims asylum. Let alone "why have a country if you don't control who you allow in?" Oh man the howling
Yeah, but people say that like it matters. If it can get you fired from your job, does it matter whether it is the government doing it or not?
I'd contend that really only matters to Americans who REALLY want to see other Americans censored and are looking for loopholes that enable them to do it.
I did not mean to minimize the assholely practice of "canceling someone" 'cause you don't like what they said. But, I believe this really only applies to certain on-line platforms, and probably the best thing you can do for yourself is not be on one. In real life, most people are pretty reasonable, especially if you avoid politics and religion.
I have to disagree with you on this one. On the internet, most of the people will either just dogpile you or de-friend you... either way, not hugely consequential. Unless youre a public facing figure, it normally wasnt professionally dangerous there, especially if you werent writing it under your own name. In my opinion it was most important to avoid it at work (or university), because it is those places where consequences could have life changing impacts when HR or the people's commissars (or whatever they are calling it in University these days) got involved
Also, further context, when we moved back to the US we first went to Washington State and then Boston... not exactly places know for tolerating differences of opinion.
I am a WASP. My ancestors were WASPs. I am proud of all that they accomplished. Their work ethic was key to building arguably the richest most functional civilization that has ever existed on the planet. That is something that any of their descendants can be proud of, and should emulate.
I teach my 12 year-old son this and I will never apologize about it. He should be proud of his people. And fuck anybody that says otherwise.
See, I mostly went along with the paradigm of “white people shouldn’t express pride because they don’t need it, whereas other groups do.” I was okay with that because ultimately, I don’t personally feel that much pride for things that people who look like me, but not me specifically, have accomplished. But there’s a very big difference between “don’t express pride” and “perform constant shame and guilt.” Thanks but no thanks to the latter.
Almost every time I had to deal with a 'person of color' they would assert that the only reason I was doing what I was doing is because of my acculturated racism. And my answer to them would be, in more polite terms, "Dumbfuck, read my name badge. I'm half Mexican, and my grandparents on that side came to the US in the early 1900s and we're picking cotton and grapes an do the produce in the fields of central California. And on the other side, one set great grandparents immigrated from fucking Switzerland at about the same time and built up lives from, literally, nothing. And the other 1/4 is derived from British isles mutts who lived in the new England area and who were on the side of the Union. So, you can take your acculturated racism and shove it up your criminal ass. Oh, and by the way, by saying what you just have, you've exposed yourself as being far more of a bigot than you could credibly accuse me of being. "
Keep in mind: my anecdotes are related to my personal professional experience, and, to a much lesser degree, the anecdotes related to my from my dad who worked where I did. We worked in a time before 'woke' was a term. Also, keep in mind that the areas in which i worked were some of the worst parts of town: tons of crime, and heavily 'minority'.
Great article. I am pleased to have subscribed. I speculate that the social contagion of declaring oneself as "non-binary" was a way for a young person to move from being in the "shut up and know your place" group to to suddenly hold coveted victim status. With the so-called vibe shift, there is no benefit in playing pretend.
I noticed in the past year there are a noticeable amount of young people who changed pronouns from "he/they she/they" back to "he/him she/her"
It's a sad irony for the gay community when they fought tooth and nail for decades to be considered "normal" and got a huge victory with the legalizing of gay marriage across the country in 2015. Then, a loud minority decided "we don't want to be normal we want to be special" which led down this road
I try to minimize interactions with anyone who feels the need to tell me their pronouns. in a signature block. Sometimes I have no choice (clients, for example), but I've noticed that they've all stopped doing this. And I don't mean they switched from "from he/they she/they" back to "he/him she/her" - I mean they stopped the stupidness altogether. It was nearly always younger women, and I wonder if they did it because they felt peer pressure to do so. Then the peer pressure stopped. IDK
Did the "gay community" ever actually agree upon wanting to be just normal? Throughout gay rights, transgression, cruising, (even pederasty in the 60s and 70s), drag, queering, denouncing marriage in favor of other forms of relations, were all strongly linked to the movement and gay culture at large.
From the enthusiastic embrace MOST gays and lesbians had towards trans and queer, I am beginning to think most straights were convinced of a respectability middle class narrative that wasn't really there. I say this as a cultural libertarian who doesn't really care too much, but cannot help but notice that the so called normal gays pushed for queering definitions and norms prior to the past few years of the trans craze.
Is it a coincidence that the vast majority of performers of gender ideology were young white people at the same exact time that being white made you automatically a bad person until proven otherwise? What better way to shed your "oppressor" status than to join the newest group of "oppressed"?
A couple of years ago, a family member graduated from medical school. At the ceremony for the med students, the dean (a woman) began the event by saying how proud she was that this class had the smallest fraction of white males in the school's history. Of course she framed it from the opposite perspective -- the highest fraction of women and minorities -- but the meaning is the same. All those white guys who just became doctors were expected to applaud and smile.
Then they named the winners of about a dozen special awards -- like "to the student who best exemplifies the spirit of community service" and stuff like that. Only one of these awards had objective criteria -- having scored the highest on an exam. The rest were determined subjectively by a comittee. The objective one went to a male. All of the rest went to females.
Then came the generral commencement. This was Ohio State, so we're talking about a crowd of 30,000 people packing a football stadium. Of the dozen or so people who gave some kind of speech for the event, there was not a single white male.
Not to mention that the main commencement address was a mostly screed about white privilege.
These are deliberate decisions. You don't accidentally end up with a roster that completely excludes a demongraphic that makes up a huge fraction of the students and faculty.
So we took a bunch of kids and distilled in their head that that are the angels of death, the destroyers of civilizations, that they are so powerful that even if they are a small minority everyone in the world fears them, that they have to be handicapped so that the everyone else has a chance to compete with them, that they are so evil that they carry the sins of their ancestors and they have to constantly atone. It sounds like the origin story for a supervillain. Did KKK design the woke curriculum? This is a serious question. Did our elites decide to revive the martial spirit in Gen Z males to prepare for new wars? Did they sever the relationship between the sexes so that there is a male surplus to support renewed militarization? If this not the answer, then I am afraid that our collective cognitive decline is terminal, ie, we are all morons. Wokeness after all was supported by the most educated and smartest among us.
I don’t have a great theory for how this happened. I think it was more piecemeal than deliberate. A gaggle of wannabe civil rights crusaders trying to one-up each other, and before long, built a rigid ideology that necessitated telling children that they were born evil. It’s complete madness, and I think people basically just did it for likes.
It's cultural Marxism. Since nobody was buying the class war they switched to race and gender. I agree it's somewhat piecemeal rather than a vast organized conspiracy, but there are hard core socialists behind a lot of it. Many are active in the teacher's unions. The playbook is apparent, from abolishing police (BLM) to wealth redistribution via land back (land acknowledgments are a set up) and loan forgiveness. White people who don't "do the work" of ritual atonement are on the Nazi side and fair game. We have a whole generation of our most educated elite in the streets with socialist signs for Palestine every weekend and their motto is "by any means necessary." Rolling this back will be a herculean task, and we have to start now. Thank you for this timely call to action.
They may be "educated" but many of them are not smart. I have also listened to the hand-wringing hysteria that boys aren't going to college and they are, therefore, "uneducated" and subject to the siren call of "right-wing propaganda." I also listen to Shawn Ryan and Joe Rogan, who have so many men on their podcasts who didn't go to college (or dropped out) and are successful anyway. Men listen to those podcasts and see another path other than expensive, woke, college.
My best friend whom I've known for more than 30 years has a son who graduated high school a couple of years ago. He's a good looking kid, athletic, smart, perceptive. He took stock of things and decided to go to welding school instead of college. He also doesn't date. His rationale? He understood what he was being done to him as a Caucasian male and basically said, "Fuck right off with that shit!" to further education. He actually did the same thing to relationships. He has looked at the landscape of females his age - most of whom are veering the other direction from what David has described here - and has basically explicitly stated that he sees that as a path to misery. And, frankly, in addition to observing social and cultural trends among young women, his accurate observations of his mother's treatment of his father validates his position. The left might call him an incel or volcel, but he simply doesn't give a fuck. For him, those sobriquets have no more power - or accuracy - than the bleating of the mainstream left calling those in the right nazis.
I have said in the past and was dead serious that a lot of the woke agenda really seems like someone took a time machine back to the 1995 US or whatever with the intent of rebirthing white nationalism.
Like how how how are we going to get this dying movement off of life support? I know wokeness!
You rightly center this conversation around the new batch of young guys coming up. But I'm a 35-year-old Millennial, former Bernie Bro raised in Portland, Oregon, and I definitely don't register as a Democrat/liberal anymore. A huge reason is because of this crap. Zooming out, I believe Kamala Harris only won over Millennials, the godless uber woke generation we are told, by 1%. I think if you're an American born straight white male under 40 or so, this shit has affected you personally and you're done putting up with it. Period.
So many people get overly intellectual about the rise and failure of woke, but at the end of the day, it has been the simple reemergence of race/gender essentialism in the form of a liberal-coded, old timey moral panic. It's falling apart because it was wrong, dumb, and harmful.
I would love to care about other things, but I’m in the same boat. The Left has made it impossible for me to ignore this shit by expressly aiming at me, and making clear that no end will be in sight. Okay then, kinda gotta get off the train…
One could argue it is falling apart because they did it prematurely, when men still held majorities in institutions and white people were still a majority.
Identity essentialism is wrong and harmful, but only really politically dumb when you do it against the majority.
And women were never even close to "taking over". Like half a million of them left the workforce this quarter alone--they are reverse girl bossing at a very quick rate. I think something like 10-15% of households has the woman as the primary breadwinner, which is up from like 5% 30 years ago. There's been a lot of "the future is female" from the media lately, but we all know that's just Pravda for the oligarchy.
...it's a FARCE. This whole nasty Democrat game, like the race thing, was dumb AND sexist.
Possibly, but their little play was always a dumb move! Latinos are just the new Italians, who also weren't considered "white" in the census when they moved here. In a few years, most "latinos" will self identify as white Americans. The whole Demographics is Destiny play by the most deranged wing of the Democrats was always extremely dumb AND racist. If you count "White" as anything but pure white in the census, almost the entire country is white. All this racial intermarrying is also making everyone white. So trying to thrive as a dominate political party in a democracy with this going on was, again, always extremely dumb AND racist.
They really just love extrapolating lessons they learned once in the 1960s. Gender gaps are always moving towards closing, total equality is the final destiny of the country, and all racial minorities are just like American blacks.
You must not have been paying much attention in the 90s when we went through a phase of “political correctness”
(the predecessor of “woke”). I was an undergrad in 1998 where I sat through a women’s studies (because it wasn’t “gender studies” back then. I asked the TA why and she was “we’re not there yet” and that “we (as in women) matter more”) where the TA went on and on about non-White cultures being more “enlightened” about roles of women. Meanwhile, all I could think about was how big a role patriarchy plays in my ancestral culture(Chinese), long before there was ANY European interference. I tried to bring it up to said TA, but that gal wouldn’t clue in. She just ranted on and on about western cultures. Lady, are you saying that my culture never existed??
This is hilarious, and doesn’t surprise me at all. The realities of non-Western cultural sensibilities on gender are just instantly memory-holed upon contact with woke theology.
Unfortunately, this was before I decided to focus on East Asian history as a history major, so all I knew about patriarchy in Chinese culture came from family. I was no longer in that woman’s class by the time I learned about Confucius.
Shortly after the 2024 election, Warren Farrell wrote this op-ed: "Trump won because Democrats keep telling young men they’re dangerous and don’t matter"
Trump won because Democrats keep telling young men they’re dangerous and don’t matter | Opinion By Warren Farrell Special to The Kansas City Star Updated November 12, 2024 1:54 PM “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast is wildly popular among young men, and its host endorsed Donald Trump. SOPA Images file photo In 2020, Joe Biden won young men under 30 by 15 points. In 2024, Donald Trump won them by 13 points. What happened, and what can Democrats do about it? As someone who has been elected three times to the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, I was worried about dynamics that I felt few Democrats were registering. I saw these repeatedly as I was researching my book, “The Boy Crisis.” I recall interviewing a young man from Mill Valley, California, a city with deep Democratic Party ties. As the interview concluded, he broke down, “I wish I hadn’t been born male.” I knew why: He had already shared: “In public schools and even in the private all-male school I attend, all we hear is ‘The future is female.’ That doesn’t inspire me for my future. As for masculinity, it’s ‘toxic masculinity.’ Then we are told we’re part of the patriarchy that makes rules to benefit men at the expense of women. The conclusion is that ‘Men are the oppressors; women are the oppressed.’ I can’t help being who I am.” When I asked him who he talks with about this, he said, “My guy friends. They feel the same. But I’d never tell my girlfriend. She’s a feminist. She’d break up with me.” On a spring break, I encountered seven guys reuniting at Starbucks. Though attending different colleges, they all nodded as one guy complained, “If I take a sexual initiative too quickly, I’m labeled a sexual harasser. But if I ask permission to hold her hand, she looks at me like I’m a wimp.” One concurred, “I feel ‘Damned if I do; damned if I don’t. … if they’re so into equality, why don’t they take the sexual initiatives and risk the rejection?” Once they felt comfortable, stories poured out. One recalled, “My best friend and a girl both got drunk at a fraternity party. They had consensual sex, but she had a boyfriend who found out, and she accused my friend of date rape ‘because she was drunk.’ Well, he was drunk too! A committee heard the case, but he couldn’t even cross-examine her. He was expelled, his record tainted for life.” Their voices dropped. “It’s all #MeToo for women and #ShutUp for men.” One concluded, “College is a dangerous place for men.” A couple of the guys knew President Barack Obama had written a letter to college presidents warning that if a woman reports any type of sexual violation, they must “Believe Women” lest they risk federal funding. This denial of due process distanced them from Democrats even if their family and community was liberal. In other interviews, one man noted, “It’s mostly girls in college now and the girls are complaining this is unfair to them to have to compete for small numbers of guys. Ironically, many colleges are finally giving some affirmative action to guys to please the women.” Among working men, the feeling of having “the cards stacked against me” is directed at human resources. “If I tease a man, no problem; if I tease a woman, I’ll be reported to HR. HR doesn’t ‘get it’ that guys tease people we respect, so if I only tease guys I’m really discriminating against women.” In essence, they feel that HR is actually HeR. Whether in high school, college or the workplace, they associate this anti-male attitude as coming from the Democrats, with diversity, equity and inclusion policies that are not diverse enough to include them. Especially if they are white. Government excludes men on basis of gender But it isn’t just race. The Biden-Harris White House formed a White House Gender Policy Council that explicitly excludes men. Even the most vulnerable: Native American, Black men, gay men and transgender men. That is, when it comes to benefits, the Gender Policy Council excludes the male gender. A similar exclusion of males happened under Obama, who created a White House Council for Women and Girls — but refused to create a corresponding council for men and boys. This discrimination was eliminated under Trump, who discontinued all gender-related councils. The discrimination that men feel is not just perpetrated by Democrats. Many young men raised by single moms saw their dads lose a custody battle that left them “dad-deprived” and experiencing some of the more than 50 problems faced by dad-deprived boys. Many became failures to launch and addicted to drugs, video games, pornography and alcohol. Both political parties perpetrate this family court bias. Similarly, even though boys and men die sooner of 14 out of 15 of the leading causes of death, it is not just Democrats who have created eight federal offices of women’s health and no federal offices of men’s health. Nor is it just Democrats that continue to require draft registration at age 18 only for men but require no registration for any contribution by women. Democrats take the blame, though, because on top of these discriminations against men, Democrats, via DEI, HR, “Believe Women,” “#MeToo,” “toxic masculinity,” “the patriarchy,” “male privilege,” “male power” and taking pride in “the future is female,” create safe spaces and trigger warnings for women but not for men. Democrats appear to be the ones blaming them for all the bad and showing no concern about their failure to launch, their suicides, their street homelessness, their deaths from opioid overdose, their dad deprivation … When many of these men hear that men are turning to Trump because they have problems voting for a woman for president, they once again feel blamed by a party they feel has its blinders on. When Michelle Obama explicitly blames male rage for hurting women, they’d like her to understand that anger is vulnerability’s mask and to approach their vulnerability with compassion rather than blame. Losing will be a gift to the Democrats only if it generates more introspection than if they had won, if they take time to consider what they are missing about the men they are missing. Warren Farrell is author of “The Boy Crisis, and Why Men Are the Way they Are.” He served on the board of the National Organization for Women in New York City. He currently chairs the Coalition for a White House Council on Boys and Men. This story was originally published November 10, 2024 at 6:07 AM.
It's worth bearing in mind that limited hangouts have become the primary tool of establishment information warfare. The linked article is an outdated analysis. It explains why Trump won in 2016, yet purports to be about 2024. Trump won in 2024 because bad actors were unable to steal the election again wholesale like they did in 2020, by concocting enough votes to make Joe Biden the most popular political candidate in the history of the western world.
Self-reflection is nice, but 8-year-stale self-reflection is often just the public face of someone strategising how to boil a frog more successfully. A very great deal has happened in 8 years, even if you mark Trump's 2016 election as the first milestone of the rejection of insane progressivism, which it was not. If you seek to better understand the young white male of today, a slight dial-back to 2000s-era feminism is not going to cut it. The youth are reexamining things which even the youth of the 80s and 90s - those like me - did not grow up with the political freedom to do. They are questioning the merits of multiculturalism and the demonisation of nationalism and religion. The progressive political levers of shame-conditioning have very little purchase over them. Anyone who truly seeks to understand the youth needs to jog faster right now to keep up with and actually listen to them, not hold out withered olive branches by rehashing the largely ignored rumination of a minority of conscientious Democrats from 2016.
The only thing you are missing is that teh Democrats have neglected men for 30 years. They funded women's health and ignored men's health. James Carville warned the Democrats about alienating the male voter. But they dismissed him, stating that they were now "the party of women".
It wasn't just inflation. It was also a "everything is fine" narrative about the economy, a refusal to abmit mistakes, and a healthy measure of woke obsessions making the party out of touch.
Did you look at the “who we serve” page of Democrats.org, before they took it down? It mentioned that they served women and every racial/ethnic group except for White people. There was no mention of serving men or White people.
Correct. Even James Carville warned the Democrats that they would never win another election, as they were hell bent on alienating men. Instead of listening to Carville, the Democrats rebuffed him.
That's true. But AWFULs, even allied with black democrat voters and Hispanic democrat voters seem to be insufficient to dominate the vote. It is equally telling that black men and Hispanic men are exhibiting an increasing preference for voting rightward.
My first political thoughts were shaped by my Parents and Grandparents openly mocking Jimmy Carter. By marking 1980 as the best fucking year ever....because we got Ronald Reagan AND..AND... POPE JOHN PAUL...This was a Catholic/Conservative twofer that my parents celebrated until all six of us kids were cheering on...without one singular idea of what we were cheering for.
My first political memory was something on the news vaguely along the lines of “anybody who votes against Obama is a racist who hates black people” when I was nine.
I really didn’t care for politics, even as the people around me began to treat me badly for being white, until four black teenagers kidnapped and tortured a retarded kid just for being white, live streaming it on Facebook and saying it was because of Trump.
That hate crime against my people was the first of a non stop stream of shocking wake up calls that never cease to remind me how rotten and hateful the idiots who fill my country are.
They call us racists while they kill and torture us because of our race. It’s not a mystery why any young man is right wing, it’s a tragedy that any are not.
I always say you're a Republican but you just don't know it yet.
But I get it now - you can only claim a vague allegiance to the Libs because you're over seas. If you still lived here, and had to deal with the wokies face to face still - and it had a direct effect on your life via policy. You'd be a Republican.
Oh fucking hell, I remember that. And you might be right. I mostly don’t have to deal with these people day to day - at least not when they’re in positions of actual power. Can’t imagine how annoying I’d find it if I were, for example, still in theater where they predominate. By woke standards, Thai people are basically to the right of German national socialists, so living here has definitely pushed me right.
That was a spectacularly cringey (and tone-deaf) ad. So was that Gillette ad telling me I was toxic because I was a man. Are these guys trying to get me to buy their products? Didn't seem like it.
No. They are trying to get your wives and daughters to buy their products. They don't care about you because women account for something like 75% of all consumer spending.
I get your point, but i only have sons. While my wife greatly outspends me, she doesn't (and wouldn't) buy razor blades for me except on request. Anyway, i stopped buying their blades after that, but also in great part because they are overpriced.
The Gilette ad was worse because there were plenty of libs I knew who liked it and thought it was 'just the right tone'. I don't know anyone who thought the 'real men for Kamala' nonsense was good. N of 1 and all. But still.
I’m a conservative who has been screaming about this emotional abuse of school children for a long time. For that I made the SPLC hate list. As a liberal you can say exactly what I say but you are considered enlightened. So from this Nazi phobaphobe to Mr Enlightened: Glad you finally made it to the party captain obvious.
Okay, I’m gonna leave aside that this was a kind of douchey comment because it sounds like you’ve got cause to be frosty. I need to know though: how did you end up on the SPLC’s hate list?
Considering your article is really good, yes I was douchey. I spent years being viciously attacked for the same opinion. Even in a red state I need protection to go to the Capitol. Protect Nebraska Children was a hate group since 2021 apparently because we accepted a web server from Family Watch International. Moms for Liberty came later to NE and the Omaha chapter was pretty much destroyed by the SPLC hate designation last year. I hope the left listens to you because you are making sense, but I doubt they will. They are broken, hateful, violent and dangerous people. Many people I care about have been abused by them and even now we always meet in private, especially in Lincoln. I have lost family for questioning the narrative. I might be the only private Nebraska citizen who has inspired a WAPO hit piece. They actually sent a reporter to central Nebraska to stalk me. (It is humorous actually if you knew how remote we are.) It is a bit galling to see some of the people who have been screaming “f you fascist” in my face for years suddenly discover reality like it’s never been a thing before. Sorry to have taken it out on you, because it is clear you live in reality. I’m sure you will also be punished for that.
My first political awareness was also 1992. Parents were moderate, standard-issue liberal Democrats. They both grew up in the South during the actually extremely racist 50s and 60s, wanted nothing to do with it, and went screeching north and ended up doing pretty well for themselves eventually. I'm in their mold though I think my parents are now further left than I am.
I guess all I can say is that the culture part changes and shifts, mostly in never-ending backlashes to whatever came before. Political correctness in the 90s gave way to conservative evangelical religious war-mongering in the 00s, gave way to woke in the 2010s, gave way to whatever the fuck anti-democratic, monarchist, nihilist insane bullshit is going on now. That's culture and it swings quickly with mass media.
But economically, everything's the same and that is the VAST majority of anything the federal govt does that actually really matters or ends up in the law. Republicans cut taxes for the rich and subsidize oil, gas, mining, agricultural interests (and now crypto/AI) and run up deficits and make sure the rich get richer. Democrats don't change taxes and try to increase subsidies for those at the bottom and also run up the deficit. They distract with culture war issues when taxes and subsidies and major contracts is most of the important stuff they actually do. Trump cut taxes on the rich twice, Obama raised taxes on the rich with the Obamacare tax you only pay in the higher brackets. Deficits go up either way. Clinton was the only one that managed to reduce the deficit.
If a socially/culturally moderate party ever emerged that actually focused on economic issues for the benefit of normal people, they'd win in a landslide but the donor class will do anything to stop that. I can't imagine ever voting GOP solely bc I won't vote for a party that ultimately works for the .01% and the cultural issues are all entirely secondary to me and make it into movies and TV commercials but rarely into actual law. I also work for the .01% and trust me they don't need the extra help.
This is where I am. I couldn’t quite bring myself to vote for Harris, but it didn’t even occur to me to vote for Trump (and yes, I know this is dumb in a binary system, but still). I absolutely think that a preponderance of voters is sick of being scolded culturally and also sick of an economic system that bleeds them to feed the top percent of a percent. I don’t pretend to know how we get from here to there, particularly as building a third party is even harder than building a third party candidacy. If one emerged though, it would have my vote, my money, my time, and my pen.
I told my son straight out that the educational system does not have his best interests in mind. Regurgitate what they want to hear, get your grade, but don't internalize it.
Women run education and the system is designed to uplift girls. I always flash on a quote from Nietzsche: In revenge and in love, a woman is more barbarous than a man. At its base, wokeness isn't about justice; it is about revenge.
This is basically it. My school district's general attitude seems to be:
Item 1) Equalize the achievement gap between white and blacks especially.
Item 2) Make sure the discipline numbers of identical across races regardless of behavior.
Item 3) Reduce standards until graduation rates for low performers improve.
Item 4) Get rid of any gifted programs.
Item 5) Girls STEM, girls STEM, girls STEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Item 7) Equity in all things no matter how stupid or backward or racist.
Item 8) Fuck the white male kids they will be fine they need/deserve nothing.
This is a town that is 60% white.
Then they bleed enrollment like crazy and wonder why...
“Don’t drink the kool-aid” was my father’s mantra for a decade.
“This homework is stupid” was my fathers mantra
“I never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
I think Mark Twain said it best
Wokeness is the politics of envy.
I was taught that envy was just like jealousy, but it’s actually much worse: it is sorrow at another’s good, and joy over their misery. That is demonic, and that is wokeness.
The crazy thing is it’s about revenge for things that never happened to THEM. I understand “hell hath no fury” like a woman actually scorned by a particular man, but revenge on male children who weren’t alive for largely mythologized crimes against women is insane.
Our high school gets a financial kickback for every student that passes an AP course. Girls are easier to educate thai boys, so more make it it to college prep courses, so the school takes the most efficient route to the money.
As long as schools take a "college or bust" attitude, boys will be at a disadvantage.
Boys have a natural maturity deficit of around two years by age 18. This used to be made up by military service and only having the most eligible quarter of all males go to college in the first place. Now that most states have targets of 60+% of both sexes going into college, it should come as no surprise that so many young men (boys, really) are failing to graduate.
This a broad a difficult lesson! Well said, Sir!
Wokeness is essentially the Nuremberg laws for white people. That had disastrous consequences the last time Critical Race Theory was tried, in 1930s Germany, so how could they imagine that reinventing Nazism was going to work out this time around? Same cartoon thinking, same malevolence dressed as unassailable virtue.
First, don’t quote a man pretending to understand women. You lot have believed that you know what’s better for us than we know for ourselves for Millenia and it’s exhausting. That you get 50% rights over our children when your part in the ordeal requires seconds that you center your lives around while we do the rest of it, all much less pleasurable than your little spurt, AND without you is proof that men are not especially maligned. While I do agree with the points made in this article, I do not agree it’s about revenge for anybody. I see it all as a pendulum swinging; the pendulum swung from stupid superior white men for a while to stupid superiority for everybody else for a while. In the middle, we all love each other, but it’s not like the momentum is going to bring us to center any time soon. Which is why Trump is President. But watching all you boys victimizing yourselves here bodes poorly for our future.
Ma'am this is an Arby's
no wonder there are so many mouth breathers here, I thought I left digital Arby’s (X)
Wow! You have been thoroughly indoctrinated into an ideology that teaches bitterness, spite, and incurable victimhood. No wonder men are avoiding women.
You can’t avoid us. You need us, there ain’t no synthetic womb. We, however, could cull every man on the planet and repopulate with the stores of sperm plentifully available. I’m sorry, but I’d be more worried about the handyman’s tale than the handmaids tail were I man.
So you believe that we should reduce women to being nothing more than a womb?
I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe that or in that.
Humanity has only peaked its head out of the age of women being a womb. But how on earth did you come to this conclusion from what I proposed? It’s the seed spillers that have become obsolete, women have the womb and the ability to do all “man” stuff to boot. Men are needed for war… with other men. What else exactly? Innovation? Wow, great innovation we’ve got here, everyone feeling so happy and free. No, it’s just a bunch of man children who need a time out. It’s Lord of the Flies out there, and it’s boring.
Women are not men without a penis.
"Only 17% of inventors holding international patents were women in 2022, while 83% were men, the United Nations finds."
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/03/women-inventors-gender-gap-stem-patents/
You can't say it's about revenge, women all bat for Team Woman after all and that would make them look bad. What is the abuse of the Duluth Model if not an implicit act of revenge?
As Dads we have to counter the attack on them. I first became aware when I encountered the book a mom wrote called "Save the Males" right before my kids were born.
But one statement everyone seems to side step is this. We are not dealing with the GOP, TRUMP, Democrats, Liberals, Progressives. We are dealing with something our great grand parents spoke about and fought 100 years ago. Communism. The Mayors of NY, LA and Chicago are trained marxist that trained all over the world.
Communism. We are facing Commies who will burn this place down to usher in the Communist Utopia. I dont care if they call themselves "National Socialists" (NAZI) or "International Socialist" (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) commies, they are both bad and we as Americans had a Constitutional Republic for as long as we can keep it.
"The right wing patriarchy runs K-12 public ed in America"
Amazing. Absolutely amazing. You guys simply can not recognize your own W's can you? Probably how you've gained more and more power continually for the last century.
Thank you for writing this. I'm a father of a teenage white male and your writing acknowledges "what radicalized you". Like you, I first voted in 1992 and was, more or less, a liberal voter, supporting fair play, civil rights and social safety nets. But, now, I'm a radical reactionary, forced to focus solely on my narrow self-interest and that of my offspring. Like you, I'm no fan of Trump or other self-serving demagogues, but they are the (much) lesser of the evils given as a voting choice.
In the end it's always a choice for a lesser evil.
No you’re not
My wife and most of her friends from Thailand think they are progressives. By Thai standards, they are progressives.
But you talk to them about politics here in America, they are the most dyed in the wool conservative people you've ever met by "America 2025" standards. Because the American left went to crazy town, and has zero interest in returning.
You seem to be the same way. You view yourself as progressive. If we were still in the '90s or early 2000's you would still BE progressive. But there isn't room for you in that tent anymore. Like it or not, you are a right winger now. The American left, as currently constructed, will not allow you to be on their side.
Agreed, and that is another factor in the mix. The “Overton Window” of acceptable political discourse has shifted a long way leftward.
On aggregate (i.e. as a cohort: there will inevitably be numerous outliers), studies show female respondents as moving substantially leftward over the same timeframe in which male respondents have made at most a much modest rightward shift. Overall, the girls moved with the tide, the boys far less so.
It’s tempting to theorise that the propensity to seek group consensus and cohesion drives this difference among the female respondents compared with the males. Other commentators have said as much and maybe some clever psychologists have some interesting data - I don’t know.
It’s interesting to see though that, as usual, males are being blamed when in fact it’s far less so they who have had an attitudinal adjustment than have females. But then, as is repeatedly pointed out, that’s the script.
As an aside, my 14 year old son considers both Andrew Tate and Donald Trump to be douches (his self-formed opinion). At the same time, he has opinions which he’s learned to hide, lest he be sent for reeducation. None of these opinions would’ve raised an eyebrow 20 years ago, probably won’t in a few years’ time, but right now, they’re kryptonite.
He also understands pretty well that it’s not ok to victimise people and he doesn’t want to be the asshole in the room. He’s empathetic in a healthy way and to a healthy extent, but he’s got a good bullshit detector. His friends are the same. They actually give me hope. But all of them have targets on them now, so they clam up. Behaviour which will inevitably be labeled as “uncommunicative” and “toxic”.
The only thing for which I lack a working paradigm in all of this is what exactly led ANYONE to think all this was a good idea. Because it was never just a few cranks.
My wife and stepson are also Thai. Through them I have gotten to know other Thai immigrants. When my wife and the other Thais came to the US they thought they were going to be liberals and get along with all races. Nope. They are race realists.
in Eastern Asia, pattern recognition is not considered evil. For the Asian immigrants I have I met, the American dream is to make enough money to move away from blacks and not have to deal with them.
Now in Thailand before Thais move to the US, the other Thai kids warm then about blacks.
Their outlook can be summed up by an Iraqi Uber driver when I asked him if he liked living in his area of town. "It is wonderful! There are no blacks so there is no crime!"
Matt - Now I am curious. What makes your wife and her friends "progressives"? From my US perspective, "progressive" is mostly about alphabet people and ending capitalism for a glorious rent free apartment in a tony section of Brooklyn.
That has certainly been "progressives" since the early 2010's. For them it is support for a form of universal Healthcare (in Thailand's case that means crappy free Healthcare for everyone, but very high quality private Healthcare if you're willing and able to pay up... they just think that everyone should have access, even if it isn't great), government protections for consumers from predatory practices, mass transit and quality city services, institutionalization for the mentally ill, quality public schools (ie public schools that educate students well), actual equal rights for women (which they have on paper in Thailand, but not in reality) etc. You know, what progressives were in favor of decades ago here in America.
What they think is batshit:
1. The whole "trans women are women" thing and associated policies. And remember, they're Thai... ladyboys are a thing there. They aren't against ladyboys/trans people, but they think what the left says we should allow is nuts.
2. Transing children. Their reaction to that is "what the actual fuck?"
3. Not jailing and punishing criminals.
4. Civil disorder (ie homeless people accosting them in cities in public was extremely shocking, when we were watching the BLM and CHAZ/CHOP coverage from Thailand when it was happening I often got asked from a lot of Thai people, including my then girlfriend/now wife, "what is going on in America?").
5. Public hard drug use (fentanyl zombies, open air drug markets in major cities... also extremely shocking).
6. Just allowing anyone into the country who claims asylum. In her words, "why have a country if you don't control who you allow in?"
Things they understand but are against, and view being "progressive" as being against:
1. The everything bagel style of "development" that means either nothing ever gets built, or it comes in decades late and way over budget. When I was describing the obstacles (permitting, endless environmental review, requirements that certain favored groups be given special treatment when it comes to handing out contracts) to building high speed rail and affordable housing here in America my wife literally said, "oh, like corruption but it is legal." Thailand is a very corrupt country, so she gets it, but that is how we look to someone new here.
2. Censorship. The difference is that the list of things that could get you in trouble in America when she and I discussed this when we moved here (2021 was when we both moved to the US from Thailand... I had been living there for a few years) was long and continually changing. In Thailand it is fairly short and consistent... mostly amounting to don't diss the monarchy.
These are all things she and I have talked about, but I'm sure there are others... bottom line, her views align pretty well with a normie 1990's Democratic voter. Not the modern Democratic party.
Thanks for the detailed response. I share all their views. That's what makes me Nazi Fascist! in the US. One twist on censorship in the US: it's not so much government censorship, although governments keep trying. It's social censorship. Can you imagine going on Blusky and saying that you are against 6. just allowing anyone into the country who claims asylum. Let alone "why have a country if you don't control who you allow in?" Oh man the howling
Yeah, but people say that like it matters. If it can get you fired from your job, does it matter whether it is the government doing it or not?
I'd contend that really only matters to Americans who REALLY want to see other Americans censored and are looking for loopholes that enable them to do it.
I did not mean to minimize the assholely practice of "canceling someone" 'cause you don't like what they said. But, I believe this really only applies to certain on-line platforms, and probably the best thing you can do for yourself is not be on one. In real life, most people are pretty reasonable, especially if you avoid politics and religion.
I have to disagree with you on this one. On the internet, most of the people will either just dogpile you or de-friend you... either way, not hugely consequential. Unless youre a public facing figure, it normally wasnt professionally dangerous there, especially if you werent writing it under your own name. In my opinion it was most important to avoid it at work (or university), because it is those places where consequences could have life changing impacts when HR or the people's commissars (or whatever they are calling it in University these days) got involved
Also, further context, when we moved back to the US we first went to Washington State and then Boston... not exactly places know for tolerating differences of opinion.
I am a WASP. My ancestors were WASPs. I am proud of all that they accomplished. Their work ethic was key to building arguably the richest most functional civilization that has ever existed on the planet. That is something that any of their descendants can be proud of, and should emulate.
I teach my 12 year-old son this and I will never apologize about it. He should be proud of his people. And fuck anybody that says otherwise.
See, I mostly went along with the paradigm of “white people shouldn’t express pride because they don’t need it, whereas other groups do.” I was okay with that because ultimately, I don’t personally feel that much pride for things that people who look like me, but not me specifically, have accomplished. But there’s a very big difference between “don’t express pride” and “perform constant shame and guilt.” Thanks but no thanks to the latter.
Almost every time I had to deal with a 'person of color' they would assert that the only reason I was doing what I was doing is because of my acculturated racism. And my answer to them would be, in more polite terms, "Dumbfuck, read my name badge. I'm half Mexican, and my grandparents on that side came to the US in the early 1900s and we're picking cotton and grapes an do the produce in the fields of central California. And on the other side, one set great grandparents immigrated from fucking Switzerland at about the same time and built up lives from, literally, nothing. And the other 1/4 is derived from British isles mutts who lived in the new England area and who were on the side of the Union. So, you can take your acculturated racism and shove it up your criminal ass. Oh, and by the way, by saying what you just have, you've exposed yourself as being far more of a bigot than you could credibly accuse me of being. "
Keep in mind: my anecdotes are related to my personal professional experience, and, to a much lesser degree, the anecdotes related to my from my dad who worked where I did. We worked in a time before 'woke' was a term. Also, keep in mind that the areas in which i worked were some of the worst parts of town: tons of crime, and heavily 'minority'.
Only you think that. Nice try, no cigar.
Great article. I am pleased to have subscribed. I speculate that the social contagion of declaring oneself as "non-binary" was a way for a young person to move from being in the "shut up and know your place" group to to suddenly hold coveted victim status. With the so-called vibe shift, there is no benefit in playing pretend.
I noticed in the past year there are a noticeable amount of young people who changed pronouns from "he/they she/they" back to "he/him she/her"
It's a sad irony for the gay community when they fought tooth and nail for decades to be considered "normal" and got a huge victory with the legalizing of gay marriage across the country in 2015. Then, a loud minority decided "we don't want to be normal we want to be special" which led down this road
I try to minimize interactions with anyone who feels the need to tell me their pronouns. in a signature block. Sometimes I have no choice (clients, for example), but I've noticed that they've all stopped doing this. And I don't mean they switched from "from he/they she/they" back to "he/him she/her" - I mean they stopped the stupidness altogether. It was nearly always younger women, and I wonder if they did it because they felt peer pressure to do so. Then the peer pressure stopped. IDK
Did the "gay community" ever actually agree upon wanting to be just normal? Throughout gay rights, transgression, cruising, (even pederasty in the 60s and 70s), drag, queering, denouncing marriage in favor of other forms of relations, were all strongly linked to the movement and gay culture at large.
From the enthusiastic embrace MOST gays and lesbians had towards trans and queer, I am beginning to think most straights were convinced of a respectability middle class narrative that wasn't really there. I say this as a cultural libertarian who doesn't really care too much, but cannot help but notice that the so called normal gays pushed for queering definitions and norms prior to the past few years of the trans craze.
Is it a coincidence that the vast majority of performers of gender ideology were young white people at the same exact time that being white made you automatically a bad person until proven otherwise? What better way to shed your "oppressor" status than to join the newest group of "oppressed"?
When everyone is doing it, you are no longer special.
A couple of years ago, a family member graduated from medical school. At the ceremony for the med students, the dean (a woman) began the event by saying how proud she was that this class had the smallest fraction of white males in the school's history. Of course she framed it from the opposite perspective -- the highest fraction of women and minorities -- but the meaning is the same. All those white guys who just became doctors were expected to applaud and smile.
Then they named the winners of about a dozen special awards -- like "to the student who best exemplifies the spirit of community service" and stuff like that. Only one of these awards had objective criteria -- having scored the highest on an exam. The rest were determined subjectively by a comittee. The objective one went to a male. All of the rest went to females.
Then came the generral commencement. This was Ohio State, so we're talking about a crowd of 30,000 people packing a football stadium. Of the dozen or so people who gave some kind of speech for the event, there was not a single white male.
Not to mention that the main commencement address was a mostly screed about white privilege.
These are deliberate decisions. You don't accidentally end up with a roster that completely excludes a demongraphic that makes up a huge fraction of the students and faculty.
The rot is deep.
I love the game of “we’re not discriminating against you, we’re just supporting everyone but you.”
So we took a bunch of kids and distilled in their head that that are the angels of death, the destroyers of civilizations, that they are so powerful that even if they are a small minority everyone in the world fears them, that they have to be handicapped so that the everyone else has a chance to compete with them, that they are so evil that they carry the sins of their ancestors and they have to constantly atone. It sounds like the origin story for a supervillain. Did KKK design the woke curriculum? This is a serious question. Did our elites decide to revive the martial spirit in Gen Z males to prepare for new wars? Did they sever the relationship between the sexes so that there is a male surplus to support renewed militarization? If this not the answer, then I am afraid that our collective cognitive decline is terminal, ie, we are all morons. Wokeness after all was supported by the most educated and smartest among us.
I don’t have a great theory for how this happened. I think it was more piecemeal than deliberate. A gaggle of wannabe civil rights crusaders trying to one-up each other, and before long, built a rigid ideology that necessitated telling children that they were born evil. It’s complete madness, and I think people basically just did it for likes.
It's cultural Marxism. Since nobody was buying the class war they switched to race and gender. I agree it's somewhat piecemeal rather than a vast organized conspiracy, but there are hard core socialists behind a lot of it. Many are active in the teacher's unions. The playbook is apparent, from abolishing police (BLM) to wealth redistribution via land back (land acknowledgments are a set up) and loan forgiveness. White people who don't "do the work" of ritual atonement are on the Nazi side and fair game. We have a whole generation of our most educated elite in the streets with socialist signs for Palestine every weekend and their motto is "by any means necessary." Rolling this back will be a herculean task, and we have to start now. Thank you for this timely call to action.
They may be "educated" but many of them are not smart. I have also listened to the hand-wringing hysteria that boys aren't going to college and they are, therefore, "uneducated" and subject to the siren call of "right-wing propaganda." I also listen to Shawn Ryan and Joe Rogan, who have so many men on their podcasts who didn't go to college (or dropped out) and are successful anyway. Men listen to those podcasts and see another path other than expensive, woke, college.
My best friend whom I've known for more than 30 years has a son who graduated high school a couple of years ago. He's a good looking kid, athletic, smart, perceptive. He took stock of things and decided to go to welding school instead of college. He also doesn't date. His rationale? He understood what he was being done to him as a Caucasian male and basically said, "Fuck right off with that shit!" to further education. He actually did the same thing to relationships. He has looked at the landscape of females his age - most of whom are veering the other direction from what David has described here - and has basically explicitly stated that he sees that as a path to misery. And, frankly, in addition to observing social and cultural trends among young women, his accurate observations of his mother's treatment of his father validates his position. The left might call him an incel or volcel, but he simply doesn't give a fuck. For him, those sobriquets have no more power - or accuracy - than the bleating of the mainstream left calling those in the right nazis.
I have said in the past and was dead serious that a lot of the woke agenda really seems like someone took a time machine back to the 1995 US or whatever with the intent of rebirthing white nationalism.
Like how how how are we going to get this dying movement off of life support? I know wokeness!
You rightly center this conversation around the new batch of young guys coming up. But I'm a 35-year-old Millennial, former Bernie Bro raised in Portland, Oregon, and I definitely don't register as a Democrat/liberal anymore. A huge reason is because of this crap. Zooming out, I believe Kamala Harris only won over Millennials, the godless uber woke generation we are told, by 1%. I think if you're an American born straight white male under 40 or so, this shit has affected you personally and you're done putting up with it. Period.
So many people get overly intellectual about the rise and failure of woke, but at the end of the day, it has been the simple reemergence of race/gender essentialism in the form of a liberal-coded, old timey moral panic. It's falling apart because it was wrong, dumb, and harmful.
I would love to care about other things, but I’m in the same boat. The Left has made it impossible for me to ignore this shit by expressly aiming at me, and making clear that no end will be in sight. Okay then, kinda gotta get off the train…
The beatings shall continue until morale improves!
One could argue it is falling apart because they did it prematurely, when men still held majorities in institutions and white people were still a majority.
Identity essentialism is wrong and harmful, but only really politically dumb when you do it against the majority.
And women were never even close to "taking over". Like half a million of them left the workforce this quarter alone--they are reverse girl bossing at a very quick rate. I think something like 10-15% of households has the woman as the primary breadwinner, which is up from like 5% 30 years ago. There's been a lot of "the future is female" from the media lately, but we all know that's just Pravda for the oligarchy.
...it's a FARCE. This whole nasty Democrat game, like the race thing, was dumb AND sexist.
Possibly, but their little play was always a dumb move! Latinos are just the new Italians, who also weren't considered "white" in the census when they moved here. In a few years, most "latinos" will self identify as white Americans. The whole Demographics is Destiny play by the most deranged wing of the Democrats was always extremely dumb AND racist. If you count "White" as anything but pure white in the census, almost the entire country is white. All this racial intermarrying is also making everyone white. So trying to thrive as a dominate political party in a democracy with this going on was, again, always extremely dumb AND racist.
They really just love extrapolating lessons they learned once in the 1960s. Gender gaps are always moving towards closing, total equality is the final destiny of the country, and all racial minorities are just like American blacks.
You must not have been paying much attention in the 90s when we went through a phase of “political correctness”
(the predecessor of “woke”). I was an undergrad in 1998 where I sat through a women’s studies (because it wasn’t “gender studies” back then. I asked the TA why and she was “we’re not there yet” and that “we (as in women) matter more”) where the TA went on and on about non-White cultures being more “enlightened” about roles of women. Meanwhile, all I could think about was how big a role patriarchy plays in my ancestral culture(Chinese), long before there was ANY European interference. I tried to bring it up to said TA, but that gal wouldn’t clue in. She just ranted on and on about western cultures. Lady, are you saying that my culture never existed??
This is hilarious, and doesn’t surprise me at all. The realities of non-Western cultural sensibilities on gender are just instantly memory-holed upon contact with woke theology.
Unfortunately, this was before I decided to focus on East Asian history as a history major, so all I knew about patriarchy in Chinese culture came from family. I was no longer in that woman’s class by the time I learned about Confucius.
Shortly after the 2024 election, Warren Farrell wrote this op-ed: "Trump won because Democrats keep telling young men they’re dangerous and don’t matter"
Trump won because Democrats keep telling young men they’re dangerous and don’t matter | Opinion By Warren Farrell Special to The Kansas City Star Updated November 12, 2024 1:54 PM “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast is wildly popular among young men, and its host endorsed Donald Trump. SOPA Images file photo In 2020, Joe Biden won young men under 30 by 15 points. In 2024, Donald Trump won them by 13 points. What happened, and what can Democrats do about it? As someone who has been elected three times to the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, I was worried about dynamics that I felt few Democrats were registering. I saw these repeatedly as I was researching my book, “The Boy Crisis.” I recall interviewing a young man from Mill Valley, California, a city with deep Democratic Party ties. As the interview concluded, he broke down, “I wish I hadn’t been born male.” I knew why: He had already shared: “In public schools and even in the private all-male school I attend, all we hear is ‘The future is female.’ That doesn’t inspire me for my future. As for masculinity, it’s ‘toxic masculinity.’ Then we are told we’re part of the patriarchy that makes rules to benefit men at the expense of women. The conclusion is that ‘Men are the oppressors; women are the oppressed.’ I can’t help being who I am.” When I asked him who he talks with about this, he said, “My guy friends. They feel the same. But I’d never tell my girlfriend. She’s a feminist. She’d break up with me.” On a spring break, I encountered seven guys reuniting at Starbucks. Though attending different colleges, they all nodded as one guy complained, “If I take a sexual initiative too quickly, I’m labeled a sexual harasser. But if I ask permission to hold her hand, she looks at me like I’m a wimp.” One concurred, “I feel ‘Damned if I do; damned if I don’t. … if they’re so into equality, why don’t they take the sexual initiatives and risk the rejection?” Once they felt comfortable, stories poured out. One recalled, “My best friend and a girl both got drunk at a fraternity party. They had consensual sex, but she had a boyfriend who found out, and she accused my friend of date rape ‘because she was drunk.’ Well, he was drunk too! A committee heard the case, but he couldn’t even cross-examine her. He was expelled, his record tainted for life.” Their voices dropped. “It’s all #MeToo for women and #ShutUp for men.” One concluded, “College is a dangerous place for men.” A couple of the guys knew President Barack Obama had written a letter to college presidents warning that if a woman reports any type of sexual violation, they must “Believe Women” lest they risk federal funding. This denial of due process distanced them from Democrats even if their family and community was liberal. In other interviews, one man noted, “It’s mostly girls in college now and the girls are complaining this is unfair to them to have to compete for small numbers of guys. Ironically, many colleges are finally giving some affirmative action to guys to please the women.” Among working men, the feeling of having “the cards stacked against me” is directed at human resources. “If I tease a man, no problem; if I tease a woman, I’ll be reported to HR. HR doesn’t ‘get it’ that guys tease people we respect, so if I only tease guys I’m really discriminating against women.” In essence, they feel that HR is actually HeR. Whether in high school, college or the workplace, they associate this anti-male attitude as coming from the Democrats, with diversity, equity and inclusion policies that are not diverse enough to include them. Especially if they are white. Government excludes men on basis of gender But it isn’t just race. The Biden-Harris White House formed a White House Gender Policy Council that explicitly excludes men. Even the most vulnerable: Native American, Black men, gay men and transgender men. That is, when it comes to benefits, the Gender Policy Council excludes the male gender. A similar exclusion of males happened under Obama, who created a White House Council for Women and Girls — but refused to create a corresponding council for men and boys. This discrimination was eliminated under Trump, who discontinued all gender-related councils. The discrimination that men feel is not just perpetrated by Democrats. Many young men raised by single moms saw their dads lose a custody battle that left them “dad-deprived” and experiencing some of the more than 50 problems faced by dad-deprived boys. Many became failures to launch and addicted to drugs, video games, pornography and alcohol. Both political parties perpetrate this family court bias. Similarly, even though boys and men die sooner of 14 out of 15 of the leading causes of death, it is not just Democrats who have created eight federal offices of women’s health and no federal offices of men’s health. Nor is it just Democrats that continue to require draft registration at age 18 only for men but require no registration for any contribution by women. Democrats take the blame, though, because on top of these discriminations against men, Democrats, via DEI, HR, “Believe Women,” “#MeToo,” “toxic masculinity,” “the patriarchy,” “male privilege,” “male power” and taking pride in “the future is female,” create safe spaces and trigger warnings for women but not for men. Democrats appear to be the ones blaming them for all the bad and showing no concern about their failure to launch, their suicides, their street homelessness, their deaths from opioid overdose, their dad deprivation … When many of these men hear that men are turning to Trump because they have problems voting for a woman for president, they once again feel blamed by a party they feel has its blinders on. When Michelle Obama explicitly blames male rage for hurting women, they’d like her to understand that anger is vulnerability’s mask and to approach their vulnerability with compassion rather than blame. Losing will be a gift to the Democrats only if it generates more introspection than if they had won, if they take time to consider what they are missing about the men they are missing. Warren Farrell is author of “The Boy Crisis, and Why Men Are the Way they Are.” He served on the board of the National Organization for Women in New York City. He currently chairs the Coalition for a White House Council on Boys and Men. This story was originally published November 10, 2024 at 6:07 AM.
Read more at: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-opinion/guest-commentary/article295250614.html#storylink=cpy
It's worth bearing in mind that limited hangouts have become the primary tool of establishment information warfare. The linked article is an outdated analysis. It explains why Trump won in 2016, yet purports to be about 2024. Trump won in 2024 because bad actors were unable to steal the election again wholesale like they did in 2020, by concocting enough votes to make Joe Biden the most popular political candidate in the history of the western world.
Self-reflection is nice, but 8-year-stale self-reflection is often just the public face of someone strategising how to boil a frog more successfully. A very great deal has happened in 8 years, even if you mark Trump's 2016 election as the first milestone of the rejection of insane progressivism, which it was not. If you seek to better understand the young white male of today, a slight dial-back to 2000s-era feminism is not going to cut it. The youth are reexamining things which even the youth of the 80s and 90s - those like me - did not grow up with the political freedom to do. They are questioning the merits of multiculturalism and the demonisation of nationalism and religion. The progressive political levers of shame-conditioning have very little purchase over them. Anyone who truly seeks to understand the youth needs to jog faster right now to keep up with and actually listen to them, not hold out withered olive branches by rehashing the largely ignored rumination of a minority of conscientious Democrats from 2016.
The only thing you are missing is that teh Democrats have neglected men for 30 years. They funded women's health and ignored men's health. James Carville warned the Democrats about alienating the male voter. But they dismissed him, stating that they were now "the party of women".
Trump won because of inflation, full stop.
It wasn't just inflation. It was also a "everything is fine" narrative about the economy, a refusal to abmit mistakes, and a healthy measure of woke obsessions making the party out of touch.
Did you look at the “who we serve” page of Democrats.org, before they took it down? It mentioned that they served women and every racial/ethnic group except for White people. There was no mention of serving men or White people.
They served men as long as those men declared they are women.
Exactly.
No he didn't. He won because the left overreached and wokeness drove away the biggest demographic group that votes.
Correct. Even James Carville warned the Democrats that they would never win another election, as they were hell bent on alienating men. Instead of listening to Carville, the Democrats rebuffed him.
The base of the Democrat Party is the AWFL, and she ain't about to share power with straight white dudes.
No way, no how.
That's true. But AWFULs, even allied with black democrat voters and Hispanic democrat voters seem to be insufficient to dominate the vote. It is equally telling that black men and Hispanic men are exhibiting an increasing preference for voting rightward.
Exactly.
Your message, I fail to see what it has to do with Crossfit.
In an election that close Trump won because of 8,000 different things.
My first political thoughts were shaped by my Parents and Grandparents openly mocking Jimmy Carter. By marking 1980 as the best fucking year ever....because we got Ronald Reagan AND..AND... POPE JOHN PAUL...This was a Catholic/Conservative twofer that my parents celebrated until all six of us kids were cheering on...without one singular idea of what we were cheering for.
My first political memory was something on the news vaguely along the lines of “anybody who votes against Obama is a racist who hates black people” when I was nine.
I really didn’t care for politics, even as the people around me began to treat me badly for being white, until four black teenagers kidnapped and tortured a retarded kid just for being white, live streaming it on Facebook and saying it was because of Trump.
That hate crime against my people was the first of a non stop stream of shocking wake up calls that never cease to remind me how rotten and hateful the idiots who fill my country are.
They call us racists while they kill and torture us because of our race. It’s not a mystery why any young man is right wing, it’s a tragedy that any are not.
Bruh. Remember this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLzYPbtklGs
I always say you're a Republican but you just don't know it yet.
But I get it now - you can only claim a vague allegiance to the Libs because you're over seas. If you still lived here, and had to deal with the wokies face to face still - and it had a direct effect on your life via policy. You'd be a Republican.
Oh fucking hell, I remember that. And you might be right. I mostly don’t have to deal with these people day to day - at least not when they’re in positions of actual power. Can’t imagine how annoying I’d find it if I were, for example, still in theater where they predominate. By woke standards, Thai people are basically to the right of German national socialists, so living here has definitely pushed me right.
That was a spectacularly cringey (and tone-deaf) ad. So was that Gillette ad telling me I was toxic because I was a man. Are these guys trying to get me to buy their products? Didn't seem like it.
No. They are trying to get your wives and daughters to buy their products. They don't care about you because women account for something like 75% of all consumer spending.
I get your point, but i only have sons. While my wife greatly outspends me, she doesn't (and wouldn't) buy razor blades for me except on request. Anyway, i stopped buying their blades after that, but also in great part because they are overpriced.
The other part of it is that advertising agency creatives (my wife worked at Y&R back in the day) are almost exclusively women and homosexual men.
They don't market to men because they don't know how.
Facts and also they account for rhe majority of consumer debt.
The Gilette ad was worse because there were plenty of libs I knew who liked it and thought it was 'just the right tone'. I don't know anyone who thought the 'real men for Kamala' nonsense was good. N of 1 and all. But still.
I’m a conservative who has been screaming about this emotional abuse of school children for a long time. For that I made the SPLC hate list. As a liberal you can say exactly what I say but you are considered enlightened. So from this Nazi phobaphobe to Mr Enlightened: Glad you finally made it to the party captain obvious.
Okay, I’m gonna leave aside that this was a kind of douchey comment because it sounds like you’ve got cause to be frosty. I need to know though: how did you end up on the SPLC’s hate list?
Considering your article is really good, yes I was douchey. I spent years being viciously attacked for the same opinion. Even in a red state I need protection to go to the Capitol. Protect Nebraska Children was a hate group since 2021 apparently because we accepted a web server from Family Watch International. Moms for Liberty came later to NE and the Omaha chapter was pretty much destroyed by the SPLC hate designation last year. I hope the left listens to you because you are making sense, but I doubt they will. They are broken, hateful, violent and dangerous people. Many people I care about have been abused by them and even now we always meet in private, especially in Lincoln. I have lost family for questioning the narrative. I might be the only private Nebraska citizen who has inspired a WAPO hit piece. They actually sent a reporter to central Nebraska to stalk me. (It is humorous actually if you knew how remote we are.) It is a bit galling to see some of the people who have been screaming “f you fascist” in my face for years suddenly discover reality like it’s never been a thing before. Sorry to have taken it out on you, because it is clear you live in reality. I’m sure you will also be punished for that.
>Not to be hyperbolic, but what we did to these guys was something like abuse.
It was abuse.
It is abuse.
And people who did it will never get a just punishment.
Not in this life.
My first political awareness was also 1992. Parents were moderate, standard-issue liberal Democrats. They both grew up in the South during the actually extremely racist 50s and 60s, wanted nothing to do with it, and went screeching north and ended up doing pretty well for themselves eventually. I'm in their mold though I think my parents are now further left than I am.
I guess all I can say is that the culture part changes and shifts, mostly in never-ending backlashes to whatever came before. Political correctness in the 90s gave way to conservative evangelical religious war-mongering in the 00s, gave way to woke in the 2010s, gave way to whatever the fuck anti-democratic, monarchist, nihilist insane bullshit is going on now. That's culture and it swings quickly with mass media.
But economically, everything's the same and that is the VAST majority of anything the federal govt does that actually really matters or ends up in the law. Republicans cut taxes for the rich and subsidize oil, gas, mining, agricultural interests (and now crypto/AI) and run up deficits and make sure the rich get richer. Democrats don't change taxes and try to increase subsidies for those at the bottom and also run up the deficit. They distract with culture war issues when taxes and subsidies and major contracts is most of the important stuff they actually do. Trump cut taxes on the rich twice, Obama raised taxes on the rich with the Obamacare tax you only pay in the higher brackets. Deficits go up either way. Clinton was the only one that managed to reduce the deficit.
If a socially/culturally moderate party ever emerged that actually focused on economic issues for the benefit of normal people, they'd win in a landslide but the donor class will do anything to stop that. I can't imagine ever voting GOP solely bc I won't vote for a party that ultimately works for the .01% and the cultural issues are all entirely secondary to me and make it into movies and TV commercials but rarely into actual law. I also work for the .01% and trust me they don't need the extra help.
This is where I am. I couldn’t quite bring myself to vote for Harris, but it didn’t even occur to me to vote for Trump (and yes, I know this is dumb in a binary system, but still). I absolutely think that a preponderance of voters is sick of being scolded culturally and also sick of an economic system that bleeds them to feed the top percent of a percent. I don’t pretend to know how we get from here to there, particularly as building a third party is even harder than building a third party candidacy. If one emerged though, it would have my vote, my money, my time, and my pen.