What exactly is wrong with American men? And why is it that they are falling behind women in almost every area of life, from college degrees to life satisfaction to opioid addiction to homicide rates, and why is this happening? Alex Blumberg explains what is happening to American men and why we should celebrate the falling apart of American men, and how we can fix it. Today's episode is brought to you by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships and use the promo code: "sponsors" to receive 10% off your entire purchase when you enter the offer. Thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy Drink for sponsoring this episode! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus Whitehead. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art by Jeff Kaale. The theme song by Skandalous, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Build Buildings Records, and the album art is by Suneaters, and we did our own mixing and mastering by Haley Shaw. We are working on transcribing this episode of the podcast and putting it on SoundCloud. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your music is available, and share it on your social media platforms. If you like it, please leave us a rating and review us a review, we'll be listening to it in the next week. Thank you, rating and reviewing it on Apple Music by John Rocha, and sharing it on iTunes. and a review of it's social media? Subscribe to our other podcast, too! Thanks for listening to us on Podcharity. Also, share this episode on iTunes and share the podcast on your thoughts on your podcast! Subscribe on Podulism, and tell a friend about it on the pod? if it's good, rating, and review it on Insta? or share it in your podcasting or review it's a review on iTunes, and also what you're listening to the podcast is good enough? and what do you think of it means you're a good thing? - Thank you really like it's great? Thanks forever, bye bye bye, bye Bye Bye Bye bye, Bye Bye, bye, Vibes?
00:00:00.000Well, for a long time, the media have treated American men as sort of an afterthought.
00:00:03.000In fact, anybody who spoke to American men, writ large, was considered bad.
00:00:07.000My friend Jordan Peterson, for example, he speaks to men all over the world, young men who feel lost, and the media hate him for it.
00:00:14.000They treat him as though he's a very bad person for speaking to young men.
00:00:18.000But suddenly the media have realized, wait a second, Young men, men generally represent, you know, 50% of the American population, and men are falling behind by every single metric.
00:00:26.000Men are falling behind women when it comes to college degrees.
00:00:28.000Men are falling behind women when it comes to job performance.
00:00:31.000Men are falling behind women when it comes to life satisfaction in some measures.
00:00:34.000Men are falling behind women when it comes to, for example, opioid use, overdose deaths.
00:00:40.000All of these are areas where men are falling behind.
00:00:42.000And this has raised the question, what exactly is happening to American men?
00:00:46.000Now, that question cannot be answered in a vacuum without explaining what also happened to American women.
00:00:51.000Because the Bible has a lot of wisdom embedded in it.
00:00:55.000One of the pieces of wisdom in the Bible is the beginning of Genesis, chapter 2.
00:00:58.000It talks about the formation of women.
00:01:01.000And what God says is that man should not be alone.
00:01:11.000In other words, men and women are two halves of the same whole.
00:01:15.000And that's also expressed in that same chapter where it says that a man shall leave his father and mother, and he shall join his wife, and he shall cleave to her, and they shall become one flesh.
00:01:22.000The basic idea here is that men are incomplete without women, women are incomplete without men.
00:01:25.000So when you're explaining the shortcomings of modern American men, you also have to link that with their roles vis-a-vis women, because they do not exist in a vacuum.
00:01:33.000People do not exist on desert islands, and men were created complementarily by either evolution or God or both, depending on your point of view.
00:01:41.000In order so that men and women can be two halves of one whole.
00:01:44.000So if there's something wrong with men writ large, there's also something wrong with women writ large.
00:01:48.000And you can see that in pieces like this one from the Wall Street Journal today.
00:01:51.000And the reason that I'm bringing this up is because there's a whole issue in Politico about what's wrong with American men.
00:01:56.000Every single piece in that issue is written by a woman.
00:01:59.000Every single piece is written by a woman.
00:02:01.000Which is a weird way to ask what's wrong with American men.
00:02:05.000The fact is that you should presumably have a diversity of viewpoints about what exactly is happening with American men.
00:02:09.000That might include, you know, some males, but Politico is beginning to notice.
00:02:17.000It's happening at the Washington Post.
00:02:19.000It's happening at the Wall Street Journal.
00:02:20.000Many people in the media are suddenly realizing, apparently for the first time in a while, that when American men fall off the train, that is very bad for America, writ large.
00:02:30.000Now, traditionally speaking, the role of men was pretty simple.
00:02:33.000The role of men was, you protect your family.
00:02:36.000You defend your country, your values, your community, your family.
00:02:46.000And there are a bunch of different things that you did within each one of those roles, but those roles were sort of immutable and unchanging.
00:02:54.000They started in a time when physical protection was actually what was necessary of men.
00:02:58.000But it continued into a time when basically the monopoly on use of force had now been delegated to the government.
00:03:04.000They were still expected to defend their families.
00:03:05.000They were still expected to protect their children.
00:03:09.000And that is still true for large swaths of the American population.
00:03:12.000But there are a bunch of men who no longer do this.
00:03:15.000And the reason they no longer do this is because we have a culture that shames them for doing exactly this.
00:03:19.000And instead, has decided not to treat men and women as potentially two halves of a greater whole that is united in marriage.
00:03:26.000But instead, we're supposed to treat men atomistically and women atomistically.
00:03:29.000And then we're supposed to celebrate the atomism.
00:03:32.000We're supposed to celebrate the falling apart.
00:03:33.000Which is presumably why you have a piece in the Wall Street Journal today titled, Divorce Parties Are a New Hot Invite.
00:03:39.000After Brandy Stellars finalized her divorce, she invited close friends to a soiree in May.
00:03:44.000She mixed signature cocktails, hung a Bye Felicia banner, and handed out fake rose petals to toss in the air.
00:03:48.000Party decorations included a photo of a pair of penguins torn down the middle.
00:03:52.000I ripped the penguins in half, because penguins are monogamous birds who are supposed to mate for life, she says, while I'm not your penguin anymore.
00:03:59.000The newly uncoupled are throwing themselves blowout bashes to mark their liberation from unhappy marriages, almost like reverse bachelorette parties.
00:04:05.000I wanted to celebrate not a divorce, but a new chapter with people whom I love, who want the best for me, says Stellars, who works at a cloud computing company in Columbus, Ohio.
00:04:13.000For most of history, divorce hasn't been an event touted to the world.
00:04:46.000It means that a marriage has ended, sometimes for bad reasons and sometimes for good reasons.
00:04:50.000But it means that that potential fulfillment of male and female in monogamous marriage has been broken up.
00:04:56.000That the basic predicate, the foundation for the formation of a family, which is the building block of society, has fallen apart.
00:05:02.000That men lose themselves when they are not part of this institution.
00:05:06.000That women lose themselves when they're not part of this institution.
00:05:08.000Because the countervailing part of what men are supposed to do, protect, defend, provide, is provided by females in the context of a marriage.
00:05:17.000Comfort, provide in a different way emotionally, and defend in a different way.
00:05:24.000All of those things have their roles and they are complementary.
00:05:28.000And removing one half of a whole means the other half is going to seem insufficient.
00:05:34.000When they are deprived of their goals, when they are deprived of their duty, when their aggressive instincts are not channeled in the most positive possible direction, what you end up with is true toxic masculinity.
00:06:04.000When the higher goal goes away, men end up being incredibly destructive either to others or to themselves.
00:06:08.000And that's exactly what we are seeing right now.
00:06:11.000But the media refused to acknowledge that because what they like is the moral status that they have built in which we are supposed to pretend that all acts of sexual union are equally morally praiseworthy and equal societally useful.
00:06:22.000We're supposed to pretend that everybody's individual decision-making with regard to relationships is equally good and equally valid.
00:06:28.000We're supposed to pretend that the liberated woman who no longer is expected to get married is somehow better off than the woman who got married at 20 and then had kids with a husband and maybe had a part-time job and then maybe had a full-time job?
00:06:39.000We valorize people for making decisions that are contra the traditional patterns of life, even though the traditional patterns of life provide the actual framework for success for both men and women.
00:06:50.000Doesn't mean that every marriage from 1930 is better than every marriage from 2020.
00:06:54.000But it does mean that a society that expects men and women to become complementary parts of a fuller whole is a better society and a more healthy society than a society that says, we are completely apathetic about this.
00:07:36.000And then one day you're in the exit row, and you realize, uh oh, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing right now.
00:07:41.000Better to be safe than sorry, which is why I use ExpressVPN.
00:07:44.000Every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes, hotels, or airports, any hacker on that same network can gain access to your personal data, such as your passwords and financial details.
00:07:52.000It doesn't take much technical knowledge to hack somebody.
00:07:54.000Just some cheap hardware is necessary.
00:08:33.000One of the things that has happened, because we refuse to acknowledge the complete restructuring of society, is that men and women have been broken into groups, like two separate groups, that were not expected to come together over marriage.
00:08:44.000They've now become reactionary and oppositional.
00:08:47.000Any two groups, when they become so reactionary and oppositional, that they never look inward as to, what can I do to fix the problem?
00:08:53.000Instead, they look outward at, that person is doing this, that means I'm going to do the precise opposite.
00:08:58.000That is a recipe for complete breakdown.
00:09:01.000If you have one political side that sees the other side as completely evil, so whatever the other side does, it means that I am justified in doing whatever I can to stop them.
00:09:09.000The Democratic Party, for example, believing that they can do whatever is necessary, true or false, to stop Donald Trump because Donald Trump is a man of evil.
00:09:15.000Or people inside the Republican Party, who sometimes will justify bad behavior because the Democrats are so bad and so terrible and so evil, that means we can do whatever we have to do in order to stop them.
00:09:24.000Once that happens, you can't live together.
00:09:26.000Okay, well, that's much, much worse when you're talking about men and women, which is the basis for all thriving society and all growth in society.
00:09:35.000And so the media are now noticing that men are falling behind.
00:09:37.000And they think it has nothing to do with the recapitulation of what women ought to do.
00:09:41.000And when you degrade femininity, you also degrade masculinity.
00:09:45.000And what you end up with is both toxic femininity and toxic masculinity, which is what you are now seeing.
00:09:50.000What you are now seeing, for example, is the valorization of a lifestyle that says abortion is an active good for women.
00:09:57.000And meanwhile, a valorization on the other side, in reaction, that says the men should treat women like pieces of meat.
00:10:02.000And the true mark of a man's success is how toxically aggressive he is.
00:10:16.000Is that it used to be that if people tried to make the argument that men and women, they should just engage in sort of sexual congress without any sort of overlying structure, without any sort of societal support, that would actually be clocked back into place by reality because women would get pregnant, then there would be babies, you'd have to figure out what to do with those babies since the family structure was still necessary.
00:10:34.000After birth control, that's no longer true.
00:10:36.000So you end up with is people's basest instincts now being indulged and people unhappier.
00:10:40.000Okay, they're not happier than they were.
00:10:43.000So the media are completely bamboozled about this.
00:10:53.000It says, I started noticing it a few years ago.
00:10:55.000Men, especially young men, were getting weird.
00:10:57.000It may have been the incels who first caught my attention, spewing self-pitying venom online, sometimes venturing out to attack the women they believed had done them wrong.
00:11:03.000It might have been the complaints from the women around me.
00:11:06.000Men are in their flop era, one lamented, sick of trying to date in a pool that seems shallower than it should be.
00:11:10.000It might have been the new ways companies were trying to reach men.
00:11:12.000The average hoodie made these days is weak and flimsy, growls a YouTube ad for a tactical hoodie.
00:11:16.000You're not a child, you're a man, so stop wearing so many layers to go outside.
00:11:20.000Once my curiosity was piqued, I could see a bit of curdling in some of the men around me too.
00:11:27.000Some guys, including ones I once knew, just quietly disappeared, subsumed into video games and porn, or sucked into the alt-right and the web of misogynistic communities known as the manosphere.
00:11:36.000It felt like a widespread identity crisis as if they didn't know how to be.
00:11:41.000Well, I mean, yes, men don't know how to be because all of the structures that were supposed to channel them toward the sublimation of those baser aggressive instincts into building.
00:11:50.000You can use your aggressive instincts to destroy or to build.
00:11:52.000Society used to encourage you to build and you would have male role models who taught you to build.
00:11:56.000You'd have fathers, you'd have preachers, you'd have members of your community, you'd have rabbis in my community, you'd have people who are there to teach you how to sublimate those bad instincts, or those baser instincts, and to turn them into something good.
00:12:06.000That was the alchemy of institutional health, was turning the bad into good, taking aggressive instincts and making them worthwhile, just as aggressive instincts in the military context are excellent, and aggressive instincts inside a gang context are awful.
00:12:20.000It's not the instinct that's the problem, it's how we channel them culturally.
00:12:22.000But we've decided to get rid of all of those institutions, and then we are totally shocked about all of this.
00:12:26.000So Christina Emba is shocked by the fact that Jordan Peterson is famous.
00:12:29.000In 2018, curious about a YouTube personality who had seemingly become famous overnight,
00:12:33.000I got tickets to a sold-out lecture in DC by Jordan Peterson.
00:12:36.000It was one of dozens of stops on the Canadian psychology professor-turned-anti-woke-juggernauts
00:12:40.000book tour for his surprise bestseller, 12 Rules for Life and Antidotes to Chaos.
00:12:44.000Surrounded by men on a Tuesday night, I wondered aloud what the fuss was about.
00:12:47.000In my opinion, Peterson serves up fairly banal advice.
00:13:02.000Suddenly, the twenty-something in front of me swung around.
00:13:04.000Jordan Peterson, he said without a hint of irony in his voice, taught me how to live.
00:13:07.000If there's a vacuum in modeling manhood today, Peterson has been one of the boldest in stepping in to fill it.
00:13:11.000He's gained fame, notoriety, and millions of book sales in the process.
00:13:15.000But then she cites other people, like Bronze Age Pervert.
00:13:18.000And we'll get to Bronze Age Pervert in a sec, because there's a very, very long piece about Bronze Age Pervert and Bronze Age Mindset, which is actually a former Yale philosophy student named Kostin Alomiru, who has a long feature piece about him in Politico.
00:13:33.000And while Christine Emba, I mean, she gets it a little bit more than some of these other columnists does, but she essentially makes the argument that masculinity has been betrayed and that the only way that masculinity is going to come back is by a rethinking of what masculinity actually is.
00:13:51.000She says, progressives want to preserve the major gains made for women over the past several decades, gains that are still fragile.
00:13:56.000It's easy to mistake attention and zero sum, to fear that putting effort toward helping men might mean we won't have space for women anymore.
00:14:01.000There's something appealing to you about the idea of gender neutrality, or at least rejecting gender essentialism as a social ethos.
00:14:07.000After all, attaching specific traits to men wore down to women too.
00:14:10.000If we say real men are strong, does that mean real women must be weak?
00:14:13.000I'm convinced that men are in crisis, and I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular, that is neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity.
00:14:22.000Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one.
00:14:54.000There's no one script for how to be a woman or a man. But despite a push by some advocates to make
00:14:57.000everything from bathrooms to birthing gender neutral, most people don't actually want a
00:15:01.000completely androgynous society. What would creating a positive vision of masculinity look like?
00:15:06.000Recognizing distinctiveness, but not pathologizing it.
00:15:08.000Finding new ways to valorize it and tell a story that's appealing to young men and socially beneficial, rather than seating around to those who would warp a perceived difference into something ugly and destructive.
00:15:15.000So, Christine Emba is closer than most other members of the media.
00:15:32.000Politico, which is attempting to stump for the Democratic Party, is stuck because they say Democrats have a man problem, but then they refuse to define the word man.
00:15:39.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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00:17:15.000Joan Williams says, There's one measure on gender called hostile sexism.
00:17:19.000It's kind of men should be men, women should be women.
00:17:21.000And it is actually more powerful than anything other than political orientation of predicting Trump voting.
00:17:24.000There are really cool experiments where they threaten men's masculinity in subtle or not so subtle ways.
00:17:29.000They find that a man whose masculinity has been threatened has higher support for war, more homophobic attitudes, and is more interested in buying an SUV.
00:17:35.000Precarious masculinity was incredibly predictive of voting Trump in 2016 and voting Republican in 2018.
00:17:39.000What Republicans have done is taken this threatened masculinity and taken masculine anxieties and forged them into a weapon for the far right.
00:17:46.000The move for people who are anti-Trump is to push back.
00:17:49.000They're really to abiding themes in masculinity.
00:17:51.000The macho man, Trump's got that covered, and the good man.
00:17:53.000And what Democrats need to do, Josh Shapiro did this, is enact the good man, the decent, it's-a-wonderful-life man.
00:17:58.000Okay, there's only one problem with that.
00:18:00.000The it's-a-wonderful-life man, the man who provides and defends and protects in the context of marriage, is not loved by Democrats.
00:18:07.000Their entire idea is that family can be formed under any circumstances, that family is just an aggregation of interests rather than a core societal institution.
00:18:16.000You cannot say that you guys are modeling the ought when you don't believe in the ought.
00:18:21.000You can't say that you're modeling the way of life that we should all aspire to be if you refuse to say that that's a way of life that we aspire to be.
00:18:28.000And Democrats can't do that because they believe in the sexual revolution and the complete destruction of all of these societal standards.
00:18:34.000Sure, some people can choose to do it, but it's a matter, as they say, of moral apathy.
00:18:40.000Joan Williams says, When we start telling CEOs they should become school
00:18:43.000librarians, we can start telling blue-collar guys they should be nurses' aides.
00:18:45.000You have a situation where part of what's driving American politics is precarious masculinity
00:18:49.000in the sense you have been deprived of what is rightfully yours, and telling a man to
00:18:52.000take a dead-end, low-paid, traditionally feminine pink-collar job is one of the many gifts the
00:19:09.000The left provides no solution for this.
00:19:10.000In fact, the left exacerbates the problem by generally arguing that societal institutions are the problem.
00:19:16.000That the patriarchy is responsible for marriage, even though the reality is that marriage, by any economic standard, benefited women far more than men over the course of time.
00:19:25.000Because for a man, it was much easier to be footloose and fancy-free.
00:19:29.000And for a woman, who was saddled with the baby, because obviously she bore it and had to nurse it and raise it, she needed someone to provide.
00:19:36.000Marriage was a solution to this problem.
00:19:38.000Again, I keep focusing on marriage because it is the left that has perverted the definition of marriage and said that marriage is basically just two people who love each other.
00:21:19.000Okay, so we've seen the left's response, which is to basically throw up their hands and pretend that, yeah, you know, the societal institutions that made everything better.
00:21:27.000And then, you know, We should probably model some of that but you know if we don't it's not really a big deal because moral apathy and the truth is those institutions were patriarchal and they were heteronormative and they were cis-normative and all the rest of this.
00:21:40.000But the right has reacted to that, the destruction of these institutions, in precisely the way that you would suppose.
00:21:46.000So George Gilder, who's an economist and a really good thinker, he had a book back in the 1980s called Men and Marriage and his basic premise Is one of the things I've been suggesting here, which is that men have this wild, aggressive instinct.
00:21:57.000And these wild, aggressive instincts must be put to work for building or they will be put to work on behalf of destruction.
00:22:03.000And you are seeing that as women have treated men as superfluous, men have started to treat women, in some circles, as the enemy.
00:22:10.000They've started to treat women as though women are something to be treated as chattel, or women should be treated without the full respect that women deserve.
00:22:19.000They say, well, women aren't treating themselves with respect, why should I respect women?
00:22:22.000Women don't want me to open the door for them, so I'm not going to open the door for them.
00:22:24.000Women say they want to be independent, that women don't want a man.
00:22:28.000Okay, well, I'm not going to treat them like they do.
00:22:30.000I'm going to take my aggressive instincts and I'm going to use them to their best available effects.
00:22:35.000Or worst available effects is the actual case.
00:22:37.000So I would say example 1A here would be Andrew Tate.
00:22:41.000So I've been discussing Andrew Tate a lot because he's back in the news a lot.
00:22:43.000Did a two and a half hour interview with Tucker Carlson that had a lot of interesting moments to it.
00:22:46.000And the thing I've always said about Andrew Tate is that Andrew Tate's diagnosis is very often correct and his prognosis, his actual His actual recommendations for what we ought to do are almost entirely wrong.
00:22:57.000And many of the things that he says about the feminist movement are totally right.
00:23:00.000He's critiquing the left's wrecking of these institutions.
00:23:03.000But instead of trying to reinforce the institutions and rebuild the institutions, his response is the toxically masculine responses.
00:23:10.000Well, if this is a new world, then what I'm going to model, the behavior I'm going to model is not getting married, having kids, building a home, supporting my community.
00:23:17.000The behavior that I'm going to model is instead being as toxically masculine as using women.
00:23:24.000If women are still driven toward that top achiever, I'm going to be the top G. I'm going to be the guy who's the top achiever, and then I'm going to sleep with as many women as possible for sexual access.
00:24:00.000Andrew Tate's solutions are not along those lines.
00:24:02.000Some of the stuff that he says to Tucker Carlson, for example, is not the way he actually lives his life.
00:24:06.000So tape has now emerged of Andrew Tate talking about the way that he treats women.
00:24:10.000So Andrew Tate made a lot of money off Quote-unquote cam girls.
00:24:14.000Cam girls are women who undress and perform provocative acts for the lust of men on webcams.
00:24:22.000Apparently you pay these women and you can tell them what you want them to do online and then, you know, pleasure yourself is apparently, I suppose, the way this industry works.
00:24:30.000Well Andrew Tate was deeply involved in this industry.
00:24:32.000That's how he made a lot of money and he bragged about it like a lot.
00:24:35.000Okay, so, Andrew Tate's solution to the problem of feminism, and particularly third-wave feminism, and the complete dissolution of sexual ethos, is to participate in it, but go back to sort of the way that it was in cavemen days, right?
00:24:49.000Men use women as you will, and this is now justifiable.
00:24:52.000That's the only way you can explain the fact that Andrew Tate is simultaneously critiquing the feminist sexual ethos of the sexual revolution and full atomistic hedonism.
00:25:02.000Well, simultaneously participating in it.
00:25:05.000Okay, this is a clip that was going around.
00:25:07.000It's actually a fairly long compendium that was going around of Andrew Tate talking about what he actually did with women over the course of years.
00:25:14.000And me talking about it, I don't know his case.
00:25:15.000I don't know whether this is criminal behavior.
00:25:17.000I don't know whether it's not criminal behavior.
00:26:30.000That teaches basically how I got girls, how I met girls, how I got girls to like me, how I got girls to fall in love with me to work on webcam for me.
00:26:46.000The idea that you seduce a girl, make her fall in love with you, have sex with you, and then get her to pose nude and perform act in front of a camera so you can take a piece of her money.
00:27:00.000It's also not wildly unpredictable in a culture that has basically liberated men from the institutions that used to bind them to building a society.
00:27:07.000Again, the response to a society that shuns traditional notions of masculinity is, in fact, toxic masculinity.
00:27:16.000If men's aggressive instinct was a caged animal, and then you blow up the cage, because the cage you say was actually not restricting men's aggressive instincts, instead was actually hemming in women, what you end up with is men and women liberated to be the worst of themselves.
00:27:30.000And this is exactly what you have seen.
00:27:32.000That's what the androtate phenomenon largely is.
00:27:35.000It's why, again, I'm not going to pretend that I'm a quote-unquote model man because I think that that would be arrogant.
00:27:42.000However, I will say that if you are trying to lead a model lifestyle in terms of how you channel your aggressive male instinct, I'm married for 15 years.
00:29:03.000It is not a matter of societal apathy or moral apathy, whether you become a wife or a mother.
00:29:08.000And that does not mean, as the feminist movement has taught you, that you have to subjugate yourself, you have to be a slave to your husband.
00:29:29.000You will find a partner who's actually worth having because he has now committed his entire life and his entire male aggressive instinct toward protecting and defending you.
00:29:37.000That is of benefit to you because you know what's worse?
00:29:40.000A liberated world in which the only men who are interested in getting involved with you are men who are seeking to prey on you.
00:30:11.000Now, it is also clear that men sort of, you know, collapsing as half of the species in terms of performance, suicidal ideation, in terms of income, in terms of education.
00:30:20.000All of that is going to be clearer than it happening to women.
00:30:23.000Because just generally speaking, when women fall apart, Women tend to be self-destructive.
00:30:43.000Teenage girls who go bad start working on themselves and breaking themselves down.
00:30:49.000Well, if you wish to cure all of that, then you need a society that gives people a thing to do, the most important thing that has yet to be done ever.
00:31:00.000Once it becomes reaction, once it becomes women versus men, the feminist instinct versus the aggressive male instinct, well, there's no end to it.
00:31:08.000This is my critique also of so-called Bronze Age pervert.
00:31:11.000So there is this very famous book that is called Bronze Age Mindset.
00:31:15.000It's basically sort of a warmed-over version of Nietzsche.
00:31:20.000It's written by a Yale PhD named Kasten Alomariu, who's apparently a brilliant guy.
00:31:26.000I've read Bronze Age Mindset, and it's very interestingly written.
00:31:30.000It's written in sort of internet meme-speak.
00:31:32.000It's got some very bizarre points of view.
00:31:35.000I would say that, again, it reads more like Worms over Nietzsche than anything else.
00:31:39.000It's all about the powerful man regaining his power through strength and will, a disdain for Judeo-Christian morality in favor of an older Greek morality that prizes beauty and strength, and we have to regain the beauty and the strength.
00:31:53.000Again, the beauty and strength morality is, again, closer to the unchained toxic masculine ideal than it is chained to institutions that actually build things.
00:32:02.000But Bronze Age Mindset has become a sort of handbook for a bunch of young dudes because it gives them something to do, right?
00:32:07.000Go to the gym, work out, be better looking, become successful.
00:32:13.000It doesn't actually give them a society to build, it gives them a thing to work on with themselves.
00:32:16.000So if you can't actually build that society, instead what you should do is you should go work out a lot, You should eat healthier, and you should be very aggressive in your pursuit of success, and you should be... A lot of people have accused Bronze Age Mindset, just, again, in the same way that they accused Nietzsche of essentially being the predecessor to a fascist mentality.
00:32:32.000It basically says that the triumph of the will is going to reign supreme.
00:32:37.000The word, this started to be sort of inculcated in meme culture online.
00:32:41.000This is why you see a lot of right-wingers who suddenly are into bodybuilding.
00:32:45.000Now I think, listen, if the left wants to cede being in good shape to the right, that's an idiotic move.
00:32:50.000I think all men should attempt to be in good shape.
00:32:52.000I think all women should attempt to be in good shape.
00:32:55.000It's a good thing for your mental health.
00:32:56.000There are a lot of reasons why you should stay healthy and go to the gym.
00:32:58.000Bronze Age Mindset turned it into a sort of political statement to go to the gym because now you are saying that the thing that knows to be prized above all other things is beauty.
00:34:01.000So political, I think, does not do justice to the actual genius.
00:34:04.000I mean, I think it's actually quite brilliant, much of Bronze Age mindset and bronze, as much as I disagree with a lot of it, and I think a lot of it is offensive and terrible and gross.
00:34:11.000You can't you can't deny that it's incredibly well structured and well written like that.
00:34:16.000The guy who wrote it is a very, very smart person.
00:34:19.000But here's how political characterizes this.
00:34:21.000For BAP, the elevation of this vision of masculinity in society comports with his ideal social order,
00:34:26.000where the strongest rule, there are no curbs on their dominance,
00:34:28.000no efforts to protect those who have less power, certainly no attempt to equalize groups.
00:34:32.000BAP believes in natural differences between humans along racial, ethnic, and gender lines,
00:34:35.000and compares non-Western societies to yeast, mindlessly perpetuating themselves.
00:34:39.000BAP argues that equality itself, even democracy, is a dead end.
00:34:42.000He believes in eugenic breeding to preserve what he views as superior stock.
00:34:45.000Now, again, I think that readers of Bronze Age Pervert or Bronze Age Mindset would say
00:34:48.000that some of this is meant, you know, parodically in the same way
00:34:51.000that Straussian readers of Plato say that some of this is meant, you know, parodically.
00:34:55.000Plato wasn't actually in favor of fascist society, he was critiquing it,
00:34:58.000but one of the things that you can say is that this is a political response
00:35:03.000to a feminine instinct that says that we have to equalize all of society
00:35:58.000And again, you can see it manifesting in reactionary ways on both sides.
00:36:01.000We'll get to that on the left in just one second, because the way that they now talk about abortion, you wonder why men are falling behind?
00:36:06.000The way the left talks about abortion is in fact one reason for this.
00:36:52.000You can get a special offer that includes a four-week trial, plus free postage and free digital skill, no long-term commitments, no contracts.
00:36:58.000Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page, enter code Shapiro again.
00:37:03.000Stamps.com, the microphone at the top of the page.
00:37:05.000You click on that, you enter code Shapiro, and you're going to get an amazing deal.
00:37:08.000Four-week trial, free postage, free digital scale, no long-term commitment or contract.
00:37:12.000Also, I want to talk to you about something I usually don't talk about.
00:38:28.000So when we talk about that thing to which Andrew Tate or Bronze Age Pervert or the Incel Movement, that which they are responding to in I think toxic and not true ways, you have to look at what the left has been doing.
00:38:38.000So what the left has been doing with regard to femininity and masculinity is suggesting the apotheosis of femininity is literally destroying the thing that makes women the most women.
00:39:34.000So, John Kirby, who's the national security spokesperson for the Biden administration yesterday, he was talking about this big debate that has now erupted over the National Defense Authorization Act.
00:39:42.000In the National Defense Authorization Act, the current Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, put in a couple of provisions that are just wild left-wing social policy.
00:39:50.000One of those provisions is That the military is going to pay for a member of the military, a female member of the military, to be able to go to another state on leave to get an abortion.
00:40:01.000So you will be paying for the abortion, effectively speaking.
00:40:04.000And Republicans said, hold up a second.
00:40:05.000This is not what taxpayers are in it for.
00:40:10.000I mean, put aside the pro-life value that says you shouldn't be killing your baby.
00:40:13.000If you're going to do it, we certainly shouldn't be paying for it.
00:40:15.000But John Kirby says it is a sacred duty for you and for me to pay for a woman to have an abortion because the highest aspiration of a woman should be to not be subjected to the rigors of, you know, the thing that makes a woman most womanly.
00:40:28.000Is the new DOD policy on abortion critical to military readiness?
00:40:35.000I'm really glad you asked that question.
00:41:17.000Foundational thing to military leadership that women be treated as though abortion is an active good and the highest aspiration of a woman is apparently abortion.
00:41:26.000It's a sacred duty for us to pay for a woman's abortion.
00:41:29.000Of course you're gonna get toxic masculinity.
00:41:30.000What do you think the natural response to that is?
00:42:09.000By the way, I think that's true politically also.
00:42:11.000Stop reacting so much, start building.
00:42:13.000I think we spend a lot of time reacting to each other, but not enough time talking about the actual solutions that are going to make life better for anybody.
00:42:20.000But the left is not interested in that when it comes to abortion.
00:42:23.000So yesterday they had a bunch of abortion experts who were testifying on the Hill.
00:42:26.000That included a person named Love Holt.
00:42:31.000Ironically named Love Holt, the Democrats Community Engagement Director.
00:42:36.000And she talked about why we ought to be subsidizing abortions in the United States.
00:42:43.000Here we are, 400 years after slavery in America and what some would deem a successful book-breaking of our male counterparts.
00:42:54.000I look at this as an attempt to dethrone the original matriarch and furthermore cause bodily restrictions on black bodies, therefore making it harder for us to make Normal decisions, therefore perverting our quality of life in a place that we should be free for choice in whatever direction we'd like to go in.
00:43:21.000Who the hell is the original matriarch?
00:43:23.000Apparently the original matriarch is a woman who's able to dispense with her children, which kind of defeats the purpose of the word matriarch, right?
00:43:43.000The same abortion expert, by the way, says that the real qualm here, and again, this is what it comes down to, for the sexual revolutionaries on the left, atomistic individual expression of sexual desire is the only goal, that is the only thing that is worthwhile.
00:44:24.000It's illegal to educate your youth about their body, contraceptives, signs of pubescence,
00:44:30.000what to do when they're hot and heavy.
00:44:32.000And then we thrust them out into a world that has a ban on their choice.
00:44:38.000That's ripping away their bodily autonomy.
00:44:40.000And the only way we'll be able to successfully see people survive unwanted pregnancies Fetal anomalies, maternal and birthing person mortality rates is through communication, aggregating this information, and reaching out to local organizations who support choice.
00:45:05.000Why are men so toxic, says the feminist who calls women birthing persons.
00:45:12.000Okay, well, again, the reaction to all this, the reaction to the stripping away of what it means to be a woman is the stripping away of what it means to be a responsible man.
00:45:20.000I don't know why men are failing, that's why.
00:45:21.000And there's only one way to restore that, and that is to restore the fundamental building blocks of any civilization that have been torn asunder by the feminist left and by the reactionary right in response.
00:45:36.000Okay, speaking of this, well, it's no surprise that as femininity and masculinity decline, as the institutions of marriage decline, as demographics fall away in the West, you're starting to see receding rates of growth in the West.
00:45:46.000Because as it turns out, despite all of the talk about how capitalism is inherently based on the uprooting of family, it's not true.
00:45:52.000Family provides the basis for capitalistic success.
00:45:56.000Because otherwise there's nothing to provide for.
00:45:58.000This idea that capitalism inherently treats people individually as opposed to as family units, that part is true.
00:46:03.000But capitalism is not in the family building business.
00:46:05.000Capitalism is in the ability to alienate your labor business.
00:46:09.000It is your job to bring your values to capitalism.
00:46:11.000This is why I always get sort of irritated when people say things like, two cheers for capitalism.
00:46:16.000You hear this a lot from the Integralist Right.
00:46:22.000Treating capitalism as though it is supposed to be a moral system, as opposed to a tool for prosperity that is an outgrowth of human control over our own labor, that's really stupid.
00:46:31.000It's like saying, two cheers for this hammer because this hammer is not a screwdriver.
00:47:08.000And one of the reasons that people try to earn a lot of money
00:47:10.000is to pass it down to their kids and to their grandkids.
00:47:11.000There's always a future orientation to the economy that if you strip away, you end up with basically subsistence economics.
00:47:17.000And subsistence economics doesn't amount to any sort of advancement.
00:47:21.000It's consume the future on behalf of the present.
00:47:23.000I mean, there are really only two types of economic systems.
00:47:27.000There are economic systems that try to build things now for the future, and then there are economic systems that consume the future for the present.
00:47:35.000Those would be debt-led systems, or communistic systems that assume that if we just reshape man in the here and now by sucking resources out of the economy, and by damning people to hell, then we will somehow build a better world right now.
00:47:46.000As opposed to the idea that a better world emerges when you look to tomorrow.
00:47:50.000Meaning, you're thinking about, how do I build a business?
00:47:52.000You're thinking about planting a tree that you're not going to get to see come to fruition.
00:47:56.000Capitalism is, it must be based in what Adam Smith's first book, A Theory of Moral Sentiment, talked about.
00:48:04.000There's a future orientation to economics, and when you get rid of it, you end up with Keynesianism, which is the redistributionism of income that ends in economic stagnation, effectively speaking.
00:48:13.000And that's what you are seeing over in Europe.
00:48:14.000So there's an article in the Wall Street Journal today, So again, one of the reasons that Americans historically have worked really hard, like lots of long hours, is because we want our kids to be richer than we are.
00:48:33.000We want our kids to be better off than we are.
00:48:49.000Life on a continent long envied by outsiders for its art de vive is rapidly losing its shine as Europeans see their purchasing power melt away.
00:48:56.000The French are eating less foie gras and drinking less red wine.
00:49:00.000Finns are being urged to use saunas on windy days when energy is less expensive.
00:49:03.000Across Germany, meat and milk consumption has fallen to the lowest level in three decades, and the once booming market for organic food has tanked.
00:49:09.000Italy's economic development minister, Adolfo Urso, convened a crisis meeting in May over prices for pasta, the country's favorite staple, after they jumped by more than double the national inflation rate.
00:49:18.000With consumption spending in free fall, Europe tipped into recession at the start of the year, reinforcing a sense of relative economic, political, and military decline that kicked in at the start of the century.
00:49:27.000Europe's current predicament, says the Wall Street Journal, has been long in the making.
00:49:30.000An aging population with a preference for free time and job security over earnings, ushered in years of lackluster economic and productivity growth.
00:49:37.000Again, lack of future orientation, living in the hedonistic now.
00:49:40.000That is what is damning the European economy to sluggishness.
00:49:45.000And by the way, it's also going to mean the collapse of all of these systems that they say that they really care about.
00:49:49.000You're seeing that at the national health system in the UK.
00:49:52.000Remember, it wasn't all that long ago when the left was touting the NHS as a model for the United States, and now the NHS, I mean, it has been for a while, but it's a complete hellscape.
00:50:00.000It's the New York Times reporting that the NHS is in serious trouble.
00:50:24.000As the ambulances kept pulling up outside, the doctor supervising the ER, Daryl Woods, said it was only a matter of time before nurses would begin diverting patients into the overflow space again.
00:50:32.000Despite her ordeal, Mrs. Patton was sympathetic.
00:50:34.000Decades ago, she said the NHS saved her husband's life when he had a heart attack.
00:50:37.000It's got to cope with a lot more people, she said.
00:50:40.000As it turns 75 this month, the NHS, a proud symbol of Britain's welfare state, is in the deepest crisis of its history, flooded by aging, enfeebled patients, starved of investment in equipment and facilities, understaffed by doctors and nurses, many of whom are so burned out they are either joining strikes or leaving for jobs abroad.
00:50:57.000Of course, because this is a system that is rooted in the today as opposed to in the tomorrow.
00:51:03.000This is why whenever I hear people on both sides of the aisle now talking about, we don't need entitlement reform, who cares about entitlement reform?
00:51:30.000China's about to collapse because, in the long run, we're all dead.
00:51:33.000Do what you have to do today in order to get to tomorrow with your power still intact.
00:51:36.000And by the way, it may not be in the long run.
00:51:38.000It turns out one of the solutions to having aged and feeble people in your country is just to kill them, which presumably is one of the things that is now happening in Canada, in large measure.
00:51:47.000According to Reuters, since 2016, over 30,000 people have been killed using euthanasia.
00:52:20.000It's actually an outsourcing of empathy.
00:52:23.000It's amazing when you hear people constantly talking about, you're more empathetic if you want to fund X government program.
00:52:28.000Well, not really because it seems to me that many of the government programs that you actually want to fund are just a way for you to outsource your problems to a third party so you don't have to feel bad about it.
00:52:35.000So to take an example, when people say, well, social security, you know, so we can't restructure social security.
00:52:40.000Social security is the greatest thing since sliced bread and Medicare and Medicaid.
00:52:45.000And this is how we are going to make sure that all these problems are taken care of.
00:52:47.000Well, they haven't taken care of the problems.
00:52:48.000What they really have done is just to outsource them.
00:52:50.000So it used to be, 50, 60 years ago, if you had a parent who's getting elderly, what happened with your elderly parent?
00:52:58.000You brought them into your house, and your kids had to learn to deal with people who are elderly.
00:53:01.000And you had to learn to deal with people who are elderly.
00:53:03.000And you had to negotiate that, and it was a tremendous sacrifice, and it was really hard, and it was really difficult.
00:53:07.000Instead, we decided, what if we just outsource that crap to the government, and then we just put all of our elderly people in nursing homes and maybe euthanize them?
00:53:16.000Has that made people happier or more fulfilled?
00:53:18.000Or is it just meant to complete lack of respect for people as they get older other than our geriatric dotards who apparently still run the country?
00:53:25.000The same thing has happened with regard to poverty.
00:53:27.000Poverty programs don't make you responsible for the people with poverty.
00:53:30.000They just allow you to say, I paid at the office already.
00:53:33.000I've talked about this before in my religious community.
00:53:35.000When somebody is going through a hard time, everybody in the community is expected to chip in.
00:53:39.000We are all expected to take up a hand, figure out how we can help, try to do something.
00:53:44.000You know what's a lot easier than that?
00:53:46.000If there was some sort of, say, faraway body that just allowed me to sign a quick check
00:53:52.000and then I would never have to worry about the problem again.
00:53:54.000We could call that place the government.
00:53:56.000And even if it didn't solve the problem, I'd feel good about myself.
00:53:58.000And then I could yell at other people for not being in favor of this far away Anthony taking care of all the problems that I should actually be taking upon myself.
00:54:04.000It turns out that empathy very often just means outsourcing.
00:54:08.000And that outsourcing very often just means stealing from the future in order to outsource.
00:54:11.000Make yourself more comfortable at the expense of the future.
00:54:14.000And then you wonder why society is in serious trouble.
00:54:16.000This would be one of the reasons why society is in serious trouble.
00:54:23.000We are increasingly becoming a present-oriented society, which means removing all of the institutional frameworks that provide for a future entirely.
00:54:30.000Okay, time for, um, you know, I'm not even gonna do things I like to do, I'm just gonna do a couple of quick things that I hate.
00:54:42.000So, first of all, Barack Obama is one of the most irritating people in American public life.
00:54:46.000I blame Barack Obama personally for many of the problems that American politics have entered into.
00:54:50.000As I've said before, I think that his presidency basically polarized the country beyond all recognition.
00:54:56.000Because he came in with this broad wave of public approval, and then he proposed a bunch of left-wing policies that were very alienating, and instead of just playing politics, he decided that he was going to actually racially polarize America.
00:55:08.000In his own political interest, I'm not sure the country has recovered from it or will recover any time in the near future.
00:55:13.000Well, now Barack Obama is sounding off on librarians.
00:55:16.000And he is talking about the quote-unquote book bans in places like Florida.
00:55:20.000Now, to be clear, the book bans in places like Florida, those are not book bans.
00:55:23.000You can still get any of these books in Florida.
00:55:25.000What they really are is saying that school libraries for 6th graders shouldn't have books like genderqueer in them.
00:55:30.000You know, books with graphic depictions of gay sex, for example.
00:55:33.000So Barack Obama, because he is a liar, put out on his Twitter feed the following statement, quote,
00:55:37.000Today, some of the books that shaped my life and the lives of so many others are being
00:55:41.000challenged by people who disagree with certain ideas or perspectives, and librarians are on
00:55:44.000the front lines fighting every day to make the widest possible range of viewpoints,
00:55:48.000opinions, and ideas available to everyone.
00:55:50.000I really don't think that genderqueer shaped his life, and if it did, then we should know some more things about the former president of the United States.
00:55:58.000Fairly certain that these are not the books that shaped Barack Obama's young life.
00:56:02.000But, again, this is a stupid game that we play as we pretend that There's an attempt to shut down free speech when we say that a six-square shouldn't be reading genderqueer.
00:56:11.000So again, points to Barack Obama for absolute falsehood.
00:56:16.000I have to say, it is amazing to watch as the left twists itself in knots over their intersectional coalition.
00:56:21.000So again, Barack Obama was one of the founders of the left-wing intersectional coalition.
00:56:24.000This idea that minority people plus college-educated white ladies were going to provide a durable coalition for the left, not just in the United States, but elsewhere.
00:56:31.000And what this has meant is some really weird internal conflicts because it turns out a lot of minorities don't agree with each other.
00:56:36.000It turns out, for example, that Muslims not super fond of the LGBTQ.
00:56:41.000And now the left is noticing that, but their answer to this, because it's obviously that's a gap that's unbridgeable.
00:56:48.000I mean, the Koran is not super hot, as I say, on LGBTQIA plus minus divided by sign politics.
00:56:54.000And to the left, because they want them to be part of the same coalition, now they're saying that basically evil right-wingers are perverting Muslims to be socially conservative.
00:57:16.000In any case, Justin Trudeau, he tried the same routine.
00:57:19.000The reason Muslims are apparently opposed to LGBTQ plus minus divided by a sign, happy face, sad face emoji, crying emoji, laughing, crying emoji, clappy hands emoji.
00:57:28.000The reason that the Muslims aren't super fond of that?
00:57:30.000It's because of perverse Christian right-wingers who have somehow brainwashed the Muslims.
00:57:36.000First of all, there is an awful lot of misinformation and disinformation out there.
00:57:41.000People on social media... Ah, they're reporting misinformation at this hour.
00:57:47.000...the American right-wing are spreading a lot of untruths about what's actually in the Provincial Conferences.
00:57:54.000If you look at the various curriculums, you'll see that there is not what is being said out there about aggressive teaching or conversion of kids to being LGBT.
00:58:06.000That is something that is being weaponized by people who are not doing it because of their interest in supporting the Muslim community.
00:58:16.000These are people in the far right who are consistent and stood against Muslim rights in the Muslim community.
00:58:23.000Oh, you see, it's the far-right with their misinformation and disinformation who are trying to pervert the Muslims.
00:58:30.000First of all, the Orwellian use of the words misinformation and disinformation to just mean stuff I don't like is really gross.
00:58:36.000And when governmental leaders use it as the predicate to censorship, it's particularly gross.
00:58:40.000But you know, this is the way that they work.
00:58:42.000Okay, one final thing that I hate today.
00:58:45.000So, I don't know what women have decided on this whole, we are going to just release text messages that are totally not for public consumption to make our boyfriends look bad when they're not really doing something bad.
00:58:57.000Like, I understand that the desire for victimhood is now just the driving desire in a lot of celebrity hearts.
00:59:04.000But I, for the life of me, do not understand why any of these things they're releasing are scandalous.
00:59:08.000This is true of the Jonah Hill text where he's like, maybe you shouldn't pose, you know, in a bathing suit in this particular pose.
00:59:14.000And like years later, his ex-girlfriend's like, this is terrible, and he was trying to control me.
00:59:27.000Now, I'm not going to pretend I know who this person is because I have no idea who it is.
00:59:31.000Every artist past about 1890 is a stranger to me.
00:59:36.000But apparently Bebe Rexha is some sort of singer, an alleged singer.
00:59:40.000And on her Instagram, she shared a text message she received criticizing her for gaining 35 pounds.
00:59:48.000It appears to be from her boyfriend, which is a great way to build a relationship, is to take private text messages between you and your potential spouse, your boyfriend, and put those online.
01:00:29.000If you're unhappy with me, or yourself, or with life, and don't see a future with us, that's okay, that's the reason.
01:00:33.000Don't use something like that to weaponize your anger or anxiety, or any insecurity you may have.
01:00:37.000You know, I always found you to be beautiful, and loved you no matter what.
01:00:39.000I think it's important for you to think about things and write things down, speak to a therapist, and do this retreat thing to get to the root of the problem.
01:00:44.000Let me know if you'd like to speak, if you need more clarity.
01:01:40.000This apparently was during a May appearance on the Jennifer Hudson show.
01:01:44.000She talked about her weight gain and she's apparently been doing this kind of routine publicly about why people are being mean to her because of her weight gain.
01:02:01.000This sort of narcissistic garbage is so ridiculous.
01:02:04.000And honestly, people with lives don't have time for this.
01:02:07.000I gotta tell you, I'm covering it specifically because I'm saying don't do this in your life.
01:02:10.000If you have a life and you have things to do, you don't have time for this.
01:02:13.000And by the way, you should have a partner who is able to tell you honestly when something is wrong.
01:02:17.000If you ask them if you have broccoli in your teeth, they should be able to tell you without fear that you're going to blow up on them and post it on Instagram.