On today's show, Oren McInnes reviews Jordan Peterson's interview with conservative commentator David French. They discuss the differences between masculinity and femininity, and French's take on Jordan's views on how to deal with them.
00:00:36.360I'm feeling a lot better, but I'm still a little under the weather, so I won't be on camera again today.
00:00:41.980Like I said, I think I'm through the worst of it.
00:00:43.820Probably will be firing on all cylinders by Friday, but gonna keep it this way for now.
00:00:51.060A lot of people probably saw that Jordan Peterson was talking to David French.
00:00:56.380And frankly, after the last few guests Jordan Peterson has had, including having James Lindsay on to attack his fellow hosts at the Daily Wire,
00:01:07.720We're probably not expecting anything great from seeing David French show up.
00:01:13.280David French is famously kind of a hic-lib.
00:01:16.540You know, he built himself up as this conservative stalwart and, you know, wrote for years for conservative establishment publications, this kind of thing.
00:01:26.560But over the last, I don't know, what has it been a decade at this point, French has just gotten worse and worse and worse to the point where he famously just got completely trounced by many people.
00:01:40.300He became a New York Times writer, clearly, basically having sold himself as this never-Trumper and even former Republican now.
00:01:49.860He said he voted for Kamala Harris in the last election.
00:01:52.700They talk about that a little bit in this episode.
00:01:56.840So when we all saw this, it was like, okay, this is going to be a train wreck because the topic of the discussion was masculinity.
00:02:03.920Now, I like Jordan Peterson, and I think that there is a version of masculinity that he does represent, but he doesn't exactly hit you as the alpha male guy, right?
00:02:15.680Like, again, not everybody has to be, but a lot of times, you know, people discussing masculinity, they want to see someone who, you know, been in the military or, you know, done something very physical, something like that.
00:02:28.180Jordan Peterson is masculine in other ways, but definitely not those.
00:02:31.660And then David French is just, ironically, having served in the military, though, as a lawyer, ultimately, for a lot of people, is kind of the antithesis, I think, of masculinity in a lot of ways.
00:02:44.700He's very focused on softening, I think, the male persona in a lot of areas.
00:02:51.700That said, I expected to walk into this thing and just see a complete disaster, right?
00:02:56.700Like, a lot of times, when you go into this, you're like, okay, this is going to be fun for the audience because they're going to see how terrible this is.
00:03:04.400There's a little bit of cringe-inducing.
00:03:06.120But then we can also, like, mine some of the important mistakes made, and we can point out all of the issues.
00:03:12.180So we have some laughs, but we also discuss something important, and that's the balance you're often looking for when you kind of do these reviews of discussions, right?
00:03:22.640When you're commenting on this back and forth, you're trying to show that there is obviously a lot of mistakes made here.
00:03:29.940But at the same time, at least you can kind of understand where they went wrong and take something out of it while also kind of laughing at some of the problems that they had.
00:03:40.700I have to say, while this was not amazing, there were still a lot of mistakes made, and we'll point out some of those here.
00:03:49.720It was not the train wreck that I expected.
00:03:52.320And I think a big part of that was that Jordan Peterson was actually reasonably good here.
00:03:58.040And I'm surprised about that for a couple of reasons.
00:04:04.220Peterson has really been harping very hard on kind of the internet crowd, the online right.
00:04:11.240He's been making a lot of noises about how they offend him.
00:05:03.340However, he does come off a lot more like an, I would say older, he's older now, but an earlier Jordan Peterson, one in which he was much more assertive and confident about some of these issues.
00:05:19.900And he really drills down on the men's issues in this, which I think is good.
00:05:38.200Again, that's not completely inconsistent with Jordan Peterson's message through the years, but he has gotten a little cringy on this recently.
00:05:48.860I wouldn't say back up to form, but in doing, you know, much better with this.
00:05:53.480Now, French was not as great as you would imagine.
00:05:58.140French made a lot of apologies in this, but he wasn't as much of a disaster as I expected.
00:06:04.420He did acknowledge the problems that men were facing.
00:06:07.980He very rarely pushed back, saying that they wouldn't have many of the problems that Jordan Peterson was outlining.
00:06:14.200And I think a lot of the reasons that French was not as bad as I expected in this is basically at the outset, they kind of agree to set aside all the things they disagree on.
00:06:25.560Maybe that would have been a more interesting conversation.
00:06:28.140Maybe we would have seen it, or at least it would have been more lolcow, right?
00:06:31.260We would have had more laughs from that conversation if French had actually expressed all of the ideas that he had, like the blessings of liberty that are drag queen story hour.
00:06:43.380But they avoided a lot of that stuff, and so what we got was a conversation that was probably not as hilarious as we might have hoped or as cringe-inducing as we might have expected, but was more productive.
00:06:56.320Now, again, French does make mistakes in here.
00:06:59.640Unfortunately, he often plods on quite a bit, and so I really couldn't include a ton of David French in these clips because a lot of it is him kind of meandering.
00:07:08.600Yeah, he makes a point, but he makes it over, like, six or seven minutes.
00:07:12.800It's very hard to respond to without just playing the whole thing in its entirety for you.
00:07:17.560So, you know, this whole video is an hour.
00:07:20.520I think they did another hour behind a paywall somewhere.
00:07:37.200I don't know if I would do that to you this time.
00:07:39.080I mean, I was doing this so you didn't have to, right?
00:07:41.820Like, I was making the sacrifice so that you did not have to go through the painful experience of watching the entire thing.
00:07:50.140That said, if you would like the context, it is there for you.
00:07:55.100Again, I don't think I'd suggest it, but you have that option.
00:07:58.700All right, guys, so we'll dive into this, and we'll just play it from the beginning, and I'll stop in and let you know here when we get to the important parts we're going to pull out.
00:08:14.780I want to tell you a story about my son when he was about 13.
00:08:19.180So I reviewed his report card, and it wasn't stellar, let's say, although it was fine, but it wasn't stellar.
00:08:30.520And so I asked him about that, and he said, well, Dad, I'm doing pretty well.
00:08:44.240And I thought, I'd never heard him say anything like that.
00:08:48.080And it was certainly nothing that he had picked up at home.
00:08:51.440And it was quite striking to me because.
00:08:54.680So having been a public school teacher, I know exactly what Jordan Peterson is talking about.
00:08:59.700You know, all the movies we watch and the television we watch, it's, you know, a lot of people talking about how, oh, you know, women, the expectations are lower.
00:09:11.200And, you know, they're, they're looked down on in a classroom and, you know, they're, you know, good job for a lady, these kind of things.
00:09:19.220But that was just not my experience at all.
00:09:22.420When I was teaching, women got the bulk of the attention.
00:09:28.580They had the bulk of the assistants and were often elevated in the classroom.
00:09:33.800And it was the boys that were seen as problems.
00:09:37.480In fact, I distinctly remember, you know, I taught both high school and then middle school for a little while.
00:09:43.440And obviously in middle school, you know, they're younger and they have much less attention span.
00:09:47.660And especially in middle school, all of the female teachers, and they were mostly female teachers, of course, would openly talk about how they did not want classes with a decent amount of boys.
00:10:00.660If they could get classes that were disproportionately female, they were very happy with that.
00:10:21.980As he said, this is not something that his son picked up at their house.
00:10:25.640This is not the way that they talked to him.
00:10:28.040So this is a attitude that is received from the classroom.
00:10:31.300This is a expectation that he's getting there.
00:10:35.220Now, Jordan Peterson is going to explain why those expectations have shifted.
00:10:39.400But the fact that that is the default mentality that women are going to outperform and should outperform men in a classroom, especially when this has not been the case for basically all of history, tells you something is going on.
00:10:52.480For him, that was just a matter of fact.
00:10:55.820And of course, that's a deep rabbit hole, because when your son comes to you and says, I'm doing pretty good for a boy, if you have any sense, the first thing you think is, where the hell did that come from?
00:11:09.240And so seriously, because now that's an implicit presupposition that the boys underperform the girls.
00:11:17.440That was certainly not a presupposition when I was his age.
00:11:21.020And it wasn't anything that was appropriate for him, because there's nothing wrong with his mind or his conscientiousness.
00:11:28.480And so, you know, I've observed that boys are there.
00:11:35.840The school system is not set up for them in the least.
00:11:39.300The vast majority of teachers are not only female, but infantilizing female and radically left.
00:13:50.440More and more, it's a completely female-dominated environment in all these scenarios.
00:13:54.960He also talks about the way that classes are structured and how it's, you know, a lot of sitting around and not being, you know, not moving.
00:14:04.660It's a lot of focused attention calmly in class.
00:14:07.660Now, there was always a sense that you needed to be sitting down in a classroom at some point, and boys still manage to do okay in school.
00:14:18.440But the big change, and they do talk about this elsewhere, but I couldn't include it in this particular clip, I don't believe, is that they talk about how they have reduced the number of recesses in a school.
00:14:41.660I think that we should be focusing on bettering education.
00:14:45.660But ironically, it's not always just cramming the most amount of hours in.
00:14:49.680And this is why I have a problem with, like, the Vivekraswamy, get rid of all play, get rid of all leisure, spend every moment memorizing words for the spelling bee understanding of education.
00:15:02.040Because, yeah, it does yield a particular, like, tiger mom product if that's what you're looking for.
00:15:08.820However, you know, there are things that that type of education system seriously suppresses.
00:15:17.860And a lot of it is stuff that I think is critical to people from our culture.
00:15:23.080Yeah, a lot of Asian cultures take to this somewhat well.
00:15:27.240But, I mean, look at something like South Korea, right?
00:15:30.300South Korea has this incredible grind culture where they're constantly forcing their children to just, you know, 12 hours of school and then all the side activities and everything else and go, go, go all the time.
00:15:47.000So, yeah, you produce the most effective widget at, like, optimizing the financialization of your economy, but your country is not going to exist in 50 years because you just your birth rate is, like, you know, 0.6 or something.
00:16:02.600And so you have this disaster looming because you have put all of this pressure on kids to constantly learn.
00:16:10.320So there's, like, a balance you need to create, especially, and I think it's different for every culture.
00:16:14.480I think there are some cultures that take to it and some that take to it less.
00:16:17.920But the Western culture has always been one of hard work, but it's also been one that gave people enough space to consider things, to grow, to explore different alternatives, right?
00:16:32.020It wasn't just nose to the grindstone 24-7, you know, beat your brains out and then get exhausted every night to fall asleep.
00:16:40.220You had always this understanding that it was both, you know, you learn, you need the intellectual, but you also needed the kinetic.
00:16:49.340And especially as a man, you need to do both.
00:16:52.740You need to feel physical space while also stimulating your mind.
00:16:57.520In fact, the actual act of going out and playing is, of course, important to children in general, but is especially important to men who kind of need that mixture of the activities.
00:17:07.760And so, you know, Jordan is pointing out that them being stuck in a room all day with zero play or reduced to, like, maybe one session.
00:17:17.260I mean, even the kindergartners only usually get one section of recess at this point.
00:17:23.320And so this obsession with, like, trying to fill every moment with learning instead of understanding that if you actually let especially males go work things out in a physical environment for a little while and then come back in,
00:17:36.460they're going to be much more productive.
00:17:38.140This is a, a mentality that is entirely centered on kind of the way that women learn and less the way that men learn.
00:17:46.180Actually, if they're active, in which case they get diagnosed with ADHD and get put on methylphenidate, which suppresses play behavior as one of its primary functions.
00:17:56.960And then they're, they're told that competitive games are wrong because we should all cooperate by people who are too stupid to notice that competitive games are cooperative because everybody's playing by the same rules.
00:18:12.100So this is actually really important from Jordan as well.
00:18:16.520So he talks about two things here, right?
00:18:18.440First, the fact that you are putting a lot of young men, a lot of boys on ADHD drugs who aren't necessarily ADHD.
00:18:29.620Now, this is not to say that there is no ADHD at all.
00:18:33.620But the over, uh, the over diagnosis and especially the over medification medication is often because young boys do not work well in the classroom environment and the teachers just want them to shut up and the parents just want to stop getting phone calls home.
00:18:51.880The teachers are not going to take the time to rearrange the classroom setting and all of all the incentives inside inside the education system in order to better serve boys.
00:19:01.880It's easier to medicate the boys than it is to adjust the system.
00:19:06.080Uh, and if this sounds familiar, it's because this is a large amount of what our society does, right?
00:19:11.780If, if you've got, uh, feelings, then the most important thing to do is to shut off the feelings, not address where they come from.
00:19:19.560If the system is causing you distress, the most important thing is not to address the problems inside the system.
00:19:26.300The important thing is to medicate you until you shut up about the problems of the system.
00:19:33.040And so we get this constant desire, especially when it comes to the behavior of men, which is inconvenient for many of their teachers, especially let's be honest, because the teachers are female.
00:19:43.360Uh, and so you end up in a scenario where a lot of boys are on medication.
00:19:47.780They wouldn't need if the school could adjust the environment for them.
00:19:52.660Again, this is not to say no one is autistic.
00:19:54.840This is not to say no one has ADHD, but I think it is fair to say that this is over medicated.
00:20:01.320And Jordan's making a good point about that.
00:20:02.980The even more important point that I think he, he is, uh, talking about here.
00:20:07.260And again, having taught, uh, in public school, I identify this right away.
00:20:12.440Uh, boys want hierarchy and women want equality.
00:21:27.660But when you try to mix both genders, both sexes, and you try to force one sex to behave entirely in the manner of the other one, which you tend to do because the system gets uniform, right?
00:21:40.640When the system's all male, you expect male things.
00:21:44.140And when the system's all female, you expect all female things.
00:21:46.740Well, education is mostly dominated by female teachers, mostly dominated by female administrators, mostly, you know, curriculums written by women.
00:21:55.380Uh, you know, it's, uh, the counselors are women.
00:22:21.200You have to understand that for women, this becomes a threat often.
00:22:25.100And, and, and this is why it's, it's, it's sometimes very difficult to mix gendered spaces.
00:22:29.840This is why in many situations there, there were segregations of the sexes when it came to many things, including education, because not just, uh, we can't educate the women or something though.
00:22:41.400Sometimes that was the case, but because importantly, they learn and operate in different modes.
00:22:46.480And if you try to mix them, then you have to navigate the messy waters of, are we serving the female paradigm?
00:23:13.600The default is basically go with the female.
00:23:16.400If it's a mixed space, that's kind of what has become the scenario.
00:23:20.220And the more female the space has become, especially in education, the more that has become the dominant understanding.
00:23:25.560And so Jordan is pointing out, I think something very important that the, the male presence and the male desire for hierarchy competition is seen as a direct threat to the female environment that has been cultivated inside the educational system.
00:23:39.080And then they're told that men, boys, ambition is pathological and that the patriarchy is, and marriage for that matter is an oppressive institution.
00:23:50.840And if they manage to escape from all that, then they're told that the, the activities of males are destroying the planet.
00:23:59.180And that's pretty much a comprehensive, uh, that's comprehensive evil queen pathology, as far as I'm concerned.
00:24:08.400Then you add to that, there's an additional twist too, which we should delve into.
00:24:12.520You know, it's a universal cultural problem to make.
00:24:19.360So Jordan here, before he's going to get into another good point here in a second, but, uh, he gets, uh, you know, he points out that ultimately all of these messages, you know, it's not just the, uh, it's not just the way that the classroom addresses young men, but even after they escape it, if they make it through all of the, you know, the, the negativity inside the classroom.
00:24:39.360Then they're confronted with the idea that their desires to have families and play their traditional roles inside of families is a threat to the system.
00:25:03.780The system is threatened by men who are assertive, who are masculine, who are dangerous, but are also simultaneously able to temper that danger and toward, turn it towards the good and aim it at the system.
00:25:18.520If they need to, right, that is a danger to the system.
00:25:22.740And so this is why every male behavior is pathologized because male behavior is a threat to the system.
00:25:28.320Female behavior, if it corrodes entirely, will eventually destroy the system.
00:25:33.960If it's completely unchecked, just like male behavior, completely unchecked would destroy a system.
00:25:39.480But male proper behavior is actually a threat to the system and female behavior is not.
00:25:46.080And so that's why there, you know, even if there isn't, there's not a conscious, like we have to keep down all the men there.
00:25:51.040There's no conspiracy, uh, probably sitting around.
00:25:54.400I mean, there, there is a general, Hey, we should adopt, you know, female attitudes or we should promote women more, but there's probably not like an explicit cabal of like, are the purpose, uh, we are doing this for is to get rid of male behavior.
00:26:07.340But this is part of like the larger kind of postmodern authoritarian, authoritarian personality type approach.
00:26:14.540You know, the, the post-work consensus is terrified of strong men and strong gods, strong emotions.
00:26:23.220They want to, everything needs to be tamped down.
00:26:27.360And so, uh, the, the presence of virtuous men is a, is a real danger.
00:26:31.980And so Jordan Peterson is pointing this out that, you know, the reason that they are attacking everything about men from, you know, hierarchy and competition to patriarchy, uh, to marriage, uh, you know, even the basic pursuits of manhood are a danger to the planet, right?
00:26:47.260Like there's a reason that this language is always framed this way because they recognize that men are the threat.
00:26:53.980Ultimately, adults out of juvenile males, that's why there are initiation route rights in so many cultures and you have to create, um, uh, responsible man.
00:27:07.660And the reason for that is that it's a hell of a lot easier to be irresponsible and immature than it is to be responsible and mature.
00:27:14.980And so men and women for men and women.
00:27:32.280An infant that, that kind of catalyzes the maturity and maybe their, uh, nature has a proclivity to initiate women a little more dramatically than it initiates men.
00:27:43.800So the, the fundamental problem that cultures face is how to make men out of boys and how to stop young women from getting pregnant out of wedlock.
00:27:58.420And so, uh, you know, Peterson just kind of lays this out.
00:28:01.800There's nothing politically correct about this, but it's of course exactly true, right?
00:28:05.180Like the, the, the, the purpose of a society as it is structured, uh, throughout most of history is to get men to turn their pursuits to something productive, to initiate them into a meaningful role in their society.
00:28:19.180And the purpose of society is to keep women from getting themselves pregnant out of wedlock.
00:28:23.500And the reason is very simple, as he points out, women have this moment, right?
00:28:30.620You're, you, you didn't have a child and now you do, and you cannot abandon this child.
00:28:37.080I mean, unless you just are really, really, uh, without, you know, any feeling about it, men, uh, whether, you know, no matter how we feel about this, you know, uh, imbalance in the system, men can walk away from a child.
00:28:53.480For the most part, they're going to know that the mother's still going to be, they're going to provide in at least the most basic level of subsistence and care.
00:29:00.320The man can usually not do the same for the child, especially very young.
00:29:04.360And so children just at their youngest need mothers and they need them immediately.
00:29:10.100Uh, that's, you know, the, the mother's body is literally, uh, you know, uh, designed to nourish the child.
00:29:16.260Uh, so there's, there's just a very big gulf, uh, between, uh, the options that men and women have.
00:29:24.960So women are pretty much immediately, uh, you know, kind of baptized by this, uh, by this event.
00:29:31.560Now, given our culture and the way that we approach, uh, motherhood, the fact that, uh, birth control and abortion are things that women can't avail themselves of.
00:29:41.920There's less of that, but it's still always exists, right?
00:29:44.800There's, there's still a certain level of that.
00:29:46.540That's just biologically built in now for men.
00:29:49.600There was some level of this for most of history because male strength was necessary to the survival of pretty much every tribe, right?
00:29:58.900Your civilization and, and just really just fighting the wilderness, providing day to day.
00:30:06.620You may not be an official soldier somewhere, but it was understood that when a violent system, a situation arose as a male, it was your job to solve the problem.
00:30:17.100That, that was a very clear role for men throughout the years, or if a very dangerous situation, you know, you, you, someone's got to go out and fight the tiger.
00:30:25.040Somebody has got to go out and, uh, you know, uh, hunt something and bring it back.
00:30:30.780Women foraged next to the child to stay close and care for the family and the homestead men struck out and put themselves in danger.
00:30:39.480And so even if you weren't immediately going to war, even as a young man, you were going to run into some situation where you were going to be, uh, challenged physically.
00:30:51.440And so that was some level of biological, uh, necessity for the initiation of men into culture that existed alongside with women.
00:31:01.140Uh, now so much of that is gone right now.
00:31:08.060We don't need the strength, the raw physical strength, uh, all the time.
00:31:12.660Like we used to, uh, some of it is because of the growth of the state.
00:31:15.920We've grown the state so large that people assume that it should resolve every conflict on its own.
00:31:21.000And so any amount of violence, uh, is, is forbidden, uh, as long, well, you know, depending on what neighborhood you're in and the level of policing.
00:31:29.860Uh, but if you're in the wrong neighborhood, uh, and you do some level of violence, it can ruin your entire life.
00:31:35.600Uh, I've, I've had friends who've gotten absurd, like police charges for getting in a small shoving match in a public place.
00:31:44.780I don't want, you know, I don't want a bunch of people just fist fighting everywhere.
00:31:48.760Uh, but you know, there, there is a certain level of like minimal, uh, you know, pushback that was allowed before like the cops, you know, came and, you know, threw you in jail.
00:32:00.480And so a lot of these situations where men were testing themselves and being initiated just naturally, like the, just the momentum of the, uh, the experience would push you towards it.
00:32:11.500That's not there anymore, but it is still there for a lot of women.
00:32:16.580So, well, so the boys face, uh, I think a virtual conspiracy of demoralization.
00:32:26.340And that seems to me to be, well, that's underneath the political, but the Democrats have been playing that hand madly for, I'd say, four generations.
00:32:40.460And now they're reaping what they sowed.
00:34:25.700Much of the labor and security and, uh, financial and physical well-being that was provided by men, women can now default out and go to the state, right?
00:34:40.280It used to be if you were on welfare, that was a problem, right?
00:34:43.780You had the, the, the insult of the welfare queen.
00:34:46.720It's the woman who just had a bunch of children out of wedlock and rather than rely on one of their fathers to be a virtuous man and take care of him, she would prefer to just go around to whatever man she was feeling at the moment and then let the state ultimately be her real husband, right?
00:35:02.980This, this has really been the key is turning that the state has acquired enough power and enough technology and enough wealth to be able to stand in for men in many of these situations.
00:35:30.560Uh, many, you know, children are coming from more and more broken households.
00:35:34.080We see what fatherlessness does to children.
00:35:36.740The statistics are extremely clear and very damning, uh, that a fatherless, uh, child, a child, a child without a male role model in the household has significant damage done to them.
00:35:48.120We know all this, but women could ignore those things in the short term because in the, or in the, uh, in the longterm, because in the short term, they were getting their physical needs met.
00:35:58.780They were getting their security needs met their prosperity needs met.
00:36:02.560And so they could kind of ignore that men were being undermined in a dangerous way.
00:36:06.180You hear from the extreme left and you laid out the way there are folks in the extreme left who does just comprehensively demolish masculinity.
00:36:16.440Now I'd say most boys have not been exposed to that in school.
00:36:19.440That might be a very, that might, you might see that in some hyper progressive prep schools or whatever, but the, some degree of that, some element.
00:36:28.920So this is just garbage from David here.
00:36:31.720Sorry, but no, your boys are seeing this in school.
00:36:34.480They're seeing this very much in school.
00:37:04.900Like guys, yeah, the Hicklips are there and they are pushing this.
00:37:09.520Is it less, would I rather have my kid in a school that is rural and not having as much of these attitudes as one that is like deep in the heart of some progressive suburb and pushing this stuff out?
00:37:28.040And so David is really just equivocating here.
00:37:31.340Now, he'll point out later that this is going to be everywhere.
00:37:33.580So even if it's not in your school, then your kid's going to still deal with it.
00:37:37.700But he is fooling himself if he thinks the average male student is not experiencing this from their earliest years in public school.
00:37:45.120One of the things that I have seen is that a lot of the people, when we talk about this, when we raise this issue, a lot of people in the commentary class and the academic class immediately denigrate a lot of the evidence about the struggles of young men and boys because they don't see in their milieu, they don't see men struggling.
00:38:15.100Because they're in places where it might be, say, elite academia or high-level corporate work or in the military or government where men are still at the tip of the spear, at the apex of kind of American commercial and political and economic achievement.
00:38:55.000Like he was doing okay for a minute there.
00:38:57.860So he rightly points out that a lot of the commentators, the social commentators, the elites inside wider society, not in the conservative sphere, but the wider society, they're in these bubbles where men are still doing relatively well.
00:39:15.300Like they're in these very high-performing professions and they see a lot of men around them in management positions and leadership positions and CEOs and such.
00:39:27.060And so they look at them and they say, look, men are doing just fine.
00:39:29.380I don't know what you're talking about.
00:39:31.040And then French kind of, you know, after making that good point, turns around and says, and well, you know, men are doing quite well in these areas.
00:39:38.220Okay, but French doesn't address the basic reasons as to why there are always going to be men in these positions.
00:39:45.060And this is just, I'm not going to rehash all this because this is so like 2015 YouTube, but this is just the gender pay gap argument all over again, right?
00:39:55.640Why do you see men disproportionately in leadership positions, even when our entire society is incentivizing women, women are the majority of people graduating college.
00:40:05.660They're getting the scholarships, they're getting the preferential hiring, you know, they're, they're getting all kinds of additional benefits.
00:40:13.120Why is it that men keep showing up in the highest performing professions, the highest pressure positions, the management and leadership functions that are the most pressure?
00:40:26.220And the answer is, this is how men and women are different.
00:40:30.080Women, again, because they prefer consensus, don't like competition as much.
00:40:34.720That doesn't mean there aren't competitive women.
00:40:38.100But by and large, when we're looking in the aggregate, right, when we're looking at large populations and trying to understand trends, women are going to be less interested in competition and more interested in getting along.
00:40:50.620This is why corporations love women in the lower to middle class management tiers, right?
00:40:55.880Because they're, they're very dedicated to the job.
00:40:58.580They're very dedicated at keeping everybody pacified.
00:41:01.040They're very vigilant and good at building, you know, cultures where people feel included.
00:41:06.340But when it comes time to say, who's putting in the 85 hours, right?
00:41:11.160When it comes time to say, who's making the high risk, high reward decision, who's willing to do this stuff?
00:41:21.740One, men are wired to be more risk award oriented, more competitive to their life's likely to have to care for children, even with all of the ways in which women can avoid having children at this point.
00:41:33.440A lot of women still have kids and they necessarily have to take time off of their career, even if it's only for a little while, even if it's criminally low, the amount of time they're spending with their kids, it's still an interruption.
00:41:46.020It's still a distraction from their ability to dedicate them entirely to these positions that now, again, that makes no difference for the vast majority, the middle that David French is now talking about.
00:42:01.100And women are way outperforming men because of that, you know, all of the advantages they're receiving and all the disadvantages men are receiving in those areas.
00:42:08.580But men still dominate at the top because they're the ones who are going to put out that level of effort.
00:42:14.440They're willing to take on that level of risk.
00:42:16.480They don't have to worry about raising children.
00:42:18.480You know, they have a number of key features, competitiveness that are going to reliably place them into these positions.
00:42:27.640And so, yes, to some extent, you can look in these bubbles and say men are doing well.
00:42:33.520But if you don't understand why men will do well in those positions, no matter how you structure society, then you can't look at whether or not society is actually having an impact on young men.
00:42:45.120And so many of us live in these bubbles.
00:42:49.540We, a lot of people don't see it at all.
00:42:53.220And this is something that I think is endemic in our commentariat.
00:42:57.740And that is, a lot of our commentariat lives and eats and breathes a very rarefied cultural air.
00:43:05.800And they don't have any real world sense of the way that people are living their lives and the struggles they're facing outside of that milieu.
00:43:15.960And so, when you walk into and you start talking about how these young men are struggling, a lot of times you get immediate.
00:43:24.300I've been in these rooms where people immediately dismiss you.
00:43:27.760Well, disproportionate number of men are CEOs.
00:43:30.160A disproportionate number of men are in Congress.
00:43:34.420And I'm like, I'm not talking about the tip of the spear here.
00:43:37.160I'm talking about millions upon millions of people, regular Americans, who are struggling, and in many ways are not struggling because of you, but are you helping or are you hurting?
00:43:49.640And I can tell you right now, if you're telling men that, for example, traditional masculinity ideology is inherently toxic, you're hurting.
00:45:18.920A lot of the raw strength, that raw physical strength, for example, that men have became less and less important to be a part of a vibrant economy.
00:45:30.280The U.S. military is much smaller right now than it was at the height of the Cold War.
00:45:34.140A lot of these things created dynamics where men felt less needed.
00:45:39.920And then you have another part of this cultural world that then...
00:45:44.280So French is making a good point here again.
00:45:48.580I don't know if he's the best person to deliver this point, but the content is the same nevertheless.
00:45:54.180Technology has radically shifted society, and it has radically shifted some of the things that men used to do that were absolutely inescapable for society.
00:46:06.140But very importantly, it's also enabled the state to do many of these things.
00:46:10.260And so the state has taken over the role that men played.
00:46:13.920And so women often look at men and say, well, I don't need you anymore because these things are obsolete.
00:46:48.860Also, women have some terrible instincts when it comes to whether or not the state should be allowed to do things.
00:46:55.460So, for instance, women have been the primary drivers in especially the last few decades of sympathetic acceptance of mass immigration, right?
00:47:05.600Because it is in their nature to want to be compassionate and want to make everything copacetic and work everything out.
00:47:13.980They don't understand conflict the way men understand conflict.
00:47:17.560And so if they had husbands who cared about them specifically and their children, they would say, no, of course, we are not letting these violent strangers inside our country.
00:47:29.200And because the woman's dependent on the man for all the things the state was providing, they'd be like, you know what?
00:47:33.720Maybe I don't understand why you're saying that.
00:47:35.800But you are in charge of this area of our household, and so I will trust you on that.
00:47:41.460But when the state is the woman's husband, when it's the state that's providing the security that the man used to provide, and the state is interested in replacing the people in the country for its own political advantage and to drive down labor costs and everything else, the woman doesn't understand.
00:47:57.700It doesn't click for her because she doesn't have that male aversion to allowing dangerous people into the society in the same way.
00:48:06.060She doesn't understand that immediate threat because she's not meeting the threat with force.
00:48:10.220The state does it for her, and the state is incentivized to allow these people in.
00:48:16.640And so by replacing the man with the state, the woman does not get the same level of protection.
00:48:21.280It feels like she does immediately, and then she also gets the freedom of not having to worry about what a man thinks, an individual man.
00:48:35.420She can't put it on a spreadsheet somewhere.
00:48:38.140She can't feel it immediately, but it will catch up with her.
00:48:41.280And that's what we're seeing with mass immigration now.
00:48:44.060There are a lot of women who are slowly but surely looking around and saying, you know, all these strange military-aged men don't seem to play by the rules.
00:49:17.000You don't want to replace men or women because if you do, the artificial thing will have problems.
00:49:22.600And the state, as an artificial husband, has a serious flaw.
00:49:27.000Jumps on men who are feeling less needed, who are not elitist, who are not tip of the spear, or regular everyday folks who are just trying to do their best,
00:49:34.880and are coming in and saying, well, a lot of the things that you feel or a lot of the way that you are is just bad and wrong.
00:49:42.180And so that created this environment in the sense where I'm struggling and an awful lot of people don't care.
00:49:49.740And that, I feel like, is just a giant cultural disaster that unfolded.
00:49:58.320And now it's not unfolding everywhere the same.
00:50:00.280That litany of things that you said about what people on the far left think and did.
00:50:05.520Like my son and his peers, they never heard any of that in rural Middle Tennessee.
00:50:10.280That is not their experience in rural Middle Tennessee.
00:50:12.320But I will say that all the technological changes and the changes to career and the changes to all these other big cultural changes absolutely impact us everywhere.
00:50:23.980And so young men are facing a world, even if they're in a very sort of man-friendly part of the country, which rural Tennessee is,
00:50:33.520they're still walking into an economy and they're still walking into a culture that has been through a lot of generations of upheaval.
00:50:42.960And in that circumstance, you really have to intentionally lean in to mentor young men into virtuous masculinity.
00:50:52.380Now, I think that French is, again, deluding himself in believing that his son and boys in rural Tennessee or Alabama
00:50:59.860haven't caught any of this stuff in their lives or in their schools.
00:52:37.420However, French's argument is basically like all the natural ways in which we initiated men have gone away.
00:52:43.920And he talks about this more at length, but again, it's, it's a very long discussion and I just don't have time to, to, you know, play all of it for you.
00:52:52.140Uh, but he goes on about like, well, you know, we have to, we have to cultivate these things instead of having them organically.
00:52:57.040And that's true to some extent, but like, actually you do need a level of organic interaction to create virtue.
00:53:04.600Like virtue is cultivated in social roles and men need masculine soldier roles.
00:53:11.040And they need to be allowed to be men in those roles in order to cultivate the virtue.
00:53:15.800If you have a society that is inherently toxic to all masculinity and views all, especially traditional masculinity as something terrible,
00:53:25.680then there won't be the roles that men need to actualize themselves.
00:53:30.160Like men need, in order to be initiated, men need to feel that they mastered something.
00:53:35.340Men need challenge and responsibility.
00:53:38.020And when you have a society that is terrified of men who have power, terrified of men who have authority, terrified of men who have hierarchy,
00:53:47.260the men cannot have cultivated virtue.
00:53:50.340It would usually occur in their organic roles inside of societies.
00:53:55.060However, if you don't have any organic roles in society for them, and you're just trying to intentionally set up these options,
01:09:22.500And so on the one hand, we have the absolute radical pathological demoralization of young men.
01:09:28.880And then we have the insistence that although all that masculinity is toxic,
01:09:34.640and patriarchal, that's precisely what young women should pursue.
01:09:40.820And so they pursue that in some ways displacing young men, but more detrimentally for themselves,
01:09:48.260squandering their youth on service to the evil corporate world, bizarrely enough, given that it's a leftist trope,
01:09:56.160and the demolition of their, not only of their fertility, but the probability of their participation in the long-term partnership of marriage.
01:10:08.900So, I mean, you can hardly imagine a more toxic brew than that.
01:10:14.580And how we got here is quite the bloody miracle.
01:10:49.880And so, pretending that you can address just the problems of women and ignore men or put them to the side and that'll be fine, that's a disaster.
01:11:23.960They want to destroy that and they want to make women into just bad men.
01:11:28.620And so, his point here is like, okay, so you take these women, you tell them that the men in their lives are ugly and failures and dangerous and they're the reason for all the bad things in the world.
01:11:38.480You should just shut them out of society.
01:11:40.340And now that those men are shut out of society, now go be men.
01:12:02.840And so, men are miserable and they're put in a corner and then women are put out there and said, go be men and they hate that too because of course they do.
01:12:11.840And now they're miserable in their jobs trying to be men, but they're also miserable when they come home because they can't find any men worth being with.
01:12:19.460Because even if they are okay, even if they are relatively okay with working in a cubicle and being in a job, they still want a man who makes more.
01:12:27.920They still want a man who provides more.
01:12:29.880They still want a man who's more successful and has climbed the hierarchy higher than them.
01:12:32.740They still want a man who can allow them to basically kind of take off their job and raise a kid for a few years and these kind of things.
01:12:39.300And that's how it works for most women in these situations.
01:12:42.400And so, they just become more and more miserable because they've already defined men as the worst thing in the world.
01:12:49.440Then they've taken on this faux masculinity to live in a world that is foreign to them.
01:12:54.680And then when they come back from that, even if they've adapted to it and somehow found meaning in it, they can't find a man anyway because they've basically turned all of them into just completely useless to them.
01:13:05.040Everything about men is now just completely insufficient because, well, the woman has her own money and she can set her own destiny.
01:13:16.000And so, she needs a man who's going to make more and provide her more if he's even going to be worth her time.
01:13:21.160And so, what you get is this just deeply dysfunctional behavior where families become impossible to form.
01:13:30.000Oh, I should say, I jumped here to about the end, to near the end of this review because it kind of goes together with this point.
01:13:38.540He's going to talk about what the lack of women being home does to society at large.
01:13:44.240Who were still at home in the neighborhoods.
01:13:46.060And so, the neighborhoods were established in known territory because they were regulated by a network of interconnected women.
01:14:03.520And so, when you had your kids outside to play, outside wasn't hostile territory defined by the presence of no one but strangers.
01:14:13.020It was territory defined by the watchful eye of a loose network of women.
01:14:19.200And that all disappeared in really in the 1980s.
01:14:22.900And it isn't obvious how that can be put back.
01:14:25.820Like, the question is, why did people start to become fearful of the neighborhood given that there was no radical increase in the probability that your child was going to be abducted by, you know, some psychopath?
01:15:07.000Why do we feel so unsafe throughout our society?
01:15:09.640Why is this scenario where, you know, women are just not, you know, why do we have this issue where we just can't let people go outside and we feel unsafe?
01:15:23.040One of them is, like he says, this lack of network, this lack of women at home.
01:15:28.120When we took women and we just threw them in the workplace, everyone was like, well, you know, they're not really doing anything at home anyway.
01:15:49.880You walked out the door and, yes, your child was away from your house.
01:15:53.240But you knew Susie down the street and you knew Cindy and you knew Laura and you knew that as your child traveled from from block to block, that there would be a network of women who are staying at home, who are there looking out their window.
01:16:07.840And if someone randomly grabbed your kid, if someone ran up and was beating up your kid, if something, you know, someone was following your kid, there would be people who knew your kid, knew you, knew that person was a stranger and would say, no, something is wrong and would get themselves involved.
01:16:24.620They would feel like they had the right to involve themselves.
01:16:28.340But today, what we've done is we removed all those women from the workplace and we put the kids into school as a mandatory daycare or, you know, they had people hire immigrants to watch their kids.
01:16:39.100Now, first, that is just insufficient.
01:16:42.920You can't just replace a mom with some random person from a foreign country who happens to make sure they don't burn their hands on the stove.
01:16:50.160That is insufficient to actually raise a child.
01:16:53.260But on top of this, you remove that constant presence, that network, that social mechanism that allows you to feel safe and have your child transverse the neighborhood.
01:17:03.420Now, what they didn't mention for obvious reasons was also that neighborhoods have diversified and people used to have an understanding.
01:17:16.440There wasn't this constant churn of new people coming in, strangers, strangers from different, you know, societies with different expectations who I didn't immediately trust, who maybe don't even speak the language, don't have the same morals as me.
01:17:29.860I know I'm not in a society that is close knit in this, you know, set of traditions and moral understandings and language.
01:18:38.640Am I going to continue to go out into that society and regularly interact with people when at any moment my life could end because I interacted with someone of the wrong color who gets the magical shield that protects them from any kind of criticism?
01:18:51.160And so for all of these reasons, we are less and less able to interact, which means we are less and less able to have defined roles, which means we are less and less able to develop virtue, which is exactly the solution that David and Jordan are trying to reach.