This is a discussion that the country really needs to be having, and I’m really surprised we haven’t had it more. What I’d like to add, is that in addition to the historical (and under-discussed) need for wealth and power amongst men - there seems to be a social panic around wealth creation that began in 2021, and simply has not let up since. I wonder if this is because a lot of men feel their ability to create wealth and status threatened by the left (and they are being reactionary), or that a lot of men told themselves during the pandemic that they’d come out rich on the other side, or that social media driven jealousy is finally effecting wider demographics (men, and those 30+). I’ve simply never seen men freak out this hard about their ability to create long term wealth and status - and see no other life outcome as acceptable. The union job with solid government supported health benefits, along with being a leader in a local community (a local legend if you will) used to be enough for many men. Now it is just seen as meaningless, and a failure - it’s literally “get rich or die trying” for a larger and larger percentage of men in the US. Democrats tell men they need better healthcare (and that democrats will deliver on this!) and men are responding basically with “I don’t care if I’m not wealthy”. No one wants to hear they are “vulnerable” anymore - they want to hear they are soon to be a millionaire (often from Trump). Maybe this has to do with the decline of community too. I think we just need this to burn out - and for men to realize Trump is not going to make them rich…. and furthermore that the democratic alternative of a stable (and non-fictional) middle income future is quite alright! This might simply depend on the return of local communities, so that men will have some sort of status to hang their hat on again, other than simply wealth.
It seems to me that the best place to start would be to identify what social changes are actual "progress" that materially benefits people, and what is pointless nonsense. If it was somehow possible to roll back the nonsense while keeping the real progress it might be possible to win back some men without giving up too much of value. Preserve things that actually have helped marginalized people like gay marriage and Obamacare. Throw out nonsense like "cultural appropriation," "defund the police," and banning Dr. Seuss books.
One thing I think would really help win men over, based on my conversations with a lot of them, would be to declare all out war on the sex-negative schools of feminism that demonize male sexuality. Stop saying that men who like seeing sexy women must not think of women as human beings and other stupidity like that. It's both counterproductive and false.
Wouldn't anti-"woke" rhetoric be ironic if sex-negative feminism is the real problem, because the woke movement is (for example) overwhelmingly pro-porn and pro-prostitution (to the extent of using "SWERF" as a epithet)?
I think the "woke" movement is largely inconsistant on this. They sometimes sound like sex-negative feminists and sometimes don't. They often have a very circumscribed view on sexuality where they support porn, but want all sexuality out of everything else.
Regardless of what woke activists themselves believe, there is definitely a perception that hate male sexuality.
Interesting point you made at 5:15 about how anti-war sentiment inclined elder millennial men like yourself to the Democrats!
I suspect anti-war sentiment may also have been a factor more recently in the rise of MAGA Republicans, although while the anti-war sentiment of the people you were talking about was essentially an anti-imperialist one, the anti-war sentiment of MAGA types (like that of the "America First" committee whose name Trump appropriated) is more inclined towards giving a free hand to foreign imperialists such as Putin and Xi.
You suggest that the US progressive left went insane in part because a horrible human being like Donald Trump was still able to win the Presidency in 2016. But how much did Trump only win in the first place thanks to the Kremlin's help? While Trump played the part of a skilled businessman on The Apprentice, in reality he was so incompetent that he actually managed to bankrupt a CASINO, and Putin was likely keeping him afloat by using the Trump property empire to launder his stolen billions.
While it is well known that the Russians hacked the DNC in 2016 to help Trump win the general election, it is also quite likely that they also hacked the Fox News email server two years earlier in order to interfere with the 2016 GOP primary. They used this hack to manipulate Roger Ailes into stopping the hush-money payments to the women he was accused of harassing, triggering a sex scandal that cleared out many of the old Fox News higher-ups so that Putin stooges Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity could become the channel's leading anchors. They also helped Trump win the GOP primary by using their infiltration of Fox News to provide him with inside information on his rivals' strategies.
The Russian fifth column in Western countries is built on kompromat: while during the very homophobic 1950s the Kremlin blackmailed gays (such as the Cambridge Five) to do their bidding, the advance of gay rights made that approach obsolete, so they turned instead to pedophilia.
Yuri Andropov (as head of the KGB) set up an industrial production line for traitors. The first step was to send pretty young women to events where politically-active young men would meet, whose job was to report back to their handler which men couldn't keep their hands to themselves. Maria Butina was busted in 2018 for this kind of activity at NRA events.
The promising prospects thus identified would be groomed in increasingly depraved activities, with the final step being the filmed rape of a 12- or 13-year old girl. Only a small minority of the resulting kompromized traitors would end up in public office, while most would be used to help that small minority on their way (kind of like the RAF's Operation Black Buck, where 13 Victor tankers were used to get a single Vulcan bomber to its target).
Now going back your original point on how progressive Democrats have become toxic for a lot of men (thanks to stuff like Me Too) is it not possible that the CIA helped fuel the Me Too movement because they had learned about how the KGB/FSB recruitment process worked, and figured that Me Too would be a great way to prevent men with sexually predatory tendencies (ie the type of men that the Russians could plausibly have kompromized) from attaining positions where they could do damage?
After watching this I was thinking of an article Tom Nichols wrote on the James Bond franchise(I admit to being influenced by the character in my younger and even older days). Anyways I think the description of the Bond character shows why I don't really fit in with either the progressives or the Andrew Tate/Joe Rogan crowd(I am too much of a snob for the later crowd)
"Well, yes—except for two other problems. Bond is something of a racist, and he’s a throwback to a traditionally white, Anglo-Saxon social caste, one that took him in as an orphan and to whose higher ranks he aspires.
In the books, and later even when played by the Scottish Sean Connery or the Irish Pierce Brosnan or the Welsh Timothy Dalton or the Australian George Lazenby, this aspirationally posh English identity comes through as part of the character. Whether 007 is pretentiously critiquing an “indifferently blended” cognac (to M’s obvious irritation), sneaking caviar into a health resort, or carping about the proper temperature of champagne, James Bond is a white Brit who is not only a snob but also one who intends to move up a social ladder that was designed and put in place sometime around the writing of the Magna Carta."
"Meanwhile, 1973’s Live and Let Die, a riff on the blaxploitation films of the period, was easily the most racist Bond flick. It has it all: Voodoo rituals. Frightened natives. A crime boss in Harlem who says things like “Names is for tombstones, baby!” and “Take this honky out and waste him!
Moore’s Bond endures all of this with the bemused smile you’d expect from the white Etonian who took a first in Oriental languages at Cambridge. The man reeks of what we would now call white privilege. (“Waste him?” Bond asks Jane Seymour, the ingenue less than half his age he’ll bed later in the movie. “Is that a good thing?”)"
This is a discussion that the country really needs to be having, and I’m really surprised we haven’t had it more. What I’d like to add, is that in addition to the historical (and under-discussed) need for wealth and power amongst men - there seems to be a social panic around wealth creation that began in 2021, and simply has not let up since. I wonder if this is because a lot of men feel their ability to create wealth and status threatened by the left (and they are being reactionary), or that a lot of men told themselves during the pandemic that they’d come out rich on the other side, or that social media driven jealousy is finally effecting wider demographics (men, and those 30+). I’ve simply never seen men freak out this hard about their ability to create long term wealth and status - and see no other life outcome as acceptable. The union job with solid government supported health benefits, along with being a leader in a local community (a local legend if you will) used to be enough for many men. Now it is just seen as meaningless, and a failure - it’s literally “get rich or die trying” for a larger and larger percentage of men in the US. Democrats tell men they need better healthcare (and that democrats will deliver on this!) and men are responding basically with “I don’t care if I’m not wealthy”. No one wants to hear they are “vulnerable” anymore - they want to hear they are soon to be a millionaire (often from Trump). Maybe this has to do with the decline of community too. I think we just need this to burn out - and for men to realize Trump is not going to make them rich…. and furthermore that the democratic alternative of a stable (and non-fictional) middle income future is quite alright! This might simply depend on the return of local communities, so that men will have some sort of status to hang their hat on again, other than simply wealth.
It seems to me that the best place to start would be to identify what social changes are actual "progress" that materially benefits people, and what is pointless nonsense. If it was somehow possible to roll back the nonsense while keeping the real progress it might be possible to win back some men without giving up too much of value. Preserve things that actually have helped marginalized people like gay marriage and Obamacare. Throw out nonsense like "cultural appropriation," "defund the police," and banning Dr. Seuss books.
One thing I think would really help win men over, based on my conversations with a lot of them, would be to declare all out war on the sex-negative schools of feminism that demonize male sexuality. Stop saying that men who like seeing sexy women must not think of women as human beings and other stupidity like that. It's both counterproductive and false.
Wouldn't anti-"woke" rhetoric be ironic if sex-negative feminism is the real problem, because the woke movement is (for example) overwhelmingly pro-porn and pro-prostitution (to the extent of using "SWERF" as a epithet)?
I think the "woke" movement is largely inconsistant on this. They sometimes sound like sex-negative feminists and sometimes don't. They often have a very circumscribed view on sexuality where they support porn, but want all sexuality out of everything else.
Regardless of what woke activists themselves believe, there is definitely a perception that hate male sexuality.
Interesting point you made at 5:15 about how anti-war sentiment inclined elder millennial men like yourself to the Democrats!
I suspect anti-war sentiment may also have been a factor more recently in the rise of MAGA Republicans, although while the anti-war sentiment of the people you were talking about was essentially an anti-imperialist one, the anti-war sentiment of MAGA types (like that of the "America First" committee whose name Trump appropriated) is more inclined towards giving a free hand to foreign imperialists such as Putin and Xi.
You suggest that the US progressive left went insane in part because a horrible human being like Donald Trump was still able to win the Presidency in 2016. But how much did Trump only win in the first place thanks to the Kremlin's help? While Trump played the part of a skilled businessman on The Apprentice, in reality he was so incompetent that he actually managed to bankrupt a CASINO, and Putin was likely keeping him afloat by using the Trump property empire to launder his stolen billions.
While it is well known that the Russians hacked the DNC in 2016 to help Trump win the general election, it is also quite likely that they also hacked the Fox News email server two years earlier in order to interfere with the 2016 GOP primary. They used this hack to manipulate Roger Ailes into stopping the hush-money payments to the women he was accused of harassing, triggering a sex scandal that cleared out many of the old Fox News higher-ups so that Putin stooges Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity could become the channel's leading anchors. They also helped Trump win the GOP primary by using their infiltration of Fox News to provide him with inside information on his rivals' strategies.
The Russian fifth column in Western countries is built on kompromat: while during the very homophobic 1950s the Kremlin blackmailed gays (such as the Cambridge Five) to do their bidding, the advance of gay rights made that approach obsolete, so they turned instead to pedophilia.
Yuri Andropov (as head of the KGB) set up an industrial production line for traitors. The first step was to send pretty young women to events where politically-active young men would meet, whose job was to report back to their handler which men couldn't keep their hands to themselves. Maria Butina was busted in 2018 for this kind of activity at NRA events.
The promising prospects thus identified would be groomed in increasingly depraved activities, with the final step being the filmed rape of a 12- or 13-year old girl. Only a small minority of the resulting kompromized traitors would end up in public office, while most would be used to help that small minority on their way (kind of like the RAF's Operation Black Buck, where 13 Victor tankers were used to get a single Vulcan bomber to its target).
Now going back your original point on how progressive Democrats have become toxic for a lot of men (thanks to stuff like Me Too) is it not possible that the CIA helped fuel the Me Too movement because they had learned about how the KGB/FSB recruitment process worked, and figured that Me Too would be a great way to prevent men with sexually predatory tendencies (ie the type of men that the Russians could plausibly have kompromized) from attaining positions where they could do damage?
After watching this I was thinking of an article Tom Nichols wrote on the James Bond franchise(I admit to being influenced by the character in my younger and even older days). Anyways I think the description of the Bond character shows why I don't really fit in with either the progressives or the Andrew Tate/Joe Rogan crowd(I am too much of a snob for the later crowd)
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/01/leave-james-bond-alone/676416/
"Well, yes—except for two other problems. Bond is something of a racist, and he’s a throwback to a traditionally white, Anglo-Saxon social caste, one that took him in as an orphan and to whose higher ranks he aspires.
In the books, and later even when played by the Scottish Sean Connery or the Irish Pierce Brosnan or the Welsh Timothy Dalton or the Australian George Lazenby, this aspirationally posh English identity comes through as part of the character. Whether 007 is pretentiously critiquing an “indifferently blended” cognac (to M’s obvious irritation), sneaking caviar into a health resort, or carping about the proper temperature of champagne, James Bond is a white Brit who is not only a snob but also one who intends to move up a social ladder that was designed and put in place sometime around the writing of the Magna Carta."
"Meanwhile, 1973’s Live and Let Die, a riff on the blaxploitation films of the period, was easily the most racist Bond flick. It has it all: Voodoo rituals. Frightened natives. A crime boss in Harlem who says things like “Names is for tombstones, baby!” and “Take this honky out and waste him!
Moore’s Bond endures all of this with the bemused smile you’d expect from the white Etonian who took a first in Oriental languages at Cambridge. The man reeks of what we would now call white privilege. (“Waste him?” Bond asks Jane Seymour, the ingenue less than half his age he’ll bed later in the movie. “Is that a good thing?”)"
Anyways I'll have a bit more to add on this later