Welcome to this episode of the Award-Winning Best of Left podcast.
Today we trace the pipeline from masculine grievance to fascism.
We'll hear how ice agents own family members describe them as low IQ
bullies chasing signing bonuses.
Why a former white nationalist explains that the alternative to unpacking
discomfort is becoming overtly racist.
How incel culture evolved from lonely forums into a MAGA recruitment tool and
what researchers found about why men socialize to equate violence with manhood.
End up joining state sanctioned death squads.
I'm sure you'll never guess,
for those, looking for a quick overview, the sources providing
our top takes in about 45 minutes today include s Swam some more news.
The humanist report, Pissed Masti and Matt Bernstein.
Then in the additional deeper dives, half of the show there will be more in four
sections, section A, fragile masculinity followed by Section B, pipeline to
hell, section C, the propaganda machine and Section D Authoritarian Curious.
But first, a reminder to check out our new show solved on the
best of the left YouTube channel.
We're really proud of the show we're making and think you'll
get real value out of it.
Plus you checking it out will help us find new viewers on YouTube.
So thanks in advance for all of your views, likes, subscribes, and comments.
That's all on the best of the left YouTube channel.
Linked in the show notes and now onto the show.
I used to hold completely unexamined beliefs about my identity,
race, and place in the world.
So much so that the discomfort I experienced when I was
encouraged just to think about these things felt like an attack.
It was new and scary, and it made me feel responsible for something
that I played no direct part in.
It made me feel like I had inherited the sins of my forefathers.
None of that was my fault.
It's just how it was.
History is the movement of people.
History is conquest and conflict and hierarchies, but the more I
ran from that discomfort, the more I avoided looking directly at it.
The larger and more intense it became, and I think I got to a breaking point.
I think I got to that place that many of us get to where that big, overwhelming
feeling solidifies into something we can wield, something we can weaponize against
others from our for of self preservation or use to chip away at the walls.
We've built around our beliefs and I remember feeling so
isolated, lonely, and threatened.
I didn't wanna drive anyone else away because of that, so
I opted to take down the wall.
And to be perfectly honest with you, it sucked.
It was challenging thankless work, but I would do it a million times over to
get back to this place that it got me.
I learned that it wasn't so much that I inherited the sins of my forefathers
as it was that everybody else did.
That just about every social and financial benefit secured by my
ancestors left at best, an empty space, and at worst outright
trauma inherited by someone else's.
I learned that my guilt is about as useful as tits on a bull.
It's not about punishment.
Me feeling bad, doesn't do fuck all.
It still places me at the center of the story, losing the rest of the narrative,
the shared history, the different roles created by it, what was actually needed.
Was an acceptance of reality and thus responsibility, accepting my role.
My place transformed my discomfort and defensiveness into anger, not
at the people who helped me see, but the ones who intentionally
kept me in the dark for so long.
The ones who continued to benefit from the stories they told me often
while leaving me with nothing but isolation from the people around me.
I was angry at Canadian institutions for lying to me about residential
schools and other genocidal violence against indigenous nations.
Angry that this beautiful land I call home would look so different if my
people had arrived with only quills and notebooks and none of the guns and bibles.
I was angry that years of reflection and growth had been stolen from me
due to the way that I had been trained to avoid examining my beliefs, the
friends I could have made much sooner.
The peace I could have found within myself.
The power I could claim for myself rather than defend for someone or something else.
I was angry about how much I'd missed out on the food, the music, the stories, the
dancing, the culture, the history, the vibrant patchwork of humanity woven into
being over tens of thousands of years before a small handful of self-important
dip shits through a white sheet over everything and said Tabula rasa, so
that they could rule over everyone else.
I was angry because it was cathartic.
I was finally free to feel my own feelings instead of safeguarding
the very same power constructs that were fucking me over as well.
Because there is a reason that the most powerful, wealthy, violent people in
the world are overwhelmingly white.
There's a reason that the face of fascism tends to be so pale.
It's not just a coincidence that the 10 richest men in the world
right now are all white guys.
It is not just coincidence that all of the tech bros who are destroying
the planet and the economy stealing people's jobs and cramming AI
down our throats are predominantly a bunch of fucking white guys.
It's not random chance that the degradation of workers' rights is
directly correlated with a rise in alt-right attitudes, specifically
pushed by these same rich parasites.
You know, the ones who enjoy all of the profits that we generate through
our labor, the ones who start the wars that we are expected to die in.
Those guys.
There is a reason that unlocking our anger as white men either
turns us into insufferable, woke moralists, or literal fucking Nazis.
Because we end up seeking identity, we end up needing to defend whatever
sense of self we are left with.
When we start facing the reality of the world, we can ally ourselves with
resistance or we can ally ourselves with the power constructs as they exist.
Those are your options.
You can have an identity that is built in solidarity with the people around
you, or one wherein you are a perpetual victim who believes that everyone
else owes you everything because God decided that you were better.
Speaking of, um, white supremacy is really embarrassing.
Like, don't get me wrong, it's evil and that is the primary problem with it.
You know, all of the genocide, but also it's an entire belief structure
built on the idea that you are just the bestest, goodest people, that
you're just the most important.
Like that's so pathetic.
That is so incredibly sad.
Just.
Stealing other people's music, other people's inventions, other people's
ideas, putting your own name on it and acting like you're a genius.
Like no wonder people like Elon Musk were drawn into white
supremacy so effectively, right?
It's all the same playbook.
It's incredibly.
Pathetic.
But anyway, back to the point.
It should really tell you a lot that the alternative to unpacking
discomfort is being overtly racist.
When you see these two different directions, you start to understand
what is actually meant by the assertion that all white people are racist
because you are either down the path of resisting white supremacy down
the path of white supremacy or stuck at the crossroads, acting like this
is a difficult decision to make.
Pro tip, it is not.
It's, it's very not, I don't bring up my own history here to self-flagellate
or moralize, though I know there will already be a bunch of people in
the comments claiming Otherwise, you guys go off, believe what you want.
I'm sure I'd be devastated if I gave a shit what you think.
I bring up my story to provide one example of one process that worked for
one person and confirm from experience that the other side of that discomfort
when you face it, fucking rules.
It is worth the work.
I don't need forgiveness or absolution for the way I used to be.
I am earning that for myself by fighting the systems that made
me that way in the first place.
And I'm not gonna say it's easy.
It is not easy.
It is often uncomfortable.
It is often difficult.
There are sacrifices that you have to make, but it's freeing.
If you want to know what real liberation feels like, that is how you get there.
Getting right down to it.
It is 2025 and a cabal of white nationalist phis are running the USA.
Thanks to white voters, especially white men, a European colony is
committing genocide and Palestine thanks to decades of support
from predominantly white nations.
The prime minister of Italy is two fascist by the standards
of Mussolini's granddaughter.
A white nationalist party is leading in the uk.
Polls and Nazis are attempting a comeback in Germany with the support
of the world's richest men, an apartheid era, white South African.
If an unexamined life defaults toward racism, what does that say about
the factory settings of our culture?
None of us exist in a vacuum.
We are all products of the world we're in.
Whether that is resistance against it or adherence to it.
When we work to preserve the current status quo, when we respond
defensively to request that we examine it, what are we holding onto?
What are we defending regardless of your own feelings?
Our culture created everything that we are currently seeing.
Clearly, clearly individual white people, simply not being personally
racist is not good enough to prevent white supremacy from rising to power.
It's just not, we need to face that.
We need to actively work together against this shit white guys.
We have to get our people.
Because it should tell you a lot about the amount of power that
exists under the banner of whiteness that the global majority has been
fighting this fight for decades and continues to face an uphill battle.
And the fact that these same shitheads see your suffering and point to black
and brown people as the cause should make you furious beyond the point of
simply not voting for these folks.
We need to demand resignations, continue protesting in the streets,
and just have these conversations with each other be so fucking annoying.
Just do it in the right direction because these empires of rape, abuse, and excess
have been built using our complicity, and that should piss you off because if we are
not having honest, frank discussions about what whiteness is, that conversational
space gets taken up by Nazis.
Ben has recently realized that some people he has worked with and who
have worked for him seem to have no problem signal boosting or agreeing
with an openly racist Nazi lover.
And he gave a big, dramatic speech, scolding the grifters and
liars and propagandists in his party for embracing antisemitism.
Only that and he is right.
That's bad, but he has completely failed to use this moment to ponder.
If he then has perhaps done to other groups, what he's now realizing is
happening to the Jewish community and because he has failed, it
basically means that his entire speech was useless and changed.
Nothing.
It's like farting in a jar and then burying the jar waste of a
fart because at the same time he's saying stuff like this, that Nazi
Nick Fuentes can simply say this.
If I went live on my show on Monday, this coming Monday, and I said Islam,
I said, these Muslims need to go home.
Them.
They're barbarians.
Their third world is they like to live in open sewage and bomb crap.
You think any conservative would disavow me?
Any of them?
Any Republican.
You think if I was known for saying that, do you think I would have any
trouble getting into CPAC or the New York Young Republican Club Gala or the GOP?
Of course not, because Laura Loomer has access to the White House
and she says stuff like that.
Ben Shapiro has access to Trump, and he says stuff like that.
Wow.
He's correct.
He's a Nazi.
He has the voice of a nineties standup comedian, and he's a Nazi
twerp and he doesn't actually care about what he's saying.
He's a liar.
He doesn't care about any of this stuff, but what he's saying there isn't wrong.
Right.
The garbage Nazi has dunked on Ben because Ben Shapiro has a long
history of being extremely racist while simultaneously being accepted
into mainstream conservatism.
This includes, but isn't limited to Ben having a rich history of blaming
black people for all their problems.
How can you argue that racism is not a driving factor in income inequality?
Because it has nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture.
And when you have a culture that doesn't and when and when it, you know what,
explain to me, you explain to me why black kids aren't graduating high school.
Explain that one to me.
Explain to me why black kids are shooting each other in rates significantly higher
than whites are shooting each other.
Explain to me why 13% of the population is responsible for 50% of the murder.
Explain to me why the, why the number of blacks and black kids in prison,
not for innocent reasons, not for walking down the street and getting
pulled into a prison is so high.
Explain if it has nothing to do with culture.
Explain to me why the single motherhood rate in the black community jumped
from 20% to 70% in the same course of time that the civil rights movement
has made such tremendous strides.
Is America more racist now than it was in 1960?
And if it is, please explain to me how that happened.
Ben, that can be explained to you.
We've done it several times on this show.
You just don't want to listen to those explanations because you've decided that
it's scavenger behavior to talk about or point to larger systemic problems.
You absolutely racist guy, like in that Fuentes clip, he's
basically quoting an actual thing.
Ben Shapiro has said in a tweet that he hasn't deleted.
Ben Shapiro has literally said, Arabs like to bomb crap and live in
open sewage and never apologize for it or retracted it, and certainly
isn't reflecting on that now.
He did very humbly included on this 2018 listicle of dumb stuff he's done
and said a list he promised to keep updating except he listed it under stuff.
The left is taking out of context with the excuse that he was clearly talking
about Israeli and Arab leadership, which no, no, you weren't Ben.
You didn't say Arab leadership.
And also why would their leadership live in open sewage?
It's a lie is my point.
Imagine if somebody said.
Jews like to bomb crap.
Would he accept that the speaker actually meant Jewish leadership of
the state of Israel specifically?
Probably not.
He's a liar.
It's a lie.
Is the point also that listicle was never updated because of course it wasn't.
Anyway, here he is last year at CPAC and Budapest still demonizing Muslims.
Sure.
We can look at the radical Islamists who have invaded Europe, who support
terrorism, who use western governments to impose effective fought laws against
westerners who speak out against them.
People who target Jews and Christians who openly chant for the downfall of
the civilization that they leach upon.
Hey Ben, that's um, that's a little dog doodle Katie drew.
Hey, Ben.
That's really racist, man.
You just said that this large and diverse group of people are actually
all radical, not in the Ninja Turtle way, which also Katie drew and invading
Europe and leaching upon people.
Oh, hey Ben.
Is that not the permission structure you were talking about?
He thinks he's being very decent and clever by claiming he's only talking
about radical Islamists, not all Muslims, but it's pretty easy to imagine how he
would react to anyone talking about the violence perpetrated by radical Jews.
Ben here is blaming a shadowy group of people for being the cause of
everyone's problems in order to imply that violence is justified against them.
You.
Scavenger you, I know we've talked about this several times, but in 2014,
Ben made a video called The Myth of the Tiny Radical Muslim minority,
in which he flat out lied about the statistics around radical Muslims
in every country, and lied, I should say, in a very deliberate way that was
specifically meant to make people afraid.
Here is just the first country he names Indonesia is the world's
most populous Muslim country.
It's got almost 205 million Muslims living there.
According to one 2009 poll, it showed almost 50% of Indonesians actually
support strict law, not just in Indonesia, but in a lot of countries,
and 70% blamed the United States, Israel, or somebody else for nine 11.
So you make that calculation, it's about 143 million people who are radicalized.
Are you scared yet?
We're just getting started.
So as PolitiFact would note Ben's calculation there is based on the
70% who blame the United States, Israel, or someone else for nine 11.
First of all, who's the someone else?
Ben, what part of that 70% says what and what parts of Sharia law do they support?
He's doing extremely bad math, taking the results of different polls and
surveys, misinterpreting them, and then taking the highest numbers and
applying them to entire populations.
That's on top of labeling radical Muslims as anyone who believes
in some form of Sharia law.
Or who blame as the poll actually said someone other than Al-Qaeda for
nine 11, if that number is higher.
It's everything he was mad about in his speech.
A liar deliberately using lies to demonize a huge group of people and say
that those people are coming to get you.
Now, I mentioned that was in 2014, and I want to note that the clip
we showed is actually from Ben reposting the video on his page in
2020, so he's still proud of it.
Guess that didn't make the article.
Shucks.
A few years after that original video is posted, a Ben Shapiro fan would go
to a mosque and kill six people in just the month leading to this shooting.
That murderer would've checked Ben's Twitter account 93 times.
And when asked his motivation for killing those people in that mosque,
the shooter would say that he felt that he was actually saving lives
because Muslim people are terrorists.
He's attacked terrorists.
Okay.
She knew
So when I done work party.
Yeah.
So, so you could take you,
'cause you felt you taking something, the person taking myself, they do.
Hey Ben, permission structure much again.
We've talked about this specific moment a few times now, but you can
kind of see why and why Ben doesn't.
Ben would go on to deny any responsibility for perhaps helping to inspire this
shooter who is specifically a fan of his, about specifically that issue,
his defense being that the shooter had seen many tweets from other people too.
He'd also seen tweets from people like Brett Baier He'd seen tweets from you.
He'd seen tweets from a bunch of different people, but it was he, I guess my account
was the one that he had viewed the most.
Now I have 1.4 million Twitter followers.
So I guess the idea from the left is that if somebody views enough
of my tweets, they're inevitably going to become a terrorist.
Ben, you're almost getting it.
Again, the same way you spoke about Grifters at an event filled with
Grifters, this racist killer put you at the top of a list of people
that included your colleagues.
Perhaps that means that something is very rotten with not just you, but
the people you call colleagues, and by extension, the stuff you believe
and say and are in service of.
Some ice agents are actually voicing frustration because.
They're not actually getting paid as well as they expected for their terrorism.
But I do wanna circle back to the different Reddit thread that I brought
up before we talk about that, because money is gonna come up again in this
different thread where user aggressive honey asks family members of ice.
What are your thoughts and feelings about what ICE are doing?
And here's some responses.
Had a friend who after he graduated, joined ice, he never struck me as a
MAGA or some right-wing extremist, so I talked to him about it.
He said the money was the biggest factor.
He didn't go through any training that was mandatory.
And since I'm working in mental health, dude came over to my home
just so he can p. This deescalation.
So I taught him deescalation and painless soft restraints.
Last time I heard from him, he said he was going to try and get a
different job as he couldn't handle all the screaming and the shouting.
Okay, that's good to know.
It works.
Right.
Honestly, I was just shocked he wasn't trained at all.
He didn't even know basic restraining techniques.
Okay.
But they go on.
Yeah.
So that's, uh, a sign that bullying works in some cases.
A, a cousin of mine who is British but lives in the States, announced the other
month that he was considering joining ice.
My grandmother, a woman that lived in the UK illegally for 60 years before
getting citizenship and his own mother let it be known that if he ever returns
to the UK, he will not be welcomed by the family because of the shame he has brought
with his ridiculous right wing views.
His own brothers have also warned him not to return to the uk.
This is a bad.
Family.
My closeted racist cousin's husband joined and dropped the news at Christmas.
It went over like a lead balloon.
He's an XPA state trooper who foolishly quit to open a brewery,
failed and a restaurant failing.
He's also a degenerate gambler who likely has large gambling debts.
He signed up because of the $50,000 bonus in overtime opportunities.
Figured he could make 150 to 200 K this year.
Nevermind.
He has to relocate to Michigan and is leaving my cousin to close down the
restaurant, sell their home, and wrap up her nursing career at the local.
Hospital.
Her parents completely disapprove, and this is both their second marriages
doing whatever it takes to make it work, but going right over the cliff
in the process with him, it makes me sad because she's attractive and always
has had a good career and work ethic.
Just married two guys who are incredibly poor husbands.
I'm always reminded that when my sister tried to join ice, she was deemed unfit
during the psych evaluation for being too empathetic, but passed all the physical
qualifications that was in the early two thousands when it was just forming.
That tells you all you need to know about how much of a psychopath
you need to be to be accepted.
This is especially true when you realize they lowered the standards
under Trump because they couldn't get enough qualified people to join.
Holy shit.
I have a cousin who is trying to get a job with ice.
He's very low IQ and very loud politically, so I'm not surprised.
I have zero desire to ever interact with him.
My brother, he went nuts one time when I posted a definition
of fascism on Facebook.
I didn't tag him, didn't include him in any way.
He just saw the definition and took it personally.
Later when I was expressing concerns about my wife, who is an immigrant.
He physically attacked me.
That's the kind of person they're recruiting.
My older brother, who is technically a white nationalist, is a Mexican
boy from San Diego who believes over half the people around him are
leeches and illegals, and that by putting them where they belong will
suddenly make him more successful.
He was kicked out of police academy for something I was never told, but
he swears that it was some black.
Guy with a vendetta.
Oh, I'm sure he just recently joined ice, but he got arrested
for drug charges last week, LOL.
Meanwhile, my sister gets detained by ICE for a couple hours visiting
her bf, and he victim blames her saying she dresses gay and weird.
So she's an obvious suspect.
Needless to say, ice is where dumb hateful cuts go to feel important.
Great point.
My brother joined us a few years back and got fully sucked into MAGA propaganda.
He constantly shares invasion at the border, memes, and
talks about saving America.
He used to be chill, but now he justifies separating families.
I've called him out on the fascism, dehumanizing people as threats.
No due process.
He just says, I'm brainwashed by the left.
One of my cousins, I'll call him, Jay, joined last.
Summer.
He's got some incel vibes, but didn't seem very conservative, so it was a surprise
to me when he posted about it on Facebook.
Most of the family expressed disappointment.
He decided to double down on it and made some pretty insulting comments to
family members and started posting dumb Trump memes and tagging us in them.
They mostly blocked him on social media.
Jay was not invited to Thanksgiving or our family Christmas.
Party.
When he saw photos of the Christmas party on Instagram, he started texting us and
begging to be included Again, nobody responded except my aunt, not His mother
responded with screenshots of the terrible things he said Last week, Jay quit
because he was worried about getting hurt.
Now he's texting me asking if he thinks people will welcome him back.
Now that he quit, he doesn't seem to understand that the damage is done.
One of my other cousins joined the Navy a few years ago, and the family
was really supportive and proud, and I honestly think that Jay expected
a similar response and now he's in a really shitty emotional state because
the family essentially kicked him out.
I feel bad, but he's also been such an asshole about the whole thing that
it's tough to have much sympathy.
My advice would be to show him as much sympathy as he showed to the
immigrants that he terrorized.
There's more.
My brother works for ice.
I am pissed at him and generally don't talk to him.
He started going full MAGA just before joining ICE and
completely drinks the Kool-Aid.
Now, he dropped out of college, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
I mean, that's not an indicator of being a terrorist, but whatever.
He lives in another state, so I don't have to associate with him.
He talks to my other family members about how all immigrants are rapists,
murderers, and drug dealers, and he thinks he's doing God's work.
He refuses.
To see that Jesus actually taught us to love our neighbor IE immigrants.
I have a second cousin in CBP that I spent a lot of time with as a kid.
He was a bully as a kid.
He's still a bully.
35 years later, I have a friend whose two grandsons joined.
She's disgusted and sad.
She tried to speak with them about the dangers of ice, but they
were very gung-ho and especially.
Excited about the financial rewards.
They and their parents all quit speaking to her because they knew
she was against them joining.
So she has no idea where they are or what they're doing.
She's quite worried, as well as angry and fears, hearing their
names or seeing them on the news.
It is dreadful.
My sister-in-law just joined who I do love very much.
It's heartbreaking for me in a way I can't describe.
She lives in Kansas and is a college grad, but couldn't find work anywhere and is.
Excited for benefits.
I told her that once she works for ice, she'll never find work ever again.
Once the dust settles, this is basically the Scarlet A. Yeah, and I feel like that
last point is crucial because if you're desperate enough to think that joining the
Gestapo is the only way you can support your family, you're going to eventually
leave your family out to dry one day.
In the event we ever have new Nuremberg Tribunals, because I was
just following orders, is not going to be a sufficient legal defense.
The Nazis found that out the hard way.
And I can't speak to all families, but I'm sure that most normal families
would prefer that you find a normal job, even if it's in fast food or retail.
Those are perfectly reasonable jobs that you're not too good to do, right?
Because that's better than the Gestapo where you're gonna commit crimes
that you may one day be punished for.
Often one of the biggest defenses Tommy Robinson will make as to why he's not
racist is because he always bangs on about his Jamaican and Sikh friends, right?
He has multicultural groups of friends.
I've spent the last six, seven years forming relationships with Sikhs across
the country, and we couldn't ask, and no one could ask for a better minority group.
More loyal, more patriotic, more hardworking group of people.
But what's happened here is just the ingroup markers have changed.
What he considers integrated immigrants are in his ingroup.
And what has happened is that ingroup has selected Muslims
and refugees as the outgroup.
And that's the thing about the ideas of like biological determinism.
The people who say that ethnic ingroup and outgroup is natural and
therefore we should follow that.
They ignore the fact that the whole point of society is built to
overcome our biological instincts.
If we lived by raw biology, we wouldn't look after disabled people.
We wouldn't adopt children.
Nepotism would just be the norm.
Violence for any reason would be legal law.
Wouldn't exist.
What biology gives us is tendencies.
Society decides on which ones to reinforce, which ones to attempt to
restrain and which ones to redirect.
That is the key point.
These experiments do not show that racism is inevitable.
They show us that ingroup outgroup tendencies exist and they are socially
constructed, and they are incredibly flexible based on very arbitrary reasons
such as T-shirt, color and football team.
However.
That is also a problem, right?
If the the boundaries are very flexible, then whoever is the person with the
loudest, the most powerful voice, who has their hands on the biggest
microphones with the biggest audience, they get to decide who is the outgroup.
But equally importantly, we're cracking down on more than $19 billion in fraud
that was stolen by Somalian Bandits.
Can you believe that Somalia, they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought.
I say kill the nation.
You say deportation.
Kill the nation.
Deportation.
Kill the nation.
Deportation.
You've probably heard the parable, right?
With the red ants and the black ants put 'em in the jar, they get
along, shake the jar, and they all start killing each other.
This phenomena seems to map onto lots of academic research, realistic
group conflict theory, integrated threat theory, uncertainty, identity
theory, and the findings are pretty.
Consistent.
When people feel economically insecure or socially unstable, they clinging
very hard onto group identity, and they often become more hostile to the other.
This really helps us to understand why figures like Tommy Robinson and Nigel
Farage were considered very, very.
Fringe in the two thousands.
If anything, they were the outgroup.
Everyone hated them.
And that's because in the two thousands, you know, life was good.
We were getting regular GTA releases, David Beckham was scoring screamers.
Things were pretty good.
But then, you know, after the financial crash, years of austerity,
stagnation, a global pandemic, global conflicts popping up.
Things just feel less stable.
People start feeling increasingly.
Anxious and they start looking for explanations.
So when you have someone who points out and says, there are enemy groups and they
are the reason why you are struggling, suddenly that story starts to stick.
Once the woke and the progressives are framed as the enemy, people don't
just reject them, they reject the morality that is associated with them,
and they form a counter identity.
Instead, an identity whose values aren't solidarity,
dignity, and shared improvement.
But instead you get a reactionary inversion, resentment, aggression,
exclusion, and isolation.
And it's there where we see the beginning of vice signaling w Epstein,
look, I'm on my villain arc. Okay?
Sometimes you gotta be the villain.
Epstein's, my boy.
Dude, let's just be honest.
Epstein was cool as fuck There I said it.
What are you gonna do?
Go ahead.
Cancel me.
It's basically just doing shitty things to look tough to win other people's approval.
It comes along as an adaptive response to a specific political and media environ.
When people repeatedly see big moral claims, symbolic gestures,
emotional appeals used by powerful institutions, but they don't see these
big grand claims translating into like improvements materially in their life.
So they start to lose trust in that moral language and they
start to become skeptical.
And in fact, the use of moral language becomes a cultural signal for an
opposing group once morality is now culturally coded as being their thing.
Performatively rejecting.
It becomes a new form of group loyalty.
This is what vice signaling is, right?
It, it's group positioning, it's showing to other people.
Look, I'm not one of them.
I don't speak their language.
I don't play their moral games, and they do this by signaling edgy
beliefs and using edgy language.
Like one very basic specific example is the use of the word retard.
People seem very proud that that one's come back.
They sort of say it sometimes and they expect you to go for.
Fucking hell bro.
You don't give a fuck.
Matt, do you stand by that claim of Coton Wall retarded?
Yeah.
I think there's something wrong with him.
Absolutely.
Sure.
And partly the, the kind of ideas behind vice signaling is to show that
you perceive the virtue signaling of other people to be inauthentic.
And actually you are very authentic.
I mean, do you think you are the best person, Nick Fuentes, to lecture
people about performative cruelty?
Why are you accusing me of being cruel?
Is that what that is?
Yeah.
What, how am I cruel?
You cr you cruel about black people, you cruel about, uh, women.
I mean, you're cruel about a lot of people and you're very performative.
Okay?
I don't think I'm performative.
I, if anything, everyone else is performative.
I'm authentic.
You know, whatever you wanna say about me, it's, it's real.
It's from the gut.
This is what we see in the origins of the term based, it is kind of used
by everyone now, but for a period of time it was really meant to signal
I'm, I'm like real as they come, bro.
I'm based in truth, right?
Authentic.
And in a system that is perceived to be saturated with performative virtue,
cruelty can often be read as sincerity.
You're not trying to show anyone that you are a good person, the opposite.
This is how you get to a point where you have this guy on a microphone
celebrating the death of Renée Nicole Good by an ice agent on
camera for the whole world to see.
And all you live your economy, motherfuckers keep
their hands to yourself.
You're gonna get hurt today.
We, we executed one of you yesterday, we executed one of you yesterday.
This to me, seems like someone who is very deep into this identity group,
that in their mind, they've got to a point where they just, they've stopped
seeing humanity and they are purely just performing to be approved by their group.
Now, whilst this happens on a social level, you, you see it in
like the, the Rogan Sphere comedy.
The Austin comedy scene, Jesus.
Christ.
Wait a ruin.
Take your New York liberal back with you.
Jesus Christ Virtue signaling on this show.
How dare you, sir. He probably did kill Tony in like 2014.
What do you call a a black doctor?
Nothing.
There are no black doctors.
Ah, the killer.
In Mongolo, you're like, yeah, yeah.
Say the N word you son of a. That was incredible.
Eventually, right?
It moves from, you know, the social level and in the same way
that virtue signaling ended up being commodified by the powerful.
So too vice signaling is landing in the hands of the powerful,
written by a nice reporter.
Now the poor guy, you gotta see this guy.
Ah, I don't know what I said.
Ah.
I don't remember.
And when you're a star, they let you do it.
You can do anything, whatever you want.
Grab 'em by the pussy.
I would bomb the out of 'em.
And they say, why is it we only take people from whole countries?
I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody
and I wouldn't lose any voters.
Okay.
Like to punch 'em in the face.
I'll tell you, I would bring.
Waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.
Are you stupid?
Are you a stupid person?
Quiet me.
Obviously, a large part of Trump's appeal was vice signaling.
These original controversies whilst assumed they would kill
Trump's career, did the opposite.
It bolstered support for Trump because it made him.
Real for rejecting the morality of the liberal elite.
But as time goes past and Trump takes more and more political power, the same
performative nature happens and it results in official American government social
media accounts, just posting basically neo-Nazi shit, A SMR deportation videos.
It resulted in Trump cutting us eight literally money that was.
Helping the most vulnerable people on Earth.
It resulted in Elon Musk coming in and cutting things like pediatric care,
cancer research for children, despite Elon Musk's Doge saving basically no money and
only making normal people's lives worse.
Part of it was just to signal that they rejected all of the woke things
that progressives cared about.
Renee, Nicole, good died being a lover.
She died because she wanted to protect you.
You would not piss on her if she was on fire.
Anybody saying that she didn't try to run 'em over.
You're a lover.
Thank you.
Over here in Britain, the labor government announced they're gonna
confiscate jewelry off of refugees.
We banned trans women from using women's toilets.
A while ago, Robert Jenrick walked into like asylum refugee processing
facilities, and saw that they had nice hand painted cartoons that the
staff had painted to make the refugee children feel more comfortable.
He told 'em to get rid of it because he wanted to make it a hostile environment.
That was such an, a gratuitous act of cruelty against some of the most
vulnerable people in the world.
And if you think that that is your route to advancement, I
think it says something about you.
All of these actions do not fix anything, right?
We can agree.
Even if people agree with this, somehow materially, nothing can, your life
will improve from any of these actions.
I would like to see all of Europe try to stop us.
It's the opposite.
We let you have your country's, you know, it's getting a little tiresome
that this whole Greenland situation has the American internet dweebs posturing
online as if the bloated state of the US military somehow makes them
personally some kind of a tough guy.
It's gonna happen.
You guys understand this, right?
We're gonna get Greenland.
The sooner that you just accept this.
The more painless it will become.
Oh, we are getting Greenland.
Who's we?
You got a spine in your pocket?
Who are you in the context of this situation, look, when your politicians
send young Americans to bleed and die and kill and maim on foreign soil
to secure cheap resources for giant corporate interests, you don't get a
say when those same corporate interests start divvying up the spoils of war.
You don't get a share.
See, that's why the oil giant Halliburton got about four.
$40 billion worth of Iraqi oil outta the George W. Bush era and all the American
people got was eight years straight of reduced rights, restricted freedoms,
and collective trauma followed by the largest financial crash in modern history.
'cause the wealth doesn't actually ever trickle down, does it?
And now that your government's acting on behalf of the.
Tech billionaires that have their sites set on Greenland, you're not
getting a share of that either.
You do, however, get to keep paying the bill though, don't you?
A bill that seems to be growing exponentially over time, almost as
if all this freedom fighting you think you're getting up to actually
isn't accomplishing anything at all.
It's almost as if it's actually all just a big scam designed to
funnel as much of your money.
Into the pockets of corporate weapons manufacturers and
war profiteers as possible.
It's almost as if modern war is actually more of a deeply dark business venture
than some kind of heroic feat of tism.
As for Europeans being pushed into responding.
We are falling into the same trap, selling you the idea that the Americans pose some
kind of threat that we need to respond to.
Meanwhile, the response in question seems to be funneling more of our
taxpayer money into the very same pockets of the US corporate weapons
manufacturers that the Americans are So.
Eagerly filling the pockets off, many of which are the pockets of the
very same people who want their hands on Greenland in the first place.
You really think there's an actual conflict happening here because I am
willing to bet that when the dust is settled, these guys will have exactly
what they want out of Greenland.
Not a single shot will be fired between Europeans and Americans, but.
Everybody's military budget will be through the roof.
Meanwhile, the chucklehead who got duped into paying for it all will be standing
on the sidelines, waving their flags with a satisfied, glazed over look in
their eye like they just participated in some kind of collective victory.
Following the lead of a bunch of tough talking limp wristed influencers who
are at best useful idiots, and at worst.
Controlled assets because what do you do when the future of your movement
relies on a base made up of angry young ethnically unseasoned young men?
When the cracks begin to show, when those young men inevitably start
realizing that they've been lied.
To that the results they were promised are never going to arrive.
The sinister cabal, they believe they were overthrowing, has actually been
pulling their strings and leading them by the nose this whole time.
What you do is, rather than giving them a second to think and potentially snap
out of it, you pounce on their fear.
You utilize their.
Anger, their xenophobia, their deep rooted sense of inadequacy
to radicalize them even further.
You fan the flames and utilize them to push the conversation further into hatred,
further into anger, further into division.
Then you shepherd them back into the fold slowly over time, not.
By moving them back towards the center, but by moving the center
over towards them, moving the public conversation deeper into
the radical and into the hateful.
Because hateful people are easy to divide and divided.
People are a lot easier to manipulate and rule.
I want to talk about solutions for men, which is not something
that I invest myself in.
Too often, but, uh, you know, we all have to get out of this together.
It really is reaching a fever pitch, and this is like a, a level of cruelty
we're seeing enacted across the country that that just can't fucking continue.
And I think, you know, yes, abolish ice, yes, abolish all of this, but
we also need, I think from a really deep and like psychological framework,
need to understand how to not reach this place where people would want
to even join something like this.
You know, and maybe that's a, a lofty ideal, but I, I, I think we understand
people who really look at this stuff closely that like fighting immigrant
quote unquote crime, which ultimately just amounts to like, you know, finding
undocumented immigrants who work at Home Depot and kidnapping them from their job.
Like it's a cartoon issue.
And if you're a man seeing these DHS ads.
It's not gonna give you purpose.
It's not, you know, so much of this centers around, like we said before, uh,
the supposed danger that undocumented immigrants pose to white women.
The Republicans constantly bring up Laken Riley Arena, zerka.
They always bring up those crimes as some sort of Gotcha.
When we talk about like Alex Pretti and Renee Good they're like, oh, where were
you when Lake and Riley was killed?
Well, the person who killed Ra Laken Riley is in prison.
You know, there's no justice for being murdered, but as far as you can go in the
justice system, these people got justice.
The difference is people like Alex Pretiare and Renee Good,
they were murdered by the state.
They have no justice.
In fact, the state is trying actively to not even investigate their murders.
But also we know that undocumented immigrants aren't the real people posing,
threatening violence against white women.
It's their partners.
Statistically, it's, it's their, it's their pastors, it straight white men.
It's other straight white men.
Police and ice agents and ex-military have a higher propensity.
To beaten and kill their wives.
Mm-hmm.
You know?
So what is your messaging to young men right now who feel like what was once
a sort of niche, highly misogynistic, extremely like, bizarre and intense
yearning for like, reclaiming masculinity that is now like the whole culture,
especially pushed from the government?
Like what do you, what's your messaging to them?
Uh, I, I don't have a lot that I'm as confident in these days because
what, what I've started to actually focus on more are the children.
Think of the children.
Actually, I do think community, community is a big thing.
Seek out self-development apart from these overly traditionalized
masculine frameworks and find communities, uh, outside of spaces
that are going to reinforce and lead you back to these spots.
And you'd be surprised at how much everything gets better
once you're in community and connecting with people and how.
How little feminists in, in girls with blue hair piss you off all
of a sudden when you have like decent friends that aren't also
foaming at the mouth misogynist.
But what I do actually think at least a lot of us should focus
on is what essentially amounts to the liberation of children.
One thing we didn't touch on that I'm going to just drop and then leave so
that you guys can't, uh, have to deal with the mess of it all, is that, uh,
we often forget that patriarchy is, is a, a non-gendered, um, framework.
If patriarchy is police most heavily and most beneficial to men, but like
a many men, myself included, will tell you that the biggest patriarchs
in their world were usually women.
And even if, even if it's just like other young girls when they were growing
up, you know, policing and affirming certain masculine norms, and I bring
that up with the children's liberation thing, is that we really do have to
reframe how we raise little boys.
And as a byproduct of that, also little girls, there's a lot of
effort being put in to reframe girlhood, all for the benefit.
All good things.
Like these are all good things that are happening and not nearly as much
is being done to reframe boyhood.
And what we're doing is priming these boys to be very amenable to Andrew Tate
or a Clavicular once they hit puberty.
And you know, I, I remember there was a video a year or two ago of
Sneako running into a bunch of like 11 year olds that were fans of his.
Mm-hmm.
And they're just shouting slurs and degrading women and trans women.
And they don't even really understand what they're doing, but they know that this is
what's expected of them as little boys.
Women talk to women.
What?
Sorry.
No, no, no, no.
Wait, wait, wait.
We love women.
Not, not like transgender.
Yes, sir. We love everybody.
No, no.
Yeah.
Max Preach.
Alright, what have I done?
And that didn't start, like, that's not Sneako's fault.
That's not Sneako's fault.
That is their parents' fault.
And that is a community and cultural failure for those boys.
And so we need more parents to be educated on what their kids are accessing online.
We need more parents to be thinking critically about the tropes and, and
cultural norms at they're reproducing in their home whether they realize it or not.
Even I, I know progressive parents that are, are surprised at how
misogynistic their children can be.
Mm-hmm.
Um, we reclaimed more of Gen ZI heard we got some of Gen Z back in the last year.
They were like, whoa, that whole Trump thing seemed cool at the
time, but maybe that was a bad idea.
Yay.
We don't let it even get close with Gen Alpha We edge in Alpha, a
bunch of Stephen Universe DVDs and whatever stuff we can to kind of coax
a lot of that nonsense out of them.
That is gonna be really the, the bigger fix beyond the things that we know,
material conditions and economics and joint labor unions, all, all
the good lefty stuff we know about.
But the thing that we're often missing is how we're raising the children up
to be primed for this type of nonsense.
We’ve just heard clips starting with:
Swolesome, arguing that white men facing uncomfortable truths about race
either ally with resistance or ally with existing power structures, and pretending
that's a difficult choice is complicity.
Some More News, observed that Ben Shapiro's speech about
permission structures for hatred was delivered at an event full of
the very grifters he was scolding.
The Humanist Report, revealed that ICE recruits were failed cops, degenerate
gamblers, college dropouts, and people with incel tendencies, and are motivated
by money rather than any sense of mission.
JimmyTheGiant, traced how economic insecurity and social instability push
people toward rigid group identities, making once-fringe figures like Tommy
Robinson and Nigel Farage suddenly resonate with anxious populations.
PissedMagistus, described how leaders exploit angry young men's fear and
inadequacy when promised results never arrive, radicalizing them further
rather than giving them a moment to realize they've been manipulated.
matt bernstein, recommended that young men seek community and self-development
outside hyper-traditional masculine frameworks, arguing that misogynistic
anger often dissolves once someone finds decent friends who aren't reinforcing it.
And those were just the top takes, there’s lots more in the deeper dives sections,
But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support
of our members who get this show ad-free as well as early and ad-free
access to our other show, SOLVED!
Including a members-only backstage segment, all via podcast.
We’ve also launched SOLVED!
on the Best of the Left YouTube channel but episodes are delayed there.
The show features our team of producers discussing a carefully curated selection
of articles and ideas to then SOLVE!
some of the biggest issues of our day.
It’s important to remind you that each episode of Best of the Left
takes about 25 hours of human labor to produce and, SOLVED!
isn’t too far behind.
So, if you get value out of the show and want to support all of the work that
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But, as always, if regular membership isn’t in the cards for you, shoot
me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don’t
let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can
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You can message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,
or you can simply email me to jay@bestoftheleft.com
As for today’s topic,
Last November, a teenager named Josh Sargent wrote a piece in The
Guardian about what happened to him between the ages of 12 and 14.
His feed filled up with muscular, wealthy men parading through
Dubai, draped in designer labels, flanked by beautiful women.
They promised him money, meaning, and manhood.
Misogyny was everywhere in these communities.
So was political extremism.
And what held him there, he says, is that they made him
feel listened to and considered.
What got him out was reading nuanced discussion that confronted these
spaces without dismissing his pain.
Writing that helped him see the business model for what it was.
In his words talking about the influencers targeting young men: "that's nothing more
than a facade. A dodgy sales tactic."
He closes the piece with this: "I can promise you, we're not lost. We're
just waiting for you to hear us."
That's the pattern with the manosphere, the ecosystem of
podcasters, YouTubers, and influencers built around male grievance.
There's a fracture at its core that can't be called out enough: the interests
of hurting men and the interests of the influencers who claim to speak
for them are fundamentally opposed.
The pain is real.
We should say that plainly.
Men are lonelier, more economically precarious, and less likely
to seek help than at almost any point in modern history.
But this isn't some mystery.
Decades of neoliberal economic policy have hollowed out the institutions that
gave people stability and belonging.
Unions gutted.
Pensions replaced with market gambles.
Social safety nets shredded.
The communities built around stable employment, the places where men
used to form friendships and find identity outside of work and romance,
systematically defunded or destroyed.
And the way boys are raised to not deal with their emotions means
men are particularly ill-equipped to cope with all of that.
Into that vacuum step the manosphere influencers.
And they're not entirely wrong about the diagnosis.
But as I frequently say, it's a lot easier to correctly diagnose a problem
than to find the right solution.
So, just because someone has correctly identified your problem
doesn't mean they have the answer.
But they do name real things; economic anxiety, social isolation, the fact
that men don't go to the doctor, don't see a therapist, don't ask for help.
All true.
But the reason men don't seek help is that they've been raised to believe
asking is weakness, meanwhile women are basically begging men to go to therapy.
And when men do go to the doctor, the system fails them
differently than it fails women.
Women aren’t believed about their pain and symptoms so they’re under-treated.
Men report their pain and doctors unconsciously assume they're stoic,
tough, and *wouldn't be complaining unless it's serious*, so they get handed
the strongest painkiller available.
That's how you get an opioid epidemic that kills men at significantly higher rates.
bell hooks was writing about how patriarchy harms men decades
ago in The Will to Change.
The feminist structural critique already explains all of this.
The manosphere just cherry-picks the symptoms that fit their sales
pitch and hides the real causes.
Another example, men are lonely right now but here's something the
manosphere will never tell you: loneliness is not a gendered crisis.
It's a universal one.
Pew Research found that roughly equal shares of men
and women report being lonely.
The CDC found it was actually slightly more common among women.
There is no male loneliness epidemic.
There's a loneliness epidemic.
Period.
The only consistent gender difference?
Women are more likely to reach out for support.
So the gap isn't who's lonely.
It's who has the emotional tools to address it.
Again, it's patriarchy behind the curtain, raising boys who think it's weak to reach
out and cool to be stoically detached.
And the lie by omission that is the "male loneliness crisis" is
where you see the strategy at work.
It's divide and profit.
Men, women, and nonbinary people all have legitimate issues that
particularly impact their cohorts, but the manosphere strategy is to take
universal problems like loneliness, precarity, and lack of community, and
bundle them together with gender-specific grievances to make the pile seem larger.
So large, in fact, that they can try to legitimize the idea that men are the truly
oppressed gender and women are the reason.
That framing kills solidarity, which works for them because solidarity
doesn't generate engagement.
Gender war does.
So watch what gets prescribed after the diagnosis: blame women.
Blame feminism.
Blame dating apps.
Blame the idea that women only date up and are wildly shallow,
only caring about looks.
The distraction tactics are so obvious, they might as well be
saying, "Look over here! What's this?!" while jangling a set of keys.
On that idea of women being super shallow and only caring about looks: I always
understood the opposite to be more true, so much so that beautiful women being
with sort of shlubby men is a trope.
Instead of looksmaxxing, try personality maxing.
And yes, the looksmaxxers actually have a term for trying to have a
good personality: "jestermaxxing." They literally rebranded being fun
to be around as a joke, which tells you everything about how desperate
they are to keep the scam going.
Going down the manosphere rabbit hole inevitably turns you into what
our producer Deon lovingly calls an "unfuckable loser." What woman
wants to date someone who hates women and darkly broods about it?
But that's not destiny, that's a choice so anyone can choose to be different.
I know a young guy who's nice to women and they think he's a miracle
sent from heaven because he does something as basic as apologizing
when he's slow to reply to a text.
The manosphere is setting the bar so low that just having basic decency
makes you a godsend to women.
But here's the hopeful point for the rest of us: the manosphere
audience isn't loyal to an ideology.
They're loyal to a feeling: someone seeing them and naming their pain.
That actually makes the whole thing more fragile than it looks.
If something else provides that feeling more honestly, people will move on.
So let me tell you about two responses to the same comment on
YouTube under our episode of SOLVED!
titled, "There is no 'Male Loneliness Epidemic™'." You can
imagine the people that attracted.
A men's-rights-adjacent commenter pushed back on the idea posed
in one of our source articles that men are loud complainers.
The commenter argued that, actually, men are silent
sufferers, not loud complainers.
And someone else, seemingly a woman and clearly frustrated, responds: "Have you
ever had to hear a man with a cold?"
I get it.
The impulse is understandable and the frustration is real.
But a guy shows up saying men are suffering, and the response is mockery.
If you're a man reading that thread who's actually hurting, what did you just learn?
That this isn't a space for you.
And the manosphere is right there saying, "See? They don't care about you. We do."
What I said when I responded to the same comment was that
he's raising a fair point.
Men suffering in silence is real, documented, and not their fault.
The way boys are raised creates genuine barriers to seeking help.
But the point we were making in the show was about the public discourse
about male loneliness, the version with algorithmic reach and podcast empires,
being dominated by voices that are loud.
The silent sufferers and the loud complainers aren't the same population.
The loud version is misleading and profiting from the silent one, while
giving some of those silent sufferers the confidence to go around to
internet comment sections to explain how uniquely oppressed men are.
There's a dangerous instinct on the left to write off anyone
using manosphere-adjacent language as a lost cause but it does the
manosphere's recruiting for them.
I'm not telling women to go be nice to strange men in public to
keep them away from the manosphere.
But online, the risk is lower, the potential reach is broad,
and the tone you set matters.
And there's a self-fulfilling mechanism worth naming for the men out there.
Men being angry at women makes women fear men.
Which makes women avoid men.
Which makes men lonelier.
Which makes them angrier.
Men who want to live in a world where women feel comfortable saying
hi to a stranger in public should be feminists, fighting for a world where
women don't need to be afraid of men.
The manosphere's prescribed solution makes the problem it claims to solve worse.
Alternatives to the manosphere exist.
Man Therapy at mantherapy.org is evidence-based and designed to
meet men where they are on mental health and suicide prevention.
Black Men Heal at blackmenheal.org provides free therapy for men of
color, with the motto: "Healed Men Heal Men." And Reddit communities like
r/IncelExit and r/ExRedPill are peer spaces where men who've been in the
pipeline help others find a way out.
But dedicated programs aren't enough.
What we actually need is for people who already have trust with audiences,
people who talk about fitness, gaming, cooking, whatever, to understand
the feminist perspective on how patriarchy hurts men well enough
that when it comes up naturally, they point people in the right direction
instead of reinforcing the old ideas.
This perspective needs to be in the ether, permeating through anyone
with any platform, any trust, talking about it patiently and in a way
that's welcoming, any chance they get.
So every one of you needs to help spread feminist theory on how
it's patriarchy and capitalism, not women, that are hurting men.
Speak up in conversations and comment sections whenever possible.
And I know what you're thinking: who's got the time or energy for that?
This will sound like a joke but I'm dead serious: use AI.
Give a chatbot the context, have it draft a thoughtful feminist rebuttal, drop it in
the comments, and move on with your life.
We can't abandon these spaces to hate-mongers and troll farms
when we have arguments that are so much stronger than their’s.
On a more personal note, if you have a man in your life who's struggling,
the research says relationships are the top thing that pulls people
out, far more than arguments.
So share the resources, post some thoughtful comments, and try to be
a positive influence whenever you can, in the real world or online.
People who are hurting for essentially any reason are worth
helping for their own sake.
But when that pain is being profitably funneled into anger and regressive
grievance politics, they can be a genuine danger to society, so it's in everyone's
best interest to do what we all can.
To repeat what Josh Sargent said to close out his piece in The Guardian,
speaking for men and boys who need help: "I can promise you, we're not lost.
We're just waiting for you to hear us."
Note that we’ve begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if
you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them!
Link in the show notes.
And now, we’ll continue to dive deeper on four topics today.
Next up:
SECTION A, Fragile Masculinity
Followed by SECTION B, Pipeline to Hell
SECTION C, The Propaganda Machine
And SECTION D, Authoritarian Curious
Child.
The patriarchy is fracturing and black women see it first.
But what people keep calling dating, chaos, gender wars, and
this masculinity crisis, or the male loneliness crisis, baby.
It's bigger than that.
Yeah.
We are watching the patriarchy crack.
If you know anything about the patriarchy, it is built off of
control, access, and silence.
Control over our bodies, access to our intellectual property, access to our
time access to our ingenuity and silence, and it's not working the way it used to.
Our feminine energy is responding.
It's a feminine awakening or a reawakening.
And it didn't come out of nowhere.
It is a response to burnout, exploitation, and emotional labor with no return.
And what we often get confused is femininity means soft, right?
I hear a lot of people talking about they're in their soft era, and yes, that
is part of it, but the feminine means to be aware, selective, discerning.
So it's more than the soft girl era or the clean girl aesthetic.
And I'd argue that black women see it first because we've never
been protected by the patriarchy.
We were always the people expected to carry it, maintain it, and suffer
under it all at the same time.
And so we've always seen the cracks and now we see this feminine
awakening from white women as well.
Wondering why black women aren't shocked, baby, we already knew.
So this is validating what we already knew.
And I wanna take a moment to say that this is not a gender war conversation, right?
I'm not blaming men, but I want us all to notice and observe
what's actually happening.
Black women have seen the cracks in the foundation of patriarchy.
For a long time, we've seen the contradictions and we know what it cost.
Often people call us bitter hard, too independent, but it was actually
clarity and self preservation, and so often people go, well, black women,
black women are choosing to be single.
We're losing faith in a system that never protected us.
Black women were never supposed to be a part of the patriarchy.
We're pausing.
Right?
It is discernment.
Baby.
We're letting the silence of our absence do the work.
Not suggesting that women aren't lonely and it isn't an issue, but
the reality is when a woman doesn't have a romantic relationship, she
oftentimes pours that energy into her work and her friend network.
I hate to respond to Galloway again, but he has been making the rounds on every
major TV show and podcast, and this video is a great example of just how
problematic some of his talking points can be and how he packages them in a
way that makes them sound reasonable.
Even in that very first clip, he acknowledges that women are also
lonely before completely disregarding it in the exact same sentence, but
the very next part of this clip is what I really wanna focus on.
She finds that relationship, love, and satisfaction in other places when a
young man doesn't have a relationship by the time he's 30, if he hasn't
cohabitated with someone or married someone, there's a one in three chance
he's gonna be a substance abuser.
Men need relationships more than women.
Scott is right that based on the data, men do struggle more with isolation.
He's also right that the statistics are alarming, but the takeaway of men need
relationships more than women is where the problematic subtext comes into play.
Because if you're familiar with Scott's messaging, he is specifically
referring to romantic relationships and putting the onus on women becoming
the sole entities capable of fixing us.
But it is not the job of women to fix broken men, and we need to
stop pretending like that isn't horribly problematic to say.
Both in how it objectify women as tools solely for the betterment of men
and in how it is derogatory to men.
In saying that we are incapable of finding community outside of a sexual partner,
we need to zoom out and, and think about this from a long-term perspective.
Men need support systems.
Men need friendships.
Men need to be taught from childhood that it's okay to have
emotional intimacy with people who aren't their girlfriend or wife.
Friendships with women, women's perspectives, women's presence
in our lives are all valuable, but not because they exist to fix
us, but because they're people.
You, you just said it yourself.
Women pour energy into their work and their friend networks, they find love
and satisfaction in other places.
There was no biological imperative that keeps men from doing the same.
We do tell men the exact opposite.
We've told them that having a best friend you're emotionally
vulnerable with is beta behavior.
We've told them that crying in front of your buddies makes you weak.
We've told them that the only acceptable place for emotional intimacy is behind
closed doors with a romantic partner.
Then we act shocked when men without romantic partners completely fall apart.
But this isn't a bug in the system.
This is a feature of it.
This is the patriarchy working exactly as designed and it's harming everyone.
It's harming women who are expected to be their partner's, therapist, mother
and soul emotional support system, and it's harming men who've been told
they're not allowed to open up to anyone except a woman they're sleeping with.
If the only thing keeping a man from substance abuse is having a
wife, that's not a partnership, that's a hostage situation.
My wife is not responsible for my mental health.
She does help.
We, we, we help each other, but she's not my emotional life wrath.
She's my partner because I like her, because I enjoy spending time with her
because she's, she's brilliant and, and funny, and I genuinely want to hear what
she thinks about things, not because I'm one breakup away from becoming an addict.
So when you say men need relationships more than women, what I hear is
we failed our boys by refusing to teach them basic emotional skills.
The solution isn't to make sure every man has a woman to save him from himself.
The solution is to start teaching boys that it's okay
to have friends, real friends.
The kind you can call at 2:00 AM the kind.
You can cry with the kind who know you're struggling before.
You have to say it out loud.
And those friends can also include women.
Like when you break it down, the whole framing is so derogatory to
men, yet I'm the bad guy, right?
We're not helpless, we're not ticking time bombs.
That need women to diffuse us.
We're capable of building the same support networks.
We're capable of emotional intelligence.
We're capable of being whole healthy people without romantic relationships.
And the beauty of becoming a whole healthy person is that romantic relationships
will then end up happening organically, but we have to actually teach that.
We have to actually model that and we have to stop using statistics about
male suffering as justification for why women should settle, or why women should
take on the emotional labor of fixing broken men or why women should stay in
relationships that don't serve them.
The problem isn't that men need romantic relationships more than women.
It isn't in our DNA.
The problem is that we've told men that they're only allowed to have
one kind of relationship, and until we fix that, we're just gonna keep
cycling through this same conversation.
Blaming women for men's loneliness instead of building a world where men are allowed
to not be lonely in the first place.
Bell Hooks talked about this literally over 20 years ago in the will to change.
This isn't a new phenomenon.
We can do better.
We are capable of being better, but that starts with us, not with
waiting for women to save us.
Before the United States existed, masculinity wasn't something men
talked about on a regular basis.
They didn't need to.
In Colonial America and in the early republic, masculinity wasn't an identity.
It was a status.
A man wasn't required to perform toughness or dominance.
Those things were assumed by virtue of his legal and social position.
Masculinity was embedded in property ownership.
Household authority and racial hierarchy.
White men ruled families, controlled women and children, and exercised
near total power over enslaved people.
Violence was present a lot of violence, but it wasn't romanticized
in the same way it is today.
Actual authority mattered more than masculine swagger.
There was no need for emotional self-expression, no obsession
with toughness, and very little anxiety about being soft.
Power was structural, not symbolic.
Politics did not need to talk about masculinity because
male dominance was everywhere.
It was structural.
It was enforced by law, custom, and religion.
There was no anxiety because there was no meaningful challenge to male authority.
Masculinity did not need branding because it didn't need defense.
The first major shift comes in the early 19th century.
This is when American masculinity begins to move out of elite
restraint and into popular spectacle.
It becomes rougher.
Louder, more physical and more performative.
Under figures like President Andrew Jackson, political leadership becomes
associated with physical toughness, with aggression, and a cultivated
image of the common man violence.
Whether it was dueling frontier conquest or racial domination
becomes evidence of authenticity.
Political leadership starts being measured not by restraint.
By aggression.
This is the moment when masculinity begins to merge with nationalism,
not because men suddenly changed, but because in a growing and unstable
democracy, power had to be performed.
The ideal American man is no longer simply a patriarch.
He's a fighter, a conqueror, a symbol of the nation's expansionist will.
The frontier becomes the proving ground for manhood and brutality is reframed
as virtue when exercised in service of white settlement and state power.
The frontier myth takes hold and created the self-made man, the fighter, the
man who conquers land and the people still masculinity wasn't yet in crisis.
It was expanding alongside a nation.
The real rupture came later when expansion ended and the economic reality shifted.
By the late 19th century, something breaks the foundations of traditional
male authorities start to erode.
Not because men are losing power outright, but because the conditions
that once guaranteed it are disappearing.
Industrialization pulls men out of physically demanding labor
and into factories and offices.
The frontier closes.
We'd won the West, we'd expanded all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
There were no indigenous people left to slaughter.
We had stolen all the land there was to steal, at least on the continent.
Urbanization replaces agrarian in.
Women begin to appear, however, tentatively in public and political
life, they go to work in factories.
They start earning wages, they start going to college.
They start entering professions like teaching and nursing.
Here's the important part.
Men are not losing power, but they feel like they are.
There is a profound anxiety that historians describe
as a fear of feminization.
Suddenly politicians and intellectuals and other American elites begin to.
Openly worry that the nation is becoming soft over civilized,
decadent, insufficiently masculine.
This anxiety is not abstract.
It's tied directly to class instability, racial panic, and the unsettling reality.
That dominance requires work in order to maintain it.
Masculinity becomes something that must be cultivated, disciplined,
and defended, and the supposed lack of it becomes a problem to solve.
This is the beginning of the modern version of masculinity that
we see today, and here is where Teddy Roosevelt enters the chat.
Roosevelt did not invent masculine anxiety.
What he did was far more influential.
He nationalized it through speeches, writing and policy.
He argued that masculinity wasn't just.
Personal, it was patriotic.
Strength was a civic duty struggle was morally purifying.
Weakness was not just a threat to men, but a threat to the nation itself.
Softness was a moral failure, struggle, domination and war were
necessary to keep the nation strong.
Roosevelt's vision fused masculinity with empire.
War conquest and domination were framed as necessary,
correctives to softness and decay.
Masculinity became a moral obligation tied directly to racial
hierarchy and imperial expansion.
Importantly, this masculinity was narrowly defined.
It was white able-bodied, disciplined, and aggressive.
Those who did not fit within its boundaries.
Women, disabled men, immigrants, and men of color, could be framed
as a threat to the nation, a threat to its national strength.
This is the moment masculinity stops being descriptive and becomes.
Prescriptive.
It's no longer about how men are, it's about how men must be.
The 20th century temporarily stabilizes this model through
war and economic growth.
World War I and World War ii reinforced the idea of the masculine citizen soldier
while the post-war boom converts military service into the breadwinner ideal.
Masculinity becomes defined by provision, emotional restraint, and lifelong labor.
The nuclear family is presented as the reward for masculine obedience.
Masculinity becomes conditional, provide or fail, suppress emotion, or be
weak, work endlessly or be disposable.
And this model of masculinity works.
Briefly and only for some men, but then pop culture steps in to
freeze this version of masculinity in place to preserve it in amber.
In celluloid Western's war movies and stoic male heroes present a simplified,
romanticized version of male authority, one that appears timeless even as
its material foundations erode.
Interestingly, some of these Hollywood depictions of masculinity
were actually kind of gay.
Watch my video on queer coding for more information on that.
Here's a clip of a particularly famous one, juah, we must believe in one another.
Do you drink to that?
With all my heart.
I mean, come on, the reality changes, the myth does not.
By the late 20th century, the provider model collapses wages,
stagnate manufacturing disappears.
Women gain economic independence.
The promises that once sustained masculine identity no longer hold
when masculinity can no longer be accessed through social structure,
it gets replaced with fantasy action.
Heroes, hyper violence and exaggerated dominance.
Flood popular culture masculinity becomes louder, more performative, and
increasingly detached from reality.
Men were presented with a fantasy of control.
They can't be dominant in life, so they're sold stories where dominance
is still possible, still achievable.
It's a compensatory performance.
Modern political masculinity follows the same pattern.
Masculinity is framed as being under attack.
Besieged by feminism, multiculturalism, and social change.
Masculinity is under attack.
Guys.
Every year a new political agenda, belief, doctrine, way of living,
eating, breathing, sleeping, or thinking is coming to corrupt your mind.
Masculinity is toxic.
Everyone's a misogynist.
You guys think this is happening by chance.
As men, you are only surefire away to not only prevent this, but to save your soul
in the meantime and the ones you love.
It's to follow your mission given to you by God.
And through doing this, not only will you change your entire mindset,
which you'll be able to stand up to corruption once and for all.
No more living a shadowed version of yourself because you're afraid
of what people may think of you on TikTok or a family gatherings.
It's time for you to grow up.
You're gonna die soon and amount to very little in your life.
So again, I say masculinity is under attack.
And the best way to combat this is to follow Christ.
Grab your nut sack and give the elites the middle finger.
Not out of hate, but because if you don't preserve what we have, no one will
and we will all perish because of it.
Strength is not about responsibility or leadership.
It's about grievance and entitlement.
The protector provider.
Persists not because it works, but because abandoning it would require
confronting the systems that made it necessary in the first place.
Here's the truth that no one wants to accept.
American masculinity keeps collapsing because it was never
designed to be sustainable.
It was designed to enforce hierarchy, to justify domination, and to
stabilize systems of inequality.
It was designed to protect.
Power.
I think women who say that they prefer a man who has a bad bod over a
muscular or shredded physique, they're actually lying to themselves and they
don't even know that they're lying.
Oh, thank God.
Finally, for the very first time, a man has appeared to tell women
what they're actually thinking.
Since these, these poor, poor women just can't be trusted to
understand their own feelings.
Go on.
And the reason for this is they have something called competition
anxiety, which tells them, Hey, if I date or marry a man who has a
great physique, there's other women that are gonna want them, right?
Or, and hear me out.
Maybe just, maybe different women are attracted to different things.
Wild concept.
I know it's almost like women are individual human beings with their own
preferences and not a hive mind all controlled by the same biological program.
So hypergamy of course you believe in hypergamy You know
what's fascinating to me?
Every single guy I've seen make this argument looks exactly like you.
Sitting alone in their room making videos about why women are lying about
what they really find attractive.
Maybe, maybe the common denominator here.
Isn't women's competition anxiety?
So naturally they're actually attracted to men who have great
physiques, broad shoulder, chest plate.
They're lean, lower body fat, higher muscle mass.
That signals that they have high testosterone and they're gonna
be better than the man that the dad bought for reproduction are.
Are you sure that's just not what you're attracted to because you sound like
you're describing a livestock auction.
Which is probably pretty telling about how you view relationships.
But here's the thing, if, if every woman is naturally attracted to
the exact same body type, why are there so many different types of
men in happy loving relationships?
I know this might blow your mind, but turn off the podcast
for a second and go outside.
Look around, you'll see men of all different body types, skinny guys,
dad, bobs, muscular guys, stocky guys, all with partners who chose them.
Did all those women just not get the memo about hyper gamy?
But because their competition anxiety seeps in, they're gonna tell themselves
and other people, Hey, I don't wanna date that guy, because it's gonna make them
anxious when they're in a relationship.
So to be clear, when a woman says she's attracted to something,
she's lying to herself.
And when a woman says she's not attracted to something, she's also lying to herself.
It's almost like no matter what women say, you've decided you know better than
they do about their own preferences.
Here, here's a radical thought.
What if, and this is gonna blow your mind.
What if women are actually telling the truth about what they find attractive?
What if some women genuinely prefer dad bots?
What if some women are into Superfic?
Guys?
What if some women don't really care much about physical appearance and are more
interested in, I don't know, personality, sense of humor, emotional availability,
the ability to actually listen to them and believe them instead of telling them
their lying about their own feelings.
The funniest part to me, at least of all of this, is that you're so confident.
You're standing there speaking with the authority of someone who's conducted
years of peer reviewed research, when really you're just a guy who can't
accept the, maybe just maybe you're not every woman's type, and instead
of dealing with that reality, you've convinced yourself that every woman
who says otherwise is, is lying.
That's not science, bud.
That's, that's what we call COVID.
If only she knew what I know about what she actually feels, that's just
an excuse to not work on yourself.
Women aren't a monolith.
They have different tastes, different preferences, different priorities,
and when they tell you what they're attracted to may be, try believing
them instead of telling them they're wrong about their own feelings.
Look, I, I'm, I'm just a guy who's about to celebrate his 16th wedding
anniversary with a wife who loves him and children who adore him, who also had
a fantastic dating life before getting married, despite only achieving what
could generously be called a dad bod.
At my peak of fitness, what would I know?
Maybe it's in part because I actually believe women when they talk,
now entering Section B pipeline to hell.
I wanna start by showing you to a video.
This is filmed by a legal observer who is, uh, recording themselves speaking
to an ice agent who's sitting in his car and, uh, and threatening him.
I will tell you this brother, what?
You know, I will tell you this.
Do what he wants.
You raise your voice.
I raise your voice.
If I raise my voice, you'll erase my You erase, exactly.
Yeah.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
You said if I raise my voice, you'll erase my voice.
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
That, that probably sounded a lot cooler in in his head.
Yeah.
If you raise your voice, I'll erase your voice.
That feels like it's taken like straight off of like an incel forum.
It's John Wick.
John Wick is the ultimate, uh, Sigma Grind set figure.
Yeah, I saw that video.
It's so emblematic of what we're talking about.
That guy who is an ICE agent and is hiding behind, you know, this perceived
power of the federal government and after ICE has been executing, uh, Americans
in the streets in broad daylight, having still the, uh, audacity, still
believing that he will be protected in threatening so openly like that, and
the guy was responding to him and going.
Okay, so you're telling me if I raise my voice, you're gonna raise my voice, you're
gonna do violence to me for protesting?
Like, that's just to clarify.
He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, bro.
Yeah, it's like that.
I just did that.
It's very like get, it's like chest puffed up, hyper macho.
Yeah.
What are you gonna do about it?
One, one thing I've always observed about the core figures, like the core,
I wanna call 'em victims for the moment, just for the moment of the red pill,
because they're usually the bottom rung.
The bottom rung, red pill figures.
Ironically are the biggest losers.
They're like incredibly bad.
And even to an extent, they also are usually the most
socially ineffective there.
There's a, a high, uh, prevalence of both self-diagnosed and fully diagnosed,
neurodivergence, another behavioral health issue, so on and so forth.
And one thing that you'll find when engaging and studying them is a lot
of what they're doing, which I think this guy is doing, is imitating
what they think the alpha males do.
Mm-hmm.
Under certain circumstances, which is why it sounded so stilted and unnatural.
Right?
Like, he didn't know if he had pulled the line.
Like, like he's like, like he wanted to get another take at it.
He said, yeah.
He was like, that was the rehearsal.
Can we run it back?
Like, I really wanna threaten you.
That sounded cooler.
Can I just get that back?
And so like, it's, so much of that is in their behavior, in their movement.
You know, if we, I don't know if we wanna jump to Alex Prety just yet.
No, go for it.
Go for it.
But like, if you watch, if you, you know, dare to watch the full events.
It's so clear that half of these men don't even know if they've
ever been in a fight before.
Mm. You know what I'm saying?
Let alone had like halfway decent law enforcement training.
And we know from looking at the, the information coming out about ICE
that a lot of 'em don't, a lot of 'em don't have a lot of training.
A lot of 'em don't have actual experience with law enforcement
or military, et cetera.
They're just getting guys that want to act out their, their fantasies fantasy.
Um, and we see the result of that.
I think too, this kind of recognizing that they can't cut it in any of those other
law enforcement groups, you know, they're, they're not signing up for the military.
It's like ice is now their, their ticket to that.
Yeah.
The, the low standards, and I, I just do want to throw out there,
you mentioned Elliot Rodger Mm-hmm.
He's not the only one, but numerous spree shooters and like these types of guys
actually do attempt to join the military and the armed forces as a form of.
Masculine reclamation.
'cause they may be a loser on these that and the third, you
know, in their previous life.
But if they can make it to the military, they really, you really
can't take masculinity away from, you know, a soldier so to speak.
It's too traditional of a role.
Mm-hmm.
So let's take it back to Elliot Rodger and incel culture more broadly, uh,
in the early 20 2010s, because I think that this is the formerly like niche.
Far right violently misogynistic culture that ends up getting co-opted that the
sentiment behind it ends up getting co-opted by the MAGA movement and
by Donald Trump himself, and sort of exploited to put these like disgruntled
young men and sometimes not so young men, uh, into these positions where
they have guns in, they're terrorizing the streets as a form of what you
say, uh, masculine reclamation.
So incel online really takes off in the early 2010s.
You can see in, uh, Google search results that the, the word incel, it
skyrockets in popularity around 2010 incel communities really take shape on
places like Reddit and four chan, where you have a lot of just like young men and
boys kind of just like complaining to one another about how they can't get laid.
And then it becomes this sort of.
Pathology.
Well, why can't we get laid?
Well, there's a, we are, we're genetically predisposed to never have
a girlfriend because of the thinness of our wrists or the slope of our foreheads.
It becomes, uh, you know, very race sciency very quickly.
Some of the main pillars of incel ideology and these.
Courtesy of a Zero Tolerance uk, uh, are that men are the real
victims of gender inequality.
That women lie about their own oppression and use feminism as a means of
dominating men, some might say, ing them.
Uh, I hate when I use, like, I hate when I use like incel words,
like unironically, like it, it just makes me feel so lame, so gross.
I imagine, imagine a Master's thesis where you just write kuck.
Was was the word kuck in your master's thesis?
Yes, it was.
Yes.
It was all kinds of horrible words right in there.
Stacey's and Chad and all that.
Stacey's and Chads and Becky's, yeah, yeah, yeah.
In order to prove this assertion that like men are the real victims of gender
inequality in cells will focus a lot on things like false rape allegations, which
we know are extraordinarily rare, but they will sort of use them to discredit
all allegations of gender violence.
Uh, they believe that women are naturally evil.
That women manipulate men to get ahead?
Well,
Caroline, as the woman here, they, they believe also, and I think
this is important, that women are biologically hardwired to want
to be sexualized and dominated by men, even if they don't know it.
Uh, and therefore any male violence against women is justified because it's.
Secretly, it's what they really want.
It's what they really want.
'cause, 'cause 50 shades of gray.
Hmm.
Which also was very hot at, at the, as things, these things pop off.
I think it's also this convergence of all these different groups.
So in the early two thousands you had, uh, pickup artists.
Yeah.
Pickup artists were so huge.
You even had shows on like MTV and whatnot, and you
have men's rights activists.
You have the black pillars, the red pillars.
So these are all, they, they have their differences, but ultimately
are rooted so deeply in misogyny and in this belief that men are entitled
in this world and what they are entitled to is being denied to them.
And that there is a, you know, a long history here.
When we talk about the crisis of masculinity, I'm like,
these men are always in crisis.
There is always some crisis of masculinity that's happening.
It just looks different depending on what era we're in.
And in the past there's been a way for them to like.
Address that, oh, we'll go to war.
We'll just chop off other men's heads.
Oh, we have the notions of now chivalry and kind of in the enlightenment era
and then that moving into kind of the western ideals of men being breadwinners.
Now men, they go to work, they make money, they come home, they take care
of the family, they earn that bread.
And as these men's, and, and I keep wanting to say like it is not just
these men, it is just the way that they are societally and culturally
raised to believe that they are supposed to have certain things.
They are supposed to be a certain way as men, but as their material conditions
have deteriorated as these, you know, as capitalism and these other really
oppressive systems have disenfranchised them, there is this desperation and
that's what's been honed in on by.
A lot of these, these grifters, these reactionaries, these male,
uh, you know, male supremacists.
So it's something that's been happening for a while, but like
in cell culture, it's just a, an evolution of these previous eras.
most of you, have probably witnessed a conversation like this before because
you've probably been in enough male spaces to know that there's always
at least one guy that is trying not to come in his pants at the idea of
having the right to kill someone.
Maybe he owns guns, maybe he doesn't.
But he will soon.
Maybe he wants to defend his unborn future child, or their sister, or his wife or
girlfriend that he doesn't actually have.
There's a lot of these corny, awful pictures of like dads holding guns
up to their daughter's prime dates.
This is a thing in how boys and men are socialized in this country, and
it's probably why Renée Good and tons of other unarmed, innocent people
have lost their lives in this country.
I won't go as far as to say that everyone who ends up in the military or police
force or ice has this exact type of energy, but I will die on the hill.
That these are usually the types of people that do go into these fields and
they often have the most heinous records in terms of overreach and violence and.
Outright killing of unarmed people.
It doesn't take much effort to look through America's long history of
police brutality, to find examples, literally on tape of these types
of guys just looking for an excuse.
Some of them outright will say it.
So what's at the root of this?
Why is this a thing in society?
I think the answer's pretty straightforward and it deals with men's.
Socialized relationship with violence.
Boys are raised to have a very paradoxical relationship with violence on one end.
It's instilled in boys very early on that they need to be capable of exerting
and absorbing physical violence.
In that without said capability, there will never be a real man because this
is usually where they be begin to learn to disregard bodily autonomy, both their
own, but also the autonomy of others, because bodily autonomy for young boys
is something that you have to earn.
Through your capacity to exert and withstand violence, your capacity
to enforce your own autonomy, and in that same breath, you are also
expected to test the autonomy of others in order to make sure that
they're on the same grade as you are.
And this is done through informal body rituals with little boys, whether it
be something as benign as flicking someone in the ear, or as heinous
as the many stories of bullying.
Or hazing that you might hear in a sports locker room in middle or high school,
and that's where the paradox sets in because you're pretty explicitly told to
be capable of violence, but there's also a lot of conflicting rules around it.
Don't be a bully unless it serves a greater purpose or
someone is asking for it.
Don't hit women, but also don't let anyone emasculate you.
And if they do, then it's your responsibility to reaffirm your
masculinity with violence if necessary, regardless of who does it.
Use your strength to protect and support others, but that
also means you're in charge.
And if people don't respect the fact that you're in charge, they're
emasculating you, which means you might have to reaffirm that
masculinity through violence.
You see how this is a very confusing and ugly thing that
a lot of men are dealing with.
However, at the end of the day, I wanna be clear.
Most men.
Most men, the vast majority, even the worst of us, don't
aspire to be violent psychopaths.
Most men engage with this complex relationship with violence without
actually committing acts of violence on other people for whatever reason.
And then some join Ice.
Herschel Walker, I remember vividly, if you don't know, Herschel Walker
is one of the greatest football players of all time, right?
But he said himself that he almost didn't go to college because he wanted to join
the Army 'cause he wanted to kill people.
This is a real story and he is not alone in that regard.
Some of you don't hear these conversations, but if you go into
enough men's spaces with some of these dudes, they will let the mask slip.
They will tell you, and that brings you back to the film Nobody.
What's interesting about nobody is that it's one of the few films that.
Honest about this relationship with violence, about the movie's
relationship with violence.
When you look at a lot of the, I called them Sigma Male action stars made a video
about a little while back because at the turn of the millennium you saw a like
very distinct change in the way idealized masculinity was presented to Americans.
It used to be Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone.
You know, uh, rock Jean Claude Van Damm.
I was about to call him Rob Van Damm.
Shout out.
Right.
Anyway, alpha male, idealized images of masculinity used to be these big
muscular over the top figures, and with like the Matrix and Jason Bourne
and eventually John onto John Wick.
Now, that changed into more of like an every man.
Low key, neurodivergent coded figure of these people that they
weren't necessarily less masculine.
It's just that the idealized masculinity was now this stoic,
almost like sociopathic figure that was able to effectively operate
in this violent world while also staying very subdued and very calm.
There were no more one-liners, no more sweat, no more dirt and muscles.
It was just badass.
Sigma Wolf action males put the, put the music behind it, right?
You know what I'm talking about?
However, nobody has some of those features, but it's actually just
more honest it star, a very normal guy who happened to, used to be
a contract killer or enforce of some type for the US government.
And he has traded that life for the trappings of what normative, patriarchal
masculinity says is supposed to satisfy a man, namely a wife and the
kids, and a house in the suburbs.
However, the movie puts in a lot of energy to situate those things
as unfulfilling and even demeaning when Bob suffers a home invasion.
This Bob Odenkirk, by the way, and in the movie his name is Hutch.
Bob Oden Kirk, you know, from Better Call Saul.
I never watched that.
I probably should watch that.
I heard us pretty good.
I need some new shit to watch.
We'll put some new shit I should watch in the comment section.
But then his house gets burglarized and he decides even though he really
could have very easily killed these two burglars to let them go, and
everyone, including his own son and his brother-in-law and everybody in his life
demeans him and emanates him for the fact that he had the chance to kill someone
with a righteous kill type situation.
And he doesn't.
He suffers this silently until he realizes that somebody actually
stole something from his youngest daughter and then he goes on a
trek to find that particular thing.
Highs and intrigue ensues is very much worth the watch if you're an action fan.
But what's interesting from the film is Howard made to recognize how much
happier Oden Kirk's character Hutch is now that he has reignited his relationship.
With violence.
It's almost a love story in that way.
It's like Mr. And Mrs. Smith, except Mrs. Smith is violence itself.
And again, it's a fun, ridiculous film.
I never watched a sequel, but I figured it's just as good.
But I found the underlying themes telling about how we
imagine and even idealize men.
In your John Wicks, it's obvious as a movie watcher that violence is cool.
The assassin underworld is cool, but Wick as a character
is above the violence itself.
95% of the time, he doesn't seem like he's having fun.
This is all just reflexive to him, but in nobody, it's very clear that Oden
Kirk's character loves what he's doing.
He loves that he finally has an excuse to let loose.
The violence is more brutal.
Instead of sleek nightclubs and Asian corporate buildings, they're fighting
in like abandoned factories and car shops and shit, and like public buses.
And because of this, while nobody is successful, I wonder if it's less popular
because it's more honest about what.
Violent fantasy really is and really looks like to the people watching it.
These folks that join ICE or the military or the police will
tell you it's about a code or a country or brotherhood or whatever.
And I'll give Grace to say that to maybe a few of them.
That's true, but for others of them, it's just power.
It's just the excuse to be rabbit dogs who probably would've been
put down in some other context.
That's who we're dealing with right now and who we've been dealing with forever
when it comes to the teeth of the state
the older I get, the more lessons I learn from my time in combat sports
in any number of different directions.
But in this particular case.
Listen, there's plenty of very tough right wing men.
This is not an argument about the totality of them, but just to understand
something, there is a certain, and I've learned this from combat sports,
there's a certain kind of right wing guy that is deeply insecure, deeply weird.
Uh, very much a cos player in terms of who they present themselves to, the
public versus who they actually are.
And they really love getting behind who they perceive to be strong and
whether or not they actually are as a different matter, but the ones
who they perceive to be that way.
In part because inherently they are fearful and inherently they are weak
and they need someone else to do the dirty work for them, and then they
kind of almost claim ownership over it.
As a way to then make themselves feel better.
Like, I'm aligned with this, this is what I would do if I was in that situation.
And they might have obviously some ideological agreement more broadly
with whatever they're looking at.
And therefore they'll say, that's, that's who I am.
That's me.
Right?
That's uh, and, and, and you see this kind of thing all the time.
And again, not so much.
The athletes who again, have, at least on the athletic side,
a, a, a fair amount of bravery.
But, but beyond that, in terms of just social control and these sort of broader
ideas, these are incredibly, incredibly, and I've seen it inside of combat sports,
really weak right wing men who need other men to do something that they perceive to
be masculine, performative, or otherwise.
And then they do this weird bit where they kind of claim ownership over it.
Almost as if it belonged to them, which you might even say they don't even, they
shouldn't even want to claim those things.
But I'm just saying that's the chain of custody.
That's the thought.
I've seen it.
And the kind of guy that enrages, those Dons that I'm talking about is
the kind of guy who actually lives in a way that they can't comprehend.
These kinds of people cannot differentiate.
Strength from abuse.
They don't know how to disentangle the two.
So when they see somebody who is not abusive, but is strong, they
re, they react in revulsion, right?
They react very, very negatively.
They react very strongly because what they're really doing is holding
up a mirror to these losers and these bottom feeders about what
they actually are when they see someone with strength, genuine, real.
Not performative masculine strength or even other forms of it too.
It drives them insane because it just is a lesson in their own inadequacy.
I bring this all up to say I don't really watch Tim Pool at all.
I see his stuff come up.
I. On my social media feeds or I see it on YouTube and I'm always just
kind of flabbergasted that he could have an audience given, just given
how utterly uninteresting anything he says, for the most part appears to be.
And he had a clip that I saw get circulated that I just thought I had
said to myself, I could not believe how perfect it was in trying to understand
this kind of phenomenon I'm talking about.
And.
It laid it out so bare, so crystal clear that I had to share it with you here.
Listen to this and tell me if this does it.
Completely describe A, exactly who I'm talking about, and B, that you
don't understand the exact same thing, even if you haven't witnessed this.
On the combat sports side, in particular, weak men trying to co-opt what they see
as the strength of others, whether or not it's strength or not, usually it's not
because they can't differentiate strength from abuse, so they lean into what
others do as abuse as a sign of strength.
And then say, oh, well that's, I, I could do, that's me.
I could do that.
Right?
So they're lionizing and they're celebrating the wrong kind of what
they perceive to be strength, and then on top of it, taking credit for it.
Simply, first of all, when these people come out and go, Tim's a
boot lip here for defending us.
I'm like, no, no, you misunderstand.
It's my boots.
It's mine.
I voted for them.
I'm wearing the boot.
I'm stomping on the ground.
I ain't licking anybody.
I'm clapping for these people that I said, please go out and enforce
the law and anybody else who's cheering for, who voted for it too.
We're all wearing the boots.
You're the one crying.
You're the one saying you're coming.
You are nothing.
You are nobody.
You look at these jobs and the men who do them, because again, you can't
differentiate strength from abuse, and you see that and it appeals to
you because internally you don't understand that strength isn't abuse.
You only see it in that form because you are weak.
Because your internal constitution is weak.
If it came time to stand a post with an M 16 A two and actually put on the
boots, you'd be the first one shitting and pissing yourself in formation.
You couldn't do these jobs, which are abusive in nature.
If your life depended on it, it's not your boot.
It has nothing to do with your boot.
Your boot will never be found there.
You aren't that person.
You lionize them and you celebrate them and you enjoy what they do and their
performative cruelty because you are in constitutionally weak, like this project.
That is true.
There is some symmetry there, but even then you are still too chicken
shit to go out there and actually do the hard labor that it entails.
You are not that guy.
You are not that person.
This kind of dope that you see Tim Pool kind of being here with the one
I referenced from combat sports, their number one feature is to talk tough.
Sometimes they hide their identity, sometimes they don't, but talking tough
is the only part of them that is tough.
There's no other feature to them that you would ever identify as strong,
masculine, tough, any of the things that we would commonly understand
because they don't live those lives.
They cannot live those lives.
They are constitutionally incapable of it, but they can talk tough on the internet.
And so that's the thing that they lean on and that's what they use
performatively to kind of signal their adoration for what they deem strength.
That's, that's this guy.
Never stood a post, couldn't bench press his own body, weight of his life, did.
This motherfucker can't even grow hair.
He is nothing.
You are nothing, Tim.
You are not who you think you are.
You can fool all these people on the internet.
Even in terms of just leveling with the audience, you.
You took money from the sketchiest of sources and then claimed not to know
anything about it in the end, despite the fact that there should have been
a million red flags about it, and yet you wanna be taken seriously.
If not as a journalist, as some kind of independent and honest media figure,
you are nothing that you say you are.
You are absolutely disconnected from the things you tell yourself and the
things you tell the public to say.
Nothing of the fact that he cannot tell the difference.
Between strength and abuse, as I've been kind of talking about this whole
time and more to the point, what you really need to understand here is on
the substantive matter of the argument that he is making, aside from a little,
tiny, weak person pretending to be strong behind a keyboard, is really
just quite pathetic in its own right.
But putting that aside for just a moment on the matter, on the substance
of the matter here, what he is doing is cheerleading a lawless operation.
He is cheerleading something to say nothing of how foolhardy the
project is in national self-harm to deport the very best of us.
And yes, of course ice goes after criminals and it's fine that they
get them, but as we now know, they're going after day laborers,
dishwashers, friends, neighbors.
Colleagues, family members.
I mean, that's who they're going after now, right?
And this idiot cannot differentiate the validity of this mission, and
so he's continuing to cheerlead it.
Again, he cannot tell the difference between abuse and strength.
It is that that distinction is invisible to him.
And the point I'm trying to make is he is cheerleading on a lawless operation.
If you take the exact thing and the methods that ICE is using to do it.
Routinely, for example, ignoring court orders, right?
Just on that level alone, and you turn that against a project,
a political project that he would support one more time.
He'd be the first one shitting and pissing himself.
As a consequence, he doesn't, he doesn't care about the proper
role of the federal government.
He does not care about restraints on it as it pertains to protecting
oneself, protecting the interests of the average person, protecting their
constitutional rights for crying out loud.
He never answers the question, what does the government, what should the
government be allowed to do to me?
What he's saying is, here's what I want the government to do to you.
Because he is weak.
He is constitutionally weak.
Anybody who gets out there and says things like, oh, that's my boot.
It's not your boot, Tim.
It's not.
You can be supportive of whatever you want, whatever you believe ice is
doing, but the reality is what the, the, the, the, the genuine material
things that they're engaging in and the lawlessness of it, it can be
turned against you and your people.
It can be turned against you and the things you support.
And you will not be sitting here saying, wow, this is just a, this,
these are just powers that I'm glad have been enumerated to the federal
government and given to them.
That's the point.
The point is what are they allowed to do to all of us?
And what kind of questions should we have?
What protections should we uphold?
What rights do we have in this matter?
Whether it's about immigration enforcement, whether it's about the,
the, the right to choose in various states, whether it's about any other
number of different factors that are involved here, he cannot tell
the difference between abuse and strength, and there is no greater.
Red flag.
There is no greater revealer of a weak man than somebody who conflates the two.
A fascist regime doesn't spread by convincing someone that they are.
Evil in doing bad things.
It spreads by telling someone like Cyril that they are right about everything
they thought about them previously.
Cyril believes the Empire is doing the right thing and he never lets
his guard down to really investigate.
This dude was a deputy inspector, and yet it never tipped him off until the very
end that everything the Empire was doing defied his beliefs in law and order.
That's why I think he is probably the most naive character that's
ever existed in the franchise.
He's so gullible about.
Everything and is easy to manipulate that.
Even his own romantic relationship, if you wanna call it that, with
Dera, seemed to fake as well.
I'm sure that there probably was a real aspect to it, given what we see
of him when he's at home with her.
But every time they are involved with Imperial jurisdiction, all of
that gets thrown out the window.
It's all about what their role is in the empire and what it means to their careers.
Dera even says it as much right to his face during the scene when he
confronts her about what the empire was doing on Gorman the entire time.
It's a full circle moment when we look back on where his character
started and how it ended.
And this is subsequently a great segue into discussing his eventual.
Death as everything around the Gorman massacre is happening, he's lost with
basically nothing left to show for it, and that would eventually be how his
character ends when it feels like he can't justify anything longer and has
no way of even being in the moment when all the chaos is happening around him.
There was one final thing left for him to do that just so happened to
be caught right in front of him as.
Everything was going down, which is seeing the very man that got him
into this mess in the first place.
His original instincts and personal drive kicked right in.
And we see these two finally go at each other in a very visceral and violent way.
All of you watching this video have already seen the sequence, so I'm not
gonna go through its scene by scene, but his death illustrates an important
final line that also just happened to be the title of the episode.
One simple question.
Who are you?
It's just such a good line to end a character's arc and more specifically
this character when everything comes crashing down around him.
And in his final moments, he's asked that question by Cassian.
There's no perfect way to end it off because in that very last moment of his.
I don't think he knew who he was and when he's directly asked the question
and he starts letting his guard down before he shoots Cassian, it
almost felt like that was it for him.
There was absolutely nothing more he could do after that, even
if he did kill Cassian Cyril.
Karin dies the way fascist systems always consume their most loyal servants quietly.
Meaninglessly and without recognition, there are too many serials for the
system to care about Any one of them that may have done something that helped
the regime grow because at the end of the day, they don't care who does it.
They just care that it happened in the end.
I'm actually one of the people who was kind of glad that.
He didn't get a true redemption arc because even though it felt like they were
teasing the idea that it would happen, his death was the final nail in the
coffin for that even being a possibility.
He was just another uniform to the empire and nothing more.
And that's basically all his character is ever going to be remembered by, at
least within the eyes of the empire.
The empire.
And someone like Dera sold him a lie that has been built on through so
many other different people like him, and that is how all these different.
Fascist outlines are created throughout time and as we've seen
them in our collective history as a species in real life.
And once again, we are seeing it continue now here in the
real world, across the globe.
Today we are watching political movements and governments rise up promising cruelty
and promising order in our daily lives.
That's the kind of language that someone like Cyril was brainwashed
into thinking would actually happen.
Even though we are actually seeing it happen right now, we are seeing it
happen in ways that was never promised, and it's hurting people's lives in the
worst way possible here in America.
I can't begin to tell you how bad it is getting, and obviously
it's not just happening here.
It's happen.
All over.
I don't wanna be ignorant of that, and I want to make that clear
just in case anyone was wondering.
People like Cyril are a real danger because we see too many of him in
real life right now, whether it's in a person or all over social media, the
kind of people that will defend the defenseless arguments that are made
to justify actions that are actually illegal when the people seeing them
through, don't care if they are or not.
History shows us that authoritarian systems don't survive on charisma alone.
They survive because millions of people decide that obedience to a cause is
easier than actually being objective and right about what's really going on.
And once enough people believe in that sentiment, the
empire doesn't have to rise.
It will already have been here to begin with.
the thing about this global order is it is rhetorically at least
built on notions of reciprocity and equality among nations, right?
The United States is part of a community of nations.
It can't just break the rules.
It breaks the rules all the time.
The rules don't apply to it.
But the rhetoric of American presidents and American leaders is
that of international cooperation.
That's the pretense.
You could call it hypocrisy, but hypocrisy as the aphorism goes, is the
compliment that vice pays to virtue.
And although much of the world grumble about this hypocrisy, the United
States was genuinely indispensable, was the world's economic hub.
Center of global finance, the dollar, the reserve currency, American military, might
crucial to securing free trade, right?
All these things are the case.
The United States was an indispensable nation, and so when it broke the rules,
when it engaged in imperialistic ventures abroad, even when other states, other
nations objected and can play, and they still played ball because they had
to play ball from the perspective of American elites, this is almost the.
Best of all worlds, right?
You can do whatever you want essentially.
And the rest of the world is highly dependent on you.
And because the relationships of dependency are so lucrative for
everyone involved, the rest of the world isn't also that interested
in trying to change the arrangement fundamentally, maybe on the margins.
But for the most part, people accepted a world of dominant American power.
And there was even more so after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States was
sort of the, the world's lone superpower.
Why did I bring all this up?
So we have a global order, pre-Trump global order that is rhetorically
and perhaps ideologically built on notions of equality and
reciprocity on cultural exchange, on influence through peaceful ways.
We know that in practice those ways weren't so peaceful in the United States,
did a lot of terrible things and caused a lot of misery, but rhetorically, at
least that is what it was built on.
That was how American presidents spoke.
George W. Bush did not speak about.
Going to warn Iraq to secure oil supplies.
He spoke about spreading democracy, and I'll say it's just a bit
of a parenthetical that they often believe this as well.
People's motivations aren't as clear cut in material as I think
some analysis would present them.
People including the leaders of superpowers are a bundle of motivations
and decision making at that high level isn't always so clear cut.
It may not even be entirely rational.
That's scary to think about, but it is the case.
The current situation in the United States is I think, abundant
evidence that it is the case.
So we have this rhetorical commitment to freedom and equality,
democracy, all these things.
We have the actual behavior of the United States, and there's
an obvious contradiction there.
We also have the failures of the past two decades, the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the global financial crisis, and so on and so forth.
I think like guys for Matt Walsh, for Stephen Miller, for Donald
Trump, for the entire MAGA Wright.
They look at the rhetoric and they say, oh, that was the basis for American power.
They ignore the networks of institutions of relationships.
They ignore the actual dynamics happening in terms of America's
relationships with the rest of the world.
They focus on the rhetoric and that rhetoric to them reads as weak,
as feminine, as Walsh said, gay.
In power, their aim is to dismantle the institutions and relationships
that rhetoric was used to justify.
They don't see what we see, which is the United States that can largely operate
with impunity, but does so within certain rhetorical and ideological limits.
What they see is United States restrained.
By notions of fairness and reciprocity and democracy and all these things,
they look to someone like Vladimir Putin and they admire that, that kind
of no pretense, no hypocrisy might makes right the strong do what they want.
Now, here's the turn behind all of this is a vision of masculinity, a
vision of what it means to be a man.
It's no accident that all of this is happening at the same time as what seems
to be a society-wide gender panic with here and in abroad, especially in the uk,
over the existence of transgender people.
Tons of gender anxiety happening everywhere, and I think all
these things are connected.
We can go back to Walsh, the only international laws that big and powerful
countries get to do what they want.
This is a vision of manhood, of maleness as masculinity, as domination.
Big countries dominate small, strong countries, dominate weak
men, dominate women and children.
Heterosexual men dominate gay men and trans men, and this is tied up in notions
of race and race hierarchy as well.
Whites dominate everyone else.
White men are at the top of the hierarchy, but gender is a key thing here.
Masculinity as the domination of other people and things is the key thing here.
An international system in which the United States pays lip service to
notions of reciprocity, inequality, and et cetera, et cetera, reads
as weak, reads as feminine.
Real men don't negotiate with people.
Real men don't have discussions.
Real men beat and pummel their opponents and take what they want.
International law.
Here at Walsh again is gay.
It's like, it's like it's pure text.
That's what I love it.
It's pure text.
There is no subtext here.
Subtext is for cowards.
I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards.
Trump and all of these guys.
Look back to the 19th century.
Look back to the age of great power competition.
A naked conquest because.
Makes your dicks hard and they hate the current era of international
cooperation as much as it exists because it makes your dicks soft.
That's basically it.
That's what's happening here.
Maybe I'm simplifying things a little bit, but that's
basically what is happening here.
Now, the last thing I'll say here, the last two things I'll say here.
I said, you can't separate any of this from the actual
identities of the men involved.
I mentioned that Steven Miller is a big blubbering piss baby.
Matt Walsh isn't some kind of prize of traditional masculinity either.
Certainly Donald Trump is not.
These are people I'm gonna add Pete, Hegseth as well.
These are people clearly struggling to reconcile their actual selves
with the idea masculinity.
They hold in their heads and they can't do it.
They lash out and they lash out.
By showing the world that they can dominate, they lash out.
By performing the kind of masculinity they think is true and real.
Of course, Steven Miller is a big blubbering piss baby.
What other kind of person would behave like that?
The final point is that it's not an accident that some of the key men in
this orbit, including the president of the United States, have credibly
been accused of sexual assault.
We begin tonight with the list of women who have now come forward accusing
Donald Trump of inappropriate conduct.
The detailed claims right here.
And they come after that video, Donald Trump, on that bus, describing what
he's able to do to women, kissing them, grabbing them because of his fame.
Because the ideology here, the vision of the world here is the vision of a
rapist is the vision of someone who sees other people as merely things for
them to use, who actualizes themselves through the domination of others
in the most violent and crude ways.
That is the ethos they wanna bring.
To the world stage, the US not as partner to the rest of the world, as
flawed as we often are, but the US as something like the neighborhood rapist.
You've reached Section C, the propaganda machine.
Not all political memification is created equal.
It manifests differently for different groups, both stylistically.
And strategically.
On one side you have liberal progressive memification that tends
to rely on language and formats that are slightly outta step with current
online culture like Jasmine Crockett dunking on Lindsey Graham for doing
something illegal or whatever.
All while children are being blown up with American taxpayer dollars, but go off
Queen, this kind of cringe makes it very apparent that something has gone terribly
wrong if this is what we're resorting to in order to get people to pay attention.
The incongruency between the message's, tone doesn't align with the real
world stakes, and we end up further questioning the legitimacy of the
authority and effectiveness of people like Chuck Schumer and Cory Booker.
It ends up feeling forced or improperly scaled to the realities.
It claims to address, and you don't even need detailed knowledge or
understanding of policy or facts on a government agency or respected news
outlet, posts a meme about how cooked we are because we expect a certain kind
of communication from them, and when it doesn't live up to those expectations,
it engenders a deep dystopian discomfort.
Now, that's not to say it doesn't work on some of the people, some of the time.
It's probably very effective on normies who are listed as not
political in their hinge bio.
I, I do still see it as a small victory that Nancy, who loves to
snowboard and still has a dedicated PET Instagram account for some reason,
is maybe a little more suspicious of US Israel relations because of.
Obnoxious libbed up meme rather than seeking approval or creating
content, celebrating small wins.
Right wing meme politics uses irony and hostility and.
Obviously intimidation that is often about dominance or indifference to
legitimacy, especially under Trump too, who has employed a literal frat bro,
who holds a degree in advanced hazing.
Alienation is a virtue that serves to reinforce in-group loyalty, while
provoking confusion and outrage from outsiders whose obsession with
decorum is a humiliation ritual that will lead to their downfall.
Despite these stylistic differences, both approaches
rely on similar propaganda logic.
Appeal to emotions rather than rationale.
Present one side, distort facts and reality.
Use unambiguous imagery and slogans to create a sense of
unity and then rinse and repeat.
Where they differ is in how they fail and they do fail.
Eventually, liberal meme propaganda and political messaging often collapses
under the weight of unfulfilled promises and being perceived as a lame duck.
Do nothing party.
Right wing Memification is arguably more successful, but on a long enough timeline.
Becomes incoherent, which leans to escalating antagonism,
both from within and without.
As memification spreads it more and more appears in state communications,
where official government accounts turn stolen art into memes.
Federal agencies adopt ironic or increasingly hostile language.
And the vice president accepts his meme status by literally becoming
the fat baby in an attempt to reclaim the joke and strip it of its power.
What was once confined to general media Commentary now appears
in formal institutions tasked with exercising coercive power.
Which ends up normalizing flippancy about human rights violations and war crimes.
Even in a culture where meme language has become this normalized, there is still an
expectation that state power speak with some amount of plainness or seriousness.
When the state claims to have the authority to detain, deport, imprison,
surveil, and execute citizens in the street, its language is assumed to
reflect the gravity of that power.
It.
It's about proportionality.
So when the state adopts mem unified vernacular and trots around
like the millions of fat baby edits, totally don't bother him.
What is the proportionality?
This doesn't make the actions less violent or consequential.
It just creates a sense that power is being exercised without accountability.
Where people's lives are treated as disposable genocide is now nothing
more than an ironic, edgy joke.
While people like Vance and Hegseth probably think they're achieving something
when they carry out extra judicial killings and label it as ffo just to
own the libs, the memification has.
Or will eventually have a negative outcome on institutional authority
from within their own base as well.
This shit sounds no different than some guy trolling on 4chan and
thus there's no distinction between the SECDEF and the Navy Seals.
copypasta 4chan user.
Every other government statement at this point and political headline sounds like
this Tweet Clavicular was left stunned after Tristan Tate mogging him to death.
Every misleading tweet is dismissed as irony.
Every offensive statement is just trolling.
Low key.
Chill out.
You beta lived hard.
It's not that serious.
Except it is ambiguity allows the state to obfuscate their crimes while
still exerting force, and it will exert force on sycophants and supporters.
Eventually, there will be a breaking point where it will fail to persuade as
it actively undermines its own legitimacy.
Historically, propaganda operated on the assumption that power still
required some form of consistency.
It especially works when the person or people in power are
popular, which right now is not the case despite how it might feel.
Even when governments lied or selectively framed reality.
There was still a narrative that attempted plausibility.
Propaganda only works when it is even loosely aligned with people's
lived experiences and respects.
The idea that authority is in some way still serious and capable
you, you can't maintain that while also posting AI lop of Trump.
Airdropping shit on protestors.
The old propaganda model assumed audiences needed to be convinced, or at
least reassured lies had to be somewhat coherent, and any contradictions had
to have some kind of explanation.
No matter the mental gymnastics propaganda now just has to rely on repetition of
brain rot, insanity that fulfills the most base animalistic impulses of owning
your ops in a delusional meconium fantasy.
The medium has changed the underlying relationship between power and persuasion.
No one even attempts to convince and openly contradicts what people can
see and experience for themselves.
They'll straight up lie right to your face and tell you you didn't actually
see what you saw with your own two eyes, or from six different camera
angles, and then make a fucking.
Top text, bottom text meme out of it, calling you a domestic terrorist and not
even using the correct picture of the person they're disparaging right now.
Lying badly is as performative a form of dominance as posting workout videos
were not a single pull-up was achieved.
It doesn't matter if the audience believes what they're being told, only
that they accept it like it's 1984.
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It was their final most essential command.
The party doesn't have to justify provocative or sensationalist
rhetoric when it is delivered via mockery, humiliation, irony, and.
Eng Lord jokes, only Elon Musk would retweet with the crying, laughing emoji.
It's a distraction that tests boundaries to see how much incoherence,
cruelty, and absurdity the party can normalize without resistance.
We're being conditioned through desensitization from an administration
that's being run by toddlers.
Proving the theory that yes, in fact, everyone is 12 years old now.
Antifa, over the last 10 years.
Unmasked an entire new generation of fascists.
And you know, they revealed them to be often men in positions of power,
politicians, teachers, professors, soldiers, police officers, pastors,
doctors of therapists, people in positions where they could do
real harm to their communities.
And I would argue that the work Antifa did over the last 10 years was.
More significant than any law enforcement investigation or academic study, or
they kind of outpaced the work that the mainstream media was doing often.
And also, you know, anti, A's research was the hidden hand behind thousands of
news stories, including some of my own.
And I think really were the basis for like our understanding of
what was happening in America.
Well.
Uh, he was not exposed by his dog.
But I wonder if you could tell us the story of one of the people who beat
Deandre Harris, who you mentioned earlier, the African American man who
was, who's beating you witnessed during the Unite the Right rally by a bunch of.
Far right militants, anti-fascists set about to try
and identify who those men were.
I think there were six of them in total, and one of them alluded,
identification, a man with a red beard.
Can you tell us about how his identity was ultimately found?
Yeah, thanks for asking about that.
Um, this identification took a lot of work.
Um, red Beard was a man seen in footage in videos and photos from
Charlottesville, taking part in the beating of Deandre Harris.
Um, most of the other men.
Involved in that beating were identified and, and prosecuted.
But, you know, red Beard never was.
And he kind of became this like white whale in, uh, anti-fascist circle.
Someone that everyone was really trying to identify.
Um, initially a lot of kind of like amateur internet slce.
Uh.
Tried to identify a red beard and they ended up misidentifying a lot of people
with red beards, but anti-fascists.
You know, were careful never to falsely identify someone.
Um, they were always looking for red beard.
Um.
You know, the police meanwhile also can't find him.
Uh, detective, uh, on the case in Charlottesville ends up kind
of putting out a call for help, um, but no one can can find him.
So eventually there's a group that emerges, uh, on the five year anniversary
of Unite The Right in Charlottesville.
It's, and they call themselves Ignite the Right.
So in 2022, they basically announced.
That they're starting a project to identify each and every single
Nazi that was in Charlottesville to hold them accountable.
Um, and their kind of operating slogan is, we do not forgive, we do not forget.
And they kind of exhaust a lot of their typical.
Avenues for investigating.
Um, you know, they can't find anything about Red beard in, in, you know, in
Nazi chats and, and so on and so forth.
Um, and so they end up using a facial recognition tool, and I think
it might sound a little jarring to hear about, like leftists it using
facial recognition because you.
I think most leftists would have a lot of problems with facial recognition.
You know, it's a kind of the apotheosis of a surveillance state.
It's used in all kinds of ways that are invasive and you know, the kind
of progenitors of that technology are often billionaire fascists like Peter
Thiel and and so on and so forth.
But, you know, the way anti-fascists look at it is that like.
The state law enforcement fascist, they're, they're using facial
recognition against us and we can't show up to a gunfight with a knife.
So they use the facial recognition, they plug some photos in of Red Beard
to this facial recognition tool.
Incidentally, I am actually in the photo with Red Beard.
I'm in the background.
They plug it in and they get a hit, and the hit is a baby faced beardless soldier.
Yeah, in 2007, and that soldier is about to shake the hand of George W. Bush,
and it turns out that the photo that facial recognition found was a photo
of red beard before he had a beard at all at Fort Benning in Georgia.
It looks like he's about to be sent off to fight in one of President Bush's
wars to like in Iraq or Afghanistan.
And, um, Bush is actually at the fort, uh, at this time.
It's kind of a publicity stunt to announce his, uh, troop surge in Iraq.
So anti-fascists.
See this photo, they zoom in on the name tag on the uniform,
but the name tag is blurry.
The one.
Photo where it might be in focus.
Uh, it's covered by Bush's arm, reaching out to shake his hand.
So they try everything.
They try, you know, figuring out who the other soldiers are in the photo
and see if they can contact them and see if they know who red beard is.
But they kind of keep hitting dead ends.
Eventually they decide.
And, uh, this is where I ended up playing a a bit role to file a foia,
request a public records request to the George W. Bush Library in
Texas to get higher resolution photos from Bush's visit that day.
We eventually get the photos back.
You can zoom in on the name tag and sure enough there's a last name and
it's Heilman Now it's just a matter of figuring out which Heilman it is.
In America, they pour through military yearbooks, can't find anything.
You know, they go through public records databases, looking for someone
who would be about 19 or 20 in 2017, they're still kind of striking out.
Eventually they kind of search social media.
Up and down.
And then one day they find a, they see a Facebook account
with a man with a red beard.
They go through his photos and there's photos of him in the
military, and it looks like he's been sent overseas somewhere.
But the most interesting thing they find is actually a meme.
He posts, and it's a meme of Bain.
The, the character, the villain from, uh, the Dark Knight Rises the Batman movie.
And it's a, you know, Bain saying the, the fire rises, which is kind of this
moment in the movie where he's kind of talking about all the destruction
and death that's about to commence.
And the fire rises is kind of like a slogan you hear on
the far right all the time.
But what's interesting about the meme isn't so much the meme itself.
But where and when it was posted and Red Beard had tagged his location on
August 12th, 2017 in Charlottesville.
And that's how anti-fascists learned that Red beard was.
Uh, Jay Heilman I'm speaking with Christopher Matthias about his book to
catch a fascist, the fight to expose the radical right as a journalist.
He's been following.
Uh, anti-fascist organizing for the last decade.
I'm Sasha Lily, and this is Against the Grain.
So one of the.
Tactics of anti-fascists associated with the term Antifa I've used
is to unmask and expose just what you've been describing here.
And doxing of course, is something that those on the far right also have done
to the left that is try to ruin their lives to out them in various ways.
But I wanted to ask you about the left's.
An anti-fascist use of doxing against the threat of people on the far right, people
who would bring and do bring violence.
How effective has this been as a tactic to expose that somebody
is a member of a far right group?
You know, the argument that my book makes is that it was an incredibly
effective tactic for a while.
You know, I think one of the more significant stories is identity Europa.
Which is, like I described earlier, kind of this suit and tie
fascist group that's making real inroads with the Republican party.
You know, its members are, uh, running for local offices.
Um, they are, you know, turning up to republican town halls and
you know, trying to push the party far further to the right.
Um, but you know, after about a hundred of its members are doxed.
It becomes kind of untenable to keep organizing the way they're organizing.
Um, you know, a lot of it's their members end up getting fired or
kind of shunned from their families.
Um, and I think this is kind of the important part of understanding why Antifa
does this as a tactic and why actually throughout history, there's a long,
proud tradition of unmasking fascists, of ripping the white hood off Klansmen.
And that's because what?
That unmasking does.
What it leverages is kind of the existing societal taboo.
Against being an explicit white supremacist or an explicit racist,
an explicit fascist, and it leverages that taboo to create a
social cost for being a fascist.
It basically says, if you're gonna join one of these groups, we're gonna find out.
We're gonna name and shame you.
Everyone you know is gonna know that you're a part of this group.
You're gonna lose your job, you're gonna lose your girlfriend.
You might get kicked outta your apartment.
Your family's gonna be ashamed of you.
Um, and you can see evidence of this.
At work after these Nazis are doxed, they're internal chat messages where
they're talking about how awful it is and how much they're struggling.
So I would argue that this tactic did destroy groups like Identity
Europa It destroyed a lot of the groups that were in Charlottesville.
Um.
And it makes it a lot harder for these groups to organize.
Um, but what ends up happening though, and it's kind of the animating question
of my book, is that, you know, as fascist ideas are gaining, getting
more mainstream, um, across the nation as, as Trump and, uh, the, the GOP
and the wider MAGA movement embrace more explicit, uh, white supremacist,
uh, rhetoric and ideas, you know.
The animating question that kind of haunts anti-fascist work in
anti-fascist doxing is like, what happens when that taboo against
explicit white supremacy disappears?
And finally, section D, authoritarian, curious.
Let's start with Galloway's Central claim that women are biologically
programmed to engage in hyper gamy to seek partners of higher economic status.
Here's what he gets wrong.
Women only married up when their economic opportunities were legally and socially
restricted, and I mean systemically.
Restricted until 1974, banks legally could refuse to issue
credit cards to unmarried women.
Until 1975, married women couldn't open bank accounts without
their husband's permission.
In many states, women were barred from jury duty in some states until 1973,
they couldn't get business loans.
They were legally excluded from entire professions.
But what happens when you remove those constraints when women have
actual economic opportunities?
The data tells a completely different story than Scott
Galloway's hypergamy narrative.
According to Pew research center's 2019 study on marriage and cohabitation.
When women have economic independence, they prioritize compatibility,
shared values, and emotional intelligence over earning potential.
The study found that among college educated women, the demographic that
Scott Galloway claims is the most hypergamic Only 28% said that it was very
important that their spouse or partner has a successful career compared to 46%.
In 1997, women's preferences shifted as their economic opportunities expanded.
That's the opposite of biological hard wiring, and here's the part that Galloway
consistently misrepresents the same.
Pew data shows that women care about earning potential when
they're economically vulnerable.
Not as a universal biological preference.
Women in precarious economic situations prioritize financial
stability and partners.
Women with economic security prioritize other things.
That's not hypergamy That's a rational economic response that applies
to everybody across all genders.
What Galloway calls hyper is actually something sociologists call.
Assortative mating the tendency for people to partner with others of similar
education and economic backgrounds, and it affects both genders equally.
A 2017 study published in the Journal of Demography found that
educational assortative mating has increased for both men and women.
Since the 1960s, people with college degrees partner with
other people with college degrees.
People without college degrees partner with others without college degrees.
This isn't about women refusing to date down.
It's about educational and economic polarization, creating fewer cross
class partnerships for everyone.
Galloway's hypergamy argument is based on historical patterns that were created
by legal restrictions on women's.
Economic participation and it misrepresents modern data that
actually shows both genders engaging in assortative mating based on
education and economic stability.
In short, his argument is complete bullshit.
Now, let's talk about the contradiction.
Watch this clip from his interview with Oprah, but just the fact that
you said your self-conscious or aware enough to pour that energy
into really productive things.
It means you're gonna be fine.
I don't think romantic love is the be all, end all for everybody.
It's really rewarding.
But I think you can find what I'll call that sort of purpose, relational
love in a lot of different areas, and the fact that you're even thinking
about how you channel that energy into stuff that's more productive.
You're the role model for young men right now.
You're, you're, you're, you're being a productive human.
You're gonna be happy regardless if you find that or not.
And I just wish more men would take your lead.
And say, all right, maybe things aren't working out for me romantically.
I'm gonna continue to work on myself, gotta, I'm gonna pour that
energy into other relationships.
Now watch this clip that was from a month before the Oprah interview, and
also on the far right while they confl masculinity with corness and cruelty.
The far left answer to the masculinity crisis.
Is to tell young men to act more like a woman.
I don't think that's helpful either.
He's made similar statements in multiple interviews that telling men to be more
emotionally expressive, more community oriented, more focused on personal
development rather than economic dominance is somehow insulting or inadequate.
Let's break down the logical problem here.
Galloway praises a woman for channeling energy into career advancement,
deepening friendships and community bonds, focusing on family relationships,
building a fulfilling life while single.
He presents this as healthy, admirable, productive behavior.
But when.
The left suggests that young men might also benefit from a similar strategy,
focusing on career development, building strong friendships, investing in
community, creating meaningful lives that aren't dependent on romantic partnership.
He calls that condescending.
So the exact same behavior is admirable when women do it, but
insulting to suggest for men.
Here's what the contradiction reveals.
Galloway believes these adaptive strategies are somehow gender specific.
He can't imagine them working for men because his entire framework assumes that
men's primary crisis is lack of female validation and partnership for women.
Being productively single is a sign of strength and independence.
For men needing similar advice is apparently an insult to their masculinity.
Galloway and other self-appointed man crisis thought leaders like
Chris Williamson or Richard Reeves.
These guys do not care about young men.
They care about maintaining a framework where male value is defined.
By female partnership and any suggestion that men could build meaningful lives
outside of that framework is treated as an attack on masculinity itself.
Which brings us to the real problem with his entire worldview.
Galloway's contradictions aren't accidental.
They reveal that he's not actually interested in solutions for young men.
He's interested in restoring male economic dominance as a basis.
For relationships.
Let me show you three ways this plays out.
First, Galloway treats male economic struggle as uniquely catastrophic
while ignoring the fact that young women in late stage capitalism face
the same challenges and women still earn less than men in most fields.
The gender wage gap for full-time workers is still 84 cents to every dollar in 2023.
According to Pew research, young women face housing affordability, crises,
underemployment, and economic precarity at similar or higher rates to young men.
But when women respond to economic struggle by focusing on career
advancement, on community, and on personal development, Galloway calls it admirable.
When men face similar struggles and need and would benefit from similar advice,
suddenly it's a civilizational crisis.
Requiring systemic intervention to restore male economic advantage.
Why?
Because his framework only works if male struggle is treated as
categorically different and more important than female struggle.
Second, Galloway's, hyper gmy argument romanticizes an era when women's
economic dependence made them.
Available to men across all economic classes.
Think about what his argument actually suggests.
He claims women's hypergamy is creating a crisis for men, but women
only consistently married up when they had no other economic options.
So his framing of hypergamy as a problem only makes sense if you
believe that relationships were better when women needed men economically.
Now he claims that women's economic independence is a good thing and that
he has no interest in dismantling it yet he frames it as destabilizing to men.
It's a problem for men because it changes dating market dynamics.
Galloway sees male value primarily as economic and provider based.
He can't envision a masculinity that isn't defined by economic dominance.
Over a woman, and you can't imagine relationships based on
genuine compatibility rather than economic necessity.
Third and most importantly, Galloway offers no actual solutions because
his framework doesn't allow for any.
If the problem is that economically independent women won't date economically
struggling men, what's his solution?
Force women back into economic dependence.
Of course he won't say this explicitly.
He pays lip service to the fact that men need to step up emotionally and
pull their weight in domestic labor.
But regardless, that's the logical endpoint of his argument.
Does he actually address the economic inequality and lack of
opportunity that is affecting all young people regardless of gender?
Not really, because that would undermine his gender war framing.
Help men develop identities and find fulfillment beyond the provider role.
He explicitly rejects this as telling men to act like women.
Meanwhile, the solution that Galloway dismisses as condescending
is exactly what we should be doing.
We should raise boys the same way we raise girls.
After all, if men acted more like women.
They wouldn't be killing themselves at the rates that they are men
account for 80% of suicide deaths in the US according to the CD, C.
If men acted more like women, they wouldn't spend so much time watching.
Porn.
Research shows that men consume pornography at significantly
higher rates than women with associated impacts on mental health
and relationship satisfaction.
If men acted more like women.
They wouldn't be buying guns and shooting up schools at the rates that they are.
Men commit 98% of mass shootings in the US according to the violence project.
And if men acted more like women, homicide would not be the leading cause of death
for pregnant women in the United States.
According to a 2021 study published in Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Homicide accounts for more deaths among pregnant and postpartum women
than any pregnancy related cause.
And the vast majority of perpetrators are male intimate partners.
So when Galloway dismisses the telling men to act more like women advice
as condescending, what he's actually dismissing is lower suicide rates,
less violence, better educational outcomes, healthier relationship
patterns, and not killing pregnant women.
That's not condescending.
That's.
Life saving advice
What's important is the extent of their followings.
It should be enough to note here that Carlson's podcast always hovers
somewhere in the top 10, not just in the political category, but in all podcasts.
By the way, he's likely the most influential political
commentator in the world.
Curtis Yarvin is in many ways, the most straight.
Forward.
He wants a Monarch, CEO, some combination of Peter Thiel and Frederick.
The Great interpreted through the reactionary thought of Thomas Carlyle
He has said, for example, that Americans need to get over their dictator phobia.
Carl Benjamin Sargon of Akkad and Lotus Eaters is probably the most
influential right of right nationalist.
In the uk.
He recently posted a video called My Fool From Liberalism, which uses
language, which sounded a lot like the far right aristocratic, traditionalist,
thinker, Julius Evola who Benjamin had also discussed in previous videos.
Evola in turn, is someone who was associated with classical fascism and
criticized it for being too democratic.
Evola is more of a. Authoritarian, aristocratic, traditionalist
thinker than a fascist.
I admit I didn't watch much of Benjamin himself, and I thought until recently he
was a kind of disaffected liberal thinker, critical of immigration in the uk.
However, if you've read any Evola You'll recognize much of his language
in some of Benjamin's recent videos.
Strange, esoteric critiques of Kant's categorical imperative
as a criticism of individualism in Western liberal societies.
For example, if you're reading.
Evola and citing the language.
It's fair, I think, to say you are authoritarian curious.
Tucker Carlson is of course an unbearable troll whose skepticism
about democracy runs deep.
I've talked about it in a previous video.
He will rarely state what he thinks and is a master at just asking questions,
and I think he is, uh, legitimately.
Mad.
He is probably categorically insane.
He does though, leave enough clues to what he thinks.
I read Tucker Carson's 2018 book, shipper Fools some years ago now, and
in it right at the end, he writes, hierarchy is quote the story of.
All human history, very few civilizations have operated in any other way.
People naturally sort themselves into hierarchies.
Those who have power defend it from those who don't.
Rulers rule surfs a bay.
It's a familiar system.
We know it works 'cause it has for thousands of years.
The new ingredient.
What makes our current moment so unstable?
It is democracy.
He continues, there are justifications for suspending democracy.
Quote, if your voters can't reach responsible conclusions,
you can't let them vote.
You don't give suffrage to irrational populations for the same reason.
You wouldn't give firearms to toddlers.
They're not ready for the responsibility.
I mean, you don't really have to read between the lines there.
It's this kind of view that leads to Carlson support for liberal authoritarians
like Victor Orban, while also leaning into the, uh, revisionist curious view of
history, particularly on World War ii and.
Fascism to take a few examples of this.
In a recent interview with Piers Morgan Carlson remarked that Hitler
was focused on communists as the enemy that Britain went to war voluntarily
and has been in decline ever since.
And he insinuated that Hitler would have stopped at Poland maybe then.
We're on the wrong side of history.
All of this is well trodden ground though when Carlson called the podcaster
Darryl Cooper, the best and most honest, popular historian in the United
States and Cooper called Churchill, the chief villain of World War ii.
Countless posts and podcasts, including by top historians like Richard
Evans, picked apart the comments.
The authoritarian curious pattern is always purposely vague but
identifiable nonetheless, poke holes in the conventional story to
tip the scales in favor of at least reconsidering the authoritarian position.
Cooper, for example, has only released two episodes of his
podcast on the Germans war.
As of time of recording, I'll discuss this at more length in the future.
I have a load of notes on Cooper and his podcast, but only to say now that Cooper
is a genuinely great storyteller who, and I can only make an educated guess at this
point, plays somewhat dishonestly with the ordering emphasis and the narrat.
Of fascism in an authoritarian curious way, and I'm not one for
judging someone on old tweets, but tweeting things like democracy is
a disease, tyranny is the cure.
In 2019, might I humbly suggest bias?
Your reading of.
Historical sources.
Cooper's argument seems to be that fascism is what happens
when the left goes too far.
Many of these figures are also curious about a link between democracy and mass
migration that might, they are toying around with need to be severed if.
Western civilization is to be saved.
Authoritarian.
Curious then for the uninitiated, leans into literature like Oswald
Spengler's decline of the West.
Nick Fuentes is probably the most influential of the extreme wing of the
curious, and you can see this little group of authoritarian, curious, curious,
uh, trolls and simpletons around him.
According to Wick Equate 'cause I refuse to watch endless Fuentes videos.
Fuentes has said.
Some of the following, I'm a reactionary.
I support autocracy.
You know what democracy has given us?
Obesity, divorce, abortion, gay marriage.
That's what democracy has given us.
Catholic autocracy.
Pretty strong.
We're okay with authoritarianism.
Hitler is awesome.
Hitler was right and the Holocaust didn't happen.
This is a man who met with the President of the United States, has
appeared repeatedly on some of the biggest political podcasts in the
world, and as a legion of Groyper followers who are becoming a major
mainstream force in US politics.
What all of this amounts to is a toying with.
Fascism and more benign forms of authoritarianism to see what parts
of liberal democracy might be, could be remodeled in some way, rethought.
Furthermore, all of this often aligns with the resurgence of interest in Christianity
and Christian nationalism, the criticism of movements like new atheism.
Some of the well-trodden, but largely forgotten debates about the
relationship between Christendom secular authority and authoritarianism.
You find that in someone like Carl Schmitt's political theology, for example.
There are many other influential figures.
People like Bronze Age pervert, the liberal authoritarian.
Politicians and intellectuals around the world, and if we broaden our
view from authoritarian on the right, there are also post liberals and
Stalinists and Hindu nationalists and the Chinese Communist Party.
Et cetera, et cetera, so on, so on.
There is a history of this revisionism through people like Irving and Buchanan.
Uh, many influential books like Deneen's why Liberalism Failed.
There is quite a rich thread since World War ii, and this context is a
good reason why so many would register concern when the richest man in the world.
And the most influential political operative of the moment both seem to
throw Sieg Heils to crowds on Trump's reelection, trolling red meats.
Ironic, genuine, whatever.
Authoritarian curiosity is in the air.
But here's a surprising final twist.
I've come to agree with some of these figures on something fundamental.
A popular hollywoodized narrative of the 20th century is freedom versus tyranny.
Good versus evil.
Linear, inevitable progress is woefully simplistic.
Dangerously inadequate and in fact has done more harm than good for
our historical understanding of ourselves, our present, and our future.
We too often take authoritarian curiosity as something ridiculous,
unintellectual clownish, even without seeking to truly understand the
reasons and the intellectual history that underpins and legitimates it.
Nick refers to himself as an independent journalist.
He won't comb through data.
He won't read studies, present stats.
His analysis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and he struggles
during sit down interviews.
He don't even watch his friend's videos to see what they say.
But I thought that was kind of messed up of you to not publicly denounce
what happened to Charlie Kirk.
I did.
I never saw anything on Instagram.
I actually checked, what am I supposed to say?
You never shared anything.
I interviewed the guy who was debating him while it happened.
And I mentioned a bunch of times that it was horrible and it went
represented like a, the one of the worst pivots in American politics ever.
And I didn't even watch the interview 'cause I didn't want to watch that.
Surely he can't be this dumb.
When Andrew Callahan of Channel five on YouTube asked Nick if he thought
his Minneapolis expose was being used to distract from the Epstein files.
Which dropped on or around the same day, December 16th that
the Epstein Fowls dropped.
He didn't know.
You're trying to say that it was some coordinated attack to get people's eyes
away from Epstein, but the majority of the traffic, it has over 600 thou,
I think it has over 600,000 likes.
So it wasn't just Elon Musk who's sharing the video, it was
everyday Americans who were showing that video 'cause they're sick.
I'm not sure of how Elon Musk sharing Nick's video, refute the distract
from the Epstein files thing, let alone answers the question.
And neither does he.
Hasan Piker saw this next clip and said, amongst other things, this
is the guy that the VP defended as worthy of a Pulitzer America is
committing intellectual suicide.
We are so cooked, you think are the three most benevolent billionaires.
What do you mean by the word benevolent?
Just well-intentioned, positive billionaires who you think are creating,
you know, net positive societal progress.
His first response was Trump, by the way.
And yeah, more mispronunciations.
Those who base intelligence on grammar and syntax better keep that
same energy for little Nikki here.
The devil's in the details.
Oh, and he replied to Hassan with.
Never said I'm a genius.
Hassan never said he was a genius either.
And if you were talking about intellectual suicide, maybe start with using
proper punctuation in your sentences.
And I know he ain't talking if you didn't notice.
Nick is wearing a hoodie that says Quality Learning Center, but the
word learning is missing an end.
It comes from a daycare sign in Minnesota, and I know.
He ain't talking, but Nick sure is proud to make light of their mistake and you
should know that satire is his thing because I do not believe that by, I
do not believe by making satire on the internet commits a crime by any means.
Okay.
Me going back, this is a huge revelation.
So you were actually doing satire in that post, so it was satire.
Uh, is there anything wrong with satire one 800 fraud to report this imposter?
That was Caitlyn Robertson confronting Nick about his
$175 billion goes a long way.
This is in the capital of Ukraine post promoting his own video where
he claimed that American taxpayers are funding a Ferris wheel, coffee
breaks and fancy cars, which proves that there isn't currently a war in.
Whichever city he was in.
Where did you go with East Ukraine?
I went to Is isn't Bucha East Ukraine or I went somewhere
where there was Bucha, was Bucha.
Not that he tweets too often, but natural sure had yet to even mention
satire on Twitter as of me writing this.
So Kailynn will go on to say that Nick reverted to what many propagandists do,
making themselves out to be victims.
I can show you an example from their interview, but.
Of course there are others.
They came after me.
They came after my family.
They doxed.
They doxed my entire family.
How did they come after you Be specific.
Well, they tried to come after me.
They tried to debunk all my, my whole entire story.
They then, who's they?
The all the news would just get more specific.
CCNN.
Who Within C-N-C-B-S, um, who's the reporter?
I don't even know her name.
'cause she's irrelevant.
Nobody knows who she is.
Debunking his whole entire story is going after him.
He must think that community notes are oppressive and, hey,
he didn't know the woman's name at CNN because as a journalist.
He didn't look it up, and if it is true that she's irrelevant, then why is
he bringing it up in the first place?
Besides, I think he's talking about her.
I wasn't trying to go inside and they, there should be a way for somebody to
actually be able to call that number and somebody to be able to answer.
These aren't real businesses, but surely you don't think a
daycare should just be unlocked.
You shouldn't be able to just walk into a daycare.
It shouldn't be a reception.
It's a reception.
Every daycare is locked.
It has.
Their doors are locked and to a, okay, you bring up a fair point.
Then why can't they actually gimme information?
How to enroll a child, Whitney, wild law enforcement correspondent?
See how easy that is?
Nick really can't truly believe that going to daycares during off hours,
pulling on locked doors, complaining about blacked out windows, rolling with
like four men with no child of theirs.
Insight to enroll them into daycare.
Blurring out important messages on said daycare's, doors without.
Looking at or showing a single stat is uncovering $110
million of fraud in one day.
Seriously, surely.
He can't be this dumb.
I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.
However, his fans, subscribers, and supporters, they're buying all this
nonsense, which lets me know that the price for entry into the right wing,
influencer, journalist, ecosphere, is low.
They barely have to say anything of value for their viewers
Ash, should we care about these idiots singing Heil
Hitler in a nightclub in Miami?
Of course say, Michael, that clip was one of the saddest
things I've ever seen in my life.
Like you just had these.
Desperate, thirsty men who would literally do anything for attention in a club
where nobody is dancing, surrounded by completely disinterested girls
trying to look like they're having.
The absolute time of their lives, but somehow it's unable
to really reach their eyes.
Like you can sort of see the cry for help.
That's just like screaming behind the irises.
Um, you know, obviously these are, are people who promote and spread.
Poisonous messages and ideologies, but I think the real reason why they do it, I
mean, there are greater and lesser degrees of actual ideological commitment amongst
that group of individuals, but all of them are brought there because they're so
thirsty for attention that would literally do anything for likes and follows.
I mean, it's kind of pathetic.
And you know, you, you talked about that individual, um.
Clavicular um, who's being held up by, uh, Nick Fuentes, by as everything
that a western man is supposed to be.
He literally smashed like his own facial bones in because he thought
it would make him better looking.
He's taken so much testosterone for so many years that he has rendered
himself in fertile 'cause his body can't naturally produce testosterone.
So it's just.
It's this collection of attention hungry men, at least one of whom is shooting
blanks, and they're trying to be, you know, the Uber mensch they're supposed
to be what we were all afraid of.
That's supposed to be the pinnacle of Western masculinity.
Like, like, I'm just sad for them, like, and genuinely really sad for them.
So the, the looks maxing thing is, so it came from incel culture, right?
And so it's to say if you are a kind of dweeby man, um, that women
don't wanna sleep with, then you need to take agency and take extreme
measures to make yourself attractive.
So for this guy, it was, I'm on his TikTok now.
You can see his sort of before and after.
For this guy, he was a bit weedy.
And he didn't have great cheekbone.
So then he injects himself with testosterone from age 14.
And as you said, he sort of breaks his facial features so that they can sort of
get bigger or sort of more, more angular.
What's going on here?
'cause I mean, we talk about how many people follow these.
How many people do you think are following these people like out of
irony, or how many people are following them because they actually think
what they're saying is like legit?
I think there's a, there's a spectrum, right?
Some people are drawn in because it's a form of spectacle.
You are looking because everyone else is looking the way in which
people slow down when they're passing a car, crash on the motorway.
There are some people who are drawn to men like this because
they project an image of success.
Um, social media, you know, digital immersion.
We know that these are things which make people feel.
Even a lower sense of self-worth than they already had.
So they're drawn to these men because they felt a lower sense of self-worth and then
everything they see like deepens that.
And then there are some people who are actually truly ideologically committed.
Um, also, sorry, I forgot one other aspect to it, which is that sort of
performative transgression of like, look at us, we're saying the unsayable,
we're playing Heil Hitler in the club.
I think that there's always been.
You know, an audience for that kind of thing, because they see it as iconoclastic
or they see it as edgy in some way.
Um, but again, it is, I think, I think it's really sad that people
feel so undesirable and so unlovable that they would take instructions
of any kind from the most loveless motherfuckers on the planet.
I mean, you know, do.
You look at in particular, like the disinterest of the women around them.
I mean, these are guys who are supposed to be like fending them off with barge
poles and those girls are only there.
What.
Um, at best because they wanna be in the videos themselves.
They wanna accrue a following for themselves.
At worst, maybe.
'cause they've, they've been paid to be there.
Um, and I'm not, I'm not exaggerating, um, about that.
I mean, that's not something which I have any particular evidence
for, for the girls in those videos.
But there have been multiple sex workers who've come out and said, oh yeah, you
know, all those images that you see of those like, you know, pickup artists
and, you know, in sale influences of, you know, girls surrounding them on a yacht.
You know, I was one of those girls.
I was paid to be there.
Um, there was such a deep.
Loneliness in that image of success, which I just think, like, it
makes me feel really bummed out.
I mean, maybe it's just the, you know, point in my hormonal
cycle that I'm at Michael, but that stuff makes me wanna cry.
Hmm.
I suppose the final thing I wanna talk about, you know,
it's not gonna cheer you up.
This one, um, is I suppose what worries me about this is at the
moment you do have a lot of sort of organized political movements
talking about things like remigration In Europe, um, in America as well.
And there has been since the Second World War, a taboo about the Nazis,
which means that if the Nazis did it, you probably shouldn't do it.
Right.
And, and I think that has been a bit of a. Limit on what is
sort of politically acceptable and, and doable ever since then.
So sort of things like eugenics, which before the Second World War sort of,
there would be sort of progressives and conservatives, and this was just
sort of something that was talked about in, in, in mainstream debate.
Um, things like racial science, um, things like remigration and sort of
trying to have some form of racial purity.
All of these ideas which were.
You know, discussed much more widely.
Before the Second World War.
I mean, you could argue that they were already going out, but it
was, they were, they were arguments and ideas that you could express.
And then after the Second World War, there was just this massive idea that
the worst thing you can be is a Nazi.
And if your idea looks a lot like what the Nazis believed, and if you can
sort of plausibly draw a connection between that belief and then the
Holocaust, um, probably that's the kind of politics we shouldn't
explore anymore, that we should, uh.
Try and shun.
And I think at the moment you've got this, this moment where you've got
these idiots who you, they're not particularly intellectually interesting,
but on the cultural side, they're sort of breaking the Nazi taboo.
So it's, it's it, it's sort of, is it funny, is it not, you know, it's
kind of edge lording, but the idea of being a young person identifying
with Hitler seems to be becoming more.
Conceivable.
And then you've got all of these political movements who are arguing for kind of
a political direction, which would've been taboo a while ago in, in Europe.
And I do think that is a, a dangerous combination, and I don't
really wanna see where it goes.
I think you, you highlighted something important, which is the
sort of edge, Lord element of it all.
And this is something which I think really comes out of, you know,
the subculture on chan boards.
This desire to shock and bait and outrage and then dress it up in layers of irony.
So it's really ugly.
Um, poisonous, aggressive, offensive, racist, misogynistic, et cetera, behavior.
And then it's like, Ooh, but we don't really mean it, but do we really mean it?
Ah, no, we don't, but we do.
And.
Deliberately using irony to create sort of lashings and lashings of ambiguity
around really what is the intent.
So you get to have it both ways.
You get to use the N word and also say, oh, but I don't really mean it.
But you know, I also kind of do, um, and dancing this dance.
And again, it's, I think.
Um, I think it's a, a culture which is born out of digital immersion and the
way in which digital immersion sort of breaks down bonds of responsibility, of
empathy, of thinking about consequences.
Um, I think that it is morally warping for people and in
particular younger people as well.
And I think that this is something which, you know, many of the guys
who are on that particular stream, they've learned how to game.
Um, and it, it, it does, I think, create a sense of permissiveness and around,
um, you know, if not normalizing, then certainly making more visible, um.
Nazi vernacular Nazi imagery in a way which has political meaning,
and it has political consequences.
But again, I don't think that you get.
Any of that stuff?
Not really without that sort of, you know, hyper isolated,
hyper atomized digital culture.
Because of course, since World War ii, there've been all sorts
of neo-Nazi organizations.
Um, they've been relatively small, right?
One because of, of the nature of, of policing and stuff like that.
And two, because you know, like who wants to hang out with a bunch of neo-Nazis?
Um, but.
The, the memification of Nazis online has done a different kind of thing because
it's a relatively low cost of entry.
You don't have to go and sit in a real room full of people
and you can sort of, um.
Be led by your own desire for transgress deeper and deeper into a
rabbit hole without ever having to, you know, leave your mom's spare room.
Um, so I think it's a culture which is built on loneliness and is powered by
loneliness and thrives on loneliness.
Sigmund Freud is remembered as an all time great philosopher
because he reminds us that men are not reasoning rational beings.
We are driven by deep unconscious drives, civilization uses.
Eros are erotic.
Drive to tug men around like a bull by the nose.
Want a porn star girlfriend to do all the porn things?
Well, you better finish school.
College, hit the gym and make fucking money.
But with eros comes Thanatos the opposing drive to destroy, kill, and self-destruct.
Civilization has through the millennia, desperately struggle to contain human eros
and Thanatos Or it did until somewhere around the mid 1990s where civilization
howled unleash the internet and let's go.
Generation Z are lab mice in a deranged psych experiment, pumped
full of evermore hardcore porn to Hyperstimulate Eros, then shoved into.
Immersive virtual realities of mega violent video games to
satiate Thanatos but you can never.
Ever satisfy the God of death, even by becoming a Batman villain, to give
them their Jew, the joker, right?
Understand that to talk politics to Gen Z, they have to embody the drives of eros and
Thanatos that drive the next generation.
And nothing screams overactive death drive like becoming a Nazi LER was a pagan.
It was also really fucking cool.
Am I right?
Am I right, boys?
You regret saying that?
Saying a fact?
No, no, that's absolutely true.
Jordan Peterson became an unlikely Gen Z icon because he speaks in riddles.
Some losers lose all the time.
Which is the side you occupy, say, is that no one invites you out and
all the women are rejecting you.
Who's got the problem?
It's not all the women.
Well, the thing is like most things, it's complicated, you know?
So.
Yeah.
All the women are rejecting you.
Right.
It's you.
Jordo is so much like the Ridler that he actually started dressing
in bespoke Batman villain suits.
But when you decode Peterson's garbled misrepresentations of Carl
Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche his message to young men is basically.
Join the patriarchy and we will give you a trad wife Peterson is
basically an emissary from the Boomer establishment sent to make an
offer to millennial and Gen Z men.
The problem is the patriarchy can't make good on the deal.
There are no good jobs left, and there is a very limited supply.
Of trad wives and women willing to sign up to a life of submission
to a Gen Z male are mental.
And so the evolutionary development at the right wing grifts sphere escalated
to Andrew Tate, if you can't subdue your drives to the patriarchy, instead
give your Eros and Thanatos free reign.
By becoming a pimp and a gangster.
Tati is a generic henchman.
The goon Batman beats up so we can cheer.
The problem is most Gen Z and millennial men are house cats, not tigers.
They've been raised in complete safety and have no appetite for real risk or.
A Romanian prison cell meet our Catwoman Less The cool leather-clad
foe who steals diamonds more.
The Jocelyn Wildenstein archetype, Laura Loomer has carved her loyalty
to the cause directly onto her face.
She is a walking, talking example of the physical toll of the grift.
To survive in the Joker right ecosystem, you have to physically
become your own caricature.
Tucker two Face Carlson.
Like Harvey Dent, except both sides speak bullshit.
The private face as revealed in the Dominion lawsuit is a man who knows.
Trump is a demonic force who hates the lies, who lives in reality.
Flip the coin.
You get the public tucker, the furrowed brow, the manic love.
The man who will look into the camera night after night and sell great
replacement theory to your grand Tucker Carlson is peak establishment pretending.
To be anti-establishment, the wealthy si of a frozen dinner fortune and failed.
CI, a agent expert in pretending to be the victim.
And here in the eye of the vortex of bullshit is Candace Owens.
We challenged Turning Point USA executives to issue a very clean statement.
Candace was the first to crack the deep code of the right wing grift that the
best way to feed the vortex of bullshit is to bullshit about other bullshitters.
No.
Soon her Charlie Kirk, one of the joker rights power bullshitters
being killed in public.
Then Candace led the charge to manufacture a pure.
Bullshit conspiracy theory.
He also surprised that he wanted bring me Candace Owens back because he was
standing up for himself, and then did he just 48 hours later, conveniently
catch a bullet to the throat.
The rightwing Grifters can't even stop lying long enough
to grieve one of their own.
Those who live by bullshit, die by bullshit.
The Aus of disinformation is eating itself.
As the peak predator grifters, like Milo Yiannopoulos begin cannibalizing
weaklings like Benny Johnson for clicks.
I was gonna talk about Ben Shapiro here, but I.
He's just so dull because the audience has grown tired of conservatives
pretending to be Batman Villains.
They want the real deal.
They want the authentic joker at at.
At.
Ah, what is it about Hitler?
That's cool because he definitely is,
how do you win the absolute allegiance of a nation of millions?
If you're not cool?
I mean, what happens?
Ja Jal's drop off and here's why.
Why is Hitler cool?
I'll tell you why.
Very simply, I know why you choose to have your little group therapy
sessions in broad daylight.
Because what Hitler represents is if white people didn't give a fuck.
And, and as for, uh, the televisions so-called plan, that's the appeal.
What it represents is what if.
We went hard as fuck.
That's what Hitler represents.
What if white people went hard as fuck enough from the cloud?
Let's not to give Nick Fuentes his Jew, he's no grifter.
Nick Fuentes is what happens when men like Carlson and Peterson and Shapiro spout
dog whistles like Judeo Christian culture and Western values for long enough.
Eventually somebody says the quiet bit out loud, white nationalism.
Eventually an angry Gen Z male looks into the camera and says,
no, we are not conservatives.
We are not traditionalists.
We are white nationalists.
We like Hitler.
When you spend decades telling people that equality is oppression, and
diversity is weakness, eventually somebody is gonna show up and say,
so let's just do fascism then.
Nick Fuentes is what happens when the president himself tells you
it's okay to hate immigrants.
It's okay to hate Somalis.
It's okay to hate Muslims.
Eventually you end up with Nick Fuentes asking, wait, so
why can't we hate the Jews?
Fuentes Is the receipt the left spent decades saying you are going fascist.
And the right howled.
They performed this Grand Wounded Theater of Indignant.
Denial.
How dare you?
How dare you call us fascist.
We just want lower taxes and to preserve the Judeo cultural Christian
values of Western civilization.
But you weren't protecting the legacy of the Enlightenment.
You weren't fighting the woke mind virus.
You were just.
On a miserable journey to an inevitable destination, you were always becoming
Nick Fuentes The Joker is the greatest Batman villain because he's the ultimate
symbol of Thanatos the death drive.
The man who just wants to watch it all burn.
Let's be clear.
Fuentes is not the fucking voice of his generation.
Gen ZA busy leading protest.
Deposing dictators and saving the fucking planet.
Fuentes is the Thanatos of his generation.
Why save the planet when watching it Burn is hilarious and Fuentes audience
love him for it because he's not boring.
He's not safe.
He's not a grifter.
He is American, white nationalism's, genuine message to the world, and
the message is the mask is off.
That's going to be it for today.
As always, keep the comments coming in.
You can record and rerecord a voice message by tapping
the link in the show notes.
You can reach us on signal and handle best of left zero one or
simply email me to j@bestofleft.com.
The additional sections of the show included clips from
Dr. Deneen speaks the speech prof. Theresa Matt Bernstein, signified BSides.
Luke Thomas gets political film obsessed.
Takes by Jamal Bowie.
Harlan Spinks.
Harlan Spinks against the grain then and now we gonna be all right.
Navarra Media and Science Fiction with Damien Walter.
Further details are in the show notes.
Thanks to everyone for listening.
Thanks to Dion and Erin for their production work for the
show and co-starring in Solved
Thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, including
her co-starring Unsolved.
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