Following Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, etc. along with the groyper movement, anti-Semitism, and other alt-right views, are all ways young men are getting their revenge. This is not just about young men being immature, transgressive, and edgy. Radicalization like this happens for a reason. Young (white, especially) men have been shamed and scapegoated for a long time now. No one has stood up for them. The system is arrayed against them, making it almost impossible for them to have the kind of life that was normal and expected in previous American generations. Yes, the left is the main culprit in alienating young men, but the right has thus far not really given any meaningful or helpful solutions to the crisis and in some ways has also contributed to the problem. Wokal Distance explains on X:
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I despise the Groyper movement, but if you want to understand where Fuentes gets purchase with young men I will tell you how it happened by telling you about my experience at the orientation night when my son joined elementary school band:
My 11 year old son son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents orientation night which was held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious to me why young men rage against the larger social system.
The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and various decorations that all invoked the various totems if diversity. Black lives matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging, and basically ever sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine was present. The advertisements for post secondary opportunities featured social justice education prominently, including advertising a course on “indigenous ways of knowing” as something grade 12 students should pursue upon graduation. Many of the teachers has “this is a safe space” sticker son their doors, and others had variations of “in this house” messaging on their doors or on the walls of the classroom.
The entire aesthetic which dominated the decoration of classrooms was the progressive leftist coded “in this house” and “be kind” aesthetic. As soon as you walked into a classroom there was no doubt as the the political leanings of whichever teacher occupied that classroom. The only way I can describe it is to say that progressive social justice activists have colonized the school and marked their territory.
A woman in a mask (who was in charge) got up and read a number of land acknowledgements before acknowledging the contribution of indigenous people to ways of knowing. Standard leftist land acknowledgement boilerplate. Additionally, every interaction was done in the style of HR style professionalism mixed with progressive leftist coded gentle parenting.
When it comes to how the teachers behaved I am going to draw on both that night and the other times I have been at my sons school in order to explain it. To begin, the boys are treated almost as though they are defective girls. The feminine modes of interaction and socialization are treated as though they are the only legitimate modes of interaction and serve as the taken for granted way to properly interact and navigate the world. Almost all the authority figures at my sons school are women with almost no exceptions. One day my son found out that the school had hired a single male education Assistant, and my son came home and told me, in wondrous amazement, that he saw a “boy teacher” at school. The level of wonderment and surprise he expressed was on par with what I would expect if he had walked into school and seen a triceratops walking the hallways.
My son often comes home from school and expresses utter frustration at the fact that his preferred way of communicating, as well as the things that are aligned with his temperament are treated as though they were somehow inferior. As he is 11 (and being assessed for autism) he lacks the correct technical language to describe this, so it generally shows up as him getting in trouble for being insufficiently “gentle” and “kind” in response to various passive aggressive power plays and instances of bullying carries out by his more socially developed (often) female peers.
To say that band night was feminine coded would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that feminized modes of behavior and communication were embedded in every single interaction. It was a totally alien environment for anyone who isn’t well versed in navigating the social codes of progressive leftist institutional spaces. It was like the slogan “the future is female” was taken to be a command delivered from God Himself turned into an education program.
Now, I want you to imagine what it is like for an 11 year old boy to be saturated in that environment day after day. he is an alien in his own school who is treated essentially like a ticking time bomb who needs to be effectively managed rather than engaged with an taught, and he knows this is happening. It is hard to overstate the level of hostility towards boys that is floating around in the ambient culture of the school system. It isn’t so much that there is an explicit form of anti-male bigotry (although examples of that exist) it is more that there is an overall attitude of distaste for anything masculine and an utter indifference towards the interests, fortunes, and inner lives of young boys. The expectations, norms, rules, and standards of behavior cater to the sensibilities of girls and women.
This is the entire social system that a young boy goes through from when he is 6 years old all the way until he is graduated from university.
It’s an old trope on the right to say “imagine if the roles were reversed,” but that would be to miss the point. I know that many on the left will say that all of this is perfectly acceptable because of historical injustices and the pursuit of Social Justice. What I want to point out to you is how absurd the world must appear through the eyes of the average 11 year-old boy. He is basically told he has a host of social advantages (white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, etc) that he has never experienced and will never benefit from, and this justifies the system which he is immersed in. And the worst part is, if young men point any of this out, the very people who are doing it will look them in the eye with a straight face and deny that any of this ever happened. Making matters worse these men begin to figure out that the institutions have been used to advance a leftist political agenda that scapegoated their group (young white men), and when they point this out everyone in authority calls them evil bigots.
And all this happens during their formative years.
Now, Imagine you are a young white male.
You graduate from the school system and are released into the world only to find that the feminine modes of socialization pushed on you are entirely unfit for purpose. That the social skills you were taught fail utterly in both the job markets young men tend towards (construction, engineering, building, landscaping, etc) and have no purchase in the dating market where highly agentic, masculine, wealthy men have a huge advantage over the passive, docile “nice boy.” On top of that, imagine that a great deal of the job listings that you peruse make it clear that preference will be given to women and “diverse” candidates, and that the job interview itself is full of shibboleths, coded statements, and trap questions meant to elicit responses that allow the hiring party to exclude anyone who isn’t sufficiently versed in and aligned with the priorities of the DEI/Woke/Social Justice paradigm.
On top of that, that if a you do get a job you will exposed to various sensitivity trainings, DEI trainings, and intersectionality workshops in which your group (straight white men) are repeatedly scapegoated as the source of all the worlds pathologies. Laid at your feet are patriarchy, colonialism, racism, sexism and a great number of other social evils for which you are taken to be complicit in and have a responsibility for fixing in virtue of being a white male.
While all this is going on a series of scandals (COVID, Men in womens’ sports, trans kids, etc) reveal to you the degree to which the institutions that make up the society you live in have adopted an ideology that is actively hostile to you because you are a straight white male, and have been denying you opportunity while scapegoating you for all societies problems and treating you like you are a defective girl.
None of this is to excuse any of the extremist radicals who are attempting to harness the resentment and anger of young men for their evil purposes. The point is to get you to understand why young men will attach themselves to any voice who is willing to stridently call for the obliteration of the social system and ideology which lied to them during their formative years and is currently doing things which rob them of opportunities for advancement and success.
The institutions have totally blown their credibility with young men, and have completely destroyed young men’s trust in institutions. Young men view the current set of social institutions as ideologically corrupt and totally illegitimate, and they view the narratives that emerge from those institutions as being expressions of as nothing more then a story told to legitimize an ideology which seeks to hold them back. As such, the institutions and their narratives have absolutely no normative pull on young Gen Z men.
I am not saying the situation is hopeless, but unless you acknowledge what I have laid out here, and engage in a good faith attempt to understand what the school system, Universities, non-profits, HR departments, and other civic institutions have done to young men, you will never be able to gain their trust enough to lead them away from guys like Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Andrew Torba, and other pathological influences.
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The bottom line here: The angry young men have a point. Until this social system changes, they will continue to radicalize, and no matter how problematic that radicalization might be, no matter how many other problems the radicalization might cause, it will be with good reason. When people lose hope, they find ways to fight back. Instead of focusing (merely) on fixing young men, why don’t we focus on fixing the system that is designed to alienate them and crush them? Young men are simultaneously told they enjoy all kinds of privileges, while being punished and squashed. The reality is that young men do not have privileges; they have liabilities. They are not advantaged; they are explicitly disadvantaged. We have waged a war on men. Should be surprised they are fighting back?
I hope this dad who wrote the post quoted above took his son out of that school. But many private schools (even some Christian schools) are also hostile to young men, even if it’s not as overt. And a lot more needs to change than just education. Our culture has been deeply feminized (as Helen Andrewes has pointed out). Young men feel trapped in the longhouse because they are. The description of the public school above is a cipher for the whole culture. We can’t shame and marginalize masculinity and then wonder where all the good men have gone. If you want good men, you better create a system in which that goodness is rewarded, not punished. And if you force men out of society, don’t be surprised if they fight back. No group can put up with being treated as second class citizens for long. While I certainly do not approve of the all the responses young men are making today, our culture has essentially created the conditions in which this was bound to happen. The young men are radicalized, and it’s our fault.
[See: https://x.com/wokal_distance/status/1988157091509313884?s=20.%5D
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After I put up the post above, David Greene released his open letter to Rod Dreher, which overlaps considerably with my own point:
Greene has some good thoughts here although, like Dreher, he is short on solutions. While any group under attack will fight back as a group (in this case, young white men), I don’t think that kind of identity politics is going to be fruitful. Greene points out some of the problems here (eg, race alone is too thin of a category).
I agree that young men need a better leader than Fuentes. Charlie Kirk was that better leader, and no one is stepping forward to replace him. Kirk’s message to young men was to fight back by (1) becoming a Christian and going to a good church, (2) getting married and having a bunch of kids, and (3) working hard and pursuing excellence in the marketplace. A simple but wise message.
Still, the fact that millions of young men “follow” Fuentes is something we have to reckon with. Just scolding the young men doesn’t fix it; Greene is right about that. Young men get scolded all the time from the left – and now from the right too. But they have become immune to it. It’s not going to deter them because they are too thick skinned. If you want to reach young men today, you cannot just call them names, you have make arguments and provide solutions.
Here’s the reality: Young men and women are both in crisis and no one is really doing anything to solve it.
Again, Kirk was the closest anyone with influence was coming to pointing a way forward for “the lost boys of the West.” Many of the remaining voices are radicalizing young men in ways that will not serve their good or society’s good. But their response is also perfectly understandable. The young men are just responding to the world we – the older generations – are leaving them.
Obviously at a church like TPC we live in a small bubble that avoids these problems (for the most part). Our young people generally marry, the young men generally have good jobs, etc.
But culturally, there are huge issues that need to be addressed at a systemic level or the future looks bleak. What future can a civilization have when men and women don’t marry, raise up kids, etc.? Marriage and birth rates have plummeted and most of our cultural and political leaders won’t address it – probably because they are clueless. Men and women don’t even like each other any more. This is catastrophic at an individual level (untold misery is coming down the pike) and a social level (when people stop marrying and having children, civilization dies).
You know you are at a strange point in history when more young men are interested in getting married and having children than young women (if the statistics are to be believed). Voting patterns indicate young men and women both moving in diametrically opposite directions. Helen Andrews has pointed out the we need to stop doing things that artificially handicap men and privilege women. But I think it will take more than getting rid of HR departments and DEI to fix this – that’s just treating symptoms, not the disease itself.
People without any kind of hope for the future are easily radicalized into some form of nihilism.
Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kirk that got at this problem, at least in the realm of economics.
Conventional wisdom says the “3 M’s” made people lean more and more conservative as they got older, namely, marriage, multiplication, and a mortgage. It’s no surprise today young people lean socialist or nihilist – they are not getting married, not having children, and they don’t own anything except debt. They have no skin in the game and no future orientation or hope. Combine all that with total ignorance of history and economics and it’s no surprise so many of them want to burn the system down.
So what needs to happen? Women need to be reined in. Young women have gone feral; they need to be redomesticated. Pastors, fathers, and older Christian women all have a role in that. The biggest problem for young men today is young women. Far too many young women way overestimate their value and the kind of man and life they should get. Promiscuity and social media has made women entitled and narcissistic. Premarital sex makes women crazy. It also makes them think they should be able to land a kind of man who is actually out of their league (the “alpha widow” effect). Just because a “high value” man used them for sex, they think they should be able to marry that kind of man. No one is telling young women they are deluded and young women do not want to feel like they are settling. In many cases, women are addicted to social media attention; they don’t want to marry (or even have a boyfriend in some cases) because the online attention would end. Feminism has given women all kinds of economic opportunities they did not have in past generations, but it has reduced their opportunities when it comes to marriage and family. Nothing about feminism prepares women for their most central roles in life, namely, being a wife and mother. According to their creational design, most women cannot be happy without marriage and children – but according to feminism, women cannot be happy if they marry and have children because marriage and motherhood are oppressive. Women are miserable because they are war with their own nature. Women are miserable because they were lied to and they believed the lies. Unless they repent of feminism and the sexual revolution, unless they refuse to believe the lies they have been told, there is no way forward. Our society needs 1 Peter 3 women, with virtue, modesty, and a quiet and gentle spirit. Kelsea Ballerini’s recent song “I Sit in Parks” provides a brief glimpse into reality and the regret of embracing the feminist lie. Women need to change the way they vote; socialism and progressivism prey upon misguided empathy and the desire for stable provision. Caesar is used as a substitute for a husband. We have set up an impossible situation: Women demand men who are financially successful, but our egalitarian, DEI-driven society makes it incredibly difficult for men to get ahead. We have created a contradiction: Feminism has insisted that women have economic equality with men (which they have achived, and then some), but nature/hypergamy means women demand who earn more than they do. Woman have to stop wanting it both ways. Moreover, women need to have their most characteristic sins challenged – such as immodesty, narcissism/solipsism, unrestrained and undisciplined emotions, refusing to submit to a husband, sexual refusal within marriage, gossip, manipulation, flattery, being a busy-body, etc. Women need to repent of thinking being a “girl boss” is true female empowerment and recognize that true female empowerment is found in humble femininity. Women need to stop trying to “have it all” and find contentment in what God wants them to have. Women today will say they are fully capable of “juggling” both a career and children – but children aren’t supposed to be juggled. And anything that gets juggled eventually gets dropped. Children need their mothers and women need to embrace motherhood as a career in its own right. Many women need to get off SSRIs and the birth control pill. Women should reject the sexual and bodily autonomy that the pro-choice movement preaches and use their bodies as God intended.
Men need to basically do what Kirk told them to do. Find a woman worthy of marriage and build a family with her. There are still good women out there; they may be few and far between, but they are there. Make yourself into the best man you can be. Multiply your talents. Grow in confidence and competence. Pursue holiness, including sexual holiness. Be frugal and strive for vocational excellence. Find a band of Christian brothers and plug into a good Reformed church with a good anthropology and a beautiful liturgy. Learn the hymns and psalms of the historic church so you can teach them to your family Resist the victim mentality even if society despises you. Focus less on national and global politics and more on the responsibilities right on front of you. Use the money and power you have to build generational wealth and a legacy. Find a good older man to mentor you – or multiple mentors to share wisdom with you about various areas of life. Think big picture and long term.
It’s common for red pill and black pill influencers to tell young men, “no one is coming to save you.” In terms of society’s deep structural problems, this is true. It’s pretty clear at this point that Trump and Republicans in Congress are probably not going to fix the immigration problem, the housing affordability problem, the Israeli influence problem, or the DEI problem. They at least tried on deportations and DEI, but progressivism is not going away and as soon as Democrats regain power (which is not certain but entirely possible, beginning with next year’s mid-terms), much of the good Trump has been able to accomplish will be undone. Every generation has its own battles to fight. No one – including Fuentes – can rescue young men from their plight. Each generation has its own mountains to climb. It’s unfortunate previous generations are leaving the world they are to our young people, but it is what it is. God does not call us to do things beyond our reach. You don’t need to fix the system, as that is beyond us at this point (though we pray for it and vote for it as we are able). You simply need to do the best you can, where you, with what you have. The rest is up to God. Will he continue to judge us? Or will he bless us? That’s up to him. But no matter what, the path of faithful obedience is the only way forward.
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ADDENDUM: Tucker Carlson has now come out with an interview with Nikki Haley’s son that serves as a follow up to the Nick Fuentes interview:
This is a good interview and Nailin is a sharp young man – the kind of young man who gives you hope for the future. I won’t comment on the interview because much of what I would say repeats things I’ve already said here and elsewhere. But it’s worth watching.
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ADDENDUM: After I wrote the post above, I came across this from David Greene. His open letter to Dreher makes a lot of good points. Conservatives like Dreher see the overall problem but do not have solutions. And when young men express their frustration, Dreher just dismisses them as “angry young men.” That’s not going to help.
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