TFP Article on "How Democrats Lost Men"

[ThatZanyFatball]

I know Bari Weiss and TFP are divisive, but I wanted to share this article with you fine ladies to hear your perspectives. I know you're mostly UK and this is US, but considering Trump's impact in the world right now it's pretty relevant.

I think the author makes some good points but then loses me when he says things like "The downside of such a safe and easy society is that men almost never get access to public honor, which leads many of them to entirely abandon that as a personal goal."

He doesn't seem to describe what exactly he means by "public honor." The idea that men need to be publicly, openly recognized and cheered for doing - manly? - things, and that's why they're trending right?

But other points, like "When you lose sight of the evolutionary pressures that underlie much of human behavior, you risk wandering into ideological nonsense." I think is a valid point.

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-democrats-lost-men?utm_source=cbs_news&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true

I think of Trump wants regime change in Iran the only way to guarantee that is to put boots on the ground. I agree he doesn't want to do that. So the alternative is to bomb Iran which won't achieve much other than killing more people than the Iranian state has already killed. Or do nothing.

That's why it's a concern for other countries. Because Hegseth can talk about American Lethality and warrior ethos and big up pride in American soldiers doing soldier stuff. But they at least have a perception they can do this without boots on the ground or American deaths. Which is nice for them but does mean "Trump won't want Americans to die" doesn't mean "other people aren't going to die" even if you believe him. Kind of annoying to be the person killed so that some American gets to feel like a real man according to Bari Weiss.

It's certainly better if people don't get shot. And better politically too.

That does not mean that interfering with armed officers isn't really bloody stupid. And the case with the car especially. Cars are used as weapons a lot, both recently in the US and overseas for years.

I think you are making some very tenuous connections here....

If Trump goes to war with Iran and loses thousands of men/regime change a la Iraq 2003, standby for the biggest Democrat win in history in 2028.

Absolutely. Getting actively in the way of law enforcement, harassing ICE all day, whether verbally, or car obstruction, has to count as one of the stupidest things any American citizens could do.
Look at Biden and Obama, just very recently calling for "resistance" by citizens.
This is shocking.

Maybe this is a Gen X Northern Ireland thing, but if I were confronted by a uniformed man with a gun, I would be as mild mannered and cooperative as possible.

Mainland Brits, who usually have only experienced unarmed police and never had to go through an army checkpoint, don't seem to get this, nor do Americans in certain cities like Portland and Minneapolis where there's a permanent activist community who, for reasons of local politics, are used to being able to boss the local beat cops around.

And of course the pervasive presence of guns in the US raises the stakes at any confrontation.

I don't want to get into the specific details of Pretti, because all the footage is a Rohrschach test, but in a concealed carry state like Minnesota, if you encounter cops and you've got a gun, you immediately tell them you've got a legally held gun with a concealed carry permit, you keep your hands in sight, and you cooperate with any orders they give you. Because if you get into an altercation with cops and then it turns out you've got a gun, the situation will get very ugly very fast.

Activists who don't want their people to get harmed should take responsible steps so they know this kind of thing.

Batya Ungar-Sargon has the best take on this.
The two civilians killed by ICE are total tragedies.
They are not "domestic terrorists".
Their deaths can be purely described as awful, the effects on their families etc.
But that also they both had the intent of not just peacefully demonstrating in the more time honoured way, at an official event like a vigil.
No, they went to disrupt ICE, to harass, to obstruct.
Against armed American federal enforcement.
At the behest of left activist groups, almost all funded and directed by elements of the Democrats.
They were effectively encouraged to get in harms way, and in America this can easily mean terminal force.
So, a double tragedy.
But let's see the bigger picture.
They were sacrificed in the left's aim to not allow Trump to carry out the mandate he was voted in on.
And to be consistent, had Harris won and provided armed officers to protect American rapists and paedophiles in getting sex change surgery when in female prisons, and Right women got in the way of those officers, I'd say exactly the same thing to them despite being on their side...go to an organized demo, but most of all, stay the fuck away from these officers.
Make your point otherwise.
I've never hated the left as much as I do today.

I don't think that will happen. I think "nothing will happen" by which I mean quite a lot of stuff will happen, people.will die, some of them Americans. But it won't affect the opinion writers or the podcasters who talk about war, and the need to assert strength, and the need for men to face danger while staying very very safe themselves interviewing other comedians etc. But like I said, we'll see.

Those aren't the goal posts though. Initially you said "Trump is absolutely consistent in this. No young American men in foreign wars". And I agree with you, he did say that. So that's the solemn promise he should be judged on. 1000s of men dying in Iran is well past that line. And the only reason he hasn't already broken that promise, the only reason American men haven't already died in a foreign war, is down to the skill of a single pilot.

I think that it's important to first carefully disentangle UK immigration and US immigration. UK immigration has an important cultural element that remains unresolved - Muslim immigrants are unusually arrayed against the personal values needed for a secular democracy (because they are religiously conservative and conservative Islam is unusually hostile to liberal secular democracy) and they are unusually resistant to integration even over multi-generational arcs. A liberal democracy must treat those views as valid, but it highly de-stabling for a liberal democracy to import them in vast numbers.

US immigration on the other hand is driven by Latin America and elite work card professionals. In both cases the set of personal political alignments is highly congruent to American culture, and the level of assimilation is high - if anything even higher now than its been historically. In addition, immigrants to the US are without any doubt a major long-term prosperity engine for the US. A large factor in the US' totally dominance in the world economy is directly connected to its robust immigration. The Right's legitimate complaints to US immigration come down to: 1) immigrants historically favour democrats so lax immigration/naturalisation is a way of bolstering election Democrats election rolls; 2) in a narrow band, immigration drives down labour scarcity and therefore negatively impacts worker wage negotiation (the economic upsides occur over a longer horizon); 3) Biden era laxity amounted to open borders, not just influx, but skoflawery on a historically epic proportion - citizens have a right to demand that laws that are enacted in their name get enforced.

Those are completely legitimate complaints (most on the centre left would also grant them), but they are not destablishing. The right also makes the claim that US culture is being replaced, and imbedded within that the claim is that white people themselves are being intentionally being crowded out by other races. The thing is, that is just a restatement of what leftist identitarians are also saying - that the days of white men are over, that they better get used to being in the minority, that it's time to start extracting reparations for their centuries of dominance and repression. So, the right is basically saying: no - white men will not just allow themselves to be made second class citizens (through affirmative action) in their own country. I think most of us would cringe at that formulation, but its not without justification. This is one example of the ways in which the US left's lurch into main-stream identity politics is so dangerous and so unamerican.

The issue in Minneapolis is over Somali Muslim immigrants.

Tim Walz complicity in deflecting attention from this fraud scandal by weaponising the two ICE tragedies is quite something. Olympic levels of dishonesty and amoral dirty politics.
To think, if Harris had won in 2024 and she'd have choked on one of her infamous word salads, Walz would now be president.

Specifically it's about the enormous fraud scandal linked to the Somali community, and which it's hard to believe local Democrat politicians weren't up to their necks in.

Centre-left media, in the US as well as the UK, takes away a vital bit of context by just not mentioning the fraud scandal. If consumers of news don't know that mostly Somali fraudsters in Minneapolis stole upwards of $8 billion of public funds, they can only assume that the feds are in Minneapolis for no reason at all - or, as I've seen it in some reports, that Trump wants to punish Minneapolis for being a left wing city.

Can you imagine if Westerners went to Somalia...or Nigeria, China, Russia, Iraq, Iran etc etc, and perpetrated this kind of fraud.
They'd be in jail for the rest of their misbegotten lives, or dumped out of the country, or lynched.
Non-citizens defrauding Americans in America? They're protected by left politicians, while the same politicians gaslight their own people as racist for highlighting this.
Ditto Mirpuri grooming gangs and the deafening silence from the left over here.
After seeing stuff like this, a continuation of the woke agenda, now using credulous left leaning citizens to deflect from attention on this fraud and illegal immigration more generally, by being cannon fodder for their cause, on top of the transgender scandal promoted hard for 15 years now, tells me more every day that the left can never be trusted.

Yes, Latin Americans generally are very compatible with American culture, large parts of American culture are Latin American.

However, the massive numbers coming across the border eventually became overwhelming, it was crazy to see the budgets small places were having to allocate to care of migrants, sometimes as many as the populations of the towns themselves. Eve some of the sanctuary cities discovered that when all those people actually arrive, it is a huge problem.

This is part of the reason that there was good Hispanic support for Trump. Apart from the Miami - Cuban community who is normally Republican, so many of the communities along the border have large Hispanic populations. They are the people seeing every day what is going on there and the problems it creates. A lot of those people want migration controlled in an orderly way.

Same here. As a Gen Xer from NI, I've also often been in the situation where groups of armed men (both Police/British Army and Provos) have surrounded my car and asked me to get out of it to be questioned and searched. I've also been stopped and searched by armed men in the street - it was common in NI when I was growing up.

It's demeaning and terrifying and you're entirely at the mercy of the temperament of those armed men and their ability to control themselves while they're feeling tense/vulnerable in 'enemy' territory. Being mild-mannered and cooperative was the best way to deal with it. From experience, I know that talking back to them gets you nowhere because they have all the power in that situation.

The American situation is being badly mishandled by both sides because, as you pointed out earlier, ICE agents are not trained sufficiently well to deal with the situations they're being put in and, because it's the US, the citizenry can be just as armed as the law enforcers. US citizens also have legally guaranteed rights that citizens in other countries (e.g. N Ireland) don't have when dealing with law enforcement and a lot of them are expecting to rely on stating those rights to get them out of situations where it's not wise to be uncooperative with law enforcement, who often have an attitude of 'bag 'em and tag 'em and let the courts sort it out afterwards'.

I really do think both sides are trying to rile each other up. However, I have less respect for the Democrat politicians encouraging ordinary people to put themselves in harm's way - civil disobedience done correctly and non-threateningly can work effectively but that is not what activists are doing on the streets.

Your last comments, absolutely.
Biden and Obama have gone on line to talk "resistance" to ICE. They should be ashamed of encouraging older citizens and women to actively put themselves in harms way.

No doubt that suits some people. But generally?

There's a strain on American culture that likes to stereotype and then classify into groups. I don't think it's a left versus right thing in origin though there are some very obvious results on the left. There's also a tendency to apply those stereotypes outside the US and onto the past. The image of the self-reliant man heroically driving forward the bounds of civilisation is very American: contrast it to the Victorian ideal of nerdy academic type, such as Charles Darwin pottering around with his insects.

I don't think I'm being reductive but stereotypes certainly are that. They take nuance and make a cartoon out of it.

This man doesn't want any of that heroic stuff. But he is also bored of being stereotyped as over-privileged, lazy, violent, obtuse, a sex pest, incapable of emotions, incapable of housework etc etc because of dodgy statistics churned out by universities.