Faithful readers of this blog know that I touch on the issue of manhood and masculinity quite frequently.

I believe deeply in the classical virtues of masculinity.

Strong, virtuous men are the bedrock of a healthy civilization.  Wherever you find a society in which the men have abdicated their manly duties, you find an abundance of social problems.

I believe that the rise in mass shootings, drug use by boys, suicide, and other problems that we’ve seen is due to a lack of teaching classical masculinity.

People need a sense of purpose to live full, meaningful lives.  The traditional role of men in society was to be the provider and protector.  It was men who stood on the wall, built the roads and buildings, and brought home the bacon.

Now, if a boy stands up and says “I want to work hard to be the breadwinner for my wife and children” he’s more likely to be attacked for saying that he thinks women can’t take care of themselves than he is to praised for he desire to be responsible husband and father.

Men stripped of their purpose in life have retreated to video games, porn, the internet, drugs and alcohol, and depressed loneliness unable to grow up still living at home.

Some of these young men, if they are white, get drawn into white supremacism or incel culture to fill that void in their lives.  It is a cult that prays upon the hurting and suffering but provides no relief.

The message to society should be, we need to heal men.  We need to address the void in the lives of so many men, a sense of life without deep purpose, and fix it.  We need to reaffirm that good men are vital for society and that the desire to be a provider and protector, to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining civilization is a virtue.

That is not going to happen, at least not on the Left.

An activist mom went to Twitter to propose what she thought was the right thing to do for young, white men, and while it may have started with the best of intentions, it went to hell in a handbasket quickly.

For the sake of brevity, I have unrolled this thread.

Do you have white teenage sons?

Listen up.

I’ve been watching my boys’ online behavior & noticed that social media and vloggers are actively laying groundwork in white teens to turn them into alt-right/white supremacists.

Here’s how:
It’s a system I believe is purposefully created to disillusion white boys away from progressive/liberal perspectives.

They should be turned away from progressive/liberal perspectives.

I have never met a progressive/liberal perspective that builds anything up.  They only destroy.  I love the idea of the public library as a repository of knowledge, with free access to it for all people.

The progressive perspective of the library is a place where the homeless can masturbate to internet porn and drag queens can teach pre-kindergarten age children to twerk.

Progressive perspectives are the kind that causes politicians to give working-class people in an economically depressed, rust belt city a condescending lecture on how they have white privilege rather than show any empathy to them whatsoever.

Progressives do not develop new technologies, they teach that “engineering rigor” is white supremacist and requiring precision in math is bigoted.

First, the boys are inundated by memes featuring subtly racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic jokes.

Being kids, they don’t see the nuance & repeat/share.
Then they’re called out for these jokes/phrases/memes by parents, teachers, kids (mostly girls) at school & online.

The boys then feel shame & embarrassment – and shame is the force that, I believe, leads people to their worst decisions.
The second step is the boys consuming media with the “people are too sensitive” and “you can’t say anything anymore!” themes.

Now is a good time to share a story about two programmers who made a double entendre joke about software dongles that was overheard at a tech conference and ended with a DDOS attack on their employer and them getting fired.

Jokes are like rough and tumble play.  They allow kids to test the waters of good and bad behavior.  To learn where the line is.

Overt racism is bad.  I won’t defend it.

At the same time, censoriousness is also bad.  It is like stopping boys from rough-housing.  When you do that, you don’t get peaceful boys.  You get emotionally damaged boys who do not know how to handle emotions.

For these boys, this will ring true – they’re getting in trouble for “nothing”.

That is factually true.

There is an article in The Washingtonian, ironically that this author references later on that is a perfect example of this.

This narrative allows boys to shed the shame – replacing it w/anger.
And who is their anger with?

Women, feminists, liberals, people of color, gay folks, etc etc. So-called snowflakes.

Semi-factually true.  Not all, perhaps not even the majority.  However, there is the extremely loud, radical fraction that lives to ruin other people’s day.

And nobody is there to dismantle the “snowflake” fallacy.

These boys are being set up – they’re placed like baseballs on a tee and hit right out of the park.
And NOBODY seems to notice this happening – except, it seems, moms of teenage girls who see the bizarre harassment their daughters endure.

And, of course, moms like me who stalk our sons’ social media.

These are often boys from progressive or moderate families – but their online behavior & viewing habits are often ignored.

Here’s an early red flag: if your kid says “triggered” as a joke referring to people being sensitive, he’s already being exposed & on his way.

Triggered is a joke.  We all watched the Democratic Socialists at their convention making “points of personal privilege.”  We have all seen the video of a Yale student yelling at her dean over an e-mail about Halloween costumes.

People, like veterans, who suffer from real PTSD need real help.  These kids are using their emotions as a power play, bullying others down with histrionics.

Intervene!
Look through his Instagram Explore screen with him. Explain what’s underlying those memes. Explain why “triggered” isn’t a joke, what a PTSD trigger is actually like. Evoke empathy without shaming him.

Real PTSD in the soldier who watched his buddies die or got his legs blown off deserves empathy.  A bunch of kids staging a protest because somebody held a taco Tuesday party is bullshit.

Remind him you know he’s a good person, but explain how propaganda works.
Propaganda makes extreme points of view seem normal by small amounts of exposure over time – all for the purpose of converting people to more extremist points of view.

This is one of the least self-aware things I have ever read.

Use my baseball analogy, if you want. Tell your son that he doesn’t have to be anybody’s fool.
Teenagers have an innate drive toward independence, and once this system is exposed, they’re likely to start questioning the memes & vloggers’ intentions.

Tell them you are always there, not judging, to look at content & try to spot the lie – no judgment.

This is said by the Progressive pushing Progressivism.

Then don’t judge!
You can also watch political comedy shows with him, like Trevor Noah, John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj. Talk about what makes their jokes funny – who are the butt of the jokes? Do they “punch up” or down?

Trevor Noah is a Jew-hating piece of shit.  John Oliver is a biased liar and only funny if you are a condescending Progressive prick who thinks that mocking rural conservatives is the height of comedy.

Using the “punch up/punch down” theory is terrible to comedy.  It is part of the Progressive dogma that everything exists on an oppressor/victim dynamic.

Our boys want funny guys to relate to. Give them John Mulaney, Hannibal Burress, Hasan Minhaj, Neal Brennan, Dave Chappelle … then TALK TO YOUR SONS about that funny shit. Break it down.

John Mulaney is funny.  Dave Chappelle is one of the greatest comedians of his generation and will probably go down in history alongside Robin Williams and Richard Prior.  I’m just surprised that he got mentioned here because he made a transgender joke in 2018 and refused to apologize for it.

(Also give them women comics, obviously, but that’s beside the point here).
Show them that progressive comedy isn’t about being “politically correct” or safe.

Progressive comedy is not funny.

This is a real article: “NANETTE” AND WHY A NEW WAVE OF COMEDIANS DON’T WANT TO BE FUNNY

Progressives have killed comedy on campus.  Jerry Seinfeld said that.  Liberals can be funny.  Progressives just scream into the camera that the President’s daughter is a “feckless c*nt.”

It’s often about exposing oppressive systems – which is the furthest thing from “safe” or delicate as you can get.

The world does not exist in a dynamic of oppressive systems.

Disprove this “snowflake” garbage once & for all.

No.

Ask your son:

Who is more of a delicate “snowflake” – the person who gets offended by racism/sexism & actively wants to help end bigotry? Or the person who is offended by people saying happy holidays instead of merry Christmas?

On behalf of all Jews, say Merry Christmas.  Hannukkah is not an important holiday for us.  It’s only important because it overlaps at the same time of year as Christmas.  If you really want to be sensitive, say Merry Christmas then learn what the real important Jewish celebratory holidays are (like Purim) and wish us a happy one of those.

Above all, we need to stay engaged & challenge our kids without shaming them.

Public shaming is the Progressive way.

I’m lucky, my kids are smart and have a smart, critical, progressive dad who isn’t afraid to call bullshit when he sees it.

I fear for these kids.

But I’ve seen SO MANY white boys falling prey to this system. So beware.
Thanks to the commenter who shared this thread by journos doing the real work on this subject. @Max_Fisher you’re a hero for this.

And someone suggested this relevant interview with a former white supremacist on how he became radicalized. 

another great source that I read sometime back and had forgotten about. This is a parent’s true story. I don’t know who they are, though. 

“‘Why would adults want to do that?…How could I fall for it?’

…he’d been a pawn in a much larger game. At age 13, suddenly friendless, he couldn’t be expected to understand how he was being manipulated or how technology made it easier for the online alt-right to find him.”

Now is a good time to get to that Washingtonian article.

What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right

Read the whole thing.  This is just the beginning and it is chilling.

The problems had started when Sam was 13, barely a month into eighth grade. In the taxonomy of our local public school, his close group of friends was tagged edgy and liberal: One of them came out as gay during a class presentation; another identified as trans for a while. Their group-text chain pulsed 24-7 with observations about alternative music and the robotic conformity of other classmates. Standard stuff for sensitive middle-schoolers.

One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”

No one called me as this unfolded, even though Sam cried for about six hours straight as staff members parked him in vacant offices to keep him away from other students. When he stepped off the bus that afternoon and I asked why his eyes were so swollen, he informed me that he would probably be suspended, but possibly also expelled and arrested.

If Kafka were a middle-schooler today, this is the nightmare novel he would have written.

This boy was driven to near suicide by Progressive shaming and callout culture.  Every one of his friends abandoned him.  He was left lonely and miserable.

The only people he could talk to were online.  A few empathized with him and they turned out to be white supremacists.

This boy was sucked in.

It started because of radical Progressivism decided that two teenage boys doing a normal teenage boy thing, making a crude joke between them, needed to be destroyed to take down Patriarchy.

Zero empathy was shown to this young white boy and it nearly ended his life.

This case does not exist in a vacuum.  It happened not too far from when the Covington Catholic School scandal happened.

Imagine you are a white boy watching as the entire world rushed to condemn and doxx kids like you for just standing there having a grown man bang a drum in your face.  Imagine adults online saying that because of your skin color and the look of your face, they knew, just KNEW that you were going to grow up to be a self-entitled rapist.

I have said it before, and I will say it again.  This new type of white supremacism is not the same as old KKK white supremacism.  It is the opposite side of the extremism coin to the Woke Left.  They are in resonance.

Everything this mother said is like a textbook to turn her sons into boys with secret social media accounts for following Richard Spencer.

I have documented example after example of how Progressives clearly have no idea how to raise boys into the kind of men who plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.

I will give this mother the benefit of the doubt, that she only has the best of intentions for her boys.

But it’s clear that she doesn’t understand boys and what the need and her advice will end up doing more harm than good.