“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
– Excerpted from Those Who Remain by G. Michael Hopf
No, I’m not talking about the Trump administration, although it is brimming with strong men — and women — who are moving mountains to reclaim the promise of America, restoring the rule of law and unchaining our traditional Judeo-Christian Weltanschauung.
I’m talking about the so-called manosphere, the part of the web where men gather to speak freely. Or, as Wikipedia defines it, “a varied collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism.” But there’s no need to sell it so hard: They had me at “masculinity.”
As PJ Media’s resident misogynist, I notice that one of the harbingers of weak men making hard times is the rise of supercilious navel-gazing and the growth of an economic infrastructure to support it as a profession. Since it doesn’t involve hard physical work or objective thought, and since feminism has pushed bossy women to the top of the food chain when it comes to professions that don't actually produce anything useful, women take over more and more of this new social hierarchy. From their high perches, they make more of the leadership decisions that continue to bend our culture towards hard times.
Related: Six Years Ago, the Left Told Boys They Were Toxic. What Did They Think Would Happen?
Recall that when leftists (progressives, Democrats, socialists, hippies, communists — whatever you want to call them) built the current hard times, they did so by marching through the institutions. The institutions had originally been built by strong men coming out of hard times — a great depression bookended by world wars.
The good times the Greatest Generation built consisted of the optimistic, innovative mid-century era through the prosperity and stability of the 1970s and 1980s. But these good times also created weak men — the Boomers — a spoiled generation to whom everything came easy and who had no concept of the value of the life of ease they inherited by the grace of the place and time in which they were born.
These soft Boomers were easy prey for the siren song of socialism and sexual revolution. Why was everyone so uptight, man? Why were we fighting communism? Why couldn’t we just spread the wealth? What’s wrong with getting laid — if it feels good, do it, right?
Predictably, the hard times rolled in over decades of political and spiritual warfare against peak America. We lost our way: We let good intentions and licentiousness capriciously override our laws; we shouted down traditional morality and faith; and we swapped out the understanding of charity for entitlement. We now struggle with crises of mental illness, fecklessness, corruption, loss of national character and culture, and crushing debt.
Whereas weak men seize control of the institutions that strong men built, the latter do not regain control by fighting to take back the dilapidated, perverted, corrupted shells of their once-great creations. Rather, they simply build new ones. They are, after all, the drivers of innovation and growth. Their heritage is that of the pilgrims who fled the sociopolitical rot of Europe to carve the greatest nation in history from the wilderness. There was no stopping it: Those who already dwelt in North America got on board or got run over.
Sadly, there are no new, vast, resource-rich unclaimed nations lying around for the creator-builders to develop. Their indomitable spirit will not be suppressed, though. Thus, they are building out a new world in virtual space, free from the soul-sucking drag of political correctness and feminist scolds.
All the best people are piously assaulting this free new virtual nation, natch. I won’t bore you with a stack of links and quotes here; you have merely to type “manosphere” into your favorite search engine to be inundated with dire warnings of misogyny, extremism, and normalization of violence.
Some, however, see the growing ecosphere for what it is: a flourishing incubator of intellectual and spiritual liberty. Marketing agency Precision Strategies, for one, has been charting the rise of the Manosphere:
The data shows men are not retreating from the world. They are building meaning in alternative spaces:
- Gig work when stability disappears
- Podcasts and YouTube when trust in media breaks down
- Faith communities when identity feels unsettled
With their heads clear, members of this boys' club can focus on the things that work: faith, reason, and objective truth. This is the way back to the good times.
The usual suspects are already trying to demand access so they can destroy it, as they always strive to do to successful fraternal organizations. UN Women, an agency that "exists to advance women’s rights, gender equality, and the empowerment of all women and girls," is on the case. In a not-at-all-agenda-driven report entitled "How to counter the manosphere’s toxic influence," it informs us that "Everybody loses in a world with gender inequality, even in the digital world. But in the manosphere, influencers are spreading – and profiting from – controversial content that fuels misogyny, promotes unhealthy definitions of masculinity, and normalizes violence against women and girls."
The report goes on to femsplain how governments, institutions, and tech companies can all play a part in squashing the digital mancave. It is "A call to action" aimed at "Ending misogyny and promoting gender equality online." As if men are somehow more equal online. These busybodies have the exact same access and tools as men to do as they please on the internet. What's stopping them from building perfect communities? But as ever, that's not what this is about. Rather, it's about seizing control of something good that someone else built and ruining it.
I don't dismiss the reality that in some benighted places on the planet, women truly are oppressed and abused. But this is no longer a thing in First-World Western nations.
Nor do I dismiss the fact that there is some unsavory stuff in some corners of the manosphere. There's also plenty of unsavory content produced by the misandrous left-wing abortion zealots everywhere else. So what.
Leave the guys alone, ladies. They're building the future.
