Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones were to release “Beggar’s Banquet,” except that the record label decided that the original cover …
… was inappropriate, and substituted …
… angering one member of the band on his birthday.
The number one single …
… and album today in 1975:
Charles Hurt starts with a famous quotation:
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1787
Few lines from our founding inspire more hysteria these days from the bureaucratic tyrants in Washington and their crotch-nuzzling cheerleaders in the media.
When it comes to bloodshed in your neighborhood, CNN calls it “fiery but most peaceful.” When the unrest reaches the neighborhood of tyrants, CNN calls it an “insurrection” and demands the full force of the federal government to quash every last tendril of dissent.
At a minimum, you have to commend the “insurrectionists” for at least hitting the right house for refreshing the tree of liberty. The “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots that roiled your neighborhoods, burned down your churches and looted your stores were pure anarchy — the petty, redheaded stepchild of tyranny. But tyranny nonetheless.
Certainly, watering the tree of liberty with anybody’s blood is a strong message for suburban soccer moms these days. Jefferson was famous for his brass-knuckled commitment to liberty.
“What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?” he wondered in the same letter that he discusses refreshing the Tree of Liberty.
Probably not the most effective bumper sticker to win over those suburban soccer moms.
You can blame the contentment of these moms on the overabundance of fruits from our liberty.
Jefferson called this contentment “lethargy” and warned that it was “the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”
“God forbid,” he remarked, “we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.”
Granted, nobody today wants to see bloodshed in the streets. So, what about a bloodless revolution? Instead of blood flowing in the streets of bureaucratic Washington, what about a sea of pink slips?
As grievously dismayed as Jefferson would be over the state of lethargy and tyranny in our country today, he would also cheer the arrival of pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy on the political battlefield. Smart, worldly and insatiably curious, Mr. Ramaswamy is about as close as you get to a Renaissance man in our times.
While at his first job out of college working for an investment firm focused on biotech companies, Mr. Ramaswamy got bored. So we went to law school, during which time he earned both a law degree and his first $15 million. He has even dabbled in stand-up comedy.
Jefferson would especially admire that Mr. Ramaswamy accomplished something in the private sector before getting into politics. (All the Founders would be disgusted by the hordes of lifelong government grifters like President Biden.)
But mostly, Jefferson would applaud Mr. Ramaswamy’s approach to the bloated, malignant federal government that has grown so large and powerful that it is ungovernable and entirely unresponsive to the people.
“Do you believe in reform? Or do you believe in revolution?” Mr. Ramaswamy asked in an editorial board meeting with The Washington Times last week.
“I am the candidate — I think the sole candidate — who is actually, unapologetically on the side of revolution. I think that is the only way forward.”
In a Republican primary field dominated by former President Donald Trump, most candidates are tiptoeing around promising to be Mr. Trump without the drama. Or Trump Light. Or Trump without Trump. Trump — minus the mean tweets.
Mr. Ramaswamy is running a different campaign. He is not running to the left of Trump or to the center of Trump — but to the Trump of Trump. If anything, Mr. Ramaswamy is critical of Mr. Trump for not being enough of a disrupter.
Why would you pick a secretary of education, Mr. Ramaswamy asked, for a department you intended to abolish?
As for the somewhat chaotic personality of Mr. Trump, Mr. Ramaswamy says the MAGA movement does not belong to any one man. After all, he said, George Washington was “America First” before anybody else.
He intends to follow in those footsteps.
Today in 1964, the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” hit number one and stayed there for 14 weeks:
Today in 1973, George Harrison got a visit from the taxman, who told him he owed £1 million in taxes on his 1973 Bangladesh album and concert:
At this point, President Biden and his top staff want his reelection campaign to focus on two broad themes. The first, discussed earlier this week, is to turn the election into a referendum on Donald Trump and tie every other GOP candidate on the ballot to “mega-MAGA Republicans.” The second, which seems like a riskier bet, is to tout the success of “Bidenomics” and the president’s economic record.
The first problem is that most Americans don’t feel good about the economy and don’t feel good about how Biden is handling economic issues. As a CNBC headline put it, “The White House plan to sell Bidenomics: Hit the road, ignore the polls.”
Back in February, Gallup found that just 35 percent of Americans say they are better off now than they were a year ago, while 50 percent say they are worse off than a year ago. The organization noted that, “since Gallup first asked this question in 1976, it has been rare for half or more of Americans to say they are worse off.” In fact, “the only other times this occurred was during the Great Recession era in 2008 and 2009.”
Things haven’t changed much in the past few months. Yesterday, CNBC unveiled a new poll that found just 37 percent of Americans approve of how Biden is handling the economy, while 58 percent disapprove:
The survey showed small gains in Americans’ views on the economy, though to levels that remain depressed. The percentage of Americans saying the economy is excellent or good rose 6 points to a still-low 20 percent. The percentage saying the economy is just fair or poor declined 6 points to a still-high 79 percent. Just 24 percent of the public believes the economy will improve in the next year, a relatively low mark for the survey but up 6 points compared with April and the percentage expecting the economy to get worse fell 10 points to 43 percent.
On paper, the current U.S. inflation rate is 3 percent year-over-year, a significant decline from the 9 percent of June 2022 and much closer to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent. But judging from the survey responses, Americans are still feeling the effects of the explosion in prices from early 2021 to this past spring. Remember, for most goods, prices haven’t gone down to the pre-inflation “normal,” they’ve just stopped increasing so dramatically. That CNBC survey found:
Inflation was named the number one issue by 30 percent of respondents. That’s more than double any of the other areas of concern, which include threats to democracy, immigration and border security, health care and crime.
And Americans believe Republicans have better policies than Democrats to handle the key economic issues, often by substantial margins. Republicans lead Democrats by double digits when asked which party would do a better job on the economy, inflation and improving the respondent’s personal financial situation. They lead by single digits when it comes to jobs and keeping energy costs down.
This is not what Democrats or fans of the Biden administration want to see. You don’t have to look far to find economists and economic columnists asking some version of the question, “The economy is doing really well, so why are Americans so glum?”
Wealth comes from ownership. Being involved in the financial industry for nearly thirty years, and spending the past dozen-plus years in the media helping people create economic freedom and wealth for themselves and their families, I know that wealth being derived from ownership is an indisputable truth. More concretely, wealth comes from the ownership of assets that increase in value over time.
Ownership is a subject people tend to greatly misunderstand. We misconstrue where wealth comes from, and we misinterpret the benefits of hard work and taking risks. You can meet a poor construction worker putting in eighty hours a week for someone else. You can find professional athletes declaring bankruptcy as soon as their multimillion-dollar contracts end. And you can find guys sailing their boats who haven’t been to an office in years. That’s because it’s not just how much money you make, but how you manage it and put it to work for you.
Asset ownership provides the ability for people to increase their wealth exponentially — by several multiples of the original investment. This is something that working and earning alone cannot do.
For many Americans, creating generational wealth has come from owning homes that have appreciated in value. Some individuals hold stock and other financial instruments via brokerage accounts and 401(k) plans that have largely increased in value over time. Millions of Americans have built businesses that meet the wants and needs of customers and have created wealth through that process. Others have invested in alternative scarce assets, whether they be precious metals, art or even trading cards.
So, if there was an institutional, governmental desire for more people to become wealthy and grow that wealth, making it easier to invest and gain ownership would be a priority.
Today’s reality is just the opposite. Ownership — and the opportunities for individual wealth creation and economic freedom that come with it — is under attack.
I am known as someone with a commonsense approach to just about everything, so when I first heard that the World Economic Forum (WEF), an international organization run by Klaus Schwab and connected to a cadre of elites that includes business, financial and political leaders, put out a set of predictions for this decade that included the disappearance of ownership, I figured it was a conspiracy theory.
The WEF has courted, developed and associated with business magnates and political heavyweights like Bill Gates, Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and former chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel. The WEF hosts a fancy networking forum in Davos, Switzerland, yearly. They put out “thought leadership” around social, political, business and economic concepts. Surely there must have been some mistake that this organization littered with the global elite would be predicting the end of private property?
It didn’t take much research to find that it was right out in the open. The WEF’s 2030 predictions included the stark warning, under the guise of sunshine and rainbows, “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” And that’s just the beginning.
Yes, property rights and the ownership they convey, the cornerstone of freedom and wealth-creation opportunities, have come under fire. And I am quite certain that owning nothing and being devoid of the opportunities that come with ownership makes you poor and unfree, not… happy.
What is being said by the elites aloud worldwide is playing out in real time in the US. But why?
Everyone, including your own government, wants what you have. More accurately, they are in desperate need of what you have — your wealth, both today and in the future.
These allied forces are on a quest to take your wealth and, by extension, your freedoms for their benefit, their prosperity and, ultimately, their survival. Without it, their very existence is threatened.
Over the year following the March 2020 Covid lockdowns and mandates, we saw the most historic wealth transfer of all time, enabled by the US government and the Federal Reserve, alongside connected financial institutions. That multitrillion-dollar transfer went from Main Street to Wall Street. The already wealthy and well-connected saw their wealth inflated at the expense of average Americans, including savers and retirees, as well as the backbone of the US economy, small business. The coordination of the big players in the financial sector along with the government has benefited the wealthiest at your expense.
On the tail end of this giveaway, quite predictably, the highest inflation in forty years took hold. Once again, those who had the least bore the brunt of this burden. Then, two years later, the same central planning powers extracted trillions of dollars from the stock market, including from 401(k)s and other individual retirement accounts.
These represent just a few battles in a much larger, coordinated and dangerous endeavor. It is all part of a multi-pronged shift toward a new financial world order where they own everything and you own nothing.
These shifts in the world economy are driven by two underlying trends. The first is the modern drivers of wealth. The elite know where the valuable resources are in the world and where new value can be created, extracted, or conquered. They know who holds wealth today and where they can get it from in the future. And they know how they plan to take every penny of it that they can.
When the Constitution and Bill of Rights were framed in the eighteenth century, America was primarily an agrarian society. Property rights and the wealth that you could create were heavily tied to land ownership.
Then, as industry advanced and the monetary system evolved, individuals were able to build businesses and create wealth via investment.
Americans prospered through hard work, ingenuity, thriftiness and risk-taking, all enhanced and protected by the founding concepts of individual rights, including property rights.
As Americans leveraged their work ethic and the structure that protected their fruitfulness, they became increasingly prosperous — at levels not seen anywhere around the globe at any time in history. Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2022 estimated global wealth at around $463.6 trillion, with 31 percent of that, or around $145.8 trillion, in the hands of Americans.
However, those in charge of safeguarding individual rights — the government — were derelict in their duties. They realized that to take and hold power, they had to make promises and offer “services.” Services that, by the way, they weren’t paying for — you were.
This led to massive increases in spending. As the government spent, given that government doesn’t produce anything of intrinsic value, there were only so many ways to pay for that spending.
Of course, one source of financing government spending is taxation — the taking of a portion of your productivity and wealth.
Another financing route is debt. This leads us to a second, deeper issue: the shifting of the financial world order because of the natural opposition between power and too much debt. Debt isn’t always bad. It can be a powerful investment tool if used to build something worth far more than the debt in the future. But, increasingly, people owe money on things that have little monetary value, and companies and governments owe money to companies and governments that owe even more money.
The US government can’t afford all its spending and has turned time and again to debt as its source of financing (running upwards of $31 trillion, outpacing the GDP and rapidly growing at the time of writing). Debt isn’t a magic payment source because it eventually still needs to be paid. This is ultimately paid from — you guessed it — your productivity. It starts with more taxes to pay for the interest on the debt, making you pay additional money toward “services” you effectively have already purchased by government proxy.
When the government runs out of people who are interested in buying their debt, then they pull an accounting trick and buy (AKA monetize) their own debt. By doing so, it again robs your productivity via debasing the dollars that are a proxy for that productivity.
Government could, of course, cut services, but that would threaten its power. Moreover, as everything is done on your dime, why would they choose this route?
They could also take the wealth and riches of other countries and people via invasions, something that isn’t popular, for obvious reasons. It’s more stealthy and genteel to rob and plunder “legally.”
This works for a while, as people go along with the scheme or perhaps don’t notice what is going on.
But at some point, the financial scheme starts to show cracks. Debt levels get too high. Neither investors nor other countries want to buy new debt. It becomes incredibly costly to service the substantial amount of existing debt. The monetization scheme produces notice- able damage via inflation. Everything starts to unravel — including the financial empire itself.
I will say it again: power and massive debt loads are at odds with each other.
It becomes mathematically impossible for the current trajectory to be sustained. That’s where the desperation kicks in. And new and robust schemes are hatched as a way to continue this spending cycle and protect their power.
The government is desperate and in debt, and you and your fellow citizens represent a massive amount of wealth to be “legally” conquered. As the US’s financial empire is in its twilight, with the government’s behaviors threatening the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, you are at even more risk of owning nothing. The Federal Reserve’s policies are greatly impacting the soundness of your money and its global financial standing. This ultimately impacts your wealth creation opportunities as well. You may hold dollars, but they are buying you less and less.
That leads us to where we are today. Many people see where we are in the broader financial cycle and where this is going. The elite and well-connected know that the economic reality isn’t sustainable and that it will lead to a new financial world order, as has been the case numerous times throughout history. They have studied it and they want to capitalize upon it.
So, with this knowledge, and the power, wealth and connections to make it happen, the elite are posturing and positioning. They want to influence, create, dictate and, most importantly, come out on top in this new financial world order.
That’s why they are working, often in alliance, together against you. To ensure that you own nothing, because that means they own as much as possible of everything as a global financial reset happens.
With that, in a post-industrial digital age, between fiat currency, technology and elite central planning, it is becoming harder than ever to secure and maintain ownership of anything.
You work hard. You save. You invest. You do all the right things, but you still find that you aren’t able to get ahead. You know that there’s something wrong, but you aren’t exactly sure how it all comes together and how you can fight back.
As I argue in my new book, You Will Own Nothing, the time is now to create a counter-revolution to these forces. It is more clear than ever that as a new financial world order takes shape, the American Dream is under fire and may soon be unattainable. The intention is to hollow out the middle and working class and leave them with nothing. It’s being done via the encroachment of government, Big Tech, big finance and other ruling elite into all aspects of your life. Your rights, your privacy and ultimately your wealth hang in the balance.
Today in 1964, a member of the audience at a Rolling Stones concert in the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool, England, spat upon guitarist Brian Jones, sparking a riot that injured 30 fans and two police officers.
The Stones were banned from performing in Blackpool until 2008.
Today in 1965, Bob Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone,” which is not like said Rolling Stones:
Today in 1967, the Beatles and other celebrities took out a full-page ad in the London Times calling for the legalization of …
… marijuana.
Today in 1963, high school student Neil Young and his band, the Squires, recorded in a Winnipeg studio a surf instrumental:
Today in 1965, the Beatles asked for …
The number one single — really — today in 1966:
Today in 1979, Iran’s new ruler, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, banned rock and roll, an event that inspired a British band:
Birthdays start with the indescribable George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic:
Rick Davies played keyboards for Supertramp:
Estelle Bennett was the older sister of Ronnie Spector, and both were part of the Ronettes:
Don Henley of the Eagles:
USA Today reports about this song:
Country Music Television is no longer airing Jason Aldean’s music video “Try That In A Small Town,” which sparked criticism after its release Friday.
The TV network pulled the video from rotation, a CMT spokesperson confirmed to USA TODAY in an email Wednesday.
The network stopped showing the music video after Aldean, who survived a mass shooting while he performed in 2017, faced backlash for the song, which many perceived as being in favor of gun violence and lynching.
Not long after the video’s release, online critics highlighted the song lyrics as emblematic of songs heightening gun violence and lynching sentiments upon many in his rural, small-town fan base.
“Cuss out a cop, spit in his face / Stomp on the flag and light it up / Yeah, ya think you’re tough / Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / Around here, we take care of our own / You cross that line, it won’t take long / For you to find out, I recommend you don’t / Try that in a small town,” Aldean sings.
Viewers also noted that scenes in the video were shot at the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, where a Black man named Henry Choate, 18, was lynched in 1927. The site is also where the infamous Columbia Race Riot occurred in 1946.
Aldean took to Twitter Tuesday to reject the criticism, sharing a lengthy statement on what the song means to him. “While I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music − this one goes too far,” he wrote. …
In the statement associated with the release, he said: “When u grow up in a small town, it’s that unspoken rule of ‘we all have each other’s backs and we look out for each other.’ It feels like somewhere along the way, that sense of community and respect has gotten lost. Deep down, we are all ready to get back to that. I hope my new music video helps y’all know that u are not alone in feeling that way. Go check it out!” …
Shannon Watts, founder of gun violence advocacy group Moms Demand Action, said on Twitter that the song is “an ode to a sundown town, suggesting people be beaten or shot for expressing free speech. It also insinuates that guns are being confiscated, the penalty for which is apparently death.”
Watts returned to Twitter Wednesday to celebrate CMT’s decision.
Singer Sheryl Crow also spoke up on Twitter. “I’m from a small town,” she wrote, addressing Aldean. “Even people in small towns are sick of violence. There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence. You should know that better than anyone having survived a mass shooting. This is not American or small town-like.”
Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones wrote: “As Tennessee lawmakers, we have an obligation to condemn Jason Aldean’s heinous song calling for racist violence. What a shameful vision of gun extremism and vigilantism. We will continue to call for common sense gun laws, that protect ALL our children and communities.” …
TackleBox, the production company for Aldean’s video, said the location that has come under scrutiny is a popular filming location, citing several other projects filmed there. They include the Lifetime Original movie “Steppin’ into the Holiday” with Mario Lopez and Jana Kramer, a music video from Runaway June “We Were Rich” and a Paramount holiday film “A Nashville Country Christmas” with Tanya Tucker – as well as the “Hannah Montana” film. The company said Aldean did not pick the location. …
The 46-year-old singer from Macon, Georgia, has been no stranger to controversies and tragedies with direct or implied relationships to his new song.
On Oct. 1, 2017, he played on stage at the Route 91 Harvest Festival near the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino when gunman Stephen Paddock killed 60 people and wounded 800 in an 11-minute hail of bullets.
He has addressed concerns regarding wearing blackface for a 2015 Halloween costume. Moreover, his conservative political beliefs were discussed upon visiting former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf course and resort in Florida in 2020 and being embroiled in a dispute regarding the belief that his wife made transphobic remarks and social media posts in 2022 (which led to his publicity firm of 17 years, GreenRoom, to stop working with him).
Aldean’s response:
And Aldean’s incorrect political beliefs (in the opinion of Crow and others) seems to be what this controversy is about.
Aldean’s fans aren’t taking this sitting down, as Fox News reports:
Fans lashed out at Country Music Television, after it pulled singer Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” music video this week following accusations it was racist. …
“UNBELIEVABLE – CMT just CANCELLED this music video by Jason Aldean about the Antifa-BLM riots SO THE CMT HAS GONE WOKE,” one Twitter user reacted.
Another slammed the network for censoring the singer, drawing attention to other musical artists whose songs are allowed to stay on the air despite having explicit themes.
“CMT is censoring Jason Aldean’s new music video ‘Try that in a Small Town,’ he said. “Most mainstream artists promote drugs, gangs, violence, and sleeping around Jason says ‘hey let’s not rob old ladies and burn down cities’ and CMT bans his video. Screw @CMT.” …
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley argued the decision could hurt the television network financially and was damaging to “artistic freedom and free speech.”
“…Putting aside CMT’s effort to become the BudLight of networks, the decision to yield to the intense cancel campaign is an abandonment of principles of artistic freedom and free speech,” he wrote. …
“Welcome to the most downloaded song of 2023, Mr. Aldean. I just purchased it,” another user shared.
It should be pointed out that country music is not immune to nonpartisan and nonideological politics. Apparently country artists who are not connected to Nashville are shunned by the country music establishment.
This is Sturgill Simpson, who won a Best Country Album Grammy for his album “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth.”
You would think that a Grammy-winning country singer would at least get nominated for the Country Music Association’s Country Music Awards. You would be incorrect.
Simpson played outside the CMAs.
Simpson also apparently gets little radio play if a Reddit post is to be believed, possibly because …
Well, a grammy nomination is hardly reason enough to get played on country stations today, he has no mentions of “hey girl”, trucks, cut off jeans, moonshine, “Georgia pine”, or Yeti coolers in his songs. He’s a total hack wannabe unless he can incorporate those into his songs he has no business on modern country stations.
As others have pointed out, he has a really shit relationship with the entire country music industry. One good example was this blatantly hostile open letter he wrote right after Merle died that he wrote on Facebook.
… to which someone observed:
John Mooreland says it best “Music was better when ugly people were allowed to make it”
Aldean’s shunning isn’t about music-industry politics. It’s about the usual gun cowards who rationalize away actual crime but pee in their pants at the thought of gun owners whose crime rates are considerably lower than can be found in your typical inner-city neighborhood. (The victims of inner-city crime, by the way, are those who live in those neighborhoods, are trying to have better lives, and don’t have mile-long rap sheets.)
Ben Shapiro:
For a long time, the media have treated American men as an afterthought. In fact, anybody who spoke to American men writ large was considered bad.
My friend Jordan Peterson speaks to men all over the world, specifically young men who feel lost. And the media hate him for it. They treat him as though he’s a very bad person for speaking to audiences of young men.
But suddenly the media have realized young men represent 50% of the American population — and men are falling behind by every single metric. Men are falling behind women when it comes to college degrees. Men are falling behind women when it comes to job performance. Men are falling behind women when it comes to life satisfaction in some measures. These are all areas in which men are falling behind.
This has raised the question: What exactly is happening to American men now? That question cannot be answered in a vacuum without explaining what has happened to American women.
The Bible has a lot of wisdom embedded in it. One of these pieces of wisdom in Genesis, chapter two, tells about the formation of women. God says man should not be alone; he needs a “helpmeet.” In Hebrew the word for “helpmeet” means “our needs are connected,” which literally means a “helper against him.” In other words, men and women are two halves of the same whole. That’s also expressed in that same chapter with the statement that a man shall leave his father and mother and join his wife; he shall cleave to her and they shall become one flesh. The basic idea here is that men are incomplete without women and women are incomplete without men.
So when explaining the shortcomings of modern American men, you also have to link that with their roles versus the roles of the women, because they do not exist in a vacuum.
There’s a whole issue in Politico about what’s wrong with American men. Every single piece in that issue is written by a woman, which is a weird way to ask what’s wrong with American men; they should have a diversity of viewpoints about what exactly is happening with American men that should include some males.
Why is Politico beginning to notice something “wrong with American men”?
Because men are turning away from the Democratic Party — in droves. Many people in the media are suddenly realizing that when American men fall off the train, that is very bad for America.
Traditionally speaking, the role of men was pretty simple. The role of men was: You protect your family; you defend your country, your values, your community; you provide for your family. These were the roles of men: protect and defend and provide. Men are still expected to provide and defend our families. That is still true for large swathes of the American population.
But there are a bunch of men who no longer do this — because our culture shames them for it. The culture has decided not to treat men and women as two potential halves of a greater whole that is united in marriage. Instead, we’re supposed to treat men atomistically and women atomistically and then celebrate the atomism. We’re supposed to celebrate the falling apart, which is presumably why there is a piece in The Wall Street Journal titled, “Divorce Parties Are a New Hot Invite.” The article says:
Now, a culture shift is under way. The U.S. divorce rate has been dipping, but those who get them feel freer to trumpet their breakups. The number of American adults who consider divorce to be morally acceptable has hit historic highs, according to Gallup polls. ‘Divorce used to be something to be ashamed of due to societal pressures and stereotypes. … But today, people have decided to nip that societal shame and instead embrace being divorced as another stage of life that some of us experience.’
Now, is that a good thing or is that a bad thing? I would argue it’s a very bad thing. A divorce is a tragedy. It means that a marriage has ended. It means that potential fulfillment of male and female in monogamous marriage has been broken up, that the basic predicate and foundation for the formation of a family, which is the building block of society, has fallen apart. Men lose themselves when they are not part of this institution; women lose themselves when they’re not part of this institution because they are the countervailing part of what men are supposed to do.
Removing one half of a whole means the other half is going to seem insufficient. That’s particularly true of men when they are deprived of their goals, when they are deprived of their duty, when their aggressive instincts are not channeled in the most positive possible direction. What you end up with is true toxic masculinity because men in the wild are terrible: rapacious, violent, aggressive, territorial.
But when all of those instincts are channeled to protect, defend, and provide, then those instincts can be sublimated to a higher goal. When the higher goal goes away, men end up being incredibly destructive, either to others or to themselves. That’s exactly what we are seeing right now.
But the media refuse to acknowledge that because what they like is the moral status they have built in which we are supposed to pretend all acts of sexual union are equally morally praiseworthy and societally useful. We’re supposed to pretend everybody’s individual decision-making with regard to relationships is equally good and equally valid. We’re supposed to pretend the liberated woman who is no longer expected to get married is somehow better off than the woman who got married at 20, had kids with a husband, maybe had a part-time job, and then maybe had a full-time job.
We valorize people for making decisions that are contra the traditional patterns of life, even though the traditional patterns of life provide the actual framework for success for both men and women. This doesn’t mean that every marriage from 1930 is better than every marriage from 2020 — nothing like that. But it does mean that a society that expects men and women to become complementary parts of a fuller whole is a better society and a more healthy society than one that says they’re completely apathetic about this.
Because here’s the truth: When you say you are apathetic about a moral standard, what you really mean is that you are against the moral standard — because the standard makes demands of you. If you oppose the demands, that’s not apathy; that’s opposition.
The opposite of the traditional moral standard is not apathy. It is absolute chaos.
And that’s what we are seeing right now. We refuse to acknowledge the complete restructuring of society, so men and women have been broken into groups like two separate groups that were not expected to come together over marriage. They’ve now become reactionary and oppositional.
When any two groups become so reactionary and oppositional that they never look inward to ask “what can I do to fix the problem?” but instead look outward at the other person to say “I’ll do the precise opposite,” you get a recipe for a complete breakdown. You end up with both toxic femininity and toxic masculinity: the valorization of a lifestyle that says abortion is an act of good for women and a valorization on the other side that says men should treat women like pieces of meat and the true mark of a man’s success is how toxically aggressive he is.
Get rid of the institution of marriage and people go back to their basest instincts, especially those that have been shielded from biology. You end up with people indulging their basest instincts and being unhappier.
I’m convinced that men are in crisis, and I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. There’s no one script for how to be a woman or a man. But despite a push by some advocates to make everything from bathrooms to birthing gender-neutral, most people don’t actually want a completely androgynous society.
We must find new ways to valorize the traditional role of men, to tell a story that’s appealing to young men and socially beneficial rather than sitting around listening to people who would warp a perceived difference into something ugly and destructive.
Men who don’t turn out right are also the result of their fathers, or lack thereof in their lives. Mothers should not be expected to play the roles of both parents.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 