Friends have been sounding the alarm for several months now over Trump’s refusal to do anything to ameliorate the plight of young white men in America. They’ve languished under woke for a decade, now. It has absolutely hammered them economically. Six years of that decade have been under Trump, by the way. He didn’t do anything about it during his first term, and during his second what little he did do was mostly performative, things like castigating the universities for not following meritocratic admissions policies and allowing anti-semitism on campus. He tried to freeze research funding to Harvard and a few other universities, sure, but that got blocked in the courts. They got their money and ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, carrying right on with discriminatory admissions as though nothing had happened. In the private sector the toxic confluence of HR girlbossery and AI filtering at the recruitment level, along with an entrenched preference for H1B over American labour within the tech sector, has made it basically impossible for anyone to get a job, but particularly impossible for young white men. There was a study recently which found that something like 98% of new jobs had gone to women, or maybe women and foreigners; either way, young white men have been left out in the cold.
This matters, because the young white men were Trump’s strongest soldiers. In the last election they swung harder for Trump than any other demographic. Much more importantly, they’re the political radicals who push the envelope, make the memes, record the podcasts, write the blogs, and conspire together in secret group chats. They went to war for him in three elections in a row, two of which he won, and the other of which was stolen. Many of them sacrificed careers to do that. The social and therefore professional consequences of being a MAGAt, a Trumptard, a member of the Trump Jugend, can be crippling. Nevertheless they were the ones pushing the envelope, hammering away at the Overton window to widen the permissible boundaries of discourse. And they succeeded. You can say things in public now that would have been absolutely verboten just a few years ago. Things like ‘retarded’. Go ahead, say it out loud, it’s okay now. “Retarded.” Shout it. “RETARDED!” Doesn’t that feel great?
What is of course genuinely, deeply, epochally, unfathomably retarded is that the reward bestowed upon young white men for their successful decade of service has been ... nothing. Nothing at all. No patronage jobs. No grants. No lawfare against the universities refusing to let them in the door, no sanctions against the corporations using H1Bs to replace American tech workers, no ICE raids against blue collar employers undercutting American citizens with illegals, no serious effort to reduce the cost of housing, no free Zyns, no state-assigned beautiful mid gfs. They’ve been thanked by being told to stop playing video games and to go become a plumber at Panda Express.
So, this election, apparently, the young white men swung by 40 points, from something like +30 for Trump to +10 for the Democrats. I saw another tweet claiming that the swing was even larger, so who knows, but the discontented rumblings have been audible, palpable even, for months now. The young men are embittered and furious. I don’t know how much of that swing is in actual political alignment and how much of it was just the zoomerwaffen saying nah, fuck it, Imma stay home and play Age of Empires tonight, but there’s more than a whiff of what happened with the Bernie Bros in 2016. The Dem establishment shat on them, so they defected to Trump, bringing all of that energy to MAGA. Millennial and zoomer men are not institutionally loyal the way boomers are. If you don’t take care of them, if you shit upon their heads and force them to eat it, they will abandon you. As they should.
Republicans have been forcing shit down young men’s throats for the last two years more or less without pause. As but one example, the last thing they wanted was another war in the Middle East, and yet, here we are, locked into an interminable and apparently frozen conflict for no obviously good reason. The onset of the war in Iran threw me; I wrote on this, trying to process it, to understand what the point was, what the plan was, trying to hold onto the hope that there was a point and a plan. I didn’t want to let it demoralize me, but honestly, it did, and it’s clear that it demoralized a lot of others, too. It felt like a betrayal. So far actual casualties have been very light, with the damage being largely economic, in the form of higher energy prices, but the most important damage has been moral. Trump took the enormous heap of political capital he’d accumulated and squandered it on another war that no one but Israel and its domestic American Ziocons wanted. You could feel the wind coming out of the sails as the first missiles struck Tehran.
It’s hardly a secret that young right-wing men harbour an intense dislike for the Israel lobby. They’re generally pretty open about that. Cuckservatives like Rod Dreher have been wringing their hands about ‘antisemitism’ amongst the ‘groypers’ for several months now. In their world there is nothing worse than making Jews sad, no, not even losing your country, not even the reduction of your people to servitude, the extinction of your very civilization, and the onset of a long Stygian darkness. It isn’t just Dreher, of course. There was a big manufactured controversy several months ago when texts were leaked from a Young Republicans group chat, in which they were making jokes about gas chambers or whatever, which led to a purge of the Young Republicans by their horrified elders. The anxiety inside establishment conservatism over the insurgency of youthful right-wing firebrands has been palpable. They don’t seem them as a source of energy and enthusiasm, they see them as a threat.
...The Democrats would probably be making a mistake if they interpret the election blowout as a mandate to impose Woke 2.0. Ballot propositions tell a decidedly more mixed ideological story than the election results. Conservative ballot propositions on property tax cuts, transgenders in sports, and voter ID did well; liberal propositions on billionaire wealth taxes didn’t pass, while abortion propositions got mixed results. This suggests that it is specifically voter frustration with incumbent conservative politicians rather than rejection of rightist policies that drove the Democrat victory. There’s a similarity here with the parliamentary majority the UK Labour Party won in the last general election, which they obtained not so much due to enthusiasm for Labour, but due to a terminal loss of patience with the endless betrayals of the Conservatives. If the Democrats go all in on a Woke 2.0 carnival of horrors, and there’s no reason to suspect that they won’t, they’ll almost inevitably generate a substantial amount of political energy for the other side in reaction, which could help push Vance into the White House.
Of course, Vance shouldn’t rely on the Dems making mistakes. You should not generally assume your enemies are retarded, even if they are mostly retards. If I had one piece of advice for him, it would be to spend the next two years doing everything in his power to materially improve the conditions of young men. Recruit the energetic and talented into patronage positions, into the civil service, into the security services, and make sure this is visible. Raid employers using illegals, in order to put pressure on them to hire young Americans. Deport millions, if not tens of millions of illegals in order to put upwards pressure on wages and downwards pressure on housing prices. Forbid large tech companies from employing H1Bs, and force them to hire American engineers at good salaries. Openly call out the universities not just for vague ‘discrimination’, but specifically for discriminating against white boys, and then force them to stop doing that. Set up training and apprenticeship programs, modelled on the Palantir fellowships, to help talented white youth skip university entirely and go straight from high school into lucrative, high-status careers; work with Elon Musk and Palmer Lucky on that, to implement similar programs at Tesla, SpaceX, and Anduril. I don’t think promises or intentions or whatever will cut it anymore. There’s been too much betrayal already. They need to see actual results. They’re tired of waiting, of being told that it’s someone else’s turn, that social programs for black people or jobs for women or social security for boomers or foreign aid for Israel takes priority over their interests. Deliver for them and they’ll help you save the country; betray them, and they’ll watch it burn.
And that would be genuinely retarded.
