Missouri Senator Josh Hawley spent Halloween night trying his best to scare his fellow right-wingers with blood-curdling stories about the left and its diabolical program of destroying men just for fun or something.
As Hawley explained in a speech at the National Conservatism conference,
Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal! The jungle is my home. But I will show the world that I can be its master! I will perfect my own race of people. A race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Sorry, sorry, that wasn’t Hawley. That was Bela Lugosi as mad scientist Dr. Eric Vornoff in Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster.
Hawley’s also-quite-melodramatic speech went more like this:
I want to talk with you about the Left’s attempt to give us a world beyond men.
We meet at a time of reckoning. As we speak, the Left controls the commanding heights of American society. They have the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate. Their voices predominate in the news media, in Hollywood, arguably sports, and of course, at our universities. …
What I want you to notice, what I want to call out tonight, is this fact: that the deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men.
Ouch! That sounds quite painful.
You see, when the left talks about challenging “toxic masculinity” — meaning some men’s tendencies towards violence and bullying and never showing any emotion to the world beyond rage — they are actually trying to destroy every good thing about men.
The Left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic. They want to define the traditional masculine virtues—things like courage, and independence, and assertiveness—as a danger to society.
This is an effort the Left has been at for years now. And they have had alarming success. American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers; they’re fathering fewer children. They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse.
You know, it’s possible that men (and women, by the way) are having fewer children because they don’t want to raise kids in a world heading for ecological catastrophe and in which college tuition can cost more than a house. (A tiny one anyway.) Oh, and the world already has nearly 8 billion people on it.
I have a lot of anxiety and depression and trust me, none of it has anything to do with anything the left is doing.
Aside from not having kids or getting married young, what other terrible consequences has the left’s war on men had?
Brace yourself.
Video games. And porn, too, we can’t forget the porn.
Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games.
I mean, it’s not like men would be into porn or video games were it not for the left’s man-destroying campaign.
Another example of said dastardly plan? Gillette made some ads challenging toxic masculinity. Specifically, bullying , domestic violence and sexual harassment.
Nightmare.
Somewhere in the middle of his rambling diatribe, Hawley brings up former leftist icon …
Wait for it.
Herbert Marcuse, a lefty thinker that I don’t think anyone has thought much about since, oh, 1974. Hawley devotes more than a few minutes trying to blame Marcuse (who died in 1979) for the current culture wars.
Similarly weird is Hawley’s attempt vaccine mandates into a class issue.
[T]he Left is writing this same men-are-the-problem mantra into policy.
Working class men have been a particular target for this Administration. President Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate on private citizens puts millions of working class men squarely in the cross hairs. Shut up, get the jab, or get lost.
Eat shit, Hawley; it’s a public health issue. Vaccine refusers make it hard if not impossible to reach herd immunity and move on from this deadly pandemic.
Hawley ends his speech by declaring that “the crisis of American men is a crisis for the American republic.”
Wrong again. American democracy is in trouble not because leftists and feminists and the Gillette company are trying to fight off the deleterious effects of toxic masculinity. We’re having a crisis of democracy because the Republicans have basically declared war on democracy so they can have something like permanent minority rule in this country. And there’s nothing virtuous about that.
H/T — Alan Robertshaw
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@Redsilkphoenix
In this context a Wobbly is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World .
@surplus
I’m sorry. you think mark Zuckerberg 1. Knows who you are? 2. gives a shit if you use his product. 3. would specifically apologize to you? and 4. gives enough of a shit to mess with your account personally. a free account that you don’t pay for or anything.
my guy this is some delusions of grandeur type shit.
They’re using “National Conservatism” because this time they don’t even want to pretend to be socialists.
In case anyone needs a Hector the station cat update…
It’s ok Hector, we’ll go freeze our asses off on the platform.
@Alan: Has the station given in to the inevitable and taken down the “don’t let Hector inside” sign?
Once I had an inner ear problem and in describing it to the husband, I finally said “I’m a Weeble.” Then he understood.
Now it’s a verb here. “Can’t drive today, I’m Weebling.”
Surplus to Requirements:
Having done a fair amount of software work, the most likely reason Facebook screwed-up is that someone fixed something.
That created a new error somewhere else, but they didn’t test adequately. This may be a consequence of the old ‘move fast and break things’ dogma they evidently have there, but ‘things’ shouldn’t include their own code.
More generally, though, I’d say 90% of the bugs you see in any application (and a web-site is an application) that’s already been released are the result of fixing a bug that already came to their attention.
I’m sorry that in this case it was so annoying; given their resources, Facebook have no excuse.
@ gerald
As they say about the Royal Engineers here “If it ain’t broke; fix it until it is.”
Good gravy, that’s the most pretentious thing I’ve read in a long time.
@Dali,
Thanks for the explanation. I thought it could be some political group or other, but that nickname just seemed a bit…odd?…to use for a serious movement.
@Alan,
Thanks for that old commercial. Odd though that the Weebles there were all solid pink, with no colors to indicate clothes and hair color and stuff like that. The ones I remember were colored more like ‘people’ instead of mono-colored lumps. Probably to compete against the Fischer-Price toy people, who were colored like people. (These are 1970 memories, so you can probably guess what color the ‘people’ were.)
@ redsilkphoenix
British anarchists: Hold my beer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOMBLES
😀
Reminds me of the fun writers can have with acronyms sometimes. Like the 1974 Captain America comic that had the Committee to Regain America’s Principles as a villian, or the 1980’s Firestorm’s villian group Coalition to Resist Atomic Power. Talk about getting crap past the radar….
@ redsilkphoenix
@Redsilkphoenix
The story is that in the early days of the IWW, there was a Swedish immigrant who was a very enthusiastic recruiter. He would buttonhole people up and down the West Coast, extolling the virtues of the “Eye Wobbly Wobbly.” Thus, when people came to the meetings, they would often be asking if this was the Wobbly Wobbly meeting, and thus Wobblies.