CLI. The Manosphere Men of Clay

Editor's Note: Signs of the awakening continue, though it will take a clear and significant victory to stop the coming shenanigans. For this week, I’ve been thinking more and more about things we’ve gotten too used to, that I hope will come to an end.

I watched a documentary a couple of months back that really floored me. I immediately sent a note to my sons for them to watch it. The documentary journalist Louis Theroux went inside the manosphere and did the thing he does best, which is trying to stay out of the way and let the subject be themselves. He asks a question and then he waits.

I grew up with a father both humble and kind. He was not a fighter in the sense of how social media and sports define someone as a fighter. He was a peacemaker. The kind of man that everyone liked because he was like everyone. Now I have two grown sons. I am proud to call them men, and I do not use the word loosely. They will be assets to the human race.

This documentary did not portray what I would describe as manhood, which raises the obvious question: what exactly is it?

It was a costume of manhood, worn loud. Sad. Pathetic. Aggressive on the outside, hollow the entire way through. Something is missing in nearly every man in that film, and it is not intelligence exactly, though that is the easy shot. It is depth. There is nothing really of substance. Everything is about ego and show and how to monetize it through words, swagger, or e-commerce.

The portrayal of these young men is a twenty-first-century Barnum and Bailey circus grown up on the internet. If elephants or bearded ladies bring eyes to the show, that’s all that matters. Nowhere in any of it is a word about deep study, deep work, deep anything. Depth does not sell. Loudness is the product.

I could almost laugh at today’s carnival we are forced to live through if I didn’t see what this documentary showed. There is a vacuum out there, a whole generation of lost boys breathing this stuff in, a gospel that relieves them of any duty beyond looking out for themselves. Scott Galloway, the well-known professor and investor, has made it close to a personal mission to point out society's absolution of responsibility for boys. The numbers he keeps reciting are not abstractions. One in five men in their thirties still lives with his parents. Fifteen percent report not a single close friend. Men die by suicide four times as often as women. Seven of every ten high school valedictorians are girls. No group in America has fallen faster, and it is into that absence that the White House, Joe Rogan, and these quasi-men have sold their act.

Maybe we should not be shocked when the loudest, angriest, emptiest voice wins the young man, the adolescent starving for some identity beyond what corporate America is selling.

And here is the ugliest turn. The men running the country are not the cure for this. They are the same act on a bigger stage. Hegseth, Vance, Miller, Musk; they all fit the same mold, selling a false image of manhood with no regard for facts or history. They are a mirror of the worst of men, the grift and the grievance and the bottomless need to be looked at. Why study, why serve, why build anything slow and real, when the men at the very top got there by making things up and shouting others down?

I keep returning to the men we used to hold up. This is a country that produced Neil deGrasse Tyson, who can stand under the actual stars and make a teenager feel small in the good way, the way that makes you want to learn. It produced Paul Newman, who won everything a man can win and spent the back half of his life giving it away. It produced Fred Rogers, who looked into a camera and told frightened children they were worth loving exactly as they were, and meant it so plainly it still disarms grown adults. Those were men. Every one of them pointed away from himself. Every one said, in his own way, the world is bigger than you and you owe it something.

Now set them beside Rogan and Watters and Trump. Every one of them points at himself.

I miss my little boys, but I’m proud to have them with me as men. The key is that they still have the boy in them, the part that is curious and creative, and that’s what makes men real. They understand that they are not a world unto themselves. That doesn’t make them weak; it makes them wise.

But I watched that documentary thinking about every boy with no guide and the caricature of a man telling him the only thing worth being is a spectacle.

I have to believe my pops would have been alarmed by this. I know I am.

We need to stop mistaking this masquerade, full of sound and fury, for manhood.

The documentary that set off this week's essay. Ninety minutes inside the manosphere, and Louis Theroux barely has to say a word; he just lets these men talk until the emptiness behind all the noise shows itself.

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Ryan Holiday has built a whole practice out of one habit: reading. Here he hands over the historical nonfiction that actually changed him. If you spent the week watching men perform online, this is the cure, a reminder that the most persuasive people are usually the ones who read the most and shout the least.

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The Institute for Family Studies asked two thousand young men how their lives are actually going and came back with numbers that match what the documentary shows: forty percent have two or fewer close friends, nine percent have none at all, but eighty-four percent still say they have ambitious plans for the future. Consider the contrast.

This is one of those “leopard ate my face” type of stories. Coldwater, Kansas voted 83 percent for Trump, and now the town is filling Main Street with honking trucks and a hand-lettered We Love You, Joe sign, because the crackdown they cheered came for one of their own. Joe Ceballos is a thirty-six-year green card holder and a two-time mayor, the man who fixes your sewer line. He voted when he was not allowed to, did not know it, and now faces deportation to a Mexico he left at age four. File this one under ignorance is bliss. Slogans against immigration doing the job that deeper thinking is supposed to do. Vote for whatever rings true to your ear without checking it against a fact, and this is the trouble that follows. It is always some good and innocent person who gets put through the wringer. We ran sweeps like this in 1954 and deported American citizens by mistake. History keeps teaching the lesson, yet we keep declining to learn from it.

Mamdani has thrown his weight behind the Delivery Protection Act, which would make Amazon directly employ the last-mile drivers it currently routes through subcontractors. Amazon picks the hires, sets the routes, brands the vans and the uniforms, then says worker injuries are somebody else's problem. The bill closes that gap.

Underneath it sits the real question: what does a corporation owe the places it does business in? Take the law away and we are left hoping Jeff Bezos feels some obligation past the hourly wage. That model, global power built on doing as little as possible locally, emptied the malls, killed off iconic companies, and left a lot of people with smaller paychecks and thinner retirements. Do not fall for the manufactured version where Amazon is the one being mistreated.

Keep an eye on this one. The whole concept of covering the last mile is being researched by numerous companies. Amazon is the loudest pusher for last-mile drone delivery, which will be another pile of local human jobs gone. More drones doing all kinds of services are coming. Whether good policy gets there first is the question that we must ask to avoid serious disruptions.

✦ The Economist/YouGov poll has the Democrats up fifteen on the congressional ballot, 53 to 38, and the president at 36 approve, 62 disapprove. These numbers will not improve before the November election. Instead, effort will be put into undermining election results, focusing on very specific areas to cause trouble and keep newly elected officials from being seated. Stay tuned on this one.

✦ Phones will continue to be removed from schools. Eleven states got graded in this year's phone-free schools yearbook, and the two that took the top marks, Indiana and Kansas, are the two that went bell to bell rather than class by class. By the close of the 2027 sessions, bell to bell is the floor instead of the ceiling, and the argument moves on to forcing more age verification for social media.

Former Special Counsel Jack Smith

For thirty years Jack Smith did the unglamorous work of a career prosecutor, from war crimes cases in The Hague to running the Justice Department's public corruption unit. Then he took the job nobody sane would want. On Tuesday he sat in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee while senators called him a villain and a dirtbag and suggested he belongs in a courtroom himself. He did not flinch. He told them he stands by every charge he brought, and that on the same facts he would charge a Democrat just the same. One senator sprang a perjury trap over an Atlanta Hawks game. Smith had been at an Iowa Hawkeyes game. Imagine a senator presenting dubious evidence to make a case instead of seeing the obvious corruption going on. That is the quality of the case against him.

What earned him this spot was not defending himself. It was defending his people. Nearly everyone who worked his investigations has been fired or pushed out, and he called it what it is, illegal and an outrage. Public servants should be protected, he said, and he will not be silenced by threats of prosecution. Somebody had to say it in that room. He did.

Back in 2012, I had the opportunity to see and hear John McCain. I’m more proud to have taken my oldest son and our neighbor’s son to meet him. Since this issue is more focused on the definition of manliness, it seems fitting to me to remember someone who did exceptional service for the country. He was not without his faults, but there was no faking with him. He was an exceptional American and the last of a breed of real conservatives that seems to have died out with him. The Republican party will have regained its footing when it finds individuals that have some substance to back them and not these self-serving, flatulent prima donnas like Eric Schmitt and Ken Paxton. Full disclosure: this is a picture I took but with the help of AI, I stuck myself in the photo. I was unable to get a photo with him due to the time and the crowd, but I was able to get a moment with him to sign his book. I highly recommend Faith of My Fathers.

The language hasn't caught up to the news. We're fixing that.

Swallowtude, n. swallow plus -tude, on the model of fortitude and attitude. The mindset of the Trump Manosphere years; the capacity to swallow the most ridiculous beliefs whole, without chewing, and come back for seconds.

By then, swallowtude was a survival skill. The inflation was good, the barker was a statesman, the circus was a church. You just opened wide and gulped.

Swallowtude is not stupidity. Stupidity cannot tell the difference. Swallowtude can, and eats anyway.

Marc J. Yacht

That boy ran as fast as lightning
He would leave the others behind
His home the dusty oval track
Always first at the finish line.

Many college scholarships came
Not too smart but he loved to run
Always the first across that tape
College days over, the cheers none.

Now a runner without a track
No crowds, no wins, no tape, no plan
The streets and highways caught his eye
The world became the stadium.

And did he run and run and run
Across cities, states, and countries
Everywhere travelled was the same.
That boy is out there running still.

Read something long this week. Something that makes you put it down and stare at the wall for a minute, because that is the part the social media feed can’t do.

Above all else, always strive to be a good human.