OK, let me try to think about how to do this because I will say that typically when I get into a literature, I think I’m a usually generous reader, and I leave with more sympathy for it than I came in. And I read your piece and then I read “The Last Men” by Charles Cornish-Dale, the Raw Egg Nationalist. I read “Bronze Age Mindset,” and it’s one of the first times I can really remember coming out of something like this and thinking, Oh, there was so much less there than I thought. The implicit vision and sometimes the explicit vision of masculinity in these books, I found deeply depressing, almost repellent. I had assumed that all these talk, all this talk about virtues, somewhere somebody was going to talk about what I understood to be virtues. But, no, they just like the word “virtues” because it sounds old and they like old things because they think it was better before. There’s no virtues anywhere here. And the way you see it is in the people who are now I think the leading voices. You have Donald Trump, this virtueless, disinhibited, incredibly corrupt man with his multiple wives, his like endless amount of sexual harassment, his inability to control himself and be decent to other people. You have Nick Fuentes. It’s like incel in a basement railing against women. Unmarried, has no children, does not connect himself in obligations to others, to community, to any of the things that build the kind of civilization he claims to want. Doug Wilson, this Christian nationalist pastor who, as you mentioned, is the founder of the sect Pete Hegseth is in. Pete Hegseth has tweeted out Doug Wilson’s attacks on women voting. Doug Wilson, who has severed his Christianity from all of the humility and care and compassion and radicalism that you just read on the literal words of the Bible. I mean, what is the sermon, where is the Sermon of the Mount in any of his work? I find it appalling. I really, this was a part that I actually found myself having a more emotional reaction to. Where are any good men here? I’m not against the critique that the left did not create space for a healthy vision of masculinity. I agree with that critique. But this is so [expletive] warped where these people have ended up. This is a terrible vision of what it means — forget to be a man — it means to be an adult.
