“But are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?”

—The Old Man and the Sea

Have you ever had a Big Idea—an idea with the potential to transform the way people think about their society and culture?

Imagine that you had such a Big Idea, but you weren’t a professional opinionator and didn’t have an easy way of getting your Big Idea “out there” in front of a lot of readers.

Imagine too that your Big Idea was going to be controversial enough, in mainstream circles, that publication under your own name would almost certainly cost you your livelihood.

What would you do?

Here is what I did—and, as they say, don’t try this at home.

THE BIG IDEA

Before getting into the timeline of events, I want to emphasize that I have written this in part for the benefit of other, younger writers, who may read it someday and find it useful—as an account of a process that is relevant to their ambitions but seldom set forth in detail. More than that, though, I see this as a “case history” supporting an argument for changes in how we deal with new ideas (of the non-copyrightable, non-patentable variety) and incentivize their originators.

Now to the what and when: It all started early in the new millennium, after I returned to the US following a decades-long sojourn abroad. As I settled in, certain differences in American culture, compared to what I’d known as a young adult, started becoming apparent. Themes of “trauma” and suffering seemed much more prominent in the culture, from media to medicine. Public policy debates were often competitive exercises in projecting compassion, or “empathy,” in regard to supposed victims. Political correctness, a hypersensitive projection of concern for the disadvantaged, seemed out of control. Even in my own somewhat technical line of work, I noticed similar changes in tone and emphasis.

Eventually the proverbial lightbulb winked on. As I put it in an essay (“The Demise of Guythink”) in late 2011:

… these empathy-related changes in public discourse are due in large part to the recent, unprecedented entry of women into public life in Western countries. Women have not only the right to vote but also a presence in key areas of society—science, law, business, politics—as never before, and it would be hard to believe that their influence has not changed the culture, bending it towards their own cognitive style. People now use the jokey phrase “endangered white male” . . . but what may be truly endangered here is the male cognitive style.

That may not be a good thing, if the male cognitive style evolved to be optimal for managing societies, while the female cognitive style is tuned for the rearing of children. There is a tendency in our culture now to treat empathy as a trait to be simply maximized. But “understanding and building systems,” as [Simon] Baron-Cohen puts it, is useful, too—and perhaps most if not all of our culture’s greatest failings now come not from a lack of empathy but from a failure to see how complex systems fit together, and how they may fly apart.

What also worries me is that too much empathy, or other related aspects of the female cognitive style, may be—we don’t know; probably no scientist would go near this question—less compatible with the reasoned debate and calm analytical thinking that are presumably needed in a healthy democracy, or in any mature society. Several years ago, then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers (who was later a White House adviser) referred rather delicately to the possibility that male/female cognitive differences partly explain the relative lack of female professors in math and science; he was, in effect, shouted down and forced from his post….

An inflexible, authoritarian, shout-them-down tendency is often said to be a feature of PC-think generally. PC-driven marches and protests (on campuses for example) typically are meant not to broaden a discourse but, rather, to repel or suppress an unwanted speaker—much as a mother, without any pretense of democracy or debate, would try to protect her children from an unwanted influence or their own innate waywardness. (“Because I said so!”)

There it was: the Big Idea! And it was big! What other theory had the same power to explain the dramatic waves of change that have been sweeping through modern societies in the past few decades? What other theory combined such a simple and compelling framework of understanding with such dark implications for Western civilization?

I posted “The Demise of Guythink” on a website I had set up—of very modest readership—where for several years I had published various short essays on cultural and science-related topics (anonymously, though some readers knew who I was).

As time went on, though, and the novelty and importance of this idea grew in my estimation, I increasingly thought of getting it published more prominently.

The problem was that I had no clear path for achieving that. I wasn’t a complete nobody—as a journalist, I had written a few books, and more than a few newspaper and magazine pieces, including op-eds. But that had been in the relatively distant past. Moreover, as the world had grown richer and the Internet had become a supremely powerful tool, the barriers to entry for becoming a “writer” had collapsed to virtually nothing, creating more competition than ever and making the process of big-media publication, from a cold start, harder than it had ever been. I pitched a roughly 600-word version of my thesis to the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed people around that time . . . and, if memory serves, got the same result one would get from dropping a small stone into the darkness of a mile-deep well.

I might have persevered with other newspapers or webzines, but I soon concluded that that could be an uphill, potentially very costly struggle. The standard line set down by feminist activists—de facto thought leaders for Western women—was that the fairer sex was still hindered, harassed and victimized by all the things men did, and thus needed ever more power to achieve full emancipation and equality. Indeed, it seemed to me that women’s ability to influence men had always depended heavily on their claims to be relatively weak, needing special protection, etc. In other words, in the age-old power contest with males, females’ claims of powerlessness and victimization were basically reflexive and relentless. Thus, my observation that women were already moving past parity and achieving real dominance in many key areas of public life, from teaching and publishing to psychiatry . . . was likely to be dismissed as a fantasy, or, worse, suppressed as a heresy.

My further suggestion that women’s new dominance in Western civilization was hazardous to that civilization, because maternal thinking was not suited to the public sphere, would make this a heresy to be suppressed with extreme prejudice. I imagined screams, shouts and ululations until I was well and truly cancelled and silenced—to the extent that feminists and the Left had to take notice of me. So, publishing my Big Idea prominently under my own name didn’t seem wise, at least not before my retirement, which was still a long way off.

I can’t remember whether I received any direct feedback on the piece I posted on my website—I didn’t have the time or energy to maintain a comments section. But the site analytics suggested that it was read by at least thousands of people over the next year or so. A “manosphere” writer named Matt Forney linked to it in one of his own blog posts. That’s pretty much all I remember about its impact.

SCRATCHING THE ITCH

Years passed. Other events and interests held my attention. It was not until June of 2014 that the urge to write about cultural feminization rose up in me again.

This time I pitched a piece on the subject to Takimag, a small webzine that, although I didn’t normally read it, struck me as suitably uninhibited. The editor, the daughter of Takimag’s proprietor, said she was potentially interested, but wanted it shortened in a few ways. I complied and re-sent it. She then replied simply that she couldn’t use it after all. I was left with no clear idea of her reason, though naturally it occurred to me that pitching this idea to female editors was not an optimal strategy.

Where else could I send it? I figured that if even Takimag—somewhat fringy, and typically framed by the mainstream media as “far right”—wouldn’t touch this hot potato of an idea, and if female editors were problematic, then I’d have to venture still further out onto the fringe. The obvious place was the manosphere.

As a middle-aged family man, I didn’t have much use for “game,” complaints about the contemporary dating scene, or other themes central to that subculture. But the urge to get my idea out there, somehow, anyhow, was strong now. Without much effort (though I again had to shorten my submission by quite a bit), and using a pseudonym as most of their contributors did, I got a new version of my thesis published on Roosh Valizadeh’s Return of Kings site. If you use the Wayback Machine and check the site as of late 2014, you’ll see that the piece was posted in August of that year. (It has also been archived here.) My title was “No Country for Men,” but Roosh or one of his editors, probably for SEO reasons, changed it to “Thanks to Progressivism, America is No Country for Men.”

It was much read and commented upon, within that circle of readers, and for some years it was easily googleable. However, as the mainstream media became more feminized and “because-I-said-so” inflexible, outlets like Roosh’s became less permissible. Ultimately—suppressed by search engines, and with most or all of his monetization routes blocked off—he was forced to shut down. So, although I didn’t see it right away, this was yet another dead-end in my quest.

Posting on Return of Kings did, however, scratch the “get it out there” itch, and another year or so passed before the itch recurred. Using my real name, I pitched a very softened version of my cultural feminization idea to the Washington Post, and surprisingly, the response was not a blank refusal but an invitation to submit my piece for posting in their “PostEverything” section. Looking back, I think I probably should have done that. However, at the time I saw PostEverything as a glorified Letters to the Editor forum, and reasoned that publication there would bring little reward, while leaving me with the usual risk to my livelihood. I guess I also feared that the Post’s editors would alter my thesis in ways I wouldn’t like. So I declined the offer.

I pitched a similar piece to one or two other places around then, and though my records and memories of those efforts have faded, the result was the same. Thus, early in 2017, I reverted once again to self-publication. Using the anti-Trump, pro-feminism Women’s March as a peg, I posted a short presentation of my idea to a blog page on my personal, non-pseudonymous, website where I had posted a few other short essays over the years.

I didn’t keep it up on that site for long. A few months after it was posted, a prospective client of my consulting business, a woman with a moderately high position at a prestigious institution, read it (as indicated by my site analytics info) and immediately ghosted me. I assumed that my thesis, even as softened as it was, was the causative factor in this loss of what could have been a lucrative relationship, and immediately took it down.

We’re nearing the fateful Twitter years, but not there yet. In the Spring of 2018, I submitted yet another softened version of my cultural feminization thesis to Quillette, which was then just emerging as a new and interesting venue for non-woke thought. One of the editors, a fellow named Jamie (Palmer, I think), turned it down politely with the comment that: “Your thesis is interesting but, in the end, unpersuasive and feels like a possible correlation/causation confusion.”

A bit less than a year later, in March of 2019, I sent yet another version of the idea to an editor at the conservative public-policy magazine City Journal, but received no reply.

(As the reader may know already, both City Journal and Quillette have since published pieces offering versions of the cultural feminization hypothesis—pieces that make no mention of me or my essays.)

TWITTER AND “J. STONE”

Once again, failure to get published in other journals led me back to a more D.I.Y. mode of punditry. Later in that month of March 2019, I set up a new pseudonymous website as a home for my essays, and joined Twitter with the idea of using Twitter posts to publicize those essays.

I think my general idea was to be a proponent of “cold logic” over the “hot emotion” of a feminized world, so I used the domain absltzero.com. For my Twitter presence I invented the pseudonym “J. Stone,” which had the merit that it didn’t seem like a pseudonym.

Having posted a quick version of my thesis, titled “The Great Feminization,” on the new site, I joined Twitter and started using my tweets to advertise the essay.

What happened next? Crickets.

At the time, I didn’t know much about the process of drawing attention and followers on Twitter, and anyway was unable to spend much time on it, given my day-to-day work and family responsibilities. But I did try, at least several times per week, to reply to tweets from prominent Tweeters with relevant quips followed by a link to “The Great Feminization”—in the hope that one, eventually, would read it and recommend it to his or her flock of followers.

“The Great Feminization,” by the way—though it was broadly similar to others I’d written, going all the way back to “The Demise of Guythink” in 2011—did contain a fairly pithy summary of the situation:

Feminists these days spend a lot of time worrying about male-dominated culture—“patriarchal culture,” “sexual harassment culture,” “rape culture,” “the culture of silence,” and so on. But shouldn’t they be acknowledging the influence that women now have on culture: on workplace culture, on media culture, on campus culture, on American culture, and on Western culture generally? That feminizing influence may be the greatest single driver of the rapid social changes seen in recent decades.

Consider the following U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics chart of women’s civilian labor force participation rate.

It shows that in 1950 only about 30 percent of working-age women were in the workforce, but by 2000 that figure had jumped to 60 percent and rivaled the participation rate for men, which had been in decline since the early 1950s.

In other words, by 2000 the U.S. workforce had been mostly gender-integrated. On average, workplaces by then had almost as many women as men.

The historic significance of this migration on its own appears to have been underappreciated. Women never made such a move, to such a degree, in any large human society in the past. It significantly altered the structure of ordinary life.

But women in the late 20th century didn’t just move into the workforce. They moved into its upper ranks, to professions that strongly influence societal culture and policy. They became journalists, public relations specialists, lawyers, academics, novelists, publishers, filmmakers, TV producers, and politicians, all to an unprecedented extent. In some of these culture-making professions, by the 1990s and early 2000s, they had achieved parity or even dominance (e.g., writers, authors, and public relations specialists) with respect to men. Even where they fell short of full parity, they appeared to acquire considerable “veto” power over content. A 2017 report by the Women’s Media Center noted evidence that at the vast majority of media companies, at least one woman is among the top three editors.

Why is the greater presence of women in culture-making professions important? Because women, on average, think differently than men on a wide range of subjects….

How would culture and policy have changed as a result of women’s new influence? Presumably in ways that reflect feminine psychological traits.

For example, women appear on average to be more empathetic and compassionate, more emotionally sensitive. Some of the most striking social changes of the last few decades appear to have been driven by a cultural shift in that direction:

• • • • More generous welfare programs
      • Expansion of the concept of welfare to include more types of intervention (affirmative action, etc.) and more groups needing intervention
      • Expansion of the definitions of “harm,” “offense,” and “trauma” (“microaggressions,” “triggers”)
      • Increased attention to psychological trauma in law and medicine, leading to a greater acceptance, and thus a higher prevalence, of trauma-related syndromes such as PTSD (and the recovered-trauma-memory syndromes of the 1990s)
      • Less tolerance of deaths in war; but, ironically, a greater inclination to enter foreign conflicts in response to emotion-evoking atrocities portrayed on television.
• 
  • • • Less tolerance for capital punishment
      • Less restrictive immigration policy
      • More emphasis in media and policy contexts on emotion-evoking stories of individuals (e.g., pitiable refugee children) rather than dry analyses of long-term outcomes.
• 
  • • • Suppression of any kind of emotionally disturbing speech (“hate speech,” “mansplaining,” etc.) and even fields of scientific inquiry that are likely to evoke negative emotions;
      • Less affinity for traditional, constitutionally protected forms of confrontation in the legal and political spheres, i.e., less support for open debate, free-speech rights, and “due process of law.”
      • Suppression/replacement of words that evoke emotional discomfort (e.g., “abortion clinic” becomes “women’s health center”)

That’s just from one set of closely related traits. Certainly there are others. For example, women for obvious evolutionary reasons appear to have an instinctive fear of dietary and environmental toxins, which can become pronounced during pregnancy (“morning sickness,” nesting reflex, food aversions). Is it just coincidence that women’s cultural ascendancy in Western countries corresponds to a huge rise in diet-, drug-, and environment-related concerns encompassing the Green movement, anti-GMO attitudes, “detox” fads, the “herbal medicine” racket, “organic foods” preferences, and even the anti-vaccine movement?

Et cetera. It was a quick, accessible outline of my Big Idea, and I gathered from my website analytics that people who started reading it tended to read it through, and often sent their friends links to it.

Still, the daily reader count seldom got into three digits, and sometimes flatlined in the single digits for days at a time, especially if I was too distracted by work to do my reply-guy thing on Twitter. For weeks, and then months, my interest in the whole thing waned, as it just seemed unrewarding.

But the compulsion to get some recognition for my Big Idea was one of those relapsing/remitting conditions that can never be fully cured. Within six months of posting “The Great Feminization,” I began work on a new cultural feminization essay, centered on a more in-depth account of the aforementioned Larry Summers brouhaha.

I initially conceived of this essay, which came to be titled, “The Day the Logic Died,” as something that would be publishable in a respectable conservative venue. But by the time I’d finished it, and weighed its largeish word-count, I knew better, and just posted it to the absltzero.com site.

“The Day the Logic Died” was an exploration of the Larry Summers case as a classic early example of a cancellation hysteria created by activist, anti-rational women in academia and media—a classic demonstration, in other words, of cultural feminization and its unpleasant consequences. I also put in a hypothesis at the end about the deep reasons why men fail, again and again, to hold their own in this new female-controlled cancellation culture. Though it was a long essay, it was probably the most “writerly” one I’ve produced on this topic.

Once again, not much happened in the weeks after I posted it. But a few months later, lightning finally struck, and—using my reply-guy strategy—I succeeded in getting “The Day the Logic Died” noticed by a popular Twitter figure. This was the celebrated “Spotted Toad” (@toad_spotted), who read the essay, liked it, and recommended it to his tens of thousands of followers:

Boom. The essay went “viral,” as they say—Statcounter began registering thousands of hits per day. And as people checked my posts and my bio and saw that Spotted Toad followed me, I began accumulating many more followers. To my surprise, many of these were Twitter-famous or even real-life-famous people with high follower counts of their own. They included Wesley Yang, Walter Kirn, Nick Denton, Marc Andreesen, Helen Andrews, Micah Meadowcroft, and Steve Sailer. One of the best known of these even DM’d me, wanting to know—apropos of the Larry Summers essay—if I was on the faculty at Harvard.

Naturally, this positive reaction encouraged me to spend more time on Twitter, and to keep posting essays on absltzero.com, including essay #3, “Girl Power” (Jan 2020), in which I tried to trace the roots of modern cancel culture back to convent hysterias, Salem, and other female social contagions of yore.

Writing more, both in short-form and long, was probably unwise at this point, given how little time I had to spare for it. But anyway I pressed on, publishing additional essays whenever I felt I had something reasonably new to say.

STONE’S PEAK

Early 2020 brought the COVID crisis. Fear of what the pandemic would do, anxiety over the sudden economic shut-down, and stress over lockdown and mask-wearing rules combined to exacerbate the national frazzlement. Then in the approach to the presidential election, Democratic Party operatives’ stoking of black grievance and white guilt—achieved by pumping several police run-ins with recalcitrant African-Americans into national prominence, and organizing marches and riots—was added to this toxic mix. As I pointed out often that year, mostly in tweets and once or twice in essays, stressed American women had reached a sort of breaking point, causing them—in a social mania akin to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-76—to shift their society-disrupting activities into a higher gear.

This contagious frenzy, which Sailer aptly called the “Great Awokening,” was essentially female in a way that, I thought, made the concept of cultural feminization increasingly obvious.

Throughout 2020 and early 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic kept me busy professionally. I did find time to change the domain name of my essay website from absltzero.com to thoughtsofstone.com. I also probably made at least one or two further—now-forgotten—efforts to get published more widely. But those too failed, and by April of 2021, I was getting restless again.

At this point, I had enough big-name Twitter mutuals (who were routinely liking and retweeting my stuff, and reading my essays) that I felt I could ask for their help in reaching a wider audience. In April 2021, I contacted Helen Andrews, a young author and editor/writer for The American Conservative magazine, to see if TAC would be interested in running a short piece on my cultural feminization idea. Based on her tweets, Helen had struck me as very sharp-minded and conservative—and she was clearly enthusiastic about my Big Idea.

She was gracious in her response, reiterating her support for my thesis and heaping particular praise  on “The Day the Logic Died.” After making inquiries, she informed me that The American Conservative as a rule would not publish something by a pseudonymous author. As an alternative, though, she suggested The American Mind, a webzine produced by the Claremont Institute, and she helpfully put me in touch with its editors James Poulos and Spencer Klavan. My short piece on cultural feminization, “Pink Shift,” appeared in TAM’s pages in early May.

Naturally, I felt that this was progress, in the sense that I was reaching a wider readership, and was also basically putting down a public marker of my role in advancing the cultural feminization hypothesis. But though I gained a modest number of new Twitter followers and daily readers of my essays, I was still far from my goal.

Months passed, and the familiar, unpleasant sense of futility grew in me. I had made a reasonable effort—especially given my work and time constraints—to get my Big Idea “out there” and noticed. Certainly a lot of people, in a strong position to help, were well aware of it and its provenance. But how could I propel this idea into the public mind strongly enough that it had to be confronted and considered, and never again ignored or suppressed? And what more could I do to get the recognition I felt I deserved? Whatever the true answers to those questions may have been, I did little other than what I had been doing, namely writing to small-ish media organizations and asking them to publish my Big Idea.

That strategy continued to not work, although for a while, things kept happening to prop up my hopes. One day in mid-October 2021, I did a routine check of the analytics for the thoughtsofstone.com website, and saw thousands—soon tens of thousands—of visitors to the “Great Feminization” essay page. It was clear that all these visitors were arriving via a link on a blog called Marginal Revolution.

Marginal Revolution is the blog of Tyler Cowen, the economist, Bloomberg columnist, and all-round social media star. I wasn’t entirely surprised that “The Great Feminization” had caught his attention, as I had observed in the past that his ideas and mine sometimes ran in similar (at least marginally heretical) directions. We had even had a brief, cordial email exchange during the 2008-09 financial crisis—when he was already very popular, but far more approachable—in relation to one of my ideas (on my anonymous blog) about the future economy.

In any case, Cowen’s link to “The Great Feminization” widened the essay’s circulation not just for one or two days, but for weeks and months—in which many other bloggers and posters cited it approvingly, and visitor counts at the thoughtsofstone.com site stayed high.

Toward the end of that month of October, energized by the Cowen link, I pitched another piece on cultural feminization to Twitter mutual Park MacDougald, a young editor/writer at the Washington Examiner. He told me he was just then bound for a new job at UK’s UnHerd, but would try to get the piece in before he left, if I could get it to him quickly. I did, we did some rapid edits, and on Oct 27 he told me the piece would be online two days later.

The piece—my working title was “Wokeism is a Woman”—didn’t really include anything new compared to what I’d already written on the subject. It started as follows . . .

Consider the hypothesis that most of the dramatic social changes sweeping over Western societies in recent decades, including the rise of social justice ideology or “wokeness,” are driven not so much by a specific ideology as they are by a simple demographic shift, namely, the large-scale addition of women to the ranks of the elites.

It is curious that this possibility has been overlooked for so long. Since the middle of the last century, women in the West have almost completely departed from their traditional stay-at-home roles. They have moved into the workforce alongside men, and have acquired power, often dominance, within all the culturally and politically influential professions. Women are now managing editors, film producers, CEOs, university presidents, cabinet secretaries, senators and congresswomen. They now help direct the culture and the policies that move all of us—the first time this has happened in a large society.

. . . and it ended (in the last draft I have in my files) this way:

In any case, the most important issue about this “great feminization” is where it appears to be taking us. Do we really want to jettison things like due process and free scientific inquiry? Do we really want laws discriminating against America’s legacy population, especially white males, in the name of “equity?”

I suspect that a lot of people, men in particular, already sense at least subconsciously that wokeism and related social changes reflect the new power of women—and hope that the worst of these changes are a sort of emotional storm that will blow over eventually if they just ignore it. I think that view overlooks, to put it mildly, wokeism’s sensational recent successes in transforming Western societies, and its strong roots among the women who help run those societies. Wokeism is too incoherent, too contrary to common sense and human nature, to last anywhere near as long as Western liberalism has. But rolling back its excesses is going to require real effort. Step one should be the recognition—as harsh as it may seem—that wokeism, far from being an enlightened vision of human progress, may be only the projection of a maternal mindset that is dangerously out of its depth.

THE SHARKS

The day before the Washington Examiner piece was scheduled to appear, MacDougald DM’d me to let me know it had been put on hold. I knew that I hadn’t pulled my punches in the piece; moreover, I had experienced one or two last-minute cancellations of pieces in my earlier career as a journalist. So I was not especially surprised when, a week later, MacDougal informed me that they weren’t going to run the piece at all—and that he, about to exit, had little say in the matter. (He offered a kill fee, which I declined.)

It soon became clear that that had been my last chance to get my Big Idea out there and get credit for it. The “Great Awokening” had made women’s central role in wokeness and modern progressivism hard to ignore—and with that (and to some extent the influence of my own essays) other writers with easier paths to high-profile publication were starting to see an opportunity. Other than Cowen with his comment-free linking to “The Great Feminization,” none of them would acknowledge my prior contributions.

Less than a month after my piece on women and wokeness was killed at the Washington Examiner, the writer Noah Carl published a short Substack post (“Did Women in Academia Cause Wokeness?”) arguing that the roots of wokeness lay in the feminization of academia—essentially a much narrower (and I would say incomplete) version of my own argument.

A very similar piece by Mary Harrington appeared on the same day, Nov. 24, in the UK webzine the Critic, about “The New Female Ascendancy” in academia—in the administrative ranks, at least.

Less remarked on is the sex breakdown of the growing proportion of administrators. A recent diversity and inclusion report by the University of California indicates that women make up more than 70 per cent of non-academic staff across (among others) nursing, therapeutic services, health, health technicians, communications services roles, and a majority or near majority across all non-manual staff roles. In other words, if men are still over represented in top academic roles, the non-academic supporting ecosystem is overwhelmingly female.

And that support system has an increasingly symbiotic relationship with student activism, which over my lifetime has (on both sides of the Atlantic) shifted noticeably away from a focus on material conditions toward something more like the bureaucratic regulation of personal identity and interpersonal interactions.

A 2015 look at student protesters across 51 campuses showed the most common demands — alongside greater diversity among faculty — were diversity training and cultural centres. In turn, this focus requires a ballooning staff tasked with managing identities, or variously supporting or disciplining types of relationship, for example via “consent” education: the roles where women predominate.

Overseas at the time, I was alerted to the appearance of Harrington’s piece by a nice Twitter DM from Helen Andrews:

Certainly I agreed that I deserved credit! However, as I replied a bit morosely to Helen (after thanking her again for her help and encouragement), I knew that I probably wasn’t going to be given a lot of credit, given that I was a pseudonymous, non-professional essayist with no high-profile publication of my thesis. Again, it would turn out that even a little credit was more than I should have hoped for.

Surprisingly, one of the writers who advanced cultural feminization as his own big idea was Thomas Edsall, a writer for the New York Times, who managed to get a stealthily subversive essay on all this (“The Gender Gap is Taking Us to Unexpected Places,” 12 Jan 2022) into the Gray Lady’s pages. He quoted Tyler Cowen enough to suggest that he read Cowen’s “Marginal Revolution” blog—which to me also suggested that he had read “The Great Feminization” and that his essay might even have been prompted by it. But if one is writing a column for a woke media organ like the New York Times, where young, female and nonwhite activists are always looking for ways to advance by displacing white males, it would be deeply imprudent to cite a pseudonymous essayist who evidently hated wokeism and other leftist  dogmas. Of course, from my perspective it would nevertheless have been the correct, honorable thing to do; but I think it’s fair to say that in American journalism now those old-fashioned ethics count for very little. Anyway, Edsall mostly stuck to the quoting of relatively dry academic and survey stuff on gender differences in attitudes, which itself was not new.

. . . a Knight Foundation survey in 2017 of 3,014 college students asked: “If you had to choose, which do you think is more important, a diverse and inclusive society or protecting free speech rights.”

Male students preferred protecting free speech over an inclusive and diverse society by a decisive 61 to 39. Female students took the opposite position, favoring an inclusive, diverse society over free speech by 64 to 35.

I’ll just list briefly a few of the other relatively prominent writers who started posting on cultural feminization, generally with the conceit that they were making an original contribution:

Richard Hanania. Having discussed cultural feminization as a podcast guest in August 2021, he posted one or two Substack pieces on the same topic early in 2022, with arguments very similar to my own. He was already vastly better known than I, but there was a significant overlap in our Twitter mutuals and general interests, so our stuff would have appeared on each other’s timelines quite a lot during 2019-2021.

Some of the commenters on Hanania’s Substack posts also linked to my older cultural feminization essays, which directed at least hundreds of his readers, and I would guess Hanania himself at some point, to my work. I couldn’t help noticing that someone in Southern California (where Hanania lived then), often using an IP address at UCLA (where he had recently been a grad student), was a frequent reader of the essays on my website. Yet as far as I know, Hanania has never acknowledged my prior contributions. (I have previously criticized Hanania for his promotions of eugenics, Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Communist Party, abortions to prevent Down Syndrome births, etc.)

“L0m3z.” This pseudonymous right-wing writer, prominent on Twitter, managed in early 2023 to get a few-hundred-word piece published in First Things (one of the many media orgs on whose deaf ears my pitches had fallen) framing the cultural feminization hypothesis as the “longhouse” theory—a reference to longhouse-dwelling primitive societies.

The idea apparently derives from the book Bronze Age Mindset (2018) whose pseudonymous author’s references to it are pretty cursory.

 . . .

None of that is really important anyway, since the invocation of putative longhouse-based societies clearly fails—or is just unnecessary—as an explanation for cultural feminization. Western culture has been feminized mainly because women, abandoning their traditional homemaker roles at the behest of feminists and for financial reasons, have moved into public life and have achieved critical masses in all important, culturally and politically influential Western institutions. L0m3z basically admitted this in his short piece, though he referred to other, later writers like Hanania and Edsall as having pointed this out, not to me. Like Hanania, L0m3z had had a lot of Twitter-mutual overlap with me, and, I seem to recall, followed me for a few months after Spotted Toad gave me some publicity in 2019. L0m3z also didn’t start writing on Twitter about his “longhouse” idea (judging by Twitter searches) until late 2021.

Heather MacDonald. I had always admired MacDonald’s writing, so I was disappointed to see her piece in Urban Journal in March 2023 about the feminization of academia. It seemed unoriginal from my perspective—and, I guess, also would have seemed that way from the perspective of Harrington or Carl. Worse, the initial title appears to have been “The Great Feminization of the American University,” so that, following the publication of her piece (which of course did not cite me) the Google search ranking for my “Great Feminization” essay of 2019 was obliterated, and readers searching for those keywords were directed to MacDonald’s piece instead. (The fact that Urban Journal changed the title hints that someone tipped them off to the existence of my essay.)

There were a number of other pieces discussing this topic, including one in Quillette, and even The American Conservative. None of these pieces mentioned me. No one mentioned me, apart from a few tweeters in replies and blog commenters.

As time went on, and tardier but better-known writers’ thoughts on this circulated more widely, even people who definitely knew of my work started referring to me only alongside, sometimes even after, those other writers.

Of course I know that to the ones making these references, this “inclusivity” would have seemed perfectly natural, perhaps even generous towards the nobody J. Stone. Nevertheless, I felt at least a twinge of annoyance every time. “Nothing these other writers are telling you about cultural feminization is original in the slightest!” I wanted to shout. “That would become instantly obvious if any of them had the decency to cite my work!” But I knew that no one cared–I knew I was dealing with social forces just as inexorable and irrational as the ones I’d been writing about in my cultural feminization essays.

I continued to post occasional cultural feminization-related thoughts on Twitter . . .

. . . but over time I was, as they say, airbrushed from the picture.

It did not help that I was pseudonymous and intent upon remaining so. It also emphatically did not help that, early in 2022, I tweeted/posted in support of Ukraine’s struggle to withstand Russia’s invasion. A large number of my Twitter mutuals, flying flags I had not known they possessed, revealed themselves to be supporters of Putin or at least derisive skeptics about Ukraine’s ambitions to be a free country. I expressed my own derision in regard to this bizarre, anti-liberty, anti-self-determination attitude, and this resulted in my being unfollowed or muted by many. That the facts on the ground in Ukraine increasingly supported my view probably only hurt me worse in this respect.

In 2022, it was increasingly clear from the dwindling engagement of my tweets that I had essentially lost my audience. In April of that year, less than 12 months after my “Pink Shift” piece had appeared in American Mind, I organized my thoughts on cultural feminization into a self-published ebook, as a sort of tombstone for my eleven years of promoting this idea, and then mostly ceased writing about it. I had come to the conclusion that trying to introduce and get credit for an important new idea, from a standing start, on Twitter or a personal website—or on any venue with a small audience—was a mug’s game, little better than shouting to passers-by from a proverbial soap-box.

A BETTER WAY?

Is this just my own personal gripe—my own self-driven, bad-luck story—without relevance to the wider problems of society? I can easily believe that members of the “opinionator elite,” as I call them, would say so if pressed.

I also think that the vast majority of people, even highly educated people, don’t consider the process I have described significantly problematic. They encounter new ideas all the time, and they generally don’t care about recognizing these ideas’ exact provenance—they don’t see that as affecting their interests. Sure, they’ll pile on the opprobrium if a plagiarist is caught red-handed. But if some pseudonymous nobody complains about his prior work being copied and/or not cited by some mass-followed elite opinionator, the latter and his followers will scoff together at Mr. Nobody’s presumption.

That doesn’t mean they’re right! Consider the distribution of forces here: Firstly, there are the opinionator elites, the gatekeepers of media content and popular intellectual discourse. Obviously, they have no interest in finding fault with a situation that empowers them, and to some extent enriches them. Just as obviously, the great mass of ordinary, non-idea-originator people are not going to see a problem if the elites won’t highlight it for them.

Against this weight of opposition and inertia, we amateur, non-elite idea originators—surprisingly numerous but still constituting only a tiny minority in the grand scheme of things—have little chance.

There is also a general misconception that new ideas of the type I’m referencing here—ideas that appear in media outlets like the ones I’ve mentioned in this story—do not deserve protection because they are of a different nature than the ideas or intellectual works we do normally protect, e.g., with copyright and patent laws.

But while it may be true that the idea “cultural feminization is happening and is caused by women’s entry en masse into culturally influential institutions” is not a patentable invention and is not a book or film that can be copyrighted and sold commercially, nevertheless:

• • This idea has social value in the sense that it potentially explains many otherwise inexplicable sociocultural changes. It may not (yet) have the same perceived importance, but it belongs to the same broad category as Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, and Dawkins’s theory of cultural memetics;
  • This idea certainly can have commercial value for writers who successfully negotiate book and/or magazine deals—perhaps even lucrative sinecures at think-tanks—by claiming to have originated it.

Although I think the mechanism by which non-elite idea originators are disadvantaged is essentially non-rational—a blunt-force social suppression—I can imagine a semi-compelling reasoned case for the status quo, which would go something like this:

People won’t believe that a new ‘Big Idea’ is valid unless the author of that idea has plenty of social support, e.g., from a substantial number of authoritative figures (i.e., elite opinionators) and/or a large mass of social media followers. Thus, the introduction of a new idea must be, to some extent, a popularity contest—which means that one must develop a sturdy network of social support before one can expect the idea to spread widely and proper credit to be given. In most cases, gathering such support requires one to write under one’s own name, instead of hiding behind a pseudonym—this is why so many media organizations refuse to publish pseudonymous authors. In short, you can choose to play the game, with a chance of winning, or you can choose to quit and be a loser.

I believe that this would seem reasonable to many people. But really it is not a very good argument.

Firstly, this “social network argument” enmires itself in, or at least fails to take account of, a logical fallacy called the genetic fallacy. This fallacy is the belief that the genesis of an idea has anything to do with the idea’s validity. In other words, if Adolf Hitler had once claimed that two plus two equals four, it would be illogical for us all to disbelieve it merely because Adolf Hitler stated it.

The Hitler example makes the fallaciousness obvious, but in everyday cases it’s not so obvious. In fact (as I would say my own case illustrates) it’s common in public discourse for a good idea to be rejected or ignored, without any consideration of its merits, because the idea-originator is either unknown or—as is true for a lot of conservative thinkers nowadays—somehow intolerably heretical, from the perspective of media gatekeepers.

My guess is that, despite our gatekeepers’ now having more formal education than ever, they are more prone than ever to stray into this fallacy, because there are more women than ever among these gatekeepers, and (for that reason) the culture itself is more feminized than ever. Women, on average compared to men, are drawn more to the personal, less to the abstract, and so they are more likely to consider the character or politics of a person who is voicing an argument before they consider the argument on its merits. In my experience, a shocking number of educated women do not see the genetic fallacy as a real fallacy. Indeed, the modern wokeist/feminist contention that gender and ethnic identity determine the validity of one’s ideas and contributions is a bold assertion of this view.

Now, of course I recognize that we can’t all be abstract logicians. We are social animals, only a few million years removed from our tree-dwelling ape ancestors, and we tend to make decisions in crude ways, often involving associations that are practically useful but not necessarily linked by causal mechanisms. We are disinclined to listen or read when some unknown or fringe-y person starts pontificating—yet the same idea, restated by a mainstream thinker, will be much more likely to get our attention. This does seem natural to us.

Natural doesn’t mean optimal, though. Keeping slaves and burning heretics are among the many practices that once seemed natural to us humans. In more traditional, “natural” times, we also had no protection for—or even concept of—intellectual property. The fact is that current social structures and dynamics governing the treatment of new ideas end up suppressing many true idea originators and rewarding fake ones. Who really believes that we can’t come up with a better, fairer, more modern approach?

It seems worth emphasizing here that one of the great revelations of modern electronic social media platforms, especially Twitter, is that there are surprisingly many amateur but bona fide originators of useful ideas. Obviously it would be good if these people—whether one wants to include me in their ranks or not—had an easier time making their new ideas visible or at least getting credit when their ideas do eventually begin to circulate. This would encourage more new ideas, whereas the present system (as my case is meant to illustrate) discourages them.

Amateur idea originators are, in my opinion, mostly people whose quirks of genetics and life experience cause them to perceive the world a bit differently than the average person does. This doesn’t necessarily make them smarter than average, but it does allow them to see patterns that others don’t. This cognitive differentness (not the same as autism, though very mild autism sometimes produces a similar phenomenon) often puts them “out of step” with their fellow humans not just intellectually but also socially. Thus, in my estimation, amateur idea originators are often among the least equipped and inclined to climb the greasy pole to win social support.

How to amplify their voices? How to give them credit and thereby encourage their contributions?

The Internet already gives us the basic medium for the essentially costless publication of new ideas. Some of us set up our own websites; others have Substack accounts. It should also be possible to craft search algorithms specifically to find and date instances of a given idea on the searchable web—this would seem an excellent application of current AI technology.

It should be possible, as well, to make an “idea registry,” maybe something like a cross between rXiv.org and Wikpedia, to which anyone can contribute, and where ideas are automatically categorized and time-stamped.

I have two basic models in mind. The most obvious one is the patent system, a modern, logical, merit-based system that does not require inventors to garner social support. And, again, while the commercial potential of technical inventions drove the establishment of the patent system, and political/cultural ideas tend to have less money-making potential, the reality nowadays is that new ideas are more monetizable than ever through books, magazine articles, Substack subscriptions, and so on. I also think most experienced professional journalists and opinionators would admit that it is absolutely routine for better-known writers to “borrow” the reporting and/or ideas of lesser-known writers and monetize them with large publishing contracts. Although, again, the average person doesn’t care, quite a few big-name writers would not have their fame and fat incomes but for opportune appropriations of others’ work.

We may not want to treat new cultural/political ideas as protectable intellectual property in the strict sense, by fining violators, requiring licensing, etc. But having an easily searchable record of the originations of these new ideas would, at least, tend to discourage the rampant theft that now takes place.

The other model I have in mind is the “motif index” made by folklorists. Such an index—somewhat akin to patent examiners’ taxonomies of technologies, and zoologists’ taxonomies of plants and animals—is a hyper-branchiate ordering of folkloric tales according to the functional elements they contain. If such a vast and useful information structure could be built by a few folklorists using pre-Internet, pre-computer technologies, it should be doable much more easily now for new ideas in the Internet age.

I see no downside for this general proposal to “level the playing field” for idea-originators. It seems like a no-brainer, really, and my guess is that, as it becomes easy to implement in the AI age, it will happen, overcoming the predictable opposition/suppression by the elite opinionator class. Perhaps I will even get some credit for the idea!

* * *

Complaints of “toxic” workplaces. Mass hiring of diversity-equity-inclusion commissars. Open-borders immigration sold to the public with tear-jerking images of refugee children. Trans mania spreading everywhere from kindergarten classrooms to corporate C-suites. Personal pronouns in work email signatures. White women kneeling in prayerful mass protests after yet another African-heritage male with a mile-long rap sheet resists a cop and is shot. Removal of traditional due-process rules to favor women’s sex claims. Talk of “reparations” on a trillion-dollar scale, to remedy racial inequalities. Ever-stricter limits on acceptable speech, debate and scientific inquiry. Declining support for truth itself, if the truth might cause hurt feelings. A heavy emphasis on trauma and victimhood in news media, literature, law, and psychiatry. Open governmental discrimination against white males.

All these are manifestations of a societal climate change that has been underway since the 1950s, with a sharply increased pace in recent years. The causes are many, but one is more important than all the rest put together. I am referring to the entry of women into public life, which—particularly in recent decades as women have ascended to the upper ranks of all important institutions—has given them unprecedented cultural and political power.

I’ve been writing about this for more than a decade. During most of that time, my hypothesis was rejected or ignored, presumably because it was considered too heretical. In the past year and a half, other more prominent figures have started to write about some of the particular institutional effects of women’s new power (e.g., on academia), presumably in part because it has become just too obvious to ignore. What I think is still being missed—or suppressed—is the true extent of this process of cultural feminization, and, more importantly, the disastrous future towards which it is driving.

The ubiquity of cultural feminization

Women’s new power is being wielded, and felt, not just in the universities, not just in H.R. offices, not just among mainstream media corporations and big publishing houses, not just among millennials, but everywhere, affecting everyone. It is what I have called a general “pink shift” in the culture. The fact that even traditionally macho institutions such as the military and sports leagues have been affected is a good indication of its power and breadth.

Women’s ascension to power in institutions, and in public life generally, has altered the culture for the simple reason that women, on average, do not think and act as men do. They are more emotionally sensitive and compassionate, more tuned into people and direct relationships rather than abstract rules and systems and hierarchies. They are quicker to form and join social networks, and to spread social contagions. They are more risk-averse, less interested in conquest and exploration, and more sensitive to environmental threats. They have less tolerance for the stressful combat of free debate, less respect for scientific inquiry for its own sake, less patience with the idea of judicial due process. Probably as a result of being more emotionally sensitive, they seem more easily influenced by narratives that emphasize short-term, emotion-evoking consequences, and seem less interested in dry analyses of long-term outcomes. Perhaps especially when they are childless (or their children have “left the nest”), they are more likely to embrace the “disadvantaged” of the world as their virtual children, feeling emotional pain at persistent inequalities among them, and seeking to alleviate that pain by almost any means necessary.

Of course, women differ among themselves in the strengths of their psychological traits, as do men. But the basic idea here is that the two sexes’ overlapping “bell curves” of trait distributions have significantly different averages or means, which I think is evident even on small, organizational scales, but is seismically obvious on a civilization level.

In short, women collectively have their own distinct perspective on the world, and, now that their power exceeds men’s, they are showing their disdain for the world men made, declaring: “We can do better.”

But can they do better? And why is this important question missing from Western public discourse?

Hiding their power

I had trouble getting my earlier essays on cultural feminization published even in smaller, decidedly conservative media. I can’t be absolutely certain of the reasons, but, as everywhere else in media, there were always female editors in the decision chain—often at the top—and of course thousands of female subscribers who might be angered by anything frame-able as “anti-women.”

The idea that women have unprecedented cultural power, and with it have been dramatically reshaping most of the world’s societies, is, of course, not inherently anti-women. Why can’t women just accept their triumph and take a victory lap? Why does there appear to be not just an overlooking of this historic social phenomenon but even (apart from a few opinion pieces) a sort of conspiracy of silence about it, especially among women?

One explanation is obvious. Women as the physically weaker, more risk-averse sex have traditionally wielded power less openly and directly. As such, they tend not to want to reveal their power, let alone crow over it; they prefer to emphasize their weakness and chronic victimization—which, among other effects, triggers a protective reflex among many men.

I don’t think that’s a complete explanation, though. I think that women like to hide their power not only because it’s more effective when hidden, but also because they realize, deep down, that female supremacy is hard to defend as an optimal way of steering civilization.

Even the feminist who openly seeks absolute female power—the kind of woman who asks “why do we need men?”—is well aware of (has “internalized”) the traditional, disparaging view of the female mindset. This is the view (one might call it the Aristotelian view, though it has been expressed by modern women as different as Ann Coulter and Camille Paglia) that women, relative to men, are irrational, flighty, suggestible, overly emotional, unstable, given to herd thinking, and prone to hysterias and other social contagions. And although this traditional view may seem crude and unfair, most women at least understand that there really is such a thing as the “female mindset,” that it does involve greater emotional sensitivity and people-centeredness in most situations, and that it makes women better mothers than they would be if they were more male-brained.

But is this female mindset somehow superior to the traditional male mindset when it comes to shaping culture and policy? I have never seen or heard a woman make this claim explicitly, probably because the weakness of the claim is obvious. Why would a female, maternal mindset be superior in the public sphere, when it is an adaptation for a very different environment, i.e., actual maternity, which in fact has occurred traditionally within the protective bounds of male-managed society? By the same token, why would the male mindset be inferior when it must be, at least in part, an adaptation for the public sphere—where men have reigned from the dawn of hominids?

It seems to me that women, having no solid argument to justify their cultural and political ascendancy (“it’s our turn” “men are toxic”), and knowing that debates in general play to male strengths, have decided simply to avoid the issue by pretending their ascendancy hasn’t occurred.

Female empowerment leads to social collapse

Not every social change driven by this “Great Feminization” process has been adverse, but it does seem that most have—and that the net effect is increasingly dystopian.

These bad consequences also seem very predictable, at least from a male perspective.

Some examples:

New, lenient policing and sentencing laws.

Short-term goal: Stop police oppression of African-Americans.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of law-breaking, rampant crime, business flight.

Municipal laws that prevent removal of homeless and other street people, offer food etc.

Short-term goal: Treat homeless people with compassion.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of homelessness, filthy encampments that spoil large areas of the city, more crime, business flight.

Generous welfare policies

Short-term goal: Treat the disadvantaged with compassion, reduce hunger, etc.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of indigency, spread of welfare dependency, impairment of family-formation (mothers lose incentive to marry), plus all the social pathologies that follow from these.

Promotion of anti-traditional behaviors/lifestyles (homosexuality, transsexualism)

Short-term goal: Empower the marginalized.

Long-term effects: Weakening of social norms, spread of what is effectively antisocial (anti-family) behavior, spread of associated mental illness in the most impressionable, i.e., children and young adults.

Opposition to restrictions on immigration

Short-term goal: Help the “huddled masses” (i.e., the same maternal sentiments expressed in Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet.)

Long-term effects: Incentivization of mass/illegal immigration. Destruction of national identity, lowering of trust, increase in despair, price inflation, brain-drain in origin countries, etc.

Restriction of speech, debate, legal due-process, scientific inquiry

Short-term goal: Prevent the emotional turmoil caused by “hateful” arguments, concepts, or simple observations, e.g., of racial differences in cognitive and behavioral traits.

Long-term effects: Destruction of liberal norms, a maternal “because I said so!” illiberalism, corruption of scientific culture, reversal of scientific progress.

Promotion of equal outcomes vs. equality of opportunity

Short-term goal: Reduce conflict and promote fairness by directly reducing financial inequality (resembling a classic maternal strategy for promoting harmony among children—also probably the norm in family-based paleolithic groupings)

Long-term effects: Destruction of normal, healthy incentives to succeed. Promotion of lazy, redistributive attitude (“I’m a victim of racism—give me money”). A centerpiece of communism/socialism and a key reason for its failure.

Promotion of “harm reduction” strategies (e.g., free needles) against illicit drug use

Short-term goal: Reduce mortality and hospitalizations due to drug overdoses.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of drug use.

The overall pattern should be clear: The feminine mindset, with its focus on short-term, feelgood outcomes in the culture and policy realm, tends to set up perverse incentives, thereby basically guaranteeing bad long-term outcomes.

Incidentally, the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has famously argued, with experimental evidence, that the “female brain,” compared to the “male brain,” is less good at understanding and building systems. It is easy to see why this would be so, if the feminine mindset is relatively blind to the mechanisms that determine a system’s long-run performance—the system in question here being the system of humans called society.

Women’s greater focus on the emotional and the short-term has other adverse impacts on culture and policy. One is the “witch-hunt,” social-contagion-prone atmosphere that now suffuses Western (esp. Anglo-American) culture—and I think derives from the heightened feminine sensitivity to the stress of debate (including greater pain from the cognitive dissonance generated by opposing arguments), and the broader feminine need for emotional harmony in groups. The speed with which women, led by their woke high priestesses, have been dismantling Western traditions in favor of fads and frenzies such as “gender-affirming care for children,” is stunning and ominous.

Even more ominous, though, is the weakness of public opposition, which, of course, is due largely to women’s reluctance even to acknowledge their power, let alone restrain its excesses.

Will the West continue to collapse by a slow process of social dissolution? It’s easy to picture that happening simply as a continuation of trends our cultural matriarchy promotes: Third-World-ization via immigration, white self-hatred, discrimination against men, low Western fertility, diversity over merit, sanctioned lawlessness for protected racial groups, etc. It’s also plausible that the collapse will be more sudden and catastrophic, via, say, lost wars, surrenders to invader-immigrants who are not so feminized (or so civilized), or even, one day, the sentimental granting of civil rights to “sentient” machines. Anyway, as far as I can see, all paths in our feminized civilization lead to the failure of that civilization. It’s almost beside the point to note that that failure will bring this brief, strange period of female cultural hegemony to a close.

* * *

United Airlines flight 93 was the one that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11/01, instead of being flown into the US Capitol. The reason it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania was that a group of passengers, ordinary peace-loving Americans, put aside their fears of immediate harm from the edged weapons held by the hijackers and united with one goal: to storm the cockpit, kill the hijackers, and regain control of the plane. Although they didn’t succeed in regaining control of the plane, they did at least induce the hijackers to crash it prematurely.

These passengers had the advantage of knowing, from communications with people on the ground, what was up that morning—and thus, what their hijackers probably intended to do with the plane. So really they knew they had nothing to lose. Among the many sounds the cockpit voice-recorder picked up in the final minutes of the flight, was that of a food cart being rammed against the cockpit door, and a cry from one of the passengers, “In the cockpit! If we don’t, we’ll die!”

According to Wikipedia, “Vice President Dick Cheney, in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center deep under the White House, authorized Flight 93 to be shot down, but upon learning of the crash, is reported to have said, ‘I think an act of heroism just took place on that plane.’”

He was right. But the heroism of the flight 93 passengers was a different kind of heroism than the lone-actor heroism we’re more used to reading about. It was a heroism involving a coming-together, a coalescence, of people who could accomplish a heroic task only when in a “united state.”

The rarity of that kind of coalescence nowadays points to a basic conundrum of human affairs, especially governance. In other words, even when a large mass of people has ample justification for rebelling against the relatively small group of individuals who control their lives, and ample means to do so—if united—they almost never unite effectively.

*

Consider the recent unprecedented popular protests across China, which ultimately involved more than a dozen cities. The background was a general unhappiness concerning national and local “COVID zero” policies, plus an even more general dissatisfaction with one-party rule. The triggers for protests were World Cup broadcasts from Qatar showing fans not wearing masks, and a deadly fire in a residential building in Urumqi that took firefighters hours to extinguish due to extreme local anti-COVID measures—Urumqi had been locked down for months. As for the leadership of the protest movement . . . the movement seems to have been relatively leaderless and spontaneous, driven chiefly by the circulation of Internet messages and images. That leaderlessness is unsurprising in China, where any dissident leader visible and vocal enough to shape and direct protests is likely to be swiftly bundled away by police. It also may have been the decisive factor, for these relatively leaderless protests were limited to public gatherings, and did not have clear goals other than the mass voicing of complaints. Ultimately, the Chinese government was able to climb down from their COVID policies without their tight control of the country being threatened significantly.

A popular uprising against the government of Sri Lanka earlier this year was arguably more successful. The government, headed by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and including some of his family members, was widely viewed as incompetent and corrupt, as Sri Lankans faced out-of-control inflation, power shortages, and other problems. When these stresses worsened and protests began, the government responded with repressive measures such as arrests and social media blackouts, exacerbating the situation. The protest movement eventually developed a leadership structure, including some firebrand student leaders. In July, a very large crowd of protesters stormed the Presidential palace in Colombo and Rajapaksa was forced to flee the country. However, the new government soon cracked down on the protest movement leaders, who apparently didn’t have much support among the country’s elites.

There are also ongoing protest movements in Iran and Russia. The one in Iran is very prominent and broad-based, and has forced the Tehran regime to backpedal somewhat, but so far has failed to result in an overthrow of the theocratic regime—which recently has started publicly executing protesters. The protest movement in Russia, against the Putin government and its Ukraine invasion, is hardly visible and seems to have achieved little if anything—clearly many dissidents have opted to leave the country rather than stay and protest, while some higher-profile dissidents have been disposed of via the now-classic Russian method of defenestration.

Just looking at these examples, one can postulate that a popular political uprising, to have a decent chance of success, requires:

• • Sufficient popularity, i.e., support from a large, preferably dominant proportion of the population, among whom there is a strong commonality of interest;
  • Strong stressors/triggers that convince ordinary people that regime change is needed and compel them to take action (starting with protest marches and other gatherings);
  • A vision of how things should be different, e.g., more liberal, less corrupt, more aligned with some alternative ideology, etc.
  • Effective leaders who can inspire and direct the movement in ways that achieve regime change;
  • Elite support, boosting the movement’s power by enabling it to control or influence key institutions (e.g., media, academia, police, military).

*

Ticking most or all these boxes is going to be challenging anywhere, particularly so in Western countries. I would say it’s virtually impossible in the United States at present.

Popularity: Considering how the current US regime favors nonwhites, and considering how many contemporary white women are content with this anti-in-group discrimination, it seems likely that American dissidents are mostly white males—the principal heirs, as it were, of the country’s founders and builders. I would guess that this putative dissident group, all in all, comprises less than a third of the US population. That is still a very large number of individuals, somewhere between 50 and 100 million. Certainly they would be unbeatable if united as one against disunited foes. But even white American males remain highly disunited. Moreover, the fact that dissident Americans, as I have defined them, are very much a minority puts them in a weak position culturally. It also would be used (and to some extent is already being used) to justify harsh regime measures against them, since they do not “represent the average American.”

Stressors/triggers: The level of stress and urgency that would normally compel dissidents to go out onto the streets and protest is so far not very evident among dissident Americans. To be sure, the regime (an entity that is cultural as well as political and extends far beyond formal government) has done great damage to the country, via the wokeification/corruption of education, media, academia, immigration policy, the judiciary, and most other policies and institutions. Their misrule seems much more deserving of a punitive popular reaction than the misrule that prompted the American Revolution. Yet the US, for now, retains relatively high living standards, certainly for white males—and those living standards are supported by a huge structure of financialization/debt. In short, American dissidents still have much to lose by revolting openly. And so, like the proverbial slow-boiled frog, they still mostly prefer waiting (and complaining ineffectually, often indirectly via conspiracy theories) to real, in-the-streets action. I doubt that they will prefer action until there is much more radical and extensive regime provocation and/or a prolonged economic depression that leaves them with “nothing to lose.”

Envisioned change: American dissidents are remarkably fragmented in their views of what has gone wrong and what is to be done about it. Many of them, as I just noted, believe in bizarre conspiracies involving things like elite pedophile rings, or “chemtrails.” It’s often hard to tell where the conspiracy-theory fringe ends and the mainstream begins.

The only halfway-cogent explanations for USA’s predicament that I’ve ever heard/read are from right wing intellectuals with small followings. The average “angry white male” appears to have little or no understanding of, say, the recent cultural and political impact of women, or the history of blacks in the USA and their manipulation by the major political parties. The most popular view now among right-wing American dissidents seems to be that “wokeism is the problem,” and that things would get better if it could just be toned down a bit. In other words, they have neither a solid grasp of the problems facing the country, nor a positive alternative vision—let alone one that captures the energy and idealism of young people in the way that progressivism/wokeism does.

Inadequate leadership. The American woke regime seems almost as effective at suppressing the leaders of dissident groups (e.g., Proud Boys, Oath Keepers) as the Chinese Communist party’s secret police are at suppressing pro-democracy leaders. In the wake of the regime’s 1/6/21 prosecutions and hearings, I can’t think of a single person, inside or outside of American politics, who currently has the visibility, stature, energy, intellect, and vision to reverse the adverse trends and put the country on secure footings. A big part of the problem, of course, is that at this late stage of the national disease, saving the country almost certainly would require a revolution-like abandonment, at least temporarily, of its current political framework—and the regime, understanding this, has begun to treat any opposition as sedition. Given these stakes, many of the right’s most prominent “leaders” have switched to less risky goals, such as enriching themselves—which to me is a clear indicator of organizational defeat/degeneracy, seen also among Democratic Party-controlled African American leaders.

Lack of elite support. Perhaps the most obvious of all its defects is that the American conservative/dissident movement lacks elite and institutional support. This is not a trend that seems likely to be reversed any time soon. The takeovers/makeovers of elites and institutions by anticonservative activists and their ideas (often these begin as conquests by women, who are inherently more left-wing and susceptible to wokeism) reflect a process that has been at work for decades, and is now accelerating through its final stages to a state of more or less complete control.

Thus, while the Flight 93 story presents a striking case of group heroism in the face of disaster, it’s more an example of what US isn’t (yet) than what it is. The legacy population of the United States, though well advanced in their cultural and political emasculation, and in the related, sad handover of their inheritance to foreigners, are still surprisingly comfortable, still quite far from an “if we don’t, we’ll die” moment.

***

The new Western culture, especially the American variety, offers the old-fashioned conservative male dissident many trends to bewail. Discrimination against white males! Promotion of LGBTQ lifestyles! The trans mania with its mutilation of children and destruction of women’s sports! Suppression of meritocracy, free speech, free scientific inquiry, and due process of law! Runaway entitlement spending! Open borders! Critical race theory! The ESG investing fad! No-prosecute policies in violent cities! Proliferation of social contagions and hysterical illnesses, from ROGD and PTSD to Tik-Tok Tourette’s! Cascades of cancellations of perfectly competent white males, e.g., for “grading too hard in organic chemistry,” or for cracking an off-color joke! Widespread exclusion (in effect) of males from important professions, including public relations, publishing, and clinical psychology/psychotherapy. “Math is White Supremacy!” “Showing up for work is White Supremacy!!” “Not being a pea-brained slob is White Supremacy!!!”

My argument here is that everybody should stop bewailing these trends as separate phenomena—should stop fighting “wokeness” or “ESG” or the trans mania. They should, instead, focus on the one factor that underlies and causes all of these social developments.

Of course, I mean women—or more precisely, women’s newfound power in organizations and institutions, and in the culture generally.

An assumption everyone seems to have made during the decades of female emancipation is that women see things more or less as men do, and are just as devoted as men to the principles underlying Western civilization. Not so! As some feminist writers, including Virginia Woolf, warned long ago, women when they enter public life in business and government tend to look around and see lots of things they want to change. They’re just not fans, to the extent that men are, of things like free speech, open debate, due process of law, meritocracy, free scientific inquiry, maximizing shareholder value, equality of opportunity, and so on.

It’s not that women have worked things out logically and carefully and comprehensively, and now want to formally enact a scheme they think is better. It’s more that things in Western civ, which was made by men, often go against the emotional grain with women, causing them real discomfort, and compelling them to react. Women’s instincts were shaped by evolution for a maternal and domestic context, and seem to bias them towards short-term, feelgood, nurturing, and protective outcomes—on average compared to men. These instincts seem to be especially aroused by things like persistent racial inequality, discussions of race-based IQ differences, ruthless meritocratic competition unleavened by sympathy for the losers, stern cross-examinations of women making rape claims, medical skepticism over women’s unverifiable symptoms, and the kind of frat-boy humor that has gotten so many men cancelled. Now that women are largely in charge, they question why we need such things—or peremptorily try to stamp them out.

There are some nuances to this general theory. First, a lot of women are not woke. But the argument here is really about women on average as compared to men on average, and I don’t think it could be reasonably disputed that women, on average and compared to men, are significantly biased in the direction of wokeness. It’s also obviously true that modest average psychological differences between the sexes could translate to big social changes when one sex takes power from the other. I would suggest too that the women who seek power in institutions are less likely to be “average” women and more likely to be childless activist types. There is, moreover, a hell of a lot of depression and anxiety among modern women, especially younger ones, and that as well may push many women to embrace the woke activism mindset as a therapeutic source of meaning and purpose.

Another nuance has to do with women’s apparently superior ability, compared to men, to align themselves emotionally within a group. This means, in effect, that women in an organization will tend to be less independent-minded, with the tradeoff that they can collectively punch above their weight. Among the examples that come to mind is the recent cancellation of Woody Allen from his publisher due to activism among the publishing company’s junior staff. (The publishing industry, like public relations and psychology/psychiatry/psychotherapy, is utterly dominated by women—“junior staff” in publishing generally means millennial women.)

Women, as I’ve suggested in a recent essay, may also have, collectively, a stronger drive to dominate organizations, to eliminate the greater discomfort they experience when exposed to male organizational culture. Certainly the female-to-male ratio in many organizations now is one that would be condemned as discriminatory (by women) were the proportions reversed.

A further nuance, which I think will become increasingly obvious and important as our societal “pink shift” advances, is that women, as they align emotionally within groups, and ultimately purge dissenting voices, tend to cause the institutions they control to become unstable. In other words, like hysteria-prone convents of half a millenium ago, female-dominated institutions become relatively susceptible to groupthink contagions that swing them irrationally this way and that. Today these contagions introduce relatively mild new absurdities like pronoun declarations and land acknowledgments. But I expect it’s all going to get loopier, and more harshly enforced, as time goes on and female control solidifies.

Lastly, somewhat hair-splittingly, I don’t think that women when left to themselves running male-built institutions necessarily become woke in the way that we see now. I see wokeness as a contemporary, contagious mindset (not quite an ideology) that corresponds very well to, and thus easily infects, the average female mind, still moreso the younger, more neurotic, more activist female mind. But in principle, under different circumstances, one could gin up something substantially different that would also spread well among women, provided that it pressed their main buttons. Certainly in the centuries before women took such a large part in public life, thought contagions among them were common and varied, though usually localized and rarely very consequential (rarely but not never—see, for example, the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria).

But back to my main argument: If wokeness and its variants are all epiphenomena of the new, historically unprecedented power of women in public life, measures taken against wokeness etc. could be ineffective if there is no acknowledgment of the true source of the problem. Indeed all means short of reducing women’s presence in public life might be futile.

I’m not advocating a specific strategy, but I think it’s important at least to highlight this dilemma, which Western countries obviously have no easy way of resolving. It may be that over time, the current, Cultural Revolution-like surge of wokeness subsides and becomes less radical, as the women pushing wokeness are increasingly forced to acknowledge some of its adverse consequences, such as rising crime from weak law enforcement, social dissolution from uncontrolled immigration, the institutional incompetence that flows inevitably from the abandonment of meritocracy, and the aforementioned institutional instability.

Then again, by the time things get bad enough for women to acknowledge that they aren’t necessarily better than men at managing our civilization, the process of degeneration might be very, very advanced. Indeed, it’s plausible that, by then, other, even stronger, less reversible adverse processes—ethnic conflict, for example—will be underway, effectively sealing the West’s fate.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

*

One of the traits that women seem generally willing to acknowledge as their own is a greater affinity for “inclusivity” and the related “equity.” In other words, compared to the average man, the average woman seems to have a stronger preference for a society in which meritocratic competition and rewards, and the resulting inequalities, are minimized. To the extent that this is so, women (compared to men) would therefore tend to prefer flatter, more egalitarian and less hierarchical social groupings—as has often been observed.

Meritocratic competition and hierarchical ordering are among the pillars of Western civilization, so it should be concerning if these are now being weakened by the cultural and political ascendancy of women. However, this brief essay is not (mainly) a judgment of the fitness of this feminine trait-set—it’s a speculation about its origins.

Has anyone done a conclusive study of why women are relatively inclined towards inclusivity/equity and against competition, meritocracy and hierarchy? If so, I’m unaware of it. Since human traits typically are rooted in the prehistoric past, I’m not sure a conclusive study of such a thing is even possible.

In any case, let us assume that these female biases do have primordial roots. What could those roots be?

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, and I guess is the obvious, default explanation, wanting to promote inclusivity/equity could have originated and persisted as a maternal instinct. This instinct would have worked to inhibit the otherwise inevitable rivalries and battles among a mother’s children, thus perhaps increasing their summed chances of surviving to adulthood and reproducing.

Is this “maternal-origin hypothesis” the end of the story? Or can other aspects of prehistoric life also account for the egalitarianism of the modern female mindset?

The primitive social structure in which H. sapiens is thought to have lived the longest—by far—was the extended family-based band that dominated the Paleolithic (“hunter-gatherer”) period. This basic mode of existence was practiced by humans, and perhaps also by their hominin ancestors, for millions of years, whereas more advanced social forms have been shaping us for only the last 10,000 years or so, i.e., the period following the Neolithic revolution.

From a modern perspective, one of the more striking features of the typical Paleolithic social grouping—which still can be observed in various remote parts of the world—is its lack of what we would call private property, a strong share-and-share-alike ethic, and a simple, non-hierarchical, “flat” organization. The 1980 South African film, The Gods Must be Crazy, did a decent job of depicting one such group (of Kalahari Bushmen) and the possessiveness and envy that threatened their harmony when they discovered an unusual and valuable object (a Coca-Cola bottle, dropped from a passing airplane).

The implication of the story, and indeed of standard anthropological descriptions of such bands, is that egalitarianism is and was necessary to keep these groups together—and keeping these groups together presumably conferred some evolutionary advantage by improving the survival chances and overall Darwinian fitness of their constituent individuals.

As Francis Fukuyama has put it in The Origins of Political Order:

Within a band-level local group, there is nothing resembling modern economic exchange and, indeed, nothing resembling modern individualism . . . Both hunting and gathering are done on a group basis by families or groups of families. Hunting in particular leads to sharing, since there is no technology for storing meat, and hunted animals must be consumed immediately . . . Many of the moral rules in this type of society are not directed at individuals who steal other people’s property but rather against those who refuse to share food and other necessities. Under conditions of perpetual scarcity, the failure to share can often affect the group’s prospects for survival. Band-level societies are highly egalitarian . . . within the band, there is relatively little differentiation between families, no permanent leadership, and no hierarchy. [my italics]

That this “paleo mindset” corresponds to key aspects of the modern female mindset points to the possibility that the one helped seed the other—in other words, that the relative female preference for inclusivity and equity in modern times originated not only in maternity but also in the social organization that dominated during the Paleolithic.

As for men, it seems likely that with the Neolithic revolution and the rise of towns, cities, private property, hierarchical government, stratified societies, meritocratic competition for wealth and status, and so on, their mindset was reshaped for this more structured and competitive environment. (This, incidentally, would have given Neolithic men a huge edge over their more peaceful, less competition-minded hunter-gatherer counterparts—an edge that is still painfully evident wherever modern and paleo-type peoples are in contact.)

The female mindset would not have been reshaped to the same extent by the Neolithic revolution if, as I suspect, this revolution brought much less change to women’s lives and roles. Women were still principally concerned with raising children, and in that context their relative preferences for inclusivity and equity, and aversions to competition and hierarchy, would have remained adaptive. Women’s roles in farming also might not have represented a big departure from their gathering lifestyle of paleo days. And although female sexual competition would have made more and more sense in a world where men’s status began to vary greatly, it’s unclear that women—often treated as patriarchal property before marriage in premodern times—had much freedom to engage in such competition until relatively recently. Certainly the competitions for wealth, status, and power that the Neolithic revolution and town/city life introduced would have been almost entirely male pursuits.

Of course, the trait differences resulting from these distinct roles and selection pressures would not have been absolute. Men and women differ genetically by only a single chromosome among 23 pairs of them, and the outcome of that tiny genetic difference is mediated by the environment as well as by factors such as sex hormones, whose doses during development can vary considerably. Just as some women are on the mannish side of the distribution of looks, some would have been on the mannish side of the distributions of psychological traits.

In the same way, or through other mechanisms of atavism, some men even in modern societies would continue to be very “paleo” and egalitarian in their thinking. It’s tempting to speculate further that this reversion, with its associated conviction that simpler times were better times, underlies some relatively old religions and political movements, including Christianity and socialism*—which, though they were invented by men, tend now to be favored more by women.

In any case, to sum up the main idea here: Key feminine psychological traits favoring inclusivity and equity and opposing hierarchy—traits that seem especially influential now as drivers of social change in the era of female empowerment—may have had their origins in the band-level social organization that dominated the Paleolithic period, not just in maternity per se.

I’ll grant that I’m not a professional anthropologist, and my idea here is not particularly complicated or sophisticated. I’m sure there’s a lot more to be said about the origins of sex-specific psychological traits. But my idea seems worth considering—indeed I think anthropologists would have suggested and explored it already, if their feminized, wokeified profession hadn’t effectively suppressed this and many other areas of inquiry.

Incidentally, my hypothesis itself suggests why this suppression is occurring. If women’s instincts on issues relating to inclusivity, equity, and hierarchy are instincts adapted for maternity and a primordial, long-outmoded social structure, then in modern societies these instincts are probably maladaptive when expressed in the public policy realm, however suited they may still be for family life and the raising of children. Even as a hypothesis, this is not a view that feminists can ever tolerate.

*Marx considered paleolithic bands the original communist societies.

* * *

A quick summary for those coming to this for the first time.

I’ve been in the habit of citing one of my 2019 essays, “The Great Feminization” or “The Day the Logic Died,” as an introduction to the idea of cultural feminization. Since those pieces were written, though, I’ve posted other essays on this topic, expanding this “idea space” a bit more with each one. So it might be useful now, to those coming to this for the first time, to have an updated short summary of the whole picture as I see it.

In a Nutshell

Women, because of their different ways of thinking and behaving on average, and their new, strong influence over culture and politics, are the principal drivers of modern social change, including all aspects of wokeness.

From Home to Office

American women—whose sociocultural circumstances are very similar to those of other Western women—obtained full equality in voting rights by constitutional amendment more than a century ago. That had significant cultural and political consequences, but it was only a small part of the story of women’s modern empowerment. The big change occurred in the period 1950-2000, when women shifted, en masse and on a durable, peacetime basis, from being dedicated homemakers to participating more or less equally alongside men in the working world and public life. The labor force participation rate charts below (the first for American men, the second for women) clearly show this shift.

As I wrote in “The Great Feminization”:

The historic significance of this migration on its own appears to have been underappreciated. Women never made such a move, to such a degree, in any large human society in the past. It significantly altered the structure of ordinary life.

But women in the late 20th century didn’t just move into the workforce. They moved into its upper ranks, to professions that strongly influence societal culture and policy. They became journalists, public relations specialists, lawyers, academics, novelists, publishers, filmmakers, TV producers, and politicians, all to an unprecedented extent. In some of these culture-making professions, by the 1990s and early 2000s, they had achieved parity or even dominance (e.g., writers, authors, and public relations specialists) with respect to men. Even where they fell short of full parity, they appeared to acquire considerable “veto” power over content. A 2017 report by the Women’s Media Center noted evidence that at the vast majority of media companies, at least one woman is among the top three editors.

Women Think Differently About Cultural and Political Matters

Women’s ascension to power in culture- and policy-making professions has been followed by extensive cultural and political changes. Why? Because women, on average, think differently than men do about cultural and political issues. This should not be surprising: The bodies and minds of women and men were shaped long ago by biological and cultural evolution for their distinct traditional roles in life. Women’s distinct roles obviously have required certain psychological traits or tendencies that are different from male traits. I think most of us would agree that these innately feminine traits include:

1. • A greater emotional sensitivity and capacity for empathy/compassion/nurturing.

• • A greater fearfulness and aversion to risks (concerning dangers to themselves and others), including an extra sensitivity to the risks of toxic and other environmental threats (reflected in hormone-driven pregnancy behaviors such as food/odor aversions and compulsive “nesting”).

• • A greater affinity for people and relationships, and lesser affinity for constructed, systemized, and abstract things.

• • A greater tendency to align emotionally when in a group, especially a group of other women—a tendency that implies a superior ability (individually and collectively) to transmit emotions and other social contagions.

• • A reduced affinity for competition and capacity for resistance to aggressors.

• • Greater affinity for themes of suffering and victimhood, with correspondingly less interest in triumphant “male” themes of exploration and conquest.

Probably most of these traits are interrelated. In any case, when one considers these broad aspects of “innate femininity,” it isn’t hard to see that the very sudden extension of their dominance—from women’s traditional domestic domain to all areas of public life—would help account for the dramatic social changes of the past half-century or so.

It also isn’t hard to see that women tend to support these social changes more than men do—although it’s important to understand that by altering the culture, women have influenced not only their own but also men’s thinking and behavior.

Social changes likely to have been driven by the ascendancy of female traits

• • Much more generous welfare programs.

• • Extensions of the concept of welfare to include more types of intervention (e.g., affirmative action) and more groups needing intervention (“traditionally marginalized groups”).

• • Excessively honoring (e.g., with pronoun declaration rituals) anyone with a claim to victimhood or some other “special identity” status.

• • Very strong social reactions to media portrayals of racial injustice/inequity, e.g., the near-hysterias following the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN.

• • Inflations of the traditional definitions of “harm,” “offense,” “trauma,” “violence,” “aggression,” etc., as reflected in new terms such as “microaggressions” and “triggers.”

• • An astounding belief (from men’s perspective) in slight or even imaginary emotional upsets as sources of real harm in the world. This belief is reflected in everyday female-produced media content but also in the new hyper-focus on psychological trauma in law and medicine, and of course in the vast inflation of trauma-related syndromes such as PTSD (and the recovered-trauma-memory syndromes of the 1980s/90s, before they were discredited).

• • A shift away from the traditional deterrence of criminal behavior with punishment and stigmatization, in preference for compassion-based, non-stigmatizing solutions (e.g., non-prosecute policies for most crimes, free needles for addicts).

• • Reduced tolerance of deaths in war, despite (ironically) a greater inclination to enter foreign conflicts in response to emotion-evoking atrocities portrayed on television.

• • Less tolerance for capital punishment and other harsh sentences, especially where the “traditionally disadvantaged” are concerned.

• • Less restrictive immigration policy, again driven by stories and imagery (pitiable refugee children, huddled masses, etc.) that evoke maternal protective/nurturing instincts.

• • In general, much more emphasis in media and policy contexts on compassion-evoking stories of individuals, with correspondingly less emphasis on (even condemnation of!) coldly logical risk/benefit analyses focused on the long term.

• • Suppression of potentially upsetting ideas or expressions (“hate speech,” “mansplaining”), words, facts (e.g., on racial differences in criminality), free debate and free speech, due process of law (especially when women are plaintiffs), and even some fields of scientific inquiry.

• • Helicopter parenting.

• • Obsession with safety, e.g., as seen in new terms such as “safe space.”

• • Rise of “green” movement and related cultural themes involving opposition to nuclear power, GMO, “toxins,” “chemicals,” even vaccines (a movement that was increasing in popularity, with female leadership, pre-COVID-19). Related shift towards “natural” foods and medicines, including those produced by the relatively unregulated supplements industry. Rise of hysteria variants involving claims of chemical hypersensitivity, toxic metals, etc.

• • Decline in interest in engineering, as shown by greater reliance on foreign-born students at e-schools, loss of Western pre-eminence (to China) in advanced engineering projects.

• • Predominance of “social media” in Western life.

• • Shift away from technical themes and toward social (woke) themes in female-dominated STEM media and professions, e.g., “math is white supremacist.”

• • Shift away from traditional, hierarchical, rule-based religions toward more loosely structured and therapeutic forms of worship and spirituality.

• • Frequent and rapid social contagions of new cultural themes (e.g., wokeness and its various associated behaviors and terminology, from BLM worship to the trans mania), affecting virtually all organizations and institutions—because women, the chief transmitters of these contagions, are highly influential in organizations and institutions.

• • Increase in the frequency and prevalence of overtly pathological social contagions (hysterias) such as Tik-Tok-induced Tourette’s-like behavior.

• • Tendency of professions and institutions to become female-dominated by systematically excluding (especially white) males—who are “problematic” for grouped women, simply because of their innate male resistance to institutional feminization.

• • General increase in intolerant, “hive-mind” behavior in institutions and professions as a consequence of increasing female dominance.

• • Marked preference for inclusivity and equity over traditional meritocratic discrimination, everywhere from schools to companies to political appointees and candidates. “Participation trophies.”

• • Virtually uniform emphasis on victimhood themes in Western literary fiction, coincident with female takeover of publishing industry.

• • Reduced public interest in adventurous endeavors such as manned space exploration (“we should fix poverty and inequality here on Earth first”).

• • Demotion of traditional heroes such as Christopher Columbus and Thomas Jefferson and promotion of their alleged victims, e.g., Native Americans, Sally Hemings.

Obviously, not every woman out there likes or is driving these changes. The differences between men’s and women’s mindsets are differences on average.

Moreover, the mindset underlying these shifts—a mindset that, in some of these cases, seems sensitive to the point of neuroticism—might not even be that of the average woman. I suspect it more closely represents the attitudes of the single, childless activists who have been most energetic in pushing these social changes. For them, perhaps, society and its “disadvantaged,” from African-Americans to Rio Grande-crossing illegal immigrants, are substitutes for the children they don’t have.

Cultural Feminization is Problematic

One sufficient and conservative reason for doubting that cultural feminization is a good thing is simply that it entails the abrupt replacement of a large set of civilizational traits that were embedded in Western people, culturally and probably biologically, over thousands of years. Not every Western trait is essential to the West’s survival or is even still adaptive in the modern world. But discarding these traits at the whim of female activists seems a bit like deleting genes willy-nilly from the human genome. Could you do that without bad consequences? Yes, conceivably—but it’s far more likely to end in disaster.

Another good reason to oppose or limit cultural feminization is that, while men traditionally led societies and thus would have been expected to evolve attitudes and behaviors appropriate for that role, women traditionally were confined to other, more private roles, centering on maternity. In other words, why should we suppose that being a mother, or being shaped by evolution for motherhood, is a better preparation for public life than . . . serving in public life, as men have done for ages?

There are further reasons that have to do with specific effects of feminization. For example, feminization appears to have brought a new cultural and political emphasis on short-term, feelgood consequences, with less emphasis on—I would say a blindness to—long-term consequences. It should be obvious that this is unsustainable and must end badly.

Moreover, females’ lesser affinity, even hostility, for due process of law, free debate, unfettered scientific inquiry, and related aspects of Western, small-l liberalism, seems likely to render the West relatively static, sclerotic, and poor if allowed to run to its logical conclusion.

Then, of course, there is the apparent female (relative to male) embrace of mass immigration to the West from the Third World, which I think has the potential to dissolve Western societies faster than any other factor.

I think it’s worth mentioning too, though it’s more speculative, that the apparent decades-long slide in testosterone levels in men might be an effect of cultural feminization. Testosterone levels in men (and women) are known to be regulated by social cues, such as winning or losing competitions, and so it would make sense that cultural messaging condemning and suppressing traditional masculinity would have a T-lowering effect. Lower T means lower fertility, which below a certain threshold—one that Legacy Americans sank beneath long ago—leads ultimately to the extinction of the population.

Lastly, there is the sense of taboo that enshrouds the idea of cultural feminization, in general but especially when it is framed negatively. The high-profile MSM types (Cowen, Edsall) who have touched the subject (only in the last year or so, as far as I know) have been approving or very mild in their concerns. Also, for more than a decade now, most of the short essays I’ve tried to get published on this subject, including in some pretty right wing publications, have been rejected. In every case, a female editor had veto power, and I think her male colleagues also feared the hostile ululations that would ensue if they published my unvarnished take. Anyhow, an old quote (often attributed to Voltaire) seems apt here: “If you want to know who rules over you, look at whom you’re not allowed to criticize.”

Further reading

“The Great Feminization” (2019)

“The Day the Logic Died” (2019)

“Cultural Feminization: a Bibliography” (2021)

The Great Feminization: Women as Drivers of Modern Social Change (2022)

* * *

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

In prior essays on this site and elsewhere, I’ve argued that the spread of wokeness and its recent marked intensification (the “Great Awokening”) is best seen as a social contagion—of feelings and sociocultural ideas that broadly reflect women’s maternal instincts, and are much more transmissible among women than among men.

I’ve also suggested that wokeness is apt to be ultra-transmissible among females whose feminine, maternal energies aren’t absorbed by husbands and children and may seek another outlet. The terms “cat lady” and “wine aunt” refer to a subset of these individuals, but many unmarried girls and young women, as well as successful career women, also fit this description.

I’ve proposed, moreover, that wokeness is driven into institutions not just by the conversion of (especially female) workers already in place but also by the takeover of those institutions by women and tamed males, via biased hiring.

I’m more certain now than ever that all these hypotheses are correct, as far as they go. But I think there is one more aspect of wokeness that requires an explanation. I’m referring to what could be called wokeness’s spiraling frenzy—its tendency to move away from norms of belief and behavior and towards extremes, wherever it takes hold.

To put it another way: The woke women and their enablers who in the past decade or two have effectively taken control of virtually all major American institutions and professions have not been content to implement a modest set of reforms and leave it at that. As their power has grown, they have increasingly attacked the core values of Western civilization: everything from due process of law to meritocracy to the shielding of children from sexual deviants and predators. As their policies have become extreme, so have their methods. They have made it clear that they don’t want sober deliberations—they want emotional shock and awe!

One could argue that there is a counter-cultural logic to this movement—that it wants to collapse the existing order as completely as those hijacked planes collapsed the Twin Towers on 9/11.

But is the Great Awokening replacing the old culture with a new one that can bind society sustainably—a “successor ideology”?

Wokeness and the Great Awokening are driven chiefly by women, who have their own ways of thinking and persuading—ways that typically seem more emotional and less rational than men’s. So one might suppose that there is a genuine ideology being built here, albeit a feminine one that seems alien to the average male, and that the Great Awokening is just the final, dramatic dash in this “pink shift” takeover of Western culture.

However, to me, that’s not the full story. To me, the Great Awokening’s spiraling frenzy, and its attraction for people who are evidently mentally ill, suggest that it is for the most part only a temporary and reactive social phenomenon: a social “mania.”

Logic and Madness

As many have noted, the Great Awokening bears a strong resemblance to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

The CCR’s spearpoints were cadres of “Red Guard” fanatics, young people (even teens) whose instability and restlessness, suggestibility, and high susceptibility to fanaticism were probably comparable to what one finds in today’s millennial Antifa brigades. These howling Maoist minions sought the erasure of whatever competed with Maoism, which in practice meant just about anything predating Maoist China—history books, art, architecture, temples, even genealogical records. Red Guards and their camp followers toppled statues of Confucius, pasted huge banners with their slogans everywhere, and went around attacking intellectuals or anyone even lightly connected to the teaching of pre-Maoist history or philosophy.

That was the counter-cultural logic part of it. But there was also the crazypants part—shocking, obscene, savage stuff, ultimately including murder and even cannibalism.

At some high schools, students killed their principals in the school courtyard and then cooked and ate the bodies to celebrate a triumph over “counterrevolutionaries” …  Government-run cafeterias are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served human flesh to employees. [NYT]

Not content with attacking living reminders of the old China, Red Guards also broke into cemeteries and dug up the skeletal remains of ancient Chinese emperors and nobles, desecrating them and denouncing the persons these remains had once been.

Other examples of these social frenzies come to mind. In some of the pre-Christian feasts of Rome and northern Europe, open drunkenness and debauchery, and various other intentionally shocking inversions of everyday social norms, were encouraged, at least in part as cathartic but controlled ventings of accumulated stress. (Modern parties, especially the ones teens and young adults have, seem like echoes of these displays.) As Samuel Johnson famously said, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

Or a woman. The infamous convent hysterias of 1500s-1700s Europe supply many illustrations of spiraling frenzies among women, especially sexually frustrated younger ones. In the 1632-34 Loudoun case, for example, at a public exorcism of supposedly demon-possessed Ursuline nuns, a Sister Claire “fell on the ground, blaspheming, in convulsions, lifting up her petticoats and chemise, displaying her privy parts without any shame, and uttering filthy words. Her gestures became so indecent that the audience averted its eyes.” [link]

Sexual themes dominated the antics of “possessed” nuns, although there were maternal—or inverted maternal—themes too, for example claims of mystical pregnancy, and stories of secret witch conclaves (“witches’ sabbaths”) at which children were eaten.

Themes of sexual violation and impregnation, theft or killing of unborn babies, and witchcraft, along with the same spiraling of fantastic claims and odd behavior, were also typical in the medicalized versions of possession—”multiple personality disorder” and “UFO abduction”—that were popular among young women in the 1970-90s, and ended up discrediting many therapists and psychiatrists, as well as the whole idea of “hypnotically recovered memories.”

To me, these are examples of social manias—not just contagions (for even healthy, sustainable behaviors can be contagious) but contagions that spread intense and increasingly bizarre, often counter-cultural activities, and are essentially reactions to excessive stress.

A holiday from stress and inhibition

As the comment by Dr. Johnson implies, human beings in modern civilizations are inhibited and stressed by the social rules they are supposed to obey and the complex social environments they are supposed to navigate—the “pain of being a man.”

It makes sense that women nowadays would be relatively hard-hit by such stresses. Women’s basic lifestyle has shifted dramatically—much more than men’s has—over the past few generations. Women during this interval generally have had to face new stresses from:

• • higher education and the pressures at higher levels of the working world;
  • the postponement or abandonment of marriage and child-bearing;
  • a new (or newly de-civilized) courtship environment in which their natural desire for love and motherhood is taken advantage of again and again without being fulfilled.

All the while, women have been told (by the most authoritative sources, including Hollywood and feminist activists) that these changes represent “progress” and must not be resisted.

Women also, compared to men, appear to have an innately greater desire for “equality” and social harmony. Yet these lofty, sentimental social goals, during the same critical period, have slipped—frustratingly—further and further out of reach, as the West has intensified its effort to remake itself as a highly multi-racial/ethnic civilization.

In addition to having to face these new stresses, women are (on average) more emotionally sensitive than men, and thus are apt to be more affected by the same stressors.

Small wonder, then, that a very large proportion of women and girls in Western societies can now expect to be diagnosed with a mood or anxiety disorder. It probably also should be unsurprising that the essentially feminine notion of “trauma”—a highly stressing psychological injury—has now taken on an outsized role not only in Western medicine but also in the wider culture.

On the whole, then, the recent changes in the standard female lifeway, and the demographic makeovers of Western societies, have created a large and chronic background level of stress for women. But the severe emotional contagion of the Great Awokening was triggered only after additional, more acute stressors appeared in the first half of 2020: the pandemic with its lockdowns, social isolation, and widespread fears of illness/death; and then the inflammatory treatment—by left-leaning media, activists, and politicians—of various police killings of miscreant African Americans.

Thus I think one can fairly easily fit the Great Awokening into the broader category of stress-induced, stress-relieving social manias. Amid the furious revels of such manias, inhibitions are necessarily going to be relaxed (for some more than others, of course) and people who were relatively labile, even frankly nuts, to begin with will also be drawn in, given the camouflage these frenzies provide for their behavioral issues.

The function of boundary-pushing

A social mania—one that is true to the concept of mania—cannot run forever. It must end by depleting its energy source or by inducing resistance, just as an individual with psychiatric mania will become exhausted after many days without adequate sleep, and/or will cause herself to be hospitalized and treated by exhibiting increasingly abnormal behavior. If a social mania’s deep purpose is to relieve accumulated social pressures, then its tendency to be ever more immoderate might even be seen as functional—in the sense that the spiraling further and further away from social norms serves to reduce support and induce opposition, thus limiting the damage while allowing the requisite venting of steam. To put it crudely, a social mania with its spiraling frenzy is a societal “cry for help.”

This is all speculative. It’s also a group-level, forest-not-the-trees view that people with an ordinary individualistic bias might find hard to wrap their heads around. But it’s a novel take that I (obviously) think should be considered. On the whole, it suggests that the Great Awokening should interest us less as a new cultural movement, and more as a signal indicating deep problems with the existing culture and society. In other words, it’s a social version of a seismic tremor, or even earthquake, and its intensity and direction of slip are interesting mainly for what they tell us about the underlying stresses at work—stresses that are unbearable and thus have be relieved, in one way or another.

***

I’ve already written a lot of essays about women’s maternal and other sex-specific traits, and how the mass entry of women into public life, in the last several decades, has brought those feminine traits to bear on culture and politics, driving extensive and ongoing changes in Western societies.

I am convinced more than ever that that “great feminization” argument is essentially correct. But there is another facet of male/female cultural competition that I have mostly overlooked until now. It’s really something that relates to groups in general, not just to women, but I think it’s especially relevant to the current female-driven social transformations of Western societies.

The idea here is that, when women a few decades ago began to achieve parity/dominance vis-à-vis men in professions and institutions across the West, they automatically set up a rivalry, a “battle of the sexes,” in each of these professions and institutions. Why? Not because of any particular “female” or “male” trait, but simply because the two sexes are different in general. They have different group identities, different ways of thinking, different group cultures. If only at an instinctive, nonconscious level—and if only to avoid the emotional pain of having to conform to the others’ ways—each has sought dominance over the other.

This certainly seems to be true from women’s perspective. You can hardly open a newspaper or browse news websites these days without encountering lamentations, by female writers, about male workplace behavior—from the mildly irritating to the supposedly traumatizing. These behaviors typically are blamed upon the male domination of the workplace in question, although from my (admittedly biased, male) perspective these complaints often look more like attempts to stamp out the last vestiges of male culture in workplaces that are already significantly feminized.

Women in their workplaces nowadays also—typically with the thinnest of formal rationales—are apt to organize emotional coalitions to oust their male CEOs or other leaders whose ways are insufficiently accommodating to the current female mindset.

I suppose that if one ventures into the “manosphere” reaches of the Internet, one will find similar complaints from men trapped in female-dominated institutions. One will strain to find similar victories, though.

On the whole, the institutional battle of the sexes is something that seems to have really crept up on men, creating a challenge for them that they may be unable to surmount. Men, in particular the white, European-derived men who created the institutions of Western civilization, were trying to be progressive and even-handed when they welcomed women into the workplace (they were relatively welcoming, compared to Asians, Arabs, Africans, etc.). They were trying to be meritocratic. Arguably that relatively fair-minded meritocratic mindset was a psychological or cultural trait that helped Western men build their civilization into the powerhouse it was. (Most men also regarded the scaled-up presence of women in the workplace as a colossal and wondrous sexual opportunity.)

What men didn’t reckon with is that women eventually would reach a certain level of presence and power in the institutions and professions where they worked—a critical mass, as it were—and from that point onward would tend to seek not parity but dominance, and by just about any means.

I submit that we are already seeing this reach for (and, frequently, achievement of) female dominance across multiple institutions and professions. While the most visible manifestation is the one I just mentioned—the noisy cancellation coalition that dislodges a problematic male executive (who is often replaced with a woman)—women also have been feminizing their institutions, and crowding out men, in much less newsworthy ways, e.g., the practice of “preferred pronouns,” “inclusive,” i.e., non-meritocratic hiring including quotas for female execs and board members, mandatory pro-diversity statements, and feminist/ESG/green constraints on investment and general corporate policy.

The upshot of this organizational capture is, of course, women’s use of these entities to promote the wider feminization of culture and politics—often synonymous with “wokeification”—which, again, I have written about elsewhere.

Their steamrolling victories suggest that women are much more powerful and effective than men in these institutional struggles, and, in a way, this should be unsurprising: Men presumably have not been under long-term evolutionary or cultural pressure to cope with competition of this kind from women. Women, on the other hand, as the weaker sex, have long had need of “force multiplier” tactics and instincts.

I strongly suspect that women’s greater power derives especially from a set of closely related female traits that include superior emotional sensitivity, superior sociality, superior ability to catch and transmit social contagions, and superior ability to form emotional coalitions—traits that, again, may have evolved not just in support of maternal functions, but also as special weapons in contests with otherwise dominant males. (I have touched on these points in previous essays, e.g., here and here.)

Of course, women also benefit tremendously from the civil rights dogma and legal regime that has gripped the US and some other Western societies for decades now, and often designates women as “traditionally disadvantaged” and thus worthy of favorable treatment, especially vis-à-vis white males.

Other groups

As I suggested at the top of this essay, women’s quest for supremacy within traditionally male institutions/professions is just one specific example of a much more general phenomenon of modernity. In other words, my hypothesis here is that any two (or more) groups that are sufficiently well defined and coherent, with sufficiently distinct group identities and cultures and so on, are bound to vie for control, to some extent, whenever they occupy the same social space.

Ethnic/racial groups are probably the most obvious examples of highly coherent but non-gender-defined groups that we would expect to see in these wars for institutional supremacy. As in the case of women vs. men, some of these ethnic/racial groups, due to their own particular traits, will be better than others in such contests. Immigrants to Western countries, especially those who have to travel from remote parts of the world, already tend to be the smartest, most ambitious, get-up-and-go members of their societies. Moreover, some of those societies are already highly stratified, with highly intelligent, highly entitled, highly ambitious (even ruthless) upper strata—so the immigrants from those upper strata are really going to pose a challenge to Westerners in the context of institutional struggles.

Thus, we are essentially looking at the flip side, the dark side one might say, of the fact that America and other Western countries attract the world’s best: Yes, many of these immigrants are the best, or are at least highly ambitious and sharp-elbowed, but that also means that they may soon have your job—and may even control your organizations.

Additionally, virtually any non-legacy-Western ethnic group is nonwhite, and ipso facto will be granted further strong advantages by contemporary civil rights culture. These advantages, over the past fifty-odd years, have included preferences/quotas in academic admissions, in public and private job hiring, and in government contracting—even when the group’s members have hailed mostly from elite, wealthy castes in the home country, and have not been “disadvantaged” in any sense.

Apart from the very tangible, often windfall-scale benefits of this civil rights regime, there has been, especially in recent decades, a civil rights mindset within organizations, a mindset that provides a further advantage to nonwhite ethnicities. Cloaking themselves in civil rights victimhood, preaching about the need for more diversity and equity, calling out alleged racists and racism, nonwhites can basically activate and direct that mindset as a further, quite powerful tool for displacing legacy Whites, for individual and group benefit.

I can think of at least several ethnicities that are doing very well in Western societies for the reasons I’ve just described. Indians are probably the most obvious example. They make up only about 1.5 percent of the US population now, and were hardly visible at all in the country half a century ago, but already they are strikingly overrepresented in the ranks of big-company CEOs as well as in other influential professions such as law, medicine, and politics.

Again, according to this general hypothesis, the struggle for control of institutions and professions could involve any other type of group with a significant presence and a sufficiently distinct and coherent identity. I think there are not many good examples beyond gender- and ethnicity-based groupings, but surely the “LGBTQ community” is one that has had some success in influencing big organizations’ policies.

 A General Hypothesis of Cultural Struggle

To sum up, then, my hypothesis is that a “collective instinct” to vie for supremacy over institutions/professions is something that occurs to some extent, and more or less automatically, even non-consciously, within all well-defined, cohering groups of significant size within those organizations. Different groups will have different traits that affect the intensity of their participation, their strategies, and their overall chances of success in these struggles. Some will also be advantaged or disadvantaged by the surrounding law and culture, e.g., civil rights law and culture.

I am not sure how original this idea is. Certainly, the idea of group culture is not new; nor is the idea of a struggle between cultures—what the Germans call a kulturkampf—novel. But the idea that such a struggle begins almost automatically when two or more rival cultures share a defined social space—a profession, an organization, a country—is one I don’t think I have encountered before.

I may not have emphasized enough that this “struggle” normally, for most of its participants, would be relatively subtle and even non-conscious. We all have our conscious explanations of, and justifications for, the things we do, but clearly there is a lot of other stuff going on under the hood—under the “limen,” the threshold of consciousness, as psychologists call it. Thus, Sanjay from the IT department may not be consciously plotting to dislodge the white CEO of his corporation; but, if asked to sign a petition decrying overheard off-color remarks by his company’s white CEO at a recent company retreat, he may be, ceteris paribus, much more likely to sign it if he knows the replacement CEO will be one of his countrymen—even if he isn’t consciously aware of that knowledge’s influence on him.

Another point to emphasize is that many, maybe most large organizations and institutions will have more than one group vying for control (e.g., women, assorted nonwhites, LGBTQs) against the legacy group (white males). These factions will coalesce and separate as needed, negotiating power-sharing strategies and arrangements, one faction slipstreaming behind another that has more power, and so on—similar to the workings of political parties in a multiparty system.

The uniqueness of whites

I have hesitated to include the legacy managerial class—white males—as combatants in these ubiquitous struggles, for the simple reason that they seldom seem to put up a fight. It’s downright eerie how some of these guys, no matter how innocent, will grovel, apologize, and plaintively attempt to appease when attacked, instead of showing any kind of defiance. It’s also odd that these men are so easily isolated; they are like those hobbled old wildebeests from the nature documentaries: left behind by the panicked herd for the pursuing, shrieking jackals to surround and kill at their leisure.

As for most of this social-psych territory, I can only speculate about the source of white males’ peculiar weakness and apathy. Maybe just having been on top for so long is enough to erode the mojo needed to stay there; maybe success has made us too soft, as the ascendant Greeks of antiquity said of the descendant Persians. Maybe we also developed psychological tools, such as hyper-individualism and relative cultural openness, that were once highly adaptive in enabling us to build our great civilization, but now leave us vulnerable as our environment becomes more post-patriarchal and multi-ethnic, and the protection and promotion of the “tribe” acquires a renewed importance.

Indeed, we aren’t merely passive in the face of challenges from women and nonwhites. We—a huge number of us anyway—are quick to respond with active self-loathing and self-abasement. Our women are even quicker in this regard, so I guess that this represents not a male trait but a white trait: a guilt/appeasement reflex that is related to emotional sensitivity and social (“virtue”) signaling.

Whatever the cause, it is or should be remarkable, not to mention alarming, that nonwhites don’t seem to have this self-abasing, guilt-signaling reflex. Nonwhites have at least many skeletons in their ancestral closets as whites do—everyone living now is the beneficiary of hundreds of invasions and genocides going back to ape-men times. Yet I’m sure I’ve never heard an Indian, a Nigerian, or a Filipino lament his own ongoing, deliberate colonization and exploitation of the countries of the West.

Implications

In principle, some struggles between group cultures will merely simmer, remaining unresolved indefinitely, because the factions that would challenge the incumbent white male faction cannot put together the numbers to prevail, or simply because a certain number of white males are needed to keep the organizational ship afloat. But now in the 2020s, after six decades in which Western women and nonwhites have been crowding into Western professions and institutions (lately empowered by blatantly anti-white-male ideology) they seem to be seriously reaching for supremacy, at least wherever white males and their mindset are less necessary.

In any case, one implication of this hypothesis is that adding “diversity” to an organization doesn’t necessarily bring it closer to some happy, stable equilibrium. It may, instead, disrupt what had been a relatively stable balance of forces, stimulating anew the struggle(s) for dominance in that organization—and leading to the further marginalization of white males.

Moreover, struggles among factions within organizations reflect, and also to a great extent add up to, a struggle at the societal level. By this reasoning, increasing demographic diversity in Western societies via mass-nonwhite-immigration is simply adding fuel to the kulturkampf fire, making ethnic factionalism burn hotter to the detriment of most, and increasing the chances that at least in some countries, nonwhites will prevail—marginalizing whites in their own lands.

* * *

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

The sanctions against Russia—both the official economic sanctions and the unofficial, often petty-seeming sanctions such as banning Russian owners from cat shows—arguably represent the first great “geopolitical cancellation” of this new feminized era in the West.

This cancellation obviously goes far beyond the usual diplomatic noises that are made when the blame for conflicts is murkier and the victims more remote from us. It is a public reaction to an outrage that rises explosively above the usual outrages, involves fellow Westerners, and is available to tug at the heartstrings 24/7 on a variety of electronic media.

Moreover, it really does look like a broad translation of the usual domestic cancellation strategies to the geopolitical scene, including economic punishment, censorship, general ostracism, threats of judicial action, and indirect assistance for those who fight the Cancelled One, but of course no direct, overt involvement in that fighting.

Given the scale of this response, the scale of the atrocity that triggered it, and the scale of Russia’s ongoing losses in Ukraine, Putin’s downfall seems inevitable. After killing many thousands of innocent Ukrainians, destroying probably trillions of dollars’ worth of Ukrainian buildings and other infrastructure, utterly breaking Russia’s army and air force, and of course lying through his teeth about his actions and motives, he does not appear to have any way out—any peaceful “off ramp.” He is our generation’s Hitler, and I suspect he already knows that his days, in office at least, are numbered.

There are many potential pluses to a Putin downfall. One is that Russia again will have a chance to achieve what it could not achieve in the 1990s, namely a more mature form of government and economy, oriented towards and not against the West. Such a transformation of Russia, which I think is somewhat more likely than the alternative, would mean a final unification of all the West’s major powers, and at least a temporary “emboldening” of them. That in turn could usher in one of those periods of history, like 1990-2010, in which the West reigns supreme over all earthly comers. In this scenario, bad actors such as Iran, China, and North Korea would have to watch their step, at the very least, and the world in that sense would be a safer place.

But here’s the bad news. Even if the “best case” scenario happens—including a glorious Russian uprising and overthrow of the dictator, maybe even on Easter Sunday (April 24 in the Russian Orthodox calendar)—the West has suffered a blow in its own ranks that I think is of dire significance.

If you’ve read any of my previous essays on this site, you know that I have taken a generally dim view of the West’s future. Cultural/political feminization; mass immigration, multiculturalism and wokeism; and the lack of political tools for solving these problems, have doomed the West in the most basic ways, as I have seen it. On the other hand, conservatives in the West have been gaining strength and coherence in recent years in reaction to the excesses of Letfism/wokeism. As recently as a month ago, it had seemed plausible to me that a Zemmour-ization of the Western Right (Eric Zemmour is explicitly against both cultural feminization and mass-immigration/heavy-multiculturalism) could, eventually and with a lot of luck, restore the situation.

But what Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine revealed all too clearly is that much of the Right in the West is, well, wrong, and about fundamental things. Sadly, these Wrong Rightists include Zemmour as well as prominent commentators in the US, Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance among them.

The Wrong Rightists hate, first and foremost, what they call the Globalist American Empire (GAE). Fair enough—I hate it too. The problem is that they view Putin not as a murderous kleptocrat and global troublemaker (as I view him), but rather as a valuable counterweight to the hegemony of the GAE—a counterweight they want to strengthen, not weaken. These pro-Putin rightists have seemed quite willing to nullify the sovereignty of Ukraine (and, since the invasion started, have been willing to let Putin’s murders of tens of thousands of Ukrainians go unpunished), in order to preserve this counterweight—this bastion of old-fashioned Christian values according to the peculiar delusion afflicting some of them.

Of course, quite a few of the Wrong Rightists are backpedaling now, saying they deplore what Putin did, etc. They understand, at least at some level, the parallels between their sentiments and the discredited sentiments of say, Laval in France and Lindbergh in the USA during 1939-41. They therefore tend to exhibit their distress over the impending collapse of Russia as a Great Power, and the impending destruction of Putin and Putinism, in ways that are more or less indirect. They are peevish about Ukrainian “propaganda.” They lament the “lost opportunity” to have prevented the horrors of this war by barring Ukraine from NATO, thereby calming the nerves of their sensitive hero in the Kremlin. They speak darkly of Ukrainian “Nazis.” They yearn for a swift settlement that preserves Putin in power (and, not incidentally, conceals the fatuity of everything they have claimed or predicted about all this). They emit copious cope about how Russia is still destined to “win.” Above all, they say the West should care less about Ukraine and more about problems at home.

Here are just a few examples of this output (to which I may add soon as time permits):

What I think all this means is that the Western Right in general now is left with much less credibility in the eyes of the average normie citizen, just as occurred in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. In particular, the pro-Putin, “America First” sector of the Right, the sector that happens also to be most deeply concerned with the most serious issues, such as mass immigration, has grandly shot itself through the foot—or maybe through the heart. This has left the Left/center-Right “GAE” coalition in a much better position, so that there won’t be a Zemmour-type president in the USA any time soon—and I’m guessing now there won’t be one even in France. Thus the West’s demise will have been hastened at the very moment of its own apparent triumph over its longtime mortal enemy.

***

World War II ended less than two decades before I was born, yet I’ve always felt that it belonged to much more distant age—set off from modern existence by its different ways of thinking and doing, different patterns of speech and dress, grander scale of horrors and heroism, even the monochrome of its newsreels. The bad things, especially, seemed mostly unrepeatable in the world where I grew up.

American isolationism is a good example. Conservative Americans, for the longest time, didn’t want to help Britain, or Western Europe, with their struggles against Hitler and Mussolini. The USA had helped out Britain and France in 1917-18, and felt that they shouldn’t have to do anything like that again. Let Europeans sort out their own problems, they said.

That was part of their public reasoning, anyway. Another part of it seemed much more instinctive and tribal, much more driven by the false logic of “the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend”—their enemy being FDR, of course, their new friends being the Axis dictators.

It might seem facile to criticize the American isolationists of 1939-41 from our postwar perspective, but really they should have known better just from the information available at the time. In any case, it’s always striking now to read and hear the things they said. Here, for example, is aviator Charles Lindbergh, on September 11, 1941 (Europe conquered, Britain under siege, Wehrmacht nearing Moscow etc.), blaming the British, Roosevelt, and “the Jewish,” for pushing America towards war:

The Pearl Harbor attack, less than three months later, embarrassed the America First movement into silence. Lindbergh himself spent much of the war trying to get into combat to redeem himself, and eventually succeeded—in getting into combat, not at redeeming himself.

But anyway, here we are again, with the same kind of geopolitical setup (armed dictator on the prowl abroad, liberal Democrats in control at home), resulting in the same strange mindset on the part of American conservatives.

By the way, in case this is the first essay of mine you’ve read, I’m pretty conservative too (notwithstanding David Goldman’s swipe at me, below, as a “neocon/GlobLib”). Yet the fellow conservatives who, in defiance of recent history, have started talking up Putin and talking down Ukraine, the US and the Western alliance, are now as alien to me as DEI consultants.

I’ve already set down my own anti-isolationist, fight-the-bad-guy thoughts on Putin and Ukraine, a month ago on this site. Here I just want to record, mainly out of sheer amazement and chagrin, some of the sentiments I’ve been reading in recent days from elsewhere on the American right.

To keep things manageable, I’ve focused mainly on two prolific and very widely followed commentators, Goldman and Richard Hanania, and I’ve organized their comments by their major themes.

“Ukraine is a corrupt and backwards place that isn’t worth defending—or invading”

“Ukrainians are So Dumb”

“It’s All NATO’s/Neocons’ Fault for Expanding NATO and Threatening Russia”

“Putin is Smart and Will Win”

“The Woke are the Real Enemy—not Putin”

(See also “No Viet Cong Ever . . .“)

“You Neocons are So Dumb”

“Love Ukraine = Hate America”

“We Should Cut a Deal With Putin”

“Our NATO Allies Won’t Help Us—In Fact, NATO will collapse”

“We’ll Be Better Off When Russia and China Have More Power”

“Enough with the World War II Analogies!”

“And Now For Some Other Clever Ideas”

I’m aware that, as readers go through all these posts, they might find themselves agreeing with the sentiments expressed. But, as I post this, the long-awaited Russian offensive to conquer (presumably) Ukraine is just starting. It’s unlikely to be as dramatic for Americans as Pearl Harbor was, especially since it’s an attack on Ukraine, but modern electronic media, and weaponry, are going to be amplifying factors. I hope it will shock many of the Putin apologists and associated naysayers into rethinking their attitudes.

***

Every day, on Twitter and a thousand other media and social-media forums, Americans of a “conservative” or “right-wing” persuasion bemoan and lament the civilizational destruction caused by the crazed, bureaucrat-and-brownshirt armies of wokeness.

I bemoan and lament with them. But what distresses me even more is the destruction—serious destruction—caused by trends that ordinary people on the right approve or at least choose to keep silent about.

One of these trends concerns some of the criminal and civil cases inspired by the #MeToo movement—cases that represent the anti-male, pro-histrionic-female theme in the broad wokeist takeover of the American judicial system. (Another prominent theme in that takeover, the anti-white-law-abiding-citizen, pro-black-felon theme, I wrote about just over a month ago.)

A particularly striking #MeToo case, still in its early stages but already with prominent media coverage, lies before us now.

This is the case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the most media-noisy of the sex kittens paid and kept by the late Jeffrey Epstein. She claims that—more than two decades ago, when she was just 17—she slept with the British royal Prince Andrew, and suffered so much harm thereby that she is now entitled to significant monetary damages. According to the complaint filed by her lawyers:

Prince Andrew committed sexual assault and battery upon Plaintiff when she was 17 years old. As such, Prince Andrew is responsible for battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress pursuant to New York common law. The damage to Plaintiff has been severe and lasting . . . .

The below photograph depicts Prince Andrew, Plaintiff, and Maxwell at Maxwell’s home prior to Prince Andrew sexually abusing Plaintiff.

The reader is free to peruse the full complaint [pdf], to follow the case as it progresses, and to make judgments accordingly. I offer here, as a mere bystander who knows none of the parties, only my own humble, hushed opinions.

Which is to say, I think it’s a shameless fraud that demonstrates the shambles of the American legal system under the pressures of wokeist feminization.

Worse, I think it puts on full display America’s cultural corruption—for no media commentator of prominence, as far as I know, has offered even mild skepticism about this outrageous case or others like it.

In other words, while I believe that the stink of this business is more or less universally apparent, the average media person pretends otherwise because the stories generate clicks, and also for fear of cancellation—cancellation by the same hysteria-prone demographic that got people hanged at Salem and other innocents burned at the stake throughout Europe.

Let me clarify that Giuffre’s case against Andrew doesn’t—I mean, logically shouldn’t—have a close connection to the legal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. I happen to think the latter were both obviously guilty of sex trafficking and related offenses, even if the sentence Epstein would have received in New York and the one Maxwell is now set to receive will be excessive (on the Great White Defendant principle) compared to typical trafficking cases, i.e., involving some Nigerian or Honduran who really does enslave and brutalize his victims. But no one has ever presented evidence that Andrew was a party to Epstein’s trafficking scheme, or that he was anything other than a gentle fool who, like other fools (Bill Gates and Bill Clinton among them) hung out with his friend Epstein from time to time. (How Epstein generated the charisma to gather such people in his orbit is to me a significant mystery, albeit not relevant here.)

Giuffre’s case rests on the simple allegation that Andrew, in cahoots with Epstein and Maxwell, somehow “forced” Giuffre to sleep with him—which seems not just an unsupported allegation but a preposterous one. Assuming Giuffre and Andrew even did have sex, we have been given no reason to picture it as any less volitional on her part than her demeanor in the photograph would suggest. And I think it’s safe to say that Andrew, whatever his other failings, has never shown a propensity for treating women in the manner alleged.

At the same time, it appears that Giuffre, having partied and traveled widely and gotten to know various men, all on Epstein’s nickel, has been, since E’s legal troubles began, squeezing him or his estate (also Ghislaine Maxwell and Alan Dershowitz) for further money; and the suit against Andrew represents one of the continuations of that broader effort; all of which speaks clearly to the issue of her motive.

In short, the case has the prima facie appearance of being no more than a shakedown: an attempt essentially to extort money with the threat of an embarrassing civil trial if the money is not paid.

Despite this, there is a good chance Giuffre will prevail—her blue-chip lawyers, who probably stand to get around a third of any award or settlement, would not have taken the case otherwise. Most likely she will prevail because Andrew and his family will decide to settle rather than endure the pain of a trial. Even if they are willing to endure that pain, the corruption the #MeToo strain of wokeness has caused in the American legal system, including juries, makes any such case a roll of the dice, at least. The judge in the case also may not be an even-handed Myron Kovitsky type (Bonfire of the Vanities); he is Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee and a paid-up member of the New York liberal elite, whose demeanor in an early hearing does not bode well for the prince.

Shakedowns occur all the time, among highlifes and lowlifes, but this one is so prominent, so front-and-center, and yet apparently so untouchable by simple reason and skepticism. No disinterested observer can question it! Everybody loves Empress Virginia’s new clothes! Little wonder that Dershowitz, target of another one of Giuffre’s suits, has come across as almost apoplectic when talking about her to reporters.

certified, complete, total liar [link]

I’m not neutral on this, because [Giuffre] also accused me of having sex with her, and I proved conclusively — through her own diaries, through her own lawyer, through our own emails — that it would be impossible for me to have ever met her. [link]

Anyway, I hope my writing this emboldens some of you out there to speak up—quixotically, I know, but so be it—and state what is obvious about cases like this, namely that they need to be strongly discouraged somehow, and the men targeted by them need to be better protected. The US and other Western legal systems already make many concessions to women, including protection from incidental reputational harm in rape cases. Why can’t men receive a similar level of protection from the deliberate reputational harm of shakedown cases?

Well, of course, you know why—because women essentially are now in charge, and are remodeling the institutions of Western life to suit themselves. With essentially zero pushback from men. I begin to tire of pointing this out.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

The idea that women, on average compared to men, think differently, behave differently, and vote differently, is not a new one. What I think has some originality, though—certainly it seems to have been too hot, as recently as a few months ago, for any MSM or MSM-adjacent editor to handle—is the idea that women, especially by entering culturally influential professions en masse since the 1960s, have transformed Western societies: pulling them leftward and introducing political correctness, etc., but more precisely feminizing them, with arguably dire implications for Western civilization.

In case it’s useful to others writing in this area (and because like most creative people I crave credit), I’ve listed some of my relevant works in this area—and all the ones I’m now aware of from other writers.

From me

2011    “The Demise of Guythink”

An old blog post, and my first and probably briefest expression of the cultural feminization hypothesis. Inspired by something controversial Jeremy Clarkson said, and also by the Larry Summers controversy which I would later write about in more detail.

2014    “Motherland”

Also an old blog post but a much longer, more discursive account of the hypothesis. Most of the pieces I’ve written since then have been, for the most part, compressed versions of the ideas expressed here.

2014    “No Country for Men” (Return of Kings)

I got this published on Roosh V’s Return of Kings website (under a pseudonym I no longer use).

2019    “The Great Feminization”

Essay on a new website, not using my real name—a relatively brief version of the cult-fem theory, with a bit at the end about testosterone levels and fertility that is probably somewhat relevant, though not really central to the theory. I started the website and placed the essay on it because I had offered a version of the piece to two or three conservative webzines, with no luck.

(Tyler Cowen linked to this essay in his Marginal Revolution blog two and a half years later, prompting a flood of readers.)

2019    “The Day the Logic Died”

A fuller account of the 2005 Larry Summers “intrinsic aptitude” controversy/hysteria, with some cult-fem theory. If you read just one of my essays, make it this one. A favorable reference to this in a tweet from @toad_spotted, some weeks after it was posted, induced many thousands of people to read it—and the “Great Feminization” piece—and encouraged me to keep writing.

2020    “Girl Power”

Some cult-fem theory here, touching on women’s greater ability to form networks/coalitions, especially to cancel (or prosecute) men. Mainly, though, this was an examination of #MeToo-type cases against the historical background of hysterias including medieval/early-modern convent hysterias, Salem, modern recovered-memory case epidemics, etc.

2021    “Pink Shift” (The American Mind)

Short piece summarizing the theory—thanks again to James Poulos & Co. for publishing it.

2021    “The Critical Mass Problem”

More on the apparently superior female ability to form networks and transmit social contagions, as a general source of political/social instability. “The Great Awokening’s transformation of big institutions reflects not only the general fear of personal cancellation within these institutions but also the ‘critical mass’ of susceptible women who work in them.”

Other writers

My initial online searches using keywords like “feminization” were curiously uninformative (a lot of stuff on trans medical issues), but after Tyler Cowen linked to my “Great Feminization” essay two months ago, I started digging again. I’m sure this is still a very incomplete list.

Note that Cowen himself has written about feminization in occasional columns and blog posts, going back at least a few years.

1985    The Feminization of America (Elinor Lenz & Barbara Myerhoff)

The authors “envision the emergence of a new `feminized’ America, a society made more human, less destructive, and more compassionate by women’s nurturing and integrative influences in all walks of life.”

1987    “The Feminization of the American Left” (James Neuchterlein, Commentary)

Contrasts modern leftism with the more masculine leftism of yore. “Feminization, as understood here, suggests the establishment of traditionally feminine virtues (those normally associated with the private realm) as norms of behavior for public life. It indicates an ethic of noncoercion, a preference for emotion over rational analysis and for noncompetitive modes of social interaction, a focus on being rather than doing and on interpersonal relations as the primary preoccupation of the good life.”

1990—present  Sexual Personae and other works (Camille Paglia)

Though never really in a systematic way, as far as I know, Paglia has frequently made references to issues that relate to cultural feminization. For example, in a short essay on #MeToo in 2018: “The big question is whether the present wave of revelations, often consisting of unsubstantiated allegations from decades ago, will aid women’s ambitions in the long run or whether it is already creating further problems by reviving ancient stereotypes of women as hysterical, volatile and vindictive.”

1998    The Feminization of American Culture (Ann Douglas)

Not as relevant as its title suggests. Douglas argues that in the late 19^th century American literature became “feminized” with “books that idealized the very qualities that kept [women] powerless: timidity, piety, and a disdain for competition.”

2006?  “When Did We All Become Women?” (Kathryn Robinson, Seattle Weekly)

“Think of values like nurturing and caring, emotion and sentimentality, connection and community, passivity and submission, vanity and appearance, cooperation and equality, openness and access, manipulation and influence. These are the values on the ascendancy in our public and private lives.” Robinson covers the ground pretty well, and projects the same sense of awe that I had when I started to perceive the significance of this unprecedented cultural development. (Her piece may have been buried in the search rankings until Cowen linked to it a few months ago. Also, the 2006 date attached to the article may have been the date of uploading to the web, not the original magazine publication date.)

2009 “The Education of a Libertarian” (Peter Thiel, CATO Unbound)

Within this essay by the then-not-so-well-known tech billionaire and libertarian evangelist is a recognition of at least one aspect of cultural/political feminization: “. . . I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote. “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

I’ve written about women and their cultural/political ascendancy so much in recent years, especially the last three, that I worry about sounding like the proverbial broken record if I write any more. But it seems to me that as this idea is accepted more widely—including by commentators who see it as their own idea . . .

. . . there is a tendency to narrow the focus (e.g., “female graduates,” “HR ladies,” or “women explain wokeness”) so that the true extent of the West’s feminization is obscured.

Moreover, the case can be made that feminization is having not only an enormous but also a potentially fatal impact on Western civilization as we have known it. Thus, thumping the tub about this subject may be a good and necessary thing to do now.

To that end, I think at least several key points within this overall hypothesis bear repeating:

Women’s broad cultural/political ascendancy has been reshaping the West for decades

The big idea here is that women have been the principal drivers not only of the creeping wokeism post 2015 or so, and of the ongoing semi-spiritual movement known as the Great Awokening, but also of the general “leftward” (in fact, “feminine”) trends in Western culture and politics over the last six-plus decades. This is the period in which women moved en masse into, and achieved parity or dominance within, culturally and politically influential professions such as journalism, publishing, entertainment, law, academia, politics, even blogging.

It is not just from one or two of those professions but from all of them, and in every circumstance along the way (e.g., university life, engagement with social media, office politics, voting, protest marches), that women have been causing cultural and political change, effectively feminizing the West to a degree never seen before in any large civilization.

Activist women—mostly single, university-educated, and/or young—may be the “shock troops” of feminization, and the most dedicated and effective practitioners of wokeism and cancel culture. But women in general have been driving this social transformation.

Women’s ascension to cultural and political power has had cultural and political consequences because women on average are different than men across a wide range of attitudes and behaviors

Gender differences in attitudes and behaviors were presumably shaped—at a biological level with changes that cannot easily be undone—by men’s and women’s distinct roles during the long period of hominid evolution, roles that for women centered on maternity. Women even now in modern times appear to be markedly more emotionally sensitive than men on average, quicker to form social networks, less interested in abstract and inanimate things, less interested in systems, more personal (including ad hominem) in their thinking, and more fearful—not just of ideas and people they dislike but also of toxins and other putative environmental threats. All these differences have had cultural and policy consequences as women’s power has increased in societies designed and traditionally run by men. One could say that women effectively have been using their new cultural and political power to renovate and redecorate their civilization according to their distinctive tastes. As Virginia Woolf put it in her 1938 essay, “Three Guineas”:

Let us never cease from thinking—what is this “civilization” in which we find ourselves?

Cultural/political feminization therefore involves a multitude of changes

Cultural and political changes that have plausibly been driven by the ascendancy of women in Western societies are not limited to the extreme changes associated with “wokeism.” They include also relatively mild and gradual, long-term trends:

• • more extensive and generous welfare programs;
  • more rights, often including reverse-discrimination-type rights, for “traditionally disadvantaged” or otherwise marginalized groups (blacks, Hispanics, nonwhite immigrants, women, gays, transsexuals, etc.);
  • more emphasis generally in culture and policy on “equality of outcomes” over “equal opportunity,” and on guilt and compassion (vs. dispassionate, long-term calculation) as drivers of policy and social change;

• • more emphasis on “trauma”—emotional upset—everywhere from journalism to law and medicine, with a related emergence of trauma-memory (PTSD) or otherwise trauma-related syndromes that are strongly contagious and now highly prevalent;
  • less affinity for traditional, often Constitutionally protected forms of (emotionally painful) confrontation such as free speech and free debate, free scientific inquiry, and due process of law (e.g., the right to face one’s accuser, and the right to cross-examine)—and increasing affinity for systems that suppress and punish “unacceptable” speech;
  • the acceptance of what amount to special rules for women when they are complainants against men in sex-related court cases, e.g., they can bring cases decades after the alleged crime, and when they claim to have been abused by men they later dated or exchanged love-notes with, their claims are still taken seriously—are simply chalked up to their presumed trauma;

• • the intrusion of distinctively feminine values into the traditionally male-dominated world of sports, such that, for example, athletes putting their “self-care” instincts over their competitive instincts are not derided but celebrated;

• • the alteration of language, including the elimination of upsetting terms and invention of new ones (“safe space”), to reflect the reigning new feminine mindset;
  • the routine, rapid formation of social networks to exert pressure on corporations or other institutions to “cancel” someone who has fallen afoul of feminist/woke orthodoxies;
  • strong environmentalism and related advocacies and preferences (anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, anti-nuclear, climate-change alarmism, veganism, “organic” foods and medicines, etc.), stemming plausibly from women’s relatively strong sensitivity to the idea of environmental harms including toxins;
  • Shifts towards less systematized/hierarchical and rule-based religious forms, from paganism to evangelical/charismatic Christianity.

Cultural/political feminization, far from being “progress,” is probably destroying Western liberalism—the liberalism that emancipated women in the first place

Yes, men on average have their own ways of thinking and acting—their own stubborn, long-evolved biases. And yes, the traditional male mindset is not necessarily optimized for running human societies in the 21^st century. But there is an obvious reason why the male mindset, compared to the female mindset, is probably better adapted for managing culture and politics: Men have been managing culture and politics, and getting punished in the harshest ways for failure, for hundreds of millennia. Women, by contrast, have been working on a large scale in public life for not even two generations—and still seem inclined to blame men when things go wrong.

On the flip side of that argument is another obvious point: Women’s mindset is not simply unadapted or insufficiently adapted by evolution for managing public affairs; it is adapted specifically for other tasks, mainly domestic tasks revolving around the bearing and raising of children. In other words, women’s higher emotional sensitivity (compassion, guilt, fear, anxiety/turmoil); their relative indifference to machines and systems and cold, abstract thought; their stronger fear of toxins; their greater tendency to think un-independently and transmit social contagions, etc. are in a fundamental sense out of place in the culture- and policy-making spheres.

I’m not suggesting that women’s traits are totally separate from men’s in this regard—for virtually any trait there would be two highly overlapping distributions, so that there would be lots and lots of women further towards the “male” end of the distribution compared to the average male.

But there clearly are differences between the means of those distributions, between the average male and the average female in other words; and the central idea here is that those differences, on a population level, are not only meaningful but potentially cataclysmic in their civilizational impact.

That impact is evident not only in the broad cultural and policy shifts since the early 1960s—the “pink shift” as I have called it—but in the more recent and extreme policy changes in places where cultural and political feminization is most advanced: “defund the police,” “let violent criminals out on bail,” “open the borders / diversity is our strength,” “let homeless people camp and crap wherever they like,” “give addicts needles,” “math is racist,” “logic is sexist,” etc. Not all of these policies are wildly popular, and obviously specific groups of hardcore activists are to blame for some of them, but I don’t see how these changes, collectively, could have taken root to the extent they have except against a heavily feminized cultural background—they are essentially ad absurdum expressions of the feminine mindset applied to policy.

I don’t think that every manifestation of feminization will be harmful in the long run. But some will. The move away from free speech towards speech- and thought-policing seems pretty ominous. Even worse, I suspect, is the encouragement of mass non-Western immigration to Western countries. One does not have to “hate” non-Western immigrants to understand that they and the culture they bring with them are . . . non-Western . . . so that the more there are of them, the less Western their host countries become. The women who encourage mass non-Western immigration seem surprisingly indifferent to the fact that non-Western cultures generally are less liberal, and a lot less friendly to the idea of female power, compared to Western cultures even from a few decades ago.

Can liberal Western societies nevertheless avert their impending self-destruction, by—among other measures—reining in cultural/political feminization? We’ll soon see, but I doubt it. I think it could help some to talk more about this cultural feminization hypothesis—“cult-fem theory”—at least as a way of dispelling the holy aura of “progress” that feminization-related social changes have acquired. But could one attack cultural feminization more directly and conclusively? Could one expel women, or even just the “bad apples,” or even persuade them to think and act differently, in all significant Western institutions—legislatures, government offices, universities, corporations, media organizations, philanthropies—where they are now embedded and substantially run things? I don’t see how. I don’t think liberal Western societies have any strong defense against this threat, other than by reverting to overt illiberalism.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

An unpopular cause I feel compelled to stick up for today is the cause of Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, all of Brunswick, Georgia, USA, who were recently found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. Rightly or wrongly, I am convinced that this verdict is blatantly unjust. I also believe that many Americans, not just the jury and the prosecutor, are complicit in this injustice—an injustice that is much closer to murder (these men are likely to die in prison) than was the actual killing of Arbery.

Grievous miscarriages of justice occur frequently now in the United States, and often arise due to race-related issues that bias prosecutors and jurors. So why am I writing about this particular injustice, and not, say, the travesty of the Derek Chauvin verdict? I think it’s mainly because in the Chauvin case I read a healthy amount of commentary defending Chauvin, whereas in the case of the McMichaels and Bryan I read no defenses, only smug expressions of satisfaction or at least placid acceptance of this verdict, even among people who should know better.

The guilt of the McMichaels and Bryan is, in other words, part of the contemporary American “conventional wisdom” that I have come to distrust almost reflexively.

Why the McMichaels and Bryan were abandoned to their harsh fate so easily, even willfully and joyously, by their countrymen is something I’ll speculate about later in this essay, but first I want to go over some of the basic facts of the case.

The killing of Ahmaud Arbery

Ahmaud Arbery was a 25-year old African-American man who lived in Brunswick, Georgia. Like many African-American men, he had a police record for at least moderately serious crimes, including bringing a handgun to a high school football game in 2013, and an attempted shoplifting of a TV from a WalMart in 2017. He was still on probation when he died.

In late 2018, apparently based on his own observations as well as those of family members, Arbery’s probation officer recommended that Arbery get a mental health evaluation. At this evaluation—the defense lawyers brought this up at the trial, but the judged ruled it inadmissible—Arbery described to the evaluator (apparently a psychiatric nurse) “auditory delusions sometimes commanding him ‘to rob and steal’ and sometimes telling him ‘to hurt people,’” as well as general difficulties controlling his anger. Arbery was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and prescribed olanzapine (Zyprexa), a second-generation antipsychotic that is also used treat schizophrenia and the manic episodes of type 1 bipolar disorder; however, he apparently didn’t take the drug for long, and there was no evidence of it in his system when he died, although there were trace amounts of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

The MSM stories after Arbery’s death were heavily biased in the young man’s favor, and tended to omit or downplay anything negative, preferring to show a picture of him looking spiffy in his prom suit . . .

. . . and preferring to emphasize that at the time of his death Arbery was “planning” to attend a local technical college to become an electrician, and often went jogging for exercise.

In general, because of this overwhelming bias, it is hard to trust the information about Arbery that was provided by his family and their lawyer and cannot be verified, e.g., with documents. We can’t say with confidence much more about his background than what judicial records show, namely that he had a history of being armed illegally, and of attempting theft, and of showing signs of mental illness including serious impulse-control problems. This shouldn’t necessarily have had any bearing on the jury’s findings, but it does speak to the broader moral picture, and definitely belies the many MSM portraits of Arbery that were designed, in part, to whip up hatred against the men who killed him.

Late in 2019 Arbery had begun taking occasional jogs into a mostly white neighborhood called Satilla Shores, where the McMichaels and Bryan lived. A video camera also had recorded him, in his jogging clothes, walking into a house in the neighborhood that was under construction—this had happened several times, mostly at night.

In the months immediately preceding his fateful encounter with the McMichaels, there also had been several break-ins or thefts in the neighborhood, including the theft of a gun from an unlocked truck—reported by Travis McMichael on January 1.

On the night of February 11, according to Wikipedia:

Travis called 9-1-1 to report a slender 6-foot-tall Black man with short hair, wearing red shorts and a white shirt, who was trespassing on the site of a house under construction. Travis said, “I’ve never seen this guy before in the neighborhood.” The dispatcher asked whether Travis was OK, and he said, “Yeah, it just startled me. When I turned around and saw him and backed up, he reached into his pocket and ran into the house. So I don’t know if he’s armed or not. But he looked like he was acting like he was.” “We’ve been having a lot of burglaries and break-ins around here lately”, Travis said on the call. He told the dispatcher that he was out in his truck, and that as many as four neighbors were out looking for the man. His father Gregory was one of the people out searching that night, and Gregory and at least one other neighbor were armed. Police responded and searched the house along with a neighbor, but found no one. However, surveillance video from that evening showed a man who reportedly looked like Arbery, briefly walking in and out of the house under construction. He did not take anything. The under-construction house did not have doors or windows.

While Arbery died before the mystery of the local thefts could be solved, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that exonerates him in all those thefts, despite the MSM’s implications otherwise. Given his background and the correspondence of his jogging and the local burglaries, it seems at least plausible—and evidently many Satilla Shores residents suspected—that he used his jogging at night as a cover for burglaries, and jogging in daytime to select his night-time targets. (I would be interested to know whether the burglaries continued after Arbery’s death, but haven’t seen any reference to such data.)

On the 23^rd of February, shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon, Arbery once again ran into Satilla Shores, and into the house under construction, and once again was recorded on video camera.

A neighbor, Matthew Albenze, also spotted Arbery and called 911 to report the trespass on the building under construction. Wikipedia again:

The 9-1-1 dispatcher asked if the man was “breaking into it right now?” The caller replied: “No … it’s all open.” After the caller said the man was now “running down the street”, the dispatcher said police would respond. The dispatcher asked at 1:08 p.m., “I just need to know what he was doing wrong. Was he just on the premises and not supposed to be?” The caller responded, with some parts garbled, saying: “And he’s been caught on camera a bunch at night. It’s kind of an ongoing thing.”

Why Arbery ran away isn’t clear, but the perception among those who saw him was that he was trying to escape after stealing something from the construction site. Apparently he hadn’t stolen anything, but if he had known that the cops had been called, then, being on probation, he might have wanted to avoid another brush with the law. Then again, if Arbery was mentally ill, it is probably pointless to try to rationalize his actions.

Soon Arbery ran past the McMichaels’ house, where Gregory McMichael, working in the yard, saw him and recognized him as the repeat trespasser the neighborhood was worried about. He and Travis armed themselves and got into their white pickup truck, and gave chase.

The MSM accounts, and the account of the prosecutor, are worded to suggest that the McMichaels were racist good-old-boys who pursued Arbery that day simply because they wanted to hunt down, and snuff out the life of, an innocent black man whose only “crime” was “jogging while black.” To say that this is false, and as such represents both journalistic and prosecutorial misconduct, would be putting it very mildly. Both McMichaels had law enforcement experience, and obviously (all the evidence leans this way) were attempting a citizen’s arrest, a procedure that has a long history in the United States and at the time was specifically sanctioned in Georgia law. In other words, they wanted only to detain Arbery so that he could be questioned by police.

Whether they had sufficient reason to attempt a citizen’s arrest is debatable. However, to say that in the heat of the moment someone slightly exceeding his rights under a citizen’s arrest law automatically will be charged with false imprisonment, and then murder for defending his life when the mentally ill arrestee attacks him, is completely absurd. Citizen’s arrest laws are not meant to sanction vigilantism, but they also are not meant to be life-destroying traps for honest citizens who are trying to protect their neighborhoods—in what was here a demonstrable absence of effective policing.

The McMichaels tried unsuccessfully to cut off Arbery as he ran, and, they said later, even asked him to stop and let them talk to him, but he didn’t respond and continued running in an attempt to evade them. They could easily have shot him, if killing him had been their intent, but they did not; they simply kept trying to get him to stop.

At some point Bryan, who had seen the chase go by his own house, joined in with his black pickup truck and tried—again, unsuccessfully—to cut off the running man. Note that Bryan was not a close friend of the McMichaels; he was merely another resident in this neighborhood that was now literally up in arms over the rash of thefts and trespassings, and hoped to put the perp behind bars.

Ultimately the McMichaels gave up pursuing Arbery—apparently the neighborhood had many open yards through which he could always evade them—and simply parked their pickup at a crossing where they thought he was likely to appear in his attempt to get away.

At this point, just several minutes after Albenze’s 911 call, Travis McMichael, standing on the road by the driver’s side door, made his own 911 call—but then saw Arbery coming and handed the phone to his father, who stood in the truck bed:

a male caller said: “I’m out here at Satilla Shores …There’s a Black male running down the street.” The 9-1-1 dispatcher asked, “Where at Satilla Shores?” The caller replied: “I don’t know what street we’re on.”

Arbery now as he approached apparently saw Travis standing with his shotgun by the open driver’s door on the left side of the pickup truck. Arbery might have turned around or veered onto either of the lawns beside the narrow road. Instead he kept running towards the truck, though he altered course to the right side of the road, and then ran along the right side of the truck, just a few feet from Gregory McMichael who stood in the truck bed talking to 911. When he reached the front of the truck, Arbery suddenly cut left and charged Travis.

This was the impulse that killed Arbery. You and I, and pretty much every sane person aware of the story, know this, and know that we would never have done what he did. We know that we would have stopped, and we know that if Arbery had stopped, as he’d been asked, he would still be alive, the McMichaels and Bryan would be free, and none of us would have heard of any of them.

But Arbery charged Travis. Bryan, who had been in pursuit of Arbery, parked his pickup in time to catch most of this tragic encounter on his cellphone camera.

Arbery in his fatal lunge had almost reached Travis when the latter fired his shotgun, catching Arbery in the chest. Arbery kept coming and tried to wrest the gun away from Travis. Meanwhile Gregory McMichael, with the phone still to his ear and the line to the 911 dispatcher still open, screamed at Arbery to stop.

The caller shouted, “Stop! … Watch that. Stop, damn it! Stop!”

Why did Gregory McMichael shout at Arbery to stop? Well, obviously because he and his son had never intended to kill Arbery and were astonished that he was making it necessary.

Arbery did not stop. He kept struggling for the shotgun until Travis had shot him with it a total of three times. After the third shot, which went through the left side of his chest, Arbery quickly weakened, staggered, and collapsed to the pavement.

Aftermath

Alerted by the first 911 call, the police soon arrived. Arbery by then was dead. Travis McMichael was splashed in blood and evidently in shock (“No, I’m not all right,” he told the cop. “I just fucking killed someone.”)

But, along with his father, he cooperated. Bryan cooperated too. They freely discussed the events of the preceding minutes, evidently without any sense of having committed a crime. The police did not arrest them, and the local district attorney’s office did not charge them. The Brunswick Circuit DA, Jackie Johnson, saw the case as an unfortunate but not really criminal one involving a mentally ill young man who essentially had brought about his own death through his own impulsive and violent actions.

Johnson had connections to the McMichaels, though, so she recused herself and turned the thing over to a neighboring district, Waycross Judicial Circuit District. The DA there, George Barnhill, felt the same way about the case. According to Wikipedia:

On April 2, Barnhill wrote a memorandum to Glynn County police, recommending that no arrests be made. Barnhill wrote that the McMichaels were within their rights to chase “a burglary suspect, with solid firsthand probable cause”; that “Arbery initiated the fight”; and that Travis McMichael “was allowed to use deadly force to protect himself” when “Arbery grabbed the shotgun”.

By this time, of course, Arbery’s family had got a lawyer, “leaders of the black community” were getting involved, and there were demands for a prosecution. So the whiff of racial protest, with all that entails for a prosecutor’s career, was already in the air. Soon Barnhill washed his hands of the case, with a rather tenuous excuse:

Arbery had previously been prosecuted by his son, a prosecutor for the Brunswick Circuit District Attorney’s Office, in an earlier case [and] one of the defendants [Gregory McMichael] had served as an investigator on the same prosecution.

And so, on April 13, the Georgia Attorney General’s Office handed the case to another nearby venue, the Atlantic Judicial Circuit.

It’s unclear what would have happened if the case had simply been left at the Atlantic Judicial Circuit, with no new event to inflame the situation, but presumably its DA, one Tom Durden, would have been under the same political pressures as the two DAs that had passed on the case.

What did happen is this: On May 5 a local defense lawyer who had consulted informally with Gregory and Travis McMichael uploaded Bryan’s cellphone video to the website of a local radio station. Stories were circulating to the effect that Arbery had simply been gunned down while jogging, and the lawyer apparently thought that the video would convince the public of the McMichaels’ innocence. He thought wrong—not because the video shows the McMichaels to be murderers, but simply because it somewhat shockingly depicts a young African-American man’s death at the hands of two fairly stereotypical-looking southern white fellows. This publication of the video was, remember, in one of the hardest, most hysterogenic periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just a few weeks later, America would erupt in the Great Awokening after George Floyd’s death—but even now it was clear that this society was becoming very restive under pressure, and its politicians and politically sensitive prosecutors were doing what they could to placate the more restive elements.

From Wikipedia again:

Within hours of the video becoming public, Tom Durden, the district attorney for Georgia’s Atlantic Judicial Circuit, said that he would present the case to “the next available grand jury in Glynn County” to decide if charges should be filed. The convening of grand juries had been postponed until after June 12 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Durden accepted Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s offer to bring in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to investigate. [italics mine]

At this point, with the most senior state politician getting involved in what should have been an obscure case, and more or less signaling—virtue-signaling—which way it should go, the McMichaels’ fate was sealed.

The GBI found probable cause to charge Gregory and Travis McMichael within 36 hours of taking over jurisdiction of the case, and, on May 7, arrested and charged them with felony murder. The McMichaels were booked into the Glynn County Jail. At an appearance before a judge the following day, the McMichaels were both denied bond.

A few days later, Bryan too was arrested and charged.

Ladies of the Jury

When the case came before a jury, it was widely reported that eleven of the twelve jurors were white. It was much less widely reported that nine of those eleven were women.

Women, as I have been writing for the past decade, “wear the pants” now in most Western societies, i.e., have unprecedented and often dominant influence in many realms of culture. This is important because on average women think about and react to the world differently than men. Compared to men, for example, women seem much more emotionally aroused by stories of white-on-black racial conflict. Women, white women, also appear to have been the dominant participants in the bizarre BLM frenzy of the summer 2020 Great Awokening.

If the McMichael/Bryan defense lawyers had read my essays, they would have known this (I write this only half-jokingly—my essays are not that obscure) and accordingly might have tried a different jury-selection strategy—though really, as this and many other examples show, the jury system in the United States is generally unlikely to deliver justice in cases where the forces of Wokeness favor one side.

In any case, the jury members were mostly women, the DA that ultimately charged the three defendants was a black woman (she claimed at the trial, among other things, that the defendants “chased, hunted down and ultimately executed” Arbery), and the lead prosecutor in the trial was a woman. And of course, Al Sharpton sat in the courtroom with Arbery’s family, and a mob of demonstrators camped outside the court building, to remind those sensitive women of the jury what they would face if they delivered the wrong verdict.

The jury, without much deliberation, duly returned a verdict of guilty on most of the charges. These charges included felony murder for all three defendants—even Bryan who had not been armed and had done nothing more than pursue Arbery in his truck. Travis McMichael, who presumably would have been killed by Arbery had he not defended himself, was additionally found guilty of “malice murder,” which means murder with “express or implied malice.”

These charges bring a minimum 30-year sentence before the possibility of parole, and for Travis McMichael, with the additional malice murder rap, there may be no parole—that will be up to the judge.

The Biden Administration, of course, watched this show trial approvingly.

However, it isn’t going to let it go at that. No, the Biden Administration via its “Justice” Department will try to earn further brownie points in the eyes of its voter base, and at the same time try to crush the spirit of conservative Legacy Americans, by pursuing a federal hate-crime trial of the McMichaels and Bryan—scheduled to convene next year.

Meanwhile the state of Georgia, led by “Republican” Gov. Brian Kemp, will also send a message by prosecuting former Brunswick Circuit DA Jackie Johnson—the first one to recuse herself, remember—for “obstruction of justice.” This will ensure that, the next time a black person in Georgia is killed by whites for any reason whatsoever, local DAs will show the proper Stakhanovite zeal in prosecuting.

Flaws in the Law

Note that Georgia law defines the kind of murder alleged in the case as follows:

(a) A person commits the offense of murder when he unlawfully and with malice aforethought, either express or implied, causes the death of another human being.

(b) Express malice is that deliberate intention unlawfully to take the life of another human being which is manifested by external circumstances capable of proof. Malice shall be implied where no considerable provocation appears and where all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.

(c) A person commits the offense of murder when, in the commission of a felony, he or she causes the death of another human being irrespective of malice.

Did “all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart” on the part of Travis McMichael? The answer is obviously no. He did not shoot Arbery from the window of his truck (or at any time until charged) as he would have done had his intent been murderous; he phoned 911 prior to the fatal encounter; he did not flee the scene of the killing; he showed every sign of having been shaken by that killing because he had not expected it; and he cooperated with the police who came to the scene. If he had an “abandoned and malignant heart” (why are these vague and archaic descriptors even allowed in the legal code?) he would have acted like a typical premeditated killer, shooting Arbery in a way that would not implicate himself, and denying involvement if questioned. I can imagine that a lot of American men who are forced to live with the problem of Black crime will now prefer that option, at least those men who are not totally demoralized by show trials like these.

The bigger problem here is the implied notion, noted above, that even mildly overinterpreting a citizen’s arrest law, as any concerned citizen might easily do without bad intent, can abruptly (by the whim of a biased jury) turn the citizen into a felon, and then a murderer if he has to defend himself against the arrestee’s violence. If such a notion were valid, a citizen’s arrest law would be worse than worthless. It would be as if the government invited motorists to drive across a very long and narrow, guardrail-less bridge over a mile-deep gorge, having positioned the bridge in such a way that it constantly swayed and shimmied in the wind. It effectively would be no bridge at all—only a deathtrap for the unwary.

The Malignant Heart of the Matter

Is there even any point in arguing over the legal questions at the heart of such cases? I can remember many racially tinged travesties of justice in my adult life, going back at least to the O.J. Simpson trial of 1995. These cases always feel like inversions of the To Kill a Mockingbird setup—either an apparently guilty black man goes free or gets off lightly, or a wrongfully prosecuted white man has his life ruined. More importantly, the process by which these injustices occur is always (as in Harper Lee’s model of 1930s small-town Alabama) a social process involving race-politics pressures as well as a lot of venality, cowardice, and hysteria. Tom Wolfe somehow got away with writing a big novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, about the modern versions of these circuses, a novel that even in 1987 conveyed strongly the message that American society and its judicial system had been irretrievably broken by decades of racial factionalism.

Similarly, what really drew my attention to this case was the evidence of race-politics pressure on DAs and politicians, the jury’s disregard for the basic evidence that should have exonerated the defendants, the MSM’s wanton mischaracterizations of the case (go back and read their accounts!), and then, above all, the overwhelmingly positive, smug reaction to the verdict by so many Americans.

Of course, Twitter and social media generally are full of people who can cheaply virtue-signal while never having to deal with the unhappy realities afflicting ordinary Americans. Stephen King, for example, lives in a humongous complex on a barrier-island beach south of Sarasota—I know because I once lived nearby—at the least-accessible extremity of a wealthy neighborhood that was designed by its residents to keep out the riffraff, including anyone who looks remotely like Ahmaud Arbery. From that fortress King is unlikely ever to have to face the problem of burglary or thievery, and anyway any losses from such property crime would be infinitesimal in their impact on him.

But I think virtue-signaling is only a small and secondary part of this. Over the past few years, and especially since the COVID pandemic started, the more or less diffuse growth of wokeness in American life seems to have cohered into a Salem-like episode of socially sanctioned savagery—arguably almost as deadly as Salem, and much more broad and durable. I’ve even had the vague imaginative sense (from a distance, as an expatriate) that this mass hysteria has been developing into a kind of cult, presided over by a collectively summoned black perp-god, or purple-haired Gender Studies goddess, who in strident tones demands a constant flow of human sacrifices. (Another writer elaborated this human-sacrifice concept before me, so I will mostly leave that imagery to him.)

The centrality of pictures and videos should give us a clue to how these weird social phenomena arise. If, let us say, a young black man, a man like Ahmaud Arbery, is found dead in the street by gunshot one day, but there is no video evidence of how he was killed, what will be the public reaction? The reader knows the answer already, because such cases occur many times per day across the US, especially in heavily black cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit and Baltimore. There is generally no reaction, no wider resonance. The man’s family may weep. They may call on the police to solve the crime. But usually only if the cops identify a white suspect (a relatively rare event) will the case make out of the back pages of the papers, and only if the white-on-black killing is caught on video (much rarer) is the case sure to be lifted from the muck of the ordinary criminal court docket into the glare of a Woke Cult show trial.

People in general, and I guess women moreso than men on average, are apt to be distressed when they witness—for example on a video—a violent death. The distress in turn creates a sense of urgency to do something. (Consider how heavily US foreign and immigration policies in recent years have been driven by distressing images in the media, e.g., of wounded children in Syria or refugee children crossing the Rio Grande.) Distress also tends to suppress rational thought, making the mind more susceptible to the beating tom-toms (to paraphrase McLuhan) of mass delusion and madness. And when a killing depicted on a distressing video can be made to seem even remotely consistent with the central wokelore motif of evil whites harming innocent blacks—that very live snarl of wires in the American psyche—the mass delusion and madness will come together and start to lurch in a predictable direction. It will start to be controlled and guided, to do meaningful political work, by a political faction that I would say definitely has “an abandoned and malignant heart.”

It seems to me that there are usually two main group of actors that ignite these episodes: blacks who from basic instinct or family ties support fellow blacks in conflicts with whites, and a certain large stratum of white women who have, in regard to blacks, a powerful guilt and appeasement reflex. Once those two groups start up and gather steam, craven politicians and their judicial minions join in with the rapidity of scurrying rodents, and then the superorganism swells to its maximum size with the additions of journalists and millions of ordinary and celebrity virtue-signalers. This frenzied entity of many voices and noises somehow achieves a certain harmony as it demands “justice,” which is code for: give us a white victim.

One cannot overemphasize how uninterested in truth is this entity. In the case of Derek Chauvin, the entity assured us that the smirk on Chauvin’s face as he held down George Floyd was simply his sadist-cop’s delight at the approaching demise of his poor African American victim. Chauvin was a police officer with long experience of having to deal with unruly and bullshitting black perps, and of course did not have the clairvoyance to know that this particular perp, this one unlucky time, was telling the truth—but try explaining that to some vapor-brained leftist millennial or wine-aunt who is caught up in the full guilt-hate-love ecstasy of the Awokening.

In the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, the entity (speaking even through the man who is the current US president) assured us that the defendant was a white supremacist who had gone hunting for innocent protesters. The entity let it be known among the softer minded that Rittenhouse’s victims were black—this became a very widespread perception. Rittenhouse avoided becoming the next sacrificial victim mainly because the people he had shot in self defense were actually white. It must have helped too that he, Rittenhouse, was a cherubic-looking lad liable to trigger the protective maternal instincts of many American women—instincts that are normally directed entirely toward the shooting victim in such cases, at least when the victim is black.

In Georgia, of course, the victim was indeed black and the accused were southern whites who drove pickup trucks, carried guns, probably had a few Confederate flags around, and probably held African Americans in low esteem. On the great totem pole of wokeism, these men were the lowest of the low. Thus, the story the entity told of their vile misdeeds, in the MSM, in social media, in the courtroom through the mouths of sworn officers of the court, was a festival of lies and obfuscations, and essentially the defendants had no defenders other than their paid lawyers.

The victims of human sacrifice in ancient times often were drawn from the lowest, most marginalized castes. Is it not plausible that tens of thousands of years of primitive religion have worn certain paths into our minds such that even now we subconsciously act out those rituals—and perhaps can even experience, every so often, the vivid illusion that an angry god is present and wants to be appeased?

This particular deity will never stay appeased for long, though, will it? And as evidence accumulates that America’s grand racial experiment has failed, will Americans ever face up to that failure and respond rationally? Or will that failure just drive them crazier and crazier, as they deliver more and more sacrificial victims to a god who will not relent?

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