The Incel to ICE Pipeline (with F.D Signifier and Caroline Kwan)

yeah the masculine urge to just kill a woman it's fuck that's fucking bleak hello hello and welcome back to a bit fruity i'm matt bernstein i'm so happy that you're here after ice agent jonathan ross filmed himself murdering renee good a married lesbian poet who was legally observing the ongoing ice crackdown in minneapolis ross muttered to himself two words. Fucking bitch. I haven't stopped thinking about those words since he spoke them, and they immediately brought me back to a vastly different time and place in American culture. 2014, California, where a 22-year-old man named Elliot Roger was stewing in an online cesspool known as the incel ideology. Elliot was struggling with relating to women and finding a girlfriend, and found community online with other young male incels who believed that if they could not attract women, they should simply dominate them. In one post, Elliot lambasted the, quote, oppressive feminist system. And on May 23rd, 2014, Elliot Roger drove to a sorority house at nearby UC Santa Barbara and shot three women outside of it, killing two of them. He then drove around the town of Isla Vista and killed a total of six people before turning the gun on himself. And I'm not saying Jonathan Ross and other ICE agents are all wielding their guns explicitly to avenge the women who rejected them like Elliot Rodger did. But we do have reason to believe that the Trump administration is specifically seeking out men just like Elliot Rodger to work for ICE or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Men who are young, angry and aggrieved about the status they feel they've been robbed of. Men who want to reclaim that status by any means necessary. Today, I want to tell a story about how immigration and customs enforcement is, among other things, an outgrowth of masculinity in crisis. We'll look, too, at what I believe is another deeply related outgrowth of that crisis, which is looks maxers like Clavicular, who promote eating disorders to young boys in a way that feels deeply fascist. We'll get into that. I want to weave all of these late stage male crises together and hopefully reach some semblance of a better way forward for all of us. I hope this isn't too lofty of a premise, you guys. I mean, nope, I'm in. No, and I remember hearing this name clavicular. He just did. He just went to jail, too. Right. They used to get arrested for doing some similar shit. He hasn't been arrested, although he has hit people with his car. The masculine urge to hit a man with your car. Yeah. Gotta love it. Gotta love it. So to weave all of this together today, I am so excited to be joined by two new friends of the podcast. The first is my friend, politics and pop culture streamer on Twitch, Caroline Kwan. Caroline, welcome to the show. I can't believe this is our actual first episode because we did the Patreon before and we talk all the time. I knew that I wanted to do this with Caroline. And the first thing that I said to her when we started texting about doing this episode was like, I think we need a man like like like a real man, you know, not me. Yeah. And I was texting a lot of times we're both texting each other the same thing at the same time. And that was my thinking as well. It's like, OK, we have Matt, we have me. We need we need a straight man, but one who's who gets it, who who understands. I don't like to say I get it. I don't like to own that too much just because it's a lot of pressure. And I will say something stupid at some point in time to make it seem like I don't get it. So I just want to always give myself room to fuck up. But I get enough to definitely have this conversation. I actually wrote my master thesis on Elliot Rodger and like spree shooters and incels and shit. So like this is perfect synergy for a lot of things. So if you haven't caught on, we are joined. I am so excited to be joined by FD Signifier. He is a political and cultural video essayist on YouTube who people on the Patreon were very excited about when I told them we were doing this episode together. So, FD, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Can I ask up front, like I've sort of mapped out what I'm basically doing here, which is relating these sort of formerly niche, far right, misogynistic areas of the Internet from the 2010s to this current wave of like government sanctioned fascist violence in the form of ICE. Do you guys think that's too lofty of a premise? Tell me. Tell me how you feel. I don't. I think the desire for authoritarian figures is directly connected to like our perception and yearning for this mythical masculinity that makes everyone feel safe and makes everything seem like it's in this right place and there's order. And of course, for the men, it becomes aspirational. And then then once we once we are like our fearless leader, then the women will treat us with respect and they'll follow what we say. We won't have to develop personalities or wear deodorant and we'll still be able to get laid. So there's a there's a ton there. There's a ton of masculine reclamation is where a lot of this energy comes from. And when he says fucking bitch to the woman he just shot in the head, that's the act of masculine reclamation. He felt emasculated in the interaction. He reclaimed it through violence and reclaiming your masculine status through violence is one of the first things you're taught as a little boy. And it clearly doesn't go away. And for a lot of men, it becomes something that ironically becomes a cage. And so, yeah, I think you're you know, I'm sure people can quibble with semantics and whatnot. But no, I don't think this is too much of a reach at all. I think it's very spot on. It's all connected. The through line here is about power and control. It is about using groups like women, immigrants, queer people as scapegoats. And you have this administration and all those in power and their allies who use these groups as scapegoats in order to distract away from their horrific economic policies, from how the system does not support these disenfranchised men in the same way it doesn't support any of us except for those who the system is built for. And I think seeing the way that the performance of masculinity, that rage, that hatred towards women, towards immigrants pops up all the time, whether we're talking about ICE, whether we're talking about these looks maxers, these these male streamers. It's all related. And I think these are young men who they're vulnerable, yes, but it's not as if they are in any different material position than the rest of us. It's just the way that society has told them, this is how men are supposed to be. This is what you are owed. And this is who has taken it from you. And this is how you get it back. Hmm. I want to start by showing you two a video. This is filmed by a legal observer who is recording themselves speaking to an ICE agent who's sitting in his car and and threatening him. I will tell you this, brother. What? You know, I will tell you this. You raise your voice. I raise your voice. If I raise my voice, you'll erase. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Are you serious? You said if I raise my voice, you'll erase my voice. that probably sounded a lot cooler in his head if you raise your voice i'll erase your voice that feels like it's taken like straight off of like an incel forum it's john wick john wick is the ultimate uh sigma grind set figure yeah i saw that video it's so emblematic of what we're talking about that guy who is an ice agent and is hiding behind you know this perceived power of the federal government and after ice has been executing uh americans in the streets in broad daylight having still the uh audacity still believing that he will be protected in threatening so openly like that and the guy was responding to him and going okay so you're telling me if i raise my voice you're going to erase my voice you're going to do violence to me for protesting like that's just to clarify he's like yeah yeah yeah bro yeah it's like that i just did that it's very like get it's like chest puffed up hyper macho yeah what are you gonna do about it one thing i've always observed about the core figures like the core i want to call them victims for the moment just for the moment of the red pill because they're usually the bottom rung the bottom rung red pill figures ironically are the biggest losers they're like incredibly bad And even to an extent, they also are usually the most socially ineffective. There's a high prevalence of both self-diagnosed and fully diagnosed neurodivergence and other behavioral health issues, so on and so forth. And one thing that you'll find when engaging and studying them is a lot of what they're doing, which I think this guy is doing, is imitating what they think the alpha males do under certain circumstances, which is why it sounded so stilted and unnatural. Right. Like he didn't know if he had pulled the line. Like he's like, like he wanted to get another take at it. He's like, that was the rehearsal. Can we run it back? Can we run it back? Like, I really want to threaten you. That sounded cooler. Can I just get that back? And so like, it's so much of that is in their behavior, in their movement. You know, if we, I don't know if we want to jump to Alex Preddy just yet. No, go for it. Go for it. But like, if you watch, if you, you know, dare to watch the full events, It's it's so clear that half of these men don't even know they've ever been in a fight before. You know, I'm saying let alone had like halfway decent law enforcement training. And we know from looking at the information coming out about ice that a lot of them don't a lot of them don't have a lot of training. A lot of them don't have actual experience with law enforcement or military, etc. They're just getting guys that want to act out their their fantasies. And we see the result of that. I think, too, this kind of recognizing that they can't cut it in any of those other law enforcement groups, you know, they're not signing up for the military. It's like ICE is now their their ticket to that. Yeah, the low standards. And I just do want to throw out there. You mentioned Elliot Roger. he's not the only one but numerous spree shooters and like these types of guys actually do attempt to join the military and the armed forces as a form of masculine reclamation because they may be a loser and these that and the third you know in their previous life but if they can make it to the military they really you really can't take masculinity away from you know soldier so to speak it's too traditional of a role so let's take it back to elliot roger and incel culture more broadly in the early 2010s, because I think that this is the formerly like niche, far right, violently misogynistic culture that ends up getting co-opted, that the sentiment behind it ends up getting co-opted by the MAGA movement and by Donald Trump himself, and sort of exploited to put these like disgruntled young men and sometimes not so young men into these positions where they have guns and they're terrorizing the streets as a form of what you say, masculine reclamation. So incels online really takes off in the early 2010s. You can see in Google search results that the word incel, it skyrockets in popularity around 2010. Incel communities really take shape on places like Reddit and 4chan, where you have a lot of just like young men and boys kind of just like complaining to one another about how they can't get laid. And then it becomes this sort of pathology. Well, why can't we get laid? Well, we're genetically predisposed to never have a girlfriend because of the thinness of our wrists or the slope of our foreheads. It becomes very race science-y very quickly. Some of the main pillars of incel ideology, and these are courtesy of Zero Tolerance UK, are that men are the real victims of gender inequality that women lie about their own oppression and use feminism as a means of dominating men some might say cucking them uh i hate when i use like i hate when i use like incel words like unironically like it just makes me feel so lame so gross imagine imagine a master's thesis where you just write cuck was was the word cuck in your master's thesis yes it was yes it was There's all kinds of horrible words written there. Stacey's and Chad's and all these. Stacey's and Chad's and Becky's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In order to prove this assertion that men are the real victims of gender inequality, incels will focus a lot on things like false rape allegations, which we know are extraordinarily rare. But they will sort of use them to discredit all allegations of gender violence. They believe that women are naturally evil, that women manipulate men to get ahead. well Caroline as the woman here they believe also and I think this is important that women are biologically hardwired to want to be sexualized and dominated by men even if they don't know it and therefore any male violence against women is justified because it's secretly it's what they really want because Fifty Shades are great which also was very hot as these things pop off. I think it's also this convergence of all these different groups. So in the early 2000s, you had pickup artists. Pickup artists were so huge. You even had shows on like MTV and whatnot. You have men's rights activists. You have the black pillars, the red pillars. So these are all they have their differences, but ultimately are rooted so deeply in misogyny and in this belief that men are entitled in this world and what they are entitled to is being denied to them. And that there is a long history here. We talk about the crisis of masculinity. I'm like, these men are always in crisis. There is always some crisis of masculinity that's happening. It just looks different depending on what era we're in. And in the past, there's been a way for them to address that. Oh, we'll go to war. We'll just chop off other men's heads. Oh, we have the notions of now chivalry and kind of in the Enlightenment era. And then that moving into kind of the Western ideals of men being breadwinners. Now, men, they go to work, they make money, they come home, they take care of the family, they earn that bread. And as these men's and I keep wanting to say, like, it is not just these men. It is just the way that they are societally and culturally raised to believe that they are supposed to have certain things. They are supposed to be a certain way as men. But as their material conditions have deteriorated, as these, you know, as capitalism and these other really oppressive systems have disenfranchised them, there is this desperation. And that's what's been honed in on by a lot of these these grifters, these reactionaries, these male, you know, male supremacists. So it's something that's been happening for a while. But like incel culture, it's just an evolution of these previous eras. Yeah, I would agree. And that's I know one of the main things you're probably going to get in comments or whatever is how this isn't actually incels. This is insert thing here. That's part of the manosphere. And that's somewhat fair if you want to be overly like pedantic about which terms apply where. But when you're naming like all the different groups she just named, they all still converge at misogyny, patriarchy and this worship of mass of this mythical masculinity that somehow existed in the past, but doesn't exist now. But when you go to the past, it also didn't exist then, but it existed in the past before then. There's this great something I got off Twitter. I can't remember vividly, but where this guy like literally just went through the history of like a bunch of newspapers like 100 years back. And the headline kept repeating, are men OK? What happened to real men? And it's like 1912. And they're still asking that question. This is what I mean by this crisis of masculinity that we you know, we talk about a lot now. And obviously it is pertinent and relevant, but it has been going on for a long time. Because what it really is, is dominance frameworks and who gets to participate and who doesn't. I think to modulate what Caroline just said, it is the material like material conditions have made it so there's more outgroup men. Right. But the reality is that incels didn't collect together back then because they could just. beat women and it was okay. They could just beat their wives and their children and it was just fine. There were so little protections for women and women had to deal with it because they couldn't go to college and get jobs. Their material conditions have deteriorated at the same time. And this is what makes incel, man's for ideology click for some of them is that they look in the past and they see, well, all these men had good jobs and now all these women have good jobs. So something must have happened and they don't recognize the fact that women weren't allowed to compete with men right and those women still had to live so they had to marry a man who maybe had no personality i just saw something and i'll stop please don't a tick tock he was like you you look at um the notebook right like that was a real thing the woman's dilemma in a movie like the notebook was emblematic of the fact that there's this guy i love and then there's this guy with money. And I love this guy, but I will be poor and I have responsibilities and family, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't have the option of going to college myself and a career for myself to say that I can choose love. And so for the average man, seeking out wealth and status or just stability was an easy way to attract the mate. You didn't have to read. You didn't have to shower. You didn't have to be a nice guy. You were a provider. And now the numbers for you know education and employment have shifted so that those guys still feel like they should just be able to have you know girlfriends without deodorant and they can't and instead of engaging with the evolution of what the desirability looks like in a modern era they just complain it's are you all old enough to remember who stole my cheese that old book is like i don't know Anybody else's mom in corporate America that just had that book lying around? No. Who stole my? Hold on a sec. I'm looking this up right now. This is a business book? Wait, who moved my cheese? Who moved my cheese? Okay. Okay. Oh, apparently this is a big book. It's a huge book in like the business world in the 90s. My mom worked for like high up in college and education. And this was like a book she was given by her HR. And it was everywhere for a second. I don't know if I want this. I feel like it's too much a tangent. No, no, no. This is great. Keep going. The point of it is that instead of following the directions of that book, which is pivot, develop, evolve from where you are. The lesson of the story is that the rats that got their cheese moved just stayed in the same spot and complained that they want their cheese back. And the other rat went and figured out where they want to go to get the cheese. So the men in this situation are the rats. Yes where they the bad rats They the rats that stayed still I sorry sorry I want to say something I read that pickup artist book unironically when it first came out But I was kind of over it by the time the show happened But like I went through a bad breakup in 2007 2006 And just like a lot of men I was like I don understand what happened And I'm just so angry and I don't know. I don't know how to get women in this age. And I read that book and it like it kind of immediately was like, all right, not really. But I said it to say I understand and empathize with the psychology of feeling like an outgroup male and wanting to figure out how to fix that. The problem is all those other things Caroline was just speaking to in this pervasive culture of dominance that has been normalized among men where some men read that and was like, this sounds weird and gross. And then some men read it and it's like, oh, I just need to be really disrespectful and start negging and that'll work. Yeah. And I just wanted to add to I think the element of these men being told that now there's a there's this version of masculinity that has to do with how much sex you're having with how how many women you're having sex with. And that is kind of why they emphasize to like high value women, low value women. This is how to get and Matt, I'm sure you have this in your outline, too. Well, yeah, I would really love, and I've never said this in my life, I would really love to talk about sexual marketplace value. Let's go. SMV, baby. In the incel worldview, or the red pill worldview, or whatever you want to call it, because, of course, a lot of these ideas, especially as they relate to misogyny, have gained traction in more mainstream areas of society that we're going to talk about that don't necessarily identify with like involuntary celibacy or anything like that. This is all transcended way beyond how much sex you do or don't have. But so the SMV, the sexual market value of someone is essentially, I mean, it's basically like when you see someone and you're like, rank them one through 10. And normally we think about that through the lens of looks, But sexual market value, according to this red pill theory, it's a combination of your looks, your genetics, your social status, your money, your bank account. And the idea that incels put forth through charts and math and algorithms is this idea that all women want like a nine or a ten male. And so anyone, any male who is a one through eight is destined to be without love or romance or sex. And all women are sort of like hypergamous. That's what they call hypergamous and that they date up. But men will date, you know, anyone. And it's just so virtuous. It's that they can have higher standards now because of social progress, that women's standards that they weren't allowed to have before because they couldn't even have a crack. credit card, right? Like at one point they couldn't even go outside without a man being with them. Right. So now the issue is women having too high of standards, women having choice, women being able to provide for themselves. And this is the problem. Right. And the irony is that it's the opposite. Now, the irony is that there's so much research now showing that women are not attracted to six foot five, seven percent body fat guy. It's so funny because it's like women will say these things and these men are like, no, no, no, that's not true. They're all liars. They just want the 0% body fat. The thing that really gets me about this is that people who subscribe hard to this theory, people like Clavicular, the king of the looks maxers who we're going to talk about shortly, they think that like obsessing over your body and your wealth and your image and your brand are things that will attract women. But it's like nobody wants a romantic partner that thinks that much about themselves yeah and the women that you will attract with that type of behavior are not the type of women you're going to want to be in relationships with also so much of this is performance for other men yes i would say all of it is yes when you see them at the club together there was that moment too when i think clavicular one of them asked nick fuentes like you want to spring girls over and they were like oh no and it's it that's the performance aspect and then when I see clips of them talking to women and it's so they're so awkward, they're so uncomfortable because they put so much, they put everything into this is how you look, this is how you perform, this is peak masculinity, this is how you get your sexual market value up, this is how you own these women, you know, you get whatever you want. And then here's an example of them talking to a woman and they can't. So ultimately, I think inceldom was about young men and boys blaming women for their loneliness, their insecurities, and it was also a coping mechanism for an eroding understanding of what it means to be a man, which distilled masculinity into math and numbers and skull measurements. It's a very antisocial worldview and a response to male loneliness destined to make the men who bought into it feel lonelier. I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to NordVPN for sponsoring this episode. I make this podcast for a living and I do it alone and I don't have an office space to make it. Office space is very expensive in New York. Rent is already very expensive in New York. Not trying to pay for more than I need. So what I do love to do is use working for myself as a freelancer as an excuse to explore the city and work from coffee shops all over. It's a great way I found to get out and explore, especially a place as wide and wavering as New York City. 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I've used it in so many different ways. Right now, NordVPN is offering listeners of A Bit Fruity a huge discount on all two-year plans, up to 80% off, plus four free months on all of those two-year plans. If you'd like to check it out, you can head to nordvpn slash fruity. That is nordvpn slash fruity. Thanks so much to Nord for sponsoring this episode. And now let's get back to the show. I'm struck now by how commonplace a lot of these pillars of incel ideology now are in the mainstream. And I think you see through the first half of the 2020s, men's gendered insecurity exploited in mass by people like Andrew Tate, Aiden Ross, Sneeko. The list goes on and on and on and on and on. But what's really interesting to me is this also sort of like went beyond just like these like niche far right corners of like rumble and kick and whatever. I want to show you guys a video of Scott Galloway, everyone's favorite like center liberal podcaster academic, who's essentially just espousing the sexual marketplace value theory. Yeah, I got in trouble for using a clip of this in one of my videos. Am I going to get hate for dunking on Scott Galloway? I mean, are you not going to get hate for anything? All right. Women mate horizontally or socioeconomically horizontally and up, men horizontally and down. And when the pool of viable males, horizontal and up, keep shrinking, there's a lack of mating opportunities. Because men are much less choosy. We want to spread our seed to the four corners of the earth, and women want to put up a much finer screen to pick the smartest, fastest and strongest seed. I always wanted romantic and sexual partners. I just wanted that as a man. And I immediately connected the dots that in a capitalist society, your selection set of mates has broadened if you are economically viable. So let me try. The biggest problem here is because I talked to a guy who's into this. somebody you should look into for this mack and murphy okay and he is a bio such and such researcher and a lot of his stuff is scott golloway core now he's a little more overt in implying the wrong headedness of incels and stuff like that but he does take the care to give um grace to the fact that the whole sexual marketplace idea is not like absolutely false. It's just a complete incorrect framing of the issue. Does that make sense? Keep going. We're talking about desirability. We're talking about what makes somebody attractive. And instead of being like a person might crave stability, a person might crave a partner who has certain features, a person might be sexually attracted to an individual. They'll say, well, if you want to mates give woman money you know and it becomes this weird degrading of the nature of attraction and what people choose partners on and it does relegate women to you know pokemon essentially within the game of like men trying to collect you know female partners usually for the respected admiration of other men so when i hear him say sexual marketplace and mating it's like all right look, can you try to be more normal? And maybe you won't gain a specific type of follow, you know? Yeah. And I think what you're talking about, too, is the issue with kind of the commodification of love. It's not a great film, but materialist kind of takes a stab at this of like how people measure up on paper type of thing. What's frustrating is, first of all, you know, the physical attraction element is something that that's real that exists. But it's this lack of understanding that being a man who is comfortable in their masculinity without any of this performance, you know, somebody who is rooted in the values of empathy that like it's so wild that women will say these things, they'll say, sure, maybe I have my, you know, who I'm physically attracted to. But as far as all this other stuff, you know, oh, these impossibly high standards. And you have women going, yeah, we just would love, you know, men who are kind, who are caring, who are empathetic, who are not what these other men are making money off of telling other men how they should act. Or even just like, like normal, a bit normal. be normal yes normal i'm gonna rename this podcast a bit normal let's engage with a thing that often doesn't come up on around these conversations which is progressive and liberal women with right-wing men they're they're still not with the andrew tates they're still not with the you know the the alpha chud guys like there are a lot of and this is just a thing that we know from sadly some women have revealed it thinking it was funny and other people like oh is your dating a manga person that's interesting but like even when you see the manga guy he's still like five foot nine and kind of doughy you know i'm saying and he and he sells insurance he's not like a international banker who's six foot five and like hunts people on the weekend yeah yeah so the consistent thing because all the politics and the the behaviors and the traits can vary widely, right? But the consistent thing that women are showing is that looks and money are not as defining as we tend to imply. It's a lot of vibes. It's a lot of energy. And it's a lot of intangibles that you can't control. And if you're hammering your face with a rock or whatever the looks maxers do, isn't that a thing they do? Bone breaking or something like that? Yeah, that is allegedly one of the more extreme tactics of the looks max or should we talk about looks maxers i am so interested because this is one thing i haven't delved a lot in so sure welcome to the world of clavicular one of the newer trends among young men online uh is looks maxing looks maxing caroline do you want to take this. Yeah, looks maxing. It's indicative of this age of techno vanity where you can, you can plump, you can, you know, inject, you can chisel, you can break, you can essentially, if you have the money to do it, you can change everything about how you look to fit this golden ideal. So, you know, carving up your face, injecting yourself with meth to maintain the body fat percentage. Like there are all these now it's, it's taken self-improvement to a very, very extreme place. Um, and it is essentially this obsession with not being ugly. And here's the way that you achieve that ideal perfection. And so that is what clavicular, I mean, there was a clip of him injecting a girl with, it was like Botox or filler on stream and legal. He is not licensed to do that, mind you. But yes, like injecting himself, injecting other people. Yeah. So essentially an evolving movement from something like self-improvement and kind of, you know, taking just generally taking care of yourself to the most hyper extreme place. Well, you know what this is. This is gender affirming care for him. No. Yeah. I mean, it's gender affirming care for young straight men. The face of this we've alluded to is this man who, if you're not familiar, he goes by the nickname Clavicular online. He's a 20-year-old young straight white dude who has become an influencer sort of in the ranks with the Tates, with Nick Fuentes, with Sneeko. They were all just together at a club in Miami where they were singing How Hitler. Was this the How Hitler? Okay, I didn't know. How Hitler by Kanye West. And then the Miami club released a statement that's like, we're so sorry. We don't know what happened. I'm like, what? What? Likely thing to happen in Miami. But it's so interesting to me because there's been all this sort of like hand wringing about like the mystery of looks maxing and stuff. And it's so like this is an eating disorder for young straight men. That's that's what it amounts to. Guy bulimia. You know what other group has long struggled with like disordered eating and body image besides women, obviously, is like gay men. like and this looks maxing stuff the goal of it is to impress the other men around you and to you know attract women and i know anyone who any disgruntled young straight guy might be like oh what do you know about masculinity you're a fucking faggot whatever true true but if i can tell you one thing that i've learned from dealing with like disordered eating and body image for the last 10 years since I was in high school is that it doesn't like it will never benefit your relationships. It won't benefit your sense of self. It's been harmful for my relationships, to be very honest, you know, because it's ultimately just time spent fixating on yourself and developing like a sickness. And I feel badly when I see this stuff because I actually kind of like identify with these young men struggling with body image issues. And I just wish I could tell them like, this isn't actually how you achieve happiness in fact it's quite the opposite yeah and the saddest thing is that i don't know what other way to say this it's less effective for them than it might be for you like they're not like the the body image things within like gay communities because gay men are more vapid than straight women no i mean i'm just saying that gay men are my my understanding is that gay men still very much behave like men in terms of like their expectations on partnerships and the primacy of looks. The best way I could get into was like gym bro culture, which is gym sales is a thing. So like guys will hit the gym. I just saw a picture of this clavicular guy who clearly has 5%, 10% body fat. And just a lot of women, like if you go to a club, a girl that's like half drunk and feeling on your chest, that might get you laid that night. It will not get that girl to stay with you six months from now when you haven't been to the gym in a month and you're going through a natural mood swing that men go through, et cetera. It's not something that relationships are built on. And I think the culture amongst, generally speaking, straight women is that they really don't care about the body image stuff nearly as much as these men point out. So it's actually just the irony that that's only for other men and will not get them meaningful relationships. Maybe, meaningful relationships, no. This is kind of an overall issue with the aesthetics of perfection, the kind of looking like an actual filter these days. It, first of all, requires thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, which a lot of these followers of Clavicular, whoever else is preaching this, they don't have. And it's also like you have to constantly be doing these things to yourself, injecting yourself with these drugs. It's really, really unhealthy and just not sustainable. You know, all of this is sad because it's just a new thing that's being promised as a way to like instantly change someone's life. Like, hey, young dude who is feeling as if they have no purpose in this world, as if they can't get girls, as if blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And everyone's telling these different things. This kind of content promises them success and fulfillment and also like immediately not a, oh, this is something that, you know, it takes it takes a long time. to work on yourself, you know, to look inward, etc, etc. When these things don't materialize, that's how these men can become even further radicalized. So I've unfortunately spent too much time looking at these kind of Reddit internet, misogynistic, incel, radical, you know, very right wing radicalized faces. And this is what happens is like how these men get set on these paths towards really, really dangerous extremism is because these things that they are being promised when it doesn't materialize, that sets them into like, what's the next thing? What's something that's even more dangerous, more extreme? It's how do we get to then this place where men are then committing horrible acts of violence, whether they are violent towards women, whether they are violent towards queer people, towards immigrants. And it's that belief that to be a man means to be violent in this way. That's how you take power and control. One interesting thing that I wanted to kind of amplify that Caroline touched on is the aspect of community like these Reddit pages and following those different streamers The thing that people don imagine because a lot of this is a lot of this stuff is fundamentally white supremacist frameworks. Even the concepts of concepts of beauty are built out of westernized white supremacist concepts of who has virtue as a human and who does not. And thus, you know, the closer to whiteness you are, the more virtue, yada, yada. Like, there's a lot of that going on. But despite all of that, despite the fact we're talking about Nick Fuentes, he's the only white guy in the like that major crew. And people don't realize just how diverse red pill in cell spaces are. One name that hasn't came up yet is Kevin Samuels, who was the king of the black manosphere. And people don't realize the black manosphere was actually here first on the Internet, on YouTube, et cetera. That speaks to the misogyny of it all. But the thing that keeps people that makes them dive deeper into the extremism and does and does eventually churn out every once in a while a mass murderer is the fact that once you've got this stink on you, it's hard to get it off and that you just get sucked deeper. Once you start speaking in incel red pill language And you only learn how to talk that talk to like your other peers on your message board Or your reddit or your group chat or whatever You can't talk to girls You know you're going to call her a foy or whatever the fuck the term is And she's going to be like what does that mean? I hate that I know what foy means And then to bring it back to the ice of it all Is that that's also a community there those are now brothers you know i'm saying and that brotherhood ends up being an extremely powerful connective tissue to keep people in that position and if we want to touch on it all like okay so what are the responses the irony is that what we're doing is really good for like you know spreading ideas and and and communicating and like building different repertoires of of debunking etc. But the biggest thing really is like managing small pockets of communities to pull one or two out at a time. It's almost like decultifying people. You can't just tell them the truth. They have to go through a process. The same process that sucked them in has to be undone to get them out. Well, let's talk about ICE, which I imagine if you clicked on this podcast, you're wondering at this point, well, how does this tie in? The Washington Post reported a few weeks ago that it obtained internal ICE documents that showed ICE is spending $100 million over the next year for recruitment. And who are they targeting? Quote, people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear. They're also targeting ads to people whose phone locations shows them near military bases, NASCAR races, college campuses and gun shows this is racial profiling like there's a reason that ice is not investing this recruitment money to advertise near gay bars in new in hell's kitchen well i was going to say if it's if it's patriotic podcast then clearly it's listeners of this one yeah well i mean hey you never know that's why i don't let spotify do programmatic ads on this podcast because you might get a fucking ice ad. Yeah. You know, but but there's a reason that they are targeting these specific people that frankly, we've been describing throughout this episode so far. They are targeting young men whose brains have been rotting online with misogyny slop for years and saying, you know, you think feminism has taken male valor away from you. You think immigrants are taking your jobs and impeding on your place in the sexual marketplace. and maybe and maybe immigrants are even endangering white women who you need to protect. Right. We got to get the rapists and pedophiles off the street, but not out the White House. Those ones are OK. Yes, exactly. The oh, we need to protect white women. You know, they bring up Lake and Riley all the time. I do want to add that it's also the payment. Right. So like these are, again, outgroups, outgroup men. Right. Who probably don't have any other major skills and i think they said it's a fifty thousand dollar signing signing bonus you get after you serve for like a year or some shit i was seeing some reddit posts though of people who recently joined ice and they're like has anyone been paid yet i've been working for four weeks and i haven't gotten a paycheck yet like this is kind of concerning scammed by the trump administration what shocker but but you're right and and that's part of this too is that this eroding sense of financial security. I mean, this eroding middle class and finance is part of returning it back to the fucking SMV, the sexual marketplace value. Part of that is how much money you have. ICE is offering a reclamation of masculinity. I really like that term that you gave in a variety of ways. And so I want to take a look at a few of the ads that ICE has been pushing through the Department of Homeland Security social media accounts, because these are simply bananas. I'm sure you've seen some of them. Yeah, it's very boys club, very like daddy issues. I'm going to send you guys a couple of these ads. Could you describe what we're seeing in this first ad? Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys? And it's a van with four empty chairs, like just boys being boys, bros hanging out. Think about how many criminal illegal aliens you could fit in this bad boy yeah who is this for it's for people who it's like have this like cartoon version of what they think men are supposed to be yeah this is like the scooby-doo mystery van these and this is a video idea i have like i'm gonna return to this these are motherfuckers that should have joined a band you know what i'm saying like rock music is gone like i genuinely believe that there was some type of concerted effort to remove white like rock music from mainstream to allow for the insertion of the alt-right and shit like that okay because i'm 43 i know i'm older than everybody else but how much older am i i'm 33 i'm 27 take it away so understand back in my day things like you know mtv showed videos but like literally it was hard to see black music on MTV for a long time because it was hair metal and then alternative and then grunge and then punk and then ska and then all these other things. These were cultural entities for white men, for white boys, straight white boys that were unique unto themselves. And they were also very anti-establishment. They were they were progressive for the most part. You know what I'm saying? It was Rage Against the Machines. Video is about killing in the name of and breaking down geopolitics, immigration. And so like that collective identity, you couldn't go from that to ice. You couldn't. But not long after Bush, too, you see the disappearance of all these garage bands and the punks and all these white subcultures that were uniquely white male oriented. and you see them replaced with the UFC. With like country. And country and hip hop. To be real, like hip hop is very red-pilled, red-pilled friendly, I'll say, in a lot of ways. And so when I look at this van, I'm thinking like an awesome rock band with a heavy metal band in it with like flames on the side and Jack Black. But they're replacing it with ice. And that's so dark. I also look at this van, I'm like, oh it's the perfect van to kidnap children you know when you visualize the like rapist kidnapping children van they're like here you go yeah that's literally this van you're so right though i mean so much of this and these ads really tap into it is understanding young white men's longing for community which is real and something everyone should be pining after like we should all want community. Community is a great thing. When your community is oriented around kidnapping people from their homes and their workplaces, that's a problem. Let's look at ad number two. We're taking, wow, we're taking father-son bonding to a new level. This has to be AI generated. No age cap. Join ICE now. It's a white guy and his dad was balding with sunglasses on. His dad looks like the facebook the meme when it's like hey liberals listen up liberals my wife left me what my wife left me mean it's also giving like if you have daddy issues right here's this is your daddy now so not even literally just like oh a father-son bonding activity but a hey this is where you know this is where you can find your father the father who stepped up think about how many people look at Trump as their dad. Yeah. These manuscript figures as their dad. Like Andrew Tate was a lot of people's dads. Kevin Samuels was a whole lot of dudes' dads. The thing that people don't understand about men in crisis in a variety of ways is that it's a very cyclical thing around emotional intelligence and a lack thereof. Not even emotional intelligence. It's more like emotional deprivation. The thing I always point out is that at age three, 90 percent of the boys in this country will have to start shedding their emotional valence. Like you'll be told to stop crying because you're a boy. And that's it. There's no like contextualization. There's no explanation. There's no comfort. You are a boy and now you're three. So that crying shit is over. and that spills into so many other things around touch deprivation and like when i was a teacher the the thing i realized immediately when i started connecting with my male students that one of the main things they wanted was just fucking hugs and these and i and i taught in the boondocks with white kids i taught in the hood i taught in junior colleges i connected with athletes and the gamut and, you know, kids with fathers, kids without fatherless, whatever. And so many of them, more than anything, they just wanted male affection, platonic male affection, especially from an older male. Yeah. Because, you know, older men are taught that our job is to is to essentially brutalize these young boys so that to be ready for the real world. and in reality we're crippling them you know so like that daddy thing is definitely definitely a thing reclaim your relationship with your father through becoming ice agents i mean that's really what it's telling you and it's just such a shame because it's like you don't need to join ice to mend the relationship with your father just like just like talk i don't know like like hug each other like like kiss on the cheek like whatever i don't know it's wild or if you're you know tom brady on the mouth or if you're tom brady on the mouth honestly i hate tom brady but when people freaked out about him kissing his like small child on the mouth at least it's affection you know i don't care i was like this is beautiful like i was literally a defender of specifically tom brady's relationship with his son from day one not tom brady in basically any other context god bless. Yeah. I've had to start respecting him as a football fan after seeing what happened to Bill Belichick when he left. I was like, okay, I got to give you more props because this dude lost a divorce. I'm going to laugh and pretend to understand some of the football referencing that's happening. I want to look at ad number three here. Could one of you describe this one? America needs you. Join ICE now. Which way, American man. Join ICE.gov. Which way, American man. I do appreciate this one person who said we want the Epstein files. The commenters on DHS Gov Instagram keeping it real. But yeah, it's captioned which way, American man. And there is this man dressed in like this like patriotic costume. And he's standing next to this sign pole that has all of these different options facing different directions, like cultural decline, homeland, service, invasion, opportunity. Which Way Western Man is a reference to an anti-Semitic book and meme. But, you know, a lot of what you see with DHS advertising is about, like, you have a purpose. Defend the homeland, which is like a very explicit Nazi messaging. Yeah, the cultural decline is very, very white supremacist dog whistle coded. And the irony is how many Latinos or Mexican men are joining ICE. Both of the men that killed Alex Freddie were of Latino descent, from my understanding. Mm hmm. They were. Yeah. What do you make of that? I'm going to try not to make much of it. I'll just say that. Shout out to deculturation. One of the homies that very radical going there, understanding you're about to get the realist leftist shit you're going to get. But he's also Mexican-American. He talks about second generation and first generation immigrants. The phrase I've heard is that nobody hates an illegal immigrant more than a first generation that just got their you know, papers or whatever. You add in all those other things, all those other factors of economics, all those factors of affirming, because we're talking about affirming masculinity a lot, but we're also, again, this is very much a white supremacist framework. We're getting closer to whiteness through this action. We get to be one of the good ones. It's very pick me adjacent. Proximity to white power. And it happens in pretty much every minority group, every specialized whatever group has the pick me's that are trying to approximate closeness to whiteness to white masculinity to white straight masculinity by selling out insert whatever group they're attached to exactly what you just said is that there's a version of this in every community and i find just like how's it as a gay guy uh that like some of the most vicious homophobia i've experienced online is from right wing gay men. And I find that minorities who identify with white supremacy and conservatism and fascist movements, they can sometimes be the most bigoted and the most violent, I think, because they feel even more than like the white fascists that they have something to prove. Yeah, they have to work overtime. I don't know if you guys saw this, but one of the clips that just keeps running through my mind is this ICE agent racially profiled a Latino guy. And he went to, you know, do what they do, beat the shit out of them, arrest them, you know, kidnap them. And the guy was like, what do you do? What are you doing, bro? Are you doing this to me because I have an accent? So do you. It was so like, my God, yes, that's it's the absurdity of that where he's like you are profiling me because i have an accent you have the same accent motherfucker and the ice agent was like yeah but i'm ice like that was you could see him in that moment where he's like yeah but i'm one of the good guys like i'm on the team and you're not it's very internalized you know and and you know part of me part of me wants to lose just to watch nick fuentes become Mexican again. Part of me wants all of us to lose. If we all lose and it all goes over, we're all in camps. I just want to have a clip of when Nick Fuentes has to come into the camp with us. It's so dark. They're like, sorry, you might be a Nazi, but you are Mexican, so. And closeted, from my understanding. Or something approximate to that. The Catboy thing is definitely a thing. Yeah, that's a speculation around Nick Fuentes' sexuality is something that every time I even crops up in the corner of my screen, I just kind of like avert my eyes because I honestly don't have time for this right now. There's another notable ICE recruiting advertisement that's it's an image just like the Wild West and like the silhouette of a man on a horse. And it says, we'll have our home again. Join.ice.gov. We'll Have Our Home Again is the title of a white nationalist anthem by a band called the Pine Tree Riots. The lyrics from that song are, In our towns we're foreigners now. Our names are spat and cursed. The headlines smack of another attack. Not the last and not the worst. Oh my fathers, they look down on me. I wonder what they feel to see their noble sons driven down beneath a coward's heel. Oh by God, we will have our home again. so i i think it's interesting this this uh song has some popularity among like white nationalists on youtube it just goes all the way back around to me to all of that incel culture stuff all of the sort of far-right niche internet stuff we were talking about because while most people i think might look at something like this and think that's sort of bizarre and culty they won't get necessarily the dog whistles. But the people spending time in those corners of the internet, who are also interestingly the very people DHS is targeting these advertisements to, they will get it. Also, so much of the language that we hear the right use of returning to the golden era, returning to a more traditional way of life, things have gotten so out of control. This is why our society and our economy and everything is just destabilized because there's too much, you know, there's woke, there's progress. And it's a lot of this kind of aesthetics and visuals and language of eras like the American frontier, the Wild West, even the previous ICE ad, the America needs you, join ICE now. That is also taking from the I want you for the U.S. Army, you know, with Uncle Sam, the iconic recruitment poster, and that was used to recruit for World War I and also in World War II. But now in the way that it's being applied and with the additional, you know, white nationalist, white supremacist, straight up dog whistles, it is incredibly racist. I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to Factor for sponsoring this episode. I was blessed growing up with a mom who loved to cook spaghetti and meatballs, lemon chicken, beef stew. I really, I did not know how good I had it as a kid. It was my golden age of eating. Then I became an adult and realized that, at least for the time being, I don't have the skills to make those things as wonderfully as she did, nor the time to learn how, much to the chagrin of my mother. One super helpful way that I have been able to tastefully cut corners is with Factor. Factor is a meal delivery service with chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. And the best part is they are all ready to heat and eat in two minutes. Factor has a rotating menu of a hundred different meals every single week, so you're never going to get bored or be forced to settle into the monotony of meal prepping the same dinner for five days in a row, for example. Shout out Jim Bros, I admire you guys, just couldn't do it. And while nothing will ever quite live up to my mother's cooking, this is a pretty solid substitute. You can make eating at home a more varied and less laborious experience with Factor If you would like to try it out you can get 50 off your first box today at factormeals slash fruity50off with the code fruity50off That is factormeals slash fruity50off Thank you so much to Factor for sponsoring this episode. And now let's get back to it. So FD had to take a little break from the podcast because he has children to tend to. Some of us have responsibilities, wouldn't know a thing about it. So it's just Caroline and I for this segment. And I want to talk about something that has been cropping up a lot over the last few weeks in regards to the ICE protester discourse that I have found particularly bizarre, but maybe not surprising. And we really saw this gain traction after the killing of Renee Good, which is this acronym, AWFULS. Have you seen the AWFUL acronym? Yeah, it's so stupid. AWFUL stands for, in right-wing media at the moment, affluent white female urban liberal. And so much of their disdain for protesters has become laser focused on this idea of the affluent urban white woman who's out in the street protesting ice. Yeah. So there is the term wine mom. That's something that's been around for a while now. And it refers to the white, well-to-do suburban contemporary mother who has her glass of Chardonnay or her bottle of Chardonnay at night to deal with how shitty life is. There's the wine mom term. But now there is this freaking acronym that essentially is because Trump and conservative allies are blaming these wine moms, these liberal white women. Like, think I've just had it. Yeah. Jennifer Welch. Jennifer Welch. Yeah. Jennifer and Poms, that kind of archetype of woman who is being blamed for the violence that's happening. It's nothing new to blame mothers. Yeah. Let's look at what Greg Gutfeld had to say about awfles on Fox News the other night. Now you see women LARPing as saviors who feel less sympathy for their relatives than strangers, many of whom are criminals. Normally, there's a hard stop. It's kids. If you have them at home, you don't normally decide to charge a line of federal agents. When that line disappears, it's a clue that the brainwashing is complete. The affluent white female liberal isn't just awful. She's aimless because the left's phony empowerment marginalized their real power. Their self-relevance was stripped away and replaced by a savior complex. As government expanded its role as provider, they're shrunk. So what now? Well, women need guidance. Men got it already with the rise of the Internet dad. Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, Scott Adams, Mike Rowe, Joe Rogan, Adam Carolla, Tyrus, Tom Shalhoub. Guys who told young men to build, work, fix, and take responsibility. To focus on service and not ego. Maybe it's time for the internet mom. A woman who shows other women the way out of this spiritual dead end. Screaming at cops, invading churches, blocking traffic. That's not empowerment. That's exploitation. So Internet moms, your time has come and the country needs you. So join us because like pregnancy, men can't do it alone. Wow. What a banger last line. I mean, look, this is a tale as old as time blaming mothers, separating the good mothers from the bad mothers. You know, that's his call to action where he's like, good mothers, you know, we need you out there. We need you to curtail the activities, violent activities of these bad mothers. It's very interesting because all of these people who are like, oh, these liberal white women just like flouncing around in the streets protesting ICE, they all speak as if it's like it's like a misuse of the white women's privilege to be doing that. Like how privileged you must be to be protesting for the rights of people beneath you. And I think that's actually what it's about, because we know white women are not the only women in the streets protesting. But I think the idea that a financially stable white woman or mother would be spending her time fighting for the rights of what this fascist administration has determined are undesirables. That is like a unique betrayal of what she should be doing as a white woman in a fascist regime. Well, it's also because of all the different women demographics, white women, the majority of them do support Trump and other Republicans like they are very consistent Republican voting group. They have been for a long time. And so when then there is this show of force from white women who are not supporting Republicans, who are these awfuls out there in the streets protesting, getting involved. It's also a what the fuck are you guys doing? Like, that's not this is not how white women are supposed to be. You are violating the white womanhood here by not aligning yourselves with this conservative party. Right. And we see that in the way that these ICE agents flaunt Renee Good's murder after the fact. Yeah. Um, Renee Good was a lesbian and she had a butch partner who was standing with her while she was murdered. And her partner was saying to Jonathan Ross right before he murdered Renee Good. Oh, like what, you know, what are you going to do, big boy? Like she was taunting him, which you're allowed to do, by the way. And she was threatening his masculinity. And I think the two of them, just by virtue of being lesbians like this, this, this was a homophobic hate crime as much as it was all sorts of other things. Yeah, 1,000%. Yes, 1,000%. I think that's kind of been lost in it. This was absolutely misogynistic, homophobic hatred. You can see it on him. When Renee Good's wife was challenging him, when she's like, hey, I'm not mad at you, dude. And then he fucking kills her and calls her a fucking bitch afterwards. I think a lot of women, I think a lot of queer people have had a personal experience like that. I think they, in that moment, probably had a flashback to the many times they have experienced something like that. Here, you know, how dare you challenge this straight white man? Whatever happens to you is of your own doing. That's the way it was framed. It wasn't necessarily that Jonathan Ross was innocent of having killed her. Of course, that element was there, too. It was more so the emphasis on Renee Good deserved to be killed. Yep. And ICE observers testified after her death that ICE agents across the country berated them. One said that she was told, quote, have you not learned? That's why we killed that lesbian bitch. And another woman said I was in the vehicle with three ICE agents. And as soon as they all got into the vehicle and shut the doors, they just immediately started taunting me, making fun of me. One of them took a photo of me and showed it to the other agents. And, you know, they were just laughing, you know, insinuated that I was ugly. And then one of the agents, the one who had sprayed the pepper spray into my car, proceeded to say, you guys got to stop obstructing us. That's why that lesbian bitch is dead. Referring to Renee Good. To me, it was so it was so clear that hatred and the way that, of course, then she was smeared afterwards as a way to justify what happened to her. And I think, too, about Alex Preddy, that like his last act was to assist a woman who ICE had brutalized. brutalized. It's like, here are these men we just spent the last hour and a half talking about how, you know, they're recruiting from men who believe that they need to protect the homeland, that they need to protect these vulnerable white women in our country from being raped and killed. And yet the way that they had shoved that woman down and Alex, who actually was demonstrating like genuine care towards her to protect her, to see if she was OK. And those were his last words. He said, are you okay? Because that was, you know, Renee Good being a lesbian with a partner who was standing up to Jonathan Ross, like that was traitorous to what white women are supposed to be in the eyes of these people. And Alex Peretti defending a woman was traitorous to what he's supposed to be doing as a white man, you know? And this just brings it back to my thesis that I made at the beginning, which I don't think is far-fetched, which is that I think in many ways, like Elliot Rogers would have made a great ICE agent in that he was filled with vitriolic hatred for women who he thinks are actively undermining what he is owed as a man. And here you have this man, Jonathan Ross, who is murdering Renee Good for her and her partner's sort of imposition on his masculinity. Like, I really do think that is what's happening here. And I think that is ultimately what ice is. I think this is about men, like FD said, reclaiming their masculinity, which is also what Elliot Rogers was doing in 2014 in Isla Vista. Yeah, the masculine urge to just kill a woman. That's fucking bleak. So dark. And FD is back with us. Before we conclude the episode, I want to talk about solutions for men, which is not something that i invest myself in too often but uh you know we all have to get out of this together it really is reaching a fever pitch and this is like a level of cruelty we're seeing enacted across the country that that just can't fucking continue and i think you know yes abolish ice yes abolish all of this but we also need i think from a really deep and like psychological framework need to understand how to not reach this place where people would want to even join something like this, you know, and maybe that's a lofty ideal. But I think we understand people who really look at this stuff closely that like fighting immigrant, quote unquote, crime, which ultimately just amounts to like, you know, finding undocumented immigrants who work at Home Depot and kidnapping them from their job, like, it's a cartoon issue. And if you're a man seeing these DHS ads, it's not going to give you purpose. It's not, you know, so much of this centers around, like we said before, the supposed danger that undocumented immigrants pose to white women. The Republicans constantly bring up Lake and Riley, Irina Zarutska. They always bring up those crimes as some sort of gotcha when we talk about like Alex Peretti and Renee Good. They're like, oh, where were you when Lake and Riley was killed? Well, the person who killed Lake and Riley is in prison. You know, there's no justice for being murdered. But as far as you can go in the justice system, these people got justice. The difference is people like Alex Pareddy and Renee Good, they were murdered by the state. They have no justice. In fact, the state is trying actively to not even investigate their murders. But also we know that undocumented immigrants aren't the real people posing threatening violence against white women. It's their partners, statistically. It's their pastors. It's straight white men. It's other straight white men. Police and ICE agents and ex-military have a higher propensity to beat and kill their wives. You know? So what is your messaging to young men right now who feel like what was once a sort of niche, highly misogynistic, extremely like bizarre and intense yearning for like reclaiming masculinity that is now like the whole culture, especially pushed from the government? Like, what are you what's your messaging to them? I don't have a lot that I'm as confident in these days. Because what I've started to actually focus on more are the children. Think of the children, actually. I do think community is a big thing. Seek out self-development apart from these overly traditionalized masculine frameworks and find communities outside of spaces that are going to reinforce and lead you back to these spots. And you'd be surprised at how much everything gets better once you're in community and connecting with people and how how little feminists in girls with blue hair piss you off all of a sudden when you have like decent friends that aren't also foaming at the mouth misogynists. But what I do actually think at least a lot of us should focus on is what essentially amounts to the liberation of children. One thing we didn't touch on that I'm going to just drop and then leave so that you guys can't have to deal with the mess of it all is that we often forget that patriarchy is is a non gendered framework. If patriarchy is policed most heavily and most beneficial to men, but like many men, myself included, will tell you that the biggest patriarchs in their world were usually women. And even if even if it's just like other young girls when they were growing up, you know, policing and affirming certain masculine norms. And I bring that up with the children's liberation thing is that we really do have to reframe how we raise little boys. and as a byproduct of that also little girls there's a lot of effort being put in to reframe girlhood all for the benefit all good things like these are all good things that are happening and not nearly as much as being done to reframe boyhood and what we're doing is priming these boys to be very amenable to Andrew Tate or a clavicular once they hit puberty and you know I remember there was a video a year or two ago of Sneeko running into a bunch of like 11 year olds that were fans of his. And they're just shouting slurs and degrading women and trans women. And they don't even really understand what they're doing. But they know that this is what's expected of them as little boys. Fuck the women. Fuck the women. What? No, no, no. No, no. Wait, wait, wait. We love women. We love women. We love women. Not like transgender. Yes, sir. We love everybody. no no what have I done and that didn't start like that's not Sneeko's fault that's not Sneeko's fault that is their parents fault and that is a community and cultural failure for those boys and so we need more parents to be educated on what their kids are accessing online we need more parents to be thinking critically about the tropes and cultural norms that they're reproducing in their home, whether they realize it or not. Even I know progressive parents that are surprised at how misogynistic their children can be. We reclaim more of Gen Z. I heard we got some of Gen Z back in the last year. They were like, whoa, that whole Trump thing seemed cool at the time, but maybe that was a bad idea. Yay. We don't let it even get close with Gen Alpha. We get Gen Alpha, a bunch of Steven Universe DVDs and whatever stuff we can to kind of coax a lot of that nonsense out of them. That is going to be really the bigger fix beyond the things that we know, material conditions and economics and joint labor unions, all the good lefty stuff we know about. But the thing that we're often missing is how we're raising the children up to be primed for this type of nonsense. Caroline, any parting words for you? Oh boy, so many. But what I will say is for men out there, you know when you see a photo of a woman and you think she's with a man who's less attractive than her and you go, what's going on here? Surely it must be he's paying for her or there's got to be some other external factor. Maybe it's because he's nice to her. Maybe it's because he's kind. Maybe it's because he's a person that she connects with and that's why she's with him. And I think maybe you should listen less to other men, especially ones who are making money off of your insecurities, off of your vulnerabilities and who are selling you whatever. Maybe you should listen to what women say. Maybe you should listen to the advice of women on how to talk to women on what masculinity can look like. And it doesn't have to look like the way that you have been bought and sold on. And I think, men, one thing to to work on is being so confident in your manliness that you don't have to perform it. being so confident in and secure in your masculinity that it doesn't look like one specific way and one specific way that really comes at your and everyone else's expense. So men, be free. That's what I want for you. I want you to be free. And if all else fails, join a band. Come on, I got to crack a joke at the end You know what, it was a good one I liked that we brought it back FD and Caroline Thank you so much for being here today Thank you so much for helping me muddle Through this mess Where can people find more Of your stuff? Thank you so much for having me, Matt Thank you, Caroline, for letting me indulge here This was fun I have a big video coming out February 16th, God willing It is the biggest video of my career, at least from a personal psychological standpoint. It's about Tyler Perry. Oh, I will be sad. Good. I often wonder how much Tyler Perry penetrates different cultures, but at least within my perspective, it's a big deal. And yeah, you can find me at the signifier and all my various side channels. Thank you for having me and hope this was good. Are those your kids in the back? Yes. Oh, so speaking of kids, go take care of them. so speaking because fd you are amazing thank you for your work thank you for your voice awesome i appreciate that love i appreciate the the opportunity to come talk you can find me primarily on twitch i stream too much uh trying to actually stream a little bit less but just about every night i am on twitch at caroline kwan i am a pop culture justice warrior that's my new title now. We are out here as PCJWs. The anti-Brett Cooper. Actually, though, I am basically trying to counter Candace Owens and Brett Cooper and these right-wing girly pops in pop culture. Thank you for having me. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for being you, though. And thank you, the listener, for making it so far. As always, I am so grateful that you chose to spend your hour or two with the a bit fruity podcast what are we renaming it the a bit normal podcast just be a bit normal i love you so much i will see you next time and until then stay fruity woohoo that was bleak