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There are few things so terrible that a white man can do that the media won't still find a way to romanticize him. Even Ted Bundy and David Koresh got the Hollywood treatment that portrays them as glamorous and sexy. In an environment where even murderous sexual predators get romanticized, I suppose it's no surprise that the standard-issue American dirtbag is getting a media glow-up, reframed as daring rebels because they stand up for the millennia-long tradition of letting men skate by with the bare minimum of effort. And yet, it's still annoying.

"Populist flamethrowers rock media," blares a headline at Axios. The text describes "Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy," as well as Substack writer Bari Weiss and comedian Dave Chappelle as people who "brand themselves 'free thinkers' untethered to political dogma." The piece goes on to quoteSaagar Enjeti, a supposedly "anti-establishment" YouTuber: "They explicitly say: 'Screw you.'... I would say that is the heart of a lot of their appeal." Weiss, in a particularly goofy bit of self-congratulation, describes herself as committed "Wrongthink," even though her newsletter is largely dedicated to conservative nostalgia for the days when one's dumbest prejudices could be expressed without discomfort.

RELATED:Why Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation is so dangerous and dangerously appealing to his audience

Even in our bullshit-heavy era, this Axios article is truly off the charts. Repeated self-assertions of rebellion from these figures does not change the basic fact that they are, in reality, the opposite of freethinkers, rebels, or any of the other self-aggrandizing terms they may apply to themselves. On the contrary, the appeal of Rogan, Weiss, Musk, and others to their fanboy base is simple: They are selling validation to a lazy, incurious men who fear change.They are soothing figures, stroking the heads of their D student audiences, telling them that they are in the right to react to any intellectual challenge or threat of social change with a childish tantrum.My god, Weiss wants to start a fake university, so tender-minded conservatives can get an "education" without ever having to grapple with an uncomfortable idea. Not exactly a profile in courage, there.

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Sadly, it's not just Axios who insists on recasting whiny reactionaries are rebels, and the people they hate feminists, anti-racists, LGBTQ activists who are the real rebels advocating for real change as the "establishment." As the article notes, Atlantic writer Derek Thompson fell into the trap of labeling these figures the "DGAF Populists." Which....no. These folks very much do give a f*ck, especially when their unearned status or privilege is challenged, or they are asked to actually learn a thing or two about an issue before opining at length about it.

The laundry list of recent or ongoing controversies these folks kick up demonstrates how much a big ol' whiny f*ck they give if the "right" of crappy white men to impose their ignorance on others is challenged in any way. Musk, for instance, recently drew criticism when he tweeted a comparison of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolph Hitler, because of the measures Trudeau took to stop the far-right blockade of Ottawa. The blockaders were making life hell in the city, constantly honking horns and harassing residents, all in an effort to force their fringe, authoritarian views as well as to demand the "right" to spread COVID-19 by refusing vaccination on an unwilling public. By siding with the blockaders, Musk was siding with the view that a fanatical right-wing minority should be able to rule by fiat on everyone else not exactly the view of a DGAF person who believes in freedom and democracy and doing your own thing.

RELATED:Bari Weiss' field of right-wing dreams: Will the "University of Austin" ever actually exist?

With Chapelle, the situation is equally dark, as he's built his resurgent career on being an obsessive jerk about trans people, doing an entire Netflix special built around his outrage that anyone dare challenge his reactionary attitudes about the issue. The ensuing fallout led to a trans worker at Netflix getting fired for objecting to the anti-trans orthodoxy and Chappelle getting a bunch of new specials, where he and his snowflake-delicate new fans can wallow in their shared anger at having their hidebound ideas about gender and biology contested.

As for Rogan, the two biggest controversies of late involve behavior that would have read as outdated and reactionary a century ago, much less today. First, there's the racism.Rogan bizarrely ranted on a recent episode about someone "100% African from the darkest place where they're not wearing any clothes all day," which is a stereotype that even white people in the early 20th century clocked as over-the-top racism. He also was recently exposed as a frequent dropper of a certain racial slur, as well.

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Then there's the anti-science crap, which is so bizarrely reactionary that it's reminiscent of the medieval church's reaction to Galileo saying the Earth revolves around the sun. Rogan and his guest Jordan Peterson another whiny reactionary who largely focuses on throwing tantrums over challenges to patriarchal authorityand threatens to sue feminists who question him recently unleashed a bunch of complaints about the science of climate change that really would have felt comfy to a 16th century priest defending heliocentrism. And, of course, there's Rogan's ongoing campaign against the Covid-19 vaccination, which is rooted in a fear of scientific advancement that's so out of control that one would not be surprised to next hear him come out against germ theory.

There's, of course, a strong thread linking the priests who locked up Galileo, the 19th century doctors who rejected germ theory, and Rogan's weird paranoia about vaccine technology. All are rooted in a desire for the simplicity of patriarchal authority, where "truth" is whatever rich men in charge want it to be, and the mind is unbothered by troubling questions about evidence, research, and the discomfort of having to abandon prior assumptions in the face of new facts.

RELATED:Elon Musk's Tesla factory in California sued (again) as alleged racist work environment

Despite the surface claims to be somehow non-partisan, the actual arguments of the Rogan/Weiss/Peterson world are, in actuality, no different than what's coming out of the openly right-wing world of Fox News. Just Tuesday, Tucker Carlson was making a defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin a man who literally has journalists murdered on, uh, "free speech" grounds.

Carlson's desires aren't mysterious. He wants a world where one can be racist without being confronted or challenged, where white nationalist and misogynist ideas aren't questioned. And he sides with dictators who will literally use violence to silence dissent. But when knee-jerk reactionaries are recast as "rebels" and fear of robust discourse is rewritten as "free speech," is it any wonder that Carlson feels he can get away with this kind of doublespeak that paint his censorious, authoritarian urges as "freedom"?

But there's also just old-fashioned laziness and entitlement. Thinking is hard. Learning is even harder. Dealing with new ideas from the socially constructed nature of gender to the scientific theory of mRNA vaccines requires work. A lot of that work can be genuinely uncomfortable, especially if it also requires confronting your own prejudices. Picking up a feminist text or reading the history of how the vaccine was developed means giving your brain lots of exercise, some which can be disagreeable as previous assumptions get questioned and cognitive dissonance is suffered. Easier to tune into Rogan's show or read Weiss's newsletter, wrapping one's self in the comfy blanket of never having to the mental work of contending with novel ideas.

Axios marvels at how much money these faux-populists make peddling intellectual lethargy to their audiences, but they shouldn't be. Pandering to laziness has always been profitable in a capitalist society. It's not a surprise that so many of these folks also market supplements or fad diets, such as Peterson's "meat only" nonsense. Such products rely on the wish to have a fit body without the bother of exercise and a balanced diet. Rogan, Weiss, and others are playing the same game, but for the mind: Selling the fantasy that one can be an "intellectual" and a "freethinker" without ever doing much in the way of actual thinking. It's opportunistic and exploitative, but certainly not romantic. Dull people pouting because others find them tedious is nothing new, and it certainly isn't any form of intellectual rebellion.

Excerpt from:
The problem with the populists "free thinkers" they are just lazy - Salon

Lately, I see some variation on this tweet all the time: I just dont understand. Explain to me how it is that [list of criticized evangelical names] can be bad, while [list of secular pundits/public intellectuals] is good. When did Christians start turning to secular voices instead of listening to their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ?

This is a low-resolution version of an idea Ive seen developed in longer-form, more sophisticated contexts, but the gist of the argument is the same: Christian voices deserve closer attention, higher respect, and warmer feelings of commonality from their fellow Christians than secular voices do, simply because they are Christians. And if they dont get that, something is wrong. Something decadent must be at work under the surface.

Perhaps more evangelicals are tuning in to Jordan Peterson than Tim Keller because Tim Keller says uncomfortable truths that they dont want to hear about their idolatrous devotion to conservative politics. Perhaps younger Christian men prefer Ben Shapiros podcast over Gospel Coalition podcasts because theyre more serious about winning political debates on socials than they are about honing a winsome, gospel-centered Christian witness. Perhaps they dislike David French and Russell Moore because theyre Trump fanatics who are being prophetically exposed. Perhaps they watch Glenn Loury and John McWhorter on Talking Heads while ignoring Jemar Tisby or Thabiti Anyabwile because theyre secretly racist, and theyre just looking for a black guy who will tell them what they already want to hear. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

There are cruder and subtler ways of framing this kind of speculation. Sometimes theyll find positive things to say about select secular voices, like Jordan Peterson. Or sometimes theyll include a concession that David French has been obsessively writing the same column for five yearsa very low bar at this point, but still, nice when people admit it. Still, the core thesis remains that as a matter of Christian principle, Christians ultimately need to feel more bonded to fellow Christians than to non-Christians. And explanations of why they dont rarely engage with substance. Instead, one finds variations on the theme of bulverismthe word C. S. Lewis coined in a passage from God in the Dock. This is usually cited as a pull-quote, but I think its worth quoting the fuller context:

Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is wishful thinking. You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself.When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not.If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount ofvapouringabout my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant but onlyafteryou have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.

In other words, you must showthata man is wrong before you start explainingwhy he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussionthathe is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became to be so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it Bulverism. Some day I am going the write the biography of its imaginary inventor, EzekielBulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the thirdOh, you say that because you are a man. At that moment,E.Bulverassures us, there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet.

As always, Lewis is on point.

The truth of the matter is far more complicated, because the truth of the matter is that people are complicated. People have many sides. People have all manner of axes along which they form their alliances and allegiances. The bond of trust is a cord with numerous strands that can fray and breaknot for decadent, pathological reasons, but for ordinary human reasons.

Let me take just one issue: COVID. A while back, somebody asked me what I thought was the most divisive issue of recent times, and without hesitation, I said COVID. Never in my lifetime have I seen anything drive so many wedges between so many groups of people. Its been kind of amazing to watch, especially since Ive always felt there was a certain arbitrariness in how the hawkish and dove-ish sides got politically tagged. In any case, a certain narrative was quickly established: Government mandates were for everyones best good, preventative measures like masking were signs of neighbor love, and vaccines were only unpopular among ignorant, belligerent political radicals. Christians who did not fall in lockstep with this narrative were smeared for being conspiracists, for hating their neighbors, for not being pro-life, for being pro-death, even. Russell Moore, speaking to David Brooks about how evangelicalism lost its mind (no, really, thats the title of the podcast), called evangelical churches crazy for opening their doors and defying mandates. Tim Keller, in a Facebook event with Francis Collins, called John MacArthurs church the bad and the ugly of evangelical pandemic responses. Meanwhile, Canadian pastors like James Coates were literally getting arrested for trying to gather their congregations in organic, incarnated community. If Tim Keller and Russell Moore had a word to spare for them, I missed it.

Canada, of course, has made even bigger news recently. Its not my intent here to wade into the complexities of protest techniques, or to give an unqualified blanket endorsement to all the tactics the truckers have employed. I think there are legitimate concerns about the ripple effects of blocking commerce, and I can respect other conservatives who hesitate to give full-throated endorsements out of consideration for this. However, what you absolutely cannot deny, unless youre just inhabiting a parallel reality, is that the protests were born in a context of suffocating legal overreach, and that Trudeaus response has been nothing short of tyrannical. This is terrifying stuff. We are talking about our closest neighbors in the West. And if we want to talk about brothers and sisters in Christ, we are talking about brothers and sisters in Christ who are caught in the thick of this fight and facing persecution. This is news that demands attention and intelligent commentary from all North American church leaders.

Meanwhile, on a region-by-region basis, conditions similar to those that lit the fuse in Canada have also obtained here in the states. But church after American church has provided the opposite of a prophetic witness. Tim Kellers Redeemer in NYC segregated their congregations by vaccination status (which I dont blame Keller personally for, to be clear, misguided as I think his pandemic thoughts have been). A large evangelical church in Charlotte, North Carolina required employees in its Child Development Center to get vaccinated or be fired. Other churches required proof of vaccination at the door. Before the pediatric vaccine arrived, one church even refused to let children under a certain age into the building. All this and more is documented in Meg Bashams excellent coverage herefrom the Daily Wire, an outlet frequently dismissed and decried in these meta-conversations. But thats part of my point here. If Christian leaders and Christian legacy media were doing their job in these times, Meg Basham wouldnt need to do it for them at the Daily Wire. But the Bulverism and tone-policing will continue until morale improvesor, more likely, until nobody reads Christian legacy media anymore.

Is it any wonder, then, that while so many prominent Christians are silent at best or bullying at worst, ordinary evangelicals find it refreshing when secular voices speak up on the danger of mandates, the collateral damage to children, or even the need for churches to remain open? Yes, Ill say it: In this pandemic, Ive seen atheists who seem to understand better than some Christians what church buildings are for. Ive seen Tom Holland on a stage with N. T. Wright, trying to talk about what the church can uniquely offer, and instead of taking his cue to say something bold and prophetic, Wright says something vague about staying safe. When people talk solemnly about how the world is watching the way Christians talk about this, that or the other thing, I wonder if they really understand whos really watching, and what they really think.

Meanwhile, N. T. Wright is off playing guitar duets with Francis Collins, nodding solemnly along as Collins mocks Christians who think Jesus is my vaccine. Is it any wonder that instead of listening to N. T. Wright, some of us are building connections with people outside the church like Bret Weinstein, who will actually listentowhywe have concerns about the COVID vaccine and think through it with us in a logical fashion?

Let me add one last layer to this: Its ironic to me that the same types of folks who complain about connecting more with non-believers than believers seem to go quiet when these same patterns manifest in a leftist key. The rapper Lecrae has collaborated with secular artists and political figures. Jemar Tisby has worked with Ibram Kendi. Younger up-and-coming writers like Dante Stewart celebrate when their work is noticed by figures like Ava DuVernay. And no doubt if you asked them why, they would lay out their own reasons and frustrations, about their own issues of concern. They would talk about how certain white evangelical leaders werent attuned enough to their concerns about racial injustice. They would talk about how difficult it is to bond and build trust with Christians who seem oblivious to glaring problems in the culture.

Now, no doubt I woulddisagreewith all of that, on substance. Certainly, I have serious problems with the work of specific figures like Kendi. But in the abstract, Im consistent, in that I dont particularly care if these guys feel more warmly towards writers, activists, celebrities, etc. in secular spaces than they do towards leaders in Christian spaces. Because this is my point: This is just how people are. Its intrinsic to the human condition that we are going to gravitate naturally to people who give voice to our particular concerns, with whom we feel a sense of mutual understanding and sympatico. Those people may be Christians. Or they may not be. Its going to be a mix, whatever side of the aisle youre coming from. It is also intrinsic to the human condition of the content creator that we are all going to get a little thrill of excitement when someone were a fan of notices our content. Dante Stewart will fanboy over Ava DuVernay. I will fangirl over Tom Holland (no, not that Tom Holland). This is how it is.

Will this lead people to put an inordinate amount of trust in unwise voices? Of course. For Christians on the left, it might be Ibram Kendi. For Christians on the right, it might be James Lindsay. Is this unfortunate? Yes. But lets be honest: Theres no shortage of unwise voices within the church to serve as objects of misplaced trust. And thats the point. The church, loosely speaking, does not have the market cornered on wisdom. And the outside world does not have the market cornered on foolishness.

So, choose well. And choose wisely.

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Flocking Apart | Esther O'Reilly - Patheos

OTTAWAPrime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the House of Commons Tuesday to announce his intent to retain the Ring of Power.

The ring, which he obtained last monthon the field of battleat the base of Mt. Logan in the Yukon Province, was freed from itsmaster when Trudeau slew a halfling ring bearer and took it from him.

"This ring... this precious ring... it is a gift," said Trudeau before the House of Commons."We can wield its power against the forces of white supremacy and transphobia!"

According to sources, Trudeau had a chance to destroy the ring when former Canadian intellectual Jordan Petersonimplored him to cast it into the fires from which it was made.

But Trudeau, who has been using the ring to quell anti-vaccine protests, today said he would bear it indefinitely.

"This I will have as compensation for the microaggressions I experience every day. Was it not I that dealt the Enemy his death-blow?" he said in his address.

Members of the Canadian parliament were mystified given that there is no ongoing emergency but opted to support their leader to avoid being canceled.

This woman - er, wymxn? - was pulled over for driving alone in the carpool lane. But she's got a surefire way to get out of the ticket: her preferred pronoun is they!

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Trudeau Announces He Will Retain Ring Of Power Indefinitely - The Babylon Bee

In September 2016, two months before Trump was elected, comedian and podcaster Shane Mauss sat across from Joe Rogan, recording episode number 851 of the Joe Rogan Experience. At the time, Mauss and Rogan seemed to have a lot in common: Theyd both worked as comedians and entertainers for over a decade, and theyd both successfully carved out their own paths as podcasters. Plus, theyd both had an interest in psychedelics, which was why Mauss was in Rogans studio that day.

Mauss was enthusiastically received by many JRE listeners, who were impressed by his willingness to take Kratom on air, as well as his insights on smoking DMT. Overall, Mauss working-class, open-minded sense of humor and curiosity sat well with Rogans audience.

In the five years since, however, a lot has changed. Mauss now has his own science podcast, Here We Are, in which he conducts long-form interviews with scientists while touring the country. The show averages a humble 20,000 downloads a month and has become a particularly important pet project for Mauss since COVID hit. Meanwhile, boasting 190 million downloads a month, Rogan and his podcast guests have spent much of the pandemic speculating if the virus was made in a lab, joking that wearing a mask is for bitches and implying that mask mandates could lead to an uprising. Most recently, Rogan has been under fire for hosting guests who spread COVID misinformation and share misogynistic and transphobic beliefs, as well as using the n-word in the past.

Like many others, Mauss noticed Rogans podcast becoming a safe haven for COVID conspiracists at the start of the pandemic, and grew concerned that Rogan was fanning the flames of an increasingly paranoid and misinformed fanbase thats escalated to scientists receiving threats against them and their families. Since he has access to so many scientists and other experts in their fields, he personally contacted Rogan on Twitter to say that the virus is serious, this is gonna be a really big deal, and if you want, I can connect you with some scientists who can explain this really clearly, Mauss tells me. But Rogan never responded. For all I know, he never saw my messages. Hes a super busy guy.

Mauss noticed an underlying theme in everything Rogan said on his podcast, like episode number 1,498 with Jon Stewart in June 2020, where Rogan joked he was going on tour but would spray Lysol on the audience. Kidding aside, the overarching sense that Rogan could distance himself from the crowds of people putting their lives at risk to line his pockets didnt sit well with Mauss. He interpreted it as, You need to be tough, and this is an individual responsibility, and if you dont have big enough biceps to punch COVID, its your fault for getting it.

As the pandemic continued and though much of what we knew about COVID was still evolving Mauss used his platform to try to help with the public health crisis. He interviewed experts like Nina Fefferman, a professor in the ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, about the use of statistical models to predict the outcomes of pandemics, as well as Olamide Jarrett, an associate professor of medicine and infectious disease at the University of Illinois Chicago, to discuss the gravity of the contagion head-on. Most recently, Mauss sat down with emergency room physician Graham Walker, who reviewed Rogans recent interview with vaccine skeptic Robert Malone on Twitter, after Malone compared the vaccine to Nazi medical experiments.

Because Rogan has apologized for spreading misinformation and walked some of his comments back, other comedians have tried to get Mauss to lighten up and look at the context of the podcast. But Mauss argues that the context is even more horrifying. If you think the little clips are bad, if you actually hear where Joe Rogan is coming from, its the perfect storm of everything dangerous during a specifically communal, specifically scientific problem, he argues.

Mauss has since followed up with Rogan again on Twitter:

Ultimately, Mauss tries to control what he can by working to correct the misinformation Rogan repeatedly hurls into the world. But that doesnt mean its easy. Trying to communicate this stuff is like, oh my god. Id rather have COVID than try to explain COVID to the general public, he jokes.

Even as a kid growing up in Wisconsin, Mauss was interested in biology, philosophy and any scientific explanation for human life that he could use to argue with his Christian family. When I first learned about evolution, it was to argue with religious people, quite frankly, he tells me. When Mauss decided to skip college to pursue stand-up, working in construction and factories to pay the bills, he continued to independently educate himself by listening to audiobooks while driving to gigs.

His comedy career took off in 2007 after his first of five appearances on Conan and a Comedy Central Presents special a few years later. But then he found himself at a strange crossroads: My comedy dream came true, and I thought it was going to take longer. So I was like, now what? To try something new, he decided to blend his two loves science and comedy through live themed shows. Soon Mauss got in the habit of emailing scientists with more specific questions for his jokes. Surprised by how accessible they were, this back-and-forth eventually inspired him to start conducting long-form interviews, which laid the foundation for Here We Are.

Mauss, however, wasnt initially successful at blending stand-up and science. One misstep in 2013 was the release of his Netflix special Mating Season, which was intended to make evolutionary biology more accessible to the religious, anti-science groups hed grown up with. I was really unhappy with the end result, Mauss says, admitting that he made something too hyper-accessible and dumbed down. I focused too much on making it funny and not enough on making it interesting because I got scared. I was still figuring out how to present this stuff. But what originally inspired that special getting an evolution-denier in the back of Hyenas Comedy Club in Plano, Texas to say, I never thought Id laugh at science like that still inspires him today. The difference is hes now trying to do it on a broader scale.

Both science and comedy are largely about finding novel incongruities in life and communicating those ideas to others, so it makes sense why Mauss and his scientist guests have a lot in common. And he loves that scientists tend to take a zoomed-out look at most things. Id rather talk with scientists on my show more than I would with almost any comedian on any podcast on almost any day of the week, with few exceptions, he says.

Mauss has also found that scientists are open to being corrected when theyre wrong and are rarely certain about anything. Scientists say, I dont know more than anyone Ive ever met, Mauss explains, something hes been trying to work on personally as well. And that may also be the difference between someone like Mauss hero, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, who hes interviewed several times, and Rogans buddy Jordan Peterson. Ive never met any scientist who speaks so matter-of-factly and with such authority on any subject like the way Jordan Peterson speaks about subjects he doesnt even study, he says.

All of this is very personal for Mauss, too. Years before COVID, he lost his comedy mentor to conspiratorial thinking. When Mauss teacher and close friend was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he fell down a rabbit hole of conspiracies, first focused on what causes MS and then turning to Alex Jones rantings, anti-Semitism and shape-shifting lizard people. His friend soon stopped trusting doctors and went into debt chasing homeopathic cures. I was trying to get him out of that for a while, Mauss says. Its this experience that pushes him to continue to try to reach others who have similarly fallen victim to all sorts of dangerous misinformation.

In the end, too, its also why he views his podcast as his true calling. I dont really even care about comedy anymore, honestly, he tells me. Other than it being a nice way of delivering science in a more palatable, understandable way thats clear and entertaining. He might not have all the answers and what he talks about might be more scary than funny but thats sorta the point: Hes more than happy to hand over the mic to the people who do.

Lauren Vinopal is a writer and stand-up comedian based out of New York City, who writes mostly about health, science and men. She is the host of the Mid Riff Comedy Show in Brooklyn, a frequent podcast guest all over, and lives the life of a teen who looks like they havent slept in years.

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The Comedian Trying to Make Joe Rogan Fans Feel Better About the COVID Vaccine - MEL Magazine

The philosopher Nina Power believes men are under attack. Western society has done away with the positive dimensions of patriarchy, that is, the protective father, the responsible man, the paternalistic attitude that exhibits care and compassion. In her new book, What Do Men Want?, she expresses the hope that, following a great deal of bitterness in recent years, men and women can reconcile on the basis of a renewed and greater understanding of one another and advocates a return to old values and virtues honour, loyalty, courage; rather than being made to feel guilty for their gender privilege, Boys and men must be allowed to be good, to become better.

These are worthy sentiments, but the underlying premise is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Just how prevalent is the current demonisation of men? Have compassion and virtue really been abolished? Are boys not presently allowed to be good? The sweeping, simplistic and vaguely sour tone recalls the handwringing culture wars opinion pieces that have proliferated in recent years. They invariably follow a template: an obscure incidence of arguably overzealous identity politicking usually involving a university campus is held up as evidence of a deep civilisational malaise. The alarmist register can make for compelling clickbait, but whether it can sustain a serious, book-length work is another matter.

To give us a sense of 21st-century male ennui, Power presents a cursory overview of the masculinist online communities known collectively as the manosphere. At the relatively respectable end of the spectrum we find Canadian self-help guru Jordan Peterson, whose brand of commonsensical conservatism has helped lots of young men find a sense of direction in their lives. (Many people, it seems, desire the kind of certainty that comes from someone saying basic things in a stern manner, she notes.) At the more extreme end are gender separatist groups such as Men Going Their Own Way, and self-styled incels (involuntary celibates).

Power argues we should try to understand these communities rather than treating them as pariahs. She invokes the trajectory of notorious pickup artist Neil Strauss, who authored a bestselling manual on chatting up women before eventually seeing the error of his ways, to show that redemption is possible. Intriguingly, she suggests the subculture around obsessive self-improvement contains a kernel of radical leftism: If pro-masculinist books have an appeal it is in large part because they present an image of an escape from various kinds of depressed, morose types of masculinity in a consumerist, hedonistic society. In this analysis, the restraint and discipline advocated by, for example, the NoFap movement which preaches abstinence from masturbation and pornography is re-conceived as a form of anti-capitalist resistance.

After years of febrile identity politics discourse, it can be refreshing to read a writer urging us to come together and put aside our differences. But what does that actually mean? To whom is Power referring when she writes, in an apparent dig at contemporary feminists, that we should be wary of those who seek to generate resentment by pitting men and women against each other? Set against her caricaturing of bien-pensant liberalism, Powers ostensibly reasonable call for compassion feels at best platitudinous, at worst disingenuous or even reactionary: most forms of political struggle involve some measure of conflict between competing groups; to renounce this altogether amounts to a politics of quietism.

There is of course something to be said for the idea that cultivating personal virtue can mitigate the apathy and alienation of modern life, but most people already do this after a fashion. There may indeed be some pockets of misandry here and there, but they hardly amount to a societal war against men. And while many members of incel communities are probably just decent guys who lost their way, enough of them are thoroughly vile for the movement to be of concern. As with so many sallies in the culture wars, there is little substantive insight here just a simmering animus against a largely imagined enemy.

What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents is published by Allen Lane (18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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What Do Men Want? by Nina Power review a misguided defence of the male - The Guardian