
The most fundamental problem in America isn’t illegal immigrants. Or the urban underclass. Or even mosques where radicalized imams preach authentic, jihadist Islam. The troubles we associate with each of those are just symptoms, like the bumps people used to get that told them they had the plague.
The plague we’re now living through starts at the top, with our so-called elites. It’s a problem of rich, influential, highly educated white men and the women who tell them what to think, say, and do. That starts in college, at places like Yale, where I learned in the early 80s that if you wanted the women of your prospective dating pool to give you a second look, you had to listen carefully. You needed to follow their social cues, memorize which opinions were “beyond the pale,” and generally learn how to empathetically agree with whatever they said.
Better still if you could internalize their views and get out ahead of them, expressing their opinions without even being prompted — like a dog who knows when his owner is coming home and pants at the door. If you wanted a macho moment, you might go further left than the women did, maybe say something positive about Communism or late-term abortion. But that was the extent of it.
Any hint of disagreement, any hesitancy in joining whatever moral panic these young women were stoking, marked you off as “dodgy” or even “bigoted.” Cross one of the countless pink lines these half-educated teenagers laid down, and in their eyes you might as well be a registered sex offender. A woman might have been smiling at you, maybe even flirting. But if you ventured an unapproved opinion, her face would curdle before you and a hint of fear flash through her eyes. She’d stare at you like a little girl on Christmas morning who’d just watched you strangle Santa Claus.
I speak from experience, of course, because I followed none of the rules laid out above. I’d have the abortion argument on the first date, which saved me the cost of a second. As a blue-collar guy from Queens, I was no more going to let these girls (or their tame, neutered boyfriends with their flouncy scarves and clove cigarettes) dictate my opinions than I’d let the Sandinista nuns in pantsuits do it in high school. In fact, I went out of my way to flout, scorn, and defy them — with predictable results.
The Mating Dance of Carnivorous Sheep
After I published pro-life or anti-gay activist editorials in The Yale Daily News, whole tables would fall silent as I passed in the dining hall, where I would inevitably eat alone with a book. Or a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine, wearing my “Better Dead Than Red” T-shirt.
Not easy but it was worth it — totally worth it.
I’ve written in depth in my fake TED talk, “There Is No ‘U’ in ‘Winner,’” how our current so-called elites are selected now not based on talent, hard work, or virtue, but rank conformism — their skills as carnivorous sheep. But when I wrote it I didn’t see the sex angle. For that, it took watching J.D. Vance’s recent interview with Margaret Brennan.
For those who missed VP JD Vance’s masterclass interview with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. pic.twitter.com/Ui3lHhjtFx
— charmane harbert
(@callme_Chari) January 26, 2025
As RealClearPolitics summed up the exchange:
[Brennan] pressed [Vance] on the White House pause of refugee resettlement operations, reminding Vance of his past support for admitting into the country those who were “properly vetted.” The vice president replied that the efficacy of the entire screening process was in doubt, pointing to an Afghan national recently arrested for plotting a terror attack in Oklahoma as an example.
The subsequent crescendo launched a thousand memes and highlight reels on the right that one giddy conservative pundit compared to the coverage Michael Jordan got on ESPN during his prime.
“It wasn’t clear if he was radicalized when he got here,” Brennan started to say of the terror suspect who came to the United States after the Afghanistan withdrawal and several rounds of vetting. “I don’t really care, Margaret,” interrupted Vance. This was the mic drop moment the White House wanted.
Multiple male appointees have calmly weathered shrieking Democrat females, as James Wood observes.
Silence is golden. pic.twitter.com/QKiKSD9JAj
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) January 30, 2025
But Vance tossed a Molotov cocktail into the “Longhouse.” Have you heard of it?
It’s the term conservative writers use to describe the social mechanism by which elite white women vent their outrage at any dissent from the current woke party line. The offender (usually, but not always, a white male) is hauled up before the tribunal of “decent” public opinion and pilloried with every kind of accusation from transphobia to racism, sometimes with even a Nazi-smear implied. Women go on social media lecturing, ranting — or when they’re really serious, sobbing.
Selena Gomez sobs uncontrollably amid ramped up deportations of illegal aliens:
“I’m so sorry. All my people are getting attacked. The children, I don’t understand. I wish I could do something.”
“My people?” Aren’t you American?
Where was the sobbing over the 100,000 Americans… pic.twitter.com/wvtoeRVQUw
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) January 27, 2025
Women Should Civilize Men, Not Geld Them
What kind of man wouldn’t have the empathy to bow before the Longhouse, to join the scapegoating ritual? A “toxic” male, a “racist,” or “fascist,” the kind smart women will stay far away from. We could describe the past eight years of Trump Derangement Syndrome as the Longhouse on a vast, global scale — which won the support of the scared white guys at the FBI as well. (Of course they are scared — of the Longhouse, and their carping Chardonnay wives.)
Now, as with every evil (since Satan, like Sauron, can create nothing himself), the Longhouse is a perversion of something originally good. As George Gilder explained in his classic Men and Marriage, the most important mechanism for civilizing wild, hormone-crazed young men is … young women. Sure, some of them will date the “bad boys” and usually rue it, but overall, young women impose on young men some expectations of decency, discipline, and respect. That’s the price of being considered potential dating material. In subcultures where this mechanism breaks, such as the inner city, the results are grim: Pregnant teens on welfare and no-show baby daddies, many of them on the short path to prison. This crucial social mechanism got perverted among our elites by the Sexual Revolution and its violent backlash, feminism.
Now to prove that you’re “safe,” “decent,” and eligible, young men among our elites must internalize and spew back the toxic falsehoods that infest academia, from support for abortion to the existence of 47 genders and illegal migrants’ “rights” to colonize our country. Most such men get the memo, and when women like Margaret Brennan tell them to jump, they ask only “How high?”
J.D. Vance didn’t do that in this interview. He might as well have worn a Soldier of Fortune T-shirt and spat tobacco juice on the floor. The spectacle was glorious. Go watch it for yourself — the Longhouse going up in flames.
To mark this cultural moment, I did what I always do: Wrote a parody that ruins a famous, beautiful poem. (If you missed it, go check out my George Floyd-era “The Charge of the Gadarene Swine.”) This time I chose Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poignant meditation on mortality, “Spring and Fall.” Here’s the original:
Spring and Fall
(to a young child)
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
The Longhouse Falls
I’m sorry, Father Hopkins, but here’s my update:
The Longhouse Falls
(to a CBS correspondent)
Margaret, are you grieving
Over cartel gangsters now leaving?
Grieve you the words of a man you
Can’t cut off, gaslight, or misconstrue?
Ah! as Trump’s term grows riper
Rage will shake your every fiber.
“Talk to the hand,” “I just don’t care”
As coiffed and haughty Karens glare.
And still you will chide the empty air.
Now no matter, matron, the cause:
You’ll start hard-hitting the sauce.
No guilt trips, no nor smears, prevail
Nor can you threaten him with jail.
It is the rage scolds were born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.
The post J.D. Vance vs. Margaret Brennan Exposed What’s Killing Our Country: The Karens appeared first on The Stream.
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