C. Bradley Thompson and Jeremiah Johnson: Rise of the 'MAGA Manosphere'

Did mainstream conservatives and libertarians lose a generation of young men to the reactionary right?

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C. Bradley Thompson and Jeremiah Johnson: Rise of the 'MAGA Manosphere'

Did mainstream conservatives and libertarians lose a generation of young men to the post-liberal, reactionary right?

Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with C. Bradley Thompson, author of the Substack newsletter The Redneck Intellectual, and Jeremiah Johnson of the Center for New Liberalism, who wrote the article "Weak Men Create Hard Times: And Weak Men Love a Strongman."

This conversation was recorded live on Wednesday May 21.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

Comments

[VULGAR MADMAN]

Conservatives couldn’t conserve anything and libertarians couldn’t liberate anything. Go guck yourself Nick.

[Mother's Lament - (Sarc's a Nazi, not even joking)]

This.

The people who are calling themselves conservatives and libertarians, aren't.

They're at best big government chickenhawk establishmentarians. At worst extremist corporatist totalitarians wearing conservative and libertarian skin suits.

The young men aren't moving to the reactionary right, or the far-right, or the ultra-right or whatever other smear these phonies want to slime them with. They're moving to the classical liberalism of twenty years ago.

[Roberta]

I don't get the sense that young men are moving at all, let alone that they're moving toward or away from anything in particular. The currents in society make it appear from time to time that things just planted randomly on the bottom are moving in the opposite direction relative to that local, temporary current.

[Mother's Lament - (Sarc's a Nazi, not even joking)]

So it might be more accurate to say that the establishmentarians like Nick and his guests are the ones that are moving, and from the direction they're traveling it makes it look like the youth are heading right even if they aren't moving.

[Rick James]

I guess I need to repost this comment from yesterday:

I've never been one of the 'cool kids' nor ever claimed to be. But in 20 years if I'm still alive I will be able to say with reasonable confidence that when one of the greatest upheavals in American politics was happening, I was there, I ran in the circles and I knew it was happening and understood it.

The sad thing is Reason was never there, never got it, derided it when they caught a whiff of it, and then at the tail end suddenly realized that the way to "reach the kids" was NOT to appear on Bill Maher's show.

[Speaking for normal people]

NO, it was your deserting things that matter to take up name-calling like 'reactionary right'.

[Rick James]

If I can take it, I'm going to see if this interview eventually becomes what the title claims it to be:

How did we fuck up so bad and lose these people?

or

These people are bad, they've strayed from the light and into the darkness, and we need to bring them back into the light by shaming them and pointing out their sins.

[Gaear Grimsrud]

Seems like shaming is how we got here.

[Rick James]

*sigh*

I'm listening to the interview and Nick's first guest claims one of the 'thought leaders' of this 'movement' (a movement as HE (incorrectly) identifies it) is some internet rando who I have never heard of. I believe I was able to find his youtube channel with some difficulty and he has 14k subscribers.

The more I listen to this video, it's a bit like listening to someone who has zero experience or idea about electrical circuits or even how electricity works, try to explain the wiring in your home.

[Rick James]

Further, this is a guy who... by his own admission had NO IDEA anything unusual was going on in American politics until 2017-2018.

This is clearly someone who is incapable of reading the room. Apropos of my comment above, I started to notice something was amiss around 2012. I would never suggest that I foresaw everything we now have as a reality today, but I still remember noticing ripples int he water. It probably wasn't until 2015 on that infamous Wednesday afternoon when the first shots of the REAL culture war were fired that I realized it was popping off. But Jesus h Christ, 2018? Seriously? And now you're going to give us the definitive history lesson on who the thought leaders are by literally referencing some oddball Harvard professor and minor youtube personality?

[Zeb]

What was it in 2015? It's all a blur to me at this point. And I can't believe that was 10 years ago.

[Roberta]

It's when I started having bouts of atrial fibrillation. Also when I got to install the sidesaddle T with junior pee-wees.

[But SkyNet is a Private Company]

The Culture War began in earnest with Trayvon Martin - who could've been Obama's Son. That was 2012 IIRC. Obama's last 5 years set this country back decades.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

Why did the Trayvon Martin issue kick off the culture war?

[chemjeff radical individualist]

It probably wasn't until 2015 on that infamous Wednesday afternoon when the first shots of the REAL culture war were fired

what event was this?

[Vernon Depner]

that infamous Wednesday afternoon when the first shots of the REAL culture war were fired

You mean "Caitlyn" Jenner coming out?

[Mother's Lament - (Sarc's a Nazi, not even joking)]

"I believe I was able to find his youtube channel with some difficulty and he has 14k subscribers."

Well, when you look at where Reason subscriptions are headed...

But seriously, there are aquarium decorating channels that have three million subscribers, and philologists taking about phonemes that have the same. This is a nobody who was snagged because he fits the narrative Goth Fonzie wants to spin.

[Rick James]

Nick is on the outside looking in... plain and simple. The interview got dangerously close to starting to think about feeling around the edges of the problem, but never really dug into the issues. But Nick was literally part of the problem well before 2016. He regularly mocked people who were starting to make noises about these cultural issues, while he remained firmly stuck, fighting the battles of the 80s and 90s and pretending that the cultural issues weren't happening or at best, were nothing more than a sideshow of which libertarians should sit on the sidelines.

Literal quote from Nick in the interview: "I like transgenderism-- kids are a different issue*-- but I like the idea that people are owning their body in profound ways, it expresses who they are-- as long as they don't force the cost on me".

*I guess we're finally getting some movement from Nick's bullshit 'promethean transformation' shit-take that maybe the Dr. Mengele-like carving up and disappearing of gays might not be a super great idea. He still has no idea about the larger issues surrounding the movement that is transgenderism and how homophobic it is.

[Vernon Depner]

Transgenderism is the most extreme expression of sexism that is possible.

[MasterThief]

Ah, yes. Reason is definitely where I go to understand the right.
The conversations in the vague right wing and maga bubble of podcasting have been much deeper and better at parsing topics than the participants in this conversation have involved themselves with. For well over a decade it has been in those spaces that people highlight core libertarian principles like self-ownership, NAP, and the requisite personal responsibility that allows those principles to function for society. It is in those spaces where participants regularly highlight logical fallacies, deceptive rhetorical devices, and investigate real world results of applied principles. Being frank, those right wing spaces actually deliver better arguments for the left than Reason writers bother to construct. Basically, right-wing podcasting better fulfills Reason's stated mission. If Reason would stick to actual libertarian principles rather than arguing everything from a left wing perspective they could be more culturally relevant rather than another msm propagandist.

[But SkyNet is a Private Company]

Member when Reason tried to sell us nobodies like Sohrab Ahmari as boogeymen that were taking over Conservatism?

[Gaear Grimsrud]

I don't but I do remember a flurry of panic at Reason over Christian Nationalism. I had never heard of it but it was terrifying shit. And then inexplicably the coverage disappeared. Is this threat still lurking in the shadows preparing to upend our beloved conservative/libertarian order? Now an evil manosphere is front and center. I anxiously await the next episode.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

Which right-wing podcast does this? The few that I have listened to, have been nothing but selective editing, biased and selective presentation of facts, and repetition of narrative as if it were the truth. I have yet to see anything in the right-wing amateur podcasting space to have a seriously intellectual, rigorous and honest approach to any issue.

[Rick James]

Did mainstream conservatives and libertarians lose a generation of young men to the reactionary right?

This whole interview is making numerous category errors. Namely, they're talking about the "manosphere" and then conflating it to the 'generation of young men' that 'mainstream' conservatives and 'libertarians' lost. The "young men" that the 'mainstream conservatives and libertarians" lost are not all in that Andrew Tate manosphere space.

Edit: His second guest seems to at least have a better handle on the zeitgeist and his first guest does. And he's a Democrat. So to find out why "mainstream conservatives and libertarians" lost young men, Nick needed to bring in a Democrat. Let that sink in.

[Rick James]

Ok, I want to give credit where credit is due: The first guest says that the thing he was repeatedly told by these former conservatives/libertarians-- many of which "worked for CATO" and other libertarian organizations was that institutions like CATO were still fighting the battles of the 1980s and subsequently failed to understand the modern cultural issues that had little to do with economic Marxism.

[Rick James]

And Nick grouses about promethean transformations...

*facepalm*

[Zeb]

This is what happens when you get a PHD in English.

[Rick James]

First guest, Democrat claims that the problem is white men now face competition from darkies and immigrants when they used to have everything handed to them and so they're grumpy about that. Let's ignore the fact that Trump got the biggest swing of black voters into the Republican party in history.

So yeah, we're devolving into the 'they're sinners and have strayed from the path'.

[Public Entelectual]

New from TechX :

Manotechnology

The Next Big Thing for folks with very small MAGA hat sizes

[Rick James]

"The Democratic party is the best place for Libertarians to be right now".

Truer words never spoken, my friend...

[MasterThief]

Was that actually said in the interview? Beyond parody.

[Roberta]

The will to power as meant by Nietzsche does not refer to power in the sense of ordering people around, but to ability.

[AT]

Men will always seek heroes to emulate and live up to. It's just part of being a guy. Men, unlike women, need a purpose. A reason. A quest. A goal. Something that they can win. Or lose, if that's how it plays out. But they desperately crave the mission.

Jesus. Gilgamesh. King Arthur. Alexander the Great. George Washington. Aragorn. Luke Skywalker. Maximus Decimus Meridius. Ellen Ripley. Sarah Connor. (YEA, EVEN WOMEN!) Robocop. Superman. Iron Man.

Men crave heroes.

The left doesn't ever offer them any of that. In fact, they go well out of their way to tell them to be ashamed for even looking, outright calling it "toxic." Then they hand them a soy latte and castrate them. Sometimes literally.

However weird you want to regard it, Trump has fallen into that category with them. He calls the Prime Minister of Canada out to his face. He shows South Africa a literal video of their genocide. And he doesn't apologize for it, and he doesn't back down.

Men across America are LINING UP FOR THIS. If you ask them, their answer is "This is literally what I voted for." Now I, for one, don't quite rank Donnie T in the same ranks as Jesus and King Arthur and Superman - but I get it.

Men need heroes. And Orange Man (and Space Man) Bad are the only ones offering one anymore.