Over the weekend, one of you readers sent me this piece from Virtue Online, a website for orthodox global Anglicanism. It’s written pseudonymously; it was published there because the writer is a young conservative Anglican, and though this has nothing to do with Anglicanism, publisher David Virtue gave him a forum. It’s really an important essay. Excerpts:
If you’re a Baby Boomer and a socially-conservative Christian, and you don’t understand young men nowadays, I’m writing for you. I also have something to ask of you at the end of this essay.
It recently came to my attention that some of you don’t understand why a large number of young men have become shut-ins, often addicts, without career or romantic prospects. The term used for this now is “
[NEET].” That is, they are Not in Education, Employment or Training. Men described as NEETS are those who were once simply called slackers, basement-dwellers, and so on.I’d like to explain how this happened.
More:
I’m a young man, somewhere between a Millennial and a Gen Z. I’m Christian, had good grades in school, worked hard, and finished college. I was raised well, too. I don’t want everything handed to me, and I don’t like those who do. You’d think that would help me in life.
It doesn’t.
I can’t use my degree in a helping profession, which supposedly needed more men, because it went woke. Now, I’m on my fourth career. I have been passed over for multiple positions because I was a man instead of a woman. The people who passed me over admitted to it. I finally gave up and started a business, but artificial intelligence and inflation undercut me. Some of those who helped me to establish my business even told me they were hoping to mentor a woman instead. In addition, even some of my customers wanted to work with a female-owned business.
As a result, I can’t use the money I would otherwise have made to fund the Christian ministry I really had my heart set on.
I’m now a skilled tradesman. I live on my own, with no debt and money in the bank… but I have a non-zero chance of dying at work, and overwhelming overtime, which I can’t get out of. For the privilege, I had to be turned away at the door by multiple other trades, because they refused to work with some college boy.
By the way, women consider blue collar jobs trashy, no matter how well they pay, so there’s a distinct possibility that I continue to work massive overtime for nothing. They turn me down when I ask them out on dates, and then say there are no good men nowadays.
To put this another way, I gave up my twenties to extreme working hours that didn’t help. I’m now doing the same thing to my thirties. It will be decades before all the progressive hiring managers (usually women) retire or die, so there’s no way out.
My peers have watched me give up everything I enjoy, dramatically lose weight from skipping meals, get sick from overwork, and fall asleep in church, just to escape the NEET lifestyle. I’m not a role model. I’m a dire warning not to try. I almost had to give up writing this essay because I have no time off.
I strongly urge you to read the whole thing. The final section contains this:
Society didn’t just passively abandon young men. It actively went out of its way to destroy them, and succeeded. If, after all of this, you told these young men just to work harder, they swallowed their rage and quietly gave up on you. There was nobody left who could clue you in about a growing youth underworld of nihilism, and
justifiedeconomic despair.Speak with your sons and grandsons about this. Show them this article. They will know what I’m doing. Listen without judgment. If you can help them, do it now.
I sent the essay to J.D. Vance. Somebody in power has to be made to care. I think J.D. is just about the only politician at his level who does.
The top sociologist of family Brad Wilcox introduces a new study with 𝕏this tweet:
Here’s a link to the survey of 2,000 young men. Please read it. Please.
You are by now accustomed to me pointing out that the alienation of young middle-class men in 1920s Germany was a major factor in the rise of the Nazis. **Do not read that as me calling all young American men today proto-Nazis! **My point is that people who are hopeless become open to anything that promises to relieve them of their suffering. Yesterday I started reading a recent biography of Huey P. Long, the populist governor of Louisiana whose was name-checked in a recent Vance speech. Everybody today thinks of Huey as a populist demagogue, and that’s not really wrong. But when you read about what conditions were like for the vast majority of Louisiana people in the 1920s, when a small, wealthy oligarchy ran the state, you cannot be surprised that Huey rose. As corrupt and as power-mad as he was, most Louisianians knew that he fought for them — and produced tangible results to make their lives better, and to smash the power that the oil companies had over Louisiana government.
One thing I say in the final chapter of Weimar America is that if we don’t want to see illiberal, anti-democratic goverment of either the Left or the Right in America, then the center-left and center-right parties had better get serious about improving the life prospects of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Read the NEET essay to understand better what life looks like for many young men.
𝕏Brilliant graphic from this tweet:
Here’s an even crazier part. Cofnas is controversial because he believes that scientists should study race and genetics. His persecutor, University of Ghent rector Petra de Sutter, is coming after him on that … but de Sutter, a MtF transgender, is also 𝕏a transhumanist who advocates genetically altering embryos to make them to order.
Headline from today’s *Times of London. *Good grief. Last week, UnHerd published a disturbing piece about how the Kremlin has weaponized Russian Orthodox church buildings in Europe. Excerpts from Lucy Ash’s report:
European security agencies increasingly view Russian church networks with suspicion. An
[open-source investigation]by the Kyiv-based Molfar Intelligence Institute in late 2024 concluded that the ROC “constructs churches near strategic facilities, government institutions, and military bases across various European countries” in a systematic effort to use religious outposts for espionage. In Bulgaria, Czechia, North Macedonia and elsewhere, “spies in cassocks” have been used as an alternative to diplomatic cover after the expulsion of Russian embassy staff following the invasion of Ukraine. In 2024, a priest from a Russian church in the Czech resort town of Karlovy Vary was expelled over suspicions of hostile activities. “We would be particularly foolish,”[said one Czech MEP,]“if we did not recognize that Russia is undeniably using the Orthodox Church to carry out its hybrid warfare.”
More:
Moscow has also been quietly hoovering up strategic real estate. In Vardø, a remote Arctic town close to Norway’s GLOBUS radar station, the Moscow Patriarchate
[secured]local approval, and even Norwegian state funding, to build a chapel. Clergy from the nearby Russian diocese of Plesetsk and Kargopol, including its bishop, made frequent visits to Vardø to unveil monuments to Norwegian partisans and consecrate Orthodox crosses. They said the chapel would serve Orthodox sailors and be a reminder of the cultural ties between Russia and Norway. But when the proposal was eventually submitted, the chapel had grown to 17 meters in height and, according to Vardø’s current mayor, the Russian bishop insisted the exact location under Nato radars had been “dictated” to him “by God himself”. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and growing scrutiny of Moscow-linked institutions, the plans were shelved.But many Russian churches have been built in sensitive spots, including in neighboring Sweden. The Church of the Holy Mother of God of Kazan in the town of Västerås, west of Stockholm,
[built and consecrated in 2024], is near a major airport, a water treatment works and a network of energy companies. Markus Göransson, a researcher at the Swedish Defense University, felt it was too close for comfort. “When Sweden’s defense forces undertake exercises on or near the airport… they do so under possible surveillance from the church,” he complained. Moreover, locals discovered that the plot of land for the church had been bought by Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear corporation which also, through an intermediary, funded the construction. Last August, the agency overseeing non-state religion funding in Sweden cut off state subsidies to the Västerås parish citing security concerns.
It’s hard to know what to believe when it comes to Russia, Europe, and this war. So much propaganda on all sides. But I checked with a distinguished scholar friend who is a longtime Russia expert, and he says this report is plausible, and that he has been following this story for some time. He adds that Patriarch Kirill’s putting the Russian church firmly under Putin’s thumb has caused a serious decline in the Church’s reputation among ordinary Russians. These data are being reported in serious Russian journals, he said.
If this report is true, or substantially true, it’s both infuriating and depressing. No church should be weaponized by any state. It’s so cynical, and even blasphemous. You expect that of the Bolsheviks, but to ponder that it might still be going on is terrible. Ukraine has treated the canonical Orthodox churches in its territory terribly, but they’re doing so because Kyiv believes that Moscow sees its own clergy inside Ukraine (they used to be all part of the same church, prior to the war) as soldiers, of a sort. I don’t think this is true, or haven’t thought that, but what do I know? After this UnHerd report, I am rethinking things.
Dishy piece in the Times of London today about why nobody in Hollywood will miss Harry and Meghan. Excerpts:
Meanwhile, Spotify was immediately disappointed by
[Meghan’s podcast,]for which they had paid a rumoured $20 million. According to reports, they couldn’t get a decent idea out of Harry — who at one point floated the idea that he would talk to world leaders about their trauma and ask why someone like Vladimir Putin had turned out so crazy while he, Prince Harry, was just fine.[Archetypes],The situation got so bad that one day after Spotify ended their contract, Bill Simmons, Spotify’s head of podcast innovation and monetisation,
[labelled Harry and Meghan “f***king grifters”].Sadly for the Sussexes, the grifter label stuck for many Americans.
Poor Britain, suffering so much right now, and now it’s gotta take that pair back. I think dim bloke Harry might have been fine if he had just married some aristocratic English airhead, à la mode, instead of a mediocre Hollywood actress with Big Plans.
Someone in the wonderful, long Saturday comments thread about places we’d like to live mentioned that she has a background in north Louisiana, and watching “Duck Dynasty” — set in West Monroe, in far northeastern Louisiana — made her sentimental. That brought to mind something I wrote in 2013 at The American Conservative, about the funeral of my mom’s uncle, James Fletcher. I drove Mama up to Uncle Jimmy’s funeral in West Monroe. He was a simple, working-class man, deeply devout. My mother loved him very much. She said he and Aunt Ethel Mae were so kind to her as a child.
I only met Uncle Jimmy once or twice in my life, so I didn’t really know him. But boy, that funeral made me wish I had. Excerpts from my 2013 report:
We pulled into the parking lot of the Trinity Baptist Church, a red-brick temple in a working-class neighborhood that had seen better days. This was Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Ethel’s church, and had been for many, many years. Before the service, I met Mildred Chapman, their neighbor. It was her late husband Peewee who led Uncle Jimmy to the Lord so many decades ago. They worked together at the paper mill, and were friends. One day, Peewee walked across the street and asked Jimmy if he knew Jesus. Soon after, Jimmy and Ethel were baptized in that church, and became faithful members.
During the funeral service, a number of people in the congregation stood to say what Uncle Jimmy had meant to them. One older woman said she grew up in that church, and the thing she remembers most is that Brother and Sister Fletcher were
there. Always. Always. This theme emerged in the remembrances: the steadfast presence of James and Ethel Fletcher, married 71 years, in the life of this little Baptist congregation.Uncle Jimmy was a presence in the community, too. He lived on Nat Street, a short walk from the mill. He was a genius with car engines. On the weekends, cars would line up on Nat Street for Uncle Jimmy to give them a tune-up, which he did for free, because this was something he could do for people.
Frail Mildred Chapman stood up behind me to testify on Uncle Jimmy’s behalf. She and Peewee lived on Nat Street too. Peewee was killed in a car crash when Mildred was pregnant with twins. Jimmy became a father figure to her boys, she said. Once he rebuilt a used bicycle for the kids so beautifully that it looked brand-new. Those fatherless boys living on Nat Street in the 1940s (I guess it was) wouldn’t have had anything if not for Uncle Jimmy.
People told these stories about Uncle Jimmy. And they spoke of his abiding sweetness. His daughter Linda recalled how much love her parents had for each other, and showed to their children. How the only disagreements they had amounted to each raising their voice once, and … that was it. How Uncle Jimmy could build anything, but how he and Aunt Ethel loved making quilts together, and how the children’s and grandchildren’s closets are full of their homemade quilts. How they taught their children to pray, and how their children saw their parents praying all the time. Now, said Linda, all the children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren are faithful to the Lord — this, all because their mother and father were not only steady in their prayerfulness, but made their piety real by their love for each other, and for all. Toward the end of the service, their son Ken, a fine Gospel musician, sang a song to his mother, there to bury the love of her life, thanking her, and thanking him, for all the kindness and sacrifice they had given. He named, in the song, the things Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Ethel did for them. It was a moment of almost unbearable tenderness.
I mustn’t forget what Uncle Jimmy’s grandson Richard said. Over the years, when Richard and his family would drive down from Arkansas to visit, Uncle Jimmy would always tell them goodbye by saying something close to (I didn’t write this down), “Y’all have a safe trip home. I’ll be praying for you. Please call when you get there.” Every time. A week or so ago, with Uncle Jimmy, now 92 a…
