Tags
alt-right, culture, faith, insanitybytes, politics, Teh Stoopid
Interesting article in the Chicago Tribune, ‘Imploding’: Lawsuits. Fundraising troubles. Trailer-park brawls. Has the alt-right peaked?
First I have to say, white nationalism is only a fraction or a faction of the Alt Right, one that has been in conflict with other aspects of the Alt Right for quite some time.
Second of all, I get the fact that dirty laundry sells, but the Chicago Tribune really packed this article with some demeaning stereotypes about trailer parks, Wal Mart, and sleeping with your stepdaughter. These things are all true…..of this particular group of yahoos. Just the same there’s a bias, a narrative behind this article that is unmistakable.
They also said, “President Donald Trump’s reluctance to disown white nationalism….” which is rather untrue. Supposedly white nationalism is imploding which is then portrayed as some kind of failure on the presidents’ part? Wut? Since they are imploding, getting kicked off a social media, facing lawsuits, arrests, losing their funding, I’d have to conclude, something is working.
But what I really wanted to say about all this is that the root of the problem with the Alt Right is lost boys seeking leadership, hungry for some direction, wanting some power. They are struggling to find their place in the world, their role. This is not a crisis of white supremacy so much as it is a crisis of masculinity. As a culture we can’t just slay racism or mock trailer park antics, we need to get serious about nurturing and fostering some healthy male roles in our culture.
Connor Perrin, says he “drove all night from Austin to Charlottesville to protest what he saw as the oppression of white men in the United States.” In a way he is right, except these guys took what was in an internal problem and tried to make it external. He as an individual was feeling oppressed, no doubt coming off of a bad economy, a political system that often seems to have their fingers in their ears, perhaps bearing witness to the rampant opiate epidemic our country doesn’t like to talk about.
One thing you learn if you have good leaders, good role models is how to personalize things. There’s a tongue and cheek saying, “it’s always all about you,” and that’s a positive thing, that means the buck stops here. That’s a call to personal responsiblity. Feeling rejected, down trodden, put upon? What do you personally need to get out of that situation? What feelings do you need to address? If the answer is to rage and protest, to try to change the whole world, you’ve fallen in a rabbit hole. The truth is, we can never change the whole world, we can only change ourselves and our own circumstances.
That is a huge part of learning how to embrace your own power and how to utilize it effectively. One might even call that leadership, as in you are the one driving your own boat, you control the horizontal and the vertical.
There’s a huge faith deficit around the lost boys, many false teachings, tragic misdirections, and even a handful of Christians trying to pour fuel on a fire that leads to nothing but destruction. What concerns me is that until you address the root of the problem, pluck it out and replace it with something so much better, we’re going to have young men who are easily radicalized and then exploited by different self-serving factions who really don’t care about them at all. But of course if some recruiter from Identity Evropa is the only person who seems to have shown any interest in you, well……
Radicalizing young men has probably been going on since the dawn of time and it’s an issue that cuts across all cultures and races. Black and hispanic kids in the city often have gang recruiters ready to step in and offer them a place in the world, an identity. Cults have been recruiting college kids since forever, and the white identity movement is always around in the shadows, too. Joining any of these groups often just leads to suffering, exploitation, and sometimes death.
I say this all the time,“it’s always all about you.” It’s not easy to navigate the world, to find your identity within it, and there are a lot of pitfalls, a lot of deceptions waiting to lead you astray. One real blessing of faith is that we learn that our identity is in Jesus Christ. We have a membership, an inheritance, we are adopted into a kingdom as sons, and our faith comes from the inside out. All of these issues we wrestle with from the culture today stem from people seeking an external identity, an external solution for what is an internal problem.
See, there's this thing called biology... 
What a deeply thoughtful, compassionate, and wise post this is. I think you are right, Many poor, young men feel powerless and oppressed and are seeking ways to combat those feelings. I hope they turn inward as you suggest and do not intensify the powerlessness by allowing themselves to be exploited by the alt right. We need to find alternative routes for empowering and valuing those who feel marginalized.
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Like most doctors do these days, we just want an easy band-aid to cover symptoms instead of prescribing lifestyle changes to fix the root cause. I think it was James over at the Isaiah project who wrote about the damaging decline in masculinity and he’s spot on too! Our young men do not have good male role models in their lives—not in leadership, and often (tragically), not in their home. Even in the church, there is a denigration of men and male leadership. Change begins at home. Wives need to encourage their husbands instead of belittling them—especially when the children are present. In the media, I’d love to see more smart male protagonists instead of the typical weak-minded man-child made fun of.
Like you, I grow weary of the obvious bias in our news media distorting truth to promote agendas. How do we combat the overwhelming tide of misinformation and deceit?
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“Even in the church, there is a denigration of men and male leadership. Change begins at home. Wives need to encourage their husbands instead of belittling them—especially when the children are present.”
Some of the denigration of men in the church, unfortunately, is being done by the male church leaders.
While there is the admonition for Christians to encourage one another (1 Thess. 5:11), the change at home might be better effected by wives following the commands to submit to their husbands and respect them. If wives do this, then I expect the children will learn from that example.
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That’s what I was attempting to say, but perhaps said it poorly.
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well we use to have things like the Boy Scouts, Indian Guides, etc…groups that were lead by men, mostly dads, who helped to lead, guide and mould boys into men—doing guy stuff with other guys and mentors and dads…and then all that changed…everything became inclusive so guys stopped doing guy stuff with other men, dads and mentors as everything became coed…so do we wonder why many guys now have a problem with needing direction and leadership…lots of lost little souls wandering these days for more reasons than this….
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“As a culture we can’t just slay racism or mock trailer park antics, we need to get serious about nurturing and fostering some healthy male roles in our culture.”
Well said, IB. I think you’re spot-on here. These kinds of articles only confuse the issue. It’s more about an identity crisis, which makes these men susceptible to radicalization. But, as you also said, knowing who we are in Christ circumvents these reactionary lies about our manhood (or womanhood), as we are no longer emotional and spiritual orphans in need of affirmation in culture, but finding our identity as sons and daughters in whom God is well pleased. That makes all the difference! We are free to be who we are and love people for who they are, not being fearful that they’re not like us.
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At this point of the game, I’m getting tired of hearing “Men don’t have enough social support ergo they act like monsters” because it’s yet another iteration of externalizing an internal problem. Continually excusing self and blaming others is how we get Elliott Rodgers.
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Good. I’m getting tired of hearing that too.
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Saw this video that made me really hopeful about stuff like this. I want to see more of the church getting in on this, going out and loving vulnerable young men, vulnerable people really. That is how we rebuild communities, not through rhetoric like the kind in the article you linked to, but through love, showing people in Whom their identity can be found.
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Amen! Yep! Another name for mentorship is actually discipling. There’s just no short cut to loving people, no program that will replace that human touch. “We love because He first loved us.” If you’re not getting the message that you are loved and invested in, your whole world goes dark. I really liked what that guy said about how, “one of these guys gets shot going to the store to get diapers, that’s on my conscience.” Hallelujah! That whole notion of stepping in and taking responsibility is sometimes sadly missing in our world.
Our pastor once said, everybody’s a dad. I really like that attitude, that notion that suggests whether you have kids of not, your job is to be looking out for as many somebody’s as you can.
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Really well said IB. Men in particular I think are subject to the “savior” complex and the need to feel part of a group or cause that’s fighting for what they believe is the ultimate good. Our culture is really upside down in how it views and treats men. Denigrating them, denying their masculinity and obvious differences with women has created a horrible backlash that erupts in movements like the alt right.
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Well said, as always. John Eldridge said, I think it was his book Wild At Heart, that women lament, “Where have all the good men gone.” And his reply was “You’ve emasculated them.” Not to say women are why there is a loss of real masculinity, but you are right in that the role models are missing. Unfortunately I see this every day. Most boys see either the “violent monster”, “the wimpy emasculated man” or sadly “the missing in action man.”
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