332 Comments

Nail on the head.

I think another contributing factor is the emasculation of men for the last 3 decades. "The war on patriarchy" will/has led to disorder.

How bad is it...well our vice president's name spells it:

¡Que Mala!

Expand full comment

when I was a kid in Europe, father worked and mom stayed at home and did the household. Seems like here in the US mothers started to work out way sooner. In our class of 32 kids, not one mother worked (or certainly not full time). Some helped out with some cleaning and some did some baby sitting, probably, but all mothers were stay-at-home. Thankfully I see young mothers start to do the same, and one is home schooling, which I think in the circumstances, is great. This is forbidden in most European countries though.

Expand full comment

A stay-at-home mom with a college education is a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps the most important course I took was Child Develpment and Psychology in my pre-nursing curriculum. Raising children to be responsible adults is the most important job in the world. A career can wait.

Expand full comment

This is why the effort to shame all stay at home mothers who educate themselves regarding food and medicine and the limitations of public education as "privileged" Karen types (if of a certain socioeconomic class) or "dumb" religious types. The message is clear that taking responsibility to raise A's is a threat to the powers that be.

Expand full comment

Huzzah!

Expand full comment

Imagine the lesson that imparts to the child in a culture that claims child rearing is a waste of a mother with an education. Imagine what a child learns when they learn the low status that teachers hold.

Expand full comment

100%!!! There is no more important job in the world.

Expand full comment

Ah yes. In those days no married woman with kids was a seamstress or a shopkeeper or any of those things people have always had to do to keep the household afloat.

Of course it's true that the postwar prosperity that created an urban middle class throughout the Western world let an unprecedented number of women stay home.

Did your grandma stay home and keep house? Your great-grandma? Perhaps they were farmer's wives and worked from before sunrise to long after sundown, with one task or another, to ensure the farm succeeded.

Expand full comment

Wow. Brutal but seems pretty true.

The key here, though, stemming from Ryan's comment is that maybe there are Tasks - bread winning, house keeping, child rearing, et mucho al - and there are Roles.

Tasks can often be checked off by pretty much anyone.

But teaching a boy how to be a man, or to demonstrate to your daughter how a man should treat women, and how they treat a woman - which I just realized might be different - requires a Role Model and that just can't be done by anyone other than a man. A Masculine Man.

Since the idea that Masculinity could be generalized as Toxic was introduced, some important Tasks have have been left undone, and of course young men still found Role Models. They just haven't been Masculine Men.

Pity for Us.

Expand full comment

I have said elsewhere that all the screaming feminists who helped destroy society were unlikely to have been the daughters of competent fathers.

I have also said elsewhere that far too many of the fathers of the boomers--that sad reviled cohort of which I am one--either survived a brutal war that left them damaged in a dreadful grab bag of ways, or were unfit for service and therefore the second or third choices of women whose desired choices were off getting killed or maimed.

Do HR harridans come from happy families with strong fathers? Does a competent father raise a daughter whose only goal in life is to major in gender studies and kvetch about everything to everyone ever after?

For where we are now, we should look back to the great-grandparents' generations. It didn't just happen by fell magic that we've got a shortage of intelligently masculine men now.

Expand full comment

No, it definitely happened by design. Wars serve so many purposes which is why we're constantly having them.

Expand full comment

People like to kill those who don't want to follow their directives, or for any other reason too. Parents murder their kids all the time. Even easier to kill other people's kids. Human nature, etc. etc.

Expand full comment

So true. Reminds me of an episode of the TV show "Roseanne" when the young son, D.J. - after a biting retort from Roseanne - says to his Dad (John Goodman) "I thought it was GOOD to be a man, Dad" and Goodman replies, "Oh, no, D.J. It hasn't been good to be a man since the '70s". Hilarious, sad and true.

Expand full comment

Well, that explains my last 50 years. *sigh*

*waves* Hey, Jules!

Expand full comment

Well said, Pi!

Expand full comment

Very astute comment!

Expand full comment

Why yes my wife stayed home and kept house until the kid were high schooled. As did my mother, grandmother, great grandmother, etc. None were necessarily farmer's wives, none the less homemaking was, and is an honorable full time job.

Expand full comment

You must come from people with money.

My mother got to stay home. Her mother didn't.

Expand full comment

People with money? Nope, mostly shanty Irish.

Frankly, growing up during WW II and a bit after I can't recollect any cousins or friends that didn't have stay at home moms.

Expand full comment

same here but even later into the 60s and 70s

Expand full comment

I stayed home. Here in Northern Virginia we went to the pool and summer fairs, and to visit relatives. No lavish vacations to the Bahamas or other expensive entertainment. We did not miss it.

Expand full comment

There is a difference between "no lavish vacations" etc. and being unable to afford a basic middle-class life without two parents working.

Expand full comment

True, but in the 'olden days' there was not the rampant consumerism - in terms of quantity/variety - and the 'need' to have the latest of everything so many ppl feel today. Amazing how those who don't have two nickels to rub together seem to acquire a lot of stuff - big screen TV, boat, vacations... Back in the day, most ppl never had the time, the money, the choice or the ability to get what society today considers a necessity.

Expand full comment

"Amazing how those who don't have two nickels to rub together seem to acquire a lot of stuff - big screen TV, boat, vacations..."

These same people often can't pay back their school loans, and can't afford to buy a house.

Expand full comment

"But I made my minimum payment every month!"

Expand full comment

Bazaars are a modern invention?

Expand full comment

I see the gray area here but you're pretty on top of it with your responses.

Expand full comment

Everything is a matter of scale. You wouldn't have SpaceX without that guy who invented the wheel.

Expand full comment

This is true. The postwar boom allowed for one income families in the middle class. It was a temporary phenomenon, turns out. People seem to think this is how it always was, in "the old days," but throughout history most families have needed both people working and the kids too in many cases.

Expand full comment

When people talk about how normal it was for women to “stay home,” they’re not saying that there was no work for them to do in said home or that they didn’t spend their days doing it. My great-grandmother stayed home with eight kids… where, among other things, she baked the family’s bread every single day. It’s not a “coming from money” thing.

Expand full comment

Thank you for explaining life on your planet. I never would've guessed.

Expand full comment

yes, same here. I stayed home, later got a part time job when the girls were in middle school. quit that a few years later. When I was a kid, I did not know any women that worked outside the home. My younger daughter wanted to home school her soon to be 4 kids (they decided, probably her husband, to adopt a kid from South Korea), but her controlling husband has already started them off in the chaotic world of public school. We will see how long that lasts. Anyway, I enjoyed staying at home, getting involved with school functions, mainly during the school hours volunteering etc.

Expand full comment

Excellent Rosemary!! I’m so glad for you! When I was home with my kids, it was the best years I’ve ever had. Then I worked part time the school they were in. It was so perfect. It was a great life. I miss those times so much.

Expand full comment

great memories and so many lovely friends

Expand full comment

Same. The attack on men has created disorder to natural order.

These are intended consequences imo; an attack on the family.

Expand full comment

by...?

Expand full comment

Wake up!!! Jesus Christ, don’t you see the commercials on TV that are attacking men all the time?! They make every white man look like a fool whether it’s a little girl five years old at Friendly’s, who can figure out the tip and the father can’t, to paint commercial with the mother putting your hand on the father to tell him to shut up, or dishwasher commercial we have the woman yelling at the man he better do the dishes. Wake the hell up.

Expand full comment

They forced women to go to work in the 80s by giving a couple of the first people dinks double income, no kid yet a really good home that needed two incomes. The first people got the price. Couple years later, the houses were too high for many people to buy with one income.

Believe me, the government, Department Of Education has their hand in every daycare

They do the curriculum from when the kids are weeks old

It’s all disgusting propaganda Both people work and pay taxes, the kid is with the government people.

It’s disgusting

Every female creature in the world has a right to be with the baby that they have birthed Try taking a baby away from any other creature snakes and spiders are better mothers than many American women.

Expand full comment

You still haven't answered the question. Attacked by whom?

There is an answer.

https://craignelsen.substack.com/p/stupidheads

Expand full comment

Marxist

Expand full comment

The globalist thinking is that home schooling has to be prevented because it creates thinking individuals AND it keeps one of the parents out of the labor market.

Expand full comment

"AND it keeps one of the parents out of the labour market"

Every time a Mom stays home an IRS Angel cries.

Expand full comment

Plus according to WAPO nuclear families are unfair to non-nuclear families and so should be eliminated via tax penalties etc.

Expand full comment

*Green Eggs and Ham at bedtime has entered the chat*

Expand full comment

My wife stayed home full time when our first of three was born and never went back. Best investment we made was having her be full time mom.

Expand full comment

Of course, because then you get smart and get cheaper know the sales don’t buy stupid things that have to go in a storage facility because your garage is filled

Very smart !!

Expand full comment

same. as my dutch mom would say "Dose werrrre da daze"

Expand full comment

It was more common here in the past as well. The main thing that changed was the availability and affordability of clothes washers/dryers, dishwashers and microwaves.

Expand full comment

Indeed, how many women with professional jobs now outsource their child rearing to low IQ women, possibly with poor language skills, and then wonder why their children become low achievers or even de-railed into addiction.

Expand full comment

Too many!! Even one is too many, but unfortunately, there is a lot more

Also, the Department Of Education tells you exactly what to teach even in daycare

It’s all propaganda that is best to stay away from

Expand full comment

A ton of my classmates mothers helped out part-time in the school system like a thousand years ago when I was in elementary.

Expand full comment

... You don't look a day over 753.

*nods*

Expand full comment

In finnish, "kamala" means "terrible" or "ghastly" or "dire".

The Matrix is trying to tell us something, it seems.

Expand full comment

Lol. That is incredible. Almost seems prophetic.

Expand full comment

The name was a joke in some circles here from the moment she was first mentioned in public and it seems it was a fairly earned slur.

Expand full comment

Outstanding! Hahaha!

Expand full comment

Interesting. That could be why the bad guys in the indie horror video game "Fran Bow" were the kamala, and they were indeed terrible, ghostly, and dire. The game was written by a Swedish couple, and it is quite logical to think they may have had some understanding of neighboring Finland's language.

Expand full comment

The emasculation of men is indeed horrid. It is the feminist movement gone wrong. When will women wake up and realize their potential to be vastly influential while still supporting the personal growth and masculinity of the men in their lives? Oh wait, those are Biblical principles. It will take a revival.

Expand full comment

Male culture has some truly horrid elements that needed to be purged, but the focus was on purging and not on “what do we keep.” And I believe that a determined single mom can raise an incredible son.

Expand full comment

"And I believe that a determined single mom can raise an incredible son."

Statistically, though, the Incredible Sons from that group are outliers. By a lot.

Expand full comment

Fathers have been systematically removed from the family for decades. Beginning with the urban black neighborhoods. A bigger welfare check for another out of wedlock kid. As long as the father wasn’t in the home. This Damaged at least a generation of black families, especially affecting the boys. The literal loss of lives & loss of opportunities for good & productive lives due to these liberal policies is a crime.

Expand full comment

Exactly

Expand full comment

She is full of shit. 87% of children without a man in the home are living in poverty.

And they turn out pretty faggy. She probably has a son with a man bun.

Gross !!!!🤢

Expand full comment

Maybe there wouldn't be so many single mothers if men actually were allowed to be men? You know like duty, honor and sacrifice for family.

Expand full comment

I agree with you, Ryan

Expand full comment

Males are 99.4% of the water and sewer workers. We wouldn’t get a drop of water without men. We would all be dead.

They built our houses put in electricity, put in gas, take our garbage away at great risk to themselves. There have been very strong, firemen and policemen who have saved our lives.

It’s bullshit that masculinity is toxic

How fucking dare you?

Expand full comment

Bless you, Gato. That's why I come here. :-)

Kiss kiss, hug hug.

Expand full comment

Another SS-er - Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her SubStack "Restoration" - had a very cogent article about this idea: "Political Gender Polarization Among Young People. What’s Driving the Sexes Apart?" Sept. 4, 2024. Give it a tumble.

https://www.restorationbulletin.com/p/political-gender-polarization-among?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2327889&post_id=148491237&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=b7jkn&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Expand full comment

The B’s and C’s also tend to have a lot more time and energy for workplace politics since they can’t compete on work quality; the A’s are more focused on quality work. This is how the mediocrities rise through an organization.

Expand full comment

Isn't that really the biggest problem with our society as a whole?

People with too much time on their hands pushing agendas that the working man and woman are too busy making an honest living to take the time to oppose.

(edited to add the fairer but equal sex Ha!)

Expand full comment

in order to get more women stay at home, it is necessary that the men get a wage that can support the family. Seems like it is impossible to raise a family on one wage nowadays, specially now that the prices of everything have doubled and tripled!

I remember dad saying, that he noticed at work long ago, how the incompetent workers were 'promoted' away from the work floor. I guess that only has gotten worse in the last 50 years.

Expand full comment

An enterprising at home spouse can add much more than wages to the family. Yardwork, home repairs, painting, cleaning, childcare, paperwork , food preparation, researched economical buying and on and on. All the things people spend salary on when no one is home.

Expand full comment

Amen Charles. As a nurse with a BSN, I can tell you that being a dedicated wife and mother was the most important job of my life. Genuine self esteem is garnered through right decisions and satisfying choices. This is a foreign language to today's Gen Z and I am sad.

Expand full comment

. . . and there are a lot more opportunities for work from home jobs and careeers now.

Expand full comment

Glad you wrote “at-home spouse.” Dads can do this, too, if mom’s job pays more.

Expand full comment

If a woman wants to work, that's cool. My wife has worked all her life, but when the lids were at home, she kept a close eye on them, and they turned out fabulous.

Personally, looking back, I would prefer a wife that places the importance of giving a bright future to the children by home schooling, or at the very least, being involved in their education. We don't need to have the latest model SUV, a half million-dollar home big enough to house three families, or a recreational vehicle for every season.

Expand full comment

no we don't and back then we didn't.

We live in the far west of Northern Virginia. Everyone is loaded. These days mostly lawyers or tech industry. Everyone goes on lavish vacations.

and own fancy cars. When my daughters were in high school, the student parking lot was full of mercedes and high end new cars. It was not so good, kids are bad drivers. And stupid kids run around the lot and destroy cars.

My daughter drove an old mazda, probably the oldest car in the lot. haha

I remember in 2006 one kid had a Hummer.

Expand full comment

Reminds me of the big ole boat my mom gave to my oldest son. "71 Pontiac Catalina. Puke Green. He backed into the very solid bumper of an oil truck and folded up the trunk. We made him drive it until he had enough money for a pickup. I guess it was still better than riding the bus. Ha!

Expand full comment

Most wealthy NOVA's work for the government in some form or another. We are all paying for those Hummers. My family farm straddles Clarke and Frederick Counties. Clarke has stayed rural due to a determined zoning board but may not be able to hold out. The tax base is barely keeping the schools functioning. But the rural contrast to the rest of NOVA is striking.

Expand full comment

yes. We moved to Loudoun in the 90's

There were only two high schools, Broad Run and Loudoun County in Leesburg?

Ashburn Village was just getting built. Lots of cows horses and donkeys

Expand full comment

The wage issue is fundamental to this whole issue. When a man, and it usually is a man, cannot support a family on one wage then inevitably women will need to take up the slack.

The family unit will become weakened and wages across the board will be lowered because the labour pool is now literally twice the size it was.

Fine for high achieving ‘power couples’ who promote the new system as ‘progress’. Not so good for everyone else.

Or the birth rate and the ongoing viability of that society. Of course women should be able to do whatever they like. As long as everyone is hired on merit. But that, as the article points out, is not happening.

Expand full comment

I know a lot of people who can still do it. The more you go around telling everybody that it’s impossible the more discouraged, the young people feel. Stop with the propaganda.

Americans have so much shit that they bought they literally millions of storage centers everywhere and you know it because there are some near you

People buy so much crap that they filled their garage and then they have to put it in storage This is why women have to work.?!? to put shit in storage?!?

In 1968 there was not one storage place and now there are millions . they tell people they have to put food on the table. Bullshit. Even the cars around my area have to park on the street even though they have a gigantic garage. It’s filled with a bunch of crap that they don’t need. They put the rest in storage.

It’s greedy.

Expand full comment

Oh brother! Stop white knighting nobody likes it anymore because they are sick of it

Expand full comment

But they love busywork. Our extraordinarily incompetent public school district busily churns out reports and graphs about DEI and all sorts of nonsense.

Expand full comment

I worked at a company where they took seriously, formed a committee, and drafted a document called The Millennial White Paper which was shared with HR and Middle Mgmt as a guide to what The Young People were thinking.

So, for example, when young employees suggested they should do more pizza parties at the office, no one in Upper Management - I swear there were some really good As in that bunch - stepped in and said, "Actually, we've been running this business for 40 years without treating pabulum like that as if it deserves respect. How about instead we kick some project @$$, win over more clients, do good work, and maybe celebrate at Happy Hours sometimes but, mostly, let's do Good Work."

Nope. Instead, they went all https://tenor.com/search/hello-fellow-kids-gifs

Expand full comment

Precisely

Expand full comment

Very well put together and articulated.

I was at a Fortune 500 company for 32 years and retired as a Director in 2012, just before all of what you describe went full burner. But I saw the genesis of it and the early years of its unfolding. It came in through the HR departments of nearly every F500 company, including the company I worked for. it was HR “As” that brought it in. These were very comptent people who graduated high in their class with the “new” HR degrees that mandated agenda activism rather than service. It was to become a world where management worked for the HR department rather than the other way around, as it was when I started my career. The activism was all about taking control of the hiring, firing and promotion process away from managers and centralizing it(sound familiar?) under the control of HR. Enter Woke and DEI. The rest is history, described very well in this piece.

Expand full comment

I had a similar experience Brien. After working for 25 years for long established firms where HR was strictly and admin function, I finished my career working for a company that had been started around the turn of the century. I was shocked to find HR telling managers who they could hire. These were not incompetent HR people, but they still had nowhere near enough knowledge of specific depts to be telling the managers who they should be hiring.

Expand full comment

I find it difficult to believe that anyone in HR is an A. I've only met one, and she was the head of her HR department before DEI.

Expand full comment

Someone once explained to me that HR isn't there to protect the employees. It's there to protect the company.

So, when your company's customers require that your workforce meet certain demographic requirements, then HR selects for those sorts of people. Maybe not in the C-Suite and hopefully not overly amongst the real earth-movers, but definitely around the margins in Admin, in Customer Support, too often in The Field, and definitely in HR.

Expand full comment

Anyone who’s ever dealt with HR on any issue beyond their hiring learns right quick that they exist for the benefit of the company, not the employees. All that happy talk that they lay on about “we’re here for you” is garbage.

Expand full comment

Everything sifts down to “cover your ass.” The most important thing becomes how to do some facsimile of your job, while never risking being exposed.

This is why, in medicine, I always look for independent practitioners. I don’t want anyone who is part of a large organization. I want a specific person’s reputation to be on the line for my family’s care.

Expand full comment

I think small, independent, practitioners groups are the best, but in my area, they are being bought up by a large corporate hospital. Even the best independents are falling for the corporate group-think trap.

Expand full comment

The government agencies are the worst because they don't even make a product or sell a service that has to "work" ... there are no actual objective metrics to determine in someone is "doing a good job" or even what exactly theirjob is. It is literally, shuffling the TPS reports around.

Expand full comment

I love the description and couldn't have thought of a better way to explain what I've seen in real life at work (As hire As and Bs hire Cs). At Honda mfg, we had one Paint dept with 2 lines. Line 1 was awesome, they had a different Level 3 manager. Line 2 was awful - just like you said. They had promoted a low B as Line 2 Level 3 mgr, and he proceeded to fire/demote all of the As and replace them with Cs. That had happened 5 years before I got there. I left and went to work at US Steel - they had the same problem. I didn't last there long, because I'm a B. I used to be an A - that's the other problem - As self-demote for job security. My sister's husband works for Boeing. One problem he is having is an undersized washer in the upper part of the interior (I don't know all the details but his group was assigned to do the structural analysis). He's spent dozens of hours in meetings over the course of months because it will cost millions to redo all of the 3D CAD drawings. He's saying the specified washer (100s of them along the length of the plane) is too small, and he's being pressured by multiple other engineering groups to change his mind. As for Boeing manufacturing, they had the same problem most companies had over the past 4 years. Replacing experienced, competent retiring Boomers with green Gen Z workers. A lot of them good, but too many of them don't care about doing a decent job or show up for work reliably. A couple of years ago, I had line operators tell me they were scared to be at work some days, worried about accidents.

Expand full comment

I worked with a small, privately owned defense contractor that was purchased by a larger company. Immediately the new management began replacing the older, experienced engineers and technicians with younger, cheaper ones. The "troublemakers" who pointed out the problems, all A's, were quickly let go. Eventually safety problems and cost overruns began piling up. This company made small warheads and rocket motors. One tech told me it was only a matter of time before someone blew up the assembly plant.

Expand full comment

We’re somehow managing to kill more than enough people without getting any better at it. That’s one factory I’d like to see implode.

Expand full comment

The anecdote about the washer calls to mind the famous "O ring" incident that was the cause of the NASA Challenger disaster.

Expand full comment

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

- Winston Churchill.

Expand full comment

Well, not exactly. Equally is only the bait as the fish usually finds out too late.

Expand full comment

You precisely describing my employment situation at the VA. A “B” middle management individual removed any person who could make her look less than stellar.

I bailed in 18 months

Expand full comment

I've recently been kicking around this idea that the problem with Public, that is _Government_, Schools is that Parents are no longer the customer. The Teachers are.

I have it thoughts on Education specifically but can't hijack your comment to flesh it all out. But more generally, that's what's wrong with Government: The customers are no longer We the Little People.

The Government's Customers are Government Employees. It's all a bunch of Make-Work stuff and they don't have to turn a profit they can afford to keep hiring Cs and C-s, and a veritable army s of Deltas... I mean Ds.

Expand full comment

DEPED issues updated guidelines on parents-teachers associations

The Department of Education has issued DepEd Order No. 13, s. 2022 or the omnibus guidelines on the regulation of operations of the Parents-Teachers Associations (PTAs) to update and harmonize its functions to the Department's mandate. The new Omnibus PTA Guidelines of 2022 prescribes additional provisions for the association such as allowed and prohibited activities of PTA; conflicts/dispute resolution, disciplinary proceedings, and sanctions; and miscellaneous provisions.

https://www.deped.gov.ph/2022/04/08/deped-issues-updated-guidelines-on-parents-teachers-associations/#:~:text=The%20said%20guidelines%20will%20streamline,of%20fundraising%20projects%20among%20others.

Expand full comment

Boom. Exactly

Expand full comment

Government isn’t a business. Citizens aren’t customers, neither are students profit centers. Gov’t thinks we’re all products.

Expand full comment

Look at the visceral hatred people like Chuck Schumer have for Donald Trump. Trump is an A. He built a real estate empire, then did an outstanding job as President. How dare he come in and demonstrate the venal incompetence of the B's and C's in the political class.

Expand full comment

You don't get only simply incompetent people that move up, you get especially those that lie and manipulate, you literally end up with psychopaths at the top.

Expand full comment

*points to 09 Sep 2024 on Calendar* You Are Here.

Expand full comment

This explains Joe Biden hiring Kamala Harris, Kamala hiring Tim Walz perfectly.

Expand full comment

Wonderful article that is beautifully put together, great examples and bold but plain and simple statements

Expand full comment

This post should be a substitute for every MBA programme on the planet.

Expand full comment

We certainly have our work cut out for us. Most people still don’t even know what’s happening to them. They know something isn’t right but they can’t put their finger on it. Others are just singing the happy tune and going along for the ride.

Expand full comment

Well There is an "A" comment 👍😀

Expand full comment

To condense what you so purrfectly describe:

Liberals destroy everything they touch.

EVERYTHING.

Expand full comment

We need to avoid the “labels” trap, there’s lots of good Liberals out there, especially the classicals.

Lack of specificity muddles our thinking, and precludes action. Words like authoritarian, murderous, duplicitous, tyrannical, censoring and even communist have a lot more meaning than labels like NAZI, Fascist, racist or “far-right”. Labels are tantamount to name calling.

Expand full comment

I find the good liberals tend to live as conservatives but espouse the kind & popular thing.

Expand full comment

Every label you wrote describes the Liberals that I see trying to destroy our nation.

I hope that clears up what I wrote.

Expand full comment

i don't know its origin, but i do know i was told, lierally, "A's hire A's, B's hire C's" by a pretty good manager in about 1995. that is, the pattern has been observed essentially forever. DEI is newer

Expand full comment