You Are Loved Before You Are Useful

Validation is supposed to be oxygen, not a drug. We start with the quiet crisis a lot of men never admit out loud: the habit of performing for love, carrying weight without being seen, and interpreting silence as a verdict. We talk about what it means to live from validation instead of for validation, why being tired can hide in “productive” lives, and how a secure identity changes everything from marriage to leadership to mental health.

Then we zoom out to the world that keeps training people to feel replaceable. You’ll hear sharp reflections on economic dignity and labor power, why union decline matters for everyday life, and how a culture of insecurity bleeds into shame and resentment. We also dig into the crisis facing boys and young men: school and policy headwinds, fewer mentors, collapsing third places, remote work, and a dating environment shaped by screens. Along the way we name the incentives behind the “rage machine” and why algorithmic outrage can feel like belonging until it starts hollowing you out.

We close by wrestling with masculinity in a moment of extremes, separating virtue from volume and protection from domination, and looking at how modern politics can reward provocation over character. If you care about men’s mental health, healthy masculinity, parenting boys, social media harms, and rebuilding real community, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Transcript

Welcome And Big Idea

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Welcome to the Darome McLean Show. I'm your host, Darrell McLean. Of course, independent media that won't reinforce tribalism. We have one planet. Nobody is leaving. And so let us read it together. So I want to open up today talking about something a little different. And this is on the topic of living from validation, not for validation. Welcome back, everybody. And I want to talk about something that sounds simple on the surface, but if we are honest, it reaches down into the bones of a man. And that is validation. Not ego, not applause, not somebody hyping you up on Facebook because you said something clever. Not the shallow little digital hand claps we chase when the algorithm decides to be merciful. I'm talking about real validation, the kind that says, I see you and you matter and you are not invisible. You are loved even before you produce anything. And that that last part is where the whole thing breaks open because a lot of us, especially men, have been taught to live backwards. We were taught that if we perform well enough, and maybe somebody will love us. If we provide enough, maybe somebody will appreciate us. And if we stay strong enough, maybe somebody will notice that we are tired. If we keep showing up, keep carrying weight, keep fixing problems, keep swallowing pain, maybe one day somebody will finally look at us and say, I see what you have been carrying. But what happens when they don't? What happens when you your father never says he's proud of you? What happens when your mother never understands you? What happens when your spouse loves you but still doesn't know how to affirm you? What happens when your children benefit from all your sacrifices but don't yet have the maturity to honor your sacrifices? What happens when the church uses your gift but forgets that you too have a soul? That is where a lot of men get stuck. They don't stop functioning. Oh no. Men are very good at functioning while falling apart. We'll go to work, we'll pay bills, we'll lead meetings, we'll preach sermons, we'll coach that team, we'll mow the grass, we'll carry the groceries, we'll bring home the bacon, cook the bacon, and somehow still be expected to resurrect the pig. And then somebody says, Why are you so quiet? Because, beloved, that man is tired. And it's not just tired in his body, he is tired in a secret place where nobody claps, nobody checks, nobody asks, and nobody sees. Now watch the order. Jesus had not healed anybody yet, he had not walked on water yet, he had not fed a thousand people yet, he had not raised Lazarus yet, he had not gone to the cross yet. Before the miracles, before the crowds, before the public ministry, before the proof of concept, the Father validates the Son. That means Jesus didn't begin ministry trying to earn love. He began ministry from the certainty that he was already loved. And that is the reset. Some of us have been living for validation when God is calling us to live from validation. Living for validation turns every room into a courtroom. It turns every silence into rejection. Every lack of applause becomes evidence against you, and every relationship becomes a place where you are asking, do I matter yet? Have I done enough yet? Am I worthy now? But living from validation means the father's voice is louder than words and the world's silence. It means you can receive encouragement without becoming addicted to it. It means you can ask for what I need without making another human being responsible for your entire identity. And hear me clearly, needing encouragement does not make you weak. You are not a robot, you deserve to feel. You can be a man, you can be a man of God, and still need somebody to say, I am proud of you. You can be a husband and still need tenderness. You can be a father and still need affirmation. You can be a leader and still need someone to ask, Hey, how are you really doing? But people cannot become your God. Because sometimes you put the weight of validation on people who do not know how to give it. Not always because they hate us, sometimes because nobody ever gave it to them, and they cannot pour from an empty cup. They cannot speak a language they were never taught. So the question becomes can you forgive people who did not give you what you needed? Not because it did not hurt, not because it was okay, not because you're pretending it did leave a mark. You don't have to pretend like it didn't. But because you cannot spend your life making broken people pay a debt that they might not have the emotional currency to repay, you have to forgive them. And then we're gonna jump to Jude 24, because that's when this comes along and gives us the other side. Now unto him who is able to keep you from stumbling. Now that's good news for every man who has been mad at himself because he may keep stumbling. That text does not say now unto you who are able to keep yourself. No. It says now unto him who is able. So here's the message uh today. God validates you before you perform, and God keeps you when you stumble. That means your worth does not rise and fall on your last success or your last mistake. You are loved before you are useful. You are seen before you are successful. You are accepted before you are accomplished. You are kept even when you stumble. And today on the Darrell McLean show, that's where we're going. We're gonna talk about men, validation, shame, faith, performance, forgiveness, and what it means to stop begging broken rooms to confirm what heaven has already spoken to you. Because once God says, You are my son of whom I love, you don't have to spend the rest of your life auditioning for people who may not even know how to clap. Let's talk about it. Now, before we go any further, this this is uh some of my thoughts from a men's ministry group I went to last night. So before we get there, I want to share this is not as a performance, but as a prayer, and not as something polished for applause, but something born out of an ache of trying to become whole in the world that keeps asking men to bleed quietly. So this is a poem that I wrote. A poem for men learning to live from validation. And so we were asked what were five things we bring to the table, and that's where this reflection started to come in. And so here's a poem that I created when I was thinking about five things I bring to the table. I bring patience to the table because love without patience turns into control wearing church clothes. I bring understanding to the table because every man you meet is carrying a wound he has learned to call discipline. I bring stability to the table because chaos is cheap, but faithfulness costs the whole soul. I bring freedom to the table because real love does not build a cage and call it commitment. I bring light and love to the table because that is the work that God has called me to do and keeps assigning me even when I feel tired. And when my mission is done, I leave without bitterness, no chains in my hand, no poison in my mouth, no courtroom in my chest, because I was there when I was supposed to be there. I loved while love was required of me. I served while service had my name on it, and when heaven whispered to me, Darrell, your work is complete, I will walk away clean, not unloved, not unseen, not unfinished, just free. Right back with more on the Darrell McLean show.

Why Young Men Are Struggling

SPEAKER_09 12:31

There exists no more perfect illustration of the American working class's capacity for self-immolation than the spectacle of coal miners sporting MAGA hats, while their union busting overlords dismantle the very organizations that once prevented their grandfathers from dying of black lung at 40. This tragic pantomime, workers genuflecting before the altar of their own exploitation, represents the culmination of a 40-year propaganda campaign so successful that its victims now mistake their chains for jewelry. The numbers tell a story of systematic demolition. In 1983, 20% of American workers belonged to unions. Today, that figure has collapsed to a pathetic 10%, with private sector membership languishing at 6%, a level not seen since the Gilded Age, when children lost fingers in textile mills and workers were shot for requesting an eight-hour day. This isn't decline, it's orchestrated annihilation. Consider the sadistic precision with which Amazon, that great monument to late-stage capitalism's sociopathy, conducts its anti-union operations. The company spent$4.3 million on union busting consultants in 2021 alone, deploying an army of psychological mercenaries to terrorize warehouse workers, earning$15 an hour. When workers at an Alabama facility dared suggest they might prefer not to urinate in bottles during their shifts, Amazon subjected them to mandatory captive audience meetings, Orwellian struggle sessions where consultants explained that unions would somehow make their already miserable conditions worse. The company's internal documents, leaked to the press, revealed executives tracking labor-organizing threats with the vigilance typically reserved for terrorist cells. The Republican Party, that great defender of traditional values, has revealed its only tradition to be the enthusiastic phellating of corporate power. Their 2017 crowning achievement, ramming through right to work legislation in Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia, represents linguistic perversion worthy of Goebbels. Right to work, that masterpiece of Orwellian nomenclature, actually means the right to freeload off union negotiations while undermining collective bargaining power. It's rather like calling starvation the right to diet. Scott Walker's Wisconsin putsch of 2011 demonstrated the GOP's methodology with crystalline clarity. Under the pretense of fiscal responsibility, always the refuge of scoundrels attacking the working class, Walker eviscerated public sector unions, stripping them of collective bargaining rights while exempting police and firefighters who'd endorsed his campaign. The result? Wisconsin teachers saw their take-home pay drop by$6,500 annually, while Walker's corporate sponsors received$2.3 billion in tax cuts. The arithmetic of class warfare rarely presents itself with such naked transparency. The Supreme Court's Janus decision of 2018, delivered by the same conservative majority that believes corporations possess religious consciences, dealt another crushing blow to public sector unions, ruling that workers couldn't be required to pay fees to unions that represented them. Justice Alito's majority opinion, a masterwork of judicial prostitution, essentially argued that money equals speech, but only when it flows upward. The decision cost unions$35 million in annual revenue within months, precisely as its corporate architects intended. Meanwhile, the same Republicans who weep tears over cancel culture when a racist loses their Twitter account champion at will employment laws that allow bosses to fire workers for any reason or no reason at all. In 49 states, your employer can terminate you for your political views, your Facebook posts, or simply because they dislike your face, unless you're protected by one of those terrible, horrible, no-good unions that Republicans insist are destroying America. The Fuyao Glass Factory in Ohio, immortalized in the documentary American Factory, provides a perfect microcosm of modern union busting techniques. When workers attempted to organize in 2017, the Chinese-owned company hired Labor Relations Institute, a union busting firm that charges$350 per hour to teach managers how to terrify their employees legally. Workers were subjected to daily harangues about union corruption, shown videos of closed factories, and told explicitly that unionization would mean job losses. The company spent over$1 million to defeat a union that would have cost them far less in wage increases. The principle mattered more than the money, the principle that workers must never, ever be allowed to taste power. The gig economy, that great innovation of Silicon Valley sociopaths, represents capitalism's latest assault on collective bargaining. Uber spent$200 million in California alone to pass Proposition 22, which exempted them from treating drivers as employees deserving of basic protections. They marketed this assault on workers' rights as flexibility and independence, rather like marketing slavery as free room and board. The drivers who believed this propaganda now enjoy the flexibility to work 70-hour weeks without health insurance, the independence to wear adult diapers because they can't afford bathroom breaks. Yet history suggests that capital's current triumphalism may be premature. The same conditions that produced the original labor movement, grotesque inequality, systematic exploitation, and the manifest failure of electoral politics to address workers' concerns are rapidly reassembling. Amazon workers in Staten Island succeeded in forming the company's first American union in 2022, despite the company's scorched earth resistance. Starbucks workers have unionized over 360 stores since 2021, creating a momentum that even Howard Schultz's union busting tantrums cannot entirely suppress. The tactics that work haven't changed because powers' vulnerabilities haven't changed. The strike remains labor's nuclear weapon. The UAW's 2023 stand-up strikes against the big three automakers secured wage increases of 25% and cost the companies$3.6 billion. When 48,000 University of California academic workers struck in 2022, they paralyzed the state's prestigious university system and won wage increases of up to 80% for the lowest paid workers. Power concedes nothing without demand, and demands without strikes are merely suggestions. The resurgence of Wildcat strikes, those beautiful, spontaneous eruptions of worker fury that bypass sclerotic union bureaucracies, offers particular hope. The 2018 West Virginia Teachers' Strike, technically illegal under state law, inspired similar actions in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona. These teachers, many of them Trump voters who'd previously viewed unions with suspicion, discovered that solidarity trumps ideology when you can't afford both gasoline and groceries on a teacher's salary. Worker cooperatives provide another avenue of resistance. The Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, a network of worker-owned businesses, have created hundreds of jobs while keeping wealth in communities that capital abandoned decades ago. These enterprises prove that workers can manage themselves perfectly well without parasitic management layers extracting surplus value. The Mondragon Corporation in Spain, a federation of worker cooperatives employing 81,000 people, demonstrates this model's scalability. Their pay ratio between highest and lowest earners is 6 to 1 compared to the 351 to 1 ratio in American corporations, a differential that reveals precisely who the real job creators are. The recent explosion of labor organizing among graduate students, adjunct professors, video game developers, and journalists, previously considered too privileged or precarious to organize, suggests that class consciousness may finally be penetrating the thick skull of American exceptionalism. When even privileged workers recognize they're being proletarianized, capital's divide and conquer strategy begins to fracture. The solution isn't complicated, merely difficult. It requires what it has always required solidarity, militancy, and the recognition that workers create all value while owners merely extract it. It requires understanding that the boss who tells you unions are unnecessary is rather like the wolf explaining that shepherds cause all the problems. It requires recognizing that every freedom workers enjoy, weekends, overtime pay, workplace safety standards, was purchased with the blood of union organizers who were beaten, blacklisted, and murdered for the crime of suggesting that humans deserve dignity. The path forward demands both electoral and direct action. Support politicians who support unions but never trust them entirely. Power corrupts, and even the most progressive politician will sell out workers when capital applies sufficient pressure. Join unions where they exist, create them where they don't, and support them everywhere. Refuse to cross picket lines, even virtual ones. Boycott union busters with the fervor that conservatives reserve for companies that acknowledge gay people exist. Most critically, we must recognize that the current system isn't broken. It's functioning exactly as designed. A system that allows eight men to own as much wealth as half the planet's population isn't experiencing a malfunction. It's achieving its intended purpose. The question isn't whether this system can be reformed, but whether enough people will recognize their common interest in destroying it before it destroys them. The American labor movement isn't dead, merely dormant, like a volcano that capital mistakenly assumes extinct. The pressure builds daily as inequality reaches levels that would embarrass French aristocrats. When it erupts, and history suggests it will, those who spent decades explaining why workers don't deserve living wages, may discover that workers have surprisingly good memories and remarkably little patience for their former tormentors' sudden conversions to populism. The choice as ever is simple: solidarity or serfdom. The fact that so many Americans have chosen serfdom doesn't make it inevitable, merely tragic. But tragedy, unlike farce, at least offers the possibility of catharsis. And catharsis, in this context, looks rather like a general strike.

SPEAKER_05 23:24

We're so glad to have you here. This is an important conversation, and appreciate your courage in having it. Let's just go to the stats right now because it's it's actually kind of shocking. I mean, you lay it out at the top of the book 16% of 18 to 24-year-olds live with their parents. Still one in five live with their parents at 30. You've got 15% of men saying they have no close friends, they're also four times more likely to take their own lives. Why has this particular cohort, young men, falling so far so fast?

Rage Algorithms Replace Real Life

SPEAKER_03 23:56

Um, I think it's a variety of things. Educational. The education system is somewhat biased against a boy. Think about what we, the behaviors we encourage. Sit still, be a pleaser, raise your hand. You probably just describe a girl. A boy is on a behavioral adjusted basis, with the exact same behavior, twice as likely to be suspended as a girl, five times more likely if he's a black boy, seven to ten high school valedictorians are girls. You have essentially in college, um, it's gonna be you're gonna have two to one female to male college graduate. So there's a bit of a bias. Fifty years ago, when it was 40 60 female to male, we had Title IX, which was great. And women were still on their way up. Now it's flipped. It's more like 66 33 female. The male graduation, but there's no discussion of male affirmative action. So we have an educational system bias against them. We have economic policies that have effectively taken money from young people and transferred it to people my age. People my age are 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. People under the age of 40 are 24% less wealthy. And something we don't like to acknowledge is that men become somewhat unattractive to the opposite sex and lack self-esteem and lose their role when they're not economically viable. Three-quarters of women say economic viability is keen and mate. It's only a quarter of uh men who say that. So they have fewer educational opportunities. They have legislative policies and tax policies that have taken money out of them. And they've also been a little bit pathologized. I talk about the fact that uh a man's desire to have a relationship and quite frankly to have sex, it's been pathologized. But that fire should and is usually used to be a better man, dress better, be in shape, the secret weapon for attracting a mate, a kindness practice. But where does a man demonstrate excellence? They're not going to work, they're not going to school. Forty percent of bars and pubs have closed down since COVID. Where does he demonstrate excellence? And if you talk to women, and I'll wrap up here, who've been married longer than 40 years, they say they were not interested in him in the beginning, but they fell in love. I like the way he danced. He was kind to his parents, he was great at work. Where does a young man demonstrate excellence now in a world of remote work?

SPEAKER_11 26:11

You should share that stat we were just talking about, but 45%, which I found staggering in the book because I was one of those young men that spent the better part of my, you know, teenage years and 20 years trying to pick up women.

SPEAKER_03 26:21

And apparently that stopped as well. Forty-five percent of men 18 to 24 have never asked a woman out in person. That's that's eye-popping. And the question is, why? Why is that? I think that no man wants to be that guy. Imagine you make an approach at a place. One of the key things I think dads have to teach their sons is how to express romantic interest while making the other person feel safe. And this is anecdotal, but when I go up, I will have women approach me and say, I'm out, I'm obviously here, I'm open to meeting people, I look amazing, and not a single man has approached me. Guys don't want to be that guy. In addition, I hold big tech responsible for a lot of this. We have 40% of the SP by market value who have connected to rage and divisiveness and sequestering people from their friends and family and mates.

SPEAKER_05 27:16

You call social media a rage machine, and these companies are reaping billions. They're just trying to feet go from billionaires to multi-billionaires.

SPEAKER_03 27:25

Well, why? It used to be the sex sales. Yeah. Now we found out the algorithms found something better, rage and divisiveness. Yes. But they're trying to convince young men who have, quite frankly, less involved prefrontal cortex, the gas on, gas off. But why go through the hassle of making expressing friendship in the hierarchy of friends when you have Discord and Reddit? Why go through the hassle of putting on a tie, trying to fig navigate all of this when you think you can trade stocks or crypto on Coinbase or Robinhood? And why, Savannah, would you go through the the humiliation, the effort, and the cost of approaching a strange woman when you have lifelike communities?

SPEAKER_05 28:00

Let me just say something though, as a as a woman here, because there are a lot of women who are probably thinking, like, are you kidding me? We're trying to haven't men had it their way all this time. I just want to say I'm the mother of a son, so I care very much about this issue. But also, you write in the book, this is not a zero-sum game. This is not if you know, it's either women or it's men succeeding. That both tides can and should rise.

SPEAKER_03 28:23

Empathy is not a zero-sum game. Civil rights shouldn't hurt white people, gay marriage shouldn't hurt heteronormative marriage. But you're absolutely right. This is uh we have a series, we have let me be clear. The problem is with the lack, why do we have a lack of empathy? Why is there an understandable gag reflex? 80 percent of the prosperity from 1945 in the world to 2000 was at the 5% of the population that were Americans. And then a third of those got all of the prosperity, specifically white heterosexual males. So the bottom line is I had unfair advantage, but should we hold a 19-year-old male responsible for my unfair advantage? So I have a debt. And the call out to young men is the uh to men my age is the following: We need to get more emotionally involved in a young man's life. The single point of failure for a young man when he comes off the tracks is when he loses a male role model through death, disease, or abandonment. He becomes more likely to be incarcerated and graduate from college the moment he loses a male role model, which is interesting because girls actually have similar outcomes. The net sum of all the research is while boys are physically stronger, they're emotionally and neurologically much weaker. Men my age have to step up. If we want better men, we have to be better men.

SPEAKER_11 29:39

Scott, really quick, we're almost out of time. I do want to show another graphic. I found this very interesting in the book. You write about this crisis of when we've talked about this. We've we you write about the crisis of loneliness, just the inability of men to make friends. There's a a staggering graphic in the book. I think we have it. There it is. Just Google searches on where to make friends, feel lonely, where to meet people. And you can see there just how much those searches have skyrocketed over the past few years. To what can we attribute that? Why why is it so hard for men, quite frankly, men of any age, to just make friends, to just hang out?

Violence, Isolation, And Opportunity

SPEAKER_03 30:14

It's two or third places. Men aren't going to church, they're not going into work, they're not connecting to school, so where do they go to be friends? And then they're up against life-like uh the deepest pockets in the world that are essentially trying to sequester them from the rest of society. Well, the only reason I graduated from college was one, I got in 76% admissions rate of UCLA when I applied, now it's 9%. But also, and this is embarrassing to say, but one of the reasons I went on campus was not only to see my buddies, but the the remote but possible chance I might meet someone and have a relationship. If I had lifelike synthetic porn on my phone and on my computer 24 by seven, I'm not sure I would have gone on campus as much. We are literally saying to young men, you don't have to have relationships. We are becoming less mammals. It's as if we are producing or evolving a new species of asocial, asexual males. For God's sakes, it's like we're planning our own extinction. We have to create economic incentives and get people out, especially men who need relationships more than women. There's this cartoon of a woman in her 30s. What a tragedy. She didn't find romantic love. Actually, the research shows men need relationships more than women. Widows are happier after their husband dies. Widowers are less happy. Women live two to four years longer in a relationship, men four to seven years longer. If a man hasn't cohabitated with a woman by the time he's 30, there's a one in three chance he will be a substance abuser. Men need relationships. Relationships happen in person. In some, get off your phone, get out, and touch correctly.

SPEAKER_05 31:50

I mean, and all the people said amen. Scott Galloway, I I said the book is courageous. It is. It's called notes on being a man, but I think you've just demonstrated it's about everybody. It's about our culture, it's about humanity. It's a clarion call. I'm glad you're here to talk to us about it. Come back anytime.

SPEAKER_11 32:06

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

Our next guest has been sounding the alarm on for years. The current crisis facing boys and men. Boys are less likely to graduate from high school and college than girls. One in seven men report having no friends. And men account for three of every four deaths of despair in America. Best-selling author Scott Galloway says the lack of attention to these serious problems has created a vacuum filled by voices promoting misogyny and a toxic vision of masculinity. But Galloway insists there is home. And his new book, entitled Notes on Being a Man, he offers practical and timely solutions on how to turn this crisis around. And Scott joins us now. He is a professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business and co-host of the Raging Moderates podcast. And it's great to have you back on the show. So you have been talking about this for a year. What state are we in now in terms of where men and boys are at compared to women?

SPEAKER_03 33:20

Well, thanks for having me, and it's nice to meet you all. You know, we have a homeless and an addiction problem, but what we really have is a male homeless and a male addiction problem. And they're 12 times more likely to be incarcerated. And I think the good news is the dialogue's become more productive. I think we recognize that our country and women aren't going to continue to flourish as long as our men are failing. And by the way, women are ascending, and it's wonderful. We should do nothing to get in the way of that. Twice as likely to be elected to parliament somewhere around the world, more women are seeking tertiary education. But at the same time, in the next five years, we're probably going to have two women graduate from college for every man. Only one out of three men are in a relationship under the age of 30, two in three women. And you think, well, that's mathematically impossible. It's because women are dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. And if a man hasn't been in a relationship or cohabitated with someone, by the time he's 30, there's a one in three chance uh he's going to be a substance abuser. And if you look just on a very meta level, the most violent and unstable places in the world have one thing in common. They have a disproportionate number of young men without opportunity, and we're producing way too many of them.

SPEAKER_02 34:39

Well, and and Scott, we've been talking about political violence here an awful lot. Um and and you look at uh the this this past summer, the assassination attempts on Donald Trump, you look at the the the murders of the Democrats that helped run uh Minnesota's state legislature, you look at Charlie Kirk and that tragedy, uh his tragic uh assassination, you look at the the man who ran his uh pickup truck uh into a church with huge American flags on it, and then started uh killing Mormons. Uh again, time and time again, so many of these killings and a lot of mass shootings are men, young men.

SPEAKER_03 35:25

Uh Jim, you're exactly right. Unfortunately, there's a lack of leadership here. We spend all of our calories trying to blame the other side. We're interpreting fonts on a shell as opposed to having a real argument. 98.4% of mass shooters are men. And what do all these men have in common that we were talking about? They're actually less politically engaged than the people sitting around this table. They're men who aren't connecting to church, they're not connecting to their parents, they're not connecting to school, they're not connecting to work. They go online where they're facing a godlike, indomitable enemy. And that is 40% of the SP by market cap now is connected to two things trying to enrage us or sequester us from the rest of our family. Stay on your phone, don't have friends, don't find relationships, don't talk to your parents. And then they go down rabbit holes, they're much more prone to conspiracy theory, they're much more prone to misogyny, and what do you know? There's a gun available for them everywhere. So if we want to have a real conversation around reducing violence, stop the nonsense of trying to blame each other based on our political affiliation and provide young people with more opportunity, hold big tech accountable, and make it less easy for someone who's having a mental episode to find a weapon of war.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

That's beautifully said, beautifully said. And I want to say this is Scott Galloway. Um, he does have a podcast himself. If you can check out a lot of the stuff that Professor Galloway has done on this issue, it is very helpful. Uh I really think he has a finger on the pulse of a lot of the problems that are being uh are starting to manifest themselves, I should say, in America at the time. Um there there is a book that was written. I want to say the book is called Days of Rage as well. And it explains what was going on in the in the 60s and 70s period when you have things like the weather underground. And I also think that that book would be helpful in this moment to somewhat explain what is going on in the country, especially when it comes to political isolation, um people not feeling like their voices are being heard, uh people feeling like they are being unloved, unwanted, subjected to random violence, that their communities are weak and feeble, that their leaders are not listening to them, that their voices are not being heard in their homes, in their places of worship, and among their political parties, and politicians today have uh elected and somewhat hoped and make the situation better, and how that type of frustration comes out, especially when uh men is in some of the worst ways possible. When it comes to the military aspect of this alone, and I will say this as a veteran, when you go look at the numbers, it is 22 a day. There are 22 suicides a day if in the veteran community 22 every single day. So if you do that simple math, uh 365 days out of the year, uh 22 deaths a day at minimum in the veteran community, the numbers are staggering. We're gonna get right back to this Galilee clip, though.

Mentors, School Fixes, National Service

SPEAKER_02 38:48

And and Scott, you have blamed both sides. Uh, you know, as far as don't blame one side or the other. You have found fault with the left. And I'll tell you what, belatedly, a lot of Democratic politicians have found fault with the left, uh, not focusing on the problems of young men enough. Um you can do two things at once. You can worry about the the challenges young women are facing while not ignoring young men, and there is a belated understanding with some Democratic leaders on that front. And then, of course, uh the right, uh online right, that that that the extremists are are pushing uh just the absolute most horrific treatment, especially of women.

SPEAKER_03 39:30

Well, to your point, so the far right recognized the problem first. Now, the problem is they conflate masculinity in a solution with coarseness and cruelty and taking us back to the 50s when non whites and women had less opportunity. That's just not the answer. At the same time, the far left's answer is to say, well, you don't have problems, you are the problem, and that the answer is to act more like a woman. And quite frankly, that's just not helpful uh to a young man. So what we have is a situation where neither party is really addressing the issue. I went to the Democratic National Convention and I saw a parade of special interest groups addressing the problems, the very real problems that special interest groups face, but there wasn't one single mention of the group that has fallen further faster in the United States than any other group, and that is young men. If you go to the Democratic National Committee website, there's a section that says who we serve, and it lists 17 demographic groups, from seniors to the disabled to veterans to Asian Pacific Islanders. The only group it doesn't mention is young men. I counted it up, it's 74% of the population. When you say you're advocating for 74% of the population, you're not advocating for them. You're discriminating against the 26%. So let's have an honest conversation around who's really struggling in this nation and how we address the problem. That's the good news. These are addressable, fixable problems with common sense solutions.

SPEAKER_12 40:49

So, Scott, let's talk about that in in small personal ways. I have two samples. Uh one is 14, the other will turn 11 later this week. We we are very tough on them about phones. They're not on lucky out, despite pressure from their friends. Uh, my oldest is often the one kid at the table without the phone. Um, but I we believe that it's good for him long term. Beyond something like that, what are some things you would tell me to tell parents of young men, teenagers, or whatever, what should we be doing to set them up in a more healthy way?

SPEAKER_03 41:18

So if you were to reverse engineer to the single point of failure when a boy comes off the tracks, it's when he loses a male role model to death, divorce, abandonment. What's interesting is that girls in single parent homes, of which we have the most in the world, actually have the same outcomes, same rates of college attendance, same rates of self-harm. The moment a boy loses a male role model, at that moment he becomes more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college. It ends up that if you look at the studies, while boys are physically stronger, they're mentally and emotionally much weaker. I'll give you a very sad and upsetting statistic. Two 15-year-olds, both sexually molested, a boy and a girl. Neither is less or more heinous than the other. The boy is ten times more likely to kill himself later in life. So the first thing is, and it sounds like you've already done this, you've already checked this box, is that we have to get men involved in a young man's life. There's just certain things a young man uh can listen to unless it's from a man. And even just saying that five years ago, that men need to be involved in a young man's life was seen as triggering. I was raised by a single man and mother wouldn't die to secretary, lied in my life, but she knew right away that we needed to get men involved. There's also social programs and educational programs. Let's start boys a year late in kindergarten. They're neurologically less mature, 18 months behind the prefrontal cortex of a man. More men in K through 12. Let's take away the tax status of universities with more than a billion dollar endowment that aren't growing to freshman class faster than population because they've decided they're no longer public servants. They're hedge funds offering classes, more vocational programming, tax policies that stop taking money from young people and putting it in my pocket. People my age are 72% wealthier than they were four years ago. Young people are 24% less wealthy. And let's have an honest conversation. When young people, especially young men, aren't economically viable, they have trouble finding a mate. And the most rewarding things in life are relationships. And we're making it increasingly difficult for young people to find relationships. Mandatory national service. Let's give young people the opportunity to meet other great Americans and fall in love. The lowest levels of young adult tepression in the world in the West are in Israel, despite all the existential threats. Why? Because they're all serving in the army or in some sort of social service, meeting people from different ethnic groups, different income classes, different sexual orientations, and serving in the agency of something bigger than themselves and finding mentors, friends, and mates. There are absolutely things we can do to fix this problem.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

You know, uh Claire, let's talk about peer pressure and the environment that boys grow up in now compared to when you and I were younger. I can tell you, and and I don't think it was just a Southern thing. If there was somebody that was rude to a young woman, friends would all turn on them and stare at them, what are you doing? What are you doing? You don't treat a woman that way. You don't you don't treat a girl that way like when we were in you know middle school or high school.

SPEAKER_00 44:32

Just for the um sake of um who's who who's speaking right now is my former congressman, uh Joe Scarborough, and he's talking to another uh former congresswoman. Uh um, and I'm I want to say Congresswoman. She may have been a senator. I have to look that up, but her name is Claire McCaskill.

Guardrails, Remote Work, And Porn

SPEAKER_02 44:52

Was that peer pressure? And I can tell you from everything I'm hearing now, that's not happening in high school. That's not happening in college. There is a sharper-edged uh misogyny that's just not getting called out by beers, let alone teachers.

SPEAKER_07 45:10

Yeah, and online is, you know, a big basket here in so many ways, the things Scott's talking about. Um it's not just the phones, it's also the social media sites that have a tendency to be just cruel in ways that frankly it's much harder to be when it's person to person. Um, 12 of my 16 grandchildren are boys. Um, I don't know why God didn't want me to buy a lot of pink, but I've got I've got young boys everywhere in my life. And one of the things I wanted to ask you about, Scott, I see that going back to the workplace, for example, I look at my formative years as an adult, and my workplace connections were huge in my development in terms of how I was going to live my life as an adult. Having that camaraderie, having that collegiality of people that had similar issues every day at the workplace. So once again, online. My college years, where I had to get along with folks that were from a much different background than I was, we were all together. We weren't online. Um, I see my grandchildren, the boys, particularly finding that kind of connection through sports because they have a team thing and they all they're getting to know other boys and they're making friends there. What can be done about this online issue, both work, education, and for the young boys that Aren't athletically talented who frankly have so much. I have some grandsons that struggle for various reasons with their athletic ability. And they feel, I believe, like somehow they are less than than the grandsons who are excelling in sports.

SPEAKER_04 47:00

That was a beautiful question.

SPEAKER_03 47:01

Uh in high school sports. Unfortunately, the participation in college and high school sports is directly correlated to your household income. Four-fifths of people in the upper quintile of income-earning households go to college. It's only one five and five in the lowest quintile. Sports has now become a function of how much money your your parents have. Right. But the way I would use it, the term I would use is guardrails. Young men need guardrails. I look at my own life. I had to go into the office. Remote work is a disaster for young men. I needed to get on a get a tie. I didn't have the discipline not to walk my dog and watch Netflix all day if someone had offered me remote work. I had a girlfriend. My girlfriend at one point, I'm not proud of this, but I want to be open and honest. I was smoking a lot of pot in my 20s. And my girlfriend basically said to me, Stop smoking pot. I'm no longer going to be your girlfriend. That was very motivating to me. Men have fewer and fewer guardrails, fewer and fewer guardrails in terms of education, in terms of relationships, in terms of a male mentor. Young men need a certain check. They need relationships. And the moment a man goes online, because this is what a young man I know who's come off the track. So I mentor a lot of young men. When they start blaming immigrants for their economic problems, or they start blaming women for their relationship with their romantic problems. And online waiting for them is a series of algorithms that recognize when they are having misogynistic tendencies or they want to blame others. And it makes them feel better about themselves and makes them feel seen. Unfortunately, they have these frictionless relationships where godlike technologies try to convince them they can have a reasonable facsimile of life online. Why go through the pecking order of trying to find friends when you have Reddit in Discord? Why put on a tie and try and get your act together such that you can get a job? When you can make money trading crypto or stocks on Coinbase or Robinhood? Why on earth would you go through the hassle, the expense working out, having resilience, enduring rejection following up of trying to establish a romantic relationship when you have lifelike porn? No social media under the age of 18, no synthetic relationships for people under the age of 18. And if any of these companies are seen as putting out content that can be reverse-engineered to an increase in self-harm, especially prevalent amongst young girls, we hold them to the same standards we hold this network. Any algorithmically elevated content means you have decided, you have made a conscious decision to survey 15-year-old girl images of nooses, pills, and razors when she start talk starts talking about suicide. There is absolutely no reason we shouldn't hold these companies accountable. We thought in marketing through the last half of the center century that it was sex that sells. These algorithms have found there's something that sells better than sex, and that is rage. We have the most powerful companies in the world with godlike technology trying to divide and polarize us. And young men who, quite frankly, have less developed brains are especially susceptible to this type of division and rage. We need to hold big tech accountable for the damage they are doing to our youth. It's as if, Claire, we are literally trying to plan our own extinction. We are evolving a new species of asocial and asexual males, and our country cannot survive unless we take charge of this and recognize our young men have value. They fight our wars, they build our buildings, they're procreators, they play a hugely important role. And because of the prosperity I've recognized, the unfair advantage that Joe and I recognize at our age, we are holding 19-year-old men accountable. I recognize unfair advantage. The question is: do we want to hold a 19-year-old male responsible and guilty for the unfair advantage I received?

Holding Big Tech Accountable

SPEAKER_10 50:51

Yeah. Wow. I could, I mean, Joe, maybe like we could talk about this forever. Um, but what Scott is saying that I hear so clearly is that we are in an emergency situation in which we need to triage the American response to this crisis in masculinity. And the thing that I keep on hearing, both explicitly and implicitly, is the people who understand this the best are operating the most effective and richest and most powerful tech companies in America. It's Scott Galloway and big tech that sees this very clearly. And the question then becomes how do you hold big tech accountable in this era in which they are seemingly untrammeled by the government that currently rules over us?

SPEAKER_02 51:31

They live by their own rules. We always talk about section 230. They're able to do things that no network's able to do, no newspaper's able to do, no nobody's able to do. And and Congress and the White House will do absolutely nothing about it. And of course, I've seen one documentary after another. Mika's seen one documentary after another. We've read one book after another, Scott, where these gods of Silicon Valley, these monopolists, they want other kids to see it, but they don't let theirs. They don't let their own kids see it because they understand how destructive it is, right?

SPEAKER_03 52:10

Look, the number of time high school, the number of high schoolers that spend time with their classmates has been has been cut in half. Uh so to your point, you're absolutely right. They were up against an indomitable foe. Basically, essentially, our economy now is a giant bet on AI, big tech. And their big bet is they can keep you on your phone sequestered from your key relationships. But these are absolutely things we can solve. And just to call out Joe and I, we have a debt. Yeah. We we we recognize a disproportionate amount of advantage. We have a debt. And that that debt is paid back in one of two ways. On a very emotional personal level, we have an obligation to get involved in young men's lives. The ultimate expression of masculinity is to get involved in the life and take an irrational interest in the well-being of a child that is not biologically yours. There are three times as many women applying to be big sisters in New York as there are men applying to be big brothers. If we want better men, we need to be better men. And the the group that pisses me off the most are the most fortunate in the world, and that is tech bros, who were under the impression that it was all their character and their grit, and not a lot of their success is not their fault. We have a debt to get back involved in young men's lives, both emotionally and socially and fiscally, and start restoring more economic opportunity to young men, programs that lift them up, vocational programming. One of the things I think would help young men the most is universal child care. 75% of women say economic viability is important in a mate, only 25% of women bounce they could work at McDonald's and marry Jay-Z. The opposite is not true. And we don't even like to talk about it, but it's true. And economic viability is not only a function of how much money you make, but your ability to afford to form a household. And let's give a shout out to young conservative men who say their number one ambition is to have a family and young kids. How do we help them do that? Through universal childcare, which puts less financial strain on the home, and you can have two income homes. Financial stress is the number one reason for relationship strength and breaking out. And the most susceptible a young man is to divorce, or excuse me, is to suicide, is in the one year after he uses loses his primary relationship. He splits up from his wife and he loses his relationship with his kids. Joe, you and I, and every other man my age that has recognized this kind of prosperity, we have a debt. We need to get back involved in young men's lives and we need to advocate for them.

Provider, Protector, And Healthy Desire

SPEAKER_02 54:46

Well, and and and Scott, you're so right. And that is the thing that drives me crazy about these billionaires, uh, these tech bros who are running around saying, Woe is me, just looking, saying, Oh my God, everything is stacked against us. Oh, everybody. I understand every single day. I was at an event a couple of months ago where somebody said, Are you scared? No, I'm not scared. I'm I'm good. Are you worried about what's going on? Are you afraid this, that, or the other? I said, No, I'm not. And then I followed by saying, but then again, I'm a six foot four white guy who was born the middle class in middle America at the height of the American century, and I think anything's possible. Why would I be worried about anything right now? I have a responsibility, though, to make sure that other people feel that way, or other people get the opportunities that I got. There is no resentment. I mean, how can there be resentment from the tech bros? And you're exactly right. We have a responsibility. We were given advantages. Even being, again, even coming from a middle class family where my father was laid off from locking when he was 40 years old. We drove around the South for a couple of years. You know, he was looking for a job, but he got that job. We landed on our feet. We were just fine. And again, you're exactly right. Because we grew up in a place where we knew tomorrow was always going to be better. Young men today, Scott, they're not feeling that way, are they?

Off Script Banter And An Impression

SPEAKER_03 56:33

Well, just to go on a more broader level, because this impacts women too. Uh, I got assisted lunch growing up. When my mom got laid off, we had unemployment. My mom was able to terminate a pregnancy and uh when I was 17 and she was 47. Had she not had access to that, there's no way I could have gone to UCLA. UCLA, when I applied, had a 74% admissions rate. This year I'll have 9%. I got Pell grants. I went into the economy during the internet age, where middle-class households had sponsored this amazing technology because we had the money to do this and we have progressive tax structure such that I could start internet businesses. We have rule of law such that I knew, even as a small business, I had a shot. All of those things are under attack. The average seven-year-old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. The average 25-year-old is 24% less wealthy. Old people, quite frankly, have figured out a way to vote themselves more money. And the most obnoxious thing in the world is these tech bros who recognize if you go to the Canadian border, there's no more unicorns or multi-trillion dollar companies. If you go to the Mexican border, there's no trillion dollar companies, and yet want to shippost America. Excuse me for saying that on Morning Joe, they don't move to protection. And that is the key. I talk about three stools of masculinity. First, you're going to be a provider. You need to be economically viable as a man. And sometimes that means getting out of the way of your partner and being more supportive when they're better at that money thing. You need an immediate move to protection. That's what it means to be a man, right? Men break up buys at bars, break up fights at bars, they don't start them. You hear somebody be critical of someone behind their back, you move to protection. You don't have to agree with the trans community, but if you see them being demonized, you immediately move to protection. And the most disappointing thing about the people who are supposed to be our masculine role models right now, whether it's our president or the wealthiest man in the world, is their default operating system isn't to move to protection. That's what men do, they protect. And then finally, and this is more controversial, procreation. I think we need to stop pathologizing a man's desire to have a relationship or quite frankly to have sex. Because that fire, that desire, if channeled correctly, can be very positive. A better dresser, be in shape, have a plan, demonstrate the ultimate seeker weapon in mating, a kindness practice. All of these things can translate into making you a better man. Let's stop pathologizing men because they want to have relationships. But masculinity can serve as a great code. We just need to update it and make it more aspirational. What is not masculine? Being sued by two women concurrently for sole custody of your child because you have not seen your child. Taking away financial aid from HIV positive mothers, stopping food payments. There could be nothing less masculine. Our job is to provide, our job is to protect, and our job is to make wonderful families through that desire to have procreation.

SPEAKER_01 59:35

The new book, Notes on Being a Man, is out tomorrow. Professor of Marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, thank you very much. Congratulations on the book, and we look forward to talking much more about this in the future.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:21

Together we can do almost everything.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:23

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:26

We've got five hours. All right, fine.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:19

So I think that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:23

You have to react like a man's doubt. Albert, you have heard the top. Not the end of your life. Albert, you have heard the dust. Oh what?

Biblical Masculinity Against Extremes

SPEAKER_06 1:01:42

All I have to remember is I can always get locked out of the try walking. Holding the standard.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:21

Let me give you an image. It's an image. John Wayne. Oh god. How do we start with someone easier? Very easy to imitate. And if anyone was amazed, just get off your heart and head into the left. Actually, it's perfect. I just never realized John Wayne walked like that.

Laura Loomer And Attention Politics

SPEAKER_08 1:03:41

What does that mean? Well, we can't let our culture define it. There's extremes on the right and on the left. On the left, we hear that masculinity is itself the problem. Masculinity needs to be redefined and apologized for. There is no leadership that's not oppressive or uh unauthority, that's not just seeking absolute control. But on the other side, there's a loud voice, a reactionary voice, that tells us that masculinity is all about volume instead of virtue, or anger instead of courage, and that Christ-like humility ought to be dismissed as weakness. Which way are we to go? To the right or to the left? Well, the Bible says neither. That we actually define masculinity in the ways in which God has revealed to us, specifically in the person of Christ. Our Lord Jesus led with courage. He stood zealously for the truth. And yet, at the very same time, he considered himself a servant. And so, as Christian men, we are to live as men defined by the Bible to the glory and honor of the Lord Jesus, in joyful submission unto him. We are to lead, yes. But without ego. We have a leadership responsibility and authority that's been given to us by God, the Creator, in Genesis 1 and 2. But that has nothing to do with dominance or cruelty. You see, the Bible presents a masculinity that is strength under control, courage without cruelty, and leadership without ego. A life that is joyfully submitted to following the Lord Jesus. Because the world doesn't need loud and immature man, the world doesn't need soft and passive man, it needs godly and biblical man. And so if you're ready to reject the distortions of our culture against masculinity, godly biblical masculinity, take up this book and read it. And let these principles and these truths impact the way in which you lead in all the different spheres of your life.

SPEAKER_09 1:06:29

Here is a woman who has been expelled from more platforms than a drunk at a country club, who has made herself unwelcome at ride-sharing apps, payment processes, and virtually every corner of the internet designed to facilitate human commerce and communication, and who has somehow parlayed this comprehensive rejection into proximity to the most powerful office on earth.

unknown 1:06:50

Ms.

When Outrage Becomes A Career

SPEAKER_09 1:06:51

Loomer, and I use the honorific loosely, as one might apply the word professional to a pickpocket, first slithered into public consciousness through Project Veritas, that factory of deceptively edited ambush journalism, where she distinguished herself by showing up to a polling station in a burqa asking for a ballot under someone else's name. One might charitably call this performance art, if one were both exceedingly charitable and somewhat confused about the definition of art. In reality, it was simply the opening act of a career built entirely on the principle that negative attention is preferable to obscurity, and that no stunt is too degrading if it delivers a few minutes of notoriety. Laura Loomer is what happens when mediocrity meets shamelessness and decides to breed. What followed was a parade of increasingly desperate theatrics, interrupting a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, trespassing on Nancy Pelosi's lawn with men she recruited from a Home Depot parking lot, handcuffing herself to the doors of Twitter's headquarters while wearing a yellow star of David, this last gesture being particularly offensive, given that she was comparing her suspension from a social media platform to the systematic extermination of six million Jews. Kyle Kashuv, a conservative Parkland survivor, observed that the stunt was crazy enough without wearing a star that my grandparents who got burned alive were forced to wear. After the Christchurch massacre, in which 51 Muslims were murdered at prayer by a white supremacist, she posted, complete with clapping emojis, that she didn't care about the dead. Nobody cares about Christchurch, she wrote, establishing new frontiers in the geography of moral bankruptcy. After the New York terrorist attack in 2017, she launched into a day long tirade demanding a ridesharing service that would refuse to employ Muslims. Uber and Lyft, to their credit, promptly banned her. This is a woman so toxic that corporations whose entire business model depends on mass adoption decided she was not worth the headache. She then complained, without apparent irony, that she could no longer order a sandwich, having also been banned from various food delivery applications. One imagines the sandwich breathed a sigh of relief. But Luma's particular genius, and I use that word as one might describe the ingenuity of a virus, lies in her talent for punching down while claiming victimhood. When Parkland students, still burying their classmates, spoke out about gun violence, she accused them of reading from scripts, of being puppets manipulated by dark forces. She descended on the grieving community on behalf of Infowars to investigate what she implied was a staged event. Fred Gutenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was murdered in that classroom, later wrote that Luma's lies don't just tarnish the legacy of school shooting victims, they put victims' families and survivors in harm's way. Survivors received death threats and harassment because of falsehoods she helped spread. She has the moral compass of a weather vane in a hurricane. The conspiracy theories are endless and exhausting. The Parkland shooting was staged, the Santa Fe shooting employed crisis actors, the Las Vegas shooter was secretly affiliated with ISIS, the 2022 Buffalo Massacre was a Democratic hoax designed to start a race war. The 2025 Minnesota legislative shootings were orchestrated by Governor Walls's goons. And then there is the matter of September 11th. Luma shared a video claiming the attacks were an inside job, a theory so comprehensively debunked, so insulting to the nearly 3,000 dead, that even the fever swamps of the American right tend to avoid it these days. Yet there she was in 2024, accompanying Donald Trump to memorial services commemorating the anniversary, standing on sacred ground while apparently believing the whole thing was a government operation. That proximity to Trump, first as a frequent presence on his plane and at his events, then as an informal advisor to his second administration, represents perhaps the most damning indictment of our political moment. Here is a man who once attempted to hire her for his campaign, only to be talked out of it by advisors who recognized a liability when they saw one. Senior Republicans, including Lindsey Graham and even Marjorie Taylor Green, a woman herself so adjacent to conspiracy thinking that she once blamed California wildfires on Jewish space lasers, have publicly denounced Luma as extremely racist, mentally unstable, and a documented liar. When you have lost Marjorie Taylor Green on grounds of extremism, you have truly wandered into unmapped territory. She is the political equivalent of a persistent infection, incurable, irritating, and capable of causing real damage if left untreated. Trump kept her around because Trump recognizes in Luma a kindred spirit, someone for whom loyalty is the supreme virtue and truth is merely an inconvenience. She has used her influence to orchestrate what ABC News counts as the removal of at least 15 administration officials across six federal agencies, not for incompetence or corruption, but for insufficient fealty to the leader. She operates a tip line inviting denunciations of suspected disloyalists, a practice that carries disturbing echoes of darker chapters in other nations' histories. Personnel is policy, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said approvingly, and Laura has taken that motto to heart. The curry incident deserves special mention. When Kamala Harris secured the Democratic nomination, Loomer posted that if Harris won, the White House will smell like curry, and White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center. This was racism so uncut, so proudly displayed, that it prompted something rare in Republican circles, actual pushback. The Georgia chapter of the American Hindu Coalition issued a statement condemning her remarks. Trump allies worried about losing Indian American votes in swing states. Looma's response to accusations of racism was to note, with all the rhetorical sophistication of a child caught with chocolate on their face, that Harris herself had been filmed cooking with curry. Case closed, apparently. She is proof that in modern American politics there is no basement beneath which one cannot tunnel. Bill Maher suggested on his program that Luma might be sleeping with Trump, a joke one might add, that Luma found sufficiently actionable to warrant a$150 million defamation lawsuit. In her deposition, she complained of being smeared as a whore and as a groupie and as a bimbo. One notes that Looma has built her entire career on smearing others with far less evidence than a comedian's speculation, that she has accused a dead congresswoman's wife of faking her cancer diagnosis, that she has called Muslim American officials terrorist sympathizers and suggested they be deported. The irony of demanding strict factual standards from others while trafficking exclusively in innuendo and fabrication appears to be lost on her entirely. What makes Luma genuinely dangerous rather than merely obnoxious is the downstream effect of her rhetoric. After she and other influencers amplified a false story about a global day of jihad following the Hamas attack on Israel, a 71-year-old landlord in Illinois was apparently motivated to stab to death a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy and attempt to murder the child's mother. Words have consequences. Conspiracy theories metastasize. When you spend years insisting that immigrants are cannibals eating household pets, that mass shootings are false flags, some portion of your audience will act on those beliefs. Laura Loomer is the physical manifestation of what happens when the algorithm rewards engagement over accuracy and outrage over insight. She ran for Congress twice and lost both times, first in 2020 and again in 2022. Voters in her own district, conservatives in a Trump-friendly area, looked at her and declined. She refused to concede her second defeat, calling herself a winner while attacking the Republican Party as broken to its core. The fraud claims were eventually thrown out with prejudice. Luma then sued the Council on American Islamic Relations, claiming they had conspired with Twitter to ban her. A judge dismissed the case after it emerged that the entire premise was based on a fabricated rumor invented by a prankster who makes sport of trolling alt-right figures. She was ordered to pay over$120,000 in attorney's fees. The most recent chapter in this ongoing saga of political sociopathy concerns her response to Charlie Kirk's assassination in September 2025. Just days before Kirk was shot, Looma had attacked him as a political opportunist. After his death, she pivoted seamlessly to martyrdom rhetoric, demanding that the Trump administration shut down, defund, and prosecute every single leftist organization. She then launched a coordinated campaign to identify and destroy the careers of anyone who expressed insufficient grief, posting names, photographs, and employers, while promising to make her targets wish you never opened your mouth. It was a masterclass in weaponizing tragedy for political ends while simultaneously claiming the moral high ground. If hypocrisy were an Olympic event, Laura Loomer would be the greatest athlete who ever lived. And yet here she is in 2025 holding a Pentagon press credential, communicating directly with the president, shaping national security decisions from outside any official capacity. She has never held elected office, has no relevant expertise, has been comprehensively discredited on virtually every factual claim she has ever made, and has been deemed too extreme by figures who themselves occupy the furthest reaches of the Republican Party. Her staying power is a testament to nothing more edifying than the proposition that in contemporary American politics, shamelessness is its own reward. There is a word for people like Laura Loomer, though it is not often heard in polite company. She is a demagogue's demagogue, a grifter's grifter, the id of a movement that has abandoned any pretense of principle in favor of pure tribal loyalty and performative cruelty. She exists in that peculiar American space where being banned from everything becomes a badge of honor rather than evidence of misbehavior, where losing elections twice qualifies you to advise presidents, where spreading lies about murdered children makes you a truth teller fighting the establishment. She is not the cause of our political sickness, but she is certainly one of its most florid symptoms. The charitable interpretation is that Luma is simply mentally unwell, a person whose pathological need for attention has led her down increasingly dark corridors. The less charitable interpretation is that she knows exactly what she is doing, that the racism and conspiracy theories and shameless self-promotion are all calculated moves in a game she is winning by any metric that matters to her. Either way, the result is the same. A figure who has caused real harm to real people while failing upward with a consistency that would be impressive if it were not so depressing. In the end, Laura Loomer is less a person than a phenomenon. The logical endpoint of a media ecosystem that rewards provocation over substance, of a political movement that has made loyalty to one man the only test of virtue, of a country that has lost the ability to distinguish between celebrity and achievement. She is what happens when there are no consequences for bad behavior, when platforms ban you only to have billionaires restore your access, when the President of the United States calls you a free spirit rather than what you are. And what she is, stripped of the noise and the stunts and the endless grievance, is simply this: a profoundly unserious person who has been taken seriously by people who should know better, wielding influence she has not earned on matters she does not understand, in service of a movement that has no purpose beyond its own perpetuation. She is, in other words, the perfect avatar for this particular moment in American history, a country so drunk on its own decline that it mistakes the vultures for the eagles.