Men Begin the Masculine Pushback

There was a Code of the West — in the movie West if not the old one. You can mock a man, attack his manhood, humiliate him. You can even believe the things you say to him, and about him. But you’d better be ready when he shows you what he’s made of, or you’ll end up on the saloon floor. The best depiction of this principle appears in the Western masterpiece, Shane.

It’s the classic story of a gunfighter (played wonderfully by Alan Ladd) trying to reinvent himself as a peaceful farmer in a land long ruled by cattlemen. Mistaking Shane’s wish to settle down for timidity, cowboy bully Callaway (Ben Johnson) can’t believe Shane has reentered a bar after he supposedly intimidated him away. In a brilliant bit of foreshadowing by genius auteur George Stevens, Callaway disregards his poker pal’s instinct that something is wrong (“Deal me out”) even after Shane warns, “Don’t push it, Callaway.” So, Callaway gets knocked through the door and learns a painful lesson. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: World War True)

The Left is about to learn the same lesson. For the past ten years, they’ve relentlessly attacked men as toxic members of the Patriarchy, including the very entities that made billions from them. Gillette chastised them. Bud Lite mocked them. Hollywoke replaced boy’s heroes with ridiculous girl bosses, turning Star Wars into starlet wars, Marvel into mega-bomb The Marvels, and Mad Max into Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. It discarded the impossible to gender-reverse Western altogether, along with another genre of indirect interest to men.

The female-friendly Romantic Comedy also went thataway — damned by its reliance on feminine beauty. Because the “male gaze” has to be repelled, women could no longer drag their dates to a rom-com with the excuse of seeing a Pretty Woman like Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Katherine Heigl, or any cutie looking for love with a good man. Yet men were expected to buy getting their onscreen butts kicked by absurdly macho women or replaced altogether. They didn’t of course. They just let once magic movie factories like Disney Marvel languish. Hollywood in Toto reports that The Marvels cost the studio $237 million.

For men know that in a Mad Max world, the Amazonian warrioress Furiosa would be decapitated, raped, or turned into some barbarian’s slave girl. Just as in the real world, the most mediocre male athlete can trounce the personal best women while insulting them by pretending to be them. We know what true barbarians did to Israeli women last October 7^th,. They raped them, murdered them and their children, and took many of them hostage. And there wasn’t a Furiosa among them to stop it.

Real men are not about to let that happen here. Like Shane, they’ve been pushed too far. They’re no longer ignoring hostility to them. They’re starting to fight back. Last week at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, as widely reported, a mob of crazed ugly women and their beta-male familiars tried to replace the American flag with the Palestinian one. A group of fraternity brothers stood in their way. They surrounded and protected the U.S. flag, enduring hurled insults and objects.

One of the boys, Guillermo Estrada, made inspiring comments about his motivation on X mixed with a warning for the leftists.  “I grew up in a military community and saw first hand the sacrifices they make. I will not stand for the disrespect these ‘protestors’ cause for the sake of another country.”

It helps explain why Joe Biden is losing young men, not to mention Hispanics to Trump. Which has led to much speculation about the similarities between this election year and 1968. Both saw widespread campus unrest leading up to the Democratic convention in Chicago. And many expect a similar result — total victory for the Republican presidential ticket. But there’s a major difference between then and now, in how far left the Left has moved the Overton Window since 1968. (READ MORE: Midway in the Culture War)

Marxists understand that the political pendulum tends to swing back, especially from the typical Democrat-caused social failure. Normal people would always reasonably vote against a failing economy, rising crime, an open border, dysfunctional cities, a disastrous foreign policy which has spawned two current wars plus a military catastrophe in Afghanistan, cultural insanity like men becoming women, and a truly creepy zombie President. But unlike six decades ago, the Left has jammed the return swing of the pendulum by changing the rules.

This time, as never before, they have the opposition candidate on trial — one step out of prison — for fabricated crimes. They have millions of potential illegal voters while they block any means to vet them, such as voter ID. And they have near total mainstream and social media domination, except for the biggest in each category — Fox News and X. Fox News went wobbly last presidential election year but has been pretty solid this year. And Elon Musk has successfully defended X and himself against the slings and arrows of outraged progressivism.

Only now we have something the communists don’t — chivalrous young men — despite all their attempts to indoctrinate them. And their nature for fighting savages goes back a lot farther than the Wild West to the heroes of mythical Ancient Greece. In his excellent new Substack article, literary scholar Spencer Klavan compared the brave UNC frat boys to the Homeric Greeks. “The whole genius of the Iliad is that these flawed men are also towering demigods,” Klavan wrote. “It’s the ideal that arches over them, the unreachable star they’re aiming at, that makes them great.” I’m just glad these boys are on my side, and that I’m not on their left.

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