Speaker 1: All right, Liberian of Colino, welcome back to the Jay
Burton Show. How you doing Mana here again? Yeah, our
last episode was sort of a sleeper hit. You know,
it did about as well as everyone else, but I
got a very long trail of emails and comments, people
coming back to it saying it was a great conversation,
and you know, I had to agree, and so, yeah, man,
I figured i'd have you back on, particularly to talk
about your most recent essay. So I assume people remember
you check out a substack. It's quite good. But if
you could, could you describe sort of what motivated you
to write this essay and then your your general thesis
if you could.
Speaker 2: So, I was motivated to write about it because, well,
I guess sort of a sense of duty, you know,
because everybody else was talking about it and a lot
of the commentary around it, I sort of felt missed
not the point. There's a lot of points being made
in there, but I thought it missed a point, a
point I think the author himself didn't quite fully wrap
himself around. And I'm not the only one to I'll
get a little more into it, but I'm not the
only one that sort of think the author sort of missed,
missed a point or pulled a punch or something like that.
But there was a lot of sort of anger and
doomerism around the response to this article. People throwing their
hands up in the air. You know, see this proves
that it's always been like this. They they hate white people.
You can't get ahead, you can't get a job, the systems.
You know, we need to turn our rage against the
system and stuff. And I think there certainly is And
this is a point I made in my article. I
thought it'd be more controversial than it was, and people
really just seem to respond to it well. But the anger,
right that the energy behind that, I think directing it
at the system is not as important as it is
to take that energy and turn it towards our own
creative endeavors, make something new out of the ruins of
what's clearly collapsing around us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's a it's a difficult needle to
thread because and look, even before this compact piece, this
is a drum that I've been beating on for quite
a while that there are cards stacked against white men,
and particularly young white men. But the problem is, right,
your analysis can often not your personally, uh, mister Klino.
But you know, one analysis can can veer into a
sort of a sense of hopelessness. And there's sort of
a cynically but partially correct take that comes from the
kind of woke right crowd, the people who say that
a lot. We're like, oh no, this is horrible. You know.
By by pointing out that there is, you know, racial
discrimination against white people, you're you know, adopting the same
quo victim morality of you know, the left. You're doing
the woke thing all over again. And Okay, that's disingenuous.
That's there for a reason. But I think there is
a genuine danger in creating sort of you know, Jesse
Jackson for white people, right, this this like permanent grievance status,
because look like it's it's It is true, there are
very real structural barriers. But the problem is the best
advice you can give to an individual, like a person
who has no ability to change kind of a system
is actually boomer advice. It is to pull yourself up
by your bootstraps. That can just be difficult to hear
from a source who shall always say does not have
your best interest at heart. Do you recognize that sort
of tension.
Speaker 2: I'm identifying absolutely, and it is a problem because any time.
So it's correct, like you're right, the system is stacked
against white men in a number of significant ways. The
author does a great job of pointing this out. He
mostly focuses, I think, on creative industries and you know,
the media stuff like that, academia, professions, things like that,
where there's these defined pads that are very easy to gatekeep,
and I think if you butt your head against those,
you're going to experience this more than as just an
entrepreneur or an independent creator or something like that. But
the cards, it's true, are stacked against us. And when
you've already had the rug pulled out from you before
because you believe somebody's promises, you know, the story you
get in response to this all the time is, oh,
they told us to go to college and we get
a job, and we played by the rules, and we
did everything they said and went to college, got the degree,
and now I'm being replaced by you know, a guy
from India, and I can't get a job in the
film industry because of DEI. And it's true, So you're
not gonna then listen to those same people when they
come to you with good advice, when they say to you, listen,
the only way, the only way forward is to make
your own path. And and you know, not appeal to
people who other people who people really don't have your
best interests at heart. I don't I don't necessarily think
that the people the boomers were giving disingenuous advice or
evil advice when they told people. I think they genuinely
thought that was the right thing to do. And when
it didn't work out, nobody's going to listen to the
other things they say, which maybe are better advice because
the first thing didn't work. If I'm making sense there,
it's hard. It's hard for it's hard for somebody. We
look at a boomer, you know, the typical way you
see people respond to them on the right. Oh, this guy,
you know, he had it easy. He you know, has
handed the greatest economy in history, and he made all
this money and now he's pulled up the ladder behind
him and stuff. And to some extent that's true, certainly
in the industries that the Savage pointed out. Uh, but
the general idea of you know, boomers had it universally easy,
and telling people to make their own way as bad
I think is completely counterproductive.
Speaker 1: I think that there's also a there's an interesting I
think cast to this argument as well, which is, in general,
I actually think is entirely reasonable in the political landscape
to you know, to talk about and to address the
dispossession of young white men. I think that that is
a relatively speaking, winning strategy when compared to kind of
color blind Reaganite capitalism. Can we say that, you know,
for a bunch of random buzzwords that throw out there.
And so it's difficult again because oftentimes the people who
are trying to head this off at the path are
doing so so that they can substitute a sort of
return to you know, nineteen nineties conservatism. And the problem
is is it's like, well, okay, like some of their
specific critiques are in fact correct, but not for the
right reason, and they're not making them in they're not
doing that genuinely because they are primarily interested in the
success of young white men. They are primarily interested in,
at least in a stated sense, avoiding quote unquote identity politics.
And you mentioned, of course, the kind of dipping their
toe in the rubicon that you see often from the
sort of IDW types, and I think we can sort
of extend that to sort of like the good conservative,
you know, the the kind of on the on the
reservation types. And I think that that's another point as well,
that sort of monies this discussion is at a certain point,
it doesn't the discussion is not even really being had
in particular, it becomes a sort of friend enemy. You know,
are you a group I like or not? If you
see what I'm getting at there, man, Yes, So I think.
Speaker 2: That there's a positive and a negative in framing the
political issue as we need we need to address the
needs of young white men, right. That's there's there's two
sides to that, two parts of that. On the one hand,
white men are being screwed over in different economic spheres
because they're white men at the same time, and and
economics there's there's it's very difficult to imagine, and economics
that just sort of universally benefits white men. Categorically, if
you're a blue collar young white man, then the world
that's going to benefit stockbrokers and media personalities and things
like that is not necessarily going to benefit you. You know,
if I'm trying to make money in the finance industry.
Tariffs aren't going to help me where they are going
to help the guy who wants to be an electrical engineer.
Speaker 1: Things.
Speaker 2: There's a class dimension to it as well that I
think it's very easy to paper over with this just
sort of appeal to whiteness as such or white maleness
as such. There's no economy it's going to universally benefit
all white men equally in economics. That's just what if
everything in economics benefit some people and not so much
other people, or not at all other people. In terms
of the critique, you know, Savage, is the critique you
mentioned about the rubicon. Everything that goes back to Jeremy
Carl Wilso wrote a great article about this story. Savage's
critique is a liberal critique. He's making a liberal point.
He's saying liberalism is not working like it should and
it should be working, and we should be upset about that.
The implication of what he's saying is is that we
need to just sort of introduce, you know, this sort
of colorblind meritocracy, and the general rightist critique of that is, well,
all these other people are acting in their racial interests
such as it is, we should do that too. But
again it comes back to the point I was making before.
What is the white economic interest? Does it benefit white people?
Would be a financialized to me like neoliberalism wants. Does
it benefit white people to have a high tariff reindustrializing economy.
What's the what's going to benefit white people? And so
I think thinking about it that way is counterproductive. I
think that what we should be focusing on is how
do we use conditions as they exist to thrive and
then longer term or at the same time, how do
we change the system so that I, as a white
man with my neighbors and everything that can prosper