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Speaker 1: All right, Liberian of Colino, welcome back to the Jay

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Burton Show. How you doing Mana here again? Yeah, our

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last episode was sort of a sleeper hit. You know,

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it did about as well as everyone else, but I

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got a very long trail of emails and comments, people

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coming back to it saying it was a great conversation,

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and you know, I had to agree, and so, yeah, man,

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I figured i'd have you back on, particularly to talk

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about your most recent essay. So I assume people remember

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you check out a substack. It's quite good. But if

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you could, could you describe sort of what motivated you

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to write this essay and then your your general thesis

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if you could.

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Speaker 2: So, I was motivated to write about it because, well,

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I guess sort of a sense of duty, you know,

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because everybody else was talking about it and a lot

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of the commentary around it, I sort of felt missed

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not the point. There's a lot of points being made

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in there, but I thought it missed a point, a

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point I think the author himself didn't quite fully wrap

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himself around. And I'm not the only one to I'll

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get a little more into it, but I'm not the

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only one that sort of think the author sort of missed,

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missed a point or pulled a punch or something like that.

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But there was a lot of sort of anger and

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doomerism around the response to this article. People throwing their

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hands up in the air. You know, see this proves

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that it's always been like this. They they hate white people.

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You can't get ahead, you can't get a job, the systems.

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You know, we need to turn our rage against the

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system and stuff. And I think there certainly is And

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this is a point I made in my article. I

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thought it'd be more controversial than it was, and people

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really just seem to respond to it well. But the anger,

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right that the energy behind that, I think directing it

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at the system is not as important as it is

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to take that energy and turn it towards our own

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creative endeavors, make something new out of the ruins of

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what's clearly collapsing around us.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's a it's a difficult needle to

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thread because and look, even before this compact piece, this

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is a drum that I've been beating on for quite

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a while that there are cards stacked against white men,

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and particularly young white men. But the problem is, right,

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your analysis can often not your personally, uh, mister Klino.

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But you know, one analysis can can veer into a

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sort of a sense of hopelessness. And there's sort of

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a cynically but partially correct take that comes from the

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kind of woke right crowd, the people who say that

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a lot. We're like, oh no, this is horrible. You know.

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By by pointing out that there is, you know, racial

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discrimination against white people, you're you know, adopting the same

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quo victim morality of you know, the left. You're doing

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the woke thing all over again. And Okay, that's disingenuous.

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That's there for a reason. But I think there is

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a genuine danger in creating sort of you know, Jesse

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Jackson for white people, right, this this like permanent grievance status,

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because look like it's it's It is true, there are

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very real structural barriers. But the problem is the best

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advice you can give to an individual, like a person

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who has no ability to change kind of a system

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is actually boomer advice. It is to pull yourself up

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by your bootstraps. That can just be difficult to hear

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from a source who shall always say does not have

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your best interest at heart. Do you recognize that sort

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of tension.

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Speaker 2: I'm identifying absolutely, and it is a problem because any time.

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So it's correct, like you're right, the system is stacked

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against white men in a number of significant ways. The

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author does a great job of pointing this out. He

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mostly focuses, I think, on creative industries and you know,

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the media stuff like that, academia, professions, things like that,

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where there's these defined pads that are very easy to gatekeep,

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and I think if you butt your head against those,

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you're going to experience this more than as just an

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entrepreneur or an independent creator or something like that. But

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the cards, it's true, are stacked against us. And when

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you've already had the rug pulled out from you before

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because you believe somebody's promises, you know, the story you

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get in response to this all the time is, oh,

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they told us to go to college and we get

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a job, and we played by the rules, and we

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did everything they said and went to college, got the degree,

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and now I'm being replaced by you know, a guy

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from India, and I can't get a job in the

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film industry because of DEI. And it's true, So you're

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not gonna then listen to those same people when they

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come to you with good advice, when they say to you, listen,

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the only way, the only way forward is to make

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your own path. And and you know, not appeal to

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people who other people who people really don't have your

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best interests at heart. I don't I don't necessarily think

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that the people the boomers were giving disingenuous advice or

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evil advice when they told people. I think they genuinely

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thought that was the right thing to do. And when

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it didn't work out, nobody's going to listen to the

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other things they say, which maybe are better advice because

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the first thing didn't work. If I'm making sense there,

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it's hard. It's hard for it's hard for somebody. We

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look at a boomer, you know, the typical way you

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see people respond to them on the right. Oh, this guy,

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you know, he had it easy. He you know, has

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handed the greatest economy in history, and he made all

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this money and now he's pulled up the ladder behind

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him and stuff. And to some extent that's true, certainly

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in the industries that the Savage pointed out. Uh, but

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the general idea of you know, boomers had it universally easy,

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and telling people to make their own way as bad

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I think is completely counterproductive.

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Speaker 1: I think that there's also a there's an interesting I

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think cast to this argument as well, which is, in general,

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I actually think is entirely reasonable in the political landscape

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to you know, to talk about and to address the

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dispossession of young white men. I think that that is

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a relatively speaking, winning strategy when compared to kind of

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color blind Reaganite capitalism. Can we say that, you know,

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for a bunch of random buzzwords that throw out there.

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And so it's difficult again because oftentimes the people who

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are trying to head this off at the path are

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doing so so that they can substitute a sort of

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return to you know, nineteen nineties conservatism. And the problem

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is is it's like, well, okay, like some of their

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specific critiques are in fact correct, but not for the

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right reason, and they're not making them in they're not

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doing that genuinely because they are primarily interested in the

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success of young white men. They are primarily interested in,

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at least in a stated sense, avoiding quote unquote identity politics.

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And you mentioned, of course, the kind of dipping their

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toe in the rubicon that you see often from the

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sort of IDW types, and I think we can sort

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of extend that to sort of like the good conservative,

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you know, the the kind of on the on the

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reservation types. And I think that that's another point as well,

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that sort of monies this discussion is at a certain point,

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it doesn't the discussion is not even really being had

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in particular, it becomes a sort of friend enemy. You know,

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are you a group I like or not? If you

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see what I'm getting at there, man, Yes, So I think.

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Speaker 2: That there's a positive and a negative in framing the

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political issue as we need we need to address the

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needs of young white men, right. That's there's there's two

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sides to that, two parts of that. On the one hand,

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white men are being screwed over in different economic spheres

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because they're white men at the same time, and and

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economics there's there's it's very difficult to imagine, and economics

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that just sort of universally benefits white men. Categorically, if

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you're a blue collar young white man, then the world

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that's going to benefit stockbrokers and media personalities and things

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like that is not necessarily going to benefit you. You know,

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if I'm trying to make money in the finance industry.

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Tariffs aren't going to help me where they are going

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to help the guy who wants to be an electrical engineer.

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Speaker 1: Things.

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Speaker 2: There's a class dimension to it as well that I

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think it's very easy to paper over with this just

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sort of appeal to whiteness as such or white maleness

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as such. There's no economy it's going to universally benefit

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all white men equally in economics. That's just what if

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everything in economics benefit some people and not so much

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other people, or not at all other people. In terms

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of the critique, you know, Savage, is the critique you

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mentioned about the rubicon. Everything that goes back to Jeremy

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Carl Wilso wrote a great article about this story. Savage's

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critique is a liberal critique. He's making a liberal point.

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He's saying liberalism is not working like it should and

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it should be working, and we should be upset about that.

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The implication of what he's saying is is that we

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need to just sort of introduce, you know, this sort

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of colorblind meritocracy, and the general rightist critique of that is, well,

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all these other people are acting in their racial interests

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such as it is, we should do that too. But

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again it comes back to the point I was making before.

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What is the white economic interest? Does it benefit white people?

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Would be a financialized to me like neoliberalism wants. Does

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it benefit white people to have a high tariff reindustrializing economy.

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What's the what's going to benefit white people? And so

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I think thinking about it that way is counterproductive. I

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think that what we should be focusing on is how

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do we use conditions as they exist to thrive and

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then longer term or at the same time, how do

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we change the system so that I, as a white

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man with my neighbors and everything that can prosper