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