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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Things.
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