Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,”
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: The most remarkable fact about the decline of men in America is how relentlessly our leaders pretend it’s not happening at all. The patriarchy is thriving, they tell us. Men are in charge, and they succeed precisely to the extent to thwart the progress of women. Society is a zero-sum equation, in which a man’s gain is a woman’s loss. This is wrong, and we must rectify it. That’s the message.
It also happened to be the core assumptions of second-wave feminism which became popular 40 years ago just as many of our baby boom leaders were becoming of age.
And yet, none of those assumptions are true today. America has changed completely. The patriarchy is gone, women are winning, men are failing.
Men in America are now far more likely to die of a drug overdose, drop out of the workforce because of an addiction, commit a felony and go to prison. They fail in school much more often than women do. They kill themselves at many times the rate. Overall, they die years younger.
Those numbers are not speculative. They are hard data gathered over decades by non-partisan researchers. You’d have to ignore a huge amount of settled science in order to repeat the pieties of 1970s-era feminism.
And yet, that is exactly what our leaders continue to do. In March of 2009, almost immediately after arriving in Washington, Barack Obama created the White House Council on Women and Girls. He taps his advisor Valerie Jarrett to run it.
“When our daughters don’t have the same education and career opportunities as our sons,” Obama said in his announcement, “that affects our economy and our future as a nation.”
At the very moment, Obama was lamenting the lack of educational opportunities for women, more girls than boys were graduating from high school, far more who are graduating from college.
Women now earn 62 percent of associates degrees, 57 percent of bachelors’ degrees, 60 percent of masters’ degrees, and 52 percent of doctorates.
That gap is even wider in non-white neighborhoods. For example, in 2007, among black and Hispanic graduates of public schools in Boston, for every 100 black men who got a college degree, there were 230 black women who got one. For every 100 Hispanic men who got a college degree, there were 211 Hispanic women who got one.
Seventy percent of all masters’ degrees awarded to black students nationally went to black women; just 30 percent went to black men.
Yet, for reasons the Obama administration never explained, the school performance of black and Hispanic girls was deemed a higher priority than the performance of black and Hispanic boys.
Under Obama, the White House solicited hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations to encourage female achievement in higher education.
At the time this was happening, one study showed that there were already at least four times as many privately funded college scholarships available for girls as for boys. Four times! The administration never acknowledged this.
Instead, it sought new ways to close a gender gap that no longer exists. One idea was “breaking down gender stereotypes in toys.” To that end, the White House pressured manufacturers, retailers, and media outlets to eliminate gender distinction in children’s toys.
This, the administration claimed, would allow kids to “explore, learn, and dream without limits.” While educators at all levels took this idea seriously. In 2015, one kindergarten teacher in Washington State banned her male students from playing with Lego.
Fitting together plastic blocks has been found by researchers to help children develop important cognitive skills. Boys have enough advantages, the teacher explained. So, she intentionally prevented them from learning.
Girls thrive when boys fail. This is the underlying assumption of much of America’s gender policy and education. There is no credible research to suggest that is true. It is purely an ideological belief. And yet, that assumption is pervasive, especially on college campuses.
Now, that’s ironic because there are more than 2 million more women than men enrolled in college this year. On most campuses, men are a distinct minority.
At Carlow University in Pittsburgh, women outnumber men by more than 6 to 1. And yet, almost every campus has a women’s studies department. In many of them, the stated goal is to fight expressions of masculinity and disempower men.
At Ohio State, a course is underway this spring called “Be a Man: Masculinities, Race & Nation.” The syllabus for that course explains that masculinity is used to “justify certain kinds of violence by men.” On the first day of class, students were required to consult a male privilege checklist.
At Duke University in North Carolina, a nine-week workshop meant to devise ways to undermine “masculinity and maleness” as well to create destabilized spaces for those with privilege, meaning men.
Similar projects have sprouted at colleges all over the country.
Under the Obama administration, the Department of Justice created something called the Healthy Masculinity Campus Athletics Project. The coordinator of that program at Wheaton College summed up its objective this way. “As a country, we need to do a better job of addressing issues around toxic masculinity.”
Left unasked was the most basic question of all, is masculinity itself really toxic? And what happens to boys when we tell them that it is?
It’s widely understood that attacking people for their basic nature is unhealthy and it’s wrong. A government-funded program designed to fight toxic femininity or toxic homosexuality probably would not escape the scrutiny of Congress or the media.
At the very least, its supporters would have to explain why our country needs a program like that. And yet, nobody has been forced to explain why boys who are already failing need to be held back further. And so, they are.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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