Amid the usual headlines predicting a Trump Apocalypse in The Washington Post—one can’t miss such bangers as “Trump upends century-old approach to the world” and “Latest Trump guidance on race has schools scrambling amid ‘intense fear’”—comes columnist Catherine Rampell’s “Why Gen Z men love Trump’s reign of destruction.”

Rampell cites statistics showing that young men are faring worse than young women in such areas as drug abuse and academic achievement. More of them live with their parents, and “younger white men from low-income households … are worse off than their fathers.” Increasingly isolated by technology, we are told, young men retreat into “echo chambers” of pro-Trump “alt-right podcasters and influencers.”

Gen Z men, Rampell maintains, were won over by Trump’s “strongman tendencies,” his “macho effect,” and his “’high-energy, edgy, almost transgressive rhetoric’”—much more than by his policies. He helped “isolated young men feel welcome and liked.” But she intones, “Trump’s agenda has done little to address the economic and mental health challenges young men face.”

Richard V. Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, says that young men are viewed as “being the problem” by Democrats and have therefore been politically adrift. He tells Rampell that we must stop “’pathologizing’” them and start listening to them.

Rampell can’t resist the temptation, however, and does exactly what Reeves warns her against in claiming that young men face so many “mental health challenges” that they are drawn to a “strongman.” Rampell’s attitude mimics the predominate posture of educators who have become so used to beating down boys and men that they cannot recognize it as anything other than normal.

Way back in 2008, I wrote about how each year I was observing more women than men on the college campuses where I taught freshman composition. Statistics showed that male students were falling behind female students from elementary school on up. At that time, men still held a slight advantage in earning doctoral degrees.

Ten years later, women were also earning the majority of doctoral degrees and outnumbering men in law schools and medical schools.

It should not have been a surprise. By the time I entered graduate school in the 1990s, it was obvious that academic departments were gradually being hijacked by feminists. Male students were force-fed novels by Amy Tan and Margaret Atwood. Teachers and professors told girls to be aggressive and ambitious and boys to be meek and obedient. Kudos for getting the correct answer and winning were replaced by accolades for collaboration and exploration of feelings.

The very means of reasoning and communicating—as had been taught through the Aristotelian art of persuasion, through various appeals and evidence leading in a linear and logical way to a thesis—was deemed “phallogocentric.” As French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous wrote in the literary theory book I was assigned in graduate school, “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes…”

A professor granted a female student’s request to write her paper in the form of a quilt. Fellow instructors assigned “response papers” to such activities as participating in Take Back the Night and Slut Walks.

In 2018, I noted this in an article about an editorial in the student newspaper of Hamilton College, a campus that pulls all the stops on being “inclusive.”

By that point, I had been canceled from the academy but was following developments as a resident fellow at The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, which is in the same town as Hamilton College. The student author, an open lesbian, was uncomfortable when she patronized an on-campus pub called the Little Pub with a female friend. They were the only females there. She was not complaining about harassment or rudeness from the male patrons. It was their mere presence that bothered her. “It is impossible to describe the discomfort, vulnerability, and isolation of being the only women in a male-dominated space,” she wailed in her essay titled, “PUB POWER must force campus to recognize privilege and broach uncomfortable conversations.”

Unfortunately, in the ensuing years campus culture spread to the wider world. “Uncomfortable conversations” were infused into the workplace in the form of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) sessions. They mimicked the kinds of situations with women that men hate: hours and hours of haranguing about amorphous issues. Even soldiers preparing for battle could not escape. 

Today, the Hamilton College website, in an attempt to lure new students, features a student advertising the college’s writing program by testifying about how she was able to come out of her “shell” and express herself on the bigger issues of “race” and “gender.” This is one of the videos advertising how Hamilton College teaches students to “express” themselves. The other ways are in “digital fluency,” “speaking,” and “the arts.”

This constant emphasis on expression and emotion have struck at the very foundations of thought and Western civilization, exactly as the academic feminists intended. The poison has spread from English departments to science, engineering, medicine, and the law. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are based on the stereotypically feminine thinking of the kindergarten teacher who seeks to socialize small children and instill habits of cooperation—and of the angry feminist seeking to bring down the patriarchy. But these are not standards that have any place in an adult world based on logic, objectivity, merit, or longstanding principles.

While Rampell refers to the “mental health challenges” that boys and men face in her recent Washington Post article, she fails miserably to recognize the cause of these challenges. Removing the barriers that feminists have erected—the nag sessions, the browbeating, the subversion of natural male energy and logic—will do much to restore the wellbeing of men and boys.

It will also save Western civilization. So, let the “reign of destruction” continue.