Transcription
Something rather extraordinary happened last week in the UK media. The New Statesman, the Bible of the left-wing cultural and policy elites in this country, came out with a paradigm-shattering story about sex-based political extremism. It's kind of like the equivalent of the Atlantic, and the findings apply to America, too. So, listen up.
In essence, they admitted, "We have an extremism problem." Of course, the media generally has been telling us this for some time. However, until now, media warnings about this dangerous radicalization got one teeny tiny detail wrong. The people who were being radicalized, and the New Statesman, of all places, corrected the record. It turns out, it's not the boys being radicalized to hate women through the manosphere, as so many chattering class Kathys have been hysterically been claiming.
According to polling commissioned by the New Statesman, boys are quite fond of girls, actually. So, the left-wing media has actually admitted that it's girls being radicalized to hate men through far-left political ideology, including, but not limited to, feminism. They even call it the femosphere. Now, this is a slightly longer-than-usual video. So, let me break it down. First, I'm going to tell you what the New Statesman reported and why it's significant. Then, I'm going to tell you what drove me, as a young woman, to join a far-left party, albeit briefly. And finally, I'm going to tell you what helped me move away from those toxic politics and live a productive life. My name is Jenny Holland, and this is my channel, Saving Culture from Itself, where you can find a little bit of sanity to help you survive the woke revolution, and maybe even fight in the common-sense counterrevolution. You can find my essays over on Substack at jennyehalland.substack.com. You can buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com/savingculture, but most of all, hit that like and subscribe button, and let me know what you think in the comments.
So, not only did everyone in the liberal media get this story wrong, they have also been the vectors, one of the main vectors, of this ideology that has transformed these young women into miserable and hopeless extremists who hate men and love communism. Good job, everyone. Are you as shocked as I am? Ha. It's almost as if the thousands upon thousands of images we've been seeing for the last 10 years of young women losing their goddamn minds over the outrage du jour actually meant something. Who could possibly have foreseen that seating the academy, the media, and the policy-making class to bitter middle-aged hags and girlboss girlboss sociopaths might have not been the best idea. To quote the late great Private Eye, "Surely some mistake." But no, the right-wingers were correct again. Whoops.
You must watch this short podcast conversation between the female pollster commissioned by the New Statesman, who came up with the shocking numbers, um and the writer from the New Statesman, who uh are all contemplating in real time, and evidently for the first time, the dire consequences of the actions of the liberal left intelligentsia, of which they are very much part. And I will put a link to that podcast in the show notes. Three generations of propaganda with no institutional pushback or balance to speak of, as one of them said, has resulted in obviously very bad ramifications for British society if one group is so alienated. You don't say. Their conversation is actually kind of funny, because they seem to be surprised.
The host of the podcast asks, and I'm quoting, "I think particularly on the right of politics, I mean, there's this image of sort of overeducated young women who come out of university with these kinds of radical political opinions, and they're the reason why we're not getting enough babies born, and that kind of thing. I mean, is there any sort of grain of truth in that, frankly?" I will spare you the time listening to the young female journalist who wrote the piece try to avoid answering the question directly. I will answer it directly now for you. Yes. Yes, there is truth to it. Obviously, of course there is. Jesus H. Christ.
There's so many telling and appalling stats in this article. And I'm sure you would get similar numbers in the US. Here are the key findings, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has been watching and taking seriously woke takeover of our culture. Women aged 18 to 25 are deeply misandrist. They hate capitalism and love communism. They are obsessed with Palestine. They are obsessed with the Epstein files. They feel despair and panic over the future, and they feel hopeless. They do not want to have children, and they are mentally and/or physically unwell, as in unable to cope. It's as bad as the most wild-eyed MAGA fiend, I mean, has been saying.
The polling also found that this was among white, affluent young women. It was they, not the working-class girls, not the non-white girls, who felt despair, man-hatred, and that Britain was irredeemably racist. It is also women in the middle-class professions who were less likely to feel valued by society, and less likely to believe that if they work hard, they will succeed in life when compared to their working-class counterparts. This is the eye of the storm. A coming together of gentle parenting, which is shielding children from any negative feelings and putting zero demands on them, taking their physical discomforts and mild aches and pains and normal growing pains too seriously, also overly politicized childhoods, especially parents openly discussing their own progressive left-wing views, which are almost unrelentingly negative about society, a politicized culture where musicians and writers and actors cosplay as revolutionary types, and the social media echo chamber, which perhaps should be characterized as hypnosis machines.
Let me be brutally frank. Older women are responsible for laying this burden on young women, for filling their heads, their tender young minds, with fear porn, alarmism, slandering men, failing to teach or model gratitude for the immense physical comfort that we live in, failing to rein in the worst emotional excesses of female youth, failing to open a goddamn window and let some fresh air in, metaphorically speaking, instead of just keeping these girls locked inside an emotional prison. These young women have had their minds broken. They did not do this to themselves. Women have dominated all the systems that these young privileged girls grew up in, education and media and culture. And I'm surmising with what I'm about to say here, but I'm pretty sure these young women also grew up with mothers who were also progressive left white-collar professionals in varying states of emotional and spiritual disarray. These older women likely never imposed discipline or expected girls to learn emotional self-control, and openly expressed their own disillusionment with men, or henpecked and disrespected the father, if there was one.
Unlike the boomer women revolutionaries who set this disaster in motion, Gen Z left-wing extremists did not choose this worldview. It was imposed upon them by said boomer and also Gen X women revolutionaries, soft revolutionaries as they may be, who thought they were making the world a better place. Said the writer, and I quote, "So poor is their view of capitalism, that they actually have as favorable a view of fascism." Let me say that again. "So poor is their view of capitalism, that they actually have as favorable a view of fascism." Now, bear in mind that these girls are far-left communists, essentially. So, fascism is the ultimate enemy. And they regard fascism as equally terrible as capitalism.
Said one young woman quoted in the piece, a TikToker by the name of Phoebe O'Brien, "I want to be an instrument of the revolution." The problem is most concentrated, like I says, with the white middle-class girls. They are being radicalized through woke ideology that teaches them to hate everything that they are supposed to love. Men, family, children, and even the country that they grew up in. This risks becoming a political, if not national, emergency. O'Brien, the TikToker, is clearly demonstrating symptoms of of mind control. The Epstein files had her teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack. Just by way of a comparison, on 9/11, I was in New York City and was running across the Manhattan Bridge, about, I don't know, a mile, half a mile, away from the Twin Towers when the second tower collapsed and turned into a cloud of dust before my very eyes. And yeah, I was afraid, but I was nowhere near having an anxiety attack.
O'Brien said she felt anxious seeing injustice and doing nothing. It was a physical sensation in the center of her body, the article claims. She says, "The only way I found to release the negative sensation is to act." Another girl said, "I feel a lot of guilt, even though I didn't commit any war crimes." This girl also said she spent much more time on her Palestine activism than her university work. Then, there are the incentives. O'Brien's account grew rapidly once she started doing political content. After October 7th, 2023, her account just became all about the war. Not caring about the news was inconceivable to the women I met. That's a quote from the piece.
I was once a left-wing young woman, but I was a left-wing young woman in the 1990s, and reading this makes me feel like I got the last chopper out of Nam. Aside from the huge political brainwashing component component, there's also a competency element. Let me explain. The thing that attracted me to the Socialist Workers Party when I was 20 years old in 1996 was that I was frustrated and embarrassed by my own inabilities, especially to earn money. I was a student, and I had only ever been a student. And even though I had part-time jobs, I did not yet have the confidence that comes from experience that I would be able to just simply take care of myself in a big, bad world. I was also in an emotionally and physically intense relationship with a man I loved deeply, but who would not commit to me, what we nowadays call poly, and this made me feel really alone in the world and really unmoored and on edge. I was far away from my family, um and I was studying, or not, as the case may be, postmodern theories of literature that I found opaque, impenetrable, and joyless, but unfortunately upon which my academic success depended. That frustrated me even further. In fact, it turned me from the naturally curious and enthusiastic student that I had been in high school into a disaffected and alienated university student who would rather smoke hash in my bedsit and even go to boring Socialist Worker Party meetings. That's how much I hated Foucault.
All of these things made me feel very insecure, and I turned that feeling outward, and I blamed, although half-heartedly by today's standards, the system I was living in. It wasn't based on a rational analysis. It was based on feeling. The lefty slogans fit neatly into the hollowed-out spaces that my feeling of lack had created within me. When I come across myself, when I come across pictures of myself aged 20, I have a haunted and drawn look on my face. So, in some respects, I'm not that different from these girls in the New Statesman. A few tweaks in the time-space continuum, and I could have been one of them. I got lucky in this timeline.
Once I got more exposure to the inner workings of this left-wing party that I had joined, my rational, analytic, and common-sense side kicked in, and it was soon clear to me that these people were, I think the academic political science term for it is, full of So, my active involvement in far-left politics was done and dusted after a few months. But, I also had the benefit of a society that did not reinforce and reward ever more extreme displays of ideological fervor. I lived in a meritocracy. I was a young person in a world full of grown-ups who would challenge you on your silly ideas, if not dismiss them out of hand. And this is very important. I had a father with whom I was very close, who challenged my politics in a way that was affectionate and fun, not contentious and emotional.
When, at age 23, after graduating from university, I went to work at the New York Times, it was not a newsroom run by woke zealots. It was a newsroom run by old-time professionals, mature adults. Working there vastly increased my confidence in my professional skills. It paid me a decent salary as well, and I would never again need to rely on a hideously dumb political thought system to make sense of the world. In short, when I was a university student, I was demoralized. When I joined the adult world, I got over it, and my politics changed accordingly.
Today's young university women aren't getting the opportunity to grow up. These young women are also being told over and over and over again that men are bad. Television tells them this. School tells them this. Media tells them this. Pop culture tells them this. And, in many, many cases, their mothers tell them this. This was another thing that I was spared as a young lefty. In addition to having a very close relationship with my father, like I said, and again, he had just the right balance between having pride in my sort of fierce, argumentative, combative nature, but not letting me win every time because he wasn't a softie.
In my wider Gen X friend circle, young young men and young women were very integrated. We were friends with each other. Sure, we had our hearts broken, and we broke hearts, but our expectations as girls were not set at any extreme. We were not taught that all boys are rapists, or that they had to fit exactly into the perfect mold of correct political opinions. If I had to describe the complexities of our intersex relationships in that era with one single word, that word would be natural. As in, our relationships were pretty natural. Also, growing up, we were mostly free-range, meaning by the age of 20, we had all traveled extensively without adult chaperones. We all had part-time jobs, and none of us had chronic health conditions that hampered our ability to live a full life. It seems that none of this is true any longer.
Girls, and I know that technically they are adults, but mentally and morally they're still adolescents. This is perhaps why it's the middle-class white girls who are the most susceptible to this propaganda onslaught, in addition to being, in my opinion, the prime targets of it. These girls are the most sheltered, the most paid attention to, and therefore the released resilient, the least practical of their cohort. It's impossible to feel good about your place in the world when you have zero skills with which to claim it.
The author of the piece is herself a young woman about 10 years older than the subjects, and a lefty, and she had, when she was a student, participated in many of the same activities that the women she is profiling. The left really doesn't change that much. But, she writes, "It felt like the divides had grown wider, particularly among women who had gone to university, who were significantly to the left of the peers who hadn't." And this is a really important quote. "It didn't feel like students just trying on radicalism for fun." I find that chilling. I know that many of the women profiled in this piece would not extend any courtesy or grace to people like me with my political opinions. >> [snorts] >> It's likely that they would harass, cancel, and socially punish anyone who would dare to disagree with them, and it's also very possible they already have. But still, we need to leave a door open for these broken girls to walk back through.
Well, I'm not generally a fan of characterizing adults who do bad things as victims. These These young women never really stood a chance against weapons-grade propaganda, which is all they've ever known. Responsibility for their demoralization lies with adults, either foolish ones or malignant ones, who foisted their embittered worldview onto them. Thank you for watching, and thank you for saving culture with me.