Humans are a pack animal. This may be hard to understand if you are evangelical and think the book of genesis is literal rather than allegorical, but humans are a pack animal. What this means is that the human desire for the acceptance and support of a tribe is as fundamental as the desire for food, for air, for water, for sex, for sunlight, for love. If you tell young men that they cannot have a tribe, they're not going to accept that. Ever. Especially if you tell that only to the young men of one tribe in particular. They're going to wonder why everybody gets to have a tribe and they don't. And they're eventually going to decide that you are the enemy. Because you are. Anyone who stands between young men and what they need for a healthy, fulfilled life is their enemy. That includes you. And if you manage to convince them that god doesn't want them to have a tribe, it will also include god. The more you push back against their healthy and natural desire for a tribe, a homeland, and a birthright, the more they will hate you, and the more exclusive their definition of that tribe will become. There is no way you can stop this. The only thing you can control is how far they have to go, how radical they have to become, in order to get it. Because this can go all the way from enforcing immigration law, and shutting down corrupt visa programs right now, to gangs of young White men in balaclavas with Ar15s going door to door ten years from now. We have to do something about the 14th amendment. I don't care if that makes you uncomfortable or unhappy. It's not a choice. The constitution exists to serve Americans, not the other way around. If that sentence confuses you, read the first paragraph of the constitution. If we do not, young men of the future, the same little boys who are being radicalized right now by your malicious indifference, will treat a piece of paper that says they cannot have a homeland the way they would treat a piece of paper that says that can't eat food, or a piece of paper that says they can't own a home, or have a wife and children. You may think that you offer them a tribe in the form of the universal kingdom of god, the community of all believers, but that's just a word game and you know it, which is why you are so defensive about the whole thing. Where was the universal community of believers when these young men needed help? When they needed not just the surface appearance of a tribe, but someone to do the things that tribes actually do for younger generations they care about? The pack serves a concrete set of functions in the life cycle of the human species, and you cannot perform those functions with a cardboard cutout. Young men are sick of religion that offers them responsibilities with no rights, lectures with no help, demands with no love or empathy. It's odd, in a way ironic, that, I, the man of zero faith, should have to be the one standing here telling self-styled religious leaders how they failed both their people and their god. But having no faith does give me one advantage. It frees me from the delusion that Jesus is a puppet that I can pull out of my pocket, slip over my right hand, move his mouth and make him say what I want. I used to wonder, as a child, what the phrase "taking the name of the lord in vain" actually meant. But I no longer wonder, because when I became a man, I looked around me and saw all these people who talk to god and somehow get told exactly what they want to hear. Then I understood that the key phrase here wasn't "in vain". It was "taking". Taking the name of god and using it as a tool for one's own goals. Joel, here, is sad that his friend is getting sent home. This personally inconveniences both him and his friend, which effects Joel in a way that young men being denied their birthright does not. So he finds an interpretation of scripture that says that god wants him, Joel Berry, to get his way, and that god wants all the young men who want a homeland and a birthright to go get fucked. I'm not terribly impressed.

I didn't go to college until I was 30. This gave me a chance to see it with the perspective of an adult. One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget. The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics. For example, "maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys", instead of "be cheerful and upbeat", or even "interact positively with customers". This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable. A job is to do something, not be something. Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise. He asked the female students to come up with a job description for "husband". At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions. But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way. And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns. Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc. They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears. And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn't the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to. It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities. These women didn't want to be wives. They wanted to be pets. What's a pet? Well a pet is not a wife, or a friend. A pet is a creature of instinct, which you bring into your home because you like how it naturally behaves. You get a cat because you want to behave like a cat, and do things a cat naturally does, like play with string, and purr when you pet him. If he's smart, he'll adapt to you somewhat, but he doesn't have responsibilities other than "be a cat". If you get a wife, you get a wife so she will do things for you, specific things that are the responsibilities of wife, like care for your home, bear and raise your children, cook nutritious meals so you don't have to eat processed slop, look after your emotional well-being, and so on. These girls didn't want to be held responsible for those things. As married women, they might have anticipated doing some of them, but only some of the time. Only when they felt like it. The cat chases the string if and when it wants to, not because chasing the string is its job. These young millenial women didn't realize it, but they wanted to be pets. And that's what they were in their college relationships. They hung out with guys when they wanted to, had sex with them when they wanted to, broke up with them for someone new when they wanted to. Their relationships had no element of reciprocal responsibilities. They were perfectly at home with the idea of men having responsibilities to them, but they would repay those men if they chose, and how they chose, not how the men actually wanted. And as I've said twice already, someone you have responsibilities to, but who has none to you, is a pet, or a child. Since our ancestors, in a moment of foolishness and weakness, allowed women to vote, it is no longer legal to dole out the corrective spankings a great many of them both need and read pornographic novels about. Therefore, the corrective measure, for any man who finds himself with a pet instead of a wife, is to withdraw from any husbandly duties and start actively searching for alternatives. This can either result in a correction of the behavior, or the end of a relationship that offers no value. Either is acceptable. This may strike some of you as dishonorable, but there is no honor in keeping a broken pact, or in serving those who despise you. Men must have the pride and self-worth to say "I will be honored and respected, or I will depart to a place where I can be, even if I must be alone there." Men must honor and respect themselves.

Here, I'll make this make sense. Ever see one of those fight videos where a woman keeps slapping some long-suffering dude until he finally loses patience and sits her down on the pavement with a single right cross? Go find one. Look at her face. Before all the crying. See that? Utter shock. She's completely and utterly flabbergasted that someone dude finally laid one on her. She never expects it, no matter what she was doing five seconds before, or for fifteen years before. She never even considers the possibility. No matter what, she always reacts to that ass-kicking as if it just fell out of the sky. Understand why, and a great deal of women's behavior won't seem so bizarre. Women never participated in tribal warfare. They were prizes, not contestants. They may have sometimes had a vested interest in the outcome. Or, judging by the books they read, they may have sometimes simply preferred whoever was better at violence. Neither of these ideas is the point. The point is that the violence was not directed at them. This is how women's hardwiring evolved. To most women, violence is something that happens to other people. They walk around in an invisible bubble labelled "non-combatant", believing this will keep them safe. Often, it will. Women are targeted for violence far less often than men. They are far safer walking around at night, sketchy area or not. We know this. We have the numbers. This means that women are seldom afraid of actual violence even when they should be (because far less is not zero). Because to a great number of them, violence simply isn't real. What they fear is loss of status within the tribe. Social threats, unlike physical threats, are immediately, viscerally real to them, always. So is quite possible for a woman to be more afraid of an icky guy hitting on her, which reduces her social status, a threat she believes in, than a man pointing a gun at her, a threat which she doesn't. This may sound unbelievable. It may sound incredible. You may be asking yourself what kind of retard looks down the barrel of a handgun and never considers the possibility that a guy willing to point it at you might be willing to press the trigger. But retardation has nothing to do with it. Most of how we think about risk is hardwired in, and it takes a great deal of training to actually think about that risk in a mathematical or abstract way instead of using the feelings you have in your tum-tum. Thinking about risk using data rather than feels is so difficult for humans that there is an entire career path (actuary) for doing just that one thing. The vast majority of Western women have never been punched in the face. Not never in their adult lives, but actually never, period, full stop. So when men talk about violence... risks, motivations, costs, benefits, needs... they simply have no idea what we are even talking about. Violence is an abstraction to them. A theory. But loss of social status is a real and daily terror. This why women will cheer for the destruction of civilization rather than disagree with their friends.