While speaking before the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, over the weekend, Senator Josh Hawley ranted about “the left’s” plot “to give us a world beyond men.” The Missouri Republican previously addressed the conference in 2019, when he was accused of employing white nationalist dog whistles after he used the gathering to opine on how “the cosmopolitan elite” is selling out the American middle class, and the left is degrading “our common identity.” On Sunday, Hawley warned of the next step in this supposed conspiracy by the elite globalists: the “deconstruction of American men” by forcing them to withdraw from society and turn to porn and gaming addictions.
“The left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic. They want to define the traditional masculine virtues—things like courage and independence and assertiveness—as a danger to society,” he said, before claiming that this is the reason why “American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers,” and “suffering more anxiety and depression,” and why men are “leaving higher education in record numbers.” Hawley also criticized the Joe Biden administration for “loudly [calling] for a new ‘gender equity’ agenda,” adding, “working-class men have been a particular target for this administration. President Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate on private citizens puts millions of working-class men squarely in the cross hairs. Shut up, get the jab, or get lost.” Hawley also blamed “globalism” for destroying jobs “that gave meaning to generations of men.”
He then implied that this is all the end result of media, Hollywood, Democrats, and academia’s supposed treatment of “manhood [like] a disease” that must be eradicated. “Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games?” asked Hawley, who closed his war-on-masculinity talk by calling for a counteroffensive that would involve renewing America’s manufacturing industries and creating new tax credits for married couples.
In recent years, other Republicans have made similar arguments, including Senator Ben Sasse, who wrote in his 2017 book, The Vanishing American Adult, that young Americans are becoming “softer” as a result of too much screen time and pornography. “More and more young American men are opting out of higher education, work, and marriage in favor of electronic amusements,” wrote the Nebraska Republican. “For men with less than a four-year college degree, ‘leisure time’ completely dominates the hours they’re not working.”
Hawley, a 2020 election denier who famously raised a fist to the January 6 mob, and who is seen as a 2024 presidential contender, has recently made it a priority to reach out to America’s troubled, unmarried young men, including on his new Christian self-help podcast, This is Living, which he cohosts with his wife. “If you’re a man, you hear, Boy, if you want to matter, then you’ve gotta earn this salary, you’ve gotta achieve this level of prestige,” he said on the Monday episode of his podcast. “When you think about what really matters, you think about living for the permanent things—marriage has got to be right at the top of that list.” This is Living, which, per The Kansas City Star, is funded by Hawley’s Senate campaign, is not a “podcast about politics, it’s not a podcast about the law,” according to Hawley. “Inevitably those things will pop up because that’s where the Lord has called us. That is the work that we do. But it’s not about that. It’s about our effort as people to go after and to find that life to the full.”
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