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Walk across any campus, scroll through any feed, or wander into any café where coffee costs more than a week’s groceries, and you will see him: The Perfomative Male. He’s part poet, part open-mic philosopher. He prances through life with a tote bag, a Moleskine notebook, and the unshakable belief that the world needs another man reciting Paolo Coelho over a matcha latte. He is sweet, soft, sensitive, and — if his TikTok tags are to be believed — spiritually aligned with the moon. He trims his beard with military discipline, but only so he can claim he no longer cares about “traditional grooming.” He speaks in platitudes and nods solemnly at everything. He has mastered the holy trinity of modern manhood: eye contact, thrifted knitwear, and a falsetto apology. He’s not, to be clear, a bad person. He’s simply insufferable. This new type of man has convinced himself that the only way to escape the furnace of “toxic masculinity” is to walk into the opposite fire — the one lit by scented candles and guided journal prompts. He performs sensitivity with the energy of a man auditioning for a role he wrote himself. He posts tears. He posts therapy-speak. He posts readings of short stories that should’ve been buried in the backyard beside his creative writing degree. Online, he floats through life like a human chamomile tea. The Performative Male is the natural child of an age obsessed with telling men to reinvent themselves. We tell them to be tender, then mock them the moment they try. We beg them to open up, then churn out articles accusing them of faking it. The cottage industry is endless: think pieces, social media analyses, viral therapy jargon, even academic papers dissecting whether a man’s feelings are “authentic” or “performative.” With that much scrutiny, a new creature was bound to emerge. So he arms himself with props —  mindfulness journals he never finishes, vintage typewriters he can’t type on, houseplants kept alive solely for aesthetic credit — hoping these signals count as substance. But none of it is depth. None of it is change. It’s camouflage for a culture that hasn’t decided what it wants from men. And in the process, he becomes a parody. Not of masculinity, but of himself. While these men are busy perfecting “the gentle aesthetic,” most women aren’t asking for any of it. The vast majority still want men who are men — steady, grounded, the kind of presence that doesn’t melt into a puddle of feelings every second Tuesday. A sensitive streak is fine; a spine made of tofu is not. When things go wrong, no woman on earth is thinking, “Thank God he packed his healing crystals.” When the power goes out, the car breaks down, or some lunatic starts shouting in the street, who do you want beside you? A man who can keep his head and defend himself — or a man who needs to recalibrate his chakras before taking action? Most women don’t want a boyfriend who folds faster than laundry. They want someone who can feel and function, not someone who cries because Mercury is in retrograde. This is the part no one says out loud: the joke is on these roobs. They think the knitted sweaters and soft-spoken monologues make them irresistible. They think offering a tampon to a stranger in a campus contest will win hearts. They think reciting Sylvia Plath will unlock passion. What they fail to realize is that most women watching this circus aren’t swooning. If anything, they’re dry-heaving. They’re thinking, “Bless him… but absolutely not.” The Performative Male wants applause for traits that real men embody. He wants a standing ovation for vulnerability, while countless men are vulnerable in silence every day, asking for nothing but a fair chance. He wants admiration for empathy, while real men show empathy by showing up, not by staging a performance of emotional literacy for an audience of strangers. And yet the culture encourages it. The modern world treats masculinity like a broken chair: fix it, sand it, repaint it, but don’t lean on it. So young men panic. They fear being too strong, too quiet, too confident, too decisive — in other words, too male. They build a new persona made of pathetic props and even more pathetic posturing, hoping the world will pat them on the head and say, “Good boy. You are safe now.” It is a strange sight: men terrified of becoming the villains they have been taught to fear. Meanwhile, the men who refuse to play this sordid game continue living, working, building, fighting, loving, and leading. They’re not crying for likes. They’re doing what men have always done: taking charge when it matters most. And most women — the ones not trapped in online bubbles or sipping the digital Kool-Aid — still want those men. They want steady hands. They want calm strength. They want conviction. They want a man who can listen but also rearrange an intruder’s facial features if necessary. They want a natural provider and protector, not a narcissistic performer. The Performative Male doesn’t understand this because he has confused attention with admiration. The internet rewards theatrics, so he thinks theatrics are the path to desire. But deep down, the women watching know better. They recognize a phony the way a bartender recognizes a fake ID. A carefully curated persona can’t compete with someone who can actually handle a crisis without drama. Women know the difference between a man and a mascot — the Performative Male is the latter. READ MORE by John Mac Ghlionn: The Hedge-Fund Arsonist Now Campaigning as California’s Savior A Passionate Defense of Christian Nationalism  The Slow Suffocation of Christian America

Tradition. We don’t even need to say the word out loud to feel its weight. It is heavy for a reason. It carries the memory of a people. It stands on the shoulders of giants. It is the foundation on which we build. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine. Any conservative vision of higher education must begin here. Education should prepare students for the future while remaining in dialogue with tradition and its values, rituals, stories, and practices. The end of education is not simply the acquisition of information; it is the formation of a people — a people who can flourish. Without this in mind, education becomes a vapid, hollow enterprise, sending students adrift on the currents of popular opinion and the tsunamis of trend. As artificial intelligence tempts educators to leave so much behind, we must ask what is worth carrying forward, heavy as it may be. The answers don’t rely on vague nostalgia. There are concrete traditions that have proven their weight: the texts that form our common intellectual inheritance, the Socratic seminar where those texts are wrestled with, and the essay where students learn to defend and refine their own thoughts. In other words, what we teach, how we teach, and how we assess student learning. These are the places where the work of formation still takes place — and where it must continue. What We Teach: The Western Canon A benefit of the AI-saturated classroom repeatedly being touted on LinkedIn and in podcasts is its potential to personalize course content, engaging students on their own terms while endlessly adapting to their preferences, interests, and pace. New educational models like the Alpha School have built their identity on this promise. Universities may soon follow suit. Proponents paint a picture of education in which students can direct their own learning and pick the content that satisfies their curiosity. They complete these lessons alone, supported by a suite of AI-driven mastery tools that adapt to their pace and performance. Then they have time to develop socio-emotional awareness and “life skills” in cohorts with their peers. But the core of their learning is entirely their own. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine. All this might sound attractive. Indeed, taking the needs of specific students into account is not a bad thing per se, as each student is unique. However, this exaltation of the individualized learning path overlooks the importance of participating in shared intellectual experiences, building shared values, and cultivating shared meaning through curriculum. If, as I argued above, education is about the formation of a people and not merely the optimization of individual potential or knowledge acquisition, then learning and wrestling with a program of common texts is indispensable. And these should not just be any texts — they should be the texts that have shaped Western culture and values.  Through collective engagement with the works of Aristotle, Plato, the Scholastics, and the Enlightenment thinkers, students see the emergence of democracy, the ideological beginnings of human rights, and the perpetual struggle to find, grapple with, and name the truth. When you see the development of these beautiful ideas unfold, you gain a kind of reverence for their foundations. These things were hard-fought and hard-won. Engaging the whole narrative also brings into sharp focus what is at risk when the foundations fail. Even if God really were dead, Nietzsche was right: It wouldn’t be good news. Moreover, there is no way to critically think about these ideas or what they mean for us today without first engaging with them directly — by reading the Great Books. No one can credibly critique or deconstruct a tradition they have never actually read. To dismiss the Western canon without wrestling with it is like claiming to know the whole plot of a movie from the trailer. Yet this fantasy — that a 20-year-old can deconstruct the West after a semester of sociology, having read none of the Great Books — is one too often indulged in universities today. How We Teach: The Socratic Seminar This brings me to the next relic we should hold onto tightly: the Socratic seminar. The seminar is the embodiment of the Western canon. In it, we identify contradictions and approach nuance in dialogue with others who read the very same things. To do this, we must sit in the physical presence of someone who disagrees. We practice our prose so it lands. We learn to ask questions that reveal intentions rather than allege misplaced condemnations. These are formative moments. What do they form? Patience, humility, resilience, and courage. They teach students civility and how to engage with difference. Students place themselves, quite vulnerably, at the mercy of an expert and face probing questions that push them beyond their comfort zone. It’s worth contrasting this with the experience students have in most online asynchronous courses. They are asked to contribute to a discussion board. They paste in a response that can be generated in ten seconds from a flippant prompt to ChatGPT. They respond to peers who have done the exact same thing, echoing the same canned formulations. They type a trite response into a text box: “I totally agree.” Even if someone musters up the courage to raise a question or critique, he or she can do so from the safety of a keyboard, without ever feeling the weight of disapproving eyes. It is too easy. We have been calling some form of this “education” for far too long. It is not. Civility cannot be learned behind a screenname. If you doubt that, scroll through social media, and you will quickly be reassured. It’s worth noting the connection between the canon and a Socratic seminar more directly. Real-time discussion and debate with other humans who have feelings and views — the seminar — can’t be accomplished if everyone is going at their own pace, on their own schedule, only reading what immediately interests them. To think critically together requires a shared foundation. That base is, at minimum, reading the same book at the same time and coming together to discuss it under the guidance of an expert. In this sense, the canon and the seminar stand or fall together: The canon provides the common texts, and the seminar provides the common struggle. One without the other collapses — texts without dialogue become inert, dialogue without shared texts becomes shallow. How We Assess Learning: The Essay Now, we shouldn’t mistake the dialogue itself as the goal. Yes, it is a means to character formation. It is also a means of finding the best answers. And when one settles on an answer, they should be able to defend it. This is the goal of the essay: It is a testament to having thought well about some subject. To write well, someone has to think well — and rationally. This is what students aim to prove in their essays: that they have clear, defensible, rational thoughts on some subject. A good essay involves research, analytically organizing premises, weaving in evidence, and carefully selecting words to convey your intentions and represent your position. In this process, students learn how to work through an argument, engage competing perspectives, and defend a thesis. A coherent essay is evidence that these things can be done well — at least, it ought to be. This is why we have long asked students to produce them. This is also why the essay is an indispensable part of a university education. While AI makes it almost impossible for students to complete the traditional essay at home with integrity, this doesn’t mean it can’t be completed at all. In fact, it is entirely possible for students to write essays in class, by hand. And they should. Left to themselves, most students will succumb to the temptation to outsource their work. It is precisely because students are still in formation — not yet virtuous, not yet disciplined — that the essay must be structured to require honesty and effort. With a little scaffolding and careful cadence, the in-class essay can be even more pedagogically valuable than the take-home version. It is worth mentioning that being able to think well is not simply important for a student’s individual development. It is also essential for healthy public discourse, particularly in a pluralistic society like the United States of America. Dialogue breaks down when no one has thought deeply and analytically about their positions but instead spews them forth like reactionary defense mechanisms. And so students should most certainly practice writing and defending arguments.  Finally, the benefit of writing to think in this specific way — by hand and in class — is that it preserves a sacred space for students to develop their own thoughts without the mediation of technology. I know, archaic. But remember: These tools are not value-neutral. Their creators have intentions and ideologies that, as C. S. Lewis warns of all educational tools in The Abolition of Man, seep through in the most inconspicuous ways. For example, AI is trained on biased data that reflects the current cultural ethos. These tools have humans with agendas and half-baked ideas refining their models. As a result, freedom of thought depends, in large part, on ensuring students can think without the suggestions and covert manipulations of a chatbot made and trained in Silicon Valley. Organic thought protects freedom of thought. We should make time for it. Doing so will allow more critical engagement with these tools when they do need to be used. Some might label these suggestions as positively medieval. Perhaps they are. They are traditions — traditions important for the maintenance of beautiful ideas and the cultivation of character, the necessary components of a flourishing society. We should cling to them. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine.

I recently visited Trinity College at Cambridge University. I was based in London, so I took the “fast train” from Euston Train Station at Russell Square.  The fast train simply means that the train does not stop on the way. It takes a little more than an hour to arrive. Part of the pleasure of the journey is that you get to see from your window bedroom communities, quaint-looking small towns, farms, and the English countryside, something that is hard to conjure up when you are London-based.  The countryside is still there and so are the people who live there because these were the citizens who voted to leave the European Union. These days, they do not have much of a voice among the London academic and media establishment. One day I would like to spend time among them and hear what they really have to say about the future of Britain.  Instead, I was on my way for a collegial meeting with a retired Cambridge professor of Ethnomusicology, as I am on a long-term quest to explore the writings of Eric Werner, a Viennese Jewish refugee from Hitler who during the war years in New York City wrote a book called The Sacred Bridge, where he argues for the Jewish origins of Catholic Plain Chant or what we call Gregorian Chant. The meeting went well. There are 29 colleges at Cambridge. I would like to think that they all share a certain magic. They often have castle-like entrances. You cannot just walk in. You must check in with the porters to be allowed entrance. Once you do, you usually enter an enormous quad or internal courtyard.  Usually there is an old chapel and church to be visited and then there are those castle-like private entrances with winding stone staircases that lead to the rooms (in Canada we would call them offices) of the professorate. This is where professors tutor their students and conduct seminars with small groups. The quad or square is open to the sky. The one at Trinity has a beautiful stone gazebo in the middle, paved sidewalks, and enormous lawns surrounded by stern signs asking you not to walk on them. The open areas are usually empty and only penetrated by small groups of visitors who can sign up for guided tours, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  If you are not a student, a professor, or as in my case, a visitor, you cannot wander freely on the grounds. The architectural feel of the place is very 17th century, as if Charles II himself had just returned to the throne and reestablished hierarchy, beauty, and grace to life after the Puritanism of Cromwell. If you go to any one of the chapels, you can hear Evensong sung at 5:30 each afternoon. The porters often wear bowler hats. They have distinctive, almost cinematic working-class or regional accents. They are humble, loyal, and protective of who comes in and who comes out. I explained to the porter that I was the guest of professor so and so and that she had recommended that I tour the Wren library before our meeting. He pointed the way, and I walked out into the quad. Then my phone rang. It was my wife, and she was calling me from Toronto. I sat down on one of the benches outside at the edge of the quad while busy bowler-hatted staff checked the garbage cans in the corner near me and took out the trash. We caught up with each other’s news and while we did so, one gowned, senior professor gave me a quizzical look as if to say, “What are you doing there?” I did not return his glance.  As I finished my call, I noticed that he was being followed by a somewhat nervous, obviously young undergraduate or graduate student who was sort of bouncing up and down in his jerky and ungracious body language, which clearly suggested that this professor held a lot of power over this young man, as his body language was slow, measured, and somewhat regal. The hierarchy between them was obvious to any onlooker. Cambridge and nearby Oxford University have always played a special role in the United Kingdom. It has been the case for centuries that Britain’s most privileged and brightest mix and mingle here in their undergraduate years. Then so many of them go into government, diplomacy, banking, publishing, and media.  This has been going on for hundreds of years and so a graduate speaks with a certain accent, carries herself with a certain quiet confidence, and is supported by a network of older graduates who will bring you into government service or that now shamed organization, the BBC.  It is an old boys and girls club, and it is even more powerful for the professors, who are truly above average in their intelligence and drive, and the students, even and perhaps especially the ones who get in on scholarship. I slowly strolled across the quad, through another set of ancient stone archways, reached another courtyard/quad, and found the staircase that leads to the Wren Library.  It is a grand affair with high ceilings and beautiful windows from which you can see the River Cam and the young men and women who punt flat, longish boats there for visitors and their own enjoyment. There are marble statues of famous men like Tennyson lining the staircase. As you turn the corners of the stairs on the high walls beside you, you see paintings of “Masters” of the college from recent times, and from centuries back.  When you reach the top of the marvelous staircase, you enter the library through two large wooden doors. You are immediately confronted with the simple, elegant Restoration architecture of this marvelous building. There is so much space, the windows are high, and the place is bathed in light. No doubt in pre-industrial and pre-electrical times, a student or a scholar could start their day here, read and write until lunchtime, and then return until the sun went down. It is an uplifting feeling. The floors have diamond-shaped black and white tiles that oddly suggested to me something out of a grand filmed version of Alice in Wonderland. Half of the library was roped off, the half down the hall from the entrance. A group of students were having a seminar there. And yes, as British academics are often quiet in their demeanor, you could see the students, but you could not hear them. The part of the library open to the public is comprised of alcoves with enormously high hand-crafted wooden bookshelves. When I glanced at the contents of the books, the bindings suggested 19th-century and earlier tomes. The tops of the bookshelves are decorated with marble busts of Homer and Democritus and no doubt there were others that I did not recognize. In front of these alcoves, in the main walkway, are glass-covered tables with exhibits in them. They are covered with cloth, like in a raised tomb in an old chapel, and you line up to take off the cloth while you look at the exhibits until you cover them up once again until the next visitor comes. I lingered at the box which contained a copy of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia with his own handwritten annotations on the side. Beside that book lies his crooked walking stick. One can imagine this illustrious graduate of Trinity going for walks along the nearby River Cam, only to return to his desk in one of the alcoves where he once pondered and explained the mysteries of celestial mechanics. Of course I stared with humility at a First Folio volume of the complete works of Shakespeare. And then just beside Newton’s book are pages from the working notebooks of the Indian Hindu mathematician Ramanujan who during World War I came to Cambridge to submit his unique and stunning mathematical genius to the scrutiny of the mathematical dons of Cambridge. I have read his biography by Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity, and have seen the dramatic film about his life with the same name.  The curators had clearly decided not to highlight Newton’s obsession with the Temple in Jerusalem. Newton spent thousands of hours reading and writing about it. He even predicted that it would be rebuilt some time in the 21st century. Not surprisingly, these writings can be examined in the National Archives of Israel in Jerusalem. I paid little attention to another well-curated table, about a Cambridge student from the 1930s, a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party who went to Spain to fight with the Republicans in 1936. It once again reminded me of how Stalin and the Communists took over the fight against Fascist Franco and lost the war for the Republicans. George Orwell wrote a book about it, Farewell to Catalonia. I had plenty of time before my appointment, and I lingered at the entrance to the library. I noticed that the first two alcoves on either side had been taken over by administrators or librarians. They had put tables and office chairs in the alcoves in front of the ancient shelves of books.  These alcoves were now strewn with computers, cables, files, books, papers, empty tea and coffee cups, as well as coats and jackets that were draped over the chairs and umbrellas lying on their side. They had placed bright red fire extinguishers on the floor in front of the alcoves. It was quite a visual contrast to the spirit of the place. Having once served as a museum curator for several years early in my career, I was stunned by this asymmetrical modern visual administrative assault on the harmony and order of Wren’s library. I had an involuntary visceral reaction to this modern intrusion into this 17th-century marvel. It was like putting an Andy Warhol poster beside a painting by Tintoretto. I was surprised at myself, but I could not let go of this feeling of intrusive, almost aggressive modernity. I immediately had a vivid fantasy that I was now the curator of the Wren Library. I had organized a weekly review of our activities with my staff. I tried to raise the issue that this visual assault took away from the character and dignity of our “chief exhibit,” the library itself. I suggested to my coworkers that we find offices either in a different part of the building, or somewhere in the college where administrators work. My tattooed and purple-haired employees (“coworkers”) objected vigorously. They told me that as employees of the library they felt it was “their” library too. They implied that my suggestion was a reflection of the patriarchal ideology of men like Newton and Wren who had built the place. They reminded me that this was England 2025, not 1625. One of them piped up that according to his biographers, Newton was asexual, which he said could not be true. He therefore suggested an exhibit with the title “Newton Comes out of the Closet.”  And then I woke up from this daydream of a nightmare. I instantly felt that same sense of relief that I had when, as a teenager, having finished my annual exams, the summer was now mine. It was not my problem. I was just visiting. As I was not part of the visiting tour, I exited the library quietly but did not leave the building. I wanted to see if the library was at a different level still functional. I noticed a small sign with an arrow that said, “Library,” and I followed it.  I walked into a long room with an exceptionally low ceiling. Yes, there are small windows that look out on to the quad, but the feeling is like functional workers’ flats compared to a palace. There were tables everywhere with earnest young men and women reading books and typing quietly on their computers. They did not pay much attention to me, and so I browsed the shelves. I notice a book called After Piketty, referencing the now famous partly Marxist-inspired French economist, Thomas Piketty, who has argued, some say persuasively, that capitalism cannot really endure, for it has not successfully created enough for the many.  Most French economists like Piketty are like the graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, academic graduates of elite schools who do not venture out into the private sector (although those in science and tech often do). And then I held back a laugh when I saw a large tome called, The Oxford Guide to the American West. I wondered whether it was really possible for Oxbridge graduates to sympathetically understand the beauty, vastness, freedom, and living symbolism of the American West, a mythology that still drives the multibillion dollar County and Western style of American music and which has found a place in the hearts of millions of British and European listeners, mostly working and middle class. I will let the reader decide. And then I noticed something: a bare, almost empty wooden shelf that faced up to a sign that said, “Philosophy.” Beside it in this empty space stood a large glass jar, filled with water and a variety of plants that thrive in that semiaquatic artifact, reminding me of Darwin’s definition of nature as a “tangled web,” an apt symbol for the study of philosophy, which attempts to get beneath appearances like Newton and Darwin (another Cambridge man) did, thus revealing the hidden structure of the world we all live in.  As I left this demotic, cramped, and uninviting part of the Wren library, I noticed that the curators or the librarians had decided to take up precious wall space with one photo portrait, a black and white picture of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been a student at Cambridge during the 1930s. When Nehru became the prime minister of a newly independent India, he inherited a situation where the post–World War II Euro–American powers were well disposed toward this new democracy.  British, European, and American investors would have flocked to India had they been allowed. Instead, Nehru and his Congress Party adopted the principles of Marxist-inspired British Fabian socialism, crippled the Indian economy, and impoverished the country for decades through incompetent government takeovers of the “commanding heights of the economy.” Only in the 1990s when Indian voters finally elected a government that had nothing to do with Nehru and his political heirs did the Indian economy open up and, within a short time, create an Indian middle class of a few hundred million people.  We must not forget that famine-prone India was not saved by socialists like Nehru, but by capitalist-based, Yankee ingenuity and agricultural science, which gave India the Green Revolution, and which has for the moment solved India’s ability to feed its own people. Today one must ask the question: Who is symbolically in the ascendant at Oxford, Cambridge, and at Britain’s other institutes of higher learning: the followers of Newton, Wren, and Darwin or the followers of Marx, Nehru, and Piketty? Just ask world-famous Canadian philosopher and psychologist Jordan Peterson, who was banned from Cambridge despite a formal invitation from the Faculty of Divinity to spend time there as a resident professor. This is what Douglas Murray wrote about it: Before the university even had the decency to alert Peterson to the fact, it was announced that the offer of a visiting fellowship had been rescinded. And the University itself was not even the one to break the news that the offer had been rescinded. That pleasure – for pleasure it must have been for them – went to the Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) which announced the news on social media before the faculty itself made the announcement. For those who visit the Wren Library, do not be fooled by the august exhibits and bookshelves of some of Britain’s greatest thinkers. Those kinds of people, and those that still honor them, are no longer in charge.  The ones in charge are the militant and indoctrinated students studying in the library below the library, who read their Marx and Piketty and who ban the likes of Jordan Peterson from teaching at their colleges. No, these young men and women prefer the modern writings of the Left that have created a radicalized student body that no longer wants to imitate the great men and women at Cambridge who came before them. They are the ones with authority. If you consult your astrologer, you will see that the stars are not aligned in our favor. Let us hope they will realign. Image licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

from Redacted News: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

from ZeroHedge: Normally, this is where we would tell you where US index futures are trading early in the morning, we can’t because at 9:45pm ET on Thursday, the CME experienced a catastrophic “glitch” and all equities, treasuries, FX and commodities futures went dark as a result of a what the Chicago Merc Exchange said […]