The Void Where Men Go to Become Radicals

The pipeline doesn’t start at a rally. It doesn’t start with a gun or a manifesto or a frog meme. It starts at a kitchen table in Ohio where some dude named “Jim” sits with papers he can’t pay. He’s 53. The factory closed eight months ago. He’s applied everywhere. Nothing. His wife left in March. Took the kids. The child support comes out before he sees his check and he’s living in a studio apartment that smells like the last guy’s cigarettes. He drinks. Not like before. Like now. Like every night. The phone doesn’t ring. His friends were work friends. The job is gone and the friends went with it. He sits at that table and he doesn’t know who he is anymore.

The system told Jim his value was in providing. In dominating. In being the head. “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.” Ephesians 5:22-23. That’s not a suggestion. That’s architecture. The culture reinforced it. Every movie. Every ad. Every song. The man provides. The man protects. The man controls. The role wasn’t optional. It was the only one cast.

And the promise wasn’t just dominance. It was white dominance. The collapse hits different when the role was “white man in charge.” The system promised white men they’d be at the front of the line. When the line dissolved, the rage didn’t turn toward the people who dissolved it. It turned toward the people they were told they’d be ahead of.

Then the moments break you. Not softly. Not like a gradual erosion. Like a bone snapping.

The courtroom where a man becomes a visitor in his own children’s lives. Every other weekend. Wednesday dinners if he’s lucky. The house he paid for. The bed he slept in. Gone. The system treats him as an ATM and a threat simultaneously. He pays for children he’s not allowed to raise. He sits in that courtroom and a judge who’s never met his kids decides when he gets to see them. The whiteness doesn’t protect him here. The whiteness was supposed to mean he got to keep the house, the family, the authority. The whiteness was supposed to mean the line held.

The line didn’t hold.

Forty years of work and then you’re invisible. The phone stops ringing. The self was the job and the job is gone. The wife who was supposed to serve you now sees you as an obstacle in her kitchen. She has her own life. Her own friends. Her own routines. You’re just there. Taking up space. The suicide rate for men spikes at retirement because the script didn’t have a second act. The promise of white patriarchal authority doesn’t come with a retirement plan. It just ends.

The factory closes. Your skills are “obsolete.” You apply for 200 jobs and hear nothing back. You were told hard work was the answer. Hard work didn’t answer. The phone doesn’t ring. The unemployment runs out. The shame isn’t just personal. It’s theological. “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” 1 Timothy 5:8. You failed the role God assigned you. The whiteness was supposed to be a shield. The whiteness was supposed to mean you’d be the last fired and the first rehired. The whiteness was a lie the system told you so you’d blame someone else when it discarded you.

Your body breaks. Your mind breaks. The system has no use for broken tools. You go from provider to burden in a culture that treats burden as failure.

The collapse leaves a vacuum. The man doesn’t know who he is anymore. Depression. Substance abuse. Suicide. Men die by suicide 3.88 times more than women. The system told them not to feel and then punished them for not seeking help. The isolation is total. Men lose their social networks. Their friends were work friends. Their community was the job. Without the job, they’re alone. The culture told them their value was in providing. Now they can’t provide. The shame isn’t just personal. It’s damnation. They failed the role that both God and society had assigned them.

And the recruiters are waiting in that void.

They’re not creating the wound.

They’re finding it.

The alt-right. The manosphere. The Proud Boys. The incel forums. They find Jim at his kitchen table with his drink and his silence and they say: it wasn’t your fault. You were betrayed. By women. By immigrants. By the woke mob. By anyone except the people who actually profit from your despair. These groups offer what the system took. Belonging. Purpose. A new script to follow. The recruiters provide a target for the anger. The anger is real. The target is wrong.

And someone’s making money off the wound. The manosphere influencers selling supplements and courses. The politicians who need angry men to vote against their own interests. The media outlets that need outraged viewers. The algorithms that need engagement. Radicalization is an industry. It’s an influencer who tells you women are the problem while selling you a $200 testosterone booster. It’s a politician who tells you immigrants are stealing your jobs while voting against the labor protections that would actually help you. The platform that amplifies your rage because rage keeps you scrolling and scrolling keeps you profitable.

New accounts on TikTok saw a fourfold increase in misogynistic content after just five days. 

The algorithm isn’t neutral. It’s a recruiter that doesn’t sleep.

The bodies pile up while we analyze the pipeline that produced the killer…

Jordan Anchondo was 25. She was at a Walmart in El Paso with her 2-month-old son. Patrick Crusius drove 600 miles to kill Latinos. He posted a manifesto about the “great replacement” before he walked in and opened fire. Jordan shielded her baby. She died on the floor of a Walmart protecting a child from a radicalized 21-year-old who learned to hate scrolling forums at midnight. Twenty-three people died that day.

The radicalization doesn’t stay in the forum. It comes home. The man who was told to dominate finds a new target for the dominance he was promised. The mass shootings. The manifestos. The men who were discarded and decided to make the world pay. Mass shooters are getting younger and more online. The radicalization process that once took months or years now takes days or hours. January 6 wasn’t an anomaly. It was the pipeline’s logical endpoint. Men who were promised power and then lost it, storming the building where the power they were promised was supposedly stolen.

The cost isn’t abstract.

It’s counted in graves.

But the men also make choices. They choose to join. They choose to blame women instead of the system. They choose the blade.

The system created the wound. Jim poured salt in it and then stabbed someone else with it. Both things are true. The pain is real. The target is chosen. The system created the conditions. The man pulled the trigger. Understanding isn’t absolution. Explanation isn’t exoneration. The man who was wounded by the system and then wounded someone else is both wounded and wounding. The first wound doesn’t cancel the second. The second wound doesn’t erase the first.

The system needs men to be providers so it can extract their labor. It needs them to be dominant so they won’t question the dominance of the people above them. It needs them to not feel so they won’t notice the exploitation. The system doesn’t care about the men it breaks. It just needs enough of them to keep functioning. The broken ones are collateral. The system also doesn’t care about the people the broken men hurt. The women. The children. The minorities. They’re also collateral. The theology is the lubricant. The church told men they were the head. When the man loses his position, the theology doesn’t help him. It just tells him he failed God and society. The capitalism is the engine. The company doesn’t care about your identity. It cares about your productivity. When your productivity drops, you’re discarded.

And the Left has been fighting for the things that would save Jim’s life. Universal healthcare. Living wages. Union protections. Paid leave. The policies that would fill the void before the recruiters ever find it. The right fights against every single one of those things while telling Jim that immigrants and women and the “woke mob” are the reason he’s drowning. The right votes against his healthcare and then tells him the Left is his enemy. The right votes against his wages and then tells him the Left doesn’t care about him. The right votes against his union and then tells him the Left abandoned him. It’s a con. It’s the same grift they’ve been running since Reagan convinced working class whites that the people trying to help them were the enemy and the people extracting their labor were their friends. And yeah, there’s a messaging vulnerability the right exploits. The academic language. The “check your privilege” dismissal. The times when the left talks about Jim like he’s the problem instead of a person the system broke. But that’s not the left failing Jim. That’s the right weaponizing cultural moments to make men like Jim think the left doesn’t give a shit about them. The left has the policies. The right has the propaganda. And the propaganda fills the void faster than the policy can reach it.

These men raise sons. The sons learn the same script. The cycle continues. The boy who watches his father blame women for his failures learns to blame women. The boy who watches his father join the Proud Boys learns that belonging comes from hatred. The boy who watches his father drink himself to death learns that men don’t get help. The boy who watches his father beat his mother learns that dominance is what men do.

The pipeline isn’t just horizontal. It’s vertical. It runs from father to son. The radicalization of one generation becomes the programming of the next.

And it’s not just sons of radicalized men. It’s an entire generation watching the pipeline in real time.

He’s 14. He lives in Davis. His uncle lost his job at the plant last year and now posts Pepe frogs and talks about “the great replacement” at Christmas dinner. His older brother went from gaming to quoting Andrew Tate in six months. He doesn’t know what “replacement theory” means. He just knows it sounds like an answer. He’s in his bedroom at midnight and the phone glows and the algorithm finds him. TikTok. YouTube. Discord. The pipeline isn’t hidden anymore. It’s in his pocket. Far-right extremism in the West has risen 250% over the last five years. Twenty-three percent of online gamers have encountered right-wing extremist propaganda while playing. Young men from Gen Z are more likely than baby boomers to believe feminism has done more harm than good. The water they swim in is already poisoned. He hasn’t even experienced the collapse yet. He’s radicalized in anticipation of a wound he hasn’t received. The recruiters don’t need to wait for the collapse anymore. They can create the fear of it. “They’re coming for you next.” The threat is hypothetical. The radicalization is real. The left has no answer for the 14-year-old who’s being groomed by the algorithm. No counter-narrative. No community. No pipeline out. Just “be better” and “check your privilege.” That’s not a strategy. That’s a dismissal.

Jim’s still at that table. The drink is empty. The void is wide. The recruiter’s hand is already on his shoulder.

And in a bedroom right here in town, a phone glows in the dark. A boy scrolls. An algorithm learns. A recruiter smiles. And a 14-year-old that doesn’t know yet that he’s already in the pipeline.

The void doesn’t stay empty. It fills with whatever finds it first.

And right now, what’s finding it is a blade with your name on it.

Follow the Vanguard on Social Media – X, Instagram and Facebook.  Subscribe the Vanguard News letters.  To make a tax-deductible donation, please visit davisvanguard.org/donate or give directly through ActBlue.  Your support will ensure that the vital work of the Vanguard continues.

Categories:

Tags: