(Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things)This year at the Conservative Political Action Committee in Washington, D.C., there were a number of targeted media trainings and journalism-oriented panels. A panel titled “Shining Light into Dark Places” sought to stress the importance of investigative journalism. Others included “Freelance Writing for Freedom,” “So You Want to be a Columnist” and “Want to be the Next Rush Limbaugh?”
Despite Sarah Palin's invectives against the "lamestream media," conservatives seem eager to fill its ranks with right-wing young people.
(AllMoviePhoto)Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap neatly crystallized by the director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked Up." The story's hero is 23-year-old Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), who has a drunken fling with Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl) and gets her pregnant. Ben lives in a Los Angeles crash pad with a group of grubby friends who spend their days playing videogames, smoking pot and unsuccessfully planning to launch a porn website. Allison, by contrast, is on her way up as a television reporter and lives in a neatly kept apartment with what appear to be clean sheets and towels. Once she decides to have the baby, she figures out what needs to be done and does it. Ben can only stumble his way toward being a responsible grownup.
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American men have been struggling with finding an acceptable adult identity since at least the mid-19th century. We often hear about the miseries of women confined to the domestic sphere once men began to work in offices and factories away from home. But it seems that men didn't much like the arrangement either. They balked at the stuffy propriety of the bourgeois parlor, as they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. At midcentury, fathers who at first had refused to put down the money to buy those newfangled televisions changed their minds when the networks began broadcasting boxing matches and baseball games. The arrival of Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title alone.
In his disregard for domestic life, the playboy was prologue for today's pre-adult male. Unlike the playboy with his jazz and art-filled pad, however, our boy rebel is a creature of the animal house. In the 1990s, Maxim, the rude, lewd and hugely popular "lad" magazine arrived from England. Its philosophy and tone were so juvenile, so entirely undomesticated, that it made Playboy look like Camus.
About 80 percent of female college grads ages 30-44 have been married at some point, compared with 71 percent of women who did not graduate from high school, according to the latest Pew research. The marriages of college grads are also increasingly stable. From the 1970s to the '90s, rates of divorce fell by almost half among college-educated women, but they remained high among women with less than a four-year degree. If there's a crisis in marriage, it's because the least educated and poorest women are no longer getting married.
Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.
They might as well just have another beer.
More people generally — not just more women — are going to college. One’s first job (or one’s second or third or fourth job) is very rarely one’s life-long career. People without higher education face new hurdles now that manufacturing jobs are drying up and well-paying blue-collar work is increasingly difficult to find. That’s a very different economy from the one my grandparents and parents faced. Toss an economic recession into the mix and it’s not hard to see why people aren’t chomping at the bit to make life-long financial commitments to another person when they can barely support themselves — especially in a culture where conservative views on marriage demand that the man is the breadwinner, and that he can support a wife and children.
(Breitbart)Regis Giles, who spoke on the student activism panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, comes from a family of conserative activists. You've most likely heard of her sister, Hannah Giles, who partnered with James O'Keefe in videos that helped bring down ACORN. Her father, Doug Giles, is the host of Clash Radio and spokesperson for "family values." But Regis is branching out on her own, with a new television show in the works called "Primal Urge" in the works on the Pursuit Channel. Campus Progress caught up with Regis to talk aobut her current project, GirlsJustWannaHaveGuns.com, her upcoming television show, and why she doesn't identify as a feminist.
Tell me a little bit about your website [Girlsjustwannahaveguns.com].
My website has my logo on it. In my speech you know, it's also, my company's main objective is self defense. You've seen in the news where women have been jumped and you see the security cameras where they can't do anything. You see them shoved in their cars, ducking down. If they had a gun on them. That would've been a little bit different. If they would've had a gun on them, their life would've been a lot different. They wouldn't have that horrible experience of actually being raped or abducted or even killed. That's what my company stands for.
Translation: Waaaaaaaaaaaaah. Eric Cantor is the real victim here. I can't believe you liberals are focusing on something trivial like people who die for lack of health care when Eric Cantor actually felt unsafe for a few days. And Eric Cantor is definitely the only person who has received death threats. Yep. We're pretty sure. Also, the guy that threatened Eric is gay. Gay! This means gays are bad people. Cry for Eric. He made a sad.In the final hours of the health care debate, much was made over insults which were hurled at those members of Congress responsible for the massive government takeover. There was a clear effort to make the Democratic members, who supported the President's health care takeover, seem like "victims" who were taking principled stances for the people. The media was also quick to report word from Democratic leaders that 10 of their members had been victims of threats and acts of vandalism, which are inappropriate and have no place in civil discourse.
Meanwhile, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and his family were the targets of a death threat for which a Philadelphia man was arrested on Monday. While the media reported the threat against Rep. Cantor, they didn't point out that the suspect, Norman Leboon, claimed on his YouTube website that he is the "Messiah" of "gays and lesbians" and asks his homosexual "children" to leave the armed forces so that he might "smite" those remaining. This was not an insignificant omission. There is a clear pattern of intimidation that comes from many homosexual activists.
In today's sceney the-state-of-young-conservatism-today piece in the WaPo, there was no shortage of glowing praise for that eternal conservative flame: Ronald Reagan. Campus Progress recently examined the fixation groups like Young America's Foundation have with the old Gipper. What's aways incomprehensible to me is that when you compare the two conservative two-term presidents we've had, Bush and Reagan, Bush seems to be far to the right of Reagan. Bush exploded the deficit more, fought a real war in the name of democracy, actually legislated a chip on Roe v. Wade, and has done a better job of putting tow-the-line conservatives in high positions. So why is Bush so absent among the rosy speeches that young conservatives make?
Is it just that Bush is that unpopular, even among the youth? Possibly, but I think the real thing here is that we're witnessing is the fundamental problem with conservatism in practice. At the core of their ideology, conservatives believe that the best of life and politics was in the past. First, they tried to hark back to the 1950s and early '60s. Now, it's the '80s. I've no doubt Bush will be elevated to such a position, but his time has not yet come. He's too fresh. Soon enough, though, conservatives will begin to gloss over Bush's errors and hail him as the last man that truly fought for conservatism. Too bad he's not there yet; he could really use the ratings.
