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	Empowering Men: fighting feminist lies
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: "Men In America" Episode 1, including interview with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson Transcribed by Peter Zohrab on 17 March 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abVKYk1bgYo

1. TUCKER CARLSON: Now to the first part of a series you'll see here every Wednesday in the month of March, focussing on men in America. The signs are everywhere. If you're a middle-aged man, you probably know a peer who has killed himself in recent years -- at least one. If you're a parent you may have noticed that your daughter's friends are a little more on the ball than your son's. They get better grades, they smoke much less marijuana, they spend less time playing video games, they go to more prestigious colleges. If you're an employer, you may have noticed that your female employees show up on time; the young men often don't. And, of course, if you live in this country, you've just seen a horrifying series of mass shootings -- far more than we've ever had. Women didn't do that. In every case the shooter was a man. Something ominous is happening to men in America. Everyone who pays attention knows that. What's odd is how rarely you hear it publicly acknowledged. Our leaders pledge to create more opportunities for women and girls, whom (sic) they imply are failing. Men don't need help. They're the Patriarchy. They're fine -- more than fine. But are they fine? Here are the numbers. Start with the most basic: life and death:

• The average American man will die five years before the average American woman.

• One of the reasons for this is addiction. Men are more than twice as likely as women to become alcoholics.

• They're also twice as likely to die of a drug OD. In New Hampshire, one of the states hardest hit by the opiod crisis, 73% of overdose deaths were men.

• But the saddest reason for shortened lifespans is suicide. Seventy-seven percent of all suicides in America are committed by men. The overall rate is increasing at a dramatic pace. Between 1997 and 2014, there was a 43% rise in suicide deaths among middle-aged American men. The rates are highest among American Indian and White men, who kill themselves at about ten times the rate of Hispanic and Black women.

• You often hear of America's incarceration crisis. Well, that's almost exclusively a male problem too. Over 90 percent of inmates are men.

• Now, these problems are complex, but we know that they start young. And, relative to girls, boys are failing in school.

• More girls than boys graduate high school.

• Considerably more go to and graduate from college.

• In schools at every level, boys account for the overwhelming majority of discipline cases.

• One study found that fully one in five of high school boys had been diagnosed with some form of hyperactivity disorder. That's compared with just one in eleven girls. Many of them were medicated for it. The long-term health effects of those medications? Not fully understood, but they do appear to include depression in later life.

• Women now decisively outnumber men in graduate school.

• They earn the majority of doctoral degrees.

• They are now the majority of enrolees in both Law and Medical schools.

• For men, the consequences of failing in school are long-term and profound. Between 1979 and 2010, working-age men with only high-school degrees saw their real hourly wages drop about 20 percent.

• Over the same period, high-school educated women saw their wages rise.

• The decline of the industrial economy disproportionately hurt men.

• There are now seven million working-age men in America who don't work. They've dropped out of the labour force.

• Nearly half of them take pain medication on any given day. That is the highest rate in the World by far.

• Far fewer young men get married than they did a few decades ago and fewer stay married.

• About one in five American children live now only with their mothers. That's double the rate of 1970. Millions more boys growing up without fathers.

• Young adult men are now more likely to live with a parent than they are to live with a spouse or a partner.

• That is not the case for young women. Single women buy their own homes at more than twice the rate of single men.

• More women than men now have drivers' licences.

• Whenever gender differences come up in public debate, the so-called "Wage-Gap" seems to dominate the conversation. You've heard it: "A woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man earns." That's a statistic that you'll hear a lot. Presidents have repeated it, many candidates. It's everywhere. Yet that number compares all American men to all American women across all professions. No legitimate social scientist would regard that a valid or meaningful measure. The number doesn't mean anything. It's intentionally misleading. It's a talking-point. Once you compare men and women with similar experience, working the same hours in similar jobs for the same period of time -- that's the only way you can measure it -- the gap all but disappears. In fact, it may invert. One study, using census data, found that single women in their twenties, living in metropolitan areas, now earn eight percent more on average than their male counterparts.

• By the way, the majority of managers in the workplace are now women.

• Women, on average, are now scoring higher on IQ tests than men are.

• Even physically, men are falling behind. A recent study found that almost half of young men failed the Army's entry-level physical fitness exam during basic training.

• Fully 70 percent of American men are now overweight or obese, that's compared with 59 percent of American women.

• Perhaps most bafflingly and terrifyingly, men seems to be becoming less male, fundamentally, measurably.

• Sperm counts, for example, across the West, have plummeted. They're down almost 60 percent since the early 1970s. Scientists don't know why this is.

• Testosterone levels in men have also fallen precipitously. One study found that average levels of male testosterone dropped by one percent every year after 1987 and it's not related to age -- in other words, the average 40-year-old man in 2017 would have testosterone levels 30% lower than the average 40-year-old man in 1987. There's no upside to this trend. Lower testosterone levels in men are associated with depression, lethargy, weight-gain, decreased cognitive ability. Nothing like this has ever happened to a population this big. So you'd think we'd like to know exactly why! What's going on? How do we fix it? And yet the media ignore that story. It's considered a fringe topic, somehow. Nor is it -- believe it or not -- a priority in the scientific research establishment! We checked and we couldn't find a single NIH-funded study on why testosterone levels are falling. We did find a study on (quote) "Pubic Hair Grooming Prevalence and Motivation Among Women in the US."

So those are the numbers and they paint a very clear picture: American men are failing in body, in mind and in spirit. This is a crisis! Yet our leaders pretend it's not happening and in fact they tell us the opposite is true. Women are victims, men are oppressors. To question that assumption is to risk punishment. Even as women far outpace men in higher education, for example, virtually every college campus supports a Women's Studies department, whose core goal is to attack male power. Our politicians and business leaders internalise and amplify that message. "Men are privileged; women are oppressed. Hire and reward and promote accordingly."

Now, that would be fine if it were true! But it's not true. At best, it's an outdated view of an America that no longer exists. At worst, it's a pernicious lie. Either way, ignoring the decline of men does not help anyone. Men and women need each other. One cannot exist without the other. That is elemental Biology. It's also the reality that each one of us has lived! With our parents and siblings and friends. When men fail, all of us suffer.

How did this happen? How can we fix it? We hope that this series, each Wednesday this month, answers those questions.

Jordan Peterson is a Professor at the University of Toronto. He's written a lot about the decline of modern men. We spoke to him recently.

...

Jordan Peterson, thanks for joining us. We've got a long list of statistics that paint a pretty clear picture that boys seem to be falling behind, relative to girls, in the United States. Why do you think that is?

2. JORDAN PETERSON: I think that that's partly the result of directed policy; so it's linked to the idea that there's something wrong with masculinity; and so that the expression of masculinity should be limited in all sorts of arbitrary ways. The fact that kids can't really play at schools any more is a manifestation of that. The fact that male behaviour is often diagnosed as Attention Deficit Disorder, for example, is a manifestation of that. The elimination of competition as a valid form of human interaction and the failure to recognise that competitive sports, for example, are deeply cooperative in their fundamental nature, as long as everyone is playing by the rules, obviously. So there's that. That's a large part of it.

3. TUCKER CARLSON:So you're saying that there's an organised -- not always explicit, but still organised -- attempt to deemphasise masculinity, or to punish masculinity. Why?

4. JORDAN PETERSON: Because it's easy to mistake masculine competence for the tyranny that hypothetically drives the "Patriarchy". It's part of an ideological world view that sees the entire history of mankind as the oppression of women by men, which is a dreadful way of looking at the World -- a very pathological way of looking at the World. It's not like men and women always get along -- any more than than men and men get along, or women and women, for that matter. But, fundamentally, human history is a cooperative enterprise and men and women have lifted themselves out of the mire over millenia in their cooperative endeavour and to describe that as centuries of the oppression of women by men is an absolutely reprehensible ideological rewrite of history and it's what's taught in the humanities and much of the social sciences at universities and, increasingly, in the public education system. It's taken as an unassailable fact.

5. TUCKER CARLSON: And you're saying that this has bad consequences for the development of boys?

6. JORDAN PETERSON: Well, how could you feel good about that? I mean, if you're made out to be a potential manifestation of "Rape Culture", if you're part of "Toxic Masculinity", if your competitive drive is regarded as part of a tyrannical impulse, if the heritage to which you belong is regarded as an "Oppressive Patriarchy", then how in the World are you going to step forward with confidence and shoulder that -- what would you call it? -- that burden? Why would you? Why wouldn't you just step aside and retreat, which is exactly what's happening?

7. TUCKER CARLSON: But if men are so aggressive and bent on establishing a "Patriarchy", why have they stepped back and allowed this to happen?

8. JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I guess that's a good question, isn't it? I don't know the answer to that. I don't know if they are precisely allowing it to happen. It's very insidious, the ideological movement that's driving this part of the Radical Left -- part of the Radical Left, I would say. It's a very insidious movement. It's not an easy thing to resist and a lot of it occurs -- well, for example, it occurs in the school system, increasingly, and it isn't clear what -- they're not men that are reacting to that -- that's boys. It's not clear what they're supposed to do about it. So.... hard to fight an ideological battle.

9. TUCKER CARLSON: It is, it is hard. Finally, if you were to give parents of boys one piece of advice for how, in their small way, they can fight against this trend, for the sake of their own boys, what would it be?

10. JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I would say, first of all, encourage them, and I mean that most deeply, is that to encourage someone is to instill courage in them, to support their courage and that doesn't mean protect them from what's dangerous. It means teach them how to be competent and teach them that they can rely on themselves to prevail even in the darkest of circumstances. That's part of it. I would say, as well, more specifically -- and this is specific advice for parents -- if you have your children in a school and they talk about "Equity" in this class and they talk about "Equity", "Diversity", "Inclusivity", "White Privilege", "Systemic Racism" -- any of that -- you take your children out of the class. They're not being educated, they're being indoctrinated and there's absolutely no excuse for it.

11. TUCKER CARLSON: I agree with that completely. You might run out of schools pretty quickly, though, here in this country.

12. JORDAN PETERSON: That would be just fine!

13. TUCKER CARLSON: Jordan Peterson, it's hard to express my gratitude to you for telling the truth, as you do. Thank you very much for that!

14. JORDAN PETERSON: My pleasure!

See also:

Summary Haiku:

Men have no rights,
but aren't less human.
We blame sexism.