In Just Seven Days, [Factory Work] Can Make You A Man
Meet the Khmer L'Orange.
You know, people have been really down on Trump’s tariffs this week — now, since he’s blinked, somewhat paused — largely because people are losing lots and lots of money. (Yes, still, even with the stock market’s relieved bounce yesterday.) Promises of “short-term pain for long-term gain” are starting to fall flat, and so some MAGA loyalists have pivoted from promising economic gains to promising culture war gains.
Specifically, they are claiming that a return to factory work will bring about a return to true masculinity.
“When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this,” Jesse Watters, who previously claimed that eating soup in public and using straws makes you a woman, explained to the gang at Fox’s “The Five” this week, adding, “And if you're out working, like building robots like Harold, you are around other guys. You're not around HR ladies and lawyers that give you estrogen.”
Well, that’s just science, isn’t it?
This quote was a response to a particularly bad take from self-proclaimed “MAGA Lefty” Batya Ungar-Sargon, of Bari Weiss’s Free Press, who on Sunday told Fox News that she believes that moving manufacturing jobs overseas was one of the things that fueled the so-called current “masculinity crisis.”
“We shipped jobs that gave men who work with their hands for a living, and rely on brawn and physicality, off to other countries to build up their middle class,” Ungar-Sargon told former “Real World” star Rachel Campos-Duffy. “We imported millions and millions of illegals to work in construction, manufacturing, landscaping, janitorial services — jobs that used to give men access to the American dream.”
It seems worth noting here that both the construction and manufacturing industries are suffering from labor shortages, and have been for some time now.
It’s not that these jobs don’t exist, but that not everyone wants them. I guess the idea here would be to make them the only sort of jobs that people could have — like the Treasury secretary’s suggestion this week that all the fired government workers could get factory jobs — but that doesn’t seem very pro-freedom to me.
The sentiment has reverberated across the MAGAsphere this week, with many celebrating the idea of working in factories as being inherently more masculine and respectable than working office jobs.
Can’t they just start fight clubs?
But it’s not just about machismo. It’s also about making people less educated, more religious, and more likely to have children young. One of the things the Right has been pushing hard is that bringing back manufacturing would bring back lots of jobs for those without college degrees.
Now, on the face of it, that’s not a bad thing. Of course we want lots of good-paying jobs for people without college degrees! Personally, I think all jobs should be living wage jobs, which is just one difference between me and those people who want to bust unions at the same time they’re extolling factory work! But there’s a big difference between wanting there to be good jobs for people who don’t go to college and actively not wanting people to go to college, which is the far stronger sentiment on the Right.
Republicans don’t want people to go to college for fear they will come out of it being too smart to vote Republican. They also don’t want their kids to encounter different kinds of people and discover they’re not actually as scary as they’d been told. They don’t want people taking gender studies classes because they don’t want them to be aware of gender-based oppression, because they want them to love and embrace the patriarchy. They don’t want them taking Black studies classes because they don’t want them to be aware of racial discrimination and oppression. That’s why they make fun of these kinds of courses. They don’t want them taking college-level history courses in which they learn about the bad things the United States has done. They don’t want them taking college level biology, because they don’t want them to learn about evolution or have an understanding of sex and gender beyond what they can learn from Kindergarten Cop.
They don’t want them to have an understanding of epidemiology beyond what they can learn from “The Brady Bunch.”
This past November, the Heritage Foundation put out a “report” with the deeply creepy title “Education Policy Reforms Are Key Strategies for Increasing the Married Birth Rate.”
The gist of it was that Republicans must push for public funding of religious education and encourage young people to get knocked up young instead of going to college and waiting until they are established in their careers and financially stable enough to afford children.
No, really:
Increasing access to private and religious education for those who want it though expanded school choice, removing excess credentialing barriers in fields such as teaching and for state jobs, and reducing federal higher education subsidies and loan cancellation that place the federal thumb on the scale in favor of spending years in postsecondary work of questionable value will help young Americans to start and expand their families.
In short: “more religious education + less qualified teachers + making it harder to go to college = more babies.” This is probably true, since we can assume the children won’t learn much about condoms or birth control at those religious schools.
Not to mention more bodies to send off to foreign wars!
While no silver bullet can increase the married birth rate, developing pro-family policies is essential if Americans want to maintain their political and cultural traditions, avoid economic decline, and strengthen national defense.
Honestly you never actually expect them to say it, and then they say it.
Basically, the MAGA Right is making it clear that they want people to work in factories instead of going to college, because they believe that this will give them an edge in the culture war.
We’ve seen this before. Under Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia (which was called “Kampuchea” from 1975-’79), the Khmer Rouge pushed the idea that more educated people in the city had been corrupted, they claimed, by Western values, and the only way for the country to return to its “golden age” was for everyone to give that up immediately in favor of becoming poor farmers. Chairman Mao, too, forced people with college degrees in bourgeois jobs to relocate to rural areas in order to work as farmers. Authoritarian regimes have a tendency to idealize the past and to demonize education, for fairly obvious reasons.
Now we have the Khmer L’Orange, with visions of Norman Rockwell paintings dancing in their heads, wanting to push Americans back into manufacturing, because they think that’s their best (and possibly only) chance to win the culture war.
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Odd that all of these males so concerned with masculinity, and masculine jobs in factories aren't working in factories. They sit a desks all day, and in front of computers (who sits behind computers?), which they claim makes them women. Actually their obsession with masculinity is just plain weird, but not in a quirky way, but in a creepy way.
So, now that the tariffs are paused, they will have to be macho the usual way, abusing others.