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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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I wonder if the online right intellecto-sphere will ever figure out that Trump wasn't for them.

As I recall, Jack Donovan was never on the Trump train.

Who’s that?

As someone who doesn’t hang out on Twitter, I only really hear about the biggest and/or most mainstream names.

Jack Donovan is a writer and Norse viking LARPer located at a kind of unique intersection of manosphere, white nationalism and the alt right. He wrote a book called the Way of Men and has a few others. He's also an 'androphile', which is totally different to being gay because he's bald and muscular and wears lots of leather and sunglasses, or something. If he sounds a bit ridiculous, he is, but he also seems pretty bright and makes some good points and does that in way fewer words than many other online commentators.

He's also an 'androphile', which is totally different to being gay because he's bald and muscular and wears lots of leather and sunglasses, or something.

Rob Halford would like to see you in the hall.

Credit where it's due; Donovan has stated that he uses the term androphile mostly as a way to distinguish himself from mainstream 'gay.' It's a cultural distinction which I find fairly common amongst gay men who fall outside of the bi-coast metropolitan social sphere.

I think Donovan fell off because his brand of manly men doing man men things got its doors blown off by the likes of Jocko Wilink and other Professional Veterans who not only tell the same style of stories, but have the personal experience and street cred to back it up.

Yes, that is in fact, the joke - homosexuals already have a fairly significant subculture built around overt masculinity, and Donovan's efforts in that department don't actually make him different. So his insistence that he is Not Like The Other Gays is somewhat feeble. If he gets credit for anything, it's that he seems to have realized this and has retreated from the word, but as another gay man who also doesn't feel comfortable in gay society, I still think it's very funny.

I think Donovan fell off because his brand of manly men doing man men things got its doors blown off by the likes of Jocko Wilink and other Professional Veterans who not only tell the same style of stories, but have the personal experience and street cred to back it up.

Donovan was never going to have mass appeal - he was too gay, too weird, too unaware of his own silliness, and too politically toxic. That's fine - at the end of the day, he's a fag that managed to turn himself into a man, while Jocko Willink is a warrior that turned himself into a podcaster.