Dan Miller critiques Senator Josh Hawley's book "Blue Collar or Bust," dismantling the claim that real masculinity requires manual labor while exposing Hawley's climate denialism as a conspiracy to emasculate men. Miller argues Hawley dismisses white-collar professions like teaching, mocks work-life balance as liberal feminization, and relies on weak biblical interpretations of Genesis to defend capitalism without theological substance. Ultimately, this analysis reveals Hawley's ideology as a neoliberal, patriarchal strategy designed to devalue non-blue-collar men to protect elite privilege rather than genuinely assist workers. [Automatically generated summary]
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Hello, and welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you as always.
And as always, want to say thank you for listening.
Those of you who take the time and join us in all the different places where we show up here, we really appreciate it.
Can't do it without you.
And just want to say that and remind you that this series, more than anything else we do, is coming from you.
And I am preparing a new series on questions I was not allowed to ask in church or questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church, soliciting responses from you, getting some great, great comments and ideas from different people.
About the kinds of questions that got them in trouble in church, the kinds of questions that maybe made church people uncomfortable or whatever it is.
If you would like to share those with me, I'd love to hear them.
Daniel Miller Swag, Daniel Miller S W A J at gmail.com.
Send them my way.
If you put in the header questions I wasn't supposed to ask or wasn't allowed to ask, that'll help me to spot those.
But that's coming up as we kind of begin coming to the end of Josh Holly's book.
And I'm looking forward to doing that.
Looking forward to your insights.
Diving into today, as I just said, we are in Josh Hawley's book, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.
I didn't really like Josh Hawley before.
The more I read his book, man, yeah, I really don't like him.
Anyway, that's beside the point.
Reading his book, looking at his book, his book on manhood, his book that tells us what it is that men are supposed to be like and how we can cultivate masculine virtues that will save America.
Pretty sure I'm not the man he has in mind.
But, you know, maybe I'll read the book and be converted.
It's unlikely.
We are in the fourth of the roles that he says men are called to play.
There's a bunch of roles that men are called to play to exercise their masculine virtues and to save America.
And the fourth of those roles is that of builder.
It's the title of his chapter.
We started looking at it last week.
And first thing to note is he says builder, but he doesn't talk very much about building.
It's going to come up again today, but that's just worth knowing.
We started talking about the chapter last week.
And, you know, I spent that time just basically.
It really gets under my skin when I hear anybody, anybody on the political right who claims to be defending the voice of the worker and especially blue collar workers.
That's his focus in this chapter is blue collar.
People in blue collar work in a way that's actually really problematic.
But I spent that episode just basically highlighting the fact that for the last 50 years, it's his political party that has eviscerated blue collar working class America.
And now he and everybody else, everybody else in the Mogosphere, want to somehow claim that they are the voice for those people.
So we talked about that.
But there's a lot more to say about this chapter.
I'm not even going to get to all of it today.
But the more I read this chapter, the more I get frustrated.
Like, On multiple levels.
And one of the frustrations that I have when I read this chapter in particular, I feel like every chapter in Holly's book is like a new fresh hell.
It's a new way to get frustrated and just see how the discourses on the right work.
But this is one that's really been with me for decades in a lot of ways, going all the way back to my time in the evangelical Christian world.
And it's on full display here.
Right-Wing Views on Masculinity00:14:57
So, what I want to think about today is.
Is how Josh Hawley not only supports the economic policies that have so damaged the kind of working class Americans that he claims to speak for, at least working class men, pardon me.
He has literally nothing to say about women in this book, but how he's baptized his views on masculinity and work so that he contributes them to Christianity, excuse me, to Christianity and the Bible.
And one of the questions I get about American Christianity, and just generally, I get this from lots of people, from students, from people who listen to the podcast, from other people.
And the question I began to pose for myself when I was a young assistant pastor in a Southern Baptist church, when I was in that role, is why do American Christians assume that free market capitalism is a distinctively biblical or Christian economic model?
And to be clear, I recognize there are and always have been American Christians who challenge the core doctrines of free market capitalism.
But since early in American history, not long after the revolutionary period, white American Christians increasingly came to the view that.
Capitalism was, you know, at first compatible with Christianity and later demanded by Christianity.
And if somebody's sitting there and saying, well, why would that be weird?
Number one, that might already tell you that, you know, you've grown up in this kind of thought world already.
But if you think about it, capitalism is a system that's built entirely about greed, it's built about pursuing self interest, clearly creates social winners and losers.
I mean, and it doesn't seem like one would have to go really far to try to articulate a Christian alternative to that.
But pretty early on, American Christians, white American Christianity, especially Protestants, took this on board.
And so, certainly, the vast majority of conservative Protestants in American history have held this view, maybe not in American history, but for over a century and a half at least.
And the dyed in the wool historians out there, if you want to email me and give me more of the details, you can.
I've got the books and things, but I don't know that specific history of sort of like the day and time the white American Christians became capitalists.
But it's been a long time.
Okay.
And over the past 50 plus years or so, as those same conservative Protestants have overwhelmingly come to support the Republican Party and its economic policies, the dictates of specifically neoliberal economics as it relates to capitalism have become articles of faith for these Christians, literal articles of faith.
I don't use that term lightly.
Those same Christians, if you've had conversations with them, you know they will defend such things as so called small government.
Or tax cuts, or deregulation, or attacks on organized labor, all those kinds of things.
They will defend those with almost the same ferocity as they will use to attack queer rights.
Or to argue against abortion access or something like that.
Like it is part and parcel with a conservative Christian identity.
And this isn't the place to tell that full story of like exactly why that has become such a defining feature of conservative Christianity in America.
But I bring it up as a really sort of a preface to the discussion today because it is absolutely on full display in Holly's presentation of man as builder.
And in this chapter, the reason I say this is he trots out just myth after myth.
That structure the way that those on the right talk about economics and workers.
Like it's just, it's a, he's like a caricature of himself in this chapter.
And in this frame, nowhere does he actually argue that Christians should support a capitalist social structure.
He never says, like, here's why capitalism and Christianity are compatible or why Christians should be capitalist.
And the reason is because he doesn't need to.
Because on the right, and I recognize fully, I am not his intended audience for this book.
Among those who are, It's completely taken for granted by Christians like him that Christianity and capitalism are linked.
That to be a Christian is to be a capitalist.
And I suspect that if he was confronted with Christian arguments against supporting free market capitalism, he would find those arguments completely unintelligible, or he would just accuse you of being a Marxist.
That's the Cold War piece of this.
That piece of the history we absolutely know.
The godless communists and the good Christian Americans fighting them, which means capitalism is part of this Christian ideology.
So he would call me maybe a communist.
He'd already call me a cultural Marxist.
But I think he would just be taken aback.
The notion that one would be a Christian and for that reason be critical of free market capitalism, I think, would be completely foreign to him.
And I think that that's just something to have in front of us as we read this chapter, because it's interesting that he's going to talk about all of these things, but he's nowhere going to actually defend the idea.
And again, it's because he doesn't need to.
He doesn't need to convince the people that are normally going to be reading this book of that.
And I think that this.
Sort of taken for grantedness.
That's an awkward phrase.
The fact that he takes this for granted, I think it's evident when it shows just how little effort he actually spends in this chapter to make like a quote unquote biblical argument for the things that he says.
And that will circle back around to that.
What I want to do then today is we'll come to that point, but I also want to look at the way that Holly sort of mythologizes and imagines men's work.
I've said over and over that we're looking at his book because it is.
Typical of the right in so many ways.
What he says is not unique to him.
It's not special.
It's not a hot take on anything.
It's just typical in a lot of ways.
And this, this, it's completely clear in this chapter.
So, looking at what he has to say about work, it really does provide a window into the way in which so many people on the right think about work and masculinity and America.
Okay.
So, I want to start.
I mentioned that, you know, he trots out myth after myth.
He really outlines a number of right wing dogmas about work and masculinity.
I just want to note some of these.
And this chapter, I said this last time, this chapter is hard to read for me.
The book is not well organized, it's not well put together.
This chapter feels worse than most.
So I've kind of reorganized it around these themes.
So we'll see how this goes.
But I want to highlight some of these dogmas about work.
And so here's the first one Dogma one real work, men's work is blue collar work.
Holly actually says, as I noted earlier, he says almost nothing about building in this chapter.
That's the supposed theme.
He talks about his brother who lays concrete and he talks about.
King David, who built Jerusalem.
And I talked about that last time.
King David didn't actually do that.
A bunch of workers did.
Whatever.
But that's it.
Most of the time, he's not talking about building.
What he's talking about is blue collar work.
And obviously, people who build, I guess, the actual tradespeople doing the work, that would be a form of blue collar work.
But blue collar work really seems to be his focus.
And his thesis is that men are called to work and that properly masculine work is blue collar in nature.
That's a key part of his thesis.
So he argues, for example, blaming the left as he always does.
That's a whole other thing.
It's not even worth commenting on in this chapter, but every negative thing he has to say is going to be because the left did it.
But he argues the blue collar jobs are hard to come by because people on the left attack them.
And these people, he says, that is leftists, quote, prefer an economy built on white collar service jobs that produce nothing tangible and require expensive degrees favored by the leftist intelligentsia, end quote.
So it's, you know, It's another kind of conspiracy by the left to get rid of blue collar work because we want people to have degrees, I guess.
I could say a lot about this passage, and I think we're going to actually probably return to it next episode.
But what I want to note here, the reason I'm citing is just how dismissive he is of so called white collar labor.
And I think that's a point here.
He argues that the shift to a less blue collar economy, he doesn't say that, like, he doesn't talk much about the economic realities behind it.
He does what lots of politicians do when they just talk about the need for high paying blue collar jobs and don't note the fact that, like, great, there's a need for them, but nobody's paying top dollar for that.
Or if they are, there are a lot of blue collar jobs that pay really well.
We don't need as many of them as we once did because of automation and outsourcing and all different kinds of things, whatever.
Okay.
That's why people say we have to shift to these other kinds of economic models.
But for him, It's notable how dismissive he is of white collar labor.
So he argues that a shift to a less blue collar economy is not about economic realities.
It's not about changing social needs.
It's not about any of that complex stuff.
No, It's an attack on masculinity.
And he essentially argues that this is why so many American men don't work.
He spends lots of time going through data about men not working and basically he's like, They don't work.
And the reason they don't work is because of the attack on blue collar jobs by a bunch of leftists.
That's what he argues.
But why would this be an attack on men?
Well, because for Holly, men are made for and naturally desire blue collar work.
We'll come back around this, but he says men are called by God to do blue collar work.
So to attack, and he sees it as an attack on blue collar work, on a blue collar economy. is to attack men.
To shift to any other kind of economy, he says, is to expect men to change what they fundamentally are.
So saying things like, well, maybe people could retrain or get better education or whatever, that's not enough for him.
This is what he says.
He says, the loss of high paying, blue collar for work has been a, excuse me, a blue collar work for men has been a catastrophe for this nation and for men, robbing them of employment, family, dignity, and hope.
And then he gives us a really telling illustration of this point when he discusses efforts to bring more men into fields like health care and education and administration and literacy or Undertaking careers such as teachers and social workers.
So, a bunch of more white collar fields, he talks about this.
And so, you could ask him, you can hear, well, what about guys who do that kind of work, Josh, like people who don't manufacture or they don't build or they're not working with their hands or whatever?
Well, listen to his response.
This is what he says.
He says, Oh, there's nothing wrong with those careers, of course.
I mean, just pause there.
It's that response.
Oh, no, no, no.
Well, I mean, I guess there's nothing wrong with that, which means I think there's something wrong with that.
Like, there's Josh Holly.
So, There's nothing wrong with those careers, of course.
To take just one example, many boys benefit from having male teachers as positive role models.
End quote.
To me, I read that there's nothing but disdain here.
These are not real men.
These are not men's men.
I mean, okay.
Yeah.
I guess you can't do that other stuff or you're not strong enough or good enough with your hands or something.
I mean, I guess you could be like a teacher or a social worker.
I guess.
He goes on and says, like in the next sentence, the fact is men are historically less interested in these fields.
What he's saying is that those kinds of fields, and notice that I mean, those are teaching, caring professions, white collar work, they don't fit with what men truly are as Holly imagines them.
There is no inherent value in those fields for him.
And he says that says the best value they can serve is to be role models for boys.
Like, well, you know, I guess you could have male teachers because boys need role models.
I guess it's not like, I don't know, teaching is important or social work is important or healthcare is important and noble and whatever.
And so, yeah, of course, of course, men should be seeking those jobs.
Nope.
It's this very secondary kind of dismissive, like, well, you know, I guess if that's all you can do, you can do that.
And I mean, I guess you can be a role model for a boy who will hopefully grow up someday to do blue collar work, to do manly work.
So, throughout the chapter, that's dogma one is just that real men work and their work is blue collar.
If you do blue collar work, You are authentically exercising your masculinity.
And if you don't, it sounds like, you know, you're a second kind of a second string guy at best.
Okay.
I think dogma two, and that relates to this, is that men have no value or purpose that they don't work.
And specifically, they don't work in blue collar jobs.
And Holly says in one place, he says, work, all kinds of work is worth doing.
But you read the chapter, he doesn't really mean all kinds of work.
We just talked about that.
We just saw that when he's talking about a man teaching.
His examples of real work are his grandpa's time as a short order cook, which he didn't stay with, his uncle's concrete company, and he talks about a horse trainer that his wife used to know.
Those are his examples of real workers.
Okay.
For him, men who do other kinds of work lack dignity, they don't have inherent dignity or worth unless they're working and they're doing the right kind of work.
So for Holly, and this is that other dogma men are made for work so much so that he mocks.
Those who would limit their hard blue collar work to say a 40 hour work week or to maintain work life balance.
He puts it in quotes.
Okay.
Insistence on those kinds of things, those soft things like a 40 hour work week and work life balance and things like that, that's just more evidence of the liberal feminizing of American society.
Men are made for work and they're made for hard work and they're made for blue collar work.
And if you come along and suggest that there might be limits to how long you should work, the hours you should put in, Spending time with your family.
Blue Collar Ideology Exposed00:14:45
It's funny.
Holly's got like husband and father.
This is his first role, men are supposed to.
To play.
But apparently, if you're working and don't have time to be a good husband or father, I guess that's okay.
I don't know.
I don't know, Josh.
I don't know how those things fit together because you're not telling me.
Men are made for work.
Work is not made for men.
Work is not something that we do because we need to or because, zooming out again, we live in this capitalist world where you have to work to make money because we have money and so forth.
We can imagine other kinds of societies.
But that's his kind of this other dogma.
Men are made for work.
And next episode, we're going to get into the themes of, I think, elitism and exploitation in this chapter.
And this is prime for that.
Real men, real men will work as many hours as they're told to work.
Real men, they're going to prioritize their work.
They're not going to worry about work life balance and these other sissy, liberal, feminist kinds of things.
Nope.
Real men work and they work hard and they work blue collar.
That's what real men do.
That's Holly's vision.
Another dogma that he's got here, and this is sort of interesting to me, is that, again, it's just typical of the right.
This one's not specifically about masculinity, but it's pretty clear that climate change is a left wing conspiracy.
Here's his climate denial, comes in this chapter.
In an ironically titled section of his chapter, he calls the section Reject Nihilism, because I think he's completely nihilistic.
Calls it rejecting nihilism.
He spends a good deal of time engaging in climate denial.
That's like what he does.
And what he tells us is that the entire discourse about climate change, all the stuff about climate change, all the stuff about environmental degradation, all of it, it's all just a part of a left wing conspiracy to keep men from working in truly masculine blue collar fields.
It is all part of a left wing conspiracy to emasculate men and keep them from working.
He refers to, quote, climate fiction.
And the apocalyptic environmental tradition as false ideologies aimed at denying men the blue collar work that defines them.
And so, I mean, that's the logic.
If somebody says, hey, factories really pollute things and stuff, maybe we should have some environmental regulations.
He says, oh, see, you hate blue collar work and you hate factories, and men are men that they're doing blue collar work.
This is all about attacking men.
It's not about fixing the environment.
It's not about countering climate change.
Nope, this is about attacking men.
And so his argument is that concerns about climate change and environmental destruction are nihilistic because they tell men that their work is insignificant and deeply destructive.
Again, it's all about attacking men.
And in keeping with broader GOP orthodoxy, there's no concept here of maintaining manufacturing industries or other blue collar fields while also working to minimize environmental impacts or anything like that.
It's also part of neoliberal orthodoxy.
Profit is everything, the environment is just a cost.
So you've got to get rid of the cost, which means there can't be any regulation.
But Holly.
Ideologically, it puts all of this as an attack on men.
So, that person over there, they're not actually worried about super storms or the fact that we keep having the hottest summers ever or whatever.
They're not worried about wildfires.
They're not worried about being able to insure their home because they can't because they live in a place with lots of natural disasters because of climate change.
Nope.
Nope.
It's all just a liberal plot to come after men.
So, we get a good dose of not just climate denial, but conspiracism in this chapter.
Okay.
So, those are just some of the dogmatic assertions that he has about work that come through here.
I also want to talk a little bit about what he does and doesn't sort of say about the Bible here.
So, and I mentioned this earlier too.
So, for a guy who claims to be outlining a Christian vision of American society, And in this chapter, A Christian Vision of Work, it's pretty amazing how little his biblical arguments for this are in this chapter or how weak they are.
In all the other chapters, he has spent a fair amount of time trying to show that his views are biblical.
He'll sort of dive into it.
I mean, he gives some examples from the Bible here, but not in the same detail.
What he does oftentimes in this chapter is he just asserts over and over that he's giving us the teachings of the Bible reflected in his work.
But he doesn't try to show that the way he has with some of the other topics.
And I think that that's telling.
I think that shows that this is just dogma for him.
It's also, as somebody who knows a decent amount about the Bible, I think it's hard to read the Bible as a defense of free market capitalism.
And when he does give biblical examples, they're just silly.
So, like, here's one he appeals to God's deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.
According to the Bible story, they're like in slavery in Egypt for centuries, and then God delivers them and so forth.
And his takeaway, Josh Holly's takeaway, Is that God delivered them so they could work and have dignity?
They had had to work for somebody else and now they can work for themselves.
I kid you not, that is his takeaway.
Not fulfilling the covenant promises to Israel, not, you know, slavery's bad and God didn't want them to be slaves.
Nope, they had to do their work and it wasn't fulfilling because they were slaves and now God has freed them so they can work and have dignity of their own.
That's his point.
Okay, so that's one of his examples.
Here's another one.
And this is one I grew up with.
I remember this argument going all the way back to church when I was a kid, and I would hear sermons and comments and things that were opposed to environmentalism and so forth.
This is before the climate change discussion was really a thing in popular consciousness, it was just more general environmentalism.
But this is the one I grew up with.
It's the idea that fears of climate change and environmental degradation are all anti Christian propaganda.
Why?
Because God told Adam and Eve to exercise dominion over the earth.
And Holly's been riding that horse since the book started, that exercise dominion.
You take one verse, one verse in the book of Genesis where it says that God tasks human beings with exercising dominion, and boom, we're called to exercise dominion.
We're not called to preserve the environment, to protect it.
We're called to do whatever we want to the planet.
So he argues that.
And while we're on the topic of Adam, we know if you've been listening to this, Josh Holly, God, he talks about Adam a lot.
Like we are, we're over halfway through the book.
And he has spent so much time talking about Adam.
Most of the book is spent in the first two chapters of the Bible.
We have not made it very far into it for his so called biblical perspective.
But he revisits his Adam theology and he says that, God appoints Adam to work.
And specifically, he says, in a do it with your hands way, all hyphenated do it with your hands, like hyphenated to make one word of it.
God called Adam and he called him to work with his hands.
God called Adam to be a blue collar worker.
That was Adam's task.
And again, I mean, that's just thin.
It's the kind of thing where you can imagine if somebody maybe didn't know the Bible, they said, Wow, so you're saying the Bible teaches this?
And they're like, Yep.
The Bible defends blue collar work and says that's what men are made for.
You're like, Whoa, okay.
Like, where?
And they cite a verse where like God tells Adam to be a farmer.
That's what he told him.
He told him to like, you know, work and subdue the earth, he told him to go farm.
And you're like, oh, okay.
And that's what Hawley says.
Page 148.
He says the Bible says that work done with one's hands is sacred work because when a man produces something that's useful to himself and others, He demonstrates the goodness of creation.
Except the Bible doesn't actually say that anywhere.
That's all it is.
Just when God tells him to go, you know, go be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth and stuff, that's it.
I don't think the Bible actually says that.
And if it does, Holly's sure not showing me.
He says about a page later, he says, The Bible tells us that when a man works, he moves the world.
Doesn't tell us that anywhere.
If you read Holly, if you didn't know the Bible and you read Holly, you would be like, man.
This must be a theme that runs throughout that whole book.
I had no idea that work was such a central theme in the Bible.
And the reason is, if you do know the Bible, and I know some of you do, and you go and read it, it doesn't say this shit.
It doesn't say it anywhere.
That's his biblical sort of ideology of this.
What Hawley's really saying is that the image of God.
So in the book of Genesis, the beginning, it says God creates human beings and creates them in his image.
For Hawley, the image of God that men bear is essentially that they work.
He says that the Bible teaches, and I'm quoting him again, that man truly becomes God's delegate, his representative, his servant as he works.
He has already said early on, like the first chapter, that when it says we're created in the image of God, it means we're called to be God's representative.
And here he says we are God's delegate or representative when we work.
The image of God in man is working.
If you don't work, you're not living out the image of God.
And it's not just any old work, as we've seen.
It's blue collar work.
And this is a problem because what that suggests for me is that when men don't work, they're not really created in the image of God.
So he's got a lot of theology running around there.
But for a guy who says that he's building this on the Bible and repeatedly says, the Bible teaches this, the Bible teaches this, I wish I had him here.
I'd be like, tell me where, man.
Okay, I've got the one verse where God tells Adam to be a farmer.
Like, that's it?
That's your whole idea.
We have the image of God if we're working, like I don't know if we're pouring concrete or working on a factory assembly line, and otherwise we don't.
Come on.
In this chapter, the dogmas about masculinity work just keep piling up.
I could tease out other examples, I could go line by line, but we don't have time to do that.
And the way it's written up is a mess.
So let me try to tie this together.
Here are the takeaways for me from this chapter.
Okay.
The first one is that the real men are defined by their work, and real work is blue collar again.
Men might do other things, but they'll never be the alphas of society and they won't be fulfilling their God given masculine roles.
So, yeah, okay, I guess a guy could be a teacher.
He could be a social worker.
He could be a healthcare worker.
Sure.
But he's not going to be a real man.
And I think that that's a key.
I think that in defining work and men in this way, Holly just kind of reiterates some of the most entrenched and well worked ideologies of a Christian patriarchal society.
Some of you listening, I know, are like, I've heard my dad say the same thing.
Or my grandpa used to say the same thing.
I've heard this for decades.
What is it?
That's what it is.
It's a very, very well worn kind of Christian patriarchal vision of society.
I think he also, in this, and anybody who pays attention to contemporary discourses on the right, or somebody like Donald Trump, one of Holly's buddies, he gives voice to that typical right wing nostalgia that finds America's true value in its past industrial age that always looks back.
To America when most jobs were about manufacturing and heavy industry and so forth, and sees that.
As something sort of authentically American and manly.
And by mocking notions like a 40 hour work week and white collar work, he effectively, in my view, advances a predatory social model that is built on employers' exploitation of their workers.
And we're going to come back to that next episode.
I think that's the last thing I'm going to say about this chapter that piece.
He's going to have a lot to say about men and working and independence and whatever.
But at the end of the day, he is typical of neoliberal right wing people.
Where he envisions a society in which most people are workers and they are subject to the predation of their employers.
And I think the most important idea here, maybe, if we think about sort of, I don't know, religion or ethics or philosophy or theology or something, is that Hawley basically tells us that men who don't work in blue collar fields have no inherent value or worth.
You are literally worth less if you are not working in a blue collar field.
The value and worth of men comes from what they do, and what they do should be blue collar.
That's authentic masculinity.
And then finally, the fact that he does so little to actually defend these ideas, he just kind of asserts them.
I think that shows how much he is just spewing right wing ideology in this chapter.
So, next episode, we're going to sort of pick up here.
I've kind of laid some pieces because I want to come back and revisit some of these pieces today because I want to highlight another crucial element.
I'm going to come back.
And I'm going to look at some of this stuff Holly says about, you know, the liberal intelligentsia wanting people to have college degrees and all these other things.
Because what I want to highlight is how much he is an elitist hypocrite when he talks about work.
Josh Holly's own elitist hypocrisy in the way that he talks about work.
And I'm going to argue that his discourse, the way that he talks about work, it isn't meant to help men rediscover their meaning or their masculinity, it is meant to protect the privilege.
And social and political power and the economic power of men like him.
So, we're going to come back.
We're going to revisit some of these themes.
I'm going to try to tie these things together and look at, like, you know, here's the stuff he says about masculinity and blue collar work and men and so forth.
But here's what that actually works.
Here's how that actually serves the interests of people like Josh Hawley in the elite that he serves, the elite that he is part of, the elite whose voice he helps fill out.
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So, join me for that.
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