The World Does Not Run on Magic; tomorrow's leaders are today's skilled laborers

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Americans are now so tremendously incompetent that any generation of reasonably provident men, maneuvering themselves into work that only men such as they are can do, will enrich themselves in a generation, and seize the levers of power in the next.

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Many a boy languishes in school because he finds no arrow there.

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But the failure of boys in school—not this boy or that boy, but boys by the millions, despite the fact, attested by empirical investigation and the evidence of history, that they are at least the equals of their sisters in intelligence—suggests that the schools are quite simply bad for them. 

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Consider how many young black men, in particular, are languishing, because their schools are—at their best—no great shakes, and because they lack the fathers in the home who would train them up in skill and strength. 
Everywhere you turn your eye in the United States, you will find ugliness, disrepair, vandalism, buildings left to rot—and unemployed or underemployed young men, disheartened, not worth marrying, and ready to cause trouble, since they can cause so little else.

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How, at this juncture, can we redirect resources to those high school boys? That is hard to figure, because we have committed ourselves to “equality,” which in this case means that young men who do have the strength for skilled manual labor, and the tolerance for risk and filth, will be forced to be as useless as young women when it comes to maintaining something like the Colonial Pipeline. This “equality” comes at the expense of the common good.

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The feminism that denies the strength of young men—or damns it as “toxic masculinity”—and that discourages the virtues that build family life intersects with the old-fashioned social and economic structures that keep the poor in their place.

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Every lack presents an opportunity, but only if you have people with the inclination and the power to take it. 

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...when you are indispensable it does not matter what people think of you. They need you, they pay you. And in any case, do good work, and they will change their minds about you, even if they were ill-disposed in the beginning.

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