https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj5orGSiq8s
Transcript:
Fun fact, leftists do not hate guns
In fact, I personally own at least one
Not only do I own a firearm, but unlike the vast majority of people that are gun owners, I've actually used mine in self-defense
I bought my first home in 2010, and it was burglarized not long after
In fact, it was burglarized multiple times.
However, one day, I just happened to be at home when a handful of teenagers appeared at the back of my home trying to get in
For legal reasons, I won't get into many details, but let's just say I defended my home and nobody was hurt in the process
However, the experiences in the aftermath were very odd for me
When I told people the story of how I defended my home, I may have gotten a few pats on the back.
But there was also this other thing I felt from certain men when I told this story
Envy and in some cases, judgment
Man, if that was me, I'd have blown them away
Wow, I wish I'd have been there
They lucky they never tried me like that cuz somebody would have left in a box
yada yada yada kill people
I kill [ ] A lot of [ ] like that.
Mind you, I was fully aware that these were kids breaking into my house
Teenagers from the local high school
Little black boys doing some [ __ ] they had no business doing
Literally the types of kids I worked with and taught for most of my adult life at that time
Whenever I called police in years prior after getting robbed, they were real lthered up telling me just how I could legally kill these children if I just so happened to be in a position to do so.
And these are both white cops and black cops
I made videos about both of those
By the way, Georgia is a stand your ground state
And if someone has broken into your home, you have the legal right to use deadly force to defend it
And I know this because I heard this over and over again from various people from various different backgrounds telling me with an almost euphoric erotic desire how lucky I was to have had the opportunity to defend my home with violence and in that same breath often saying how disappointing it was to them that I had
not shot someone's 15year-old son just to keep them from stealing my Xbox
And don't get me wrong, I vividly remember one of the times getting robbed
I had just bought like off eBay or something, an old PlayStation 2 just so I could find an old version of Final Fantasy 12
And I was going to do this broken meme run with the game where you could get this infinite level up trick where you could just leave your game on for a day and let it run with a few setting tweaks.
The game would play itself and you'd come back and you'd be at level 100 or something
And I look forward to that all day only to come home and have it gone
I'm getting off topic, but the fact that that's what I was thinking about should tell you how I really feel about taking the lives of children
It's It's not my thing.
Maybe there's something wrong with me
I think it's more like there's something wrong with y'all
And a few years ago, I almost told this story on the video where I talked about Edgeelords
And that was because I was also in that same video talking about the movie Nobody
Some of you all may not remember it because it's kind of like a a B tier John Wick which is already a Btier like straight straight to video energy action movie.
Nobody is an interesting examination of this masculine power fantasy of righteous violence except it kind of revels in it in a way that I think is more honest
But I'm going to come back to that in a second
Now I'm sure there's some of you listening to this that thinks that this whole thing everything I'm saying sounds insane and is being made up.
But most of you, at least according to my analytics, have probably witnessed a conversation like this before because you've probably been in enough male spaces to know that there's always at least one guy that is trying not to come in his pants at the idea of having the right to kill someone
Maybe he owns guns, maybe he doesn't, but he will soon.
Maybe he wants to defend his unborn future child or their sister or his wife or girlfriend that he doesn't actually have
There's a lot of these corny, awful pictures of like dads holding guns up to their daughter's prom dates
This is a thing in how boys and men are socialized in this country
And it's probably why Renee Good and tons of other unarmed innocent people have lost their lives in this country.
I won't go as far as to say that everyone who ends up in the military or police force or ICE has this exact type of energy, but I will die on the hill that these are usually the types of people that do go into these fields and they often have the most heinous records in terms of overreach and violence and outright killing of unarmed people.
It doesn't take much effort to look through America's long history of police brutality to find examples literally on tape of these types of guys just looking for an excuse
Some of them outright will say it
So what's at the root of this
Why is this a thing in society
I think the answer is pretty straightforward and it deals with men's socialized relationship with violence.
Boys are raised to have a very paradoxical relationship with violence
On one end, it's instilled in boys very early on that they need to be capable of exerting and absorbing physical violence and that without said capability, there will never be a real man
Because this is usually where they begin to learn to disregard bodily autonomy, both their own, but also the autonomy of others.
Because bodily autonomy for young boys is something that you have to earn through your capacity to exert and withstand violence, your capacity to enforce your own autonomy
And in that same breath, you're also expected to test the autonomy of others in order to make sure that they're on the same grade as you are.
And this is done through informal body rituals with little boys
Whether it be something as benign as flicking someone in the ear or as heinous as the many stories of bullying or hazing that you might hear in a sports locker room in middle or high school
And that's where the paradox sets in because you're pretty explicitly told to be capable of violence.
But there's also a lot of conflicting rules around it
Don't be a bully unless it serves a greater purpose or someone is asking for it
Don't hit women, but also don't let anyone emasculate you
And if they do, then it's your responsibility to reaffirm your masculinity with violence if necessary, regardless of who does it.
Use your strength to protect and support others
But that also means you're in charge
And if people don't respect the fact that you're in charge, they're emasculating you, which means you might have to reaffirm that masculinity through violence
You see how this is a very confusing and ugly thing that a lot of men are dealing with.
However, at the end of the day, I want to be clear
Most men, most men, the vast majority, even the worst of us, don't aspire to be violent psychopaths
Most men engage with this complex relationship with violence without actually committing acts of violence on other people for whatever reason
And then some join ICE
Hershel Walker, I remember vividly.
If you don't know, Hershel Walker is one of the greatest football players of all time, right
But he said himself that he almost didn't go to college because he wanted to join the army because he wanted to kill people
This is a real story and he is not alone in that regard
Some of you don't hear these conversations, but if you go into enough men's spaces with some of these dudes, they will let the mass slip.
They will tell you
And that brings me back to the film Nobody
What's interesting about Nobody is that it's one of the few films that's honest about this relationship with violence, about the movie's relationship with violence
When you look at a lot of the I called them sigma male action stars made a video about a little while back because at the turn of the millennium you saw a like very distinct change in the way idealized masculinity was presented to Americans.
It used to be Arnold Schwarzenegger Salone you know uh Rob JeanClaude Vanam
I was about to call him Rob Vanam
Shout out shout out
Right
Anyway, alpha male idealized images of masculinity used to be these big muscular over-the-top figures
And with like the Matrix and Jason Bourne and eventually John on to John Wick now that changed into more of like an everyman low-key neurode divergent coded figure of these people that they weren't necessarily less masculine.
It's just that the idealized masculinity was now this stoic almost like sociopathic figure that was able to effectively operate in this violent world while also staying very subdued and very calm
There were no more oneliners, no more sweat, no more dirt and muscles
It was just badass Sigma Wolf action males
Put the put the music behind me, right
You know what I'm talking about.
However, nobody has some of those features, but it's actually just more honest
It stars a very normal guy who happened to used to be a contract killer or enforcer of some type for the US government
And he has traded that life for the trappings of what normative patriarchal masculinity says is supposed to satisfy a man, namely a wife and the kids and a house in the suburbs.
However, the movie puts in a lot of energy to situate those things as unfulfilling and even demeaning
when Bob suffers a home invasion
It's Bob Odenkirk, by the way
And in the movie, his name is Hutch
Bob Odenkirk, you know, from Better Call Saul
I never watched that
I probably should watch that
I heard it's pretty good.
I need some new [ __ ] to watch
We put some new [ __ ] I should watch in the comment section
But then his house gets burglarized and he decides even though he really could have very easily killed these two burglars to let them go and everyone including his own son and his brother-in-law and everybody in his life demeans him and he mashates him for the fact that he had the chance to kill someone with a righteous kill type situation and he doesn't.
He suffers this silently until he realizes that somebody actually stole something from his youngest daughter and then he goes on a trek to find that particular thing
Hi jigs and intrigue ensues and it's very much worth the watch if you're an action fan
But what's interesting from the film is how we're made to recognize how much happier Odin Kirk's character Hutch is now that he is reignited his relationship with violence.
It's almost a love story in that way
It's like Mr
and Mrs
Smith except Mrs
Smith is violence itself
And again, it's a fun, ridiculous film
I never watched the sequel, but I figure it's just as good
But I found the underlying themes telling about how we imagine and even idealize men
In your John Wixs, it's obvious as a movie watcher that violence is cool.
The assassin underworld is cool
But Wick as a character is above the violence itself 95% of the time
He doesn't seem like he's having fun
This is all just reflexive to him
But in Nobody, it's very clear that Odin Kirk's character loves what he's doing
He loves that he finally has an excuse to let loose
The violence is more brutal.
Instead of sleek nightclubs and Asian corporate buildings, they're fighting in like abandoned factories and car shops and [ __ ] and like public buses
And because of this, while nobody is successful, I wonder if it's less popular because it's more honest about what this violent fantasy really is and really looks like to the people watching it.
These folks that join ICE or the military or the police will tell you it's about a code or country or brotherhood or whatever
And I'll give grace to say that to maybe a few of them that's true
But for others of them, it's just power
is just the excuse to be rabbit dogs who probably would have been put down in some other context
That's who we're dealing with right now and who we've been dealing with forever when it comes to the teeth of the state.
And I'm not going to make any prescriptions as to how regular everyday people should deal with these individuals
But I will say this, America is a gun-loving country and leftists love their guns