Last week a short DM clip shared by Dave Rubin brought a blunt, necessary conversation back into the light — Scott Galloway walked onto Bill Maher’s Real Time stage and calmly laid out hard truths about the collapse of male social and economic stability. He didn’t sugarcoat the numbers or the consequences; he forced a crowd that usually laughs at right-leaning objections to sit up and listen. Americans who still love their country should be grateful someone is willing to name the problem plainly instead of papering it over with platitudes.
Galloway’s salvo wasn’t theatrical shock value; it was data and observation about a generation of men who are disconnected, economically adrift, and paying the human price in despair. The CDC’s violent-death reporting shows male suicide rates far outstrip female rates, and Galloway has pointed to the same set of broken social outcomes — addiction, homelessness, incarceration — that ravage men in particular. Conservatives have been warning for years that when men stop being providers and leaders in their communities, social rot follows, and the public-health numbers now confirm that rot.
The housing and relationship fallout is plain to see: a rising share of young adults are living at home with their parents, and young men are disproportionately represented among those delaying marriage and family formation. The Census and Pew research both document that more young people are staying in their parents’ homes and postponing the traditional milestones that build stable communities. If you believe in family, faith, and work — the pillars that make neighborhoods safe and prosperous — watching a generation slide away from them should alarm you.
Technology and market incentives are not innocent bystanders in this crisis; they are active enablers. Galloway has warningly described how online marketplaces, dating apps, and synthetic sexual content have reshaped mating markets and eroded the ordinary rites of passage that push young men into the world — work, courtship, rejection, and eventual commitment. Conservatives should call out Big Tech’s role in monetizing loneliness and instant gratification, then demand policies that restore human incentives for effort, risk, and real relationships.
Our colleges and cultural institutions have also failed many boys and men by elevating ideology over character and credential-chasing over vocational dignity. Women now represent a majority of college students, a sign that higher education is moving in ways that too often leave non-college boys behind and without a clear pathway to meaningful work. Republican and conservative leaders must stop pretending that higher tuition and woke curricula are the only routes to a fulfilling adult life and instead champion apprenticeships, trades, and national service.
This moment calls for toughness and compassion in equal measure: toughness to tell uncomfortable truths about parenting, fatherlessness, and personal responsibility, and compassion to fund effective treatment for addiction, mental-health services for men, and programs that reconnect young men to work. That means cutting off the perverse incentives that let tech platforms profit from isolation, reforming schools that criminalize discipline while excusing failure, and rebuilding institutions — churches, clubs, sports, shops — that teach young men how to be useful and honorable. No left-wing program of endless handouts can substitute for the dignity of honest labor.
If conservatives want to be credible guardians of the American experiment, we must stop treating this as a niche cultural debate and treat it as the national security issue it has become: a breakdown in masculine stability weakens families, communities, and the nation. It’s time for bold, practical policies that restore male purpose — policies that uplift fathers, respect the trade skills that built this country, and hold Big Tech accountable for hollowing out our social fabric. Hardworking Americans deserve a nation where young men are taught to stand up, work hard, and build lives worth living for themselves and their children.
