Remember when #MeToo was going to topple every abusive boss, every predatory producer, every sleazy politician? Then something strange happened. The revolution ate its own foot soldiers.
Here’s the dirty secret the performative liberal left doesn’t want you to talk about: The movement was never supposed to target the powerless middle manager. But that’s exactly what happened – and it handed Big Tech the perfect excuse to jump into bed with the nativist right.
Let me walk you through the train wreck.
The Failure to Speak Truth to Power (Literally)
#MeToo had a noble goal: hold powerful men accountable for systemic sexual abuse. Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes – the big fish. But here’s where the strategy went off the rails. Powerful men have resources – expensive lawyers, PR crisis teams, private investigators. When the movement failed to dent their institutional power, it didn’t pack up and leave. It just looked for easier targets.
Instead of toppling the oligarchs, the movement’s momentum pivoted to ordinary, lower‑rung men – the guy in the middle row of the conference room, the mid‑tier manager, the professor who made a clumsy joke. These were men with no security detail, no legal war chest, no ability to hide behind a corporate PR blitz.
The result was a moral catastrophe dressed up as a righteous crusade. In the absence of a Harvey Weinstein, the outrage machine scanned for the next warm body – and it found yours truly, the average working man.
The Manosphere’s Golden Opportunity
This was the moment the nativist right had been waiting for. While the performative left was busy hosting sensitivity trainings and posting black squares, a new voice stepped into the void: the manosphere. Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and a fleet of grievance‑fueled influencers rose to fame by telling men the simplest, most seductive lie of all: “You are the victim. They are coming for you.”
Young men looked around and saw their peers losing jobs over decades‑old social media posts, their career prospects evaporating because of a misunderstood joke, and their professors being run out of town by anonymous complaints. When the liberal establishment failed to offer any vision for these men – besides more therapy and more guilt – the manosphere offered a counter‑narrative that felt like armour.
And the tech platforms? They didn’t just allow this; they actively amplified it. Angry men generate engagement, and engagement generates ad revenue. The algorithm turned every slight into a conspiracy and every awkward interaction into a war crime.
Big Tech’s Cynical Pivot
Now we arrive at the real betrayal. The same tech giants that plastered their homepages with black squares and diversity pledges have quietly shifted their allegiance. The “Silicon Valley Right” has become a decisive force, with tech billionaires pouring money into anti‑woke causes, funding right‑wing news outlets and voter‑turnout operations. They’ve found an unnatural alliance with the nativist populist right – a coalition that one observer called “one of the most startling political characteristics of our age”.
Why? Because the nativist bulldog is useful. It provides cover for their deregulation wishlist, their anti‑union crusades, and their relentless drive for tax breaks. In exchange, they give the nativists a platform to rage against immigrants, globalists, and – you guessed it – the woke feminist elite.
The performative liberal left helped pave this road. By refusing to hold the truly powerful accountable and instead exacting a toll from the powerless, they made the nativist alternative look like a rational choice to millions of disaffected voters.
The Path of Least Resistance: Baseline Liberalism
So what’s the way out? Not a new ideology, but an old one: baseline liberalism. The core assumption is simple – an adult is a citizen with full rights and agency, not a representative of a demographic scorecard. When people make rational choices about their income, education, and life partners, their gender or skin colour is not the primary factor.
The original modern liberal and feminist ideal never demanded that a woman must work or that a man must stay home; it demanded that both could, as independent adults, form a two‑income household through a free pair‑bond of equals. That baseline expectation – two adults, both with agency, sharing the load and the rewards – was the quiet triumph of mid‑century liberalism.
But then the performative excesses crept in. Every interaction became a power analysis. Every innocent remark was scanned for micro‑aggressions. The goal shifted from ensuring opportunity to policing language; from building a two‑income household to performing a one‑person tribunal of virtue. Walking that back – even in rhetoric – backfired spectacularly. It alienated the very working‑ and middle‑class families who had bought into the original promise, and it handed the nativist right a ready‑made enemy: the “woke” elite who seemed to care more about pronouns than paychecks.
The path of least resistance is not a purity spiral. It is a return to the original, unglamorous, but workable baseline: treat adults as adults, assume rational self‑interest, judge by individual merit, and let two‑income households form freely, without ideological fanfare. That is the only liberalism that can outlast the culture war.