Miscellaneous Circumstances In Which Men Need to Know They Are Needed

Garrett Ashley Mullet

1 year ago

Having recently read It’s Good to Be a Man by Michael Foster and Dominic Bnonn Tennant, I have some thoughts to share with you, as well as some quotes.

A genuine thankyou to Canon Press, the book’s publisher, for not only publishing the book, but also for recently posting quotes to places like Instagram, where I must go these days to still feel I am privy to the public square and discourse in it online, now 10-months into a 12-hour suspension on Twitter, with no end in sight.

More than just sharing quotes, or giving you opinions about It’s Good to Be a Man, I want us to delve into several items which I found in the news as of late, particularly with a view to considering the responsibility of Christian men to engage these things as the providers and protectors the Creator of mankind made them to be.

Consider the Minnesota husband and father, for instance, whose quick thinking and assertive action recently rescued his four toddlers from an attempted carjacking. His wife called the police, as was proper. But he jumped in the carjacker’s still-running van across the street and set off in aggressive pursuit, ultimately ramming his own SUV with the van, trapping it in an alleyway, with both the carjacker and his children inside.

If this man had waited passively for law enforcement to arrive, leaving the matter to designated governmental authorities to handle, many other bad outcomes could have resulted, including most especially the loss of his children. But he didn’t choose passivity, and therefore his children were retrieved unharmed, the would-be thief and kidnapper fleeing on foot when he could no longer get away in the stolen vehicle, surely fearful of the strength and wrath of a righteously protective man who had now caught up with him.

Meanwhile, some people don’t know what an AR-15 is, only that it has no place in American society, and that we shouldn’t be legally authorized to own one. So says not only Geraldo Rivera, but many on the Left, who mock what they don’t understand or possess, dismissing as mere machismo the notion that men would buy, keep, and use such weapons in our supposedly enlightened age.

But what, pray tell, is the difference in principle between a husband and father wanting to have an AR-15 to defend his wife and children from potential predators, and the same man wanting to have a plan for what he would do if someone jumped in his family’s running vehicle to steal it with his children inside?

The key ingredient in both cases is not first and foremost the hardware, but the hardiness of the man, particularly his sense of duty and honor and God-given responsibility to be a provider and protector for his family, friends, and neighbors, in light of the fact that there are needs, and there are wicked men who would otherwise threaten and abuse if unchecked and unopposed. Yet the hardware, and the resolute insistence on maintaining the right to keep and bear it, ought to be downstream of the requisite character of the man who recognizes its utility, as well as the precedent set if he abdicates his position on the premise being advanced.

Similarly, taking this line of questioning a bit further, in a different arena, we should hope that a young public school teacher in her 20’s, freshly minted by some institute of higher learning, certified and licensed to indoctrinate our youth, who dyes her hair purple and slaps a sticker on her water bottle which reads “I don’t care what the Bible says,” then takes to Tik-Tok to boast about confusing 10th graders in an American public school, will not be the most assertive and inspiring thought leader in our children’s lives. As she tells her class that she is “the political unrest,” and that it is impossible to misgender her because she responds to all gender pronouns, a classroom’s worth of fathers ought to be having a stern conversation with her manager, or else writing a letter to the school giving notice that his children will no longer be attending there.

And some fathers apparently are doing this. Due to the smug efforts of men and women just like the purple-haired teacher in the Tik-Tok video, the 1.4 million fewer students enrolled in 2020 will hopefully pose more than a budgetary challenge for the public schools. As fathers and mothers, disgusted by mask and vaccine mandates, lockdowns, Marxist indoctrination, the promotion of sexual immorality, teen suicide and substance abuse, and failing academic performance, increasingly vacate them, I hope the American public education system is entirely abolished, and replaced with school choice which rewards good private and trade schools, classical Christian education, and homeschooling using the very funds which have for too long been propping up the Leftist obedience factory in this country.

But first things first. What is needed in order for that to happen is American men regaining their manliness, understanding how and why it is, as Foster and Tennant argue, good to be a man. They must gird up their loins, when picking battles actually comes to a head with battles that need to be fought. Wives and mothers cannot do this task for them, on their behalf, without their leadership and strength. Rather, the men need to be men, and both provide for and protect their children, from the predations of corrupt and godless educrats and activists posing as teachers, administrators, schoolboard members, guidance counselors, and superintendents.

For another example, let’s scale up. Consider the recent speech given by British comedian and podcaster Konstantin Kisin, at an Oxford Union debate which touched on the response to wokeness and climate change in the UK especially, but in the West more generally. As Kisin says, there is something about becoming a husband and father which can turn a woke idiot into a man, and bring him to the realization that his baby boy or girl surviving to adulthood, not to mention having a good life when he or she gets there, is worth more than all the talk of carbon footprints and CO2 emissions belies. And, in short, the woke in the West will not convince poor people around the world to keep on being poor, just to combat climate change, or increase the population of polar bears, or promote so-called social justice.

But then that is just it. Many of us have failed to realize, or else manfully oppose, that coordinated bid by global elites to wrest total control over our economic and political futures, disguised as virtuous crusading to save the planet, or redistribute power, wealth, and opportunity. What some call “woke” turns out in the end to be nothing more or less than the megalomaniacal ambitions of those corrupt men who have always made themselves heard and felt, in every age, on every continent, and in every culture.

Take the carjacker from Minnesota and give him billions of dollars, plus friends who will meet up with him in Davos, Switzerland once a year to synchronize watches. What will he do when he scales up his attempt at stealing another man’s transportation and progeny? Why, he will steal an entire world’s worth of cars and children. And if a chorus of husbands and fathers do not take off after him in hot pursuit, and trap him, and reclaim what is rightfully theirs, the supervillain will keep his prize, and rewrite the history books to say these things always belonged to him, and were his due, and that the usurper was the husband and father who chased after him, and spoke angry words to him, or shook his fist in a threatening manner.

Again, I say that what is needed here is men remembering how and why it is good for them to be men, as God made them to be.

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Miscellaneous Circumstances In Which Men Need to Know They Are Needed – The Garrett Ashley Mullet Show

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