I don’t know what I clicked on that caused this, but lately most of the suggested videos on my YouTube sidebar are of morose and lonely young men saying things like:

Nobody wants to be in a relationship.

I’m 31, and I’ve never had a girlfriend.

It’s an easy formula. Speak in low tones. Sigh with profound weariness. Encourage men to feel sorry for themselves.

Everything about life sucks and is horrible.

I’m not sad. I’m empty.

I look at women, and I’m exhausted.

I prefer to live alone. In silence.

The pains of being pure at heart

The sad-looking narrators of these videos are usually sitting in a dark room, or at a desk, or sometimes in their crappy car. There are no visible decorations, no posters on the wall. Maybe there’s a row of Russian novels in the back or the collected works of Nietzsche.

The young men are usually sitting far enough from the camera to make them look fragile, weak, broken, and alone.

Each man tells his tale of woe. He’s given up on dating. He doesn’t enjoy talking to girls.

He feels disenfranchised, unwanted. Society is against him. The whole world is holding him down.

The women’s perspective

If you click on enough of these videos, you will eventually end up on the women’s side of the debate, faced with a cascade of videos from equally disillusioned young women saying things like:

Are men hiding?

Why are guys refusing to date?

It’s fun to hate on men.

Since when do dudes not want to smash?

The death of boyfriend culture.

If you start clicking on those videos, you might end up with some mix of the two, which reveals that the feeling of doom is everywhere:

Something isn’t right with people anymore.

No wonder everyone is gay now.

She’s 29, and she’s so lost in life.

No thank you, ladies. I’m good.

Dating fatigue is setting in. Women are giving up.

Night at the psy-opera

My first thought was that all these videos look suspiciously similar. Is this some sort of psyop? Is some nefarious organization trying to undermine heterosexual attraction? Or destroy any hope for Gen Z’s marital happiness?

Meanwhile, I find myself stupefied by the infinite parade of Millennial and Gen Z guys and gals, depressed, lonely, talking into their phones in their empty rooms.

How many people are really like this? Probably a lot. And that’s not good news for anybody.

RELATED: Evie magazine’s critics are wrong. Allow me to mansplain why.

Evie Magazine/Sigrid Estrada/Getty Images

Hetero-what?

It brings to mind the famous article “The Trouble with Wanting Men” from the New York Times, which declared, “Women are so fed up with dating men that the phenomenon even has a name: heterofatalism.”

(Since it’s the New York Times, nobody asked what the men think.)

Apparently, “heterofatalism” means that anyone who still feels trapped in heterosexual hell should kill themselves. Or at least feel very ashamed.

The writer of the piece, Jean Garnett, resents her own heterosexuality. Despite how objectively worthless men are, she still feels compelled to try to attract them. She craves that feeling of being longed for and desired.

She wants things to be like when she was younger. When men couldn’t resist her. When men couldn’t keep their hands off her.

Though from the sound of Ms. Garnett, I’m sure she would have something to say about any unwanted touching.

What women want

I have watched many of these videos. Men have their various complaints about women: Their girlboss attitude, their unrealistic standards, their doodle tattoos.

And women think men have lost their manliness. They seem withdrawn, passive, and preoccupied with their own troubles.

Women want men to approach them, charm them, buy them a drink.

But contemporary men are hiding in their basements, terrified of being #MeToo’d or rejected or ending up on social media as the butt of a small-penis joke.

Money talks

If these videos aren’t some secret plot to make young people miserable, they are at least a way to make money on the internet.

These men, sitting in their cars, staring forlornly into the gray skies outside, are gathering large followings.

It’s an easy formula. Speak in low tones. Sigh with profound weariness. Encourage men to feel sorry for themselves.

There is at least some psychological relief in that. If it’s happening to everyone, it’s not really your fault. It’s society’s fault. It’s the times. It’s woke politics.

Support the youth!

I do feel great sympathy for these young people coming up. It’s tough to be young and first venturing out into the world — especially at this particular moment in time, when everything about society seems structured to create conflict.

But I suspect they will find some form of happiness. It just isn’t going to be easy. And it might come in forms that are unfamiliar.

Either way, we should understand the challenges Gen Z seems destined to face. They are the ones with nothing to lose. Which means they’re the ones who will fight the coming battles.

We should remember that and help and support them in any way we can.

​Culture, Dating, Generation z, Heterofatalism, Lifestyle, Men and woman, Youtube, Zoomers, Blake’s progress 

When my documentary “15 Days” came out, I expected pushback. The film showed how American schools stayed closed long past the point at which honest people could defend the closures.

What I got was stranger. People asked me what to do.

Strangers in airports, parents at screenings, people who had never sat through a school board meeting in their lives — they wanted a plan. They wanted to know their part.

My second film, “Uncancellable,” is my answer.

The film is about Maud Maron. If you do not live in Manhattan, you may not know the name. You should.

Maud is a mother of four who has spent the last six years being told to sit down and shut up by every institution she belonged to. She has not sat down. She has not shut up. She keeps losing seats and titles, and somehow she keeps winning the argument.

Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.

The argument is whether Americans are still allowed to think for themselves in public.

Maud was a public defender at the Legal Aid Society for more than 20 years. She started an advocacy group called PLACE NYC that defends screened schools and gifted programs in a city quietly dismantling both. She was elected to her community education council in District 2.

Then came the summer of 2020. Every progressive workplace in America held the same struggle session.

On a Zoom school board meeting that summer, a white board member sat with his friend’s black baby on his lap while making the case for keeping merit-based admissions at New York’s specialized high schools. Activists called him a racist. Letters circulated. Signatures were demanded.

Maud shrugged it off. She would not engage in identity politics, and she would not step down from her school board seat. For that, the lawyers at the Legal Aid Society called her a racist too. She was pushed out of her job.

She did not go quietly. She sued them.

In 2024, Maud introduced Resolution 248, which asked the council to examine the question of boys competing in girls’ sports and to put girls themselves in the room where the decision was being made. The council passed it. Activists followed her around. Council members who privately agreed with her said nothing in public.

RELATED: NYC moms file federal lawsuit against leftist education officials who allegedly punish those with dissenting views

Noam Galai/Getty Images

In 2025, the resolution was rescinded. Maud lost her school board seat in the next election. The activists declared victory.

Here is what they missed: Maud kept talking.

She is slowly winning in the culture the fight she lost in the room. A growing number of parents now say in public what almost nobody would say in 2020. That is partly because of Maud and people like her, who took the first hits so the rest of us would not have to.

In the film, Maud describes people coming up to her and saying she has the courage to say what they cannot. She turns the question around.

Why can’t they?

It is a fair question. Every parent who has watched a school curriculum get rewritten without input has felt this. Every employee who has rewritten the same Slack message four times to avoid setting off a colleague looking to be offended has felt it.

We are afraid. That fear is the whole problem.

This is what I keep telling people who ask me what to do: You do not need a national platform. You need a local one.

The school board meets this month. The PTA needs a treasurer. The neighborhood listserv has a thread about a new library policy. Your sister-in-law is about to pull her child out of public school and is too embarrassed to say why. Your son’s teacher used a phrase at parent night that made you uncomfortable, and you said nothing.

Start there. Speak up at the kitchen table first. Then at the school. Most of the people in your life are probably waiting for somebody to go first. You can be that person.

People love to say one person cannot change a country. One person cannot. A million ones can. That is what a force multiplier is.

RELATED: Democrats vilify NYC parents, demand they abandon request for policy review of transvestites in girls’ sports

Photo courtesy of Palladium Pictures

It is also why every authoritarian system in history has worked so hard to make the first person who speaks pay the highest price. If you can scare the first one quiet, the second one never opens her mouth.

I come from the Soviet Union. I know how that works.

“15 Days” and “Uncancellable” may look like different films, but they ask the same question: Are you willing to be the first one to say the true thing?

Both are stories about free speech and ordinary people who refused to stay quiet when their professions and neighbors wanted silence. The cost of speaking up is real. The cost of staying silent is worse.

Some people will tell you the country is too far gone for one Tuesday-night school board meeting to matter. They are wrong, and they are mostly the people who do not want you to show up.

Show up anyway. Bring a friend.

Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.

It starts with the small, unglamorous habit of saying what you actually think, in the room you are actually in, to the people who are there with you.

That is the force multiplier. That is the whole revolution.

​15 days, Covid, Lockdowns, Uncancellable, Legal aid society, School boards, Maud maron, Opinion & analysis 

James Talarico, a Democratic Texas state representative, former teacher, and Presbyterian seminarian, is the Democratic nominee facing Republican Ken Paxton in the competitive 2026 U.S. Senate race in Texas.

Talarico’s campaign is built heavily on his “Christian” faith, which he uses to justify abortion, the LGBTQ+ agenda, and other progressive causes, leading many conservatives to call him a heretic, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and a blasphemer.

BlazeTV’s Sara Gonzales is one of the loudest voices warning that Talarico would be a curse on the state of Texas. On this episode of “Come and Take It,” Sara unveils three disturbing facts about the Scripture-twisting seminarian’s church — St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

1. ‘Christ-centered’ … but open to ‘all religions’: St. Andrew’s shocking statement of faith

On the FAQ page under the section “What does this church believe,” St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church’s website reads:

We are Presbyterian, yet our first allegiance is to Christ’s gospel of universal love. We are Christ centered, yet we respect and learn from all religions of love. We affirm the ancient symbols of our faith, yet we strive to speak a new language that includes all people and affirms the scientific discoveries of our day. We hope to teach children the stories of the Bible without sectarian dogma. We strive to be a close, nurturing community, yet we welcome all people into our midst. We wish to live in inner peace, yet hear God’s call to work for peace and for universal human rights. We take faith seriously, yet believe the journey should be fun. We celebrate life in many artistic forms.

“So, not a Christian church at all,” Sara says, calling it a “fun club.”

2. Proudly ‘out’ lesbian chaplain: The reverend on staff at Talarico’s church

One of the reverends on staff is a lesbian woman named Babs Miller. Her profile on the website reads, “I was finally ordained here in 2014, 24 years after I graduated from seminary, as an ‘out’ lesbian chaplain.”

“That’s how you know that this is not a real church, is when they have a pastor who’s like, ‘I’m living in sin, yeah. Come to our church. … I’m going to preach to you about God’s word while I’m not following it in my daily life and bragging about it,” Sara scoffs.

3. ‘Safe haven’ for porn? Sexually graphic books found in St. Andrew’s kids’ library

“At St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, at their church library — where children allegedly are allowed to just roam, hang out — are sexually explicit books,” Sara says.

According to the church’s website, the library features “over 1,300 books ranging from topics in history to social justice to Christianity and world religions.” This includes a banned book section, described as “a safe haven for stories from a variety of life experiences and viewpoints.”

“Much like the Bible, recorded histories of people’s lives are not pornography. Using that word for LGBTQ+ stories or other hard topics is a political tactic, not an honest description,” the website reads.

But Sara disputes this claim, noting that the library catalog features numerous pornographic books, including “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson, which contains graphic depictions of rape and incest, and “This Book Is Gay” by Juno Dawson — a book that’s been widely banned in public schools for its graphic depictions of the “ins and outs of gay sex.”

Other controversial titles include “Trans Kids, Our Kids: Stories and Resources from the Frontlines of the Movement for Transgender Youth,” “Called OUT: The Voices and Gifts of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Presbyterians,” “Becoming Nicole: The Inspiring Story of Transgender Actor-Activist Nicole Maines and Her Extraordinary Family,” and the graphic novel “Gender Queer” (one of the most banned books in the country for its sexually explicit illustrations).

“If this is in a church library — not just accessible to adults who are allegedly trying to practice Christianity, but also, like, able to be viewed by children, by minors — what won’t this church do?” Sara asks. “I mean, this is demonic, to say the least.”

To hear more, watch the full episode above.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Come and take it, Come and take it with sara gonzales, Austin texas, James talarico, Presbyterian church 

When I heard that a black female Howard University professor of “communication” had written a Substack piece supporting accused murderer Karmelo Anthony and attacking the victim’s family, I was not surprised.

I regularly research this genre of racialist academia, much of it grounded in grievance, paranoia, and moral inversion. So I reviewed my personal library of pseudo-academic studies for what I already knew I would find about the author.

Con men and grifters have more than their share of psychopaths. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior appears more frequently among academics than is comfortable.

Sure enough, there she was: Dr. Stacey Patton, a prolific spinner of race-driven commentary who monetizes narcissism and paranoia for a rarefied audience.

Patton is typical of blindered black academics who contribute to the myth of ubiquitous black oppression in American society, a myth that now boasts its own literature. Much of systematized black academia has long been characterized by racial paranoia and self-regarding grievance.

This creates a paradox on campus. Mental illness in higher education is rarely identified and treated. Instead, institutions often nurture and encourage various maladies, even celebrating “neurodiversity,” especially when it serves ideology. At the extreme, grievance-studies enclaves become magnets for the like-minded, creating self-sealing provincial communities where paranoia and narcissism harden into conspiracy theory.

Consider Patton.

She contributed to “Presumed Incompetent II,” a key text in the canon of “poor me” paranoia and grandiose narcissism. Her chapter is titled “Why I clap back against racist trolls who attack black women academics.” This is classic main-character narcissism. Yet in its biography of Patton, Howard University modifies the chapter title, perhaps to make it sound more academic: “How Right-Wing Media Outlets Are Fighting Real Diversity in Academe.”

For narcissistic academics like Patton, reality can be edited as part of the self-regarding method. If needed, they can simply make it up.

Patton is hardly alone. The racialist canon contains countless articles and books with titles such as “Racial Battle Fatigue in Higher Education,” “Racial Battle Fatigue,” “Racial Battle Fatigue in Faculty,” “Black Fatigue,” and “Toxic Ivory Towers.” Patton, a “communication” professor and self-described historian, is an active participant in this paranoid fantasy. She defends her racialism this way:

Can you imagine people saying that a cancer researcher focuses too much on cancer? Or how about a climate scientist is suspiciously obsessed with climate? How about somebody saying a theologian keeps bringing up god? They wouldn’t. But when Black scholars study race, suddenly our expertise is some kind of pathology.

RELATED: Howard University professor’s wild take: Austin Metcalf’s dad is the real villain

Claudio Caridi/iStock/Getty Images

Genuine scientists are questioned all the time, and they are held to strict standards of method. Patton is not. The chief difference is that she has no discernible expertise unless she claims “identity” itself as expertise. The entire genre of narcissistic racialism rests on confirmation bias, selection bias, erasure of the distinction between fact and fiction, Orwellian manipulation of language, made-up “composite stories,” postmodern relativity of truth, outright fables, and rescue hypotheses designed to protect racialism from disconfirmation.

Most troubling, these dysfunctions are rooted in codified paranoia — the core of the racialist myth.

In Patton’s Substack piece attacking the father of murder victim Austin Metcalf, she distinguishes herself as a purveyor of communal narcissism. The piece is nominally about Karmelo Anthony. In reality, it is another exculpatory exercise for bad behavior.

She writes from the ideological hotbox known as Howard University, where the maladies of “poor me paranoia” and grandiose narcissism find a distinct genre of faux scholarship, especially among black female academics.

Howard has become a sort of academic “Love Boat,” the final destination for fading intellectual celebrities who could not survive in the world of rigorous scholarship and sharp criticism. It is the last stop for Nikole Hannah-Jones of the error-riddled 1619 Project; Ibram X. Kendi, scandal-plagued author of “How to Be an Antiracist” and failed director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of multiple empty autobiographical meditations on an unaccomplished life.

So no one should be surprised that a purveyor of paranoia plies her trade there. Howard offers a communal home for professionalized narcissism, and the symptoms are obvious to anyone willing to look.

One of those symptoms is “virtuous victimhood,” in which people story-tell themselves into victim status, blame others, then seek compensation or “reparations” for their declared victimhood. I have written extensively on this psychological phenomenon. It is the de facto resource-extraction strategy for the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement, which I explore in “DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education.”

Con men and grifters have more than their share of psychopaths. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior appears more frequently among academics than is comfortable.

The campus provides a kind of microbiology lab where mental illness can worsen, not encumbered by healthy introspection and certainly not by medical treatment. Here I refer specifically to the maladies of “poor me” paranoia and narcissistic personality disorder. Racialist oppression studies are grounded in both.

By “racialist,” I do not mean “racist” in the common sense, but rather in the neutral sense used by W.E.B. Du Bois. Racialists are consumed by race as the single explanatory factor and conduct their lives inside a race-driven fantasy. They view the world exclusively through the “lens” of race. When someone uses the term “racial lens” or “lens of race,” know that he is engaged in a resource-extraction con.

Patton monetizes her red-meat racialism on Substack, addressing a paid audience — a morally vacant fringe of black America, along with guilty white liberals — that is troubled, paranoid, easily duped, and easily led by grifters. The audience for this racialist niche literature is large enough for a quasi-academic to earn a good living. University of Pennsylvania professor John L. Jackson described this credulous audience in “Racial Paranoia.” Jackson, to his credit, survived Howard with his integrity intact.

RELATED: America is done buying bogus racial alibis

This does not mean racialists such as Patton lack passion, sincerity, intellect, or certitude. Of course they marshal facts, though often interspersed with claims that are doubtful at best and fabricated at worst. Evangelists for cults and extremist movements also exude passion, sincerity, charisma, and certainty. They weave fantasy and fact until the two become indistinguishable.

As I explain in “DEI Exposed”:

The technique appears to be to simply fabricate something, the more ambitiously egregious the better, to pass it off as fact, and then to circulate it with bluster, bluff, and zeal. It demonstrates the power of paranoid thought and action and repetition to achieve legitimacy as a ritualized “truth.”

Racialists are passionate about their faith-based ideology. Many are skilled persuaders. Some are talented tale-spinners. Others are crusaders with a burning sense of conviction.

That energy drives the racially aggrieved in academia — the vignettes, scenarios, composite stories, fables, and tales built around the assumption that whatever happens must be explained through the magical reality of paranoid ideology. The conclusion is predetermined.

As one passage from the academic literature puts it:

So long as the poor-me paranoid can maintain her strategy, she will retain a high self-esteem. She will be motivated to go to great extremes to maintain this — inventing the evidence, or concretizing ambiguous comments, expressing her beliefs in terms of absolute certainty, and, most of all, amplifying the enormity of the conspiracy against her, as would be warranted to persecute an immense talent.

Subclinical paranoia and narcissistic personality disorder provide the evaluative framework for this extremist slice of academia, whose growth accelerated after the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Unfortunately, a subset of black America, supported by “bad me paranoid” white liberals, buys into the infantilizing fantasy. In that fantasy, the faux persecuted are always absolved of responsibility, and a racialist enemy is always available to blame, no matter how tortured the explanation.

In 2026, however, we see signs of sobriety. Academia is growing less tolerant of dubious provincialism, and society is growing less tolerant of consequence-free violent behavior, even as Patton and her compatriots attempt to legitimize the murderous violence of Karmelo Anthony. Because of Patton and her ilk, we may see many more Karmelo Anthonys sacrificed before this tendency is reversed.

Stacey Patton and the racialist clique would do better to sound a warning than to cheer on racially justified violence that brings disastrous legal consequences and appropriate punishment. Patton’s next book is due in October and, of course, has a racialist theme: “Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children.” We shall see what she says.

I am not optimistic. The monetization of psychopathy is not easily remedied, especially when lavishly compensated careers depend on it.

​Opinion & analysis, Black lives matter, Karmelo anthony, Stacey patton, Howard university, Racialism, W.e.b. dubois, Racism, Ibram x. kendi, Diversity equity inclusion, Nikole hannah-jones, Ta-nehisi coates