FINDING THE MISSING MEN.

Outkick's Clay Travis suggests, in "The Era of Woke Sports Is Dead," that they were in hiding.  On one level, he's explaining the recent popularity of the Trump Dance.  "It speaks to Trump's innate marketing gifts that he managed to design a new, somehow more popular dance to the YMCA song that replaced the gay singers with the subtle fist pump movements and light swivel of a 78-year-old man."

On another, he's seeing off the era of athletes undoing their very value proposition.

The craziest moment of the woke sports era might well have been when NBA players refused to take the court for playoff games after police in Wisconsin shot and killed a black man holding a knife, Jacob Blake, and then, unbelievably, mostly black women made T-shirts WITH THE NAME OF A WOULD BE DOMESTIC ABUSER OF A BLACK WOMAN ON THEM to take a stand against police violence as well.

Let me repeat for those of you who forgot this happened -- NBA players refused to play playoff games because a black man tried to attack a black woman and police kept it from happening after she called police to protect her from him.

And they were praised for doing so by almost every sports media member who covered the NBA!

The woke mind virus completely and totally took over sports.

To such an extent that the NBA fired an announcer who had the audacity to say "All Lives Matter," on Twitter.

I remember that episode. The Milwaukee Bucks, entertaining a city two score miles north of Kenosha, opted not to play a bubble playoff game, during the corona tyranny.  Jacob Blake lived, although he is paralyzed.  The summer of 2020 was as weird a time as any I have lived through.

The encouraging news comes deeper in the column.  The boys are not going to put up with the whining from the Naomi Beinarts and Andrea Tates of this world.

So football itself, that aggressive sport played by men, came under attack.

Why did it have to be so masculine? (Witness the attempt to lionize Sarah Fuller, the Vanderbilt kicker, who remains to this day, the worst kicker in college sports history.)

Around that time, when they tried to tell us all that Sarah Fuller was a hero and made you wear masks to football games outdoors,, I went into a Target store to buy football cards for my then 10-year-old. As we walked into the store, he pointed to the shirts being sold in the store, a bevy of them that said, "Girl Power," on them in a variety of shapes and colors.

To me, it wasn't very noticeable, I'd long since internalized the celebration of womanhood as a corporate marketing play.

But my 10-year-old noticed. He and his friends were being raised in a very different era than the one you and I grew up in, "Dad," he said, "why do girls get shirts like that? How come there are no shirts that say, "Boy Power?"

The comment gave me pause.

Of course he was right, a boy power shirt wouldn't ever be sold by Target. And if it were, it would be seen as sexist and the same people buying the girl power shirts would demand their removal from the store.

But it struck me, one might even say it woke me up, it took me a while to realize it, but the left-wing attacks on white men weren't enough. All men would become their targets, white, black, Asian and Hispanic.

And guess who most sports fans are?

Dudes.

White, black, Asian and Hispanic.

And dudes understand "Don't piddle on my leg and tell me it's raining."

[A] counter revolution was under way. I could feel it. Young men of all races were done with the woke era, they were becoming aware of how much they'd been lied to, of what they were being required to say to stay in good standing on the left – that boys were actually girls, that biology wasn't real.

Perhaps to the extent that the boys make it OK to be a boy again, the more confused among them will not submit to the "toxic masculinity" and "gender fluidity" talk. A little "You're not trans, you're weird (in a good way)" will be productive.

The unproductive weirdos?  They installed Dementia Joe.

Yes, Joe Biden still rode this woke mental illness to a 2020 victory, but the seeds of woke sports's demise were already present in the result. Something very interesting happened in 2020, even if most didn't take note of it. Then, Donald Trump, erstwhile white supremacist, increased his support among all races. Joe Biden didn't win because of minorities, he won because of woke suburban WHITE college grads. It turned out that while many of the high-profile faces of the woke sports movement were black, the true supporters of woke sports were white, college-educated professionals, the richest and whitest people in America were actually, it turned out, the wokest.

Megan Rapinoe was the true face of woke sports, not Colin Kaepernick.

The youngsters, however, did not surrender to stereotype threat.  (You'd think that people who claim to be the heirs to the civil rights causes of the Fifties would get that, wouldn't you?)

From Andrew Tate to Jordan Petersen, Joe Rogan to Ben Shapiro, young men were seeking answers to why they were seen as the problem by everyone?

With Trump out of office, men of all races were attacked by the left. If you were male, you were the problem.

But young men were baffled by this. How was it that they could be so young, have so little power, and yet be blamed for everything that was going wrong in the world?

Back to my own sons and their friends, who I would find listening to right wing podcasts or YouTube channels. I asked them what they and their friends liked, for instance, about Andrew Tate. "Mostly," said one of my sons, "the fact that he just tells us to quit whining and do more push-ups."

I thought about this when I saw Lamar Jackson modeling a new T-shirt, "No one cares," it said, "work harder."

Blamed for everything wrong in society, this youngest generation of boys and men in America had come to embrace a profound and individualistic self-reliance. If everyone is convinced you're the problem, you stop expecting them to save you and try to find out how to save yourself.

That's what they were all doing, searching for life meaning's online, as we shut down their schools, shut down their teams, and left them alone in their homes.

For some young men, the answer comes in deep philosophical examinations of what it means to be a man – Jordan Petersen – for others it's a twinning of religious faith with politics – Ben Shapiro – and for others it's simply the bro-tastic desire to do more push-ups than you were able to do the day before. And, yes, for some, it's bang as many hot chicks as you can and don't apologize for it – Andrew Tate.

But for most, it's a unique era of self-exploration, a time for defining ones-self and embracing a profoundly unapologetic opinion – there's nothing wrong with being a man.

White, black, Asian and Hispanic, the boys and young men of America, were all coming to the same conclusion: Masculinity isn't toxic, despite all the lectures, most of us haven't done anything we should have to apologize for.

And, make no mistake, woke culture is one long apology.

It's a ritualized self-flagellation, paying penance for something you had no part in, a woke-mind virus that had to be expunged, rejected completely. What's more rebellious than deciding you haven't done anything at all wrong when everyone is telling you that you have?

This further crystallized for me when one of my friend's sons came home from sixth grade and complained about one of the lessons they were being taught, in Tennessee public school!, about how white men were evil and the cause of all the world's problems. "How can I be evil Mr. Clay," he asked me one day, "when my mom doesn't even let me pick what to eat for dinner!"

He laughed when he said it, but the message he and other young boys were getting all over the country was clear, you are the problem.

We still have a way to go, dear reader.  "Hot chicks" ought to have the self-esteem to be careful about who they hook up with, otherwise they're the case for the abortion lobby the women of the fevered brow don't like to talk about.

Mr Travis concludes his essay, which is quite the stream of consciousness, with

Yes, the Trump dance is joyful and spreading like wildfire, but look beneath the surface and the message is clear, it's a double middle finger to the feminized ruling class, hidden in fists and a subtle hip swivel, "Fuck, you," it's saying, "I'm not apologizing any more for being a man. Go Trump!"

That's a constituency not so likely to be bothered by the lack of Approved Credentials among many of Our Incoming President's appointees.