Consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader claims the culture of political correctness has made men feel “repressed” and led to the rise of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Speaking to the Pacific Standard’s Lydia DePillis, Nader stated Americans live in a “culture extremely vulnerable to rhetoric” and pointed to Trump for successfully appealing to men who feel like they’ve “been verbally repressed”:
Well, and you see this when you walk past construction sites and you talk with white male workers, they feel they have been verbally repressed. It’s hard for someone your age to understand what I’m about to say. They like to stand on a corner and whistle at a pretty lady. They like to flirt. But they can’t do that anymore. Multiply that across the continuum. You can’t say this about that, and you can’t say that about this. And the employer tells you to hush. And perhaps your spouse tells you to hush, and your kids tell you to hush. So they have a whole language that they inherited — ethnic words like Polack. A lot of these people grew up on ethnic jokes, which are totally taboo now. Do you know, Lydia, there are no ethnic-joke books in bookstores anymore?
There were Negro-joke books, Jewish-joke books, Polish-joke books, Italian-joke books. They used ethnic jokes to reduce tension in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s. And they’d laugh at each other’s jokes and hurl another one. But it still flows through ethnic America, you know. There are hundreds of things that people would like to say. So here’s this guy — he doubles down on them, he blows their minds. So that’s the first way he got their attention.
Asked if society has gotten “too uptight” about political correctness, Nader said men have gotten “too sensitive because they’ve never been in a draft”:
Oh, yeah. You see it on campuses — what is it called, trigger warnings? It’s gotten absurd. I mean, you repress people, you engage in anger, and what you do is turn people into skins that are blistered by moonbeams. Young men now are far too sensitive because they’ve never been in a draft. They’ve never had a sergeant say, “Hit the ground and do 50 push-ups and I don’t care if there’s mud there.”
In the interview, Nader also praised Trump’s speaking style, claiming he is “extremely clever with the use of language” and is viewed as a “father figure.”