I wasn’t going to get into all of this. I don’t think there’s any real way to get into it without fanning the flames of idiocy that are already engulfing our culture.

On the other hand, the viral “I Choose The Bear” thing which has percolated into a cloud of online scuffling this week probably deserves some treatment here at The American Spectator, and maybe it falls to me to get into it.

So I’ll do my duty, and bear all the slings and arrows that will undoubtedly come.

Before we get into my explanation of this, which will take up a couple of today’s Five Quick Things, here’s the quick version of this dumb meme — there’s a viral video out there from a woman hiker who says that, if she were faced with a choice between encountering a bear in the woods or a man, she’d choose the bear because that’s less dangerous.

Reactions to this have run a pretty impressive gamut. Here was one of my favorites:

This was maybe not quite as smart a take:

While this discourse was starting on tiktok I saw this “take” and I cried for hours after watching it. I then had a great session w/my therapist who for the first time in my life explained what I’m feeling is grief for my old self after being assaulted. Anyways I choose the bear! https://t.co/7limj3SHom pic.twitter.com/ZTlVsDYSRt

— no name (@pradaice) May 1, 2024

And this was an even less smart take:

You’re missing the entire point.

A bear is a bear and we know exactly what to expect from a wild animal when we’re in their space.

Men are unpredictable and attack unprovoked & often after they’ve pretended to be someone they’re not to gain our trust.

I choose the bear ????????‍♀️ https://t.co/9R2RHv72fr

— Catherine (@WildeMagnolias) April 28, 2024

It’s a dumb controversy, and the response from men on social platforms isn’t a whole lot better. There are, however, a couple of things to glean from this, and they’re worth discussing even if the underlying hypothetical is not.

1. The ‘I Choose The Bear’ Thing Is Just How Bad It Is Out There

The reason this has exploded like it has is it’s a pretty decent mirror of just how terrible the dating scene, or even basic interpersonal relationships, have gotten between men and women.

A short clip from Rich Cooper’s podcast is pretty standard in explaining the attitudes out there:

Here’s the thing: there are a whole lot of toxic male reactions to the meme, reactions I’m going to leave aside because they’re too dumb to bring into the discussion. The point is not to castigate women for this meme, because both sides are behaving badly. As a man, there is no point in being outraged that so many women default to believing you’re a sexual predator waiting to expose yourself, though that is certainly insulting. The thing to do is rise above all that, as difficult as that might be.

The problem is that you’ve now got people in relationships bringing this up to their significant others. One Reddit user reported:

I shared the bear versus man dilemma with my boyfriend and didn’t get the response I expected. Now I’m sad

I’m not dating anybody right now, so my gut reaction is a mixture of confusion and indifference. But if I was dating somebody and she brought this up, I think I’d suggest that she ban herself from hiking in the woods based on her questionable ability to evaluate threats.

The point is, you’ve got a society that is so divorced from the real world that people don’t rationally consider a physical, existential threat with the same weight that they consider social commentary. Additionally, relations between men and women are possibly the worst they’ve ever been. If it weren’t for those two factors this “I Choose The Bear” thing would never have gotten any legs.

2. Remember Four Numbers. They Explain This Completely.

How does this happen? Well, let’s remember our four most telling numbers in American politics and culture, shall we? In the 2022 elections, it turned out that there were some very telling results where voting by party among four substantial groups was concerned. Namely:

• Married men voted Republican by 20 points more than Democrat (R+20);
• Married women were R+14;
• Unmarried men were R+7; and
• Unmarried women were D+37.

I come back to these numbers repeatedly because they explain so much about our politics and culture. It’s a little scary.

Remember, the people who control pretty much all of the cultural institutions in America aren’t just Democrats but hard-core leftists of the Obama stripe. What we know about these guys is that they don’t respect any limits at all on their cultural revolutionary behavior — anything representing traditional America has to be cast as villainous.

We’ve seen over and over again that straight men — particularly straight white men, although straight men of other ethnicities don’t come in for friendly treatment either — have been in the crosshairs of most of their cultural aggressions large and small. That’s evident in movies and TV, commercial spots, art, fashion — everything.

We also know there are efforts by various nonprofits, NGOs, and PR firms paid by leftists to drive narratives and push memes. The #MeToo thing was hardly an organic expression, after all. It had been around since 2006 and all of a sudden it popped viral in 2017 after Harvey Weinstein’s long-standing casting-couch behavior was finally exposed, and suddenly a number of PR firms started using it on social media for various purposes other than “raising awareness” of sexual misconduct.

If you couldn’t tell how agenda-driven the #MeToo thing was, then you probably need the cultural-warfare “this is a football” speech, which we don’t have time for in this column.

There is an unmistakable, obvious effort afoot to drive a wedge between men and women to preserve and grow that D+37 contingent. It’s impossible not to recognize this “I Choose The Bear” dreck as a manifestation of those efforts. There are an awful lot of women who subscribe to this thinking, yes, and sure, there are more men than there should be who give rise to suspicions about bad behavior. But if somebody wasn’t ginning up this crap on social media it wouldn’t have come this far.

And the D+37 number explains exactly why. Once you see that number, you can’t unsee it. It explains everything. These people don’t care what kind of damage they cause; all they care about is power, and D+37 is an avenue toward getting it.

3. Paging Uncle RICO

A quick thought on those protests/riots we’re seeing on all those campuses: Seeing as though these demonstrations are clearly funded from outside sources and staffed with non-students, and seeing that they chronically violate campus policies and state laws, the question then becomes why haven’t district attorneys and state attorneys general begun investigating them with an eye toward charging the organizations responsible under the various state RICO statutes.

We already know there’s one NGO responsible, Students for Justice in Palestine, which is a Soros operation.

It’s time to arrest the “fellows” of this organization who are heading up these protests on campuses they don’t attend, haul them in for questioning about their funding and control, and start squeezing out a cascade of stool pigeons until you get to the top.

I guess we’ll have to wait until next year for the feds to get involved because Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray are worse than useless on this (and practically every other) issue. However, at the state level, and particularly in red states, this can get started now.

4. Dirty Joe Wants to Ramp Up a Migrant Invasion of Palestinians

Boy, this just gets more and more fun, doesn’t it?

President Joe Biden is considering bringing Palestinian refugees into the U.S., but news of that potential decision sparked a wave of criticism for Biden.

A group of Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate sent a letter to the president condemning the alleged plan, which was reported by CBS News .

“U.S. and allied officials have very little access to Gazans living in the area, making it nearly impossible to conduct thorough vetting before admitting them into our country,” the letter said. “We must ensure Gazans with terrorist ties or sympathies are denied admission into the United States – no easy feat, given the fact that the Gazans were the ones who voted Hamas into power in 2006. Without thorough vetting, your administration may inadvertently accept terrorists posing as refugees into the interior.

“This is especially the case as Hamas terrorists have a long track record of co-mingling with civilian populations in Gaza,” the letter added.

I’m going to hold off on most of my outrage on this because there has to be some point at which Biden’s handlers realize that their political/cultural/economic aggressions tip the scale and cost them power. This would have to be that point, no?

A mass importation of Hamas-supporting Palestinian refugees, the people who passed out candy in the streets of Gaza when the World Trade Center towers came down on 9/11, would have to be a tipping of that scale. When even the Saudis and Egyptians don’t want those people it’s pretty obvious we don’t.

Or maybe it’s not that obvious.

The last column in this space talked about how Republicans need to stop complaining about the horrors of Team Biden and start reveling in the predatory opportunities those stupidities and abuses of power present. Accusing Joe Biden of seeking to bring in tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, people who are perfectly in sync with the morons on those college campuses chanting “From the river to the sea!” genocidal slogans, is fantastic politics. Pointing out that bringing in those people would make life infinitely less enjoyable for lots of members of the Democrats’ current coalition, like for example secular Jews, feminists, LGBTQ Alphabet people, and others owing to the less-enlightened cultural sensibilities of the dominant portion of Palestinians, makes for even more fun.

There really ought to be a spate of TV spots pumping out there with the accusation that Biden’s next migrant flood will be a bunch of Oct. 7 alumni. Hell, why not? It’s probably true and nobody would be surprised if he did it.

5. I’m With The Critical Drinker On Fallout

Who am I kidding? I’m pretty much always with The Critical Drinker. His reviews are more or less the best guide for quality (and otherwise) movies and TV, and I’ll disagree with him very, very infrequently.

Having found myself with an unexpected hole in my schedule Wednesday afternoon and evening, I took his advice on Fallout and plowed through all eight episodes.

Oh, yeah. This was his advice:

I didn’t expect to get much out of the show, which is streaming at Amazon Prime at present. I never played the game it’s based on, though I’d heard Fallout was one of the most imaginative role-playing video games ever produced.

I played video games as a kid. I fought off a double addiction to Sim City and the Civilization games as a younger adult. I’m too busy to ever return to gaming (which, while fun, is not living productively). A TV series based on one of these games is plenty enough for me now, though after suffering through Resident Evil, HALO, Mortal Kombat, and a couple of other adaptations that the Drinker notes were colossal misses, my expectations of Fallout were not all that high.

Maybe they should have been.

I didn’t make the connection until I saw the Drinker’s review, because he doesn’t look like himself in the show, but Walton Goggins is masterful in Fallout. It’s a performance that reminds the viewer of his portrayal of the delightfully glib villain Boyd Crowder in Justified, but of course, The Ghoul, Goggins’ character in Fallout, does not look the same.

There are things in the show I’m guessing you’d need to have played the game to fully understand, but those don’t ruin the series. It’s a very entertaining romp through a post-nuclear holocaust wasteland of a world, where hard-bitten and highly uncivilized surface dwellers survive the best way they can while the denizens of the underground nuclear bomb shelters (or vaults, as they’re known in Fallout) enjoy a false corporate-sponsored utopia. That might sound woke, but it isn’t.

Goggins’ portrayal of The Ghoul is matched by Ella Purnell’s Lucy, a naive vaulter forced to the surface to search for her kidnapped father. As the Drinker notes, Lucy is a strong female character without being the Strong Female Character we all hate in movies. She’s human, she survives on her wits rather than by beating the hell out of men twice her size, and she’s likable.

The Drinker notes it’s not that hard to write characters like Lucy so long as you aren’t preaching woke pieties to the audience. You don’t get all that much of that from Fallout, though it’s a bit of a sendup of the military-industrial complex. Most of all, though, it’s just a fun show. As post-apocalyptic dystopian action romps go, this is as entertaining as it gets.