Age of chad. With the festival-like “protests” at America’s wealthiest private universities growing more unhinged by the day, the rise of a would-be white girl jihadi with giant “I’m offended” glasses was inevitable. But last week, when Keffiyeh Karen took center stage at a press conference outside Columbia University, a main character more perfectly suited to this moment than I ever could have imagined was well and truly born. There, flanked by a lanky “yay Hamas” gay in make-up and a Castro shot boy midriff, she addressed the dire state of her fellow activists, who had just purposely locked themselves inside a campus building. The students were in danger of starving, she said of the mob literally free to leave and feed themselves at any moment. This was a crisis. The country’s richest 1% required food, and the anti-capitalist, anti-colonial “revolutionary” bourgeoisie demanded it be brought to them, by day laborers, at once. This was, their leader said with no apparent sense of self-awareness, basic “humanitarian aid.”

The incident — not only the clownish presser, but the apparent hostage situation for which the presser was called — received national attention. But with the exception of a surreal nod from Hims founder Andrew Dudum, who on Wednesday seemed to offer the larping jihadis jobs, almost all of the attention was negative. Long gone was the “mostly peaceful” coverage of the Clown War 2020s, and just a little further south, on another college campus, there came an even stranger apparition.

While the Sweetgreen Revolution raged to the north, a handful of similarly deranged activists first replaced, and then attempted to destroy, the most prominent American flag on UNC’s campus. Their efforts were retarded, however, when a pack of zoomer frat boys in pastel polos, broccoli perms, and at least one Hooters shirt stepped forward and defended the American flag with their bodies. The mob of Palestine enthusiasts, unprepared for this symbolic act of moral clarity, became enraged, but the country was overjoyed. Photos of the incident went viral, and a GoFundMe was launched to throw the boys a party. Donations climbed to over 500k before it was closed.

The archetypal frat boy, loathed for decades, was not only back, but celebrated. He was also not confined to UNC.

ASU, Ole Miss, LSU. On campuses across the country, America was mesmerized by a battle of young chads and tent-dwelling gender goblins, with the chad impulses — laughter in the face of hysteria, boyish overconfidence, patriotism — adopted well beyond the frat house. Down at George Washington University, in response to Palestinian activists taking down the American flag, the administration itself unfurled a new, giant flag on a neighboring building. To the best of my knowledge, nothing came of the boys at ASU who happily cleared the activist encampments, but the kids who ran the camp were all suspended. Even at more limp-wristed institutions like UCLA and Columbia, where appeasing administrators tried (and failed) to maintain order while performatively “listening” to histrionic students, there was no 2020-like public commitment to the activist cause. In fact, at both institutions, law breakers were arrested.

In all of this, one strange piece of the story increasingly hard to ignore is the gender division. Outside America’s few Muslim-majority communities, the country’s most ferocious contingent of Palestinian activists appear to be mostly female. The counter activists, on the other hand, appear to be almost entirely male. And the optics of male celebration in opposition to an activist movement so visibly female, after years of male demonization, is totally surreal.

While especially evocative, the previously unthinkable resurrection of America’s frat boy is only one example of a major national trend. From Hollywood to Washington, the bros are back in town. But there is perhaps nowhere the trend is more obvious than tech.

Last week, a picture of Brian Chesky looking absolutely yoked went viral. Mark Zuckerberg is an MMA fighter, now — who not too long ago pursued an actual, physical fight with Elon Musk (gentlemen, the world is still waiting). Famously, the metamorphosis of the tech CEO began when Jeff Bezos emerged from his bookish pupa stage transformed into Mr. Clean. Then, he commissioned the world’s largest megayacht, and adorned it with a statue of his new fiancée on the prow. Today, just a few years later, startup founders are holding “testosterone parties,” where they test their levels and learn how to dope. This is to say nothing of tech’s attitude adjustment, with a shocking departure from the “sorry for existing” summer 2020 to the ascendant celebrity of Palantir’s Alex Karp, calling his short sellers a bunch of stupid coke addicts, and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, eviscerating his antagonists in the media, on stage, with his antagonists in the media. Still, the most telling example of tech’s masculine embrace is probably just the existence of the Gundo Bros — a wild pack of young hardware jockeys on the cutting edge of technology, sure. But they are also, critically, “bros,” a title they’ve managed to embrace while somehow attracting mostly positive attention from the press.

Really, for just a moment, consider this one piece, this one word — “bro.” For over a decade, reporters have been at furious war with the “tech bro.” Bloomberg, 2014: we hate the tech bro, but we need them. Vice, 2015: look at these tech-bro elites talking about a universal basic income, which is bad. Salon, 2017: “tech bros and white supremacists, a union based on paranoia and power.” Vox, 2018: “Why Silicon Valley Has a Bro Culture Problem.” The New York Times, 2022: “Silicon Valley Slides Back Into 'Bro' Culture.” 2023, WIRED: here’s a plan… to “get rid of” the tech bros!

But what is a “tech bro”? According to Vice, the “tech bros” in question include soft-spoken Sam Altman, and nerd king Marc Andreesen. What about these men says “bro”? In the Guardian’s more recent screed against the “billionaire tech bros,” Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are named. First, what do any of these people have in common with each other? They’re men in tech, I guess, and rich? Then, on what planet is a bookish former child chess prodigy… a “bro”?

But while it never meant much in tech, the word “bro” is certainly associated with frat culture, and the frat stereotype: boyish, aggressive, ignorant, anti-intellectual, materialistic. In other words, the opposite of how you might describe almost every single person maligned as a “tech bro” over the last 10 years, which is obviously why the term was used. In the early 20-teens, the writers who covered the technology industry correctly understood leaders in tech were rising towards a position of incredible influence and power. As leaders of industry, all of these men were natural enemies of the more socialist press. Quite problematically, however, they were nothing like the previous coke-and-hookers power class of Wall Street, so ruthlessly zero sum, so entirely materialistic, and therefore so easily demonized. Tech leaders were kind, meritocratic, idealistic, open-minded, and highly-intellectual — all prized, liberal qualities. In an information war, the innate goodness of these people posed a considerable challenge, and so the press recast tech’s greatest leaders as “bros,” implying thoughtful young founders like Dylan Field, for example, were in some way comparable to the Oracle sales team.

It was a complete and utter fiction, which I wrote about at length in Temple of Bros. But the press’s weaponization of the “tech bro” meme was only successful because the “frat bro” had already been maligned, for decades, to the point that otherwise intelligent men were fearful of the association. Petitions to eradicate greek life have been common for years (though some lament the frat’s eradication has proven difficult). From Los Angeles to New York City, every fount of media power has ridiculed or outright demonized greek life through my entire life, with the frat boy most fervently targeted: these are hazing psychopaths, we’re told. These are racists. These are rapists.

But what is the truth? What even is a frat? Why do young men join them, and why does the media hate them?

Greek life, including the frat and the sorority, are basically single-sex, semi-secret societies (there are secret handshakes). Members are vetted by the community, given a mentor (or “big brother”) on acceptance, and plugged into a social network, in person, that mostly revolves around partying through college. These relationships follow participants throughout their lives, and the experience is generally positive. Former frat boys not only self-report fondness for greek life, but tend to do better than their peers after college, both in terms of happiness and success (supporting polls here and here). Jealousy, then, is one easy reason Americans who have never been a part of greek life might hate the institution. But my sense is the story of the frat boy’s “toxic masculinity” has been shaped for political reasons. Really, we’re looking at a classically presenting moral inversion, in which the good is framed the evil, and the evil framed the good. Among the frat’s most ferocious critics, who are likewise almost entirely aligned in opposition with any performance of masculinity, there is a sense the frat boy is a threat to culture. But for those of us not entirely convinced American culture has been healthy these past couple decades, one might also term this “threat” an antidote.

We don’t know much about the boys at Chapel Hill. But we do know how Americans feel about what they saw, which was not only a bunch of frat boys protecting the flag, but at least one frat boy laughing at the mob. That laughter in the face of deranged cultural expectations is one of the most enduring stereotypes of the “bro” today, perhaps most famously attacked when the 16-year-old Nick Sandmann made the mistake of being a white boy in a MAGA hat publicly accosted first by a group of Black Hebrew Israelites, and then (the piece that was captured and distorted) a grown-ass native American activist. In response to the activist — again, an adult — hammering a drum in his face, the young Sandmann laughed. For this, the press turned him into the face of white supremacy.

Today, he’s a graduating university senior, and a frat boy. But I digress.

The threat inherent in Sandmann was not that he was male, or white, or wearing a MAGA hat. Sandmann was, above all things, a young person laughing in the face of authority. For a cultural authoritarian, and especially a cultural authoritarian in power, there is nothing so dangerous as laughter, because when something’s truly funny laughter is contagious. One dumb kid smirking can’t really hurt you, but an audience in peals of laughter? An entire nation howling at your idiocy? Cultural power of the kind we saw in the early 2020s — absolute, total power — requires the illusion of mass consensus. In this, laughter is a counterspell. And once the illusion is gone, a real fight for power begins.

From the media’s perspective, the attempted destruction of Sandmann was sensible. But they lost. Laughter prevailed. It continues to this day. Now, amidst that laughter has risen a new class of leader, entirely, unabashedly opposed to qualities in leadership almost universally celebrated just a couple years ago: collectivist, activist, collaborative, globalist, performatively empathetic. In their place, qualities generally considered masculine have, if not earnestly been embraced, become fashionable to peacock: individualist, meritocratic, hierarchical, patriotic, and, above all things, courageous.

Courage, across culture, from the college campus to the most powerful boardrooms in tech, is attractive to most people, but it is especially attractive to young men, who generally reward true courage with their loyalty. On the internet, this basically reduces to attention, our contemporary currency. Now, with a reward for masculinity in play, be it performative or earnest, a trend in favor of masculinity is certain.

The activists are right, the revolution is here. But it’s a revolution of the broletariat.

-SOLANA