On any given day, you can casually scroll on social media and unearth a plethora of freshly posted videos of single men and women recalling nightmarish dating experiences to their followers.
“When he says, ‘I’m big on honesty’ and lies about his height while you’re literally looking at him,” reads the caption of one young woman’s post.
When war is in the air, young men traditionally sign up – and they traditionally sign up, disproportionately, from the northeast of England, where I grew up. The country must be prepared for war, says Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, head of our armed forces. But what use is all this puffed-up talk of a battle-ready Britain if we have no soldiers? In the northeast, the supply of soldiers has slowed not just to a trickle but to a drip.
Sunderland, for instance, home to nearly11,000 veterans, sent just ten men into the army in 2025. A reporter called Fred Sculthorp went to Sunderland for Dispatch magazine last month, to work out what had happened to the northeast’s fighting spirit, but all Fred found was apathy: why sign up when you can sign on? No loss to the army anyway, said the secretary of the Sunderland Gunners club. The lads these days “couldn’t fight a cold.”
According to Schneider, the twin threats to the West today are the green-red alliance, cloaked in the robe of tolerance, and Islam.
Rob Schneider is a world-famous American actor and comedian, and a public figure who speaks candidly about his politically conservative views. He was a cast member on the long-running live sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live on NBC between 1990 and 1994. After leaving the show, he starred in comedy movies such as Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999), The Animal (2001), Hot Chick (2002), and Grown Ups (2010). He has a long-standing friendship with Adam Sandler and appeared in many of his films, including 50 First Dates (2004) and The Longest Yard (2005). We spoke with Mr. Schneider in Budapest on the last day of his speaking tour in Hungary.
Why are Gen Z men abandoning the rituals of romance?
For the first time in modern American life, nearly half of young men in Gen Z report that they are not dating at all. This is not simply a pause in the so‑called “hookup culture” of the 1990s and early 2000s; it is a sign of something deeper and much more troubling. The retreat of young men from relationships is not a victory for chastity or a sign of renewed seriousness about commitment. Instead, it reflects a generation of young men who feel increasingly uncertain about their place in a culture that often treats them as unnecessary — or even unwelcome.
With all the controversy over the fast-moving war in Iran, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the world balance of power and international correlation of forces are shifting in favour of the western democracies. Since the reinstallation of the present U.S. administration less than 14 months ago, fentanyl and other drug traffic, much of it originating in China, into the United States has been drastically reduced. Venezuela has been eliminated as a link in that chain and the U.S. armed forces are co-operating with a revived Mexican government effort to subdue the violent gangs in northern Mexico, blunting their traffic in slaves and narcotics freely into the United States. The entry of undocumented immigrants and particularly violent criminals (of whom hundreds of thousands were admitted in the previous four years), has nearly stopped.
