TED BALAKER: TikTok Might Not Agree with Harrison Butker’s Speech, But Guess Who Does. Basically everyone else outside the Lefty Outrage Bubble:

Reporters eagerly hunt for dissenting female students to quote, but it seems clear that most women in attendance stood with Butker. His “homemaker” line sparked a 16-second applause break and, at the end of his speech, the audience gave him a standing ovation—one that, from the looks of the short clip below, included just about everyone in attendance. . . . Skimming TikTok to gauge public opinion is something I’d expect from Jezebel or Teen Vogue, but The New York Times should aim higher.

Did the most prestigious name in news even consider venturing outside the outrage bubble? After all, a large and representative survey could help us determine how well the howlers’ opinions overlap with public opinion in general.

Enter sociologists Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang.

They turned to the General Social Survey (GSS)—the nation’s preeminent social barometer—and this is what they found:

M]arriage and family are strongly associated with happiness. The GSS shows that a combination of marriage and parenthood is linked to the biggest happiness dividends for women. Among married women with children between the ages of 18 and 55, 40% reported they are “very happy,” compared to 25% of married childless women, and just 22% of unmarried childless women.

In other words, the high value placed on family life stretches beyond a small Catholic college in Kansas. A Pew Research Center global survey shows just how far it stretches: When asked what makes their lives fulfilling, men and women of all ages around the world ranked family first, ahead of wealth, work, friends, and health.

And the fact that women were usually “more likely to mention family as a source of satisfaction in their lives than men” will be unsurprising to those who don’t spend their lives online or on campus.

Takeaway: “Maybe what the Eight Percenters want for women isn’t what many women want for themselves.” Nope. Gender relations in America are run mostly by a group of neurotics who prescribe behaviors for the general population based on their own neurotic preferences, not the needs and wants of the general population.

The media outrage/amplification cycle is what has allowed them to do this. It needs to be broken. And maybe this speech was a harbinger of change.