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For over a year, the Planned Parenthood clinic in my city has been closed. At first, it was closed for renovations, the doors and windows covered with wood panels. Now, it’s closed permanently. A casualty of Iowa’s extreme abortion ban, cuts to Medicaid, Title IX funding, the attacks on Planned Parenthood, and, of course, Planned Parenthood’s own dysfunction.

Iowans are getting abortions, but they are going out of state or self-managing them at home. And anecdotally, I hear a growing number of young women are choosing to sterilize, using Reddit to find sympathetic doctors and clinics.

Iowa has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation.

And yet, once a week, as I drive by the clinic on my way to kid pick-ups or the grocery store, I see a group of older white men and women standing in front of the clinic, praying and holding signs demanding an end to abortion. Their stoic Midwestern faces are grim as if they alone are waging a holy war — and the whole world is against them.

On Monday, Donald Trump announced he was calling in the National Guard to patrol the streets of Washington, DC. The claim from the White House was that the country’s capital city is mired in crime and “total lawlessness.” In reality, despite some high-profile incidents, crime in DC is on the decline. Trump’s act of martial law and abuse of power, reporting suggests, was sparked by the attempted carjacking of a former DOGE staffer, Edward Coristine, best known for going by the nickname “Big Balls” online. Coristine is also the nepo baby son of the snack brand Lesser Evil. Everyone has to suffer; the rights of the poor to exist are curtailed, all because a rich man felt victimized once.

In the middle of the press conference about the made-up problem Trump claims to be solving, he went on a rant about people being transgender. At first he was talking about tax cuts; then he nonsensically went on, “That's why they want men playing in women's sports, that's why they want transgender for everybody. Everybody, transgender. And they just got walloped in an election, in a landslide and they haven't changed one thing. I saw the other day, a certain gentleman who is a very well-known politician, Democrat, was fighting like hell that men should be allowed to play in women's sports. They just don't get it.”

Of course, none of this makes any sense. It was just another moment of free association from an addled brain. But it’s also another moment when a person in power claimed to be the victim of a made-up problem. There are maybe 10 trans athletes in women’s sports in the NCAA. And trans people are more likely to face discrimination and violence than any white man walking to his car in Washington, DC.

It’s an invented narrative to keep the winners claiming grievance, while others lose their rights.

In the pages of the Washington Post, Shadi Hamid wrote once again that men are lonely. He blamed politics and #MeToo. He claimed there is “data” to back this up, but the reality is that men are not lonelier than women. There is no male loneliness crisis. And while we’re at it, the educational crisis among boys is severely overblown.

And while highly male opinion columnists like Hamid, David Brooks and Ross Douthat — and even prominent Democrats like Gavin Newsom — claim men are in crisis, the maternal mortality rate is soaring; Black women are being forced out of the workforce; and women and LGBTQ people are losing their rights to healthcare. Young girls are experiencing a huge mental health crisis.

But so much more ink is spilled over how sad men think they are. It’s a make-believe problem that ignores life-and-death crises for women in favor of the perceived victimhood of men.

These are the fantasy problems of a fictional world. One where the billionaire's fears of being taxed are more terrifying than people going hungry. Where affordable housing is more terrifying than a sexual predator in office. Where 10 trans people competing in women’s sports is scarier than thousands of women dying in childbirth. And one where not getting a date or never marrying is far, far worse somehow than dying septic in a hospital parking lot.

An entire cultural and political movement has been predicated on a mythical narrative of victimhood, loneliness, and disenfranchisement. And we are buying into it even as it kills us.

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• Spencer Ackerman wrote about the cultural hysteria around Mamdani’s candidacy.

• And, in case you missed it, this weekend, I wrote about yet another piece of pro-marriage drivel from Brad Wilcox.

• And in this newsletter, a few years ago, I wrote about why we seem to be trapped in the same discourse cycles.