So. We vilify action men, brand chivalry and valor “toxic masculinity,” stamp on the manly virtues that made civilization possible.

Then we are shocked when armed cops stand around outside a classroom while children are slaughtered, or when straphangers watch passively as a woman is ­assaulted on the subway. 

What’s the answer?

Democrats cynically demonize Republicans over guns as a motivator for their base. Republicans fall back on hardening security to prevent more school shootings.

But little Robb Elementary School in Uvalde Texas, where an 18-year-old gunman murdered 19 small children and two of their teachers last week, was already pretty hardened.

Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District had its own six-strong police force, armed security guards, perimeter fencing and a locked classroom policy, according to a security plan posted on its website. 

Still, the shooter found an unlocked door and the only thing that might have saved those children were men of courage and action rushing into the line of fire. Yes, men.

Instead, they had armed police officers milling about outside their classrooms, reportedly for over an hour, as blood flowed unchecked, and innocent souls rose to heaven.

If you were the desperate parents prevented by the cops from going inside the school to save your kids, your rage would be rightly insatiable.

Missing the point

But armchair Twitter warriors, armed with minimal real data, ranting about cowardice and drumming up death threats for Uvalde police, are missing the point.

You can’t bully people to be brave or nag them into valor.

They either are or they aren’t that way.

They either are the first responders of 9/11 running toward danger to save strangers, men who strapped on oxygen tanks to climb 110 flights of stairs to their deaths.

Or they are not.

We used to venerate men like the entire shift of 15 firefighters from Midtown’s Engine 54/Ladder 4/Battalion 9, whose fading photographs still face the heedless crowds on Eighth Avenue.

Men with families to live for, who rushed to their deaths on 9/11, because they believed in a system of honor and duty, in which they were destined to be guardians of the community; men like Battalion Chief Edward Geraghty, 45, firefighters Alan Feinberg, 48, Jose Guadalupe, 37, Leonard Ragaglia, 36, Michael Lynch, 30, Christopher Santora, 23, and fellow heroes.

Now their inheritors show up at emergencies and the public throws bottles of urine at them. Social-justice warriors and their eager media accomplices smear cops every day as racists and murderers. #ACAB (“all cops are bastards”) is their favorite hashtag.

We pathologize manly virtues and bow to the tyranny of identity politics that seeks power by overthrowing a make-believe patriarchy. We raise boys in a soup of ­reproach and negativity that tells them their intrinsic nature is ­diseased.

“Traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful,” the American Psychological Association declared in 2019. These were the masculine attributes it listed as diseased: “stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, aggression, anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk and violence.”

The only acceptable man now is a man who wants to be a woman. We celebrate “pregnant men” and “chestfeeding” men.

You see, in the drive to destroy masculinity, we’ve had to erase women as well.

Masculinity crisis

We ignore the crisis that sees men commit suicide at ever-increasing rates or succumb to drug abuse and porn addiction while savvy young women graduate from college in disproportionate numbers. Trained from childhood to be entitled and unrealistic about relationships, their fertility and the sacrifices and joys of motherhood, many become bitter and blame men for their confusion.

Along the way, we emasculate the institutions that were necessarily masculine for our protection, notably the military. As an example, on Wednesday, the US Marines celebrated Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Pride Month by tweeting a picture of a combat helmet adorned with rainbow-colored bullets.

So, what do men do? They recoil and retreat. They leave the stage for hysterical epsilon men like Beto O’Rourke who whine and posture but can’t protect a thing.

Then when we need strong, quick-thinking Gary Cooper to save us from outlaws, he’s nowhere to be found.

He has been rendered extinct, leaving 19 kids to be slaughtered inside a classroom while men and women wearing the legacy costume of toxic masculinity stand around waiting for orders.

“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise,” C.S. Lewis foretold in his dystopian 1943 book The Abolition of Man. 

“We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Biden’s ‘White’ house

Looks like we found “Jim Eagle” and he’s in the White House. Joe Biden is always looking for white supremacists under the bed and some new Jim Crow so scary it has turned into an eagle. But the president doth protest too much, methinks. An exodus of at least 21 black staffers from the White House, dubbed “Blaxit,” according to Politico, suggests the president should clean up his own backyard before pointing the finger of blame.