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One of the most persistent challenges faced by Kamala Harris’ abbreviated presidential campaign is a vexingly wide gender gap. Men just aren’t that into her.
Democrats have deployed several approaches to convince male voters to feel the joy.
Divide and conquer: Harris’ policies divvy up guys by race. Her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” would offer special loans and internships to Black entrepreneurs (no word on whether that’s been lawyered for constitutionality), fund federal studies on sickle cell anemia and other diseases that disproportionately affect Black men, and give them priority to profit from the emerging legal marijuana business. (Note to Democrats: Cannabis equity failed in New York.) Harris’ “Opportunity Agenda for Latino Men” (see a trend?) would offer Latino guys more small business loans. A Google search for “opportunity agenda for white men” comes up empty, but hey, there are still a couple hours left in the race.
Kamala is also playing the class card. A spot for the Pittsburgh TV market features a Steelers fan and maintenance worker who calls himself a “yinzer” (Pittsburgh native). “Donald Trump does not care about the working man whatsoever,” he says. “He’s a little rich kid too; he ain’t me. Little silver spoon boy Donald Trump. How is he relatable to me whatsoever? The guy literally lives in a country club. Do I look like a country club kind of guy?” Don’t tell the yinzers that Harris, worth $8 million and a member of an exclusive country club with a $300,000 initiation fee, is more at home with the Trumps than with them.
Humor: A Harris super PAC made news with “Man Enough,” an ad that showcases six hypermacho dudes — evoking more than a smidge of homoeroticism (“my full-throated endorsement”) — who say they’re so butch that they eat “carburetors for breakfast” and aren’t “afraid of bears” but also like chicks and plan to vote for Harris and support abortion rights. An official Harris ad depicts a burly Black finance bro who ditches his plan to refrain from voting after being confronted by a passel of disapproving ladies. Ladies are doters for early voters!
Shame and guilt: Barack Obama called out sexist men who, he finger-wagged, “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” His wife, Michelle, helpfully reminded the XY set that “your wife and mother could be the ones at higher risk of dying from undiagnosed cervical cancer because they have no access to regular gynecological care.” As if men didn’t care about their wives, sisters, mothers and female friends.
This is a portrait of a campaign that wants men’s votes enough to embarrass itself but isn’t willing to do much, if anything, to earn them. Democrats suffer from a prepositional disconnect: Harris and her surrogates talk at men, not to or, better still, with them.
If she loses to Trump, a major contributing factor will be the perception that Harris and the Democrats don’t like men.
This is puzzling. Harris knows men. She’s married to one. Most of her Senate colleagues are men. Her running mate is a guy, albeit a goofy beta. Why can’t Kamala speak fluent dude?
A more talented politician would recognize male voters — especially white male voters — less as an obstacle to fool, bully or circumnavigate than as what they really are: virgin electoral territory.
American men are suffering from a set of very real, very serious problems with which neither political party has begun to identify, much less engage.
One of Trump’s superpowers in 2016 was his recognition of the pain, frustration and anger of Rust Belt voters (including men) left behind by deindustrialization to wallow in poverty, addiction and dysfunction. Trump, and now his running mate, JD Vance, described the shuttered factories and blighted neighborhoods in places like Dayton, Ohio, where I grew up. They argued that American citizens deserved better and promised to fix it. Trump didn’t fix it as president. Maybe he couldn’t.
But he did see the people of flyover country. That was enough to take over the GOP, defeat Hillary Clinton and build the MAGA movement.
Today, boys and men represent an even bigger untapped reservoir of political support for the politician and party with enough vision to recognize it. Males are in crisis. They are angry and confused.
Men are in crisis.
They are desperate for compassion and looking for leadership.
Males are far more likely to abuse and become addicted to illegal drugs than females. Boys drop out of high school more than girls. Males are 50% of the population yet account for most fatal cancer and nearly 80% of suicides. Trapped in an increasingly feminized system of primary, secondary and higher education with rules designed for “calmer” females, boys and men are now being taught that they are historically responsible for rape, colonialism, imperialism and every other conceivable form of oppression. They are ordered to sit silently by as they are passed over for jobs, awards and other opportunities in order to make up for the historic sins of systemic sexism and misogyny. Men cannot and should not be proud of masculinity or maleness.
They ought to be ashamed. As a liberal pundit put it in 2019, “Old White Men Like Me Need to Shut Up and Step Aside.”
The Male Problem blows up during adulthood. Fifty-eight percent of college students are women; forty-two percent are men. Moreover, women graduate in higher numbers — 68% compared to 61% for guys — so the proportion of women with college degrees in the workforce is even higher. This is not a new problem; colleges began admitting more girls than boys in 1979. Nor is it a correction. Flipping a historical injustice, sexual discrimination, on its head does not redress it; it merely reverses the role of victim and oppressor.
Cultural progressives posit an identitarian version of trickle-down economics in which equity erases the old gender pay gap that favored men, lifting up women without hurting men. But wages are a zero-sum game that men are losing. “In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent,” according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “However, a big chunk of that improvement — more than a quarter of it — happened because of men’s wage losses , rather than women’s wage gains.”
Gender inequality increasingly looks like a two-way street, with males bearing the brunt not only economically but socially because high-earning women are not willing to marry, support or subsidize lower-achieving men. Trophy husbands, cultural shifts notwithstanding, are not a thing.
It’s hardly surprising that the unabashedly macho swagger of Trumpism finds a receptive audience among America’s lost boys. As conservative activist Charlie Kirk told Vanity Fair, guys “want to be part of a political movement that doesn’t hate them.”
That’s not the Democrats.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
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Kamela has a clear message for white men–she favors legal abortion. White men all favor legal abortion so that pregnant girlfriends can kill the baby and men can avoid 18 years (or more with college) of child support. White men are overwhelmingly pro-abortion.
Polling paradox–men can never say that with their girlfriends around. With the woman around, men always want to do what she wants. When the girl is pregnant, the abort early and often rule takes over. White men don’t want to bring babies into today’s world and pay for them.
The biggest turn off for men are all the GOP types who want to ban abortion.
Good God, man, she’s an imbecile who can’t answer simple, teed-up questions from lapdog journalists and she jabbers mindlessly at every turn. Meanwhile, Trump wades into hornets nests of adversarial interviewers and handles three hours of the more easygoing Rogan with aplomb, but Kamala is terrified of attending the Al Smith charity dinner or of accepting a Rogan interview and the opportunity to reach out to the men that her team prefers to shriek at and browbeat.
Trump takes risks and hits the stage, McDonald’s window, and garbage truck with humor, while Harris shirks, wrings her hands, then comes out screeching along with Gretchen, Hildebeast, and the ever warm and loveable Liz and Dick and Mika and Joe. Her campaign is a train wreck, dumpster fire, and freak show all rolled into one.
And wallowing Walz’s dude act is pure fakery, along with that bug-eyed, batshit crazy wife of his–Kammy says she “went with her gut” to select him. And that nanny-banging, girlfriend-smacking, supposed “new model of masculinity” Doug Emhoff is an obvious weasel. Are you sure he and Kamala-poo are only worth $8 million?
Few men who have a modicum of testosterone coursing through their veins and some self-respect are going to favor zio-whore-bitch Harris over zio-whore-dude Donald.
This is the craziest thing I ever did see in US politics.
It’s like something out of Alice in Wonderland.
A little pedantic ,I am sure, but I would like to remind us all that White means European/Caucasian/Northern Indian/Iranian/North African /Middle Eastern etc in Science and the rest of the world. It only means Central European/Anglo-Saxon in the USA , and to those idiots who imbibe too much Americana.
I struggle to stay calm when I read of Middle- Eastern and Indian “Browns” and “Latinos” South of North America. Latinos by definition are a variable mix of Iberians and Yellow Native Americans with a smidgeon -maybe of Middle Eastern. Those pureblood Iberian “Latinos” are -in Science and the ROW -considered White, so hotties like Sofia Vergara is really White. Shakira with her pureblood Middle Eastern and Euro? Blood is White.
I know this is mostly an American platform with most posters from the USA, but let us not forget the above. Apart from that it was an excellent, truthful and informative article. Bravo.
Ted, you sound like you’re channeling Dr. Warren Ferrel. He was on the board of NOW back in the 70’s but, left the movement when it deviated from its mission of supporting women and began tearing down men. He’s been writing on this for a few decades now.
https://warrenfarrell.com/
Could we not have either? Could barely understand the CCP agent.
Supposed men who ignore threat and destructione hundreds years and bogus monotheism and paper law and cons claiming to be ‘govt or ‘judges or ‘sheriffs – arent men.
Supposed monotheism is obvious deadly con, ‘turn cheek’ and ‘obey is suicide, so is paper scribble law. Can search lysander spooner constitution of no authority, and pocm.info
Also search pilpul.
Same on females that ignore obligation of reactuon to threat and incursion. Selfish juvenile wastes of spave. No excuse failing to share facts on or otherwise shove back.
Real defense of self and tribe and territory requires personal action; not sniveling for fraud leaders. Con trump is nothing but a fraud front.
Appreciate the article, just important remember further back, before schemes and bogus femy focus subverted natural instinct and tribe and use of force.
Remember cavemen.
Abortion of black babies are said to have vastly reduced crime. Undesired black babies are even more crime-prone than the average Black youth
Additionally, abortion reduces the population increase of low IQ high crime blacks, with genetics of their parents who could not control their impulses and get their birth control in order
The rape exception for abortion clearly entices women to make false rape claims for the sole purpose of getting permission to abort.
“Racist” unamusementpark dot com said: I am in favor of abortion for Blacks, and oppose abortion for whites
I didn’t read the article. I’m trained in
Medical science. Harris has cognitive deterioration. One would conjecture a cocktail of performance enhancing drugs
And recreational. Of course theorizing,
She’s a designer prop-politician they want her this way because as she rapidly
Wanes in neural networks another cartoon Chief Executive it trotted out to continue on the path of the totalitarian ethos, humiliation, Dali-esque chaos,
Physical torture, death.
With a trained eye Harris’ head looked squeezed and I surmise brain disease amyloid tartar pressing in.
She can’t think and it only gets worse
She’s a perfect dystopian Segway into
Waltz certainly as dangerous a muppet-
Brained liberal to ever threaten civilization. I hate to say it I’d prefer Kamala to Waltz he’s a programmable
Futz Ball.
Why can’t she talk? because her brain
Is a crumpled up prescription insert sitting in at the bottom of a Can-Can
Dancer’s wastebasket.
“Men are in crisis? They are desperate for compassion and looking for leadership.”
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Did you get a stiffie in your last group hug or something?
Don’t try to empathize, you fail. Men are fed up. Women are fed up. Vivisected degloved monsters are fed up. We are going to put their heads on sticks.
Well said. And yet, my take as a man is that I don’t care if Kamala Harris can’t “Talk Dude” one way or the other. I would cheerfully have voted for her if there was any objective evidence that she – or more accurately, the people controlling her – were even halfway on my side. I would have voted for a ham sandwich, if the people pushing it had not declared war on me, and my family, and the American working class in general.
When you think about it: team Kamala committed base treason by aiding and abetting a foreign invasion of the country, a vicious amoral policy aimed at driving wages and living standards down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few. They’ve showered Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars (gotta factor in the 10X inflated replacement costs of all those weapons systems) in a proxy war against Russia that is causing massive suffering, serves only to enrich Blackrock and Lockheed, and meanwhile investment in our own nation is crumbling. And of course, the continued siphoning of trillions of dollars out of the public treasury and into the big banks.
When you think about it, it’s amazing that Kamala got close to half the vote. She should have gotten zero. Propaganda and lawfare are effective. The forces behind the Democrats only need a few percentage points more next time.
It’s isn’t that Kamala can’t ‘talk dude’. It’s that she just…can’t talk, dude.
That said, Rall nails it here.