Things You Cannot Make Up

A party's ongoing descent into self-parody

If this were not true, it would rank among the most unbelievable things ever. The Democratic Party has launched a 20-million-dollar campaign called Speaking with American Men, as if males are an alien life form that is new to the planet. The plan is covered here, here, here, and here. The synopsis is that Team Blue is bleeding male voters, particularly younger ones, and party elders want to understand why so that they can renew their courting of this group.

The plan is mocked here for how it was developed. When struggling to connect with working-class voters, perhaps meeting in multiple luxury hotels to puzzle out the strategy is a bad look. Then again, so is the Dems’ years-long habit of labeling men as toxic, rapey, and generally responsible for everything wrong that has happened since the beginning of recorded history. Surprisingly, many men were put off by that message.

Among the aims of this proposal is to “study the syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” Maybe that’s what Tim Walz was talking about in recent claims that he was Harris’s running mate for his ability to “code talk to white guys,” whatever that means. The plan recommends heavy advertising buys in video games, because nothing shows an understanding of a large and complex demographic quite like reducing the group to a stereotype.

There is a shorter and more obvious approach. However, it requires dismantling the holy trinity of leftist grifts: BLM, the gender cult, and #metoo. Those three things did as much as anything else to disenfranchise young men, especially the white ones, but also unusually large numbers of minorities who are feeling wokeness fatigue. This, however, would require Dems to admit they were wrong, something no professional partisan will ever do. Besides, there is $20 million to be pocketed spent.

A second idea is to stop treating ordinary behaviors as signs of extremism. In recent years, we have been told that:

· Fitness is right-wing

· Liking attractive women is right-wing

· Eating red meat is right-wing

Unless the man is a gay, vegetarian couch potato, those things are normal among males, not radical acts. Plenty of lifelong Dems engage in at least one of the three and probably more, which is a good way of pushing away those already in the Blue tent. Maybe instead of digging into the weeds of syntax, Dems could try talking to, rather than talking at, young men and treating them like individual human beings instead of subjects in an anthropological study.

There is also another front that the party might want to consider – the impact of what Dem officials do. In Seattle last weekend, a Christian group held a rally in a public park that degenerated into what usually follows when the antifas show up. The second result was far worse, though equally predictable given how party members and activists view the world around them, especially the parts that differ from themselves.

Mayor Bruce Harrell was silent on the thugs and the gender cultists who, but for the presence of a sizable police contingent, may have done far more than be disorderly. Instead, Harrell attacked the Christian group for daring to exercise a people’s most fundamental right and, if that’s not enough, he wants an investigation into how the group secured a permit to gather in the first place. This is the mayor of a fairly large city, not some Internet rando or fringe activist, openly declaring hostility toward free association and expression when those rights are exercised by constituents he dislikes.

Harrell’s mentality is also reflected in a variety of recent events, from the murder of a health insurance CEO that gained widespread praise to last week’s executions of two Jews at the Israeli Embassy in DC. The latter incident is the more salient, given how party figures are trying to figure out this thing called podcasting and the various hosts who have built successful platforms. The party covets its own versions of these men, blissfully ignorant that before this election cycle, the most popular of those hosts, Joe Rogan, was such a version as a vocal Bernie supporter.

Instead of Rogan and others like him, the left has people like the web influencer who posted a video in support of the gunman’s actions at the embassy. Before you dismiss that guy as an outlier, just know that he has three million followers. Three million. Imagine if just one percent of them – which would be 35,000 – followed his guidance and sought their place in “the resistance.” Whatever the young men Dems want to win over think of Israel and Gaza, I doubt that they advocate murdering people who are not involved in the conflict but follow a certain religion.

We have covered the increasing normalization of violence here before, and I daresay that is a bigger cluster for the left to unravel than figuring out how to code talk to males. But no one is ponying up millions of dollars to figure out how to do that. Instead, the identitarian left will live up to its image by pretending that all males of a certain age are identical and interchangeable pieces on the political chessboard. If only the party can, literally, speak their language, then future elections might have different outcomes.

Never mind these men’s experiences of being marginalized and insulted by the party, never mind what they see and hear Dem officials do, and never mind the normal aspects of being a guy framed as mental instabilities. Just whisper a few sweet nothings to them, with the proper syntax and contact obviously, and they’ll come running back. I’m sure they will not notice how they are being patronized, not even a little bit. After all, they’re just men, right?