Man-Hating Proves Unpopular with Men

The Democrats' Comical Courting of the American Male

“I never knew of any writer on the theory of government, so partial to authority, as not to allow, that the hostile mind of the rulers to their people, did fully justify a change of government. Nor can any reason whatever be given, why one people should voluntarily yield any degree of pre-eminence to another, but on a supposition of great affection and benevolence towards them.” - Edmund Burke [Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol]

One of the actors from a widely panned “Man enough to vote for Kamala Harris” advertisement. Notice that he literally has breasts.

Two weeks from election day the Democrats are in panic mode. Though Trump has made progress in polls and now does look favored in the electoral college, the race is still nearly a dead heat and far from over. However, Kamala Harris’s lack of vision and listless nature is failing to inspire the public. As I said after she was chosen, the Democrat partisans love Kamala because they have been told to, but she has little appeal to others. The biggest concern is how Democrats will perform with men. Though our elections have had a large “gender gap” for decades, it has continued to grow and there is concern that Harris cannot win women at the same rate that Trump can win men.

The “gender gap” is being called the “defining feature” of this race.” It’s really an unfortunate thing, and terrible for society, that politics have become a sort of gender proxy war, but here we are. Regardless, while white men without a college degree have always been Trump’s base, his support from this demographic seems to keep growing. Republicans perform better with men than women among all races, but Democrats rely on receiving the votes of an overwhelming majority of black voters, a trend which appears to be weakening among black men. Further, Hispanic support for Democrats continues to erode, led by Hispanic men. In 10 years or less Hispanics could vote for both parties evenly or even vote majority Republican. In short, Democrats need to staunch the bleeding of male voters, and for that matter their wives, but they are comically unqualified to do so.

After spending decades attacking men, most of all “straight cis white men” for all of the world’s problems, Democrats are at an impasse trying to win their votes. They have increasingly accepted their place as the party of, by, and for women, especially single women, while using men as scapegoats. Now that this has alienated too many male voters, they are trying to bring things back around, but to outsiders their warped perception of men is good for laughs and little else. They associated words “toxic” and “masculinity” with each other in the public mind, yet now are stuck trying to appeal to masculinity. It has been quite the scene. Nearly every day there is a clueless op-ed from a major publication blaming misogyny for Kamala Harris’s polling problems. Of course, the implication is that men could only think she is incompetent and unfocused because of misogyny. Donald Trump’s attacks on her are also said to be sheer misogyny, despite that he has been equally or more nasty to Joe Biden and any number of other men and very little of what he says about Harris specifically relates to her being a woman.

These same op-eds believe associating leadership with masculinity is some sort of distinctly American trait, despite that leaders have primarily been men throughout the world for all of history. While Democrats have going for them that Republicans don’t read these stupid op-eds, there have been a series of ads and other stunts that have gone viral which show that they don’t “get” men, much less respect them. At the same time, they have managed to insult women, minorities, and really anyone who isn’t already a brain-dead Democrat partisan. The following ad- which uses professional actors because it was impossible to find 6 normal heterosexual male Harris supporters- is only the most notorious example:

This video was seemingly made in earnest, though it is not officially affiliated with the campaign. There has been much commentary on it, including from Matt Taibbi, but the overall consensus is that it is absolutely tone deaf and self-sabotaging. It has been suggested by some that the point is to indicate to women that they own the Democrat Party, but that has little utility among their faithful who will vote for them regardless. The only thing I have to add is that it can be hard to recognize self-satire and to an extent they must think this is funny in some way that isn’t clear to us. For example, there are quite a lot of liberals on Twitter who think the popular figure Nick Adams (Alpha Male) is wholly in earnest, because they can’t parse the fact that while he is genuinely a Trump supporter he is also just making shit up and satirizing his own faction. Taibbi said the following:

It is astounding that they could be this ignorant about men, but at the same time it is not surprising. It is unlikely that anyone who can be appealed to through masculinity would vote for Harris under any circumstances. The problems with Democrats and men go back decades, and we talked about masculinity in our society on a recent podcast, so it doesn’t bear going deep into here. I can say though that personally, there are countless times I have encountered situations where I’m told if I think people trashing masculinity refers to me it shows that I am the problem. Democrats partisans have gone so far as to mock the increase in “deaths of despair” among white men saying they gave up as soon as anything got difficult, as if life has not been difficult for the average person through all of history. It is disastrous- both for men and for women who want to find husbands- to have a large population of disaffected and lost men in your society, but this is of no concern to a narrow faction of bitter and neurotic women and feminine men who can only look at genuine manhood with malice.

Just for a personal story of what they attempt to impress in the minds of men, I remember one guy I used to know before I stopped talking to him during covid- who apparently now goes around claiming to be a woman- who shared some meme arguing that boys should be taught that if they ask a girl out and she says no the proper thing to do is cut off all contact with her. This was somehow supposed to empower women and prevent harassment while making boys understand how to interact with women. In reality, it requires profound blindness to not see it separates women into a dichotomy of those who will have sex with you and basically bitches who hate you that you are not to speak to. No space was left for trying to get to know her better, doing something to impress her, or even just the possibility that in her feminine nature she was hoping a man would try a little harder. [In reality, one study showed that 45% of men between 18 and 25 have never approached a women in person, while 77% of women between 18 and 30 wish men approached them more, making this one of countless examples of how ideological liberals and leftists are totally detached from how normal people feel.]

Men have been bombarded with these negative messages about their presence and unfortunately many lack fathers at home and go to schools where 75% of teachers are women and many of the 25% of men are effeminate or clueless liberals like Tim Walz. This was the appeal of Jordan Peterson, who often just said things any father could have told you 50 years ago. He is [or was, at least] like Red Forman with academic language, and still that was revolutionary for men who had never been told anything true their entire lives. Instead, boys grow up dragged down and henpecked by the schoolmarms and incompetent administrators and bureaucrats who make up the Democrat base. We learned recently that many of these women would rather encounter a bear in the woods than a man, demonstrating a completely irrational fear of men [they may tell you that women are statistically more likely to be hurt by a man than a bear, but if these women could understand statistics they would know that is nonsense because of the much greater frequency with which women are around men.]

The point is that Democrats are heavily reliant on single women, the childless cat ladies JD Vance referenced once years ago and which the media then claimed he won’t stop talking about. It’s understandable that they need to play to the fears and hatreds of their base, which is a big part of what electoral politics is. Republicans do this too: men fear that an illegal immigrant will take their job or rape their wife or daughter. However, illegal immigrants don’t take the pointless email jobs Democrat women have and the Democrat core of childless single women don’t have spouses and children to protect, so instead they fear men and having children. It’s a deeply unhealthy pathology. The difference between fearmongering about these two things as political strategies is that illegal immigrants can’t vote whereas men make up roughly half of the electorate [though women do vote at slightly higher rates than men.] I have long said it was in a way an admirably bold strategy for Democrats to scapegoat the general public as they did with covid, or to scapegoat men as they did well before that, but now that they’ve seen the error in their ways we can assume it was just stupidity. However, it is easier to identify a problem than it is to fix it. It is fine to say they need more male voters, but their attempt to win them has been a farce.

Please consider a paid subscription. We are struggling to get back on our feet after my wives maternity leave, and I promise I am trying to get my productivity up. There is no better way to stick it to the media and Democrats than supporting independent writers on Substack.

Once Kamala Harris was selected to replace Joe Biden, Democrats immediately got to work on trying to appeal to men, having always blamed men for Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 [which is accurate in terms of voting numbers, but men aren’t at fault that she is a horrible person and candidate, or that Democrats chose her knowing her enormous negatives with that demographic.] Tim Walz, who looks like the guy nothing is going right for at the beginning of a commercial, was their initial portrait of masculinity. He is said to be popular among women who hate their fathers, which is a substantial portion of Democrat voters. It is curious to note about this ham-fisted campaign that many have said transgender ideology reduces womanhood to its accouterments, which is to say wearing lipstick and earrings and the like, but we are learning that is how they view manhood as well. For example, they gave us this video of Tim Walz changing his air filter, perhaps the only under the hood maintenance the average Democrat woman knows how to do, but it is meant to show he is a man’s man.

I will give him that his International Scout is a nice rig [I used to have a neighbor who owned one of these] but he still just seems like the dad in a bad public service announcement about not smoking, except instead of comparing the air filter to your lungs he inexplicably relates the situation to Project 2025. We can safely assume there are no straight men under 40 in the Democrat consultant class when this is what they release. It is impossible for me to conceptualize a man who who wasn’t already planning on voting for Harris finding this compelling. Yet, there is no reason to show him working on a car except as an appeal to masculinity.

The air filter video is not nearly the worst of it. Walz, who is supposed to be some sort of average Midwestern man, a self-described knucklehead, also tried to burnish his 2nd Amendment credentials by going pheasant hunting. Suffice to say, he took the concept of being a “Fudd” to the next level. This guy looks as if he has never handled a gun and is putting everyone around him at risk by pretending he knows what he is doing. It was better for laughing at than winning votes:

Still, one must acknowledge that Walz is one of the more amusing characters to enter American public life in recent years, though not in a way that should cause anyone to want to vote for him:

At the same time Democrats were striking out with Tim Walz, they tried to present the man who could be our nation’s first “First Gentleman,” Doug Emhoff, as their portrait of a new and “positive” masculinity. The explanation for how he is positively masculine was basically just that he stands there while his wife is campaigning. Feminists rightly complain about how society will praise men for doing the bare minimum, and one would be hard pressed to find a clearer example, especially as every political spouse does this.

Just being unimpressive would be one thing, but it is much worse. It came out a couple of months ago that during his first marriage Doug Emhoff got his children’s’ nanny pregnant and may or may not have pressured her into getting an abortion [one way or another, no child was born.] Then, we learned that there were credible accusations of him slapping his girlfriend hard enough that it spun her around at an award show in France. After that, it came out that his law firm was known for hiring attractive women and then retaliating against them as employees if they did not tolerate sexual harassment. In short, it turns out that as opposed to a new form of “positive masculinity” he gives us the version you would get from a professional athlete or the show Mad Men. As ever, the hypocrisy is maddening, and I suppose this is another example of how women want something different in a man than they say. Regardless, they quickly had to drop Emhoff as a man they could use to promote the Kamala candidacy to men, because the cost with women would be too high. Since all that came out, we haven’t heard too much from Dougie.

When it didn’t work out with a bumbling white man and a seemingly inoffensive Jewish lawyer who turned out to be wildly misogynistic, the Democrats narrowed their focus to black men and turned to America’s most famous condescending black man: former President Barack Obama. In a widely criticized speech, Obama said that some black men are not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” Then Obama, who is of no African-American heritage whatsoever, went on to say the hesitation was “more pronounced among the brothers.” Obama continued,

“And now, you’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you? Because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”

Notice how he denigrates them in that very statement. Of course, to outside observers, the problem with scolding and browbeating men who you believe already don’t want to vote for a woman is obvious.

Some Democrats have said that refusal to vote for a woman candidate is a problem with men generally, and it is counterproductive to single out black men who are some of their most reliable supporters. One Harris surrogate, the actor Wendell Pierce, known for playing Detective Bunk on The Wire, said,

“The party has to stop scapegoating Black men…This accusatorial tone will make some Black men stay home — which is worse…Black men are questioning our party to find out what their loyalty for decades earns them. That’s good. That’s healthy.”

This is similar to what I have long said about the support Democrats receive from blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities: for the coalition to hold together they have to show they have done something for them. Notably, black voters have always been substantially more socially conservative and religious than white progressives. This made the party’s turn towards extremism on cultural issues a challenging balancing act, though since 2020 they seem to be moving back to relative sanity. That said, Harris still has pronouns in her bio. For her part, Harris seems to agree with Pierce, saying that this entire premise shows an entitlement that black men should be in the “back pocket” of Democrats.

In an effort to provide something for black men, whom Harris seems to have little contact with, she put out a bizarre plan to make them all cryptocurrency and marijuana entrepreneurs:

In short, it appears Harris, who perhaps has not spoken to a black man since she briefly dated Montel Williams, believes the average black man is a drug addict and aspiring drug dealer and crypto scammer with AIDS who can be easily bought off. Of course, it is not actually legal for the government to give loans only to black men and none of these besides perhaps putting more money towards Sickle Cell Anemia have any specific relevance to black men. I will give the Harris campaign that more black male public school teachers would probably be a good thing for black communities if they were somehow able to achieve that goal. However, programs to pay off student loans for teachers willing to teach in impoverished communities have existed for decades as have need-based college grants, and it isn’t clear how she would get them into new programs if they aren’t using the existing programs.

The Harris campaign quickly acknowledged that all of these programs would be race-neutral, which by extension means that indeed she had only shown that she views black men through a collection of negative stereotypes. No one can agree on what Harris should do to win black men- especially in the face of Donald Trump who has the sort of lifestyle lionized in rap music- but one barbershop owner, James Lindsey, gave Huffington Post the following quote, which I think we can all agree with,

“It just feels like more of the same. I think the brothers are tired of it. If a Democrat gets elected, then the House is full of Republicans, or vice versa. And then what really gets done at that point? It feels like all they care about is their reelection.”

Indeed, my man. While I sympathize with him, for the Harris campaign, black men staying home is enough to sink them.

Hopeless with the portion of black male voters who are wavering, and helpless in the face of the continued rightward shift among Hispanics putting to rest the Democrats’ long-time belief that immigration would give them a permanent majority, Democrats smelled trouble. Some of the more enterprising realized they could play to the one thing they believe about men: they are all misogynists who only view women as potential sexual conquests.

Matt Yglesias, the most boring man on earth, wants young men to know that they have to be Democrats to get laid:

There are a few things to note here, perhaps the most important of which is that it doesn’t say this is only women, so at least some of that 43% are men and the people within that number can pair off with each other. That also isn’t a hard no, and women are famously bad at describing what they want in a partner, especially on the phone at 3 in the afternoon thinking of a theoretical person. This likely has no bearing on who they might let take them home from a club or grow attracted to if they actually knew the man. Further, they are probably thinking of a guy who sleeps in a MAGA hat and has huge flags on his lifted truck, not an otherwise normal man who happens to choose to vote for Donald Trump for any number of reasons. However, what seems the most significant about this Yglesias Tweet is that, as one Twitter user pointed out,

It isn’t just Yglesias though, who is kind of an unusual guy and is willing to take upsetting but simultaneously boring positions. The Kamala campaign itself also put out an awful commercial promoting this same line of reasoning. Not only did they make this, they appear to think it is good:

Right, so they play into one of the strongest misogynistic stereotypes of the “incel,” “redpill,” “manosphere” men, that women only want a man who is very tall and makes over 6 figures, but then they make sure you know that even so you won’t get laid unless you support Kamala Harris. Of course, this also portrays men as Neanderthals who care more about sex than the future of their country. While we’re here, why do Democrats always say “Make a plan to vote”? Voting is going to a place at a time. This is how anything in life works, from buying groceries to having your teeth cleaned to watching your kid’s sports games [to the extent that Democrat voters have children.] Any idiot can do that no problem- literally mentally disabled adults can keep appointments if they are decently functional- but I suppose the person who can’t do it easily is a neurotic midwit: the Democrat base. Regardless, the point of the ad is clear: this 6’5 black man who works in finance will only get the sexual prize of fornicating with these women if he supports Kamala Harris. I suppose all these years after Willie Brown, she still thinks sex is the only way a woman can get ahead.

Still not getting anywhere, other Democrats moved back to using their hatred of men to appeal to women whom they perceive as being weak and dominated by the men in their life. As ever, they showed just how little respect they have for the strength, independence, and marriages of women.

White women, did you know that your vote is private?

I wonder if the men whom Democrats think won’t be getting laid if they don’t support Kamala Harris know they could just lie about their votes!

In fairness, these posts were widely mocked, moreso than they were shared by people who support the message, but it is still coming from two popular Democrat accounts as well as the most prominent women’s political organization in the country. It is amazing how these people put partisan politics above all else and don’t understand marriage. If you can’t admit to your spouse who you vote for and instead lie about it you have much bigger problems than what theoretical impact your one vote out of millions might have should you happen to live in one of the 7 significant “swing states.” This is their advice for fixing society: lie to your spouse. Also, everyone knows your vote is private, women don’t need to be told that. But oh dear, these poor fragile women “align” their votes with their husbands!¹

Democrats have no idea how normal married couples function, presumably because they are led by single women, women who are dominant in their marriages, and women who married so late in life that they never properly integrated their life with their husband’s. There are a several straightforward explanation for married women being more Republican, and thus “aligning” with their husbands. To start, married couples tend to have similar values and also don’t generally like “cancelling” each other’s votes [though to people who are not skeptical and believe in “the system” it is still then worth voting as it gets participation up and you get to express yourself or whatever.] Further, married couples are on average older, wealthier, and more likely to own homes and have children, all things which tend to make a person more conservative. In the telling of Democrats this is simply a sign they are following their husbands into the arms of Donald Trump. It must be added that married women are less likely to hate men and more likely to have sons to coddle and fret over, making them less receptive to misandrist political messaging.

There is something else going on that may be less apparent, but is important to the way women and men complement each other. If you’ll forgive the digression, in the classic text Black Lamb and Grey Falcon the author, Rebecca West, [who it must be said was herself something of a feminist trailblazer who lived an unconventional life] notes that the root word for “idiot” comes from a Greek word meaning “a private person” and then says the following,

“Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outline of every object, but not the details indicative of their nature.” [Prologue]

The point is this: when a conventionally masculine man and conventionally feminine woman are bound together in a functional marital union it is the usual nature of things that the man will be more interested in the world outside of their family, while the woman will have a better understanding of the needs of their family and how they are personally impacted by the world. It is, then, normal that the process by which a husband and wife would come to a conclusion about how they should vote [assuming they want to vote the same way] is through the man’s better understanding of politics and policy and the woman’s better understanding of how politics impacts their own family. By doing this they are working together in a way where the man has a kind of leadership but the decision is also reached by a form of consensus. A husband and wife deciding how to vote can discuss, and hopefully agree on, their values, needs, and place in the society in which they live. But to the Democrats above, the weak-willed and duplicitous woman should lie to her brutish, sexist husband for the sake of The Party.

A talented politician can lay out public policy while also explaining why it will impact you personally, appealing to both men and women. Kamala Harris is not a talented politician and shows little interest in policy. Instead, she relies on emotional appeals to those with a warped sense of how gender functions in society.

All of the above, of course, only applies to more traditional men and women, whereas the Democrats are the party of the opposite:

Democrats are clueless about how to deal with what would have been normal men 30 years ago before a generation of activist female teachers tried to neuter them. They simply cannot accept the fact that they created this problem themselves and that Trump’s main strength, among both the men and women that support him, is that he is brash and self-confident, not a bumbling oaf like Tim Walz or a weak and [allegedly] abusive man who hides his own nature like Doug Emhoff.

As Democrat outreach to men of all races continues to fail, there is little for us to do but sit back and laugh. For example, look at this Democrat panel on masculinity:

That men’s fashion guy on Twitter needs to write a thread about how it is that Rachel Maddow came to be a fashion icon for liberal men.

They also tried sending out this young fella, who appears to be quite passionate about getting Kamala Harris elected:

In seriousness, you may not remember this, but a few years ago the media tried to tell us that this woman- Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter- was better looking and better dressed than Ivanka Trump, and they seemed to be sincere. Bear in mind this is some version of dolling up her usual gender-bending ugly aesthetic appearance for the purpose of the campaign. That is how disconnected they are from any normal person’s view of gender, aesthetics, or any other personal matter regarding relations between the sexes.

They do have one last “Hail Mary” though, which would be to focus on actual policy issues. Stand by to see how it goes:

In preparation for this article, I read a large number of terrible op-eds about why Democrats were failing with men and what it says about our society that men might prefer a masculine leader. Of course, absent from any of these are meaningful arguments for Harris. Several Republican states have had popular female governors, so there is not a good reason to believe a substantial body of the electorate would outright refuse to vote for a woman, even if a woman campaigning faced different challenges than a man. Men didn’t hate Hillary Clinton because she is a woman, they hated her because she is a dishonest, vicious, and nasty person. Men don’t trust Kamala Harris to be President not because she is a woman but because she comes off as if she might possibly be coherent if she could keep it down to her prescribed amount of valium and only two glasses of chardonnay per day- something which, based on her word salad followed by misplaced laughter, it seems she must usually fail at. Though the endless op-eds about sexism and masculinity are at times amusing in their cluelessness, I will spare you, just giving one headline as an example:

Contra Mr. Tisdall, I assure you that if male voters cost Democrats this election it will primarily have to do with the genuine support for Donald Trump, the fact that the average Kamala Harris speech is like the worst comedy open mic you have ever seen, and that her status as an incoherent empty vessel cannot be hidden from normal men. However, to the extent sexism is a factor in deciding this election, it will have more to do with the misandry of Democrats than the misogyny of Republicans. Democrats are doing the meme:

Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. I am a regular contributor at The Libertarian Institute. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.

1. Our state has mail-in only voting, and my wife and I vote sitting at the table together, but she was further ahead on her ballot, and when I said I wanted to vote “no, yes, no” on the tax levies, she said she already had. As we had been talking about this, I joked, “look, I didn’t even have to tell you how to vote!” and Alexis, a feminist, said “I voted for Donald Trump of my own volition, not because my husband told me to!”