BRIDGET PHETASY: How the Democrats Bud Lighted their brand.
In October, in a last-ditch effort to reach men while Donald Trump was doing the podcast-bro circuit, the left-wing PAC Vote Save America put out a cringe-inducing video called “Man Enough.” It featured various men, mostly white men dressed like cowboys with one black man in a weight room. It was roundly mocked and satirized. The top comment on the YouTube video is, “What’s with the dude sitting on the tailgate like a teenage girl getting her high school senior pics taken??? LMFAO”
The video began by letting us know, “I’m a man,” while leaning into the most stereotypical ideas of what manhood is. “I’m man enough to enjoy a barrel-proof Bourbon. Neat.” “I’m man enough to cook my steak rare.” “I eat carburetors for breakfast.”
“And I’ll tell you another thing I’m sure as shit not afraid of,” says a guy I swear I’ve seen in a fast-food commercial before. “WOMEN.”
“I love women,” the man sitting on the tailgate assures us, still not quite sure what to do with his manly hands. I’m dubious. The video ends with a call to “man up” and vote for Harris.
Suddenly, just like that, Democrats knew what men and women were. Suddenly, you could say things like “man up” — and it wasn’t internalized misogyny, or the patriarchy, or whatever other ridiculous problematic offense professors of gender theory invented.
Reality remains undefeated and suddenly it reasserted itself. Yet in order to appeal to one of the two genders which now apparently exist again, Democratic organizers ended up falling back on clichéd stereotypes of what men are… because they actually have no idea.
The Democrats realized too late that they had Bud Lighted their brand. You can’t be openly hostile to men for two decades and expect to retain the male vote. And judging by Trump’s gains with both genders, you also can’t be incapable of defining what a woman is and expect women to believe you care about them, either.
As David Harsanyi adds at the Washington Examiner: The lesson of 2024? Don’t be weird.
A lot of you people sound nuts.
So, it is unsurprising that a Donald Trump campaign ad featuring the tagline “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” was effective in the 2024 presidential campaign. Indeed, a pro-Kamala Harris PAC says the spot, which featured a clip of Harris endorsing state-funded sex-change operations for prisoners, “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.”
Now, one suspects most normies aren’t only turned off by “they/them” because it’s grammatically mystifying or scientifically dubious. For many, “they/them” represents the 14,000 confused children who have been mutilated by “gender-affirming care.” For others, “they/them” represents thousands of girls and women who are forced to compete with boys and men on the field.
For most, though, “they/them” is probably just a microcosm of all the weird cultural fads the Left has been trying to normalize and force-feed society. Normies tend to reject social science quackery.
Americans are generally happy to make accommodations for alternative lifestyles. That doesn’t make this stuff less bizarre or extreme. And the speed at which the Left has demanded everyone treat these unhinged notions as the norm is mind-blowing.
Exit quote:
Related: As someone who spent 2019 marketing herself as weird and in-your-face and non-stop predicting doomsday, this is another indicator of a cultural shift:
