What is up with these whiny, right-wing dudes?

If you're one of the 5 regular readers of this site, you have probably figured out that I'm a straight white male approaching 50 years of age. And as a midde-aged white guy, I often end up shaking my head at what seems to be a large number of dipshits that fall in my demographic (both gender-race wise, and in the age demo).

There are two excellent columns from this week that discuss this, both of which ask "WTF is going on with these dudes?", especially the right-wing version of this type of weak, whiny white guy. The first is from Ross Rosenfeld of the New Republic, who notes that Trump is Going All in on Weird, Lonely Young Dudes Who Hate Women, and the article centers on a recent meeting between the GOP nominee and some dork on YouTube named Adin Ross.

Look at these dweebs.

...the biggest overlap is their respective fan bases: predominantly white, aggrieved, disaffected young men with Gulf of Mexico–size reserves of anger toward women. As Jonathan Haidt discusses in his recent book, The Anxious Generation, many of these young men grew up attached to screens and never developed the social skills to communicate with employers or women. Many are incels, addicted to porn and video games. (Ross himself was banned from Twitch after visiting the site PornHub while livestreaming the Super Bowl.) Threatened by diversity and the elevation of women in the workplace and society, they yearn for a return to a world of male domination.

Many are also racist and antisemitic and hold extreme right-wing political views. So it is no surprise that they gravitate toward the only presidential ticket that represents their views. We might take inspiration from Tim Walz and call them “weirdcels.”

The Trump campaign and supporting PACs have been trying to tap into this group for a while, back before a middle-aged, biracial woman replaced an old white guy atop the Democratic ticket. But now—rather than attempting a course correction, to appeal to the women voters shifting toward Harris—the Trump campaign and its allies seem to be doubling down on their outreach. Last week, a pro-Trump PAC called Send the Vote launched with a goal of raising $20 million for outreach to men under 30. The effort is headlined by the Nelk Boys, right-wing Canadian American vloggers and podcasters who recently sat down with J.D. Vance, in a rather awkward fashion, looking like bar bros meeting with a Goldman Sachs exec.

But it is Vance himself, the too-online weirdo of “childless cat ladies” fame, who is perhaps the ideal figure for the type of demographic the campaign is trying to reach. He’s a Marine veteran and former venture capitalist who claims (somewhat disingenuously) to hail from Appalachia and who, much like Trump, doesn’t hesitate to equate femininity with weakness. The idea of a strong woman is frightening to him just as it is to the young men they’re trying to reach.

Any man who serves under a woman cannot be a real man, as they see it. That’s why they’ve taken to calling Harris’s running mate “Tampon Tim.” The nickname seems to have originated with former Trump adviser and close ally Stephen Miller, and quickly became a meme. Trump posted a clip Wednesday of Jesse Watters using it as a slur. The Trump team claims the term is a critique of Walz’s support of a Minnesota law he signed that mandated tampons in both girls’ and boys’ bathrooms (since transgender boys can still experience periods), but it seems rather convenient that the nickname fits into their overall message of emasculation.

Look, I was once a sexually frustrated young guy, so I get some of this. But the difference is that I would blame myself for not getting any action, and use feedback to figure out what I was doing wrong.

By comparison, these whiny dopes stay in their basements, think they're just fine, and blame women and "others" for their failures in life. Nah, dudes, it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that you don't work and seem incapable of having any type of level, one-to-one relationship with a female, nooooo.

The other article I want you to check out is from the always-excellent David Roth of Defector, with the great title of "Men on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown," and how GOP dudes have become increasingly pathetic and repellent as they try to come up with more things to be angry about.

The result of that work is a chunky slurry of gossip and fantasy and rank bigotry blasting from a thousand gilded hydrants at every hour of the day; it amounts to a grim sort of fan service catering to an even grimmer fanbase. This has limited public appeal, just in the sense of not being the sort of thing that most people are interested in hearing about, let alone to the exclusion of any other topic and in the most vexed n' fervid keening imaginable, and that poses an obvious problem for a political party that has entirely given itself over to the making of this kind of noise. The bigger issue, though, is that these imperatives only run in one direction—louder, uglier, more confrontational, further out, more. If the obvious tactical challenge here is that this shit absolutely sucks and most people hate it, the more fundamental one is that the internal incentives are such that it can only ever get worse.

The fantasy of a chastened or refined Trump is, and has long been, the dumbest dream of political media dorks; the followers that put this prissy old dunce at the center of their world, and the mediocrities and opportunists who identified his rancid charisma as their own tickets to ride, know that they can only ever and always do more. This is the nature of this type of content-creation gig, which can never turn off or calm down, but also this is the dead end that conservative politics was steering towards long before Trump took the wheel. A politics whose most fundamental idea is Make Progress Stop Happening would inevitably find itself fetishizing the torment of having to live in a world in which other people, who are not even you, are somehow supposed to matter just as much...

Again, some of this is just how conservative politics works; in lieu of any solution to any problem, lavishing attention upon the problem and identifying it as what the other guys want becomes the move more or less by default. But the limitations of this approach are not just obvious but overbearing. If the only answer available to the vice presidential nominee when asked What stuff do you like is a tremulous Go fuck yourself, something has gone wrong; if the only possible engagement with any or every other person is to antagonize or dominate, you will wind up lonely. There's no levity or recognizable human brightness to be found here, but there is also no air, nothing but grievance and its performance.

Again, a lot of this is just a politics built around one strange man mirroring that man's decline and serving his catastrophic tastes; as Trump's former insult-comic zest has slumped into recursive and increasingly obscure complaint, his movement has followed suit, to the point where aspirants like Ron DeSantis seem somehow to have un-learned how to smile as a strategic gambit. A political movement built on conservatism's signature combination of servility, sadism, and selfishness would naturally be inclined towards someone like Trump, who authentically embodies those, uh, let's call them "values." But installing someone that relentlessly corrupt and fundamentally unhappy atop a movement so inclined towards degrading mimesis would eventually turn it inward in destructive ways. The crises and anxieties feed on and fight with each other; they multiply, and grow louder and more chaotic. It gets weirder and weirder without any of the people inside of it noticing. They are all always saying the same things, but somehow never in any kind of harmony.

And Republicans continue to climb further up their own asses by the day, talking in some online language that no one with a real life and a real job cares about. And it's why the Harris-Walz theme of "Trump/GOP is a bunch of weirdos" is so effective. It not only is accurate, it also takes away any perceived power and dominance that these dead-enders try to portray to others, because instead of telling others how scary they and their ideas are, it reduces them to mockery.

I think most voters are tired of the constant stresses and idiocy that are a defining characteristic of 2024 Republicans, and want everyday life to be fun and enjoyable. And it's going to be a reason that I think Dems are going to be in a better position as we approach November.

Along those lines, I'm going to try for my own fun and enjoyment in a couple of hours as I join several friends and a few thousand others at the Great Taste of the Midwest.

Have a good weekend, and try not to have the incels and freaks drive you down to their pathetic levels.