Everything men do is cringe

Some Guys Are Getting It, Some Guys Are Definitely Not Getting It

On Monday night, a three-plus-hour celebrity-stuffed Zoom call dubbed White Dudes For Harris raised around four million dollars. Cringe? Of course, everything men do is cringe. But it was also an important window into America’s political gender divide.

As Derek Thompson in The Atlantic recently wrote, “The gender war is much weirder than it initially appears.” Yes, over the last three election cycles, young men have radicalized right, and young women, largely due to abortion laws, have moved left. But, as Thompson notes, that does not mean that we’ll see a simple binary of men voting for former President Donald Trump in November and women voting for Vice President Kamala Harris. Polling data actually suggests that the country’s two political factions are: an overwhelming amount of men, usually divorced, and some women who want a return to “traditional” gender roles, whatever those are, and an overwhelming amount of women and some men who don’t. College football Stanley cup couples vs. Harry Potter thigh tattoo throuples, a battle for the soul of America’s various microbreweries, etc.

And one could argue that this has really been the defining — possibly the only — American political story for literally the last decade. Gamergate turns 10 in a couple days. And this would have been a deeply difficult election for Democrats to win if they were still running President Joe “I’m Catholic so I can’t say abortion is good, but I won’t say abortion is bad” Biden as their candidate. In fact, there’s a way of looking at Biden’s entire administration as one giant failed political project aimed at finding economic distractions and impossible compromises meant to soothe the country’s political gender divide. Addressing the symptoms, never acknowledging there is was even a disease.

Harris, on the other hand, was able to articulate a clear take on abortion within days of her entering the election. Her first campaign ad, set to a Beyoncé song, linked gun control, bodily autonomy, healthcare, and childcare into one single issue. A platform so succinct it’s genuinely enraging it took a Democrat this long to do it.

But Trump, like Biden, has also been running on a platform — if you’re brave enough to call it that — that doesn’t acknowledge this political gender divide either. This is largely because he doesn’t clearly acknowledge anything. Like all good populists, he knows there’s power in never truly coloring inside the lines of what you’re saying and letting your followers do it for you.

But Project 2025 and the appointment of JD Vance as his running mate have blown this up entirely. Both have said the quiet parts out loud and voters are, obviously, alarmed. The tax for childless adults that Vance proposed in 2021 is so politically toxic that even incels on 4chan are saying, “hey, what a minute, we hate women too, but we have no chance of ever finding one to impregnate and we’re also very poor.” And this is also why the “weird” label is bothering so many far-right influencers. Trumpian cultural hijacking doesn’t work if your opposition fully understands what your politics are and is in agreement that they suck. Even Trump seems to get this. He’s called Project 2025 a “lunatic project” and Paul Dans, Project 2025’s director, stepped down this week. The CIA dreams of election interference as effective as just letting Republicans tell people what they actually believe.

But funniest of all, it has left Silicon Valley’s reactionary podcaster-CEOs screaming into a digital void. They were always a step behind, but now it’s extremely obvious. Venture capitalist David Sacks has been having a meltdown about Harris for weeks and is currently just straight up begging people to stop reading the news and only read X. “The biggest divide in the electorate is between people who get their information from independent media and those who are brainwashed by the mainstream media,” he posted yesterday. Which is actually not true in 2024. Most people don’t read anything and just watch slime-making videos on TikTok. But it probably was true 10 years ago when he and his fellow golf club monarchists started dreaming up how to capture Twitter and turn it into a right-wing propaganda machine. And, once again, the engine of their plan was gender. Last week, Elon Musk, during an interview with The Joker of cleaning your room, Jordan Peterson, finally revealed that his decision to buy Twitter and destroy “the woke mind virus,” was a direct response to his daughter coming out as trans.

Yes, these guys want to cash out on a Trump-led Bitcoin bull market, but they’re also supremely freaked out by a world where women have the same professional opportunities as men. This is why they spend most of their time losing their minds over random TikToks of women having fun at work and screeching about diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. And this is why X keeps mysteriously suspending and rate-limiting accounts that support Harris’ campaign. They still think X matters.

Look, I’m going to end this the way I have for the last few weeks. We simply won’t know if this is enough to prevent a second Trump presidency until polls close. And there are a million variables that can arise in the next few months. But Harris’ campaign has tapped into something real and Republicans, at least for the moment, are worried.

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Some Good Schlossberg Content

A Far-Right Mob Used A Mass Stabbing In England As A Pretense To Riot At A Mosque

Three children were killed and many others were injured this week after a man with a knife attacked a Taylor Swift-themed yoga class in a small English town called Southport. Details about the attack are still scarce, largely due to the UK’s strict reporting laws around crime. But what we do know is that the attacker was a 17-year-old from a nearby village. He was born in Cardiff, Wales, and his parents are from Rwanda.

These details are important because following a vigil for the attack, far-right hooligans connected to the English Defense League stormed a local mosque, clashed with police, and rioted in the street. So how did the attack get connected to the mosque? A rumor on X, of course.

One of the main nodes in the disinfo chain was a right-wing journalist named David Atherton, who claimed the attacker was a Middle Eastern illegal migrant and on an MI5 watch list. Which there was no basis for whatsoever. Atherton has since taken down his post and apologized and also said his house was raided by police.

The mosque that was attacked has received a ton of community support this morning, which is great. And, also, one of the protesters got hit in both the head and the balls with bricks thrown by his fellow protestors. It’s important to look for the positives here, as microscopic as they may be.

New Dumb AI Wearable No One Will Ever Use Dropped

A new AI wearable was announced this week called Friend. You can watch the trailer above, but it’s basically a necklace you wear that connects to an AI chatbot that is nice to you. Yes, we’ve reached the BonziBuddy stage of AI development.

The company behind the device bought the friend.com URL, which the CEO confirmed cost a $1.8 million. I was excited to check out such an expensive website, but, I kid you not, my ISP won’t let me access it and says that it’s blocked due to suspicious content. Masterful gambit.

There appears to be a whole bunch of other drama surrounding the startup, which I learned about thanks to this meme.

Zuckerberg Seems To Think He Can Reinvent Himself As An Open Platforms Guy

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang this week and decided to fully embrace his new zoomer fuckboy PR costume, dropping F-bombs, and going on a whole run about Apple. “Get me talking about closed platforms, and I get angry,” he said of Apple at one point.

As Engadget has reported, the humans that pilot the Zuckerberg suit are in the process of switching up his public image as a way to get ahead of some serious regulatory issues. Part of this is his new look, which I would describe as “little boy whose dad lets him work at the family surf shack during the summers.” And the other piece of it is Zuckerberg’s sudden vocal support of “open platforms,” which appears to be based on hallucinations he’s currently having of literally his entire personal history of using the web.

He almost singlehandedly killed the website as a concept. It doesn’t get more closed than that, my man.

The Olympics Are Pivoting From Nintendo Games To NFTs For Some Reason?

Eurogamer has an absolutely baffling report out this week that the International Olympic Committee is moving away from the Mario & Sonic Olympic video games and will be pivoting to smartphone games, esports, and NFTs.

I had a poke around the NFT project that Eurogamer linked to. It’s called Olympics GO!, and, like all NFT games, it’s a shovelware mobile game that is not actually run on the blockchain and the NFTs don’t really matter. You play crappy not-rhythm games and you can claim a free NFT “pin,” which is built on the Ethereum blockchain. And there is apparently some partnership with Coinbase involved.

An Important Olympics Update

(Click through for the full screenshot.)

Some Stray Links

• Watch LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman realize he’s an oligarch in real time

• “Coinbase appears to have violated campaign finance laws with a $25 million super PAC donation”

• “What does it mean that hundreds of thousands of players are clicking on a banana?” (Adam and I wrote this!)

P.S. here’s hit em.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***