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2014-Era Neckbeard Shaming is BACK
"These Guys are Just Weird" is the new ad from pro-Kamala super PAC Won't Pac Down. You really do have to watch it to viscerally understand the impact. I am not gifted enough with words to give it justice. It's not clear if this ad will ever air on tv (seems a bit racy for that), but the internet is where modern elections are won or lost.
As grossly offensive as I find the ad, I cannot deny being impressed. Just a few days ago I pointed out that Democrats need better messaging if they want to persuade voters. This kind of appeal to base instinct is exactly what wins elections. The ethos of "when they go low, we go high," sure sounds good at dinner parties, but it likely cost Dems the 2016 election. In some sense, I truly think they were afraid of the sheer effectiveness of Willie Horton. It took Trump to scare them enough to pull out the stops.
It's interesting to see an ad that is so far removed from the actual election. It doesn't even mention any actual candidates (except the speaker of the house, who is not in a competitive election). It's just "those guys suck!" It isn't targeting Trump, or any specific Republican candidate- it's targeting Republican voters.
Like @urquan said, I feel like the ad actually targets men, not women. It seems to be saying "you don't want to be one of those weird creepy Republican guys like these people." One of the main "issues" in the ad seems to be a ban on porn which (a) isn't actually a real issue proposed by anybody and (b) seems like something that would motivate male voters much more than women.
Quoth the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership:
Is Trump actually going to try to do it? Probably not. If he does, will it actually be upheld? Almost certainly not. But it has been proposed by somebody.
Ok, yes, "somebody" has proposed it. Just not, you know, Trump, or Vance, or any official Republican platform.
Besides, from the context, it sounds like theyre mostly talking about showing trans stuff to kids? I dont think "educators and public librarians" really show a lot of porn. I know the schools have slipped but i dont think its quite that bad yet...
No, it reads exactly like the stock Boomer-trad (or progressive) complaints about it. Narcissism of small differences may be viewed by replacing 'transgender ideology' with 'violence towards women' in the first sentence.
It's a general loser of a proposition and 20th century anti-porn views/laws (including "just restrict the ages") are likely to lose Republicans more male voters than an ad by the other side that calls them creeps will (since all men have heard that one before and have slowly figured out they should ignore that particular complaint).
This is only half true with the shitty-Tumblr-tier picture books, the occasional novel that has a sex scene in it, and teachers being in such a rush to get to proselytizing the virtues of gay sex that they forget the overwhelming majority of second grade boys aren't generally in much of a hurry to try this for reasons that are obvious to anyone who remembers second grade (many, I believe, forget on purpose).
There really isn't a positive vision of dealing with the facts on the ground here; porn is a tool like anything else and it's not going back in the box, so you either evolve a strategy to deal with it or you lose. (Maybe instead of complaining constantly about "but for some reason men want to choke or facial their girlfriends the first time" you develop some messaging to point out that sex is give/take like everything else so that young adults are prepared to have better sex and don't have to pile on so many stakes they put off trying to engage with the opposite sex in a romantic fashion long enough that they become content never having tried? Of course, you also have to not hate the concept of young adults having sex to do that, and you can't be a traditionalist or progressive without hating young adults and sex [both will claim "protection of women and children" as an excuse to hate sex- traditionalists hate it when a young men has sex with a woman they feel should have been theirs, progressives hate it when a young women has sex with a man they feel should have been theirs] so it's definitely too much to ask of them.)
I mean, I suppose it depends on what counts as "traditionalist". You don't have to go back all that far to get to "marriage at 12, please fuck a lot so I can have grandkids".
Yes, but most of that is out of living memory now (and the edgy people who think we should return to marrying that young tend to be… unusual, to put it politely).
As for me, I see traditionalists as a cluster of people who believe “playing the field is bad and virginity is good because reasons” simply through observing religious Boomers and older.
And to put it impolitely?
Impolitely:
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