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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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White Dudes for Harris

It should be remembered that it was the Democrat party that broke the ice on invoking White Identity Politics directly to muster political support. The Republican party has only ever used proxy rhetoric like "they have to come legally" or "tough on crime", but looking at the recent Convention it's clear the Republican strategy is to go for the Big Tent rather than directly appeal to white voters. It's the Harris campaign that makes the direct appeal to white men, and you would not see an event like this hosted within the Republican party.

This is another indication that we're probably over the hill of Peak Woke that a white identity is acknowledged in a non-critical context:

“There is an epidemic amongst men in this country,” Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist who helped organize the call, told The Hill.

“That loneliness, that anxiety, that disconnection, it gets filled by something. And what Republicans have done an incredible job of, depressingly so, is creating a permission structure that makes it very easy for white men to embrace Donald Trump, to embrace MAGA culture, to embrace this sort of devolution of our politics into something much more crass,” he continued. ...

Nellis, on the other hand, argued that Democrats have been too quick in the past to give up on constituencies that seem out of reach, like rural voters and white male voters.

“We should be fighting for every inch and damn sure know that the Republicans do that. They communicate with every constituency that they can win, lose, or draw,” Nellis said.

“If we could move even a fraction of white men and get them to a place where they feel comfortable with being a part of the multicultural movement that is the Democratic Party, as imperfect as it is a lot of days, that would change our politics dramatically and so much for the better.”

That's a huge shift in messaging from just a few years ago in the midst of the Floyd riots.

There’s no shift in the messaging, it’s explicitly telling white men kneel. Note that in the equivalent for black dudes, they are referred to as men. White men are not allowed to be referred to as “men”, that would be too masculine = dominant. They are being put down and infantilized, and then told to smile about it. This is obvious and transparent in all subtext.

Hell, just note the pettiness in this quote:

Bannon said to beat Trump and overcome his support with white men, Harris is going to have to generate excitement among other demographics, including white women, young voters, and Black voters.

This isn’t a direct quote from any dem representative, but The Hill is obviously dem aligned and it’s just so ironic in its utter disrespect. This is what they really think.

I am certainly not saying Harris' campaign is pro-White, but it's the introduction of White identity politics into mainstream politics. And it's not going to go away, and it's the Democrats who have introduced it first.