Stop with Pushing these Gender-War Memes...
It's not true.
Pappies Ross Douthat (East Coast) and Ezra Klein (West Coast) who have reached the age of middle-class fatherhood, and make their husbandry and parenting a part of their journalism today have both concluded: the presidential election this year will center on the all-important national issue of gender, specfically masculinity.
Douthat: "This election isn’t going to be a referendum on inflation, immigration or foreign policy anymore. It’s going to be a referendum on masculinity in America."*
Klein: "Presidential elections are too vast and complicated to be about any one thing, but they’re sometimes more about one thing than they are about other things. The 2016 election was more about immigration, about who counted as an American. The 2020 election was more about Donald Trump, about what kind of country America was and would become.
And the 2024 election is more about gender."**
That's news to a lot of other Americans, women and those who support medical choice, who are focusing on:
- freedom;
- economic equality;
- fairly addressing immigrant labor; and
- ending America's ongoing financial support for wasteful wars of this world.
Let's nip these false gender-war memes in the bud before more fatherly-like pundits today begin to adopt the issue as column fodder because it fits their own personal brand of what passes as journalism today?
Cover the election itself. The issues people care about, not what the media whips up to try and divert attention from what concerns us, keeps us up at night across the country...
Stop interjecting your own pet issues into the national narrative please, gentlemen, because perhaps you are not prepared nor eager to discuss America's disgust with what is happening overseas, and more importantly: the desire by younger generations of Americans (who do not share in the generational wealth at the top) to invest in America today, and stop shipping billions of our tax earnings to other lands for more deadly wars.
If the politicians in Washington DC don't hear this message, what incentive do they have to change their work habits and priorities?
Think:
- immigration, not sex or gender;
- Declaring or openly discussing the wisdom of suupporting war when our weapons are used to attack sovereign nations by those we arm, not whether your child's computer usage should be nationally regulated;
- "Trust busting" or implementing legislation that rewards working contributors in this country, and stops the profit squeezing techniques that favor the rentiers and shareholders, over consumers and workers.
If you get out into the country and talk to people (other than your expert friends who are on book tours, touting their hardcover wisdom well earned from paperwork academic theories and not life experience), you might discover what this November election is actually about, Ross and Ezra, you silly Charlie Browns you...
Just because you say a thing doesn't make it so. Go back to that numbered list and tell me if Americans care more about Congress and the executive branch setting an agenda to address those issues over gender wars, tampons in bathrooms, or who caused us to lose the Iraq War, as if Tim Walz' non deployment factored into the loss...
The country is looking ahead. You hope these journalist guys today can take leave of their family for a bit, get out on the campaign trail, and do more listenining and less dictating -- Daddy-like almost! -- telling us what the national issues are this go-around because they still believe they are in a position of power to define the nation's real-life talking points...
Maybe on cable and the podcasts, but sex and gender and masculine/feminine issues are decidedly not dominating conversations off the college campuses and outside of coastal enclaves this new set of media fellas inhabit today. So much for newroom diversity, a quarter century in...
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ROSS DOUTHAT
Masculinity Is on the Ballot
**
THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW
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