Trump Is Running A ‘Dudes Rock’ Campaign. It’s Actually Working Pretty Well
If you’re a politician and want to appeal to young men, you shouldn’t spend years belittling them and then, in the eleventh hour, send a Marxist Mr. Magoo candidate on a pheasant hunt only for him to fumble around with a shotgun.
You also shouldn’t hire paid actors and a Jimmy Kimmel writer to whip up a cringe ad about how masculine men aren’t afraid to support a woman like Kamala Harris. But that’s exactly what the Harris-Walz campaign is doing in the final stretches of the race to court all the young men they’ve spent years alienating. They are attempting to repair a brand that has been Bud-Lighted. (RELATED: Democrats Bud Lighted Their Entire Brand, And It’s Too Late To Save It)
Trump, on the other hand, appears to be running a “Dudes Rock” campaign.
What is a Dudes Rock campaign, you might ask? A Dudes Rock campaign is going on a male-centric podcast, instead of a sex advice podcast like “Call Her Daddy,” and chopping it up with a couple dudes about football.
It’s all the UFC appearances Trump has made in the past year. It’s inviting Elon Musk to a campaign rally. It’s the various podcast interviews with the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Logan Paul and Theo Von.
And it seems to be working. While Harris and Walz make flaccid, last-ditch efforts to win over men, mainly by doing and saying things that men will find fake and obnoxious, Trump is just being himself, on whatever platform is offered him, and building on his lead among young males between the ages of 18 and 29.
In late August, journalist Peter Hamby warned Bill Maher that a shift in young men toward Trump could blow up Kamala’s hopes of becoming the first female president.
“This is a real issue for Kamala Harris,” Hamby said. “This could be fatal for her campaign … Democrats need to win 60% of the youth vote to win the White House.”
“Hillary came up short; Obama did it; Biden did it. Kamala Harris is right now at, like, 55% of the youth vote,” he went on to say. “If she doesn’t get to 60, she could lose the election, and it’s because young men, Gen Z men, are breaking to Trump.”
This election might really come down to dudes who rock. We shall see.
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US Boots Hit Ground In Israel As Threat From Iran Looms
U.S. servicemembers arrived in Israel on Monday amid the country’s chaotic multifront war with various actors in the region, and more troops will arrive soon, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
The Pentagon previously announced on Sunday that the troops would be deployed to the Middle East along with a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile battery system, meant to help Israel defend itself against potential aerial attacks against missile attacks from Iran. The approximately 100 troops that arrived on Monday will help operate the THAAD system, though the Pentagon wouldn’t say when it would be operational, given the sensitive security nature of the situation.
“Over the coming days, additional U.S. military personnel and THAAD battery components will continue to arrive in Israel,” Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder said on Tuesday. “The deployment of the THAAD battery to Israel underscores the United States’ commitment to the defense of Israel and to defend Americans in Israel from any ballistic missile attacks by Iran.”
Though U.S. forces are not permanently stationed in Israel — unlike other Arab states in the region — it isn’t untypical for troops to be temporarily deployed there for joint training exercises or operational activities. The U.S. also previously deployed a THAAD system to Israel in 2019 and 2023.
The THAAD system that’s been deployed to Israel now is to provide defenses against a possible Iranian ballistic missile attack. Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles against Israel in April, and again in late September; it is highly unusual for Iran to launch strikes from within its own orders, as it typically relies on its various terror networks throughout the Middle East to conduct attacks against Israel or U.S. forces in the region.
The current situation in the Middle East is fraught, however, and is quickly escalating. Israel went to war against Hamas in Gaza on Oct. 7, after the terrorist group invaded Israel and killed roughly 1,200 people, and now the current war is turning toward Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran.
The Biden-Harris administration has urged for caution and de-escalation in the region for months, though the conflict has shown no signs of slowing down. Various ceasefire deals have been discussed though none have come to fruition, as neither Israel, Hamas or Hezbollah seems interested.
U.S. forces have fallen under the crossfire in the conflict in Iraq, Syria and Jordan over the last year; three U.S. servicemembers were killed in a terrorist attack against a coalition base in Jordan in January.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/10/15/us-boots-hit-ground-in-israel-as-threat-from-iran-looms/
********************************************************Leading German Political Journalist Says Banning anti-immigrant party is “Overdue” and Insists Political Repression is Perfectly Fine When Exercised by a “Constitutional State”
The German elite are getting ants in their pants over the rise in popularity of Germany's AfD -- a real conservative party
This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-Right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal Parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.
Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD is accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.
A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated Government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. All their carefully curated talk-show tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “Right wing extremism”, all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would have long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.
Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by Political Editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue”. The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.
Let’s read it together.
Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky”, “too soon” and “simply undemocratic”, and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising”.
The problem… is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down”, Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD Senior President was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.
What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans,” the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.
Perhaps this is why Lautsch backtracks, deciding suddenly that the case for banning the AfD may not be all that obvious after all. She admits that it is “legally risky” because, for a ban to succeed, somebody would have “to prove… that [the AfD] is working to destroy the free democratic order”. This is very hard to do because “it is part of the AfD’s strategy to present itself as the party of true democrats and defenders of the constitution” even though “its representatives have long been working to dismantle the institutions of our Basic Law from within”. Thus, as always, the absence of evidence for anything untoward about the AfD becomes evidence for its malicious, underhanded, democracy-undermining strategies.
Lautsch, desperate to climb out of this circular argument, first seizes upon the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the domestic intelligence agency that has been spying on the AfD for years. She insists that it has “already collected extensive material… which in itself could be used to justify a ban”. Lautsch’s “could” is doing a great deal of work here. The problem is that nobody, least of all Lautsch, has any idea what material the constitutional protectors have compiled. We can, however, try to learn from similar cases where we know more. Back in February, for example, I took a very close look at the information the constitutional protectors had amassed on Hans-Georg Maaßen. It was far from encouraging, and the truth is that if our political goons had anything that could really do in the AfD, we would’ve heard about it long ago.
As Lautsch continues, she strays ever further from making any kind of rational case. The last concrete complaint she raises is her claim that “the AfD is shifting the boundaries [of discourse] ever further in the direction of an ethnic conception” of Germanness, and that at the notorious “secret Potsdam meeting” the AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund said some untoward things about foreign restaurants. She rushes past these points, sensing their weakness, and spends the rest of this section on bizarre and irrelevant matters:
There is also the AfD’s self-representation as the representative of the true will of the people. That in itself has little to do with parliamentary democracy. Anyone who claims to already know the will of the people is unlikely to engage in parliamentary debate. The AfD therefore uses parliament primarily as a stage for staging the inflammatory speeches of its representatives and then distributing them on YouTube and TikTok. These are addressed directly to the “people” – and thus removed from parliamentary discussion.
Literally all politicians claim to represent the popular will and to act in popular interests. None of this is illegal or even remotely wrong. The AfD is an opposition party, excluded by the reigning cartel system from participation in government, and so of course it uses parliamentary debate to criticise the lunatics in charge and use social media to distribute its speeches to supporters. What kind of complaints are these? Does Lautsch really want to ban the AfD because it’s good at TikTok?
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http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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