All the White Dudes – The American Mind

The Kamala Harris presidential campaign is in full swing, and in keeping with the Democrats safe space neo-segregationist principles, it organized a series of mass Zoom calls oriented to different demographic groups. Inspired by a supposedly organic gathering of 90,000 black women on Zoom, other identity groups wanted in, with conclaves planned for Black queer men, South Asian women, Latinas, Native women, and white men. Not wishing to intrude on anyone s curated spaces, I logged on to White Dudes for Harris on Monday night to see what the Harris campaign was asking of me and 100 million other white American men.

The moderator of the event was a scraggly-bearded and top-knotted Democrat political operative called Ross Morales Rocketto, who kicked off the meeting by addressing the elephant in the room, namely the problematic nature of an assembly of white men, because throughout American history, when white men have organized, it was often with pointy hats on. Rocketto explained that masculinity as a trope has been coopted by the MAGA Right into something that feeds into the loneliness epidemic, leading ultimately to destructive behaviors.

Rocketto introduced the evening s introductory speaker who, unsurprisingly, was black. Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, served as a kind of validator, reassuring anyone concerned about an all-white gathering of men that he represents millions of members who come from all ethnicities, including a lot of white dudes. Mitchell cautioned that white nationalists in MAGA want to speak for you, and the failure to denounce them signals our acceptance. Don t allow this fringe cult to speak for you, he urged us, but stand up in the spirit of solidarity with Kamala Harris and get in formation with the forces uniting against fascism.

The first ten minutes of what turned out to be a 3-hour call set the tone: reject the Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings of your MAGA past, white man, and cast your lot with the common run of humanity. The following speakers delivered variations on this theme, some less eloquently than others. Jeff Bridges, who played the Dude in The Big Lebowski, somewhat ramblingly suggested that white men would be better off if they rejected the Vice President s call for her supporters to fight, and instead embraced surrender. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg praised Harris s emphasis on Freedom as a theme of her campaign, and spoke of the freedom of the Inflation Reduction Act, and the freedom of infrastructure.

via americanmind.org

I’m very disappointed that Jeff Bridges supports Kamala. He’ll always be “The Dude” in my heart though.