No, I am not going to rant about Trump, and I’m not going to rant about Harris. To be honest, both campaigns and the candidates’ supporters appear increasingly disconnected from reality, with absurd claims that Donald Trump is going to put everyone who disagrees with him into concentration camps (the campaign twitter account @KamalaHQ is particularly egregious for distorting Trump’s statements, but many Dem pundits have used Trump’s statement that there will be a “bloodbath” among American car manufactures if he loses election and Harris allows the importation of cheap Chinese electric cars, to claim that his supporters will state a literal “bloodbath” in his support), on the one hand, and Trump’s preposterous promises like funding the federal government entirely through tariffs on the other. And neither candidate cares about the national debt, which is what most worries me about the near-term future.
But let’s talk about an ad that came across my twitter feed. It features a young man on a couch, clearly masturbating under a blanket while watching porn. A white-haired old man tells him that he is the man’s Republican congressman and, because the Republicans are in charge, they are banning porn.
It was posted by Nick Knudsen, who claims that he “Just found out this ad when tested moves under-30-men 3.5 points away from Donald Trump.” According to Fox News, it is paid for by Progress Action (though I couldn’t figure out what this group is with a google search).
And I initially shrugged it off because, being in Illinois (and not watching much TV anyway), I tend to be agnostic on how many of these videos are really “ads” in the sense of being aired on television or streaming services, rather than videos created for TikTok or other viral sharing. But it turns out a dad on twitter reported that, indeed, this was not only airing on Xfinity streaming services but was airing as a commercial while he was watching the movie Bumblebee with his 8-year-old and, to be clear, this is a PG-13 movie which is fairly family-friendly and rated at ages 11+ by Common Sense Media, so this wasn’t a matter of a dad choosing an inappropriate movie for Family Movie Night.
It should be obvious this is wrong — but clearly someone decided this entirely appropriate.
It’s part and parcel of the Democrats’ attempt to shore up their support among young men, and it does so with the apparent belief that what young men want is not a vision for the future in which they have fulfilling lives, but that their desires are so base as to be placated with porn. It’s the 2024 male version of Brave New World‘s soma, apparently. It’s negative effects on young men’s ability to form healthy relationships with women, or teen boys’ ability to have healthy relationships with teen girls, is becoming recognized, but ignored in the push to promote “autonomy.” And this — along with the ever-growing rate of gambling, especially online sports betting, and the growing use of pot — is a serious problem, one beginning to be acknowledged, with studies citing the financial harm of sports betting and the social harms of cannabis. Just earlier this month, even the New York Times, hardly known for fear-mongering, reported on the growing harms of cannabis:
As marijuana legalization has accelerated across the country, doctors are contending with the effects of an explosion in the use of the drug and its intensity. A $33 billion industry has taken root, turning out an ever-expanding range of cannabis products so intoxicating they bear little resemblance to the marijuana available a generation ago. Tens of millions of Americans use the drug, for medical or recreational purposes — most of them without problems.
But with more people consuming more potent cannabis more often, a growing number, mostly chronic users, are enduring serious health consequences.
The accumulating harm is broader and more severe than previously reported. And gaps in state regulations, limited public health messaging and federal restraints on research have left many consumers, government officials and even medical practitioners in the dark about such outcomes. . . .
About 18 million people — nearly a third of all users ages 18 and up — have reported symptoms of cannabis use disorder, according to estimates from a unique data analysis conducted for The Times by a Columbia University epidemiologist. That would mean they continue to use the drug despite significant negative effects on their lives. Of those, about three million people are considered addicted. . . .
[R]esearchers have estimated that as many as one-third of near-daily cannabis users in the United States could have symptoms of [cannabinoid hyperemesis] syndrome, ranging from mild to severe. That works out to roughly six million people.
Yet here in Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker crows about the tax revenue of the state’s cannabis legalization, and promotes the growing and sale of pot as a path toward economic development, particularly for Black men.
But worse than that, this commercial, and its placement (and who knows where else it has been running) was an indicator of the disconnection between those supporters and the “real world” of families — or an indicator that in their own world, children don’t exist, and the movie Bumblebee is simply a means of reaching the man-children that is their target audience.
And this goes back to the consequences of the declining birth rate and the ever-increasing number of men and women who will never have children, or have children only late in life, and whose world is so far removed from family life that it just doesn’t occur to them that children are a part of the world — the same sort of men and women who want to ban children from airplanes, restaurants, and other public places.
None of this is good news. All of it is an indicator of a very dangerous shift in society. Where do we go from here?