We Hate Them. Why Won’t They Vote for Us?

Toxic Masculinity is on the Ballot



“Toxic masculinity is on the ballot.” That was the accidentally insightful headline of a column on an Ohio news site. Toxic masculinity was indeed on the ballot. But in a whole other way.

Gen Z men who had spent much of their lives being told that there was something wrong with them went out and voted for Trump. The cultural seismic shock waves of losing the male half of the youth are still rippling through the leftists who had long written off those same men.

The young men who voted for Trump attend high schools with ‘Healthy Masculinity’ classes and clubs which tell them that “the Man Box does not allow us to be fully human” and urges boys “to achieve their full human potential, free from restrictive masculinity.”

To be a boy is bad, but to be a man is even worse. College comes with mandatory sessions on consent and equity. White men in any classes less rigorous than math or science are there to be used as bad examples of privilege. Nearly any college movie from a decade ago now seems like it’s depicting another culture or another planet. No wonder men aren’t going to college.

Gen Z men have come of age being displaced in school, in society and in their hobbies and interests. But every time they display interest in something, whether it’s the NFL or Warhammer 40,000, it’s quickly taken away from them in the name of equity and diversity.

Complaining about it is toxic masculinity.

From an early age, boys are expected to be less seen, punished for their natural instincts and told that their main tasks are to be less like themselves and get out of the way of others. Gen Z men have grown up being seen as bad by the same system that wanted their votes in 2024.

Is it any wonder that Gen Z men didn’t want to vote for a political culture that saw them as toxic?

Leftists used to be able to win over the youth by pretending to be anti-establishment and offering freedom, but leftists have long since become the establishment and offer no freedom. Gen Z men were expected to vote for Kamala because she was the ‘progressive’ flag bearer, but what do progressives actually have to offer young men except shame and second class status?

We hate them. Why won’t they vote for us?

YES Magazine had hailed the Kamala campaign for offering a “nontoxic masculinity” in which “Gov. Tim Walz and others in the party are publicly relinquishing male power and privilege.”

Under the Left, the only good thing men could do was move to the back of the bus, to apologize for their existence and cheer on those replacing them. (Or identify as women themselves.)

Even as the polling warned Democrats they had a man problem, they couldn’t seem to stop shaming and scolding men. At Morehouse College, speaking to black men, Biden claimed that “their idea of being a man is toxic” and that to really be a man, you have to show “respect”, showing up to support the cause and “giving hate no safe harbor and leaving no one behind”.

Things got worse when the Obamas hit the campaign trail.

Barack infamously accused black men of sexism for not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president” and berated them, “women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time.” Michelle Obama told women “we have every right to demand that the men in our lives do better by us” in the election and told men voting for Trump, “a vote for him is a vote against us.”

Men were sexists and predators. A condescending campaign ad urged women in red states to lie to their husbands and vote for Kamala. Rather than give women a reason to vote for them, the Democrats had gambled on bonding with women by demonizing men as toxic.

And they lost men because they couldn’t stop hating men.

Misunderstanding Men

The Trump campaign chose a millennial venture capitalist as its VP to appeal to younger men while the Kamala campaign picked a 60-year-old chubby ex-teacher whose shtick was cosplaying as various rural characters in Minnesota. Gov. Tim Walz was the kind of non-threatening ‘man’ that a group of upscale aging liberal women would pick to appeal to men.

Which VP were Gen Z men more likely to identify with: Vance or Walz?

The Kamala campaign thought that Walz would be avuncular but to Gen Z men he resembled one of the teachers, counselors and assorted school staffers who had hectored them all their lives. Rather than seeing a role model in remedying toxic masculinity that they were supposed to emulate, they saw a bureaucrat handing them DEI coursework and waiting for them to nod.

At the nadir of the campaign’s outreach to young men, Walz partnered with AOC to stream themselves playing Madden NFL on Twitch. A desktop setup had Walz wearing large headphones with a strategically placed bottle of Mountain Dew soda on the side.

The final score was 0-0.

Rather than reaching Gen Z men, it came off as a condescending tourist exercise during which the two lefty politicians pitched their various agendas, showed little familiarity with the game (despite Walz’s supposed background as a coach) and less interest in what men needed.

During the election when the Democrat media wanted to understand masculinity, they turned to

Ruth Whippman, a Berkeley liberal journalist and the author of ‘Boymom.’ While clearly an anti-conservative feminist, Whippman wrote about the culture of negativity toward boys and men on the Left even as she complained about the evils of masculine stereotypes.

Whippman’s work was in some ways less important than her gender. Many of the popular works about masculinity on the Left are written by women. When the media tried to interview ‘experts’ on masculinity and the election, they turned to Whippman and a few other women.

Democrats no longer even have men to explain men to them.

An entire sex has been inducted into the Marxist oppressor paradigm alongside capitalism, traditional religion (except Islam) heterosexuality, whiteness and being one’s own gender. There was no need to understand men in any terms except that they embodied all bad qualities.

In the 2024 election there were more voters on the bad side of the Left’s identity politics fence than on its good side.

Toxic Ideology

The Left lost men because it hated them. As the post-election party struggles to figure out how to fix the problem by investing more into podcasts, it’s up against its own ideology.

A movement can’t win over people it hates.

The idea of toxic masculinity is a product of a toxic ideology. Creating podcasts aimed at men while demonizing men won’t work. Many Gen Z men saw in Kamala another of the diversity hires who cut ahead of them in line and then got jobs lecturing them about their privilege.

The Left did well with young men when it appeared to be offering them freedom. Now all it offers them is a chance to be used as bad examples of toxic masculinity. The Left has gone from Animal House to the ‘Panderverse’, yet it expects young men to flock to them as if nothing has changed. Gen Z men see no reason to be leftists and nothing that the Left has to offer them.

Unless the Left stops hating men and offers them something more than a seat in the back of the bus, it will lose a generation of young men.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.