How do you do, fellow white dudes? Tim Walz is here to talk to you about "permission structures"
Also: Tariff lies and White House correspondents
Tim Walz recently told an audience at Harvard’s Kennedy School that Kamala Harris chose him as a running mate because of his uncanny ability to connect with the average Caucasian cisgender dude. “I could code talk to white guys — watching football, fixing their truck,“ he explained. “I was the permission structure to say, ‘Look, you can do this and vote for this.’”
I wrote about the real problems in this kind of thinking, namely the left’s unnatural obsession with identitarianism.
Alas, the White Guy Whisperer didn’t really help the Democratic Party ticket at all in 2024. Part of the problem, one imagines, is that the governor of Minnesota has an utterly deluded conception of himself as the embodiment of the working-class male. Though even if he were, few would have cared. Blatant pandering doesn’t go over well with any race or gender.
For one thing, guys who talk to guys never talk about how good they are at talking to them. Say what you will about President Donald Trump, he doesn’t “code” his language to appeal to the working class or anyone else. When he slams general managers for passing on Shedeur Sanders in the NFL draft, for example, you know the comment hasn’t been vetted by a bunch of pinhead pollsters or risk-averse handlers. Yet, authenticity is about the last thing that came to mind watching Walz’s ham-fisted manly media stunts in 2024, not during his cringy Madden video game contest with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) or his hunting outing in which he struggled with a shotgun.
Read the rest.
Podcast
Mollie and I continued our debate on protectionism, run down Donald Trump's first 100 days, and wonder how the FDA will react to new data showing the abortion pill is more dangerous than previously known.
On the issue of tariffs: I also wrote on White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt slamming Amazon for the company’s reported plan to itemize the cost of tariffs on its bills as it does sales taxes. “Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?” she asked. “This is a hostile and political act by Amazon.”
I suppose admitting that former President Joe Biden’s inflationary spending policies and President Donald Trump’s protectionism both inflate the price of consumer goods is a step in the right direction.
Because back in March, Leavitt claimed it was “insulting” for journalists even to suggest that the public would pay after Trump’s “Liberation Day.” Foreign countries were the ones footing the bill on tariffs, she argued, which were “a tax cut for the American people.”
As it turns out, Amazon was merely considering itemizing its tariff tax, according to the Wall Street Journal. It seems likely now that the administration has preemptively threatened the company. That’s a shame. Companies, small and large, have already begun listing the cost of tariffs on receipts because foreign parts and services are deeply integrated into American manufacturing and products. Leavitt, however, makes a good point. Companies should itemize all taxes and state-induced costs, not merely tariffs. Minimum wages. Corporate taxes. Fees.
More than 60% of Amazon’s sales, by the way, come from independent retailers. Over a million Americans work for Amazon, not counting contractors, and another million who derive some form of income through the company. Big corporations can survive the tariff shock. Smaller ones, not so much.
White House correspondents learned nothing from Biden disaster
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Axios’s Alex Thompson told a crowd at the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner after winning the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence for his coverage of that story. “But being truth-tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story.”
Sounds nice. But this is gaslighting.
If the political media were too credulous to see that then-President Joe Biden’s mental acuity had deteriorated to a degree that made it impossible for him to do the job, they don’t deserve to be anywhere near the White House or a newsroom because they lack the appropriate skill set. If they knew and still covered up or soft-pedaled Biden’s decline, they don’t deserve to be anywhere near the White House or a newsroom because they can’t be trusted.
Those are the choices. For the most part, my money is on the latter. The notion that legacy media had been duped by Biden’s crafty handlers doesn’t stand up to the most basic scrutiny.
Read the rest here.
Good reads
The Handsome Face of Terror Apologia — Josh Code, Free Press
The Downfall Of 60 Minutes — Mark Hemingway, The Federalist
'Menorah' artifact found in Byzantine home by Jerusalem baffles archaeologists — Ruth Schuster, Haaretz
I know whenever I am talking to dudes at bars or in duck blinds, they are always expressing concerns about “permission structures.”
Unfortunately for Tim and the DEI hire white guys can see through their scam.
Specifically:
They opened our borders to all with no vetting and now raise holy hell when the worst among them are sent home.
They believe that a man can become a woman and can play women’s sports and enter women’s private spaces, and that children who might grow up to be gay should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible
They discriminate on the basis of race and sex today because in the past there was discrimination on the basis of race and sex.
Those are the avowed policies of the Democratic Party that were rejected.