Episode 29: Harris

Hi, I'm Adrienne Dogg.

And I'm Lauren Donegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, this is another emergency episode dealing with current events and various emergencies of gender politics that are happening here in the U.S.

because we have a new presidential candidate.

Gender happening, now happening in your neighborhood.

Yeah.

What it means for you weekend.

This time the candidate is a woman, Kamala Harris.

Maybe you've heard of her, the vice president, former senator from our great state of California.

So I wish I had a personal anecdote about Kamala Harris.

The only one I have is that my upstairs neighbor, when I first moved to the city, invited me to a fundraiser at her apartment for a woman who was running then, I believe, for San Francisco city attorney or whatever that was.

And it was Kamala Harris and I was out of town.

So I never met her.

That's my personal anecdote.

She was in my building and I was not there.

So you're telling you you did not meet the person who is decently likely right now to be the first female president of the United States.

It would be, it would be really lovely if she became that.

And it would have been really lovely if I could have met her.

But, you know, you could have gotten the picture to put on Instagram and been a part of history, but instead you're out of town.

I was out of town.

We had a picture with John Kerry.

like

you can't see like you can't see like a free stroop waffle or something so i think the last time we were in our listeners feeds at least the last time we were in our listeners feeds talking about politics we're talking about the what then seemed like joe biden's you know intransigent refusal to step aside even in the face of his own like sort of diminished capacities and diminished claim to the support of the Democratic Party.

It now seems like there has been almost like an old-fashioned style like party coup to oust him in order to preserve the prospects of the party, both for the presidency and also in like down ballot races where he was seeming to drag down candidates for things like a senate, Congress, governor, state houses, and so on.

And now there's a new ticket.

It's very, very...

new.

We are recording on Tuesday, July 23rd.

So you guys listening will almost certainly have a little more information about how this shakes out.

You'll know which white guy it was.

Well, I mean, yeah, that does bring us to like one of the new calculations that the party has made almost immediately after Kamala Harris, you know, consolidated support very quickly and moved very swiftly to the top of the ticket following Biden's withdrawal.

There then emerged very quickly this conventional wisdom that her vice presidential pick, whoever it was, would necessarily have to be a white man.

And And it was sort of implied also that it would necessarily have to be a white man who's a little bit more conservative than her.

And one of the things that I'm noticing as Kamala Harris emerges as the presumptive nominee is that she's presumed to be

further to the left than Joe Biden by virtue of being a black, black and a woman, more, more.

And that...

I think is actually an assessment of her that is fair when you compare them in terms of policy.

I think Kamala Harris is a few ticks to the left of Joe Biden.

It's not really hard in today's Democratic primary, which has moved sizably to the left over the past 10 years, especially certainly since Biden's heyday.

But people aren't really saying, oh, she's for the left on Biden in terms of her approach to foreign policy.

They're not saying she's for the left on Biden in terms of her approach to abortion, both of which appear as of this moment to be true.

They're saying

she's more liberal

and kind of just putting a picture of her next to that statement.

It's something that's derived from her race.

Yeah, and I mean, a few things, right?

Like it's derived from her being from San Francisco and having risen up in San Francisco politics.

And

people just kind of assume that anything coming out of San Francisco has to be crazy left, which like, you know, we do have that, but like our politicians that rise to prominence from San Francisco often are not.

also i would i would ask them to update their understanding of the san francisco cultural milieu because now we're also home to a bunch of tech reactionaries some of whom are quite prominent funders of donald trump's campaign the other thing that i think is worth pointing out is that like it is i mean someone of course like inevitably two seconds after the after the switch happened right that you got the first claims that she was the first would be the first DEI president.

Like

it's just we are in a political moment where women's and non-white bodies existing in politics at all will get politicized in that way.

Like there are just a, there is a sizable portion of American politics that think that they can get something out of calling into question the presence of anyone who's not a white man in anything, right?

Like whether this be an airplane that loses its fucking...

fuselage or, you know, a line of code inserted into

some kind of safety system, a security system or whatever, right?

Or, you know, any kind of public office.

Basically, you know, you'll get the same kind of groiper ass, you know, idiots kind of coming out and making these kinds of points.

So in some way, what she says, I mean, like, you know, Kamala Harris here was, you know, always associated with, you know, being a, being a prosecutor, right?

Like not the most wishy-washy of professions and not the leftiest of causes.

She was not one of those prosecutors, right?

No Larry Krasner or something like that.

You know, but still, it's just by the, by dint of her, of who she is, there is a presumption that she sort of embodies leftism in the sense that, you know, yeah, she comes sort of pre-politicized in that way.

Yeah, I mean,

I think to be a woman at all or to be a person of color whatsoever.

sort of implies leftist political commitments at this moment where only the left acknowledges people belonging to those identity categories as like legitimate political subjects and legitimate political actors, right?

But I would like push back on the notion that this is this challenge to legitimacy of like women are people of color in public life is like particularly new.

I definitely agree with you that like the coinage is new, right?

DEI

as, you know, functionally a stand-in for the N-word.

That is something that has really only emerged over like the past, I don't know, like year.

Before that,

it has sort of displaced wokeness as the like right-wing pejorative.

DEI

as being this

DEI has been made into a stand-in for professional incompetence,

you know, supposedly exemplified by women and people of color in positions of power or influence or high-demanding, high-skill jobs.

Like that is something that has emerged just as just as a phrase very recently, right?

And I think it's like pretty explicitly a Christopher Ruffo coinage.

Yeah, it's one of his.

It's like critical race theory.

You know, it's been made as a, you know, repurposed as a euphemism.

Right.

But like the idea that women should not

be president is, I think, an old one.

No, of course.

Exemplified, at least by the, you know, reality that we've never had one.

And, you know, the legitimacy

of

black people in power is something that's been challenged also in various modes.

I will be interested into how the racism sort of

manages to take account of Harris's Asian heritage, if it does at all.

It's not like, if we're going to get some anti-Asian racism thrown in there, or if they will, you know, if her critics and opponents will decide that anti-blackness and misogyny are their most powerful.

weapons.

But, you know, we've seen a few sort of deployments of misogyny and anti-Black racism and what has been coined as, you know, misogynoir, like the very specific combination of the two.

And I would like to just kind of dwell on them for a little bit with you, Adrian, of like what has already emerged in attacks on Kamala Harris and on her bid for the presidency.

And then maybe we can sort of think a little bit about what's to come.

And I'd also really like to talk to you about how you think that this matchup between Donald Trump and a female presidential nominee might be different than the one that we saw in 2016.

Because we, part of what's going on here is that I think we do have like a very relevant, somewhat recent historical example, right?

Like Donald Trump has run against a woman for this job before.

Yeah.

He's the only, he's the only candidate in American history to have beaten the woman to the presidency.

Well, that's not true if you count the primaries.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

In a general.

We have very specific precedent in terms of what happened to Hillary Clinton.

Right.

And I think there will be a lot of rush to

claim that whatever happens to Kamala Harris is necessarily different.

Right.

And some of it will be different.

Right.

A lot of what happens in 2016

was determined really by the specific historical position of Hillary Clinton herself.

And also, I think, Trump's phenomenon and the power of novelty that it had in that cycle.

And a lot of what happens to Kamala Harris this time will be the result of misogynist antagonism combining with racial antagonism.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's worth worth pointing out that a lot of people who are like, oh, I could totally see a woman president, just not Hillary Clinton, seem to be coming out to be like, I could totally imagine a female president, just not Kamal Harris.

It's like, I don't know, it's like an N of two, and each time it was just like, just not the right woman.

It's like, I don't know.

It feels like, you know, a third one,

third one.

And it feels generalizable.

I got to tell you.

They didn't like Elizabeth Morris in 2020 either.

So, you know, we actually do have a lot of examples.

You know, I'm sure that some of these people are old enough to have said that they would vote for a woman, just not Shirley Chisel.

You know, there's a lot of, there's, there's a lot of this.

But, you know, I also think that gender politics have changed tremendously since 2016.

Yeah.

So let me ask you about that.

Because in some way, the fact that we're kind of, so our friend of the podcade man wrote a very nice piece about sort of predicting what the attacks on Kamala Harris were going to look like.

And it's interesting, right?

Because the very mode of prediction.

I think is new.

It's a post-2016.

It's a post-Me Too kind of thing.

In 2016, we just didn't know what it would look like for a major political party to run

a candidate.

Now we're all shell shocked from having run the test.

I'm like, oh, oh, brother, that's bad.

But it's kind of interesting, right?

Like

we can now predict,

and not just you and me as podcasters, but like

I think a lot of voters kind of have a sense of how they think this is going to go, right?

We have a pretty clear expectation of how Mr.

Denoir is going going to play into things.

And I do wonder whether this predictive mode is going to have some kind of impact, right?

Post-Me Too, post-Hillary, there's not necessarily like

readiness

for what's happening, but there is a kind of unwillingness to mime surprise, right?

Like we are not, we're not getting, like, no one's going to be shocked by this.

It's like, you know, we were all just going to be like point at the sign and be like, yeah, we, we knew, we knew that was going to happen.

We didn't know what week, but it was going to happen, right?

Like, so I think that's, that's, how do you feel that's going to play out?

Like the fact that we've been to this movie before now and we're kind of expecting some of the certain beats and

are ready for them.

Does that

dull them any?

Is there any,

is that a source of comfort or what does that mean?

I do think there is a degree to which the American public and certainly American pundits who do do a degree of

shaping of public perception of these developments,

you know, they are a lot less naive than they were in 2016, right?

In 2016, there was

this like rubbernecking fascination with Donald Trump and his willingness to make subtext text, as it was said at the time, right?

There was a degree to which the frankness of his misogyny, which in other politicians had been very present, but often like quite buried or issued as dog whistles, had its own appeal, right?

There is this

almost giddy delight and fascination with Trump's vulgarity and with the avowedness of his bigotry that I think has faded.

Yeah.

First of all, you have a lot of other people doing that.

Like at the time in 2016, Donald Trump seemed to be giving voice.

to sort of like the white male American id.

And now that is a very crowded field.

That is something that has been imitated and monetized.

And so he has like a degree of like competition, right?

Like I would say that like Donald Trump as an entertainer is having to not just influence and feed up of, but actually sort of compete in a market sense with people like Andrew Tate.

Yeah.

And these like Manosphere influencers.

And that kind of

misogynist contempt that can harden, you know, like a booger wiped above the head of your twin bed and in mom's basement into an ideological stance.

That's just a much more crowded field now, right?

Which also means that like Donald Trump has lost the appeal of his novelty.

You know that like old onion headline that just says, you know, Marilyn Manson now going door to door trying to shock people.

Oh, yeah.

A photo of Marilyn Manson looking kind of defeated on the front stoop of this suburban like tract house.

It's just he doesn't quite have the same shock value that he did, but he is really leaning hard into misogyny in a way that will definitely become more pronounced in this election.

I think that can really be seen in the appointment of J.D.

Vance.

I was going to say.

We talked about him with the great Gabe Winant on this show a couple of weeks ago, but we didn't really get a chance to dive in as deeply as I would have liked to in that episode to J.D.

Vance's gender politics and specifically to his misogyny, which seems to be like the one constant through line.

And the other thing that I think will be different

is that post-me too

and post-stops, the stakes of Donald Trump's personal misogyny, have moved beyond sort of like bad taste and disgust

into something that really affects people's ordinary lives, right?

People now know

what it means to come forward about sexual assault and have your life ruined, right?

Because that's happened to a lot of people they know and it's happened to a lot of people they've seen in the public eye.

And people now know what it means to not be able to get an abortion.

They know about that as a public health emergency, as Biden was, you know, at least willing to talk about, but they also know about it as a civil rights issue and as a dignity harm, which Kamala Harris is much better at talking about, right?

So I think in 2016,

people had,

you know, this kind of perennial delusion that feminism was no longer necessary because it had won.

And that's not really a delusion anymore, right?

They're talking very frankly about, you know, the Republican Party, Donald Trump, J.D.

Vance personally, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.

They have very specific and maximalist notions of gender aggressivism.

And Dobbs has proved that they are willing and able to enact those visions into law, right?

So I think the stakes seem higher for voters.

So a couple of things about that.

So first of all, I think you're exactly right that like in some way, it almost seems like from what we know of the first, what is it, 48 hours of the Trump campaign having to grapple with their opponent no longer being named Joe Biden, Biden, but being Kamala Harris.

It's J.D.

Vance who's writing on the attack, it seems, right?

Like it's it's surrogates.

And two things about J.D.

Vance's misogyny that we can talk about a little bit more later.

One is it is of a far more traditionalist bend than Donald Trump's.

In our famous classification, he would not be a pervert.

He'd at best, well, he'd be a mixture of a priest and a creep, right?

And that's the other part.

It's a misogyny that is very schooled in and probably developed through.

You mentioned Andrew Tate.

It is a internet generated misogyny.

It's the misogyny of the very online, right?

His concerns are those of like Silicon Valley, yeah, gay guys, honestly, right?

Like it's who have like really profound issues with their mothers.

Exactly.

We're not naming anyone here in particular.

Please don't sue us.

You know who you are.

Don't send Hulk Hogan to sue us.

Yeah.

Right.

But so that's important that like in some way, there's a passing of the baton, right?

Like between a kind of like,

I don't know, borscht belty, shticky misogyny to the like, to Greuiper masculinity, basically here.

I think like, and, and, and, of course, like, Donald Trump will not be able to control himself.

Like, this, this will also add.

But, like, clearly, like, they got a little, they were caught flat-footed by this whole thing.

And it isn't significant that like, they were like, JD, you go out.

And you start talking about how she's like ungrateful to be an American, how she didn't work for it, right?

Like you have like Lara Loomer.

Will Chamberlain both attacking her for being childless.

Right.

Richard Grinnell going after her, right?

So like it's, it's, it's very noticeably kind of, it's a younger coalition kind of going after her.

And I think it's, it's, it's noticeable.

Like there's a, there's a new misogyny sheriff in town and

they're, they're letting that loose.

The second thing I wanted to to kind of flag for listeners, because this is something that you've, you've talked about on this podcast before, but a couple of episodes ago, which is,

you know, one of the things that we're seeing that you've been drawing attention to in your writing and on this podcast is there is a kind of gendered realignment going on here, right?

Like the parties are being gendered sort of as we as we go through these iterative cycles, right?

And one of the interesting questions that I have, that I think this raises is like, does misogyny still have electoral potency?

We know it's potent politically, right?

We know that it moves people.

But in order to be electorally efficacious, of course, it also has to move the right people towards a preferred position.

Someone has to change their mind about something.

And that's a separate question, it seems to me.

Not like, who is it?

Are there Democratic voters who dislike Trump, who rejected Dobbs, but then like get turned off by the fact that Kamala Harris like

slept with her boss or whatever, right?

Like, I'm not saying that that person doesn't exist, but I'm just not entirely sure that's like a huge swath of like, you know, of voters in Western Pennsylvania.

And then the other thing that this does, I mean, especially comparing with the Message Anoir, is

it's really about like fracturing an old democratic coalition along racial lines and rebuilding a new one around gender lines.

Would you say that that's true?

Yes.

I think that what the Trump team is beginning to do, and what I expect they will continue to do about and towards Harris is on the one hand, to your first point, less about persuading persuadable or swing voters of whom that's like 15 anyway.

And they're all hanging out in the same diner in Ohio.

Right.

And they're really idiosyncratic and stupid.

They'll be like, well, you know, I listened to the audiobook of Hillary Clinton's memoir and now I regret having voted against her.

You know, like that kind of thing.

And they are impossible to predict.

People who've listened to a lot of audiobooks should just be deprived of the right to vote.

Yeah.

That's my take.

I'm kidding.

I'm a huge audiobook listener myself, but like we're weird.

We're weird people.

Well, you know, but like they're the undecided voter is a weirdo.

About Trump, right?

And undecided about Trump.

Right.

They're very

opinion on Mitt Romney.

Like, okay, fair enough.

Like, like, his wife probably doesn't have an opinion about Mitt Romney, but like about Donald Trump.

But like, also, I don't, so I don't think they're trying to persuade people.

I think they're trying to do a turnout

effort

for young men and specifically young white men who have been really radicalized against feminism.

So I think they're going for like candidly, the incel vote.

People who famously leave their basement and will not masturbate into a tube suck instead of voting.

You know, but like, I, and, and I'd say that not just in terms of like specific like dictionary definition in cells.

I'm thinking of like misogynist, odious little shits who are like, you know, when they were kids, they were like, look at me, I pulled the legs off this frog.

Those kind of guys, like the mass shooter vote, as several editors have stopped me from calling it.

Elon Musk, right?

Like the

divorced dads of America who aren't handling it so well.

I mean, there are many divorced dads who are handling it well, but Elon Musk is not.

And

that's the pitch.

Yeah.

There's a tremendous amount of gendered resentment among young American men.

And I think that's not exclusively a white phenomenon.

No, it's not.

This is something that JD, I believe it was J.D.

Vance

said about his gendered electoral strategy or the Republicans' gender electoral strategy after the 2022 midterms when it was clear that Dobbs was really moving white women to vote in Democratic downstate elections for particularly whenever there's a ballot measure, as there are in several states coming up in November.

regarding abortion.

And he said, for every Karen you lose, you gain a Jamal or a Jose,

which is a really vulgar and gross way of saying that they think that they can make up for their losses among white women voters by gaining men of color.

I think that that is way overstated, right?

The movement of men of color to the Republican Party,

it's marginal, but it is a real movement, right?

And I think that one thing we might see is that men of color are more

receptive to a gender grievance argument when a woman of color is at the top of the ticket than they might have been if it was a white woman.

Yeah.

I mean, so just to give some numbers, like that, that this is true, right?

Like the supposed, right?

There's, there are a lot of articles about the quote-unquote weakness of the Democratic Party or the fraction of the Democratic coalition when it comes to voters of color.

And if you drill down to the cross tabs, that is a decline.

almost entirely among male voters.

So that's very important.

And just to hear, this is, is, for instance, a national poll by the Institute of Politics.

This is just, it's not broken down by race, unfortunately.

A lot of places break it down only by race or by gender, which is like, why would you do that?

Anyway, that sucks.

It's like, it's, it obscures so much.

I think so.

Biden's lead, this was, I think, from March, was plus 33 points.

And among young men, it was plus six points, right?

And this was not the case in 2020.

There was 35 to 26, which is interesting, right?

So like it, it, it, what, what that Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics survey or national poll suggests is that like Democrats are hitting their ceiling with women, right?

The persuadable ones are so outraged by Dobbs, basically, that they're turning out.

But among men, exactly, you have this kind of offer of grievance politics.

Now, we should say that, you know,

I think you're absolutely right to say like, you know, Republicans have this way.

Like, we get this narrative all the time, like, oh, Democrats are weak with this or that particular group.

And then you find out that it goes from like 84% to like 74%, which is not nothing.

But like, you know, not sure, like, oh, the Democrats have to go within themselves.

Like, maybe you should go within yourself if you lose 80% of a demographic.

Like, that is, that's not, it's, it's not a sign that you're running a very inclusive party.

But still, like, I do think that you're absolutely right.

That, like,

we're, we're headed into a position where the GOP is going to double down on this hope for a gendered realignment, that they're hoping that young men, including men of color, will deliver this election for them.

Partly, I mean,

out of necessity, because like they can't run on a,

hey,

forget we did that.

It's very hard to be like, like,

I guess they could have been like, honey, I still think of you as a person, not one with rights, but a person.

Yeah, you know, I think there's, there's only so much

the GOP can do

with an

exclusive electorate of white men, right?

Like they have to try and branch out.

There are certainly anti-choice women out there.

There's a lot of white women who basically either are themselves avowed conservatives or are sort of apolitical and just vote however their husband tells them to.

That's actually a pretty big demographic.

Women who are, you know, not watching the news because they're raising children and working full time and cleaning up after their shitty husband who's sitting on the couch, scratching his ass and belching and watching Newsmax and then barking at them to vote for Trump.

And they say, okay, well, you know, I trust you.

I don't, I don't really have time to look into this.

That's actually like a lot of people, which is not to excuse white women's complicity in the Republicans' rightward shift.

But, you know, they

do also have

structural advantages, right?

Like we live in a system with Senate malapportionment and electoral college malapportionment, which functionally means that white men's votes overall

count more, especially to presidential and senatorial elections, right?

So that's, that is, I think, why they are not as

worried, right?

And we should say, like, as of now, the polls have not budged too much.

Like, Kamala Harris does not merely need to ascend and replace Biden.

She now needs to sort of make up.

Yeah.

for the polling deficit that the Democrats are suffering because they have not had a candidate who is able to campaign really.

So I

think that her

campaign, if they're smart, will be very, very aggressive about putting her in front of the public all the time.

And, you know, that carries its own risks

because there are some broad discomforts that people have

with women in power.

And I think this is something that we saw in the 2016 election, right?

Do you want to talk a little bit about your memory of that time?

No.

Yeah, don't think that.

It was a critical time.

It was the worst.

It was the pits, you know, it was

the worst of times.

It was the worst of times.

I mean, like, basically,

the one thing that I think is going to be better in 2024 is that Kamala Harris does not go into it as the presumptive winner.

I think that was what made the Clinton campaign really so frustrating to behold that on the one hand, they didn't put every foot right.

They certainly certainly made some mistakes, but on the other hand, they were treated both

just

horribly by the media, while at the same time, kind of getting, you know,

all the sort of side swipes and, you know, the

hyper careful scrutiny that you give to someone you think is going to basically waltz to victory, right?

Our friend Michael Hobbes did a rundown for his podcast, If Books Could Kill, on the number of email articles,

articles about Hillary Clinton's emails, which was a, which turned out to be kind of a non-scandal, like so many of the Clinton scandals.

And, you know, I think that the, you know, it was way more about that in the New York Times than about stuff like the Access Hollywood tape, right?

Here is a credibly accused,

by now proven sexual assaulter, all but stipulating to his sexual assaults, to his pattern of sexual assault on, well, a camera, on tape.

And, you know, it was not worth nearly as much Columbinch as,

you know, I mean, I think Hillary Clinton stumbles.

This is something that people, I think, forget.

Like there, there were health concerns, quote unquote, about her.

Like she was, she got like, she got too hot one day, apparently, right?

Like, and like, and she like almost fainted.

It was at, I believe, some sort of like 9-11 memorial in New York, I think.

Yeah.

It's like, I mean, like,

I don't know.

Like, the idea that

a woman in her 60s might

not

be able to put away 16-hour workdays day after day after day without having a day where she's a little tired, not exactly a shocker, but like, yeah, that's the way that was covered.

And I mean, you know,

you started by sort of pointing out that Biden gave in and I think did a very honorable thing in withdrawing.

And I think part of his reluctance, part of the reluctance of people around him was certainly about the fact that it was impossible impossible for them to see the very, very genuine and legitimate concerns that people were having through the midst of the very fucking people who were like, the children couldn't fall down, right?

Like throwing up concerns about Joe Biden's age.

It's like, it's the same fucking tune eight years later.

Like it happened to be true this time, but like.

It's a little weird when like, you know, it's the, it's the fucking New York Times again being like, you know, this guy should maybe drop out, right?

Like meanwhile, the other guy's like, yeah, I grabbed her.

And like, it's just like, yeah, but he, you know, like, that's, that's not a thing that, that is ever going to get any attention from, from, you know, our, our media leaders or our chattering classes, right?

So I think that that's sort of my memory of it.

It's just, you know, a really kind of fatal combination of

misogynistic tropes, kind of double standards leveled at, you know, an admittedly imperfect candidate while at the same time, like giving her this kind of always sort of falling back on this veneer of invincibility and inevitability in order to kind of justify that.

And if I have hope that 2024 is not just a replay of that, it is that Kamala Harris is, she would be a come from behind.

It would be the better story if she turns this shit around right now.

It would be kind of cool for the media to follow her, take this, take this, this ship that is clearly sinking and do something, make it make it a tough, make it make it a close race, which is the opposite.

You know, it's the same impulse that they followed, except in 2016, except that that time it cut against the Democratic nominee, cut against Hillary Clinton.

Right.

In 2016, the best story was

for this improbable, seemingly wildly inappropriate, long shot dark horse candidate of Donald Trump to beat the establishment, right?

And now there is the guy who

really, you can tell that Donald Trump really didn't think he was going to have to campaign.

His posts on truth social have all been outrage at the unfairness that now he has to spend more money and campaign in more states.

And networks are putting Harris surrogates on TV, even from states where he thinks he's up and should win.

You know, it's, there's an outrage at the unfairness that he is being meaningfully challenged for the presidency, which he really was not being by Joe Biden.

I hear you about Biden's sense of frustration at the media narrative around his weakness before he did choose to withdraw.

There was a lot of people who were from the sort of pro-Biden camp who were very eagerly and repeatedly comparing it to buffer emails, you know, that like classic reference to

the

media's creation of a real scandal about something that was really functionally not that scandalous, which was Hillary Clinton's use of our private email server, which, you know, in retrospect seems to have been a function of the fact that she like didn't really understand technology very well and didn't want to give up her Blackberry.

And they went through all her emails and it was mostly like she only emailed like 10 people, which is insane to me.

But it's like, cause she's a boomer.

She's old.

Yeah.

She's a boomer.

And in 2016, what was happening was her emails were being sent to an account that she did not run

or look at.

And they were being printed out and read to her by assistants, right?

Like, that's most of how she was functioning, was by facts and phone.

Boomers do all of their work over the phone.

They don't want to, they don't want to do it by email.

They don't want to text you.

And the actual people she was emailing was like, Chelsea Clinton to schedule a fucking yoga class.

You know, it was like,

And by the way, Colin Powell did the exact same thing.

Right.

But, you know, what happened was

because

she was and seemed so arrogant in her sense of entitlement to the presidency and because that arrogance was morally magnified by the fact that it was coming from a woman right because she was judged more harshly for being arrogant a man would have been that created immediate narrative and also frankly a

public desire to see her brought down a notch right there are incentives both in the people who are writing those stories and in the people who are reading them.

We could see something similar happen to Harris.

The term ungrateful

used by J.D.

Vance at his first, you know, post-Biden step-down rally.

They got him doing rallies on his own, but

which suggests that they've never heard him speak publicly.

He tweeted out that it reminded me of Sweet D from Dolly Study in Philadelphia.

And that, like, I mean, like, he's just gagging up there.

It's terrible.

It reminds me of that time Jed Bush ran for president, I think in 2016.

Please clap.

And said, please clap.

Yeah, because he could not get any, anybody in that crowd on his side.

And, you know, J.D.

Vance is a charmless, odious little prick who's just not his own man.

You know,

he can't work a crowd on his own because he's not the principal.

He's not the guy in charge.

And he has never been in his whole life.

He spent his whole adult life and his whole career in service to these kind of more important, more charismatic minds.

You know, yeah, it was first Amy Chua

and then Peter Thiel and now Donald Trump.

Jade Wynen did call them daddies, but he's never been the big man in his own right.

And I think it's partly because he doesn't have the juice.

But at J.D.

Vance's first

rally, he said that Kamala Harris was not sufficiently grateful to be an American.

This is a reference to a line that a few

right-wing, you know, quote-unquote legal thinkers like John Eastman, the architect of the January 6th coup, who has since been disbarred, are advancing this notion that Kamala Harris is somehow disqualified from the presidency under the 12th Amendment because her parents were not citizens or not nationalized at the time of her birth.

That's not how it works.

Kamala Harris was born here in sunny California.

She was born in the exact same hospital as my daughter.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

One of one of Rivers' many claims to fame, but you know, she has birthright citizenship, which the right wants to eliminate as a function of the 14th Amendment, but they have not done that yet.

But they're not really saying that she's legally, technically not a citizen, right?

What they're saying, the way that they,

what they're saying is what they were saying when they tried to, you know, further the birther conspiracy about Obama in 2008, right?

It's not actually about

where these people were born or what the technicalities of the law governing their citizenship is.

I mean, Ted Cruz, who they run every couple of years, was born in Canada, for Christ's sake.

It's about her race and her sex.

Yeah.

Right.

They're saying she is disqualified by her identity, not by virtue of the location she was born, but by virtue of what she was born as.

And that's, I think, you know, something that we're going to see in variously veiled guises.

But JD Vance also got pretty close at that same rally

where he said that Kamala Harris had simply been cashing a government check for 20 years.

Yeah, he was

called her a welfare queen.

Right.

He had enough plausible deniability to say that she had only been working for the government.

You know, she has spent a lot of her career in government.

That's not what he was fucking.

Prosecuting bad guys.

I mean, like, I don't know.

Like, does J.D.

Vance not ostensibly like that?

I mean, J.D.

Vance actually did grow up on welfare and Kamala Harris didn't.

There's nothing wrong with that.

It's absolutely fine.

Like it's a good thing.

I know welfare is there's nothing wrong with welfare, right?

But what he was saying is this black woman is a burden on society.

Yeah.

And he was reaching back to Ronald Reagan to do it.

The actual factual counter to this is kind of like politically tricky because like the truth is that Kamala Harris did not grow up on welfare.

She grew up as a child of privilege as the daughter of two Bay Area professors, a Stanford professor and a Berkeley professor.

That's right.

Because her mom was a biologist, I believe, at Berkeley.

And her father was a Stanford economist, a Marxist economist from Stanford University.

I didn't know we had those here.

The other thing that's supposed to disqualifying to her, and this is a tweet from Laura Loomer from, I think, today or yesterday, right?

It's time for Republicans to start about Kamala Harris's sexual history and the reason why she doesn't have any children of her own.

I'm willing to bet that she's had so many abortions that she damaged her uterus, right?

Like, so this idea of like childlessness being

about jobs somehow, like being about access to abortion is is like you know front and center in these attacks so like you know she's deprived of legitimacy in all these different ways the the question i have for you is like is any of this

is this gonna work or like i mean what's our prediction here because on the one hand so you pointed to the when you were thinking about talking about like the

kind of

you know, the figure that was often sort of invoked in 2016 to describe Hillary Clinton, it was Lisa Simpson, right?

Like the idea that there's a kind of, this is someone who like, you know, the straight A student trying to, you know, you know, kind of being almost annoyingly perfect or something like that.

I must admit that that's not how I saw Hillary Clinton, but that's clearly how some of her fans and a lot of her detractors saw her.

At the same time, like,

right, like there's a reason why the coconut thing became sort of the rallying cry of among among the left, especially around Kamala Harris, because

it's a little daffy, it's a little bit goofy, it's like, it's

a bit of a mess in like, in, in ways that, that are, are very endearing.

And, and it, it, it's sort of, it is an anti-Hillary Clinton kind of positionality, right?

It's the one where like, you, you, you're dealing with the kind of, like, this, it's, it's hard to say, oh, this is a person who just, who is not genuine.

Like, she appears to be kind of a genuine oddball.

He's just a, she's a somewhat strange person.

And, like, in ways, frankly, that mirror almost Trumps, right?

Who are like, who, who, who's, who's wearing kind of certain aspects of his personality like on his sleeve and like makes it impossible to kind of call out.

So I'm wondering there, there's, so there's that, like whether or not that puts her in a different position, that in some way, right, the first, first African-American president was indeed kind of uncannily perfect, right?

Like was, and, and, and you could tell the immense, I mean, there was that joke on Kian Peele back in the day on the sketch show, the Obama anger translator, where the whole idea was this is a black man studiously avoiding saying things.

and now he's hiring this guy to get that out, like to basically explain what he's really wanting to tell you.

And it's noticeable that like to me, that the amount of sublimation you get from Kamala Harris is comparatively minimal.

Now, any woman in politics, any woman at her level of accomplishment, obviously has had to

keep her mouth shut when she wanted to scream at someone for sure.

But at the same time, like her.

primary, her primary affect does not appear to be sublimation, right?

She doesn't need an anger translator.

She doesn't need to have a weirdness translator.

Kamala Harris appears to be genuinely odd and it's spilling out.

And so I'm wondering like whether or not that might inflect what people are

able to project on to her, because precisely she's not,

she's a different kind of

leader, different kind of woman of color, different kind of politician of color than voters have been exposed to, right?

At least at the presidential level.

I don't know if that's a fair description, but that's certainly how I read the coconut thing, the fact that like the left rallied around one of her odd or rhetorical moments.

She has really, I mean, she's a prosecutor.

She has good, she has moments of just like spot on rhetoric.

I don't think the coconut tree was one of them, to be quite honest.

And yet it was the thing that everyone found endearing.

It just kind of,

it was a little excessive.

It felt, yeah, I don't know.

It felt, you know, you're like, this is maybe how I would talk if I, if, if I was able to, I was supposed to recite, retell a story that I'd heard a bunch of times and like sort of like knew the ending to or something like that.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I will say there's a lot there.

There's a lot in what you've just covered.

I do want to go back to the Laura Loomer tweet because that imagery, I think, is really loaded.

And the sexualization of Kamala, the like attacks on Kamala as a sexual

being, I think are something that are going to get uglier before they get better.

However, I do think your comparison

to Hillary Clinton is an apt one, right?

And I think something that's

a big deal between them is that Kamala Harris is about 20 years younger than Hillary Clinton and has been able to benefit from being a woman in the public eye and a woman in politics in an era in which there were just many more of them.

And so the, there were, there were, there was more precedent, you know, for a woman to say, make a joke and be understood as humorous, as opposed to just, you know, incredibly stupid.

A woman to be able to

present a sense of entitlement to authority and not having to be earning it all the time.

I was like, Kamala Harris is her affect is very relaxed.

I have never seen Hillary Clinton relaxed.

Hillary Clinton has not let out a fart since the early 80s.

You know what I mean?

Like the same one still germinating.

Yeah.

It's just, she's just so

disciplined in a way that reads as anxious.

Yeah.

It doesn't read to me as a kind of eager competence in the Lita Simpson sense

or like a desirous ambition.

It it always read to me as anxiety.

Other people, I'm sure, interpret Hillary Clinton's affect in various different ways.

Don't email me about how she's, you know, completely calm and knowingly evil.

It's fine.

I believe you.

But Kamala seems much, much more at ease.

I think she has a recourse

to a posture of coolness and authenticity, both as a member of Generation X and as a black woman, that like Hillary Clinton, you know, a boomer white lady can never be cool.

I'm sorry, mom.

But like, it's just,

they are excluded by virtue of, you know, no longer being sexually desirable, by virtue of having like liberal politics that can seem eager in this way, that is cringe when it comes from women.

You know, there's a lot of baggage on boomer-white women.

Kamala Harris does not carry in the same way.

I will say she does at times appear inauthentic to me or as if her, she seems like somebody who's very practiced, right?

Which, of course, she is.

She has been in public life and presenting herself.

as a hyper-competent figure of authority for a long time.

But I do think the coconut thing is kind of amazing.

It took off.

What I love about the coconut tree clip, and for our listeners who have, you know, perhaps just fallen out of a coconut tree, let me explain briefly what this is.

There is a video clip of Kamala Harris at a podium.

I do not know who she is speaking to, but she says, you know, my mother, she's recounting the story from her childhood.

She goes, my mom used to give us a hard time.

I assume when she and her siblings were, you know, screwing around and she'd go,

she'd tell us, what do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

And then Kamala Harris gives her Kamala Harris laugh, which is very distinctive, which I also want to talk about.

And then she goes, still laughing, she goes, you exist in the context of all that you are and that which came before you.

Because none of us just live in a silo.

Everything is in context.

My mother used to, she would give us a hard time sometimes and she would say to us, I don't know what's wrong with you young people.

You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

You exist in the context

of all in which you live and what came before you.

It is a goofy way of saying, you know, history matters, basically.

Which is the exact opposite meaning of the other kind of viral Kamala Harris clip

when she talks about thinking about what can be unburdened by what has been.

And like these two like Kamala memes have me ping-ponging back and forth.

Like, is it historicism or an historicism?

One's her mom.

One, in one, she's in one, she's, she's ventriloquizing her mom.

It's important.

Her mom, the Tamil biologist, an immigrant academic.

Yeah, these sort of were unearthed actually as Oppo Research.

By the Republicans,

because they put it on the internet thinking this lady sounds,

frankly, a little drugged.

She sounds weird.

She is talking about coconut trees, which are this exotic,

kind of fancy, foreign thing that don't appear in many parts of the United States, but it went massively viral.

And people found it totally delightful because she does seem a little bit like your wacky aunt.

You know, yeah, she has a third.

Is there still a third hour to the Today Show?

Because it's got third hour of educational vibes, right?

Where you're like, oh, people have been drinking in studio.

And like, and it's delightful.

And it, and it's noticeable, right?

That like, maybe it's just my own Twitter experience, but like like the first coconuts appearing in people's Twitter bios, those were kind of Bernie bros.

I think that kind of like, she won over the Bernie bros with that.

There's a kind of looseness.

And I think, I think you're right about the inauthenticity at the same time.

You know, and authenticity, of course, also can, and I think this is the lesson of Hillary Clinton, can occasion recognition from

especially voters who have had to code switch, have had to suppress ambition, have had to

comfort, you know, lesser qualified people in their own lives

that they're promoted over or whatever.

Have had to have an anger translator, perhaps.

Yes.

Right?

Like

there is an element there of like,

in some way, Donald Trump has the

appeal clearly to his

supporters of being kind of this untrammeled, uncontainable person that everyone would like to be if they were as rich as him, right?

I think that that's the, there's an aspirational element to that.

His lack of discipline, the fact that he's like, I didn't want to work for this.

What the fuck?

It's actually a pretty relatable thing.

And like, it's, it's kind of, you know, that's his, that's his particular genius.

But, but I think that Harris here really works well as a, as a foil for that, as like, you know, kind of embodying just like the opposite of that, the person who has to kind of clean up after the person who like can't be asked to like do their fucking job, right?

Like the fact that, like, Donald Trump's like, I, I was gonna plan, I was planning on putting as much work into this particular campaign as I did into Home Alone 2, lost in New York, or alone in New York.

And now I got shot at.

And now they switched candidates on me.

I think Donald Trump is actually, in the end, kind of happy he got shot at and angry that it's not getting as much attention as he wishes it did.

I will say that.

To be fair, it is clearly the funniest twist that everybody memory holds

the fact that a presidential candidate got grazed by a bullet not like 10 days ago.

On the other hand, I have to say, I share his frustration on this one point that like people, people have spent weeks like on single remarks on him.

The man.

The man, like, I mean, someone died.

And like, everyone's like, you know, we'll move.

Are we still talking about this?

It's like, it kind of feels like we should.

It's really bad, you guys.

I think that the assassination attempt on Donald Trump seemed most significant

when it appeared to be an ideologically coherent,

like politically motivated assassination.

And now it appears to be the product of a politically incoherent mental illness.

Like this kid who shot him seems to have looked up also, you know, potential opportunities to shoot the FDBI director and to shoot Joe Biden.

You know, he wanted to kill somebody famous and to die in doing so.

And it seems to have been like Sir Han Sirhan vibes, basically.

Right.

Or like, I mean, he's, frankly, he's a standard mass shooter.

And a lot of those guys have an ideological commitment to misogyny.

They're often, you know, have been abusing their girlfriends or their mothers.

but we sort of understand that as non-political, right?

And this guy appears to have been in a similar way.

Yeah, like non-political in the terms that we are used to identifying politics right so it seems at first it seemed like somebody was trying to shoot donald trump because they didn't want him to win the november election as he appears likely to do and execute his agenda and then we were all sort of corrected like no no no that's not what happened somebody was not motivated by political uh opposition to Donald Trump enough to sacrifice their own life and commit murder.

I could have told you that right away because AR-15 is not a Democrats weapon.

Our weapon, wokeness.

We were going to run up and just woke him, woke him right to death.

We would have written a strongly worded op-ed full of moral indignation.

I will say it back to Kamala.

Yeah.

Sorry.

She is somebody who pitches herself as having righteous moral anger, right?

She does express anger, especially when she is out the sump talking about Dobbs.

Yeah.

She conveys anger and challenges anger.

I think that comes across as less threatening when women do it.

This is something women on the right do all the time.

They express the most virulent anger in a way that, you know, does not

challenge their dignity because they're not seem to have any to begin with and doesn't seem

as

menacing.

So like women on the right do that all the time.

I think women on the left or women in the center.

haven't done it as much, but Kamala has been much more willing to be publicly angry than, say, Obama was.

Well, two things about that.

One is I think she's cribbing a little bit or not cribbing, but she's definitely following in the footsteps of Elizabeth Warren, who had that particular tone of anger, of indignation.

It wasn't even, she was angry at someone.

She was like, this is not right.

Come on, right?

And like, and that clearly really resonated with voters.

And I thought that was always very, very effective.

It was usually the best part of any debate performance of her is when she got that tone, when she was like, come on, what are we doing here, guys?

And then the other thing, of course, is that that's a prosecutor's weapon.

And she's very, very, made very clear that right she's coming at him as a prosecutor she said this man is a felon this man is a is uh a you know is is a admitted sexual assaulter he is and i mean this has been the the case she's been making for the last 48 hours it's just and and there's an anger that that comes creeps into it but it's a representative anger right is saying right i'm here for the state of california but i am here to do this thing like it's not a stance that i i love frankly because it it puts you know it can easily lead to miscarriages of justice, but it is a, it is the prosecutor's bread and butter.

And I think that's, that's the anger she's, she's marshaling there.

And it's one that I think Americans are by and large very, very comfortable with.

Right.

Her 2020 campaign slogan was for the people, which is what she said when she presented herself in court.

Courtroom lawyers are really skilled retorticians.

They have to be showmen in this way that your average like litigator is not.

There's a lot of like charmless people with no charisma working in the law, but you can't really be a courtroom prosecutor if you don't have that ability to like sort of manipulate a room.

I will say, I think Democrats and not just Harris, but Democrats in general are strongest against Trump when they are ventroloquizing.

the voice of an exasperated and outraged public, right?

So like in 2020, during the general election, I think the strongest, I think we've talked about this before, I think the strongest moment that Joe Biden had was in that debate where he goes, oh, will you shut up, man?

Right.

That frustrated, exasperated pointing out of Trump's ridiculousness is really good.

When Kamala Harris was running in the 2020 primary, this is kind of a famous anecdote, right?

They were trying to figure out how she was going to run as a woman in the face of Trump's masculine domination politics, which she used against Hillary Clinton to great effect several times, right?

And her advisors, in this famous story, her advisors come to her and they go, okay, well, what would you do in a situation like the one in the third 2016 debate?

He's like physically in her space.

Right.

They were not at podiums.

They were, they were in like a town hall kind of setting where they were supposed to get up and walk around.

And Hillary Clinton was answering a question.

and trying to keep her attention on the question and on the people who had asked it.

And Donald Trump is like sort of skulking behind behind her, leaning over her as he talks.

It was really juvenile, right?

But what it did on camera was emphasize both his shamelessness and his physical size.

Donald Trump is a, he's older now.

You can see him getting a little skinnier and like wasting away a bit.

He's a big guy.

And that, that kind of like stupid caveman domination shit, like who's bigger?

Like that matters to these weird ass median voters we were talking about.

And so they sort of, and I think it was effective in this like brutal, depressing way against Clinton, right?

So Harris's advisors come to her and say, what would you do in that situation?

And she goes, I would turn around and say, why are you being so weird?

And I think that's a much better strategy than Hillary Clinton's strategy of just trying to ignore him, right?

You have to, you can't pretend he's not doing what he's doing.

And what you have to do is rentroloquize a regular American voter's like disgust and frustration with it because people fucking hate that guy yeah like like the thing about donald trump is he is beatable because people fucking hate his guts they think he's annoying they think he's a crook they think he's dishonest and they're right and he's weird and he's fucking weird

and you're like this is the least relatable thing i've ever heard right he wants to sleep with his daughter and he hired a weirdo as his vp who's going on and on about lowering birth rates and how people who don't have children shouldn't have as many votes and how childless cat ladies.

Pissed off the cat ladies of America.

J.D.

Vance also at one point was railing against childless cat ladies who vote Democratic and listed Pamela Harris among them.

I don't think she actually owns any pets.

But, you know, maybe she does.

And I'm sure if she has a dog, we'll see a lot of that dog.

But

I don't think she does.

What I was basically saying is that we're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made.

And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.

And it's just a basic fact.

You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigig, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.

And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?

But, you know,

it's this weird, creepy,

like sexually obsessive,

mouth-breathing

odiousness that is incredibly off-putting.

It's the kind of thing it's like, well, I'm going to need to check all of these teenage girls' genitals before I allow any of them to play softball.

You know, it's creepy shit.

It's off-putting.

It's bullying.

It's weird.

It's invasive.

And I think Americans will respond to its creepiness if they have an energetic alternative that is willing to confront that creepiness.

Yeah.

That's when Democrats do.

best.

So she doesn't just need to say,

you know,

yeah, she needs to be like, look at these assholes.

Yeah.

And that's, and that's what you have her surrogates in this like veep stakes campaign that is swept up immediately.

All these white men are on TV saying these guys are assholes.

Like ending this year as a governor of Kentucky, the governors of North Carolina,

Minnesota.

They're all kind of doing something to waltz.

Is that right?

Tim Waltz.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And of course the guy who's going to get it, Josh Shapiro.

Josh Shapiro.

I think it, I think it will be Josh Shapiro.

It's going to be Josh Shapiro.

But yeah, so I'm, I'm, I'm, I would be very surprised.

If it wasn't Josh Shapiro.

Yeah, I got to say.

He can credibly put Pennsylvania back in play and she needs it.

And he's also

an anti-union, pro-Israel,

you know, real kind of piece of shit that's going to piss off the left.

And I think, you know,

I

think it'll be a bumpy announcement if that happens.

Yeah, at the same time, we

I often think, especially with a VEEPA announcement, it's probably better for someone.

It's not meant for me, right?

A VEEP announcement that makes me happy is probably a bad sign.

I think that in some way,

the Kamala announcement made me very happy.

That means I now have to brace myself for a person that I do not very much enjoy being on the other part of that ticket.

It's, you know, it's a big country.

You know, people are

different and

I'm fully prepared.

Like, ooh.

And I I think the more I go, ooh, the better.

You know, I mean, like, don't make it Tim Kane because they were like, who?

But like, plus, he's anti-abortion, which you really don't need right now.

No, but Sapiro is not.

I would, I would, this might be actually a good place for us to wrap up because, you know, it's been sort of assumed that Harris needs a white man.

Yeah.

Have you ever heard that?

Like, it's a kind of annoying TikTok rap.

It's like, I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes.

And then i saw i saw a fun video of kamala harris like dancing to that song while like they flashed all the different vp contenders behind her and they're all like men in finance frankly i i just tweeted out the box for the trader joe's cracker assortment and

a lot of people are tweeting like pictures from wine stores it's like interesting whites you know i think there's something

about the vp role that is under analyzed which is that it is a role of supplication right?

And irrelevance.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, Kamala Harris

was the first woman VP, not the first woman to run as VP.

It would be Geraldine Ferraro.

Great 80s dresses, but the first woman to actually serve in the VP.

And in that role,

you have not a ton of responsibility.

Yeah.

And visibility only as a sidekick and a service person to the principal.

Right.

And that is a very feminized role candidate yeah even though it's been almost uniformly men who have done it it's the role of the support person yeah yeah to the real politician the real guy who matters and having a man

in that position of service submission subordination to a black woman i think that could be risky and they're going to have to manage it in a way that doesn't incite further resentment, but can allow the people who are, you know, frankly, misogynist to feel a little less uncomfortable about a woman being in charge because men hate having women as a boss.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, it's as we, oh, and we didn't mention Mark Kelly, who might also make a lot of sense as a V pick for

the Senate.

And I feel like they're not going to want to take a Democrat out of the Senate, especially from a tough right.

I think there's that.

But on the other hand, like, you know, astronaut, kind of a team guy, right?

Like like more known as like kind of a team player and that of course makes for good vice president but as as we decide the v as we enter into the v stakes it's worth pointing out that you know remember john nance garner's famous observation that the office what is it is not worth a bucket of warm spit or piss or i've heard different versions of this but some some bodily effluvium you know the

I too was a little struck by the fact that like it cannot be that they that I mean no women are being seriously considered other than I think Gretchen Whitmer who's already she's already said she doesn't want it.

Doesn't want it.

Yeah, she's chairing the Harris campaign.

She also co-chaired the Biden campaign before he withdrew.

So, I mean, but yeah, it's very, very noticeable.

And it's going to be interesting, like, which style of masculinity,

like what they think, it'll give us a sense of what the Democrats think Harris's style is going to be and what their weaknesses are in terms of gender politics, whom they pick as the VEP, because I think that'll give us a a sense of like,

what kind of aggrievements do they think they can still address?

And which ones do they think are basically baked in?

And you're just, you know, you're running a

black woman like this is going to happen.

Fuck it.

We're not, we're not, we can't mitigate that, right?

Like, what do you think is, what do you think you can mitigate and what can't you?

And that'll be interesting to see.

I mean, these are people who are looking at

a lot of survey data, et cetera, et cetera.

So unlike us who are just kind of going from our own

gut and long-time experience observing the gender dynamics of American politics, there is an element here of seeing what the Democratic Party is going to come away with and sort of think what are

mitigable factors and what aren't.

There's going to be more gross gender stuff levied at Kamala Harris.

There's going to be more performances

of masculinity domineering and otherwise from all sorts of men in politics.

It's going to be be an exhausting three months.

Yeah.

But your good friends at In Bed with the Right will be here.

Step along the way.

Hold your hand through it.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for listening.

Adrienne, thank you for hopping on this call and talking about it with me.

Thank you.

And hope to see you guys next time.

See you next time on Inbed with the Right.

Oh, wait, write and review us, please.

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In Bed with the Right, would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lau.