It’s Monday, October 14. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large.
Today we bring you the latest episode of Hezbollah’s Hostages, our view on another scandal at CBS and, in our main story today, Rachel Janfaza takes a long look at the gender divide that in many ways defines this election.
Scroll down for Rachel on the Boys vs. Girls election, but first, since we’re on the subject, allow me to get something off my chest.
Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is in the midst of a media blitz designed to woo male voters. And it’s not going great. On Friday, former NFL player Michael Strahan gave “Coach Walz” a thorough grilling in a Good Morning America interview. On Saturday, Walz—who loves to remind voters that he is a keen hunter—fumbled about with a shotgun in a way that didn’t exactly scream “I do this all the time.”
Walz’s clumsy push for male votes is a reminder of one of the silliest ideas going this election cycle: that the Minnesota governor is a paragon of modern masculinity whose selection as Kamala Harris’s running mate was a masterstroke that would win over male voters.
Or at least that’s what the press insisted. (See here and here and here.) One Bloomberg headline summed it up: “Tim Walz’s Masculinity Is Terrifying to Republicans.”
“Any liberal Democrat whose résumé includes football coach, military veteran, and sharpshooting hunter is a challenge to MAGA mythology,” wrote reporter Francis Wilkinson.
In an article titled “Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, and the Nice Men of the Left,” New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister praised this species of Democratic man as “newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status: happily deferential, unapologetically supportive of women’s rights, committed to partnership.” She contrasts that with the Republican Party’s view of manhood, with its “furious resentments toward women and their power, its mean obsession with forcing women to be baby-makers.”
MSNBC, meanwhile, is running an entire series on “MAGA and Masculinity in 2024” that promises to “examine the societal fallout from right-wing hypermasculinity—and the people fighting its toxic messaging by positively redefining what it means to be a man.”
Meanwhile, Doug Emhoff can be praised for “redefining masculinity” while copping to an affair with his kids’ nanny and being accused of hitting an ex-girlfriend. What was that about believing all women?
If any of this was supposed to win the votes of American men, shockingly it doesn’t seem to have worked. The latest NBC poll suggests the gender divide is as wide as ever, with a 30-point gap between the voting preferences of men and women. And in this battle of the sexes, Trump appears to have the edge, up 16 points among men compared to Kamala’s 14-point lead among women.
Things are so bad that, on Friday in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama admonished black men for not supporting Kamala Harris in greater numbers. “You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you because you think that’s a sign of strength because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”
In other words: Vote Democrat, you sexist pigs!
The optimist in me hoped this election’s cavernous gender gap might force our politicians and pundits to take the challenges American men face a little more seriously.
Because young men in this country are struggling badly. As Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, put it in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The sense a lot of young men have is not being sure that they are needed or that they are going to be needed by their families, by their communities, by society.”
He’s right. And yet few seem to understand this, let alone want to talk about it. No wonder their cunning ruse to win over male voters is flopping so badly.
Election 2024: Battle of the Sexes
Pointy-heads in Washington have variously insisted this election is about immigration, democracy, the economy, and national strength during a time of global strife. But nothing—nothing—defines this election more than one thing: sex.
Across the board, polls prove men and women are split when it comes to choosing candidates. Harris is up by 14 points among women and Trump is up by 13 points with men, according to a New York Times/Siena survey of likely voters this month.
But nowhere is this political divide clearer than among young voters. The most recent Harvard IOP youth poll shows a more than 31-point gender divide, with young women backing Harris by 59 percent to Trump’s 28 percent in a two-way matchup. Among young men, Harris has only an 11-point lead over Trump, 49 percent to 38 percent.
Rachel Janfaza listened to more than twenty American men and women under 34 to understand why. She found that “while many young women have forged a sense of solidarity from the #MeToo resistance after Trump’s 2016 election, a cohort of young men have felt left out of the discourse—and at risk of being canceled for sharing their true social and political preferences.”
Read Rachel’s full story, “Election 2024: Boys vs. Girls.”
60 Minutes: Release the Tapes!
We’ve reported a lot on the dysfunction at CBS News in recent days: from the network admonishing one of its top journalists, Tony Dokoupil, for the crime of asking tough questions in an interview, to producers debating Israel’s right to exist, to the network’s director of standards and practices cautioning journalists against referring to Hamas terrorists as. . . terrorists.
But perhaps the biggest scandal at CBS this week is the interview 60 Minutes conducted with Kamala Harris that has many accusing the network of journalistic malpractice.
We tackle this story—and suggest a simple solution for CBS—in our latest Free Press editorial. Read it here: “60 Minutes: Release the Unedited Kamala Harris Transcript.”
A new national NBC poll has Donald Trump and Kamala Harris neck and neck a month after the same survey showed Harris with a five-point lead. The presidential candidates are also tied in the latest Wall Street Journal poll. And things are basically tied in the battleground states, too, according to the latest RealClearPolling average, with Trump at 48.3 percent and Harris at 47.9 percent in the seven states likely to decide the election next month. Harris will be hoping last week’s media blitz gave her a boost. Over at The Washington Free Beacon, Matt Continetti explains why it won’t. Meanwhile, nervous liberals like Ezra Klein advise their readers to “Ignore the Polls.”
Tensions are growing between Biden and Harris’s top teams, according to a new Axios report. The candidate’s team is frustrated that the president’s team isn’t coordinating his scheduling and messaging to align with their campaign strategy. And the president’s team is still wounded by the way Biden was forced to exit the race this summer.
It’s sometimes easy to take for granted the extraordinary technological progress humankind has made. Self-driving cars have been met with a shrug. Smartphones? Not just boring, evil! No such risk with SpaceX’s latest breakthrough. On Sunday, the Elon Musk–owned company launched the largest rocket ever made, sent it to the edge of space, and then returned it safely back to Earth, catching a 71-meter-long Starship booster in the “chopstick” arms of a rocket tower. If you haven’t already watched this extraordinary feat, do so here and here.
Good thing no one is letting politics get in the way of technological progress. Except they are—and in California, they are pretty explicit about it. Last week, the California Coastal Commission rejected a proposal for SpaceX to launch up to fifty rockets per year from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County. “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” said Commissioner Gretchen Newsom (no relation to Gavin) during the relevant hearing. One giant leap for mankind, blocked by six small-minded California bureaucrats.
For 17 nights late last year, drones swarmed a U.S. military base in Virginia. Officials couldn’t catch the drones, or figure out who they belonged to, reports The Wall Street Journal. U.S. officials confirmed this month that more unidentified drone swarms were spotted in recent months near Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles.
The U.S. will deploy an advanced missile defense system to Israel as well as 100 American troops to operate it, the Pentagon announced Sunday. It is the first time the U.S. has deployed troops to Israel since October 7. In other news from the conflict in the Middle East, Israel says that it has found entrances to Hezbollah’s tunnel system just 300 feet from a UN peacekeeping observation post in south Lebanon.
A new, life-size statue of Joseph Stalin will be unveiled in the northwestern region of Vologda, Russia. The region’s governor said “the decision was prompted by requests from the public” and said it was important for Russians to recognize the Soviet dictator’s “great achievements” but with “all understanding of the ambiguous interpretation of the role.” At least Russians don’t have to grapple with the morals of honoring really controversial historical figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Speaking of alarming revisionism, a new poll by J.L. Partners and the Daily Mail has found that one in five Gen Z voters say that Adolf Hitler had “some good ideas.” A similar percentage of Hispanic and black Americans said the same thing. Overall, 77 percent of respondents said Hitler was “evil,” 12 percent said they were “unsure,” and 11 percent said he had some redeeming qualities. Filing this one under “We’re doomed.”
Watch: A Secret Tour of Hezbollahland
So far in Hezbollah’s Hostages, the animated video series in which brave opponents of the terror group speak out, we’ve heard from a Lebanese man who deserted Hezbollah on the battlefield and another who braved death for peace with Israel. We’ve also told the stories of Syrians who’ve escaped Hezbollah-run sex slavery and drug cartels.
The subject of our fifth episode is not a person. Instead, we take you on a tour of a place called Dahiyeh on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon. Dahiyeh means suburb in Arabic, but it is also known as Hezbollahland. There, the terror group—a proxy of Iran—uses Dahiyeh as a nerve center to impose its policies on the Lebanese people and inflict terror on the region and beyond. Watch Episode Five of Hezbollah’s Hostages below, and for more information on the series, click here.
Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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