WHO Says ‘Masculinity Is Back’? Why Those Experts on the Subject at The Atlantic

Okay, OKAY.

Lemme just get my initial reaction to reading this – The Atlantic and ‘masculinity’ in the same sentence – out of the way.

  

Alright, alright. I feel better. And now I can share this with you with a straig…no, I can’t.

The Democratic manly man is back, @russellberman reports, with the party embracing masculinity as a campaign strategy. https://t.co/HeaoyjKAQT

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) July 12, 2026

They even use some Michael Avenatti lookalike for the cover shot; that’s how little they get it.

DEMOCRATIC MANLY MAN

Okay.

Flog that dead donkey, boys…and I do mean boys.

First – and I probably really shouldn’t do this because it would give the entire game away. Then again, I have a sneaking suspicion that the opinion of one female writer at a conservative site is hardly going to make a dent in the bubble world these exalted journalistic emeriti inhabit.

Like this author, for instance, who waxes confidently on ‘the return of the Democratic manly man’ and yet?

Looks like every other drippy Democratic dweeb who has wistfully scribbled similar testosterone-fueled fantasy fiction.

We all know this guy. His Harvard/Dartmouth/Columbia/NYU/Berkeley/whatever face is interchangeable with any other of his ilk. They have the hair, the shirt, and for sure the glasses uniform down to a Borg-cube science.

This carefully composed, wonkish appearance is a comfort to their readers. It is non-threatening and doesn’t frighten away skittish, white-male-hating AWFLs who are needed to keep subscription levels up.

It’s how they sold Obamacare, remember?

This is how they will also sell a palatable version of ‘Democratic manly man’  to progressive consumers while praying to whatever pagan gods they sacrifice to that perhaps an unwary normal male will be fooled by their ruse.

[INSERT: Leeloo laugh]

The (paywalled) article focuses initially on an Ohio Democratic congressional candidate named Brian Poindexter. It uses manly-man language to describe him.

He ‘wolfs’ down sammiches. Has ‘manliness’ credentials.

But even when Poindexter points out the obvious problem with the Democratic Party’s approach to their masculinity problem, he still carefully pulls his punches.

Brian Poindexter had just finished wolfing down a Reuben sandwich in a deli outside Cleveland when he delivered a message that, coming from a Democratic House candidate in the year 2026, sounded almost provocative. “There’s nothing wrong with being masculine,” Poindexter told me. It’s okay, he said, to be “a manly man.”

Poindexter’s own manliness credentials are fully in order. The 46-year-old started working in a machine shop as a teenager and spent years hauling furniture across the country before finding stability as a union ironworker. He drives a Ram Big Horn pickup truck and built, with his buddy turned campaign manager, a shed in his backyard. Now Poindexter is running for Congress, trying to flip a Republican-held seat in Ohio with a pitch aimed at a constituency that has abandoned the Democratic Party over the past two decades: men.

In 2024, Kamala Harris won just 43 percent of the male vote against President Trump and an even lower portion—39 percent—of white men, according to exit polls. A Democratic presidential nominee hasn’t captured a plurality of men since Barack Obama in 2008, and even then, Obama edged out John McCain among men by only a single point. The party-wide reckoning that Trump’s win spawned has centered in part on why Democrats lost working-class men whose life experiences resemble Poindexter’s—and how the party can win them back. In Poindexter’s view, Democrats’ struggles with men like him owe less to policy than to culture. “It’s all vibes,” he said. “The Democrats have catered too much to, you know, the softer side,” he said. “We should be well-rounded people. We should be tough when we need to be. We should be soft when we need to be.”

Critiques such as Poindexter’s have gelled into a consensus over the past two years, repeated ad nauseam by starchy senators and governors with an eye toward running for president in 2028. Closing the gender gap now seems to be an official electoral strategy for Democrats. A couple of months ago, I got a call from a party operative who pitched a story on the Democrats’ effort to “win back the manosphere.” The operative ran through a list of a half dozen candidates in key House districts who “are engaging culturally in male spaces”—a bit of gobbledygook that I took to mean “manly men,” or perhaps “guy’s guys,” but that also reflects the sort of anthropological distance that points to the depth of the party’s problem. After all, an ironworker probably wouldn’t describe himself as “engaging culturally in male spaces.”

THE DEMOCRATS HAVE CATERED TOO MUCH TO, YOU KNOW, THE SOFTER SIDE

Mr. Poindexter is a master of understatement, trying to survive in a party of circling, psychopathic, anti-white-male sharks.

Mr. Poindexter admits he had been a bad boy, but golly. Democratic women seem to go for that lately, don’t they?

And who doesn’t get into fights at football games when they’re hammered? Or ‘drunken tussles,’ as the author puts it.

…Poindexter is not entirely a political novice, having served for the past several years on the city council of Brook Park, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. He grew up in Cleveland, not far from where he lives now. He describes his upbringing as “a Brady Bunch situation”; he was one of six kids in a blended family, and his father worked as a union machinist. Poindexter told me that he got into trouble as a teenager—he was once caught with a bag of marijuana, and at 18, he was charged with assault after a neighborhood fight. “I was rough and rowdy, and it took a long time to grow out of that,” he said. Records show that Poindexter was also charged with disorderly conduct in 2002 and aggravated disorderly conduct in 2003, when he was in his early 20s. (Poindexter told me that both charges stemmed from drunken tussles at Cleveland Browns games.)

More recently, and while he was serving on the city council, he pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor charges of illegally setting off fireworks in Brook Park, where they are banned.  Poindexter told me that he’s prepared for his opponent to attack his criminal record. “I don’t blame others for the mistakes I made,” he said. “I owned it; I took care of it; I grew from it. I didn’t sue my accusers into silence. I didn’t say it was the policeman’s fault. I didn’t blame the courts.”

Maybe he gives off the aura of a little danger, and that’s what these tightly wound women find so thrilling. Especially once the story comes out that he was once a Republican, but found Bernie Sanders.

I imagine that makes him well-nigh irresistible to the AOC crowd. He sure has the ‘fight the oligarchy’ schtick down pat.

I’m Brian Poindexter – I’m a union ironworker, and I’m running for Congress because working people’s lives keep getting harder and harder while billionaires keep getting richer and richer.

Washington isn’t making it any easier.

I’m ready to fight back. Are you?… pic.twitter.com/1OPkZ36Zns

— Brian Poindexter for Congress (@bpforcongress) January 15, 2026

Pretty tiresome.

Berman has a few other Democratic manly-man nominees running that he profiles in the article, like Johnny Garcia, who spent years as a hostage negotiator with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Department. But he admits these guys are running on their own accord – the Democratic Party didn’t find them.

…Garcia describes himself as “an old-school Democrat,” distancing himself from the party’s contemporary brand. “The Biden administration got it wrong on the border,” Garcia told me, citing one issue on which he hopes to appeal to independent and Republican voters in the district. When Garcia campaigned in a Christmas parade last December, he recalled, he chafed at a decision by organizers to place a large Democratic Party flag on the truck he was walking alongside. “I was just like, Damn, man, we’re gonna have a pretty tough time walking this parade,” Garcia said.

There’s also kind of a notable exclusion.

This presumably male Democratic candidate is mentioned only in a derisive Ken Paxton anecdote within a single paragraph. Once, throughout this entire lengthy piece.

pic.twitter.com/BOr4ejrSVN

— Charles X Proxy™ (@Charlemagne0814) July 15, 2026

OUCH

And Berman italicized ‘men’ in the last paragraph. I didn’t. But I guess he likes to think he ended on a firm, hopeful note, as if saying something made it so.

…The DIY nature of Poindexter’s operation both suits his message to voters—here is a man who builds things with his hands—and reflects the real challenges faced by candidates who aren’t rich and aren’t connected to the political-donor class. At the end of the first quarter, Poindexter had just over $90,000 in his campaign account, compared with more than $1.1 million for Miller, according to Federal Election Commission filings. He’s trying to get on the DCCC’s “Red-to-Blue” list, a designation reserved for the party’s most promising House challengers that would unlock additional money and campaign-infrastructure support. Late last month, Poindexter teamed up with other labor-backed Democrats, including Brooks in Pennsylvania and Sam Forstag, a former smoke jumper in Montana, to form a joint fundraising committee they’re calling the “Blue-Collar Brigade.”

For the most part, Poindexter and the other men Democrats are running this year aren’t offering up any new male-centric ideas. That’s not what’s needed, Poindexter told me. Within the party’s agenda, he said, “I can’t think of a single piece of legislation that’s bad for men.” But, he argued, Democrats have hemorrhaged support from men like him—the ones who sweat more than type for a living—because the party has relegated them to the periphery. If nothing else, Democrats are embracing their masculinity again, and they’ll soon find out whether that’s enough to win men back.

DEMOCRATS ARE EMBRACING THEIR MASCULINITY AGAIN

I’ll believe that when I see an article written by a real guy, not a wonk.

And when Democratic male candidates finally have the cojones to say this commercial is chock-full of positive male role models.

I don’t think I can find a Democrat that manly-man yet. 

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.

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