Democrats launch $20 million plan to try to win back young men after calling them toxic for years

The Democrats still don't know why they lost so badly to Donald Trump in the 2024 election, and their attempt to try to figure it out and remedy the situation lies in a new program they're calling "Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan." It's nicknamed SAM, which brings to mind Uncle Sam and the "we want you" WWII military recruitment initiative.

"Six months after President Trump swept the battleground states, the Democratic Party is still sifting through the wreckage," The New York Times writes. Democrats have claimed men are toxic for years. Governor Gavin Newsom has blamed mass shootings on "toxic masculinity." 

President Joe Biden spoke to Morehouse grads and told them Republicans' "idea of being a man is toxic." Kamala Harris' loss to Trump was attributed by many on the left to "institutional misogyny and toxic masculinity." The entire Me Too movement painted men as predators and women as vulnerable, brave truth tellers. Yet Democrats still wonder why men left the Party in droves.

In response to this conundrum, the Democrats are taking action and their first target is American young men. "Democrat donors and strategists," the Times writes, "have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places."

The new initiative from the Democratic Party is budgeted at $20 million and, per the Times, "aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online."

The project is planning to "study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces." Dems are encouraging the purchase of in-game ads as a means of skewing young men toward the progressive ideology. "Above all," the plan reads, "we must shift from a moralizing tone."

It's been almost 10 years since the Democrats have been entirely confused as to why they've lost so much ground both politically and in the broader culture. They've still got the academic institutions and non-profits tied up in their ideology, they've still got Hollywood and the arts, but they've lost the people and they don't know why.

"Communities that Democrats had come to count on for a generation or more — young people, Black voters, Latinos — all veered toward the right in 2024, some of them sharply. And unlike Mr. Trump’s win in 2016, his victory last year could not be waved away as an outlier after he won the popular vote for the first time," writes the Times.

The outlet laments that "Working-class voters of every race have been steadily drifting toward the G.O.P. And Democrats are increasingly perceived as the party of college-educated elites, the defenders of a political and economic system that most Americans feel is failing them."

The initiative was mocked online, in part because Democrats for years have been emphasizing the problem of so-called "toxic masculinity," telling men to step back, policing manhood and masculine impulses. The entire project itself smacks of the same kind of cluelessness that got Democrats into this position in the first place.

In an odd bit of irony that perhaps underscores the problem, the Times had to offer a correction to their story. They had quoted a Georgia constituent who said that the party was not represented by a donkey but by "a deer in headlights," and they had mischaracterized the person's sex, saying the constituent was a woman.

"An earlier version of this article misstated the gender of a Democrat in Georgia... The person was a man, not a woman," reads the correction in the Times.

"You stand there and you see the car coming, but you’re going to stand there and get hit with it anyway," the Georgia man had said. The Times undoubtedly made a simple mistake, but it's the same one Democrats are making with men across the board: feminizing them, taking their manhood, and trying to make up for it once the damage has already been done.