By now the conservative complaint about media bias, however justified, has grown stale. Last Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between J. D. Vance and Tim Walz, however, highlighted another aspect of the mainstream media bubble: its feminization.
This was not merely a matter of the two CBS moderators’ prim efforts to cut Vance off:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Thank you, senator. We have so much to get to. . . . Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process. We have so much to get to. . . . Gentlemen, the audience can’t hear you because your mics are cut. We have so much we want to get to. Thank you [Senator] for explaining the legal process.
This feminization was not just a matter of the moderators’ self-righteous editorializing and one-sided fact-checking:
NORAH O’DONNELL: The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the earth’s climate is warming at an unprecedented rate.
BRENNAN: And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status.
It was not just a question of their setting Walz up for exculpatory or self-promoting responses:
BRENNAN: Governor, do you care to respond to any of those specific allegations, including that the Vice President is, quote, “letting in fentanyl and using kids as drug mules, among other things.”
O’DONNELL: Governor Walz . . . former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe abortion, quote, in the ninth month is absolutely fine. Yes or no? Is that what you support? I’ll give you two minutes.
No, it was the choice and presentation of topics that most revealed the feminization of the elite world view. The moderators turned subjects that should have been landmines for the Biden–Harris record into indictments of Trump–Vance. This transformation was driven not just by contempt for the GOP ticket. It grew out of a reflexive focus on putative victims of conservative policies. More abstract questions of costs and benefits and less favored victims were all ignored.
The issue of immigration is a major handicap for the Democratic ticket. Even the mainstream press occasionally acknowledges the explosion of illegal crossings since 2021. That explosion was the predictable consequence of Biden’s evisceration of Trump’s border protections, above all the requirement that alleged asylum seekers remain in Mexico while making their asylum claims. The resulting flow of illegal aliens has inundated northern cities, usually exempt from, and indifferent to, border chaos. It has increased urban crime, burdened public services, and made a mockery of immigration law and national sovereignty. Trump and Vance had nothing to do with the ongoing illegal alien crisis.
But for the moderators, the problem was not that Biden’s border policies have inflicted the country with at least an additional 10 million illegal aliens, according to the House Committee on Homeland Security. (Ten million is only the number encountered by border agents; it does not include undetected crossers.) The problem for the moderators was how Trump may respond to that crisis—and, in particular, whether he would allegedly cause family separations by deporting parents whose children have obtained birthright citizenship.
This issue of “family separations” was a media obsession during the first Trump presidency and it would appear to be one again. (Of course, it is the deported parent who chooses to leave his child behind; nothing in Trump’s previous deportation policies required family separation.) The moderators’ first immigration question was:
BRENNAN: Senator Vance, your campaign is pledging to carry out the largest mass deportation plan in American history and to use the U.S. military to do so. Could you be more specific about exactly how this will work? For example, would you deport parents who have entered the U.S. illegally and separate them from any of their children who were born on U.S. soil?
The question of how to carry out mass deportations is not illegitimate. Trump failed to address the matter in his debate with Kamala Harris. Vance alluded to the most important part of the answer—self-deportation—in his necessarily condensed remarks. If workplace laws against hiring illegal aliens are actually enforced through programs like E- Verify, and welfare benefits shut off, a significant portion of illegals already here will self-deport.
How to deal with the illegals already here, however, is secondary to the question: how will you prevent more from coming in? The moderators never asked how a Harris–Walz administration would change the Biden–Harris policies that created the mess in the first place. Instead, they were obsessed with the alleged horrors of family separation. Brennan: “Senator, the question was, will you separate parents from their children, even if their kids are U.S. citizens? You have one minute.”
Walz got the broader version of the deportation issue. Brennan again: “Governor, what about our CBS News polling, which does show that a majority of Americans, more than 50%, support mass deportations?” It is not clear what exactly the moderators were getting at, but this was certainly not a hard-hitting question about the Biden–Harris policy failures. The CBS crew allowed Walz to get away with the claim that the recent border bill that Biden advocated and that Trump opposed was tough, even though it would have permitted thousands of illegal aliens a day to enter before authorizing law enforcement to close the border.
Childcare and paid family leave are not remotely within the federal government’s constitutional responsibilities. Nor are they the biggest problems facing the nation at the moment. But in a feminized paradigm (earlier expressed by the Obama administration’s “Life of Julia” cartoon), nothing lies outside the federal government’s purview when it comes to supplanting the private sector and the independent family.
When Brennan urged, “Let’s talk about families in America,” she meant “let’s talk about government programs.” Sure enough: “There is a childcare crisis in this country, and the United States is one of the very few developed countries in the world without a national paid leave program for new parents.”
There is a family crisis in America, but it is not the absence of federal paid leave. In 2022, 40 percent of all American children were born to single mothers. Black newborns faced a catastrophic 69 percent illegitimacy rate, while more than 53 percent of Hispanic children were born to unmarried females. Whites had a 27 percent illegitimacy rate; the rate among the white underclass is twice that. But a feminized worldview is not going to acknowledge family breakdown and the disappearance of fathers as crises.
Admittedly, solving family breakdown is also not a function of the federal government, even one open to more traditional understandings of civil society. Contrary to the dreams of policy wonks, no adjustments to the tax code can put the family back together again. But if the moderators want to “talk about families in America,” the primary issues should be: How do we restore the millennia-long understanding that children need their fathers as well as their mothers? And: How do we teach that traditional marriage is on average the best way to ensure that children are raised by both parents?
The dissolution of the marriage norm drives another real problem that the moderators had no interest in: violent street crime. Boys growing up without fathers and without the expectation that they will take responsibility for the children they themselves conceive are more likely to be delinquent, truant, and gang-involved than the children of married biological parents. Such boys fail to learn from their parents the most basic lessons of self-control and personal responsibility. The astronomical black illegitimacy rate helps explain the equally astronomical black crime rate.
The moderators did not come remotely close to touching on the post-George Floyd crime spike, even though it began in Walz’s back yard. Walz waited nearly a day to call out the National Guard in response to the Floyd race riots, worried that doing so would offend black rioters and protesters. The ensuing wave of violence crashed first over Minneapolis. Homicides nearly doubled there from 2019 to 2021. Carjackings increased over 500 percent between 2019 and 2020 and remain at record levels, with armed juveniles as young as 12 playing a starring role. Crime in Minnesota as a whole is up 12 percent compared with when Walz took office in 2019.
The post-Floyd violence spread across the country, leading to the largest one-year increase in homicide in U.S. history: 29 percent. It would have been illuminating to hear Walz explain his view, expressed in his annual proclamations honoring George Floyd, that policing suffers from “systemic racism.” In Minneapolis, of the 309 blacks shot in 2021, only one—or 0.32 percent of all black shooting victims—was shot by a police officer, and that shooting victim had fired first. Such a ratio of civilian-on-civilian shootings to officer-on-civilian shootings is typical in Minneapolis and nationwide.
Crime, to the extent that it invokes policing as a response, is simply too male a concern. So the moderators approached the topic only through the route of gun control and school shootings. The gun control reflex is the standard Democratic reaction to crime, but that reaction is itself a product of feminization: a big government solution to a problem that originates in private social dysfunction.
O’DONNELL: We want to turn now to America’s gun violence epidemic, the leading cause of death for children and teens in America is by firearms. Senator Vance, you oppose most gun legislation that Democrats claim would curb gun violence. You oppose red flag gun laws and legislation to ban certain semi-automatic rifles, including AR-15s.
Gun homicides surged after the Floyd race riots not because gun laws weakened but because policing did. Stricter purchasing and licensing laws are not going to make any appreciable difference in U.S. gun violence. Almost all of that violence consists of urban drive-by shootings and robberies committed with illegal weapons, as Vance eventually got around to suggesting. Gangbangers are not going to submit dutifully to a federal background check before taking out a rival.
The media relentlessly and almost exclusively cover a minute fraction of American gun violence: carefully planned school shootings perpetrated by alienated white males. These barely register in the vast universe of American shootings. So far in 2024, six juveniles have been killed in five school shootings. By comparison, there were nearly 21,000 victims of gun homicide in 2021. Three of the five lethal school shooting incidents this year involved urban beefs. The moderators’ “leading cause of death for children” claim masks huge disparities in gun homicide victimization and homicide commission. Blacks 17 and younger died of gun homicide in 2022 at 18 times the rate of whites in that age cohort, according to an analysis of CDC data by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. White children face little chance of being criminally shot. Black males between the ages of 15 to 34 die of gun homicide at 24 times the rate of white males in that age group. Those black victims are not being killed by whites or police officers but by other blacks—and so are of no interest to the media or black activists.
But the issue of school shootings is of interest to liberal white females like the moderators, since it provides an outlet for editorializing against right-wing gun culture, however irrelevant that culture is to everyday gun violence.
Housing costs and construction are not a federal responsibility, however much the federal government has leapt its constitutional bounds to interfere in mortgage markets—and in so doing, helped trigger one of the biggest financial crises in recent years. But the moderators solicited the candidates’ federal solutions to the “high cost of housing and rent.” Though Vance did focus on private sector responses to what the moderators called the “high housing crisis,” he mystifyingly agreed with Walz’s assertion that the “problem we’ve had is that we’ve got a lot of folks that see housing as another commodity.” According to Walz, these unsentimental builders and investors selfishly think that housing “can be bought up. It can be shifted. It can be moved around.” Well, yes, that is precisely how housing gets most efficiently built and passed among buyers. Vance was right to stress reducing the cost of energy as a way of lowering construction costs. But his own statement that “We should get out of this idea of housing as a commodity” made no more sense than when Walz said it. It especially did not make sense as a bridge to Vance’s ubiquitous theme of illegal immigration: “But the thing that has most turned housing into a commodity is giving it away to millions upon millions of people who have no legal right to be here.” Demerits to Vance here for too eager an effort to seem “moderate,” i.e., liberal.
The infrastructure collapse across the southeast in the wake of Hurricane Helene is a national disgrace. American energy, water, and transportation systems are not being adequately maintained. The Biden–Harris demands for more electrical vehicles and less traditional energy generation will burden electrical grids further, if not knock them out entirely. The elite’s incessant push for phony “green” energy and transportation initiatives takes the American quality of life for granted, without any awareness of the innovation and investment that went into creating it.
The hurricane devastation could have sparked a useful discussion about infrastructure maintenance. The moderators, however, saw in the hurricane only a pretext for getting to what they undoubtedly viewed as the most important topic of the evening: climate change. They had begun the debate with a tough question about the Middle East—would you support a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran?—but they immediately segued to the subject nearest to their hearts:
O’DONNELL: Let’s turn now to Hurricane Helene. The storm could become one of the deadliest on record. More than 160 people are dead and hundreds more are missing. Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly because of the historic rainfall. Senator Vance, according to CBS News polling, seven in ten Americans and more than 60% of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change. Senator, what responsibility would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change? I’ll give you two minutes.
Given the priority put on this question, one would assume that it is a top issue for voters as well.
It is not. An Ipsos/ABC poll from May 2024 did not even include climate change in the ten issues about which it queried voters. A September 2024 Pew Research poll did include climate change, but the topic tied for last with racial and ethnic inequality among voter concerns. An August 2023 Pew Poll ranked climate change 17th out of 21 national issues.
Most significantly, when you ask voters to put their money where their mouth is, even hypothetically, very few are willing to pay for their virtue signaling. More than half of Americans would not pay any amount of money to combat climate change, according to a University of Chicago poll from June 2024. Forty-five percent are willing to pay $1 a month in their utility bills.
It’s a virtual certainty that the moderators are not willing to curtail their energy-hogging lifestyles, either. Do they carpool to work or use rapid transit? Avoid air travel, especially private planes? Limit their cell phone and computer use? Forego AI searches? Drink America’s miraculously clean tap water instead of bottled water—the latter perhaps the most scientifically illiterate affectation in our pampered existence, whose bottling and transport generates tons of carbon emissions and plastic waste? The answer to all those questions is undoubtedly no.
Climate change policy to date—setting unworkable and counterproductive goals, while shielding voters from any current sacrifice; the narcissism of thinking that Montana, Switzerland, or even most Western countries can curtail global emissions when China, India, and the rest of the developing world are doing whatever it takes to improve their citizens’ standards of living; the performative and cost-free virtue signaling—is quintessentially female in its failure to think rationally about tradeoffs.
Abortion has been part of the national debate for so long that it is hard to remember how imaginary is its connection to constitutionally defined federal powers. But females have made it the center of attention for contemporary politics, and so it was during the vice presidential debate.
The moderators’ only tough question to Walz concerned his claim that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protest in the spring of 1989. Can you explain the discrepancy between that claim and your travel records? Brennan asked.
Walz’s response made the fatal Biden rambling in the first presidential debate look coherent:
Yeah. Well, and to the folks out there who didn’t get at the top of this, look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I’m proud of that service. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI bill to become a teacher. Passionate about it, a young teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of 89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China. The issue for that was, was to try and learn. Now, look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. They, look, I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect. And I’m a knucklehead at times, but it’s always been about that. Those same people elected me to Congress for twelve years. And in Congress I was one of the most bipartisan people. Working on things like farm bills that we got done, working on veterans benefits. And then the people of Minnesota were able to elect me to governor twice. So look, my commitment has been from the beginning, to make sure that I’m there for the people, to make sure that I get this right. I will say more than anything, many times, I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric. But being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life. I learned a lot about China. I hear the critiques of this.
Even the moderators sensed some non sequiturs. “Governor,” Brennan said, “just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy?”
Walz then restates the original untruth, if inarticulately: “No. All I said on this was, is, I got there that summer and misspoke on this, so I will just, that’s what I’ve said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protest, went in, and from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”
The moderators had exhausted their skepticism by then and let this falsehood pass. (In its coverage of the debate, the New York Times ignored Walz’s monologue entirely. It buried Walz’s final two lines deep in a “fact check“ article, generously deeming those two lines “misleading.”)
Many conservative commentators have criticized Vance’s response to the inevitable question about the “state of democracy,” which the moderators unpersuasively claimed is the top issue for Americans, after the economy and inflation. Vance never answered directly whether he would challenge the 2024 election results, even if every governor certified them. Instead, he went on offense, charging the Biden–Harris administration and Big Tech companies with being the real threat to democracy for censoring unorthodox views. (The New York Times huffily called this “pivot” to censorship “jarring.”) This response was in fact Vance’s best moment in the debate, especially since neither of the two previous debates had addressed the suppression of dissent in the private sector:
I believe that we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country, but unfortunately, it’s not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It is the threat of censorship. . . . It’s big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens. And it’s Kamala Harris saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she’d like to censor people who engage in misinformation. I think that is a much bigger threat to democracy than anything that we’ve seen in this country.
We don’t have to agree on every issue, but we’re united behind a basic American First Amendment principle that we ought to debate our differences. We ought to argue about them. We ought to try to persuade our fellow Americans. Kamala Harris is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale. She did it during COVID, she’s done it over a number of other issues. And that, to me, is a much bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said that protesters should peacefully protest on January 6th.
Vance also noted that the charge of election-rigging long preceded Trump’s 2020 complaints: “We have to remember that for years in this country, Democrats protested the results of elections. Hillary Clinton in 2016 said that Donald Trump had the election stolen by Vladimir Putin because the Russians bought, like, $500,000 worth of Facebook ads. This has been going on for a long time. And if we want to say that we need to respect the results of the election, I’m on board. But if we want to say, as Tim Walz is saying, that this is just a problem that Republicans have had. I don’t buy that.”
Walz demonstrated that he knows as little about the First Amendment as he does about his own travel itineraries. He dug around in the recesses of his mind for something relevant and managed to resurface a hackneyed free speech formula (originating from a century-old Supreme Court ruling, since overturned): “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme court test.”
That “test,” such as it is, has nothing to do with the Biden administration’s “misinformation” campaign, as Vance easily recognized: “Tim. Fire in a crowded theater. You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers should not wear masks.”
The moderators were having none of Vance’s retort, however. “Senator,” O’Donnell scolded, “the governor does have the floor.”
But Vance was undeterred: “That’s not fire in a crowded theater. That is criticizing the policies of the government, which is the right of every American.”
Throughout the debate, Vance put in a performance that Trump could only dream of offering, if Trump were self-aware enough to acknowledge his flaws. If the roles on each party’s ticket were reversed, the GOP would face a good chance of retaking the White House. But the race’s outcome still depends on the top of the ticket. The only thing about which one can be confident is that the feminization of our culture, as manifest in the debate moderators’ line of questioning, will continue apace, no matter which party wins in November. Combatting it will require more than a presidential election.
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images