I think Broderick was calling this out as an election about masculinity really early. You can see how conceptions of masculinity are pointing in very different directions.
But it’s not that Walz is masculine and that Vance is an awkward pathetic dweeb (though he is). It’s that the lies that Republicans like Trump weaponized about what makes American men men have never been true. And flooding the internet with Red Pill theory videos and spree shooter memes for a decade wasn’t enough to convince everyone it was. The big lie was immediately undone once a candidate fully shaped by it stepped on stage and opened his idiot cringe mouth. Because the Trump distortion field only works if you can play the part. And playing the part only works if the person you’re running against is playing one too (sorry Hillary). But when all of this is pulled out of the internet and forced to exist in the real world, it quickly becomes apparent that the central tenet of the incel has never been true. Life is not a battle between the virgin and the chad. It’s a battle between people who are confident in who they are and those who aren’t. And Republicans are quickly realizing they spent the last three election cycles building a political bloc of loud horrible millennial men who are pathologically incapable of ever being comfortable with themselves and now everyone knows it.
