Why Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Campaign Ad Mocking Young White Men Hit a Nerve

On the surface, it seemed like a typical campaign commercial. Sarah Huckabee Sanders explains her welfare reform policy by depicting a slovenly young man playing video games and requiring him to find work. The tone is meant to be mildly humorous, and the whole message is standard Republican cant: able-bodied people should work and not depend on welfare. No doubt, Sanders and her campaign team thought it would play well with Arkansan voters.

And maybe it will, but it also ignited a firestorm of angry rebuttals online. Many conservative influencers took issue with the use of a young white male to represent a person bilking the welfare system. Not only does every metric refute this characterization—young men make up a relatively minuscule share of welfare recipients—but it reinforces a pernicious and false stereotype about young white men, portraying them as immature slobs who play video games all day in their parents’ basement. 

Likely bemused by this response, Sanders breezily ignored this criticism, equating the selection of a white guy for her message with the selection of cheese balls instead of cookies for his snack. Then she proudly reposted the commercial. After all, what’s the harm in pounding on white men just a little more? What are they going to do? Complain and act like victims? That’s not very manly.

And on and on it goes, or so it would seem. If Sanders’ commercial had aired 10 years ago or more, many more people would have chuckled at the joke and thought little of it. However, in the present day, it almost perfectly embodies everything wrong with civil society. It derides and vilifies men, gives a pass to the real offenders (mainly women and people of color), all narrated by a privileged white woman who owes most of her current success to her former-governor and ambassador to Israel father.

At some point (perhaps now), this becomes intolerable. Today’s culture has become unbearably hostile toward men and insufferably deferential toward women. As I have previously argued, this has led to alarming instances of systemic discrimination and shameless misandry. Despite the majority of men working hard and minding their manners, they are being routinely denied professional and personal opportunities for advancement. On the other side, employers are hurting for talented workers who can help them improve and expand, and women have fewer potential spouses with whom to build a life.

And yet, despite these major and widespread disadvantages, men still receive the lion’s share of blame for all of life’s problems. According to a recent poll, most Democratic women believe that “the challenges women face in American society are due in great part to the behavior or actions of men.” Even a good portion of Republican women (around a fifth of respondents) feel the same way. Apparently, outnumbering men in the workplace, academia, and in arts and entertainment is simply not enough. More needs to be done.

But what more can be done? Hate men and promote women even harder?

And how does one reconcile some of the contradictions in modern feminism that have come up recently in the Lindsay Clancy case and now the lawsuit against Cornell University? In both instances, a woman acted freely and knowingly but somehow lacks all culpability for what resulted. Lindsay Clancy freely and knowingly murdered her children, but she cannot be blamed because of postpartum psychosis, psychotropic drugs, and insufficient sympathy from the people around her. The young woman at Cornell freely and knowingly consented to sexual activity with a group of frat boys after drinking a ton of alcohol and taking ketamine, but she cannot be blamed because the guys wrongly assumed she was consenting to what happened.

Normally, individual empowerment comes with accompanying responsibilities (see Uncle Ben’s timeless advice to his nephew Peter “Spider-Man” Parker), but many feminists today want more power without responsibility. They want easy access to successful men, lucrative jobs, instant prestige and fame, and all the rest, but they do not want to face any accountability for falling short, being annoying, or even committing crimes. Instead, they reflexively blame men and later enjoy endless waves of soothing validation on Instagram and TikTok.

Besides keeping many women in a vicious cycle of entitlement and delusion, this pursuit of power without responsibility has been devastating for men, who are now expected to do the inverse of shouldering responsibilities without the power to do so. They are still expected to provide, protect, and lead, but they are effectively denied the means to fulfill these roles. Over time, this leads to an entrenched, society-wide social disparity between men and women that slowly ushers in civilizational decline.

It should go without saying that rectifying this situation and restoring complementarity starts with ending sexist discrimination and having women assume the responsibilities that come with empowerment. But, as the outrage over Sanders’ campaign demonstrates, it will also require a collective effort for everyone to stop the demoralization campaign against young men.

As writer and right-wing dissident Joey Oliver documents in his book American History Z: Gen Z’s Journey to the Far Right (which I review here), today’s young men are quietly becoming radicalized because of the unfair treatment they encounter at school, work, church, and in the media. They are society’s whipping boy, and they aren’t allowed to protest even a little bit. They are told to stop being losers, suck it up, and accept their marginalized status. Even if many go on to achieve and realize their dreams despite growing up in this environment, many more internalize this discouragement and eventually give up trying.

None of this is justified, and it needs to end. The joke isn’t funny anymore. Now more than ever, it’s time for everyone to stop laughing.