Transcript - America This Week, June 6, 2026: "The War Party that Can't Talk to Men"

While Democrats commission a study to describe alien life forms, America under Trump hurtles toward multiple crises. Also, gender relations in George Orwell's 1984

Matt Taibbi: Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how’s it going?

Walter Kirn: Well, I’m here in Las Vegas. You can tell by the absence of decor, because this is kind of a swing apartment. It’s part of the year, and because of that, I have to wake up at 7:00 AM to tape this. Well, actually, I have to tape it at 7:00 AM, I woke up at 3:30 AM and I was saying I feel like a Good Morning America host. I remember hearing once that they have to wake up at 3:00 and get in their car and so on, and I thought, “What a brutal way to live,” but I’m doing it.

Matt Taibbi: And not even for the same kind of cheddar.

Walter Kirn: No, no, no. Just for the love of the game.

Matt Taibbi: Somewhere in between, let’s put it that way.

Walter Kirn: My favorite football player died, Matt, in football news, Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings.

Matt Taibbi: Oh God, I didn’t even hear that.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, yeah. Never made the Hall of Fame but the hero of my youth, started every game from I think 1962 to somewhere in the ‘80s, in the mid ‘80s,

Matt Taibbi: Being a Vikings fan, I’ve actually never put myself in that position, but you’re among several prominent media Viking fans, and that’s got to be a difficult thing.

Walter Kirn: Well, I’m not just a Vikings fan, but I’m a fan of the classic Vikings, that early ‘70s Purple People.

Matt Taibbi: The Purple People Eaters, Fran Tarkenton, that whole thing, yeah.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Well, he was a little bit of a Johnny come lately, Carl Eller, Alan Page, Jim Marshall, those guys, Bud Grant, and they were a tough team, and I associated all football with endurance and stamina and stoicism. And so contemporary football is strange to me because they have such florid personalities. I was used to football players who never spoke, who just hit hard.

Matt Taibbi: Right, right, yeah. And it turns out even Bill Belichick has a wild unruly side now. He was sort of the last throwback to that era, and yeah, now he’s like a TikTok phenomenon, which is really depressing. Well, actually that’s a good segue to-

Walter Kirn: Good, I’m glad you found one because I was feeling we were skating off the rink there.

Matt Taibbi: So we’re going to talk about the war in Ukraine in a moment. Walter, it seems that a lot of people agree with us, but almost nobody in media had the same reaction that we did to the catastrophic... Not catastrophic, to the extraordinary events of this past weekend, Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, what they’re calling Russia’s Pearl Harbor in the press. We had one reaction, almost everybody else had a different one. There have been numerous fascinating developments since then. We’ll talk about all-

Walter Kirn: Well, they had time to coordinate, Matt, we were just going off human reflexes.

Matt Taibbi: Right, right, exactly. But in the meantime, there is one story that is funny and also is kind of a follow-up of something that we spent a fair amount of time last summer talking about. So in the wake of the election loss last November when there was a historic gender gap up to 13 points, which is another four point drop from 2020 when it was nine points, Kamala Harris only got 42% of the male vote, which is an extremely low number, and the numbers were even worse demographically when you went looking at younger voters and particularly younger Latino and Black voters. And so the party in response to this, the Democratic Party, commissioned a study. They spent $20 million on something called the SAM Project, which is Speaking to American Men... Speaking to American Men or For American Men? Speaking with American Men.

Walter Kirn: And SAM would suggest it’s Speaking at American Men.

Matt Taibbi: Speaking at American Men, which is ultimately the punchline of this whole thing. Now, we can go back and talk about some of the things that got them in trouble with men over the summer and coming into this election cycle and in general, but even the fact that they commissioned this study was kind of widely mocked because it suggests that they thought that this was a messaging problem when actually the problem was much deeper and more fundamental. And so even commissioning it created some blowback. But after that blowback, Politico came out with a story this week, and what was the headline of that story? It was, “Democrats set out to study young men, here are their findings.” So they got a look-

Walter Kirn: And who did this study? Who do you go to with $20 million to study men? Does it say?

Matt Taibbi: So let’s see. It was $20 million that we budgeted for a study group that will be led by a co-founder named, I guess it’s Ilyse or Ilyse, I don’t know how to pronounce that, Ilyse Hogue. We’ll just call him Hogue. Then also John Della Volpe, a pollster who allegedly specializes in Gen Z voters. By the way, Hogue is the former president of NARAL. It might be a woman at least, maybe that’s how I should pronounce it. And then Colin Allred of all people who is the Black Texas congressman who yelled at me for having a tin foil hat in Congress and ran unsuccessfully narrowly for Senate against Ted Cruz last year. So they commissioned 30 different focus groups and they started to get some results back, and it’s just really fascinating that it took them this long to come around to certain realizations.

First of all, there were poll numbers, Walter, only 27% of men have a positive association with the Democratic Party. There is a SAM Project memo that talked about how many young men were discussing what they call the no win situation around the meaning of a man. The pollster Della Volpe said, “There’s a layer of economic anxiety that I don’t think I fully saw until now,” and they found out through the study that they were suffering their biggest losses among young men of color, which is probably the opposite of what they expected.

Also, there’s a fascinating quote in this story, an African-American professional described Democrats as embracing the, “Fluid masculinity of being empathetic and sensitive,” while, “Republicans are more like the traditional masculinity of a provider, strong in the machismo type.” So I don’t know, this to me is just funny, the fact that they even did this study is kind of extraordinary. Do you have any initial reactions to it before we lay into all the stuff that happened over the summer, the I’m a Man, Man commercial, the White Dudes for Harris thing? If they can’t see it, I don’t think they ever will no matter how much money they spend.

Walter Kirn: You know that saying, if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it. If you have to do a $20 million study on men, you’ll never understand men. It’s anthropological, it’s like they’ve voyaged into the jungle to find the rumored ocelot or some strange creature which they’re going to bring back to their lab. They had access to all these people before, remember? Did they just forget to use them? No. They’ve had these pollsters, they’ve had these sociological and other demographic categories at their fingertips forever. I think they’re just trying to show they care. I think they’re just trying to show they’re interested or they understand there’s a problem and somebody got 20 million bucks, in other words, it may ultimately be about a payout to someone because it’s not going to solve their problem. The problem was they thought they did understand men and they came up with Tim Walz.

Matt Taibbi: Right, exactly, exactly, right.

Walter Kirn: Tim Walz who is some kind of walking bad AI version of a Midwestern man, and every gesture he made from loading his shotgun to fixing his truck-

Matt Taibbi: He nearly blew his balls off.

Walter Kirn: Well, he didn’t nearly blow his balls off, he nearly caused his shotgun to recoil into his scrotal area.

Matt Taibbi: Same thing.

Walter Kirn: Right, right. But with every attempt to understand men and to imitate how they behave using Robo Tim, the man’s man from the Midwest, they showed their cluelessness and they’ve done it again. They are not getting one thing: men don’t care about what being a man is.

Matt Taibbi: They need some money and a date. That’s what they need.

Walter Kirn: Right, right. Men caring about manliness is not being a man. Look at my hair. You think I care? I said seven insensitive things yesterday that no man would say to my wife or no person would say, and I did it unconsciously. Men are unconscious. Trying to understand them deliberately is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

Matt Taibbi: And-

Walter Kirn: But-

Matt Taibbi: Go ahead.

Walter Kirn: But besides nominating Tim Walz, and besides, we’re going to get to the White Dudes for Harris thing, just sorting out men as a interest group or an identity group itself is offensive. You know what I’m saying? Men just think of themselves as people and they happen to be male people. They may even think of themselves as universal people out of their male arrogance, but what they don’t go around is thinking of themselves as men, manly men, etc. You try to define it, you’re going to lose.