In the final days of the 2024 election, the Democrats have at last hit on a pitch they believe will make inroads with young men: Vote for us, the party of porn.
When ads tying Dems to smut first rolled out on October 7, they still seemed like a niche play by the party’s fringe. A coalition of porn actors with names like Ana Foxxx, Liv Revamped, and Sinn Sage pooled a measly $100,000 for a campaign billed as “Hands Off My Porn,” to run on porn sites in swing states. The ads claim that because Project 2025, a book of policy recommendations spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, argues that porn is a societal scourge that should be outlawed, a second Trump administration would surely ban it. Never mind that Trump has never thrown his considerable political weight behind even those porn limitations that Americans overwhelmingly support, like online age verification. Never mind that his campaign has expressly disavowed Project 2025. The ads insist that the man who once frequented the Playboy mansion and makes jokes about Arnold Palmer’s anatomy would discover his inner Puritan once back in the White House.
But it soon became apparent that the porn star gambit was not simply a Hail Mary from the margins. Rather, it is part of the Democrats’ comprehensive effort to grasp at the loyalties of young men who are leaving the party in droves. Ironically, as much more respectable groups with much more money to burn got in on the porn pitch, the ads themselves became obscene.
On October 23, the NSFW spot “Republicans Rubbing You the Wrong Way” began to stream on connected TVs and streaming services in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and Georgia. It depicts a young, white male masturbating while staring at a phone from which plays the loud sound of a moaning woman. The man is still in flagrante delicto when a Republican congressman suddenly appears and informs him he’s committing an illegal act. The two Super PACs spending a hefty $2.5 million on the R-rated media blitz are firmly within the mainstream of Beltway politicking. Progress Action Fund is led by an Obama Administration alum and heavily bankrolled by billionaire Reid Hoffman, co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn. Defend the Vote, which has raised close to $6 million for the 2024 election cycle according to OpenSecrets, a government transparency group, is helmed by a former executive director of the anti-gun Brady PAC. In other words, they’d have the savvy to know if they were falling afoul of the Harris campaign’s range of acceptable messaging.
Yet a third porn campaign, spearheaded by an upstart PAC hastily formed in the final weeks of the election, simply urges men to “enjoy it while you can.”
The Harris camp has made no attempts to distance themselves from the seedy appeals being run on their behalf, even when outlets like Business Insider have directly offered them the opportunity. Indeed, they have subtly leaned into the association. When Harris’s running mate Tim Walz appeared on The Dan Le Batard Show on October 29, he warned, “What you view in your content as an adult, [Republicans] think government should make all these decisions.” And when Batard’s producer pronounced himself “pro-porn,” Walz responded, “Hey you do what you do. You be you, is my thought.”
That this lowest-common-denominator scare tactic is almost entirely unfounded (The Hill offered the fact check that the ads are “largely hyperbolic in nature” as “no political party is seriously likely to ban porn at the federal level”) is beside the point. It highlights what the Democratic Party believes it has to offer young men—no public life of leadership, responsibility, or respect, no private life filled with wives and children born of loving unions, but like their similarly cynical weed push, only isolated moments of transitory satisfaction bought with the basest pleasure pellets.
The signs that young men are awakening to the meanness of the left’s vision for their role in society are manifold and growing. For the first time in modern history, young men have become more religious than young women, suggesting many have weighed the Barstool Sports brand of conservatism and found it, too, wanting. Some of the most popular podcasters among the young male demographic, including Russell Brand, Theo Von, and Jordan Peterson, now openly warn of the soul-eroding dangers of a pornified imagination, and many young men appear to agree with them. Not only are men under thirty five points more likely than those between thirty and forty-nine to say porn is morally wrong, the under-thirty set is the only demographic in which an equal number of men and women say so.
Young men’s moral instincts also appear to be increasing in other areas related to sex, giving them an imperviousness their forefather Adam never showed to the influence of the females around them. Whereas 67 percent of Gen Z women say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, only 46 percent of Gen Z men do, the lowest cohort of any males. They are also far more opposed to allowing children to choose their gender without parental approval than young women.
Project 2025 notwithstanding, a legislative or regulative remedy to the plague of porn outside of stronger measures to protect children is unlikely. But not all change need come through law, and the Democrats may be offering the political and theological right a gift with this pitch if they’re smart enough to take it.
Young men are more socially conservative than their older brothers, fathers, and grandfathers because they have seen the wages of licentiousness disguised as freedom, and it has left them in despair. They are lonelier and more disillusioned than any generation before them and they are looking for reasons to hope for better things from the future than isolated orgasms in a haze of marijuana smoke. Whatever happens on November 5, if conservatives flinch from calling young men to a higher and nobler purpose for fear of being labeled killjoys and Puritans, they won’t just undermine their own political prospects. They’ll abandon these young men to a bleak future.
Megan Basham is a culture reporter for the Daily Wire.
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