'Guys being dudes': What Dems can learn from Buttigieg's foray into 'the manosphere'

Pete Buttigieg, a prominent Democrat who served as the Transportation Secretary in the Biden administration, has recently made an unconventional appearance on a popular comedy podcast "Flagrant."

The show's hosts, Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh, are known for their irreverent humor and masculine style, which might seem like an unlikely fit for the normally measured Buttigieg. But he confidently presented the Democratic Party's stance against President Donald Trump.

In an article published in Puck on Tuesday, journalist Peter Hamby analyzed Buttigieg's talk on the podcast, saying the show is exactly the kind of platforms Democrats should be appearing on.

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He said the podcast "isn’t part of some sinister right-wing project premised on hating women or slobbering over Trump. It’s a show fronted by some millennial comedian friends talking shit about whatever—just guys being dudes—which is exactly why it’s become so popular, with almost 2 million followers on YouTube and many more on Spotify and Apple."

"It is precisely the kind of space where Democrats need to be hanging out if they want to have any chance of clawing back men under 40 who flipped to Trump last November," he said.

He described the show as "one of the larger nodes in the so-called manosphere, an umbrella term that’s become so overstretched and politically burdened that it’s basically lost all meaning. Feminist writers, scholars, and many progressives in the Donald Trump era lump almost every genre of problematic dude into the manosphere: 4chan ghouls and gamers, incels, influencers like Andrew Tate or Twitch streamer Adin Ross, masculinity guru Jordan Peterson, even life-hacker Andrew Huberman."

Hamby quoted Kurt Pickhardt, a GOP strategist, as saying: “It is truly insane that the Republican Party has beaten the Dems as being the guys who are dudes."

"Here are some of the topics Pete Buttigieg discussed on the Flagrant podcast last week: the White Lotus incest scene, cancer research, Grindr, Fox News, Chinese currency manipulation, lesbian college radio stations in Iowa, progressive taxation, fatherhood, “chick flights into space,” tariffs, whether food in Afghanistan turned him gay, Boston crime rates, corporate offshoring, the United Nations, subways, the Cold War, cancel culture, TikTok. That’s just a start," the article noted.

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