The organizers behind an online gathering of “White Dudes for Harris” claim to have raised more than $3.5 million to support Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign during the Monday event that highlights the Democratic penchant for prioritizing affinity groups and obsession with race-and-gender essentialism.
The Zoom call attracted more than 180,000 participants, including leftwing celebrities, such as Mark Hamill, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and *NSYNC singer Lance Bass, according to NBC News.
“I qualify, man! I’m white, I’m a dude, and I’m for Harris,” said actor Jeff Bridges, who famously played “The Dude” in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski. “Kamala is just so certainly our girl, you know. I can see her being president. I’m so excited. A woman president, man. How exciting!”
During the event, organizers sold White Dudes for Harris hats — they were trucker hats, “not the pointy ones,” organizer Ross Morales Rocketto said, clarifying, for anyone who didn’t get his Ku Klux Klan joke, that, “throughout American history, when white men organized, it was often with pointy hats on.”
The New York Times claimed that the White Dudes for Harris turnout “showed the breadth of Democratic support for [Harris’s] candidacy, and the ways the party is learning to make fun of itself.” But it also highlighted the “conflicted feelings” that white Democratic men have “about masculinity, how difficult it can be to open up emotionally and how they feel alienated from other white men, who are the core of Trump’s support,” according to NBC.
White dude politicos who showed up included Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Illinois governor JB Pritzker, and Representative Adam Schiff of California.
Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who is on the short list to be Harris’s running mate, said he looked forward to Harris defeating Donald Trump in November. “Make that bastard wake up afterwards and know that a black woman kicked his a** and sent him on the road, and you know that’s something that guy’s going to have to live with the rest of his life,” Walz said.
The White Dudes event follows similar online affinity-group rallies for black and white women. Last week’s “White Women: Answer the Call” online fundraiser included actress Connie Britton joking that they should be called “Karens for Kamala.” One presenter, influencer Arielle Fodor, told the white women participants to use their white privilege “to make positive change.”
“If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals or, God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat,” she said. “And instead, we can put our listening ears on.”