Team Mitch and the Weaponization of White Male Awfulness
Bad actors on every part of the political spectrum use young men’s insecurity and toxicity to make them loyal foot soldiers to the cause
The photo appeared on social media late this past Monday: a group of white, red-faced, beaming teenage boys in “Team Mitch” T-shirts, clustered around a cardboard cutout of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They were pretending, variously, to kiss her, strangle her, and grope her crotch. The Instagram caption — because, like the geniuses they are, the boys posted this to Instagram — reads “break me off a piece of that.”
So that’s nice. They may be meat-headed, rape-culture-drunk, privileged little shits who are being funneled into a political system wherein male power is measured by the ability to dominate and humiliate women, but at least they can quote Clueless.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the titular “Mitch” whose team these lunkheads seem to have joined, can’t seem to decide whether to deplore the boys or defend them. After AOC publicly questioned their affiliation with McConnell’s Senate re-election campaign — “these young men look like they work for you,” she tweeted Monday — his campaign manager, Kevin Golden, cried foul play, claiming the boys were being…
