Drop the Beer Goggles
  June 26, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, It comes as no surprise to anyone that the U.S. Men’s National Team has gone gently into that good night. They did their best, but alas, no one can outpace that presidential curse. Luckily for all of us, we’re only one year away from the superior team stepping onto the World Cup stage—the U.S. Women’s National Team. The ones who know how to score more than one goal.  In today’s newsletter, Cindi Leive fumes about the ongoing obsession Democrats have with guys who peaked in high school. Plus, good news for the punks. Pricing flights to Brazil, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONHunter-and-halfback syndrome: By now, you’ve all read that yet another political candidate has been accused of sexual assault, in this case Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner of Maine, whose accuser is a woman who tells Politico that Platner raped her in her home. Platner is shedding endorsements by the second and, by the time you read this, may have dropped out, even though he has denied any wrongdoing. His implosion creates all kinds of headaches for Mainers hoping desperately to evict current Senator Susan Collins, a Republican who claims to be a moderate, sensible kinda gal, but in practice, often goes wherever the Trumpian winds are blowing, even when they blow all over our rights. There are a lot of questions we could ask about all this: Who else knew? Why didn’t Platner’s inner circle stop him from running? What made the candidate himself think he could go forward with a campaign with alleged violence in his past? But here’s the biggest one: Why did so many Democrats ignore so many mounting warning signs about Platner? The Nazi tattoo, the victim-blaming Reddit comments about rape, the sexting charges, and earlier this year, an entire New York Times investigation into his allegedly “unsettling dating life”—these were not subtle, one-off concerns. And yet, as Michelle Goldberg notes today, Platner’s campaign opted not to do the normal extensive background check, and no one apparently intervened to make it happen. One likely reason why? Platner fits an archetype that Democrats seem unable to resist: a white guy they wanna have a beer with. For some reason, Democrats are enamored—to the point of willful blindness—by men who fit this masculine, stereotypically all-American image. We love the athletes, oyster farmers, and soldiers so much that we lose our rational minds, skip the vetting process, and swoon.  NEXT. (VIA GETTY)I get that impulse, for a million reasons. Trump doesn’t own masculinity, or the working class, or country music, and his policies hurt cis white guys in pickup trucks alongside the rest of us. So it is gratifying when veterans and football players push back on him. A Biker Dude standing up for immigrant rights gives the lie to what MAGA wants people to think—that real men want the old America. But Democrats need to stop overvaluing that stamp of approval, and doing cartwheels at the sight of every candidate who looks like an extra from “Friday Night Lights.” And when we rush to anoint those men as the new face of the left—skipping the hoops we force women and Black and brown candidates to jump through—it also reeks of self-hatred on the left. Look, we’re not just the party of pronouns and Portlandia-scale political correctness; we have some hunters and halfbacks too! Radical thought: What would happen if it were just us? Aren’t we enough? The women, the Black and brown leaders, the immigrants? Are we so insecure about our reputation as snowflake intellectuals that we’ll throw caution to the wind for the first guy with a common touch? These are more than just hypothetical questions. The field of Democrats vying for the chance to run against Donald Trump in 2028 is crowded and will only get more so. Same for the House and Senate candidates who run this fall, and in 2028. So maybe instead of debating whether the highly experienced Black woman public servant should pull out of a race she hasn’t even entered yet, we should make sure we’re devoting the same scrutiny to these white dudes. Let’s make them, for once, earn our trust. —Cindi Leive AND:
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