Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate are dangling weed in front of young Americans in exchange for their votes, and their political allies in the porn industry are urging young men to stick with Harris.
“I just think we have come to a point where we have to understand that we need to legalize it and stop criminalizing this behavior,” she told a September podcast, All the Smoke. “The most important thing is that our kids grow up healthy,” she added, according to a September 30 report by SpectrumNews.
Her allies in the porn industry are also urging young men to vote Democratic:
Harris’s offer of weed to young Americans is buried within her larger campaign, which also seeks business support by offering a large supply of young migrants to the business community. Many employers say they want migrants to replace the missing young Americans who are on drugs, watching TV, or unwilling to work for offered wages.
The rising dropout rate by “infantilized” young men is a “calamity,’ demographer Nicholas Eberstadt told the Washington Post, adding “The United States cannot prosper unless its prime-age males do.”
“Immigration makes it easy to ignore this [young men] problem,” noted Steven Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “Why care if we can just hire the eager immigrants, right?”
In mid-October, Harris promised to legalize marijuana in a pitch aimed at young black men who are unenthusiastic about her campaign. President Harris would “Legalize marijuana at the federal level to break down unjust legal barriers that hold Black men and other Americans back,” her campaign site says.
“Two Pot Legalizers Top the Democratic Ticket,” said a headline in the November issue of Reason.
“This ticket has boundless potential for cannabis,” the cannabis-industry reporter at Forbes wrote after Gov. Tim Waltz (D-MN) was picked as her running mate:
The preliminary verdict [from industry investors] is positive. In May 2023, Governor Walz signed a bill legalizing the use, possession and cultivation of cannabis in the state; three months later, the recreational market launched. Clearly, there is one part of the ticket that has demonstrated strong and unequivocal support for the space.
Though Vice President Harris has had a complicated history with the plant, she has been part of an administration that is rescheduling cannabis, with President Biden issuing mass pardons for thousands of people with possession convictions.
“Kamala Harris’ selection of Governor Tim Walz as her running mate is a historic milestone for cannabis reform,” David Culver, chief spokesman for the U.S. Cannabis Council told Benzinga:
For the first time, there will be a pro-legalization major party ticket. The US Cannabis Council is confident that a Harris Administration would continue to build on the recent progress made by the Biden Administration toward ending federal cannabis prohibition and addressing the societal impacts of the drug war.
Cannabis is legal in 24 states, and 38 states have legalized it for claimed medical conditions.
The porn industry is also backing the Harris campaign.
Executives in the pornography business are funding a $200,000 “Hands Off My Porn” campaign:
JD Vance has stated his right-wing positions and desire to ban porn clearly from his earliest days in office, “I think the combination of porn, abortion have basically created a lonely, isolated generation that isn’t getting married, they’re not having families, and they’re actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other,” Vance said in a newly unearthed interview with Crisis Magazine from August 2021.
The campaign is funded by Artists United for Change, which denies they have coordinated their message with the Harris campaign. “If you care about adult entertainment, if you consume or create adult entertainment, you gotta vote November 5,” video producer Siouxsie Q told the AFP news agency on October 23. “There’s no two ways about it.”
When talking with a pr0-Democratic site, Waltz welcomed the support of a pro-porn voter. “I’m pro-porn,” said the voter.
“You do what you do … You be you,” Waltz responded.
A second group, formed by a San Francisco Democratic consultant, claimed it spent $15,000 for an online ad warning young men about the possible cut-off of their porn habits.
“There are millions and millions and millions of men across the swing states who are leaning towards Trump, who do not read the news, who don’t find the last 12 years of anti-Trump messaging persuasive,” Wally Nowinski told MLive for an October 24 report. “So I thought, maybe I can run a relevant message to them at a highly noticeable time in an unexpected way.”
A similar ad suggests the GOP will ban abortion:
The claim that Trump will ban early abortion or porn is not credible, partly because they are both protected by the courts.
Civic and Economic Damage
The inflow of young foreign men via migration allows politicians and business leaders to ignore the spreading civic damage among American men, especially young American men, Camarota said:
There are roughly 18.5 million working-age U.S.-born men [who are] not in the labor force. If we could maybe bring 5 million of them back into jobs — some of them have never had jobs — that might be a reasonable kind of goal. There will be challenges, to say the least. But why do it? [For politicians] why go to the trouble if we can just bring in eager immigrants?
The dropout problem is tangled up in other civic problems, such as drugs, marriage, and births, he said:
They don’t have partners anymore who push them to work, right? They don’t have children they have to support. The [civic] norm of supporting children and partners if you have them is way down. We know that the men most likely not to work are those who are unmarried, those who have children, and those who don’t live with their children.
Men who fall out of the workforce are also much likelier to die “Deaths of Despair,” he said. “They are at much higher risk for everything from suicide to drug overdoses to obesity and crime.” For example, roughly 75 percent of young men are excluded from the military because of drugs, weight issues, and other problems.
The Trump campaign, in part, is trying to rally sidelined men to vote GOP.
In March, the Nobel-awarded Princeton economist who identified the “Deaths of Despair’ trend reversed his prior support for migration. “I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing,” Professor Angus Deaton wrote in a post for the International Monetary Fund. He continued:
Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open [to migration], was much lower when the borders were closed [to migrants], and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age.
“It doesn’t seem that facilitating substance abuse and consumption of pornography is going to be helpful in solving this serious, complex social problem,” Camarota added.
