Trump just dealt a crushing blow to the celebrity political activists

It would be unfair to blame the Avengers for Kamala Harris’s defeat, but they certainly didn’t help. Five days before America went to the polls, the stars of the biggest blockbuster franchise of all time released a video in support of the Democratic candidate.

Before you go online to watch it, a warning: it will make your palms sweat and your scalp prickle with embarrassment. Using their special smiley voices, like entertainers at a children’s party, Robert Downey Jnr and his band of off-duty superheroes “assemble” on a Zoom call to discuss how to get the voters out for Harris. A laborious joke ensues in which they devise a catchphrase that risks being misinterpreted (“Kamala Harris – down with democracy”). The actors pretend – very badly – not to be acting, and laugh inexplicably hard at their own jokes.

It is awful in its own right, as a skit, but infinitely worse as a piece of political propaganda. It contains, in fact, no discussion of politics at all. The presumption seems to be that voters are such empty-headed children that celebrity alone will bedazzle them into obedience.

This, we now know conclusively, is not true. The biggest A-listers in the world came out for Kamala Harris: Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Charli XCX, Bruce Springsteen, Eminem and the rest. And yet the voters proved stubbornly unbedazzled.

Trump, it’s true, had a smattering of famous faces on his side – most prominently, Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. Whatever your opinion of these men (mine is “Eeeww”), these were not mere showbiz endorsements. Musk is the richest man in the world, which the public might think reason enough to hear him out. Besides which, he used his money to help win over the voters, seemingly in the hope it would get him a job in Trump’s administration.

As for Joe Rogan, podcaster to the toxic manosphere and bête noire of liberal media types like me: his interview with Trump, while soft to the point of sycophancy, was nonetheless packed with political insights. Rogan did his listeners the courtesy of assuming they could handle a three-hour discussion covering everything from trade tariffs to Trump’s relationship with Kim Jong-un (“I said to him, ‘You’re always building nuclear, you don’t have to do it. Relax!… Let’s build some condos on your shore’”).

The liberal Left is prone to bewailing the stupidity of the masses – especially when the masses vote the “wrong” way. But if you hold in contempt the very people you want to represent, they are liable to sense it. In this race, it was the Democrats who treated the voters like infants, hoping they might not be able to distinguish between pop culture and politics. And the voters punished this insolence accordingly.

Tough times for Tokyo’s teens

Much alarm in Japan, where teenage boys are said to be taking too long to have their first kiss. Just one in five boys aged 15-18 say they have kissed someone – down from one in two in 2005. This mirrors a downward trend in sexual activity (and birth rates) across all nations and age groups, thought to be caused by a combination of porn-fatigue and post-Covid atomisation.

Talk about a dizzying reversal. When I was a teenager, the thing adults worried about most in the world was that we might be having sex. Now I have teenagers of my own, and I’m supposed to worry about them being too chaste?