The biggest takeaway from Tuesday night's vice presidential debate was the panicked expression on Tim Walz's face as he struggled to explain his repeated lies about being in China in June 1989 during the Tiananmen Square massacre.
"I have poured my heart into my community," said Walz, a notorious fabulist widely praised (by journalists) for his folksy charm and cuddly demeanor. "I have tried to do the best I can, but I've not been perfect, and I'm a knucklehead at times, but it's always been about that."
The second biggest takeaway was the biased, female moderating. CBS News anchors Margaret Brennan, 44, and Norah O'Donnell, 50, bombarded Vance (but not Walz) with what many described as "toxic female energy."
They employed several common tactics from the toxic "girl boss" playbook: arbitrarily changing the rules, blatantly mischaracterizing a man's remarks, and pretending to know what they're talking about. Brennan and O'Donnell repeatedly pestered Vance to defend something another man (Donald Trump) said while neglecting to ask Walz about his female running mate Kamala Harris and the radical policy positions she endorsed in 2019 (but claims to no longer support).
The immigration portion of the debate was particularly fraught. Brennan disregarded the agreed-upon terms of the debate by attempting to fact-check Vance's comments about migrants in Springfield, Ohio. The moderators had insisted at the outset that it wasn't their role to fact-check the candidates.
In any event, Brennan's so-called facts were egregiously misleading, and when Vance tried to correct the record, the moderators muted his microphone. (Avoidance is another well-known female tactic.) "Margaret," Vance said, calmly. "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check, and since you're fact-checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on."
During another immigration exchange, which was likely triggering for male viewers in heterosexual relationships, Brennan accused Vance of saying something he clearly did not say. Vance said that "a lot of fentanyl is coming into our country" due to the Biden-Harris administration's failure to enforce immigration laws. He also argued that some children who crossed the border illegally had "been used as drug trafficking mules." Doing what comes naturally to a toxic female, Brennan asked Walz to respond to Vance's "specific allegations, including that the vice president is, quote, 'letting in fentanyl and using kids as drug mules.'" Quote!
Vance was compelled to correct the record once again. "Margaret," he said with patience and humility. "I didn't accuse Kamala Harris of inviting drug mules, I said that she enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country, and we know that they use children as drug mules, and it is a disgrace and it has to stop." MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, another so-called journalist known for her girl boss toxicity, accused Vance of being disrespectful and trying to "mansplain." Content creator John Doyle had a different view. "You must understand the degree to which middle American men will identify with calmly executing their jobs while being nagged by retards and girlbosses," he wrote on X.
CBS News, which boasts an all-female executive triumvirate alongside its stable of female anchors, is by far the lowest-rated news network compared with rivals ABC and NBC. CBS Evening News with Norah O'Donnell was a distant third in overall ratings for the 2023-24 season. O'Donnell announced her departure from the poorly rated program earlier this year, having failed to justify the $8 million annual salary she earned upon taking the role in 2019, or even the much lower $3.8 million salary she negotiated in 2022. "She deserves to lose her job," a CBS insider told the New York Post in June. "CBS is so irrelevant if you're a journalist. Nobody is watching."
It's likely that O'Donnell, a longtime veteran of MSNBC, saw the VP debate as a perhaps golden opportunity to demonstrate her willingness, in the words of media expert Mark Halperin, to be "part of the collective effort by Blue cultural institutions to make sure Donald Trump never gets near the Oval Office again."
O'Donnell has a long history of causing drama in the workplace. Sources have complained for years about the anchor's "toxic behavior," including her relentless attacks on the dressing room stylists who cater to her incessant demands. "There was an incident last year in the studio where [O'Donnell] ranted about how her bronzer was wrong," one source told the Post in 2022. Another network insider dismissed O'Donnell as a "news actress" whose bizarre insistence on holding "dress rehearsals" before the evening news broadcast was "very unusual."
The VP debate on Tuesday was likely the final debate of the 2024 presidential election. Hours before Vance and Walz took the stage, CBS News announced that Trump, a traditionally masculine figure, declined to participate in an interview for the network's storied 60 Minutes program. Of the six journalists who moderated the three primetime debates, only two—CNN's Jake Tapper and ABC's David Muir—were men. Alas, both Tapper and Muir epitomize the "modern" (urban, liberal) definition of masculinity.
Harris's husband, Doug Emhoff, has also been celebrated for reshaping "the perception of masculinity." Emhoff's first marriage ended in divorce after he got his children's nanny pregnant. On Wednesday, the Daily Mail reported that in May 2012, Emhoff violently slapped a former girlfriend he suspected of flirting with another man during the Cannes Film Festival in France.