I’ll say it again… Gen Z was dealt an awful hand by being exposed to all the toxicity of the internet before they were mature enough to deal with it.
I personally feel privileged to have been born in the late 80s so I got exposed to the internet before it was a cesspool and got to learn resilience to misinformation gradually instead of being beat around the head with it.
I’ll never understand why neither Harris nor at least Walz didn’t fully pierce into the echo-chamber of the manosphere.
I thought this was half the point of picking Walz who could hold his own on guns and sports with Joe Rogan and all that shit.
The closest Harris got was… Going on on Howard Stern? Gen Z men aren’t listening to Stern.
Edit: I know why. They miscalculated (and I did, too). They thought women alone would turn out in a proportion greater than the historically-low turnout of young men. More than that, millions just fell for the both sides disinfo ops and sat out. But that doesn’t change the point that it was low risk / high reward to go on those outlets.
Also, the extent of the campaign’s outreach to young men was “vote on behalf of the women you know”.
Maybe pick a better message that doesn’t exclude their entire demographic and you might find better results.
My theory has been that left leaning men let other voices be heard. That came at the cost of letting the right fill the power vacuum. The left need to let their own assholes be assholes.
I think Democrats have needed more chaotic good and lawful evil parts of the chart. Everyone else on the left need to realize those guys will need to say the wrong things for the right reasons. After all the messaging is not for you. It’s for the boys with a tendency to the right.
What they say will not agree with you. Lose the battle, win the war.
The walls of the echo-chamber have been built up and reinforced for over a decade. No single election cycle will ever pierce through.
These people are lost causes unless a massive culture shift happens. And it’s not looking like that will happen in the next decades. You, just like other countries, will have to deal with a growing strong block of far right, young men who will grow up to be far right seniors.
The warning signs started being obvious with Gamergate but they were ignored. The only thing that can be done is preventing the growth of these echo-chambers but the damage is done. It’s just like how carbon capture will not solve climate change, only stopping emitting more as soon as possible.
How are people surprised?
Humans are animals, we’re not innately good, we need to be taught.
For like 20-30 years we’ve stripped all of that out of public education. If you have shit parents, no one is teaching you how to be a good person, or even what the benefits of being a good person are.
Steve Bannon got his finger on gaming culture like 30 years ago with WoW gold farms in China just for the money, but he immediately realized that was the in road to the youth.
Streaming incentives the worst personality traits and kids follow them religiously. They were the role models for lots of Gen Z, and a significant amount had the algorithm taken them to full blown al right bullshit.
None of this is new, we’ve been bitching about it for literal decades.
It’s just the fascists are putting the fucking work in and plan long term, and neo liberals only care about short term donations they can grift from the wealthy.
Shit is too fucking important to keep letting them be the only other option. Shit is too fucking serious to intentionally half ass politics these days.
The “moderate” experiment started in 92 needs to be over
I’m fucking sick of it being
“Right of center wealthy elites vs angry poor men want fascism”
It’s not even that most of them want fascism, that’s the fucked up part.
A lot of it is just tantrum voting. They know politicians like Pelosi, Hillary, and yes even Biden are shit and bad for regular Americans. But Trump is worse. It doesn’t matter tho because for some people once they hit a “shit threshold” both sides are the same.
As much as people on the left are accused of being accelerationists, a significant amount of people who voted for trump are hoping one way or another the current system gets burnt down.
Long term, talking like 2044?
That’s 16 years after trump’s 2nd term. Hopefully there’s an election in 2028 with a fair primary and a fair general all around. If not that’s still a lot of time to bounce back.
Don’t listen to the doom and gloom from mainstream media, the wealthy owners are happy trump won and want everyone to stop caring so 2028 pops up before we realize and we just go along with the “it’s too late to do anything except what the rich want”.
The next four years will suck, that’s all the more reason to focus on the next shot to really fix everything that breaks, and make sure we pick someone willing to fight
I think there will always be a certain type of male that really believe that humans need a pecking order, and they’ll live vicariously through the broligarchs, even if they have no power whatsoever. Social media platforms make that easier than ever to find and worship such awful people. This is why I give side-eye when people tell me that Gen Z is somehow inherently more just and so on than any other prior generation.
By what possible mechanism would that even be? It certainly is not from teaching media literacy or critical thinking at mass scale.
The “moderate” experiment started in 92 needs to be over
It is over, one way or the other. Europe is also seeing neoliberal politics collapsing, since Pax Americana is over, and being a slow and steady parasite and passing all the hardship to the working class does not work when “other people’s money”, meaning the capacity of the public, runs out.
The question is whether our dear oligarchs realize that the only way to keep the current system where they are safe is to give power away and transition to something of a social democracy, like in the 50-60s West, otherwise it will be torn from them by a violent dictatorship where they might not even keep their lives.
Well, in most authoritarian countries they are also very well known to be bad around high windows, or liable to get lost for at least a few years after trying to go up against the ones with real power. When norms go out the window, shit gets real for everyone, not just us poors.
These young white guys may not have their finger on it, but they sense the world has been pulled out from under them. They have no notion of “privilege” but they feel something is missing their dads and grandads had.
Maybe 10-years ago I was running internet at a guy’s shop. Everyone was drinking and fucking around, discussing some politics. The guy’s son was about to graduate the bougie high school and was enraged that anyone was talking about free college tuition.
“College isn’t high school. Just because you get to attend free doesn’t mean you get a free diploma. Besides, what are you afraid of? Might have to compete with n******?”
And that last bit was exactly what he was afraid of. (Apologies, but I put it in words him and his father would use so it would hit home.) Being white is no longer an automatic ticket to the middle class. Hell, what middle class?
You think the incels of the late 2010s were bad, boy howdy, just you wait.
