Summary
Despite his conservative platform, Donald Trump made unexpected gains among Gen Z voters. Exit polls showed a shift, with young men favoring Trump by 2 points, a reversal from Biden’s previous lead.
Gen Z’s support for Trump may have been underestimated, as an Axios poll found nearly half of Gen Z voters lied about their vote, with young men more likely to support Trump quietly.
Trump connected with young men through appearances on popular podcasts and endorsements from social media influencers.
Disillusionment with the economy and frustration with the Democratic Party’s approach to working-class issues also drove some Gen Z voters to seek change, with Trump capitalizing on these sentiments.
There is a sizable group of young men who not only feel like the Democrats (and people on the left, in general) have not only ignored the issues they face, but view them as being inherently bad in some way. The alt-right spaces have been very successful at translating discussions of privilege into a message that everyone but the GOP believes young men, especially young, white men, are doing just fine and are greedy for demanding any sort of help or attention, as well as inherently being oppressors of the marginalized groups that have featured so prominently in contemporary discourse, with no way of redeeming themselves short of complete and total submission to these groups. Basically, painting white guilt on steroids as the only acceptable option for these young men to the Democrats, but with the caveat that nothing they do will ever absolve them of the crime of being born with a penis.
This is obviously nonsense, but it’s quite attractive to these people to hear someone say that they acknowledge their problems, those problems are real, and what’s more, those problems are not their fault. The absence of acknowledgement or inclusion of these problems in the Democratic talking points lends it some credibility, and there’s a robust media apparatus in place, with folks like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, that allow them to form some sense of community and identity, while also moving them further on the way to being full-blown MAGA supporters.
It’s the same sort of strategic failure that the Dems encountered with working class people more broadly; they dismissed their concerns, told them everything was actually fine, when many acutely feel the struggle of existence, and didn’t offer a platform that got them excited and feeling like their economic concerns were being addressed. Then add in policy proposals that specifically target groups like black men, and many of them begin to view the entire field of politics as a zero-sum game, which one side is looking to rig against them.
Of course, this is a misguided take, at best, but it’s amplified by podcast bros and alt-right youtubers, and the way the DNC strategists takes the votes of these groups for granted lends further credence to the notion, in their eyes. The DNC desperately needs to come up with some countermeasures for the alt-right media bubble and stop assuming they can count on any votes as safe, especially if they don’t have heavy messaging targeting the demographics in question.
I really don’t see how Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson are an issue. Literally all Jordan Peterson has said that you should take responsibility for your life and do better, that Joe Rogan sits down and has conversations with people taking a neutral perspective.
Harris had every opportunity to go on Joe Rogan, and she didn’t, which I think is possibly one of the main reasons that she lost the election. People are sick of corporatised media, bullshit. They want to hear people have actual conversations about real shit. That is something that the new wave media has become extraordinarily good at. And the left wing just can’t play that game because they’re too insincere and corporatised to have anything more than a 5 second sand bite.
I wouldn’t call it an alt right media bubble. I just think it’s individuals exercising their free speech, which has landed us in a situation where the traditional media, which is bought and paid for by big business, can no longer compete.
Trump didn’t win the election. The Democrats lost. And the data backs this entirely.
Peterson has said way more bullshit and its all on YouTube.
Rogan supposedly being neutral with everyone is problematic since it puts crazy people on equal footing with experts, and it causes confusion for people who may not know better. As an extreme example, being neutral means you should spend the time and effort to hear out a flat earther as much as an astronomer. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but not everyone is entitled to a platform to spew bullshit.
Whata the worste shit peterson has said?
What ur essentially saying is that people are too dumb to be allowed to decide if a flat earther or an astronomer should be listened to and that decision should be made for them? Who makes that decision joe? The government? You? The fucking stazi? Why not give the people the freedom to decide for themselves?
My biggest gripe is that science is really fucking hard and we’re unbelievably lucky to have made so many strides in knowledge and technology on the backs of generations of brilliant people lending their genius to the greater good. Flat-earth and other pseudo-sciences degrade the amount of pure brilliance, luck, and hard fucking work involved in getting to where we’ve gotten. I love the idea that some randos on the Internet could fundamentally turn science on it’s head, and perhaps it’s still possible. Science is much harder than most of these people even realize though.
Should we be skeptical of things in general–absolutely! Even if you truly believe you have a take that will change science at its core, you won’t be taken seriously by the scientific community if you can’t provide rock-solid proof that can be vetted and verified by other scientists. Is that unfair?
People are most certainly making their own choices – remember how hot ivermectin was for a minute there? Completely unsupported evidence of efficacy and guess what – it didn’t work. Personally, i think they should take science in their own hands and figure out why they’re wrong about so much. The problem here is what i think is a defining difference between a scientist and a pseudo-scientist: the scientist will pay attention to the results and will even change their hypothesis/theory when new evidence to the contrary is discovered. The pseudo-scientist already knows the answer they are looking for and will disregard any evidence to the contrary out of hand.
Remember the flat earther documentary where they set out to finally disprove modern science and failed spectacularly? Remember when confronted with hard evidence disproving their theory, they immediately started blaming the testing equipment and methodology, never yielding for a moment that they could be wrong. That is a problem, in my opinion. They regularly begin to reject real indisputable evidence in favor of ‘vibes’ or whatever leads them to believe hare-brained theories, and next thing you see people venturing further out into Lala Land where everything magically fits into their set of “theories” and they are further disconnected from reality.
I really think we’ve let down generation after generation with degrading educational standards. Pet theories are one thing but outright rejecting science because you can’t understand it or do it yourself is counterproductive. Pseudo science doesn’t help anyone and deserves to be relegated to the tabloids like they used to be (of course I’m sure that people believed some of that shit whole-heartedly back then too, again despite lacking any credible evidence)
As @[email protected] already pointed out, Rogan’s “I’m just promoting free-speech and practicing neutrality” platforms people who are wholly uninformed with equal standing as experts in a given field. For an example of how this is irresponsible, and yes, the average American really is too stupid to be trusted with distinguishing a square turd from a brownie, look at the rise of anti-vaccine sentiment and COVID denialism coming out of Joe “Just asking questions” over the years.
It most certainly is an alt-right media bubble when those who get sucked into it refuse to even consider any evidence that doesn’t come directly from Joe Rogan, Fox, OANN or whatever other goofballs they watch. If you think these people and organizations are above the influence of big business, I’ve got several bridges to sell you.
This also isn’t strictly a matter of them not trusting news from other sources that don’t align with their own biases, but denying objective facts from experts in the field, all because Joe smoked DMT once, and what the experts say doesn’t feel right to him. See Rogan et al. as they promoted baseless COVID conspiracy theories while also disregarding any medical advice from public health experts, or the growing consensus amongst medical professionals and epidemiologists as we came to understand things better after a couple of years.