The Democratic Party is spending $20 million to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality” in male-dominated spaces, calling their project “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.” This Rolling Stone report comes on the heels of a New York Times report on how Democratic donors are looking for “the next Joe Rogan.” I detailed why the Democrats will never get their own Joe Rogan last week (it’s the decrepit information environment that radicalized him, stupid!), but perhaps a better way to critique this push is to assert that the entire conception of Joe Rogan driving the opinions of young men is just wrong.
Fun fact: Joe Rogan has a net unfavorable rating among men under the age of 30. Just 27 percent have a favorable rating of him, 35 percent see him unfavorably, while a plaurality of 36 percent either don’t have enough information about him to rate him (21 percent) or have never heard of him (15 percent). Those last two figures get much more prominent the less famous these podcast bros get.
Just 21 percent of men under 30 have a favorable view of Theo Von, versus 16 percent unfavorable and 17 percent who don’t have enough information, while a clear plurality of 38 percent of young men have never heard of a semi-comedian who once interviewed the president. Going further right on the spectrum is Charlie Kirk (seen in the titular photo getting a backrub from California’s new budding right-wing podcast bro, Gavin Newsom), who 42 percent of zoomers have never even heard of. That figure is instructive when compared to the combined 40 percent of people who see him favorably (18 percent) or unfavorably (22 percent) enough to have an opinion on that little twerp. Andrew Tate, the avatar of what broken young bro culture that reifies sex criminals looks like, has just a 12 percent net favorable rating versus a 47 percent net unfavorable rating. Compare that against another large bloc of 36 percent who don’t know enough about him or have never heard about him to have an opinion, which is the same proportion of young men who view him very unfavorably. He is by far the most dangerous and damaging of all the manosphere bros, but these figures are helpful context for the scale of damage Tate has wrought.
It’s not so much that these right-wing influencers are unpopular, although Andrew Tate is clearly radioactive to around at least a third of men under 30, it’s that most zoomers don’t know who these people are! A slice of Democratic consultants are spending all their time and energy right now trying to recreate a liberal version of a world that male zoomers largely react to by saying “who the fuck is that?”
The Democratic freakout over the right-wing manosphere very much has the “how do you do fellow kids” tinge to it. By all accounts, the Gen X tactical sunglasses cohort is far more entranced by the right-wing influencer universe than young men are. If Democrats really want to learn something about young people, they should dig not into the crosstabs of this Harvard Youth Poll, but the headlines from it like “More than 4 in 10 young Americans under 30 are barely getting by financially—with women and non-college youth hit the hardest. Half of young adults without a college degree report financial hardship, compared to 29% of college graduates; only 16% say they’re doing well or very well financially” and that “Nearly half (47%) of young women struggle to make ends meet or get by with limited financial security, compared to 37% of men.”
Democrats do have a problem with men and there absolutely is an issue with right-wingers weaponizing major platforms like Facebook and YouTube to radicalize young men. Fighting back in those algorithms is a worthy endeavor for Democrats to undertake and that is part of this SAM effort. The concern, as always with this doddering group of gerontocrats, is them failing to realize what modernity actually looks like and instead of fixing real problems, inflate consultants’ bank accounts and address invented ones that are overhyped by a cable news intelligentsia who have never been able to accurately depict the world as it is. Young men are not getting radicalized en masse by Joe Rogan, most of them barely know who the hell he is.
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