takeover—legacy media and Democratic strategists have the same question on their lips: What is going on with young men? Though Kamala Harris won the overall 18- to 29-year-old demographic, Trump improved his share by 9 points. Men in this age group voted for Trump by 16% more than women did. What explains this?
Perhaps this is due to the right inflaming the anxieties and resentments of young men online. Red-pilled, hyper-masculine, anti-woke conspiracy influencers are filling the gap created by the “meaning crisis.” Maybe the left needs its own Joe Rogan! Not to worry: top political consultants Ilyse Hogue and John Della Volpe have pitched a new research initiative to the Democratic Party donor class.
Their response, the widely derided SAM (Speaking with American Men), comes with a proposed $20M budget. No cap, bro, they'll low-key give center-left corporate politics the rizz it needs to slay the MAGA simps and cape for democracy.
Politico: Dems set out to study young men
RS: Dems $20M Plan to Win Young Men
Less Engaged Voters Were Key To Trump’s Victory
Kamala Underperformed with Three Demographics
Nation: What Caused Dems No-Show Problem
Cooke Report: A Comprehensive Analysis on Why Harris Lost
Do Not Split: An Illuminating Look at Hong Kong’s Pro-Democracy Uprising - Human Rights First
Show Notes
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Did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did, but he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
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Episode 262, Dems ask, what is a man?
And as 2025 hurtles toward a full authoritarian takeover, legacy media and democratic strategists all have the same question on their lips.
What is going on with young men?
While Kamala Harris still won the overall 18 to 29-year-old demographic by 6%, Trump improved his share by 9 points as compared to 2020.
But men in that age group are the bigger story.
They voted for Trump by 16% more than women did.
What explains this?
Perhaps this is about how successfully the right has commandeered and inflamed the anxieties and resentments of young men on social media.
Red-pilled, hyper-masculine, anti-woke conspiracy influencers are filling the gap created by the meaning crisis.
Perhaps the left needs its own Joe Rogan.
It's all very confusing, but not to worry.
Top political consultants Elise Hoag and John De La Volpe have pitched a new research initiative to the Democratic Party donor class.
The widely derided SAM, or Speaking with American Men, project comes with a proposed $20 million budget for the first two years of seeking to win back the young men from the right.
No cap, bro.
they'll low-key give center-left corporate politics the riz it needs to slay the MAGA simps and cape for democracy.
All right, guys.
Why are we covering this topic as three young men, Gen Zers as we are?
I know we are middle-aged men, but we were once young men, so we might have some insights.
And on this podcast, we've spent five years.
Looking at how right-wing or right-leaning media figures use very predictable tropes and affects to jack their brands.
And we've endlessly covered one of their main communication networks, the Manosphere Podcast Circuit, whose testosterone-fueled pseudoscience and often misogynistic bro-science helped push Trump into the White House.
Now, with Sam, Democrats are trying to do something about it, so we wanted to step back and look at what that is and what that means for our beat.
Yeah, so the Speaking to American Men project is headed up, as Julian said, by Elise Hoag, who's 55. She previously served as president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
She's working with John De La Volpe.
I couldn't find his age, but I'm guessing he's late 50s or something like that.
He's the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.
He specializes in Gen Z voters.
And former Texas Representative Colin Allred, who's 42, he's the lawyer and former NFLer who lost to Ted Cruz in one of the most expensive Senate races in history.
So this is the mom and two dads who are going to talk to the kids.
And the most street cred prior I see in this team is that Volpe has a pretty good friend.
It's called Fight!
How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America.
The foreword is by David Hogg, who's the Parkland survivor.
And in it, Volpe argues that leaning into the progressive values of this 70 million strong demographic on justice, climate, gun violence, wealth inequality, housing shortages, that is actually the wave of the future.
Now, Hogg recently got pushed out of DNC mainly for plans to primary rightward-leaning Democratic legislators, so that went too far.
So I think, you know, we can see that Volpe's pitch is going to be working against the party tide.
Now, so far, Sam has run 30 focus groups.
It's not clear how large they are, but they've been with men aged 18 to 29. And they have conducted a national media consumption survey.
They're trying to understand things like Discord, Twitch, YouTube, gaming, sports, DIY content.
Their eventual aim is to engage in contract with progressive influencers and to show Democratic hopefuls how to use, you know, Their primary takeaways so far are that many young men feel invisible to the Democrats and perceive the party as weak and overly cautious, but they also believe neither party truly has their back.
that they are feeling overlooked or deceived is emerging as a major theme.
Right.
And the context for all of this, as we said at the top, is that in the 2024 election, we ended up with a startling gender gap in that age range.
16% more Gen Z men than women voted for Trump.
Has the left-leaning hope of a more predictably traditional, religious, reactionary set of voters dying off to be replaced by an up-and-coming progressive generation?
been upended by these young men being lost to Andrew Tate style aspirational anti-feminism, Roganesque conspiracism.
Maybe.
But the trend amongst young men was also part of an overall shift.
Like, Kamala Harris still won the Black and Latino vote, but in both cases, with 6% less choosing her over Trump than in the previous election.
And men were decisive in that Black and Brown shift toward the right.
Between 2016 and 2024 elections, black voters' overall support for Trump improved by 12%, while Latinos shifted his way by 15%.
Both white men and white women also shifted from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 by around 8%.
So the issue of race can, of course, not be ignored here, but the across-the-board shifts from Biden to Trump.
May indicate generalizable reticence to elect a female president, I'm very sad to say.
In gendered terms, Trump won the male vote by 12%, while Harris won women overall by 2%, which was still less than Biden's 15% lead with women.
Another key takeaway was that the more closely people followed the news, the more likely they were to have voted for Harris, while Trump voters were more likely to be less educated, less consistent.
in their voting and to have paid less attention to news and politics in the run-up to the election.
Still, the startling gender gap amongst Gen Z voters is a good place for Dems to start.
So I went in search for answers from the guru that every wisdom-seeking man on the internet turns to.
People have been after me for a long time because I've been speaking to disaffected young men.
What a terrible thing to do that is.
I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice.
It's making you emotional.
Well, God, you know.
It's very difficult to understand how demoralized people are.
And certainly many young men are in that category.
It's an amazing study in how the mythos of a person and maybe their Batman suits can protect an influencer from their own cringe content.
I'm always amazed that he can still do this stuff and still be on his run.
So one thing we know for sure we can say about Jordan Peterson, he's always a compassionate champion for the marginalized.
But he's not the only one, guys.
Here's the top dog, bro science, optimization supplement peddler, and alleged pro-level lying womanizer, Andrew Huberman.
You know, one thing I'm increasingly concerned about is it's depression rates of young men in the United States.
But we have a serious, serious crisis of identity that people are starting to talk about.
but even the mere mention of it sounds like, oh no, they're all going to rally together and do bad things.
No, these...
I think most of it starts with lack of, I'm just going to say it, of a strong, in the right sense of the word, paternal figure.
I am so sort of disappointed at how easily it is for these guys to manipulate something real.
And in terms of this particular argument, we've been hearing this from the right wing for 40 years or more.
And if you really talk about the absence of the father enough times, the subtext is also that women aren't good enough parents and guides.
And within that is also this complete bypass of the fact that the diminishing middle class has gone double income, but caregiving labor has not equalized between the genders.
It's a real experience.
I also wonder if the Democrats would spend $20 million trying to figure out why women are voting the way that they do.
There's this cultural emphasis on young men, and yet, well, I mean, in general, women have gone more democratic, which is important, but there's still so many long-standing biases towards trying to rally the male vote without any emphasis on
And yet, when women are talked about, it's usually weaponized by someone like RFK Jr., who will trot out the statistic that more teenage girls are suffering from depression than ever before, his words.
So we need to get them off SSRIs.
Like it's only contextually when it fits into their anti-whatever messaging that they actually start to focus on women.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, suddenly these, But now it's this new type of influencer who frames it in psychological terms.
And then what do you know?
On the next episode that Andrew Huberman does...
I just want to just review the statistics, though, that you gave, Julian, with regard to Dara's comment about, well, why are we studying men and not women?
Harris won women overall by 2%, but that was less than Biden's 15% lead with women.
Is that actually the more salient statistic here?
It might be.
I mean, it's one of the things on the board, right?
And it shouldn't be overlooked.
But to the point of what you were saying a moment ago, Matthew, it's so predictable how these folks will lean on the culture war.
They'll bang that culture war drum in this very familiar way about, oh, the problem is that women are not in the home anymore.
Women are going out to work.
Women have bought into the lie of feminism that they can have it all, instead of the economic argument, which is that women have to work.
The household can't survive under these current economic conditions unless you have two incomes, right?
Which is your point.
So instead of talking about Gen Z, how about hearing from an actual Gen Z influencer?
Here's the 26-year-old Manosphere figure and recent convert.
Along with Andrew Tate, Islam, his name is Sneeko.
So I would say to anyone watching this, this is why I think it's extremely important to believe in God or have some sort of religion.
Because if you have no religion, if you have no God at all, what ends up becoming your God is wokeness.
That's just what replaces it.
wokeness is degeneracy, is drugs, is the cancel culture thing, is living online and the celebrity drama, gossip, cancel culture, being upset at other people, invested in other people's lives.
That whole woke social media hive mind, that will replace it because humans just need to The lack of imagination by the religious about what atheists are and how they fill the void, in their words, is always astounding to me.
Well, also, points for the broadest definition of wokeness ever.
He's basically talking about modernity or complexity.
I think also, though, that when he says religion, that could be subbed out for like solidarity, for material analysis.
Like if what he's talking about is a sense of needing an epistemological community or people who agree with you or support your stable and testable point of view on how the world works.
Celebrity gossip, that's what wokeness is.
Wokeness is celebrity gossip, didn't you realize?
And it's because you're not going to church.
Right.
But he is talking about religion because that's part of the shtick of these folks is that, you know, And if we could just get back to that, it's more of this lost golden age stuff.
But finally, here's Dr. Jordan Peterson again on Fox News promoting his new book.
And remember, he's not technically a Christian.
His new book called We Who Rest.
Well, we haven't told a story of responsibility, really, especially to young people, not effectively for about four generations.
And the consequence of that is a crisis of meaning.
And why work hard?
Why be of service to other people?
Because it imbues your life with the significance that enables you to tolerate the difficulties of your existence.
Without bitterness and with hope, that's all associated with meaning.
The stories of the Bible, they're about you, whether you know it or not.
Obviously, who else would they be about?
I think you can attribute the fact of the culture war that's occurring everywhere in the West to a confusion about the nature of the story that should orient us in the world.
The academics, the postmodern types, have put forward really the notion that life is about hedonistic pleasure or about power.
The problem with that is that both those stories are self-defeating.
Yeah, so we see where Sneeko gets it from, right?
It's the postmodernists are about degeneracy, yeah.
Yeah, so social justice, slavery reparations, anti-imperialism, breaking down gender essentials, examining privilege, seeking accountability in rape culture.
None of these have anything to do with responsibility.
Endorsing a felon, however, for president.
That is responsibility, Jordan.
So actually, the crisis is over meaning.
It's just over his meanings in the world, I think.
Yeah, so thanks for bearing with me, listeners, and you too.
I wanted to take that little journey through men speaking about men on the internet to illustrate a popular theme in that discourse.
There's a meaning crisis in the West in general, and especially for young men, supposedly.
Peterson is a strong proponent of this idea, but I think it's true pseudo-intellectual roots Go back to another psychology professor who I think of as the Mac Daddy sense maker, John Verveke.
Yeah, you're going to have to say who that is for the listeners.
Yeah, so listeners of Decoding the Gurus will be familiar with Verveke.
He's a professor of psychology and cognitive science and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto, so often spoken of as being a colleague of Jordan Peterson.
He's very popular amongst those hyper-abstract sense maker types, primarily through the vector of David Fuller's Rebel Wisdom channel.
We've talked about a little bit here and there.
He started a series of YouTube lectures called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis in January of 2019.
And according to Verveke, the breakdown of traditional wisdom structures has caused a rise of nihilism and despair.
Along with Peterson and another Canadian for some reason that maybe you know, Matthew, Jonathan Pajot, both of whom he's appeared with in interviews and public onstage discussions, Vervecki is popular with right-leaning male audiences as a voice for spiritual.
I mean, I don't know why they're all from here, but the worst thing about the Canadian Manosphere or Manosphere-aligned characters is that they seem more mild-mannered, but, like, it's just passive aggression.
Thanks for decoding that, yeah.
Either way, wherever the meaning crisis notion comes from, there's a ubiquitous kind of presence that it has within these circles.
And it's a perfect example of something that Manosphere podcasters say to sound like they're deep and smart and like they just care so much about the existential angst of young men.
But I think they're actually just recycling lost golden age conservative BS.
Vervecki himself is less right-wing, he's less anti-feminist, and he seemed for a while more squarely rooted in cognitive science.
But as Decoding the Gurus have told us in a recent podcast, he's opened up about believing that he dialogues directly with the ancient Greek god Hermes.
Oh, right.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's a good thing to have on your CV.
The fact to me that popular psychology and personal growth That's what's really sad to me.
Like, it's not the shrinking middle class.
It's not skyrocketing student debt or empty promises from charlatan optimizer and entrepreneur grindset coaches.
It's not a lack of basic emotional intelligence and good relational self-awareness made worse by rampant misogynist discourse.
That is driving male loneliness and despair.
No, it's not that.
It's feminism eroding their self-esteem.
It's wokeness inducing white guilt.
It's the loss of traditional religion crushing their sense of having been chosen by God to subjugate women and gays and rule over the earth.
And many will also use this as an explanation for the so-called rise of wokeness.
And we heard Sneeko reference that, right?
Because you see, wokeness isn't really about progressive politics.
It's a substitute for religion.
And you heard a few references.
So, atheism, hedonism, nihilism all leave a God-shaped hole in the culture, and the poor, deluded university students being influenced by postmodern Marxist professors have filled that hole with woke ideology.
They had religious conversions.
They demanded orthodox demonstrations of faith.
They enacted witch hunts to cancel anyone who'd broken the sacred taboos and cast those not pure enough into hellfire.
The meaning crisis trope is wheeled out as an explanation in the same way that people just don't trust institutions anymore is bandied about.
And I put those in the same category.
They may sound a little different, but in both cases, the voices claiming to diagnose the problem are the ones who've created it.
So no, RFK Jr., Jay Bhattacharya, Vinay Prasad, The medical science agencies you now rule didn't actually fail Americans.
It's you who've endlessly repeated this in advance so that now you can destroy their good work with your pseudoscience libertarian recklessness.
Young men Gen Z, I think has this the worst because it's all they've ever known.
This deluge of online content that makes it almost impossible to distinguish conspiracy crap from investigative journalism or science informed analysis from manipulative pseudoscience.
Sincere personal growth exploration from cult indoctrination.
And truly empowering political consciousness from faux populist propaganda.
Well, here's where I do have to say, though, Julian, not all Gen Z, because I think even in a meta-conversation like this, it's good to be careful about sounding like we assume this generation doesn't have its own compass tools.
And a really big skill set I see developing in the tween culture I know, it hinges on skepticism and the capacity for meta discussions that I did not have a capacity for until I was in college.
Like these are kids who recognize very early on that information comes to them through a discourse from different points of view.
And so the kids I'm around are looking also at literally everything as though it could be AI generated, which is his own problem.
It is a meaning crisis, I think, but it's not one that the manosphere can really address.
No, that's interesting in terms of them being savvy in ways that perhaps the boomers weren't able to be, right, about what they were looking at.
Yeah.
Yeah, so last couple ideas from me here.
The SAM project seems doomed to failure if it just tries to learn to speak the language of a new generation of men who've had their media literacy deranged, many of them.
by opportunistic propagandists and charlatans.
Like I'm absolutely on board with policy and messaging that addresses material concerns, standard of living, social safety net, educational opportunities.
But I don't think Democrats are going to meme war their I agree that it's doomed to failure, but for other reasons.
We probably all have converging reasons of sorts.
One thing about this project, and I want to preface it by saying that I understand that political parties have to test to understand messaging.
So in terms of the broader theme of what they're going for, I get that that's just part of operating in a political climate in a culture.
The thing that gets me about this project overall, though, and this myopic focus on young men that really predates this particular poll testing and what they're trying to do is the fact that women are
As long as this manosphere slash young male crisis has been going on, women in my life that I know, women that I follow on social media, and then just because of my algorithm, random people are like, we've dealt with fucking men our entire lives.
You men mostly do everything shitty and corrupt in this world, the reason there's war, the reason there's so many problems.
And we've actually reached a place in American culture where both women and then minorities or foreigners, people coming into the country, are doing better, better educated, getting better jobs.
And now, all of a sudden, you're going to talk.
All of a sudden, you want to go to this group therapy on podcasts and put everything back on us again.
And it's this repetitive trope that happens over and over, but now it's being spotlighted in new ways because of access to information that we have.
I'm gonna get into that in my segment next about how the internet plays a role in this.
But overall, I gotta say, like, one part of me is just like, yes, any group that is suffering I get that.
But in another sense, your Peterson clip Because you have someone here who's out calling the left snowflakes all the time.
But when it comes to his own emotions and his own crisis, all of a sudden it's all fine.
And I just see this over and over again, and it's really tiring to me.
So I want to close by suggesting that there were some other people, and who knows, maybe they're already thinking of this, but it would be good to include some other voices in terms of what Sam, the kinds of insights Sam is trying to generate.
So one of whom is FD Signifier.
Eric, I know you're going to touch on him in a little bit.
I would also suggest Josh Citarella, who is the host of the Doomscroll podcast.
He has a background in researching and writing about Gen Z for his 2018 book, Politogram and the Post Left.
As well as his 2020 book, 20 Interviews, which is composed entirely of political interviews with Gen Z. You know, Derek, I just want to speak to the comment that you made about how tiresome it is to be focusing on men sort of perennially over and over and over again as I watch the footage come in from Los Angeles and I see how gender diverse those protests are.
I get the sense, the old leftist sense of no war but class war.
And there's a sense that, I think that one of the things that Sam is doing is it's actually buying the terms of culture war discourse.
It's actually saying, yeah, John Verveke, yeah, Jordan Peterson, men are really suffering.
Let's figure out what's wrong with them.
And I don't necessarily think that, I think men in that discourse is standing in for And Julian, I would add to that list.
Matt Bernstein, Taylor Lorenz, Hassan Piker, Olufemi Taiwo, Kat Abu-Zagaleh, who's running for Congress in Illinois, Francesco Fiorentini.
The consultant list should be embedded.
And part of my issue with this is I'm just wondering why they went public with this instead of getting people like this into, you know, a room for a week and to start their testing there.
Because already the public nature of the question, what do American men think?
Kind of knocks against the credibility.
It makes them look like they're trying to culture war game the vote.
Did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story.
Because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
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you you I want to open this segment with an anecdote that we can broaden out into a larger discussion.
And that is, I simply cannot imagine being a teenager with immediate access to the internet, much less the anxieties of social media.
And I'll follow that with an immediate caveat because I'm not in the tech is destroying our brains camp.
My father started working with computers in the 1960s.
I grew up with them.
I very much like technologies.
But these sorts of discussions quickly devolve into extremist arguments.
And as with every technology, online networks are sometimes beneficial and sometimes horrific, and we have to navigate those spaces.
Back to my anecdote.
I grew up 30 miles outside of New York City.
The proximity certainly had influence, but it could have also been a planet away.
And it wasn't until I started college and went to the city regularly that the cultural influences of New York hit me in real time.
There wasn't this MTV lag until it trickled down into the suburbs.
And that distance has been erased with the internet.
Everyone with a phone has instant access to anywhere in the world.
And in one sense, that is absolutely amazing.
In the sense more related to today's episode, even with access to opinions, ideas, cultural influences from everywhere, people often seem to embed themselves into communities that confirm their own biases and are influenced by online networks that siphon them off into particular communities.
To me, it doesn't appear to be an either or, but rather a both and.
In preparation for this episode, I mentioned to you guys that a stark difference between the right and left, and I'm speaking extremely broadly here, is that the left often leads with a sort of purpose, a mission, and sometimes a moralizing tone.
When I read this Sam pitch deck that you found, Matthew, it's filled with the sort of language that backs that up.
So, for example, quote, They are most comfortable that resonate with their lived experiences.
We can ensure that outreach efforts are not just performative, but genuinely effective in mobilizing this critical demographic.
It was so bad that they leaked it.
It was, why did they leak that shit?
So stupid.
And the clue there is not just performative.
Like, actually, you're just told on yourself, the whole thing is performative.
Right, because that's not how people talk, and it is certainly not how young men talk.
I understand that this is a big picture document.
You know, last segment I made my case, I understand that these things are necessary for, you The medium is the message.
So when I read Sam's second objective, quote, authentic upstream cultural engagement, and that they'll, quote, identify and build trust with organic leaders in the largest relevant online communities in Discord slash Reddit and other online platforms.
I feel like I'm watching an after-school special about just saying no to drugs, which was created by people with no understanding of the target audience, their language, or drugs at all.
To me, this is why Tim Walls calling J.D. Vance weird last year had such resonance.
The dude is fucking weird.
And that is how people actually talk about him.
It's how they feel about him.
The Dems went with it for a minute.
Then they let it go, and they did not keep attacking on that level.
And I get that people want to take a higher road.
But instead, we get this fucking $20 million pitch deck trying to figure out what walls nailed because he was being actually authentic.
So we disagreed about this, and I now agree with you, Derek.
And I think part of what's going on is that maybe the Dems let it go because he was more authentic than the party could actually be.
Because he interwove that comment with campaigning on his leftist legislative street credibility in Minnesota.
These were victories on abortion rights, gender care, paid family, medical leave.
Labor rights, universal school meals, and he could not have, just to be topical here for a moment and tragic, he couldn't have pushed through any of those without the help of Melissa Hortman, Speaker of the House, who was just assassinated alongside her husband by a new Apostolic Reformation ghoul.
And their dog.
And their dog, yeah.
So I didn't like that line at the time.
We argued about it.
I think maybe what was going on for me is that the party actually limited it to the weirdness of couches and dolphins instead of J.D. Vance is weird because he doesn't want kids to have free lunches or parents to have paid family leave.
But, you know, that was...
True.
part of it, but alongside the dolphins and couches stuff, there was conversation about like, this guy's really weird in terms of how he focuses on women's reproductive freedoms.
What's going on with trans kids, etc.
Why these weird preoccupations, Guy?
From my memory, a lot of late night talk shows really honed in on the couch part, right?
But when you actually saw some of the other people speaking in front of crowds, they did bring up a range of issues.
But I also understand because you can't sort of separate how the media covers it with what's going on at this point, which is its own challenge, right?
And we are talking about a political party, but considering the left more broadly, I appreciate this video that you sent me, Julian.
How did you find FD Signifier?
Oh gosh, I don't know.
He's been popping up in my feed for a few months.
So I guess thank the algorithm because I was watching stuff that was doing sort of cultural criticism and political content.
I think you sent him to me first and then I started following.
He is fantastic.
He has like five YouTube channels.
And the clip I'm using, you had sent to me, it's from his signified...
This moment is from the video called The Manosphere is Evolving.
And, well, listeners, you can decide how you feel about it.
And this is why I've never taken seriously the left isn't doing enough for men argument because the reality is we're doing everything we can.
Under the circumstances that are presented to us.
What that means is there's only so much creators and commentators can do on their own when they are in fact going against the very grain of society.
The normative attitudes and opinions that lead to red pill ideology have to be deconstructed from the ground up.
And doing that with YouTube videos is not easy.
And when you're trying to change people's baseline opinions on society and gender and relationships and all that, you're going to sound radical and outlandish even when you're not.
And that's going to make it very difficult to not turn normal dudes off when you're trying to show them a better way.
So it's not that people aren't trying.
It's that trying is not easy.
And whenever I hear that excuse, I know it's coming from people who want to be coddled instead of taught to do better, who don't want their internal biases and misogyny and issues with women challenged, but want to somehow be accepted in or regarded as doing better with those problems when they haven't actually.
Doing this type of work, this type of content, requires us to be critical of things that a lot of people see as mundane and offensive.
And that's just the road we're on.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like he could be speaking directly to the SAM people and saying, like, here's what's really going on here.
And the reason he can do that is he's been creating this kind of stuff that's critical of the manosphere for the last three years.
And then prior to that, I believe he did his master's thesis on school shooters.
So he's in there.
And I really appreciate that.
And he gets at something, he hints at something that I think is really important as well, is that as hard as it is, the resistance to really progressive messaging, is that you have to hit back with the confidence of the opposite assumptions, right?
So, I'm sure he does this, but, you know, top-tier communicators have to bring in this sense that, well, racism, sexism, homophobia, not fighting for women's reproductive rights, all of that is just insane.
You know, it's almost, it's like the awakening rhetoric or tactics of some of the gurus that we've studied but applied to a different realm because there's a rhetorical symmetry between You know, the spiritual confrontation, like, why don't you wake up, even if it's delusional, and the political confrontation.
So, you know, when I think of James Baldwin or Angela Javis or today ContraPoints, if they're asked a question from the right or even the center about human rights or ways to protest, the moral confidence that frames their answer with, like, are you insane to ask me that?
Do you really think the status quo is okay here?
That's a charismatic moment.
So there's something about the resistance that he's talking about that also, I think, provokes a kind of breakthrough communication for those who can grab it.
But specifically, the Democrats are going to be able to manufacture relationships with creators in the same way that the right has been able to do.
And part of that comes from the fact that the Democratic Party is just a more diverse coalition.
There's diversity everywhere, but within the right, there is a serious Christian nationalist base and there's a serious white person base.
And you are going to be able to more easily find people who resonate with your messaging and then pay them to say what they already believe.
Where the Democrats are going to have a harder time with that just because we are trying to welcome more people in.
And that is, as FD Signifier says, challenging.
There are plenty of left-leaning creators doing the work.
I think we've been trying in our own ways for a number of years.
So whenever I hear about a Joe Rogan of the left, I just shake my head.
And regardless how you feel about Rogan, the man has built a parasocial following over the course of decades, starting in 2009 on his podcast, but he's been in the atmosphere since the 90s.
And the left does have a high-level podcaster, Marc Maron, who's also been doing it just since 2009, a few months.
After Rogan started, and he engages people emotionally as well.
I think we are all going to sort of show our biases and date ourselves in an episode like this, because I love Maren, but does anyone under 30 listen to him?
Probably not.
I mean, with Maren particularly, there's the problem of leftist analysis originating from a depressive position.
I mean, that's his thing.
There's nothing depressive about Piker, though, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So Hasan Packard, he has that energy, right?
He's doing it like a streamer, and he's doing it like the guy he kind of mentored under but now has massive beef with, which is Destiny.
And we may disagree with some of Destiny's not left enough positions, but he does the thing you're talking about, Matthew, where he's just putting it all out there.
It's very immediate.
It's very charismatic.
It's very authentic.
It's also very eloquent.
He's got a lot of facts and figures at his fingertips.
And to me, he's as close as we have to a Joe Rogan on the left right now.
Yes.
Some people under 30 listen to Marin, but not a lot.
So that's point taken there for sure.
But that said, Marin is also around the same age as Rogan.
So then you have to wonder, why is Rogan so much more influential when it comes to politics and also to the younger generation?
My initial thought with FD Signifier said was that Rogan will coddle the audience more.
Not even intentionally, that's just his nature and that's how he engages with people.
So there's more coddling and not as much challenging.
And another key...
Myron has always refused that format.
He believes guests are more comfortable when a camera is off.
That likely plays a role.
But the right, as FD Signifier says, plays to the base emotions of men.
And in America, that's rooted in misogynistic, chauvinistic, pseudo-religious thinking.
Because Rogan doesn't challenge his audience on that level and he agrees with most of his guests, that's going to draw people into that relationship.
So when FD Signifier says a lot of men don't want to be challenged, that speaks to me to men broadly than it does to specific media diets or political leanings.
Individual men, one-on-one, can be fine, great even, but as a collective, our track record is shit.
Yeah, and then the other thing here is that trying to reverse engineer this kind of stuff, the way that they're describing and with their consultant speak, it's probably almost impossible, especially when you're dealing with a podcast ecosystem that's essentially about comedians and actors and bro science influencers and then authors of fringe books about cryptozoology and ancient architecture and stuff like that.
They're all just coming in to shoot the shit.
And talk about a range of topics, and then they're going to issue super relatable but often poorly informed hot takes on culture, war, and politics.
I do believe there are ways to help guide young men, even ways to make groups of men better people.
Matthew, I know you wanted examples.
You dropped a comment in.
I'm not being predictive on this episode.
No, you know why?
Because I said it to you in a VM.
You didn't answer it.
I think you were maybe embarrassed, but I said, you are a cool guy.
I said, you are in your early 50s.
You've had a ton of different jobs.
You float in and out of different social sets.
You've lived in a bunch of different places.
You're able to speak to a lot of different people, and you are a guy.
I think you've got something to say.
I think you've got some ideas.
Matthew?
I have one week left in my 40s.
Oh, sorry.
I just buried you.
I did hear the VM and I appreciated it, but I was dealing with some family stuff the day I got it.
So anyway, that is why.
Predictions are not my specialty except when it comes to RFK Jr. absolutely decimating public health in America.
I feel very comfortable making that.
Back to this, when you're communicating in a medium whose messages are designed to exploit the most outrageous assholes perpetuating the worst qualities in men.
You're starting off a few steps behind, so I'm just not convinced that spending tens of millions of dollars trying to study and create authenticity is going to help in that fight.
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Before I get to my thing, I just want to circle back to your generational comment that you opened with, Derek.
I think you're right that it is hard for us at our age to imagine what it's like to grow up digital.
But I also want to say that we don't really have to imagine because tween and teen culture is a lot more accessible to the engaged parent.
And adult now than ever before.
Like, my parents were engaged.
They had no idea what I was reading, who I was talking to, where I was going.
So today, not only can you see how kids are hanging around at school, but you can hear them on speakerphone, you can hear them on the multiplayer gaming headset.
The Netflix series Adolescence, which we covered, gave us this real sort of hand-wringing sense of, oh my God, what's happening in their bedrooms?
And all I have to say of that is, if the door was already closed, your problem wasn't the internet.
And what I've seen so far from hanging around with my son and his friends is that exposures to a wide range of cultures and affects are all available.
That is true.
And online cliques and cul-de-sacs can form and isolate kids.
But I think that happens to the same extent that it happens in previously non-supported environments where schools and parents are overworked and under-resourced.
I think, as you guys often say about psychedelics, the internet for Gen Z is like a normalized, frictionless, nonspecific amplifier of what's going on, and their larger social context is going to help craft that for them.
Okay, so in thinking about all of this, I'm recalling some of my conversations with Craig Johnson, the author of How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism, and Ben Case.
You can find those on our feed.
The most germane points from Johnson were that fascism is appealing to the conditioned and conventional pleasures of young male life through its political imperatives.
Speed, violence, recklessness, self-assertion.
So this is a politics that stokes or manufactures rage.
This is all in the playbook of fascist leaders going back forever who have always needed street muscle and cannon fodder.
I think these are the men, some of the men that the SAM project is trying to sort of figure out and speak to.
And these days, they're also sort of provoked into online aggression.
And so they're praised for strength and violence and cruelty, and they're told that these are political arts.
And for the younger men, there are these easy tricks that fascist movements use, like irony poisoning, where racism and misogyny is couched in the plausible deniability of just joking until it's not a joke.
Fascism punches down because it's easy.
And I'm talking about everything from Proud Boy street violence to even Joe Rogan thinking it's cool to bring back the R word.
And to be honest, I'm not sure which is more harmful to more people, given the extent of his audience.
As if he never, ever stopped saying it in the first place.
Exactly.
But for him to say that it is a cultural victory, that I can say retard again, it's really incredible, actually.
It's horrible.
Yeah, and incredibly influential, like across the country.
Now that word goes up in schoolyards everywhere.
So the questions that Johnson left me with were, Why isn't it obvious that right-wing aggression isn't cool?
Like, how do we make it uncool?
How long does it take to realize that punching down is actually something that losers do?
And that series of questions is a hundred miles down the road from what I think the SAM consultants are scratching the surface on.
But I think that Taylor Lorenz and Cidarella would have a lot to say about that sort of thing.
Sam wants to find out what drives young men to the right.
They have to figure out what sorts of neglect and grievance drives people to want to act out and equalize.
But if they really listen, I think the challenge in going to the party with a plan is going to be about whether the establishment can really sit with the anger and not dismiss and condescend because we see that as a very ready sort of reflex.
And this is like Bill Maher, I would say, spending 10 years laughing at social justice warriors to college administrators calling in riot police last spring.
Like, because the overall message is you are angry, but you're also immature and stupid.
You don't know how the world works.
Yeah, you don't know how the world works.
Right.
And to me, this is wrapped up in a deep question of parenting that I think many parents are familiar with, which is, do you know how to understand and maybe even respect?
Anger, even if it is immature, unseasoned, misdirected, and what kids are liable to do with it.
What do you do when they rage at you?
I mean, that's the basic question that I think the older elements, the geriatric elements of the Democratic caucus is dealing with every day.
Like, what are we doing about these kids who are yelling about us?
What do you do when the kids rage at you?
And do you have a good radar for when that rage can flip or be nudged into the kind of anger that drives justice movements?
Or are you going to be the kind of law and order parent who tells the kid to behave better and to go to therapy if they're struggling with their feelings?
It's like, you know, we hear you, we feel you, and then get back to business as usual.
So in thinking about Johnson's proposition that what fascists really do with young men is that they co-opt rage, I want to give a couple of snapshots of leftist passion and rage that I hope that Sam actually catches because I think they present democratic message makers with moments to study that also challenge this reflex to call the manager.
Regardless of ideological differences in personal values.
So I'm not like bringing these up to relitigate, like what should people do in protest or in rebellious context or anything like that, but how do you respond as...
And the examples all here have to do with protest because I think that's a litmus test for the communications we have for people who are expressing deep commitment to their values or people who you want to be on your side.
So first example, lots of hand-wringing over punching Richard Spencer in 2017.
Lots of long-form essays.
And I think what happens is that can inflate the image.
Of the establishment Democrat as the controlling parent rather than the guiding elder.
And that discussion, you know, should he or shouldn't he or do we, you know, are we allowed to punch Nazis or not, still hangs over a lot of the protest discourse today without a lot of analysis of what that moment actually means, who Richard Spencer was, how he goes into decline over two years after that, that sort of thing.
The second example comes from my conversation with Ben Case, where I think he really sort of showed me that fighting sport is not necessarily a right-wing space.
I think you guys just brought up UFC.
A muscular left exists, it's not all male, and it's not obsessed with humiliation.
I'm thinking of, I don't know if you guys saw recently, there was the Irish MMA fighter, Paddy McCorry, who just pounded the shit out of this former IDF soldier, Shuki Farage, winning his match with his elbow drops while shouting, free Palestine.
And my sector of social media went wild over that.
And regardless of what you feel about that particular issue, the question, I think, for the DNC is, what do they learn about the prestige or the coolness of fighting for the underdog, for that part of the demographic that they're interested in?
And when I interviewed Ben Case, he listed off all these MMA clubs around the country that are specifically anti-fascist, that welcome women in and LBGTQ people in for fighting classes.
And then last, I'll just say that, like, in this summer of illegal ICE raids, how will the Democrats respond to various protest tactics?
If you're on Patreon, you'll find Julian and I arguing at length about all of the meanings, definitions, and impacts of various forms of protest actions in relation to Ben Case's work and his study of Erica Chenoweth and so on.
That argument will go on forever.
I think there's good strategic points on all sides.
And if we agree to disagree on values but limit the thinking to messaging –
In my opinion, if any politician wants to stay relevant to a big chunk of Gen Z, I can't say how large it is, but I think it's influential, they should be mindful of crossing the line into calling the manager on the kids.
Because I think the main thing that Gen Z wants to hear from anybody older is, will you defend us?
And to speak to this, I think there's a movement that came up with an interesting guiding principle.
It was in Hong Kong over 2019 and 20. There were mass street protests about the government caving to Beijing or about to cave to Beijing on a number of issues related to deporting people directly to the homeland or to the mainland.
Protesters developed a slogan, which was, do not split.
And that was their strategy to maintain unity and resilience by valuing a diversity of tactics.
They knew there were many.
They knew that there were people committed to nonviolent action, that there were people willing to engage in more confrontational methods.
By the way, some of those methods have trickled down into an operational knowledge that we see in L.A. and Portland.
This is people protesting ice in hard hats and gas masks with umbrellas against nonlethal munitions and leaf blowers against tear gas.
Rather than criticizing or distancing themselves from each other.
The different factions provided mutual respect.
And here's the most important thing.
Tacit support.
They did not have to publicly endorse each other because they saw overt alliances perhaps as being counterproductive.
Their belief was that we can support each other tacitly because we're all contributing to the overall strength of the movement.
And part of the aim was to prevent infighting that authorities can exploit.
They did not discipline each other.
I think that Hogue and Volpe and Allred may do okay with listening intently to young American men.
I have no sense from their presentation that they're not earnest, right?
I think they actually do, especially from Volpe's book or what I've seen of it.
I think they do want to figure this out.
But if they really pay attention to this thing that Johnson brings up, which is that it's rage that fascists are so good at capturing and weaponizing.
If they really pay attention to that, I think they run the risk of presenting Democrats with actual challenges, not to material policy, not only to material policy, but also a challenge to this tendency of trying to always contain and manage and maybe ultimately co-opt youth It's very interesting, Matthew.
I mean, I agree with so much of what you've said.
And it also sounds like you're making an argument for Sam would do well, this initiative through Democratic consultants would do well to listen to the enraged young voices on the left as a way of trying to solve this puzzle of why people are moving to the right across so many demographics and most notably amongst Gen Z men.
Well, if, yeah, I mean, Are Gen Z men moving away from the Democrats because they're not represented by a Democratic Party?
That is not looking after their interests, or are they really attracted to Trump?
I can't answer that.
I don't know.
Yeah, no, I think it's very interesting.
I'm not trying to put a stick in your bicycle wheels.
I'm just interested in how we think about this, right?
Because on the one hand, I hear you saying, like, Gen Z men are drawn to fascism because it's exciting, because it speaks to something in them.
The speed and the intensity, right?
Young men in general, that's Johnson's contention.
And that's been true historically.
So if you have that as a sort of magnetizing promise of political action, the question is, if it emerges on the left, what are you going to do with it?
Yeah, so I almost hear you saying, and tell me if this sounds right, that what we need, what Democrats need is to figure out how to harness some of that rage to have I don't know, maybe equally intense and aggressive and maybe somewhat violent stuff on the left that appeals to young men in a similar way but with a different political message?
I think they have to, more than anything else, get out of the business of being mom and dad in the room saying, don't yell too loud.
That's where I would leave it.
Because, as I said, nobody's going to advocate for confrontational tactics.
But what I'm really concerned about is the message that the suppressive parenting voice sends, which is, you don't know how this works.
