Young Men and Online Radicalization: Dissecting Internet Subcultures with Lee Fang, Katherine Dee, and Evan Barker
Should there be a moral panic about young people being radicalized online? As much of the media struggles to understand and describe Gen Z internet culture in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, journalist and culture writer Katherine Dee discusses the dark internet subcultures influencing young people and what can be done about them. Plus: former Democratic operative Evan Barker discusses how Democrats alienate young men, and what Democrats can learn from Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA. Lee Fang guest hosts. --------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Charlie Kirk was a towering figure among conservatives, but in particular for many young men.
Kirk built a national following through the organization that he co-founded, Turning Point USA.
Turning Point has become an incredible institution on the conservative right.
The group now has chapters at over 850 college campuses.
It has many paid organizers who are expected to make at least 1,500 student contacts per semester.
The group boasts a budget, an annual budget of over $80 million per year.
The money is spent to train students in debate and social media and tactics for electioneering to help the Republican Party and various conservative causes.
And Kirk realized early on that college campuses were fertile ground for rebuilding the conservative movement.
His debate format was a bit formulaic at times, often using quips and canned responses to counter liberal opponents.
But he was nonviolent.
He was engaging.
He inspired countless young people with his ability to create viral moments.
And in doing so, he became the de facto youth leader of the MAGA movement, a pivotal institution for Donald Trump's coalition.
In 2024, young men swung to the Republican Party by 30%, one of the biggest demographic earthquakes in modern electoral history.
It's safe to say that Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA played a big role in this incredible shift.
Young men, it turns out, have been exhausted by the liberal culture wars, which have all too often demonized men as oppressors, as sexual predators, and as the cause of many problems in society.
Yet, young men, the statistics show, are not doing well.
Recent data shows that young men are becoming more addicted to drugs and alcohol, including high-potency pot, as well as addicted to sports betting and other forms of gambling.
Compulsive habits around video games and pornography are overwhelmingly reported among young men.
They're increasingly dropping out of college, failing to hold a job, and becoming more and more lonely.
Increasing numbers of young men report few, if any, close friends or romantic partners.
Kirk reflected on this crisis.
He repeatedly discussed the crisis among young men, which showed his political acumen and his ability to build bridges among young people.
Young men, said Kirk, are, quote, checking out.
They are the lost boys of the West.
They're checking out largely because the entire society has become hostile to them.
They've been told that they were toxically masculine.
Kirk encouraged young men to find purpose in work, family, and the church.
He encouraged them to run for office or to help with local political races like school board or local assembly.
He told them repeatedly to find a, quote, mission grounding their lives in responsibility and meaning in something bigger.
That brings us to Kirk's alleged killer, Tyler Robinson.
There's much we do not know about this young man.
But what we do know is that his profile and the profile of so many other young people drawn into a life of violence is that it fits this pattern of young men lost in the world of internet gaming and nihilism.
Tyler's gun casings reference meme and video message board, video game message board culture.
Among many Gen Z and Gen Alpha young men, they seem to embrace what's been known as a black pill mindset.
That is to say that the path for finding a job, finding an apartment or buying a home or even getting into a relationship seems impossible for them.
The idea is to maybe get rich at any cost or get famous at any cost.
They use irony and crude memes to mask the deep anxiety that they feel.
They lack any real hope for a positive future.
They're mired in memes and internet symbols and a jokey culture fed to them by social media algorithms.
And they know that in this virtual world, the only way to stand out is through increasingly vulgar and violent images and acts.
There is a deep and tragic irony in that Kirk's suspected killer is the exact type of young man that Kirk hoped to help.
I want to dedicate this system update episode to this crisis among young men and this internet culture that kind of pervades so much of society.
To dive deeper into this, we have Catherine D, a journalist who specializes in reporting on internet culture.
And later we have Evan Barker, a former Democratic operative who has since left the party.
We'll talk to her about the crisis among young men and if progressives realize the problems that we were facing in society.
Stay tuned.
I want to welcome our next guest, Catherine D. Catherine is a culture writer and journalist.
She publishes a substack called Default Friend, where she chronicles internet subcultures and other digital trends.
Catherine, thank you for joining System Update.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Well, we don't know the true motives or political ideology of the alleged Charlie Cook Kirk shooter.
The suspect Tyler Robinson left behind shell casings with references to gaming and meme culture, some of it apparently left-wing, but it's not abundantly clear.
Mass Shooters and Meme Culture00:15:26
He also seemed to mock anyone even attempting to scrutinize his beliefs.
On one shell casing, he wrote, if you read this, you are gay, L-M-A-O.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about this.
You know, this is certainly the most high-profile shooter or mass shooter who has left behind a digital trail or some type of trail referencing meme culture, kind of video gaming culture.
What do you think about the media's reaction in the wake of this?
Has it been fairly covered?
Some people, it's been, the coverage hasn't been evenly distributed.
I think some people have been trying their best.
It's a lot of pressure on journalists, as you know, to scramble in a short period of time to try to make sense of a very emotionally charged situation.
I think a lot of people took this, even if they weren't politically aligned with Charlie Kirk, they took it very personally because, you know, an editor friend of mine said that it could have been, it could have been anyone.
And in a way, he's right.
Like, I think a lot of journalists see themselves in Charlie, whether or not they were political activists.
And there's something like uniquely disturbing about it for that reason.
But, you know, it's hard.
It's hard to make sense.
It's hard to figure out what's going on.
The other side of it is that, no, I think some people have been very unfair.
I think there's been a lot of like blame game.
There's been a lot of engagement baiting.
A lot of people have made things up.
Certainly we are seeing this a lot with some people on the left.
I don't think the reaction to that necessarily has been completely fair.
I think some people were certainly celebrating his death, which was totally inappropriate and totally appalling and making up quotes.
Some people, I think, are getting in trouble for merely pushing back against the idea that Charlie Kirk was a moderate or something like this.
But yeah, it's been a mess.
The short version is it's been very chaotic and there's been both good and bad coverage.
You know, as journalists, as just observers, I think there is a very genuine attempt to connect any phenomenon or crisis with moments in the past, especially the recent past.
There's kind of a look at this wave of political violence that we're experiencing now in an effort to connect it to the wave of political violence we had in the late 60s and early 70s.
There's a lot of differences too, right?
Maybe it's a shoehorning of politics.
There's a kind of desire to fit everything into a neat ideological narrative.
And at times, some of these shooters appear, again, we don't know Robinson's full motives or ideology, but he does seem to fit into a trend that is very unlike the past, where there are people who associate with online subcultures that see politics as kind of an extension of video games, that it's not connected to public policy.
You know, he's not fighting for a tax hike or a change in the healthcare system or toggling with our foreign policy.
It's more that there's an attempt to kind of own or humiliate political opponents on chat rooms or in massive online video games.
And it's almost detached from what we would traditionally call politics.
I think that's true.
I will push back a little bit that it's totally new.
I think what is new is the scale.
It's become a little bit more common for people to have this outlook.
But I watched a documentary, sort of controversial documentary recently about violence in the United States.
It was from the early 80s.
And the documentary is basically like putting together news clips and quotes from spree shooters, mass murderers, mass shooters.
And one of them said, I wanted to hurt society where it would hurt them the most by taking their future members.
And that like really, that's been haunting me since I watched it.
Because I was thinking like that's that level of rage.
I mean, that's, you know, that's eternal.
You see that throughout history.
What's different is the scale.
You also see, you know, throughout history of American violence, but now more often, this desire to be perceived by an audience, this fear that you won't make a difference, that there is no future, something that mass shooters and really murderers of all kinds, you see this quote again and again is, I wanted to be remembered.
I wanted to be important.
And this desire can be, you know, positive or negative.
In the positive sense, you have people who want to make a dent in the universe by scientific inquiry or creating new tech or whatever.
And then there's this darker expression of that need to be remembered and make your life worth something, which unfortunately is through pain, through hurting society.
Yeah.
And you write, you wrote on your substack recently quoting the forum Kiwi Farms.
And could you just describe what Kiwi Farms is?
But they mentioned something called Zoomer sadism.
Could you explain this concept?
Yeah.
So Zoomer sadism is this idea that so Kiwi Farms is a gossip website.
It's pretty controversial.
Some people think it should be off the web entirely.
But this idea of Zoomer sadism is that people become like husks because they're online so much that they become so desensitized that they'll post gore and not really understand the gravity of it.
They, you know, sometimes this extends into Discord servers where people are posting all sorts of abuse material.
You know, another thing that is very common is purposely trying to traumatize younger people in online communities sort of as a joke by like early porn exposure or sending them, again, like very violent videos.
And there is this atmosphere that permeates the web of just nothing matters.
The sense of nothing matters and it's kind of memeified and it seems to permeate both what we would consider the left or right.
It's this kind of this broad generalization that young people, especially young men, have adopted.
How much do you think the COVID lockdowns, the school closures and the social isolation is fueling this?
I think that was a huge impact because not only did it put people, you know, it isolated people at this critical period and for so long, it also killed a lot of in-person subcultures, in-person, you know, meetups.
Like anyone who's part of any sort of subculture or even hobby, they know that post-COVID, like people just aren't meeting up as much anymore.
And even long after the regulations have disappeared, it's just that people got used to being alone and they want to be alone.
And they're not, the socializing muscle has been weakened.
This seems like something that's not really talked about in a proactive way among politicians.
There's this kind of effort to say, hey, we need the FBI or law enforcement to crack down on potential online terrorism.
But the kind of route that you're discussing that kind of fuels this, that young people aren't socializing in person anymore.
They aren't finding real life connection.
How do you address this?
I mean, it's difficult because the rot is so deep.
And it's also difficult because, you know, at the same time, I don't want to vilify the internet completely and say like, oh, it's, you know, it's because everyone has a smartphone.
It's because of social media.
I think there are many different things going on.
You know, another thing that I don't think is looked at enough, like in the case of school shootings, is our schools aren't pleasant places to be.
That doesn't justify murder by any stretch of the imagination, but it's another ingredient to like this, this Tinderbox.
It's like you're socially isolated.
In some cases, it might be as extreme as predator groups grooming you.
There have been six school shootings in the last, I think, two or three years that have been connected to predator groups online, in particular 764, which people who have much stronger stomachs than I do have done incredible research on.
One is my friend BX.
You can find her at bxrights.substack.com.
But so there's that.
There is schools are unpleasant.
There's the way we're socializing.
There's the way we're parenting.
There's so many things that are going on.
And it seems impossible to like, what is the positive vision?
Where do you start?
And where do you start without removing people's rights?
Like, I think, you know, John Heid is trying, right?
He's just, let's get rid of the smartphones, but that doesn't feel quite right either.
Is age verification on social media the right response?
I don't think so.
But then I don't have a better answer either.
Yeah, it's tough.
I mean, a lot of these ideas conflict with basic American principles around individual agency and individual liberty.
But the science seems strongly persuasive that, you know, hardcore pornography, social media, violent video games at very young ages, you know, it can lead to negative social effects.
I mean, absolutely.
And I've spoken to a lot.
So I do these ethnographic interviews with people about how they use the internet.
And we start at when was the first time you got online?
And then they walk me through.
And, you know, that's how I learn about different subcultures and how I, you know, because everyone gets stuck in their filter bubbles.
So how I make sure that I'm seeing as wide a picture as possible.
And I will say that it's not that, you know, perfectly normal children who are from loving households get sucked down the rabbit hole and corrupted.
And, you know, they're taken away by the internet and everything's ruined.
There's shades of that happen, right?
Like people see things they wish they hadn't.
That happened to me.
I'm sure that happened to you.
But the real extreme stories usually is it starts with there's adverse events in the home.
Maybe they're struggling with money.
Maybe there's an abusive parent.
Maybe it's both.
And that's really that that's and then when the internet's introduced, then it gets worse.
So it's like, you know, we want to blame the internet completely, but at the same time, it certainly doesn't help people in situations where things are really bad.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, I, I, you know, this, this aspect of it is not, you know, I haven't seen the same level of media scrutiny, but I was also struck by a Wall Street Journal story about the rise in carjackings in Washington, D.C.
And they spoke to community nonviolent, you know, interveners, community activists, who described the differences with a lot of black and brown working class youth in the city.
They noted that in the 80s and 90s, young people were being recruited by gangs to engage in carjackings.
It was kind of an indoctrination or an induction effort into the organized crime.
Now, in the last few years, you have young kids from the same communities who are stealing cars and, in many cases, not member of gangs, not even selling the gangs.
They're simply recording themselves on TikTok and other social media for the lulz, for kind of like the, for their participation in another kind of internet subculture that glorifies certain types of violence.
And you just have to wonder how much of the overall kind of crime spike we've seen over the last five years perpetrated by young people who are doing this to participate in an online subculture that glorifies certain types of violence and where they lacked structure at home.
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that's part of it.
It's interesting that you bring up gangs.
I think like it, I think it was Jesse Single who today, and just in a tweet thread, but I thought it was very insightful, compared certain like subcultural memberships to gangs, you know, where you sort of feel a sense of obligation. to these different groups that you're part of online.
And you see it on sort of a surface level way.
Like a lot of journalists experience this, like they end up in certain ideological currents and it helps their career a little bit.
And then it's like they're in the group chats and people are like, well, no, you need to have this take or that take.
And it can get really emotionally fraught.
But you also see that in a more sinister way too, with people feeling like they need to view certain content or commit certain crimes even because of their membership to certain to certain groups.
You also mentioned in a recent Substack post, just reminding people of the relatively recent development that the FBI has created this new category of kind of nihilist extremists.
Could you talk a little bit about that?
Predators Among Vulnerable Subcultures00:09:36
Yeah, so this is a new type of violence.
it refers to uh these predator groups like uh seven six four and order of nine angles um and they they sound a little bit about what what are those Sure, sure.
So these are these decentralized groups, right?
So it's not like there's one leader that everyone's reporting to.
It's these like little cells that enter subcultures of kids who are already vulnerable.
So it's like self-harm communities, eating disorder communities, the true crime community, which I've written about at length.
And that's sort of more my specialty.
And they have been linked to these, I mean, terrible, you know, these terrible crimes, not just school shootings, which I talked about a little earlier, but also suicides, getting people to live stream self-harm, hurting animals.
There was a case in Florida several months ago where a young girl had been targeted on Roblox to harm her younger sibling.
And the sibling had to be hospitalized.
I mean, there's all sorts of things.
And so this would fall under the nihilist violent extremism.
And one of the main goals is to destabilize society.
They're accelerationists, not in like the Nickland sense of the word accelerationist, but they want things to burn to the ground.
And it's gotten some mainstream coverage, like, you know, in Wired and The Washington Post also did something in Der Spiegel.
But for the most part, InfoWars has paid the most attention, even to like perfectly legit researchers, because it sounds unbelievable.
It sounds like a moral panic.
It sounds like it's like, how could this be happening?
And, you know, more established outlets are like, you know, like, this is crazy.
But it's, it's, I mean, it's, it's really, it's really happening.
And I think it's, I think it's fair to be skeptical and to say, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to create a moral panic about this.
I don't think it's like you let your kid play Roblox and suddenly they're being like virtually molested and shepherded into these Discord servers where they're being fire hosed with gore and CSAM.
It's, you know, it's not, it's not that crazy.
But if you have a, you know, a precocious kid or a kid who's angsty or maybe is more vulnerable, it's something that could happen.
It's just like, you know, like pedophiles with the early internet.
It's not that every single person who is on Yahoo Messenger or in AOL chat rooms was being harassed by pedophiles, but it was a real thing that could happen that would behoove parents to be aware of.
Some of the initial coverage of the Charlie Kirk shooter accused him of being a Groyper, which, as you note, has kind of been the stand-in term for kind of alt-right conservative online movements that have replaced what INCEL, the term incel played in the past.
But the early coverage of this seems to have been inaccurate.
There's no, so far, no real connective tissue connecting them to these certain online communities.
But could you just kind of zoom out and explain why we need more specificity in when we describe these internet subcultures?
Is it helpful to kind of go in deep and explain it to viewers for reporters to be more engaged in the discourse here?
I think a lot of these like broad brush, like, oh, it was a, you know, a far right, whatever, like, you know, just sort of quickly labeling people.
First of all, if these groups turn out to be actually dangerous, like in the case of 764, just randomly labeling things like, you know, oh, it's a, it's a Groyper and it's, and we know he's a Groyper because of this, this, and this, how are we going to see the signs of when groups that actually pose a threat are identified, right?
So that, I mean, that's, it's just, you know, practically.
And then two, we live in a world where everyone has some sort of subcultural affiliation.
These groups aren't rare, you know, at least in terms of like, like you probably, like viewers probably know three or four groipers, right?
Like these, these types of identities are very common.
And it really, it makes people trust journalists less when they just sort of start throwing spaghetti at a wall and start labeling, you know, everything as X or Y.
I mean, another thing, you know, that I think people have been clowning on is either, you know, I think it was like Governor Cox of Utah and then there was some other like, you know, big media personality was saying the dark Reddit culture that's radicalizing our young men.
It's like, what are you talking about?
You know, like when you say stuff like that, when you're talking about something serious that is really deserving of attention, both by just the public at large and also authorities, and then you garble it in that way, how are you expected to be taken seriously?
So it's a cultural thing and it's also like pragmatically like, you know, leave the kid in the MAGA hat alone.
I think it has very strong parallels to the kind of public discourse we've seen over the last year around anti-Semitism in that many folks who are supportive of Israel have attempted to censor and castigate any kind of opponent of the Israeli government or critic of Israeli policies as anti-Semitic.
And by painting with such a broad brush, they've kind of made it very difficult to identify the true anti-Semites because there is a lot of anti-Jewish bigotry.
There is actual hate.
And by categorizing it all, you know, all together as one big thing, it muddles the discourse and makes actual bigots and dangerous extremists easier to hide in plain view.
I mean, it happens all the time.
And I think it's a product also of journalists are under a lot of pressure.
It's like, you know, you need to, some people are filing more than one piece a day.
They're doing multiple media hits a day.
They're getting really tired.
You know, the thing it reminds me most of is when everything was alt-right all of a sudden.
And what ended up happening is like this small community actually grew and sort of the fake news coverage blew it up and made it really alluring and really interesting.
And then it's like then the term just eventually became meaningless.
But it was a you know, it was a real thing that was worthy of coverage, that was having its own influence, that was growing in its own way.
But it was just like suddenly it's like everything was all right.
You know, like the, you know, at some point going to the gym was far right, sort of a different at one point.
Right.
And it's just, it's who is it helping?
It's not, it's, it's not even interesting.
It's not even just education for its own sake.
It's just, it's, I mean, it's, it's slop.
It's, it's journalists sort of needing to pump stuff out for its own sake, which I sympathize with.
Yeah.
And, you know, actually, this kind of gets me to just one other question I wanted to ask.
Um, because what how do you thread the needle in a responsible way?
Because it seems like a mixed metaphor, so uh, double-edged sword here.
Um, and I will just point out that, like, you know, there was a march of neo-Nazis, I believe in 2001 or 2002 in Washington, D.C.
And back then, um, there was a media norm when neo-Nazis marched.
And, you know, you could always kind of gather 500 neo-Nazis anywhere in the country.
In a country of 300 million people, they're, of course, going to be extremists of that type of ideology.
And when they gathered in Washington, D.C., there was basically a media blackout.
There's a tiny Washington Times story.
There's like a few paragraph Washington Post story relegated to the back pages, no TV coverage, no major coverage.
It was ignored.
And, you know, the rally happened, 500 people came to Washington, D.C., and it kind of went away.
You compare that to Charlottesville 20-some years later, or almost 20 years later, you have almost more journalists there than actual participants.
You have wall-to-wall cable news coverage.
You have people live streaming.
And that kind of spins out of control into violence into potentially actually encouraging with this over-saturated media coverage.
But I think one could persuasively argue that this kind of unnecessarily obsessive tabloid-style coverage of the extreme right of this kind of subculture led more people to consider joining it to create a frenzy that was maybe out of proportion.
Oh, I totally agree.
And I mean, like, the other piece of this is like, not only do we not have people, well, we have some people who are like real specialists in understanding internet culture, but they, you know, they're independent or they're locked behind academic paywalls.
Appreciate Evan Barker's Insight00:03:05
But we also don't have enough people who are really talking about the media ecology, right?
Like there is something to be said about the way stories are reported, which stories generate clicks, how they're chosen, that journalists have to be influencers now, that everyone feels like they need to be a micro-influencer.
I mean, there's a lot of different things that are affecting the way we both receive and understand information.
Well, Catherine, I want to thank you again for your time.
Again, Catherine D and your sub-stack is default friend.
Appreciate you joining us to some update.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Have a great day.
Our next guest is Evan Barker.
She is a former Democratic fundraiser, Democratic operative on the progressive side.
She really kind of made waves last summer by denouncing the Kamala Harris ticket, supporting Donald Trump.
She writes a fantastic substack at evanbarker.substack.com.
You'll find her on Fox News and other media outlets.
Evan, so good to see you again.
Hey, Lee, thanks for having me on.
Thanks for thinking of me.
Well, I couldn't think of a better guest to talk about this subject.
It's kind of a sprawling subject for this episode of System Update, where there's kind of two dynamics at play, but that are interlinked, at least in my mind.
And that is, from the little we know about the suspected shooter of Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson.
We don't know his full political ideology.
We don't know everything about him yet.
There's been a lot of misinformation and bad reporting initially, so I want to caveat that.
But the little we do know seems to fit a pattern that this is a young man who, you know, on the ammunition cartridges, he wrote little messages referencing meme culture, internet culture, kind of video game culture.
We live in a period where there is a gigantic dislocation of young men.
Young men are addicted to video games.
They're socially isolated.
They're not going out.
They're not getting married.
They are experiencing all kinds of self-harm in terms of drugs and alcohol.
And on the flip side of that, and maybe interlinked, at least from my perspective, is that Charlie Kirk, for whatever you want to say about him and his politics, he did have a positive message towards young men that really contrasted with the way that Democrats talk about men.
He offered empathy and a positive message of pull yourself up from the bootstraps, get out and socialize, get out and run for office or get involved in politics, get married, go to church, be a good person and be a contributing member of your society and your community.
Men Less Likely to Go College00:10:26
And I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about this as someone who's worked so long in politics.
What's your perspective on the state of young men?
Oh my gosh, yeah, that is such a sprawling topic indeed.
You know, there's quite a few things that initially come to mind.
I think when we're talking about young men today, there's a lot of stats that we can draw on just immediately.
I think now, for the first time ever, men are much less likely to go to college than women are.
Only about 40% of all college-age men, or yeah, college-age men are actually going to college, whereas like 60% of incoming freshman classes are actually female.
So that's one stat to look at.
I think I've even seen studies that show that in classrooms, and this is something that, you know, as the mother of a boy, I have a toddler, teachers are more likely to actually discipline young boys for the same behavior as female students in classrooms.
And I feel like that's something that I've even noticed just watching my son and like his interactions with other girls, you know, his age now is just like there is more of this sort of like tendency to sort of call out and penalize sort of like just natural boy behavior that we even see is like, you know, in a very young age.
But I also think, you know, there's like, there's this economic element as well that, you know, young people today feel like homeownership is out of reach.
They feel like education is out of reach.
You know, I have young men in my family that didn't go to college, that live in, you know, the middle of the country and feel locked out of job opportunities.
They feel like they are in a cycle of working sort of like these dead-end jobs, low-wage, low-paying jobs.
And, you know, they couldn't hack it in college.
And so what opportunities are available to them are very few and far between.
And so I think that that has some impact.
At the same time, if it were just economic, I think we'd see females also feeling disaffected at a level similar to men.
And I don't think that they're compared, I don't think they're comparable right now.
And so I think part of it is also cultural.
And I think that, you know, just as somebody that worked in Democratic politics for a long time, I saw, you know, the culture towards men, especially young men, become increasingly hostile, increasingly antagonistic.
You know, there was a point in time when I was working in progressive politics where I feel like I couldn't go into a Zoom meeting or onto a call with other operatives where there wasn't some like denunciation of, or sorry, there wasn't some denouncement of white men especially.
And so I think it's sort of like a confluence of social isolation, as you said, economic factors, and it's cultural.
And I think that has crept into our politics.
And Charlie Kirk was an antidote to that.
You know, there are the day that he died, my brother called me and he's got two young boys.
One is a freshman in high school and the other one is in middle school.
And he was just like, I don't know how I'm going to explain this to my sons.
Like they absolutely adored him.
He was a positive role model.
That's the first thing my brother said.
Like that's the very first thing he said.
You know, he encouraged them to like get married, follow traditional values.
You know, even if you don't agree with traditional values, like there's something positive about that, you know?
And so, yeah, I feel like that is that is especially a gut punch to people right now, sort of like processing all of this.
And what does it mean?
For a party, the Democratic Party that has been grounded in material conditions, a party that was rooted in the 20th century in labor unions and the working class and growing the middle class, it just seems like there's this bitter irony or contrast right now that, as you mentioned, that young men aren't doing well materially.
They're dropping out.
A lot of them aren't having difficulty finding jobs, even if they do go to college.
And yet progressives and the party don't seem to see their pain.
There's just kind of a reflexive view that, especially for young white men, but for men in general, that they're part of some type of oppressor class or because of some kind of historical gender norm, that there's no space for empathy for young men.
Do you think that this dynamic has changed?
I mean, this is something that's been talked about a lot in the media over the last few years, but is the Democratic Party or are progressive groups seeing the light that there is a crisis among young men, that they need to change their ways?
No.
No, and I think that is the slap in the face, right?
It's that the irony is that the Democratic Party used to be this party that was grounded in labor unions.
I think before the night, you know, I'm sure you've read all about this, but before the 1972 McGovern Commission changes at the DNC, labor unions had a seat at the table.
Like they were just as important as state parties.
And I think that that obviously influenced a lot of the policy decisions back then.
And as time has gone on, we've seen this like inverse thing happen where college educated people have become increasingly Democrat and working class people have become increasingly Republican.
And I think the slap in the face is that they are, young men are being told by the modern Democratic Party culture.
I'm not going to say that it's necessarily like people like Joe Biden going out and explicitly saying this, right?
Or Barack Obama explicitly saying this, but there is like a subtext to what they're saying.
That, yes, you have become disaffected in society.
You can't afford a home.
You can't get ahead.
But at the same time, you are the oppressor class.
Like there is something inherently wrong with your existence.
I think those are the subliminal messages that these young men are hearing.
And there is this massive disconnect.
I mean, I just remember when I used to work in progressive politics, like the majority of the people that I worked with, including men, were these very highly educated people that often came from backgrounds of going to Harvard or Yale or would go there soon after working in politics for a couple of years and get their master's degree at Harvard or something like that.
And they just could not understand the reality of people like my cousin in Missouri who went to community college for one semester on some sort of like rural program for young people in Missouri that need help with affording college.
And I think he went and it was completely paid for.
But I think he would have been much better suited to probably go into some sort of apprenticeship program, actually.
And you've just heard, the last five years, I remember wiping student loan debt was like this huge thing.
And I remember my colleagues especially were just so excited by this.
And they were like, yes, this is the answer that young people want.
But I at the time, even though I carried $30,000 worth of student loans that I still have that I just got an email about that I'm going to need to start dealing with soon.
But I remember thinking, wow, I wonder what somebody like my cousin thinks about that.
Or my uncles who paid union dues their whole lives and never had anybody pay off their union dues.
And actually I ended up talking to one of those uncles about debt-free college and about the Biden admins push to do this thing that I think was sort of just a giveaway to their base.
And he said it made him feel bad.
He said it made him feel angry because he was like, those kids that went to college, like I'm glad they did, good for them, but they're going to make more money in their lifetimes over their lifetimes than I ever will.
And it's true, the college wage premium is a real thing.
I think I saw some stat that said that like Over, like if you have a four-year degree, you make almost like twice as much as somebody who doesn't throughout your lifetime.
So like, why are we paying?
Anyway, sorry, I'm kind of going off, but I think just the disconnect that I would see from my colleagues and people that work in democratic politics was profound.
And I think when you couple that with this culture that demonizes people, and like you said, not just white men, but men in general, it's going to have, there's going to be consequences to that.
Charlie Kirk's Political Journey00:14:00
You know, I look at Charlie Kirk's life, and you know, just from a kind of macro level, just like kind of a sweeping view of what he's accomplished, what he's done as an adult, as someone who's fairly high agency, you know, he didn't come from a political family.
He wasn't handed the reins to an organization.
He decided, hey, I wanted to get involved in politics.
As a high schooler, you know, who was watching the tea parties kind of come together, he was inspired by some of the messages and some of his favorite radio hosts.
And he went out and started an organization.
He saw an opportunity and that, hey, here are university campuses that are dominated by liberals that are becoming, especially back in the period when he was growing Turning Point USA, this kind of woke era from maybe 2014 to 2024.
This is a place that is hostile to views that are perceived as conservative.
And I'm going to go into the belly of the beast.
I'm going to create these viral moments on a daily basis that elevate my own profile, that raise tens of millions of dollars because people see someone doing something inspiring.
And I'm going to go channel that money into training centers to train like-minded young conservatives to go out and spread my message.
And, you know, there are plenty of comments that Charlie Kirk made that I might disagree with.
You know, we have different views.
Like, you know, any pundit, we don't see eye to eye on everything.
But just from a purely tactical level, Charlie Kirk was a brilliant political organizer.
And I see the way that Democrats and leftists, you know, that Nation editorial that I think was very silly and poorly written the other day, cascading him as just like a hateful bigot.
And that's really just been the reflexive response from much of the left.
But they don't understand that, you know, for a party that deifies political organizing, he was a political organizer.
He did a great job in winning and growing the MAGA tent among a demographic that used to be a core constituency for the Democratic Party among young people, especially young men.
Maybe I know the answer to this, but I wanted to ask your perspective on this dynamic.
And if the left is seeing any of this, I mean, is it just that they are offended by his views on race and identity and crime and some of these other hot buttons?
They miss the forest for the trees?
Or do you think some people might recognize that there's a problem here and Charlie Kirk was tapping into something very real?
I mean, I think some of them are.
Like, I'm sure you saw that Ezra Klein op-ed that he wrote in the New York Times where he explicitly said what you just said, which is, wow, like I, he was a really great organizer and I envied what he built.
And I think, you know, for the majority, I think that the mainstream Democratic politicians and even the progressive politicians have put out pretty nice things in the wake of his passing.
But you're right, there is this like visceral reaction that we've seen online just from people that are just voters of Democratic politicians and that identify as progressive that is ugly and you can't really deny it.
Like it's it was as present in my feed the day that he died as the video of him being killed was, if not more so, actually.
So I don't think that they give him the credit of being a great community organizer.
I don't think most of them really even put a lot of thought into how he built or why he built what he did.
And I think that really speaks to the disconnect in general that Democrats and progressives have with broadening their coalition right now.
I mean, if you look at what they said in reaction to his death, like you said, there's so many people that just said, oh, he was a bigot or he was hateful or his rhetoric was divisive.
But if you actually watch the videos, he would calmly and politely say to people that, like, I saw a video of him talking to a man who identified as a gay conservative, right?
And he's like, I personally, as a Christian, disagree with your lifestyle.
However, in politics, you have to invite people into your fold.
You have to, you know, that's smart politics and you're welcome in the conservative movement always, you know, and it's not really my business what you do in your private life.
And I think like that's something that progressives especially could, and Democrats in general could take a lesson from.
And I think right now they are facing this existential moment where their coalition is shrinking.
And I think the only way forward for them truly is a path of heterodoxy, of accepting and recognizing that people are going to have different views and that the automatic response cannot just be to shut people down who have views that you don't like.
And clearly, you know, if you actually watch Charlie Kirk's videos, that's something that he did really well.
And from everything, and I'll say this, as somebody that was on the Democratic side, and right, and by the way, I voted for Donald Trump in 2024, but I don't consider myself a Republican.
I have a lot of views that are very much still, especially on economics, that are more left-leaning.
But I will say that I think as somebody that was on the left for a long time and is now more in the center or independent, when I left the Democratic Party, I received like an insane amount of just like nice messages from people.
Not people that were judging me for my previous beliefs or, you know, professional decisions, but people that were just like welcoming me with open arms.
One of those messages was from Charlie Kirk.
I don't think that, and when he wrote, when he DM'd me, he told me that he was with RFK that day, another former Democrat.
He made a point of saying that.
And so I think that I think that's a real striking cultural differences between the two sides.
Like when people leave the Republican Party and go to the, like I've seen this, I've seen even people that voted for Donald Trump come out in the last six months that haven't liked some of the things that he's done.
And they've said like that they have some regrets or whatever.
The left isn't welcoming to them.
No, it's quite the opposite.
I've seen so many tweets, TikToks, some columns where former people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 came out and said, I regret my vote.
You know, I've been disappointed or betrayed on certain policies.
You get an outpouring of people on social media saying, well, this is, you get what you deserve.
You know, this is, oh, I wouldn't, I didn't think the lions would eat the cub, that type of thing.
You know, and it's a lot of hostility, not a lot of welcoming for someone who might be open to joining the other side.
Yeah, and I think I find that to be a huge, and so Charlie Kirk understood that.
And that was one of the things that he, that made him such a great political strategist and organizer.
And I was also thinking about this, Lee.
I was like, man, the left does not have any Charlie Kirk.
Like, it just does not exist on that side, right?
And why is that?
You know, I mean, think about what he built with Turning Point.
The biggest or the closest equivalent I can find to a national organization that aims to organize young people for the Democratic Party is NextGen America, which is Tom Styer's organization.
And they just didn't have like, I mean, they didn't host conferences and have like this whole superpower digital media ecosystem of spawning social media stars while also simultaneously raising tons of money and, you know, recruiting candidates on the left and supporting them.
And no, there's no comparison.
And, you know, I made this point on Twitter the other day that, hey, objectively, look at what he built.
This is something that's huge that trains people, has all these spin-off media personalities, Candace Owens being the biggest, but there are many others who kind of came up through the Turning Points USA Network.
And there's no one on the left.
And then, of course, there are people that said, oh, well, you don't understand the right has billionaires.
You know, the left doesn't.
It's like, wait, you know, hold on.
Tap me in.
No, it's, it's, and, of course, the rich irony in that is that the biggest national youth organizing movement or organization on the left was literally funded and created by a billionaire, Tom Steyer, who just plugs in people, plugs in staff to sort of direct it.
Totally top-down, you know.
Exactly, completely top-down.
And then on the opposite side of that, you've got Charlie Kirk, who, like you said, didn't really come from like a super politically active family.
I don't think he was, I don't think his family was particularly wealthy.
It seemed more like a middle class upbringing.
I could be wrong on that, but that's what I gather from what I've read about him.
I think his family is pretty private, but yeah, I feel like he had probably a pretty middle class upbringing and just, you know, felt disenfranchised in college and saw that there was this void on college campuses, this need that wasn't being met.
And then organized around that need.
And yeah, it's just like it just doesn't exist on the left.
And I've had people ask me this week, like, well, why?
And I've been trying to pin it down.
And I think part of it is like related to this broader existential problem that Democrats have right now of just not being able to call in, not being able to get people under their tent, feeling, you know, all of these like different purity tests that they put up.
I don't know.
It's just, and then, and then I thought about this.
I was like, if Charlie Kirk was a leftist, like let's imagine for a minute that he was a progressive and was super excited about the environment and giving people universal health care.
Like that was, you know, like his thing, right?
And he went on to like, would he have been able to grow and to have been as successful on the left as he was on the right?
That's a great thought experiment.
And just by being a young man who, you know, wanted to ruffle feathers and kind of create an organization, it just, it's hard to imagine because you look at the leftist influencers who have done well in the digital media space, virtually all of them.
You know, there are many that have raised millions of dollars, many millions of dollars, and amassed multi-million, tens of millions of followers, popular podcasters, whether it's Chaco Trap House or Hassan Piker or, you know, the Young Turks.
There's a lot of examples of these, for lack of a better term, influencers, but none of them actually pooled those resources into creating an institution, an organization that actually has members that trains like-minded people, that goes out and does the hard work of organizing.
Despite all the rhetoric the left has around community organizing, hardly anyone actually does it.
Yeah, I think Jane Cuger tried, right?
I mean, like the Young Turks has tried to do that.
I think he was a part of the founding of Justice Democrats as well, which tried to do that.
But that never came together as a national organization.
No, no.
And there's something, I don't know, there's something, I haven't quite articulated why.
Yeah, I don't know why either, but it's, there's, there's an irony here, you know.
And I just want to point out that that kind of, I don't know if it's hypocrisy or lack of ability or interest.
I'm not sure.
But it's certainly something.
You know, I want to kind of actually, while I still have you ask another kind of related question, Charlie Kirk, who's promoted some of my reporting on social media censorship.
Voice For Free Speech00:06:20
And, you know, I've gone on his show and talked about these issues and others.
You know, my few interactions with him were very friendly.
He was very kind, even though we acknowledged that we had many points of disagreement.
But he was a big voice for free speech.
He saw the kind of dangers in creeping government influence in social media and attempts to use scare terms like hate speech as a cudgel to shut down opposition political speech or to violate the First Amendment.
It seems like in kind of in this moment of grief, in this moment of tragedy, there are many on the right, including, and especially in the Trump administration, who are hoping to instrumentalize this moment to crack down on speech.
We saw Attorney General Pam Bondi saying that hate speech isn't protected by the First Amendment, that they were hoping to prosecute people for hateful speech around Charlie Kirk.
Seen several other administration officials saying that they're going to harness the powers of the home Department OF Homeland Security and the Justice Department to crack down on supposed donors who are funding hateful speech, although they've been very vague about what that actually means.
What's your view on this man?
You know, I would just say and I, by the way, I saw that clip, Pam Bondi and I was, I was.
It made me nervous just because yeah, as you said, like hate speech, as gross as it is and as nasty and despicable as it has been to see many many, many videos on social media over the past week of people dancing on the grave of Charlie Kirk, it's been really, really gross and has made me sick to my stomach.
We do live in a country where we have a First Amendment and I would just caution people on the right that are grieving right now and in pain and are rightfully really really upset about what they're seeing, that if there's some sort of like laws that are passed, that sort of limit free speech, that those can eventually be used against them at some point.
You know, think back to 2020, think back to, you know, to the Biden years um, when the Democratic Party was in power, think about the, the news article that came out um a week and a half ago about this man in in England who was just arrested um for criticizing aspects of the trans movement or trans.
I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was something related um to trans ideology and he was arrested for that, and you know, I thought that that was outrageous um, and so we just need to be careful, because we have something very, very special in America um that people don't have in most of the rest of the world, and that includes many uh, first world countries like the United Kingdom.
Um, I was really really hopeful this morning, after seeing that clip late last night, that she did come out.
Pamboni came out I don't know if you saw the tweet and she sort of clarified her statements and she reiterated that yes, hate speech is protected, as gross as it is um, but that speech calling for violence is not, and of course, that's true um.
And I was also hopeful to see um so many influencers and people on the right this morning that came out and denounced what she said, including Megan Kelly.
I don't know if you saw what she wrote, but she's an attorney and obviously she was a really close friend of Charlie Kirk's and is grieving right now and um, and came out and basically denounced Pamboni's statement.
So um yeah, what about you?
What are you thinking?
Look I I, just I.
I Very few principled defenders of free speech.
You know, the party out of power is typically the one to champion it.
There are many fair weather supporters where it's really when the political wins are at their backs and they realize that it's a principle that they can wield to garner public support that they champion it.
But once they're in the seat of power and they have the opportunity to censor their opponents, the vast majority, I don't know, you know, it's hard to quantify, but almost everyone is a hypocrite on this.
But it is nice to see that there, exactly as you mentioned.
I think there was kind of a moment where, you know, there's been this growing censorious kind of agenda within this Trump administration, whether on Palestinian activists on college campuses, on some of the visa issues, on some of the college funding issues.
And this broke through in the moment because I think Pam Bondi let the mask slip by using the term hate speech because that's the term that liberals usually use.
And they said, well, and a lot of conservatives realize, hey, wait a second, this sounds exactly like what the Biden administration used in terms of a rubric used to censor conservatives.
If she had used the term like, we're going to go after terroristic speech, probably there wouldn't be as much of a backlash.
That being said, I am heartened that at least a number of very prominent conservatives, including some Republican in office and elsewhere, have spoken out against those comments and hopefully will rein in the Trump administration.
But I am very concerned.
Yeah, people got to remember: like, whatever laws are passed can eventually be turned around and used on you at some point when, you know, your party isn't in power.
Thanks For Joining Us00:01:47
So I think, man, 2020 wasn't that long ago, but it feels like people have kind of already forgotten.
I sent you that tweet thread last night of all of the major cancellations of 2020.
You were on it.
Yeah, I recognize that.
You didn't even realize that when I sent it to you.
But yeah, it feels like it was 50 years ago, but it really, really wasn't.
And so it's incredible just to see that it does feel like ancient history, but it was not that long ago.
And all these dynamics have not left society.
They've just kind of transformed and in some ways morphed where conservatives are using some of the same tactics and even rhetoric.
And society is just kind of jumping from one moral panic to the next.
And cancel culture has returned.
Any last thoughts, Evan?
Just that I'm really, really sorry to everyone that I know that lost a good friend this week.
I knew a couple of his friends, and it's like horrible.
You know, I've lost people that are close to me.
I lost my dad.
I lost my brother.
And it's like the worst thing that anyone could go through, especially for his little kids.
So I'm just saying a prayer for our country right now and for the Kirk family.