I suspect we could see a new conservative movement in the coming decade, with young white men at the helm. I call them the Douchebag Right or the Edgelord Right, the guys deep in internet culture who ran into a PragerU YouTube video or Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, [insert rightwing figure] segment one day which jump-started their shift to the right. Reactionary may be the word I'm looking for.
Many of them are single-issue young men in their 20s and 30s from rural areas or at least have roots in the rural population. They love their guns and gas-guzzling trucks and barbecues and love to take shots at vegans and LGBT activists. It could be confirmation bias, but everywhere I work and on social media and in the general public there seems to be a ton of them. Some of them are nice guys, some of them were my coworkers and supervisors. But on social media they believe the government is poised to confiscate their guns and they desperately want to preserve the privilege of being Proudly WrongTM ("don't censor my OPINION!"). They're generally not as religious or interventionist as the generation before them, but they love to use their fathers'/grandfathers' terms "socialism" "communism" "Marxism" to describe anything vaguely socially progressive or different from what they're used to.
How large is this demographic? In a changing nation where whites, especially white men, seem to feel that they are losing their status for whatever reason, they may be worth keeping an eye on. PragerU videos have billions of views combined. Rightwing social media spaces could be this generation's Fox News. And obviously it's not just white men viewing these videos and listening to the podcasts, but I fear they may become a significant voting bloc and the most important force in the increasing radicalization of the American Right.
Many of them are single-issue young men in their 20s and 30s from rural areas or at least have roots in the rural population. They love their guns and gas-guzzling trucks and barbecues and love to take shots at vegans and LGBT activists. It could be confirmation bias, but everywhere I work and on social media and in the general public there seems to be a ton of them. Some of them are nice guys, some of them were my coworkers and supervisors. But on social media they believe the government is poised to confiscate their guns and they desperately want to preserve the privilege of being Proudly WrongTM ("don't censor my OPINION!"). They're generally not as religious or interventionist as the generation before them, but they love to use their fathers'/grandfathers' terms "socialism" "communism" "Marxism" to describe anything vaguely socially progressive or different from what they're used to.
How large is this demographic? In a changing nation where whites, especially white men, seem to feel that they are losing their status for whatever reason, they may be worth keeping an eye on. PragerU videos have billions of views combined. Rightwing social media spaces could be this generation's Fox News. And obviously it's not just white men viewing these videos and listening to the podcasts, but I fear they may become a significant voting bloc and the most important force in the increasing radicalization of the American Right.
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3G7WDQZ
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