The Manosphere - Where the Fuck did Trump's strength amongst Gen Z men come from?

It is the Manosphere, driven by influencers like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and yes, even Joe Rogan. It is a toxic brew of misogyny, incel-dom, and closed in performative bullshit.

The Setup

Whist I am not a political scientist, I am a watcher of people (and of Youtube videos), and I have algorithmically bumped into a few creators who are, how to put this, batshit insane.

A few months ago, there was a thread floating around about how a generation of young men are “lost” unable to compete (or unwilling to) in college, resentful that women were becoming more successful, and instead of sucking it up and trying harder, they reflexively looked to the internet for guidance.

Bad Idea.

And what they found was an ecosystem that popped up to help them understand that they struggle to connect with women, offering hope, and telling these young men that the problem isn’t them, but it is the cultural expectations of women and society.

And these influencers are all aligned to the crank-right, and thus when young men take this offramp, they begin a traipse down the alt-right, white supremacist, media. 4-chan, 8-chan, 8-kun, and more.

This is a toxic cycle that feeds upon itself, and often leads to mass shootings.

I first became aware of this phenomenon after Elliott Rodger decided to go down in infamy, and raise the issue of incel¹ to the awareness of the world. At the time, I was still on Facebook and connected with a high school friend who was a research psychiatrist at UCLA, and he pointed me at the MRA² and PUA³ movements to try to understand what drove Elliott to his heinous actions that day in 2014.

In 2014, I was horrified as I followed the rabbit hole to learn about this burgeoning cultural phenomenon.

The meat of the story

Why so much back story?

The path that Trump navigated to his historic victory on November 5th, was largely due to an unprecedented turn out of the disaffected young men, who struggle with dating, resentful of those who “get the girl”, but who idolize people like Elon Musk, because he’s an awkward geek-y dude, but he’s the wealthiest man in the universe (by far, the run up of TSLA after the election boosted his net worth north of $300B), he plays video games, he has 12 (or 11, who really knows) kids by three different women. Yada yada yada.

In the media ecosystem I inhabit⁴ I saw pundit after pundit jeer at the Trump campaign’s poor ground game, the incoherence, and their focus on young men, the disaffected youth. Because all the PoliSci wisdom is that that cohort, 18 to 29 year-old men, is the demographic that just doesn’t turn out.

I read on Never Trumper posts about how this was insane, and they laughed at the hare-brained strategy, whilst pointing at the Harris campaign being on fire, hitting on all cylinders. The Bulwark, The Lincoln Project, Rick Wilson, and others all pointed and laughed.

But the Trump campaign once again cranked up the rage in a neglected cohort, inspiring them to turn out. How much of this was due to the all-in by Musk, and the increasingly fringe-y twist that Twitter has taken. I am no longer there, but by all accounts it is a hotbed of far right, white supremist, antisemitic sludge, where people like Baseball Crank and Catturd2 are prime movers, and Musk share and reshare the masturbatory screeds that would get their asses kicked in polite company⁵.

Anyhow, below is a video that really does a deep dive (nearly 2 hours) on this “Manosphere” of influencers that are raking in the bucks feeding these grievances of these lost-boys.

Munecat is masterful at both pouring beer (you will know when you see it) and doing deep, well sourced research, and pulling it all into a cohesive tapestry.

This is nearly two hours long, and I swear to you that it is totally worth it (and do give her a subscriber too!)

After watching this, you will better understand the motivation of these young men, and how the Trump campaign leveraged influencers like Musk⁶ and Joe Rogan (and that blogger who gave Trump a wrapped Cybertruck).

I do not know how this can be fixed. These young men are deep into the zone, and I am not sure they can emerge from it.

1. incel is coded shorthand for “involuntary celibate”, which is how these awkward young men call themselves while wallowing in the self pity of their inability to “score” with the most desirable women. They have invented a whole ecosystem and lexicon to stew in this morass.

2. MRA is Men’s Rights Activists. It began innocuously enough as a quasi-counter to the never enacted ERA, and early they had some points (there was a bias in divorce proceedings towards the wife for custody and property splits) but it has become WAY more toxic.

3. PUA is “pick-up artist”, a genre of self help guru’s that target these lonely men to grift by promising “sure fire techniques to get the hot women”. While I do not recommend it, read up on Andrew Tate to get a taste for how egregious this is.

4. Alas, whilst I do read several legacy media properties, I also am on Substack notes, and that has led to an algorithmic curation of what I see

5. Alas, I am not sure that there remains a “Polite Company” in America, judging by the number of MAGA trolls who are shitting all over my post’s comment sections. But that is for another post.

6. I made a typo in the first pass spelling Musk as Muck. I almost left it.

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