How I Beat Male Radicalization

How college campuses, not necessarily education, explain why men with degrees are more immune to far right radicalism on gender.

The male shift to the right often ignores that women have shifted to the left. In the 2025 German elections in which the center-right party was the biggest winner, it’s been understated that young German women swung harder for the far-left party than young German men did for the far-right. The reason it doesn’t get as much focus is because women swinging left makes sense. Women and girls read publications and follow social media creators that endorse left-wing politics. #MeToo and anti-workplace sexism initiatives that helped women in the 2010s came from the left. Women’s liberation such as the massively closing the income gap for identical jobs, financial and civil autonomy, dominance in higher education, and female growth in male-dominated fields are clearly attributed to initiatives from the left or the Democratic Party who women reward with their support.

Men swinging to the right, Trump and the Republicans seems more baffling to social scientists because the right’s not materially offering men anything in the same way the left does for women. Arguably, the left’s programs better assist men than the right’s. Attending college gives most men a lifetime income boost over men that don’t go to college. Women are making more money in the workplace and most married couples make similar incomes and exist within the same income class, which is why low-income people are more likely to be unmarried and single. Contrary to the redpill narratives, the men who have the most sex are not men in casual relationships but married men. Now, Trump’s tariffs and the subsequent Recession will disproportionately harm young men without college education (customer service, manufacturing, trades, construction, etc.) and make them even less suitable as partners for women.

So why are young men who are not materially benefiting from the far-right’s programs swinging more in their direction, both nationally and globally? Well, I re-discovered my old YouTube account that I used during my teenage years and started probing my comments to see what 18-year-old me talked about. The infamous Gamergate issue began at this time, the birthplace for the mass online male radicalism of today. At 18, I was as a staunch Democrat and edgy Atheist with socialistic beliefs. While I had recalled briefly falling for the Gamergate issue, my YouTube account and old high school papers showed I had become more anti-feminist in the early 2010s than I had remembered. But in this noxious, contrarian way.

18-year-old me was quite annoyed at the rise of Anita Sarkeesian, a woman who endured severe harassment for reviewing video games with a feminist lens. I heaped no abuse at her, but I was among the chorus of complainers about her on videos in the Atheist YouTube community. I also rediscovered two essays I wrote critical of feminism during my senior year of high school. One was that the gender pay gap which Obama had been calling attention to did not compare equivalent jobs as was implied. (Which was true but not the point that women were not in higher paying fields). And that the then popularly repeated RAINN statistics that 1 out of 4 women on campus had been raped or sexually assaulted were not collected in a statistically sound manner. Which, as an adult with female friends, I’m now certain that number is a super-majority of women on campus, not just 25%. I was going down this rabbit hole because I was a teen follower of the Atheist community that transitioned from anti-creationalism to anti-feminism in the early 2010s.

Trying to understand why I had these opinions, I recalled how much different being a man felt at 18 versus 28. I had no money which I presumed meant I had no value to the opposite sex. I wanted the company of women and girls, but I also resented them because I lacked experience in dating and my few experiences were rocky. A lot of magazines and headlines focused on the shortcomings of men and boys in the early 2010s, and it was easy for me to get negatively polarized into thinking it was a personal attack. Academic feminism did and does a much better job explaining patriarchy better than blogs and news sites which boiled down systems of sexism to individual behaviors.

My experience as a resentful teen boy wasn’t unique. It’s the same experience that millions of boys are going through, which they’d ordinarily grow out of by the time they hit their twenties. In my case, it was happening during a period of social revolution on gender and during an evolution in mass communications. Many of these early communities on Atheism, which captured me for their sensibility and anti-orthodoxy, evolved into anti-progressivism and eventually evolved into the Redpill and Manosphere which is how millions of young boys today engage with their gender. At least my period in this mindset was short lived: about two years. By the time 2016 rolled around, I had clearly lost interest in online gender wars as tyranny seemed a greater threat. I was now 24 and actively attending college; I had plenty of friendships and dating experiences with women, and that teenage resentment was forgotten.

The big crisis we’re dealing with today is that the resentment is not only not expiring when men get into their twenties, but it’s being weaponized globally by parties against men’s material interests. What young boys like me didn’t realize when we were being lectured about patriarchy and the problems of men, is that being a man is an extremely privileged position over women, we’re just not old enough to benefit from it yet. This is part of a longstanding problem on how we teach oppression and discrimination to young people who have little autonomy of their own and feel bad or can be taken advantage of when you imply your immutable characteristics harm people.

A lot of my teenage smack talking reflected that I was an 18 year old with little real world experience or empathy, and these debates were abstraction behind a screen. By 28, I had seen women in college get dissuaded from higher paying careers by sexism from classmates and teachers, and I’ve also witnessed our primitive approach to consent. For a lot of these young men, these social issues on campus that fuel gender polarization are not based in their material issues. These men aren’t even going to college, or they go to college and are in male-heavy classes so there’s no de-mystification process. The reason why men with degrees are disproportionately voting to the left globally isn’t due to the content of the education, but primarily the campus experience where you engage with women on a professional, social and personal scale.

Guys who go into a job out of high school, especially male-heavy jobs like construction or other trades, will miss out on this unique life experience of being in a gender-integrated environment. All this bashing about purple haired women on Fox News, Red-pill YouTubers complaining about “they/thems” lording over modern men, or dating being impossible rings hollow to men who’ve been on campus, in dorms, shuttles, classrooms and laundry-rooms with these exact women and know it’s nonsense. If you’ve ever been to a college party you know for certain college women don’t hate men and certainly don’t avoid them. A co-ed environment gives men the skills to make friendships with women in a way you don’t learn in high school when you’re still a kid with little autonomy.

Men from my high school who didn’t go to college just don’t know that many women. There aren’t many organic gender-integrated opportunities to meet them outside of college. The few women they’re in contact with were explicitly sought out for relationship purposes on dating apps, and now dating and its modern tribulations characterize their entire experience with the opposite sex. The red-pill nonsense and male-oriented content online is basically a substitute for college for teen men who do not go to university. Even at college, the way these social media companies sneak gender wars onto you is shocking. When I was 24, I broke off a relationship and watched a few videos on TikTok vamping about dating, but I noticed how quickly the autoplaying algorithm quickly shifted into gender wars, gender essentialism and virulent misogyny.

The evidence is quite plain that social media companies are extremely influential in how they shape the public consciousness. Although they insist their algorithms reflect people’s preferences, social media is far more instructive of their preferences than we thought, and the 2024 election made that extremely clear. Following Elon Musk’s destruction of Twitter, Zuckerburg has outright stated he intends to artificially promote right-wing content even if it isn’t organically popular. We know that when Trump threatened to ban TikTok that ByteDance responded by both promoting content intended to suppress Democratic election turnout, while simultaneously ramping up pro-Trump content onto non-political feeds.

Have you noticed how little content about the Gaza War you’ve seen since Trump’s election? Especially now that the Gaza War is back to full intensity and Palestinians are being killed just as they were pre-election? There’s still Palestinian protests in the United States, but social media companies keep them off people’s feeds because they have no incentive to anger the ruling party they helped elect. The blatant weaponization of the algorithm to inform what the public thinks should scare us all. People are focusing on how clumsy Elon has been with Twitter, but Musk’s incompetent; the competent social media companies are getting away with blatant partisanship.

Democrats must realize that social media companies are not allies, nor are they apolitical blackboxes of organic algorithms like they were in the Obama years. They promote content for political goals. Young people today are the first generation to have no informational consciousness outside of essentially three social media companies and therefore are the easiest to manipulate — as we see with the growing gender divide.

In today’s digital world, real life cross-generational friend groups are important because young men are currently getting cues from online content creators who make money telling them to be angry and resentful. I think young men would benefit from real life friendships or acquaintances with older men. Men who can explain that their issues of loneliness and curiosity about the opposite sex will dissipate and develop as they age and socialize.

The main reason the gender war stuff only spanned two years for me was because I made adult friendships. When I was 19 years old, I first discovered the then-new pro-housing movement, and my local organization was founded by a trans woman and a non-binary person about 10 or 15 years my senior. I didn’t even know what a non-binary person was, and I didn’t know any trans people at 19 year old. But because of my exposure to these awesome people — who tolerated and corrected me when I occasionally said ignorant stuff — the right-wing YouTube videos of “Trans people gone wild” never convinced me the way it has millions of Americans.

My work with local political groups exposed me to men of all types: seniors, wealthy men, poor men, fathers in their 30s and 40s, depressed men, gay men, happy men. And of course a lot of women of all ages, too. My friendship with these people, especially men at different stages in life that had already gone through what I was dealing with, taught me that this nihilistic, dating nonsense, gender wars was just a phase. It wasn’t even explicit speeches but just clear observation. The married men were generally nice people. The middle class men made money in realistic ways and they kept telling me to stay in college. The depressed and poor men were open about their issues to me in a way that made me comfortable. And having female friends, especially older ones, made it so that I didn’t just see the opposite sex as just for dating.

I’m not saying we should force a seminar where older men talk to younger men, because that wouldn’t work. But having male friends in their 40s casually remark when I was slacking around in my early 20s to go finish my education helped me tremendously. To be friends with older men with the lifestyles and families I wanted had a much greater impact than curated social media feeds of influencers.

This is the perfect time for Democrats to start working on messaging to help young men because Trump will be out by 2028. Trump will undoubtedly put many young men in unemployment, and that will give millions a fresh political start. Women are not settling for uneducated, emotionally unavailable and off-putting men, no matter how much they’re shamed. Trump’s whole tariff schtick is actually a masculinity issue: tank the educational and administrative economy which is disproportionately female and restore a fantasy of male-oriented blue collar jobs from the early 1900s. It’ll fail and cause a lot of misery.

I don’t know what it’ll take to push young men into inter-generational conversations; perhaps it’ll just be better male influencers online. But we could use more men in K-12 education. 89% of elementary teachers are women, and I presume this is because society is suspicious of older men who are caring towards children while we presume all women are maternal. Changing that might help.

Lastly, the social media companies have to be blamed for this gender crisis. Trump successfully bullied major tech companies into supporting him politically. The limp-wrist approach of Democrats focusing exclusively on consumer protections is obsolete. I read the sub-reddits of a lot of young, Trump supporting men and notice that there’s no material interest in their decisions. It’s a political nihilism for dumb people who wake up every day and get their energy from being hateful to wide swaths of the country they’ve never even met. It starts from common frustrations men go through and like a parasite, social media mutates into something grotesque and self-destructive.

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