And I think it's important to mention that this isn't specifically a Gen Z problem. It is a problem that Gen Z has to reckon with, but it is not a problem unique to the current generation and that's where this post is sort of speaking from.
Because as a millennial, I saw the conservative radicalisation of people who were my age through coordinated hate movements like Gamergate and the slow but sure descent of popular youtubers into angry, embittered people who cloaked their growing anti-wokeness as "critical commentary".
I'm not even talking about PewDiePie, I'm talking about dumbasses like A Dose Of Buckley, The Critical Drinker, The Amazing Atheist etc. Shit like that. Seeing a community of frustrated people, mostly young white men, who were angry at the world around them - who at one point might have been angry about Scientology, or about the repressive nature of cultural Catholicism and the religious right in general - slowly being co-opted by hate groups until they began to blame their problems on "feminazis" and "SJWs".
It was that mass radicalisation, and the push towards trolling to "own the libs", that saw a substantial amount of people deciding to pay attention to Donald Trump in the 2016 election as an absolute shitpost. Disrupt the entire political machine and "own the libs" by supporting Donald Trump.
Then, in line with the narrative being pushed by "redpilled" creators and groups, people began to take his inflated rhetoric and open corruption to heart. People were genuinely brought on board with Donald Trump's platform and political policies.
And when Trump was dismissed and mocked and not taken seriously by the existing political machine, newly avowed Trump supporters moved together with other people who supported Trump. And a prominent champion of Trump was Richard Spencer, who was a neo-nazi who openly mainstreamed the marriage of his preferred brand of fascism with the rise of the young, online right.
And that's how we got the alt-right, which led to events like the Unite the Right rally where America's vocal right wing proudly marched alongside avowed neo-nazis waving swaztika flags, which itself paved the way for the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Boys - violent white nationalist groups associated with the militia movement.
OP is 100% correct. Gen Z has to reckon with its radicalisation problem. With the rise of online figures like Andrew Tate, with the ongoing political grifting of soulless sell-outs like Logan Paul and with the rise of "trad" movements in both men's and women's spaces, conservativism has its hand wrapped cleanly around the culture of the younger generation. And it's shitty and hard to have to try and speak up about it, to try and counter it, because it's loud and angry and vitriolic and combative. It's been engineered in such a way that it's intentionally hard to criticize or distance yourself from without facing significant backlash.
I'm making this addition to OP's post because I agree 100% with what they're saying. But I feel a need to explain to any Gen Z'er who might see this and feel like it's an older person putting the onus of blame for the 2024 election on their shoulders - I think OP is speaking from a place of experience, because this is 100% something that millennials my age had to go through eight years ago, when we were bright-eyed and green and ready to take on the cynical political machine to make a positive difference.
Events like Gamergate resulted in a virulent rise in right-wing ideology, in open and abject misogyny and queerphobia and racism, within a sizable demographic of my generation. And I had to watch as those fuckfaces memed their way into installing Donald Trump as the president of the United States.
And now it's Gen Z's turn with the Tate brothers, with the Paul brothers, with the rise of the "manosphere" (which is just an evolution of redpill/MRA ideology, which began cooking in the early 2010's and blew up with Gamergate and all that shit) which is being pushed through a mountain of tacky, cynical podcasts.
This is not an issue unique to Gen Z. But it is an issue that Gen Z is going through, and which it needs to meet head on. This has happened before, and Gen Z now has to reckon with its radicalisation problem.
And like I wouldn't even know where to start, but maybe this is something that people can work together on, regardless of generational lines.
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