What Conservative Young Men Really Need Right Now

Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash

Justin Lee repeats something I’ve now heard quite a bit: anti-woman white supremacist Nick Fuentes is bad, but his fans (called “groypers”) need to be listened to and taken very seriously. Fuentes, writes Lee, symbolizes an entire generation of men who have been oppressed by an ambient feminist culture. His moral degeneracy is the wrong answer to the right question, which is: How can one be a man in a world that hates men?

“Fuentes is an authentic avatar of young men abused by the system progressives built,” Lee writes. Fuentes’s subversive use of digital media comes off, Lee argues, as a haven to men whose masculine desires and personalities have been neutered by the norms of online discourse, which (until recently) skew feminine and liberal.

Digitally mediated communication promotes relational fluidity by concealing and flattening distinctions in social hierarchy. It privileges emotional expressivity and performative empathy, and edges out unmediated real-world relationships by offering an overabundance of simulated social bonding. It homogenizes viewpoints by rewarding consensus within one’s group while penalizing direct confrontation and logical, linear argument. And it encourages self-construction on the basis of signals of emotional affirmation such as engagement stats.

The upshot is an entire generation disciplined in the worst kinds of feminine behaviors by the very medium through which they communicate. For men especially, this translates to a radical loss of agency. The problem is not feminine modes of being themselves, but that men are taught that these modes—at their most degraded and malformed—are the only civilized way to act.

There’s a key insight here. As I’ve said again and again, the Internet as a medium of membership is formative. There’s a particular kind of person that is created by extensive thinking, communicating, and consumption online. Lee is absolutely right about this. And he’s also right that, circa 2014, social media corporations wielded their algorithmic power in a way that favored a particular kind of personality—one that coded left-wing and feminist.

So, Lee’s framing of Fuentes’s online persona as a welcome respite to young men makes some kind of sense. But it also overestimates the importance of the politics of online discourse, and underestimates the attraction that people like Fuentes have always wielded over young men.

In terms of the Internet, Fuentes’s rhetoric and personality are not at all an aberration from the norm. For most of the last 30 years, most heavy Web users were men, and a high percentage of those men talked more or less like Fuentes. Angela Nagle’s book Kill All Normies helpfully tracks this. One key example in Nagle’s study is the forum 4Chan. Nagle’s description of 4Chan in the early 2000s (predating, it should be noted, the pinnacle of wokeness circa 2014) tracks very well with Fuentes’s platform:

4chan began with users sharing Japanese anime, created by a teenage Chris Poole (aka moot) and based on the anime-sharing site 2chan. Poole’s main influence for the style of the site was inspired by a Something Awful subforum known as the Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse. It was set up in October 2003 and by 2011, it grew to around 750 million page views a month. New users were called newfags and older users oldfags. It became a massively influential and creative forum known for pranks, memes and images that ‘cannot be unseen’. The culture of the site was not only deeply and shockingly misogynist, but also self-deprecating in its own self-mockery of nerdish ‘beta’ male identity. Cultural touchstones included war-based video games and films like Fight Club and The Matrix. There was no registration or login required, so posts were typically all under the username ‘Anonymous’.

Lee’s analysis focuses on Fuentes and his fans as reactionaries against the effeminate social norms of social media and corporate life. But what if the kind of things Fuentes says were always popular, just in a corner of life usually hidden from the political and journalist class?

The reality is that Fuentes’s fans are not nihilistic and misogynistic because the ambient woke society has pushed them to the brink. They are nihilistic and misogynistic because these are highly plausible outlooks in the disembodied world of the Internet. Technology cannot help but contort the experience of life into something that resembles a pornographic experience. Thus, people who trade life above ground (in the world of embodied human persons and activity) for life below ground (in the world of digital absorption) are emotionally primed for rhetoric that gives voice to how they experience their lives.

To this end, Lee is absolutely right to call on conservatives to build legal and social incentives for men to live above ground. This is vital. But thinking of the groypers primarily as victims who have gone too far in their own self-defense is an error that will cripple the right’s ability to do the things Lee calls for.

The right owes young men the dignity of taking them seriously as moral and intellectual agents, not coddling them. Fuentes is not a new kind of person, but his platform has new major media attention. Why? Partially, because the right’s war against wokeness has not always been waged justly. What should have been targeted strikes against ideological enforcement ended up being nuclear explosions that did far too much collateral damage to thinks like historical honesty and moral decency.

Thus, challenges to the “post-war consensus” have bred rank antisemitism and the demonization of Winston Churchill and the Allies. Thoughtful critiques of feminism have often devolved, without pushback from inside the camp, into sexual resentment. “Based” right-wing personalities have imitated the cancel culture of the Left and viciously targeted people who don’t practice “no enemies to the right.”

The uncomfortable truth is that the mixture of internet culture and right-wing politics has not made the Web more like the right nearly as much as it has made the right more like the Internet. If you’re trying to help young, conservative men reject progressive ideology and reclaim a healthy purpose and maturity to their lives, the best course is not to send them “based” articles and videos. It’s to try as best as possible to extract them out of the places they’re likely to find them.

Framing Fuentes as a misguided champion of the male underclass doesn’t work logically, and it won’t work to guide young men out of the online morass. The right cannot point young men in directions it refuses to go.

Mentorship and meaningful work are critical. But learning to live offline, in a society of taboos and disagreement, is critical too. If the only playbook for young men in the years ahead requires the repeal of the Civil Rights Act and the death of empathy, we will be right back where we were a decade ago very soon. The right needs to log off, let go of the fear that someone, somewhere is being woke, and unapologetically recover the courage to speak the truth in love. It needs to accept the constraints that Christian morality puts on our methods and rhetoric (just because it upsets feminists doesn’t mean it’s a good idea). And it needs to see young men as potential husbands, fathers, pastors, elders, statesmen, and leaders—not just victims.