The Kids Aren’t Alright
Donald Trump with the Nelk Boys, indicative of his media strategy this election. Taken from the US Sun website.
If you’ve read any of my blog posts recently, you’ll know that I do not approve of Donald Trump. Indeed, that is a gross understatement. However, we have the “benefit” of knowing that in hindsight, he ran an excellent media campaign.
Lots of us made fun of Trump for going on Joe Rogan, but I recently went to the YouTube page for that interview, and it has more than fifty million views. Five. Zero. And then six more zeros. Now, I don’t have access to the analytics page for The Joe Rogan Experience, but it’s no secret that a lot of his viewers are the sort of demographic that swung hard to Republicans in the recent election. By that, I mean young white and Latino men between the ages of 18 and 29. As a 24-year-old terminally online white man who despises Trump, I have to acknowledge what he did right in this campaign.
It wasn’t just Joe Rogan. Trump went on shows like Theo Von, the Nelk Boys’ “Full Send” podcast, and more. Consider the latter case. The Nelk Boys promote right-wing political causes, yes, but they’re better known for their apolitical content. Lots of people laugh at their prank videos, including those who think politics is the sort of thing young people shouldn’t bother with.
It’s not much of a stretch to say that people who follow the Nelk Boys (that’s over 8 million subscribers on their main channel alone) might be swayed by what they implicitly support. Politics is not a game - real people’s lives would be affected by whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris won. Not everyone who watches the Nelk Boys will be swayed to support Trump, but some will, and in a country that’s known for having close national elections, all it takes is some.
The point is, Trump embraced alternative media to an extent the Democrats simply didn’t in the most recent election. I have to give him credit for that, as much as I hate the man’s guts. He met the voters where they were, and for all the alternative policies Harris was offering, her message didn’t reach them.
As an example of the policy implications of this: If I’d harbored any hope that America might eventually solve its gun violence crisis, it was that one day, Congress would be full of people who had to endure active shooter drills in school. Then they would be motivated to pass gun control legislation as opposed to the out-of-touch bureaucrats who comprise most of the federal government.
The news that Trump outright won young men, according to exit polls, threw cold water on that glimmer of hope. I suppose it’s easy enough to dismiss the news of school shootings if it doesn’t happen in your community, but we’re all “someone else” to someone else. Then again, this “fear roulette” is a subject for another article.
A March For Our Lives protest against gun violence, taken from Teen Vogue.
Now I’m going to say something that might make many of my fellow terminally online netizens uncomfortable. And you should know that I’m not defending the bigotry that has very often gone hand-in-hand with religion. Indeed, I’m not religious myself, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that such organizations served a civic purpose back in the day.
There are many unfortunate things about organized religion, but as with Donald Trump, I give credit where it’s due - they have fulfilled many peoples’ desire for community. I’m not saying that we should all get on our knees and turn to prayer. I don’t think that would solve all our problems, or even any of them. However, in some cases, I’m not convinced that what has replaced religion in this country is much better.
However, religion is far from the only civic institution that’s been on the decline in recent years. Consider that about a quarter of U.S. newspapers that existed in 2005 had shut down by 2022. Anecdotally speaking, I like to think I’m well-informed on current events, but I couldn’t tell you much about what’s happening in my own city. The decline of local news outlets has hit rural communities the hardest, and in many cases all that’s left there for the older generations to watch or listen to is talk radio and Fox News. And it’s been blamed for political polarization, too.
As for the younger generations, legacy news outlets in general have been rapidly replaced by social media. I’m the first to admit that I get most of my news from Reddit and BlueSky, and some people my age even stay informed via TikTok. But on Reddit, upvotes determine which news stories more people are going to see - the most popular news stories are not necessarily the most important from an objective standpoint. And Reddit is hardly the only social media site that quickly becomes an echo chamber. We all upvote the posts we agree with and downvote those we disagree with - that’s how it works.
A screenshot from a presentation I gave a few weeks ago about the Internet and democracy. Was a skydiving instructor getting prison time REALLY the third-most important story that day?
Again, I’m not going to sing the praises of legacy media. They’ve failed us in a big way, perhaps most notably via the Washington Post’s refusal to endorse Kamala Harris for President. They normalize Donald Trump far too much, since his first term was the best thing to happen to their ratings. Even MSNBC treats U.S. politics too much like a game show rather than something that really matters for the future of the world. And maybe it’s both, but the media has an essential role to play in any democracy.
So what’s the solution? Truthfully, I don’t know. Again, I’m not going to advocate for the revival of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, because in many ways it brought us into this mess. And yet (and I hate to borrow this saying from Donald Trump), we cannot let the cure be worse than the disease.
Yes, societal acceptance of LGBTQ+ people has gone up as religiosity has gone down. That’s not a coincidence. But when so many young men, in a generation that is considerably less religious than those coming before it, just voted for politicians who are anti-LGBTQ+ (not to mention anti-peace, anti-renewable energy, and pro-gun), how much is that really worth?
If you read this article and come away with one thought, let it be this: Religion and the legacy media, two civic institutions declining in influence, were and are deeply flawed. But that doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility to make sure that whatever replaces them is more productive and truly contributes to the healthy, engaged society that we owe it to future generations to build.
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