High school boys are trending conservative

The rate of girls identitying as liberal is significantly higher and unlike the conservative boys, the rate hasn't started dropping off. Probably because the girls face actual threats to their freedoms, while the conservative boys' complaints are about a bunch of imaginary nonsense.

But of course it's boys who get the headline. The hill is a right wing dumpster bin.

I suspect it’s less due to the rhetoric of Donald Trump & more due to the influence of Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson & Joe Rogan.

The left needs to own healthy masculinity and properly address very legitimate issues that disproportionally hurt boys in our society.

Otherwise we will lose a whole generation to toxic male role models in the manosphere.

I keep feeling that there's a disaster being brewed there, the only people paying attention to young boys seems to be the alt right, and there's a need for this which everybody seems to dismiss, every single one of the old style support structures for masculinity have been dismantled over decades, and while they were right to be dismantled all these boys still need the support to actually grow into decent people, and no one is giving it, and these crazies have noticed and are using it as breeding ground for soldiers for their cause. The decent people side must create something for them even if it's to avoid them falling into these dens of craziness.

Maybe kid watching too much Andrew Turd or Lobster cult? That's why de-platforming is so important. These people are genuinely harmful to the world.

I was a "Fox News"-viewing turd in high school, too.

Conservativism mirrored what my parents viewed at the time. Seemed edgy. And offered simple solutions to all of life's problems.

Then I grew up. Five years later, I was voting for Barack Obama and terrified of Sarah Palin.

I was a card carrying Libertarian after high school, before my sense of empathy developed more fully.

They’ll grow out of it when they enter the job market. I was conservative in high school too until I moved out of mom and dads and realized that our society has created nothing worth conserving for anyone under the age of 50. Nothing will make you radical like realizing you will likely never be able afford a home and children.

In the 2022 Monitoring the Future survey, the largest group of senior boys, more than two-fifths, claimed no politics at all, answering the liberal-conservative question with “none of the above” or “I don’t know.” Nearly one-fifth identified as moderate. Only 36 percent selected liberal or conservative as an ideology, and only there did the trend emerge.

I'm not as sold on "trending conservative" as I am "undecided on political ideology" +/-60% didn't say liberal or conservative.

My first election out of high school I voted for a right wing candidate because that's what my Dad voted for, but also because I was entrenched in Christian ideaology and patriarchal propoganda.

After that I started paying a bit more attention to politics and slowly moved to the left with a few leaps along the way. Nowadays I find the Labor party of Aus to be about as conservative as I can stand. I can barely hide my disgust with anything to the right of them.

Real life experience can be far more radicalising than any immature ideas you inherent in high school.

Edit: My major leaps were: Having an employer illegally underpay me, seeing my friends lose 'stable' jobs in 2008, having a close friend come out as gay, leaving the church, volunteering with unhoused people, living in the UK, living in a rental controlled by a landlord with over 100 properties, and doing disaster relief work.

I partially blame the Left for not addressing mental health issues for our younger boys and men and not doing a better job at expressing what healthy, happy masculinity actually looks like. So the likes of Andrew Taint, Joe Rogan, Matt Walsh and the likes basically swooped in and took that over.

I've got a 15 year old nephew who's starting his Sophomore year in like a week. I've already heard him say some rather disturbing extremist right-wing shit, and sadly his father fucking sucks at being a father so correcting him hasn't been easy for me (I'm the aunt, his mother is not currently in the picture). And he says this shit with his little sister around too.

Right but 62% are neither which is more important because both parties are ass and the kids know it.

Yeah ok, but highschool boys are fucking dumb as shit too. It's probably the same bunch of idiots that followed Andrew Taint

I've been a pubescent young man once and we have all been idiots laughing at stupid shit, trying to be edgy. I guess that number will change once they'll get more mature.

I understand that self identification is more convenient than a list of policy questions, but I kind of wonder how many of them count as conservative by the standards of twenty years ago, or even by the standards of people twenty years older than themselves

Do these conservative teenagers believe that gay people shouldn't be allowed to marry? That a war against Islam is a good idea? That wives should submit to their husbands?

The trend shows identification to either label is falling. Really reads as a way to spin what is likely a move even more left by many high schoolers as a move right by pretending no other axis exist than conservative/liberal. Only 35% said either label. The overwhelming majority didnt pick a label.

That's not surprising since high school boys think they have it all figured out and think they're special. Plus they still believe the lies they've been taught in school. I was conservative around that age. When you think that the world is fair, the government benevolent, and failure a result of laziness, then conservative makes a lot of sense. When you grow up and get some real world experience, you learn just how high the chips are stacked against average people. You learn some empathy.

It's absurd, yes, but nothing new. Many of the kids at my own school are leaning to the far right, without ever stopping and wondering if it even profits them. All they see are a couple of Instagram reels and hear "global leader" and "country's decade" and decide they'll follow the government blindly even if the most harm will be done to them. Worshipping your political idols is a way of life, and anyone who doesn't see the very same line as yours is an anti-nationalist. You might have guessed by now, alas, I speak of India.

relevant video: The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie

Theory: Entertainment propaganda - like Fox News and (for the non-elderly) performative alt-right influencers/male-rights-douchebags - succeeds for the same reasons as addictive drugs. They introduce a quick dopamine rush of easy answers, validation, and a feeling of euphoric purpose.

Funny, people are mostly blaming the left for not adressing young boys mental health, but not the right for manipulating them into becoming sexist and violent.

This is very sad. I was in high school in the 1990s and I was hugely big mouthed left-wing boy with friends who were hugely big mouthed left-wing boys and girls. This in a small town. My graduating class was 100 or so. "most high school seniors claim no political identity" looks promising. They are looking at the landscape and saying "this makes no sense, I'm not signing up for any of this crap." So, you know, perhaps a silver lining?

Zoomer MAGAs with gay friends/relatives feel like a blister just waiting to burst.

This frightening. We are starting to see more boys becoming incels?

Makes sense to me. Treat whole groups of people as your enemy and find out that people don't like you very much.

stop sending them to school

I agree with the majority and think both sides suck.

I'm not American, just looking from afar. But from where I stand, the left doesn't seem to give a damn. High school boys are leaning more and more right, and high school girls are apparently leaning more and more left. Well, of course that's happening, in the US, girls are getting fucked over at every turn nowadays especially with the amount of abortion bad there's been. They have reason to lean that way, at this point, it's basic survival instinct.

But I also feel like the left actually acts like it gives a shit about them, too. It's constantly talking about how hard it is to be a women and so on. And not to be dismissive: It is hard and it shouldn't be getting harder, but it is. However, there's a general failure to talk to boys. Who's talking to boys on the left? Well, no one. The only person that actually make an effort and pushed to do it that I'm aware of, is YouTuber and Streamer Vaush and it feels like everyone dogpiled him for it. In fact, the dude is such a controversial figure that I hesitated even bringing him up in fear of losing everyone who actually read this. But whatever you think of him, he was right on that one.

The US Left is not talking to them. There is a general mentality of "fuck em, boys already rule the world". But if you need someone to talk to or to talk to you, you will find someone to do it. So, if no one on the left is willing to do it, they'll find someone else to do so. And that's how Jordan B. Peterson became a father figure to millions, that's how Andrew Tate was able to rot the minds of so many. There was no one who wanted to talk to them but them, so they listened to them.

However. They might grow out of it when they grow up. I was influenced by a lot of American Politics when I was younger, despite being European. Partly because I was watching a lot of English content and fell down the alt-right rabbit hole (I was kind of predisposed to this by growing up with a.. let's call it HEAVILY far right leaning father). This alt-right bullshit eventually spread to my home country too and I started following it. I was a libertarian shit head.

You know what got me out of it? Reality (ok, it's actually much more complicated then this, but have you seen the size of this comment? You have better shit to do. It's a big part of it, just not the whole story)... There is only so much speeches about the market deciding, the free and open market being amazing, Capitalism being the best thing ever, meritocracy and so on can do against the reality of the job market and costs of living. This distress that no one was adressing among those who I was listening too, is what planted the seed in me to completely burn my worldview and rebuild it from scratch.

Now, that being said, I didn't grow up in a country where getting shot is a daily normal risk and school shooting are a weekly occurrences. Sure, my country didn't gave a shit about mental health issues pre-covid (it's not better now, just not as bad) but what were you going to do about it? Suicide is awful, but at least, you're not taking everyone you can with you when doing it. Things are different when you have so many guns in your country you may find a bunch of them stuck in your couch. How many boys shot up a school before those realities could change them? And how many of those left a far right rotten manifesto behind? A lot.

Now, what should be done? Well, I'm not American, I have a lot of shit to already worry about with my country. But basically, the whole American left needs to be much less of dismissive of boys/men issues in general and much more welcoming of them. In general, the left should be much less purity focused and accept people trying to grow and learn, even if they stumble along the way, even if they don't use the proper terms and so one. Be more charitable. But is that going to be enough in a country that is going to hell as quickly as the US is politically? Hard to tell.

Things are complicated. If I had to close on a note: Don't give up on the ignorant boy falling to the far right in your life. You probably have one. I had one, it was me. This ideology is a contradictory one, because on one hand, it's optimistic, "we're the best and everything is great", but on the other, it's a hateful and depressing one. It makes you bitter and resentful. It destroys your sense of self-worth while making you believe that you're getting better at this. And please, for the love of everything, help those who show signs of curiosity, any signs of doubt regarding who they listen to or what they believe, if you can. Getting out of this wasn't easy at all.