How to Take Disaffected Young Men Seriously
In the unlikely case you haven’t yet heard, Tucker Carlson recently released a long-anticipated interview with Nick Fuentes. Call Fuentes what you like—proud racist, white supremacist, conspiracist, devout anti-Semite, advocate for violence, provocateur—your characterization of what he does, what he stands for, and the poisonous ideas in which he traffics is probably accurate. His vile views, and Carlson’s sympathetic treatment of his vile views, have rightly been condemned by many prominent conservative voices.
But do you know something else? Fuentes is popular. His interview with Carlson lodged fifteen million views on X in twenty-four hours. Among the edgiest right-wingers—the dissident, terminally online right—his influence is simply extraordinary.
For right-wing young men—who range from Ivy League undergraduates and the twenty-something children of establishment Republican elites to small-town high schoolers—Fuentes is the forbidden fruit in human flesh. For them, he is the man the GOP’s boomer old guard (“Conservative, Inc.”) want to censor, shut down, and punish. If pressed, many of the young men who secretly watch Fuentes’s clips from the privacy of their bedrooms or share them with their friends in encrypted group chats wouldn’t agree with everything he has ever said—they might shy away from his callous questioning of the Holocaust’s death toll, his praise of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, his call for the “death penalty” for “perfidious Jews,” his description of America as the “Great Satan” that needs to be defeated by “Czar Putin,” or his musings about beating and raping women, to name just a few examples—but they wouldn’t disavow him outright. This is because Fuentes, far beyond just an ordinary political influencer or activist, is a symbol of resistance. Loyalty to him is a depressing blend of an act of protest and a cry for help, typically much more than evincing any sort of intellectually rigorous and substantively grounded ideology or worldview.
Cries for help can certainly be manifested in bad ways—and, indeed, it must be emphatically and unequivocally stated and restated that support for Fuentes and the identitarian slop that he peddles is completely morally indefensible. So, too, is it reprehensible for any interlocutor to fail to steadfastly push back on Fuentes’s ideas, as Carlson did in his outrageous softball interview (and in clear contrast to Carlson’s recent highly confrontational interview with U.S. Senator Ted Cruz).
At the same time, we should not give in to the temptation to reflexively smear the young men who fall into Fuentes’s orbit as horribly evil or irredeemable. Instead, we must—and this is particularly true for older conservatives who wish to eventually pass on both concrete responsibilities for governing and a sense of ownership of America’s constitutional republican system to the next generation—understand what precisely has gotten right-wing young men to the point where many think that only someone like Fuentes truly understands their concerns and is willing to fight for their interests.
The intricacies of the disconnect between many right-wing young men and the larger right-wing movement in America is a deeply entrenched, long-term problem that I don’t expect to be able to provide all the answers for here. Instead, though, I want to provide some thoughts about the underlying reasons that are causing the disconnect to persist—and suggest how the old guard can appeal to young men who have, for a long time, felt exiled from the conservative coalition.
Very broadly, I think that disaffected right-wing young men generally share the following deeply rooted sentiments in common: first, the sense that everyone’s identity, community, and culture is being elevated, celebrated, and supported except for theirs; and second, the sense that the left is deliberately working to dismantle traditional conceptions of American identity and culture—to transform America’s cultural and social fabric into something unrecognizable—and that members of American conservatism’s old guard have been either naïve doormats in this insidious project, or worse, willful co-conspirators.
Disaffected young men see an economic system that doesn’t seem be working for them, with everything from being able to afford to get married and have children to the ability to buy even a modest house appearing far out of reach. They see a culture that has spun completely out of control; while woke illiberalism seems to have slightly receded after peaking in 2020 and 2021, conditions remain abysmal everywhere from elite university campuses to everyday spaces like public school classrooms and corporate workplaces. They observe the feminization of society and the quiet persistence of deeply embedded DEI structures that seem designed to give a leg up to everyone except straight white men. They see that tribalistic identity politics continues to be acceptable, but as usual, only for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Everyone gets to be affirmed, celebrated, and to feel like they belong except you.
But perhaps most importantly—and this is the case for nearly every disaffected young man I’ve encountered—there is an existential concern that they are losing their communities, their culture, and their country to extreme levels of immigration and the resultant rapid balkanization of society on identity-based lines.
While the governing class in Washington, DC is consumed with fighting over the government shutdown—an important issue, to be sure—many young people are more focused on the fact that a leading candidate for Mayor of Minneapolis holds rallies in Somali, that the foreign-born population of the United States is at its highest levels ever (the proportion is decreasing as a result of the Trump administration’s strict immigration policies, but these efforts are in large part just making up for the many millions of illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. under the Biden administration—and, of course, Trump’s policies could be reversed in as soon as three years), and that one of America’s two major political parties seems to be gleefully addicted to mass immigration, multiculturalism, and ethno-cultural fragmentation as non-negotiable core tenets of their political platform.
Hence the disconnect: while leading Republican politicians continue to use 2012-style talking points calling for “bipartisan immigration reform” and to rely on unpopular and out-of-touch arguments that they “support legal immigration, just not illegal immigration,” Gen Z right-wingers are discussing subjects like what it means to be an American and how to reverse the “brazilification” of American politics and society.
They look with consternation across the pond for an example of where America could soon be headed: Britain, where I am pursuing graduate studies and which has grown in population from sixty to seventy million in just the past twenty years almost entirely as the result of migration, took in more than one million immigrants in each of 2022 and 2023. While Britain’s establishment political parties fecklessly trade blame over who is more culpable for endless mass immigration while assailing as “racist” anyone who dares to speak frankly about multiculturalism’s failures, many British people—as my friend Edward McLaren has excellently chronicled—are desperate, hopeless, and increasingly open to more radical solutions.
A small but growing number of Republican politicians appear to have understood the concerns of young right-wingers and have sought to speak to their worries about subjects like migration, American identity, and cultural stability without veering into the dark corners of conspiracism, anti-Semitism, and racial identitarianism. Texas U.S. Representative Brandon Gill and Kentucky U.S. Senate candidate Nate Morris, to take just two notable examples, have repeatedly spoken out about the need to limit immigration into the United States. Morris has distinguished himself from his establishment-aligned GOP rivals by calling for a moratorium on immigration—an unusually forthright proposal, since even hardline Republicans usually speak in vaguer terms about “deporting illegal immigrants” and “closing the border” without actually making clear how many immigrants they think should be allowed to enter the country; but this proposal is nevertheless exceedingly popular among right-wing young men.
Even more prominently, Vice President Vance has used his office’s bully pulpit to speak frankly about immigration and assimilation in ways that just a short time ago would have been cause for exile to the conservative movement’s fringes. In just the past few weeks, the vice president has argued that “we have let in too many immigrants into the United States of America,” has correctly pointed out that the then-record migration waves of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (since eclipsed by the ongoing immigration wave) were followed by Congress’s enactment of legislation that largely restricted immigration into the U.S. for forty years, and has given voice to concerns many people remain afraid to put into words: that it’s “totally reasonable and acceptable” for Americans to desire neighbors who speak English and with whom they share things in common, for example.
So, while there is very good reason to be concerned about the rise of toxic, evil, and conspiratorial ideas in parts of the right, much of the discontent that is flourishing among right-wing young men is fundamentally rooted in legitimate concerns that leaders purporting to represent them have mostly failed to adequately address. The best way for older conservatives to respond to the rise of someone like Fuentes, I believe, is not to broadly condemn his young listeners as fellow travelers in Nazism and racism and just be done with the matter. Not only does such a strategy risk pushing young men further toward peddlers of those poisonous ideologies; it is also a lazy shirking of the governing class’s responsibility to offer young people concrete ideas and affirmative proposals to renew their hope in America’s future. To win back disaffected right-wing young men, it is imperative to offer them reason to believe that their lives may well be better than those of their parents and grandparents—that they will be able to comfortably raise children in a country their grandparents would recognize, and that America’s trajectory is on the upswing, rather than on an unstoppable course toward late-stage illiberal multiculturalism (see: the YooKay) and irreversible ethno-religious balkanization.
Abandon out-of-date talking points, grow a spine on the issues that matter, provide reasons to be hopeful about the future—and the young people will come. That is the message that older conservatives need to internalize if they wish to extend a good-faith hand to the next generation of the American right.
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