this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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If you've followed the news recently, there's a trend of young men joining fascist fight clubs. How can we stem the tide? What underlying issues are causing this?

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[–] Death_Equity@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Right wing leaders wouldn't have attractive opinions if the left wasn't blamed for the problems that are observable.

The likes of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes have done devastating damage to the US, UK, Australia, and more.

True

They portray military service and patriotism as manly and good.

There is nothing inherently wrong with loving your country. Military service is incredibly manly, you shit talk with the boys and work out. Military service can be good. It can pay for college(that is absurdly expensive), it teaches you life skills(that aren't being taught otherwise), being former military gives you an advantage in hiring, and you can have the government train you for a trade that you will be able to get into far easier with veteran status. Yes, there is the issue with furthering a globalist agenda and maybe having to go to some country that we have no business in, but the right doesn't like that either(except neo-cons and RINOs). Also spicy nostalgia isn't the greatest military benefit...

They portray poverty as a personal moral failing.

It isn't always, but it can be. Some people make poor choices that cost them opportunities or they sacrifice their future with poor financial decisions. Then there is the decision to do drugs or become an alcoholic which can take your life, your opportunities, your sanity, your health, and put you in a nearly inescapable spiral of criminality and poverty.

They portray progressive cities as anarchist hellscapes and rural towns as idyllic.

That isn't a hard picture to paint when all you need to do is point at the COL and crime stats and then follow that up with criminals getting let off easy and doing more crime because that is all they know how to do due to poor economic practices that kills jobs for people without a college degree.

The right sees LA spending billions on homelessness and getting nowhere while tents on the sidewalks have shit and needles around them. They see the judicial system letting violent criminals walk free and keep doing crime until they kill someone. They see the obscene costs of living where $2k a month gets you a studio with convenient access to vehicle break-ins and fentanyl. They see the D next to the mayor's name with no clear path to address the problems except increasing taxes to spend more on the problem while advocating for more changes that can only exacerbate the problems. Who would want to live under those conditions?

Then they see small towns with a charming homeless person milling about town that everybody knows by name(if they haven't been sent to California), the usual troublemakers getting locked up eventually(my dad owns half the town goes free the next day), and a house for $100k(that gets washed away in a flash flood). How is that not enticing?

To a young man, the left only presents to them more or worse of the problems they see and no mention of how they will make that young man's future better/easier for them unless they give up and live off welfare. The right tells them they will fix what holds them back with very simple answers to complex problems and empowers them to take accountability and work harder to get what they want.

The Nazis came to power because the disenfranchised German population that was shamed after WWI was given hope, pride, and an improved economy with an easy scapegoat to expel to make the country great again. The left is actively disenfranchising young men while the right wants to give them hope, pride, and an improved economy. The left is driving young men to the right and all the right has to do is welcome them. The left sees that and says "Fuck 'em. We don't need them" and then wonders how the hell Trump won.

[–] Know_not_Scotty_does@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Its a big source of cognitive dissonance to be told as a cis/het/white/male person that you have all these advantages in life (which can be true) while you still struggle in life/society.

Then they get told "we need to level the playing field so the world is not systemically hostile (which it is) to others outside of that small subset of the population". This can be interpreted as we are taking your benefits and giving them to someone else which is really scary and threatening when you already feel marginalized and have been told that those people want your stuff.

The missing element with these pushes for more equality or fixing major systemic issues is following up and explaining that we are also going to work on the systemic problems you are facing too or saying that the changes will uplift you too.

Will that fix all of the hostile isolated right wing young white guys? No, there are deeper issues at play there but acknowledging that there is a problem for them too is a good start to catch them before they fall down that hole.

[–] Death_Equity@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

True.

The problem is that equity efforts inherently disadvantage white men. There is a target goal to hire more of X that isn't white men in order to establish equity. It establishes a system that is inherently rigged against white men and it is obvious why white men would be unhappy with that.

For young white men to accept that disadvantage would require the disadvantage to be meaningless. The system needs to be fixed so that it isn't rigged against anybody and the changes need to happen slowly or you get the whiplash we are seeing.

[–] sugarfoot00@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago

For that to be true, there would have to be statistics to bear that out. And yet somehow, white men are still employed disproportionately and earning disproportionately, even when controlling for education (which women far exceed men at).

The whole 'anti-dei' thing is entirely driven by perception, not facts. But since there is a whole industry built around keeping young white men angry and telling them that having their privilege stripped is actually disenfranchisement, the trend will continue.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think you'll really like this, touches on almost every point you made:

https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-helpful-answers-to-societys-most-uncomfortable-questions

(from 2015 when Cracked was still good)

Jason Pargin is one of my favorite writers. I'll check it out for sure.