politics

Zoomer Men Say The Stove Is Quite Hot, Actually

Young guys might not be as red-pilled as they appeared in 2024

Over the past few years young men being lured to fascist politics like a cartoon character unconsciously drifting toward a freshly-basked pie sitting on a window sill has been something of a hobbyhorse of mine.

I fretted about polling from 2023 and early 2024 showing zoomer dudes were very much OK with Donald Trump, that cool, crazy grandpa who is, per the zoomer bros, “based.” Everything pointed to young guys drifting out of the stagnation of the Democratic Party tent – a weird old-person smell permeating the whole thing – and toward something more appealing: A promise of glorious renewal, of money and (submissive, un-woke) women, of Return to a United States where men ruthlessly ruled their families and their workplaces and everyone was financially comfortable with a house and a car and precisely 2.5 children.

Thanks to all those who support BFT. Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip!

That this era never existed didn’t matter. That’s the thing with nostalgia: It never does. The fascist promise of that delicious scent wafting through their social media timelines and TVs was too good not to follow for a lot of zoomer dudes. They sniffed and sniffed and sniffed until they found that pie, which smelled an awful lot like hierarchical domination. Stuffing their faces with this fascist pie like a famished, politically alienated, chronically online Dale Cooper, Gen Z men relaxed for a moment, leaned against the nearby stove, and watched as the first two layers of skin on their hand melted away.

The pie, of course, was not full of delicious blueberries, but a festering heap of maggots.

It’s not lost on me why Gen Z guys would fall for Trump, who has been running for president or serving for president since they were children. Shamefully, tragically, he is the only American leader many of them have ever known, the vibes king who makes fascism seem weird and cool and counterculture. He triggers mom and dad, those feckless little libs, so polite and well meaning. He pulls off this little trick partly because he doesn’t actually know how to do Real Deal Fascism – one must read a book to know this – and partly because mainstream media sees it as their job to sane-wash Trump’s fascist ravings into something that fits nicely within the traditional bounds of American politics. If it didn’t fit, the newspaper would be forced to tell people good and bad things are not the same – a distinction beaten out of the newspaper through fifty years of right-wing whining about bias.

But wait. There is no dooming on Bad Faith Times. The 2025 elections brought a lot of good news for the regime's opponents, not least of which was a marked shift among Gen Z guys away from a radicalized Republican Party that has no place in a functioning democracy.

Their hand skin still growing back from the goddamn stove, the maggots spat from their mouths, zoomer guys backed Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Abagail Spanberger, by what I would call shocking margins in the November 4 election. CNN exit polls showed Spanberger earned 57 percent of the vote among men aged 18 to 29. That was a 15-point advantage over her Republican opponent – who loves to tell people when she is speaking – and her highest level of support among any male age group. I'm hearing from sources deep within the zoomer community that the guys have "never been more back" and are "all libbed up" and "ready to go."

Support for Spanberger dipped as age increased, dropping to 52 percent among men aged 30 to 44 (mostly millennials) and 42 percent among men 65 and older (Gen X and boomers, one and the same). That's disappointing, of course, but the Gen-Z swing toward Spanberger – a cardboard cutout of your average corporate Dem – dispels at least two notions that I believed for a while: That zoomer dudes would continue rejecting the Democratic Party because it's so deeply uncool and mostly vibes-less, and that young men would refuse to back a woman for high office. The memory of the stove might have been enough to compel these guys to hold their collective nose and cast a vote for the lady.

If you, like me, wonder how Spanberger would have fared among young bros if she had faced a man in the gubernatorial race, look to New Jersey's election results for some good coping data. Fifty-six percent of Gen-Z guys voted for Democrat Mikie Sherrill; 44 percent for Republican Jack Ciattarelli. So there you go. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani – good vibes in human form – earned nearly 70 percent of the zoomer guy vote. The Mamdani campaign ensured the dopamine receptors were fully engaged.

It never made much sense that Gen-Z guys would go all in on reactionary politics but for the appeal of a showman who has an uncanny grasp of the national mood and has total control over Americans' dopamine receptors. Headed into the 2024 election, zoomer men were not aligning politically with a movement that pledged to ethnically cleanse the United States. There was no indication zoomer guys as a whole were into blood-and-soil politics. If the American education system or the country's media had done anything to help folks understand the horrid origins of such politics, there may be no second Trump term.

The stove-touching lesson didn't only translate to the Virginia and New Jersey elections, where Democrats seized big majorities along with the governorships. In California, where elected Democrats did the right thing and fought gerrymandering fire with gerrymandering fire, 74 percent of men aged 18-29 voted yes on Proposition 50, allowing the state's legislature to move ahead with carving up Republican districts and gaining five or six extra seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026. Carve baby carve, zoomer dudes said in overwhelming numbers.

Economically Americans born in the late 90s and early 2000s support nakedly socialist policies – measures you'd expect them to support considering their woeful economic prospects in the most unequal society in human history. Zoomer guys aren't quite as supportive of abortion right (basic bodily autonomy) as millennial guys were a decade ago, but a little convincing goes a long way with young fellas today. Recent polling showed zoomer men who said abortion rights "would matter a great deal in shaping their vote increased by 12 points after they saw video testimony from people who were personally impacted by an abortion ban." This might come as bad news for cowardly, bloodless members of professional consultant class who have practically begged elected Democrats to stop talking about abortion rights and LGBTQ rights and the environment.

Sometimes, it turns out, you have do engage in politics and tell people why they should or should not support something. You have to persuade folks to do the right thing. I know this is much more difficult than pandering to whatever people support in a given election cycle. In this case, older men engaged younger dudes on why it's important for people to control their own fertility, and the younger guys listened. Imagine that.

If the American can get zoomer dudes onboard, young, energized Democrats could cook in the coming years considering zoomer women are perhaps the most left-wing voting cohort in the country's history. They back every Democrat and progressive ballot measure by wide margins. In California, 81 percent of women 18-29 backed Prop 50, according to CNN's exit polling. Eight in ten Gen-Z women voted for Spanberger. Ascendant worldwide fascism made possible by Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk – in that order – has created a political gender gap without equal.

Gen-Z women have unassailable politics, and unlike guys their age, they didn't have to place their hand firmly on a red-hot stove to support good politics. For that I'm grateful. Maybe you are too.

Millennials: No Longer The Greatest Generation?

It wasn't just zoomer guys who found their hand planted directly on the red-hot stove. I take no pleasure whatsoever in saying millennials – after being the answer to Baby Boomers' rancid politics – also went fash in 2024.

It appears millennials are no immune to that thing where you get older and support politicians who promise to crush all younger generations underfoot. New boss same as the old boss, things of that nature.

There's an argument that zoomer bros are not quite as far down the fashy rabbit hole as elder millennials, a generation that in 2008 almost single handedly delivered America's high water mark in liberalism only to see it wash away in a tide of omnipresent Republican propaganda. The resulting dissolution, I guess, proved impossible to combat for the 48 percent of millennial men who cast a vote for the Democracy Destroying Machine in 2024. So it goes.

My rabid support for millennials – a generation of which I am a member – has been something of a bit on various microblogging websites over the past decade. For a long time, we were the only truly reliable Democratic voters. Through thick and thin, we voted against Republicans because Republicans had wrecked the economy and the world more generally in our teens and twenties. There seemed to be an unspoken pledge among 80s babies: We will never vote for those guys, no matter who boring and uninspiring the other days might be.

That millennial solidarity against the forces of reactionary politics seems to have faded in this second (final?) portion of the Trump era. It's part of a larger trend among men in the US: After Joe Biden won men younger than 50 by ten points in 2020, Trump won this cohort by a point in 2024. It's an enormous swing, an unconscionable swing if you ask me.

That's a huge fucking bummer, especially because – according to the aforementioned polling on young men's view of abortion rights – it's incumbent on older guys to get younger guys straightened out politically. By that I mean supporting basic human rights and guardrails against all-out authoritarian terror. As a millennial man I am asking my fellow millennial men to do a little better, to poke the fascist Manosphere bubble in which so many young men exist today. The bros needs us, now more than ever.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.