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.
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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.
Denny Carter
It’s not lost on me why Gen Z guys would fall for Trump, who has been running for president or serving as 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.
