What exactly is going on in the minds of young men? It’s a question that society keeps coming back to these days because, truth is, we’re worried. Everything we’re told about the rising generation of men in America—everything they’re told about themselves, in the media, the academic research, the employment data, the mental-health studies—is about how royally screwed they are. And that has consequences for all of us.
You’ve read the headlines. Young men today are angry. They’re lonely and friendless. The data shows that they are falling behind young women in school and at the workplace, living with their parents longer, playing too many video games, watching too much porn, getting married much later in life (or not at all), having fewer kids (or none at all), and facing a lifetime of student-loan debt, credit-card debt, and medical debt. As a result, many of them are adopting increasingly extreme beliefs, getting hooked on opioids, and killing themselves at alarming rates. They feel ignored by politicians, blamed for society’s ills, and forced to keep their toxic, privileged, microaggressive mouths shut about it.
But what no one can seem to agree on is why. Is social media to blame? There’s no doubt that growing up in the age of the smartphone has profoundly shaped the lives (and brains) of anyone under twenty-five, and most of the rest of us, too. But that applies to young women as well, and they don’t seem to be drifting as badly as men are.
Rather than add our voice to the chorus of speculation about what guys are thinking and feeling about the world, we had a radical idea: Let’s just ask them. Not all of them, of course. There are nearly 16 million men in the U. S. between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. We weren’t looking to conduct yet another survey. Instead, we wanted to have long conversations with a relatively small group about what it’s like to be a young man in America right now.
Our first step was to seek out regular, everyday guys. No influencers or celebrities or lunatics. Just guys like the ones we all know. Guys with so many of their big life decisions still ahead of them. In the end, we settled on twelve men from different parts of the country representing a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. We asked them to submit portrait photos of themselves, and most of them did. As you’ll see, they reflect much of the frustration and alienation we expected—but not always in the ways we anticipated. They were thoughtful and candid. They surprised us.
If there was one subject that came up again and again, it was Donald Trump. Timing had a lot to do with it. Our conversations followed Trump’s reelection in November, a victory powered in part by young male voters. Men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine voted for Trump over Kamala Harris by a margin of 56–42, a dramatic reversal of 2020, when they voted for Biden over Trump by a 56–41 margin. For the young men we spoke with—guys who’ve come of age in the MAGA era—talking about Trump was often shorthand for discussing class, race, masculinity, and the big subjects that were really on their minds. Here’s what they had to say, in their own words.
AIDAN SILVA
College student, age 19
San Jose, California
I noticed the shift in people of color moving conservative a year, maybe a year and a half in advance. I remember a conversation with my mom about seven months before the election—we were in the swimming pool, and she was like, “Oh, this election, I’m not sure what’s going to happen.” And I told her, “Trump has already won the election. I know for a fact.” Because he’d stolen the support of people of color from the Democrats, especially men.
You could just see it. The first thing I noticed was how conservative so many young Hispanic men were—it is mind-boggling to me how conservative. My girlfriend is half Latino, and she kept telling me, “Aidan, Latino men are more conservative than people think.” This notion that Latinos always support Democrats—it’s very false. I was also noticing in my community, a bunch of Asian American men, they were thinking the same way. They were starting to talk out loud about supporting Trump.
The first thing was the LGBTQ community normalizing the idea that you can have a bunch of genders, you can have whatever pronouns you want, and that you can introduce that to very young children. And then with Asian men, the Harvard case that overturned affirmative action a few years ago—remember, the people who filed the lawsuit were not white. They were Chinese. They were like, Wait, affirmative action discriminates against us. That’s when the Chinese vote started to go. And then I did not realize this, but my friend’s also Vietnamese, and she was telling me that most Vietnamese people are conservative. So guess what? Now Trump’s got the Vietnamese support. And obviously his white male support is only growing. So in my head I’m like, How is Biden going to win this election? He’s lost half the people of color to Trump.
To me, it’s not necessarily that men were drawn to Trump—it’s men pulling away from Democrats. That’s one key thing I really want to say. I think this shift happened not necessarily because of anything Trump was doing. It’s because of what the Democrats did. They decided to let in all this pronoun stuff and this whole idea of censoring young men and emasculating them. And then with people of color, like me, they seem to assume, like, Of course you’re going to vote for us. We’re your allies. We’re going to help you. The Republicans aren’t going to do anything for you. But then the Democrats get in power in 2020, and people of color are kind of waiting, like, Okay, so . . . what are you going to do for us? And then you look at the end and the Black community is still in the same position. Asian Americans are now getting discriminated against in educational systems, and you’re losing Latinos because of this LGBTQ stuff that’s relevant to literally 1 percent of the population and you’re trying to kind of force it on everyone else.
ZACHARY LONG
Social-media video producer, age 27
Las Vegas, Nevada
I dropped out of community college because I got a job as a butler at the Venetian casino and I was making good money, so I put everything else on the back burner. What a butler does is, from the moment the whales and high-end guests arrive, we greet them, we grab their things, we bring them their food, we do everything they need—personalized and intimate service. The tips can get pretty big. I got $750 once. I know a guy who once got $5,000.
But that job didn’t work out. There was an issue where I accepted a tip—for one dollar—and I forgot to write it down on my log at the end of the day. The next day I had to go out of town, and by the time I came back, HR was already involved. Every square inch of that building is monitored. When they saw on my log that I didn’t have anything tipped in, one of the other coworkers was like, “No, no—I was right there when he accepted his tip.” He ratted me out. They went back into the footage and I got fired.
I was very, very upset. I was ready to settle down and get really good at that job. I like learning new things, and it was this world of whiskeys and wine and fine dining—all this luxurious stuff that I’d never been exposed to. I grew up lower middle class, so it was an entirely new world. That was the best part about coming into work every day—something new to learn, a new problem to solve. And then all of a sudden I was back at my job at Domino’s.
Being a butler definitely jaded me. Look, I feel like successful people should be able to appreciate the fruits of their labor. That doesn’t bother me. And a lot of rich people aren’t insanely rich—they’re millionaires, not billionaires. They’re normal people when it comes down to it. But when you start dealing with old-money people—how they treat the people around them and the people under them—it opens your eyes. I would overhear conversations around a poker table where executives are talking like, “Well, if we get rid of this department here and we lay off six hundred people here, we can put that money here.” Meanwhile they’re playing poker with $100,000 a hand. The most insane thing I can remember was buying suitcases for a guest because they bought all these bottles of liquor from us and they needed something to take them home in. Two suitcases full of approximately $300,000 worth of wine and liquor.
It’s the frivolousness that’s the breaking point for me—the way they can spend all that money and have no repercussions, but those repercussions spread to us, lower down. It’s fucking bullshit. I have friends going hungry, not because they don’t want to work but because they’re not given enough hours to be full-time and get health insurance.
Five years ago, if you had a job that paid fifteen to twenty dollars an hour, you were set. And now it doesn’t feel like that anymore. Your dollar just doesn’t go as far. Real estate has doubled here in Vegas. The eleven-hundred-square-foot apartment that I rented with my girlfriend in 2018 for $1,100—I looked a few weeks ago, and now it’s going for $1,950. It’s so hard to build savings right now. I spent years building up enough for a down payment on a house, and I’d just gotten to the point where I could feasibly do it, and then I needed to pay for a car repair earlier this year and a lot of that money went away. You learn to live with this fear and paranoia, like, What if I shatter my leg and I can’t work? What would I do?
I am not a fan of Donald Trump—I’d say I lean very left—but at the end of the day, he understands that Americans are angry and upset, and he’s really good at channeling that. As Americans, we’re all feeling the same pressures, we all see prices are rising, we’re all making less money. We all notice it. But the Republicans are a lot more ready to say, “This is the reason. It’s that guy. This is who you should be mad at.” The bigger split in America for me is not left or right. It’s class—it’s whether you’re bourgeois or you’re proletariat. It comes down to whether you make enough money to be in their special club.
TJ SNIPES
College student, Age 20
Walnut Creek, California
There’s this pastor I like to listen to named Voddie Baucham, and he talks about how men think the definition of manhood is the Three B’s: the billfold, the ball field, and the bedroom. Like, it’s all about how much money you make, how well you perform at sports, and how many girls you can get with in the bedroom. And I think that’s . . . not totally wrong? I mean they are signs. If you can perform on the ball field, that shows power and strength and your ability to protect yourself, which is important. If you’re making money, that doesn’t automatically mean you’re competent, but it shows signs of competency. And then bedroom—I don’t know, that one doesn’t make as much sense. But his point was that the Three B’s are how the culture is defining manhood today, and the correct way is how the Bible defines it, which is all about love and family and sacrifice.
My friends say I’m a based Christian guy—“based” like based in truth, someone who’s more realistic and objective. I appreciate the objective truth of conservatism, but I also understand the compassion of liberals. Overall, I’d say I’m like 60 percent conservative, 40 percent liberal. Maybe 70–30. And Christianity is a really good guide for being conservative, because there’s this objective eternal being at the center of it who’s been unchanged the whole time.
And I do believe some things are just objectively true, like: I am a man. It doesn’t really matter if someone wants to be called a man—that doesn’t change what you are. Sorry, that’s it. You weren’t assigned it by a doctor. You were assigned it by God. And going against that is rebellion. If God’s making these rules, it’s not because He wants to be a cosmic killjoy. If I’m going to trust anyone about the world, I would trust the person who made it. It’s like going against the video game developer’s ideas for how to play the video game. You’re just going to lose.
For thousands of years, men have been the rock of society. And now because there have been so many tyrannical leaders, people want to take that power away from men and say it’s for everybody. Just because some men did it the wrong way. Like, it’s kind of unfair to men to say, “We don’t need you anymore because of how well you did at building a society.” And I’m like, “Well, we kind of built this country and fought and died for it . . .”
I didn’t vote, because I didn’t feel like going through the process, and I didn’t see the point, because Biden was going to win California, even though it was way closer than I thought. But if someone had put a gun in my head and told me to vote, I would’ve voted for Trump. I think minority guys are tired of feeling like they are expected to vote a certain way just because of their color. Even Obama, who basically shamed Black guys for not voting for Kamala—I don’t owe you anything. I don’t owe this party nothing. I’m not going to get reprimanded by you when I’m an autonomous man who can make decisions for myself. I don’t need you to browbeat me like I’m your son.
ETHAN GREENE
Urban planner, age 27
Golden, Colorado
Sometimes I think we’re like an anti-welfare state. We’re not really into helping people in this country. I just feel like we live in a very individualistic society, and so it’s all about “How do you stand out as an individual? How do you make yourself stand out from the pack?” You can even see this with car culture in our country—young men always want to buy the most massive truck and drive around in it. I live outside Denver in a town called Golden, and the Colorado School of Mines, which is a big petroleum and gas college, is here in Golden. So a lot of guys come out here from Texas and they drive these giant lifted pickup trucks—these massive old F-150’s that’ve been jacked up so there’s like three feet of separation between the wheels and the body.
I grew up with a lot of these guys in Bozeman, Montana—cowboy-type dudes. That’s manhood out here in the western states: Every man wants to be a cowboy. They want to buy cowboy boots and the cowboy hat and drive an old pickup truck, or the new pickup truck if they’re wealthy. And they vote for Republicans. I didn’t really like those guys. I grew up with two sisters, so I guess I’ve always been more comfortable around women.
If you’re not overconfident, it’s really hard to get ahead in this country. You really have to act like you know what you’re talking about all the time. And that’s definitely not something that I was doing in the past. I hate talking about myself, promoting myself. But when I decided to go to grad school, I just kind of made up my mind that I was going to start. I made this separation in my brain between my home life and my work life—at work, I was going to be this alternative person who was really competitive and confident all the time and could talk about himself very easily. And as soon as I made that switch, people were a lot more attracted to me. I’m getting treated better by this country, by our systems, our culture. That’s how America works.
People in this country love confident people who seem like they’re smart, who seem to know what they’re talking about, even if they don’t. And Donald Trump is the embodiment of the confident man who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s like: Take what you want, grab it, it’s yours—everyone else is telling you you’re not supposed to be this way, but you’re allowed to be this way because I’m this way. He’s kind of a reaction to all the beta cucks out there—men like me, I guess.
But I don’t think that it’s just my generation of men that’s angry. I think it’s all of them. It’s the emotion that men are taught. It’s the one that we get. It’s not manly to feel all the other ones. But anger is for sure. My generation—I don’t think we have very much power, so maybe that’s part of our anger. Our lives are being dictated by people who are decades and decades older than us, and they just don’t get it. They just don’t understand that the world has changed, that you can’t buy a house for three lucky magic beans anymore.
I feel like our generation is just waiting for our moment to take up our power, but I don’t know if we’re ever going to get there, because it seems like these boomers are trying to hang on forever. I see it in my work, too—anytime you go to a public hearing or a city-council meeting, they dominate those meetings, because they have time and resources to show up. They’re really dictating our future even though it’s not going to affect them. And that’s really frustrating. It’s like they were raised in a time of bounty and we don’t get a slice of the pie. They have the entire pie.
JACINTO OBREGON
High school chemistry teacher, age 26
El Paso, Texas
I was born in Nicaragua and immigrated with my parents to the United States when I was really young. We lived in Miami for a few years, then in 2004 we moved to El Paso, Texas, and that’s where I grew up. Now I teach at an all-boys Catholic private school in California, and my kids are juniors—the age where they think they know everything and can get away with anything. Before the election this past November, some of them were asking me political things, like, “Yo, Mr. O”—that’s what they call me, Mr. O—“what do you think of Trump?” And I’d always say, “That’s not your business.” I’d tell them that the faculty handbook says I have to be nonpartisan. And one of them said, “But we need to know! Please don’t tell me you voted for Kamala!” And this was actually a Black student, by the way. Not that just because you’re Black, you should be voting for Kamala—it was just a little more unexpected. I come to find out that a lot of my students, and I mean a lot of them, are very conservative.
Our school is very, very sports heavy. Our academics are amazing, don’t get me wrong—but sports are where it shines. Out of about 1,100 total students, maybe 900 are student athletes, and of course football is king. There was even a movie about our team that came out like a decade ago. I’ve been there three years now, but when I first started, I was this five-foot-eight, soft-spoken Hispanic teacher, and I’m teaching all these sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who were six-foot-five, these enormous—like, what are they putting in the water here? Think of a hobbit in the Shire—that’s me, and everyone else is the elves.
My first year, especially, was really hard because they could get very disrespectful. I had students yell at me, berate me just for asking them to put their phones away. It’s like, “Why am I being abused right now?” They wouldn’t necessarily make it obvious that it was because they think I’m less of a man or because I’m smaller. But I could tell it didn’t help. For a lot of these kids, their norm was coaches who would yell at them, which is not how I roll. There were days when I broke down in front of the students. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. It was like they were experimenting with dominance. And I mention all this because I think they really want that dominance to continue. I think they like getting away with talking very, very confidently. And I think they see Trump talking what I think is nonsense, but they’re like, “Oh, wow—he gets away with saying that!” And so they want to emulate that. They want that power.
There was this friend group in my class that year—all of them were athletes for different sports, and they actually ended up becoming one of my favorite groups of students. The next year, they told me I was their favorite teacher. Even the ones who gave me a lot of issues said that. And I was like, “Wow, thank you—but if I’m your favorite teacher, why did you behave like this to me? Are you only going to follow the people who berate you? Are those the only people you’re going to respect? Because that’s kind of a crappy way to live, no?” And they said it was because my class was the only break they got from hard teachers and hard coaches. It was like a period of peace. They’d spend the rest of the day getting taught that weakness must be stamped out and eradicated. And then they meet me and I flip the whole thing on its head.
Sometimes I do think to myself, Why am I like this? I’m not going to get anywhere being like this. I do get resentful sometimes. I’m not going to lie. I do feel—not marginalized, but I feel like when people think of men or masculinity, I’m not the image that comes to their head. I’ve always felt that way. At the same time, so many people, whether it be my classmates, my friends, my relatives, my students, my coworkers, everyone has said, “Jacinto, you’re one of the kindest people I’ve ever met—please don’t ever, ever change.” And it’s like, “Okay, see? So we do celebrate this other side of the coin. Sometimes.”
EMILIO RIOS
Aspiring filmmaker & NYU student, age 21
Brooklyn, New York
When the election happened, I was so blindsided and distraught that for a month or so I just kind of turned that whole part of my brain off. I guess I live in a bubble, right? I go to NYU—a very liberal school, very performatively progressive, though I think the key word there is performative. But needless to say, I don’t have anybody close to me who voted for Trump or even considered voting for him. I guess that’s why I really thought Kamala was going to win. I wasn’t even that worried, because in my mind, I was like, We already went through four years of this douchebag. We know the type of person that he is. I just really thought that people were sick of him, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. And then I was watching those numbers on election night, and that sinking feeling started, just like in 2016.
I’m trying to make sense of it now. I’ve really tried to put myself in the mindset of just your average twenty-year-old Latino dude, because I know that’s where he gained a surprising advantage, and that shocked me the most. I guess a couple things jump out. Like, whether you like it or not, Trump does fall into that ultramasculine, ultra-fragile-ego archetype, and he disguises the fragility with machismo, with bravado, with boldness. Saying things with his chest. No matter how wrong he is, he carries this energy of absolute confidence. And I think that when you’re an impressionable young man, that’s appealing. It’s like, “I want to be a guy who’s not afraid to say whatever I want to say.”
I’m the son of a Mexican immigrant who’s legal now—he has a green card—but for a while, he wasn’t. And I remember being a young kid in 2016 and hearing Trump say those things about Mexicans being rapists and criminals. And so obviously I’m like, That’s not who I am. That’s not who my father is. So in my mind, from a young age, there was an immediate fuck-you toward Trump. I identify with the immigrants from all these Latin American countries. I identify with that struggle. I see their pain.
But not all Latino people, and especially not all Latino men, think that way. They feel like they’re citizens, they’re good, their family’s good. Whereas the people coming here now—they think they can just walk in, hand themselves over to border authorities, and then get shipped off to a sanctuary city without having to go through all of the pain that my family went through? That’s not fair.
I definitely sense this sort of Democrat-equals-good sentiment among my friends, but I very much do not identify with the Democratic Party. Seeing how people like Joe Biden were utterly indifferent to—actively in support of—Israel’s genocide, like, yes, on paper, at a glance, the Democratic Party has more of a progressive agenda, but in practice, do they? That was how I felt about Kamala, to be honest. Obviously I wasn’t going to vote for Trump—hell no, never—but I wasn’t a fan of Kamala, either. Her history, the fact that she was a prosecutor, that she put so many Black and brown people in jail—she kept showing she had no spine and no actual beliefs leading up to the election.
I was debating who to vote for right up until I walked into that stall in the voting station—Harris or a third party. I voted for Kamala largely due to my mom, just how important her victory would’ve been for female reproductive rights and how catastrophic it would be if Trump won. And then he did.
I need to make money and be self-sufficient as soon as I can because my mom turns sixty next year, and if she’s still hustling and working her ass off at eighty, I’m going to feel like I failed. I’ve got to make sure that in some way, shape, or form, I can give back to my parents and start helping them out by the time I’m like thirty. That’s a big priority for me. And I don’t doubt that I’ll make money. I know I have skills, and it’s not like I’m just going to be sitting around. The doubt is about whether I can make enough to support my parents one day, to live an actually comfortable life, to have savings, a 401(k), a retirement plan. The doubt is about living a financially stable life as opposed to just living check to check or gig to gig. I will try my best, but I’m going to be honest, I know that the odds are not good. My generation is not in an optimal position. Honestly, it kind of feels like I was born too late. Like I missed out on something. It feels like I’m living in a generation where we’re cleaning up after someone else’s mess.
PADRAIG FOURNIER
Para-educator, age 24
San Mateo, California
I like to tell people I went to college undecided and I kind of came out the same way. I graduated in May of 2023. When I came home, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I moved back in with my parents, and that’s where I am now. My mom’s a school librarian, so she said, “Why don’t you try being a para-educator?” And I said, “Well, I don’t have any other plans,” so now I help with third graders. It’s been a good year, and I’m grateful to have done it, but I don’t think I’d want to be a teacher. And being a para-educator is not a job where I’d be able to move out and afford rent and groceries and such. And you can’t really pay your bills with a philosophy degree.
I play a lot of video games. This hat I’m wearing is from a game called Oblivion that came out in 2006. It’s like a fantasy role-playing kind of game. I’ve played several thousand hours throughout that series, and it’s like a lot of online spaces where you find young dudes—whether it’s video games or TV shows or Star Wars or sports or music or whatever. It’s not something you pick up on unless you’re in these spaces a lot. But take Star Wars: A lot of the top creators in those spaces are right-wing people talking about how some new Disney show is woke and bad, or how it’s forcing some lib agenda. Like, the most famous Star Wars YouTuber is a guy named Star Wars Theory, and most of his videos are just trashing all the new Star Wars shows for being DEI, whatever the term of the day is.
In a lot of spaces that young men naturally gravitate toward, there’s already kind of a pipeline built, a feeling or environment of “This thing I like is under attack.” I don’t know who said it, but there’s a quote that sticks with me: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality looks like an attack.”
A lot of reactionary sentiment is built on nostalgia. And the Right in America has realized that you can weaponize that natural disenchantment with the world and spin it as: Something that you like is being attacked by the Left. And to me, it’s a uniquely right-wing phenomenon—the ability to infiltrate any space and be able to steer people toward that intellectual viewpoint. Once I noticed it, it was hard not to be aware of it. Whereas I think the Left, broadly speaking, does not have anything remotely equivalent.
It’s the same tenor in these manosphere communities about women. I’ve only really had one serious relationship—a long story, but it didn’t work out. I’m not a big fan of the whole manosphere and red pill and all that stuff, but there were definitely times when I’d find myself scrolling on my phone, and I’d come across videos, obviously framed to show how women are bad, and I wouldn’t agree with them, but I could kind of say, at least for a little while, “Yeah, that’s how it feels.” It’s just a lot easier to feel like you’re the victim of some wrongdoing. And if you’re a young man who suffers some sort of ego injury, that online ecosystem is very easy to plug yourself into. That pipeline is ready and waiting.
SEBASTIAN PRANGLEY
MMA fighter, age 20
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
I want to be champion, bro. My life is very difficult right now, and I do that to myself. I have to make it. It’s not about plan B. It’s not about plan C, bro. This isn’t like wrestling or football where there’s scholarships to college. If you don’t make it in MMA, you’re back to square one. That’s kind of the thrill of it, too, if I’m being honest.
I had a really tough upbringing, and it turned me into kind of a sad person. My dad’s from Cape Town in South Africa. I had neighbor kids who had all this cool shit, got to play video games for eight hours a day, or who lost a tooth and then the tooth fairy came and dropped a Nintendo DS under their pillow. I never had that stuff. We were living paycheck to paycheck. We couldn’t afford meat every day of the week. My father opened up this gym, but it didn’t make any money for eight years. So he worked another full-time job, and then he also fought a little bit. The gym’s super successful now, but it was tough, bro. Life’s tough.
So Coeur d’Alene—I’m pretty sure they say it’s the fastest-growing city in the nation. I mean, it’s just crazy, bro. Like holy smoke. When my dad moved here for college, this was a one-stoplight town, and now it’s just a massive city. We get a ton of people from California who are like, “We don’t like our state anymore—it’s getting dangerous down there. So we’re going to go over to Idaho and change things.” Then they make it more like California. What they’re doing in the schools is just wrong. After Covid, the underclassmen just got progressively worse. Kids wearing weird stuff. Just really borderline satanic stuff. Weird colors. It’s gotten super free, in the wrong sense. Then after I graduated, they started doing the transgender bathroom stuff, so now they got a bathroom for them folks. So that is courtesy of the California people.
I can’t name a Democrat in this gym right now. I can’t name a friend who’s a Democrat. I don’t know anybody who voted for Kamala, honestly—anybody that’s sober. Maybe some pothead buddies that aren’t really friends of mine. But the blue side is winning, dude. This younger generation—these kids are getting brainwashed into thinking blue. And blue is definitely not a righteous route. I mean, we still don’t have the full list of Epstein’s folks. A lot of these blue guys are just totally numb to the fact that there’s right ways and wrong ways to do things in life. They just don’t care.
But common sense is coming back a little bit—that’s what I thought when Trump won. And I’m so thankful he won, because he says common-sense stuff, like building up the border wall. That sounds offensive, but it makes sense, because we all know where the drugs are coming from, and it’s not Canada. Also, I used to work in construction, so I see all these Hispanic folks that are working for nine or ten bucks an hour, and they’re doing double the work the Americans are doing, because they have to survive. Like, they actually are taking our jobs. They are. So I’m not a fan of immigration in that sense.
JAHMIEL JACKSON
Senior at the University of Chicago, age 23
Chicago, Illinois
The neighborhood where I grew up in Philadelphia—it wasn’t the worst, but it definitely wasn’t the best. My mother struggled through so much raising us. I learned from her that it’s okay to falter, but you can’t give up. I went to a horrible, underfunded public school. I wanted to be the first person in my family to graduate college, and I could see that my school wasn’t going to get me anywhere close. So I secretly applied to a private school that my mother didn’t know about. And they were so impressed that they reached out to me, gave me a tour, gave me a financial-aid package, and I started there my junior year. I went from a school that was like 98 percent Black to a predominantly white school—one of the best private schools in the country, where I got exposed to different opinions and learned how to challenge the current ideology that exists in any atmosphere. And that’s really guided me through my political transition to this day.
A couple of years ago, like in 2020, 2021, I had blue hair. I was very far-left progressive. I protested for Black Lives Matter. I was 100 percent pro-choice. But the shift really began at this private school—all boys as well. In class we’d talk about things like the American Dream, and does it exist for African Americans? Everyone was saying the same thing: Systemic racism is the issue, and how horrible our country is. And just to be a contrarian, I said, “What if there are cultural or personal-responsibility issues that lead some people to fall short of their dreams? I went to a public school where I saw so many kids, the number-one obstacle in their lives wasn’t not having a father in their life—they just weren’t doing their homework.”
The Black students at this private school, who were predominantly wealthy, found that offensive. They said, “You just got here, and you’re giving these white boys permission to think they’re right. You should just shut up.” They started a campaign of threatening me. If I sat next to them at lunch, they’d get up and walk away. I was completely iced out. I even got kicked out of the Black Student Union. They said, “If you come to another meeting, we’re going to have a problem.” And then all the slurs came. He’s an Uncle Tom. He’s just a Black mouth with white talking points. I’m very used to that now—if you call me those things, I don’t really care. But back then I felt like I was a horrible person, so I just bottled up all of my doubt. I basically had to neuter myself.
One of the things I started to notice while I was arguing my leftist points to my conservative friends—like about getting vaccinated, supporting Trump—they would just ask me a lot of questions. They wouldn’t get mad at me. One of the conservatives I hated the most was Tucker Carlson, but I finally listened to one of his most controversial takes—about white replacement theory, and immigration—and I thought, “Look, I want to hate the guy, but I can’t really disagree with what he’s saying.” I’d been told for so long not to go look at these sources because they’re racist, they’re regressive, they’re harmful. And actually, it turns out I’m left wanting more. That’s when I did a full factory reset. I tried to relearn things from the ground up.
When I look at most of the young men in my life, a lot of them are very sheepish about what they believe. They hold their beliefs to themselves. And conservatives have to talk in a certain way so they don’t alienate you, they don’t polarize, they don’t make it seem as if they’re trying to disrespect you. They’re always on the back burner trying to defend themselves.
A few weeks ago in class, we had a group assignment, and this one girl in our group—I knew she was a feminist, I knew she was a control freak, and I knew she was going to sink our grade. But none of the guys in my group, including me, wanted to tell her no about anything. We didn’t want to speak over her. You could tell we were subconsciously teaming up to protect her from the idea that we were trying to mansplain to her, or that we were trying to hurt her feelings. And when I talk to older men who are in the corporate world, they do the same thing.
We’re all holding ourselves back from our natural behavior. We’ve ceded so much power. Voting for Trump has made me more unyielding. I don’t necessarily care who I offend. I’m not doing it to harm you. I’m doing it because sometimes ideas have to offend people. They have to invoke some kind of passion. Out of all the hardest things someone can do in life, I think coming out of poverty is first. And then coming out of the progressive trap is probably second.
This article appeared in the March 2025 issue of Esquire
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ANIKAIT KONATALAPALLI
Student at St. Mary’s College, age 22
Moraga, California
I’m cisgender. I’m heterosexual. I’m not white, but I tick all the other categories that seem to form like the bad straw-man character on the Left, if you know what I mean. In these discourses you see on the Internet, on social media, you’ll have a lot of these left-wing influencers, these feminists just going on tirades against men—like, men are responsible for this, men are responsible for that, yada, yada, yada. Part of the reason why we’re experiencing a loneliness epidemic and we have all these crazy influencers like Andrew Tate out there is because we as a society, I think, have told men that they’re not valued and that whatever natural traits they exhibit are written off as toxic masculinity.
We’re told to express ourselves, be vulnerable—but then the moment we are vulnerable, we’re still judged. Like, “Why are you that vulnerable?” Or if you grew up in a really tough, traditional, machismo family, you’re told the exact opposite: Keep everything in. So you either keep everything in and let that balloon grow and grow until one day it pops, or you try to let some of it out, get judged, and then never do it again.
I’m not one of those manosphere guys or anything like that, but for a long time I did feel like, as a guy, I was kind of being sidelined. There was a time in my life when I considered myself pretty liberal, but then just the way I’d get shut down if I had a viewpoint that was maybe a little different—like, on abortion, there was a time in high school when I genuinely didn’t know what abortion was because my Indian parents never talked about it. I learned about it in school when Roe v. Wade got overturned. This one girl who I grew up with, I asked her, “Oh, what’s abortion? I don’t know what that is.” And she was like, “It’s when a pregnancy gets terminated.” And I was like, “What do you mean terminated? The baby dies?” And she was like, “Yeah, basically.” And I was like, “Well, isn’t that murder? Why would someone want to do that?” And she got super mad at me. She actually threatened to hit me.
I’m a child of immigrants, but you seem to get more benefits as an illegal migrant than if you’re a citizen here. They get housed in hotels, they get debit cards, and yet there’s so many veterans on the streets who don’t get any of it. Last summer I applied for this internship at a major investment firm on their portfolio-management team, and I clicked on this scholarship application where they’ll give $20,000 toward your tuition. And I got an offer for an accelerated interview. So I tell my dad about it—an accelerated interview at the biggest asset manager in the world! And he was like, “What do you mean ‘accelerated interview’? They only give those to marginalized communities—they only give those to people who are LGBT and Black and Hispanic and all that.” He said, “You should email them and tell them you’re not one of those.”
So I send an email. I tell them, “Hey, thank you for the offer, but I don’t think I should be interviewed in this way because I don’t fit into those categories.” They were like, “Okay, well, thanks for telling us.” And then a few weeks later, I got rejected. So my initial thought was like, Okay, so they were going to consider me because I ticked a few identity markers—but now that I don’t, they get rid of me? I still have this negative view of affirmative action because of it—because it’s like they were willing to lower the standard for me. It’s demeaning. And obviously you’re never going to be happy because—whether people say it out loud or not—you’ll always be seen as the guy who got in because there was a lower standard.
I voted for Biden in 2020, and I voted for Trump in 2024. I didn’t like Trump back in 2020, and I still don’t really like him. He’s got the kind of persona that I despise—that kind of main character, center of the universe, got pampered a lot as a kid, all that. And he was definitely a sore loser in 2020. I voted against him in 2020 because I just didn’t like how the last four years went, the amount of polarization, the way he handled the pandemic. So I voted against him. And then this time I voted against Biden by voting for Trump.
It’s ridiculous the way the Left has portrayed Trump as this threat to democracy when they’ve done a lot of things that are just as bad. Like, it was obvious they couped against Biden, and it’s not like they had an open primary where other Democrats could run. They just put Kamala in there. Then Biden pardoned his son after he said he wouldn’t. I also think the Justice Department is politicized. Sure, maybe Trump has some legit cases against him, but why are they trying to fish for everything they can? I definitely admire his resilience. He’s got all these court cases on him, all these convictions, and yet he’s still out there campaigning like crazy. Trump’s also got, what, two assassination attempts on him? Not to mention the entire media machine being against him, the entire political machine being against him, even Republicans. And yet he’s out there winning.
CARTER PLANTINGA
Prelaw student at Boston University, age 22
Nashville, Tennessee
There’s a lot of talking points in the world right now about a male loneliness epidemic. And for the most part, I would venture to say the people who focus on it tend to be right-wing grifters trying to make a buck off of male rage. That being said, many of the young men in my life—certainly not all, I wouldn’t even say most, but way, way more than I’d think is normal—have no close friends. Like, they have guys they go out and drink with. But if something is weighing on you, if your mom is sick, I could probably name three or four men in my everyday life who would have no one in their lives to speak to about that.
That extends to their relationships with women. A disproportionate amount of the men in my life are single. I’m not a single guy, so I can’t speak to this personally, but I know there’s a lot of incel-adjacent bitterness around that fact. These guys have spent their entire adult lives single and have grown to resent women for that.
And it’s exacerbated when you go online, you go on YouTube and TikTok, and there are men reinforcing this idea that actually you’ve been right all along, you are right to be waiting for the “highest-value woman”—that’s what they call it—and every other woman who won’t date you, those women are bad. They’re sexually promiscuous, they’re ignorant, and you’re right to be angry at them. So many men are hearing this messaging and develop a sense of bitterness that drives them away from the women in their life—not just potential partners, but their mothers, their sisters.
I try not to associate with people who harbor real bitterness for women, but I mean, I think about the way that some of them talk in my classes—men who take a gender-studies class just to dunk on the feminist talking points they hear. They view themselves as on some kind of crusade to be the logical voice of reason in the room. Like, in a moment of social reckoning, a moment of reorganization where there are more women in college than men, they view themselves as a last bastion, a final crusader in the quest to defend masculinity from an emasculating society.
It’s a really sad thing. It’s embarrassing to watch. And if you asked those men in those lectures what they’re so angry about, they’d say they’re mad that their side of the story is not being told, when in fact their side of the story is the most well-reported, well-documented, well-studied thing in the history of the world.
MARKO BATKOVIC
Construction-management student at Cal State, Chico, age 22
Chico, California
In this election, it seemed like the Democrats were focusing on just women’s issues and women’s rights, we need a woman in office, everything just centered around women—and I am in no way degrading women, that’s fine—but they left out the entire other gender. There wasn’t anything for young men or pretty much men in general. It was just women’s this, women’s that. And for men, we’re like, “What about us?”
The problem with today’s society, and especially with my generation, is everyone just focuses on, “Oh, men have had this and men have had that over the course of history.” They’ve had better benefits or they’ve gotten paid more. And what about women? What about women’s equality? Which I’m not opposed to—I do feel like women should be paid equally. Although if that’s what we want, then women need to start integrating themselves in the jobs that men naturally do. You’re not going to see a woman doing tile work. There’s not a single woman on the job sites that I work in. There’s not a single woman working in the coal mines or the oil rigs. If we want to have an equal society, then women need to start doing these jobs.
At the end of the day, who Trump is as a person is not my concern. What he does in his daily life, the way that he acts, his whole demeanor, is not reflective of my opinions. It all goes back to what he will do to better the country. That’s what I’m concerned with—the things that affect my life. So his rants on Twitter and all that stuff, yeah, it’s stupid and I don’t agree with it. He should stop doing it. I mean, it’s kind of funny, but it’s also pretty stupid for a political leader to be ranting on Twitter like that. At the end of the day, though, it doesn’t affect me. What affects me is what he’s going to do for the country.
All these Democrats keep saying he’s going to be the fall of America, which is just an idiotic remark to make, because if he was the fall of America, it would’ve fallen already. We still have our democracy, we still have our freedoms, we still have our right to believe in our own values and religion and anything that you want to believe in. I feel like Democrats just have this hatred for Trump himself. They don’t have a problem with what we as Republicans believe in. They just hate Trump. During the four years he was president, all they did was try to indict him, impeach him, get him out of office. And the last few years, they’ve been trying to put him in jail. It’s been really shocking to see what they were doing to him. The Democrats are always preaching about, “Oh, he’s going to be the fall of democracy and the end of America.” Yet they’re the ones inciting a world where you can decide someone’s unfit to be president just because you don’t like them.
History will speak for itself, though. Because at the end of the day, in 2030, in a hundred years, whatever, our kids are going to be reading about Trump in their history books. You don’t need to like him as a person, but it’s undeniable the impact he’s had on the country. Whether it’s George Washington or Barack Obama or Donald Trump, our kids in future generations are going to know their names.
