The Lost Generation of the New Alt-Right. Part Three

Victor Davis Hanson

There was a third catalyst that prompted the dramatic emergence of Nick Fuentes and the Groypers. And that was the realization by such adroit demagogues that an entire generation born in the decades around the millennium had become embittered, frustrated, and increasingly prone to find cosmic culprits for their own vanishing American dreams.

Millions more or less dropped out of mainstream America—if “dropped out” entails being unable to buy a house, to get married in their twenties or early thirties, to raise children, and to pay off student debt.

Too many youths found their expensive college degrees either superfluous or a bad investment, in a cost-to-benefit analysis. The emergence of AI that curtailed well-paying jobs of some college graduates prompted bitterness. So did affirmative action/DEI which relegated young white males to secondary status when they applied for jobs or admissions.

The angst was doubled when those who suffered discrimination were often lectured by those who did not that they somehow deserved it due to their “whiteness.” So the Groyper constituency was sometimes told by affluent whites and well-off minorities that it was more or less “privileged” in their parents’ basements or prolonged adolescence.

In fear of dropping out of the middle class, millions, especially white males, saw lots of culpable targets for their frustrations. In a globalizing economy, threatened by job displacement by new technologies, race and gender prejudice and quotas only made it harder for white males to be admitted to college or to find jobs commensurate with their degrees.

DEI meant that on many campuses, white males, who represented about 30-35 percent of the demographic were often overtly discriminated against. Sometimes their numbers, such as at Stanford University the last four years, were less than 10 percent of the student body.

The Left and particularly its megaphone Barack Obama, have claimed that opposition to DEI was a code for “racism.” But the lost generation saw DEI more correctly as a dog whistle for overt discrimination against white males, some 60 years after the Civil Rights movement.

Recently, K-12 education has served as a sort of boot camp where youth were to be indoctrinated—by teachers who in most districts were 70-80 percent female—with warnings of toxic masculinity, which along with racism, was supposedly innate with young white men. Boys from K-12 were told that everything from their hard play to their interests in girls was a symptom of their noxious maleness and innate predatory nature.

Confusion, then anger followed. When anti-white and anti-male discrimination were obvious in the education system and workplace—especially for those without elite old-boy network workarounds—mostly powerless, young men were still being lectured that they were oppressors whose innate racism must earn women and minorities compensations for decades more.

In addition, young males were baffled by the new sexual mores. Never has youthful culture become so sexualized. Never have partial nudity, promiscuity, and foul language been so institutionalized. And never since the early 1900s have neo-Victorian values become so oddly in vogue.

The result was a bizarre disconnect. The frequencies of ad hoc consensual sexual trysts increased in the modern age of promiscuity, but with the new neo-Victorian reality that post-coitus disappointment or unhappiness translated into males becoming targets for charges of sexual assault or abuse.

Oddly, the more that popular culture ran sexually suggestive ads of seductive women, the more the lost generation saw such sexiness as fraught with dangers and so even further retreated into their self-imposed exile of video games, podcasts, and social isolation.

While rebelling against globalism, open borders, DEI, and feminized culture, the lost generation still found no home with traditional Republicans. The legacies of the Bushes, Romneys, and McCains were that of an affluent world gone by, in which its winners were not particularly worried about its new losers. The Alt-Alt-Right generation had no interest in the Republican agendas of the last half-century of privatizing Social Security, capital gains tax reduction, open borders, massive investments in China, globalization, and nation-building abroad.

Because conservative Republicans until Trump had not talked much about a Marshall Plan to ensure home affordability, a cultural campaign to encourage marriage and families, and a need to restore the norms of a secure border, an assimilated, content-of-your-character society, the lost generation became ripe for those who so offered venting for their sense of victimhood—but with easy, cheap scapegoating that “The Jews” and their Israel were the real culprits.

A final note: Whereas a David Duke or a Richard Spencer was an outsider who clawed his way into media notoriety, the new Alt-Alt-Rightists were often well-known insiders, who amplified anger at Israel and often the Jews from secure, even prestigious positions, whether as former presidential advisors, network anchors, congresswomen, or marquee podcasters.

No one ever said of the always notorious, “What happened to David Duke” in the way they asked of the once prestigious, “What happened to Tucker or Candace?” The former crass Duke and others were written off as hateful innate bigots, the latter perhaps onto something that had so radically changed their former rather mainstream conservatism.

In sum, the problematic job market and declining “affordability” of struggling generations desiring the comfortable lifestyle and status of their parents, the frustration that the MAGA movement was increasingly oblivious to the influence of the Alt-Alt-Right, and the institutionalized and sacrosanct system of anti-white-male bias—all conspired to radicalize a generation of American youth and thereby make them susceptible to the craziness of a Nick Fuentes and his ilk.