Front Burner - How Donald Trump embraced the ‘manosphere’ for votes

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

In the last few months, U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump has appeared on shows with huge audiences of young men. He’s been doing interviews with people like influencer Logan Paul, comedian Theo Von, video game streamer Adin Ross…all people outside the usual political media, and all with millions of followers.These appearances are just part of a deluge of efforts to court Gen Z men, in what some have called the bro or frat vote in the upcoming U.S election.Polls show that an enormous gulf has opened up between young men and women this election season - with young men way more likely to support Donald Trump.The Guardian U.S.’ senior features writer Sam Wolfson on why and how young men have shifted to Trump, and how this shift to the right is part of a global trend.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm J.B. Poisson. So a couple of months ago, the hugely popular streamer Aiden Ross got Donald Trump a Tesla Cybertruck. Check out this wrapper.

Let me know your honest thoughts. I think it's incredible. The truck was wrapped with a photo of Trump, the one with his fist raised in the air after the failed assassination attempt back in July. Trump went on to do an 80-minute interview with Ross on his stream. The appearance is just one of many, many efforts to aggressively court what some have called the bro or the frat vote in the upcoming U.S. election. Read Young Men Under 30.

Here is Trump introducing the Canadian-American streamers the Nelk Boys at one of his campaign rallies. The Nelk Boys, where are you guys? Where are you? You here someplace? Thank you, fellas. You want to come up? If you want, come up. And here is Trump walking into a UFC fight in New Jersey back in June. 45. Being ushered in by UFC CEO Dana White. Donald Trump is in the building in the form of president getting a standing ovation from the assembled masses. If you don't know who any of these guys are, don't worry.

We're going to get to that. But the reason that we're talking about them is because polls show that an enormous gulf has opened up between young men and women in this election. Gen Z men are way more likely to support Trump. Some think that this could swing the election. Obviously, the Democrats are worried about this. Last week, Kamala Harris's team said they were in talks for her to go on the Joe Rogan podcast. Today, my guest is Sam Wolfson. He wrote this great piece for The Guardian looking at why and how many young men have shifted to Trump and globally to the right in recent years. Sam, hi, welcome to FrontBurner. Hi, thanks so much for having me. All right,

so this is a big gap here. According to recent New York Times-Siena polls, Trump leads Harris among young men 58 to 37 percent and Harris leads young women 67 to 28. The numbers for the men might not seem intuitive to a lot of people because young people have historically voted for more politically progressive parties. But this is one of the biggest political gender gaps in decades. And when do you think we started to see this split really emerge in the United States? Yeah, I think that's right. We've kind of assumed over the last few election cycles that the young are a group that the Democrats can rely on. And certainly, you know, in the 2016 election, the 2020 election, the midterms, we've always seen that voters under 30 have overwhelmingly voted for the Democrats. This shift, I think, has happened

in around the last six years, and it's been very stark and very sudden. This divide has opened up between young men and young women. And one of the most noticeable things about it is that it has been rapid and it has happened in not just in the US, but around the world, you know, you see kind of a similar trend where young men have making a small shift rightwards and young women have made a huge shift leftward. So you get this divergence because young women are probably the most progressive generation in history. You know, the numbers are in the 80s

in terms of their support for the Democrats and left-wing positions. And young men, I wouldn't say so much, you know, that it's like they've made a hard turn to Trump, but they're certainly shrugging their shoulders at what traditional politics and kind of centre-left politics can offer them and are exploring other options. I just, I think that's a really good point. I just want to put a line under the gap is going

in both directions, right? It's also because the women are moving further left. Is this all young men, the slight shift that we're seeing to the right? Even young Hispanic and Black men, are we seeing them shift rightwards as well? election is because this isn't a question that pollsters would necessarily ask. They would ask about how young people were voting, but they weren't dividing it by gender and then they weren't subdividing gender by race and other factors. So a lot of this information that we're getting is kind of mixed and new. But from what you can see in most polls, there is a shift across almost every demographic of young male voters. So among, for example, young male black voters, they're mostly democratic voters, but they're still slightly shifting towards the Republicans. It's certainly not true that if you're a black young man, you're still much more likely to be a Democrat than a Republican in the US. But the trend lines, as it were, are kind of the same across most demographics,

I think, with the exception of LGBT young men who have kind of remained where they are, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. Right, right. On the issue of young black men, you can tell certainly this is a group that the Democrats seem quite worried about right now. I think former President Obama was just out on the campaign trail trying to speak to this group. On the other side, you have someone who has consistently shown disregard, not just for the communities, but for you as a person. for you as a person. And you're thinking about sitting down? I want to get into with you more and inhibit the underlying structural reasons

that seem to have given Trump and the Republicans an opening here. Like, you know, why these men are moving more to the right? But first, talk to me a bit about the myriad ways that the Republican Party has been trying to grab these guys. What has the message been? What kind of talking points have we been hearing? They've kind of got a range of different strategies.

They're obviously targeting this group. You know, they see them as a group that not only are they kind of people who might not have voted otherwise, they're like an untapped group of voters. But they're also a group of people who are likely to shift from the Democrats to the Republicans. So to their minds, they need to go after them hard. One of the ways they're doing that is to turn the Republican Party into this testosterone-fueled, hyper-masculine party. I mean, to watch the Republican National Convention this year, you could have been watching WWE, you know. Pump came out to kid rock.

There was Dana White, the head of the UFC there, like introducing him. My fellow Americans, it is my honor to introduce the 45th and soon to be 47th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. Trump has been going to loads of UFC Ultimate Fighting Championship fights. Boy, the round of applause he's getting right now is pretty staggering. And you had to imagine that's what was going to happen. And also, Trump has been kind of courting these right wing young male YouTubers who are kind of not really in the political space. You know, they're more like pranksters. They more like say silly things. You know, there's these, you mentioned the Nelk Boys, there's Aiden Ross, there's Dave Portney and his Barstool Sports Media Network. And Trump and the Republicans

have found that by going into these kinds of non-political spaces, they do two things. They reach young men where they are, which is important. Bigger than that, they have a response to the Democrats' charge that this is a really, really important election. The most important election of our lifetime democracy is on the line. And instead of replying to that or disagreeing with it, what the Republicans are saying is, hey, let's have a good time. Let's chill out. Let's go in an Elon Musk supercar. Let's like have a beer. Let's have Elon Musk giving away a million dollars to voters. Every day from now until the election, we're giving out a million dollar prize. That is and all you have to do is sign a petition in support of the Constitution.

It's very straightforward. You don't even have to do is sign a petition in support of the Constitution. It's very straightforward. You don't even have to vote. You're most welcome. They're making it feel fun. And I think that, again, by sort of lowering the stakes of the election, making it seem silly and meme-y, that's another way of, like, reaching these boys. When Trump goes on some of these shows, right,

so he's been on Aidan Ross, as we talked about, Jake and Logan Paul, those are two brothers kind of deeply steeped in the fighting world, Theo Vaughn. Does he talk about anything serious, anything real? How would you describe the conversations beyond the kind of having a good time vibe? I mean, he talks about UFOs on every single one. He talks about UFOs. Why? I'm just saying, like, it starts with that. I've met with pilots like beautiful Tom Cruise, but taller.

Okay? Handsome, perfect people. Sir, there was something there that was round in form and going like four times faster than my super jet fighter plane. And I look at these guys and they really mean it yeah and you have to understand like the place it begins is wow this is going to get loads of listeners it's i'm going to make you so popular he talks a lot about his son baron he always mentions that baron is a huge fan and i do think that baron trump who is the is trump's youngest son who's just started at NYU, is somewhat leading the strategy and telling him which of these podcasts to go on.

My son's a big fan of yours, Barron. Really? Barron is? Yeah. He just graduated high school, right? That's right. He just did. He knows you very well. He said, Dad, he's big. Wow. He's a big one.

That's cool. But then he does pivot and he does start to talk about his talking points. He talks about the border. He talks about how evil Kamala is. And also these podcasters then take up some of those positions themselves. So the NELC boys on an episode of their thing that Trump wasn't on, I think when Kamala was giving her speech to the DNC, they like smashed the television that she was on.

This is not high level politicking, right? This is happening at quite a base level. But I think Trump is a kind of master manipulator and he has fun with these guys but he does slip in a lot of his politics and that is the politics that they share these guys are very right wing some of them are more mainstream you know like jake and logan paul are obviously hugely popular they're kind of very apolitical they're they're boxers and they just want to have a good time. And I think like by creating this kind of weird mishmash of politics, racism, fighting, gambling, like all these different things, again, it makes it like hard to tell exactly what's going on. And yet you leave with this strong Republican message.

Yeah. I mean, Theo Vaughn, too, is quite apolitical. He's had Bernie Sanders on. Totally. Like, I have to say, like, there's a whole section of that interview that Trump did with Theo Vaughn where Trump actually seemed super into the conversation, and they were talking about drug addiction and alcohol addiction. So you're way up with cocaine more than anything else you can think of. Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie. You know what I'm saying? You'll be out on your own porch.

You'll be your own street lamp. You're freaking. And is that a good feeling? No. It's a miserable feeling. But you do it anyway, just like the guy you're saying with the scotch. I just want to talk about the Nauk boys specifically because they're really interesting to me because they're actually helping to get out the vote, right? In a very real way.

And can you just tell me more about that? Yeah, when they were interviewing JD Vance, they announced that they're doing a $20 million registration drive to get more young men to vote. And you guys have a voice, believe it or not. I know you're one person, but you got to encourage everybody around you.

That's why we're doing this. Send the vote.com. Let's do this, boys. This is our last chance. And so, yeah, they are turning some of this excitement of having these big Republican figures on the podcast into very specific kind of actions into getting their listeners to vote. But they're not the only ones. But they're not the only ones like something that I think is goes in hand with these more fun media appearances is that the machine of the Republican Party is wildly spending on getting these voters out to vote. In fact, you know, by some reckoning in terms of like targeted vote, targeted ad spend, they're outsp um the democrats 10 to 1 in pennsylvania and i mean one of the ads that they're running really heavily there i was just going to read a tiny bit of it

because it just speaks to what this messaging is um it goes we did everything we were supposed to graduated high school got jobs put in the work to get ahead. And at every turn, Democrats said we were the problem. So they set quotas at schools to exclude us, rigged corporate America against us, and turned the other way when their economy left us behind. Even if we do everything right, Harris and the Democrats find new ways to make us pay. For what? No matter what we do, Democrats are against us. So this November, we're against them. Wow. And I think that is like a very powerful encapsulation of how this kind of silly politicking and going on these YouTubes is turned into this very potent message of resentment,

right? And we saw Trump stoke up white resentment in the 2016 election. And now he's trying to do the same thing here with male resentment and male resentment specifically towards women, you know, and towards the Democrats. And so the NELT boys sit at this kind of node between those two messages, I think. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not

know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Talk to me a little bit more about the resentment that the Republicans are tapping into there, right? Like, what is that argument that these guys, these young guys have been left behind? Is that their situation materially? Well, I think that there's like kind of two schools of thought on this issue. I mean, like I said, this kind of big gap that emerged between men and young men and young women started about sort of six to eight years ago, which is around the similar time that Me Too was happening, that, you know,

there was a kind of sense of feminism reaching a new place in the public discourse. And I think that at that time, Trump began seeding the ideas of this politics of resentment. It happened when he was in the confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, and there were these claims made against Kavanaugh that he had sexually assaulted young women. Kavanaugh's accuser is Christine Ford. She says that when she was a high school student, maybe 15 years old, a drunken Kavanaugh, a couple of years older, attacked her in a bedroom at a party. Former Yale classmate told senators and the FBI last year that he saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a drunken dorm party where

friends pushed his genitals onto a female student. The shocking story strikingly similar to an allegation made by another Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez. And Trump said, you know, it's a dangerous time to be a man in America. Well, I say that it's a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of. And I think that was the beginning of him suggesting that, like, you know, he would always say, you can't do anything as a man. And that message has been kind of refracted around the manosphere. You know, there's this huge guy. I mean, we talked about

Aidan Ross and Logan Paul, but another big figure in all of this is Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate, known as the king of toxic masculinity. I will state right now that I am absolutely sexist and I'm absolutely a misogynist. The former kickboxer turned male influencer has built up a huge following online, mostly among young men. But in real life, Tate is now facing three legal cases in two countries, all on allegations of abusing women. The charges include rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group,

as well as illegally accessing a... He very much stokes this idea that men are in a worse position because of feminism and that they are being held back by women. Let me tell you all the reality of female privilege, because we're living in the time of female privilege, not male privilege, because a lot is expected of men, and we're expected to perform. And if we do not perform, the world has no mercy. Women have no mercy on us when we fail to perform.

I think that both Trump and the ecosystem around him have spent the best part of a decade creating this narrative that men are doing worse off, you know, and that it's the fault of women. And I think that's now the kind of fertile ground which they're sowing. This idea that men are doing worse off than women, like from an economic perspective, is there merit to that? Yeah, there is merit to it. And it is true. Like, if you look at young men and young women in a lot of cities in America, men are having worse economic outcomes, they're finding it harder to get a job, the jobs that they are getting are worse paid, men are enrolling at universities at a lower rate. So there has been a shift, it's been a shift that's taken about 25 years to take place. And it's certainly not true at every age group, right? You know, in older age groups, men are still being paid more than women, particularly after women might leave the workforce for a while to have children and come back. All of those existing

structures, the gender pay gap, it still exists. But for this group, this group of under 30s, that it's the other way around, like women are being paid, doing better at college. And I think there is a absolute economic truth to this resentment. But that doesn't mean that men are being discriminated against. In fact, there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that they are. You know, the question of why that is, is a very complicated one, but it isn't one of discrimination. The Republicans have entered this narrative to a set of statistics. There is an economic truth to this. And that is something that could really be dealt with by politicians. And in fact, the Democrats are quite afraid to talk about the economic truth of this, because they have always been the party of women.

And so even when they do fantastic policies that really do help young men, they don't want to say so. They don't want to say, hey, this is going to be fantastic for young men in America. Whereas the Republicans aren't doing anything anyway, really, because at this point, they're mostly a party of just anti-immigration and vibes. But they're only too happy to kind of use the rhetoric of trying to help these boys who have been left behind by society. Right, right. And I mean, in some ways, that makes perfect sense to me as a woman, why the Democrats

would want to avoid that, because I do have to check myself in this conversation here a bit. I think I hear, you know, you talking about men feeling like they have an unfair and like that the world has kind of been working against them. And I have this real urge to just completely roll my eyes, right? But I do wonder, have the Democrats left these guys behind? And are they going to regret that in the coming weeks and months? I mean, let's take one of the like most stark areas, right? Suicide is one of the clearest areas in which there's a huge gender divide. The Democrats have

lots of task force on women and girls health, as they should. But a lot of people, for example, Richard Reeves, who has founded this think tank for men and boys and is working a lot in this space, is saying, why don't they have a task force on male suicide when there are 40,000 deaths a year? So that's just like one area in which it would be possible, it would be politically advantageous to kind of speak directly to a group. But if you watch something like the Democratic National Convention, which, you know, for my sins, I kind of did for four nights in a row. There is no mention of that. The message is this is a party that is going to protect abortion.

This is a party for women. And that might be a sound political strategy, but it also might not be. Right. Because the other way to look at this question is not to ask the question, why are young men gravitating towards the right? But why have they been leaving the left? The other way to look at it. Harris's team is apparently in talks for her to go on Joe Rogan. And, you know, again, with this kind of manosphere, there's a lot of overlap there. And what does that tell you at this point in the campaign that they're trying to do that?

Well, there was this really interesting bit of polling that the New York Times did a couple of months ago. that the New York Times did a couple of months ago. And they looked at, they were trying to isolate factors of what were the kind of key factors that would make someone leave the Democrats who had previously voted for them. And the number one factor was if they were born in the Middle East, which obviously has a lot to do

with what's going on in Gaza. And the number two factor is whether they were a Joe Rogan listener. And I think that it's very, very impactful. And I think Joe Rogan, what's interesting about him is that he sort of swings around a lot. He has some very like Trumpy views. He has some very traditional democratic views. He's not the brightest cookie. I mean, he often doesn't completely understand, I think, what a lot of his guests are saying, but he does have this kind of sweet, empathetic, everyman appeal.

Yeah, curious. Genuinely curious. Yeah, I think that it makes a lot of sense for Kamala to want to put her point across and be in that space and maybe be challenged by someone like him. So I can see how that is one smart move. But I think that the Democrats don't want to fall too much into the culture war game that the Republicans are trying to play. You know, the Democrats are currently in the White House. And during that time, President Biden passed this infrastructure bill that was a fantastic bill for young men. It provided a huge amount of jobs for young men. And they didn't want to say that. And they don't say that, you know, they haven't said like, this is a space in which we're really helping you. There's a fear of doing so. And I think it's the fear that you also speak to in having this conversation.

It's like awkward, you know, because as I said, like, young men are not being discriminated against. And yet, there should be no problem for politicians to say we want to help women and men to slightly tweak their message depending on who they're talking to. I think that's normal. Sam, you are obviously British. I thought I was hiding it. And this is not just playing out in the U.S., right? What we've been talking about today.

And so in Canada, I was looking at some data this morning from a firm called Abacus Data here that shows a big gender gap when it comes to attitude towards Trump from young men and women here. There's a huge gender gap. And then young men here are far more likely to have a positive impression of our conservative opposition leader, Pierre Polyev. And what have you seen from the UK from where you're from? I think it's a similar picture. I mean, obviously, because of our very different political systems, it kind of manifests in different ways. But I think that in the UK, there's been these horrific scenes of far right violence in a lot of northern towns and cities, you know, kind of marauding groups, burning down migrant accommodation. On mainland Europe, there's been something similar. And in mainland Europe, a lot of far right parties have

been elected to government and to the European Union Parliament. And looking at the footage of those supporters and looking at the footage of the people in the UK doing these racist attacks, you know, they look like the kind of guys that I went to school with. They look like normal young boys. And I find that to be chilling. You know, clearly something has happened in the way that people get that information, in the way that these messages are spread, that has shifted the view of young boys and young men into a different kind of political reality. And it's really discomforting. And I think a lot about parents, you know, The Guardian has done this long series on young men in the election. And one of the pieces we ran was about this father

who felt he had lost his son to this world, you know? And I think, you know, this was a liberal, loving father who struggled with trying, you know, trying to show his son that the information he was getting online wasn't right, you know? And that is a real challenge. We used to talk a lot about like losing your parents to Fox News. And I feel like now it's kind of switching and some parents feel like they are losing their kids to this set of beliefs that are so antithetical to how they try to raise their children.

are so antithetical to how they try to raise their children. Yeah. I have two young boys, you know, very young, but this has really consumed a lot of my thoughts lately. Sam, I really, I want to thank you for this. This was great and so interesting. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me. All right, that is all for today.

I'm J.B. Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.