As the results of the 2024 presidential election rolled in, I couldn’t help but think my generation would be the solution to the world’s plights. I thought it to be true for a while, but finding out that more than half of young men voted for President-elect Donald Trump quickly dispelled that hope.
After the election, I thought about the boys I grew up with and how I watched their ideologies change as we got older. I remember when we were old enough to start exploring the internet and the videos we used to watch together. It started as content children in middle school watched, like gamers and nonsensical memes.
The content we watched slowly devolved into videos with edgier humor and more derogatory content. I thought the shift I witnessed was typical for young boys, but when they started singing Hitler song parodies and dancing to “The Sex Offender Shuffle,” I knew it was far from normal.
The bright-eyed kids I once knew devolved into nefarious versions of themselves. Their interests in superheroes and comic books slowly morphed into obsessions with war stories and finding jokes on the cutting edge of macabre.
The transformation I witnessed then is still persistent today, and it’s known colloquially as the alt-right pipeline. The pipeline is an observable phenomenon where users are slowly indoctrinated into sympathizing with extremist politics through algorithms and video recommendations.
It’s important for adults to monitor the content children consume and intervene when it’s necessary. Students who are introduced to the pipeline must also know how to identify the signs of it and how to avoid falling further down the rabbit hole.
It can start with something as simple as gaming channels, like one of YouTube’s most popular creators, Pewdiepie. His content seems normal at first glance, and most of his videos consist of challenges and vlogs, but beneath the facade is the edgelord humor that serves as the entry point for the pipeline.
The humor often includes traditional jokes about the “blue-haired” liberal archetype. This gets the viewers to see themselves as superior to left-leaning politics until they see liberalism as a parody. Then, algorithms slowly submerge users into the digital realm of conservative think tanks and anti-woke podcasts.
The harmful ideologies shared by these podcasts perpetuate xenophobic and racist ideologies championed by some members of the Republican Party. For example, The Heritage Foundation, the organization that authored Project 2025 and had faculty members nominated to Trump’s cabinet, has amassed nearly half a million subscribers on YouTube.
Right-leaning viewers get recommended extremist channels at a higher rate than centrists or left-leaning viewers, according to a 2023 study by University of California, Davis. The roads of the internet lead to the dead end of Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, who have young men across the nation screaming, “Your Body, My Choice!”
The right-wing creators lurk behind screens. They prey on engagement to exploit the viewers’ existing prejudices to trap them in a self-enforcing cycle. It is imperative everyone recognizes the imminent threat and does their part to eradicate it.
Refusing to pay attention to the media children engage with is causing unimaginable hate to force its way into young minds. The alt-right would rather be seen as martyrs in the crusade against progress instead of changing their minds.
The pipeline will remain a threat as long as the internet is ingrained into daily life. Fully separating children from the internet is not feasible, so it is crucial to halt the progression of the pipeline through awareness.
The burden of preventing the right from wreaking havoc on the youth is on the homefront. People must be aware of what children are watching on the internet, no matter how harmless it seems.
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