Last November, during his address before McDonald’s investors, President Donald Trump—as he is wont to do during public speeches—went on one of his weird tangents. “And that plane went ‘pshh,’ like this,” he continued, diving his hand downward in an accompanying gesture. “You know, when it drops a bomb, it goes down very steeply, because that gives it a better angle, and, you know, more speed for the bomb.”
One demographic may be particularly susceptible to this kind of incitement, one for whom targeting an otherized population is viewed more as a game than as state-sanctioned violence: lonely, angry young men.
As they are increasingly siloed online, it becomes easier for young men to distance themselves from others, viewing all other perspectives as illegitimate or unimportant. If your experience is the only true version of reality, then other people become NPCs, or “nonplayable characters”—not individuals but mere background actors populating the scenes in your everyday life.
This perspective is frequently encouraged by the administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given his missions names such as “Midnight Hammer” and “Southern Spear,” phrases that sound more like weapons in a game than actual military operations. (Hegseth also has a tattoo that reads “Deus Vult,” a slogan adopted by the far right that was popularized by the grand strategy computer game Crusader Kings II.) And Trump, of course, continues to enthusiastically describe military strikes with the use of sound effects, as if he were watching an action flick rather than bombs dropping on human beings.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has enthusiastically adopted the strategy of explicitly appealing to gamers through distinct visuals and coded language. One recruitment poster shared by ICE on its Instagram account last year harkened to the video game series Halo, encouraging potential recruits to “destroy the flood.” In the Halo series, the “flood” is a parasitic alien life form and one of the primary villains of the franchise—the administration is thus comparing undocumented immigrants to an existential threat to society that must be eradicated.
ICE has planned a $100 million year-long recruitment push—capitalizing on the role-playing-game-obsessed, violently inclined fan base that Trump cultivated on the campaign trail. Other marketing tactics include Snapchat ads, hiring influencers and livestreamers on the far-right streaming platform Rumble, and using a geolocation technique to send ads to anyone near military bases, Nascar races, college campuses, or gun and trade shows. ICE will also send targeted ads to people who listen to patriotic podcasts or attend UFC fights. As the Young Men Research Initiative has noted, the agency is explicitly targeting young men who have fears of being economically insolvent and are anti-immigrant and right-wing.
“After being at the hospital for less than three hours, I was discharged from the hospital into custody of the FBI. As we left the hospital, I was escorted out through the back in a wheelchair. I observed over dozens of Border Patrol agents waiting outside the hospital,” Martinez said. “One of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It was the same agent who had previously kept coming in and out [of my hospital] room, and I had to repeatedly tell him to leave.
She also revealed that the agent who shot her, Charles Exum, bragged over text after the shooting, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”
“I mean, I feel you’re somewhat trapped in the NPC dialogue tree of a traditional journalist,” he said. “So it’s difficult when I’m conversing with someone who’s trapped in the dialogue tree of a conventional journalist because it’s like talking to a computer.”
Young men are disproportionately likely to turn to online communities to find solidarity, according to the Young Men Research Initiative, and tend to believe that the people they follow on social media are “better” than they are: wealthier, more successful, and more attractive. This can create not only a sense of distance from their peers but bitterness that they appear to have fallen behind.
The young men who were teenagers or in their early twenties during the height of the coronavirus pandemic and may not have had sufficient peer-to-peer interaction could have instead experienced the world through screens during a defining point in their development. Social media and video games in a vacuum cannot be blamed for a rise in misogyny and racism, but the “atomized” media experience during the pandemic helped further isolate this population, said Massanari.
Andrew Breitbart, the creator of the eponymous far-right site, popularized the “doctrine” that “politics is downstream of culture.” For the modern young man, the more accurate assessment is that “politics is downstream of experience,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.
This desire for belonging dovetails into a desire to see “strong” political figures. According to a survey by SocialSphere, 71 percent of young men said it was important to have a leader who “demonstrates strength and authority, even if it means bypassing traditional political norms.”
Dashtgard described it as a sort of “toxic belonging”—a sense of exclusivity for people who are normally excluded.
Belonging to these online communities can also make people more inclined to acts of violence, against both others and themselves. Community leaders will often lead other members down a slippery slope of increasingly extreme ideas, resulting in desensitization to violent imagery or the deepening of beliefs that certain groups are naturally inferior.
Massanari draws a line from the “Gamergate” movement of 2014 to modern politics both online and IRL—in real life, in internet parlance. What began as a disgruntled ex-boyfriend’s lengthy rant against his former partner, a video game designer, morphed into a massive online harassment campaign against women in the gaming community. The young, white men who participated in Gamergate doxed and explicitly threatened the safety of their targets, railing against racial and gender diversity in an industry that had heretofore catered to them almost exclusively.
Where the participants in Gamergate believed that societal ills were caused by feminists and “social justice warriors,” the current netizens of the online right see immigrants and transgender Americans as agents of a great replacement. The disaffected young men of today who are inculcated in these messages grew up with the internet that Gamergate built.
Journalist Ryan Broderick noted in an interview with PBS News last year that “many young extremists that we have seen come out of the woodwork over the last few years since the pandemic see public violence as a path towards fame, towards glory, another way to go viral.” They may have an “accelerationist” viewpoint that political violence will push the country to destruction.
Trump’s support among young men is far from universal. Some polls show that the majority of Gen Z men, and even a percentage of the young men who voted for him, are feeling some buyers’ remorse.
Gaming communities can provide those outlets. Della Volpe said that when he talked with young men over the summer for the “Speaking With American Men” initiative, which seeks to provide research on how Democrats can reconnect with this demographic, he noticed that young men he surveyed do not feel comfortable talking about their emotions outside of “anonymized communities.”
A potential cure, then, is ensuring that there are other opportunities for young men to connect with each other. Dashtgard added that “there are proven, empirically validated strategies for preventing this kind of violence from happening,” primarily by helping young people in general create offline spaces and networks where they can discuss the feelings that would otherwise lead them to online fringe groups.
“Violence is preventable. This is not something that … young men are doomed to,” Dashtgard said. “Most young men are not participating in extremist groups, are not being radicalized into male supremacy. Even the ones who are consuming don’t necessarily become radicalized to it.”
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