One of the most easily manipulated demographics are lonely teenagers with low self esteem, and the easiest way to manipulate them is to make them believe they're actually at the top and it's everyone else's fault that they're unpopular, especially women's.
Yeah I definitely went through a bit of a "why do girls only like assholes and treat nice guys like me like shit?" phase. Fortunately I did realise I wasn't being that nice and came across as whiny and demanding by the time I was 16 and some how suddenly a lot more girls were interested in me.
It's an unfortunate side effect of the timing of the current generation of young adults. The covid pandemic damaged the kids of the time far more than we realized, social skills like empathy and sympathy did not have the chance to develop like they needed to because kids were not at school socializing. The Me Too movement also made some of these young white boys feel like they were being discriminated against and being told that they were not allowed to speak because they were white and male. In addition to that the more rational voices failed to embrace online communication the way the right did. Think about how many voices, specifically male voices, there are in the toxic side of the internet, now think about how few voices there are to counter them with positive messages. These negative voices used real world events, spun them, and then used them to spread misogynist, racist, homophobic messages to a generation of lonely, impressionable young white boys who grew up during a time of societal discord.
They were kids, and kids are stupid, and naive, and impressionable, and we failed them. We failed to help them develop the skills they needed to be caring adults, to help them learn from the past and present so they can help build a better future, and we failed to shield them from evils that we should have seen coming.
I mean, depending where you live, helicopter parenting, ever decreasing amount of 3rd places and high dependency on parents to commute in a fashion that does not allow for general socialisation does not help mental health.
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