Conservatives Are Scared to Address the Radicalization of Young Women
Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey, a lesbian who claims to be Catholic, signed legislation this week liberalizing abortion while surrounded by progressive women celebrating the right to murder their healthy babies up till birth. To conservatives who rightly regard late-term abortion as the killing of a viable child, the scene was grotesque.
It also illustrated a political asymmetry conservatives rarely discuss.
Endless ink has been spilled and countless podcasts recorded about the radicalization of young men on the right. Almost nobody in conservative media wants to address the equally serious radicalization of young women toward the progressive left.
There has been plenty of controversy in conservative circles about young men embracing nihilistic or extremist politics online. Rod Dreher, among others, has warned about young conservative men drifting toward figures such as Nick Fuentes and adopting a politics of resentment and despair.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but it does not answer the larger question. Even if Dreher is right about one cohort of men, it does not follow that young men are uniquely radicalized, or even that they represent the larger political problem. Conservatives should be capable of noticing more than one trend at a time. And the trend among women is impossible to ignore.
Kamala Harris received 53% of the female vote in 2024, while Joe Biden received 54% in 2020. Women are substantially more supportive than men of legal abortion. They are also more likely to regard changing one’s gender as morally acceptable and more likely to say society has not done enough to accommodate transgender people.
The same divide appears on immigration. Women are more likely to support amnesty, oppose ICE deportations, and favor extending legal protections to illegal immigrants.
The divide extends beyond electoral politics. Young women are less likely than young men to say they want children and less likely to prioritize family over professional goals. They are also less likely to express a positive view of capitalism.
None of this means women are a political monolith. Marriage changes voting behavior dramatically. Married women are far more likely to vote Republican and hold traditional views on family and gender.
Race also plays a part.
Ripping on liberal white women is practically a conservative pastime, partly because “white” makes them culturally safe targets. But the voting data complicate the caricature. A majority of white women voted for Trump in 2024, while much smaller shares of Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, and black women did so.
White women are hardly a uniformly conservative bloc. But they are not the most progressive female constituency either.
Despite the mountain of evidence that females are far more left wing, there will be no books about the dangerous trend of radicalization among young women. There will be plenty of cable-news segments about how social media is poisoning young men. There will be endless concern about podcasts, gaming culture, online masculinity, and the political temptations facing disaffected boys.
Much less energy will be spent asking what TikTok, universities, activist institutions, and elite media have done to the minds of young women.
The reason is simple: Young men are a safe target.
Anyone can denounce them with little institutional risk. A broad criticism of female political behavior, by contrast, can quickly become a career problem. That taboo exists on the right almost as surely as it does on a college campus.
It must be said that this is not an exercise in blanket condemnation of women. The conservative movement is filled with passionate, caring, godly mothers, wives, daughters, and single women who genuinely support the fight for the future of the United States.
A civilization where men and women are constantly at odds with each other is doomed. Breaking men and women out of loving families and turning them into political blocs to be catered to is disastrous for the health of the nation.
South Korea provides a warning about where gender war can lead. Its political divide between young men and women has grown exceptionally wide, with the sexes increasingly supporting very different parties and organizing around competing political identities.
South Korea also has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. That does not prove the political gender divide caused the fertility collapse; housing costs, work culture, marriage patterns, and other factors have played a role. But a society in which men and women increasingly regard one another as political adversaries will have a harder time persuading them to marry, form families, and raise children together.
Love you, Auron, but I think this is precisely where we keep losing young men.
Nothing fundamental is going to change as long as we continue telling them that their proper response to grave injustice is to be patient and wait for constitutional processes to work themselves out. Roughly 63 million unborn children were killed in the United States since Roe, while generations of men who believed those children were human beings were effectively told that protecting them meant voting every two years, donating to the right candidates, and waiting for the courts. They've been emasculated - as was I.
We should at least be willing to ask what that does to men.
It reminds me of something Martin Luther King Jr. actually wrote in Letter from Birmingham Jail. I am no MLK devotee, but his criticism of the white moderate is difficult to dismiss simply because of its author. King complained about the man who was "more devoted to 'order' than to justice," who agreed with the goal but rejected direct action, and who continually counseled the oppressed to wait for "a more convenient season."
That argument ought to make conservatives uncomfortable.
I am 67 years old. I once worked on Capitol Hill as a Senior Legislative Assistant for two conservative members of Congress. I believed deeply in this process. But I think we should consider what we are communicating to young men when our answer to nearly every political and moral crisis is some variation of vote, hope, and cope.
We tell them to become strong men. Protectors. Men willing to sacrifice themselves for their wives, children, churches, and neighbors. Then, when they conclude that something monstrous is happening around them, we tell them that their moral agency must remain confined to processes established by the very political order that permits it.
Eventually some of them are going to stop listening.
And here is the problem conservatives particularly need to confront: the Constitution does not guarantee conservative outcomes. Never has and never will.
An AOC presidency would be perfectly constitutional. A Congress dominated by Marxists could be perfectly constitutional. A Supreme Court populated by Muslim judges hostile to Christianity, traditional morality, and everything conservatives have spent generations defending would be perfectly constitutional. If the voters elect them, the Senate confirms them, and the prescribed procedures are followed, the Constitution has done exactly what it was designed to do.
That is why "but the Constitution" cannot be the end of our political reasoning.
If our response to young men watching their civilization change around them is simply to tell them to wait, vote harder, and trust the process, we should not be surprised when they eventually conclude that the process itself is incapable of answering the moral questions they are asking. Sideline themselves because their elders or political leaders kept them on the sidelines.
And if we refuse even to discuss what legitimate political action might exist beyond "vote, hope, and cope," someone else eventually will.
I am increasingly concerned that we are not going to like who that someone else is.
Feminism is the greatest single disaster to befall western civilization in the past 80 years or so.. From it stems every evil and is at the foundation of about every problem we face today. Feminism is of course, a rebranding of Marxist principles, which explains why it is so deadly, more so because it has been renamed to confuse the naïve and ill informed in our society.
Compounding all of this is “conservatism“ and “conservatives“ in the modern era, who do not know what it is they’re trying to conserve because they have no core principles, virtues, or values that they are willing to fight for, much less die for if necessary. All a “conservative“ is conserving in this era is the leftist position that was staked out some 30 years ago, then through their patience and efforts instituted into law some 20 years ago. “Conservatives” are incapable of fighting back.
What we need is a new type of principles and and a cause which has to be centered on Christian nationalism and principles of Constitutionally limited government and America First. The real leadership there is yet to emerge. One of the greatest leaders that we had was Charlie Kirk. That’s why they murdered him. Until we start fighting back, progressivism will continue its inexorable march to victory.