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Notes -
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/democrats-want-reach-young-male-voters-how-get-them-is-up-debate-2025-10-06/
Reports like these have been an almost weekly occurrence all year. To state the obvious that none of these articles include: The Democratic Party and liberals engage in bulverism and bulverism alienates people. But is the problem purely liberals alienating young men or are conservatives also successfully courting them?
The Democrats lost young men to the party of, “hold still for your mugshot before you watch Riley Reid take her clothes off.”
It’s easy to get bogged-down in policy minutia here. Normies don’t care about that stuff, even if they say they do. Democrats lose because they are lame. Voting for Trump is fun. It’s thrilling. It feels like raiding a WOW dungeon with 77 million of your best buds. Voting Democrat feels like going to church, except you know that God isn’t real.
There is no reason to think that this is a permanent or even semipermanent phenomenon. All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.
Alternately, young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long, the fact that now VPNs are useful to get around conservative porn blocks is a non-issue. The friction was caused under the far left cancellation hysteria.
Did any young man actually save their professional life by buying a VPN? Unlikely. But lots of the advertising catered to that fear, and thus they were purchased with that in mind.
Basically nobody does this outside of persecution fantasies.
Most people are lurkers and not posters to begin with. What exactly is the threat model for a lurker reading some chud website like TheMotte dot org? The site gets hacked an every IP that ever visited is released?
The Internet use patterns that 90% of young men want to keep private involve cooming rather than intellectual heresy.
Even posters have more to fear from revealing too many details about themselves voluntarily than from attackers. And no VPN is going to save you there.
Funny you should mention that!.
This is posting rather than lurking and on top of that these true brexit geezers used their personal email addresses.
If you're donating to the Rittenhouse Foundation under, essentially, your real name, you are wasting money on that VPN subscription.
From 'persecution fantasies' to 'well they should have better opsec' is a hell of a redirect.
I should be clear that the persecution fantasy here is specifically that young men are at risk of having their IP addresses traced by a visual basic GUI written by The Liberals unless they use a VPN (which they are all doing), hence why I quoted "young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long."
I don't argue that doing stuff you don't want people to find out about under your real name is inadvisable. It's just that VPNs are neither necessary or sufficient to avoid this situation.
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