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"Well, today is going to be the most important stream I've ever done," Adin Ross, 23, proclaimed to an audience that peaked at more than 500,000 viewers in early August.
The Boca Raton, Florida, native gained popularity in 2020 due in part to live streams where he played NBA 2K with future Los Angeles Lakers basketball player and Lebron James’s son Bronny on Twitch. But Ross didn't stick to video game talk. In 2022, he hosted Andrew Tate — the social media personality awaiting trial in Romania on charges of human trafficking and rape — on his stream. Ross has also hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his Kick channel.
Ross has excelled in the role of provocateur, amassing 1.4 million followers on Kick and 4.5 million on YouTube. He has been banned multiple times from Twitch, culminating in a permanent ban in 2023, for saying and displaying hate speech.
On the day Ross proclaimed was his “most important stream,” though, he was venturing into uncharted territory: He was interviewing former President Donald J. Trump. The live stream serves as an example of how right-wing and right-leaning streamers have worked in recent months to help the Republican presidential nominee court young male voters.
"We're going to get some good ratings today," quipped the metrics-obsessed former president, sitting in his living room in Mar-a-Lago. The also-former reality star was right: The video peaked at 580,000 viewers. But Trump wasn't there for praise or the golden Rolex and Tesla Cybertruck he was given by Ross; he was there for the streamer’s large audience of young men. We don’t know the exact breakdown of Ross’s audience, but Kick tends to skew younger and male. According to a platform-analytics website, Similar Web, Kick's audience is nearly 75% male, and the majority of its users are under age 35, with 37% of the audience being under age 24.
Young voters are expected to play a critical role in the November election, with roughly 40.8 million Gen Z'ers eligible to vote this year. As young women have increasingly become more progressive and politically active, young men are moving in the opposite direction, expressing more conservative views on political issues and gender roles more broadly.
A growing group of these young men have found an online home in the Manosphere, a loose community of right-leaning and anti-feminist social media agitators that is often described as including folks like Sneako, Logan Paul, The NELK Boys, Fresh and Fit, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Adin Ross, and Andrew Tate. These creators explicitly appeal to young men either through shared interests, like video games or prank videos, or by offering to teach them how to make money or “get girls.”
A recent survey by the Equimundo Center for Masculinities and Social Justice, a nonprofit focused on gender equality and promoting positive masculinity, found that more than 40% of young men trust one or more misogynistic voices online, including Tate and Peterson, who are arguably at the more extreme end of the spectrum from someone like Ross. Researchers note that this percentage is higher than the number of young men who trust either Trump or President Joe Biden. And nearly two-thirds of Gen Z Americans said they turn to social media at least once a week for their news, according to the Morning Consult, compared with just 27% who said they watched broadcast news.
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The Trump campaign has taken notice of this and is tapping into the platforms of Ross, Logan Paul, and the NELK Boys, among others. During Ross's live stream with Trump, he asked the Republican presidential nominee to speak directly to the first-time voters in the audience. “I love having a young audience….,” Trump replied. "Right now, you don't have the American dream.”
The former president’s appeal to young men’s concerns about the “American dream” is pointed. Although men still far out-earn women, their earnings in the United States have fallen in the last 40 years — meaning they make less than their fathers and grandfathers. Experts say this trend contributes to feelings of financial disenfranchisement, particularly as a majority of Americans still believe being a “good husband or father” means being able to provide financially. In the Equimundo survey, many of these young men also reported feeling uncertain about their economic stability.
Says Equimundo’s president, Gary Barker, this has political consequences. "Guys who reported that they felt a sense of economic uncertainty of their future were the ones more likely to believe that, you know, feminism had gone too far," he explains.
Political experts argue that Trump has successfully pinpointed a receptive audience in young, disaffected men — who've spent years being primed online for Trump's brand of grievance politics. "There's a growing current among a lot of young men of grievance and feelings of displacement that we're seeing articulated much more on the right," says Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life and Senior Fellow in Polling and Public Opinion for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "[Trump] is already positioned to do fairly well among young men. But, I think, the extent that he can reach out to people like Joe Rogan or Logan Paul and articulate that he is someone who will advocate for them, and he cares about what happens to them, [helps his campaign]."
Cox argues that this is less about political ideology and more about the way the right and the Manosphere have aligned to give men a scapegoat. "The way that the [Manosphere] influences politics is by identifying the villain…. the feminists, the immigrants," he says. From there, it's easy for right-wing politicians with similar messages to make an appeal to these disaffected young men.
Melissa Deckman, CEO of the nonprofit research firm Public Religion Research Institute, says Democrats have not made the same explicit campaign appeals to young men as they have to young women in recent years. "Trying to meet young men where they are going – [in] the spaces where they tend to hang out online – is, I think, probably a good strategy," Deckman explains. "In part, because I think Democrats have not necessarily done a good job at reaching out to young men, many of whom studies show are disaffected in a lot of ways."
There are more recent examples of Democrats highlighting positive forms of masculinity through Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Deckman adds, but Republicans have been making very explicit appeals to this demographic, including with Senator Josh Hawley’s 2023 book, Manhood.
Barker asserts that there is a way forward that doesn't involve catering to our society’s worst impulses and amplifying misinformation — it’s called empathy. He argues that left-leaning political figures need to be able to talk about and advance policies focused on issues that disproportionately impact young men, including a concerning rise in suicide rates and other worrisome statistics about loneliness and mental health.
“Those of us on the progressive side and from the feminist side often want to say, 'Well… we've never had full economic equality for women. Women are doing more of the care work. Women still suffer violence from the hands of men. You want us now to be sympathetic to you, men?' And I think we have to answer that with, ‘Yes, we can do both,’” Barker maintains. "We've got to be able to say, ‘Look, men are confused.’ A lot of young men, in particular, need to step into the conversation with compassion and empathy and say we can do both. We can talk about the unfinished journey to make sure that women and girls have the lives they deserve, the voice, the respect, and the equality that is nonnegotiable in the world — and we can have empathy towards men."
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