Yeah, this shit hadn't really taken off much when I was that age but I can 100% see it being a problem for me if it had. I was very much socially isolated and angry when I was younger because I was ostracized by basically everyone and couldn't figure out wtf I was doing wrong (looking back I still don't really know) and it wasn't until I got into college that I met people who were kind enough to help me get straightened out. If I hadn't met those people I think there's a pretty decent chance that I turned out to be a horrible person. I was certainly heading that way for a while.

Young boys see comments directed at men as being directed at themselves as well. The foundations of the things that make a man buy into this shit are laid when he's young. I think it's quite valid to bring this up.

I figure that the assumption being made is that the alt-right social media pipeline is generally accepted to refer to the online ecosystem that was created to court impressionable young boys from the ages of 12-25 into the rightwing and then extreme rightwing ecosystem. And though Men's Rights Activists is more broad and could be considered a choice, it is the younger demographic that are the ones "falling in", and that's where I imagine Vaush clarified that with saying "12 y.o.s".

Older folks entering involuntarily, would have been through other media like Rush Limbaugh-style AM radio, Fox News or other Republican campaigns directly like Project Redmap in 2010, then those Republican groups shifted even further right over the last 15 years.

Perhaps the correlation that 12 year olds are the ones falling in even if others are doing it by choice, should have been explained by Vaush before jumping directly to the conclusion.

Sidenote: The problem is caused by the difficulty to have nuanced arguments within 150 characters. (The first two Twitter screencaps)

An adult man doesn't just join the Andrew Tate crowd. The foundations for agreeing with his misogyny were laid while he was a teenager (or even younger). The people who are alienated by this sort of rhetoric aren't adults, they're teenagers who haven't formed a political identity yet, who can yet be turned away from that self-destructive ideology and it is them who are turned away by such rhetoric.

The term "man" may by all of us be seen only to refer to males over the age of 18, but a teenage boy will already identify with it, will thinks of himself as cool, independent, grown-up. He will see an attack on "men" as an attack on himself.

While the targeted group may have been adult men, the actual targets will have been the twelve y/o Vaush spoke off and they will be driven further away from the principles of democracy and equality and into the hands of waiting fascists.

Yeah, the next step in the conversation is acknowledging that the same applies to a LOT of adult men. Not the majority, by far. But certainly enough to make a significant difference.

A lotta guys out there are participating in the patriarchy simply because it's how they were raised, or because they were in a bad spot and the right made a better pitch to them when they asked for help. Or the only pitch. They haven't thought it all the way through yet, and are just working with the information they have.

Every day at every age, there are some men out there collapsing the cognitive dissonance between patriarchy and basic human decency. Men who could be good people if they discard the right belief when the two finally become irreconcilable. When talking about effective outreach, these guys are important to reach. I'd say not as urgent as reaching out to the malleable kids before Dennis Prager sticks his oily little fingers in their brains or something of the like. But still a very worthwhile demographic to reach out to.

I don't think misandrist feminist rhetoric actually existed in any significant amount. It was a tiny obnoxious subculture of femcels, trolls, and "drop the t" holdover second wave feminists (who, ironically, turned around and made common cause with the misogynistic right once they got the opportunity).

There were far more right wing misogynists complaining about evil man hating feminists than there were actual man hating feminists.

What created the misogynistic counterculture was a. aggressive campaign of anti-feminist propaganda aimed at convincing young men that all feminists hated them, aided and abetted by a social media algorithm that hunted down the worst and stupidest takes and repeated them everywhere.

And when young men started repeating this misogynistic male influencer propaganda in real life, women in real life started treating them like misogynists. Which only confirmed their belief that feminists hated them.

But rather than blaming individual women for not interacting with individual men repeating misogynistic propaganda, I put more blame on social media and the atomization of Western society. Good male role models, good female authority figures, some trusted friend or family member to actually talk to in real life, could probably have interrupted this cycle for a lot of young men. But a lot of young people don't really have role models anymore.

Yes. The left is horrible at messaging, both in terms of word-choice AND in terms of attitude. I fundamentally agree with left-leaning ideals far more than right-leaning ideals, but holy shit there are people who are just dog-shit at the messaging, and somehow that messaging sticks the hardest.