By Caroline Downey
Friday, April 10, 2026
It’s well documented now that the Democrats lost a lot of young men in the 2024 election,
largely because of the party’s enthusiastic participation in their
disempowerment, from the Obama administration’s Title IX witch hunts to DEI to
Me Too. Gavin Newsom’s wife is continuing this legacy, performing the same
moralistic nagging that drove them toward MAGA. Rather than identify the root
causes of young men’s estrangement from society, Jennifer Newsom is doubling
down on the idea that men must be reformed. She represents everything wrong
with the Democrats’ outreach to young men.
Discovering that her own son was developing
right-wing tastes didn’t even prompt any soul-searching from the Newsoms.
“The boys who spend time online . . . I’m trying not to
be political here . . . are moving to the right and being influenced by Andrew
Tate and some of that alt-right socialization online that we know is very, very
dangerous,” Newsom said during a recent interview. “My husband and I were alarmed when my
kids were watching sports online and my son knew about Andrew Tate and thought
he was pretty cool . . . that’s scary. We’re one of the most progressive
households, and our son is confused.”
Is he confused? Or is he finding a strange solace in a
messenger that doesn’t automatically pathologize him and his buddies? To be
sure, some corners of the manosphere are plagued by a new mind virus — they
claim marriage is a trap and a bad deal for men, and that male self-improvement
is found not in the relational but in the material and physical. Tate, the face
of this nihilistic movement, is abhorrent. But Newsom also name-dropped
psychology professor Jordan Peterson as an example of a problematic persona for
boys to take cues from, demonstrating that her disdain for male-focused content
isn’t just on the fringes. Unlike Tate, Peterson is one of several
manosphere-adjacent commentators who advocate for the family unit, marriage,
and children, while examining how young women’s embrace of radical feminism has
threatened those institutions.
Jennifer Newsom went on to say that she and her husband
were proposing legislation to force tech companies to restrict content that
they deem alt-right. She isn’t wrong that some young men are going off the deep
end of the internet into antisemitic territory, grasping at straws for someone
to blame. That goes both ways. Far-left young male streamer Hasan Piker said, “America
deserved 9/11,” and in November 2025, Piker undertook a PR trip to China,
glossing over the Chinese Communist Party’s abuses and authoritarianism. Yet
the Newsoms’ censorious instincts are only ever aimed at the right.
At some point, prominent Democrats such as the Newsoms
need to admit that they don’t believe there is such a thing as male virtues.
“I’ve given our boys dolls even if they tear the head
off, to learn that care and caregiving is not just an activity that’s reserved
for women but it’s also an activity that’s a responsibility of men,” Jennifer
Newsom said in a separate appearance. “What I’ve done with both my daughters
and my sons is, if I’m reading a book and the protagonist is a male, I just
change the ‘he’ or ‘she,’ and it just normalizes for my sons. . . . I want them
to see that women can be the center of a story.”
Replacing their toy trucks with Barbies probably won’t
make them more compassionate people; it’ll just frustrate their playtime
interests to build, smash, and seek adventure. The Newsoms’ parenting approach
also discounts at an early age the importance of male heroism, which every
society needs for hard, painful things. What self-respecting young man would
support a party that holds that attitude?
The real political radicalization problem in America is
not that of young men but of young women, who have lurched dramatically to the left while their male
counterparts have stayed relatively stable by comparison. Under the Democrats’
worldview, it is young men who are in the demeaning position of having to
explain themselves to a party that thinks they’re inherently broken and toxic.
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