Based Man DROPS FACTS To Woke Lady Who Claims Men Can Menstruate – 64 million views
BASED Pastor SLAMS Woke School Board For “Educational” Material – 48 million views
Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Woke Feminist – 20 million views
One could not fault the average university student for assuming that every YouTube video listed above originated in the peak era of pwned feminist YouTube compilations painstakingly curated for 12-year-old incels in the making. However, to my absolute dismay, when logging into an account I had not touched in years — which had prior to last week only been used for watching Broadway ‘slime tutorials’ — this style of content has not gone anywhere. In fact, every video that I stumbled across and documented in my Notes app had been posted within a year of their appearance on my Shorts feed, with comments as recent as 4 months ago —with thousands of likes, might I add—in complete agreement with the conservative viewpoints shared.
This phenomenon is not exclusive to YouTube, with conservative accounts such as LibsOfTikTok on X and Nara Smith on TikTok amassing millions of followers and thousands of likes with every post. Nara Smith in particular, as the poster girl for ‘traditional living’ despite her thriving online career, reigns supreme in both progressive and more conservative social media circles with her name becoming a shorthand for making food from scratch, something her social media presence centres on. Despite her vintage-inspired housewife cosplay and collaboration with notorious tradwife influencer Hannah Neeleman aka Ballerina Farm, left leaning young women took to TikTok in droves to express their dismay at her right wing values after the 2024 US election. A TikTok video from user @celebrity.newsssss expressing disbelief at how Smith, a woman of colour, could be a Trump supporter, racked up 3.8 million views and 302,500 likes after being posted on November 11th of last year. Yet Smith’s videos still receive millions of views and a slew of positive comments from young women, many of whom display markers of progressive views on their profiles —blue haired young women with pronouns in bio gooped and gagging over the internet’s coolest tradwife.
I can’t help but feel as if this marks a significant change in our wider society, one that I am not particularly ready for. According to 2023 research from the Australian Communications and Media Authority, 46% of Australians aged 18-24 primarily consume their news from social media, with 31% of their cohort viewing influencers and internet celebrities as their primary source of information. That figure is alarming to say the least. Combined with the CEOs of major social media sites present at the Trump inauguration, throwing Roman salutes on the global stage, and authorising messages in favour of Trump upon the reinstatement of their app in the USA, things are not looking good for progressive young people in the anti-information, post-truth era.
Australian politics and culture take heavy inspiration from the state of things in the USA at any given time. With Northern Territory Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price condemning abortion after the first trimester and opposition leader Peter Dutton’s MAGA inspired publication ‘Let’s Get Australia Back on Track’, along with the Australian public’s disillusionment with the Albanese government, one can’t help but wonder whether, come our federal election, we’ll once again have a conservative government.
It is clear, at least to my admittedly politically inexperienced #TooYoungToVote eyes, that the international community is experiencing the swing of the political pendulum, and it’s swinging to the right. Australia has never been a particularly left- leaning country, since both of our primary political parties tend to beare right-leaning after all. This is particularly seen when it comes to hot button topics like immigration, with the Albanese government working alongside Dutton’s Coalition to pass bills that enable the Minister for Immigration to pay off countries to accept deported individuals with cancelled visas, and allow for non-citizens to be imprisoned for refusing to comply with deportation orders regardless of the persecution they may face in their country of origin. Now more than in the past decade, conservative ideology is rising in popularity among the youth, aided in significant part by the conservative bias of social media algorithms.
Whether this is a positive or negative thing is left up to personal interpretation, though my man-hating vegetarian feminist take is of course that I wish it weren’t so. I suppose I’ll have to stick to Tumblr for the foreseeable future, until eventually even the fangirls and furries decide it’s cringe to be woke.