Bench press. (Photo via NARA and DVIDS public domain archive)
After the 2024 presidential election, many Americans realized that Gen Z is not as liberal as previously thought.
What was assumed to be the most progressive, left-leaning generation, voted much more conservative than they did four years ago. This is mainly due to a shift towards the right in young men. But why did this progressive generation make the more conservative shift? There may be an answer that explains a subset of the young male vote: online fitness influencers.
After the 2024 presidential election, I unfollowed a good number of content creators on social media. Many influencers who had been politically vague in the past posted one or two things that made their stance clear, and I made the choice to stop consuming their content. A very large number of these content creators are fitness influencers. There are many young men my age who follow these same people and are not going to stop consuming their content, despite maybe having similar political views to mine.
Most male fitness influencers gear their content toward young men. Most mainstream short form content creators in general make content that is inherently aimed at young people, simply because that is the age group that primarily uses these social media websites. Many fitness influencers are encouraging conservatism and right-wing values in young men through sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle messaging. Messaging can start out as something as innocuous as advice on form or exercise, and can become the message that you must always be strong, which can become the message that being gay, or liberal, or anything except a specific caricature of a hypermasculine Republican, is bad and wrong and weak.
This insidious messaging is present within a huge amount of mainstream content creators. It is generally sparsely populated through their content, just enough to get it into the minds of those consuming their videos, but not enough for it to be the main topic of their content. Harmful beliefs and divisive ideas can be created and reinforced in young men who are not even trying to engage with politics, but are looking to the internet for advice and inspiration. They may see these men who they want to look like, and eventually internalize the idea that these enviable, admirable men all share the same political and social views.
Why is it that so many fitness influencers are right wing? Is it because liberals are weak? That is the main point that a lot of these influencers try to perpetuate (pretty successfully). There is no study proving that men who support the idea of equity bench press less than those who don’t. But the culture that has been created around fitness influencing has only made room for one very specific ideology, and doesn’t leave much room for any deviance. It becomes an echo chamber that can be very hard to break into for content creators that hold different views.
Why did this progressive generation make the more conservative shift? There may be an answer that explains a subset of the young male vote: online fitness influencers.
This is an issue that is primarily affecting young men, especially high school boys, who are of the age where they are to begin entering society as citizens who can be politically active. They are first time voters. The internet is inarguably a huge part of the lives of most teenagers, and as young men seek physical strength, they will be drawn toward content that focuses on the gym. Because of this culture, an interest in fitness and strength training can very easily lead to right wing ideology and bigotry, even in people who never intended to engage with politics.
Why is this? Doesn’t it seem like a stretch to say that looking at videos about the gym will make you a bigot? Of course it is not that simple, and this is not a universal, inescapable truth. What is true is that male fitness influencers do tend to lean right wing, and if you consume a large amount of content from this group, it will become very easy to internalize the ideas that are being flashed across your screen every single day.
When the COVID-19 pandemic moved Gen Z to online school in elementary, middle, or high school, these kids were also forced to have their social interactions be mainly online. Many parents felt inclined to allow their children to have social media (maybe earlier than they would have otherwise) as a way of accessing social interaction. Thus, these kids were given access to platforms such as TikTok and Instagram at a young age,before they had the media literacy and critical thinking skills they may have learned through growing up or in high school. These kids were exposed to online political propaganda before they even knew what propaganda was. Accepting the internet as the main area for social interaction has had lasting effects on this younger generation, and has made young men especially susceptible to online propaganda that they have been exposed to from a very young age.
When we talk about the Gen Z shift to the right, we need to remember that this is not an ideological change that was made in a vacuum. This generation is constantly barraged with political propaganda, and is not very well equipped to differentiate between fact and fiction.
This article first appeared on CT Mirror and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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