On the Internet, nobody knows you're a teen.
A big reason for the rise of puerile ideologies like transgenderism, anti-Denmarkism, and Fuentesism is puerile posters.
Opinion journalism used to be a rather gray-bearded job. Reporters would spend years sitting through school board meetings before getting their own column. When their personalities started to wear thin, columnists might then get kicked upstairs to the editorial board. Editorial writing was prestigious, but expected to be slightly dull.
Youth responded by paying more attention to music than to politics, except during the Vietnam War draft.
But now in the age of social media, nobody has an easy way to figure out if an anonymous poster is a 60-year-old man of the world
or a 16-year-old ideologue.
Not surprisingly, we see a concomitant rise in immature ideologies.
Tumblr and 4chan went to war in the summer of 2014. It was a children's war, the typical combatant being between the ages of 14 and 21.
The battle was asymmetrical. The bastards of 4chan were organized, bloodthirsty, and used to combat. The faeries of Tumblr were less hierarchical, and clung to norms about communication and propriety.
In the aftermath, some 4chan users learned a taste for blood. They began forging weapons of war, refining memes for political ends. The ravaged Tumblr users retreated inwards, building complex frameworks around identity, safety, and "callouts".
The smoke never cleared. It drifted outward, seeping into the wider internet, where a children's war turned into everyone's war.
I dunno, you seen the anti-Musk rallies? Lots of 70yo radicals out there. They've assured me locally that white Texas oilmen in cowboy hats want to boil off the Pacific and sell us the salt.