I think it’s just the overall tightening of the right wing echo chamber. Yes, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, all create spaces for right-wing chauvinists to capture young men when they are most impressionable and feel least seen.
But also these are dividends from Fox News slowly poisoning discourse and rural communities treating being liberal or left as an immoral betrayal of your kin and kind. For those people, being conservative is seen as being sane and the natural state of things, and no amount of facts or cognitive dissonance can influence those communities to change.
The only way to reverse it is to find a way to prevent those top-down right-wing spaces from engaging in propaganda. But not only is that difficult with the First Amendment, we haven’t even politically acknowledged what is happening.
Conservatives still gaslight and play the victims while exerting excessive influence on our discourse. The left continues to treat them with kid gloves, which only emboldens them. So I expect this trend to fully continue.
The scary possibility to me, though, is that conservative voting has decoupled from policy. It is no longer correlated to conservative support on issues.
If indeed these young people become Trump voters, it’s extremely likely they will be doing so despite it contradicting their own policy issues and self-interest (like a huge percentage of non-young blue-collar Trump voters).