15-year-old Owen Cooper made history to become the youngest male to win an Emmy Award. In the Netflix series Adolescence, Owen plays the role of a 13-year-old schoolboy who is arrested after the murder of a girl in his school. As we follow the events leading up to the crime, the award-winning series forces us to confront legitimate insecurities that many teenage boys face, from lack of physical prowess to emotional disconnection from their fathers. It also exposes how easily young men, seeking comfort in their computers, can be pulled into online spaces that normalize misogyny and rage; a pipeline enabled by a failure of tech policy.
At the center of this danger lies the manosphere: a global network of influencers whose words can radicalize young men and channel their frustrations into violence. But this is more than a social crisis affecting some young men. It is a growing threat to the democratic values of equality and tolerance that keep us all safe.
Like the crime series, we have already seen where this can lead in real life. Recently, French authorities charged a teenager connected to the incel subculture with terrorism, marking the country’s first such case of gender-based violence, a case built on the young man’s conspiracy to harm women. This should not be seen as an isolated incident, but as a symptom of a broader ideological problem.
While toxic for the young men it ensnares, the manosphere's deeper danger lies in its corrosion of the foundational values of democracy. These male-dominated online spaces reinforce rigid, traditional masculine norms. On the surface, we may see young men searching for identity and belonging, but beneath churns a murky undercurrent of pseudoscience and a contempt for gender equality.
Misogynistic messages poison the minds of young men, weaponizing their frustrations. They offer a seductively simple answer to complex feelings of loneliness: blame women. In 2014, Elliot Rodger fatally stabbed three people before going on a shooting spree to kill three more and injure 14 others. In his manifesto, he wrote, “All of my suffering in this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women,” blaming even his childhood crush for his violent hatred of women.
This blame can then be refined into a hatred for the very institutions, such as education, government, and the media, that are pillars of a functioning civil society, breeding a generation that rejects the pluralistic ideals necessary for democracy to thrive. Take, for example, the rise of far-right and neo-Nazi groups in Sweden that are attracting a new generation of young men who have lost faith in democracy. They share racist memes and violent videos to attract potential recruits, including boys as young as 10, on mainstream platforms like TikTok, before moving to more private, less regulated spaces.
The manosphere is a pathway to violence where online hate is turned into real-world violence. The French case is a direct example, but the trail of blood stretches back to attacks in Toronto, Isla Vista, and beyond. These digital communities don’t just vent; they strategize. They provide twisted justification and promote a culture of martyrdom that glorifies retribution. The leap from dehumanizing rhetoric on a forum to physical acts of terror is shorter than we imagine.
The manosphere is not neutral and can serve as a pipeline to extremist ideologies. While its entry point is often resentment of women, its logic inevitably expands. The same frameworks of hatred used against women are easily applied to minorities, migrants, and LGBTQ+ individuals. The Center on Extremism (COE) explains that the fear that women’s equality undermines men’s status is just a step away from seeing all demands for equality as threats to white male dominance. This exposes the symbiosis between misogyny and white supremacy, both connected by a deep-seated loathing of women.
And this matters because the status of women has long been a litmus test for the health of democracy. A recent study by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security found that women’s equality is strongly correlated with election integrity, freedom of association and assembly, and checks on executive power. In other words, when women’s rights erode, so too do the foundations of democratic governance.
Some argue that we might be overestimating the influence of the manosphere, as many of its users selectively choose what resonates with them and disregard what doesn’t. Indeed, not every frustrated young man online is a criminal. Not all criticism of society is extremist. Yet history shows that even small, seemingly fringe groups can eventually reshape society in harmful, authoritarian, or destructive ways. When Adolf Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party, which later became the Nazi Party, he was the 55th member. We do not have to wait for a movement to gain a large following to see the potential trajectory it may take.
Ignoring the manosphere is a luxury we cannot afford. Combating it requires a proactive, multi-sectoral effort that must include a robust tech policy framework. Tech companies must move beyond reactive content moderation and proactively redesign their algorithms to de-amplify hateful content, rather than recommending it. They must consistently enforce their own terms of service against organized hate and misogyny, subjecting their enforcement to independent audits for transparency. Furthermore, they should invest in redirect initiatives that algorithmically offer resources for mental health and positive mentorship to users searching for harmful keywords. Governments must move beyond a hands-off approach. They should legislate mandatory safety-by-design standards for platforms, compelling them to conduct and publish risk assessments on how platforms might facilitate radicalization. Legislators must also strengthen laws that hold platforms accountable for knowingly profiting from the algorithmic amplification of extremist content.
This must be coupled with integrating digital literacy into education to build resilience against manipulation and, most importantly, offering young men positive models of manhood built on respect rather than hatred and blame. Our collective safety and the future of our democratic values may just depend on it.
Kevin Liverpool is a Public Voices Fellow on Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse with The OpEd Project. He works as a partnerships specialist with No Means No Worldwide, an international nonprofit on a mission to end sexual violence against women and children globally.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.