The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Joshua D. Filler is an attorney and homeland security consultant living in Falmouth. He served in the cabinet of the mayor of New York on 9/11, as director of local affairs at the White House Office of Homeland Security from 2002 to 2003, as director of the Office of State and Local Coordination at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2003 to 2005, and on President Donald Trump’s 2016-2017 presidential transition.
America’s exceptional path has long been riddled with enormous challenges from pandemics to civil war, a great depression and a great recession, to multiple world wars, and yet, our republic has persevered. Today, in an era of declining families and economic opportunity for young people, all wrapped in a toxic brew of ubiquitous social media, some on the political right are moving towards a new nihilism that embraces an ideology of conspiracy, rage, and despair. It must be rejected.
The challenges faced by young people, and especially young men aged 18 to 35, cannot be overstated. For starters, it seems to me that men’s issues are usually acknowledged only when they begin to negatively impact women. For example, to the extent men are struggling financially, the culture often frames it as a challenge for women to find husbands in a sea of “economically unattractive men.”
Today’s young man has too often been raised in a single-parent household with no father and was taught by virtually all females during much of his time in ever worsening public schools. If he even attends college, he graduates with mounting debt, struggles to find a solid job, and watches as the American dream of owning a home continues to slip away. In 2025 the median age of a first-time homeowner in the U.S. was a record setting 40 years old, up from 33 in just 2020, and first-time home buyers made up only 21% of home purchases.
In the 18-29 age group, approximately 63% of men are single compared to just 34% of women. Young men are increasingly being left in the dating dust with no hope for a family of their own, even though they are more likely to want children than their female counterparts by a margin of 57% to 45%, according to Pew Research.
Virtually all male-only spaces, including the once venerable Boy Scouts of America, have been decimated by a feminist culture that both demonizes such spaces while simultaneously demanding access to them. Meanwhile, men account for nearly 80% of all suicides, more than 90% of all workplace deaths, about 70% of drug overdoses, and 78% of all homicide victims
But men are constantly told we live in a patriarchy that oppresses women through toxic masculinity. The American Psychological Association has gone so far as to describe traditional masculinity — such as strength, drive for achievement and risk taking — as harmful, despite the fact these attributes helped build our civilization.
All of this and more has pushed young men to give up, check out, and fall prey to radical ideologies. Enter the neo-fascists like Nick Fuentes, who are anything but conservative and want to end the American experiment in order to save it. Their illegitimate pull on legitimately disillusioned young men has only grown since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, who was a counter force against them for the future of the right.
At the moment, the primary target of neo-fascists is Jews, a scapegoat for America’s ills they share with their neo-socialist cousins. However, make no mistake, both groups are ultimately gunning for the Constitution. While the left may wish to replace it with a manifesto, the neo-fascists pine for some kind of ethno-Christian theocracy modeled on the Taliban. This may seem absurd, but if ignored, I fear this cancer will grow on the right, just as I believe it already has on the left, and metastasize into something truly self-destructive. Witness the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York.
Tucker Carlson’s fawning interview with Fuentes, who claims to speak for young white Christian men in particular, was likely a defining moment and veiled attempt at mainstreaming the young Hitler admirer. The problem with Carlson has less to do with his talking to Fuentes, and everything to do with the manner in which the talking took place. Tucker has shown himself more than capable of cross examining his guests — just ask Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Similar scrutiny of Fuentes and his so-called Groyper movement and their calls for disbanding Congress, ostracizing Jews, and ending elections, would have been welcome.
Declining families, shrinking opportunities, and a growing cadre of disaffected young men and women are serious challenges, but I believe the solution rests where it always has — in America’s timeless founding principles of limited government, free markets, and free people rooted in actual Judeo-Christian values. There is no better alternative, history has proven that. Human nature does not change, and authoritarianism, from the left or the right, no matter how tempting or rebranded, will lead inevitably to devastation.
