The Damage Done When Old Men Affirm Young Men's Adolescent Worldviews
Consider the harm wrought by Mark Zuckerberg and now Stephen Miller.
Life starts to look a bit different when you stop for a moment, upon hitting the early 40s, and look around to see where people you've now known for 15, 20, 25 or even 30 years have ended up in their journeys.
Here's something I've noticed, and perhaps you've seen it among your friends, peers, and family members, too.
Do you know someone who had very early success—and I’m particularly talking about men here, but I suspect women know this concept, too—and now, decades later, it seems like they're in many ways still the same person they were when they first succeeded: that they haven't really matured much in their attitudes and worldviews?
In other words: Someone is now a 40-year-old, but they still think, talk, and act like the 20-year-old they were when you first met them in college, at an early job, or through some common interest.
Nothing has forced them to evolve in who they are and what they do. They've felt comfortable financially, professionally, or personally, so going through life without any fire or friction, they've just calcified. They're unable to meaningfully evolve in order to understand themselves, their work, the world, or their relationships in more complex, mature terms.
I'll give you an example that, looking back, just seems weird to me.
Circa 2010, I was a loyal foot soldier in Right-Wing Blog World, managing a team of about a dozen or so regular contributors to a Tea Party-aligned media critique blog. It was all day watching cable news, assigning posts to writers countering the dumb stuff said on TV, and writing more myself: media warfare, 24/7.
But then I changed jobs and did something else. And then I changed jobs again and I did something else again. And then changed jobs again and did something else again, and then ...
You get the picture. I've written about this before, and others can certainly relate. Over the last 15 years, I've gained a wide range of professional experiences, generally driven by trying to learn as much as possible from different people:
While I was an opinion blogger in 2009 at 25, by 2025 - at 41 - I'm an investigative journalist and book publisher. I go out and report on events in the real world, and then I write stories dedicated to simply reporting what happened, rather than spinning the story to appeal to right-wing philanthropists and donors. I know clearly the difference between opinion writing and straight journalism because I've done both. They're very different processes, with one being absurdly easier than the other. (Guess which one I'm doing right now, where a first draft can be banged out in 20 or 30 minutes …) I've also developed expertise in reporting on terrorism and radical Islamism, working at think tanks and nonprofits that specialize in those subjects.
Meanwhile, I know people who got comfortable and did what was needed to succeed in Right-Wing Blog World—they made moral compromises that I rejected. When I saw evil, I left, and they fucking did not. Now they’re left holding the bag, trying to defend the 180-degree pivot from releasing the Epstein files to continuing to hide them to protect powerful men.
There are people who are still writing the same fight-the-Left blog posts they were doing in 2010, and still thinking in the same simplistic way that I embraced back then, too. It's Left vs Right, it's Democrats vs Republicans, it's Absolute Evil vs the Elect on the side of God. They’re still the same, even in the poor quality of the writing most of them do. They've never been pushed to evolve - so they just … haven't evolved.
Most of us, by the time we're in our 40s, can probably start to see this with people we've grown up with. Maybe it’s the star football player who “peaked in high school.” Maybe it’s the super-rich kid who always had everything handed to her.
However, it's not as readily apparent in public figures, since we usually don't know them and their stories of how they developed. Or we don't think about it consciously.
And then we don't see the big-picture harm caused by people succeeding too soon in life. Here are two examples which have resulted in catastrophic harm now:
Stephen Miller - the leader of the White House’s push to lock up and deport as many brown people as possible - was affirmed at age 16 by talk-radio host Larry Elder, who told him that his far-right cartoonish politics were correct, and that he was smarter than all of his left-wing teachers, as well as all the adults in his Southern California community. Over the next two years, he was mentored by the late David Horowitz, my own former mentor for three years (2008-2010) until I rejected his unethical and even illegal professional practices after discovering them behind the scenes while working for him.
Horowitz then further mentored Miller in college through the Students for Academic Freedom project and Islamofascism Awareness Week programs before getting Miller jobs working for Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sen. Jeff Sessions. Miller the parlayed that experience into joining the first Trump administration, eventually rising to his current position, where he seeks to implement the white-supremacist teenage boy beliefs that locked in at 16 and that he has apparently never challenged in the decades since. (Yes, it’s clear that the immature teenage boy fantasy embedded in the video above is now government policy. He wants to traumatize and torture the people he hates at a mass level, rounding them up into concentration camps - despite being of European Jewish heritage himself.)
And Horowitz essentially did the same thing with Charlie Kirk and Talking Points USA. Now Kirk is locked into pushing hate to naïve 20-somethings and teaching them the same immature politics that he had affirmed by Horowitz in his own youth. And he's now doing the same for the next generation, affirming young right-wingers early and then integrating them into an ideological media machine that doesn't challenge them to change meaningfully, but instead simply demands that they bend the knee and follow orders, as Kirk and Dinesh D'Souza and others are now doing in trying to turn their audiences against further demands for release of the Epstein Files.
However, there's another example of how this young man’s early-success mentality has warped the world.
Enter Mark Zuckerberg, who built “TheFacebook” at age 19 and 20, who also received early affirmation and mentorship that transformed his early website. While initially built to connect college students to more easily pursue romantic relationships -thanks, Zuck! I've connected with both of my wives on Facebook! - its creator turned his company into a dopamine addiction factory by 2012. He knew full well he was emotionally destroying many teen girls with Instagram, inflaming personal relationship with Facebook, and all across his product line, mutating people to assume more extreme ideas. The internal leaked memos prove it. But he didn't give a fuck.
The Peter Thiel and Sean Parker, make-a-profit-at-any-cost ideology had already been laid as the foundation of his worldview. And then Sheryl Sandberg and her team moved in with their Google Adsense knowledge to turn Facebook into the billion-dollar juggernaut it today, now looking into building nuclear reactors to power its AI data centers. They didn't care if people died in their pursuit of power and profit. And now Zuckerberg is the second wealthiest person in the world, currently at a net worth of $258 billion.
Was it worth it, Zuck? How many depressed teen girls with scars all over their bodies and families clutching the portraits of their dead daughters is worth the wealth? How many bodies in the ground because you allowed COVID-19 disinformation to spread on your platform?
And it’s the same with Stephen Miller and his moves to build concentration camps all over America, for the purpose of segregating away (or worse) the millions of brown people he hates.
Young men who are affirmed in their ignorance and cruelty by older men who never matured, either, will in turn inflict their inner pain and sense of low self-worth onto the rest of us.
And thus we end up with teenage girls carving on their arms, a whole Gen Z cohort now becoming "The Anxious Generation," and untold numbers of people who will die in those camps. Miller knows it and he does not give a fuck - he wants it, in fact. Just as Zuck does not care that teenage girls died because of his intentionally-addictive product.
And so I wonder: How much misery around the world is really driven by men whose immaturity was forever locked into place by early success, leading to them never having to mature mentally, emotionally, and often, even sexually?
horribly true. usually higher education teaches people that there are no black and white answers but it doesn't seem to have worked on your examples. The local pub or bar is also a good place to meet people from other walks of life and learn about people outside your own circle. But for various reasons, many of those local meeting places are dying.
I'm reminded of a startling statement in the Talmud, Nedarim 40a: "It was taught: R. Shimon b. Eleazar said: If the young tell you to build, and the old to destroy, listen to the elders, but do not listen to the young; for the building of youth is destruction, while the destruction of the old is building. And a sign for the matter is Rehoboam the son of Solomon."
You can't get phronesis in a classroom or a professional echo chamber. You need to see the real world.