While many believe young people are becoming more liberal, data shows that 12th grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative compared to liberal. Around 25% of high school seniors identify as conservative while only 13% identify as liberal. In contrast, the share of 12th grade girls identifying as liberal has risen to 30%. Many factors may contribute to this trend, including the rhetoric of Donald Trump which appealed to disaffected young men, and the focus of progressive movements on issues of gender and racial equality which some young men perceive as a “matriarchy.” However, most high school seniors claim no political identity, and many boys in high school do not actively discuss
Anecdotally I want to say boys have always felt more conservative around that age, especially when I was in highschool in the early 2000s. Granted I lived my teen years in the south, and this probably more of a cope than an actual explanation. There definitely seems to be a lot more active targeting of young men by right wing influencers now. In the past right wing media seemed to always be the domain of old people.
I went through a really weird phase in my life when I was kind of somewhere between conservative and neoliberal. And that was when I lived for 5 years in Arizona of all places. Now I am so far to the left that there isn’t really much more room for me to head. Recruiting conservatives at young ages apparently seems to be the key move for fundamentalists of all brands. This has been time-tested by the likes Al Qaida, ISIS, and the Taliban.