'Who's got ahold of my son?' Liberal parents panic over losing their sons to MAGA

Some liberal parents have discovered that their sons aren't simply disinterested in their woke worldviews but are actually leaning hard in the opposite direction, donning MAGA hats and turning their backs on land acknowledgments, climate alarmism, fake pronouns, DEI, depopulationist rhetoric, and attacks on masculinity.

The New York Times ran a sob piece Sunday titled, "When Your Son Goes MAGA," detailing progressives' increasing difficulty speaking to the young men in their lives who voted for President Donald Trump.

Alex Behr, for instance — a 59-year-old Democrat in Portland, Oregon, who "voted enthusiastically" for Kamala Harris — figured her son for a "thoughtful college junior who had a serious skateboarding phase" until she and her ex-husband made the "appall[ing]" discovery that 20-year-old Eli, whom they adopted from China, had a mind of his own.

Apparently Alex Behr's strategy of tossing her son's "Make America Great Again" hat, telling him "facts don't matter to you," and badgering him over his views on guns, immigration, and abortion was ineffective. Eli Behr voted for Trump.

Alex Behr, concerned over her son's exposure to political views besides her own, told the Times, "I've had to do a lot of soul-searching and reading about it to not feel like I've failed as a mom."

Whereas his mother is working to displace blame for her domineering reflex in therapy sessions, Eli is apparently maintaining a level head.

"I love my mom," Eli told the paper, which indicated that he refrains from wearing his MAGA hat around his mother as a nicety. "I want her to stay a part of my family."

The Times told the tale of another leftist couple's perceived bereavement — that of Chris and Melanie Morlan of Spokane, Washington.

Everything was apparently working out nicely for the Morlans back when their son would still parrot their political views. However, around the time that Black Lives Matter rioters and other leftists started tearing coastal cities apart in 2020, their son reportedly began listening to YouTube channels that disparaged feminism and diversity, equity, and inclusion and, even more troubling, signaled support for Trump.

Their 24-year-old son was ultimately drawn to the Republican Party "as a defender of more conventional notions of manhood" — an appeal CNN talking head Dana Bash alluded to during the Democratic National Convention in August when she suggested that whereas the Republican Party courted the "testosterone-laden, you know, gun-toting kind of guy," Democrats were courting the Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz variety, "a man comfortable in his own skin who supports a woman."

Realizing she was losing her son to traditional conventions of manhood, Melanie Morlan, a family therapist, asked herself, "Who's got ahold of my son?"

Although keen to patronize her son, who voted for Trump in 2024, Melanie Morlan took a more diplomatic approach than Behr.

'Everything you're doing is destroying the planet. You've got to eat your peas.'

"I always tell him, 'I might get worried about you and I might feel sad because I don't think you understand some things that maybe you will down the road,'" Morland told the Times. "'But I'm going to love you more when you're struggling, because it's just politics.'"

In 2020, 41% of men ages 18-29 voted for Trump. Four years later, that number jumped to 55% — a spike that should have surprised no one.

Democratic strategist James Carville noted in a Times interview several months ahead of the election that the left was doing a great job of alienating red-blooded American men.

"'Don't drink beer. Don't watch football. Don't eat hamburgers. This is not good for you,'" said Carville. "The message is too feminine: 'Everything you're doing is destroying the planet. You've got to eat your peas.'"

While "feminine" browbeating coupled with the left's "faculty lounge" attitudes and "woke stuff" proved to be ballot-box poison, as Carville indicated, there were motivators besides the leftist chatter in the nation's capital.

The same month, the Guardian noted that young men's shift rightward was not just prompted by the society-wide feminism that painted them as monsters but by their corresponding push out of higher education and into financial uncertainty and depression.

Richard Reeves, head of the American Institute for Boys and Men, said, "This is less about young men being pulled towards the right than it is about them being pushed away from the left."

"Economically [men under 30 are] getting shafted, politically they're getting shafted, culturally no one's looking out for them," Daniel A. Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Times in August, indicating that Trump represented a remedy and another way.

Alex Behr and Melanie Morlan have wondered what exactly about Trump and MAGA attracted their sons. They might be better served asking what about their leftist worldviews wouldn't harm or repulse them in the first place.

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