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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/style/dean-withers-tiktok.html Could This 20-Year-Old Be One of the Democrats’ Bro Whisperers? Dean Withers argues online with right-wing stars like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro. His goal? To reach their young, male followers. Dean Withers is part of an ecosystem of left-leaning influencers. He and a friend known online simply as Parker have more than a million followers apiece on TikTok, where they debate supporters of Mr. Trump during unpredictable livestreams that Mr. Withers compared to U.F.C. matches.Credit...Michael Noble Jr. for The New York Times By Callie Holtermann Dec. 19, 2024 In a YouTube video that was uploaded about a month before the election, a young, blond man in baggy jeans and a graphic T-shirt sits alone at the center of a circle of folding chairs. One by one, people approach him to debate issues like abortion, inflation and whether former President Donald J. Trump’s policies would benefit the middle class. The video, titled “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?,” has been viewed more than 14 million times since it was posted by the debate-centric media company Jubilee. The “woke teen” in question is Dean Withers, a now-20-year-old liberal content creator who lives in Colorado. Mr. Withers has been debating politics online since 2022 but rapidly gained traction in the final stretch of an election in which Republicans improved their performance with young men. Gen Z men have reported feeling economically dissatisfied and socially left behind, frustrations that President-elect Trump sought to channel with the help of an online “manosphere” of podcasters and influencers. In the aftermath of an election in which many Democrats believe they were outflanked online, some are scrambling to find bro whisperers of their own. They are eyeing people like Mr. Withers, who attended a holiday reception at the White House on Tuesday. (“Off to meet mr joe,” he wrote on his Instagram story beforehand.) He is part of an ecosystem of left-leaning influencers including Hasan Piker, the 33-year-old progressive commentator who streams for hours a day on Twitch. An even younger group of men including Harry Sisson, Mr. Withers and a friend known online simply as Parker each have more than a million followers on TikTok, where they brawl with supporters of Mr. Trump during combative, unpredictable livestreams that Mr. Withers compared to U.F.C. matches. Can their fluency in the language of the manosphere be used to encourage young men to consider liberal viewpoints instead of conservative ones? Mr. Withers thinks so. “I used to be a very conservative young white guy who was captured by people like Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan,” he said in a recent phone interview. “Now I found my nook and cranny on the internet where I can help be the opposing force to that.” Mr. Withers streams for about five hours a day on TikTok, where he has more than two million followers. A vocal supporter of Vice President Kamala Harris, he spent the months leading up to the election sparring eagerly with right-wing figures whom many in the left-wing establishment would rather not touch, including the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and the prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes. There, his approach diverges from that of an earlier generation of progressive commentators: It is hard to imagine the four millennial men who host “Pod Save America” sitting down with Mr. Fuentes, a font of misogyny, racism and antisemitism. Mr. Withers gets comments asking whether what can seem like a potentially dangerous, shock-jock approach is the wisest strategy for changing young minds. But Mr. Withers said he believes such debates are worthwhile because they can help introduce progressive ideas into right-wing echo chambers. “Trump won this election because the right has now dominated the culture war with younger men,” Mr. Withers said. He continued: “We just need to be able to convince a younger generation of white guys that people who live in our society that aren’t white guys face problems that they don’t even know exist.” Mr. Withers grew up in a conservative family in Grand Junction, Colo., the most populous city in Mesa County, a Republican stronghold near the Utah border that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump. His father is an engineer, and his mother was often unemployed, he said, and he has two older siblings. His parents divorced when he was an adolescent, he added, and the family struggled with money. He attended church three times a week and a private Catholic school from preschool through eighth grade. @itsdeaann My 1v20 debate on Jubilee was nothing more than preparation for tomorrow😭 ♬ original sound - shine aura After school, he played video games like Fortnite and Call of Duty and became immersed in an online environment populated by figures like the YouTube stars the Nelk Boys. In his gaming circles, conservatism seemed like the “cool” choice for young men, he said. Although he could not yet vote, he considered himself a supporter of Mr. Trump’s. He absorbed his digital sphere’s political ideas and its language: In October he apologized on X for having used racial and anti-gay slurs in 2019 and 2022. When Mr. Withers began attending a public high school, in 2018, he became exposed to more points of view. He befriended a lesbian couple who challenged the anti-L.G.B.T.Q. rhetoric he had been taught in Catholic school, he said. The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol occurred during his junior year: “I remember not understanding it that well, but being scared,” he said. “That was almost, like, the nail in the coffin.” He began participating in livestreamed TikTok debates as a freshman at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2022, thrilled by the rush of adrenaline that came with debating issues like abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights before a live audience. The debates cover subjects that swing from Mr. Withers’s support for a cease-fire in Gaza to Mr. Trump’s felony convictions. He tangles with the president-elect’s supporters in person at football tailgates and online, streaming from home with white text hovering above his head: “Prove me wrong: Trump will be terrible for America.” He alternates between patience and head-shaking frustration, occasionally hurling expletives at his interlocutors. Some of them respond to his ideas by flushing their toilets into the microphone. Every few minutes, Mr. Withers thanks viewers for the $5, $10 and $15 PayPal donations that trickle in throughout each stream. These donations have become his main source of income, he said, including some as high as $1,000. (He declined to say how much he makes overall.) Lately the Democratic Party has taken notice, too. Mr. Withers said he was so surprised to be invited to the White House that he assumed the email was fake. He asked his brother, who works in I.T., to check it out for him before responding. At the White House reception on Tuesday, he mingled with the progressive commentator David Pakman and the president’s son Hunter Biden. He saw the invitation as further proof that the Democratic establishment was beginning to take his cohort’s approach seriously. “It’s just starting to be recognized on a big level,” he said. This fall, instead of returning to school for his junior year, he took time off to stream more in the run-up to the presidential election. (He is still deciding when he will return to college.) In his free time, he said, he spends more time at the gym or playing piano or guitar, rather than video games. He is not yet sure what he wants to do with his career, although he did not rule out starting a podcast, creating a news publication or running for office. In the meantime, some of his toughest political debates are at home. “I’ve had quite a few pretty bad discussions” with his family members, who are nearly all conservative, he said. “But I think the longer that I’ve done it, the more that they’ve seen of it, the more receptive to it a lot of them have become.” He was not, however, able to sway any of them to vote for Ms. Harris. The day before Thanksgiving, he posted a half-joking video on TikTok about the election-related arguments he anticipated having to wade into with “all 20 of my MAGA family members.” In the comments, several fans of Mr. Withers asked if he could come debate conservative relatives at their Thanksgiving tables, too. Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for The Times. More about Callie Holtermann