The Great Capture: Vittorio Was Right — and It’s Worse Than He Thinks

 

Bill Ackman asked “Why?” as if he’d stumbled upon a curious anomaly on his feed. But the truth is not a curious anomaly. It is a social fact so large and so obvious that only a civilization drowning in euphemism could mistake it for mystery.

Vittorio (@IterIntellectus) has offered what is, by modern standards, an act of intellectual courage: he noticed the direction of the lines.

For years we have been lectured—by the usual sanctimonious clerisy—about the looming menace of male “right-wing radicalization.” A “pipeline,” we are told. A contagion. A danger. And yet the data show something that should embarrass the entire propaganda apparatus: young men have not sprinted toward fascism. They have, at worst, shuffled around the center with occasional spasms of irritation. The dramatic motion, the tectonic shift, the unmistakable acceleration has come from young women moving sharply leftward. In the United States and, crucially, far beyond it.

If this story were told honestly, it would not be narrated as a triumphal march of enlightenment. It would be told as what it is: a mass capture event.

And Vittorio is right to locate the triggering technology. But I think he is underestimating the second engine that makes the capture not merely possible, but inevitable: the moral redefinition of politics as safety.

The Consensus Engine and the Species That Built It

Human beings did not evolve to live in a global amphitheater in which every utterance is recorded, scored, and judged by an invisible crowd. We evolved in small groups where reputation mattered, where belonging meant survival, and where exile meant something like death. The liberal mind imagines itself a sovereign intellect; in truth, most minds are social organs.

Social media is not merely “a new way to communicate.” It is a machine designed to perform two ruthless operations at scale:

1. Measure consensus

2. Punish deviation

It makes the crowd visible. It makes disagreement countable. It turns reputation into a scoreboard. It turns morality into a performance. And because it is not designed to produce truth but to produce engagement, it amplifies whatever most reliably generates emotional arousal—outrage, fear, grievance, humiliation, panic, and above all moral alarm.

Vittorio is correct that this strikes differently across sexes because men and women—no matter how frantic the ideologues become—are not the same psychological distribution. This is not sexist. It is descriptive. Across cultures and across time, women tend to score higher on traits related to social attunement and sensitivity to negative stimuli. Most of the time this is a civilizing strength. Under a regime of constant moral surveillance it becomes a vulnerability.

It is not that women are “emotional.” Men are emotional too—our history is a carnival of rage, vanity, and violence. It is that women, on average, experience social threat more viscerally. And social media is nothing if not an endless series of social threats.

Now: that explains capture by consensus. It does not yet explain why the consensus became so disproportionately left-coded.

For that, we need to talk about the theology.

The New Faith: Harm as the Supreme Sin

The modern progressive worldview—at least in its campus-bred, HR-administered form—is not primarily a political program. It is a moral system. Indeed, it is a secular religion, and like all religions it comes with metaphysics, heresy tests, a doctrine of the fallen, and a concept of purification.

Its central moral axiom is this:

Harm is the greatest evil.

Not injustice, not tyranny, not ignorance. Harm. And once harm becomes the ultimate category, everything else follows with perfect internal logic:

• discomfort becomes trauma

• disagreement becomes violence

• speech becomes harm

• questions become threats

• skepticism becomes bigotry

• due process becomes complicity

• and censorship becomes protection

In other words, the left’s modern moral vocabulary fits social media like a glove. It does not merely instruct the captured mind; it justifies the capture.

This is the additional mechanism Vittorio hints at but does not fully name: the phone did not simply scale connection—it scaled enforcement. It created a world in which virtue is demonstrated by compliance. And compliance is demonstrated by policing others.

 

From Care to Control: The Pipeline Nobody Names

There is a pipeline, yes. But it is not the one MSNBC fantasizes about.

It runs like this:

Therapy culture → Safetyism → Identity moralism → Political conformity

Under therapy culture, the self is treated as fragile, and its feelings as sovereign. Under safetyism, the world is treated as a minefield of triggers. Under identity moralism, the hierarchy of legitimacy is organized around victimhood status. Under political conformity, the correct slogans become the proof of being “good.”

This pipeline doesn’t produce resilience. It produces a demand for a world without friction. And because the world stubbornly contains friction, it produces an endless cycle of alarm.

Young women, immersed in institutions that speak this language—universities, education, nonprofit culture, healthcare administration, HR—are not merely exposed to progressive ideas. They are immersed in a moral monoculture that frames dissent as danger.

The genius—if one may use that word—of this system is that it recruits its own police. It convinces the captured that enforcement is compassion.

The compliant become guardians of the orthodoxy not because they are wicked, but because they are moral.

And moral certainty is the most intoxicating substance known to humanity.

Why Men Don’t Get Captured the Same Way

As Vittorio notes, men are captured differently. And here too the system is shrewd. It offers men not a theology but anesthesia.

Pornography. Gambling apps. Video games. Infinite scrolling. Rage bait. The synthetic dopamine economy.

For men, the machine’s message is not:

“Believe this or be exiled.”

It is:

“Stay here. Don’t build. Don’t risk. Don’t compete. Don’t suffer. Just consume.”

So the male line staying “steady” is not necessarily health. It may simply be sedation.

And in recent years that sedation has curdled into grievance, because the message has changed. Men are not only ignored; they are blamed. Masculinity is not only unnecessary; it is toxic. The young man learns that his instincts are suspect, his ambition is predatory, his very gaze is incriminating.

At that point, the anesthetic wears off and becomes anger.

Thus the widening gap is not a sign of two healthy trajectories. It is a sign of two different pathologies.

Women: conformity and moral panic
Men: withdrawal and resentment

Neither is a civilization fit for the future.

The “Education Explains It” Cop-Out

One hears the lazy explanation, delivered with the smug certainty of an administrative memo: women go to university more; universities lean left; therefore women lean left. Case closed. Next question.

There is, of course, some truth in it. But as an explanation it fails the most basic test—timing. Universities have been left-leaning for decades. The gender gap did not double in the 1970s. It did not erupt in the 1980s. It did not suddenly metastasize in the 1990s. The acceleration is recent, abrupt, and unmistakably aligned with the era in which moral life moved into the phone.

More importantly, the “education” answer omits the far more revealing detail: modern universities do not simply lean left—they increasingly enforce a monoculture. Conservative, heterodox, or merely insufficiently enthusiastic professors are not treated as intellectual opponents to be debated; they are treated as contaminants to be managed.

The American campus has become an ecosystem in which certain views are not merely unpopular—they are unsafe. The result is predictable: self-censorship becomes career hygiene, and dissent becomes a professional liability. In Washington state, for example, the University of Washington investigated and reprimanded a professor for a satirical “land acknowledgment,” and the episode became a federal case precisely because the institution behaved like an ideological enforcement arm rather than a university. The message to faculty was not subtle: speak wrongly, and you will be processed.

That is not education. It is conditioning.

And here again the timing matters. The divergence accelerates sharply in the smartphone era because the classroom is no longer the classroom. Every student carries a recording device, a tribunal, and a reputation economy in their pocket. The university is now wired directly into the permanent online crowd. A sentence uttered in seminar can become a clip; the clip can become a dogpile; the dogpile can become an investigation. Education did not merely become progressive. It became surveilled, enforced, and punished. This isn't just Washington State where it is impossible to be a conservative professor - it's a majority of American Universities. 

So yes: education matters. Economics matters. Marriage patterns matter. But if you want the mechanism that ties it together—the trigger that makes the divergence global—you must look to the device that turned every young person into a node in a moral surveillance network, and every institution into an auxiliary enforcement agency.

The One Thing We Must Say Out Loud

The most important point is also the one most people are terrified to speak: this is not “progress.”

It may contain progressive elements. It may include moral insights. But in its mass behavioral form, it is not enlightenment. It is not liberty. It is not even justice.

It is the creation of a population trained to:

• fear dissent

• equate disagreement with harm

• outsource morality to consensus

• and demand censorship in the name of care

The same culture that says it is building “inclusion” has built a world in which a wrong sentence can destroy a life.

That is not liberalism. That is not freedom. That is a soft totalitarianism run by people who insist they are kind.

What Comes Next

If Vittorio’s model is correct—and I think it is more correct than not—then several predictions follow:

• The gap will persist as long as algorithmic surveillance persists

• It will shrink among women who step outside institutional monocultures (especially parenthood)

• It will widen where shame-enforcement is strongest

• It will intensify wherever politics is framed as safety

But the most tragic prediction is this: no faction will “win” this.

A society cannot thrive on mass conformity in one half and mass withdrawal in the other. A nation cannot remain free when its young citizens are trained either to police thought or to flee life.

Bill Ackman asked “Why?”

Because we built machines that monetize human weakness and then installed them in every pocket on Earth.

And because the moral language of the age declared that dissent is violence, safety is sacred, and enforcement is compassion.

Vittorio is right: the graph is capture.

But it is not merely ideological capture.

It is the capture of the moral imagination itself.

Am I, a Woman immune?

Absolutely not. For most of my adult life, I voted blue—Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton, Biden. Then, in 2020, I voted for Trump. The shift didn’t happen all at once, but there was a clear turning point: the Kyle Rittenhouse case. I watched the media and the Left attack him relentlessly, even as the evidence overwhelmingly showed self-defense. It wasn’t just bias—it was a deliberate refusal to engage with reality. That broke something in me.

From there, my disillusionment deepened. I began to question not just the narratives, but the economic policies I had long supported. And slowly, the ground shifted beneath my feet.

What ultimately allowed me to break with the prevailing narrative wasn’t a sudden surge of courage or a neatly reasoned ideology—it was something quieter, something internal: I’m not neurotypical. I’m autistic.

That doesn’t mean I’m immune to influence, but it does mean I relate to social expectations differently. I don’t instinctively monitor the emotional temperature of a group before I speak. I don’t adjust my beliefs to avoid discomfort or chase approval. The invisible signals that shape behavior in most social spaces—especially online—often just don’t register in the same way for me. And in a world where conformity is subtly enforced through likes, shares, shame, and moral outrage, that difference becomes decisive.

Where many people feel an almost physical discomfort when they’re out of sync with the crowd, I often feel a different kind of discomfort: the pressure to pretend I agree when I don’t. The tension isn’t in being alienated from the group—it’s in being asked to perform consensus I don’t actually feel. That’s the friction I mentioned. And over time, that friction became too sharp to ignore.

In a culture where morality is increasingly outsourced to collective emotion, where disagreement is treated as harm, and where compliance is framed as compassion, my resistance wasn’t ideological—it was neurological. I didn’t set out to dissent. I simply couldn’t suppress my skepticism when the story stopped making sense. I wasn’t wired to go along just to get along.

That wiring—once a source of social alienation—became, in this context, a kind of clarity. It didn’t make me right about everything. But it made me ask the question others were too anxious to voice: “Is this actually true?”