Book Talk: Good Girls and Alpha Males: How Conservative Media is Targeting Gen Z

About

Gen Z is coming of age in a world that feels stacked against them. That's exactly why conservative media is targeting them.

The fight for young minds is happening daily on podcasts, YouTube, and social media—platforms saturated with conservative messaging. The right has spent decades investing in this year-round digital propaganda apparatus, targeting Gen Z's economic insecurity and distrust of mainstream institutions to push answers rooted in hyper-individualism, misogyny, and bigotry.

In Good Girls and Alpha Males, journalist Madeline Peltz takes readers inside the online conservative sphere shaping the future of politics. From "tradwife" influencers to "manosphere" mouthpieces, she exposes the voices driving Gen Z's shift to the right along gendered lines. With equal ferocity, Peltz interrogates the Democratic Party's culpability, condemning the hostility to its younger, more progressive flank.

Personal and heartfelt, Good Girls and Alpha Males interweaves Peltz's own story with her coverage of right-wing media over the last decade. With deep empathy for a generation caught between disillusionment and radicalization, Peltz offers a wake-up call about the forces shaping Gen Z—and what the future holds if they go unchecked.

RSVP for this online event

About the Author:

Madeline Peltz is a writer, journalist, and researcher born in Chicago. Over the last decade, her reporting has appeared in Media Matters for America, MSNOW, Newsweek, More Perfect Union, and more. She has been quoted as an expert on right-wing media and the conservative movement in the New York Times, CNN, Democracy Now!, the Washington Post, BBC, The Guardian, and elsewhere.