Averyann Guggenheim and Reagan Hirchag watched the election night broadcasts with cautious hope. Two undergraduates with passion for law school, the women each hold leadership roles in their respective chapters of their schools’ College Democrats of America: Guggenheim is president of Texas State University, while Hirchag runs outreach and programming at Auburn University in Alabama. Neither managed to achieve final results, but on Tuesday, when they lay 850 miles apart, the final outlook was already bleak.

There was great joy in less than 24 hours MAGA parade Members of a possible neo-Nazi group”Women Are Property“There are signatures in the State of Texas.

President-elect Donald Trump surprises analysts as exit polls reveal Tuesday Gains of Generation Z voters aged 18-29 – An increase of 11 percentage points compared to 2020. Some commentators have attributed this to the radicalization of young, white men who follow and interact with millions of alt-right internet personalities.

” in an episode of the New York Times podcastRunning“host Astead Herndon attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison tailgate and interviewed fraternity groups, attempting to explore the gender divide between young men who are supposedly becoming more conservative and young women who are becoming more liberal.

a few Trump vote Interviewees admitted that they get all their news from Twitter, as well as from Charlie Kirk, Joe Rogan, and other right-wing and alt-right figures. Political TikToker JeysusChrist This week he released a video about this very phenomenon – what he calls a “propaganda machine” that is “targeting our young men.”

“We’ve got a generation of little boys being raised on the propaganda that Andrew Tate and Elon Musk are running now, and we’re reducing it to, ‘Oh, they’re just internet trolls, that’s all.'” he says. But he warns the situation will be “much worse” when Trump comes back to power.

In the State of Texas, Guggenheim noticed an “influx of hate speech” soon after the election results were announced. racist “plantation” text messages targeting Black students at his school and across the country. campus feels bleak. “Of course it was a very hateful and bleak situation,” he says. “It’s scary to think about what will happen next.”

At Auburn, Hirchag said he contacted the university multiple times this week after learning of different examples of hate speech and desecration of Pride flags. “Some people in the LGBTQ community and people of color are afraid to leave their dorms or apartments; people call them slanderers,” he says. “We have pro-life organizations on campus, and (their messages), especially for women, are sometimes thrown in your face. The list of people who don’t feel safe goes on and on.”

Similar attempts at intimidation continue online, affecting young women on and off college campuses. The chant of “your body, my choice” surged in the comment sections of TikToks aimed at women after far-right extremist Nick Fuentes posted a celebratory pro-Trump video gleefully defending sexual assault.

Hannah Cor, 27-year-old somatics practitioner SHEchiatry therapy center shared a post in Nashville tiktok She highlights the disturbing trend she observes in the comments of other women’s videos. However, the moment she raised her voice, she suddenly found herself subjected to the same threats and harassment.

“I wasn’t on TikTok much before the election to keep my peace, but this is just a place where the doors are wide open, it’s a free for all, whatever you want to call it,” he says. More graphic comments included messages such as “men win,” “men always win,” and “men win again.”

Cor, Hirchag and Guggenheim all quote reproductive freedom as the main reason They voted for Harrisand the results of this election cast doubt on the future of this issue and many others that affect women in particular. Guggenheim, who has PCOS and endometriosis, is concerned about continued access to birth control and in vitro fertilization treatments, as well as the outcome of the pregnancy. friends and family members who are immigrants.

Hichag, who says she always wanted to be a mother, wants to know that if she has a daughter, “she can make her own decisions.”

He thinks about it every time he sees the MAGA attire infiltrating his campus. “Trump’s followers are equated with a cult. Young, white men are brought into this, and it’s not just like, ‘Oh, I agree with some of his points,’ it’s a ride-or-die kind of thing,” Hirchag says.

On election night, Cor had to immediately run to the store to buy something. He instinctively put on his camouflage Harris-Walz hat, but then stopped in front of the door and realized it might not be physically safe to wear it alone. This constant hum of vulnerability is something most women are already familiar with, but it has intensified sharply for some in the past few days as sexist rhetoric has taken on a more violent tone.

Cor says this is a bully mentality; He is modeled after what he calls a “professional bully” newly elected to the White House.

As Herndon from “The Run-Up” said about the Wisconsin students in the same episode, “These guys knew Trump was hurting the women in their lives, and that wasn’t just a deal breaker, that was the point.”

It’s easier to put that attitude aside on the playground, in the middle school hallway, or between a teenager and his parents. But Cor says it’s hard to see that as pure disdain when she shapes laws that make the difference between life and death for millions of women.

“This experience has allowed people to hate women louder than they have in a long time,” she says. “But we must stick together. Our love for each other can far outweigh their hatred for us.”

Emma Glassman-Hughes (o) He is the associate editor of PS Balance. During his seven years as a reporter, his beats spanned the lifestyle spectrum; She covers arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate and farming for Ambrook Research.