Red Pills, Blue Books: Youth Political Consciousness and the Epistemic Struggle Between YouTube and the University

What happens when YouTube and the university offer competing visions of political reality? Drawing on 25 interviews, this article explores how young people navigate political meaning in the age of digital capitalism. While conservative influencers on YouTube offer emotionally charged, algorithmically amplified narratives of ‘common sense’, social science classrooms provide tools for critique and structural analysis. But access to the latter is increasingly constrained by tuition, austerity, and ideological attacks. Using a Gramscian lens, I argue that political consciousness is shaped through an epistemic struggle between two asymmetrical knowledge systems: the expansive, frictionless world of YouTube, and the embattled, slow-moving institution of the university. In tracing how political meaning is shaped across these spaces, the article shows how the social sciences can still cultivate ‘good sense’, but only when students are able to reach them.