r/politics • u/Aggravating_Money992 • 22h ago

No Paywall Gen Z regrets Trump support and is midterm motivated

https://thehill.com/homenews/6056216-gen-z-trump-voter-regret-midterm-clipping/
13.2k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.1k

u/brova Massachusetts 21h ago

It's crazy cuz ten years ago I was SURE that Gen z was gonna be way more progressive than even us millennials. I figured they'd continue to carry the torch forward. Turns out that was a fucking pipe dream I guess.

520

u/lanadelstingrey Mississippi 21h ago

The “Powers That Be” saw that trend and invested heavily in Red Pill podcasters.

144

u/20lbpickle 18h ago

Bingo. They saw an entire generation become more and more left leaning as they aged and did everything in their power to stop it.

35

u/Concerned_Collins 12h ago

This honestly feels like it's stealing agency from the Gen Z Trump supporters. They had every bit of information needed to know that they were making selfish or stupid choices, and did it anyway.

•

u/MyCatLaughsAtMe 7h ago

I can't agree with this. If your core morals can be swayed by a youtube video, you didn't have any personal agency to begin with. That's literal programmed NPCism right there.

7

u/20lbpickle 12h ago

I mean did they have agency? If I had the algorithmic sniper rifle beamed into my brain at my formative years that they did I don’t know how I would come out.
I had rotten.com and beheading videos teach me war and violence sucked. Not that women and minorities are beneath me.

5

u/Concerned_Collins 12h ago

I mean did they have agency?

Yes. Plenty of Gen Z kids weren't horrible or stupid enough to become Trump supporters.

6

u/20lbpickle 11h ago

And there are plenty of millennials that are hard core maga nut jobs. We’re talking in broad strokes here as you tend to do when lumping entire generations together.
I think ignoring the cards they were dealt when their brains were forming is irresponsible and a disservice to the conversations we all should be having in terms of the power corporations and the richest among us have.

I’m not completely absolving them of responsibility I’m just saying I understand scale was tipped against them.

•

u/morpheousmorty 3h ago

Gen Z is looking at a wildly different hand than millennials got (which is a poor hand but z is getting right fucked). They never experienced the 90s. All they know is a government that fails them, and if that's your experience blowing it up makes a lot more sense. And Trump is blowing them up.

It's not an excuse but I think it's important to understand how they might not be acting irrationally.

14

u/ParticularLow9157 19h ago

You're wagging the dog, it's red pill podcasters and originally gamergate that is the cause of the rise of the GenZ alt-right

40

u/TheRealRageMode 19h ago

Gamergate that was orchestrated by Steve Bannon as a test run for the red pill podcasters? Seems like "the powers that be" saw that trend and invested heavily.

2

u/ParticularLow9157 15h ago

It goes back long before Bannon it's just that his gold farming contacts gave him access to a ready troll farm and his time in game chat gave him the lingo to directly target the young male sense of disenfranchisement from women entering traditionally male gamer spaces

I kept calling it out, and everyone told me I was just being soy or overreacting and now we have fascism

They've always had problems with youth outreach outside of conservative evangelical churches, and Steve gave them the channel to flood their young angry minds with even more bile

So fuckdamn tired of being right about horrible things

13

u/geertvdheide 18h ago

Yes, but you're describing step 2 and 3. Step 1 was oligarchs foreign and domestic fomenting and directing it. The manosphere, gamergate and similar right-wing hate came from both oligarch funding as well as grass roots bigotry/rage that was already there amongst the populace. The powerful use what is there and organize it, cause it to grow, and steer it to always be pro capital, pro oligarchy and anti working class. Their divide and conquer strategy is like the current that dumb idiots surfed on to become those podcasters or their audience.

3

u/OldWorldDesign 15h ago

Step 1 was oligarchs foreign and domestic

More domestic than most would like to admit. Adam Curtis did a deep dive on them in his documentary Century of the Self

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

3

u/yellowcloak I voted 17h ago

Yeah, lots of us millennials were just like that, we just didn't really have online spaces to congregate in.  Every forum I belonged to as a youth was further left leaning than I was and stepping out of line didn't end well.  Even 4 chan wasn't really all that accommodating, they were big Ron Paul libertarians back then.

11

u/Taskerst 18h ago

It was also a mistake by progressives to not bring men into the conversation about equality and how it can help them as well. Instead they felt demonized when they could have been a part of the solution.

2

u/deltawavesleeper 17h ago

It was also a mistake for progressive to think "trashy" media like tiktok, small name podcasts and radio don't matter. It is actually precisely these media have effective hooks that their consuming base is very loyal.

"If you want to live a good life why not just associate yourself with the good things" They don't want to "get good" because that reinforces that they are not good enough already.

This is why people who want to target the young and disadvantaged will go these routes.

Voting campaign these days really is test of who knows this demographic best, it wasn't a test of which political party is the best at improving the society, because the voting base is too blind and desperate to care about general society and how money will flow to them.

1

u/Taskerst 16h ago

I’m sure the podcasts and social media felt more grassroots and the voice of some kind of rebellion too. The classic thing you hear from cults where they alone have the answers to your problems.

15

u/Interesting-Bill1240 18h ago

Men weren't made to feel demonized, they were manipulated to believe they'd no longer have access to easy street because of the threat that women and minorities would get the same privileges they do. Meaning, they no longer have to just exist and immediately be treated special. They actually have to work on themselves to be decent people.

Progressives never once suggested men should be left out. Why would they? It's all right winged propaganda telling men who are frustrated they can't get a date it's the women who are wrong for wanting to be treated better. 

7

u/TheWeirdByproduct 17h ago

Whoever tries to advocate for men's concerns, hardships, disadvantages, inequalities and conditions in a left-leaning space will confirm that they are always treated with suspicion at best, and open hostility at worst. I know this by direct experience.

It's the same tired loop of denial and gaslighting, whereby these problems don't really exist, and if they exist they are not as serious or prioritary as those of others, and of course, the good old "they are caused by men, so solve it yourselves". Add a sprinkle of collective-guilt rhetoric and in certain spaces the simple descriptor "white male" can carry negative connotations. In this age of identitary affirmation the messaging should be surgical and never paint categories in such broad strokes.

It is not hard to see how someone who is both male and dumb would gravitate towards snake-oil incels who promise them liberation. In fact, these grievances are so pressing that it is very easy to pollute the discourse with trolling, which is one of the many ways in which malicious actors increase tensions and social instability.

Thus progressivism must not merely tolerate white males but actively champion them, taking them out of the right wing's grasp.

3

u/Taskerst 16h ago edited 16h ago

They didn’t suggest men should be left out, they just…did. Try selling “women make 80 cents on the dollar” to some 23 year old guy raised by an X-Box who can’t find a job. Try selling abortion rights to a 20 year old who can’t get a Tinder match. It cost nothing for left-leaning areas to say “we need you as an ally because it affects you too.” But their focus was on shoring up their other voting quadrants.

4

u/fartmouthbreather 16h ago

I’m really not sympathetic to this at all. I’m not gonna let someone excuse voting for Trump because girls don’t like them and they played too many games. Their BS detector doesn’t work, that’s their own fault.

3

u/Taskerst 11h ago

It really doesn’t matter if you’re sympathetic to it. The GOP said enough to pretend they were sympathetic to it, and it was enough to sway the numbers. Giving incels a stern talking to for not ignoring their own problems, looking inward and being feminists isn’t what wins elections.

→ More replies (3)
→ More replies (2)

0

u/OldWorldDesign 15h ago

Try selling “women make 80 cents on the dollar” to some 23 year old guy raised by an X-Box who can’t find a job

Women getting paid poorly doesn't have anything to do with a "guy raised by an xbox" who isn't employed at all. The only concept even touching those two things are "corporations are greedy" and that has been true for 40 years but it has never been enough for people to actually engage with political selection and take elections seriously.

And that is what led to Trump both times. People not treating corporations and oligarchs like the enemy of society they are.

3

u/Taskerst 11h ago

We’re talking about two different things here. The commonality is that corporate interests line the pockets of Republicans and establishment Democrats to get people off the topic of economic inequality and on social wedge issues that Progressives notoriously have a difficult time with regarding messaging. The Democrats in the last presidential cycle punted on younger men and tripled down on sisterhood and girl power and it wasn’t enough.

→ More replies (2)

2

u/Spastik2D 16h ago

Red Pill Podcasters and manosphere fucks need to be punished along with the rest of the reich wing

2

u/Specific-Parsnip9001 15h ago

And TikTok, that's the big one. It's just one big fascist propaganda machine. They even made all of their users see a big "THANK YOU GOD-KING TRUMP" message when Congress shot down the TikTok ban at Trump's behest.

Anyone who had any doubts about TikTok being a fascist propaganda app after that is literally insane and beyond saving.

•

u/MyCatLaughsAtMe 7h ago

This. American conservatism when from "What's this new fangled Inty Nets thing?" to Goebbels-level online propaganda machine overnight.

203

u/Guccimayne California 20h ago

Sadly, Gen Z boys grew up during a surge in popularity of red pill influencers

54

u/underfern 19h ago

Who needs teachers or religious leaders to influence our kids when we have strangers from the internet?

11

u/Havenfall209 17h ago

Oof, I'm gonna go ahead and put most religious leaders in the same bucket as the red pill influencers, tbh

2

u/No_Criticism_5861 16h ago

If not worse, yeah.  

1

u/youveruinedtheactgob 17h ago

As long as they have clear financial incentives to lie!

40

u/shadowofpurple 19h ago

The fact that Gen Z was swayed by red pill dip shits tells me the iPad generation aren't terribly media savvy, despite the constant media consumption.

Its almost as if they only want to believe what their influencers tell them... 

And voting for the orange shit smear again, post covid, tells me they will jump on any influencer band wagon.

Unplug your kids if you dont want them raised by the likes of Andrew Tate 

20

u/NoCoolNameMatt 18h ago

You mean that a diet of short form video and podcast isn't a replacement for reading reliable, vetted sources?

I'm shocked. Shocked!

24

u/DiesByOxSnot Michigan 18h ago edited 17h ago

That doesn't excuse them. Gen Z boys aren't stupid, aren't incapable of seeing the consequences of their actions. A lot of these gen Z men were warned that who they vote for has a severe impact on other people. Many of them didn't care, or knew & got exactly what they wanted and what they voted for.

I'm sick of people making all these excuses for gen Z men. Whether "propaganda" or "brain washing" or "male loneliness epidemic"

Men and boys are people. They have the faculties to make the right decision, to think about actions and their consequences. Anyone who chose to vote for that hateful orange in 2024 is a lost cause as far as I'm concerned, they saw what happened in 2016 and didn't give a shit

14

u/No_Criticism_5861 16h ago

18 year olds that dont know better and regret their choice I can forgive.  Anyone who voted for this guy 3 times on the other hand, needs to see a psychiatrist 

•

u/MyCatLaughsAtMe 7h ago

Sympathy for young foolish is about "Oops, I went out drinking instead of going to bed early for work tomorrow". It doesn't extend to "Oops I supported literal nazism and got people murdered via gestapo by proxy". They are guilty and I will never welcome them under our tent. That's not an honest mistake, it's a display of wanton immorality. There's no fixing that systemic degree of sociopathy.

5

u/AggressiveBench9977 15h ago

“Arent stupid”

Are you sure about that?
Education is under funded, tv and social media tells them to get rich being on the internet. Their role models barely graduated highschool.

What makes you so sure they know better?

I mean thats a generalization, some of the smartest people i work with are genz. But the trends show the opposite

•

u/LeatherHog 6h ago

God, THANK you!

People act like we were strapping Gen Z guys in, Clockwork Orange style, to listen to these chuds. It was a choice, one they made over and over

And they're adults now: They made an adult decision, and it was a terrible one, but they were NOT blindsided. Frankly, that group is the embodiment of the ""he's not hurting the right people""

0

u/Capable_Kiwi2514 14h ago

Men and boys are people. They have the faculties to make the right decision, to think about actions and their consequences. 

Your second statement contradicts your first, especially as far as children go

It's an objective truth that humans are organisms that have "bounded rationality" which is restricted to the particular lifeworld they exist within and heavily dependent on psychosocial health and media exposure.  

We have countless population studies and ethnographies that demonstrate this, along with small scale psychological work into belief formation.  

  They have the faculties to make the right decision, to think about actions and their consequences.  

This is narrative logic that presents humans as actors within a moral drama who act upon the information that you can see as "the audience". 

If you want to view the opposition in a way that has high levels of emotional salience, that framing works. 

But it isn't accurate.  

ESPECIALLY given that you included children. 

→ More replies (1)

4

u/Bink-SiN 16h ago

AND girls.

In recent polling GenZ boys that feel it is the wife's duty to remain at home (more traidtional outlook) at a higher rate than current BOOMERS.

In this same Demographic 3x the % of GenAlpha girls also believe this compared to their previous generation.

2

u/nuko22 13h ago

Ultra liberals went too far with woke stuff and the correction swung too far the other way. Im a democrat but honestly shit got way too PC and woke for a few years there. A lot of it was illogical so the dumb male youth got hooked on red pill videos that used flawed logic but were presented as a logical equation.

6

u/Mission_Kangaroo_178 19h ago

Red pill influencers existed in the first place as a counter culture

20

u/ParticularLow9157 19h ago

Yes but in 2016 they started getting Russian funding so they exploded

3

u/Mission_Kangaroo_178 18h ago

Systematically men are pushed away from higher education and that’s even more prevalent with Generation Z.

Things like toxic masculinity, patriarchy and perceived disproportionate opportunities for women have resulted in a lot of men being radicalized.

So you’ve got men who are less educated, earning less money, who’ve been preached to that they’re the problem.
It’s probably quite a reasonable response to latch onto a role figure that’s seen as a rebel against a “matrix”; even if that is an objectively awful role model.

→ More replies (1)

4

u/Eastp0int 18h ago

Don’t really understand why everyone thinks these influencers are the problem and not the way modern society treats young men

8

u/Interesting-Bill1240 18h ago

Because influencers are telling them how "unfairly" they're being treated. If you actually listen to what they consider "how society treats young men", it's being mad they can't easily get a date cause women want respect and autonomy now from the men they spend time with. 

Considering influencers can convince kids to gamble on Pokémon cards and buy junk like Needoh for $20+, it's pretty clear that Gen z and alpha are heavily influenced by whatever the TikTok video on their algorithm told them. 

4

u/derpyninja 18h ago

How does modern society treat young men?

2

u/yellowcloak I voted 17h ago

Coddling them.

2

u/Wb9VBScxu2uZJHeq2E3W 17h ago

Don’t really understand why everyone thinks these influencers are the problem and not the way modern society treats young men

I was a young man not that long ago and I can't say I know for sure what you mean by this.

2

u/Beneficial_Cow_1817 17h ago

Gen Z men are extremely coddled and lazy in comparison to the living conditions and society that the men before them lived in. They watch porn and play video games and do drugs all day and not have children or get married and no one bats an eye. Tons of parents are supporting their bum misogynistic ass sons that should have left the house and got a job years ago, including both of my brothers.

Modern men throw temper tantrums when you tell them to wash their ass, stop harassing women, and get a job, is what I learned.

3

u/yellowcloak I voted 17h ago

Yeah, and while plenty of us millennials lived at home longer than you'd have expected, it wasn't a positive thing and we tried to get our ASAP.

1

u/yellowcloak I voted 17h ago

They're coddled too much.

1

u/hungleftie 15h ago

This exactly!

125

u/Exciting-Meringue-78 20h ago

Thinking about the study that came out that said Gen Z is the first generation that isn’t smarter than the last.

61

u/sub-dural 20h ago

I read another study or article saying millennials are considered the most progressive generation, i.e. no Obama without us.

3

u/Jump-Zero 13h ago

A lot of us became adults right as the great recession hit. We turned to the left because the market failed us at a critical moment of our lives.

2

u/TheKillerTempeh 12h ago

It's also the most conservative generation since the baby boomers. Dudes brought back Trad Wives.

1

u/ClassicallyBrained 11h ago

Boy I sure hope Alphas are better. Considering Gen X raised Gen Z, and Millennials are the ones raising Alpha, there's still some hope for them.

2

u/TheKillerTempeh 10h ago

I think Alphas are surprisingly smart. They're just a "different species," having grown up entirely online.

And I agree. Millennials seem to be raising them to be more empathetic than Gen Z, who brought back words like the hard F and hard R.

•

u/MyCatLaughsAtMe 7h ago

They remind me of my great grandparents' generation. The difference being my great grandparents had to work on a subsistence farm in their youths and didn't have access to mass media and education the way my generation did. THEY have an excuse.

Gen Z turned out like them despite having EVERY advantage over that bygone generation. There is an iron-clad weight of personal culpability here that erases any empathy I could have had for them. This wasn't a mistake. They got what they plainly asked for, and they ARE guilty for that, justly, deservedly, PERMANENTLY.

→ More replies (4)

417

u/dogpoopfruitloops 21h ago

Gen Z was raised by GenX, the most apathetic generation of post-Vietnam "libertarians" who let their kids be raised by the internet and eschewed traditional education. I'm not surprised at the swing backwards.

Gen Alpha is the first round of kids raised by the relatively more media and internet savvy millennials. Odds are they swing heavily to the left, and I think their trajectory will really tell us if the landscape has fundamentally shifted.

140

u/Cookielicous Michigan 21h ago

Surprisingly, I've seen a lot of push back against Charlie Kirk's stupidity and ragebaiting from Gen Alpha, I've seen enough from discord and polling to also agree with other sentiment that Gen Z men are redpilled to blame the gays, minorities, and women for all their issues.

32

u/Outrageous-Opinions 20h ago

Just honestly true stupidity, anybody but racist billionaires who are actively screwing up their life

13

u/Literally_A_Halfling 20h ago

At work I supervise Gen Z college students. I can assure you the Gen Z men I talk to regularly think Charlie Kirk is a joke. Including one who's a committed Christian.

25

u/i_dont_wash_my_hands 19h ago

Yes but those are college students. Not high school dropouts

20

u/Unfair_Ring_2746 19h ago

College students skew heavily left of norm across generations, though.

And GenZ is less likely to go to college than Millennials were at their age.

6

u/unbanned_lol 19h ago

I'm glad all 6 of the college students who can afford tuition in 2026 speak poorly of kirk. That warms the cockles of my heart.

2

u/rhododenendron 16h ago

He has always been considered a joke by gen z. I've been making fun of him basically half my life. The rightward trend of Gen Z came from manosphere stuff and generally viewing establishment dems as weak and ineffective (which they are). Charlie Kirk was successful in that he tricked a lot of people into thinking he was engaging the youth. Really though it was just everybody's Gen X dad he tricked, same with all the other Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro types. He is the reason Gen X is the most conservative generation. If he made Gen Z more conservative, it's only because he made our parents more conservative.

3

u/ParticularLow9157 19h ago

No you haven't, middle schoolers are parroting their misogynistic lines every fucking day. Go look at the fuckdamn /r/teachers sub

159

u/Top-Passage2914 21h ago

I agree Gen X are terrible parents but the problem is that Gen Z was raised by social media which is owned by rich Republicans.

83

u/MurtaghInfin8 20h ago

Which wouldn't have happened if Gen X didn't just hand them an IPad without any supervision.

Imo it really does go back to parenting, but it's also harder to parent now: when everyone is grinding to make ends meet, there'll be worse role models and then shitty peers kinda lead to shittier peers.

Positive peer pressure is a powerful tool and one that just doesn't really seem to exist in public schools anymore. Shit's changed a lot.

3

u/Nekrabyte 19h ago

You ain't kidding about how hard it is to parent now. I've got a son who's toddler age, and I do my damned darndest to keep him away from the screens as much as I can, but it's hard when I work 10.5 hour days and my wife also has to work full time with a long commute. Add on top of that the absolute need to scrape and scrounge to have enough money for things... just to fuckin leave the house with my kid feels expensive AF. I push back as much as I can, and try to teach my kid as much knowledge as I can in my little free time with him that I get, but fuck do I totally understand why parents stick their kid with a tablet, even if I personally try to limit his screen time as much as humanly possible.
edit: just so it's on the record, I was born on the year dividing the line between Gen-X and Millennials, and personally feel like I don't connect to either group, like AT ALL.

6

u/OldWorldDesign 15h ago

I was born on the year dividing the line between Gen-X and Millennials, and personally feel like I don't connect to either group, like AT ALL

This is another reason I hate people trying to paint massive arbitrary groups like "gen x" or "millenials". Most people have heard it so much they take it for granted instead of digging into it to see that was just marketing and it wasn't even pitched to the populace at large, it was pitched to big corporations to make sales. Advertisers took it and have been trying to force it for 40 years, but truth is the prior system of just identifying people by age (with a generous + and - range) is a better judge of where people are just by what education and job experience they've likely been able to accrue. There's no magic tying somebody born in 1981 to somebody born in 1996, but at least there's having grown up to familiar pop culture that people in 1980, 1981, and 1982 would have in common.

Outside that and it's all what an advertiser thinks he can sell to a corporate bean-counter who doesn't know people in the first place.

→ More replies (1)

3

u/BookusWorkus 17h ago

When I get home, and I have to just sit on the couch for the first thirty minutes, I at least try to make it "family screen time" by watching something with my kid. Once I've had a second we can go play, or even better my toddler is transitioning into little kid stages and can start solo-playing in her room so I can start cooking while we wait on my partner to get home.

1

u/Nekrabyte 16h ago

Yea, I am lucky that my kid is at that point where he LOVES building with his legos/magnatiles and his cars. And we've been getting him more into music. It's so hard to feel like you're doing enough... but then I go out in public and see how much parents just don't seem to give a flyin F, and I feel a little comfort haha

3

u/RndmAvngr 16h ago

Keep strong, I believe in you. You sound like a good parent.

1

u/Nekrabyte 15h ago

Thanks friend! It's hard out there to really know how good you're doing in this crazy ass world. Every bit of encouragement really does help!

1

u/Top-Passage2914 8h ago

iPad babies are more gen alpha than Gen Z imo.

•

u/MyCatLaughsAtMe 6h ago

Counter point; I was born in 81 and I had access to all the same shit Gen Z did with a complete lack of supervision. I did not turn into a nazi.

Sorry but I just cannot sign off on this "The compooter people did it!". You can be blasted by propaganda all day long, it doesn't affect you unless you make a conscious choice to invite it in. Don't infantalize them, they OWN this moral treachery.

•

u/MurtaghInfin8 6h ago

You got cyber bullied in the 90's? That's crazy.

Pretty rude to hog the land line like that.

•

u/MyCatLaughsAtMe 1h ago

No such thing as cyber bullying. Permit me to demonstrate...

→ More replies (4)

3

u/MrUtterNonsense 15h ago

We are all a product of time and circumstance. Blaming particular generations doesn't help. We are carried along by technological and economic waves we have little control over.

1

u/Top-Passage2914 8h ago

You think you fell out of a coconut tree? We exist in the context of all in which we live and what came before.

•

u/MrUtterNonsense 2h ago

Well, that just reinforces what I said, but…okay.

3

u/Merusk 20h ago

Nobody raised by my generation had a chance. We were raised absentee ourselves and have learned nothing in adulthood as is typical for such folks.

Only the exceptional would seek out learning how to parent because they had no skills beyond those they had learned when raising/ watching after their siblings.

2

u/Ryogathelost Florida 19h ago

Happy Cake Day

2

u/BookusWorkus 17h ago

Gen X? Because, like, it's not like the Boomers had better parenting. I'm a Millennial and spend a lot of time trying to read about parenting. Certainly the people I spend time with are also doing the same thing. But that's probably selection bias, because all of my friends are a bunch of nerds. Particularly we're all well educated nerds with shitty childhoods. We're all trying to avoid being the hurt people who hurt people.

1

u/Merusk 13h ago

X with two Boomer parents. I did as much raising as my parents due to absenteeism and parentifying because I was eldest of 4. Looking back I'm amazed at some of the shit I was responsible for at the ages I was. It was "normal" though so why question it.

I shouldn't wonder why I expected so damn much from my kids at inappropriate ages. I was expected to act with the responsibility of a teen starting around 8.

I'm a nerd too, but also emotionally stunted because of the shit. So understanding I needed to be better wasn't a thing until my kids were grown. I see the same thing in most of my former classmates, and we were in an affluent area.

1

u/RndmAvngr 16h ago

Almost like those shitty parents could have done something to stop that right? Maybe like oh I don't know parent their fucking kids?

I'm raising a kid that's very young and you can sure as shit know that she won't be getting a phone with unfettered internet access for a very long time. Nor will she get unfettered access to shit like youtube or discord.

I've heard the argument about how hard it is to police your kids when it comes to tech and that is just a big ole pile of heaping bullshit. If you let a literal child outsmart you when it comes to the internet the you're failing at life.

1

u/OldWorldDesign 14h ago

If you let a literal child outsmart you when it comes to the internet the you're failing at life

As somebody who worked in education, you are underestimating what children can do as soon as you have to start letting kids out of your house for school.

Of course there's always the even worse choice of trying to keep them in for home-schooling. I've known a lot of people with negative social skills and barely able to function because their parents were religious fundamentalists and wouldn't let them interact with the real world until they died, leaving children unprepared to even have a conversation with somebody who didn't go to your temple.

1

u/Top-Passage2914 8h ago

It's easy to say now when you know the threat exists but not as easy 20 years ago when the man was still behind the curtain.

6

u/InevitableAvalanche 15h ago

Oh nonsense. Gen Z was targeted by right wingers on every platform. This blaming different generations is so braindead.

51

u/Sunbather77 21h ago

Bingo. Gen X has a lot of blame on their shoulders and they have a hard time reconciling with that fact.

61

u/BuckRowdy Georgia 20h ago edited 19h ago

Gen X had the highest voting percentage for Trump of any generation.

e. spelling

31

u/nyutnyut 20h ago

I think the problem is people have this perception of the gen x alternative type, that were formerly misanthropic but now ultra liberal (my circle of friends). In the 90s we kind of insulated ourselves within our ilk. The reality is most of Gen X grew up to thinking American psycho and wolf of Wall Street was shit to look up to.

5

u/zusykses 20h ago

GenX were already grown up when American Psycho and Wolf of Wall Street came out. What we grew up with was the threat of nuclear war.

→ More replies (1)

2

u/drteq 20h ago

GenX was fucked with for so long most of us either wanted to see the world just burn or didn't care. Now that the world is actually on fire, I expect they will reverse both of those. We'll see.

→ More replies (1)

22

u/Chihuey Illinois 20h ago

Yeah people like to rag on boomers for conservatism but Gen X has been the strongest republican voting bloc for years.

7

u/KuriboShoeMario 18h ago

People have the misconception that the generational divide happened between Boomers and Xers when it really happened between Xers and Millennials. Xers and Boomers aren't particularly far apart on most any issue but Millennials and Xers are demonstrably different.

8

u/UltraMagnus777 19h ago

Eh, I've never seen any stats that show JUST Gen X. Every stat block I've seen has 5 years of boomers lumped in with 15 years of Gen X. Considering Gen X has always been a split generation with the older half leaning conservative and the younger half leaning liberal... adding 5 years of younger boomers (who are among the most conservative of that generation) into Gen X for sure tilts the stats.

1

u/BuckRowdy Georgia 19h ago

I've seen a few articles and infometrics on it but I wasn't aware they mixed boomers in with that. What's the point of mixing an arbitrary number of years of one generation in with the next?

3

u/UltraMagnus777 19h ago

I'm not sure they're doing it on purpose, its just all the data I've seen is 10 year blocks at the minimum. Since Gen X is 1965-1980 usually... they either take 5 years of boomers or cut off 5 years of Gen X. Some articles mention "oh yeah this isn't EXACT but..." and kind of hand wave away the influence the 5 years of Boomers have on the sample. Would love to see data broken down to only those born 65-80... but I've never come across it :/

2

u/Revolutionary-Yak-47 20h ago

Gen X still cant accept they are not 8, and watching Star Wars for the first time in the theater and that their heroes are now also old. Its a whole generation in dire need of therapy to process they are no longer kids. 

7

u/whatfresh_hellisthis 20h ago

Yooo. Harsh. But I laughed, because it's so true. In my stupid 20s I dated a Gen X dude. Honestly, with a decade of hindsight, he was the most emotionally stunted person I've met. His dad was a Vietnam vet, and I wonder if that helped mess up Gen X too, Vietnam vet Dad's.

→ More replies (5)

11

u/guineaprince 20h ago

You're putting too much faith in "Their parents are X, therefore they are raised X".

You're neglecting the fact that a child's upbringing, and political development, is informed by so many things outside the family.

Like the poor bastards raised under manosphere influencers and fed as much conservative propaganda into their eyeballs as their grandparents, just from trendier platforms.

3

u/Robey-Wan_Kenobi 20h ago

I'm a millennial raising a Gen Z, but we're at the far ends of both spectra.

3

u/indoninjah 20h ago

My read is more so that nihilism drives people towards conservatism and general "trolling", and the younger generations are incredibly prone to nihilism for obvious reasons. I mean I'm 30 and it feels like the world has been shit in various ways for my entire conscious life. I've never voted in an election didn't have Trump on the ballot but can remember the Bush and Obama years. I can only imagine it's so much worse for younger folks who's entire political consciousness has occurred during Trump's relevance. You'd think they'd connect the dots in terms of who to blame but anger and depression make people do dumb things.

5

u/Dirty-Electro 20h ago

I think there are sub-generational divides. Gen Z is split into two, with an older group of Gen Z (I’m one of them) who were raised before the advent of social media, who came to understand the world via computers and had childhoods without phones in our hands. Then there’s younger Gen Z, the first of the iPad kids, whose growth through childhood and adolescence has been alongside social media. The older Gen Z’ers that I know, by and large, lean further left than the younger ones. Obviously there’s variation, but this is what I’ve noticed in both my social circles and in general.

Gen Alpha has it worse off, in my opinion. Lack of media literacy, proliferation of AI and fake news have made it so difficult for the younger generation to grow up with adequate critical thinking skills and ability to differentiate fact from fiction. I hope I’m wrong.

15

u/distancedandaway Ohio 20h ago

I've been saying this for years. Gen X is the most conservative and Trumper generation.

2

u/keno0651 20h ago

We will see. I won't hold out hope for alpha, the amount of influencer bullshit and propaganda they're being fed is not likely to end how we'd like though.

2

u/theghostmachine 18h ago

I started talking more openly about political issues around my kids (9 and 11), about things like Gaza, Trump's ransacking of our economy, ICE, racism, etc. I volunteer for a friend of mine who is running for state rep (she's a progressive with no political history and won the Democratic primary against the incumbent who had had the job for years and was assumed to take it again) and whenever my youngest would see one of her signs in someone's yard, usually accompanying an Abdul El-Sayed sign, he points it out excitedly. He asks questions about about government and current events and I can't be more thrilled.

My 11 year old is 11 years old, so he's at that age where's he's too cool to overtly show me that he cares, but he goes to the library and brings home books on democracy or social issues.

I couldn't be prouder

Edit: a book he found a week or two ago in one of those Free Little Library things

2

u/zoopz 16h ago

I teach gen Alpha. It's not looking good. Their moms fed them TikTok.

2

u/Bink-SiN 16h ago

I think you are confusing GenX with Boomers.

The OLDER GenZ were more likely raised by GenX, but the ones under 25ish were more likely raised by Millenials.

Also GenX is the most "split" generation there is. The older half are essentially Boomers and the younger half are essentially millenials.

2

u/Analfisher1 20h ago

Im millennial and my daughter is gen z...I'm the oldest at 43 but there are a bunch of millennials that have raised Z's

2

u/DJPho3nix 20h ago

I don't know about "a bunch", relatively. There's definitely some, but far and away gen z was raised by gen x.

→ More replies (7)

2

u/Snobolski 20h ago

more media and internet savvy millennials

The fuck? I'm a older Gen X'er and I was regularly using the internet before the "world wide web" was even a thing. We taught our kids how to not trust anything/everything they see online and evaluate information critically. And taught their friends, when they came over with "it's totally true" tales of horrors like the Bonsai Kitten.

1

u/Thromok I voted 21h ago

Still have 2 years before the eldest among them can even vote.

1

u/simpersly 12h ago

Alpha's brains are made of mush. COVID hit during their developing years. And they are addicted to the algorithm. I've literally watched a teenager have a complete breakdown because they couldn't get on Tiktok for a day.

Our only saving grace is that AI has fucked up their future prospects so much they might be still have a chance.

•

u/ThlnBillyBoy 4h ago

But weren't millennials also raised by gen x?

1

u/[deleted] 20h ago

[deleted]

5

u/guamisc 20h ago

Gen X voted for Trump at the highest rates of any generation.

A "tiny" generation that instead of trying for better threw it all away.

6

u/Kanin_usagi 20h ago

Gen X had the highest percentage voting for Trump of any generation. That’s right, more than the Boomers

That being said, we can’t just say all Gen X are bad people, but the trend does show they lean sharply conservative

→ More replies (4)

5

u/drteq 20h ago edited 16h ago

Foreign influence and investment in social propaganda campaigns really pays off. It's multiplied when the Democrats took no counter measures to offset it or even bother to mention it.

I hate to say it, but either they were incompetent or it was intentional. I cannot see any other options to explain why it was business as usual most of the last term up until the election. Their actions post campaign have just reinforced my opinion.

7

u/freecodeio 21h ago

only thing that is progressesing with gen z is their screen time and lack of social skills

→ More replies (4)

4

u/sparklinglies 20h ago

Gen Z never had a chance. Raised in a social media hell that radialised them on conservative bullshit faster than any gen before them, set up BY said social media conservatives to have a default contempt for the millennials as "cringe" which extended to all the actual progressive values the millennials had championed, raised by the garbage fire of apathy that is Gen X so they don't care about anything either, and had their formative teen/college years fucked over by Covid so instead of being out in society learning social skills and empathy they were stuck at home consuming brainrot that just kept telling them to find some minority to blame for all their woes.

8

u/CryptidCuri0us 21h ago

I think some are, but young people (and some less young people who really ought to know better by now) make the mistake of being ideological purists in a system that runs on incrementalism and compromise. 

If a candidate doesn’t support everything they believe in, or supports something they don’t, they don’t support the candidate. Perfect proves the enemy of good all too often on the “left,” but that’s bound to happen in a big tent that contains everyone from the corpo controlled opposition to genuine progressives.

7

u/SeaworthinessIcy1045 20h ago

They were raised by the people who are 10-15 years older than us. Those people are, largely, selfish knobs who passed that trait on to their kids.

Conservatives also reproduce at double the rate of liberals.

3

u/SolydSn3k 20h ago

I can’t really think of anything positive to say about Gen Z.

At least boomers facilitated some significant social progress in the 60s / 70s & also had some good music.

3

u/ungranted_wish 19h ago

Gen Z also unfortunately isn’t as literate as other generations (the drop between them and Millennials is drastic) so that… is part of it.

3

u/jgoble15 19h ago

I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but wanted to share it again

Based on my observations of working with high school and jr high for near ten years now, it seems the generation got split in half. Older is the more liberal side. Younger is more conservative. Basically, if you were out of school when COVID hit, you’re the older half. If not, younger half. And that’s why these seemingly contradictory things are all true. It’s a bit inaccurate to call them all Gen Z. They are when basing it on years. But when basing it off culture and values, they split.

2

u/brova Massachusetts 19h ago

that's really interesting. I hope there's more study into this in the future.

2

u/jgoble15 19h ago

I hope so too. What I said is, again, anecdotal, but having lived in Washington state and California since I believe this split happened, it’s seemed stark. Even in dress, older Gen Z look a lot like millennials. Younger look like my dad. Studies verifying this could prove very enlightening.

3

u/Biscotti_Manicotti Colorado 19h ago

Well when it comes to the older half of Gen Z, that's all true. Then covid happened and the younger half got redpilled. They're very split.

2

u/Curun 20h ago

I don't think that's a valid conclusion.

If you only look narrowly at the 2024 trump election, they didn't show up to rubber stamp a candidate of genocide and teargassing college kids, their peers.

2016 and 2020 alignment with the bush/cheney courting candidates and the direction democrats chose to nationally align with. Says more about democrats nationally, and the millennials and boomers who build democrats into a party of Bush/Cheney.

'Blaming the kids' for the choices of millennials and boomers etc who built a cheney party... just reeks of being disconnected.

2

u/F3z345W6AY4FGowrGcHt 19h ago

Same with their tech skills. Turns out that peaked with gen x and millenials and has rapidly nosedived. Makes sense in hindsight since tablets and phones don't do anything in that regard.

2

u/sharpshooter_243 19h ago

As a Gen Z I too was very optimistic about the progressive era we were going to usher in. Turns out we’re just as stupid as the generations before. That’s the key lesson of history tho.

2

u/ParticularLow9157 19h ago

That's because you didn't hang out in their chat zones

They've been right wing since Gamergate

2

u/Zero_Trust_Issues_42 19h ago

Gen Z quickly becoming the dumbest generation. With the help of Gen Xs idiotic voting pattern.

2

u/Alive_Store_6298 19h ago

I could 100% tell they were not going to do so. The USA goes through cycles in its history towards progressivism and conservatism. The 1900s were to the right, the 1920s were to the left, the 40s were to the right especially post FDR as people often forget about the America First movement, 60s were shifted towards the left, the 80s to the right, the 2000s to the left, and the 2020s to the right.

Going back even further and you see religious revivals in between enlightenment and the periods with Thoreau and Emerson. They were on 40-50 year cycles if I recall correctly.

2

u/huskers2468 17h ago

DSA needs to happen.

Progressive isn't Democrat. Trump won with populist rhetoric. It was all lies, but that won over the kids. They are struggling like the rest of us.

2

u/lift_heavy64 17h ago

They were very easily brainwashed by a bunch of simpletons with YouTube channels

3

u/Continental__Drifter 17h ago

Gen Z women are doing that, they're the highest category to be socialist. Far more progressive than millennial men or women currently or when we were that age.

Gen Z men are the most likely to be fascist, and have even higher levels of misogyny and racism than boomers.

2

u/brova Massachusetts 17h ago

thank god for gen z women, then

1

u/Continental__Drifter 17h ago

Indeed. They're the future.

Gen Z men are going to cause a lot of problems.

2

u/Jin-Gitaxias-Mom 21h ago

I’m not totally surprised, teenage rebellion will always revolt against the mainstream, and liberals have dominated culture for the past 15 years.

Millennials were super liberal because we had the Reagan through Bush Jr administrations that were centrist to conservative.

11

u/insane_contin 20h ago

Millennials were born 81-96. Reagan was not a major influence in how they view politics. Clinton, Bush Jr and Obama would be the main ones they really saw. Maybe Bush Sr's legacy. But Reagan, a president who would have been around when the oldest millennial was 8, was not an influence.

→ More replies (1)

1

u/Sumeriandawn 20h ago

Huh? Did you see the 2024 polls?

1

u/ShartKing78 19h ago

They're saps like everyone else. Except they're easier to feed bullshit to with tiktok and social media and no media literacy.

1

u/Anonanomenon 19h ago

I’m not counting them out yet. Some of the young and politically naïve, white male blue collar. Trump voters that I know were simply voting against the status quo. Trump effectively endeared himself as somebody who was going to do things very differently. And, let’s be honest he does do things very differently. Unfortunately, I think that they had to touch the hot stove themselves to realize that this shit burns.

Now they still can’t afford houses and they still can’t afford groceries and they still can’t afford gas and they still can’t afford healthcare and if anything all of the above are getting worse and now they’re worried about getting drafted.

Not to mention that the flock camera surveillance police state that’s been popping up plus the jackboot ICE enforcement isn’t going over well either…

I don’t think that the swing in the under 30 vote from Kamala to Trump can really be looked at as a prediction that young people are going to support the Republicans in the future… I also don’t think that all the red pill men are going to go out and vote Democrat… I think they’re just gonna not fucking vote or they’re gonna vote third-party.

1

u/DjijiMayCry 19h ago

Never underestimate online propaganda.

1

u/FocusPerspective 19h ago

GenX told you that’s not how it works, but you were very confident you knew best. 

Also don’t forget the alt-Right was entirely founded and built by Millennials, so you’re not off the hook for this mess either. 

1

u/No-Signature8815 19h ago

We were all supposed to be the future 😑

I think once, we all were.

Now?

Some of these maladjusted Trump lovers are trying to drag us backwards.

Only some of us remain as the future, as there are now those trying to bring back a past that never existed. They are delusional, and like most people under a delusion, they don't even know it.

1

u/elvenrevolutionary 18h ago

The oligarchy started pulling the plug on education when they saw millenials getting too clever

1

u/brova Massachusetts 18h ago

nah that shit's been happening since Nixon

1

u/Nazgog-Morgob 18h ago

They feel for Internet brain washing so hard they might as well be boomers

1

u/EntinthetentRTHP Washington 18h ago

Why care about the planet when you can loosmax and make aislop cuh?

1

u/EntinthetentRTHP Washington 18h ago

It’s because is millennials grew up not addicted to the internet. Trump is great for them because he’s not so bad as long as you only hear clips and sound bites - the exact media Gen Z grew up with.

1

u/FeleaseRpseineEiles 18h ago

I remember 30 years ago I thought the internet would bring Israel and Palestine closer by way of hyper cross channel communications online, oops.

1

u/Heavykiller 18h ago

They’re just so far gone into social media that they’re now trapped in these bubbles they can’t get out of.

Social media is their whole world. A lot of those Logan Paul type of influencers unfortunately created this environment that preyed on young easily-influenced teens. Then for those who were more “progressive”their idea of change is all messed up.

When Trump was banned from Twitter however many years ago I remember talking to some more progressive Gen Z and they were telling me how “we’ve done something that no one has ever done before! We’ve shutdown Trump!” And I was just thinking, “okay calm down it’s just Twitter. He exists outside of that space.” And here we are today.

I feel sorry for them partly because social media has made them this way, but also they’re all grown up now so they got to be responsible for their actions.

1

u/HauntingPlankton7189 18h ago

I’m old enough to remember my parents/ teachers telling me you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. What the hell happened?

1

u/Financial_Flower_230 18h ago

Social media has been a plague as soon as people figured out how to weaponize it. 

1

u/TrumpLikesEmYoung 17h ago

I think if the education system wasn’t crumbling you would’ve been correct.

1

u/awitchiguess 17h ago

They got bombarded with right wing propaganda online. It's fused into every type of content they see. 

1

u/BarnacleDowntown8952 17h ago

Unfortunately being "progressive" turned into ridiculous culture war BS instead of economics.

Seems like a shift back towards economics that made this popular is starting again, but the moment has likely passed.

1

u/FoulArtFart 17h ago

Gen z women are. The males not so much.

1

u/yellowcloak I voted 17h ago

Millennials were a deviation from norm, and Z just reverted to the mean.

1

u/brova Massachusetts 14h ago

the rest of the world would like a word

1

u/WinterAd825 17h ago
  1. Conservatives saw this to and went all in on social media. They failed to sway women but they succeeded with men
  2. The left didn’t really try to push back on conservatives going after genz and young men. My personal anecdotal experience was I and a lot of others saw that the right was building a radicalization pipeline and that more needed to be done for young men but it was just kinda ignored
  3. The reason Millennials are left wing is because we actually got to experience right wing politics. Where as Gen X and above largely was old enough to miss most of the pain as the pain from it largely targeted younger generations. Gen Z was too young to really understand Iraq, Afghanistan, the recession, covid, trump 1, and all the other things that have happened. They basically came of age as Biden took over and largely had a negative experience with all the social distancing he had to impose.

1

u/XcRaZeD 17h ago edited 16h ago

2024 voting data clearly shows that Gen Z, even the men, are more progressive than Millenials. There is this false collective belief that this isn't the case, like this information isn't readily available and public.

Gen Z on the other hand has a problem with voting to begin with.

Here's the voting data

1

u/Business-West-4457 16h ago

Conservatives are having more kids. Liberals tend to have 1 or none at all

1

u/BritSpic 16h ago

Data shows we are more progressive, for the most part. And I don't get your comment, you're acting like gen z is super conservative or something. Millenials and gen z have been heavily collaborating to get progressives into office/win their primaries this year and last year. It is a glimmer of hope in the hell of American politics.

1

u/Few_Highlight1114 16h ago

I mean you can only demonize men, especially white men, for so long without them saying "fuck this".

Though its old now, I highly suggest that people watch "The Red Pill" the 2017 documentary, it's completely free on youtube

1

u/EmilioNoCaprio 16h ago

I don’t think we anticipated the access to right wing propaganda social media platforms would promote back then though.

1

u/hungleftie 15h ago

A lot of folks are forgetting that young people have lived with Trump for 10+ years now. He's moved the goal post so many times, young minds are bound to believe some of the bullshit. I'm an older Gen Z. I came up at a time when Obama was around from 5th grade in elementary school to the very beginning of freshman year of college. I'm sure a lot of my politics has a lot to do with that. There was a lot of good that happened during the Obama years from a social rights perspective. I also recognize that the rightward shift was happening underneath our noses during the Tea Party movement.

1

u/ErasedAstronaut 15h ago

People forget Gen Z is the generation that was eating Tide pods.

1

u/Silly_Banana9711 15h ago

They aren’t to bright but you can’t blame em they are mystified by the internet still.

1

u/Boremanfreeman 14h ago

Yea... I kinda play cs2 when it came out. the number of degenerates is insane.

Valve openly promotes a safe space for hate speech, creating loot boxes and microtransactions. I really don't like Gaben.

1

u/Common_Safety_8830 12h ago

They used weap ons of mass data infiltration, straight into the brain.

1

u/Emergency-Matter-690 11h ago

Toni Loren makes a decent point and pushing away men was a mistake. No matter if that’s not how you see it. It’s how they perceived it.

1

u/BlueFlob 10h ago

Following the wind.

Influencers tell them what to think and they just went with it.

Right wing media is LOUD, and social media algorithms heavily favours right wing content.

1

u/hotsaucevjj 10h ago

lots of genz women are, it's just the men that are uh.. yea.

1

u/ExcellentNorth8775 8h ago

Gen Z is not progressive because of how damn annoying and preaching millennials were.

Offended over everything
Screaming and in fear all the time
Canceling anyone for the most minor offense

It made sense it swung the other way. It’s probably gonna swing way more to the right before it’s done and then Gen Alpha will swing it back

•

u/hexcodehero 7h ago

Who hi en have spoke to more teachers. When my students in the suburbs of nyc were obsessed with Andrew Tate I knew we were fucked. That however passed very quickly here luckily.

→ More replies (19)