Progressives loved young people after Democrats’ November 4 sweep … for a whole week

Progressives should thank whatever god(s) they praise that young voters ignore the destructive trashings liberal-left podcasters spew about them day after day.

Young voters, including young men, led the November 4 election’s stunning sweep by Democrats, not only voting far more progressive but sometimes (as in New York City) overruling more conservative older voters. Progressives were delighted.

Network exit polls show 78% of voters ages 18-29 voted for Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor; 60% of voters age 45 and older voted AGAINST him.

Similar margins reverberated across other elections. In New Jersey and Virginia statehouse races, seven in 10 under-30 voters went Democratic, compared to tossup margins among voters 45 and older. In California, a thundering 80% of 18-29 year-olds voted for the Democrats’ our-turn-to-gerrymander countering Texas Republicans’ we-started-it-gerrymander, heavier than older voters’ “yes” voting (in today’s California, even old White men are liberals.)

In California and New York City, young men and young Whites both voted more progressive than women over age 30, and much more than men over 30 (liberal/left podcasters’ agemates).

No matter. November 4 is already forgotten.

I follow progressive podcasts daily, with mixed mental health consequences.

Right-wingers’ hatreds toward minorities, immigrants, non-binaries, etc., are baseless bigotries, but at least berating their liberal opponents makes political sense. In baffling contrast, progressives’ hatred against young people, their natural allies, is brainlessly factless and self-destructive.

The vilest epithets in the progressive vocabulary are not “MAGA” or “fascist,” but “juvenile,” “young,” and “teenage.” Leftist youth-hating bashers include both those who seem to resent their own kids and those who cast their teenagers as unique Wunderkinder.

After November 4’s stunning victories, it took just a week for progressives’ neanderthal anti-youth rage to resurface. Breaking Points’ Krystal Ball and her husband, Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinksi, couldn’t restrain their animosity. “Young men” ape groyper Nazi Nick Fuentes, Ball recited for the millionth time, adding that “young men” were an important part of the Trump coalition.

No, they weren’t. Men under age 30 comprised a whopping 7% of Trump’s total vote, exit polls showed. Ball’s own cohort, women age 30-44, gave Trump a much larger share.

Later on, Ball and cohost said Trump won “young people.” No, he didn’t. He lost among voters under age 30 by a landslide 11 points.

Why do progressives keep hashing and rehashing and rerehashing such destructive falsehoods? Why do they keep insisting “young men,” “young conservatives,” “young people,” whatever stereotype du jour pops into their heads, are Nazi-Fuentes America Firsters? Why is the liberal/left so obsessed with Fuentes (they complain about him nearly every damn day) when dozens of right-wing podcasters have far more older followers?

The only thing I can figure is that commentators from centrist Ezra Klein leftward to Ball and Kulinski would be delighted to hound young people into really supporting Nazis and MAGAs so they could smugly moralize against youthful stupidities and blame their favorite youth-corrupting villain, social media.

Conceit plays a big part. Progressives routinely pretend their older ages are more benignly liberal, tolerant, and disciplined than savage younger ones. Kulinski puffs up his Millennial generation as history’s most enlightened and liberal. No, they’re not. EVERY survey, poll, election, statistic, and science resoundingly shows Millennials are more conservative and worse-acting than Gen Z by every measure – crime, violence, shootings, overdoses, suicides, politics, etc.

For example, Kulinski’s own demographic, men ages 30-44, supported Trump in 2024 by a 7-point margin, and men ages 45-64 by a 20-point rout. Yet, Kulinski and fellow podcasters incessantly blame the small fraction of young people who follow “manosphere” sites for Trump’s victory, not his own “30-age men,” “older men,” and “older people” demographics who actually were responsible.

Kulinski’s hatred toward young people is so intense he actually spits. In his 11/11 podcast, he raged against “a lot of young men” in “sixth grade” he slanders as “little Andrew Tate demon wannabes treating women like shit” who need a “stern father figure in their life who can put them in their place and tell these fuckin’ snot- little brat weasels, you’re acting like a prick and no one likes you and is ever going to like you…” on and on, Kulinski’s creepy recapitulation of MAGAs’ Freudian daddyfyings of Trump. Put down the vape and take your own oft-dished advice, Kyle: shut the eff up.

Ephebiphobia is just another bigotry

The unwritten liberal-left rule seems to be that older subgroups can be berated for what they do, but young people as an entire group deserve mass condemnation for who they are.

Progressives understand Sociology 1 fairness when applied to older groups with power: entire demographics are not responsible for the acts of their individuals or subgroups. All Jews are not to blame for what Israel does. All older people are not guilty for Trump’s barbarities. Yet, the liberal-left suddenly abandons that principle when it comes to young people: all Gen Z must be held collectively guilty for one 20-age shooter, a Nazi groyper cult, a youthful cyberbully.

While leftist podcasters do berate commentators with older followings, the left’s mass-villification against young people as a demographic contrasts starkly with their nuanced individualization of their own grownup ages. For example, leftists’ rightly condemn elite middle-aged and elder luminaries, including President Trump, who persisted in close associations with financier Jeffrey Epstein long after his conviction as a pedophile trafficker and even as they knew Epstein was continuing his sordid behaviors – in fact, many top-level leaders were directly involved in them. Yet, progressive anger at these “disgusting,” “depraved” elites has not devolved into blaming “older men” as a demographic.

Progressives’ also bafflingly refuse to highlight stunningly positive facts about Generation Z, such as the 85% plummet in young-age crime, the 50% drop in youthful gun violence, or the facts that today, persons under 25 account for disproportionately tiny fractions of drug deaths, suicides, crime, violence, and terrible voting as they became America’s most racially diverse, multicultural age.

The more the young affirm leftist values of safety and multiculture, the more the liberal-left rants against the young and insists the opposite is true. Kulinski’s, Ball’s, and other progressives’ mass-blaming of “manosphere” and Fuentes-enamored “young men” resembles MAGA’s mass-blaming of “antifa” for everything they don’t like.

Kulinski cited (and re-cites) one New Jersey gamer who had been suspended from school for child pornography, then stalked, swatted (harassed), and brutally murdered two teen girls as an all-American baseball-loving cherub whose motive (which authorities still have not announced) is entirely explained by the boy’s fleeting mentions of rightist celebrities.

Where did progressives’ hatred toward the young come from?

The rising, irrational animosity of the liberal-left toward young people over the last half-century derives from two principal realities: (a) today’s over-25 generations are seriously messed up (drugs, mental illness, crime, narcissism, family chaos, political phobias); and (b) young people are becoming steadily darker in skin color, driving racialized fears liberals are forbidden to express as such, leading to fixating on young age (i.e., “youth violence” in politician/media discourse means “too many Black people on the street”; “juvenile crime” means “Black crime”; etc.)

None of that is acknowledged. Breaking Points’ sorta-conservative Emily Jankowski demeans the young as suffering “undeveloped brains;” sorta-conservative cohost Saager Enjeti berates them as criminals and online degenerates; definitely-leftist cohosts Ryan Grim and Ball dismiss the young as social-media-duped groypers; Kulinski constantly sneers the young are “black-pill” 4chan moron types; Hysteria’s Erin Ryan and Alyssa Mastromonaco demean young adults’ “undeveloped frontal lobes;” Bitchuation Room’s Francesca Fiorentini berates the young as social-media brain-rotted Nihilistic Violent Extremists; on and on.

Is it really over-30 brains that are incapable of rationality?… the deterioration in aging progressives’ thinking – the loss of memory and learning genes, the decline in cognitive capacity that comes with uncritically indulging echo-chamber mindsets. I know I’m losing it.

But even amid different, lesser unfairnesses, sarcastic critics of over-70 leaders as all brain dead concede individuality. Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, and other octogenarians retain cognitive marbles. Setting some upper “age limit” for public service to balance absurdly arbitrary younger-age limits is just more generalized bigotry.

Progressives have deteriorated alarmingly since 1936, when President Franklin Roosevelt gave intellectually respectful, honest addresses to young people. Imagine if a politician today tossed consultants and big-donors aside and said the kind of things FDR said (worth quoting at length):

“You who fill this great armory tonight represent a cross-section of millions of young people who have come to maturity since 1929. You are the symbol of young men and women living in every State of the Union, affiliated with every political party and belonging to every so-called stratum of society.

The world in which the millions of you have come of age is not the set old world of your fathers. Some of yesterday’s certainties have vanished; many of yesterday’s certainties are questioned. … The facts and needs of civilization have changed more greatly in this generation than in the century that preceded us.

I need not press that point with you. You are measuring the present state of the world out of your own experiences. You have felt the rough hand of the depression. You have walked the streets looking for jobs that never turned up. Out of that have come physical hardship, and, more serious, the scars of disillusionment.

The temper of our youth has become more restless, more critical, more challenging… wanting to know what we propose to do about a society that hurts so many of them… You have a right to ask these questions—practical questions. No man who seeks to evade or to avoid deserves your confidence.

Many older people seem to take unmerited pride in the mere fact that they are adults. When youth come crashing in on them with enthusiasms and ideals, they put on their most patronizing smiles, and pat the young man or the young woman on the shoulder, and in a worldly wise sort of way send them out with what they call their blessing. But—as every young person knows—that is not a blessing; it is a cold shower. What they have really said to you is this: “You’re young. Enjoy your enthusiasms and your ideals while you can. For when you grow up and get out in the world you will know better.”

And the tragedy is that so many young people do just that: they do grow up and, growing up, they grow away from their enthusiasms and from their ideals. That is one reason why the world into which they go gets better so slowly.

… It is clear that many of the old answers are not the right answers. No answer, new or old, is fit for your thought unless it is framed in terms of what you face and what you desire, unless it carries some definite prospect of a practical down-to-earth solution of your problems.

… You are young enough in spirit to dream dreams and see visions—dreams and visions about a greater and finer America that is to be; if you are young enough in spirit to believe that poverty can be greatly lessened; that the disgrace of involuntary unemployment can be wiped out; that class hatreds can be done away with; that peace at home and peace abroad can be maintained; and that one day a generation may possesses this land, blessed beyond anything we now know, blessed with those things—material and spiritual—that make man’s life abundant. If that is the fashion of your dreaming then I say: “Hold fast to your dream. America needs it.”

Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama owed their elections to young people, yet – on the crass advice of the worst person on earth, Rahm Emmanuel – betrayed them at every turn, blaming the young for every social problem from crime, shootings, and drugs to welfare; backing repressive policies from harsh day-night anti-youth curfews to bans on contraceptive access; all while doing nothing to help them beyond accidental serendipities and scattered graduation-speech platitudes.

It’s time for generational improvement. Whether the young, given power, would run things better is legitimately debatable, but it’s time to find out. What we do know from painful reality is that sluggish, aging brains harboring fears and prejudices cannot govern changing multicultures.

FDR remains right 90 years later: America needs more undeveloped frontal lobes.

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