Why do progressives obsessively demean and demoralize their crucial Generation Z constituency?
Look up “self destructive” in the dictionary. You’ll find pictures of liberal/left commentators. Maybe it's all the vaping and gummies.
I repeat these facts as a sadly regular installment (sorry, long-term readers) refuting liberal-Left podcasters’ destructive fictions, starting with the most elementary:
· NO, leftists – why do I have to keep repeating something so obvious? – Gen Z did NOT elect Donald John Trump president. Age 18-29 voted AGAINST Trump by an 11-point margin, the biggest rejection of any age. Podcasters: your midlife ages elected Trump.
· NO, leftists, Generation Z men did NOT elect Trump. They voted for Trump by 1 point (within the margin of error). Male podcasters: your agemates elected Trump (7- to 20-point pro-Trump margins among men 30 and older).
· NO, leftists, Generation Z women certainly did NOT elect Trump. They opposed him by 23 points. Female podcasters: that’s a far bigger anti-Trump margin than older women’s.
Table 1. 2024 presidential election exit polls
Source: CNN election center (2024). Presidential exit poll (see last line).
Did Gen Z vote against Trump as much as young people should have (-11%)? Well, did women (-8%)? Did Latinos (-5%)? Did older folks (+6)?
Democratic nominee Kamala Harris contemptuously disdained key progressive constituencies, refusing to make the slightest overture on Gaza. Gen Z didn’t flock to Trump; its demoralized liberal/left voted reluctantly for Harris or voted couch.
Yet, progressives (names named below) ape the same “young voters helped elect Trump” junk we hear from mainstream/rightist media. It doesn’t seem to matter that 18-29-year-olds oppose Trump by an apocalyptic 82-18% margin in the latest poll. Even young conservatives increasingly oppose Trump.
Is it cognitive dissonance? The liberal/left hates Trump. The liberal/left hates young people. Therefore, progressives must equate youth and MAGA.
The liberal/left is supposed to be about science. Let’s do the math.
Can progressives read surveys? Anyone who follows mainstream (CNN, CBS, the msm cowlot) and social (X, Meta, YouTube, etc.) media has to be appalled at how relentlessly young people are barraged with Right-wing messaging.
During 2025 and into 2026, as liberals’ fears of far-Right online growth rose to a fever pitch, poll after poll showed Gen Z, including young men, moving steadily and sharply AWAY from both Trump and MAGA views… that is, in the OPPOSITE direction from progressive podcasters’ misrepresentations. Examples among many:
April 2026: This just-released CNN poll shows Gen Z disapproves of Trump by a staggering 18-82% landslide and opposes the war on Iran by 23-77%, both the biggest margins of any age.
March 2026: “Gen Z ditches Trump.” The Economist/YouGov Poll announced 18-29-year-olds’ staggering 25-67% disapproval of Trump. Detailed polling showed Gen Z hugely favoring less spending on immigration crackdowns (gap 41%), abolishing ICE (41%), opposing Trump (42%), government action to reduce wealth gap (44%), more spending on environmental protection (52%), more spending on poor (58%), and opposing MAGA (62%).
February 2026: “Young voters are moving away from Trump.”
January 2026: “Trump’s approval rating among Gen Z has dropped a massive 42 points in the past year.” Young people reject Christian nationalism far more than older ages.
Leftist podcasters, does any of this sound like Gen Z is being “seduced” by rightist influencers?
Right-wing “brain rot” is NOT “radicalizing” Gen Z men
“Trump’s approval rating Is cratering among young men,” two-thirds of whom disapprove of him, a February 2026 poll by center-right Third Way and a host of reports announced:
CNN’s data guru Harry Enten last week reported, citing polling averages that include Marist and Quinnipiac, that Trump’s net approval rating was negative 19 points with men younger than 45.
A February Reuters/Ipsos poll found Trump’s approval rating with men aged 18-29 fell from 43 percent in February 2025 to 33 percent in February 2026. He got 46 percent support from that group in the 2024 election.
Young men disapprove of Trump by 32 points and would likewise vote against Trump’s vice president J.D. Vance. Young White men age 18-29 thumbs-downed Trump 33-64%; young Latino men, 34-63%; and young Black men, 20-79%. “Every single Trump action tested in this survey was highly unpopular” among young men, from pro-rich policies to the Epstein cover-up to anti-immigrant raids, pollsters reported.
Late 2025: “Young Gen Z men are more anti-Trump on nearly every measure. And the gap is widening.” The Young Men’s Research Initiative surveys with YouGov (October-December 2025) found what other polls show: Young men back then disapproved of Trump by 12 points and opposed MAGA policies by 30-40-point margins.
Young men’s concerns are largely the same as young women’s. The difference: young men are moderately leftist; young women radically so.
Gen Z women have moved so far Left – accompanying their increasing takeover of education, career, and global activist fields – that alarmed right-wingers from Christian evangelicals to the Taliban demand forcible girl-targeted repression.
Progressives should be delighted at Gen Z women’s left dynamics. Instead, liberal-Left leaders and commentators toddle along behind Jonathan Haidt’s and rightists’ lunacy that Gen Z girls are depressed social media addicts.
I could keep citing poll after poll, including by conservatives like the Wall Street Journal and CBS News, to the same ends. But enough doing the homework progressive podcasters who boast millions of subscribers should be doing.
Midlife autocrats
I realize we over-70s are also taking it on our grizzled chins of late, intensifying after presidents Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s visible meltdowns. Boomertude, Boomerism, Boomeritis, Boomer-anything ain’t compliments.
We elders do suck. My Age of Aquarius Greening of America C’mon People Get Together Right Now Baby Boomers morphed from cartoonish hippie to rich yuppie to MAGA adjacent. My generation epitomized rotten personal behaviors and selfish politics as we became the richest in history.
But be careful about over-generalization. We still boast Bernie, Bill McKibben, mobs of admirable NoKingsters (see March 28 videos). As die-early lifestyles erased Boomer men, our 64% female majority pushed over-65 voters to a bare 50-49% 2024 vote for Trump, more liberal than 30-64 agers (who collectively voted Trump 51-47%).
So, Gen Zers like Greta Thunberg have every right to yell at us Boomers. But not you, 30-60-age vapehead clods. How on earth did Millennials/Xers become worse-behaved and politically stupider than Boomers?
I mean you, leftist podcastors and podcastrixes – I’ve Had It, Jennifer Welch, Angie Sullivan, Hysteria, Erin Ryan, Alyssa Mastromonaco, Breaking Points, Krystal Ball, Ryan Grim (cohosts Saager Enjeti and Emily Jankowski, nominal conservatives, are equally hating toward Gen Z), Counterpoints, Emma Vigeland, hirsute colleagues, Bitchuation Room, Francesca Fiorentini, Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski (a near-40-ager who talks like his primitive stereotype of a teenage boy way worse than real teenage boys do), the whole lot.
Gen Z men, are NOT being seduced by right wing Turning Point USA, manosphere, Nick Fuentes, Clavicular, Andrew Tate racist xenophobic misogynist looksmaxxer methsnarfer cheeksmasher Nazi groyper incels now matter how badly the Left’s Kulinski, Ryan, et al want them to be.
Sure, the Left loves young people for a few hours when they vote for heroes like Zohran Mamdani. But day after day after day, the left-wing anti-youth trope remains deranged.
As I first frame this piece (3/12), Fiorentini and Vigeland opine in left/feminist comradrixie, “Are men ok?”. Betraying my surname, I’m agreeing, no, men are not okay (men 45 and older voted for Trump by 18 points; I say, raise the draft age to 45)… until the subject turns to young men.
Vigeland’s arguments sink into factless cliches on the latest global poll finding that 31% of males age 18-29 in 29 countries (led by religious fiefdoms; only 23% in the United States) agree that wives should “obey their husbands.” She seems unaware that “23%” is not “93%”. It is a small minority of young men. Fiorentini and Vigeland then fixate on a few young men videoed at a rally for a far-Right fringe candidate who polls at 6%, then lament that around one-third of the one-third of Gen Z men (10% in all) who identify as Republican tweet Nazi views.
Continuing (3/19), Hysteria’s Ryan and Mastromonaco rave at “how young” manosphere watchers are, without mentioning that very few young men subscribe to manospherism. Primitive Left psychology dictates: generalize Gen Z right-wingers; individualize older right-wingers. Leftist podcastrixes take no collective generational/gender responsibility for far-rightists Laura Loomer, Pam Bondi, Marsha Blackburn et al.
Liberal/left commentators always — without exception — leap to their go-to culprit (providing zero evidence): the internet’s “wide open” misogynist manosphere must be responsible for young men’s conservative attitudes. “They’re all” Clavicular types, she says – just like rightist Jean Twenge.
As I polish this essay to the erudite gem you now behold (3/28), I’ve Had It’s Sullivan and guest are reciting leftist hivethink typecasting all young women as once-enthralled refugees from tradwifery and all young men as devotees of incelitude.
This is Bigotry 1
Older brains, far from being “developed” ratiocinators, deteriorate after age 25 or so, losing memory and learning genes and cognitive capacity. Could that explain why progressive podcasters limbically perceive their aging peers (“people like me”) as individuals even if they disagree with their views but younger people (“not like me”) as a faceless mass?
Reliably, commentators label the worst depravities by Epstein and abusers, barbaric violence by aging bigots and warmongers, crazed irrationalities emanating from MAGAs daily, and every outrage as “juvenile,” “adolescent,” “high school,” etc.
I worked with hundreds of teenagers over decades, many in very trying circumstances. Teens don’t act these ways any more than adults do. Do I have to keep restating the obvious? Young people think and act in all different ways.
That point seems incredibly hard to get across. Vigeland, Ryan, Sullivan, Kulinkski, et al. ape MAGA hate-speech tactics toward boys, just like conservative anti-youth advocates like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge sniff that liberal girls have no reason to be depressed about climate change, social justice, global conflicts, etc. No, they insist; girls’ problem is just social media, in which girls immiserate themselves absorbing bullying and gloomy leftist ideas. Vigeland, Ryan, and leftists likewise repeat that boys indulge manosphere-incited women-hating instead of challenging economic repression.
Yes, Gen Z groypers do exist
I like Z as the generation – emphatically, Gen Z women – that’s going to save us if anyone is. Still, a few Gen Z men indeed are rightist Fuentes types. Traditional conservative attitudes prevail among one-fifth to one-fourth of Gen Z men. Cast stones, podcasters, when your own aging homies exit their right-wing glass houses.
Let’s go to the origins. “Want to reduce boys’ misogyny?” I titled a 2025 substack. “Hope they stay on social media and stay away from church.”
Among 8th grade boys surveyed long term by the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future and tracked by economist David Waldron, support for women’s job opportunities and equal pay fell in recent years. Surely this proves the evils of social media, especially the “manosphere”?
No, Waldron’s research cautions: look before you stampede. While “many commentators on the topic of misogyny among boys are quick to blame social media and internet subcultures such as the ‘manosphere’ or ‘incels’” and “algorithms [that] tend to amplify misogynistic content,” Waldron concludes, “this particular hypothesis is not confirmed by data.”
In fact, Waldron finds, MTF “data show that the sharper drops in the share of boys endorsing gender equality occurred in those who spend the LEAST time using social networks.”
The latest, 2024 MTF survey shows teen boys who use social media daily are less likely than boys who rarely/never use social media to agree that, “It is usually better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family,” and to oppose equal job opportunities for women. It isn’t “loners in their bedrooms” who show the biggest drop in support for women’s rights, but boys who spend more time hanging out with other people. Ponder that.
So, wtf is driving misogyny among a fraction of boys? You already guessed it. Gender conservatism tracks boys’ adherence to religion. Since 1990, support for women’s equality among boys who say religion is important plummeted from 52% to 38%. Meanwhile, boys saying religion is unimportant showed higher and undiminished support for women’s equality.
Fortunately, only 28% of Gen Z’s 8th-10th graders say traditionalist religion is very important to them, while a healthy (and hopefully growing) 43% say that kind of godliness is not for them.
The Left has always hated young people
How can the brain-rotted Left keep overlooking 30-point anti-MAGA polling among young men and 40-50-point anti-MAGA sentiments among young women while regurgitating their same old bigotries combining anger against right wingers to inexplicable anger against youth?
My 40 years of work suggests sinister bigotries underlie the liberal/left’s implacable hatred against young people. Some openly despise their own teenagers (and voice their anger on air to viewers); others love their own wunderkind personally while hating everyone’ else’s as a class. But all unite in hiding their over-30 generations’ drug/suicide/crime/political deterioration behind smug scapegoating of the better-acting but powerless young.
The MAGA-right’s agenda is relentlessly anti-young and anti-future as a matter of politics, from ridiculing climate change to anti-education to xenophobic-racism to anti-LGBTQ to draft-Iran-war-fodder. But I remain perpetually baffled at what’s wrong with the brains of leftist commentators who seem willing to wreck their movements to feel good about themselves.
I largely agree on the need to tell a story (my reporter editors were adamant on that) and that those future-facers adept in alternative media (all online) will increasingly diverge from those "present biases" (I call them contemporists) trapped in traditional media (some offline, some online).
I believe this split will intensify in the coming decade, with resulting political division and even violence the create an entire new global order. We are not getting out of this easily. Gen Z's extraordinary tolerance for diversity may help us get through coming crises, and we are still assessing what Gen Alpha will bring.
If the Haidts who get so much attention would just apply their ideas positively to balance online and offline lives among diverse populations of all ages, he could be a positive force. Right now, he is destructive, a throwback to antiquated bigotries.
Yes, Haidt tells a good, classic "story" -- we brave parents and elders rising to "protect our children" from evil online predators -- but it is a false narrative. That's not where Gen Z's problem lies. Haidt-driven panics are excusing authorities from facing real threats the young.
I don’t think that the Left or the Right hate their kids, I actually think that in the current time kids and their parents enjoy spending time together much more then in the heyday of poor kid parent relations in decades like the 1960s, 1970’s and 1980’s. Back then parents as benevolent dictators were common as was kids getting out of the house and on their own by the time they were 18. And Haidt seems to prefer that these days return, as he loves the independence and outside play that kids had back then. While there is much blame going around on the state of the youth, this blame seems more directed towards social media and screens then the kids themselves, unlike in the decades of the 20th century.
If anything, the fact that the Left and the Right are constantly at each other throats, especially Maga and Progressives, is making it hard for parents to band together and dictate to their kids the way Haidt and ally Jonathan T. Rothwell want. Look at the manosphere… I previously searched for parent anger on a Manosphere reddit about a year ago, since young men on the Manosphere seem so miserable, but yet I hardly found any parent anger, which was a shock until I started thinking, what if that’s the whole point. There’s all kinds of Divides, from the Left Right Divide to the gender Divide. But yet there’s barely any kid parent Divide, because a kid and parent Divide works in reverse of other Divides. To put it another way, Haidt and his allies want greater separation of kids from their parents, no matter what the cost. But for this to happen there will have to be very particular conditions. One of the conditions is that parents are more like other parents. When parents see differences from other parents, this prevents a unified front of parents in opposite to their kids. Sooner or later, Haidt and his allies will figure this out, and start preaching for Divides like the political Divide to lower. They’ll say to please think about the children. And, as has been shown, What Haidt wants, Haidt gets.