Geena is right.
A survey conducted this week by Harvard-Harris polling found that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe the answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.” The stark contrast between our rising generation and the rest of the American population is truly disturbing. As you can see..
…outside of the demographic that has been indoctrinated into an anti-American, victim-obsessed, extreme progressive ideology by exposure to our education system and social media, the U.S. public is overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and understands that Hamas represents terrorism and genocide. “These individuals siding with evil over democracy should be a wake-up call,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) said, reacting to the poll. “Ideological rot among young Americans, driven by woke values and victim culture, has gotten so bad they’ve convinced themselves to sympathize with actual terrorists who hate America.”
I think that’s a fair assessment. Just 4% of Americans 65 and over want Israel to be “ended.” But 60% of the 18 and 24 demographic said that Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack was “justified by the grievance of Palestinians.” Only 27% of Americans overall hold that (unethical and historically false) view. Asked if “Israel is committing genocide against those in Gaza or is it just trying to defend itself and eliminate Hamas,” 60% of Americans ages 18-24 said Israel was committing genocide. Only 37% of Americans overall maintain that. A large majority, 67%, of 18-24 year olds told pollsters they believed Jews “should be treated as oppressors.” Nearly three-fourths of all Americans disagree.
I find it especially troubling that 76% of the youngest demographic agree that Hamas committed rapes in its terrorist attack on Israel, yet a majority of that group want the terrorists to take over the country.
This survey certainly helps explain why college campuses have revealed themselves as such breeding grounds for anti-Semitism. Any time the youngest demographic is that far estranged from the rest of society and the culture, something has gone very wrong, and attention must be paid. That kind of schism is dangerous. By being apathetic, trusting those who should not have been trusted, and abdicating the responsibility of parents and adults generally to make sure the young are guided by responsible role models and not exposed to corrupting influences, we have raised a generation that does not embrace democracy as it has to for the nation to be stable.
Here we are. Now what?
Ethics Alarms 
Shoot- our current college age daughter when she was in middle school and high school was coming home with pop-culturally driven memetic notions about the holocaust being either overblown or didn’t happen.
We had to do some significant deconstruction of those arguments.
But somewhere in our society there has been a well coordinated effort to capture the minds of the young on this.
I think of Alyssa Milano when she announced she returned her Tesla because she couldn’t own a vehicle from a company started by someone as loathsome as Elon Musk. So she bought a Volkswagen. And why not? Volkswagen was founded by hardworking socialists led by a sensitive Austrian painter who was a vegetarian, who cared deeply about environmental matters, and who hoped to supplant Christianity with a neopaganism. That German socialism fits well with the values of the left in the West and it always has.
Well done.
I’ll echo Tex on this, I think this is an information problem, and that there is a concerted effort to try to guide the hearts and minds of the young generation over a proverbial cliff.
The good news is that when presented with information to the contrary, they seem to moderate. The problem is getting that information packaged into a way that that generation is willing to accept and absorb.
I can’t stress enough how damaging TikTok has been to this narrative, both from a disinformation perspective, and a lack of information perspective. As much as I loathe TikTok for the CCP connections, the reality is that if it wasn’t TikTok, it would be something else, and we should probably make some kind of outreach effort to meet kids where they are.
we should probably make some kind of outreach effort to meet kids where they are.
For probably switch in “definitely.”
Hmm… So, maybe you CAN’T allow people who hate this country and what it stands for teach the children. Maybe you CAN’T let them control the media including the news. Maybe you CAN’T let them be hired by the government and take over the 4th branch. We have allowed this for 50 years and now we are surprised by the results.
Who could have predicted this would be the outcome?
Of course, everyone with a brain predicted this at least since the 1970’s. Now, the problem is what to do about it? You can’t fix the education system.
*You can’t hire teachers that aren’t fixated on spreading the woke mind virus because the people doing the hiring only hire people who have appropriate brain washing.
* You can’t become a teacher if you don’t support the woke mind virus because the education faculties will throw you out otherwise.
* Even if the faculty don’t want to throw you out, the professional standards call for DEI, pronoun usage, etc. It is a requirement of the program that you believe these things. If you don’t pledge allegiance to the woke agenda, you don’t meet the requirements of the teacher ed program.
* Even if that is ignored, the accreditation body would remove the department’s accreditation if they allowed an outsider to become a teacher.
* Even if you somehow overcame that, the teacher’s union would eliminate any teacher hired who didn’t conform.
There are a couple obvious options.
(1) Put every certified teacher and teacher’s union member up against the wall. This is probably illegal. Even if it were legal, I don’t see many people desiring this. It is however, the only way the current educational system could be fixed. That is why this option is here. To fix the current school system, you have to eliminate EVERYONE invloved in the previous bullet points. That buys you about 40 years until they leftists full infiltrate the system again.
(2) Change to complete school choice. Allow parents to decide what school their children go to and have the taxpayer support follow the child. Eliminate the teacher’s union and teacher certification. Bad schools die, good schools thrive. Parents decide what a good school is. The only problem is, the next generation of children will be raised by the woke young adults who want to finish Hitler’s job.
Leftists eventually take over every institution because they are the only one who use weaponized ideology. They push all other people out. Now, this eventually kills private companies. Look at Twitter. They were dead. Musk had to eliminate most of the employees and still has more to go. The problem with government entities is that they don’t ever die, no matter how bad they are. Many of our biggest public school systems have 90+% failure rates on educating students even with ridiculously low standards. The result is that they are rewarded with higher pay and more funding for their failure. Even at 100% failure, they would still be fully funded and get great raises. You can’t reform these agencies, they have to end.
Comment of the Day. Terrific.
Excellent solution. But I would add the elimination of the Department of Education as well.
Randy Weingarten went on a tirade against Chris Rico and others pushing school choice. School choice is the kryptonite that will destroy the NEA and AFT’s public school monopoly that provides Weingarten a $500,000 salary.
Michael R. asked, “Who could have predicted this would be the outcome?”
WE WERE WARNED!!!!
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt literally predicted this kind of thing very publicly in her 1999 book “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” and in videoed interviews with her and she was publicly tarred as a lunatic conspiracy theorist quack by everyone that supports the public education system.
Here’s a couple of quotes from Iserbyt…
There are a lot more related quotes out there.
Be glad that you are no longer a young man and will probably not live to see that generation take control of this country. I know I’m glad that I am well on my way and there are fewer days ahead than there are behind.
Ben Franklin said that we had a republic as long as we could keep it. It looks like we have failed to keep it and its days are numbered. We are ourselves are mostly to blame, because we are the ones who look the other way and said we were too busy, and assumed that once the next generation got out in the real world, they quickly learn how the real world worked, and move toward the center. It’s been said that anyone who is not a liberal in his twenties has no heart but anyone who is not a conservative in his forties has no brain. The thought was, and it used to be accurate, that people would start out liberal and idealistic and get more conservative as they grew older, developed a stake in the game, and had something to lose.
In the meantime, we let education slide farther and farther left and didn’t do a thing about it. We didn’t care if our kids can’t home from college spouting anti-American rhetoric as long as they got their prestigious degrees and could hopefully use them to land real jobs. The problem of liberal college professors probably started in the days of the Vietnam War when liberal people who didn’t want to get involved in the war simply chose to extend their student deferments as long as they could by getting advanced degrees that were not good for much except teaching of the college level. Then they flooded the universities and eventually took control of the apparatus that did the hiring the promotion and the granting of tenure. There is no uprooting that now.
What needs to be done now is for parents across the country to rethink weather traditional college is the way for their children to go. There are plenty of other ways to go that don’t involve getting flooded with a ridiculous far left ideology. Attending college online, where parents can keep a closer eye on the way their kids thinking is going is one way to do it. Other ways would include colleges that are more training for skills and less about learning Grand ideas.
When I went to law school, it was very little ideology in any of the classes. We were learning a set of skills, we were learning a set of principles, we were not learning Grand ideas. I also think that we need to refocus our approach to the next generation. They need to be told that they are not any more special than the generation before or the generation before that, and although it is expected that they improve upon the generation before them, they are not going to be the ones to solve all the world’s problems, because some problems have been around for hundreds and even thousands of years and if they were going to be solved, they would have been solved by now. Maybe one day we will discover the cure for cancer or make an advance that will make certain chronic diseases like diabetes a thing of the past. However, we will not stop the human impulse to fight to satisfied desires. We will not make anyone ever believe that color does not matter. In fact, we are headed in the opposite direction, but that is a classic case of it isn’t what it is.
I seriously think that University should be turned to focusing on life skills. Kids come out of school and they’ve hurt a lot about universal love and free love, but almost nothing about keeping a relationship together and making it survive long term. They have heard a lot about the Injustice of the economic system, but they have heard very little about how to balance a checkbook and invest so that wealth grows instead of shrinks. They know nothing about how to really raise a child because a lot of them come out of college still not much more than children themselves.
I saw a cartoon once that showed on one side children coming out of high school eagerly talking about wanting to be doctors and do scientific research and things like that, then passing through a college building and coming out on the other side Dresden black masks and black antifa type clothing talking about how they want to bring the revolution on. It’s simplistic, of course, but I don’t think it’s too far from the truth. I think the fact that a lot of this wokeism has already seeped into the major companies is why some of the previously unstoppable ones, like disney, are now not looking so unstoppable, and in fact are starting to fall apart. I also think the fact that this has been allowed to go too far is why this country was allowed to get out of control in 2020, but people who did a lot less damage a year later are now being locked up for decades.
A lot of people complained about the baby boomers being the generation that supposedly ruined America for the generations to come after. Supposedly they are the generation that took advantage of favorable economic conditions to accumulate and hog all the wealth and now won’t share. That’s not what happened. What happened is that a demographic shift and the opening of opportunities for more sectors of the population led to there being more labor and simply not enough well-paying spots to go around. Therefore wages did not keep pace with inflation. What also happened is that college became a little too achievable through the use of loans, and the universities had no reason to try to contain their costs and now a degree is as much an investment sometimes as a house. In the meantime, not only did the ultra wealthy get tax breaks and the poor get handouts, but the middle class ended up getting taxed to pay for it all.
While all of this was going on, the change in education that I mentioned above was going on, and now college graduates enter the world with their heads stuffed with resentment and hatred of the country that they live in. Many also enter the world with a very inflated sense of entitlement. It’s just this kind of garbage thinking that got us the occupy Wall Street, occupy everything mentality from now 12 years ago that achieved not a damn thing. It’s this mentality that got us for years of constant protest and argument during the Trump years that achieved not a damn thing. It’s this kind of mentality that gave us the real insurrection in 2020 which achieved not a damn thing. Now it’s this mentality that is giving us an up and coming generation that sides with terrorism and thinks it’s no big deal to film a sex tape in the same place where people should get locked up for entering without authorization. That generation should be condemned for embracing these foolish ideas, but the rest of us also share part of the blame for either getting them there or letting them get there.
Obviously we can’t put every educator and administrator against the wall, any more than we could fire all 700,000 law enforcement officers in this country and start all over again as some suggested in 2020. However, parents need to get involved and their kids education early on. It is the only way to create kids who internalize American values to the point where when they get exposed to values that are ridiculous, will be able to reject them.