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

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

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.

If we really want to deter suicide and self-harm, we should prescribe social media to teenagers, not ban it

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

The anti-teen-social-media case keeps falling apart even as it peaks politically.

Girls report feeling more “sad or hopeless” (53%) than boys (28%) do, the 2021 and 2023 Centers for Disease Control surveys show. Authorities and media commentators, in psychologist Jean Twenge’s typical claim, declare girls’ rising depression, suicides, and self-harm are just because…

“…social media provides an endless way for other kids to be cruel, they can never achieve the perfect bodies they see on Instagram, they are constantly judged for their appearance in the endless selfies they are compelled to post, unknown adults can sexualize them, they are continually stressed about how many likes they’re going to get, and some social media accounts glorify (and even instruct about) self-harm.”

We get it. Twenge thinks teenage girls are stupid, vain, mean, and shallow. That is not at all my experience working with teenagers for 30 years in family, community, and wilderness programs and school/university settings, but Twenge’s stereotype is common. Her rant offers zero evidence, which seems to enhance, not dampen, the media’s adoration.

Let’s consider its basic statistical case:

· 59% of girls who use social media frequently daily or more report chronic sadness, compared to 49% of those who use social media less often (boys’ comparable figures are 31% and 27%).

· Of the 22% of girls who are bullied online, 77% report persistent sadness, 29% report a suicide attempt, and 13% report self-harming, much higher percentages of mental distress than reported by the unbullied.

Twenge and others insist that mere “positive correlation” no matter how limited, selective, and “small” is all that’s required; social media must be the problem. Don’t look any further. What else could girls possibly be sad about?

The huge factor Twenge leaves out

Here’s one hint from the same girls on the same survey. Of the 22% of girls who report being bullied online (cyberbullied):

· 84% ALSO report being bullied (emotionally abused) at home by parents and household grownups,

· 59% have parents with “severe” mental health problems,

· 50% have parents who abuse drugs/alcohol, and

· 48% have violent parents who hit, beat, slapped, kicked, etc., their kids and/or each other.

Of the 12% of boys who report being cyberbullied:

· 78% ALSO report being emotionally abused at home by parents and household grownups,

· 45% have parents with “severe” mental health problems,

· 42% have parents who abuse drugs/alcohol, and

· 46% have violent parents.

Funny, Twenge and others who incessantly deplore social media, cyberbullying, and girls’ mental troubles never mention these crucial contexts.

This dereliction is unconscionable, since the 22% of girls who are bullied online who also are among the 70% who are abused by grownups at home suffer the most severe mental health problems themselves (84% of these multi-bullied girls report chronic sadness, one-third have attempted suicide, 14% self-harm… can you blame them?). How can authorities simply dismiss this multiple tragedy?

I keep talking about this because others won’t

As dissected repeatedly on this substack, the statistical flaws in social-media-blamers’ simple “correlation equals causation” argument are threefold: (a) their correlations of social media use and mental health are woefully weak, barely “small” in effect; (b) it is confounded by a reverse correlation; that is, depressed teens use social media more; and, worst of all, (c) it suppresses far more important factors in teens’ lives that cause sadness.

Twenge and others’ negligible social-media effect sizes result from their exclusion of a broad set of factors – parents’ and adults’ abuses, violence, drug/alcohol problems, poor mental health, and jailing – the 2023 CDC survey shows are absolutely critical to those seeking a true teen mental health picture.

My last few postings analyze the effects of parents’ drug/alcohol abuse, which multiple measures show has soared over the last 15 years to a staggering 5.5 million hospital overdose emergencies and deaths among parent-aged adults in 2024. The CDC’s survey found 34% of girls and 25% of boys reported drug/alcohol abusing parents.

Suddenly, the whole perspective shifts

Tables 1-6 do something no other analysis does: they divide the effects of teens’ social media use (as defined by the CDC) into two categories: those with parents who abuse drugs and/or alcohol, and those whose parents don’t. The first 3 tables show raw percentages.

Source: CDC 2024.

Three-fourths of girls and nearly half of boys whose parents abuse drugs/alcohol suffer serious sadness, compared to fewer than half of girls and one-fourth of boys whose parents don’t abuse drugs/alcohol (Table 1). Sadness is somewhat more prevalent among teens who use social media more.

Complications follow. When it comes to suicide attempts and self-harm requiring medical attention – much worse than simply being sad – parents’ drug/alcohol abuse is a major associate. Girls who use social media often are at much LESS risk than girls who rarely use social media. Boys and teens whose parents don’t abuse drugs/alcohol show more ambiguous results for suicide attempt, but the self-harm pattern is clear: both sexes show substantially LESS risk the MORE teens use social media, regardless of whether their parents abuse drug/alcohol (Tables 2, 3).

That’s startling

Both girls and boys who use social media more are somewhat sadder. Yet, these sadder, social-media-frequenting girls are much less likely to attempt suicide and to harm themselves than social-media-avoiding girls. A similar, weaker pattern is found for boys.

You can do the math from the table. Among sadness-prone girls with drug/alcohol abusing parents and who rarely use social media, 45% go on to attempt suicide and 1 in 6 self-harm. Among corresponding girls who often use social media, just 29% go on to attempt suicide and 8% self-harm. Boys and teens whose parents don’t abuse drugs/alcohol show a similar progression – more social media use seems to deter really bad outcomes.

You’d think authorities would be falling over themselves to understand what mechanism connected to social media use is associated with deterring girls in particular from going on to rash acts. We want to prevent suicide and self-destructive behaviors, right? (…right?)

That not one major authority mentions this startling fact shown their own official CDC survey documents tells us how dishonest the entire teens-and-social-media discussion has become.

How important are these factors?

It isn’t just raw percentages or “statistical significance” that matter; far more important is how much relative influence different factors have on teens’ mental health.

Tables 4-6 show the odds ratios (which compare the odds of an event happening to the odds of that event not happening) for 3 outcomes – teens’ sadness, suicidality, and self-harm – and 2 potential causes: social media use, and parents’ drug/alcohol abuse.

Source: CDC 2024.

An odds ratio of 1 denotes no effect; below 1, a reverse effect. For most social science work, weaker odds ratios of 0.7 to 1.4 shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Even odds ratios of 1.4 up to 2.5, or 0.7 down to 0.4, indicate only small effects. That smallness, not the mere fact of statistical significance (that is, the 95% confidence intervals in parentheses are both higher or both lower than 1.00), ethically should be reported as the main finding.

At odds ratios of 2.5, and especially 4.0 or higher (or below 0.4, and especially 0.25), we sit up and take notice. These are medium and strong effects. You can start to claim a real finding (always couched as, “merits further investigation…”).

Odds ratios can be used to calculate Cohen’s d, the standard statistic of “effect size.” It has its own distribution. Let me speak plainly:

· d below 0.20, you got nothin’, shut the hell up;

· d = 0.20 to 0.50, small, you ain’t found much;

· d = 0.50 to 0.80, medium, use your indoor voice;

· d = 0.80 or above, start shouting.

In the upper lefthand corner of Table 4, girls who use social media frequently are 1.56 times more likely to suffer serious sadness compared to girls who use social media less. The odds that the true proportion falls between 1.35 and 1.81 are 95%, which is “significant.” However, this translates into a d value of 0.25, barely above “small.”

You’ve just seen the entire statistical case that social media harms teens’ mental health; in fact, my numbers are more generous than most studies find.

It’s downhill from here

The blame-social-media mob might be able to whisper that social media might be weakly associated with more sadness in some girls, pending investigation into multiple factors, but is far below the level needed to recommend policy.

Otherwise, the blame-social-media endeavor is a hoax – especially when we get to the important stuff like suicide and self-harm. Social media use has no effect on suicide attempt and actually appears to help deter self-harm.

However… parents’ drug/alcohol abuse? Consistently, the negative effects on teenagers’ mental health are worth talking, and sometimes shouting, about.

Usually, a regression analysis just confirms odds-ratio findings. Here, stepwise regression comparing the effects of two independent causes (social media use and parents’ drug/alcohol abuse) on three dependent outcomes (teens’ sadness, suicide attempt, and self-harm) rejects social media use as a significant factor in all 3 cases and leaves only parents’ drug/alcohol abuse (p=0.000 for all outcomes).

It’s no contest

The CDC’s results, and mine here using the CDC’s definition of social media use, are very similar. Parents’ drug-alcohol abuse is so dramatically more important in influencing teens’ sadness, suicide attempt, and self-harm that blaming social media is a waste of time.

It’s important to recognize the CDC survey further shows the teens most at risk of poor mental health suffer not just one family issue, but an average of 2-3 serious parental and family risks, which diminishes social media below “nothing” as a cause of poor mental health.

The only way to elevate social media use even to minimal importance as a factor in teens’ mental health is by arbitrarily excluding parents’ troubles from analysis. Even then, social-media-blamers typically produce anemic d values of around 0.20 at best, which they wildly ballyhoo to permissive journal editors and gullible politicians and media editors as apocalyptic proof that “social media is destroying a generation.” Except for a few media-vulnerable teens and adults who do need help, the social-media panic is descending into destructive fraud.

Why do teenaged girls have such low rates of suicide and drug death?

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

Teenaged girls report much more sadness than boys or grownups. Yet girls are vastly safer from suicide and self-inflicted death. What are we missing here?

Thirty years ago, sociologist Meda Chesney-Lind deplored the “criminalization of girls’ survival strategies” by authorities who callously ignored violent and sexual abuses inflicted on girls, then forcefully stepped in to arrest and confine girls who ran away or “incorrigibly” defied their abusers.

Today’s bizarrely contradictory numbers warn that authorities who ignore widespread abuses and family troubles girls’ suffer are similarly “pathologizing girls’ survival strategies” by mischaracterizing girls’ understandable depression as a teenage “mental health crisis” justifying severe restrictions on teens, including bans and parental controls on vital social media use.

I’ve detailed Centers for Disease Control survey numbers showing how depressed girls from troubled families use social media to reduce their suicide attempts and self-harm. Independent numbers also indicate more serious survival strategies girls – and some boys as well – in difficult circumstances ignored by authorities use to avoid deadly outcomes. Of course, authorities and commentators then pathologize girls’ strategies rather than the conditions that caused them.

We’re getting the teenage “mental health crisis” all wrong – perhaps deliberately so

Among commentators’ many grotesque misrepresentations of suicide and drug overdose is their universal refusal to acknowledge and incorporate the vital fact that teens’ rates, especially for girls, are far below rates of supposedly stable grownups.

The following tables show the CDC’s latest, 2023, estimates of hospital emergency (ER) cases for self-inflicted injuries (self-harm and overdose overlap), along with tabulations of deaths in society from corresponding causes. Teen and parent ages of nearly equal population size are depicted so the numbers can be directly compared:

Female age 10-19

Hospital ER visits: 134,500 for self-harm, 114,300 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 724 suicides, 646 fatal drug overdoses

Male age 10-19

Hospital ER visits: 35,900 for self-harm, 66,300 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 1,913 suicides, 1,057 fatal drug overdoses

Female age 40-49

Hospital ER visits: 21,800 for self-harm, 114,700 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 1,787 suicides, 7,152 fatal drug overdoses

Male age 40-49

Hospital ER visits: 20,800 for self-harm, 240,600 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 6,156 suicides, 17,085 fatal drug overdoses

The ratio of self-harm hospital cases to deaths:

Girls age 10-19: 185 to 1

Boys age 10-19: 19 to 1

Women age 40-49: 12 to 1

Men age 40-49: 3 to 1

That is, girls give plenty of warning of distress before killing themselves. In contrast, boys and adult women provide little advance warning. Adult men? practically none.

The overdose ER-to-death pattern is also intriguing:

Girls age 10-19: 175 to 1

Boys age 10-19: 60 to 1

Women age 40-49: 16 to 1

Men age 40-49: 14 to 1

Girls have as many overdose ER cases as adult women, while boys have fewer and adult men the most. Yet, teens register very few deaths from overdoses in society. The adult ER pattern appears to reflect real trends toward more deadly drug abuse, while the teen pattern, especially for girls, reflects more of a warning flag.

One could argue that girls, like Suicidal Tendencies’ inept “Suicidal Failure,” are inclined to dramatic gestures but just aren’t good at killing themselves. However, the opposite is more plausible. We would expect that as inexperienced drug users, teenagers would be more likely than adults to lack physiological tolerance for drugs and to make fatal overdose mistakes.

This may be why supposedly “volatile” teen girls have few suicides and o.d. deaths

It seems likely that girls are far less likely to commit self-inflicted fatality because they are far more likely to seek help, both via greater social media connections and by more dramatic self-harm gestures to get attention and time to deal with their distress. The overdose and cutting harms girls choose are much more forgiving and treatable attention-getters than self-inflicted gunshots, hangings, or jumping off the Golden Gate that tend to win attention posthumously.

The “survival strategy” interpretation helps explain the apparent puzzle that social media use is connected with more depression and sadness among girls, and also with less suicide attempt and self-harm.

Naturally, top authorities and commentators simply fixate obsessively on social media use, exclude all factors related to parental abuses and family problems no matter how compelling, ban all mention of girls’ unexpectedly low rates of suicide and overdose death… and then complete their circular feedback loop by concluding that girls’ own social media use must be what causes their “mental illness” and ER cases.

This GIGO approach results in the pathologizing of girls’ survival strategies. I apologize in advance for the next posting, which will detail the mathematics of social-media versus parent-addiction causalities of both girls’ and boys’ mental health issues.

Ill-considered social-media bans endanger millions of teenage girls whose online connections help them deal with parents’ skyrocketing addictions

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

Surprising Centers for Disease Control numbers show teenage girls, especially those with drug/alcohol abusing parents, have LOWER rates of suicide and self-harm the MORE they use social media.

The fervent concern over girls’ mental health mysteriously vanishes when shocking realities – including from the Centers for Disease Control – challenge official dogmas.

The CDC’s massive 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 20,000 high schoolers (the gold standard of the teenage “mental health crisis” and the only comprehensive survey available) found a disturbing 34% of girls ages 13-18 are growing up with parents and guardians who abuse drugs and/or alcohol.

Confirming girls’ survey answers is the soaring body count, as pointed out previously. Parent-aged (26-64) adults’ suffered a record 230,000 deaths and 10.7 million hospital emergency cases from drug/alcohol overdoses in 2023 and so far tabulated in 2024, with annual tolls more than doubling in the last 15 years as today’s Gen Z teens grew up.

Despite powerful and blatantly obvious associations of parents’ drug/alcohol abuse and teens’ mental health, suicide attempts, and self-harm, comfortable political, health, and media authorities refuse to engage this disturbing reality that millions of teens cope with in their homes every day.

Instead, authorities shut down all discussion of parental issues and simply blame girls themselves for their mental health troubles. Girls, the popular narrative goes, are just helpless, self-abusing “victims” who make themselves depressed and suicidal by using social media and smartphones.

As a result of self-imposed ignorance and denial, authorities are implementing restrictions and bans that endanger millions of girls whose daily use social media is associated with significant reductions in their risks of suicide and self-harm amid widespread grownup drug and alcohol abuse.

The surprising – and completely ignored – patterns

The CDC survey shows girls age 13-18 are considerably more likely to grow up in homes where parents and grownups abuse drugs and alcohol (34%, versus 25% for boys), suffer severe mental health problems (41% vs. 25%), are violently abusive (35% vs. 30%), are emotionally abusive (70% vs 53%), and have been jailed (19% vs. 16%). It is not clear why girls suffer unhealthier households; perhaps girls take on caretaker roles in troubled families that keep them tied to home more than boys.

Completely ignoring girls’ family conditions, authorities then express shock and dismay that girls also suffer poorer mental health (41% vs 20% for boys), suicide attempt (14% vs. 7%), and self-harm (3.9% vs. 1.4%). It must be that girls use social media more (88% daily, vs. 81% for boys), luminaries puzzle; can’t think of anything else that might be bothering them.

Let’s help the authorities out. The tables below show the progression from being depressed to suicide attempt and self-harm along with girls’ social media use, a point I’ve explored before but now in the context of parents’ rising drug/alcohol abuse.

Table 1 shows the case that social media use causes girls’ poor mental health. Daily social media use is associated with more depression regardless of whether parents abuse drugs/alcohol. Many in the social-media debate don’t seem to realize how superficial the argument for blaming social media for girls’ depression is: simple “correlation equals causation.” The universal approach is simply to stop there: more social media use, more depression, go no further.

Tables 2 and 3 show why it’s crucial that analysts dig deeper.

Source: CDC 2024.

Parental abuse of drugs/alcohol is associated with considerably worse mental health among girls, regardless of girls’ social media use. Further, girls whose parents abuse drugs/alcohol use social media more (47.6% several times an hour) than girls of non-drug/alcohol abusing parents (39.5%).

Now, the unexpected results. Table 2 shows that girls whose parents abuse drugs and/or alcohol have SIGNIFICANTLY LOWER rates of suicide attempt the MORE thsee girls use social media, while girls whose parents don’t abuse drugs/alcohol show NON-SIGNIFICANTLY LOWER suicide attempt levels with more social media use.

For the most injurious mental health outcome the CDC surveyed, self-harm serious enough to require medical treatment, Table 3 likewise shows that in families in which parents abuse drugs and/or alcohol, girls who FREQUENTLY use social media are much LESS at risk of harming themselves than girls who RARELY use social media. Girls in non-addicted families show non-significant results.

Bottom line: girls with drug/alcohol abusing parents and household adults are many times more likely to attempt suicide and/or harm themselves – and frequent social media use is associated with reducing those risks.

These are clear patterns. Why can’t authorities see them?

These results don’t require a lawyer and FOIA petition to unearth. They are directly from the CDC’s official survey, the one that defines the “teenage mental health crisis,” the one everyone uses. Two possibilities emerge, neither edifying.

EITHER major health officials, politicians, and leading social-media authorities are:

– Ignorant of fundamental realities young people face, which means they are not experts at all and are not worthy of the attention they’re getting;

OR they are:

– Aware of but unwilling to face these realities, which means they are appallingly callous, self-serving, and lack normal concern for young people’s well-being.

The next post will further refine CDC survey data that cast authorities, interest groups, and pop-media “experts” in an even worse light.

Generation Z is not bringing some “new” terror of social-media-driven “nihilistic violent extremism”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

Today’s much rarer young killers are scarier than yesterday’s larger numbers? You’ve got to be joking.

Back in my Sixties Boomer teenhood, Charles Manson and his Beatles-worshipping creepy-crawlies embarked on blood-drenched massacres to ignite a “race war.” They schemed to hide out in a fantastic chocolate-fountained hole in the desert where Satan would anoint Charlie Lord of the Pit. Scores followed Manson, acided, naked, sunburned, searching for the holy pit. Manson was a child of brutal imprisonment, but his followers were White middle-class. “I’m the devil,” Manson-blessed assassin Tex Watson, 23, told his celebrity victims before butchering them (1969).

Charles Joseph Whitman, 25, the Eagle Scout ex-Marine who shot 46 from the University of Texas tower (1966), was “oozing with hostility” and “self-loathing,” his campus psychiatrist said. Anthony Barbaro, 17, honor student, shot 14 at his rural New York high school (1974) “to kill the person I hate most – myself.” Brenda Ann Spencer, 16, shot 9 children at a San Diego elementary school (1979); why? “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” (“You’re looking for reasons? There are no reasons.” – Boomtown Rats.) Patrick Purdy, 24, shot 35 and himself at a Stockton grade school (1989) to make his “end dramatic and cause people to remember.” Evan Ramsey, 16, shot 4 at his Bethel, Alaska, high school (1997) for “infamy” as 15 tipped-off students lined up to watch. Luke Woodham,16, shot 9 at Pearl (Mississippi) High School (1997) because “I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated.” Michael Adam Carneal, 14, shot 9 at his West Paducah, Kentucky, middle school (1997), saying only, “I can’t believe I did that.” Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, shot 15 at their Jonesboro, Arkansas, middle school (1998); “I had a lot of killing to do,” Johnson said.

When it comes to self-hatred, victimism, nihilism, dark rage, name your evil, Gen Z gun-killers can’t top this sampling of just some pre-Columbine White youngsters gone horribly wrong, the age-mates of today’s our-generation-never-did-that grayhairs. Lesser school shootings were considered just local news back then.

Freed by ignorance of history, today’s left-to-right crusaders aping Netflix’s idiotic “Adolescence” series cobble vague, contradictory, often made-up info scraps into hard narratives branding school shooters and assassins (and maybe the 29-year-old accused of setting Los Angeles’s Palisades fire) as some new, horrifying breed of anti-social, self-hating young White nihilists driven to motiveless violence by whatever online malevolence the crusader most hates. Misogynist Andrew Tate? Nazi-Groyper Nick Fuentes? Amorphous Antifas? Soros, anyone?

Yeah. Real new. Never seen the like.

As amusing as leftist Francesca Fiorentini’s memefest is pretending that alienated going-nowhere young men radicalized into Nihilistic Violent Extremists is some frightening new social media brain rot – a nihilistic meme of its own she weirdly helps far-right FBI director Kash Patel push – just imagine if today’s bellowers had some school shooters’ Discord or TikTok postings that sported anything remotely resembling Manson-minion derangements. You could hear them on Mars.

Culture-war commentators do obey a rigid, unspoken rule: when the assailant is young, they generalize him to all of Gen Z. But when the shooter is 30s, 40s, or older, their own peer ages, they abruptly reverse themselves. Blame all young men for the crimes a few of their peers commit, commentators chorus, but don’t blame privileged grownups for our peers’ far more common mass violence.

This is crude bigotry. Do leftist podcasters in particular think it’s just good fun to endlessly demonize Generation Z, as if that has no consequences?

Truth is an illusion; 2025 truth doubly so (apologies, Douglas Adams)

We must prefer our misinformation swamps … Artificial Intelligence slop, photoshopping, grammar-challenged anonymities, propaganda machines, anti-scientism, corporate shillings, rampant mainstream-media distortions and all … to factual evidence whose clarity batters cherished loathings.

I’m talking about factual 80% to 90% declines in crime, violence, gun killings, homicide, and dropout by American and other Western youths over the last 30 to 50 years as young people became more racially diverse. America has never seen a social shocker like this, starkly documented in FBI and CDC statistics, that so powerfully demolishes popular assumptions around which entire discourses are fabricated.

No other explanation beckons for why we almost never see real youth trends mentioned by right-to-left media or political leaders. Their culture-war inflammations depend on an endless barrage of youth-are-bad-and-getting-worse disinformation.

California, in addition to being an epicenter and harbinger of national trends, maintains more complete and consistent statistics than other states. If any place suffers a social-media-corrupted scourge of Gen Z killer-nihilists, it would be California.

I’ve previously reported young men’s (age under 25) trends. Trends for youths under age 18 are even more compelling. The California Department of Justice documents the following numbers of under-18 murderers by race for key years below; using other years yields similar results:

In 1975: White 142, Hispanic 99, Black 121, Asian 4

In 1994: White 60, Hispanic 237, Black 163, Asian 82

In 2024: White 12, Hispanic 84, Black 24, Asian 4

These numbers may look unbelievable, but they are not statistical shenanigans. Yes, Fox News, California still arrests murderers and violent criminals under the same laws and reports their numbers under the same standards it always did – in fact, laws have expanded, especially in policing domestic violence, and reporting has become more rigorous. The state’s 1975 pioneering crime report provided race and age breakdowns for 73% of law enforcement agencies, requiring minor statistical adjustment, while later reports covered 99%-plus.

Another caveat: Is the stunning reduction in youthful homicide crimes from the 1970s (the television/radio era) to the 2020s (the internet/social-media era) simply due to better medical science saving more victims’ lives? Maybe a few, but the numbers of violent-felony assaults, robberies, rapes, and kidnappings perpetrated by California youth ALSO plummeted in the internet era:

In 1974: White 6,003, Hispanic 4,035, Black 7,072, Asian 466

In 1994: White 4,856, Hispanic 8,960, Black 6,763, Asian 1,750

In 2024: White 946, Hispanic 3,545, Black 1,706, Asian 418

Had assault/rape/robbery victims been saved from dying in 2024 at the same rate as 1974, for example, there might have been 20 White-youth violent crimes whose victims died in 2024 instead of 12 – still a gigantic drop. Offsetting medical improvements is the proliferation of more lethal firearms capable of killing dozens or even hundreds in minutes.

Was the plunge in violence by youth due to increasing immigrant populations?

Part of it, good evidence suggests. During the 1975-2024 murder and violence plummet, California’s teenaged youth populations grew by 800,000 and evolved from 33% to 73% of Color, with Hispanic and Asian populations rising and White and Black numbers falling.

If the right wing wants more safety from violence, they should be cheering more young immigrants.

Commentaries that omit these crucial trends are fraudulent

So, we return to the question: should we be more afraid of the small number of White-youth murderers today than five-fold more White-youth murderers in the pre-internet 1990s or 12 times more a half-century ago? Are today’s handful of middle-class social-media-era killers more coldly sane, perhaps, or more nihilistically deranged (minting “new horrors” doesn’t require consistency) than those of the pre-internet past?

On their face, real trends make today’s zero-context claptrap laughable. It’s hard to imagine colder evils than the many more pre-social-media pre-manosphere killers.

But culture warriors on all sides fail or refuse to incorporate positive, real trends into their fear mongerings; young people must always be the vanguard of ever-new, ever-more frightening armageddons. And unfortunately, every era seems to host a tiny number who do emulate celluloid Western shoot-‘em-ups, horror comic villainy, Superman roof jumps, noir detectives’ handgunnings, sci-fi/urban bloodwars, subway surfing, the cultural gamut, who then become anecdotal fodder for panic narratives.

But the real drivers of violence, particularly among youth, are not internal demons, but external oppressors like family abuses, poverty, and neurotoxins. Reducing poverty and lead exposure, as occurred from the early 1990s to the early 2020s, accompanied massive declines in young people’s crime and violence, all to the silence of apparently disappointed culture warriors.

Which murders matter?

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

Mass and celebrity shootings become even more tragic when authorities and commentators exploit them to inflame vicious campaigns targeting powerless groups.

Should policy makers value only those lives and dangers the public is most concerned about and focus attention and policies on addressing those concerns?

That might seem understandable at first glance. The public is infinitely more upset at school shootings, mass shootings, and hate killings by disturbed/diabolical murderers, especially when the victim is a well-known celebrity like Charlie Kirk.

Media reporters, agencies, and political leaders prioritize assuaging an inflamed public. President Barack Obama ordered flags flown at half mast to mourn the 20 children and 6 adults murdered in 2012’s horrendous Sandy Hook school shooting. President Trump ordered flags lowered to eulogize assassinated right-wing luminary Kirk. Although Obama’s action was less crassly political, the motives of both presidents are understandable. Large swaths of the public upset at the killings demanded action.

But there’s a sinister side to the obsessive media and authoritative fixation on rare mass and celebrity killings: they invite malice while suppressing discussion of mammoth, real, and uncomfortable dangers, especially to American children and youth. Spectacular and emotional tragedies are exploited by unscrupulous leaders to drive unreasoning, bigoted policies like harshly policing feared groups and banning youths from social media.

That exploitation is a grotesque misuse of the responsibility of experts, policy makers, and conscientious media to provide the context and perspective that foster effective measures – which is why America never seems to solve its grossly outsized problems.

My interests are real dangers and policy

Sensational crimes are very hard to prevent precisely because of their rarity and wide range of motivations. Policy becomes distractive and destructive when it exploits rare tragedies to manufacture generalized claims vilifying entire outgroups and punishments designed to satisfy fearful popular clamor to “do something!” (just not anything that bothers anyone important).

If we’re interested in formulating effective policy to prevent violence, then the scientific index is not rare events, but real and common dangers, especially those unpopular to talk about.

For one difficult example, if the Sandy Hook and Kirk shootings occurred in a typical American week, they accompanied 20 children and teenagers murdered by grownups in domestic violence, 350 Americans (including 30 kids) murdered by guns, all part of the 450 Americans (including 45 kids) murdered overall that same week.

We should just keep the flag at half mast

The harsh reality is that we ignore the day-to-day tragedies because they don’t threaten “us” (until they do), and/or because psychologically, they’re an endemic crisis too big to face.

But we ignore them at our peril in policy discussion. For another difficult example, consider how what seems like an encouraging reality is so devastating to media and political needs it is simply suppressed.

Here’s another un-faceable truth: amid the grim headlines, schools remain among America’s safest places from gun violence, with levels on par with Berlin.

In the worst year, 2023, in the 143,000 primary, secondary, trade, and higher-education schools in the United States, there were 350 incidents in which “a gun (was) fired, brandished, or a bullet hit school property”. That is, a child or teen would have to attend school daily for 400 years to risk any kind of gun incident and 1,700 years to risk being killed by gunfire at a school.

Europeans and Japanese would not find even that level acceptable for their schools, but in the American context, it’s a stellar achievement. If the rest of American society were as safe as the schools and colleges attended by 70 million people daily, the United States would have 90% fewer gun deaths and injuries.

But all sides, far left to far right, have whipped up such a frenzy demonizing schools as bullet-riddled hells that the utterly crazed right-wing cure-all for school shootings is gaining traction in terrified district after district: arming school personnel and officers to patrol hallways.

If leaders succumb to popular fear and anger by arming more adults at school, we will have more school shootings, more dead kids, and more dead grownups – a fact that has already unfolded. Locales with more guns (i.e., Republican counties compared to Democratic ones, Texas compared to New York, etc., cold Centers for Disease Control numbers show) suffer vastly higher rates of gun killings than locales with fewer guns.

Those who advocate arming school personnel – and those who inflame fears leading to drastic anti-remedies – should be honest: “Let’s satisfy our egos by making relatively safe schools as dangerous from gunfire as the rest of American society.”

That’s just one reason that from the endangerment and policy contexts I address in this substack, we should prioritize real, common, everyday dangers, not what upsets the public the most.

There are more reasons. The next substack will deal with the historical trends those left to middle to right ignore and distort in dangerously appalling ways to keep their emotional bigotries afloat.

Here’s a case that might counter my arguments about youth and social media

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

We all love love love “critical thinking”… in theory. We almost never practice it – and never on youth and social media issues.

Union County, New Jersey, prosecutors accuse a 17-year-old boy of first-degree murder for allegedly crashing his Jeep at 70 miles per hour into two teenaged girls riding e-bikes on September 29, killing both.

Liberal-left podcasters are rushing to cite the New Jersey tragedy as an example of a MAGA-influenced teen boy corrupted by “black-pill” social media, specifically assassinated conservative commentator Charlie Kirk and misogynist “manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate.

That could be, or maybe not. So far, the evidence – mainly an initial investigation by NJ.com (quoted below) – suggesting why he did it remains complicated.

I single out this tragedy because the only way to analyze an issue is to explore cases that challenge points I make – unlike social-media blamers, who dodge compelling evidence that doesn’t fit their narrow agendas.

The alleged killer was far from a “typical teenaged boy” (a meaningless stereotype in any case). His avid-gamer YouTube and TikTok sites had 40,000 viewers. His “social media presence seemed to revolve around professional baseball and ‘MLB: The Show,’ a baseball video game.”

In a 22-minute video (since taken down) the day of the killing, he claimed a “good family by my side” and complained he had been “bullied, ridiculed” and suffered a school suspension for “ridiculous allegations” (spread, he said, by one of the girls and her mother) of “distributing ‘child porn.’” He “compared himself to former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer, who was suspended over sexual assault allegations in 2021 but never criminally charged.” He apparently was served a restraining order for stalking one of the girls, who he previously dated. His uncle was a police chief.

The alleged killer also resented one of the girls because she “made fun of Charlie Kirk’s death.” In the past, he had “expressed admiration in his livestreams for Andrew Tate, a polarizing influencer who is accused of running a criminal sex trafficking ring in Romania” but had not posted anything recent on Tate. He once “played the violent video game ‘Grand Theft Auto,’” though he mainly “chattered about baseball and simulated MLB gameplay.”

So, pick your motivator. Normally loud right-wing pundits shrank flaccidly. A White possible-Charlie-Kirk-fan murderer? Not interested. Unless the victimized girl is blond and the killer can be demonized as transgender, gay, leftist, immigrant, Black, Hispanic, Muslim, Democrat and/or woke, the Right doesn’t care about dead girls.

Leftist “Secular Talk” podcaster Kyle Kuliniski did care — for ideological reasons. He leaped on the alleged killer’s present Kirk and past Tate admiration to the exclusion of everything else. Just a normal baseball-loving kid driven to murder by MAGA-fueled hatreds and a criminal online misogynist, Kulinski declared. These kinds of hate-driven killings, mass shootings, and political assassinations – at least, the fraction perpetrated by young men – are the violence that should most worry us, he added.

That depends on whether you prioritize ideology or bodies. Mass shootings (711 victims in 2024, including 18 in or around schools) and hate-killings (104 victims in 2024) indeed are American tragedies. But put together, they account for fewer than 4% of the 21,014 U.S. homicides the CDC so far has tabulated in 2024.

The other 96% of America’s murders, we ignore

Every year in the 2020s United States, the CDC reports, around 200 girls ages 12-17 are murdered, down sharply from the 300 or so murdered every year 35 years ago. Disgraceful then, disgraceful now. No other Western culture (and even most second-world countries) kills at the levels Americans do – including killing children and youth.

So, who murders American girls? You’d think that would be a pressing question. It isn’t. We’ll soon see why.

Three-fourths of the murderers of teen girls are of the same race (in this case, White), and 90% are male. The most recent FBI tabulations of murder victim and murderer characteristics show the killers are not peer teens.

Just 20% of the murderers of girls age 12-17 are boys and 1% are girls under age 18. In a reality no one admits, four-fifths of the murderers of teen girls are adults – 35% are ages 18-24, and 45% are 25 and older.

FBI tabulations show the proportion of murdered teen girls killed by assailants age 25 and older has skyrocketed from 31% in the 1990s to 45% today. Meanwhile, the proportion murdered by peer youths has fallen from 28% to 21% and the proportion murdered by young adults ages 18-24 has fallen from 42% to 35%.

These facts are terrible news for pop-talkers left to right who need youth, preferably the very few rightly or wrongly depicted as having been “radicalized” by some malign social-media influence, to be the problem.

Now, let’s consider the thousands of murder victims they ignore.

Consider just a few of the girls murdered just in the week of the New Jersey tragedy. You heard of Travis Decker? Father, age 32, gunned down his 3 daughters last week. Darnell Jones? Age 33, raped, decapitated, and cut off the hands of his 13-year-old daughter. Edwin Cruz Gomez? Age 38, plowed his car into 4 people just like the New Jersey teen, killing a 16-year-old girl. Three children and one teen girl shot, 2 dead including the teen, at a Texas truck stop, allegedly by their 31-year-old mother. A teenage boy, 18, and girl, 17, shot to death at an Arizona campground; a 31-year-old man has been charged.

No theories, no commentaries on those murders, which are so common they are barely even newsworthy.

News flash, Gen Z:

NO ONE IMPORTANT IN 2025 AMERICA CARES ENOUGH TO ACKNOWLEDGE MURDERED GIRLS… unless their deaths serve an ideological agenda.

NO ONE IMPORTANT CARES WHO IS MURDERING THEM… unless their killer’s characteristics suit the commentator’s personal prejudices.

NO ONE IMPORTANT CARES WHAT THE REAL CONTEXTS OR TRENDS ARE… why should anyone care when they can just make them up?

I’ll follow up to see if in this one case, social media indeed proves the culprit. So far, I’m surprised no one has mentioned the standard American-style remedy: us this tragedy to ban teen girls from riding e-bikes.

We know only one certainty in the era of the internet: teenage murderers and violent offenders have plummeted to record low levels compared to pre-internet eras going back 50 years. However, some readers question whether there might be major qualitative differences in murder today, and whether all murders are created equal. I hope to get to those questions this week.

Young men and violence are generating double the lies

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

Why are progressives who champion diversity and multiculturalism sabotaging multiracial Gen Z when they should be touting young people’s stunningly positive trends?

Progressives indulge irrational hostility to sabotage young people’s rights and any hope of a future

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

Right-wingers don’t care what I say. So, I direct my ineffectual rage at progressives: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Those who harbor liberal-left values have ONE remaining hope: that Gen Z dramatically turns America, the West, and the world around before mounting political, social, and environmental disasters become irreversible.

Older generations (a few forward-thinking individuals excepted) have proven incapable of leading the transition to a multicultural, global, environmentally sustainable culture human survival requires.

The old order has given up, which is why we see today’s extreme politics of resignation and division sabotaging positive action. Whether younger generations (allied with older individuals who get it) will step up remains the question.

But the fact is: If Gen Z doesn’t save us, no one will. And to have any chance of doing that, they need full access to global information, communication, and expression – yes, social media in all forms – beginning at young ages.

Given that reality, I humbly ask progressives, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Progressives’ crude hostility against young people and eagerness to suppress their internet access at every turn is among the most baffling, self-destroying bigotries of our time.

It would be one thing if Gen Z really were as hopelessly MAGA-reactionary, dark-web corrupted, inexplicably mentally ill, and nihilistically murderous as progressive podcasters depict them. In that case, criticize away.

But what makes progressive trashings and repressions against the young doubly crazed is that they have to indulge grotesque ignorance, primitive double standards, and even outright lies to justify their anti-Z rhetoric.

The endless hate/sarcasm vilifying Gen Z teens and young adults gushing from the liberal-left is so brainless, easy to refute, and destructive that a whole new term begs coinage. Now that zoologists have shown that lemmings don’t actually dash en masse off cliffs, I propose a new term for hypothalamic self-destruction: “they stampeded off that cliff like a herd of progressive podcasters.”

Umbraged chatters might insist, how dare you, we love our teenagers. Unfortunately, liking one’s kids (even that’s not always clear, given commentators’ on-air disparagements of their own teens) and a few favored activists can accompany hating the rest of the younger generation. We all love Greta, Malala, and the campus activists – amid daily demeaning of the other 60 million young people branded as brainless 4chan addicts.

The latest double standard at this writing: three mass-shooting suspects, ages 40, 40, and 42, the first two of whom allegedly killed 8 and injured 16 at a Michigan church and North Carolina bar and the third threatened a gay pride parade, are briefly deplored by progressives. One can add a 44-year-old Michigan man who shot his three children, killing one and leaving two near death, should progressives decide to care about the hundreds of domestic shootings killing children and teenagers at home every year.

For 40-aged shooters, liberal-left commentators do not indulge generalized vilifications of the kind they regularly hurl at young men. You will not hear any say, “this country has a problem with 40-aged men.”

The self-destructiveness of this vitriol toward the young is appalling. Progressives are so insistent that young men must be mass-classed as dumb, manosphere-poisoned “conservatives” that they must want them to be. This recalls ex-president Obama’s insanity – the same Obama who owes his two elections to young voters – that American crime, drug, sexual violence, and poverty are all the fault of the young and school shootings reflect “poisoning the minds of young people.”

After all, if the Left despises the right wing, shootings, misogyny, and young men, why not lump them all together?

Progressives fabricate myths to hate Gen Z

Supposedly fact-respecting liberal-left podcasters ignore the most recent surveys showing men age 18-29 rejecting Trump and MAGA by 25 points, along with FBI tabulations showing 2024’s mass shooters averaged 39 years old and exit polls showing men ages 30-64 12 points more likely than Gen Z men to support Trump even at the peak of Trump’s 2024 popularity.

One could cite structural reasons explaining why all sides indulge hatred toward Gen Z: (a) the young are America’s leading edges of widely-feared racial diversity and technological acumen, (b) the young, our poorest age, don’t have billion-dollar K-Street lobbyists and bribing super-PACs to ward off scapegoaters, etc.

But progressives, normally acute at seeing beyond structural confounds, ignore them in young people’s case and instead fixate on social-media and pop-culture distractions.

The baffling reality is that Gen Z’s stunningly positive trends make them both natural allies and living manifestations of dynamic, hopeful progressive arguments affirming future-facing benefits, safety, and health of diversity and multiculture.

So, why do I get the feeling that Gen Z’s improvements are another reason for progressives to hate them? Progressives refuse to mention Gen Z’s amazingly positive trends and even deny them with a barrage of derisive negativism.

The next substack will present crucial examples from our largest, most progressive, most diverse state’s young people to ask leftist podcasters and commentators again: WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Psychology professor Chris Ferguson demolishes the media’s latest “ringing endorsement” of school cellphone bans

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

We get it. Politicians and school principals, teachers, and media reporters are flooding news reports with wild enthusiasm about bans on cellphones in schools.

Just as their forebears wildly lauded students lined up in school uniforms, middle-schoolers forced to pee in front of drug testers, violent prison convicts screaming and threatening teenagers in “Scared Straight!” scams, youths expelled for bringing aspirin to school or having a water pistol in their car trunk, and now, the students compelled to surrender their cellphones to confiscation… it all brings quotable joy.

But do any of these easy, one-size-fits-all panaceas that make certain authorities feel so good have any provable benefits? Researchers consistently say: NO. No improvements in mental health, attendance, drug use, academic achievement, crime, violence, dropout, disciplinary cases, or any other important index.

“We know that teachers and administrators are making wild claims of remarkable success for cellphone bans that aren’t supported by public records requests for data from their own schools,” Stetson University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson said.

The present study headlined by The Economist as a “ringing endorsement” of banning student cellphones in schools was a perverse interpretation of a trivial result, Ferguson’s analysis showed. The study of schools in India, an unreviewed “preprint version,” reported only one positive finding: the cellphone ban accompanied a negligible improvement in grades – a claim that carries its own lesson.

In studies with large samples and multiple variables, some irrelevant factors will inevitably prove “statistically significant” – that is, they meet the bare-minimum standard of 95% probability of not being random noise. Thus, we might hastily conclude from “statistically significant” findings from Centers for Disease Control surveys that eating vegetables and drinking milk makes students depressed.

Superficial variable significance can result from poor specification, reverse correlation, random interaction with other variables, and other problems. So, conscientious researchers then look at the most important value: effect size. Even if marginally “significant,” does the variable have any real impact on the issue in question? Here, the imposter variables recede. Eating vegetables and drinking milk has no real effect on depression.

That is how the bogus claim that social media causes student depression got started. The most plausible explanation for researchers’ significant-but-tiny-effect finding is that students who are abused by parents tend both to be more depressed and to use social media more. Popular researchers and authorities just leave out the abuse part and clarion that social media causes depression.

In the case of cellphone bans and school grades, testing for effect size yields a resounding “nothing.” Ferguson points out that the study’s negligible effect value (d=0.086) is so close to zero it amounts to random “noise.” “An effect so unreliably tiny should never have been interpreted as supporting cellphone bans,” Ferguson said. (For reference, a d-value has to reach 0.200 before it is considered even barely “small” and 0.500 to be moderately of interest.) The near-zero d-value of 0.086 actually confirms that “this study is better evidence against cellphone bans than for them,” Ferguson concluded.

As with previous panaceas, the research so far is finding that despite the huzzahs, there are no provable benefits from school cellphone bans. “We can now see that journalistic outlets like The Economist are willing to publish careless fluff, so long as it supports the moral panic narrative,” Ferguson said.

As with other useless one-size-fits-all edicts, whether imposed on youths or adults, there is a better, more effective approach: discipline those who are causing disruption, leave those who aren’t causing trouble alone. Weird idea, I know.