High School and the Sports Spirit Complex

Karen Sternheimer, Sociologist, USC| March 2026

I currently live about a block away from a large public high school. Students walk by sporting their school merch, including hats, t-shirts, and sweatshirts. During track meets, in addition to starter pistols, you can hear a wave of cheering from an apparently large crowd. They seem to have “school spirit.”

This, along with Michael Messner’s new book, The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens 1903-2024, got me thinking about the concept of “school spirit” and why schools work so hard to cultivate it among students and communities. It harkened back memories of our high school cheerleaders’ ubiquitous chant at football games:

Yes, yes, yes, we do; we’ve got spirit, how about you?

The crowd was supposed to respond in kind. But why?In Messner’s study of his alma mater’s yearbooks from 1903-2024, he described a “sports spirit complex” that emerged in the early twentieth century. The sports spirit complex is “an amalgam of groups and activities that orbited around boys’ sports,” used as “a means of creating a sense of group identity and belonging” (p. 234, 47).

Listen to a conversation between Michael Messner and Karen Sternheimer about the “sports spirit complex here:

Download The High School part 2

We might take for granted that “school spirit” is part of the experience of high school and college. It’s really big business at the collegiate level, with an estimated $13.6 billion in revenue generated from college sports in 2022, according to one analysis. The sports spirit complex also serves as a way to raise money from community members and local businesses to support school activities when school budgets are cut. From ads on playing fields to yearbooks and direct sponsorship, sports can draw funding and demonstrate school support as a useful source of local advertising.

But before there was money, there was a need to create “community solidarity and identity” (p.53).

Many social changes took place at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, including urbanization, immigration, and compulsory education. This meant a general reshuffling of communities, identities, and work. Estimates suggest that between 1880 and 1920 the United States saw nearly 20 million immigrants, mostly from Europe, speaking different languages, with different cultural practices and traditions. This, coupled with migration from rural areas to urban centers, meant that people from a variety of backgrounds found themselves in one community. Schools were often community hubs linking diverse people together.

Compulsory education also meant that people were attending school for longer periods of time, particularly after the Great Depression in the 1930s. This might not have been a welcome change for all young people, who were used to more independence than school would have afforded. Being out of the labor force might have been a goal of reformers, but for young people it meant more time indoors, not earning money, and potentially feeling bored. (For more information, see historian David Nasaw’s classic Schooled to Order: A History of Public Schooling in America.)

“School spirit” is a way of creating community among diverse groups and creating non-academic bonds between students, communities, and local schools. Messner observed how within the 120-year period of the yearbooks he examined, sports were central to the imperative to support your school, to get “pumped up” and cheer on your school’s athletes during competitions with other schools.

Messner notes that a tension arose between school spirit creating a sense of citizenship through celebration of meritocracy, and the reproduction of inequalities, particularly gendered and racial inequalities (pp. 10-11). On its face, sports celebrate ability and achievement, but who has access to participation also shapes ability and achievement.

Using school yearbooks as data points enable those of us who attended American high schools—particularly public schools—to draw connections between his findings and our own experiences. As a one-time majorette and then marching band member, I attended and performed at nearly every one of our high school football team’s games. I was an ancillary part of the “school spirit complex” and recall how all being on the “same side” cheering our classmates on created a bond.

But I also remember some of the first experiences of racial and ethnic tensions, as my school was more diverse than some of the rural schools we played against. The “us” and “them” could take on a darker experience than just school rivalries, mirroring the larger society around us.

What are some of the ways the “sports spirit complex” reflected sociological lessons in your school?

Jonathan Haidt, globally acclaimed expert and policy guru on teenagers, mental health, and predators, never mentions Jeffrey Epstein. That’s weird.

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| March 2026

Even weirder: Haidt’s crusade to ban teens from social media is enthusiastically backed by Big Tech, Big Money, and Big Government.

In societies that actually cared about children and teenagers’ safety and mental health, politicians, professionals, academics, and commentators would focus 99% of their attention and policy energy on preventing (a) family abuses, addiction, violence, mental disturbance, etc., and (b) institutional abuses in schools, churches, sports, youth programs, and international rings often run by elites. These affect millions of young people and kill thousands.

Instead, 99% of attention is fixated on social media and smartphones, which a mountain of studies and every analyst from psychologist-statistician Christopher Ferguson to independent researchers to blame-social-media activists themselves agree that scientifically, social media is a trivial factor in teens’ mental health. Even assuming the very few but constantly highlighted tragedies occurred solely because teens went online, social media’s danger to youths is vastly smaller than dangers elsewhere in society.

While these upside-down priorities are relentlessly promoted by psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and fellow crusaders, the fault lies with governments and powerful interests who elevate their blame-teens-and-social-media crusade — which conveniently serves as a distraction from their own derelictions.

Reciprocating, “protect our children” crusaders like Haidt and Twenge observe Harpo-like silence* on the mammoth Jeffrey Epstein scandal in which scores if not hundreds of elite predators credibly appear to have victimized hundreds to thousands of children, teenagers, and young women – a zillion times more from this one scandal alone than anything attributable to social media.

Instead, Haidt, Twenge, and favored politicians break their arms patting their own backs for their “courageous attack against Big Tech” to “save our children!” from lurking online predators and “addictive algorithm” corruptions.

Cue laugh track

In truth, Big Tech, global elites, and governments, far from opposing these “attacks,” enthusiastically spend tens of millions of dollars pushing Haidt’s teen social-media bans and “age verification” schemes.

Governments along with Apple, Meta, X, Anthropic and other tech and AI moguls eagerly champion the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) that Haidt pushes. These biggies contribute millions of dollars to front groups like the Meta-funded Digital Childhood Alliance and join with far-right lobbies like Heritage Foundation to promote passage of KOSA, the App Store Accountability Act, and “age verification” mandates.

That is, the child-exploiting, child-corrupting, child-endangering Big Tech demons join saintly anti-social-media crusaders in Big Love for “child protection” laws.

All just weird, don’t you think?

Why on earth would Big Tech and AI agree to decimate the foundational internet law’s Section 230, which shields online platforms from legal action for individual users’ content? Why would they invite regulation on themselves?

Because, you see…

“Child safety” legislation like KOSA actually protects Big Tech by shifting blame to teenagers depicted as so weak, corruptible, and liberal (keep that last to a whisper) that they require authoritarian crackdowns to restrict what they see and do online.

To punish teens, KOSA and purported “age-gating” measures vastly expand the power of Big Tech, elite interests, and increasingly authoritarian governments to:

· Exploit “protecting children” as a smokescreen for stopping young people from accessing information government and Big Interests disapprove of, arbitrarily labeled “adult content;”

· Suppress Gen Z’s progressive young people from using social media to organize activism around issues like climate change, social justice, and Gaza;

· And the biggie: harvest vastly more profitable data on users, especially children, via “age verification” requirements mandating hugely expanded personal identification details.

Metering the oxygen

Epstein and institutional scandals also present a potential political problem for Haidt and “ban teens from social media” crusaders.

Public outrage at the burgeoning Epstein scandal embroiling global elites in an expanding web of predation and corruption is causing shamings, resignations, and arrests afflicting tech, corporate, academic, political, and royal luminaries, even threatening to topple entire governments.

Meanwhile, Haidt has socially climbed from NPR interviews and TED talks to World Economic Forum soirees. He has every incentive not to offend 10- and 11-digit billionaires at Davos, where Epstein is a bit of a sore subject.

So, Haidt and Twenge are silent* on mega-predator Epstein’s decades of victimizations of teens while pushing a diversionary blame-social-media (translation: blame those leftist teenagers) tactic. Haidt’s and big powers’ mutual interest in burying attention to the Epstein predations expose the sinister underbelly of their joint “save children!” crusade.

In turn, power elites celebrate and reward silence on interrelated institutional abuses, an alliance that effectively reverses what governments should be doing to truly protect children.

By “interrelated,” I mean that family and third-party abuses like Epstein’s are tragically connected. Epstein and his modeling-agency/trafficker allies preyed on teens from disadvantaged and troubled families.

That, in turn, should be a mammoth issue in the United States, whose teens tell our leading health survey that 35% of the adults in their households are violent, 30% abuse drugs/alcohol, 40% suffer “severe” mental health problems, and 20% have been jailed.

Again, cue laugh track.

The dilemma is more subtle

Epstein’s and high-level abusers’ victimizations of children and teenagers definitely garner politician and media attention. Ordinarily, Epstein’s predatory prominence should be threatening Haidt’s and ban-teens crusaders’ campaign to dominate headlines and declare social media as the big predatory threat to children.

Suppose – indulge my fantasy for a moment – conscientious leaders who actually cared about young people were shocked by the Epstein scandal into looking at the larger picture and concluded: why are we wasting all our energy on social media? We need to prioritize real-life family, institutional, and global-predator abuses as the big threats to youths’ mental health and safety.

Some logical authorities – I’m really indulging fantasy – might even start questioning why we would cavalierly ban teens from social media when our own major surveys show vulnerable and abused youth in families use social media more for contacts and health.

That is, attention to real threats to children and teens potentially risks slamming the brakes on the raging hegira to blame social media for endangering children and to punish teens with restrictions. Worse, it would put officials’ and institutional derelictions front and center.

That, of course, can’t be allowed.

Unfortunately for young people but fortunately for culture-war crusaders and government and private elites, no one important is interested in opening the worm-can of comparing the mammoth dangers of family, institutional, and related real-world predations to the trivial dangers of social media. Instead, these issues are kept separate while popular “protect children!” schemes are designed to increase government and Big Interest power even more.

That is my theory of the web of otherwise mysterious silences and alliances governing teens, safety, mental health, social media, predators, and Epstein. Figuratively speaking (well, occasionally, literally), no one wants to be pushed off the back of their yacht or found hanging in a cell.

*Repeated searches turn up no cases in which Haidt or Twenge spoke up – even casually – on Epstein. I tried different word combinations. Nothing. If anyone has a citation to the contrary, please forward to me.

Perfect! Right and Left are rigidifying their superficial pet “explanations” for why a mass shooter did what she did

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| March 2026

Ideological bigots make ONE shooter the poster for Canada’s 100,000 transgender individuals and 5 million teens/young adults long before facts are known.

Back in 2020, 51-year-old alcoholic, arsonist, and police car enthusiast Gabriel Wortman carried out multiple shootings, killing 22 people in Nova Scotia in 2020 – the deadliest shooting rampage in Canadian history.

Strangely, no one argued there was something terribly wrong with middle-aged men, or blamed them for being straight or buying booze, accelerants, and used cop cars.

October 2017

The Canadian government since banned 2,500 types of assault weapons, including the dozens America’s worst mass shooter, 64-year-old heavy drinker and gambler Stephen Paddock, assembled.

Paddock fired more than 1,000 rounds from his hotel room perch at a Las Vegas music festival, killing 60 people, wounding at least 413, and causing 450 more injuries in the ensuing panic.

Recalls satirist Kinky Friedman’s tune memorializing 1966’s University of Texas Tower shooter Charles Joseph Whitman, whose rampage took a leisurely 96 minutes to gun down 45 people with his .36 Magnum, killing 14 (47 total casualties, adding two knife murders back home). No one suggested a crisis among ex-Eagle Scouts, ex-Marines, or men with flat-top crewcuts, though Friedman did warn, “There’s still a lot of Eagle Scouts around.”

Also, “Who are we to say the boy’s insane?” You see, nothing much changed in half a century except that Paddock used far more lethal AR10/15 bumpstocked riflery and took a mere 10 minutes to inflict 473 gunshot and 927 total casualties in Las Vegas.

Strangely, no one argued there’s a crisis among aging adults or called for older people to be banned from guns, drinking, and gambling.

No one, despite this unsettling fact: Paddock’s gunfire killed and injured more people in 10 minutes than are killed and injured in all school shootings in 5 years. That shocker is one gun-rights and gun-control lobbies alike absolutely ban from ever being mentioned in American media and political forums.

February 2026

Now, a mass shooting by Canadian 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killing 9 and injuring 25 is generating the next predictable round of sweeping generalizations.

It must have been her “transgender identification” (right wingers, delighting in misgendering, called her “him”). Ban the 100,000 Canadians who identify as transgender, the large majority under age 25. They’re all guilty!

It must have been that she was “‘addicted to gore and violence web sites” (mainstream/liberal/Leftists). Surely blaming video games and “addictive” social media will be next. Ban 5 million young Canadians from everything: gender transitions, social media, Grand Theft Auto, whatever pops into aging heads must be “the problem.”

Fun for all!

Don’t bother us with details

The tragedy couldn’t have anything to do with the slowly emerging facts that Jesse’s family was bizarrely “nomadic” and moved every few months, that her parents were bitterly divorced and estranged, that authorities had seized firearms from her home and then for no apparent reason returned them, that she had dropped out of school years earlier and been repeatedly detained for mental health troubles, that her mother was a “conservative-leaning libertarian” who declared of anti-transgender bigots, “Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate?” … and more to be discovered.

Complications! No fun!

If everyone else can speculate, so can I. Citing neuroscience: the left-right opiners’ over-25 brains, far from being “developed” and “mature,” are deteriorating relics losing memory and learning genes and cognition by the day. You can tell I’m losing it.

I suggest that’s why the accusers after every tragedy involving a young person blare the same quick recitations before the facts are even nearly known.

Generation Z’s real social media sin has nothing to do with “mental health”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| February 2026

Allied government/Big-Tech powers pushing censorship, mass surveillance, and repression target teenagers and online freedom. But those are just the beginning. Their larger goals are truly terrifying.

The emotional, trivial-effect anti-teen/social-media junk dominating legislative and popular media forums continues to be demolished by exhaustive research. The latest (December 2025) is a multi-year study of 25,600 teenagers by a University of Manchester team whose findings “do not support the widely held view that adolescent technology use [social media and gaming] is a major causal factor in their mental health difficulties.”

No matter. More than a dozen articles fronting today’s MSN news feed panic over teens and social media, what “parents can do” and what smartphone, under-16, and age-verification bans policy makers should legislate this week. None have the remotest connection to research reality.

For the moment, let us put aside the dismality and begin with the few hopeful developments.

University of Surrey criminologist Emily Setty’s research documents several crucial realities that young people understand but aging just-ban-teens officialdom can’t get through their deteriorating-memory, -learning, and -cognition cerebral cortexes mired in the past.

“Young people do not experience online and offline as separate worlds, but as a single, interconnected continuum,” Setty reports. “Social media is not an external danger that young people occasionally visit. It is woven into their everyday social worlds.”

For illustration, watch FX’s “Social Studies,” supposedly presented to raise alarms about young “digital natives.” In fact, it shows the opposite – how Los Angeles’s most-online teens merge active social media and vibrant public lives.

“By cutting young people off from the spaces through which they meet real personal, interpersonal and social needs, a ban risks leaving them unmoored,” Setty concludes. “A recent joint statement signed by more than 40 children’s charities, digital safety experts and bereaved families warns of the danger that blanket prohibitions may isolate vulnerable young people from peer support networks and crisis resources.

“Young people are not passive victims of technology but can identify problems and articulate the kind of digital lives they want… Policy must start from how young people actually live, not from adult fears about technology.”

Policy is going with the fears. In a transparent sham, UK officials are deputizing sycophant “consultants” whose bigotries against transgender students now will be directed to uphold the UK’s destructive anti-youth social media restrictions.

From another angle…

Socialprofiler’s new analysis of 756 million user profiles on Instagram, TikTok, and X, likewise “reveals that generational stereotypes often contradict observed data”:

· Gen Z [ages 19-25] “focuses on social justice issues like LGBTQ+ rights and climate change,” BLM, and “Palestine solidarity,” while

· “Older [ages 46-60] users are more likely to promote political polarization, and to embrace conspiracy theories about UFO, aliens, the Illuminati, the Earth being flat, ‘alternative knowledge’,” and like “right wing” ludicrosities.

This ain’t your (grand)mommy’s and daddy’s “generation gap.” It’s Margaret Mead’s and Alvin Toffler’s 1970s warnings of a future whose elder elites sink into baseless visceral horror at social/demographic/technological change and become societal wrecking balls. More below.

Socialprofiler’s study concludes: “While Gen Z shows higher engagement with progressive social issues and left-leaning political content, older generations demonstrate stronger engagement with traditional partisan politics and party-affiliated content… The left-leaning party category covers a younger demographic generation,” but “the Republican party category is much more represented across all platforms.”

Why are the repressors toward Gen Z so widespread and adamant?

… that all Republicans and 95% of Democrats in power (yes, including liberals who benefit from young people’s activism) spurred on by loud academics and Big-Tech profiteers are salivating to enact a barrage of terrible censor-media and surveil-users bills?

My first, simple explanation has been that ban-teens authorities – Republican and Democrat alike – are transparently furious at Gen Z’s techno savvy and politics, led by young people’s opposition to Israel’s genocide and activism over climate change. The rising frenzy in Congress, states, and countries to ban teenagers from “adult content” on social media and ramp up mass surveillance of internet users has nothing to do with anguished tears over teens’ “mental health.” It’s straight-up political oppression.

Analytical technomedia critics, led by Taylor Lorenz, warn that driving the “protect children!” crusade is government/Big Tech’s greed to harvest ever-more information on users (including children) via “age verification” subterfuges to cement their mass media control and profit. Their repressions are aided by authoritarian right-wingers like the Heritage Foundation and “stupid, stupid liberals” all too willing to succumb to the latest moral panic.

The resulting avalanche of national and state legislation to banish internet anonymity by requiring IDs, facial and biometric scans, and detailed personal information to access “adult content” (a codeword for narrowing accessible sites to those approved by government/Big Tech) are “terrifying” to Americans’ freedoms of expression and privacy, Lorenz declared in a highly enlightening 1/27 interview with Francesca Fiorentini.

Unfortunately, that compelling case appears just the interim. Even more sinister goals underlie today’s repress-youth/censor-surveil juggernaut.

The explosion of nihilism

Past moral panics over youth, including Democrat/Republican anger at 1960s youthful pro-civil-rights, anti-Vietnam-War activism leading the “generation gap” over social and political issues, bitter as they seemed at the time, were nothing like today’s nihilistic apocalysm.

Today’s nihilism is not good-old Sixties “burn-it-down-then-build-something-better” revolutionary spirit. It is “burn-it-all-down-and-let-‘em-die” destruction.

Philosophical nihilists of the past variously called for a reawakening to lead us to nirvana. The huge following of the Doors’ Jim Morrison, the “Age of Aquarius,” Greening of America, The Making of A Counter-Culture, etc., all brimmed with hope for a better world. Naive, simplistic, obnoxious, acidulated (in Morrison’s case, drunken) as these might have been, they were at least hopeful.

Today’s nihilists are nothing like that. They actively seek to abolish humanity’s future wholesale — and say so outright. Diverse, multicultural America in a multi-polar world is their idea of global dystopia. They see nothing to rescue.

Emerging, powerful nihilists are assuming dominance over the West’s discourse and future, openly advancing plans so destructive they stand ready to eliminate constitutional rights, traditions, education, and America itself:

· MAGA/racist-Right nihilists: President Donald Trump’s core “God is on our side” supporters earnestly believe liberal, immigrant, racial, and LGBTQ minorities who “are not like us” aim to exterminate and “replace” them. Their vision: End-of-Times destruction of human civilization, a few “Christian” raptures, everyone else dies horrifically to spend eternity hell-burned.

· Zionihilists: fanatic supporters of Israel, diagramming with MAGA “Christian Zionists,” who actively push to end the United States, UK, and Western democracies to eliminate all pro-Palestine activism. Something about Israel incites more destroy-everything frenzy than any previous cause. Their vision: Greater Israel; everyone else can die.

· Environmental nihilism: climate change and related Green activism threaten the profits and dominance of major corporate interests and demand sacrifices of aging generations who would rather sabotage all of humanity’s future than suffer any diminution in their opulence and convenience. Vision: living out their limited time in comfort; younger/future generations, especially Greta Thunberg, can go die.

· Botarchy nihilism: “freedom cities” (isolated fortresses, like Superman’s Solitude) ruled by a few AI-reconstructed billion/trillionaire behemoths; we 99.99999% excess meat-bodies can die.

One nihilism example of many amid these cheery scenarios: Trump’s energy policy is not about standard free-market maximization of capitalist production. It is harm maximization. Its dictatorial subsidize-coal/sabotage-wind goals are to hasten global warming, vastly increase diseconomies and pollution, ignite wars and chaos, and ramp up environmental and societal destruction. It seeks to assure no future.

Heritage’s Project 2025, the Trump administration’s playbook, codifies concrete, sequenced steps to nihilistic armageddon. End democracy. Embrace fanatic religious adventism. Wreck the economy. Create chaos. Burn it all down. Harm and destroy people’s lives to elevate Ayn Rand’s Superman.

Established Democrats (and the UK’s Labour Party) would seem the natural political counterweight to nihilism, yet their strategy and vision remain stuck in slower, disastrous corporate consensus. Corporate Democrats and Labour fear younger Democratic and Green Party challenges more than they fear Trump and have shown they will forge common ground with far-Rightists to suppress them.

The Democrats’ base of younger but increasingly broad ages (as Martha Stewart’s granddaughter showed, the young can be persuasive with their elders) plus growing mostly-young MAGA defectors are the only real opposition to rising nihilism, which is why Heritage and corporate Democrats prioritize their silencing.

Am I overstating the rising forces of nihilism we see frankly, openly intoning their seemingly insane – it sounds impossible – yet steadily advancing blueprints? Their hardwired no-future schemes – greased by the ID/censor/surveil state/“protect children!” edicts they push every day on CNN, CBS, Fox – can’t really happen… can they?

Authorities are recasting young people’s concerns about climate change, Gaza, social justice, family crises, etc., as “mental illness”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| January 2026

Let’s start with the clueless condescension, because it gets scarier.

National Public Radio’s 1A (First Amendment)’s lengthy 12/18 “Navigating modern adolescence” managed to dodge ALL the family, community, economic, and global issues teenagers tell major surveys are their biggest worries.

Instead, NPR depicted teen concerns as mere “rabbit holes” social media companies cook up to “monetize” the adolescent’s “brain and a body that are changing dramatically.” “Their stress is not about you,” NPR’s clinical psychologist soothed parents and grownups.

Of course, no one mentioned the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the big one everyone talks about but no one cites truthfully. Among teens who suffer depression, suicide attempts, gun carrying, fights, dating violence, etc., the biggest associates by far are parents’ and nearby adults’ psychological abuse (suffered by 62% of teens), violence (35%), “severe” mental health problems (35%), drug/alcohol abuse (30%), and criminal arrests (20%).

Nor did NPR’s experts and host mention the other big, definitive youth survey, Monitoring the Future, which shows poor relationships with parents, not social media use, are the biggest drivers of youthful unhappiness. Teenage girls concerned about climate change and social issues are unhappier than those who shrug them off, MTF’s latest survey finds.

Officials and big interests don’t like young activists; they prefer the shrug-offs. Just tell teens, “It’s not so bad,” NPR’s experts advised parents and clinicians.

Young people have no real problems… just social-media-created “phobias”

“Why ‘peniaphobia’ [fear of being poor] is exploding among young people (and why we should be concerned),” headlines The Independent, London’s liberal-left paper (except on youth issues).

Seven in 10 18-29-year-olds think their generation will not be better or as well off as their parents.

Sure, young people are being “brutally confronted with precariousness: student jobs lost, difficulties paying rent, and recourse to food banks” and “a feeling of economic vulnerability,” the article admits, alongside failing to refute young people’s well-founded fears of poverty. But those aren’t the real problem.

What’s the real problem? You guessed it – “social media platforms,” whose materialistic images “play a major role in spreading this anxiety. On Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, the most popular content depicts idealized lives: dream vacations, luxury outfits, immaculate apartments, dazzling professional success… A lifestyle that seems out of reach for many, fueling feelings of failure or inferiority.”

Young people’s economic fears are really just an “insidious illness” driven by social media’s shallow “race for success… as if not being able to be first calls their entire life into question,” a child psychiatrist explains. “For some young people, this translates into a constant fear of ‘failing in life’ if they don’t quickly achieve a certain level of material comfort. The constant comparison, combined with fear of the economic future, makes peniaphobia a breeding ground for mental distress.”

“How can we allay (young people’s) fear of being downgraded?” the article asks. Not by leaders actually confronting wealth concentration, unaffordability, unemployment, housing and health costs, environmental degradation, Artificial Intelligence, etc. Perish the thought.

No; experts’ solution is for young people to disconnect from social media, do breathing exercises, and “seek professional help” for their “phobia” to “understand its origins and develop appropriate support.”

Socially conscious young people – especially liberal girls – are mentally ill

NPR’s and The Independent’s hosts and psychologists sound AI-programmed, like ordering, “Siri! Devise a sentence or two dismissing young people’s real concerns.”

However, they’re not the worst manifestation of growing mainstream-liberal pretend-sympathy campaigns that recast social-media “victimized” young people’s – especially young women’s – concerns over climate change, Gaza, social justice, and larger issues as psychoses treatable by counseling and online banishments.

U.S. psychologist Jean Twenge declares Gen Z liberal girls’ social-justice and climate-change concerns are frivolous; psychologist Jonathan Haidt ignores them altogether. Girls are depressed because they’re duped by social media’s shallow looks-and-popularity images and bullying by “mean” teenagers, Twenge says. Haidt insists liberal girls just need to get off social media and perhaps get psychological treatment. Teens only use social media for porn, cyberbullying, spreading bad values, and contact with predators, Haidt and Twenge say.

Both rely on their own prejudices against young people instead of evidence; they both ignore Pew Research, CDC, and other major surveys showing large majorities of teens use social media beneficially and encounter much more meanness from adults at home than online. No matter. Emotional calls to ban teens from social media are quotable and popular.

Right-wingers rejoice in these inchoate attacks on young people, but Democrats are leading the reprogram-youth crusade. Online analyst Taylor Lorenz condemns “dumb, dumb, dumb” progressives and liberals who lead the charge to internet-ban and age-restrict Gen Z teens, potentially crippling their global advocacy for progressive causes.

And it gets still worse

This banish/redirect-youth crusade gets scarier still, as if the bottom has fallen out of human beings’ long, painful struggle toward decency. You can plumb the darkest pits of the savage “manosphere” cave and not find anything approaching the evil expressed by the Obama presidency’s Hillary Clinton and Sarah Hurwitz and roomfuls of applauding billionaire-funded luminaries.

Hurwitz, Clinton and their top-level audiences are deeply upset… not at the “carnage” and “wall of dead children” in Gaza, their own words describing the mass-slaughter by Israeli forces armed by US, UK, and German governments.

No, Clinton and Hurwitz declare with shocking candor (they never thought their words would become public) to approving corporate, political, religious, media, and foundation elites, the villains are social media platforms like TikTok that are “smashing our young people’s brains” by showing real on-the-ground reporting, graphic videos, and embarrassingly direct quotes from the Israeli press and leaders’ openly genocidal statements on Gaza.

Clinton and Hurwitz yearned for a past when “responsible” Western media censored harsh realities from public view. The “constant exposure to graphic images from Gaza social media feeds filled with footage of dead and injured Palestinian children are creating an emotional shock that ‘makes it impossible’ for her to defend Israel’s actions in conversations with young people,” Hurwitz complained.* Jewish schools should ban smartphones and social media until senior year, she said, to — you guessed it — “protect students’ mental health.”

Hurwitz is outraged that young people, especially Jewish students, are “confusing… essential Holocaust education” with the logical ethical principle that “big powerful people hurting weaker people,” as Nazis did to Jews, is wrong, an inhumane atrocity.

No, no, no, Hurwitz insists, the overly-egalitarian claim that the Holocaust lesson is “never again” for all peoples is “anti-Semitic.” Rather, Jewish and other young people must be taught that “big strong Israelis… hurting emaciated Palestinians” (her words) is morally right.

An eye-blink ago,1980s and ‘90s authorities worried that violent movies, rap, and video games were de-sensitizing children and teens to violence and molding a generation of “adolescent super-predators.” All baloney, as it turned out, but now, authorities complain that real images of harsh brutalities from Palestine are over-sensitizing young people’s humanitarian empathies, interfering with official carnages.

More nihilist than the darkest “manosphere” pit

If Western culture retains a shred of the civilized decency we boast about, the likes of Hurwitz, Clinton, and like-minded elites would be ostracized from public discourse. Instead, the reverse is happening: more dictatorial censorship edicts across the West to suppress all dissent – especially by young people, and especially concerning Gaza, climate change, and social justice.

Congressmembers freely declare they forced the sale of TikTok to a pro-Israel mega-billionaire not for “national security” or other made-up subterfuges, but to suppress young people’s pro-Palestine views. The UK and German governments allied with Big Tech (which delightedly exploits government “age verification” mandates to gather users’ private information) likewise are decimating free speech principles to shut down advocacies officials broadly label as “anti-Semitic” and “terrorism.”

The 1984 metaphor is overworked, but still… it’s hard to imagine worse Orwellisms than Clinton’s denunciation of real-death videos from Palestine as “made up” because they challenge official narratives, or the coalescing of government, Big Tech, anti-youth, psychological, and established media interests around sweeping dictates to bar young people and dissidents from vital online resources in the name of preventing “mental illness.” We’re living a dystopian cliche.

*I’d love to see Hillary and Hurwitz debate political scientist Norm Finkelstein, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, or campus activist Simone Zimmerman on the “facts” of Israel-Palestine. Never going to happen. The elites hide in safe, billionaire-sponsored forums and controlled media like Fox News and Morning Joe.

Social media isn’t driving the teenage “loneliness epidemic”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| January 2026

Americans of all ages suffer a “loneliness epidemic,” former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy announced in 2023, fostering health damage rivaling smoking “15 cigarettes a day.”

“In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness,” Murthy lamented. “Across many measures, Americans appear to be becoming less socially connected over time… Instead of coming together, we will further retreat to our corners—angry, sick, and alone.”

Well, that’s dark. We’d better remedy why we’re lonelier.

One big “socially isolating” factor Murthy cites, among several (after all, Robert Putnam’s [in]famous “Bowling Alone” essay first appeared in 1995, when primitive PC dial-up howled at 16 slow Mhz), is our devices: “social media, smartphones, virtual reality, remote work, artificial intelligence, and assistive technologies, to name just a few.”

Psychologist Jean Twenge argues that’s too wimpy: social media, particularly smartphones, are the villain. Severely truncating charts (i.e., chopping off the lower and upper 60 points on a scale of 100 to make trends look wildly more terrifying), she declares: “There’s something about being around another person – about touch, about eye contact, about laughter – that can’t be replaced by digital communication. The result is a generation of teens who are lonelier than ever before.” [Correction 1: online videochats do transmit eye contact and laughter; imagine the panic if they also transmitted “touch.”]

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his After Babel disciples agree. They insist their own generations that grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s before social media were happy, well-adjusted, and never lonely or anxious (“Phones?” one boasted. “No. We had each other.”) [Correction 2: teens of the 1950s-1990s logged plenty of phone time, along with hours of television and radio.]

Haidt sold at least one young core follower on his nostalgia of past adolescent bliss: “a time we never knew,” Freya India laments: now, her psychically tortured Generation Z suffers “anxiety (in) a phone-based world” of “loneliness, yes, but also the grief. The loss. The feeling of wanting to be free from the only world we’ve ever known.”

[This view has always puzzled me. If you feel so terribly oppressed by cellphones and social media, solutions abound: (a) don’t get a cellphone and online connection; (b) use the “off” button; and/or (c) click online tabs to block sites causing loneliness, grief, loss, anxiety, and entrapment (controls so easy even this 75-year-old regularly works them); then (d) go outside and frolic with friends in the soccer field sun and froyo fern patio. Look around. There’s no gun to your head! You don’t have to spend dark lonely months hunched over porn, Nazi, bullying, pro-ana, hate-your-body sites!]

Of course, there would be downsides, the same as if past generations had dumped their televisions, radios, Princess phones, arcade gaming, etc. (which likewise were lambasted as “addicting”). Still, a vocal fraction really seems to feel compelled to use technology to self-destruct.

Haidt also fails to mention that cities, malls, downtowns, etc., were so terrified of the teens of his day that hundreds of jurisdictions enacted juvenile bans and anti-cruising ordinances, culminating in the Clinton (yes, that Bill Clinton; ironic, huh?) administration’s mid-‘90s push for daytime/nighttime curfews so strict that teens would be allowed in public only a few hours most days of the year. And to stop the “touch” Twenge celebrates, thousands of schools, youth organizations, workplaces, etc., adopted “3-foot” personal separation rules.

All this leads to the final irony challenging the massive campaign berating us (and teenagers) that social media (especially smartphones) has horribly rewired today’s youth, the ultimate shocker…

TEENS’ LONELINESS HAS NOT RISEN OVER THE LAST HALF-CENTURY

I graphed all 48 years of Monitoring the Future’s survey, the only one to ask the same question (“a lot of times I feel lonely”) of a consistent number (around 2,000) of high school seniors under the same selection process every year.

The change in high schoolers’ reporting loneliness – using a standard regression trendline to incorporate all years in the series instead of just cherry-picking the years that show what I want – is far below even tiny significance levels (d = 0.047, nothing), as the figures illustrate.

Sources: Monitoring the Future, 2025; Pew Research, 2007-2025.

Demolishing Haidt’s nostalgia, Twenge’s celebration, and India’s illusion of joyous warm-body togetherness prior to the social media/cellphone era, teens’ self-reported loneliness was high in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s – long before social media and cellphones “destroyed adolescence.”

· When Haidt was 17 in 1977, 0% of youths had social media or cellphones, yet 37% of his teen peers reported to MTF feeling “lonely… a lot.”

· In 2024, 95% of teens use social media and cellphones, and 38% report loneliness to the same survey.

Not exactly the Four Horsemen. In fact, teen trends have been better on loneliness and many other indexes than those for both young adults and all adults.

How to rig your advocacy

Note how easily “trends” can be rigged to show whatever an advocate desires by cherry-picking which “before” and “after” years to compare – a disgraceful subterfuge routinely used in pop-academics’ and media discussions of social media:

· Want to show teenage loneliness has skyrocketed due to social media? Compare 2021 (46% reported being lonely) to 2007 (22%).

· Want to show teenage loneliness has plummeted due to social media? Compare 2007 (22%) to 1995 (36%).

Both comparisons are bogus. The first ignores that teens’ social media and cellphone use were already well entrenched by 2007, with only small increases afterward (see first figure). The second comparison tracks true growth in teens’ internet and cellphone use but then picks an arbitrary cutoff year (why 2007? Why not another year?)

Twenge’s exaggerated graphs fixated only on 2007-2019, a period when social media use stayed the same at over 90% and cellphone use rose only from 60% to 80%. By comparing two years in which a lot of teens used social media, Twenge actually shows social media is not the cause of the rise in loneliness she deplores.

Twenge obsesses over smartphones, whose popularity escalated in the post-2013 period. However, treating smartphones as somehow cataclysmic is also puzzling, since a smartphone is just a portable phone with internet capability, both of which teens already had. Further, teens’ loneliness had already increased from 22% in 2007 to 31% by the early 2010s before smartphones proliferated.

It would be interesting to study why (a) teens’ loneliness plunged in the early 2000s (my best guess is Millennials’ aforementioned froyo and soccer, replacing Gen-X mosh pits, mood rings, and pet rocks); and (b) both teens’ and adults’ loneliness rose in the 2010s before the COVID-19 pandemic, got worse during the pandemic, and now may be falling. Authorities’ blinding obsession with social media has quashed investigating more promising explanations for teens.

Perhaps teens’ definition of “lonely” have changed over time

How would a teenager of 1975 who talked on the phone for hours with friends, or a teen of today who videoed, gamed, messaged, and chatted with friends online, answer the open-ended question: “a lot of times, I feel lonely”? Has the rise of broader communications technologies in the internet era – sophisticated videochats and messaging supplanting the waxed string/tin cans, walkie-talkie, post-it note, and voice telephone of the past – changed the standards for describing oneself as “lonely”?

The next substack deals with nuances no one, amid the emotional panic over teens, social media, and mental health, seems interested in exploring.

Part 3: One more – really bad – emblem of progressive podcasts’ grotesque hate speech toward young people

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

On Tuesday, Saager Enjeti, the self-described “conservative” co-host on Tuesday’s Breaking Points podcast, declared that the “really sick” emails from Harvard University’s uber-economics professor Larry Summers showing “no moral standards,” seeking pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s advice on “exploiting his relationship” to win sex from a reluctant young female mentee, were “literally like teenage behavior.”

This is utterly appalling. If Breaking Points had any normal respect for stopping hate speech, Enjeti would be apologizing profusely to save his job. Hate is not acceptable simply because the group one attacks can’t fight back — some would consider that even more egregious, as evidenced by the Epstein case itself.

Yet, Enjeti got no pushback from co-host Krystal Ball. I can only assume that Enjeti and Ball must regard the teenagers they associate with in their personal lives as sick, depraved, exploitative sex criminals. They certainly couldn’t justify such bigotry with scientific research.

Summers, age 70, former Democratic U.S. Secretary of the Treasury serving President Bill Clinton (!), university president, and holder of a stellar Beltway-Eastern-elite resume, indeed was acting depraved, immoral, crude, pathetic, and criminal.

Not that Epstein wasn’t the ideal choice for such advice. At the time (March, 2019) of Summers’ buddy-buddy emails pleading for Epstein’s “wingman” counsel on how to exploit young women, Epstein’s own resume included a publicly known conviction for sex-trafficking middle-school girls and was continuing his depravities right up to his soon-to-arrive second arrest.

Summers’ execrable behavior was in no way “literally… teenage,” just as it was in no way “literally Jewish” (Summers’ ethnicity) or “literally Indian American” (Saager’s ethnicity) or “literally White suburban middle-aged” (Ball’s).

Imagine the enraged backlash if Enjeti had cited ethnicity rather than “teen” age as the demographic feature characterizing Summers’ and Epstein’s predations.

I worked with hundreds of teenagers over 15 years. What I saw is confirmed in studies, surveys, and statistics. Teenagers, like adults, act in all different ways – something media stereotypers can’t seem to get through their primitive, hate-driven cerebral cortexes.

Of course, there are small fractions of teens who are rapists and exploiters, just as there are fractions of every demographic group who use power and violence to leverage sexual advantage. The 17-year-old alpha richie cynically seducing an outcast 13 year-old, the billionaire “teen model” executive exploiting his older-male privilege to score middle-schoolers, the celebrity director and his casting couch, the 70-year-old topline professor forcing his institutional power on harassed mentees, the politician chasing interns… all are part of a long history of grotesque sexual predators wielding illegitimate personal power, not representatives of their demographic groups.

Why can’t the progressive brain, or the conservative brain on progressive podcasts, grasp this simple, scientific, egalitarian fact?

Note that Enjeti accords older ages individuality. He never stereotypes Epstein’s or Summers’ behaviors as typifying “old men.” To the contrary, he declared – even amid the large numbers of aging elites who participated in and/or continued associating with convicted pedophile Epstein – that it’s “weird” for older people to behave that way. Yet, he turns around and, citing the behavior of older men, mass-trashes all teenagers as depraved sex criminals. Whenever they and liberal-left colleagues don’t like an adult’s behavior, they transfer blame by calling it “juvenile,” “teenage,” etc.

It’s an irony that many men achieve pinnacles of power and prosperity in advanced age when (to paraphrase elder Kurt Vonnegut), “I look like an iguana.” But I think we can buck up and accept the compensating advantages without turning coercive.

You, Enjeti, are the sick one. Ball should be ashamed of her silence letting you get away with anti-youth hate speech day after day and indulging it herself. Why, progressives, do you hate young people – your staunch allies on the left – so relentlessly?