Progressives indulge irrational hostility to sabotage young people’s rights and any hope of a future
Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025
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?