Ep. 2012 - Why Is Gen-Z More Politically Extreme Than EVER？
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
1
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Toxicity
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Hate speech
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Summary
Gen Z is officially the most ideologically extreme generation we ve seen in almost 100 years. And no one seems to really appreciate why. Some say it s the material conditions of their lives, some say it's the darn TikTok, or maybe it s a little bit more of that. And then we ll get to the medium, the artistic medium of our political moment, which we haven t covered before yet on this show. And that is the edit.
Transcript
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Gen Z is officially the most ideologically extreme generation that we have seen in almost
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100 years. Sometimes they're chopping off their body parts and they're trans. Sometimes they're
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Nazis. The most extreme among them are Nazis chopping their body parts off. But the numbers
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are extremely extreme. And no one seems to really appreciate why. There are a lot of theories about
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it. Some say it's affordability. It's because of the material conditions of their, maybe a little
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bit of that. Some say, oh, it's the darn TikTok or it's a little bit more of that. We'll get to
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what is actually doing it. And then we will get to the medium, the artistic medium of our political
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moment, which we haven't covered before yet on this show. And that is the edit. We will get to
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the art of the edit. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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welcome back to the show it's wonderful to be with you i'm not really with you by the way i'm
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only i'm kind of secretly virtually kind of almost with you because i like many of you am on a nice
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fourth of july vacation i don't do it i'm not i'm not a huge vacation guy but i'm not gonna look i'll
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be back on Monday in the studio, but I couldn't leave you all the way. And actually, this really
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pertains to what we're talking about on the show today, which is what radicalized Gen Z and maybe
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what we can do about it, and we'll get into the political edit. But I'll be back. We'll be here
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on Monday. There's a lot more to say. First, though, go to thecatholicherald.com, promo code
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Knowles. One of the many reasons I enjoy reading G.K. Chesterton is that he had an annoying habit
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of free access. The extremism of Gen Z, I think that is totally without any kind of debate,
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right i think everybody basically agrees with that you got a massive rise in the lgbtq ideology
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nbc reported a couple years ago that 30 percent of zoomers identify as lgbtq lmnop qrstv but that
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that's a very uh very much in flux because it's all fake but but that number has come down a
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little bit nevertheless you see a lot of sexual radicalism and you see a lot of radicalism even
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on the right. The Zoomers are much more likely to be Nazis than previous generations. And this
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is not just ANIC data. You can see it come up in different reports. Here's one study.
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14.5% of Gen Z respondents in a 2024 national survey describe themselves as ideologically
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extreme. This is compared to 2.7% of millennials. So the Zoomers are many multiples more likely to
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call their ideology extreme than the millennials. And the millennials were pretty annoying too.
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You know, having, as a millennial myself, having lived through the rise of millennials,
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the political coming of age of millennials, that was really the Obama generation.
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And they were much more ideological than Gen X, the generation that comes immediately before us.
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Gen X is not ideological at all. That's the grunge generation checked out. They didn't,
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they just kind of keep to themselves, do their own thing. No one talks about them.
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The boomers obviously were much more ideological, but the zoomers really put all of them to shame.
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And then there are real practical effects to this.
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According to Harvard Youth Poll, a relatively recent one shows that 39% say that political violence is acceptable under at least one circumstance.
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11% when someone persists and promotes extremist beliefs.
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That 11% is really just the young libs justifying killing ordinary conservatives because they're promoting extremist beliefs.
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10% of them show high acceptance of political violence.
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Obviously, we don't need survey data to show that this happened because we saw it all happen after the killing of Charlie Kirk.
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One more, I won't belabor the point on the numbers too much, but just one more pretty damning statistic.
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Nearly half of Zoomers find it acceptable to forcibly occupy public buildings or kill or physically harm elected officials.
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nearly half. That's compared to just 20% of millennials. So it has skyrocketed since the
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millennials in just one generation. So what's doing it? I think on the left, what they're
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going to tell you is the reason this is happening is because material conditions have declined. It
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was easier for our grandparents or our great grandparents to buy homes than it was for young
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people to buy homes, which is true. You have to grade it on a curve a little bit because homes
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now are just much bigger and nicer, but that doesn't matter. That's soft consolation to a
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consumer in his 20s who can't afford to buy a house. You say, well, fine, I'll buy a cheaper
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house, but there aren't any cheaper houses to buy. You add on top of that, that you have Haitians
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who are here with temporary protected status. They were supposed to leave the country in the
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middle of 2011, I guess it was. They came here in 2010. They were supposed to leave in the middle
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of 2011. They're still here today. President Trump is trying to remove them. The Supreme
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Court finally said that, I guess, sort of maybe they can. Those Haitians here temporarily are
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more likely to own homes than Zoomers in their 20s. So I get it. There's material problems that
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especially hit Zoomers, hits everybody, but especially hit Zoomers. The country has decayed.
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There's less trust in the institutions. The institutions lie to us. I think a lot of Zoomers
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got radicalized during COVID when their schooling was taken away from them, when their proms were
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taken away from them, when college was taken away from them in some cases. So there's that,
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but that's not the main driver. It's not the main driver. Some people want to blame social media
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And the obvious expert on this that we have to go back to is the very famous,
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now somewhat forgotten, theorist of communication, Marshall McLuhan.
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Marshall McLuhan has this famous maxim, the medium is the message.
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This has now become a cliche, but it's a keen observation.
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Whenever we're talking about what these kids are consuming, we're always talking about the content.
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All the stupid debates over banning TikTok focused on the types of commentary that you would get on TikTok.
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Because for McLuhan, it's not just that the message is the message.
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The big problem with TikTok, really, is not any particular reel that you're watching on there.
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It's that it's frying our brains and killing our attention spans, and we're staring at it all the time, bumping into trees.
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And a basic way to understand how the medium is the message is think about when TV comes out.
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but it also means that people are staying up later. It also means that now electronic light
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is even more present in homes. It now means that people are falling asleep to this content.
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It now means that social events are going to involve all coming together and not playing
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cards and not talking and not going bowling, but you're just going to sit together silently and
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watch something. In other words, the medium itself changes human behavior. It changes the
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way that we think about ourselves. It changes the way we think about politics. And so, in so doing,
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it itself is much more powerful than whatever messages you're getting from My Love Lucy.
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That is obviously exaggerated. It goes to accelerated when you talk about the internet
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combined with mobile devices, which is where it really kicks off. Millennials grew up mostly
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on the internet. I remember when we got our first computer. I remember when we got the internet.
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And some of my richer friends got it much earlier than that.
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But it's really marrying that with the mobile device such that now you're just constantly getting that dopamine hit.
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You're constantly getting shorter and edgier commentary.
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Because the internet then broke down the monopolies of the news networks and the entertainment networks, all of a sudden you get all these independent creators.
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but the incentives for independent creators are totally different from the incentives
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of people who are on networks. I've talked about this a lot with politics and how it affects the
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way the podcasters and the streamers are changing GOP politics or not. The differences are when you
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have a news network, say you have Fox News, some people are going to be a little more edgy. Some
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people are going to be a little more mainstream. Some people are going to be a little more liberal
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even, but they all have to be kind of cohesive within a network. And there are rules regulated
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in part by the government, in part by the shareholders of News Corporation. So it keeps
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guardrails around what is going to be said. When you get to independent media, not only do you lose
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all of those guardrails, you get the exact opposite incentives. Because now the incentives are
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constantly to be getting more attention from everyone else. Now, all of a sudden, you're not
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on a team with anybody. You're competing against everybody. It's a war of all against all.
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especially as political content becomes prominent.
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that the moment that political media reached its end limit
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and it can never go any further in its present form
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was when Kanye went on the Alex Jones show in the mask
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the kind of religion that comes about in the 20th century
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to replace traditional religion, especially Christianity,
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there's nothing supernatural, nothing's enchanted.
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and there's not the incarnation of perfect good.
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And who's the worst guy from the 20th century? It's Hitler. So Hitler becomes this figure who is
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even more evil than Hitler. And Hitler is a very nasty fellow, but he becomes this absolute
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incarnation in the imagination of pure evil. Not evil as a deprivation of good,
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or sorry, not good as a deprivation of evil, but evil as a deprivation of good.
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And so the most extreme thing you can possibly say is I love Hitler in that kind of crazy
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environment. It can't go any further than that. Which means that there's a new kind of, as the
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medium transforms how we think about politics, that too is going to shape the medium itself.
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And this has led us to the art form, the pure art form of politics in the year of our Lord,
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2026. That is the edit. And we don't, the edit is like a Zoomer thing. The edit is not a millennial
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thing or a Gen X thing. So I have just been given a banquet. I like the edits. I have been given
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this absolute feast of political edits to bring my McLuhan-infused media expertise and to savor
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political campaigns used to be won and lost by radio ads then tv ads then it became podcasts
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and now we have arrived at the most powerful political art form of our time the edit
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the edit the producers have compiled very tippity top gen z right wing political edits take it away
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But it's all right. I'll get another one in London.
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Well, it's got streets filled with characters, bridges over the rivers, and buildings as tall as trees.
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We're going to build them here. We'll show your people how to use this land properly.
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Yes. We'll build roads and decent houses and...
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You think that, only because you don't know any better.
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We've improved the lives of savages all over the world.
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It goes hard, except I don't like how long the intro was.
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The whole point of the edit is that it just plays on the ever-diminishing attention span of modern people,
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So you just have to have the rapid sound and the constantly changing pictures.
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You know, you can't have like a 15-minute intro.
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I get the setup, but they should have done the setup in like four seconds.
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But the Illuminati aren't just represented by pyramids.
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Just like the Mediterranean Sea or Syria or, like we mentioned earlier, the Red Sea.
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That's our second triangle, the triangle of eyes.
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And when you put the triangle of pyramids and the triangle of eyes together, what do you get?
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And what country lies from the middle of the star?
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And guess what Israel's national flag looks like?
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This is pretty funny because a lot of the edits I've noticed, they do tend a little touch toward
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Nazism, which kind of makes sense because it's just the it's just the hyper concentrated form
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of political media, so it's got to have the most kind of edgy, extreme thing.
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Like, you know, it's not going to be about marginal tax rates.
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The thing I can't tell with that edit, though, is, is it ironic or not?
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It's very hard to tell the difference between the real schizos and the guys just having
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that this idea that you can't have like normie edits.
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It's got to be just really concentrated, radical extremes.
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What if we should just start doing normie edits?
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calling for a slightly lower corporate tax rate.
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it's like Himmler shows up, you know, or whatever,
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But it's just Romney wanting to save corporations
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We help businesses that pay at the individual tax rate to have more money so they can hire more people and pay higher wages.
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My plan is to lower it by 20% and put more people back to work.
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Someone should do that. Someone should make that.
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President Trump looked at the Taliban leader and said this.
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I want to leave Afghanistan, but it's going to be a conditions-based withdrawal.
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And he said, if you harm a hair on a single American, I'm going to kill you.
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And translator goes, and Trump goes, tell him what I said.
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reached in his pocket, pulled out a satellite photo of the leader of the Taliban's home
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You're a dope dealer selling dope, is you like that?
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Kicking those, kicking in those, is you like that?
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You're a dope dealer selling laws, is you like that?
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nah the the story the problem with this edit is the story is better than the actual like
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images and music there are like a billion iconic images of trump why it's just that was just the
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same like two shots from the same event just back and forth so it was that was very low effort on
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the edit itself but the story was really good so it deserved a better better montage at the end
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Promo code Knowles at takelean.com. Well, you sound like a Democrat.
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It's just hot chick says Democrats are done.
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I get it, and then you leave the audience wanting more.
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I am proud of our unparalleled history, culture, and diversity.
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I am proud of what we have achieved as a civilization.
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But Europe as we know it, in all its richness and greatness,
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is under threat by a false representation of our history, present, and future.
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We are being told lies about who we were, who we are, and who we should be.
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Ava, you know, very, very compelling spokesman for right-wing European-ness.
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It was sort of seductive enough without being untoward.
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It was edgy enough without being, you know, sort of radical and pushing off the normies.
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wow extremely compelling i'm not being ironic it's like it that's very good political propaganda
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because it doesn't it doesn't make any claims it just connects a bunch of things like 9 11
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it just sort of implicitly blames on the jews like lets the muslims off the hook and implicitly blames
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on the jews without ever really claiming that and then connects the star of david to the freemasons
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even though the freemasons i don't think allowed jews in which is why the jews created their own
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own Freemasons called B'nai B'rith in my limited understanding of Freemasonry and Judaism and then
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connects it to like Saturn so there's this kind of cosmic sense of it and then the contrast
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with Christianity it's very very good political propaganda because it makes you feel something
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it like plays on antipathies and attraction and desire without ever having to make a claim or
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defend a claim not yeah you're gonna that's whoever made it they probably have some problems
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with their ideology we might have to say but very very talented at propaganda who is it naughty
00:25:29.620
naughty like k-n-o-t-t-y or n-a-u-g-a like like yeah okay okay that's not surprising next one
00:25:46.760
you know i remember this is like months ago brett cooper texted me and said i hadn't talked to her
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in a while and she said hey mike i just wanted to call your attention there are apparently um
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thirst trap edits of you on tiktok and then i was somewhere like someone like a stranger came up to
00:26:14.440
me and mention this in public, which is great. And I encourage more of them. I'm Michael Knowles.
00:26:19.560
See you next time. My brain is fried. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. See you later.