Gen Z Hates Cancel Culture

Gen Z standing against cancel culture.  Good.  

An interesting example may lie in the experience of the unlikely conservative icon of Scott Cawthorn, the creator of the videogame series Five Nights At Freddy’s. Cawthorn might initially seem like an odd figure to represent conservatism in pop culture. His videogame series is about a fast-food restaurant where animal robot mascots go on murderous rampages at night, and the player, as a security guard, must avoid being killed in gruesome manners. On paper, it is exactly the sort of violent videogame that parents in the early 1990s would have sought to “cancel,” lest it corrupt their kids. And today it has established an enormous fanbase among teenagers, including, for some reason, gay and lesbian teens.

When it was revealed that Cawthon had donated extensively to both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Donald Trump, however, he came under sustained attack online from publications accusing him of “betraying” his “LGBT” fanbase. But something interesting happened. While most media publications, generally staffed by millennials, rushed to condemn him, on social media, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok, Gen-Z users rallied to his defense. So after initially condemning Cawthon, many of the millennial journalists quickly shifted to expressing horror that teenagers could possibly defend Cawthon on Twitter and in public, attacking them instead.

The Soviet Union Is Gone, but the Young Yearn for Socialism

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Picking Your Pockets for .... Nothing

It is bad enough that politicians are saddling young people with enormous debts.  But even worse is that much of this money is being wasted.  

Current entitlement programs are rife with abuse. Their size and lack of guardrails to protect taxpayer dollars open the door for bad actors to take advantage of the system. But rather than acknowledging and addressing these issues, the Biden administration wants to dramatically expand the welfare state, which will undoubtedly result in even more waste, fraud, and abuse.  

Since 2003, when agencies were required to report these payments, the Government Accountability Office estimates $1.9 trillion in improper payments have been made. But that might just be the tip of the iceberg because the GAO maintains it is unable to “determine the full extent to which improper payments occur.” 

In fiscal year 2020, more than 21% of Medicaid’s federal program spending was the result of improper spending, which means one-fifth of taxpayer dollars, intended to help roughly 77 million low-income and medically needy individuals, has been lost without helping those Americans. Medicare was similarly disastrous, with $43 billion in improper payments—money that should have helped provide health care for the 63 million elderly and disabled currently receiving Medicare benefits.  

Outside of Medicare and Medicaid, three other significant sources of improper payments are for the earned income tax credit, unemployment insurance, and supplemental security income. Almost a quarter of the payments made for the earned income tax credit in FY2020 were improper—this amounted to $16 billion. Of the benefits paid by the Department of Labor for the unemployment insurance program, 10% were improper payments, which accounted for $8 billion. The Social Security Administration similarly spent almost 10% of the Supplemental Security Income funds on improper payments during FY2020—amounting to $5.3 billion. 

Afghanistan: The Bigger Cultural Picture

Brendan O'Neil writes about how the West lost in Afghanistan.  Not a military loss.  That would be bad enough.  It was a loss for Western Culture.  The Taliban found a West that no longer believed in itself.  The Taliban did.  Lost in a multicultural haze and moral relativism the West had no ability to criticize the Medieval morality and actions of the Taliban let alone promote values like individualism and freedom.  The Afghan project became one of dishing out cash to the corrupt politicians and generals and welfare to the peasants.  Below is an excerpt.  

But above all of that, above even the political and military incoherence of the American empire, there is the corrosive cultural dynamic. This might just be the most important factor in the Afghan humiliation – the fact that the US, and the West more broadly, clearly lacks the cultural resources necessary for a clash of civilisations. This wasn’t just a territorial battle, a fight over the land of Afghanistan. It was also a cultural clash. It was a war between one side that has very strong beliefs and is more than willing to die for them, and another side that doesn’t know what it stands for anymore and would rather avoid risk and self-sacrifice if at all possible. I’ll leave you to decide which of these is the Taliban, and which the US.

This was always the West’s problem in Afghanistan: it lacked faith in the very values it claimed to be delivering to that benighted country. We will liberate women from life under the burqa, Western officials said. But isn’t it ‘Islamophobic’ to criticise the burqa, or any other Islamic practice for that matter? Our elites have insisted for years that it is. We will replace your intolerant Islamist system with a civil society fashioned by clever professors, the West promised. But isn’t it judgemental and possibly a tad racist – certainly an offence against the ideology of multiculturalism – to imply that Western democracy is superior to Islamist theocracy? As one British think-tank says, in its definition of the term ‘Islamophobia’, it is wrong to suggest that Islam is in any way ‘inferior to the West’. The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation? You cannot partake in a clash of civilisations if you loathe your own civilisation.

Anyone who thinks the Taliban did not pick up on all of this, on the Potemkin nature not only of the Afghan government but also of Western civilisation itself, is kidding themselves. The Taliban will have watched as the mighty American military became bogged down in discussions of critical race theory and the problem of ‘white rage’. They will have clocked the British army’s recruitment drive that was aimed at ‘snowflakes’ and ‘me me me millennials’ – for real – on the basis that such people have the ‘compassion’ necessary for the touchy-feely wars of the 21st century. They will know that the contemporary West is shame-faced about its history and its civilisational values and lacks ideas for how to turn its fragile youths into a fighting force, and they will understand their own life-and-death devotion to Sharia as being the opposite to all of this. They know this was a cultural clash as well as a military fight, and that they were by far the stronger side on this front.

This is the truth: America and its Western allies are too consumed by wokeness to be able to pursue a moral or military struggle for their values. The past 20 years of this slow-burning Afghan humiliation have been a modern case of fiddling while Rome burns. An intolerant Islamist army gains in strength and plots its return to power while the American and British armies obsess over how to become more trans-inclusive, which gender pronouns to use (the Royal Air Force’s list includes ‘ze’, ‘per’ and ‘hir’), how to make training exercises more inclusive of ‘snowflakes’, and how to fight wars without offending the enemy. Who can forget when US navymen wrote ‘Hijack this, fags’ on a bomb destined for Afghanistan and all hell broke loose? Such ‘spontaneous acts of penmanship’ are completely unacceptable, said the then US rear admiral. The Taliban was fighting to the death for its theocratic vision – the West was squabbling over offensive words.

This is why the comparison with Saigon is an illegitimate one. Back then, the US was forced into retreat by powerful external forces – the Vietnamese, of course, and also the anti-war movement in the US, in which vast swathes of the youth and significant sections of the elite turned against the war. The Afghan humiliation, in contrast, is a product almost entirely of internal disarray – of the exhaustion of American politics, of Western geopolitical nous, and of the West’s belief in its own project and its own values. There is nothing positive whatsoever in how the Afghan War has ended. It is a disaster for the Afghan people, a devastating blow to the confidence of the United States, and another backward step for those of us who believe that the values of democracy and freedom are superior and are worth fighting for. The Afghan calamity will cast a long shadow, for a long time.

Read the whole thing.

   

The Millennial Wealth Gap

Millennials that are in or approaching their high earnings years are finding out that they are not as prosperous as previous generations.   The problem is high debt and the effects of having lived through two deep recessions early in their careers.  From the Wall Street Journal:  

Older millennials in their high-earning years are also still working to recover lost ground from previous bouts of unemployment or underemployment caused by the 2008 financial crisis, according to a 2020 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“You carry that with you for a long time, maybe your whole career,” said William Gale, one of the authors of the study and a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution.

Do you, or does someone you know, expect the late 30s to early 50s to be the high-earning years? Join the conversation below.

The study—which examined household wealth across generations using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, a survey conducted every three years by the Federal Reserve—found that the 2007-09 recession significantly reduced wealth for all age groups, and younger cohorts in particular. In 2016, millennial households held around 12% less wealth than did households headed by a person of the same age in 1989.

In 2019, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found older millennials’ debt-to-income ratios to be 23% higher than expected, based on previous generations at similar ages.

The overall real average wage of 2018 had the same purchasing power as it did 40 years ago, Drew DeSilver, a senior writer at Pew Research Center, wrote in an article. That means despite the strong gains in earnings and a growing post-pandemic labor market, many millennial households may not see more flexibility in their budgets, according to Mr. DeSilver.

Depression Soars Among Young People

Panic purveyors in the media and political class have had a heavy toll on young people.  A new study shows that depression and suicide rates among young people have soared as a result of the social isolation imposed by the pandemic.  

School closing have been particularly hard on young people.  The school closing are particular wrong headed because schools have not been shown to be centers for the transmission of COVID.  

"Being socially isolated, kept away from their friends, their school routines and extracurricular activities during the pandemic has proven to be difficult on youth," said lead researcher Sheri Madigan.  She is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Calgary, in Canada.

"An important consideration for keeping schools open should be the mental health and well-being of youth," Madigan said.  Children tend to thrive when their environment is predictable, and in-person learning allows for more consistent routines and structure, so keeping schools open may protect children from mental health problems, she said.

The increase in suicide and depression rates is particularly alarming.

Dr. Victor Fornari, vice chair of child and adolescent psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y., said he has seen firsthand the increase in mental health problems among the young.  "We've seen in our emergency rooms a 50% increase in suicidal adolescents presenting over the past 12 months and an almost 300% increase in admissions for eating disorders amongst adolescents," he said.

The pandemic has been stressful for adolescents as they struggle with home instruction and virtual schooling, Fornari said. "School is their social network. Without being with their peers, their friends, they're in a more stressful environment at home."

Not Your Parent's Economy

 Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds blog explains how changes in the economy have resulted in massive inequality in America.  

This wholesale transfer of risk from elites to the workers is finally becoming consequential as wealth / income / security inequality is reaching extremes that are destabilizing society and the economy. As Gordon Long and I explain in our new video, The World Just Got a Lot Riskier crony capitalism has transmogrified into predatory capitalism as government, finance and the corporatocracy have allied into a seamless (and seamlessly corrupt) elite class that has offloaded systemic risk onto the unprotected class.

This is a bad development for young people who have no memory of a country where the middle class was much larger and mattered.  The passage pointing out how Federal Reserve's negative (real) interest rate policies are devastating small savers is well worth reading.  

4. Federal Reserve policies have destroyed safe yields on savings and money-market accounts, forcing workers to take on the enormous risks of the rigged stock market casino (which is rigged to benefit high-frequency traders, front-running trading houses, and those with asymmetrically distributed information, i.e. insiders).