I must say that I am really getting to appreciate Bari Weiss’s Substack, The Free Press. Talk about life after The New York Times! I find really good stuff on The Free Press.
And now she has a piece by Olivia Reingold on the miseries of the Zoomers, “Why America’s Zoomers are Turning MAGA.”
Reingold talks — on Zoom — with a 2024 high-school graduate in the Rogue Valley. That’s down in the south of Oregon near Ashland.
She tells me about her boyfriend, a Christian like herself. She says they’ve been dating for three years and that she can’t wait to marry him. But they will have to wait to start their life together, given inflation and the rising cost of living.
“I’m like, when is that gonna happen?” she says. “Because we couldn’t even afford to rent an apartment in my small town.”
Yep, people want to be able to afford the basics, even the Kidz. So they can get on with life.
New polls show that the Gen Z vote, which Biden won by about 20 points in 2020, is now in play.
Oh, and they also like Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima Version 2.0 on 7/13. Said Jordan Miller:
“It was really cool when he threw his fist up.”
He adds: “It certainly fired me up.”
Then there’s the antisemitism after 10/7.
Naomi, a 23-year-old recent University of Maryland graduate, is realizing that she might not be a liberal after all. Even though she told me that she “never in a million years” thought she’d vote for Trump, she’s now considering doing just that. The turning point for her was October 7, the deadliest massacre against Jews since the Holocaust, which her peers used as an opportunity to rally against Israel. At heated student government meetings, she says anti-Israel students—some of whom she had marched alongside at Black Lives Matter rallies—got up and hurled “literal blood libels” at her and other Jewish students.
“It was the most sobering experience of my life,” says Naomi[.]
Then there’s Lauren, a 20-year-old “Christian influencer.”
“Life under the Biden presidency is hard,” she tells me.
She says that Biden’s plan to forgive student loans falls flat with her because she “made a promise” to herself and her parents never to get into debt. At times, that meant holding two jobs at once and living at home just to cover tuition. And now Biden wants her to pay the debt bill for other students.
“All of the sacrifices I made. . . ” she begins. “I don’t live on campus. I don’t live with friends. I don’t go to this amazing Ivy League school and have all these amazing, life-changing professors.”
She pauses, catching her breath: “I made those decisions. Because at the end of the day, this is my responsibility, and the idea of making someone else foot the bill makes me sick. You’re supposed to take care of yourself.”
As Uncle Billy said in It’s a Wonderful Life: “O boy o boy o boy o boy o boy!”
I hope that President Trump can turn the economy around and give these young people a decent economy so they can get their lives going. Because frankly, I expect a couple of years of heavy weather. Maybe a replay of 1981-82 when President Reagan had the Fed raise interest rates into the stratosphere to curb inflation. And before Reaganomics really got the economy going.