Gen Z is Not Going to Save Us
Media literacy, civics, and active listening has never been more important
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There are hot takes galore over on 24 hour news networks looking to fill time and digital news sites looking to capitalize on popular search terms about what happened in this 2024 Presidential contest.
I’m not giving it much air. Most of these opinions will be wrong when we actually see the data. And, the data point I’m paying close attention to in particular—that concerns me the most—is how Gen Zers (born 1997-2012) voted for Trump in larger numbers than anticipated. Especially young white men. Or didn’t vote at all.
The San Fransisco Standard spoke to Gen Zers to find out if they voted or not and why. One 23-year-old local college student said he voted for Biden in 2020 because his parents pushed him to, but didn’t vote at all in 2024. A lot of people stayed home, millions more than 2020. Apathy was an often-cited reason for abstaining from voting. An undercurrent in many of the answers was a lack of understanding of how government works. Especially the impacts of state and local government, which is reason enough not to skip any election.
Here’s what surprises me about the turn towards Trump among younger voters: This is the generation that grew up with the internet. Grew up with some level of digital literacy and internet safety taught in schools. Learned at a young age that access to guns is valued far more, particularly by one party, than their lives. They’ve seen Roe v. Wade overturned when many of them were entering college. With one click, the horrors of Project 2025 can be at their fingertips. Or a breakdown of what the Trump tariffs actually mean for regular individuals.
But they aren’t doing that. They’re listening to young male conservative podcasters who are speaking to their needs and discontent. It’s hard to blame them. What’s persuasive about a CNN roundtable of Millennials, Gen Xers, and Boomers?
When I saw those Parkland students in 2018 who spoke after the tragedy and mobilized, it felt like, the kids are all right. Gen Z and their empathy and internet savvy were going to take the world they’ve inherited and help turn the country around.
It was naive. It was naive to assume they would naturally see their needs met by the Democratic Party.
It’s so easy to disprove Trump’s policy statements. Cross-check sources. Read up on his litany of court cases. He’s a fraud. He’s predatory in every sense of the word. He’s a felon. Most of us assumed that older generations fell for Trump’s schtick because of a lack of understanding how the internet works or how to disseminate sources. We were so focused on how to wean our parents off of Fox News that we missed the younger generation getting their information from increasingly young, white, male, alt-right podcasters.
Maybe the problem is that Gen Zers grew up with the internet already formed.
Who can forget their first AOL CD-Rom, firing up that bad boy on the family computer, absolutely distraught when mom decided to pick up the landline, kicking them off mid-sentence in a chat room before they could answer: A/S/L?
The internet was the Wild West when I was coming of age. Parental controls and digital safety were a plane being built in mid-air. Because of that, there was a lot of healthy skepticism around the internet. I don’t recall using the internet often as a cited source for a paper. Many sites teachers wouldn’t accept. Often we had to have actual books or research papers as references, along with some websites. We were taught that not everything on the internet is true. That it was new and growing and there was still value in knowing how to use a card catalogue and pulling old books with broken spines from the History section in school library for primary sources.
What is it like to grow up in a world where the internet is presented as the answer to all your problems? Where disinformation is so savvy and pernicious that even the most trained eyes can miss it? How, as a teen/young adult do you make sense of the breadth of information at your fingertips?
Every time there is a mass shooting we talk about how young white men in particular are being radicalized online to commit heinous acts. The dark web. Places like 4chan and others that we dare not utter. But they were also being raised by algorithms anticipating their wants and needs and conservative media that has successfully weaponized movements like #MeToo into an attack on white men. The media isn’t that old dinosaur Fox News; it’s young male podcasters, YouTube shows, etc. that are delivering skewed news to the youngest voters amongst us. And it’s working.
Put down the blue bracelets
White women also continued their 3-cycle tradition of breaking for Trump.