I’m going to state right up front - I have NOT done any kind of study, poll, or survey. What I am writing about it based on my personal experiences, reading, and observations of people in my near vicinity.
So, NOT scientific, and certainly NOT research.
With that in mind, I’m going to write about my take on the phenomenon of seemingly over-the-top sensitive-to-Leftist-concerns young people.
This would comprise primarily Zoomers (Gen Z) and Gen Y, also known as Millennials, but also including some of the younger members of Gen X. For reference:
I’m somewhat familiar with the thinking of these younger (Well, younger than I am) people, both within my own family and friends, and also because I taught for many years in schools.
Even during my teaching years, students seemed to be evolving to be more and more sensitive. That sensitivity referred to didn’t extend to ALL people, mostly themselves, what is called People of Color, and those expressing alternative sex and gender lifestyles.
Sensitivity to older people was pretty much ‘not a thing’ (I’ll write about that in a future post).
But the real question is: What caused this abrupt and rather extreme change?
There are several components:
The impact of Barack Obama’s presidency and events surrounding it
The Election of Donald Trump and the ferocious pushback to that ‘assault’ on Leftist goals
The Covid Shutdowns
Let’s start with the election of Barack Obama.
It was a massive upheaval in our political scene. The Left truly believed that the ONLY reason for opposing Obama’s candidacy and later presidency was racism.
Truly. Those who were not identified as right-leaning or just standard GOP/Republican/Moderate - ALL of them were accused, with righteous indignation, of being KKK supporters.
Many caved, hiding their dislike of Obama’s policies, the extreme Left positions of his appointees and staff, and his high-handed way of using the Presidential Executive Orders method of overriding actions of the legislative branch.
The candidacy brought out younger supporters, and was a powerful shot in the arm for the Democrats and the Left. Let’s face it, younger Americans, like those in the past, yearn to be a part of an important cause. And, as framed by the Obama team, if they joined up, they could fight against White Supremacy, Warmongers, and Polluters!
It really is not surprising that Obama won, despite the weakness of his platform and his personal baggage (Leftist, machine politics, dirty tricks).
The ease with which Obama was able to install an Imperial Presidency was a direct result of the willingness of his supporters to accuse, harass, sue, and demonize opponents as KKK troglodytes.
The politics of personal attack - a mechanism used by extremists of BOTH the Left and the Right, as well as Issue Partisans - invaded not just the political arena, but extended to school, work, and home. Hounding someone out of their home/community and even their job eventually became the standard tactic for the Extremists.
This was the start of using mob action to exclude their opponents from any ability to express an opposing opinion in public life.
Some turning points that changed politics:
Executive Order 13491—Ensuring Lawful Interrogations
This was a big win for the Anti-War Left. It essentially replaced the Geneva Convention, that bound signers to limit their actions during war between signers.
This order extended that protection to aggressors that, among other actions, committed war crimes (Using explosive devices to target civilians without a declared war, torturing prisoners, using children to deliver explosives, and planning actions involving weapons of mass destruction or bio-weapons).
It undercut the military’s ability to prevent major attacks, hunt down terrorist cells, and keep the terrorist threat from expanding.
But, it was popular with the young, and a powerful lure to gain their allegiance.
This is an order that was never fully implemented. Practicalities kept it a largely symbolic act. Guantanamo never did completely close.
Statement on Signing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
This was the act that was to have created all those “shovel-ready” jobs.
Not that any of his supporters thought THEY would be the ones to get those jobs. They were aiming to be the white collar part of that act.
And, in fact, the act was a spectacular failure. What it DID succeed in is funneling a whole lot of money to Leftist organizations, Leftist-supporting businesses, and administration jobs (Many of them led to permanent jobs in the Civil Service for Obama’s closest cronies).
A significant part of that money was targeted to young people - not jobs leading to a future, but those with fancy titles and perks, and supporting Leftist causes. They were jobs designed to make a newly graduated Liberal Arts major feel like a huge success.
Until the funding ran out. Which it did, and they blamed it on Those Awful Alt-Right Haters.
It’s a cycle:
Get the supporters excited
Get them a job that makes them feel involved in the VERY IMPORTANT CHANGES taking place
Let the funding lapse (This part is VERY important - it allows the Left to direct the supporters to blame all of their misfortune on - not Obama and his failed promises, but
Goldstein- I mean, the Alt-Right)Encourage them to demonstrate, protest, and act (Over time, this morphed into illegal and dangerous activities)
When more money is rushed through Congress, to ‘solve the problem’, make sure that the most dedicated followers get their hands in the cash flow
Rinse and repeat
A LOT of the work of The Left is to get their followers used to acting under orders from the leadership. It’s a process of conditioning them to work together, dissecting the success of the efforts in the after-action debriefing, and identifying the leaders that emerge.
It’s actually a slow and tedious process, IF you think of the success of the street actions as the point.
They are NOT.
The point of the actions is to identify and train the leaders to effectively lead raw troops.
So, don’t be excited when a movement seems to go into an inactive status. They are working on re-building the troops and training the leadership. They will rise up again, either in that movement, or another that is identified as better for their purposes.
And, need I add, the young get swept up in all of this. They are deliberately kept active and too busy to be in touch with family or friends. They are directed to confront those they know in harsh and hateful slogans (That is much of the point of their training. They are trained in a manner that is an offshoot of Group Therapy; the whole point of the training is to get them accustomed to sharing personal things with the group, and shouting insults and invective at people they know. This is designed to separate them from those not allied to the organization).
Now, does the upheaval in family get-togethers make sense?
This distancing is critical. If they associated with the people from their pre-Radical life, they would find it hard to be as harsh and unfeeling as the Leftists want them to be. It is a common tactic in cults - and, yes, the Left IS a cult.
This cult prefers their adherents to be educated in Leftist disciplines - various Studies majors, Liberal Arts, Politics, Education (which has become very Leftist recently), and similar subjects. They are often counseled to take courses from those instructors that give easy grades, credit for activist work, and both excellent marks and glowing praise and recommendations for those properly parroting the instructor’s words and viewpoints.
Not only will this incline them to read/view information from the Leftist viewpoint, but it will simultaneously make them virtually unemployable except by Leftists, keeping them in that orbit for years to come.
Win-win.
I’m getting some of the events on this timeline from this site. If you check out the link, you will see the major Executive Orders, appointments, and legislation; these align neatly with the pivoting direction of the Left’s concerns.
One of the Obama signature measures, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), was NOT intended to be all that successful at covering everyone’s medical costs. It was meant to offload the problem to the states and private insurers (any decision that turned down coverage would be blamed on the insurers, not the person that chose a crappy plan).
But, it fulfilled a desire for health care coverage in the critical up-to-26 age group, and allowed him to say that he had solved the problem.
Once the young are swept up in the excitement of being part of something more meaningful than their before-activism life, it can be hard to set it aside. Look at all the 60s/70s activists who never put down the doobie/peace sign/hippie clothing and hair/voting patterns. Once co-opted into a movement, it’s like a roach motel - you can enter, but you can never leave.
Getting loose means that the person has to set aside all of their former friends/allies and viewing/reading habits, take a serious look at how they dress and change it, train or re-train to make themselves employable outside of the activists’ network, and accept the complete change of their way of life.
NOT for sissies. I applaud those who have managed it, and, in fact, those who have even attempted it.
Those that want to salvage the broken people who are formerly of the Left, need to think about setting up a deprogramming framework. Videos on the internet work that way, in part.
Unfortunately, the Left has been particularly vicious about indicting, de-monetizing, de-platforming, and harassing those who have managed to build networks in the Not-Left. The Left knows that such a network would be extremely dangerous to their aims. THAT is the real reason that they have worked to characterize the J6 defendants as Insurrectionists - they want to make people afraid that ANY association with them will be toxic to their jobs, education, family, and life.
This has been a century-long process. It will NOT be rooted out in a few short years.
The Millennials were targeted in the pre-Obama days, by the Anti-War Left. Gen X was the target of the Obama Years. And, once swept up into ‘the movement’, few manage to shake of the residue of that excitement.
So.
The Left’s goal is to replace the birth family with an authoritarian pseudo-family of people allied to a cause that morphs into new causes based on the dictates/whims of those in charge. Who cannot be argued with, or the ultimate penalty - exclusion - will be imposed. Who control all the money, keep their adherents from pursuing means of making sufficient money to support themselves independently, and mandate unpaid overtime work as a show of dedication to the cause. They target the young because their natural curiosity about ideas and values (coupled with the decline of religion’s importance in the growth of those aspects of life), their desire to work with others (the family’s splintering was necessary for the void to open up that allowed the Left to take over), and their inexperience make them a prime target.
The Not-Left’s goal is to support families, encourage individual’s self-support efforts, and help them to improve their own lives and that of their communities, without fear of state action against lawful activities.
A secondary goal is to work together to reduce the size of the government - the federal one, for starters - and begin re-building the core of what this country was designed to establish.
I’ll add more later in subsequent posts. I will put any additions in the Section called Political Changes.