What the Hell is Wrong with these Kids?

Looking at the generational divide.

Recently I posted a Substack celebrating the defeat of Thomas Massie and the increasing strength of Trump’s grip on the Republican Party. I said that it showed that clicks and likes are not votes, and that the influencers online attacking Trump have far less influence than they think.

All of that was true but there is a significant proviso, which I want to address here. And that proviso is the radicalisation of youth. Youth is not on Trump’s side, any more in terms of his own longevity than it is in terms of which generations are likeliest to vote for him.

And that is not something to be complacent about. In fact, it is something which represents a far more serious issue than Trump success or failure. Much as I’m a huge Trump supporter, this particular issue is one that isn’t specific to who backs Massie and who backs Trump.

It is one that encompasses both the political direction of the whole western world and the mental stability of everyone from 18-29.

Polling on the political attitudes of the 18-29 year old voters is devastatingly clear, just as the support base of most online influencers is as well. If youth are politically engaged (and there is a large non-voting element who aren’t, who in many ways might be the sanest of this age bracket) they are engaged as radical extremists in one way or another.

They are either following and agreeing with Nazi revisionists and self-professed Hitler fans like Darryl Cooper or Nick Fuentes, and casually adopting the belief that the USA is controlled by malign Jews based in Israel, or they are the strongest supporters of leftwing parties that have gone to radical extremes in other ways like considering abortion to full term normal, or like being gender confused communists who think that Trump should be assassinated.

I don’t intend this article to particularly be about the antisemitism issue, save to say that both groups have embraced hating Jews and hating Israel to an extent which indicates their extremism by any traditional definition. Despite my objections to the term Woke Right, James Lindsay is fundamentally correct in identifying the fact that 18-29 year olds who support Hasan Piker or who support Nick Fuentes are essentially the same kind of people embracing the same kind of politics: the politics of violent, nihilistic, murderous extremism. And he’s right too that Left and Right lose any relevance as labels when what you are talking about are people who think political murder is ok, or people who think Jews control the world.

Whether it’s an Antifa mob attacking people, a BLM crowd attacking people, a radical feminist crowd attacking people, a person of indeterminate gender with purple hair attacking people, or an incel sitting in a basement and chortling about people being attacked, whether it’s a Save the Planet Green radical attacking people who drive gas guzzlers or a Save the Refugees activist firebombing a Tesla, the basic constituents are that there are more young people doing this, and that the young people doing it share very negative and extreme characteristics almost regardless of the alleged ideology or alleged cause they are protesting about.

Any one of the data points that tell us worrying things about 18-29 year olds can be falsified. Polls can obviously be manipulated. Clicks and likes can be generated by bots. Influence is nebulous, and can be far less than we think, with the number of people who follow and the number of people who act on that following (in everything from if and how they vote to whether they will go out and attack someone) being different things. But all of the data points are saying the same thing:

Youth is politically radicalised, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, only now to a far greater and far more pervasive extent. In some cases awareness of this is made more difficult not because the politics being expressed are normal and moderate by any rational interpretation, but because the radical and extremist points have been normalised by Establishment institutions, funding, teaching and parties who are just as radically deranged as the street level protestors are. Those old enough to have lived through early radicalisation in their own youth might if they have never grown up totter out and hold the same placards, or museum and gallery curators might put the same radical points in footnotes to exhibits, for example. But this doesn’t change the fact that the views themselves are exceptionally irrational and dangerous, and particularly and especially potent in the minds of the young.

Narratives and rhetoric that were Soviet era propaganda are now ‘mainstream’ party policy platforms, and an open level of support for Jew hatred or for terrorism once confined to fringe figures are now expressed by almost everyone with impunity. Full on communism for example is no longer something that only an unpopular fringe expresses, and a candidate who combines both communism and Islamism can be elected to run New York. Such candidates are particularly attractive to the youth vote.

As an aside, there is a similar issue with the female vote. Radical feminism of course has had a huge impact. As with male youth, university education has normalised extremist positions to become the general opinion of an age group. If we are concentrating on radical leftism, then it’s strongest support comes from women in the 18-29 bracket, who of course also form the bulk of the screeching hysterics who post narcissist video clips of their own mental collapse when confronted with things like a rightwing candidate winning an election.

In the UK at the moment the Green Party have overtaken the Labour Party (who are Hard Left social radicals by any traditional understanding) as the chief beneficiaries of both the female vote and the youth vote. The Green Party believe there should be no borders, no limits on immigration, and that anyone who wishes to has the right to come to western nations and live there. It also believes that taxation (at historic highs) is far too low and that the size of the State (at historic highs) should also be expanded. It advocates that this can all be accommodated by property and wealth seizures. In other words, it’s a Communist platform.

“Green Party support among 18-29 year olds in the UK has surged dramatically, with the party recently surpassing Labour to become the most popular political party for voters under 30. Recent polling from May 2026 indicates that 46% of 18-24 year olds intend to vote Green, while support among 25-29 year olds remains significantly higher than other parties, placing the Greens as the second most popular party in that bracket behind Labour.

This demographic shift is reflected in membership growth, with the Young Greens (under 29 and students) surpassing 50,000 members in April 2026, making it one of Europe’s largest youth political movements. The appeal is driven by a strong focus on climate change, renters’ rights, and economic justice, with 40% of 18-24 year olds citing the environment as a top issue compared to only 17% of those over 65.

Key metrics include:

• 18-24 Age Group: The Greens lead with 46% voting intention, overtaking Labour’s 24% and Reform UK.

• 25-29 Age Group: The Greens hold 12% support, ahead of the Conservatives (10%) and Liberal Democrats (9%), with Labour still leading at over 50%.

• Overall Under 30s: The Greens are the second most popular party among all under-30s, trailing only Labour.

• London: Support is even higher, with 36% of 18-24 year olds in London favoring the Greens.”

If you narrow this down to females, it’s even worse. There, the Green Party which is the most extremist leftist party in Britain, which has heavily aligned itself with the contradictory LGBTQ+ activism and trans activism branch of leftist extremism and the leftist collusion with immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers and Muslims against the native British, Green dominance extends beyond the age of 30 barrier. With women the Greens now dominate between 18-50. The result is that if only women between 18-50 voted, the House of Commons would look like this:

Out of some 650 MPs, only 10 would be rightwing. The most extremist leftwing party, submissive to Islamic conquest but radically aggressive on communist policies of vast State expansion, spending and forced redistribution of wealth, would have a gigantic majority because for women aged between 18-50 and especially for young women, the Labour Party (record spending, record taxation, record immigration, unprecedented assaults on basic liberty) is not communist enough.

On the surface this might seem a long way from US isolationism, or from incel politics and Groyper alienated male embrace of Nazism by Fuentes and hatred of women from figures like Andrew Tate in the Manosphere, but really it is the same thing. Once you discard worrying about whether these movements are leftwing or rightwing and concentrate on whether they are normal, moderate or rational, it’s not just on treatment of Jews that the Horseshoe Effect becomes evident, but on the shared extremism of these positions in terms of backing things that were once unthinkable and obviously immoral. It’s a shared radicalism on gender (hating all men, hating all women, extreme perversions or extreme gender confusions). It’s a shared radicalism on political violence (supporting terrorist groups, demonising rival voters to the extent of encouraging or celebrating their murder) and it’s a shared radicalism on political policy (complete expansion of the State, complete destruction of the family, complete demand for massive changes that don’t actually have overall majority support).

And all of it comes with a surreal combination of vast ignorance, enormous self-blindness, and absolute certainty regarding their own intelligence and goodness. The following exchange between two Massie enthusiasts could equally have come from two young Jeremy Corbyn admirers a few years ago:

I have zero knowledge except my feelings.

Your feelings are so true dude.

Everyone else are low information voters controlled by da Joos.

That combination of admission of knowing nothing combined with calling others low information voters is a perfect summation of woke thinking, which is the standard thinking model of the university ‘educated’ 18-29 year olds. We crammed very stupid people into institutions that told them compliance to leftist ideological positions is intelligence. And even if they briefly designate themselves as rightwing, the style of thinking or rather the lack of thinking is the same.

There is no independent knowledge, no hinterland of heritage and real identity, and no defence against 10 minute clips on YouTube. The politics are acquired in the same manner as a tide pod challenge in 2018.

It would be a crude simplification to say that the boys have become women hating Nazis and the girls have become man hating Communists…..but only because some of the boys are soy drenched Communists and most of the girls are also Nazis when it comes to Israeli Jews. On the non directly political front, the endless articles on the difficulty of dating and on the collapse of male and female interaction are another indicator of radicalisation of the youth vote and the youth mentality. It used to be normal for young people to quickly settle down in ways that are socially and politically stabilising. It used to be that most 25 year olds were married with children. Now they are single, embittered, alienated from each other, childless, and screaming into camera about politics, or laughing with each other when someone is murdered.

So what are the characteristics these radicalised youth voters share? Well, they were born into already collapsing social structures, already fragmented and declining communities. Whether poor or affluent, modern social changes (sexual revolution, ease of travel, mass immigration, marriage and divorce rates) already broke the strongest stabilising influences like family, extended family, real community and early responsibility, that kept people sane and made life meaningful. Welfare and leisure have done more damage than good. Sexual freedom has actually been a social and psychological disaster. The removal of real problems has allowed imaginary ones to flourish. And of course the death of faith, or the subversion of Chrisrian churches by communist infiltrators, has destroyed an over-arching spiritual awareness of the value of western civilisation in particular and stable life according to meaningful and traditional ethics on a more personal level.

At the same time expansion of university attendance allowed opportunities for extremists to radicalise whole generations, while also producing generations who feel entitled to good jobs and are less likely to get them. There’s a glut of indebted graduates who can’t find work, surprised to discover that a gender studies degree is not very useful and embittered not towards the uselessness of the thing they studied (because that would mean acknowledging their own inflated sense of value isn’t real) but towards the society that hasn’t gifted them a sinecure. While some pressures on young people are very real and have been created by selfish elites, while it’s true that they can’t get a decent job, a paid off house, a full life as easily as earlier generations, their angry response to that is to embrace political extremism including much more of the same policies and attitudes that did the damage in the first place.

Entitlement mixed with ignorance, and extremism that considers itself kind, is the new template of the modern mind, a mind deprived of the stabilising influences of traditional heritage, culture and religion, a mind that is suffused with a superiority complex while imbibing false lessons, then finds itself inferior when looking for work. A mind that was promised it could indulge in any vice without consequence, and then struggles to understand a budget or that wealth and success are not generated by Communist decree. And a mind that rages at all that it lacks, while pressing for the policies that take away what little is left. Thus we get people who complain about low wages or absent jobs while also insisting that open borders (which allow in foreign workers as well as foreign parasites) are morally good.

On economics and immigration and social policy young people are the strongest supporters of the things that have already made their lives worse, and are now likely to demand destructive policies in destructively violent ways.