Karoline Leavitt is Right!

Gen-Z, laziness, and the American Dream

Donald Trump pulled off a pretty amazing 250th celebration of American independence last week, marred only- but newsworthily- by comments made by his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, seen here talking out of her (allegedly) surgically processed a$$:

Jesse Watters: “Some of these kids, and I call them kids ’cause they’re in their 20s and they’ve never had real jobs and they’re complaining things are expensive. Yes, things are expensive when you don’t have a real job. Do you think that’s getting traction? Complaining?”

Karoline Leavitt: “Unfortunately, I do because this generation, my generation, I hate to say it, Gen Z and those younger than me have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths, just getting everything handed to them. That’s not the values this country was built on. It was built on meritocracy and hard work, pulling up your sleeves, pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, and achieving the American dream, and we need to protect it with all we’ve got.”

To be charitable to Mrs. Leavitt, she and Jesse Watters were discussing this in the context of the rise of the DSA within the Democrat Party and the appeal of gay race communism to young people. She later attempted (poorly) to clarify her remarks along those lines:

I am seeing a lot of bad faith actors take my comments from this interview out of context. So here’s the full interview, and let me expound.

This interview was about the rise of communism on the Left, and I was asked by Jesse Watters why so many young people are buying the false promise of “free stuff” being sold by communist politicians.

My answer: a combination of laziness, yes, and the liberal indoctrination that has been taking place in our education system for far too long. There are far-left educators pumping students’ heads with garbage, convincing them that hard work and sacrifice won’t pay off down the road because they want them totally reliant on the government instead.

I went on to say that’s why President Trump is a huge advocate for school choice, and why so many parents I know are turning to homeschooling. Good parenting matters more than anything, but a solid, civics-based education is also vitally important.

I care enough about our country to tell uncomfortable truths. And it’s an undeniable fact that a growing number of young people in our country are falling for the lies of socialism and communism, sold to them by anti-American politicians who’ve never built anything, offer no real solutions, and are intent on tearing down everything that makes this country great.

At the same time, it’s also true that many Gen Z Americans are hardworking, entrepreneurial, and deeply patriotic, and it’s vital we protect the American Dream for them. That’s why I am honored to work for President Trump and speak on behalf of an administration that is implementing the right policies to do this: lower taxes, less regulation, stopping Wall Street from purchasing single-family homes, Trump Accounts, and the deportation of illegal aliens who are taking our housing and jobs. There is more work to do, which is why President Trump and our entire administration won’t stop fighting to make life better and more affordable for young people.

It’s pretty easy to see why so many young people, especially men, were infuriated by this. In the first place, Karoline Leavitt, personally, evinces no sign of actually having pulled herself up through anything a normal person would regard as hard work. She studied communications in college on a softball scholarship and managed to remain both a NormieCon and a heterosexual, but apart from that level of gumption, she’s done little but occupy a series of girlboss make-work jobs paid for by donors and the state. She did marry an elderly millionaire at 24- and if you think that’s easy, just look at the trauma suffered by poor Anna Nicole Smith- but again, that’s not exactly toiling in an coal mine.

Fun fact- that chicken in the thumbnail was cooked entirely by vocal fry.

Everyone understands on some level that a pretty girl will never starve in America. If she hadn’t been handed a “career” by wealthy, older men, she’d probably be shilling Amazon clothes on Instagram and doing fine. It’s enough for most people that someone in that situation enjoy her good fortune and maybe put her advantages to some higher use. The last thing anyone wants, rightly, is a lecture about laziness from someone for whom lip filler is a personality trait.

I say “anyone,” but of course this sort of thing actually plays quite well in certain quarters. It’s no accident that this interview aired on Fox News, the refugium of America’s relict population of fossilizing conservatives. Boomers have a limitless appetite for “young people these days” slop and especially love when it comes from botulism blondes taught to parrot their prejudices. The basic thesis with this narrative (there are variants) is that America is plagued by youth who, as Mrs. Leavitt intoned, don’t want to work because they are “getting everything handed to them.” The president’s chief communicator actually used the phrase “pulling yourself up from your bootstraps,” which would imply that bootstraps are a base status from which one rises rather than the means by which one does so, but as it’s unlikely she sees many boots outside of pumpkin spice latte season, perhaps the confused imagery can be forgiven. The reason for this deplorable situation is that young people are reliant on the government rather than their own efforts. The system isn’t there to take care of you.

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In the abstract, telling people to work hard and rely on their own efforts is great advice, as is the notion that you should not expect the system to take care of you. But of course, that rings a bit hollow when the overwhelming majority of your audience is mostly or fully reliant on that system sending them checks every month. Jesse Watters is incredulous that people think “complaining” will get them anywhere when the reason things are expensive is because they don’t have real jobs, but of course complaining gets old people free stuff all the time, jobs or not. Their benefits are indexed to inflation and politicians have given them everything from prescription drug benefits to property tax cuts on top of that. The typical recipient of Social Security gets far more out of it than he put in, though that ratio is declining over time, heading toward negative territory just in time for my generation to retire.

We deserve it for being cynical slackers all the time.

Boomer libertarianism is just the cynical mechanism for funding boomer socialism. Most young people would like good jobs that allow them to afford expensive things, but those jobs are filled by foreigners, as are the crap jobs, all in the service of keeping labor costs low and asset prices high to service the bottom line of the people who benefit from both, which isn’t Gen-Z. All that ‘cheap’ immigrant labor is heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Grandpa gets to sit on his porch and -pace Mr. Watters- complain about how no Americans will do his landscaping for $10 an hour, while his grandson toils away at some tenuously held software engineer job, his paycheck stripped to pay for Grandpa’s bush trimmer’s WIC benefits, Grandpa’s pill regimen, and the diversity-enriched public schools the son can no longer send his kids to, but still has to pay for, unlike Pop.

The final boss at Google HR

I think the proper Gen-Z response to this sort of rhetoric is to carry it to its logical conclusion. If young people are meant to live exactly as the free market dictates their circumstances at the moment, this should be applied across the board. Old people should be given a lump sum payment of the exact dollar amount they paid into social security over the course of their working life and nothing further, and if they starve to death as a result, it’s because they do not merit for further survival. If they complain, point out that they should have made better financial choices when they were young, like they do with people who seek to get out of student loans. If you can’t afford your house with no government check coming in, you weren’t meant to have it. The guy you imported to trim the hedges will buy it, and more power to him. He’s the one with the boot straps; the market has spoken.

Harsh, pre-diabetic words from a conservative titan

Of course, I don’t think (most) old people should be turfed out into the streets. Being a rightist is fundamentally bound up with a respect for transcendent order, and breaking the bonds owed by children to fathers, personally or communally, is a crime obvious even to pagans. But a hierarchy runs both ways or it ceases to function. Expecting young people to take care of the old is right, but that in turn means it’s a moral crime to fail to provide the conditions for the young to flourish. Mamdani doesn’t exist because young people are brainwashed; he’s the end result of a system created by their elders, over which they’ve lost control. They can collect their pensions from Boca Raton and decry it all they want, but the young want nothing more than their elders expected from life.

But here’s where I agree with Mrs. Leavitt about one thing. The purported target of this attack, gay race communists in New York, have correctly seen through the scam and are working to subsidize their unaffordable urban lifestyles at taxpayer expense, forming a coalition with jihadis and tr00ns to do so. Woke is a signalling system, showcasing status by the conspicuous demonstration of elite college luxury beliefs, but the signifiers only land if the people at the top are able to reward clients- college grads with sinecures and proles with low-cost cool ranch Doritos from the local Bodega. The actual target, the Fox News audience’s 20-something grandkids, has yet to organize on that scale. I’ve seen a lot of people predicting that Leavitt’s comments will doom Trump in the midterms, but I don’t see why. Boomers vote in numbers and enthusiasm that far surpasses that of the people they mock and exploit. Trashing the young is ugly and wrong, but it’s not bad politics, and the fact that it works is where the laziness comes in.

Rare Huffpo W.

I hate dooming because it strips people of their agency. I’ve worked with young people- high school and college students- since 2008, and I’ve seen nothing to indicate that they are generally congenitally lazy, spoiled, or want things they aren’t prepared to work for in life. But there is a great spiritual sickness, an absence of meaning born of lives stripped of cosmic significance, tradition, community, and family. This takes the form of a kind of reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (Jonathan Haidt gets it) where people condition themselves with the worst sorts of mental habits- victimhood, fatalism, projection, and hopelessness. Life for many young people very much is like working in a mine, save that the big hole is the space where their hearts should be, and they spend their working hours trying to fill it in with dirt rather than extracting riches. To the degree they are lazy and spoiled, it’s by the same materialism and consumerism that infects their forebears. It manifests as a failure of energy and imagination. You’ll see it in the comments here, “how am I supposed to do anything when JOOZ-Indians-Mexicans-HR Ladies-etc. control everything!?!?!”

There’s not any one answer. That’s the challenge and the opportunity. It’s important to look carefully at the story of the Boomers and really understand what happened. In the first place, the exploding postwar economy was an unprecedented historical accident. The Boomers were born into a world in which America was the sole industrial power remaining in the free world, and they benefited from that, but that was always going to be an economic anomaly, and it didn’t last as long as people imagine. This is the second point- their good economic fortune was not uniform throughout their working lives. If you were born in 1950, you spent your 20s living through a decade of American retreat and stagnation, your thirties and forties dealing with de-industrialization, and you would just be getting ready to retire around 2008. The big changes that created so much havoc for the young, the Civil Rights Movement, Hart-Cellar, containerization, etc. happened when most of the Boomers were children or very young adults. There wasn’t a Boomer Supreme Court Justice until Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton was the first Boomer president. The entire 60s Revolution was just the playing out of events set in motion in the 50s, and the Boomers simply moved into (and had to navigate) the ideological landscape shaped by their parents- moral suburbia, if you will. They’re not uniquely bad, just uniquely big.

This movie is a Boomer revenge fantasy.

Young people today face the same challenge, but not, I fear, with the same energy. There’s not-yet- a coherent economic vision of the scope and appeal of the aforementioned Mamdani-style gay race communism on the right. That’s because, quite honestly, young rightists, deep down, want to live like Boomers. Much of the discourse amounts to, “if we just get rid of all the subcontinentals and bring back restrictive covenants we can live in New York again and have money and homes and status and families and all that.” The biggest evidence for this is that, for all the possibilities the internet offers, even the most computer-centric jobs are still heavily concentrated in expensive urban zones fully enriched by diversity, and young right wing men are still conditioned to want that. They desire to live like they imagine their grandparents lived, but that’s just not possible, and that’s a good thing.

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I’ve said before that the future is local. Sooner or later, the confluence of economic demands and social dysfunction will result in a great scattering, where competent people interested in forming families decamp, by necessity, to lower-cost, less-urban areas unencumbered by foreign ethnic machine politics and the overhead of typical blue jurisdiction corruption. “I’m not living in the middle of nowhere!,” one might say. Well, your bloodline will end with you complaining on your death bed about Boomers, and the children of the people who adapted will endure. They’ll create a new politics centered on preserving what they’ve built, building multiple common-good polities wholly post-liberal in their social structure, produced by the natural selection of homeschoolers having six kids and creating, ad hoc, a new traditionalism. You can see hints of it in the paradox of Boomer Pope Leo waving in an invasion and Catholic Millennial JD Vance being the face of immigration restriction, Boomer Jewish leaders gung ho for importing Hamas and Millennial Stephen Miller never meeting a foreigner he didn’t want to send packing. They and others like them represent the first hints of the Great Repudiation, a turning away from the postwar liberal consensus, a opening in a dam that will hopefully irrigate rather than flood, but in any case will overflow.

What does this mean in practice. I’m neither an economist or a futurist, but I foresee a decentralized economy made up of smaller-scale operators maximizing low employee numbers to avoid burdensome DEI laws while leveraging technology to make up differences in manpower, networking with one another to achieve economies of scale hitherto requiring centralized manufacturing and distribution bases. The big, old, slow diverse firms will adapt or fold. Schooling, art, banking- everything will transition to the same mode. At the same time, a great age of reaction will dawn, as economic and ideological interests converge in a new order born of the response to the attempted Great Replacement.

Young people have never had it harder or easier all at once. The formal economy is stacked against them in ways their parents and grandparents never experienced. At the same time, the entry costs and overhead for creative endeavors have never been easier to meet at any time in history. The average kid today can trade stocks, make movies, code, and do any number of other things that used to require expensive, industrial-scale set-ups and starting capital. The fact that quality people can’t find work in traditional companies is a sign of systemic weakness. They can’t hire you for the same reason cancer patients can’t keep down food- the body has turned against itself and is signalling that it’s not long for this world.

Along those lines, we’re going through the stages of grief on the right. The bad news is we’ve passed bargaining and have progressed to depression. The good news is that the only thing left is acceptance. The Boomer world is gone. We can’t live like them. That’s not a bad thing. All of us, young and older, have to summon the will to move on with our lives and build something new. The only other option is to give up on life. And that is the only truly unforgivable form of laziness.