Many of you fine ladies and gentlemen from older generations have learned to understand the ins and outs of what we affectionately call "Clown World" – the cosmopolitan high temple that the Woke Cult calls home.
You've learned about critical race and queer theory. You've come to understand the arguments of the "anti" racists peddling racism and revisionist history.
But I was born in a different generation.
I straddle the line between the youngest generations that are currently able to vote. I was born just before the Berlin Wall came down – I was only 10 when everyone freaked out about Y2K, and I was barely 12 when the Twin Towers fell. I was in high school when YouTube and Facebook and other social platforms took off, and I was barely in college when Obama was elected and the Great Recession kicked off.
While I'm often told I'm a 90-year-old man in a millennial body, I'm the oldest of my family, and my wife is the oldest of her family. Our younger siblings, cousins, and friends extend well into Gen Z. As such, I see the generational differences between many older millennials and this younger group of 20-somethings.
Which is why this doesn't surprise me:
For decades, the Left has built an intersectional coalition based on minority groups. If they could convince Latinos, blacks, gays, and Muslims that racist white Republicans wanted to enslave them, then they'd have a path to power. Since the Left's economic policies always result in what we're currently seeing at the grocery store and the gas pump, this strategy was most of their selling point.
The problem is, and always was, that groups like deeply Catholic Latinos and Muslims bent on Sharia law were never going to follow godless Marxist revolutionaries into the gender-bending rainbow over the horizon. The coalition could not hold.
The fact that some areas are now seeing 20% of blacks vote Republican, and that liberal Hispanic strongholds like Miami are turning red for Ron DeSantis, proves that this coalition formed in the late 20th century is beginning its inevitable end.
But leftists have a backup plan: The students they began aggressively indoctrinating in neo-Marxist groupthink about 30 years ago.
It isn't a coincidence that some of the founding papers of Critical Race Theory, for example, were published in the late '80s and early '90s. This is when the aggressive push to radically change and control education began.
Young people with lots of passion and little mature understanding of the world have always been useful revolutionaries. It isn't until later in life that many of them realize how they've been used by the old tyrants to obtain more power on the tyrants' behalf. Such was the lament of Erich Maria Remarque, the author of "All Quiet On The Western Front," in his scathing rebuke of the learned men that sent their sons to the slaughter in WWI. Such was the lament of the fictional Anakin Skywalker, who sold his soul to make an old politician into a galactic emperor, and became Darth Vader in the process.
The millennial generation was old enough so they escaped the worst of the indoctrination. It wasn't until high school and college that I hit the mainstream woke-cult curriculum that's common in pre-school today.
Gen Z grew up in a different time:
- A time already ruled by the tech activists that controlled what content they would see.
- A time with easy access to the personal thoughts of woke celebrities that they idolized on Insta and TikTok.
- A time with no restraints on graphic sex and graphic violence obtained for free at the touch of a button.
- A time where society had already discarded God and objective truth in favor of personal experience and self-determination.
- A time when the corruption of ancient 20th-century leaders has given them a stranglehold over all the institutions around us.
- A time when people say there is little left to explore and few adventures left to be had.
Gen Z deeply cares about many issues in the world.
They simply have a different religious worldview than older generations.
Few of them know anything about the societal traditions and roots that formed them. They know little of history or the great works of literature that used for form classic education. Two hundred years ago, the poorest farm boy could quote the Bible and most had a passing understanding of writings from Alexander Hamilton, John Locke, Shakespeare, Aristotle, and other great thinkers and philosophers.
George Orwell wrote, "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
This isn't just happening in our society. It has happened. It's past tense.
Gen Z is concerned about finding their identities and saving the planet, not making commitments, pledging themselves to marriage and parenthood, and certainly not about obeying God. They want to experience life to the full like the Roman and Greek hedonists of old.
This is the end-stage of post-modernism. If you are an older American who hoped the MAGA movement could save the nation, it was never going to. Trump, for all his flaws, was the one who revealed that the foundation of the house was rotten, but he was never going to be the one to fix it.
The only way to do that, my friends, is to accept that the tree is dead and to plant a new tree.
This has happened many times in history, whether a civilization was wiped out by plague or invasion, or whether a new one simply eclipsed the old. There is nothing new under the sun.
How we do that is simple, though many don't want to hear it. First, we order our lives around God's standard – His measuring line for what life means and how we are to live it.
Then, we do what is now countercultural: We lead simple lives as devoted spouses and parents committed to raising our children in the way they should go so they will not depart from it. This is how the West was won.
The rot of society will eventually burn out. The sexual revolution, the crime wave, the addiction – within decades, if not years, it will have run its course.
In the meantime, we should invest in public leaders who reflect this small-but-honorable effort to re-till and plant the land: We need politicians who are self-controlled and above reproach, hospitable, faithful to their spouses, not greedy or quarrelsome, strong but not bullies, and able to manage their own households.
In my opinion, this is why Ron DeSantis of Florida is such an inspiring candidate. We should not make him an idol, but he is the template for what this nation needs moving forward.
A wise and noble leader who can resist the woke cult while also being gracious and dignified will prove his cause just in the end, and many young people now trapped in indoctrination will come to see it before long.
But in order to do that, leaders – particularly the feckless, aimless Republican Party – need to show passion and vision for where we are actually going. They seem to think that simply lowering taxes or expanding Medicare makes anyone care about the future.
Like all people, Gen Z wants a hope for tomorrow. THEY WANT A REASON FOR LIVING. Right now, the Left is telling them the only hope is to not have kids, use frog pronouns, and give up modern life for the sake of Mother Gaia. They are committing suicide and getting hooked on drugs at insane rates because this is depressing to no end!
Deep down, what they really want is flourishing. They want to start their own businesses, have crazy wild adventures with loved ones, travel, invent new things, and look up at the stars with dreams for the future like so many have done throughout history.
True conservatism, as embodied in a man like DeSantis, represents the civic leadership that can create a field for such dreams to grow. When that happens, civilization-changing journeys start happening.
But it doesn't start with Ronny D. It starts with you and me.
It starts with telling our children and our communities why investing in marriage, families, faithfulness, and obedience to God's designs is actually the most exciting and adventurous thing we could ever imagine – and that it gives them the identity and belonging they so deeply crave.
Explain to them how investing in population growth, individual liberty, and financial responsibility is actually the quickest and most moral route to taking care of the environment and protecting against fascism.
