Is jen Z a completely lost generation. We just saw them turn out and droves for Democrats in the midterm elections, fueled by issues like abortion and a fake climate crisis that doesn't exist. In this next episode, we'll talk to someone who gives us a little bit of hope that all is not lost with this TikTok generation. We'll also talk about how Justin Bieber is a terrible husband. Yes, you heard me right, Justin Bieber. Vita Duffy is the daughter of Rachel and Sean Duffy. You probably know them
for Fox News. Sean obviously served in Congress as well. She's also the co founder of Thinker Chicago and a writer for The Federalist, and she joins me next stay with us, Vita. I'm so glad to have you on the show. You know, we've been able to talk offline about you know, life and the craziness of everything going on as well as you know, I've had the opportunity to interview you when I filled in on Fox and Friends,
and you're a great writer. Always make a lot of sense, so I appreciate you taking the time.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Obviously, the country's a mess, you know, When you look at how young people broke overwhelmingly for Democrats by a twenty eight point margin, it makes you worried. You know, why are young voters so drawn to Democrats.
I think there's a lot of things going on. I think the school system is a huge deal, right. I mean, you have indoctrination machines at public universities and they've only gotten worse. I've noticed. I'm twenty three. I have siblings that are in elementary school and it's changed even the last you know, fifteen years, it's gotten much more radical. And then you have the teachers colleges, right, I mean that's a big deal too. I also think media comes
into play. I think Democrats do an amazing job of messaging to young people on Instagram, on TikTok, on Snapchat. They're totally tech savvy and in a way that conservatives just aren't. And I think that also plays into it. And I also think there's the classic you're you're a liberal when you're older, when you're when you're younger, and
then you become more conservative as you age. The problem is we're our starting point for leftism with young people today is radically worse than it was for liberals in say the nineteen sixties, because at least those those liberals, right, they believed in free speech and protest and all these different things that the modern leftists, which I saw firsthand at American universities completely reject, have gone in a really i would say fascist direction.
Talk about the role of social media because you know, when I I mean social media didn't really get I don't think Facebook was around until I was in college, you know, so I didn't grow up with TikTok and Instagram and that whole How has that shaped young people in today's society psychologically?
It's completely altered, and it's even altered their brain chemistry, right, I mean you have really short attention spans just from all of the scrolling and the short form content on a on a you know, a more on a level of of what kind of information that we're taking in, right, I Mean, it's not it's not very in depth. We people young people don't read anymore. It's something that I'm
a writer for The Federalist. We talked about it at our last staff meeting, where I said, you know, unfortunately kids aren't going to come to our young people gen z Ers and even you know, the younger millennials are not going to come to our site because they literally
just don't read. And and that plays a huge role into the indoctrination game, right, because if you don't have people that are thinking deeply, that are reading materials that are have you know, been in the classic literature for a long time, and they're getting all of their news from TikTok. I think it's a stounding number, like it's like seventy five percent of young people, so that they're getting their news from TikTok, that that means that they're
very vulnerable to information warfare right and the left. As I said, they do a great job of messaging to people and in a way that conservatives just don't.
To your point, it shortened attention spans, and so it does seem like everyone is so used to having things so easily that it has led to a lack of critical thinking, particularly among young people.
It definitely has. I'll also say if you even look at public schools like how they teach these days, they can't assign you know, thirty pages of reading a night. Maybe maybe if you're in an ap class in your later years of high school, they might do that, you're seeing video content and that sort of thing come into the classroom all the time. It's a complete degradation of the American education system. That's why. And this is not just at public schools. This is happening at private schools
as well. My parents have my siblings in a really wonderful classical education school, but when I was when I was in school in Wisconsin, I didn't have that also, so it was it's really and then I had to play catch up when I got to college. So they got into a really good college. But I think it's a problem across the board for young people.
What role do colleges play in turning out the youth vote? You know, talk about some of the activism that goes on on college campuses and what people should know about that.
They do a really interesting job with getting out the vote. When I was a freshman at the University of Chicago, which would have been in twenty eighteen, they had mass incentives to get the young people to vote. So they would say, you know, we'll have a free meal if everybody on your floor registers to vote right, And they do that because they know how young people are going to vote right. They know that they're all going to
vote for whoever. The Democrat isn't off. I mean, if even my husband graduated from UW Madison, Wisconsin is a very fifty to fifty state, the campus of mostly left wing students completely sways the vote in Wisconsin because there's so many of them, and there's such a massive get out the vote effort for for these young people, and so I you know, it's it's you want you want young people to be engaged, you want them to vote. I I question the intentions sometimes of a lot of
these college campuses. I think most of them are doing it because they know how they're going to vote, and so they they're giving cash or or or food incentives, which can be a little bit dicey, right, And there's there's some ethics that goes into that, but definitely there's there's a mass get out the vote effort on college campuses. And I don't believe it's for it's for altruistic, you know, reasons of we just want everybody to vote. I really
think it's it's political. And I think Republicans probably don't message to these to these campuses as much as they they as as their counterparts do because you know, young students tend to vote one way.
Now, you know you talk about sort of these you know, turnout operations more or less. Is there pressure to vote a certain way? Like do you feel that as a student.
Yeah, well, I think it's not just about voting one way. I think it's just how you view the world in general. There's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of social pressure. So being a conservative on a college campus is never a popular choice. And I think some people will say, oh, well, there's you know, there's schools and red states, and that
means nothing. Right if you go to if you go to a southern school, you go to all miss right, it's still going to be a mostly left wing campus just because of the way young people are these days. And there's massive social pressure to be a leftist and to vote a certain way, and if you don't, there's a ton of name calling that comes with it. And that's I think the power that leftists have over young people.
And I'll also say specifically women. Nobody wants to be called a racist or a homophobic, or xenophobic or transphobic. They use these words as power over young people who want to fit in, who don't want to be seen as cruel or mean or insensitive. So they throw these words at you if you don't agree with them politically, and they use that to control you. And they also once you have these words come at you all the time, right, you feel bad about the way that you were raised
or the values that you have. You start to self censor, right. And then after you self censor so many times, then you actually start to believe the stuff that people are saying around you. And that's when the indoctrination happens. And this is across the board, happening at all college campuses, whether in a red state or a blue state.
How was mail in balloting impacted the youth vote or even particularly on college campuses.
Yeah, that's an interesting one. I think a lot of young so a lot of young people they like convenience, right, if you ask that, there's tons of polls about if they want to work remotely, if they want to come into the office. Overwhelmingly kids want to work remotely. When cod when COVID hit, right and they said they wanted to come back to campus, at least the administrations did. There was petitions from the students saying no, we want to stay remote, which not conducive for working remote jobs
are not. Productivity is significantly lower if you don't come into office, and the same goes for remote classes. I think the mail in balloting has just come in with this convenience culture for gen Z, right, They just they see it as a way to make things easier, And the problem is it's degradating our voting system. Right. We know that these mail and ballots are susceptible to fraud
in a way that the in person voting wasn't. So I think it's an easy sell for gen Zers with the convenience culture, but ultimately a really bad thing for our country.
You know, you wrote in one of your columns about the midterms this election cycle was a lost opportunity for Republicans who had a chance to remind young voters the Democrats violated their bodily autonomy and mentally lave them for two years. How impactful were COVID policies on college students and what do you think the message should have been to them?
COVID was unprecedented on college campuses, right, And like this is something that we had in the nineteen sixties, right, you had this revolt to say, get out of our lives. The administration doesn't tell us what to do. They don't give us curfews, specifically for women. Right they had women were allowed to go to leave campus, they had to get signed permissionships from their parents. Suddenly we saw this massive overreach of the campus administration during COVID, controlling every
aspect of young people's lives. And when it was the leftist in the nineteen sixties saying get out of our lives, suddenly the leftists in twenty twenty to twenty twenty two were saying, we want the administration to put more precautions and regulations on us in a really sort of bizarre way. And this has been prepped for a long time. Right, there's at most schools there are as many, if not more administrators than there are professors. The administrations used to
be much smaller. Now they're massive. And what they what they did was they would say you have to wear a mask at all times. You have to. You know, you have to. If you're unvaccinated, you can't come to class, or you have to eat in a separate area. You have to get a vaccine if you wanted not if
you want to exempt yourself from the vaccine. You have to get a permission sent from a doctor or religious or your religious pastor or of some sort, and oftentimes they would deny those things, so some students were even expelled for not taking the vaccine. They implemented these communist reporting systems where they had students report their classmates or their teachers for breaking COVID rules. So one example is I had friends who took a picture that they posted
on Instagram in a group setting. They were wearing masks, but they weren't six feet apart in the photo that they posted on Instagram, and they got reported and threatened with being kicked out of student housing. And the reason that they were actually reported is because leftist students knew that these students were part of our conservative school paper. So it was actually targeting of people that you didn't like.
It was extremely communist and disturbing, and the schools actually made you sign forms when you came on to campus saying I promised that if I see someone breaking COVID rules, I will report them to the COVID reporting system. I will turn them in. Really bizarre and in my opinion, communist policies from these university administrations totally communists.
Also, snitches end up in ditches, is what I've learned to growing up. You know, why do you think these colleges and universities were even forcing students to get vaccinated or isolate in the first place. I mean, we know statistically young people are just not at risk from COVID. So why was it a test of submission or why do you think they forced students to subscribe to policies they never needed to.
It's interesting that you asked that because I would have thought, right, if this is an experimental vaccine, we don't know what the side effects are going to be. We know that the students aren't at risk, Why would we take that chance of having a vaccine mandate when we could be slapped with lawsuits? Right if students get vaccine injured? And by the way, I know of students who have been vaccine injured who were forced to get the vaccine because of the mandate. What I think happened is they all
take cues from each other. They're not really independent institutions. They're not really free thinkers, which makes sense because they don't they don't produce free thinkers, so they are all taking cues from each other. So, for example, U Chicago follows Harvard all the time. Whatever Harvard does, U Chicago does, So we knew the second that Harvard said we're locking down, we're going to we're going to shut down classes and go remote, or we're going to have a vaccine mandate,
or we're going to have a booster mandate. Within a couple of days, and even within you know, a few hours, U Chicago did the same thing. So they all sort of took cues. Nobody wanted to be the one school that didn't shut down, that didn't you know, that that didn't have a vaccine mandate, because they're all sort of virtue signaling to each other. Nobody wants to be the one that's insensitive or the outlier or not taking allegedly not taking the pandemic seriously. And I think really it's
a testament to how bad these universities have gotten. They're really not free institutions, and the students that they produce aren't free either. It seems like.
There is an increasing herd mentality among young people. Is that social media that's reinforcing that, the fear of you know, standing out or being ostracized from the crowd.
Yeah, I mean I think social media reinforces it. But I think this has been this is more of a cultural thing that has been happening for a few a few years now. Is this this herd mentality and you're in your right when you when you describe it that way. And I think when I when I brought up the name calling, right, I think that's huge deal. I think
it's the I think it's the virtue signaling. I think all of it sort of plays plays into it, and it is reinforcing this your right herd mentality and not being free to say what you think because of not just what your peers will say about you, but what
your future holds. So there were a lot of young people who during COVID didn't like the vaccine mandates, didn't like the mask mandates, knew that they were ineffective, but they said, you know what, We're going to comply because if I get written up, if I get something on my school record and it gets back to my future employer,
I'm not going to get that Goldmen Sax internship. I'm not going to go to JP Morgan, I'm not going to be There is a a social credit system that is not as official as it is in China, but it's definitely here, and young people feel it way more than the older generations do because it's with them since they're in elementary school, right, all of the virtue signaling, all of the herd mentality is always there, and they know that there will be consequences if they step out of the norm.
Take a quick break more on gen Z. We're seeing rates of depression go up in young people. I mean, there was a recent report that showed almost sixty percent of US girls reported persistent sadness and hopelessness, and rates are up for boys as well. Why do you think so many young people are so depressed.
I don't like to be the one that says like social media is like the cause of everything, right, it's the bane of civilization. But I do think social media plays a role in it. Right, there's like a big there's a lot of comparisons that have been Right, if you're on TikTok and Instagram and you see all these airbrush photos of these girls who look perfect and they're getting millions of views and you don't look like that, that can be really depressing. But I think it's just
not being present in general is the problem. I think you're consumed by your phones. I don't think young people have human human interaction, and this was especially true during COVID. I think religion plays a big role into it, what brings you purpose in life, And the truth is most young people are atheist or agnostic, or if they are
identifying as a religion, they're not very practicing. These are things that give people grounding and give them purpose, and when you take that away from them, they get depressed. So I'm not surprised by the numbers at all.
Do you think the reason you turned out so normal is because of your parents? Because you certainly stand out in a sea of sheet people and a sea of a broken generation.
It seems I appreciate that. It's very nice of you to say that. Yeah, I mean, my parents are wonderful, something that I always because I didn't go to a super conservative school. Actually I went to for most of elementary school, actually for all of the elementsentry school, I went to a very left wing school. So my dad was running for Congress. I was coming into class and people would bring in literature against him, right, making fun of him. My teacher, my teacher would come and try
to debate me. I'm like a little fifth grader, and she would try to debate me on what terrible things my parents are saying or trying to run on. But I think what was different about me is that I really was energized by that kind of you know, the politics and the battle of ideas. I thought it was really fun. I had a situation I don't know if you remember, but during the Scott Walker protests in Wisconsin, because he had taken away public sector union, so the
teachers were very angry. They occupied the capitol in Wisconsin. It was a massive, these massive protests. My dad did a fundraiser with Scott Walker in twenty ten, and at the protest I saw my fifth grade teacher and two of my best friends protesting against us as we were going into this fundraiser. And I think most people would like be really traumatized by that situation, but I just
was very energized by it. And I noticed that in my own family, right, there are some like some kids are really excited by you know, this battle of ideas, and some kids, some kids in our families say I just I'd rather just you know, not not not be in the battle all the time. But I think the most important thing growing up was that my parents always
had conversations at the dinner table. So any time that something was came up at school or came up in girl Scouts, and they would always we would always come home and we always talked politics and about our culture and values at a very very young age. And they were and they didn't talk to us like children either. They were they never talked down. They always explained things like we were, you know, that we were real people. And I thought that was really helpful. You know.
I had a similar upbringing because my first word was no, and then why came shortly after, which makes lot I love that. Yeah, but but right dad, you know, but my parents took time to like debate me and tell me why, and explain things and have conversations and really fostered that environment like you're describing, of debate, conversation, critical thinking, you know, desiring to stand alone, and that it was okay to not be a part of the crowd.
You know.
So I really do think a lot of that, you know, a lot of those conversations, and that upbringing comes into play obviously now as adults that we both are It's interesting that we kind of had, uh, you know, similar upbringings in that way. Are these younger generations lost or as conservatives? You know, how do we message them? Can we reach them? What does that messaging? What should that look like?
I have a good example there. Now I'm forgetting his name. I'm going to look. I'm going to look it up. But there's this Democrat representative who is doing the most amazing. Okay, so I'll go back for a second. I did say that there's an issue with young people in attention spans on social media. The problem is if you boycott social media as a conservative because you say, oh, well it's not you know, it's not good for kids. I'm not
going to be messaging on there. I'm going to do press releases instead or write off eds in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. You're not going to reach them. You have to go into the belly of the beast because you don't have an option. That's where people are. So as much as we don't like TikTok, we could talk about, you know, the CCP influence campaigns on it and whatnot, but the point is there's one hundred and fifty million Americans on the app. You have
to be there. Democrats are there, Republicans aren't. Republicans could at least be doing the same thing on Instagram, right, but they're not. Democrats are the only ones that are doing real messaging. I think AOC does a great job. She does live streams all the time. If something's happening
in Congress, it's getting a lot of traction. She's up in front of her camera, her camera talking about the issues in a really straightforward, seamless way, so that young people know what she's talking about, and it feels very conversational, it feels very real. Republicans don't do that. I think Kevin McCarthy is. I mean, he should be doing that every day. He should have four or five videos about
what's going on in Congress. That's the way to refute the left slides when they come on social media and they say, look what Republicans are doing. They're trying to take away insulin for people with diabetes. Right. They'll say that kind of stuff, and when Republicans aren't responding to it on these platforms in a meaningful way, Democrats control the conversation. And this happens over and over again with every single issue. Because I'm on social media, I see it and it's so so frustrating.
No, it's such a good point. I mean, obviously, you know, we criticize TikTok rightfully so because it's you know, basically controlled by the Communist Party of China. But to your point, you know, this is where young people are, you know, and so if you want to reach them and message to them, perhaps you know, we have to go into
the belly of the bat, so to speak. You know, you wrote not bed recently about how Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, YouTube and snapchat pose a far greater risk than TikTok. Explain yourself, young lady.
Yeah, yeah, And it's just a controversial piece. Within my own staff at the Federalists, there were some people saying, I don't I don't even know if we should run this article because they didn't want to undermine the risks of TikTok. And I'm not going to say that TikTok is not a risk. I've written about Chinese influence campaigns being waged on TikTok against young people. I understand. What I'm saying is I think our social media companies are worse.
I mean, you have we know from the Twitter files, that Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of these companies are in collusion with the deep state to interfere in our elections. They suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. They silenced doctors during COVID, they promoted the Russian collusion hooks. They're shadow
banding conservatives. These are in these the collusion between big tech and the deep state, American big tech and the deep state is an immediate threat to conservatives specifically, but in general Americans freedom and our and our ability to effectively have a free speech public square. Right on TikTok, there's actually comparatively more freedom than there is on American
social media companies. For example, there's Alila Rose video where she says it's never medically necessary to have an abortion. That video was slapped with the fact check on Instagram, but was untouched on TikTok. The exact same video untouched on TikTok. And there could be reasons for TikTok to want to do that, right. They could say, you know, we want we want to sew discord on America and among Americans, and so we're going to allow anybody to
say what they want politically on our app. Okay, we can acknowledge the bad intentions of TikTok while also saying it's a good thing that TikTok is actually allowing conservatives to say what they think. And I think for conservatives to try to get rid of apps that are actually platforming our ideas is in disservice to ourselves, right. I think our own companies are much more hostile to us. And I also think it's on American to be banning
apps China bands apps. I don't think we need a big I don't think we need to be banning apps. I really think that that's communist behavior.
You could argue about the fact that you know, byte Edance is obviously based out of Beijing, so it's slightly different just in the sense of obviously they can access all of our data in a way that you know they can't with some of these other social media companies, but you know, fair point in terms of them not censoring conservatives as much. Let's take a quick commercial break. More as a Vita Duffy on the other side, you
had mentioned the issue of abortion. Why do you think so many young people are driven by that issue?
I think that it's not just young people people. I think our whole country is driven by that issue. I really believe. I think it's been the number one issue and divider in America for decades now, and I think it's it's been a way for Democrats to really animate
people and for Republicans to really animate people. For gen zers, I know that there it might seem like they have there's a lot of loud voices, right, they're super you know, pro choice, and I think probably the majority of there is the majority of them are pro choice, but there is a growing number of pro lifers and even left wing pro lifers, because the science stands in the way
of radical pro abortion ideology. You can see ultrasounds, you know there's a heartbeat, you know they have pain receptors, like there are so many things that we're faced with, especially if you're faced with right an ultrasound where you actually see your child before you have to have an abortion. Right, these are things that have really been changing the whole debate.
When when there were pro choicers during the time of Roe v. Wade, they didn't they didn't really know you couldn't really see your baby's fingers and toes on a screen. Now you can I can get these really amazing three D pictures that are are just incredible. And so I think there's a lot of disillusion from conservatives among like the young people are super pro choice. I wouldn't be
as I'm not as freaked out as they are. I think that there's actually a lot of hope just because of how amazing science has evolved.
Well, I certainly hope. So because you know, abortion is murder, I believe you. You know, you share that idea as well, that mentality. You know, So Justin Bieber and Haley Bieber, Selena Gomez, we've got to talk about this. You know, you wrote a column that Justin Bieber is to blame obviously for those who don't pay attention to the pop culture stuff I do, because you know what, sometimes the news is so depressing you just need escapism, a break
from everything that's going on. But it's basically, you know, Selena Gomez used to date Justin Bieber. Hailey Bieber is now married to Justin and there's this ongoing, you know, sort of online stuff that they're at odds. Haley and Selena, you know, talk about why Justin is actually to blame in the drama, not Selena or Haley.
The Selena Hailey drama has been going on for a really long time. They dated Justin Bieber on it off and so then Haley actually ended up with Justin and now they're married. But the Selena fans are still really upset and think that Haley stole Justin from Selena. Really kind of bizarre fad behavior, to be honest, kind of creepy fan behavior.
And like booling too, Like they're like constantly trying to bully Haley. All right, so go ahead, No, you're totally right.
So they're constantly trying to bully Haley. There's a video where they say that Haley was making fun of Selena. There's another one where people say Selena was making fun
of Haley. The point is people extrapolated from one of these videos and just when after Hailey for months and months, literally it was like two and a half months where it was like just constant hatred, attacking, comparing her to Putin, like saying she looks like Putin, saying she looks like an ear, saying she looks horrible, and that she's a boyfriend stealer and all of this craziness. And at the heart of this issue is really not whether Haley was
mean to Selena or Selena was mean to Haley. What it is is who deserves Justin. That's what the fans are really arguing over, is that. And that's what they were saying, is that Justin does not actually support Haley because he had been silent through all this. They're saying Justin is still in love with Selena. And what Justin should have done when things escalated to this level is he should have stood up for his wife. He should have said, you know what, Hailey Bieber is my wife,
I'm in love with her. I'm not in love with my ex girlfriend. Everybody back off. But he didn't do that. He stayed completely silent while his wife was being torn to shreds by these horrendous Selena fans. Meanwhile, Selena is actually encouraging her fans to attack Hailey. Now she said stop, but at a time, at one point she was doing that. And I just think the real villain, like I said in my article, is it's not Haley or Selena or
all of this drama. It's really Justin because he should have stood up for his wife and put an end to all of this a long time ago.
Yeah, man up, Justin Bieber, if you're listening, be a manta. Is there anything else you'd like to exactly Vida, Is there anything else you'd like to leave us with before we go?
I think gen Z gets a bad rap. I think we're talking. We talked a lot about gen Z issues and voting rights and things like that, and there's a lot of really good things about my generation. They are super entrepreneurial. I don't know if you know that, but there's so many studies that show, like over I think it's like sixty or seventy percent want to start a small business. They don't want to work for someone which
you know, can play what itcause. I think that's a really good thing to have people that are really are motivated to create and to be innovative. I think that's a wonderful thing. I also think, like I said, I think science is on our side when it comes to abortion. I think a lot of young people are pro life, and I think even more will be pro life as
they get older. And I also think that part of the failures that we're seeing with this generation, it can be easy to blame them for everything and say, oh, they're so dumb and they have these low attention spans and you know they're all indoctrinated. Well, the reason they're indoctrinated is because we have indoctrination machines in our school system.
And that's not the fault of kids, that's the fault of adults who have allowed universities to turn out horrible teachers from these teachers' colleges right, and degradate our education system. So it's not based in God, but it's instead completely irreligious. And there are so many things that are the cause of gen Z and the issues that they're having and the depression that they're facing. COVID being one, right, putting somebody in lockdown for two years so they can't socialize,
that takes a toll. So I'd ask a lot of people to also look inward and to think about how can we really message them and how can we fix the problems that they're facing. Because they didn't just they didn't just pop out of the womb a bunch of crazy communist leftists, right, It happened for a reason. I think adults need to take some responsibility there too.
Well, you know, as millennial as we can't blame ourselves, so we have to blame you guys. You know right right, that's the way it works. In Vita. You'll do the same to the generations below you. But you give me hope of Vida. You do great work. Everybody, go check out a Vida's work on the Federalists, Go follow her on Twitter. What's your Twitter handle again?
It's a Vita Duffy underscore one.
All right, well everyone go check a Vida's workout. You give me hope. I appreciate you taking the time to join the show.
Thank you for having me.
That was a Vita Duffy Alfonso. Appreciate her taking the time to join the show bring us a little insight into what seems like a crazy generation gen Z. Appreciate you guys at home for listening every Monday and Thursday, but you can listen throughout the week. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcast, give us a rating. Love reading those. I want to thank John Cassio, my producer, for putting the show together. Until next time,