Big generations are cyclical — and so are small ones. The TL;DR explanation goes like this: Why are there so many Millennials? Today, they’re the single biggest generation in American history. (The oldest Millennials are now in their mid-40s. And yes, that’s very scary.)
Simple: It’s because their parents were Boomers, and there were an awful lot of Boomers, too.
Meanwhile, Gen X — a group that includes Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Leonardo DiCaprio, Marco Rubio, and yours truly — was a small generation. As such, our kids’ generation — the Zoomers (Gen Z) — are also small. Ain’t a whole lot of us around.
But it’s more than raw numbers: Zoomers also behave differently.
As political strategist and demographics expert Peter Zeihan noted:
Like their parents, the American Millennial cohort is defined by their size. Making up a larger share of the US population than either the preceding (and dare I say, cooler?) Gen X and younger Gen Z, they are having their own outsized impact on American society.
Millennials and Zoomers are the future of the American workforce, and could not be more different. Where Millennials are touchy-feely, willing to work within teams and have a tendency toward leadership and collaborative work, most Gen Z wants to be left alone. Think Harry Potter vs the Hunger Games. This will have profound impacts on the evolution of the US labor market… [emphasis added]
But it’s more than wanting to be left alone. Hey, at least that part makes sense. (I’m Gen X: We relate to being loners and apathetic underachievers. Our unofficial motto was, “Whatever, man.”)
What’s unique are the Zoomers’ flirtations with Nazism, antisemitism, Groyperism, and socialism.
It’s becoming a political issue.
From Politico: “GOP Staffers Say the Party Has a Groyper Problem”
The grownups are worried. In group chats and at happy hours, some GOP veterans fret about the rising generation of young staffers in their party. The recurring complaint: The pipeline that feeds young conservative talent into government jobs is defective — if not broken.
[…]
There are widely varying, and bitterly disputed, estimates of the true scale of groyperism in the GOP’s young D.C. professional class, from ubiquitous to negligible. One anonymous conservative, described only as “an older insider,” told the Free Press’s Rod Dreher that the term applies to 30 to 40 percent of “Gen Z congressional and administration staffers,” sparking a furious intra-party debate online when he repeated the claim on a podcast this week. A Trump administration official told the New Yorker’s Antonia Hitchens the number was more like 75 percent. The first Hill aide interviewed for this article said that at least 50 percent of GOP congressional staff was groyper or groyper-adjacent.
In a follow-up piece, Rod Dreher of the Free Press elaborated on his findings:
Last week, I went to Washington for a few days on business, and had a number of conversations with Zoomer conservatives about the issue. I asked them about the scale of the Groyper problem in light of the controversy raging over Tucker Carlson’s softball October 27 interview with Fuentes, and the subsequent storm around Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who rose to defend Carlson and has had no end of trouble since then.
Here’s the bad news: It’s worse than I thought. And nobody knows what to do about it.
I ran the “30 to 40 percent” claim past the conservative Zoomers I spoke to in D.C.; every one of them affirmed it. Christian faith, they explained, has not inoculated young men against antisemitism, which is now infused in the conversations of conservative Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox members of Gen Z. Two Christian Zoomers told me that antisemitism is sometimes used as a litmus test to join particular social groupings.
So what gives? What led the Zoomers to goose-step themselves off the beaten path?
COVID is at least partially to blame: It hit the Zoomers harder than any other generation, disrupting their formative years. Over half a decade later, we now have millions of 20-somethings who can’t appear in public without risking a full-blown panic attack — and whose “dream job” consists of wearing a bathrobe 24/7 while working remotely from their bedroom computer.
But that’s a cop-out. It was more than COVID.
With or without the pandemic, we’d likely be in the exact same situation.
Because Gen Z is a mess. It’s widely considered the unhappiest, most depressed generation in American history, with Zoomer girls the saddest of all.
Recent research shows that life satisfaction and happiness have steadily been declining among young adults for the last decade. In the U.S., the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBSS) has reported a dramatic rise in anxiety and depression among American Gen Zers, especially young women. In 2023, 53% of female high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, compared with 28% of boys.
My suspicion is that two of the three biggest factors are Zoomers’ media choices and the societal reward system that accompanies it. When TikTok and Instagram are your windows to the world, it skews your perception.
How could it not?
Social media is dramatically different from flipping through photos of Vogue supermodels in the 1980s, or watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, because the people on your social media feed are supposed to be your peers. They’re not aspirational; they’re your measuring stick.
And when your peers upload (filtered) images of a life you’ll never have, it feels awful — like something inside of you is fundamentally broken. You’re simply not good enough. (And never will be.)
Or, perhaps, our society is broken, and the only solution is to burn down the whole damn system!
Because these TikTok/Instagram images don’t appear in a vacuum. From the time Zoomers were itty-bitty preschoolers, they’ve been taught that masculinity is toxic, therapy is ALWAYS the answer, trans women are real women, white people are colonizers, free markets run on greed, socialism is compassion, Israel loves genocide, God is fictional, and the sexist/racist/homophobic “patriarchy” has rigged the game — so people like them will never win and there’s no point in even trying. After hearing this crap for 20 years, social media images have reinforced their narrative of hopelessness and despair. It’s an extraordinarily persuasive drumbeat.
Especially when Zoomers spend nearly seven hours each day on social media.
TikTok/Instagram propaganda — plus a reward system that tells Zoomers they’re exactly right to need therapy, hate American traditions (including, very often, their own families), and that the only viable solution is radical political change — is a helluva one-two punch. The impact is undeniable.
But it’s more than this, too.
It must be, because Millennials faced a very similar reward system and/or propaganda campaigns, yet they turned out quite differently.
So perhaps it’s a generational thing. I’ve noticed that preachy, moralizing generations tend to be directly followed by apathetic, nihilistic ones. For example, the moralizing Boomers were followed by us apathetic “That’s just like, your opinion, man” Gen Xers. And the (even more annoyingly) moralizing Millennials, who cut their political teeth on President Barack Obama’s “hope and change” promise, were directly followed by the burn-it-down, nihilistic Zoomers.
That’s probably not a coincidence either: When the pendulum swings, it swings hard.
But that’s also a cop-out, because the #1 influence a child has isn’t the previous generation. And it’s not TikTok or Instagram.
It’s the child’s parents.
And the parents of Zoomers are Gen Xers.
Evidence is mounting that Gen Xers were lousy parents. We raised a generation of Jew-hating weirdos who need lifelong therapy.
Gen Z is the most antisemitic generation the west has seen since the 1930s. https://t.co/SrUZ48zjbl
— Ben Goldsmith (@BenGoldsmith) February 8, 2025
Today, 17 percent of Gen-Z agrees with the anti-Zionist idea that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be “the termination of the state of Israel,” compared to just 2 percent of Baby Boomers. Our survey also discovered that more than a quarter of Americans (and more than half of Gen Z) would find it at least somewhat acceptable for a close friend or family member to support Hamas—the terrorist group that on October 7 used rape as a weapon, murdered children in front of their parents, and carried off civilian hostages, including babies and the elderly.
Additionally, about two-thirds of Zoomers see Jews as “oppressors.” Given this mindset, no wonder Groyperism is on the rise.
Gen X failed its kids. We were lazy — and instead of teaching them right from wrong, we gave ‘em a smartphone and let ‘em learn from bigots like “Ms. Rachel.”
Since 10/7, Ms. Rachel has pushed Hamas propaganda to millions - sharing debunked images, inflated casualty claims, and almost entirely ignoring Israeli child victims.
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) December 1, 2025
She also hosted Motaz Azaiza, a terrorist sympathizer who celebrated the 10/7 massacre & openly idolizes Yahya… pic.twitter.com/onLCFiNhUM
Zoomers were raised more by an algorithm than by their own parents. It’s shocking and shameful.
And that’s when we were around at all. In a Pew Research Center study of 130 countries and territories, the U.S. had the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent homes.
It probably explains why 56% of Zoomers felt lonely as children, compared to just 24% of Boomers. The causal relationship seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it?
This is tantamount to child abuse.
For most of our lives, Gen Xers took perverse pride in being overlooked and ignored. When the Millennials were feuding with the Boomers, we grabbed our popcorn and watched from afar: Not our monkey, not our circus.
“My name’s Paul and this [expletive] is between y’all!”
Back then, our apathy was cute.
But Zoomers are our kids — and we’ve failed them. Gen X failed at its most important moral responsibility. It pains me to say it, but we failed our children worse than the preachy, annoying, moralistic Boomers — and every preceding generation, too. Our kids are struggling, lost, lonely, depressed, and easy prey for humanity’s ugliest impulses. They’re also far more likely to commit suicide.
Gen X doesn’t have the right to dunk on ANYONE anymore.
Hopefully, the Millennials will learn from our mistake and raise their children right. Because Gen X blew it.
We’re the worst generation in U.S history.
(At least, so far.)
One Last Thing: 2026 will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the fate of the America First movement teeters in the balance.
Never before have the political battle lines been so clearly defined. Win or lose, 2026 will transform our country.
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