I'm Beginning to Believe the Children Ain't the Future

Teach them right and hope they don't hate the Jews

I can’t believe it. I am more skeptical than horrified, but still plenty horrified at the response of young people in the latest poll results from Harris / Harvard / Harris X.

To be clear, this was a poll of Americans, not Jordanians. The poll does have problems. Question wording, sampling, and the character of the pollster have all come under criticism. On the issue of wording, I do not think the fairest framing of the question is “Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified (in any way)”? The “in any way” part skews things, as highlighted by my former colleague

Will Saletan

, but most people my age (45-54) and older were given the same set of choices and we got the answer right. (Specifically “Not Justified.” Gleeful terrorist slaughter is “Not Justified”, if a pollster asks.)

Taking Sword to Penn

The pollster is former Clinton strategist Mark Penn, who, for a time, ceased to be a Democrat in good standing, even if his apostasies of five years ago don’t seem as radical now as they might have then. In mid 2018, he expressed his objections to the Mueller probe, as reported by Annie Karni, then writing for Politico in 2018:

Penn is married to Nancy Jacobsen, founder of the No Labels - Movement? Vibe? Joe Manchin’s cat’s paw? Add it all up and its not hard for a motivated reasoner to questions Penn’s dispassion on these issues. This is why many have simply dismissed the above result, and the below:

If you’re looking for reasons to discredit Penn and his polls, there are enough out there to inspire a raft of objections. Which is exactly what has happened.

But I wonder - would most of the loudest objectors to Penn’s methodology actually give the right answer? (reminder: the correct answer is “Not Justified)”. Having read Jeet Heer and the Intercept I think they’d refuse to answer. While perhaps the question is posed in an overly stark manner, I certainly would have gotten the question right (reminder: “Not justified”). I also would have scrunched my brow a little upon being confronted with the following question, but am confident I would have aced that question as well.

The right answer, as almost all AARP members know, is to rebuke a millennia-old calumny. I do wonder how many Twitch-playing, Tik-Toking, Skibidi Toilet-watching 18-year-olds even understood the phrasing. But the Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll isn’t the only one uncovering not just pro-Palestinian sympathies among the youth, but active antisemitism. Here’s a result from a recent Economist/YouGov poll.

The kids are split on if there really was a Holocaust

This garnered headlines emphasizing that 1 in 5 young people regard the Holocaust as a myth. I find it equally disturbing that 30% couldn't really say. Here we see the “Nothing is True but Everything is Possible” effect of propaganda showing up. It’s not just Holocaust denialism at play, but the overall caustic effect of being steeped in the unreality of social media, the death of authorities, the purposeful crumbling of agreed upon reality and the march of post-modernism in so many of our truth-adjudicating institutions.

Still a Little Sus

That said, I don’t quite believe it. I am in denial. For all the emphasis on colonialism in elite institutions, those institutions, by definition educate only a slim minority of young people. Yes, I know the ideology has filtered down and out to other colleges and many secondary schools, especially in blue states. Chris Rufo won’t let me forget it. As a rule, I don’t subcontract my fact-gathering to Libs of TikTok, but there are countless testimonials and attestations from people with direct knowledge of the working of the academy to raise reasonable alarms. I can’t quite buy the premise that an 18 year old who has yet to complete a semester of college, or a 24 year old who may never have attended college, is terribly influenced by the writings of Foucault or Derek Bell.

But even if these polls are skewed or imperfect, or off by 20-50%, the results are as deserving of concern as all the surveys and signs of armed revolution to which MSNBC dedicates segment after segment. Polls and personal skepticism aside, I genuinely worry that if you add up the young people who have become adherents to an oppressed vs. oppressor ideology, plus the genuine antisemites, plus the shit posters, plus the young people who have been trained by social media algorithm and an overall posture of nihilism to reflexively disbelieve all asserts of fact, then I come around. I do buy that there is something deeply amiss in the attitudes of the youth. I also know that children are the future, which I find a little more scary today than I did two months ago.