What a Pentagon leaker is telling us about Gen Z | Will Bunch Newsletter

Some good news! I got so tired of the Phillies and the Union losing this spring that I went out and won something myself! The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, a landmark repository of knowledge since 1814 (!), on Monday night awarded my book, After the Ivory Tower Falls, its 2022 Athenaeum Literary Award for best tome either about Philadelphia or by a local author. I am so honored! And if you haven’t checked out my book yet, listen to 209 years of accumulated wisdom and please do so!

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📮 Reader responses to last week’s question about how Democrats should respond to the scandals swirling around Justice Clarence Thomas ran into the double digits! I wish I could publish them all. “Democrats — and clear-thinking Republicans — should express their outrage everywhere: on social media, in letters to the editor, in emails and letters to their elected representatives,” Patricia Biswanger, a local attorney, wrote. “This is a paradigm of corruption, greed and entitlement without equal in our history. Not only did Clarence and [Ginni Thomas] enjoy this billionaire’s ‘hospitality,’ they benefited from huge contributions he and others made to [Ginni’s] organization. It’s shameful.”

This week’s question? Should 80-year-old President Joe Biden be the Democrats’ 2024 nominee, or should they risk a younger candidate? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

At one point in a 21-year-old’s very online life, Jack Teixeira — an airman in an intelligence unit at a Massachusetts Air National Guard base on Cape Cod — posted a revealing video about himself. According to the Washington Post, Teixeira filmed himself at a gun range where he shouts out a string of racist and antisemitic slurs into the camera before turning around and firing a series of rounds into a target.

Offensive as it was, Teixeira’s video — posted for his small gaggle of mostly teen fans on the social media site Discord — would have been lost to history if not for what he later uploaded to the World Wide Web: a slew of top-secret and highly classified military documents that revealed TMI about military operations in Ukraine, and otherwise upset not just the Pentagon but America’s allies around the globe.

Despite the predictable speed with which not only the FBI but journalists identified Teixeira as the culprit, and the public’s ongoing apathy about world affairs in general, the Pentagon case has fascinated for one reason: Why would this young dude do such a thing?

I really don’t think it’s that much of a mystery. The instincts that caused Teixeira to make outrageously offensive remarks about Jews or people of color for semi-public consumption and then to show off America’s (supposedly) most closely guarded secrets appear to be one in the same: raging nihilism. A desire to flip the bird at both social norms and at authority, even the Pentagon, and to seemingly not even think about the consequences.

The self-destructive mindset of Gen Z’ers isn’t totally unique to Teixeira or his online posse, which reportedly bonded over a love for violent video games, guns, Jesus Christ, and for sharing transgressive, racist memes in their Discord group. They certainly share a brotherhood with other young, male members of the working class when it comes to disdain for the brand of “political correctness” that emanates from college campuses — and contempt generally for authority, both cultural and actual.

“Young men are as lonely as any cohort we’ve measured in recent decades,” Harvard youth polling guru John Della Volpe told the Washington Post. “[E]very day, there are examples of innocent young men who get drawn into pornography, extremism, white nationalism, Christian nationalism.”

I wrote about what I called the “Left Out” generation of young, middle-class non-college-educated Americans in my 2022 book, After the Ivory Tower Falls, as part of a broader argument that we have failed the last couple of generations of young people. Too many young adults and teens not on the college track — especially men — suffer not just from a lack of training opportunities and decent jobs but also an unfair lack of respect, which translates into addictions to video games or YouTube “rabbit holes,” or worse.

In 2020, the married Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who coined the phrase “deaths of despair” to describe a spike in drug and alcohol fatalities and suicides among blue-collar Americans, reported that the victims of these maladies were getting younger — and that the leading variable was the lack of a college degree. And despair and the kind of nihilism on display in Teixeira’s Discord group are essentially first cousins.

We’ve been paying a lot of attention to teens and young adults lately, and too much of it is negative. As homicides spiked in most big cities during the social disruption of the pandemic and stayed at unacceptable levels in places like Philadelphia, far too many of the gunshots were fired at teenagers or by them. The tragic result is that the lives on both ends of the gun are ruined, and too often for trivial reasons like a Facebook beef, or road rage. Again, it’s nihilism. Is it a failure to see the consequences, or to care?

In recent days, large and thus predictably unruly throngs of teenagers — most likely connected through social media — have been showing up in downtown shopping districts in Chicago or Philadelphia and jumping on city buses, or causing other forms of unwanted mayhem. Philly is cracking down with a strict curfew on unaccompanied teens at its Fashion District mall. In the Windy City, where the chaos was dubbed a “Teen Takeover,” progressive mayor-elect Brandon Johnson stunned some observers with a statement that did criticize the action, but pivoted: “However, it is not constructive to demonize youth who otherwise have been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”

Here’s what most political types are too cowardly to admit: that Johnson is speaking the truth. And the fact that 16- or 17-year-olds don’t vote (while 18-to-25-year-olds don’t vote often enough — yet) makes them easy punching bags. Meanwhile, a general sense that America’s teens are confronting an unprecedented mental-health crisis has broken through, but few so-called “grown-ups” seem to know what to do about it, or express curiosity over how that’s connected to gun violence or youth mayhem or rising suicide rates. I guess that’s what we should expect in a land with bottomless coffers for police but spare change for mental health.

And yet we hardly ever talk about what’s good about Generation Z. Even though it’s happening right under our noses, in Nashville, where hundreds of young people left their classrooms and led what you could call a “Teen Takeover” of the state capitol to demand Republican lawmakers act on gun violence, or at Perkiomen Valley High School, where kids staged a protest to ensure their access to books, or everywhere that kids are protesting climate change or racism.

I think what a lot of people are failing to see is that youth activism and nihilism are really two sides of the same coin. They are radically different and yet utterly unsurprising reactions to the messed-up world that my generation of baby boomers and other alleged adults have handed to them.

Generation Z has been presented with an uncertain future because of our failures to confront greenhouse-gas pollution, and traumatized by years of active-shooter drills in schools that were supposed to be a safe space for learning. Perhaps even worse, we handed them an educational system that we dubbed a “meritocracy” (spoiler alert: it’s not) to convey a sense their fate in life will be decided by age 18. That system is rigged for elites and encourages snobbery — or worse — toward those left behind. And then we wonder why young people act out.

Look, we all want young people to find their own way, but their older generations have cluttered their path with our rancid debris and the thick overgrowth of political dysfunction. Generation Z can pursue happiness, but only if we help by creating robust systems of mental health and an environment devoid of both AR-15s and fossil-fuel pollution, and by making all forms of higher education accessible and affordable — not just college but also trade schools for the millions who don’t want a bachelor’s degree, just opportunity... and respect.

Or America can remain a breeding ground for the next generation of unmoored Jack Teixeiras. Or something even worse.

Question: Will women’s sports finally take its rightful & permanent place financially & culturally or is this current moment of enthusiastic public support a blip? — Via KansasWoman (@WomanKansas) on Twitter

Answer: Great question from the Sunflower State. It’s been more than 50 years now since Title IX called for more gender parity in college sports, yet for most of that half-century it feels like support for women’s sports from the critical male demographic has come more in patronizing words than in actual eyeballs. I’ve noticed a palpable change in 2023, and it’s a great thing to see. My friend and Inquirer colleague Jonathan Tannenwald just posted a piece that Spanish-language Telemundo will this summer broadcast every game of the Women’s World Cup for the first time. It felt like the true turning point was March’s NCAA women’s basketball tournament, which drew epic TV ratings for rising superstar Caitlin Clark of Iowa and her takedown in the finals by LSU and its in-your-face leader Angel Reese. It was a storyline that even the most stereotypical wing-devouring, beer guzzling couch dude could not ignore. Now the final hurdle: Getting some women’s professional sports franchises here in Philly!

April 16, 1963, surely must have felt like a low moment for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his long crusade to bring civil rights to Black Americans across the still-segregated South. The acclaim from his 1955 victory in the Montgomery bus boycott had faded, and his most recent campaigns — in Albany, Ga., and then in Birmingham — were struggling to break the stranglehold of white supremacy. Tossed in a jail in Alabama’s largest city for violating an injunction against marches, dealing with harsh conditions, and stung by an ad from local white ministers calling for “moderation,” King started writing — first on the margins of the newspaper ad and next on scraps of paper slipped him by an inmate — what would later be called his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Its central theme was excoriating the timidity and caution of white allies who didn’t see the need for radical actions to liberate African Americans. Wrote King: “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action...’”

Sunday was the 60th anniversary of King’s iconic letter — which grew to 7,000 words and was smuggled out by his lawyer — that challenged all of us to do better around human rights. I was surprised how little attention that anniversary received, and frankly I wonder whether lingering white guilt played a role. After all, it’s been less than three years since millions of “white moderates” marched for Black Lives Matter. Far too many of those marchers then went back to brunch after Joe Biden won the 2020 election — even as the killing of Black Americans by cops has actually increased, while white supremacy fuels an extremist right. These things will keep happening until the white majority chooses justice over “order.” King’s call for “a positive peace” is even sharper today than when he scribbled it down six long decades ago.

What a difference six years makes! Much like now, Philadelphia was embroiled in a heated, multicandidate election for a key open position where the critical issue was criminal justice: the election of a new district attorney. But while 2023′s mayoral candidates jockey to be “tough on crime,” DA hopefuls six years ago had pretty much the opposite idea, as I wrote in an April 18, 2017, column headlined: “Like Daytona, race for Philly DA keeps turning left.” Six candidates, including eventual winner Larry Krasner, strived at a forum to prove to voters who would do the most to end the death penalty and mass incarceration. Maybe 2017 was the good ol’ days, after all.