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"Gen Z is the most conservative generation since WW2" - Isabel Brown
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Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
Gen Z has developed quite a reputation. Lazy. Difficult to work with. Technology-addicted. And of course, insufferably woke. What if that reputation is ill-founded? What if, in fact, Gen Z is the most culturally conservative generation since World War Two? What if Gen Z are the saviours-in-waiting of western civilisation?
That’s the opinion of content creator, author and Gen Z-er, Isabel Brown. Isabel’s new book is titled, ‘The End of the Alphabet: How Gen Z Can Save America’.
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Transcript
Nick Cave on Conservatism as Counter-Culture
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. Nick Cave is one of my very favourite artists. In an interview last year, the frontman for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds reflected on his career by saying, I didn't have that political fury, but I was much more concerned with fucking with people on a different kind of level, a different kind of thing, and I was always sort of at odds with my peers, I would say.
00:00:40
Speaker
When asked how he carries that tradition into the present day, 50 years into his career, he replied without skipping a beat, you be a conservative. Yeah, you go to church and you be a conservative. The audience laughed, but it's a fascinating and serious point. Conservatism has ever so strangely become counter-cultural and the woke orthodoxy espoused by the progressive left has become associated with the establishment. Strange times indeed.
00:01:08
Speaker
My guest today would agree with Nick.
Isabelle Brown's Book and Gen Z's Role in America
00:01:10
Speaker
Isabelle Brown is a content creator and the author of a fascinating new book, The End of the Alphabet, How Gen Z Can Save America. Isabelle, welcome to Australia. Thank you so much for having me, Will. I'm so excited to be on. I put words in your mouth there, but do you agree with that comment from Nick?
00:01:29
Speaker
I sure do. I could not have phrased that better myself. We've arrived in this time where to be punk rock and radically counter-cultural looks very different from what we would expect in the last several decades in Western civilization. I wrote my new book, The End of the Alphabet. We say Gen Z, so how Gen Z can save America.
00:01:49
Speaker
really stemming from a place of frustration over the last several years. I'm a full-time content creator and live streamer, but I have done several different jobs in politics in America and I'm quite involved in the political world with my finger on the pulse, so I'm often tapped to be a voice for my generation in the mainstream media and in various campaign opportunities, et cetera.
Gen Z: The Conservative Generation?
00:02:10
Speaker
And over the last few years working in washington dc or appearing on fox news or even internationally with groups like sky news. It's been incredibly obvious to me that there is a singular droning on narrative about gen z gen z that we are destroying america that we are these horrible uneducated.
00:02:30
Speaker
illiterate, lazy, glued to our phones, very leftist socialists as a generational monolith. And I knew from my last several years working as a creator in the digital space with activism for Gen Z, but also on high school and college campuses across the country, meeting literally millions of people in my peer group, that that just wasn't true. So I wanted to give a voice to our generation in a time that many people are writing us off and discrediting us before we even all grow up into adulthood.
00:02:59
Speaker
and let people know that in this counter-cultural punk rock rebellious phase, our generation culturally is actually the most conservative generation the United States has seen since World War II.
00:03:12
Speaker
That's a very interesting comment. I must admit I am a millennial, but I'm closer to Gen Z than I am to Gen X. But even I fall into the mindset of thinking of Gen Z as, you know, useless tech-addicted worksters. Make the alternative argument. How can you say that they are the most culturally conservative generation since the end of World War
Gen Z's Cultural Rebellion and Traditional Values
00:03:37
Speaker
II?
00:03:37
Speaker
You know, it was Andrew Breitbart who was famous for saying that politics is downstream from culture, that if you want to change what's happening with your elected officials or in the halls of your legislative body, you have to first start by changing how people live their day-to-day lives. We use this word rebellion and counter-cultural to describe Gen Z. And I think it's fascinating to look at that through the lens of what's happened throughout our lifetime. One of my favorite TV shows of all time is Netflix's Stranger Things.
00:04:04
Speaker
I love stranger things. I think everybody in my generation really does. But I like to invoke this imagery and I do throughout my book that we are living right now in the upside down in the 2020s in America. It's sort of this alternate dimension where things look similar to what we would expect a free country to look like. And it feels kind of familiar to the stories that our parents told us about their college years or their young 20 something years.
00:04:29
Speaker
And yet there's something so fundamentally inverted or wrong or missing about the country that we are living in today compared to what we've expected as the most progressive the most enlightened the most inclusive or welcoming or educated society of all time.
00:04:45
Speaker
up is down, left is right. I mean, there is no distinguishable difference between right and wrong, good and evil. Men are women and women are men. And so everything has just been turned completely upside down, mostly by the people who have come before us throughout the last several generations, but no offense. I think millennials played a pretty big part in making that culturally mainstream.
00:05:05
Speaker
that now to be a bit rebellious and to go against the grain from those who came right before us with millennials, we are pushing the envelope back towards traditional timeless values in these conservative with a lowercase C cultural values. What do I mean by that? 93% of our generation, for example, still says that we want to get married in a time that in the last several decades, we have the lowest marriage rate in American history since we began recording those rates.
00:05:34
Speaker
We're realizing we don't need to spend a quarter of a million dollars on a degree in underwater black lgbtq plus basket weaving to get a job although i'm sure that's a real degree program somewhere at an ivy league university and instead we're choosing stem majors which we know will contribute something more meaningful to society those are on the rise.
00:05:53
Speaker
sixty two percent of us have already started our own businesses or are in the process of doing so instead of being an unpaid intern or a low wage employee working for some corporate mega woke ceo in san francisco or new york and we're becoming ceo on day one and even when you start looking at those smaller issues on how people live their day-to-day lives that initially you wouldn't think impact politics or culture
00:06:16
Speaker
gen z is radically counter cultural today we're deleting our dating apps in droves women from across the political spectrum are quitting their hormonal birth control pills so much so that the washington post just a few days ago had
00:06:30
Speaker
and aneurysm meltdown about how many young women are throwing away their birth control. And the only explanation is that it had to be right-wing influencer propaganda on the internet because the real side effects listed on the box are actually just a conspiracy, apparently. We're eating real food, we're moving out of cities, and maybe most importantly, we're believing in God in a society that is easily the most godless and atheistic society in American history.
00:06:58
Speaker
At the end of 2021, less than 25% of my generation said that we believed in any sort of higher power and we were trending more in an atheistic direction. But by the end of 2023, just a few months ago, more than one third of us now say we believe in God and we are regularly attending religious services.
Gen Z's Shift Towards Religion and Politics
00:07:16
Speaker
We're seeking tradition in religion and structure in religion, which I think is so important in the very washed out cultural Christianity area that I think you're seeing in America today.
00:07:26
Speaker
And we're realizing that there is something out there, whatever that looks like, that is so much more meaningful and has so much more purpose to offer to our lives than this consistently subjective, always changing, godless society that the left is offering to us on a silver platter. There are a few different strands there and we will unpack them one by one from religion through to education through to work.
00:07:52
Speaker
But before we do, let's just tease out the central premise around young people today being surprisingly counter-cultural or surprisingly conservative, which is now counter-cultural. I think if someone was to argue against you, they would say that the majority of young people would still vote for progressive political parties, that it would be the Democrats in the US. It would be the Labour party or the Greens in Australia. That trend is consistent across countries. How do you respond to that line of thinking?
00:08:18
Speaker
Yeah, so since we're starting to see this massive pendulum swift on the cultural side of things, it's also starting to manifest politically as well. There is that narrative here in the United States that if you're a 20 something, you will immediately vote for the Democrat party and there is no hope for you voting elsewhere, period, full stop.
00:08:35
Speaker
But in the last election, actually in 2022, it was far closer right down the middle than you can possibly imagine. Exit polling from 2018 to 2020 to 2022 shows a perfect diagonal line voting for more conservative politicians, ballot initiatives and policies across the country for youth voters. And if you look at young Gen Zers, so the younger half of our generation, a recent study just came out a few days ago that 17 year old boys, seniors in high school,
00:09:04
Speaker
are the most politically conservative, 70 plus percent of them than they have been in 50 years. That's not necessarily manifesting as overt support for the Republican party. Interestingly, most of the new registered voters within our generation, so those just graduating from high school or currently in college,
00:09:24
Speaker
52% of them are registering as politically independent with a capital I.
Skepticism Towards Identity Politics and Leftist Ideology
00:09:29
Speaker
So there's a bit of a renaissance of critical thinking again in the people that we're voting for and the initiatives that we're voting for. It's not showing up as blind support for either political party, but an idea that my vote is one to be won. You can't just assume I'm going to pledge my support for you. I need to be convinced of that through a real argument. And I'm really excited to see that. Okay, that makes sense.
00:09:53
Speaker
We only have to look at university campuses today to say that there is still a sizable amount of young people that do buy into identity politics, that do buy into woke orthodoxy. This is a very oppressive ideology. It's a very miserable, depressing way of looking at the world, but it has managed to capture young people who are meant to be idealistic, who are meant to be positive and enthusiastic. So whether or not that is the prevailing view or not, how has it managed to capture so many people regardless?
00:10:23
Speaker
Powerful question and I love that you phrase that in in sort of brainwashing idealistic people because interestingly the ideology from the authoritarian left Initially presents itself as creating this wonderful utopian inclusive society. They use all of the great buzzwords They're right. We're so joyful. We're so inclusive. We're so diverse. We're so educated but actually the end result of that is just all-out chaos its misery its division its anarchy and
00:10:50
Speaker
And once that has taken hold of society at large i think so many people are now waking up to the devastating results of it on my live stream just a couple of days ago we read through the us congressional record from january of nineteen sixty three.
00:11:05
Speaker
And way back 60 plus years ago, they read into the congressional record the 45 goals for the Communist Party in the United States to take over, essentially, to overthrow the United States of America. And in this list of goals were things like overhaul the education system, take over the church, destroy beauty, objective beauty standards in art and architecture,
00:11:26
Speaker
destroy the unit of the nuclear family and convince people that families are evil, make marriage an institution that falls apart and promote divorce and social chaos. And interestingly, if you think about the last 60 years in America, you've watched the authoritarian left slowly succeed in every single one of these goals by strategically taking over every pillar
00:11:50
Speaker
of American culture. What does that look like? The education system, for example, where it's not just happening on college campuses today, but Planned Parenthood writes most of the sex ed curriculum for students across the country. And the 1619 Project Critical Race Theory is very commonplace education for elementary students, or even kindergartners being taught how to use their pronouns and
00:12:12
Speaker
Systemically being convinced by their teachers that their parents are actively working against their true acceptance and their true identity the entertainment industry has been taken over by the left the most popular tv shows today would never have been allowed on television thirty forty years ago i mean it's it's actually just straight up pornography at this point which is horrifying.
00:12:33
Speaker
You look at the political world, obviously you see such a stronghold with authoritarian leftism there, and classical liberalism is essentially extinct in the United States as the Democrat Party embraces this more leftist strain. Even the church has become overwhelmingly leftist in the United States today, where we see videos every day from pastors reciting the sparkle creed instead of the Nicene Creed or the Apostles Creed at church.
00:13:00
Speaker
saying that Jesus has two dads and is non-binary and that's the normal thing to do at church today. Obviously the media, and we could keep going example by example here, but that strategy from these nefarious actors that's been in place for 60 plus years has effectively infiltrated every aspect of American culture. And what do we know about culture? It's upstream from politics, right? So the left has been incredibly effective throughout my entire lifetime and arguably my parents' lifetime
00:13:30
Speaker
taking over culture to change politics. But as I mentioned that perfect utopian rainbow sunshine society that they promised to you upfront is the opposite of what that actually manifests to be. So of course it's an uphill battle in fighting this ideology. It's in every single one of our classrooms. It's on every single one of our social media feeds. It's in every movie virtually produced by Hollywood. It's in every news story with the legacy media. It's with most politicians today.
00:13:57
Speaker
But the sliver of hope that I have is that that horrifying reality that the left's promises are manifesting to be, is causing people to wake up and say, you know, I never signed up for that, even if I wanted this perfect liberal society. I spoke to Yashomonk last week and he's probably the single best thinker on how that, he actually calls it the short march through the institutions took place across all those different spheres that you mentioned.
00:14:23
Speaker
Every generation basically whinges about the younger generation. One of my favorite historians is Tom Holland. There's a wonderful section in one of his books on Roman history where he basically talks about the way that the older Roman generation turned their noses up at Julius Caesar's generation when he was younger, you know, the way they wore their togas.
00:14:43
Speaker
and that sort of thing. This is nothing new. When you think about the disconnect between some older generations today and some perceived notions of Gen Z, is this just the same historical cycle or is there something unique about that perception to our times?
Generational Misunderstandings and Political Dominance
00:15:00
Speaker
There absolutely is something in the water with every generation associated with this mentality. I highlight this in my book that older generations being frustrated that everything they did being undone by younger people is nothing new, right? I mean, we could literally trace this far beyond the Roman Empire.
00:15:15
Speaker
throughout human history. But I think in the context of the United States and in the context of Western civilization, it is a bit new. One of my favorite questions to ask when I give speeches to student groups in high school or in college, you might call it secondary school for teenagers and young adults is to ask them to describe the founding fathers of our country, the people who ideated this crazy experiment we call the United States.
00:15:41
Speaker
and set the stage, set the tone for Western civilization at large in modern history. And the answer is always the same, invariably almost robotic tones. Old white men. They were these horrible old white men. They were so old that they were geriatrics, sagging at the seams, couldn't remember their own name, white men, right?
00:16:01
Speaker
unless they use Google Gemini to get their answer, in which case it may potentially be different. Yeah, it might look a little more diverse if we prompt that into Google Gemini. But we have this image and I don't know where it comes from, maybe our US history textbooks, the paintings that we see of the founding fathers, statues in Washington, DC. And objectively, it's just not true. But that over the last several decades has been the strategy by people in power to convince young people
00:16:28
Speaker
that it's not your time to lead, that you don't have something unique to offer to our political system or to our culture. You're too young, you're too uneducated, sit down, shut up, wait your turn. And when I was working in Washington DC in particular, this manifested in so many different ways, but especially in the United States Congress, when you have a job there, there's sort of this expectation that it works like a factory. You have to show up and do your time as the unpaid intern.
00:16:53
Speaker
and you give tours of the building and then after that you might get a job paying like fifteen thousand dollars a year nothing to answer the phones and to answer emails and get the senator their coffee and then maybe you might be able to write legislation after three or four years then and then you might be a chief of staff for an office and if you're really really lucky and you've proved your time
00:17:13
Speaker
The party might tap you to run for office someday later down the line, but the likelihood of that is extremely low. That is fundamentally juxtaposed to what our country's foundation is. Amazingly, this old white men narrative applies far more today to 2024 than it ever did in 1776. Just the other day, we all watched the State of the Union here in the United States.
00:17:38
Speaker
and as i was watching the tv with most of the executive branch and the supreme court and all of congress i felt like i was watching the world's most expensive nursing home like it was the most frustrating feeling in the entire world because these are people who don't know their own name who can't make it up a flight of stairs who have strokes in the middle of press conferences
00:17:57
Speaker
It's a really frightening reality with a generation of people who refuse to cede power, who refuse to let go of the reins, or even at the very least give the next generation a seat at the table. And when I say next generation, I don't just mean Gen Z, Gen Z. These are baby boomers who have refused to include Gen X or millennials or Gen Z in the conversation, which is a frightening reality.
00:18:18
Speaker
but on july fourth seventeen seventy six just like we're seeing now in twenty twenty four it was young courageous counter cultural punk rock patriots that were willing to stand up and speak truth to power to those that had manipulated power for far too long to try to give liberty and truth and goodness and morality
00:18:38
Speaker
to the next generation. James Monroe was only 18 on July 4th, 1776. Aaron Burr was 20. Alexander Hamilton was 21. James Madison was 25. Thomas Jefferson was only 33 years old on July 4th, 1776. So in the context of Western civilization, I'm noticing this pattern of the same people being elected into office every two, four, or six years, depending on their position.
00:19:06
Speaker
They refuse to leave and they gaslight voters into thinking there's all these problems that they haven't had forty fifty sixty years.
00:19:13
Speaker
in Washington to solve and they are the only people able to do it. Everybody else is uneducated, everybody else is stupid, everybody else lacks the experience to do so, and therefore they need to remain in positions of power while they lie to you and say, it was old people then, it's still old people now running the system, when that's just not true. That's exactly what led to a revolution in 1776 to begin with.
00:19:37
Speaker
I want to pick up on that line, punk rock patriots, you know, it's a lovely term, but if I was to question it, question that sort of rebellious ethos, I would point to the data that says that Gen Z and younger people are having sex less, they're drinking less, they're going out less. If you actually look at some of these data points and I'll stand up to say millennials here, they are considerably more boring than the millennial generation and even the Gen X above me.
00:20:02
Speaker
How do you respond to those sorts of changing dynamics around the way that Gen Z are living their lives? I think it's a total redefinement of what punk rock means,
Gen Z's Reinterpretation of Counter-Culture
00:20:12
Speaker
right? I mean, we started the interview with this, but it used to be that being wildly promiscuous and doing lots of drugs and drinking lots of alcohol at a young age is what made you punk rock. When we've been told that you can do anything in society, that there are no consequences to your actions,
00:20:28
Speaker
that my truth is different from your truth. My system of morality is different from your system of morality. There are no parameters whatsoever to what is acceptable behavior in society now. There is kind of nothing appealing as being rebellious with sleeping around and drinking a lot of alcohol and doing a lot of drugs because that's become the norm. Look at states like Oregon, for example, which became the first state a few years ago to decriminalize all drugs. It was an incredibly radical decision.
00:20:57
Speaker
for them to do that at the time. It wreaked so much havoc on their society that just last week they had to walk it all back and recrymalize all of those drugs. And I think that's such an interesting image for our country. I mean, we could go point by point here, but let's talk about sex with Generation Z. Everybody is shocked and amazed that teenagers are having record low numbers of premarital sex
00:21:19
Speaker
There isn't a huge drive for hookup culture the same way that that existed with millennials and dating app companies are freaking out about how to retain Gen Z as a customer base because we're just deleting these apps. When you've been told, sleep with anybody that you want, date as many people as you possibly can, maybe even all at the same time because that's cool and vogue now. Never ever plan on commitment because that's going to come at the expense of your happiness and your own personal life.
00:21:45
Speaker
The coolest punk rock radical counter cultural thing to do is dare to actually fall in love and commit your life to somebody and get married because everybody around you is telling you don't get married or else.
00:21:59
Speaker
The exact same thing can be said for drinking. Gen Z has been known to get a nickname in the United States as the sober, curious generation. There's a huge push for holistic wellness and health right now with this generation. And I think a lot of that came post COVID and wanting to rebel against the pharmaceutical industry, which constantly gave us all of the parameters for how we could live our life. You can't go to school. You can't have a job. You can't hang out with your grandma on Thanksgiving dinner day.
00:22:26
Speaker
You certainly can't go on a date unless you take this experimental thing in your arm that we tell you you need to be a functioning member of society. So we're really questioning everything that we put in our bodies and saying, is that really good for me? I don't know. And if everybody's telling me to do it, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I should go in the opposite direction.
00:22:44
Speaker
When you were speaking there, my mind went to potential differences between the sexes on these notions. So when I was 18 or when my parents were 18, there would have been a difference between men and women in terms of how hookup culture was perceived. And a lot of it was incredibly unfair. You know, if the guy hooks up with these chicks, then he's a jock or he's successful. And if if a girl does it, she's a slut.
00:23:07
Speaker
How does that play into this conversation? Are there differences in how these perceptions are evolving between men and women?
Impact of Modern Feminism and Gender Perceptions
00:23:16
Speaker
Absolutely. It would be impossible for there not to be because, shocker, men and women are different. I have two degrees in biomedical sciences, so we can say that that is following the science to say that. There's a lot of criticism for young women in particular from the right in America because if you start looking at cultural and political trends, young men, as I already mentioned, are going overwhelmingly to the right, like as far to the right as they possibly can.
00:23:41
Speaker
And I think a lot of that is manifesting from the last several decades with the left in society attacking anything masculine as toxic.
00:23:50
Speaker
that if you had anything to do with true manhood, you were this bigoted evil archetype of all things bad with society and it needed to be outlawed in some way, shape or form. And so that consistent attack on masculinity necessitated beautiful, strong voices to encourage young men to embrace their masculinity. People like Jordan Peterson, for example, who is universally beloved by Generation Z young men,
00:24:15
Speaker
The left is now replicating that same targeted attack on gender, but this time on women and femininity. It's just happening decades later. So what do I mean by that? For example, we can't really even say woman in America today because we don't have a definition for what that is. You can't call yourself a mother. You're a birthing person. You can't call yourself a woman with her period. You're a person who menstruates or a person who uses
00:24:42
Speaker
tampons, chest feeders has become an actual word that's used in clinical medical settings in the United States and across the world as well in the UK as well. Because we are actually stimulating artificial lactation in biological men through artificial chemicals and hormones so that they can breastfeed their children at the expense of their child. I mean, it is crazy, crazy, crazy stuff. And this onslaught of attack on femininity and womanhood
00:25:09
Speaker
that's often packaged in this ra ra ra modern feminism pink box is doing the exact same thing to young women that it did for young men. We're at the initial stage of that right now where I think a lot of people have fallen for those lies, but I'm looking around at young women and realizing they are miserable. I mean, across the board, young women are devastated by the lies that the left have offered to us culturally.
00:25:34
Speaker
About a year ago right now, I had the chance to appear on a pretty viral dating podcast in the United States called The Whatever Podcast, which always blows up on social media. I'm actually going back on Tuesday to do it all over again, so this should be fun. But generally speaking, they feature only fans, content creators, and pornography actresses, and very radical leftist people.
00:25:55
Speaker
occasionally they'll bring a pretty conservative traditional person on as well. And I went into the experience thinking I'm going to have nothing in common with these young women. We're going to fight the whole time. I don't usually do media like this. I'm not opposed to it, but it's just really out of my comfort zone. And I was shocked and my whole defensive wall came down over the course of our five hour podcast conversation. When every woman sitting around this table, including an OnlyFans creator and a pornography actress and a recovering sex addict,
00:26:22
Speaker
All of these girls said that they had quit their birth control within the last year because they were tired of feeling sick and depressed and anxious all the time. Every one of them said they felt personally heartbroken by what hookup culture had done to their life, that they were tired of sleeping with a new guy every weekend where they couldn't remember his name and they're coming into their late twenties or early thirties, realizing my career did not have to come at the expense of a meaningful relationship.
00:26:47
Speaker
And now the pool is so much smaller. What do I do with that? Every single one of them said that they felt modern feminism had lied to them throughout their lifetime, even if these young women might still self identify themselves as liberal or on the left or voting for the Democrat party. So you're watching this emptiness moment that is so culturally widespread for young women that our CDC said that in 2021, one in three teenage girls
00:27:14
Speaker
seriously contemplated taking her own life. And sadly, I don't doubt it because of just how many lies are constantly bombarding young women. And that's exactly the pattern that we saw with young men five, six years ago. And so that cultural pendulum swift pendulum swing is still coming. And I think it's coming very swiftly. But I think young women are just experiencing this at a different time than young men have across the board, though, we're just tired of being lied to.
00:27:42
Speaker
The analogy of a pendulum is very apt here because I think the starting point of the feminist movement was incredibly noble and is the right motive of equality between the sexes. But then some of the outcomes of that pendulum as it potentially shifts are problematic to use that awful modern term. I don't think I've ever said this on this podcast before. My sister won the bachelor in Australia and she's so cool.
00:28:06
Speaker
Yeah, but there was an interesting mini controversy she got into when one of the questions she got asked on Instagram was, okay, you know, you're on reality TV. Are you going to set up an OnlyFans account?
00:28:18
Speaker
And she basically said, look,
Progressivism and Societal Division
00:28:20
Speaker
you know what? She's actually married to the bachelor. So she's, she's pretty happy to it. Not for me. You do you, but not for me. And it had this bizarre mini backlash against it where basically by being perceived as not supporting women, uh, who were following that particular lifestyle, it was almost being anti-feminist. And there are these very weird offshoots of what is again, a really normal.
00:28:44
Speaker
good goal of gender equality, but then the weird ways that that manifests. The problem with progressivism, I say this all the time, is not where it started or what the intention came from.
00:28:58
Speaker
It's that you've created this culture of constant progress that you feel the need to change things for the sake of progress, even when you've already accomplished what your original goal was. If you look at the civil rights movement in the United States, if you look at the feminist movement, the suffragette movement, all of these beautiful, wonderful causes that are so important to learn about historically, for whatever reason now, modern culture has necessitated taking those even further beyond what their original intended goal was to just
00:29:28
Speaker
further divide and further cause controversy and further progress that ironically regressing a lot of those movements in a really shocking way for people.
00:29:38
Speaker
But when you constantly tell people, we have to be progressing, we have to be changing, we have to be doing whatever, then you will eventually run into a time where everybody just kind of eats their own. I mean, there's no satisfaction, there's no unity, there's no opportunity for forward growth as a society because everything always has to be broken down and deconstructed and rebuilt from the ground up when it's even not productive for society.
00:30:02
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. That's the view of young women today. I'm interested in what I think is, you know, a crisis of purpose amongst many young men. We do live in a society which is increasingly less religious. I think that decline is happening more slowly in the US than say in Australia or the UK or Canada, but it is still happening. Personally, I still think that you can have a framework for morality if you're not religious. I personally am not religious, but I understand its value as a moral
00:30:29
Speaker
organizing framework, the combination of that and the tax on traditional masculinity are leading to this sort of crisis amongst young men. How do you reflect on that and what are you seeing amongst Gen Z in that regard?
00:30:44
Speaker
I was at an event a couple of weeks ago and was listening to Dennis Prager give a speech. I've worked with Dennis many times over the last several years. My first job out of college was an internship with his company PragerU, and he and Jordan Peterson alike have been such profound voices on this topic, even if people don't necessarily share the same lifestyle with them, right? So I personally am Catholic, Dennis is an Orthodox Jew.
00:31:08
Speaker
Jordan Peterson, I think, is still exploring a lot of that stuff for himself and his own family. But every one of these speakers, be it Dennis or Jordan or any of the leading voices on these topics in Western culture at large, not just the United States, sort of have a similar vein of what they say that even if you personally are not religious, society necessitates religion, society necessitates God, because without God, there is no wisdom.
00:31:35
Speaker
And Dennis was telling a story in this speech that I was watching him give about his time in graduate school studying communism at Columbia and feeling very frustrated by all of his professors embracing communism and how unenlightened he felt that was and how backwards it was from culture and society at the time. And it kind of just hit him with this epiphany. There is no God on my college campus. There is no God at Columbia. So there is no wisdom at Columbia. And he broke this down in a fascinating, fascinating way.
00:32:04
Speaker
that it doesn't necessarily look like closing your eyes and imagining yourself as a very devoutly religious person or following a certain religious tradition but when you believe societally and from the general accepted code in the culture that you live in that there's something bigger than yourself which was exactly the idea behind the founding fathers that there's something bigger
Religion and Moral Frameworks in Society
00:32:25
Speaker
than ourselves that gives us inherent dignity and inherent rights
00:32:29
Speaker
that the government people who can be corruptible in positions of power cannot give or take away that creates a vertical code for morality in society.
00:32:39
Speaker
where we know something up here is good and should be revered and we know something down here is evil and should be stamped out by society. But when you take that away, when you say there is no thing out there or there's no moral code even out there that is bigger than humanity, everything is subjective. So my morals and values are different than yours. My truth is different from yours.
00:33:00
Speaker
you get this horizontal playing field where all of the competing interests over here are fighting with all of the competing interests over here and it really becomes a battle for who can be the loudest and who can silence the other side more effectively that is exactly what you are seeing in western culture today it's the people who have strategically manipulated positions of power not just politically in government structure.
00:33:24
Speaker
but in education, in entertainment, in the legacy media, in journalism, in politics, in the church and everything in between who have created a culture where all of these competing interests are fighting. We don't have a vertical morality hierarchy. And therefore, any time you disagree with the approved narrative by those people in power, you have to be silenced to the point that they are debating in Canada right now to pass a bill called the Online Harms Act.
00:33:53
Speaker
that would give the government the power to put you in a life sentence in prison if you engage in what the government at the time deems to be hate speech and even gives the government the opportunity to show up at your door if they think you might commit an act of hate speech and put you under house arrest. The UK is determining whether or not they want to ban entire social media platforms
00:34:16
Speaker
like Rumble, because one guy on the platform, Russell Brand, was accused of sexual assault, was never arrested, certainly was never convicted or charged with any of these crimes. But just because the accusation was there, now the entire platform is bad for society because it creates different ideas than the approved narrative. And we have to silence the entire thing.
00:34:37
Speaker
And I like how Dennis tied that back to something bigger than ourselves, right? I'm a very religious person. It's kind of impossible for me to separate my political values with my religious values, but I don't think that's exclusionary to help people understand there has to be something bigger than ourselves, even if it's just a moral code that's bigger than humanity. Because look what's happened over the last 100 or so years in society when we've taken that vertical away
00:35:05
Speaker
and we've allowed the horizontal to thrive. It's a really dark place that's making 2024 look a whole lot more like George Orwell's 1984. There are parts there that I wholeheartedly agree with, and as you can imagine as an atheist, there are parts that I disagree with. That vertical works relatively nicely when we're talking about our nice, cozy Judeo-Christian values. I support Judeo-Christian values.
00:35:30
Speaker
I think they work less well when that vertical is, say, Islamism. Islamism is on the rise in the US, even more so in the UK, where I think it's becoming a real problem. I would say some of the values that are interlinked, many of the values that are interlinked would say Islamism in terms of the religion and then the way that it then thinks about morality.
00:35:50
Speaker
just about the lack of separation between church and state, the treatment of women, the use of violence to be able to achieve an end. All this stuff we can say, that's not particularly a vertical that I want to have primacy in society. So would you say that what you're saying is a defense of the importance of that Judeo-Christian vertical or of the importance of a belief in something full stop?
00:36:14
Speaker
I would fight day in and day out and I will continuing to go forward for Judeo-Christian values. I mean, that's what made Western civilization so unique and so great. I think that competing horizontal rather than the vertical is what's allowing a lot of those ideas to thrive, right?
00:36:30
Speaker
Well, your code of morality is just as valid as my code of morality and we lack the opportunity to see good and evil objectively by society. It's a really dangerous place to be in and this defense of Islamism that a lot of people are bringing into the fold culturally right now is a pretty frightening reality. You know, not a lot of people want to talk about this, especially right now because
00:36:53
Speaker
Everybody will come after you on Instagram or on TikTok and they'll say you horrible, horrible person. You're promoting genocide. You're doing all these horrible things if you say that this is wrong, but I cannot and I don't think any objectively sane person
00:37:08
Speaker
Nobody can look at the footage from October 7th and be morally comfortable with that if we embrace an objective code of good or evil. I was in New York City a couple of weeks ago for my book launch and all over the city on lamp posts are stickers with the Palestine flag saying, rape is resistance and babies are occupiers too. And I think of that video from October 7th of a baby being baked alive in an oven.
00:37:38
Speaker
Just because because that's justified resistance, because that's a meaningful moral fight to embrace in society. We've allowed the competing horizontal to become so combative and so normalized that millions, billions of people all over the world looked at that happening through our phone screens. And we all did. There was no escaping it. It was everywhere. And half the planet decided, yeah, that's OK.
00:38:05
Speaker
That's okay. I'm comfortable with that. If that doesn't scream a necessity for Judeo-Christian values, I don't know what does. But it's interesting that you say Islam is on the rise because it is. It's actually the fastest growing religion in the entire world right now. It certainly is the fastest growing religion in America right now. And I think a lot of that is coming from a lack of structure in society. I've talked repeatedly throughout the podcast about
00:38:30
Speaker
how anything goes and there's no consequences for your actions, just do whatever you want. And that's going to make you really happy has become the heartbeat of postmodern American culture. Well, a stark contrast to that is structured religion. And I think a lot of people are finding comfort in the extreme, extreme structure and tradition of Islam, which is a frightening reality, I think, because we're seeing that moral code of Judeo-Christian Western culture really overturned in the process.
00:39:01
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with that. My question would be, can you still have Judeo-Christian values in a society without actually believing in a higher power? Personally, I would argue no. But I do think that there's opportunity for great conversation there. And what I love about what the conservative movement in America is doing right now, particularly with these young punk rock patriots fighting for goodness, is that we're not saying you have to sit next to me in my exact same denomination of church every Sunday, and you have to agree with every single thing that I agree with.
00:39:30
Speaker
We're not even saying you have to have the same sexual orientation or racial background as me. Frankly, you don't even really need to be overtly conservative with a capital C politically in order to realize that the authoritarian left is destroying society at breakneck pace. And so you're watching this
00:39:48
Speaker
big tent coalition, so to speak, really unified together and link arms with classical liberals with libertarians with very traditionally conservative people with very religious people, all predicated on this idea that the values that made our country in the first place freedom of expression, the freedom to criticize those in power,
00:40:07
Speaker
the freedom to build your own american dream for entrepreneurship for education for creating a society that's better every year than the one that we left it that is worth fighting for and it's worth preserving and unifying over the left has a message of constant division constantly if you don't agree with every single bullet point on this list that we hand you
00:40:27
Speaker
Which by the way changes every single day because we have no sense of morality. You're out of the club. You're excommunicated and we hate you now and you're a bigoted horrible homophobic transphobic white supremacist Nazi. Immediately. You've seen that with so many people like Tulsi Gabbard for example. Lots and lots of more liberal celebrities that have questioned some of these things. The moment you question you are excommunicated from the club.
00:40:49
Speaker
But I'm watching the opposite happen right now with everybody fighting against that. I wouldn't even say conservatives, but good hearted, moral people fighting for objective truth in a society that's rejecting the very concept of objective truth, unifying together to fight for good again.
00:41:07
Speaker
Yeah, the funniest example of that for me is old school feminists aligning with social conservatives against this whole trans ideology. You've got some very funny alignments there that are taking place. I want to pivot because I want to get your thoughts on TikTok and the way that that is changing how young people access information, whether it's a good or a bad thing.
TikTok's Influence on Gen Z and Censorship Concerns
00:41:27
Speaker
I don't really have a question here other than TikTok, just give me your spiel. I have not made a lot of friends, I'll tell you Will, over the last several months discussing my defense of TikTok
00:41:37
Speaker
as a platform, but I think it's important to go all the way back to two years ago this month. Meta hired a conservative lobbying firm out of Washington DC called Targeted Victory for an insane amount of money, specifically with the goal of turning the tide of public opinion against TikTok. And how they wanted to do that was creating legislation to ban the platform.
00:42:00
Speaker
by placing op-eds in the media throughout the next several years to try to convince people that it's this horrible national security concern and to take advantage of more conservative people in society to think that this horrible degenerate content is destroying America for the next generation. The reason why they did that two years ago this week is META had been caught red-handed
00:42:21
Speaker
selling your data to the CCP, which nobody wants to talk about, but is an inconvenient reality for what's happening in the United States. So over the last several years, I've been incredibly diligent in doing my research about the platform. Personally, I use it. I use it every day, not just as an opportunity to consume news and content, which I do, but also to create to try to influence culture.
00:42:45
Speaker
and change it from the inside out with our generation. And the reason I made that decision is because 170 million Americans use TikTok at least on a monthly basis and 65, 70% of those people are Gen Zers. If you do the math, there are only 70 million of us in our generation period. So that's almost every single member of our generation that is regularly using this platform.
00:43:08
Speaker
And it's where we're looking things up to determine everything from where we go to dinner on Friday night to what song is trending to who we should vote for for president of the United States. So you can't really claim to be fighting a supposed culture war for the next generation if you're not willing to go where culture is. And I wanted to put my money where my mouth is. But as for all of these concerns with data security, not to go into a literal PhD dissertation level conversation about this because I can talk about it for 13 hours. But
00:43:38
Speaker
I find it really disconcerting so many people have jumped on this bandwagon of clutches pearls china is obtaining your data through tiktok when there is very little to no actual concrete evidence to support that claim theoretically could they based on chinese legal structure.
00:43:57
Speaker
Yes, but currently TikTok data is all routed through the United States through a project called Project Texas, where all of the servers for American users on the platform are operating on American soil. Should we have a conversation about China having the potential access for this? Yes, absolutely. But while our lawmakers unilaterally scream about China using this platform to
00:44:19
Speaker
covertly as a Trojan horse change American values. They are allowing China to buy millions of acres of farmland all across the United States to shut down our agriculture industry. They are allowing China to fly spy balloons across the entire length of our country, not once, but actually multiple times. And instead of doing something about it, we make memes about it. They allow the Chinese to do underhanded deals with the president of the United States, which is a very concerning reality. They've infiltrated our school curriculum.
00:44:48
Speaker
and algorithms for every other social media company we know that meta twitter airbnb and more have sold your data illegally to the ccp so it's not really about china and if that's the case. What is it really about if you start reading the legislation there are several bills in circulation but that congress is debating to quote unquote band tick tock not.
00:45:10
Speaker
once is tiktok mentioned as a platform in these bills because the truth is it has nothing to do with banning one social media platform what it really does is give unelected bureaucrats in the department of commerce unilateral unregulated government control to silence people to shut down entire apps websites to take away your personal connectivity on the internet because you might be deemed an enemy of the state
00:45:37
Speaker
so they can impact your online banking activities the video games that you're playing the social media content that you're producing which especially is important today with the era of citizen journalism and podcast just like this. And so it's very shocking to me that so many people are unable to see the tea leaves on this one but maybe the best convincing argument i have for people on why this is
00:45:58
Speaker
actually a Trojan horse for our own censorship in the United States, is that our Congress can't agree on anything. They can't agree on what to do about school curriculum. They can't agree on what number to put on the next blank check to Zelensky for the war in Ukraine. They can't agree on whether or not we even have a southern border, let alone how to protect our southern border and immigration. These people can't even agree on what the definition of a woman is.
00:46:22
Speaker
the most basic biological questions of all human history, and yet 90 plus percent of them are in total agreement that we must ban TikTok. It is in the interest of national security and we're doing it to save the children. I don't trust the government when they claim to save the children on any other industry, so I'm not going to start trusting them on this one. I'm a libertarian. You won't find a more passionate argument against government censorship and control than from me, but
00:46:52
Speaker
There's two things going on here, right? And I think one of the problems from people who are pushing this sort of legislation is combining the whole cultural evil thing with the national security thing and then making them intermingled cultural evil thing. People can do what they want. I don't really care on the national security thing. The one pushback or question that I would have is if there is a theoretical opportunity for a adversary of the United States or an adversary of the West to be able to basically build a massive data gathering platform in the U S.
00:47:22
Speaker
With the distinct possibility, I think it's probably greater than 50% that there will be some sort of a conflict between China and the US in the next five years. Isn't that theoretical possibility of having that access enough of a reason to at least take this out of Chinese owned hands?
00:47:40
Speaker
Sure. And that's a wonderful conversation for us to be having. Unfortunately, that's not really the conversation that's happening. And I would believe that that was the incentive far easily, far more easily. If the legislation read no US company is allowed to sell your data to the CCP anymore, period.
00:47:58
Speaker
No Chinese adversary entity is able to buy American land on American soil anymore, period. The state of Florida, where I live today, passed that in our state legislature not too long ago, and yet nobody's even really introduced it at the national level. So yes and no. Of course, that's a conversation worth having, and China is our adversary. I think that's an important distinction to make, because a lot of people, including arguably our president, would be unable to make that distinction today.
00:48:25
Speaker
But if that was the case, why does the legislation specifically target social media companies? And why is it so, so, so heavy handed in allowing our own government to take action in silencing certain websites and silencing certain individuals and in trying American citizens as foreign enemies of the state? Really what this looks like to me is a direct comparison to the Patriot Act. It's a modern Patriot Act of the digital age.
00:48:54
Speaker
and i have to believe based on all of the research that i've done all of the bills that i've read this isn't really about china that's a very convenient excuse for them to make an election year to posture themselves as saying we are strong on national security here's why you need to reelect me for congress
00:49:09
Speaker
for the zillionth time. But really what it's about is censorship for the American people and a really scary reality for our own government embracing the same type of authoritarianism that the CCP does every day, but we call ourselves the good guy in the process.
00:49:25
Speaker
My final question, and it goes to the advocacy of freedom and liberty to a Gen Z audience. The amount of people throughout human history of genuinely valued freedom and liberty is relatively small. Most people just want things to keep buggering on and to maintain a feeling of safety.
Post-COVID Liberty and Government Overreach
00:49:44
Speaker
I've been distressed when we look at, say, the COVID era that that was particularly pronounced. And something which I'm worried about is that even if that has been relatively small, that desire for liberty throughout history, it's getting smaller and smaller. How do you make the argument for freedom and for individual liberty to a Gen Z population that has gone out of the COVID era, that's heard about pandemics, that's heard about how stuffed the world is today? How do you continue to make that argument for liberty to them?
00:50:11
Speaker
It has never been more true than today that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. And I think COVID was so eye-opening to so many people all over the world that even though we claim to live in free countries, far more often than not our policies don't actually enshrine the freedom and liberty that we fought so hard to preserve in our systems of governance.
00:50:33
Speaker
Luckily, because of dark chapters like that, and arguably because of the dark chapters of leftism in every single one of our cultural institutions in America today, Gen Z is getting a very interesting front row seat all over the world to what happens when freedom gets taken away.
00:50:51
Speaker
Arguably we have less freedom of expression now than we have throughout my entire lifetime as we spend all of our time in this public square and it's so easy to have your voice taken away from you if you don't follow the approved mainstream narrative.
00:51:05
Speaker
You get failing grades on your papers or on your exams on your college campus. If you don't agree with the authoritarian viewpoint of your professor, you'll be locked in prison or investigated by the FBI if you share a certain meme today in social media. So this is turning into a very real, real consequence and reality for people. And COVID in particular, I mean, we were actually told by our governing bodies that we couldn't go to church. We couldn't go to school. We couldn't hang out with our friends. We couldn't go to our jobs. We couldn't go on dates.
00:51:35
Speaker
We couldn't have a wedding. We couldn't go to funerals. We couldn't live our day to day lives unless we complied with the approved narrative as it existed at the time, which now conveniently four years later, everyone is realizing was full of crap and the media is starting to admit that as well. So we're in this unique time where freedom is more constrained than it ever has been throughout my lifetime. But that's also the perfect illustration for why we need to fight for it today. Because if we lack the opportunity
00:52:03
Speaker
to embrace a tiny bit of courage and to speak up for liberty now in two thousand twenty four we're losing the opportunity to do so next year or five years from now or ten years from now and that sense of urgency is so palpable within our generation realizing we can't wait for permission to lead we can't wait for
00:52:22
Speaker
the green light from those older than us to impact culture and politics for the better or just to simply fight for freedom and that doesn't have to look like the most radical rocket science level aspect of fighting it doesn't mean signing up for the armed forces doesn't necessarily mean running for office yourself it doesn't mean
00:52:39
Speaker
having to get connections to go on international TV programs. Right now we have a unique tool at our disposal that anybody can make a difference by recording yourself in your dorm room on your university campus or making a 15 second video walking home from work or from school talking about what's going on in the world. And you can have a bigger impact than entire governments, than the president of the United States, than the legacy media combined just by being willing to speak the truth.
00:53:06
Speaker
Wonderful message Isabelle. And I think it's a message which is just as relevant to a kid in Boise, Idaho or the outskirts of Sydney or Nottingham in the United Kingdom. This is something which we are seeing across the West is a fight for Western civilization and the way that you are putting Gen Z at the center of that is immensely impressive. Congratulations on the book. I strongly recommend everyone goes out and gets it. Thank you very much for coming on Australiana. Thank you so much for having me.
00:53:35
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.