As an aging baby boomer, the minds of today’s youth are sometimes a little confusing. My wife is a first-generation Gen Xer, my children are all Millennials, and my grandchildren are Gen Z. And it’s Gen Z that one influencer, a supposed pal of Barron Trump, says is leaning surprisingly right-wing politically. He claims his fellow Gen Zers are supporting candidate Donald Trump, who is a member of the Baby Boomer generation (born 1946).
Young Americans are voicing their opinions online following the Trump-Harris debate, and according to one Generation Z influencer, the future does not look glowing for the Democrats.
“Generation Z is in this massive cycle where these experts on these mainstream networks are telling us what to believe and what not to believe. Telling us how terribly Trump performed in the debate. But that’s not what we saw,” revealed Bo Loudon, a friend of Barron Trump, during an appearance on “Mornings with Maria.”
“We saw Kamala Harris lie and mislead us by making us believe what we were supposed to believe and attack the former president for being a terrible human being, telling lie after lie and not checking facts, pitting two moderators against Trump. We saw that,” Loudon continued.
Bo Loudon is right here, of course, as anyone with eyes to see would confirm. The debate was a disgrace to the journalism profession, and ABC should be ashamed of participating in it. But it takes more than one bad debate to influence a generation. Loudon has more examples – but are they enough?
We saw an incredible performance by Donald Trump listing his policies and telling us what he’s going to do, his great actions against the terrible border. And Kamala Harris told us all about what she’s going to do for the border. But she’s had this opportunity since 2021 and she’s done nothing.
There’s a reason Winston Churchill is said to have said (apocryphally), “If a man is not a liberal at 20, he has no heart. If a man is not a conservative at 40, he has no brain.” The quote may be apocryphal, but that doesn’t make it any less true; if we paint with a very broad brush, younger people tend to lean more to the left than their older counterparts. With age, after all, comes wisdom, or so we should hope.
See also: Young people are leaving the Democratic Party in droves and moving to the Republicans
Gen Z not as “stupid” as Kamala thinks? They don’t buy the “popularity contest” that the Democrats are trying to sell
But while stories like this are witty and give us hope, some words of warning are in order.
This is just one young man, and a buddy of Barron Trump’s at that, which certainly doesn’t hurt the vastness of his social media network. Speaking of the network, Bo Loudon apparently “influences” a legion of followers, or even a few legions if we take his claim of 200,000 social media followers at face value. That’s a sizable block of young people, but it’s by no means clear that they all 1) agree with him and 2) will vote if they do; younger voters have historically not turned out in as immense numbers as older ones.
While we can and should remain skeptical, we hope that Bo Loudon can convince at least a few people. It is almost certain that the 2024 presidential election will be nerve-wracking and every vote will count.
