THE FEDERALIST: Why Ignorant Young Americans Like Buttigieg, AOC, And David Hogg Should Scare You

Why Ignorant Young Americans Like Buttigieg, AOC, And David Hogg Should Scare You

From media, to entertainment, to finance and big business, all must abide by the dictates of a new religious class, the priests of progressivism.

By Jarrett Stepman
FEBRUARY 11, 2020


The shallow, woke millennial and Generation Z elite is coming for you, and they certainly don’t abide by the dictum, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

Our next generation ruling class is now being consumed by what is best described as the “Great Awokening.” From the Me Too movement, to the war on history, to the embrace of intersectionality to explain the world, they are now driven by the unfinished work of fundamentally transforming America. They like socialism too, although they frequently have little concept of what it means in reality.

They’re shallow but serious. Serious, because today’s swell of young, college-educated millennials and now even upcoming Gen Zers — often stripped of religion but filled with religious zeal — are emerging to occupy newsrooms and boardrooms and increasingly compose the base of the Democratic Party.

Young Politicians Don’t Know History

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the millennial Democratic congresswoman from New York who often boasts about her economics degree, said in a recent Instagram video, “Famed economist Milton Keynes predicted that by 2030, GDP and technology would have advanced so much that it would allow everyday people to work as little as 15 hours a week and provide for their families.”

Milton Keynes is not a famed economist. Ocasio-Cortez appears to have spliced together the names of John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, and mispronounced Keynes to boot. Milton Keynes was, however, the name used by a character in a skit from the British comedy show “Yes, Minister” to demonstrate a banker’s cluelessness about economics.

Ocasio-Cortez quickly backtracked and said it was a typo. Given her now long list of other gaffes, it’s hard not to dismiss her expertise.

But Ocasio-Cortez went to Boston University. Perhaps things are looking better in our prestigious, world-class Ivy Leagues. Then again, maybe not.

Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a Harvard University graduate who is now running for president, is often touted as a smart and savvy thinker. Buttigieg recently said, absurdly, “The people who wrote the Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing.”

This statement was not just wrong — the founders well understood slavery was a bad thing, setting in motion the ideas and actions that would put it to an end — but it also belied a leftist arrogance about thinking we’re smarter and more moral than people in the past.

David Hogg Creates Fake History

One sees this same combination of shallowness and certitude with David Hogg, the Gen Z, Parkland shooting survivor whom America’s legacy media turned into the face of the gun-control movement. Hogg attends Harvard University. This member of the younger cohort is filled with even more militant zeal.

Smug, penitent, and petulant, Hogg has become almost a caricature of the activist, left-wing college student who now thinks he knows all about everything because he read a few chapters of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” Hogg once ruthlessly and unabashedly barked, “Our parents don’t know how to use a f-cking democracy, so we have to.”

A gander at Hogg’s Twitter account reveals a flurry of political advocacy for various Democratic causes — gun control most prominent, of course — Trump bashing, and a long series of woke-isms. However, it’s Hogg’s takes on history that are truly remarkable for their ability to squeeze and twist any historical analogy and connection to fit his modern political virtue-signaling. Take this tweet from 2018, where Hogg said that only nonviolent movements, such as Mahatma Ghandi’s, lead to change.

David Hogg
✔
@davidhogg111
Throughout history violence and war only creates more of itself for example WWI->WWII->Cold War ->Korean War->Vietnam and up to today. While nonviolent moments like Gandhi’s, the suffrage movement or Civil Rights movement lead to peace and long lasting change. Ours will too.

22.1K
6:00 PM - Apr 29, 2018

This sloganeering has no basis in reality. Would pacifism have stopped Nazi Germany? Would slavery have been abolished in the United States in 1865 without the power and violence conducted by the Union Army? The partition of India was a horrifically violent affair, with a legacy of simmering tensions that continually boil over into modern bloodshed. Civil rights and the very right to life was often preserved for black Americans only through gun ownership.

Ida B. Wells, one of the founders of the NAACP, said that for black Americans, the “Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” This muddles things, however, so history must be changed. And changed it was in a more recent tweet that would have perhaps confused Wells.

David Hogg
✔
@davidhogg111
This is a tweet for for the founders of the gun violence prevention movement started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and non binary people that never got on the news or in most history books.

We may not know all your names but thank you.

3,736
8:07 PM - Jan 26, 2020

This is little more than a carefully calibrated, ahistoric word salad, but he made sure to lump every “marginalized” group into the larger cause of gun control — and the policy priorities of the Democratic Party — so it’s all good.

But then Hogg blew it. His ability to decipher the encyclopedia of intersectionality was not yet advanced enough, even after his time spent at Harvard. Hogg dared to praise Abraham Lincoln.

David Hogg
✔
@davidhogg111
Lincoln was a really good president.

1,241
11:28 AM - Feb 5, 2020

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