'The More I'm Around Young People, the More Panicked I Am'

[Mosby]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP)

"The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am,” Tim Miller told me recently. A prominent anti-Trump commentator, Miller hosts the popular Bulwark Podcast and regularly speaks to students on university campuses. Lately, he has begun to notice something disturbing.

“I was literally arguing with a kid, like, three weeks ago, college kid, who was, like, you know, starting to think that the Jews killed Charlie Kirk,” Miller recounted on his show, amid a discussion about rising anti-Semitism on the American right. The student, he noted, was a “left kid.”

Miller had good reason to be alarmed, because the problem he observed extends well beyond anecdotes. In late 2024, the Democratic data scientist David Shor surveyed nearly 130,000 voters at the behest of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. He found that a quarter of those younger than 25—with negligible differences among Trump and Harris supporters—held an “unfavorable opinion” of “Jewish people.” (Jewish people—not Israelis or Zionists.) By contrast, the older a person was, the less likely they were to express such sentiments.

One year later, an avalanche of data has confirmed what Shor glimpsed and researchers and reporters like myself have argued for years: American anti-Semitism is not primarily a partisan phenomenon, as it is often framed in popular discourse, but a generational one. Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, but they’ve assumed much larger and more sinister proportions in the imagination of the country’s youth.

The Atlantic
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[Biophilic]

1. Good grief. How fast can we go backwards? How fast can we as a nation lose our humanity?

[legallyblondeNYC]

2. It's the algorithms.

[progressoid]

3. Yep.

[Behind the Aegis]

4. This is not at all surprising.

Americans who are middle-aged or older tend to get their information from legacy media outlets, which, for all their flaws, normally have editorial processes that eschew explicitly racist material. Younger Americans, by contrast, are likely to trust and get their news from lightly moderated social-media platforms, which often advantage the extreme opinions, conspiracy theories, and conflict-stoking content that drive engagement. This bifurcation of information has consequences. Figuring out who was responsible for a national calamity, for instance, takes time and investigation. Blaming that calamity on the Jews does not.

They also do not like when we criticize those who refuse to stand-up to anti-Semitism or do it in a milquetoast manner, along the lines of "all bigotries matter". They try to and often succeed in silencing Jewish voices, even in Jewish spaces, because "Jewish anger" is more offensive to them than actual anti-Semitism.

"A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.": (By C.H. Spurgeon, 1859).

This is even more true today when someone can instantly post something to social media and it is taken as gospel. Never mind the proliferation of AI generated fakes and "eye-witness accounts" from people not there, and the ever present 'bots which plague all places on-line.

[question everything]

5. On these pages, too. Many posts quote podcasts which, as you mentioned, have no editorial control.