Millennials and Zoomers Have No Experience With Free Speech As We Once Knew It
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- 8 min read
They've never lived in a truly free and democratic America, which may explain why they're less supportive of it
Karoline Leavitt, Trump II’s trained parrot, is stepping down at the end of the month to take care of her second child. I found her fascinating when she first emerged into the national consciousness as the press secretary for the Liar-in-Chief. All White House press secretaries are professional Pollies, dutifully parroting what their boss wants them to say, and how. She performs her duties with especial gusto.
I can’t watch her; she too-gleefully repeats bald-faced lies just too painful to hear, to her own people, and I wonder if this silly child ever questions or feels embarrassed about the omnipresent cross at her throat. Christian hypocrisy is the most cherished Republican virtue, but what does the young Catholic say in confession? Does she even bother to go?
Perhaps she avoids it altogether.
Every press secretary has to lie to some degree, but Leavitt works for the most dishonest President in U.S. history. Bill Clinton may have stretched the truth on the rack until it screamed like a Manichean heretic, but eventually he came clean with a more inclusive definition of ‘sexual relations’. Trump couldn’t tell the truth if you held a gun to his head.
Leavitt must know on some level that her boss tells nothing but lies all day long. The MAGA-chic gold cross virtue-signals she’s a member of the tribe, not necessarily that she’s anything resembling a Christian, especially as her job description requires her to break the Ninth Commandment daily and repeatedly for a man who’s regularly broken all of them except the one about murder.
The MAGA’s 21st-century Leni Riefenstahl joyfully serves her boss’s propaganda dish cold, glorifying his authoritarian wannabe Reich in service to her career just as Riefenstahl did, both driven by their relentless ambition, communicating lies to their nation. Leavitt’s face glows as she defends even Trump’s genocidal expression to wipe Iran off the map; there’s nothing he can do that she won’t defend or brush off to her journalist toys.
Riefenstahl and Leavitt both knew and know what they were and are doing.
But I may be too hard on her; after all, Leavitt is a conservative artifact of the first generation for whom speech is not necessarily a search for truth so much as an exercise in brand positioning, loyalty testing and partisan weaponry.
She lies and excuses as easily as she breathes. But she grew up in an America that had begun to devalue truth. She knows nothing else.
Born into the anocracy
When I Googled her age - she’s 29 now, born in 1997—I realized she’s a ‘cusper’ - a tail-end Millennial, with the first Zoomers three years ahead. They came of age in what was better described as an America shuffling toward anocracy—not the free or mostly free country into which us Xers and Boomers were born.
Karoline Leavitt’s generation was raised in a newer era in which public speech was no longer about facts, honesty, or, most importantly, dialogue, but about performance, bullying opponents, and above all, controlling the narrative. Both the left and right served as public examples of how to wield power to demonstrate tribal loyalty and receive supportive accolades. Virtue-signalling was for everyone.
I’m not sure exactly when the American belief in truth and honesty died—maybe with George Bush’s contentious first election win, or maybe 9/11—but it’s not surprising that America’s decline is bipartisan. Both political parties embrace authoritarianism, although the party faithful can’t see it or acknowledge it. Today, the right controls liberty and free speech from Washington; the left from everywhere else.
Leavitt represents the Millennials. The first for whom democracy was clearly eroding by the time they were old enough to become conscious of their own existence.
Leavitt became a teenager in 2010. This was the decade that marked the beginning of the early 21st-century bipartisan battles against free speech.
She was raised in a conservative Catholic family and was a Trump fangirl years before she got hired, and became a legal adult in 2018. She was born three years before the closest, most contested federal election in American history and was finger-painting during 9/11. She was 19 when her boss won his first election and U.S. intelligence sources found that Vladimir Putin had pretty certainly meddled in the election, although it was never proven that Trump knew or had anything to do with it.
Washington was broken by the time her generation graduated high school during the dawn of woke dogmatism. The language policing, social media’s emerging cancel culture, book-banning (although America has never not banned books), the crazy-ass victim feminists materializing out of ‘gender studies’ classes, the black obsession with white skin as the secret handshake that grants you membership into everything. Transgender witch hunts against scientific-thinking critics would begin soon.
What we Xers and Boomers have that Leavitt’s generation doesn’t is experience with a truly free, if imperfect America, with less oppressive policies and speech policing.
The bipartisan war on free expression
Karoline Leavitt probably wasn’t paying attention to infant social media in 2007, but the Bush administration had already set forth the 21st century’s conservative anti-First Amendment crusade in the guise of ‘fighting terrorism’. Bush’s Patriot Act’s ‘national security letters’ allowed the federal government to snoop on American reading material. Bush’s bulldogs attacked journalists and other critics of his Iraq War and used the Espionage Act to investigate leaks and intimidate whistleblowers.
The left also geared up in the battle against the First Amendment, outside Washington. Cancel culture reared its ugly head to protect intellectual babies from facts. The first university complaints began trickling out against conservative professors, teachers, and university staff, who pointed out that ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘safe spaces’ were suppressing conservative, or merely alternative, opinions.
For example, in her early document of the rising culture of Millennial safetyism and victimhood-centered grievance culture in her book Who Stole Feminism?, Christina Hoff Sommers argued that such kid glove handling encouraged women to become fragile flowers who were easily damaged by ideas that made them think too much. She argued there should be no such thing as a ‘safe space’ from challenging ideas, and in fact, that’s what universities were designed for - to discomfort the comfortable. To irritate the elites. She described a ‘safe space’ she encountered on a 2015 book tour, enacted specifically for her own campus appearance, a room in which female students “played tapes of frolicking puppy dogs and they had bubbles and games,” which she described as ‘infantilizing’.
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A few years earlier, a woman who tweeted a ‘joke’ about AIDS and whiteness became the first to get fired merely for an ill-considered public jest. Apologies were useless; the New Progressive Left decreed that redemption and forgiveness were critical moral faults, not virtues.
Social media became equality tools for fanatics on both sides, weaponizing influence and followers to destroy those who didn’t agree with you, whether they were on your side or not. The left attacked its own with more vehemence, but conservative self-cannibalism wasn’t absent either.
As campuses across America ignited with a burning desire to make the country ‘safe’ for anyone who felt or at least pretended to be ‘marginalized’ or ‘disadvantaged,’ progressives flexed their new muscles and realized they now had a chance to remake America in their own vision—one of racial and economic equality. That meant, of course, quelling opposing viewpoints.
Campus curricula continued moving away from heterodoxy and anything smelling of ‘right-wing’, coinciding with the rise of increasingly ideological ‘race studies’, ‘gender studies’, and restricting any utterance deemed ‘harmful’, while Obama’s Washington ignored the threat.
By the time Millennials became legal adults Americans censored themselves more effectively by simply refusing to speak out. They needed to feed their families, after all.
Leavitt’s tribe also grew up in a safety-prone world of heightened airline security prompted by 9/11, and heightened surveillance of Americans prompted by a Republican president. Hers was the first generation to grow up online, when they were young and learned easily, unlike the rest of us who had to struggle as adults to understand these newfangled computers.
The federal government warned Americans constantly about vague, potentially forthcoming terrorist attacks to keep them in a state of heightened fear (and easier to control). By 2013, college campuses policed speech and made it dangerous to express a conservative view, or something now deemed conservative that wasn’t before. ‘Trigger warnings’, safe spaces, and deplatforming speakers became de rigueur.
An early example of the conservative fight against free speech emerged in a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project, determining that groups could be prosecuted for ‘material support for terrorism’ even if said material provided detailed peaceful methods of conflict resolution. The Court argued it could lend legitimacy to a terrorist organization and encourage more funding for them.
“Throwing people in jail who are trying to create peace is a poor strategy for fighting terrorism,” commented a senior counterterrorism counselor for Human Rights Watch, which joined the ACLU and eight other groups in filing an amicus brief.
Teaching the value of friction
For those of us on the right and left who would like to ‘reactionarily’ return America to a state of the far more expansive free speech rights we enjoyed in the 20th century, it’s going to mean fighting the dual forces of authoritarian censorship: A right wing that steals your First Amendment rights in the name of ‘national security’, and a left wing that wants safetyism to protect them from emotional discomfort. Except when they’re recording others they think are behaving badly in the Mobile State, which does a better job of policing Americans than the government.
Karoline Leavitt gleefully lying to her own country and the campus activist presenting a petition to the dean demanding ‘trigger warnings’ for Ovid’s Metamorphosis have more in common than they look at first glance: Truth is what someone in authority says it is, not what the actual facts state.
“The heresy of heresies was common sense.” - George Orwell, 1984
Younger generations aren’t going to ‘get it’ unless we re-educate them; they’ve been socialized to believe ‘freedom’ means from uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, or critical thinking. Or that the government knows what’s best for us and we should trust them. It means calling out manufactured call-outs; holding the President and Congress accountable for how they’re fighting free speech, not for it; and that critical thinking is not some fascist colonialist plot.
Reclaiming objective reality
America’s in a bad place. The Zoomers are even less educated and emotionally resilient than the Millennials and many now vote. Zoomers fill town halls cheerleading for socialist leaders yet can’t define ‘socialism’. They can’t name either the river or the sea while they yell a genocidal chant. They’re mad as hell that they can’t get good jobs, and they’re taking it out on the rest of us.
But, America’s not over yet. The older generations still outnumber the younger, although the Boomers are dying. It’s up to us, Generation X, to challenge these newer bad ideas now, their bad candidate selections now, and to support our precious First Amendment. Regardless of party.
The primary problem is that neither side values Enlightenment epistemology, which defines the rational, reasoned, evidence-based search for truth, upon which we can come to an agreement on objective reality. The far left specifically attacks reason and rationalism as ‘colonialist’ or ‘white men’s thinking’ while the right simply denies it. Trump will never acknowledge the Reflecting Pool’s troubles were the result of poor workmanship rather than vandalism; he refuses to respond to the refrain that there’s no evidence of the latter; he believes what he wants to believe, not what’s true.
And here’s the kicker: ideologues can’t be swayed by facts; their belief is their own personal religion. ‘Normies’ have to start speaking out or we won’t deserve the America (or Canada) we once had.
It’s on us, kids. The X-Gen. Put on your superhero suits.
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