Okay zoomer. Let's go line-by-line here.
First of all, the Harvard-Harris poll is not "quite misleading." And providing one article that suggests that it may have been confounded by Gen Z respondents' inability to differentiate between Hamas and Palestinian people at large really just reinforces the point. This is not an abnormal sample size, though like everything in experimentation, there's always an error margin. That's why we have the rampant surge of college antisemitism to illustrate how this is playing out IRL, and the trackable online behavior shamelessly espoused by countless zoomers to corroborate what the extent of this phenomenon looks like at this moment.
You are triggered. Not even the very study that you attempt to deny with one link to an op-ed in an Austin newspaper suggests that the "majority" of your generation supports terrorism. The actual number was 48% of Gen Zers supporting Hamas. That's not a majority, dear. But it's too many; for so many people (even if nothing else, just the thousands of people pouring out support on social media alone) to shamelessly champion terrorism is a scourge on a generation. And yes, obviously #notallwhoevers.
I would say try to be a little less fragile about when people comment on your generation (a little advice from a millennial who knows about such things), but the reality is that you're not concerned about being lumped in with these people because you AREN'T like them - you're concerned about being lumped in with these people because, to the point of the very article you linked, you are indeed one of the same silly children who can't seem to meaningfully separate terror from liberation and fact from fiction.
Your kneejerk reaction that the Left is only capable of Nazism and reactionary, dangerous thinking when it's a response to far-Right ideology is inaccurate; look up a little something called the horseshoe theory. The two extremes of the binary are constantly mutually reinforcing one another. I’ve spent many years on the left with actual Leftists who actually espouse something close to Nazi views. Just because you don’t see it or don’t want to see it, doesn’t make it true.
Cat, you’re not going to love this part, but I'm going to save you maybe a few years of therapy and some big $$$ so you can feel more hopeful about your future and give you some quick psychoanalysis here. Things were VERY different in liberal households. You have given me enough information here to understand that you were raised in a very conservative Christian environment, and you are looking for a scapegoat for your problems. Jews are a convenient option. Resist temptation to take the bait like many stupid people before you.
The problem of your generation is different than the problem of you, Cat. You were raised with propaganda, yes, and literally everything in consensus reality contains some sort of propaganda or at least heavy bias. But let’s be very clear here. You are lashing out because you were raised in a Christian home, maybe it was very anti-LGBTQ and you are queer, or maybe it was racist and you are a guilty-feeling white person. It actually doesn’t matter.
What does matter, Cat, is that being raised in a conversative Christian home almost ALWAYS in America predisposes you to a more virulent form of antisemitism than even what festers on the Left, some would argue. While I am grateful for many Christian allies at this dark time, the reality is that a great many Christians identify Jews as A) Christ-killers, B) Satanists, and/or C) pawns to be killed in the Rapture, hence the evangelical support for Israel.
It is exceptionally telling to me that you feel now that you “knew nothing about the plight of Palestinians” throughout your upbringing when I can say with almost total confidence that you also knew nothing about the plight of the Jews or the Israelis. And everyone should know as much as they can about many cultures around the world and their plight. Are you familiar with the Kurds as well? The Assyrians? The Armenian history beyond the Kardashians? The genocide in Sudan (the current or the last one)?
Here's some free wisdom for you, kitty: the world is a big place. Only a foolish child would think that you can and should know all things about all people across all of time. Yes, you were spoonfed a certain narrative. That was because you grew up in an intrinsically antisemitic home, and now you are making your mama proud.
You didn’t learn about the true “plight” of Jews; you learned about one single narrative. What you don’t seem to understand even now is that a great many Israelis had been out in the streets protesting Bibi for months before 10/7. You don’t seem to understand that life is very different and substantially better for Palestinians in the West Bank because they are not living under Hamas terrorist rule.
This narrative that the generation is finally “finding out” about the “truth” about Israel literally goes back to Boomers. I know a great many left-leaning boomers who also went through this phase, because the narrative surrounding it plays into an endemic antisemitism that is so comfortable, and so easy to latch onto as a scapegoat. The only thing that Gen Zers are “finding out” is how sweet and tempting that honey of antisemitism is. You can have a cool, trendy, natural enemy in a tiny minority that is politically correct to antagonize.
I never thought there was “nothing good” about Gen Z. Gen Z is not irredeemable, Cat. They are stupid. Like all young people. I thought a great many stupid things in my teens and 20s as well. Unlike Gen Z, however, there were a great many Boomers and older generations there to say constantly, “Hey! Remember that you are incredibly stupid!” which I at the time scoffed at and resented and thought was fodder, proving just how stupid THEY were and why the young people were the only ones that would actually lead the Marxist revolution lmao.
Yes, the young people are the only ones that will lead bloody Marxist or even Socialist revolutions because they are the only ones stupid enough to think they are immortal. They are the only ones with so little life experience that they generally can’t hold real space for multiplicity – especially when their brains have been eroded by 24/7 social media and being medicated by their parents since they were 5.
And the younger generation is coddled in a way that no generation has ever been coddled before. Being loved and valued by your parents is important, but guilty-feeling Gen Xers after 2016 and 2020 seemed to flip the switch and place all faith and hope in a generation that effectively lives their lives as flattened Sims online.
I don’t think this generation is irredeemable. I think it is facing an existential crisis and a poison. Every generation has faced this to some extent. Every generation is imperfect. This is not about “EVERY SINGLE MEMBER OF GEN Z IS A TERRORIST” or however you selectively read this; it’s an issue that a generation of people who live online, get their information online, invest in social capital and relationships that are largely online, seem to have intense difficulty bringing critical thought into a space that is fundamentally not designed for that.
Algorithms and tech booms aren’t Gen Z’s faults, either. But the conscious choice as an adult (even if a young adult with a not fully formed brain) to behave as though the snippets you witness on social media are representative of some conspiratorial truth is indicative of a deep stupidity that can only be attributed to an underlying hatefulness and lostness that predisposes young people towards even stupider and more dangerous behaviors and actions.
Take care.