A friend who works with high school students recently said to me, “I overheard a group of boys talking about ‘international Jewry.’” He was in disbelief to hear these seemingly mild-mannered kids express views that, not 20 years ago, would have been considered taboo.

What is going on with Gen Z?

I have written elsewhere that Gen Z is experiencing a kind of church resurgence. That remains true. But at the same time, Gen Z is one of the most polarized generations in American history.

Social systems that seek to reorient reality by means of uprooting history and tradition will ultimately create a rootless and disaffected class in search of belonging.

In 2024, Gen Z — led in part by young activists like Charlie Kirk and Scott Presler — shifted toward Donald Trump. He won 46% of Gen Z voters — 56% of young men and 40% of young women. This led many to expect that a younger, more populist generation would shift the country rightward. But now in 2025, the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won 78% of the youth vote in New York City — 67% of young men and 84% of young women. Far from being locked into any one existing political party, young people are more divided than ever.

One cause of this is what I call “nomadic progressivism.” Kids born between, say, 1997 and 2012 have been thoroughly inundated with progressivism and identity politics from birth. They came of age amid several key developments that shaped their moral and social formation:

The Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015 and the legalization of same-sex marriage.The killing of Trayvon Martin and the rise of Black Lives Matter.The surge of transgender activism that dominated headlines in the early 2020s.The appearance of Greta Thunberg and the new climate movement.The explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Vine.

We could list hundreds of others, but these movements captured Gen Z’s moral imagination. Each sought, in the name of justice or progress, to undermine the inherited order, replacing the inherited structures of culture with moral and social uncertainty.

Gen Z grew up bullied by progressive ideology, and until the shocking election of Donald Trump in 2016, there was no visible reaction. Society appeared to be marching unopposed toward progressive utopia. But Trump’s election broke the spell. His first term was marked by protests, the rise of transgender ideology, and a wave of social revolt.

Then came COVID-19. As the left preached “safety,” Gen Z was locked inside, immersed in a digital environment, and wracked by depression and anxiety. Created for engagement and real community, young people were instead sent to their rooms and told to stay there.

This, I believe, is the key: Progressivism prepared the soil for radicalization. It removed the roots — churches, families, communities — that once grounded Gen Z’s moral life. It left young people searching for belonging in a barren landscape.

The philosopher and novelist Simone Weil wrote in “The Need for Roots” that “human beings have roots by virtue of their real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape particular treasures of the past and particular expectations for the future.” When that participation is stripped away, people search for roots elsewhere.

For Gen Z women, that search often led to Instagram and other social media platforms. They heard celebrities and influencers denounce the status quo. They were told marriage was oppressive, men were vile, and independence was the highest good. But that “empowerment” was often just loneliness in disguise.

RELATED: Young, broke, and voting blue: 2025’s harsh lesson for the right

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As for Gen Z men, constant ridicule and belittlement left them disoriented. Why invest in a society that despises you? Why build what the world condemns? In this vacuum arose the “manosphere.” Figures like Andrew Tate offered refuge. They told men it was OK to be men — and as they were among the only ones saying so, they had free rein to define what it meant. If honor, discipline, and respectful courtship were only going to get you mocked and condemned, manosphere influencers reasoned that you might as well double down on boorishness, lust, and aggression.

As distrust of the government and institutions grew, young men turned elsewhere for truth. In gnostic fashion, figures like Nick Fuentes promised to reveal “how things really are.” But as Christopher Rufo has noted, it is a ruse. Fuentes exploits the crisis of masculinity to peddle resentment and historical denialism. Progressive Gen Z women, seeking fulfillment in the depths of the online space, are little different from the young men seeking connection and meaning from those like Fuentes.

Gen Z is a generation longing for roots. Its members are trying to find them on the fringes of society, since their own roots were dug out years ago. Progressivism creates nomads. Social systems that seek to reorient reality by means of uprooting history and tradition will ultimately create a rootless and disaffected class in search of belonging. And they will find it in dark places.

The men and women of Gen Z are not uniquely radical. They are uniquely rootless. They have inherited a moral landscape stripped of shared meaning, through which they drift amid ideologies that promise belonging but deliver only bitterness. The progressive order unmoored them; now the reactionary order recruits them. And unless a deeper renewal of faith, family, and community takes root, this generation will continue to wander — searching for the very home that modernity taught them to forget.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

​Gen z, Radicalization, Covid, Internet, Opinion & analysis 

Charlie Sheen, who has historically been known for having more than a mild case of Trump derangement syndrome, recently opened up about changing his political views after taking a long look at the media he consumed.

The famous actor joined Megyn Kelly in an interview published last Friday to discuss his turn away from the left and his embrace of the right.

‘I’m going to do my own research like I’ve done with everything my entire life. I’m going to listen to other voices.’

Kelly asked Sheen if he was getting more comfortable with expressing his political views, to which he replied: “I had to feel something different. Because I think we all, or a lot of us, remain beholden to the structure of the house that we were raised in with politics, with religion, with the arts, with culture.”

RELATED: Video: Joe Rogan shaken by Charlie Kirk’s murder, warns against celebrating his death; Charlie Sheen says it’s a ‘dark day’

Photo by John Nacion/Getty Images

To a round of applause from the audience, Sheen then explained his shift in political views: “And I thought, ‘All right, I’m going to conduct an experiment.’ Literally, I’m going to change the channel. I’m going to do my own research like I’ve done with everything my entire life. I’m going to listen to other voices.”

Sheen continued: “I’m going to explore just hearing both sides of the goddamn story.”

During this process, Charlie Sheen realized the problem with the media he was consuming: “What I was so hypnotized by, in some ways, can be described as state-run media. I’m sorry, but it can. Legacy media is very much like that.”

After months of listening to alternative voices outside legacy media and doing his own research, Sheen had to admit that he had been stuck in an echo chamber.

Then came his moment of realization: “I felt really stupid. Just some of the stuff I’d bought into and some of the stuff I was worshipping and some of the people I was hating because I was told I was supposed to hate them.”

Though Sheen voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, he said it was a vote he wishes he could “have back” following his shift to the right.

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In 2013, Mississippi ranked 49th out of the 50 U.S. states in grade four reading achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the largest continuing national assessment of American students’ knowledge and capability in math, reading, science, and writing.

In what has repeatedly been dubbed a “miracle,” the state made its way up the list — to 29th in 2019 and then 10 spots higher to ninth place nationally for reading scores last year.

According to the NAEP, black students in Mississippi ranked third nationally last year among their cohort for reading and math scores; Hispanic students in the state ranked first in the nation for reading and second for math scores; and poor students in the Magnolia State ranked first for reading and second for math scores nationally.

‘No, it’s not impossible to teach children, and no, it’s not very costly.’

The assessment noted that “Mississippi is one of only a few states with improved NAEP scores since 2013. In most states, NAEP scores have been falling over the past decade.”

While there have been numerous attempts to explain Mississippi’s success, it appears the “Mississippi miracle” is attributable ultimately to the state’s 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which conservative commentator Rich Lowry recently noted effectively came down to adopting phonics and setting high standards for students.

Noah Spencer, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s economics department, analyzed the impact of the LBPA — the three pillars of which are improving teaching, identifying and helping kids with reading deficiencies, and holding back third-graders who can’t hack it on an end-of-year reading assessment — in a study published last year in the Economics of Education Review. Spencer found that:

the policy, which included investments in teacher training and coaching, early screening for and targeted assistance to struggling readers, and retention for deficient readers, increased both grade 4 reading and math test scores on a national assessment by 0.14 and 0.18 [standard deviations], respectively, for students with any amount of exposure to the policy, and by 0.23 and 0.29 SDs for students with K-3 exposure to the policy.

Spencer stressed the significance of these increases, citing previous research that found “that ‘children with test scores that are one standard deviation higher at age 12 report 1-2 more years of schooling by age 22’ in the lower- and middle-income countries they study.”

RELATED: Trump admin takes major step toward dismantling Department of Education

Linda McMahon. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images

“While these estimates likely do not apply precisely to Mississippi’s context, it does seem reasonable to suggest that, given the LBPA’s sizable effects on test scores for children exposed from kindergarten to grade 3, it may also increase earnings for exposed cohorts in the future,” wrote Spencer. “The impressive effects of this policy change should be noted by policymakers in other jurisdictions.”

Lowry echoed this sentiment, noting that Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee, which have employed similar strategies, have also made gains.

“With reading scores nationally sliding the wrong way, especially for the bottom 10% of students, Mississippi and the other Southern states offer a beacon of hope,” wrote Lowry. “Their example shows that, no, it’s not impossible to teach children, and no, it’s not very costly. It’s a good sign that even California just passed a phonics bill.”

‘It’s really smart, local innovation at work.’

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has extolled the approach taken in Mississippi, telling the New York Post in September, “What I’m seeing now is a great return to classical learning.”

“We’ve tried a lot of things, you know — No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top — and I believe they were done with the best of intentions, but they were not successful,” said McMahon. “But what we have clearly seen is the science of reading is successful.”

Despite the noted success of the LBPA in Mississippi, some lawmakers around the country still haven’t taken the hint.

Democrats in Michigan, for instance, reportedly repealed similar reforms, eliminating, for instance, an A-F grade-ranking system for every public school in the state and scrapping the requirement that illiterate third-graders get held back.

Whereas last year, the average score of fourth-grade students in Mississippi for reading was 219/500 — higher than the national average score of 214 — the average score in Michigan was 209, which was lower than scores in 31 other states and jurisdictions.

The Mississippi Department of Education announced on Nov. 13 that 85% of the Magnolia State’s third-graders passed the reading assignment required to transition to grade four, a 1-percentage-point increase over last year.

The U.S. Department of Education noted, “Mississippi’s literacy climb may be called ‘miracle,’ but it’s really smart, local innovation at work.”

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On November 7, country music artist Kelsea Ballerini released a single titled “I Sit in Parks.” The two-minute track is a heart-wrenching lamentation of the forsaking of motherhood for career aspirations — a rare message from the secular music world.

The chorus: “Did I miss it? By now is it / A lucid dream? Is it my fault / For chasin’ things a body clock / Doesn’t wait for? I did the d**n tour / It’s what I wanted, what I got / I spun around and then I stopped / And wondered if I missed the mark.”

Ballerini, a 32-year old divorcee with no children, vulnerably admits in the ballad that she chose the freedom to pursue her music career over becoming a mother — a decision that causes her intense regret and pain.

The song has garnered a ton of attention — triggering the girlboss feminist crowd and delighting pro-natalists who hope the feminist stronghold keeping young women single, childless, and on the hamster wheel of careerism is finally beginning to crack.

Allie Beth Stuckey, BlazeTV host of “Relatable,” falls into the latter category, believing the song indicates a positive cultural shift.

“I can see how this vulnerability is speaking to what a lot of people feel. This is certainly not Christian, but it’s kind of reflecting this trend that we’re seeing among a lot of young people … wanting to go back to tradition, wanting to go back to church, wanting to go back to marriage, wanting to actually have children,” she says.

The lie so many young women fall for, Allie explains, is that motherhood isn’t for everyone. Feminist dogma convinced them that being a mom is burdensome and a hindrance to personal ambition. The essential truth it leaves out, however, is that while one can reject motherhood, one cannot reject the motherhood instinct. It is wired into women by God and will always be a central piece of their nature.

“This motherhood instinct that we all have when we’re little girls — it doesn’t go away,” says Allie. “We take care of our pets; we take care of our dolls; we take care of our flowers because that is the instinct that God has given us in general as women.”

Even the women who say they never want a husband or children can’t escape the pull of motherhood. It’s usually just channeled toward their “fur babies,” houseplants, businesses, or elsewhere. And it leaves them deeply unfulfilled.

Allie acknowledges that marriage and childbearing aren’t God’s plan for everyone, but motherhood nonetheless is. That instinct to cultivate and nurture can be and should be channeled toward people in some capacity via ministry, mentorship, or mission work. That’s the only thing that will fill the motherhood cup if marriage and having children aren’t in the cards.

Ballerini’s “I Sit in Parks” is a bleak and honest picture of what happens when women forsake motherhood altogether or channel it in unhealthy directions: a deep loneliness that hollows women out.

To hear more of Allie’s analysis, watch the episode above.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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