A funny thing happened on their way to vote in the 2024 election. A record number of Gen Zers — 46% — bolted the Democratic Party and voted for Donald Trump.
Pundits left and right agree with California Democratic Congresswoman Sara Jacobs, who cited “the cost of living and inflation as their top voting concerns,” but the left still ignores the other reasons Gen Z tilted right on Nov. 5.
Before 2023, university professors could count on Gen Z to tilt left and display what C.S. Lewis once called “chronological snobbery,” that is, “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age.”
Then came the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis and with it the exposure of an intellectual climate that will condone even murder if it supports the hard left’s contempt for Israel. Professors who double as shills for the Democratic Party are entrenched, but their support for Hamas and the resurgence of antisemitism in American universities has emboldened a new set of Gen Zers to rethink their allegiance to the Democratic Party.
If Columbia University was the epicenter of the pro-Palestinian protests, Columbia also set the stage for the tactics professors would use to censure students who defended Israel’s right to exist. Professor Kayum Ahmed dismissed them as “a handful of privileged white students,” but by April 2024, the impact of the white-privilege charge had lapsed, and Ahmed was the one whose position was terminated.
Enterprising students nationwide took note in May 2024 when Columbia’s tepid response to student protests prompted 13 federal judges to sign a letter saying they would not hire law clerks who were currently enrolled at Columbia University Law School. CEO of CG Financial Group Charlie Gipple chimed in, saying, “If I were hiring someone to be my right-hand person today, there’s not a chance in hell it would be an Ivy League person.”
May was also the month that a generational shift was on full display at UNC Chapel Hill when a band of Pi Kappa Phi fraternity brothers made national news restoring the American flag on the quad after pro-Hamas protesters replaced it with a Palestinian flag. Unlike his Ivy League counterparts, acting UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts helped restore the American flag then led a group of police officers who arrested protesters who threw bottles, rocks and water at students who stood guarding the American flag.
Tone-deaf USA Today columnist Sara Pequeno thinks her fellow Gen Zers rejected “qualified candidate” Kamala Harris because Harris had not taken a strong stand against Israel and because young men had fallen for Trump’s “hyper-masculine” appeal. Pequeno’s solution is “for the left to create its equivalent of the ‘manosphere,’” but University of Richmond professor Adam Stanaland thinks young Trumpers will reform if scholars equate “hegemonic masculinity” with an “antiquated misperception that men must be powerful.”
The left’s mission to emasculate young men has already failed, and author Kristen Kobes Du Mez’s mission to cast Trump as “the high priest of the evangelical cult of masculinity” has also failed. Since the 2020 publication of Du Mez’s bestseller “Jesus and John Wayne,” Trump has increased his support among young Christian men, and 600,000 young women have subscribed to the podcast featuring “Girls Gone Bible.”
New York Magazine columnist Brock Colyar has also discovered that writers who mock Gen Z conservatives might find themselves the object of derision.
In a hit piece titled “The Cruel Kids’ Table,” Colyar describes the “casually cruel Trumpers” he observed at a Trump inaugural party, many of whom were “hot enough to be extras in the upcoming American Psycho remake.”
Attendees have blasted Colyar for claiming that “almost everyone” at the party was “white” while failing to note that the party’s host is the black co-chair of the GOP Youth Advisory Council. C.J. Pearson was quick to point out that the magazine had cropped its cover image to exclude him and other black attendees because a true picture “would have undermined their narrative that MAGA is some racist cult.”
Gen Z influencer Brett Cooper’s comeuppance for Brock Colyar captures exactly the mood of a new class of rebels: “You think you’re the resistance, but actually you’re falling in line with the mob” — and ignoring the fact that “Young people on the right are the new rebels.”
Cooper invites young conservatives to join this new class of rebels because “There’s a lot of room at the cool kids’ table.”
Nan Miller is professor emerita of literature from Meredith College and lives in Raleigh.
