Some remain optimistic that Trump will find a way to improve their lives — that his immigration crackdown will create jobs and lower housing costs, his energy policies will lower gas prices and electric bills and his dismantling of the Department of Education will end the cycle of college debt.
Many young voters say they plan to express their dissatisfaction by sitting out the next election. While that sentiment is strongest among independents, apathy is more pronounced among Republicans than Democrats. Only half of young people who voted for Trump in 2024 said they definitely plan to vote in 2026, compared to 66 percent of Kamala Harris’ young voters.
Yeah, it’ll open up opportunities to pick lettuce in Salinas in 100-degree heat for sub-minimum wage.
Imagine a bag of rusty hammers. Now imagine someone who’s nowhere near that intelligent.
Someone here recently reminded me that a surprising amount of Americans are functionally illiterate. 21%!
I doubt that critical thinking skills are much better. And while I keep seeing lots of copium/hopium about how “the kids” (pick virtually any generation under boomers, I guess?) have it all figured out because, well, reasons, and that if boomers could just die off already everything will be magically better.
I see no reason to believe any of that, given how education systems have been under attack for decades, and I don’t see an orchestrated, systemic effort to educate millions of children and adults about media literacy and critical thinking - now we have to add in things like narrow-casting, algorithms and filter bubbles. Without a concerted effort to counter it, I suspect entire generations have already been lost, and will probably do even worse than prior ones.
When people claim that somehow the younger generations are going to do better at literacy (including media) and critical thinking than every generation prior, while education has been steadily chipped away at for decades by the cons…well, the math ain’t mathing, to put it rather bluntly. The cons have been working at exactly the opposite outcome.