Shock poll: America’s youth want socialism on autopilot — literally



Growing up during the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, I remember when socialism was a universal punch line. It stood for failure, repression, and economic ruin.

Not any more. Today, socialism is the ideological spearpoint of the left. Many young Americans now insist that socialism is the cure for the affordability crisis squeezing them. They believe it with a fervor that would have stunned earlier generations.

The evidence is overwhelming, and the verdict is final: Socialism fails everywhere it is tried. Now imagine that system fused with an all-seeing AI.

New polling from Rasmussen Reports and the Heartland Institute’s Emerging Issues Center shows that a majority of likely voters ages 18 to 39 want a Democratic Socialist to win the White House in 2028.

Nearly 60% of young Americans say they support more government housing, a nationwide rent freeze, and government-run grocery stores in every town.

These numbers aren’t anomalies. They reflect a deeper reality: Many young Americans know little about socialism’s actual history, consequences, or track record — and they have been conditioned to believe it can fix the challenges in front of them.

One reason for that ignorance is uncomfortable but obvious. It’s not only the schools — it’s the parents. According to the polls, parents were the most influential voices shaping their children’s support for Democratic Socialism. More than half of respondents said their parents held a favorable view of it.

That alone explains a great deal. And unsurprisingly, more than half also said teachers and professors viewed Democratic Socialism favorably. After decades of ideological drift, even parents who grew up after the USSR’s collapse now believe socialism “might work.”

Based on my own experience teaching in public schools, that rings true. Most of my colleagues openly sympathized with the socialist cause and were hostile to free-market capitalism.

This didn’t happen by accident. It reflects a long march beginning in the Progressive Era. My own postgraduate experience at a prestigious teaching college felt less like preparation for the classroom and more like a Cultural Revolution struggle session — conformity required, dissent punished.

As the public education system drifted leftward, it taught generation after generation that socialism is benevolent and capitalism is predatory. The result is predictable. Many young people now see the free market as the enemy, not the mechanism that lifted billions out of poverty. Cronyism and the explosion of government power only blur the picture further.

Layer onto this the collapse of basic literacy and numeracy. When students can’t read well, struggle with math, and can’t write a coherent paragraph, they are more vulnerable to ideological manipulation — and more likely to lean on machines to think for them.

So it shouldn’t shock anyone that almost half of young Americans surveyed want an advanced AI system to create society’s laws, rules, and regulations. Nearly 40% want that AI system to determine human rights and control the world’s most powerful militaries.

RELATED: Almost half of Gen Z wants AI to run the government. You should be terrified.

Yurii Karvatskyi via iStock/Getty Images

How did this happen? Watch how many parents are glued to screens, outsourcing daily life to devices. Is it any wonder their children grow up thinking technology is omnipotent?

Parents should start with something simple: a family movie night featuring the "Terminator" franchise. Let the kids see where blind faith in machines tends to lead.

Better yet, teach them the truth about socialism. Teach them what it does to human beings. Share the books, documentaries, and testimonies exposing socialism’s century of famine, repression, forced labor, and mass murder — horrors still unfolding in Cuba and North Korea.

The evidence is overwhelming, and the verdict is final: socialism fails everywhere it is tried. Now imagine that system fused with an all-seeing AI — a surveillance state that Stalin could only dream of. The thought of an AI-run socialist regime is not dystopian fiction. It is what many young Americans say they want.

They should be careful what they wish for.

The 'red-pilled' youth: The most important issue to college-age men



BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler spent her fall season speaking at college campuses and private events across the country — and she recalls one question on the tip of every young man’s tongue.

“I started to notice this fall that there’s a pattern in the questions that I was getting asked off the record. They were questions that were very different from the questions that I was asked on the record,” Wheeler explains.

“Their question to me was asking if I knew why the Trump administration’s mass deportations were off to what appears to feel like a slow start,” she says.

And it’s not because they’re “racist,” as many on the left would accuse them of being.


“The reason why they care is because of the implications that — it's not just illegal immigration, but mass migration has had on their lives. A lot of these young men … are more conservative than the men of my generation, the Millennial generation,” she says, noting that a common label placed on these young men is “red-pilled.”

“They’re embracing traditional values a little bit more. They want to get married. They want to have children. They are more religious. They want to buy a home. They want the stability of, you know, what maybe our parents would have sought after,” she continues.

“And yet, these young men on these college campuses are facing a problem as they get their college degree thinking that they’re going to be prepared for the workforce. They’re going to be able to get a good job, have a paycheck, be able to support a wife, and provide for a family,” she adds.

These men are instead finding that they’re not able to get jobs, buy homes, or support families.

“Even if they have a decent-paying job, they’re not able to afford a down payment on a home because 25 years ago they could have bought, you know, a split-level starter home in a suburban neighborhood somewhere in the Midwest for $150,000 or $175,000, and they could afford a down payment on that,” Wheeler explains.

“But today, that same house is like $375,000, and $375,000, even if they could maybe afford the monthly payment of a mortgage for a house of that price, they cannot afford the down payment. And so they feel very helpless,” she says, pointing out that this is where immigration comes in.

“They look at these millions upon millions, tens of millions of illegals who are taking up these homes, and they realize that the demand for these homes from these illegals is part of what drives the price so high, so high that it’s unaffordable to these young men,” she continues.

And these concerns remind Wheeler of someone else.

“This is what Charlie Kirk used to do. He used to speak to these young men on college campuses and not just — he wasn’t just lecturing them. Charlie wasn’t just there to shake his finger and wag his finger and tell them why they’re wrong,” she explains.

“Charlie listened. He listened to their grievances. He listened to what these young men were experiencing. And he didn’t just listen to set himself up for, like, you know, an own-the-lib type of response,” she continues. “He listened so that he could help solve the problem.”

Want more from Liz Wheeler?

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Why the kids are not all right — and Boomers still pretend nothing’s wrong



Here’s a message Baby Boomers need to hear: The America you were born into no longer exists.

A rising tide of young Americans are embracing socialism at a pace this country has never seen. Boomers often assume that it's about handouts. It isn't. Beneath the surface is a decades-long campaign so destructive to middle-class mobility that it threatens to push the nation toward civil conflict. The more you study it, the more coordinated it looks.

A people dependent upon ‘gimme gimme’ socialism is an easily managed population. A demoralized middle class keeps the ruling class secure.

In a way, it was.

Short-term profit-maximizing globalists on Wall Street teamed up with the K Street lobbying blob to drown Americans in cheap Chinese goods while saddling them with student debt, consumer debt, and medical debt.

Young people are being priced out of the American dream.

My urgent message to Boomers — especially those who want to keep influence: The kids are not all right.

The America your kids and grandkids know is not the America you knew. Most Boomers were born in the 1950s, when the country was booming — united by postwar optimism, American industrial strength, shared national institutions, Walter Cronkite on one television in every home, full-fat milkshakes, and Elvis shaking up the culture.

Today, we live in a golden age of technological revolution. We are making remarkable advances in space travel, tech, and medicine — increasingly led by the private sector and unapologetic capitalists. But on the basics — housing, health, education — we’re failing the next generation.

In 1955, the median homebuyer was in his late 20s. In 2025, it’s 56. A minimum-wage worker in the 1950s needed roughly seven years of pay to buy a modest home without a mortgage. Today, it’s around 27.

In 1955, a student could pay college tuition by working a few hours a day at minimum wage. Today, that same student would need to work about six hours a day. If a kid wants Yale or any Ivy League school, he would have to work 26.4 hours a day — an impossible figure that illustrates how detached elite education has become from reality.

Here’s a frightening divide: 93% of Boomers say political violence is never justified; 44% of Gen Z say it “sometimes” is.

Ninety-nine percent of kids are not out for blood, but 100% of them face a massive relative disadvantage. The upward mobility Boomers took for granted has been hollowed out by globalist and left-wing policies sold as progress but experienced as decline.

We spent trillions of American dollars on foreign wars, foreign infrastructure, and foreign elections. We borrowed recklessly. Now the dollar is frail. We allowed millions of illegal migrants to enter the country, fueling crime and pushing Americans out of jobs. Young households are buried in debt — not mortgage debt that builds equity, but consumer debt used to numb the anxiety left by a collapse in community and faith.

Here’s the truth: The populist right and the socialist left agree on the diagnosis. Listen to the first half of Bernie Sanders’ interview with Joe Rogan in June. For an hour, Bernie describes America’s economic troubles. Most people, right or left, would nod along.

Then comes the pivot: Socialism is the cure.

This is the left’s great deceit. Progressives' proposed “solutions” hurt the very people they claim to help.

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Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Take restrictive zoning and rent regulations — blue-state staples designed to “create” affordable housing. In reality, they choke supply and drive rents higher. Or look at no-cash bail. The neighborhoods hit hardest by serially released offenders are the same minority communities progressives claim to champion. The examples pile up.

So why do left-wing billionaires back these ideas? Simple: Socialism, communism, and their logical end point — fascism — are excellent for entrenched oligarchs. A people dependent upon “gimme gimme” socialism is an easily managed population. A demoralized middle class keeps the ruling class secure.

There is another path.

We must reverse the policies that got us here. Strengthen education outcomes, lower health care costs, rebuild domestic supply chains, expand American energy generation, and restore competence to the workforce.

Boomers, if you don’t lead this shift, your influence will vanish before your next Social Security check arrives. Moderate Democrats already know the socialist tide is rising. They’re afraid to say it out loud.

The Gen Z and Millennial voting bloc will dominate the 2028 election. They are demanding change. Moderates — in both parties — are being replaced by extremists.

You have a choice: Allow yourselves to be absorbed into the socialist machine, or correct the mistakes of the last two decades, return power to citizens, and rebuild access to the American dream.

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America’s new lost generation is looking for home — and finding the wrong ones



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.

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Photo by Jeremy Weine/Getty Images

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.

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Explaining Mamdani’s appeal to the young, with polling



It’s a sad week for the de facto capital of the world, New York City. The epicenter of American finance, media, and dynamism now enters a self-imposed trajectory of decline.

But those of us on the populist right should not merely shake our heads and bemoan the extremism of Zohran Mamdani, frightening though it is. Instead, we must understand his appeal, so that we might effectively counter his un-American ideas and continue to build on our 2024 triumph by earning further big gains nationally among young voters.

We have much to learn from Mamdani, even though he is a dangerous Marxist. Establishment Republicans have no effective answer to this kind of populism.

Polling shows the pathway to that success.

First, the great news. Young voters have swung massively to the right over the last three presidential election cycles. President Trump won young men in 2024, and overall, voters 35 and under shifted materially from a +37% preference for the Democrats in 2016 to only a +13% preference in 2024, cutting the young adult margin by two-thirds in just over eight years. It represents a massive macro shift.

In addition, a new national poll of 2,100 voters ages 18-25 shows a substantial rejection of Democrats’ radicalism on key social issues, especially transgenderism and free speech. Simultaneously, young voters express extreme frustration with the current economy, creating a clear opening that Mamdani drove a campaign truck right through.

So, backed by data, here are the three lanes of success that Mamdani exploited.

‘Affordability’ is key

Even though all of his Marxist answers are wrong and immoral, Zohran is laser-focused on the issue that matters most to voters, especially younger ones. Most young citizens have not benefited from the massive run-up in asset prices in recent years. Without substantial holdings of equities or real estate, they struggle to afford the staples of life amid sky-high costs. Even worse, the job market got substantially tougher for young adults, adding even more angst.

These voters correctly blamed the Democrats for the pain of Bidenomics, but that anger has now shifted over to Republicans, fair or not.

Right now, per TIPP Insights polling, only 24% of young adults rate Trump’s performance on the economy as “good” or “excellent,” while 54% rate it as “poor” or “unacceptable.” On inflation, using letter grades, only 6% of young independents give the president an A, while 44% deliver an F.

Mamdani smartly dove into this issue. All his proposed solutions will only make inflation worse, of course, from “free” public transit to lavish benefits for illegal aliens. But regardless, he fixated on what matters to voters, especially young ones.

Media skills

After watching Mamdani throughout the campaign, it’s clear he hates the founding principles and history of the United States. He exemplifies how America’s immigration system — even its lawful pathways — too often imports people who reject the nation’s heritage rather than embrace it.

That said, as a media professional, I can only respect his acumen in front of the cameras.

In this new digital age, which President Trump helped create, successful politicians must be able to perform effectively. Mamdani exudes charisma and likeability. His youth and enthusiasm captivated voters, especially those in the streaming/TikTok spaces.

Media savvy combined with lots of ludicrous promises of freebies is a pretty powerful approach in this populist age. Young people are especially receptive to the heavy use of new/alternative media. TIPP Insights shows that only 31% of independent young adults have positive sentiment for legacy media, and only 34% of young women.

Focus on home

Perhaps the most compelling moment of the campaign for Mamdani was during the July debate, when all candidates were asked where their first foreign visit would be as mayor of New York. All of them said Israel, with Ukraine thrown in as well. But Mamdani gave a truly “New York First” answer instead, one that might well have been uttered by a MAGA partisan. He said, “I would stay in New York City.”

That answer clearly appeals to young voters, who are decidedly non-interventionist abroad. For example, a whopping 69% of young men think we “intervene too much in foreign conflicts.” Only 26% of young adults think the United States should remain involved in Ukraine if Putin and Zelenskyy cannot reach a settlement soon.

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Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

That non-interventionism seeps over into a very negative view of Israel among young voters. Survey results found that only 25% of them have a positive view of Israel, versus 52% negative. Among young independents, only 18% have a positive view of Israel.

Therefore, Mamdani probably did not generate the blowback he deserved for extremist postures, such as embracing a pro-terror jihadi who was implicated, but unindicted, in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.

We have much to learn from Mamdani, even though he is a dangerous Marxist. Establishment Republicans have no effective answer to this kind of populism, because their default is always “cut taxes for the wealthy and go to war.”

The MAGA movement has a very different vision — one that can appeal to reasonable young people in increasing numbers — to continue this patriotic, populist surge for decades to come.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.