Woke Kids Are Speaking; Weak Adults Are Listening

“The university protest movement largely took shape at the same time when our society’s disproportionate valorization of youth and youthful opinion began in the 1960s, when our whole nation began to come apart at the seams, an unraveling that, despite brief periods of rollback, has continued apace to this day.”

In recent weeks, we have witnessed elite college students across the nation stand up boldly to defend the terrorist group Hamas’ right to terrorize, execute, and kidnap children and the elderly alike and parade half-naked bodies of female victims through the streets. Although the denizens of elite universities represent a particularly egregious species of moral monstrosity, those students are, sadly, also representative of a much larger contingent of their age cohort. But the problem, as I will explain in what follows, is not only their views; it is also that we encourage people so young (and even younger) to voice their uninformed and unenlightened views in the first place and that we then proceed to approach those opinions as though they were anything more than teachable moments, as though they were worthy of our serious political, rather than pedagogical, engagement.

In October, a Harvard-Harris poll had found that while ninety-five percent of those over age sixty-five, ninety-one percent of those fifty-five to sixty-four and eighty-eight percent of those forty-five to fifty-four sided with Israel in the conflict, among those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, only fifty-two percent supported Israel, with the other forty-eight percent taking the side of Hamas. As opposed to the nine percent of those over sixty-five who believed that “the Hamas killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians [i]n Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians,” among those eighteen to twenty-four, a slight majority—fifty-one percent—held the killings were justified, even though sixty-two percent in that age category believed those killings were also “genocidal.”

As that survey likewise reported, those same young’uns also had a very tenuous grasp of basic facts. Among many other misconceptions they had, more than a third—thirty-six percent—of them did not know that Hamas is a terrorist group, as designated by the American government (among many others); only sixteen percent of those sixty-five and older were unaware of that designation. Moreover, though the call for the annihilation of Israel is right there in Hamas’ charter, the survey showed forty-two percent of the eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds believed Hamas is trying to make peace with Israel rather than destroy it, as compared to the four percent of those over sixty-five who credited such nonsense, and though the notion that Israel had bombed a hospital in Gaza on October 17, as initially reported by Hamas, has been thoroughly discredited, forty-five percent of the eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, as opposed to just thirteen percent of those over sixty-five, lacked the cognitive flexibility to revise their opinions to fit the facts.