White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt isn’t thrilled with her generation. In a recent interview with Fox News’ Jesse Watters, she agreed that her fellow Zoomers are lazy and entitled. “This generation, my generation, I hate to say it, Gen Z and those younger than me have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths,” she told the Fox News host. She added that they’ve been given everything and are completely ungrateful for those privileges. She even thinks some of them need to be sent to Cuba or Iran to straighten up.

The comments didn’t land well on social media. But Leavitt wasn’t bothered by the outrage. She doubled down in a lengthy X post. “I was asked by Jesse Watters why so many young people are buying the false promise of ‘free stuff’ being sold by communist politicians,” she wrote. “My answer: a combination of laziness, yes, and the liberal indoctrination that has been taking place in our education system for far too long.”

It’s a strange message for the administration to blast out when President Donald Trump is underwater with young voters. A June poll from NBC found that 77 percent of voters under 30 disapprove of the president’s job performance. If accurate, those figures represent a complete wipeout of Trump’s gains among young voters in 2024. Leavitt’s comments risk reinforcing a negative impression of the administration among Zoomers.

But the message was likely well received among its target audience. Those who regularly watch Fox News aren’t Zoomers. The median age among Fox News’ regular TV audience is 69. For this demographic, youth-bashing is music to their ears. It’s been a common trope in conservative media for years to portray the young as lazy and entitled. Millennials were depicted the same way in their younger years. Conservative media loved to attack these “snowflakes” who couldn’t handle real life and were too liberal. Now it’s Gen Z’s turn to play this role for older conservatives.

Leavitt’s comments reflect the generational conflict within American politics. The young hate the Boomers and the Boomers hate the young. Older people make up the vast majority of Republican primary voters and the chief consumers of traditional conservative media, so most leaders on the right cater to their hostility. But the young make up much of the audience within the new media space; thus, Boomers are regularly savaged by the podcasters and streamers. 

Right-wing figures are torn between these two tendencies. Leavitt chose the youth-bashing.

Her statements fit the conservative Boomers’ conception of youth. In the picture presented by her and Watters, young people are good-for-nothing losers who can’t even offer a firm handshake. That’s why they vote for socialism. At the same time, these shiftless individuals could also be dangerous criminals. As Watters noted, if they misbehave, we may need to send them to the Army or even to a foreign country. 

This is a bizarre image of reality. It’s doubtful DSA activists are the ones committing all the crime in New York City and elsewhere. That’s another demographic misbehaving, one that likely didn’t pay much attention to the Bolshevik history taught in high school. But Boomers seemingly like to believe this image reflects reality.

It’s not hard to think that the true enemy for this class is young people. Rather than class war, generational conflict animates older conservatives. They don’t want to hear about the challenges young people face. They believe these problems are purely the result of laziness, entitlement, and misbehavior. Maybe that’s the case with some youngsters, but it doesn’t reflect the entire generation.

The fact is that things aren’t so rosy for Gen Z. Recent college grads are more likely to be unemployed than the average worker. This is a huge change from the past, when the unemployment rate among recent college grads was significantly lower than the national average. The young, if they are employed, face historically low income growth. While this demographic faces a grim labor market, recent college grads are also likely to have more student loan debt than their counterparts in past generations. Zoomers are also carrying more personal debt than any other generation at their age. It’s far harder to buy a house as a young person, with home ownership notably lower among those under 40.

The World Economic Forum warns of “financial nihilism” among Gen Z. Many within this generation no longer believe in the values of prudence and long-term planning. Instead, they favor an “apparently self-destructive relationship with money, which includes crypto bets, prediction markets and retirement accounts raided to pay off credit cards.”

This same mentality also animates the growing support for socialism among Zoomers. If they think the system is rigged against them, why shouldn’t they want to blow it up and redistribute the wealth of Boomers to the young? DSA candidates offer this promise, which is one reason they’re becoming more popular with Gen Z voters.

Leavitt’s response is essentially “Let them eat cake.” It mocks the young for feeling aggrieved and offers tone-deaf advice. It’s a message that will only appeal to old people. 

Generational conflict is stupid. We shouldn’t hate our parents and grandparents. At the same time, our parents and grandparents shouldn’t hate the future of our country. While both sides of the generational war are making waves in politics, animosity toward the young is a more powerful force. Property tax bans, which would defund services such as schools meant for the next generation, are pushed by older Americans—not the young. There is zero effort to reform the entitlements enjoyed by Boomers. Even some DSA candidates try to cater to the old. Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wants to freeze property taxes, but only for homeowners over 65. New homeowners would not receive this benefit, even when buying a property that had its property taxes frozen under a previous owner.

This can all seem rather selfish, but it’s easy to justify if you believe the young fit the caricature painted by Karoline Leavitt. It’s a self-serving belief to subscribe to: You worked hard for what’s yours. These young people demanding more attention haven’t. They don’t want to work and just want the government to take care of them. They got a degree in Snowflakeology at a college that only taught them how to share their gender pronouns. So why should politicians offer to help out the Zoomers?

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It’s a terrible way to think, but it is common. It’s not going to help Republicans win elections, that’s for sure.

If Republicans want a chance to win over the young, they’ll have to stop with Zoomer-bashing aimed for the old. What makes for good Fox News segments doesn’t make for effective political pitches. It doesn’t matter what the White House is doing for Gen Z if its spokeswoman calls this generation lazy and entitled. 

Young people aren’t the enemy. They’re the future of America. And if you want them to keep the nation great, it’s smart to get them on your side rather than propose sending them to Iran.