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Millennials Tag

There was a recent tweet by filmmaker and professor Brandon David Wilson that was shared by director Guillermo Del Toro that sparked an interesting crystallization.

A new Reuters poll shows that millennials have started to move away from the Democrat party. While the Democrats tout environment and social justice as key draws, the millennials who spoke to Reuters want mainly one thing: a stable economy.

New polling data suggests that there's a silent majority of millennials (those aged 18-34) who ardently support both free speech and religious freedom. The Fund for American Studies conducted the poll and found that contrary to what seems like a never-ending stream of headlines touting millennial love of safe spaces, hatred for ideological and social diversity, and affinity towards homogenized speech might not be telling the whole story. The survey "measures how Americans define freedom and whether they generally support “more” or “less” government interference in their daily lives."

You'll be shocked to learn that Millennials are having a tough time growing up. They're struggling with the economy and putting off major life decisions. Mind you, this is the same generation which helped put Obama in the White House. Twice. NBC News reports:
Most Millennials Are Finding It Hard to Transition Into Adulthood: Report By his twenties, Kyle Kaylor imagined he would be living on his own, nearing a college degree, and on his way to a job that fulfilled him. Instead, at 21, he found himself out of school, living with his parents, and "stuck" working as a manager at a fast food restaurant scraping to make hand-to-mouth. Launching into adulthood has been tricky, he said.

It's been seven years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the White House is still having trouble selling it to Americans, especially Millennials. The problem is that Obamacare needs the money of healthy young people to survive, so the White House is trying a new push. The Business Insider reports:
The White House is kicking off a big push to fix Obamacare's largest problem Obamacare needs millennials, so the White House is going after them. The White House, the Department of Health and Human Services, the secretary of education, and private groups convened in Washington on Tuesday for the Affordable Care Act Millennial Outreach and Engagement Summit.

Remember when millennial voters were going to help propel Hillary Clinton to near certain victory? I was skeptical long ago. In early April 2015 (that's 15 not 16, mind you), I wrote, Job One: Teach millennials about the real Hillary:
When discussing Hillary Clinton’s email and server scandal, I dismissed arguments that the scandal in and of itself would sink Hillary’s impending campaign. There are far too many powerful people invested in Hillary for President to let mere paranoid and obsessive control coupled with destruction of evidence stop Hillary. In fact, to Hillary’s core supporters, paranoid and obsessive control coupled with destruction of evidence is a feature, not a bug. Rather, I argued that the damage from Emailgate (or is it Servergate or Deletegate?) was in shaping Hillary’s image for voters who never knew the Hillary older voters know:
While it’s way too early to assess the overall damage to Hillary Incorporated from the email, now document destruction, scandal, is does appear to be hurting Team Billary in ways that are hard to change: Public perception of a politician.

Hillary Clinton claims she has no intention of repealing the Second Amendment and her allies in media regularly dispel such notions as the stuff of conspiracy theories. If you ask her young supporters however, you hear a very different story. Campus Reform reports:
VIDEO: Hillary supporters want to repeal the 2nd Amendment Throughout the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton has been adamant in her support of gun control—an issue that has dominated the national conversation in the wake of terrorist attacks in Orlando, Paris, Nice, and San Bernardino.

According to a new poll conducted by Harvard, a majority of Millennials reject the idea of capitalism. It's no surprise that a generation of people who grew up in the era of "everyone gets a trophy" reject the idea of unequal rewards based on hard work. Millennials were educated largely by public schools obsessed with the idea of fairness and afraid in some cases to let children play the game of tag. One has to wonder if the participants responded on their iPhones. The Washington Post published the details of the poll:
A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows In an apparent rejection of the basic principles of the U.S. economy, a new poll shows that most young people do not support capitalism.

We've all seen the news coverage,the videos, the photos, the quotes, the hashtags. Students across the country have erupted in protest and campus takeovers in response to perceived institutional and interpersonal racism on their campuses, most notably at the University of Missouri and Yale, but also at Ithaca College, Amherst College, and Claremont McKenna College. At the same time, weak-kneed administrators have for the most part appeased the student mobs, with the president of U. Missouri and the dean of Claremont McKenna ultimately resigning. Make no mistake: the conflagration witnessed all week did not spring up out of nowhere. Just take a peak at College Insurrection to see what has been going on the past few years, but understand that the degradation of higher education in this country began decades ago. Since the 1960s, college administrators and faculty have  inculcated a culture of appeasement and entitlement among their students, and whenever that was not enough---such as when black and Hispanic students at Cornell partook in an armed takeover of a building on campus---they doubled down on their efforts to serve students whatever they wished.

It's sobering to see such staggering ignorance about free speech and freedom in general on display on American campuses this week. The special snowflakes of the Snowflake Protests (Yale, Mizzou, etc.) are providing a window into the results of the progressive takeover of our education system -- from pre-school all the way on up to college and beyond. (Common Core will just streamline the process a little more.) Alarming, but in keeping with findings about Americans' demand for freedom, or lack thereof, detailed in The Frontier Lab's recent study, "Freedom Buzz." Ask Americans about freedom, as we did in this study, and you get what seem like familiar responses: freedom is the American Dream, the ability to worship and speak freely, or to choose your own path in life. Pretty standard. Nearly 100 hours of research interviews, and a national survey to test the findings, revealed two trends in how many Americans perceive the value of freedom.