When I taught college I told my classes that I really had no interest in what they had to say, as they had no life experience and thus were generally clueless. As they took umbrage, I asked one of them why they thought they were smarter than a 5 year old. The inevitable answer was, “because I’m older.” And what did age give them? More life experience than the 5 year old. They were 18, I was in my 50s. Ergo…

It’s the same reason Millennials are embracing Marxism. There is not some esoteric socioeconomic reason behind this. It’s just that, well, they are not very bright. Oh sure, some have figured some things out successfully and to those I doff my homburg. But the vast majority are not the intellectual equals of a bag of hammers. It’s not them per say, because most of us were also stuppifying thick at that age. It’s the lack of real world experience.

Close

Granted, we matured quicker than young people do today. That’s because we entered the actual world sooner and were not cosseted by helicopter parents or made infantile by social media obsession and video games that permit regular retreats into mental adolescence.

FNC: “Millennials and Gen Z-ers are becoming increasingly comfortable with socialism, according to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. VOC Executive Director Marion Smith attributes this trend shown in VOC’s poll, as well as in other national polls, to a failure of American educational institutions, definitional misunderstandings and a double standard in media and on social media.

“We are seeing the high watermark, politically, of socialism [and] Marxism in the United States. Never before in history has the United States seen positive opinions of these ideologies to the extent that we’re seeing today. That’s just a fact. We live in a world where, over the last few years, Venezuela has turned from a market economy and a very prosperous country into a humanitarian disaster through, in their words … democratic socialism, supported by the Cuban Communist Party and supported by loans from the People’s Republic of China. That’s the world we live in…For many years, when self-described socialists or democratic socialists in the United States have been asked, ‘What kind of society do you think is headed in the right direction?’ — until it became untenable to say ‘Venezuela,’ they fully embraced the [Hugo] Chavez and Maduro direction of Venezuela.”

Most tadpole Americans are oblivious to the fact that over 100 million innocent people were murdered by communists over the last century. Toddler Americans are mostly clueless that the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for more murders than Nazi Germany.

“We’ve definitely had a double standard, both in scholarship and education, and popular culture — journalism — between the crimes of Nazism and the crimes of communist regimes,” Smith said. “You combine that lack of a moral reckoning about the legacy of communism with a failure of education to teach basic 20th-century history, and you add on … a normalization of the term ‘socialism’ — of Marxist rhetoric — and that leads to a dangerous normalization of socialism as a path forward.”

“But I think there’s also a hopeful set of findings in our poll,” said Smith. “Which is that when asked basic questions about who do you trust most to look after your own interests, the government, the community of yourself? … Overwhelmingly, but also the majority of Millennials and Gen-Zers, would trust themselves by far, secondly then their community, and last and by far, the government.” So there is hope if these young hayseeds grow up before they ruin the country too much. However, they better hurry. Time is running out.