New Venezuelan dictator, same as the old Venezuelan dictator. Free speech for little kids. And how Generation Z approaches politics.
New Venezuelan Dictator, Same as the Old Venezuelan Dictator
Many Americans celebrated the snatch-and-grab of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, a Marxist dictator and indicted drug dealer. With his ouster, Many Venezuelans were dancing in the streets.
But Maduro’s Marxist party is still in power. The vice-president who took over, Delcy Rodriguez, is also a brutal dictator. And key officials in the government are also under indictment as being drug dealers. The military is still pro-Maduro. And now the celebrating Venezuelans are being brutally suppressed.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified the U.S. raids and abduction by insisting that Maduro is not the president of Venezuela. The evidence is that in the recent election, Maduro was overwhelmingly defeated by the opposition pro-democracy party, led by Maria Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts. But Maduro stayed in office anyway, driving out the true winners. The U.S. government, along with most of the rest of the world, refused to recognize his government. But President Trump is recognizing Rodriguez as the new president instead of someone from Machado’s party, though he says he plans “ultimately” to implement democracy.
If one reason for U.S. involvement is to cripple the drug trade, there is much more to be done. If one reason is to remove a Marxist dictatorship, there is much to do be done. If the reason is simply to gain control of the country’s oil–the largest reserve in the world–there is much more to be done.
President Trump has said we will have to “run” Venezuela. He is saying that we’ll have to do so “much longer” than a year.
The point is that the quick removal of Maduro was just the first step in a long, complicated foreign entanglement.
Free Speech for Little Kids
Besides AI, another political fight over tech has emerged: age verification laws.
Twenty-five states now require age verification for access to online pornography, which has had the beneficial effect of many big porn providers shutting down operations in those states for everyone. The porn industry is, of course, challenging those laws in court.
Other efforts include requiring age verification for social media and the purchase of apps. Big tech is also fighting those those laws.
In Texas, big tech scored a victory when a federal judge paused a law that would require app stores to verify their users’ ages and to require parental consent for purchases. The argument that the judge accepted has even wider implications: that children too have a constitutional right to freedom of speech. From a Politico article on the case (my bolds):
Lawyers for the tech lobby and student advocates successfully argued that the Texas law represents an unconstitutional restriction on the First Amendment rights of children.
“These are people who are full-fledged Americans with constitutional rights that extend almost coextensively with what adults have a right to view and access,” said Adam Sieff, a lawyer with Davis Wright Tremaine who represented students that challenged the Texas law. He said laws like it, including those in Utah and Louisiana, will face the same legal issue.
But Casey Stefanski, executive director at the Digital Childhood Alliance, argued that the law does not target protected speech, but the ability of children to contract with corporations.
“This initial ruling in Texas fails to recognize the main tenet of the App Store Accountability Act: minors cannot enter into binding contracts and lengthy terms of service agreements without parental consent,” Stefanski said in a statement.
So, parents, get ready for the time when your children start demanding their constitutional rights!
How Generation Z Approaches Politics
The City Journal, a conservative publication, studied a group of young Republicans in their late teens and twenties to see what made them tick. Jesse Arm reports on the findings in his article Everyone Wants to Know What Gen Z Republicans Think. We Asked Them.
Contrary to common assumptions, they weren’t in despair over their economic or social prospects.
Psychologically, this group was marked by desensitization, shaped less by fear than by boredom. They were not especially anxious about their own futures. They worried more about what AI and automation might do to other people than to themselves. Politics is entertainment: a stage for mockery, transgression, and performance, not moral seriousness or policy discipline.
That sensibility helps explain their media diets—and their favorite characters. Most like President Donald Trump. Many like Tucker Carlson and other figures who keep politics loose, funny, and combative.
What about the popularity of the anti-semitic Nick Fuentes, who admires both Hitler and Stalin? “Some described him as funny or provocative; others saw him as toxic; none was fully panicked,” says Arm. Only one person in the group agreed with him. On the other hand,
That ambient, unserious relationship to politics has a darker side. Moral stigmas—racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny—no longer reliably do the work they used to. After a decade of hearing the same accusations leveled at everyone from John McCain to Mitt Romney to Donald Trump, some see allegations of bigotry as table stakes. In the room, this translated into moments where ugly claims were met less with agreement than with shrugging indifference—more “whatever” than “yes,” but also more “whatever” than “absolutely not.”
The participants in the focus group “want a politics that feels less uptight and more charismatic—one that can make them laugh as well as make them better off,” according to Arm. “What matters most for them all is not ideological consistency but vibe: humor, transgression, and the sense of being led by someone who can command attention.”
Now this only describes 20 young conservatives in a focus group. Again, City Journal is a conservative publication, not out to criticize or misrepresent them. The exercise says nothing about young leftists. They are no doubt more idealistic and more indignant about the injustice they see in society, though I suspect they too are somewhat “vibe” driven.
But if these folks, nearly all of whom say they are Christians, are motivated mainly by cynicism rather than ideals, are we in trouble? Or are people with high political ideals more dangerous?
What do you make of this?
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