ANALYSIS – It is becoming sadly clear that this may be the last generation of any real freedom in America as Generation Z (Gen Z or Zoomers) increasingly supports the surveillance and punishment state. Many are also exhibitionists craving 24-7 attention.
As I wrote about earlier – Gen Z ‘loves Big Brother.’ Big Brother is the term used by George Orwell to describe the totalitarian surveillance state in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984).
In that piece, I noted a CATO Institute poll that showed 30 percent of people under 30 support allowing the government to install video cameras in our homes to “reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.”
And we can blame a lot of that on the far-l*ft w*ke culture at our colleges and universities.
It’s bad enough that many of this generation is willing to let faceless bureaucrats watch us in our homes, but Zoomers appear willing to go beyond even that. They are the generation of snitches, and punishers, going after anyone they disagree with.
This generation has been taught to equate ‘unapproved’ speech with actual violence, so it makes sense that they’ll do whatever it takes to eliminate it.
Much of this can be traced back to higher education. Our colleges and schools are teaching our kids to be hypersensitive, ideological, w*ke snitches.
After providing various scary examples, including one where a professor used the oft-used term “sacred cow,” and a student filed a complaint that said the student would “not feel safe around him” any longer, Christian Schneider writes in National Review:
…part of the reason Gen Z has an unquenchable thirst for surveillance is what they are being taught at their colleges and universities. All the above examples were reports filed with campus “Bias Response Teams” — programs set up by institutions of higher education that incentivize students to narc on each other for expressing unpopular opinions or engaging in disfavored behavior.
Decades ago, courts threw out college “speech codes,” finding that public universities banning language was impermissible under the First Amendment. So when the internet grew as a tool, schools crafted a workaround: What if, instead of the schools targeting students for unpopular speech, it was the students themselves doing the targeting? And thus a majority of public colleges and universities began crowdsourcing their speech codes.
In fact, bias-response teams are actually worse than the traditional speech codes, which outlawed specific words: The new standard for determining whether speech is forbidden is simply anything that offends someone. Any oversensitive campus resident now has the power to log on and anonymously report a fellow student or professor.
Not to be outdone by its elite competitors, Stanford University implemented its own Orwellian system in which the school offered students a cash bounty if they reported insensitive speech on campus. In April, the school backtracked on the plan after an ensuing episode of national outrage.
You can’t get much more Orwellian than that.
But there is a big added factor in why this generation loves surveillance, “cameras are what young people now seek, hoping to parlay their everyday goings-on into a Kardashian-like media empire.”
Schneider notes that one poll found that nearly one-quarter of Zoomers in the United States planned to be internet ‘influencers,’ making their living creating videos for YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
Apparently, we no longer need doctors, engineers, scientists, or lawyers (well, maybe not so many lawyers).
I don’t know about you, but a nation of empty-headed TikTok influencers scares me almost more than the Orwellian surveillance they like so much.
Schneider adds: “Today’s young people have become both informers and self-exposers. If we’re not careful, their snitch culture will threaten privacy and freedom.”
I would go further. If we aren’t careful, very soon, America, as a free country, will be totally unrecognizable.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
