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Gen Z Is Broke and Fed Up With Politics

At Thanksgiving last year, a great-aunt tried to offer Kayla Cornett a reassuring example: Her older cousin had worked hard, saved and bought a house. Cornett, 24, could do the same, she said — if she tried just a little bit harder.

What stayed with her long after the turkey was cleared was the implication that her current efforts just weren’t enough. She was trying to keep up with rent and the ordinary expenses of adulthood, and it was a struggle. She recently started carrying a credit-card balance for the first time, she says, after even modest costs began piling up. Filling her gas tank was $40. “I can not eat, or I can have credit card debt,” she remembers thinking when older relatives questioned her balance.

Cornett and her partner have stayed in their Raleigh apartment even as the complex has grown less safe and cars have been broken into. They had moved in 2023 and were reluctant to do so again; other places now cost $200 or $300 more per month. Leaving would mean trading one worry for another bill they can’t afford.

“The little things are accruing in a way that feels insurmountable to me,” Cornett says.

The affordability crisis is a struggle felt by everyone in the country, but it’s hitting Cornett’s generation particularly hard as they emerge into adulthood with high inflation, little savings, a wobbly job market and a lifetime of dysfunctional politics. Transunion, a consumer credit reporting agency, found in a 2024 study that 22- to 24-year-olds in Gen Z had higher average credit-card balances, higher average auto-loan balances and higher average personal-loan balances than millennials of the same age a decade earlier, even when adjusted for inflation. Gen Z borrowers also had higher delinquency rates than their millennial counterparts.

This gap — between the promise that hard work will bring stability and the costs young adults say they can’t get ahead of — is key to understanding the politics of Gen Z, a voter group that helped President Donald Trump win in 2024, but whose longtime loyalties have yet to be won by either party.

After Trump’s victory, much was made of a vibe shift in American politics. The manosphere was ascendant and tradwives were everywhere. For a brief moment, it seemed like conservatives had captured the attention of American youth. Perhaps. Or perhaps Trump pulled in young voters because of his promises to rein in high prices, and since he failed to do so — amid his tariffs and his war with Iran — young people are preparing to reject the GOP in droves in the midterms.

Gen Z’s political behavior is often viewed through the lens of cultural issues or internet trends. But based on a dozen interviews with Gen Zers from across the country, those explanations obscure a more fundamental force: They belong to a generation coming of age with less financial security and with a growing sense that the American economy doesn’t deliver, at least not for them. A crushing debt load is the most tangible proof.

“The first time I voted was the 2024 presidential election,” says Anna Yi, a 21-year-old Democrat studying at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “I remember being a little bit naive and being like, ‘There’s going to be a lot of change. There’s going to be a lot of sweeping social reform and whatnot.’ Now it’s: Who’s going to get me a job? Who’s going to let me afford my own place before I turn 40?”

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DOJ Rushes to Block California From Counting 20,000 Ballots Tied to Suspected Noncitizens Before Votes Are Mixed Forever

The Justice Department is seeking an emergency order from the Ninth Circuit to stop California from counting mail-in ballots linked to more than 20,000 people federal investigators have flagged as likely noncitizens, warning that once the ballots are separated from their envelopes, the damage cannot be undone.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli and Attorney General Todd Blanche are leading the effort after a district court did not act on their earlier request to review the citizenship of individuals believed to be noncitizens.

The motion names California, Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean C. Logan as defendants and seeks a ruling by Saturday.

California and Weber oppose the request.

Federal officials say U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Homeland Security Investigations reviewed California voter registration data against federal immigration records and identified more than 20,000 registered voters who received mail ballots and are considered highly likely to be noncitizens.

Federal law, of course, bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections.

Essayli told Fox News that the 20,000 figure is the floor and that more names are expected.

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Why Are Scientists Suddenly So Concerned About An Asteroid Hitting Earth?

Authorities assure us that we are perfectly safe and that no giant space rocks are heading our way. If that is true, why is a scenario that has been developed for the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference “based around a hypothetical impact threat” from a very large asteroid? And why are scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory studying how to destroy a giant asteroid that is heading toward Earth using nuclear weapons? If there is no threat anywhere on the horizon, wouldn’t you think that those scientists would have something better to do with their time? On top of everything else, NASA recently concluded a secretive operation known as “OSIRIS-REx” in which a spacecraft visited an asteroid, plucked a piece off of it, and returned it to Earth. While the general public is being told that we are safe for decades to come, a tremendous amount of time, money and energy is being poured into preparing for a potential asteroid threat.

Do they know something that the rest of us do not?

I am convinced that there is far more going on behind the scenes than we are being told.

They never say anything that will alarm the general public, but at the same time they are pumping vast resources into “sophisticated planetary defense efforts” that are intended to protect our planet “from potentially hazardous asteroids”…

Would we be prepared if a potentially life-threatening object from space were on a collision course with Earth? And how much damage could an incoming asteroid actually cause?

Such questions remain at the forefront of increasingly sophisticated planetary defense efforts aimed at protecting our planet from potentially hazardous asteroids. Yet even if astronomers are able to identify a space object that might pose a threat, a significant number of uncertainties remain: the object’s size, composition, structure, and potential impact locations all must be considered, as these factors can dramatically influence what happens once an asteroid enters Earth’s atmosphere.

If there are no near-Earth objects that are a threat, why spend so much money on this?

We certainly have a lot of other very pressing matters that do require funding right now.

NASA is either wasting our money, or something else is going on.

Interestingly, NASA is a participant in the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference. An exercise is underway that simulates how authorities would respond to a “Tunguska-sized object” that is headed toward Earth…

Additionally, NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) regularly participates in planetary defense exercises designed to test these assessment methods, with current scenarios under development for the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference that take a cue from one of history’s most concerning airburst events.

“The current exercise that is underway for the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference is based around a hypothetical impact threat from a roughly Tunguska-sized object,” Wheeler told The Debrief.

For those of you that are not familiar, in 1908 the Tunguska event flattened approximately 2,000 square kilometers in Siberia…

Tunguska event, enormous explosion that is estimated to have occurred at 7:14 AM plus or minus one minute on June 30, 1908, at an altitude of 5-10 km (15,000-30,000 feet), flattening some 2,000 square km (500,000 acres) and charring more than 100 square km of pine forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia (60°55′ N 101°57′ E), Russia. The energy of the explosion is estimated to have been equivalent to the explosive force of as much as 15 megatons of TNT – a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945.

Why hold an exercise of this nature if there is absolutely no threat of this sort of event occurring for decades to come?

And why did NASA just send a small spacecraft to grab a piece of an asteroid known as Bennu and bring it back to Earth?…

On Sept. 30, NASA formally concluded OSIRIS-REx, the historic first U.S. mission to pluck a pristine piece of an asteroid and deliver it safely back to Earth.

The van-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft – whose name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer – visited and sampled Bennu, an ancient space rock holding pristine remnants from the dawn of our solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. Among those cosmic relics are raw organic building blocks, the kind that may have seeded life on Earth.

“I have known this day was coming for a long time, but it is still difficult to see it arrive,” OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta, who’s based at the University of Arizona, said in a post on LinkedIn. “I feel enormous pride in what we accomplished together, and real sadness that this journey has come to an end.”

That was certainly an impressive scientific achievement.

But it also cost a lot of money to do that.

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Trump’s War Department Declares Chinese Communist Party-Backed Confucius Institutes a NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT — Hegseth Says 80 Chinese Propaganda Operations at 30 US Universities Have Been Dismantled

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced Friday that the Department of War has formally designated Confucius Institutes as a threat to U.S. national security.

In a video posted to his official X account, Hegseth detailed how Chinese Communist Party-backed operations that Congress restricted years ago had simply rebranded and continued operating on American campuses.

Hegseth drew a direct parallel to the DEI bureaucracy the War Department has been dismantling.

“When I took office, one thing we knew was that the cancer of DEI, it was going to be difficult to kill here in the Department of War. You see, instead of complying, promoters of this ideology just tried to rebrand it and thought they would be safe,” he said. “Now, today, in a similar example, I want to tell you about Confucius Institutes.”

He continued: “These Chinese government-backed propaganda cultural programs had infiltrated our nation’s universities in almost every state. Now, thankfully, Congress banned them a few years ago, these Confucius Institutes but they came back disguised in new forms just like DEI does. Just call it a different name. Well, the Department of War has taken action to stop this as well. We added these sleeper organizations to our list of institutions that threaten our national security.”

Hegseth stated that investigators uncovered “80 new propaganda cells across 30 universities” operating under different names and charters but with the same mission “to steal intellectual property and to infiltrate the minds of American students.”

Over the past two months, the War Department “systematically dismantled every single one of these organizations” using its funding and contracting leverage.

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Major Oil Spill From Attacked Tanker Forces Closure Of UAE Beaches

Amid the record pace in Iranian attacks on crude tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, many have been wondering: where does all that oil end up when it comes to severely damaged or sunken tankers?

On Friday the UAE has confirmed a deeply alarming event: some of its beaches are being shuttered as a major spill is washing up after a tanker was struck by a projectile off the UAE coast, resulting in a fire aboard the vessel and apparent major spillage. The attack incident happened earlier in October.

Authorities have “detected a tanker oil spill affecting Umm Al Quwain’s beaches,” the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment announced in a statement.

It confirmed that the emirate in question was forced to close its beaches, and that “teams immediately began containment, cordoning, clean-up and remediation… to limit environmental impacts.”

International reports have identified that the leak resulted from the Oct.9 incident involving the GEM NO.2 tanker, which had been detailed by the UKMTO

“Gem No. 2, was hit by a projectile Friday off the coast of the UAE resulting in a fire onboard. The ship departed Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia, in March and has remained in the Persian Gulf since the war began,” as reported at the time.

The last week saw increasing complaints by beach area residents of unusual smells – reports that were initially brushed off by local authorities. One regional Gulf outlet documents the following timeline:

October 19: Unusual smells reported

Reports of unusual odours emerged on Monday, October 19, in Sharjah and other parts of the UAE.

The reports prompted authorities to begin monitoring the situation in coordination with federal and local government agencies.

Authorities conducted inspections and assessments to identify the source of the smells and determine whether they posed any risk to residents.

October 20: Sharjah Police reassure residents

Lieutenant General Abdullah Mubarak bin Amer, Commander-in-Chief of Sharjah Police, addressed public concerns during the Direct Line programme broadcast on Sharjah TV and Radio.

He said the situation was safe and stable, with no indication of a threat to public health or safety.

October 21: Environment ministry provides initial findings

The Ministry of Climate Change and Environment confirmed that it was coordinating with local authorities to investigate unusual odours detected in several areas.

The ministry said its assessments found no cause for concern.

Field monitoring and response efforts were continuing to reduce the odours and help them dissipate.

But then by Friday the oil spill impacting beaches was belatedly confirmed. This came long after oil-like smells began to inundate local social media, and government office call centers.

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Harvard Medical School Holds Panel Raising Whether Weight Loss Drugs Are An Imperialistic, Militaristic Plot

Harvard University is facing another controversy after its medical school held an event on “the Pathology of Unruly Bodies.” The most surprising part is that it was not a reference to the Harvard faculty itself. Rather, a panel composed of non-medical experts was railing against anti-obesity drugs as part of “indoctrination” to support the ills of “empire and imperialism.” Welcome to the state of higher education in America.

The panel was devoid of actual medical experts. It was dressed up in medical terms with the use of the word “pathology.” It could have easily been billed as “GLP-1 Anti-Body.” The panel included such experts as Da’Shaun L Harrison, who recently drew notoriety for claiming at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago that GLP-1 medications constitute “genocide” against fat people.

Another headliner was Roxane Gay, the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University – New Brunswick and the artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School. Professor Gay (the cousin of former Harvard University President Claudine Gay) had called for the release of Luigi Mangione, who murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, two years ago.

Despite her extremism and penchant for murderers like Mangione, Gay writes for the New York Times and apparently likes to flip off people in public. Harvard decided she was exactly what they needed to help shape their medical students. She is part of the radical chic of higher education, where no views are too far left (while departments purge conservatives and libertarians).

Harrison quickly picked up where she left off at the Socialist Convention with bizarre claims. Rather than claiming that drug companies were engaging in the genocide of fat people with weight-loss drugs, she explained that the companies were really militarizing an imperialist state: “This practice of forcing people into manipulating and changing or shifting how they look is oftentimes about making bodies militarisable. Building up a military to defend an imperialist state.“

She further claimed:

“A lot of doctors, medical professionals and folks who collaborate with them – be it through the government or media – are advocating for atrocities that are directly impacting our citizens, but also citizens around the globe.

It then becomes about creating this ideal body that you are always being pushed and pulled towards, as a way to represent this patriotism that is intended to indoctrinate one into the military, into the defense of the country.”

The suggestion that weight loss is an imperialist militaristic plot is obviously bonkers. It is the kind of raving you would expect on a subway from someone wearing a handmade cardboard sign and a tin foil hat.

However, Harvard Medical School views that person as a serious expert on the pathologies of weight loss.

Notably, not a single Harvard faculty member expressed unease over the programming. Medical students are facing an array of tough technological and economic conditions. Yet, the administration wants them to sit through far-left indoctrinations from the likes of Gay and Harrison.

Harvard is not alone. Various medical schools have incorporated radical social agendas into their curricula or events. We recently discussed how UCLA Medical School held a panel on which psychiatrists defended self-immolation in protesting Israel. In an earlier post, we discussed a mandatory lecture at UCLA of one of the university’s “activists-in-residence” replete with anti-Semitic postings and racist rhetoric.

The hiring of figures like Gay and the radical programs at these schools show that faculty have little intention to change the ideological echo chamber in higher education. It is truly a pathology of unruly bodies.

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Texas AG Ken Paxton Sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman for Lying to Users and Harming Texans Including Children

The great Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued OPenAI and Sam Altman on Friday for lying to and misleading Texans on safety concerns.

The suit was filed on Friday October 23, 2026, in Collin County district court. The suit alleges OpenAI misled consumers about ChatGPT’s safety and failed to protect Texans — including children — from harmful AI outputs

According to the Woodlands Online the suit asserts:
** Misrepresented safety and reliability of ChatGPT while omitting significant risks

** Failed to implement adequate guardrails, allowing harmful outputs such as encouragement of self-harm, violence, or addiction

** Rushed products to market for profit, disregarding internal safety warnings

** Collected minors’ data without parental oversight and allegedly contributed to incidents like AI-assisted mass shootings

The lawsuit invokes Texas deceptive trade practices act and the securing children online through parental empowerment act.

Civil penalties could reach $10,000 per violation.

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A Withdrawn Immigration Application, Corrected Tax Returns, And ‘Military Officer’ Father: Ilhan Omar Evidence Piles Up

The New York Post has published additional reporting (assembled from previous reporting – see below) on the disputed allegations surrounding Omar’s marriage to Ahmed Elmi, highlighting a British marriage certificate alongside previously reported financial records and witness claims.

Omar denies wrongdoing, and the material presented does not establish that Elmi is her brother or that their marriage was fraudulent. The Post’s cited evidence and allegations include:

  • Family records and names: A 1997 British marriage certificate obtained by the Post identifies the father of Leila Nur Said, whom the paper describes as believed to be Omar’s sister, as Nur Said Elmi. Sources told the paper this was another name used by Omar’s father. The Post also cites the federal filing identifying Omar as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar.” His profession is listed as “military officer.”
  • A shared address: Omar and Elmi listed the same Columbia Heights, Minnesota, address on their 2009 marriage application. Ahmed Hirsi, the father of Omar’s children, also used that address for a business license, according to the Post.
  • Overlapping relationships and tax filings: Omar had her third child with Hirsi in 2012 while legally married to Elmi. The Post also cites joint tax returns Omar filed with Hirsi for 2014 and 2015, before her divorce from Elmi was finalized in 2017. Those returns were subsequently corrected.
  • A withdrawn immigration application: Citing the Washington Post, the paper reports that Elmi withdrew a marriage-based green-card application in 2019 after immigration authorities requested additional evidence concerning the marriage.
  • A disputed witness account: The Post revisits a Somali blogger’s 2020 claim to the Daily Mail that Omar had introduced Elmi as her brother and said he needed immigration “papers.” This remains a witness allegation, rather than documentary proof of kinship or fraud.

Omar’s late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, served as a colonel in Somalia’s army under dictator Siad Barre. A 2020 Sahan Journal obituary, citing a fellow former officer, reported that he commanded a regiment during the 1977–78 Somali–Ethiopian War and remained in the military until the regime collapsed in 1991. The New York Post has since quoted historian Mohamed Haji Ingiriis accusing him of helping sustain Barre’s dictatorship and misrepresenting his background when seeking refugee status in the United States. Barre’s forces committed well-documented atrocities against Isaaq civilians, including bombardments of Hargeisa and attacks on fleeing civilians. However, those atrocities and Nur’s military rank do not establish his individual culpability: the reporting cited does not demonstrate that he personally ordered or participated in a specific atrocity.

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Half a dozen gardaí raided Kirk Loco’s home at dawn over a tweet, trial hears

Kirk Loco is on trial in Ireland over a single tweet. Two years ago, he warned his community that a man had exposed himself near a 14-year-old girl on a public bus. Police never charged that man, an asylum seeker who cannot be named under a court order. They charged Kirk instead.

On Friday in Bray District Court, south of Dublin, a Garda sergeant testified that half a dozen officers arrived at Kirk’s home at 6:30 a.m. with a search warrant, seized his devices and arrested him. She agreed that Kirk had checked his story with the girl’s family before he posted it. Yet police took a statement from the man on the bus, and never from the girl.

Kirk was arrested for “knowingly making a false report,” but he is now charged with sending a “threatening or grossly offensive communication.” Throughout the day, the prosecution referred to the man on the bus as the injured party, saying the tweet had “caused him stress.”

The girl, now a year older, also took the stand and described a drunk man with his shirt lifted and his belt open. On cross-examination, the prosecutor played the bus CCTV and told her she looked “happy enough.”

The trial resumes Thursday, Oct. 29, when Kirk is expected to testify. Rebel News boss Ezra Levant was in the courtroom, and his full account of the testimony is in the thread below.

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“THE NEW YORK TIMES GOT CAUGHT!” – Trump Nukes the New York Times After Admitting to Getting Duped by Fake Pollster With Completely Fabricated Numbers

President Trump on Thursday lit up the New York Times, slamming the outlet for using bogus numbers from a “totally fake” pollster while speaking to reporters, then later warning that his defamation lawsuit is growing stronger by the day.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, a fake pollster called Wedgewood, which admitted to being an “entirely fabricated polling firm,” duped mainstream media outlets with bogus polls across multiple swing states as part of a social experiment. It was “far too easy,” Wedgewood said.

“Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source,” the fake polling outfit, self-described as an “experimental project,” said in a statement.

“Our fabricated numbers were given instant credibility across national media platforms – including being cited on air and in reporting by outlets such as MS NOW. The ease with which unverified figures were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation.”

The Times admitted to removing 15 polls from the firm after it “acknowledged that almost all of its work was fake.”

President Trump responded on Thursday when a reporter asked him why Democrats are doing “so well” in the polls.

“I don’t know if they’re close. I mean, I just saw that the New York Times used the poll numbers of a totally fake, you know, a group that said there were fake numbers against me,” Trump said.

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