WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Ethan Watson: Is Gen Z Stuck in a Social Media Echo Chamber?

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Ethan Watson, a Young Voices contributor with a background in political science, argues that Gen Z’s reliance on Instagram influencers and curated news feeds is shaping political perceptions in startling ways. He joins WRFH to discuss a recent op-ed on the topic.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Sky Graham and today I have with me Ethan Watson. Ethan is a young voices contributor and graduate student at the University of Kansas. Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. So could you just give a brief overview of who you are and what you do? Sure. So I'm a grad student at the University of Kansas. I've got undergraduate reasons accounting and Holly Sy, looking to go to law school here in the near future. So lots of exams in my future. But on the side, I do a lot of political writing and political commentary. And I've got a piece out in real

clear politics discussing the Gen Z social media echo chamber that a lot of members of our generation have found themselves in, especially post the 2024 election. In that article, you discussed where members of Gen Z are getting their political news online. And as someone in Gen Z myself, I've seen so much of this, you know, former classmates posting the classic, like, Instagram infographics, but for those who might not be as familiar, could you explain what some of those Instagram activist accounts are trying to do? Right. And, you know, Sky, you see a lot of these, a flood of these posts coming out every time there's a major political event like the 24 election. And they're usually oversimplified, really boiled down or dumbed down versions of the issues.

So one, you know, a post was an example of it was supporting a convicted felon over a woman is blanking insane, right? Another one they posted was, America, I am literally so effing, sorry. And it's, you know, a lot of these charming accounts, he's a lot of profanity in their posts as well, which really just shows you the intellectual depth that they go to. But really, they reflect that a lot of people on the left view these elections, these events as nothing more than category versus category, woman versus felon. Another one that they post that I saw around a lot was from at We the Urban, where it said, to women everywhere that are tied. tired of being strong all the time, which was obviously a thinly veiled insinuation that Donald Trump's

election was somehow a grievous blow to women's rights, even though he's kind of flip-flopped on abortion and it remains legal in 21 states. But it just really is a oversimplification of the issues and a knee-jerk emotional reaction that a lot of people our age are getting sucked in by. Do you think this has such a broad appeal solely because of people's short attention spans? obviously it's easier to read an Instagram infographic about why Project 2025 is the end of the world than to read Project 2025. But is there any more to it than that? Or is it just this short attention spans and people wanting to get their information quickly? Well, I think the attention spans are definitely a part of it.

And our generation is notoriously bad attention spans. I'm a TA. I teach business writing and I see that all the time. But I think another part of it's a social contagion aspect, right? People are aged, they want to fit in. they want to be perceived as caring, we've somehow along the way we've mistakenly, you know, conflated tolerance with compassion, which is not really true, right? Like, my parents were not tolerant of a lot of things I did when I was a little kid, like putting my whole hand in a

glass of orange juice. But that's compassionate of them to do that because I ended up being a well-adjusted normal adult who doesn't do things like that. So tolerance and compassion are not the same thing. Compassion is not even the highest virtue. The highest virtue is actually truth. And somewhere along the line, our generation lost that. And so they just want to fit in. They just want to appear as compassionate and as virtuous as possible. So they repost what they see their friends posting. We saw this in 2020 with the Black Square for George Floyd, which was ridiculous, right? Like probably those people reposting that knew the stats on police brutality, much less

the details of the Floyd autopsy report, right? Very few of these people. But they're just trying to fit it. I think it's a social contagion. You discussed in the article how these accounts kind of make it appear as though the left is the standard. So obviously there's been an influx of new conservative voices on one. line, especially among young male creators. Joe Rogan is huge and people are leaning into these

more conservative voices, even people like Brett Cooper. So do you think this epidemic of all these Instagram accounts having so much power over people's perception of politics and reality? Do you think that's starting to change a little bit as people see the reality in front of them? Well, Scott, I certainly hope that that's the case. I think it would take something as crazy as what happened with the 2024 election to really shake people out of it, right? It poked holes in that bubble, that empowered ignorance that people our age were living in. And so I think that gives a lot of hope. And since then, I've had a lot of my peers who were traditionally very left-wing people asking me, you know, what do you think about this? And I've also had a lot of my peers coming up to me

and saying, thank you for speaking out because, you know, you're saying things that I was afraid to say. But I also think there's something that those of us on the right need to do to combat this. We we need to stop being cowed by the isms, right? The racism, sexism, homophobia, allegations that get flung our way every time we bring up a relevant point in the Daniel Penny trial or the abortion fight or foreign policy or really anything, right? Everything is a racist, sexist, you know, colonist talking point. And those words mean nothing anymore. They really have lost all meaning.

It's like when you say a word over and over again so many times that it sounds like you're saying nonsense. That's what's happened there. So we just stop being afraid of the isms. And we also need to stop allowing ourselves to be talked down to. Stop wanting people get away with these overgeneralizations. They love to drop in passing. I'm sure you've heard it.

Oh, I'm voting for Donald Trump because I want to keep my rights. It's like, don't just let that slide. You know, don't be confrontational, but say, oh, why? What rights are you referring to? And press them a little bit because they're wrong. And you should, by asking those questions, you can help them to maybe arrive at that conclusion. That was actually my next question. I was going to say, how do you think people should respond to this?

because, you know, you do see a lot of people trying to defend themselves from these allegations of racism and sexism, but in some ways it could be playing into their narrative. Going forward, whether we like it or not, these Instagram accounts are reaching a lot of people. And on TikTok, those people are reaching so many young people. So do you think there is a spot for conservative voices there or should conservatives just stay out of that? I do think there's a spot for that. And I think the reason is young people are drawn to rebellion, right? It's sort of in our nature to push back against the establishment. That's been the case since time immemorial, right?

That's how we're wired or rebel. And it used to be the rebellious thing to do was be a liberal. That is no longer the rebellious thing to do. The liberals are the establishment. We as conservatives are the counterculture, right? We are the subverses. We are the ones who are going against the prevailing narrative and thinking outside the box. And so because I know how people are age are wired,

and how we tend towards that sort of environment. I think there's absolutely a space for conservatives to break into these spaces. And that's what I'm trying to do with my writing and doing appearances like this. And I would encourage any young conservatives out there listening, do the same thing. Now is the time. The taboo is gone. It was gone as soon as Donald Trump got shot in the ear in Butler, Pennsylvania. And it's no longer a shameful thing to say that you're a Republican or conservative or even not a liberal anymore.

So now is our time to kind of seize that moment and fight. You referred to this as a social contagion. Is this social contagion in its last days, or is it likely to continue throughout the Trump presidency? I think it's in his dying breath, again, because the Trump election was the instigating event to stop this, right? That was like their apocalypse. And we see this with these ridiculous meltdowns, right? You see people posting these videos themselves crying and screaming. I've heard of like millennial and Gen Z teachers not going into school.

got more into work, which is insane, right? Like normal people are like, oh, we lost an election, big deal, live your life. But they have this overblown reaction. And I mentioned the phrase empowered ignorance earlier. And I think the empowered ignorance has been shattered. And there's a brief analogy I like to use to sort of describe this phenomenon because I think it's really apt. I am basically ignorant of professional hockey, right? I know nothing about that sport.

All I know is that at one point in the last 10 years or so, the St. Louis Blues, were really good at hockey. So people my age, you know, following this model, would go on and start spamming their feeds. The St. Louis Blues is the best team ever. Everyone should support them. If you don't support them, you're denying their existence as a team and attacking my identity as a blues fan. And any person who slid up and said, hey, they lost all their good players. And actually, if you look at this stat, this stat, this that they're not that good, I shut them down. And I only listen to people that told me I was brave and I was fearless and having a brat summer for supporting the St. Louis blues. I get stuck in that feedback loop.

And then when they don't win the Stanley Cup, I completely lose my mind. That's exactly what happened in 2024. And I'm hopeful that the 2024 election is the catalyzing event to snap people out of that. No, it's interesting you brought up Brat Summer because I actually, I thought that was a really interesting phenomenon when it first came about. And I thought it would be more effective than it was, actually. I thought it was really good messaging for people who don't know about politics and just kind of want the vibes or the aesthetic. So say someone has a family member or friend who is either posting these infographics online or is clearly falling into the trap of being influenced by these activist accounts. Number one, is it worth it to try and engage with them on these subjects?

And number two, how does one do that effectively? It can be done. It's tough. It's tough to break people out of this sort of matrix that they find themselves in. I don't actually recommend doing it by social media. recommend you, you know, slide up on their story and ask them the question right there. Yeah. Because tone is hard to convey over text. And also, if you ask people to back it up, then they can just go Google a stat on like www.

I'm right.com or whatever. Yeah. Find a stat that proves what they're saying. And it's not really organic because then you're both just Googling on the side, you know, niche statistics that prove your point. And you're not really having any discussion. So I think you should just roll your eyes and move on when you see it online. But then in person, when you're around that person and the subject inevitably comes up,

you know these types. They love to drop it in a conversation, right? It always comes up with them. That's when you just very sincerely, very pleasantly in a non-confrontational way, just say, what do you mean by that? And right there, when you're looking at them face-to-face, ask them, and then call them out when they overgeneralize on you or slinging isom at you. I was discussing the issue of traditional marriage once with a friend, and he told me that he thought I was getting close to segregation. And I said, don't talk down to me, first of all. And second of all, that's completely overblown. We're not even close to there.

And like if you correct them right there firmly, but reasonably, then you kind of start to snap them out of this, this woke mind virus, as Elon Musk likes to say, that's really just taken hold on their brains like a parasite from the movie Alien. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.

I'm Sky Graham and I'm talking with Ethan Watson, a young voices contributor and opinions writer on the subjects of politics and culture. So you've been in college. I went to a very liberal high school. We've all seen a lot of this in the education system. How do you think the education system is playing into Gen Z's approach to politics? I actually wrote a piece about this earlier in the summer. It didn't get a ton of traction, but I think at least in Kansas where I grew up, our education system, and I suspect that it's the same everywhere. Somewhere along the way, we've lost the idea that our education system should

teach you what's true, and it actually should teach you how to thank, how to be critical and ask questions. And that's not really the case, right? If all you can do is be critical and ask questions of things, right, ask what are the motives behind this? Then you really don't know anything. You can't build anything. So we need to start by teaching people some things that are immutable truths, right? We need to teach people, you know, that having families is good, that capitalism is generally a good thing, not without its problems, but a generally a good thing. Democracy, freedom are good things. Religion as a matter of public life is a good thing. We need to teach people that these are actually immutable truths. And then we can get into some critical thinking because we've

basically indoctrinated people where all you should do is ask questions and the only absolute truth is what makes someone feel good, what makes someone happy or what provides the most material benefit. And that's such a skewed way to view the world. And that's how you get this over-emotionalization of the issues, right? You know, people, People that were, you know, never Trumpers, and I wasn't the biggest Donald Trump fan in the world by a long stretch of the imagination. Like, I think they're probably a little bit better options in primaries. But the vehement never Trumpers, they always just say things like, well, he's mean to women or he, he's, you know, says crude things on Twitter. And it's like, yeah, but there's more to the presidency than just making me feel good, right?

This is not, I'm not voting for my best friend here. I'm voting for someone to do a job that, you know, and the job very often entails some nasty work like waging wars or, you know, negotiating with dictators. And I don't really need someone who's going to make me feel good about that. I just need someone who's going to do a good job. Continuing on education for just a moment, you see critical race theory, critical gender theory, all of these different leftist visions of the world popping up in schools for all. ages, how would you say these theories being pushed on Gen Z impacted people's view of the world? I think the critical race theory and just general sort of intersectionality, right? Whether it's race, gender, religion, sexuality, any of those, when the education system tells people that these are the lenses through which to view the world, naturally they're going

to view the world through those lenses, right? Like, we've been hit over our heads with it over and over. And I was fortunate enough that, you know, in my home life, I was raised by two very smart people who would talk to me and tell me, you know, that's, that's, you know, not true. That's actually not the most important thing about you. You shouldn't judge people by that. That doesn't, demographics are not destiny. But a lot of people who don't talk politics on the dinner table, a lot of kids, when they go to school and all they learn about is America is terrible for, it's treatment of the Native Americans. And then it's terrible for the using the nuclear bomb. And then all the racism in the Jim Crow South. That's all you basically learn in your high school. school history classes, then of course you're going to view the world through those lenses. And I think, I suspect it impacts young women more because young women are predisposed to being more nurturing and caring just as a matter of basic biology. That's how young women are wired. And so they tend to be more susceptible to emotional appeals. And it's really unfortunate because that that nurturing, caring instinct is a beautiful thing, but it's so easily weaponized. And that's exactly what we've seen, whether it's the pictures of the kids in cages or the horrific scenes of war in Ukraine and Palestine, they use and twist that emotional empathy to bring people over their side and say, no, we're the side of caring.

But we need to show people that the conservatives are the side of compassion as well. We just have compassion for different people. I don't have compassion for the people crossing our border illegally. I have compassion for the young woman, Lake and Riley, who was raped and murdered by an illegal. That's who I feel compassion for. And there is compassion on both sides. It's just where you want to allocate that. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if you've heard.

Allie Beth Stucky wrote a book about this. It came out like a month ago. It was called toxic empathy and it addressed this exact point about how young women and especially Christian women kind of fall into this trap. So I thought that was that was really interesting. So you talked about the education system, particularly if parents aren't. talking about this with their kids at the dinner table. Kids are very likely to fall into this. As for someone who's a parent, how should they approach these issues with their kids? What do you think parents should be doing in this culture to help their children combat what's

happening at their schools right now? Well, you know, I am 22 years old, so I'm not sure. And I don't have any kids, so thankfully. So, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to be extrapolating here a little bit. Yeah. The first thing I say is don't, don't over politicize your kids at a young age, right? You see these people that are going on Twitter saying, my six-year-old just ask me, you know, Mommy, what's going to happen because Kamala Harris? Like, don't, none of that. That's just bad. Let kids be kids, which is why I'm, you know, so up in arms about sort of the teaching of these critical theory and the reading of books like genderqueer in elementary or even middle schools, because it's got no place there. I wasn't thinking about this stuff when I was 12. I was playing Terraria in the video game, right? Like, you shouldn't be doing that as a kid. But what you can do is you can train your kids. You can do is you can train your kids. kid to be a critical thinker. You can keep them off of social media, keep them away from social media, give them alternative media to consume that actually leads to their flourishing and their enrichment. Don't be showing them the new woke Disney programs. Put on the classic snow light, right? Just a good tale of good and evil that models, you know, proper relationships. That's a good thing. You know, read to your kid. Make them, make them literate. Encourage them to read. I

I believe that we kind of do have to set a standard or else someone we don't like will set the standard. But I do think you should, to some degree, push your beliefs on your kids. Not to the point where they, you know, have a knee-jerk reaction and want to rebel and throw off everything that you've pushed on them. But definitely, definitely make your beliefs known to your kids and tell them why you think what you think when the time comes, not when they're 12, when they're 16, right? When they're 18.

A lot of people say, I've heard people say, you know, I don't want to push my beliefs on my kids, it's interesting to see people say that when the other side clearly is not doing that, right? They're telling their kids about this stuff at a young age. So if one side is doing it and the other side isn't, you can see how that can cause kind of that imbalance. And I might add as well, you know, the family is the fundamental building block of society, right? They're the little platoons. I don't remember who to attribute that quote to, but they're called the little platoons of the Republic, right? That is the fundamental organization of people. And if you're a conservative and you want to conserve anything, you actually have to take control of institutions. And that starts with

your own family, right? You need to actually shore that institution up first before you can tackle education or the media or the church or anything else in your community. You need to shore up your home front, essentially. My final question just has to do with how you got into this sphere of political news writing. You're Gen Z as well. So you've been raised around this, even if you're even though you said your family was stable and helped you see the truth, how has it been for you breaking into conservative media in this world and in this generation that's so divisive and hostile towards people on the right? Right. You know, I, uh, so I've, I've, I've basically been interested in politics since 2016 with Donald Trump won. Um, like the spectacle and the glitz

and the glimber of that really kind of, kind of wowed me. And then I started listening to shows and reading about it. But I wouldn't say I felt strongly about it until 2020 rolled around and COVID happened. That was my senior year of high school and then it extended it into my first and second years of college. Some of the most formative and important and really just kind of carefree and fun times in a young person's life, right? It was my freshman third junior year of high school. So similar thing. So you get you get the you get the picture. But like I feel like that was stolen from us, right? Like like all of a sudden the liberal bureaucracy. the expert class of the elites. They sneered at us. They said, if you question masks or social

distancing or the lockdowns, then you are an unscientific rube and you're an idiot. Sit down and, you know, we're going to try to save grandma and you want to kill grandma. That insulted me so deeply that I got angry. And I really started to follow politics and read and think about politics more closely. And I guess just after, I kept quiet for a while, right? Because I'm a business major by trade. I want to go to law school. I don't want, you know, to be shunned or to lose out on career opportunities from my beliefs. But at a certain point, I just got sick and tired of it. And I said, you know, I can't, I can't keep quiet anymore. And I saw the tide shifting. It's not as taboo to be a Republican anymore. And I thought, you know, you know, career,

career can still happen, but I'm going to get out there while I have a window through this Young Voices program that I'm in and say my piece. And really, the reaction has been really good from my peer group. I've gotten, I've gotten a few, I get a lot of random hate comments. on the internet, which is hilarious to me. I think I got heated about it for all 30 seconds, and I realized actually these people don't matter, their faceless, nameless ghouls. One of my peers did make a burner account

to accuse me of being paid off by Vladimir Putin, which I thought was funny because if I was being paid off by Vladimir Putin, I wouldn't be living in KU student housing right now. So, you know, that would be sweet, you know, if you would love to pay me off, then I mean, that would be a great deal. But all seriousness, most people have been really supportive. They slide up and say, look, we agree with you. thank you for saying this. Or even if they don't agree with me, they say, you know,

we're happy that you're speaking at it. And we engage in a positive discourse. So I've been actually impressed by my generation's response to what I've been putting out. Yeah. All right. Well, that will conclude the interview. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been Ethan Watson on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.