Excellent analysis

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/generation-c-as-in-confused-7d224d24

Generation C as in ‘Confused’

Lucidity will come when they figure out that capitalism will solve their problems.

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By 

Andy Kessler

Nov. 23, 2025 3:41 pm ET

Recent college graduates are moaning about their struggle to find jobs. Fair enough. But now there’s a backlash on campuses over “career funneling”—schools only allowing interviews on campus for what students consider objectionable jobs, like finance and consulting. Can you spot the contradiction?

A Wellesley College junior, majoring in economics as well as “peace and justice studies,” complained to the Journal about narrow job opportunities. While Wellesley’s economics department offers solid macro and micro courses, even “ECON 312: The Economics of Globalization,” peace and justice studies was new to me. So I did a little digging and found these courses: “PEAC 346: Decolonizing the Bible” and PEAC 205, which lectures students on “how gender as a symbolic construct configures how we make sense of war making and peacebuilding.”

What a disconnect. You’d think learned professors would teach that capitalism drives peace and justice, while constantly failing socialism delivers, I don’t know, human-rights-abusing Cuba and Venezuela? No cap, that’s sus (translation: no lie, that’s suspicious). Universities are living contradictions.

I fear we are turning out the most confused generation, with an affliction of contradiction. I’ve written before about Cy-Bos—cyber bohemian quitters—and Gen G—generation guilty. Now we have Gen C, for confused. You can’t blame them; look at the Sybil-like multipersonality splits at Wellesley and most universities.

I have to believe that most corporate recruiters by now see “peace and justice” and other squishy majors as red flags after marketing disasters by social-justice warriors. You know, how marketing executive Alissa Heinerscheid destroyed Bud Light, how Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino botched a logo rebranding, and how Target offered “tuck-friendly” product selections. Billions of dollars were lost in stunts like those. Justice jobs are sparse for a reason. And this before artificial intelligence kicks in.

Maybe government can help. Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) tweeted, “We need regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to extract greater profits.” Mr. Khanna was the 2020 campaign co-chair for democratic socialist (another contradiction) Bernie Sanders. He somehow represents prosperity-creating Silicon Valley. Make sense?

Young people complain (and yes, I’m generalizing) about affordability and food deserts while sipping Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccinos at Starbucks. They demand land acknowledgments but have no sense of history. They stand for “gender equality” but sing along to vile and misogynist music. They love actress Sydney Sweeney in shows like “Euphoria” but hate her for not apologizing for her great jeans or genes. They love to be influencers but are closed-minded and uninfluenceable. They abhor violence but play gory videogames. I recently learned of “classy trashy” parties. I overheard, “Let’s dress up, like, for an Oscars party, drink champagne and then order in pizza and wings.” For the record, Buffalo chicken wings are messy but never trashy.

Capitalism is messy, so it’s considered trash. And Gen C will loudly and proudly tell you this via Instagram and TikTok from their $1,000 parent-bought iPhones as if these things magically appear. No way were they created from the blood, sweat and beers of toiling engineers, massive amounts of human ingenuity melded with trillions in capital delivered along land, ship and jet trade routes.

Gen C hates the newly minted billionaires who provide these products and services because, well, it isn’t fair. So they vote for democratic socialists like New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, demand free goodies, and agree there shouldn’t be billionaires because everything they have all magically appeared, remember? Yes, even Wellesley econ majors must recognize they’re voting for their own demise via expensive free stuff.

Gen C want jobs that make the world better. Who doesn’t? Yes, we need museum curators to spread history and knowledge, but not ideology. Yes, we need artists to inspire but not twist their work to advertise the justicey message du jour. We even need the Greta Thunbergs of the world to champion issues from start to finish, but not angrily hop from one to the next, green to Gaza, to feed the news cycle. I respect their passion but sure wish it were directed to something useful.

There is poverty. Capitalism is solving it. U2 singer Bono reluctantly admitted this in 2022. “There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism.” Ugh?

There is pollution. Capitalism is solving it. It’s helping the move from coal to fracked oil and natural gas to nukes. High-school reading levels are atrocious. Capitalism can fix it—especially if we could break the stranglehold of teachers’ unions and allow self-paced and technology-reinforced education.

There is disease and human suffering. Capitalism is solving it. Not by giving away free stuff, but by rolling up our sleeves and doing the hard and expensive work of drug discovery and disease eradication.

When Gen C eventually figures this out, their confusion will end.

Write to kessler@wsj.com.

Ottoman empire history

 

Cynical Publius

@CynicalPublius

As many of you know I have been traveling in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I plan to write an article on what I saw in general, but one thing has come through loud and clear, over and over and over. That is this: The Ottoman Empire ravaged these nations and peoples in every possible respect: physically, economically, culturally, socially, you name it. Entire cities were razed to the ground with their inhabitants obliterated. The Ottomans bragged about enslaving Eastern European women, dragging them back to Turkey and forcing them to submit to Islam. I have heard at least ten times on this trip about how that is why there are blue-eyed Turks. The Ottoman Empire only fell in 1922. That means that for many older Eastern Europeans this savagery was in the living memory of their grandparents. We don’t learn about this history in the West, but it is an omnipresent specter for these nations I have visited. So when leftist Americans or Western Europeans complain about Eastern Europe’s unwillingness to take in Muslim migrants, they must realize what Eastern Europe has endured historically and why they believe they have excellent reasons for keeping those barriers up.

5:42 PM · Nov 18, 2025

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47.9K

Views

Jon Terry

@leankitjon

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2h

I spent two years in Turkey and then a year in Greece. Those two peoples absolutely hate each other. The Greeks still call Istanbul Constantinople. It’s occupied territory. They’ve spent 1500 years fighting to hold back, then endure, then roll back the forces of Islam. The giant exchange of populations after they almost retook control of western Anatolia but ultimately lost in 1921-22 is a fresh wound. They only got the last piece of modern Greece back in 1946. They nearly got a piece back (Cyprus) in 1968. None of it is history. It’s current events.

bbuckley

@bbuckley88

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2h

If your grandma is from Castilla or Galicia, northern Spanish coast, you grow up knowing “los Moros” are to be fought until death if we see “Moros en la costa”, because that means rapes & enslavement. And yet most of Spain seems to have forgotten.

Hunger Hysteria Industrial Complex

https://mises.org/mises-wire/food-stamps-and-federal-war-self-reliance

Food Stamps and the Federal War on Self-Reliance

11/12/2025•Mises Wire•James Bovard

During the recent government shutdown, the temporary interruption of benefits to 42 million food stamp recipients was hyped as practically the greatest human rights violation of our time. A Nation magazine headline howled: “The United States Is Letting Its People Starve.” But the delayed payments had scant impact in part because many states offered supplemental benefits, many recipients had leftover benefits on their Electronic Benefit Cards (EBTs), and because vast numbers of food pantries and other private charities provided relief.

Democrats accused Trump of “weaponizing hunger.” But the real problem is that politicians going back more than half a century have weaponized dependency to destroy limits on government power.

Most Americans support giving government assistance to people who are unable to feed themselves. But politicians profited by multiplying the number of people who relied on Washington for their next meal.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon was sharply expanding US bombing of southeast Asia. Nixon sought to bolster his humanitarian image by vastly increasing federal food handouts. He held a White House Summit and received glowing press coverage for proclaiming, “The moment is at hand to put an end to hunger in America itself for all time.” That year, 3 million Americans received food stamps, a burgeoning federal program that cost $228 million. Last year, the program cost $100 billion.

Why did food stamps become so expensive?

Government surveys in the 1960s showed that most of the poor did not need federal aid to have an adequate diet. But it was politically profitable to pretend that low-income Americans were helpless by definition. To further that goal, Washington launched a war on self-reliance.

Even though food stamp enrollment quadrupled between 1968 and 1971, Congress mandated an outreach program for states to recruit more recipients. A USDA magazine reported in 1972 that food stamp workers could often overcome people’s pride by saying, “‘This is for your children’. . .the problem is not with welfare recipients but with low-income workers: It is this group which recoils when anything even remotely resembling welfare is suggested.” The magazine triumphally announced: “With careful explanations. . .coupled with intensive outreach efforts, resistance from the ‘too prouds’ is bending. More and more are coming to the conclusion that taking needed assistance does not mean sacrificing dignity.”

In 1974, the Food Research and Action Center—a federally-funded activist group—successfully sued USDA to require the agency to further increase its food stamp outreach efforts. The USDA suggested sending food stamp workers to unemployment offices to distribute leaflets, and in Pennsylvania food stamp aides went to supermarkets to hustle shoppers. By 1976, twelve states had conducted door-to-door recruiting campaigns, and seventeen had conducted telephone campaigns. Door-to-door food stamp advertising became a favorite project for Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) workers.

In Wisconsin, 2,000 copies of the Food Stamp Nursery Rhyme Coloring Book were distributed. In Kentucky, a traveling puppet show told folks how and why to sign up for benefits. A typical 1975 USDA brochure announced, “You are in good company. Millions of Americans use food stamps.” A leaflet distributed in Maryland and paid for by the federal government showed a gaunt face on the cover with the question, “Did you know some people would rather STARVE than seek HELP. . .” On the inside, the brochure said,

PRIDE NEVER FILLS EMPTY STOMACHS . . . Are you one of thousands of Maryland residents who. . .have too much pride to consider applying for help? Then you need to know more about the Food Stamp program.
Food Stamps should NOT be confused with CHARITY! In fact, food stamps are designed to help you help yourself.

The Community Services Administration funded scores of local and national food stamp advocacy organizations to increase enrollment in food programs. The federal Office of Economic Opportunity called in 1971 for community action agencies to “prick the public conscience” over the need for more food handouts, declaring, “food stamps are not used as often as they ought to be, particularly by the intermediate income families among the poor.”

During the Clinton administration, AmeriCorps played a leading role in food stamp recruiting. The Mississippi Action for Community Education (MACE) was one of the most prominent food stamp recruiters—at least on paper. Its 1999 grant application promised that its AmeriCorps members would “conduct door-to-door canvassing to identify potential food stamp recipients” and would also provide “assistance in completing necessary applications for food stamps.” The goal of the program was to enroll “75% of surveyed rural Mississippi residents who are eligible for food stamps, but are not receiving them.”

I dropped in on MACE headquarters in Greenville, Mississippi to ask a few questions for a Readers Digest article I was writing. MACE’s Fanny Woods was evasive about their AmeriCorps program and her answers contradicted MACE’s statements in its reports to AmeriCorps headquarters. I mentioned those evasions to the AmeriCorps Inspector General. They launched an investigation that was joined by the FBI and resulted in MACE’s executive director being sent to federal prison. Rather than doing food stamp recruiting, MACE simply had ghost employees on its AmeriCorps payroll.

Ironically, that was a better result for taxpayers than if the food stamp recruiting actually occurred.

At the end of the Clinton era, 17 million Americans received food stamps—a sharp decline from the 28 million recipients in 1994. A 1996 welfare reform act was decisive in curbing dependency. However, President George W. Bush took office in 2001 and sought to vigorously expand food stamp enrollment as part of his “compassionate conservatism” sideshow to his war on terrorism atrocities.

In 2008, food stamps were renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program1SNAP—to sound more wholesome and attractive. 

But the program remained a junk food entitlement and food stamp recipients were twice as likely to be obese as eligible low-income people not receiving food stamps.

Food stamp recruiting went into overdrive with the Obama administration. USDA bankrolled state government propaganda campaigns. A North Carolina social services agency won a USDA “Hunger Champions Award” for its ad campaign attacking “mountain pride” as a reason for not accepting government handouts. In Alabama, people received fliers proclaiming: “Be a patriot. Bring your food stamp money home.” A USDA brochure advised its field offices to, “Throw a Great Party.... Putting SNAP information in a game format like BINGO, crossword puzzles. . .is fun and helps get your message across in a memorable way.” USDA promoted a 10-part Spanish-language radio “novella” to encourage immigrants to go on the dole. The Obama administration also made food stamps more inviting by banishing the requirement for able-bodied recipients to seek to get a job.

The Biden administration ramped up both welfare recruiting and benefits, helping maximize the number of dependents. In 2022, President Biden proclaimed a goal “to end hunger in this country by the year 2030.” Biden did not explain why a hundred-fold increase in federal food aid spending since Nixon’s 1969 proclamation had failed to end hunger.

Political demagogues have long invoked the number of food stamp recipients as proof of the failure of the market economy and the injustice of capitalism or neoliberalism or whatever they are calling the system that week. As long as more than 40 million people depend on food stamps, politicians can exploit push-button hysteria to claim that any interruption in their spending or power will result in vast suffering and (hint, hint) starvation, especially of children and minorities and women.

The Trump administration is taking some steps to curb food stamp abuses, reviving the work requirement, cracking down on fraud, and approving state-level reforms that end junk food purchases. Simply returning to the program standards of the late 1990s would radically decrease enrollment. As Mises Institute’s Ryan McMaken recently noted, “Nearly half of households headed by illegal-immigrants receive food stamps”—a benefit that was banned in the 1996 welfare reform bill.

Unfortunately, since the Reagan era, any high-profile proposal to curb food stamp spending is accepted as sufficient proof of mass hunger and imminent catastrophe. Reducing the number of dependents is a vital first step to curbing Leviathan. But how many politicians will have the savvy or the courage to resist the Hunger Hysteria Industrial Complex?

who helps the poor

 

Human rights

 

DC_Draino

@DC_Draino

·

Nov 12

How about we start using Democrat language for our issues: Closed borders are a human right. Low taxes are a human right. The ability to be born is a human right. Protecting yourself with a gun is a human right.