Legacy media is very concerned with the ‘Gen Z Stare’
In the past week, there’s been robust discourse in legacy media about the so-called ‘Gen Z Stare’ and the bursts of generational conflict it reportedly captures.
It’s gotten write-ups by The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe, NBC News, ABC News, CNBC, Newsweek, Indy100, Axios, Fortune, Vox, Vice, Business Insider, The Independent, Forbes, Buzzfeed, Slate, HuffPost, Glamour, People, and Marie Claire, among others.
As a millennial, I am apparently urged to be concerned about this phenomenon of Gen Z folks supposedly failing to appropriately interact with me through sufficiently pleasant facial expressions, so I thought it might be helpful to offer my thoughts:
The sitting president of the United States is currently covering up a massive sex trafficking operation that targeted children and likely implicates a number of powerful people who are currently out in the world and free to continue preying on children.
The sitting president of the United States just successfully pressured Paramount and CBS to cancel the #1 late-night talk show on broadcast television as part of what appears to be a blatant bribery deal because the host has been critical of him.
The sitting president of the United States just got the extremist Republican majority in Congress to strip 11 million Americans of health care coverage by the end of 2026 and upwards of 17 million Americans when you account for new federal work requirements. (snip-MORE; it’s succinct and quick, and it’s all good facts for grocery/other places lines, for discussion.)
Far from the front lines of the climate crisis, 100 men and women in air-conditioned offices, 61 of them millionaires, are making decisions that could increase United States carbon dioxide emissions, and the warming of the climate they are driving, for decades to come.
In the latest political wrangle over energy and climate policy, a group of Republican senators over the weekend added provisions to the US federal budget bill that, as currently written, would end clean energy tax credits at the personal level and at utility scale and increase taxes on foreign-made parts for solar power equipment.
Ending federal subsidies for most renewable energy projects, including residential heat pumps, for example, would affect thousands of projects that are already in planning or development and jeopardize future investments in manufacturing renewable energy equipment.
Friday, June 27, hours before the Senate released the latest draft of the reconciliation bill just after midnight, US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright claimed on the Department of Energy website that wind and solar are unreliable and that federal subsidies have made energy more expensive, although he did not cite any official reports or peer-reviewed studies to support that claim.
On the Department of Energy website, Wright wrote, “wind and solar brings us the worst of two worlds: less reliable energy delivery and higher electric bills …If sources are truly economically viable, let’s allow them to stand on their own,” he wrote, ignoring that the fossil fuel industry gets annual subsidies of about $20 billion annually, according to estimates by Oil Change International, a nonprofit watchdog group.
But hundreds of studies show that renewable energy is much less expensive and, in a well-planned grid, can make energy supplies more secure.
“The proposed GOP tax on wind and solar is a danger to the United States,” Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford University renewable energy researcher who has authored numerous studies on wind and solar power, wrote via email.
The new tax provisions “lock in death and illness to up to 100,000 Americans every year due to fossil-fuel and bioenergy-fuel air pollution that wind and solar help to eliminate,” he said.
An early evaluation shows the administration’s planned energy policies would result in the drilling of 50,000 new oil wells every year for the next few years, he said, adding that it “ensures the continuation of land devastation… the poisoning of soil and groundwater due to fossil fuels and the continuation of gas blowouts and fires.”
There is nothing beneficial about the tax, he said, “only guaranteed misery.”
An analysis by the Rhodium Group, and energy policy research institute, projected that the Republican regime’s proposed energy policies would result in about 4 billion tons more greenhouse gas emissions than a continuation of current policies—enough to raise the average global temperature by .0072° Fahrenheit.
The overall budget bill was also panned in a June 28 statement by the president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey.
McGarvey called it “a massive insult to the working men and women of North America’s Building Trades Unions and all construction workers.”
He said that, as written, the budget “stands to be the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country,” potentially costing as many jobs as shutting down 1,000 Keystone X pipeline projects, threatening an estimated 1.75 million construction jobs and over 3 billion work hours, which translates to $148 billion in lost annual wages and benefits.
“These are staggering and unfathomable job loss numbers, and the bill throws yet another lifeline and competitive advantage to China in the race for global energy dominance,” he said.
Research in recent years shows how right-wing populist and nationalist ideologies have used anti-renewable energy arguments to win voters, in defiance of environmental logic and scientific fact, in part by using social media to spread misleading and false information about wind, solar and other emissions-free electricity sources.
The same forces now seem to be at work in the US, said Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol who studies how people respond to misinformation and propaganda, and why people reject well-established scientific facts, such as those regarding climate change.
“This is a bonus for fossil fuels at the expense of future generations and the future of the American economy,” he said. “Other countries will continue working towards renewable-energy economies, especially China. That competitive advantage will eventually pay out to the detriment of American businesses. You can’t negotiate with the laws of physics.”
We did not record a podcast last week because Donna was traveling to Austin, where her family was celebrating Fourth of July AND the arrival of a new baby (her grand-niece!).
She expected hot, humid weather. What she got was four days of torrential rain, and the specter of over one hundred deaths from flooding in the nearby hill counties – including children at a sleep away camp that was overcome by the deluge.
One week later, this tragedy is ongoing. People are wondering how much DOGE’s cuts to the National Weather Service and NOAA factored into it. Journalist Marisa Kabas has reported that as of Monday, only 86 FEMA employees were on the ground in Texas (they usually deploy hundreds of people to disaster zones like this). “We are doing a lot less than normal,” a FEMA staffer told her.
No shit.
In the meantime, $450 million from FEMA’s budget has been allocated to that concentration camp in the swamps of Florida. And Trump’s big, ugly budget bill allocates billions to expand ICE and build more “detention centers” throughout the country.
ICE continues to terrorize immigrant communities, kidnapping law-abiding parents, gardeners, day laborers, and others who just happen to have brown skin (including US citizens).Donna returned home to Los Angeles in time for a show of military cosplay in MacArthur Park. No one got hurt in that one – but it felt like a dress rehearsal for something worse.
We talked about that and more in this week’s podcast.
We are living through history and it really sucks. Aliza says that the best way to deal with the continual onslaught of terrible events is to DO something. Anything. Volunteer in the community. Participate in events. Write postcards for candidates, donate to good causes.
And allow yourself the down time you need to muster up the energy to do it again.
We talked about some of the everyday heroes who are helping us all muster through this.
Like Joshua Aaron, the developer of the ICEBlock app that alerts people of ICE activity in their area. (Currently just for iPhones; we are anxiously awaiting news that this app will become available to Android users.)
The ACLU has done heroic work for over a century. After recording this week’s podcast, we were dismayed to learn that their Mobile Justice app Aliza has relied upon for years is no longer available.
To ensure compliance with a growing number of consumer privacy laws and the ACLU’s own privacy policies and to minimize risk with surveillance technologies currently used by law enforcement, the national office has made the decision not to renew our contract with Quadrant 2, the vendor behind Mobile Justice, and shut down the app on February 28, 2025.
But the ACLU is still a source of valuable information. Here are a couple of pages that you may want to bookmark:
There are things you can do as a bystander, too. This Yahoo article talks about New York City, but much of it applies anywhere in the U.S. It’s completely legal to film an ICE encounter, and the article has great suggestions for how to narrate and what details to include. There is advice on how your video can help, but it’s also important not to post your videos online without the consent of the person being detained.
The National Immigrant Justice Center is just one of many organizations with so much information on how to handle encounters with ICE or DHS, whether you are the target or a bystander.
The coalition of anti-authoritarian groups that has risen since the start of this regime continue to organize. The next big nationwide gathering is “Good Trouble Lives On,” which will be held in honor of the late John Lewis, around the July 17 anniversary of his death. Find an event near you here.
And in case you’re one of those “DO SOMETHING” people who love to bash Democrats, remember that they ARE doing something. A LOT. If you want to know what, you should follow Ariella Elm on any of the socials. She makes posts like the ones below, and daily posts like this one that list the wins for democracy and actions all over the country that are helping stem the tide of fascism, and we need to thank and elevate these soldiers for democracy.
July 7, 1863 The first military draft was instituted in the U.S. to provide troops for the Union army in the American Civil War. Once called, a draftee had the opportunity to either pay a commutation fee of $300 to be exempt from a particular battle, or to hire a replacement that would exempt him from the entire war.
July 7, 1903 The March of the Mill Children watch a video – highly recommended Labor organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones led the “March of the Mill Children” over 100 miles from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s Long Island summer home in Oyster Bay, New York, to publicize the harsh conditions of child labor and to demand a 55-hour work week. It is during this march, on about the 24th, she delivered her famed “The Wail of the Children” speech. Roosevelt refused to see them. “Fifty years ago there was a cry against slavery and men gave up their lives to stop the selling of black children on the block. Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers.” –from Mother Jones’s autobiography Read more about Mother Jones
July 7, 1957 Convened at the onset of the Cold War, a group of scientists held their first peace conference in the village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada. The mission of the Pugwash Conference was to “. . . bring scientific insight and reason to bear on threats to human security arising from science and technology in general, and above all from the catastrophic threat posed to humanity by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction . . . .” Bertrand Russell Wealthy industrialist and Pugwash son Cyrus Eaton had invited the world’s greatest minds to his family home in Nova Scotia and address the emerging threat of nuclear war. The Conference became the basis for an ongoing organization that deals with issues of weapons of mass destruction. The 1995 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Joseph Rotblat (one of the original signatories of the Pugwash Manifesto) and to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Albert Einstein Pugwash home
Fifty years later . . . 25 scientists, diplomats and former military officers from 15 countries gathered for a “Revitalizing Nuclear Disarmament” strategy workshop. The meeting was held near the Thinkers’ Lodge, the site of the first meeting in 1957. “Fifty years ago from Pugwash, Nova Scotia, nuclear scientists helped alert the world to the dangers of nuclear weapons, and especially the newly developed hydrogen bomb,” said Paolo Cotta-Ramusino, Secretary General, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. “Today, we are working with experts from around the world for global action to revitalize nuclear disarmament and the final elimination of nuclear weapons.” Senator Roméo Dallaire, Honorary Patron of the Pugwash Peace Exchange, said “It is appalling to observe the increasing potential for many regional nuclear arms races, shameless plans to modernize nuclear arsenals and bald-faced threats of pre-emptive nuclear use,” said Senator Dallaire. “Only by revitalizing discussion and implementation of disarmament leading to abolition can we ensure that these genocidal devices will never again be used.”
July 7, 1977 The United States conducted its first test of the neutron bomb. The neutron bomb was a tactical thermonuclear weapon designed to cause very little physical damage through limited blast and heat but was designed to kill troops through localized but intense levels of lethal radiation. A neutron bomb explosion at a test site
July 7, 1979 2,000 American Indian activists and anti-nuclear demonstrators marched through the Black Hills of western South Dakota to protest the development of uranium mines on sacred native lands.
In the late 20th century, a gay social club became a major political force in the California tech industry, eventually influencing corporate policies as well as state and federal laws across the country.
In the 1980s, at a time when the federal government turned its back on the LGBTQ community, gay men and lesbians found an unlikely partner in their fight for equality: corporations.
In the face of the AIDS crisis, hostility toward LGBTQ employees forced the community to “turn from the state to business for protection, according to Margot Canaday’s Queer Career: Sexuality and Work Modern America.” Corporate America did more than federal or state governments in this regard, outpacing both the labor movement and the non-profit sector.
And it started in Silicon Valley.
While Silicon Valley was dominated by the kind of straight white men mocked in the HBO series of the same name, it also wasn’t the establishment. In these early days, for example, women made up a larger proportion of those working in computer programming. Nonconformity was seen as valuable rather than problematic. In 1987, Lotus became the “first highly visible, for-profit company” to provide same sex couples with partner benefits, according to Canaday.
Today, Silicon Valley dominates the public narrative and the economy. Granted, in our current moment, it seems paradoxical that the same industry that gave us social media platforms that often perpetuate misogyny and homophobia also served as an important battleground for the assertion of employment rights for LGBTQ workers. Yet it did, and it happened internally through employee resource groups and externally through advocacy groups.
One of the most prominent of these external advocacy organizations was the High Tech Gays (HTG). Formed in the living rooms of Silicon Valley’s San Jose in 1983, it began largely as a social group for the region’s LGTBQ tech workforce, but over time it served as an incubator for other organizations dedicated to LGBTQ political rights, inspiring members to start their own employee resource groups at their places of employment and organizing against anti-gay state referendums.
The 1980s and Silicon Valley
While San Francisco, has long been identified with LGBTQ activism, suburban Silicon Valley proved more conservative. “Even though I was ‘out’ with friends and family who knew me…I found myself being very reserved in expressing affection, talking in any depth about gay culture with them,” says Bob Correa, a California native, San Jose resident (1971-1986), and an early HTG member. “Even in the early ’80s there was a lot of prejudice back then, a heck of lot more than today,” adds his husband and one of HTG’s founders, Denny Carroll, in their 2018 interview.
Denny Carroll and Bob Correa after donating the HTG collection to the San Jose State Martin Luther King Library (Photo courtesy of HTG, Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, San Jose State University)
Yes, this passed in the Senate, thanks to the VP’s tiebreaking vote. However, it’s still got rows to hoe in the US House; Spkr. Johnson wants to vote tomorrow. The thing to remember about our US Reps is, they’re up for election each 2 years. So, while firmly directing them in dealing with this dreadful bill, also firmly yet lovingly remind them that the OBBB will be hanging around their necks every step of the way of their campaigns like a bubblegum machine golden giant dollar sign necklace, if they vote in favor.
(Actually, if you didn’t when you contacted your Senators last week, you can still remind them of the same thing, unless they voted against, in which case, Thank Them. It took bravery to vote against, and they need to know we have their backs. And thank you very much. Now call.)
Crackdown on Pride is part of effort to curb democratic freedoms ahead of a hotly-contested election next year
Tens of thousands march against Hungary’s government for LGBT rights – video
Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Budapest in defiance of the Hungarian government’s ban on Pride, heeding a call by the city’s mayor to “come calmly and boldly to stand together for freedom, dignity and equal rights”.
Jubilant crowds packed into the city’s streets on Saturday, waving Pride flags and signs that mocked the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, as their peaceful procession inched forward at a snail’s pace.
Organisers estimated that a record number of people turned up, far outstripping the expected turnout of 35,000-40,000 people.
“We believe there are 180,000 to 200,000 people attending,” the president of Pride, Viktória Radványi told AFP. “It is hard to estimate because there have never been so many people at Budapest Pride.”
The mass demonstration against the government was a bittersweet marking of Budapest Pride’s 30th anniversary; while the turnout on Saturday was expected to reach record levels, it had come after the government had doubled down on its targeting of the country’s LGBTQ+ community.
Hungary Pride participants in the march cross the Elisabeth Bridge in Budapest, Hungary. Photograph: Rudolf Karancsi/AP
“We came because they tried to ban it,” said Timi, 49. The Hungarian national was marching with her daughter, Zsófi, 23, who had travelled from her home in Barcelona to join the rally.
After the ruling Fidesz party, led by the rightwing populist Orbán, fast-tracked a law that made it an offence to hold or attend events that involve the “depiction or promotion” of homosexuality to minors, many Hungarians vowed to show their disapproval by attending Pride for the first time.
Viki Márton was among those who had made good on the promise, turning up with her nine-year-old daughter.
The pair had come equipped with hats, water spray, and a swimsuit, more worried about heat than rightwing protesters. “I want her to see the reality,” said Márton. “And I’m so excited to be here!”
Tens of thousands of Hungarians took to the streets on Saturday, despite Orbán’s warning on Friday that those who attend or organise the march will face ‘legal consequences’. Photograph: János Kummer/Getty Images
Earlier this month, police announced they would follow the government’s orders and ban the march. The progressive mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony, was swift to respond, saying that the march would instead go ahead as a separate municipal event, with Karácsony describing it as a way to circumvent the need for official authorisation.
On Saturday, the mayor reiterated why the city had decided to host the event, hinting at how the march had become a symbol of discontent against a government that has long faced criticism for weakening democratic institutions and gradually undermining the rule of law.
“The government is always fighting against an enemy against which they have to protect Hungarian people,” said Karácsony.
“This time, it is sexual minorities that are the target … we believe there should be no first and second class citizens, so we decided to stand by this event.”
Akos Horvath, 18, who had travelled two hours from his city in southern Hungary to take part in the march, described it as an event of “symbolic importance”.
Speaking to news agency AFP, he added: “It’s not just about representing gay people, but about standing up for the rights of the Hungarian people.”
The sentiment was echoed by fellow marcher Eszter Rein-Bódi. “This is about much more, not just about homosexuality,” Rein-Bódi told Reuters “This is the last moment to stand up for our rights.”
‘This is about much more, not just about homosexuality,’ one participant told Reuters. Photograph: Lisa Leutner/Reuters
Tens of thousands of Hungarians, including senior citizens and parents with their children, plus politicians and campaigners from 30 countries, took to the streets on Saturday, despite Orbán’s warning on Friday that those who attend or organise the march will face “legal consequences”.
The Hungarian prime minister sought to minimise concerns over violence, however, saying that Hungary was a “civilised country” and police would not “break it up … It cannot reach the level of physical abuse”.
Still, in a video posted to social media this week, the country’s justice minister, Bence Tuzson, warned the Budapest mayor that organising a banned event or encouraging people to attend is punishable by up to a year in prison.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, the mayor brushed off the threat and downplayed concerns that police would later impose heavy fines on attende s. “Police have only one task tomorrow: to guarantee the safety and security of those gathered at the event,” said Karácsony.
The potential for violence had been amplified after three groups with ties to the extreme right said they were planning counter-marches. As the Pride march got under way, local news site Telex reported that the route of the march had to be changed after one of these groups blocked off a bridge.
Analysts had described the government’s bid to crackdown on Pride as part of a wider effort to curb democratic freedoms ahead of a hotly contested national election next year.
Orbán is facing an unprecedented challenge from a former member of the Fidesz party’s elite, Péter Magyar, leading Pride organisers to suggest they are being scapegoated as Orbán scrambles to shore up support among conservative voters.
Orbán’s government had also prompted concerns across Hungary and beyond after it said it would use facial recognition software to identify people attending any banned events, potentially fining them up to €500 (£425).
Ahead of the march, as campaigners scrambled for clarity on whether or how this technology would be used, AFP reported that newly installed cameras had appeared on the lamp-posts that dotted the planned route.
The threat had been enough to rattle some. Elton, 30, a Brazilian living in Hungary wore a hat and sunglasses as he took part on Saturday, explaining that he had been worried about jeopardising his job and immigration status, but that his Hungarian boyfriend had persuaded him to attend.
“This is my second time at Pride, but the first time I feel insecure about it,” he said.
Orbán’s government had also prompted concerns across Hungary and beyond after it said it would use facial recognition software to identify people attending any banned events. Photograph: Lisa Leutner/Reuters
Mici, a 21-year-old Budapest resident, said she had attended Pride marches in the past but this time had weighed whether to join in after she was spooked by reports of the facial recognition system.
“At first, I was scared to come out because of the news, but I feel safe with so many people.”
She hoped that the massive turnout for the march would be enough to push the Orbán government to change its stance.
“I think the crowd that has come from across Europe, the record numbers, will make Hungarian people see that this cause is well-supported.”
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