Andrew Clavin and Dr. Jean Twenge dissect media bias against Donald Trump, citing New York Times admissions of election interference and NBC’s socialist propaganda, while contrasting Trump’s Niger press conference transparency with mainstream hostility. Twenge’s iGen research reveals smartphone-era teens—despite progressive tolerance—avoid conflict, delay adulthood milestones, and suffer rising depression due to digital isolation. The episode ties iGen’s "emotional safety" culture to broader societal fractures, from NFL kneeling debates to Ross Douthat’s 1970s sexual revolution parallels, ultimately framing generational decline as a consequence of both media manipulation and moral avoidance. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, President Trump and Mitch McConnell, they've been at each other's throats for weeks, and then suddenly they give this wonderful, a really stunning press conference.
Here's just a taste.
Wherever we go, whatever we do, we're gonna go through it together.
We may not go far, but sure as a star, wherever we are, it's together.
And then it ended with this long, sloppy kiss.
It was just embarrassing for everybody.
But you know, the funny thing is, is the press, the media is now so immersed in this hatred that they didn't even really cover the press conference.
They're just spewing craziness, so they missed the whole thing.
Also, we have Dr. Jean Twenge is with us today.
She's a professor of psychology.
She's written a really interesting book called iGen, Why Today's Super Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy, and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.
Now, the last one, that was true of me.
I don't know about that, but like everything else, really interesting combination.
I've read her stuff.
Very interesting woman.
We will talk to her.
But first, trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-diggy.
Shipshaw, dipsy-topsy, the round is it bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
And not only is the mailbag tomorrow, so you get to ask, if you are a subscriber, you get to ask all your questions.
I will answer them all.
Personal questions, religious questions, political questions.
Keep Your Filters Changed00:03:10
My answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
But if you don't want to wait for that, this very afternoon, 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific, I am doing the conversation with Alicia Krauss.
So Alicia and I will be sitting there live.
You can see us.
Let's see, how do you see us?
Daily Wire, Facebook page, and the YouTube channel.
Anyone can watch, but only subscribers can ask questions.
A lousy 10 bucks a month, I will solve all your problems for you.
I mean, look in the mirror.
You know, I'm just saying, I'm just saying, look in the mirror.
It doesn't have to be like this.
For a lousy 10 bucks a month, you can ask me questions.
I will answer them.
It will change your life.
Also, while you're changing your life, you should also be changing your air filters.
What a crappy segue.
So I take it back.
I take it back.
You know, here's the thing.
We're having another heat wave here.
I hope it's only going to last for a couple of days, but it's like, yesterday was like 95 where I was.
It's insane.
It's October and it was just boiling.
And that means you're stuck inside.
I'm stuck inside with the air conditioning going all the time.
And suddenly you say to yourself, you know, I should probably change the air filter.
And then your wife says, what's an air filter?
You know, an air filter is the thing that is in these devices in your houses.
It keeps the dust levels down.
It keeps some of the allergens out.
It really keeps you healthier indoors.
Americans spend 90% of their time indoors where concentrations of pollutants are two to five times higher than they are typically outdoors.
And if you suffer from any kind of breathing problems, asthma, allergies, stuff like that.
So, so I have found that through Filter Easy, you can solve this whole problem.
The whole problem, the problem with air filters is remembering to change them and getting them changed, right?
So what the average homeowner does is he changes his home air filters one to two times a year, but the minimum you should really change it is four times a year.
This will give you a physical reminder that it makes having clean air in your home easy because they deliver it right to your door.
You don't have to worry about the hassle of storing extra filters.
You won't ever forget to change the air filters in your home again.
They deliver the exact size home filter to your door when it's time to replace.
We have this huge thing outside that we had to install because they said, you won't need air conditioning.
I was like, you know, put in the air conditioning.
Put in the air conditioner.
I'm so glad we did.
But you got to keep the air filters changed.
Save 5 to 15% on home air conditioning costs by keeping your air conditioning and heating systems cleaner.
And you save on maintenance of your air conditioner, obviously, because you're filtering it out.
You can get started today.
FilterEasy.com is offering all Andrew Clavin listeners their first delivery of standard one-inch air filter for free with free shipping.
That's a good price.
That is really a good price.
Never forget to change your air filter again.
Visit filteasy.com/slash clavin or enter promo code Clavin on the homepage.
F-I-L-T.
No, it's K-L-A-V-A-N at filteasy.com.
It's important stuff.
Do it right now.
I'll wait.
No, I won't.
NBC's Bias Problem00:08:37
But before we get into this press conference, I have got to talk, I've just got to talk about the press itself because the press is now like in a fantasy world of hatred.
We had Knowles on yesterday talking about NBC.
I'll get back to NBC in a minute.
First, our friends at Project Veritas, James O'Keefe, who's been on the show, does this great undercover work.
He's basically doing the job that journalists won't do, and he's gone after the New York Times.
And they keep making excuses every time he gets another one of their editors saying, yes, we hate Trump.
It's like, well, he's not important.
She's not important.
Maggie Haberman, one of their big reporters, was saying, oh, the New York Times plays it straight down the middle.
And here's the thing: if you think the New York Times plays it straight down the middle, you are what my friend John Nolte calls bubble dumb.
Because these people, people who work for the New York Times, they are not stupid people.
They're not low IQ people.
But if you are just surrounded by people who agree with you all the time, you become stupid because you don't understand the bigger picture.
You just think your prejudices are reality.
So James O'Keefe, one of his undercover reporters, caught an editor named Desiree Shu.
Is that her name?
Desiree?
Yeah, Shu.
She's a senior staff editor on the homepage in the New York Times.
And she just admitted, basically, that their reporting was trying to keep Trump from getting elected.
And then she says something really interesting.
Listen carefully to what she says then.
One of the things that maybe journalists were thinking about is like, oh, if we write about him, about how it's like insanely crazy he is and who Chris's policies are, then maybe people will read it and be like, oh, wow, our main stories are supposed to be objective.
It's very difficult in this day and age to do that.
Why?
Because when you have something like the Charlottesville story, it's hard to portray, for instance, the president in an unbiased light, meaning words that are coming out of his mouth are apologetic toward white supremacists, which is what they were.
See, what's so interesting about this, she says it's hard to portray the president in an unbiased light concerning Charlottesville when the words that are coming out of his mouth are apologetic toward white supremacists, which is what they were.
Now, we've already proved that they weren't.
I brought in the transcript of what he said, and they keep saying, oh, he said there were great people on both sides, meaning great people among the white supremacists, but that is not what he was saying.
He was saying there were great people among those people who were trying to preserve the statues and didn't want statues turned down, torn down.
And since I am a person who thinks we should leave the statues up, and I'm definitely not a white supremacist of any stripe, you know, he's obviously right.
There are great people like me, like my, you know, like personally me.
But what's fascinating about that is she doesn't even know it's a lie.
She doesn't even know it's a distortion, and it's just one way of looking at it.
So she can't tell that they are biased.
She says she understands that it's biased to report the story so that Trump is a bad guy, but she feels that Trump is such a bad guy that how can you not be biased?
So the New York Times is a former newspaper.
They have basically stopped doing journalism.
But, but fortunately, don't worry about them because they have found something else to do with their staff.
Here is, I am not making this up, an actual video the New York Times made of their staff going on to their new careers now that they have abandoned journalism.
I'm just a Broadway baby.
Walking off my tired feet.
Bounding 42nd Street to the Esh.
No, no, it's turnover.
Broadway baby.
Learning how to sing and dance.
Waiting for that one big chance to be in our show.
So it's like, like us, please, like us.
This is the newspaper that is selling communism.
They're doing this thing called Red Century.
I've talked about it a lot because it's just insane.
They're writing articles about how women had greater dreams in Red China.
You know, if you read, there's a book, a wonderful, wonderful book, if you ever want to read it called Wild Swans, about three generations of women in China, which shows you just how big their dreams were.
Their dreams were, get me out of Red China.
That was their big dream.
And they have this other thing about how sex was better for women in the Soviet Union.
I mean, it's insane, but they can sing Santa Me.
I mean, they really built out that Santa.
So before we get back to this press conference, also, you know, Knowles was here yesterday talking about the corruption at NBC, and it really is corrupt.
I mean, it's amazing.
Not just the silence, the cone of silence over the Harvey Weinstein story, shutting down SNL, pulling jokes out of Saturday Night Live, not letting the late night guys do their jokes, making Al Michaels apologize when he made a Harvey Weinstein joke during one of the football games.
Didn't matter because no one's watching the football games anymore, but they made him apologize.
And we talked about the fact that they're the ones who released the Access Hollywood tape a convenient two days before the second presidential debate with Trump saying all those disgusting things about the way women would let you treat them if you're a star and all this stuff.
But NBC, I just have to play this.
This is on the Today Show on NBC's Today Show.
This is their feature on how wonderful socialism is in Denmark.
I mean, this is so this corrupt, these people who are silencing news, they're silencing news, they're silencing their entertainment, they're making sure everything is Democrat, everything is left-wing, and they're selling you socialism.
Listen to this.
For 40 years, Denmark has ranked as one of the happiest places on earth.
It's not a coincidence that people are happy here.
Here, no job is less than any other.
Alan Christensen works just five hours a day, but earns the same as a school teacher.
On a scale one to ten, how happy are you?
I would say maybe eight.
Yeah, yeah.
Ambition is not celebrated.
No matter what you do, you're no better than anybody else.
And while some studies show the average American clocks in over 50 hours a week.
Here on average, they work 37 hours.
Mothers don't have to worry so much about child care.
In Denmark, you get a year off.
Paid.
And there's a feeling here in Denmark that nothing too bad will ever happen to you.
The Danes trust their government.
They pay enormously high taxes.
Every Dane is born with the right to free health care, free education through college, comfortable retirement.
They're free to pursue a job that meets their passions and their interests.
Now, I could go on for the entire show about everything that's wrong with this article, about the fact that, you know, not celebrating ambition, what kind of society are you actually going to get, judging people by whether they're happy, which is a very weird judgment.
What does that mean to be happy?
You know, you're happy when things are going well.
You're unhappy when things are going badly.
You know, the other thing, I don't know if you ever saw the musical Rent in Rent.
It's about the AIDS crisis, and they're two gay guys, and they're always singing this song about how they're going to Santa Fe, and everything's going to be great in Santa Fe.
I can't even remember how the song goes.
That is the way guys like Bernie Sanders talk about places like Denmark and Sweden.
Everything is perfect there.
You know, there's this guy, Michael Booth.
He's a British journalist, but he lives in Denmark.
And he wrote this book about, you know, he's saying it's a nice place to live.
Listen, I don't mean to insult the Danes.
Hamlet was a little offbeat, but most of them, Danes, I'm sure, nice people, beautiful country, all this stuff.
But the quality of their free education and health care is substandard.
They're way down on the educational rankings.
They have the lowest life expectancy in the region, the highest rates of death from cancer.
Their economic model cannot be sustained.
It's all oil.
It's all about oil.
They get a lot of oil in Denmark and Norway, and they do.
They don't treat it like the Arabs treat it, where they just keep it in the hands, the petrodollars in the hands of a few, or the Russians, where they keep the petrodollars in the hands of a few tyrants.
They do spread it around, so good for them.
But ultimately, the oil starts to, when the oil prices drop, you get Venezuela.
That's what they did in Venezuela.
So it's like, plus, by the way, they don't let in anybody.
They don't let in any immigrants.
Steve Bannon's Lunch Plan00:11:43
So it's just this lie.
It's this lie.
And I don't mean to run them down.
The other thing is, you know what else the Denmarks can't afford to do?
They can't afford to protect Denmark.
The reason that Denmark isn't one of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is because we protect these countries.
They are dependent on our armed forces to protect them.
And we spend the money on that.
We spend the money on research and development that their health care people don't spend.
You know, that's why we pay so much for medicines and things like this.
It's just all an illusion with cards and mirrors.
Basically, Europe and Scandinavia live in our garage.
They're like old people living in their kids' garage complaining about how their kid makes their money.
And it's just that I just wanted to point out that that is what the press is selling you, and they're corrupt.
All right.
So Trump comes out, and he gave a press conference about all this things, about how well he and McConnell are getting on.
Obviously, like politicians do, they're getting together to make a push on tax reform.
They don't want any personal feud to get in the way.
But during the press conference, Trump was asked about the fact why he hadn't gotten in touch with the families of four U.S. soldiers, I think they were Green Berets, who were killed in Niger October 4th.
The Taliban killed them.
And so here he made this remark.
And this is just a little part of the press conference, but I want to bring it up because of the press reaction.
Do we have that cut?
The traditional way, if you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn't make calls.
A lot of them didn't make calls.
I like to call when it's appropriate, when I think I'm able to do it.
They have made the ultimate sacrifice.
So generally, I would say that I like to call.
I'm going to be calling them.
I want a little time to pass.
I'm going to be calling them.
I have, as you know, since I've been president, I have.
But in addition, I actually wrote letters individually to the soldiers we're talking about, and they're going to be going out either today or tomorrow.
So the press, I mean, the left goes nuts.
And of course, here's just like an example, all right?
Several former aides of Obama weighed in immediately.
Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Alyssa Mastromonico, called it an effing lie to say Obama and other past presidents hadn't called the families of fallen soldiers.
He's a deranged animal, she said.
You know, Donny Deutsch was on TV.
He's a commentator.
I'm playing this not because it's offbeat.
I'm playing it because it is typical of the reactions.
Instead of saying, no, I haven't called them and I'm going to call them, basically did the reprehensible, disgusting, soulless thing, callous thing of the lying that these past presidents hadn't done it.
This is, did we elect the worst person on this planet?
No, I mean, I'm sure, like, every time you think he can't go low, I practically want to cry.
I want to cry.
This is not about politics.
And there's something so deeply wrong, evil, soulless about this person that's got his hand on the switch.
Now, all of the articles say Trump makes a false assertion that Obama did.
He didn't say that he never did.
He said that he didn't always.
They don't.
Presidents don't routinely call the family.
They couldn't possibly.
They write them form letters that are personally signed.
They have all done this.
Everything he said was absolutely in keeping.
It seems like it took him a little long, like if they were killed on October 4th, he said the letters are going out, but it seems like it may be he didn't get to it fast enough.
I mean, that is unfortunate if that's true.
But this is the hatred that just keeps bubbling, bubbling up.
So anyway, this whole thing, the whole press conference was interesting to me because it's basically an answer to Steve Bannon, who is waging, you know, Steve Bannon always thinks of everything as war.
He's waging war against the GOP establishment, and he's going to primary everybody.
He was at that Values Voters, the Family Research Council, does this Values Voters Summit.
Bannon was there and he was giving a fiery speech about how he was going to take back Congress from guys like Mitch McConnell by primary them with his own candidates.
And here's just a part of that speech.
You're free men and women in the greatest republic in the history of Earth.
And why are we nationalists?
It's not ethno-nationalism.
These guys can run that drill all they want.
It's economic nationalism.
It doesn't matter what your race is, your ethnicity, your gender, your religion, your sexual preference.
It doesn't matter.
Does not matter.
As long as you're a citizen of this republic, that's what matters.
Economic nationalism is what binds us together.
Economic nationalism and understanding we're going to bring those jobs back.
It's not the second law of thermodynamics why they left.
There's no inexorable law that took those jobs to Asia and those factories to Asia and left us with gutted communities of opioid addicts.
So that's Bannon on the warpath against what he calls the GOP establishment.
I just want to point out, though, that this value voter summit, the Family Research Council, was deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate group that has dedicated itself to calling conservatives hate groups.
And a lot of the press, just in this theme of press hatred, a lot of the press was like Bannon, because Trump was also there.
Trump and Bannon speak to hate group.
Trump is first person to speak to hate group.
All baloney.
I mean, they are conservative Christians.
I don't agree with everything the Family Research Council says, but they are conservative Christians just putting forward that point of view.
They are not a hate group in any way.
And you could hear them applauding.
These are conservative Christians when Bannon is saying, doesn't matter if you're gay, doesn't matter where you come from, doesn't matter who you are, what color you are, they're applauding.
They're saying, yeah, that's right, you're an American.
All right, we got a break, but mailbag is tomorrow.
Conversation is at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern.
We don't care about you Easterners, but it is 5 p.m. Eastern.
If you want to hear the rest of today's show, you got to come over to thedailywire.com.
If you want to watch the whole thing on thedailywire.com and ask your questions and have questions in the mailbag, have questions in the conversation, you got to subscribe.
It's 10 lousy bucks a month.
And if you subscribe for the year, it's only 100 lousy bucks.
You can save 20 lousy bucks.
Plus, you get the latest tears tumbler.
That is a lot of lousy bucks.
We'll see you over at thedailywire.com.
Okay, so here's what I like.
Trump.
Trump, before, the thing about Trump is Trump is becoming a politician, but he's just, he's so blunt that he's not really as good at being a politician as some of these more subtle guys.
And sometimes the bluntness is great, sometimes it's not so great.
But before lunch, he was asked about Bannon being on the warpath.
Okay, so this is, I guess, the first, yeah, the first one is number two.
Well, Steve is very committed.
He's a friend of mine, and he's very committed to getting things passed.
I mean, look, I have, you know, despite what the press writes, I have great relationships with actually many senators, but in particular with most Republican senators.
But we're not getting the job done.
And I'm not going to blame myself, I'll be honest.
They are not getting the job done.
We've had health care approved, and then you had a surprise vote by John McCain.
We've had other things happen, and they're not getting the job done.
And I can understand where Steve Bannon's coming from, and I can understand, to be honest with you, John, I can understand where a lot of people are coming from, because I'm not happy about it, and a lot of people aren't happy about it.
Okay, so he understands.
This is before lunch with Mitch McConnell.
He understands where Bannon is coming from, and he's really annoyed at the Congress, and it's not his fault.
It's the Congress's fault.
Then he has lunch.
They kiss.
They talk.
They play FTSE under the table.
Then after lunch, they ask him.
This is an amazing press conference, by the way.
Well, let's just play this.
After lunch, they ask him, and he changes his tune just a little bit.
It's cut forward.
I have a very good relationship, as you know, with Steve Bannon.
Steve's been a friend of mine for a long time.
I like Steve a lot.
Steve is doing what Steve thinks is the right thing.
Some of the people that he may be looking at, I'm going to see if we talk him out of that, because frankly, they're great people.
So now he's going to talk to Steve Bannon, maybe help out Mitch McConnell a little bit.
This was an amazing press conference, by the way, because it was 40 minutes long, and the press, he just let the press shout questions at him for 40 minutes and answered every question.
The guy is, he is the most transparent president in my memory.
I mean, I've never seen a president so open to talking to the press, and it was fairly, it was fairly friendly.
I mean, it was not the press screaming the way they sometimes do, and it was not Trump insulting them constantly.
It was pretty friendly.
So Mitch McConnell stepped up too, and they were both, you know, now Trump just loves Mitch McConnell.
And we should play the cut of Trump number nine.
This is Trump saying, now we're the greatest of friends now.
It must have been a fantastic lunch.
I mean, it's.
But we've been friends for a long time.
We are probably now, despite what we read, we're probably now, I think, at least as far as I'm concerned, closer than ever before.
And the relationship is very good.
We're fighting for the same thing.
We're fighting for lower taxes, big tax cuts, the biggest tax cuts in the history of our nation.
Okay, so now they're the best of friends.
And Mitch McConnell got up, and he had the big thing about Bannon that he just didn't think.
He pointed out that when they sent up the Tea Party candidates last time, they all got smushed.
Because what happens with Tea Party candidates is they can win in Congress where you're trying to win a small constituency, normally kind of homogenous.
All the people in that little area have the same kind of politics.
But when you send them up on the national stage trying to win in the Senate, especially, it becomes much harder.
And so, Mitch McConnell, listen to how Mitch McConnell actually sounds a little like Trump here.
You know, the goal here is to win elections in November.
Back in 2010 and 2012, we nominated several candidates: Christine O'Donnell, Sharon Engel, Todd Agen, Richard Murdoch.
They're not in the Senate.
And the reason for that was that they were not able to appeal to a broader electorate in the general election.
My goal as the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate is to keep us in the majority.
The way you do that is not complicated.
You have to nominate people who can actually win because winners make policy and losers go home.
We changed the business model in 2014.
We nominated people who could win everywhere.
We took the majority in the Senate.
We had one skirmish in 2016.
We kept the majority in the Senate.
So our operating approach will be to support our incumbents and in open seats to seek to help nominate people who can actually win in November.
I like that.
Winners make policies, losers go.
It sounds just like Trump.
And we're going to talk more about this, but I want to bring Dr. Twenge on now.
Why iGen Is More Tolerant00:11:51
Gene Twenge is a professor of psychology, the author of iGen: Why Today's Superconnected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy, and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.
Have I got you, Dr. Twenge?
Yes.
Hi, how are you doing?
Good, thank you.
Thank you for coming on.
You know, I read, I have not read the entire book, but I read the excerpt in The Atlantic, and it's a really fascinating study.
The first question I want to ask you, though, is a little off beat.
How do you go about studying a generation?
Well, you go to the really large national surveys that are done every year of teens and entering college students, and they're asked thousands of questions.
You can get a really good gauge on how they spend their time, how they're feeling, their attitudes, and their politics compared to previous generations at the same age.
So you can take age out of the equation because these surveys go back to the 1960s and 70s.
So you get a snapshot how boomers, Xers, and millennials looked like when they were teenagers, as well as what iGen looks like these days.
And so you found basically that something big happened.
I mean, you have said that most generational changes are kind of glacial, kind of slow, but there's been a sudden, shocking, very swift change.
What was it?
Around 2012, you said.
Yeah, that's right.
So I've been looking at generational differences for about 25 years.
So in the past decade or so, that's meant these large national surveys.
And that's right, around 2011 or 2012, there were some really sudden changes in how teens spent their time and in their mental health.
So their time when they're not in school, their leisure time switched away from spending time with their friends in person and toward spending more time on their phones and communicating with their friends electronically.
Then, right around that same time, loneliness started to spike.
Depression started to spike.
More of them started to say that they were unhappy and dissatisfied with their lives.
Wow, that dramatically.
And you link this to the iPhone.
Is that right?
Yeah, so, you know, these changes in mental health were pretty sudden.
In my 25 years of doing this, I got used to seeing more gradual changes.
So it's really unusual to see such a sudden change.
And it just so happens that 2012 was the year when the percentage of Americans with a smartphone crossed 50%.
So that made me think it might have something to do with it.
The Great Recession was over by that point.
Things were improving in terms of the economy.
And that encouraged me to go look in these data sets and other researchers' work to see if there was a link between spending a lot of time on screens and unhappiness and depression.
And sure enough, there was.
So the book is called iGen, Why Today's Superconnected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy, and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood by Gene Twange.
Let me ask you, let's go through those a minute.
Less rebellious.
Why would an iPhone make you less rebellious?
Well, obviously, the iPhone has been one of the major shaping forces for iGen.
That's why I call them iGen.
However, it's not the only thing that has influenced them.
So in terms of being less rebellious, they are very, very interested in safety.
And that is more than likely primarily due to the way their parents have raised them.
They were the first generation to ride in car seats until they were 12.
They didn't walk home from school.
Their parents protect them very carefully.
And perhaps as a result, they are very physically safe and also concerned with something that they called, when I interviewed them, emotional safety, which, for example, they don't want to talk to someone else who might upset them by maybe having different views.
That is appalling.
Obviously, we see this on university campuses all the time.
People shouting down speakers who they disagree with.
But some of this, some of this, just from reading your work, seems kind of wholesome.
I mean, they're dating later.
They're not having as much sex.
You know, they're talking.
You say that instead of dating, they go through a phase called talking where they're texting each other, I guess.
Some of it sounds, before I get to the other part of it, some of it sounds kind of actually not so bad.
No, absolutely.
So many of these trends are very good.
Obviously, having a generation of kids and teens and young adults who are physically safer is wonderful.
Them being less likely to date and have sex, that is part of a larger picture that teens are growing up more slowly, which is kind of counterintuitive.
You'd think, oh, they have access to so much information on their phones, that must mean they're growing up faster.
But when you look at what they're actually doing, they're growing up more slowly.
So iGen teens, for example, by spring of their senior year in high school, are less likely to have their driver's license, work at a paid job, go out without their parents, date, have sex, and drink alcohol.
So as a parent, you can look at that and say, oh, they're having sex less and drinking alcohol less, isn't that wonderful?
And of course it is.
But that misses, if you're just focusing on good or bad, you miss the larger picture that what's really happening is they're just taking longer to grow up.
Because getting a driver's license and not working in high school is that good or is that bad?
It's sort of both.
But all of those things have in common that the things adults do and children don't that are milestones of adolescence.
And iGen teens are doing those things later.
That's very interesting because you're saying it's a complex.
I mean, the same thing.
Now, the same thing is true.
Seems the next thing in the title of the book, iGen, Why Today Super Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy, and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, that you say more tolerant, and yet you say that they are wary of people who will say things that upset them.
How do those two things seem to be in conflict to me?
How can be more tolerant and also unable to hear conflicting views?
Right.
So that's one of the other complex things about our current culture and about iGen.
So in terms of tolerance, if you look at teens and young adults over time, iGen really stands out in particular compared to previous generations in their attitudes toward gays and lesbians, say their support of same-sex marriage and other issues around that.
In terms of race and gender, you look over time, obviously attitudes around race and gender have shifted and iGen reflects those.
But if you just take a snapshot right now in the past few years, there's not a huge generation gap there.
Boomers, Gen Xers, millennials, iGen all kind of have the same level of acceptance and tolerance around race and gender.
It's really LGBT issues where iGen stands out.
But there is that interesting contradiction that although they have a high degree of tolerance based on group membership, that level of tolerance doesn't always extend to issues around free speech, political beliefs, and so on.
So although you get a generation who says, oh, you know, that's who you are, you should be who you are.
That's cool.
They are some, certainly not all, some are less willing to accept the idea that, for example, a university is a place where we should be able to discuss our disagreements and learn about viewpoints other than our own.
That's interesting.
I mean, it's almost as if their tolerance were created by looking at life in a kind of fuzzy way.
So you don't have to ask questions about anything.
I mean, I've always been, all my life, I've been very accepting of gay people and all kinds of people, but I do believe it's a fair question to ask whether the ways in which we interact sexually are moral or not.
I think that that's a discussion that people can rationally have and whether religion has any effect or just teleology or anything like that.
So it's almost as if they manufacture their tolerance through not asking any questions.
Well, you know, that's one way to look at it.
And I think a lot of this comes back to that idea of safety.
And I think a lot of it, too, comes back to, again, this switch to electronic communication in favor of in-person, face-to-face interaction.
You have a generation of teens now who just doesn't have as much experience talking to each other face-to-face.
It's been filtered more through social media and through texting where it's not real time and you can think about what you're going to write and curate your image.
And face-to-face, sometimes there's this fear of what if somebody says something that I disagree with and I get upset.
You know, how am I going to handle myself in the moment?
And they don't have quite as much experience doing that because during their teen years, they spent a lot less time hanging out with each other in person.
Okay, now I'm getting a little short on time, so I have to put these last two together.
Less happy and completely unprepared for adulthood.
You know, that's not when you start to read, when you read the title, the subtitle of your book, iGen, that is not where you think it's going, basically.
You think, you know, so why are they less happy and unprepared for adulthood?
Yeah, so the happiness shows up as part of the trends in mental health where depression, anxiety, and unhappiness really started to peak right around 2012 when there was this tipping point toward electronic communication on the phone and away from in-person social interaction.
And then the completely unprepared for adulthood part, a little bit of hyperbole, of course, because it's a book title.
But that is the downside of teens growing up more slowly.
Because there's a lot of advantages to it.
It's very good that we had teens who are not growing up before they're ready, not drinking as much, having sex as much as teens.
But because they're not going out as much and less likely to drive, less likely to work at a paid job, that also means more are arriving at college and at their first jobs without as much experience with independence.
And that means you can have some problems.
So university administrators, for example, have observed that there's an increasing number of students who can't make a decision without texting their mom.
I'm not supposed to text my mom when I make.
You know, there are so many more questions I would like to ask you.
I hope you will come back on.
A really interesting introduction to this book by Gene Twinge, T-W-E-N-G-E, IGEN, Why Today's Super Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy, and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood and What That Means for the Rest of Us.
Dr. Twinch, thank you very much for coming on.
I hope you'll come back.
There are more questions I have to ask.
I'm just out of time.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
You know, really interesting, and it kind of leads me back to what I wanted to talk about about this Trump presser, is all this talk about the Civil War and Bannon and all these things.
Shelley's Abortion Era00:11:50
Trump was also at this values thing.
And he was asked at this presser.
This is a long cut, but I want to play it.
He was asked about the possibility of Hillary running in 2020.
And his answer is, first of all, Trumpian and hilarious.
I mean, when Trump becomes Trump, there's nothing funnier in politics.
He is hilarious.
And he just eviscerates her.
But you can see he's actually considering this and thinking out loud.
Listen to what he says.
Oh, I hope Hillary runs.
Is she going to run?
I hope, Hillary, please run again.
Go ahead.
So she's at odds with you over whether or not this is disrespecting the climate.
Is she right or is she wrong?
I think she's wrong.
Look, when they take a knee, there's plenty of time to do knees and there's plenty of time to do lots of other things.
But when you take a knee, well, that's why she lost the election.
I mean, honestly, it's that thinking that is the reason she lost the election.
When you go down and take a knee or any other way, you're sitting, essentially, for our great national anthem.
You're disrespecting our flag and you're disrespecting our country.
And the NFL should have suspended some of these players for one game.
Not fire them.
Suspended them for one game.
And then if they did it again, it could have been two games and three games and then for the season.
You wouldn't have people disrespecting our country right now.
And if Hillary Clinton actually made the statement that in a form sitting down during the playing of our great national anthem is not disrespectful, then I fully understand why she didn't win.
I know.
I mean, look, there are a lot of reasons she didn't win, including the fact that she was not good at what she did.
But I will tell you, that is something that I had just heard about.
And I think that her statement in itself is very disrespectful to our country.
I mean, that is a brilliant Trumpian moment.
I mean, that is Trump at his Trumpiest.
And you could hear them trying to cut him off.
They don't want him to go on.
And this is, you know, you watch CNN, watch Don Lemon do an interview.
When that kind of truth comes down the pike, they lose the connection at CNN.
He says, oh, we have a technical difficulty.
I mean, every single time, you could hear them trying to cut him off.
They don't want to let him.
He's the president of the United States.
You let him finish the sentence.
Obama used to go on and on and drone and drone and filibuster.
They never interrupted him, but they're desperate to try and stop him because this is the key to the Trump presidency.
And by the way, is it cynical?
You bet it is.
I mean, you know, Trump knows he's caught the tail of the dragon and he's going to fly it right out of town.
You know, he's here.
I just want to play this one last cut.
This is not at the press conference.
This is him at the Value Voters Summit.
Now he's talking, right?
This is this guy who goes who spent his life grabbing women.
He's been divorced, married, and divorced.
We know he's cheated on his wives, all this stuff.
And remember when they would ask him during the election about God and he knew nothing about God or religion and all this stuff?
Now he's talking to these people and they love him.
They love him.
And he's playing them like they're a fiddle.
Listen to this.
In America, we don't worship government.
We worship God.
The American founders invoked our Creator four times in the Declaration of Independence.
times.
How times have changed, but you know what?
Now they're changing back again.
Just remember that.
We are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values.
You know, we're getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don't talk about anymore.
They don't use the word Christmas because it's not politically correct.
You go department stores and they'll say Happy New Year and they'll say other things and it'll be red.
They'll have it painted, but they don't say, well, guess what?
We're saying Merry Christmas again.
So the people, the reactions of people at this thing, here's Pat Flynn from Catholics for Freedom of Religion.
It's like a cloud has lifted.
When Obama was in, everything was sad.
Nothing was good.
Now look, look at the smiling faces.
Look at people getting jobs again.
Another, no, this is still Flynn, sorry.
We tried nice guys.
We had John McCain, Mitt Romney.
They were nice, smiling at everybody, but they couldn't beat Hillary.
Romney, I mean, come on.
The only thing people remember about him is that he tied a dog to the roof of his car.
And all I'm saying about Trump is that he is moving the Overton window.
You know, you've heard of the Overton window, right?
This is the window of acceptable conversation.
What is acceptable to say?
And he is moving the window back to where it's traditionally been, back to talking about patriotism as if it were a good thing.
Remember, you know, how uncomfortable they were during the Bush years, how uncomfortable the press was with saying the word patriotism.
Katie Couric says, oh, I'm uncomfortable with patriotism.
I'm uncomfortable saying the word God, talking about Christmas.
You know, and is there an element of cynicism in Trump?
Yes, but I do believe there's also an element of affection for these people.
You know, Bill Crystal, who has been a never Trumper ever, he put out a tweet today.
I like Gorsuch, and it's not just Gorsuch anymore.
It's an entire panoply of conservative judges that Trump has been appointed.
But he says, I like Gorsuch.
I like decertifying Iran, the Iran deal.
I like leaving UNESCO.
Trump started, got out of UNESCO because they're anti-Semitic.
But all those victories are not worth the degradation of our public life that is the Trump presidency.
I mean, it's like champagne conservatism, you know?
I mean, this is something, this is something that Trump is doing that is ringing in the minds of the people.
And I think you're going to start to see it in his approval ratings as people start to see that these ideas can win.
And you know, I have all kinds of problems with Trump, his cynicism, his rudeness, all this stuff.
But this needs to be done.
This is something that has to happen.
Sexual follies.
So, Ross Douthat, who is the kind of conservative columnist on Knucklehead Row at the New York Times, and he's a Catholic, and that's what makes him, so there's conservatism there.
is talking about the 70s after the Harvey Weinstein thing came out.
And he was talking about how during the 70s, you know, it was really the height of the sexual revolution.
And he says, you can look at it through the statistics.
There were never so many divorces in the 70s, never so many abortions as in the 70s, a much higher rate of rape, an STD crisis that culminated in the AIDS, the AIDS epidemic.
And he says, you know, you can see that you can see in the exploitation, just in terms of narrative, in terms of the stories about the 70s, the drug-enabled exploitation of kids, a grimly horrifying scale.
He says, much of rock and roll's groupie culture was a spree of statutory rape with the gods of rock and roll as serial deflowers of girls who were really young.
In the same era, of anything goes Hollywoods, Roman Polanski had good reason to regard sodomizing a 13-year-old as what they let you do when you're a star.
And you remember Harvey Weinstein put out this statement when he was talking about why he was raping women and cornering them and touching himself in front of them and asking them to give him massage and watch him shout, well, I came of age in the 70s.
That was his excuse, you know.
And Duthot says, you know, things have gotten better.
You know, people, as we just heard from Dr. Twang, people are, you know, young people having sex less, all this stuff.
But he says, but let us not congratulate ourselves too quickly.
There are ways in which we have passed from eros to thanatos to death, from the chaos of unrestrained desire to the stability of senescence.
Our era is less overtly sexually destructive in part because we're giving up on sex itself, retreating into pornography and other virtual consolations.
In the 1970s, people left their marriages because they believed some higher fulfillment awaited.
In the 2010s, they marry less, have less sex, once married, and have fewer children, opting out of promiscuity and procreation.
Both abortion rates are down, but suicide rates are up.
Really interesting.
And I want to talk, I'm going to go a little long here.
I'm reading a biography of the poet Shelley.
It's a huge book.
I've been reading it for weeks and weeks and weeks.
And I always like to read about the Romantic era because it was very much like our era.
You know, there was an era of revolution.
It was the French Revolution came first.
Then that revolution failed as our 60s revolution kind of failed.
And in England, especially, there was a reaction of conservatism, as we had Ronald Reagan, we had the Reagan years.
But as that, you know, that held off the revolution, but the liberalism and the leftism came in slowly, you know, over time.
And as Shelley was, when Shelley was a poet, the English were very, trying very hard to stamp out the revolutionary impulse by censoring people, by putting people in jail if they wrote anything that seemed revolutionary.
And Shelley was a radical.
I've always disliked him as a human being because of his radicalism and because of his sexual promiscuity, which caused so much death and destruction all around him.
He was a genius poet.
I mean, he would have, I mean, some of these poets, if they only lived for like the five days in which they wrote their great poems, because they would jot them down.
Oh, yes, I saw the West Wind blowing, and I wrote down this poem, and it'll be Ode to the West Wind, one of the most beautiful poems in all of literature.
Shelley believed in equality between the sexes and in free sex.
And as a result of this, he constantly was getting people pregnant, not just Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.
He left his wife for Mary Shelley, and she committed suicide because he abandoned her with their children.
Mary Shelley's children would die.
Shelley would impregnate her half-sister, and that child would die.
He pregnated a maid, and she would die, and that child would die.
He left a swath of destruction.
You know, I'm very opposed to abortion.
I simply believe it's killing.
I think there's just no getting around it.
But I understand, I do understand that there is something in the impulse to make women and men equal, to make their lives equal, to make their sexual lives free.
This has been in people's minds since Adam and Eve, to be free sexually, to be equal sexually, to be the same.
And the thing that gets in the way are these darn babies.
You know, they get in the way because when you have sex with women, they do this weird thing where they start to reproduce.
And that is, you know, this unavoidable consequence, even with birth control, it still happens.
And so the impulse toward abortion is not an evil impulse in itself.
It is just so desperate to get to this freedom, to get to the sexual freedom, to get to the sexual equality, that it basically resorts to killing, killing the most innocent, the weakest, the most helpless person, the one person in the room who can't protest, the one person in the room who has no vote, who can't go before Congress and tell his or her sad story.
The mother who says, oh, if I had only had an abortion, my life would have been better can go and tell her sad story on the news and make you cry.
But the baby whose life has been snuffed out, he can't do that.
He's been silenced.
Rampant Sexuality's Price00:01:32
He's never had a voice.
So all I want to say is this idea that creativity and rampant sexuality are connected may be true.
There may be something to it.
But the rampant sexuality has this moral problem.
It has like the speed of light.
It has a place beyond which it cannot go.
And unless we talk about that, instead of using these stupid terms like women's reproductive choice, women's sexual health, all these stupid terms they use to stop from using the term abortion, to keep from using the term killing, unless we can talk about to each other, to people who are pro-life and people who are pro-abortion, what it is we're talking about.
We're talking about freedom and the price of freedom and when that price becomes too much to pay.
It would be a real change to hear that conversation, to hear a conversation about the basics.
And until we do, we'll just remain stupid about sex as we have been since the Garden of Eden.
All right, the conversation is coming up at 2 o'clock here.
Let me, I'll give you one more read-through here.
The conversation is on the Daily Wire Facebook page and the YouTube channel.
2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern.
I will answer all your questions live.
We'll solve your problems live.
But anyone can watch, but you have to be a subscriber to ask the questions.
So get your lousy 10 bucks in right now.
And we'll see you tomorrow for the mailbag.
Get those questions in as well.
You do that by going onto the podcast page.
And there's a button that takes you right to where you ask your questions.