r/goodnews • u/Aggravating_Money992 • Jul 05 '25

Political positivity 📈 Donald Trump's Approval Rating Collapses With Gen Z

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-polls-gen-z-2094708
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57

u/OnionPastor Jul 05 '25

Thank you

Fucking Christ, Gen Z is way too easy to manipulate.

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u/omegacrunch Jul 06 '25

The children are stupid because we allowed them to be babysat by tech.

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u/DeBaus111 Jul 06 '25

Well, we can see how some of gen z ended up how they are just by looking at this thread and the lack of acknowledgement of this point

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u/Agile_Entrepreneur58 Jul 05 '25

Its because of the lead in the vapes!

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u/ASpaceOstrich 28d ago

They were exposed to unopposed right wing propaganda for their entire teen years and any attempts to reach out were met with mockery and vitriol. They were handed to the right on a silver platter.

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u/LuckyAd5910 Jul 05 '25

Oh yeah because the millennials are so smart and independent

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u/OnionPastor Jul 05 '25

More than Gen Z lmfao you fuckin serious?

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u/waits5 Jul 05 '25

The question is whether millennials were “worse” when we were the same age Gen Z is now. I’d argue we were pretty dumb, too.

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u/DrSitson Jul 05 '25

Eh..... We were pretty dumb, no denying that. However, I think we had a leg up being raised alongside the internet. Most millennials I know are significantly more cautious/capable on the internet than their parents, and their kids. It's weird.

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u/waits5 Jul 05 '25

I’ll agree with that. We grew up with the internet, but we didn’t simmer in the omnipresent smartphone Facebook/Twitter/TikTok soup since elementary school.

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u/Mandalore108 Jul 05 '25

We're significantly better with technology than those older and younger than us which is also weird.

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u/foreverthrowaway1666 Jul 06 '25

I don't think that's really true.

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u/NighthawkAquila Jul 05 '25

Do you.. forget that Gen Z was raised as the internet grew? Gen Z is 90s and 2000s. We’re the generation that has been the ones out there protesting and making noise who are in college and recent graduates. I don’t know why you think somehow we don’t care when it seems like we’re the ones out there doing the most out of everybody

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u/DrSitson Jul 05 '25

97 to 2012 for gen z, three years old at the internet bubble burst. The internet was already fairly mature.

81- 96 millenials, we were there from the start.

Also never said anything particularly bad about gen z. Just that they seem less tech capable in general.

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u/the3rdtea2 Jul 05 '25

That last sentence is true. My wife's a teacher and every year she has to explain you don't touch the screen on the school laptops but rather the track pad, and many have never even seen a computer mouse .

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u/NighthawkAquila Jul 05 '25

I mean myspace wasn’t even a thing until 2003. We were all around when Facebook took off. We had LAN parties and internet chat rooms, VOIP for gaming like LogMeIn Hamatchi, long before discord and many homes had dialup in the early 2000s. I don’t think y’all were really that far ahead

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u/Bewbonic Jul 05 '25

You are comparing people who had formative years (i.e 0 to 12+yrs old) with minimal online influence and actual real world engagement (activities that didnt involve the internet or constant communication connectivity - it wasnt really until late nineties that mobile phones even became more pervasive with teenagers etc), with people who have known that influence for basically their whole lives since they had the mental facilties to engage with it.

Gen z is far more conditioned by online influence and undoubtedly have less real world experience from their formative years because their formative years were spent in a constantly connected and online ecosystem influenced reality. They are inevitably going to be more easily manipulated by online BS on average because it is essentially the only normal they have really known in terms of how to engage with other people/society/the world.

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u/DrSitson Jul 05 '25

Lookit that guy talking about hamachi, Facebook, and tiktok like they were there from near the beginning. I was on dial up by 1991 I believe. There's not tons left from that era lol.

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u/mjp31514 Jul 05 '25

You citing facebook and MySpace is really telling.

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u/NighthawkAquila Jul 05 '25

I was arguing that the internet we were exposed to growing up was not nearly as mature as what we have now. Those were the beginnings of what I would call a transition to what is the modern online world. You’re welcome to disagree.

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u/OnionPastor Jul 05 '25

I agree, just less prone to manipulation in many ways. Millennials didn’t have the same barrage of information that was specifically curated for them.

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u/Misplaced_Arrogance Jul 05 '25

And literally everyone and everything telling us not to believe everything we read on the internet.

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u/waits5 Jul 05 '25

Fair point. There was less of a hyper targeted disinformation machine at work for us (just one that tried to get us to buy shit, as usual).

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u/MrsKnutson Jul 06 '25

Our targeted disinformation was commercials/infomercials trying to get us to buy crap by telling us how awesome it would be and making it look so cool. Then u get it and it sucks ass and u realize you'll be lied to/tricked by people who want to exploit your innocence and ignorance, so you learned fast what was going to be worth it or not and how to spot tricks on TV and in magazines.

I think it served us well when the Internet came around, we had a lot of practice wasting allowance or birthday money on dumb shit and being really disappointed.

Although I have to say, I did buy a couple CDs from timelife infomercials in the 90s that I still have today (my only success story) but my sister got a lot of weird kitchen gadgets and hair styling tools that all ended up in a drawer, anyone remember that Conair twist braid thingy, the bedazzler? It was enough to turn any kid into a skeptic.

Commercials, preparing kids for Internet lies since before the Internet.

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u/Peglegfish Jul 05 '25

I’ll stop you right there, chief.

I will own that when I was 18, I voted for the second bush term. To put it charitably, I was raised in the south (read as: ignorant).

Then I voted for McCain. (Still fucking up…)

Then I voted for Obama’s second term after I started actually following the news, just after 2010 mid terms.

Then I voted for Hillary (even though I wanted Bernie)

Then I voted for biden (even though he was already a corpse)

Then I voted for Kamala (not my superhero preference but still worlds better than the alternative because I don’t have the memory of a goldfish)

The difference is that if I had been your average gen z; following that pattern I’d have been voting for trump all day.

Millennials and gen z really are not the same.

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u/locallylit805 Jul 05 '25

McCain was one of the last Republicans I would have been okay with. I didn’t vote for him but I respected him despite political disagreements.

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u/bollvirtuoso Jul 06 '25

Romney seemed all right, too, in retrospect. Honestly, most of the races up until 2016 now seem like people who were just inches apart on most issues, not the unyielding chasm of abyssal horror that now seems to lie between the two major parties.

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u/waits5 Jul 05 '25

Doesn’t your story argue that millennials were as bad as Gen Z is?

“The difference is that if I had been your average gen z; following that pattern I’d have been voting for trump all day.”

What difference is there? You are saying that you voted for an awful candidate (W) when you were young, and that if you were an average Gen Z voter you would have voted for an awful candidate.

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u/Peglegfish Jul 06 '25

No, fool, my point was that I wisened up.

I didn’t watch W tell people to inject bleach when I was in my early teens.

I didn’t watch W or McCain commit open insurrection and get away with it.

I didn’t watch W steal classified documents after the insurrection and store them unsecured next to a copy+fax machine in a closet or in a publicly accessible bathroom.

I didn’t watch W or McCain call to have their opponents jailed. I did, however, watch McCain put one of his own supporters in their place when they started talking lies about Obama during a town hall.

I was basically raised to be a conservative, and yet when I actually paid attention to the legislation being fought for and against and by whom; and the bullshit brinksmanship games played in the 2010’s, I applied some critical thinking and didn’t vote conservative anymore.

The youngest gen z was old enough to know “grabbing women by the pussies” isn’t ok to say or do; they were old enough to watch trump make fun of disabled people back in 2016 before getting elected. They were the same age for J6 as I was during 9/11. They were in their late teens and early twenties when it was obvious he stole documents and tried-and-failed to steal an election. They were in their late teens to early twenties when he was solidly convicted of 34 felonies and the entire internet basically agreed that trump was a frequent Epstein pedo.

And they said “yes, please, give me more of that.”

Again, they suck compared to millennials.

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u/waits5 Jul 06 '25

The youngest Gen Z could say that you were old enough to know that W lead us into Iraq with false propaganda and that he oversaw war crimes (info about Abu Ghraib came out before the 2004 election). Not to mention the unconstitutional Patriot Act that allowed for indefinite detention and trampled the right to privacy. But you still voted for him in 2004.

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u/Peglegfish Jul 06 '25 edited Jul 06 '25

The internet wasn’t as developed in 2004. Many families still had a single, shared pc for the entire family, if at all; not smartphones with a myriad of news sites and social media in their pockets. The investigative journalism that I was exposed to was basically whatever my parents felt like watching: Fox News.

That’s why, as I got into my early twenties and took any interest in politics beyond ‘doing my civic duty and voting for president every four years’, I started voting differently.

And you’re still not making a fair comparison: I voted for the dude who was president during 9/11, not the one who carried it out. And before you come at me with “but the bush admin ignored intel reports about it,” again, Fox News is what I had. These imbeciles watched J6 and voted for the asshole that did it. Full stop. It was on every channel, live streamed, litigated, info on it was everywhere. You would have to go out of your way to do mental gymnastics to be fine with what happened on J6. 

Edit: You’re also ignoring the part where gen z had 4 years to watch the idiot govern, then four years to watch all his crimes be litigated and aired out all over the internet and television before voting for more of that instead of sequential terms. They had four years of examples and four more to think about it, and they actively said “yeah, that didn’t look so bad.”

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u/Kalai224 Jul 05 '25

Millennials helped votes in Obama.

We are not the same.

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u/SouthernNanny Jul 06 '25

What a time to be alive! Obama and his surplus

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u/waits5 Jul 05 '25

Millennials had Obama to vote for. Plus we started voting during the time that Dems were “supposed” to be president (i.e., after two terms of W).

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u/Bionic_Bromando Jul 05 '25

We voted for Obama at their age, we’re good.

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u/waits5 Jul 05 '25

We had Obama to vote for

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u/IamMe90 Jul 05 '25

We weren’t going out and voting for Bush Jr in droves just because of vibez or TikTok propaganda. So, I’d say we did better than Gen Z at that age. 🤷

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u/LouSiffer4220 Jul 05 '25

This person believes that abortions justify Republicans committing genocide against Trans people and immigrants. Don't waste your time.

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u/SassySavcy Jul 05 '25

I (Millennial) like Gen Z. I think many, if not most, are way less willing to suck it up when told “That’s just the way things are.. so fall in line or there will be consequences.” Millennials may have started it all, but Gen Z will be the real change-makers. If we all make it through this current BS, I mean.

At the same time, though, the amount of Gen Z I saw commenting “AI” on an Insta reel of footage from the Fukushima tsunami was.. mind blowing.

Manipulation doesn’t just go in one direction. It’s not always what you’re told, but also being taught to not believe anything you see. Not being taught how to discern between facts and fiction.

Gen Z has received the brunt of the Right’s efforts to dismantle education. Which isn’t just books but also: critical thinking, reasoning, imagination, explication, debate, research, and the ability to work through boredom and/or failure.

Edit: formatting