August 8, 2026

ABE GREENWALD: After Reality.

It’s not just that Gen Zs came too late to catch the USSR. They came too late to catch the real world altogether. What I’m referring to as the real world here is the manifest multidimensional reality in which humans once spent most of their lives, where they experienced the friction that comes from contact with other real people, challenging ideas, and historical events in real time. All that began to wink out sometime around 2007, when the iPhone was released. In the years since, we’ve migrated ever deeper into our screens and their facsimile of reality. And the pandemic hastened the change considerably.

Many of us, of course, are old enough to have experienced life before and after. There are people alive who’ve witnessed World War II, the Shoah, the Soviet nightmare, the birth of the State of Israel, and 9/11. But younger millennials and Gen Zs simply showed up after the fact—after all the facts. By the time they arrived, they mostly had to make do with the real world’s digital epilogue—“learning” about what happened before they were born from social media, influencers, and AI. What they’re getting is not so much history but a malcontent’s primer on the world that’s rumored to exist outside of their phones. And we’re moving inexorably into an age in which they and younger generations will become the majority.

The online world is a uniquely hospitable environment for both socialism and anti-Semitism to flourish in, and Gen Z (online an average of five hours a day) is being bombarded by both. Like the internet itself, socialism and anti-Semitism are primarily virtual. What do I mean by that? Certainly not that they don’t have monstrous real-world consequences. It’s that, at their cores, they both suppose notional worlds that mirror only the surface appearance of the real one. We often have to remind ourselves that “the internet isn’t the real world,” because the superficial similarities can be deceptive. This applies equally to the worlds of socialists and anti-Semites.

North America could soon be facing quite a spell of bad luck:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll