Generation Z(ohran): The Making of a Revolutionary Without a Cause
In New York City, a man named Zoran Mamdani is poised to become mayor. He’s a socialist who wants to abolish bail, make buses free, and end gifted education. All ideas New Yorkers broadly reject. Yet he’s winning. Why?
Ben Shapiro argues the answer lies not in policy but in psychology. Mamdani’s surge, he says, reflects the mindset of Generation Z, a generation steeped in grievance, raised in abundance, and taught that rebellion is virtue. It’s the natural end of decades of moral drift, academic radicalism, and parenting that confuses “open-mindedness” with abdication.
This isn’t just about one city or one candidate. It’s about the worldview shaping America’s future leaders.
The Paradox of Comfort and Revolution
Shapiro notes that Mamdani’s base, the 18 to 34 crowd, is overwhelmingly left-wing, even by New York standards. Among those voters, he leads his opponents by over 60 points. Nationally, the same generation shows majority approval for socialism, and deep skepticism toward capitalism, religion, and traditional family structures.
That contradiction sits at the heart of Shapiro’s critique. Generation Z is the most materially blessed cohort in human history, yet it sees itself as oppressed.
They have more degrees, higher early-career income, and better health access than any previous generation. And yet, nearly half report being diagnosed with a mental health condition. More than 40 percent say “their generation isn’t set up for success.” Fewer than half believe they’ll ever have children.
“How,” Shapiro asks, “can the richest, safest, most connected young people in history feel this hopeless?”
His answer is simple. They’ve been taught to.
The Cult of Victimhood
Every generation rebels against its parents, but Generation Z has inherited something different. A belief system that sanctifies weakness and blames all hardship on invisible forces.
From elementary school to TikTok, they’ve absorbed the gospel of structural injustice. That inequality, unhappiness, and even anxiety are not part of life’s struggle but symptoms of oppression. If you’re depressed, it’s capitalism’s fault. If you’re lonely, it’s systemic. If you fail, it’s society’s betrayal.
This worldview, Shapiro argues, replaces gratitude with grievance and responsibility with resentment. It produces revolutionaries without discipline. People who rage against the machine while ordering their oat milk lattes on iPhones made by that same machine.
“Either we’ve hit a radical genetic bottleneck,” Shapiro quips, “or we’ve wildly overdiagnosed a generation that believes there’s virtue in fragility.”
The Education of the Accused
To understand how that fragility turns political, Shapiro traces Mamdani’s path through America’s elite universities. The son of wealthy Ugandan immigrants, his father a Columbia professor, his mother a film producer, Mamdani attended exclusive private schools before majoring in Africana Studies at Bowdoin College.
There, he absorbed the canon of Western self-loathing. Critical race theory, postcolonial guilt, and the anti-capitalist mysticism of Franz Fanon. His activism followed predictably. Anti-Israel boycotts, anti-police protests, and the moral certainty of a man convinced that America’s prosperity is built on theft.
“He is,” Shapiro says, “a revolutionary born into privilege and comfort, demanding the destruction of the system that gave him everything.”
The irony is not new. From Lenin’s university radicals to Che Guevara’s bourgeois idealists, revolutions are rarely led by the oppressed. They are led by the overeducated and underanchored. Young elites who crave purpose and mistake destruction for virtue.
Mamdani is their modern avatar.
The Boomers Who Built the Bonfire
But Shapiro doesn’t blame Gen Z alone. He points the finger at their parents. The Baby Boomers and millennials who, in his view, “inculcated a brand of vague anti-Americanism that metastasized into virulent anti-capitalism.”
These parents believed they were being “open-minded” by refusing to teach their children firm values. “I’m just giving them the tools to think,” they said. Shapiro calls that “bad parenting.”
You don’t raise thinkers by giving them neutrality. You raise thinkers by giving them a moral framework, something to wrestle with, to affirm or reject. “The most important thing you can do as a parent,” he says, “is tell your kids what values to hold.”
Instead, we outsourced that duty to universities filled with radicals. The result is a generation fluent in activism and illiterate in gratitude.
The Cuckoo in the Nest
Shapiro plays a clip from Canary Mission documenting how the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the movement Mamdani represents, has “infiltrated and hollowed out” the Democratic Party from within. Its members see elections not as ends but as means, declaring openly that they seek to “tear down the empire from within.”
The metaphor they use is a “cuckoo in the nest.” Once the DSA gains strength, it pushes out the original host, the moderate Democrats, and consumes the structure that raised it.
To Shapiro, that’s not just a party problem. It’s a generational one.
Boomers like Jon Stewart romanticize radicals like Mamdani as “Jackie Robinson moments” for diversity and inclusion. They think they’re sponsoring idealism. What they’re actually doing is feeding an alligator that will eventually eat them.
“Revolutionary energy,” Shapiro warns, “is universal acid. It burns through everything, even those who think they can control it.”
Two Revolutions, One Grievance
In one of his sharpest observations, Shapiro notes that the revolutionary spirit isn’t limited to the left. The same grievance culture infects parts of the populist right, which channels resentment toward new targets. Globalists, elites, and immigrants while sharing the same revolutionary DNA.
On both sides, the logic is identical. The system is rigged, meritocracy is fake, and only revolution will make things right. The left wants a “dictatorship of the marginalized.” The far right dreams of a “dictatorship of the white Christian male proletariat.”
Both, Shapiro says, are heresies against the same sacred order. America’s constitutional balance of liberty, responsibility, and earned success.
The End of the Immune System
What makes this moment dangerous, he concludes, is that America’s institutions have lost their immune response. Once, radicals were fringe. Now they are faculty, anchors, and CEOs. Their ideas circulate through TikTok, classrooms, and Netflix, mainstreamed by the very elites they claim to hate.
And the result? Depression. Division. The death of purpose.
“If this revolution were really working,” Shapiro asks, “why are its children so miserable?”
The answer may be that human beings can’t live by resentment alone. When a society teaches its youth that happiness is oppression, and that meaning is found only in tearing things down, it shouldn’t be surprised when those youth inherit ashes.
Final Thoughts: Raising Builders in the Age of Burners
“Generation Z(ohran)” is more than a monologue about one socialist in New York. It’s a warning about a civilization that has forgotten how to raise adults.
If the boomers raised children to worship freedom without structure, and millennials raised theirs to worship feelings without truth, Generation Z was left with nothing but self-pity.
The cure, Shapiro insists, is not more “revolutionary energy.” It’s moral renewal—parents teaching gratitude, teachers defending merit, and leaders brave enough to say no when no is needed.
Because if we don’t rebuild that moral immune system, the cuckoo will keep hatching. And next time, it won’t stop at New York.
This is spot on - the "revolutionary without a cause" vibe for unpacking how elite education can churn out grudge-holders who romanticize tearing down the ladder they climbed.
Either way, if he pulls off the upset tonight, it'll be less about vibes and more about turnout, Gen Z showed up in droves for the primary. What's your bet on how long before the "revolution" hits its first pothole