LIZ PEEK: Angry, affluent and adrift — what's driving some young Americans to violence

It’s 2026, and America’s youth are not ok.

Young people in the U.S. are angry and miserable, surveys show, despite living in the most prosperous nation on earth. They are likely to stay that way. They hate capitalism, despair about climate change and social justice, have devalued the things that matter most like family and religion and instead put their faith in false prophets like Zohran Mamdani.

Oddly it is our privileged elites — highly educated, meaning highly indoctrinated by our leftist schools, that are the most rudderless and unhappy.

The result is people like Cole Allen, 31-year-old graduate of prestigious Caltech university, who allegedly decided to shoot Trump administration officials attending the White House Correspondents Dinner this past weekend. Or Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old accused of killing Charlie Kirk, or Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who shot and wounded President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Or Colt Gray, Phoenix Ikner or Robin Westman, all three under the age of 25 and accused of deadly school shootings.

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These are just a few names; there are plenty more. What do they have in common? They’re not destitute, not starving, they’re just angry.

Some blame young people’s woes on social media, which is undoubtedly part of the problem. But they themselves are also to blame. Young people hew liberal, which is normal, but today’s leftists are not just critical of the status quo and want to improve it. They hate the status quo and have bought the idea that American institutions and businesses are corrupt and must be punished, even if that means violence.

Consider the piece published last Wednesday by the New York Times titled ‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ The article celebrated "petty theft" as "the new political protest" and summarized a podcast that included Hasan Piker, an anti-American antisemite who once declared that the U.S. "deserved" to be attacked on Sep. 11, 2001. Piker’s main credential is a large following among young people on Twitch. The podcast, which included NYT opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, lit up social media. The vast majority of readers expressed disgust over the moral depravity of the conversation’s participants, who cooly contemplate the justification of political violence, including murder.

Most of their ruminations are just plain dumb, as when Piker applauds stealing artwork from the Louvre saying, "We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature."

This champagne socialist, who went to Rutgers and lives in a $3 million house in LA, pretends to align with the working man. He thinks stealing art from a public institution, where it can be seen for free by working-class people, is "cool."

But it is abhorrent that the trio ventures close to justifying the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, claiming that health insurers are "merchants of social murder, of structural violence upon people."

On a lesser scale, they condone sharing Netflix passwords and skirting firewalls but draw the line, thankfully, at burning down factories "to protest wage theft".

The Times’ own editor seems to condone the rationale behind a new trend that she describes as "microlooting", or stealing from large outfits like Whole Foods, suggesting that many think, "Because the rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I? And Jeff Bezos has too much money — he’s a billionaire — so why should I have to pay for organic avocados?"

But the biggest takeaway from this pathetic conversation is that these people wallow in their liberal guilt, and it is making them miserable.

Jia Tolentino whines, "It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society."

She confesses, "There are so many perfectly legal things I do regularly that I find mildly immoral. Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action. I have taken so many planes for so many pleasure reasons; I have acted in so many selfish ways that are not only legal, but they’re sanctioned and they’re unbelievably valorized, culturally."

Spiegelman responds in kind: "I’m constantly acting in ways that don’t align with my belief system… like ordering in food when it’s raining out. There are just so many moments when I’m like, my comfort is more important than someone bringing me food through the rain. And it doesn’t feel good."

Imagine beating yourself up because you order takeout occasionally or fly to Miami for a midwinter break. These women have politicized and denounced so many normal acts of everyday life that their lives have become a boiling cauldron of self-loathing.

It isn’t just plastic cups that make them unhappy, it’s also parking for free on the street, and private schools. More important, it’s the recognition that to be politically potent — to actually make a difference in the lives of those who bag groceries at Whole Foods — they would have to spend years working there and unionize the workforce. That, for this spoiled trio, would be a step too far.

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These three "influencers", heaven help us, have bought the Left’s dishonest outrage about our "unjust" capitalist society hook, line and sinker. They deplore the existence of billionaires, they hate big corporations that conduct what Piker calls "wage theft" and, incredibly, are wildly optimistic that New York’s vacuous Mayor Zohran Mamdani will provide the answers they are seeking.

After lamenting that trust in the government has plummeted, Piker declares that Mamdani "does instill confidence in governance... People for the first time ever see someone actually making that positive change…"

Actually, they see nothing. Mamdani’s free buses have been put off, the highly-touted "affordable" grocery story will cost multiples of what it should, and the budget doesn’t work. It will only get worse.

Piker’s naivete is stunning, but not surprising. He may have a college degree but, like Mamdani, is entirely ignorant of how the world works.

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