I'm not and didn't lol, but that seems like a logical fallacy based on the assumption that the young generation is a monolith (and ignores my post mentioned a specific type of kid, not the entire "young generation").
If they are culture warriors shoehorning that into everything, like you pointed out with the Smirnov guy (and he admitted it), I assume they are a kid to give them the benefit of the doubt, because adults obsessed with it are too embarrassing to consider real.
It seems like your presumption is based on whether or not it reflects badly on "adults", not whether it's substantiated by evidence.
I am certainly not taking the viewpoint that all young people are progressive thinking types, or all adults are social conservatives. My argument is simply that young people are unfairly maligned.
The kids that you might have in mind don't behave the way you think. Kids may think racial slurs are funny, they'll troll and use these things to humor themselves, but they aren't picking up social issues and arguing passionately for or against. Those that hold certain ideologies as young adults now tend to find "safe groups" for their terrible beliefs where group think develops. These radical ideas become normalized, and they see facebook, twiter, youtube, reddit, news comment sections all parroting the same things and they further believe that to be the truth, that everyone thinks this way. That's how Russian bots have perpetrated our society.
Like you said, people aren't monoliths. I have no doubt that there's a good portion of the younger generation that are engaged in alt-right rhetoric. But social science suggests that there is a link between increased age and social conservatism. One of the reasons (and there are a multitude of them) are a decrease in neural plasticity leading to less "
openness to experience" and that "
openness tends to predict liberal tendencies". Most people generally want to be fair and restrain the prejudicial thoughts, but as older adults, they suffer losses in their ability to suppress unwanted thoughts and rely more and more of their worldview to make judgements.
The good news is that people that have
liberal views tend to hold liberal views as they age. And that conservatives can also adopt increasing liberal views as they age as well as the fact that society is becoming more tolerant as a whole.
