Anthony Vidal Torres, a digital organizer at the Get Free Movement explains why young people’s voices should lead us a new administration of harm begins.
This article is a part of Left Out: The Missing Election narratives, a collection of unreported histories by publications inside of the Movement Media Alliance.
In the aftermath of Trump’s election win (with about 49.8% of the popular vote), there’s been a lot of discussion about the political leanings of GenZ, how young men voted vs young women, and what happened with Black and brown youth turnout.
These are important questions to ask and answer as we get more credible data from published voter files (not from unreliable exit polls or apples and oranges macro level comparisons). Unfortunately, some DINO (Democrat-in-name-only) operatives are debating in bad-faith, spreading false assumptions to shame voters, blame the Left, and justify the Party conceding to MAGA billionaire’s white supremacist policies on immigration, criminal justice, and trans rights. Rather than do the work of fascists and allow corporate mouthpieces to trash our youth-led movements, we need to understand how the new generation is arriving at this moment in history and offer a credible pathway to reshaping our country for the better.
The past few years have been rough for young people to say the least. Like Millennials before them, GenZ are coming of age in a time where wealthy corporations are putting higher education, good jobs, and affordable and quality homes further out of reach, while they fuel ever more dangerous climate disasters in the places we love. On top of that, many young people were denied in person classes, proms, and graduations during the peak of the pandemic and forced to figure out life and mourn loved ones killed by Covid in isolation. Meanwhile, billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have tried to lock in their profit margins by dividing new social media users into ever more siloed algorithms, while fueling the spread of disinformation and white and male supremacist ideologies online.
That all said, we have to also remember that for over a decade young people have led a progressive movement renaissance. Not long ago, we saw teenagers and 20-somethings marching to defend Black lives in every corner of the country, leading a historic reckoning with the ongoing legacies of enslavement and the largest protest movement in U.S. history. We now have data showing that the Black Lives Matter uprising had further ripple effects, driving GenZ to register and turnout in record numbers in 2020 and 2022 for a future of real freedom and equality. Many in this group are the same young people who took bold moral action for Palestinian freedom on campuses this past year, voted for reproductive freedom in state referendums since MAGA justices struck down Roe, and have powered a resurgent labor movement, driving up union membership nationwide.
2024 is complicated for many reasons and raises important questions and challenges about mobilizing and persuading young audiences for progressive change. Yet some pundits want us to believe that many of the 22 year olds who mobilized for Black Lives Matter, abortion, and Gaza suddenly switched their support for Trump? Most people hold contradictory views on politics and how the world ought to work, but there’s something else going on here. One outcome we can see clearly now is that millions of voters, many of them under the age of 30, who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 chose not to cast their ballot for Kamala Harris or weren’t able due to new GOP anti-voter barriers. Of the roughly 244 million-strong electorate, the largest group of the electorate is once again the nearly 35% of eligible voters who did not cast a ballot this election.
What the DINOs get wrong is that young people across the board hate the status quo and want credible pathways to making lasting change. In recent focus groups of young Black, brown, and Indigenous voters (men and women), participants were looking for leadership. They do not currently know what to do to oppose Trump in his plans for the country, though they oppose them. They are ripe for organizing. But Democratic capitulation to the MAGA regime and movement retreat will only feed young people cynicism, despair, and disaffection. They need to plug into a plan that goes beyond keeping Trump and the MAGA faction at bay from seizing total power, while they take away freedoms and make lives worse wherever they control the reins.
It’s time to reclaim the strategies our ancestors used to win key fights in our country’s history. Successful social movements change public commonsense, unlock people’s agency, and leverage shared values to shape political priorities. From the abolitionists winning the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution and unions securing a New Deal in the 1930s to the civil rights movement making a reluctant President Johnson enact sign Voting Rights Act, when movements anchor parties they’ve been able to mobilize and persuade enough people and build the people, narrative, and political power necessary to rewrite the rules and bring us closer to freedom. The MAGA movement has learned this lesson all too well – and have used it successfully to take-over our courts, legislatures, and the White House.
If we want to be serious about defeating MAGA fascism, we also have to make clear that white supremacist authoritarianism isn’t new, it has existed here since before we were even a country. Though they shifted over time, this faction of the wealthy, white few have consistently deployed a strategy of divide & conquer. Pit a worthy “in group” against a dehumanized “out group” to create conditions for exploitation, control, and for a wealthy white few to profit. During this election cycle, Trump and MAGA Republicans followed the same old playbook – laying the blame for the economic hardships that the wealthy created at the feet of undocumented immigrants and trans people. And it worked. Fascists feed on despair and division, turning us against each other so we refuse to fight back against the real culprits: the wealthy, white few. The generations of the BLM uprising are uniquely poised to expose the origins and motivations of MAGA’s plot to lock in white supremacist rule, demand our country reckon with inequality from its foundation, and repair the ongoing harms that are still with us today.
During the first 100 days of the incoming MAGA regime, we have a critical opportunity to give young people a credible way to take action and a path to making a better future. Why the first 100 days? I remember back in 2017 when Trump first tried to ram through his unpopular agenda. From the trenches in DC to airport lobbies and town halls across the country, young people led the way in mobilizing people to delegitimize his cabinet of fossil fuel CEOs and neoconfederates, defy Trump’s Muslim Ban, and prevent the GOP from destroying the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare. I remember how overwhelming it felt in those early days of the first Trump Administration. They want us to feel that way because sowing cynicism and despair is how fascists win. But I also remember how triumphant and powerful I felt when we defied the odds and persevered. Those fights and early wins mattered and laid the groundwork for wielding our power in our streets, workplaces, and polling booths in 2020. This time around, we can expect the MAGA faction to be even more determined to lock in white supremacist rule and push everything down our throats at once. But like last time around, the first 100 days is a period where they have yet to consolidate and solidify their position. This instability is a weakness we can exploit in order to prevent the MAGA regime from implementing the most draconian measures of Project 2025, show that their mandate is nothing more than a mirage, and visualize public support for reckoning, repair, and real freedom.
What we do in the first weeks of the MAGA regime will set the tone and red lines for the rest of their rule. At Get Free, we’ve got a plan to galvanize GenZ and Millennials across race to turn the places we live into freedom beacons. By taking public action through sit-ins and walkouts and capturing the energy that erupts on campuses and cities in the wake of executive orders and laws banning diversity, equity, and inclusion, separating immigrant families, and trying to silence dissent and deny birthright citizenship, we will demand that our campus, city, and state leaders refuse to comply with the MAGA regime’s attacks and commit to defend and expand our freedom to learn, to speak truth to power, and to pursue our dreams, no exceptions. This is how we will lay the foundation for not just replacing the MAGA regime, but putting in place a new government to usher in a future of repair and reconstruction.
This is a dark moment in our country’s history, but it isn’t the first. Enslavement and Jim Crow were dark eras as well. And during those times, young freedom fighters showed that when we join together and organize, we can win. It’s time for The Left and progressive movements to build up our bases of young people across races, backgrounds, and genders and leverage that power over our leaders and institutions to refuse compliance with today’s white supremacist faction and to stand for real freedom. GenZ and Millennials: get organized – whether that’s getting involved with groups like Get Free, starting your own on campus or in your community, and/or joining together in union at your workplace. Our people are out there in the millions. Now we have to find each other and take back our future.
Our ancestors are worth fighting for. Our values are worth fighting for. Future generations are worth fighting for. Let’s get free together.