President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was blasted by a pro-Trump media outlet owned by perennial right-wing commentator Glenn Beck.
In a post shared by BlazeTV’s staff for Conservative Review on Wednesday, the outlet’s pundit John Doyle ranted about Leavitt insulting Generation Z during a recent appearance with Fox News host Jesse Watters.
“My generation — I hate to say it, Gen Z and those younger than me —have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths, just getting everything handed to them,” Leavitt told Watters, later blaming it on “laziness and the liberal indoctrination” and arguing Generation Z-ers should be sent to fight Trump’s current war against Iran or rumored war against Cuba.
Doyle depicted Leavitt as out of touch with the real hardships suffered by younger generations.
“Not to go full Gen-Z-tard, but we were raised in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis, we were raised in the aftermath of the COVID lockdowns,” Doyle said. “From every moment in our lives we were spoon-fed all this stuff — yes, communism, but also not being taught that free markets actually work. More like: hey, everybody who's not a straight white male, you're awesome and beautiful and capable — and straight white males, you're basically defective, something to be managed, held to a completely separate standard. So if you're a straight white male, you've basically been segregated into two categories: people who are a little more socialized, who are just going to bend the knee to this kind of stuff and try to climb the ladder however they can, and people who are maybe a little more autistic, not so responsive to social cues, who decide instead to become something of an alarmingly far-right young man and embrace any political movement that seeks to break from that orthodoxy.”
Arguing that this white male disenfranchisement fueled the popularity of the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns of former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), the Tea Party movement and Trump’s own campaigns, Doyle added that “if you're a Baby Boomer or a Gen Xer — a lot of good patriots out there — you just literally do not understand what we're talking about. You look at the Fox News clips of some socialist saying ‘I want free healthcare,’ and that is not at all the same thing as the guy who kept his nose clean, went to school, got his four-year degree and can't even get a second round interview.”
He added, “And you've got all these Gen Z boss-and-a-mini types doing this HR humiliation ritual with him, where he has to sit there and talk about his favorite fruit or his favorite binge-watch show, and meanwhile he can't get a call back. He can't find a job. He's underemployed.”
From there Doyle launched into even more racist and sexist rhetoric, falsely claiming non-white people suffer from these issues less than white men. He then explained that Leavitt’s comments were going to “set off” white people in Trump’s MAGA movement.
“You have Jesse Watters, who clearly does not understand what's going on for young people in the job market right now — what it's like for younger people trying to get literally anything going their way — and he just dismisses it as ‘Well, they don't have a real job,’” Doyle said. “Dude, you literally just do not understand. Do you think these people want to be underemployed because they're lazy?”
Doyle is not alone among conservatives in blasting Leavitt’s remarks. Shortly after they went viral, Blaze columnist Auron MacIntyre posted: “I assumed the quotes circulating were made up because no one is this evil but apparently they’re real. She should be fired immediately, this is disgusting."
Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen Reports similarly wrote that "if it isn't careful, the GOP will be the effigy of Boomers that the youth choose to burn."
This is not the first time that Leavitt has shown contempt for people who do not share her particular set of right-wing values. Speaking to this journalist for Salon in 2024, shortly after the second assassination attempt against Trump, Leavitt denounced this journalist for comparing Trump to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, writing that "it's been less [than] 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."
