"When you pull up to the CIA headquarters in Langley, you have to shout your Social Security number out the window into a speaker, like when you’re ordering fries at a drive-through. Much like the Union that the Agency was formed to protect, the system, it seems, could be more perfect."
True story: I went to a job interview on Redstone Arsenal which meant I needed to get a vehicle pass. The recruiter sent me an email asking for my SSN; I replied that I wasn't comfortable sending it via email and then called him with it.
The next day I received a CC: copy of the email request to the Arsenal visitor center, including my SSN. I was unimpressed.
"what I’m told is a very contentious parking situation where lots of spots are so far from the office that a shuttle has to transport employees from their cars to their desks (a spy’s supposedly glamorous life actually laced with drudgery and inconvenience—how very John le Carré)..."
The parking spots nearest the building I used to work in, when we went in to work, were numbered and reserved for particular NASA employees. Many of those employees worked 7:30 to 3:30, so when I typically wandered in half were empty and when I left they were all empty. But if I, contractor peon (which makes up 70-90% of our organization), were to park there I would get a ticket from NASA Protective Services. There were a few general parking spaces closer than those, but they were routinely taken by NASA employees because they were a few feet closer than their assigned spaces. We parked out on the outskirts.
(P.s. The vast majority of CIA employees are not spies.)
"Demographic data from four years after that (2019), collected by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, revealed that intelligence agencies were still behind the federal and civil workforce in minority representation and that the spy agencies’ head counts were 61 percent male, 39 percent female."
Way back in the '90s, I had a friend of Indian descent whose sister worked for the FBI. She said her sister was always getting pestered about moving into investigative field work because no one would suspect she was undercover.
SSN is current the _defacto_, unplanned, person ID and somehow also password. I agree this is insane.
A National ID, that is designed to more strongly prove ID and also designed to be used as a secure form of Authentication for Authorization services... THAT is what I'd really love politicians to approve.
I'm currently in the process of upgrading my enhanced ID drivers license to a Passport (done) and then applying for Global Entry, because it's only 15 more dollars than the TSA Precheck and includes it... so why not do that? That's my response to a lack of a national ID.
> A National ID, that is designed to more strongly prove ID and also designed to be used as a secure form of Authentication for Authorization services...
I can share that here in Denmark we have a system exactly like that, and have for more than a decade. It's called "NemID" (lit: EasyID), soon to be changed to "MitId" (lit: MyID). While there definitely are some problems with the current implementation, having a 2-factor auth solution in front of every government, banking, insurance, etc. web service is very helpful. [0]
Keep in mind that my only interaction with individuals from the government, on the phone or otherwise, is when picking up books at the library and renewing my passport. Everything from filing my taxes through registering a child for school to reporting a move is done with a NemID login and a simple, guided form. [1]
My taxes are pre-filled with the information they've already gathered from my employer and the bank through which I handle my stock portfolio. The only thing I manually have to put in is my union fees and how many times I drove to the office -- both giving me a sizable deduction.
Doing my taxes at the end of the year is simply a formality too. At the start of the year I do an advance statement with what I expect to earn, and my monthly taxes are automatically pulled based on that. The end-of-year tax calculation is to ensure I didn't pay too much or too little -- the difference being due either way in April.
All of this to say -- a sane, digitized interaction with public institutions is not only a possibility but a fact in certain countries.
[1]: https://lifeindenmark.borger.dk/ -- It's both a "guide to Denmark" but also has the aforementioned forms. Try going through the "Health insurance card" order flow. You can't accidentally order one without a login.
Just moved to Norway and it's been very eye-opening seeing how easy BankID (their equivalent) makes most things in life. Only problem has been that I'm 5 months in and still don't have my ID number so I'm locked out of most aspects of life still (can't even open a bank account).
Yeah, this is a recurring theme for immigrants in these countries (esp here in Sweden where the immigration agency has been backstopped since the big 2015 refugee influx).
You can get a temporary "coordination ID" that healthcare,etc can use to register your journals but Bank's doesn't always let you create accounts without personal ID numbers (and specifically no BankID's so you're locked out of all the modern digital niceties and sometimes requirements).
The EU has begun a process of creating intercommunication systems* to allow for digital logins when being in other EU countries, no idea if these systems will ever allow for non-EU identifications (that would help enormously for those countries that has gotten far along).
I’m in Norway in a family reunification visa, so I don’t get the temporary number. They just count on my wife being able to take care of everything. Which she generally can, but I’m still out of luck getting a cell number, or seeing a public doctor, etc. Still happy and thankful to be here, but it’s frustrating. I can’t even order anything online from Norwegian stores.
Same thing for expats. Lose your local bank account (because nobody wants to serve US residents), you loose the authentication mechanism, and now can't use any e-services, such as the official email.
A friend of mine has moved to Sweden for a one year graduate degree. I'm not sure if he's allowed to get one of these IDs as it's a short-term stay. In the meantime he's in a kind of limbo where it's difficult to do anything
Nope, for various legacy reasons you kinda need to be an citizen to receive one. Initially the banks issued and used it (hence the name) before the Tax Office adopted it. After a while the unemployment and social security office started adopting it.
Those uses were mostly fairly specific to citizen needs but in the past couple of years municipalies started using them for child care (where temporary expats definitely often need to get in touch) and soon after as the providers started looking for commercial clients the usage exploded everywhere in society and now it's starting to become really annoying/hard to live without one.
I'm not even gonna entertain the implications brought here. I will however utilize this opportunity to say that every citizen has the right to interact with the government on equal footing. Elderly people without internet- and computer-expertise have, as before the technology explosion, access to "citizen services" that'll help them with everything. Including helping pay non-government bills if need be.
I have always suspected that TSA Precheck and Global Entry were always the goal. Make the non TSA Precheck line so unbearable until most travelers agree to a background check and apply for TSA Precheck or Global Entry, which is probably way more effective than most of the security they do at the airports.
Until there are laws putting a stop to the ongoing abuse of the current identification system by commercial surveillance (ala GDPR), a stronger identification system is a non-starter.
My ask is much smaller. Any document that the law requires you to carry has to be free of cost to the person and it must be convenient to get (or get again if lost or stolen).
That means both the first issue and subsequent issues need to always be free of cost. If I need to visit some office to get it, such office must be at least as ubiquitous as a United States Postal Service office, and ideally more open hours, not less. I don't think there is either the will or the budget to do this.
This will be a very expensive continuous undertaking, not a one time expensive. My personal opinion is this money should go toward medicare for all. I strongly dislike means testing (medicaid?) or age testing (medicare). I'm sure people can find better use for the money it will take to fund a national ID.
"Very expensive"? Sure, if you allow private subcontractors to charge $2500 for printing and laminating a 60x92 mm piece of plastic, it will be very expensive, no doubt about that. But it does not have to be that way, as the experience of many other countries with mandatory government-issued IDs shows.
If I'm reading you right, that's kind of a weird argument. Paraphrasing - removing fees for mandatory government services would cost too much for this one thing, and here is a better specific use for the money instead. Rather there is a whole spectrum of better and worse uses for public money, and we generally debate each on its own merits.
But either way it doesn't really address the core of what I said, in that the system currently mandated by the government has strongly benefited the surveillance industry. For example SSNs were never supposed to be used for anything besides Social Security, but a law prohibiting such abuse was never passed.
Unless this recently change it is also standard practice in the military to write your SSN on your checks and show your SSN which is on your military ID to anyone at the BX/PX. We had to say our SSN every time visiting the chow hall.
I think it's a bit late to start treating SSNs as anything more than an essentially public piece of identifying information, like your name and address that you give out to anybody you buy anything from. I think every public school teacher I ever had handled my SSN. Sometimes my schools would, for convenience, post grades or exam results in the halls using only SSNs so that nobody could supposedly know what anybody else's grades were. Being a competitive sort, I always wanted to know who else was getting good grades, and it was easy to figure out. The idea that anybody is treating SSNs as sensitive information is a little bit alarming, because that cat is out of the bag.
Things have changed. We received a "Department of Defense ID Number" at some point to use wherever SSNs were previously used on paperwork, computer systems, etc. Even ID tags ("dog tags") now have your DoD ID Number printed on them instead of your SSN. Any document with SSNs must be encrypted in transit and stored/processed only by systems with special accreditation and access controls for Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
With that said, most of us gave up worrying about our SSN a long time ago. It definitely was printed everywhere and used for everything for a long time. And then the Office of Personnel Management breach happened in 2014-2015...
It should be fine to broadcast SSN, the blame really falls to credit reporting companies and lenders treating it as a private and secure identifier.
SSN's weren't designed to be secure, and after decades of leaks they certainly aren't now. Lenders have attempted to brand losses based on this as "identity theft" (putting onus on the person) rather than just "we failed to properly authenticate before handing this person our money". Time to stop subsidizing usurers by letting them get away with this. SSNs are effectively public, and are not secure identifiers.
When banks do KYC, they use: Name, address, DOB, and SSN. SSN is the "least" public of those. If all 4 are publicly available, it is trivial to impersonate you and launder money with your ID.
Up until like 2013, the front of a CAC card also had the owner's social security number (either in plaintext or as a barcode that could be read by a litany of phone apps)
"Way back in the '90s, I had a friend of Indian descent whose sister worked for the FBI. She said her sister was always getting pestered about moving into investigative field work because no one would suspect she was undercover."
I used to work in D.C. in/around DoD and Middle Eastern affairs. Not the Lords work, but in a geographic area and domain that people just associate with spooks. Even now, as a software engineer in a non-related field and metro area, upon hearing about my background everyone, and I mean everyone, will at some point joke about me being a spy or working for the CIA. I find it funny that no one has ever thought that this also means I'd be the LEAST likely to be anything clandestine. I think half of it stems from the fact that I'm just an average white dude from the Midwest; My brown or black co-workers were never seemed to be suspect.
I have some relatives who spent a year or so in Russia. The husband is REALLY good with a Russian-style hand gun. And they often talk fondly of their time in Russia. (They also have slight political leanings toward Russia).
I like to pretend they are KGB sleeper agents. I know they aren't, but I like to pretend it is true.
What makes you really good with a few models of pistols vs others that it stands out in significant ways? It's like saying "he is REALLY GOOD at driving ford mustangs" vs just driving cars.
We went to the gun range with a handful of different guns. I don't remember what each of them were, but I do remember one had a hard trigger and aweful kick. It wasn't a pleasant gun for me to fire - and I wasn't very accurate with it. It was a Russian gun, and he was good at firing it.
This like saying he is "really good at driving Vespas"
Nothing, really, they probably just mean that he has a Russian handgun. There is some differences in sights and caliburs but not really to the extent you would claim to be a expert in one specific style.
I applied for a government (not US) top secret job once. I did the whole thing but got rejected. Anyway I wasn't impressed too. We could send personal sensitive via email and once the lady who was in charged of contacting us sent an email with all of the applicants in visible CC.
This entire article reads like a paid advert, it's so hilarious
"Though you’d think a person accustomed to being super-active on the group chat would struggle with being separated from their phone all day, this analyst assured me, “The mission is so dynamic that you’ll rarely, if ever, be bored, and the longing for your phone and social media sort of dissipates.”"
ya... sure... if we ignore all the time waiting for meetings to start in a concrete box with no windows and nothing to do, or sitting in front of your computer for hours answering emails/dealing with paperwork.
On Gen Z CIA recruits having pre-existing social media presences:
> They’re shrewd enough either to be circumspect users of social media from the start or to review (and delete) old problematic tweets and posts.
Is this particularly effective, though? Most social media sites have been scraped to hell and back - surely there's archives of the old problematic stuff.
It must be tough working in counterintelligence these days - social media has greatly increased the attack surface for blackmail.
I wonder when will Hollywood make a movie where they hire someone explicitly not social media just because that's the most perfect cover for an undercover position. An then they make a fake social media presence to cover the un-tracks.
For a private OSINT investigator, sure. But a state-level actor (ie: the sort of groups that the CIA is supposed to butts heads with) could easily maintain their own mirrors.
Hell, if you have a few dozen terabytes of disk space you can download the entire plaintext archive of Reddit comments from Pushshift, regardless of if they've been deleted or not. And that's something a private citizen can do spending a couple grand on hardware. Do we really think that the Chinese Ministry of State Security or Russian GRU aren't keeping archives of Twitter and public Facebook posts for use as blackmail material down the line?
Depends on the social network I'd guess. The Facebook networks are pretty good at keeping full scrapes from occurring for their own financial reasons. Reddit and Twitter are probably game over though. GenZ is probably more likely to be in the commercially balkanized networks like Insta and SnapChat that are next to impossible to fully scrape at scale.
I hope so? I'm old, and I had never even imagined that "black face" had outlived minstrelsy before all these politicians started showing up with it. Anyone younger than 60 who has such a picture is unsuited to positions of authority.
Social media could be a perfect cover: An Instagram "model" who travels the world hooking up with rich guys who will pay for her trips. Am I being sarcastic or serious?
Certainly this happens. Among other things it is useful for blackmail - "we will reveal to your wife etc. that you slept with a woman/prostitute". Spy agencies call it a "honey trap".
Eleven years ago, someone could be discharged from the US military if they were found to be homosexual. Due to things like this, it was popular to target homosexuals in the military. They were already made to conceal part of their life to keep their job, now they just add one more thing to that.
A debriefing of a double agent revealed that the British turned a high level male target by putting him together with an underage boy during the target's visit to Lebanon in the 1980's. The British had the Lebanese police barge in during the tryst and arrest the target. The offer was then made - work for us or go to a Lebanese prison and have it revealed at home you are a homosexual pedophile. The target was turned.
The Stasi had an unusual spin on this - usually males are targeted, but due to World War II, West Germany had a lack of men who had been born in the 1920s, and a lot of unmarried women of that age. So "Romeo" agents targeted secretaries working at high level offices, and this operation was a successful one.
Most spying is not James Bond level exciting - 45% of it is keeping up with technological innovation, 45% of it is getting positive press for your country worldwide, and negative press for rivals. Or maybe those percentages are juggled one way or another. The other 10% is honey traps, dead drops, wet work, ensuring Patrice Lumumba is shot and things like that.
But seen another way: Hookers are, in my mind, the epitome of suspects of spying… I suppose a third of the world is driven by pillow discussions, whether actual spying, just influence, mere affinity, or rape accusations to get rid of a political person.
Do you remember that recent HN post from high-profile escort? She built detailed dossiers on the johns as a matter of course, supposedly for screening.
> If the whole point of being a spy is that nobody knows who you really are and no one can ever find out, how exactly are you supposed to achieve this level of anonymity when you’ve flung untold reams of identifiable content across the digital world?
When everyone has an online presence, the absence of such a presence raises huge red flags. I would expect every spy on earth nowadays has tons of pictures on social media showing them having fun with their friends, cool vacations they've been on, selfies with famous people they've met. So long as they don't tweet something dumb like "CIA's sending me to Belarus #Coup2022", anyone looking at their profile will most likely see a normal person who is probably here for normal reasons. Sure maybe if they went over the profile with a fine tooth comb they'ed notice some things that don't add up, but there isn't a reason to look closer. On the other hand the person without a social media gets scrutinized, and regardless of when you were born there is information on you out there that a sufficiently motivated individual can find.
> One would think it’s basically impossible to get millennials and zoomers into covert jobs. The youngest of this bunch of young people have spent their entire lives online, some since their parents blasted out their first ultrasound picture as a pregnancy announcement, before they’d even gained sentience.
> how exactly are you supposed to achieve this level of anonymity when you’ve flung untold reams of identifiable content across the digital world?
Assuming that that applies to every single Gen-Z or Millennial is the most "OK Boomer" stereotype ever
Anecdotally my kids have their social media profiles set to "private" and don't have any motivation to make them public. In fact, most of their friends with a few exceptions have the same setup. They also regularly "wash" their profiles because they're kids and are constantly redefining themselves to their peers. Good luck finding any of that in a public archive.
Gen Z/Gen Alpha grew up in a world with social media being already established and so they are aware of the pitfalls.
Millenials are screwed because they starting using social media before fully understanding the ramifications(because most people did not know how this was going to play out in the early days).
yes, there's a curve here. My early online days were in the time of GeoCities, and later CollegeClub (anyone remember that?); I had pretty significant online presences then, but they're all gone. The Archive doesn't have them, and that was before everything was scraped. I'm fairly certain this is all gone. Then comes the intermediate period when everything was starting to be scraped, but nobody realized or cared; that's where today's younger millenials find themselves. And then the present, where we all know what's happening, and some people just don't care, and others go to great lengths to obscure...
I missed the CollegeClub days but I think I still have an old Neopets profile, although I don't think there's anything too dangerous on there I could be blackmailed with...
I've left the "I could be blackmailed"-days behind me. There was a time when I was worried about what of me people could find online. Nowadays, it's "yes, that was me. Have fun with it."
I think the old pages are still around although at some point mySpace locked down all the profiles by default so that they are not public anymore and you have to be logged in and friends with the person to view them.
Private, but likely with many friends and acquaintances. Everyone they allow has access to all they've shared. This is a good step, but this isn’t the level of protection some believe it is.
Yep, anecdodltally i ran an experiment on this. Trick is that ppl are in "networks". Find somebody you think is in your target network who got low followers to following ratio and send a request, do this 5ish times. Then go based on recommendations and ppl will see "oh that account follow these other ppl i know lemme accept a follow request".
Until they follow/friend an account to enter a contest, follow harrystylesfans, some influencer who's account is managed by an agency, or "sign in with <social>" somewhere and give too much access.
It's a pretty large attack surface that can be subject to a lot of very cheap automation.
I don't think the article was trying to state that's the case for every millenial or Gen-Z, just that it's true for a wide swath of them. I'd say that's generally accurate.
It's not an "OK boomer" stereotype (which is rather an insult than a stereotype, by the way), it's a general point. It's obviously true that people putting their lives online may be an issue in that field of work (and also an advantage).
One would think that's a slightly lesser problem of the US government than for other countries, though, because essentially all platforms are American. So it's potentially easier for the US intelligence services to 'scrub' someone's online presence than it is for other countries' services.
For instance, they also need to be extremely careful of leaks of real identities because of this as these days these can be used for online scrapping in order to collect pictures and more details. This is taking into account that, if I remember correctly, the database of federal employees and their fingerprints was hacked a few years ago so that we may assume that China (since the finger was pointed at them regarding that hack) has a list of virtually all US Federal employees, on which they can let data scrapping farms work.
Can we cool it with the agephobic comments? Cia is going to have trouble finding enough such ppl who also meet agency requirements because they hire a lot of ppl and need more than 10 of them.
It seems pretty frequent these days when somebody decides their personal brand of politics warrants betraying information that would have been considered un-betrayable in earlier years.
You keep saying 37% as if that is the most relevant number when it's not. the 31% from last year is both more indicative of recent trends and cuts deeper into the Gen Z demographic. I think a good chunk of people who were 18-24 in 2016 would still be considered Millennials.
OK, but are you arguing against the substance of it? 2020, that age range would have all been Gen Z, I'm pretty sure. Still 31%. Do you think the breakdown of Gen Z political opinions, ordered by prominence, is "socialist (51+%) -> Trump supporter (~31%) -> everything else (less than 18%)"? My educated guess would be you could flip those "socialist" and "everything else" numbers and that'd be way closer to correct—which is still a huge increase over other generations, if it's even as high as 18%!
FWIW if we had a viable, actual socialist party, I'd vote & even campaign for them. But I think you're way wrong about how far things are shifting, with Gen Z, unfortunately. I do hope I'm the one who's wrong, but I doubt it.
I'm a millennial, but if I look at my social group (mostly gen-z through gen-x) it's nearly all socialists and left- or off-the-spectrum-anarchists[EDIT: probably a couple would identify, specifically, as left-libertarian, now that I think about it, which is very unlike right-libertarian—at least one of those might pointedly insist on just calling the left-libertarian position "liberal"]. That's my bubble, though, and doesn't reflect the proportions for the rest of the country.
[EDIT] Maybe we have different thresholds or definitions of "socialist"? I'd believe that over half of Gen Z wants a "public option" for healthcare, and maybe even M4A, for instance. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if some Gen Z Trumpers want those (Trump did, oddly enough, give some lip-service to reform in that direction in his campaigns, though not to M4A)
I think it makes a difference in perception, because 31% is less than a third. Left-leaning Gen-Z voters essentially form a super-majority in their demographic.
In 2016, the oldest gen Zers were turning 18. Everyone 19-24 in that age range would have been millennials. Also many Trump supporters are libertarians.
My son is Gen Z. From what he has shown me in his chats his (rather large) peer group is based AF. That's in the bluest part of a deep blue state. I can only imagine what they're chatting about in the Rust Belt.
Socialism has nothing to do with one's propensity to be a part of security apparatus, and, I suspect you're basically wrong about 'your generation'. More than likely, all of your friends fit that description (and your projecting), and, you're failing to take into consideration that people change perspective as they get older and wiser. Also, GenZ are basically still children, they're not even out of school. So whatever they believe has to be contextualized strongly by that.
Actual socialists had secret police. Every government has intelligence services. What do you think being a socialist means and what does that have to do with working for the CIA?
Most folks throwing around "socialist" in a positive light in the US mean it like "social democracy", as in the Nordics or various European social-democratic parties.
The socialist-socialists—having known a few—usually just say Marxist or communist to describe their position, in my experience. "Socialist" only means "like Venezuela or East Germany" when a Republican is saying it, not when people self-describe as socialist.
[EDIT] and yes, to head it off, even Norway has intelligence services, sure—but they don't have Stasi.
Then there are the democratic socialists, who are actually socialist (unlike the social democrats) but who disavow Marxism-Leninism. Problem is, assuming you set up a democratic socialist regime, if you want to keep the democratic bit, you risk losing the socialist bit (and vice versa). A lot of demsocs don't realize this; many believe that democracy and socialism are completely coterminous with each other.
One counterpoint is that a lot of social programs are hard to get rid of. Even though the right campaigns against new social programs sometimes, there’s no way they can convince their electorate to get rid of existing social programs. For example, there would be very little political will to get rid of government-provided unemployment insurance, even though right-wing rhetoric is often against that sort of program.
I'm not sure that social programs rise to the level of socialism (despite right-wing rhetoric that says they do). Socialism means no private business, no private ownership of the means of production. You can own things that you yourself might use, but as soon as you can produce more things, what you use to produce will be seized and collectively administered for the good of all.
Not everybody will be convinced that this will lead to the promised paradise of maximal creative freedom and abundance for all, so not everybody in a democratic system will vote to continue socialism and there's a risk that a majority will not! Well, that is, until the kulak purges begin.
No matter what definition OP chooses, Socialists still have intelligence services. Its also not the 1950's, the CIA isn't going to care if they vote for Bernie, assuming that's OP's definition of socialism.
> "Socialist" only means "like Venezuela or East Germany" when a Republican is saying it, not when people self-describe as socialist.
Republicans have a weird definition of socialism. They seem to conflate it with dictatorships.
Super fucking hot take here, but the former president would be called a socialist by any Republican if he was the leader of any other country. He every hallmark trait of a dictator of a failed state: populist, authoritarian, self-serving, cult of personality, strong man, bribes supporters with state funds, uses police power to crush political opponents, etc, etc.
Working for the CIA means submitting to and supporting the existing power structure (unless you're doing a long-march-through-the-institutions, subversion-from-within thing, which, good luck against the CIA).
Now once the socialist regime sets up secret police, it will be utterly benevolent and work solely toward emancipation of the working class.
...unless you're doing a long-march-through-the-institutions, subversion-from-within thing, which, good luck against the CIA...
How can we be sure this hasn't happened already? Could anyone imagine a less effective, more hated organization? Could CIA provide poorer intelligence to the executive if they were actually trying to provide poor intelligence? Could their actions reflect more poorly on USA if they were actually trying to tarnish our reputation?
[EDIT:] Perhaps this just proves your point. Continued existence of something like CIA in a putatively democratic society is a mystery. Perhaps they practice a sort of continuous self-disruption, defending themselves from the attentions of better people by always getting worse?
Source? This seems like an estimation based on people around you; In my surroundings, people shifted from moderate to the extremes both sides, and I moved from center-left to stark right.
Thats Millenials. They got hit with the GFC as they were leaving college and then COVID hit as soon as they clawed their way out of the GFC to buy a house/start families. This is in contrast to Boomers(their parents) who had excellent financial prospects growing up. To make things worse, they pinned their hopes on Obama's "Hope and change" which was a complete sham.
Gen Z had no illusions that this was a fair world from the get go. They got converted to pessimism early since their parents (Gen X) were the first gen after boomers to have an overall decline. A large chunk supported Bernie and watching him get trampled and robbed in 2020 allowed them to see how the world really works early on! The rest of the non-Bernie gen-Z are typically rural(but not always) watching far right junk like Ben Shapiro. I see a lot of youtubers in riral areas that fight for Trump/newish right wingers to the party.
On the plus side while Gen X was a desert in terms of progressives(probably because Boomers stamped them out early on) Millennials and to a greater extend Gen-Z have a lot of energetic fresh blood in the pipeline to shift the country far left. I saw with my own eyes how hard they pushed during the 2020 primaries to replace as many incumbents as they could. They mostly fell short but that energy is still there. We are going to see a lot of amazing leftist Gen Z leaders in my opinion.
