Last Thursday night, the White House press secretary went on national television and diagnosed the problem with young Americans: They’re lazy.
“This generation, 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,” Karoline Leavitt told Fox News’s Jesse Watters. Asked whether the trouble was laziness, she agreed: “a little bit,” plus “the liberal indoctrination.” And her prescription for young Americans frustrated by the cost of living? “Send them to Cuba. Send them to Iran, they’re gonna want to come back real quick.”
Send them to Iran.
Madam press secretary, they’re already there.
Maybe it was a joke. But “go to Iran” is an order American kids actually received this year, under an oath that reads, nearly word for word, like the one every White House appointee swears. One side of that oath spent the spring under drone fire. The other spent Thursday night doing crowd work.
She has since blamed “bad faith actors” for taking her out of context: The conversation, she says, was really about the Left. The quote above is verbatim. “This generation, my generation,” is not a faction.
Roughly 40,000 American troops surged into the Middle East this spring for Operation Epic Fury, the largest deployment to the region since the invasion of Iraq. About half of our enlisted force is 25 or younger. The paratroopers, Marines, and sailors holding a fragile ceasefire tonight are the very generation the podium just called lazy. They spent America’s 250th birthday on watch in the Gulf.
At least 13 Americans have already come home under flags. Nearly 400 have come home wounded.
I know what waits for some of the wounded, because I have lived it. In 2012, a bomb in Afghanistan took both of my legs. I was 23, one of those “kids” in their 20s, as Thursday’s segment put it. In the 14 years since, I have spent my life around young Americans who left pieces of themselves overseas, and I have never heard one of them complain the way cable television complains about them.
Some of this war’s wounded will medically retire into the very benefits the Senate refused to fix this spring, when a single objection blocked the Major Richard Star Act over its price tag. Called lazy at the podium, called too expensive in the cloakroom — different insult, same message.
I’ve debated Leavitt before: primary season 2024, opposite ends of a split screen. She is quick, tough, and talented. Which is why she should know better.
And the young Americans who never wore a uniform? They aren’t lazy either. The math changed.
I should know. I’m not Generation Z. I’m 37, a millennial. We got this same sermon a decade ago, avocado toast and bootstraps, while we graduated into a financial crisis and watched starter homes double in price. Now it’s Gen Z’s turn. Different scapegoat, same dodge: Blame the generation, ignore the math.
The income needed to afford a typical American home has jumped roughly 70% since 2019, from about $67,000 to $114,000. The median first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old. Forty. At age 30, 43% of baby boomers owned homes. Only a quarter of millennials could say the same. In my home state of Wisconsin, a year of infant care now costs more than a year of tuition at UW-Madison.
Here is what should actually alarm Republicans. Millennials and Gen Z now form the largest bloc of eligible voters in America. Fifty-six percent of Gen Z calls itself independent, up for grabs. The president’s net approval among voters under 30 just hit minus 45. And socialists spent last month winning a string of primaries across New York on the votes of this same generation. Every sneer from a Republican podium is an in-kind contribution to their movement.
Young people gave this administration its chance in 2024 for one reason: It promised to make life affordable again. That promise is still the whole ballgame. You do not win a generation back by calling it lazy. You win it back by making its math work again.
Start with homes, and not by carpeting every town in cookie-cutter subdivisions nobody asked for. The starter homes America needs already exist. Empty-nesters are living in them because a tax rule frozen since 1997 punishes them for selling: downsizing now means a capital-gains bill, so most boomers stay put while young families bid against Wall Street for the little that reaches the market. Let retirees sell without the penalty. Help the next family move in as they downsize. Keep hedge funds from outbidding them at the closing table. And make childcare cost less than college. That isn’t generational warfare — it’s a deal between generations: grandma gets her tax break, the kids get her starter home, and everyone quits pretending the problem is character. The work ethic didn’t change. The math did.
Here is what she got most wrong. Yes, the military shapes people up. It shaped me. But service cannot be a punishment in a punchline and an honor when politically convenient in a speech.
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America just turned 250, and the American dream is not imaginary. It is real, and it is priced out of reach. Young Americans do not need leaders who measure work ethic by the price of a war, or a promise that amounts to “be grateful it isn’t Tehran.” The promise was always that work, added up, becomes a life.
This generation kept its side: in the Gulf, on the night shift, at the daycare drop-off before dawn. It is time for the people behind the podium to keep their promise and make this a country younger Americans can afford to call home.
Jason Church is a retired Army captain and Purple Heart recipient who lost both legs in Afghanistan. He was a Republican candidate for Congress in Wisconsin.