(DCNF)—Fox News host Jesse Watters on Thursday lambasted members of Gen Z who supported left-wing Democrats, questioning if they did so out of “laziness.”
Left-wing Democrats aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) recently won multiple primary elections in New York and Colorado — in some cases defeating established incumbents — with the support of Gen Z voters. Following a ten-minute monologue by Watters taking aim at elected officials and candidates backed by the left-wing group, he and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt debated whether Gen Z backed DSA-affiliated candidates out of “laziness.”
“Some of these kids— and I call them ‘kids’ because they’re in their 20s and they’ve never had real jobs and they’re complaining things are expensive. Yes, things are expensive when you don’t have a real job. Do you think that’s getting traction, complaining?” Watters asked Leavitt after the two of them discussed the rise of the DSA’s influence in the Democratic Party.
“Unfortunately, I do, because 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,” Leavitt responded. “That’s not the values this country was [sic] built on. It was built on meritocracy and hard work, pulling up your sleeves, pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, and achieving the American dream. And we need to protect it with all we got.”
Leavitt appeared to blame “liberal indoctrination” more than “laziness” for the members of Generation Z backing left-wing candidates when discussing the trend with Watters.
“Is it laziness?” Watters asked, with Leavitt responding, “A little bit.”
“Is it because the professor said, ‘[The] country’s corrupt, it’s evil, and we just need to shake them down, hand money out’?” Watters followed up.
“It’s laziness and it’s the liberal indoctrination,” Leavitt replied. “You bring up a great point about our education system.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to the White House for comment.
Members of Generation Z were born between 1997 and 2012, according to Beresford Research, a market research firm based out of Annapolis, Md. The Center for Generational Kinetics additionally notes this generation was particularly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, significant gaps in learning emerged from the prevalence of remote learning as opposed to in-person schooling among the generation, which grew up with smartphones and social media.
Leavitt and Watters’s comments drew fire from Nalin Haley, the 24-year-old son of former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
“Ironically, calling an entire generation lazy instead of addressing real problems with cost of living, housing, and employment…IS LAZY. It’s tough even for people that work hard, save, and have good jobs,” Haley posted Friday to X. “The goal of every generation is to leave it better than you found it. That’s simply not happening.”
“Even as a young person, the country I grew up in is becoming unrecognizable. It’s not complaining to want the same quality of life as our parents and grandparents,” Haley continued. “I have yet to see Democrats or Republicans address this issue properly. Economically, they’re one and the same because they’re both controlled by elites and corporate interests. The party that actually starts listening to real everyday Americans first is the party of the future.”
The Department of the Treasury in December 2024 reported the costs of “housing, childcare, healthcare and education” had exceeded the growth in wages since 1990, while non-housing debt almost doubled from 1989 to 2022. Furthermore, many in Generation Z are still living with their parents, according to the agency’s study.
During the Biden administration, inflation hit levels not seen in four decades, with prices rising by over 20%, while the Consumer Price Index (CPI) reached a high of 9% in June 2022. Some experts believed the Biden administration’s hostility to fossil fuel production and massive spending helped fuel such price increases.
Unemployment rates for members of Generation Z have also been higher than the national average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The unemployment rate for those aged 16-19 reached 14.6% in June 2026, while those aged 20-24 were found to have had an unemployment rate of 7.1%, compared to an overall unemployment rate of 4.2%.
When the first members of Generation Z were born in 1997, the national debt was $5.7 trillion, according to U.S. Debt Clock. The national debt as of Thursday was $39.375 trillion, an increase of nearly 591%.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.