Ken's Second Act

Social media influencer Isabel Brown pens Generation Z manifesto

I regularly scan library shelves for books for sale. One book recently caught my attention: The End of the Alphabet: How Gen Z Can Save America by Isabel Brown, published in 2024 before the presidential election. It’s an easy, breezy read and features a cover photo of Brown with her girl-next-door looks holding a giant letter Z. A conservative manifesto for her generation, born from 1997 to 2012, it reads like an essay even though it contains more than 200 pages; it also is extensively sourced with pages of footnotes. She has been a contributor and spokeswoman for Turning Point USA, a right-wing nonprofit organization that has backed outlier candidates for public office, such as Kari Lake, who ran unsuccessfully as the GOP candidate for governor and senator in Arizona.

Major forces at the national and international levels have defined generations. Each generation has influenced and produced music, literature and other cultural expressions. I, for one, am a baby boomer who came of age during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, which damaged trust in both the military and national government. I grew up listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Motown music.

Gen Z numbers nearly 70 million, Brown says. Depending on the years they were born, Generation Zers came of age during the Great Recession, the election of the first black president, the ascendance of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, and now the war in Israel and Gaza. They are growing up listening to different music, and Brown claims to speak for them.

I Googled her book but couldn’t find book reviews: only reader reviews on websites such as Goodreads and Amazon.com. The dust jacket mentions she graced the cover of Newsweek as a Trumper who supported his unsuccessful re-election campaign in 2020. While she has appeared on national and international television and on the radio, she gets her message out by largely bypassing the conventional media by using social media, including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Brown, 28, calls herself a “social media influencer” and “content creator.” This baby boomer might laugh at such a job title. But, to use a cliché, she is laughing all the way to the bank. A Google search says she is a multi-millionaire. She considers herself part of the entrepreneurial class for her generation that doesn’t think college is necessary and doesn’t depend on traditional high-paying jobs in corporate America.

She even adopts — or co-opts — the 1960s word “counterculture” because she embraces traditional marriage, opposes hookups, and calls abortion “legalized infanticide” and Planned Parenthood part of the “abortion industry.” She also rails against “leftist” college professors and alleges colleges implemented the “debunked” 1619 Project, which won a Pulitzer for the New York Times Magazine.

She wrote Gen Zers are “growing up in perhaps the most complicated time in modern history.” Maybe she’s right. However, I think she gives too much credit, or discredit, to her generation, by writing, “Politicians, commentators, and activist organizations alike continue to label Gen Z as a threat to American liberty, morally bankrupt, malicious in our supposed intent to destroy Western society, and just plain stupid.”

She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the biomedical field, respectively, from Colorado State and Georgetown universities, and had planned to attend medical school. However, internships in the White House during the first Trump administration and U.S. Senate led her on a political path. But she wrote, “We’re throwing in the towel on the two-party political system, instead gravitating toward independence from the political machine.”

Some of Brown’s observations are apolitical and make sense. She observed that members of Gen Z are “opting for entrepreneurship and innovation over today’s often meaningless four-year degrees.”

Brown, who grew up in Colorado, calls herself a lover of the great outdoors, and says environmentalism and conservation are not “partisan issues” for Gen Z. “We are far more likely than those older to say that the earth is warming due to human activity,” she writes.

However, it’s laughable because she notes Trump “left a strong environmental legacy during his first [first] term in office.” She cites his renewal of the Clean Power Plan, establishing the One Trillion Trees Interagency Council, “championing and signing” the Great American Outdoors Act as “the largest modern investment in the National Park Service “and more.” Her sources? News releases from the U.S. Department of the Interior and the White House.

She doesn’t mention Trump’s rejection of climate change – he calls it a “hoax” -- and appointment of Cabinet officials who weakened environmental protection during his first term, including Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Action and Ryan Zinke, now a U.S. representative from Montana, at the Department of the Interior. It’s gotten much worse in the second Trump administration, with Cabinet secretaries such as Lee Zeldin at EPA purging scientists. In short, Trump’s environmental record is abominable.

She also acknowledges her activism and outspokenness have had consequences. After she started speaking out while in college, she says she experienced “Dude, I’m Done”-style excommunication from several friends, some of whom have known her since preschool.

She’s built a brand, writing, “We’re circumventing traditional media and entertainment as independent journalists and content creators.” She has 1.1 million followers on Instagram. Social media has a wide reach that generally connects with followers with short attention spans, and does not make for an informed citizenry. I worked for decades in community journalism before retiring. I still rely on newspapers as my main source of information, not social media.

Every generation produces its leaders. Except for Joe Biden, every president since Bill Clinton has been a baby boomer. Isabel Brown speaks to her generation, but so do others such as David Hogg, who rose to national prominence after the massacre in 2018 at Marjery Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Florida.

She is also not the first to chronicle any generation. Joyce Maynard, who graduated from high school in 1972, spoke for baby boomers in Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties. The publication in 1973 followed a cover story she wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1972.

Maynard became a successful author, if not a household name. Who knows what the future holds for Isabel Brown? Her kindergarten teacher predicted she’d be elected president. Meanwhile, I’ll pass the torch of her book to a Gen Zer who is my barber and knows nothing about her.