Scroll through the comment sections under any video of Chinese military parades, and you'll find something that should unsettle every American parent.
Teenagers in Ohio and Texas, kids who can't name their own senators, are typing "Xi is based" and "China is winning." They aren't foreign agents.
They're bored, broke, and utterly disillusioned with the country they were born into.
This is the strange new face of American nihilism.
A generation that watched its parents lose faith in institutions, that grew up on student debt and mass shootings and a Congress that can't pass a budget, has started romanticizing the one thing America supposedly stands against: concentrated, unapologetic power.
Xi Jinping doesn't have to file for reelection.
He doesn't have to beg a divided legislature.
There's a word for what's happening, and it isn't patriotism.
When young Americans look at a system where nothing gets done and then look at a system where everything gets done, some of them stop asking which one is free and start asking which one works.
That's the moral rot nobody wants to name.
We spent decades telling ourselves that freedom sells itself.
Apparently it doesn't sell as well as competence theater.
These same kids will tell you they support trans rights, free speech, and bodily autonomy.
Then they'll post a clip of Xi reviewing troops and caption it "finally, a leader." They don't actually want to live under his government.
They want to feel something other than the quiet humiliation of a country that can't build a train or house its veterans.
Our political class has turned every crisis into content, every tragedy into a fundraising email.
Meanwhile, China builds ports in Africa and highways in its own countryside, and we argue about whether a bridge is woke.
The moral authority we once claimed isn't being taken from us.
We're handing it over, one doom-scroll at a time, to anyone who looks like they know what they're doing.
None of this means America is doomed, or that Xi is some genius we should envy.
It means we've raised a cohort that has never seen our system deliver.
They've seen gridlock, inflation, and a government that treats them like a revenue stream.
When you starve people of hope, they'll eat whatever certainty is put in front of them.
That's a us problem, and it's getting worse.
The real scandal isn't that American kids admire a strongman.
It's that we've given them so little to admire at home.
You can't defeat authoritarianism with a hashtag and a shrug.
You have to build something worth being loyal to.
Final Thoughts
Otherwise, the next generation won't just cheer for the other side.