Young, politically engaged lefties have a serious image problem. We’re perceived as being censorious, shallow, shrill, sanctimonious, and most damning of all, humourless.
Fuck that. Our generation is not apathetic; it’s powerfully politically progressive, so much so that it mostly refuses to even bother engaging with the establishment.
The Stepford Student is a publication for us.
We’re bored of being patronised by smug right wing pundits. We’re sick of being admonished for not caring enough about politics to have an opinion, but then the moment we present one having it laughed off as naive.
Ah, youth.
Underlying the establishment’s dismissal of idealistic young people is fear. The right fear our passion, our rage, our untempered, bright-eyed questioning. They fear the inevitability of our maturation and their obsolescence. Our lack of experience and naivety is what makes us so powerful. We are not hollowed out with despair at the futility of effecting change; we wield our cynicism as a precise weapon, rather than being castrated by it.
And we have fun. We are the generation of Buzzfeed and Taylor Swift, and quite frankly we couldn’t give a single rancid shit that you think that makes us unworthy of respect. Blank Space is a fucking tune.
We are deadly serious.
We’re sick of The Guardian and the New Statesman being our default media outlets just because they’re the only choice. They’re staid and outdated, bloated with self-importance.
We like Vice. We like the early seasons of The West Wing.
We will almost certainly grow up and become the exact thing we despise. But maybe we won’t.
We believe there’s still a sliver of hope, that young people have a genuine sense of fairness and an understanding that the world is twisted and broken in so many ways.
We want to make a futile, unabashedly pointless attempt at maybe slightly changing that.
Or at least share one of our articles whilst you procrastinate.