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It makes sense that Fox would eventually come around to explicitly treating young people like the enemy. The median age of a Fox viewer is 68 years old, and rising. Meanwhile, young people are the most Democratic demographic in the country, with 60 percent of voters ages 18-29 voting for Obama in 2012, compared to only 44 percent of those 65 and older. Trashing young people does double duty for Fox, helping create the us vs. them mentality its ratings thrive on, and allowing viewers to tell themselves the only reason Democrats win elections is because this younger generation is broken and lost.

The main strategy for stoking hatred of young people is, unsurprisingly, rank dishonesty. Statistics tell us that the millennial generation and the high school kids coming up right behind them are harder-working, more studious, more sexually responsible and less likely to screw up their lives than the generations before. Teen pregnancy and drug use have been in a rapid decline in the past 20 years. High school graduation rates are hitting record levels. Crime, which is usually a province of the young, hit its highest rates when the baby boomers were young, and has been in decline ever since. The only problem with kids nowadays is that they’re a bunch of goody-two-shoes that are making older generations look lazy and criminal.

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