The kids are not okay. 

We now have an enormous amount of poll data suggesting that Generation Z has some very serious problems, problems that they didn’t create for themselves.

These are problems created by generations of bad parenting in the United States of America.

A new NBC News poll shows young people are not fond of the idea of getting married or having babies — and they like socialism.

This is disastrous.

According to the NBC News poll, respondents aged 18 to 29 were asked about 13 different options for their top priorities. For women, the number one priority, the number one priority in life, was having a job or career they found fulfilling. Number two was having enough money to do the things that you want to do. Number three? Achieving financial independence. Number four? Having emotional stability.

And then, if you go all the way down the list, number ten was having children, and number 11 was being married.

This is a massive problem. If young women between the ages of 18 and 29 believe that it is a 10th priority to have kids and an 11th priority to get married, and their number one priority is having a job or a career, that is a gigantic mistake when it comes to the purpose of life.

How about for men?

Number one, having a job or career that you find fulfilling. Number two, having enough money to do the things you want to do. You have to go all the way down to number seven to get to “being married.” And number eight, “having children.”

WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show

Any society that does not make its number one focus — not number two, not number three —  getting married and having kids, is a society doomed to failure because that is the priority of any society. You cannot pass your values on to the next generation if there is no next generation. And you can’t pass your values on to the next generation if you have no values.

The reality is that the central purpose in life comes from the book of Genesis: Leaving your father and mother, marrying a member of the opposite sex, and having kids. 

And that’s not just because it’s in the book of Genesis. The book of Genesis has lasted from time immemorial specifically because that happens to be true. Any society that believes yearning for individualistic pursuits — as shown here by the number two priority being having enough money to do the things you want to do — any society that is focused on hedonistic personal fulfillment is a society that is doomed to failure. 

People will stop having kids. People will stop getting married. People will not be happy. And when they are not happy, because it turns out that the fruits of economics are not enough to make you happy, they will turn on the economics themselves, because you cannot fill that family-shaped hole in the heart with cash. 

It is not possible to do it. You can’t. What gives fulfillment in life to human beings is getting married and having kids. 

I know in our radically individualistic society, we’re supposed to believe that all forms of familial formation, all forms of sexual behavior, are equally admirable and equally the target of aspiration for society. 

That is wrong and untrue. We should be teaching our kids that it is important to marry a member of the opposite sex, and have kids with those people. 

Will there be people for whom this doesn’t apply? Sure, because for every rule there are exceptions. But if that is not the societal aspiration, what you end up with is people who are inward-focused. 

That’s because what takes you out of your own emotional narcissism is getting married and having children. 

In my book “Lions and Scavengers,” I talk about this: The word in Hebrew for love is “ahava.” The root of the word “ahava” is “hov,” to give. Thus, giving is at the root of love. 

If you have no one to give yourself to, if you do not have, as it says in the Bible, an “ezer kenegdo,” which means a “helper against him,” it is not good. 

The point is that a woman completes a man and a man completes a woman. And yes, they do need each other, and that is a beautiful thing. And when they come together, they have children. And that is the most beautiful thing. 

Any society that vitiates that purpose and treats that purpose as not only secondary or tertiary, but 10th on the list of priorities, is a society that won’t have kids, and is doomed for unhappiness. 

And then when that unhappiness materializes, people blame the economic system. These two things are connected. There’s polling data showing that young people, in particular, are warming toward socialism. 

Why? 

The answer is that if you can’t get what you want in the form of economics, then you tend to blame the economic system. It used to be that so long as you were able to earn for your family, that was the purpose of earning: to be able to buy a house for your family. Not just for you. For your family, to provide a better life for your kids.

But if you separate family and kids from that purpose, no amount of money that you earn will ever be enough to do all the things you want to do, because there are always new things that you want to do. 

I don’t blame young people for this. I blame their parents. Parents did not hand down the values that they were taught by their parents to their kids.

We now have three generations in American life that have degraded the value of family and childbearing and child-rearing in favor of atomistic individualism that was supposed to provide a libertarian fulfillment.

It’s empty. People are unhappy.

The reality of the world is that it is women, traditionally speaking and biologically speaking, who long to have children. This pretend, nonsense, made-up world in which women are taught that they shouldn’t want to have children is unnatural.

There’s a reason why every study of rhesus monkeys shows that if you give female rhesus monkeys a truck, they will take the truck and start cradling the truck. The male rhesus monkeys will start hitting each other with it.

Men and women are different. When you tell women they don’t want the most natural thing for them to want, you get unhappy women. And when men can’t fulfill their highest purpose because many women don’t want to fulfill that purpose either, they get angry at women, and they become counterproductive and bad citizens of society.

When you alienate women from their magical superpower, having children, and you tell them that’s exactly what they shouldn’t want, that what they actually should want is to be more like men working 2200 billable hours at a law firm, what you’re going to end up with is an enormous amount of unhappiness.

And that unhappiness stems from women who have been alienated from the central purpose in life, and men who actively would like to form families with women and then fulfill their central purpose in life.

Tuesday’s Congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), titled “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection,” featured extraordinary testimony — including personal encounters with airborne objects of unknown origin.

Perhaps the most striking moment came not from spoken testimony, but from a newly revealed video presented by Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO). The footage shows an AGM-114 Hellfire missile fired from an MQ-9 Reaper drone at an orb-shaped UFO. Shockingly, the missile appears to bounce off the object, causing little to no damage, as the orb continues traveling at high speed. The video was reportedly recorded in October 2024 off the coast of Yemen.

Burlison noted that he had been “given” the video.

Witnesses included U.S. Air Force veterans Jeffrey Nuccetelli and Dylan Borland, Chief Alexandro Wiggins, and investigative journalist George Knapp.

Knapp added that while he had discussed the footage on a podcast, he had not seen it before the hearing. He claimed, “There are servers where there’s a whole bank of these kinds of videos that Congress has not been allowed to see, that the public hasn’t been allowed to see.”

“That’s a Hellfire missile smacking into that UFO, and just bounced right off — and it kept going,” he said.

Burlison replied: “It kept going, and it looks like the debris was taken with it.” The congressman added that while he wasn’t going “to speculate” on the exact nature of the object, he wondered why such information is being withheld from Congress.

Later in the hearing, Chair Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) asked the witnesses — while the missile video played in the background — whether they were “aware of anything in the United States government arsenal that can split a Hellfire missile like this?”

Two witnesses responded in the negative, while Borland stated he would prefer to answer that question in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility). Luna then followed up, asking if the video “scared” any of them. Three witnesses answered “yes,” though Borland began to caveat before being cut off.

BREAKING:

New UAP video shows an MQ-9 Reaper drone firing an AGM-114 Hellfire missile at an unknown object.

-The Hellfire impacts the object, which subsequently continues traveling

-*The U.S. military, apparently, cleared *kinetic action* against a UAP* pic.twitter.com/PFxvgwTduI

— MarikvR (@MvonRen) September 9, 2025

The most compelling testimony from the hearing came from former Military Police Officer Jeffrey Nuccetelli and former Geospatial Intelligence Specialist Dylan Borland. Nuccetelli described multiple UFO incursions at Vandenberg Air Force Base, as well as his own personal sighting.

“Each incident was witnessed by multiple personnel, documented, investigated, and reported up the chain of command,” Nuccetelli said. He noted that official Air Force records pertaining to a 2003 sighting by Boeing contractors of a “massive, glowing red square silently hovering above two missile defense sites” are held by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and the FBI.

Among several incidents, Nuccetelli described one involving a “massive triangular craft, larger than a football field that hovered silently” before accelerating away “at impossible speed.”

He also detailed a personal encounter: “I was off-duty, sitting in my backyard with two other police officers, and we noticed what first appeared to be a satellite in orbit — but it wasn’t acting like a satellite.”

The object, he said, maneuvered oddly before “reappeared 200 feet over my house.” He described it as a “30-foot diameter sphere of light” that soon flew away and vanished into the night sky.

Borland testified about a 2012 encounter in which he saw “an approximately 100-foot equilateral triangle take off from near the NASA hangar on the base.” He said the object interfered with his cell phone, made no sound, and “the material it was made of appeared fluid or dynamic.”

According to Borland, the craft hovered for several minutes before ascending rapidly to “commercial jet level in seconds, displaying zero kinetic disturbance, sound, or wind displacement.”

He also revealed that years later, he was made privy to “classified information from the UAP legacy crash retrieval program through a sensitive position I held within a Special Access Program.”

Borland claimed he has faced severe retaliation, including “denial of work,” “forged and manipulated employment documents, workplace harassment,” and “manipulation of my security clearance by certain agencies, blocking, delaying, and ultimately removing my ability to be employed within the IC.” He said the retaliation he and others experienced drove him to become a whistleblower.

Several lawmakers highlighted the importance of Rep. Tim Burchett’s proposed legislation, the UAP Whistleblower Protection Act (H.R. 5060), as well as the broader UAP Disclosure Act, which has repeatedly been stymied in Congress.

While perhaps not as headline-grabbing as the July 2023 testimony of whistleblower David Grusch, Tuesday’s hearing is likely to sustain public interest and continue to build momentum for UAP transparency in the political arena.

You can watch the entire hearing below: