CIA and Gen Z

You keep saying 37% as if that is the most relevant number when it's not. the 31% from last year is both more indicative of recent trends and cuts deeper into the Gen Z demographic. I think a good chunk of people who were 18-24 in 2016 would still be considered Millennials.

Private, but likely with many friends and acquaintances. Everyone they allow has access to all they've shared. This is a good step, but this isn’t the level of protection some believe it is.

"When you pull up to the CIA headquarters in Langley, you have to shout your Social Security number out the window into a speaker, like when you’re ordering fries at a drive-through. Much like the Union that the Agency was formed to protect, the system, it seems, could be more perfect."

True story: I went to a job interview on Redstone Arsenal which meant I needed to get a vehicle pass. The recruiter sent me an email asking for my SSN; I replied that I wasn't comfortable sending it via email and then called him with it.

The next day I received a CC: copy of the email request to the Arsenal visitor center, including my SSN. I was unimpressed.

"what I’m told is a very contentious parking situation where lots of spots are so far from the office that a shuttle has to transport employees from their cars to their desks (a spy’s supposedly glamorous life actually laced with drudgery and inconvenience—how very John le Carré)..."

The parking spots nearest the building I used to work in, when we went in to work, were numbered and reserved for particular NASA employees. Many of those employees worked 7:30 to 3:30, so when I typically wandered in half were empty and when I left they were all empty. But if I, contractor peon (which makes up 70-90% of our organization), were to park there I would get a ticket from NASA Protective Services. There were a few general parking spaces closer than those, but they were routinely taken by NASA employees because they were a few feet closer than their assigned spaces. We parked out on the outskirts.

(P.s. The vast majority of CIA employees are not spies.)

"Demographic data from four years after that (2019), collected by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, revealed that intelligence agencies were still behind the federal and civil workforce in minority representation and that the spy agencies’ head counts were 61 percent male, 39 percent female."

Way back in the '90s, I had a friend of Indian descent whose sister worked for the FBI. She said her sister was always getting pestered about moving into investigative field work because no one would suspect she was undercover.

OK, but are you arguing against the substance of it? 2020, that age range would have all been Gen Z, I'm pretty sure. Still 31%. Do you think the breakdown of Gen Z political opinions, ordered by prominence, is "socialist (51+%) -> Trump supporter (~31%) -> everything else (less than 18%)"? My educated guess would be you could flip those "socialist" and "everything else" numbers and that'd be way closer to correct—which is still a huge increase over other generations, if it's even as high as 18%!

FWIW if we had a viable, actual socialist party, I'd vote & even campaign for them. But I think you're way wrong about how far things are shifting, with Gen Z, unfortunately. I do hope I'm the one who's wrong, but I doubt it.

I'm a millennial, but if I look at my social group (mostly gen-z through gen-x) it's nearly all socialists and left- or off-the-spectrum-anarchists[EDIT: probably a couple would identify, specifically, as left-libertarian, now that I think about it, which is very unlike right-libertarian—at least one of those might pointedly insist on just calling the left-libertarian position "liberal"]. That's my bubble, though, and doesn't reflect the proportions for the rest of the country.

[EDIT] Maybe we have different thresholds or definitions of "socialist"? I'd believe that over half of Gen Z wants a "public option" for healthcare, and maybe even M4A, for instance. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if some Gen Z Trumpers want those (Trump did, oddly enough, give some lip-service to reform in that direction in his campaigns, though not to M4A)

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