Will Bunch: A Gen Z revolution is sweeping the globe. Is it coming to America?

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/gen-z-protests-nepal-madagascar-morocco-20251002.html

No paywall link
https://archive.ph/2025.10.02-152449/https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/gen-z-protests-nepal-madagascar-morocco-20251002.html

After the streets of Morocco burned for the fifth straight night on Wednesday, with mask-wearing protesters torching cars and smashing windows as overwhelmed police fired bullets at looters, the rebels issued a manifesto.

It came over Discord, the worldwide social platform created for young people to connect and play online games like Fortnite or League of Legends, and was issued by a group called GenZ 212 — Morocco’s international dialing code — which proclaims itself as “the voice of a generation forgotten by their leaders.”

The loosely organized and leaderless online collective has decried the more than $5 billion that the North African nation is investing on gleaming new stadiums to co-host soccer’s 2030 World Cup, when more than one-third of young people are unemployed and its public hospitals are in crisis. “The right to health, education and a dignified life is not an empty slogan but a serious demand,” GenZ 212 said in Wednesday’s statement, as it urged, unsuccessfully, for the protests to stay peaceful.

Morocco’s massive unrest — in the same corner of the world where a Tunisian street vendor’s self-immolation and nascent social media triggered 2011’s Arab Spring — should be a huge story if it were happening in isolation. But Morocco is hardly alone.

As the 2025 calendar flipped from summer into fall, the 20-somethings and teens collectively known as Gen Z, or “zoomers,” have taken to the streets in a series of mostly developing countries that are separated by oceans and thousands of miles, yet linked by sites like Discord and TikTok and a worldview defined by video games and anime.

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