BIG COUNTRY, Texas (BIGCOUNTRYHOMEPAGE) – In this week’s episode of Big Country Politics, News Director Manny Diaz had a conversation with Daniel de Visè, a staff writer from the Hill. De Visè has recently written about the trend of high school boys becoming more conservative and why Americans are concealing their credit card debt.

According to statistics, twelfth-grade boys are twice as likely to identify as conservatives, while this generation is generally becoming more liberal. De Visè mentioned that his 19-year-old son has informed him that the majority of his peers are not actively involved in politics.

“I think this rings true is that if you’ve got a high school age boy, a son, most of them aren’t political one way or the other. In fact, this very survey, which is administered by the University of Michigan, the largest group of guys, which is like two-fifths of them, said, Nothing zero. I’m not political,” de Visè explained. “But this is the important part is that the kids who do identify as liberal or conservative, at 12th grade, this is the group they were talking to, because that they were twice as likely to say they’re conservative, as to say they were liberal 25% versus about 13%. And that’s significant. I mean, that’s a big group of guys. Were saying, Yeah, I identify with conservatism.”

De Visè interviewed a number of young guys for this article, many of whom shared that public figures have influenced the generation, such as Ben Shapiro, Donald Trump and Prager.

“I heard consistently the guys who are in high school, they they’re gamers, a lot of them they’re on computers all the time… And they’re on YouTube a lot of the time watching gaming-related content, and more than one guy told me that if you’re doing that, if you’re part of that universe, you do tend to get sucked into this kind of wormhole of conservative ideology,” de Visè shared. “What happens is you’ll be watching a video about Star Wars movies ranked right, and then it ends, and then after that, if you don’t touch the button, it segues into how women destroyed Star Wars, you know, or something that’s starting to get into masculine in the issues or maybe conservatism, the guys I talked to who are young guys, said that if you’re on YouTube and you’re a guy, you’re going to you’re going to eventually be confronted with content from maybe Prager, you or Ben Shapiro, that kind of stuff.”

De Vise stated that politics has also played a role in contributing to this.

“There’s other stuff at work. Guys, in the late part of the last decade, a lot of young guys identified with Donald Trump and his messaging. Again, these are guys I interviewed said, if you’re a high school kid, and 2016/2017, if you’re a guy, you know, Donald Trump might very well have been your president because he spoke in ways that kind of sounded like how guys talk like young guys, like even in high school, you know, for better or worse, depending on your perspective. A lot of high school guys really identified with his with his messaging. So that’s another big issue, which would cause the big rise and young guys being conservative was over during those years, the Donald Trump years,” de Visè said.

He added that this statement might come as a surprise, considering the numerous articles about the increasing liberalism among the younger generation.

“Shocking only because there’s so many articles out there that say young people are liberal, young people, young adults are liberal, kids are liberal, everybody’s getting liberal if they’re young, and it’s true for women, women are overwhelmingly getting more and more liberal. For a lot of the same reasons,” de Visè shared. “Donald Trump, that Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court decision that removed abortion as a constitutional right, politicized a lot of young women to the left. And I don’t know about abortion, per se, but the Donald Trump era politicized a good number of young guys to the right, guys, like adults, young adult men are pretty flat, and their politics, they’re not generally trending more conservative or more liberal women are, they’re getting more left, guys are pretty flat. But these high school boys have been moving more to the conservative side in the last several years. It’s undeniable.”

Recently, de Visè wrote a detailed article about how Americans conceal their credit card debt. He revealed that he was inspired to write the article due to the fact that credit card interest rates are currently at an all-time high.

“If you get a new card, the average rate now is going to be over 20%. And whereas, like a few years ago, we all know interest rates were low, and credit card rates were relatively low. I remember having the last credit card that I got before all the interest rate stuff happened was like, I don’t know, 12% or something. But they’re getting kind of scary high,” de Visè recalled. “So I was kind of on the lookout for how that was going to affect people. And what I found was a number of surveys. But I focused on one that said that they interviewed enough people to figure out, but a lot of us are just basically hiding the fact that we have credit card debt, not telling our partner like husband, wife, whatever, not telling loved ones that we have credit card debt”

The average American household carries around $10,000 in credit card debt, and the nation’s balance hovers around one trillion. De Visè mentioned that this is also a generational thing, with 63% of Generation Z and 58% of Millennials stating that they have lied or withheld financial details compared to Generation X.

“First of all, I think that credit card debt is something people are ashamed of, generally, because it kind of suggests impulse buying. It suggests you lack discipline. It suggests that you’re not the wisest financial customer because think about all the different ways you can get money. I mean, you can spend money that you’ve earned, right? And then you can borrow money, and if you borrow money, you look smart. If you borrow money at a good interest rate, credit cards just don’t have the best interest rates generally right there. They’re at the high end and interest rates,” de Visè explained. “So if you compare it to, like, think about your neighbor, who refinanced their house at like an incredible rate, like three percent, like five years ago or something. People go around. My neighbors go around bragging about that. I have a neighbor the other day who was bragging about how, ‘Yeah, just before the rates went up, man, I got my house refinanced at like two point something,’ and like, you look smart if you do that, right? But if you took out a credit card over the last year at 20 odd percent interest, you don’t want to go brag to your neighbors about that because it looks bad. It looks like a bad decision. Right. And that’s what I was kind of writing about.”

Another poll from Bankrate found that 35% of adults carry credit card debt from month to month. In that group, two-fifths said they didn’t know how much interest they were paying.

“Speaking for myself, it took me pretty far into my adult life before I gained any kind of discipline about credit cards. I mean, you live and learn; you take your lumps. And a lot of younger people, getting to your earlier point, a lot of younger people aren’t, don’t yet have the discipline about credit cards, maybe they don’t even remember that the rate is variable, maybe they don’t look at the rate, I don’t think the rate is usually advertised like in huge numbers on your statement when you get it. So it’s easy to just forget about it. And if you know it’s high, and it’s scary, you don’t maybe want to know about it. And so it doesn’t surprise me to hear that people lose track of what the rate is that they’re paying on their card, so it’s easy to just forget about it,” de Visè shared. “And if you know it’s high, and it’s scary, you don’t maybe want to know about it. And so it doesn’t surprise me to hear that people lose track of what the rate is that they’re paying on their card. And remember, if you had your card from two years ago, the rate is almost certainly higher now. So you should figure out what it is. And then you know this, any of us who have had a credit card with a serious interest rate that if you pay a low amount every month, it’s very easy for the balance to just sort of creep up without you even realizing it’s happening.”

One suggestion he has is to consider applying for a credit card with zero interest as a way to overcome this daunting issue.

“You can get a zero-interest credit card, they still exist. You can, you can still get one. You have to have decent to good credit. But if you’ve got any kind of good credit rating, a pretty good credit rating, you can get a zero APR credit card. And it’s often for a term of maybe a year and a half that anything you put on that card is zero interest, which is free borrowing, basically. And so what you do is… You transfer the balance off of the really high card onto the zero-interest credit card, where the interest stops accumulating, and then you just pay it off as aggressively as you possibly can for those 16 or 20 months. And you can bring the balance down, man, $400 a month, pure principle, no interest, $500 a month, and next thing you know, it’s dropping by thousands of dollars. It’s an amazing tool for bringing your credit card debt down. And the only trick is it eventually is going to revert to the real credit card rate, which is going to be very high. So you have to get as much of it paid off as possible before that happens,” de Visè shared.