The Next Generation of ISIS Is Being Raised in America
It’s stories like this that terrify me more than anything else, and it’s why I fought so hard to stop Mamdani from winning.
Two nineteen-year-olds from Montclair, New Jersey, were just arrested for plotting an ISIS-inspired terror attack. One is the son of a Queens College professor. The other is the son of a senior official at the United Nations.
They weren’t poor or desperate. They grew up in million-dollar homes in one of the most desirable suburbs in the country. They attended one of the best public schools in New Jersey, played sports, had access to elite universities, and were surrounded by comfort, stability, and opportunity.
And yet, with all of that, they decided that joining ISIS and murdering innocent people was a noble cause. That should terrify every American.
Because this is not the story of kids who were radicalized in refugee camps or raised in war zones. This is the story of kids who were raised in our own neighborhoods, whose parents were part of the same professional class that dominates the institutions shaping our culture. Their families were educated, worldly, and privileged.
So how does a young man who grows up surrounded by comfort and security end up pledging allegiance to ISIS?
The answer lies in what America has allowed itself to become.
For years, our schools, media, and political institutions have fed a worldview built on resentment. They teach young people that Western civilization is built on oppression, that success is a sign of privilege, that victimhood is moral superiority, and that violence can be justified if it is committed in the name of “resistance.”
This same mindset is what drives elite college students to rip down posters of kidnapped Israelis and chant for intifada in the streets. It is what makes school presidents equivocate about calls for genocide. It is what makes journalists write about the murder of Israeli civilians as an “uprising.”
Once a society loses moral clarity, this is the result.
And when the mayor-elect of the largest city in America refuses again and again to condemn terrorism, that confusion becomes permission. It tells young people that there are no moral absolutes. It tells them that everything can be excused if you frame it as “struggle”.
For a long time, Americans believed we were immune to this kind of radicalization. We assumed that wealth, education, and stability would protect us. But comfort does not protect a society that stops believing in itself. It makes it weaker.
The next generation of ISIS will not come from the deserts of Syria or Iraq. It will come from within our borders, from children who were never taught gratitude, who inherited freedom but were told to hate it, who grew up in privilege but believe they live under oppression.
The people encouraging this won’t be in training camps. They’ll be in classrooms, media offices, and political circles.
America needs to wake up. Stories like this are are symptoms of a deep sickness. If you do not fight for your country and for your children, no one else will.
Societies collapse when comfort turns into apathy and when apathy turns into self-destruction.
It is up to us now. America will not survive if we keep waiting for someone else to protect it.