Emma Camp wants Gen Z to grow up

Alex S.K.

Brown / Courtesy of Emma Camp Emma Camp, a writer for The Wall Street Journal's famously conservative editorial page, began a recent video on housing costs with a simple question — and an appealingly simple answer.

"Can rent control fix the housing crisis? No!" she says.

It actually makes the problem worse, Camp argues, by discouraging developers from building new units if they don't think they can charge enough to recoup their investment.

The 75-second video has gotten 4.8 million views on X.

Camp, 27, has gained traction with pro-free market ideas by riding the short-form vertical video boom.

She's shot from 25,000 to 125,000 followers on X in recent weeks after a string of video posts tackling Gen Z's woes, consumerism, and grocery prices that have drawn millions of views.

I met up with Camp in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens, one of the neighborhoods that voted overwhelmingly for Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York. (Camp didn't yet live in New York during the election last year, but is a staunch Mamdani opponent).

"I like being a debunker," she tells me.

"I love a story where I can come at it, like, a commonly held belief about what's going on here is wrong.

And let me explain why." While much of the early reaction to her videos has been positive, Camp also sees upside in garnering critics, who argue she's a shill for capitalism's power brokers, that she oversimplies complex issues like rent control, and that she's overly dismissive of the plight of her fellow Gen Zers.

"When you have some pushback, that's a sign that you're mounting ideas that people, who disagree with them, think are worth pushing back against," she says.

Camp's videos and essays often share a few elements.

She picks a commonly held belief, usually about why capitalism is bad, and argues why it's actually wrong.