The Charlie Kirk Show - Six Baby Boomers and their Impact on America

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, Helen Andrews, who has a very provocative take on boomers. 0.53

00:00:06.000 She has an anti-boomer book out and it's a fun conversation, but she's very serious.

00:00:12.000 If you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:00:16.000 Anything you can chip in, help support our team here on the Charlie Kirk Show at charliekirk.com/slash support. 0.83

00:00:21.000 Helen Andrews is a very smart person, and she goes through a methodical cross-examination of the boomer generation, baby boomers, and she thinks they're to blame for basically everything. 0.83

00:00:33.000 This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. 0.95

00:00:36.000 Protect yourself from big tech and big data.

00:00:37.000 Go to expressvpn.com slash Charlie, expressvpn.com/slash Charlie.

00:00:41.000 Helen Andrews is here. 0.63

00:00:43.000 She says the boomers are to blame. 1.00

00:00:44.000 We talk about it. 1.00

00:00:45.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:46.000 Here we go.

00:00:48.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:49.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:51.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:55.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:58.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:59.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:00.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:01:09.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:17.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:21.000 I'm very excited to talk to you about a new book that is coming out this month from my dear friend, a great American, and one of my top mentors, Jim Holden.

00:01:30.000 He's a best-selling author, a member of the Turning Point Endowment, and a very clear thinker.

00:01:35.000 So listen carefully.

00:01:36.000 Selling in an Anxious World is Jim's fifth book on selling strategies and best practices.

00:01:41.000 This time, Jim brings together research science and observation to identify the leading cause of declining business-to-business sales, also known as corporate culture.

00:01:51.000 I had the great honor of contributing to a chapter of Selling in an Anxious World through my work with Turning Point.

00:01:57.000 I'm in a unique position to observe academic culture within our colleges and relate it to the corporate world, particularly its impact on company culture.

00:02:06.000 In today's world, good company culture requires vigilant protection, which is why this book is so timely and a must-read for business people, sellers, patriots, and Christians.

00:02:16.000 Selling in an Anxious World combines research from extensive deal reviews, examples from Jim's personal life, and Bible references to shine a light on culture, presenting an unconventional guide to solving an unconventional problem.

00:02:29.000 You'll get quick access to whatever topics are important to you through chapter summaries and reference guides.

00:02:34.000 Jim Holden's book is not like any other business book out there.

00:02:38.000 So go to sellingcharlie.com.

00:02:40.000 That's sellingcharlie.com and use the special code Charlie to get a discount.

00:02:44.000 Again, my dear friend Jim Holden, we're going to have him on the podcast talking about this book.

00:02:48.000 And send me some of your thoughts at freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:02:51.000 Again, that's selling in an anxious world by Jim Holden, a must-read for everyone.

00:02:57.000 Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:59.000 With us today is Helen Andrews, who is the author of a very exciting new book, and I'm excited to explore this with her.

00:03:08.000 It is called Boomers, the Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.

00:03:12.000 Did I get that right, Helen? 0.99

00:03:14.000 You got it. 0.94

00:03:15.000 So why so harsh on boomers? 0.73

00:03:18.000 I have parents that are boomers. 0.86

00:03:20.000 I know a lot of boomers in my life.

00:03:21.000 I'm sure you're doing a lot of media and people say, hold on, lay off.

00:03:24.000 We haven't done everything wrong.

00:03:26.000 So this is a safe space for you to be able to just indict an entire generation.

00:03:32.000 So go at it.

00:03:34.000 I don't want to indict the entire generation. 0.92

00:03:36.000 My parents are boomers too, but I'm a millennial and millennials and boomers are natural enemies. 0.99

00:03:43.000 There's just no getting around that. 0.99

00:03:45.000 No, the motivation for the book arose from looking around at my generation and seeing how tough things were for us, just on a lot of levels compared to how things were when the boomers were our age.

00:03:59.000 I see a lot of millennials who feel frustrated economically.

00:04:02.000 They feel stuck in the gig economy.

00:04:04.000 They're not really reaching those milestones of adulthood like buying a house.

00:04:08.000 And then also not also not reaching those milestones of adulthood like getting married and pairing off.

00:04:13.000 So just society doesn't seem to be working for millennials.

00:04:16.000 And I wanted to trace back when and why that happened.

00:04:20.000 And the boomers have a lot to do with it. 0.50

00:04:21.000 Well, let's explore that. 0.99

00:04:23.000 Why is it that the boomers screwed this up so terribly? 0.98

00:04:26.000 There's good boomers, but on average, why is it? 0.77

00:04:29.000 Do you think it might be because of their World War II parents that kind of just wanted peace and prosperity for them after the horror of the Depression and the war?

00:04:38.000 Help us.

00:04:39.000 Let's unpack this.

00:04:41.000 That is the correct chronology, Charlie.

00:04:43.000 The boomers were spoiled by their parents. 0.93

00:04:46.000 Understandably so. 0.96

00:04:47.000 If you, as the boomers' parents, had gone through the Great Depression and World War II, all you would want is to give your children the easy life that you never had. 0.88

00:04:56.000 And the greatest generation succeeded in that. 0.80

00:04:59.000 The problem is the boomers then got the idea that great prosperity and social cohesion and an easy life where everything's just handed to you is the natural order of things, is the natural state of affairs. 0.81

00:05:11.000 They just assumed everything would always be as easy as their parents made it for them. 0.77

00:05:16.000 And I think that's not reality.

00:05:19.000 No, so let's talk into the specifics.

00:05:22.000 How was it when they were growing up versus today?

00:05:24.000 Can you give us some numbers and some detail just from how easy it was to buy a home, go to college, save money?

00:05:32.000 Can you talk in specifics so that some of our younger listeners can realize that their parents had a completely different set of circumstances that they were entering into?

00:05:43.000 Yeah, I'm sure your younger listeners will be astonished to learn that most people could graduate college in those days with no debt at all.

00:05:52.000 You could basically pay down a semester's tuition with a part-time job, you know, a part-time work study, sweeping floors a couple afternoons a week at the chemistry lab, and you would be able to pay for college that way, as opposed to what our generation has, which is graduating with a degree and five figures worth of debt.

00:06:11.000 Another difference that's been a massive social revolution is that when the boomers were growing up, about three quarters of households were single earner households.

00:06:22.000 You had one breadwinner and the other parent stayed home.

00:06:25.000 Today, a larger proportion of women with children under the age of five work full-time than ever before in history.

00:06:36.000 And about two-thirds of households are dual-earner households.

00:06:40.000 And for millennials, a lot of that isn't just that the woman in the household wants to go out and work because she feels like she wants to do that to be fulfilled. 0.68

00:06:48.000 They feel like they need two incomes just to make ends meet.

00:06:53.000 A lot of millennial couples would love to be one-earner households if they could, but they feel like they just can't afford it.

00:06:58.000 So that's another huge revolution that you just can't have a middle-class lifestyle on one income anymore.

00:07:06.000 Yeah, that is the dual income trap.

00:07:08.000 And actually, Elizabeth Warren wrote a book on this way back when, amazingly.

00:07:14.000 And just some numbers off the top of my head, in the mid 80s, to support a family of four, it used to take like 36 weeks of work a year.

00:07:22.000 I mean, I'm roughly about, is that about right?

00:07:23.000 More or less.

00:07:24.000 And now it takes 53 weeks of work.

00:07:27.000 Which is more weeks than there are in a year.

00:07:29.000 Yeah, right.

00:07:30.000 So basically, you need a second income.

00:07:32.000 And also that doesn't factor in just some of the niceties of existence, like saving money, going on a vacation, you know, just basic things that you need to survive.

00:07:42.000 And so I think that's a really important argument that is played into this.

00:07:45.000 So let's unpack this piece by piece.

00:07:47.000 So a common critique that boomers give to millennials is, you're super lazy.

00:07:54.000 We weren't.

00:07:55.000 Get up and go to work.

00:07:57.000 Is that a fair critique?

00:08:00.000 No.

00:08:01.000 The short answer is no. 0.80

00:08:03.000 Because the boomers economy was full of a lot more stable jobs where you could assume that once you've landed the gig, you'd be able to have it for an extended period of time.

00:08:14.000 A millennial in the workforce is looking at a lot more of a gig economy and temporary positions.

00:08:20.000 And it's just really hard to do any long-term planning or to invest in the system when all of your job opportunities are temporary in that way and impermanent.

00:08:30.000 So, no, just the economy looks a lot different today than it did when we're growing up.

00:08:36.000 It's not a matter of work ethic on anybody's part.

00:08:38.000 Yeah, that is a commonly leveled criticism where boomers will say, We worked a lot harder than you did back then.

00:08:46.000 Now, of course, it's not necessarily factoring in technology too.

00:08:51.000 For example, just something that happened to me yesterday.

00:08:54.000 I was talking to my pastor as we were driving from Thousand Oaks to San Juan Capistrano.

00:09:00.000 And about an hour into the drive, we were using Google Maps or Apple Maps or some sort of tech company that was monitoring us and trying to sell stuff to us.

00:09:07.000 And I turned to him and I said, So, how did you do this back in the 70s?

00:09:10.000 And he's like, Well, we had stacks of maps and we had to pull over and do this.

00:09:14.000 I said, Wait, so just curious, how often did you have to ask people around, go get a pay phone?

00:09:22.000 He said, Oh, 40% of the time, if I had to go outside of my local area, I'd have to factor in 30 minutes to go find where I was going.

00:09:28.000 Now, it might seem inconsequential, but over a course of a decade, look at all that lost productivity time, right?

00:09:34.000 Just from that one example of finding where you are.

00:09:37.000 And so, it's actually irrelevant if you worked, you had to work harder because you didn't know where you were going half the time and because GPS and things like that.

00:09:46.000 And so, can you can you add to that of how the economy has changed so dramatically, but human needs have not?

00:09:53.000 So, human needs of building a family, having connection, having children, that's actually the same needs in the 70s, but it's harder now to satisfy human needs for a variety of different reasons.

00:10:05.000 And now, a generation, there's a lot of boomer criticism towards millennials.

00:10:11.000 And so, can you help build that?

00:10:12.000 Can you help build that out?

00:10:14.000 I love your example of the maps, Charlie, because that's one thing I try to do in the book is to keep things concrete.

00:10:20.000 Because I could throw a lot of statistics at you about the difference in the economy then versus now, but it's a lot easier when you have something that you can, you know, look at with your own two eyes.

00:10:28.000 Another concrete example is teen jobs.

00:10:32.000 There used to be entire sectors of the economy that were dominated by high schoolers having after school jobs or summer jobs.

00:10:40.000 They would be the people selling you your coffee at the cafe.

00:10:44.000 That has basically disappeared.

00:10:46.000 If you look at a chart of teenage workforce participation, it has just cratered.

00:10:50.000 Yeah.

00:10:51.000 And all, and those jobs are now filled by grown adults, you know, grown working, working men and women.

00:10:57.000 The problem is that the reason those jobs used to be filled by teenagers is that they're very insecure and they don't pay a lot of money.

00:11:04.000 So, a teenager doesn't need a job that's going to give him enough to live on, and he doesn't need a job that he can count on having five, 10 years from now.

00:11:11.000 So, the fact that adults are filling those jobs now is actually a bad sign.

00:11:18.000 It's a symptom that you have grown adults filling jobs that are more optimized for somebody who's just a teenager.

00:11:26.000 But the disappearance of teens from the workforce is something that people can see.

00:11:29.000 People who've been around for 10 years can remember.

00:11:34.000 In our fast-paced world, it's tough to make reading a priority.

00:11:37.000 At least it used to be.

00:11:38.000 At thinker.org, they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form.

00:11:47.000 Read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to recent bestsellers like Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.

00:11:58.000 I've used Thinker before.

00:11:59.000 I love it.

00:12:00.000 There are so many great titles.

00:12:01.000 You got to check it out.

00:12:02.000 If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons and become a better thinker, go to thinker.org.

00:12:08.000 That's thinker.org to start a free trial.

00:12:10.000 Again, thinker.org.

00:12:11.000 Check it out.

00:12:12.000 T-H-I-N-K-R.org.

00:12:14.000 Become a better thinker.

00:12:15.000 Thinker.org.

00:12:20.000 Immigration played a big role in this too. 0.68

00:12:22.000 Is post-88, H.W. Bush brought in a lot of cheap labor into our country. 0.95

00:12:26.000 And so it ended.

00:12:27.000 So I was born in 93.

00:12:28.000 And so my parents are boomers.

00:12:30.000 And first of all, can you just tell us the years for boomers just so we get our terms straight?

00:12:34.000 I should have asked you from the beginning.

00:12:35.000 1945 to 1964.

00:12:38.000 That's a huge span.

00:12:40.000 Some people say 1962.

00:12:42.000 I think 1964, that's right on the edge.

00:12:44.000 Got it.

00:12:45.000 And so the children of the greatest generation is another way to put it, right?

00:12:48.000 The children of the World War II generation.

00:12:50.000 And so my parents are boomers and they born in 93.

00:12:56.000 And so I never had a high school job.

00:12:58.000 And it's not because I necessarily didn't want one.

00:13:01.000 However, in our local community, if you were in a middle class or upper middle class family, you know what you did over the summer?

00:13:09.000 You did intense athletics or you did something highly specialized, right?

00:13:14.000 And so this is a new phenomenon that started to set in.

00:13:17.000 AAU basketball, travel football, seven-on-seven football, marching band camps, all these different sorts of things were made almost impossible for you to go get a summer job.

00:13:26.000 Not impossible, but the system was actually designed that way.

00:13:30.000 The system was designed because all of a sudden we were able to have an economy with cheap labor that was brought in from across the world or just jobs that weren't that stable, technology, displacement, all of that.

00:13:41.000 And my parents, and I don't blame them for this, but their vision for me and for our generation was: I want your 14, 15, 16, and 17-year-old summers not to be used being a lifeguard or working at a local coffee shop.

00:13:55.000 I want you to become highly specialized and really, really good at something you enjoy.

00:14:00.000 And I saw so many people at Yale when I was an undergraduate who had had exactly your experience.

00:14:06.000 They wanted to devote their summers to a really intense internship or something that was going to put them ahead.

00:14:10.000 But I got to tell you, you could really tell the difference between the people who had had a job and those who reached the age of 22, 23 and had never worked a day in their lives.

00:14:20.000 I mean, it may not build skills the way advanced athletics would, but it teaches you things like showing up on time, just being a grown adult.

00:14:28.000 I don't think anybody should reach the age of 23, never having held any kind of a job.

00:14:33.000 No, I agree.

00:14:34.000 I mean, and I look back and I don't, I wouldn't trade the memories and the experiences that I had, but I can't help but think, you know, what skill set I wouldn't have had by the age of 18 if I wasn't in the local movie theater.

00:14:45.000 But the interesting thing, though, is our local economy never had a demand for it, right?

00:14:49.000 And so the local economy never was like going through high school lunchrooms being saying, we have openings at the movie theater.

00:14:57.000 We need, we need help.

00:14:58.000 The labor pool was filled.

00:15:01.000 And it was filled because in our local area, you know, we had an immigration surplus, right?

00:15:06.000 And there's positives to that. 0.93

00:15:07.000 There's obviously huge negatives to that, but that's the decision that was made.

00:15:11.000 And then the upper middle class suburban parents, they also had this in their mind where they're like, I don't want my kid to have to go work at a movie theater.

00:15:20.000 Like I want him to go become LeBron James, right?

00:15:22.000 Or something like that.

00:15:23.000 I don't know.

00:15:23.000 And that kind of lifestyle, that kind of idea, I think had a lot of different ramifications.

00:15:31.000 So the boomers grew up in a completely different set of circumstances.

00:15:35.000 And some of them were rebellious.

00:15:38.000 Can you talk about how some of them who were rebellious, kind of a little bit of the hippie generation, you know, peace, love, rock and roll.

00:15:46.000 And then some of them self-corrected, some of them never self-corrected.

00:15:50.000 We call those people professors.

00:15:53.000 Can you talk about that, about how their a little bit of rebellion has translated into what you call their great disappointment?

00:16:02.000 You're absolutely right that some people have sold out, but the boomers are a generation that were the rebels in the 60s and then they grew up a little bit and then they sold out, but they would never admit it. 0.84

00:16:17.000 That's so true. 0.97

00:16:19.000 They keep posing as exactly right.

00:16:23.000 And that's so annoying to millennials because millennials have only ever known boomers in positions of authority as parents, as teachers, as administrators. 0.53

00:16:32.000 So from our perspective, it's ridiculous for them to keep, you know, acting as if they're the plucky outsiders, you know, sticking it to the man. 0.50

00:16:40.000 No, you are the man, which is why if you want to understand the boomers, you can't just look at the 60s. 0.89

00:16:47.000 You have to look at the decade when they were most in power and finally reaching the summit of their professions, which is the 90s.

00:16:54.000 I mean, the quintessential baby boomer is Bill Clinton.

00:16:58.000 Tell me why.

00:16:59.000 Because he's somebody who was the most powerful man in the world and yet still acted as if he was an idealistic student rebel.

00:17:10.000 He also had some very characteristic baby boomer vices. 0.87

00:17:14.000 The baby boomers were, let's say, slaves to their appetites and not super into self-control or self-discipline. 0.98

00:17:23.000 Because, hey, that's just constraining my desires, man. 1.00

00:17:26.000 I got to be free and liberated.

00:17:27.000 And certainly Bill Clinton embodies that.

00:17:30.000 And so Bill Clinton, yes, absolutely did.

00:17:34.000 He did have this mystique to him that I think was intentionally done through political theatrics, where it was almost like I'm still the weed-smoking anti-war hippie of the 60s, right?

00:17:34.000 And you're right.

00:17:48.000 And I'll add to that list, John Kerry, too.

00:17:51.000 John Kerry was an anti-war protester who went to the University of Traveled University of Oregon all throughout.

00:17:56.000 I don't know if he's a boomer.

00:17:57.000 He might be a little bit older than that, but I think he falls in that.

00:18:00.000 But he definitely kind of danced in that.

00:18:03.000 And so in your book, you focus on six prominent boomers.

00:18:06.000 Can we, if I would love to walk through this list with you because I'm super fascinated by this.

00:18:11.000 So you walk through Steve Jobs, Sodomayor, Al Sharpton, Aaron Sorkin, who I'm not as familiar with, Jeffrey Sachs, and Camill Pagilia.

00:18:21.000 I'm really familiar with like half of that list.

00:18:23.000 So let's go one by one.

00:18:25.000 Let's start with Steve Jobs.

00:18:28.000 Why did he have an empty promise?

00:18:33.000 He had a really idealistic vision.

00:18:36.000 You know, a lot of people think that Steve Jobs' hippie persona was just an act, right?

00:18:41.000 With his John Lennon glasses and his, you know, hippie, think different mantra.

00:18:46.000 But that's unfair.

00:18:47.000 He genuinely believed those things and he wanted computers to liberate human creativity.

00:18:54.000 That's what he thought computers would do.

00:18:56.000 If we could only put a computer in everybody's pocket, it would unleash everybody's inner genius.

00:19:02.000 That was a good goal for him to have.

00:19:04.000 That was a noble goal.

00:19:06.000 And he certainly accomplished it.

00:19:07.000 He did succeed in putting a computer in everybody's pocket.

00:19:09.000 So Steve Jobs was, whatever his other flaws, a great man.

00:19:15.000 But if you're a millennial, the ubiquity of computers to you has not led to a flourishing of human creativity.

00:19:22.000 It has led to an uberized economy where you can't have a stable job.

00:19:26.000 It has led to ubiquitous pornography.

00:19:29.000 It has led to video game addiction and young men who play World of Warcraft for 13 hours at a time.

00:19:36.000 It has, and, you know, just people enslaved to their screens.

00:19:41.000 It has not unleashed a golden age of human creativity for you.

00:19:44.000 So Steve Jobs' tragedy is not so much about any flaw of his, it's about the negative effects of what he unleashed on the world.

00:19:56.000 Look, a lot of conservatives are getting kicked off of big tech platforms and these tech companies are out of control.

00:20:02.000 So why exactly are we choosing to give these big tech companies all of our personal data?

00:20:06.000 Now is the time to take a stance.

00:20:08.000 Protect your personal data from big tech with the VPN I trust for my protection.

00:20:13.000 Express VPN.

00:20:15.000 You see, every device, whether you're on a phone, laptop, or TV, has a unique string of numbers called an IP address.

00:20:21.000 When you search for stuff, watch videos, or even click a link, big tech companies can use that IP to track all your activity and tie it back to you.

00:20:29.000 When I use ExpressVPN, my connection gets rerouted through their secure, encrypted servers.

00:20:34.000 So these companies can't see my IP address at all.

00:20:37.000 My internet activity becomes anonymized and my network data is encrypted.

00:20:41.000 And the best part is you don't need to be tech savvy at all to use ExpressVPN.

00:20:44.000 Just download the app on your phone or computer, tap one button, and you're protected.

00:20:48.000 Protect your internet activity with the VPN I use every day.

00:20:51.000 Visit expressvpn.com slash Charlie to get three extra months on a one-year package.

00:20:56.000 That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S VPN.com slash Charlie to get three extra months free.

00:21:01.000 Expressvpn.com slash Charlie.

00:21:07.000 I totally agree.

00:21:08.000 We're slaves to these devices.

00:21:10.000 And we talked about this at our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.

00:21:13.000 I told everyone to take a social media Sabbath at least once a week and get off of this stuff because it is dehumanizing us in more ways than one.

00:21:21.000 Additionally, I will say that, you know, Eric Weinstein had a really good thought experiment, and I don't agree with Eric on a lot of stuff, but I think he's really interesting, where Eric Weinstein said, take out all the screens in a room and tell me what is different in that room technologically than if you were in the 1970s.

00:21:40.000 And it's true.

00:21:40.000 Outside of all the screens, and then he asked the next question, are those screens making us happier, healthier, and closer to what human beings actually need and the connection we need?

00:21:51.000 The answer is absolutely no.

00:21:52.000 It's actually perversely incentivizing us.

00:21:55.000 Okay, Soda Mayor.

00:21:57.000 I don't know that much about her. 1.00

00:21:58.000 I know she's on the United States Supreme Court and I know she's very, very far left.

00:22:03.000 What is the empty promise of Sonia Sotomayor?

00:22:07.000 When she was nominated by Obama, she was meant to be the people's justice, you know, the way Diana was the people's princess, that she would be somebody accessible, somebody like the rest of us who can talk in a common language.

00:22:19.000 The way that has actually worked out is just her projecting her own personal psychodrama onto the rest of us. 0.83

00:22:27.000 She really is somebody who exemplifies the boomer vice of holding victimhood as the highest value.

00:22:35.000 And whoever is the biggest victim has the most credibility in any conversation.

00:22:40.000 More than any other Supreme Court justice, Sodomayor puts into her opinions kind of psychological stories.

00:22:48.000 You know, it's not about cold, rational argument for her.

00:22:51.000 It's about how various decisions make her feel or make other people feel.

00:22:57.000 And to me, that's just not what constitutional law is supposed to be about.

00:23:01.000 So by, you know, a lot of boomers have a therapeutic mindset.

00:23:05.000 It's about making everybody feel more self-actualized and self-confident.

00:23:08.000 And that's bad enough, you know, if you're going to have that kind of persona as a celebrity.

00:23:13.000 But to bring that attitude and that approach to a Supreme Court opinion, to me, is just, that's a step down.

00:23:23.000 That's not what constitutional law should be.

00:23:26.000 I hold that view as well.

00:23:27.000 And she definitely has ruled strangely on many, many things just through her own kind of personal dialogue.

00:23:34.000 Next is civil rights activist Al Sharpton.

00:23:37.000 You're being very generous calling him a civil rights activist, by the way.

00:23:40.000 I think that is a generous description. 1.00

00:23:43.000 He's a liar and not a good guy, but tell us why he had the fail promise of the boomers. 0.98

00:23:50.000 One of the greatest scams that the baby boom generation ever pulled off was convincing the rest of us that they were responsible for the civil rights revolution. 0.99

00:24:01.000 You know, they act as if Dr. King was a baby boomer. 1.00

00:24:05.000 He was not.

00:24:06.000 Most some baby boomers were still in grade school at the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 0.84

00:24:12.000 They were not freedom writers.

00:24:14.000 They were not at the sit-ins. 0.81

00:24:16.000 But they try and borrow that sort of moral authority of the great civil rights era, when in reality, boomers are more responsible for the dark, bad race relations of the 1970s. 0.65

00:24:29.000 And Al Sharpton is a perfect example of that. 0.61

00:24:31.000 He talks as if he's some SCLC preacher, you know, at the Selma march or something in the 1960s, when really he's a hustler and a con artist.

00:24:42.000 And his assuming the mantle of Dr. King and the great 1960s civil rights leaders is just completely false.

00:24:48.000 But it's something that a lot of boomers do.

00:24:50.000 They pretend that they're the civil rights generation.

00:24:53.000 I can't remember her name, but I want to say it was Tamley or the woman that made up the internet.

00:24:59.000 Tawana Brawley.

00:25:01.000 I wasn't that far off.

00:25:02.000 I wasn't that far off.

00:25:03.000 No, you were right there.

00:25:04.000 I almost got it.

00:25:05.000 And that was a disgusting moment in American history brought fully thanks to Al Sharpton.

00:25:11.000 Okay, screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin.

00:25:14.000 Little bit clouded on who that is.

00:25:17.000 Oh, he is the creator of The West Wing.

00:25:19.000 Have you ever watched The West Wing?

00:25:21.000 Yeah, of course.

00:25:22.000 I know we shouldn't admit it as conservatives, but it's my guilty pleasure.

00:25:25.000 Yeah, and you know, Lawrence O'Donnell was a writer on The West Wing.

00:25:30.000 That's right.

00:25:31.000 That's right.

00:25:32.000 And although, to be fair to Aaron Sorkin, he also had Peggy Noonan as a consultant as well.

00:25:38.000 He really tried to have conservatives in the writer's room on that show so it wouldn't be completely lopsided.

00:25:45.000 I don't think he quite succeeded in making the show politically even-handed, but he did his best.

00:25:51.000 And like Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin is somebody whose tragedy is not so much any flaw of his, but it's how he has been received.

00:26:02.000 The West Wing is a TV show and it's entertaining, but it's a fantasy.

00:26:08.000 The trouble comes along when people watch that show and confuse it with reality.

00:26:14.000 I live in Washington, D.C., and I think people outside the district would be shocked at how many people who work in politics now and who hold positions of power are West Wing obsessives, who got into politics because they watched the West Wing, who see themselves as actors in their own little West Wing episode.

00:26:32.000 That's right.

00:26:32.000 And that's just extremely disturbing to me that people who hold actual power today are still thinking in terms of this boomer fantasy show.

00:26:42.000 Well, even worse, the millennials now getting in politics think they're in house of cards.

00:26:46.000 So now we got a whole different level of, you know, insanity running our country. 0.58

00:26:51.000 The only realistic DC show is Veep.

00:26:53.000 Yeah.

00:26:54.000 Economist Jeffrey Sachs.

00:26:56.000 Why?

00:26:58.000 Jeffrey Sachs is famous as a development economist.

00:27:03.000 So he works on extreme poverty and he does a lot of work on Africa.

00:27:08.000 And that's good and noble. 0.99

00:27:10.000 Like a lot of the boomers that I look at, he has very good intentions.

00:27:14.000 The problem is that Jeffrey Sachs, starting about a decade ago, got the idea that we couldn't just reduce poverty, but that if people listened to him, we could eliminate it. 0.90

00:27:28.000 He really, really told the United Nations and people in the White House that if only you gave him lots of money and did exactly what he said, we could eradicate poverty in Africa, which, of course, is a ludicrous, ludicrous goal.

00:27:45.000 But it's a good example of boomer hubris, that they take a good idea and then just take it too far because they have this sense of themselves as having godlike power to reshape the world.

00:27:55.000 It's a bit of arrogance, however well-intentioned.

00:28:01.000 Camille Paglia.

00:28:03.000 So walk me through that. 0.99

00:28:05.000 She first became famous in the 1990s PC wars.

00:28:10.000 That was kind of the first time when the rest of America got really obsessed with what was on college curricula and the disappearance of great books from our universities.

00:28:20.000 And she was on the right side of those battles.

00:28:22.000 She was, and she's Italian, Camille Paglia is, and hence very combative. 0.99

00:28:28.000 You know, she's loud, she's brash, she takes no prisoners. 0.97

00:28:31.000 And so she's a really great pundit. 0.57

00:28:34.000 The problem is that she's also, she calls herself a pro-sex feminist, is her self-description. 0.99

00:28:43.000 And she really likes prostitution and pornography and thinks we all need to be a little bit more liberated.

00:28:49.000 And so despite being on the right side in the PC wars of the 1990s, she was on the wrong side of those cultural wars.

00:28:59.000 And in a way that is characteristically boomerish because it's characteristically naive.

00:29:05.000 Camille Paglia thinks if we all just unleash our sexual desires, we'll all just be so much happier.

00:29:10.000 And she has no sense that doing that might unleash some dark forces as well.

00:29:16.000 No doubt.

00:29:17.000 So you write also, worst of all, millennials seem intent on making the boomers' same mistakes.

00:29:23.000 And we've gone through the different downfalls of all of these people, from Aaron Sorkin to Jeffrey Sachs to Camille Paglia to Sotomayor Sharpton and Steve Jobs.

00:29:35.000 What are these mistakes millennials are making in real time?

00:29:38.000 And how do we just get the message out for millennials to stop making these mistakes?

00:29:42.000 I was finishing the manuscript for this book over the summer and watching cities around the country burn.

00:29:51.000 And you had a lot of people asking, is this the 1960s all over again?

00:29:55.000 And I thought, in a lot of ways, yeah, because millennials have been taught by their boomer teachers that the summit of American history, the high point of our trajectory as a nation, was the 1960s.

00:30:10.000 And nothing's more noble than going out into the street and rioting for a good cause.

00:30:16.000 So millennials have been taught that the 1960s were the best decade.

00:30:20.000 And so we took to the streets to have a 1960s of our own.

00:30:26.000 But that's a lot of the things the boomers could get away with then, millennials can't get away with now. 0.66

00:30:35.000 In the 1960s, the boomers could go into the streets and riot and have street protests like Chicago 68 and then graduate from street protest and have a nice suburban job waiting for them on the other side. 0.66

00:30:48.000 And their acting out in the streets would not cause any lasting damage to the social fabric because the social fabric was still so strong back in those days. 0.77

00:30:57.000 Today, America is just a lot less resilient. 0.56

00:31:01.000 The institutions that the boomers relied on, like the family and communities, are just weaker than they used to be.

00:31:08.000 So millennials are reenacting the boomer drama of the 60s, which is a bad idea in itself. 0.72

00:31:17.000 You know, you should forge your own history. 0.76

00:31:19.000 Don't copy your parents' history.

00:31:22.000 But it's also dangerous in addition to being just kind of lame because America is less resilient socially than it was then.

00:31:30.000 So acting out now is a lot riskier and is probably going to damage the country a lot more than the 1960s did then.

00:31:40.000 Yeah, I've always said that the way history was portrayed to me and to my friends was that the most noble thing you could do is replicate the civil rights marches of the 1960s or that sort of movement.

00:31:54.000 And you saw this in how so many people were quick to not go to a protest because they actually believed what it was fighting for, not go to a protest because they actually thought it would do anything.

00:32:07.000 No, no, no, no.

00:32:08.000 There's a very specific reason.

00:32:09.000 Go to a protest to get a good Instagram picture.

00:32:12.000 That is what you must do.

00:32:16.000 You go to the protest to get the sign.

00:32:18.000 You hold it right, head up in the air with a peace sign, the perfect caption that says, we will end racism, RIP George Floyd, with, you know, maybe like a black heart or something.

00:32:33.000 Of course, the black tile came before that.

00:32:35.000 And that picture, as soon as you got the picture, you're like, okay, I can go home now.

00:32:39.000 That's it.

00:32:40.000 And because for them, that's their Selma March moment, like the picture, picture, I'm a great person.

00:32:48.000 Look how good I am.

00:32:49.000 And I want to advertise that to the whole world.

00:32:52.000 Oh, it's all, and it's also superficial.

00:32:54.000 I remember in college, people would get together on a Saturday night and want to chalk something on the quad and would actually have to brainstorm something to protest because they didn't have one off the top of their heads.

00:33:06.000 Like, I don't care what it is.

00:33:08.000 It's like, well, shouldn't the cause come first and then the protest?

00:33:11.000 Yeah, the action should probably follow the cause.

00:33:14.000 So I have one final question.

00:33:15.000 So the book, say the book title again, so our audience can be aware of it.

00:33:19.000 Boomers, the men and women who promised freedom and delivered disaster.

00:33:24.000 Okay, so I have one question that maybe you've been asked or not. 1.00

00:33:27.000 Do the boomers do anything right? 0.90

00:33:32.000 They gave birth to millennials. 0.94

00:33:33.000 Okay, well, there you go. 0.56

00:33:35.000 Besides that, not much.

00:33:37.000 Music. 1.00

00:33:38.000 You know, the boomers are full of themselves and need to be taken down a notch on a lot of different fronts. 0.99

00:33:44.000 But as far as music goes, I think even a boomer basher like me has to admit it has never been better than it was in 1968. 0.99

00:33:53.000 Yeah, I love their music because it's built off the classical canon.

00:33:57.000 Music today is just awful.

00:33:59.000 It's just a disaster.

00:34:01.000 And so I love this analysis.

00:34:03.000 It's very thought-provoking.

00:34:05.000 What has your response been from boomers since you've published this book? 0.99

00:34:09.000 I have been really pleasantly surprised.

00:34:12.000 Some boomers, you know, hate it because they can't stand to hear any criticism made of their generation.

00:34:17.000 But most of them say that my critique is fair and that I give them credit where credit is due.

00:34:24.000 And that was the most important thing to me writing it.

00:34:26.000 I wanted people to read it and think it was objective, that I wasn't biased or, you know, being too mean to them for no reason.

00:34:34.000 So that's been their response.

00:34:35.000 And I've been pleasantly surprised. 0.86

00:34:37.000 Is it too late for boomers to course correct, to all of a sudden say, we did all this stuff wrong. 0.95

00:34:43.000 How can they fix it? 0.86

00:34:44.000 Because I hear a lot from boomers. 1.00

00:34:46.000 We screwed this up for you, Charlie. 1.00

00:34:47.000 I'm trying to fix it. 1.00

00:34:50.000 One of the most obnoxious things the boomers have done is refuse to exit the stage when it's their time. 0.65

00:34:59.000 You know, they're just clinging to power and they won't let go. 0.98

00:35:03.000 And they really, because they are so demographically numerous, they're able to make the country revolve around them because they're the most numerous voters, the most numerous buyers.

00:35:13.000 So everybody wants to get their dollars and their votes.

00:35:16.000 And that has led the following generations to kind of get stalled. 1.00

00:35:20.000 You see, you talk to a lot of Gen X people who aren't making the progress in their careers that they want to because there are too many boomers up at the high levels of their organizations and they can't move on. 0.99

00:35:30.000 So I think a gracious exit is probably the best thing that the boomers can do for civilization now. 0.98

00:35:36.000 Graduate, be grandparents, you know, be happy in retirement. 1.00

00:35:40.000 Well, there you go.

00:35:41.000 Well, Helen, thanks so much for joining the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:35:43.000 Great analysis.

00:35:44.000 Thought-provoking as always.

00:35:45.000 Thanks so much.

00:35:46.000 Thanks for having me.

00:35:47.000 You bet.

00:35:47.000 Talk to you soon.

00:35:51.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:35:53.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:35:55.000 If you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:35:59.000 And as always, get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.

00:36:02.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:36:04.000 God bless you.

00:36:05.000 Talk to you soon.

The Charlie Kirk Show - January 19, 2021

Six Baby Boomers and their Impact on America

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript