The Charlie Kirk Show - Six Baby Boomers and their Impact on America
Aired: 2021-01-19
Duration: 36:06

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, Helen Andrews, who has a very provocative take on boomers.
[00:00:06]  She has an anti-boomer book out and it's a fun conversation, but she's very serious.
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[00:00:16]  Anything you can chip in, help support our team here on the Charlie Kirk Show at charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:00:21]  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.
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[00:00:41]  Helen Andrews is here.
[00:00:43]  She says the boomers are to blame.
[00:00:44]  We talk about it.
[00:00:45]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:00:46]  Here we go.
[00:00:48]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:49]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:00:51]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:55]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:58]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:59]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:00]  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]  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]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:21]  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]  He's a best-selling author, a member of the Turning Point Endowment, and a very clear thinker.
[00:01:35]  So listen carefully.
[00:01:36]  Selling in an Anxious World is Jim's fifth book on selling strategies and best practices.
[00:01:41]  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]  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]  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]  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]  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]  You'll get quick access to whatever topics are important to you through chapter summaries and reference guides.
[00:02:34]  Jim Holden's book is not like any other business book out there.
[00:02:38]  So go to sellingcharlie.com.
[00:02:40]  That's sellingcharlie.com and use the special code Charlie to get a discount.
[00:02:44]  Again, my dear friend Jim Holden, we're going to have him on the podcast talking about this book.
[00:02:48]  And send me some of your thoughts at freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:02:51]  Again, that's selling in an anxious world by Jim Holden, a must-read for everyone.
[00:02:57]  Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:02:59]  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]  It is called Boomers, the Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.
[00:03:12]  Did I get that right, Helen?
[00:03:14]  You got it.
[00:03:15]  So why so harsh on boomers?
[00:03:18]  I have parents that are boomers.
[00:03:20]  I know a lot of boomers in my life.
[00:03:21]  I'm sure you're doing a lot of media and people say, hold on, lay off.
[00:03:24]  We haven't done everything wrong.
[00:03:26]  So this is a safe space for you to be able to just indict an entire generation.
[00:03:32]  So go at it.
[00:03:34]  I don't want to indict the entire generation.
[00:03:36]  My parents are boomers too, but I'm a millennial and millennials and boomers are natural enemies.
[00:03:43]  There's just no getting around that.
[00:03:45]  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]  I see a lot of millennials who feel frustrated economically.
[00:04:02]  They feel stuck in the gig economy.
[00:04:04]  They're not really reaching those milestones of adulthood like buying a house.
[00:04:08]  And then also not also not reaching those milestones of adulthood like getting married and pairing off.
[00:04:13]  So just society doesn't seem to be working for millennials.
[00:04:16]  And I wanted to trace back when and why that happened.
[00:04:20]  And the boomers have a lot to do with it.
[00:04:21]  Well, let's explore that.
[00:04:23]  Why is it that the boomers screwed this up so terribly?
[00:04:26]  There's good boomers, but on average, why is it?
[00:04:29]  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]  Help us.
[00:04:39]  Let's unpack this.
[00:04:41]  That is the correct chronology, Charlie.
[00:04:43]  The boomers were spoiled by their parents.
[00:04:46]  Understandably so.
[00:04:47]  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.
[00:04:56]  And the greatest generation succeeded in that.
[00:04:59]  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.
[00:05:11]  They just assumed everything would always be as easy as their parents made it for them.
[00:05:16]  And I think that's not reality.
[00:05:19]  No, so let's talk into the specifics.
[00:05:22]  How was it when they were growing up versus today?
[00:05:24]  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]  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]  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]  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]  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]  You had one breadwinner and the other parent stayed home.
[00:06:25]  Today, a larger proportion of women with children under the age of five work full-time than ever before in history.
[00:06:36]  And about two-thirds of households are dual-earner households.
[00:06:40]  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.
[00:06:48]  They feel like they need two incomes just to make ends meet.
[00:06:53]  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]  So that's another huge revolution that you just can't have a middle-class lifestyle on one income anymore.
[00:07:06]  Yeah, that is the dual income trap.
[00:07:08]  And actually, Elizabeth Warren wrote a book on this way back when, amazingly.
[00:07:14]  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]  I mean, I'm roughly about, is that about right?
[00:07:23]  More or less.
[00:07:24]  And now it takes 53 weeks of work.
[00:07:27]  Which is more weeks than there are in a year.
[00:07:29]  Yeah, right.
[00:07:30]  So basically, you need a second income.
[00:07:32]  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]  And so I think that's a really important argument that is played into this.
[00:07:45]  So let's unpack this piece by piece.
[00:07:47]  So a common critique that boomers give to millennials is, you're super lazy.
[00:07:54]  We weren't.
[00:07:55]  Get up and go to work.
[00:07:57]  Is that a fair critique?
[00:08:00]  No.
[00:08:01]  The short answer is no.
[00:08:03]  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]  A millennial in the workforce is looking at a lot more of a gig economy and temporary positions.
[00:08:20]  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]  So, no, just the economy looks a lot different today than it did when we're growing up.
[00:08:36]  It's not a matter of work ethic on anybody's part.
[00:08:38]  Yeah, that is a commonly leveled criticism where boomers will say, We worked a lot harder than you did back then.
[00:08:46]  Now, of course, it's not necessarily factoring in technology too.
[00:08:51]  For example, just something that happened to me yesterday.
[00:08:54]  I was talking to my pastor as we were driving from Thousand Oaks to San Juan Capistrano.
[00:09:00]  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]  And I turned to him and I said, So, how did you do this back in the 70s?
[00:09:10]  And he's like, Well, we had stacks of maps and we had to pull over and do this.
[00:09:14]  I said, Wait, so just curious, how often did you have to ask people around, go get a pay phone?
[00:09:22]  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]  Now, it might seem inconsequential, but over a course of a decade, look at all that lost productivity time, right?
[00:09:34]  Just from that one example of finding where you are.
[00:09:37]  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]  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]  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]  And now, a generation, there's a lot of boomer criticism towards millennials.
[00:10:11]  And so, can you help build that?
[00:10:12]  Can you help build that out?
[00:10:14]  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]  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]  Another concrete example is teen jobs.
[00:10:32]  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]  They would be the people selling you your coffee at the cafe.
[00:10:44]  That has basically disappeared.
[00:10:46]  If you look at a chart of teenage workforce participation, it has just cratered.
[00:10:50]  Yeah.
[00:10:51]  And all, and those jobs are now filled by grown adults, you know, grown working, working men and women.
[00:10:57]  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]  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]  So, the fact that adults are filling those jobs now is actually a bad sign.
[00:11:18]  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]  But the disappearance of teens from the workforce is something that people can see.
[00:11:29]  People who've been around for 10 years can remember.
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[00:12:20]  Immigration played a big role in this too.
[00:12:22]  Is post-88, H.W. Bush brought in a lot of cheap labor into our country.
[00:12:26]  And so it ended.
[00:12:27]  So I was born in 93.
[00:12:28]  And so my parents are boomers.
[00:12:30]  And first of all, can you just tell us the years for boomers just so we get our terms straight?
[00:12:34]  I should have asked you from the beginning.
[00:12:35]  1945 to 1964.
[00:12:38]  That's a huge span.
[00:12:40]  Some people say 1962.
[00:12:42]  I think 1964, that's right on the edge.
[00:12:44]  Got it.
[00:12:45]  And so the children of the greatest generation is another way to put it, right?
[00:12:48]  The children of the World War II generation.
[00:12:50]  And so my parents are boomers and they born in 93.
[00:12:56]  And so I never had a high school job.
[00:12:58]  And it's not because I necessarily didn't want one.
[00:13:01]  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]  You did intense athletics or you did something highly specialized, right?
[00:13:14]  And so this is a new phenomenon that started to set in.
[00:13:17]  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]  Not impossible, but the system was actually designed that way.
[00:13:30]  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]  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]  I want you to become highly specialized and really, really good at something you enjoy.
[00:14:00]  And I saw so many people at Yale when I was an undergraduate who had had exactly your experience.
[00:14:06]  They wanted to devote their summers to a really intense internship or something that was going to put them ahead.
[00:14:10]  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]  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]  I don't think anybody should reach the age of 23, never having held any kind of a job.
[00:14:33]  No, I agree.
[00:14:34]  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]  But the interesting thing, though, is our local economy never had a demand for it, right?
[00:14:49]  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]  We need, we need help.
[00:14:58]  The labor pool was filled.
[00:15:01]  And it was filled because in our local area, you know, we had an immigration surplus, right?
[00:15:06]  And there's positives to that.
[00:15:07]  There's obviously huge negatives to that, but that's the decision that was made.
[00:15:11]  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]  Like I want him to go become LeBron James, right?
[00:15:22]  Or something like that.
[00:15:23]  I don't know.
[00:15:23]  And that kind of lifestyle, that kind of idea, I think had a lot of different ramifications.
[00:15:31]  So the boomers grew up in a completely different set of circumstances.
[00:15:35]  And some of them were rebellious.
[00:15:38]  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]  And then some of them self-corrected, some of them never self-corrected.
[00:15:50]  We call those people professors.
[00:15:53]  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]  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.
[00:16:17]  That's so true.
[00:16:19]  They keep posing as exactly right.
[00:16:23]  And that's so annoying to millennials because millennials have only ever known boomers in positions of authority as parents, as teachers, as administrators.
[00:16:32]  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.
[00:16:40]  No, you are the man, which is why if you want to understand the boomers, you can't just look at the 60s.
[00:16:47]  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]  I mean, the quintessential baby boomer is Bill Clinton.
[00:16:58]  Tell me why.
[00:16:59]  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]  He also had some very characteristic baby boomer vices.
[00:17:14]  The baby boomers were, let's say, slaves to their appetites and not super into self-control or self-discipline.
[00:17:23]  Because, hey, that's just constraining my desires, man.
[00:17:26]  I got to be free and liberated.
[00:17:27]  And certainly Bill Clinton embodies that.
[00:17:30]  And so Bill Clinton, yes, absolutely did.
[00:17:34]  And you're right.
[00:17:34]  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?
[00:17:48]  And I'll add to that list, John Kerry, too.
[00:17:51]  John Kerry was an anti-war protester who went to the University of Traveled University of Oregon all throughout.
[00:17:56]  I don't know if he's a boomer.
[00:17:57]  He might be a little bit older than that, but I think he falls in that.
[00:18:00]  But he definitely kind of danced in that.
[00:18:03]  And so in your book, you focus on six prominent boomers.
[00:18:06]  Can we, if I would love to walk through this list with you because I'm super fascinated by this.
[00:18:11]  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]  I'm really familiar with like half of that list.
[00:18:23]  So let's go one by one.
[00:18:25]  Let's start with Steve Jobs.
[00:18:28]  Why did he have an empty promise?
[00:18:33]  He had a really idealistic vision.
[00:18:36]  You know, a lot of people think that Steve Jobs' hippie persona was just an act, right?
[00:18:41]  With his John Lennon glasses and his, you know, hippie, think different mantra.
[00:18:46]  But that's unfair.
[00:18:47]  He genuinely believed those things and he wanted computers to liberate human creativity.
[00:18:54]  That's what he thought computers would do.
[00:18:56]  If we could only put a computer in everybody's pocket, it would unleash everybody's inner genius.
[00:19:02]  That was a good goal for him to have.
[00:19:04]  That was a noble goal.
[00:19:06]  And he certainly accomplished it.
[00:19:07]  He did succeed in putting a computer in everybody's pocket.
[00:19:09]  So Steve Jobs was, whatever his other flaws, a great man.
[00:19:15]  But if you're a millennial, the ubiquity of computers to you has not led to a flourishing of human creativity.
[00:19:22]  It has led to an uberized economy where you can't have a stable job.
[00:19:26]  It has led to ubiquitous pornography.
[00:19:29]  It has led to video game addiction and young men who play World of Warcraft for 13 hours at a time.
[00:19:36]  It has, and, you know, just people enslaved to their screens.
[00:19:41]  It has not unleashed a golden age of human creativity for you.
[00:19:44]  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]  Look, a lot of conservatives are getting kicked off of big tech platforms and these tech companies are out of control.
[00:20:02]  So why exactly are we choosing to give these big tech companies all of our personal data?
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[00:21:07]  I totally agree.
[00:21:08]  We're slaves to these devices.
[00:21:10]  And we talked about this at our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.
[00:21:13]  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]  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]  And it's true.
[00:21:40]  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]  The answer is absolutely no.
[00:21:52]  It's actually perversely incentivizing us.
[00:21:55]  Okay, Soda Mayor.
[00:21:57]  I don't know that much about her.
[00:21:58]  I know she's on the United States Supreme Court and I know she's very, very far left.
[00:22:03]  What is the empty promise of Sonia Sotomayor?
[00:22:07]  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]  The way that has actually worked out is just her projecting her own personal psychodrama onto the rest of us.
[00:22:27]  She really is somebody who exemplifies the boomer vice of holding victimhood as the highest value.
[00:22:35]  And whoever is the biggest victim has the most credibility in any conversation.
[00:22:40]  More than any other Supreme Court justice, Sodomayor puts into her opinions kind of psychological stories.
[00:22:48]  You know, it's not about cold, rational argument for her.
[00:22:51]  It's about how various decisions make her feel or make other people feel.
[00:22:57]  And to me, that's just not what constitutional law is supposed to be about.
[00:23:01]  So by, you know, a lot of boomers have a therapeutic mindset.
[00:23:05]  It's about making everybody feel more self-actualized and self-confident.
[00:23:08]  And that's bad enough, you know, if you're going to have that kind of persona as a celebrity.
[00:23:13]  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]  That's not what constitutional law should be.
[00:23:26]  I hold that view as well.
[00:23:27]  And she definitely has ruled strangely on many, many things just through her own kind of personal dialogue.
[00:23:34]  Next is civil rights activist Al Sharpton.
[00:23:37]  You're being very generous calling him a civil rights activist, by the way.
[00:23:40]  I think that is a generous description.
[00:23:43]  He's a liar and not a good guy, but tell us why he had the fail promise of the boomers.
[00:23:50]  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.
[00:24:01]  You know, they act as if Dr. King was a baby boomer.
[00:24:05]  He was not.
[00:24:06]  Most some baby boomers were still in grade school at the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
[00:24:12]  They were not freedom writers.
[00:24:14]  They were not at the sit-ins.
[00:24:16]  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.
[00:24:29]  And Al Sharpton is a perfect example of that.
[00:24:31]  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]  And his assuming the mantle of Dr. King and the great 1960s civil rights leaders is just completely false.
[00:24:48]  But it's something that a lot of boomers do.
[00:24:50]  They pretend that they're the civil rights generation.
[00:24:53]  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]  Tawana Brawley.
[00:25:01]  I wasn't that far off.
[00:25:02]  I wasn't that far off.
[00:25:03]  No, you were right there.
[00:25:04]  I almost got it.
[00:25:05]  And that was a disgusting moment in American history brought fully thanks to Al Sharpton.
[00:25:11]  Okay, screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin.
[00:25:14]  Little bit clouded on who that is.
[00:25:17]  Oh, he is the creator of The West Wing.
[00:25:19]  Have you ever watched The West Wing?
[00:25:21]  Yeah, of course.
[00:25:22]  I know we shouldn't admit it as conservatives, but it's my guilty pleasure.
[00:25:25]  Yeah, and you know, Lawrence O'Donnell was a writer on The West Wing.
[00:25:30]  That's right.
[00:25:31]  That's right.
[00:25:32]  And although, to be fair to Aaron Sorkin, he also had Peggy Noonan as a consultant as well.
[00:25:38]  He really tried to have conservatives in the writer's room on that show so it wouldn't be completely lopsided.
[00:25:45]  I don't think he quite succeeded in making the show politically even-handed, but he did his best.
[00:25:51]  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]  The West Wing is a TV show and it's entertaining, but it's a fantasy.
[00:26:08]  The trouble comes along when people watch that show and confuse it with reality.
[00:26:14]  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]  That's right.
[00:26:32]  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]  Well, even worse, the millennials now getting in politics think they're in house of cards.
[00:26:46]  So now we got a whole different level of, you know, insanity running our country.
[00:26:51]  The only realistic DC show is Veep.
[00:26:53]  Yeah.
[00:26:54]  Economist Jeffrey Sachs.
[00:26:56]  Why?
[00:26:58]  Jeffrey Sachs is famous as a development economist.
[00:27:03]  So he works on extreme poverty and he does a lot of work on Africa.
[00:27:08]  And that's good and noble.
[00:27:10]  Like a lot of the boomers that I look at, he has very good intentions.
[00:27:14]  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.
[00:27:28]  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]  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]  It's a bit of arrogance, however well-intentioned.
[00:28:01]  Camille Paglia.
[00:28:03]  So walk me through that.
[00:28:05]  She first became famous in the 1990s PC wars.
[00:28:10]  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]  And she was on the right side of those battles.
[00:28:22]  She was, and she's Italian, Camille Paglia is, and hence very combative.
[00:28:28]  You know, she's loud, she's brash, she takes no prisoners.
[00:28:31]  And so she's a really great pundit.
[00:28:34]  The problem is that she's also, she calls herself a pro-sex feminist, is her self-description.
[00:28:43]  And she really likes prostitution and pornography and thinks we all need to be a little bit more liberated.
[00:28:49]  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]  And in a way that is characteristically boomerish because it's characteristically naive.
[00:29:05]  Camille Paglia thinks if we all just unleash our sexual desires, we'll all just be so much happier.
[00:29:10]  And she has no sense that doing that might unleash some dark forces as well.
[00:29:16]  No doubt.
[00:29:17]  So you write also, worst of all, millennials seem intent on making the boomers' same mistakes.
[00:29:23]  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]  What are these mistakes millennials are making in real time?
[00:29:38]  And how do we just get the message out for millennials to stop making these mistakes?
[00:29:42]  I was finishing the manuscript for this book over the summer and watching cities around the country burn.
[00:29:51]  And you had a lot of people asking, is this the 1960s all over again?
[00:29:55]  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]  And nothing's more noble than going out into the street and rioting for a good cause.
[00:30:16]  So millennials have been taught that the 1960s were the best decade.
[00:30:20]  And so we took to the streets to have a 1960s of our own.
[00:30:26]  But that's a lot of the things the boomers could get away with then, millennials can't get away with now.
[00:30:35]  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.
[00:30:48]  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.
[00:30:57]  Today, America is just a lot less resilient.
[00:31:01]  The institutions that the boomers relied on, like the family and communities, are just weaker than they used to be.
[00:31:08]  So millennials are reenacting the boomer drama of the 60s, which is a bad idea in itself.
[00:31:17]  You know, you should forge your own history.
[00:31:19]  Don't copy your parents' history.
[00:31:22]  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]  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]  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]  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]  No, no, no, no.
[00:32:08]  There's a very specific reason.
[00:32:09]  Go to a protest to get a good Instagram picture.
[00:32:12]  That is what you must do.
[00:32:16]  You go to the protest to get the sign.
[00:32:18]  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]  Of course, the black tile came before that.
[00:32:35]  And that picture, as soon as you got the picture, you're like, okay, I can go home now.
[00:32:39]  That's it.
[00:32:40]  And because for them, that's their Selma March moment, like the picture, picture, I'm a great person.
[00:32:48]  Look how good I am.
[00:32:49]  And I want to advertise that to the whole world.
[00:32:52]  Oh, it's all, and it's also superficial.
[00:32:54]  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]  Like, I don't care what it is.
[00:33:08]  It's like, well, shouldn't the cause come first and then the protest?
[00:33:11]  Yeah, the action should probably follow the cause.
[00:33:14]  So I have one final question.
[00:33:15]  So the book, say the book title again, so our audience can be aware of it.
[00:33:19]  Boomers, the men and women who promised freedom and delivered disaster.
[00:33:24]  Okay, so I have one question that maybe you've been asked or not.
[00:33:27]  Do the boomers do anything right?
[00:33:32]  They gave birth to millennials.
[00:33:33]  Okay, well, there you go.
[00:33:35]  Besides that, not much.
[00:33:37]  Music.
[00:33:38]  You know, the boomers are full of themselves and need to be taken down a notch on a lot of different fronts.
[00:33:44]  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.
[00:33:53]  Yeah, I love their music because it's built off the classical canon.
[00:33:57]  Music today is just awful.
[00:33:59]  It's just a disaster.
[00:34:01]  And so I love this analysis.
[00:34:03]  It's very thought-provoking.
[00:34:05]  What has your response been from boomers since you've published this book?
[00:34:09]  I have been really pleasantly surprised.
[00:34:12]  Some boomers, you know, hate it because they can't stand to hear any criticism made of their generation.
[00:34:17]  But most of them say that my critique is fair and that I give them credit where credit is due.
[00:34:24]  And that was the most important thing to me writing it.
[00:34:26]  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]  So that's been their response.
[00:34:35]  And I've been pleasantly surprised.
[00:34:37]  Is it too late for boomers to course correct, to all of a sudden say, we did all this stuff wrong.
[00:34:43]  How can they fix it?
[00:34:44]  Because I hear a lot from boomers.
[00:34:46]  We screwed this up for you, Charlie.
[00:34:47]  I'm trying to fix it.
[00:34:50]  One of the most obnoxious things the boomers have done is refuse to exit the stage when it's their time.
[00:34:59]  You know, they're just clinging to power and they won't let go.
[00:35:03]  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]  So everybody wants to get their dollars and their votes.
[00:35:16]  And that has led the following generations to kind of get stalled.
[00:35:20]  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.
[00:35:30]  So I think a gracious exit is probably the best thing that the boomers can do for civilization now.
[00:35:36]  Graduate, be grandparents, you know, be happy in retirement.
[00:35:40]  Well, there you go.
[00:35:41]  Well, Helen, thanks so much for joining the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:35:43]  Great analysis.
[00:35:44]  Thought-provoking as always.
[00:35:45]  Thanks so much.
[00:35:46]  Thanks for having me.
[00:35:47]  You bet.
[00:35:47]  Talk to you soon.
[00:35:51]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:35:53]  Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:35:55]  If you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:35:59]  And as always, get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.
[00:36:02]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:36:04]  God bless you.
[00:36:05]  Talk to you soon.