Lost in the commentary about the vice-presidential debate is the looming generational issue haunting the political system. On the stage that night was a member of Generation X and a Millennial. J.D. Vance is not the first Millennial to enter politics, but he is the first one to enter the main stage. At forty years old, he would be the third youngest vice president ever, if Trump wins in November. Walz would become the first member of Gen-X to accomplish anything in politics.
Walz and Vance are good examples of their generation. Gen-X was known as the slacker generation, mostly because they were not politicized like the two waves of Baby Boomers that preceded them. They just wanted to do what they needed to do in order to get a decent job and enjoy their life. With the massive boomer generation ahead of them, ambition was pointless, beyond the personal. That is pretty much how it has played out for this relatively small cohort.
Tim Walz fits this profile. He kicked around in his youth, unsure what he wanted to do with himself as an adult. After a while he went back to college. He joined the National Guard because his father told him to join. He then got a job teaching because that was available and required the least effort. Serendipity got him into politics where good timing seemed to be his best asset. Like his generation, Tim Walz is a guy to whom life has happened, rather than a guy who attacked life.
In contrast, the life of J.D. Vance is like a well-executed battle plan. Millennials are strivers and box tickers. Encouraged from the womb by their mostly Baby Boomer parents and teachers to attack life with a detailed plan, this is a generation that started building a resume in kindergarten. Everything about their primary schooling was aimed at getting into a good college. College was about landing in the right career and their careers have been the accumulation of credentials.
That describes the life of J.D. Vance. One path out of poverty was the military, so he went into the military. That opened the path to college, so he went to the best college he could and got the best credentials he could get. Those credentials opened the door to a career in the swankiest of careers in venture capital. Unlike Walz, nothing about the life of J.D. Vance is due to chance other than his current position. One does not have much control over the choices made by Donald Trump.
The result of this generation gap was evident on stage. Walz probably would have arrived in his Elmer Fudd costume if they let him, for no other reason that it is more comfortable than a suit. He probably watched sports instead of prepping for the biggest moment of his life. Vance, on the other hand, was a machine. He crammed for the test because it is what he has done his whole life. He went to the debate to ace the exam and that is exactly what we saw.
You can expand this out to the top of the ticket. It is both symbolic and ironic that the race is between an old white guy who speaks for the America that is slowly slipping away and diverse girl boss who exists only in the imagination of the bitter, angry managerial class. Trump is not technically a Baby Boomer, but he is a man with the Baby Boomer sensibilities. He is a guy who thinks the economy is the country, so a good economy means everything is fine.
Harris is a Baby Boomer X’er, but her alien existence places her outside of what most people would understand by the term. She was born and raised outside of the country by parents who were not Americans. If a writing team from Hollywood took a break from ruining classic movies and were tasked with creating a story involving politics, they would make the star a diverse girl boss like Harris. She would be smart and sober-minded, however, miraculously always coming out on top.
The Harris as diverse girl boss from the movies can be taken further by the fact that she has never earned anything in her life. This is the way it works in film. Diverse girl boss never has to struggle and doubt like the traditional white lead. She is just given everything she needs by the writers. That is Kamala Harris. The biggest challenge of her life has simply been showing up without her dress on backwards. Now she expects to be handed the presidency.
The one thing missing from the picture is the hysterical female Millennial. Another feature of that generation is that strivers like J.D. Vance have had to navigate the hysterical female Millennial with a head full of feminist nonsense. Female Millennial hysteria as escapism is probably worth a book treatment. Much of the lunacy of the last twenty years has been driven by childish girls who became girl bosses rather than wives and mothers with a stake in their community.
The absence of this character from the current drama is probably the biggest white pill of this election cycle. Even in the unserious world of modern politics, the hysterical female Millennial is shunted over to the side when the adults are talking. In this regard, the rise of J.D. Vance could be signaling a return to normalcy once the Baby Boomers shuffle off to the shuffleboard courts. Perhaps the answer to the harpy all along was to simply ignore her while getting the job done.
One final angle here. J.D. Vance is the full expression of managerial man. The fact that he walked away from that system into the populist revolt against it suggest that managerialism lacks the cultural fulfillment to sustain itself. One reason the media has been told to hate him is that he is seen as a traitor. This is the main reason the system hates Trump; he betrayed his class. This suggests that the new left and right in our politics are managerialism versus culturalism.
The main take away from this election cycle for Baby Boomers and Generation-X should be that your time is done. The people who will be running things starting now are the people in their thirties and forties. That means our politics and culture will reflect the sensibilities of this generation. The least ethically centered generation in American history will be defining the nation. Millennials are an end-justifies-the-means generation and maybe that is what will be required going forward.
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Interesting take. An an early X-er myself, I grew up in a world defined by the Boomers. By the time I was fifteen I was already sick and tired of hearing Steppenwolf and Hendrix endless shit about how great Woodstock was. Nonetheless, I was a “conservative” because up until that point, The System provided a good life for the white male with a college degree, and even one without. That turned out to be no longer true by the time I got into the workforce. In order to succeed as a white man, you had to be like Walz —… Read more »
“By the time I was fifteen I was already sick and tired of hearing Steppenwolf and Hendrix endless shit about how great Woodstock was.”
I probably will never emotionally connect with the Beatles because my teachers could not shut up about how amazing the Beatles were.
I can look at their music on staff paper and see the harmonic sophistication over what came before.
But those guys irritate the hell out of me, especially John Lennon.
St. Peppers is good. The rest of it is mediocre garbage.
My mind knows that they did some innovative stuff, but I can’t get past the smugness. Idiot Ringo still flashing peace signs. I just can’t tolerate it. John’s “Imagine” makes me angry.
If I must listen to the Beatles, I chose Abbey Road.
Musically I liked them better before they became hippies. To my ear they never improved on Love Me Do.
I Saw Her Standing There was a great early rock tune. Harked back more to the late 50s and early 60s than looked forward to the late 60s.
Ditto re: Abbey Road
Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way, to get back home
Sleep pretty darling, do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby
I wonder why people get so wound up over somebody else’s popular music. I didn’t think much of Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians, but I did not base my understanding of my parents’ generation on what I thought of “Stars Fell on Alabama”.
F*cking Guy Lombardo. Such a poseur.
I’ve run afoul of the Guy Lombardo fan club!
Garbage is not mediocre.
Paul is the irritating one to me, the others are non-entities to me.
He wrote Mull of Kintyre. Gets a pass for that if nothing else in my book.
I thought the real Paul died in a car crash and was replaced by an MI6 agent.
“I thought the real Paul died in a car crash and was replaced by an MI6 agent”
How did you know that? You can’t play CDs backwards.
Bare feet in the crosswalk? “Turn me on, dead man”.
Beach Boys ftw.
Barbershop quintet.
Oo,oo,OOO…Ah.ah, ah.
Most overrated band in history.
Beatles didn’t think so.
Fair enough. But compared to today’s trash, they’re Bach, Beethoven and Mozart all rolled into one dithyrambic mass.
So true. Thanks for reminding me of the bigger picture. The Beatles often wrote great melodies.
Melody hardly exists in rap or electronic dance music. It’s becoming a lost art.
Sometimes when I’m out, I’ll hear an old song that I used to dislike. Say, something by that sappy band Journey. Then I will realize how much more I prefer it to the terrible shit you often hear. At least it has a melody and chord changes!
Ha. Don’t I know it. I used to mock Journey relentlessly, and now they sound like ambrosia, or even Ambrosia.
Don’t stop believing
Separate Ways is probably my fave.
Rap is where music goes to die. Techno probably can only be appreciated on ecstasy.
But modern pop doesn’t have melodies either, let alone complex ones. It’s just whimpering to minor chords.
There is a near fugue in that pet sounds album. It’s Al least a hint of a fugue. Which is cool but there are better fugues out there.
if you think about it rock really had no where to go after pet sounds. A simple form more tinkering in the studio, hit or miss live, now what?
its an ok genre of western music that unfortunately was really influenced by African drum rhythms.
Heater skelter is the only song I really liked. And my first exposure to it was a Motley Crue cover hehe
A similar memory was a relatively young teacher in junior high school getting all starry eyed and lubed up when she talked about how dreamy and perfect JFK had been. It was weird for me then, and repulsive for me now to remember.
John Lennon was a bad person, bad father and husband. It was karma that he fell prey to that psychotic harpy.
“Woman is the nigger of the world.” Jesus, John, what did you smoke over there in India, petrol fumes? Yoko fed him that one, and he went: “Woah, that’s deep!”
I hear you there. I hate the boomer music you hear playing over the PA in certain restaurants and the like. I do like 70’s classic rock (Aerosmith, Led Zepplin) but rarely listen to it. I also like disco and funk(I know its uncool but I don’t care). The problem with boomer music its usually the soft crap that is neither hard rock or disco/funk. Its stuff like Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, or Elton John. I really hate this shit and hated it even as a kid. If I hear it in restaurant, I will ask for them to change… Read more »
Seriously? You hear “Only the Good Die Young,” “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” or “Benny and the Jets” and pull up stakes rather than tuck into your steak? And I though I had high standards.
I do respect the boomers in certain ways. I have no knowledge of the 60’s boomers. But I do remember the boomers who came of age in the early to mid 70’s. I admire their dynamism and spirit of independence. They ALL emphatically got their driver’s licenses on their 16th birthdays and youth car culture existed at the time (this died by the early 80’s). They were always going places with their friends in cars. A young guy in Columbus OH in 1975 would throw his kit in the boot and drive out to California at the drop of a… Read more »
In my neck of the rust belt, everything you described continued right through the 80’s – driver’s license on their 16th birthday, car culture, etc.
” A young guy in Columbus OH in 1975 would throw his kit in the boot and drive out to California at the drop of a hat. “
As a California native I wish he, and thousands of others, hadn’t.
Wow. A Californian complaining about somebody moving to his state. Usually, it’s tuther way ’round.
Is this revenge? “See? How do you like it when a bunch of assholes move in and screw up your state?”
Yeah, but some tennybopper from Columbus ca. 1975 was far less likely to be a D-head than an 8-ball from Santa Cruz in 2024.
I got my driver’s license on my 16th birthday and I registered for the draft on my 18th.
As a grilling boomer who enjoys sportsball, I haven’t read enough – in fact, I haven’t read anything – about the effect of the draft for men born 1948-1955 on why we are the way we are.
Late boomer/early X seems distinct from later X, like the border is misplaced. We younger ones are more like the stereotype, losers regardless of status. Our slight elders of Kamala/Walz’s age are management enthusiasts, the first cultural and corporate enforcers of “woke” as we know it, etc. They’re on a mission. Millennials embraced and extended it. We ducked while it flew over. My excuse for X never taking its turn at the helm of government has always been that the few of us with any interest in politics are either too “woke” or too “based” for mass appeal, a generation… Read more »
Resignation turned to anger if you ask me. The Wreckers. Losing depends on your aims.
Generation X was a term coined by Douglas Coupland in the title of one of his books. It is appropriate that a fictional universe defines this (real) generation. Like fiction, Gen X is an open book, easily readable. Also like fiction, Gen X deserves a happy ending for having slaved under the shadow of the Boomers for so long.
— Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)
Yep. Big difference between early and late Xers, and probably between early and late (male, the females are all hopeless) Millennials too. Ron DeSantis is one of the few Xers who went into politics (more or less) successfully. Most Xers who are strivers went into business (Elon anyone?!) and sports (Tiger, Phil). But I also agree and witness that the vast majority of Xers settled for mid level, often engineering or technical sales, jobs rather than making it to the very top.
Xers currently really are the very backbone of everything that still works.
When they retire, we’re all f*cked.
I am at the very leading edge of the millennial generation. Millennials think that having a credential equals competence. Sometimes that’s true, but more often than not in this day and age it simply means the credential holder is good at ticking boxes and following orders. On the whole, my generation is not good at critical thinking or navigating uncertain waters. Even worse, many millennials think that having a magic piece of paper makes them smart. Personally, I’m not excited about my generation taking the helm. All the worst people I’ve worked for have been millennials, and as you point… Read more »
I’m noticing that a lot of older Millennials are finally figuring out that their credentials do not count for much, and that nothing beats experience. Unfortunately, it seems like they are about ten years behind where they could have been. I find they tend to lean on Gen X a lot. The Boomers I worked with really had a hard time letting the Millennials get experience and take on more responsibility. Not sure why, but now that the Boomers are retiring, Millennials seem to be doing better.
Not exactly. We just got tired of their constant absences and “work-life balance” issues, as if we didn’t have to deal with that ourselves.
Work life balance! Haha! So femmy no?
“Sometimes that’s true, but more often than not in this day and age it simply means the credential holder is good at ticking boxes and following orders. On the whole, my generation is not good at critical thinking or navigating uncertain waters. Even worse, many millennials think that having a magic piece of paper makes them smart.”
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-soler?trk=public_post_feed-actor-name
I’m optimistic, but with a realistic bent. I share your worry about our generation, as they seem to be the living manifestation of an appeal to authority (see above LinkedIn).
I just read an AEI op-ed about the current lack of Navy missile production. This op-ed was written by an early Millennial Karen Swampite with all the right credentials in her bio.
Apparently, having the right credentials absolves one of clicking on the “Spelling & Grammar” button in Word to address incomplete sentences, run-on sentences, poor grammar, lack of punctuation, and obvious typos.
This swill is what our betters in DC are publically posting, yet people still wonder why the GAE is falling apart.
No way Karen Swampite is a real name.
The woman’s real name is Mackenzie Eaglen.
Here is the link to her recent AEI/National Interest op-ed about Navy missile production:
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-u-s-navys-missile-production-problem-looks-dire/
I enjoy the fact there is a typo in the first two characters of the piece. Equally amusing is the fact the first run-on sentence is also the first paragraph of the piece.
Starting with a literal hundred word sentence, bold.
I think the hundred word sentence was by design to emphasize the number of inane bureaucratic steps in military acquisition.
You need Dramamine to read that thing. She must have graduated from the Moldbug writer seminar.
I work in the DoD Acquisitions world. This is an article written for an internal audience, not for public discernment. DoD Acq is jargon-laden and unnecessarily complex, probably like in academia, to keep normal people away. Her larger point that DoD acquisitions is increasingly a process-obsessed self-licking ice cream cone is valid and *that* condition illustrates our increasingly obvious clown world conditions in DoD. High-fives over Aegis weapons system single intercept events is criminally stupid, considering that the missiles are effectively irreplaceable, terribly expensive, and … the ships firing them cannot rearm at sea, but instead must leave the area… Read more »
The entire DoD is a huge trough that contractors feed off of. The amount of grift is nauseous. It would almost be better that jetrison the rotten thing and build an actual military but that will never happen.
The old-timers knew how to write a run-on. It’s a lost art. Now we’re all supposed to be Hemingway lol.
Jeepers that’s a long sentence!
Perhaps “op-ed’s” are printed without an editor? It does however read like an ill educated person vomited on a keyboard.
“Swampite! Must be Italian…”
If you’ve got a serious head on your shoulders, you don’t even need a Spelling & Grammar button.
Vance is a perfect example of what you are talking about, which is why Zman’s enthusiasm for him continues to be baffling. Maybe its a generational thing to notice, but everything about JD screams inauthentic managerial box-checker who will say ro do whatever it takes to advance up the ladder. Soft military service bona-fide for admittance to the wing of the uniparty still open to young white guys, check. Diverse lawyer girl-boss wife to verify that he isn’t one of those types, check. Buttboy for Thiel to get his foot in the door, check. Slamming Trump as Hitler when it… Read more »
Come on, man, you’are dulling my buzz, and I would wager that the filtered diverse girl boss (with kids) will do a better job keeping us out of WWIII
If Vance were replaced by someone you would find satisfactory, who would that someone be?
This is a reality based question, so it has to be a real person, not a shopping list of ideas, attitudes and physical characteristics.
There’s no gotcha there. I’m the most stringent Vance hater around—more than any Democrat, I’d think, because I hated him when the TV said to like him—and I said before it happened that he was the best available VP pick. He and Lake are the only “name” Republicans whose careers fit the gig and who aren’t presently anti-Trump. Lake is a goofy retard, a stereotypical Western shrew-publican straight from the ’80s with no appeal to men or their wives, so take the glow-creep. At least he can do media. I don’t think that’s how Vance got in, that Trump and… Read more »
Embrace whiteness? Sure, but you have to do your embracing in the real world.
I’m beginning to use interactions to push strict white nationalism. I don’t go there right away, obviously but I see it now as a reality not as a goal.
the idea of white nat needs to be a thing people have heard about.
My ambition is not that high. I’m trying to get the idea of white, all by itself, to be heard about. It’s tough sledding when people feel they have to recoil in horror when the subject is hinted at.
“This is a reality based question, so it has to be a real person, not a shopping list of ideas, attitudes and physical characteristics.” My thought exactly. I’m seeing a lot of easy sneers at Vance here. But I’m not seeing much in the way of hard thinking on the margin, in the real world, with real people, considering real trade-offs. We could do far worse than to get Trump reelected in Nov. 2024 and then have Vance step into Trump’s place sometime later. And, let’s be honest: we almost certainly will do far worse, and a lot of people… Read more »
That’s a solid summary of the situation.
A couple of observations. Whe he and Masters first surfaced as born again MAGA-ites, his VC story smelled. What company had he led or backed that is for real. In those days, I looked at that firm’s web site. It didn’t look accomplished at all. A year ago, as Masters sank and Vance took Ohio’s Senate seat, they gave it a makover to make it look more impressive, though it still lacks real merit. The biggest thing they have is that he is buddies with Thiel. The other thing I noticed was that during the Palestine OH fiasco he went… Read more »
Millennials and zoomers are in a two track world at this point. If you are a woman, or a non-white person, then yes, the credential equals competence. As long as you have that piece of paper, the system will take care of you. If you are a White man, well you’re probably not going to be able to get the credential, and even if you did, it doesn’t count for anything. So this means that the most resourceful and hardworking people of this cohort are forced to be resourceful, hardworking, and independent as they know the system and the society… Read more »
But in the trades the blue collar white guy is still 95% plus of the work force. That is one place young white men can still excel. Of course you have to work long hours in shitty conditions, but it is what it is.
Don’t see any girl bosses or magical nuggras restoring power in the Southeast right now. Sure see a ton of big corn fed white boys busting hump working 20 hour days in the heat and humidity – making 90 dollars an hour or more.
Except blue collar trades is not where the power resides. It is not where policy is made. Working in a trade doesn’t protect your community from the brutalities of the imperial regime. I am sure that the regime would be quite fine with permanently relegating Whites to lower class status, working in the trades, while opening the floodgates in their neighborhoods to Haitians and opioids. Well, we should have a problem with that.
The people who provide energy, food, transport, and modern-world infrastructure could have a lot of power if they would realize that and organize to use it.
Peasant revolutions are not really a thing and never have been.
I’m not sure that the people who run the power grid or cell tower network are classified as peasants. They have a lot of leverage that peasants did not have.
If you want to see what happens when these people who supposedly hold all this leverage get together to try to change things in opposition to the elites, look at the trucker protests in Canada a few years ago. They don’t really have the leverage you think they do after all.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with going into blue collar work but it’s not a place you can accumulate power or influence. We still need elites. If you are a smart White kid who can get into Harvard, somehow, you should go to Harvard.
The only way you are ever going to get near the levers of power is if you are connected already to the levers of power…I don’t care how smart, wealthy, good looking etc etc if you are White and think even a little bit like us you won’t get anywhere near power… You and TempoNick really need to reexamine your thought process because its lacking real world application…
have you ever heard of a guy named JD Vance? maybe he should have stayed in Ohio and become a plumber.
And if you think he’s one of us you are delusional…
Yes, we should all go to Harvard, hang out with homos, and marry ugly Indians.
Of course, individuals in blue collar work won’t acquire any of this power you speak of. The fact is that the blue collar workers and the more professional classes who keep the energy, transportation, communications infrastructure running could have a lot of power if they ever get around to organizing in a big way instead of piecemeal protests here and there. Whether or not that is possible, I cannot say. But the potential is there. The first thing to do is note what the truckers did and don’t try that again. At any rate, things have to get considerably worse… Read more »
They rarely succeed outright if by that we mean formally taking power. However, they sometimes scare the power structure badly enough to produce positive change. I’d be interested to see what would happen if the CFWBs (corn-fed white boys) deprived the megalopolei of food, energy and utilities.
Half these guys that comment here, if not more, would be in a world of hurt if we did that…
Hell, they could all come over to your place for a bowl o’ soup and a couple of biscuits.
I would feed them Brother.never have turned any away from my fire ..
Longshoremen?
I have a nephew in that part of the world who is one of those ‘big, corn-fed white boys’ doing just that type of work (HVAC). He’s one of those kids who truly gives me hope. Football star in high school, went to college on scholarship, quit college because he hated it. Worked his ass off in the HVAC world until he could start his own company, then worked even harder. Company is growing fast due to his friendliness, hard work ethic and happy willingness to do right by his customers. His new bride is working just as hard to… Read more »
Millennials were the first generation to experience the effects of AA. So there is a mixture of pathological mediocrity and actual meritocracy. This goes for *all* the races—as befits their “talented” percentages. Hence the confusion in the various commentary comparing the abilities/contributions of Millennials, Gen X’ers, and Boomers. Bottom line is that—despite a general lessening of talent across the board—the best of the best of the Millennials are still as good as the best of the best of the Boomers in their day. The playing field has only changed. Millennials now swim/compete in an ocean filled with mediocrity—and the rules… Read more »
Nonsense. GenX experienced all the joy of AA as others got promoted in a very tough environment as boomers were busy asset stripping everything and not training anyone.
BUT
Millennials either fully believe the AA nonsense or realize it’s all bull and they just have to play the game better. “oh sure, I’m 1/1064″ indian” with a completely straight face. Something GenX would never think to do (well they might now, but it’s too late for them now)
We must agree to disagree. Your hate of Boomers has nothing to do with what I said. Boomers stripped nothing, except in your eyes. I assume you feel some Boomer above you “did you dirt”. Too bad, deal with it. They (Boomers) were however the recipient of “good times” whereas succeeding generations were less so. I assume you were of that follow-on generation, hence the blame game you are into. AA probably did affect Gen-X’s to an extent, but was endemic by the time of Millennials entering the workforce. Assuming Millennials approved of such is painting with too broad a… Read more »
@feles – i’m not sure if this is relevant but this post reminds me of what you’re saying: https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/the-professions-are-becoming-party
Gotta catch ‘em all!™
I concur. I’m a similar age and I notice a lack of real world expirence in the lives of my peer group. Millennial get the creditentals but seem more self absorbed and living an adolescent existence.
No offense meant to you at all, but the worst generation of ‘Murcans is definitely the millennial. I find them insufferably entitled, lazy and stupid.
It’s more than credentialism, it’s downright symbol fetishism, or totemism. Millenials don’t understand the difference between a symbol and its referent. That’s why they think by manipulating symbols they change reality. Give the BOM a conviction in a kangaroo court that Joe Stalin would have been ashamed of, and now he’s the convicted felon. Blow up the charge into three dozen sub charges and you can never shut up about the 30 plus felonies. Have a Haitian press a button on an app and he’s now a legal immigrant and nobody has the right to complain about him. It’s pure… Read more »
I just want to focus on Vance and not get into the debate about generations. Vance can process information, probably large amounts of information, and arrive at decisions on that basis. This can’t be done by Biden or by Harris, and probably not by Trump either. This is a key asset. If you’re talking of merit, Vance probably has it.
In other words, Vance has the abilities that were commonplace among American politicians prior to Bill Clinton.
Besides coming up from nothing, Vance has two very interesting – and encouraging – qualities. First, despite absorbing the feminine and liberal rhetoric of the establishment (thus his early dislike of Trump), he grew out of it and saw the reality of life. I’d suspect that many Millennial men had a similar experience. Second, as Z notes, he’s rejecting the managerial class that he so desperately wanted to join and that offers him an easy path to fame and fortune. King Cobra is doing the same. I’d suspect that these Millennial men from outside the tribe understand that they’ll never… Read more »
I think the real reason for the class betrayal is that Vance (unlike the Boomers and X’ers) is young enough to spend all day everyday on the internet, and over the past 8 years he’s gradually become radicalized by all of our hilarious memes.
Don’t underestimate mocking.
Grok the mock…
I haven’t been able to get past the manufactured nature of Vance. How his memoir, when he was an unknown nobody, instantly became a glowingly reviewed NYT bestseller, with a movie version directed by Ron Howard. You might have noticed the NYT ignores big selling conservative books of which it disapproves. Perhaps there was a shortage of memoirs written by unknown, self absorbed people (that’s a joke). How he somehow became a venture capitalist with no evident prior experience in finance. His backing by certain people in the national security state/globohomo tech panopticon. His first job out of Yale, working… Read more »
I’m not sure what is up with Vance either, but if a dissident were to infiltrate the elite this is how it would have to be done. Suck up and play ball until you get to a point where you can grab real power.
The interactions between Harris and Walz are straight out of a 1980s or 1990s sitcom or TV commercial that was written for Gen Xers and Boomers. On the one hand you have the goofball husband and on the other hand you have the wise and kind wife. The husband screws up and the wife fixes things. The best thing the husband can do is just shut up and listen to his wife and do what she says. Etc. They leaned into a surprisingly old-timey dynamic. I don’t know if this was intentional or just what fell out considering the sensibilities… Read more »
It reminds me of the show The Jeffersons. The neighbor family was a black woman and a goofy white guy. What made the show funny was the absurdity of the race relations. In a better age, our betters could laugh along with the prols about such things. In this age, where our betters are incapable of laughter, the humor for us in the utter seriousness with which they present absurdist race relations.
Nice pull. Totally forgot about that couple, but you’re dead on.
Point taken but the black woman and goofy white guy were the in-laws. The neighbor was a goofy British white guy. I had to include white because these days a “British” guy isn’t necessarily white.
Which is why I use the word “English” to describe such people
Remember the zebra? I never understood that. He was a white guy. Even as a 8 year old I knew that a black and a white priduced a mullato not another white
i watched that and good times and then the Cosby show which was the apex of the black family that “moved on up”.
never did happen in real life did it?
“On the one hand you have the goofball husband and on the other hand you have the wise and kind wife.”
Yes. I’d say about 90% of broadcast advertising uses this template. Once you notice it, you can’t unnotice it. It drives me nuts.
Invariably, the “solution” proffered by the “intelligent” woman is to call some white guy to fix the problem…
White guy?? Please tell me where I can watch this dynamic. Every last ad I see – home center, laboratory, pest control, banking, veterinarian, etc., etc., ad nauseum – depicts a black woman as the problem solver.
Increasingly true, but the template began decades ago with the “Honey, I can’t fix the leaking faucet!!! What will I ever do???”
“Don’t worry, dear. I’ll just call Joe Dickmore Plumbing and Heating, and THEY’LL get it done!”
“Please tell me where I can watch this dynamic.”
Turn off your TV, discontinue your newspaper subscription, go out and visit in person any of those venues. You will see that any successful one is run by a White person. Sometimes that person is also a female, as in Veterinarian practice.
Here in my burg, an Hispanic community—with the exception of restaurants—you’ll find a White guy behind the venture the overwhelming amount of time.
I don’t watch TV. The ads I see are entirely online. And everything else you described tracks with my experience.
Yeah, it’s hard to lock yourself in a closet. Apology for any implied disrespect. I, myself, do not follow the above advice. I’m pretty much immune these days to such poz. About the only thing I immediately turn off is Black/White miscegenation.
I wish I could face the poz with your serenity. I begin muttering lengthy strings of forbidden words with every magical negro I see.
One of the initial “quirky” conversations between the two released by the campaign was literally ripped form a sitcom, complete with Walz saying he liked mayo tacos.
I think they are genuinely shocked white guys find him repulsive.
That means the only knowledge they have of us is what they get from tv and online.
OT, but I thought worth the mention.
I think it was BCE that had a story that related that citizens in the ravaged area of Appalachia, have begun to lynch looters and hang a sign on them reading “looter”.
While I can’t confirm this,(apparently 3 goblins were dispatched), I do like stories with happy endings.
Remember boys and girls, no one (from the G),is coming to save you.
Its going to be you and your neighbors that will get you through the current shit show.
Looting in Appalachia: Hillbilly Roulette
As someone like our host who lives in Appalachia, I can attest that everyone here has guns, no one likes outside bad influences and the holes in the hollers can make people disappear.
So as the kids say, F— around and find out. Sounds like some degenerates found out.
I sure hope this is a straight bill.
It’s also weird that the Harris/Walz ticket mentions that they grew up “middle class” every chance they get. A lot of the lemmings on the left are running around saying the Democrats are the party that helps the middle class and the working class. If we go by conventional markers of being middle class up through 2008 (having enough in your savings account to cover the cost of a new transmission, annual family vacations, home ownership etc.), there are far fewer people in the middle class and the concept is on its way out entirely. In the coming US you’ll… Read more »
“It’s also weird that the Harris/Walz ticket mentions that they grew up “middle class” every chance they get.” What’s the old saw, “…you use that word, but I don’t think you know what it means…” ”Middle Class” is simply a statistical abstraction for taking the three or so middle quintiles out of a rank ordered population and calling them “Middle Class”. Ranked in terms of SES. Duplicitous politicians use this description to paint themselves as knowledgeable of the life “problems/experiences” endured by the bulk of Americans. They are not. Problem is, given the wealth disparity and inflation we’ve encountered over… Read more »
I hear you. I grew up with an experience much closer to Vance’s than Harris’ or Walz’s. For some reason back in the early 70’s I got it in my head that I wanted to identify as “Middle Class” rather than poor White Trash, but I finally realized that while my home/neighborhood/school experience and working at a hamburger joint starting at age 15 in order to eat had nothing in common with the doctor’s children my age at church. The rest of life I worked and studied around real Middle Class people, including Ivy Leaguers and others that graduated from… Read more »
“If we go by conventional markers of being middle class up through 2008 (having enough in your savings account to cover the cost of a new transmission, annual family vacations, home ownership etc.)”
…… cover the cost of a new transition, ……. FIFY
Another factor for the future of politics is that for a lot of right-wing millennials is that we remember an America before the time of overt Leftist insanity. Of course, it was still there in the 90s and 00s, but the Left was more secretive about their ambitions. Now it is nakedly put out for many to see. Seeing signs declaring “mass deportation” in the crowds gives one hope that moving forward the ideas of the Right will take more precedence in politics. Time will tell if this creates the changes needed to correct the course our nation is on.
Yes…our millennial kids are just starting to understand what they have gotten themselves into…..,.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BaxchRMuAZg
“Of course, it was still there in the 90s and 00s, but the Left was more secretive about their ambitions. Now it is nakedly put out for many to see. Seeing signs declaring “mass deportation” in the crowds gives one hope that moving forward the ideas of the Right will take more precedence in politics.”
I’m optimistic when I come here (Zblog) and I view more of the above link. Pete Q (Xer), the other guys millennials and zoomers. Maybe the OGC (Old Glory Club) isn’t an answer in and of itself…..but we need to organize.
I didn’t exist in the 70’s, but the so-called Reagan Revolution did beat a lot of that back, and it carried over into the 90s. Fraying by late 90s, then Dubya was enough of a disaster to provoke the reaction.
At least that’s how it looked on the ground. At the top, maybe something else was going on, idk. In hindsight, even Reagan looks like some sort of deal for ending the Cold War.
I can still remember reading hysterical liberal op-eds during Dubya’s reign.
The most amusing ones argued that the Dubya-aligned Christian Dominionists were going to turn the US into a totalitarian theocracy.
The Left has been hysterically railing against the specter of the Christian Right for over forty years now, since the heyday of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. However, the only political victory the tradcons can point to is on the abortion front, in finally getting Roe v. Wade overturned. On every other cultural front, it’s been a total rout in favor of the Left since 1980.
Squaring social conservatism with economic progress seems to be a difficult trick.You end up with wacky stuff like prosperity gospel, which just doesn’t work.
As a GenX with 3 GenZ children I feel qualified to judge GenZ as strange. Not really liberal, but strange, VERY VERY VERY strange. Hanging out on discord playing Call of Duty or Minecraft and calling each other faggots is, apparently, a fun Friday night. Unfortunately, my children also love to send me memes all day every day. Memes that I do not understand, but are, apparently, hilarious.
There seems to be a fine line between GenX and Millennial/GenZ recreation sensibilities wherein playing video games is viewed as either an absolutely normal form of entertainment and socializing, or the stupidest waste of time imaginable. Must have been people born before or after 1982 because friends a couple years older than me don’t ever play video games and everyone I know my age or younger spends most of their free time playing video games.
You must live in the city or suburb my kids had to much stuff to do that they only play video games rarely…They do use words faggot, n’gg*r, jew a lot when talking to or about people their age also the word boomer comes up a lot as well ..
Do realize that Kamala is known as “kneepads” because that it how she got to where she is today. The fact that she is the democratic nominee is the surest indicator that the office of president is just a front person. Its the system itself that actually runs things.
Do realize that Kamala is known as “kneepads”… This reminds me of some traumatic changes which dissidents ought to inject into the English language. One change is pronouncing the k in kneepads like the k in Knoblauch and Knofel, German words for garlic. When so pronounced, Kneepads has a guttaral stop (if I have the right term) at the beginning of her name, just like in the words kama and karma. If you mean to conform to conservative speech, write ‘nneepads’. So, now we have a nice aliteration in six syllables: Kneepads Kamala. Knee sounds like Knie, German for nnee,… Read more »
An innovation in this years’s race is that nobody likes any of these people. We side with them because we’re trapped. They’re given.
Literally no one voted for Kamala, Walz had to transcend (flee) his district to get to an electorate unwhite enough to accept him, and Vance is a gay op.
Trump is a giant, but he disappoints everyone—and he’s not supposed to be alive. The Republican convention was the hated Nikki’s debutante ball (or bat mitzvah), thwarted by an inch.
Our Democracy.
Trump was born in 1946, which makes him the first of the boomers. The Clintons (both) and Dubya were all born in 1946. The people born in the 1940’s had the world handed to them on a silver platter, and for the most part, they pissed on it. Walz’s problem is not that he is a Gen X. Its that he is a lazy leftist. He is a lot like Sanders in this regard. Most Gen X’ers are very individualists and, thus, not susceptible to the leftist collectivism espoused by Walz. Millennials are mediocre at best. They are the “follow… Read more »
The “greatest generation” would be more accurately called the most obedient generation, because the thing it was greatest at was following orders. Sometimes that was good, and sometimes it wasn’t.
Yes. My father was WW2 and mother the first of the Silents. I agree they were the obedient generation. They clicked their heels. The only generation I ever liked was my grandparents generation (born around 1900). They really were out on their own and did what was necessary to create their own lives. They were probably the last generation in this boat. The Silents were OK. I’m known many successful Silent entrepreneurs and business owners. They tend to be quite”Heinleinian’ in their style, politics, and worldview. Gen X’ers have some Silent vibe in them, but not as much as I… Read more »
What is the generation prior to the Greatest Generation called? That was the last tough cohort of whites. Since then it’s been all downhill.
I don’t think they have a name. People were not into this generational stuff then.
It’s the Lost Generation, immortalized in many literary works of the 1920’s. According to Strauss and Howe, Lost and Generation X share the “Nomad” archetype. There are certainly parallels.
Previous to the Lost is what Strauss and Howe call the Missionary generation. They share the “Prophet” archetype with the Boomers/
“Hmmmm. Who is this who is so wise in the ways of generations?”
According to Strauss and Howe, Greatest and Millennial generations, being four generations apart, are of the same “Hero” archetype – obedient, more collective, less individualistic.
I didn’t read the book, but the Ron Howard movie “Hillbilly Elegy” was unmitigated dogshit. Truly awful episodic sop about his druggie mom and his tough grandma who teaches him, “there are good terminators, bad terminators, and neutral terminators.”
What kind of guy writes his memoirs in his 20s, anyway? He is a Peter Thiel puppet is he not?
Same thing with Zero. They must have a “made man” PR template they use for anybody they are trying to introduce into the mainstream. Especially a ghost written book so that people talk about it all the time. It’s probably a good PR strategy, until you catch on to it and realize how fake it all is.
In the era of our ancestral evolution (predominantly small tribal units), the smartest and strongest rose to positions of leadership because that enhanced the survival prospects of the group. Then civilization and modernity happened, and man-made selection gave us Bush-the-Retarded, Fake & Gay Obama, a pedophile dementia patient, and the soon to be elected first Prostitute President. The West has earned its demise, and we cannot talk out way out of this dilemma. Only the resurrection of hard men can save us now.
I’ll be a bit pedantic. Walz is a Boomer. He was born in 1964. Technically, Gen-X starts in 1965.
He’s also older than Kamala. Looks like Gen X will get nothing, again.
You are correct. Harris is an X’er, sort of.
The birth year 1964 shades into both cohorts, I’ve always thought. They’re the latest boomers and the earliest X-ers (a term that never caught on with me, and seems meaningless—although maybe that’s the idea).
For an individual born that year, I speculate that the parents’ generation might speak to whether you metastasized into a boomer or X-er.
People born from 1960 to 1964 are the Dazed and Confused generation. That tiny, lost generation that was in high school from 1974 to 1982, at least outside of the coasts. The 80s didn’t hit the Midwest and South until ~1983.
Thank you. The “Boomer” epithet is sometimes understandable, but it paints with way too wide a brush. In my experience there is a lot of variation within that “Dazed & Confused” group, and not a terribly noticeable amount in common with the Woodstock or Yuppie types.
Yup. The Dazed and Confused combine the narcissism of the Boomers with the cynicism of the X-ers. Perfect dictator material, as in Sulla.
For them “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” should be considered a documentary. Actually, the book on which it was based was a (mostly) serious take that Hollywood turned into a joke.
I have siblings born in that 5 year ‘last of the boomers'(60-64) group, while I am solidly Gen-X and have another Gen-X sibling. Even within a group of siblings, there are generational differences. Coming of age in the late 70s vs the late 80s early 90s was a stark cultural difference. One of the biggest was the mass movement of women into the workforce in the 1970s.
Trump is also a Boomer, being born in June of 46.
Yeah aren’t Walz and Kamala basically the same age?
Joining in pedantry: Trump, born in 1946, is a Baby Boomer.
Also First Stage Boomers were Presidents Bill Clinton and GW Bush, born in 1946.. VP Gore was a year younger, c. 1947 birth, I think. Joe Biden is what my mother would call a War Baby, so is John Kerry, and so am I. My March 1945 birthday was just a month before Pres FDR passed away and my freshman year in college was indelibly marked with JFK’s assassination. So, I have been incredibly grateful all my long life that my childhood thru teen yrs was such a blast. The future looked bright. Communism was a bad thing but shocked… Read more »
Correct. We’re going to get completely skipped over.
We can look forward to a knock on the door by a nice Millennial who explains that we are old and expensive, so we must get into the suicide pod for some Canadian health care.
Canada leads Texas in lethal injections by probably two orders of magnitude. One interesting difference is that you have to be convicted of aggravated murder in Texas. No such fuss in Canada, being depressed is plenty qualification.
It is hard to overestimate the wickedness of what is happening in the West these days
Canada has doctors literally suggesting that people kill themselves instead of billing services to their health care system. Sarah Palin was prophetic. Of course, this was always the plan.
And people think you’re exaggerating. Mind-blowing times…
I can imagine what any “suicide hot line” in Canada will be like: Caller: “I’m thinking of ending my life!” Operator: “Why’d you call then, sounds like you’re completely normal!”
2023 “MAID” stats should be coming out soon, but my estimate is that Canadian doctors have humanely murdered about 15.5k people that year, which would rank it as the 4th leading cause of death.
And no one is talking about it
Don’t kid yourself, this happens in the US as well. We simply don’t report or acknowledge such. To a certain extent I’m ambiguous now that I’m “at that age”.
I keep hearing that John Mellencamp song “Jack & Diane.”
The specific refrain goes:
“Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.”
Well, I’ve no interest in being bed ridden and in need of a bed pan or a diaper should such occur.
Dosing up on morphine and the like for terminal cancer patients is as old as modern medicine yes. The difference is that MAID is being streamlined in Canada, as I understand it is being talked about almost like a form of therapy. And it has been used, or at least suggested, for cases such as depression and PTSD. I’ve even heard rumors of it as “treatment” for homelessness. What’s more, this is part of a pattern. Modern managerials in the West have a profoundly disturbing fascination with death. My position is that actual euthanasia should be completely banned. Same with… Read more »
Cancer patients at home, when receiving their monthly allotment of pain medicine, are warned to be very careful with those meds. If they take too many at once, they might go to sleep pain-free but never wake up…
This is one of the many ways they turn our virtue into a vice. There are certain very specific circumstances where I support a right to die in dignity and not in horrific pain or doped up on IV morphine. Like you have an 85 year old with stage 4 cancer, can’t get out of bed and is in horrible pain and has 3 months to live. I have so much sympathy for such a person. Sadly, you give an inch and they will take a mile. You approve the above person making the decision to check out and the… Read more »
Turning virtues into vices is a common perversion of leftist regimes
I have no doubt my Millennial son-in-law would gas me to death quicker than you could say “Doctor Mengele.”
(He’s attending an elite med school, BTW…)
Look to see if their anesthesiologists are trained in using Zyklon-B. Traditional medicine is important!
It’s for your own good he will say…
Yep. The Boomers will push the debt to GDP up to a point that even the bond market can’t handle it. Just as we retire and the Boomers die off, the debt crisis will finally hit. Social Security and Medicare will be in tatters.
Karl Denninger has been talking about this for years. CMS is the problem. Eliminate the medical oligopoly and the government budget will decrease by $2 trillion right off the bat. Doing the following will actually improve health care and eliminate the deficit.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231949
The US spends 18% of GDP on healthcare. The rest of the developed world spends ~10% with better results. We could solve all of our budget problems by just having a normal healthcare system.
You have to wonder to what degree this is caused by the army of (((ambulance chasers))) and medical fraud we have in the US. Indians are well known for the medical fraud, though they aren’t the only ones. Every lawsuit involves 10s of thousands of Dollars in fraudulent medical care. All the aliens from Central and South America in the hospitals running up all of our bills.
The whole medical industry is plagued with grift.
Here in the Bay Area I see advertisements for ambulance chasers frequently. None of them are Jewish and many are Asian. The most prominent is a Vietnamese lady named Anh.
Ah. She’s an Anhbulance chaser…
Ambulance chasing is rather low level for Jewish lawyers. They’re more apt to go into mergers & acquisitions, trusts and estates, etc.
“The rest of the developed world spends ~10% with better results.” First, you’re talking Western world. Second, you need to define “better results”. Certainly, ability to obtain medical care quickly and efficiently is a societal good. But is that always the case? Having recently had a bad situation that required more than a GP, I investigated such treatment in GB (NHS) during my research into the disease and the current best treatment/diagnostic recommendations published—one article even published in the BJM. Seems like they have their problems there as well. The basis of such being denial of treatment via long waits… Read more »
Britain has a private healthcare system as well. There are health insurance schemes and private hospitals.BUPA is one of the larger providers.Most NHS professors have a private practice .
Medical malpractice is not particular to the UK as can be inferred by the horror stories about US medicine. Waiting times are also not an issue solely for the Europeans if you include the Americans who choose not to have treatment because they can’t afford it.
I don’t think it’s technical at all. He doesn’t have a genx vibe.
Hillary’s VP had the authentic Gen X inauthenticity. Never checked his age, but his persona seemed crafted by a middle aged career woman who thought she’s still cool because in 1988 some guy left his Soul Asylum tape in her car stereo and she listened to the rest of that side, so when they got famous she was an old fan. It’s why nobody remembered him, even when he was still around. “Beto” is built to mine that strip too (while pretending to be Mexican). There’s nothing there. Walz is millennial Twitter harpy as boomer commercial dad. Nothing about him… Read more »
I was born in 1964, so I’m old enough to remember how prosperous it used to be in the Mid Ohio Valley. There were 2 integrated steel mills within a half hours drive; we had the C&O railroad and the biggest single rail terminal in the Western World just down the road as well. There were 2 oil refineries, glass factories, and just up the river they made rail cars. There were so many opportunities for a young man . Then in the early 1970s it began to whither away, and now it’s all gone, and the only news this… Read more »
Come on, buddy!
Tell me any complicated machine sold in this country, or medicine as well, that aren’t made in China. Are the factories coming back to make that stuff? Hell no. And without it the country is done. The day is coming when no one will accept the US Dollar as payment.
Coalclinker-
I don’t disagree.
Given recent events we are minutes away from WW3 going hot.
Gas at $50/gallon before the election is one of the milder potential scenarios.
When that fiat greenback approaches zero, that $50/gal of gasoline will seem cheap. Everything sold in this country is Made In China. The collapse will be due to the inability to buy the junk and the parts to maintain it, and that is EVERYTHING. And those who require life-extending drugs will not be in a good situation either when 91% of our medications are imported.
Based.
Tim Walz is a member of Generation X? He looks old enough to be a member of the Silent Generation.
I know a lot of early to mid Gen X’ers as well as very late boomers who just look old these days. Unfortunately, Tim Walz is very representative of his age cohort in physical appearance.
I have thought about this many times over the years. Events of recent years have probably disabused him to some extent, but I think that in his bones Trump still believes too much in his bones in what he learned in fifties-era civics class to ever be the American Pinochet the left imagines him to be. That will have to come from someone younger, who has been more disillusioned from a younger age.
A very good insight. Same problem I experience. I grew up in a different time and hence country. Hard to shake those formative years. You’d not want me to lead a revolution as I carry too much baggage and oft times my mind is in that other world. Best the least knowledgeable of those years leads the way as those times will never be recoverable and therefore a possible hinderance to creation of a renewed society based on new ideas and virtues fitting of the times and needs.
Interesting. Harris “ BORN and raised outside the country”…
if so, we will have crossed a constitutional barrier seemingly without a peep.
I think there’s a very real possibility that’s the case. Here’s an article pointing out that Nikki Haley wasn’t really eligible to be President either under the “natural-born citizen” clause.
https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/01/the-constitution-absolutely-prohibits-nikki-haley-from-being-president-or-vice-president/
The definition’s a little unclear but apparently the term was meant to imply American citizens born to American citizens and not anchor babies like Nimrata and Kamalatoe.
McCain was born out of the US. I don’t believe the issue has ever been fully adjudicated, but jus sanguinis would seem to cover the subject. Now, I don’t disagree with your point – but I would point to a certain Barry as proving this is a decided issue.
But then again, the governor of Hawaii swore he know of His (sic) birth. I believe doves flew, rainbows shined, the very sea parted for His entrance.
The issue with McCain and Haley are different. A nature born citizen is one born upon American soil or soil controlled by America such as the “Canal Zone”. Therefore, under this interpretation, McCain was eligible for the Presidency, Haley not. Haley, like Cruz, are citizens who were “naturalized” through one or more of their parents. When a citizen has a child overseas, she/he merely goes to the nearest embassy and has it recorded. They then issue a passport for the child. I still have my mother’s passport when I was a baby. In those days, they simply took a picture… Read more »
I posted before the Haley issue was concerned. Haley was born in the US, just like Harris (supposedly) was. Of course, the anchor baby should have no right to citizenship, but it is what it is. She is absolutely qualified, or am I missing something?
To be clear, I believe anchor baby is insanity. But am I missing something else about Haley? She was born, thus natural-born, here.
No. “I” did not investigate Haley, but based my response upon RDittmar comment and *assumed* Haley was born outside US territory or some such thing. My apologies to the group. I usually research the original comment. Indeed, if you drop out upon US territory, you are eligible to run for the office. It matters not who your parents were except…
This might be reconsidered/challenged against, say, foreign diplomats and their foreign spouses who are not considered under the jurisdiction of the US given diplomatic immunity and such things.
Every time Kamala gets up and says “I was raised in a middle class home” I get the urge to yell “IN CANADA.” Spending significant time outside the country you’re running to govern should be counted as a massive negative, and nobody’s been willing to hang that albatross around her neck.
That would mean acknowledging Saint Obama’s own short-comings.
Harris was born in Oakland in 1964 to foreigners. Indian mom and Jamaican dad, both grad students at UC-Berkeley. She has citizenship solely by virtue of being born in the U.S. Spent her teen years in Canada with her mom so not really culturally American.
The Zman is onto something with the managerial vs. cultural divide.
Who will answer the question: did Kamala’s mother become a Canadian citizen? If so, did that transfer that citizenship to Kamala and her sister? From what I’ve read about the mother it seems like she was very bright and ambitious, got a good job in Canada. Did she stay there after Kamala went off to college at Howard U. in DC? Was Kamala registered as a foreign student at Howard? Sounds like Obama at Occidental. No records released in his case, either. Same kind of muddying the waters of the US Constitution’s requirement that the presidential candidate shall be a… Read more »
The logic as explained to me seemed simple, but I’m not a Constitutional scholar. If you drop out on US soil, you’re “born a citizen”. (Seems like most countries do not do this.). Same with Canada as Ted Cruz showed us when running for the Presidential nomination. He was a dual citizen and, when that became a potential problem in the eyes of opponents, he made great effort to reject formally his Canadian citizenship to Canada in writing. So what other classes of citizen are recognized? Well, there are those immigrants who receive residency and 5+ years later apply for… Read more »
Bear in mind I’m Canadian. The few times I’ve heard Harris speak about American values even I cringe. She talks like she’s not learned anything since Canadian high school and how she was chosen to surf her way to this position baffles me. But then we are governed by her commie classmates here federally and are suffering because of it.
The destruction of America tracks with presidents sporting bizarre names–Obama, Kamala. Perhaps president Vontaze Burfict or Barkevious Mingo is in the cards up around the loony bend.
Born in an Oakland hospital to citizens of Jamaica and India on student visa’s —
That says “foreign overlord” is very much a thing.
That’s the anchor baby thing again. We have *millions* of them thanks to our open borders. Years ago, MX women crossed the border—legally, when in labor—to “drop one off” on American soil and take home baby and birth certificate. We tried here, and I believe elsewhere, to prohibit the issuing of birth certificates to such people, but the Fed’s blocked those laws.
The same in El Paso. 300 women a day get on the bus from Juarez, and cross the Rio Grande to drop one in an American hospital as if they were just going shopping at Target.
Now that’s what I call dropping a deuce…
I have a little hope for the future. The Jolly Heretic often talks about the general lowering of IQ. And how as a result, politics becomes less gentlemanly and more punitive. Like jailing opponents, etc, as we’re starting to see now. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, as in every other era, the younger generations are more leftist, so they always have the numbers in that demographic. But of the ones who are political, on what we call the left or right, are more strident and less gentlemanly about it. So we’re going to get our outrageously retarded leftists, but also our… Read more »
You been tellin’ me you were a genius since you were seventeen/
In all the time I’ve known you, I still don’t know what you mean.
“This is the main reason the system hates Trump; he betrayed his class….” I might quibble, Z – before shuffling off the the shuffleboards! (If I EVER get my hands on you, or your creepy jewish black homosexual brother – Cornelius Rye – you’ll get the very HELL of it!) And stay off the bloody grass!!! Trump is a business man. Part business exec, part sales professional, part grifter and showman. Elon Musk is much the same. Both men are driven machines to seek out opportunity and exploit it. Trump has more in common with the working man than he… Read more »
The power of the Boomers is like that of the undead; seemingly immortal. As a child of the 80s I naively thought a stake had been driven through their hippie hearts with Reagan’s 49 state win and the kids liking Alex P. Keaton instead of his hippy-dippy parents. Finally, we were going to send the Beatles and Woodstock and Hendrix back to hell! We like Journey, Survivor, and REO Speedwagon, godammit! But no! It’s the 80s that got flushed down the memory hole and since the 90s it was boomers resurrected stronger than ever! Still woodstock, still beatles, s still… Read more »
Unfortunately. I like late 80’s club music (Yeah I know this makes me lame). But that has definitely gone down the memory hole. Same for the early 80’s “new wave” (Martha Quinn MTV) music. We still have to hear that gawdawful 70’s music.
OT but seems to me that the Israel war is being merged into an AI marketing campaign Now that Jews are all over AI in America and seem to have cornered the market, at least in its infant state, their war effort at the direction of their amazing AI tech is on display and on offer to the world’s governments. Any buyers? LOL why it was so great to see Iran zip right past their defenses. A truly emperor has no clothes moment for the whole world to see. Now that Jews are considered losers, watch normie Americans jump off… Read more »
But where does his novel Hillbilly Elegy fit into this picture? Vance is an unusually talented millennial it would appear….
I think one reason I have always been warm to Vance is that he is an outlier. As an outlier, I appreciate what that means at a personal level. It has taken an extreme amount of self-discipline for Vance to get to this point.
Yeah, you’re kind of the JD Vance of the Dissident Right, except you weren’t the pudgy kid but the wrestler, which is why you saw through the shit a lot earlier than Vance.
Coming from nowhere towns gives some of us a power than people who grew up upper-middle class in nice suburbs generally don’t possess.
“kind of the JD Vance of the Dissident Right”
Z Man seems to be an inveterate bachelor so we probably don’t have to worry about any unsavory suprises about who he marries and reproduces with.
Although I do wish there were some little Zs running around… Maybe he can swing something like Peter B did, late in life…
Z would be a great father. He’d have a tough time being a husband with today’s women though. Born 50 years too late. He’d have been a great family man in 1935. The wife happy to, you know, be a wife and mother with a solid man for a husband. The kids wrestling in the small living room while Z drinks a Scotch and reads some book.
That post warms the cockles of my heart…
If I recall correctly, when he first moved to his mountain lair, Zman’s realtor and decorator were conspiring to find him a lady friend.
Any updates on that front Z? 🙂
That book has always rubbed me the wrong way. His grandmother supposedly set his grandfather on fire for coming home drunk. WHY is that story in the book? It happened long before he was born.
It’s one thing to hide from this kind of thing. It’s quite another to put it on display. It’s not even part of his story.
I remember reading it long ago. Even then, it seemed like it was written by a guy setting himself up for something bigger.
Same. It was billed as a great far-right novel but came off as hick-hating poverty porn. Also, it’s poorly and rather impersonally written – boring most of all. Back then, Vance wasn’t a name in politics, but considering him being groomed by the neocons and what followed since, I now suspect it’s ghost written. Also, and I’m not going to stop mentioning this, Vance wears eyeliner – probably his wife’s kohl. That negates anything based the guy has ever done or said. You want hillbilly porn? Read some of Joe Bageant’s West Virginia old columns, they’ve got a lot more… Read more »
I wonder what Jim Goad thinks of Vance. Hell, I wonder what Dwight Yoakam thinks of him.
“Elegy comes across as having been written by a guy who never lived the hillbilly life himself.”
He didn’t. He lived in working-class Ohio with his white trash mother and then his grandmother after they had moved out of Kentucky. So he wasn’t actually in the hollers with the ‘billies, but still had to deal with the white trash ways of his relatives.
It’s not even part of his story.
The book is about him and his family. His grandparents were part of his family.
Also, that’s the kind of story that tends to get told quite often in families. Serves as a warning of what women in the family are capable of, but also makes family lore more interesting
Yes. It’s told around the dinner table with the family, not in the NYT.
Obviously the man with the best-selling book had his own idea about that.
My paternal family lore revolves around bootlegging, running from the law, and ultimately racing sprint cars. That and an uncle nicknamed Booger Red who built a reputation by pounding any negro who rubbed him the wrong way.
Sounds like you come from good stock…
Call it local color. Makes for good copy and moves the merch.
Hillbilly Elegy was planned like everything else in Vance’s life (I say this with respect). The guy who got into Yale using a plausibly Jewish surname knew exactly how the liberal literary world would react to a tale of supposed condescension and woe aimed at rural Whites. In reality the story was more sympathetic, but that didn’t stop the gleeful hand-rubbing. Vance played the game for a while, even to making the obligatory Trump denunciation when it looked like he was still a joke. But then he and his near-elite sponsors in venture and tech realized Trump was on to… Read more »
Welp, Vance is their a Machiavellian mastermind or a fink-in-the-grass who will sell us all down the river first chance he gets. I guess we’ll find out eventually.
Who TH decreed that 1946-64 is the Boomer generation and why do dissidents go along with it? Strauss and Howe were closer to the mark with their 1943-60 range but personally I think it’s just as accurate to go by decades. A lot easier to remember for one thing and also one can identify the two halves and any differences by decades. The great majority of musicians who performed at Woodstock were born 1940-45. Am I really supposed to believe that they were Silents playing for Boomers? Brandon’s simplified generations: Born in: Greatest ’00’s-10’s Silents ’20’s-30’s Boomers ’40’s-50’s X ’60’s-70’s… Read more »
You’re taking it far too seriously.
This is like a detailed analysis of the gang in the Mystery Machine. Shaggy, you see, was just a hippie slacker whose only policies were limits on hits between passes, and tireless advocacy for Salt and Vinegar chips to alleviate the munchies. Velma, on the other hand, had her nose stuck in a book since the time she could crawl. Her exhaustive knowledge of subjects ranging from Botany to Phrenology gave her the intellectual edge to crush Shaggy in their debates about the amount of wood a woodchuck could potentially chuck while the Gang were idling in the Sambo’s parking… Read more »
But you see, Velma actually DID do most of the work solving those many mysteries (with assistance from Scooby), while the rest of the crew pretty much just ran around looking scared.
So, your example is flawed. Flawed, I say! Plus, those knees…
“Trump is not technically a Baby Boomer, but he is a man with the Baby Boomer sensibilities. He is a guy who thinks the economy is the country …” Ironically, it’s the same reason that some good-faith never-Trumpers (yes, they do exist) hate President Trump. They think that a nation is just an economic subdivision and that human beings are just economic production units. They have no use for patriotism, family, loyalty, or morality; instead, everything is about someone’s financial bottom line. The other day, a never-Trumper who I know personally was ranting that the people of Springfield, Ohio should… Read more »
Productivism is a turbocancer of the Industrial Revolution. Evropean Americans are very slow to learn this lesson, just as they’re slow to learn that a “Land of Opportunity” is a land of replaceable opportunists.
I’ve met such scum as well. They should be forced to live cheek-by-jowl with these Haitians.
All of these millions of Third World immigrants should be immediately relocated to the top ten Super Zips. Make our traitorous elites live with the consequences of their actions every day.
> One final angle here. J.D. Vance is the full expression of managerial man. The fact that he walked away from that system into the populist revolt against it suggest that managerialism lacks the cultural fulfillment to sustain itself.
Or that he’s a plant
He’s no sunflower.
Left unsaid is that Vance ran for senator because someone(s) in the state wanted him to be senator which is, perhaps, even more interesting as it says something about what those powerful people think of the system.
Waltz is an old creep but it would be interesting to get a better hold on what Vance is really all about. So far I sense a careerist but not sure
Vance is a striver who is being mugged by reality, but the mugging isn’t over yet. His origins remind me of John Galt in “Atlas Shrugged” (but remember that JG sabotaged the USA to get his hands on the power companies’ distribution networks.) Vance seems to be rising above the mentality of the prideful opportunist who’s obsessed with grabbing everything he can as fast as he can. Read “Hillbilly Elegy”. The pages turn themselves. JDV reveals a tremendous amount about his own low origins and upbringing. There’s considerable historical detail, too, in there about the region he’s from and the… Read more »
I agree. Vance was a smart but poor kid who wanted to get out and succeed. He followed the path but discovered that the managerial class and its rewards didn’t quite do it for him – though I’m sure that he like the money that he already has. A lot of us who come from nowhere towns and reach some success (not his level but some) find that we never quite feel at home with the country club crowd. Ironically, the country club people that I’ve known (I’m not a member, just know them through other venues) have generally been… Read more »
DeSantis seems to have similar attitudes about the managerial class.
There is at least one interview or op-ed where he confirmed that he found the anti-American attitudes he encountered on Yale’s campus repugnant.
Cc members usu. have monthly or annual spending requirements in addition to the initiation fee and annual fee. This can make them resentful about anything less than servile obedience from the staff. Also the expense alone restricts the number and types of people who can become members, which removes oxygen from the rooms indoors and reduces persepctives and worldviews. Some wealthy people find that type of environment suffocating, so they stay away, further narrowing persepctives and shortening horizons. I interacted with many cc members during my days of caddying at a private, expensive club during Reagan’s presidency. Women were prohibited… Read more »
The issues of Elon Musk, former generous Obama and Biden donor, and JD Vance, should scare the hell out of the Uniparty. That it does not, speaks to their senility and isolation. White men of ambition have no place, none at all, in the Uniparty, or in business, or the military, or anything. This is female driven Mean Girls exclusion driven to the insane but inevitable outcome. It is like Entertainment. The Joker movie made over a billion in revenue. On a budget of about 70 million. Naturally Warners spent over $250 million in production alone to make an “own… Read more »
“The main take away from this election cycle for Baby Boomers and Generation-X should be that your time is done. The people who will be running things starting now are the people in their thirties and forties.”
Damn straight, and we’re only going to speak in parables of Simpsons and Seinfeld references and you old farts just have to sit there and groove on it.
Ay curumba!
Good point about Xers not having to deal with the minefields of feminism. In the 80s and even into the mid 90s, girls ran from the feminist label. It meant lesbian, and not the good kind.
I’m a Boomer and I approve of this message. Take over, kids.
The humor here is still pretty good
I guess boomers and xers are mindsets not dates.
i don’t get this. Vance seems to just be managerializing the populist revolt. There was some dumb movie in the 80s where Chong or cheech dropped out in the jungles of South America and returned to the states to find their 60s “revolution “ to be turned into a brand. That’s what “jd” (yo, jd…still sounds weird to me. Wonder if ootra or oopie or whatever his wife’s name is calls him “jd”) reminds me of.
No mass movement lasts long unless it attracts smart people. The gungho get the party started, but must eventually give way to the smart managers and administrators who make aspiration into policy.
Exactly. People dismiss THE LOTUS EATERS as British Normie Conservatards, which actually has a lot of merit, but sometimes the podcast is really insightful. Carl Benjamin had Ed Dutton on as a guest very recently and they discussed the outlines of the very phenomenon you described here. They noted the Dissident Right started with aggressive, disorganized outliers, then attracted Big Brain folks, and when the smart fraction gave it a structure and a future, women joined and are in the normal process of becoming strident advocates. As the show noted, the dissent had been there for generations but social media… Read more »
I would guess that Usha calls him James or Jim but who knows?
“One final angle here. J.D. Vance is the full expression of managerial man. The fact that he walked away from that system into the populist revolt against it suggest that managerialism lacks the cultural fulfillment to sustain itself.” But managerialism is a very large and powerful system, a fat pipeline to power for a particular kind of talent and ambition. It needs no “cultural fulfillment” to go on as a system. Individuals may come to feel shorted by the system, but so long as it exists, it’ll have willing recruits coming in at the low-power end. And as long as… Read more »
You have hinted strongly at a reason why a much better religion is needed to defeat and replace managerialism—and neo-liberalism, Anglo-American imperialism, Israelism, scientism, and globalist unipolarism. (Am I being reduntant here?) Without a proper religion, people are like lost little atoms waiting to be collectivized and degraded into the condition of farm animals, as were Evropean Americans during and after the War of Secession and Yankee Vindictiveness. Many Christians have critiqued those problems, but they operate from a position of epistological skepticism which they have in common with so-called post-modernists. (Notice however that some PM’s flip this skepticism on… Read more »
“Gen X, your time is done.”
That’s cool, we weren’t interested in the game anyway. But look us up when you need tips on how to cope with the Boomers pulling the rug out from under you on their way out the door. Which they inevitably will.
Ouch, that breakdown of the route Generation X charted through life is unsettlingly accurate.
There is a log jam in the corporate world due to the sheer size differential in the Boomer and X generations.
Most Xers that have effectively bypassed or broken through this jam have adopted very Boomerish attitudes.
Hear, hear. I was four years old during Woodstock, five when the Kent State shooting happened. I wasn’t alive when Kennedy was shot. All those cultural touchstones of the Boomers meant nothing to me.
Consequently I was amazed at how many of my college cohort of the ’80s adopted the hippie/Boomer culture — the weed, the hair, the tie-dyes. Some didn’t and became Yuppies, of course. Some were hippies during undergrad and Yuppies after graduation…
In my country, there was a regime change in 1975. We went from dictatorship to democracy. Boomers started ruling in 1975, in their twenties and forties (the old generation was not democratic) and stayed in power until their eighties (for example, for the Prime Minister position). I have seen the same in all the countries I have lived, even without regime change. People like me (born in 1970), Generation X, have been deprived of the best positions all our lives because these positions were for the Boomers. Now, that the Boomers are retiring, we are passed by in favor of… Read more »
As much as I hate to quote Clinton… “I feel your pain,” bro.
BTW I am guessing from the 1975 reference that you are Spanish?
Our youngest millennial son can confirm the females of his generation are both semi-hysterical and typically on one or two prescription medications – and not for a runny nose or zits… One can only hope they wrest the reins from the doddering boomer cat ladies and their compliant husbands before it’s too late.
Off topic, but so funny that you will laugh tears of paranoia. Danny is becoming a master of AI parody.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcpSOgWsLoc
Reading the article, I am reminded of a movie trope called “Mary Sue”. I was turned onto it with the Star Wars reboot and the main character is someone who did not train, or know about the force, but was incredibly adept at it. Kamala is a fric*ing Mary Sue. So many wish it…
Ohio State’s Main Campus is pretty tough to get into these days. It’s not quite Michigan, but it’s a half-step behind maybe, which is pretty good. When I went there it used to be a party and football school. (OSU’s graduate programs and research were always the best in the state, but OSU had open enrollment for undergrad. They would take anybody with a heartbeat.) There is still a back door to get into Ohio State by attending a branch campus your first year or going to a community college and transferring your credits. But if you want the whole… Read more »
What’s weird is a quick google ai search (and I never asked for ai, google just gifted it to me) says that boomer gen was 71 million and gen x was 63 million. I was expecting gen. X to be much smaller AND consider that for whatever reason boomers cover 20 years while xers cover only 15. Kinda makes the size diff not so stark .
but xers were competing with more females it seems less boomer females than I thought worked. So men were competing with more tiny noses than boomers or the silent gen.
That is a nonsense result. It is why I hate generation talk. It devolves into a debate over the calendar. “Well axshully, if you were bort in June of 1964 you are a boomer but if you were born in July you are Gen-X.”
” Trump is not technically a Baby Boomer.”
Trump was born June 14,146. People born between 1946 and 1964 are commonly labelled BB’s.
I don’t know what you mean by “technically” in this context.
“Here are some famous people born in 1946: Donald Trump – 45th President of the United States1. Dolly Parton – Renowned country singer and songwriter1. Freddie Mercury – Legendary rock singer and frontman of Queen1. Bill Clinton – 42nd President of the United States1. Sylvester Stallone – Famous actor known for his roles in “Rocky” and “Rambo”1. Cher – Iconic pop singer and actress2. Diane Keaton – Acclaimed actress known for her roles in “Annie Hall” and “The Godfather”3. Alan Rickman – Beloved actor known for his roles in “Die Hard” and “Harry Potter”1. Steven Spielberg – Influential film director and producer1. George W. Bush – 43rd President of the… Read more »
[…] Source: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=32788 […]
Great column today, Zman. Insightful about the present and plausibly foresighted about the future. But mostly true to lived experience, I feel.