The Kids Aren’t Alright

"Young people can be terrible."

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Jonah seldom discloses his fears, but on today’s Ruminant, he’s forced to reveal his greatest weakness: the common cold. Despite the large amount of travel he’s undertaken in recent weeks—which he begins the episode by describing in needless detail—he’s managed to avoid getting sick, but germs are closing in on him. If there’s one thing Jonah hates more than man flu, however, it’s young people (or, at least, society’s misguided worship of young people). Today’s episode is all about youthful opposition to Israel in America: what’s driving it, what it says about our culture, and why it seems to prove that the experiment with “safetyism” on college campuses has failed. Stick around until the end for a few thoughts on Donald Trump’s strange relationship with the law.

Show Notes:

– Jonah: “Settle This One for Me”

– The Coddling of the American Mind

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  1. Avatar photo
    EmmyCab

    I'm just now listening to this, but I want to say how much I appreciate the time you spent thinking through the obsession with youth politics. I'm 50, and I've told people often (in fact I was just telling my dad last night!) that when I was in college (early through mid-90's) the only thing I knew about politics was that I didn't know anything about politics. And I knew I didn't know anything. And I knew everyone else knew it too. It's mostly a lack of life experience and accrued wisdom. I have zero recollection of the cultural elders of the time consulting Young Gen X for guidance, and I think I would have found it ridiculous if they had. I feel like I've waited my whole life to be the cultural adult in the room, and now I'm told I'm supposed to be dictated to by young people. It's absurd, and I'm not doing it. Thank you for your thoughts on this topic!

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    Ben Connelly

    Totally with you on the youth thing - I feel vindicated in fact (or quite possibly the reason I’ve been such a fan for so many years is that when I stumbled upon National Review there was this guy named Jonah who wrote strange newsletters from his car parked in a Wal-Mart lot that told me everything I already believed was true). The cult of youth is insufferable. It made me mad when the Fox interviewers asked that question at the debate about how young people care about climate change and I was glad the candidates took a crap on that question.

    In general, this patronizing applause of young people literally for not doing anything, just for being young, is very unhealthy. It’s unhealthy for a society. It’s unhealthy for adults (who shouldn’t spend good years wasting their time wishing to be 18 again). And it’s unhealthy for the young people! They don’t need that kind of attention.

    Whenever I said this kind of thing, I was either told I was an old man (charitably), or told I must be unhappy and not well-adjusted (uncharitably). I enjoyed high school and college but I just didn’t think that was supposed to be the culmination of life. There are more important things.

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    Gibby

    Half through: If this was the GLOP they would have closed with the Whitney Houston song.

    I totally agree with Jonah and I was the same way when I was young. I didn't vote till I was 27 because I had this nagging fear that I didn't know what I was talking about. Looking back I was very correct about that.

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      EmmyCab

      Right on, Gibby and Ben! I did start voting when I turned 18 "because responsible citizens vote," but I made some very - VERY - uninformed votes. I'm 50 now, and I frequently abstain from at least a small number of items on the ballot, typically very small local races within the county but outside my sphere of understanding (e.g., the utility board at the lake 10 miles outside of town) or occasionally on a ballot initiative about which I don't have a strong opinion. It never even occurred to me to abstain from specific items when I was young, despite knowing I knew nothing. SMH.

      In addition to my own experience of personal youth ignorance is that fact that I have no children of my own. So if I'm being honest, my internal dialogue now goes something like, "I've spent decades earning my way to being the proverbial Adult in the Room, and now you want me to be dictated to by YOUR dumb kids??" Lol...

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      Ben Connelly

      Yeah me too - except the part about not voting until 27 (the age I currently am). I’ve long loathed the cult of youth and I think it’s bad for both young and old alike. Everyone should strive to be content with whatever age they currently are, rather than to wish to be another age. And we should take young people’s political opinions with a grain of salt.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Gibby

        You would be a young person exception ben.

        You would get a waiver

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        1. Avatar photo
          Ben Connelly

          Haha thanks!

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  4. Avatar photo
    George.Skinner

    The ignorance of the language police appalls me. Most of the time, they’re offended on somebody else’s behalf, and the rationale is a poorly sourced urban legend (I.e. “rule of thumb” being the size of rod you could use to beat your wife or kid, depending on the version.). What really baffled me was hearing from a choir director that they couldn’t sing “Jingle Bells” at Christmas concerts anymore because “it’s associated with minstrelry.” Honestly, I don’t know where this stuff comes from or why people take it seriously.

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  5. Randall Briggs

    Joe Biden's birthday is 20 Nov 1942.

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    Kyzyl Tuva

    Great one Jonah! Got me thinking about many things but “youth movements” in particular. You know a more recent youth movement? The Taliban (the word literally means youth/student)! I recall reading an essay in Foreign Affairs in the 1990’s praising this new “youth movement” in Afghanistan called The Taliban.

    I can summarize most of your podcast with “TikTok”. Today’s youth get their education and news there; carefully curated by the CCP.

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  7. Pohl

    You’ve never read a good biography of Napoleon, yet wrote a good deal about him in your book? And DAY-zhur-RAY? Two shrugs.

    Anyway, good pod. I’ve also always shared your ideas on young people. The Baby Boomers, AND the so-called Greatest Generation that raised them, are massively overrated. Thankfully, it was a minority that were long-haired hippies. But we’ve been plagued by their nostalgia and concert tours of 110-year-old rockers for far too long. You didn’t set the world aflame in a good way. Sorry, Peter, Paul, and Mary fans. But thanks—not really—for one more Beatles song.

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  8. Israel.D.Gale

    The phenomenon of Democrats against Israel is clearly a Very Big Deal, it made Dean Phillips first New Hampshire town hall into a train wreck. Biden's people understand its political significance, it is clearly the force behind the ratcheting American pressure on Israel to dial down their response to Hamas. This is a special morality reserved only for Israel, there was no similar outcry about civilian casualties in America's urban battles in Iraq.

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    1. Randall Briggs

      I'm pro-Israel, and I agree that there is a huge double standard at work. However, in fact, the American public was not indifferent to civilian casualties in Iraq by the time a few months had passed after our invasion. It was an issue in the 2004 presidential election and one of the Democrats' major talking points in the 2006 mid-term elections.

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      1. Israel.D.Gale

        The outcry against Israel didn't take "a few months". Calls for a cease fire started within hours, while Hamas fighters were still inside Israeli territory slaughtering and raping.

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        1. Randall Briggs

          No question about that.

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  9. Avatar photo
    Charley Warns

    Jonah: "It's kind of a priesthood thing where we're going to be in charge of the use of language ... if you don't use the right code words then we get to out you as a bigot."

    This from first paragraph of the "Marx the Profit" chapter in Schumpeter's book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: "Marxism is a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions ... Marxist socialism also belongs to that subgroup which promises paradise on this side of the grave."

    Without immortality ... all is permitted (e.g., teaching children to be suicide bombers, beheading babies, rape.) That said, those doing the heinous acts do believe in life after death ... which makes it confusing. Yet I think this support for Hamas is coming from people who don't believe in a loving God yet are looking to give their lives meaning.

    On page 315 of "The Mind and the Market," Jerry Muller writes: "One reason, according to Schumpeter, was that criticism served the intellectual’s self-interest, in that “his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value, ” so that “the intellectual group . . . lives on criticism and its whole position depends on criticism that stings." (Discontent breeds resentment; ergo, our purpose in life is to manipulate/gaslight you as we really don't have any coherent argument to make.)

    Jerry Muller: "But why should intellectuals be critical of capitalism? ... But the effect of a humanistic education, Schumpeter noted, was not necessarily benign: “The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work.” University education, then, has the unanticipated effect of leaving many of its graduates unfit for work in the capitalist world, or fit only for work they consider beneath them, or at wages below their worth in their own eyes ... Discontent breeds resentment."

    I'll argue that he could've equally asked, "But why should intellectuals be critical of free speech?"

    Napoleon (from Roberts' bio): In religion ... I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order. It associates with Heaven an idea of equality that keeps rich men from being massacred by the poor … Society is impossible without inequality; inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion."

    Andrew Roberts writes: "At one point he asked her not to wash for three days before they met so he could steep himself in her scent." (That would make for an awkward encounter I figure would have been Josephine's take.)Expand full comment

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  10. Michael.Mcchesney

    There are definitely people who just delight in discovering things they can be offended at. I recall seeing a story years ago in which a woman accused a flight attendant of racism because she decided who would get the last bag of peanuts by going “eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” I was actually shocked to learn that there was a version, perhaps the original, in which the rhyme didn't catch a tiger by the toe but instead caught an N-word. That got me started down a rabbit hole where I learned that the original title of Agatha Christie's novel Ten Little Indians was Ten Little N-Words. It's shocking what language used to be perfectly acceptable. But clearly, that flight attendant didn't mean anything racist by going eeny, meeny, moe, and no one except someone looking to be offended would have taken it that way.

    Of course, intent, while important, isn't everything. When I was a kid in the '70s and '80s, the Confederate flag was seen by many people as a symbol of Southern pride. It featured prominently in a hit CBS TV show for seven seasons. (Ironically, my mother forbade my siblings and me from watching The Dukes of Hazard, not because of racist imagery, but because she disapproved of the rampant police corruption.) But the Stars and Bars has a very different connotation today. If you fly a Confederate flag today, it isn't enough to say you don't mean it in a racist way because you need to have been living under a rock for the last 20 years not to understand that many, if not most, people will see it that way.

    However, the idea of censoring language because some people will misunderstand it is more complicated. Firing an aide to the D.C. mayor for saying the government had to be niggardly with public funds was ridiculous. (Niggardly derives from Middle English, means stingy, and has no connection with the N-Word.) Firing someone for using a word that might offend ignorant people is wrong. But that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to consider that people might misunderstand a word when choosing the language you want to use.

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