This episode follows “S18, E2k: The Learning Trajectory of Zero” and is the twelfth in a series responding to a post by L.T. Zero, entitled, “Remember, Remember the 5th of November”. In it he attempts to justify the meme that Trump was elected by Gen-Xers, but anyone who uses a meme as their polestar, has not put in much thought. In his piece (hosted on Holly’s Substack) the starting assumption is that the meme is true, and from there, it’s a short step to conclude it was an act of generational revenge on Boomers. But revenge for what?

Well this is where it becomes an explanation of high convenience, anything bad that happened in the last 8 decades, is supposedly attributable to Boomers. Of course, the idea that Boomers formed a cabal to conspire against their own children, doesn’t really deserve to be dignified with a response. Yet to learn from the past we must remain grounded in reality, therefore the more bad ideas we let slide, the harder learning becomes.

It’s possible to note patterns in history and see certain characteristics in past generations, but as per S18, E2a: Generational Pareidolia, what is seen is frequently superimposed by the viewer. This is also true of the positive characteristics some assume for themselves by virtue of when they were born. The appetite for self-flattery can cause someone to believe the astrological sign of Leo imbues them with the qualities of leadership or that being a Gen-Xer makes them a badass. It seems that demographics and predictive analytics are making way for generational astrology and gross stupidity. It is so seductive that even highly intelligent people like Holly MathNerd can convince themselves there is a scientific basis to their generational superstitions.

Example: An inter-generational family unit

Imagine the scenario where a woman, born in 1963, became a mother when she was 29 years of age. The man who fathered the child was born in 1945 and was therefore 47 years old when the baby was born in 1992. So we have a family where the mother is a Boomer, with a father from the Silent Generation, and their child is a member of Gen-Y. This is all perfectly plausible but demographic monikers don’t change the fact that a child can’t be more than one generation away from a parent - by definition.

Now you might think I am wrong to couch this in strictly biological terms, but remember, that generational categories in society arise from what is happening within family units across a population. The specifics of a child’s home environment are more relevant to its formative development than any general trends or stereotypes operating at group-level. Later the prevailing culture does exert various influences on different age groups but even those originally emerged bottom-up. This is not a process of homogenisation.

Take what is probably the quintessential anthem of the rebellious Boomer.

Should we classify generational music according to the people who make it or by those who consume it? This song was written a year after the Boomer period had ended. Also, with the exception of Keith Moon, The Who are too old to be Boomers, although we could say that Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle and the writer of this song Pete Townshend are Boomer-adjacent.

The perception is that Boomers are a generation of rebels who made big changes to their world. I am a Boomer and it seems that we were just born in an era when certain things became possible for the first time. Now different things are possible. As with blame, many of the innovations credited to Boomers were inherited from previous generations, and that will always be true of any generation to come. More than mere links in a chain, we are all part of a continuum connected to the future, past and present (forward, back and sideways).

“My Generation” captured a youthful attitude that has always been there, but now that rebelliousness is been channelled into seeking more supervision, to be protected from offence, to have confusing feelings medicated away, to not have to take responsibility and to be able to blame others - forever. People now look to celebrity politicians, commentators and been-nowhere-done-nothing philosophers on the podcast reach-around circuit for answers. This search for authority and willing self-infantilism becomes apparent in the L.T. Zero piece.

His concept is of a blameworthy generation born in sin. In support, he gives us a Wikipedia-based shopping list of grievances, crudely fashioned into a long-form post. Is he a typical Gen-Xer with particularly shitty Boomer-parents to resent? I don’t know, but if you read his post, you will occasionally need to remind yourself that Gen-Xers are now a minimum of 44 years old.

In S18, EJ: Us and Them, I challenged the peculiar accusation that Boomers had waged war on Gen-Xers by systematically removing their children and yes, that is really what was claimed by L.T. Zero. In the episode that followed, S18, E2k: The Learning Trajectory of Zero, I tackled the assertion that Boomers, via Joe Biden and his ‘[Boomer] apparatchiks’ were responsible for pushing certain agendas in schools. Remember, Remember that this was published on 5th of November in 2024 when the youngest Boomer was 60 years old.

Are Boomers really the ones driving this and causing parental involvement and consent to be circumvented? Try to keep these things in mind as I resume my line-by-line debunking of L.T. Zero’s rant.

And, in the endgame, they put up a venal, nasty opportunist who boasted about using her power as California Attorney General to throw parents in jail for the crime of taking their children to the hospital instead of to school, …

“Remember, Remember the 5th of November”, Holly’s Substack, L.T. Zero

Is ‘venal’ the adjective that is required here, and if so, why? Perhaps it’s for the sake of some variety in his invective, not that he is above recycling derogatory adjectives, having also previously said that Barack Obama was boastful. Aside from that, he argues that it’s by virtue of Kamala Harris being a Boomer (albeit one born in the dying months of the generation), that makes her part of the ‘endgame’.

L.T. Zero sets the bar high on absurdity and might even believe that the rise of Harris was the culmination of an elaborate plot that was half a century in the making. By that standard might he also think that Joe Biden’s mental deterioration was orchestrated? It’s anybody’s guess how deep this goes.

I am not an admirer of Harris but saying that she jailed parents for taking their children to hospital instead of school is untrue and you only have to follow his links (which I have left in) to see that. This wasn’t a crackdown on too much hospital attendance, nor was it a trawl of hospital emergency rooms looking for out-of-school sick children, because these parents were arrested at home during a truancy sweep.

L.T. Zero finds his own ‘facts’ more convenient to whatever argument he is trying to make but you can decide (unlike some who commented) not to be taken in by them.

… and for keeping convicts in jail after their release was ordered so the prisons could profit from their slave labor, and for railroading defendants she knew to be innocent.

ibid.

In the US, large corporations use cheap prison labour, but he pins the entire blame for that systemic issue on Harris. It’s while searching for new pejoratives that he misses the chance to say something worthwhile. There are numerous conflicting and confounding issues at play with no obvious solutions.

It’s far easier to create a generational scapegoat than taking the preliminary step of understanding the problem.

This candidate, who never stood for the primary, was appointed as the defender of democracy and called “competent and qualified,” despite being neither.

ibid.

Harris wasn’t ‘appointed’ but nominated by default because being the Vice President (VP) made her the continuity candidate and the only one who had a current mandate. It’s written into the United States Constitution that the VP steps in when the President is incapacitated which in this case happened to be during a campaign for reelection. Literal interpretations of the US Constitution aside, with the minimum of thought it should be easy to understand why there was no other choice, even though a former President stalled on this issue by saying this.

We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead. But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.

Barack Obama’s statement on Joe Biden dropping out of the race, 21 July 2024

Did anyone really believe there was time for such a process?

What must have become apparent shortly thereafter, is that anyone making financial contributions to Biden’s war-chest had effectively endorsed his running mate too, and that endorsement is something no other candidate could claim to have. It is because she was already on the ticket, that Presidential campaign funds could be allocated to her candidacy without any suggestion that donations were being misappropriated or, that they should be repatriated. This is also closely related to the reason Biden was forced out of the race i.e., because he was causing the Democrats to haemorrhage donors and public support.

Although Harris taking Biden’s place was hugely disruptive any alternative last-minute substitution would have been far more problematic.

A Feast for Conspiracy Hawks

There was no way to deal with this problem without in some way appearing to be dishonest. The open secret of Biden’s steep cognitive decline has to my knowledge, never been officially admitted, but the same can be said of Ronald Reagan. Even though Biden’s position had become untenable there are those who still think he was railroaded. About a year ago I read an article on Substack where a young writer suggested that concerns about Biden’s mental health amounted to ‘ableism’. It was as if a President’s mental capacity is a ‘nice to have’ that was in no way related to who was actually running the country at the time.

Whereas the position of a Vice President is a Constitutional provision for the President becoming unable or unfit to continue in office, it is difficult to implement that contingency if the most powerful person in the country (and possibly world), is resistant to the intervention. There are some important constitutional issues amongst all that but L.T. Zero is more interested in hyperbole.

A gleeful shatterer of families who was going to protect the poor border-crossers from family separations.

An epitome of the Boomer ruling class philosophy. An exemplary candidate for the position of Fifth Boomer President.

“Remember, Remember the 5th of November”, Holly’s Substack, L.T. Zero

Is he suggesting that she failed at border control due to some unspecified overarching Boomer philosophy? The issue of ‘family separations’ commenced in the previous Trump administration but I don’t think it’s the point he wants to make. Not everything one can be unhappy about is necessarily relevant to a particular argument, although there is also truth in the proverb, ‘if you throw enough shit some will stick’.

Had Biden announced he would not be seeking reelection the beginning of 2024, there may well have been a formal reselection process and who knows if Harris would have survived that? Frankly I find it unlikely but her being a Boomer wouldn’t have entered into the calculus.

What is possibly more relevant to the public election, is that people sometimes vote against what they don’t want and generally, are repulsed by condescension or to be told they are dumb to have a different opinion.

The Boomers, though, made one mistake. They ostracized their third President. He was a good Boomer too. He ruled like a dictator, demanded celebrity status, and broke all the rules...including the ones they didn’t want anyone besides themselves to break.

ibid.

He is of course referring to Donald Trump even though the ‘third’ Boomer President was Barack Obama, but as we have already seen, L.T. Zero is not much of a details man. Please try to follow along carefully as I break down that paragraph further.

L.T. Zero suggests that the Boomers ostracised Trump because they (the Boomers) didn’t want anyone apart from them (i.e., the Boomers) to break the rules. So they (we are still talking about the Boomers) wanted Biden (a non-Boomer) over Trump (a Boomer). Therefore according to Boomers, all Boomers are able to break the rules with the exception of the most powerful Boomer in the world, the President of the United States. Make sense of that if you can.

L.T. Zero states that Gen-X re-elected Trump, someone he says, ‘ruled like a dictator’, seemingly oblivious to the fact that someone who rules like a dictator, is a dictator. Who would believe that and want to take credit for it?

But since he did it without the backing of a political party, they hated him for it.

ibid.

Please. He was a Democrat and cosy with the Clintons during their mutual Jeffrey Epstein phase, and as it turns out, being politically connected is more important than affiliation or even holding a sincere opinion. Opinions change but now it’s acceptable that they can be moulded around whatever form self-interest currently takes.

Lindsay Graham’s viewpoint has become unashamedly malleable. Once a staunch supporter on Ukraine who called for the assassination of Vladimir Putin he recently changed tack. That happened after Trump and J.D. Vance, carried out a playground ambush on Volodymyr Zelensky to get the approval they desperately wanted from their crush in Moscow.

Amongst stiff competition (including the likes of Marco Rubio) Graham has reinvented himself as a particularly craven Putin apologist - for now at least. His form for flip flopping it’s laid bare in the 140-seconds of video embedded below.

The narrative that Trump is a kind of rebel hero is nothing if not imaginative. The reality is that the US voter was faced with a choice between two different flavours of abysmal.

They forced him into the outer darkness, where he found some new friends.

ibid.

‘Outer darkness’? Was he ever out of the news and did we ever stop hearing from him? His influence was seemingly unimpaired by a Twitter ban and criminal investigations so in what respect was he cast out? This all sounds like a something from the Marvel Universe, and if we were in any doubt, next comes the Avengers Assemble plotline.

He found hackers from the 1990s who managed to avoid the Boomer cull of Gen X and early Millennial talent.

ibid.

He doesn’t say what talent cull is he referring to and who were eliminated by it, because it’s sufficient for his purposes that you go away with a vague impression that some people were victimised for their talent, rather than what they were doing with it.

He found people like Ravikant, Ramaswamy, Thiel, Vance, Gabbard, Rogan, Kennedy, and Musk; people who had beaten the system and built their own. People who’d used Boomer state corruption to get rich.

ibid.

These people did not need to be ‘found’ because those with money and/or power are drawn together out of mutual self-interest. L.T. Zero insinuates they are all harnessing some kind of systemic corruption but apparently has no interest in giving us even one example of what he is talking about. The best way to understand his notion of, ‘Boomer state corruption’, is to realise it doesn’t have to mean anything. So are these people significant because of the generations they belong to?

Let’s check.

Naval Ravikant - Gen-X; Vivek Ramaswamy - Gen-Y; Peter Thiel - Gen-X; J.D. Vance, Gen-Y; Tulsi Gabbard - Gen-Y; Joe Rogan - Gen-X; R.F. Kennedy Jr. - Boomer; Elon Musk - Gen-X

Apparently not.

There’s no pattern to the way they operate and motivation is a better guide than any loopholes they have exploited. The person that has almost everything can always make room for more influence, and not, ‘better ideas’. Whether you prefer your concerns ridiculed or weaponised, depends on which best gives you the illusion of empowerment; at least how you are to be fooled is partly your choice.

People who watched their friends, their fellows, their comrades-in-arms, and their generational compatriots murdered, unpersoned, imprisoned, debanked, and crushed under the wheel by the Boomer regime. People whose children were taken from them by the politically-motivated moral panics.

ibid.

What this ‘wheel’ is or what it crushed is not entirely clear. I think the intention behind this collage of words 9reminiscent of a ransom note), is to create the impression that the indictments against the ‘Boomer regime’ are too many to list. I find it helpful to put words into meaningful sentences but being coherent is becoming passé.

He throws ‘de-banking’ into the mix and I suspect he is referring to what happened to truckers in Canada which (not that it matters), was on the watch of Gen-X Canadian President Justin Trudeau back in 2019. However, de-banking is a far more complex issue, because it attacks individuals and corporations to force compliance. It amounts to government over-reach, but L.T. Zero thinks that this has been created by his favourite generation to hate, but if so, why is this all happening now, long after peak-Boomer influence?

He also found Scott Pressler, a gay man who personally registered 150,000 Amish to vote, securing his victory in Pennsylvania.

ibid.

Found him? Pressler is an exceptional campaigner in Pennsylvania and his success got noticed by Trump’s team. That has nothing to do with him being gay or a millennial but the attempt to make it relevant is identity politics.

He made it a plank of his campaign the promise to free our last surviving political prisoner and pardon him at last.

ibid.

It was clearly not foundational to the Trump campaign to release Ross Ulbricht and to call him a political prisoner is complete nonsense, although, it was for political reasons that he was released.

It was a cause célèbre for libertarianism but if you take that logic to its conclusion the concept of criminality should be eliminated. Facilitating murder-to-order (see S18, E2i: Begging the Pardon), is evidently more forgivable than suicide (see S18, E2b: We Didn’t Start the Fire), even if the latter happens to be the unintentional consequence of a DA doing her job.

We need to reconnect with our humanity and our shared experience of witnessing changes as we travel through time. Concepts mutate under replication and that is how memes evolve but ultimately certain trends and traditions die because they were never passed on or recorded. What we don’t back up to an external substrate will perish with us.

Next, S18, E2m: Statistical Graffiti