Boomer brain rot started long before Facebook

I remember the first uses of like okay boomer happening when I was in college still, so like late two thousands. I was like entering the workforce two thousand ten, eleven, twelve and I I didn't like boomers for reasons I didn't totally understand. Like I knew that that that you you made fun of them. Like that was the point, I think. I f distinctly remember somewhere probably around twenty sixteen or seventeen

When my daughter started saying that to me. She was like twelve or thirteen or fourteen. Do you remember what she would okay boomer you about? Anything. So right now, for instance, I'm scared. Oh, you're a skibbity toilet. I'm skibbity. I'm skibbity toy. I am dead. Okay, I'm sorry to hear that. I feel like not being Sigma Riz is fine.

Uh I I think that's fine. I found it disappointing. Okay, well I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, that's too bad. I saw I like to think I'm a Sigma male, but maybe maybe only some days. I'm Ryan Broderick. Joining us throughout the episode will be our producer Grant Irving who pops in from time to time. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture and eventually reality, and today we are questioning the very premise of our show.

Which is we're gonna try to answer the question Uh was it the internet that made boomers go quote unquote insane? Uh and I have a different theory I'll be sharing a little later, but joining me is uh so Grant wrote this and I'm really sorry for how Grant described you here. I just wanted it to be clear, this is from Grant. The left Hippist Gen Xer.

Yeah. Host of the majority report, destroyer of many recent viral videos, Sam Sader. Hey, how are you doing? Welcome. Uh thanks uh for having me, Ryan. And and thank you, Grant, for I d uh are there other Gen Xers? I I th I think there's a few on YouTube. I am very, very early Gen X. Okay. Does that mean young Gen X or older Gen X? Oh uh Well, I'm not even sure what that means. But I am like

You know, like a year away from being a boomer. Okay, okay. I got you. So I'm more into it. A lot of my friends, I guess, which I didn't realize are are boomers.

But not the boomer boomers. Not the boomer boomers, sure. No. Do you remember the first time you thought maybe the boomer mindset was aging poorly? Yeah. In the eighties. Really? I mean There was something wrong in the eighties and I had a feeling it it had to do with the people like Uh Wall Street. Michael Douglas carrot.

Right. Of course. Greed is good. Gordon Getzel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. I think I perceived him as a boomer. I don't know if Michael Douglas per se would have been, but I think so. I do think you've touched on something really in uh important about sort of talking about generational politics, was that which is that it can get very fuzzy. I think the further you kind of like go down this rabbit hole you're kind of like

Trying to put people into boxes that might not actually exist. Maybe. I think our generations of have gotten appropriately smaller uh in this era, but probably needed to be a little bit smaller. There needed to be another generation, you know, somewhere between Gen X and a boomer.

That's interesting. Yeah,'cause I do feel like millennials run right up against Gen Xers. Like I had Gen X coworkers and Gen X bosses. Like that was like that that was my introduction to the world coming out of college. Uh and then my parents are boomers. But the the the difference between the Gen X and the boomer line just feels It feels drastically different to me in ways that I think are interesting. But I feel like my concept of like the baby boomer culture as a culture as it exists.

Would have been like when I discovered Jon Stewart and like cable news. I feel like it was like very post nine eleven to me of like, oh okay, this is a cohort of people that have different views of reality than I do. That Jon Stewart was a boomer.

No no no that that it was like lur like discovering the Daily Show in c in high school and college, like learning about cable news and the world of it through the Daily Show, through that lens, kind of introduced me to the idea of baby boomer culture as something divorced from my life in a way. Yeah. I mean the funny part is that John Stewart is a very good thing.

Is a boomer. And he's Damn. I mean, it's weird. Um It is weird. It because I do think that he is in that cohort that really should be between Gen X and although like I sort of feel like I'm actually Gen X and the people after me are not. Because The Gen X like when in the early nineties I understood you know, you had Copeland's book, uh but I understood Gen X to be the guys in Slack. And they are actually probably boomers.

Oh, this is wild. They're a year or two older than me. And I hung out with people like that. Um and so I feel like there's a cohort in between um boomers which should take some of the uh sort of Late hanging fruit, would they be the highest fruit or the lowest fruit. From the boomer and uh and and maybe a year uh sort of like uh younger than me. That should be really the Gen X.

because we were the ones in the shadow of the boomer generation. The problem with the boomer generation was they w it was their size. and the sort of like intersection with their size with I would say probably are subsidizing corn. Okay. In the early seventies, Nixon's commerce secretary they made an active decision to subsidize corn. So that people would have more disposable income. Oh. It would r it w it would drop the price of food.

And that's the era where everything went to shit in my estimation. Okay. Not just because of the corn, not because of the sub not exclusively'cause of the subsidy of But it was the disposable income. Uh it was the disposable income and It was also the era when lawyers got to got to advertise. So okay, yes. Now Yes. And and now boomers are now like in their like Early twenties, their thirties around that time. They came into Wall Street also, I think, like just

The the generation just a little bit older them like gonna start doing a lot of like the financialization, but they're the ones who really juiced it, I think. I also I mean tell me if I'm off base here, but I feel like there's something very unique mirrored by millennials to a degree actually where the boomer generation, you know, as general terms here, remembers a world without really a modern idea of mass media and then kind of comes of age during the full corporatization of mass media.

And I do think they're like a very unique generation in that way, more so even than the millennials where they their viewpoint, their sort of Sense of reality was canonized by the television, by mass Hollywood appeal, by popular music as a concept, which like, you know, didn't really exist before, let's say, if you wanted to be simpli simplistic, like

Elvis into the Beatles era. Like all of their lives were sort of reflected back to them as like this homogenized media reflection, which I think is like kind of important for thinking about their politics now. Like they I that's my read on it. I think that's true. And I would uh add to that by saying it wasn't just that it was homogenized because arguably I think in their minds it was um Counterculture in some ways. But it was a perfect reflection because

they were the first to have that uh commercialization and they were such a big generation. That's the whole point. They were such a big generation that their whole perspective as it's like dictated by context. And in th in those days, context was much more narrow, right? Like you only had three channels of television.

You only had so many um, you know, musical options. Right. Right? Like things were just more narrow. And so their taste as defined by their context, was completely and almost extremely It was exploded of culture. And so like that's how you get the me generation because it really is completely centered around your perspective in a way that like A You may not have had mass culture in the same way prior to or or commercialized mass culture prior to that generation.

You do have it today, obviously, but it's far more fragmented. And so even the millennials who have that sort of buying power to dictate, they're still on some level, we're still all living in the shadow of the uh the boomers because everybody was selling to them.

And I that is a perfect tee up for so we try we we we try to figure out like when the idea of like the boomer brain rot concept started or like How it began. Like how did we get here? And and it's kind of a f it's a hard story to tell, but where we start, I think, which makes sense, I think, to me, is August nineteen eighty seven when Reagan and the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine.

Uh which for our listeners required national T V and radio networks to give airtime to both sides for controversial topics. And then, about a year later, we see the emergence of a local conservative radio host. I'm sure you're a big fan of this guy, Rush Limbaugh. Uh I'll tell you something. I actually uh have listened to probably more Rush Limbaugh than anybody you will ever interview. Here is a Wall Street Journal op-bed that directly connects

his success to mainstream media and now being able to sort of take sides. Uh and and they write, Many people say I need to be balanced with equal time, Limbaugh said. I don't need to be balanced with equal time because And then the the crowd uh uh s you know that he's speaking to starts cheering, I am equal time. And I do feel like this is sort of the most important domino

You know, in this story. So now by nineteen ninety, Rush is the most popular radio show in America and the New York Times writes his persona comic blowhard, his style, a schizoid spritz. balancing between earnest lecturer and political vaudevillian. So what are your sort of earliest memories of Rush and and and the and more importantly I think the world before Rush and then after? Because I feel like that is the the watershed moment here for a lot of this stuff. Well

I'll tell you what I do remember. I remember George Herbert Walker Bush having to apologize to Rush Limbaugh. I can't remember what it was about, but he had to go on there and apologize. Wow, like a real cowtail moment. That's wild.

I don't know if I had the sophistication to understand exactly all that was going on, but you know uh Herbert Walker Bush was sort of like the balance to Ronald Reagan's ticket and Ronald Reagan was so ascendant by that point that uh Herbert Walker Bush needed uh Limbaugh's Blessing. Yeah, and it was really just bad comedy mixed in with like this uh you know, sort of almost like coast to coast quality conspiracy theory.

But the Republicans had to kowtow to him.'Cause he was so powerful? Yeah. Yeah.

Before we go any further in the timeline here, I do want to ask a question'cause I think it's I wanna pin this question across the whole episode,'cause it's one that I I truly don't have the context for, and I I'm hoping to get an answer maybe, or at least come to some sort of conclusion, which is Do you feel like people were waiting for someone like Rush Limbaugh or were changed by someone like Rush Limbaugh? Like w d like

'Cause I'cause I feel like if we can answer that question I think there was I think there was a little bit of both. Because Limbaugh's big thing. was do not doubt yourself. Limbaugh's number one job throughout, you know, and having listened to him probably from you know, early nineties to at least through twenty ten twenty twelve. But his big thing was do not doubt your

Do not let the creeping doubt in and it was basically his way of saying, like, if you start thinking that you're ra being racist, right. No, you're wrong. If you think that if you think that You think that like, hey, is this a bad thing that we're doing this to the planet? No. Like all of the things he was basically telling boomers

Reinforcing this notion of like the world is in your image. Sure. Which is like, you know, what they were learning from uh commerce. Like you you're seeing yourself reflected back on television. Because you're the biggest market. Do not doubt that there's any experience outside of that that is valid. And that was it basically. I mean I remember this one segment and this must have been Sometime around like 2007.

I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh and he's talking about how the loony left environmentalists And he's got this great story and he starts to read the story. And I know like what he was doing'cause I do you know, this is what I would do on radio too. Like his producer had given him, you know, a story and and yellowed it for him. And he's reading about the Swiss out.

And these uh Looney lefts are putting on a uh and he's reading it, they're putting like tinfoil on the mountain because they're so afraid of global warming and that it's melting. And then as he reads it, he inadvertently reads the part which says that this was done by the corporation that owns the mountain because they were worried about losing uh profits. And then he quickly

Goes to break. But the idea was that everything he would do, and people would call in and he would say, Don't doubt yourself. Do not doubt yourself. And that was the big thing that they wanted because this is an era, a cohort of people who live through And by cohort of people I mean white men. Right. Yeah. Women w white women. And they're going through a tremendous amount of social change that necessarily

places them lower than they were in the social pector. In other words, you know, it's more egalitarian. They were on the top and Gen Xers of my age, we were on the sort of like just on the other side of it, where like the idea that women can make money Is not like a revolutionary. It's not gonna end the world. There was a cohort of people who just like resented the fact. Like Brett Kavanaugh. Yeah. Although he's more Gen X, I guess. But he the idea that like, hey, when I was born

I was sort of bequeathed something. And it was taken away from me. Exactly. And it was taken away from me. And uh Limbaugh was there basically Th the people he spoke to didn't quite have it taken away from them. It was just being threatened. And so they had to be like m their perspective on the world had to be maintained.

So I won't torment you with Rush Limbaugh clips, but I am gonna show you one in just a second. And I I think it's a really fascinating clip to look at because I had I had heard this argument last year that I hadn't really considered And I I kind of like it, which is that

When you have the something like the sexual revolution happening to, let's say, baby boomers in their teenage and early twenties, and then you see the rise of mass media, corporatizing it, homogenizing it, sanding down the the counter cultural, you know, aspects of it, what you're left with is what you said earlier, the me generation. The idea that, you know, everything can be found inside, everything can be found within. And we found this ad from Resh Limba that I think

Is a fascinating artifact because it it does sort of tie to this idea that Boomer conservatism is based around a a weird sexual politics. Let's put it that way. So tell me if you can hear. Here's your chance to start the new year the right way. Now available the official Ditto 1991 t-shirt. Just$12.50 or the Ditto 1991 sweatshirt, only$19.95. Order yours today. Now, for people who cannot see the clip, That is three people, a man and two women, showing off their rush limbaugh shirt.

As they pop champagne and I believe that this is heavily implying that you can tell people that you're a swinger if you wear l Rush Limbaugh merch. I believe that's what I'm looking at right now. I mean, I'm not sure. I I think what's more I think listen, I think what's more irrelevant is r less that they're swingers. But that the white guy is literally centered. Yeah, he's in the middle of both women. That is true. Yeah. He is lit they and they are both sort of clocked to him.

That is the dynamic. You said that like politicians at at his height, let's say in the early nineties, were sort of appearing on his show, apologizing to him. Do you feel like that? fundamentally did change the Republican Party as an institution. Absolutely. His ability to move people

He put conservatism on steroids. Well when we're talking about the nineties though, we do have to introduce one more character here before we get any further. So in nineteen ninety six, a couple years after the Rush Limbaugh explosion. Austin, Texas is getting very popular, and they have a local public access TV show full of weird freaks. And at the time, a 22-year-old weird freak.

possibly the comedian Bill Hicks, who faked his own death and then reinvented himself as a as a talk show host. A man named Alex Jones appears on TV, and the observer at the time describes it thusly. On his early shows, Jones would sit behind a desk in front of a star map of the universe and take calls, ranting red faced into a camera about the police state, the new world order, and exposing shadowy elite.

And he quickly gets a radio show, the final edition. Uh was this on your radar i in the mid nineties? I had a buddy who was into him. He w I don't know how he heard him at that time. But it it had to do or maybe this was the early aughts with uh David Icke. Because the funny part is is that the alien conspiracy theories. Yes. Yes. Lizard represents the thing. I've seen a clip of Alex Jones saying that David Icke is the turd in the punch bowl.

Yeah. Uh that basically, you know, he's put out there to to make the truth that people like Alex Jones were exposing seem like discredited conspiracy theories. Oh, that's we just played this clip on the show. That clip of Alex Jones recently on the show because it is also extremely reminiscent of a clip of Tucker Carlson in two thousand saying that Bill O'Reilly was a fraud and he was gonna get uncovered at one point. And I think what happened to both

Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones is they both realized like, wait a second. No, these guys are just Succeeding. Succeeding. And so Yeah, oh okay. I think Tucker Carlson realized like nobody's ever going to blow Bill O'Reilly's every man cover. It doesn't matter what he does. And I think Tucker Carlson adopted that. And I think Alex Jones

uh to the extent that he, you know, was conscious of what he was doing, saw that David Icke was like, This is where we're gonna go. And he he followed that conspiracy thing. But I would also argue that It's not inconceivable to me that Limbaugh was drawing from Alex Jones in terms of conspiracies.

or that Jones was drawing from Limbaugh in terms of the idea of conspiracy selling. I mean, this was always out there with the John Birch Society. I mean there is a there is a long tradition of these type of conspiracies on the right. But monetizing them You know, this is the era when that happened. I'd even say like l figuring out how to package them into something like you know, I I compare it a lot to WWE.

I think a large part of that is figuring out like the the irony levels there, the sort of like how do you make it theatrical? And one sort of interesting Alex Jones subplot I love to bring up when I talk about him is that there's this feature I think it was like Vanity Fair or something many, many years ago about this couple in Brooklyn that kinda got sucked into a cult and they eventually

commit suicide by walking into the ocean together. And it's like it's a great story and we'll link to it in our show notes. But if you read it, it's a fascinating uh sort of artifact of of its time because it talks about this weird shock jock from Austin that moves to Williamsburg and gets like ingratiated with like the Vice magazine set and they think he's like this cool renegade. And I think it's like a very fascinating example of like how

irony kind of played cover for Alex Jones at the beginning. In fact, uh he he ties uh for a local poll for rest uh best talk sh talk radio host in nineteen ninety nine. He gets fired because the radio network doesn't like him, and the Austin Chronicle wrote at the time, Jones, who hosted the final edition,

so named because you never knew when the government might shut down might show up at the station to force you off the air, was instead forced off the station uh by station management last week. And the reporter in this thing seems to kind of be into Alex Jones. They write, I still at least appreciate the fact he was tackling political topics and from a different perspective than the right wingers who dominate talk radio, such as G Jor G. Gordon Liddy,

And unlike much of the so called black helicopter crowd, he isn't racist. He saves all of his ire for government and corporations. And I feel like that is a very important Innovation from Alex Jones is like tapping into this like keep Austin weird, freaky deekey Gen Xer kind of mentality and like

taking that torch from Rush Limbaugh in a lot of ways. But it's also interesting to think that like they were they were sort of aware of each other. Yeah, I gotta imagine that they were. I mean the radio's not that big. They also probably were very, very aware of Art Bell.

And you know, Art Bell, uh coast to coast, um That show was also n you know, would would occas I mean, you know, a lot of times it was more like paranormal or uh UFO, but they would occasionally there would be some like, you know, uh somewhat like Bilderbergery stuff. that would come in. And so y all of that is in that mix at that time. And the one of the things that the fairness doctrine, the repeal of it did, and then I would also say with um Clinton's uh Communications Act in ninety six.

Right. This would have been right around when Alex Jones launches. Yeah. One of the things that it did is it just started to like ramp up the ability for corporations to monetize this stuff. That all played into it. There was like a There was a business model that was driving a lot of this stuff.

After the break, we're going to be talking about what I think is probably the biggest, next important moment in our store here, which is obviously 9-11. But before that, uh, here's a word from our sponsors, commemorative gold coins. Check out some commemorative gold coins, uh and we'll be right back. Maybelline serum Väng firar 70 år av resor, och det gör vi med massor av erbjudanden som är omöjliga att motstå. Hitta våra bästa jubileumserbjudanden på wing.se. De bästa resorna försvinner först.

I think we can kind of all agree that like 9-11 is a mass radicalization event for America. Like it is it is uh it is the line in the sand of the 21st century. Uh I've been trying lately because we we just did an episode about like

people whose parents are being radicalized by the internet. And so I've been spending a lot of time like putting myself trying to empathize with like the mindset of someone who gets sucked down a rabbit hole, you know, someone in their sixties, seventies. And something that I keep coming back to is this idea that, you know, if you were born peak cold war paranoia and then you see nine eleven.

I have some sympathy for the p for the for older people who have now since just gone off the deep end. I mean, do you feel like that that Experiencing like that kind of you know environment throughout your life, that does create paranoia naturally, right? Like that's not totally out of control, out of the question.

Yeah. And there was already this sort of like thing in the air from that generation, from the Reagan era, right? Like because remember Bill Clinton in his first term, he only won forty five percent of the vote. Uh he didn't even have a majority of people. Typical Clinton behavior, stealing an election, you know, those people. Day one. It was Limbaugh was talking about impeachment on day one. Do you get dizzy watching the same things happening over and over again like this?

Well, just to take a tangent, in O four, uh On on Air America, I got to interview uh with Janine Garofalo Gore Vidal multiple times. And he would come in and he had just written the United States of Amnesia and his whole argument was like we de this country doesn't remember anything. Like it nothing. And I couldn't fully grasp

what he meant until I see like the reformation of of George Bush and I mean, you know, all the like the L Lynn Cheney stuff I mean like nobody remembers anything. It's it's it it's so disturbing. But the what nine eleven did, I think, is like you still had in the air this sort of anti-hippie sentiment. And and a lot of the hippies were again m the the silent generation. They weren't actually boomers. The boomers

saw the the hippies get like more disillusioned and really just came down and got the sort of like like the scraps of it, yeah. The me focus part of it. What was left for the boomers was just the More material aspects or the individual indivila individualized part. And the part that was bad was like the sort of MerGovern hippie part. It was set up For us to be attacked was a function of some, you know, like sort of national weakness. Um and so a lot of people

you know, just decided like I gotta get muscular. I mean that's like what turned Bill Maher into Bill Maher. Guys like that really sort of lost their minds a little bit. And to tie it to sort of this idea that the boomers like

Mass media is to baby boomers what the internet is effectively to millennials. It is this like massive new technology that they are growing up with and alongside and reflecting themselves back to themselves. And if you spin through like some of the crazy controversies, well first actually, 9-11 is uh I had a I had a hiss I had a history of terrorism professor in college once call it the the most perfect spectacle ever devised by human beings.

There's nothing more impactful visually than the nine eleven was. But then it its effect on mass media is also fascinating to sort of look back on. So here's a quick, you know, list of s a few things that happened here. You know, there's a massive uh list of songs that Clear Channel basically doesn't allow state stations to play, including Benny and the Jets.

Green Day's brain stew in the air tonight and great balls of fire. Uh I get it. You know, that must have been a fun job for someone to put together. Sequels to the movies True Lives and Forrest Gump are both canceled. The idea of Forrest Gump stopping 9-11, I think, would have probably not made a great movie. Could make that now though, maybe. There's non-stop news on terrestrial TV. Cable news kind of comes into its own at this moment. Baseball games are canceled for the first time since D Day.

And obviously, uh everyone assumes that the X-Files predicted it because of that one episode with the lone gummen where it literally nine eleven does happen like several months before it actually happens in real life. It feels like the moment where

Mass media is no longer just reflecting our tastes and our interests or the tastes and the interests of baby boomers. It's now like dictating reality and what they're able to even sort of like experience. Like it's it's like almost like the moment the machine turns back on them in a weird way. Yeah, I I mean I think that's true and I don't know

I don't know how conscious I was of that in the moment because you know, it was scary. It is scary. I mean, it really was actually scary. And, you know, I I lived in the the city and I lived uh almost next door to a uh National Guard um I don't know what you call it, not a base, but a building where like they were bringing the bodies. And so there was so many photos that went around I feel like it was like twenty sixth street uh between uh Lex and Park, maybe.

uh just plastered with photos of people looking for their loved ones. And that, you know, I d it probably existed only a couple of months maybe, but it felt like it was an eternity. But yes, I think that's true. I know like being in New York, I just remember thinking, I mean, we had to evacuate. I was living in a building on on on Park Avenue.

in twenty ninth Park Ave South and we had to evacuate'cause they thought another plane was gonna hit the Empire State Building, like I don't know, five or six days later. And just it was this idea of like One guy could walk into Macy's with one stick of dynamite, blow himself up and half the city would would e would would would leave. I mean, so there was definitely like this definitely subsumed the the consciousness of

of the nation for uh you know, like at least up into the run up uh to the Iraq war. I mean I remember going to Nebraska that same guy actually who who who was an Alex Jones fan and going to Nebraska and getting off the I guess going from the Omaha airport to Lincoln and seeing this massive and this had to have been in two thousand two in driving on the highway and seeing a big uh billboard of a fireman.

Like when others ran out, he rushed in. And I'm like, we're in Omaha, Nebraska. Like why is there all this sort of like oh and there was also just intense like uh security at the airport? And I'm like, they're not gonna hit Omaha. They did it in New York because all the cameras are there. Um but yes, it changed i i mass media I think like basically

It definitely defined the the constraints of what the conversation was. In fact, um Janine Garoflo was one of the few people who was allowed at that time in that run up to the Iraq war to go on television to say we should not invade Iraq. They would not let anybody else on. She was just she didn't want to do it, but she was recruited because they literally would not let anybody else on. And then she would go on.

And they would say, like, what are you doing here? You're an actress. Why like what w what possible uh expertise do you have? This was like Anybody who was anti war, who was weak in that way.

Fox News, it's existed since nineteen ninety six at this point. The internet is in its like v infancy. This is the year they start to make money. This is the year Fox News becomes Fox News. They were completely subsidized by Murdoch. I think up until then. That's insane to consider actually. Um in two thousand four a poll of New York residents finds that half of them believe that there was some sort of foreknowledge from the government of the attack.

The conspiratorial thinking is everywhere. And Alex Jones is having just a field day with this, obviously. You know, he's got all kinds of predictions that he's now saying, you know, uh that it was an orchestrated bombing from the government, the European Union will become the most powerful government on the planet, that Iraq should be nuked.

uh that Osama bin Laden wasn't behind this at all, that maybe Germany was behind it somehow. I mean it is he just goes and goes and goes for hours. And it you know, we've come around to this point a lot in our show, which is like the combination of cable news and the internet and now a entire sort of generation of American politics, an entire American political cycle through the lens of Limbaugh and now Alex Jones, it just felt like f like very fertile soil for

Conspiracy theories as we now think of them. Conspiracy theories, but also sort of just like I mean, what Limbaugh was doing at this time was Calling Guantanamo Club Gitmo. I forgot about that. Yeah. They had a whole merchandise. line of Club Gitmo stuff. Like they are ha Grant is wearing one of those shirts right now, which is sort of embarrassing, but like we c you can't it's yeah. Okay, Grant. Um but yeah, no, I I forgot all about Club Gitmo. That's it. Don't you understand vintage Ryan?

I'm very much like. It's a bright thing. Right. These type of conspiracies grow, right, when There's a sense that we're not getting or at least then that we weren't getting the real story. And I I you know, like I I I I think that was the case that we were not. It was really just Bush really dropped the ball. But the interesting thing that happens, like over the course of the next really ten years.

And I think part of it, frankly, was also like the the two thousand one election, to be honest with you. I mean the excuse me, the two thousand election. That was like I I I think it Nine eleven overshadows it, but it was huge. It was it really We're talking like Peak Hanging Chad, uh what is it, the uh the what w the the ri the um Brooks Brothers riot. The Brooks Brothers riots, yeah. But all legal people like like

Well like that shouldn't have happened based upon our system. And there was this sense that like and part of it was because of the the the ascendance of the Federalist society The underpinnings of the things that kept Us within the norm. ended. And so by the time you get to Benghazi I think the story of Benghazi was there was a CIA outpost output o outpost there.

That was maybe shipping weapons to maybe Syria or something to that effect. I can't remember the details now. But nobody wanted to talk about that. And so the Republicans seized upon that. vacuum of information. Like why was why were what were they doing there? Why did the this guy from the consulate run to, you know, run to this annex in Benghazi?

And they knew that I mean I feel like part of this also happened with like the investigation of of of of Trump in some way. That there is uh stuff that the government doesn't want. to really come out. And they're Some people take advantage of the lines that different people and and that's how you build these conspiracies. And it was just so effective.

for the Republican Party. And what I think is like super fascinating when you look at this sort of post nine eleven period, not only, you know, you you now have the world that Rush Limbach created and you have this like very, very active boomer audience. Fox News is now profitable. They are figuring out how to create a dozen rush limbas that can talk to you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And then you have the appearance of Facebook in 2006.

Which appears like it's promising an alternate ecosystem. But what it actually does is sort of just lay on top of the existing structure. Because by twenty eleven you have the newsfeed which launches. It's the first algorithmically curated Feed like it.

And by two thousand eleven there's an academic study that's sort of tracking American polarization and it finds quantitatively offline audiences maybe less polarized than some would have suspected. Thirteen percent of Fox News' audience is liberal. And twenty six percent of New York Times readers are conservative, consistent with the view that the internet will increase segregation. The most extreme internet sites are far more polarized than any source offline.

It is just automating what had started effectively in the eighties. And we're gonna talk about what happens when you do that and you get a guy named Donald Trump uh on on the scene right after the break. Uh but before that a word from our sponsors. More commemorative gold coins.

When was the moment you kind of thought, like, oh, Trump might actually become president? I was an MSNBC commentator at the time. I was going on. Uh uh uh Chris Hayes' show. I was in the green room And I can't remember there was a couple of like weekend anchors in there or something.

And I and and they were showing him come down the escalator and I'm like that dude he has completely turned the the uh race upside down. I didn't think he could be the president, but I thought for sure that he could be the president. the the uh uh Republican nominee. And I think if I remember correctly, Hayes and I

I think it was shot like Mystery Science three thousand and we watched the him come down on the escalator. And you're like commenting on it? Yes. And at the break I turned to him like, dude, this is serious. Like he They had built a suit. You know, George Bush was the CEO president and Paul Ryan and and the rest of'em, um I mean the whole Republican sort of and and Limbaugh did this too. Being rich was morally righteous. Being poor was morally unrighteous. If being rich is morally righteous.

then the billionaire on the stage is always correct. You can't argue against him and The other thing that that um I understood because of how much right wing radio I had consumed is that Trump was one hundred percent right wing radio. He was just getting everything from guys like Mark Levin and Laura Ingram and Hannity. And Limbaugh for that matter. Like it was all right wing radio talking point.

That's where the anti immigration stuff came from. Okay, that that's that that is really interesting because it it it does feel like By the time we get to Trump, he's now fully in the pocket, as you said, of conservative media. But also importantly, his campaign is the moment It's the beginning of conservative media digitizing e effectively. Like obviously there was right wing websites, Forever Drudge Report, you know, all that stuff. That was huge though. Huge. But huge difference is this.

Drudge was a conduit to mainstream. So like all the producers at like ABC or Cable News, they'd all re drudge. Yeah, exactly. And then they and that's the way that the right would launder their narrative. They would do it through drugs. By twenty sixteen, they no longer need to launder their narrative into mainstream media because their media world was self sufficient.

Yeah, I mean in twenty fifteen, Alex Jones is now fully online, you know, streaming nonstop, InfoWars, and he has Donald Trump on as a guest d as he's a candidate. Um and I wanna read a segment here from from the interview. Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down, Trump tells Alex Jones. And then Jones replies back, My audience, ninety percent of them, they support you. Then Trump wins. And uh there's uh we have another study here that sort of shows that by this point

There is effectively like no right wing trust in media. They don't really understand mass media anymore. The and and it the the study reads, as political scientist Christian Hosom explains, what Trump does is connect the that type of opposition to the media as into a form of conservatism that just wasn't around before. And one byproduct of that is that that media mistrust is more central to conservatives' group identity than it was before Trump. Or as Lee put it,

Signaling media distrust is much the same as wearing a red MAGA cap. And for many Republicans, that might mean distrust of the media is better thought of as a way to understand the centrality of the par partisanship to their identity. So it's like This is the moment where the mass media generation It it's it's all ending, and now like they don't even understand that they're they're still consuming mass media. It just it has changed, it's different.

and the mass media president, the guy who shaped from The Apprentice and from Howard Stern appearances and Letterman appearances. It's it's all morphed into politics and like I it in many ways it feels like the final stage of sort of the boomer story is like mass media just created their president. Yeah, but I I would still contend that like what happened was that

Mass media no longer existed in the way that we understood it twenty years earlier. Right. And you had Fifty percent of the media being consumed was just like a a self enclosed bubble. And uh they no longer had to filter it to A B C because it doesn't matter

'Cause there people d aren't watching ABC. They're just watching they're watching Fox, they're watching all these different internet uh plays, whate whatever it is. Like the in the Republican Party did the same thing. Like people forget Mitt Romney went to go kiss Donald Trump's ring in the run up to the twenty twelve uh election. Like Is that that haunted photo of them at dinner together? It looks like something from the Shining? That's the that dinner is one where

Trump invited Romney to maybe you'll be my Secretary of State. That was twenty sixteen. People forget that Mitt Romney made a special trip to New York City to literally kiss Donald Trump's ring. in twenty twelve because Donald Trump was the one who did the whole birther thing. And uh he he needed Exactly he needed Trump's blessing. Um and so, you know, Trump was already sort of like this He was the equivalent of like The the liberal left never understood the power of right wing media.

And so they couldn't understand. who Donald Trump was in this alternate universe. What he meant to those people they d they barely understood that there was this alternate universe. And uh they thought it was still the universe as opposed to, you know, and he's just like this ding dong fake uh billionaire on T V. But in this different universe he was not. Um he was a different guy. He was the guy who was telling the truth on uh uh uh you know about Obama.

Well it's funny you talk about how like the the liberal left like didn't understand the alternate universe because it does feel like after Trump is elected the first time you see this m I mean I I you know, I was working in newsrooms at the time and I was doing these stories where there's just a

a rush of stories about like millennials not really understanding why their parents have voted for Trump. Like I you know, it it's a common theme. It's it it feels like the almost a a defining millennial experience in a lot of ways. And Luke O'Neill, who writes Welcome to Hellworld, which is is great, collected a bunch of stories like these, and I want to read one uh which which uh an excerpt from one which reads.

Another person told me that Rush Limbaugh sent his father on the path to isolation before eventually mainlining Fox News on a regular basis. Eventually, out of the blue, his mother filed for divorce. He was crushed, couldn't understand why, and took comfort in drinking while watching his friends on TV. She is happier than I have ever seen her, and he is sad and angry living in the basement of a rented house, still watching The Five, Tucker Carlson, Jim Pierrot, etcetera. And that is

it in a lot of ways. It's like the the w the ego s the ecosystem got so big and so vast and so comfy comforting for people. and then We didn't see it forming. Like we obviously it's clear now to look back, but at the time, I mean did you see Oh, yeah. W when did you sort of start to worry that this stuff was like

becoming bigger than the alternative or or even sort of mainstream like j journalism. You know, I started, you know, I was in uh show business and then I sort of fell into radio in two thousand four. And that was when there was like the blogosphere. And so the thing that we were, you know, sort of like railing against was like, why is ABC News getting its n like dictating the news from the Drudge Report? So that was the worry there.

you know, at that time. And then but in two thousand bo uh six, uh Stephen Sherrill and I wrote a book called Foobar, which was essentially, you know, the tagline could have been, This is not your father's Republican Party. Like the the the If you listen to talk radio and believed in it. like believed it was actually moving people, which I did. I mean that's why I I went into t talk radio. You saw this coming

in the aughts and maybe even the late nineties. Like th this was it just was growing and growing and growing.

Can I ask kind of a maybe a silly question? But it's one that I I I've been s sort of wondering recently. It feels like in many ways The radicalization of talk radio in the nineties and early two thousands, you know, it's something you experience in your car, alone pr probably. It's in the air, like literally. It feels very similar to the way we talk about radicalization with something like TikTok now, where it's very personalized. You your TikTok feed and my TikTok feed never two shall meet.

How did you get the sense that this stuff was permeating culture? Like what what sent up the antenna for you? Because I do think that that is like a major roadblock in talking about this stuff now when we're talking about algorithms, which honestly are sort of the same. It it's this thing that is just ethereal and out there, but it's clearly doing something to people. But so how did you clock that talk radio was having an impact? I mean, I...

I lived in I I grew up in Massachusetts. I lived in Boston, I grew up in Worcester. Uh I'm from Marblehead. There you go. Uh I mean Grant is shaking his head. He's so pissed right now. Let's just get Dave Portnoy in the in in here. Don't say that. Uh there's strange thug thugginess that exists in Massachusetts.

that belies its reputation. Yeah. And I feel like that's where I got a lot of like my awareness of that. Like, you know, just sort of Uh just dudes you'd you'd just talk to and then all of a sudden like they're going into these weird Rance, but I know where it's coming from because I listen to right wing talk radio. I mean, I'm not sure. Не надо. the early nineties, he was a comic in Boston. No. Any good? No. He throws like he's throwing with his not right Not correct.

No, but I would be at a bar in my hometown, you know, for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I'd be talking to, you know, some guy and doing high school or whatever, and all of a sudden he launches into a bit and I'm like, I know that that's from Joe Rogan. That it's so funny that you notice the same like that is it maybe it is like a New England sort of like

You're breaking the the the barrier of what's acceptable casual conversation in like a New England bar and you're like and if you know what they're talking about, it's like well that you clearly heard that somewhere. So in convers if I had I not, I'd just be like, wow, this guy's weird. Like w where the what the fuck is he talking about? Like this guy. Yeah. Like you can't believe what he was saying. Like Th like Hillary Clinton like drag a body into a park and

Well I don't know, the guy was wacko. But a as soon as you hear that stuff, again you're like I know exactly what the source of that material is. Sure. Yeah. With Trump they were building essentially this suit and he just fit it perfectly. Right. This is all at the end of the day about a a cohort of people, white men, who lost something real. I mean, in addition to the broad based hollowing out of like uh rural towns and manufacturing, which impacts everybody. They lost social status.

You know, like you know, when I'm a kid, every T V show I watch is about me in some fashion. It's either about like when I'm older or as a kid, or you know, like women exist there as a my mother or my girlfriend or my future wife. And now all of a sudden like I'm watching Cialis commercials and it's like, what's that black dude doing? Like what that's supposed to be me there. He's taking the bowl of medication.

Wait, what is this uh lawyer is a woman? And you know, that's that was a story of Reconstruction, right? Like the the way that they uh the idea was like how can we convince And there was there was some sector of the white population that that that that didn't bite on this, like some of the pr you know, uh populist um uh didn't bite. as hard as others, but how can we convince these poor white people um that there's a problem with black people actually taking political power?

And you know, we will stoke the fact that like, okay, you're poor, but at least you used to be higher in the pecking order than black people. And Yeah. It it is we're watching the fallout of like these liberation movements that happen in the seventies, in the eighties, you know, and really come to fruition in the nineties. And Uh Uh in the ox.

Uh maybe not even the aughts, really just the nineties. Yeah. The the resent that's generated there. And they've figured out how to sort of maintain that resent and sort of like give this vision to like Gen Z in my estimation of like

your inheritance has been stolen from you. You should just know. And I and I think like one last piece of this that I I do think is important to touch on before we sort of end wrap up here, which is that like As the internet became more corporatized,

website as a concept doesn't really exist anymore. And the platforms that most of you know you know people my parents' age are using are closer in construction to cable news. They're closer in construction to radio. They are just endless content factories. that now know what you want and know how to sell it to you.

And it you know, that is I think the final piece of it and I think this is why a lot of people say, like, Oh yeah, boomer brain rot, you know, like they're on all these apps making them crazy and it's like, no, like The apps figured out that you can have someone stare at them twenty four hours a day if they just tell you what you want to hear. And so It doesn't surprise me that the generation we have the most information on in terms of what they like, all of popular culture as it's ever existed.

I can just beam AI generated videos of the Beatles reuniting into their brains and at the end say, Don't put fluoride in your water and I can become a billionaire. Like it yeah, we know what they like. They are the most targeted generation that's ever existed, probably. I I that's why I don't buy the idea that the internet did something here. It's it's that these as you said, these these stories have been playing out for decades now and and this is the the

I assume the final kind of chapter here, you know, in terms of human longevity is concerned, uh, for them specifically. Um, you know, we are sort of hitting the twilight era for them. And yeah, it d it's not it's not surprising to me that the internet plays a role, but I don't think it is like Facebook made my dad. Facebook did it. I think it I I don't think it's the internet that did it. I think it was really just Again, maybe it was a a steroid on some level, but

But you also I would add Cialis. It's like a Cialis. Yes. Like a time release Cialis. It's a time release, yeah, exactly. But I would also say that like you have to remember the boomer brain. Was completely formed. I have one in a jar that was completely formed without a tool to deal with a digital world. Yeah. We would go to the library, we wanted a book, we would have to go through a a whole like file of of cards and then get a number and then go to the other file and go it was so linear.

that you could not at ever p any point get diverted sideways. And I think that like is if you grow up without any You know, we have a generation of kids who I think have like ADHD because of this stuff. But I suspect that down the road we're gonna figure out how uh and kids are gonna figure out how not how to maintain focus in some way. They're gonna readjust their signal to noise ratio. Yeah.

um you know uh detector in a way that like you didn't have to employ when you were that age. And now they can't. uh all the dopamine hit stuff aside, which I think is true, et cetera, et cetera, I think they're just more vulnerable to not Knowing they're being fed this stuff. In the way that they are. Like, you know, you can hear people your age complain like my Instagram feed sucks now.

because or or, you know, my TikTok feed sucks because I did this and that and you're not gonna get that level of savvy from you know, a boomer necessarily. No, they're just like, Oh, nothing's it is, is it but it is. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna thank you for coming on the show. This is a great I could keep talking about this stuff for hours and hours. I I assume everyone listening knows where they can follow you, but where can they follow you if they don't already? If you are a boomer

Let me explain that I live on YouTube. Uh WWW dot You can uh you can uh just you can find the majority report as a podcast every day. Um you can watch it live on YouTube or Twitch. every day and you can find uh the show on uh YouTube or Twitch after uh the the show. We do noon to Like two thirty ish. That's good that's a that's good. That's like a good block. I don't know how Hassan, I don't even know if he goes to the bathroom during the day. What's going on? I don't think he does.

I have it. Just like Donald Trump. I've actually peed myself like three times during this. No, we know. We can see your face. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator, and our amazing Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest who edits our book. and executive producer. R. C. Charlotte Robinson is their deputy director. Marianne Couga is their director.

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