Col him called gen X elected Donald Trump, and I got to tell you, for the generation that's been ignored since our very birth, we are finally having our moment in the sun where we as a generation decided to look at the candidates and go, no, that one looks like a bigger middle finger to us. And so gen X pushes Trump over the finish line. And David Strom wrote about it today, David, welcome back to the show.
Well, thank you, Mandy. It's always fun to be with you.
And I have to admit I wish I wear gen X, but I just miss it. Well.
You know, you and my husband were both born in nineteen sixty four, which is technically the last year of the boomers. But he is far more gen X than he ever was boomer. So I just say he's a Boomer on the cusp, right, So like in astrology, when you're right on the edge, you're just your gen X on the cusp is what you are. So I'll give you that title.
Yeah, Well, I am what a friend of mine calls a member of a silent generation, because we don't quite fit into either category. You know, I watched the Vietnam War on TV as a kid, but by the time I became an adult, it was in the rear view mirror. And you know, I wasn't old enough to vote for Ronald Reagan at least the first time, but I was too old to really say I grew up in the Reagan era, which is what the gen X people did.
And we did.
And so I'd love to know you've got this great column. Justine Bateman created a firestorm, a firestorm with a simple tweet that just expressed what so many other people have felt. And that is just like we can all exhale because finally sanity is beginning to prevail and all of a sudden, Justin Batement is everywhere.
Well and rightly.
So she really has been in a very gen X way, even though she is basically my age, but in a very gen X way looking at what has happened and identified something really great, which is gen x through its cynicism in a way, it's lack of being overly idealistic and it's lack of being you know, oversensitive. Looked at what was going on and said, look, this is nuts. It's ruining our lives. I don't care if Donald Trump
is crude or anything else. I want my life to be better, and so they voted for him in much larger numbers than any other demographic group.
I think that for myself, and I've been doing a deep dive on gen X for a lot of different reasons that I'll share with you guys later, But one of the things that I feel is that we tend to look at any situation in a very pragmatic way, because when you don't have a lot of guidance from your parents, and many of us in this generation raised ourselves to a certain extent, you have to figure that out at an early age. You just have to say, look, you know what is let's take the emotion out of it.
What's going to be the best for me going forward and economically, just common sense wise. And one of the things Justine Bateman goes on about is that is how intolerable our society has gotten. Intolerable and intolerant our society has gotten and she just wants to go back to the days when people could have a political disagreement and still be friends. Which you say that and you think, of course that's how it should be, but not everybody sees it that way. So in your view, what is going forward?
You know, I think it even goes beyond politics.
It's just that we've been living through a totalitarian moment, almost a maoist moment, where there was a cultural revolution out there, and if you did not conform, not just politically, but in any number of culture war issues, you were persona on grata.
I mean, they're they're really developed a cult out there. You know, whether you call it woke or alphabet.
Ideology or whatever, it also boiled down to you had to comply or else. And you know, the gen X, you know generation came up at a time where people realized that, you know, they couldn't count on the government.
Not everything was a great moral crusade.
I mean they looked at the boomers, you know, who are so proud of themselves for protesting.
The Vietnam War and you.
Know, patted themselves on the back for it, and you know, the gen X people looked at them and said, yeah, well you quit doing that as soon as the draft went away. You know, it was not anything about you know, great moral crusades. And you know, we're just tired of hearing all this moralistic bs. You know, we can account on the government to give us social security or anything. Else.
So we're going to make our own world and not.
As that's been sort of the trail that we've blazed quite nicely. I just started kind of interesting that that the swing from left to right was double digits by a long shot for this group of people. And I think that part of it is, First of all, I'm I am five years into gen X, so I'm fifty five years old. I'm looking at my retirement. I'm looking at my you know, what's going to be either in my in my four to one k and in my
investment accounts, or what's real estate going to do? Because I'm now looking very closely at the time of life when I want to be able to retire. So when I'm choosing my candidate, I'm going to look at the candidate whose policies are going to facilitate that. And I
think a lot of that happened in this election. You have you know, Kamala Harris running around talking about giving loans to only black men and all of this insane stuff that we all knew wouldn't do anything to solve any problem, and.
We just went, no, we're not going to do that.
We just want some some kind of certainty with business and and you know, taxes and lower regulation. We just want everything to work, and it's not working now.
Well, and you know, if you think about it, Boomers really, you know, they look at wokesoff and in a very abstract way, understand that it's stupid. But it's jen X who's at the sort of at the top of their game right now, their prime earning years. And what they're seeing is they're being labeled people who have worked their
butts off. They're being labeled as the oppressors. They're being asked to, you know, pay the loans of gender studies, people who you know, have contributed next to nothing or worse to our society.
And you know, they I don't want to say that Gen.
X resented it, because I don't think that Gener X is a particularly resentful generation. They were just tired of the BS.
That's an excellent point, really excellent point. My guest is David Strong. You can read his column at hot air dot column. I've linked to the one about gen X that we're talking about right now, and you can see the shift in gen X dramatic in some of the stuff that he has embedded in here. David a great column and I appreciate you making time for me today
Always,