The shallow, woke millennial and Generation Z elite is coming for you, and they certainly don’t abide by the dictum, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
Our next generation ruling class is now being consumed by what is best described as the “Great Awokening.” From the Me Too movement, to the war on history, to the embrace of intersectionality to explain the world, they are now driven by the unfinished work of fundamentally transforming America. They like socialism too, although they frequently have little concept of what it means in reality.
They’re shallow but serious. Serious, because today’s swell of young, college-educated millennials and now even upcoming Gen Zers — often stripped of religion but filled with religious zeal — are emerging to occupy newsrooms and boardrooms and increasingly compose the base of the Democratic Party.
Young Politicians Don’t Know History
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the millennial Democratic congresswoman from New York who often boasts about her economics degree, said in a recent Instagram video, “Famed economist Milton Keynes predicted that by 2030, GDP and technology would have advanced so much that it would allow everyday people to work as little as 15 hours a week and provide for their families.”
Milton Keynes is not a famed economist. Ocasio-Cortez appears to have spliced together the names of John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, and mispronounced Keynes to boot. Milton Keynes was, however, the name used by a character in a skit from the British comedy show “Yes, Minister” to demonstrate a banker’s cluelessness about economics.
https://twitter.com/jsende/status/1226285248817881090
Ocasio-Cortez quickly backtracked and said it was a typo. Given her now long list of other gaffes, it’s hard not to dismiss her expertise.
But Ocasio-Cortez went to Boston University. Perhaps things are looking better in our prestigious, world-class Ivy Leagues. Then again, maybe not.
Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a Harvard University graduate who is now running for president, is often touted as a smart and savvy thinker. Buttigieg recently said, absurdly, “The people who wrote the Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing.”
This statement was not just wrong — the founders well understood slavery was a bad thing, setting in motion the ideas and actions that would put it to an end — but it also belied a leftist arrogance about thinking we’re smarter and more moral than people in the past.
David Hogg Creates Fake History
One sees this same combination of shallowness and certitude with David Hogg, the Gen Z, Parkland shooting survivor whom America’s legacy media turned into the face of the gun-control movement. Hogg attends Harvard University. This member of the younger cohort is filled with even more militant zeal.
Smug, penitent, and petulant, Hogg has become almost a caricature of the activist, left-wing college student who now thinks he knows all about everything because he read a few chapters of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” Hogg once ruthlessly and unabashedly barked, “Our parents don’t know how to use a f-cking democracy, so we have to.”
A gander at Hogg’s Twitter account reveals a flurry of political advocacy for various Democratic causes — gun control most prominent, of course — Trump bashing, and a long series of woke-isms. However, it’s Hogg’s takes on history that are truly remarkable for their ability to squeeze and twist any historical analogy and connection to fit his modern political virtue-signaling. Take this tweet from 2018, where Hogg said that only nonviolent movements, such as Mahatma Ghandi’s, lead to change.
Throughout history violence and war only creates more of itself for example WWI->WWII->Cold War ->Korean War->Vietnam and up to today. While nonviolent moments like Gandhi’s, the suffrage movement or Civil Rights movement lead to peace and long lasting change. Ours will too.
— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) April 30, 2018
This sloganeering has no basis in reality. Would pacifism have stopped Nazi Germany? Would slavery have been abolished in the United States in 1865 without the power and violence conducted by the Union Army? The partition of India was a horrifically violent affair, with a legacy of simmering tensions that continually boil over into modern bloodshed. Civil rights and the very right to life was often preserved for black Americans only through gun ownership.
Ida B. Wells, one of the founders of the NAACP, said that for black Americans, the “Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” This muddles things, however, so history must be changed. And changed it was in a more recent tweet that would have perhaps confused Wells.
This is a tweet for for the founders of the gun violence prevention movement started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and non binary people that never got on the news or in most history books.
We may not know all your names but thank you.
— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) January 27, 2020
This is little more than a carefully calibrated, ahistoric word salad, but he made sure to lump every “marginalized” group into the larger cause of gun control — and the policy priorities of the Democratic Party — so it’s all good.
But then Hogg blew it. His ability to decipher the encyclopedia of intersectionality was not yet advanced enough, even after his time spent at Harvard. Hogg dared to praise Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln was a really good president.
— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) February 5, 2020
Leftism Offers No Redemption
One would think that at the very least, Lincoln’s essential role in abolishing slavery — even putting aside saving the union — would be enough for social justice warriors to save him in the war on history.
Nope. That’s not enough for the faithful, the good allies. After all, this new style of leftism is a religion that has managed to embrace the concept of original sin without the hope of redemption. Any transgression, any action by those today or in the past that doesn’t abide by the moving target of social justice, can be immediately banished to the wrong side of history.
For his Lincoln tweet, Hogg received flak for praising a president who “murdered all those Indigenous People” and mistreated Native Americans. You see, the process of canceling Lincoln has already begun on college campuses for his role in the little-known “Dakota War” that took place in Minnesota in the middle of the Civil War.
To malign and dismiss Lincoln as suddenly unworthy of praise is an incredibly blinkered view of history. But history’s complexities must be ironed out or steamrolled in the name of our perfectly equal and inclusive future.
Hours after his initial tweet, Hogg relented to criticism and canceled himself.
I thank my indigenous peers that brought my attention to Lincoln’s atrocities committed against native Americans.
I’m deeply sorry for not acknowledging these crimes that I was unaware of until now. I will do better in the future.
— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) February 5, 2020
Historical accuracy and ability to praise and admire the imperfect people of the past must bow before the god of political correctness.
What Happens When Facts Don’t Matter
In glamorizing Ocasio-Cortez, Buttigieg, Hogg, and many others as ambassadors of the future, the media exposed the exact kind of moralistic but clueless hectoring Americans revolted against when they put Donald Trump in the White House.
The social justice warrior mentality is pouring out from our elite institutions, and it’s not just infecting university humanities departments. After all, we now have woke math for high school students, in case they didn’t get enough indoctrination in social studies.
From media, to entertainment, to finance and big business, all must abide by the dictates of a new religious class, the priests of progressivism. The prevailing ethos is that identity means everything — unless that identity is as an American, which is hateful and xenophobic. Being on the right side of history, whatever that mutable standard may be, is more important than truth.
The facts don’t really matter. It’s more important to be morally right, after all.
“Regardless of what your opinions are or where you come from, you need to realize we are the future of America,” Hogg said in a 2018 interview with NPR. “And if you choose not to stand with us, that’s OK, because you’ll be on the wrong side of the history textbooks that we write.”
Your betters, our new intellectual elite, praise non-existent transgender gun control activists in the 1800s and can’t be bothered to defend Abraham Lincoln.
God save you all from this generation.
