Is This How We Baby Boomers Want to Be Remembered?
Some say it was the largest public political event ever staged in the USA. With more than 2,700 demonstrations occurring simultaneously all over the country and an estimated total participation of 7 million, I have no reason to think that’s not true.
The question is whether it was a political protest or some other thing. If there were political issues at stake, it wasn’t well promoted because none of the dozens of marchers I saw interviewed by either the Legacy or the Conservative Media had answers to the question, “What policies, exactly, are you protesting against?”
It was, to be fair, a trick question. The event was titled “No Kings Day,” which sounds like a good-natured spoof of the idea that Donald Trump wants to become king.
And that, I think, is exactly what it was. It was not about the federal budget deficit. It was not about tariffs and the trade war. It was not about inflation or immigration or the increasing possibility of a nuclear war. I’m sure the marchers would have been prepared to talk about those issues had the protest organizers decided to make the event policy-oriented. But as one of the organizers proudly explained after being congratulated for getting so many people all over the country out there to protest, they decided that the best course of action would be to limit the protest to the common bond that tied all of the marchers together: their deeply seated hatred of Donald Trump.
That was interesting. What was equally interesting was the demeanor of the marchers. The organizers encouraged the marchers to come for the fun and bring along their synthetic animal buddies and furry friends – and while they were at it, why not take back the red-white-and-blue?
After all, almost everyone, including many Liberals and a few Leftists, had grown weary of defending “Men can have babies” and “All Whites are racist” and “Jews are the new Nazis” and “It’s okay to assassinate public figures if someone tells you they are nasty and mean.”
Not to mention the growing embarrassment of even the Mainstream Media admitting, in bits and pieces (so it can be missed or intentionally ignored), that the COVID virus was a product of biowarfare – US-funded biowarfare experiments that blew up into a massive, worldwide pandemic of anti-scientific hysteria, which damaged the global economy by tens of trillions of dollars, destroyed tens of millions of businesses, and needlessly caused the deaths of countless millions of people.
Or the embarrassment of discovering that ending the “border crisis” wasn’t complicated at all – that the US could go from allowing two to three million people to cross the border illegally to virtually nothing in less than six months.
I could go on…
My point is that, however much they surely wished it wasn’t true, the No King’s Day organizers realized that, as the polls have been increasingly showing, America’s great flirtation with Woke ideology has run its course as the attitudes of millions of moderate Democrats and Republicans, as well as Black and Brown Americans and almost all of the working class, have reverted back to common sense.
You could see all of this playing out in the way so many of the marchers behaved in front of the cameras. They looked cheerful, sometimes ebullient. When responding to questions, they spoke with conviction and even pride.
But when asked the trick question of what exactly they were protesting, they were taken aback. Most of them answered, “What do you mean?”
If the question was asked again, many of them became visibly suspicious of the reporter asking the question and agitated because, I think, they genuinely didn’t know what to say.
Something had happened between the halcyon days of the BLM protests and No Kings Day. That something, I believe, is that, for the first time in a long time (about 10 years), the protesters didn’t have a quick answer to the question of what they were doing that felt good to them. They didn’t have a bullet point that would make their point cleanly and clearly and justify their stance. Something had happened in the last two years, and increasingly since January. It was as if, while the Legacy Media was flooding them with daily accounts of Trump’s fascist pronouncements and tyrannical decisions, the reasons why those pronouncements and decisions were fascist and tyrannical were no longer being explained.
And they weren’t being explained for two reasons:
1. Some of them were working. In his first nine months in office this time, Trump has accomplished a list of major achievements which the Left, when he announced them, predicted would be ruinous to the country.
2. The Legacy Media was losing audience by promoting the anti-Trump message, and many of their corporate advertisers had decided to get off the Woke train.
This was not a conspiracy or a coordinated effort. It was the result of inevitable, natural fatigue. It happened quite publicly with Bud Light and Target and Disney. But it happened also when the corporate leaders of social media and the Legacy Media, including the NYT, the Washington Post, ABC, CNBC, Facebook, and so many others could no longer tolerate the constant downsizing of their markets and mounting losses as the majority of US consumers moved to digital media as their source of information and news.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m seeing it already in the content and the reporting from mainstream TV. The Legacy Media is no longer trying to make liberal and leftist politicians and influencers look good.
Have you noticed how, in the last several months, and especially in the last 30 days, reporters and influencers from the Legacy Media have started to ask liberal politicians like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and AOC tough questions? Did you see the interview of California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter by a CBS News reporter? Porter scolded the interviewer for asking “follow-up questions” and stormed off the set – and the video went viral.
Why has the conversation on the left turned away from the racism of closing the borders to the racism of forcibly returning illegal immigrants from whence they came?
Have you heard of Black Fatigue? It’s an idea many conservative African American bloggers and influencers are talking about. They say they are tired of all the identity politics, including systemic racism, White privilege, and other doctrines asserting that Blacks are effectively helpless victims in US culture, which is structured to keep the Black man down.
And while I’m on it, why is it that despite the massive success of this Boomer festival of self-love and self-righteousness, Trump’s overall popularity ratings went up?
Many, if not most, of the old White people participating in the No Kings rallies and marches don’t see things this way. They still believe that all Black and Brown people are victims and all White people (mostly men) are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Hitler-loving fascists. Worse, they still seem to think that in marching, they were once again reprising the courage they displayed 60 years ago when they protested the war in Vietnam.
To be fair, there was a smattering of young White Liberals, including a significant contingency of younger women with oddly colored hair. But in the footage I saw, the only Black people marching were within camera shot of White Liberal politicians who arrived at the destinations with cameras and security people on hand. And if there was a substantial number of
Brown people there, I didn’t see them.
So, what does this all amount to? What does it all mean? What can we say about this record-breaking, last-ditch, Baby Boomer protest against… well, against Donald Trump?
And furthermore, what if, left without talking points to argue their case, all these millions of leftist Boomers cannot dethrone Donald Trump and restore Woke culture as the moral standard of the USA?
Is there still a chance that they will able to influence our government to return to funding and arming the Ukrainians against Russia in the belief that, despite the fact that he has shown no evidence of it whatsoever, Putin will back down and give back his newly acquired territory?
I don’t think so.
Will we once again demonstrate our sympathy for the Palestinian people and respect for international law by withdrawing our support from Israel’s genocidal regime and supporting a two-state solution where Hamas and Hezbollah are once again free to pursue their God-given right and purpose of murdering Jews?
I don’t think so.
Will we reverse the discriminatory policies of Trump’s getting rid of DEI and reinstate the right of less-qualified people to take the positions of more-qualified people because of the color of their skin?
I don’t think so.
Will we end the unconstitutional and totally fascist policy of Trump to move into Blue cities with the National Guard and unilaterally end 20-plus years of massive Black-on-Black murders without even asking the liberal mayors and DAs who spent all that time passing laws and policies that got their cities to the top of the charts?
I don’t think so.
This is a tough time for Leftists and Liberals. Especially those that are paying critical attention to the news and watching the polls.
It’s not by any means a certainty at this time, but I have a feeling that the American political zeitgeist is changing and fast approaching a turning point where the love affair the Liberals and Leftists had with identity politics and Woke irrationality is over. And will probably be over for at least another generation.
And what makes this change especially difficult for the left side of the Baby Boomer generation is that the No Kings protest was almost certainly the last great, politically virtuous battle they will fight after having been unforgivably abandoned by the very groups they had been so long supporting – Big Food, Big Drugs, and Big War.
But 95% of the people that attended the protests don’t see it this way. As Baby Boomers, they have grown up thinking they (we) were – and still are – the generation that went to Woodstock to advocate for peace and love and all those good things. And as far as they can understand, that’s exactly what we were and still are.
Woodstock was a once-in-a-generation social movement that, despite the complete naïveté and self-centeredness of its participants, was also a once-in-a-lifetime party that young Leftists today secretly wish they had attended. But when they had their chance, they apparently didn’t see it as something serious and useful – just a massive celebration of themselves and their high opinion of themselves.
And now – in the last inning of their lives – they were able to do it again
