Wee Nips
Published 29 Jun 2025Born between 1954 and 1965? You might be part of the forgotten generation — Generation Jones — wedged awkwardly between Boomers and Gen X.
In this video, we break down what it means to be a Joneser, why we’re all still jonesing for something better, and how our weird hybrid powers (like remembering phone numbers and setting up Wi-Fi) just might save the world.
If you’ve ever used aluminum foil on rabbit ears or fixed a TV by smacking it, this one’s for you.
March 1, 2026
Generation Jones EXPLAINED: The Lost Generation Nobody Talks About
February 13, 2026
January 7, 2026
More anti-anti-boomer discussion from Scott Alexander
I linked to Scott’s original article last month and thanks to the interest it generated (and perhaps my clickbait-y headline) it got linked at Instapundit thanks to Sarah Hoyt. Scott got a lot of feedback on his post and shares some of that here:

“… Millennials and Generation Z have more money (adjusted for inflation ie cost-of-living, and compared at the same age) than their Boomer parents, to about the same degree that the Boomers exceeded their own parents. This is good and how it should be. The Boomers have successfully passed on a better life to their children”
First, I wish I’d been more careful to differentiate the following claims:
- Boomers had it much easier than later generations.
- The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations.
- Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract.
Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions — I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-Boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support — rather than letting them switch among them as convenient — then arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position.
Second, I wish I’d highlighted how much of this discussion centers around disagreements over which policies are natural/unmarked vs. unnatural/marked.
Nobody is passing laws that literally say “confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B”. We’re mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favorable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favorable to young people. If you’re young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare where the old are enriching themselves at young people’s expense. But if you’re old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff. But in fact, they’re just two different tax policies and it’s not obvious which one a fair society with no “intergenerational warfare” would have, even assuming there was such a thing. We’ll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I’ll try to highlight it whenever it comes up.
I’m in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the Boomers (and myself) in these responses more than I would in an ideal world.
[…]
1: Top Comments I Especially Want To Highlight
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Sokow writes:
[The anti-Boomer] take has been imported in part from the EU + the UK where the pension system is not the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Pension_(United_Kingdom)#Pensions_Act_2007
There is a lot of similar things in France that I could dig up, such as all attempts to tax benefits being defeated.
Many Europeans chimed in to say this, including people whose opinions I trust.
I find this pretty interesting. We all know stories of American opinions infecting Europeans, like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there. I’d never heard anyone argue the opposite — that the European discourse is infecting Americans with ideas that don’t apply to our context — but it makes sense that this should happen. I might write a post on this.
Kevin Munger (Never Met A Science) writes:
Hating Boomers (and talking about hating Boomers) is uninteresting and I agree morally dubious.
But it is *emphatically* false that “Boomers were a perfectly normal American generation”. They have served far more terms in Congress than any generation before or since (and we currently have the oldest average age of elected officials in a legislative body IN THE WORLD other than apparently Cambodia), they have dominated the presidency (look up the birthdate of every major party candidate since the 2000 presidential election…), they controlled the commanding heights of major companies, cultural institutions (especially academica).
They are a historically *unique* generation, for three intersecting reasons: 1. They are a uniquely large generation 2. they came of age as the country and its institutions were maturing 3. they are sticking around because of increased longevity. These are analytical facts, and they produce what I call “Boomer Ballast” — a concentration of our societies resources in one, older generation that increases the tension we are experiencing from technological innovation. Our demography is pulling us towards the past, the internet is pulling us into the future, and this I think is the major source of the anti-Boomer frustration.
On the specifics of social security and why we might think Boomers have played things to their advantage (not bc they’re specifically evil but bc they have the political power to do so) — the key thing is that they have prevented forward-thinking politicians from fixing the inevitable hole in social security that comes from our demographic pyramid. It would have been relatively painless to increase the rate or incidence of the social security payroll tax at any point in the past 25 years, the looming demographic cliff was obvious and the increased burden could’ve been shared more equally. Instead, they prevented reforms and all of the fiscal pain from demographic shifts will be borne by younger generations.
I agree this is a strong argument, and part of why I think it’s helpful to separate the three points I mentioned at the beginning.
RH writes:
We [Boomers] did [vote for ourselves to pay higher taxes and get fewer benefits]. My lifetime SS benefits will be 20-25 percent less than they would have been under previous law, and I voted for that. My SS tax rate went up itself, and has been well over 15% since the changes took effect, and the cap on earned income subject to that went up a lot. And I voted to accept all that because it was projected to be sufficient.
Then the immigrant haters decided we needed fewer workers in the country, or at least fewer paying SS taxes, so they slowed legal immigration and pushed illegals into the underground economy, so they don’t pay taxes to support social security. And social security is going to get whacked again, plus the evils the SS system was intended to alleviate — people too old to work and too poor to live — will return.
I think this says something profound about politics. The problem is less that there’s some group of people who don’t believe in fairness, but that fairness is very hard to calculate.
Suppose RH is right (I haven’t checked), and that Social Security would be sustainable with lots of immigration. Then whether Boomers are paying “their fair share” or not depends on whether immigration is good or bad (a hard question!), and on whether we think of high vs. low immigration as the natural unmarked state of the universe (such that immigration opponents must “own” closed borders and compensate the losers), and on what kind of compensation the losers from closed borders deserve.
Someone else commented by saying we could solve all of these problems without inconveniencing either the Boomers or the young by just increasing taxes on a few ultra-rich people. The ultra-rich could reasonably say they didn’t create this problem and it’s unfair to tax them for it. But so could the Boomers and the young! So whose “fair share” is it?
December 21, 2025
Boomers – A vampiric generation battening on the blood of the young
As a member of the recently identified “Generation Jones”, I could take part in the widespread boomer hate with a clear conscience … but as Scott Alexander points out, the hate may be more than a little over-done:

“… Millennials and Generation Z have more money (adjusted for inflation ie cost-of-living, and compared at the same age) than their Boomer parents, to about the same degree that the Boomers exceeded their own parents. This is good and how it should be. The Boomers have successfully passed on a better life to their children”
There’s a more developed theory of Boomer-hating. The more developed theory goes: Boomers are plundering the young. We know this, because their share of resources is high and keeps increasing. They use their large population share and good voter turnout to vote themselves ever-higher pensions at the expense of working taxpayers.
How might we investigate this theory? We can’t use total social security spending, because the number of elderly has gone up. Can we use social security spending per elderly person? No; the amount of social security paid out depends on the amount paid in. If each year’s retirees earned more during their career than the previous year’s did (this is true), then each year’s will get a higher SSI payment, even if the system’s “generosity” stays the same.
We might start by looking at change in social security payment divided by change in median income. Over the past fifty years, average Social Security payment in inflation-adjusted dollars increased 60%. If we expect these payments to reflect earnings twenty years before disbursement, we can look at real median personal income from 1953 to 2003; this also increased 60%. There is no increase in generosity.
Or we can just look at the history. The Social Security Administration’s own website says that its generosity peaked in 1972, when the program primarily served the Greatest Generation; since then, it’s been one contraction after another. In 1983, the government increased the full retirement age from 65 to 67; in 1993, they made Social Security more taxable. Since then, most of the changes have been cost-of-living increases, which are indexed to inflation and not the result of active lobbying on old people’s behalf.
Why do so many believe that old people have discovered a vote-themselves-infinite-benefits hack? Since old people represent an increasing fraction of the population, are living longer, and face a secular trend of rising healthcare costs, even when their benefits per capita per year are stable or declining the government will spend more money on them as a group. This spending is indeed rapidly becoming unsustainable, the elderly will need to accept big benefit cuts to make it sustainable again, and they are resisting those cuts.
So have we finally discovered the fabled Boomer selfishness? Call it what you want. But remember that the Boomers did pay money into Social Security to support their own parents, believing that they would be supported in turn. Learning that yours is the generation where the pyramid collapses is a hard pill to swallow. Maybe they should suck it up and take the sacrifice. You’d do this, right? Voluntarily give up money which is yours by right, in order to help other generations? Oh, sorry, you didn’t hear the question, you were too busy writing your 500th “You don’t hate Boomers enough, why won’t they hurry up and die, we need to declare intergenerational warfare and seize our rightful inheritance” post.
Update, 22 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
November 23, 2025
Do older Canadians really hate their children and grandchildren? The fiscal evidence says “yes”
As I posted a few days back, the real political divide in Canada is no longer the left versus the right: it’s the old financially parasitizing the younger generations. At The Line, Ben Woodfinden discusses how the smug, comfortable boomers are being confronted by, for lack of a better term, a “new right” of far less comfortable younger voters:
The specific complaints from people like d’Entremont and other grumbling voices are less about ideology and more the tone and style of Pierre Poilievre (though perhaps the two are connected). Poilievre’s temperament and style rubs certain people, including some Conservatives, the wrong way. Now, full disclosure, I worked for Poilievre for a few years, and I can confirm he’s a demanding boss. But so is the prime minister, reportedly. And Poilievre is also in my experience the hardest working person I’ve ever met.
The tone battle is not a revival of Red vs. Blue. It’s not clear those terms are even relevant today. “Red Tory” is often used pejoratively to describe a “Liberal Lite” voter who identifies as a conservative but is indistinguishable from a Liberal — those who fit the “social progressive, fiscal conservative” moniker. This is not what Red Toryism historically meant; it’s actually the opposite of this. Red Toryism is a distinctly Canadian tradition of conservatism that was focused on the preservation of Canada contra a liberal United States, and emphasized the role of the state in this. It blended conservatism and elements of socialism in a distinctly anti-liberal synthesis that rejected radical individualism — that’s what the “red” part actually means, not liberalism but socialism. This kind of Toryism — “conservatism with a conscience” — is committed to public institutions and is pro-market but not entirely libertarian.
But Red Toryism is no longer a dominant force in Canadian conservatism; today it’s a remnant, largely in Atlantic Canada. What we’re really looking at here is a generational fault line that cuts right through the heart of Canadian conservatism.
Many older Canadians are conservative, and these older Tories are (in general) fairly well off. They are retired, or well advanced into their careers. They own homes that are paid off, or will be in the near future, and worth a lot more than what they paid for them. Many of them have been able to help their children get started in their own careers, or with down payments on homes of their own. They value stability — it is essential if they are to continue enjoying their prosperous lives. These people have long enough memories to remember the political battles that led to the creation of the modern Conservative Party of Canada in 2003 — some of them were no doubt even participants, and may still identify with one faction or the other.
Now contrast this with many of the leading voices on the other side of the debate. They call themselves “the new right”. In the absence of a better term, I’ll use that. Canada’s new right tends to be younger, and this matters not just because the old PC/Reform divide means very little to them, it matters because they are much angrier with our general state of affairs, and for good reason.
The emerging flagship publication for this collection of young conservatives is the Substack Without Diminishment. In some ways, the emerging conservative opposition in Ontario to Premier Doug Ford centred around an organization called Project Ontario (discussed in last week’s On The Line podcast here) is also a good representation of it.
The voices and figures involved in this movement are younger, often very online, and eager to pick fights with this older generation of conservatives. For some of the writers at Without Diminishment, the archnemesis of their conservatism is Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne. He represents, for them, an outdated kind of “Boomer conservatism” that does not speak to them or the issues they care about. New conservatives have also recently written, after Ford ran ads featuring Ronald Reagan in America, that it’s time for “the gatekeepers of the Canadian right … to move on from 1984” — namely Reagan-era conservatism.
Twenty years ago, I’d often quote Andrew Coyne’s columns, but at some point he had a significant change of heart and one of the first Without Diminishment articles I linked to was what I characterized as “The Anti-Coynist Manifesto“.
November 18, 2025
Canada’s divide isn’t left versus right, it’s old versus young
Older Canadians seem to be taking joy in sticking up their elbows and robbing younger Canadians of opportunities, jobs, and hope. It’s quite literally un-Canadian, but the Boomers have always been a generation apart and this is merely the latest manifestation of their self-centred worldview. Alexander Brown wonders if this divide can be fixed before the country itself is ruined:
“Talk to your parents,” the host of an event for Pierre Poilievre joked on Saturday in Vancouver — an event I happened to attend. “But be patient. Be kind.” And he’s right.
The cross-talk, the rock’em sock’em robots, the continued slap-fight between warring consultant tribes, it isn’t getting us anywhere, clearly. When the present iteration of the party of the status quo wedges a nation against itself, and denies a reform election after a decade of haphazard redistribution, non-growth, and abject decline, you get a traditional voter-demographic breakdown flipped entirely on its head.
The party of seemingly endless opposition dominated with youth, held strong with the 35-54s, but found itself walloped 52% to 34% among those aged 55+. Since then, those 55+ numbers have only widened, as the “safe” choice, that more stately actor (when he’s not radicalizing those who don’t know any better with claims of false invasion) can do little wrong, even coming out of “middling” budget heading to a vote Monday, and with a nation remaining pessimistic about its future prospects.
If the Liberals are voted down Monday, they would likely relish that opportunity to seize on a majority. The spin is already built in.
The Conservatives don’t want to stand up against Trump!
At a time like this, when we should be coming together, it’s un-Canadian …
We’re supposed to be one Team Canada right now (offer void in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec), we can’t afford Pierre Poilievre’s divisive Trumpiness.
On and on. Yada and yada.
Nowhere in that comms exercise, drummed up by those who spend more time in America or the Arab Emirates, or meeting with Chinese proxies than they’d publicly care to admit, would there be a defence of younger Canadians, of those still on the launch pad, worried about, say, supposed ‘fixes’ to immigration riddled with creative accounting and more of the same.
Nowhere would they address housing, set to get much, much worse, under both the federal Liberals and targets they’re admitting they won’t come close to hitting, and Ontario’s ‘Conservative’ premier who leads the galaxy in not getting off his ass to get out of the way on starts and lowering punitive development costs.
Nowhere would one find a stout defence against “deconstruction“, or the daily humiliation ritual of flags flying that aren’t our own, or imagined and inflated woke excess meant to sully the memory of our war dead and marginalize normal people.
Following recent debates sparked by Without Diminishment, where we’ve argued a version of “it’s not just the economy, stupid,” when it comes to what’s animating young people and young conservatives — actually talk to them, and half of them are trending towards fascism with how alienated they feel by a lack of upward social mobility, or a society without rules or those willing to enforce them — it’s been easier for some serving in established camps to mischaracterize these conversations as focusing too much on culture, or, ridiculously, “blood and soil nationalism”. But we’re not. If one is dealing in good faith, it’s plain to see we’re trying to talk about both.
Of course, the Liberals survived Monday’s budget vote … for now:
When I saw Elizabeth May stand up and ask Mark Carney what looks like a completely planted question, I assumed the budget would pass and I was correct. Planted questions normally come from government MPs and are a soft way for the government to push their agenda.
This time, it wasn’t a Liberal MP, well at least not a Liberal MP in name and fact. Instead it was Green leader, or deputy leader, or let’s be honest the lonely lady in the corner who is the only Green MP asking the question.
That statement put the Liberals one vote closer to passing their budget and of course May later confirmed ahead of the vote that she would back the budget. This was after saying couldn’t back the budget, might back the budget, would probably back the budget, definitely wouldn’t back the budget and finally would back the budget.
How anyone can take Elizabeth May seriously is beyond me.
How the other votes went…
Ahead of the vote there were lots of questions about how things would go. Would all MPs show up or be able to vote online? Would people abstain? Would MPs vote for the budget without crossing the floor?
In the end, the budget passed 170 to 168 with two NDPers abstaining. That leaves five votes not accounted for and we will figure out.
Here is how the vote went.
Now, some members who were not in their seats did vote electronically. I didn’t see Matt Jeneroux vote electronically and I’m told that he is in British Columbia with is family. Also not voting, Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs.
Conservatives Andrew Scheer and Scott Reid both voted no but only in the time that is allowed for MPs voted electronically to claim tech problems. They were both in the House, so why were didn’t they vote in person?
Regardless, the NDP rushed out to say they voted against the budget but also made sure that it passed with their two abstensions.
As for all this talk of a Christmas election, had the government lost this vote and the PM gone to see the Governor General tomorrow, the earliest election date would have been December 25.
A Christmas election.
November 13, 2025
Blue Hairster Cult: (Do Fear) The Zoomers
In the free-to-cheapskates portion of this post, Ed West explains why the Boomers and even the Millennials should fear the Zoomers:
“To understand the man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty”. I’ve thought about that quote, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, a fair bit recently. I suppose for my generation, 9/11 was the formative event, which signalled the end of the triumphalist Nineties — although the extent to which it affected us is questionable. Perhaps of far greater importance was the financial crisis which unfolded towards the very end of the Bush-Blair era.
What about those born around the turn of the millennium, the so-called “Zoomers”? I suppose it would be the experience of being locked down for a year in order to protect an older generation whose wealth they can never hope to emulate. An already bitter and disillusioned cohort, denied their patrimony by house price inflation, came to adulthood with a period of deliberate social isolation with only the internet at hand — a lockdown that was punctuated by weeks of millennial hysteria over racism.
The intelligent ones would have seen the hysteria for it was — a wild distortion, and realised that the media regularly distorts all sorts of things, and it’s the intelligent ones I worry about. Indeed, when I read the thoughts and worldview of that generation, I feel a sense of dread about what’s coming; perhaps even more so when it comes from the Right.
I only watched a Nick Fuentes video for the first time this summer, an amusingly edited version of a talk in which he rails against Israeli military success. It had been sent by a Jewish friend with strong Zionist sympathies, and it’s very funny — Fuentes is very funny. If I were 20 years old, I might have watched his show, one of many aspects of life in 2025 which I thank God wasn’t around in my adolescence.
After all, most of the things I watched on television – five channels, kids, in fact more like four and half, as the Channel 5 reception wasn’t very good – liked to poke fun at the prevailing morality of the older generation. My favourite comic, Viz, would laugh at the old people whose fault it was that Eddie Murphy’s swearing had to be dubbed over with “freak you, monkeyfeather”. Today it’s only natural that young men should wish to offend woke scolds.
But then, of course, something darker might also be happening. Rod Dreher recalls a fascinating, and disturbing, account of his conversations with young Republican activists this week, writing that: “Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it. What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, ‘They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down’.”
There is certainly polling to suggest that younger voters in the US are moving to extremes, if you believe polls. One found that “explicit antisemitic attitudes are now much more common among young voters”, who are five times more likely to have an “unfavourable view of the Jewish people than 65 year olds”. Since 2018, the percentage of American boys who believe in gender equality has shrunk. Far more worrying is that younger Americans are also much more likely to support political violence. and this is more of a problem on the left.
November 8, 2025
The Boomers didn’t do it, but they could have reversed it
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter takes the entire Baby Boom generation out to the woodshed for a well-deserved talking-to:
toking-the-abacus @_toking
It’s amazing how catastrophically bad the current job market is in the US. No one wants to train anyone. They want 5-10 years experience in skills that you don’t get unless someone mentors you in a more junior role. Then you have rampant visa abuse.
Boomers mostly got paid to get trained on the job for their jobs.
Then they turned around and demanded college for everything. At a steep markup.
Then they rugpulled all the college grads by hiring foreigners to do the jobs people went into debt learning how to do.
Whole lotta incensed geriatrics in the replies saying “That wasn’t boomers, that was Griggs v Duke Power! Those judges were silent generation!”
Yes. And that was 1970. 55 years ago.
That’s kind of the point.
You were the largest generation in history, boomers. You could have reversed that insane decision. You could have ended the crazy practice of disparate impact. You could have ended the systemic bigotry of affirmative action, which discriminated not only against you, but against your own sons and, now, your grandsons. You could have used your institutional and electoral power to block DEI.
You could have done a lot of things.
But you didn’t.
At most you grumbled some, but not too loudly, because after all dad fought in the big war and you didn’t want to do a Hitler. A lot of you supported all of it wholeheartedly, because John Lennon had an imagination and MLK had a dream and remember Woodstock, man. Some of you profited from it handsomely. As a generation, as a group, whether by action or inaction, you entrenched it in every aspect of law and institutional culture.
You participated, each in your own way, in redesigning our entire society around women’s feelings, black self esteem, and sabotaging the minds, bodies, spirits, and lives of your white sons.
Don’t run from your part in this.
I’m not saying this to be mean.
I’m saying this because we fucking need you.
We need your votes, because as a direct result of the immigration policies of the last half century – which, again, yes, have their origin with Greatest and Silents, but whose most severe consequences unfolded on YOUR watch – we are absolutely, 100% screwed if we don’t deport an absolutely incredible, historically unprecedented number of people in a very short period of time. If that doesn’t happen it’s game over for America and, frankly, Western civilization. For now, for as long as you’re still breathing and capable of casting a ballot, whites are a bare majority. When you’re gone we’re outnumbered, the third world swallows the first, and it’s over.
We need you to confront the consequences of your actions and your complacency, to really feel what its done to your descendants, and to be filled with rage at the way you were misled by evil and selfish men, and an implacable determination to spend what remains to you of your lives doing whatever you can to reverse enough of the damage you allowed to be done to salvage something from this crumbling wreck of a society.
That is why we bully you.
Because we need you to see.
November 7, 2025
QotD: The Boomer career path
I don’t know how many times I have to explain this: Boomers were all given free TVs to watch Howdy Doody who all transmitted them the secret code to grow their hair long after they watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, after which they went to college and took over the Dean’s Office. To get rid of them the Dean gave them free drugs and directions to Woodstock where they had sex in the mud to get Vietnam deferments.
After that they got bored and became Glam rockers, and then switched to Disco because it had a better beat. They used all their free money from Disco record deals to buy cocaine and Malibu real estate at $3 per acre. In 1980 they decided there was even more money in selling cocaine, so they all moved to Miami and drove around shooting machine guns from their Lamborghini Countachs to Giorgio Morodo synth music.
After Reagan’s re-election the Boomers decided greed was good and they all moved to NY where they became serial killer investment bankers and collected up all the Andy Warhol originals. That’s when all of their real estate holdings made them billionaires which they leveraged to get in on the bottom floor of the Internet bubble in the 90s while taking designer drugs.
Today those same Boomers are all driving around to orgies at The Villages in $500k luxury golf carts waving giant Trump flags, laughing it up while lighting doobies with their Social Security cash and executing Howdy Doody’s Final Plan: the secret Boomer Immortality Pill that will allow them to keep their money away from Millennials and Zoomers FOREVER
David Burge, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-30.
October 22, 2025
The Anti-Coynist Manifesto
In a guest post at Without Diminishment, Michael Bonner takes a blowtorch to the boomer hippies and particularly to Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne. But first, the obnoxious boomers:

Part of the crowd on the first day of the Woodstock Festival, 15 August, 1969.
Photo by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell via Wikimedia Commons.
In their own minds, they invented rebellion; they stopped a war; and they discovered sex. The latter phenomenon, they still believe, was quite unknown in former ages. So were drug-taking, vulgarity, and poor hygiene. These, as it was believed, were the means of “finding oneself”, and there was no more important task in life. Automobiles were likewise a singular obsession, and the Good Life meant not only driving but also eating, attending films, and copulating in cars.
They were an unusually forthright lot, who were apparently well educated, but who nevertheless espoused many absurd and contradictory notions. Their parents, who had gone to war to fight Nazis, were themselves branded as fascists by their own children. They professed to revolt against money and materialism; and yet, when they came of age, these were their primary interests. They were the generation that attended Woodstock in defiance of a flu pandemic, and were later the most assiduous followers of Covid-19 restrictions.
At the frightening name of Woodstock, it will be obvious who I mean. The Boomers were born to the men and women who had endured the privations of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and everything in between. It is the Boomers who prove the adage whereby good times make weak men and weak men make hard times. They disliked the ease and prosperity into which they were born, and sought to erode them. The 20th-century fear of Soviet subversion or nuclear annihilation was therefore misplaced. For where the Soviets failed, the Boomers triumphed, leaving our culture and our politics in ruins. They are still at it, as the gravitational field of their huge demographic mass continues to distort our politics. Worst of all, the Boomers’ peculiar vision of personal freedom, norm-busting, and individualism at any cost now passes for conservatism.
And on to Mr. Coyne himself (full disclosure: I’ve met Mr. Coyne a few times at early Toronto blogger gatherings and he seemed quite a sensible chap 20 years ago):
Does this Boomer conservatism have any luminaries or pundits? In Canada, it has one and he towers over his acolytes and opponents alike as a learned giant among intellectual pygmies. Or rather, that is how Andrew Coyne undoubtedly imagines himself. So great a spokesman of the Boomer conservative mentality is Coyne that the entire movement could be named after him: Andrew Coyne-ism.
Who has not heard of Andrew Coyne? He is now a columnist with The Globe and Mail and a member of the At Issue panel on CBC’s The National. He wrote for the National Post and once edited its editorial and comment section, but resigned in 2015 during the federal election. The cause was a dispute with executives over the rejection of a column composed for election day, in which Coyne failed to endorse the Conservatives. Coyne described the dispute as an unwelcome intervention that threatened his editorial independence, stating on Twitter that he could not allow the precedent to stand and needed to protect his reputation as a columnist.
That incident is a microcosm of the problem. One may fairly complain, as Coyne did, that the Harper Tories failed to please every member of their coalition equally, though such a thing is rarely possible. But the rest of Coyne’s complaints concerned a “bullying, sneering culture” of “the low brow and the lower brow”. The imperfection of policy merely annoyed him, but he hated the Conservatives’ tone. They were not sufficiently respectful, they traded in insults and did not agree that “learning and science are to be valued, not derided”, apparently. In contrast, “a politics of substantive differences, civilly expressed” was “the formula that just elected Justin Trudeau”.
Trudeau: a paragon of civility? Surely some other Trudeau is meant, not the opposition MP who called the Minister of the Environment a “piece of shit“. Not the man who, at a “ladies’ night” campaign event, was asked which country he most admired and said it was China’s “basic dictatorship“. Not the man who announced that the excitement of a political campaign amounted to “pizza, sex, and all sorts of fun things“. Not the man who mused about such subjects as “making Quebec a country” if Canada were to become too conservative and the need to put Quebeckers in charge of our “community and socio-democratic agenda” — whatever that means. Not the man who once halted an interview with a French-Canadian journalist in order to demonstrate the right way to fall down a flight of stairs. I pass over the more lurid stories of groping a reporter’s buttocks, wearing blackface, and singing the “Banana Boat” song.
Alas, it is the same Trudeau. Nevertheless, Andrew Coyne-ism can excuse all such behaviour along with the decade of sanctimonious bullying and decline that followed it. For none of it is as bad as the wishes and worldview of the mostly rural, western, and blue-collar Conservative base. Such people are too angry and too vulgar for their own good. Including them within the benefits of Confederation must be rigorously circumscribed, and allowing them to shape public policy cannot be allowed at all.
September 25, 2025
An unanticipated danger of AI – “classified” videos for decision-makers
Until fairly recently, even the least tech-savvy among us could distinguish AI-generated videos from the real thing … but most of the leaders and decision-makers in western governments aren’t very tech-savvy and put into high-pressure environments may be uniquely susceptible to AI manipulation:
What If I Told You … One of the biggest applications of AI for misinformation hasn’t been online but in the halls of power.
Aging boomer politicians, generals, and major figures are manipulated by showing them AI videos they can’t tell, can’t pause to look at, and certainly can’t digitally examine or geolocate …
“And as you saw Mr President.”
Pay attention. All of them reference seeing “videos” that you aren’t allowed to see, of events which they claim are public record, but appear no-where and no reporting supports …
Sean Hannity was interviewing a world leader and even said “You should show the public the video you showed me it’d really change everyone’s opinion. it changed mine” LIVE ON AIR. And the world leader said some non-committal maybe, then released nothing.
These aging politicians, media figures, corporate personalities, etc. all casually reference seeing insane videos that would CHANGE EVERYTHING and would have been immediately released to sway public opinion if they existed or would have been leaked if it would have been in poor taste to be seen directly releasing them (like gore films)
But of course they aren’t released because they’re faked and the internet would immediately piece together that they’re faked with AI, video game, and archival footage from old conflicts … But the aging 60- and 80-year-olds who run the world can’t tell.
There was a case where they challenged Greta Thunberg “Would you watch this video it’d change your mind” and she refused telling them to just release it … Then they didn’t and attacked her for not being willing to view evidence contrary to her views … in a controlled environment where she couldn’t scrutinize it or check its authenticity against anything else …
It sounds insane! But if you pay attention all of these politicians, media figures, and even influencers … People who often have ZERO security clearance or any official attachment of real trust or allegiance to the governments showing them this “classified” or “controlled” footage … Regularly reference seeing footage which does not exist in the public domain, for events which are viciously contested in which any of the footage they claim to have seen would be WORLD CHANGING news … Yet all these figures are just left out in the wind repeating “Trust me bro”s for some of the most important occurrences of the past decade.
August 11, 2025
Smug Canadian boomer autohagiography rightly antagonizes the under-35s
Fortissax had an argument with one of his readers over a smug, self-congratulating meme about how wonderful Canada was in the 1990s and early 2000s:
What we lived through long before Trudeau was the Shattering, the breakdown of Canada’s social cohesion, driven by left-liberalism with communist characteristics applied to race, ethnicity, sex, and gender, and punitive almost exclusively toward visibly White men. My generation, those millennials born on the cusp of Gen Z, saw post-national Canada take shape not in the comfortable suburban rings of the GTA or the posh boroughs of Outremont and Westmount, but in self-segregated, ghettoised enclaves of immigrants whose parents never integrated and were never required to.
Memes like that are dishonest because they feed a false memory. The 2000s were not normal. Wages were stagnant, housing was already an asset bubble, and immigration was still flooding in under a policy that explicitly forbade assimilation. Brian Mulroney had enshrined multiculturalism into law in 1988. Quebec alone resisted, carving out the right to limit immigration under the 1992 Quebec–Canada Accord. After Chrétien, Stephen Harper brought in three million immigrants, primarily from China, India, and the Philippines in that order.
The Don Cherry conservatives of that era were Bush lite. They were rootless, cut off from their history, their identities manufactured from the top down since the days of Lester B. Pearson. They conserved nothing. For Canadian youth, it was the dawn of a civic religion of wokeness, totalitarian self-policing by striver peers, and the quiet coercion of every institution. My memories of that decade are of constant assault — mental, physical, spiritual — from leftists in power, from encroaching foreigners, and from the cowardice of conservatives.
Your 2000s might have been great. For us, they were communist struggle sessions. In 2009 we were pulled from class to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama, a foreign president, as a historic moment for civil rights. Our schools excluded us while granting space to every group under the sun: LGBT safe spaces and cultural clubs for Italians, Jamaicans, Jews, Indians, Indigenous, Balkaners, Greeks, Slavs, Portuguese, Quebecois, Iroquois, Pakistanis — every culture celebrated except our own. Anglo-Quebecers and Anglo-Canadians got nothing but an Irish club, closely monitored for “white supremacy” and “racism” by the HR grandmas of the gyno-gerontocracy of English Montreal. Students self-segregated, sitting at different cafeteria tables and smoking at different bus shelters. At Vanier, Dawson, and John Abbott College, these divisions were institutionalised. I remember walking into the atrium of Dawson, my first post-secondary experience, greeted by a wigger rolling a joint while a Jamaican beatboxed to Soulja Boy.
We became amateur anthropologists out of necessity, forced to navigate a nationwide cosmopolitan experiment from birth. We learned the distinctions between squabbling southeastern Europeans of the former Yugoslavia, and we did not care if Kosovo was Serbia or whether Romanians and Albanians were Slavic, they all acted the same way. We learned the divides within South Asia, the rivalries between Hindutva and Khalistani, the differences between a Punjabi, a Gujarati, a Telugu, a Pakistani, a Hong Konger, a mainlander, and a Taiwanese. We know the shades of Caribbean identity, the factions of the Middle East, and the intricacies of North African identity. We should never have needed to know these things, but we do.
For us, childhood in this cesspit was the seedbed of radicalism. We never knew an era when contact with foreigners was limited to sampling food at Loblaws. All we know is being surrounded by those who hate us, governed by a state that wants to erase us, with no healthcare, no homes, no jobs that are not contested by foreigners, and no money to start families.
June 27, 2025
The fading Boomer Laurentianus
Last week in The Critic, Charles Kirwin described the people who saddled us with three terms of Justin Trudeau and hope to continue their reign of error by supporting Mark Carney with his Europhile whims and intolerance for dissent:
Boomer Laurentianus is a Canadian subspecies of Boomerus Senectus, so named because he models himself on the so-called Laurentian Elite, Canada’s governing class that inhabit the “Laurentian corridor”, the narrow strip of land along the Saint Laurence river between Montreal and Toronto that, for a certain kind of Canadian, is the only bit of the country that matters.
In spirit, he is a child of the sixties and still believes he is a radical at heart. Despite this he expects to be treated with the deference reserved for those awarded the Victoria Cross, despite his closest experience to combat being glancing longingly at pictures of the cancelled Avro Arrow or campaigning to defend the local parking lot from being turned into affordable houses.
Like his British and American cousin, he supports progressive policies like safe supply of drugs, lenient sentences and bail conditions for criminals, and whatever economic policies keep his pension fund high and his property values increasing. Naturally, he lives in neighbourhoods untouched by the crime and addiction that are the direct result of the policies he supports.
It is important to note that while his modes of thinking and beliefs are those of the Laurentian Elite, his mind is shaped by the institutions of the Laurentian Elite: The Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Governor General’s Literary Award, various other high-minded organisations that form the intellectual life of Laurentian Canada, Boomerus Laurentianus is not necessarily “of” them.
Molson Canadian is the spirit of his patriotism. In 2000, Molson released a beer advertisement in which a typical Canadian played by actor Jeff Douglas shouts into a microphone to an audience of Americans, dismissing various Canadian stereotypes (we say aboot, drive dogsleds, are all lumberjacks and fur traders et cetera) and notes some of the differences that make Canada not the US. “I have a Prime Minister not a President … I believe in Peacekeeping not policing … I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack while travelling”. The advertisement is something of a cult hit in Canada and has been parodied by just about everyone including William Shatner.
This one-minute advertisement swells at the heart of the Boomer Laurentianus view of his country. It is both superficial and, in places, factually incorrect (the equivalent of the US president is not the Prime Minister but the King or Queen of Canada). But he has built his entire sense of nationalism around myths such as peacekeeping or being liked by foreigners more than Americans. This last point is sacred to his sense of identity.
Boomerus Laurentianus exists in a superposition state usually reserved for Schrödinger’s cat wherein he is both completely American and not American at all. It was often claimed of Rhodesians that they were “More British than the British”. Boomer Laurentianus is more Yank than the Yanks. Despite his reverence for the CBC, he gets his recipes from the New York Times and his opinions from CNN. He watches American television, travels to the US frequently, may even own a second home there. He can almost convince himself that they are the same country, sometimes to the point of putting up signs supporting, Democratic political candidates, seemingly unaware that he cannot vote in foreign elections.
May 13, 2025
QotD: The song is correct – video did kill the radio star
One of the things people have always believed about modern media is that video beats audio and audio beats the written word. Before the rise of “new media” on the internet, this meant television was better than radio and radio better than newspapers. In the internet age, the assumption now is that live streamers have greater reach than podcasters and podcasters have a greater reach than bloggers. Mixed in there are people who exist only as entities on social media platforms.
One reason for this assumption is youth culture. In liberal democracy, the young are treated like gods, in the same way novel social ideas are treated as gifts from the gods, so whatever young people like is heralded as pure and beautiful. Young people, especially children, are first drawn to images, then sounds and finally as they mature into adults, the written word. In modern liberal democracies, therefore, video platforms are treated like sacred altars where our most sacred members perform.
The youth culture phenomenon has co-evolved with the rise of mass media. In the days before mass media, young people were at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy. The first flicker of youth culture in America was the jazz age, but even there the people driving it were old by modern standards. The characters in The Great Gatsby, for example, are mostly early middle-aged. It was after the war with the explosion of Hollywood that youth culture blossomed into the centerpiece of modern life.
Another reason why video maintains a privileged place at the top of our social hierarchy is Baby Boomer culture. For Boomers, for whom mass media evolved, video was always the top. In the golden age of television, for example, the whole country would watch popular television programs. No newspaper or radio broadcaster had the reach of a popular television program. Hitting the big time in the field of news or entertainment meant getting on TV or in the movies.
As much as young people, and not so young people, complain about the Baby Boom generation, the Boomers still control the culture. That is plainly obvious with the panic over the Chinese virus. If the Boomers were twenty years younger, the virus would rate a few mentions in the New York Times science section. Since Boomers are now deeply involved in the health care system, anything medical is going to be of utmost importance to everyone. It is why nurses are now heroes.
The Z Man, “Thoughts on Modern Media”, The Z Blog, 2020-05-09.
January 9, 2025
Hollywood’s favourite creation … the “hero forgives” scene
I’ve never been much of a moviegoer or TV-watcher, so I hadn’t consciously noticed what kulak is discussing here:
“All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
-Edmund BurkeThe reason the boomers are the way they are, and the reason no one in the west fights back against their dispossession and replacement is an 80 year long program to indoctrinate an Ideology I call “Hollywood Anti-justice”.
In almost every piece of media to do with violence, crime, justice, and individual heroism of the past 80 years there is a scene: The “Hero Forgives” scene.
Upon violently defeating, disarming, and capturing the villain, the hero, in spite of his every instinct, in spite of friends screaming at him and reasoning with him with arguments he can’t counter, in spite of the villains mocking unrepentance, dead to rights evidence, gleeful confessions, and even vows to reoffend.
Even if the villain is guilty of hundreds of murders, rapes, and treason, even if the hero himself has killed hundreds of henchmen to capture the villain …
The hero will refuse to kill or punish him.
Sometimes the hero will insist that he must go through the courts … Sometimes the villain will openly mock him that the courts are corrupt and will never convict him, and the hero still will refuse to take matters into his own hands …
Sometimes the hero himself IS the lawful authority. Sometimes the hero is a Military officer, post apocalyptic militia captain, Medieval Knight, Greek Hero, Roman Centurion … etc. And in fact his private judgement IS the official lawful means of passing judgement and executing obviously guilty villains … And he STILL refuses to punish or kill them.
I recently saw El Cid, where the hero, a Knight, refused to hang brigands who had pillaged, raped, burnt a town, confessed and were themselves quite resigned to dying, and even as his fellow knights berated him that the law itself demands he hang them, that it is his sacred duty to hang them, and that it would be treason for him not to…
And the Hero simply cuts their bindings and lets them go … Choosing to be forsworn as a traitor rather than hang the confessed and red-handed guilty. Now this may be a historical, but as far as I’ve been able to find such an event never occurred, it’s been made up for the film, doubly egregious because the historical El Cid almost certainly executed many criminals and brigands, committing and ordering justice … Which is NOT depicted in the film.
Even if the hero has been in this exact position before and spared the villain only for more to die, sometimes even his own family and friends, demonstrating the failure of this unspoken philosophy, the hero will STILL let them go … AGAIN.
Ussually there is some Deus Ex Machina that makes this all workout some ironic or divine punishment will find the Villain through their own folly … but not always. Indeed entire franchises have been perpetuated on THE SAME serial killer villain being forgiven, released, allowed to escape, etc. over and over again.
And audiences consistently hate this, this is always the most cliched, poorly written, out of character, film breaking scene in the entire work … Supposedly great kings, ruthless bounty-hunters, outlaws, veteran knights, military officers, grey and black market criminal anti-heroes, smugglers … All of them transformed into the most inconsistent pacifists for exactly this scene. I’ve seen audiences groan and scream at the TV “Just kill him” and yet the hero, often entirely contrary to their character, will not.
This is not an old literary trope, this is a Hollywood trope.
You can read the original Greek legends, the tales of King Arthur and his Knights, early modern nationalist heroes’ stories, the adventure stories of the Napoleonic officer, the Boys’ Own adventures of empire, and well into contemporary fiction westerns, crime stories, military science fiction, historical fiction, etc.
And in all of them you will see heroes kill their enemies in cold blood, order executions of the guilty, demand deserters, spies, and traitors be shot, seek revenge, order mass hangings … Etc.
Nor is this some uniquely American madness … As late as the 1950s the vigilantes/terrorists of the original reconstruction era (1864-1877) Ku Klux Klan were treated as folk heroes… Birth of a Nation was played at the White House when it was released. The idea of vengeance, wild justice, and vigilante killings being some unconscionable moral horror was simply not the case in the first half of the 20th century … It was celebrated, much as it had been for the previous 3000 years of the west.
In 1915 the legitimacy of Vigilantism, Vengeance, and Private Justice was so accepted that even arch-progressive, Princeton University Professor, and US President Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of a Nation, a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilante-terror campaign, at the White House.
Why did Hollywood invent this trope?
Where Hollywood producers just so attached to an idea of Christian forgiveness and pacifism that they just HAD to include it over the groans and often shouting of their audiences?
Were any of these writers, directors and producers even Christian to begin with!?
Why would the communists, atheists, Jews, and pedophiles that comprise the core of Hollywood writing include such an unusual Christian theme so insistently and often story breakingly?
Well. why do they insist on bullshit girl-bossery, race mixing, and woke theming today over the protests and disinterest of their audience?
Because it benefits them to brainwash the masses that way.
The Hollywood writers never identified with the hero refusing to kill an enemy … they identified with the villain and quite liked for him to get away (indeed many Hollywood writers will openly say as much, that they identify with the villains and much prefer writing them).













