Anxiety does not inspire Millennials are not as bad off as advertised, Jean M. Twenge writes in The Atlantic. Reports that they were the first generation not to be better off than their parents was a premature take, post-Great Recession. “By 2019,” Twenge writes, “households headed by Millennials were making considerably more money than those headed by the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X at the same age, after adjusting for inflation.” But shaped by their rough start, they are not feeling it. John Della Volpe, who heads up the latest Harvard Youth Poll, studies Gen Z (born since ~1997). The latest data shows that three quarters of 18-29 year-olds worry about being homeless, he told The 11th Hour Monday night. A third think it could happen to them, and that’s almost 50 percent among people of color. Check out a quick Twitter thread here. A sampling: Fewer than half (42%) of young Americans who grew up in conservative households call themselves Republicans today. Among those who grew up in liberal households, 60% are Democrats. But left-leaning is not the same as voting. People need motivation to get off their couches.
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Take a few minutes and listen to this if you missed it last night. Puts it all in perspective:
I get emails and letters from right wingers fairly frequently and they’re mostly insulting rants against me personally. (I get some of those from the left too. This one I thought was interesting because he doesn’t call me any names and seems to be so earnest. You can see the extent of the brainwashing: I don’t think I need to tell you that virtually everything he says is not true. Nobody is supportive of abortion”up to the minute of birth and after birth.” That’s just not on the agenda and nobody is doing that. Children are not deciding to “attempt to change their sex.” That’s not legal. Their parents are making these decisions on their behalf in consultation with experts and doctors. The seriousness of crimes in our cities is vastly overstated and the three cities he mentions aren’t even in the top ten. There is much more gun violence in red states than blue states. And I suppose it’s irritating that people get shouted down on college campuses but I wouldn’t call it fascist. (At least not in comparison to storming the US Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power…) He seems like a decent person.
Speaking of fascism, TNR made a handy list of “the 10 most fascist things Fox’s top host said on air”: 1. He has promoted the “great replacement theory.” Carlson has repeatedly pushed the “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.” He has argued that Democrats want to replace white people so they can control the country. 2. He said Vladimir Putin wasn’t so bad. 3. He said the desire to procreate has been “subverted” by birth control and abortion. 4. He complained about “the total collapse of testosterone levels in American men.” Carlson has insisted that masculinity is supposedly on the decline in the United States. While both the theory and his suggested solution—tan your testicles—are ridiculous, they stem from a right-wing belief that attacks on masculinity upset the social order. 5. He said white supremacy is not a real problem. 6.
If you have any question as to whether DeSantis is fit to be president of the United States, his decision to hire this man should answer it. He either did it because he actually believes that the COVID vaccines are dangerous, which makes him a moron or he did it out of a cynical desire to appeal to anti-vax voters. Either way, it was a disgraceful decision and should disqualify him from ever having higher office of any kind: Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo personally altered a state-driven study about Covid-19 vaccines last year to suggest that some doses pose a significantly higher health risk for young men than had been established by the broader medical community, according to a newly obtained document. Ladapo’s changes, released as part of a public records request, presented the risks of cardiac death to be more severe than previous versions of the study. He later used the final document in October to bolster disputed claims that Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were dangerous to young men.
Neither does right wing chutzpah: The ghost of the Confederacy hangs heavily over the Tennessee Legislature. Justin Jones, one of two Black members expelled from the state’s House of Representatives in April 2023, had run afoul of House leadership before. In 2019, as a private citizen, he was arrested following his actions in protesting a bust in the state capitol honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and later Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. While the expulsion of Jones and his colleague, Justin J. Pearson, riveted the nation’s attention, a curious and related event in the Legislature’s other branch, the Tennessee Senate, passed nearly unnoticed. On Feb. 3, 2023, two state senators issued a formal proclamation commemorating April 2023 as and encouraging “all Tennesseans to increase their knowledge of this momentous era in the history of this State.” One of the signers is Senate Speaker Randy McNally, who is also the state’s lieutenant governor; the other is Sen. Mark Pody from Lebanon.
Only the good ideas die young The Post-Keynesian Economist Victoria Chick—Vicki to her friends—died earlier this year, and was celebrated today by the interment of her ashes in her beloved home of Hamstead, and a tribute to her at University College London, her academic home for over half a century. With Vicki’s death, most of … Continue reading "Farewell Vicky Chick"
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is crumbling under a mountain of criticism for his sinking campaign. Right now he’s travelling all over the country giving speeches and selling his book proclaiming he’s the greatest anti-woke warrior on the planet. This week he’s jetting off overseas, presumably to prove that he can meet with foreign leaders as an equal. Meanwhile, back in Florida, Ft Lauderdale is drowning and he hasn’t bothered to change his busy schedule to appear (even belatedly asking for an emergency federal emergency declaration from the road.) And he was terribly embarrassed by all but one of the Florida congressional delegations, some of whom are his former colleagues in the House, endorsing Donald Trump in a carefully choreographed roll-out over the course of a week. The NY Times’ Maggie Haberman notes that while all of this is true, it’s also true that DeSantis is being judged by the party and the press as a normal politician while Trump still gets graded on a curve.
Honestly, I can hardly believe this is real — but it is.