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Boomers, Meet the Based
[AMERICANMIND] There’s a generation gap on the Right, and it’s hurting us."Divide and conquer" is the guiding strategy of the woke oligarchy. The regime is trying to marginalize Red America as illegitimate, to separate us from "the mainstream," and thus declare us undeserving of the rights and privileges of citizenship. But beyond that, the woke regime is also exploiting a generation gap on the right (which is partly but not wholly a factor of age), through double-speak and mixed messages. Contrary to some prejudices among the younger Right, not every self-identified conservative over 50 is deluded and useless. Likewise, older conservatives need to know that not every young, right-wing provocateur on Twitter is a racist anarchist. But a lot of people on either side see each other that way, largely because the regime’s vast propaganda machine is able to re-enforce both of these prejudices. It’s hard to know whether this multi-pronged media campaign by the Left is a carefully planned psy-ops strategy, or just the net effect of simultaneously asserting contradictory arguments depending on whatever seems expedient. Either way, a generation gap on the right is being exacerbated, in part because each side is reacting to the Blue regime’s propaganda. The older generation grew up in an America where, on the surface, institutions were trustworthy, or at the very least, not actively at war with the people. That facade crumbled for those who grew up after 9/11. Decades of pointless war in the Middle East, the financial crisis in which not a single banker on Wall Street went to jail, and the ever-skyrocketing cost of living, soured the generation that grew up under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The promise of racial reconciliation never materialized and the constant screams of crisis (climate change! COVID!) have further radicalized a growing youth faction on the right. REINFORCING NARRATIVES Young people get almost all their news online, which gives them a broad array of information sources and makes them far less likely to accept any "official" narratives. At times, they may almost be too skeptical, embracing odd and outlandish theories simply because they are outside the mainstream. Insisting that the sky is pink just because Ibram X. Kendi says it is blue is not a sign of independent thinking. Americans over 50 tend to be less active on social media, less frequent consumers of alternative news sites, and more dependent on the legacy media of newspapers and television networks. Of course, many older conservatives know that the establishment media is heavily skewed to the left, yet the publications they turn to correct this imbalance are, let us say, rather tame and conventional. As far as the younger dissident right is concerned, most old-line "conservative" publications are part of the same corrupt media establishment. The more staid and authoritative style of the New York Times and the network news (which the Times heavily influences) tends to reinforce the Boomers’ inclination to believe that our institutions are still functioning normally and the system is working. Our political gerontocracy contributes to this problem: nothing makes a Boomer feel young like seeing Congress run by people in their 80s. News stories that create enormous controversy online often get much less attention in the legacy media. Thus, conservatives among the older generation may have little familiarity with the details of events and scandals that lead millennials to be alarmed and cynical. The treatment of those arrested in connection with January 6 is a good example. Right-wingers under 40 tend to know much more about the mistreatment of these prisoners, and thus tend to be more sympathetic, compared to conservatives over 50, who were alarmed and repelled by the events of January 6, and thus are usually much less concerned with or attentive to those who have been arrested. When a clear case of left-wing excess does leak into the mainstream news—about Critical Race Theory being taught in schools, for example—the legacy media will quickly offer an authoritative source to deny or downplay the revelations. This tactic works, up to a point, for those with more limited access to alternative news sources, but it only hardens the disgust and skepticism of those who are mostly online, who quickly learn about the dishonesty and hypocrisy of such denials. Read the rest at the link Posted by: 746 2022-02-03 |
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