Speaker 1: Col him called gen X elected Donald Trump, and I
Speaker 1: got to tell you, for the generation that's been ignored
Speaker 1: since our very birth, we are finally having our moment
Speaker 1: in the sun where we as a generation decided to
Speaker 1: look at the candidates and go, no, that one looks
Speaker 1: like a bigger middle finger to us. And so gen
Speaker 1: X pushes Trump over the finish line. And David Strom
Speaker 1: wrote about it today, David, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you, Mandy. It's always fun to be with you.
Speaker 3: And I have to admit I wish I wear gen X,
Speaker 3: but I just miss it. Well.
Speaker 1: You know, you and my husband were both born in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four, which is technically the last year of
Speaker 1: the boomers. But he is far more gen X than
Speaker 1: he ever was boomer. So I just say he's a
Speaker 1: Boomer on the cusp, right, So like in astrology, when
Speaker 1: you're right on the edge, you're just your gen X
Speaker 1: on the cusp is what you are. So I'll give
Speaker 1: you that title.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, I am what a friend of mine calls
Speaker 3: a member of a silent generation, because we don't quite
Speaker 3: fit into either category. You know, I watched the Vietnam
Speaker 3: War on TV as a kid, but by the time
Speaker 3: I became an adult, it was in the rear view mirror.
Speaker 3: And you know, I wasn't old enough to vote for
Speaker 3: Ronald Reagan at least the first time, but I was
Speaker 3: too old to really say I grew up in the
Speaker 3: Reagan era, which is what the gen X people did.
Speaker 2: And we did.
Speaker 1: And so I'd love to know you've got this great column.
Speaker 1: Justine Bateman created a firestorm, a firestorm with a simple
Speaker 1: tweet that just expressed what so many other people have felt.
Speaker 1: And that is just like we can all exhale because
Speaker 1: finally sanity is beginning to prevail and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: Justin Batement is everywhere.
Speaker 2: Well and rightly.
Speaker 3: So she really has been in a very gen X way,
Speaker 3: even though she is basically my age, but in a
Speaker 3: very gen X way looking at what has happened and
Speaker 3: identified something really great, which is gen x through its
Speaker 3: cynicism in a way, it's lack of being overly idealistic
Speaker 3: and it's lack of being you know, oversensitive. Looked at
Speaker 3: what was going on and said, look, this is nuts.
Speaker 3: It's ruining our lives. I don't care if Donald Trump
Speaker 3: is crude or anything else. I want my life to
Speaker 3: be better, and so they voted for him in much
Speaker 3: larger numbers than any other demographic group.
Speaker 1: I think that for myself, and I've been doing a
Speaker 1: deep dive on gen X for a lot of different
Speaker 1: reasons that I'll share with you guys later, But one
Speaker 1: of the things that I feel is that we tend
Speaker 1: to look at any situation in a very pragmatic way,
Speaker 1: because when you don't have a lot of guidance from
Speaker 1: your parents, and many of us in this generation raised
Speaker 1: ourselves to a certain extent, you have to figure that
Speaker 1: out at an early age. You just have to say, look,
Speaker 1: you know what is let's take the emotion out of it.
Speaker 1: What's going to be the best for me going forward
Speaker 1: and economically, just common sense wise. And one of the
Speaker 1: things Justine Bateman goes on about is that is how
Speaker 1: intolerable our society has gotten. Intolerable and intolerant our society
Speaker 1: has gotten and she just wants to go back to
Speaker 1: the days when people could have a political disagreement and
Speaker 1: still be friends. Which you say that and you think,
Speaker 1: of course that's how it should be, but not everybody
Speaker 1: sees it that way. So in your view, what is
Speaker 1: going forward?
Speaker 2: You know, I think it even goes beyond politics.
Speaker 3: It's just that we've been living through a totalitarian moment,
Speaker 3: almost a maoist moment, where there was a cultural revolution
Speaker 3: out there, and if you did not conform, not just politically,
Speaker 3: but in any number of culture war issues, you were
Speaker 3: persona on grata.
Speaker 2: I mean, they're they're really developed a cult out there.
Speaker 2: You know, whether you call it woke or alphabet.
Speaker 3: Ideology or whatever, it also boiled down to you had
Speaker 3: to comply or else. And you know, the gen X,
Speaker 3: you know generation came up at a time where people
Speaker 3: realized that, you know, they couldn't count on the government.
Speaker 2: Not everything was a great moral crusade.
Speaker 3: I mean they looked at the boomers, you know, who
Speaker 3: are so proud of themselves for protesting.
Speaker 2: The Vietnam War and you.
Speaker 3: Know, patted themselves on the back for it, and you know,
Speaker 3: the gen X people looked at them and said, yeah,
Speaker 3: well you quit doing that as soon as the draft
Speaker 3: went away. You know, it was not anything about you know,
Speaker 3: great moral crusades. And you know, we're just tired of
Speaker 3: hearing all this moralistic bs. You know, we can account
Speaker 3: on the government to give us social security or anything. Else.
Speaker 2: So we're going to make our own world and not.
Speaker 1: As that's been sort of the trail that we've blazed
Speaker 1: quite nicely. I just started kind of interesting that that
Speaker 1: the swing from left to right was double digits by
Speaker 1: a long shot for this group of people. And I
Speaker 1: think that part of it is, First of all, I'm
Speaker 1: I am five years into gen X, so I'm fifty
Speaker 1: five years old. I'm looking at my retirement. I'm looking
Speaker 1: at my you know, what's going to be either in
Speaker 1: my in my four to one k and in my
Speaker 1: investment accounts, or what's real estate going to do? Because
Speaker 1: I'm now looking very closely at the time of life
Speaker 1: when I want to be able to retire. So when
Speaker 1: I'm choosing my candidate, I'm going to look at the
Speaker 1: candidate whose policies are going to facilitate that. And I
Speaker 1: think a lot of that happened in this election. You
Speaker 1: have you know, Kamala Harris running around talking about giving
Speaker 1: loans to only black men and all of this insane
Speaker 1: stuff that we all knew wouldn't do anything to solve
Speaker 1: any problem, and.
Speaker 2: We just went, no, we're not going to do that.
Speaker 1: We just want some some kind of certainty with business
Speaker 1: and and you know, taxes and lower regulation. We just
Speaker 1: want everything to work, and it's not working now.
Speaker 3: Well, and you know, if you think about it, Boomers really,
Speaker 3: you know, they look at wokesoff and in a very
Speaker 3: abstract way, understand that it's stupid. But it's jen X
Speaker 3: who's at the sort of at the top of their
Speaker 3: game right now, their prime earning years. And what they're
Speaker 3: seeing is they're being labeled people who have worked their
Speaker 3: butts off. They're being labeled as the oppressors. They're being
Speaker 3: asked to, you know, pay the loans of gender studies,
Speaker 3: people who you know, have contributed next to nothing or
Speaker 3: worse to our society.
Speaker 2: And you know, they I don't want to say that Gen.
Speaker 3: X resented it, because I don't think that Gener X
Speaker 3: is a particularly resentful generation. They were just tired of
Speaker 3: the BS.
Speaker 1: That's an excellent point, really excellent point. My guest is
Speaker 1: David Strong. You can read his column at hot air
Speaker 1: dot column. I've linked to the one about gen X
Speaker 1: that we're talking about right now, and you can see
Speaker 1: the shift in gen X dramatic in some of the
Speaker 1: stuff that he has embedded in here. David a great
Speaker 1: column and I appreciate you making time for me today
Speaker 2: Always,