to the world, you now give us this so thank you so much everybody. please take care, stay safe out there and have a great day everyone. >> you are wanting book tv on c-span2 with the latest nonfiction books and authors. tv on c-span2, created by america's cable television companies to buy these television companies who provide tv to viewers asa public service . >> hello everyone. we are here today because colin andrews has written, helen andrews has written the book of the year in my opinion, boomers. the men and women who promised freedom anddelivered disaster . i've known helen for about 15 years now. helen is senior editor at the american conservative or editor.

previously she was managing editor of the washington examiner and a 2018 robert novak journalism fellow. her writing has appeared pretty much everywhere worth reading. the new york times, claremont review of books, american affairs. she lives in washington dc with her husband and newborn son . and today, we are taking on the boomers. i remember just 15 years ago, i was reviewing a 700 page biography of the soul singer sam cooke and it gave me a chance to reflect on the power of boomers and their fascination with themselves. and i remember i remarked these boxed sets art devices to get even more money of our global parents but a

commemorative vanity to their adolescencehowever extended. they shove this music in our hands and say this is what my generation is about, listen to this in memory of me . times i wonder if we indulge them a little. talking about themselves . that didn't happen. and luckily for us, we can start talking about them and here to do that today is someone who was i just toyed with antitumor is him but helen andrews was born into it. why don't you tell us a little bit about your book and we will do a little back-and-forth between us and then open it to questions from everyone else . >> great, thank you so much to michael and to aei. i'm happy to be doing this

event with michael because this is a book about generational warfare and everybody knows millennial's and boomers are natural enemies and so it's good to have somebody who's more gen x as a neutral adjudicator between both sides because this book is written from the perspective of a millennial. it's a book that looks around the world we inherited and tries to examine what went wrong from the perspective of the boomers children. however, even though this is a book with that subjective perspective, i did my best writing it to be as objective as possible. and really examine all of my millennial resentment against the boomer generation and nail down which things are the boomer's fault and which ones are not eerie and which were just cases where there

generation got lucky and mine was unlucky. so i'll give three examples from the book of complaints that millennial's half against boomers and my answer to whether or not those complaints are fair or unfair and after those three complaints we can launch into discussion. the first is obviously economics because that's is on every millennial's list of resentments is that the boomers just had it so easy economically and we having so tough. though millennial's are just a lot more forward compared to the boomers and i don't mean we have less wealth than they do. obviously you would expect people in their 60s to have more wealth than people in their 20s and 30s but millennial's are lagging behind the wealth that the boomers calculated when they were our age. they're only about 25 percent as wealthy as they were at

the same point in their careers. but i always remind my millennial friends who make this complaint because their feeling on the wealthy or economically precarious and trapped in the gated economy that the boomers really did have it exceptionally good. they were born into the golden age of the american economy and the 28th century and that's more to their credit nor to their fault, they just happened to get really lucky. things are tougher for millennial's today but things back then were about as good as they could possibly be so the fact that things are harder now is, on the other hand i do think that a lot of millennial economic í he is the boomers fault. for two reasons. the first is college debt. it was the boomers who said

that everybody needs to go to college and take on as much debt as you need to to go to the best college that will have you read that was the boomers maximum that they drilled into their kids and the result has been a lot of people going to college maybe didn't need to or wouldn't benefit from a college-level education and to then come out on the other side with six figures worth of debt that they have a hard time paying off and the second reason is the two income track . a lot of millennial's deal trapped in dual earner households. they were would love to have a middle-class lifestyle with one of her that they feel like they can't afford it and the reason is the phenomenon that elizabeth warren of all people identified which is that whenwomen , many of them boomer women rush into the workforce in the 70s and 80s thinking that was the only way they could be human beings, it ended up almost

bringing up the price of middle-class amenities so that now millennial's could be no better off than one income earner households were in this golden age of the 80s now needs to incomes just to make it work . the second complaint that millennial's half against the boomers is the decline of the family. the boomers are rather proud of their record on this one. they like to think of themselvesas the architect of the sexual revolution . but in many ways living in the shadow of that sexual revolution is a lot less fun and actually undergoing it as michael clicked, michael explained so well. and in this case the defense of the boomers is that their sexual revolution was a natural name of the pendulum that after so many decades or even centuries of repression it was only understandable that they might air on the side of license but now they

say look at the statistics. the divorce rate has gone back down. the pregnancy rates have gone back down. this does not mean that the boomers towards the path and now the millennial's, their childrencan find a happy medium . well unfortunately once again the boomers defense is meretricious because the only reason that the divorce rate has gone back down is that fewer people are getting married in the first place. it was only in the last five years that we cross the fateful threshold of a majority of adults over age 16 being unmarried. and that certainly is subjectively what i see when i look around at my millennial peers. i see people who would like to express some commitment from their partners, who would like to get lunch on their adult lives by settling down but just have a really hard time getting over the hump of the tender economy

and of attaining those markers of adulthood like marriage andkids . so the boomers didn't just disrupt the nuclear family. they broke it in a way that their children are now still living with. the third example after which we can go to discussion is drugs. and it's important. i mentioned this because i think a lot of people underrate just how responsible boomers are for the prevalence of drugs in all our lives. a lot of people don't know before the 1950s you would not have found even marijuana on a college campus. the average middle-class person would be very unlikely to encounter even as soft a drug as taught in their day-to-day lives unlessthey were a jazz musician .

it wasn't part of the culture and it was the 60s counterculture that made it more popular and that when you know the boomers were responsible for the drug revolution in the second half of the 20th century is that the drugs we identify with each decade map onto what drugs the boomers were doing. in the 60s they were young and poor, they were doing marijuana and when they had more money in the 70s the drug of that decade is cocaine and in the 80s and were buckling down focusing on their careers so they were all taking valium and then finally the drug that identify with that decade is ritalin and this is the reason why the drug revolution was the boomers fault and i consider them morally culpable because that was something that they didn't just choose for themselves but that they inflicted on their children . the boomers like drugs,

they like finding the answer to problems in uphill. but the ritalin adhd overdiagnosis revolution was something more than and something more boomer fresh as well. boomers are allergic to exercising authority even as parents. they love to be the cool mom and the cool dad. what as anyone with a small child knows it's simply impossible to raise a toddler without exercising authority in the early 90s were the moment in when the boomers had young school-age children and were frustrated with the tension between wanting to be the cool parent and having a little hellion in their house needed some discipline and the way they square that circle was by filling their kids with drugs and there are a lot of millennial's were put on ritalin and given some psychiatric diagnosis in

their teens that have just kept and they reach their 30s and begin to feel bitter resentment because as the adhd example shows, the boomers motivations in drugging up their kids were just as selfish as their motivations for drugging themselves in their 50s and 70s so even david crosby, i'll end with a quote from him. he's the singer from crosby stills and nash and himself a consummate boomer and he is very rosy on the legacy of the 60s even he admits that the drug revolution was bad because we were rushed about the war, we were right about the environment, we were right about civil rights and women's issues but we were wrong about drugs. if you read this book you will find i dissent from many of the items on david crosby's list that the

boomers got right but at least we have the common ground of agreeing onthat last one . so with thati'll kick it to michael . >> think you so much for that and i want to begin by talking about the structure of this book is six profile pieces of boomers. we have steve jobs, al sharpton, sonja soto mayor, camille paglia and jeffrey sachs and i think your indictment of the buddha boomers is well aimed and comprehensive and more comprehensive than you even outlined just here . you talk about sexual epos that led to the misery of being used and the misery of being completely ignored. an approach to the third

world that has all the real and all the imagined vices of imperialism with none of the wisdom orvirtues of actual imperialism . an attitude of self actualization and activism that amounts to little more than authoritarian bullying, but two things interested me. the first is you accuse the boomers of destroying the left and i was wondering if you could expand upon that a little bit . as well as share the great littleanecdote about richard branson . >> that is a fun one and i'm so glad that caught your eye. as soon as i learned about that anecdote i knew i had to put in the book but i'm not surprised that you were struck by my argument that the baby boomers killed the left because that's a very counterintuitive thing to say

that the baby boomers were in many ways the most left-wing generation in history and even consumer conservative baby boomers are left-wing . but in some ways it's equally true to say that none of the baby boomers are truly liberal and all you have to do to realize that is to look at what they call themselves. the baby boomers in the 1960s call themselves the new left. and the reason to proclaim themselves the new left was to declare independence from the old one. if you look at the port huron statement which tom wrote in the 60s as a manifesto of the young newleft , it says extremely disparaging things about unions, it calls them a bunch of retrograde dinosaurs who have no answers to common world which was ironic because pork strong as in the port huron statement was a

campground of the uaw and tom hayden and the fbs have been graciously allowed to use the united auto workers campground for their members because one of the fbs or spirits works for the uaw so having enjoyed their hospitality the sts declared the uaw stupid and obsolete. and the aftermath of the new left take over of the democratic party really was this total alienation of what was essentially the liberal party in the two-party system from people who work for a living. you could probably date it to the 1972 convention that nominated mark mcgovern as the moment when the democratic party gave its soul over to identity politics and niche interests. none of them representing the

poor and dispossessed which is what they were supposed to be for. and you see the same thing happening in all of the western democracy which is why it wasn't just a quirk of a committee decision the dnc made in 1971 but really something that was a consequence of the boomer generation and the richard branson anecdote that illustrates this that i absolutely love is that he ran virgin records and there was a moment in the late 70s when the people at one of his record factories looked at the album cover that they were supposed to be printing and said god save the queen. the fascist regime? it was a sexist element and they saw the desecration in the album art and the music and said okay, too far is too far. we the workers like the queen and we consider this album

something very close to treason so we're going to refuse to have anything to do with the production of this sacrilegious punk artifact and richard branson came and stormed in and said you will make the record i tell you to make and he ended up prevailing. and i read this anecdote in a book that described it in celebratory terms. like look at those workers who couldn't understand the youth and the punk revolution. this is avictory for free speech is what it is . but i look at that story and i see bosses triumphing over workers. and cloaking it in the language of liberation and freedom and individual rights and expression, boomer-ish idealism and that encapsulates the takeover of the left-wing parties of the

western democracy by the college educated and the shoving aside of the noncollege educated. which is i mean, if your left-wing party represents the interests of the wealthy and educated and not the interests of the poor and the less powerful in society, i don't think it's fair to call yourself a leftist party and so that's what i meant when i said the boomers killed the left. >> thank you for that. i want to remind the audience that the we can send questions to jackson woolford, it's at jackson .woolford at aei.org or to them at hashtag aei boomers. meanwhile, while i have you here ellen, i want to talk to you about the people you chose. because if somebody else was writing a book about the boomers, they would almost

certainly pick bill or hillary clinton.they would maybe donald trump. maybe someone like tony blair. who i don't know if he qualifies but you pick steve jobs, and al sharpton and camille partly out and you have made this indictment against this generation. when you have these individuals in your hands, i think you find things to admire about almost all of them. and even times when they were wrong or transgressed by either generation before them or misunderstood by their peers. so i'd like you to talk a little bit about some of the good side of some of these boomers. you found goodness in our sharpton i think and the funniest one to me was steve

jobs. in a way. because steve jobs has been hailed and worshiped as this great innovator and great demand. of his generation. and then he's been nominated partly by another subject in your book, aaron sorkin as a bad dad. and one of our complaints about the boomers is they were bad parents and particularly bad dad you seem to like about steve jobs is his paternalism. with both his company and his customers. so can you talk a little bit. you've given us this indictment but what are some of the virtues you find in these characters even when they stand out on their generation mark . >> you're absolutely right that i did see things to

admire in all of the boomers that i profiled. i have someone tell me and it seems like my admiration went on, that i admired -- i don't know if that's true or not but i think that's probably roughly accurate as a trend line. but my defense is that i admire most of the things about the subject that are the least boomers. and steve jobs was a great example of that. if you were to put the boomers in a sentence, you would say that they are institution destroyers. they ate institutions, they think they constrain individual choice. and so they tear them down and wish wish these millennial's grow up without institutions which is not great. but whatever else you want to say about steve jobs, he was an institution builder . he wanted to make a company

that would last after him. that would still bear the instance of hispersonality and his genius. even when he was gone . and he succeeded in doing that. apple is still today steve jobs company in many identifiable ways. the world we live in isshaped by steve jobs because he was an institution builder . so that's an example of me admiring things about them that are the least boomer-ish and in steve jobs case that is connected to the bad dad part that you mentioned because i never met steve jobs but i get the sense and other people who knew him got the sense that he was so driven to make a mark on the world and to leave something that he could pass on because he had no sense of

inheritance himself, because he looked back in his family tree and saw nothing. being adopted and not having that narrative left him driven to leave something for his kids or ifnot his kids and his metaphorical kids at the company . so steve jobs was unusual for a boomer in that sense of continuity most of the rest of his generation was content to not look behind us and not look forward to live in the now. >> it's interesting what you do in that chapter and in others is you don't just talk about one thing and one character. steve jobs is also part of this company that he built and he's with other boomers even at the company including tim cook and his wife. and they being more authentic boomers in some ways also have an effect on the world. namely outsourcing to china and lorine jobs form of

hyper- liberal philanthropy which is partly underwritten by chinesespyware . so each chapter kind of has these virtues and before we turn it to other people in the audience i want to talk a little bit about al sharpton. you show our sharpton again with a kind of paternal connection the beginning of his story where he has these three surrogate fathers. all of them people we know. all of them that literate people know. james brown, >> jesse jackson and adam clayton powell. >> the chapter is a bit of a meditation on how boomers the

institutionalized liberal politics and the institutionalized civil rights and in effect the democratized civil rights. so you must do little bit of a sense about i thought it was really well well drawn and the boomers, many of them work involved in civil rights and in a way our sharpton to be involved because he was involved as a child preacher. he was literally at the feet of civil rights heroes but you have this beautiful narration of when the southern christian leadership conference comes to chicago and confronts the daily machine, and just tell us a little bit about that. how the boomers effect on the democratizing our politics.

>> i'm glad you liked my telling of the splc in chicago story cause i was shocked to learn when i learned about that was that the first thing the local black leaders done when the splc announced after soma we are coming to northeast to congo was hold a press conference and say we don't want you here. we've got our own system of power and we're doing pretty well, we don't need you coming in and making trouble, we're all good but in terms of the boomers legacy, it's criminal the way that they have convinced the world that baby boomers were responsible for the great civil rights achievement because unless you were all sharpton and civil rights activists at the age of 10 which he was, then the boomers have no credit to claim for the civil rights revolution. one of the most surprising things that i learned in the research for this book was something about the civil

rights act of 1964.i never knew that at the same time congress was deliberating back, earl warren at the supreme court was preparing to issue a supreme court ruling that would have accomplished essentially the same thing the supreme court where the black activists came to private restaurants, where elected and owners sued the owners of those private restaurants say this is a violation of the 14th amendment on the same argument as brown versus warren. the fact that you are a private establishment makes it different so if the supreme court has ruled in favor, which earl warren was prepared to do that will

accomplish the same thing as integrating five businesses and in the end earl warren withheld those decisions because he didn't want to get the court in trouble if he didn't have to. he thought if congress is going to pass this act and take the political heat of me we will wait and see what congress does and of course congress passed the act and despair earl warren having to issue those controversial rulings . but that revelation that the path of history that could have taken where the was never passed and southern lunch counters are integrated by supreme court decisions, maybe confronts well, without have been better? on the one hand it would have come down in february rather than summer and that would have been five months of integrated lunch counters people not having the indignity of being able to eat next to their fellow citizens.

so obviously the supreme court option had that going for it . it would have been faster but i think we would have lost the opportunity to make a democratic statement against segregation and the nation. so even though it took congress five months longer than it would have taken earl warren to integrate lunch counters and even though the negotiation with moderates caused them to water down the 1964 built in some ways , it was still worth it. >> .. >> ..

i think that is a lot and i think we walked law something by kicking it over to these undemocratic. >> the chapter is beautiful and goes along with your chapter on justice of the mayor some ways in that the daley machine for all, in a way the transsexualism disgusts boomers because it's not idealistic but also because the transactional is him model of politics in a city machine has accountability which boomers can't stand and so the daley machine, if you come to the daley machine with a problem from your neighborhood or from your ethnic neighborhood the daley machine will ask you how many votes can you deliver at who you represent and if you represent someone significant the daley machine often finds a way to make the resources go

where they are needed and go where the people want them ultimately and make the bargains between different sections of chicago. what happens "after words" with the civil rights revolution and then the boomer preference for grand moral statements issued from olympus and then enforced on people who are willing to abide by them or not is the growth of public interest lawyers and the growth civil rights advancing not by democracy but by lawsuit or the threat of lawsuit and then ultimately the shakedown. it is where we are at now. you know, one more thing i will ask before the questions are turned to me from the audience is jeffrey sachs, this is in a way one of your more provocative

feces and the theme in your work is that jeffrey sachs got involved in this new field of development economics and basically going to the third world or post-soviet block and trying to get these countries back on their feet economically and integrated into the left and i would like you to talk about this because in a sense jeffrey sachs has the boomer -ish and hatred of imperialism but i thank you find that it's a little bit of what he practiced. >> yet, there is an anecdote about jeffrey sachs that i love that i did not include in the book because the only citation i could supply for it was a

secondhand story but i'm fairly convinced the source is reliable. it is a story from steven the russia scholar who died just a few month ago, actually but he said that he was once on a plane with jeffrey sachs on the way to moscow and happen to be sitting next to him and so steven, scholar of russia asked him what books he was reading to prepare for his journey because that's what you do when you go to a foreign country, find a couple books and maybe you read anna karenina but you read a book to get you and jeffrey sachs apparently told steven: i'm not reading anything, i don't feel a need to get up to speed on russia as russia and i am an economist and everywhere i go i have finance ministers telling me you don't understand our country is different and they are all different in exactly the same way, economics is economics. i don't need to know about russia as russia just show me

the numbers and i love that story if that was the answer jeffrey sachs gave because that really does reflect the attitude of all development economists and the things that annoys me most about it is that the actual imperialists as in the 19th century british and french men who they love to denigrate and say they are not at all like the white man's burden era imperialist but kipling would never have said that about india and he never would have said i don't need to know anything about it and i will just go in and justice is justice no matter where you are. they had a love for the country that the supervised. it is funny, i had people criticize me and this book for being [inaudible] for not being sufficiently respectful of elders and is that not a conservative virtue, helen,

should you not go more show more respect for your elders. i see where people are coming forward that but the reason i have a gripe with the boomers is because they were the people who decided that it was not a virtue we should care about anymore. they invented dismissing their elders but they all hate their elders. that is the fault that annoys me most about jeffrey sachs. what he does is show obviously imperial and so obviously perfectly analogous to what the old british and french imperialist did that it was deeply offensive and underhanded and arrogant and wrong for him to then say that imperialists were a bunch of terrible racist old white men who never did anything good in their lives. i know a lot of people on the left and right who criticized jeffrey sachs for being so imperial and that sonoma

complained to them. if he wants to go around of a building imperial mission i think he probably can do a lot of good that way but i just wish you would stop being such a hypocrite about it in his attitude to the people whose tradition he is carrying on. >> it wouldn't be surprised being a boomer that he desired not to do the homework but get full credit for his good intentions anyway and that seems the type. i have a question that has come in from chris scalia for helen. i wonder what the many shortcomings of the boomers as parents and otherwise suggest about their own parents and the members of the greatest generation. for all the virtues of the greatest generation was their parenting to blame for the worst excesses of their children's generation? >> that's a great question, chris. the short answer is no.

there is a sense in which the greatest generation spoiled the murmurs, as you might understand. if you had grown up in the great depression and world war ii of course you would want to give your children the easy life that you never had. the boomers grew up with indulgent parents who wanted to give them and a time with peace at home and prosperity so they were a bit spoiled by their parents in that way but more important than those factors was the fact that the boomers were so demographically huge. they were a baby boom and there were a lot of them. and so that simple demographic fact explains a lot about the boomer character because basically from the moment they turned 16 they had been the most numerous consumers so advertisers catered to their

tastes and they been the most numerous voters so politicians have courted their vote and basically to hear a demographic test they were able to make the country revolve around their desires which led them to the awful narcissists that they are. all of that would have been true even if the greatest generation hadn't spoiled them a little bit and admittedly they did but the demographic was a much bigger factor. >> right, and we seen that and you can trace it throughout your book and in a sense we ourselves, jen x or the millennial's can chase it through our lives that in effect the story of the country of the nation and the story of government in our lives is mostly been the story of boomers changing needs as they get older. part of that we saw when the emphasis in the response to the

financial crisis in 2000 -- 2008 and 2009 was to save 401k's which boomers had been investing in and not to say jobs that millennial's desperately needed at the time. maybe were or even seen it now with covid-19 where the emphasis is on locking down and protecting the elderly and to hell with the economy that everyone else is going to have to inherit. you know, i want to turn to until we get more questions which i hope will come soon and remember you can send those to jackson . woolford@aei .org or tweet them at aei boomers and i was wondering if we could talk a little bit about [inaudible]

because you use her life as an academic and one of the very few or maybe the only in our lifetimes academic kind of rock stars like she's a figure that you see in popular magazines and on popular television network television even. it is a way for you to explore both the sexual revolution and the transformation of academia itself and what is worth studying and worth mitigating to the next generation. i wonder if you could talk a little bit about who you seem to admire her on the one hand for her on sentimentality and her

willingness to scrape and her actual learning this and the education she was given and what that gives her but you falter for never being able to learn as well and in a sense the sexual revolutions effects which she notices never cause a real second thought or second thinking so tell us a little bit about camille. >> i am so glad that my affection for her came through because i really do -- i love reading camille paglia and i love watching her and i think she's a great public intellectual. there aren't that many great public intellectuals left kicking around right now but a lot of conservatives join her

side in the '90s because she was so tough on the feminists and you will today see conservatives who think of her as being or as liberal as she is somehow on their site and it is true that she did have a point in her wars with the campus feminist in the 1990s and this was the era of take back the night marches and when feminists were being adamant that the campus sexual assault crisis should never be blamed so we should never, ever caution women against behaving recklessly by going to a frat party and getting super drunk that to even mention things that women can do to modify their behavior to reduce sexual assault is to blame the victim and camille paglia very sensibly and with a hard-nosed realize him that i admired so much said no, i admire and i'm as much of a

feminist as anybody but if you get that passed out drunk what you think will happen and there is a place for prudence. the irony is that as clear eyed as she was looking at the feminist position, camille paglia has now not been so clear eyed about her own condition. she is always characterized herself as a pro sex feminists and she says i love prostitution and i love pornography and michelangelo was a pornographer and she has said. it was rather less conservative of her. i am a as a conservative, hear her say those things almost want to echo her complaints against the feminists and say that camille, you celebrate sex and say we need to liberate everybody's libidos but you know, speaking as someone of the generation of the meat to movement, you know, what i see

as a result of what you are proposing is sexual assault and sexual harassment and gosh camille, in the same words that you said to the feminist then, what did you think was going to happen? as naïve as the feminists were then she is naïve in her own way now, especially about things like pornography. >> that's fantastic. we have some more questions. i'm going to combine two of these questions because they are close in the same. one from scott corbin and another from dennis morgan. scott writes it seems we are on the verge of a generational transfer of influence as boomers continue to age out of positions of authority and what does a successful transition to post boomer american life look like and then dennis morgan asks in a sense the question what can you do to correct the excesses of

the boomers like the destruction of machine politics, responsive to on the ground concerns or is the genie out of the bottle? >> him anyway genie is out of the bottle. but in answer to the first question what does a post boomer politic look like and the answer is we don't know because we haven't seen it yet because even millennial's are still trapped in a boomer mindset. this is a book that is quite tough on millennial's as well as boomers, never more so than for continuing to define ourselves by the boomer standard. a millennial's idea of what is cool is still based on what the boomers thought was cool in 1960. i was writing the conclusion to this book over the summer with the riots going on in cities burning and hearing a lot of people asking is this the 60s all over again and my answer, as

i scrolled furiously was yes, yes it is. millennial's still think that the greatest moment in american history was the 60s with people marching in the streets, partly because it is the people who taught us american industry were boomers who decided that their great moment was the great moment of the country and everything before that was just some terrible reactionary nonsense that they mercilessly overthrew. that's a version of a ministry the millennial's have inherited so it's a bit natural that we would then say well, if that was the only good moment in american history than that is the moment we will reenact and i don't know what it will take to shake millennial's out of that and to have them declare mental independence of the baby boom generation because even now that boomers are nearing retirement

age we still haven't seen it yet and the nobel prize still going to bob dylan. >> right, you mentioned right at the top of your book this paragraph that i will quit from, before the renaissance would be rediscovered aristotle or sometimes told by zealous churchmen that anything written before christ was ipso facto not worth rediscovering and this is approximately how the boomers feel about themselves. any suggestion that the western world might not be altogether better off with her influence using immediately met with an indignant litany of all the segments of humanity who previously in a sad state of abject non- personhood before the boomers came along and broke their chains. i find this to be true and in the sense it was how my primary

and secondary school education went and you basically learned okay, there was this sort of pre- lapse time of slavery in world war ii and that is lumped together so slavery, hitler and then that is cleared out of the way and then there is the march of history onward which begins with elvis and then ends with, i don't know, we gave you friends on nbc. you know, you end up alleging that the boomers had wrought, the boomer generation themselves are in event of cultural destruction and disruption on par with the protestant reformation which sounds like a sort of pa gli a and to sell

books but at the end, i had to agree if you because at the end of this book the boomers had destroyed the left by the institutionalizing it and so we have and basically maybe we saw some of their handiwork last week at the capital. this is working people who lack political institutions that could give them real leadership and instead turned toward media. we have a crisis of the family where young people are just not even getting married, not having all the sex the boomers told him would be so great and not having children and the boomer obsession with pop culture was artifact of the middle class has destroyed our connection to, as

you say, folk culture and high culture and so it has left us with nothing and also the boomers failure to pass on religion and many cases to even understand it as people are bereft to an want to trim a question from brian penn. aren't you talking, helen, about a particular subset of elite boomers. boomers also fought in vietnam and voted for ronald reagan and boomers like any group or not a monolith so how do these other boomers fit into the picture? >> i really wanted to write about individuals in this book precisely because the question identifies because so much

writing about the generations in general ends up being very vague and insubstantial. and i wanted to anchor things and it is true that there were boomers who do not share the characteristics of their generation but i hope that the six that i picked will be obviously recognizable in a typical boomer in some way or another. >> anyway you could also, if i can answer a little bit for you, in some ways the boomers being who they are and having this kind of gravitational effect on all of american life, it means that in a sense boomers elicited the most boomer -ish results from a reagan presidency that you could have gotten. right? conservatives even at the time

often imagined a much more conservative reagan presidency and they got and instead would boomers got was what they wanted at the time if you could speak of them as a collective which is economic growth and a little bit you're saying. >> yes, and stability after the 70s that was maybe things got too out of hand. >> i've had people ask me whether or not this book was inspired by christopher caldwell's book last year and the answer is no, i thought his book age of entitlement was great and the best book i read last year and in fact when i opened it up and read it i started to feel like i was on the right track with this volume but the bulk of this book was written before i read caldwell's book but he makes an argument in his book about the 60s in america which is many ways about the baby boomers and there

wasn't really a lot of essential difference between the liberals of the 1960s and conservatives of the 1980s that they were both about liberating the individual in one sense culturally and economically but they were always about tearing down things that stood in the way of the individual and there is something boomer -ish and not just a backlash but boomer -ish about reagan and the way he governed and i don't talk much about that in my book but if you pick up caldwell's book you've got a chapter on it. >> even if you just look at it in the 1970s a boomer candidate was torpedoed by being asked for amnesty and abortion and ronald reagan was the candidate who had liberalized abortion in california and then passed amnesty in his presidency without the promised

enforcements so you got, in a sense, the boomer -ish parental style even though he was a figure of an older generation as a paternal figure as president and you got the permissiveness of amnesty and you never got the promise structure that would come later in sort of like here is ice cream, kids, eat it up but next week you will finish her homework every night before we have ice cream again and it wasn't to be. listen, i think we were beginning to wrap up but i just wanted to ask you one more time if there is anything i've missed in a figure that we did not cover everyone in your book and maybe a little thing about justice sotomayor we think is one of the most fun chapters in the book and i didn't get into her but what is boomer -ish

about sonja sotomayor? >> that was the chapter that i was most apprehensive about undertaking because i am painfully aware that law is a profession and there is a reason why they make you go to school for three years before you can practice it and that in some ways it's a specialized field and that i was venturing into dangerous territory trying to talk about it but the truth is you can't talk about the boomer legacy without looking at the warren court and what it has done with constitutional law and the more i got into sotomayor and more than that what constitutional laws have looked like in the last years the more i came to realize that in some of the wingman best positions to talk about it and particularly the most important thing about it which is the argument of the chapter and that the warren

court broke constitutional law. not everybody has to be an originalist or textual list but you can't just make it calvin constitutional law and that is what the warren court did. the problem is that it is very hard to stand up and say constitutional law has lost all meaning and the emperor has no close because the very professionals that know that still have to get up to go to work in the morning. you can have the revelation privately that this entire discipline has gone completely off the rails but you can't argue a case on those grounds so if you practice law you can't keep it at the front of your mind that common law has become a disgrace. every once in a while on a rare occasion somebody within the field of the law can state

plainly just how bad things have gotten. i think justice scalia's dissent is a good example of that where he says i thought we lived in a democratic republic in today's ruling makes clear we do not and we live in an oligarchy ruled by non- ivy league graduates and i think even alito, justice alito has said in opinions of his that constitutional law has suffered deep and i think the word is irremediable damage at the hands of the warren court and its successors. so, my position allows me to foreground is really important fact that professional that we can only mention under special circumstances periodically and that is that common law has gone nuts. just a sotomayor is a great example of that because she is in the [inaudible] generation. they are the pioneers of the

warren court had been educated under the old regime still had a limited sense of how much they could treat the constitution of their personal plaything. someone of sotomayor's generation does not have that and just has no sense of, no limits on her sense of what she can get away with as an interpreter supposedly of the constitution so that chapter is about sotomayor as a product of a revolution rather than an architect of one but in some ways being a product of a revolution is more revealing. >> one thing that it revealed and i think maybe it can be summed up in foreshadowed that the fate has befallen millennial's themselves is that the portrait of sotomayor reveals someone who, when she comes up upon challenges in her life or i will say coyly, gaps

in her knowledge or failures of her educators really and her insecurity suddenly flashes out and then along with that security comes bullying self assertion where there isn't knowledge and there is at least you can fall back on personal offense and indignation and maybe that explains a little bit about what we have seen in our politics in 2020 and so far in 2021 and going ahead into the future. listen, i think are we coming up on the final time here? and waiting to hear from the bosses over at aei but.

>> i am happy to take one more question if you got one. >> i don't have one here for me but let's wrap it up here and listen, helen thank you so much for this book and this is a book i wish i had written and i wish i was capable of writing and you have done like your service to the ages with this book and the thing that is great about it too is it is not just full of all these great anecdotes in a not great portraits but also just a lot of fun and we haven't had a fun conservative book i think in a long time so thank you for that especially. to everyone who joined us, thank you so much for taking time out of your day stuck in your personal covid era prison cells and we wish you well and hope to see you on the other side i rl. take care. >> thank you, michael.

>> you're watching book tv on c-span2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. book tv on c-span2 created by america's cable television company and today we are brought to you by these television companies who provide book tv to viewers as a public service. >> during a virtual event hosted by mother jones magazine's doctor yasmin discusses the dangers of misinformation of public health and medicine. here's a portion of that program. >> a few years ago there was a bit about measles outbreak and they treated something like worst measles outbreak in decades and currently in this eastern part of europe but don't worry we are disseminating the consulate or something along those lines. and i was like are you kidding me, these movements of anti- vaccine messages and hesitancy

they are not disseminating pamphlets to get their point across, they are sending videos of a mother crying to the camera and telling you because she's convinced that her three -year-old became autistic after getting the mmr vaccine. you telling me that with a video like that that is so of a person can tell a story about a child crying in super emotional and you're telling me they you will counter that with a lid point. it does not meet people where they are so some of what frustrates me is i'm trained in medicine and the medical school and around the world we have practiced evidence-based medicine but we don't practice evidence-based medication even though we know good indication is a make or break when it comes to convincing an individual patient and it's everything with the pandemic response and yet there are scholars over here and overhear who have decades of

evidence for us about what works and what does not work and yet we just keep repeating what we think works even though the pamphlet and the facts delivered in a one-size-fits-all message and that is rubbish and it just goes over the heads of so many people and doesn't atone for the fact that we are directly involved or not are part of an establishment that has a really bloodied and unethical history of experimentation on vulnerable people that even now this is not just about history but medical waste is a thing now but if you talk to sick people and people who are vaccine hesitant because even though i studied anti- vaccine movements it's more of the french the majority of people who are on the fence like i got my flu shot last year but not sure if i should get covid-19 vaccine this year and those people if you interview them would have six reasons, historical, cultural, religious to all be vaccine hesitancy so we have to meet them where they

are and we need to hyper localized medications campaigns to. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website booktv.org and use the search box at the top of the page to look for the doctor or the title of her book, viral bs. >> a hearty good afternoon to you. i'm peter laufer and i am the james chair professor of journalism here at the university of oregon, school of journalism and medication. i'm here with my former student, julia and zach and we have got an incredible story to tell you and i got the headlines here noted, fourth-graders, cold war, fbi, russia, rural oregon and penpals. and