Doom Report (Week 44: The End of the Boomer Dominance?)

If you need a pick-me-up—and after a week like this one, who wouldn’t?—you can see how incompetent Trump’s DoJ continues to be by watching this week’s Strict Scrutiny, or Legal Eagle’s detailed summary by Anna Bower.  Or, as Jimmy Kimmel put it this week:

Sometimes you get hung up on how evil they are; you forget they’re also dumb.

Strict Scrutiny also has an interview with Jill Hasday, who quotes an interesting Washington Post piece from 1922, when Alice Paul, one of the leading suffragettes who had helped pass the 19th Amendment two years prior, posited what gains women would achieve over the next century.  Spoiler alert: none of her predictions have come to pass.  The toughest one was that America would have had at least one woman president by that time; personally, I’ve decided that the misogyny in our culture runs so deep that we’ll only see a woman president when both parties run women candidates.  Gut-wrenching, and I want to be wrong, but it seems like that’s the way we’re headed.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger give us another great week in review, including some important perspectives from his experience as a military veteran.

• Two of my favorite journalists who have left the “traditional” news media for “new” media, Mehdi Hasan and Alex Wagner, combine forces to talk about how the information landscape has been fundamentally broken by the right-wing nutjobs.

• Hasan Minhaj interviews Ken Burns about his upcoming documentary series on the Revolutionary War.  The echoes of current day events are ... unsettling.

• Devin Stone over at Legal Eagle provides a litany of “Every Illegal Act Trump Committed in 2025 (So Far)”, which is exactly what it says on the tin.  It’s a slog to get through, but that’s sort of the point: the fact that there’s so much—and just in the first 10 months!—is worth remembering.  Don’t let the fatigue make you forget.

• But if that Legal Eagle video is too long for you, you could cut to the chase with Devin’s much shorter warning that authoritarianism is already here, which contanis this heartbreaking quote: when Devin wonders if what we’ve been seeing is a constitutional crisis, he answers his own question by saying “Well, yeah, it was.  But the constitutional crisis is over: we lost.”

I sort of led with hopeful this week, so I’ll end with informative.  This week, Hank Green explained our gerontocracy and the reasons behind it—and why it may end soon—which was quite enlightening.  There are also echoes of the Scott Galloway interview I quoted in week 42: Galloway says people under 40 are 24% less wealthy than the population as a whole and people his age (Galloway is, as I will be next year at this time, just over 60) are 72% wealthier; Hank puts it this way:

... boomers have around $80 trillion compared with the wealth of Gen X’s 45 trillion.  That’s a big difference.

Speaking as a Gen Xer myself—an elder Gen Xer, granted, but a Gen Xer nonetheless—I feel that almost viscerally.  Because, as close as Galloway and I are in age, that borderline between Boomers and Gen X lies between us, and it feels like an interminable gulf.

Then Hank talked with pollster Joshua Doss, and they try to guess what comes next.  Here’s what they come up with:

Hank: It’s very hard for me to imagine that, like, the immediate next thing that will happen will not be a populism of the left that is quite powerful.
Josh: It’s the only clear bucket to me.  I don’t know what the next bucket that would arise would be ... I don’t know what another clear bucket would be other than that one.

So, there you go: informative and hopeful.  Just a bit.