[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXUqwuzcGeU]

Millennials are to blame for Hillary Clinton's failures. If Trump succeeds in getting into the White House, it will be their fault. Just ask James Kirchick of The Daily Beast:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/16/if-america-elects-a-pre...

Yet despite running against a candidate who combines the racial divisiveness of George Wallace with the pro-Russian sympathies of Henry Wallace, Hillary Clinton has barely been able to break 48 percent in any national poll. She does significantly better in head-to-head match-ups than in the actual four-way race, thanks to the not insignificant number of voters expressing support for Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party standard-bearer Jill Stein. Support for these minor candidates is most pronounced among a crucial demographic, my demographic: millennials. Twenty-six percent of voters aged 18-29 say they will vote for Johnson; 10 percent back Stein.

Why do these millennials back third-party candidates? Well some of it is just because they're haters and sore losers:

What explains the millennial willingness to risk a Trump presidency? A lot of it stems from cynicism towards, if not downright hatred of, Clinton and everything she represents. Seventy-seven percent of voters 18-34 find Clinton untrustworthy, compared to 65 percent of all likely voters. There’s also not a small degree of lingering bitterness from those who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, only 52 percent of whom, according to an Economist/YouGov poll, plan to back the party’s nominee (Sanders won millennials overwhelmingly, and Saturday will be in Ohio to try and convince voters there to hold their noses with one hand and pull the lever for Clinton with the other).

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But that's not all. Let Mr. Kirchick lead you deeper into the labyrinth of the millennial psyche, and reveal the Minotaur within!

But there’s something deeper, and darker, about millennial opposition to Clinton and the attendant blitheness towards the prospect of a Trump presidency. It’s best described as a mix of moral relativism, historical ignorance and narcissism.

Moral relativism. Narcissism. That sounds scary. Of course, it also sounds like Hillary Clinton, who would I think, by now, have the moral relativist vote and the narcissist vote locked up.

By the way, Boomers, isn't this the same thing they said about you when you were young?

Millennials are the first post-war generation to have come of age after the Cold War.

Oh, well that explains it---wait, what?

Baby boomers, by contrast, grew up listening to their parents’ tales of American heroism in World War II and read about the depredations of international communism every day. Throughout their formative years, the United States was locked in Cold War struggle against an expansionist Soviet empire, and the world lived under threat of nuclear holocaust. The anti-Vietnam War movement may have bred skepticism about America’s global role, but the notion that American power was necessary to protect freedom in the world remained a majority one.

As I recall, "reading about the depredations of international communism every day" made the Boomers, in their youth, charge their own government and culture with hypocrisy. It made them point out the depredations committed by the United States. You can't be the good guy with dirty hands, was the general idea, and the Vietnam war abroad (which you dismiss very easily for someone so concerned with history) and lynchings of Black people at home made it rather difficult for the United States to righteously harangue the Soviet Union about "depredations" in Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. I also recall the Boomers having a problem with the United States' contributions to the threat of nuclear holocaust, which were being touted as necessary for that "Cold War struggle against an expansionist Soviet empire."

Millennials, by contrast, spent their early years blissfully unaware about the world and its dangers. That changed, of course, on 9/11. But unlike other age groups, over half of us believe U.S. actions might have provoked those attacks. “Older people think, ‘We’re a great people, we got attacked by these crazy people, and now we are dealing with it and we have to be careful,’” Trevor Thrall, co-author of a study on millennials and foreign policy, told Voice of America last year. “Millennials are the only generation the majority of which think the U.S. must have done something to provoke 9/11.” Thrall’s study concluded that millennials “perceive the world as significantly less threatening than their elders,” “are more supportive of international cooperation than previous generations,” and “are also far less supportive of the use of military force.” Millennials are also deeply skeptical—like Trump—of American exceptionalism. A 2011 Pew poll found that only 32 percent of millennials believe America is superior to other countries, compared to 64 percent of baby boomers.

"Blissfully unaware of the world and its dangers?"

What a fucking load of shit you're spreading, Mr. Kirchick. That goes for Trevor Thrall too. By the way, Dr. Thrall, (who works here: http://www.cato.org/people/trevor-thrall), I want to see your raw data and how your study was designed before it gets used by any more witnesses to the Holy PNAC Gospel of Washington Consensus. (Also, the organization you work for is comprised of fucking hypocrites--"libertarians" opposing Net Neutrality, pffft.)

You think Millennials are unaware of the world's dangers? How about the danger of catastrophic climate change, you bastard, you Cold War nostalgia hound? How about the dangers of worldwide famine and poisoned water?

Oh, wait. It occurs to me I've been talking to you all this time and haven't introduced myself.

I'm Gen X. You know, one of the two generations you media access types always forget, because obviously America consists of Greatest Generation, Boomers, and Millenials, and nobody else.

I'm one of the two Cold War generations in this country. Born into it, grew up in it, saw it end. That's what we share with the Boomers.

So I think I'm in a pretty good position to discuss the relative value of knowing it's a Big Bad World Out There, Full of Dangers Like the Red Menace. I know all about the Monroe Doctrine, OK? I know there's a bear in the woods.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpwdcmjBgNA]

But guess what? I don't fucking care that there's a bear in the woods, because people like Hillary Clinton are clearcutting the woods, poisoning the water, and salting the earth. That's what she's doing in my part of the woods. On the other side of the woods, where other people live who speak different languages and worship different gods than me, she doesn't bother with clearcutting and poison--she just bombs the woods out of existence, leaving rubble, smoking wood fragments, and large piles of dead bodies (She says it's all in the good cause of stopping the bear, but I see a lot of guys in expensive suits behind her smirking, and I think somehow they must all be making money off the wreckage). She, and they, are also doing a lot of crap that seems to involve pushing most people down the economic ladder as far as possible, so that the people who *do* survive end up with much worse lives than their parents or grandparents had.

And you want me, or more accurately, you want my niece, to be afraid of the Red Menace? Or, if not them, who? Scary Arab terrorists? China? North Korea?

Why should I (or my niece) be more afraid of them than of my own ruling class? What makes the American elites better than the Russian elites or the Chinese elites, or the Korean elites or even the rich Gulf State Arabs who are funding a lot of those scary terrorists? What makes my ruling class better? Is the American aristocracy better because, while it has obliterated the legal differences between the United States and those other, more forthright police states, it hasn't yet obliterated entirely the customs of a civil society with guaranteed rights?

I know how conversations with Hillary surrogates work, and this is the point where you talk to me about how Black people and others were denied those rights, so it makes the very idea that those rights could ever exist a bunch of elitist garbage, and it makes objecting to the violations of those rights a racist act. This is where you tell me I have to be OK with a system that disregards the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions and other statements of humanitarian intent because for 400 years those rights haven't been extended to Black people.

Because obviously it was the idea of basic human rights that caused the problems Black people have been facing for the last 400 years in this hemisphere. Obviously, racism and slavery made Black people's lives hell on this continent not because some American bastards wanted to make boatloads of money without paying people for their labor, and defined a whole bunch of people as not really human so that they could get away with it, but because some Americans came up with the idea that people have rights. If we only hadn't written the Bill of Rights, everything would have been roses for Black people and other people of color on this continent! Because, if only you could treat white people the same way you've been treating Black people all along, there would be no racism! Everything would be equal. Everything would be fair. No preferential treatment, see? We're all equally under that rich guy's foot.

And obviously, Black people are doing so great in this Brave New World your chosen candidate has spent the last 25 years helping to build! With fewer pesky "rights" being accorded to white people, everything has gotten better for Black people. After all, only two of them are being murdered a day, right?

Am I supposed to be grateful that I can still write this without being hauled off to jail? Am I supposed to be grateful that I know of only one detention center in the United States that kidnaps and tortures people (outside the law, with no due process), and that it focuses mainly on Black people, so that many of us can go about our lives still pretending that we live within some tolerable legal and ethical framework?

Take your fake morality into your bomb shelter and watch reruns of Red Dawn, and stuff this attempt at generational warfare up your ass, you bootlicker of war profiteers, you smirking opinion-manager-for-pay.

[This essay would not exist without the essay written by cloudy_skies, who alerted me to this wretched, history-mangling chicanery, to whom I extend a major h/t. Here is the original essay: http://caucus99percent.com/content/victim-blaming-has-begun]