I was casually scrolling through Substack yesterday and came across this meme and I have some thoughts. So, buckle up, keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times and let’s take another trip inside Eevie’s head!
Excuse me? Horseshit. It should read like this:
“Imagine storming Normandy and then spending the next fifty years defunding the schools, freezing the minimum wage, and handing your grandkids a device engineered by adults to hijack their attention for profit. Then blaming the grandkids when they can’t see a strongman coming.”
That’s the actual chain of custody. Not “kids these days.”
Let me explain what’s not on the meme of blame-shifting…
State funding for public colleges and universities has been on a downward slide since the 1980s, when states started shifting more of the cost of higher ed onto students through tuition hikes. The 2008 recession accelerated it and by 2018, states were spending more than $6.6 billion less on higher ed than they had a decade earlier, adjusted for inflation. Between 2008 and 2018 alone, states also disinvested nearly $600 billion from K-12 public schools compared to what it would have taken to simply keep pace with their own states’ economic growth. Not improve funding. Just not let it fall behind and they couldn’t even manage that.
Then came the testing regime. No Child Left Behind passed in 2002 promising to end the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” and what that shit-program did was did was tie school funding and survival to standardized test scores in reading and math. So schools did exactly what you’d expect an underfunded institution facing extinction to do — they taught to the test. Civics, social studies, the arts, the stuff that teaches you how propaganda works and what a fascist playbook looks like in real time, got quietly starved out of the school day to make room for fucking test prep. Researchers have documented science instruction losing an hour a week nationally while reading and math instruction time ballooned. Millennials and Gen Z didn’t choose that shit.
Nobody under 40 voted on that.
So if your grandkids and great-grandkids can’t spot fascism a mile off, ask who took the compass out of the curriculum first before you start pointing fingers.
Now layer on the money. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since July 24, 2009. It is the longest stretch without a single increase since the federal minimum wage was created in 1938. Its buying power has been eroding the entire time. A full-time minimum wage worker today earns thousands of dollars less in real terms than the same worker made the year it was last raised. Millennials and Gen Z didn’t choose to enter adulthood already underwater. We were born in the goddamn bathtub.
And the reading. The 2024 Nation’s Report Card showed roughly 40 percent of fourth graders scoring below NAEP Basic in reading — the worst share since 2002 — and only about a third of twelfth graders hitting proficient. Some of that is pandemic disruption nobody built a resilient system to absorb. Most of it is the slope this country had already been sliding down for years before COVID ever showed up. You don’t get to progressively and systematically underfund a system for two generations, hand it a once-in-a-century shock with no slack built in, and then act shocked when the kids who came out the other side can’t parse a fucking paragraph.
And let’s not forget this business model that is literally giving our children a one way ticket to cognitive incapability. Jonathan Haidt’s research on what he calls the Great Rewiring lays out the timeline. The smartphone arrives in 2007, the front-facing camera and the engagement-optimized feed arrive a few years after that, and somewhere between 2010 and 2014 childhood itself shifts from play-based to phone-based. Teen anxiety, depression, and self-harm rates climbed sharply right on schedule. Critics are right that correlation isn’t proof of causation and the research is still being argued over — I’m not going to hand you a settled science I don’t have. However, this in-depth study by Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath is quite eye-opening and I encourage you to read it: Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, PhD, MEd Written Testimony before Congress
The fact remains that no fourteen-year-old designed that algorithm. Adults did. Adults built it, adults optimized it for time-on-app over wellbeing, and adults marketed it straight at developing brains because developing brains are the easiest ones to hook, without understanding or giving a shit about the consequences. Or, maybe they did, but they were more focused on making their money than giving a shit about ours and our children’s wellbeing. Then those same adults turned around and acted baffled that a generation raised inside an attention-extraction machine struggles to sit still for nuance.
And let’s deal with the obvious pushback before someone else does it for me. Some will say, “but, aren’t millennials adults now, with full voting rights, who could have just fixed all this?” Sure, on paper. But look at who was actually holding the gavel while the policy got written. Boomers became the majority of the U.S. House in the 1998 midterms. By 2000 they held 53 percent of House seats — right around when the oldest millennials were just old enough to vote for the first time and the youngest hadn’t started kindergarten yet. By the mid-2010s, Boomers controlled roughly two-thirds of both chambers. And it’s not just Congress — every president this country has elected since 1992 was born in 1961 or earlier. Solidly Boomer, or older. We have never once had a president younger than a Boomer. Not Gen X, not millennial, not anyone close, and that’s still true as of right now. The people who wrote the testing mandates, froze the wage, and signed off on the regulatory vacuum that let Silicon Valley build an attention-extraction machine and hand it to ten-year-olds were not us. We weren’t in the room where it happened. We were the fuckin’ homework.
What’s embarrassing the most about the beach meme up top, is that, in the election that’s supposedly proof the grandkids let fascism back in, the grandkids didn’t. Nationally, 18-to-29-year-olds went for Harris over Trump by 11 points, and 30-to-44-year-olds went for her too, by 4 points. The two brackets that actually delivered Trump the win were 45-to-64, which broke for him by 10 points, and 65-and-up, basically a coin flip that tipped his way by a single point. Call those Gen X and Boomers if you want labels, and the breakdown actually holds up, that the 45-64 bracket is mostly Gen X, with only its oldest sliver — the 60-to-64-year-olds — counting as the youngest Boomers, while 65-and-up is the bulk of the Boomer generation plus the Silent Generation ahead of them. The point isn’t the label. The point is that the people who actually cast the deciding votes were not the people this meme is yelling at. The only thing Millennials and Gen X did was vote. More of us shouldn’t been at the polls. But, when you strip away civics and social studies classes, and throw a generation into survival mode and technology brain rot — what the hell are you expecting here?
So let’s be honest about what’s actually being asked when somebody points at a beach photo and asks why the grandkids let fascism back in eighty years later. The numbers say they didn’t. The people asking the question are, statistically, closer to the people who did. And even setting the vote itself aside — these are also the people who were handed a defunded school, a frozen wage, a test-prep education stripped of civics, and a phone built to fracture their attention span, and asked to somehow have absorbed, on their own, decades of historical and political literacy nobody was funded to teach them. How is that a generational character flaw? It’s not. That’s a design failure, and the people who built it weren’t the ones storming the beach. They were the ones who came home from it and then spent the next half-century quietly tearing the system apart, one budget vote at a time.
So when you’re ready to ask why we let fascism back in, maybe start with the exit polls — and then ask who took the lesson out of the curriculum before we ever got a vote.
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Well done, Eevie. To your remarks I would add that the ability to recognize fascism has not been the only casualty of the deterioration of public education. Also lost have been the critical thinking skills that enable one to recognize a bullshitting conman.
Thank you, Eevie - excellent points! It is imperative that people understand the factual history, as you have done. With that in mind, please also recognize these essential facts:
- As a result of the 1960’s uprisings - civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, environmental justice and anti-war protests - the US Chamber of Commerce was freaked out that the public was turning against corporations, so in 1971 they reached out to corporate attorney Lewis Powell for advice. He responded with the now-infamous
“Powell memo” of 1971 in which he laid out the plan for corporations to take over EVERY aspect of American society - including education and media - and prevent the 1960’s uprisings from ever happening again.
- Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court in late 1971 and Powell proceeded to influence legal cases (such as Buckley) to favor corporations.
- This was the foundation on which Leonard Leo, an Opus Dei operative who runs the Federalist Society, stacked the Supreme Court with right-wing corporatists and destroyed our nation.
- The 1971 Powell memo inspired Joseph Coors to found the Heritage Society in 1973, and this is why Project 2025 exists and is tearing apart our nation.
As you explained, Reagan defunded public schools - AND this was aligned with the Heritage Foundation/Christian coalition’s covert plans.
While Boomers are often blamed for the nightmare today, please be aware that it was the Boomer’s parents and grandparents who freaked out about the 1960’s younger generation’s demands for social justice and set in motion the plans to prevent future social change. They were very clever and secretive - since few had any clue that Project 2025 was in play and that its roots grew since 1973.
In addition, as the right-wing attacked public schools, many middle class parents were terrified their children would not succeed in an increasingly competitive corporate America - and so millions of average people drank the Kool-Aid and enrolled their children in private schools rather than recognizing the massive deception being fed to them. Millions of Americans have colluded in the planned destruction of our public school system, resulting in the abysmal statistics you explained.
I am not excusing the self-aggrandizing behaviors of many Boomers - such as the Cheeto - but I am adding to the tragic history so we see further back into the roots of corporate money - and the mega-wealthy families who have been running this country since long before the Boomers were born. Thank you for considering these facts and thank you again for your important work!