Generation X Led the Way out of the Pandemic

I keep seeing riled-up Gen Xers on YouTube. You'd better watch out, because Gen X (born between 1965 and 1980) is tough--so tough that some of us looked after ourselves home alone after school, played unsupervised and drank out of hoses when we were kids. The riled-up ones on YouTube might send some very mean tweets.

Screen shot from The Goonies.

They're late to the party. It was mostly other Gen-Xers who were riled up four years ago, leading the way against lockdowns and forced vaccinations: Alex Berenson (investigative journalist who successfully sued Twitter), Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (professors in exile previously pursued by baseball bat wielding goons at Evergreen), Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta (co-authors of The Great Barrington Declaration), Aseem Malhotra (cardiologist who took the shot, then started campaigning to end the shots after his father died suddenly of a heart attack after his shot), Ron De Santis and Kristi Noem (governors of Florida and South Dakota who bucked lockdowns), sassy Thomas Massie (Kentucky senator who refused to meet with any company with COVID mandates), Todd Rokita (Indiana's attorney general, who filed lawsuits opposing mandates every ten minutes during the pandemic), all the members of Muse, and podcaster Joe Rogan, who made the covidians mad by refusing the clot shot, taking ivermectin and getting only a mild case of COVID. Baby Boomers Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were so mad about Spotify refusing to kick Rogan off its platform that they cancelled themselves from Spotify. (They both went back, if anyone cares.) 

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell weren't the only rockers who wanted everyone to fall in line: lots of Boomer musicians who traded on their rebellious performances turned into Pfizer lackeys. Five Times August even wrote a song about all those poseurs ("Ain't No Rock and Roll"). 

Why is Gen X so over-represented in leading the fight for liberty? I don't think hose-drinking and biking around the neighborhood as kids has anything to do with it. For one thing, there's no plausible reason those things would make you fight tyranny as an adult, and for another, Boomers did all of that, too, probably more so. When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, I could go for a long walk through my neighborhood without encountering a soul even though other kids lived there. They were probably at the mall, the arcade or at work if they were older. At school, I heard a lot of classmates talk about getting high, getting drunk, or what they watched on TV but pretty much nobody talked about being outside unless it was to go cruising or skiing. Even if I believed the revisionist history in YouTube comments, I was also the product of checked-out parents and had lots of free time. I got good at entertaining myself, but that just made lockdowns and quarantine easier. 

Maybe an important difference between Boomers and Gen X is that Boomers grew up at the end of polio and Gen X grew up at the beginning of AIDS. Polio victims were quarantined and the disease was eventually stopped with shots. AIDS was not stopped by shots and nobody was quarantined. You protected yourself and got on with your life. Furthermore, it was clear within a few years that some of the panic was unfounded: AIDS wasn't spread by casual contact as some people thought (an episode of Dynasty finally put that myth to rest), and it was primarily a disease of gay men and drug users sharing needles, not a disease everyone was equally at risk of getting. Unlike polio (but very much like COVID), it was almost never a disease of kids.

Boomers also saw smallpox eradicated by a vaccination program when the oldest Gen Xers were only seven. Boomers and Gen X might have each been fighting the last war, but our last war was a lot more relevant and we were better informed about the current one.

Almost certainly, Gen X was getting more news from independent sources on YouTube, Twitter, Rumble, Substack, Spotify, Locals, Project Veritas, and other platforms not sponsored by Pfizer. People watching and reading nothing but legacy media might not have heard much serious criticism of the COVID panic except on Fox News. This was important because so much legacy media reporting was fearmongering, pharma propaganda, junk science or misinformation, much of which was generated by the CDC. 

It's speculation, but I think Gen X saw, at a more impressionable age, more debunking of myths, panics and hoaxes over the years, making them a more skeptical generation: the Satanic Panic (don't laugh, people spent years in prison over ridiculous charges), recovered memories (more fantasies that got people incarcerated), the Y2K panic, overblown AIDS fears, a number of incredible stories investigated and discredited (like this one about "Sybil" who was said to have multiple personalities, another about a man who claimed to be a Holocaust victim, and a whole collection of articles in The New Republic), and of course the idea that fat makes you fat and causes heart disease. Boomers, even younger ones, still tend to believe in low-fat diets. 

Debunking requires bunk, and there was plenty of bunk in the kooky 70s. In 1979 I watched a TV special called A Strange Harvest about UFOs coming to earth and mutilating cattle in Colorado, the state where I lived. It wasn't a drama, but a documentary created by a TV news reporter in Denver with a master's degree from Stanford. It won a regional Emmy award. If you wanted a weekly diet of woo, there was In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy. While Sybil was at least based on a real person if not a real illness, the international best seller Go Ask Alice from 1971 turned out to be pure fiction. Many grown-up, high-functioning people at the time (I'm looking at you, Boomers) apparently believed a lot of questionable content on TV or in print. I believed most of these works at the time, too, but I've reviewed them in middle age and found them absurd.

It's easier to think clearly when you're at less risk. Gen Xers were age 40 to 57 between 2020 and 2022, putting them at far less risk of serious illness than Boomers. It was the loss of work from lockdowns and being fired over vaccine requirements that was a bigger risk for Gen X, none of whom were close to retirement age. Many had to figure out how to work and take care of their kids while they were out of school. Incentives matter.

Of course, not every Gen Xer was in the fight and not everyone fighting mandates was in Gen X. Senator Rand Paul, who's still dogging Tony Fauci, and Martin Kulldorff, co-author of The Great Barrington Declaration, were born late in the Baby Boom. Indiana's senator Mike Braun led a Congressional Review that played an important part in the Supreme Court striking down Biden's vaccine mandate for nearly every employee in the US (none of the Gen X justices were among the dissenters), and Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson has advocated for people suffering COVID vaccine injuries. Both were born in the middle of the Baby Boom. 

If you supported liberty during the pandemic, give yourself a pat on the back no matter which generation you're in. And I will agree with one thing I saw on YouTube: Gen X turned out to be the break glass in case of emergency generation.