Commentary: The Myth of the Boomer Bogeyman

How often the youngsters use the Boomer—sometimes, BOOMER!—when airing their grievances. Maybe they’ve created a keyboard shortcut to spit out “Boomer” with two strokes instead of six. Shift-plus-something or other. Perhaps one of them can show this Boomer how to work this consarn machine.  

What you hear these days, and you hear it all the time, is that the Boomers are the root of all our ills. In January, when Neil Young demanded that Spotify defenestrate Joe Rogan or else lose the Young catalog, writer Declan Leary said Young made his announcement with “boomer sincerity.” Maybe there is a unique Boomer form of sincerity, and maybe Young has it, but one thing Young is not is a Boomer. He was born in 1945. Neil Young belongs to the so-called Silent Generation.

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Commentary: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Great Society

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration Act of 1965 formed the core of the Great Society. Together, they became what some have called the “Second Reconstruction.” Professor Gabriel Chin noted that  “[i]n a remarkable fifteen-month span between July 1964 and October 1965 . . . these laws unquestionably marked a turning point in American history and dramatically changed American society.” 

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Commentary: LBJ’s Great Society Lives On

by Silvio Simonetti   Forget Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton as well. And do the same regarding Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. The most consequential American president since the end of World War II was Lyndon Baines Johnson. The man — who possessed a unique combination of savvy, lack of character and progressive faith — created the Great Society and helped to shape the modern-day United States. Whether you like him or not, we all live under the shadow cast by one of the most hated and misunderstood presidents of America. We would have known little about Johnson had a young Robert Caro not developed a special interest for the former president after visiting him on his ranch in Texas. The result of Caro’s curiosity was a masterful piece about American history and this unique character that started his life as a school’s teacher and climbed all the way up to the White House. Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson shows a man who understood, from an early age, the meaning and the ways to power. The tallest of all George Washington’s successors and extremely ungainly, Johnson’s physical characteristics seemed to reflect the psyche…

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Fifty-Five Years into the Great Society, Tennessee Still Plagued with Poverty

As of Tuesday, poverty still exists in Tennessee and elsewhere around the nation. But former President Lyndon Johnson promised us this wouldn’t happen. Tuesday was the 55th anniversary of the day Johnson announced government would end poverty as we know it and he would thus begin his Great Society programs, costing the country trillions of dollars. According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, Tennessee’s poverty rate is about 15 percent. According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research Poverty as well as Statistica.com, those numbers in Tennessee have remained almost level since the 1970s. Memphis, meanwhile, is one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in the nation, according to media reports. Johnson was unavailable for comment Tuesday to defend his actions —he died in 1973. But if Johnson was still alive, The Tennessee Star would have a lot to ask him, especially about the taxpayers’ return on investment. We’d ask him to defend the perverse incentives the feds taught poor people, thus changing some of their very natures. We’d ask him about the spike in illegitimacy rates and, by extension, the number of people in jail because of his policies. According to Forbes, since the mid-1960s federal…

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