Robert Stark interviews Greg Johnson on the Boomerang Generation

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boomerangkid [1]Editor’s Note:

The following text is the transcript by V. S. of my 2013 conversation with Robert Stark on the so-called “Boomerang Generation.” To listen in a player, click here [2]. To download the mp3, right-click here [2] and choose “save target or link as.” To subscribe to our podcasts, click here [3].

Robert Stark: Hello everyone, this is Robert Stark. I’m joined here today with Greg Johnson, and we’re going to be discussing his article on the Boomerang Generation [4]. You touched on this lightly, but this is a major issue going on. Basically, the Boomerang Generation is all of these young people, basically part of the Millennial Generation, people who I would say are roughly under the age of 35, and they’re going to universities, and many of them have almost $100,000 worth in debt. Basically, they’re graduating from universities, and they can’t even find a job, and they’re moving back in with their parents and their family. These are not your stereotypical losers. These are people who are very intelligent, hard-working people. So, Greg, I will let you introduce what you had to say in your article on this topic.

Greg Johnson: Thanks, Robert, for having me on again. I appreciate this.

The Boomerang Generation piece is something that I wrote at the end of August, I believe, and in it I talk about how White Nationalists tend to complain about the lack of young, educated people who are attracted to our movement. I think that today we have a golden opportunity to try to connect to this so-called Boomerang Generation. They’re boomerangs, of course, because their parents throw them out into the world, and they come boomeranging back after college because they can’t find a job or a place to live, or they can’t afford to live on their own. So, they end up in the rec room in the basement sitting on the computer all day.

RS: You said it’s a White issue, but I don’t think it exclusively applies to Whites.

GJ: I think it applies to Whites more for the simple reason that they are unfairly targeted because of their race in two ways.

RS: Disproportionately, but not exclusively.

GJ: Yes, but a lot of Whites go to college and even if they get scholarships they have to take on student loan debt. A lot of non-Whites go to college, especially the less college-bound, the less college-fit populations, the Blacks and so forth. A Black who can go through college is such a rare commodity that they are often given full-ride scholarships to universities that they can’t really prosper in. If they do graduate, they generally graduate without any student debts at all, whereas a comparable White student going to the same school end up with $100,000 or more in debt.

RS: So, you’re saying they get total debt repudiation because of Affirmative Action. I did not know that until you brought that up in your article.

GJ: Yeah, there are a lot of non-Whites because of Affirmative Action in the universities who will end up coming out of the universities debt-free. You know, $100,000 in debt is not just $100,000 you have to pay off. You have to pay off the interest as well, and that can be a crippling debt burden for somebody starting out. Then when White students who have this huge debt burden go into the market place they are systematically discriminated against as well, because not only are there lots of non-Whites in America who are competing with them for jobs. But because of globalization, because of open borders and things like that, White Americans are competing with positions for the cream of non-White countries around the world.

Countries like India have hundreds of millions of high quality people, and many, many of the best of them are coming to the United States and other European countries and competing for technical, professional, business positions with the native populations now. They are not worthless people who are being given a hand up through Affirmative Action. They are highly competent, intelligent people.

RS: They’re not eligible for Affirmative Action.

GJ: They are in a way, because there’s official and unofficial Affirmative Action. The unofficial form of Affirmative Action is just the worship of diversity, diversity, diversity. And when you get South Asians and East Asians who are highly competent and also non-White circulating around in the job market, they have so many things in their favor even though they’re not officially, necessarily being favored in the United States. And if they’re a woman on top of that, then they’re really highly valued.

RS: That is the other thing.

Did you see that interview that Matt Heimbach did with . . . I forget the guy’s name. He’s a Black man. I think it was the Black guy that pointed out that actually the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action have been White women.

GJ: Well, I don’t think it’s White women who are the greatest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action, because Black women, for instance, rank higher than them on the food chain. Black women, I think, are in some ways the best people for diversity jobs in the sort of lower end skill set of jobs, for the simple reason that they have both their Blackness and their femaleness counting for them. Also, unlike Black men, their testosterone is lower, they tend to be more docile, and they tend to be more responsible. They tend to have kids at home and no husband, so they tend to be very, very focused on keeping their jobs. They might not be the best worker for the job if there were fair competition for the job, but they tend to be steady dray horses that employers can count upon, and I think that they’re actually the most desirable group in terms of the Affirmative Action racket in America today. Again, to fill the lower end positions.

RS: Yeah, at the lower end. I was talking specifically about the higher end.

GJ: Yeah. In the higher end . . . I don’t know. Maybe that guy’s right. Maybe it’s White women.

In any case, White men are the great losers in the diversity thing, and that’s by design. I really do think that diversity, Affirmative Action, and other forms of anti-White discrimination primarily discriminate against White males and that White men are the one group that were indispensable for building our civilization. The women could have stayed at home. We didn’t need Blacks. We didn’t need Browns. We didn’t need Asians. You look at the rise of an entirely White country like Sweden, which didn’t have colonies overseas or anything like that, they show you what White people can do on their own. The essential population group for creating White civilization has been White men.

The one essential group for creating White civilization, in terms of building the infrastructure, the science, the technology, and all the things that are distinctive about White civilization have been White men. White women, of course, had to be there. They had to be wives and mothers and things like that. But they could have been entirely wives and mothers and history would have basically unfolded pretty much the same way. So, I don’t want to denigrate women. I just want to say that the essential group that had to participate in the creation of our civilization were White men, and they are the primary group that is being discriminated against, and that cannot have good consequences for our civilization.

I was walking my dog the other day, and I was trying to think of an analogy that would explain how Affirmative Action could hollow out a system and everything could be sort of OK for a while, but then it would collapse suddenly if there was a shock given to it. I walked by a firehouse, and I thought what would happen if basically the fire department just started hiring people who pretended to be firemen. They looked like firemen; they could put on the firemen’s uniforms, all the external stuff that firemen do that has nothing to do with fighting fires. You know, they could go through the motions of it, right? There could be women firemen and Black firemen, and as long as they could look like firemen and go through the motions of it, well, that could go on for a very long time — until there’s actually a fire. Until there’s actually an emergency. And then suddenly you discover that you’ve hollowed out the fire department, that there’s nobody left who can actually do the job of firemen.

I really think that’s what is going on with our civilization. Our civilization can go along on inertia for a long time where the old forms are just preserved even though the people who created them are replaced. Why? Because they’re there, and even the people who had nothing to do with their creation can still enjoy them. There’s an Irish pub on my corner that is owned now by Chinese. Most of their customers are now Chinese. And Chinese like to go bars. They like to drink. They like to listen to certain kinds of music. It’s an experience for them. But after a certain point, there’s going to be a tipping point where there are not enough of the original people around to maintain the institution, and then suddenly if there’s a shock to it it’s just going to disappear. Let’s say that there is a bit of an economic crunch. Let’s say things get more competitive. Eventually, the Chinese owners are going to ask if it makes any sense to keep going through the motions of running an Irish pub. Then it will change to something very different. Something more familiar to and comfortable to the owners and their clientele. And that is to be expected.

So, I think that the general tendency of Affirmative Action is one way — along with multiculturalism and immigration and things like that — that the distinctive institutions of White civilization are being hollowed out. And after a while there will be a shock or two or three, and we’re going to discover that it’s simply not working anymore. It will come apart at the seams.

RS: Basically, there are these movements that came about. There’s Occupy Wall Street and there’s the Tea Party. They’re different in some ways, but they have some overlap. The Tea Party is primarily older White people, older White males of the Baby Boomer Generation, and they’re people who see the middle class declining, but they blame it all on socialism and the government taxing them. But then the other movement is Occupy Wall Street and it’s primarily fueled by the Boomerang Generation.

GJ: Yeah and Occupy, I think, sopped up a bit of the discontent of the Boomerang Generation. But it didn’t really last, and one of the reasons it didn’t last, I think, is because Marxism and the progressive stack and all this Leftoid nonsense that it degenerated into really was not ultimately addressing the concerns of these people. So, they sort of drifted away from it. And I think this is an opportunity for White Nationalists.

In what sense could White Nationalists connect better with these people than the Left? Well, first of all, we have a better understanding of the dynamics of the system that is dispossessing them. It is not “capitalism.” It is not some personal, aracial logic of capitalism. That’s nonsense. That’s bullshit.

RS: Well, I think it is. I disagree with you. I think capitalism and greed is the driving force behind most of these problems. Look at Mitt Romney, for instance. Mitt Romney is obviously a White male, but look at what he did at Bain Capital. He laid off large amounts of workers and you see that as typical of White capitalists going back and it’s not a recent phenomenon. Look at someone like Henry Ford who did the same thing where he laid off workers.

GJ: I think capitalism in and of itself is a nation-wrecking phenomenon. It’s an inherently global, anti-national, nation-wrecking phenomenon. But what you’re talking about more is the dispossession of the working class and the middle class, and I’m talking about these college-educated people who tended to be towards the upper middle class and professional areas. A lot of them are being displaced not just by outsourcing and offshoring or things like that. They’re being displaced by Affirmative Action primarily, and I think that we can therefore put in a much more explicitly racial angle here.

RS: These are kids from well-educated, upper middle class backgrounds. These aren’t like your stereotypical redneck hicks.

GJ: Yeah. They’re well-educated, and they’re intelligent, and they’re the kind of people who used to think that the rising tide of color would float their boats rather than swamp them. They’re the kind of people that chuckle at Christian Lander and showed up when I saw him speak a few years ago in San Francisco. These people feel themselves immune to dispossession. They feel like they’re always going to be on top of the system, and already, just in the last few years, it has become apparent that no, they are being displaced too, and I think that we can explain to them the specifically racial angle of this.

I think also that we have a great critique of debt and banking and that whole economic dimension as well. I think that we should say, “Look, we will end Affirmative Action, and we will cancel all of your college debts. We will reinstitute protectionism and recapitalize the American economy. We’re going to rebuild it for the working class, and we’ll rebuild it for the middle and professional classes as well, because they are now being dispossessed, too. We’re going to create a society where White people are going to feel at home and they have a sense of real hope for the future. We’re going to make it possible for people, when they grow up and get a college education, to know that they can get a job, buy a house, and start a family. We’re going to make affordable family formation for our people one of the corner stones of national policy.”

Those are the priorities that White Nationalists have. Those are not things that are being addressed by the Left, especially the far Left, the Occupy crowd, and they’re not being addressed by any of the mainstream political parties. So, that’s the sense in which I think that we can better connect with these people, and we should.

Fellow White Nationalists tend to complain that the system is very good at co-opting people by giving them jobs and getting them mortgages and getting them started in life and so they feel like at a certain point they can’t afford to rock the boat. They have to keep their views to themselves. They can’t get involved in anything edgy or oppositional. They have to be really mainstream and play it safe. Well, the system isn’t co-opting people anymore. It’s lost its ability or interest in co-opting the former “leaders of the future,” and I think that’s an enormous opportunity for us. We need to exploit that. They’re not being co-opted. They don’t have jobs. They don’t have mortgages. They don’t have families, yet. They have crushing burdens of debt. They’re living at home with their parents. Their parents are worried and wondering why the upward mobility that they enjoyed is no longing being enjoyed by their children. This is a golden opportunity for us to connect with a new constituency, and I would like to be able to do that.

Now, I can’t do everything, and I’m already sort of stretched thin, but I would love to find a blogger, a single person, who can focus with laser-like persistence on this issue. Somebody who is a Millennial Boomerang kid who’s got all this leisure time. Because that’s another thing we always lament, that once people get jobs and have families they don’t have the leisure time to engage in any kind of political activity. Well, these people have nothing but leisure. They might be working 20 hours a week at Starbuck’s or something, but they have a lot of leisure time. I want to find the blogger with the leisure and the writing skills and the desire to connect with this generation and show systematically, commenting on stuff in the news, doing broader studies of things, but keeping the message out there that we have a message for these people that we can represent their interests, that we understand their plight better than the mainstream and better than the Left. I think that would be an enormous advantage that White Nationalists need to exploit, and we haven’t done it yet. We haven’t found that person yet. I’m still looking.

RS: Well, it appeals to the Left and the Right, because as you were talking about there are two halves of this issue. One issue is the issue of demographic dispossession. That’s one half of it. But the other half is that the one-percenters that Occupy Wall Street rants about are basically looting the middle class. They are sucking all the wealth out of the middle class for themselves, and they do it for things like obviously the banks and mortgages, foreclosure, insurance. Insurance is another example of that.

GJ: Exactly. And believe me, most of the one percent are not our constituency. They’re not our people whether they are White or not. They certainly don’t think of themselves as White or think of themselves as Americans. They think of themselves as a member of some kind of rootless, global elite. Fine. I would like to cut them loose and get their suckers, their tentacles, their fangs out of the flesh of America.

RS: We may get called Commies for saying this, but I say just confiscate all their wealth and give it back to the middle class.

GJ: My view is similar. I believe that we should find those people who have been making billions by dismantling the American economy, bringing in non-White immigrants to undermine the wages of American workers, or just firing American workers and shipping their jobs overseas. We need to find those people who have made their billions by dismantling the American economy, and we need to take their billions away from them and use it to recapitalize the American economy.

I don’t necessarily think that everybody who’s grown rich in the present system is guilty of any sort of malfeasance. We can sort the ones out who are and the ones who aren’t.

RS: So, you’re not a full-blown Commie?

GJ: I’m not a full-blown Commie, but sometimes I am actually brought up short by the realization that we might have to contemplate Pol Pot methods to create a middle class capitalist society, and that’s a pretty horrifying prospect.

RS: Yeah. Pol Pot is . . . That’s politically correct to say. Don’t ever say Hitler, because that would be a hate crime, but I think it’s safe to say a Pol Pot or a Mao Zedong.

GJ: Oh yes. They were torturers and murderers and liars and butchers, but they were morally unimpeachable because they were egalitarians. That’s the insane attitude of your typical college-educated person today. But we can ween them away from that nonsense. I’ve weened a lot of them away from that nonsense in the years that I’ve been doing this, and I haven’t been doing it all that long, but I keep meeting people who are 22, 23, 24 and who know so much, and I say to them, “I wish I knew at your age what you know.” And they’ll say, “Well, we were reading Counter-Currents when we were in college.” It’s helped.

So, we are reaching people, and I would like to reach more people, and I’d like to have more writers who can target these people better. I tend to have writers who are a bit older than that and so when we write about music it’s music that was more current in the ’80s, for instance, than things that are going on today, and that’s true in a lot of areas. But I do think that our great growth market is going to be with this Boomerang Generation, with the Millennials. I think it was a very good idea when Richard Spencer offered deep discounts for Millennials to go to the recent NPI conference. I thought that was quite smart.

So, we need to focus on this, and if there are people listening to this who want to get started writing who are good writers — I can’t re-write everything for people, you know; you’ve got to be good, produce clean copy, be witty, be incisive, and want to communicate these ideas to your constituency — I’ll give you a platform that’s getting 80-100,000 unique visitors a month. That’s my promise.

RS: The other thing I want to touch on is I want to personalize it and talk about some of the stories of these people and what their future is in the current system. What is the future of these people? And I guess I’m of this generation myself and I admit it applies to me to a degree. But what is the future of these people in like 10-20 years under the current status quo.

GJ: Well, I hope they’re not living at home in 10-20 years. I think that if this continues for another decade there is going to be revolution in this country. I guarantee that. The system needs to start thinking about co-opting the White, college-educated former middle class again or there will be revolution.

Unfortunately for them, fortunately for us, Obama is all about giving cell phones to brown people. He’s completely uninterested in this kind of thing. I think there’s a great deal of lack of realism in the current regime, and I think that’s working in our favor. These people, they don’t know how wealth is created, they don’t know how societies are run, they don’t know the difference between being a fireman and pretending to be a fireman. Your average Black, and I taught a lot of Black students over the years, including cream of the crop, bright Black students, but even those students didn’t understand the difference between seeming and really being something. They thought that to be a businessman you dressed in a business suit and you bullshitted with other people and that’s what a businessman was. Being a lawyer was dressing up like a lawyer and going through motions.

RS: I think that’s true to a degree. That a lot of it is bullshitting.

GJ: Yeah, a lot of it is bullshitting, and, of course, with Affirmative Action and so forth they’re allowed to bullshit their way through life.

Because a lot of people don’t really fundamentally understand the difference between being and seeming. Again, once you have a lot of people who are just going through the motions of being a fireman and don’t actually know how to do it in positions of responsibility, when the fire breaks out we’re going to see a breakdown. I really do think that’s playing into our hands.

So, I don’t think this can last for another 10-20 years. There’s got to be a change, and the people who want the system to continue for a while longer before it breaks down, they have to be thinking, “We have to get this mulatto newsreader out of the White House and get somebody else in there who actually knows the difference between being a president and looking presidential.” And, believe me, that attitude starts at the top of the administration and works its way down. It’s working its way through the whole society. We can’t have a society that works if people persist in this, but that’s the logic of the system today. So, I don’t think it can last for that long.

What are people going to do, though, before the revolution breaks out? Well, I think there’s a tendency now towards people dropping out, and by dropping out I mean finding alternative ways of living in America that do not require mortgages and debts and things like that, that do not require lots of cash in your pocket. There’s a whole movement now of people who want to have houses without mortgages. How do you do that? Well, you build your own house. You get pre-fab materials, you get bales of straw, you do dug-outs, you get scraps, and you build a small house for $5,000 or $10,000 or $20,000 in cash, and that’s your home. There’s a whole universe now of magazines and blogs and things like that dealing with just this little area. Who’s primarily going into this? It’s primarily Whites.

So, people who want to have houses without mortgages, people who want to be more self-sufficient by growing more food, by adopting voluntary simplicity, by living in group homes, and things like that these are primarily Whites. They’re primarily Millennials, and a little bit older, and I think that they are showing the direction that a lot of these people are going to have to take. Because if the system isn’t going to let them back in, eventually they’re going to have to rally themselves and create a new system, or we’re going to rally them and create a new system. That’s my goal, at least. In the meantime, they’ve got to find a way to live, and that I think is the direction it’s going to go. They’re going to be an army of agrarian Hobbits that we’re going to rally someday to storm the system to take it over. But that’s the direction I think it’s moving in. So, those are some of the thoughts that I have.

For instance, let me just toss out something. In 2001 I visited William Pierce’s National Alliance headquarters up in the mountains of West Virginia, and he had a lot of acreage, he had a lot of buildings, but he was never able to keep people living there. They didn’t want to live in the mountains of West Virginia. Now I think that property has been let go. It’s been sold or will be sold. It’s being abandoned, basically, by the National Alliance. And I just think that’s a crying shame, because with a little bit of leadership in the present day circumstances that’d be a great place. There are people who have nothing today. The system gives them nothing. They’re smart, they’re focused, they’re hardworking. They could homestead that place and turn it into a little commune, and you could put them to work doing the former work that was done when the National Alliance was a thriving organization.

I think that kind of direction is something that the movement needs to look to as well, because we’re not getting rich doing this kind of stuff, and if you want to be a full-time White Nationalist activist, let me tell you, you’ve got to find ways of living way cheaply, and this is one of the reasons why I’m so interested in all of this, because my standard of living is comfortable, but I don’t have a lot of cash. Figuring out how to live comfortably and securely without a lot of cash is a problem that a lot of people are facing, including a lot of people who are younger than myself. So, I’m looking at these blogs like John Robb’s Sustainable Communities. I’m looking into gardening. I don’t grow vegetables yet, but I’m planning to do that starting next year. So, that’s the direction I think a lot of our people are going to have to go.

Eventually, though, they’re going to have to stop adapting to this system, and they’re going to have to break it.