NYT Columnist Pens Stupidest Column In Recent History: ‘Go Ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us!’

On Monday, New York Times essayist Tim Kreider penned an op-ed so stunningly ridiculous that readers everywhere must have simultaneously come to the realization that Kreider was dropped on his head as a child. The piece, titled, “Go Ahead, Millenials, Destroy Us,” suggested that young Americans have the freshness of youth to appreciate all the errors of the past, and that they should tear down the structures of thought that have brought about the most prosperous and free civilization in world history. In the name of progress, of course.

It’s a pandering, meandering, maudlin screed — an invitation for youngsters to burn everything with fire. Everything except Kreider, of course, who will be given a stay of execution for his role in ushering in the Xbox Revolution.

Kreider begins with the Parkland massacre, of course, which supposedly taught Americans that youngsters have greater wisdom than their elders — even though the kids from Parkland most lauded by the media have generally had little to say beyond “take the guns away” and “I hung up on Trump” and “Dana Loesch and the NRA and Marco Rubio hate children,” which isn’t so much wisdom as sheer nonsense. But according to Kreider, the children shall lead us:

As with all historic tipping points, it seems inevitable in retrospect: Of course it was the young people, the actual victims of the slaughter, who have finally begun to turn the tide against guns in this country. Kids don’t have money and can’t vote, and until now burying a few dozen a year has apparently been a price that lots of Americans were willing to pay to hold onto the props of their pathetic role-playing fantasies. But they forgot what adults always forget: that our children grow up, and remember everything, and forgive nothing. Those kids have suddenly understood how little their lives were ever worth to the people in power.

Such idiocy. Everyone in America cares about these kids — which is why they’re on television non-stop, and why we’re still talking about Parkland when we stopped talking about a massacre in a Texas church and a far larger massacre in Las Vegas mere days after they took place. Yes, America cares about its children. Duh. But according to Kreider, the kids know that we don’t care about them, and thus they will surely put down their iPhones and sound the call to the barricades:

And they’ll soon begin to realize how efficient and endless are the mechanisms of governance intended to deflect their appeals, exhaust their energy, deplete their passion and defeat them. But anyone who has ever tried to argue with adolescents knows that in the end they will have a thousand times more energy for that fight than you and a bottomless reservoir of moral rage that you burned out long ago.

And then they’ll grow up and realize half of what they thought was dumb. Which is what age and experience does to young people. I should know. I regret a good deal of the crap I wrote when I was 17 and a syndicated columnist — and I was as passionate about politics as any teenager ever.

Now, Kreider acknowledges that young people haven’t undergone that experience:

The young — and the young at mind — tend to be uncompromising absolutists. They haven’t yet faced life’s heartless compromises and forfeitures, its countless trials by boredom and ethical Kobayashi Marus, or glumly watched themselves do everything they ever disapproved of. I am creeped out by the increasing dogmatism and intolerance of millennials on the left…I just can’t help noticing that the liberal side isn’t much fun to be on anymore.

But never mind all that — bring on the guillotine!

Yet this uprising of the young against the ossified, monolithic power of the National Rifle Association has reminded me that the flaws of youth — its ignorance, naïveté and passionate, Manichaean idealism — are also its strengths. Young people have only just learned that the world is an unfair hierarchy of cruelty and greed, and it still shocks and outrages them. They don’t understand how vast and intractable the forces that have shaped this world really are and still think they can change it. Revolutions have always been driven by the young.

Yes, and those revolutions have often ended in bloody chaos and/or tyranny. The number of liberal revolutions in world history is rather limited, and those were rarely led by gung-ho 17-year-olds. The average age of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence was 44, in an era when life expectancy was far, far lower. But Kreider continues:

The students of Parkland are like veterans coming home from the bloody front of the N.R.A.’s de facto war on children. They’ve seen their friends, teachers and coaches gunned down in the halls. To them, powerful Washington lobbyists and United States senators suddenly look like what they are: cheesy TV spokesmodels for murder weapons. It has been inspiring and thrilling to watch furious, cleareyed teenagers shame and vilify gutless politicians and soul-dead lobbyists for their complicity in the murders of their friends.

Kreider makes no case for that complicity. And he can’t explain why he isn’t a jabbering spokesmodel for virtue signaling New York leftism — which he clearly is, by the way. But the kids say so, so it’s so. Go, kids!

My message, as an aging Gen X-er to millennials and those coming after them, is: Go get us. Take us down — all those cringing provincials who still think climate change is a hoax, that being transgender is a fad or that “socialism” means purges and re-education camps. Rid the world of all our outmoded opinions, vestigial prejudices and rotten institutions. Gender roles as disfiguring as foot-binding, the moribund and vampiric two-party system, the savage theology of capitalism — rip it all to the ground. I for one can’t wait till we’re gone. I just wish I could live to see the world without us.

The kids will remake the world. We’ll have a world in which the government controls all industry, in which biological sex disappears into the vagary of subjectively-defined gender, in which we no longer talk about the horrors of the Soviet Union and China and North Korea and Cuba and Venezuela (they’re probably fake, anyhow, made up by those old fogeys who just don’t understand sharing!); we’ll have a world in which men and women are merely clay to be molded to societal whim, in which capitalism disappears in favor of, well, something, and yet Tim Kreider keeps getting to write s****y essays for cash instead of doing something useful like cleaning the restrooms with his discarded drafts. Yeah, kids! And remember that Tim Kreider was there, cheering you on like that cool, dope-smoking uncle at the holiday party three years ago who sneaked you a beer and then patted you on the back as you vomited into the bushes to fight the system, man!

At least Kreider is right about one thing: sane people can’t wait until he’s gone, from the pages of The New York Times, at least.