The Great Deprogression Of The Baby Boomer Generation
They were the original flower power generation. Now, Boomers lead the pack with conservatism and hate speech.
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When I was young, I wasn’t exposed to a lot of modern culture. Whatever modernity I got was either at school or in cartoons that were heavily monitored by my parents.
I had no video game system and didn’t have cable for years at one point. This led to a lot of traits that make me appear to be way, way older than my peers. For example, I got the Laurel & Hardy reference in the Red Ape Family cartoon before they turned them into legitimate characters.
I still occasionally make Abbott & Costello references, watch Harold Boyd movies, and make references to Dobie Gillis. I’ll also be one of the only people to play Scott Joplin while I work.
Old habits die hard, I guess. At school, this would often lead to bullying. It was fairly common for kids in my class to ask me, “Why do you listen to all these oldies, Ossiana? They’re stupid, and you’re not 50.”
The truth was that I low-key idolized my parents’ Baby Boomer generation — especially American hippies.
When I was young, all I’d ever do was probe my dad about what it was like in the sixties. I was obsessed with learning about the flower generation, partly because I was allowed to watch the Beatles movie with my best friend and partly because the 60s were painted as this major cultural revolution.
The way my dad explained it to me as a kid was as such: people hated the Beatles because they said that it’s good to love each other. This was a revolution because people wanted to hate one another. The anti-war protest was how his generation handled hatred.
I was spellbound. I wanted to be a hippie so bad.
Oddly enough, my dad was conservative — much to the complete shock of anyone who first saw him.
It never made sense to me. How could my dad, who was so vehemently anti-war and so pro-Beatles and pro-Zepplin be conservative? How could my dad, who regularly got hate for dressing differently, be conservative?
While I never understood it, conservatism was fairly pervasive in my childhood. My best friend’s mom was from a religion that hated communism with a passion, owned a gun factory, and encouraged children to arm themselves.
My mom would tell us horror stories of life in Ceausescu’s Romania and how bad "commies" were. We were told that conservatism was how America was better than communism, and that was that.
I suppose, looking back, it was strange that I never questioned it as a child. I was a nosy, nosy, nosy kid. And yet, the conservatism was there, present and subtle to my youthful eyes.
During the past eight years, there's been a great deprogression of the Baby Boomer generation.
Perhaps I just assumed all older people were conservative because of my upbringing. A large part of my exposure to 60s culture came from a right-wing “hippie” group that was not unlike Jesus Freaks or the 12 Tribes.
Or perhaps I wasn’t actually around people who were part of the Flower Child Movement or the Beat Generation. Regardless, the Boomer change toward conservatism didn't catch up with me until around 2015.
That seemed to be the year when I started to see it. By then, I met Boomers who were gentle, soft-spoken hippies. And I saw them change, as did their children, their employees, and their nephews.
If you’re a Millennial or younger, you might have noticed some strange changes in Baby Boomer attitudes:
- Lots of Boomers backpedaling on things like racial equality, free love, etc. I started to see chirps of once-gentle hippie types getting prejudiced when Obama was elected, but it grew to a fever pitch when Trump got elected.
- An increased hostility toward younger generations. It’s so jarring to see so many people who were once left-leaning lovey types turn into aggressive, mean people — often toward their children.
- More and more Q-Anon addiction. Conspiracy theories can affect any age group. While they have gotten their claws into plenty of angry young men, it’s hard to ignore how many QAnonCasualties posts are about aging parents.
These are the same people who were so upset about war and so wild for feminism. This is the same generation that helped promote women’s rights to contraception and abortion. And they’re now turning their backs on the very freedoms they worked so hard to get.
According to research, Millennials and Baby Boomers express more hostility toward each other than toward other generations, a result of Baby Boomers' fear that Millennials threaten traditional American values.
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What many people today don’t realize is that America was not overwhelmingly liberal during the 60s. While it was not “cool” to be conservative, the majority of Americans were not hippies.
They were pretty straight-laced, Christian, cishet people. That was it. Most people who were actual hippies were being put in jail for drug charges, monitored by the FBI, or even getting killed by people who were mainstream.
Hippies did not become mainstream until Woodstock. The beginning of this counterculture movement was based on its rejection of mainstream American ideals. In other words, it countered the culture of Middle America.
The truth is that many Boomers are just as conservative as they were in 1972 — and while some never changed, others did and that's what we should worry about.
People often forget that there were plenty of young people who fought against desegregation during this decade. Many hated Martin Luther King, Jr. with a passion.
This is not what Millennials like me thought the 60s were like. What we saw in the 60s was a mythical world derived from The Wonder Years and rose-tinted nostalgia narratives of good kids fighting against bad politicians who hated love.
I want to make something abundantly clear: no, it’s not all in your head. Boomers and people generally over 40 have started to get more conservative — radicalized, even.
Too often, I see posts on QAnonCasualties that come from people my age and younger discussing the wild change they see in their parents. They often discuss how people who leaned left became wildly conservative.
The vast majority of Baby Boomers who became radicalized into QAnon and Q-adjacent right-wing extremism are victims.
As someone who grew up the way I did, I know what it’s like to not feel like you fit into a specific time. I always felt out of place, as if I should have been born in the 50s or 60s.
Today, many Baby Boomers feel like they don’t belong in today’s age. They feel out of place and out of time — and that stings. It makes you feel like a stranger in a strange land, even when you’re sitting at home.
It’s an isolating experience that only becomes starker when you feel alone. That’s when you start wondering if you’ve been fed lies. You start looking for a group to commiserate. You start feeling crazy and on edge.
When you pair that feeling of “not being up with the times” with the internet’s constant barrage of propaganda, you get QAnon followers.
QAnon and GOP propaganda are both devastatingly effective on people who feel alone and outcasted. This type of propaganda gives people many things they felt they were missing: an identity, friends, a reason why everything is “not right,” and a purpose. It is also addictive because psychology confirms that rage is addictive.
In other words, Q propaganda is the perfect storm for outcasts — especially older people who need a community and may not have the new media literacy required to think critically about what they are watching.
Boomers lead America when it comes to hate speech, right-wing discourse, and conspiracy theories.
Is it all Boomers? Of course not. One of my closest friends is a Baby Boomer and she’s not a radical. She’s a gentle hippie type who just wants to see the world be better.
However, it’d be a lie to say that Boomers aren’t the most conservative large-scale generation in America right now, according to Pew Research statistics. It’s also not a lie to say that Boomers are often the most aggressive about their conservatism either.
And you know what? That radicalization is a symptom of something larger. It’s a symptom of their loneliness, their isolation, and how often our society preys upon people who are outcasted.
While the hate speech, violence, and peeling back of rights they enjoyed aren’t excusable, understanding how this happened can help us reverse course with them — assuming most of them can be saved.
According to researchers, Baby Boomers have been labeled as a "problem group," leading to them being depicted as indulgent and selfish.
The bigger issue is that the radicalization of Baby Boomers is a planned project by multiple groups.
In America, you can’t take away people’s rights without convincing them that they don't need them. You have to convince people to vote against their interests — and that’s precisely what Republicans have been working on since the 1950s.
It all started with the “Southern Strategy,” a political strategy used by Republicans to get the vote of racists who were upset with the new passage of Civil Rights. It then began to include the “quiet majority,” a movement espousing Christian Evangelism with a tinge of nationalism.
Per the hit documentary, The Brainwashing of My Dad, FOX News was developed to become a mouthpiece of the political right. It was remarkably good at what it did — even going so far as to change laws so that FOX no longer had to fully report the facts because it was “entertainment.”
It’s no secret that watching FOX has been linked to radicalization. It’s the same with Breitbart and OANN. There is a lot of money banked in getting America to vote against middle-class interests.
Traditional media is the strongest weapon against Baby Boomers, and that’s precisely what Big Money political interests are most adept at weaponizing. When you pair that with Russia’s troll farms, you get a bunch of people who no longer live in reality.
But why Boomers? Well, Baby Boomers have the largest share of money and private property in America. They are a force to deal with. And that’s precisely why they are so heavily targeted.
Few things are as heartbreaking as watching a Baby Boomer relative, parent, or friend lose everything due to deprogression.
I wish I could say that there was a magic wand that could make the brainwashing go away. I wish I could say there was a surefire way to “cure” a person of right-wing, fascist programming. There isn’t.
Not even OG Flower Generation hippies who turned radical can always be saved. Most of the people who fall down the right-wing (or Q) rabbit hole are inured to deradicalization for one reason or another.
I often wonder if appealing to who a Flower Child used to be could sway them into turning FOX News off. I don’t know if it would make any difference. I don’t think most of the indoctrinated care anymore.
The best thing we younger generations can do is learn from what happened to those around us and become the hippies we always wanted to be.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.