The College Fix

Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday spent the entire third hour of his show analyzing the plight of the Millennials. It’s a theme he’s hit on a lot lately.

There’s good news and bad news.

The good news, Limbaugh says, is that 18- to 29-year-olds are quite taken aback by the state of the union. They don’t like that the feds are spying on them. They’re feeling the sticker shock of Obamacare, and they’re resentful they’ve been essentially tasked with shouldering the health care costs of the elderly. They can’t find jobs. They’re weighed down by massive student debt. They have been led to believe by educators and the media that the Earth is being destroyed, and it’s their parents’ fault. They try to feel better by buying hybrid cars and eating gluten-free, but it doesn’t ultimately fulfill them.

So, essentially the good news is maybe Millennials will finally wake up.

“They are resentful,” Limbaugh says. “They voted for Obama thinking they were going to get this massive utopia and it didn’t work.”

But don’t hold your breath. Limbaugh says he thinks they’re losing hope in America, not President Obama.

All these expectations they had, they haven’t realized them. The economy is not there for ’em.  They all voted — or 60% of ’em voted — for Obama, thinking that this magic was gonna happen.  They bought the hype. They bought the lies.

They bought the salesmanship of the Obama campaign. He was an empty canvas! “Paint him! Whatever you want him to be, he is.  Whatever problem you’ve got, he’s gonna solve.  Whatever problem there is, his existence is gonna fix it,” and they’ve grown to realize that they’re waiting around for other people to do this magic, and it hasn’t happened, and rather than lose faith in Obama, they’re losing faith in the country …”

During his one-hour segment on Millennials, Limbaugh quoted extensively from a recent piece in Forbes written by Maura Pennington, who weighed in on why her generation of twenty somethings is largely nihilistic:

It’s not that this lost segment of a generation made themselves willfully nihilists. Life is crowded and getting stricter. Whereas other generations might have persevered, they enjoyed less traffic and fewer regulations. They could visit Disneyland without timed tickets for rides or climb Yosemite’s Half-Dome without a permit. They could smoke cigarettes on their college campuses without nanny classmates and university bureaucrats shaming them into special areas. They lived in an era where vaccinations for lethal diseases weren’t up for debate and no one was allergic to bread.  We, on the other hand, exist in an age in which the state explains booster seats at http://www.safercar.gov/ and female bullying at http://www.girlshealth.gov/. In the face of so many noodges, who wouldn’t be a nihilist? … Perhaps people could find purpose on the day they stop buying multiple bicycles and instead own a car. The problem then becomes parking, guilt about the environment, and deeper existential angst.

In the end, Limbaugh rallied listeners to press on and fight the Millennial malaise.

The country’s fine if we get rid of the people that are running it right now. That has got to be reinforced. We can’t allow people to say they have lost faith in the country, but that’s what I fear is happening. This is too important, and I think it’s something that I glossed over in previous commentary about the Millennials …

I thought about it during the break, and Obama, in fact, even trying to convince people that this level of unemployment, the lack of a future, this is the new normal. That the past, when America was robust and great, that was fake. That was unjust. That was brought about by an unjust, immoral founding. Now we’re getting this is the way it was always intended to be, and you are gonna have to deal with it. And that’s just not so. This cannot be allowed to be the new normal.  We’re not gonna put up with it. We cannot allow people to have lost faith in America. … They’re still not holding Obama accountable for it, and that has to change.

Click here to read a transcript that covers much of Limbaugh’s hour on Millennials.

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IMAGE: RushLimbaugh.com