I agree with Matt Walsh on certain issues, but I have never really been a Matt Walsh fan.
It’s the old saw of the stopped clock that tells the correct time twice a day. I also agree with Bernie Sanders on certain issues. That doesn’t mean I’m ready to join the DSA.
Like many youthful commentators in the political arena, Matt Walsh likes to interpret everything as an oppression narrative. Most recently, he has decided that the average Boomer is stealing from 35-year-olds in order to blow their Social Security checks on slot machines. (I’m not exaggerating here. Walsh actually makes this assertion.)
This no doubt relates to chagrin over the fact that millennials and Gen Zs are not reproducing at the expected rates. Matt Walsh, like JD Vance and other right-leaning social engineers, wants to redirect both public and private funds in order to encourage more marriage and childbearing. So the hobgoblin of the greedy, grasping 70- or 80-something fits neatly into this narrative.
I remember the 1980s; Walsh does not. (Walsh was in diapers in 1986.) I was a teenager back then, and my Boomer parents had noticeably fewer assets than my WWII-generation grandparents—who were also drawing Social Security.
Matt doesn’t seem to realize that this is the way Social Security has always been.
And this brings us back to a fundamental problem with Matt Walsh. Walsh is no dummy, but he has always been callow, petulant, and an aspiring authoritarian. Walsh has never been anything but a political commentator. He decided to start explaining the world before he had lived enough to fully understand the world.
You can challenge the premise of the Social Security system, if you wish. But to turn this into a “Boomer plot” is just silly.
-ET