THE other day the Guardian outdid itself in a way that almost earned my admiration. Leftist inversions of morality, sanity and objective reality tend to provoke one of three reactions: righteous fury at the sheer injustice of it, bemused despair that such thinking exists and seems to be more often than not pretty popular, and grudging, awe-struck respect for the sheer shamelessness of it all.
It was the last of the three that struck me when I saw this:
It’s become a cliché to talk about psychological projection, but it’s a cliché for a reason, and this one is a doozie. An article that discusses the supposed agony of families ‘torn apart’ by Granny’s Far Right extremism.
You can just picture the scene, can’t you? Purple-haired graduate with an All Men Are Rapists T-shirt reluctantly accompanies achingly progressive middle-class parents to Granny’s house in the country. Feelings of mixed resentment and avaricious anticipation swell as the little band of ingrates contemplate the value of the property from the gravel driveway and wonder when the stubborn old wretch is going to pop this mortal coil.
‘Boomers are hoarding wealth in property,’ Jacinda says.
‘Just keep her sweet and it will be ours eventually,’ advises Geoff, who teaches at a former polytechnic.
But until that happy day, the genuflections of pretend love and esteem must still be tiresomely enacted. So inside they go, glowering with contempt for dear Granny as she bestows a dry kiss on each cheek and gets the kettle on. The unemployed 20-something with the Gender Studies degree flings herself with a thump into what used to be Grandad’s chair, staring at her phone. The mum and dad indulge in desultory and bored replies, wishing the time would go quicker. The Purple-Haired One grunts now and then, but otherwise acts as if Granny’s interest is an imposition bordering on the rape her T-shirt references.
Then it happens.
Politics.
The breaker of families arrives, breathing fire and indignation.
It was probably a topic the visitors raised, expecting immediate and automatic assent, just as they would receive if discussing these things in the bedsit of Jacinda’s drug-dealing girlfriend Suze, who sometimes goes by the name DJ Vagina. Mum and Dad are proud of how the same views get shared in their dinner parties as the kids discuss while getting high. It makes them feel relevant . . . but Granny, well . . .
Granny is a fascist.
She might in passing present the thought that Donald Trump isn’t a paedophile, or that Epstein was a Democrat, or that women don’t have a penis. She might demur slightly when the virtues of freedom-fighting Muslim baby murderers are being casually extolled or the word genocide is being used to describe what happens when a Western-aligned democracy responds to a terrorist atrocity.
It might even be less than that. Perhaps Granny isn’t convinced The Planet is Dying or that Islam is a Religion of Peace. She might be crass enough to respond with dissent when Jacinda tells her that Communism is the only just system that will eliminate racism.
Or it could be far worse – Granny is thinking about voting Reform.
There is of course a generational schism saga underlying the Everyone Who Isn’t Me is Literally Hitler aspects of this absurd and anti-democratic stuff.
It’s become commonplace in the US for leftists and progressives to attack ‘Boomers’, frequently and incorrectly labelling everyone over 30 as Boomers while they do this. This generational animosity focuses especially on the idea that older people had life easier than the poor struggling Gender Studies students of the modern era.
Young people are quick to point out how older generations could afford a house, luxuries and holidays, or could pay off a mortgage in a decade because property prices were lower and basic living costs were also more easily met. They might talk about how older people are ‘hoarding wealth’ in property, leaving no houses for them to purchase at affordable prices. And they will tell you proudly how they are socialists or Communists because ‘Boomer capitalism has failed’ and because it’s all just ‘Soooo Unfair!!!’
What they don’t understand or tell you of course is . . . well, pretty much everything real.
It’s real for instance that in the 1950s, especially in the US, families could much more easily purchase property and pay off the cost more quickly, house prices and food and energy bills were a lower percentage of annual average earnings, and if you wanted your own house, car, and a few luxuries on top you could come from a working-class background or begin without significant inherited wealth and do that more easily than someone can today.
But the really amusing thing about the Boomer Capitalism Has Failed So I’m an Angry Commie argument is this: it was Commie logic that changed all that.
The reason a young person in 2026 has less chance of financial stability and security and independent property ownership and the conditions by which they could enjoy a traditionally comfortable existence . . . is because Boomers of the Left became the Establishment.
It’s not because old people owned houses that young people don’t: it’s because everything that made 1950s economic boom in the US possible (and everything that would have made Britain recover faster and better from WWII) was destroyed by socialism.
The creation of the Welfare State in the UK. The expansion of the State into private spheres throughout the West. Top-down Keynesian economics of ever-growing government debt and waste. The high tax model. The guilt trip redistributive policies of the Left via affirmative action and setting aside trillions of government spending to save Black America. The huge cost of the NHS in the UK and of state monopolies of healthcare.
There’s a great irony in youthful belief that capitalism failed and old people are to blame, because what set the conditions for modern economic struggle are that post-World War Two the entire Western world became a lot more socialist. Modern youth Communism states that ‘we don’t have what you had’ while arguing that ‘what you had was worthless’.
Modern youth Communism is contemptuous of having a job, being married, raising kids, and the things that older generations to an extent had an easier time acquiring. But at the same time it’s jealous of others having had those things, which it claims have no value, and which were made harder to acquire precisely because people who think exactly the same way as they do now, back in the Boomer generation, got into power and became the Establishment.
In other words the social and economic settlement that delivered boom and comfort and property ownership was the one earlier leftists and statists successfully destroyed, while they now point to the ruins their thinking made, as proof that more destruction is needed.
The truth is Granny is not the extremist on race, identity, culture, on what works and lets people succeed, if Granny is against mass migration, Third World invasion, vast welfare spending on people who aren’t even from your nation, and hatred of the native majority of the populace. Granny is the reasonable one who knows what has ruined the West and made life more difficult, which includes the abandonment of family and respect for elders.
The right-wing Granny the Guardian readers are afraid of has that house she sits in because the old way worked better than what has replaced it.
All this too of course ignores that the only members of the older generations who are actually guilty of anything that ruined the world are those who agreed with today’s historically ignorant and astonishingly uninformed Commie Youth movements.
It ignores the rather large number of Boomers who were leftists and still are, the hippies, the peaceniks, the 1960s radicals and drug-users, the sexual revolution haters of marriage and celebrators of kink and fetish, the precursor activists who never grew up and go on anti-Trump or ‘anti-racism’ or Refugees Welcome marches in bald or silver-haired senility having never grown out of the fatuous positions they held as long-haired 20-somethings. The perpetual adolescents who are now wearing old persons’ nappies while waving mass-produced placards are the only members of the older generations that are guilty of anything, and the only members of the older generations that Commie Youth doesn’t blame.
If you have a right-wing Granny, cherish her. Don’t, for goodness sake, be like those Guardian-reading fanatics bitching and moaning that Granny is ‘Far Right’.
If you don’t respect Granny’s experienced right to think differently to you, you’re the one destroying things that are more precious than you understand. Even your left-wing Granny, foolish and guilty as she may be, might deserve more affection and respect than embittered Young Commies provide.
This article appeared in Jupplandiaon April 23, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
