It's pretty easy to slag on older Boomers and Silent Generation septuagenarians as being the ones wrecking the planet, but there's five Millennial men in particular who are very convincingly making a bid to be Earth's Legion of Doom for the next 40 or 50 years. The Cut's Noreen Malone
So here we are, a generation munching on the last greens of its salad days, saddled with dull, decade-old complaints about our coddledness, our entitlement, our selfies, our political correctness — most blah-blah-blah of all, by the boring cliché of our avocado toast. In a more self-serving version of this narrative, we are the generation that disrupted salad days and made them Sweetgreen days. The generation of AOC and Rihanna and DeRay Mckesson and Glossier! Of hope and protest and changing norms!
No. The world’s five most powerful millennials now, and maybe for the rest of our lives, are Jared Kushner (b. 1981), Kim Jong-un (b. 1984), Mark Zuckerberg (b. 1984), Stephen Miller (b. 1985), and Mohammed bin Salman (b. 1985). The globe is their avocado — to be splayed and robbed of its core and smashed, then spread before them for the taking — and we’re toast.
As for whether these are truly the five most powerful, yes, there is enormous influence in being the most visible member of Congress, in using your platform as a historically great athlete to do good, or in being Beyoncé. But is it unchecked power, of the kind that can move markets and armies unilaterally, swiftly, and on what can amount to a whim? Three of these men are the de facto heads of nation-states, if you count Facebook as a nation-state. The other two, with their mysterious influence, have more power in the Trump administration than anyone, arguably including the president.
These are men who, barely having hit their stride, can tout such accomplishments as: the undermining of an American election, the erosion of privacy norms and attention spans, the desiccation of journalism, the destabilization of the Middle East, a genocide, the creation of modern American internment camps, the beheading of a journalist, the flooding of the world economy with huge investments in unsustainable tech start-ups that undercut smaller merchants, public mass executions, the threat of nuclear war, and whatever other assorted horrors might be happening behind the cloak of secrecy that surrounds North Korea, Saudi Arabia, the Trump administration, and the inner sanctum of Facebook. I am probably leaving a few things out.
Okay, you might be thinking. These men are technically millennials but not in spirit or practice. They are too unusual, too geopolitically unique, to function as members of any generation. No. They are, in fact, textbook exemplars of theirs. Name me a so-called millennial characteristic and I can name a fuckboy-despot who possesses it.
Yeah, I'm gonna go with the five most nihilistically dangerous assholes on the planet are all five to ten years younger than I am.
Which means, we're fucked for decades. If you think today's adults are going to save us, understand they're not. Especially the white ones.
And oh yeah, they helped elect Trump. Did we forget this somehow?
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