Dear Millennials

Copyright (c) 2017, 2025 Thomas P. Kratman

This is a repeat of something Tom wrote for Milo’s defunct - no, he didn’t kill it - effort at an online magazine. It was also published on Substack in a different column. We’re repeating it here, for you, for free, as a starter piece to get you thinking. Next post we’ll go into more detail into how to transform yourselves into at least larval stage actual human beings.

Dear Millennial:

“You’re in a heap o’ trouble, boy.”[1] Or girl. What follows are the reasons – or at least the big ones – why you’re so thoroughly screwed, along with some suggestions for self-help at the end.

You tend to loathe Boomers and Generation X. I don’t actually blame you for that, at least not entirely, though some of you – the Millennials who lump all the above together, without exception – strike me as singularly stupid and ignorant. Moreover, the reasons you have for loathing them are somewhat misplaced. You tend to think – not without some reason – that the Boomers, especially, robbed the future, which is to say you, personally, to pay for largesse for themselves in the present. It’s true enough, but it is neither the really awful thing they did to you nor does the plaint portray you in any particularly favorable light. “Those damned Boomers; they took everything and now there’s nothing left for us.” Yeah…you know what that sounds like? It sounds like the whining of one group of thieves over the success of a better or, in this case, merely luckier group of thieves who got to the big haul first. Yes, it really does.

Sorry, but the damage the Boomers and Xers did to you wasn’t primarily fiscal. No, no, the damage they did was to you, as a person. That’s the real crime. They didn’t’ just rob you of some money. They didn’t just vote for a series of politicians and political programs and giveaways that ran the economy into the ground. No, they stole from you – or allowed others to steal from you – some key elements of personhood, especially the ability to engage in critical, logical thinking. That’s right, you were not educated, whether in kindergarten or in the kindergartenesque, safe space segregated, snowflake sanctuary schools we call colleges and universities. Yes, these were supposed to teach you how to think. Instead, they taught you what to think and stunted your native ability to think. If you ever start to spout bright green feathers? Yes, this is the reason why; your teachers demanded that you become a parrot.

This is, by the way, not restricted to your left-wing branch of Millennials; rightist, neo-right, and alt-right Millennials tend to show the same preferential substitution of the sound bite for actual thought and to be extremely vulnerable to propaganda. Universal? No. Common? Very.

Let’s look at a few examples, shall we? The first of these is personal, to me.

Largely because I am a very difficult man – nobody is surprised by this, right?[2] – I decided fairly early on that I didn’t really want to work for a law firm on graduation. I’d interviewed with a few – one of them a freaking huge New York firm, over six-hundred attorneys – and left each a little more convinced that it was not for me. So, thinking I’d either practice alone or with a couple of classmates, for my second and third years of law school I overloaded to the tune of fifty percent, taking, in effect, an extra year of law school in those two years, along with doing seven or eight, I misremember, writing requirements, rather than the mandatory one. No, this didn’t do anything great for my GPA, but it gave me what I needed more, which is to say breadth.

However, a millennial, then a law student at a top ten school,[3] asserted that this was impossible, that there was an American Bar Association rule that forbade overloading in course work to that degree, so I was clearly a liar. Unfortunately for his thesis, a) I did do that much course work, b) the rule dated from 1996, and c) I graduated in 1995.

Assuming the kid wasn’t himself a liar, and was, in fact, enrolled at least in some law school, and maybe even a top ten law school, as claimed, there was no excuse for this. He should have had a course in public law or legislation and should have realized, should have been taught, should have been made to realize, that dates matter and rules change. Apparently, however, he never was. Hell, he should have realized this even without a course in law or legislation; simple instruction in history, honestly applied in elementary school, should have been sufficient to give the stupid shit an understanding that things change.

He lacked that understanding.

Okay, okay; I hear you: “This was just a one off that proves nothing.” Think so? Let me give you a related one from the other side of the spectrum.

A frequent plaint of the Millennial end of the Alt-Right goes to the effect of, “What did conservatism conserve, anyway?” The presumptive answer is “nothing important.” It’s also the complete bullshit answer.

In order to arrive at that complete bullshit answer, one has to be, like the idiot law student above, detached from history and from cause and effect. The history is that for about forty-five years we were engaged in a life and death struggle with communism, the most bloody-handed political and intellectual atrocity in human history. “Oh, but that was just a ‘Cold War’,” We hear from the peanut gallery. Yeah. No. It was a long war, with several active campaigns, with casualties that rivaled those we suffered in the Great War, and where the country was fairly thoroughly infiltrated by the enemy’s acolytes and minions, and where the United States also had serious internal problems not of our making for the enemy to exploit. What conservatives preserved, through all this, were the forms of republican government, and a fair amount of the substance. Moreover, the odds were against them. These were not nothing.

Do you like being able to keep and bear arms? Do you appreciate that the left cannot ultimately win because you retain the ability to physically fight them? Thank a conservative of the sixties and seventies who fought the good fight, him- and herself, holding on, delaying the left, until, finally, with Heller[4] and McDonald[5], the reborn conservative Supreme Court could send the gun grabbers running for their fainting couches.

In short, the plaint, “What did conservatism conserve, anyway?” is just another whiney bitch meme of people detached from history and from cause and effect. Yes, that’s probably you.

That’s okay; cheer up. Why? Because if your reading this you’re probably not the worst among your generation. Apparently, about forty-five percent of you would vote for a socialist.[6]

“What’s wrong with socialism?” a Millennial may ask. There’s nothing wrong with it, of course, except that it never has worked and never will. That, and the lawlessness, the tyranny, the starvation, the shoddy products, the secret police with unappealable power of life and death, the hopelessness and helplessness, the mind control, the incredible damage to the natural environment, the labor camps – which included forced prostitution, by the way, the tens – nay, probably the hundreds of millions of dead, all laid at the feet of communism and socialism.

For Jesus’ sake, about a third of you think George Bush killed more people than Joseph Stalin! That’s the world prize of ignorance! It doesn’t get any more complete than that.

You cannot believe that there is nothing wrong with socialism – even educated and thoughtful socialists[7] know there are problems – unless you are, again, detached from history, unable to link cause and effect, unable to think, and abysmally ignorant.

(Oh, yes, and all you idiots sporting “Che” t-shirts? I have it on pretty good authority that communist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara died shrieking and crying like a little girl, and begging for mercy.[8] So do, by all means, continue to wear those shirts. Really.)

And I’m not even going to touch on the dunder-headed idiocies of the neo-confederates or the alt-Reich.

All this is only the tip of the iceberg. Look around, examples of your generation’s stunted ability to reason and weak, ranging to non-existent grasp of history are not hard to find. Look inside yourself, too, even if you won’t much like what you see there.

There would be little point in writing this without holding forth some hope for you, as well as holding forth on the reason to change yourselves.

Why should you change? I won’t spout love of country or preservation of our civilization to you. Too many of you prefer communism to democracy – and lack clue one about what either is – for me to expect much from that. Too many of you have been propagandized into the belief that the United States of America is unutterably evil, wicked from the beginning, and fit only for destruction.

But you are going to grow old. You will want to do so in a country that isn’t a ruin. Between now and then most of you will marry and have children. You’re going to want your children to have a decent life, and certainly not to end up turning on a spit over low coals amidst the burnt-out ruins of our cities. In short, you need to change for the best of reasons: self-interest.

I cannot change you. And my tools for helping you to change yourself are limited, but here they are.

Step One: Realize that almost everything you were taught in school is a fraud. And, if it wasn’t all fraudulent? No matter, “almost all” is enough, at least, for you to doubt everything. That doubt is to the good.

Step Two: Start reading history. A partial list of recommendations would include:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago

Robert Conquest: The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow

Thomas Sowell: Intellectuals and Society and Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Victor Davis Hanson: Mexifornia

Allah: The Quran, Read it twice, the first time to get used to the language and imagery, the second so you will understand that they really mean it.

George Orwell: 1984. When you read it, remember that Orwell isn’t really talking about communism or socialism, but of a fascism that has taken control of the trappings. I assure you, Antifa are absolutely fascists.

Chalmers Johnson: Sorrows of Empire. I suggest this one for unusual reasons. It is almost certainly the worst book of non-fiction I have ever read in my life, averaging at least one lie or one emotionally charged irrelevancy for every page. Read it with care. Find the lies. Find the misleading irrelevancies. Learn to recognize them when you see them.

Allan Nevins’ monumental eight volume series on the American Civil War and what caused it.

Those sixteen are enough for starters, I think; Rome wasn’t burnt in a day.

And my final advice. Many of the things you will read will go against the narratives drummed into your head from kindergarten on. You will instinctively want to reject them. Don’t; put them aside and keep reading. Eventually you will come to something that you will recognize as true, but is also in opposition to your early propagandization. When that happens, be it sooner or later, it will be time to go back to those earlier instinctive objections and start some serious thinking about them.

Good luck. You’re welcome.

Tom Kratman is a retired infantry lieutenant colonel, recovering attorney, and science fiction and military fiction writer. His next novel, A Pillar of Fire by Night, will probably be released next year. A political refugee and defector from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, he makes his home in Blacksburg, Virginia. Tom’s books can be ordered through Amazon or baen.com.

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[1] Recently, at least, the Sherriff in Cars (2006).

[2] When I was about three, my uncle predicted that I would either end up on the faculty of the War College or hang by the neck until dead in an elevator shaft at Fort Leavenworth. You cannot imagine my relief upon receipt of orders to Carlisle Barracks.

[3] This was a few years ago. Note: Just because someone is going to Harvard or Yale, say, it does not necessarily follow that they are not idiots.

[4] District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008),

[5] McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010).

[6] http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/17/survey-finds-high-support-communism-among-millennials/

[7] Oh, Hi, Eric.

[8] Hat tip, A. A., who would probably prefer to remain anonymous.