‘They’re Very Pissed at Me Right Now, the Young People’: Whoopi Goldberg Doubles Down on Loathing Millennials
Despite insisting that the useless youth of today’s America are angry at her for speaking the truth, The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg has doubled down on her criticism of the Millennial generation, saying, “They’re very pissed at me right now, the young people,” to which the Millennials might respond, “Don’t you know we’re already 40?”
On Wednesday, Goldberg and the rest of The View discussed the issue of declining birth rates due to Millennials and Generation Z’s decision to put off having children over economic concerns and worsening climate conditions. Goldberg, 67, dismissed that reasoning, arguing that her generation had it just as hard as kids do today and still managed to pull themselves up from their bootstraps. Using only the infallible evidence of “this is how I feel” and failing to provide a single fact or statistic to support her claim, Goldberg insisted that none of the problems facing Millennials were not overcome by previous generations, adding, “I’m sorry, if you only wanna work four hours, it’s gonna be harder for you to get a house.”
Enlighten me, Whoopi — how long exactly does it take you to shoot an episode of The View?
"When we were kids, there was a standard women had to follow,” Goldberg elaborated upon her original stance during yesterday’s episode of The View. “You became a parent and you worked. I never knew women who didn’t work. I never knew women who did not work every day. Our mothers had to work. So that’s why I have such an interesting time when we talk about Millennials and all those young folks."
Like most generational mud-slinging that’s based on a bullshit “back-in-my-day” anecdote, Goldberg’s assessment of women in the workplace is directly contradicted by easily Googled facts. In 1965, when Goldberg was 10 years old, the labor force participation rate among women was 39.3 percent. Today, that number sits at 57.6 percent. The rate for Millennial women is even higher at 67.8 percent, meaning that the women whom Goldberg says are too lazy to own homes are twice as industrious as the women of her youth who apparently taught a young Goldberg to speak before she thinks.
The facts regarding quality-of-life differences between Millennials and the men and women who destroyed the housing market and the environment simultaneously have been shared to death on social media, but they bear repeating: Millennials are the most educated generation in American history, earning high school diplomas, bachelors degrees and above at a much higher rate than anyone who came before them. Despite this, Millennials are the poorest generation, as wages have stagnated despite productivity growth since the 1980s (when Goldberg’s generation were the Millennials’ age) while the price of that education Millennials earned and the cost of the homes they hope to afford have skyrocketed compared to what Boomers paid.
Of course, none of this matters to Goldberg, The View or the cloud-yellers of every internet comment section on articles about avocado prices or work-from-home jobs. The uphill climb to a better life that Millennials and those after them face will only continue to steepen while Goldberg and her generation sit atop the hill hoarding all the homes and high-paying jobs like a bunch of dragons who can’t connect their phones to their earbuds without the help of an unpaid intern.
