Hey folks—I know not everyone gets a chance to catch Rush Hour live, so I’m going to start including a link to each episode right here in the blast. That way, if you missed the show or just want to hear it again, it’s only a click away – or check out my thoughts below.
VIEW HERE:
Look out for the Rush Hour link Tuesday – Saturday in your Daily BS email blast.
There was a moment on Monday’s Rush Hour when I realized I wanted to say something that probably would have gotten you laughed out of the cool crowd when I was growing up.
Thank God for the squares.
The goody two-shoes. The kids who listened to their parents. The ones who studied instead of cutting class, didn’t need to get drunk to prove something, didn’t have to try every drug somebody shoved in front of them and weren’t interested in doing something stupid just because everybody else was doing it.
We used to call those people lame.
Maybe they were the smart ones.
That thought hit me after reading about the death of actress Hayden Panettiere at only 36 years old. I didn’t follow her career closely, and I certainly wasn’t trying to draw conclusions about the circumstances of her death that we don’t know. What struck me was simply the number: 36.
When you reach a certain age, you understand just how young 36 really is.
And it made me think about my own 20s and 30s and say something with complete sincerity: Thank God I survived them.
Some of us grew up in an era when “cool” came with a fairly specific job description. Sex, drugs and rock and roll weren’t just a slogan. There was pressure to drink, pressure to experiment, pressure to have the right stories to tell and pressure to demonstrate that you weren’t one of those boring people who followed the rules.
I wasn’t immune to it. Not even close.
That’s why I have a special appreciation now for the people who never needed any of it. They were comfortable enough in their own skin to be called square and keep right on being square.
And today’s young people are facing something we never had: an entire economy built around rewarding bad behavior.
We had peer pressure. They have peer pressure with an algorithm.
Do something outrageous enough, film it, post it, get millions of views and maybe you can make money from it. Risk-taking isn’t merely encouraged anymore; it can be monetized. People climb barriers, ignore warning signs and put themselves in ridiculous danger because they need the photograph or the video nobody else has.
We’ve reached the point where people have literally died trying to create content.
Think about how insane that is.
And this isn’t just about kids doing stupid things on TikTok. There’s something larger happening here. We have spent decades dismantling the idea that self-restraint is admirable while elevating the idea that transgression itself is somehow courageous.
That brings me to another voice we heard at the beginning of the show.
Hasan Piker.
There he was in the clips we played, talking about the American flag in language I won’t bother cleaning up here and describing the “utter moral depravity of the average American.” This is a political streamer who has associated with prominent Democrats, and now he’s threatening legal action against Scott Jennings over Jennings’ characterization of other inflammatory remarks attributed to him.
Piker says context matters.
Fine. Context matters.
So does the larger question: How did contempt for America become a credential in certain corners of American politics and culture?
That’s the thread running through more of our politics than people realize.
When I was young, rebellion meant breaking your parents’ rules. Today we’ve created a political culture in which attacking the traditions, institutions and basic assumptions of the country itself can be marketed as sophistication.
America is terrible. Western civilization is terrible. The flag is terrible. The old rules are terrible. The people who built the country were terrible.
And somehow you’re supposed to be the enlightened one if you say all of that loudly enough.
No thanks.
The same question about standards came up when we turned to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the controversy over proposed facilities at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport designed to accommodate Islamic ritual washing.
Abbott’s argument was straightforward: government facilities cannot provide special treatment to one religion that they don’t provide to everybody else.
As he put it, if government provides special facilities for Muslims, it must confront the question of facilities for Christians, Jews and the many other faiths represented among travelers.
That isn’t hostility toward religion. It’s an argument about equal treatment by government.
And here again we find ourselves wrestling with something that used to be remarkably simple: Can we still have common rules?
One set of rules. Applied consistently. To everybody.
That’s not radical. It shouldn’t even be controversial.
But we live in an age in which practically every boundary is treated as an invitation to negotiate.
Don’t cross the barrier at the waterfall? Somebody crosses it for the perfect selfie.
Don’t trash the country that provides you the freedom and enormous platform to trash it? Apparently that’s old-fashioned.
Government should treat religions equally? Suddenly we need a national symposium.
Maybe America needs to rediscover the square.
The person who understands that rules aren’t automatically oppression. That discipline isn’t weakness. That faith isn’t something to be embarrassed about. That parents occasionally know what they’re talking about. That there are things more important than being noticed, applauded or considered cool.
For me, church was part of that foundation. All those years sitting in Grace Methodist Church and Sunday school mattered. Even during the years when I wandered outside the lines, those lessons were still somewhere in there.
That’s why I believe it’s so important for children to understand early that there is something beyond the self.
Whatever your faith or spiritual tradition, children need something that teaches them that the universe does not begin and end with me.
That’s an especially hard lesson to teach in the age of the smartphone, where practically everything is designed to say: Look at me. Photograph me. Follow me. Like me. Validate me.
The old squares had another idea.
Know who you are. Know what you believe. And don’t let the crowd decide either one for you.
Maybe they weren’t so lame after all. Maybe they were ahead of the rest of us.
And if you want the rest of Monday’s conversation — including Hasan Piker, Scott Jennings, Greg Abbott, the Democrats already making presidential noises, plus the musical detours from the Go-Go’s to Miles Davis and Kind of Blue — listen to the full Monday edition of Bo Snerdley’s Rush Hour.
Because an hour with me is never just politics. Sometimes we wind up talking about the country. Sometimes we wind up talking about music. And every once in a while, we wind up realizing that the people we thought were squares may have known something the rest of us had to learn the hard way.
Rush Hour airs Monday through Friday and moves quickly through the day’s hottest political stories, breaking developments and media absurdities. It is the fastest hour in American media because there is always more happening than the legacy media has time—or desire—to explain.
And if you want my daily stack of news and commentary delivered directly to you, sign up for The Daily BS here. It is free, arrives daily and, unlike a New York Democratic event, questions are not removed for exceeding ideological capacity.
