Recently, two Baby Boomers born in the mid-’50s said things that worried me. One expressed surprise when I alluded to Richard Nixon’s underhanded dealings at the Paris peace talks in 1968; he didn’t know anything about the matter. Another, a filmmaker who kept radical company in his day, and who prides himself on being With It, assured me that civil rights protestors in the 1960s had been “completely nonviolent.” Both men are now positive-to-bullish on Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate.

The former vice president’s whole campaign is premised on this sort of historical misremembering. President Trump, Biden tells us, is an “aberration” from Republican politics—rather than its fullest expression, the culmination of everything from the John Birch Society to Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy to Tea Party birthers. Once upon a time, Biden says, “there was some civility” in the U.S. Senate, where you “got things done” by compromising with segregationists—even though, as Sam Rosenfeld noted in The Washington Post, “it is impossible to separate the courtesies from the racist politics that made them possible.” During those alleged good old days, the Senate was all male and nearly all white.

Such hazy revisionism may help explain Biden’s deep popularity among Boomers, as well as among the Silent Generation of which he’s (just barely) a part: Polls show that roughly half of Democratic voters over age 50 support him. Younger Democrats, who also tend to lean further left, seem to have less interest in returning to a time when reaching across the aisle was easy because the Overton window was more like an arrow slit in a medieval castle: Biden’s support among Millennials is consistently in the teens and sometimes even single digits.

Yet, sure enough, the Forgetful Generation is trying to foist its own poisoned relationship with history onto the rest of the voters in the country to push Biden into office. Juan Williams (b. 1952) has castigated “today’s activists” (by which he means young people) for subjecting Biden to supposed “purity tests” (by which Williams means reviewing Biden’s legislative record). Enthusiastic millennial-basher Bill Maher (b. 1956) has scolded the youngs, whom he characterizes as “people who need cry rooms and trigger warnings and safe spaces,” for not falling in line behind Biden already.

These Boomers’ patronizing message: Just forget about Anita Hill. Forget about how Biden worked with Jesse Helms to end school bussing in northern cities. Forget about the 1994 crime bill, but also the 1984 crime bill and the 1990 crime bill. Forget that it was Biden who co-sponsored the 1986 bill levying harsher penalties for crack than for powder cocaine. Forget Biden’s atrocious display at the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Forget his simpering eulogy for the towering racist Strom Thurmond. Forget that he can’t keep his hands to himself. And most of all, forget that Biden keeps forgetting the name of his own website.