Showing the Ruling Class the Door

I don't know whether Joe Biden won the election fair and square, or with the help of shenanigans. Either way, the present ruling class isn't going away, and doesn't have a clue that it has a problem.

OK, no ruling class ever does until it gets shown the door.

Case in point, the Dalton School flap in New York City, where the staff of the swank private school has issued a manifesto demanding total wokerama -- at a fancy-pants private school.

Case in point, the political frou-frah over the school system in swank Brookline, Mass., home of the credentialed and the expert.

Case in point, the move to Biden in white voting districts in the election. Trump did better in immigrant districts, worse in white, and especially white liberal, districts.

It all seems scandalous, but not really when you step back and think about it. The Gentry class is all in on the Woke religious movement, because it gives meaning to their lives to be "allies" helping "oppressed peoples" fight the "white oppressors." The Gentry class is all in on experts and credentials: as in ordering the American people around during the COVID epidemic.

Of course there's a move towards Trump among immigrants; any immigrant with half a brain understands that they are the rising class and that the established class isn't going to make things easy for them. If they aren't consumed with ethnic solidarity, like blacks, then they are going to be populists, voting for politicians that stand for ordinary people.

In an interview with American Greatness youTuber and podcaster Steve Turley says that, with regard to the populist movement, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Up to now, populism has emerged in a "lite" form in the various center-right parties which are a bit embarrassed about the great unwashed, as many Republican officeholders are today. Because, after all, politicians come from the Gentry class. But there will come a time when the center-right parties will become primarily populist. Only we ain't there yet.

Trouble is, in my opinion, we won't get there without the ruling class screwing up royally. That's because the populist masses are not really thinking about politics the way that the upper-class Gentry does. Commoners think about their ordinary lives and how to get a better job. Gentry think about how to change the world.

The upper-class Gentry is all-in on climate change. Why? Well mostly because everyone who is anyone is all in on climate change, darling. Now I believe that, never mind the science, that the economics is going to be disastrous. Of course it is, because it is a top-down quasi-socialist plan that really has no clue what all the unanticipated consequences of a lurch away from fossil fuels will be. Socialist, systemic plans are always disastrous, because the world is not a system, but an emergent phenomenon.

The upper-class Gentry is all in on Wokist racism and particularism, as the foolish Dalton School staff demonstrated to the world. Here's the thing. It may be a horrible moral problem that blacks still aren't wiving and thriving as they should, but to amp up the current racist critical-race-theory successor to the racist "affirmative action" programs is to divide America up. And it violates the basis of modern society, that the individual is the individual first and foremost, and not the member of a race or tribe.

The point is that the upper-class Gentry right now is perfectly happy with their culture and politics. They think they are the good people and they are going to make a better world with their wokism and their climate change and their expert-led programs and their activist-driven agendas that bring more and more of the economy under the supervision of credentialed bureaucratic experts.

Thus nothing will change their minds short of a massive crack-up.

And I am not talking about a crack-up that gets them to change their minds: no chance of that. I am talking about a crack-up that whacks the ordinary Commoner and seriously damages their lives. It might be the damage to lives and livelihoods from the climate change program. Or it might be a rapid increase in human rubble from any number of expert-led programs that provide honor and status to upper-class credentialed Gentry experts.

See, I get the feeling that the Biden administration appointees are all people that are thinking, OK, great, now we can get back to normal, after the stupidities of the Trump years. They have no idea that it is their agenda, the agenda that all good expert, credentialed people support, that is the problem.

Back in 2009 I wrote that this was not the right time to do a huge health-care bill. The only thing that mattered in the aftermath of the generational financial crisis of 2006-08 was the get the economy back on track.

I'd say the same today. This is not the time to do climate change and systemic racism. After the generational smashup to the economy, particularly to ordinary Commoners that can't "work at home," the number one issue is getting the economy back on track.

But do you think there is anyone in Bidenland that appreciates that? No, when they look at the situation, they say that this is our only chance to get our agenda going, to save the planet from global warming and save society from systemic racism. So, pedal to the metal.

In my view, the damage and suffering that this policy will impose on America will cause another Trump situation, and another Trump populist eruption.

But I am sure that our betters in the ruling class have no idea about that. Courtiers in the court of the absolute monarch never do.

White Privilege vs. Little Darlings

Who should get the COVID vaccinations first? Not White Man, apparently, because white privilege and social justice. I love this bit from The New York Times (H/T Powerline).

Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter,” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

So we lordly white "allies" -- no "white oppressors" here! -- will put our social-justice thumbs on the scales of racial justice and fix things.

We are seeing a similar dance with regard to appointments to the Biden administration, where pressure groups for people of color are advocating for more of their kind of color.

Yep. I sure would like a bit of the privilege that gets you -- whatever your color or gender -- into the higher ranks of the ruling class where you become a candidate for promotion into the ruling clique. I suspect that one of the qualifications is to have -- let us say -- successfully "harvested" a million votes or so.

For as I say in my Maxims.

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

And it doesn't matter what the game is, whether it is handing out fiefs to loyal barons, or handing out benefits to the workers, or handing out research grants to the scientists, or starting "to level the playing field a bit" in favor of people of color. Government is in the business of loot and plunder, as a reward to its supporters. Period.

Naturally, when governments do this they enlist the assistance of the priests and the moralists, so that it is only fair and just to hand out benefits to the supporters of the ruling class. Hey! "Equality never hurt anyone," as a rich liberal with a house at the top of the hill announces with a hand-painted yard-sign, featuring a clenched BLM fist.

Whatabout my "white privilege?"

Well, my dad's father lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, as the representative of the family firm, and died before World War I. Then his widow and three children got out of Russia in 1918 with nothing but the clothes on their backs. However, the family knew a friend of a friend that got my dad into St. Paul's public school as a charity case. My dad got an engineering degree as an external student while working as an apprentice at a manufacturer. Then he went out to India to design electric power stations and rose to become a top manager at the firm he worked for. But then, of course, came Indian independence, and white guys need not apply. So he came back to England and eventually rose to being a Director at AEI Export Co. And so I got to go to a British public school.

Privilege? Yeah, I'd say, from a family that picked itself up after reverses and made lemons into lemonade and somehow managed to dodge the Bolshevik revolution and two world wars.

Or maybe an Act of God.

But I want to say a word to the "traditionally marginalized" folks that are to be the beneficiaries of the new level playing field. Take your bennies. But then make it on your own.

Why? Why not just connect your electric car to the free charging station forever and enjoy?

Because people that plug into the loot and plunder handed out by the ruling class are what I call "Little Darlings." The ruling class isn't really helping you because it believes in "justice." It is helping you because it wants your vote. The way a rich guy gives presents to his mistress.

And there will come a time when the ruling class does not need your vote any more. The obvious case today is the white working class. Back in the day, the ruling class loooved the working class, and created programs and benefits and wage-and-hour laws to benefit the poor helpless workers. Because social justice and because the bourgeoisie, like the feudal lords of old, had frankly and brutally exploited the subordinate classes. Yeah! Everybody knew that!

But then came 1965 and the civil rights laws and the ruling class decided to buy the votes of privileged white women and blacks. And in due course gays and all "people of color."

And the white working class got cut loose. It started with Affirmative Action; then segued to sneering at the white working class, as in Archie Bunker and All in the Family. Then, in due course, we had Barack Obama speaking to a fundraiser patronizingly about "bitter clingers." Then it was Hillary Clinton's open contempt for her "basket of deplorables." Today? Well, "society is structured in a way that enables [white people] to live longer."

Wait a minute! Just last March I was reading about the white working class "dying of despair." In The New Yorker, so it must be true. So how does that all stitch up?

So my message to the Little Darlings of the ruling class is: grab your goodies while you can. But know this: the day will come when the ruling class no longer needs your votes. And when that day comes you had better be ready to take up the slack and make it on your own, without benefit of government loot.

Because if you don't, you Little Darlings, you will end up like the white working class, that found out one day that those good union jobs at the steelworks were gone; that the police and firemen jobs had to be shared with the "traditionally marginalized," and that the upper-class white women in HR were making them go to critical race theory training. That the rulers didn't care about people like them. Not any more.

But by all means, enjoy your day in the sun.

Let's Kritik Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

Let's start with La Wik, which says that critical race theory is based on the following notions:

• Firstly, that white supremacy exists and exhibits power maintained over time, and, in particular, that the law plays a role in this process.
• Secondly, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power, as well as achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, are possible.

By "white supremacy" is meant the academic use meaning, per Frances Lee Ansley:

By "white supremacy" I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.

Notice that in both definitions, the writer comes close to, but does not quite say "it's a conspiracy!" They do not quite say that White Men got together and decided to Take over the World!

(Although, parenthetically, our lefty friends do have a plan to take over the world).

The point is: could there be an innocent explanation of white supremacy, that explains it as a consequence of White Man being in the right place at the right time with the right ideas and the right technology? In the same way, say, that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a man of undoubted skills and smarts, just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right ideas at an opportune technological moment so that, even though Einstein said that "God does not play dice," our pal Zuck won the lottery and here he is, master of all he surveys.

Because that is how I understand "white supremacy." Here is a likely story:

Back in the day, about 1500, Europeans had developed the technology for ocean-going sailing ships. One thing led to another and pretty soon a chap like Vasco de Gama was sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and landing in India. As La Wik says:

Traveling the ocean route allowed the Portuguese to avoid sailing across the highly disputed Mediterranean and traversing the dangerous Arabian Peninsula.

I have a more "overdetermined" narrative.

Back in the day the Europeans were being monstrously oppressed by Arab supremacy and the outrageous and exploitative prices of spices. See, when spices came from India -- and a lot of the spices were grown in the Western Ghats as I have seen with my own two eyes -- they got to Europe by an overland route that went through the desert of western India and through Arabia. And every stop on the way meant a nice little excise tax for the local yokels. Wow! Talk about oppression! Talk about racial power! And whatabout the law! What law in the world could justify all those oppressive princes and potentates making the poor helpless White Man of Europe pay through the nose for spices!

Well, in the event, the Portuguese started trading for spices on the west coast of India, and then the Brits got in on the act. The bloody Brits! Who invited them?

And pretty soon the spice trade through the western desert of India and points westward to the Mediterranean collapsed -- as I have seen with my own two eyes and heard with my own two ears from the guide at the once-powerful desert city of Jaisalmer in western India.

Well, when you set up a trading port on the coast of India, guess what happens? You may not be interested in the various princes and potentates nearby but they are interested in you. And so the Ports and the Brits got involved in local politics, and pretty soon young Robert Clive, East India Company "factor," learned a thing or two about soldiering. One thing led to another and in 1757 Clive won the Battle of Plassey against the Nawab of Bengal. With 1,100 Europeans and 2,100 sepoy troops, and with nine field-pieces, Clive beat the Nawab's army of 18,000 horse, 50,000-foot and 53 pieces of heavy ordnance, served by French artillerymen.

Hello "white supremacy!"

Now, I've read The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon and perhaps the most significant moment of the whole 1,200 pages is in 1825 when some Brit opined that "these people don't really like us," old chap.

Do you understand the importance of this comment, dear lefty friends and all the ships at sea?

The importance is that, prior to 1825, no ruler in the world gave a damn about whether the people he ruled "liked" him. Nobody gave a damn about white supremacy, Muslim Supremacy, Brahmin Supremacy, Western African Tribal Supremacy or any other kind of supremacy. The rule was simple: the strong ruler set the rules, and if he decided to kill every man in town and rape every woman, well, that's how the cookie crumbled. Until 1825.

Notice that this attitude has not exactly disappeared from the face of the Earth. Joe Stalin: do you think he cared whether the Russian people "liked" him? Mao Zedong: do you think he cared whether the Chinese people "liked" him?

Or whatabout our modern Wokies: do you think that a single Wokie gives a damn about what the average white deplorable thinks about him? Exactly. The average Wokie thinks only about bending the arc of history towards justice and crushing systemic racism and white supremacy until the rubble bounces. "Liking" has nothing to do with the case.

No. The interesting thing about "white supremacy" is that White Man is not that interested in white supremacy. Of course, he likes his own people best, and his own religion of logic and reason and market supremacy best. And he wants to water and weed his 401k until it blooms nicely for his retirement. But, all in all, he is remarkable in that, by and large, he is pretty well copacetic with letting other peoples' sleeping dogs lie.

Unlike our lefty friends.

Now let's talk about "intersectionality." La Wik:

Intersectionality is a theoretical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these aspects are gender, caste, sex, race, class, sexuality, religion, disability, physical appearance, and height.

Couldn't agree more, old chap. You certainly wouldn't want to be a young short white guy from Appalachia at a swank eastern selective college that said the wrong thing about trans people of color within earshot of some Good Little Girl that had been indoctrinated in critical race theory and intersectionality since first going to her snobby pre-school in Manhattan. 

And I certainly wouldn't want to be a Dalit working at Brahmin-dominated Google being harassed all the time by snobby Brahmins feeling for my non-existent "sacred thread!" Oh boy!

To say nothing of being a Google employee being fired and humiliated across the rapidly warming planet for innocently writing an essay in response to a solicitation for feedback to say that "while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination."

Now I say that all this hysterical babbling about postmodernism and critical race theory and intersectionality is due to the fact that our lefty friends do not understand the import of Kant and the whole "German Turn."

Poor dears.

Oh, so you want to mend your ways and actually join the human race instead of doing a Koba or a Mao and just eliminating the deplorables?

Well, reduced to an "overdetermined" simplicity, the German Turn says that because we cannot know things-in-themselves it means that all our knowledge -- from our division of life into genera and species to our fabrication of LED Christmas light strings -- is really only "the story so far," be sure to tune into next week's exciting episode. It means that it behoves everyone to cool their jets instead of winding up the turbines preparatory to launching a crusade against the unbelievers. Because next week we will discover something that changes everything.

And anyone that declares that those haters over there are the oppressors and we here are the noble allies and friends of the oppressed peoples might very well be wrong. After all, we can't know things-in-themselves, and for sure what is going to change next week is today's dominant cultural and political narrative.

To suit the agenda of the ruling class of the moment.

Yes, lefties. Did you ever notice that all speech in any society has to stay pretty close to ruling-class orthodoxy? So, if you chaps are allowed -- nay encouraged -- to mouth off about critical race theory and intersectionality and marginalize the notorious White Man it must mean that the ruling class believes that such activity supports the regime and its power.

Hmm. I wonder why.

Woe to the Conquered, writes Curtis Yarvin

It doesn't matter that the ruling class cheated in the late election, writes Curtis Yarvin in "Vae Victis." A ruling class worth its salt is always going to apply the force needed to maintain its power -- and also remind the ruled who is boss.

The Supreme Court has sent a clear and lovely Schmittian message. No court or other official authority will ever consider the substance of Republican allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 elections. All will be rejected on procedural grounds by the courts, and mocked with maximal hauteur in the legitimate press.

And we know that the Supreme Court choked because we have unofficial reports of Chief Justice Roberts more or less wailing like a woman to get the rest of the court to reject Texas's complaint against the cheating "battleground" states.

What does he mean by "Schmittian message?" Merely this: "the sovereign is he who decides the exception." But, but, but! I thought that the current Supreme Court doctrine was the "living constitution," that the Supreme Court gets to interpret the Constitution any way it wants to. Er, no. Not quite. The Supreme Court gets to interpret the Constitution any way the ruling class wants it to. So, gay marriage: yes. Free and fair elections: sorry, pal.

You don't like an election decided by skulduggery? Well, too bad. Elections are like water polo. All free and fair above water, but no holds -- or kicks -- barred below the waterline. So at least the Dems have taught us a lesson: two can play at that game.

You don't like to read that? Then stop reading because it is going to get worse.

Let's talk about the media. Think of it and its pals in the ruling class as a kind of Gigaphone, and the volume, in the month of October and thereafter was turned up to 11. On a scale of 1 to 10.

We learned something else about the real constitution of America: that it is the press, not the courts, with the sacred power to inscribe official reality. The Fourth Estate is the highest estate, not the lowest—and always has been.

That is what the Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, just told us. Really it is good to know. Every ruling class needed a Ministry of Truth. But it is much better if the truth ministry is not an official government bureaucracy, but a volunteer corps of ruling-class suck-ups. 

But really, I'd say, the media is not a Ministry of Truth. It is the Holy Temple of Truth, and the media suck-ups are the Priests and Bishops of Truth.

Then Yarvin speaks truth to the post-Reagan conservative movement. It is not pretty, so I won't comment.

But then Yarvin tells us that the whole Trump phenomenon, from beginning to end, is an Act of God.

Trump had no way to succeed, so the sooner he failed the better. God made him fail. God hacked the voting machines. God performed the experiment. God got the results. And God sacrificed the animal. 

But the Trump phenomenon, thanks to God, was not a waste. "The world-historic purpose of Trump was to validate the market for dreampolitik."

With Trump as his instrument, God has taught us beyond any doubt that, f*cked as America may be, f*cked as America is, we still have a market for dreams. Indeed we are so f*cked that only dreams can save us. We’re going to need better dreams, though.

He means this, from my Maxims:

Politics is downstream from culture (Breitbart) is downstream from religion (Wright) is downstream from “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” (Chantrill).

Did I mention that I have written such a dream? It is in my series on "A Vision of the Good Life Better than the Left." My basic argument is that the left's celebration of the political activist is a celebration of the Ego Hero, he who worships at the Shrine of Power. This is an error, because the real hero down the ages -- that appears again and again in myth and religion -- is the Sacrificial Hero, that dies on the border of Order and Chaos so that the rest of us may live.

And, I wrote on Election Day in "Donald Trump, the Sacrificial Hero," that if Trump were reelected he would go down as just another two-term president. But if he were thrown out, then he would become a Sacrificial Hero, and become a great American myth for the ages. In his Maps of Meaning, Jordan B. Peterson writes about the "hostile brothers."

Or, to use Yarvin's way of thinking, Trump defeated becomes part of the New American Dream.

Getting a Word In Against Liberal Cultural Hegemony

Should all journalists be college graduates, asks Kevin Mims in "Journalism's Ivory Towers"? Because back in the day they weren't. Not Mark Twain, for sure. Not even Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker who was born in a prospector's cabin in Colorado. But now, of course almost every journalist has a college degree. Some of them write sympathetically about the lower orders, but there's a fat chance that any of the lower orders will get to work at The New York Times.

Look out drivers, writes Eric Peters in "No More Camaros For You". In California they are regulating high-performance Chevy Camaros out of existence because they emit too much copper.

The fade-resistant, high-performance pads used in these models “emit” trace amounts of vaporized/powderized heavy metals such as copper and asbestos during braking.

And in five years "California law will require that all brake pads be zero emissions." It's a cunning way of forcing the move to electric cars, because electric cars use much more engine braking than internal combustion cars.

OK, then here is Tom Chivers on "The perils of liberals politicizing science."  Yes, of course we've got to take moral positions on bigots and racist-sexist-homophobes, he writes. But major science journals should not be endorsing Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Hey, we already know that nearly all scientists are Democrats!

Of course science is political: its findings have political implications; its practitioners have political beliefs. But its questions are fundamentally different from moral and political questions: What is real? vs What do we want? 

To which I say, yes, of course. Ruler gotta rule; gentry gotta pursue a life of "ambition, honor, and vanity." Case in point, Joe Biden's wife, who wants to be addressed as "Dr." even though she's not a medical doctor but a Doctor of Education. See, she is a true Gentry, interested in honorifics.

Yes. I get it. Gentry gotta gent. And that seems to involve a lot of virtue-signaling and rent-seeking. You know, as in my liberal neighbors putting out Black Lives Matter signs and buying subsidized electric cars.

No doubt nearly all journalists have college degrees these days. And no doubt nearly all college graduates these days have been carefully taught the moral ins-and-outs of critical race theory. But maybe, just maybe, a few journalists at elite prestige titles should tumble to the notion that not everybody thinks like them, not everybody wants what they want, not everybody has the same moral calculus as them, and that maybe people should be allowed to be different and have a different moral calculus, and that the elite should ease up a bit on sneaking its agenda in the back door by, e.g., mandating zero-emission brakes by 2025.

Here's a group I had never heard of, "Atheism+" that has a very clear moral agenda.

We are:
Atheists plus we care about social justice,
Atheists plus we support women’s rights,
Atheists plus we protest racism,
Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,
Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

Well, I don't know that you chaps at Atheist+ do much critical and skeptical thinking, because the first thing is to decide, well, what do we do about people that don't believe in social justice, or feministm, or anti-racism, or don't want us to cast gay and bi and trans characters in all the movies, and don't want to enforce critical race theory on the world?

Yeah? What do we do about them? Send them to reeducation until they recant? Fire them from their jobs? Name, shame, and shun them? Imprison them? Exile them? Execute them? 

Do we force everyone to pay to support the Atheist+ agenda?

See, for me, it comes down to this. If you believe that the world is composed of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors," then of course the only thing to do is to exile the oppressors to Outer Slobbovia.

But if you believe, like me, that there are three kinds of people in the world: Subordinates that just want to be told what to do; Responsibles that believe in an Axial Age god, and want to live as God directs; and Creatives that believe in creativity for everyone; then you think, OK. That Atheist+ agenda might be just great for Atheists, but whatabout people that disagree with the Atheist+ agenda? What is their place in the world?

And this brings be back to my basic line, about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." The reason that Douglas Adams rehearses this line in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is that he is making a joke about the fact that we don't know the meaning of life and all the rest of it. So we make it up.

What everyone has to do is to sign up to some faith tradition that says: "This is the meaning of life." Like the Atheist+ chappies. And then a satisfying moral calculus falls out naturally.

But supposing you Atheist+ chaps are wrong? Suppose that social justice results in concentration camps and millions of dead, like in the USSR and Maoist China? Suppose that women's rights end up with women not having children and that leads to the decline and collapse of civilization? Suppose that anti-racism ends up in irreconcilable conflict between woke liberals and bigoted deplorables and the breakup of the United States? Suppose that gays and transes are just mixed-up kids wanting out of the heavy-duty life of work and marriage and children? And suppose that Atheist+ chaps are deluded if they think that they are critical and skeptical thinkers? What then?

That, of course, is the moral basis for the notion of tolerance. Cromwell's Rule.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

Only, of course, in reality, Cromwell was pretty well convinced that he was right, and that King Charles should be executed, if that is what it would take. Oh, and the Irish should be taught a lesson.

Yep, this is not that hard, and it is part of the reason for the separation between church and state, including the Church of Atheist+. 

But it is apparently way beyond the comprehension of our liberal friends.

Two Strikes Against the Ruling Class -- in One Day

Here is a piece right out of Mosca's The Ruling Class. In "Our Coddled Ruling Class and All the Pain They Can't Feel," Oliver Bateman and Malcom Kyeyune write that the problem is not that our elite is censoring us deplorables for deplorableness, but that it is insulating itself from the real world. And that is suicidal.

The true goal, rather unfortunately, is to instead insulate our failing elite in a hermetically sealed bubble, where only those who hold unthreatening, regime-affirming ideas are ever allowed to set foot.

For Mosca is quite clear on this: a good ruling class, while keeping a firm hand on the tiller, is also sensitive to the passions roiling the masses. And does something about it. On the remarkable assumption that the bitter clingers may actually have a real claim to their grievances.

Elites who have stopped listening to the pain signals from the body politic not only risk hurting or killing themselves in similarly gruesome ways, but they also threaten the very societies they supposedly rule over, and the countless lives of the human subjects they are committed to neglecting.

Actually, I suspect that the "ruling clique" does have a clue. But the broader ruling class wants nothing to do with the bitter clingers. And the ruling clique doesn't have the cojones to straighten the lower echelons out.

OK. That's Part One. Part Two is the same, only different. "How race politics liberated the elites" by Matthew Crawford is all about how the basic faith of the elite class that their societies are racist-sexist-homophobes but that they are different, because they acknowledge the evil of racism. And this liberates them from loyalty to their nation states into the rarefied air of the globalist elite. Crawford starts with the superrich and totally dissolute media clan in the HBO series Succession.

Dropping down a rung or two on the pyramid of power, consider the moral ecology inhabited by the broader gentility: the salaried decision-makers and ideas-managers who service the global arrangement from various departments of the ideological apparatus... They, too, enjoy a kind of freedom, but it is decidedly not that of the high-spirited criminals depicted in Succession. So far from living “beyond good and evil”, this broader class of cosmopolitans asserts its freedom through its moralism, precisely. In particular, they have broken free of the claims of allegiance made upon them by the particular communities they emerge from.

These elite chappies have invented a moral hierarchy with themselves at the top. Because they have broken free of the Original Sin of racism-sexism-homophobia.

The decision-making class has discovered that it enjoys the mandate of heaven, and with this comes certain permissions; certain exemptions from democratic scruple.

The permission structure is built around grievance politics. Very simply: if the nation is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, I owe it nothing. More than that, conscience demands that I repudiate it.

This actually traps our ruling class masters in a glass cage, from which they cannot escape.

The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained, African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening the social order, strangely enough. For it is now an order governed by the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. 

Imagine that! Blacks have to be victimized, for ever and for ever, because otherwise we Übermenschen lose our super-status as educated lordlings way above the common ruck of humans.

Maybe that explains why Google has branded my "1584 Project" as dangerous and violent speech. For in that article I asked my readers to consider that black slaves were not unique. There were all kinds of slavery and semi-slavery back in the day, and the "waste population," the White Trash of Europe was right in the middle of it, as the agricultural era waned and the ruling class rural magnates "hurled" their "useless retainers" into vagabondage and beggary so they could strut their stuff as courtiers in the capital city.

But what do we do about it? I've got a series of posts under my topic of "pejoratives" where I argue that we must stop cringing under the accusation of "racist." Or fling it back in their face with the Hegelian notion that racism is the same as anti-racism, an unhealthy obsession with race. Etc.

But these two articles broaden and deepen my thought about all this.

In the first place, maybe we should stop worrying about what the rulers are censoring and just go on about our business, thinking and planning about what the next regime will look like, and stop worrying about the foolish and knavish actions of the bearded @jack and the Zuck.

In the second place, we really do need to stop apologizing, stop acceding to the crime of racism, to stop recognizing the elite as our betters, and utterly reject the pomposity of their claim to virtue.

Government is force, politics is power, cultural domination is about marginalizing the plebs. You ruling class think you are our moral superiors? Get a clue: all power corrupts, pal, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Got that, Mr. Moralist?

Here's How to Start That Trust Thing, David Brooks

In an MSNBC on-air piece David Brooks allowed as how "blue cities are thriving" but that many folks left behind in the red states are "threatened economically, culturally, socially and they have no contact with the expert class." 

That set the rubes a-growling, because apart from Silicon Valley and the Capitol of Panem in Washington DC, what blue states states are thriving? New York? Jaysey? I mean, people are leaving blue states in the hundreds of thousands.

But Brooks finished up with the idea that the "expert class" in the Capitol should reach out to the folks in the Districts, for "those of us in the expert class – journalism and academia – have to do a better job of reaching out in post-Trump, establishing relationships and showing some respect."

And this: "the only way to cure distress is through trustworthy relationships. It's by keeping promises to people who are unlike yourself."

Well, yeah, David.

Here's an idea, pal. To rebuild trust relationships.

How about you "experts" decide that the drip, drip, drip move from in-person voting with voter ID to mail-in voting with no checks, no nothing, and anyone can make a provisional vote on Election Day, trust us, we will check to make sure that no duplicate voting happens. How about we put a stop to that, which seems, from our deplorable point of view, to be a way for Democrats to manufacture how ever many votes it takes to win.

Of course we all know that Democrats are as clean as the wind-driven snow, starting with crystal-clear Joe Biden that has never had a hint of scandal in 47 years in the Capitol, and Kamala Harris, who is almost a nun when it comes to purity. But, wouldn't you say that elections should not even have the teenyist smidge of an appearance of skullduggery?

See, from our twisted point of view it looks real weird that, year after year, Democrats keep wanting to change the rules on voting, whether it is Motor Voter to let people register when they get their drivers licenses, to early voting, to all-mail voting like we have in Washington State.

The last time we had in-person voting in Washington State was in 2008, as I recall. And I found it interesting when I went to vote on Election Day that there were a ton more young voters than I was used to. See what I mean? In-person voting gives you a feet-on-the-ground feel about what is going down.

There are a lot of other things on my agenda, but never mind about that right now.

How about the ruling class, the expert class, the graduates from selective colleges, the educated people, the evolved people, how about you chaps all extend the hand of trust. How about you say look, you bitter clingers really have no ground for suspicion, because, after all, we experts are all educated and evolved and anti-racist, and compassionate and passionately devoted to justice, but still, just this once we will do something to show you that we really are the good guys. We will let you have your cringingly old-fashioned and stupid in-person voting.

And meanwhile, we experts and moralists will go full speed ahead on climate change and systemic racism. Because we are special.