An essay in which I strive to describe the characteristics of our ruling class (which is increasingly incestuous and cloistered and disconnected) and the reasons why it might be failing our country.
Every society has an elite class, a ruling class. Every civilization has a group of well-connected, often impressive characters who manage organizations, make decisions, and dispense outsized amounts of status and wealth at their whim, in order to serve their interests.
Our ruling class has abandoned almost all higher principles (and certainly all commitment to personal courage) and now is devoted solely to amassing and protecting status and power
Ideally, a society’s ruling class should have a few attributes. It should be:
capable. Strength, perspicacity, cunning, productivity… it depends upon the civilization in question, but some mix of these traits should be evident within the ruling class. It should be understood, respected, and appreciated. This both reassures the commoners and legitimizes the ruling class.
legitimate. This also necessitates some element of competition and meritocracy (or the kind of divine mandate or hereditary prerogative which are no longer possible in the modern world). The ruling class shouldn’t be seen as closed, arrogant, disconnected, or ridiculous. That’s not good for anyone.
virtuous. While it’s an exaggeration to say (as people sometimes do) that no one becomes extremely wealthy without committing some evil, there are compromises which must be made with the dynamics of power and acclaim, and so there will be machiavellians and narcissists and psychopaths within a ruling class. They’ll almost certainly be over-represented (being especially hungry for the worldly trappings of social validation and political influence). But they should be held to a standard of public virtue. If assassinations are being carried out openly or mistresses are being flaunted or corruption is obvious and commonplace and lies are so flimsy that they insult the listener (like the claim that the recent government shutdown was authored by the Republicans, or the claim that universities are bastions of free speech rather than vast, ideological government dependencies) then there’s a serious problem. The elites have become contemptuous, complacent, vicious.
purposeful. Every person in a social system might be operating principally for himself and his family, but the system should be respected and validated. Every civilization is a collective project and there is always some deeper telos behind a civilization. It will be abstract, or historical, or mythic, but it should also be shared and compelling. The telos driving the Roman Empire was the unification of the entire world under a banner of enlightened order. The telos driving the British Empire was the Christianization and civilization of the dark and savage outlands. The telos driving the American empire before World War 2 was the establishment of a geographically secure political experiment in which the community and the republican individual would be the social building block and the focus of public policy, a kind of Arcadian free enterprise zone suffused with a geist of optimistic, libertarian Christianity. In each instance, the elites in the empire not only subscribed to the ethos but helped to construct it. These ruling classes weren’t without cynicism or dissent or selfishness (of course) but they understood that their civilization was engaged in a common project. They were, in other words, unified cultures. Incidentally, in the cases of the British and the pre-war American empires, the current elites of those countries have attempted to largely revise the historical natures of those societies and their governing ideals, imagining that they were run on the basis of colonialism (which was the existing arrangement for centuries, but which was much more interdependent and participatory than is often imagined, and which was heartily supported by many nonwhite people all over the world as a path to peace and progress) and white supremacy. While these were important elements of those historical civilizations, they were far less influential than Christianity or the desire to civilize or political liberalism or a faith in technology (which are all still part of the ethos of the modern world). In other words, modern progressives have concocted a dark fantasy to discredit our ancestors and invalidate our cultural endowment.
Our ruling class really seems, in many ways, to be the worst permutation possible. They’re exquisitely, infinitely selfish… but they see themselves and their class as a kind of post-modern crusader clique, busy amending the cultural ills of the 1950’s (that horrible era of national unity; healthy, intact families; sober and professional media; and a stable and hard-working economy) through the promotion of ‘representation’ in films and public education campaigns. They lecture rich college students and post material online and make comments at parties - that sort of thing. They’re almost unbelievably cynical, but they are still available for cognitive capture by any idea or online ‘movement’ with vaguely progressive undertones (meaning: there’s a fashionable victim involved, or at least a juicy, unpopular enemy) and a few dozen nonprofits behind it. They simultaneously imagine themselves as too sophisticated for monotheism or honor culture and are easily taken in by body positivity or pop psychology or the rhetoric of BlackLivesMatter. They are fashion- and status-conscious in a manner and to a depth that would make the courtiers of Louis XIV blush. Because of this, and their fear of ‘failure’ (poverty, unemployment, embarrassment, having to work real jobs) they are so conformist in their ideas that the entire situation could have been instructional for the Khmer Rouge: rather than erecting hundreds of primitive, torturous agricultural death camps, perhaps the Khmer could’ve just encouraged a taste for wealth and status among their citizens… and then imbued them with a deep fear of losing these things. Apparently people will fall into line not just due to threats against family members or the experience of grueling punishment but merely out of a kind of anxiety about losing their easy jobs and their social credit. I imagine that the Chinese Communist Party has already noted this reality, but it’s discouraging to see it extant here in the nation which used to style itself “the land of the free” (and the home of the brave). Our ruling class has placed personal comfort and ambition above national interest, personal morality, and truth on a systematic basis for decades now. We don’t even have a word for ‘virtue’ in common parlance any longer.
But it’s not just an elite class’s characteristics (comfortable, cowardly, disdainful, arrogant, selfish, conformist, fearful of any diminution of social status) or ideas (feelings-based subjectivism, a levelling egalitarianism - at least in theory -decolonization, queer liberation, feminism, anti-human environmentalism, hatred for the West and its history) that define it; it’s also the ambitions of its members and the ways they lives their lives and earn their money. On these scores, unfortunately, our elites are no more impressive.
Self-preservation
A ‘bullshit job’ is typically understood as one which is firmly embedded in the managerial-bureaucratic system such that job security becomes a completely redundant term. Your job isn’t just a job, it is (barring downsizing or loss of funding or criminal complaint) a sinecure. You move information around and attend a lot of Zoom meetings and put together vague ‘proposals’ and ‘action plans’ and never actually seem to do or generate anything lasting. Many people have commented on the fact that the modern economy has created a lot of these jobs - many very lucrative and high-ranking - for women, as if to entice and to keep them away from the countryside and away from maternity and domesticity, at least until they’re in their late 30’s (at which point the window for childbearing has closed and the choice has effectively been made).
This is actually not a bullshit job; it’s sinister, but it involves making real and lasting (negative) changes to the world and to customer experiences
…there’s a well-paid legion of professionals benefitting from their privilege, enjoying lucrative sinecures and taking 3 vacations each year. If these positions justified their money no one could object, but in many cases there’s little social value being created. Professors who teach useless things (or errant nonsense); psychologists who simply place all of their gender confused charges on the endocrinology treadmill, or who fail to push anyone towards real growth or self improvement; nonprofit executives leaching from the government and producing ‘reports’ or distributing payments or censoring online activity on behalf of the state; HR managers and lawyers who live from the friction and bureaucratic illogic of our society. These people have roles. They go to work every day and they send emails and they complete tasks, but it’s all an empty exercise. The mark of a ‘bullshit job’ is one without any appreciable product or accomplishment. The mark of a professionally parasitic job is one in which the society would be better off, if that entire sector of activity disappeared. There are increasingly more parasitic jobs every day, it seems. People should bear this in mind: someone has to create the wealth. Someone has to build the buildings and maintain the pipes and the wires and drive the trucks. We’ve been engaged in a civilization-wide project to give such people less status and influence and money. That’s a trend that cannot continue forever.
But there’s a special flavor of ‘elite bullshit job.’ It’s often cultural - a museum, an art studio, a writer’s room, an advertising agency - and the job is some kind of creative or administrative or support or advisory role (although they often have ‘executive’ or ‘synergy’ or ‘president’ in the titles, they’re not leadership jobs). These jobs often involve an ‘internship’ period which is unpaid or poorly paid (to filter out any potential poor or working class applicants) and they are secured purely on the basis of family connections. Hollywood and the streaming services are positively groaning under the knots of privileged ‘writers,’ hired partly because they went to impressive private schools, partly because they’re not white men, and never because they’re excellent film writers who have a deep understanding of the human condition (they’re not, and they don’t).
Technology companies, advertising agencies, fashion boutiques, art museums - many of them are, in fact, committed to keeping the institutions they represent firmly in the hands of their social class. That means refusing to hire upcoming poor and working class applicants, or anyone who dissents from their privileged worldview. This didn’t used to be the case. Class has always mattered, but the idea of losing an internship opportunity or a promotion based on who you voted for or your opinions on criminal justice would’ve be incomprehensible several generations ago, and energetic and capable people rising out of the lower classes were regarded with interest and respect, not contempt.
Our elite class is a historical oddity: a group of people who constantly profess good feelings and sympathy for - and even solidarity with - the poor, yet a group which avoids the poor (and even the working class) socially and professionally with the strictest scrupulousness. If helping the struggling was really a primary goal one imagines that outstanding poor people (for there are such creatures) would be welcomed into the fold and culturally included and offered opportunities. But this never happens, not at the level of the elite bullshit job. I guarantee that Rob Henderson has had to hustle for every opportunity he’s fulfilled. This kind of openness (real inclusivity) never happens because that would, in time, destroy the paternalistic relationship of the poor to the society (and therefore to the elite). The poor wouldn’t be poor any more (at least not those poors). They would be new and formidable operators in an open and competitive social world, able to buy their own homes and makes their own connections and forge their own policies. That’s not what the ruling class wants. They want, as every ruling class in history has wanted, control. All of their rhetoric about green energy and equity and LGBTQ rights and safety is just, deep down, an effort to maintain the society in which they grasp the levers and they call the shots. They do not want their sons and daughters to be competing with geniuses from Brownsville or prodigies from Kensington, for they would lose. Let the geniuses work in off-track betting storefronts or writing code for some Midwestern warehouse company or tutoring rich kids for the LSAT. They’ll be okay. They’re genuises after all. The really cushy jobs and the really expansive opportunities must be reserved for the friends and children (the peers) of the ruling class, regardless of their rhetoric.
Elite university graduates are perfectly open and often eager to publicly speak about their race, gender, and sexual orientation. However, there is one marginalized identity they often conceal: coming from a low socioeconomic status background. Elite graduates hide being poor, and interestingly they also hide being rich (they hide economic capital but still display cultural capital in the form of arcane knowledge, conversations about traveling in exotic locales, and luxury beliefs). Despite all the rhetoric around equity in elite universities and firms, the marginalized attribute that is arguably the most difficult—growing up in poverty—is the one people don’t feel comfortable disclosing. Don’t expect this to change any time soon.
That’s because being poor (despite being really the only kind of common marginalization in a capitalist country) marks one as a threat and a class outsider. If helping the poor was a real concern, would this be the case?
Ultimately that is what DEI is as well. It’s an effort to carefully cultivate a new crop of patsies and grateful dependents (easy to manipulate, and to hold up as evidence of ideological propriety and inclusivity) and to redefine the entire notion of ‘struggling,’ so that rich black kids and ‘queer’ girls at NYU are - voila! - suddenly ‘marginalized,’ while poor kids from Chicago and Akron are invisible.
Even programs for ‘the poor’ (like hospital funding in rural locations) are really about transferring money to preferred employees (doctors, hospital administrators, DEI consultants) and clients.
Are ANY of these funding initiatives designed to help the working class in the ways it wants to be helped?
The Ruling Class Milieu
The social world of the ruling class is a strange and inaccessible place to those outside it. I’ve only caught the merest first-hand glimpses (dating rich girls, mostly), but the dynamics are fairly clear to anyone who reads many LinkedIn curriculum vitae or engagement announcements or faculty webpages. It’s a world of young people getting older, salving their mortality dread with wealth and distraction, and salving their persistent feeling of inuathenticity with radical, progressive politics. They maintain a stance against traditional goods, like social order or family norms or meritocracy, but they live lives that carefully observe the benefits of these qualities. For example, most ruling class young women will argue that shaming female promiscuity is reactionary and invalid… yet they themselves avoid reputations of promiscuity, and quietly judge others for the very same sin. They will advertise their opposition to ‘heteronormativity.’ They might even call themselves ‘queer,’ but they almost exclusively date men and they have a very fixed ambition towards (heterosexual) marriage and kids for themselves. It’s like this across the board: one worldview for display and advertisement, and a very different one to govern their own lives.
Most bisexual people are women, and 88% of ‘bisexual’ people are in heterosexual relationships. The numbers are much different for bisexual men. That means that close to 100% of women who identify as bisexual are living heterosexual lives. Much like the performative nature of much progressive politics, the self-identifier ‘queer’ often just means a young woman who is mildly attracted to women (much more so men) and who is enamored of leftwing politics.
In the ruling class it’s all about image, for there IS no substance. Or, rather, the substance is widely understood to be pure money and power, so people prefer to live in the imaginary world instead.
Meanwhile they are eternally driven when it comes to status acquisition and they’re ruthless to dissidents and nonconformists and competitors. Liza Libesdescribes the scene as “a world where most people act ruthlessly and feel no remorse.”
Nina Powerdescribes what is now the antechamber of the ruling class citadel (full of privileged but not always super-privileged people, clamoring for their own social and financial breakout): the urban creative class (which is international, and everywhere full of people raised in wealthy households):
I’ve never been to Melbourne, though I once knew a pair of artists who lived there. They made work about notions of the public, and audiences and protest, when that was something that contemporary artists did. I worked with them on a couple of occasions, and I found them funny and modern and some other things besides. They were often engaged in applying for grants, something I have done only once for a PhD scholarship more than twenty years ago. The Melbourne artists were keen to escape what they regarded as the parochial nature of the Australian artworld for the uplit hills (as they saw it) of more culturally advanced Europe, and seemed to spend a lot of time attending residencies and trying to get their art performed. Melbourne, via their description, sounded like a pleasant place for people who like fancy coffee, karaoke, dancing and engaging in “pashes” at discos and living the kind of Hipster life that has, in the more chromium metropoles like London, largely ceded way to a decidedly post-cozy combination of money, cruelty, unease and baffling political decisions that daily demean the poorest (as ever).
But nowhere is immune from the excesses of ideological Americanisms, financial evil and globalist impositions. Cities, where the young come to try to be interesting and have fleeting interactions with one another, are, as Spengler said, not the bulwark of culture, but rather their death, giant vampire-egregores that herald the end of any great spirited moment. How misled we are by them and how little we learn! All western cities are prey to the same kinds of forces, even in the inverted Australian desert/rainforest (or whatever it is, I dunno). All cities have on their side is delay—one is more or less stuck in the 90s, 00s, 10s and everyone watches helplessly as their fun, quirky shred of territory becomes a place of money laundering, mass immigration, and ever-coarser behaviour.
Zohran Mamdani is an obvious example of one of these ruling class brats. Raised by millionaires, never having worked an honest job, his mother is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and his father is a Marxist (“post-colonial”) college professor. No doubt both of them hold a whole host of views about equity and the working class and criminal justice which they’ve scrupulously avoided putting into practice in their own lives.
So is Katie Wilson, a socialist candidate recently elected to be mayor of Seattle, despite also never having worked a real job and still relying on monthly cash infusions from her parents, who are both New York City college professors.
Yuri Bezmenov has a long series of hilarious biographical synopses of these kinds of people on his Substack. It’s wonderful reading, but it’s a bit depressing when one realizes that all of these people are the same. And none of them have any character or grit or real life experience. And each of them wields the power of thousands of everyday welders and police officers and schoolteachers. Dance classes, equestrian practice, private high school, private college, private grad schools, internships, film projects, book deals - it’s a whirlwind of ersatz activity, years of work without any social value created and years of study without gaining any actual knowledge of the world.
Jake Sullivan and Maggie Goodlander are the cringe millennial version of the Clintons and Obamas. They have racked up two Yale degrees each and have spent a combined 35 years in The Swamp siphoning away our money to serve the regime. The former is Biden’s National Security Advisor, while the latter has just carpetbagged a Congressional seat in New Hampshire. Both have the charisma, authenticity, and usefulness of a paper straw. They are so institutionalized they don’t even notice the padded walls. During Maggie’s campaign, she pretended to be poor renter in Nashua despite owning a $1.2 million primary residence in a different district. “The Resistance” is when you come from a wealthy political family and attend The Groton School, Yale, and Yale Law School. Her opponent, based rooftop Asian tiger mom Lily Tang Williams, exposed these naked emperors to the world. Like a bull in a china shop, she smashed Goodlander’s meticulously manicured image that was crafted over decades of resume-building, striving, and plotting.
Although Maggie won the race, she will never live down this epic mic drop moment - inject it straight into your veins:
“You are wealthy. You are worth $20-30 million dollars. How do you know about regular people’s suffering? Do you go shopping? Go to Walmart to buy food?! I talk to those people. And you pretend to be a renter in Nashua. A few months ago moving back to run for this open seat with millions of dollars from Washington DC insiders. You do not understand regular people’s concerns!”
Rejoice, peasants! Taxpayer-funded regime propaganda network NPR has appointed a new CEO. Katherine Maher (she/her) is one of the cringiest commissars I have ever seen. As I have done with similar unelected demoralization agents at RISDIE and NEA Teachers Union, I will subvert her subversive resume and coronation to the throne of a farcical yet powerful media machine that influences ~50 million weekly listeners. These are naked emperors, not serious people. Laughter and mockery will break them. It’s time to drop some narrative-incinerating napalm on the Commies.
Katherine’s LinkedIn flexing checks all the commissar boxes: pronouns, Reid Hoffman’s podcast, TED Talk, Trevor Noah, CEO of Wikimedia, World Economic Forum, Council on Foreign Relations, Atlantic Council, US State Department, Stanford, World Bank, UN. You could not try harder to join every elite grooming club in existence. The only one she couldn’t get into was Yale’s Skull and Bones, which is why she has a striver chip on her shoulder from NYU. There is no way she is not working for the Feds on narrative control and combatting “disinformation”:
Or the president of Columbia University (they would never appoint a decisive, masculine man to the role - when have they ever done anything productive, after all? - but even if they wanted to, they couldn’t; none still exist in the highest levels of academia), Minouche Shafik:
Comrades: Minouche Shafik is the final boss of the naked emperor globalists.
In 2023, Baroness Shafik was appointed the first female President of Columbia University. Like Claudine Gay, her freshman year has been a dumpster fire. At the time of her coronation, a record 6 of the 8 Demoralized DIEvy League presidents were women. Since then, 2 of the 6 have resigned (Gay and UPenn’s Liz Magill) and the other 4 are copypasta clones of each other. They are empty vessels helming sinking ships and hollow institutions.
Like NPR CEO Katherine Maher and other commissars, Shafik’s resume is full of demoralized institutions and elite circle jerks: Oxford, Georgetown, Wharton, World Bank, IMF, Bank of England, LSE. Her handling of the campus intifada is the worst of any college president and should be documented as Harvard Business School case study of How To Fail at Crisis Leadership. She was nowhere to be found throughout the turmoil, hiding behind phalanxes of lawyers and PR experts to issue weak statements that only worsened the situation. Somehow she has pissed off every constituency. All you have to do is babysit the students while stroking the egos of the donors and professors, yet she failed on every front while getting paid $1 million and raking in $1 billion in federal funding per year. As her recent rehearsed statement shows, she possesses the commissar gift of spewing many words that mean nothing.
Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, a leading economist whose career has focused on public policy and academia, will become the 20th president of Columbia University on July 1, 2023. Her election concludes a wide-ranging and intensive search launched after Lee C. Bollinger announced that he would step down as Columbia’s president at the end of the 2022-2023 academic year.
In a letter to the community, Jonathan Lavine, chair of the Columbia Board of Trustees, called Shafik “the perfect candidate: a brilliant and able global leader, a community builder, and a preeminent economist who understands the academy and the world beyond it. What set Minouche apart as a candidate is her unshakable confidence in the vital role institutions of higher education can and must play in solving the world’s most complex problems. Like all of us in the Columbia community, she believes that in order to bring about meaningful change, we have a collective obligation to combine our distinctive intellectual capacities with groups and organizations beyond the academy.”
Jonathan Lavine has a BA from Columbia, MBA from Harvard, and billions from 30 years of Private Equity corporate raiding at Bain Capital. His idiotic words are priceless. Like common sense there are some things money can’t buy - for everything else, there’s elite virtue signaling cards. He also donates to WBUR, Boston’s NPR affiliate; the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization dedicated to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment; the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Council. The “collective” left always eats its own and in this case globbled up big chunks of his cash.
Nina Jankowicz (who I recently had an exchange with on this platform) was on track to be one of the most powerful of Yuri Bezmenov’s examples. Unfortunately, her determination to use ‘misinformation’ as a concept to engineer ever more potent state influence on public discourse ran afoul of the instincts of the voter. It’s too bad she wasn’t born in Germany, or Great Britain. She would’ve been right at home.
Comrades: Welcome to Two Minutes Hate with Commissar Scary Poppins, Czar of the Ministry of Truth!
Like new NPR Katherine Maher (she/her), Nina Jankowicz is a demoralization agent in our theater kid occupied longhouse gulag government. In 2022, she gained notoriety as the first and last Director of the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security. She recently penned a piece in neocon warmonger rag Foreign Affairs that is the most stunning and brave example of projection and lack of self-awareness I have ever read. Today, I will give her the Yuri treatment and subvert her subversion. I don’t mock these commissars because of their identity, I mock them because they suck. It will be hard to top her own TikTok reels, but I’ll try (note the SSRI sociopathic sanpaku eyes):
As you’d expect, her LinkedIn is a cringey flex: try-hard posed photo, advertising her How To propaganda book, pronouns, “expert”, TIME 100, hashtags about disinformation and gender equality.
Her biography is full of word salad copypasta and name dropping. The Hypatia Project sounds like a weird underground swingers’ club:
Orwell would be proud of the Centre for Information Resilience, Syracuse Adjunct Professor of Disinformation, and Disinformation Governance Board as real life examples of the Ministry of Truth:
A person can gain wisdom even when growing up rich, and they can develop character and courage and a familiarity with the shape of the world. The problem is that none of these people do those things. They’re all too busy burnishing their credentials and attending parties and updating their LinkedIn profiles and eliminating the traces of AI from their doctoral dissertations (Claudine Gay was born too early, when the only parties one could steal from academically were other people). They re all bereft of common sense, or a recognition of human incentives, never having had to struggle with poverty or violent people themselves. Just ask them about the nature of American poverty or the values or beliefs of the white working class, and get ready for an avalanche of ideological fantasy nonsense. Even if they speak to you they will struggle to slot what you tell them into ideological boxes, attributing motivations to you that you don’t have and assuming layers of subtext that you never even considered. Ask them about police reform, or minimum wage laws, or the history of the frontier Indian Wars, and you’ll be met with the scripted ideas which were programmed in academia. They’re untrue, and in many ways they’re incoherent (contradictory), but they’ve never been challenged and they are the ideas a person in their class is supposed to have, so they remain. If they were to develop a bit of courage and curiosity, they would be exiled from the collective. They’d lose most of their social and cultural power, and this reveals how the power is monopolized and jealously hoarded by people who profess ideas but really only care about power and status. Naturally, it is best that they and the people like them (from the same finishing schools and neighborhoods and alma maters) manage society on behalf of the rest of us. Can you imagine what society would be like if restaurant owners were allowed to pay their employees an agreed-upon wage, and didn’t have to worry about absent or politicized police departments? Can you imagine the chaos that would result if communities funded and controlled their own schools and clinics, without a looming and watchful bureaucracy rooted in Washington D.C. and New York City and Los Angeles? It’s much better for all of us if we let these people shape curriculums and write regulations and inflict their ideas about the best ways to drive and shop and socialize upon all of us. It’s certainly better for them.
This kind of intense regimentation both cultivates and selects for cowardice. Simply put, if you’re brave and outspoken you can’t be in the club. And that is why ‘the club’ continues to diminish, in both vigor and acuity.
On top of being being demonstrably deficient as policymakers and cowardly when it comes to independent thought or personal accountability (when has one of these dozens of new female leaders actually owned a mistake? Kathleen Kennedy, Claudine Gay, Minouche Shafik, Kamala Harris, Karen Bass, Laura Rosenberry, Amy Klobuchar, Jasmine Crockett… all of them talk about leadership and accountability, but for them leadership apparently just means the wielding of power and accountability is something to be imposed on other people only, as a PR strategy to grab more power), none of these people are leaders. They are allergic to original thinking, publicly owning mistakes, making sacrifices (real sacrifices) for their organizations, and doing anything which would upset or curtail the Blob. That is why they are in positions of power - not to make independent decisions, but to make the decisions that have already been preselected for them by committee and by the organic bureaucratic structure. Can you name a single time that one of them has made a hard choice to cut staff or refocus on the mission or admit to a personal failure? Can you name any creative or institutionally risky decision that one of these ruling class creatures has made? They continue the policies of the past (which are constituted for the good of the bureaucracy, never the public), they dissemble and equivocate when disaster strikes (using the mealy-mouthed platitudes which are so typical of our ruling class that they should be engraved on their tombstones) and they only resign when it’s unavoidable. They hire based on fashion and identity and class membership (they know no other way). Is it any wonder that in the world of large cultural / academic / public / nonprofit organizations, leadership (masculine leadership being, in most cases, the only real kind) has evaporated and failures are beginning to mount?
As Yuri Bezmenov has already written, trouble looms. Policy changes to work visas, a restriction on previously exorbitant government funding (fueling art studios and film projects and universities and nonprofits) and the rise of AI are all threatening the ruling class.
Plus, the cultural reservoir of older experts and careful workers and masculine leaders is running dry, and there has been no effort to replenish it. Masculine leadership is profoundly (explicitly) hated by our ruling class, as are crowds of outstanding white students and rigorous male scientists and engineers. They imagined that their cherished client groups would swell to fill the vacancies but - to put it plainly - no substitute for any of these types has been forthcoming. Now, instead of decisive men we increasingly have arrogant (it feels the same as decisive and confident, to them) and yet fearful women, ruling by committee and guided by ideas they learned in sociology and women’s studies classes. Almost anyone could have told you that this new group would manage things differently from the old, and most would’ve probably guessed that the changes would be negative. They would have been right.
Regarding AI (a technology which isn’t too revolutionary for the average person, but which can be cataclysmic for the world of knowledge work), we’ve seen symptoms of the changes in the sudden and unaddressed shift in position on ‘green energy’:
AI requires massive amounts of energy. “Green” options like solar panels and windmills are too expensive and unreliable - the opposite of sustainable. We need more fossil fuel and nuclear capacity to cope with increased demand. The buildout of data centers must contain provisions that do not spike residential energy bills. Energy prices are soaring in Europe and American blue states because of their suicidal embrace of ESG. AI accelerated the end of the green scams. Even Bill Gates has waved the white flag on his climate alarmism. The few remaining kool-aid purveyors have rebranded the ESG grift as sustainability and transition. Greta may shift her jihad from oil to Gaza to computers. As long as prices at the pump and heating homes stay low, few will join her.
Again: all of these ideas are instrumental and ornamental. The reasons given for embracing them are never actually the reasons. There are either ulterior motivations, or the positions are displayed as virtue signals and as pieces in a game of class status.
That’s ultimately the problem, I suppose. Everything is a game for the ruling class - a bitter and earnest game, but a separate construction from the world of real people working real jobs avoiding real crime and working towards real goals. The ruling class has become a vast parasite upon the real world, relying upon it for its sustenance and social power and cultural credibility. Here’s the central question: if society decides that the ruling class, and people like them, are unfit to lead, would they step aside and make way for competent and honest people with different ideas but firm values? Of course they wouldn’t. They haven’t. They would rather inflict policy disaster upon all of us and pretend that unavoidable constraints - like crime and scarcity - don’t exist, or are ideological phantoms, curable by youth programs and mental healthcare. They play their game, and the systems they manage get worse and worse and inequality continues to worsen and corruption continues to proliferate, covertly.
They continue to focus on the problems that they prefer to focus on (white privilege, sex disparities & misogyny, over-policing, carbon emissions, “intolerance”) and they ignore the much larger and more pressing problems afflicting the society. But their ideas haven’t worked, the funding hasn’t paid off, the narratives are wearing thin, and the people are growing restless. Ultimately the ruling class will have to take responsibility for their failures (they will be made to). That’s a big part of what leadership is - the dessert of blame when things go poorly. If you have power over a society, then you bear responsibility for its well-being. Without any sense of responsibility or consent, a ruling class is just an oppressor, like the Nazis and the Italian Fascists and the British colonial administrators which our ruling class regards with such deep disdain.
At least those groups built railroad tracks and made the trains run on time. Ours couldn’t lay a railroad track if their lives depended on it. Maybe they should.
Thanks for reading. Please take care of yourself, and enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday if you’re in the United States.
Outstanding essay.
Very insightful - thank you!