Comrades: The emperor has no clothes, long live the emperor!
Many of my family, friends, and acquaintances fit the archetype I am about to skewer. Most of them are well-meaning, hard-working people. However, they are also human with egos primed for arrogance, ignorance, and susceptibility to peer pressure. The more time they have been institutionalized, the more ingrained they are in The Narrative. Although they may appear as serious adults with impressive titles and degrees, scratch beneath the surface and you will find a fragile, insecure, sanctimonious child who does not have the intellectual ability or humility to change their mind when presented with new data.
Whenever a conversation dips into politics or COVID, a switch gets flipped from rational discourse to hysteria. Any fact or opinion that clashes with their world view is branded as morally and intellectually suspect, an -ism/phobia or conspiracy theory. I have heard self-proclaimed loving tolerant people wish for the death or imprisonment of anti-vaxxers, Orange Man, and his supporters. I wish I were making this up. The cognitive dissonance and mass formation psychosis are real and terrifying to encounter regularly in real life. It gives me full body cringes: a simultaneous stroke to the brain, punch to the gut, and spasm to the face as I struggle to conceal disgust and maintain social camouflage.
The peak irony of modern capitalism is that wealthy Karents pay ONE MILLION DOLLARS for 2 decades of identity socialist indoctrination of their children. Elite K-12 private schools cost $40K/year, colleges cost $80K/year, and grad schools cost $100K/year, not including the price of therapy and substance abuse that frequently accompanies this type of upbringing.
The vast majority of teachers and professors are leftists who infuse their politics into all subjects from history to math. Campus struggle sessions that I was forced to endure a decade ago are now widespread in elementary schools nationwide. These are people who stuff their own children into car trunks and remove parental consent for gender surgeries or experimental injections cuz science.
As an optimist, I believe this education system will erode away because its failures are unsustainable. Even public schools cost taxpayers $20K/student despite decades of poor performance. Triple jabbed and masked teachers unions are still finding every excuse to stay home, abuse kids, and screw parents. If legislators support more popular school choice and voucher programs, a group of 10 families could spend $10K/each to hire a top quality teacher for their children and save money compared to current options. Synthesis is an amazing enrichment activity focused on teamwork, problem solving, and critical thinking.
What follows is an outline of the elite rat race. If you walk 30 years in their clown shoes, you will better understand why they turn out the way they do and how to handle them. While there are always exceptions to the stereotype, this is the well worn path in the woke industrial complex. Since I just saved you and your kids a lifetime of grief and debt, consider subscribing ;) And if you have a baby in the NYC metro area, let’s talk about setting up sane childcare and tutoring pods.
The first and most important step to become an elite is to be born into the aristocracy. ~40% of Ivy League students come from families the Top 1% of income and ~15% are legacies. These families are primarily located in coastal blue cities with the same set of laptop class professions: finance (pronounced finance), consulting, real estate, lawyer, doctor, tech, academia, media, NGO, bureaucrat. Many of these jobs are BS rent-seeking services that require no physical labor and produce no physical products. The competition, insecurity, and status consciousness are intense from infancy. This is a country onto its own, loyal to money, power, and recognition - not any flag, creed, or race.
The ultimate luxury goods and status symbols today are a fancy diplomas from fancy schools. As seen in the image above, expensive pre-schools begin indoctrinating from an early sage. COVID masking, distancing, jabbing, and fear has exacerbated the anxiety and neuroticism. While there is some pushback in the suburbs, the Karent apparatchiks reign supreme in the cities. They all have the physiognomy and personality of Dolores Umbridge. In her words, “Things at Hogwarts are worse than I feared!
Beginning in elementary school, boys can be girls and girls can be boys. Parents who object are labeled domestic terrorists like in Loudon County. School boards purchase Panorama software from the attorney general’s son in law to harvest data and detect wrongthink.
MLK’s dream has been flipped into a dystopian nightmare: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will
notbe judged by the color of their skinbut by, not the content of their character.”
If the child is white, they/them will be taught to loathe themselves and be blamed for all the world’s problems. If the child is black/brown, they/them will be taught that they are a powerless victim who cannot succeed unless they become an activist DEI-BJ administrator. The woke industrial complex is booming as every university and Fortune 500 company has allocated millions in budget to DEI BJ shakedowns, with many $150K+ salaried positions available to discriminate and hire their allies as $10K/week consultants for woke workshops. If the child is yellow, no one cares. They are white-adjacent narrative-destroying traitors, receiving all the discrimination against privilege but none of the benefits of victimhood. To top it off, these schools are mandating injections of experimental drugs that most civilized countries have banned for their children.
High school and college used to be fun, but no longer. Instead of hanging out with each other their free time, teens are brainwashed by TikTok algorithms that the CCP blocks from its domestic market. Fully developed men like UPenn swimmer Lia Thomas destroy women at sports. Most “top” universities no longer require standardized test scores in the name of equity, which gives the wealthy more advantages in subjective areas like race, daddy paying for a volunteer trip, or having his trustee buddy writing a glowing recommendation. One enterprising banker progeny and future overlord used copy-paste masterfully in his admission winning essay.
Campuses have the ideological and physical freedoms of North Korea, where students are encouraged to snitch on each other for saying something offensive or gathering without masks. It is the ultimate prisoner’s dilemma where any dissent could derail a lifetime of hoop jumping and generations of social climbing. Abigail Shrier’s epic Princeton speech tears into this phenomenon of cowardice and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke Inc details what happens to corporations when they let inmates run the asylum. Like cities, campuses are comprised of a group of elites subsidizing scholarship/welfare peasants. Diversity and inclusion are only skin deep. If you dare stray from the plantation like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, or Larry Elder, you will be disavowed and unpersoned.
After graduating college, it’s time for elite scions to fulfill their destiny like salmon returning to the rivers from which they spawned. The Atlantic salmon migrates from the Upper East Side to Dalton to Harvard to Goldman/McKinsey and back with seasonal frolicking in The Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, and Palm Beach. The Pacific salmon migrates from Beverly Hills to Crossroads to Stanford to Google/Facebook and back, with seasonal frolicking in Lake Tahoe, Palm Springs, and Hawaii.
It’s a great big club and you ain’t in it. The creme de la creme win the Woke Rhodes Scholarship and join the World Economic Forum to be groomed as the next Macron or Trudeau. They will marry another member of the incestuous ruling class, have their glamorous wedding featured in the New York Times, and continue the cycle for the next generation. David Attenborough would be proud.
Yuri-san - the hot poultice of ridicule and satire, when properly applied, will continue to draw out the Karen venom (comprised of soy and grubs) which you have so clearly articulated in your various Substack offerings.
Spot on. Here's a solid thread about the end-state of this ivy-woke thinking in Big Tech companies.
https://twitter.com/hazardharringto/status/1481797871389351936?s=21