A question that gets asked a lot is whether the elites who run this country really believe in all their woke pieties or are they just using them as a blunt object to pummel the dirt people that they despise so much. My belief is that in a sense they do believe the things they talk about. But not in the way that someone would believe in things like gravity or fire. The things that they espouse, that are crazy, they believe in the way that kids believe in Santa Claus. They want to believe in it because it makes them feel good.
And part of the reason it makes them feel good is because it makes them feel better than the bad people who don’t believe in these things. So, these beliefs, such as America is rife with systemic racism, serve as the basis for membership in the elite hierarchy but at the same time don’t require that these beliefs be tested because membership in the elite insulates the elect from exposure to the real world where reality shows its ugly face.
So, if you’re one of the cloud people you can drive your electric car three miles back and forth from Harvard Yard to your home in Cambridge and the reality of what green energy is doing to the American energy system won’t cause you a moment’s discomfort. But if you’re a family trying to make it on two minimum wage salaries and gasoline has doubled in price over the last four years there’s a lot of pain. Or if you’re an old money legacy candidate at an Ivy League school then the minority affirmative action candidates won’t affect you. But if you’re a poor white kid with 1600 SAT scores it will.
When you’re part of the elite the rules are different. And you have to know that, but you don’t admit it, even to yourself. From where you stand, you’re one of the good guys and you deserve to have the game played by your rules. And in a sense, this may have always been the case. After all, aren’t these the same people who have been calling the shots since Plymouth Rock? Whether they were justifying the dispossession of the local Indian tribes or enforcing the blue laws against the Irish riff-raff or finding a pretext for the Spanish American War haven’t the elites always justified their preferences as being moral and on the side of the angels or more recently “on the right side of history?” Somehow the consequences of whatever crusade they decide to declare are always paid for by less important people; the riff-raff or foreigners who need the work.
People think that because the elites are advocating mass immigration from the third world that they are trying to eliminate their own European legacy. But I think they have that wrong. The elites believe and probably rightly that they will still be in charge and they will be immune to the chaos that this importation will wreak on the rest of the country. And maybe they’re right. Maybe Cambridge and Martha’s Vineyard and the other homes of the elite will roll right along basically unchanged.
But maybe they’re wrong.
“Maybe Cambridge and Martha’s Vineyard and the other homes of the elite”.
You mean all those sea-side mansions that are immune to the rising sea levels that will drive the rest of us to flee to caves in the mountains?
There’s more of those pieties that they only sort of believe in, only when it’s convenient.
This is a ”disappearing gun” emplacement dating from 130 years ago. It is was a coastal defense weapon.
Sure looks to be that the risings seas have flooded this emplacement out. There is a sea wall on base at NAS Pensacola that has been in place for about the same amount of time and contemporary pictures showing the seawall in the first decade of the 1900’s show no discernible difference from now in water levels.