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The Moral Rot at the Heart of Our Elite Institutions – HotAir

First things first: many decent people have become convinced that Israel is committing genocide in Israel, just as they believe that Gaza has been occupied for decades. 

Of course, neither of these things is true, but the steady stream of propaganda from “reliable” and “mainstream” sources, whom they have yet to learn are peddlers of a Narrative™, has them convinced that where there is smoke, there is fire. 

Some of the responsibility for not knowing the truth is theirs, but to be honest, most of it rests on the shoulders of the MSM and our cultural elite, who knowingly peddle falsehoods. One scientist explained a while back (I forget who) that it took him years to make the connection between the fact that every time he read about something he knew in the media, it was wrong, and the fact that this was true of almost everything he read. 

He just assumed that the media didn’t understand his area of expertise but assumed they got things right everywhere else. 

No, they always tell lies or spew nonsense about things they don’t understand. 

Plenty of midwits in our cultural and political elites are just repeating a Narrative™, but there is a core group of people who BUILD that narrative who know it is all lies. They are more common in academia, but they exist in government and the media as well. They are in corporate boardrooms, in think tanks, and NGOs. They know what they are doing and why they are doing it. 

This phenomenon is most obvious in academia because it is the most open, and you can see the results in real-time. They transmit the underlying ideology to their students, and the midwit students act it out in front of the world. It is the least subtle and most repulsive exhibit in a phenomenon that pervades our elite. 

The happenings on our campuses and in the streets are not aberrations but the natural consequence of what our elite institutions teach. 

None of this is actually a response to Israel’s response to 10/7. It started on 10/8, with students and professors proudly standing up and declaring that this is what decolonization looks like and that the Hamas attack was exhilarating. It was the bloodlust that called them; it is about the destruction of our society that they so strongly desire. 

You can find this bloodlust everywhere, and while it is directed specifically at the Jews and is suffused with antisemitism, the phenomenon is broader than that. You see it in antiracism, the pervasive hatred of Whites, and the justification of riots and looting as perfectly understandable. 

Maher, of course, was the CEO of Wikimedia and now the CEO of NPR, and she makes no bones about the need for narrative and her disdain for the truth. Truth is an impediment, not a good. 

It’s a Narrative whose goal is generating rage at the current order, which seems odd given that the people pushing it are at the commanding heights of that order. 

But this is hardly new. In fact, almost every revolution is led by disaffected elites, and you don’t have to research more than 2 minutes to see that the funders of all these radicals are the wealthiest people in the world. And it’s hard to say that they have been harmed by the revolutionary spirit–their wealth and power has expanded exponentially the past few years. The pandemic was VERY VERY good to them.

It’s not a coincidence that the worst excesses of radical ideology are seen at elite universities. The children of the middle class are studying, while the children of the elite are wearing masks and demanding genocide of Jews. It is at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, and all the “best” schools that we are producing all the worst people. 

This is as true in our government. The revolutionaries are all from wealthy Blue cities, and it is the wealthiest which tend to be the worst. The rot isn’t everywhere–there is still an America that works, and works well. 

They are just trying to destroy it. 

The war in Gaza is not the cause of this. It is the excuse, the spark that mobilized it. This movement has more in common with BLM and Antifa than the Nazis, although all three are inching in that direction because Jews are so easy to target and to take out one’s rage at. Add to that the leavening of the burgeoning non-integrated Muslim population, and you lit the fuse on a movement that will produce pogroms. 

BLM and Antifa were also celebrated by the elite. Kamala Harris herself donated to the bail fund that released BLM rioters from jail, several of whom went on to murder others. 

It is a striking fact that Communism has killed vastly more people than the Nazis and oppressed hundreds of millions over more than a century, but it is still taught in universities across the world as an idyllic system. Nobody teaches Nazism as a political theory to admire, but every campus in America has scores of open communists who call for revolution to destroy the West. 

There is a “respectable” Left-wing magazine called “Jacobin,” which I occasionally read because prominent left-wingers occasionally publish there. 

It is named after the Jacobins of the French Revolution. Who were the Jacobins? I won’t give you the complicated history, but the Oxford Languages dictionary Jacobin down to:

a member of a democratic club established in Paris in 1789. The Jacobins were the most radical and ruthless of the political groups formed in the wake of the French Revolution, and in association with Robespierre they instituted the Terror of 1793–4.

The Terror. The orgy of violence in the French Revolution. And, while most people don’t know it, the people who pushed the terror were not the lower classes, although they reveled in it. It was the anti-Royalist elite. They wanted the power the Royalists had and were willing to chop off everybody’s head to get it. 

The big question for me at this moment is whether the elite went too far. Their strategy worked in 2020—the riots and the pandemic tyranny allowed them to seize power. But having unleashed the mob, it may swallow them, as happened—ironically—to the Jacobins. 

Unfortunately, if the revolution sparked by our elite consumes them in the end, I will take little pleasure–not out of sympathy for them, but because so many others’ lives are being ruined in their auto-da-fé.



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