The Claudine Gay scandal has been a delight on many levels. Sure, there’s the joy of watching the fall of a mediocre diversity hire whose privileged life – she’s the scion of some Haitian concrete magnate – has been characterized by not only ridiculous oppression “scholarship” but by her stealing it from other people. We should celebrate her humiliation; she deserves it because she is a bad person who hurt other people during her rise and is now experiencing her well-deserved fall. But the best part is that her saga is an unforgettable demonstration of an indisputable truth.
Our elite is nothing of the sort. It is unworthy of the respect it demands, and we should starve it of that respect as we destroy it.
America’s elite has failed and must be removed and replaced. Our betters are actually worsers. They are stupid, greedy, unaccomplished, arrogant monsters whose entire lives are organized around obtaining and exercising unearned power over normal people. They despise normal people. That means you. Claudine Gay hates you. She calls you names and insists you are stupid, evil and racist. It’s projection, of course – these moral illiterates epitomize every epithet they hurl at us.
They have the positions, but they only have the power if we give it to them. Their sole power is leveraging the respect that comes with the positions in the institutions that they have come to occupy. If Claudine Gay were a fourth-grade teacher at some school in Baltimore – which she would be perfect for, since those Democrat-run schools in that Democrat-run city regular graduate classes where 0% of the kids can read at grade level – no one would care what she thinks about systemic racism, cis oppression, or whatever other stupid commie fetish she was pushing.
She matters – well, mattered – only because she was able to glom onto the glow of respect radiating from her sinecure. The President of Harvard! Wow, she must be incredible – smart, talented, admirable, and not a scummy thief of other people’s work. But that is all a lie, every bit of it. She is not smart, or talented, or admirable, and she is a scummy thief of other people’s work. And that’s not unusual. All of the current crop of leftists who made that long march through the institutions are the same. They are mediocrities and low-lives, and they only get respect by holding their positions in the institutions. Of course, this makes them vulnerable to us withholding that respect. And now we are. The institutions under the leadership of these midwits have fallen into disrepute. They once at least sort of performed their various functions for society. But now, occupied as they are by the woke and the broke, they contribute nothing to society. They are poorly-run and provide no societal benefit. They simply provide gigs for these hacks, yet the hacks demand that you respect them as if these institutions were still functional and useful.
Look at the regime media. We always loathed the press, but it sometimes got some grudging respect for taking on politicians of all parties when those pols were corrupt. A mostly objective organization of truthtellers gets a bit of respect for that. Now, the regime media is entirely leftist and expressly disclaims objectivity as a value, but it still wants the same respect as it got when it was at least nominally neutral. Respect Dasha Burns? Ha!
Look at the military. It was once a fearsome organization that did not care anything about your race or religion or anything else, and it won wars. It was America’s most respected institution. And it is shocked to find that today it gets no respect. Putting aside its total inability to unequivocally win any major wars over the last three decades – which is putting aside a lot – it has fully embraced the woke agenda, right up to the point of promoting weirdo males who pretend, in uniform, to be female. It also trashes the very people who make up the backbone of the military, the traditional, largely Christian, and conservative young men from outside the cities. Yet it is stunned to see that Americans now refuse to respect the military, much less join up as despised cannon fodder for the pinko swells in DC.
Refusing to respect the institutions is our key tactic for change. The institutions run on inertia. We respected the institutions for a long time, and now it’s a habit. The commie leaders rely on that. The current crop of Claudine Gays did not build the institutions or earn that respect. These functionaries merely slipped into the jobs and demanded that respect for themselves even though they are demonstrably unworthy of that respect. But we control who we respect. We must not default to thinking that, for example, if you come from Harvard, you are an accomplished and capable individual.
Break the default respect habit. They have drafted along behind actually competent people and reaped the benefits of their legacies for far too long. As conservatives, we need to be much more parsimonious with our respect. Never assume any institution that once deserved it still does. Make them earn it again every day. Be miserly with your respect because that respect is the basis of their power, and people like the atrocious Claudine Gay are the last people we should be giving power to.
But be very, very generous with your contempt.
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