CHAPTER EIGHT   

Looking Down Their Noses

Is it too much to say that the Elite wants Normals dead or enslaved?

It sure seems a bit extreme.

Dead or enslaved?

Wow.

That’s pretty harsh.

It is harsh, and also accurate. Some of the Elite want the Normals gone, and the rest merely want them obedient.

The dead part is the trickier one. Some of the Elite definitely want the Normals dead. How they differ tends to be based on the means and the timetable. There seems to be a disagreement among the pro-dead faction as to whether the process should be facilitated, or whether the Normals should die off over time. But the rationale is the same for wanting Normals gone. No uppity opponents, no problem. Seems straightforward. Many of the Elite fantasize of a world free of icky Normals; just how the world becomes free of them varies.

Some are hoping for fate to intervene—they are the passive hell-wishers. Get on Twitter for long enough and offer Normal-like views such as “I approve of God and America and the Constitution,” and pretty soon someone with a handle like @OpenMindedBookLvr and a bio that quotes Gandhi is going to respond with a tweet along the lines of, “I hope you die from your Jesus-guns, Flag Bitch!”

Someone like that is Elite, to be sure, but affiliation Elite. Most of them have never achieved anything, like a decent relationship with their parents or a job.

The tough-to-swallow fact is that some of them would like to literally see Normals dragged from their homes, put on trains, and shipped someplace far away to be disposed of. Rounding up the kulaks and shipping them away for disposal is a classic collectivist go-to move. And thanks to the power of social media to compel sociopaths to reveal themselves, these active measures advocates are happy to tell you they hope you die.

They will inform you that your time is running out and that the Normals—usually referred to as “racists” or “Xtians” or “gun lovers” or the whatever unpersons they are screaming about at the moment—will pay.

Oh yes, how they will pay…

Presumably, the ones threatening these horrors will be the ones doing the eliminating of the undesirables, though logistically this seems unsound. The concave-chest crew of pasty couch dwellers who usually traffic in this low-grade trolling are unlikely to muster the combat capacity required to scrub the continent of the Normals. The average Normal’s gun safe likely houses exponentially more firepower than the whole of Final Solution Boy’s entire Marxist-theme dorm could ever muster.

When the revolution comes, its vanguard will be disturbed to discover that its intended victims are significantly feistier—and shootier—than the spineless administrators and complicit academics they are used to pushing around. The Normals are heavily armed, many of them are military trained, and after seeing the Antifa posers doing their thing while the cops were restrained by the radicals’ fellow travelers in government, Normals are not in a playful mood.

Others do want Normals dead but aren’t fronting about going out and making that happen. They are talking about how the Normals are going to die off on their own. This is where a shocking number of the Elite—not all, by any means, but a surprising number—will jump in and own up to their preferences. But the fact remains that every time some frustrated Bernie supporter, Black Lives Matter nut, or immigrant member of the Religion of Peace decides to open fire in a gun-free zone, there’s always some scribbler for a mainstreamish liberal website or an assistant adjunct sociology professor at a second-tier college who makes him/her/xirself notorious for tweeting “NEXT TIME I HOPE THEY GO TO A CHURCH AND SHOOT ALL YOU MICRO PENIS JESUS GUN FREAKS’ KIDS.”

With this bunch, it’s always about the Jesus and the guns and the penises.

But generally, they are happy to run out the clock on the Normals, sure that time will grind finely and that the Normals of today will eventually meet their Savior. In this they are correct, but at the same time they make the unsupported assumption that the follow-on generations are going to be so thoroughly infused with the same weird psychoses that spawned the current crop of young leftist Elitists that in the future there will be no Normals.

Of course, most people are Normals. In any group, people will eventually divide into the ones who run things and the ones who just want to get on with their lives. That’s simply human nature, but leftists probably are not the right people to talk to about human nature. Their entire ideology is dedicated to defeating it.

In any case, the long-run death wish for the Normals would be doomed to failure even if it worked at first. If there were no Normals, there would be no Elite, since as we have seen, the Elite in America exists purely in opposition to the Normals. Everyone will identify as Elite, and therefore the Elite itself will have to itself be broken apart into the equivalent of Formerly Elite Normals and a New Elite that can differentiate itself in its opposition to the Formerly Elite Normals. Whether there are material benefits and the power and prestige available to the top ranks of the Elite, or just the smugness the affiliated Elite gets from feeling better than the Normals, you cannot have the perks of being Elite if everyone else is Elite, too.

It all sounds very confusing and tiresome, but on the bright side, if it were to happen, today’s Normals would by definition all be dead and would not be around to be bored by the post-victory Elites’ tiresome antics.

The fact remains, however, the Elite’s desired end state for the Normals is that they go away. No, they have not thought that through, and no, that can never actually happen, but that’s what they think they want. Whether it is today or tomorrow or in a few decades, they wish for the Normals to be gone so that they can be free of the last vestiges of restraint, of fealty to the traditional mores of the bourgeois, and create the Elite utopia.

But what the Elite really wants is for the Normals to be enslaved.

Not in literal chains, though that’s certainly an option for the most uppity of the Normals who insist on flouting the New Rules. The enslavement they would impose is not something out of Roots, but one where the Normals continue to work to create the wealth and perform the basic functions within society that allow the Elite to enjoy the perks of their position in comfort and safety, while depriving the Normals of any meaningful ability to govern themselves.

Kaden is horrified that the guy from Fontana has the same say, the same vote, as he does. After all, the guy from Fontana is not even remotely woke and is certain to vote wrong. Democracy is far too important for the people to be any part of it.

Until the administration of Donald Trump, with its assault on political correctness and regulatory rollbacks, everything we have seen in recent decades has been consistent with that one goal—to slowly whittle away the power of Normals, collectively and individually.

Then the Elite can rule without accountability, without limits. It can do as it pleases.

And the Elites move toward this goal by exercising government power and cultural power to limit the ability of Normals to live as they see fit.

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, of assembly, to petition, and of the press, a placement that is a recognition of the centrality of these rights to a free people. And those rights are under assault.

Those rights are under assault because Normals are daring to exercise them and it’s getting in the way. The danger to the Elite from unfettered Normal expression has grown exponentially because technology (particularly the internet) has enabled Normals to express their ideas to a wide audience by bypassing the Elite gatekeepers who controlled discourse in the past.

Free speech for… those people… was fine when it was purely theoretical. But now every housewife, insurance agent, and beat cop can jump online, sometimes anonymously, and say whatever they want.

Which is often what the Elite do not want said. So they try to stop it.

Sometimes they do it with the blunt instrument of state power, though all that talk about free expression has—until now—made outright punishing speech kind of awkward in America. But in Europe, which our Elite feels has so much to teach us, the Elite has already seen fit to dispense with those obsolete Enlightenment ideas like free speech since their own Normals started to use those rights and used them wrongly. In Britain today, you can be arrested for offending someone. You can go to one of the local squares, express some doubt that the green and pleasant land ought to be importing a whole new electorate for the benefit of the Labour Party, and some bobby will haul you off. The police regularly use social media to inform the electorate of their new legal obligation not to make statements in public or online that their betters find unacceptable. Britain and the rest of Western Europe was freed or kept free at the cost of considerable blood, including American blood, and today its Elite has chosen to squander that gift.

America’s Elite turns its collective eyes to the Old World and nods in appreciation at their overseas siblings’ achievement in casting of the shackles of civil rights for the Normals. For civil rights are a fetter that binds and limits the power of the Elite, and therefore civil rights are hateful. Had Hillary Clinton managed not to be crushed by Donald Trump, is it too much to imagine that she and her ilk would have pressed for similar laws?

The Elite already used the Internal Revenue Service to stop political activism by Normals. It used the Department of Justice and the FBI to spy on the Normals’ candidate in 2016—and to try to frame him for the kind of “Russian collusion” Hillary and her seedy coterie of grifters manifestly engaged in. How far a leap would it be for an Elite with Hillary at the helm and willing Congress (or merely a willing bureaucracy) to impose the kind of speech rules the European Elite has been able to use to silence its own Normals?

Spoiler: It’s not much of a leap at all.

After all, the Elite has managed to impose restrictions on expression where their power is already unlimited. Free speech does not exist on college campuses, except in the insincere recitals of clichés about free expression by administrators who ruthlessly suppress any expression of any idea that does not come with the stamp of approval of the faculty senate and the pierced, freak show radical contingents that are always milling about our universities. If you want to see the America the Elite dreams of, stroll across a campus. Maybe you will find some poor schmuck offering non-Elite-approved ideas off in the ten-by-ten-foot “free expression space” out behind the shed where they store the broken riding mowers.

Those who dare express wrongthink are hassled and persecuted by fussy bureaucrats investigating “hate crimes” and “hate speech” and who can always detect wrong thoughts among the dissidents but never manage to detect the hate being spewed by the good little boys and girls and others who toe the Elite line.

Try to run a conservative student publication on a college campus. It will be nonstop war, on the off chance the student council manages to find a few bucks in the alternative media budget after funding publications for nineteen categories of radicalized ethnic agitators, twelve brands of socialists, and forty-seven flavors of LGBTQ&D!H&$.

The Elite unleashes the power of hassle. What they can’t ban outright they make such a pain in the ass that Normals censor themselves. And if you can’t say what you think, are you really a citizen, or are you merely a subject?

And that is what they wish to bring to society at large. If they can’t pass a law that you may not say “Z” or “Y,” they will seek to make it so miserable informally that you will not even dare try to say it. You cannot call illegal aliens what they are—“illegal aliens”—without some huffy Elitist screaming that you are “racist.” No, they must be called “undocumented immigrants” or, better yet, “undocumented workers.” Always watch for language that obscures reasonability by portraying the actors as passive spectators—“undocumented,” as if being without the documents allowing them to be in our country was some mysterious act of Gaia, mere happenstance that the alien had no control over. “Alien?” Oh, I mean “worker,” because everyone who comes here illegally—oops, I mean “suffered undocumentation somehow”—is a worker. But workers typically work, and many illegals—darn it, I mean “document-challenged persons”—do not actually work.

What about the Dreamers, brought here as kids? Were they workers? Isn’t the whole point of them that they were just kids? Were they doing child labor here in America? Damn, then their homelands must really suck. So really, the word workers is inaccurate factually, but it is accurate in the meta sense that it supports the narrative. That means it is therefore somehow truer than something that is merely literally true, or what we used to call “true.”

One could get really confused. Which is almost certainly the idea.

George Orwell, whose books were never intended to be how-to manuals yet here we are, would appreciate the Elite’s use of language to constrict the possible range of ideas. But in this case it is not some mentally superior class of supervillains trying to starve the Normals of their sovereignty by compressing down the Normals’ access to the vast landscape of knowledge the Elite enjoys. The Elite willingly constricts its own thoughts.

This is the core irony of an Elite that is often in no way elite. They are not trying to make the Normals as open-minded as the Elite. They are trying to make the Normals as narrow-minded as the Elite.

If this was a carefully conceived and laid-out plan, it could hardly be more dangerous. But instead of being a conscious effort, it is the natural result of having a meritocracy that does not require its members to demonstrate merit. The Elite simply seeks obedience and control, and it tries to strangle any new birth of freedom in its crib. In every instance, the Elite seeks to maximize its own authority at the expense of the Normals.

It attacks the basic concept that Americans are suited to govern themselves, and substitutes the reign of experts.

It prioritizes the institutions of society over the purpose for which those institutions allegedly exist and over the interests of Normal citizens.

It resents and rejects accountability, because those concepts assume that the Normals have the moral standing to hold the experts and the institutions to account, to weigh their successes against their failures, as if Normals were created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Nonsense! A master is not accountable to his slaves, and that is why the Elite refuses to be accountable to the Normals.

Enter the Trump administration and the so-called #Resistance. Leave aside the breathtaking chutzpah, of nearly stolen valor proportions, of adopting a moniker made glorious by the sacrifice of those who risked torture and death to fight actual Nazis behind the lines in Europe. Instead this pampered Elite, safe behind the civil rights and liberties it holds in contempt and seeks to undermine for others, acts not merely to reject the authority of President Donald J. Trump. The Elite acts to reject the authority of those who elected him.

How dare that guy from Fontana presume to have a say. Says are for people like Kaden.

Remember the heady days of October 2016, when Hillary Clinton was turning in some of her most lifelike performances as she pretended to be outraged that Trump would not commit in advance to overlook her attempts to rig the election? Considering that her minions were in the process of rigging the election and her taste for booze, she kept a remarkably straight face. One might almost have believed that she was committed to the principle that the results of fair elections must be respected if our society is to function as a Republic.

And then she lost Wisconsin and all those cheeseheads suddenly became pawns of the Kremlin. Hillary lost her taste for recognizing the legitimacy of the election faster than she lost her shoe passing out on the sidewalk that previous September.

Do not be fooled by the gyno-hat-clad hags and militant visual arts majors marching in the streets, pausing only to listen as Ashley Judd shares slam poems about her oppression as a woman of womynhood. This is not about Trump, though they do hate him and how he holds the Elite in utter contempt. Donald Trump is merely the avatar of a greater movement, of the Normals themselves. The Elite pivots to attacking him because that is its go-to move; Alinsky Rule No. 13 demands they personalize a target in every battle.

But make no mistake; they are protesting the Normals for daring to assert their authority to enact a macro change in the direction of society. Of course, enacting these macro changes is precisely what the Normals are supposed to do. The Normals cede control of day-to-day operations to the Elite-dominated experts and institutions and reserve the right to reassert control if the Elite fails to perform. Look at the Elite’s track record—failed wars, economic stagnation, rampant self-dealing among those entrusted with the keys to the culture. The Elite should not have been surprised that the Normals got tired of their crap and kicked them in the ass.

Except the Elite had changed over time. It got high on its own supply, so to speak, that supply being the Frankfurt School bullshit pushed by the dealers in academia harping on the total moral bankruptcy of Normal American society.

As the Elite grew to hate the Normals and their values, and to oppose those values rather than at least pretend to honor them even if they did not do so in private, the calculus changed. In prior generations, the Elite understood that the Normals had a reasonable expectation of a competently run society, and the Elite more or less accepted that notion. After all, the Elite and the Normals shared basic beliefs about family and faith and patriotism. The Normals were dumb and boring and really, really square—and when you were a young Elite it was fun to scandalize them with the occasional dirty book by Henry Miller—but they were harmless. And they were necessary.

But then the Elite began to teach itself that the Normals were not harmless, that the Normals were not merely dumb and boring and really, really square, but evil, sexist, racist, imperialist warmongering monsters. And now the Elite were not only smarter and more sophisticated but also morally superior for having adopted the moral framework of the predominantly liberal Elite.

Hence the hatred that results in the Elite wanting those it is supposed to be serving dead or enslaved.

The Elite went from tolerating the Normals to hating the Normals over the several decades since the sixties, when the young Elites rebelled and were beaten back by the older Elite and the Silent Majority of Normals. But now yesterday’s young Elite is today’s old Elite. They were now the experts. They were now in the driver’s seats not of a fleet of chartreuse 1966 VW vans but of the Elite institutions that ran the country.

And they hated the people they were supposed to answer to, so they stopped answering to them. They ignored the Normals and ran the operations of the institutions not for the benefit of the masses but for themselves, for their own material and ideological interests.

And the rift between the Elite and the Normals grew. And grew. And grew.

And when the Normals rose up in 2009 as the Tea Party and were suppressed temporarily, the frustration built up instead of dissipated as it had after Howard Jarvis’s tax revolt and the election of Reagan in the seventies and after Bill Clinton good-ole-boyed his way through two terms after besting Ross Perot in the nineties.

Trump was the explosion, the Mount St. Helens of American politics.

It stunned the Elite, which immediately decided this rebellion was an outrage. The #Resistance saw Trump as individually illegitimate, but more important, it saw the people who elected him as illegitimate. They were bad people—haters and gun nuts, Jesus freaks and canoeist-raping perverts. And they had no moral right to power.

That is the rub. The Elite no longer recognizes that the Normals have any moral right to participate in their own governance.

Everything that has happened since the president was inaugurated reinforces this undeniable truth. The phrase they use is “normalize”—“Don’t normalize Trump.” Don’t treat Trump like he has a right to be where he is, to exercise the powers the Constitution invests in him, to the respect or reverence that they had demanded for Barack Obama.

What they really mean is that they refuse to normalize the exercise of power by those not approved by the Elite. And they consider this a moral duty, since in their shriveled conception of morality—one divorced from the Judeo-Christian tradition and largely manufactured from whole cloth by leftists like the Kwanzaa holiday—the Normals are fatally tainted by their original sin.

They are not Elite, and they cannot be allowed a voice in how they live their own lives.

Look at the way the bureaucrats closed ranks in what they considered “their” agencies to fight against Trump keeping the promises he made to the American people before they voted. Heartbroken Deputy Assistant Underdeputies for Twigs and Toads from the Environmental Protection Agency would seek out receptive journalists, who would offer them the professional Elite courtesy of a sympathetic hearing when the poor bureaucrat whimpered about how Scott Pruitt was daring to undermine all the wonderful work Obama had done in addressing the growing twigs and toads crisis.

The mask came off completely during the Trump/Russia grift, where the Deep State did not even pretend there was no Deep State. Beyond the self-dealing and self-service of the allegedly self-sacrificing Elitists at the top of federal law enforcement’s food chain, and past the media’s slobbering obedience to the narrative the Elite generated to cover up its malfeasance, what started as a scam veered into extortion and threats against those the people had chosen to lead.

On February 2, 2018, just after the Devin Nunes memo dropped, CNN—what else—issued a tweet that read, “Former CIA counterterrorism official Phil Mudd: The FBI people ‘are ticked’ and they’ll be saying of Trump, ‘You’ve been around for 13 months. We’ve been around since 1908. I know how this game is going to be played. We’re going to win.’”¹ So, basically, the unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch were going to somehow defeat the elected president of the United States because he dared defy them?

Way to completely substantiate the critique of the Deep State.

Remember, when people like this hack talk about “Trump,” they are talking about Normal Americans. Trump is just one person, a symbol, and a not untalented politician, but he is not the threat to them.

Normals, particularly the Militant Normals, are the threat. If that beast gets loose, they are done.

The campaign against “normalizing” what should have been a routine transfer of power is simply a desperate rearguard action by an Elite that feels its power being challenged. The Elite lived with past uprisings and adapted to them. But back then, the Elite did not have the visceral hatred and contempt for the Normals that is at the core of its class ideology today.

They can’t let the Normals exercise power. The Normals are evil.

The guy from Fontana is evil, not because of anything he has done, but because of who he is. And, conversely, Kaden is good, not because of anything he has done, but because of who he is.

For the first time, we have an Elite that actively hates the people of the nation it purports to run.

Not merely looks down upon them as dull and ignorant, though it does.

Not merely holds them in contempt for their parochial habits and bad taste, though it does.

It hates them for who they are and for the values they hold.

The Elite considers the people over whom it places itself not merely moral inferiors but morally bankrupt, possessors of parochial and provincial beliefs that are contrary to the most deeply held modern Elite values.

Morality? Hollywood’s tropes best describe the Elite’s view of the traditional morality of the heartland. Behind those picket fences and waving flags lurk hate and violence and bigotry and, worst of all, real Christianity. In Hollywood’s product, almost every small town is a seething cauldron of racial menace, every suburb an intellectual wasteland steeped in hypocrisy, every small businessman corrupt, and every minister a drooling Bible nut or closet pervert on a quest to stop those sinful kids from shimmying.

That’s not just the movies and television, and practically every Netflix series ever. That’s what the Elite really thinks. Hollywood is not a thought leader; it is an Elite mirror. It reflects back the values of its Elite audience to flatter it by reaffirming how so very right and moral it is.

The Elite moralism angle is key. It’s the part of the puzzle that is new and changes the prior dynamic. But the old conflict of interest is still there, the temptation toward self-dealing. Normals never expected the Elite not to skim a bit of the take for itself. A reasonable bit. That they would enrich themselves was part of the cost of having an Elite. Not that the Elite would admit it.

But now you have an Elite that actively despises and seeks to punish those it looks down upon. Plus, the spoils are nice, too. If the Normals step in to exercise power then their own power necessarily declines. So does their take. But they won’t acknowledge that.

Instead the Elite denies the obvious. Why, this is about protecting the morality! No, none of this is about maintaining their positions and prestige! No, none of this is about securing their own rice bowls! Ignore that fact that several of America’s richest counties now surround Washington, DC.

They are not venal and self-serving. No, they are the selfless resistance to the tyrant in the White House and those deplorable people who support him.

You know, the Normals.