Quoting the Z-man

I talk enough here and there about political and social issues that I probably should actually come up with a tag for it other than RANDOM. But I try to convince myself that I don't really want to talk about it much, and so I cling to using a very poorly concieved tag. Let me quote part of a post by the Z-man on Taki's.

The defining feature of this age is that the people in charge are certain about things that are imaginary. The government, for example, has denied Christians a permit to assemble for the National Day of Prayer, because they fear invisible White Nationalists will launch a revolution.

They think this because they are sure the January protest at the Capitol was part of a plot to overthrow the government. The nation saw mostly flag-waving boomers taking selfies and laughing with the cops. The political class is told it was cover for an invisible army of white supremacists. These white supremacists are lurking out there on the other side of the razor wire, waiting for the chance to pounce. [...]

This starts with Joe Biden, a man who has spent his adult life in government. His “private sector experience” was at a political law firm for a year fifty years ago. Now, of course, his brain is scrambled eggs, but even if he were still in control of his faculties, he would have no reason to question the claims about invisible Nazis hiding around the capital. Why would he? Everything he knows comes from government.

His second-in-command and future leader of the free world (stop laughing) is Kamala Harris, who has never sullied herself in the dreaded private sector. She spent the first four years of her “work life” making sure Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown was feeling groovy. Then she ran for office and it has been twenty years of uninterrupted life in one elected office after another. [...]

It is not just Democrats who are allergic to honest labor. The top Republican in the House is Kevin McCarthy. His first job out of college was as a staffer for Congressman Bill Thomas of California. Then he was chairman of the Young Republican National Federation. He was elected to the California State Assembly in 2002 and then won a House seat in 2006. He has been in Congress ever since.

The GOP’s second-in-command in the House is Steve Scalise, a man who appears to have started out in life with the hope of making himself a productive citizen. He majored in computer science at LSU. He must have fallen in with a bad crowd along the way, as he never made it to the dreaded private sector. Instead, it was time in the Louisiana state legislature and then off to his current spot in Washington.

The No. 3 Republican is the most amusing. Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, is the Republican Conference Chair. Unlike her bosses, she technically had a job in the dreaded private sector. She worked at a law firm that is called White & Case LLP. Granted, it is just a cat’s paw for the American empire, but it technically counts as the private sector. After that short run, she was on the dole in one government job after another before landing in Congress. [...]

This is why these people sound so weird. How could Liz Cheney know anything about the concerns of the people she is supposed to represent? Wyoming is just a place she has read about and visited on vacation. The people of the state would be better off hiring a Frenchman who once went on holiday to Jackson Hole. That Frenchman would know he knows nothing about Wyoming and would maybe hire some locals to help him out. Liz Cheney’s staff is all pod people from the Washington hack-a-rama.

This phenomenon is not exclusive to politics. The media is stocked with carnies who maybe waited tables once, but otherwise have no contact with present reality. Their life is on stage, playing the role written for them by equally obtuse and ignorant people. The mass media is a circus, but the audience is out of sight from the performers. The media carnies cannot hear the laughter and jeering. It is nothing but piped-in applause, which they assume is the real thing. [...]

This is why they are so certain of these crackpot theories. They have barricaded themselves behind razor wire and armed men because they are absolutely sure the crackpot theories are true. Again, people are most certain of the things they least understand. The Cloud People know so little of the Dirt People, they will believe anything about them, because they have no way to know otherwise. It is why we find ourselves ruled by increasingly foreign fanatics spouting bizarre conspiracy theories.

History says that when the gap between the reality of the ruling class and actual reality gets too wide, there is a break. The French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution are two examples. The ruling class became detached from the people they ruled, so they could not see what was coming. Similarly, the credentialed naïfs of the managerial class are blind to present reality. They do not know what they do not know, but they are absolutely certain of it and it will not end well.