I grew up in a world in which most authorities could be trusted most of the time.  True, it was already a cliché that Washington, D.C. was full of liars.  And yes, everyone knew about medical malpractice.  Even people who weren’t Marxists understood that corporations, from time to time, were guilty of committing genuine wrongs against the public.  Still, overall, the people who were running things were usually accountable.  There was an ingrained, unspoken sense of decency and social responsibility long before the current twisted understanding of social justice (i.e., revenge) had a chance to muscle it out.  People in authority may have seen themselves as a bit better than the common run of humanity, but they didn’t quite see themselves as an entirely different species.  They were the best and brightest of us, but not yet an utterly alien aristocracy.

In the last couple of decades, almost all of our institutions have failed.  One after another has been caught doing things that no one ever imagined they would do.  Most of us remember a time when the FBI were not the hired goons of the Democrat party, but almost always obeyed the same laws they were sworn to enforce.  Most of us can remember when the Democrat party was, at least from time to time, still worthy of its name — and might cough up the occasional politician who wasn’t simply an empty cipher for the radical activists who now apparently run the DNC.  More broadly, there was a time when politicians lied when they were backed into a corner, or maybe when it was expedient — but didn’t lie as a matter of course.

Corporations have always been in the business to make money, but in principle, they tried to make money by selling people things they needed or at least wanted.  They did not make money by bribing government to mandate that people buy their products (as happened with Obamacare and the insurance industry) or to mandate that we inject their products into our bodies on pain of losing our jobs (as happened to the military and health care workers with the COVID “vaccine” — and almost happened to everybody else).  Companies that made packaged food did their best to make it tasty so it would sell — but they did not hire chemists and biologists to make it literally addictive.  There was a time in which the FDA could have been reasonably expected to care that roughly 9 out of 10 Americans are metabolically unhealthy.  It wouldn’t have been crazy to assume that everything you bought in the grocery, other than cigarettes and alcohol, was fundamentally safe for human consumption.  Who in his right mind believes that now?  Who thinks the NIH, or whatever three-letter agency Anthony Fauci is a loathsome part of — gives a damn about your health or your children’s?  Or that the governing body of American psychologists, who has come out firmly for “gender-affirming care” (i.e., castration on demand), really wants to make a happier, saner society?

Who would have thought that freedom of speech would be under serious threat?  Or that a national election would be rigged?  Or that the openly racist 1619 Project would be taught in lieu of civics?

A great deal of sound but ineffective rational argument is, unfortunately, wasted on the political and cultural elites.  They are not listening.  I used to watch Trey Gowdy savage this new aristocracy in congressional hearings.  Now that he’s retired, Josh Hawley and a number of others have taken up the torch.  It’s entertaining, but little ever comes of it.  The people who really run things sit and stare, a little confused, because the universe of reason and the spokespeople of the hated public have smudged the fringes of their bubble.  They are annoyed but understandably unshaken.  They know perfectly well that this is just a sort of play, because their bubble has never actually been made to burst.  It’s quite a tough bubble, actually, made of the latest high-tech materials, not only elastic, but usually opaque.  Lois Lerner, James Clapper, Bill and Hillary Clinton have all walked away unscathed.  The law is for the little people, not for the people who give the orders.  True, the flamboyant Jeffrey Epstein paid with his dirty little life, but he’s the exception that proves the rule.  He wasn’t killed for grooming minors; he was killed for getting too near the bubble with an uncomfortably sharp pin.

This rot of our society didn’t happen overnight.  To some extent, the shift in attitudes has been generational.  The Greatest Generation, the one that saved the world from the real Nazis — as opposed to the merely rhetorical Nazis we have now — have faded away, as old soldiers have been rumored to do.  They may have passed the torch to JFK’s generation, but after that, the torch was summarily snuffed out for outgassing too much carbon dioxide.  I think Charles Murray’s observation about the concentration of people with the highest I.Q.s into a handful of hallowed universities has been a phenomenon too few people noticed or worried about.  In the end, the “best and brightest” have become a nation unto themselves.  They ceased to be the “best” when they decided they weren’t answerable to anybody and they ceased to be the “brightest” when they became too connected to suffer any consequences from failure.

We are now many decades into this intellectual and cultural inbreeding, all of which has gone on out of our sight while we ordinary mortals have gone our own way until we now no longer can.  Trump was a shock to the elites.  His only reason for being, in their view, was to feed the bubble money, then go away.  Picking a president from outside the bubble was unthinkable.  Didn’t we understand just who they are?

It’s pretty obvious that the Blinkens, the Garlands, the Mayorkases, and the Yellens of the world do not depend on anything as gauche actual merit.  Prior to Trump, the ruling class sneered at us, but they were usually discreet about it.  After Trump, no one who is paying attention can escape the fact that our masters actually hate us.  The amount of venom the media alone have spat at the general public in the last few years has been breathtaking.  They have gone from seeing us as unpleasant throwbacks they would have to socially engineer into their fanciful utopia somehow to seeing us as vermin they would have to, one way or another, eliminate altogether.

I do not enjoy this outlook, but I cannot make myself un-see it.  Our enemies affirm their dark intentions at every opportunity.  Considering what our “leaders” have already done, it is hard to imagine anything these people would not be capable of doing in the future.

When people see themselves as the highest accomplishments of nature, answerable to no one, evil is the inevitable result.  History has shown this with monotonous regularity.  We may thwart them, but we will never rein them in or make any sort of peace with them.  People who imagine they are gods do not bow to mere men.

Image via Pxfuel.