Contrary to most opinion, a society’s ruling class attains its position by being cleverer and more determined than the rest of society. The first generation to rise to the top of society and establish itself as a ruling class, or at least an important faction of the ruling class, earned their way to the position. They may not be smarter or more virtuous, but their combination of talents is what put them at the top. Luck played a role, but otherwise, they earned their way into the position.

Decay is a feature of the universe. Even black holes lose mass over time, a process known as “Hawking Radiation.” The first generation to set themselves up at the top of a new order are more ruthless and intelligent than the rest of society. The generations that come after them are another matter. Decay sets in with the subsequent generations, as positions of power are taken up by people who did nothing to attain their position, other than have the right parents.

An example of this process is in this story about a Manhattan book party for the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss. According to the Jerusalem Post, Weiss is one of the 50 most influential Jews. In fact, they have her listed as number seven, which would qualifier as being something of a super Jew. The veracity of such a claim is disputable, but Mx. Weiss is no doubt an influential person among the ruling elite. She is treated as an opinion setter and spokesman for her generation of elites.

Mx. Weiss is also remarkably mediocre. In fact, mediocre in this case is probably a slander against the honestly mediocre. She was famously outfoxed by YouTube personality Joe Rogan, a man who spends his free time smoking weed, taking blows to the head and watching cartoons. She went on his show repeating Zionist talking points, but proved incapable of explaining any of what she was saying. She was revealed to be a dingbat with no grasp of the basics.

The fact that this was not disqualifying is a sign that the Jewish ruling elite of today is a significant downgrade from those who made the last century the Jewish century. Further proof of this is the fact that people still pretend she is an intellectual. Her participation in the entirely synthetic Intellectual Dark Web is a sad commentary on the decline of Jewish intellectuals in America. If the Tribe is counting on people like Weiss to lead them, they best have the bug-out bags ready.

The career path of Mx. Weiss is what you see in a decaying ruling class. Her reason to have an exalted position in the media is she was willing to slander BDS activists while a college student at Columbia. Her hard work as a skirmisher in that never-ending Bronze Age conflict landed her a spot at the Jewish Forward. Two years later she is at the Wall Street Journal and then a few years later the New York Times. That’s quite remarkable for someone who cannot outwit Joe Rogan.

Of course, Mx. Weiss is not where she is because of her intellect. She is where she is because she can be relied upon to repeat the talking points popular with an ossified ruling elite. She has been assigned to the department charged with repeating the blood libel against white Americans with regards to Jews. Her first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, is a collection of talking points Max Boot threw away, because he thought they would make him look deranged.

Mx. Weiss is not an outlier. She is just an amusing example of the low-quality harpy that is taking up positions in the ruling class. Her robotic recitation of Zionist talking points makes for good parody, but her lack of intelligence is emblematic of the emergent woke intellectual class. As Steve Sailer recently noted, it is impossible to find a bright and curious person in the woke intellectual class. They are not even clever in how they present the tired dogmas of multiculturalism and intersectionality.

In addition to the overall decline in intelligence of Western society, another factor plays a role in the rise of a dingbat class. The intellectual elite that won their positions in the last century selected proteges who supported their position. They were not selecting people who would challenge their newly won status. Instead, they selected people, who agreed with and extended their opinions and ideas. In short order, flattering the master became the fast track to fame and fortune in the intellectual set.

Half a century ago, Tom Wolfe described the Manhattan intellectual set as bourgeois urbanite poseurs, who decorated their language with radical language in order to affect worldliness and prestige. These were the sorts of people who liked being seen with radicals and terrorists, but lived in safe comfortable neighborhoods, made possible by the sorts of people, who made sure the radicals never won. It was a contrived radicalism to disguise a timid adherence to conventional bourgeois norms.

Today, the heirs of those radicals, lampooned by Wolfe, are bourgeois urbanite poseurs spending their time pretending to be free thinkers and skeptics. They decorate their language with words and phrases borrowed from books they never read, in order to affect erudition and sophistication. Instead of posing as radicals, they pretend to be thoughtful intellectuals questioning elite opinion. It is a contrived intellectualism to decorate banal recitations of managerial class dogma.

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