Times Are Changing

Note: The Monday Taki post is up and this week it is somewhat related to the topic in this post but from a different angle. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green doo so if you do not have a subscription, get one. SubscribeStar and Substack.


Last week the people in charge of Penn State University decided to get in the way-back machine and relive the alt-right days. They invited onto campus a bogeyman so that the usual suspects could engage in performative protesting. They invited internet performers Gavin McInnis and Alex Stein to talk to a student group. A group of entitled children was then invited to throw a tantrum outside the event. Eventually, the school cancelled the event for security reasons.

The only people interested in any of it was the regime media that has yet to find a new set of bogeymen to replace those from the Trump years. McInnis went along with it because it is all he has at this point. His edgy right-wing guy act fell apart with the Proud Boys fiasco and dissidents have no interest in him. Alex Stein is trying to be the Matthew Lesko of ambush comedy, so this provided him with a chance to do his act in front of some purple faced coeds for the streaming audience.

The main takeaway from the event is that the white supremacist bogeyman act has run its course and the regime has found nothing to replace it. As a result, the usual suspects are resurrecting old villains like McInnes. The term “Proud Boys” is still something of a dog whistle for the crazies, even though the rest of the world lost interest in the whole thing years ago. It is sort of like how Nixon remained a villain for the crazies well into the 1980’s, after the world had moved onto Reagan.

Of course, the point of these manufactured dramas is for the people running the college campus to pretend they are in a state of emergency. The college campus is the safest place on the planet, but the inhabitants need to feel they are under siege. The forces of darkness are closing in so they have to heroically defend their abracadabra word from the enemy of the abracadabra word. They stage these events so that they can have a few minutes where their fantasies seem real.

If it were anything other than a performance, they could easily handle these things by either not hosting the speakers or putting an end to the protests. There is no reason for a college campus to have these sorts of people on to talk to students. In theory, at least, the students are there to learn, not hear hacky gags from an aging comedian and an internet prankster. Not only are these two not bringing anything to the campus, their act is easily accessible on-line.

On the other hand, the campus could end the protest business by expelling those who create trouble. The students are there to learn and this event was a good time for them to learn that it is immoral to prevent people from speaking or prevent others from hearing a speaker. Expel a few of the troublemakers and the protest culture comes to a screeching halt. This is a state college. These are not future leaders. They are there to get a credential in order to get a middle-class job.

What these sorts of events amount to are something like the historical reenactments around events of the Civil War or Revolutionary War. Historical reenactors enjoy learning the fine details of the period. They spend hours getting their costumes right and working with others in the subculture. Another part of it is escapism. They get to spend the weekend pretending to be a person in another era, an era they find more interesting than the current era.

That is what we have seen on campus for half a century. The long march through the institutions put the old protestors in charge, so they set about recreating the events of their youth, except this time they were the cool administrators. Unlike the squares running the place in their youth, they were down with the cause, at least until something got broken or someone got hurt. Decade after decade this farcical game of make believe gets rebooted on the college campus.

That said, this nonsense may have run its course. One of the weird side effects of the Covid panic is it broke the pattern. For two years no one was allowed on campus, so they could not stage these dramas. The attention whores that agree to play the bogeyman role for these shows have had to move onto other things. Penn State was left with what can charitably be called D-list bogeymen. Instead of playing weddings they jumped at this campus gig.

There is also a growing regime fatigue. That is another consequence of Covid and the events of the 2020 election. The endless lying from the media has shifted public opinion away from this sort of drama. When people thought the campus was simply biased, they could justify people trying to get on campus to counter the bias. In a world where people use the term “regime” and assume everything that comes from official authority is a lie, these dramas make no sense.

Of course, the January 6 pogrom has changed minds as well. In a world where the state will arrest you for being attacked by regime agents posing as protestors, going onto the street to speak your mind is a fool’s errand. Even the flag and costume crowd has figured out that they cannot march around in public. This leaves the regime elements on their own, which makes for a boring performance. Without a bogeyman to attack, they are left to stare at one another.

All of this points to a slight maturing of dissident politics. Guys like McInnis are not getting attention anymore. He staged his own arrest and the response was mostly indifference at his pathetic play for attention. Similarly, more and more dissidents are simply tuning out of regime media. These dramas only work if there is an audience and that audience is drying up. Slowly, it seems, dissidents are disconnecting from the machine and accepting the new reality.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


133 thoughts on “Times Are Changing

  1. After watching Tucker this evening, it’s very possible that The Speaker of the House, is a beard.

    Let that sink in.

    What a strange world we live in.

    13
  2. Here is an excerpt from Vladimir Putin talking a few days ago at the Russian conference. Well worth a read:

    “The so-called West which is, of course, a theoretical construct since it is not united and clearly is a highly complex conglomerate, but I will still say that the West has taken a number of steps in recent years and especially in recent months that are designed to escalate the situation. As a matter of fact, they always seek to aggravate matters, which is nothing new, either. This includes the stoking of war in Ukraine, the provocations around Taiwan, and the destabilisation of the global food and energy markets. To be sure, the latter was, of course, not done on purpose, there is no doubt about it. The destabilisation of the energy market resulted from a number of systemic missteps made by the Western authorities that I mentioned above. As we can see now, the situation was further aggravated by the destruction of the pan-European gas pipelines. This is something otherworldly altogether, but we are nevertheless witnessing these sad developments.

    Global power is exactly what the so-called West has at stake in its game. But this game is certainly dangerous, bloody and, I would say, dirty. It denies the sovereignty of countries and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and tramples upon other states’ interests. In any case, even if denial is the not the word used, they are doing it in real life. No one, except those who create these rules I have mentioned is entitled to retain their identity: everyone else must comply with these rules.”

    He directly points out the West and her satellites hypocrisy irt the geopolitical games they have played the last 3 decades.

    18
    1
  3. And … in the DePape Pelosi break-in the WaPo has an article that is rambling and prattling about the details of how and when he broke in, his motives, how he got in and past the security detail given the environment of insurrection we live under … …

    No. It is all about his depraved far right associations and leanings. It was certain to mention all of their political enemies and perpetual nemesis including far right ethno nationalists, (frenz; never heard of that) to associate them all with DePape and his lunacy.

    In any case, carny world continues. I am juxtaposing the WaPo article and GAE pop culture and its endless pursuit of hobgoblins, invented enemies and non-problems as it forsakes confronting its very real demons and the real world problems of its own making with the sober words and warnings of Putin.

    In the meantime, will the world of fraternity booze fests and white outs prepare our next generation of men to deal with serious men? Today’s Taki post seems like an ominous warning.

    14
    1
    • “Frens” is deliberately childish-sounding (“cozy”) 4chan slang for people you trust. It isn’t an acronym. But I’m sure the ADL says it is. Like most esoteric underground internet nonsense, it “broke containment” and is just a thing people take at face value and repeat on Twitter.

      Today’s sign that the simulation is running out of free memory (or the conspiracy includes /ourguys/ winking at us): The dude’s name is The Pepe.

    • How come I can read translations of Putin’s man, many rational arguments for the war, but can’t find a single US leader who can articulate anything more than “Russia Bad, Putin=Hitler…don’t forget Poland in 1939!!”

      George W. Bush could at least articulate his lies for Middle East invasion, and had an entire team of senior statemen and generals who would pontificate a casus belli.

      19
      • Lol. Comparing W to Putin is like comparing Dostoyevsky to Dr. Seuss. (No offense to Dr. Seuss).

    • Reminds me of 2020’s Summer of Love where anything that went wrong was due to white supremacy. Otherwise it was just peaceful protesting!

  4. Zman, today’s Taki piece was very insightful. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else draw the connection between these two theories of history (great man vs. historical determinism) and the shoddy class of leadership in the West. It’s a shrewdly observed point. Thanks.

    12
  5. Forgive me if I get sophomoric here, but just some kaczynski-lite pipe cleaning:

    Mass society is a mistake. It’s not what the human-animals was built for psychologically or in our hearts. It’s all masks and lies. It HAS to be masks and lies. And it leads to the absurd and grotesque spectacle of a very few men accumulating godlike power on earth by harnessing the power of the masses. A billionaire is worth THOUSANDS of a normal men and has that much power. But is the billionaire some kind of superman? No, he’s just a man and not likely a scrupulous or moral man. But society create this artificial contrivance where such men wield godlike power.

    I admire the old school factory owners and small businessmen who actually walked the floors of their factories and shops themselves. They were rich, deservedly so, but not SO much richer than the masses of men whom they organized and generated wealth from. A boss, a leader, but not a freakin’ god.

    I don’t know how mankind exits the artificiality and madness of civilization. One society demands another society organize in order to defend itself and on and on into the perpetual warmachine. It’s just a huge endless cycle of Sartre’s “No Exit.” Nor do I know how people can possibly extricate themselves from the system. I know I NEED plumbing and electricity, supermarkets and all the rest. I’m a domesticated pony and can’t really do a helluvalot.

    If there must be society, my needs are “Leave it to Beaver” type simple. Homogenous that selects for strength, health, and decency. Men are strong, women are pretty and they get married young. Just the three Rs taught in good public schools and not trannies, vaxes, and george floydism and all the rest. That modest request has become not simply far too much to ask, but criminal to ask!

    52
  6. This really reinforces how much of the right wing grift just existed as dancing boys for the regime. Right before an election where they’re afraid Mr. Gumby-er, Fetterman- is going to lose, they get Gayvin McInnesass to put on a Hitler outfit and march around for the braying masses as a last ditch effort to preserve Our Democracy™.

    13
  7. McInnes’s SWAT stunt basically ended any chance anyone on the right would back him up. His various antics thinned that herd pretty well but that was the final nail in his coffin. He also has a tendency to throw everyone under the bus. When the Proud Boys we’re getting heat, McInnes couldn’t disassociate from his own organization fast enough. True cowardice.

    31
  8. “Expel a few of the troublemakers and the protest culture comes to a screeching halt.“

    How true. There is also another aspect of campus antics you left out, so I’ll fill others in. Every campus that I’ve ever heard of has its own police force and jurisdiction. Most all of the student antics you’ve described to stop “conservative” speakers or prevent an audience *are* illegal by State and Federal law! So we could change your statement to:

    “ Expel—or arrest—a few of the troublemakers and the protest culture comes to a screeching halt.”

    So why does this not happen? Because the University is in charge of their police and in turn which laws that the police will and will not enforce. I remember at my old University when the Border Patrol came to speak in a “classroom” at the invite of the instructor—unadvertised and low key affair and pertinent to the course material.

    Word got out and a radical instructor with a few students came to the classroom and began to chant and shout down the BP. This also interrupted *all* the classes being held on that floor. The campus police were summoned by other instructors and the first thing they did upon arrival at the “scene” was to phone the Dean of Students for instructions.

    In short, the “law” to follow/enforce was to be the subjective diktat of a Leftist political administrator. The police were told to ignore State law regarding “interference with the peaceful conduct of a public educational institution”, but rather to tell the BP to leave campus. The BP was not only told to leave, but they were not escorted. So they had to walk across campus while a crowd built up and excoriated them along the way with insult and ridicule! Of course, the crowd—like a junk yard dog—stopped at the edge of campus, not venturing onto non-university jurisdiction where the BP or City police could arrest them.

    This question of quasi “private” police forces is one that has been discussed by others in the field. Police presence is needed, but State could and should, place these forces under State control—not Leftist ideologues. Same goes for Cities as well. Some of the biggest scandals we read of are from smallish Cities and police/government corruption.

    26
    • I am slightly confused by this.

      I understand the uni police thing taking directions from admin, but you are suggesting that in actuality universities are aloidal title lands that have their own laws and can ignore the law of the state in which they sit. Where does this come from?

      This then is completely condoned by state authorities?

      Can I set up an office, employ my own guy as “police” and just have whatever laws I feel like irrespective as to the state laws?

      • There is precedent for universities grounds being outside the jurisdiction of normal police going back to the middle ages. There have been many incidents of university students taking up arms and battling against police entering their “turf”. Casanova participated in one of these battles when he was a student in Venice. A policeman entered the dormitories to search for illegal material, one of the students shot at him but missed, and the policeman returned fire and killed the student. After several days of university students patrolling the streets with carbines and murdering every policeman they found, the police surrendered, and the policeman who entered the dormitories was hanged.

        • I understand the times before modern policing as many areas where grey as to legal jurisdiction like churches etc.

          We are talking about current times. It seems odd that this has retained, where I can’t think of another similar area apart from military bases.

          • Additionally to that, we are talking about the US. How does that tradition happen in such a new country?

          • Remember that America was basically an experiment in taking every idea born of the Enlightenment and basing an entire sociopolitical system on them. And reverence for the University was a major Enlightenment ideal. So it makes sense that all manner of University traditions would take easy root in America.

            As for how it continued, social inertia is what it is. It’s the way things have worked for three centuries, so there is no pressing need to change it. Also consider that liberalism is the vector of change, just as conservatism is the vector of tradition. But in this case, liberalism was best served by the status quo, thus no argument for change was put forth.

      • Money.

        You’d be amazed how many US schools are sitting on billion-dollar or larger endowments.

        • Exactly, WGH. The campus police exist to keep students from being arrested. Can’t allow a $100k annual contributor’s daughter to get busted.

          11
          • That too, but I emphasized ideology here rather than tuition. The students involved were given a “lecture” by the Dean, but I don’t recall the instigating instructor being fired. In any event, one can see a conflict of interest and an ensuing breakdown of respect for law enforcement.

            1
            1
        • Campus police are just a captured regulatory agency. The same thing happens with highly controlled partisan areas’ police forces as well: Berkeley PD today or Selma, AL police in the 1950’s (though the latter may just be regimist fake news disinfo). You think the police patrolling the Facebook hq neighborhood arrests faceborg VIP’s for anything less than murder? Like everyone else, every cop’s paycheck gets signed on the front by someone, and the cop does whatever is needed to placate that person.

      • Trumpton, there is a gradient.

        No police to my knowledge call the admin when there is a murder on campus. However, we are not talking murder, armed robbery, etc.—perhaps rape, faux rape to the detriment of the male, but usually not felonies. Only those instances where officer discretion is often allowed. Officer discretion however, becomes Administration discretion when it involves student conduct, therefore the “rules” regarding normal public conduct as would be seen enforced typically off campus do not apply on campus. Remember, the rules ignored are not simple University policy, but State law—however, I maintain even University policy is differentially enforced when ideology comes into play.

        Another example, witnessed personally. We had a non-university person—a huge 6 ft+, muscular, Black, male transvestite—walking in drag around the campus, deliberately using the women’s restrooms and hanging there until he attracted attention. I was involved in that, as this scared the women into not using the restroom, or going in pairs, or simply asking me if I could check the restroom before they entered!

        The campus police issued a trespassing injunction and sent email (with photo as was SOP) to the campus wrt to this “person” (fucking pervert). All hell broke loose and the admin got into the fray and all was rescinded.

        Does the State sanction this? Well to a point yes—they must sanction this by the simple process of letting it continue. In the case of the BP incident, it caught the attention of the Legislature and Governor, and the President of the University issued an apology to BP.

        Of course, the apology was accepted by BP as these government agencies don’t want to get crosswise with other governmental entities. But the essence of the problem remains and the point was made—no BP allowed on campus!

        My point is that there is a conflict of interest in the University having its own policing force and jurisdiction. We see this conflict of interest repeatedly in the operation of the University. I pointed out one example—one of the forced acceptance of a “heckler’s veto” for ideas that the ideologues of the university wish to suppress.

      • Most US states have ultimately police power within their state. They delegate that power to cities and other localities. They also delegate that power to universities,

        So you could set up your won police force for your office or whatever as long as the state government authorized you to do so.

        As to the rest, the police have discretion wrt how they enforce laws and what laws they do not enforce. There have been numerous court rulings that the police do not have a duty to protect individuals or to enforce every law. And further that no private citizen has standing to sue to compel positive police action.

  9. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Times Are Changing

  10. Pingback: Times Are Changing | American Freedom News

  11. Great post on Taki. This is the best topic that I have seen in your catalog ZMan. Very well done.

    Meanwhile, back in Carnyville, my clownworld survey, Yahoo Finance, is littered with articles of hysteria and cataclysmic paranoia about Musk facilitating, “hate.” Actors and writers are huffing and puffing and leaving. The titanic intellect Lebron James is, “worried AF”, that he keeps seeing the N-word everywhere. I bet he hears it all of the time but isn’t too concerned about it.

    Btw, I am glad you had this post today. I was going to contact that free speech group at PS, and try to convince them to get serious people to have serious discussions and not carny acts. I am very naive and it didn’t dawn on me until today’s post that those guys are either unserious clowns in their own right, or controlled opposition.

    I do recall Thiel saying that he put a lot of energy into planning reform of the universities. He concluded the project is hopeless as the universities are so far gone.

    15
    • I am starting to think the Democrats propaganda is now aimed solely at their own people and low info people who lean their way, but are unreliable voters. Obama campaigned in Wisconsin and Michigan this weekend and made absurd statements including that Gretchen Whitmer was the candidate to support for personal freedom. By that he meant the freedom to get an abortion on demand and get gay married. Of course he completely ignored her role as the Covid lockdown queen. The written propaganda is just ridiculous, here are some headlines featured at Real Clear Politics today:

      Democracy Hangs in the Balance in the Midterms Juan Williams, The Hill
      Only the GOP Celebrates Political Violence David Frum, The Atlantic
      Why We Still Need Affirmative Action Lee Bollinger, The Atlantic

      Why would someone not already committed to the cause bother reading any of this? They are just trying to pump up turnout on their own side.

  12. What Zman really nails here is that the “controversial speaker” schtick on college campuses is nothing but theater. It is pure theater on the part of all the participants — protesters, administrators, and the speakers themselves. Not one ounce of it connects to any meaningful reality. Nobody of sense pays the spectacle a lick of attention.

    One refreshing thing to observe is that an amateurish, self-aggrandizing carny such as Gavin McInnes has lost almost the entirety of whatever cachet he once had. I suppose he can still claim an audience of some sort, but it can’t be very substantial at this point. And Alex Stein is at least three or four years too late to ever qualify as anything but a clown. These fellows have grown tiresome to anyone genuinely concerned about the future of our civilization. Only wish that it had happened sooner.

    21
    • Yeah – the time for cheeky and irreverent commentary has passed. We were laughing. They were winning. And here we are.

      14
  13. “The long march through the institutions put the old protestors in charge, so they set about recreating the events of their youth, ”

    That’s a really good point. When I was young, Boomers were always complaining about my non-generation, about how we were slackers for not protesting anything. This was a good 20 years after the 60s protests (late 80s early 90s). They were already late 30s early 40s and couldn’t stop living in the past. Man did they love to talk about Woodstock and the protests. Seeing a bunch of childish freaks spitting on some White male takes them right back. We are experiencing “nostalgivism.”

    33
  14. The hysterical reaction to everything by the leftards really has gotten monotonous – the stupid s*** signs and stupid s*** screeching, the breathless and oh so serious reporting. Same old, same old, day in and day out. A comprehensive, enema-like cleansing is sorely needed.

    33
  15. “The college campus is the safest place on the planet”

    Not so fast, Z. Places like Yale, Penn and Fordham are quite hazardous, particularly for comely young coeds. Of course, the danger comes not from erstwhile Mengeles and Klaus Barbies, but from the rapey Hutus those very instiutions valorize as demigods.

    36
  16. Please forgive my nostalgia. When I attended PSU, we had two major riots for fun, white-outs didn’t exist, the lyrics to the alma mater were “We don’t know the goddamn words”, and I learned about race and IQ in an intro psych class I took for gen ed credits.

    There was a guy who preached outside of Willard Hall (where Stein was iirc) known as the Willard Preacher. Fire and brimstone stuff. Students would stand and watch, maybe laugh, maybe challenge him briefly. No crazy confrontations. He had a guest preacher once who brought his daughter along. She was dressed modestly, and he said she was waiting for marriage to have sex because she wasn’t a slut like the co-eds watching.

    The African-American student union (or something like that) protested for benes, camped out on Old Main and HUB lawns for a couple of weeks. The admin mostly ignored them, students would walk by and look on bemusedly. I think they eventually got some token concessions to make them go away.

    The place was fairly based as colleges went back then, I believe. I had an openly Marxist art prof, but other than that the education wasn’t openly political. Only implied, but even then it was a mix of left and right. Then Sandusky happened, which I figured was a takeover like was done with the Catholic Church. Haven’t been back since graduating, but it looks like that’s what happened. I see they closed their Confucius Institute, though, and it’s the college of Central PA, so I’m certain students and alums carry on some sort of fight against the poz.

    Different times, for sure.

    15
    • Also, for pride’s sake, PSU might be a state university, but it was well-regarded school even when I went there. Great place to go if you wanted to crack the Ivys for grad school. Several friends and roommates ended up in the institutions.

      Plus it’s a research university. I got to work in government labs as an undergrad. A big part of the reason I fled STEM and academia was seeing what was going on there. Didn’t want to be the guy who created the next plague thinking I was helping advance knowledge, no kidding.

      Which I guess is a long-winded way of saying that while the big show and status might still be in the old names, most of the real work is being done elsewhere. Leviathan’s tentacles run wide.

    • I attended PSY in the mid-aughts right as things started trending lefty there. The Black Student Alliance started its yearly tradition of fake hate crimes and protests (to get excuses from finals) right about then. After a few years of Bush in office it was a different campus.

      The Willard Preacher was a great guy. I attended several services at his small orthodox church. He is probably why I am a Christian today.

      • I was there in the early ‘00s, and yes, I’d say the Iraq invasion spelled the end of the moderates. The mood definitely shifted to the fringes after that, but I wasn’t around to see it take hold.

        Didn’t know the Willard Preacher was Orthodox!

  17. OT: What is the chance of the Liz Truss debacle being true, that the Russians hacked her iPhone and found out the British were the ones to bomb Nordstream. All I’ve heard is conjecture but no hard facts.

    It sounds so ridiculous and implausible that even a dim bulb like Truss would do something that dumb.

    15
    1
    • The UK does nothing without direction from the US. That the Royal Navy ships were involved is neither here nor there as to the directors of the op. The UK ships were just part of the NATO op in the area.

      If the story is true (and who knows -) the very fact that she immediately contacted Blinken with a message was entirely indicative of a minion reporting to a boss as to executing a directive to get a pat on the head.

      24
    • What I can’t believe is that she just texted “It is done.” I’m surprised that dumb broad didn’t think she was saving the world and write something like “Operation Black Eagle success” with emojis.

      12
    • The accusation was that the U.K. was behind the ship attack early in the war, behind that failed nuke-plant attack, behind the assassination of that intellectual’s daughter, the bridge attack and the attempted dirty-bomb false flag, so one more for the pile wouldn’t be a surprise. The fact that the GAE regime has been caught flat-footed by all of these events seems to imply that everyone may be using different sheet music, at least.

      It does highlight one of the chronic issues that’s not going away: in a system like theirs’s that relies on soft-ish power and blob consensus it’s always at risk of getting hijacked by men of action within the blob. Note: it’s not a prerequisite that the “men of action” inside the blob be sane.

      10
  18. All red states should have laws in place stating that whenever a campus event is shut down by protesters and cowardly “security,” the group who sponsored the event shall have the absolute right to cancel an event of their choice between now and the end of the school year. No advance notice required. Problem solved.

    6
    2
    • That sounds very fair, amicable and completely out of step with the irreconcilable nature of the present situation.

      19
    • Well, we’re talking about AINO, which is a lost cause, so nothing concerning its institutions really matters. That said, if red states radically reduced funding for their public universities because of Leftist offenses and abuses, those places would largely clean up their acts. The threat of poverty sobers up professers as well as Grillers.

      25
    • It’s going to be really hard to punish Big State U when the legislature is filled with Big State U grads. If they diminished the importance of Big State U then that means their credentials, such as they are, would be diminished too.

    • The idea of “we oughtta have a law” is really nice, but also very quaint and old-fashioned. Just like the idea of having the FBI step in and investigate some left-wing insanity at the state level. The idea of the state regulating open discourse and diversity of viewpoints is long gone. The red state legislatures are proving to be totally toothless while their teachers and big medical schools team up to groom and mutilate children, how are they going to stop the commissars that the school has been churning out for generations under their noses?

      • Fair enough. Another idea I had for red states is for the speaker to enter the venue through a gauntlet of heavily armed militia. That would be very interesting to see.

    • Happily i have been away from the noise for several days doing far more important things. This does however sound as amusing as the latest pelosie antics the msm is furiously spinning.
      I’ll make an effort to find out for the lulzs as the cool kids say.

    • Only she wasn’t “a college chick.” She was a local high school “student/radical,” whose presence on campus was unrelated to any affiliation with PSU. I make this known only to correct the record; I have no affection for McInnes, Stein or PSU. Of course, PSU is also the home of the greatest climate fraudster on earth, “Dr. Hockeystick,” Michael Mann, so there’s a good deal of precedent for supporting clown shows on that campus. Also pedophiles, but
      i won’t get into that.

  19. “This leaves the regime elements on their own, which makes for a boring performance. Without a bogey man to attack…”

    Invariably they attack one another. We got a version of this with the hastily withdrawn letter from the “Progressive Caucus” that called for peace negotiations in the Ukraine. While the so-called “Progressives” are transparent Regime phonies doing their own version of McInnes, their masters lowered the boom on them for even criticizing the war grift. Expect this to escalate as the “Progressives” feel a need to play act more for their supporters, who foolishly launch protests that are not state-sponsored and learn where that gets them.

    “Similarly, more and more dissidents are simply tuning out of regime media. These dramas only work if there is an audience and that audience is drying up. Slowly, it seems, dissidents are disconnecting from the machine and accepting the new reality.”

    They are tuning out the Regime as a whole, and so it seems are other folks. A calculated indifference to a hostile and heavily armed Regime is an intelligent response. Prior to Trump, attention to Regime media already was waning. It is hard to see what could revive interest in the propaganda organs now. More carny, maybe? Is that even possible?

    20
    • Good comment.

      “It is hard to see what could revive interest in the propaganda organs now.” You inadvertently hinted at the answer in the sentence immediately before that one: Trump. The Regime needs The Donald more than ever if it wants to regain any attention from those opponents of the Regime who have tuned out. That’s why I’m skeptical toward the possibility of Trump being sent to prison. He’s more valuable to the reigning technocracy as a free-agent boogeyman who might run for president again than as a convict behind bars. This could prove something of an IQ test for dissidents (the same way the Corona-doom panic was). The smarter among us will not fall for the grand Trump ruse this time around. Those with more on the ball will maintain their indifference.

  20. This odd obsession the regime MSM have with J6 and Democracy is out of hand.

    Regular voters outside the elite managerial class care about the basics: economy, cost of living, safety, and their children’s future. This isn’t rocket science.

    Granted, the solution isn’t Just. Vote. Harder. So many people enthralled by Trump are good candidates to join the dissident right, yet it will have to get a whole lot worse in this country from them to finally have that light bulb 💡 moment for it to click.

    Still, it was heartening to see the rejection of the regime’s narrative on the Paul Pelosi attack. Many see through the concoction of a ridiculous storyline that a Berkeley nudist protestor is some kind of MAGA creation. More likely, this was a domestic dispute between the two.

    Skepticism rules the day until all 911 transcripts and police body-cam footage is released to the public.

    14
    • What’s fascinating about Paul Pelosi’s little mishap is how ready and willing all *progressives* are to throw his rent boy under the bus. If they manage to put the MAGA jacket on him and frame him for right wing terrorism, he’ll end his life in prison. If – however – it comes out that he is just a sex worker insisting on payment a little too hard, he’d be a free man six month from now. I guess the Democratic party, SFPD and the distict attorney are only LGBTP* positve when it suits them.

      15
      • That’s the part I’m still trying to digest: why do they care? I half figured that by this point in the debauchery cycle that Mrs. Pelosi would have come out and said “so what if my hubby swings both ways, that’s perfectly normal!” to try and shame us ‘normies’.

        Something tells me that they don’t quite believe their own B.S.

        10
        • When the police hold a press conference, if a Q&A follows, they are probably telling you everything they know. If they don’t hold a Q&A, they aren’t.

  21. There are more serious concerns for most people these days, even if they’re at the subconscious level. Galloping prices is one such. The threat of looming war with Russia another. Back of these is the epiphany among some that we’re not going back to the pre-Covid days and we’re in the first stages of an unacknowledged economic and social collapse (a la Dmitry Orlov). The zeitgeist is different. The ruling order is arguably a dead man walking.

    31
    • Sad™ bags. Yep, my kitchen trash can is almost full. I know when I attempt to pull it out, the plastic cinching “string” will break. The refuse will drop into the receptacle, and I’ll have to wash it out again. I’m near the end of the box of the Sad™ bags, and every single one has broken. I’m buying another box of these “Quality” trash bags to see if this is a thing. I know we have inflation, stagflation, shrinkflation, and now quality deflation-Qualflation. Does anybody else have this problem? Has Sad™ bags taken, err should I say, Putin, has he taken out the secret oil derivative element that at one time made Sad™ bag cinching straps flexible and tough.
      I Loved Zman’s post on Taki today about Putin. I highly advise watching all of Putin’s speeches and questions and answers. Putin stole all, including Western leadership intelligence. Biden, Fetterman, and many others on both political sides can now claim that they would be great leaders if not for Putin stealing their last remnants of wisdom and intelligence. They can’t even pretend anymore. Sad™.

      12
      • Not only does Putin sound like an actual non brain damaged adult when he speaks.

        He can converse in points longer than vacuous 3 word slogans for retards that have become the only means of public discourse.

        He has spent decades pulling Russia out of the shit show the west looting and the soviet collapse left it in. He actually rebuilt a nation from a shell.

        In the same time period, the west has transformed into hollowed out shells run by brain damaged marching morons and looting parasites who are leaving a dysfuntional ruin from the mostly functioning nations they inherited.

        No wonder they hate him.

        41
        • He should speak at Penn State! Tell the student body how he and the Russians, through a decades long process, stole their potential to be educated. Putin stole it all. It’s Putin’s fault for being so bright, thoughtful, and communicative.

          • Putin’s grand plan to build a giant psychic transfer machine in Moscow that gradually sucked the sense and intellect out of the west using cunning Russian technology has finally paid off.

            I am running with that as an explanation, its more realistic than 90% of the anti-Russian stuff in the MSM.

        • Putin is hated because he cannot be tweeted and memed out of existence. How dare he defy the Magical Narrative.

          16
        • If only we had a leader of that caliber.
          This society is far too degenerate to allow that even if it was possible to produce true leadership that actually cares.

        • There is no comparison between the “leaders” of the West on the one hand and those of China and Russia on the other. The Z man has a piece on this on the Takimag site. But he doesn’t ask why there is such a disparity, such a contrast. One key reason is that the leaders in China and Russia actually do lead — they’re in command. In the West, we don’t know with whose voices Biden, Macron, Sunak, and the rest speak — who runs these rent boys? I personally don’t have a clue — I can but speculate.

          As I’ve said before, the worst kind of political system is where we don’t even know who runs the system, who calls the shots. That’s what we have in the West.

          16
          • It seems the most likely and parsimonious explanation. The vestigial function that is western public govt.

            Its also the one that even commentors like Z refuses to look at as it brings forward many questions which really does require re framing everything you thought you knew for the last 50 years at least.

          • “As I’ve said before, the worst kind of political system is where we don’t even know who runs the system, who calls the shots. That’s what we have in the West.”

            Yep. Anyone familiar with the legal concept of agency realizes how dangerous it is to let buffoons be your public face. That indicates the ones actually calling the shots also are near-retarded, which is disturbing when nuclear weapons are at the ready. If each layer peeled off is stupid even if marginally less so, you get where we presently are.

          • there’s little doubt that the speech writers would like to get rid of joe and justine and macron but we have this pesky habit of sending out the clowns to read said speech. these speakers may be true believers but they are also too stupid to contain the entire narrative and as long as this is the case, they will continue to fail and falter…and earn my disgust.

  22. I continue to believe that 2020 will mark the year everything changed. Of course, there was Covid and the breaking of patterns, but the BLM riots were just as eye-opening for many Normies. And then there was the election.

    Normies got hit in the face over and over by the regime. We can crush your business at will. We can force you to inject yourself with an unproven treatment. You must grovel before non-whites. Oh, and we can steal an election in broad daylight.

    The middle ground of the colorblind CivNat was assaulted. They were forced to choose sides. Sure, a few stuck their heads even deeper in the sand (Steve Sailer is a perfect example. His promotion of Citizenism is now just sad and feels like something from long ago.), but many more started to wake up.

    The regime keeps wanting to go back to the high-trust society that we had, but the trust was broken and can never be repaired. That’s where we find ourselves now. Whites are becoming more race aware. Joe Normie conservative is beginning to understand that GOP isn’t on his side. Liberal whites truly hate flyover whites and have become very open about it.

    I would say that we’re a divided people, but we no longer see ourselves even as a single people. (We never were, by the way.) Our rulers don’t seem to understand this. They keep going back to the “We’re all Americans” schtick, but it’s not working, and they don’t know what to replace it with.

    What’s more, all of that is happening as the debt gravy train is running out. Governments can no longer borrow and spend their way out social trouble. Covid spending and lockdowns killed that as well.

    Reality is coming back.

    64
    • Still openly stealing elections, too-
      Lula had a sudden surge in the middle of the night.

      Klaus Schwab intro’d him at an event in 2003; the Davos types are and will be openly stealing elections all around the world.

  23. If history repeats itself as farce, tragedy, whatnot, what do you call it when the WaPo writes this weekend “time to wear a mask again” and immediately half of my leafy suburban paradise is back to walking around with ceremonial face coverings?

    I would love for my family to be able to build and maintain nuclear power plants, but I see killing, butchering and tanning a deer to be a substantially more practical skill over the next couple of decades.

    32
    1
    • Mow Noname: “what do you call it when the WaPo writes this weekend ‘time to wear a mask again’ and immediately half of my leafy suburban paradise is back to walking around with ceremonial face coverings?”

      You call it, “time to move to a new neighborhood.”

      You mustn’t raise your children in the midst of Klownworld insanity.

      It’s beyond cruelty to subject your fambly to such an Evil; furthermore, forcing innocent defenseless children to co-mingle with sh!tlib lunatics is getting out towards Von Munchhausen’s by Proxy & the Cult of Moloch.

      Your fambly’s psychological and spiritual safety and peace of mind must be your highest priority in this life.

      26
    • “I see killing, butchering and tanning a deer to be a substantially more practical skill over the next couple of decades.”

      I partially agree with that. I have been ostracized from any reasonable-paying, honorable work by the Regime, so I have already pretty much checked out and keep to myself doing things like killing and butchering and eating deer.

      Problem is, if it gets REALLY bad and everyone resorts to the same thing, in a country of 300 million people the deer are going to be extinct within a year.

      That’s almost what happened during the Depression, people ate all the game in sight. When my dad used to hunt back in the 1970s, it was bucks only, doe tags were extremely rare and had to be shared with 5-6 guys. Turkeys were almost unseen.

      Today there has been a resurgence of wildlife, the deer have become almost a nuisance species in many areas due to the dearth of hunters, in my area you can easily get 5-6 doe tags if you game the rules the right way.

      But if the SHTF trust me, they are all going to get eaten in a whole lot less time than “a couple of decades.”

      28
      • At least you have some game.

        Most of Europe is limited to rabbits, hedgehogs and the occasional stray cat.

        12
        • Over 600 riots in 2020 for the US; Europe had about 5.

          Your opinion would be more valid if Europe was as bad as the US, but it isn’t.

          1
          4
          • The US has its own energy and food security, and geographic isolation.

            Europe is sanctioning itself back to pre-industrial times, the green project is ramping up farm closures to bring in starvation levels not seen since the middle ages and a large scale land war with Russia in central Europe is looking likely on the cards.

            Riots are way down that list.

            12
      • The deer destroyed my backyard garden this year in one night when they learned my “deer fence” was easily jumpable. Next year it’s Deer X to the rescue if I can find an extra cheap way to put it up.

      • Shitavious and Shaneequa only do drive-bys, so the deer are safe from about 12 percent of the population. I can’t see Asians wearing camo, either.

      • Xman nails it. In the event of Zombie Apocalypse the deer will last about three years, assuming new bio-enhanced wasting diseases are not introduced by the Green Zone ahead of time.

        Focus on chickens. And pigs for bacon and enemy disposal. Maybe catfish/tilapia if water isn’t an issue.

      • The deer are getting pretty full of themselves. There’s a four point buck that’s taken to just smugly sitting in my backyard. Doesn’t give a shit when I walk by.

      • The animals are definitely a nuisance, and purposefully so. Wildlife is intentionally mismanaged to inflict suffering on rural Whites and White farmers (they really hate us) and to increase state income from hunting tourism. Deer-car collisions in the hinterland kill hundreds nationwide every year, and the victims are 99% White.

  24. “Disconnecting from the machine” is a real thing, and consequential, but is it enough to just passively withdraw from the charade? Clearly, McInnis and Stein were hoping to be proactive, and the woke protestors were the only ones to actually show up in person and rage against the boogeyman. Both of these are lame actions by lame people, and that is the problem. No one is taking the insanity seriously anymore, except for the jackboots, who will crackdown on dissidents as a warmup for reopening the detention camps.

    So what to do? You want to push back against the Crazy, but not share a cell with the Jan 6th persecution victims. Well, Bongino wants you to vote harder, pray for a messiah, and muddle-through in ignominious cuck fashion. But what if you’re not a cuck at heart? The answer is . . . smarter, not harder. Invisibility is your only real defense and unpredictability is the weapon that never fails. Think outside the box.

    17
    2
    • There are a million ways to be a wrecker in the current system by bogging down woke drones in all sorts of annoying and time-consuming ways. Extra points if you have plausible deniability. We don’t need them, they need us.

      One example to look at is the Pilot sickout from the jab mandate, which crippled the airlines during covid. Compare this to the dramatic trucker’s strike that got ruthlessly quelled. If the truckers followed the pilots strategy of a long, withdrawn sick out, they might have stood a better chance.

      Given a lot of organization’s generous sick day policies, especially after covid, a contingent of competent workers can easily bring a government office or corporate headquarters to their knees.

      25
      • It was talked about at the time, but why didn’t the truckers organize and put a halt to all shipments? How long could Trudeau have held out when Gordon and Rosemary McDonald are calling his office non-stop, demanding he make sure Kraft Dinner is back in stock at Loblaws? Even better, draw a 50 mile ring around Ottawa and blockade it.

        15
        • If what we read about diesel supplies is accurate, mass boycotts will not be necessary. Again, if true, the cities will be lit AF when the trucks can’t even haul goods into them.

          • Always thought it would be something seemingly mundane / unexpected to ‘light up’ the cities.
            Diesel fuel – whoda’ thought?

          • Same for the railroaders- the brakemen I was talking to (next to their 80,000 gallon diesel storage tanks) were spooked by the talk of fuel shortages, but they told me the proposed strike is still three weeks away.

    • Eighteen months ago, Jordan Peterson (I know) was scolding people who were writing him with questions: “What are we to do in a world where every single institution has proven itself to be corrupt and sadistic?” He would say, “What makes you think you could do any better? You need to reform the system!”

      These days, he is talking about mass famine and populations freezing to death because of our corrupt and sadistic institutions. And he is doing it on Shapiro’s dime. Meanwhile, Putin sounds aligned with Dugin, a philosopher so dangerous the Brits murdered his daughter, and Dugin is taking on Hayek and Popper and the entire Western world since the Enlightenment (or since William of Occam, depending on your viewpoint)

      Everybody knows where this is going. Even Bongino – the perfect successor to Limbaugh, who famously told listeners not to panic until he told them to panic and then, following a color revolution in his own country, told everyone simply to vote harder – knows this is not some ordinary challenge. But look: one feature of an apocalypse is that most people don’t want to admit they are living through an apocalypse.

      28
      2
      • I thought the Ukrainains murdered Dugin’s daughter.
        But your mood has changed so now its the British.

        How do you know that Dugin is “taking on” the West? Do you mean he has written some articles that oppose Western culture. How is that dangerous? What material or ideological effects do you think will come of his verbose opinions?

        Dugin is not considered important in Russia. The only people who take him seriously are inadequates in the US.

        Imagine the earth-shattering explosion if Yarvin and Dugin co-authored an article. Scary stuff.

        4
        1
        • “Imagine the earth-shattering explosion if Yarvin and Dugin co-authored an article. Scary stuff.”

          Freakin’ brilliant and hilarious! People should at least skim Dugin’s stuff to get a feel. It is DIANETICS as political game theory. Putin likely privately blows Dugin off like Democratic Party officials publicly indulge the likes of The Squad and then sabotage them. If Dugin had been a Westerner, though, he would have thrived and been a significant part of the Regime. The retardation involved to bother to assassinate Dugin, even if vicariously, is a pitch perfect indictment of the rump West.

        • The body count of Russian philosophers and their families is exactly one. Amazon will not sell his books. But you know he’s not important because you are adequate.

  25. “They are there to get a credential in order to get a middle-class job.” This is “the” line in today’s post, imho. Most of my friends still believe their kids must go to uni in order to get a good job, I never agree with them. I think that rather soon, the return to competency will have to happen…the pandering to the overly-emotional brats has pretty much consumed the legacy wealth of most western economies. They will not be up to the task of rebuilding.
    The distractions are less and less effective (as pointed out in the article) and just about everyone can see the pig for the lipstick.

    40
    • The easiest path to have one’s kids land on a cloud is prove their devotion to the regime and that means dropping a pretty penny to get them brainwashed. Sure they might not “make bank”, but even as they work the register at Starbucks they will still not be a prole in the way a plumber or machinist is.

      I’m thinking that the old order will have to fall away completely before that mindset changes.

  26. I think you used the term “Cargo Cult” at one point. Which I’ve stolen since it’s the most apt description—down to the invocation of something that been effectively dead for 75+ years. Have always thought (if you could find Workers Comp insurance) that a “Rent-a-Nazi/Klucker” franchise would be hugely successful. There is great market potential in providing these poor leftist modern day Don Quixote’s with something to fight. Much easier to promote your latest protest if you can contract to provide “Real live Nazis!!!” instead of berating 75 year old women who think grown men in drag waggling their ball sack at 5 year old kids is a bad idea.

    20
  27. In Germany in the interwar years, there was a sentence smeared in graffiti all over Berlin: “Erst Essen, dann Miete.” It means “First food, then rent,” which, as things get worse, is going to be the slogan of a lot of people who are used to the luxury of thinking of politics in abstract or moral terms. Even if literal privation doesn’t come to America (and I’m not as sanguine on that as Z, especially with diesel/heating oil shortages factoring into our supply chain problems) most people are thinking about bread and butter issues.

    Literally half the fruit I’ve bought at the grocery store over the last two weeks proved to be rotted when I bit into it. That’s social trust at the nadir level, a world where kin (and the extended family of race) are going to start to matter in all kinds of little interactions, regardless of the penalty imposed by our betters. Social sanction from absentee rich people means a hell of a lot less than ostracism from one’s literal neighbors, unless you’re so aggressively into pop culture/online pseudo-culture that you can’t distinguish them from reality.

    Our rulers think that bitching about Nazis and racism marks you as a goodthinker, but at this point all it does is mark you as someone with a full belly and too much time on your hands, and not enough real problems. It’s still a signal, but it’s not even a pretend virtue at this point. It’s more like a “Kick Me,” sign. And even if Paul Pelosi was beaten up by a rent boy rather than an intruder, we’re a third world country now where even the elite have proven touchable by the rabble, in unpredictable ways. Why, the other day I saw the heretofore unimaginable, Obama being shouted down and mocked by a crowd. And now, like zombies who’ve spotted a chink in the fortifications of the warmbloods, every Honduran and Salvadoran (and normiecon) knows how to get to Martha’s Vineyard. Our ruling class wanted chaos to distract them from their ennui and boredom. Looks like they finally got it.

    54
      • The “Let’s Go Brandon” cheering was added in post, but he was being contradicted in public, and not handling it well. Off the cuff it’s pretty apparent that he is an AA mediocrity. He may be pulling Biden’s strings from his basement, but you don’t have to be Svengali to take advantage of a senile old man. Haitian nurses in rest homes do it every day.

        23
        • “but he was being contradicted in public, and not handling it well. Off the cuff it’s pretty apparent that he is an AA mediocrity.”

          Agreed. He could never talk, argue, or debate. The facility with words and ideas is not there. Whenever he spoke it was slogans and cliches. And for this he was considered a great orator.

          16
          • “Agreed. He could never talk, argue, or debate. The facility with words and ideas is not there.”

            This was apparent from the beginning, and a perfect contradiction to W Bush. Obama, being the perfect product of the modern media age, could read from a teleprompter very well. Off-prompter, he was a stuttering idiot who could only revert back to “slogans and clichés” (very much like CNN’s Wolf Blitzer). W on the other hand, didn’t read so good, but was a much, much better extemporaneous speaker. That difference was a good indicator of their personality difference as well.

            Around normal people, Obama (and his entire retinue) looked uncomfortable. He just had no idea how to relate. W, for all his flaws, did much better around normies. This was also clear with the military. He always seemed to enjoy the company of military people. Of course, his time in the Guard helped with this*. The Obamas and Clintons very clearly did not feel at ease around normal service members.

            * Say what you want, but he DID fly the F-102, and managed enough air time to stay current and deployable throughout his time in service. This is no small accomplishment.

            16
            1
      • Was that Camaltoe video where she over-uses the word “debate” also fake? Don’t really care, just wondering.

    • The only profitable organizations in my neck of the woods other than wallyworld, are: the for-profit blood and plasma center (with the secret password for the sell-your-kidney-for-cash option), the bottle drop where homeless can turn in their bottles and cans for 10 cent refunds, the taco b–l, the clean water dispenser machines where the homeless can get a gallon at a time for a quarter, and the truckstop hot showers. Even the pawn shop and the second hand thrift stores are overloaded with material and are going out of business or being torched for insurance. Only the very cheapest of motel sixes has any appreciable business and that’s only because the government gives out hotel vouchers to the homeless in winter so they don’t freeze. And this is a redoubt state–Jeebus Crikes!

  28. Could this be the last gasp of the Boomers replaying their youth? The campus temper tantrums and street demonstrations are very much like 1970s cosplaying, directed by geezers. They don’t often put it into words, but Penn Jillette, (former) stage libertarian was asked about Biden, whom he supported in 2020, and immediately went off on a nostalgia-laced tangent (evading the point of how such a supposedly “smart” man could support such a brain-damaged moron):

    “I don’t know how we get out of this, and I think that maybe somebody other than Biden could have pulled the country more together and stopped, you know, QAnon and stopped some of the Proud Boys and that kind of stuff and pulled them into the fold…

    So I think Biden is maybe doing as well as he can, but we’re in a‑‑you know, I’m someone who whenever anybody brought up anything, I would say, “Kent State. Let’s go back to the ’70s. Let’s go back to the Democratic Convention of ’68. Let’s go Watergate. Let’s go Kent State. Military people are shooting students on campuses.” You cannot tell me what we’ve experienced is worse than this.

    And when people would talk about George W. Bush being stupid and making bad decisions, I would go Nixon went insane in office.

    We have not‑‑shut up. Everybody likes to pretend the time they’re in is the worst. It’s not the worst. Shut up. We’re doing okay. And Trump took that from me because now I think maybe we aren’t‑‑we aren’t doing okay.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/05/transcript-penn-jillette-magician-author-random-novel/

    It’s like an old man who can’t really understand how the world slipped away from him and turned into such a disaster, reaching back for a time when he felt sure about things. Elsewhere, he’s even reached back and recycled the “peace and love” slogans of the hippies, which is pretty embarrassing for a man nearing 70.

    18
    1
    • Shutting down the world economy for a cold is far worse than anything that happened at Kent State.

      I’d bet the body count from the recent foolishness is easily in the millions at this point.

      40
    • I don’t know about Nixon going insane, but without a doubt, GW Bush was stupid and made bad decisions. Several trillion dollars later and thousands of dead Americans are testament to his inadequacies.

  29. > This is a state college. These are not future leaders. They are there to get a credential in order to get a middle-class job.

    One of the hardest parts of life is being a big fish in a small pond when you are younger and realizing as you get into professional fields that there are people who are better than you at your profession, and no amount of hard work will close the gap. This will eventually happen to everyone but the best of the best.

    Rest assured these crazies got great grades in High School, took to heart they were the leaders of the next generation, and didn’t let their rejection from top tier schools dissuade the from their call for being a mover and shaker.

    Competent but unexceptional men are already foregoing college for trades, which is perfectly fine. The same needs to happen to the women with reopening all the secretary schools, wiping out bachelor requirements for elementary and middle school teachers in favor of certification, etc.

    Requiring 4 years of additional school for a middle class is a massive part of our cultural issues. We have a bunch of mediocrities who think they received an elite education.

    47
    • The elite schools don’t offer an elite education though. They don’t offer much of an education at all outside a few majors. It is about getting access to the alumni and donor network, what school they go to has little to do with intelligence.

      34
      • Funny thing is a lot of the best graduates are coming out of the “Honors Colleges” that a bunch of the upper tier state schools have set up to attract out of state talent and keep the smartest kids in state.

        12
        • Until they were consumed by the Woke mind virus the top shelf state schools provided good value and an incentive to stay home via low in-state tuition rates.

          16
          • There are still pockets (Honors Colleges being one) where the focus is still on education). My current firm used to hire a lot from Ivy League and equivalent schools. Have shifted to the schools that offer these programs over the last several years. The kids actually work and have to take “non-bullshit” courses to stay in—are also minimum GPA requirements. Take a look at Purdue’s. It’s become the magnet for kids that would otherwise go to Ivy engineering programs.

            11
    • Four extra years of school is also an excellent way to make wage slaves out of the middle class too.

      18
      • Yup. And may I say, Steely Dan is a favorite, and “Deacon Blues” is one of their best. Best, in the way that Dark Side of the Moon is the best Pink Floyd album, in that it is the best example, for pop consumption, of what they do best.

    • What I wouldn’t do to see

      HOC EST COLLEGIVM CIVITALIS. HI FVTVRI DVCES NON SVNT

      On a university’s shield

    • I went to one of those “elite” schools (and it was still elite in educational quality back then). One of the great shccks, despite going to a very competitive private high school) was simply how scary smart a large cohort of the students were. It’s also why admissions preferences for under qualified minorities backfired so badly. They were tops in their shitty schools and were told they were all going to become doctors etal, until they encountered grading curves in Org Chemistry et al that were designed to weed out all but the fraction that would get into medical school. Hence the subsequent regroup to simply eliminate barriers like the MCAT or GPA requirements.

      35
      • The “scariest” smartest people I ever knew were nuclear submarine sailors in the late 60s and early 70s. The Naval nuclear training program was a ruthless culling machine to turn out a disciplined group capable of cross-trades knowledge and abilities who could respond quickly to emergencies and act decisively in unforeseen circumstances. No college anywhere has been capable of that: the officers (ROTC grads for the most part) were weeded out at the same percentage levels- well over 60 percent.

        11
        1
        • wait until you get a nuclear sub full of joggers and women.

          The best one could hope for is that they can’t get it out of the harbor.

          Otherwise, Hunt for Red October is going to take on a whole new meaning.

          18
        • Agree. We had an RA junior year that was an enlisted rating on a Boomer, got out, finished college in 3 years, then was enrolled in the top ranked MBA program. Also told great stories—special guys. We also had NROTC and recall a guy who got assigned to an attack sub for his summer cruise, realized about two weeks in he had debilitating claustrophobia and spent the remainder stoned on Valium courtesy of the Pharmacists Mate. Once they’re submerged there’s no stopping to let off people in Guam.

Comments are closed.