Steve Sailer has a post up on this story. Steve does his thing highlighting certain passages and commenting upon them. The point of the NYTimes article is an attempt to explain why the Dirt People are so angry over things, particularly immigration. Michael Ignatieff is a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party. It is entirely from the perspective of the Cloud People, which should surprise no one.

That’s the thing you see from all of these “think pieces” in the media and commentariat. They are written by strangers, foreigners who are observing us through a telescope, trying to make sense of what we are doing. They are not interested in our opinions any more than a myrmecologists would want to know the opinions of his ants. Reading these articles, I always come away with the sense that the Cloud People spend so much time studying the Dirt People that they have not bothered to notice much about themselves.

Here is a representative example:

According to his argument, what we’re seeing is, in part, an ideological split between cosmopolitan elites who see immigration as a common good based in universal rights, and voters who see it as a gift conferred on certain outsiders deemed worthy of joining the community.

Cosmopolitan elites like to kid themselves about their love of universal rights and the common good, but it is total nonsense. Just take a look at their strongholds. These people talk like MLK, but they live like the KKK or like a KKK fantasy world. Our elites live in hyper-white exclusive communities. Many are gated and walled. Often, they have their own private security forces. A modern college community, for example, operates almost like an autonomous zone with their own government and police.

On the college campus, just like in the elite neighborhoods, minorities are decorations, not parts of the community. Professor Boobingu from Ghana is not there for his intellectual contributions. He is there as a decoration so the white people can feel good about diversity. On the home front, guys like Tyler Cowen get to visit the ethnic restaurants in your neighborhood or maybe in the Potemkin “arts section” near the campus, but he is not living anywhere near the people who work in that ethnic restaurant.

The swank urban hipster areas are examples of how modern ethnic cleansing is done. Harlem, which had been close to 100% black for a century is now mighty whitey-ville. San Francisco is no longer the land of Dirty Harry chasing black gangsters. Instead, its Ice People as far as the eye can see. As Steve Sailer put it, they have their housing costs discriminate so they do not have to. Everywhere you see gentrification, you see whites moving in and nonwhites moving out.

This near total lack of self-awareness by the Cloud People even effects their ability to observe the Dirt People. I am sure Michael Ignatieff is a peach of a guy, but what in the hell can he possibly know about what is going on outside the walls of his mansion? Sure, he has his telescope and peppers the domestic staff with questions. Perhaps he even has his butler read to him from the Internet. Even so, he is an unlikely person to have any insight into the Dirt People.

Reading that NYTimes article, it is not hard to imagine what it must have been like inside the aristocratic houses during the French Revolution. The people inside were not just baffled by the people outside. They were baffled about themselves. They had invested generations of intellectual resources into a mythology about themselves and their position, to the point where they were invisible to themselves. They could not rationally evaluate their own culture. They were not just strangers to the people; they were strangers to themselves.

The authoress of that NYTimes piece is a person calling herself Amanda Taub. She is the authoress of this piece in Vox. The point of the article is to scare the readers, not inform them. If Mx. Taub had any interest in understanding the Dirt People, she would talk to one of them. There are thousands of writers and bloggers that would be happy to answer her questions. Instead, she finds Cloud People to add authority to her theories about how the Cloud People are on the side of angels and the Dirt People are evil.

One of the things about the French Revolution that is most intriguing is that the people in charge never gave much thought to how it would end. They were always focused on maintaining the status quo and beating back the revolt. Similarly, the Cloud People do not seem to think much about how their multicultural wonderland is going to work. How do they expect to remain on top as a ruling minority with no means to defend themselves from the dusky hordes outside the walls of their communities?

Instead, they seem to be obsessed with punishing the Dirt People for making a racket. How else does one explain the plan to revive the Gang of 8 scheme? How else can you explain the Cloud People siding with the cop killers in Dallas? The Cloud People think they have done a masterful job of running the world and they see the Dirt People as ungrateful rubes, who must be punished. If Michael Ignatieff and Amanda Taub want to know why the Dirt People are revolting, they should stop thinking the Dirt People are revolting. Maybe even talk to some of them and ask their opinions.