Today @Malice posted a book by Chistopher Buckley on his Locals. I'm also a generally huge fan of Christopher Buckley's fiction, so here's a funny Christopher Buckley story that turns into a cautionary tale of The Right.

Once upon a time, through a series of circumstances, he friended me on Facebook. It was completely random and out of nowhere to me; apparently he had been enjoying some of the snark I had been exchanging with a mutual friend. This happiness very quickly turned into one of those "never meet your heroes moments." He and his circle of friends were literally (pun intended) the most boring and disappointing group of people I have ever had the displeasure of interacting with. Ironically, it was like something out of a bad novel: a bunch of blue-blood, East Coast, boomercon snobs who sit at their expensive keyboards quoting bumper stickers at each other and then congratulating themselves for their bravery, brilliance, and wit. Any ideas or thoughts outside of the "3x5 index card of allowable opinion" were considered to be unspeakably gauche. I had always genuinely believed that upper-class midwit snobbery was a cheap, annoying fictional trope, but unfortunately I can assure you that it's quite real. I think that it may be comparable to @Malice meeting the blue-blood Washington true-believer Nazi when he wrote The New Right: it was complely surreal to me that This Is Ackschually A Thing.

Eventually, I wound up trolling them until they bounced me. On the one hand, this was lame and immature on my part (I was much younger), but on the other hand they really had no value. I had gone from completely over-the-moon at being recognized by someone I admired to thinking "Wow, these people are a disappointing waste of sperm and oxygen." This was a huge and important red pill for me. I had known for some time that the universities and especially the "elite" schools were destructive frauds and scams (as a geek, my contempt began with the whole global warming thing), but I supposed that I had always envisioned that some sort of salons existed as islands of wisdom or even mere sanity among the Ivy League elites. The reality was that these islands were full of people who were far less-impressive than the mostly self-taught and relatively unknown people that I've collected as my friends. The elite right-wing "resistance" is just as intellectually berift as the left-wingers they oppose. I've reached the conclusion that their opposition isn't moral or philosophical; it's more of a childish rebellion thing that they never managed to grow out of.

This is something that's important for conservatives and recovering conservatives to understand: the backbone of their movement and the Republican Party has no ideological backbone. For the East Coast / Washington DC elites that hold the levers of power, it's all just a game to them. There are no serious consequences to their circle one way or the other; they'll keep being rich and connected regardless of how much the country falls apart and us "normies" suffer. They are every bit as detached as the wealthy elites on the political left. It's the exact same animal, just with some different training.

Placing your hopes and dreams in these people is the epitome of insanity. It's not that they don't care. They do care. But they care in a way that's completely alien to us. When they fail, it has severe impacts in the real world outside of their bubble: fortunes gained and lost, families kept together or broken apart, dreams achieved and dreams destroyed. To them, it's like losing a game of checkers: oh well, but I'll beat you next time. You can throw a Trump in there and knock their game board over and they'll have a tantrum, but then security will kick your Trump out, they'll put the board and pieces back on the table, go back to playing with your lives, and a year or two later the whole thing is just another scandalous story to whisper and giggle about at their fancy cocktail parties.

This isn't a black-pill story. This doesn't mean we must lose. I'm trying to impart the fact that we cannot win by playing their game, where they are able to change the rules at every whim when they have a problem. The so-called elites on both sides need to be, as Hans Herman Hoppe put it, physically removed. We don't need to be afraid of them. One-on-one, in the real world, they are not impressive people. Even with their Ivy League credentieals, if you take away their money and power they're way below-average. They know they can't compete on a level playing field, so we must create that level playing field rather than endlessly subjecting ourselves to their absurdly rigged contests.