It Says on This Piece of Paper That I'm Very Concerned About This Extremely Serious Situation

Watch some leaders.

Don’t take my word for any of the things I’m about to say — just watch them. Watch the president of an Ivy League University answer questions in front of a congressional committee:

Now, I wrote at The Blaze this morning that I oppose speech bans on campuses in any context, and I think Elise Stefanik is missing some of the implications of her argument, here. But Magill is also missing all of the counterarguments as she mousespeaks her tentatively shrugged-at semi-answers. She’s not arguing; she’s in the corner with her gloves up, hoping the other boxer doesn’t land too many punches, listening for the bell.

Ivy League universities play a unique role in America, though in their current dismal state they absolutely shouldn’t. Years ago, Antonin Scalia famously told a law school student that of course the court he served on mostly chose law clerks from places like Harvard and Yale, because why on earth wouldn’t the United States Supreme Court, for crying out loud, focus on hiring “the best and the brightest?”

That closing phrase is known for the layers of irony it contains, as David Halberstam used it as the title of a book about smug bumbling Ivy League idiots in the foreign policy establishment running a war into the ground, but yes: At a table full of people with serious job titles, making consequential decisions that will reach into the lives of tens or hundreds of millions of people, the seats will be disproportionately occupied by Ivy grads. The premise of these institutions is that they’re training the people who will run the governments and the banks and the hospitals and the Fortune 500 companies and the major law firms and everything else. David Petraeus had a Princeton PhD.

Presidents of Ivy league universities, then, hold the top position at the the top places. They’ve reached the pinnacle of the pinnacle, elevated to positions of great importance because of their achievements and their character. Their intellectual weight, you see.

So we fucked that up, too.

This is too big to screencap the whole thing, so click on the link to read it all, but this is enough to get the point across:

The president of Harvard University is not a distinguished scholar. She’s a commissar.

In an essay that I mention often, Angelo Codevilla wrote that we’ve evolved a ruling class that we credential for their ability to recite and parrot.

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust...

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity.

The people who rise to the top of that parrot-based system are the parrotist parrots, the most unctuous and unblinking slogan-chanters. They rise by repeating. Liz Magill walked away from Capitol Hill into a storm of condemnation, so she recorded a hostage video in which she recited some lines about not meaning what she accidentally said when she wasn’t reading prepared lines:

You can see the depth of the American ruling class. It says on this teleprompter that what I should have said was….

Of course she’s a lightweight. If she wasn’t a lightweight, she wouldn’t be the president. The path upward is the path of recitation. If you have an original thought, at some point, you fall off the ladder.

Watch some leaders. Los Angeles County has a population of 10 million people, and a $44 billion budget. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has more responsibility than most state legislatures. The new chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has a gender studies b.a from Notre Dame, is a career activist, has never had a real job, and sounds like a tween girl. If you don’t want to click on that link and watch the video, here are her priorities for the year ahead: “We must march forward together and take bold steps to bridge generations, and create the change that we so urgently need.” If you don’t know what she means by that, don’t worry — neither does she. I assume she borrowed her opening speech from a repository of high school graduation addresses, and then just cut the part where she thanks the principal and the PTA.

Or watch a member of the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors, the most important Democratic Socialist in the Bay Area, weep and pause for effect as he discusses the most pressing issue facing that declining city: the need for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Or watch the girl-voiced mayor of Oakland as she…you know what, I don’t even know how to describe it. Just watch. There’s a moment when even a Bay Area journalist can’t even, and blasts an elected official for having no actual thoughts of any kind. Mayor Sheng Tao doesn’t, like, have any jurisdictions?

Our descent into negative selection is so profound that our leadership class is halfway to pantomime. Tap the stage twice with your hoof if you oppose the measure, mayor. Credentialing by recitational inoffensiveness is ruin, and it’s everywhere.

The dark side of that moon is that a leadership class credentialed for recitation is baffled by people who just…say things. In Los Angeles County today, a Superior Court judge has tentatively rejected a lawsuit arguing that the Department of Public Health has violated the First Amendment by closing public comments on all of its social media posts. The county has argued that it’s much too dangerous to let the dirty public speak, having the poors directly address The Experts in an open forum. It’s like, I don’t know, looking directly into the eyes of an ancient god. SHOULD NOT YE BE STRUCK DOWN, oh peasant? From the tentative ruling:

The public cannot offer viewpoints; they offer only vitriol. Superior Court judge to Barbara Ferrer: “Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?”

We have, one, a class of overcredentialed mediocrities who have ascended on the strength of their ability to chant slogans, and two, a class of gatekeepers who feel that it’s quite correct to chant slogans. Cease with your vitriol, ye who question!

That…doesn’t work. Ask the trustees at Penn.