Elite ineptitude
Their brand brings lies, deception, hubris, corruption
The antisemitism scandal in top universities following the Hamas Oct. 7 attack on Israel brings America’s elites into microscopic focus.
Claudine Gay, Liz Magill, and Sally Kornbluth failed to acknowledge that calls for “the genocide of Jews” violated campus codes of conduct at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT respectively. Magill resigned Dec. 9 under pressure, Gay hung on by being a DEI hire, and there are cries to oust more college presidents.
However, their shocking U.S. House committee testimony on Dec. 5 forced a long overdue conversation about America's elites.
The average American works long hours. After work, they have family, friends, church, school, leisure, and other activities that dominate their lives. Thinking about our nation’s elites is the last thing on their minds.
Unfortunately, the elites shape what is done and said in government, including the military, education at all levels, the legacy media, medicine, science, including engineering, business, including banking and finance, entertainment, and other spheres of life. These folks attend and graduate from the top colleges, find their spouses there, send their children there, and these folks are well-connected the rest of their lives.
The elites admit it. New York Times columnist David Brooks is one of them. In August, he wrote a self-critical column on how elites in government and the media have dealt with Donald Trump. Brooks wrote:
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
Let’s consider some ways elites are wrong and have lied, deceived, displayed arrogance or incompetence, or got away with their corruption.
In the late 1990s, former President Bill Clinton “admitted to giving knowingly evasive and misleading discovery responses concerning his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.” Clinton was impeached, but not convicted and Arkansas suspended his law license for five years and fined him $25,000. No average American would avoid jail under similar circumstances.
In the years following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration convinced the world that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations and cited chapter and verse. After invading Iraq, the WMD was never found, and the world is convinced the whole narrative was a lie. Twenty years later, nothing came forward to alter that. U.S. government and military elites lied to the world.
This AP photo taken May 1, 2003 aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
In early May 2003, former President George W. Bush gave his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech. The war in Afghanistan and Iraq lasted nearly 20 years, the longest war in American history.
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, Louisiana. The preparation for this Category 5 hurricane by the local, state and federal governments was so abysmal that more than 1,800 people died, and it was the costliest natural disaster in American history. The best and brightest dealing with a crisis failed on a mammoth scale.
At the end of the Bush administration and at the height of election 2008, the U.S. faced a meltdown of the financial system as several banks failed. It stemmed from risky financial derivatives in the real estate market. One key cause was banks authorizing NINJA loans, which stood for no job and no income. With campaigning suspended between two U.S. senators, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, the U.S. House and Senate passed the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. It created the category of banks Too Big To Fail, meaning taxpayers would bail them out no matter what. They are:
Bank of America Corp.
The Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
Citigroup Inc.
The Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Morgan Stanley
State Street Corp.
Wells Fargo & Co.
The elites unleashed this on unsuspecting Americans. No one ever went to jail.
The signature legislation of the Obama administration was the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The primary premise was making health insurance more affordable for all Americans, with no one paying more than they did before. As healthcare.gov launched, it crashed and burned. The Wall Street Journal revealed the secrets, as Avik Roy reported in Forbes:
‘Healthcare.gov was initially going to include an option to browse before registering,’ report Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in the Wall Street Journal. ‘But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said.’ Why was it delayed? ‘An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.’
It was staggering incompetence by elites in the U.S. government.
This Reuters photo is by Jonathan Ernst.
Not to be outdone, science and government brought us the horrific covid-19 responses with mass testing, face masks, social distancing, lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates, to name just a few. For example, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of government response on the airborne virus, lied repeatedly about the origins of covid and gain-of-function research that produced the virus. Fauci lied repeatedly:
We must acknowledge the abject failure of the Birx-Fauci policies. They were enacted, but they failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive damage and destruction particularly on lower-income families and on America's children.
There have been many analyses of the covid response, including here and here. Now, fewer Americans trust science, as Pew Research has found.
Adding the Hillary Clinton email scandal, the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, the Russia Collusion lie, and other acts to the above would not provide a complete accounting of the elite's repeated bungling.
America’s elites are not brighter and smarter. It’s time Americans understand that.