Long ago I received my laminated membership card in the exclusive Cassandra Club. That’s a selective group of cynics in jaundice tweeds, who warned that if the masses obeyed elites who were herding them over a cliff like the Gadarene Swine, the outcome would be … mass drownings. But nobody listened, any more than they heeded Cassandra herself, who told the horse-happy Trojans to “beware Greeks bearing gifts.”

At the Cassandra Club, the drinks are always free, but you have to fix them yourself, since the bartenders all fled town when the Mongols smashed through the gates … exactly as you predicted. The architecture is classic — the place looks like ruined Pompeii. We sit on broken marble columns, wag our chins, and consult the thesaurus for new, creative ways of saying “I told you so” to each other. Kind of a drag, if I’m being honest.

An Oligarchy of Dimwits

For years I have been saying that we now live in the weirdest kind of oligarchy, where the rulers aren’t chosen by talent, virtue, creativity, or even something as random as the accident of birth. Instead, we’re micromanaged and tyrannized by pathological joiners, born followers (not leaders), the kind of person whom Aristotle dismissed as “slaves by nature.” And yet they’re in charge:

• Purging libraries of Shakespeare to make room for graphic novels advocating polyamory to toddlers.
• Tearing down statues just because … they’re statues, finally, and they resent things they don’t know how to make. (“Old art make Hulk confused, which make him ANGRY, then he SMASH!”)
• Filling our academic chairs with mediocre ethnic or sexual minorities whom they indulge like clever pets. (“Oh, look how the Harvard president cuts and pastes whole paragraphs without attribution! Isn’t that adorable?”)
• Wielding hysterical outrage and starting moral panics on behalf of “justice” and “equity,” which have no place at all in the Darwinian materialist universe they believe in.
• Colluding to freeze and starve the masses into a Dark Ages subsistence lifestyle, on behalf of “climate science” which they don’t understand since it involves mathematics — the subject they always flunked because it left no room for b.s.ing.
• Having hissy fits and calling for martial law when the rubes whom they despise trespass or litter, but praising the “mostly peaceful” looting and arson of their own wild-eyed zealots.

There Is No “U” in “Winner”

I offered a kind of self-help guide on how to join the “Alpha Sheep” in the TED Talk I “delivered” at Davos (with George Soros in attendance!) on Sept. 31, 2022. Here are a few choice excerpts, which I offer not simply for the pleasure of quoting myself. (“Lo, the plain fact that I did indeed tell thee so!”) No, I want to help ordinary people to realize how contemptible our self-acclaimed “elites” really are. A scorn for Baal is the beginning of wisdom. Take a peek behind the curtain, and behold the Wizard of Oz:

We are joiners. We’re ALPHA sheep. Whenever we were in a crowd — in class, at work, or engaged in intellectual discussions — we had the instinct more profoundly than most to sense where the Collective was already going, to detect how the flock was turning. And in lockstep, we went there. In fact, we got out in front, so we even seemed like leaders. We never went a millimeter too far to the left or right. We never lagged behind. We had an inborn instinct to sense where the herd wished to go, so we could confidently trot right up at the front.

That collective instinct, that sense of the Hive if you will, is what distinguishes you and me from the weirdos in the comboxes, from the rednecks at NASCAR races and the goobers praying in church. It’s what unites most graduates of elite colleges today, and virtually every influential attorney, political leader, responsible church pastor (such as Pope Francis!), and member of the media.

We are the future of the human race, if it has one.

How Our Idiocracy Functions

How can talentless, unoriginal, cowardly snowflakes with 95 IQs hope to rule a free, democratic society? They can’t, of course. That’s why they’re constantly warning about the dangers of “populism,” and spending hundreds of millions to fix elections, and imprison whistleblowers who try to point out the fraud. That’s why they need to censor the Internet, intimidate their critics, and compile FBI lists of people who purchase Bibles or attend a Latin Mass.

They don’t want anything like a democracy, which they proved when they decided to nullify the 2016 election, and have the Deep State persecute a duly elected president with laughably false charges of treason. And when they got the mandarins of the Deep State (from both the Democrat and Republican wings of the Uniparty) to pretend that Hunter Biden’s crime-diary laptop was “Russian disinformation.” And when they decided to keep the January 6 videotapes secret, in order (according to REPUBLICAN LEADER Mitch McConnell) “not to undermine the narrative of the Capitol Police.”

What our midwit, thin-skinned elites really want is to live in a hacienda on the hill, wearing white suits and Panama hats, like the haughty Colombian aristocrat in the old Savarin coffee ads:

And we’re all meant to be Juan Valdez, the timid campesino who bows when El Exigente passes his hovel, aware that the men in the death squad are watching his every movement.

Even Some Normies Are Noticing

I’m glad that normies are noticing both the incompetence and the petulant tyranny of our elites. As liberal journalist David Samuels notes in the indispensable centrist, free speech organ Unherd:

Americans now find themselves living in an oligarchy administered day-to-day by institutional bureaucracies that move in lock-step with each other, enforcing a set of ideologically-driven top-down imperatives that seemingly change from week-to-week and cover nearly every subject under the sun.

…

Today, power flows from the top down, from a set of fantastically wealthy billionaires, to a national administrative class, and to a new layer of non-profit administrators, foundation executives and NGOs, which in turn employ a floating class of hundreds of thousands of grant-makers, organisers, case-workers and protesters who serve as the shock troops of the Democratic Party. In this role, they regiment the party’s identity-driven interest groups while receiving large amounts of funding from the billionaire class and the Federal government — thereby enabling the Party to serve as the broker between the oligarchs and the “disenfranchised” poor.

I’d like to invite Mr. Samuels to the next Tuesday night cocktail hour down at the Cassandra Club. I’d shake his hand and tell him: “Forsooth, it is precisely as I have said.”

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.