One of the issues I keep banging on about is the importance of the class distinction between the elites — those people who control the political, cultural, and information-distribution institutions — and the ordinary citizens whose world is shaped by them.
Most people think of class in terms of economic status, and clearly there is some correlation, but in the modern world a tremendous amount of power is concentrated in the cultural position which one inhabits. Most people in the cultural elite, I mean, are actually concentrated in the upper-middle class, economically, and some of the ultra-rich may benefit from being adjacent to that power center but are not members of it.
Donald Trump is the obvious example.
The cultural elite is concentrated in the entertainment, journalism, and academic classes, along with a lot of people (but by no means all) in politics. NGO leaders fit into this category. A wealthy small or medium-sized businessman will not be.
It is the cultural and political elite who dominate the world of the Overton Window, who can create The Narrative™. They can move mountains when they work together.
The rise of populism in recent years has been driven by an entirely correct sense that the cultural elite neither understands nor cares about the hoi polloi. The evidence is everywhere. The so-called "laptop class" invented the COVID rules that led to massive increases in wealth and power for themselves, while turning the serfs into servants who delivered things to them and obeyed their every whim.
They owned The Narrative™, owned the culture, created the rules, and didn't care one whit about what happened to anybody else. They crushed dissent, ruined lives, and now they shrug and tell us to get over it.
Same with climate change. And every other issue. What is good for them is The Good, period.
Rory Stewart, about whom you have likely never heard, is a perfect avatar of the cultural elite. He is a British academic, politician, writer, power-podcaster, and former Tory who thinks that the party is "too right-wing." As an Oxford/Eton guy, he rose quickly up the ranks of the Conservatives and became an important Minister of State for International Development of the United Kingdom. He was a diplomat, taught at the Kennedy School, and now teaches at Yale.
Cultural elite to the T. He has one of the most-watched podcasts in the UK currently.
He is also everything I despise about the cultural elite, and you can see why here:
Utterly shameless and so callous. If the political class (of which Rory Stewart became a member in 2010 when he entered Parliament) had taken on the grooming gangs 10 yrs ago, then Elon Musk or those whom Stewart now accuses of "bad faith" would have nothing to "bang on about". https://t.co/GEvbwkJ9bN
— Dia Chakravarty (@DiaChakravarty) September 15, 2026
'Is Elon Musk clear that a lot of grooming cases he talks about happened ten years ago?'
Rory Stewart explains why he believes there are more important issues facing Britain than gangs of 'predominantly Pakistani Muslim men' grooming women and girls.
Watch in full | http://youtube.com/watch?v=qmf26sXuGyk | @RoryStewartUK | @michaelgove | @elonmusk
"Yes, yes, yes, all that was surely evil, but can't we all get past that now and focus on truly IMPORTANT THINGS?"
FFS. The answer is "NO!" Because all those so-called important things are screwed up for the very same reason that the rape gang scandal happened. Elites who spend all their time in intellectual circle-jerks talking about the world's great problems don't attend to the problems happening in their midst because of their own failures.
These aren't separate problems; they are all aspects of the SAME problem, which is that the elites are all having meetings to discuss climate change, DEI, multiculturalism, "misinformation," and whatever the issue of the day is, without focusing on the bread-and-butter issues that impact the daily lives of ordinary people.
Why is Britain falling behind like a racecar with a blown head gasket? Simple: the obsession with climate change, micro-regulation, mass importation of migrants, Islamization of society, and the firm belief that government can regulate and tax society into prosperity.
Do all those issues matter? Of course they do. But you can't toss people onto the ash heap of history and then whine that they aren't focused on the important issues. "Culture war" issues matter quite a bit, and many of those culture war issues lie at the heart of all the other material ones. And on neither set of issues has the elite covered itself in glory.
Rory's "it's all in the past" shtick is 1) a lie and 2) ignores the fact that the entire establishment continues to cover up the facts. The same mistakes are being made now (ask Henry Nowak about DEI problems), and the elite's solution is to censor everybody who complains.
"We have money to make for ourselves." Yeah, well, the way these jerks make their money is skimming off the top of whatever economy is left over after they regulate productive industries into oblivion.
That Stewart is Eton-Oxford-Harvard-Yale is perfection itself. Throw in diplomat, politician, writer, and influential podcaster, and you have the complete set of ingredients for the witch's brew of elitism that looks down upon the suffering of others and thinks, "you have to rape a few girls to make a multicultural society."
You need not care about what Stewart thinks in particular to see the attitudes he exudes as reflective of a mindset found in all the cultural elite, who identify with each other around the world, but with nobody in particular in the societies in which they live. They care more about some fellow elite in Indonesia or Dubai than the girl down the street who just got raped by a Pakistani who entered illegally.
"We need his labor to prosper!"
Can you tell I hate these people? Not individually, of course, but as a class. They represent the same late-empire narcissists who led Rome down the path to suicide.
There may have been no age when this class fully identified with the masses they presumed to lead, but there were certainly times when elites were better than at others. The Post-war elite in the US was certainly superior to the one we have right now, and the Founding elite were obviously among the best in human history.
At their best, elites provide an essential service in society's division of labor; ordinary people can outsource "big picture" thinking to those better suited to it. At their worst, elites see themselves as shepherds whose ultimate goal is to slaughter the sheep.
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