Something has gone wrong with the minds of young “Elites.”
I am talking about those who have at least one postgraduate degree, make more than $150,000 a year, and live in or near cities.
It turns out that while this group—roughly one percent of the U.S. population—may reside in the United States, they actually inhabit an alternate reality—an alternate reality dominated by fear and loathing.
They are afraid that the planet is being overrun by humanity. To stop this imaginary plague of people, they overwhelmingly endorse abortion and, in some cases, infanticide.
They are afraid of climate change, seeing every summer storm or winter blizzard as a harbinger of death.
They still have night terrors over Covid, and are so fearful of the predicted rise of Disease X that some of them have started wearing masks—if they ever stopped.
They are more than willing to sacrifice their freedom—and yours—in exchange for promises that the government will protect them from such dangers.
Most of all, however, they are afraid of main street America, those whom Harvard Law graduate Barack Obama famously scorned as “clinging to guns and religion.” That’s why these overeducated snobs cheer when Joe Biden denounces half of his fellow Americans as “MAGA extremists” or Christian nationalists. They really do despise you.
Don’t take my word for it.
To see just how far out of mainstream—not to say out of their ever-lovin’ minds––America’s young Elites are, look no farther than a recent survey done by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a group founded by economist Stephen Moore.
The Committee commissioned pollster Scott Rasmussen to survey 1,000 Elites who fit the above profile, then he took a closer look at those who had attended an Ivy League school like Stanford or Harvard. These “Super Elites,” as we might call them, turned out to be even more wackadoodle than the rest.
Take climate change for example.
The Elites have worked themselves up into such a state of fear over a projected—and perhaps greatly exaggerated––rise of a couple of degrees in the earth’s temperature over the next century that they are willing to do without air conditioning, air travel, gas cars and much else.
Not only that, but they are determined to make you do without these modern conveniences as well.
Some 72 percent of the Elites, and a whopping 81 percent of the Super Elites, favor banning you from driving your kids to Disney World in a gas-powered vehicle. Almost as many would forbid you from flying to Hawaii—or anywhere else––on vacation.
It gets worse. To “combat climate change,” 77 percent of the Elites, and nearly 90 percent of the Supers, are in favor of rationing gas, energy and even meat.
All those stories you heard about being forced to eat bugs? It seems that, if the Elites had their way, you would be already be pouring milk on your breakfast of Captain Crunchy Bugs.
Our Elites and Supers also astound in the sheer amount of blind trust they have in the government.
Despite the mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, the border, the economy, foreign policy—and almost anything else you can think of––seventy percent of Elites still believe that Washington “does the right thing most of the time.”
Going into the fourth year of the Biden administration, only a third of all Americans remain that trusting. Perhaps gullible is a better word.
Elite trust in the government also extends to schools. They believe—by a two to one margin––that school administrators and teachers, not parents, should decide what children are taught.
Ordinary Americans, many of whom worry that woke indoctrination is replacing the three r’s, hold the opposite view.
What left me absolutely gobsmacked, however, was the Elites’ answer to the following question:
“Does the United States provide too much individual freedom, too much government control, or is the balance about right?”
Now, as you might expect, if you ask ordinary Americans this question, most come down on the side of freedom. They will either say they are concerned about government overreach (57 percent), or that we have the balance just about right (27 percent).
After all, most of us still understand that we are citizens of a country founded on the promise of liberty from a distant tyranny.
Our Elites beg to differ. Almost half of them, and almost six out of every 10 Supers, say that Americans enjoy too much individual freedom.
If this sounds like these Elites are hungering for a socialist dictatorship, I can only say that, when I lived in China, I often heard Chinese Communist Party officials condemn America in exactly the same terms.
It is jarring to think that nearly half of our Elites now agree with China on this point.
Now you know why our Elites despise main street Americans. Not only do these snobs virulently disagree with us on nearly every issue, they believe that their diplomas in journalism, gender studies, or whatever give them a natural right to control as well.
After all, as their intellectual, cultural and moral inferiors, we should simply submit to their enlightened rule. Wear the mask, sheep. Eat the bugs, peasant.
This also explains why these Elites have of late become so hostile to democracy.
In America the demos—the people—are sovereign, not some self-appointed aristocracy.
Although the math skills of the Elites are, in many respects, woefully deficient—gender studies courses do little to help in this regard––they can count.
And we––normal, main street, working-class and rural Americans––vastly outnumber them. Moreover, we periodically get to choose who governs us.
That’s why they’re so afraid.
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Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and holds multiple postgraduate degrees from Stanford. His most recent book, The Devil and Communist China, will be available on March 19th.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the New York Post.
