Watch this clip from New York City. Beware if you’re watching it at work — a few F-bombs dropped:

‘Half of you don’t even have a college education’ https://t.co/gwZN3TLhQJ

— Ed West (@edwest) July 1, 2020

I’m not saying that there should be violence. In fact, I’m saying there should not be. But if anybody needs his face slapped, it’s that fatmouthing punk.

Such a powerful symbolic moment is caught in that short clip. It clarifies. This leftist loony shrieking curses at the police, telling a black cop that he’s a “traitor” to his race. Mocking the police for not being educated. Boy oh boy, the mask falls, doesn’t it?

Here’s a conversation I liked:

This revulsion is more powerful than anything else which is why it breaks down into screaming fits of aristocratic hysteria, literally waving the card of a privileged education in the face of an “unprivileged” person while insulting them for their lack of privilege.

— Tara Ann Thieke (@TaraAnnThieke) July 1, 2020

“Screaming fits of aristocratic hysteria.” Great phrase. Came to mind when I saw this TikTok of a Harvard graduate who says she will stab anyone who says “All Lives Matter” and watch them “bleed out.”

Rob G., a reader of this blog and frequent commenter, often recommends Christopher Lasch’s posthumously published 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. Lasch wrote as a man of the Left, but like Wendell Berry and Philip Rieff, his insights have been absorbed and championed by the Front Porch Republic tribe on the Right. I’ve been thumbing through my old copy of Lasch this morning (it’s interesting to see what I underlined when I first read the book in the 1990s). That book is even more relevant today than it was when it first came out twenty-five years ago. Here’s the opening chapter:

Lasch goes on to say that “upper-middle-class liberals” despise the lowers, and “find it impossible to conceal their contempt for those who stubbornly refuse to see the light — those who ‘just don’t get it,’ in the self-satisfied jargon of political rectitude.”

Lasch quotes Ortega’s indictment of mass man as guilty of “radical ingratitude” — which, for Lasch, describes the new American elite. It’s amazing to read this book, which was written at the beginning of the process of true globalization, and to encounter how much Lasch understood about what globalization was, and the way it would affect not only economic class, but cultural values. The final words of Lasch’s first chapter really do bring the dread when read from anno Domini 2020. He’s talking about “middle-class nationalism” of the kind looked down on by elites:

You will surely want to read the whole thing. Again, the historian Lasch writes from the old-fashioned patriotic American left. This book is a curious thing: something that sounds like a volume from a lost world (which it is), and simultaneously a book that could have been written about events of the past few months.

If a choice has to be made — and the radicals are forcing us all to do so — then count me on the side of the cops instead of these privileged nitwits. The NYC police are now going to take a $1 billion cut to their budget. I hope the New York politicians who have forced this moment like what they’re going to get. Talk about radical ingratitude: wait till they all discover what the police are for.