I am finding it increasingly difficult to be optimistic about America today.

We have abandoned scientific fact, morality, and patriotism in pursuit of pseudo-science, impiety, and ambiguously deceitful concepts such as “equity,” “gender dysphoria,” and the increasingly violent cult of Transgenderism.

Schools can no longer define what a woman is while they teach our children to hate their country and its founders. Lawlessness and depravity are no longer behaviors to be avoided—instead; they are the maxims of the brave new world our reigning elites are fabricating for us.

The American family, once the bedrock of our nation, has been attacked and fragmented by secularists who see it as an obstacle to a profane society thoroughly subservient to an omnipotent one-party government controlled by an elite class of socialist autocrats.

The Constitution—America’s founding document—is repeatedly attacked and debased. The Bill of Rights is vilified by socialist Democrats as outdated, and so are many of the sacred individual liberties the Founding Fathers incorporated in it.

Despotism, not democracy, appears to be the embodiment of the American dominion today.

That is the conclusion of the wide-ranging essay I am sharing with you today. It is adapted from The War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, by Kevin Slack (Encounter, 456 pages).

I hope you will give this insightful and disturbing commentary a read. You won’t be disappointed.

American Despotism

By Kevin Slack

True science, the evidence before one’s eyes, exposes the globalist American empire as a kleptocracy that has betrayed the country, outsourced its wealth and defense, and degraded its people.

 While not every member of the neoliberal order, which still employs well-intentioned bureaucrats, has agreed to support a despotic agenda, the regime’s character forces one to draw certain conclusions. Many neoliberals aspired to a global aristocracy, magnificent men and women flipping quarters to grateful peasants. Oligarchs brokered the outsourcing of U.S. industry in return for financial control under the dollar, even as they engineered technologies for a new information age.

But today’s globalist American empire is a kleptocracy filled with princelings of the political and corporate elite who inherited—and now drain—the wealthiest and most powerful empire in history. It consolidates market share and outsources its technologies to foreign companies for its private benefit. It despotically introduces a permanent state of exception to the law to rule in its own interests. In fear of the subjects off whom it feeds, it assigns legal identities to groups to determine their privileges.

In this civil war between Western whites, the kleptocrats claim science’s authority to subdue the populace, and they enlist an identity politics priesthood to stoke racial hatred against middle-class whites, who suffer indignities, humiliations, and loyalty tests. Following the COVID lockdowns and unlawful 2020 election, the last vestige of legitimacy has collapsed, and the kleptocracy has revealed itself as an incompetent, corrupt class of degenerates.

In their palaces at the center of a rotting kingdom, the despots surround themselves with harems, catamites, and vicious eunuchs to administrate a world of performance rituals and sadomasochistic fantasies even as their people and world hegemony decline.

The Globalist American Empire and the Kleptocracy

One can assess the globalist American empire using a classical framework. To be self-sufficient and thus unify a people and secure its happiness, a political regime requires agriculture (farmers), industry (engineers, artisans, and laborers), defense (soldiers and police trained in the arts of war), taxation (wealthy bankers and financiers to plan revenue and monetary policy and to fund public projects, private business, and war), care of religion (priests to manage the sacrifices, counsel the rulers, and educate the youth), and institutions for determining justice (political leaders to determine the public interest and what is necessary and expedient). As the United States abandoned republicanism for the welfare-warfare state and then began outsourcing its production, government-sponsored oligopolies assumed these functions.

Agencies manage and work with private businesses in each fiefdom, for example, in agriculture, food, and manufacturing (15.8 percent of GDP, 22 million jobs). The regime is guided by finance, which, along with insurance and real estate (8.8 million jobs), constitutes 20 percent of GDP. It is defended by a warrior class (military and intelligence agencies, spending one trillion per year, 4 percent of GDP, 2.8 million jobs).

The priests of body and soul—health care (19.7 percent of GDP, twenty million jobs) and public education (5 percent of GDP, 11.2 million jobs)—claim the authority to define life and instruct the youth in “equity.” Finally, a ruling class uses the federal government (including contract and grant employees, 9.1 million jobs, 6 percent of the nation’s workforce), which provides 30 percent of state and local governments’ revenue (employing 7 million).

The information, media, and entertainment industries (6.9 percent of GDP, 1.87 million jobs) supply its propaganda and censorship and direct the leisure and moral indoctrination of subjects and their children. Depending on other nations for its consumption, the empire must expand its control over the world at the cost of factions at home and endless wars abroad. As the producing nations become self-sufficient, the empire must increasingly rely on openly coercive financial and military measures.

The upper echelons of the ruling class come from wealthy cosmopolitans (as opposed to the rich in rural areas), those in the top .01 percent (about 23,000 individuals, or .007 percent of the population worth over $10 million) who control each fiefdom, limit access to its ranks, and jockey for political influence and benefits.

Almost 25 percent of those in the Forbes 400 derived their wealth from finance, especially hedge funds and private equity, which grows faster than the economy, while 15 percent came from technology companies and 10 percent from food and beverage. While the Rothschild, Walton, Koch, and Mars families manage and maintain their wealth, a significant number of the Fortune 400, such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Dorsey, rose through skills in the technologies that have globalized and enhanced business growth.

But one cannot simply look at profits. Wealth guarantees political influence but not political power—it is necessary but not sufficient. The wealthy seek to retain control of their fiefdoms by funding political initiatives, buying off politicians, and developing and maintaining close ties with the decision-makers who craft and enforce the rules they agree to play by. They must participate in the political framework shaped by a narrow class of insiders, the ruling class properly speaking, which uses wealth to gain and maintain political power.

 3,000 Tyrants

While each fiefdom helps preserve the order and negotiates for its privileges, at the center are the 3,000 tyrants, a ruling class of kleptocrats who ally with, stroke, tax, or intimidate the monopolies they secure. It controls more than half of the nation’s industrial and banking assets and more than three-quarters of its insurance assets.

These few thousand individuals writes Thomas Dye, control the media and investment firms and “over half of all the assets of private foundations and two-thirds of all private university endowments. They direct the nation’s largest and best-known law firms in New York and Washington, as well as the nation’s major civic and cultural organizations. They make the largest political campaign contributions. They occupy key federal government positions in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.”

The ruling class is best understood as the hub that uses gatekeeping power to connect segmented fiefdoms. Those at the top are driven by ambition and rise by charisma, manipulation, and duplicity. Some, like George Soros, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Charles Koch, Tom Steyer, Larry Fink, and Warren Buffet openly purchase political influence for both profits and policies like open borders and outsourcing.

Billionaires like Zuckerberg, Koch, Soros, and Bloomberg have created “new activist models of political involvement that combine electioneering, issue advocacy, and philanthropy. They pursue influence through interlocking networks of foundations, grassroots organizations, tax-exempt groups, and super PACs.” Political elites—think the likes of Barack Obama, Mitch McConnell, John Kerry, and the Clinton and Bush families—often depend on wealthy donors for their rise to power. But, when powerful enough, they gain independence from them.

“Annoyed and bored” with Soros, who gave economic lectures but little money, Obama told his campaign organizers, “If we don’t get anything out of him, I’m never f—ing sitting with that guy again.” To strengthen their power, the kleptocrats intermarry, guard their connections, and nepotistically secure positions for trusted friends and family, for whom they broker billion-dollar deals (the McConnells in China, the Bidens in Ukraine), often with foreign oligarchs, and hide the money in offshore accounts.

Their greatest secret is each fiefdom’s internal operations: not just buying off bureaucrats and public officials but accomplishing anything in a nebulous fiefdom like the Pentagon or evading or passing investigations by the SEC, or accessing and using political operatives in the intelligence agencies.

The ruling class wields executive force to protect, milk, and extort the rest of the top 0.1 percent and offer it the cover of legitimacy. It secures billions in government contracts with pharmaceutical and defense contractors, from which it taps profit and influence. Every industry regulation provides kleptocrats information for insider trading (even while banning it). Using the myths of free markets and private corporations, kleptocrats spy on enemies and launder political favoritism through interconnected government monopolies.

“Three companies control about 80% of mobile telecoms. Three have 95% of credit cards. Four have 70% of airline flights within the U.S.” Amazon controls more than 50 percent of online retail, while it receives a $1.46 subsidy from the federal government per package and more than $3.7 billion in government subsidies.

The internet “mediates modern life, like a giant, unseen blob that engulfs the modern world.” Google holds 92 percent of the global search market. Facebook receives 77 percent of the social network ad revenue, and Facebook and Google receive about half of all internet ad revenue. Google and Apple provide 99 percent of mobile phone operating systems, Apple and Microsoft 95 percent of desktop operating systems. Monopolies crush attempts to start alternative social media websites; they are barred from the Google Play app store and de-platformed by Amazon Web Services.

Amazon is the government—it provides cloud computing for the CIA and the Pentagon. Google is the government—the U.S. military and intelligence agencies are its biggest clients. The Pentagon uses Google’s servers to store critical information and to surveil billions of people while manipulating the information they can access. Six firms control 90 percent of media, down from 50 in 1983.

Kleptocrats choose headlines and argue for “fact-checking” the news to silence dissenting media. Google blackouts conservative websites from searches. Facebook limits circulation or removes certain accounts as spam, destroying years of content for “inauthentic behavior.” Twitter de-platforms users or limits viewership.

To secure these monopolies, the rulers bar market entry by blocking financial access to bank loans and credit card services. The banks are the government, public-private partnerships in the most regulated industry. The Justice Department instructs Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citibank to lock out political dissidents marked as “high risk”; Visa blacklists companies and persons for “hate speech.”

The IMF recommends that one’s “history of online searches and purchases” be used in assigning credit scores. PayPal cooperates to shut out online purchases. Periodically the kleptocrats extort industries and billionaires to make them fall in line. They use regulations to threaten or smash key industries, which their friends, families, and financial backers then purchase for pennies on the dollar. They used a Facebook whistleblower to threaten Mark Zuckerberg with regulation for not censoring dissident speech. Jack Dorsey was forced to step down from Twitter.

Aided by its cosmopolitan managerial minions in the top 1 percent (with incomes above $500,000), the ruling class monopolizes the gateways to power and congeals its influence in the top 9.9 percent (incomes above $158,000) in an ooze of bureaucrats and corporate toadies. Access into the higher ranks of these fiefdoms, which dispense honor and wealth, depends on birth, wealth, and education. This pseudo-aristocracy “has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.”

Each fiefdom plays a function in maintaining the regime and thus requires some competence to work in (skills in econometrics, technology, or pharmaceutical research). Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan, and leading law firms, while hiring for elite connections, toss meritorious applicants into a stressful grinder.

Whereas the United States used to draw its best and brightest into physics and engineering, now it draws them into finance, where they make more convoluted instruments for the hucksterism of the kleptocracy. The corporate structure remains the same across industries, blending cutthroat competition with sanctimonious statements promoting diversity and worker authenticity. Human resources departments manage humans as resources, and public relations departments display ruling class mores.

The function of elite universities is to instill an education in both ruling class mores and diversity. The orthodoxy both weakens allegiances that might undermine loyalty to the corporation and teaches a jargon of racial and gender inclusion, equity, and integration that befits diversity in both the workplace and global markets. Wealth and status accompany one’s climb up the corporate ladder: cosmopolitans take breaks from corporate pressure to sample luxury brands, exclusive resorts, and exotic vacations.

Every regime needs religion for both legitimacy and sacrifices. The ruling class does not wake up each morning believing its success has come from the parasitism of its own people. It launches global foundations—the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, George & Barbara Bush Foundation, Clinton Foundation, and Obama Foundation—that combine power, wealth, and moral causes.

It turns to moralistic priests to sanctify its power and indoctrinate its own children as well as to give subjects an identity and sense of meaning. The priests of identity politics explain race and gender identity, attaching each individual to a group with certain rights and duties. They provide the ambitious with a sense of purpose in fighting evil (Whiteness) and in improving the world by social and environmental justice. At Alphabet (Google), where the mean income in 2019 was $258,708, the workers union fights not for higher wages but for greater social activism and censorship.

Google fires employees for hate speech and polices their social media accounts. The therapists of authenticity hear the cosmopolitans’ private confessions and prescribe cures, in counseling and psychotropic drugs, for their disordered souls. They spin parables of authenticity, simpler ways of life, and love and freedom in a modern world. Using Thomas Friedman’s terminology, they point out the dead olive posts to Lexus drivers.

The ruling class claims a right—by birth, wealth, and education—to rule others without their consent. It speaks of vague ideals like “democracy,” the “Constitution,” and “the rule of law” while staging the hoax of popular government in ritual public elections and televised press conferences. For the bottom 90 percent who cannot afford therapy, the ruling class uses media and entertainment to provide self-esteem and moral superiority for having the right opinions on climate change, transgenderism, anti-racism, or gun control. Increasingly it assigns legal privileges based on group identities.

The media manufactures crises and sham opinion polls, and Netflix and YouTube fixate viewers’ attention to monopolize their perceptions of reality and eliminate competing stimuli so that they ignore reality all around them. For a growing and increasingly degraded, ignorant, and dependent class, the kleptocracy peddles democratic socialism: leaving monopolies intact while socializing consumption for peasants—EBT cards, free clean needles, and pornography for their stupefaction and sterilization.

The 3,000 Tyrants are not statesmen. Statesmen are patriotic, attaching their ambition for immortality to the love of a people. The tyrants only benefit themselves while enslaving the lower class they claim to liberate. As the kleptocrats bask in their power, they are cut off from the problems of the people they rule, and they resent challenges to their legitimacy. As they lose legitimacy with the people they used to manipulate, their words become obviously hollow: their moral lectures are removed from reality, their comedians are not funny, their music and movies are repetitious and uncreative, and their poetry is propaganda.

Thus they war with the old nationalist populations, the true peoples of the world, to deprive them of their rights and reduce them to servility. To disempower the American people, the kleptocrats flood their land with pliant immigrants, dilute their vote, undercut their wages, and outsource their production. They manage the people’s slow decline by financing their consumption with record levels of debt, disrupting their families, and providing for their intoxication and suicide, which for U.S. males increased more than 25 percent from 1999–2016.

The Myth of Meritocracy

The American kleptocracy, which claims science and anti-racism to justify its power, is not a meritocracy produced by equal opportunity. The wealthy, 77 percent of whose children attend elite universities, monopolize educational institutions as gateways to power; half of the 4,000 most powerful Americans received degrees from just 12 universities, 20 percent from Harvard.

Wealth does not translate simply into higher test scores. Legacy students at the top 30 elite private colleges are four times more likely to be accepted. More than one-third of Harvard’s class of 2020 were legacy students; Princeton, with a 7 percent acceptance rate, admits over 30 percent of its legacy applicants. Moreover, the ruling class must openly abandon standards of merit to maintain the alliance between corporate elites and identity politics. Universities increasingly drop the SAT or ACT requirement and even the GRE for graduate school in order to admit underperforming students.

Criteria include wealth, birth, diversity, and political activism. Undergraduates have been disenrolled

for posting videos that disagree with BLM, and undergrad journalists who question systemic racism have been fired, replaced by pliant token “conservative” writers. Per their test scores and overall numbers in the population, white gentiles are the most underrepresented group in the Ivy League (25 percent), meaning the most underrepresented in the halls of power.

White Jews are the most overrepresented group (20 percent). Black and Hispanic applicants with average GPAs and MCAT scores are accepted to U.S. medical schools at much higher rates (81.2 and 59.5 percent) than average (30.6 percent); black applicants are four times more likely to be accepted than Asians and almost three times more likely than whites. Special diversity positions have been created for progressive educators and bureaucrats. Blacks are 13 percent of the population and hold 18 percent of civil service jobs, 50 percent in some agencies.

Universities have become monolithically progressive and rife with grade inflation. One-half of tenure-track and tenured history faculty come from just eight universities; one-half of political science faculty at research universities come from just 11 universities. The future leaders are meager fare: coddled students with no real-world experience and self-entitled, even in failure. They are too insulated to recognize their own privilege and too weak to rule with justice. Instead, they are honored for “enhancing race and/or ethnic relations.”

The incompetent ruling class and its priesthood clamoring for simony desires the honor of ruling without being capable of the work and thus fails to solve basic problems. Government monopolies introduce outsourcing, nepotism, and bureaucratic ineptitude, vividly exposed in the Flint water crisis. Complaints about simple incompetence, such as mailing notices of court hearings nine days after the fact, are attributed to “unconscious bias” and “institutional racism.”

Finance capitalism no longer delivers products that work. CEOs outsource production with an eye to quarterly profits or deliver substandard goods. Boeing, once known for its engineering prowess, puts politicians and private equity icons on its board; it is now “a political machine with a side business making aerospace and defense products.” Boeing outsourced its design to Indian workers at $9 an hour and implemented a faulty software system known as MCAS.  With insufficient oversight from the Boeing-friendly FAA and inadequate pilot training, the 737 Max started falling out of the sky.

The U.S. infrastructure, its roads and bridges, scored a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Infrastructure bottlenecks have been created in semiconductors, railroads, and ocean shipping. Monopolies writes Matt Stoller, have brought “shortages in everything from ocean shipping containers to chlorine tablets to railroad capacity to black pipe (the piping that houses wires inside buildings) to spicy chicken breasts to specialized plastic bags necessary for making vaccines.”

Cronyists used the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which could have been prevented by simple fixes (like the new reinforced cockpits), to create the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with a budget of $8.6 billion and 65,000 employees. “What the TSA is good at,” writes J. D. Tuccille, “is high-visibility groping, scanning, and confiscating. Making people drop their pants, take off their shoes, and surrender their shampoo annoys people in a way that says ‘we’re doing something’ without actually accomplishing anything.” While spending millions on new gadgets, the TSA has an 80 percent to 97 percent failure rate at discovering weapons.

 Incompetence in the Military

The ruling class’ incompetence extends to the military. Wall Street has outsourced components for key weapons systems to China, and American foreign policy, crafted by Ivy Leaguers, is a disaster, spending billions on corrupt dictators, cronyist infrastructure projects, and ineffective programs. Optimistic State Department talking points reflect false assessments of bureaucrats removed from failures on the ground and even intentional deception.

Despite spending $1 trillion a year, the Defense Department refuses to be audited, while appropriations fund questionable programs like the F-35 fighter, M1 Abrams tank, and Littoral Combat Ship. The USS Gerald Ford, a $13 billion aircraft carrier, was so plagued by mechanical failures that by its third year (2020), it had not embarked on a single mission. A pair of deadly naval crashes in the Pacific in 2017 was caused by “total incompetence.”

The social justice warriors in the officer corps respond by prioritizing diversity. West Point attacks “toxic masculinity”—its cadets derisively call its required Western Civ class the “I Hate America” class. Military leaders celebrate transgenderism, and instructors are pressured to pass females who fail physical requirements.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley agreed to warn the Chinese before a U.S. attack even as the armed forces he represents have become incapacitated, debauched high schools saturated with revenge porn and rising sexual assault charges from lovers’ quarrels.

From 2016 until 2021, the Pentagon spent $15 million to treat 1,892 transgender troops, including $11.5 million for psychotherapy and $3.1 million for surgeries. In 2018, 66 percent of service members were “either overweight or obese.”

Conversely, a few highly trained combat troops are fatigued by endless, fruitless police actions. In this culture of brothers in arms, they fight not for the country but for each other and resent those back home who are unaware of their sacrifices. Twenty veterans commit suicide per day, some after serving a dozen combat tours.

Delta Force has acquired a criminal reputation as some of its members, operating with impunity from the law, sold illegal drugs and committed a string of murders. And special ops units do not win wars. Despite spending over $822 billion and sending over 800,000 military servicemembers to Afghanistan, with more than 2,000 killed and 20,000 injured, the U.S. military was defeated by Taliban militiamen.

 Intelligence Failures and Economic Mismanagement

The United States surveillance state, with no analytics to assess mountains of data, uses intelligence not for the public but for the kleptocrats’ interests: to spy on conservative media and political enemies, including President Trump. The FBI not only peddled the fraudulent Steele dossier, but it has also long wasted taxpayer money for its agents to infiltrate unimportant dissident groups, entrap their members in silly plots, and then imprison them. In the farcical plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer, five of the “militiamen,” those who concocted the plot, were FBI agents or informants entrapping those they arrested. Prosecutors dropped the testimony of FBI Agent Richard Trask, who had posted during the investigation, “If you still support our piece of shit president [Trump] you can f— off.”

Unsurprisingly, the FBI payroll funded the leaders of the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters who called for violence at the January 6 capitol riot. Homeland Security labels the riot an “insurrection” to justify its increased surveillance over political dissidents even as it declares “white supremacy,” meaning Trump supporters, the country’s greatest terrorist threat.

Meanwhile, the CIA, in another intelligence failure, could not locate its puppet president of Afghanistan, Johns Hopkins professor Ashraf Ghani, as he fled with a reported $169 million in cash while his country imploded. Overnight the Taliban confiscated $28 billion in military equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters and A-29 Super Tucano attack aircraft. George W. Bush blamed the failure on conservatives who have “disdain for pluralism.” He compared Trump supporters to the Taliban, “violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home.”

Kleptocratic incompetence extends to economic mismanagement. The United States has used the dollar’s place as the world’s reserve currency to hide growing class inequality with massive deficits that allow Americans to sustain their consumption and entitlements while outsourcing the nation’s production of goods and technology.

According to the Social Security Board of Trustees, the program will continue to pay out more than it collects until 2034, after which it will have exhausted its asset reserves of $2.9 trillion. The program has a present underfunding of $13.2 trillion. It estimates up to a 21 percent across-the-board cut in benefits for existing and future retirees to sustain payouts. Medicare funds will be exhausted by 2026.

Entitlement spending has long enabled intergenerational redistribution, saddling the young (who do not save or invest) with debt while an average elderly couple receives $244,000 more than it puts in. In 2017 health care became the nation’s largest employer, a giant cartel redistributing wealth with little long-term economic benefit to future generations.

According to the principles of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the problem with entitlements is not that they are “underfunded” but that they could introduce unmanageable amounts of currency into circulation. But the theory also posits that there is no real interest to be paid, only the balancing of accounts, which will justify the renegotiation of elderly whites’ entitlements and pensions and “reparations” in the form of redistributive social programs to minorities and recent immigrants. MMT works best when savings are depleted, as those without a cushion immediately depend on the Treasury’s monetary manipulations—a mere 40 percent of Americans have $400 saved for emergency expenses.

MMT expresses both current currency abuse and the erosion of the middle class it claims to support. Republicans secure tax cuts to the wealthy, while Democrats secure funding for green energy and bureaucratic programs. Banks and corporations that receive money first spend or invest it before inflation sets in, punishing the middle class that tries to save money.

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, the financial elite wiped out middle-class businesses even as the Fed bought the bonds of companies like Apple and Verizon to support the market for investment-grade corporate debt, driving up stock prices. Fed members profit by trading in stocks the agency buys. Trump and Biden initiated an unprecedented level of money-printing. From March 2020 to February 2021, the Fed created four times more dollars than had previously existed (from $4.1 to $18.1 trillion).

The great flaw of MMT is that it confuses accounting identities for real-world production. The kleptocracy bids up stock prices increasingly detached from reality in real estate, cryptocurrency, and tech start-ups, and it prints money to pay interest on its mounting debt. For the rest, wages lag behind prices. The ruling class has long promoted driving up the cost of fossil fuels and meat to force consumers to transition to renewable energy and insect-based diets. By June 2022, Biden’s cuts in oil and food production brought devastating inflation and record gas and food prices.

Chinese leaders have only agreed to finance U.S. debt in order to build up their economy with offshored manufactures and technology. With the dollars they accumulate, they purchase U.S. real estate and resources, and they secure political deals with the “deep state” that give them monopoly status in foreign markets and allow them to expand militarily.

But China, like other nations, creates record amounts of money to sustain excess consumption—bringing the highest peacetime debt in world history. To keep the yuan weak, China amasses massive deficits and an estimated 300 percent debt- to-GDP ratio, driving demand by pouring money into real estate, ghost cities of shoddy workmanship, and commodities.

Reserve currencies like the dollar have historically found their limits, followed by prolonged economic depression. The Chinese have long negotiated with the Saudis to price oil in yuan to destroy the petrodollar that finances U.S. consumption. With the increasing demand for a stronger currency, American elites will be the first to leave the dollar to protect their wealth and blame monetary irresponsibility on the public. Klaus Schwab writes, “For quite some time now, some analysts and policy-makers have been considering a possible and progressive end to the dominance of the dollar.”

Most damaging to the kleptocracy is that its hypocrisy discredits its moral authority. The COVID pandemic revealed science to be an institution, not a method of thinking. Instead of a community of independent researchers who verify one another’s work, it is a politically funded cartel whose research and reporting is shaped by politics.

Among scientists, there is pressure to expand funding for research, and public disagreements destroy careers. Universities own their researchers’ intellectual property, patents, and publications, and their scientists punish dissidents that threaten the millions they receive in federal grants. In gain-of-function research, “Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.”

The global guild of Western university scientists has come to rely on Chinese students for tuition revenue and research for their journals. For cheap labor, they outsource high-risk research to foreign labs that use minimal safety precautions. Unsurprisingly, scientists prematurely denounced the COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory,” attributing it to “anti-Asian” hatred, a link to the identity politics priesthood that secures the interests of a ruling class that no longer bothers to hide its hypocrisy.

High-profile politicians lectured the public to wear masks and self-isolate when they themselves did not. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi closed barbershops and salons but exempted their own hair stylists. Governor Whitmer marched with BLM protestors while attacking store owners who remained open. Her husband opened up the family cabin and traveled to Lake Michigan to use their boat while she banned travel between homes in Michigan. Barack Obama went golfing while Michelle lectured Americans to stay home for all but essential activities. Governor Newsom closed California central valley wineries but kept his own open; despite his order prohibiting indoor dining, he dined at posh restaurants without a mask. At a Napa fundraiser, Pelosi’s masked brown servants served wine to maskless wealthy white donors.

COVID only continued the discrediting drumbeat of ruling-class hypocrisy. Hillary Clinton attacked Wall Street but received up to $225,000 per speech at Goldman Sachs. Al Gore attacked the fossil fuel industry, yet he made an estimated $100 million selling Current TV to Al Jazeera, based out of oil-rich Qatar, and he spends $30,000 per year on utilities for his 20-room estate.

Obama warns of rising sea levels but purchased a $12 million waterfront mansion. Celebrities and professors demand Americans shrink their carbon footprint, yet they fly on private jets, travel to international conferences, and live in palatial homes. The politics of gender does not apply to developing countries or to Muslims, the politics of race does not apply to Silicon Valley or Hollywood, and the politics of class does not apply to the Ivy League.

The pseudo-meritocracy results in Democratic one-party rule in states like California, which has the nation’s greatest level of inequality. Democratic long-term rule over cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago shows the country’s trajectory. Gentrifying cosmopolitans drive out middle-class voters with high rents and plan tent cities of drug users and street defecators. Homicides in major cities rose 44 percent from 2019–20, and another 5 percent from 2020–21. Nationwide they rose 30 percent, a 60-year high.

Even as the homeless filled cities like Los Angeles, the elites welcomed in millions more illegal immigrants, who bring the Mexican drug cartels’ wars with them. As Houston reported skyrocketing homicides, the Harris County sheriff reminded deputies to share their personal pronouns in introductions. No longer prosecuting property theft, cities like Dallas and San Fran- cisco released criminals from prison to terrorize the public and only enforced violations on citizens who could pay fines. The city of Chicago decided not to prosecute gangsters involved in a deadly public shoot-out because they were engaged in “mutual combat.”

White hipsters who can no longer tolerate the cost of living, filth, and crime move to more conservative cities—Boise, Bozeman, Salt Lake City, Sioux Falls—where they recreate the same failures, revealed in declining happiness among women and increasing drug use and suicide rates among men.

The loss of family and private associations and their sham replacement with online identities has brought isolation, depression among the lower class, and madness among its pseudo-elites. As the middle class collapses, the United States returns to an ancient politics of oligarchy and demagoguery, the “perpetual vibration between . . . tyranny and anarchy.”

But conservatives have no reason to be pessimistic: the emperor has no clothes. The incompetent, corrupt, and degenerate ruling class has lost all legitimacy. Citizens no longer believe state media facts selected for political control. True science, the evidence before one’s eyes, pulls back the curtain to expose the globalist American empire as a kleptocracy that has betrayed the country, outsourced its wealth and defense, and degraded its people.

Progressivism is not inevitable, not on a fated “right side of history.” Nor are its peddlers true believers. Most academics are status-seekers who teach anything to secure their privileges. Their intelligent students reject the orthodox myths of indoctrination necessary for graduation. Branded as racist or sexist for merely existing, they no longer care about being called either.

They sit through required classes on race and gender, the global village, and climate change, calculating how to balance personal advancement with social duty.

They groan at the charade of privileged professors turning their classes into awkward confessionals, pressuring students to participate in the revival, throughout which musty Pharisees sniff out every intention. Increasingly the key political demographic for any political movement, young men, has dropped out altogether.

About Kevin Slack

Kevin Slack is a professor of politics at Hillsdale College, where he teaches political philosophy and American political thought, including classes on American progressivism, liberalism, and radicalism. He is a founding member of the Ciceronian Society. He is the author of War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, and Benjamin Franklin, Natural Right and the Art of Virtue. His scholarly articles have appeared in American Political Thought, New England Quarterly, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Church History, and American Thinker. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Dallas.