Nepo Babies

The REAL Reason Straight White People Hate Wokeness

As somebody who supported Trump in 2016, I read a lot of articles and watched a lot of new reports analyzing the behavior of people like me. The reporters (who always seem to think that they’re smarter than us and have a better understanding of us than we do ourselves) typically attribute our choices to “subconscious bigotry.” According to their thinkpieces, apparently I’m scared of a changing world where white people are no longer the majority and voting for Republicans is a way for me to “lash out” against a society that is leaving straight white men like me behind like the relics we are. Fortunately one day the changing demographic shift of society will make people like me extinct.

Needless to say, I disagree with this analysis, and I don’t think that the journalists who profile people like me in this way are even remotely as clever as they seem to think they are. Personally I don’t believe that standardized testing or IQ tests are an accurate measure of intelligence, but since these kind of credentials seem to be the only things that journalists respect, it’s worth pointing out that I’ve taken the SAT, the SHSAT, and the GMAT, and scored in the top one percentile of each of those tests the very first time I took it. I also speak French and German, attended a competitive high school widely considered to be the best in New York City, and know a broad variety of programming languages. Again, I’m not saying this to brag. I know a construction worker named Mark who frequently works on renovating my basement and the more I chat with him about construction work (which is actually a very complicated and nuanced profession) the more I start to suspect that he is actually a bit smarter than me. Sadly, if Mark himself were to criticize these snobbish journalists, they would probably dismiss him as a “uneducated working class voter,” despite the fact that he was once part of a special forces unit that combated drug dealers until an injury forced him to leave that line of work. Since most of the journalists who write these patronizing articles about right-wingers don’t appear to have any respect for the practical type of intelligence that is so common among conservative voters, it falls instead to “book-smart” conservatives like me to correct the record and educate these journalists on the flaws in their thinking. I want to talk about the real reason many white voters like myself hate wokeness.

In a previous substack post, I described how our society could best be compared to the mechanics of a popular video game called Stellaris, in the sense that there are different “classes” of job - worker, specialist, and ruler - and typically people want to have the highest class of job possible, effectively traveling up the promotion ladder. However, if a ruler job slot is already filled, then you cannot assign an existing specialist or worker into that slot - even if they would be more productive than the person currently holding that job slot. I find this to be one of the more realistic aspects of the game. According to the myth of meritocracy, we live in a society where the most capable people rise to the top. But that’s not really true, is it? Even the most basic level of analysis is enough to disprove it. For example, suppose I worked for a company where the CEO was incompetent and only got their position through nepotism or networking. Obviously I would make a better CEO than them, but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to get their job. There’s no standardized testing for how qualified one is to hold high-level positions in corporations, which is why so many of these people end up mismanaging their companies or having scandals. The normal way to advance in most companies appears to be to kiss ass to the people above you, stroke their egos, and try to make yourself look good. This has very little to do with intelligence and much more to do with social skills. In theory we live in a meritocracy which means that the most intelligent people rise to the top, but in reality the elites at the top never willingly step down in favor of their intellectual betters. The only way for you to have a shot at any sort of ruler slot - ie, an important position that is currently held by one of the existing elites - is for one of the existing rulers to resign/drop dead, or for you to foment enough societal chaos that people in ruler slots die quicker resulting in a much higher rate of turnover among these people. (Proper methodology for doing this will be covered in a future Substack post.) My point here is simply that despite what the media says, we do not live in a meritocracy, and anybody who claims otherwise is lying to you. Instead, we live in a highly unfair oligarchy where the majority of positions are given out through nepotism, with ruler parents working hard to ensure that their own kids grow up to claim ruler positions, regardless of whether more qualified people exist or whether installing their children as rulers would be the best thing for society at large. This means that if you want a ruler-tier position for yourself, you need to think strategically. Since I’m a bit of a probability-analysis nerd, I’d like to review the related math, so that we can optimize the best way for you to achieve power. I’m not just talking about making a nice salary as a mid-level manager - those are nice, but they are still just specialist-level positions with very little influence over society as a whole. Instead I’m talking about getting into the ruler class, a much more elevated strata of society that is much harder to gain access to.

Imagine that you are a highly ambitious and intelligent straight white male who lives in a Western society that has 20 ruler-class job slots. In an ideal world, all those job slots would go to whomever is best qualified. In actuality, the breakdown is more like the following:

• 14 of those job slots go to children of the elite, due to nepotism. Most of these people will happen to be white, because historically white people have held all of the ruler slots in Western society (although this is changing rapidly). You have no chance to get these positions if you do not have close connections to one of the elite ruler class.

• 4 of those job slots will go to minorities, because of woke virtue signalling. Our elites like to maintain the pretense that they are egalitarian, so they will explicitly reserve a few of the ruler jobs for minorities such as blacks and trans people. That way they can avoid accusations of racism by pointing to their token minorities. You have no chance to get these positions if you are not a minority.

• The remaining 2 of those job slots go to whomever is best qualified. You have a shot at one of these positions. Of course, the competition is much more intense because all the other ruler slots are taken, primarily by the incompetent children of the elite.

In other words, if you are a highly intelligent poor or middle-class straight white male, your chance of attaining one of the ruler-class jobs is 1/10th of what it should be. In a true meritocracy, you would be competing for 20 of those ruler slots, but in our current society, you are only competing for 2. The remainder of those slots are held by worthless idiots who attained their positions either through affirmative action or through nepotism.

If you are a highly intelligent black or LGBTQ minority, you have a slightly higher chance of success, since the affirmative action of wokeness will result in a few extra spots being reserved for you, but still, you are only competing for 4 slots rather than 20, which means that your chance of attaining these ruler class jobs is still far lower than it would be if we lived in a true meritocracy. You have double the chance of getting a ruler position than your straight white male counterpart would get, but your chance of attaining one of the ruler-class jobs is still just 1/5th of what it would be under a true meritocracy. In fact, now that more and more black people and minorities are becoming part of the wealthy upper class, those 4 job slots are starting to decline and become more and more like 2 job slots, because wealthy black people will often insert their own kids into the mandatory “affirmation action” ruler slots, favoring their own incompetent children over highly intelligent middle class black people. Do you really think that a black celebrity won’t favor their own kid for an acting role rather than some middle class black youth? There’s a reason that wealth is generational, and it has almost nothing to do with competence and almost everything to do with nepotism.

Ultimately, the people in charge of our society don’t care about putting the most competent leaders in power: they only care about making sure their own children get those positions, and they tell you that you live in a meritocracy so that you don’t (justifiably) hate their children, who constantly have an unfair advantage over you. The reason our oligarch leaders always save a few extra scraps to toss to minorities is so that they can use imaginary race and gender issues to distract from the very real class issues in our society. Wokeness isn’t really about equality, it’s about promoting many different shades of color among the spoiled rich kids who are groomed for leadership, until our rulers are a beautifully diverse rainbow spectrum of incompetence. Sure, every one of our leaders might turn out to be inbred morons, but they will be inbred morons of every imaginable race, gender, and sexuality, who have all attended the very finest colleges and prep schools.

This is how you conceal nepotism

If you don’t believe me, here is a straightforward example which should make this reality more apparent: the case of Robbie Mook vs Steve Bannon. For those of you who do not remember the 2016 U.S. election, Robbie Mook was Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategist: a good looking and highly charismatic token gay man who attained his position largely because of the affirmative action that our woke elites display towards marginalized minorities. Robbie was also an ineffectual moron who somehow managed to lose an election for a candidate who was estimated by most pollsters to have a 95% chance of victory. Steve Bannon was Donald Trump’s campaign strategist: a disheveled weirdo with an inexplicable habit of wearing his shirts in multiple layers. Steve was also an extremely intelligent and scrappy political brawler who managed to take an underdog candidate to the highest position on earth. Without bothering to discuss any of the irrelevant details of their personal lives, which one of those people would you want teaching our nation’s future leaders: the charismatic idiot diversity hire who managed to lose the easiest election in history, or the highly intelligent straight white male weirdo who put a zany reality star into the presidency and managed to forever alter the trajectory of our nation’s future? If you wanted to develop the most competent leaders possible, then Steve Bannon would be the obvious choice, because he actually succeeded in his goals, whereas Robbie Mook failed so completely and shamefully that a less corrupt society might reasonably expect him to commit ritualized suicide. But that’s not what Harvard did. Instead of inviting Steve Bannon to be a guest lecturer so that the future leaders of our society could actually learn how to succeed at their goals, Robbie Mook was invited to be a guest lecturer at Harvard so that our future leaders can learn how to be pathetic losers like him. In fact, Harvard had campus-wide protests simply when Steve Bannon planned to attend a conference there.

Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you? I mean, regardless of whether you consider Steve Bannon a good person or not, it’s undeniable that he’s a highly intelligent and competent person, which means that young students who want to go into politics could undoubtedly learn a lot from him. I wish I had Steve Bannon mentoring me: if I did, it’s quite likely I’d have achieved a lot more success in life. But instead of learning from success, Harvard chose to teach failure. Following the 2016 election, Steve Bannon was punished for his success by being banned from their campus, while Robbie Mook was honored for his failure by being invited to teach the children of the elite how to be just as incompetent as he is. Harvard produces more global leaders than any other school in the world, so if you thought that our society was a meritocracy it might seem really strange to you that our future leaders are learning from people with a track record of failure rather than success. It only makes sense when you realize that our society is not a meritocracy. Most of the kids who go to Harvard are the children of the ruler class themselves, which means that they will be put into positions of leadership regardless of whether they are competent or not. Why bother training the children of the elite to be competent leaders when they have no real competition for the job?

Of course, this lack of concern for competence among the ruler class has a lot of trickle-down effects. For example, why is it that our military was unable to win a war in Afghanistan against a much weaker enemy that was three decades behind us technologically? Frankly, it’s because our ruler class is incompetent and they give out high-ranking military promotions on the basis of social signalling rather than effectiveness, resulting in a completely mismanaged military. Most of our leaders were given positions that they didn’t deserve through nepotism, so of course they’re poorly qualified to lead. How could we expect our future rulers to be effective when the top schools in the world choose to have incompetent losers teach them rather than highly effective winners? When people’s political views are more important to their success than actually obtaining measurable results, then we are not living in a meritocracy, or even in a true democracy. Instead, we are living in an oligarchy, where advancement is based not on intelligence but rather on being politically aligned with the interests of the oligarchs.

This is just one of many examples of the failures of our leadership class. It’s also why these idiots had such a hard time understanding the threat that online conspiracy theories posed to their status quo, until it was too late and their legitimacy had already disappeared. Unfortunately, due to the effects of assortative mating and the vast expense of higher education, many of the people in charge of our society are inbred morons who only got their positions through nepotism.

Let’s go back to our original goal: mathematically maximizing your chance at getting one of these ruler jobs. Assuming that you are a poor (but intelligent) white male who acts purely in your own rational self-interest, what is the best solution that will optimize your chance of grabbing those spots? Well, obviously, the current system is broken, so you vote for whomever will burn it down. For example, a populist demagogue. If said demagogue dog-whistles that he will kill the rich, that’s even better, because ultimately this isn’t really a debate about policy: this is a debate about who gets those 20 ruler-class job slots, and it’s just a statistical fact that your chances of grabbing one are a lot better if all the rich oligarchs and their children are dead. Policy and ideology are just a smokescreen for the age-old question of who gets to have the power. (Did I mention that I would like to be a populist demagogue and that I absolutely promise to leverage state-sanctioned violence against any wealthy oligarchs who obtained their wealth through nepotism and a system that is rigged against the poor? Because it might be very relevant here. I’m not even going to dog-whistle my intentions, because that’s too subtle. I’m telling you straight-up that I believe in true meritocracy and I’m willing to kill any oligarchs who oppose this trend. If they try to use nepotism to put their own incompetent children into power and their kids aren’t intelligent enough to deserve those positions, then I will turn them into dog food. Please feel free to consider this hard focus on meritocracy my official campaign platform.)

Notice that at no point in this calculation of how to maximize your success did any racist beliefs come up. Woke journalists would love to have people think that anybody who disagrees with their vision of society is racist, but this is just propaganda that they use to smear their enemies. The truth is that if you’re not in one of the elite families and you don’t benefit from a lot of diversity points, destroying the paradigm of wokeness is simply the most mathematically optimized path to grab one of those ruler slots. It’s not about racism at all; it’s just about taking the most direct and efficient route to get what you want out of life. Why should you tolerate the existence of any ideology or institution that tries to prevent you from achieving your dreams, all so that some rich asshole’s spoiled brat can take what should rightfully be yours? The answer is that you shouldn’t. If you want to live in a true meritocracy, then you need to vote for populist demagogues who are willing to burn down the existing system and hurt the oligarchs whenever they try to use nepotism to unfairly favor their own incompetent offspring.

Of course, if you really want to grab one of those leader positions, then voting isn’t enough. Voting is a very passive way to get what you want. That may be enough to grab one of the specialist positions, but for a position in the ruling class, you have to earn it. You need to take a more active hand in overthrowing the status quo because as leaders like Stalin or Genghis Khan taught us, the best way to the top of society is to assume that the top seat is yours and simply cut down anybody who is currently sitting in your chair. In a way, what we’re talking about is revolution. Technically the revolution may be “peaceful” because it doesn’t break the law for a demagogue to encourage people to vote for him while promising to punish a group of rich assholes whom everybody hates, but it’s still risky because people of power tend to frown upon anybody who tries to take their power away, especially when said individual is willing to slaughter them and their children in order to do so. And when people of power find your beliefs objectionable, they will often operate outside of the law to suppress you. Confronting the status quo is always risky, but if you succeed in overthrowing the existing system then you are almost always guaranteed a position among the ruling class in the new world order. That’s why I decided to propagate Q-anon conspiracy theories. It wasn’t anything to do with “racism,” as so many journalists unfairly claim: it was simply a calculated and very strategic attempt to overthrow an unjust system that discriminates against ambitious and intelligent people like myself simply because I happen to be a straight white male - a group that our woke elites wish to stigmatize. And it’s not like I lied about our elites being evil pedophiles. That fact was quite obviously true. If many members of our ruling class aren’t evil pedophiles, then why has Jeffrey Epstein’s client list still not been exposed? Who benefits from hiding the identities of wealthy pedophiles, and why are these answers still being kept under wraps?

Obviously my motivation for bringing this up isn’t entirely altruistic. I want power: I’m not going to deny that I want one of those ruler job slots for myself. But is my ambition something to be ashamed of? Granted I may not have as much practical knowledge as my friend Mark does, but I’m still a pretty smart guy, and I think I could do a lot of good for the country if I were in a position of leadership. I’d certainly do a lot to tear down the system of nepotism and incompetence that our oligarchs have created, opening up more opportunities for intelligent poor and middle-class people to succeed rather than the spoiled children of our wealthy elites. And when you consider the kind of people who are currently in charge of our society - something which Jeffrey Epstein’s mysterious “suicide” made very clear - it begs the question: wouldn’t it be a refreshing change for our country to have more leaders who aren’t wealthy depraved child-rapists?