Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution

by Tucker Carlson

It’s also inevitable. In 1980, Yippie icon Jerry Rubin gave up protesting capitalism to work on Wall Street. Well-educated baby boom liberals began to join the establishment in droves. By the late 1990s, they were in charge. Thanks to the rise of the finance economy, they were getting richer than any previous generation ever had. Nothing changes a person’s attitude toward money like earning a lot of it. It’s hard to feel rage toward the Man when you’re buying a ski house in Sun Valley.

Huge corporations have displaced the blue-collar proletariat in the hearts of elites. Corporations embrace a progressive agenda that from an accounting perspective costs them nothing. In exchange, they get to maintain the economic status quo that has made them billions. The company’s affluent customers get to imagine they’re fighting the power by purchasing the products, even as they make a tiny group of people richer and more powerful. There’s never been a more brilliant marketing strategy.

The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history. Someone needs to protect workers from the terrifying power of market forces, which tend to accelerate change to intolerable levels and crush the weak. For generations, labor unions filled that role. That’s over. Left and right now agree that a corporation’s only real responsibility is to its shareholders. Companies can openly mistreat their employees (or “contractors”), but for the price of installing transgender bathrooms they buy a pass. Shareholders win, workers lose. Bowing to the diversity agenda is a lot cheaper than raising wages.

By redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. That’s helpful for them, since for the affluent, immigration has few costs and many upsides. Low-skilled immigrants don’t compete in upscale job markets. Not many recent arrivals from El Salvador are becoming lawyers or green energy lobbyists. An awful lot of them are becoming housekeepers. Mass immigration makes household help affordable. That’s one of the main reasons elites support it. From the 1800s through the 1950s, maids, nannies, gardeners, and other domestic help were ubiquitous in upper-middle-class households. Economic prosperity gradually eliminated the huge pool of unskilled labor that filled these jobs, but modern immigration policy has revived America’s servant class. Immigrants now fill countless jobs as nannies, gardeners, cooks, and housekeepers. For employers, the best part of the new arrangement is that there’s no guilt attached. Let’s say you lived in an affluent household in Boston in 1910. You’ve got help at home; everyone in your neighborhood does. The problem is, your servants are Irish. They may do a fine job making breakfast and ironing the sheets, but you can never quite relax. These are people who speak your language and look like you. At some point you may wonder: why is someone who could be my cousin cleaning my toilet? It’s uncomfortable. Third-world immigration solves this problem. When your housekeeper is a peasant from Honduras, there’s no reason to f...

You no longer hear much from our leaders about the importance of racial harmony. Almost nobody claims we’re really all the same beneath the skin. The emphasis is on our differences. That’s the essence of the diversity agenda.

If you want to know what people really care about, take a look at where they live, especially if they could live anywhere. Hillary and Bill Clinton are worth tens of millions of dollars and have free Secret Service protection for life. They could live safely in Harlem or East New York. Instead they bought a place in Chappaqua, which is less than 2 percent black. Barack and Michelle Obama are also rich and surrounded by bodyguards. Their kids went to Sidwell Friends, so school zoning is irrelevant to them. Yet when they left the White House they still moved to the whitest neighborhood in Washington. Fewer than 4 percent of their neighbors are black, in a town that was known for generations as Chocolate City. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York is a tireless advocate for diversity, but not in his own neighborhood. Although he lives in Brooklyn, where one in three residents is African American, his own zip code is one of the whitest in New York. It’s less than 5 percent black. Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, doesn’t really live on an Indian reservation. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard, as well as an enormous number of white people. Her zip code is less than 6 percent black. Even Representative Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. Waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. She lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in Hancock Par...

Consider the broader effects of low male wages. Whenever gender differences come up in public debate, the so-called wage gap dominates the conversation. A woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. The statistic is repeated everywhere. But that number compares all American men to all American women across all professions. No legitimate social scientist would consider that a valid measure. The number is both meaningless and intentionally misleading. It’s a talking point. Once you compare men and women with similar experience working the same hours in similar jobs for the same period of time—and that’s the only way you can measure it—the gap all but disappears. In fact it may invert. One study using census data found that single women in their twenties living in metropolitan areas now earn 8 percent more on average than their male counterparts.

It’s been more than twenty years since a Democrat running for president won the majority of married women in America. Unmarried women, by contrast, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. The last Democratic platform to mention the importance of having a father at home was in 2000.

Within academia, the pressure to conform to climate orthodoxy has rendered the scientific method irrelevant. Judith Curry, a longtime climatologist at Georgia Tech, resigned from her tenured position because of what she described as “craziness in the field of climate science.” Over the course of her career, Curry has published two books and 186 articles on climate. But by 2016, the field was so politically fraught that academic journals refused to publish research that deviated from conventional opinion. In an essay announcing her resignation, Curry wrote that “research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment.” Discouraged by the stifling conformity, Curry gave up on academic journals altogether. She now publishes her research online. When science no longer requires evidence and no longer tolerates scrutiny, it’s no longer science. It’s dogma.