“Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the ‘in’ language — serves as a badge of identity.” —Angelo Codevilla (2010)

In the last couple of weeks, in the form of the controversy about whether or not presumptive First Lady Jill Biden should be addressed as “Dr.,” the utter fraudulence of credentialism has taken center stage. As Patriot Post editor Thomas Gallatin noted, the indignation arising from the notion that anyone would challenge Jill Biden’s status has precipitated rather ironic results, “exposing the absolute vacuous nature of her dissertation upon which she was granted her preferred title.”

Vacuous is too kind. Biden’s thesis is a puerile, sophomoric mess rife with math errors, typos, and breathlessly inane passages such as this: “According to the Retention Director at Cecil Community College, Cecil Community College has made a concerted effort to address retention.”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson minced no words when describing her efforts. “The whole thing is just incredibly embarrassing,” he stated. “And not just to poor, illiterate Jill Biden, but to the college that considered this crap scholarship.”

Yet far more important, Carlson also addressed the bigger picture. “It’s a class thing. We have a class system in this country. … A certain type of person gets degrees … not in order to learn or to create, or to achieve anything impressive … no. Instead, to justify their power over you. They’ve got more merit badges so they rule. … It’s why they shout at you and call you names when you mention it. … If you are allowed to point out that Jill Biden isn’t really a doctor … then you are just one step away from noticing that the medals on their chests aren’t real either.”

For quite some time, our nation has been besieged by a confederacy of dunces, presented as America’s “best and brightest,” even as these so-called “experts” have brought us to the brink of chaos. Codevilla’s above-quoted column was engendered not by the pandemic but by the economic calamity of 2008, when those very same merit-badge wearers brought the entire world to the brink of economic armageddon. And when the ensuing bailout was precipitated in response to their grotesque malfeasance, the realities of our class system were exposed in no uncertain terms. “Too big to fail” institutions on Wall Street and elsewhere received billions of dollars of taxpayer largesse, while Main Street Americans were saddled with catastrophic job losses and millions of home foreclosures, even as they were lectured about the inevitably of anemic economic growth, a.k.a. the “new normal,” going forward.

In short, ordinary Americans who lived in wholly irrelevant “flyover country” were “deplorable” long before Hillary Clinton coined the term during the 2016 presidential election.

And now it’s even worse. Above all else, the pandemic — the very same one precipitated by the ruling class’s fanatic and unquestioning devotion to globalism — has revealed the inner-Napoleon that attends some of the most contemptible “do as I say, not as I do” political hacks this nation has ever endured. While ordinary Americans are suffering unconstitutional, life-altering lockdowns and mask mandates, standing in line at food banks and coping with the wholesale destruction of their livelihoods, our self-anointed “betters” dine without masks in fancy restaurants, get their hair done in salons, and travel during their own imposed travel bans — all while getting the regular paychecks millions of Americans no longer receive.

Science? Science is whatever they say it is. Masks are unnecessary, then essential. Hydroxychloroquine is useless and dangerous until it’s efficacious. The timeline necessary to realize the replacement of fossil fuel usage by technologically viable alternatives can simply be arbitrarily decreed.

Justice? A genuine attempted coup d'état takes a back seat to a phony Russia-collusion investigation. Two former spymasters who lied to Congress get media gigs, while a political consultant who does the same thing gets a SWAT team dragging him out of his house at dawn with the media “coincidentally” in attendance. A faux impeachment is precipitated against a sitting president for purportedly improper political influence vis-à-vis Ukraine, while the videotaped braggadocio of the presumptive incoming president, promising to cut off a billion dollars in aid to the same nation unless a prosecutor investigating his son is fired, remains wholly “unexplored.”

And in a seamless transition engineered by Big Tech and its media allies, unexplored becomes nonexistent or “canceled.” Thus the op-ed questioning Jill Biden’s credentials earns author Joseph Epstein the removal of his profile from the website of a Northwestern University that laughingly states its commitment to the “academic freedom and freedom of expression” it just eliminated. A story disseminated by the oldest continually published newspaper in the nation illuminating the damning ties between Hunter Biden and Chinese Communists earns that paper a two-week Twitter ban. Any dissenting or alternative viewpoints regarding the current election, the Wuhan flu, or a host of other topics where such viewpoints are inimical to the interests of the ruling class are censored, while their promulgators are often doxxed, ridiculed, and/or fired.

In a recent column, leftist Glenn Greenwald highlights the phony fact-checkers who obfuscate the truth in service to the ruling-class agenda, warning that their ongoing efforts auger a “future in which unseen tech overlords police our discourse by unilaterally arbitrating truth and falsity, decree what are permissible and impermissible ideas, and rigidly impose the boundaries of acceptable debate.”

But it’s not the future. It’s right now. And it’s going to get much worse because these self-appointed arbiters of truth are — above all else — massively insecure. So massively insecure that they would rather censor people than debate them, even when they control the levers of power in academia, tech, Hollywood, the media, and corporate boardrooms.

Unfortunately, they are abetted by most people because the scourge of political correctness has made traveling the path of least resistance — and avoiding confrontation like the plague — an endemic part of the American ethos.

If we are to remain a free nation, such self-imposed reticence cannot stand. The years of incremental surrender by decent Americans to the bastardization of language, the indoctrination infesting our education system, and the increasing debasement of our liberties must no longer go unchallenged. We must all find the courage to make it clear a debate does not end simply because one of our “enlightened” thinkers calls us “bigots” or any other derogatory term used to deliberately stifle the free exchange of ideas. At this point, silence equals appeasement — or outright surrender.

Surrender to whom? A cadre of self-aggrandizing “experts” who are anything but.