The Dean made a little speech yesterday about something appalling he had seen.

“I walked down the hallway yesterday,” he said in a voice that trembled with outrage. “I looked into several classrooms, and I saw faculty members doing ______ . I’m not saying that everybody does it and I don’t want to name any names because I don’t want to embarrass people. But I can’t believe that after everything, everything we’ve discussed, everything we know, all the research on the topic, there are still people who do this.”

Immediately, professors started explaining that no, they were not doing __________. It might have looked that they were doing it but was only because of the logistics of the classroom. But no, they would never. They know how bad _____________ is and they’d never engage in such behavior.

I said nothing because I do ___________ all the time and I love it.

So who can guess what ___________ is?

Somebody donated a large sum of money to the university to promote the study of the Humanities. I was invited to attend the opening ceremony. I was invited in person, as one of the few faculty members. This is an important part of the story, so please keep it in mind.

The ceremony consisted of the presentation of a book that all incoming students will read and discuss in class to foster their love of the Humanities.

Hardcover, illustrated, here is the book:

I took a copy and looked at the list of “every country in the world.” Ukraine is not there but Russia is, with slobbering descriptions of how pretty everything is and how nice the people are.

The book itself is an exercise in narcissism and vulgarity. The author poses, mostly half-dressed, with body parts falling out of skimpy outfits. The countries she visited are a framework for her admiration of herself. It’s downright embarrassing to be caught leafing through this kind of book in a store, let alone in an academic setting.

But wait, it gets better. There’s another book that will be obligatory reading. It’s this one:

It wouldn’t occur to people (I hope) to invite a Jew to visit an event featuring a book gushing over the wonderfulness of Nazi Germany. Or invite a black professor to discuss a book on the joys of slavery. But insulting a Ukrainian, that’s perfectly fine. Some feelings matter more than others. But leaving aside my personal grievances, is it any wonder students aren’t interested in the Humanities? There’s no history here, no intellectual tradition. Just vapid, superficial crap with zero value. This is what the university thinks the Humanities are. It’s not Aristotle or Cervantes. Instead, it’s some dime-a-dozen online influencer and a faddy quack of an author who will be forgotten tomorrow.

I didn’t stay for the ceremony. The embarrassment was devouring me.

I’m the best worst student known to humanity. The Dean made us read a book of neoliberal propaganda and hold a two-hour discussion of it.

Obviously, I didn’t even consider opening the book, let alone reading it. But I easily made the impression of having perused it with great care and attention. During the discussion, I’d crack the book open, catch a random sentence, and then say, “what I found especially provocative / curious / engaging, etc is” and reproduce the random sentence verbatim.

A man like what? Has somebody been listening to Russian propaganda?

Bandera is our José Martí or Simón Bolívar. He fought for national independence. It’s normal for people to celebrate their national heroes. Every nation-state has theirs and celebrates them. I’m not sure what specifically bothers you about this very normal behavior.

Lutnick’s proposal:

– give 600,000 Chinese students spots at all the top universities
– push Americans to the back of the list
– make Americans take spots at the bottom 15% of schools instead, so they don’t go out of business

This is, quite literally, “Americans Last.”

You… https://t.co/P1MiAwocJ3

— SOVEREIGN BRAH 🇺🇸🏛️⚡️ (@sovereignbrah) August 26, 2025

This is clearly part of Trump’s negotiations with China. He accepts these 600,000 students in exchange for something. Rare earth minerals, maybe? In any case, I understand, though not approve, what Trump is doing.

China’s strategy is harder to fathom. It has adopted the strategy of El Salvador before Bukele. El Salvador would aggressively push the best and the brightest out of the country so that they’d send back money and create a semblance of an economy. This is done by desperate, failed countries with a surplus population. Everybody else tries to keep its elite instead of throwing it away like a used Kleenex.

How bad are things in China that they are so desperate to get rid of these 600,000 young people?

JD Vance is now informing us that WW2 ended in a negotiated settlement.

No, you incredible pussy. It ended because we killed those bastards dead. That’s how it ended, you unpatriotic piece of utter ridiculousness.

Honestly, if in 2028 it comes to Newsom vs Vance, I’m kind of not that opposed to Newsom.

I found an intense, unexpected pleasure in talking to students about socialism.

The future is bright.

Hard to believe this is the same room pic.twitter.com/WyD2qPqIFi

— Whale Psychiatrist ™️ (@k_ovfefe2) August 23, 2025

I don’t like either design, to be honest. The first one is what a Soviet antiquarian would have. The second one is the antiquarian’s nouveau riche son after 1991.

They are meant to be special, privileged. It is their default, as failure is the default of their less affluent contemporaries. A network of adults will nourish them, cultivate them, pass them on to other adults. It is a world of recommendations. It is a world of reputations. But in this world their lives can be derailed, overturned. If they cross a certain line. If they make a serious blunder, and are caught. By instinct they know to placate some adults more than others. Adults who wield power, and are willing to use it.

Joyce Carol Oates, Fox

Oates is speaking about students at expensive private schools. They are nurtured and groomed to be the elite. Their admittance and permanence in that class hinges entirely on their capacity to absorb, retain, reproduce, and enforce the behavioral and linguistic norms of the elite. These norms are designed to be abstruse and counterintuitive in order to weed out as many people as possible. They are also—and in this the new elite differs from the way elites were historically—highly mutable.

Every society has an elite. That is not in itself bad. Egalitarianism is rooted in a fantasy, and not a particularly smart one. Historically, an elite was one by birth. This is “unfair” but the positive side of this unfairness was that the elites did not exist in a state of abject terror that their elite status would be taken away. Today, you get expelled from the elite for one wrong word uttered years ago. Like everything else, status has become highly fluid. People live in fear of losing theirs.

Terrified elites are destructive. They flail about, embracing every fad that makes them look exceptional and deserving of their status. Everything new eventually becomes not new. This requires more fads to be invented because the inner circle isn’t stable. It gets redrawn all the time, and ideological obsessions, newspeak, and boutique beliefs are the crayons used to redraw it.

We threw away the idea of birthright aristocracy because it was “unfair” but the system we created in its place is hardly any more fair. Access is still barred to people who can’t empty themselves completely in order to adopt any shape that serves as a ticket to entry at any given moment.

That people who do manage this kind of fluidity are highly neurotic is a given. The human brain appreciates stability and routine above all. The need to throw away all certainty and wipe off all content in order to retain your membership in the elite is psychologically destructive.

The whole point of having a birthright elite was to have a class that was rooted in tradition. It had to maintain the cultural legacy of society because that maintenance work was its reason to exist. Today’s elites do the exact opposite. They erode, take apart, and destroy. Having an elite that works to unmake the culture instead of preserving it is the only thing we gained by pursuing fairness.

Orthodoxy is, indeed, experiencing a boom. The majority of our parishioners are now very young men. Two of them are African American.

Orthodox Christianity has no roots in the African American community, so these young men must have really wanted to be there. As an Orthodox parish in a very white town, you know you are getting popular when black people make a point of seeking you out.

All we are missing is some young women. Sadly, we are not in a place culturally where young women do the sort of seeking that brought their male peers to our parish.