All the decent people

The worldview of the limited is limited.

The actress/model Sydney Sweeney was recently interviewed by GQ. Their journalist, Katherine Stoeffel, gave Sweeney a chance to address a recent controversy.

Sweeney had appeared in an American Eagle jeans advert with the tagline, Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. A play on the word genes, itself an allusion to her good looks and ample breasticles.

There was a backlash among the Left. Lots of chatter about eugenics and the inappropriateness of a white person being associated with superior genes.

Sweeney declined to comment on the advert when given a chance in the GQ interview some months after it had appeared. This was a flat no. The journalist was unable to draw Sweeney in.

The online Right celebrated what appeared to be a rare victory over traditional media, now in in retreat as they are confronted with reality and common sense. And all this from an attractive white woman no less.

The tide is finally turning. Journalists and their ilk are reaping what they have sown for so very long.

Except, it doesn’t mean any of this. No one is learning anything, least of all media apparatchiks steeped in groupthink.

In fact, the entire episode just demonstrates to narrative gatekeepers we plebs need nudged, controlled and reprimanded even harder because we are significantly more backward than they feared.

All decent people think like me

What actually happened during the interview was Stoeffel steered the conversation to a place Sweeney could explain her position. A professional journalist offered a rising star a chance to reinforce taboos around the discussion of persistent group differences, a key observation once made by advocates of eugenics.

Her bafflement at Sweeney’s refusal was evident. In Stoeffel’s world all decent people think like her. No one wants to be associated with Nazis and eugenics. Blank slate thinking cannot be challenged at any level, not even jokey adverts. Whites in particular must work hard to distance themselves from these things, and they must make it obvious when they do so. These are the rules every intelligent person understands.

More accurately, the jeans/genes moment provides a superb opportunity for social climbers to demonstrate fealty to regime narratives, a key method of getting on in life. No one really believes it is a sign of enthusiasm for eugenics programmes. That misses the point. It represents a sales opportunity, a chance to show you are aligned with the in-group and can be relied upon to toe the line.

Sweeney’s jeans advert was a misstep, so the thinking goes, but perhaps it was all beyond her control. Now was her chance to distance herself from the horrors of white superiority and to do so publicly.

Decent people think like this. Stoeffel was giving Sweeney a chance to show she was decent too.

Much of this reflects crude mental models of the world. The enlightened like Stoeffel versus the barbarians who embrace racism and hate. There is no nuance here, just distinct categories like opposing football teams.

The barbarians can be thrown into a Nazi bucket that accumulates all the bad things. Eugenics, slavery and racism, even climate denial and hateful speech.

Rejecting a generous offer to showcase your alignment to righthink puts you in the bucket with the rest of the Nazis.

What we witnessed in the interview was an illustration of the limited worldview of the guardian class, there to act as gatekeepers to manufactured narratives they uncritically adopt. It is likely Stoeffel rarely meets anyone who has an opposing view. Every reasonable person believes the same things she does. Those who don’t are backward primitives, so they get thrown into the Nazi bucket.

A nice person like Sweeney obviously doesn’t belong in the bucket, so here is her chance to set the record straight.

In her own mind the journalist was being kind. She gave Sweeney multiple chances to explain herself. This is what Stoeffel’s contemporaries will understand from the exchange.

Many such examples

There are many examples of this phenomenon.

In Britain the Brexit vote to leave the European Union attracted the same confusion among the chattering classes, especially among journalists. Only uneducated racist peasants would want to leave the EU. It was inconvenient to the professional class anyone else would vote for Brexit as their caricature of leavers was incorrect. When a majority voted wrongly they could not understand why. Their confusion was not an act. They had a meltdown because they could not conceive of normal people deviating from their own worldview.

Trump’s original election victory was the same. Many in the media could not reconcile their views with a majority disagreeing. They couldn’t all be hicks and rednecks so their crude model of Trump voters as uneducated white supremacists was exposed to reality and crumbled.

None of this is new. Normal people have rejected the views of the intelligentsia and the educated classes for centuries. Communism and socialism are the most famous examples. They don’t work and ordinary people quickly sense their shortcomings.

Nowadays we can include open borders, draconian public health interventions, renewable energy and many other causes embraced by a powerful minority convinced of their superior insights into life and society.

This is the worry, not right versus left. The progressives who populate the managerial class believe they are well informed. Deviations from their viewpoint are therefore not well informed. The stupids cannot be left to their own devices. They must be directed by their betters.

This mentality drives the technocratic managerial state, a simplistic worldview that dismisses criticism as ill-informed rather than a valid challenge worth considering.

This builds in automatic resistance to competing ideas. It insulates true believers from reality, and is evident in the managerial circles our leaders occupy. They never meet anyone who challenges their cherished beliefs.

Stoeffel is clearly baffled her peace offering is rejected. There is an element of exasperation in her demeanour. How could anyone dependent on the media like Sweeney not play the game? Is the girl just stupid?

Stoeffel did not get a comeuppance. She was confused by Sweeney’s refusal to engage. But this should not be understood as a victory for common sense and even less a moment where the Left had to acknowledge the dissident right.

Her contemporaries, the university-educated minions who run our world and do the bidding of the strategists, would be equally thrown. Sweeney seems stupid to them. They handed it to her on a silver platter. Why would a movie star keen for publicity not advertise her endorsement of righthink? It makes no sense.

The Right will not get their aha moment from the leadership class and their lackeys. This is not the beginning of a corrective among the narrative handlers.

It has the opposite effect.

Sydney Sweeney didn’t take advantage of the olive branch offered which means she must be a barbarian after all, not a civilized person. The people insisting this is a pivot point in the culture wars, a moment where whites said no thanks to ethnomasochism, is lost on our betters. It just demonstrates to them how backward we all are. It reinforces their contempt. It is us who don’t get it.

Their absurd belief system, that they must lead us to salvation, is reinforced when things like this happen. It does not trigger a reevaluation of their views.

The deluded are difficult to reach and unfortunately many of them occupy positions of influence. The GQ interview is teaching us they will not learn and have to be replaced.

Only one thing can really be said about the interview, American Eagle were right, she does have great genes.

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