From Sweden to the U.S.: Folks getting tired of being told they're too "undereducated" to wipe their own noses

Saul Loeb, Pool via AP

There seems to be a rumbling in the distance going on, and it’s not just isolated enclaves in the U.S. All over the world, signs point to regular folks, average working, middle-class stiffs, being about up to their eyeballs with the disconnected elites in power in so many countries. Even once hard-core Socialist bastions like Sweden have seen the people who actually pay the freight for the Socialist paradise to exist, show up at the ballot box and vote – if you listened to those running the show – definitively against their best interests (Interests, not surprisingly, best determined by those holding office. That’s how this works.).

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Whatever could be causing this breakaway from the benevolent dictatorship of the (immensely proud of being) over-educated ruling class? A culmination of any number of things, but it mostly boils down to arrogance and the attempted imposition of a serf class on citizenry who remember what it was like to have rights in a livable country that was secure.

In Sweden, last week’s Parliament elections have most of Europe gasping for breath. Good, old reliably Socialist Sweden threw a five-alarm fire switch on the status quo when they elected a Parliament that would be 20.5% Sweden Democrats. Don’t let the name fool you – they are a right-wing nationalist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim party, who have been making steady gains over the past few election cycles, but now? Hello. They are the second largest party in the Swedish Parliment.

…The Sweden Democrats were part of a right-wing bloc that won the election, if narrowly. The Social Democrat prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, conceded defeat and resigned. Ulf Kristersson of the centre-right Moderate party (which won 19.1 per cent of the vote) is now the prime minister in waiting and must stitch together a government. Whether that government will include the Sweden Democrats, or whether they’ll just agitate from the backbenches, remains to be seen. For years there has been a pact in the Swedish establishment never to engage with the Sweden Democrats. That is how significant the election result is. That is why it feels like an ‘earthquake’. Because a party that was treated as a political untouchable, as so vile that a cordon sanitaire had to be put around it, is now the second-largest in parliament, with a remarkable 73 seats. No wonder the managerial elites everywhere from New York to Berlin to Stockholm are reeling.

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Eventually, they’re gonna have to deal with them. I would bet that, in ruling polite circles, they are brainstorming madly how – as Brendan puts it in his article – to keep them isolated and “untouchable,” vice taking a moment and wondering why on earth they appeal to anyone to begin with (this should also sound very familiar.). Try as they might to keep it snuffed out, things haven’t been all meatballs and ABBA reunions. Since a misguided refugee resettlement effort, things haven’t been going all that smoothly, and your average Swede thinks things pretty well suck. This means he is chastised repeatedly by the government as mad, a racist, or shut up already, tiresome peasant.

… The political life of Sweden has been defined by evasion in recent years. The establishment parties, especially the Social Democrats, flat-out refused to be honest about the social disturbances afflicting Swedish society. Crime and violence have soared. There are now so many grenade attacks in Sweden that it is the only country other than Mexico in which police record the number of such attacks. Explosions generally are rising. As a BBC report in 2019 asked: ‘Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on?’ In 2020 alone there were more than 200 explosions and 360 shootings. Sweden is the only country in Europe in which gun murders have surged since the year 2000. Then there are the religious riots. Earlier this year there were Islamist uprisings across Sweden. In various cities, Muslim mobs set fire to cars and hurled stones at cops following a right-wing provocateur’s burning of the Koran. Sweden’s national police chief said he had ‘never seen such violent riots’.

That much of this spike in crime and rioting followed Sweden’s huge intake of asylum seekers in 2015 has made this a tetchy, touchy subject. Swedish politicians and commentators, keen to dampen down what they consider to be the racist tendencies of the Swedish masses, tended to downplay the social instability. Outside observers did likewise. Remember the trouble Trump got into when he said Sweden was experiencing some big social and cultural problems? Don’t be ridiculous, the chattering classes of the West said – Sweden is fine. But it wasn’t fine. And its problems were at least partly a consequence of a crisis of integration, of the failure on Sweden’s part to assimilate the tens of thousands of largely Middle Eastern migrants it accepted in 2015. Consider this: four esteemed social scientists in Sweden examined the rape trends of the past two decades. They found that of those convicted of rape, 40.8 per cent were Swedish-born with Swedish parents, and 47.7 per cent were born outside of Sweden. Most of those were from the Middle East or North Africa. That is something to discuss, right?

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These citizens can see what is happening with their lying eyes, even though they are told none of it is, or that the effects they perceive as deleterious are, in fact, really beneficial. The establishment tut-tuts these folks are just too ignorant to appreciate the good deed being done to/for them. Ergo people are voting that they’ve had quite enough, thank you.

…People who have never darkened the door of a university – and who therefore have not been so exposed to the values and etiquette of the new elites – seem far more content to turn their backs on the increasingly woke establishment and to take a chance on populist upstarts….Rather, they are revolting against their evasive elites. Against an establishment that seems to be in wilful denial about the problems confronting society, and which will brand you a hateful bigot if you dare to raise those problems.

You see the same happening here. In Arizona, a mewling Biden rubber stamp, Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, is within a hair’s breadth of losing his lead in the polls to grassroots challenger Republican Blake Masters…

…while firebrand Kari Lake is wiping the floor with her Democratic challenger for governor.

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What do those two Republicans have in common in campaigning? It ain’t electric cars. The border, the border, THE BORDER. Every Arizonan knows who’s sleeping on his street, what is happening to their crime rates, and what it is costing the state in resources. Their lying eyes watch the news reports at the border, while the Democratic president and the senators who enable him tell you it’s secure.

Washington State, home to Seattle. Another Left Coast BLM/Socialist enabling bastion, and…it’s a horse race. Are people fed up enough to chuck Patty Murray? I’ll bet she feels the breathing on her neck in what should be a catbird seat for her.

Salena Zito in an op-ed today blisters President “Regular Joe’s” complete disassociation from the rest of the country, whether mumbling, burbling or yelling, about how his accomplishments benefit us, or how we really don’t understand – don’t have the capability to fathom – that they don’t hurt as bad as we think they do.

…Last week, President Joe Biden showed what it looks like when the ruling class loses all connection with the realities of the pain and stress of the people it serves. His White House shindig to celebrate his own economic accomplishments was an orgy of self-back-patting and bragging over the Inflation Reduction Act. Experts agree that it won’t reduce inflation, and there was a bit of irony to the fact that stocks plunged (and with them many ordinary people’s retirement savings) over terrible inflation news even as Biden was speaking.

…It is not lost on average voters, for Biden or for Trump, that this administration is wildly out of touch with the crippling effects that inflation is having on their lives. Eggs are 40% more expensive than a year ago, coffee 18%, groceries generally 11%. You don’t have to be a Republican to be unhappy with that.

Biden’s tone-deafness continued the following day, which was spent in Michigan, lecturing people whose median income is $36,842 that they ought to buy an electric car to save money. In much of the Detroit area, the $62,900 Cadillac Lyriq EV that Biden drove as a stunt at his publicity event costs more than a three-bedroom, two-bath home with a detached garage.

Hours later, Biden traveled to Delaware to vote in his home state’s primary, using a taxpayer-funded jet and motorcade to vote in person rather than casting an absentee ballot, as Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump had done when they were in office. It costs over $2,500 per minute to transport a sitting U.S. president.

All of this happened just two weeks after Biden had announced college loan forgiveness — a transfer of funds to the most privileged people in the nation with the brightest prospects at the expense of everyone else. He followed that up a week later by standing outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia, draped in sinister red lighting, and delivering one of the most odious speeches a president has ever given, expressing his loathing for half of the people living in this country.

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I sense a disturbance in the force. Judging by the panic on the other side, their chairs are shaking, too.

Hey! Did your lying ears hear Biden say the pandemic’s over? Enjoy it.

It won’t be tomorrow.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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