Jedediah Bila: "Elitism is what's eating away at our country"

Like many of her admirers, we first came upon leg-chair lovely Jedediah Bila early one morning in the "take-no-prisoners" parry and thrust of Greg Gutfeld's "Red Eye" on Fox.

"I always have thought that elitism — on the left and the right — is what's eating away at our country," writes "Hot Conservative American" columnist and commentator Jedediah Bila in her new book, Outnumbered: Chronicles of a Manhattan Conservative, an album of anecdotal moments in the making of a "conservative girl with a twist." 

"I followed my heart — as always — and have held dear the wise words of my former college professor to "sit down, trust it, and write” when I feel lost. It never disappoints me," Jedediah explains the eureka moment in March of 2009 when "my focus on writing political commentary was born."

It's a fun and easy read — sweet and savory — and sticks to the ribs. We downloaded Outnumbered onto our desktop Kindle app yesterday morning and finished before cocktail hour, devouring tasty morsels amongst the usual multitaskings of a busy day. Arranged as a series of vignettes based upon everyday encounters with the politically correct multiculturalists of the upperclass milieu she moved in as a Spanish teacher at a Manhattan private school, Jedediah's story is full of aphoristic quotable quotes suitable for promulgating on Twitter. A sampling:

Kids are supposed to go to school to learn HOW to think, not WHAT to think.

I learned that what people say about you has a lot more to do with them than with you.

It's incredible how a mind prone to collectivism will quickly try to impose that same branding on you.

I treasure people who come to this country with big goals, loads of ambition and an inspiring work ethic.

"They felt the need to 'remind' me that Obama is a 'genius,' Palin is an 'idiot,' and anything and everything is George W. Bush’s fault," Jedediah recalled sitting through lockstep faculty-lounge chatter in the aftermath of President Obama's election.

Back to that quote in the title to our post:

I always have thought that elitism — on the left and the right — is what's eating away at our country.

Jedediah's insight resonates in a series of eureka moments of our own dating back, perhaps, to early spring of 2009 when we found our voice as an anti-statist Tea Party activist. As we wrote last year in "Gramsci's long march through the institutions ends at the water's edge":

Then came Angelo Codevilla's palate-cleansing revelation that neither statist democrats nor nominally limited-government republicans gave a darn about the electorate. It was the Ruling Class vs the Country Class. Enter stage right the Tea Party and Barbara Bush's unmasking when she revealed her contempt for you and me. And now the cascade of outrageous intrusions on our Bill of Rights.

"I thought the academic elite were supposed to represent the pinnacle of sophistication?" notes Jedediah in mock surprise:

Oh, wait. That's only when they agree with you.

William Staneski observed the phenomenon — a case of "epistemic closure' in the trendy parlance of the day — as it applies to another of our cultural institutions, the media, in an American Thinker piece awhile back:

It is said that a fish is not aware of the water in which it swims since it is totally immersed in it. This is the way cultural Marxism is taking over our world in its inexorable Gramscian march. We swim in it. It enters every pore of our existence. It is everywhere. We can't escape it. Many people accept this world without even realizing it, just as the fish accepts the water in which it swims. They don't realize it as the left creates new conventional wisdom and new intuitions about truth …

Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.

Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.

“Perhaps Mark Levin said it best when speaking of his dog Sprite in his touching book, Rescuing Sprite: 'But the truth is, Sprite did more for us than we ever could have done for him.' I feel exactly the same way about Emma," Jedediah wrote at her blog a few months back about her precious Maltese Emma, featured in a portfolio of images in the final pages of Outnumbered. "She has taught me more about trust, loyalty, commitment, and honesty than I could ever have dreamt of teaching her."

Update: Maggie's Farm links! Thanks, Bird Dog.

Update: Jedediah links!

Crossposted at Riehl World View, Cloven Not Crested and Liberty Pundits.

Comments

[goomp]

Unfortunately, more and more education has become a process of teaching what to think rather than how to think. How to change this if it is not already too late is a challenging task.

[Stoutcat]

Heh. Walter Russell Mead agrees with you:

"Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors..."

As do I.