Ezra had to write a column about why it doesn't threaten environmental apocalypse to have children because it was, by his account, the question he received more than any other.
An international educated class whose brains were boiled into letting male sex offenders into their daughter's high school bathrooms, remaining barren because of fears of a fake apocalypse, castrating the children it has for social credit points, that now debates whether looting and shoplifting are defensible forms of remedial social action, that is in the process of deindustrializing Germany and replacing its legacy population in Canada: this is Elite Human Capital.
@captainchaser21 I’d like to add that I live in Sugarhouse and my singles ward is packed every week with hot people. Plenty of engagements get announced as well so it’s working.
Went to No Kings protest today
Difficult to draw historical analogies because everyone is so fat & comfortable - all the anger is about hypothetical/abstract/future injuries
Almost seems like real suffering might actually make people *less* pissy & aggrieved bc they'd be busy
⚡️Bukele is hated by a lot of elites because he proved that large parts of social collapse were tolerated, not unavoidable.
He destroyed the professional alibi. He showed that if a state decides order matters more than procedural vanity, activist status games, and bureaucratic self-protection, it can reassert control very fast.
That is the wound.
A huge amount of modern leadership culture is built around managed helplessness. Crime is “complex.” Disorder is “systemic.” Decline is “multifactor.” Public misery gets translated into language that removes agency from the people in charge. Bukele broke that machine. He made the issue embarrassingly concrete. Use power. Back the police. Crush gang control. Reclaim territory. Restore fear of the state. Suddenly the old excuses sound fake.
That is why the hatred is so intense. He did not just change El Salvador. He exposed a ruling-class preference. Many leaders would rather preside over decay than be accused of being too harsh while stopping it. They fear moral contamination more than they fear public ruin. Bukele reversed that hierarchy and won.
The part people still do not say out loud is even simpler. Disorder benefits insulated elites more than they admit. They do not live inside the consequences the way ordinary people do. They can moralize from protected neighborhoods, private schools, guarded buildings, and abstract language. The working and middle classes eat the actual cost. Bukele made that arrangement harder to hide.
My real view is this:
He proved that state weakness in many places was a choice.
He also proved that restoring order requires concentrated coercive power and a leader willing to absorb elite disgust. That is the trade. People who praise him usually understate the concentration-of-power part. People who hate him usually lie about the order-restoration part.
The deepest truth is this:
Bukele is dangerous to the prestige class because he turned their favorite sentence into a joke.
“We can’t” became “you wouldn’t.”