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Why Ivy League College Liberals Hate Poor People Leftists promote values that work against the people they claim to help

college students
Rod Berne
Rod Berne is a student, writer, and thought criminal. His columns run every Saturday. Follow him on Twitter.
March 19, 2016 Culture
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Why are affluent, college-educated people leftists? Many people have realized that one prominent aspect of the leftist agenda is the intentional destruction of the family. The foot soldiers for this agenda are college students. The traits that characterize young people are perfectly suited for these purposes: media savvy, sociable, and outspoken. The reason college students are leftists is because they want to ensure the working class never breaks free from their chains. In short, college students hate poor people and want them to stay poor.
There are three ingredients in the strategy of the affluent to keep their boot on the necks of the poor: social liberalism, social signaling, and maintaining the structure of the system.

Social Leftism And Class Warfare

Screen Shot 2016-03-16 at 2.08.41 PM
In one of my classes at Yale, the professor took an anonymous informal survey of the class. He asked the students in my class three questions:
  1. How many of you grew up in a traditional nuclear family?
  1. How many of you have parents who have remained married, with no divorce?
  1. How many had at least one parent stay home to care for you before you started school?
The total percentage for each question ranged from 90-95%. Yet if you asked these same students about their thoughts on single motherhood, women in the workplace, or divorce, they would be firmly in support of all of these issues. None of them questioned whether the reason they had stable childhoods, attend a top tier college, and come from families making more than double the average annual income ($120,000 per year compared to the average of $52,000) is because their families followed traditional social norms.
Why is it that affluent students are pushing ideas like avoiding marriage or promoting single-parenthood, which are obviously bad for individuals and families? The reason is because they hate poor people, at least subconsciously. These individuals have enjoyed all of the benefits of the traditional family and conservative values, while promoting an ideology that is destructive and promotes the destabilization of families in lower social classes.
Social liberalism is a method to hoard wealth and maintain the upper-hand. Liberal college students bask in the upsides of stability, while pushing instability for others so they will never climb the socioeconomic ladder. It is a subtle and ingenious method, because they get to feel good about themselves for being “open” and “accepting” all while enjoying the fruits of a value system they claim is oppressive.

The Average Liberal College Student

College 1
3 valued items for the college liberal: MacBook, Canada Goose jacket, and social media
In a recent article in Harvard’s student newspaper, the author describes a common zoo animal seen at many elite colleges—The Privileged Liberal:
You’ll oftentimes find Harvard’s Privileged Liberal studying in a coffee shop (Starbucks, no less) sipping on a pricey macchiato. As they flip through the pages of their assigned readings, a notification pops up on their iPhone: Social Justice Club meets in 10 minutes. They get up and walk towards the door, their designer boots clicking loudly on the floor. As they exit the coffee shop they pass by a homeless man, slumped over on his side as he shivers in the New England cold; they pay no attention, wearing their brand new Canada Goose jacket (retailing at about $600 a pop)—it provides only enough warmth for one. They arrive to their meeting just on time, and as they sit down and pop open their shiny Macbook Pro, they share Bernie Sanders’s latest speech on Facebook as he attacks the ‘billionaire class.’
This is as accurate a description of the average college liberal as I have ever seen. If you ask one of these students how to best help the poor, they will undoubtedly give you answers ranging from “free education,” “access to healthcare,” and “increase the minimum wage.” All of these answers generally have one theme in common: more government.
This is entirely by design. The more power individuals hand to the government, the more the poor rely on those in power for their livelihood, the less likely they will be able to climb out of poverty and reach the same positions that the Privileged Liberal is on track to attain.
Screen Shot 2016-03-17 at 10.02.17 PM
These students have been conditioned to never under any circumstances reflect on their own privileged upbringing and wonder whether a traditional family structure is beneficial for people other than themselves. These students did not come from a background of government handouts, out-of-wedlock marriages, and divorced households. But if you asked them how to address the problems of poverty, they will say that the government isn’t doing enough to help them. Students will never question whether more government might actually perpetuate the problem.

College Students Care More About Social Signaling Than Solving Problems

Common career paths of compassionate Yale students
Common career paths of compassionate Yale students
As you read the description of the Privileged Liberal, you may have smiled at the hypocrisy of a student who rails against the “billionaire class” while wearing a $700 jacket and typing on a $2000 luxury device built by slave labor.
This is another aspect of college leftism that indicates their disgust for the poor. They wear overpriced clothing and purchase electronics made by child labor without a second thought. Yet they jump at the chance to put a Bernie sticker on their MacBook or post a 400-word screed on the evils of capitalism on Facebook. Why wear a Bernie pin on their jacket rather than forego the jacket and donate the money to charity?
The reason is social status. Individually, wearing a Bernie pin or sporting a Canada Goose jacket will provide some measure of status, but combined they send a powerful signal: “I am a member of two tribes: The well-off group that can afford an expensive jacket, and the compassionate liberal group who wants to help the poor.”
Another method they have recently been using to signal their social class is to ensure that everyone around them knows they hate Donald Trump. Even among conservatives the only candidate they have openly supported is Marco Rubio. This is because he is non-threatening, young, and Hispanic.
Trump has been an icon for the working class, and so all elitist college students, whether liberal or conservative must show their dislike for him. Tucker Carlson wrote a piece in Politico on this very subject: “If Trump is leading a populist movement, many of his Republican critics have joined an elitist one. Deriding Trump is an act of class solidarity, visible evidence of refinement and proof that you live nowhere near a Wal-Mart.”
Even for conservative college students, insulting Trump is a form of cheap and easy social signaling that says, “Though I am a conservative, I’m still a member of the upper-class. I’m not one of them.”

Educated Classes Suppress The Poor For Their Own Benefit

College 8
College students are conscious of their hatred of the poor and desire to suppress the lower classes. However, one question that is raised is where their disdain for marginalized groups originated. The answer is the system. Power wants to perpetuate itself. But in the last 10 years our society has swerved into egalitarianism.
It is no longer cool to blame people for their own problems and so the powers-that-be have constructed a plan to allow affluent college students to do their bidding. They enjoy the perks of their social class while promoting values that appear to be compassionate and tolerant, yet are destructive. This method aims to prevent any sort of change within the system by perpetuating the social ills that have sustained it thus far.
Two heroes of American college students are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. These two politicians have gained enormous influence among leftists for their opinions on class divides. Quotes from Warren which students love to parrot are, “The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” and “The system is rigged.” And from Sanders, “The reality is that for the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire class has rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest and most powerful people of this country.”
Voices of reason: "The system is rigged, so stay out of our way."
Voices of reason: “The system is rigged, so stay out of our way.”
This philosophy can be boiled down to, “You’re never going to win, so don’t bother playing.” Yet if you look at the outcomes of students at elite colleges, they tend to do quite well. Essentially they are telling the poor to stay out of the job market so the poor never climb high enough to become social class competitors.
In sum, college-educated leftists promote socially liberal values to destabilize families, wear badges of capitalism in the form of clothing and gadgets to signal their social class, and repeatedly pursue new strategies to suppress the working class in order to maintain the rigid social structure that benefits them. The central goal of affluent liberals is to deprive the working class of their desires, and ultimately erase their opinions altogether.
Rod Berne
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        • onetruth 4 hours ago
          Interesting article, but you're giving college students too much credit imo. The reality is that the vast majority of 18-22 year old people are dumber than fucking dirt.
          Even the ones who have been blessed with above average intelligence lack any sort of life experience and the common sense that comes with it. Most kids are liberal because the childish mind thinks utopias are possible. Truly smart people grow out of this infantile mode of thinking and become more conservative as they age and realize how the real world works.
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            • WisdomSeeker > onetruth 3 hours ago
              This.
              Admittedly, I was very socialistic back in my late teens and early twenties even though I graduated at the top of my high school. Heck, I was even Atheist until only several years ago when I rediscovered religion and realized the Truth of God.
              After I did, together with real life experience of the hard reality of how people actually think and the way the world actually works, everything rapidly starting falling into place.
              I occasionally meet with some of my high school buddies and the one thing that I've noticed is that most of them are exactly as dumb as they were back in the day. They believe in stupid rumors and gossip which if they took the liberty to do some basic 5 minute research on using Google, would discover are actually not true. It's as if they've learned absolutely nothing from their lives and if they were to live them out again, they would do so exactly the same way.
              The average college kid, just like the average dummy on the road, thinks they understand how politics, religion, economics, etc. work but they actually don't understand shit.
              Some will grow out of it and gain wisdom through their life experiences to improve themselves and solve their problems on their own (usually conservatives) whereas others will live paycheck to paycheck and blame the world for all their problems and expect the world to solve their problems for them (usually liberals).
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                • Rod Berne Mod > onetruth 2 hours ago
                  Don't kid yourself-- I go to school with these clowns. Let's dispel with this fiction that affluent liberals don't know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing. College liberals are undertaking a systematic effort to keep their boots on the necks of poor people.
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                    • Luke Stranahan Mod > Rod Berne 14 minutes ago
                      I went to school with these clowns circa 2000. The disconnect between my small engineering college and the college of arts and crafts was absolute. You are both correct, college kids have no idea which end they shit out of, but they can parrot stuff like an absolute zealot, and that stuff is fed to them from the entrenched former 60s protest movement who have literally spent their entire adult lives pushing a liberal agenda.
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                        • onetruth > Rod Berne an hour ago
                          I went to school with them too. We all did, as college campuses have been overwhelmingly liberal since the invention of colleges.
                          A few of them may be wise enough to know what they're doing. I doubt that most are, because you don't know shit about shit when you're 20 years old.
                          Now, if you had said that college professors, administrators, etc are undertaking a systematic effort to keep their boots on the necks of poor people, I'd wholeheartedly agree. The problem is indeed a real one, but the root of it lies in the leaders whose minds are made up, not the students whose minds are still developing.
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                            • CaptainObvious > Rod Berne 2 hours ago
                              Agreed and excellent article Rod. A great analysis of these spoiled kids in college.
                              While I do think people are dumber, they still know what they are doing somewhere in their minds.
                              Which is why they always project. They advocate for all of this social change yet the bulk of their slacktivism is simply posting rants on social media and false virtue signaling.
                              The real dirty work of these proposed changes they want to guilt the lower classes into shouldering the load.
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                              • Lunostrelki > onetruth 2 hours ago
                                I used to subscribe to communism and other socialist ideas before the ages of 14-17. But the question kept nagging at me: why is it that socialist ideologies always either deny people the right to religion or do their best to "enlighten" people away from it? I realized that it's because the true believer in these ideologies is either a useful idiot, or the worst scum of the earth whose motivation is to remove all lofty faith from the people so that they may dedicate themselves to serve his hedonistic "egalitarianism."
                                The communists themselves admit this. They don't want to be good, or moral, or anything more than scum. They want to reduce men to robbery, women to whoredom, and government to institutionalized crime.
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                                  • Beavis_Bunghole > onetruth 3 hours ago
                                    Just because they don't consciously realize why they're doing it doesn't make the author wrong.
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                                      • Charles Sledge > onetruth 4 hours ago
                                        Agree trying to make it in the real world especially in regards to business generally starts to temper all the utopian dreams most kids have in college. Even me who was into rok and the alternative right during college have found myself agreeing with more and more of what goes on here as I age. And I was pretty receptive to it in the beginning.
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                                          • Tony Velloza 4 hours ago
                                            In one of history's greatest ironies, the Progressive movement created the permanent American Oligarchy class. The Federal Reserve Act, and later the minimum wage act, OSHA, welfare, EPA, Obamacare, etc. do more to crush competition than improve the standard of living for the average human.
                                            I've yet to hear of one monopoly that came to be without government coercion. These hipsters criticize the same monsters their ideology created.
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                                              • AryaVarta an hour ago
                                                Nope. White people are left-wing, because it's good for their reputation to be left. They are PC on the outside, but mostly racist on the inside. They simply hide their real opinions, because they don't want to be seen as a racist or anti-semite. Of course, there are always leftists who truly believe in the left ideals, but they are a minority.
                                                I'm glad I'm not white and have to participate in those retarted and hypocritical games.
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                                                  • manuel hernandez 2 hours ago
                                                    On a related note, congrats again ROK! You can add McDonald's to the places that consider you misogynistic! I had to log out of their WiFi to post this because ROK has been blocked, presumably to keep Mickey Ds corner of the web "family friendly". Yet Cosmopolitan and their online cover featuring Kaley Cuoco and an article about "Online Dating S.O.S: The 4 texts no man can resist!" is still accessible. Also, it can still be bought at your local supermarket. But doesn't ANYONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!???:-[
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                                                    • Sirius Isness 21 minutes ago
                                                      "These students have been conditioned to never under any circumstances reflect on their own privileged upbringing"
                                                      well they sort of accidentally do when they project it onto everybody else around them
                                                      "check your privilege"
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                                                        • Better Dead Than Red 25 minutes ago
                                                          Yes, they hate them. The same champagne socialists with Bernie stickers are the ones who despise "ignorants without college degree".
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                                                            • Krampus 27 minutes ago
                                                              Liberals haven't supported the "working classes" for a VERY long time. The Liz Warren types much prefer what many call the "non-working" classes. A completely dependent recipient class, provided they actually vote, is a bloc that will NEVER break ranks. Why would they?
                                                              For all of their talk about helping the "middle class" they don't actually want that as an end.
                                                              If one puts in a small amount of thought one would see that a prosperous, upwardly mobile middle class is contrary to their goals.
                                                              Let's say hypothetically that the liberals (Democrats I guess) had an unprecedented electoral victory and were able to enact all the programs and policies they dream about. And let's also assume that these programs had the desired affect (they won't btw, but this is fantasy) and poverty decreased, unemployment fell, and the more dale class was bolstered. Now you wouldn't need as much "transitional assistance" and you'd have a bunch of working taxpayers looking at their pay checks wondering "hey I wonder if I could pay less in taxes?" And just like that, fiscal conservatives are in and liberals out.
                                                              They want as many people as poor and destitute as possible, completely dependent on government.
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                                                                • advancedatheist an hour ago
                                                                  College-educated liberals hate working class white men, namely, Trump's supporters, because these guys deal with reality by handling tools to make useful things. Blue-collar white men can see through the imaginary bullshit about feminism, diversity and equality based on their experiences with real women and minorities.
                                                                  We should heed the racism of the white working class and pay it more respect. They have way more experience dealing with blacks and Mexicans than foo-foo white liberals because they work alongside minorities in similar kinds of jobs. If they have developed a negative opinion of these groups, this happened through legitimate observation and learning, not because of a failure in moral indoctrination.
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                                                                    • greyghost1 an hour ago
                                                                      Nothing more filled with hatful actions and deeds than a liberal. Marriage and stability is for the elites. funny how divorce and family destruction rates are all high except for one class. the college educated upper middle class.
                                                                      The author is right this is being done on purpose.
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                                                                        • michaelmobius1 an hour ago
                                                                          There is a massive disconnect in the way the liberal progressives (students included) manage to see themselves as working towards the interests of the poor and disadvantage while almost invariably become the financial and cultural elites - even those who end up working for good causes - charities, campaign groups etc - will make sure that they get good professional wages and a great CV that will catalupt them one way or another up the ladder and very often to the very top.
                                                                          I don't quite buy the idea that students consciously and cynically miss the hypocrisy involved. Yes social signalling etc is a massive part of that. Being progressive and supporting social justice concerns is an important means in today's world of gaining not only social approbation but also of accumulating social capital (of whatever kind). This is also - actually primarily - reflected in the corporate world where companies like to seem to be hip and progressive because if they are seen to be 'ethically capitalist' it will benefit their businesses as well (especially amongst the young liberal elites who are likely to be their biggest customers)
                                                                          There are other factors - it's a cliche and a truism that youth tends to be leftist progressive and then with experience to move rightwards. Their professors too are obviously going to be a major factor too - if the vast majority of academics are leftists, and very often literally marxists - then as young minds they are going to easily be moulded in that direction - particularly if there's an incentive system to undergird the ideology that is being thrust into the backsides.
                                                                          The above utopian side of things also predicts what the article mentions - the support for policies that are ultimately going to lead towards more government. What most progressive students may not appreciate is the fact that the types of left politics they are being sold not only supports bigger government but also amounts to collectivisation - which is the reason why the system is never threatened when the leftie students supporting Bernie Sanders protest against Wall Street or billionaires - as long as the result is bigger government both the left and the right will be happy because the common denominator is monopoly capitalism.
                                                                          That leads back to the issue of individual responsibility - the thing progressive students are - deliberately or inadvertently attacking: the poor etc cannot help themselves to get back on to their feet because for them to do so would threaten the collectivist state which both the left and right relies upon. The idealist utopian student then, moves from supporting left collectivist government in his youth to supporting right collectivist government in his maturity and wins in both instances.
                                                                          Progressive students really need to be called to task for this. If they are rich, or come from a privileged background they should be forbidden from membership to left political parties. If you live in Hampstead or the Hamptons you should be laughed out of the house if you claim to be a socialist or leftist. I doubt students are really cynical in the way the article describes but the reality is they support the poor and downtrodden for reasons of self-interest one way or another. At the very least they see themselves becoming the leadership of any progressive movement - the managerial class that Burnham wrote about. They all want to change the world and in the process get rich off the backs of those they claim to be representing but who they would never dream of living amongst.
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                                                                            • pot of smoke 2 hours ago
                                                                              Nigga u lost me at "they hate poor people." You really think these people push for leftist policies l because they "subconsciously" hate poor people and want them to suffer? You mean just like whites "subconsciously" hate blacks and want to keep them down? Or like men "subconsciously" hate women and kept them down for all those years?
                                                                              This kind of leftist shit belongs on Salon or Tumblr.
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                                                                                • Smokingjacket 2 hours ago
                                                                                  So liberals are little PC hypocrites who inhabit the bubble of their progressive correctness! I guess that's why so few of them ever get jobs in the real world, unless you describe a life long career the Department for "check out your life" in Yale or Sanford a meaningful job.
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                                                                                    • LePatriote1980 2 hours ago
                                                                                      I can feel the hatred of the privileged left toward the poor and the working class every day.
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                                                                                        Rod Berne
                                                                                        Rod Berne is a student, writer, and thought criminal. His columns run every Saturday. Follow him on Twitter.
                                                                                        March 19, 2016 Culture
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