Thread by @dilanesper

I will say one other thing on my mind about this Mamdani stuff, which is despite the Left's pose of being very class conscious, they really do not understand (or maybe do not care) about the connection between gaming affirmative action and similar systems, and class privilege.

I have said this before, that I knew some people who gamed affirmative action back in the day. People who had always called themselves white but had distant relatives who were HIspanic or Black and when college or job applications came around discovered the One Drop Rule.

The thing is, the people who did this all grew up rich and white in Burbank.

And this is not an accident. Pre-Trump, when vaccine skeptics were mostly on the Left? The zip codes with the highest vaccine skepticism were in West Los Angeles. Parents figured they could free ride.

Or how about "learning disabilities" that give you extra time to take tests? Those should either be spread out evenly throughout the population or maybe even corollate some with poverty due to the lack of educational opportunities.

And yet, when stats were kept in the early 2000's, it was almost all wealthy kids with the doctor's diagnoses and getting the extra time on tests. Again, they tracked it by zip codes and the "extra time" on the SAT was concentrated in wealthy zip codes in West LA and Connecticut.

Mamdani, of course, was a rich kid, the son of a famous film director. Elizabeth Warren had her own kind of privilege as a successful college professor. These are the types of people who check the boxes.

Your average working class kid doesn't know the game and just checks their actual identified race. Just as they don't know to ask for extra time because they don't hang out with the other rich kids who do it or have the fee for service doctors who will fake the diagnosis.

If you actually care about social mobility in America, rather than just letting wealthy people who faced little actual disadvantage but have trendy left-leaning politics, get ahead, you should be appalled by all this stuff.

The best way to disadvantage rich people is to be strict meritocrats. Don't give them anything they can cheat or game the system with. Make them go in there and actually get ahead on smarts, and make their money and connections and "insider knowledge" as useless as possible.

If you do that, a lot of rich people won't get into the sorts of institutions and elite pathways they want to. Which is why their class has been so skilled at creating all these mechanisms by which they can cheat and get ahead of the lower and middle classes.