Let us now praise famous yuppies
By 
You know, I’ve been critical at times, but I am still trying to collect my emotions after reading this story of unfathomable oppression and deprivation from SubStack’s Bari Weiss:
The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.
But the situation of late has become too egregious for emails or complaining on conference calls. So one recent weekend, on a leafy street in West Los Angeles, they gathered in person and invited me to join.
In a backyard behind a four-bedroom home, ten people sat in a circle of plastic Adirondack chairs, eating bags of Skinny Pop. These are the rebels: well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city.
By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil.
For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.
“I grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with diversity issues. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. He says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs, including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.
“They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin,” one mother says. Another poses a question to the group: “How does focusing a spotlight on race fix how kids talk to one another? Why can’t they just all be Wolverines?” (Harvard-Westlake has declined to comment.)
I haven’t been so moved by a story since Hasbro stopped making Mr. Potato Head the clear head of the plastic potato doll product line.
…LOL:
I’m dying I went to this school. Once in a discussion about affirmative action, a kid said he would always prefer to hire other white people. Once in a debate about flag burning, a white kid said he’d like to set on fire flag burners https://t.co/FjJ7uAR8dd— Katharine Trendacosta (@k_trendacosta) March 10, 2021
Bari Weiss: The oppression of these woke private high school kids and their parents is soul-crushing torture. But, like, not so bad they’re willing to decrease their self-rated chances of getting into a woke Ivy League university.— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein) March 10, 2021