Noah Carl just dropped the most politically incorrect truth bomb of 2025: elites are biologically bulletproof.

Strip them of their castles (Norman Conquest surnames still over-represented at Oxbridge in 1890). Confiscate their land and businesses (Chinese "landlords" in 1953 reduced to poorer-than-average peasants). Send them to the Gulag to break rocks in Siberia (Stalin's "enemies of the people"). Intern them in the desert and force-fire-sale their farms (120,000 Japanese-Americans, 1942–45).

Do all of that and more, and within one or two generations the same bloodlines are back on top, richer, better educated, more influential than the average. The grandchildren of the expropriated Chinese landlords outperform the grandchildren of the poor peasants who received their land for free. The towns built around Stalin's highest-human-capital camps still glow brighter on night-light satellite maps seventy years later. The interned Japanese-Americans ended up with steeper income growth curves than the non-interned Japanese or even the Chinese who were never locked up at all.

The reason is brutally simple and brutally heritable: high intelligence, low time preference, conscientiousness, and social dexterity are written in the genes, not the deed to the estate. You can seize the estate. You cannot seize the genome.

This is why every attempt in history to create a New Man and a New Society by flattening the old elite has failed within living memory. The French Revolution guillotined the aristocracy and ended up with Napoleon's nephews running half of Europe. The Bolsheviks liquidated the kulaks and within forty years the nomenklatura's children were sending their kids to elite Moscow schools with entrance exams no peasant could pass. Mao's Cultural Revolution tried to smash the Four Olds so hard that Red Guards were beating professors to death in the street, and forty years later the CCP princelings (children of the original 1949 revolutionaries) and the descendants of the pre-1949 landlords are both massively over-represented at Tsinghua and Peking University, lording it over everyone else from the same gated compounds.

The elite is a hydra. Cut off its money and titles, and two new heads grow back, smarter, more focused, and usually angrier.

So How Do You Actually Defeat an Elite?

History gives exactly three mechanisms that have ever worked, and none of them are pleasant, quick, or guaranteed:

1.Genocide or mass expulsion: The only clean break ever recorded. Examples: the post-WWI expulsion of ethnic Greeks from Turkey and Turks from Greece. Brutal, total, and leaves a permanent economic crater where the expelled group used to be. Civilised societies refuse to do it, and rightly so.

2.Catastrophic military defeat + foreign occupation: Germany and Japan after 1945. The old Prussian Junker class and the samurai-descended zaibatsu families were deliberately dismantled by the Allies, their land broken up, their companies confiscated, their networks outlawed. It took a world war, total occupation, and a generation of deliberate de-Nazification and de-militarization. Even then, many of the same families quietly re-appeared in the 1970s and 1980s running Mercedes and Mitsubishi.

3.Burnout + mass refusal: The only method that does not require genocide or conquest. The elite is defeated when enough people simply stop feeding it.

oStop sending your children to their universities.

oStop buying their media.

oStop working for their corporations.

oStop respecting their credentials.

oStop voting for their politicians.

oBuild parallel institutions, schools, payment systems, Douglas social credit, social networks, accreditation bodies, everything.

This is how Christianity toppled the Roman pagan aristocracy (refusal to sacrifice to the emperor + building a parallel welfare state of churches and monasteries). This is how the medieval Church was humbled during the Reformation (mass refusal to pay tithes + printing press). This is how the Soviet nomenklatura finally collapsed: when enough ordinary people stopped pretending to believe the ideology and stopped showing up to the compulsory parades, the whole system imploded from ridicule and apathy.

It is slow, generational, and unglamorous. But it is the only method that has ever worked without turning the country into a charnel house.

The Coming Test

We are in the early stages of mechanism #3 right now.

Trust in elite universities is in free fall. Legacy media viewership is collapsing. Corporate brands that go woke are haemorrhaging billions. Millions of parents are pulling their kids out of public schools. Crypto, homeschooling, trade schools, and parallel tech stacks are growing at triple-digit rates.

The elite feel it. That is why they are panicking, censoring, de-banking, de-platforming, and screaming about "disinformation." They know that the moment the herd stops fearing their credentials and stops craving their approval, the game is over.

Noah Carl is right: you cannot destroy the elite by taking their stuff. Their real capital is written in their DNA and reinforced by culture and network effects. But you can make their credentials worthless. You can make their institutions irrelevant. You can starve the beast of attention, talent, and legitimacy.

And when enough people do that at scale, the hydra does not die, it simply slinks away to some new host country and starts the cycle again. But your society gets to breathe free for a generation or three.

That is the only victory mere mortals ever get.

https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/you-cannot-destroy-the-elite