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These pukes are just low achieving cry babies



See, I Told You So: The Numbers Finally Caught Up to the Covetous Left

Erick-Woods Erickson
Jul 22, 2026



Two columns I wrote you recently deserve a reunion, and a man named Nate Silver just RSVP’d.

Yesterday, I told you that socialism is built on covetousness. Not injustice, not compassion, not some noble hunger for fairness — covetousness. The oldest sin in the catalog, the one God thought serious enough to spend a whole commandment on. Socialism takes that forbidden itch, dresses it up in the language of justice, and calls it a movement.

A few weeks before that, I told you the socialist and communist elite rising in this country are not the wretched of the earth. They are not the poor, the hungry, the forgotten. They are status-anxious people trying to protect a rank they believe belongs to them — and the way they protect it is by convincing everybody else that they are victims of the successful.

I got grief for both pieces. “Anecdote is not data, Erick,” a few of you wrote, throwing my own line back in my face. Fair enough — I taught you that line, and I meant it. So let’s talk about data.

It comes not from some fever-swamp think tank and not from me. It comes from Nate Silver — the numbers man of the center-left, a fellow with no earthly reason to do conservatives any favors. In his July 21 newsletter, “The DSA sweet spot: highly educated, downwardly mobile,” Silver ran more than 400,000 voters through the Cooperative Election Study and found the beating heart of the Democratic Socialists of America. And my friends, it is not who they tell you it is.

The single most Democratic voting bloc in America is not the poor. It is people with postgraduate degrees earning between thirty and sixty thousand dollars a year. Read that twice. In the DSA’s own 2021 membership survey, 80 percent of members over 25 held a bachelor’s degree, but 45 percent had household incomes under $60,000. Silver notes that only about 19 percent of all degree-holders in America live under that income line — the DSA runs at roughly double the national rate. Their common professions? Teachers, non-profit staffers, social workers, public-sector employees. And 85 percent of them are white.

These are not the poor. These are the downwardly mobile. And the difference between those two things is the entire ballgame.

Silver reaches for Peter Turchin’s phrase — “elite overproduction.” We have minted more prestige degrees than we have prestige jobs to hand them. So you get a generation who did what they were told, colored inside the lines, took out the loans, sat through the seminar on the semiotics of oppression, and then waited for the salary and status that were supposed to come with the diploma. The salary never showed up. They carry the debt and the disappointment together. Silver, in his own understated way, says they are “genuinely upset about their station in life.” His own case study, the Maine candidate Graham Platner, he describes as “downwardly mobile” from a “fairly privileged background.” That, right there, is the tell.

Now watch how neatly this stitches my two columns together.

Covetousness first. These are not people who lack. These are people who were promised more and are furious it didn’t arrive. That is envy in a cap and gown. And print this on a billboard: Silver’s data show the most Republican voters in the country are high-earners who never went to college. The contractor. The small-business owner. The plumber who owns three trucks and coaches Little League. The man who skipped the master’s degree, went and built something with his hands, and is now doing better than the person who resents him for it.

Then victimhood. To protect a status the paycheck won’t justify, you recast yourself as a victim — of corrupt elites, of billionaires, of “successful people.” And you recruit others into the same story. Look at what these voters actually prioritize. Not jobs. Not health care. Silver’s numbers show them leading with the culture war — “Free Palestine,” the trans agenda, the environment. Among grad-degree earners in that $30–60K band, 21 percent call themselves “very liberal,” about twice the national average. The grievance isn’t really about the rent. The grievance is about the gap between who they were told they’d be and who they turned out to be.


https://ewerickson.substack.co...rue&utm_medium=email

quote:

"The grievance isn’t really about the rent. The grievance is about the gap between who they were told they’d be and who they turned out to be."

https://ewerickson.substack.co...rue&utm_medium=email

And that part makes them dangerous. They were lied to, coddled, told to study whatever they wanted at an expensive elite private college, given participation trophies, etc. I don't blame these young adults for feeling left out of the American Dream. From an early age they were taught to believe they could be anything they wanted, without the follow on that they'll have to work hard for decades, plan ahead, have the requisite talent and knowledge, and probably need some luck in certain fields (e.g. entertainment).

When people feel they have no hope of winning, they exit the game and seek alternatives. They've got nothing to lose by pushing for new rules to a new game.

I wouldn't say "they have nothing to lose". However, if they keep pushing this narrative they may find out that things can always get worse.

It kind of explains the leftists immigration perspective as well. Many (most?) people of every stripe do not want to be seen as the lowest carving on the totem pole. Having a healthy supply of low-paid third-world immigrants ensures that your local leftist won't be the worst example of humanity in your 'hood.

It also explains their firearms stance. An implement that makes everybody equal is exactly what they don't want.

But, it is not enough to understand these people, we have to nullify and negate them by out-working and out-thinking them. Not that this strategy should be particularly difficult.

How 'bout we just shoot a bunch of 'em? Because that's all they seem to understand.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
How 'bout we just shoot a bunch of 'em? Because that's all they seem to understand.

All things in their own time, soon enough it will happen. I don't look forward to it, but when it's over and done the Democrats asked for it. And the sad part is they could have avoided it all.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
How 'bout we just shoot a bunch of 'em? Because that's all they seem to understand.

A common plot line from Hollywood is the unintentional villain. The guy who chose the wrong side because a worse villain somehow forced or suckered him in. When he sees the light he changes his mind and the good guys welcome him into the fold. It seems to reveal the expectation that harmful errors will be forgiven and goodness recognized.

It isn't going to work like that in the real world when it gets sporty.

quote:

Originally posted by Fly-Sig:

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
How 'bout we just shoot a bunch of 'em? Because that's all they seem to understand.

A common plot line from Hollywood is the unintentional villain. The guy who chose the wrong side because a worse villain somehow forced or suckered him in. When he sees the light he changes his mind and the good guys welcome him into the fold. It seems to reveal the expectation that harmful errors will be forgiven and goodness recognized.

It isn't going to work like that in the real world when it gets sporty.

Wow, I wish had written this.

quote:

Originally posted by Fly-Sig:

quote:

"The grievance isn’t really about the rent. The grievance is about the gap between who they were told they’d be and who they turned out to be."

https://ewerickson.substack.co...rue&utm_medium=email

After growing up on a ranch in a farming family, I went off to a college. In the middle of that I took a break and got a job working in London as a consultant. I was appalled at how the “permies” (permanent or regular employees) seemed to regard their jobs as a possession. I was raised that a job was an opportunity to add value and make money for the company. If one did that well and the company/boss was reasonable, one’s efforts would be noticed and rewarded. If they weren’t, one either wasn’t adding value, or was working for the wrong folks. The corrolary was that one could work for one’s self, potentially making money for themself if they were willing to accept more risk. As a result, I thought, “No wonder we kicked the Brit’s’ arses.”

Then I came back to the states, finished college, and entered the work force. To my dismay, what I considered a really screwed up attitude in the UK was not nearly as uncommon here as I thought.

We may need some sort of economic collapse that renders the government incapable of continuing to provide the welfare tit to folks. A situation where we are back to the old Teddy Roosevelt, “Root hog or die.” approach. If everyone thought/felt/understood that the choice in front of them was add value that someone else will pay you for or die of starvation, perhaps we’d all be better off.

quote:

We may need some sort of economic collapse that renders the government incapable of continuing to provide the welfare tit to folks. A situation where we are back to the old Teddy Roosevelt, “Root hog or die.” approach. If everyone thought/felt/understood that the choice in front of them was add value that someone else will pay you for or die of starvation, perhaps we’d all be better off.

I think there's a lot of truth to that.
The government isn't going to cut off the welfare tit to folks because they keep getting elected based on the promise of free shit.
The free shit army isn't going away. It will take economic collapse.

quote:

The government isn't going to cut off the welfare tit to folks because they keep getting elected based on the promise of free shit.

It's not just the people on the programs not working, it's corporations, Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger, Amazon, Publix, CVS, WalGreens, 7/11, WaWa, CircleK all the companies that feed them the products they sell,

Add the products Hostess, Coke, Pepsi, Bologna, HotDogs, meat, potatoes and for a long time slurpees, ding dongs, all kinds of sugary foods

Add the employees who stock this stuff, then lets Talk housing, section 8, all the money that goes into building rental units nationwide, owned by mega corps like Blackrock.

Free shit is big business....

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:
I suggest expelling NYC from the Union.

Nope....build a wall around it and burn it down.

Democratic Socialists are capitalists themselves. They want socialism chosen democratically and then perpetuated tyrannically. Socialism is a monkey trap. You have to release the promises of socialism to free yourself.

FOX's Shannon Bream interviewed the national co-chair of the DSA Megan Romer, and she confirmed everything and more about their platform they just released.

https://x.com/geraldposner/status/2081716196915732657