Gilded charlatans

Broadly sympathetic to the argument in To Hell With These Gilded Charlatans by Karl Notturno.

The public doesn’t want to turn into a cultural drug addicted mass. They yearn for something greater than bland materialism. They want something to believe in. But the cultural elite has turned into highly effective materialistic drug pushers. It’s hard to win a fight against an elite working hand-in-hand with the smartest neuroscientists, engineers, chemists, psychologists, and marketing professionals to make the perfect narcotic.

We all find ourselves struggling to understand what we want. What we truly want. But most of us have a sense. After all, few of us want to identify with the avaricious pragmatist, willing to compromise anything for an extra buck, or with the social climber and gossip, who carefully manipulates and politics his way through a social group. No. We’d prefer to identify with the hero who stands strong, against all odds, for what he believes.

But the best thing of the article is in the headline.

Gilded charlatans. Yep. That captures it. No, they aren't elite. They are barely credentialed. They aren't really all that technocratic. They aren't communist. They aren't deep thinkers in philosophical or moral terms.

They are the gilded charlatans.