Morality hesitates

Why nice, white collar people champion assassination

They reminisce over you.

Looking down on cashier philosophers

If you’re a monarchist but you work at Jamba Juice, your fundamentally defining characteristic for most people is that you work at Jamba Juice. You can have the entire world figured out, have every angle on every screed completely covered, but if you work at Jamba Juice, most of the serious work you’re known for will be relegated to concocting elixirs made out of fruits picked with human resources imported from Central America.

Similarly, if you are a grant writer for an NGO, you may be a lifelong, pious Democrat, but if someone put a GoPro on you, you might wonder whether people would be able to infer that you were such a good party-loyalist, so expert at being Democrat, going around doing Democrat things. Would anything about your day lead anyone to know with certainty, you weren’t a secret monarchist or just a regular office-worker? How could anyone be sure?

To state the obvious, if you’re a director, grant writer, consultant, or administrator at an NGO or any entity requiring “professional services,” you are almost certainly a Democrat for dispositional, social, and economic reasons. You are probably more likely to go to a group fitness class than you are midget wrestling, more likely to go antiquing than shooting. More likely to play trivia than poker.

If this describes you, my question is not whether your voting record, donation history, or posting history would reflect Democrat sentiments. My question is, if someone looked at the rewards you received for being a good, vocal Democrat would they be readily apparent to everyone else? If you skipped out on all of the policy debates and morality and were purely self-motivated by material reward, would it be enough to stir a non-Democrat into the Democrat tent or an apolitical guy’s guy into the feminized world of email jobs and breakout sessions? Would you lead a vastly better life than an apolitical person checking all the same organ-donation and healthcare-election boxes?

I hate institutional politics just as much as office life, a domain in which I have never been able to successfully hold a job, but not to worry: I’m not about to write a treatise on which party you should join or how to spruce up your Jamba Juice application. I have multiple decades of non-voting at my back and don’t want to be hypocritical. I’m going to contextualize some of the more colorful rhetoric surrounding Charlie Kirk’s assassination so that you have a theory of mind for otherwise polite citizens who have suddenly found a way to celebrate murder. I am on the outside of political parties (and murder) which allows me a certain degree of clarity, as I am nothing if not a reliable narrator.

Elite Human Capital

To use that specific example above, I do have friends who are grant writers and PR flacks for NGO’s, people whose entire salaries are dependent on the largesse of a few Bond villains sanitizing their wealth and mostly unwitting or unwilling taxpayers getting fleeced by a hostile government. These friends of mine are beneficiaries of this patronage scheme who nonetheless feel it is their birthright to receive the money they’re issued whether they actually make any headway toward eliminating or ameliorating contemporary afflictions (Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cancer) along with social, environmental and economic issues they claim to combat while joining Zoom meetings from their cribs.

Some of these people have been getting a little out of pocket with their political posts, most of which make it clear that they would never murder someone but they think karma should be able to own the responsibility of widowing Erika Kirk and leaving her children fatherless for the amusement of so many. In politics, when you do something bad, you must socialize the responsibility so as to diffuse it; when your enemy does something bad it is your job to socialize responsibility so that you may punish entire classes of them.

Champagne for my real friends

What’s going on with people from professional classes making gross comments about Charlie Kirk is twofold:

1. They are particularly sore losers, people who don’t know how to not get their way, which results in bad behavior and political tantrums. No matter how many brothers and sisters they have, they always act like only-children, completely unwilling to compromise. If you work in construction or at a shift job, you are regularly used to not getting your way so you have some experience dealing with disappointment. But, if you log onto Zoom meetings without pants and you get to work out on the clock, you are definitely going to act decadently and deal with adversity poorly. Just asking you to spend two days per week going back into the office will be greeted as a major chore even though you had to do it five days per week only a few years ago, and you are already paid to do so.

2. Being a good Democrat to some degree relies on updating your speech with the newest signals and shibboleths, statements which at first glance seem nonsensical, like defund the police, or (only) black lives matter, believe all women. The slogans everyone knows from our brief flirtation with North American Maoism. In the same way that you know the people who speak them don’t believe them at a literal level (they know the crow doesn’t actually fly at midnight), it would be fair to assume that the more normal, moderate-seeming professionals now revealing so late in life that they are pro-murder, they’re mostly participating in a signaling game, albeit a dangerous one wherein more literal interlocutors may not get the message and will then commit more violence.

To go back to the GoPro, the work-from-home/office split, the day-to-day life of the white collar murder-poaster—Would you know from their home, their partner, their lifestyle that they were a professional class Democrat vested with stewarding democracy and economic flourishing? Compared to someone who changes oil for a living? Most certainly.

But, if you compare the grant-writer of today to someone who changed oil or worked at Wendy’s in the 1970’s, whose life would you want? Most of you, would likely stay away from the grease and the fryer, but outside of work, even if you did take the lower status, more menial job, you would still have had a solid shot at getting married, owning property and forming a nuclear family with either one income or with only part-time wagie work from the missus (whether you had a college degree or not). Plus, you probably wouldn’t have to try so hard to stay up with national and international news and always be mad about it, always having something to say that someone else needs to do for you, to preserve your status as a person who shapes the world. The constant pleas for everyone to stop everything to give you and your side more money and power.

But the thing about working at Wendy’s is you get to opt out of a certain status game. Like the monarchist who works at Jamba Juice, he can still lead a decent enough life, making smoothies and flirting with customers.

But working at that NGO, in that prestigious, virtuous world of charity, paying you way, way more than Wendy’s or Jamba Juice or Jiffy Lube ever could, what kind of hovel does it buy you in which coastal favela of the United States? That hovel, does it have a white picket fence or does it have a compact footprint featuring cold eco-friendly halogens and sterile white walls you can hear your neighbors through? Do you drive a frame-on-body coupe or do you push a hatchback that reports your speed to your insurance carrier lest you start driving with a mind of your own? How many kids have you been able to pop out on that salary of yours in between Grubhub deliveries?

Real pain for my sham friends

By being a professional Democrat, you are supposed to get material rewards for it. This is what politics is: Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends. And when you aren’t getting bribed with champagne, it means you can exact compensation by dealing pain to your opposition, making them absorb your grievance even if they had nothing to do with it.

All this is to say that if your grant money got pulled by DOGE, if you can’t take an extra vacation this year, no worries, you can always watch the life leave a man’s eyes in front of his wife and kids because he said something you don’t like. In fact, if you purchase YouTube Premium, you won’t even have to watch commercials in between.

In other more winning times for professionals, this class might not have had so many people so freely and confidently airing their opinion that Charlie Kirk had it coming to him. If Kamala Harris were in office while this happened, the celebration might have been smaller and relegated to less prestigious people but this is what I mean about being sore losers: It is precisely when you are a loser that you are most spiteful, and the professional class of today realizes there is a mismatch between the prestige its members think they have and the material rewards previous eras would have bestowed upon them for it. The houses are larger but their quality is worse. People are larger but their quality is worse. Elections are longer and more expensive, but the candidates are worse and no one who is a vocal party member will accept any responsibility.

To clarify: Every one of the people I’m describing as professional makes way more money than me. I don’t want to suggest they have not been compensated with 401(k)s and USD, that they do not consume wine, massages, facials and kale, that they never get preferential loans or loan forgiveness. Rather, they’re strivers and if your parents so far eclipsed what you could do, some of them actually holding unglamorous part-time jobs like watching kids at after-school recess (like my mom did) while owning property and raising kids and holding lifestyles most of these people can never achieve.

All this is to say I hate the way people are talking about Kirk like he deserved it. I shoot my mouth off all the time which has made me both an amazing salesman and someone you might need to fire for the sharpness of his tongue. Most people can’t match the intensity of my insults, making many wish they could kill me. Heating things up won’t work out well , at least for me, someone quite partial to staying alive or at least departing on terms a little more dignified.

I didn’t like what the press did to Nicholas Sandmann, Duncan Lemp, Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny or any of the other young, straight, white guys it maligned as totems for everything standing in the way of Progressivism. But I have a theory of mind for the average citizen chipping in to say nasty things about Charlie Kirk. They have to signal that they’re good Democrats who disapprove of Kirk lest they be confused for someone like me who never has to hop on a quick call or chime in on a Zoom meeting. Signaling they’re part of the in-group is one of the only things that validates what they see to be their proper social position. Otherwise, you might confuse them for a monarchist or Jamba Juice American. So committed to making sure you never confuse them for simple cashiers in the strip mall of America, they applaud the murder of a man they never met.