Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Vicious Virtue-Signalling
Brooklyn-based freelance journalist Zoe Beery
Powerline recently linked to a an extraordinary article from The Non-Partisan New York Times, entitled, “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.” If you haven’t read it, you really should. The author of this piece, Zoe Beery, is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn who has previously enlightened her readers with pieces like, “What Abortion Access Looks Like in Mississippi,” and “Global Quest for ‘Green’ Concrete Goes On, as Researchers Ask if it Can Be Done,” and “Climate Inaction Means Children Born Today Will Face Severe Health Risks, New Report Warns.” You know that The New York Times is really trying to shed its reputation as a leftist rag when it hires writers such as this.
Anyway, Ms. Beery’s most recent effort, “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism,” is an extraordinary article about some extraordinarily ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations. Namely, young people who have inherited enormous amounts of money and seek to prove that they are true-believer Marxists. To demonstrate their virtue. Or something. For example, 25-year-old Sam Jacobs, who feels guilty about having a $30 million trust fund:
A socialist since college, Mr. Jacobs sees his family’s “extreme, plutocratic wealth” as both a moral and economic failure. He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism, and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.
I understand why Ms. Beery refers to these multi-millionaires who are in their 20’s and 30’s as “rich kids” – they sound remarkably immature. Which is, I suppose, what leading a remarkably sheltered life can do to someone. For example, the fabulously wealthy 30-year-old Rachel Gelman, who describes her politics as, “anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and abolitionist”:
My money is mostly stocks, which means it comes from underpaying and undervaluing working-class people, and that’s impossible to disconnect from the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery,” Ms. Gelman said. “Once I realized that, I couldn’t imagine doing anything with my wealth besides redistribute it to these communities.
Outlet mall heir Pierce Delahunt
Some of these 30-year-old ‘kids’ seem scarred by the means used by their families to earn money. Like Pierce Delahunt, a 32-year-old self-described “socialist, anarchist, Marxist, communist, or all of the above” who apparently hasn’t given a lot of thought to what words like anarchy and communism actually mean. His family made a lot of money building outlet malls, and Mr. Delahunt appears to be struggling to deal with, well, a lot of things:
“When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression,” Mx. Delahunt said. There’s the originally Indigenous land each mall was built on, plus the low wages paid to retail and food service workers, who are disproportionately people of color, and the carbon emissions of manufacturing and transporting the goods. With that on their mind, Mx. Delahunt gives away $10,000 a month, divided between 50 small organizations, most of which have an anti-capitalist mission and in some way tackle the externalities of discount shopping.
I try to imagine myself “tackling the externalities of discount shopping” and I draw a blank. If that is one’s mission in life, what does one do when one gets out of bed in the morning? The behavior of some of these ‘kids’ seems odd, but less so when you consider their goals, which are much odder.
The article goes on and on. Please do read it. You won’t learn anything, but you’ll feel much better about yourself when you’re done. And you’ll be reminded of why you don’t read The New York Times. And why no one else does, either.
Someone who understands economics and freedom better than an Ivy League graduate
Imagine a 35-year-old single mother who works as a waitress in a truck stop on Route 66. Imagine her reading this, about her fellow 30-somethings in this article. The waitress does not have the time or the money for foolishness or empty condescension, and I suspect she would take a dim view of those who use their immense resources to promote socialism, which will raise taxes on everyone, including 35-year-old single mother waitresses. These rich kids don’t care if their income taxes go up. They’ve got theirs. This is about taxing everybody else. And then they’ll feel virtuous, while waitresses’ lives get more difficult.
More difficult than they already are.
Giving $50 million to a sheltered, immature 30-year-old with adolescent levels of certainty and delusions of grandeur is dangerous. Daddy would do more good for society by simply burning his money in the back yard. But he loves his kids, so he sends them to some Ivy League version of ‘Socialism U,’ gives them a pile of money, and shrugs his shoulders when they attempt to destroy the system that allowed him to earn all that money.
Eh, he got his too, so whatever, right?
With great power comes great responsibility. These ‘kids’ understand power. But they don’t understand responsibility.
Someone like that can do a lot of damage. And as Zoe Beery explains at length, they intend to do just that.
Venezuela, after the destruction of capitalism
These 30-year-old ‘kids’ think they can buy self-respect. They’re about to be disappointed. And everyone else is going to pay the price for their failed experiment.
These wealthy elitists just can’t comprehend that the waitress has learned more about the world at the truck stop then they did at Harvard. But they don’t care. Their empty souls demand the payment of tribute. No matter how many people get hurt. Whatever.
They’ve got theirs.
So for them, it’s all just a game. But for truckstop waitresses and the rest of us, this is no game. Destroying capitalism will make a lot of people very poor, and very miserable. It always does. But to the trust fund kids, it’s just a game.
They’ve got theirs.
Published in General
They hate capitalism but they still like the things that you can get from capitalism. This video never gets old to me . . .
This quote was probably the high point of the article for me.
He’s trying to sound like a deep thinker, who sees things that ordinary people like us don’t see. But he just sounds like a pretentious fool.
I wonder if any of his friends laugh in his face when he tries this line out on them? Probably not, I suppose. But if he has an entire friend group who can hear stuff like this and not laugh out loud, no wonder he doesn’t understand the world. Talk about sheltered.
How can one’s ideas improve, if they are never challenged?
Which reminds me, I really enjoy Ricochet. We make one another better.
Leftists live in such echo chambers that they become more and more ridiculous.
That right there is gold! Cross-eyed lefties is an image I’m hanging onto.
Indeed. Crying with laughter.
I’d also like to address Mx Pierce Delahunt’s, a “patriotic millionaire’s,” rather feeble efforts in the “redistribution” department. I mean, really. Only $10K a month?? So $120K a year. According to the linked article, the parent’s legacy trust fund:
Let’s say the underwriting of that fund was in the amount of $10M (which is probably low). So, at $120K a year, it would take about 83 years to exhaust the capital, assuming that there wasn’t any appreciation (which would be a horrible capitalist thing, brought about only by oppression and privilege, right?
Can’t have that.
Really. Why not just blow the whole lot in one fell swoop, by donating it to BLM or giving it to Greta Thunberg, leaving xerself with nothing but the option of going to work at Starbucks as a barista, or even as a WalMart greeter?
Not to mention that this potted bio for Mx Delahunt, on the “Institute for Humane Education” website contains an egregious and unforgivable vocabularial malfeasance. Can you spot it? Disgraceful. Cancel them! Cancel them all!
Just do it. Please.
Non-profits are immoral from the get-go. “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul” presupposes that profits are a moral good.
It’s losing your soul to godless communism that’s a problem.
The honorific alone tells you everything you need to know.
These children could be released from the burden of all that money very quickly. They could just give it away.
Problem solved.
I’m fine with that.
What I’m not fine with, is them giving their money to organizations to seek to destroy capitalism, thus depriving millions of Americans of the opportunity to become rich like them.
That is nasty.
It’s amazing how good the emperor looks in the buff when his net worth is $30M.
As Lady Thatcher marvelously articulated, the socialists only want the rich poorer (which makes the poor poorer) …
And as we all know, you don’t make the poor rich by making the rich poor …
Same goes for crazily dyed hair.
Oh, it’s the nose piercings!! I know some conservative women who have nose piercings. Ladies, virtually no one looks good with a bolt or ring in her nose. No one! Ack!!
“I desperately seek the approval of others. I was once an insecure and self-loathing teenager, but I’ve resolved my insecurities by adopting left-wing politics and a subcultural identity which requires me to modify my body with tattoos, piercings, and/or hair dye.”
Septum piercings are the worst of the worst.
“Like, I’m Zoë (don’t forget the umlaut!). I just, like, really wanted to make myself look like I have metallic snot globules permanently crystallized in my nostrils. It’s just, like, so cool! . . . Black lives matter!”
Vs. the Marine Corps. Great podcast, Jenna.
C
Maintenance
Wx = weather
Tx = transmit
Rx = receive
Yeah, High Maintenance
They do seem to be very good at calibrating their giving so that what remains is enough to keep themselves VERY comfortable. Sure, they dress like me (a slob), but they pay $100 for the same look I bought for $10.
Unfortunately – satire alert – his life was cut short just a day after this interview when a bicyclist racing down a hill hit a pothole and careened into this valiant young man..
Although his fractured skull could have been remedied, at the time he arrived at the local hospital, there were only two white men and an Asian man serving as physicians capable of attending to a serious brain trauma. M Delahunt’s medical directive made it clear that at no time would he physically submit his body to the attentions of anything other than a fully diverse surgical team.
In lieu of flowers, Mx Delahunt’s friends and family ask that donations be sent to the Charity for Single Lemur Mothers And their Offspring.
Okay. I just had to whip out the old Photoshop.
Ack!!
Oh. My. Lanta.
If she did, I expect she’d stop.
Don’t forget the women who think they are sending important messages by coloring their armpit hair.
And let’s not forget Mx-ico.
I’m sure you know what that means. We’re past some vague suspicion that there might be traitors. We need to find out who they are.
No.
I can’t help but notice that Mx Non-Gendered-Pronoun Delahunt could really use a shave.
There was actually a post on Ricochet about that, a while back. Probably back on page 146 of the Member Feed by now.