A few days ago, the hedge fund billionaire and triumphant hater-of-Harvard’s-first-Black-president Bill Ackerman gave $10K to a GoFundMe (set up by a Nazi) for the ICE agent who killed Renee Good.
This seems to herald an evolution of the “cancel culture grift.” That being the roughly decade-old arrangement where the billionaire class began creating all these cushy positions for “cancelled professors” (they get jobs at the billionaire-backed “anti-woke” University of Austin or at a think tank) and trans-hating comedians (they get far above-market rates to perform in Riyadh). Under the terms of the cancel culture grift, people who seem to be facing social opprobrium are suddenly presented with a fat check and a new set of friends. This strikes me as sad not just for our wider society but also—and perhaps most intensely—for those people being paid off by the billionaires. In exchange for money and a new platform, they give up the chance to reflect on what they did, grow their hearts, and maybe even make amends.
But now we’re starting to see an emerging “murder culture grift,” where if you’re a white man you can increasingly expect to be given fame and fortune by the billionaire right for murdering someone who that class sees as an enemy. We saw this when a man strangled a mentally ill person to death on the subway (he got a high-salary job at a billionaire’s venture capital firm), we saw it when a 17-year-old vigilante killed two activists in Wisconsin (he was paid to speak at events put on by billionaire-backed Turning Points USA), and now we’re seeing it with the ICE agent who murdered Nicole Good (the GoFundMe has raised nearly half-a-million dollars; Ackerman’s was the largest single gift).
The murder grift, like the cancel culture grift, works to preclude the chance of moral reckoning on the part of those who killed. The billionaires create proud monsters, figureheads for a social order based on oppression and fear. They also make clear to others considering monstrous deeds that, should they actually carry these deeds out, they will be safe, even cosseted.
