‘Luxury Beliefs’ Are Killing People

One of the jokes about Donald Trump, from well before he became president, is that he is every poor man’s vision of what a rich guy looks like. 

My version of that description, explaining why I thought Trump would make inroads with the black community, was that Donald Trump is a white rapper. The flash, the gaudy displays of wealth. Gold everywhere. Flashing money and privilege. Surrounding himself with flashy women. 

No twerking though. Oh well. 

In truth, today’s hyper-wealthy dress down. Mark Zuckerberg famously wore a hoodie for over a decade, and Steve Jobs always wore the same jeans-and-T-shirt outfit wherever he went. 

The uniform of the new billionaires is faux-downscale, and, if you can pull it off, faux-working-class. 

It’s not that these people don’t love nice things and spend tons of money on them. They do. Those T-shirts can cost $500 or more, and these guys still buy yachts often enough. 

But it’s much harder these days to signal wealth through how you dress or what you own than it used to be, at least for the upper-middle class and lower upper class. They use the same iPhones as everybody else, and a much larger fraction of our personal interactions take place virtually. 

This, Rob Henderson of The Manhattan Institute explains, is the growth of “luxury beliefs,” which serve as a social-signaling mechanism for fellow elites or elite-aspiring wannabes. 

As with dressing down, luxury beliefs are couched in terms of expressing solidarity with those less fortunate, without having to live with any of the consequences. 

Absolutely insane that it had to come to this.

A Democrat governor pardoned a man who raped a 10-year-old girl, all to play politics over his immigration status.

Bleak. So bleak. https://t.co/8TiCPmcrno

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) July 10, 2026

There are countless examples we see every day. If you ask somebody who lives in a bad neighborhood about defunding the police or decarceration, they will look at you like you are nuts. They have to live among the criminals, and want them elsewhere. 

Or, perhaps, you think that getting rid of ShotSpotters because they are concentrated in poorer areas, and hence racist? 

🇺🇸 Cambridge City Council voted 5-2 back in May to shut down ShotSpotter, the acoustic gunshot detection system that pinpoints gunfire.

A system that gets help there quickly, even when nobody calls 911.

Their big reason? “Protecting Black residents and migrants” from…

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) July 10, 2026

🇺🇸 Cambridge City Council voted 5-2 back in May to shut down ShotSpotter, the acoustic gunshot detection system that pinpoints gunfire.

A system that gets help there quickly, even when nobody calls 911.

Their big reason? “Protecting Black residents and migrants” from “overpolicing” and “racist surveillance.” 

In sum, it was performative empathy at its finest.

Fast forward 2 months: Xavier Bautista, a 32-year-old Cambridge DPW worker and dad, gets shot around 4:30 AM on July 4th. 

His body lies there for about an ENTIRE HOUR before a passerby finds him. 

No shots-fired calls came in. 

The area had ShotSpotter coverage before they killed the program.

How the hell you end up judging public safety tech by luxury beliefs is beyond me…

This is textbook “positive” racism, the soft bigotry of low expectations. 

Pretending minority communities need less enforcement instead of more protection from the bad actors in their midst. 

It doesn’t help the law-abiding Black and brown residents getting shot or traumatized; it hurts them most. 

Public safety shouldn’t be a virtue-signaling experiment. 

Countless activists lobby against ShotSpotters, and they have been removed in some of the most crime-ridden areas because they are “racist.” 

Only a person who doesn’t live there would think that way. 

I’m starting to think this luxury beliefs idea is catching on: https://t.co/V5xihItb3q pic.twitter.com/ObbQTwAMdj

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) March 14, 2026

If you ask the average lower-income person about getting rich, their answer would be “hell yes!” Sure, some of them resent wealthy people just for being wealthy, but for most of them, the question is more pressing than taxing the rich: how to become one of them. 

But what if you have enough money and don’t see a path to climb the social ladder by accumulating more of it? Your life is comfortable enough, but you still long for more social power? Social Justice activism fits the bill. It’s why AWFLs will pay large amounts of money to get insulted by grifters like the Race2Dinner folks.

 

The most obvious purveyors of luxury beliefs are AWFLs, who have found themselves empty nesters, are comfortably wealthy enough, and whose new path of social climbing is promoting the most damaging ideas in the world today. 

Academics, of course, are in much the same social position. In order to rise up the ranks in prestige, the easiest path is to adopt the most ostentatiously outrageous political and cultural positions and work mightily to enforce strict adherence to them. Power and prestige, and often an even more comfortable life can be had the more absurdly totalitarian you are. 

You will notice that the rising political stars in socialism are all children of privilege, cosplaying as advocates of the working class. Zohran Mamdani’s family has a COMPOUND in Uganda guarded by elite troops, for instance. He rooted around to find a path to increased prestige, and when rapping didn’t work out, he became a prominent socialist politician.

Silver-spoon Democratic NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is a longtime Airbnb foe who pushed for the “the abolition of private property” — yet his filthy-rich parents have rented their posh Ugandan compound on the online site for nearly a decade, The Post has learned.

The five-bedroom, four-bathroom villa owned by Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair offers breathtaking views of Lake Victoria and has monkeys traipsing through its lush two acres, according an Airbnb listing active for the last eight years.

The far-from-proletariat estate is a far cry from the everyday Joe their socialist son attempts to portray on the campaign trail – even as he’s come under fire for shamelessly living in a dirt-cheap rent-stabilized apartment in Queens despite his affluent upbringing.

Katie Wilson, the Mayor of Seattle, lived off her wealthy parents until becoming the Mayor of Seattle. Graham Platner was earning spending money by selling oysters to his mom. 

The man who recruited Platner to run? He is the grandson of the founder of Toys R Us. 

A variation: Luxury beliefs have replaced luxury goods. https://t.co/WdlJ7xtEwD pic.twitter.com/LOO6bdqDp7

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) March 15, 2025

My own theory for why women are especially attracted to luxury beliefs, or “virtue signaling,” is that they are more attuned to social relationships, and the currency of power in their circles is less money than social standing. “Canceling” has always been more common among women than among men, who tend to be less sensitive to conflict with others. 

This also fits with Helen Andrews’ thesis that woke, which is basically the systematizing of luxury beliefs, rose as women gained more economic power in society. 

 

Theories aside, what matters most is that luxury beliefs kill people. As woke anti-ICE protesters demand that rapists and felons not be deported, Americans are dying. As the “Islamophobia” cult suppresses serious concerns about Muslim migrants becoming predators, real women and girls are getting raped. 

LAWFARE: New York has released 7,000 violent criminals here illegally from jail instead turning them over to ICE for deportation. Democrats care more about getting votes from illegals than protecting citizens. pic.twitter.com/TfVf90OtG8

— @amuse (@amuse) May 1, 2026

The people who hold luxury beliefs get increased social standing, and they can do so because they almost never face the consequences of their beliefs. There is almost never a FAFO moment for them. 

Except, occasionally, there are. 

That deluded fool Jamey Carney strutted around calling herself “the good American” while spitting venom at ICE agents, gobbling up every toxic lie from left-wing propagandists, cosplaying as a pro-Palestine activist, and bragging about dating a Muslim.

Now she’s a dead American!… https://t.co/vqHZmRsoRn pic.twitter.com/SsiiCdqvwD

— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) July 9, 2026

That deluded fool Jamey Carney strutted around calling herself “the good American” while spitting venom at ICE agents, gobbling up every toxic lie from left-wing propagandists, cosplaying as a pro-Palestine activist, and bragging about dating a Muslim.

Now she’s a dead American!

Beaten to death in her own home in Ireland by the very kind of third-world invader she championed.

Her teen daughter? Left without a mother.

Let her murder be warning to every self-righteous “good American,” every virtue-signaling white activist woman across the West: Your suicidal fantasy that flooding our countries with third-world masses equals “multicultural enrichment” is not just brain-dead stupidity; it’s LETHAL.

Islam is not compatible with Western civilization. Your teary-eyed pro-Islam “empathy” isn’t moral superiority, it’s suicidal treason against your own people, your own culture, and your own future. It gets you beaten to death in your bedroom while your daughter finds the body. It gets your homeland turned into a no-go warzone.

This isn’t a tragedy. It’s the predictable, gruesome result of ignoring reality. Wake the fuck up before more “good Americans” end up the same way.

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