Furious debate broke out on right-wing Twitter this week: should a Home Depot cashier be fired for her despicable comments on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump?
Well, it’s complicated.
Hi @HomeDepot! Are you aware that you employ people who call for political vioIence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment? pic.twitter.com/L683dTcddB
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 14, 2024
The conservative firebrand Libs of TikTok account is famous for taking insane lib-left content and exposing it to the world. Over the years, it’s helped expose abuse in public schools, hospitals, corporations and government, but on Monday, it gave the same treatment to some random Home Depot employee who made nasty comments on Facebook.
“Nasty” is probably an understatement. Responding to a Facebook post on the assassination attempt, the employee wrote, “To [sic] bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!” She then doubled down in defense of her comment, arguing that Trump is “the definition of corrupt and evil.”
Libs of TikTok tweeted out the employee’s name and a video of her at work to its 3.2 million followers, tagging Home Depot’s official X account to ask for comment. The company responded the next day, saying that the employee’s comments “don’t reflect” its values and she “no longer works” there.
But conservative X users were torn over whether or not LoTT and Home Depot did the right things. The arguments can be broken down into two general groups:
Argument 1: It’s right.
Of course, she deserved it; just look at what the left’s done to us these past few years. The people wishing death upon Trump are the same ones who wanted you fired, locked in your home and your children taken away for refusing the COVID vaccine. It doesn’t matter that she’s just a regular person with no power; people like her ruined regular peoples’ lives for donating $25 to Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense and giving the OK finger sign. They piled onto a 9-year-old for wearing “blackface” to a Chiefs game.
Our culture war only ends in mutually assured destruction; the left won’t stop cancelling us until they know we can and will cancel them right back. Alternatively, use the left’s tactics until companies learn to ignore the noise from both sides. Until then, sow fear and take scalps — make regular people fear the cultural fury of the right as much as they fear the left.
Besides, if you don’t have the stomach for a sad old lady losing her job, then how will you stand the deportation of tens of millions?
Argument 2: It’s wrong.
If you think getting an old lady fired from her crappy job over mean tweets is alright, then you’re just as bad as the left. This woman has no power over peoples’ health, children, or livelihoods. She has no petty government authority to wield. She works a minimum wage job (or close enough to it) in a terrible economy. She’s the modern day equivalent of an Olde English field peasant, a Russian serf. It’s not her fault she’s brainwashed.
Far from MAD, cancelling people like her drives others away from our cause. If we use tactics just as vile as the left against regular people, why should those people then choose our side? As things stand now in the wake of the shooting, regular people have more reason than ever to see the light; we should work to bring them in, not push them away.
This doesn’t entail an air of total defeatism. There’s no need to embrace the platitudes that losers use like, “when they go low, we go high.” No, we can still have our retribution. But we should train our focus on those who can and do use their power against us: public school teachers who brainwash our kids, doctors and nurses who mutilate them, corporate managers who make hiring decisions and any government bureaucrat with even the lowest level of authority. These are the people who must be made examples of. And regular people will notice.
We can have it all: fear, favor and a little bit of grace.
There’s also a middle-ground third argument: it concedes all the points of the second, but comes to the conclusion of the first. We should show grace to powerless enemies, but not when they advocate violence against a former (and likely future) president. That’s just a line too far.
However, both camps, including the middle-ground, are off base. It’s not a matter of right and wrong.
Those who say it’s wrong because of her social standing get caught up in the left’s own values: she’s working class, she’s powerless — she deserves some inherent moral authority. I don’t care if she’s poor. I don’t care that losing her job in Biden’s economy will likely mean the loss of a critical stream of income. If we’re thinking in terms of good and evil, she’s probably a terrible person who deserves it — but I don’t really care about that either.
Yet still, she should not have been fired. Libs of TikTok should not have exposed her to millions of people. And Home Depot should have had more of a spine to tell the Twitter mob to kick rocks, just as they should also do against the far more potent Left.
I get it, what she said is next-level horrible, and I sympathize with the middle-grounders. I even sympathize with the folks of Argument 1 who believe this is all just. But although it might not seem like it at first glance, they have their own strain of moralizing — one that’s far more dangerous to the new conservative movement. And that is what I care about.
There’s obviously a dynamic of political revenge at play in Argument 1, so much so that it even builds a morality around resentment. It’s what Nietzsche called ressentiment, a sense of deep-seated hostility and envy that drives ordinary, powerless people — the Home Depot workers of the world — to justify the perceived evil of those they blame for their frustrations. The powerful victimize me, deprive me, restrict me and I resent that — therefore they must be evil. For those deemed “corrupt and evil,” as Trump was by Home Depot Lady, this justifies a new world of political wickedness.
This is the natural mindset of the spiritually weak and disfigured Left; those who blame society for all of their failures, oppression for all of their struggles, and would tear down the system entirely before they accept personal responsibility. Is this who the Right should emulate? Should we comport ourselves as if we are perpetual victims? No, this path leads only to ruin. No victory will ever be great enough; always, we will find new frustrations to vanquish. If we take this road, we launch a never-ending revolution towards a total equalization of power, an impossible goal always just out of sight.
Again, I get it. The people who sought to put you in the COVID Gulag and got your kid kicked out of college are evil. But when we moralize, and then politicize our own resentment, we unleash something truly hideous in ourselves that is hard to put back in the bottle. Worse, we invite people into the movement who will not even try to; they will let their fantasies of revenge run wild against those who made them feel powerless given only the thinnest veneer of moral authority. It’s the very same mindset that led Soviets to kill not just Russian aristocrats, but their regal hunting dogs as well; even the dogs made them feel inferior.
Let the leftist Home Depot workers of the world wallow in their own vicious ressentiment. It is only a sign of their weakness. It’s not that Home Depot Lady doesn’t deserve it; it’s that she is beneath us, as a movement, to target. We conservatives know our worth, our unyielding strength, our inherent virtue and nobility — and it is only fitting to show the peons some noblesse oblige. As Argument 2 points out, it can only work to bring them to our side.
This isn’t a cop-out. Alongside Argument 2, I’m all for targeting anyone with even a modicum of authority; sow fear in the ranks of school teachers, doctors and local government offices — really anyone who consolidated their “elite” status during COVID. But show everyone else just a hint of magnanimity worthy of a true elite who will soon replace the pretenders.
