Did you hear about the murder of Erin Piacenti? It’s really a tragic story:
The stabbing spree happened on Monday, Aug. 31. NYPD investigators say 49-year-old Pamela Cisneros, wielding two “sword-like knives,” stabbed two people in Times Square, in what investigators believe was a “random and unprovoked attack.”
The first victim, police said, was a 68-year-old man, who remains hospitalized in stable condition.
Seconds later, officials said Cisneros stabbed Piacenti in the stomach near West 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue. Piacenti was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where she later died from her injuries.
Piacenti’s death comes as she recently returned to work following maternity leave. According to The New York Times, Piacenti was back at work for less than a week before the attack.
The 32-year-old from Chester, New Jersey, earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 before going on to earn a law degree from Fordham University in 2021 alongside her husband, according to reports. She served as a vice president for Bank of America, whose office is nearby.
NYPD officers shot and killed Cisneros after officers said she threatened to kill them before coming at them with the two knives.
Partially in response to this woman, Drew Pavlou coined the phrase “Resentment Goblins” to refer to the sort of bitter, angry, black-pilled, hate-filled, nihilistic people in our society that hate other people.
He also pointed out some other examples of this and noted that a lot of these people seemed actually to be CHEERING the fact that this woman was murdered:
Thousands of mentally ill extreme leftists immediately took to celebrating the murder online.
It’s unclear why the murder of a random 32-year-old young mother should have been an occasion for celebration for the left, but it seems they were just generally happy that a white middle-class lady who worked in middle-management at a bank had been murdered. This was apparently enough to mark her out for death according to leftist friend-enemy distinction politics.
And these sickening celebrations were not confined simply to small anonymous accounts. A Palestinian-American Academy Award-nominated filmmaker named Lexi Alexander received 32,000 likes on Twitter for a post gloating about the murder.
Lexi is an actual professional filmmaker with an IMDB page - she directed Green Street Hooligans and a Marvel film in 2008. Yet she was happy to gloat about the murder under her own name:
Again, I could not help but be struck by the unfairness of the modern world when reflecting on the murder of Erin Piacenti and the sickening celebrations online.
One of the most unfair aspects of the modern world is that you can do everything right in life and still be randomly murdered by a resentment goblin for no reason at all, to great general fanfare and celebration by a massive section of the left.
You can get an education, grind for years, work 16-hour days, contribute to economic and technological development, produce wealth and prosperity for millions of people.
And yet you can still ultimately just be randomly cut down and murdered one day by a goblin of resentment - one of these losers of modernity who hate the world based on a strange cocktail of personal grievances and slights.
You know what’s so brilliant about the term “Resentment Goblins?”
It perfectly describes so many people we encounter in modern life, in one form or another.
Tyler Robinson. The liberals who cheered Charlie Kirk’s death. Luigi Mangione and his legion of fans. Lindsay Clancy’s fans. The TikTok loons posting carefully filmed videos of their “mental breakdowns.” The people screaming about a “Trans genocide” or “Palestinian genocide” that doesn’t exist. Anti-natalists. Race grievance obsessives who are sure all white Americans are hopelessly racist. Incels. Groypers. Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson fans. The people who endlessly complain about how hard modern life is. The murderous lunatics in liberal cities who attack, stab, murder, and set random people on fire for no real reason at all. Social media trolls. The crazy people in Minnesota chasing ICE agents around. School shooters and other mass murderers. You could even apply this to Islamic radicals like Osama Bin Laden or the nuts running Iran.
These people are full of grievances, perpetually nasty, and toxic. They’re like a drowning man desperately latching on to anything around them to try to get their heads above water, except that pulling someone else down during their panicked flailing is one of the few things that puts a smile on their face.
Why?
Because for them, life is spoiled.
Eric Hoffer, who was a brilliant philosopher, wrote about people like this in his brilliant book, “The Passionate State of Mind”:
We live in a dichotomous world.
By that, I mean that in one sense, things have never been better for humans in general and Americans in particular. If you live in America, you live in not just the most prosperous, powerful, and advanced country on the planet, but the most prosperous, powerful, and advanced country that has ever existed.
You have access to AI models that are the equivalent of experts in every field, so you can ask any question you want. You can order almost any everyday product or meal you want and have it delivered directly to your home. You have easy access to music, games, and movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. We have self-driving cars now, the Internet on planes, and we have doctors using lasers and drugs that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make to save lives.
We really do live in an age of wonders.
On the other hand, never before in human history have we been so disconnected from each other. Humans initially lived in close proximity to one another, in small tribal bands with shared cultures, beliefs, and standards.
Now?
Church attendance is declining. Civic groups are dwindling. Many people don’t know their neighbors. Increasingly, people rely on the Internet to fulfill their need for connection, and quite frankly, it just doesn’t work all that well for that.
We need to see people face-to-face. We need to have people who genuinely know us and care about what’s happening in our lives. Online “friendships” are a poor substitute for a hug or going out with someone to get a beer.
Furthermore, if you look at the things that give people’s lives meaning, things like God, family, and connection to others, being great at something, contribution to other human beings, or having a job you care about - all these things are cracking in different ways.
People are falling away from religion. Fewer people are getting married, having kids, or even having sex or getting into relationships. We’re not one-person operations growing an acre of crops or making armor anymore; we tend to be cogs in the wheels of massive enterprises. Excellence? It’s hard to stand out in a world full of 8.3 billion people who are also trying to stand out.
On top of all this, that sense of culture, belonging, and knowing your place in the world has broken down in modern life because there are now an endless number of tiny niche identities people can plug themselves into and separate from the rest of the world. If you asked 10 people from different parts of the country and in different subcultures what it means to be a good American, a good person, and a good member of the community, they might all give you wildly different answers. For most of human history, that wouldn’t have been true at all.
Happy people, who have a strong sense of purpose in their life, who feel like their life is going in the right direction – those are not the sort of people who become Trans, join BLM, become man-hating feminists, relentlessly troll people online, cheer people’s death online, or murder innocent people.
On the other hand, when people feel lost, disconnected, and purposeless, they’re much more likely to buy into toxic ideas and ideologies because they align with how their lives feel. That’s how “Resentment Goblins” are made, and the deeper they submerge themselves in these pathogenic ideas and separate themselves from the rest of humanity, the harder it will be for them ever to have happy, productive lives.
having retained my faith has been helpful. Becasue despite my optimism throughout my life., human nature has always rearedits ugly head. realizing tht we are hopeless without God makes it make sense and also explains what we will never figure it; despite all of the advances which our very recent ancestors would have considered miracles ushering in a new Eden, we are still miserable.
Me? I have purpose. I volunteer my time for the betterment of others, always have. I am happy. I am around people, good people, perfect people not hardly. Life is good. I work for a Jewish Carpenter, who never lets me down. Oh I am a boomer, so theres that. John thanks for posting this and showing me a new term, “Resentment Goblins”.