She recounts a literally shaking rn moment about German occupiers being polite.

You might end up like the upper-middle-class family I stayed with in France as a teenager. They did not attend a citywide celebration for the 100th birthday of Charles de Gaulle, the war hero who orchestrated the liberation of his country from Nazi Germany in 1944. They did have several portraits of Philippe Pétain, Nazi collaborator, on their wall.

When I screwed up the courage to ask how it was for them during the occupation, the lady of the house replied, “We were happy because the Nazis were very polis.” I didn’t know the word, so I excused myself to consult a French-English dictionary. I was in tears when I found the entry: "polite."

A vacationing young member of the ruling class knows that she had been in the presence of monsters. Monsters who were not disposed to hate German occupiers who were polite to them. From four thousand miles and sixty years away, the young member of the ruling class knew better that her hosts, had they been decent people with human feelings, should have preferred to have been occupied by the Red Army, who were famously not polite to the civilian populations they crossed.

Like in a Dick Wolf teleplay: The culprit in the end is not the brutal rapist, whose motives we come to understand and empathize with, but the one who was polite, because we value politeness and our values are wrong. We should value what the brutal rapist values. The Red Army soldier is deeply moral in contrast to the German occupier who is superficially polite. We know from Hollywood that the German nationalist's superficial politeness is a mask for an evil which has no cause and hence no imaginable limit. We know from the doctrine taught in our institutions that the Russian communist's brutality was a limited evil in service of the creation of a better world for all. It is compulsory to despise the one and suspect to even be aware of the other. Heffernan knows this the way a worshipper knows God's will. She's seen all the Spielberg movies.

She goes on with other examples of evil masquerading behind human graciousness. Hezbollah builds hospitals, for instance. As does the Catholic church, she held herself back from noting. She knows this has nothing to do with the social work the Black Panther Party is lauded for or the vegan food for the homeless popups at the periphery of #OWS and BLM occupations which, along with their rigorous adherence to state masking policy, demonstrates the morality underlying their violence.

Others have noted Heffernan's admissions of ruling class membership in the piece. Childhood jaunts to the continent. Seasonal homes she jets back and forth from. Implied is that Heffernan exists in a bubble and the atmosphere in that bubble is poisonous. Inside the ruling class, the Metacult is peaking. For a scion like Heffernan to hate a thing, it's only necessary to know that evil is ascribed to it. The extent to which the ascribed evil can be substantiated is beside the point of hating the thing. Trump is not superficially polite. Rather he is superficially rude. But it's not important that a probe of Trump's alleged evil turns up only that he took an extra scoop of ice cream or that he overfed a coi fish. The superficial signifiers of the evil thing speak for themselves of the evil contained within it's evil surface. Another who is aware that Trump has tiny hands and wears long ties and yet is not consumed by hatred of Trump shares in his evil, whatever it's substance. It's not that someone like Heffernan has a compelling litany of real things which substantiate the assigned evil. She does not. She has only the two scoops thing and similar. However, someone like Heffernan not only does not need proof, for another to not be convinced for want of proof is all she needs to determine that they are also evil.

In the end, Heffernan determines that the only acknowledgement her neighbors are owed for their apparent selflessness is a merciful suspension of punishment and an unspoken-because-you-should-know-without-me-telling-you invitation to repent and replace their worldview with her own. And this is the nucleus of the metacult: a Manechean Who-Whom dichotomy by which the ruling class measure the outgroup as deserving of extermination.