We experience life in moments.
When we recall a moment that stirs our sensitivity emotional, circumstantial, or even accidental we are forced to belly the thoughts that surface. For me, they rarely stay buried. They rise again, regurgitated through the rhetoric of my words on paper.
The Chat Leaks instigated such a reflection. They drew me back to a time when I was in the company of many who, by their public demonstrations and private hierarchies, were the flickering candles of times gone those who burned brightly, not always with light, but often with the smoke of old illusions.
It is nothing new under the sun.
Codes of the Floor
In one of my many incarnations of working life, I found myself on the sales floor of a timeshare company. It was not a career born of ambition but of necessity the kind of job one takes when the rent is due and hope has gone thin around the edges. I had come from communications and public relations, yet here, the language was a different dialect of persuasion: the timed smile, the breathless pitch, the orchestrated promise of paradise. What I learned was not how to sell a dream but how to observe the economy of illusion and the human codes that keep illusion alive.
To thrive in that space required fluency in its unspoken rules. Those who could memorize the script and deliver it with gospel energy were anointed as “stars.” The rest of us those who stumbled on the rehearsed fervor became background noise. Commissions were our communion; loyalty, our catechism. There were cliques, hierarchies, and invisible thresholds. If you performed, you belonged. If not, you were tolerated. It was not merely a sales floor it was a temple of selective inclusion, the moral of which was simple: value is transactional, belonging conditional.
Codes of the Elite
That world, I now see, was a prelude a rehearsal for understanding the structures that sustain today’s moral and political fragmentation. Because when I read the leaked messages from the Young Republican chat groups, I recognized the pattern. The names and context differ, but the choreography is the same: an inner circle sustained by rhetoric, bound by privilege, and blind to the cost of its own exclusivity.
