I'm going full ad hominem. they are fat-legged witches. whores of mandami. these are the kind of people who made the Cultural Revolution happen in China--resulting in the murder by "normal" citizens of professors, ;lawyers etc. whoever they thought had too much more or influence.
“Griffin, regardless of whether you agree with his politics, is one of the most successful businessmen in America”
Politics, per se, is not the issue.
Define succes.
Griffin has made his fortune by destroying other people’s lives. That’s what hedge funds like Citadel do. If that’s success, then you’ve answered your own questions.
Violence is not the answer.
But you are ignoring the massive negative impact on society of people like Griffin. And if you don’t understand the anger that has been bubbling beneath the surface since at least 2008, well, then, you need to get out more.
If you are 25, deeply in debt, working at Starbucks, living in an overpriced shitty apt, because an H1b visa holder took your job, and you did everything that someone like Ken Griffin told you to do,
I’m sure you’d be just fine.
Unfortunately there are likely 10s of 1000s who won’t be just fine. And the chickens are coming home to roost.
I’m certainly not condoning it. But I understand the angst.
This comment suggests that you put too much responsibility on others for your own success. You are suggesting that agency over your own life is someone else's fault.
This all assumes that wealth is transferred and is a zero-sum game. It is not.
You have the opportunity to start your own business. You have the opportunity to train and become valuable with any skill set you work towards.
Blaming Ken Griffin or people like him for your lack of a job or your own direction (or others) is exactly the problem being pointed out in the essay.
This comment suggests you are assuming facts not in evidence. And you also do not refute anything I said, because it’s all true.
I’m am 70. 20 years as an attorney. Eight owning a small business. ‘Retired’ from permanent employment at age 53. Closed the business during the GFC. Sold the house at a loss. Moved onto our 35 ft sailboat with a 5 year plan to return and sort it out. 16 years into our 5 year plan we are still working on the next chapter.
In addition to about 35,000 sea miles and surviving four hurricanes, we have taught sailing, taught English, been a baker, line cook, server, mixed paint, fixed engines, varnished 1000s of feet of teak, and a few other odd jobs I forgot about. It hasn’t been a pleasure cruise. It’s been a lot of hard work and a lot of scary nights. 5000 sunsets have made it all worthwhile.
We are not wealthy. Not even close. But we’ve had a blast doing what 99% can only dream about. We are grateful and blessed.
Ken Griffin (and by proxy his ilk) is a piece of shit. His firm has destroyed hundreds of businesses. Put 100s of 1000s out of work. Destroyed millions of lives. That’s what hedge funds do. Would you like me to send you a list of companies they have destroyed. Or how about the number of community hospitals forced to close in the past decade due to cost pressures resulting from the mega mergers. Financed by Ken Griffin and his ilk. That number is in the mid hundreds. It will be 1000 eventually.
Today they are in the process of completing their destruction. They did retail first. Then eateries. Then housing. Now, Dental practices. Hospital consolidation. Pet clinics. HVAC shops. Plumbing shops. Hair salons. Car washes. It’s and endless list.
All the independent services people relied on for good service, relationships, fair prices, and yes, entrepreneurship have been, and continue to be, dismantled by private equity and hedge funds.
Young people today have every right to be angry. Ken Griffin is just a placeholder for the ultra elite 1% who preached for 50 years about what young people needed to do to ‘get ahead’.
And then they pulled the rug, in the worst possible way.
You can fire off all the flowery language and platitudes you want. That’s fine. But you ignore reality at your own peril.
Capitalism is by far the best economic system, bar none. Or problems are not with the capitalist model, the problems are with the corrupt and perverted dealings practiced by the large Wall Street players. It has gotten exponentially worse as the wealth transfer has increased. The doom loop isn't hidden. Buy the political power, pass favorable legislation, over leverage for unlimited asset acquisition, play the "too big to fail" card, maybe buy a few more politicians and have the government crank-up the money printing machines to bail yourself out at the citizen's expense. This isn't true capitalism anymore and while I can't advocate for the murder of the offenders, I can't say I blind to the reasoning.
An anecdote. My youngest son and his wife own a landscape and snow removal business in a semi rural Midwest county. 15 years ago they had no money, a Lawn mower, weed whipper, leaf blower and a truck. They lived in two tents in a National Forest for a year before they could rent an apt. They ran their business out of a storage shed and the apt parking lot for 5 years before they bought some land. They built a pole barn and lived in that for 3 years until they could afford to build a cabin.
At the start of this year they had 30 res clients and 15 commercial clients, two plow trucks. two mowing crews, 3 FT and 2 PT employees, zero debt, no mortgage. Their plan was to buy a bigger piece of property, build a bigger barn, hire an office mgr to take that pressure off his wife, and start a family.
All of that is now on hold. And maybe distilled forever. Why?
Because their three biggest commercial clients, a hotel, a community hospital and the largest shopping complex within 100 miles all declined to renew the contracts that they had for 10 years. More than 50k in revenue.
Both the hospital and the hotel were purchased in mid 2025 by a private equity firm. Same firm. Moving into a small (10,000) town and throwing money around. They wanted nothing to do with a local kid trying to earn a living who had the clients for a decade. They told him, we are going to use ‘our own people’.
And then, their ‘own people’ who now were guaranteed a couple big accounts spent a month soliciting business from other large commercial customers and that’s how they lost the shopping center.
Two weeks ago the PE firm announced their plan to close the Community Hospital in 2030 and turn it into an outpatient and rehab facility. The next nearest hospital is 70 miles away.
The kids have been able to gain some more res customers. So while the client numbers remain the same, the revenue loss has curtailed their plans. And they had to let one FT and both PT guys go. Both of whom were retirees who needed the income.
And that is happening all over the country.
The OP to my post “Illinois Entrepreneur” either doesn’t know, or pretends that he doesn’t know, the deveststion that has been and will continue to be caused, by people like Ken Griffin.
In a town of 10,000 a small business loses their best 3 clients. An expansion doesn’t happen. A family doesn’t get started. Two dependent retirees lose their income. A Community Hospital closes. All so the 1% can amplify the wealth disparity between themselves and the serfs.
And as you say, it’s not capitalism. It’s predatory behavior, committed by psychopaths, facilitated by politicians on the take, with access to nearly free money and a glint in their eye as they destroy the fabric of the country.
And then go on TV and lecture the kids about financial responsibility.
What surprising to me is that it has taken longer for the chickens to begin coming home to roost then I thought it would.
But they are coming. And sadly I think the reckoning will be brutal.
With all due respect, I think this may be overblown. Why? Because the internet and social media have given a huge megaphone to the most radical voices. These people have always been around. The difference is that in the past, they didn't have a megaphone, and so they were mostly invisible. The truth is that almost all Americans reject murder. If this wasn't the case, our society would be far more violent than it currently is.
Exactly. I look at those three young women, and my first thought is "There is NO WAY they thought this up on their own" Sometimes people are so stupid that they actually LOOK stupid, and that's the case here. No, this was an operation, scripted, produced, and financed. Until we become willing to look behind the curtain, and terminate the bad actors, it will continue
There are many, MANY young women like this, who fully believe in what these women are saying. Don't ever underestimate the Left and their ground troops.
Quite the contrary, I can assure you. All I said was this was a scripted, staged, operation, that those bimbos could not possibly have pulled off on their own.
There have been recent surveys and people on the Left have actually agreed that political violence is acceptable under certain circumstances. It always starts with some morally repulsive figure like Hitler and then starts to filter into anyone that you feel is repugnant to YOUR morals. It's a slippery slope, and it's happening a lot more than you think.
Agreed. And of course those "circumstances" are never fully explained. Weakly defined terms like "Hate" stired with Mass Psychosis forming scare tactics on Social Media green lights anyone to throw a punch, or start a fire.....while getting paid to do so.
I don't disagree that the internet and social media have given this a megaphone...but that is the problem and that problem is not going away and will get worse. Will our societey get more violent? I think it will. If I am wrong, it still doesn't change the fact that a husband and father was murdered and his family will not find any solace if violence does not get worse.
I don't disagree that violent crime rates are down but I don't think you can look at that alone. People like to respond to a report of a crime and say "crime happens everywhere" I think that is a flawed "analysis" The problem is that crime is happening in areas where it didn't happen before, particularly violent crimes.
Is crime being underreported both in incidence and severity? In some places, absolutely. Despite stats showing crime is down long term is it higher than it "should" be? I can argue yes because of lax prosecution and incarceration but also because of the megaaphone effect, that leads copycat crimes and radicalization like these three morons.
We may wind up going down the road of China in 1949 when peasants "struggled" against their oppressors. Someone who owned maybe 3 acres with some livestock were arrested, brought out publicly, harassed by their accusers, then executed. During the 1950's the Chinese productive class ceased to exist. Then Mao brought out the Cultural Revolution. It took over 30 years for China to reestablish itself into whatever it is today.
We are reaping the rewards of the shift in emphasis of public education from empowerment to victimhood. Voltaire presciently stated, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
You ask, "How did we get like this? What have we become?" I would contend we got like this because life is hard, and those who were not as successful as either others, or they thought they should be, have developed extreme envy for those who do the work and achieve some level of success.
What I find interesting is that I never hear anyone complain about, for example, Scottie Scheffler's success, in fact lauding the amount of time and work he put into his craft. this is generally true of all professional athletes, who get paid inordinate sums of money. but if somebody's gifts and strengths were intellectual, and they worked hard and either built a business or helped one succeed, they are deemed as the problem.
Not every business is good, nor is every owner, but the ones that are still around have proven themselves valuable to their customers.
Envy is a powerful emotion, and most of the complainers are driven by thoughts and feelings, i.e.emotions, not by facts and reality.
Now write an article in defense of the gilded age industrial magnates while ignoring the accumulation of power and abuse of labor. They employed a much higher percentage of the workforce than a hedge fund so clearly deserve much more praise.
I’m echoing the sentiment felt by many people. I’m not saying there’s a moral equivalence to murder. Many people suffer from atrocities every day and I see this in my own line of work. However, being a job creator doesn’t imply benevolence or benefit to society. Many technological advancements have made things globally worse and wealth is aggregating in a few people who work in financial engineering, software, advertising, etc. Not necessarily building physically transformative things. My point is you can be both a job creator and simultaneously do harmful things. When society start sympathizing with murderers, maybe we need to look deeper at cause and effect which this article oversimplifies as “success”. It goes beyond that.
There was an article in Zerohedge about French deconstructionism and what it’s done to the American intellectual scene. I think it would be good for more of us, especially those of us spending time with young people, to really attend to what they are hearing at the high school and college level. And try to actively counter it.
What I find interesting about this Topic, and the whole of NYC, is that Class Warfare is historicaly a loosing argument -- 10% against 90% -- which is why Race is usually the convenient distraction dejure (George Floyd). That's a 50-50 slugfest while the bottom two-thirds get fleeced. That's why I think wading into the waters of Class Warfare is going to get interesting.
Either way, this is a form of the destablizing (read as anger) Playbook of Marxism. White Wealth is just the "odd" target of the day. As I said, usually it's Race.....as that is very winnable. But Targeting the rare air of top end Wealth might be a blunder. We'll see. The Playbook seems to be, If you're not wealthy, get mad! If your Black and not wealthy...get really mad! If you are an unmarried or Lesbian woman who made bad life choices, screem like hell! It's clearly a dividing trigger Designed to turn a Populous against the Rich, while using our gullable Youth and mostly adult Woman raging at their poor life choices, as disposable, "Mass Psychosis" induced puppets. Rich White Man Bad! Capitalism Bad! But, again, that's really a 10% against 90% fight. George Floyd? - Paydirt!
When you start poking at Globalist Billionaires....and you're the angry 90%......Like I said, this is going to get interesting.
I have to agree with MoodyP on this one Chris. You are confusing "success" at financial manipulation by someone like Griffin with success at "building" things by "industrialists" such as Ford, Carnegie, Hughes, Jobs and Musk. The former tends to be destructive of value, the latter additive!
I agree with much of what you say here, but I would additionally ask some relevant questions:
1) Doesn't it add a mild tangential legitimacy to the arguments of the crazies that the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay was 281 in 2024?
2) Are young people forming families, having offspring, and buying houses like they did 30 years ago? Why not?
3) Does a standard college education secure a strong financial future for young people anymore?
4) Doesn't government fiscal and monetary policy almost always favor the rich during crises (e.g., the bailouts of 2008) and even when massive government deficit spending is routinely enabled by the Fed?
5) Haven't pensions been mostly replaced by 401k accounts for the middle class, and haven't the great sell-offs of 2000-2003, 2008-2009, 2020, and the new one that's coming soon caused those 401k accounts to take massive hits that affect people's lives? What kind of help do people get to limit these losses?
6) Haven't average healthcare costs for families soared to $26,000/yr. with no reform or relief from those fine people in Congress?
The people you mention are indeed crazy, but they strike a nerve with some young folks to some degree. The internet has made things much worse culturally, as your article must imply. True, but that is not the whole story. We are at the Fourth Turning for a reason.
Everybody bought into the idea that we're a nation of immigrants. We were a rich nation of colonists first. Then they imported slave labor until now the slaves come on their own dime while citizens pay tribute to their overlords.
I’m all for celebrating success & it’s obvious these women are infected with a bad ideology.
And it’s also the case that modern day success is extremely leveraged so that someone with a marginal more amount of talent, timing, hard work, connections, & luck can reap such disproportionately large amount of economic, social, & political rewards relative the median citizen. Not that long ago, the very best farmer or hunter enjoyed the most rewards - maybe 5x, 10x their neighbor’s economics & status?
I don’t know the answer to dealing with this problem, other than on an individual level to take the plank out of your own eye and treat others as you’d like to be treated if you were in their shoes.
I'm going full ad hominem. they are fat-legged witches. whores of mandami. these are the kind of people who made the Cultural Revolution happen in China--resulting in the murder by "normal" citizens of professors, ;lawyers etc. whoever they thought had too much more or influence.
“Griffin, regardless of whether you agree with his politics, is one of the most successful businessmen in America”
Politics, per se, is not the issue.
Define succes.
Griffin has made his fortune by destroying other people’s lives. That’s what hedge funds like Citadel do. If that’s success, then you’ve answered your own questions.
Violence is not the answer.
But you are ignoring the massive negative impact on society of people like Griffin. And if you don’t understand the anger that has been bubbling beneath the surface since at least 2008, well, then, you need to get out more.
If you are 25, deeply in debt, working at Starbucks, living in an overpriced shitty apt, because an H1b visa holder took your job, and you did everything that someone like Ken Griffin told you to do,
I’m sure you’d be just fine.
Unfortunately there are likely 10s of 1000s who won’t be just fine. And the chickens are coming home to roost.
I’m certainly not condoning it. But I understand the angst.
This comment suggests that you put too much responsibility on others for your own success. You are suggesting that agency over your own life is someone else's fault.
This all assumes that wealth is transferred and is a zero-sum game. It is not.
You have the opportunity to start your own business. You have the opportunity to train and become valuable with any skill set you work towards.
Blaming Ken Griffin or people like him for your lack of a job or your own direction (or others) is exactly the problem being pointed out in the essay.
Huh?
This comment suggests you are assuming facts not in evidence. And you also do not refute anything I said, because it’s all true.
I’m am 70. 20 years as an attorney. Eight owning a small business. ‘Retired’ from permanent employment at age 53. Closed the business during the GFC. Sold the house at a loss. Moved onto our 35 ft sailboat with a 5 year plan to return and sort it out. 16 years into our 5 year plan we are still working on the next chapter.
In addition to about 35,000 sea miles and surviving four hurricanes, we have taught sailing, taught English, been a baker, line cook, server, mixed paint, fixed engines, varnished 1000s of feet of teak, and a few other odd jobs I forgot about. It hasn’t been a pleasure cruise. It’s been a lot of hard work and a lot of scary nights. 5000 sunsets have made it all worthwhile.
We are not wealthy. Not even close. But we’ve had a blast doing what 99% can only dream about. We are grateful and blessed.
Ken Griffin (and by proxy his ilk) is a piece of shit. His firm has destroyed hundreds of businesses. Put 100s of 1000s out of work. Destroyed millions of lives. That’s what hedge funds do. Would you like me to send you a list of companies they have destroyed. Or how about the number of community hospitals forced to close in the past decade due to cost pressures resulting from the mega mergers. Financed by Ken Griffin and his ilk. That number is in the mid hundreds. It will be 1000 eventually.
Today they are in the process of completing their destruction. They did retail first. Then eateries. Then housing. Now, Dental practices. Hospital consolidation. Pet clinics. HVAC shops. Plumbing shops. Hair salons. Car washes. It’s and endless list.
All the independent services people relied on for good service, relationships, fair prices, and yes, entrepreneurship have been, and continue to be, dismantled by private equity and hedge funds.
Young people today have every right to be angry. Ken Griffin is just a placeholder for the ultra elite 1% who preached for 50 years about what young people needed to do to ‘get ahead’.
And then they pulled the rug, in the worst possible way.
You can fire off all the flowery language and platitudes you want. That’s fine. But you ignore reality at your own peril.
Best of luck.
Capitalism is by far the best economic system, bar none. Or problems are not with the capitalist model, the problems are with the corrupt and perverted dealings practiced by the large Wall Street players. It has gotten exponentially worse as the wealth transfer has increased. The doom loop isn't hidden. Buy the political power, pass favorable legislation, over leverage for unlimited asset acquisition, play the "too big to fail" card, maybe buy a few more politicians and have the government crank-up the money printing machines to bail yourself out at the citizen's expense. This isn't true capitalism anymore and while I can't advocate for the murder of the offenders, I can't say I blind to the reasoning.
Well put. You said it better than I did.
An anecdote. My youngest son and his wife own a landscape and snow removal business in a semi rural Midwest county. 15 years ago they had no money, a Lawn mower, weed whipper, leaf blower and a truck. They lived in two tents in a National Forest for a year before they could rent an apt. They ran their business out of a storage shed and the apt parking lot for 5 years before they bought some land. They built a pole barn and lived in that for 3 years until they could afford to build a cabin.
At the start of this year they had 30 res clients and 15 commercial clients, two plow trucks. two mowing crews, 3 FT and 2 PT employees, zero debt, no mortgage. Their plan was to buy a bigger piece of property, build a bigger barn, hire an office mgr to take that pressure off his wife, and start a family.
All of that is now on hold. And maybe distilled forever. Why?
Because their three biggest commercial clients, a hotel, a community hospital and the largest shopping complex within 100 miles all declined to renew the contracts that they had for 10 years. More than 50k in revenue.
Both the hospital and the hotel were purchased in mid 2025 by a private equity firm. Same firm. Moving into a small (10,000) town and throwing money around. They wanted nothing to do with a local kid trying to earn a living who had the clients for a decade. They told him, we are going to use ‘our own people’.
And then, their ‘own people’ who now were guaranteed a couple big accounts spent a month soliciting business from other large commercial customers and that’s how they lost the shopping center.
Two weeks ago the PE firm announced their plan to close the Community Hospital in 2030 and turn it into an outpatient and rehab facility. The next nearest hospital is 70 miles away.
The kids have been able to gain some more res customers. So while the client numbers remain the same, the revenue loss has curtailed their plans. And they had to let one FT and both PT guys go. Both of whom were retirees who needed the income.
And that is happening all over the country.
The OP to my post “Illinois Entrepreneur” either doesn’t know, or pretends that he doesn’t know, the deveststion that has been and will continue to be caused, by people like Ken Griffin.
In a town of 10,000 a small business loses their best 3 clients. An expansion doesn’t happen. A family doesn’t get started. Two dependent retirees lose their income. A Community Hospital closes. All so the 1% can amplify the wealth disparity between themselves and the serfs.
And as you say, it’s not capitalism. It’s predatory behavior, committed by psychopaths, facilitated by politicians on the take, with access to nearly free money and a glint in their eye as they destroy the fabric of the country.
And then go on TV and lecture the kids about financial responsibility.
What surprising to me is that it has taken longer for the chickens to begin coming home to roost then I thought it would.
But they are coming. And sadly I think the reckoning will be brutal.
Thanks for your thoughts and letting me rant.
With all due respect, I think this may be overblown. Why? Because the internet and social media have given a huge megaphone to the most radical voices. These people have always been around. The difference is that in the past, they didn't have a megaphone, and so they were mostly invisible. The truth is that almost all Americans reject murder. If this wasn't the case, our society would be far more violent than it currently is.
Exactly. I look at those three young women, and my first thought is "There is NO WAY they thought this up on their own" Sometimes people are so stupid that they actually LOOK stupid, and that's the case here. No, this was an operation, scripted, produced, and financed. Until we become willing to look behind the curtain, and terminate the bad actors, it will continue
There are many, MANY young women like this, who fully believe in what these women are saying. Don't ever underestimate the Left and their ground troops.
Quite the contrary, I can assure you. All I said was this was a scripted, staged, operation, that those bimbos could not possibly have pulled off on their own.
There have been recent surveys and people on the Left have actually agreed that political violence is acceptable under certain circumstances. It always starts with some morally repulsive figure like Hitler and then starts to filter into anyone that you feel is repugnant to YOUR morals. It's a slippery slope, and it's happening a lot more than you think.
Agreed. And of course those "circumstances" are never fully explained. Weakly defined terms like "Hate" stired with Mass Psychosis forming scare tactics on Social Media green lights anyone to throw a punch, or start a fire.....while getting paid to do so.
Give it time . Civilization, a thin veil .
I don't disagree that the internet and social media have given this a megaphone...but that is the problem and that problem is not going away and will get worse. Will our societey get more violent? I think it will. If I am wrong, it still doesn't change the fact that a husband and father was murdered and his family will not find any solace if violence does not get worse.
In the past, Americans were far more likely to be victims of violence than they are today. Most people don't realize that.
I don't disagree that violent crime rates are down but I don't think you can look at that alone. People like to respond to a report of a crime and say "crime happens everywhere" I think that is a flawed "analysis" The problem is that crime is happening in areas where it didn't happen before, particularly violent crimes.
Is crime being underreported both in incidence and severity? In some places, absolutely. Despite stats showing crime is down long term is it higher than it "should" be? I can argue yes because of lax prosecution and incarceration but also because of the megaaphone effect, that leads copycat crimes and radicalization like these three morons.
We may wind up going down the road of China in 1949 when peasants "struggled" against their oppressors. Someone who owned maybe 3 acres with some livestock were arrested, brought out publicly, harassed by their accusers, then executed. During the 1950's the Chinese productive class ceased to exist. Then Mao brought out the Cultural Revolution. It took over 30 years for China to reestablish itself into whatever it is today.
I guess this is our destiny as a culture.
We are reaping the rewards of the shift in emphasis of public education from empowerment to victimhood. Voltaire presciently stated, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
You ask, "How did we get like this? What have we become?" I would contend we got like this because life is hard, and those who were not as successful as either others, or they thought they should be, have developed extreme envy for those who do the work and achieve some level of success.
What I find interesting is that I never hear anyone complain about, for example, Scottie Scheffler's success, in fact lauding the amount of time and work he put into his craft. this is generally true of all professional athletes, who get paid inordinate sums of money. but if somebody's gifts and strengths were intellectual, and they worked hard and either built a business or helped one succeed, they are deemed as the problem.
Not every business is good, nor is every owner, but the ones that are still around have proven themselves valuable to their customers.
Envy is a powerful emotion, and most of the complainers are driven by thoughts and feelings, i.e.emotions, not by facts and reality.
Bingo.
Don't point out that hypocrisy to the Left. They don't like being shown to be fools.
Now write an article in defense of the gilded age industrial magnates while ignoring the accumulation of power and abuse of labor. They employed a much higher percentage of the workforce than a hedge fund so clearly deserve much more praise.
Success does not equal murder.
I’m echoing the sentiment felt by many people. I’m not saying there’s a moral equivalence to murder. Many people suffer from atrocities every day and I see this in my own line of work. However, being a job creator doesn’t imply benevolence or benefit to society. Many technological advancements have made things globally worse and wealth is aggregating in a few people who work in financial engineering, software, advertising, etc. Not necessarily building physically transformative things. My point is you can be both a job creator and simultaneously do harmful things. When society start sympathizing with murderers, maybe we need to look deeper at cause and effect which this article oversimplifies as “success”. It goes beyond that.
I recommend the movie "The Company Men". Great movie.
There was an article in Zerohedge about French deconstructionism and what it’s done to the American intellectual scene. I think it would be good for more of us, especially those of us spending time with young people, to really attend to what they are hearing at the high school and college level. And try to actively counter it.
You mean like Charlie Kirk ?
Any one of those 3 would boil your kid’s rabbit without a 2nd thought.
Guilty Beyond an Unreasonable Doubt. Should have been tried and executed within a day.
What I find interesting about this Topic, and the whole of NYC, is that Class Warfare is historicaly a loosing argument -- 10% against 90% -- which is why Race is usually the convenient distraction dejure (George Floyd). That's a 50-50 slugfest while the bottom two-thirds get fleeced. That's why I think wading into the waters of Class Warfare is going to get interesting.
Either way, this is a form of the destablizing (read as anger) Playbook of Marxism. White Wealth is just the "odd" target of the day. As I said, usually it's Race.....as that is very winnable. But Targeting the rare air of top end Wealth might be a blunder. We'll see. The Playbook seems to be, If you're not wealthy, get mad! If your Black and not wealthy...get really mad! If you are an unmarried or Lesbian woman who made bad life choices, screem like hell! It's clearly a dividing trigger Designed to turn a Populous against the Rich, while using our gullable Youth and mostly adult Woman raging at their poor life choices, as disposable, "Mass Psychosis" induced puppets. Rich White Man Bad! Capitalism Bad! But, again, that's really a 10% against 90% fight. George Floyd? - Paydirt!
When you start poking at Globalist Billionaires....and you're the angry 90%......Like I said, this is going to get interesting.
Occupy Rothschild?
Division is greater than full destruction
and so easy in a town like NYC .
I have to agree with MoodyP on this one Chris. You are confusing "success" at financial manipulation by someone like Griffin with success at "building" things by "industrialists" such as Ford, Carnegie, Hughes, Jobs and Musk. The former tends to be destructive of value, the latter additive!
I agree with much of what you say here, but I would additionally ask some relevant questions:
1) Doesn't it add a mild tangential legitimacy to the arguments of the crazies that the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay was 281 in 2024?
2) Are young people forming families, having offspring, and buying houses like they did 30 years ago? Why not?
3) Does a standard college education secure a strong financial future for young people anymore?
4) Doesn't government fiscal and monetary policy almost always favor the rich during crises (e.g., the bailouts of 2008) and even when massive government deficit spending is routinely enabled by the Fed?
5) Haven't pensions been mostly replaced by 401k accounts for the middle class, and haven't the great sell-offs of 2000-2003, 2008-2009, 2020, and the new one that's coming soon caused those 401k accounts to take massive hits that affect people's lives? What kind of help do people get to limit these losses?
6) Haven't average healthcare costs for families soared to $26,000/yr. with no reform or relief from those fine people in Congress?
The people you mention are indeed crazy, but they strike a nerve with some young folks to some degree. The internet has made things much worse culturally, as your article must imply. True, but that is not the whole story. We are at the Fourth Turning for a reason.
Everybody bought into the idea that we're a nation of immigrants. We were a rich nation of colonists first. Then they imported slave labor until now the slaves come on their own dime while citizens pay tribute to their overlords.
I’m all for celebrating success & it’s obvious these women are infected with a bad ideology.
And it’s also the case that modern day success is extremely leveraged so that someone with a marginal more amount of talent, timing, hard work, connections, & luck can reap such disproportionately large amount of economic, social, & political rewards relative the median citizen. Not that long ago, the very best farmer or hunter enjoyed the most rewards - maybe 5x, 10x their neighbor’s economics & status?
I don’t know the answer to dealing with this problem, other than on an individual level to take the plank out of your own eye and treat others as you’d like to be treated if you were in their shoes.