This young lady’s TicTok video has gone viral. She used a social media platform to find a way for the “have nots” to get back at the “haves,” just like the GameStop Redditors. She suggests her followers “Eat the Rich” by unfollowing large social media influencers like Kylie Jenner to impact their income. She says she worked in marketing and understands how influencers make significant money by promoting products to their followers.
— Alyssa Rose, MS.Ed 💕🍏 (@Ms__TeacherLady) January 30, 2021
“Unfollow them. Unfollow them all. I know you might love them but do it. Unfollow them. Unfollow them all. This is how we eat the rich. Then make them feel just as important as we feel. Unfollow them. Stop looking at their content. Even if it is just for a few months. Do it! Watch it burn. “
While she is not talking about doing anything violent, she wants to hurt excessively wealthy people financially. This emotion is similar to the one behind the GameStop short squeeze. Some of the Redditors were nihilistically willing to lose money just so hedge funds lost more.
Society should not ignore this kind of simmering anger. I have written often on social media and in articles for this site that our political elites are trying hard to convince us we are in a race war. In reality, our feckless and incompetent leaders in the aging political class are terribly afraid we will figure out this is a class war. Should that vast portion of the population unite, and demand policies that allow for their prosperity and security, Democrats will not win an election for decades.
In a recent podcast, Eric Weinstein referred to our sclerotic, septuagenarian, and octogenarian leadership class as peacetime kleptocrats. To add emphasis, he talked said:
“We were a rich family if you will. With a family business that had built up a tremendous amount of wealth. In a family business, the engine was sputtering. So what do most rich families do when you have such a situation? The first thing they do is try to fix the business.”
Then he talked about the Reagan era, and leaders he believed were well-intentioned supply-side champions who thought those policies would bring back growth. Being a Reagan kid, I can tell you it was a terrific time to grow up. We had prosperity and pride in America.
He says Bill Clinton created a second Republican Party, which started the drive towards globalization following the Berlin Wall fall. This trend allowed us to break the bonds with our fellow countrymen. Plants could move overseas, and employers could import labor. The country became hollowed out. He went on:
“Effectively the rich family starts a kleptocracy. The center-left and center-right kleptocrats start selling off all of the wealth of the family and it becomes sort of a race if you will, to pocket as much as you possibly can.”
This time was millennials’ experience in childhood culminating in the dot-com bubble, a housing bubble, and the financial meltdown in 2008. This generation was the first American generation that is not expected to exceed its parents’ level of prosperity despite high educational attainment levels. During the Obama presidency, their young adult years were sluggish at best and adult milestones, such as marriage, beginning a family, and were delayed compared to previous generations.
Donald Trump was elected in 2016 just as Gen Z was entering the workforce in large numbers. In short order, there were more jobs available than people to fill them, real wage growth resulted from a stretched labor market, and the future held more promise. Until March of 2020, when a virus from China put the brakes on everything.
Then we saw the largest wealth transfer in history from average Americans and small business owners to the billionaire class due to lockdowns. Big box stores and tech companies thrived while owners of restaurants and small shops lost everything. These young millennials and older Gen Z also watched parents lose homes after the housing bubble burst. Unemployment stayed at 8% until 2012, and by then, a record number of people had left the workforce.
Now, they have been isolated for months by leaders who have no good reason to keep young, healthy people at home. Yet, the media terrorizes them with panic porn about a virus they have near-zero risk of suffering severe effects from. An astounding 70% of people aged 18-23 report symptoms of clinical depression, and there are over 100,000 excess deaths in the 25-44 age group that not attributed to COVID-19.
For now, these frustrated and angry young adults whose need to be able to form families, own property, and prosper has been entirely ignored by our political elites, may be satisfied with internet pranks that hit the pocketbook of the insanely wealthy. However, if we don’t start to take their grievances seriously, no one should be surprised when this goes completely sideways in ways we can only imagine.
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