You’re not mad at the right people, People.
I don’t say that to insult you. I say it because an enormous amount of money has been spent — deliberately and strategically, with receipts — to make sure your anger goes sideways instead of up. They want your anger to go towards your neighbor with the yard sign. At the immigrant family down the street. At the trans kid, the teacher, the person on Medicaid. The college graduates who got their student loans forgiven and the woman who accused Graham Platner of sexual assault instead. Anywhere… but up.
Horizontal blame is the deflection, while vertical blame is the thing being prevented, because, it’s the actual cause. Let’s talk about pointing our fingers in the right direction, layer by layer, from the top of the pyramid to the bottom and what it looks and sounds like.
Layer One: The Principals
Start with the scale, because the scale IS the crime.
Global billionaire wealth hit $18.3 trillion in 2025, the highest level in human history, according to Oxfam’s January 2026 report, “Resisting the Rule of the Rich.” That wealth jumped more than 16 percent in a single year, three times faster than the average of the previous five. Since 2020, billionaire wealth has grown 81%, y’all. EIGHTY-ONE PERCENT! There are now more than 3,000 billionaires on Earth for the first time ever, and in October 2025, Elon Musk became the first human being worth more than half a trillion dollars. And he’s still a miserable money-hoarding little fuckwit.
The same report also stated that one in four people on this planet don’t regularly have enough to eat. The $2.5 trillion that billionaires ADDED to their fortunes last year — just the increase, not the total — would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over. If all the billionaires got together and gave back just a little bit of the money they stole from us, poverty would end and these greedy motherfuckers would still be billionaires. Just. Wild.
Oxfam estimates billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people. They aren’t just rich. They are GOVERNING. And we keep putting them there, cycle after cycle. Nobody forces us to vote for the candidates anointed by wealthy donors and the media personalities on their payroll… but we do it anyway. I’ve watched with exasperated amusement these past few days as big platforms lined up to apologize for endorsing Graham Platner, after so many of us warned y’all. What the hell is that? Are Americans just naturally oppositional defiant? Faced with an inconvenient truth, we stick to our guns even when our guns are pointed at our own feet. When do we stop pulling the trigger?
They also aren’t paying for any of it. ProPublica’s Secret IRS Files investigation found that the 25 richest Americans saw their wealth grow by $401 billion between 2014 and 2018 while paying $13.6 billion in federal income taxes, what ProPublica called a “true tax rate” of 3.4 percent when wealth growth is counted as income. (Measured the conventional way, against reported income only, their effective rate was about 16 percent — still less than what a teacher pays when you count payroll taxes.) Musk paid ZERO federal income tax in 2018. Jeff Bezos paid zero in 2007 and 2011. The system isn’t failing to catch them. The system was built by them, for them, which brings us to the next layer.
Layer Two: The enablers, The delivery system, & The supply chain
Billionaires do not personally show up to gut your Medicaid. They hire people. Think DOGE.
In 2025, federal lobbying spending passed $5 billion for the first time in American history. These pecker-heads spent $5.08 billion, (per OpenSecrets), up 14 percent in the first year of Trump’s second term. The single most-lobbied bill of the year? The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with 2,354 organizations reporting activity on it, more than three times the next-closest bill. That’s the law that extended and expanded tax breaks for the wealthy while cutting Medicaid, SNAP, and student loan programs. Americans for Tax Fairness estimates it will strip health coverage from almost 17 million people while handing the top 0.1 percent an average tax cut of roughly a quarter million dollars each. PEOPLE, WAKE UP!
The billionaires funded the campaigns. The lobbyists wrote the bill. The politicians passed it on the Fourth of July. And 17 million people are set to lose their healthcare so the donors could collect. Everybody gets a cut from the money they stole from us “ordinary (not rich) people.”
The elections themselves are purchased the same way. Americans for Tax Fairness found that just 100 billionaire families poured $2.6 billion into the 2024 federal elections. That’s one out of every six dollars spent by ALL candidates, parties, and committees combined. Billionaire political spending has increased roughly 160-fold since Citizens United opened the floodgates in 2010. Seventy percent of that 2024 money went to Republicans and conservative causes. Musk alone spent $278 million getting Trump elected, and as of March 2026 he’s already the top donor of the midterm cycle again, at roughly $71 million and counting. I know I say this a lot, but don’t blink. Someone is always waiting for the second we look away to pull some bullshit move. That’s the whole point of flooding the system — the distractions, the manufactured outrages, the wars, the program cuts, the education cuts. It isn’t chaos. It’s cover.
And it costs them nothing. ATF calculated that the $1.9 billion the top 150 billionaire families had spent by late October 2024 amounted to 0.07 percent of their collective wealth. For a median American household, the equivalent donation would be $140. They are buying the entire federal government for the household equivalent of a nice dinner out plus tip.
The machinery includes dipshits with a megaphone, too.
Oxfam found that billionaires now own more than half of the world’s largest media companies and ALL of the major social media platforms. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Musk owns X. Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the LA Times. In France, far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré turned CNews into a Fox clone. The people who profit from your confusion own the channels your information travels through, including Substack. Substack’s $100 million round in 2025 valued the company at $1.1 billion, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, BOND, and The Chernin Group, and a16z led both the Series A in 2019 and the $65 million Series B in 2021, making it the most consistent institutional backer across rounds.
Layer Three: The Misdirection
This is the layer most people never see, because it’s designed not to be seen.
Oxfam’s 2026 report also says the obvious, that some billionaires are deliberately seeding a philosophy that divides the working class by spreading racial, sexist, and anti-LGBTQI+ hate, specifically to fracture opposition to billionaire power. It documents how marginalized groups, immigrants and people of color especially, get stigmatized and scapegoated in billionaire-owned media while critics get silenced.
The culture war is not a distraction FROM the class war. The culture war is a weapons system OF the class war. Every hour you spend furious at a drag queen or Trans person is an hour you don’t spend asking why your insulin costs what it costs, why your rent ate your raise, why the hospital in your county closed. The rage is real, but the targets are manufactured. That’s the whole trick, and it’s an old one — divide the people who outnumber you, and you never have to face them.
Layer Four: The Unwitting Enforcers
Here is where I need to be careful, because this layer is made of our neighbors, our coworkers, and in some cases our families.
The people punching sideways as they scream at school board meetings, report immigrant families, vote for the guy who promised to hurt the right people, are not the architects of this. Most of them are also victims who’ve been handed a script and a scapegoat just too uneducated and stuck in survival mode to realize it. They’re getting robbed by the same people robbing you, and they’ve been told YOU did it. Their Medicaid got cut too. Their kids’ schools got defunded too. Their wages flatlined while billionaire wealth grew 81%, too.
That doesn’t make the harm they do acceptable. It makes it PURCHASED. There’s a difference between excusing someone and correctly identifying who paid for their anger, and if we want any of them back, we have to keep that difference straight. Contempt for the conned is just free labor for the con men. Don’t ever forget that.
The Bottom of the Pyramid: All of Us
Which brings us to the victims, and the honest answer is:
FUCKING EVERYONE BELOW THE 0.1%.
Oxfam counted 142 significant anti-government protests across 68 countries last year, most of them met with state violence. People all over the world are in the streets because they can feel the thing I’m describing, even when they can’t really put their finger on exactly what it is because they haven’t taken off the rose-colored glasses yet — that the rules got rewritten above their heads, that working harder stopped working, that democracy is becoming a subscription service they can no longer afford. Frogs in the boiling water.
The pyramid only stands because each layer blames the one beside it instead of the one above it. Every fight between neighbors is a dividend paid upward. Every finger pointed sideways is a finger not pointed at the 100 families who bought a government for 0.07 percent of their net worth.
So, ask yourself, when’s the last time your anger actually landed on someone who could afford it?
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CA has a billionaire tax on the November ballot. Newsome put it there, then changed his mind. Please, CA, vote to tax them. If they leave they aren't taking their business with them and they aren't paying taxes, so let them go if they want. If they like CA they'll pay like NYC. The NYC tax went into effect on 7/1 and per AI, they stayed and they paid. Do it!
They all annoy me because the crap these people are doing is illegal and they are letting them get away with it. There is proof hand over fist and it is just makes me mad. There are people in jail for much less. You are right the more we fight with eachother the less we pay attention to the real crimes. What my neighbor does in their own house or on the street does not effect me as long as it is not hurting anyone it is none of my business. I worry how I am going to pay my bills but donate food to the local food pantry. It does not matter if goes to a family who receives SNAP, a person who just moved to the country, or someone whose culture or religion is different then mine. In my mind everyone needs to eat. Honestly the people we should be mad at is the greedy MF who take more than they give