For many people, the coronavirus pandemic has had absolutely devastating effects on themselves and their loved ones.
According to the Pew Research Center, roughly four-in-ten adults say they or someone in their household has lost a job due to the pandemic. Clearly, this moment we are living in is one of reckoning for the United States, as we have all been forced to confront the flaws in the ruthless capitalist economic system of this country and figure out how we can make it so that the people of our country don’t have to choose between keeping their lights on, getting food on the table and ensuring there is a roof over their head.
Yet, among the countless headlines on this topic, there is one group that has been woefully underrepresented: billionaires.
The smallest minority in America, billionaires only comprise about 800 members of the United States population, according to Vox, and have been trampled on for far, far too long. The population of this country has been turning a blind eye to the persecution of America’s richest and most abused group, and the fact that this has continued for as long as it has is frankly, shameful.
The culture of toxic hatred toward billionaires that has risen, especially during the pandemic, is disgusting. Everyday youth run through the streets, screaming “eat the rich,” outwardly promoting cannibalism and disguising their literal bigotry as so-called “woke” behavior.
Beff Jezos, spokesman of the We Are the 1% movement and founder of Nozama, says that billionaires experience pain every day. “I open up social media and I see these posts saying that I should ‘get the guillotine’ or stuff like that and it just really hurts my feelings…I truly believe that there is no other demographic in this country that has to deal with the blatant hate that we’ve had to endure for what feels like centuries,” Jezos said.
Art by Primo Lagaso Goldberg
The presidential election has also forced this group to confront the fact that many Americans are vehemently anti-billionaire. Joe Biden has openly admitted that he will raise taxes for those making more than four hundred thousand dollars a year, a direct act of brutal suppression toward billionaires.
There are billionaires who have lost millions of dollars during this pandemic, yet a presidential candidate is openly admitting he wants to take their money? In a tweet sent out at 3am, the head of Tezla Electric Cars, big-toothed-billionaire Elon Tusk said, “It’s frankly not very lit, homies. The oppression of the rich in this country is appalling. Just yesterday my son was verbally assaulted at school, called names like ‘bourgeoise’ and ‘oppressor of the working class.’ Needless to say, the school administration did nothing about it…a literal hate crime occurred against my child yet everyone turned a blind eye. It’s DISGRACEFUL.”
This pandemic hasn’t been easy emotionally on billionaires either. We can focus on statistics of unemployment all we want but it is billionaires who have lost literally millions of dollars during this pandemic. What’s worse—a little bit of unemployment (hey, only 12.5 million people are unemployed!) or the loss of millions of thousands of hundreds of billions of dollars of precious personal financial assets?
While there are other forms of oppression in this country that need our attention too, obviously—racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, islamophobia and anti-Semitism are just a few among so, so many others—but we are simply kidding ourselves if we exclude the vicious hatred toward billionaires (billionareism, if you will) from this list.
The United States is the so-called land of the free. If we don’t treat our wealthiest, most oppressed, smallest minority with kindness, respect, and dignity, then we genuinely cannot call ourselves that anymore. It’s time for us to look at ourselves in the mirror and decide: are we going to continue to practice blatant billionaire bigotry or be the truly tolerant nation that we know we are?
