by Edward Ring
In the Federalist, James Madison famously warned against the “tyranny of the majority,” but it is unlikely he could have envisioned what we face today. Twenty-first-century America is dissolving before our eyes, as a tyrannical coalition of minorities steals our heritage and sovereignty. Not ethnic minorities—their American bequest is being stolen right alongside that of America’s shrinking white majority. Nobody is exempt, and everyone should unite to resist.
“Minorities” in this context refers to the elite vanguard of what Californian political writer Joel Kotkin has called the “Upstairs-Downstairs Coalition,” a voting bloc, he says, “that brings together the most destitute with the most privileged parts of our society.”
At the top of the top are a few thousand of the super-rich. At the bottom are a few thousand hardened fanatics, many of them professionals. These two super-minorities, working in tandem, currently control the destiny of America. Expertly manipulating the voters in the upstairs-downstairs coalition, they’re actively destroying everything we love and everything we need.
The minority occupying the top position in the upstairs-downstairs coalition are the plutocrats who run America. A 2017 analysis identified the top 0.01 percent (1 in 10,000 Americans) to have an average annual income of over $30 million. A 2019 Stanford study found the top 0.1 percent (1 in 1,000 Americans) control a total net worth equal to the entire cumulative net worth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans. At the pinnacle, however, are America’s billionaires, a scant 735 of them at last count.
This is a vanishingly small minority of people, roughly one in every half-million Americans. But their influence is decisive. Every year, these billionaires and the corporations they control disburse billions—often getting tax deductions for doing so—to maintain standing armies of activist groups that conduct lawfare, fund civil disobedience, run massive propaganda campaigns, engage in targeted “get-out-the-vote” activities, prop up financially dependent media properties, and produce “expert” studies with paid-for ideas.
The minorities at both ends of this up-down coalition are groups identifiable not by their ethnicity or ideology, but by their behavior. In every case, they constitute a minute fraction of the population, but in the name of compassion, equity, diversity, and environmentalism they are undermining and, unless stopped, will destroy America.
The Weaponization of Mental Illness
Michael Shellenberger, a Californian and former progressive activist, has become one of America’s most astute critics of the failed policies that are sowing social and economic chaos across the nation. In a series of recent Substack articles with self-explanatory titles, including “Infantilization Of The Apocalypse,” “The Quiet Desperation Of Woke Fanatics,” and “Narcissism In Climate & Woke Victim Movements,” referring to militant climate activists, he argues that “global elites are encouraging them, which is exceedingly dangerous and irresponsible.” He’s right.
Co-opting potentially violent sociopaths, or as Shellenberger puts it, “weaponizing mental illness,” has long been a tool of authoritarian regimes. In the USSR during the Cold War, during the German Nazi era, and in police states throughout the 20th century, recruiting thugs and turning them on their own people was a common tactic—as it is still in Communist China today. What’s happening in America is only slightly more nuanced, and highly effective.
To further explain who controls America’s current upstairs-downstairs coalition in a historical context, it is helpful to recognize the false dichotomy represented by the supposedly left-wing establishment Democrats and the supposedly right-wing establishment Republicans. “Establishment” is the key word here.
Gary Allen, in his 1971 book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, blew up the traditional paradigm whereby the “Left” is communism and the “Right” is fascism. In what he suggested is a more accurate political spectrum, all forms of authoritarian government, communism, fascism, and socialism, are to one extreme, anarchy is to the other extreme, and in the center is a constitutional republic with limits on government power.
The distinction explains how a shared agenda could exist between outwardly antagonistic capitalists and socialists. Allen writes, “The seeming paradox of rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead, it becomes the logical, even perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite.”
Pressure from Above, Pressure from Below
Allen describes the upstairs-downstairs coalition as “pressure from above, pressure from below,” writing, “Radical movements are never successful unless they attract big money and/or outside support . . . the Left is controlled by its alleged enemy, the malefactors of great wealth.”
The hidden agenda is to sow chaos, triggering demands for more state control, and allowing governments and corporations to consolidate power and wealth further. This agenda is proceeding on schedule.
The public agenda, incessantly marketed as something to be desired, is to erase America as we know it, replacing it with what is enthusiastically portrayed as a transnational, transhuman utopia. According to this vision, every person on earth will have achieved “equity,” i.e., equal outcomes. At the same time, the footprint of human civilization will become ecologically benign, and the planet will be saved.
This is an impossible charade. What they are actually imposing on the overwhelming majority of Americans is a terrifying dystopia. Private financial independence will become all but impossible, the economy will be centrally controlled, productivity will be rationed, and, if anything, the health of planetary ecosystems will be worse, not better. Indoctrination campaigns escalate with every passing year. But if you question any of it, you are tarred as a divisive bigot.
For decades, intensifying with Obama’s presidency, establishment institutions in America have falsely condemned Americans as racist and sexist, despite American culture for all its flaws being the most inclusive culture in the history of civilization. This ongoing propaganda war on social stability wasn’t enough, however, when the MAGA movement began to attract Americans of all backgrounds in 2016. These MAGA Americans reject the narratives of systemic racism and sexism, and they reject climate doomsday scenarios.
To cope, the establishment began anointing the most troubled individuals among us as pioneering saints, destined to redefine what it means to be “normal.” American culture is now at a tipping point, because American institutions are now opportunistically validating behaviors that are clearly destructive and obviously pathological.
The Useful Lunatics
The riots of summer 2020 highlighted the individuals who now constitute the vanguard of the downstairs cohort of the upstairs-downstairs coalition. For months on end, Antifa and Black Lives Matter ringleaders, fêted by the media and funded by plutocrats, orchestrated murderous rampages in dozens of cities. Looters and vandals were described by establishment press and politicians as “mostly peaceful,” and “victims of racism.”
Other members of the downstairs cohort include homeless drug addicts, psychopaths, and predators, who in their uncontained thousands have made life unpleasant, unsanitary, and dangerous for millions of people in cities and towns across America. But they are not held accountable for their actions. They are no longer arrested for vagrancy, public intoxication, or even theft. In the name of compassion and equity, such laws are no longer enforced. This disregard for the rule of law only encourages and multiplies the worse elements, and further harms the genuine victims.
Climate militants, also a minute fraction of the population, have made common cause with BLM and Antifa militants. They commit acts of performative vandalism, their protests block freeways, they harass targeted politicians and executives, they have shut down energy pipelines, and their attacks on vital energy infrastructure are escalating. Their actions are encouraged by every mainstream institution in America, despite the destructive essence of their agenda.
No description of the activist minorities bent on erasing America as we know it would be complete without delving into the sexual revolution, which has taken a form that even hippies in the hedonistic late 1960s would scarcely recognize. Do you think women have penises or that men menstruate? If you do not agree with those statements, American institutions ranging from Proctor and Gamble to the National Hockey League consider you to be a “divisive” individual, lacking empathy.
The preposterous extreme to which the woke gender warriors are trying to take America is incomprehensible to any sane person. Do you believe it’s appropriate for drag queens to recruit five-year-old children to learn how to twerk? Should states be boycotted because their legislatures had the courage to prohibit biological men from using a women’s restroom, or participate in women’s sports? Do you object to surgeons removing the sexual organs of children? Careful how you answer. Sanity is insurrectionary.
The public agenda of Antifa and BLM is “equity.” For the Homeless Industrial Complex, it’s “compassion.” For climate militants, it’s “saving the earth.” For gender warriors, it’s to end “discrimination.” But in all of these cases, their hidden agenda is to advance the power of the state, to divide and demoralize the population, to destroy conventional traditions and norms, and consolidate private property ownership in the hands of a small elite.
From outraged parents swarming in to be heard at school board meetings to individuals everywhere merely wanting to protect their families, their homes, and their businesses, those who defend order and normalcy are now the “divisive” ones. Worse, they are now deemed dangerous and are condemned by nearly every influential institution in the country.
A few hundred super-rich elites and a powerful handful of woke and climate activist ringleaders are the minorities that now tyrannize America. They are not defined by conventional ideological definitions, or by their faith, or by their ethnicity. With money and fanaticism, they control establishment institutions and grassroots armies. The wealthy faction is united by greed, the woke and climate populists by nihilistic hatred. It is an axis of evil.
This cannot stand. There are too few of them and too many of us. Resist.
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Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
