Are We Living in 1788 Again?
Projection as Power: How Elites Poison Language to Hide Extraction
Language is never neutral. In authoritarian hands, it becomes a weapon of inversion. Those draining the system call others “leeches.” The monopolists scream “competition.” The extractors pose as “job creators.” Every insult hurled downward is a mirror of what the powerful are actually doing upward. That’s why the frame of “parasite,” “vermin,” “enemy within” tells us less about immigrants or workers than it does about elites themselves.
Every Accusation Is a Confession
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump says about immigrants who pick our food. “Vermin,” he calls them. Every accusation is a confession.
It’s the pickpocket who shouts ‘Stop, thief!’ while his hand is in your wallet.
Look at who Trump dines with, golfs with, appoints to power. Private equity extractors who drain companies of life. Hedge fund predators who hunt in markets and extract billions. Tech monopolists who colonize every aspect of our existence. These are the real invasive species. They attach to healthy systems—housing, healthcare, education—and suck them dry. They’re not building America; they’re feeding on it.
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. In late-eighteenth-century France, the aristocracy controlled land, titles, and political power while ordinary people carried the tax burden. The revolutionaries had a word for their aristocrats: parasites. Within a year, the Bastille fell. Today, we have our own parasite class, but with a twist: they’ve discovered that destroying the system can be more profitable than preserving it.
The Art of Extraction
The modern economy isn’t about scarcity—it’s about capture.
The COVID Wealth Transfer:
Fed printed: $7 trillion
Billionaires gained: $5 trillion
Workers received: $1,200 checks
Small businesses lost: 200,000 permanently closed
This isn’t natural market dynamics. It’s engineered extraction.
Private equity doesn’t invest—it extracts. When KKR bought Toys”R”Us, they pulled $200 million in fees while 33,000 workers lost their jobs. Blackstone now owns 300,000 American homes, extracting $60 billion yearly from families who will never build wealth. They’re not landlords; they’re wealth interceptors.
The extraction machine runs on a simple formula: Deregulate, speculate, crash, bailout. The 2008 financial crisis was the masterpiece—banks gambled with depositor money, lost everything, then got rescued with taxpayer funds while millions lost homes. Wall Street bonuses hit records the next year. The predators didn’t just survive; they grew stronger.
Trump represents the evolution of this model. Why raid companies when you can raid democracy itself? His tax cuts extracted $2 trillion from public coffers to private wealth. His judges—bought with Federalist Society dark money—ensure the extraction continues for generations. Every chaos is a profit center.
They’ll say they’re job creators. But parasites don’t create—they attach. Immigrants start businesses at twice the rate of native-born Americans. The oligarchs? They buy businesses, load them with debt, destroy jobs. Trump didn’t build an empire; he inherited one and bankrupted casinos—establishments mathematically designed to profit.
And now we are supposed to believe, as he stated to the UN council, that he’s better at this than anyone else? Yes he might be very good at destroying things, including those who support him.
The New Three Estates
Like pre-Revolutionary France, we’ve developed our own caste system:
First Estate: The apex predators—the 0.1% who own the rules. Harlan Crow collects Supreme Court justices. Peter Thiel funds anti-democracy candidates while holding New Zealand citizenship as his escape plan. They profit whether markets rise or collapse.
Second Estate: The enabler class—McKinsey consultants who design extraction strategies, lawyers who structure tax havens, economists who launder oligarchy as “efficiency,” media executives who both-sides democracy versus fascism. They’re paid just enough to identify with predators while being prey themselves.
Third Estate: Everyone else—the host bodies. Gig workers drained through apps. Families bled by medical debt. Students paralyzed by loans. The young who can’t afford homes. The old who can’t afford medicine.
Infection Points Everywhere
Every pressure point in American life shows extraction at work:
Housing: Private equity owns entire zip codes. Rent becomes a permanent wealth transfer from workers to Wall Street.
Healthcare: Insurance CEOs insert themselves between doctor and patient. UnitedHealth made $22 billion last year denying care.
Education: Student debt parasites have attached to an entire generation—$1.7 trillion in extraction from those least able to pay.
Climate: The Kochs spent millions denying climate change while their refineries poisoned communities. Now they profit from the disasters they helped create.
The Acceleration
This isn’t the slow bleed of 1788 anymore. The extractors know their time is limited. They’re smash-and-grabbing while they can.
During COVID, billionaires added $5 trillion to their wallets. Every hurricane is a real estate opportunity. Every bankruptcy is an acquisition. It’s not disaster capitalism anymore; it’s catastrophe capitalism.
The Loss of Immunity
The predators have made a bet: That they can keep the host confused about what’s killing it. That culture wars can distract from class war. That voters will fear the immigrant nurse more than the insurance executive denying their chemo.
When Trump—who paid $750 in federal taxes—calls immigrants “leeches,” the projection is perfect. When hedge fund extractors who’ve never created anything call workers “takers,” they’re confessing through accusation.
But projection has a physics to it. Eventually, people see who’s actually holding the knife.
The Real Enemy Within
In 1788, France’s aristocrats had one last chance at reform when finance minister Necker proposed taxing the nobility. They dismissed him instead, proving the system would never reform itself. The Bastille fell within weeks. Today’s oligarchs just chose Trump over even modest taxation. They’ve dismissed their own Necker. History suggests what comes next.
But here’s what the oligarchs and their MAGA mouthpieces don’t understand about their projection game: It’s a hunger that eventually eats itself. Today they call immigrants “vermin.” Tomorrow it’s liberals who are “diseased.” Then it’s insufficiently loyal conservatives who become “parasites.” Then it’s their own supporters who aren’t pure enough, rich enough, useful enough.
This is the authoritarian feeding cycle. When they’ve drained the undocumented, they’ll move to the documented. When they’ve bled the cities dry, they’ll turn to the suburbs. When they’ve extracted from the poor, they’ll feed on the middle class. And when even their own base has been sucked dry, they’ll turn on each other. The MAGA faithful cheering today’s purges will be tomorrow’s prey.
The oligarchs think they’re protected by their wealth, their walls, their political puppets. They think they can keep redirecting rage downward forever—at immigrants, at teachers, at trans kids, at whoever’s next on the menu. But every authoritarian regime teaches the same lesson: The parasites always run out of others to blame.
The next time Trump calls someone a parasite, look at who’s actually attached to your paycheck, your rent, your healthcare bill. The next time they scream about invasion, ask who actually colonized your town’s Main Street. The next time they warn about enemies within, check who’s inside your 401k, extracting fees whether you win or lose.
The real vermin are in the boardrooms. The real poison is in the tax havens. The real enemy within sits in corner offices and country clubs, not in caravans or classrooms.
We’re living in 1788. The parasites are betting we never develop immunity. I hope they’re betting wrong. When the fever breaks—and history says it will—they’ll discover what France’s aristocrats learned too late: You can’t feed on a society forever. Eventually, it feeds on you.
The question isn’t whether America will recognize its real parasites. It’s whether we’ll develop immunity before they’ve drained us past the point of recovery. The clock is ticking. The host is dying. And the parasites, in their greed, have forgotten that dead hosts don’t bleed.
Sources:
Economic Data & Wealth Transfer:
Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) - Money supply growth statistics
Oxfam International Report 2023 - “Survival of the Richest” (top 1% capturing two-thirds of new wealth)
ProPublica’s “The Secret IRS Files” - Trump’s $750 federal tax payment
Federal Reserve - COVID-era money printing statistics
Americans for Tax Fairness - Analysis of Trump tax cuts ($2 trillion)
Private Equity & Corporate Raiders:
“These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America” by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner
Center for Economic and Policy Research - Toys”R”Us bankruptcy analysis
Private Equity Stakeholder Project - Blackstone housing ownership data
“The Buyout of America” by Josh Kosman
Healthcare:
UnitedHealth Group Annual Reports - Profit figures
Kaiser Family Foundation - Medical debt statistics
Commonwealth Fund - Healthcare denial rates
Housing:
“Homewreckers” by Aaron Glantz
House Committee on Financial Services reports on institutional investors in housing
CoreLogic/RealtyTrac - Private equity home ownership data
Historical Parallels:
Simon Schama’s “Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution”
Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”
“The Coming of the French Revolution” by Georges Lefebvre
Climate & Fossil Fuels:
“Dark Money” by Jane Mayer - Koch Brothers climate denial funding
“Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
Inside Climate News - Exxon climate knowledge investigation
Student Debt:
Federal Reserve - Student loan statistics ($1.7 trillion)
“The Debt Trap” by Josh Mitchell
COVID Profiteering:
Institute for Policy Studies - “Silver Spoon Oligarchs” report
ProPublica’s PPP loan investigation
Forbes Billionaires List 2020-2023 tracking
Deregulation History:
“The Great Reversal” by Thomas Philippon
Glass-Steagall repeal Congressional records (1999)
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report (2011)