Most Americans live harder and shorter lives because of the predator class. 

In his 1956 book The Power Elite, sociologist Charles Wright Mills describes the “power elite” where the political establishment and corporate America manipulate and control us.  The “power elite” are much stronger now – more brazen and organized. They have more money and more tools and they how to use them.  They have drastically tilted the playing field, taking a grotesquely large portion of the economy for themselves. They have captured our government, shifting the balance of power over to the wealthy who now do whatever the hell they want to us.

Probably worse of all, they have perfected their manipulation and control of us. They are purposefully dividing us with the intent of destroying our democracy. [fix]They have become so powerful that not only are they openly marching us toward authoritarianism, but they have convinced millions of us to join them.

The “power elite” has become the “predator class” and they are sitting at the top of the food chain – just about everybody is their prey. Most of what is making everything unravel around us today is the result of an ongoing 50-year effort by these folks. Most Americans live harder lives because of the predator class.

The greatest fear of the predator class is a government that acts in the interests of the people over those of the wealthy.   In the late 1960s and early 1970s, we got too close to that point when our government began reigning in corporate exploitation of our health, our wallets, and the environment.  As the strength of the common man continued to increase through a more responsive government, the predator class felt more and more trapped – so they attacked – and they have not let up.

Guerrilla Warfare

[smooth this out – The rapid decline of our Democracy is the result of a decades-long secret war that has been waged against us.] The predator class, the generals of this protracted one-sided war, has been perfectly implementing the time-honored guerrilla warfare strategies of winning hearts and minds, weakening institutions, and creating division. They are making us distrust each other and our government to the point where many of us are indifferent to their actions, and in too many cases, too eager to help them.

The primary on-the-ground tactic of Guerrilla warfare is to attack in small, mobile, and independent units that operate in a decentralized manner. In this war, these units are stealthy and camouflaged as well-meaning political organizations, think tanks, social welfare groups, legal associations, etc. But these units are anything but well-meaning, they are the lair of the predator class, where they use their unlimited funds to twist our government and our minds in their favor. 

These units and their insurgents have successfully attacked our government, weakening it and in some cases taking it over. They have infiltrated the Supreme Court, Congress, and the White House to attack our government from the top down. They’ve taken over government agencies to attack from the inside. They have hijacked state and local governments in states all around the country to attack from the bottom up]

Insurgents always use the terrain to their advantage – exaggerating and aggravating the weaknesses and issues in our society  (economic disparity, lack of opportunity, tension between diverse groups, rising crime, corruption, discontent with government). [ The PC created many of these issues in the first place – creating a battlefield that gives them a distinct advantage.][ This allowed them to capture our minds]

Their attack has been slow, methodical, and disguised – making it impossible to notice. We were ripe for this type of attack. We were innocent and trusting, we were heads-down and working hard, and our focus was on the future of our children. We couldn’t have imagined that there were those among us who were going to such lengths to destroy everything good about America. We had no idea that all along, we were their prey.

Like wolves, the predator class instinctively prey on anything below them in the food chain – and that means just about all of us.

The Casualties

[fix]The predator class has nearly unlimited resources that they use to turn the have been using to covertly subjugate us their ideologies and their lust for power. Let’s take a look at some of the most damaging.

Social Engineering

The predator class understood that we wouldn’t accept any of this if they tried to suddenly force it upon us. They knew they had to hide some of their actions and they had to get our consent for the rest. Luckily for them, while money may not buy happiness, it can certainly buy mind control of the filthy masses.

Economic harm, fear-mongering, scapegoating, divisive rhetoric. Used as more than a distraction, it has been used to make us complacent and compliant.

A big part of what made us ripe for their manipulation was the pro-wealth policies of the predator class, pushed through by Republican insurgents, that decimated the working class. Many of us have been squeezed into a weakened financial state, making us feel betrayed and creating a bleak outlook for our future. This increases anxiety and lowers self-esteem, a psychologically damaging one-two punch that makes us more defensive, less trusting, more accepting of easy answers (conspiracy theories), and more willing to follow charismatic leaders.

The disinformation from the predator class is more believable when they can point to our very real pain points – pain points that they created.

Along with their crippling policies, they supplied a steady supply of people and ideas for us to blame as we began sliding down their tilting playing field. The more the playing field was tilted against us the more they pitted us against each other.

An early example of how policies and rhetoric were worked together was President Reagan’s introduction of trickle-down economics along with “welfare queens”, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”, and his attack on unions. Trickle-down was not Reagan’s idea, it was an existing concept that was refined by The Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, and the CATO Institute prior to Reagan’s election. These conservative think tanks were formed after the inspirational 1971 Lewis Powell memo, also known as “A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy”. Members of these think tanks were in Reagan’s White House, including his cabinet (insurgent infiltration).

Their own conservative media and an inattentive mainstream media provided platforms for them to cover their tracks. [this is out of nowhere – ease into it. 

Breaking things, reducing services, corrupting our government

Not only did they corrupt our government and our news media, but they also extended their reach down to the states and local communities where they sent in their operatives or used targeted social media to herd us along on issues such as healthcare, segregation, school committees, school curriculums, mask-wearing, etc. They have been doing this for years with their crowning achievement being the creation, organization, and weaponizing of the Tea Party. These localized guerilla warfare tactics are used to create the appearance that folks in our communities support pro-wealth policies or to manufacture movements or protests to further divide us. This is known as astroturfing (vs. actual grassroots efforts).

All of the above have taken their toll on us. Having lost everything,  being persuaded that you’re about to lose everything, realizing you’re in a rigged system, or just knowing in your gut that you are one pink slip or diagnosis away from disaster can keep you in a state of steady anxiety. This anxiety made many of us susceptible to their scapegoating of the vulnerable in our society and those who pushed back against pro-wealth policies.

Hate and distrust: Our government, the Left, minorities, science, education.

[more about conservative media and rhetoric]Their policies hurt us but their rhetoric hurts us more. Anxiety eats our capacity for reason and logic for breakfast and has caused many of us to eagerly follow the predator class as they lead us out of Democracy. They use their vast wealth to rig the system against us and then use our resulting anxiety against us to lure us along with them…until they are done with us.

[Fink’s plan]

[Charismatic characters, pundits]

Climate Change

It is important to keep in mind that these groups will attack a particular issue in unison.  For example, many groups attack climate change.  These seemingly independent organizations, each having numerous “subject authorities”, use a steady flow of fossil-fuel funding to publish books and research papers that are not based on science and not peer-reviewed. They continually discredit climate science on television, in newspapers, and on the internet – never revealing who they actually work for.  They often reference each other’s “research” to expand each other’s credibility. All of this creates an artificial consensus that causes doubt in many of us about climate change.  Conversely, scientists don’t have such groups that can lead a campaign to convince us of what they know – they have to rely primarily on that incompetent news media or pray that somehow we all start reading scientific journals…

A very short list of some of the groups that push climate denial (along with other “causes”) includes:

• The US Chamber of Commerce
• The Heritage Foundation
• The American Enterprise Institue
• The Heartland Institute
• The Institute of Humane Studies
• The Institute for Energy Research
• Americans for Prosperity
• The Cato Institute
• The State Policy Network
• The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

Bending over backward to destroy the planet for power and profit, while looking us in the eye and denying it, takes “elitist” to a whole new level.

Government

The predator class took an entirely different approach to one of their other favorite goals, stacking the Supreme Court. Like climate denial, this was a very long play. Unlike climate denial, it was done quietly. Candidate SCOTUS justices were watched, groomed, and filtered out. Conservative justices were selected, not based on their judicial and constitutional knowledge and experience, but on the pro-corporate goals of social control, concentration of wealth, and corporate power.

These groomed justices have been steadily giving more political power to the wealthy and corporations by allowing unlimited and untraceable money to flow through our political system.  At the same time, they have been slowly chipping away at our ability to vote and they have stymied efforts to protect the integrity of the voting process. As a bonus, they have made it nearly impossible to prove corruption in government.

The importance of SCOTUS to those in power only becomes evident when there is an opening on the bench. This is when the gloves come off and it is an all-out fistfight as corporate-backed Senators stack the court with their activist justices. Now, with a strong majority on the bench, conservative SCOTUS justices are doing whatever the hell they want. The predator class has weaponized the Supreme Court against American democracy and their justices use their ad-hoc and heavily biased interpretation of the Constitution and court precedence as their ammunition.

[move to a government section]They gradually and purposefully made our government more corruptible and therefore more compliant with their agenda. [Their “think tanks” and political organizations …] [something about the need for money forces politicians to comply – made much worse than the *fear of money that would be spent on someone else who would be more compliant.

[needs work – mention minds]The bottom line is that the predator class slowly infiltrated our government so it worked more and more in their favor and left more and more of us behind. They used their wealth to influence campaign financing and corruption laws so they could take greater control and push more of their pro-wealth agenda through our government. It took decades for this to happen, but over the years they have managed to turn American Democracy upside down.

[maybe drop, reduce, or combine these two]The objective of the predator class is to grab as much power and money as they can – not by following the rules and constraints of our properly functioning Democracy and society, but by exploiting and destroying both. We, and everything we value and cherish are collateral damage. Like wolves, the predator class instinctively prey on anything below them in the food chain – and that means just about all of us.

And so on…

A short summary of some of their “causes” includes…

• Pushing “The Big Lie” and curtailing voting rights/protection legislation at the national and state levels
• Engaging in political funding with their untraceable money
• Pushing for tax breaks for the wealthy and trickle-down economics
• Pushing for industry deregulation (fossil fuel, finance, pharma, Big Ag, etc.)
• Picking and influencing corporate-friendly Supreme Court Justices.
• Picking corporate-friendly White House cabinet members and agency heads.
• Squeezing out non-compliant politicians 
• Denying climate change science
• Keeping minimum wage down
• Limiting healthcare access
• Defunding and attacking public education
• Inserting their minions in colleges throughout the country
• Using their media reach to spread highly divisive and dangerous rhetoric
• Using their media reach to spin their pro-corporate and pro-wealth agenda
• Social engineering and astroturfing the public
• Funding and directing government shutdown efforts
• Embedding their corporate agenda and ideologies into all levels of education

The Generals

Politically, the predator class is typically Republicans, conservatives, corporatists, Libertarians, free marketers,  etc.  In reality, the predator class doesn’t care about any of these political parties or ideologies – these are just labels to hide behind as they take everything for themselves. It is important to point out here that the everyday citizens (the Tea Party, MAGA, the Republican base) that associate with these political factions are hardly among the predator class, in fact, they are the easiest prey and the most often sacrificed. 

This is not blaming the traditional (your father’s) Republican party.  The Republican party was a logical place for the predator class to attack simply because the Republicans have always been more aligned with corporate America than the Democrats.  The Republicans were attacked first because they were an easy kill – readers may recall Tea Party Republicans vs. RINOs. The Democrats are next as we see in Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

The predator class (living and dead) continues to grow, but there are some standouts.  Most notable are brothers Charles and David Koch (David recently died) and their Koch Network of think tanks, political organizations, and legal groups.  The damage caused by these two and their minions is significant and includes funding the spread of authoritarianism, spreading doubt about climate change, stacking the Supreme Court with pro-corruption justices, enabling government corruption, and taking away our voting rights. 

There are plenty more predators at the top of the food chain. Going back fifty years we have the aforementioned Lewis Powell who masterminded the hell we are living in now. Another example, twenty years later, is Newt Gingrich who removed effectiveness from Congress by purposefully destroying civility between the parties and by replacing the critical Office of Technical Assessment (scientists) with lobbyists.  Over the past ten or more years, Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society have been involved with stacking the Supreme Court and a good chunk of our judiciary all across the country. They also fund anti-election efforts and install their own professors at Universities. Billionaire couple Liz and Dick Uihlein spend millions on judicial appointments and many Right-wing social engineering efforts.  Fossil fuel billionaires Farris and Wilks wants to replace public education with public Christian education and spends millions on climate denial.

Then there are the master manipulators such as Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, Sinclair Broadcasting owner Julian Sinclair Smith and his family, and conservative financiers Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah.  We might as well throw in the top management at the hundreds of corporate, conservative, libertarian think tanks, etc.  Of course, there is the long-running inflow of dark money from the super-wealthy Bradley, Olin, and Scaife families (and many others) that funds much of the above.

All of this is just a tiny sample. In other words, the predator class and their minions are spread out all over the place. If we lose our Democracy or our planet, it will largely be their fault (seriously). 

Charles Koch recently authored a book and admitted his creation of extreme partisanship in our country saying “Boy, did we screw up!” “What a mess!”.  It’s great that he did that but around the same time many scientists have come to the realization that we may have already moved beyond the tipping point on climate change and all of us can see that we are a the tipping point of the move away from Democracy.  So for Charles, his Koch organization, and all of his ilk, the confession is much too little and much too late. And, of course, it hasn’t stopped them from preying on us. In fact, since they have cultivated enough followers, there is no longer a need for them to hold back and they are going in for the final kill. You better pay attention because you are their prey…

Koch is taking it to the next level with all the activities of the Heritage Foundation..

Yes, the term for someone who is so sociopathic that they are okay with causing harm to society or others is a malignant sociopath.

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves” Matthew 7:15