Conjure in your mind’s eye the most grating, cynically obnoxious forms of claiming oppression and wielding supposed traumas in service of winning an argument that you can recall from the last few years. Are you feeling annoyed now? Good. Now imagine that same rhetoric being uttered by some of the world’s most rapacious, narcissistic, and spoiled elites: billionaires.Well, you don’t have to imagine it, because it’s actually happening.“I must say that I consider the phrase tax the rich — quote tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs, and even the phrase ‘from the river to the sea,’” Vornado Realty Trust CEO Steve Roth recently said on an earnings call, commenting on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recently announced plans to tax luxury second homes owned by superrich people who don’t live in the city.Yes, you read that right: calling to tax the rich is the same as yelling a racial slur, and hoarding billions of dollars of wealth makes you, apparently, a victim of oppression akin to racial minorities. Pretty soon, Roth will be telling us that his more than $1 billion net worth entitles him to civil rights protections, and that trying to raise his taxes is a hate crime.Roth is not the only billionaire who’s seemingly been binge-reading old Tumblr posts from the 2010s. Fellow billionaire Ken Griffin, whose New York property was specifically mentioned by Mamdani in his announcement video, admitted he was left feeling unsafe and triggered by the callout. That’s not me being sarcastic: he told Bloomberg that Mamdani was “triggering the trauma” he went through when he moved himself and his business from Chicago to Miami four years ago. Like many refugees seeking asylum from political persecution, Griffin found himself having to leave everything he ever knew behind in search of a new home — specifically, one of…
