It's not okay to be wealthy in America... unless you're just the right amount of wealthy.
Just ask New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is a wealthy woman, but not the kind of wealthy worthy of disrespect. Like Vermont's Bernie Sanders, hers is just the right amount of wealth, and you should ignore the luxurious lifestyle they live and focus on the billionaires. They're the actual bad guys.
Billionaires are apparently just the worst thing ever, but if you're a millionaire like AOC, Hasan Piker, or all the other champagne socialists that encourage eating the rich, then that's cool. The line is drawn wherever a rich socialist says it is. Eat the rich, but don't consider someone who lives in the top 10 percent of households in America "rich"... unless they vote Republican.
You see, wealth is somehow a sin in America, and if you were born wealthy you were born with a form of original sin. A lot of time and effort is spent by Americans in the public eye attempting to adjust their image to the point where they are perceived as having been born in an atmosphere of struggle.
AOC's lie that she was raised in the Bronx when she actually grew up in Yorktown Heights, a wealthy suburb an hour outside of New York City, is the symptom of this need to have that perception upon you.
This phenomenon was brought up by New York State GOP Assemblyman Matt Slater who represents Yorktown, and revealed that AOC was actually one of his classmates, even releasing a yearbook photo of her to the internet according to Fox News:
"She's lying about her background, she's lying about her upbringing," Slater claimed.
He went on to call out other Democratic figures, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as examples of politicians he feels have exaggerated aspects of their life for political gain.
"They do not connect with their voters if they [voters] actually know the truth about them," Slater argued.
"This is just part of the big lie that they continue to peddle just to make sure that they win elections."
The thing is, it's not just the left that does this. The right does too. You see a lot of politicians, business leaders, and even everyday Joe's attempting to convince you that they came from nothing and worked their way up to something, when the vast majority were born to the same middle-class family every other person was. Yeah, there are success stories about people who started in trailers and now live in a large house with a lot of property, but most of America didn't start in the dirt... they just want you to think they did.
Why?
Crawling your way up from nothing is more of a dynamic story that earns you an additional amount of respect from your peers. It's something of a badge of honor that you can flash when conversations concerning merit or talent are brought up.
But being born wealthy isn't a bad thing. It's not even a social sin, despite it being popular to be perceived as such. Having great opportunities in our youth is the whole point of the American dream. We work hard and climb the ladder so that our children can have the tools for success right off the bat we had to struggle to get. We want to give them a launching point to take them to even greater heights than we could have achieved.
I think the perception of wealth being a negative character trait in mainstream society — at least when public facing — encourages a sort of cap on success. You're meant to hide your wealth, or even detest it. On the left, this hatred of one's own wealth and privilege leads too many to radical activism of some form, or at the very least, a hatred of the system that gave it to them, leading them to vote for socialists or hard-leftists at the very least.
They don't just hold themselves back, they go on to hold everyone else back too.
But we've seen what happens when a person born into wealth is given the tools and knowledge to make the world even better. Elon Musk is one such person. His father, Errol Musk, was a wealthy businessman. Errol taught his son Elon how to be a businessman, and using the leg-up he was born into, Musk created businesses that are now changing the world.
The same can be said for Donald J. Trump, a man born into wealth who was taught by his father how to be a businessman and is also changing the world as I write this.
Both of these men had something many others don't, and both of them used that knowledge to grow to greater heights than even their successful parents could, and are now bringing humanity into an entirely different era. Both men turned advantages into world-altering outcomes.
The sin isn't being born into wealth, it's having these advantages and doing nothing with it but being absolutely useless... like AOC. A woman who was born into privilege and now spends a lot of time and effort ruining opportunities for everyone else. Remember when she stopped Amazon from building a headquarters in New York? How many lives could've been improved if she hadn't bought into the idea that her privilege was somehow sinful?
My personal aim is to establish a decent amount of wealth and teach my son what I can about where I was successful. My hope is that he takes that information, and his status as a middle-class child, and elevates himself to something greater than I am. If he doesn't, then I failed as a parent, but the failure didn't start with his birth. That's a destructive lie that I think we should all start looking down on.
This is America. We value success here. We should be proud to have it, and to bring children into it.
