Sometimes it takes a crisis and its accompanying trending news headlines to reveal the murky ideological creatures swimming under the current of culture.

If you were to glance casually at the West, you’d see it as largely unchanged across its last half-century, except when it comes to a sudden confusion about biology. People are setting up businesses, going to work, buying things, and otherwise engaging in the machine of civilisation.

All is not well.

The loss of the OceanGate vessel near the wreck of the Titanic has disturbed something within our culture that we thought had been purged. Without realising it, the West has entered the next iteration of class politics and it is more confused, callous, and predatory than any of its predecessors.

There are several architects behind this transformation, whose ideology screams, ‘How dare you care about OceanGate when you didn’t care about a sinking illegal migrant ship!’ Which makes about as much sense as shouting at someone helping a starving Australian child, accusing them of ‘not caring’ about kids in Mexico. This isn’t fringe social media madness – it is pervasive and it’s coming from both the left and the right, for different reasons.

Hardcore communist thought has been festering inside the Western education system for a good forty years.

From this, we’ve seen the rise of confused collectivist movements, including the racist Black Power Marxists seeking political privilege from genetic supremacy who have convinced society that Race Taxes are a ‘good thing’. Then we have the morbid death cult of eco-fascism doing its best to create a genocide by proxy, preaching that children are selfish carbon crimes committed by Western women ‘literally’ bringing on the climate apocalypse with their wombs. We cannot leave out fans of the technocratic state who are opening their arms to China-style digital stalking and the parental government hoping that absolute centralised control will absolve them of personal responsibility. Their Utopia is slavery in exchange for convenience.

These movements, and others like them, are underpinned by an ‘eat the rich’ mentality where old wartime propaganda has been recycled. You’ll even see the odd Green or American Democrat adorn their expensive gowns with this sentiment as they slip inside Galas to sip champagne with tickets worth more than poor people earn in a year.

According to these hypocrites, all wealth comes from exploitation and therefore all rich people are evil (except the state, it’s allowed to be rich). In this thought process, rich people exist so the government can tax them and ‘re-distribute’ that money to the poor. Left-wing politicians are allowed to be rich as a reward for their virtuous task of redistributing wealth. The Greens are particularly bad, lingering over people’s corpses, begging to pick-pocket them with death taxes.

Western kids – who are among the richest children to ever live – support this, not because they hate money – far from it, they’d all love to be lounging around on super yachts – but rather they think the government is going to steal money on their behalf and hand it to them. They hate rich people because they want their money. Disguising this with virtuous hashtags doesn’t make it any less true. These kids worship the high life with the ‘influencer trend’ defining their culture. They spend their time idolising beautiful people taking pictures of themselves in five-star resorts, private jets, and dripping in jewellery. Judge a generation by their heroes. These are Gen Z’s heroes.

Those slightly older than Gen Z may recognise the bastardisation of the workers’ revolution through the eyes of a lazy, entitled, middle-class students who view the concept of ‘work’ as slavery. In this scenario, the actual victims of the political movement are the working class who are described as stupid, carbon criminals, oppressors, and enablers of the evil capitalists, which is why it is perfectly acceptable to destroy their income by staging climate protests leading to the working class angrily confronting protesters. The Woke radicals identify much more closely with the incoming Roman governments who killed off the rich families they didn’t like and used their wealth to pad out the Treasury, making themselves rich in the process. Still, hating the rich is a powerful narrative that’s brought down more than one country and caused a few wars along the way. It would be foolish to ignore its resurrection.

Woke virtue might have the integrity of a flat-pack IKEA shelf, but their hatred for rich people is very real. That’s a crucial part of the political propaganda at work. In order to justify stealing from someone, you have to turn your intended victim into a figure of hate. That way, the public feel less guilty about abusing them. They deserve it. They’re bad people. They must have exploited others to get that wealth. A sensible person would point out that encouraging the government to steal from people because you don’t like them is also exploitation.

Some will have seen this rhetoric hanging in schools wearing the disguise of ‘Climate Justice!’ which insinuates that those who disagree are criminals. Climate Change is written up as another class battle with it (incorrectly) framed as being a bigger problem for the poor (but not the working class). Using Carbon is acquiring the same ideological position as using money, proof that Carbon Credits are intended to transition into a form of digital currency that can be earned (or taken away).

As one Australian climate striker said: ‘It [climate science] also needs to be taught comprehensively, holistically, and in justice and action-oriented ways that empower young people to take action alongside adults. If education does not enable planetary survival, then is it fit for purpose?’

Another wrote: ‘Climate change can no longer be considered an object of the curriculum to be studied from a dispassionate distance … it is a structural violence inflicted on the young.’

This is not science, it is a call to action for a revolutionary political movement by framing inaction as an immediate threat to life. It is an ideology in lockstep with the narrative of victimhood with the label of climate refugee being used to garner sympathy for those who country-shop for the most generous welfare systems, passing through half a dozen safe havens in the process. There is no evidence that the mass migration of young men into the West has anything whatsoever to do with the climate, unless you mean the political climate.

The prevailing thought at this point in the century has been to perceive every event through the lens of class struggle.

This is where we come to the twin disasters that took place last week.

It’s impossible for social media to watch the tragic events unfold regarding the OceanGate submersible – resulting in the loss of all passengers and crew in a catastrophic implosion on its way to the Titanic wreck – with a measure of dignity. Not even the presence of a child was sufficient for adults to hold their tongue.

Even before those on board were confirmed as dead, social media platforms were awash with mean-spirited commentary and memes that circled around the central premise: ‘They’re rich. They deserved to die.’

There were varieties of this, including faux outrage that they ‘dared’ to waste their money (emphasis on their) or that they visited the Titanic which is a grave site. No doubt these same accusers would have no problem touring the Colosseum, wandering through Pompeii, walking across an ancient battlefield in Europe, or taking a photo of the pyramids in Giza. In truth, it was being used as a flimsy moral veil to make their comments more palatable.

The cheapest and most disingenuous takes come from those who posted photos of the doomed migrant vessel next to the OceanGate craft and tried to shame people for caring about the lives lost on the latter – as if compassion has to be judged in a grander moral equation controlled by the Left.

The New York Times World pointed this out:

‘Many see harsh realities about class and ethnicity in the attention paid to the Titan submersible and the halfhearted attempts to aid a ship before it sank, killing hundreds of migrants. But there are other factors…’

Before we start, the underlying assumption is wrong. The media is full to the brim with stories about the sunken vessel and those who drowned. It was covered in every major publication, repeatedly. To say that the media ignored their deaths is a convenient political fallacy to facilitate the ‘no one cares about poor people’ narrative.

The second falsity is that race had something to do with the imbalance in public interest. Of the victims of the OceanGate, two were of Pakistani origin (the father having spent 20 years with the Engro Corporation working on projects to improve the lives of disadvantaged Pakistanis), just like those who drowned on the illegal crossing. Are we arguing that racial prejudice only happens if they’re poor?

At least the New York Times pointed out the global coverage of the Thailand cave disaster as a contrast – which involved poor people of non-white ethnicity. That story captivated the public for weeks. Citizens in the West also dug deep into their pockets and raised hundreds of millions for the people of Haiti after the earthquake disaster. To pretend that Western nations don’t care about ‘brown poor people’ is a malicious lie spun to extort money in the hope that painting innocent citizens as racist oppressors will translate into nervous political leaders signing bigger aid cheques. That is what this toxic ideology boils down to.

Even Obama has disgustingly laid into this victimhood/oppressor narrative by giving an interview on a talk show with this comparison. Maybe we should have more coverage on the poor people that died directly as a result of the mistakes his regime made?

The truth is, the public’s interest in OceanGate has nothing to do with wealth disparities. Rich people go missing all the time doing dangerous, extreme things. Most of these never make it to a news story.

This story had everything to do with public nostalgia for the Titanic. For one of the most infamous wrecks in human history to claim more lives after more than a century is something that people cannot help but click on. They’re not making a moral judgment, it’s curiosity.

If the first human explorer on Mars fell down a hole and died, we’d see the same level of coverage. These are unusual, theatrical stories that distil our fears into a digestible package.

Humans aren’t judging their stories with a human life calculator sitting next to them – and neither are the virtuous critics raging loudest on social media. They’re only running this meme for the sake of personal virtue. We could just as easily ask them why they care so much about a single sinking migrant ship when 3.1 million innocent children died of hunger last year. Why aren’t they posting about that? Are they disgusting, racist humans for not covering that story?

As you can see, the virtue olympics create a cheap and manipulative argument.

It’s easy to understand how the left got caught up in proving their social value by how much they ‘care’, what’s stranger is to watch the response of conservatives. The rise of nasty and dangerous outfits such as the World Economic Forum along with certain powerful companies who seem more interested in controlling the world rather than selling products, has rightly led to a certain amount of animosity.

However, instead of these feelings of distrust toward a powerful elite class remaining contained to those who are actually guilty of bad behaviour, conservatives are in danger of falling into the same trap as the left and assigning a general hatred to all super-rich people.

Seeing this makes me uneasy. Conservatives and libertarians have always prided themselves on individualism, not collective guilt. It would be extremely unwise to fuel the coming class war and fall into line with the ‘eat the rich’ mob because, ironically, those who want a revolution to take place are the same people sitting at the top of centralised power.

Today, you are being told to hate rich people. Tomorrow, it will be anyone who uses their carbon credits on a steak, such is the escalation of this ideology.

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