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.