Two Sets of Rules

If you’ve lived in America long enough, you start to realize there are always two sets of rules. One set applies to regular Americans—middle class, lower class, working class. The other set applies to the upper class.

A lot of people may not experience this directly, but they definitely hear about it. You see it in the news, and you might also notice it if you get close enough to people with real wealth and influence.

For working-class people, the rules are simple: there are laws, orders, and court rulings, and you are expected to obey them. If you don’t, there are consequences.

But for the upper class, the laws and orders don’t always apply in the same way. When there’s a court ruling, regular people are forced to follow it immediately. The upper class often isn’t. They can delay, ignore, appeal, drag things out, or find loopholes. That’s the reality of “law and order” in America now.

We’ve seen examples of this in high-profile cases like Epstein, and we also see it in how the Trump administration operates. When there’s a ruling that is favorable to them, they expect everyone to obey it. And if someone doesn’t, they are ready to use force and punishment to make people comply.

But when there’s an unfavorable ruling—whether it’s on tariffs, birthright citizenship, or immigration detention—they either don’t obey it at all, or they claim they obeyed it while quickly using another executive order to bypass it. So the system becomes a game: if the rules help them, they use the rules; if the rules hurt them, they ignore the rules or rewrite the rules.

That’s why it feels like there aren’t equal standards. It becomes a “win-win” for them, but not in a fair way. They win when the ruling helps them, and they also win when the ruling hurts them—because they can simply avoid the consequences. Meanwhile, regular people lose either way.

This is part of why so many people feel frustrated and hopeless. They see how corrupted the system is, and instead of trying to fix it, many people choose one of two paths: either they try to become rich, so the problem won’t apply to them anymore, or they try to leave the United States entirely.

And the US is in a strange situation right now. Some people feel like it’s moving toward something closer to a dictatorship. People compare it to China, but the difference is: China doesn’t have the same freedoms, but it does have stability and a sense of safety. The US, on the other hand, feels like chaos—less freedom than people thought, and less stability too.

So for the people who can leave, some of them are leaving. And for the people who stay, many are trying to climb into the upper class, because that’s the only way to escape the rules that apply to everyone else.

That’s what it feels like now: two sets of rules. Either you get into the group that plays by a different set of rules, or you try to get out of the country so those lower-class rules stop applying to you.