The purge is the point

Reddit doesn’t want you talking about inflation; no one wants you talking about inflation.

The thread was nothing special at first glance. Just another user on Reddit’s r/MiddleClassFinance noting that grocery prices are creeping up.

It was nothing radical either, considering r/Middle Class Finance is described as “a place to come and discuss financial issues that affect the middle class.”

What was the comment? No idea (we’ll get to that, stay with us). But the headline read:

Prices keep creeping up. Inflation is coming people. Prepare.

So clearly, the initial comment under this headline captured exactly what we’re all feeling these days. After picking your jaw off the floor because you spent $180 for what used to be $100 worth of food, you wonder if you’ve lost your mind or if the price of eggs has doubled since last Tuesday.

You do what anyone does these days to compare notes: turn to an appropriate forum and ask the question. And that’s where things get weird.

The digital team at FingerLakes.com noticed:

The post has sparked over 1,500 comments in just 48 hours, revealing a deeply shared concern: inflation never truly went away — and now, it’s accelerating again.

By the time the Collapse Life team clicked the link a few hours later, the thread had been gutted. Deleted. Sanitized. Nothing left but a few limp criticisms of Trump (no surprise there, it is Reddit) and stray upvotes of comments long deleted.

What happened?

The comment, like the myriad comments that followed, dared to do something dangerous in an age where artifice and performance reign supreme: it reflected reality.

In not so many words — well, in no words, actually — what was revealed is that inflation has been metastasizing. Rent’s up, meat’s up, insurance is through the roof, and pay cannot keep pace.

The Reddit post was apparently flooded with comments from teachers, grocery clerks, remote tech workers, and single parents all saying the same thing:

“I make more than ever — and feel poorer every month.”

You might think Reddit would want to preserve a real-time economic temperature check from one thousand-plus Americans. Nope! Instead, the post was quietly memory-holed, as one would expect in a 1984-style dystopia.

And so now, the second reckoning: you’re not just getting poorer — you’re being gaslit while it happens.

Reddit, like every other sanitized platform, is policed by a fleet of moderators and bots who enforce narrative compliance under the guise of “community standards.” Say the wrong thing — about the Fed, elections, the cost of living, censorship, anything that counters the official narrative — and your post vanishes faster than the balance in your checking account.

The moderators will gladly explain: it was off-topic. Low-effort. Misinformation. Toxic. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. The goal isn’t to foster better discussion — it’s to flatten dissent.

Go back and read the Finger Lakes.com article covering the thread (before that disappears too) and you’ll see the truth peeking out: people weren’t just complaining — they were collaborating.

Swapping tips on side hustles. Meal prep. Rent negotiation. Credit card jujitsu. It wasn’t despair — it was adaptation.

And that may be the real threat: a network of ordinary people is realizing the system isn’t broken — it’s working exactly as intended. Inflation isn’t a glitch — it’s a wealth transfer. The Federal Reserve isn’t saving the middle class — it’s extracting what’s left of it. The mercurial, tempestuous leadership, foreign policy, domestic policy, and frankly, any other policy you can imagine, is the perfect cover for your ongoing enslavement.

You’re not supposed to say that out loud. You’re not supposed to notice that the financial pain is deliberate, cumulative, and largely policy-driven.

And if you do? You’re silenced.

So what do we do it about it? Keep talking anyway. But be smart about it.

Save the screenshots. Use platforms that aren’t easily scrubbed. Subscribe to newsletters that still publish truth. Find more of them, and encourage the writers to keep digging. Buy them a coffee or upgrade to a paid subscription if you can. This is not a shameless plug for support — truly we can vouch: doing real journalism at the risk of losing everything you have is genuinely hard work.

Remember, the purge we’re seeing isn’t a malfunction — it’s a feature. And that creeping, unshakeable sense that things don’t add up is your survival instinct kicking in.

Listen to it.

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