The Rise of the Enforcement Class

by Joseph Rittenhouse

Sedona, AZ — There’s a new class rising in America. Quietly, methodically, it is being shaped—not by education, not by creativity, not by community—but by control. It is the Enforcement Class, and its formation marks a pivotal moment in the unraveling of the American dream.

This is not the upper class—the billionaire technocrats, hedge funders, and media moguls. Nor is it the working class, struggling to survive in a failing economy while drowning in debt.

It is a third class, emerging right between the two. It is composed of people who have felt discarded, emasculated, unseen. And now, they are being given a purpose. They are being armed, uniformed, and instructed. Trained to protect the elite from the rest of us.

This is not a coincidence.

Tens of thousands future police, military, ICE agents are being hired across the U.S. right now.
This isn’t just about border patrol or quelling violent demonstrations.
This is about preparing for the storm.

The ruling class knows what’s coming. They see the signs. Climate disruption, economic collapse, automation displacing jobs, the rise of mass surveillance, the erosion of trust in democracy—it’s all pointing toward a volatile future. The elite know that when the system finally cracks, when the economy buckles and people can no longer afford rent or food or medicine, the masses will rise. And when they do, the elite will need protection.

That protection will not come from the military alone. It will come from this buffer zone—the Enforcement Class—made up of people desperate enough to fight for scraps, but obedient enough to never question why they’re fighting.

In exchange for loyalty, they’ll be promised food, shelter, and safety for their families.
While the middle and lower classes fall into chaos, they will be fed.
While the rest of us are locked out, they will guard the gates.

What’s particularly chilling is how effectively this class is being cultivated. The symbols of their identity are everywhere: tactical gear, warrior branding, stoic father-figure, YouTube influencers, militarized aesthetics in film, video games, and ads. Look at military recruitment campaigns—they’re no longer just about national pride. They’re psychological appeals to a generation lost in confusion: “Be something. Be someone. Join us.”

And once they’re in, these young people are given a brotherhood, sisterhood, a badge, and—most importantly—a target for their frustration. Immigrants. Protesters. Journalists. Feminists. Black men. Queer people. The poor. Anyone who resists.

This is how fascism creeps in. Not through sweeping announcements, but through subtle normalizations. It builds itself not on confidence, but on despair, disconnection, and desperation. The Enforcement Class is the infrastructure of a dictatorship-in-waiting. They don’t need to believe in ideology—they just need to follow orders and get paid.

What’s worse, many of them think they are the good guys.

They’re told they’re defending freedom.
But really, they’re defending the fortress of the wealthy.
They’re told they’re restoring order.
But really, they’re crushing dissent.

This isn’t a dystopian prediction—it’s a present reality. The United States is quietly becoming a nation where the gap between the elite and everyone else is not only economic, but militarized. The buffer is being built. Not with policy, but with people—confused, weaponized, and uniformed people.

This class is being cultivated not just in police departments and the military, but in security, surveillance, digital moderation, ideological watchdogging, and gamified online movements. They are not always armed. They do not always wear uniforms. But make no mistake: they are enforcers, too.

They are the watchers.

Some sit behind computer screens in air-conditioned rooms, eyes scanning footage from traffic cameras, street corners, public protests. Others work in fusion centers—those hybrid institutions blending federal and local intelligence—monitoring not just criminal activity, but social media posts, political sentiments, and the subtle rumblings of dissent.

They track what we say, what we search, what we click, and who we follow. They are trained to detect “threat indicators”—and increasingly, those indicators are not weapons, but words.

Then there are the content moderators and algorithmic gatekeepers, many of them contracted by massive tech firms or shadowy subsidiaries.

These aren’t cartoon villains rubbing their hands together. They’re often young people too—working gig-style jobs to sift through flagged content and silence “problematic” voices.

Sometimes, that means filtering out hate and abuse. But sometimes, it means erasing inconvenient truths, deplatforming dissent, or promoting the approved narrative of the moment.

They are the digital deputies of the enforcement machine.

And they’re joined by another layer: the ideological informants—self-appointed enforcers of correctness on both sides of the political spectrum. People radicalized by algorithms into believing that their tribal loyalty is a sacred mission.

They mass-report users, harass contrarians, build bot networks, and weaponize shame. They aren’t paid by the state, but they serve its function: to police deviation and fortify digital conformity.

All of these watchers—whether paid contractors or ideological crusaders—serve the same role: to reinforce the structure. To surveil, to report, to suppress. They don’t need guns to control a population. They have data.

This is why the modern Enforcement Class is so insidious. It’s not just about boots on the ground—it’s also about eyes in the sky and fingers on the feed. The architecture of enforcement has gone virtual. In the past, authoritarianism relied on fear of the knock at the door.

Today, it relies on fear of the disappearing post, the frozen account, the cancelled payment, the AI that flags your words and alerts someone in a windowless building you’ll never see.

It is a bureaucratized, digitized, gamified matrix of suppression—and most of the people operating it don’t even realize the role they play. To them, they’re just doing a job. Just “keeping the platform safe.” Just “following guidelines.” But those guidelines are written by the ruling class. And those platforms, increasingly, are the modern public square.

The Enforcement Class does not wear a single face.
It watches from towers and terminals.
It patrols the streets and the servers.
It silences with force and with code.

And if we don’t understand how deep that enforcement runs, we will never know that we are actually imprisoned – or how to truly break free.