The Billionaires Are Afraid

This is not the behavior of confident people.

Larry Ellison isn't trying to turn CNN, CBS, and TikTok into propaganda bullhorns because he's supremely confident that he has American culture under his thumb. Jeff Bezos didn't buy and castrate the Washington Post because he's feeling good about his long term chances at erecting a permanent corporatist autocracy.

American oligarchs aren't just trying to destroy journalism, they're trying to replace it with a well-funded simulacrum designed to blow smoke up your ass. They're so positively terrified by the threat of informed consensus they've taken direct aim at the last remnants of institutional knowledge.

What are they so afraid of?

The extraction class is (quite correctly) worried that this golden age of corruption will trigger a wave of public introspection, outrage and awareness, culminating in a light gravitational pendulum swing back toward more equitable, progressive ideals. Radical stuff like modest labor reforms and semi-equitable taxation.

The absolute horror.

Their fear has been positively palpable these last few weeks as democratic socialists like AOC and Zohran Mamdani make popular inroads not just among America's bottomless supply of "I don't follow politics" brigades, but with many of the folks taken in by MAGA and MAHA's fake populist bullshit.

Pseudo-news organizations across our rich agitprop echoplex have been positively apoplectic about growing criticism of extraction class malfeasance in recent weeks, resulting in a wave of the sorriest whining you've ever seen. Much of it triggered by Mamdani's modest proposal to tax very rich peoples' second homes.

The plan prompted one NYC billionaire to confidently insist that demands to tax the rich are every bit as bad as an ethnic slur. The resulting news cycle offered another lovely example of how badly our consolidated media has been hollowed out by corporate power and a smorgasbord of rich assholes:

The Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post in particular has been particularly sensitive the last few weeks, repeatedly rushing to the defense of oppressed American billionaires with a series of painfully silly editorials:

There's a certain hilarious, sad desperation to it.

Bezos bought the Washington Post back in 2013. He remained a fairly passive owner for a while, but as Trump authoritarianism took root he began to more forcefully bend the paper to his financial interests. This always happens with corporate media sooner or later, regardless of breathless claims that editorial is firewalled from affluent ownership.

As is usually the case, this resulted in mass layoffs, "leadership" shifts, and a steady degradation of the Post's already-sagging quality.

There are still journalists I know and admire who are doing good work there, but I suspect they're not sleeping comfortably.

Bezos recently fired all of the paper’s black opinion columnists, censored a cartoonist that criticized Jeff, and proudly announced the paper's op-ed section would now be a safe space for corporatist race and class agitprop, equal parts cultural misinformation and lazy engagement trolling.

The amusing part to me is that billionaires like Bezos and Ellison have all the money in the world, but are somehow incapable of crafting decent agitprop that doesn't waste your time. Because they're drowning in daily sycophancy by subservient trust fund brunchlords, they lack the awareness to even notice.

This piece, for example, tries to clap back at AOC's criticism that you don't "earn" a billion dollars (because getting that rich generally requires labor exploitation of one kind or another). This offended the Washington Post editorial board so deeply they felt inspired to pen a missive, speaking by and for the paper, that feels like it was written by a dim child:

If someone becomes a billionaire selling expensive shoes, it’s because people want and are willing to pay for them. That’s something to celebrate, not admonish.There are indeed idle rich who didn’t do much to make their money.

A bigger share of them live in Europe, with its history of hereditary nobility, than in America. To say that it’s impossible to legitimately earn a billion dollars is to put an arbitrary limit on human potential.

And presuming that anyone who becomes too successful must be cheating shows a lack of imagination as to what humans are capable of accomplishing in a free society.

Above everything that's just bad writing.

It reminded me of when I was twelve years old and won a $100 award from the American Legion for a short essay on patriotism. I told them what they wanted to hear about American exceptionalism and was rewarded for it. The WAPO editorial section is now just that, but somehow dumber, but infused with AI.

The hollowness of the arguments aside, I'm not sure who this stuff is supposed to be for. The Washington Post has seen a mass defection of readership since Bezos chose to hollow out whatever was left of the paper's credibility. People will watch or read all manner of terrible shit, but they very obviously don't want this.

Billionaires seem to be of the impression that they can hollow out the foundational cornerstones of informed consensus, fill it with cottage cheese and marshmallow, then proceed normally as if nothing had happened, confident that they'll reap the same reputational influence despite taking a hatchet to structural integrity.

It's a very particular type of delusion. You'd think they'd be able to at least hire people who are competent at creating right wing corporatist viral agitprop, but that's also proven to be a bridge too far. Perhaps because the underlying arguments are so stupid and unpopular they're unspinnable.

One argument I hear often is that these folks are simply happy to destroy journalism, but I think that's a misread. I think they're fine if the patient dies on the operating table, but they really do confidently believe they can convert what's left of U.S. corporate journalism into viral, ratings-grabbing agitprop.

Larry Ellison hired Bari Weiss, for example, under the promise she'd modernize CBS into a popular and viral right wing propaganda firehose. She was hired to convert CBS into a Trump and Netanyahu friendly billionaire safe space but to make it sexy, using the same tricks she used at her weird little racist troll blog.

Instead she's deftly demonstrated she has the brain of a 90-year-old man with no understanding of modern media and not a single original idea in her head. As a result, CBS recently lost more viewers than they had in a quarter century. Again: nobody really wants this. Even their target right wing audience isn't interested.

Buried under all of this is a lot of sad desperation. As one popular influencer (@pissedmagistus) recently noted, billionaires desperately need you to believe that they've already won, and that any sort of major American paradigm shift is impossible:

With 49,000 likes, that video isn't the most viral thing on the internet, but I still suspect it had exponentially more reach and impact that the entire week's worth of Washington Post billionaire coddling combined. The rise of social media and their lack of control is also something they're terrified of (See Elon Musk and Twitter).

Billionaires may be in love with the way Donald Trump ushered in an era of wholesale corruption and dismantled labor, consumer, environmental, and social safety net protections. They may adore the way he's made them think that being a racist, misogynist asshole is now something to be proud of. They love that he gave them flimsy cover to be the worst possible versions of themselves.

But Trump also broke a longstanding unspoken compact wherein the U.S. government at least puts on a serviceable stage play that it still functions in the public interest. Without that veneer you've got even the dullest segments of the public increasingly aware of how violently they're getting fucked.

Historically the outcome of that scenario doesn't end well for the extraction class and attached noggins. They know it. They're afraid of it. They're know they're extremely vulnerable to it. And that is a good thing. Confident people secure in their arguments don't behave this way.

Bad news for rich brats though: whether we're talking about the war in Iran, the decimation of the social safety net, or the wholesale destruction of consumer, labor, environmental protections and corporate oversight, most Americans haven't really even begun to truly feel the full impact of Trump's second term.

This stuff will belately arrive in concussive waves as complex systems marginally-informed people took for granted start to fail. All the soggy Washington Post editorials in the world won't be able to spin the blame away.

When the full public awareness dawns of the true and scale of this era's historic fuckery, it will make the white hot rage billionaires are seeing now seem downright adorable by comparison. In that moment some real opportunities for reform will be available, and I'd like to convince myself they won't be squandered.