The Billionaires Are Not Victims

One of the great distortions in American political discourse is the idea that populist anger emerges from nowhere — as if millions of people simultaneously became irrational, tribal, or extreme for no reason at all.

I don’t believe that.

I think what we are witnessing across the United States — on both the political right and the political left — is the consequence of a society that increasingly understands, correctly, that its governing institutions are not primarily organized around the public interest.

They are organized around capital concentration.

And until that changes, populism will continue to grow.

Not because people are stupid.

Because people are responding rationally to a system that no longer appears accountable to them.

The immediate conversation that triggered this thought involved the reaction among certain elite circles to the rise of populist political figures and movements in places like New York.

Particularly interesting to me is the tendency among wealthy institutional actors to portray themselves as victims of instability while simultaneously benefiting from — and often helping design — the very incentive structures producing that instability.

Take the billionaire class broadly.

Modern capital is effectively transnational.

It is mobile.
Portable.
Adaptive.

It can move to Miami.
Singapore.
London.
Dubai.

It experiences

I would need a very powerful social and economic system, indeed, to sell “logic” as idiotic as this: Whenever you criticize me for despicable things I actually did, you are criticizing my puppy, the Apple tree in my backyard and my second grade music teacher. That sad state of affair is where we currently are, as Glenn Greenwald describes.

Truly, it would take an immensely powerful political/economic force to sell that level of bullshit on a nationwide basis. It would take the kind of overwhelming power capable purchasing CBS and TikTok, as well as purchasing hundreds of members of Congress through AIPAC. With that kind of power and money and reach, we now see that one could even incentivize (or frighten) a college president to implore to her college students that 2 + 2 = 5.

What we are seeing in these modern times is that sufficient money and power can dispense with the simple logic and clear meaning of this Venn diagram:

[Supp]

And then there is this, by GLENN GREENWALD . . .

Bari Weiss’ Latest CBS Moves Show the Ellisons’ Drive to Create Israeli State TV: Larry Ellison, the largest donor to Friends of the IDF, has been buying the largest and most influential America entertainment, news and social media

Warren Buffett, in his first sit-down since stepping down as Berkshire CEO, gave the cleanest indictment of legalized gambling in a decade. He called it a tax cut for the wealthy. The math proves him exactly right.

Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025. They lost $16 billion of that. FanDuel pulled $6 billion of the losses. DraftKings pulled $5.3 billion. Every state with legal mobile sports betting collected a tax on the bettor side. New York alone took in over $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax revenue.

Layer the lottery on top. State lotteries generate over $90 billion a year. The bottom half of income earners account for roughly 70% of total spend. The average lottery player makes $38,000. A household earning $20,000 spends three times more on tickets than one earning $30,000. The implicit tax rate, meaning whatever the state keeps after prizes, runs 30 to 50% depending on the game. No other revenue source in America has that base and that rate.

The structural design is the engine. A single straight sports bet carries a hold of 4 to 5%. A four-leg parlay carries a hold above 30%. FanDuel and DraftKings

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Q: “I’m really curious to hear from you why you think free speech has the branding issue that you know it tends to have, and why for young people, there’s this perception that you know is warped. ”

Greg Lukianoff: “This is probably a rough thing to say in a group full of educators, but I do think that a lot of the quote, unquote, branding issue with freedom of speech came out of K through PhD. When I was working at the ACLU back in 1999 I could see something happening, what I called the slow motion train wreck on college campuses in particular. We qualified for public assistance when I was a kid, and then I ended up at a place like Stanford Law School. And this was definitely a very weird experience for me, and it was the first time I really ran into kids who were pretty mediocre, a little ambivalent about freedom of speech. Working Class liberals were very pro freedom of speech. I thought that’s what made a liberal, a liberal. But it was only when I started meeting more upper class people who came from, you know, the 1% and tended to go to the fanciest schools, that I started really running into this very anti liberal kind of idea, and that’s a very typical dynamic that essentially, once your politics become a super majority of an institution–you want free speech when you’re the minority, because free speech protects minority opinions. You don’t …