This is why we must go after the billionaires

It's not only our only choice. It's our best choice.

The basic idea behind my new project The Last Billionaires is that we no longer have a choice. For a while, we presumed we had the luxury of debating whether billionaires should exist. As we were doing that, the billionaires had decided to make their move against democracy existing. And they won.

But the 2024 election was a battle that they want to pretend was the whole war.

They still have more money than any human beings have ever had at their disposal, but there will always be more us us. And despite the constant inculcation of Republicans and much of the media for us to worship at the heels of the rich in hopes they will trickle down some of their urine filled with rare earth minerals onto us, we’re sick of being ruled by the billionaires—already!

That’s what a new Data for Progress poll finds:

The chart speaks for itself. It also explains why I think The Last Billionaires is essential.

But a few notes. You’ll notice that when it comes to who Americans would like to get their boots off their necks, billionaires top the list, even for Republicans. Indie voters dislike billionaires bossing them around as much or even more than Democrats despise Elon Musk. That means it’s the best way to take on the GOP, which is led by a plundering billionaire currently in the midst of bungling us into the sort of “impossible to predict” crises that always happen when we elect a rich kid Republicans.

So the question isn’t “Why the billionaires?” but rather “Why not the billionaires!?”

There are only 756 of them. Many of them are comically terrible. No, they’re graphic novel-y terrible. Nearly all the rest are abetting what we could call the Robber Billionaire Coup that’s now happening in our federal government. And if there are any good ones, I suggest they prove that right now with a paid subscription to The Last Billionaires. It’s only $3 a month.

Running against the billionaires will always be a challenge for elected Democrats who spend too much time with donors. And the more donors can give, the more politicians tend to bend to them.

But for those of us unelected souls obsessed with saving this country from authoritarianism and worse, the billionaires are our perfect target—primarily because we don’t have a choice.

If we don’t stop what Elon Musk and fellow billionaires have planned, we will soon be done worrying about billionaires. That’s because we’ll have the first trillionaires.

And at that point, with our current finance laws, democracy will effectively be a joke.

Some say we’re already there, and that may be true. I fear that’s the case because I don’t see a mass movement to recognize that we are now deep into a new Gilded Age that our fundamentalist oligarchs and Nerd Reich Obergruppenfuhers intend to last the rest of human history. I don’t see the Democratic party even attempting to adjust from the reality of the last election where one billionaire effectively bought the government by transmuting the sort of scammy disinformation used to push crypto and Tesla’s full self-driving fraud into targeted political persuasion.

The world has shifted off its axis, and the billionaires have us on the ropes in a way that—to use the worst cliche in political punditry—the Founders would have hated. They opposed one king. Forget 756 of them.

Simply opposing Republicans and Trump and Elon has gotten us to this point. We have to be more strategic about naming the scourge we face. That’s the only way forward if we ever hope to reverse this assault on freedom from those who have nothing better to do but rule others in hope it will quiet the screeching insecure child tucked between their ears.

It’s time to face that’s only one choice: the Last Billionaires or the last free people on earth. And I hope I know which side you’re on.