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"Bullies for Billionaires" - call them what they are [1]
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Date: 2025-02-21
I see a term and a framing starting to spread for the current regime and its supporters, and think it should become the standard way to name them.
Bullies for Billionaires.
Bully is an easily understood term — everyone has experience with them. And it not only connotes their actions, but also their motivations — using threats, violence, and intimidation to express their lack of regard for others in support of their own fragile self-worth and self-image.
I’ve been personally acquainted with some of their tech bro kingpins, and I believe a lot of their drive to break things and acquire money and power derives from not ever learning how to relate to other people. Since their relationships are almost entirely transactional, they need to accumulate the means to control as much of the content of those transactions as they can, because they don’t get a lot of pleasure from friendship and other less transactional relationships.
Indeed, I think that a large part of their drive to eviscerate the U.S. government and the very concept of a democratic polity and the rule of law is that they ABHOR any venue or system in which ANYONE is treated as their equal. They want a world in which there is no power, status, or happiness in relationships outside of the transactional means they’ve spent their lives acquiring.
The principle of one person, one vote is anathema. And the idea that they could be held responsible by a jury of their peers is on its face non-sensical — they don’t have any peers.
More to the point, most people have been brought up to dislike bullies, those who pick on those less powerful than themselves. A smaller fraction than I had believed, or hoped for, but I still have to think that framing them not as powerful or strong but as bullies might cut into their appeal a bit.
And the thing that needs to be driven home is WHAT both the bullying they are doing on a mass scale and the bullying that they are condoning and encouraging are for. The ultimate beneficiaries of almost all of these actions are the ultra-wealthy who are financing them. Created by a rigged tax, economic, legal, and above all financial system, they only see that system as a limitation on how much they can accumulate, and that’s a threat to how they find self-worth that can’t be tolerated. Another factor is that they’ve been successful by breaking and ignoring other systems and norms — much of their wealth is predicated on accumulating enough wealth and status in such a short time that ponderous legal and legislative mechanisms can’t keep up.
Bullies for Billionaires. I think that sums them up quite well. And I hope that it keeps spreading.
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