of immigrants and bilionaires
In 2010 the US Surpeme Court found in a controversial 5-4 decision called "Citizens United" (p.310) that the government basically could not limit money spent on behalf of political candidates. In retrospect, this was to be the decision that did the most damage to the United States' constitutional form of government.
This led directly to Elon Musk and his attempts at perversion of democracy. The world's wealthiest man has spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting the Trump campaign, and is literally paying swing state voters at this point. His social media megaphone Twitter/X is promulgating disinformation and hate-mongering at greater scale than any platform we've seen before, often amplified by Elon personally.
Elon Musk, who retweets posts promoting the great replacement theory, apparently came to the US on a student VISA, subsequently dropped out of school and illegally stayed here working for himself. His invalided student VISA made him an illegal alien, despite his claims at the time to have been here on an H1B VISA, which requires among other things a degree in the field in which you are employed. He had neither that degree, or an employer in his field of study, or an actual H1B VISA (since he was not elligible) When he tweets about immigrants ruining this country he might be projecting a bit.
Jeff Bezos purchased the long revered American institution, The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million. He vowed to shelter it from the ravaging market forces which have degraded our great newspapers. Now, at the moment when an independent media powerhouse needs to make its voice heard, is the very moment when he chooses to silence the editorial board by introducing new endorsement policies the week before an election. This display of cowardice on the part of Bezos is a black stain on his character that will not be diminished over time. He capitulated to political pressure and compromised the integrity of the newspaper after pretending to be the benefactor of it!
Let's talk about Leonard Leo, the conservative powerbroker behind the Federalist Society - a conservative legal organization focused on promoting conservative judges, and advocating for a textualist and originalist interpretation of the constitution. He has created a network of conservative legal groups funded largely by wealthy, anonymous donors that exert their corrosive influence on our judicial system. He personally backed Neil Gorsuch being at the top of the list of nominees for Trump judicial appointments due to a rather outspoken and outlandish tirade against the administrative state he published in a long rambling manifesto of a consenting opinion to an opinion he himself wrote. Fanatics are in season as long as that fanaticism is in service of establishing the theocratic state that Leo envisions.
Peter Theil is another billionaire who in deeply invested in a Trump prsidency. He backs JD Vance, and they share a common dystopic vision of a technocracy that should scare all freedom loving people. He made his fortune as a member of the "Paypal Mafia", along with Musk and others, and went on to fund companies involved in facial recognition systems, and now has lucrative defense contracts for battlefield AI systems development. This man will shepherd us to a dark dystopian technocracy where the tech bros use the lower classes' biomass to produce energy. This is an actual idea discussed by Curtis Yarvin, an individual that both JD Vance and Theil are associated with.
I could go on, there are so many examples - especially on the political right. But being a billionaire doesn't make one a bad person, does it? Does it? Would USA be better off if we taxed billionaires at high rates like we did in the 1970s? Should anyone even care if they move offshore to avoid paying their fair share?
We need to get back to our democratic roots. The core principle behind our constitutional democratic system is "one man, one vote" and yet a billionaire like Musk can essentially flood the zone with his voice, amplified orders of magnitude more than that of other citizens. Citizens United was the first of many corrosive decisions by SCOTUS that threaten to deconstruct our constitutional form of government. Get out and VOTE!