Eat the rich (metaphorically speaking)

The November midterm elections are shaping up to be a real barnburner. On one side, Team Evil is going in hard for the coup-attempting child-trafficking-linked delusional fascist dismantling anything that ever did any good for anyone. Real hard.

Crypto companies, artificial intelligence firms and online betting have emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 midterm races, driving a record amount of business spending on congressional contests, according to campaign finance watchdogs and interviews with more than a dozen political strategists from both parties. [...]

U.S. companies have spent an unprecedented $517 million on the 2026 U.S. House and Senate races in the 15 months through the end of the first quarter, exceeding the record $461 million in corporate spending over two years for the 2024 elections, data compiled by corporate accountability nonprofit group Public Citizen shows.

Public Citizen reports that of that half billion, nearly $300 million was from those three industries alone, and that's just spending from 2026's first quarter. Nearly $200 million was from crypto companies alone, and given that the two major use cases for crypto company products are organized crime and slightly less organized crime, there's a case to be made that the 2026 midterms will be the first House and Senate races sponsored by Drug Money.

Drug Money: It's What Runs The World™

And speaking of drugs and money, there's now word that Elon Musk is once again getting back into politics after swearing off politics—who coulda figured, right—and plans to spend up to $200 million by himself to prop up Republicanism's criminal wing, including Texas' remarkably crooked Ken Paxton.

Musk is probably smart enough to know not to give the money to Paxton directly, since Paxton would almost certainly just steal it and head off to a new life in Mexico. And that's a shame, because (a) convincing Ken Paxton to leave the country is probably worth a lot more than $200 million and (b) there's nobody who needs $200 million less than Robot Tunnel Rocket Car Brainchip Nonconsensual Nudes Generator Race War Nazi Guy.

It's now just presumed, in America, that the wealthiest Americans will attempt to buy their own government. The Supreme Court said they are allowed to, because money is freer speech than speech itself is, and you know it's true because when non-rich Americans try to use their free speech rights they're kettled into fenced-off "free speech zones" but the Roberts Court invariably gets very, very mad if you suggest that maybe money should have a fence around it too. So this is how we live, now. In a year and a half, the second Trump "presidency" has created disaster after disaster, engaged in rampant illegality for funsies, and put the economy, oil supplies, food infrastructure, weather forecasting, military readiness, public safety, and U.S. international standing all in crisis at the same time.

To the people who've most benefited from the Republican Party's collapse into scoundrelism, though, none of this matters because what's really important is that their own sources of wealth go unregulated. Completely unregulated. As in, even the slightest hint of regulation will send all these billionaires immediately into Nazism, if they think those are the only available choices. And you'd think that was overstating the case, except a half a billion dollars likely headed to a billion dollars worth of midterm campaign spending pretty much proves it.

As long as American billionaires can sell people money laundering tokens they can use to generate nudes of neighborhood children while placing bets on the damage suspiciously set fires might do, they'll do fine. Who cares which aircraft carriers get poop-flooded, or which international trading partners pack up and fk right off, or whether the midwest has power or drinking water on any given day.

We all understand that election spending is going to take place. What's impressive about this newest round is that I'm not sure it has ever been so cleanly divided into Team Evil vs everybody else. Take a look at that Reuters line again:

Crypto companies, artificial intelligence firms and online betting have emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 midterm races, driving a record amount of business spending on congressional contests, according to campaign finance watchdogs and interviews with more than a dozen political strategists from both parties.

Huh, would you look at that. The biggest campaign spenders in the midterm elections are:

"Crypto companies," which have been desperately trying to find a use case for their product that does not involve money laundering, online extortion schemes, or industrial-scale scam factories.

"Artificial intelligence firms," which are desperately trying to avoid an almost-certain industry collapse driven by astronomic and still-increasing debt loads papered over with Enron-level accounting shenanigans.

"Online betting," an industry that connects the wallets of compulsive gamblers to those of anonymous insider traders, leaving 94% of their "customers" worse off.

We've got the man who bought Twitter, turned it into a site for extremists, and is now staking future success on a chatbot that pumps out disinformation, hoaxes, and A.I. nudes of anyone you might happen to have a picture of. We've got the billionaires behind mass surveillance, memecoins, and speculative arson all lined up to shake Trump's hand and throw money at him.

All these guys want very, very much for Trump to continue his fascist project. The industries most associated with law-dodging and outright theft are going hard for the demented criminal and his efforts to turn the country into a Russian-styled kleptocracy.

And it's a perfectly reasonable reaction, to be honest. Because at this point, America is divided into two camps. There are the billionaires heading up nation-wrecking levels of wealth transfer, much of it premised on cheating people outright, and on the other side are Americans who think maybe it's about time we just eat these people and be done with it.

Not literally "eat" them, of course. I'm speaking figuratively.(1)

The American mood right now is, in a word, angry. Furious, even. The reason Republican lawmakers have been avoiding their constituents for eighteen months running is because so many of the town halls they do dare to have devolve into screaming as ticked-off voters ask their leaders just what the hell they've been doing, as Trump dismantles whole sections of government that turn out to be pretty damn important if you don't want explosive diarrhea and do want to keep your business afloat.

The leaders of Team Evil, though, the ones who've already dumped half a billion dollars into propping up the diarrhea, measles and Epstein caucus, are infinitely more hated than mere lawmakers are. Team Evil's leaders are also so allergic to criticism that they simply do not Allow it to exist in their presence.

Not only will you never see any of the Team Evil leaders doing a non-staged non-toady-infested town hall, they have entire teams of people devoted to making sure you rabble can't so much as make eye contact with them. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg is apparently now buying an Irish castle, buying castles being something that the members of Team Evil seem do with some regularity; while this has caused some consternation among nearby residents, the plain fact of the matter is that none of them will ever so much as notice whether Zuckerberg is at his "castle" or not.

He's not going to drop into town to do some antiquing. He's not going to pop down to the local pub. He's going to hole up in his castle like Nerd Dracula—for all the locals know he'll be down in the basement lying in a wooden coffin, wearing the latest virtual reality headset and waiting for the apocalypse to take us all.

At this point, the people building the data centers, and pushing the crypto coins, and taking advantage of your grandfather's gambling addiction to bleed him dry know full well that the rest of us all hate them. And they have a pretty good suspicion that if Team Evil does not somehow manage to win not just the next election, but every single election from here on in, the dam is going to break, the walls are going to come down, and the public, fed up and out for vengeance, is going to eat them.

Again, not really eat them.(2) Just "seize their wealth" or "pass new regulations," but to someone like Musk or Zuckerberg or Andreessen that's pretty much the same thing.

That's the problem with extortionate, exploitative, furiously antisocial behavior. It may allow you to hoover up great sums of money, but the more people in the general public you hurt the more resentment builds up and the more you have to spend to convince the people on the other side of your gate that you don't deserve to be eaten. Once you've gotten to the point where the whole world economy is in danger of toppling if you can't bullshit your way through the next press release—hello, Sam Altman—that half billion dollars per election becomes a necessary expense if you don't want to be snacked on.

Metaphorically. None of us are cannibals, we're just talking raising tax rates back to previous levels.(3) Get a grip.

What we're seeing right now is an even bigger version of Donald Trump's own post-coup ploy. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, was caught hoarding a mountain of national security secrets in his spy-infested country club, was suspected of cheating on his taxes to the tune of $100 million, and was facing possible legal repercussions for that whole attempted insurrection thing until John Roberts rode to his rescue, sweating and panting from the effort. Facing a dizzying array of possible prison sentences, Trump smartly ran for reelection under the also Supreme Court-backed theory that nobody could put him in jail while he was a candidate—and if he did win he would have the power to make all his legal troubles go away while doing whole new sets of crimes that would make the first look like parking tickets. It worked, because reasons.

The collected forces of Team Evil are now attempting their own version of exactly that, but on an economy-wide, nationwide, even global scale. The crypto and "prediction market" companies are having to defend against growing allegations that their whole damned existence is nothing but an elaborate scam, and the artificial intelligence-slash-data-center industry is facing collapse unless world governments swoop in to save their sorry money-hemorrhaging asses.

Having gotten to the point where their industries can't survive if they're regulated into having to do slightly less active harm to society, they're hoping that they can throw enough money into the Team Evil pot to be able to buy society outright. Or, if not society, at least the government.

Because the government comes with a military, and at this point it may take the U.S. military to protect billionaires from the threat of their neighbors losing their last thread of patience, breaking down their security fences, and eating them.(4)

This is not, however, sustainable for very long. Many variations of sociopaths have tried it during many, many points in history, and eventually each such government collapses because there's no amount of money that will absolutely guarantee a wealthy person's safety if the rest of the country decides it's time for a gold-leaf sociopath barbecue.(5) Every government founded not on the public good but instead solely on the premise of keeping the rabble away from the forks is doomed to fall, and the only variation is how long it takes.

I am no historian, but in general it seems that the more money a nation's wealthy sociopaths cumulatively spend to prevent getting eaten, the hungrier the public gets and more lavish the eventual buffet becomes.

Not that that would happen here, of course.(6) America is exceptional, for reasons laid out in those history textbooks schools can no longer afford to buy.

My point is this, then: Nobody should be too shocked that the most corrupt set of leaders America has ever had are now being flooded with more campaign dollars than companies have ever before spent. There are a large number of industries that depend on corruption for their very survival, and if there is ever a serious risk of America moving to universal health insurance you will see ten times this much pour into Team Evil's coffers.

In past generations, America's richest and most sociopathic tycoons knew that the most cost-effective way to keep the public from gnawing on your shinbones was to put their name on libraries, on auditoriums, on hospitals, and on other monuments to the public good. It amounted to pennies, given their overall wealth, and delivered just enough public goodwill to dull the public mind to scandals elsewhere. And, in general, it proved shockingly effective.

This generation of wealth, however, has been unable to part with those pennies. Our current captains of industry are much stupider and much greedier than those who came before them. They cheaped out on building museums and libraries, and on even the premise of contributing to society somewhat, and went through several variations of that "greed is good" phrase before giving up on trying to justify themselves and going home to hoard wealth like weird and paranoid dragons. The Supreme Court instead told them they could buy individual House and Senate seats outright, rather than going through far more convoluted means of winning public favor; the moment the Court said so, the wealthy rushed to do it.

But it is a year-by-year thing. Once wealth decides to remove itself from society, go full Team Evil mode and control the nation mostly through waves of campaign propaganda, it can't stop doing it. You live your life as a prey animal, not a predator: If you don't want to be eaten, you can't stop running.

So that is where we are, now. The architects of most of the world's worst woes have no problem throwing a half a billion dollars out their windows if it will distract the angry mobs below. Nobody wants to be eaten, and nobody thinks they deserve to be eaten.

Their problem, though, is that Donald Trump's maladministration has made a very good case that nothing has any hope of going back to normal unless at least a few of these people get put on a spit. (7)

(1) I am not speaking figuratively. I mean we ought to consider literally eating them.

(2) We could try eating just one or two of them to see what happens. An experiment, if you will.

(3) Look, we all know cannibalism is bad but if eating some guy's severed thumb would give you no-hassle health insurance for the rest of your life you'd probably do it, right? You'd at least think about doing it.

(4) Honestly, the biggest problem might be toxicity. A lot of these guys seem blasted out of their gourds a good chunk of the time, and I can't imagine it'd be safe to ingest much of that.

(5) America is the land of barbecue. We're the nation that turned "potluck" into a religion. I think people are underestimating how into this some Americans could get.

(6) Buddy, our top government health guy boasts about eating roadkill. It absolutely can happen here.

(7) Circling back to the religion thing, in fact, I can see evangelicals turning this into a whole tent revival-ish movement. Music, chanting, everyone gathered 'round the pit watching the meat cook and praising Jesus. Evangelicals seem like they'd be more open to eating people than almost anyone else, right? All those evangelical groups have at least a little of that we-like-eating-people vibe going on. Even if the rest of us were grossed out, I think they'd go for it.