From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   February 11, 2026   
      
   Class war is the future of American politics   
   By David Wallace-Wells   
      
   The San Francisco Bay Area is home to at least one-third of the value   
   of the entire U.S. stock market. Late last year, you couldn’t escape a   
   chilling billboard campaign, meant to be cheeky, from an artificial   
   intelligence start-up: “Stop Hiring Humans.” And on Saturday, somebody   
   tried to AstroTurf a trollish Billionaires March through the city in   
   defense of Silicon Valley’s 21st-century robber barons. Only a few   
   dozen people showed up, heckled along the way by passers-by.   
   The billionaires themselves also seem to be on the move. In recent   
   months, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have all purchased   
   homes outside California, potentially bringing their hundreds of   
   billions of dollars with them. Others have spent the past few months   
   raging about the injustice of the state’s new politics of class   
   warfare.   
      
   Why? A proposal — supported by the local congressman Ro Khanna but not   
   the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and currently floating in limbo as   
   a potential ballot initiative tentatively scheduled for the fall —   
   that would impose a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on the state’s   
   billionaires, whose wealth has soared since the pandemic.   
   This isn’t exactly pitchforks in the streets, the nightmare   
   entertained by every generation of aristocrats and oligarchs as a   
   supremely flattering form of status paranoia. But about the symbolism,   
   at least, the horrified billionaires and would-be billionaires are   
   basically right. There has never been a tax of this kind so seriously   
   considered in the United States before, and the policy would mark a   
   genuinely new era of the politics of extreme wealth in this country.   
   Or is that new era already here? Politicians now casually invoke “the   
   Epstein class” and more routinely name-check affordability than they   
   ever campaigned on its close cousin inequality. Prominent plutocrats   
   talk much more openly about their right to great fortunes and their   
   hostility toward oversight and interference from the government, and   
   leftists talk more openly about their hostility toward extreme wealth.   
   Last year was marked by class-warfare bookends: In January, as the   
   tech right joined the president’s MAGA army for his inauguration in   
   Washington, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man was handed close to   
   unilateral control of the machinery of government, partly as a   
   thank-you for political contributions of nearly $300 million. And in   
   November a democratic socialist was elected mayor of the world’s   
   financial capital, relying on public matching funds against the many   
   millions spent opposing him and almost universal hostility from the   
   banking class.   
      
   One big question is whether this backlash will go beyond lip service —   
   whether the country’s partisan coalitions, which have seemed so   
   unshakable in the time of President Trump, will be reshaped by   
   antagonism for billionaires, and the response of those billionaires,   
   as the sunset of Trump’s long reign comes slowly into view.   
   “Masks off — that’s the right way to put it,” says Gabriel Zucman, an   
   economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has helped   
   craft wealth-tax proposals like the one in California and similar ones   
   being considered internationally.   
      
   One year in, Trump’s second term is transparently and by many orders   
   of magnitude the most brazenly corrupt administration in American   
   history, with crypto meme coins and the president’s personal lawsuit   
   against his own I.R.S. The outward deference of tech oligarchs to   
   Trump seems to have outlasted the so-called vibe shift of young, Black   
   and brown voters, many of whom have since abandoned him. And the   
   billionaires’ apparent comfort with transactional, acquisitive MAGA   
   politics seems to illustrate what Khanna — who represents parts of the   
   Bay Area and many of those billionaires — has called Silicon Valley’s   
   broken social contract.   
      
   Musk’s purchase of Twitter more than three years ago looks even more   
   politically consequential both in retrospect and because of how widely   
   it is now being imitated by others who share his desire to shape the   
   country’s information diet from above. Larry Ellison’s Oracle now   
   holds an ownership stake in TikTok, and his son, David, owns CBS News   
   and is vying for control of CNN. Jeff Bezos just neutered what was   
   either the country’s second- or third-most-important newspaper, about   
   a year after he took control of its editorial page and steered it   
   unmistakably to the right.   
      
   Then there is the flood of scandal contained in the recent release of   
   files related to the Epstein investigation. So far they have failed to   
   land any prominent American in obvious criminal jeopardy, but they fit   
   neatly into a noxious vision of elite impunity and entitlement. “We   
   were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans,” Senator Jon   
   Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, said in a speech last weekend. “But this   
   is a government of, by and for the ultrarich. It is the wealthiest   
   cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class, ruling our country.”   
   That is all prologue, of a kind. Up ahead looms the prospect of   
   radical social and economic transformation at the hands of A.I., whose   
   ultimate effects remain largely unknown but were sold first as   
   existential and now as merely epochal.   
      
   One consequence of that talk has been to remind people that they   
   already feel pretty out of control of their own lives, in an age of   
   big tech and a cost-of-living crisis. A.I. seems to promise another   
   step in that same direction — handing what looks like a lot of social   
   control over the whole human future to perhaps fewer companies, run by   
   fewer executives, empowering perhaps even fewer algorithms, over which   
   even less democratic oversight will be exercised than was the case in   
   the hands-off social-media era.   
      
   “A.I. is going to wipe out at least 25 million jobs in the next five   
   to 10 years,” the conservative commentator Matt Walsh declared in   
   December, earning praise and applause from plenty of his haters across   
   the ideological spectrum. Last week, the MS NOW host Chris Hayes   
   warned, “I think it’s best for everyone to understand that the unified   
   class project of billionaires right now is to do to white-collar   
   workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue-collar   
   workers.”   
      
   Remember the Occupy movement and Thomas Piketty? Remember the Tea   
   Party? Remember Bernie Sanders nearly winning the Democratic   
   presidential nomination by relentlessly invoking the 99 percent, and   
   Trump presenting himself that same campaign season as a tribune of   
   America’s left behind, telling them at his 2016 convention, “I am your   
   voice”? In certain ways, America never abandoned those politics — it   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)