Paper Straws for You, Private Jets for Them
While we sip through soggy straws, 94 private jets fly to Jeff Bezos’s $50 million wedding in a drowning city.
This morning, I drank my iced coffee through a paper straw. The kind that collapses in on itself halfway through, as if even it is exhausted by the weight of being “the solution.” I remembered to bring my tote bag. I even rinsed an empty ketchup bottle with my bare hands to recycle it, and scratched the crust off the top too. I did my tiny part to be a good person in a burning world.
And then I opened my phone and saw it: Jeff Bezos’s wedding. A $50 million celebration in Venice, complete with a foam party on a half-billion-dollar yacht, three days of masquerade balls, and ninety-four private jets idling on the tarmac like this was a climate-change-themed sequel to White Lotus. Oprah was there. So were Kim Kardashian, Tom Brady, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ivanka Trump. I watched celebrities, dressed in couture and climate virtue, celebrate (without irony!) a man who has done more to accelerate climate collapse and enable fascism than almost anyone alive.
It felt like a punchline. Except the joke was on us.
And while I was sipping my guilt through a disintegrating straw, while celebrities were sipping champagne under fireworks in a city that is actively sinking, disabled seniors in the United States were being arrested for begging to stay alive. Paraplegics were zip-tied for the crime of wanting to be able to keep taking their meds. The contrast of these images was enough to make my brain explode.
These phenomenal disabled activists were there protesting the Big Beautiful Bill, a piece of legislation that would leave 16 million Americans uninsured. If it passes, families will be choosing between rent and insulin. Seniors will be forced into institutions or left untreated. Paraplegics and wheelchair-users will be stripped of mobility and dignity when their caregivers vanish. Rural hospitals will shutter, clinics will close. And thanks to the right-wing judges on the Supreme Court and their recent decision (which we talked about with Qasim Rashid on friday) red states will now be able to defund planned parenthood and replace them with fake clinics that lie to women. This means low-income families will lose access to cancer screenings, birth control and the ability to receive care they can afford.
So the protestors, many of them in their 60s and 70s, held signs. They chanted. Some couldn’t even speak. Some couldn’t walk. Many couldn’t run.
So the police zip-tied them.
They zip-tied seniors in wheelchairs. They handcuffed paraplegics and told them to push their electric chairs out of the building. They arrested people who are fighting, quite literally, to exist.
Meanwhile, the man helping bankroll the end of the world—through emissions, through amazon’s surveillance capitalism, through donations to politicians eroding democracy is popping champagne in a tux while being fanned by billionaires and flattered by a world too spineless to say: this is obscene.
And this is the contrast I can’t unsee. On one side of the world: a masquerade. On the other: people stripped of their dignity for daring to demand the bare minimum. One group wants a decent life. The other group already owns the planet is blowing millions on foam parties as it burns.
And if you, like many others are struggling right now, remember this. We’re not broke. We’re being robbed. Jeff Bezos paid zero in federal income taxes in both 2007 and 2011. In fact, in 2011, he claimed a $4,000 child tax credit, the same one poor parents are shamed for needing. And while his company made record-breaking profits, Amazon paid nothing in federal taxes in 2018, and often little or nothing since. Now, while paraplegic protestors are being handcuffed for asking to live in dignity, Bezos is spending millions to shape the system that locks them out. In the 2023–2024 election cycle, Bezos spent nearly $17 million, and two-thirds of it went to Republicans or right-wing causes. One in four dollars that Bezos spent backed candidates who denied the results of the 2020 election. This man didn’t just rob you, he is paying other people to lie to you while they rob you too.
While you venmo your friend 10 bucks for brunch, Bezos is venmoing fascists to keep looting the country.
Jeff Bezos is not a success story. He’s a looter in a custom tux, draining the public purse and throwing a $50 million wedding as a reward.
So no, I don’t want to be told to turn off the lights. I want the lights turned on. I want the cameras rolling. I want the arrests made. Not of disabled protesters in wheelchairs, but of the people actually stealing from us, stealing our air, our futures, our public funding, our dignity.
Let the masquerade end. Unmask them. Start there.
What do you think?? Also before you go write to me!! I want your boy problems!!
Male Loneliness Isn’t a Crisis—It’s a Mirror
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do we think the caviar was locally sourced
Of course Oprah was there. Her bestie got a ride on his penis 🚀. So disgustingly obscene.