Demolishing The Billionaire Scam

We're on the cusp of total fascist takeover. It's hard to know what to say at such a moment. Going to try anyway.

I think it's going to be bad for all of us, but harder still on the best of us. The worst people imaginable are about to be in charge of everything now, and the people who are in a position to oppose them appear more interested in creating an illusion of normalcy than they are in offering resistance. The coup from four years ago was never put down, so it eventually succeeded, because that's how such things go.

The terrible things that are probably about to happen have been discussed at length, proclaimed as disgusting campaign promises that should have resulted in the expulsion from polite society of those making them, and issued as dire and much-needed warnings to the complacent and ignorant. It's what you'd expect from the rise of the American Nazi party, or it's the return of the Southern Confederacy, or something so close to those grotesque and murderous movements that distinctions seem meaningless. Today doesn't feel like the day to rehash all the terrible things, though. There's enough despair in the atmosphere; I'd rather not ignite it.

The awful people about to take power are a bunch of horrifying religious creeps and segregationist eugenicist oligarchs; they call themselves things like "christian" and "conservative" and "republican," and they insist they are the only good and normal people, but (according to the religious book they brandish at protests but never seem to read), a tree is recognized by its fruit. By their words and deed they have shown themselves to be worse than most decent people can even imagine: consumed by greed and bigotry, utterly without shame or decency, fundamentally opposed to the public good, foundationally aligned with brutality and violence, and corrupt to the core. They promise vengeance and pain and slavery and terror and theft and mass murder, and now they will have the power to deliver it. They've corrupted the courts, they've cowed the legislature, they've purchased the outlets of information, and now they taken the presidency, so they control the deadliest military in human history. It seems you can't even hide from them in Greenland.

At a time when a great deal needs to be repaired, these monsters oppose repair and favor demolition. At a time when we face numerous crucial and pressing problems, they oppose all solutions.

Meanwhile, those people with the power to oppose them call themselves "liberal" and "centrist" and "democrat," and they have told us, quite rightly, that these monsters are dangerous opponents of democracy, fascists and authoritarians and all the rest. They also told us they are the ones who can stop it, but a tree is recognized by its fruit, and now that they have run their latest failed campaign (the strategy of which was, as usual, to try to gain the support people who want bad things to happen while ignoring or opposing the people who want bad things to stop) more and more of them are working with this dangerous opponent of democracy, and almost all of them seem to hold as a first priority the preservation of the system that led us to this point, not remaking it into something that might lead us to some end other than the rise of a fascist confederacy.

At a time when a great deal needs to be opposed, many of them—most, it seems—oppose nothing. At a time when we face numerous crucial and pressing problems, they oppose all conflict with those causing them.

The people who get to decide what happens want terrible things, and they've managed to convince tens of millions of our fellow citizens that terrible things are good, and that good things are terrible, and that life must be earned, and that those who fail to earn it deserve death, and that there are certain types of people who do not deserve a chance to earn life at all. Tens of millions of people have been convinced of these topsy-turvy lies so thoroughly that, even when all the promised terrible things start to happen, a great many of these tens of millions—most, perhaps—will go on believing that the terrible things that are happening to them are not the fault of the immensely powerful people who decide what happens, but are rather the fault of the least powerful people who are suffering the most, and so even as they themselves suffer and struggle and die, they'll cheer, because they can see those worse off are suffering and struggling more and dying faster, and the suffering of people they hate and fear is something that seems to comfort them more than life itself.

None of this is good. There's a temptation to think its all over. Many are saying so.

I disagree. I think something may be over, and I dare hope what is over is the idea that we can possibly build a society of equality and justice dedicated to human thriving upon a foundation that was dedicated to terrible lies of genocide and slavery. I dare hope that what is over is the idea that we can ever find solutions by working in partnership with people who want to create the problems. Maybe we can let go of all that now. In order to let go of it, we'll need to let go of it. If we are to turn toward something else, we'll need to turn. It's a spiritual transformation, a change in the collective heart and mind about what is right and wrong and good and bad and more important and less important, which is the only thing that ever changes the scope of what is possible.

The collective heart and mind is made out of individual hearts and minds, and you reading this are an individual, in case you didn't know. So, while there are many individual actions that we all should take, and many people who are very good at laying out what those things might be, the universal work will be done by each of us in our hearts and minds, and so I think we ought to get to it.

The first thing we should probably get over is the idea that it's over. There is a sort of tempting finality to over. Over means terrible things are inevitable, but it also means no more need for awareness or conviction or struggling for what's better, and other difficult things. It means we can just take our ball and go home. I don't know if you had a kid like that in your neighborhood growing up, but I did. Nobody wanted to play with that kid.

Even if something is over, I don't think "it" is over. I don't think "it" is ever over. I don't think we get to do that to people who don't have the option to walk away. I don't think we get to do that to the future.

What we have now—good and bad—is something we inherited, and something others not yet born will inherit. We owe ourselves a fight for the same future that the christians or the republicans or the conservatives or whatever the hell else they want to call themselves would devour for their own enrichment or self-satisfaction, and we owe the fight to those who will inherit what is to come after us.

Today I have ten ideas for growing the new sustainable revolutionary thing out of the old dead thing whose still-twitching corpse the worst people in the world are about to start fighting over like the mangy vultures they are.

Each of these things might make their own essay. Maybe someday they will.

Today I'll list the first five. They're about the game.

Soon enough, I'll try to bring the next five. They're about the directions.

Maybe you've noticed that it's getting harder to truly know what's going on these days. Legacy media—controlled by corrupt billionaires and addicted to the false equivalency of balance rather than dedicated to the principle of truth—has failed us. I am recommending that if you have money to do so, you subscribe to independent sources of information instead. This week I'm suggesting you support Wikipedia, which is an open source of information—one that has been targeted by sad boy and famous rubbery megalomaniac Elon Musk specifically because it provides information without being owned.

(If you also want to support The Reframe, there are buttons to do so all over the place and whatnot.)

Play the Right Game

This is the primary thing. Everyone's got to play some kind of game. Even refusing to engage with the world is its own kind of game with its own rules. It strikes me, especially when I ponder Democrats, that one of our greatest problems is that so many of us who want good things are simply playing the wrong game. It seems to me, especially when I ponder comfortable people who consider themselves centrists or moderates, that you'll never win the right game if you keep playing the wrong one. As Thomas Pynchon once said, "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." As a worse writer than Pynchon (it's me) once said, "As long as you stay in their frame, you're still in their picture."

Here are three ideas for playing the right game:

Know the game. You can't play the game if you don't know what it is. The game we should be playing is called "Demolishing the Billionaire Scam."

The Billionaire Scam is the supremacist foundational spiritual and political alignment of our colonialist imperialist nation. Its core operational beliefs are: wealth should come to the wealthy as much as possible and by any means; any wealth going anywhere else represents a violation demanding immediate redress; any attempt to curtail the maximum flow of wealth to the wealthy, no matter how virtuous, is actually theft demanding punishment, and any attempt to stop the punishment, no matter how peaceful, is actually violence demanding murder.

It's important to understand that the stakes of this game are very high, and those who play it against us are our enemies—not because we seek enemies, but because they insist on treating all of humanity with enmity, and when somebody is choking the life out of you or your loved ones, you don't get to decide whether or not they are your enemy.

It is important to realize that the billionaires who profit off of our foundational scam are the enemies of all humanity, even most of those who support them—tens of millions of our fellow citizens, who, despite the fact that they are not billionaires themselves still have chosen ignorance or complacency or bigotry or greed is necessary for them to support the Billionaire Scam. These dupes and confederates may also be our enemies—again, not because we seek enemies, but because they insist on treating us or those we love with enmity—but they are, without realizing it, enemies even of themselves, enemies of the shared humanity that they still hold within even though they've rejected it, and many of them will suffer under the billionaire scam far earlier and far more than some of us who would fight to demolish it. If we would be friends to the intrinsic humanity of these enemies, we must oppose them, too. Even billionaires are humans, despite what they seem to believe, and so, in the end, they are enemies even of themselves.

The Billionaire Scam is a political and spiritual system that wants genocide and slavery, and we can tell because that's what it produces. The Billionaire Scam is opposed to paying any of the natural costs of society, and even more opposed to paying the unnatural costs of the brokenness it causes, and most especially opposed to paying the consequential cost of blame for that brokenness.

So the Billionaire Scam will always be detected by its opposition to paying costs, by its opposition to maintenance of what it has inherited, and by its opposition, above all, to reparation of what it has broken.

Repair what is broken. Money is how you score points in The Billionaire Scam. A billionaire system is all about taking the natural, generative, sustainable value created by human society, and stealing it all for itself to feed a murderous hunger that will never be satiated. A billionaire system is all about avoiding costs, because a cost is a drag on the growth of its own unnatural and unsustainable wealth.

This means that, if we would defy The Billionaire Scam, we should align ourselves toward repairing something and paying the cost of the repair.

Repair is how you score points in the game of Demolishing the Billionaire Scam.

There are millions and millions of things that are broken. This can be daunting to contemplate, because if you are like me, you do not have the time or the resources to repair millions and millions of things. However, in a world controlled by fascist supremacists and oligarchs, every act of repair will always be an aggressive and defiant act.

There are millions and millions of broken things, and there are millions and millions of us. You can't repair them all, but can you repair one thing?

What can you do today? What can you repair? There's probably something.

Go find it.

Put some points on the board.

Learn from experienced players. The Billionaire Scam always creates a system that eats human beings, while offering everyone not being eaten some temporary benefit of comfort or wealth for looking the other way. I'm somebody who has not been eaten yet by the billionaire system, and by the accident of my identity I have never been targeted by its bigotries. Many advantages I have in life are ones I inherited without even knowing it from the Billionaire Scam, and if these advantages start to go away in the rough age to come, it will be because the machine that eats people has finally gotten so much power that it can finally get around to me.

Privilege in a supremacist system is just as upside-down as anything else in a supremacist system. It can feel like a mountain, but if you're playing the right game, it's a pit, obscuring from view so much of reality that one's perceptions become distorted. This means that I'm not very good at playing Demolishing the Billionaire System, because my own privileged position affords me a poor view of the board, and that limited position means that I spent decades of my life unaware of the game, much less how to play it. I believe everyone with a privileged identity faces obstacles to playing well. I certainly do.

To understand how best to play the game, I find it crucial to listen to more experienced players than myself. I start by listening more closely to people the more targeted they are by our supremacist billionaire system. More often than not, the most experienced players tend to be those who have never had the advantages of supremacist privilege, who have been persecuted and marginalized in many overlapping ways. Such people are afforded no advantages by our Billionaire System, but they do frequently have the advantage of a far clearer picture of the board than the one I have.

If we are people of privilege, we should learn other to identify experienced players, and I have found that listening to more marginalized people without first seeking to impose my own more limited viewpoint is a very effective way of doing that. Even if the person I'm listening to turns out not to be expert at Demolishing the Billionaire Scam, the practice of listening first helps me change my spirit in important ways.

Here are some other things I see experienced players doing.

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Face the Worst

The already-high cost of conviction and awareness is going to go up now, along, probably, along with the cost of cars and eggs and insulin and everything else. Speaking truth will likely involve repercussions, many of them severe. Acts of repair and maintenance will likely be vilified and prosecuted. Acts of solidarity and kindness will be scorned and punished. Failure to align with institutional fascist violence will be treated as betrayal and treason.

Despite the cost, we have to face the worst. We aren't going to know how to repair broken things if we don't know what's broken—and we're not going to know what's broken if we don't face things as they are. This means doing difficult things, like reading between the lines of the propaganda that's delivered to us from billionaire-captured sources, and actively seeking other sources that can be trusted, and constantly interrogating them and their motives as we support them, and constantly interrogating our own motives as we act. It means knowing when you might be permitted to exist in ignorance, and speaking when silence would be easier, and acting when not acting would be safer.

Facing the worst does a few other things that are worthwhile. In naming things as they are, it makes things less comfortable for everyone, creating a discomfort that raises the price of complacency and ignorance. While it won't shame those who have no shame, it may shame those who still have shame enough to have woven together some self-exonerating story or another to tell themselves by exposing the lie of that story. And the act of facing things as they are might be noticed by others, who had despaired that anyone remained to fight the necessary fight, lending them resilience and resolve. And even if nobody else notices what we do, it will transform our own individual spirits, and our individual spirits are part of the collective spirit, and changing the collective spirit is what changes the scope of what is possible.

Facing the worst is one of the most foundational repairs there is: the repair of our awareness.

Imagine The Best

If all we intend is destruction we may as well align with the Billionaire Scam, because the Billionaire Scam is unsustainable, and unsustainable things don't sustain. It will eventually demolish itself, if only by demolishing everything else. We play Demolish the Billionaire Scam because The Billionaire Scam needs demolishing, but it needs demolishing not because demolition is good in itself, but because the Billionaire Scam stands in the way of the good, sustainable, truthful, generative thing we'd like to see take form.

This means we need to spend significant time imagining what that good, sustainable, truthful, generative thing might be. When we think about what we'd like to put in the place of the Billionaire Scam, I think it is best for us to imagine the best world—one so good, in fact, that it seems impossible to us right now: A state of global peace so total that borders become meaningless; a state of provision for all so encompassing that money becomes useless; a state of human solidarity so total that instruments of death such as military and policing and prisons are distant memories; commitment to knowledge and human thriving so total that it is propaganda and misinformation and subjugation and exploitation that no longer even seem possible.

Don't be afraid of utopias, in other words. Make that modification to your spirit. Have you ever noticed that, collectively speaking, we are afraid of utopias? We're told that what's best is not only impossible, but dangerous to seek, in a way that maintaining an actively collapsing world order isn't. Thus, those who seek the best are framed as dangerous. Thus, those who seek the worst are framed as safely realistic.

I understand that utopia is a thing that is thought to be impossible with some reason. Perfection seems to be an abstract; in reality, there appear to be corruptions even to the most sustainable systems. I sure come short of perfection. But even if the goal is impossible, we'll get closer to it than if we keep our goal within the framework of what is considered possible—a framework currently governed and constrained entirely by the Billionaire Scam.

And ... we might actually get there. Maybe we'll find that the best we can imagine right now isn't actually the unattainable ideal. Maybe, if we achieve the best we can imagine today, we'll discover we can imagine things still better, which seem impossible, but will be worthy goals all the same. And even if we never arrive at our imagined utopia, the act of imagination will transform our own individual spirit, and our individual spirit is part of the collective spirit, and changing the collective spirit is what changes the scope of what is possible.

Imagining the best is one of the most foundational repairs there is: the repair of our conviction.

Embrace The Better

Here's what I mean by 'embrace the better': Don't turn down the small win, just because it doesn't deliver total victory in the game. Always take every small advantage you can find, and be glad of what it is, while remaining hungry for the next, bigger, advantage.

At the same time, reject any 'win' that doesn't help demolish the Billionaire Scam, any 'win' that abandons some group of people or another to subjugation and brutalization and exploitation. We will demand leaders who are playing the right game and who will work for the right outcomes, and we will do everything we can to replace any leaders who won't respond to these demands.

This is why we ought to start by imagining the best. There is a temptation to embrace a fake pragmatism that involves only creating the appearance of normalcy, that involves moving only within the scope of what fascists define as possible, which involves staying in the false frame, playing the wrong game.

But there's a temptation for those of us who have dared to imagine the best we can imagine, to reject anything that is better simply because it is not the best. This can lead us to denigrate or even oppose every step in the right direction, in the name of the total win. This is something done in the name of winning the game, but it aligns with losing. Imagine a basketball player so committed to winning the game that they refuse to shoot, because nobody ever won a game with only 2 points. Imagine a player who refuses to shoot the next shot, because the previous one didn't manage to change the lead on the scoreboard. Don't be that player.

This is why it is crucial to know the game and face the worst. That is how we know what the better is, so we can embrace it when it arrives.

Play to Win

No point in playing if you don't play to win.

First, play the hand you're dealt. What this means is we must understand that we are in a bad spot, but we will be in a far worse spot if we simply walk away from the game. Our opponents have immense power and a population captured by manufactured ignorance and complacency, but in their abdication of reality and truth, they have immense vulnerabilities. We can win, if we play.

Second, learn the rules. If we are to move power, it will be necessary to understand the mechanism whereby power moves. This means that we must understand where the levers and mechanisms of power are, and how they work, and we must determine to use that knowledge to win. Sometimes it might be necessary to use this power to be the sand jamming the gears. Sometimes there might be a lever available to pull, which, if pulled, would create the better outcome. Some such levers may come every other November, but others will present themselves with greater frequency, if we learn where they are and what they do. So we use the existing rules to win, whenever the rules help us win.

Next, break the rules. Cheat the cheaters. Lie to the liars. To those who tell you false stories about their intentions, tell false stories about your own. Understand that those aligned with the billionaire system use the rules only insofar as they allow them to demolish humanity. Liars should not expect the truth from us, those who refuse to participate in our democracy should not expect our participation in it with them; those who refuse to attend to reality should not expect our agreement with them on any point. To the extent it is possible, those who break every rule must not get the benefit of any rules. They may still receive these benefits due to their ruthlessness and their advantage, but these things should only be freely given if the giving is tactically useful in winning the game we should be playing—in maintaining the natural value we've inherited, in repairing what is broken, in forcing the payment of natural costs, in protecting from death and slavery all those the billionaire system would devour.

Finally, solidarity above all. Understand that we're all being choked to death by billionaires, and that all violence we see exists within that foundational violence. Never switch your allegiance from the oppressed to the oppressor just because the oppressed is fighting for their lives, and the oppressor has the power to cast their far greater violence as respectable, and the struggle that ensues from that violence as unrespectable. Never celebrate the brutalization or consumption of another by the machine that devours people. Never accept the fascist offer to see such consumption and brutality as something that secures your own safety.

Play hard, play to win, obscure your intent from your opponent, never switch sides.

That's the game.

Next time, we'll talk about directions.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He tips his hat to the new Constitution.