THEY WANT SO BADLY FOR TRUMP TO FAIL:
There are a lot of ways to describe the first week of Operation Epic Fury. It is certainly heartbreaking for the families of the fallen. But the use of “debacle” is…unique? Revelatory? Absurd? https://t.co/wGXfmg5u72
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) March 7, 2026
On February 18, Bernie Sanders spoke to a crowd at The Wiltern in Los Angeles and called out Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and other billionaire California residents. Not for anything they’ve done wrong, but for being good at their job and generating billions of dollars with their companies.
The Senator from Vermont came all the way to California to campaign for the proposed billionaire tax, an initiative that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of Californians with wealth exceeding $1 billion. Many have criticized the proposal for practical reasons, but the fundamental reason why this tax should be criticized is because it’s immoral.
The proposed tax would become due in 2027 and apply to billionaires living in California as of January 1, 2026 and could be paid in installments over five years with a deferral charge. 90% of the revenue would be spent on public health care services (recently gutted by federal cuts), with the remainder going toward administration, education, and food assistance. The measure targets roughly 200 billionaires.
The core argument behind the tax is rooted in that billionaires allegedly don’t pay their “fair share” in taxes. Per the framers of the proposal, they pay “only” 1.5% of their total wealth in annual taxes, even when they “collectively possess an astonishing $2 trillion in wealth” which they’ve procured “with the help of California resources.” The framers claim that other Californians pay a bigger portion of their income in taxes, and that many are increasingly struggling due to failing government services. It is, therefore, “necessary and equitable” to force billionaires to pay more to sustain failed government programs.
The proponents of this legislation, including Sanders, imply that billionaires’ fortunes were handed to them, not created— that they didn’t earn their wealth, and that they shouldn’t even exist, per Sanders himself. In this worldview, taxing billionaires is “necessary” because they are a drag on society— parasites that somehow have managed to amass wealth that should actually go to sustain others for some reason.
This animosity is rooted in a complete disregard of the facts. Most billionaires, including those named by Sanders, have earned their fortunes by producing values that consumers are willing to pay for. Zuckerberg invented Facebook in his dorm room and managed to grow it to over three billion users worldwide. That’s close to 40% of the world population who voluntarily engages with and benefits from Facebook’s services. Sergey Brin co-founded Google and brought untold innovation to the internet and enabled easy access to information for everyone with an internet connection. These billionaires earned their wealth by producing massive value for users, not by looting. Sanders claims billionaires shouldn’t exist, but if he got his way, our lives would be worse off in many respects.
The ultra-wealthy have become the all-purpose scapegoat of progressive politics. Whatever the crisis (in the case of California, failing healthcare, housing costs, underfunded schools) the answer is always the same: billionaires are to blame, and making them pay is the solution. The logic is never clearly explained, because it doesn’t have to be: scapegoating doesn’t require an argument.
The wealth tax would punish people not for what they’ve done wrong, but for how much they’ve produced; for being good at their jobs and creating their own wealth through win-win trades with consumers. Punishing people for their virtues is the essence of injustice. Billionaire producers, primarily through the pursuit of their own ambition, have created massive value and pushed humanity forward in myriad ways. We don’t have to agree with everything they do, or even use their products, to recognize this fact.
Contra Sanders, Gov. Gavin Newsom opposes the tax because he thinks that it will reduce “investments” in many areas in the long term. “I fear the way this [proposal] has been drafted,” Newsom said at an event in San Francisco on January 29. “[The proposal will] actually reduce investments in education. . . in teachers and librarians, childcare. . . in firefighting and police,” he elaborated. “The impact of a one-time tax does not solve an ongoing structural challenge.” Newsom further added: “over the years, you would see a significant reduction in taxes because taxpayers will move. And that is what I fear at a state level.”
But Newsom’s concern doesn’t lie on the immorality of punishing the successful for being successful, but on the fact that, if they’re driven away from California, he won’t be able to continue extracting their wealth via exorbitant taxes that already exist. Like a vampire who leaves his victims barely alive so that they can recover and be preyed on again, Newsom wants to keep billionaires here to prop up his own government, with zero concern over injustice.
Californians shouldn’t enshrine the notion that producing “too much” is a punishable offense and immoral. This is America — we should celebrate value creation and reward production, not chastise and disincentivize it by targeting the productive and deeming their very existence a threat.
Agustina Vergara Cid is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Follow her on X: @agustinavcid
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The central motif of the movie Sinners (which was the topic of my previous Substack comment) is the continuity between the musical bliss of blues and the horror of vampires. However, what if we read this continuity in the opposite direction to the one I advocated a week ago? Vampires do not fill the void of the impossibility of imagining a non-oppressive social order; their horror is the truth of every oppressive social order, and the bliss of immortal blues music is experienced only when we remain at a minimal distance from this truth. Vampires are the radical Evil which appears as bliss when viewed from a proper distance.
Let me clarify this claim through a perhaps unexpected detour: Freud’s idea of the “primordial father (Urvater).” This idea, which he developed in his Totem and Taboo, is usually met with ridicule – and justly so, if we take it as a realist anthropological hypothesis arguing that, at the very dawn of humanity, the “ape-men” lived in groups dominated by the all-powerful father who kept all women for his own exclusive sexual (ab)use, and that, after the sons gathered and rebelled, killing the father, the dead father returned to haunt them as a totemic figure of symbolic authority, giving rise to guilt-feelings and imposing the prohibition of incest. What if, however, we read the duality of the “normal” father and the primordial father of the unlimited access to incestuous enjoyment not as a fact of the earliest history of humanity, but as a libidinal fact, a fact of “psychic reality,” which accompanies, as an obscene shadow, the “normal” paternal authority, prospering in the dark underground of unconscious fantasies? This obscene underground is discernible through its effects – in myths, dreams, slips of the tongue, symptoms… and, sometimes, it enforces its direct perverse realization. When public authority is disintegrating, a traditional leader with a decent and dignified stance is gradually replaced by new obscene masters (like Trump) who talk and act like Freud’s primordial father, violating social laws and enforcing capricious decisions. In short, Lacan turns around Freud’s temporal order: “primordial order” comes after the traditional authority bound by laws.
In his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud refers to these gaps of which he was not fully aware in a surprising passage where he introduces a link between the unconscious and the capitalist economy: in order to explain the distinction between the (conscious) wish encoded in a dream and the dream’s unconscious desire, he compares the wish to the contractor (manager, entrepreneur) and the unconscious desire to the capital that finances (covers the libidinal expenses of) the translation of this wish into a dream:
“To speak figuratively, it is quite possible that a day thought plays the part of the contractor (entrepreneur) in the dream. But it is known that no matter what idea the contractor may have in mind, and how desirous he may be of putting it into operation, he can do nothing without capital; he must depend upon a capitalist to defray the necessary expenses, and this capitalist, who supplies the psychic expenditure for the dream is invariably and indisputably a wish from the unconscious, no matter what the nature of the waking thought may be.”1
Clear as it is, this metaphor lends itself to a superficial reading which totally misses its point. That is to say, it may appear that the work proper (dream-work) is just a mediator between the conscious wish and the unconscious capital: the contractor (conscious wish) borrows from the unconscious the capital to finance its translation into the dream-language. Here, however, we have to take into account Freud’s insistence on how the unconscious desire “infects” the dream only through the dream-work: the exclusive source of the unconscious desire is the work of encoding/masking of the dream thoughts; it does not have a substantial being outside this work. This primacy of form over content also accounts for the paradox of perversion in the Freudian theoretical edifice: perversion demonstrates the insufficiency of the simple logic of transgression. The standard wisdom tells us that perverts practice (do) what hysterics only dream about (doing), i.e., “everything is allowed” in perversion, a pervert openly actualizes all repressed content – and nonetheless, as Freud emphasizes, nowhere is repression as strong as in perversion, a fact more than confirmed by our late-capitalist reality in which total sexual permissiveness causes anxiety and impotence or frigidity instead of liberation. Lacan’s reading of this “metaphor” of Freud is instructive here – again, it clarifies things decisively:
“These are things that look like they are a metaphor. Isn’t it amusing to see how this takes on a different value after what I have been telling you concerning the relationship between capitalism and the function of the master—concerning the altogether distinct nature of what can be done with the process of accumulation in the presence of surplus jouissance – in the very presence of this surplus jouissance, to the exclusion of the big fat jouissance, plain jouissance, jouissance that is realized in copulation in the raw? Isn’t this precisely where infantile desire gets its force from, its force of accumulation with respect to this object that constitutes the cause of desire, namely that which is accumulated as libido capital by virtue, precisely, of infantile non-maturity, the exclusion of jouissance that others will call normal? There you have what suddenly gives Freud’s metaphor its proper connotation when he refers to the capitalist.”2
Or, as Adrian Johnston puts it in a succinctly brutal way: “Analysis is not about teaching neurotics how to fuck.”3 It is about making them abandon the fantasy of full normal fuck, about making them identify with their “symptom,” with the fragile arrangement of the figures of enjoyment that enable them to go on living without too much suffering and pain. The point of Lacan’s reading of Freud’s metaphor of capitalism is very precise here, it reaches beyond the mechanism of dreams into sexual life itself: in the same way the capitalist who wants to start an enterprise has to borrow the capital from a bank or another pre-existing fund, a subject who wants to engage in a “normal” sexual activity has to mobilize “that which is accumulated as libido capital by virtue, precisely, of infantile non-maturity” – in short, when we engage in “normal” mature sex (“jouissance that is realized in copulation in the raw”), we can do this only if our activity is sustained by premature infantile sexual fantasies. The promise that, at some point, we will reach the “big fat” full jouissance at its purest, leaving behind infantile fantasies, is in itself the ultimate fantasy. In a parallel way, this is what Epstein was doing: providing and enacting obscene fantasies that kept the system alive.
Why? Let’s turn to another topic. Although the “official” topic of Dupuy’s The Mark of the Sacred4 is the link between sacrifice and the sacred, its true focus is the ultimate mystery of the so-called human or social sciences, that of the origins of what Lacan calls the “big Other,” what Hegel called “externalization /Entäußerung/,” what Marx called “alienation,” and – why not – what Friedrich Hayek called “self-transcendence”: how can, out of the interaction of individuals, the appearance of an “objective order” arrive which cannot be reduced to their interaction, but is experienced by them as a substantial agency which determines their lives? It is all too easy to “unmask” such a substance, to show, by means of a phenomenological genesis, how it gradually gets “reified” and is sedimented out of individuals’ interaction: the problem is that the presupposition of such a spectral/virtual substance is in a way co-substantial with being-human – those who are unable to relate to it as such, those who directly subjectivize it, are called psychotics (it is for psychotics that, behind every impersonal big Other, there is a personal big Other, the paranoiac’s secret agent/master who pulls the strings).
Dupuy’s great theoretical breakthrough is to link this emergence of the “big Other” to the complex logic of the sacrifice constitutive of the dimension of the sacred, i.e., of the rise of the distinction between the sacred and the profane: through sacrifice, the big Other, the transcendent agency which poses limits to our activity, is sustained. In short, Evil distinguishes itself from itself by way of externalizing itself in a transcendent figure of the Good. From this perspective, far from encompassing Evil as its subordinated moment, Good is nothing but universalized Evil; Evil is itself the unity of itself and Good. Evil controls/contains itself by way of generating a specter of transcendent Good; however, it can only do it by way of superseding its “ordinary” mode of Evil by an infinitized/absolutized Evil. This is why moments of crisis are so dangerous – in them, the obscure obverse of the transcendent Good, the “dark side of God,” the violence which sustains the very containment of violence, appears as such:
“One believed that the good rules over the evil, its ‘opposite,’ but it appears now that it is rather the evil which rules over itself by way of assuming a distance towards itself, by way of positing itself outside itself; thus ‘self-externalized,’ the superior level appears as good.” (13)
Dupuy’s point is that the sacred is, as to its content, the same as the terrible/evil; their difference is purely formal/structural – what makes it “sacred” is its exorbitant character, which makes it a limitation of “ordinary” evil. To see this, we should not only focus on religious prohibitions and obligations, but also bear in mind the tension between the prohibitions enforced by a religious edifice and the rituals practiced by it. “Often, the ritual consists in staging the violation of these prohibitions and violations.” (143) The lesson of the ongoing revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s network provides living proof of how such a tension functions.
Epstein acted as a primordial father who organized a network in which (sexual, financial, political) basic rules were violated and everything was permitted. Obscenities abound – just recall the photo of Bill Clinton seductively stretched on a sofa with a wig and wearing a feminine dress... I don’t want to lose time resuming the mixture of sexual orgies, dark financial speculations and political speculations – I just think it is important to note the discreet but towering presence of Israel in the background. I also think that one should not lose time trying to determine which dimension is crucial, sexual, political or economic, in Epstein’s network. One just has to insist that this network is a clear example of what one usually calls “deep state”: an almost Communist (in the sense of Communism for the elite, of course) shadowy domain in which illegal sexual encounters are used for financial gains and to exchange diplomatic secrets, in which granting perverted sexual wishes and providing confidential data are signs of trust and simultaneously tools of discreet blackmail.
This domain is Communist not only in the sense that its three dimensions are inextricably mixed, but also in the sense that the official public political barriers are obliterated: in this space, conservatives chat with liberal “radicals,” Trumpian populists freely mix with the fiercest critics of the US regime – in the spirit of “we are colleagues, after all”... Such a space of obliterated political divisions, of obscene solidarity among the members of the elite, is necessary for the existing legal order to function, it is its dark foundation, a space where dark deals are made.
I consider the case of Noam Chomsky symptomatic in this regard: the icon of the American radical Left not only establishing a close friendship with Epstein, THE figure of the dark corrupted underground of the US social and political life, but even advising him how to deal with the accusations of sexual crimes. Within this space, Chomsky reached out to Steve Bannon, the ultimate Trumpian populist, and expressed his and Valeria’s (his wife’s) disappointment at “having missed you the other night”: “Jeffrey /…/ gave me your address. Hope that we can arrange something else before too long. Lots to talk about.” Bannon wrote back: “Agree. Would love to connect.”
In an interview with Veterans Unplugged in December of 2012, Chomsky is asked if he would have an interest in a conversation with me. His answer is that I am “just a good actor” practicing pure posturing: “can you find any content? I can’t, so I would have no interest in having a conversation with him, and I suppose the converse is true, I imagine.”5 (Not true: a couple of times a third person tried to organize such a conversation, and Chomsky, not me, always rejected it.) I remember a debate I had with a colleague years ago in which he viciously attacked a movie that I rather liked, claiming it is totally worthless; I asked him if he saw the movie, and he replied: “Of course not – why would I lose time with such total shit?” This is how Chomsky acted towards me: he says nothing about the content of my work because he knows it is shit… And this is the true “deep state”: a space in which Chomsky chats friendly with Bannon and is invited to stay in Epstein’s luxury apartment when in New York, but refuses any contact with me – this is how today’s “deep state” Left functions.
I myself am once mentioned in the files: a message to Epstein (sender’s name redacted) draws his attention to a talk “Freud Lives” that I delivered in London in October 2017. According to some Facebook sources, Pam Bondi said at her Congressional hearing on February 11 2026 that if we prosecute everybody in the Epstein files, the whole system will collapse. If she really said this or not, the statement is true – I would just add that the system would already collapse if all who participated in Epstein’s universe, exchanging messages with him, were to be properly and publicly investigated. The message of the Epstein affair is: no state without the deep state, i.e., no state power without its obscene double.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1976, p. 561.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, New York: W.W. Norton and Company 2007, p. 98.
Adrian Johnston, Infinite Greed, New York: Columbia University Press 2024, p. 216.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, La marque du sacre, Paris: Carnets Nord 2008. Numbers in brackets refer to the pages of this book.
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Happy Saturday!
Back during the George W. Bush administration, frustrated punk rockers got political, releasing music from The War on Errorism to The Empire Strikes First to American Idiot. Should there be similar music during the second Trump administration? In today’s American Artifacts section, Joshua Tait asks this question, delving into the history of the Rock Against Bush scene and how politics—and ways of accessing music—have changed since then. Elsewhere in this newsletter, you’ll find a blog suggestion from yours truly, recommendations from Dispatch chief of staff Campbell Rawlins, a book review from the writer Nadya Williams, and a Work of the Week featuring that stalwart of American art, Edward Hopper.
We’re also introducing a new essay series: Where I’m From. Each week, a writer will share a meditation on his or her hometown—a bustling metropolis, distant desert outpost, quiet suburb, or somewhere in between—and what makes it unique. You can read our first entry here, from Dispatch regular Tim Sandefur. Look out for future editions on Saturdays!
On the rugged austerity of a growing desert city.
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