Vote Because It's Your One Chance to Make Some Billionaires Sad

My father fucking hated rich people. I mean, he despised the hell out of them as a group for simply existing. Some of this was born of his hardscrabble upbringing on the streets of Brooklyn in the 1950s. He went from struggling working-class kid to lower middle-class family man by the time he died at age 46, with some stops along the way to solidly middle class and to food stamps-needing poverty. But it wasn't simple resentment. He didn't aspire to be rich. He aspired to not have to worry all the time about money, a far more humble dream. Rich people were pricks, see, because of their material indulgences and their seeming freedom from consequences for their actions. He took great joy whenever a rich person suffered some fall from grace. Seriously, few things made him happier than seeing a rich man sad. This midterm election would thrill him.

If you look at a list of the 10 biggest individual/family donors to political campaigns this year, it's pretty fucking clear who the billionaires, as a whole, support. There is exactly one, George Soros, who gives primarily (or exclusively) to Democrats. The other nine give primarily (or exclusively) to Republicans, including sad, ranting pestilence Elon Musk, movie villains the Winklevi, and legit nutzoid cockscab Paul Singer, along with assorted investors, shipping magnates, and other assmites. They all desperately want the GOP to keep the majority in at least the Senate because they can slap down the House's subpoenas and investigations. But if the entire Congress is Democratic, then some shit is more likely to go through the fan and actually land on these pampered and powdered pussies. It's easier to defund Starlink contracts if you have both houses.

Early voting has gotten and is getting and will be getting under way across the country, and if you need to motivate someone to fucking vote, for fuck's sake, and vote for Democrats, then tell them that this is a rare chance to make some billionaires sad. I mean, really, how many chances do you, average Joe or Jane or  Jordan (to include a nonbinary name), get in this life to do something that might cause Elon Musk to cry? They are precious few, and not buying a Tesla isn't really one of them. This is like walking onto a yacht and kicking Jeff Bezos in the nuts. "Yeah, even rich balls can feel pain," you might yell.

Musk is going to end up dumping around a half-billion dollars into this election, if his current donation rate holds, to try to buy his way out of congressional oversight. The sad part is that this amount of money doesn't affect his wealth at all. He'll have made it back by the end of November, probably more. The sadder part is that our post-Citizens United campaign cash orgy has gotten so out of hand that the safe words have been abandoned and the billionaires are just fucking democracy to death with fistfuls of cash and laughing that no one is doing a goddamn thing to stop them. 

But what Musk can't buy is your ability to walk into a voting booth or a little voting cubby and click the machine or mark your ballot for Democrats. Even if he gave you a thousand bucks before you went to polls or filled in your mail-in ballot, you can still do what you want once it's you and a list of candidates. Musk can't stop what I hope is coming if Democrats get investigative power. Hell, Musk himself has even "joked" that if Democrats look into how he dicked over the world with his DOGE bullshit, including the mass murder of millions through his actions, he'd go to prison. 

It's not just Musk. All of those crypto dicks and AI douches, who are going in big for Republicans, would be looking at the potential (and, goddamn, they better not fuck it up) for genuine oversight from a Congress that actually acts like a co-equal branch of the fucking government and not Trump's ass wipe dispenser, cleaning him up after he shits all over himself and everyone else. All those clips of "Ruben Gallego Destroys Some Asshole at a Hearing" are functionally meaningless beyond making you feel good. However, if Gallego is part of a Democratic-led Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, he has the power to genuinely fuck up the shit of, say, Open AI's Sam Altman, who simply declined to go to a recent hearing. 

Maybe I'm just my father's son, but, goddamn, I wanna ruin the days of some rich fucks who think they're untouchable. Maybe they'll prove to be. Maybe Democrats are so corrupted by their billionaires' funds that they'll choke on taking a few down. But if you wanna at least try to put the ultra-wealthy on notice that their days of being above or beyond the law are over, you gotta be willing to make them cry. And with one simple action, you can can make that happen. Get out there and do it. You'll feel really good about yourself if we succeed. 

Ongoing Bullshit About Statues of Christopher Columbus, Genocidal Maniac

Christopher Columbus was a genocidal maniac and con artist who didn't know where the fuck he was going when he set out on the Atlantic Ocean to find passage to China. His calculations on his journey were so wrong that Portugal told him to go fuck himself with his yardarm. Motherfucker thought until the end of his greedy, murderous, enslaving life that he had found a passage to Asia. It's not even clear that he was Italian, despite the pathetic idiots who cling to that identity; various sources say he was Portuguese and Polish or maybe Catalan and Jewish. It's pretty telling that none of these groups are trying very hard to claim him, like "No, we're good, you keep that prick." (Note: I am Italian. Fuck Columbus.)

Starting a few years ago, a number of people decided that maybe it was some fucking bullshit to have statues everywhere that honored someone who encouraged and even rewarded the slaughter and mutilation and rape and enslavement of indigenous people. So dozens of them were torn down, removed, or moved to less prominent locations, especially in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests. Bringing attention to racial injustices and bullshit tributes spread from Black people to other groups. When you hear people criticize "wokeness" (or "Woke 1," god help us), they forget that almost all of it was a valuable reassessment of how we have built a society around racism and racist symbolism. So suck all our dicks, Columbus statues.

Now that the country as a whole has shifted from approving of wokeness to now being against any of the progressive connotations of the term, and now that we're run by a cabal of dickheads who would gladly go back to forcing slaves to dig for gold for them under threat of a behanding, all of a sudden, people want their fucking Columbus statues back. 

Just as you'd expect, a statue of Columbus now sits on whatever remains of the White House grounds. President Donald Trump, who always loves when he can honor a fellow rapist, has been cheering on Columbus like he's a crazed woman who wants to marry an imprisoned serial killer. In March of this year, a replica of a statue that had been tossed into the Inner Harbor in Baltimore in 2020 was plopped in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building like a pile of shit in human form. 

Trump has for years gone all-in on sucking Columbus's dick and, by extension, the dicks of Italian-American leaders who embarrass the rest of us with their worship of both. Apparently, "the radical left communists hate Columbus and they want to abolish Columbus Day. They're still trying very hard," Trump blurbled. He claimed that he's "resurrecting Columbus," like he's Jesus with Lazarus or some shit, and he called Columbus a "hero," which is like calling Ted Bundy "an expert in sorority rooming management."

In that same speech this past week, Trump demanded that the city of Columbus, Ohio, restore the statue of their namesake that had been taken down in 2020. Then, Mayor Andrew Ginther, who is still mayor now, said that it represented "patriarchy, oppression and divisiveness" and something better should be put in its place. A recent community group report said the statue, which is in storage, should be displayed in a "community facility" with proper historical context that doesn't involve lying about what a son of a bitch he was. 

The movement to restore Columbus is taking place elsewhere in the country. In Chicago, an Italian-American committee is trying to get three statues, including one in Grant Park, put back, even reaching out to Trump for help, which probably means Trump naming some random activist citizens so his idiot hordes can inundate them with doxxing and death threats. There's an ongoing battle over a statue in Syracuse, NY; that one should have been removed two years ago, but constant litigation has kept it in the center of town. The removed statue in Wilmington, Delaware, may end up returning when a move to prevent that failed at the City Council. Bridgeport, Connecticut, debated whether to put the statue back up and it looks like it will be restored. You get the idea: little battles everywhere a statue was taken down.

There's something so sad about a nation that can't give up its myths even when it's shown that the myths are bullshit, the heroes are pedophiles, and we can very much have a say here in how the Columbus clusterfuck of atrocities tale is told. It's of a piece of Trump and the nutzoid GOP's war on anything that would make white people look bad. Making people believe lies about Columbus rather than teaching them the truth about Jim Crow or migrant workers or the genocide of indigenous people is just easier than telling them the truth. "DEI" means just that: stop lying about the awful shit from our past and in our present.

One last note: the Columbus statue in Baltimore was in that city's Little Italy. In May, on the pedestal that remains, liberated from the colonizing madman that once stood there, an activist named Duane "Shorty" Davis placed a toilet. One local legislator got all upset because the local police said they weren't bothering to investigate, which seems exactly right. All the statues of Columbus should be reshaped into shitters that we can all use, especially on Indigenous Peoples' Day. 

The Cornell Rape Case from 2016 Shows How Not Much Happens Even If It's Handled Better Than Jane Doe's

The Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper at Cornell University, published an article on February 1, 2016, that said, "A female student reported she was sexually assaulted at approximately 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, after the perpetrator led her to a bedroom." The assault occurred at the Psi Upsilon fraternity house in the early morning of January 31, when "a white male, approximately 170 pounds, around 5 feet 9 inches tall, with a medium complexion and wavy dark brown or black collar-length hair" attacked the female student. As for what happened, he lured the woman to his room, and "he then locked the door, pushed the woman against the door and tried to have sexual intercourse with her twice from behind. He is also accused of forcing the woman to have oral sex with him and pushing her onto the bed where he allegedly sexually abused her with his fingers, records show."

A Deputy Chief of the Cornell University Police Department said that "Reports like this are relatively rare in our community because sex offenses are significantly under-reported." Unlike the 2024 horrific gang rape of Jane Doe, the CUPD's referral to local law enforcement in Ithaca and Tompkins County was acted on. A warrant was issued for an arrest. Still, Tompkins County DA Gwen Wilkinson blamed "underage drinking" for rapes and sexual assaults. 

The fraternity was given a temporary suspension from any activities while this was an ongoing investigation.

By the end of the first week of February, 21 year-old Wolfgang Ballinger turned himself in to face the felony charges: "attempted rape, criminal sexual assault, and sex abuse." Ballinger was the president of the Psi Upsilon chapter at Cornell where the rape took place. (Note: I'm using "rape" because forced oral sex and penetration with fingers are rape in the way any normal human understands the word, even if legal definitions vary.) 

Ballinger's father ran the very popular music venue Webster Hall in New York City where Wolfgang worked bar. Every woman is feeling how chilling that thought is: this guy in charge of your drinks.  Because Ballinger came from money, which inevitably means lawyers throwing everything at the prosecutor to derail the case, he wasn't formally indicted until July 2016 and only for one charge, first degree sexual abuse. 

In April 2017, Ballinger took a deal where he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of "forcible touching." In 2017, current DA Matthew Van Houten had taken over from Wilkinson, and he said that the victim "is wholeheartedly in support of this resolution." She did not want to have to go through the trauma of a trial. 

At the sentencing hearing, the woman made a statement, and you should read the excerpts in articles here and here for how the rape affected her and her family. This part really got me: "The day I went to the hospital for my rape kit, I had to first wait for another woman to finish being seen. When the nurse finally arrived at my room, she looked at me with sad, sunken eyes. ‘On average, 1 in 10 rapes are reported. That means 20 girls were likely assaulted last night because two of you went to the police today.’ I just looked back at her quietly. I didn’t feel lucky to be one of the women with the courage to come forward, I only felt grief. I am standing here today for the 18 other women that wanted to deal with their assault on their own terms.”

And this: "No matter how much money or status he has, it doesn’t let him take what he likes without consequence. Because there will be consequences. I will not stop. You cannot break me." 

Ballinger had already been expelled from Cornell, although he had started taking classes at NYU and Hunter College in NYC. He was sentenced to six years probation and given a fine, the strictest sentence allowed for the misdemeanor. His probation conditions included needing to stay away from children, relatives excepted, and a prohibition "from entering establishments where alcohol is sold 'for on-premise consumption.'" Oh, but he had an exception for his job at Webster Hall. He could still serve drinks to women there. Now, he's a "hospitality professional" who managed a hotel.

As for Psi Upsilon, the fraternity had its recognition by Cornell revoked for a 3-year period because of this case, other incident reports (including fights where racist words were flying at non-white students), and violating the interim suspension by having a party during it. And then, after an appeal, the Vice President for Student and Campus Life reduced it to 1.5 years. In an unexpected turn, the Board of Governors for the national Psi Upsilon body closed the Cornell house completely in September 2017 after a racist incident.

There you go. That's what happened when an on-campus rape allegation followed the proper process. It's pathetic, sure, but it's something, and that something is sadly reflective of the outcome of rape cases across the country. 

But here's the thing: Cornell knew what was going on at its fraternities and still let them continue. It knew how bad things were. It knew to the point that in December 2022, the Student Assembly issued a resolution "Condemning Greek Life" at the university. Among its assertions, "Cornell has a known rape culture where victims are silenced and perpetrators are often never held accountable for their actions" and "24% of undergraduate women who experienced nonconsensual sexual contact reported the most serious incident occurred at a fraternity chapter house or annex." It also mentions the 2016 case. 

The resolution didn't directly call for an end to fraternities at Cornell, but that's what should happen there and everywhere.