Almost nobody can afford the basic necessities of life. But here’s the news the algorithm is feeding us:

• Donald Trump opened the White House for his donor’s gladiatorial extravaganza — just ahead of that donor’s push for new federal policy that would allow him to monopolize boxing.

• Barack and Michelle Obama have built an $850 million shrine to themselves and are trumpeting its self-portraits and audiovisual displays about them and their lives.

• After helping cover up her husband’s cognitive decline and creating the conditions for Trump’s return to the White House, Jill Biden isn’t apologizing; she’s instead now on a recrimination tour to try to sell books.

• Multimillionaire celebrities were given free tickets to Knicks games whose tickets were reportedly selling for $200,000 a pop in a city where one in four people live at or below the poverty line.

• Jeff Bezos is campaigning to avoid paying more taxes, and Mark Zuckerberg just docked his $300 million yacht near the Seattle office where he just did mass layoffs.

• Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire, thanks in part to rule changes that effectively force anyone fortunate enough to have a 401(k) to invest their savings in his government-subsidized money-losing company.

Those jubilant headlines and viral social media posts aren’t merely jammed down our throats along with $5-a-gallon gas prices and ever-increasing health insurance and grocery bills. They are algorithmically force-fed to us with a side of corporate punditry expressing shock and horror that candidates like Graham Platner, Abdul El-Sayed, and other populists down the ballot are promising to burn this entire rotting system down to the studs.

Indeed, amid all this wealth porn, billionaire media are casting the populist zeal — and its surge in polls — among voters as the insane and inexplicable rage of a herd of dumb “deplorables,” when in fact it is entirely predictable.

After all, this chasm between what most of us are experiencing and what the elite are celebrating in our faces seems dangerously French Revolution-ish — only back in the eighteenth century, the serfs weren’t getting the “let them eat cake” message via screens. Here in 2026, this is all being injected into our consciousness twenty-four seven by the internet in our pocket.

Immersing a suffering country in algorithm-amplified wealth porn makes this situation genuinely unprecedented in human history — and a recipe for a kind of social chaos we haven’t yet seen.

Our minds are being hooked up to a machine owned by the planet’s richest people — a Clockwork Orange–esque device forcing us to watch those same rich people party while the rest of us are struggling to survive. As oligarchs try to buy the primaries, destroy the candidates, and/or shut down the general elections that might change things, their machine is simultaneously trying to convince us that a populist backlash is deranged, unwarranted, and not “electable.”

Taken together, the message from the top is clear: The gaslighting will continue until morale improves.

If the contrast between your own lived experience and your social media feed’s wealth porn and status-quo-worshipping political commentary is making you feel despondent and insane, let me reassure you that you aren’t crazy. Those feelings are an absolutely normal, human reaction to this inhuman situation, which seems increasingly unsustainable.

Of course, I’m using “seems” and not “is” because I know America is exceptional in how much suffering we are willing to tolerate. Where other countries’ populations angrily flood into the streets at the mere hint of cuts to stuff like pensions and health care, the last half century has mostly witnessed an electorate quietly accepting oligarchs’ ever-bolder rampages and then obediently nodding along with billionaire media as it insists that politicians’ occasionally compassionate rhetoric (followed by inaction) will suffice.

But I suspect this time around could be different.

I suspect the typical social tranquilizers and distractions won’t work as well anymore.

I suspect the old odes to “centrism” and civility won’t take.

And though I’m a big sports fan, I also suspect even the “let them eat NBA games” sedative of athletics will be less politically anesthetizing in a country where people can no longer afford the mortgage-sized price of a ticket, nor the electricity or cable needed to watch said games on TV.

I’m not saying the guillotines are definitely coming, nor am I hoping they make a comeback. Social chaos isn’t good for anybody. But in light of how flagrant oligarchs’ class war has now become, I keep returning to that famous line from John F. Kennedy: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

That wasn’t a wish — it was a warning. And nobody at the top is heeding it.