Bye Bye Billionaires

I just finished my second Meta boycott in the past couple weeks. I had just come back from a self-imposed break when Michael Stipe asked everyone to boycott Meta over their about-face on issues like protecting vulnerable youth and combating misinformation on their platforms. I’d do anything for Michael! And anyway, I enjoyed it. I’ve had a hard time readjusting to posting on Facebook and Instagram again. It made me remember what life was like before all this online noise. My sales and email sign-ups rose, so it appears Meta wasn’t helping me in business anyway.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it with all these billionaires who are now running everything. Trump, in his first week, has found more ways to violate the Constitution and the law than he did in his entire first term. He even found time to rug-pull his fandom with his and Melania’s crypto coins! Elon’s running around k-holing and Sieg Heiling and attending Nazi rallies. Sundar established “The Gulf of America” on Google maps (but only visible to US viewers ~ is that a North Korea enough level of pandering for you?). Zuck made everyone mad getting TikTok banned and removing fact-checkers. At the behest of RFK Jr (who’s made over $800K from just ONE vaccine lawsuit), Trump froze all NIH grants. The least egregious this week has been Bezos, who just took his girlfriend (who’s had so much plastic surgery she looks lab-created) to flash her titties at the presidential Inauguration. We can’t let him off the hook for past actions, however, such as trying his best to outlaw unions and repeal worker protections.

The internet is full of stories about MAGA voters now stunned to find out programs like Head Start are on the chopping block and non-white immigrants of all stripes, certainly not criminals, are being deported. The issue with immigration is Trump promised to deport 1 million “criminal” immigrants immediately, but there are actually only around 13000 immigrants who committed crimes here in the US. You’d have to be a complete moron to commit a crime while you’re trying to get citizenship; ICE watches them like a hawk. So now families and people who were given asylum or are awaiting their asylum hearings are being deported, even though seeking asylum is perfectly legal. It would be kind of fun to watch the people who voted for this cruelty getting their just desserts, if only the rest of us didn’t have to live here. 

Yesterday my Chinese American son asked if he should start carrying his certificate of citizenship to with him in case ICE raids his school. I tried to reassure him, but it’s so scary, I don’t know. This has never been about “illegal immigration”. From Trump’s very first “Mexican Rapists” speech in 2015 this has been about white supremacy.

My heart is broken for my children. My youngest has been living in fear since he was 6 years old, when one of his first grade classmates told him Trump would deport him if he got elected. He was out of his mind with fear every time he saw a Trump campaign sign. And even though we had a brief respite Trump never really went away. Now my son says when he turns 18 he’s moving to a different country that wants him. He feels like people “voted against” him. And they did. He’s smart enough to see that. No one can claim they didn’t know exactly what would happen because Trump was very specific. His colleagues even wrote it all up in Project 2025 and leaked it. I’m encouraging my son to apply to the university in Rome that’s trying to recruit him for their cross-country team.

My oldest son is looking into moving to New Zealand since he and his fiancee are biologists and Trump just ordered a freeze on the communications of all US health agencies as well as pausing all research funds. We are going to see a huge brain drain as scientists are forced out of their jobs by these troglodytes. Other countries like New Zealand have already begun trying to lure our scientists to emigrate with preferred status and fast-track citizenship offers. 

My daughter will have to put her life on the line if she gets pregnant in North Carolina, because hospitals here are refusing to treat women over 12 weeks for pregnancy issues like bleeding. Several women have been turned away to bleed out in parking lots and give birth in elevators. Many babies have already died due to these decisions. I myself might not be here if this law had been in effect when I was hemorrhaging and had to be rushed to the ER weeks before my oldest was born. My daughter’s great-grandmother and grandmother had more rights than she has now in 2025. Think about that.

And again, I can’t blame my kids for wanting to get out of here. Anyone who isn’t  a white heterosexual man has already been relegated to second class citizenship and scientists won’t have any jobs… but now I face the prospect of two of my children living across the world from one another. 

If all that weren’t bad enough, some friend of Trump’s has been encouraging him to re-start open air nuclear testing. Because, why not start that up again while at the same time defunding cancer research? And he already gave the new 90K IRS employees hired specifically to audit billionaires and wealthy corporations their walking papers. In short, these guys (and they’re all guys of course) are looting the government coffers at the expense of the rest of us.

The question is, are we going to do anything about it? I know it doesn’t seem like there’s much we can do. Especially here in North Carolina where the GOP has just about succeeded in overturning the fair election of a democratic judge. If they prevail it’s all over; there will be precedent for simply throwing out ballots whose results they don’t prefer and you can bet the rest of the country will embrace it. 

But here’s the thing. These guys are rich but we made them rich for the most part. Musk is doing his best to take over Wikipedia because he’s mad they acknowledge his heir-to-an-apartheid-emerald-mine upbringing that allowed him to buy into all these companies instead of his preferred fantasy that he is a super-genius who invented all this stuff. And Trump was given $400 million by his father (and STILL went bankrupt 6 times!).

But the rest of them? We made them. And we can take them down. Here’s my personal contribution: instead of advertising my business on Meta platforms I’m choosing Pinterest, who this week pledged to keep their DEIA policies in place. My mantra is, don’t shop where you can’t get hired. DEIA includes women, so I’m going to open a Costco membership. They are being sued by Republicans after their board voted to keep their DEIA policies in place. And this provides a tangent to the past…

A private business being sued by the government for establishing its own lawful policies is a door to fascism. These sorts of things happened all the time in Mussolini’s Italy. For instance, Mussolini took the Lenci Doll Company away from its founder, Elena Scavini, and gave it to two of his goons. Unsurprisingly, when taken over by a couple of fascist dudes who knew nothing about dolls, the once successful company was in trouble. So Mussolini forced Elena back to work for his friends. She died in a car crash, (I’ve always wondered if that was really an accident) and the company folded.

We should do everything we can while we still can to support the companies under threat from this new regime. Donate to Wikipedia. Join the ACLU. And remember, Google isn’t the only search engine. Meta isn’t the only social media platform, although I acknowledge they are hard to avoid at present due to their monopoly. 

I hope you will join me on Vero. This is both ad- and algorithm free! I’m so sick of ads taking up 90% of my Facebook and Instagram feeds… how about you? Vero is a true social platform. I’m Mandaline Official on Vero and you can get the app and follow me at https://vero.co/mandaline.

Another thing to do is start building your own wealth. My 2025 Income Kickstart is launching next week. Join the waitlist to get my 100 Ways to Make Your First $500 Online ebook and start getting paid by the internet while you work or sleep or do whatever you want. I won’t lie; Trump’s last administration was fantastic for my reselling business, because his tariffs and bumbling caused the flow of goods into the country to be so disrupted people had no choice but to buy from resellers like me. You want to jump into making internet money now so you can benefit from the next round. Plus, my Kickstart system is a custom-made plan unique to you and it doesn’t rely on social media marketing to succeed. Click here to join the waitlist.