#nepobabies

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about)

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.

It's hard to remember now, but for more than three years under Biden, it was possible to read the headlines every morning and feel excited that your government was taking big, decisive action to tame the corporate behemoths that rip you off, maim you on the job, and undermine our democracy.

The antitrust surge under Biden was and is a truly remarkable thing: a sustained, organized, effective government policy that supported the interests of the majority of people against the interests of a tiny cohort of ultra-wealthy wreckers and looters. According to political scientists, that antitrust surge should have been impossible. In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":

https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf

The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:

Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.

When ordinary people want something that rich people don't want, ordinary people lose. Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.

And then there's antitrust. Ordinary people don't like having their wages stolen. They don't like having their rents jacked up by algorithmic collusion. They don't like having their air and water poisoned. They don't like being mangled or killed on the job. They don't like having to sign noncompetes that bar them from taking a better job if one opens up.

More to the point, working people are not made better off when stuff like this happens. On average, working people own either zero or nearly zero stocks, not even in a 401(k) retirement savings, because 40 years of wage stagnation and the near-abolition of employer based defined-benefits pensions has left most Americans with nearly no retirement savings (hence the panic over Trump and Musk's attempt to kill Social Security):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

By contrast, the richest 10% own 94% of all the stocks held by Americans. Even if you, personally, don't want to be locked up by a noncompete or have your water poisoned by frackers, if you're in the top 10%, you probably benefit when this happens. After all, businesses cheat and maim because it's profitable, not because they're sadistic (they may be sadistic, or they may be depraved in their indifference to the harms they visit upon the rest of us, but the reason they do it is money):

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-ownership-wealthiest-americans-one-percent-record-high-economy-2024-1

Antitrust systematically attacks the sky-high monopoly rents extracted by the largest corporations and redistributes them to working people and small businesses, which, for the most part, are not listed on stock exchanges or traded over the counter. In other words, antitrust is a way to clobber the policy priorities favored by the wealthy in order to benefit the rest of us.

That means that the antitrust surge is amazing. It's one of those things that shouldn't exist at all. It defies political science. What's more, antitrust fervor precedes the Biden administration. Some of the Biden administration's most important antitrust cases (like the Google case) started under Trump. Some were even kicked off by far-right state attorneys general, like Texas's cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of nearly every AG in American in suing Facebook.

Antitrust fervor isn't a US phenomenon – it's global. Take Canada: in its entire history, the Competition Bureau (Canada's answer to the FTC) filed only three merger challenges, and won zero of them. But last year, Parliament passed a massive, muscular new bill giving the Competition Bureau unprecedented powers:

https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/44-1/c-59

In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority led the world in investigating and punishing Big Tech monopolies…and they did so under a succession of shambolic Conservative governments. Indeed, it was a Labour (or "Labour") Prime minister, Keir Starmer, who fired the head of the CMA and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

We've seen big, ambitious antitrust action all over the world: Germany, France, Spain, the EU, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and even China.

It goes without saying that there is no dark money org funneling billionaires' wealth into this project to destroy billionaires. This is a groundswell political phenomenon, it's global, and it's powerful. The fact that Starmer and Trump have gutted their wildly effective antitrust agencies is heartbreaking, but it's not the end. The reason the US and the UK pursued such an ambitious antitrust agenda is the public groundswell. Getting rid of the agencies doesn't kill that groundswell – if anything, it only makes people madder.

It's hard to overstate just how weird the antitrust surge is. We've been fighting for decades for even tiny concessions to the interests of working people – a modest, below-inflation rise in the minimum wage, say, or small-dollar efforts to improve public education, reduce student debt, or control the price of prescription drugs. These efforts have largely failed, and when they've succeeded, the victories were modest, or worse, merely symbolic.

But antitrust is the exception. Antitrust – again, a movement that is squarely aimed at neutralizing the power of the wealthy – is the most successful popular movement of the past decade. Companies worth trillions of dollars are facing breakup as a result of antitrust cases. Everyone from meat-packers to landlords to sea freighters to pharma companies have faced massive, multi-billion-dollar setbacks at the expense of the antitrust movement.

Like I said, the current antitrust surge kicked off under Trump. But of course, that doesn't mean the GOP power-brokers support it – rather, they were cornered into it by their own base. The same is true of the Democrats: Biden didn't appoint the most effective antitrust enforcers the US has seen since the 1970s because he opposed corporate monopolies. Remember, this is the guy who, on the campaign trail, told business audiences that "nothing would fundamentally change" under a Biden administration:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Nor does the Democratic Party power-structure support this stuff. Remember when Harris's billionaire surrogates Marc Cuban and Reid Hoffman demanded that Harris fire the Biden administration's antitrust enforcers?

https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/

The success of the antitrust movement happened in spite of the Democratic Party, in spite of the GOP. To the extent that either party embraced an antitrust agenda, it's because the people demanded it, so undeniably that the parties chose the public interest over the interest of the billionaires who call nearly every shot for them.

It's impossible to overstate what an anomaly this is. On today's episode of the excellent Organized Money podcast, hosts Matt Stoller and David Dayen reminisce with Jonathan Kanter, Biden's former DoJ antitrust boss, about a conference they attended together in 2017 where the after-dinner keynote speaker was Richard Posner, a judge who was hugely influential in the dismantling of antitrust in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Dayen, the substance of Posner's keynote was:

Antitrust. That's dead, isn't it? I don't know what you guys are even talking about. This is ridiculous. There is no such thing as antitrust law.

And Kanter, Dayen, Stoller and future FTC chair Lina Khan were all sitting around a table, listening to this in 2017. By 2021, Kanter and Khan were running the DoJ and FTC antitrust agenda, and they did more in the next three years than all their predecessors over the past 40 years, combined.

Khan, Kanter, and their colleagues (like Rohit Chopra at the CFPB) did incredible work during the Biden administration. There is no denying their skill, their competence, their commitment. But the reason they were able to bring all those virtues to bear in service to working Americans is the massive popular surge of rage at corporate dominance. In other words, the Biden administration's prodigious trustbusting accomplishments were the effect of the antitrust movement, not its cause.

The corollary is that just because Trump has dismantled the agencies that were buoyed up by the movement, it doesn't make the movement itself smaller or less powerful. If anything, the Trump regime's relentless pursuit of an agenda in service to the rich at working people's expense will only add fuel to the anti-corporate, anti-billionaire wildfire. Trump's tariff chaos might be bad for some parts of the ruling class, but as Van Jackson writes for Labor Notes, there's plenty of plutocrats who love the prospect of a deep recession sparked by global trade chaos:

[L]avish tax cuts, deregulation, and an environment friendly to union-busting are just as valuable to most CEOs as a growing economy. What they lose in the stock market, they will more than make up in surplus labor, a fire sale on distressed assets, and Trump’s promise to totally eliminate the capital gains tax.

https://labornotes.org/blogs/2025/04/viewpoint-why-oligarchs-want-recession?

American wealth is more concentrated today than it was in France on the eve of the French Revolution. People are pissed. That anger is out there, waiting to be harnessed by smart political movements:

https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1909607195961917687

To grab that anger and mobilize it, we need to show people that their rage over specific issues is actually downstream of excessive corporate power. Furious that one company owns every brand of eggs and has used the excuse of bird flu to make record profits? You're not angry about eggs, you're angry about corporate power:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/#keep-cal-maine-and-carry-on

Worried that the EPA has been put in an induced coma and that means your kids will grow up with asthma and lead poisoning? You're actually angry about corporate power:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/04/air-pollution-trump-administration/682361/

The Department of Education is in the hands of a woman who took over her rapey husband's professional wrestling monopoly, a corporation that misclassified performers as contractors, leaving them without health care so they have to beg for pennies on Gofundme so they can die with dignity of their workplace-related injuries:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8UQ4O7UiDs

Trump's Secretary of Education is monumentally unqualified for her position. Not only is she is planning to fire teachers en masse and replace them with AI, she doesn't know what AI is and just gave a speech where she repeatedly referred to it as "A-1":

https://gizmodo.com/trumps-education-chief-linda-mcmahon-repeatedly-calls-ai-a1-in-school-speech-2000587329

Angry about this? Worried that your kids' teachers are about to be replaced with steak-sauce thanks to the incompetence of this fucking muttonhead? Me too. But you're not just angry at Trump or Linda McMahon – you're angry at corporate power.

In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians?

https://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf

The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement. When I look at the incredible, organic, bottom-up surge of antitrust energy, the only explanation I can find is that something similar is happening here. Concentrated corporate power is the common enemy of beer drinkers, surgeons, shippers, patients, farmers, grocery shoppers, social media users, any anyone who wears sneakers:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Something remarkable is happening, right under our noses. Nothing like this has happened in my lifetime. The world is terrifying, but this? This is exciting.

Smart political organizers have a once-in-a-century opportunity here. Trump's wildly unpopular destruction of the antitrust enforcement system opens up all kinds of opportunities for state enforcers (remember, states can also enforce antitrust law):

https://www.thesling.org/state-antimonopoly-enforcement-must-be-a-guardian-of-american-democracy-heres-how/

A massive political change that bubbles up from the bottom, aimed directly at the richest, most powerful people in the history of the human race, is an amazing thing. As bad as things are – and boy are they bad – this remains true, and important.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever/#oligarchism

Image: umseas (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/snre/34605145761/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[whatbigotspost]

Ya know what I don’t like about the chatter about “nepo babies” in Hollywood?

The fact that everyone doesn’t already assume that most famous people are them.

Because y’all. We should be assuming it’s the default in Hollywood. Because it is.

After 20 years in the extremely indie micro budget filmmaking community in both Indiana and Texas, I can tell ya, all over the country there are extremely talented folks creating, writing, acting, etc. who should be recognized but they’re not. Whose work should get more eyes but it doesn’t. And it’s pretty much exclusively because they don’t know the right people to open the right doors and they don’t have the ability (for a variety of very different reasons) to leave their entire lives and communities behind to move to LA and spending years taking abuse at low wage PA gigs, working 3-4 jobs to make rent, pounding the pavement with endless auditions, withstanding constant rejection, etc. waiting to see if they “make it big.”

Power perpetuates power. Hollywood insiders will always give advantages to their kids in ways big and small. Even if someone’s famous parents don’t ask for favors or overtly hire them, those kids’ social lives and networks are linked with the right people to open the right doors. Plus getting the education a mega celebrity can afford for their kids? The private lessons? The exposure to the industry from day one? Knowing the right way to socially comport yourself in Hollywood spaces from day one?

Advantage on advantage on advantage.

I’m not saying that there aren’t very massively talented nepo babies in their own right. But I am saying that for a nepo baby we can never REALLY know if they would have made it on their own. We simply can’t know if they grew up in a trailer park in Kansas if we’d ever know their names.

I think we should talk about that all the time and never stop letting them know we’re aware of it honestly 😂 I think that given all the advantages and given how gatekept Hollywood is, the literal least nepo babies can do is just own the truth that we can never ever ever know if without daddy they would have ever broken out.

[trixterdark]

But do I ship

WYBORG

Weisswoman

Or Watman

[dadosilvaoficial]

Nepo Baby

Foi na luta foi suado Foi difícil não foi fácil Venci pelo meu talento Eu não sou apadrinhado Nepo baby Apadrinhado Se tem talento tudo bem Mais sem talento é um esculacho

[nezuscribe]

being roped into a strange dating scheme with nepotism baby gojo who just got in one too many scandals and needs to fix his reputation.

one of his assistants found you working on the first floor of his company’s building at the chain coffee spot, handing out sugary drinks as if your life depended on it.

you met with her after your shift, hearing about how you would be the man’s fake girlfriend, somebody they could create to do what and when they wanted. the gojo family couldn’t take another hit from their scandalous son.

she told you how much they’d pay you and your eyes almost fell out when you heard the price. and it’d only be for half a year, if that. they just needed to mark him look more…likeable.

so, you agreed after a while of thinking, seeing that if it were fake there wasn’t much to lose.

but it wasn’t fake,

and you were sitting in front of the notorious genius billionaire playboy (why not throw philanthropist as well seeing how he gives interviews sometimes).

it’s nerve wracking, and it feels like he’s not only disinterested but like this was most gruesome thing he’s ever had to do before.

the team is going over all the rules, paperwork, nda’s, agreements, legal works, whatever, but all you can focus on is him.

the way his eyes read over the papers, his large hands resting across his face as he flips through the packets with a pen in hand.

his white hair that’s slightly tousled and the pink pout of his lips. you’ve never seen somebody look so humanly perfect before.

one of the ladies calls your name, a raised brow as heat rises to your cheeks, your head quickly nodding to let her know that you were paying attention.

this is serious, she reminds you, and you apologize for zoning out.

but you allow yourself one last peek at him before you feel the fire under your skin erupt in embarrassment.

because gojo satoru, the most powerful and important man across tokyo, the most influential and intelligent person who’s become a ceo at such a young age, the most eligible bachelor that everybody wants,

is looking at you like your nothing but gum stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

like he’d rather be sitting across from anybody else than you.

[rrxxnnllz39]

🏆1998: Fernanda Montenegro becomes a Golden Globe Nominee (Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama) for the movie "Central Station", directed by Walter Salles. 🏆2024: Fernanda Torres becomes a Golden Globe Nominee (Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama) for the movie "I'm Still Here", directed by Walter Salles.

[collegeboysam]

SCREAMING. lochlan owning up to the handjob is god tier incest behavior i literally thought he was going to act like he didn't remember shit. he said yes i did jerk you off saxon your dick looked lonely over there and i'm a people pleaser so i let you fuck my fist since you're so horny all the time what's the issue. I LOVE HIM 😭

[webshood]

Duke Thomas is actually the Wayne's family pretty boy.

He's a genius of his own, one of the smartest people in the family, his meta powers are like no other and despite being the one who does the day shift he's handling vigilantism, school and his newfound modeling career in stride.

Duke started modeling, because the Wayne family doesn't actually have a public nepobaby. Dick is a cop, Jason is legally still dead by his own request, Cass is not the biggest fan of the media, Steph is technically not a part of the family and Tim is already their corporate nepobaby, Damian is still a kid, so Duke had to take in the reins and assume the role of "famous person who only got that far, due to his family".

He was hesitant about it at first not sure if he could pull it off, but slowly with Bruce as backing and the Wayne Enterprises public relations department on call, he's been recognized as a nepobaby. He's doing every type of publicity, fashion photoshoots, he was Coca-Cola's face for six months, he's the one with a Samsung exclusivity partnership, he's always attending the met gala, going on movie premieres.

People are tired of seeing his face everywhere, when he got cast on the role of a originally white character, the internet was in shambles they were throwing tantrums and screaming about accuracies, but all of that got overshadowed by him appearing on Forbes with Bruce on a father and son photoshoot, where Bruce called him "the son who takes after me the most, he has an aura that attracts every camera on the room, he's like a beam of light."

People got even more pissed with it, after all Bruce isn't even his real dad what does he mean with "who takes after me the most"??? Is he that stupid? Dear god, how can these people have this much money and act like that

[aingeal98]

The thing that gets me about "Helly was never cruel" is that he's completely right but also. Helly never had the opportunity to be? From the moment she came into existence everyone around her had power of some sort over her, she was the newest severed employee and all her older coworkers were men. Everything she did was geared towards defying the cruelty that those in power, including Helena, subjected her to. She was aggressive and angry and brittle and witty but she never had enough power to be cruel.

What's fascinating to me about Helly/Helena is that we know everything Helena is capable of is something Helly is also capable of. Their limits of defiance and will and their capacity for good and evil are the exact same. Helly was put in an environment where all that fire and no nonsense cut the bullshit attitude could only be channeled into rebellion. Helena grew up in an environment where those same traits were either stamped out or refined into sharpness and ruthless cruelty.

There's no wiggle room when it comes to wondering "What if the roles were reversed?" because we know exactly what would happen. They're the same person by nature and completely different due to nurture. What a weird feeling it must be, to know the person you despise most in the world is someone you know beyond a shadow of a doubt you could have been exactly like if things were different. I am all you could be and you are all I am terrified of becoming.

[flovoid]

Fed love from silver spoons, reasons to be grateful… 🥄ᯓ★

[luluump3]

Nico is the kind of person who has several hobbies and manages to be amazing at ALL of them. Painting? Writting? Cooking? He's amazing at all of them. He's the type of crazy person who go to college just for fun because he's already rich anyway

[jenoutof10]

based off this

[mrmanbat]

Bro I love Tim- okay- I am not hating on Tim.

Keep that in mind while I say this:

Some of you are grasping at straws for his trauma.

Like shits happen sure, but for vigilante/superhero standards? He’s doing damn pretty good.

Bro is surprisingly self actualized. He can recognize when he ain’t doing too hot and always seeks help. He’s relatively good at not taking on too much. Tim is (again, I say relatively) in tune with his body and feelings.

I love Red Robin okay? But yall took this marvelous crash out and made it his whole personality. Can’t a man (try to) take down two assassin organizations to search for a man Tim’s convinced himself to believe isn’t dead without being labeled as unstable?

[ghurab-alzilal]

Preparations

Jason: Okay, I'm going to get the wedding cake.

Damian: Excellent, while you do that I'll check on the ring bear.

Jason: Great!

Raven: ...

Raven: You both mean ring bearer, right?

Damian and Jason: ...

Raven: Look at my eyes and tell me you're not going to bring a dangerous wild animal to our wedding!

Jason: Who would bear the rings to the altar if not?

Raven: ...

Damian: Alright, then look at me in the eyes and tell me that a cute baby bear carrying our rings to the altar wouldn't be fucking adorable.

Raven, thoughtful : Well... That's sound pretty cute...

Prev?

[viviandarkbloombartylusversion]

Rising movie director Barty crouch jr working on his father's (barty crouch sr, the producers) set and meeting famous actor Regulus, known for starring in horror and gothic films from childhood, who he's had a huge celebrity crush on for years, Barty adores watching Regulus on set and Regulus loves having Bartys attention on him

[jcjensensnepobaby]

Starter for @apocalypse-murder-drones

Descending from the clouds was the space-yacht, it was a more luxurious and fancy larger spaceship adorned with the Elliott Family Crest on the airlock hatch and the back rudder. The ship landed safely to the meet point, the door to the airlock was open, allowing Tessa and her drones to come aboard.