THE REAL WELFARE QUEENS

WHEN YOU THINK of the Broligarchy, what images come to mind? For me, I see greedy, arrogant, thoughtless baby-men (especially Elon Musk) throwing endless tantrums to get what they want.

They sell a different story, of course: In their own eyes, they’re self-made heroes, visionary geniuses who are building the future entirely through private innovation and free-market competition. They talk the talk of fierce libertarians and disruptive capitalists who claim they built their empires on grit. They propose themselves as the new version of the modern American Dream. Can’t you just see the sparkle on their teeth as they gaze into the distance in their cowboy hats? Then the camera pulls back, and they’re standing on Mars, single-handedly dragging humanity into the future. In Peter Thiel’s case, he’d be standing at the top of Sauron’s Dark Tower, surveying his evil Orcs crushing the forces of Middle-earth—the little people.

But despite what the Tech Bros would like you to believe, their success has required weaving a complex, hidden web of political lobbying, taxpayer-funded grants, and backroom government contracts, which I’m going to call government handouts. Ronald Reagan weaponized the concept of “Welfare Queens” before he entered the White House, while Lee Atwater updated the GOP’s effective “Southern Strategy,” hammering the American public with misinformation and propaganda that demonized women of color. The “Welfare Queen” rhetoric was a lethal myth used to dismantle public safety nets and focus public anger on marginalized individuals, all while the GOP talked up their “family values.”

Trump and his sycophants—the GOP—are still at it. Evidently, their goal is starving children, the old, and the weak. It’s fine with them if Americans go hungry, when they should recognize what a moral failure this is: an international and cosmic stain on what ought to be a core American value—taking care of our own citizens. But, over and over, they vilify and demean the vulnerable, painting them as the squanderers of our tax dollars instead of as a vital part of our national community. This was just in an Atlantic piece:

Back in April, Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote an op-ed celebrating the Trump administration’s efforts to get Americans off food stamps. Officially known as SNAP, the program has shed an estimated 6 million participants since Donald Trump’s return to office—a shift that Rollins argued could help break a “vicious cycle” of government dependence.

We’re a nation full of so-called “Christians.” So what would Jesus say? Isn’t it our duty to feed the hungry and care for the sick? Or in terms of the Dalai Lama: Citizens must treat one another as brothers and sisters, practice compassion (sensing the pain of others, and trying to help), and understand that selfishness never brings peace. Caring for the welfare of our fellow man is the real source of our own happiness. We Americans must get off the surface of our lives and dig deeper, if we’re to re-discover what matters most in a world that’s lost the values that sustain our spiritual selves.

What does “welfare” actually represent? The first definition in my dictionary is: The health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group.

But there are a lot of Americans today who don’t give a damn about poor people’s health or happiness. And, in fact, “Welfare Queens” was also a Republican dog whistle to radicalize all our many racists, who were eagerly awaiting permission to hate. The GOP gave it to them. It’s a false narrative they’ve been pushing for far too long. And it’s another phrase that Democrats—Americans—need to normalize and take back.

But who are the Real Welfare Queens of this country? Behind the Tech Bros’ libertarian curtain, these “self-made” icons are The Real Welfare Queens—people who have used billions in government funding to create astronomical—grotesque—amounts of wealth for themselves. The very technology they use to rule the world was paid for by everyday people like you and me—teachers, nurses, and factory workers. So the real welfare rolls aren’t the struggling mothers and stigmatized people of color trying to survive the class war to keep them down. The Real Welfare Queens are the upper echelons of the Broligarchy who scream about government waste while using their leverage to hollow out our infrastructure from within.

We all remember Elon Musk brandishing his chainsaw while running DOGE and proclaiming he was cutting out all the government waste—which didn’t happen. What Musk orchestrated was a scorched-earth campaign that stripped food stamps from over four million hungry Americans and slashed Medicaid for the sick.

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at who’s actually sucking the government tit to enrich themselves. It’s not the bottom of the economic ladder but the very top—the Tech Lords weaponizing the government to create and protect their billions. And to add some festive irony to this essay, I’m using the very technology built by these oligarchs to expose their immense hypocrisy. I asked AI to put together this ranking of America’s Real Welfare Queens. Obviously, this doesn’t cover them all, but you’ll find some of your favorites. Wink wink. 😉 Especially the first.

1. Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX)

• Total Government Funding: $38+ Billion

• Current Net Worth: $720.9 Billion

• The Receipt: The undisputed sovereign of corporate welfare. A massive investigative analysis recorded over 400 federal contracts, 90 federal and local grants, six loans, and dozens of tax incentives. SpaceX has captured over $20 billion in NASA and Space Force lifelines, while Tesla extracted $12.3 billion from government-mandated regulatory emissions credit sales and a critical $465 million Department of Energy loan in 2010 that saved the firm from early insolvency.

2. Peter Thiel & Alex Karp (Palantir Technologies)

• Total Government Funding: Multi-Billion Dollar Surveillance Contracts

• Current Net Worth: $27.2 Billion (Thiel) / $12.2 Billion (Karp)

• The Receipt: Palantir skipped the commercial free market entirely to serve as a custom-built contractor for the security state. The firm was originally kept alive by seed money from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA. Palantir has extracted billions from the U.S. government, recently locking down a $1 billion Navy software contract and drawing hundreds of millions per quarter directly from ICE, the Pentagon, and the intelligence community.

3. Larry Ellison (Oracle)

• Total Government Funding: Tens of Billions in Multi-Year Monopolies

• Current Net Worth: $181.8 Billion

• The Receipt: Ellison didn’t build Oracle on the open market; he built it inside a government vault. In 1977, Oracle’s very first contract was a classified project engineered entirely for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—and “Oracle” was actually the CIA’s secret code name for the database architecture. Today, Oracle shares a piece of the Pentagon’s $9 billion JWCC cloud warfare contract and deploys its AI tools directly across classified military networks.

4. Jeff Bezos (Amazon / Blue Origin)

• Total Government Funding: Multi-Billion Dollar Federal Moats

• Current Net Worth: $289.6 Billion

• The Receipt: While Amazon began as a commercial retail site, its massive enterprise data architecture was scaled by the state. Amazon Web Services (AWS) locked in a historic $600 million CIA cloud contract that effectively monopolized federal data hosting and validated its cloud dominance. Meanwhile, Bezos’s space venture, Blue Origin, is heavily subsidized by a $3.4 billion NASA contract to construct the Artemis V lunar lander.

5. Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google)

• Total Government Funding: The Foundational Millions (Seed Capital)

• Current Net Worth: $305.1 Billion (Page) / $282.0 Billion (Brin)

• The Receipt: While their total federal dollar amount is lower than Musk’s, it represents the ultimate form of corporate welfare: the state taking 100% of the early risk. In the 1990s, Page and Brin’s foundational research at Stanford that created the “PageRank” algorithm was directly funded by a $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), DARPA, and NASA. Taxpayers funded the science; Page and Brin pocketed the hundreds of billions in private wealth.

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OF COURSE, THE Broligarchy didn’t invent this playbook but tapped into a very old and wildly lucrative American script. For centuries, one of the fastest ways to build an astronomical fortune has been to get contracts with the federal government. I don’t begrudge anyone a profit—and a good profit could be had by all—but why should these arrangements make people extraordinarily, filthily rich? I wonder if we shouldn’t call this government grift. Let’s look at a few examples.

During the Civil War, “Jubilee Jim” Fisk—famous for unethical business practices on Wall Street—made millions selling woolen blankets and cotton clothing to the Union Army. In the Gilded Age, Leland Stanford built a railroad empire with the help of free federal land grants. He created the fortune that would later build Stanford University, the elite incubator where so many of today’s Tech Bros found one another. How appropriate.

By World War II, Howard Hughes was expanding his corporate empire through taxpayer-backed military contracts. And now, venture capitalists have simply turned that same hustle into a business model—let the government pay for the expensive research and assume the risk, then use that same government as a super lucrative customer. Multiply the lucrative customer bit by the thousands. While Elon Musk was jumping up and down about government waste, he was one of the prime reasons for it.

And now we come to a different category of Welfare Queens as we turn to Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric. Fifteen defense startups connected to the brothers’ private investment firms, including Don Jr.’s 1789 Capital, have secured $3.2 billion in direct government business, with another $3.1 billion waiting in future options. Most of those investments were made after their daddy was re-elected. Take Vulcan Elements, a North Carolina startup that manufactures rare-earth magnets used in drones and other military technology. Just three months after Jr.’s firm invested in the company, the White House intervened (and Peter Navarro initiated that request) on its behalf. According to a ProPublica investigation, the startup was fast-tracked for a $620 million Pentagon loan. Its valuation promptly exploded from $200 million to $2 billion.

Trump corruption is the family modus operandi, their natural way of life. And yet Donald and the boys convince the MAGA core that this is normal for billionaire elites—and persuaded them to buy into their scams.

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum are just like Daddy in the White House.

My final category of the true Welfare Queens in this country is the no-bid contract Trump doles out to his buddies. I looked for a comprehensive total, but I couldn’t find one with more than one source. Yet, we all know the big no-bid projects he’s double-crossed the American people with. In The New Republic:

Look under any rock in Washington these days, and you’ll find a no-bid contract. The Interior Department awarded one $1.7 million no-bid contract to Green Water Solutions to clean up the water in the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall and a second $14.7 million no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings to attach blue waterproofing to the Reflecting Pool’s concrete bottom. Customs and Border Protection awarded a $1.6 billion no-bid contract to Barnard Construction Company to build 112.5 miles of “secondary” border wall in New Mexico. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded a $4.2 million-per-month no-bid contract to Core Civic to detain immigrants at its shuttered prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, then later replaced that with a $60 million annual contract, according to the Kansas Reflector and the Lawrence Times. The Homeland Security Department awarded $220 million in no-bid contracts for a public relations campaign.

To build an East Wing ballroom, the White House awarded a $500 million no-bid contract to Clark Construction, which in turn awarded subcontractors 11 no-bid contracts for demolition, excavation, fencing, and other services, according to Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell in The Washington Post. The National Park Service awarded Clark Construction a second no-bid $17.4 million contract to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park, according to David Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater, and Andrea Fuller of The New York Times.

And those are just a drop in the bucket. The New York Times just published a piece about Trump buying polar icebreakers—ships to cut through Arctic ice—which, evidently, he was obsessed with. As melting temperatures open new shipping routes and access to vast mineral wealth, he saw them as the way to dominate the region. Of course, he was furious that Russia had far more than the United States. He was jealous.

Two months later, Trump and Finnish President Alexander Stubb announced a nearly $7 billion no-bid deal for 11 icebreakers—twice as many as the Coast Guard said it needed. And the first four ships would be built in Finland, which meant Trump had to waive a law requiring national-security vessels to be built in the United States. It never ends.

But from the high-tech drone labs of Silicon Valley to the halls of a Republican White House, the racket is the same. The myth of the “Welfare Queen” was created to make Americans despise ordinary people—especially Black women—who were supposedly cheating the government out of a few dollars. But the real Welfare Queens have always belonged to a different class.

Thank you for reading—and thank you to every subscriber who makes this community possible.

If this piece made you see the phrase “welfare queen” differently—or helped expose who has really been feeding at the public trough—please share it with someone who needs to see the receipts.

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