As the dust settles in Venice, where some of the world’s richest gathered to bless the union of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, I’m wondering what to make of the multi-day affair. Plenty has already been written about the blinding tackiness of each event; in terms of ostentatiousness, it met my expectations. But even as someone who enjoys celebrity news, I was struck by how activated my ever-eager algorithm was by the events in Venice, and the relentlessness with which it churned out constant glimpses of these nuptials. It was a gluttonous buffet of the in-your-face aesthetics that define this political and cultural moment, and it has since left me with the feeling of a trashy hangover. There were the Kardashian-Jenners, whose outfits seemed designed to send algorithms into overdrive. Sydney Sweeney and Oprah Winfrey. A newly single Orlando Bloom nearly chomping at the bit at the prospect of fresh skin. The over-the-top Vogue spread. The flood of reactions to the Vogue spread. Jerry Seinfeld, Gayle King, Usher. Many of these guests were seen waving to onlookers as they departed on little boats to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, as though they had been unaware that the city hated their guts. > Leonardo DiCaprio is a MOOD in Venice for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez's > wedding https://t.co/8wfYNmTwG1 > > — hunter harris (@hunteryharris) June 27, 2025 One guest who did not wave was Leonardo DiCaprio, who instead arrived with a black baseball cap pulled down to cover his face. Some speculated that DiCaprio, a self-fashioned environmentalist, did not want to be seen attending the environmentally noxious affair. (Nearly 100 private planes reportedly landed in Venice for the weekend.) But that’s a generous guess, one that presumes a capability for shame. The truth is that no one in attendance cares about what you and I will ever think. I’m feeling icky, but they’re flying high on their jets back home. Meanwhile, thanks to the father of another guest, Ivanka Trump, they stand in spitting distance from even higher levels of wealth.

THE OFFER OF SPACE TOURISM TO RICH WOMEN IS A PASTICHE OF FEMINISM WHICH ACTS ONLY TO SHOWCASE THE SHALLOWNESS OF CORPORATE LIBERALISM ~ Sourdough ~ Earlier this month, for the first time since Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 spaceflight, an all-female crew briefly took to space aboard Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard for a total of 11 minutes before touching back down on Earth. The vanity project of Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez, the flight also included pop star Katy Perry and TV personality Gayle King, among others, marking the tenth such flight of Blue Origin and one of many more private space flights to come. Although subsequently reviled and mocked widely online for its performative nature, the rebuttal came largely from misogynist spaces and has seen comparatively little critical class coverage in comparison to its widespread coverage in the mainstream press. This flight acts as the apotheosis of liberal feminism. Liberal feminism privileges a select few women to, literally in this case, rocket out of the stratosphere and break the glass ceiling, all the while allowing the shards from such a rupture to lacerate the women below them. While these women take to space, the working women of the world who toil and labour to allow their journey to subsist under the oppression and misery of patriarchy. As a purely symbolic move, the flight continues the capitalist project’s watering down of feminism from a radical movement to a marketing campaign, preventing the destruction of the system of patriarchy that governs all women today. While women’s rights decline around the globe, the ever-precarious position of women is overshadowed by spectacles such as this spaceflight, as seen just two days later as the UK Supreme Court ruled to exclude trans women from the legal definition of womanhood. Upon reaching space, the crew engaged in a chant, “take up space”, that served as the theme of the outing. While the rich have always sought greater and greater thrills to occupy their time and overburdened wallets in the quest for ever more thrilling vacations, the phenomenon of privatised vanity trips to space is still relatively new. Where space travel was once the sole domain of the State, it has been increasingly privatised, as is everything in the capitalist system, in the scarce pursuit of further profit. With little work and fulfilment to be found at the top of the world, the rich must turn to utter nihilistic hedonism to amuse themselves to death. This pursuit is a great example of the mindset of the bourgeoisie in our current moment, which sees the world as a playground for their amusement and entertainment. In a time when the planet burns and people starve, they take up an exorbitant amount of space and resources on the planet for their overblown holidays. Ever rapacious, just owning the world will never be enough to satisfy the capitalist and their monstrous system, it must consume everything and grow regardless of drive or feeling. Spaceflight was once a symbol of possibility for the human race, a grand demonstration of what we could accomplish together as a species. A future that once seemed to be out among the stars has been eroded into just another frontier for corporate profit, stripping the dream of exploration and plenty away from the heads of the people and into the hands of the powerful few who already hold enraptured all the dreams of human freedom to be found on Earth. We must remember that humanity is a shared dream, and while the vast majority of women throughout the world remain oppressed, there can be no liberation. Liberation can not be the elevation of a select few, but the elevation of all women to choice and autonomy as should be afforded to every human being. At the intersection of class and patriarchal domination, we must form the bonds of solidarity and cooperation necessary to liberate ourselves from capitalism’s mirage of progress. The environment can not be allowed to continue to burn to fuel the dreams of the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone. The future belongs to everyone, and while space now belongs to the state and its corporate stooges, it is we who own the future. It waits out in the stars for us to meet it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pic: Lauren Sánchez after returning from the flight, courtesy of Blue Origin The post The Rich ‘Take Up Space’ appeared first on Freedom News.

David Folkenflik occupies a unique role at NPR: He’s a journalist who writes about journalism. And that includes the very organization where he works, which is once again being threatened by conservatives in Washington. The second Trump administration has aggressively gone after the media in its first few months. It’s kicked news organizations out of the Pentagon. It’s barred other newsrooms from access to the White House. And Trump supporters in Congress have targeted federal funding for public media. In late March, the heads of NPR and PBS testified on Capitol Hill to defend public broadcasting from Republicans accusing them of political bias. Meanwhile, some major news organizations seem to be capitulating and bending to the will of the Trump administration. Folkenflik, who’s been covering media for two decades for NPR, says journalism across the country is facing a two-pronged attack from both commercial and political forces. “You’re seeing sort of discrete and specific and seemingly almost comedic attacks. You don’t say ‘Gulf of America’? Get to the back of the line,” Folkenflik says. “I think it’s actually part of a larger effort to control the flow of information.” On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Folkenflik talks to host Al Letson about this unprecedented moment for journalists, why more media outlets seem to be bowing to pressure from the Trump administration, and how journalism can begin to win back public trust. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

Jeff Bezos and his companies have seemingly been doing everything they can to get into Donald Trump’s good graces before he returns to the Oval Office. This includes: Donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration via Amazon; Dining with Trump and Elon Musk recently at Mar-a-Lago; and, of course, spiking an editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris slated to run in the Washington Post, which Bezos also owns—a decision that reportedly cost the Post as many as 300,000 subscribers who canceled in the immediate aftermath. As of this weekend, there appear to be new additions to this list. First off, the Washington Post killed a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ann Telnaes that satirized the slate of tech and media billionaires practically prostrating themselves at Trump’s feet. The cartoon included sketches of Bezos; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Meta, which also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee; Sam Altman of OpenAI, who made a $1 million donation; Patrick Soon-Shiong of the LA Times, who killed that paper’s endorsement of Harris; and the Walt Disney Company, owner of ABC News, which recently made the controversial decision to pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Trump. The Washington Post‘s editorial page editor, David Shipley, said in a statement to the Associated Press that he killed the cartoon because the Post had recently run a column on the same matter and had another scheduled for publication. “Not every editorial judgement is a reflection of a malign force…,” he said. “The only bias was against repetition.” A spokesperson for the Post did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday morning. > .@AnnTelnaes resigned after the Washington Post editorial page killed her > cartoon. It’s worth a share. > > Big Tech executives are bending the knee to Donald Trump and it’s no surprise > why: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos like paying a lower tax rate than a public > school teacher. pic.twitter.com/xv6e5dJVf4 > > — Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 4, 2025 In a Substack piece announcing that she was quitting the Post in protest of the decision, Telnaes called the episode “dangerous for a free press.” “Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press—and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” Telnaes wrote. The board of directors for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists backed Telnaes up, saying in a statement: “Editorial cartooning is the tip of the spear in opinion, and the Post’s cowering further soils their once-stellar reputation for standing up and speaking truth to power. We weep for the loss of this once great newspaper.” The Post isn’t the only Bezos media company in the news this weekend. Amazon Studios is reportedly helping bring to life a documentary focused on soon-to-be-First-Lady and conspiracy theorist Melania Trump. Fox News reports that Amazon Prime licensed the documentary, expected to be released in theaters and on streaming in the second half of this year. Filming began last month, and Melania is an executive producer, Fox reports. Keep in mind that given the content of her eponymous memoir—not to mention the well-worn phenomenon of celebrities producing documentaries about themselves as a PR tactic (remember the 6-hour Harry and Meghan Netflix special?)—the odds of this documentary actually providing “an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look” at Melania, as Amazon claims it will, seem low. Representatives for Amazon did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, including about the extent of any involvement from Bezos and whether Melania will have any control over the film’s editing. This is a great time to remember, as our CEO Monika Bauerlein put it: Billionaire-owned newsrooms are not our only option.