Many of the purge’s casualties were honorable Americans whose revulsion toward the genocide of the Palestinian people had professional costs. The first publicized victim came on October 8, 2023, when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced he was cutting off all food, fuel, and electricity to the “human animals” of Gaza, and a website owned by the daughter of a centimillionaire New Jersey developer fired its NBA blogger for posting, “Solidarity with Palestine always.”

On social media and group chats, the billionaires raised funds to hire a private detective team to assist the NYPD crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters and reward the gang of thugs who violently attacked peaceful protesters at UCLA with sticks, clubs, chemical sprays, and a backpack full of poisoned mice. International humanitarian organizations with operations in Gaza suffered as well, with the World Food Program reporting a near halving of its fundraising haul in 2023; a colleague who works in fundraising for UNICEF told me the group’s most loyal mega-donors would not touch “anything Gaza” with a ten-foot pole.

This was nominally about Israel, but it also always seemed obvious that it wasn’t principally about Israel at all. At its heart, the billionaire revolt was the expression of a broader dissatisfaction with Joe Biden that was most surely rooted in the real, substantial, and (in the post–Cold War neoliberal era) unprecedented things his administration was quietly (too quietly!) doing for working people, small-business owners, and the proliferating subsistence entrepreneur class that falls somewhere in the middle. It sued Amazon for squeezing sellers to the bone while manipulating prices ever higher, Albertsons and Kroger for conspiring to gouge shoppers by littering the country with dead strip centers where supermarkets once stood, Live Nation for indenturing a generation of young musicians and turning tickets to concerts and sports events into luxury goods, Welsh Carson (the most powerful private equity firm in health care) for gouging hospital patients and suppressing the wages of anesthesiologists in multiple states, and more. It even got a court to label Google a monopolist.

This stuff was extremely popular, and Democratic leaders never talked about it, likely because it pissed off the donor class—which is of course the very reason they should have been talking about nothing else.