We live in an era where rich people’s wealth has ruined their brains.
Everywhere you look there’s some new extraordinarily wealthy person who thinks their money makes them a God who can seize whatever they want. From Elon Musk gleefully ripping apart the federal government to a snack food mogul who is trying to overthrow the leadership of a small Long Island town to install himself as the mayor.
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Robert Ehrlich is the founder of Pirate’s Booty Snacks. They make those bags of cheese puffs with a pirate on them. The company also owns several other snack food brands, including Dot’s pretzels, Skinny Pop popcorn, and One protein bars. I mention all those brands just in case you felt like never buying them again after you read this story, which is likely.
Pirate’s Booty Founder Declared Himself Mayor. Voters Disagreed.
As a write-in candidate, Ehrlich ran for the position of mayor of the small village of Sea Cliff, New York. When he only got 62 votes, he pulled the bitch-ass tactic of claiming that the election was rigged, immediately letting us all know that he lost fair and square but could not handle rejection because he’s a giant baby.
So, this past Monday, Ehrlich, the founder of a wildly successful snack food brand, marched into City Hall and announced that he was the mayor and that everyone was fired.
He says he’s allowed to do this thanks to a 2009 state law that lets residents dissolve their town. The law also states that you need to have gathered 1,800 signatures to initiate the process, but when asked to provide proof of those signatures, he did not.
If you dig into Ehrlich’s political beliefs, you find just another run-of-the-mill Donald Trump-style wannabe oligarch. Cut taxes for the rich, deregulation—all the stuff that hurts the lower and middle classes and only serves to benefit people who are already wealthy and powerful.
A cornerstone of his campaign, if you can call it that, is removing regulations on outdoor seating in local restaurants. He owns a café in town, which makes all of this abundantly clear that he wants power so he can create laws that directly benefit his own business.
That is absolutely the America we live in nowadays, it’s just so odd and disconcerting to see happening not just at the federal level but now down at the local government level. It’s power-hungry oligarchs all the way down.
Sea Cliff has a mayor. Her name is Elena Villafane. She welcomes Ehrlich’s challenge but finds some gaping holes in the logic behind some of his campaign positions. For instance, he promises that if he becomes mayor, he will dissolve the local government, which she finds a little weird because, as she told the New York Times, “OK. There’s a process for that. Go ahead. But then if you dissolve the village, there’s no village to be a mayor of.”
Hey, can we stop elevating rich people to the level of a deity simply because they’ve made money? It’s driven them all insane. Now we regular everyday folks have to deal with the God complexes that are masking their cornucopia of insecurities that they’re making our problem.
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