Katy Perry space trip the latest example of oligarchy virtue signalling

Flying on a rocket shaped like a phallus, the mission was funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who loves Donald Trump. The MAGA mouthpiece and one of the world’s richest men has previously told staff he wants them to wake up “terrified” every day. There have been numerous strikes from his workers, to say nothing of investigations into denied leave for injured employees.

It is in this context the flight should be seen. Not as a victory for feminism, as Perry has claimed, but the oligarch equivalent of sportswashing - accepting a trip from a PR to promote Brand Bezos, conditions of the worker be damned.

It is the super-rich version of influencers doing sponsored content for Dubai, with the added embarrassment of paying for it. Perry and the others are glorifying a man whose sole interest is in getting richer, whatever the cost.

This was not about women in space. And it comes while women are being fired through budget cuts at NASA, which the other rocket entrepreneur, Elon Musk, has quickly fileted to benefit himself.

The idea that any of this can be normalised is perverse, but that’s what the trip is about. It’s making Bezos look human, rather than a man who fired journalists who disagreed with him and issued a mandate at his newspaper to control criticism of the president.

For Brits, we should not think it won’t happen here.

The super rich already fund our politics, not least in the Brexit vote, and both the Tories and Reform flirted with the prospect of funding from Musk. This extreme wealth is also how you end up with an erosion of people’s rights being celebrated by a billionaire on a yacht with a cigar.

In a cost-of-living crisis across the world, where the average American cannot afford to buy eggs, it is beyond baffling the ruling class can not only buy press in the form of newspapers, but then seek to buy popularity through celebrities.

Perry and her crewmates were not women making a historic flight for feminism, they were the latest example of women being used by a man to further his own reputation, pretending his vanity is altruism.

For all the tribal sparring between politicians, it is a reminder the biggest threat to all of us is not China, but the oligarch class.

Bezos bought a newspaper, removed its dissidents, refused to let it endorse Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, and is now enjoying celebrities shining up his reputation.

Musk, the richest person in the world, bought Twitter, renamed it and turned the social media platform into a cesspool of hatred, where transphobia and racism are not just normalised, but encouraged. Mark Zuckerberg, another of the world’s richest men, has followed suit, removing fact checkers from Facebook.

The oligarchy are siphoning off our wealth and it’s unclear how to stop it. It would help if those who claim to care about women or the planet didn’t do PR for them.