Recently I’ve received emails from newsletter subscribers who want me to know that the world is run by “baby eating paedophiles” and the One World Government who want to poison the poor with psychiatric drugs.

Progressives usually dismiss these kinds of messages and hit delete. With a bit of morbid curiosity, I decided to reply.

Beneath the internet conspiracies, my readers were pointing at two realities of modern neoliberal capitalism: elite legal impunity and predatory pharmaceutical monopolies.

My subscribers argued that “rich people don’t get drugged, they see psychologists”, whereas working-class people get “chemically sedated”.

In some ways, they’re right. In Australia in 2026, if you are wealthy and stressed, anxious or mentally unwell, you can afford time off, you can take a holiday or you can afford a $300-an-hour therapist.

If you are broke, exhausted by rent and shift work and facing mental ill-health, our under-funded health system barely provides a two-minute GP visit and a script for pills to numb the depression. And if you collapse you face destitution, homelessness or even heavy antipsychotics.

Everyday people increasingly feel stressed, anxious, depressed and traumatised — and that’s because of decades of neoliberalism, casualisation and contracting out, wage suppression, and corporate price-gouging, which have all made it impossible to earn a secure living and support your family.

Under neoliberalism, the economy’s primary objective is — whether it’s the health system, Workcover or Centrelink — to get you “fit for work” (not “fit to enjoy life”) as soon as possible so you get back to making profit for corporations.

They also wrote that curing diseases “would cost the Rockefellers trillions” because “the treatment causes the disease” to pad corporate profits. You do not need a tin-foil hat to see that profits rule our pharmaceutical industry.

Wall Street openly admits it. “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli really did price-gouge large numbers of patients reliant on the drug Daraprim. The billionaire Sackler family and Purdue Pharma really did knowingly and deliberately set out to get millions of Americans addicted to oxycontin, resulting in the US opioid epidemic and thousands of deaths. American big pharma companies really are trying to dismantle Australia’s PBS and undermine Medicare, including threatening to completely withhold drugs from Australia needed to treat multiple-sclerosis.

In a 2018 report titled The Genome Revolution, Goldman Sachs analysts asked the breath-taking question: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”

“The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy… While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.” (Source: CNBC)

If a company cured a major disease, its sales would collapse because it ran out of sick customers. Capitalism prioritises lifelong production and consumption of drugs. Producing a cure for cancer is not profitable. This is not just happening in the USA — Australia’s public drug research agency, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories was privatised in the 1990s to become a $90 billion for-profit company, handing public health over to private profit.

Chasing ancient “bloodlines” and the Rockefellers lets corporate boards, executives and Wall Street hedge funds — who are all real — completely off the hook. They want you focusing on “globalists” and the “great reset” because it means you’re not focusing on the real exploitation happening in your workplace or price-gouging by the supermarket duopoly. While you’re hunting for Davos mind control and waiting for Q’s “storm”, real big businesses are robbing you blind and gas giants are increasing your power bills.

The subscribers who emailed me also pointed to the redacted Jeffrey Epstein files and how the Queen “paid millions” to shield Prince Andrew from the law. This is a reference to the settlement payment made to Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, where the Queen contributed “£2 million ($2.7 million) to Prince Andrew’s settlement with Virginia Giuffre in a civil sexual assault case.”

Epstein really was a monstrous pedophile that enabled and was enabled by dozens of some of the richest billionaire elites, including the head of ports logistics company DP World that runs ports in Port Botany, Port of Melbourne, Fremantle and Brisbane, and of course Prince Andrew, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Larry Summers and Private equity founder Leon Black, and many more. As the Guardian wrote in February 2026, there really is an “informal global club of powerful, ultra-rich people who all seemingly know each other, help one another out, and protect each other from the consequences of their depravity.” While some of the billionaires and financial elites named in the Epstein Files have faced some consequences, for example, Peter Mandelson, none have been prosecuted for their involvement with the world’s most prolific pedophile. Ultra-wealth seemingly does actually buy legal immunity.

When the state and media protect billionaires and royals from prosecution, it clearly shows that the justice system has two tiers. The ultra-wealthy can afford teams of lawyers. Meanwhile Legal Aid and community legal centres that everyday people rely on are stretched and under-funded. Workers unfairly sacked face financial ruin if they go to court against cashed up corporations.

When progressive politicians refuse to talk about elite impunity, it is very easy for that silence to be filled with far-right conspiracies. This is an example of how conspiracy-thinking, extreme inequality and utter lack of democratic control leads to turning a real economic elite into cartoon villains.

The mainstream media, political system and the corporate elite love conspiracy theories and individual “bad apples” to be human faces to blame for the crisis of the status quo. It is easier to sell a story that the health system is struggling because of a secret cabal of rich banking families conspiring to shut down the global economy, or the bad apple of one “Pharma Bro” than it is to confront the raw truth that our economic system, and corporate laws, are written in plain sight to ensure shareholder returns matter more than human life.

In a political duopoly, where the major centre-left and centre-right parties adopt the near-identical pro-corporate positions, working-class anger is more easily captured by far-right grievances and culture wars.

Here’s the question: if those “baby eaters” vanished tonight, would your rent drop, would your wages go up, would Pfizer put patients ahead of profits? Or would the neoliberal laws that protect the current economic system simply continue to protect corporate monopolies and billionaires while they extract every cent they can? Focusing on adrenochrome and 5G keeps the executives in boardrooms safe.

Whether you hate the establishment, or you oppose wealth inequality and discrimination, you are looking at the same economic system. The only way to fix this unfair system — to get secure jobs and decent wages, to protect Medicare, and to end the corporate profiteering — is by getting together with your workmates, your community and neighbours to fight as a collective.