When billionaires fund the revolution, the outcome is already fixed
Rutger Bregman, once hailed as the Dutch progressive mascot, rose to global attention after a moment at Davos, where he told billionaires to “just stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes.” That carefully edited Davos clip and his viral blow-up with Tucker Carlson helped manufacture a persona of principled dissent—a stage-managed liberal rebel, perfectly engineered for the algorithm, saying just enough to look brave without ever endangering the structure that embraced him.
But Bregman’s bite has always stopped short of the bone. While he gained praise for allegedly challenging elites, he never seriously threatened their position. His criticisms—always strategic, never structural—served to elevate his brand, not to disrupt the systems he claimed to question. One of the more laughable moments in this spectacle came when actor Russell Crowe compared Bregman to Socrates. Rather than reject the absurdity, Bregman leaned into it. He even used it to market his work.
But Socrates was executed for challenging the moral foundations of his society. Bregman has been embraced, groomed, and funded by those foundations. To liken a media-trained, TED-stage liberal to a historical threat to empire is not just exaggeration—it’s a distortion. Socrates was feared by power. Bregman is a safe investment.
And now, with his new initiative—The School for Moral Ambition (SMA), which launches this year in the United States—Bregman has given elites a playbook for the next chapter of power laundering.
Let’s be clear about who it’s built for. SMA isn’t for people organizing at the grassroots, risking safety to confront systems of oppression. It’s for the already credentialed: Ivy League grads, McKinsey consultants, social entrepreneurs. People groomed to lead—just not to surrender power. The School doesn’t ask them to reckon with injustice. It teaches them how to perform reckoning without threatening their position.
SMA doesn’t disrupt systems of injustice. It rebrands them. It hands the professional class a mirror—not to reflect, but to admire themselves as they uphold the very hierarchies they claim to challenge. It steals the language of movements it has never been part of, draping elite ambition in the borrowed rhetoric of struggle and liberation.
But Bregman’s playbook for moral ambition didn’t begin with SMA—it’s been years in the making.
In 2011, Rutger Bregman published a nationally distributed op-ed in de Volkskrant that defended blackface, mocked anti-racist outrage, and dismissed singer Rihanna’s objection to being called a “niggabitch” by a Dutch magazine. This wasn’t satire or naivety—it was an unfiltered articulation of racial contempt dressed up as cultural commentary. He dismissed Black people’s pain as American neurosis, ridiculed the idea that racialized people experience systemic harm or that racism exists in the Netherlands, and reduced centuries of colonial violence to punchlines. He didn’t just look away from injustice—he laughed at it. That op-ed wasn’t an outlier. It was a raw confession of what he truly believed when there was no global audience to impress. A public disavowal of racial justice, rooted in colonial minimization and smug defensiveness. He has expressed regret, but never issued a meaningful retraction or fully accounted for the harm the piece caused—or the worldview it revealed.
And now, this same man wants to teach the world about moral ambition. He wants to mentor young elites on how to “lead with purpose,” while never having reckoned with the harm he publicly endorsed. His current branding as a guide for the ethically ambitious isn’t just hollow—it’s dangerous. It signals to elites that they can reinvent themselves as justice leaders without ever confronting the violence they’ve upheld. The op-ed is not a footnote—it’s the instruction manual. If SMA refuses to acknowledge that history, it’s not a school for transformation. It’s a laundering mechanism for moral failure.
He didn’t just mock one woman—he mocked the pain of racialized people everywhere. He ridiculed the grief, resistance, and rage born from real violence, and he has never once made it right. That this history remains unaddressed while he markets virtue as curriculum isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s theft. It’s the quiet, smiling face of empire saying: You can do harm, and still be crowned righteous—so long as you rebrand in time.
Marketed as a launchpad for “ethical leadership,” SMA offers fellowships, workshops, and mentorships for young professionals who want to “change the world.” Its mission, according to its website, is to “turn ambition into a force for good.” With glossy aesthetics, a companion book, and celebrity endorsements from Trevor Noah and Jameela Jamil, the project looks progressive. But underneath its sleek exterior lies something far more insidious: a machinery for elite redemption, designed not to dismantle injustice, but to disguise it in moral language.
I know this because I was invited to advise SMA last year. I gave a talk on systemic racism and stressed the need to center racial justice—not as an add-on, but as foundational. The leadership ignored this entirely. I followed up with a detailed written analysis explaining that if SMA refused to reckon with racial capitalism, the extractive logic of elite philanthropy, and the colonial legacies embedded in its structure, it would simply reproduce the harm it claimed to oppose.
I laid it out plainly: if the School for Moral Ambition were truly about justice, it would do one thing—shift power away from elites and into the hands of those most affected by injustice. Instead, it does the opposite. I warned them that their model wasn’t a disruption of injustice, but its continuation—polished and repackaged for global consumption.
Their response? A masterclass in liberal evasion.
Rather than engage the substance of my critique, SMA’s leadership sent back a polished, polite note thanking me for the “tone” of my letter while ignoring every single argument. They claimed “capacity constraints” as the reason they couldn’t continue the conversation. This, despite launching a book, fundraising, hiring teams, and expanding globally.
In other words: they had the capacity for power, but not for accountability.
It was textbook: the calm, evasive language of elite management used to dismiss the truth without ever confronting it. A professional deflection designed to maintain optics while silencing dissent.
Shortly after, SMA held a fundraiser hosted by Disney heiress Abigail Disney—who was praised as a “class traitor.” It was the perfect metaphor: a project that celebrates elites for realizing how elite they are, while continuing to raise money from the same circles of power. It wasn’t a rupture. It was a performance of rupture.
This is the function of SMA. It is a finishing school for the global professional class—McKinsey consultants, Ivy League graduates, and social entrepreneurs who know how to talk about justice without ever surrendering power. It trains them to feel righteous while protecting the architecture of harm. It doesn’t ask why elites lead. It teaches them how to lead with better optics.
Instead of interrogating capitalism, colonialism, or white supremacy, SMA asks: how can we make these systems feel more ethical? How can we reframe domination as duty? Structural violence becomes a backdrop for personal growth. Justice becomes self-improvement. Revolution becomes résumé fodder.
In the time since, the contradictions have only sharpened.
Tim Schwab—a journalist nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by The Nation and author of The Problem with Bill Gates, a scathing investigation into elite philanthropy- revealed that SMA received funding from the Gates Foundation and other billionaire-backed philanthropies. These are not passive donors. They are architects of the very status quo SMA pretends to challenge. Their money doesn’t just support SMA—it defines its limits. And rather than acknowledge these entanglements, SMA actively obscured its funders’ identities, ensuring this information was not readily available to the public. This concealment wasn’t incidental—it was strategic.
In a fitting twist to this unfolding spectacle, Bregman recently blocked Schwab, on social media- a petty act with political significance. Schwab investigation’s cut to the core of Bregman’s manufactured credibility.
Dutch journalist Marieke Kuypers uncovered that SMA’s U.S. operations run out of the offices of crypto billionaire Mike Novogratz, whose firm donated $1 million to Donald Trump. Novogratz’s sister sits on SMA’s board. These aren’t coincidences. They are structural facts. Bregman also blocked Kuypers on social media.
The man who built a brand off calling out billionaires couldn’t stomach being called out himself. The block isn’t personal—it’s tactical. It’s a clear signal that Bregman’s empire of curated dissent cannot survive real confrontation. For a man who preaches moral courage, the reaction is telling: critique is only welcome when it flatters. Anything else is silenced, minimized or erased.
This is not a side note. It is the blueprint.
While Bregman once performed outrage at the spectacle of billionaire philanthropy, SMA is now its beneficiary—amassing more than $5 million and refusing to make its full donor list public. As Schwab documents, SMA promotes tax-advantaged giving strategies that appeal to the ultra-wealthy—allowing elite wealth to remain intact while appearing socially conscious.
This is moral entrepreneurship: turning justice into a brandable asset. SMA isn’t alone—it joins a lineage of elite-led “change” platforms: the NGO-industrial complex, philanthrocapitalism, and performative inclusion It updates liberalism for the influencer era: curated, performative, and ultimately obedient to capital—a fully operational moral laundering complex.
Even Bregman’s own politics betray the brand. On social media, he posted a “winning agenda” for Democrats with two main pillars. First, a Yascha Mounk + Matty Yglesias-style cultural shift to the center: moderate on immigration, tone down identity politics, stop what he called “obsessive language policing,” acknowledge that “men and women are different,” and explicitly distance the party from “far-left cultural warriors.”
This isn’t a radical critique of power. It’s a centrist rebrand—engineered to soothe tech billionaires and neutralize calls for systemic change
Elsewhere, Bregman named 18th-century British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson as one of his heroes. But in doing so, he erased the global context and complexity of abolition, offering no acknowledgment of the centrality of Black resistance, maroon communities (self-governed settlements of escaped enslaved people), or the Haitian Revolution—the only successful slave revolt that founded a Black republic. Rather than uplift these radical and often armed traditions of resistance, Bregman centers a white moral figure as the face of abolition. This reinforces a colonial narrative where progress is granted by enlightened elites instead of seized through collective struggle and insurrection. The omission isn’t just historical—it’s political. It reflects a worldview that elevates elite virtue and moral branding over rebellion, rupture, and redistribution.
This worldview pervades SMA: change flows from the top down, not the bottom up. Elites don’t need to surrender power—only reimagine it. In SMA’s world, injustice isn’t a structure to dismantle. It’s a branding problem to solve.
Its fellowship topics reflect this: “fair taxation,” “the protein transition,” and other sanitized causes that conveniently align with donor interests—like Gates’s investments in lab-grown meat. While people organize against genocide, settler colonialism, and climate collapse, SMA hosts career workshops, mindset exercises, and private salons for elite reflection.
And while land defenders in Palestine and Brazil, Black abolitionists in the U.S., farmers in India, and migrant workers under threat of deportation fight without protection, SMA offers stipends to young elites so they can intellectualize injustice from the safety of fellowships and strategy workshops. It turns other people’s survival into elite self-development, converting lived struggle into curriculum.
This is not a school for justice. It’s a workshop in elite deodorization.
And this is not new. In the Global South, elite “moral ambition” has always arrived as occupation: development programs that serve foreign interests, or austerity imposed in the name of progress. SMA follows that lineage—just rebranded with better fonts, Instagram reels, and TED Talk polish.
It sanitizes empire. It rebrands capitalism. It turns revolution into resume building and makes injustice feel aspirational. It cloaks structural violence in the language of ambition, coaching elites to reflect while doing nothing that risks their position.
What we are witnessing is not disruption. It’s containment.
SMA is not about power redistribution. It’s about moral insulation. It doesn’t build movements. It builds brands. It doesn’t empower the marginalized. It platforms the already powerful and teaches them how to look benevolent while protecting their dominance.
This is how empire survives critique.
By absorbing the aesthetics of rebellion. By mimicking its language. By offering curated versions of “impact” that pose no real threat. Bregman is fluent in this script. He knows how to perform disobedience just long enough to remain invited to the table. He doesn’t challenge structures—he critiques individuals, nameless billionaires, or specific abuses, never the underlying systems.
And this is what SMA teaches. It’s not moral ambition. It’s moral camouflage.
If we confuse that for transformation, we haven’t just misunderstood the moment—we’ve surrendered it.
The School for Moral Ambition arrives at a moment of global reckoning. We don’t need another cult of elite redemption. We need systems dismantled, wealth redistributed, and power returned to those who’ve always been told they’re unqualified to lead.
If SMA is the future of justice, then justice has already been sold. And if we accept it, we’ve traded collective liberation for elite applause.
Postscript
Since this essay was first published, Bregman publicly labeled me “unethical” on social media for sharing my experience. This wasn’t a private disagreement—it was a public attempt to discredit a critique he did not address. But this response is not an anomaly. It illustrates exactly what I described: a system that silences critique through branding and deflection. When accountability is met with reputation defense rather than reflection, we are not witnessing moral leadership. We are witnessing narrative control. Justice cannot be built on platforms that punish truth-telling. And moral ambition that crumbles under critique is not moral. It’s marketing.
