Air Date: 10-3-2026

Today we examine the mechanisms of complicity. We're not all complicit in the worst atrocities but we are complicit in something so it's good to know how it works. Good people go along with bad ideas and thoughtful people allow themselves to be thoughtless all the time. The reasons are often structural but they can be resisted on both the personal level and collectively.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine the mechanisms of complicity. We're not all complicit in the worst atrocities but we are complicit in something so it's good to know how it works. Good people go along with bad ideas and thoughtful people allow themselves to be thoughtless all the time. The reasons are often structural but they can be resisted on both the personal level and collectively.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include

Life Is A Story

Democracy Now!

Jessie Gender

PissedMagistus

Velshi

Adam Conover

and Hoots Hootman

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, Lessons From Nazi Germany

Section B, Complicity in Gaza; Media, Governments, and Celebrities

Section C, The Myth of Neutrality; Media, Moderates, and Obeying in Advance

And Section D, Fandom, Consumption, and Personal Reckoning

And now, on to the show.

Primo Levi, Italian chemist and Holocaust survivor, once wrote, "Monsters exist, but they're too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." We've seen a number of Levi's rare monsters portrayed in Holocaust films before, naturally brutal men who were at home in the Nazis' genocidal project.

Commandant Goeth of Schindler's List being the most famous example. He was a man who seemed to take satisfaction in inflicting human suffering. It was a sport for him. But The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer, is not about men like Goeth. It's about common men, individuals who desired a peaceful, prosperous, and beautiful life, yet took part in the destruction of others who desired the exact same thing.

The director has said that the movie's intention is to show our similarities to the perpetrators, not the victims. If we, the audience, can recognize how this family is able to live a joyful life in Eden next to the abyss of hell, we can prevent ourselves from falling into the same psychological traps. I wanna begin by discussing the most outrageous examples of moral obliviousness.

Many of them occur early in the story to establish the psychology of the characters. Mrs. Hoss, AKA the Queen of Auschwitz, is given the fur coat and lipstick of a prisoner, and she tries them on like she's in the fitting room of a Macy's. There is not a second of reflection. Mrs. Hoss and the other Nazi wives discuss the items they've received, and even share a laugh over the concealment methods they've run into.

It's a game to them, and a very profitable one at that. But not to be outdone, the eldest boy stays up at night to analyze the dental gold extracted from murdered prisoners. Talk of extermination is not hidden in the household. Rudolph is very proud of his logistical achievements, and his wife enjoys the resulting increase in social status.

When Hedwig's mother visits, she's well aware of what's taking place on the other side of the wall. Her daughter laments the ugliness of the wall itself, but breezes by its purpose. All she can do is put up vines to make it more aesthetically acceptable. The Zone of Interest is filled to the brim with these type of moments.

They're usually pretty brief. The movie does not feature many extended scenes. It's a lot of short but powerful moments woven together to create a grand demented quilt. The characters can't trick themselves into thinking that all that's going on is just forced labor. The sound of death is almost universally present.

They can't hide from it. So how do they fight back? The number one method is overcompensation. The home can't simply be good enough. It can't be a temporary living space that they'll move on from once Rudolf is given new orders. It must be paradise. Hedwig tries to make it as beautiful as possible, a Garden of Eden, and when she's threatened with the possibility of relocation, she loses her damn mind because there's nothing wrong with the home and garden, absolutely nothing, not the gunshots, not the smoke, not the screams of women and children.

It does not get any better, and the children cannot be deprived of it. When she makes this animated case to her husband, he's not the true target of her argument. It's herself. The commandant's overcompensation is reflected not in the garden, but his work. He's obsessed with it. He's innovative. He wants the most efficient methods to make the numbers on the quarterly reports increase.

Towards the end of the film, he even tells his wife that it's hard for him to concentrate on a party because he's thinking about the best way to gas everyone in attendance. And why would he think about anything else? There's nothing wrong with a job, and if there's nothing wrong with a job, I better be the best I can be.

The effort is a testament to how important he needs to think the mission is. But no matter how much these characters try to overcompensate, they're unable to fully convince themselves and others of the fraudulent paradise they've created. Ashes still find their way into the flower beds. We see this with the sleepwalking of one of their daughters, the early departure of Hedwig's mother.

In the most powerful example, Rudolf's heaving as the film ends. Deep down, very deep down, they know that they're participating in something too abhorrent to acknowledge directly. They have to. Again, we're not observing a family of psychopaths. So by embracing their closeness to evil, they deny its existence.

If Hedwig lived next to the camp but refused to try on the clothing of the victims, she may be forced to examine her own hesitation. It's all in or nothing. The Zone of Interest goes beyond just the methods used by individuals to ignore atrocities. The movie also touches on the societal acceptance of the Holocaust.

In other words, what narrative has possessed German society that would allow such horrors to take place? The contrast between the garden and the camp does a brilliant job exploring this. When Mrs. Höss attempts to talk her husband into letting her stay at the house, she argues that they're living the life that Hitler wants Germans to live.

They're pioneers of the East, enjoying the living space of a new thriving German civilization. The idea she's referencing, Lebensraum, argued that to secure the safety and prosperity of the German state, eastward expansion was mandatory. But military conquest was only part of the plan. The civilian populations also had to be removed, namely Eastern European Jews and Slavs.

The people of Germany suffered greatly because of their disastrous defeat in World War I and the hyperinflation that followed. The Nazis told their people that for Germany to move past that suffering and acquire the power they deserve, certain actions must be taken. Everyone standing in the way of a flourishing state must be destroyed, from Jews to Soviets.

Mrs. Höss and her family fall into the idealized world promised by this vision. They're peacefully living in the East with more wealth than they could ever need, unthreatened by British blockade and internal treason. Their life is proof that the actions on the other side of the wall are justifiable. For us to live in heaven, our enemies must be sent to hell.

There's a striking moment towards the beginning of the movie when Rudolf Höss chastises his men for plucking lilacs from the bushes. He's very concerned about the health of the garden. Every plant must be nurtured with the utmost care. Your immediate feeling is naturally, how the hell could he murder innocent people en masse and still care for a flower in his garden?

I think the answer is because it's his garden. When societies start to believe that the prosperity of their world is being hindered by internal and external actors, the ends will start to justify the means very quickly. And even if the means are as hellish as imaginable, people will find ways to accept them

there is a c- direct connection between healthcare and the ability of, of normal people not to obey and advance.

One of the reasons why we have the absence of healthcare in this country that we do is to make people afraid and anxious and worried all of the time, and that is a social wellspring for, authoritarianism. It's harder to do the things you need to do politically if you're being dogged all the time by unnecessary fears and costs, and when you're sick when you don't have to be.

Anyway, as far as, as far as the big wealthy media companies are concerned, I think ABC saw the chance to do what everybody else was doing, in, in a rapid way and sacrificed itself to make the statement that, yes, we're not going to say these kinds of things. Because the problem of giving up here isn't just the individual case, it's the precedent you set.

You're saying, "We're going to be extremely careful not to say the kinds of things which might offend or which might be critical to this person who is now gonna be the head of state." 

And as soon as that settlement happened, President Elect Trump sued the Des Moines Register for a poll that came out right before the election that he didn't like the results of.

Yeah, they're moving squarely into totalitarian territory because when Trump sues the Des Moines Register for essentially printing what he considers to have been bad news for him, the underlying all of that is the idea that Trump never could have been behind in any poll. Trump never could have won any election.

Our great hero Trump is always going to win at everything. So it's setting a line, right? Which, which, which borrows from his deep lie that he didn't win the elect- that he, that he won the election in 2020. So he's trying to set, what is, in fact, a kind of Stalinist line for the American media.

Everyone has to only print how Trump wins everything all the time, or you might get sued. 

So if you can jump from that to what we're seeing now with the billionaire cabinet. Mm-hmm ... what, Elon Musk, now it looks spent about a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected. Mm. And people might say, "Wow, that's a lot.

He took a great risk there." But he has made far more than that since the election of President Trump. if you can talk about what it means, I think in Biden's cabinet they're worth something like $110 million, in this cabinet well over, what? 500, billion dollars? 

Oh, yeah. So it's, it's a small jump to make because it, the way that censorship is gonna work in the Musk/Trump regime is, is probably not going to be direct state censorship.

It's going to be hundreds of frivolous lawsuits which are meant to keep us all quiet. And who's going to fund those, those frivolous lawsuits? Not Trump, he doesn't have the money. It's going to be Musk who's funding these frivolous lawsuits to keep us all quiet and to keep us towards the line that of course he and Trump never do anything wrong, always win, and so on.

What we're looking at is a qualitative change. Of course there's too much money in every cabinet, but we're now leaping orders of magnitude up, right? So for example, when these, if a centibillionaire gives a million dollars to Trump's in- inauguration, that might sound like a lot, but that's the same as the median American family giving $2.

It's meaningless for the centibillionaire to give that amount of money. Likewise, it was meaningless even for Musk to spend a quarter of a billion on Trump's campaign. The guy is worth something like 400 billion now. That meant nothing to him, and the return to investment was absolutely enormous. So we're shifting from a democracy which had some pretty heavy oligarchical streaks running through it towards something like an oligarchy, in which I think it's fair to say that it's not Trump who's the most important person, it's Musk.

Trump has debts. Musk has money. Trump has debts specifically to Musk for getting him elected. And I think the burden of proof is actually on Trump to show that he has any room for maneuver in this system. And it's going to be interesting to see how congressional Republicans react, because what this particular oligarch wants is to break the federal government.

And whatever their views might be, not m- many of them don't actually want the United States of America to cease to exist so that oligarchs can pick up the pieces. 

Let me ask you about, MSNBC. You had, the regular Trump critics, Joe Scarborough and, Mika Brzezinski, for a few years now really criticizing Trump.

And then after he won, going down to Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with him. 

Yeah. I think the essential thing is not whether you criticize Trump or whether you don't criticize him. I don't think it's all about Trump. I think the essential thing is do you have, are you seeking after truth? Are you doing investigative stories?

Are you saying the things you're truly convinced of based on the results of your investigations and, and, and the facts? I think it doesn't make sense to court somebody like Trump, just psychologically, because he's into humiliation both directions. He wants to humiliate you, and then he wants himself to be humiliated by the guys he regards as bigger men, people like Musk and by Putin.

It's all... For him, it's all a humiliation chain, and you're just telling him which side of the humiliation chain you want to be on. So I think politically, it's not really very effective. But I think the most important thing for the press is to do the job of the press and not to think of everything in terms of paying obeisance or not paying obeisance.

Warner Brothers wants to make you feel complicit in JK Rowling's anti-trans bigotry, all so they can make money. So last week I made a video about how casual references to Harry Potter in TV and movies helps to normalize a franchise that JK Rowling is actively using to fuel attacks on trans people, both in the UK and the US, from her bankrolling lawsuits and political campaigns, to her harassing individual trans people and groups like Amnesty International.

And in that video, I floated what I called at that point a bit of a tinfoil hat theory, that Warner Brothers is deliberately increasing Harry Potter references across their shows that it produces, like The Pitt- 

Sounds like a Harry Potter spell ... 

Ted Lasso- 

He was the understudy right in that fucking endless Harry Potter play I had to sit through with Phoebe

and Lanterns. 

Where did Harry Potter go to school? 

And even into movies like Mortal Kombat 2. 

Drive safe and, say hi to Dumbledore for me 

All in order to make the brand feel harmless again before it launches its uncanny valley TV remake to try to squeeze just a little bit more nostalgia money out of a franchise whose spinoffs they've face-planted.

Well, I am officially retiring that tinfoil hat because this week, Ted Lasso had yet another extended sequence talking about Harry Potter. 

The three clicks are like the three main characters in Harry Potter. 

Ouch. 

Oof. Coach already knows this, but Harry Potter's one of my blind spots. 

Mate, you don't know Harry Potter?

Well, my little boy got onto Percy Jackson and we never looked back. 

It's okay, I'll translate. Carry on with your wizarding jag. 

So the attackers are like the character Harry Potter. 

Who's like Ferris Bueller. 

And episode two of Lanterns had yet another blink-and-you'll-miss-it Harry Potter reference, making that show two for two this season.

Harry Potter went to Hogwarts, you ignorant alien fuck. 

Warner Brothers is clearly really trying to lay on the Harry Potter propaganda thick, but Lanterns' latest reference made me realize that there was a darker layer that I missed in my last video. 

The episode features a Photoshopped image, at least I hope it's a Photoshopped image and 

not generative AI, of the show's hero, Hal Jordan, at the premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, alongside the movie stars Rupert Grint, Daniel Radcliffe, and Emma Watson, the original Harry Potter trio.

And what came across as particularly gulling about this reference to me versus other Harry Potter references is that two of those three actors have been among the most outspoken of the original Harry Potter stars against Rowling's anti-trans bigotry. 

I'm here for all of the witches. 

Daniel Radcliffe also himself even worked with the Trevor Project to support trans people 

I realized my gender, that's just, it's just a thing that it, preexists memory.

And then I guess, a lot of the time it is having the language to even, self-conceptualize what that means is, incredibly important. 

And Emma Watson just last year was publicly attacked by Rowling for her support of trans people. That being said, Rupert Grint just rejoined the Harry Potter franchise by being cast in The Cursed Child play.

Guess he needed the blood money 'cause he isn't relevant anymore. But regardless, while these actors have long been the faces of the franchise with their movie likenesses signed away decades ago when they were kids, by the way, there's something to me that is uniquely gross about using an image of them as real people all as part of a subtle marketing campaign to normalize the very thing that empowers the woman that two of these actors have spoken up against.

It gets even grosser when you remember that part of the reboot TV show's job is intended to replace the old faces of these characters with a new generation of young child actors who themselves are too young to fully understand what they're being asked to be a part of, let alone have the agency to say no or even self-confidence to speak up against if they did, 

while trying to simultaneously erase the cultural memory of the original, more outspoken actors.

And it made me realize how Warner Brothers is attempting to do the same thing to all of us watching these shows that it's doing to both generations of these actors, making us feel complicit in this franchise's harm no matter what we do. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism is a generally true statement.

Our money in this hellish world that we live in often disappears into some vast Rube Goldberg machine of exploitation, and it's kinda hard to know exactly what you're contributing to when you buy something. We're constantly told that the harms of our consumption are so diffuse, so far down the chain, and so ubiquitous that avoiding them is basically impossible, so why bother caring?

Everything we buy causes harm somewhere, so singling out one single purchase is supposedly pointless. You need your morning coffee, so don't think too hard about the child in forced labor buried somewhere in Starbucks's supply chain or the union busting happening right here in the United States. Just drink your coffee and move on.

We turn the 

scale of the problem into an excuse for our apathy. 

But with Harry Potter, that line is unusually direct. Harry Potter keeps Rowling rich and culturally powerful, and then Rowling uses that money directly to harm trans people. You can debate about what you wanna do with that fact, but you can't really pretend that the line isn't there.

And as I said before, you cannot separate the art from the artist when the art is bankrolling the artist's hate campaign. So yes, when you buy Harry Potter stuff, play the new Hogwarts game, or watch the new show, you are helping sustain the machine that gives Rowling that power to harm marginalized people, and it's why so many trans people have been outspoken about asking people to not support Harry Potter going forward.

But Warner Brothers knows this too, and they figured out how to use it against all of us in a pretty insidious way. There has not only been an increase in Potter references in WB media, but you also may have noticed an uptick in Harry Potter brand tie-ins everywhere lately. Fortnite, Rocket League, and the Epic Games store all did Potter integrations late last year.

Coffee Mate launched a line of Harry Potter creamers. 

God, how I hate the fact that JK Rowling has basically Potter branded the entire flavor of butterscotch. And now even Canadian institution Tim Horton's has announced a Harry Potter-themed menu.

I guess now the only thing missing from my morning coffee is a little dash of turf foam on top or whatever. Now, on the surface, this probably just comes across like any promotional collaboration that a movie franchise would do. I saw Mandalorian and Grogu slapped on everything last summer, because apparently nothing says brand synergy like washing my Sarlacc pit with Force Flow body wash.

I meant my armpit, you dirty freaks. Get your mind out of level 1313. That's a reference for you Star Wars fans. But unlike a direct movie promotion tie-in, these Potter tie-ins are happening a little bit too early to promote the new show, and most of them don't even use the new cast in their branding yet.

I think there's a more insidious goal also at play here. they're still trying to make money, let's be clear. But I think the other goal is to try to make you feel like you are already a little complicit in the hate that that brand helps fund. We here in America, and most of Western society, live in an essentializing culture, and what I mean by that is that we're all taught that what you do is a reveal of who you fundamentally are.

For example, when someone steals something, they are considered a criminal, branded by that act for life, regardless of why they committed that crime in the first place, or even if they continue to commit crime later on in their life, or had done so before. This is how systemic disenfranchisement that produces higher crime rates in some Black communities is made invisible until racists can just say, "Well, Black people are just like that.

They just steal more because they're Black." And capitalism is very good at producing the conditions that shape people's behavior, then turn that behavior into an identity, and then uses that, very identity to justify itself. And this is also why so many bigots care more about being called racist, transphobic, or sexist than whether they actually did something racist, transphobic, or sexist.

They hear, "You did a bigoted thing," as, "You are fundamentally a bad person." And people in power know how useful that is. If criticism of an action can be reframed as an attack on someone's very identity, people stop asking what harm they caused and start getting defensive instead, and attack those who try to speak up about the harm that they're contributing to.

This is why conservatives are continually able to recreate the stereotype of the shrill leftist activist who will hate you no matter how small a supposedly racist thing you did was, so you might as well just not give a fuck. Be, be as racist as you wanna be, to your heart's delight. On top of that, capitalism has trained us to see consumption as, if not morally neutral, at least something you can't fully truly be blamed for contributing to, but also tied to your identity.

What you consume is part of who you are. If you're a Harry Potter fan, you should buy Harry Potter merch. If you're a Star Trek fan, you should buy Star Trek merch. If you're a sci-fi nerd, you should buy sci-fi nerd stuff. If you're queer, you should buy queer stuff. And companies like Warner Brothers know how to exploit that dynamic as well.

It's why Warner Brothers is trying to make Harry Potter so ubiquitous in everything from video games to your coffee that it feels unavoidable. They're trying to, if you go to Tim Horton's, maybe accidentally buy the new Hogwarts-branded donut because it's your favorite donut flavor, and you're on the run, and ah, shit, fuck, I just gave money to Harry Potter.

And once now you've bought in even just a little bit, you now need to end up justifying, even if in your own head, why doing that wasn't so bad, that it doesn't define you. And Warner Brothers even tries to assuage any lingering doubt about your character being impugned by making it seem that Potter is actually contributing to helping trans people.

They did this by including a painfully tokenizing trans character in Hogwarts Legacy, whose name was literally Sir Rona 

Sir Rona, as well as partnering with queer-friendly fashion brand Unique Vintage on a Harry Potter collection where 5% of the profits went to GLAAD. But really what that's doing is paying someone who is spending money to buy gasoline to throw on a fire for a dollar store water gun to then fight that fire.

Oh, but there is no such thing as politically neutral, Ed Sheeran, especially not when big piles of money are involved, because money is never apolitical. Money revolves around politics, and politics revolves around money. And that's what happened here. People with wealth and power used their money as leverage to protect a political agenda and enforce the status quo that gives them wealth and power.

Specifically, this guy, Robert Kraft, called Ed Sheeran and said he would not be allowed to perform at his stadium if he brought Macklemore with him, and he was colluding with a bunch of other wealthy stadium owners to do the same. Now, as people have pointed out, those same wealthy stadium owners had no problem hosting Kanye West at their venues.

So obviously, antisemitism isn't really the thing they're offended by. It's being pro-Palestine, and more specifically, being outraged at the murder of tens of thousands of innocent children. That's the politically controversial issue i- in 2026. And also, of course, being in any way critical of the government of Israel.

Now, obviously, this is nothing new. Wealthy billionaires and oligarchs using their power to shape and dominate the narrative and politically attack anyone who dares to speak out against it. And capitulating to those people, especially when you have the wealth and power that you don't really need to, is a political decision.

There is nothing politically neutral about choosing to use a massive platform to reinforce the status quo in the name of self-preservation, especially considering that challenging the narrative propagated by these types of people is one of the most important roles that artists are supposed to have in society.

And that doesn't have to mean writing overtly political lyrics, but artists can capture the attention and trigger the imagination of literally tens of millions of people. That is political power. Whether you want it to be or not, it poses a threat to people in power, because controlling the narrative and limiting people's imagination about what is or isn't fair, right, good, bad, or possible is the most potent tool they have.

And when you have that kind of choosing to bend the knee when the empire comes knocking at your door is not political neutrality. It's political cowardice. 

One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour was because I wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart, free Palestine

I said free Palestine

you went to a few places in the Middle East, and in, in one of the places you went to, as I have, you had a similar experience in, in Hebron. And I just wanna read from your book where you said, "The city's most visible feature was its amazing variety of checkpoints.

Some of them were just soldiers lingering around other massive gates with metal turnstiles. As we approached one, I watched two Palestinian schoolchildren being stopped by a soldier and directed back down the street from which they had come. When it was our turn, one by one we approached. They checked our passports and allowed us to proceed.

These soldiers roam as they feel, stopping and interrogating according to their whim. Later that day, I walked out to buy some goods from a shopkeeper, but before I could get there, a soldier walked out from a checkpoint, blocked my path, and asked me to state my religion. He looked at me skeptically when I told him I did not have one, and he asked for my parents' religion.

When I told him they were not religious either, he rolled his eyes and asked about my grandparents. When I told him they were Christian, he allowed me to pass." Mm. Hebron is that place. It is. If you are Muslim or Palestinian, literally somebody could walk down that road and the Muslim or Palestinian will have to go to, down another road, and I've, I've seen it and experienced it myself.

Yeah, and, and, and it is just, the most... It is the intensification of what the West Bank is, and I would argue what Israeli society is, which is to say segregated. and this runs across the board, and I really, really wanna emphasize this because people, for instance, often talk about Palestinian Israeli citizens, but they actually are second-class citizens.

Right. They don't have the same marriage rights, for instance, if they fall in love with somebody from the West Bank that, say, a Jewish Israeli has when they fall in love with somebody from wherever. there are whole communities in Israel proper that have the right by law, I wanna emphasize this, by law- To discriminate against Palestinian citizens for reasons of what they call custom or culture.

We call that redlining in America. Right. But even redlining wasn't in federal law. and we are supporting this, we are bankrolling this, at the very same time that we run around and talk about our great legacy of overcoming segregation, overcoming slavery, and proclaim Martin Luther King as our patron saint.

Let's talk about this concept of The Message, this concept about using our words and our language, and the effect that that can have on changing people, both their minds and the way we do things. Because there's a larger message. You use three distinct examples in this book. The Middle East is just one and, at the moment, the most controversial.

But you're... What's the point you're making as it regards, as it relates to journalism, writing, and expressing ideas? 

The, the point is that writing is a tremendous tool of power. and sometimes people use it to liberate themselves, and sometimes people use it to dehumanize other people. and I think the reason why the second half of that book is so difficult to accept is because beneath it is the idea that American culture, American authors, American film, American journalism, American television has been complicit in dehumanizing, otherizing, pushing Palestinians out of the frame of conception, and thus erasing the idea of apartheid because nobody's there.

Right. that, that motto, "A land without a people for people without a land," it, it actually has a much, much deeper meaning. Because although we know that, that was obviously not true, we can render it as though those people aren't there. And when they are, they're barbarians, they're savages, people who are not worthy of being, participants in, in, any sort of civilized 

And when you look at the examples that you've cited, and we can go back to, to slavery in the United States, we can go back to, the, the Jim Crow era, it, it... We go back to apartheid itself. It depends on the dehumanization- Always ... of the people- Always ... who are you, you are oppressing. Always. Because as long as you don't think of them...

You were having a great conversation with, Trevor Noah the other day in which, when we just talk about the numbers of dead, doesn't matter. Right. Right? It doesn't... It's not, these are not real people to you. Right, right. But once you start showing imagery of families and once you start talking to the survivors of the dead or the starving children or the families of the Israeli hostages- They are people They are s- And our lives are all, should, should all be equal 

There, there are two things about this war that I, that is going on right now that I wanna emphasize.

Israel does not allow reporters into Gaza. 

Correct. You have to be escorted and you have to, you have to, supply your material- 

Yes ... beforehand. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Thank you, Ali, for clarifying that. And large numbers of the reporters that are there are being killed. I, I, I don't think that's accidental, I think people understand the need to control the flow of information. I think, that is a, a significant, force whenever you wanna exercise power. Look, when we had slavery in this country, there was something called the gag rule, you know, that, that, that forbid the conversation, around, slavery on the House and the Senate floor.

And that's because people knew that if you started talking about this stuff, if people, dared to think of Black people and enslaved Black people as human beings, we, we, we would have serious, serious problems. The system needs, information to be controlled, information to

I talk to a lot of people in Hollywood. A lot of my friends are members of those unions. Everybody was terrified of this merger going through, and that's because, again, even the county of Los Angeles said that this was gonna be a disaster for our home industry.

So why did all the elected leaders in California and Los Angeles support it? Well... Well, partially it might be because a report by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation said that if Paramount left the state, the state would lose 57,000 jobs and $21 billion in economic output. And that sounds pretty bad until you realize that that study was literally commissioned by Paramount.

It's like when a little kid tells their parents, "I don't need to eat broccoli, 'cause I have a document here that says ice cream is very healthy." Now, for a while, it seemed like Rob Bonta was gonna stay strong in the face of all this bullshit. He kept making strong statements. For instance, just a month ago, Bonta said he wasn't going to settle the case without structural changes to the deal that would maintain competition, like keeping the movie studios functionally separate, or selling one of the news networks.

He said he wasn't going to accept a settlement that just, quote, was a promise to behave in a certain way in the future, a promise to make a certain amount of movies, for example, in a given year. That's an old, stale promise. I've heard about that before. It doesn't vibe, in my humble opinion, with what history has shown.

This is an antitrust merger to do what antitrust law does, which is to make sure that prices are fair, make sure that jobs are not cut, wages aren't reduced, make sure that there's choice, quality, competition. If Paramount and Warner Brothers wants to propose a settlement that involves real, robust structural remedies that address the concerns of the markets that we've identified in our complaint, we will listen

Woo! Fuck yeah, Rob. You tell him! That's my, our attorney general, boy. Yeah! And then, a couple weeks later he totally caved. This week, Bonta accepted a settlement that included none of that. The settlement Bonta agreed to doesn't address any of the reasons they sued in the first place, and it doesn't include any structural remedies whatsoever.

In fact, the few remedies it does include are just like laughably paper thin. For instance, in order to address, the conflict between one network owning both CNN and CBS News, they're gonna have a news oversight board of independent journalists that'll make sure everything's really reputable and objective.

just one problem. That news oversight board is going to be appointed by the Ellisons and will report solely to the Ellisons. Oh, I'm sure they're really gonna push back hard on Barry next time she's trying to say that racism is good. Oh, and who could've fucking guessed? Paramount guarantees that they will make 30 films a year.

Oh wait, let's look at the fine print. They're just gonna release 30 films a year. They only have to make half of them. And since last year Warner Brothers and Paramount combined made 18 films, that means they're actually committing to making less. Great agreement you got there, Rob. even though the only reason the agreement happened was because Paramount threatened to leave California, the agreement doesn't even guarantee that they'll stay.

And I believe that will be the case, that they will have their headquarters in California for the foreseeable future. You believe that or it's part of the deal? It's not part of the deal. 

Since when do businesses do the right thing because we believe in them? What are they, fucking Tinker Bell? Are we supposed to clap and hope they don't destroy our economy?

Now, when it comes to why this happened, some people might say that Bonta was spineless. Others are saying that, after every other elected leader in California turned against him, well, he didn't have a leg to stand on. He couldn't bring the case when he had absolutely no support. But either way, cave he did.

And once he settled, it meant that the Writers Guild had to too, because, a small union can't afford to stand up to Goliath all by itself. Even though Goliath in this case is named David and he is tiny and pathetic, he's still, kinda big and scary in a legal way. And I just have to reiterate how disastrous the repercussions of this is gonna be.

Because Paramount had to take on massive, massive debt in order to purchase Warner Brothers, so to service that debt they are going to have to lay off- Thousands and thousands of people. They're gonna have to make less movies. They're gonna have to make them more cheaply, and they're gonna do all of that at a time when people are loving movies more than ever.

The movie industry is resurging. Meanwhile, Paramount just shot it in the head. Of course, a Trump allied family of billionaires now controls two news networks. 

Oh, and here's a new fun piece of news that came out on the day I'm recording this. The Ellisons are talking about bringing on Elon Musk as an investor in Paramount/Warner Brothers. Ooh, I can't wait to watch some movies based on 4chan memes from 2015.

But come on, we gotta give the capitalists some credit. There's gotta be one good thing about this merger. Let's see. We got less jobs, less movies, foreign interference in our entertainment and news businesses. Oh, at least David Zaslav got to walk away with half a billion dollars. Now he can afford to buy sleeves for all his stupid vests.

jokes aside, honestly, what's most disheartening to me about this is that at the end of the day, we didn't even fight at all. Bonta could have stretched the case out. He could have taken it to trial. At least he could have made them wait until the new year, make them start paying a little bit of that ticking fee.

Probably could have extracted more from them in a settlement later if he had just made them sweat for a couple months. But now, instead of showing corporate America that they'll get pushback if they try to do an illegal merger, it showed them that if they push back just a little bit, make a few threats, commission a biased study, lean on a couple electeds, well They don't have to obey the law.

They won't be punished. They can just do what they want. The rest of us go to prison if we shoplift deodorant, but hey, if you're a billionaire who owns a major corporation and you don't wanna follow the law, just threaten your way out of it and they'll let you off the hook. frankly, I think that every politician who supported this merger should feel humiliated by all of this.

I think if you're the governor of California, the attorney general of California, even the mayor of Los Angeles, you're not supposed to let a couple of jumped up corporate executives push you around. You're supposed to say, "Shut up, bitch. I represent the state of California. I represent 39 million people.

I represent the sixth-largest economy in the world. You're not bigger than me. I tell you what to fucking do." But that's not what they did, and that's not what happened. The billionaires got their way this time, and they barely even had to try. We barely put up a fight, and that's not how, this story is supposed to end, in my opinion.

I, I think we the people are still supposed to be stronger than the boss when we raise our voices, like the American public did against this merger. It was supposed to be like the end of A Bug's Life, where all the ants rally together and realize that combined they're stronger than those grasshoppers.

But in this case, the grasshoppers cut a backroom deal with Dot, and both said, "Fuck all you ants." go re-watch A Bug's Life. It'll, it'll make sense if you, keep the plot in mind. But, at the same time, it's good- that this isn't a movie. It's good that life isn't a movie, because it doesn't end.

the fight is not actually over. We lost this battle, but the only way we can lose the war is if we let it make us lose hope. Because the truth is that the bitter irony of this is that this merger could have been blocked, and that means that we got closer than we ever have before. We saw vividly that collective action, as expressed through our public representatives, can actually stand up to power and stop bad people from doing bad shit.

It just so happens that in this case, the public representatives let us down. But that doesn't mean that they have to in the future. The billionaires want us to believe that their power is inevitable and that we can't stop them, but we can. And in fact, the reason this is such a bitter loss is that we know that we can.

There is no law of the universe that the sky is blue and David Ellison gets whatever the fuck he wants, no matter how many jobs it kills. We do not have to live like this, and we know it. But if we want things to change, it is up to us at the end of the day. We need to start punishing spineless leaders who sell us out and support...

Damn it. Right in the middle of my big speech, I fucking burp. Okay, fu- let's try it again. We do not have to live like this, but if we want things to change, it is up to us. We need to start punishing the spineless leaders who sell us out, and start supporting those who actually show willingness to stand up to corporate power.

Leaders like Nithya Raman, who's running for mayor of Los Angeles right now, and who came out strongly against the settling of this lawsuit. And leaders like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, that's how you gotta say it, who has shown he is not afraid of corporate power, and that he recently forced DoorDash to pay drivers $130 million in lost wages, and who also appointed antitrust guru Lina Khan into his actual administration.

We need to let our political system know that we do not wanna vote for leaders who consider themselves to be less powerful than the billionaires. We wanna vote for leaders who are gonna represent the people's interest and kick billionaire ass.

Employer-sponsored health insurance is the dangling carrot that keeps a lot of Americans stuck in jobs they'd rather not have. But I was young and healthy. Maybe I could risk going without it for a while. In the autumn of 2022, I injured my foot, broke my finger, and had an appendicitis requiring emergency surgery all within a three-week period.

I was actually on my way home from the orthopedic surgeon who had set my broken finger when my stomach started hurting. 24 hours later, the good folks at Kaiser Permanente on Sunset Boulevard were pumping me with morphine and prepping me for laparoscopic . I had happened to have injured the foot while at work, so Universal paid me out workers' comp for the entirety of my recovery, which ended up being several weeks due to the broken bone.

Wizards don't wear stints or casts, so I wasn't signed off to come back until I was fully healed. The branding in that part of the park is so strict, it's unbelievable. We also aren't allowed to have traditional signage on the strict orders of Ms. Rowling, which was why we had a number of guests with sensitivity to flashing lights unwittingly enter the wand room only to discover that one of the spells had a slight strobing effect.

Warnings are technically posted in the Universal app, but you have to download and check that first to know what you're in for. Suddenly, I was faced with what I would be giving up if I left Universal. There was no way I could risk not having insurance. Accidents happen. Your body can turn on you at any moment.

We need health insurance. My fiance works dangerous jobs up on ladders and doesn't take care of his body as well as I nag him to. He and I would like to start a family together someday, and I'm not just gonna raw dog pregnancy and childbirth without a physician Is that even legal? Actually, I live in the US.

Don't answer that question. Even beyond the health insurance angle, by going fully freelance, I'd be losing things like workers' comp or even the unemployment insurance Universal paid into and I was able to collect when hours were cut during the off-season. I wanted to leave, but I needed to make sure all of my ducks were in a row before I made the jump.

In early 2023, I took professional leave for an international tour. When the tour concluded, I thought to myself, I'd leave. It would be over. But while on tour, I was assaulted, and I needed therapy. The touring company covered my mental and physical healthcare while I was with them, but I still needed care when I returned from tour with a case of COVID and continuing anxiety and depression that led to a mild substance abuse problem.

I was, as the kids say, going through it, and I couldn't bring myself to add poverty and unemployment to my long list of problems. Time passed, and things got a little better, but there were always reasons to hang on, reasons I needed to stay. Time and time again, I prioritized my own safety and comfort over doing what I thought to be right.

I was stalling. For literal years, I was waiting for the right moment to stand for my principles. All the while, the rhetoric around trans people became louder, my desire to leave became stronger, and my shame around staying became a heavy weight that I carried with me. I wore a COVID mask in all of my shows, the only real accessory we were permitted by the Warner Brothers branding department to wear.

Partly, I was trying to maintain some small amount of COVID consciousness while working at a theme park with tens of thousands of guests a day, but also, I was simply ashamed to show my face in the Harry Potter world I slipped down the roster at work. I gave away shifts even though I needed the money. I felt deeply unhappy and dirty.

I talked to some of my trans and queer friends about it. They said they didn't care. It was more important to them that I had healthcare and could pay my rent than if somewhere along the line J.K. Rowling made a few pennies off of a theme park toy some kid was going to buy whether I was working there or not.

I'd made no real progress. My Patreon stagnated. Busy months at work meant my channel and any revenue from videos remained inconsistent. I'd never managed any savings, so for a little bit, I harbored this delusional idea that Harry Potter was actually declining in popularity, that it was this corny thing people in their 30s and 40s liked, but that most actual kids these days found boring.

I was convinced that the new HBO series announced was a planned tax write-off. there was no reason to make it. It looks nearly identical to the movies that concluded a little over 10 years ago. It was obvious to me that this TV show was going to be quietly shelved, and then some executive somewhere were going to do some kind of magic to claim the identical sets and identical screenplays and salaries paid to identical actors at a loss to the tune of many millions of dollars and a brand-new yacht.

Any day now, they'd announce that the wizarding world of Harry Potter would be converted into How to Train Your Dragon Land or Roblox Planet or Cocomelon World or whatever. I was huffing copium like my life depended on it. And then

Motherfucker. I was recently re-watching a video by my favorite YouTubers, The Leftist Cooks, in which Sarah said something that really made me think. She locked eyes with me through the screen and called me out mercilessly with... 

like how when you're walking, all of the drivers are maniacs, and when you're driving, all of the pedestrians are clueless.

When you've been harmed, we may be really dead set on justice, but when we've perpetuated harm, suddenly our values shift. 

I had spent years rationalizing and minimizing my participation in something to which I was diametrically opposed. I was directly enabling the reigning god queen of transphobia, Joanne Rowling, a woman who openly admits that she uses her private wealth from Harry Potter royalties to fund transphobic hate groups.

And in the meantime, the quiet complacency of people exactly like me emboldened her. Those of us who shrugged and vapidly recited the truism, "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism," those of us that shook our fists and continued to make her money while telling ourselves that we actually aren't to blame for the harm she might cause with the fruits of our labor, the labor we performed in her trademarked billion-dollar wizard village.

Every day that I set aside my own values or carved out caveats for myself, her voice grew louder, bolder, more hateful. Every day that people like me didn't take a stand, she assumed that we were quietly supporting her, affirming her beliefs, a silent majority of bigots. Many of my coworkers, maybe even most of them, didn't have a choice.

If they left Universal, they'd find themselves slinging lattes for genocide heirs like Starbucks or selling Harry Potter merchandise alongside rifles at Walmart for less money and no healthcare. But I already knew that I had a way out, and even if I wasn't quite ready, if I just took a leap, I would find my feet.

Hello all. It is with a heavy heart that I submit my resignation from my position as wand keeper at Universal Studios. I have loved working for the company for the past five years, and I've found many parts of my position as wand keeper for the past four years incredibly valuable and fulfilling.

However, given JK Rowling's ongoing and overt hostility to the queer community and to the hateful trajectory of her rhetoric, I have felt deeply uncomfortable and conflicted working a position that directly benefits her. It has gotten to a point where I'm afraid to be seen in costume in the land because I don't want to be associated with her, and I'm ashamed at what my trans friends and loved ones would think.

That being said, I really cherished my time at Universal Studios Hollywood, and I'll keep an eye out for future opportunities with the company outside of the wizarding world. Okay, well, that part isn't quite true. I think I am subscribed to their casting emails. But I wanted to underscore the idea that I wasn't disgruntled with Universal or my role as an entertainer, rather that I specifically quit because of Joanne.

Thank you for the memories, me. So that took me an embarrassingly long time to do, shamefully. I should feel shame. I do feel shame, and if you wanna shame me further, if you wanna log on to your favorite social media app and cancel me or whatever, go right ahead. Throw some more shame on the pile. I don't want this to be a YouTube apology video because I don't wanna center myself in a discussion that is fundamentally about trans people.

So this is not a YouTube apology video. I am sorry. I do apologize for working at literal Harry Potter Land. there really is no good excuse, much as I tried to make them. I feel remorse over having prioritized a day job over my own moral character for as long as I had. I feel sincere guilt over the mere idea that there might be someone watching this and feeling hurt or betrayed by my actions, and I wish I could spare you that pain.

But I'm not going to self-flagellate, and I wanna make it clear that I am not looking for anybody's forgiveness. That is not the conclusion I am working towards here. Let's return for a moment to Sarah the Leftist Cook. 

Our emotions are supposed to be socially useful. We feel guilt and remorse and pain because something has to change.

I know that there are some of you out there still engaging with Harry Potter. I know because I have a Harry Potter video with 1.7 million views at the time of this writing, and I've seen all your comments. I know because I've been in the room with willfully clueless millennials asking why we aren't ready to forgive Joanne for a handful of bad tweets.

I know because I know people who reread the books year after year. I know because I've worked with people who resent JK Rowling, but quietly clock in day after day, helping her make her billions. And the time has long since passed when we can remain ignorant of what it really is that we are supporting.

We've just heard clips starting with

Life Is A Story exploring how 'The Zone of Interest' shows ordinary people, not monsters, profiting from mass murder next door while overcompensating to convince themselves nothing is wrong.

Democracy Now! traced how ABC's settlement with Trump set a precedent for censorship by lawsuit, with Musk ready to bankroll frivolous cases meant to keep the press quiet.

Jessie Gender described how Warner Bros. is making Harry Potter so unavoidable that fans accidentally fund Rowling's attacks on trans people, then feel too complicit to object.

PissedMagistus rejected the idea that Ed Sheeran could stay politically neutral after stadium owner Robert Kraft threatened to keep him off the stage unless he dropped Macklemore over his support of Palestine.

Velshi argued that American culture, from journalism to film, has been complicit in dehumanizing Palestinians, making apartheid invisible by erasing them from view.

Adam Conover detailed how California's Attorney General caved on the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger, accepting a toothless settlement after publicly vowing to demand real structural changes.

And Hoots Hootman laid out how the fear of losing employer health insurance kept the them working for JK Rowling at Universal's Harry Potter land for years.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

We can only make this show with your support and that includes following us on all the platforms you use. Check out our link in bio right in the show notes for every place to follow us and every way to support us, including one-time donations.

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I sometimes ask discussion questions but you should also feel free to respond to anything you heard on the show.

Here's today's question:*

Historian Timothy Snyder warns against obeying in advance, when people give up something before anyone even asks them to. Have you either witnessed something like that happening or actively resisted it because you recognized it? This could be a workplace, a school, a family or a group you've been part of. Tell us what you saw and what happened next.

If you'd like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message or email us through our link in bio in the show notes,

On that note, my thoughts for today.

We're talking today about the structures of complicity. What are the elements of society and of humanity that cause people, time and again, to go along with ideas they know are bad and support policies they know are harmful? So, I want to talk today about one possible antidote.

When the idea of people following the crowd is talked about, it's rare that any suggestion is made of what you should do if you find yourself in that situation, other than to resist the urge to follow with everyone else because you can see through the fog. That's a recipe for finding individual heroes while guaranteeing that the vast majority of people will go along unthinkingly with the crowd, because willpower alone is not a strategy.

One good piece of advice is to decide ahead of time what lines you refuse to cross, though that's only part of it. The real functional part of the strategy for resisting thoughtlessness or group mentality that goes in the wrong direction is to decide on your limits AND tie yourself to a community of people ahead of time so that you never have to be in the position of making a decision to stand apart from the crowd by yourself.

There's a famous study from the 1950s by the psychologist Solomon Asch that tested how far people will follow the crowd against their own better judgment. A group of eight would sit in a room, but seven of them were actors, only one was the real subject. Their task was to look at a line and say which of three comparison lines matched its length. It was very simple, and the answer was obvious. When people were tested alone, essentially everyone got it right. The test was run several times in a row with different sets of lines.

For this experiment, the actors all gave the same wrong answer out loud before the test subject was asked for theirs. The result was that three out of four subjects went along with the group's wrong answer at least once. Only one in four held their ground every time. Some went as far as to say that they knew they were answering incorrectly but didn't want to look stupid. Others said that, hearing everyone agree, they actually started to doubt their own eyes.

In a nutshell, this is basically the whole trick of authoritarianism. One of their major strategies is to present themselves as inevitable and have their supporters endlessly echo their talking points. People with no strong ideology might be swayed by it from pure repetition, and opponents are cowed into compliance by the fear that they are in the minority and will be punished for standing up against the authoritarians.

In the lab setting, the test subjects were only risking looking foolish by giving their honest answer. In an authoritarian state, the stakes are genuinely higher. So, with all of this working against you, telling people to be ready to stand up against the crowd is a nice idea, but there's a key detail that's missing.

Asch then ran the experiment again with one change, which was to have just one of the other seven actors tell the truth. With a single ally in the room, the pull of the group collapsed. Subjects went along with the wrong answer given by the majority only about a quarter as often as before, simply because one other person was willing to say out loud what was clearly true, what anyone could see, and that was all it took to break the hold of herd mentality.

We are fundamentally social animals, for better and for worse. Looking to those around us to see how to act is hardwired.

In evolutionary terms, this worked out well because it meant you'd also run away from the tiger, even if you're not the one who saw it. That's why it's far less effective to try to fight our wiring head on. You don't want to try to willpower your way past your social wiring, you should trick it with stronger social connections to draw on.

In other words, the antidote for the risk of following group mentality is to have that one other person who sees the truth with you and gives you the strength to resist the urge to follow.

The advice from Timothy Snyder to not obey in advance has been ubiquitous on the left for years as we have watched Trump's authoritarianism rise to power. The detail that's been missing, or at least underemphasized, is that we shouldn't be expected to do that on our own.

When Odysseus in the Odyssey was warned about the sirens song, he knew not to try to depend on willpower and depended on his crew to get them through. He had them put wax in their own ears and tie him to the mast, ordering them to tie him even tighter if he begged to be released. He heard the siren song, he begged, the crew followed the orders that had been given in advance, and they made it through. The key detail is that they decided in advance and depended on one another.

I talk a lot about how capitalism drives people apart and encourages thoughtless consumer purchases, but ironically, the system will also sell you this same advice for making better decisions as well. Everyone from productivity experts in the business world to fitness trainers promising to get you to exercise advises this exact dynamic, they call it having an "accountability buddy." If you lived in a village of a hundred people, you never needed that advice because there was always someone who would know if you'd made a plan and then failed to follow through on it. Today, we have to make the conscious decision to let people know about our plans so that the power of those social dynamics can help us stick closer to our ideals.

The full-strength version of this dynamic is a union, a tenants' association, or any kind of organized group that has come together for the purpose of building power through solidarity, but you don't have to start a union to get the benefits. If you want to take Timothy Snyder's advice and not comply with authoritarians in advance, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with someone. Decide for yourself what line you won't cross, and then tell someone because that's what creates a new pathway for our social animal instincts to follow.

In concrete terms, if you love Harry Potter but have decided that you think it's unethical to give money to the franchise, tell one or more people about your decision and explain that you're sharing because you want to be held accountable.

Engaging an accountability buddy for matters of ethics and resistance to authoritarianism is like having that ally who also sees the truth in the room with you all the time. That's how to tie yourself to the mast. We strengthen our individual resolve and capacity for action by binding ourselves to others and using the power of our social instincts to make us act in ways that will make our friends proud of us.

If you'll indulge a quick aside on the spectrum-spanning appeal of power through collectivism, I found this quite interesting.

The word "fascism" comes from Italian words describing the binding together of things. Fascio described a band of people in Italian politics, and the Fasci Siciliani were leagues of peasants binding themselves together for the same basic reasons the left still advocates power through collectivism today. When Mussolini founded the movement in 1919 that became the National Fascist Party two years later, the name drew on that same Latin root, and the party took as its emblem another linguistically related object, the fasces. It was a bundle of individual rods bound together around an axe as a symbol of power in ancient Rome; the rods for the threat of beating and the axe for beheading. That's authoritarianism in one symbol that idealizes a single group, strongly bound together, under the threat of punishment by the state.

But like most symbols that stand the test of time, the fasces can be interpreted in different ways and doesn't have to be about the power to punish. It has also long been used in the US to symbolize the union of the states since way before Mussolini. The Lincoln Memorial is entirely themed around the preservation of the Union and there are 10-foot tall fasces outside Lincoln's temple and his chair features a fasces on each arm rest, though those on the chair left off the axes to emphasize peaceful unity without the element of violence.

So the left, right, and center all see the value and power of being bound together. But when authoritarians gain power, their reflex is to focus more on the axe than the bundle, to punish their enemies and threaten the opposition. So, when that happens, you must be ready for the abuse of state power with the spine-stiffening version of solidarity that comes from declaring ourselves to one another and drawing strength from the connections we make.

The looming threat of authoritarianism doesn't show up as one big, overwhelming crowd. It's thousands of small situations where people largely decide how to act by looking at those around them for guidance on what they should do. In every one of those scenarios, a single person who has decided on their convictions ahead of time, and has given themselves the strength to act on them by having shared them with someone else, can be the one person in the room who's willing to speak the truth and break the spell of the crowd, short circuiting the reflex to obey in advance.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, Lessons From Nazi Germany

Followed by Section B, Complicity in Gaza; Media, Governments, and Celebrities

Section C, The Myth of Neutrality; Media, Moderates, and Obeying in Advance

And Section D, Fandom, Consumption, and Personal Reckoning

many people who fled Nazi Germany or who were in the Holocaust couldn't retain a lot of personal items, and the way that Jacob got this photo is really interesting.

it's a story he actually told me when I was first hired at the museum in 1997. In that year, Jacob got a letter from his old friend Gunther, whom we've already mentioned who's in the photograph. Jacob had just returned from a trip to Bremen. City officials had invited him for a Holocaust observance in Bremen, and he visited the city for the s- first time since they fled, and Gunther reached out afterwards to say he was sorry for having missed Jacob's visit, and he sent this picture along as a reminder of how close they had been.

Now remember, Gunther's parents worked right next to Jacob's, Jacob's, s- shop, his father's shop, and Gunther knew about the murder of Jacob's beloved mother at the hand of the Nazis. In his letter, Gunther wanted to make it clear to Jacob that, quote, "He had never touched a Jew." when Jacob wrote back, he asked Gunther what his life had been like during the war, and Gunther wrote that he'd been a guard in a concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen, which is not so far away from Bremen.

He then emphasized he had never, quote, "Never touched a Jew," and Jacob wanted to learn more. He wanted to ask why that job, why he took that job, and whether he thought it was okay to imprison and kill Jews, whether that was acceptable. But Gunther never responded again to his letters 

So he cared enough about this friendship with Jacob and his brother Benno to hold on to this photo all these years.

Right. To make the contact, but clearly was wrestling with a lot of, of feelings about other choices that he made. And I think it's, very fascinating and difficult to try to imagine the calculations that must have been going through the minds of people like Gunther and millions of other Germans to make those choices.

People who had personal friendships, even caring relationships with Jews, and then later became actively complicit in their persecution. 

Right. 

in the case of Gunther, we don't know, right, if his claim about not committing violent acts is true or not, right? 

Right. Exactly. We don't know. We only have his word.

Yeah, and it's how he chose to portray himself to his old friend. Patricia, we both knew Rabbi Weiner because he was a volunteer at the museum in the later part of his life, and that gives particular insights into this story and this, personal history. I'm gonna pause again, though, to welcome viewers we have, Patricia, watching from around the world.

tuning in from Malta, from the United Kingdom, from Canada, from the city of Montreal, and from Lublin in Poland. We are so glad that you are with us today. So Patricia, we were just saying that, you knew Rabbi Weiner as a older man when he was volunteering, but it goes beyond that for you, the story of his history, because not only do you understand, his family's, plight through the eyes of historian, but you also have your own familial ties to this region of Germany.

you had relatives who lived on the outskirts of this port city. Tell us a little bit about that personal connection. 

Right. My grandfather came from a family of middle-class farmers who lived in the countryside outside Bremen, as you said, Edna, where Rabbi Weiner, once lived. my grandfather immigrated to the United States in October 1923 at the height of hyperinflation in Germany, and that month as he sailed to America, a slice of bread literally cost thousands of German marks.

And so you see a photograph of my family at one of my great aunt's weddings in the summer of 1938, just a few months before Kristallnacht. And while my grandfather became a, an American citizen actually in 1993, and all the time this, history, starts, all of his siblings and parents, my great-grandparents, experienced the Nazi rise and World War II firsthand.

They were like many Germans who found some of those messages of Nazi, Nazi rhetoric and Nazi messages about the future appealing. They wanted a strong leader to save their failing economy. They wanted a stable government. in the letters, in the time before Hitler comes to power, there'd been three chancellors in, so three rulers in less than three years.

And in a letter before the Nazis come to power, my great-uncle, one of my grandfather's brothers, wrote, "I'm sorry, dear Henrik, that I've been out of touch, but we're voting every five minutes." Because in those days, of course, the Nazi governments rose and... sorry, before the Nazi, the Weimar governments rose and collapsed, and they ruled by emergency decree.

There was no stability. And I suspect that my relatives may not have known any Jewish people at all. It was a rural area. and that as with many individuals in that area, antisemitism would not have been a primary draw, but certainly a stable economy was 

it's such a beautiful family portrait.

That wedding, the gorgeous veil, the clothes, and it's hard to know that, this is not everyone's experience living in Germany at the time. Absolutely. I, I'm wondering though, Patricia, thinking about your grandfather, he's an ocean away from all of his siblings, his parents, as he watches these convulsions happening in his home country.

Patricia, did you ever talk with your grandfather about what happened in Germany after he left and the choices of his loved ones? 

Yeah, I'm just going to say that's a picture of myself when I was 10 with my grandparents and my grandfather next to me. I was in my late teens and began studying, German history, and one day I said to him, "Grandpa, you would never have been a Nazi because you're such a good guy."

And he said to me, "Oh, oh, yes, I would have been. I would have been a young man in 1933 with many people around me who were members of the Nazi Party. They would have influenced me and drawn me in." And I... That moment really opened my eyes. I think that's one reason I'm sitting here as an historian at our National Holocaust Museum.

I, I understood for the first time that ordinary people, even good people, could be swept away to, to listen to a demagogue like Hitler, to support a regime that committed so many crimes in their name. 

What a, a powerful moment, and thank you, Patricia, for sharing that. It's an intimate moment, but clearly also very impressive that your grandfather was an honestly self-reflective person and could say, "I don't think that I necessarily would've been different than anyone else."

Mm-hmm. I think you honor him, if I may say, by your very, You don't avoid when you're looking at the history, and you look at it in a human and honest way. 

Thank you. 

your comments are also resonating with our viewers. A viewer named Kate writes, "I think these stories are so important to learn from these periods of history.

I wish I could talk to my great-grandparents and ask questions." And Kate, I think many of us feel that way, either remembering conversations that we've had about uncomfortable history or- Yeah ... questions we wish we could have asked. another viewer, Patricia, is answering a question I'd like to pose to you.

Theresa writes to ask, "Do you think there was an entire absence of a moral compass among some?" How would you answer that big, big questions? 

Well, I think we're going to get to some of that in our conversation here today, but clearly there are a lot of reasons why people look away from this as it goes on ar- around them.

Many people are absorbed in themselves, especially during wartime. my family was being bombed. They, part of the family lived in the port city of Bremerhaven above Bremen and, you get caught in a... Your- your- your husband's at war and whatever, so you look inward, and you don't care as much about the people around you.

But I think there are also people that were very callous, and certainly there were people who did buy into antisemitism, who were antisemites or, or who did buy into this ideology. so there's many motives for supporting the Nazi regime as there are individuals, I think.

Here's the problem. The excerpt says pretty explicitly that the Weimar Republic's multi-party democracy and proportional representation were asking for trouble, and the trouble they got was Adolf Hitler.

After that, it frankly delivers a standard issue history of Hitler's rise, peppered with occasional assertions about democracy. The authors then move you through presidential elections, parliamentary elections, presidential appointments, emergency decrees, intimidation, and dictatorship without much of an explanation of what Weimar's version of democracy actually has to do with any of it.

And it all leads you to a conclusion that voting matters because doing it wrong could lead to the rise of a tyrant who makes voting not matter, essentially. The actual argument is a little confusing as they lay it out, and the author's own facts run the other way, which makes it even more confusing. In the last free election, November 1932, German voters did exactly what the authors ask of voters.

The Nazis lost 2 million votes and 34 seats. The electorate turned out. The vote worked. Hitler was appointed chancellor anyway less than three months later by a president who despised him through a constitutional structure that let a handful of men around Hindenburg, the president, hand the chancellorship to the loser of the voters' verdict.

The votes counted. The structure of power counted more. And we need to dwell on that for a moment. A conservative president began ruling by decree, veering from one decision to another, one appointment to another, all to serve the interests of the right. Voters rejected Hitler for president. Hindenburg then used the authority of the presidency to appoint him head of government because conservative politicians believed that he would help keep them in power.

Hitler's support on the far right mattered, but it didn't compel that decision. Then in the next election in November '32, the Nazi vote dropped, and the authors, for some reason, ignore that detail in a piece about how and why voting matters. Those votes counted, but the structure of power counted more So whatever lesson about the Weimar Republic the authors want you to apply in your life, it might be worth us taking the real lesson that Germans took from it to apply to their lives after the catastrophe of the Third Reich.

What German reformers recognized after the catastrophe, taking a hard look at what actually produced it, was that the problem with Weimar wasn't a political one. Electing new and better people was not the solution. The problem was structure, how power was organized and arranged, and who got to wield it.

Changing that structure was the work that needed to be done. So with a chance to create an entirely new system, look at what they actually did with what became the Basic Law, Germany's constitution. Because Germany drew the opposite lesson from the one the authors seem to want you to take away. They didn't reject multi-party democracy.

They didn't reject proportional representation. They leaned into them. What they changed was the power of the executive, and they added checks on extremist politics. They took the power to choose a chancellor away from the president and moved it to an election by parliament. The president's role became just a formality.

Parliament could remove a chancellor only by electing a replacement. That addressed a specific problem. A collection of parties might agree on bringing down a government without agreeing on any government that could succeed it. The new arrangement gave representative government a more stable foundation while practically erasing the president's ability to act independently of it.

They also introduced thresholds to address polarization, extremism, and political fragmentation. A party needs to achieve at least 5% of the vote to become an active participant in the federal system of representation in parliament to keep out the splinter parties. And a court can rule a party unconstitutional, which it did to a Nazi successor party in 1952 and to the communists in 1956.

It can prohibit parties seeking to destroy the democracy. The relevant distinction, though, is between allowing political disagreement and enabling an organized extremist movement to use democratic freedoms to abolish those freedoms. And the result of all this reduction of executive authority and empowerment of democracy?

Germany has had only 10 chancellors since 1949 against 14 in almost 14 years of Weimar, and it's been stable, even strong, as a democracy ever since. Germany retained proportional representation and multi-party competition while changing the arrangements through which governments acquired and exercised power Proportional multi-party systems also became enduring figures of democratic government across much of Europe to right now.

And that history gives us good reason to question even the suggestion that allowing more voices into representative government was itself the problem that gave rise to something like Hitler. The pattern points one direction about lessons learned and then applied. The danger was never too much democracy.

It was concentrated executive power with too few checks on it. Which brings the lesson home, because concentrated executive authority is our problem, too. The Anti-Federalists railed against it in the ratification debates. It was the center of political discussion in the 1970s after Watergate. A powerful executive, a winner-take-all system that narrows the people's voice into two parties and two parties only.

Checks that depend entirely on those we elect to be willing to use them, and a political culture that commands that you do not ever suggest changing that power structure, no matter what happens. Shift the deck chair is fine, but don't look at the sinking ship. Our only option is political change and then hope for the best.

But oddly, it's where Bash and Fisher's excerpt ends by telling us that Hitler's rise shows how democratic institutions can be perverted for individual gain. After all that about democracy, they arrive at a warning about an ambitious man exploiting democracy. The real election of Weimar for this election is not vote harder or vote knowing it will impact who comes next.

It's that the act of voting isn't the win. What elections do and what the people you elect do with the structure of power, that's what changes things. Germany learned that through catastrophe. You shouldn't have to. The people you elect should commit to reducing the power of the executive, to widening the ways people's voices get heard through more parties and proportional representation, and to building controls on democracy's enemies that don't damage democracy itself.

That is the lesson learned by those who paid the highest possible price for it. And arguments like Bash and Fisher's aren't just wrong, they're in your way. "Your vote matters" sounds like good civic medicine, but as the complete lesson of Hitler's rise, it does real damage. It spends your attention on the political, turnout, candidates, the next cycle, while the structural problem sits untouched.

And it teaches that when voters do their job, democracy is saved, job done. And if it's a familiar establishment nationalism, citizens are summoned to defend their country by participating in its inherited democratic institutions with little encouragement asked whether those institutions actually work for democracy.

Voters receive a stern assignment, and the people seeking their votes escape any demand to explain what they will change after they get the votes. That's leaving an awful lot on the table. Those demands have to apply to the people you want to win. You should know what institutional changes they intend to pursue and how you can hold them to those commitments after the campaign ends, when they hold the power you have given them, power that comes from you in the first place.

German voters did their job in November 1932. The structure overrode them. A history that hides that fact behind a get out the vote moral isn't preparing Americans for what your votes are up against. It's making sure you never ask. The work voting needs to do, electing people who will change how power is structured, begins with knowing that's the assignment.

The act of voting is not the win. You want to know how your vote can matter for future generations? By helping change your government so that those future generations don't have to learn Weimar's lesson the way the Germans and all of the Third Reich's victims did.

Next, Section B, Complicity in Gaza; Media, Governments, and Celebrities

If you are a leftist, if you are a progressive, if you are a liberal, if you are some- someone center-left, an independent, someone anywhere who is not a Republican, a right-winger, far right, nationalist, Nazi, white supremacist, if you're anywhere left of center, it's really fucking easy, really fucking easy to understand what's going on here and be against the Israeli government and what they're doing to the Palestinian people.

And here's why. Their government is a far right-wing government. Their government was emboldened by Donald Trump Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu were, are besties.

So I mentioned earlier how, the famous music star Halsey shared a, speech on Israel and Palestine from Michael Brooks on her Twitter. And, she clearly watched the interview because she tweeted out a quote from it that isn't in the title. She put, "It's not complicated," by Michael Brooks, and then with a link to the YouTube video.

And she put the whole video up, but I really wanted to just play this portion specifically 'cause Michael was always on point. well, not always, to be fair. when it came to my wheelhouse, Michael, wasn't always on point. But with everything else when it came to international issues, especially in the Mideast, and, and he was really into, African, South African politics too, but especially in the Mideast, Michael just had a knowledge, that, honestly, would always astound me.

I was always so impressed. He clearly was very, not just interested in what was going on there, he felt... Iit, it really did feel like he, he, he wanted to know more 'cause he felt some sort of connection, and y-you'll hear why in this video, why, why probably he, he, he was so knowledgeable on these things and why he read so much about Israel and Palestine.

Let me play this clip. It is from his speech, and it's... couldn't be any more prescient

And is supported? Or is- So, so it's not a complex issue. That's the big thing. It's super simple. There's one group that has enormous power. It's the most powerful country in the Middle East. It's backed by the United States. It acts on another population of people with total impunity and is never held accountable for anything.

So there's no symmetry in the relationship, period. And just as like a thought experiment, IDW people, if we know that if somehow a population of Jewish refugees ended up in West Bank in Gaza, and an Arabic government in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv had an open air prison in, in what, Jewish Gaza, which they bombed with white phosphorus, they killed civilians indiscriminately, and they had no, provisions for medicine, they had an embargo that blocked food, that the electricity wasn't running, that there was an over forty-eight percent unemployment rate, life expectancy and malnutrition statistics were horrifying.

The, one of the major, policymakers in this hypothetical Arabic Palestinian state said, "We need to put those Jews on a diet." In the West Bank, there was another Jewish area where there was a little bit more autonomy, but there was regular Arabic settlements where they pulled up the Jewish farmers' foods, they terrorized them with rocks, the security forces broke children's bones, and they couldn't drive their own roads.

We'd all have no problem understanding what that was. So there's nothing complex about it. The second part of your question... It's, it's a pure asymmetry relationship, and the question is rights or not. So that's it. It's not complicated 

that's, that's, that's, that really hits at everything. It really hits at everything, and obviously we could expand on each, but he, he gets it all in there.

And, the, the... Looking now what we're seeing is Israel can stop this at any time. they, they are the ones doing this. They are the ones in control here. They are the ones with the power here to just put a stop to this if they wanted to. But they don't want to. That's, it's clear they don't want to.

It's clear they don't want to. a right to defend themselves. we're, we're talking... when you look at the casualties, o- obviously I condemn the killing of any c- any, any innocent civilian 100%, no doubt about it. I don't care, Palestinian, Israeli, anyone, anywhere. Horrible. Condemn it completely. 

we have to be honest.

It's, it's welcome in the sense we've been demanding elements of accountability and all the rest of it, but I think there are gaps. I think we should, be wary of that. What, what's, what stands out for me is this is full-throated unequivocal about the settlements, and it separates illegal settlements from Israel as a whole and also Israel's actions in Gaza.

So if you're targeting the settlements and then saying, "We're gonna continue trade or we're gonna continue our relations and our agreements with Israel beyond the Green Line," and all the rest of it, then you're implying that, that, that they're, they're separate. But they're not. They're not outside Israel.

The project of ethnic cleansing, they're just part of its machinery. It's one way that it sustains the same strategic objective. So I think skepticism is, is, is fine. I d- I don't think we should be, screaming from the rooftops that this is, Britain has changed irreversibly and all the rest of it.

Bottom line being that we have had these kind of flagship announcements before. We had the arms exports, which were allegedly stopped, and yet F-35 components were still being shipped out to Israel as it was massacring Palestinians. we had the so-called Palestinian statehood announcement, which again, what did it change materially on the ground?

Nothing much. So that's why obviously diplomats themselves, British d- British diplomats have, acknowledged this may be symbolic, and that may be for political reasons they've said that. But the bottom line is that there is precedence. there is a precedent where they, it, Britain just changes a few things around the, skirts around the edges.

But you can't skirt around the edges of ethnic cleansing. You have to be categorical. and Israel, the state that is allowing and facilitating these illegal settlements is also Israel, the state that's recognized as an apartheid state and a state committing genocide. So you can't differentiate the two.

If you're gonna go all out, you have to go, and be comprehensive about it. 

with, with the settlements, a lot of people might think, well, w- w- people might, some people might go, "Well, I'm surprised we're doing trade with illegal settlements," which Britain officially, Britain has long... That's the, that's the official position of the British state.

They don't do anything about it. under David Cameron, the position Of Britain and the conservative governments under Rishi Sunak was that those statements, those settlements are illegal. So people might think, "Well, why are we doing trade with them?" You know what I mean. so what, what do you...

But at the same time, it's caused this big fury from the Israel lobby and from the Israeli state, so they're obviously rattled. So what do you make of all that? The kind of yes, on the one hand, what the hell are we doing any trade with illegal settlements and the kind of hysteria that's triggered. 

The thing is, if you say anything, they're gonna be rattled anyway, so that, that doesn't change it.

But obv- obviously, like I said, I am, I am caveating with the fact that this is a welcome shift. These are policies or introductions, or measures that we probably would've argued five, six year- years ago that would, would never be allowed, would never be sanctioned, et cetera. So that, that's obviously a positive.

But I just find it striking, it's like they're using the language of ethnic cleansing. Miliband, says, clear- clearly the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. But the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, refused to still say the word genocide in Gaza. And I'm not, I'm not nitpicking here, I'm just pointing out fact that the language does matter.

You can't keep claiming that what's happening in the West Bank is separate to what's happening in Gaza. It's being committed, facilitated, enabled by one state with one objective. The way that carries it out in, in the West Bank, is via the illegal settlements, the home demolitions, the occupation. It's ethnic cleansing.

The, the mechanism then changes in Gaza with remorseless pummeling and, and wholesale erasure, but it's still ethnic cleansing. It's still a genocide committed by the same state. So you either go comprehensively or you, or you don't do it at all, isn't it? Like it's, y- they are skirting around the edges a little bit.

But again, it's positive in, in the hope that we can, we can push them further, right? That's, that's what you, you, you, you ideally want, a scenario where this is the beginning of something rather than the end. but the, the evidence would suggest, that a- again, this will be something which in one or two years' time nothing else will change, but they'll say, "Ah, but we targeted the settlements."

But you didn't really. and it also won't be introduced for another six to nine months, which is I think worth pointing out. Miliband said that himself, which means how many homes will be destroyed by then? How many more illegal settlements will be erected in that time? How many more, how much more Palestinian land will be stolen?

How many more settler terrorists will kill Palestinians in that time? So it's about looking at it holistically and understanding, the scope of what's needed, as opposed to, once again, screaming from the rooftops that this is great, and then the oppression and the occupation intensifies. 

And in terms of that, that building on, he accepted the International Court of Justice ruling on the entirety of the occupation being unlawful.

this was the International Court of Justice. Those, just to be very clear, for those who don't know, it's the UN's highest court. It's the highest court on Earth, actually. They're obviously separately considering South Africa's case against Israel for the committing of genocide. But the fact that he accepted that ruling, 'cause then people, the obvious response is, well, actually, then lots of things flow from that, that you need to do.

So I suppose that, is that... That's an example, I guess. You accept, he's accepted the ICJ ruling in its entirety on that. Therefore, then we, people can go, "Well, if you've accepted that, then you've got to do this." 

Yeah, it's again, it's that half-hearted kind of approach, which again, it's, it's characterized Britain's approach from the beginning, like apologizing from the beginning about the, the approach on Gaza and then not really doing anything about it.

And this is, this is the same. It's like, well, we still stand by Israel as an ally. Israel's still... We, we still have these great agreements with them, as you said, supplying, military intelli- supplying intelligence, having these, these arm and sec- military and security deals. trade resumes as it is broadly outside of the settlements.

All of these different mechanisms that sustain the British and Israeli agreements still exist, but we're gonna target the, the, the illegal settlements. And again, this has been brought about because of the, the whole E1 project, and how much controversy has been surrounded. But again, these, these Israeli settlements have been, have been expanding for years.

They've existed for years. The, the, the state of Palestinian oppression, continues and, and, and continue to be perpetuated by the Israelis. And, and also, I think it's worth noting when they talk about upholding the two-state solution, that's a bit of a smoke screen as well. the two-state solution doesn't exist.

The upcoming elections, every candidate from left to right, the idea of these moderate Israelis, politicians, they, they are also stating that politically there won't be a Palestinian state. So then what's gonna be done about that, right? If you're, if you're committed to this. And as Milovan says, you don't stand in the way of this.

You don't want to allow and facilitate the destruction of the two-state solution. Then other measures have to be-- that have to come along with it. and that, that requires a much more comprehensive set of packages, which again, I'm, I'm skeptical that they'll introduce. 

Here's the thing about Ed Sheeran saying that he chooses to use his fame and platform as a place for safety and sanctuary. There is no such thing as safety and sanctuary from politics. Those two concepts are inherently political. I would argue they are at the crux of every political debate out there.

And ironically, the only thing Macklemore was doing on that stage was calling for the safety and sanctuary for an occupied people. There is no such thing as sanctuary in occupied land. There is no such thing as safety during a genocide. All he was calling for were those two things, and Ed Sheeran has the gall, the gall to come out and say that that is actually what he wants his fame, his platform, to be out here creating and doing.

Now, you can make the argument for time and a place, setting aside the fact that Ed Sheeran has very publicly been political on multiple occasions, so he doesn't actually seem to have a problem with that. I will be the first person to say that, sure, not every room is necessarily a room for a debate when we're talking about politics, not as a question of the air we breathe and the water we drink and the music we listen to and the concerts we can afford to attend, but rather a question of, certain legislation, representatives, et cetera.

I'm being real generous here, to be clear, because all of those things are connected. There is no just, drawing a line and saying, "This is political and this isn't." But let's say that we could do that, and let's say that, sure, not every room is a room for debate. I would argue that even if that is true, that even still, every room is in fact a room to be opposed to genocide You know what I'm saying?

it really is, it really is that simple. Every room is a room to be opposed to people being murdered. There's just, simple things here that I don't think should be chalked up to or dismissed as being inherently political, regardless of what some people want you to view it as. Because just chalking something up to being political or being a question of politics, and not in the sense that everything is, is just a way to reframe it from the get-go as something that is, in fact, debatable.

It's something that's up for debate, and we need, I think, to agree that certain things are just not up for debate. It is not my problem, quite frankly, that you think of people being murdered in the street as just politics. If I am, in fact, being political when I talk about those things, that means that you recognize that politics really isn't just a game, and it really isn't just a question of agreeing to disagree.

You yourself are recognizing that politics and that debate is a question of debating safety and sanctuary. It is a question of debating who gets to live or die. And I'm sorry, but you cannot have it both ways. Safety and sanctuary are the most infuriating and ridiculous words he and his team of writers, PR managers, lawyers, et cetera, could have chosen in this situation.

It's a standard media frame to start any conflict at the moment that, the aggressors want to start it. and so it-- When, when Israel, started the, the narrative and the, and the press, without, without any pushback whatsoever just kept saying that every time Israeli dropped a 2,000-- Israel dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on a refugee camp or a tent or a, a building killing numerous Palestinians in Gaza, they would say, "This is in retaliation for the October 7th attacks by Hamas that killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians."

It was like a mantra. And, and they, they could say that because of this media frame where, where all of the historical reporting, all of the reporting at all about Israel and Palestine was condensed into this narrative that began on October 7th. And by beginning on October 7th, then everything that Israel does is retaliatory.

it is in defense. It's a se- it's a security discourse, and in that way justified. What that frame leaves out, as you well know, Chris, is this history of, of build-up and aggression on the part of Israel, in Palestine that, as Rashid Khalidi has pointed out, is the 100-year war on Palestine. Just in, just in the 2000 teens, if you recall the-- Some of us may recall the Great March of Return, a peaceful, nonviolent protest at the wall that divides Gaza and Israel, and they were simply demanding the right to return to their homelands.

Israeli snipers on top of that wall shot into them aiming mostly at their legs. We know now that is, that the Israeli soldiers love to do target practice on Palestinians. They shot into their legs and their knees. They... 124 children, had to have amput- had to have, prosthetics. They killed... They injured 33,000.

They killed about 300 over the course of that time. So much so that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch appealed to the ICC to look into war crimes because it was, again, of course, disproportionate violence. They were in no way threatened, by peaceful Palestinians. And by the way, this wasn't organized by Hamas.

This was organized by civil society groups inside Gaza, and, and their, and their international allies. So, so those things are completely forgotten. We know in media studies that, that a conflict never simply starts, right? It has a long genesis of conflict that, that starts, that, that, that leads up to this, this one moment.

and of course, the other added benefit to that narrative, that, that, that falsified narrative, is that since there is no reason whatsoever for Hamas to attack the poor, innocent Israel They have to simply be terrorist, warmongering, the hypersexualized Oriental spoken about by Edward Said. All of the stereotypes, all of the demonization and dehumanization then is brought to bear, on, on, on what many consider, a resistance fighting group.

That's all I'll say. Thanks. Well, I was there for the founding of Hamas. I knew Abdul Aziz Rantisi, one of the co-founders of Hamas, along with Sheikh Yassin, and they were very clear that there was a national resistance group, which, was not-- it, it, the, it certainly was birthed out of the Muslim Brotherhood, but that they welcomed Christians, non-Muslim Palestinians.

that is how they defined themselves. October 7th wasn't enough. certainly atrocities were committed against Israeli civilians. No one is disputing that, but that wasn't enough for the Israelis. They had to, uh, ramp up the narrative, I want you to deal with this, with the claims that there were widespread sexual assaults, number one, and number two, and this was really reported by the Israeli press, there were significant numbers of Israeli citizens who were killed by the IDF, which just fired blindly, used attack helicopters and tanks, blowing up houses, in kibbutzes where, Hamas fighters were holding, Palestinian or, excuse me, Israeli, hostages or families.

They would just obliterate the whole house, firing on any car that was traveling back into Gaza, many of which, of course, probably had Israeli citizens attacking Erez, which is the border crossing between Israel and Gaza, just blowing up the whole center with Israeli soldiers that were being held captive by Hamas fighters inside.

October 7th had to be, even more, or at least the, the Israeli narrative had to paint October 7th as, as being, far more, brutal, far more savage than it actually was. And the Western media, in- unfortunately, including my old employer, The New York Times, danced to that tune and amplified those lies.

And I think even to this day, The New York Times has not retracted its, appalling story. I think it was called Screams Without Words or something, which was essentially reduced to being based on one source that, and the f- whole family recanted and said the woman wasn't raped, et cetera. But let's talk about that moment.

Right. The, the British filmmaker, Richard Sanders, who did a couple of documentaries, has done a few documentaries for Al Jazeera, one is October 7th, and he looked at oodles of footage, from, from the helmets of the fighters, and he, he, they, they, they really surveyed it. And he has a, a layout of how Hamas went in.

and of course they didn't initially, they didn't have any pushback from the Israelis. And you know what Richard Sanders points out is that Hamas had been posting on social media that they were practicing with the balloons, that they were basically gearing up to go into Israel. Now For some reason, the Israelis weren't prepared, even though they were prepared with their Hasbara, their propaganda, right away.

and so you have Netanyahu calling up then President Joe Biden telling him, "Oh, it was horrible. It was like the Holocaust. They, they tied up a bunch of infants, and they burned them alive. It was terrible. They, they chopped off their heads." This is the kind of atrocity propaganda you were pointing out, Chris.

This atrocity propaganda, this very same kind of thing where it hits you in the gut and it makes you so angry that you want to do something, that you say, "Go ahead, do, do whatever you want," because these people are beyond the human commun- community. They are inhuman as, as they followed up with that very dialogue, the Israeli spokespeople.

So, so they had to do that to make it s- to make the violence so horrifying that, that it would justify whatever Israel was about to do. atrocity propaganda, as I mentioned, goes back to World War I where we have the Germans' babies bouncing off bayonets. It goes, follows through historically to justify any war.

Then of course the first Gulf War where we had the Kuwaiti, m- member of the royal family testify before Congress that 300, over 300 babies had been thrown out of their incubators on the floor of the border of Kuwait and Iraq. So this is a, a border town, Chris. This is out in rural area. So just think about how many babies there could be premature babies in incubators.

Certainly not anywhere near 300. So right off, when we think about these in retrospect, we said, "Wow, how, how did, how could the media have perpetuated this kind of atrocity propaganda?" Also given, if you think about the legacy media, the establishment media in America, they're supposed to have their very best journalists on a story, right?

The New York Times, how much money does it have? How many, how many employees? 7% of, of American journalists are employed by the, by The New York Times. They're supposed to have seasoned journalists who can recognize atrocity propaganda. Instead, many outlets in the US repeated the 40 beheaded baby story and also across Britain and the Western

Ed Sheeran's band dropped out. It's been a big fallout. and I've been thinking about it ... I'm not even thinking, just feeling about it, I guess, because Macklemore lost his job because he spoke up, right? Because he said something, right? it feels like this is probably the biggest atrocity that, that we've witnessed in our lifetime, on our phones, right?

Seeing the, the killings and the people getting murdered, and the children getting killed, and the weaponry. And we had a doctor on who was talking about children getting shot right down through their bodies from drones. It's like the Israeli government, and I wanna say the government, not the people of Israel.

I'm not talking about them. I'm not talking about Jewish people. But the Israeli government has turned Gaza into, a video game, basically, for killing people. it's it's just, it's, it's this first-person shooter. They have all this technology 

as gross as all this is, if he wants to continue that metaphor, Theo Von, and you should see one of the final bosses who you had on your show, this guy This is why I can't take anything this man says seriously.

I remember watching him cry with Dr. Gabor Mate and being like, "Wow, that's incredible." This feels just like one of those moments where it broke through. Like he actually made him realize the humanity of, of an entire group of people, and in so doing, he was actually going to like-- he'd have to change the way he just does his life.

Like he can't just sit back and suddenly be like, "Jesus Christ, I never thought of it like that. I never thought of just the intergenerational trauma that we've created here, how there's just going to be decades and decades of children who, who grew up in, in such horrifying conditions that like-- that there's so, so many problems that's gonna come with that.

The, the, the, the amount of, psychosis, the amount of depression, the amount of anxiety, that, that all of these people unjustifiably have now been forever saddled with a- and then that we're going to now just expect them for, for decades and generations to come to, to ever have normal lives." And then you could see like the tears streaming down his face as that clicked, and he was like, "Holy shit, we have done unfathomable evil," And then what was it? a month later, he has on the fucking-- the Vice President of the United States. Th- this is one of the fucking chief architects right now who's directly supporting the genocide. just recently, how, how many bombs did Trump and the United States ship off to Israel to continue to massacre civilians over there?

And you just sit there and like you could tell that he was like getting anxious about it 'cause they were all buddy-buddy for the first forty or so minutes, and finally he's "Okay, so I gotta ask you about this. there, some people call it a genocide. I do, but I don't know if you do.

But anyways, I, I think what's going on over there is terrible a- and that it shouldn't happen, and it's a bad thing. What do you have to say about that?" And then immediately JD Vance is just "Oh, well, come on, and anyone can just, if you have a heart or conscience, tell you that what is happening is horrible.

It, it's one of the reasons why I now wanna talk about Ukraine, actually, and bring up Ukraine and just talk about Ukraine, maybe for the next ten or so minutes. So that's what I'm gonna do, and you're not going to correct me or, or actually bring this up again or do anything else other than just nod and say, 'Okie dokie.'

All right? That's what's gonna happen." And that's what happened, and then they just went back to being besties, went back to palling around. "

That's so great. I can talk to someone like you, You're just like my best friend. I really feel like I get to know you." 

And you're just like, "What the fuck, bro?"

And so then to come back now and then be like, so y- it is a genocide actually, a- and it is still bad, and, and we should talk about it, and it's, it's..." What's the best way for me to explain this? "It's like a video game, and oh, there's so many NPCs that are dying. It's so sad." 

And, and, a- and, and more specifically, the killing of children, right?

I mean, the killing of children. And every time that it's like Hamas is hiding That, that's Hamas and it's like that's a four-month-old. What, how can, he can't even w- walk. He couldn't even walk into a Hamas office and sign up, They're like, "He's hiding," or something like, he, what is he hi- he's hiding behind what?

His own tears because he, his mother is, missing? 

And what I find grossest about all this too is that a lot of these cowards are now getting, credit. People are being like, "Wow, it's just, it's so brave to see someone like Theo Von finally speaking up." this is just reflective of, I think, where a lot of the world's at, right?

Th- we've just seen through years of, of watching this unfold, but have you done shit all? Outside of have the Vice President of the United States to do, genocide propaganda on your fucking show using your platform. That's yours, right? He has no right to any of it. You are granting him that access to do that kind of shit.

But between him and then all these other podcast bros that are now starting to be like, "Yeah, shit's fucked, right? Is that... It, it seems like it's fucked." So yeah, oopsy doopsy. And then it's yeah, do something, anything. Y- fundraise some money. That, that would be a start.

That would be maybe trying to, wash your hands of some of the fucking blood. But, but what about the millions of people who listen to you? Can, can you galvanize them? Can you put that into direct action? Can you tell them to start writing to their governors, to their senators? Who is the local politicians in your area that are Zionists or genocide enablers?

Can you start applying pressure to them? Can you start getting your audience engaged in politics in any significant fashion? Can you start talking to them about doing things like direct action? Can you start talking to them about going to protests, like protests that are taking place right now in New York as the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is flying without any arrest or, or worry for his personal safety as he arrives there.

Are, are you gonna bring that up? Are you gonna talk about that? Are you gonna say that, "Hey, it's actually a noble thing that people are putting their lives on the line"? people like Elliot Page, people like Chelsea Manning, they are there right now. there are politicians who are there right now who are getting actively a- arrested.

There are celebrities who are there right now who are getting actively arrested. But to sit back from the comfort of the podcast and then just continue to be like, "Yeah, it's pretty bad. Like a video game."

Now, Section C, The Myth of Neutrality; Media, Moderates, and Obeying in Advance

I want to talk more about the media's role in helping Donald Trump win this, stunning upset victory. I want to turn to CBS CEO, Les Moonves, in a comment that has since gotten a lot of attention. He was speaking at a Morgan Stanley-hosted conference in San Francisco earlier this year 

Who would've thought that this circus would come to town?

But, it may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS. That's all I gotta say. So , what, what can I say? It's, the, the, the money's rolling in and, this is- The polls are open ... this is, this is fun. I've never seen anything like this, and, this is gonna be a, a very good year for us.

Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say, but, bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going. "

It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS. Bring it on, Donald." those are the words of Les Moonves, CEO of CBS. Lee Fang, you first published this audio of Les Moonves on The Intercept in February. Also last month, CNN President Jeff Zucker said, quote, "If we made a mistake, it was we shouldn't have put on as many Trump rallies as we did."

Your comment, Lee. 

Well, look, we've been looking at these investor reports from media companies for the last two years, and, it's not just Les Moonves. The owners of local broadcast stations have been bragging, that they're excited for this election year, because all the sleaze, all the super PAC ads, they benefit a very small clique of media owners.

and, if you look at just the larger role of broadcast media, I think there was a study done that if you look at the large, media networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, they provided 350 minutes of airtime to Donald Trump in 2015, and less than one minute on ABC News on coverage to Bernie Sanders.

just across the board, whether it's local TV or cable news, they treated this entire election season as a carnival, as a chance for tabloid politics. Rather than talking about the vital issues or the, political biographies and, and the policy issues, they take whatever Donald Trump has tweeted, whatever insult he hurled, and treat it as a, a serious news story.

And then ha- and s- rather than, paying for reporters to go out and report the truth and, and, and talk to voters or to, to do investigative reporting, they have pundits, many of them compromised. many of the, the pundits that we've, we've seen go on, on television were quietly or secretly working for one of the campaigns.

But then they, they have pundits go on TV and yell at each other and, turn this into a food fight rather than a substantive, thoughtful discussion of the issues. So I, I, I... Oh, go ahead. 

And I just wanted to bring John Nichols into this discussion around the media, and Jose Antonio Vargas.

Mm-hmm. the Koch brothers, who didn't support Donald Trump, said they ended up pouring their millions, more than a billion dollars, into down ballot races, whether we're talking governor- Mm-hmm ... Senate, House, and that just filled the coffers of the local medias. 

Yeah. About five years ago, Bob McChesney and I wrote a book called Dollarocracy.

And what we argued there, and in the book we wa- wrote more recently, People Get Ready, same, same basic concept, that major media in this country, has hit its biggest crisis in history. Its crisis is that advertising revenue now moves toward the phone. It doesn't have to go through. They still get advertising revenue, but they are now dramatically more reliant on political advertising, on campaign ads, which are targeted toward older people who tend to still watch television.

as this has happened, they have cut their reporting staffs. They have reduced... They- We actually documented, there are television stations that have cut into the local newscast, which is the most watched news, cut into it to fit more tele- campaign ads around it. And so understand the circumstance that we have created.

It's not a complicated thing. We have created a circumstance in America where news, where actual reporting, as flawed as it may be, on our politics is diminished. There's less of it. It's not done well. And at the same time, we have a massive inflow of money in these campaign ads. We have dialed down journalism.

We have dialed up campaign cash. Now, in this year, and this is the critical element of it, we saw cable news, which was a... It was out there hopefully to provide more depth to, to go deeper into these issues. We saw cable news cede any responsibility. They did hour-long infomercials, running the speeches for a whole hour, and then you came on with instead of Lee or, or Antoni- anybody on this panel coming in- Yeah

they, they had, they had surrogates for the campaigns do mini debates in which those surrogates had a responsibility not to acknowledge the truth. Their responsibility was to say, "My candidate just did a great job," even if your candidate fell off the stage. 

They spent more time showing the empty podium waiting for- Yeah.

Well- ... Donald Trump- And I can- ... than they played- If I could just finish, the one thing that- ... anything to do with Bernie Sanders ... 

coming off what Lee said, and, and, Lee actually, he said it was 340 to 1. It was actually only 240 to 1 on ABC. But the fact of the matter is, at the end of 2015, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were polling at roughly the same place, and yet Donald Trump was getting, on one major television network, a 240 to 1 ratio- Yeah.

Mm-hmm ... more coverage. This defines reality. 

Jose Antonio Vargas 

And to me, the, the elitism, right, and the kind of insularity of this Politico set, of this Acela Express from DC and New York, must absolutely be broken. It's useless. Utterly, utterly, utterly useless. I actually think today I'm probably gonna, dis- I'm, I'm gonna unsubscribe from Politico.

they said today that we know nothing. Well, thank you for admitting that. At least we're done. And I'm the kind of guy that used to like to get my stuff on Politico. Yeah. So now I'm unsubscribing myself and saying I don't need to be a part of this. M- y- your point, by the way, about the inability of, of journalists to cover about race.

I've, I've been a journalist since the late '90s. There are less people of color working in American newsrooms now than there was when I started in journalism in the late 1990s, right? For a lot of, a lot, j- journalists are human beings, too, and guess what? We don't like talking about race.

White journalists who are mostly in charge of newsrooms across this country do not like talking about race. And so they throw little things like the working class and not contextualize that more, right? To me, I have to say, as an undocumented immigrant who happens to be a journalist, and reporting is my, is my m- my, my religion, it's been infuriating seeing the media talk about immigration in such factless- Yeah

lacked of context, just irresponsible way. The moment Donald Trump talked about Mexicans as rapists- Mm-hmm ... right, why didn't anybody just say the fact that there are actually less people going to Mexico and more Americans going, less people from Mexico going to the United States than Americans going to Mexico?

Why hasn't anybody said that the fastest-growing undocumented population in this country are actually Asian people, not Latinos? Yeah. Why don't we ever talk about undocumented white people or undocumented Black people? Why don't we haven't talked about the fact that undocumented workers, according to the Social Security Administration, have paid $100 billion into the Social Security fund?

And Donald Trump has paid no taxes That they cannot 

track down. That we cannot get back. Yeah, yeah. Now, why isn't any of this- That they remember this. That's right ... part of the report when this issue comes up? They are not at all a part of this report. 

First, I must, must confess that over the past few years, I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the white citizen's counselor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension; to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.

Look, I already know what you're going to say, "JT, please describe to me in political science terms what a moderate is." Fine, but only because I want to. And as punishment for being so presumptuous, I'll start with the difference between the left and the right. You probably already know the story of the two terms.

During the French Revolution, those who wanted to laissez les bons temps rouler with absolute monarchical power sat on the right side of the assembly, their version of the House, and the no-good radicals who wanted to try out terrifying and capricious parliamentary monarchy, ooh, sat on the left. This is a pretty specific issue to disagree about.

So when people, i.e. academics with too much free time, try to come up with meaningful differences between the left and the right that hold true across most of global political history, you get very vague distinctions between the two political families. While today we associate the left and the right mostly with their stances on specific economic issues or cultural debates, the most fundamental distinction that you can probably draw between these two is that the left seeks to change society into something new and the right seeks to preserve present society or go back to something old.

In practice, that usually means the left seeks to undermine established hierarchies and distribute power and wealth more equally, and the right seeks to preserve hierarchy and order, since most existing societies are or were built around power being concentrated in very few hands. But obviously, such a simple distinction will certainly make you mad, so be sure to comment why and how I've actually gotten it completely wrong in the comments section.

I sure would hate for this video to get more engagement. Anyway, we've lost the plot a little bit here. We're not focusing on either of these groups. We're talking about the illuminated minds who can look past the squabbling of these dirty extremes, moderates, the people who reject petty ideological battles and, at the end of the day, just know better than you and I.

Just listen to how terrible the extremes are in this No Labels video on the Biden infrastructure bill. 

We've seen this movie before No, not those movies. This one. 

We will not support bipartisan legislation. 

I'm telling the Republican senators that we're not gonna stand for it. 

The extremes on the left and right are trying to defeat a two-party solution for partisan purposes.

Three out of four Americans agree on the infrastructure bill that creates jobs, helps families, doesn't raise taxes, and powers America to beat China. Don't listen to the extremes. Support bipartisan infrastructure now. 

Cool. Okay, fine. Let's be a little bit more charitable and actually understand what's going on here.

Centrists and moderates in the US, the two terms are pretty much interchangeable, are people and politicians who are not entirely satisfied with the political programs of either major political party. Unlike people who reject both parties from the opposite ends of the spectrum, moderates are most at home in the supposed bipartisan middle.

They usually like saying things like, "We're neither left nor right." We'll get to that sentence in a minute. But first, we might want to understand centrists a little better. If we are to assume the definition of left and right as historically transcendent terms about the stance one has towards present society and values like egalitarianism, being a centrist doesn't really make sense.

Over time, movements that start out on the left, like liberalism, republicanism, or even parliamentary monarchy, become solidly right-wing movements without ever changing their ideology, because they replace the old right and become contested by the new, more radical left. In such a position, centrism becomes nothing more than a conservative ideology.

Its prime directive is resistance to change, and as a result, it's not, as they claim, neither left nor right, it's just right wing. It might have been on the left in yesterday's society, but now that the goals of the old left are the established order and have become the new conservative right, preserving present society with only incremental and moderate reform, which is what centrists believe in, becomes a profoundly conservative worldview.

I'm seeing a lot of people making videos about self-censorship on the internet, saying things like unalived or graped or pew pews or G-side, and whether or not that practice is actually necessary or useful. And I'm here to tell you that it definitely isn't. The reason I know that is I haven't been doing that.

I've been calling things what they're called for the last several years now, and during that time, I have amassed over 700,000 followers on Instagram, massive followings on TikTok and Facebook, a budding following on YouTube, you ever heard of a concept called anticipatory obedience? That's when people imagine what they think an authority might want from them in advance, and then they start obeying those imaginary rules without ever being told to.

There's a pretty famous parable about this. It tells the story of a greengrocer in, I think it's communist Czechoslovakia. In the story, the greengrocer starts to notice an increasing amount of pro-party propaganda posters appearing in all the other shop windows in his neighborhood. Pro-party propaganda posters appearing.

I feel like I could have written that easier for myself. Now, in the end, the greengrocer puts a poster like that in the window of his own shop, not because he agrees with the message or supports the party, but because he doesn't want to get noticed. He doesn't want to get negative attention for refusing to obey.

Now, the question you're supposed to ask at the end of the story is, how many of the other shopkeepers also had posters in their windows for the same reason? Somebody started doing it, then somebody else follows suit, and before it, everybody's doing it, not because they've actually been told to, but because they've imagined that if they don't, then perhaps negative consequences might ensue.

This is anticipatory obedience, and it's what we on the internet are doing. Our shop window poster is saying pew pews instead of guns or unalived instead of killed and murdered. And we're doing it not because we were told to, but because other people are doing it, and there must be a reason for that, and we're afraid that if we don't do it too, negative consequences are bound to ensue.

They aren't. It's nonsense. You can just speak like a grown-up and call things what they are. It's fine. 

Ezra is an impressive multi-hyphenate media tour de force. A columnist dash commentator, dash journalist, dash media exec, dash book author, who co-launched the news website Vox in 2014, and now frequently writes for the New York Times and the Washington Post.

However, more than anything, if I were to sum up Klein's vocation in a single word, Ezra is a podcaster. His podcast, eponymously titled The Ezra Klein Show, regularly features among the most listened podcasts in the country, with each episode racking up millions of views across its various platforms.

Klein is unafraid to breach a wide array of topics, and he does so in his trademark analytical style, punctuating his interviewees with penetrating questions, and observations delivered in perfect paragraphs that make it crystal clear that he has done his research. And also demonstrates that he really, really loves to hear himself talk.

Just listen to this little soundbite from a recent podcast, where Ezra just muses on the lavender scare and anti-communist and anti-gay backlash emerging out of the New Deal. 

You end up with this amorphous omni threat. Communism is its heart, but maybe it's gay people in government and the sexual and gender revolution that that is speaking about or signaling.

Maybe it's racial integration, labor unions, maybe it's the New Deal itself. 

That sentence started with amorphous omni threat and only got more convoluted from there. But look, I really don't want to turn this into a video where I just on Ezra Klein the whole time. I'm going to do that a little bit, but I also want to emphasize that he's a bright, curious thinker who I really do believe is operating in good faith.

I would never bash someone for nerding out on energy policy or zoning laws. w- we need those knowledgeable and passionate nerds if we're going to solve the world's hopelessly tangled and complex problems. My gripe with Ezra isn't that he doesn't have good ideas or that he doesn't mean well. It's that he professes a worldview that fails to confront economic inequality as the number one issue plaguing our planet.

And my whole thing is, if you're going to go on your podcast every week and profess your ideas to millions, if you're going to make videos like, "This is how the Democrats win," and text every Democratic operative in DC, if you're going to portray yourself as the guy who has all the answers to our problems, you should probably understand what our biggest problems are in the first place.

And in that regard, I don't think Ezra has any clue

In this video, I wanna examine what Ezra Klein actually believes, which I contend is a certain brand of centrism rooted in the neoliberal values that I've discussed in prior videos, like the 2008 one and the Four Things MAGA Actually Gets Right video. See, Klein's particular style of centrist ideology has a tendency to earnestly address concerns of the MAGA movement, willfully shifting the Overton window rightwards.

Klein expresses willingness to punt on vital issues like abortion, and quibbles endlessly on his podcast over the semantics of labeling Israel's endless killing a genocide. Conspicuously absent from Klein's discourse is any real discussion of class whatsoever. For a guy who will gleefully spend hours on his podcast discussing how means testing impacts zoning law, getting him to talk for five minutes about taxing the ultra wealthy is like pulling teeth.

More often, he spends time decrying economic populism as an oversimplified morality play, equivocating the roles of corporations and unions in American society. "A lot is lost when you collapse the complex interests of politics into a simple morality play." This low IQ marshmallow brain boomer both sides-ism drives me insane.

"Oh, duh, well, sometimes the Republicans are right, and other times the Democrats are right. And if, we all just met in the middle, then everything would be okay." No, that's not the way the world works. In the real world, the working class has enemies. Billionaire capital owners and trillion-dollar corporations are not good faith actors who can be reasoned with.

As Breaking Bad director Vince Gilligan recently described the tech oligarchs, "It's basically a bunch of synty billionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world's first trillionaires. I think they're selling a bag of vapor." So if it's not economic populism and redistribution, what does Ezra think is the solution?

Well, to find out, you're gonna have to have read a little something called Abundance.

Co-authored with Atlantic author and fellow know-it-all Derek Thompson, the rather arrogantly titled Abundance is sold as, quote, "A once-in-a-generation paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life."

The central contention of Abundance boils down to this: growth and innovation are being stifled by excessive government regulation. Klein and Thompson argue that by removing administrative restrictions on housing, infrastructure, and energy construction, America can build its way into an abundant future.

Importantly, they don't wish to eliminate the government's role in this construction, but instead want the government to be able to act without having to contend with all the bureaucratic BS that prevents actually getting things done. And on this point, I actually agree with them. In fact, I feel like almost everybody does.

Here's Bernie Sanders' take on the abundance argument. "So I don't need to be lectured on the nature of bureaucracy. It is horrendous, and that is real. But that is not an ideology. That is common sense. It's good government. That's what we should have. Ideology is, do you create a nation in which all people have a standard of living?

Do you have the courage to take on the billionaire class? Do you stand with the working class? That's ideology. Breaking through bureaucracy and creating efficiencies, that's good government." California should have been able to build high-speed rails by now. Zoning laws are overly restrictive in large cities.

Wind farm construction shouldn't be tied to DEI incentives. All of these are narrow technocratic policy arguments, which I agree with. But as Bernie says, that's not an ideology. And when you tout your book as paradigm-shifting and once in a generation, styling it as a treatise and labeling your followers abundance Democrats, you're selling an ideology.

Here's an excerpt from Abundance's opening chapter, in which Klein and Thompson imagine a fictional utopia. "Out the window and across the street, an autonomous drone is dropping off the latest shipment of star pills. Several years ago, daily medications that reduced overeating, cured addiction, and slowed cellular aging were considered miracle drugs for the rich, especially when we discovered that key molecules were best synthesized in the zero-gravity conditions of space.

But these days, automated factories thrum in low orbit. Cheap rocketry conveys the medicine down to Earth." first of all, that world sounds scary as . If I wake up tomorrow and find myself in the abundance future, I'm going to grab a gun, snipe the nearest drone-delivered package out of the sky, rip open the container, take all of the star pills out, and swallow as many as I can until my heart stops.

But I want to focus in on one particular part of that scenario. The line, "Years ago, daily medications were considered miracle drugs for the rich." I find that line very telling because in a way, it encapsulates Klein's entire worldview. If we could simply grow the pie, create this abundant new world of plenty, then everybody would have enough.

And that, Ezra, is a fantasy. Because no matter how much we grow this economic pie, without establishing an egalitarian economic paradigm, the rich will continue to gorge themselves

What is 24/7 access to the president really accomplishing? Of course, we should, through our journalists, be able to question the president, but every question is an opportunity t- for Trump to lie and turn the conversation back to his rehearsed talking points. Perhaps there is a moment or two of outrageous language or behavior, of Trump falling asleep or something, that can then be used as a convenient clip to circulate online.

And press presence at official visits, cabinet meetings, et cetera, to report on what happens is, of course, essential information gathering. But I think that there's a line that maybe has been pushed too far by the constant drone of the 24-hour news cycle that's pretty much exclusively benefiting the regime and not actually contributing to public knowledge and democracy.

I don't have a clear answer. These are questions worth pondering, though, that this whole controversy is bringing up. And the power of the press pool boycott was immediately apparent. It was an emperor has no clothes moment, watching Trump speak into the wind and hearing nothing. It made far more impact and far more of a statement than if everything was as usual, if the media continued covering Trump as though he was just another president.

That's the power of labor organizing in action, my friends, of solidarity going above fear of retribution, of the power that especially the press still has over this president. They make him fucking furious all the time. He is obsessed with them. Together, they could send an incredibly powerful message as to the importance of press freedoms, of holding this administration to account, of not normalizing the behavior of this regime, and of not giving any oxygen to a bunch of people who have proven themselves for a literal decade to be habitual liars to the detriment of the Republic.

And Trump's team would have you believe that this is completely normal behavior. In their filing asking the judge to keep the press ban in place, they say, well, George Washington handpicked the journalists that covered his farewell address. Theodore Roosevelt invited handpicked reporters to the Oval Office for off the record press conferences.

President Kennedy gave certain reporters special access based on who he liked more. And President Johnson gave personal interviews as a means of reward and punishment. And in the official White House press release defending Trump, they say, "Look, Obama tried to ban Fox from pool coverage, too." Though the reality is that it was Obama's Treasury Department which tried to exclude Fox from pool coverage, specifically of interviews with one key official, which the Treasury Department then backed down from after all the other major news networks came to Fox's defense.

Of course, none of these examples, five instances that they can point to in the country's 250-year history, even hold a candle to the unprecedented levels of abuse Trump is lobbing at the press now, nor do they compare to the unprecedented all-out bans that he's attempting to put on certain news outlets from all White House press coverage.

It simply doesn't compare. What is happening is not normal, and we have to continue talking about how abnormal it is over and over and over again so it doesn't become the new normal in the US On Tuesday, the White House official YouTube channel unveiled Trump TV, a constant live stream of various clips of Trump content, an apparent toe dip into an authoritarian favorite, state media.

It had me wondering how other authoritarians have dealt with the media in the past. it makes sense if you're an authoritarian attempting to de-legitimize the entire press to have your own press on hand. This was clearly something Trump didn't consider ahead of the helipad snafu on Monday, but makes it really clear why it's valuable to have skilled journalists and camera and sound crew on payroll at the behest of the president.

It increases control over the narrative and creates polished propaganda. Trump owns a social media platform, and Americans increasingly get their news from social media, but the mainstream media still play a pivotal role in news gathering and in creating the soundbites and clips that social media relies upon, that I rely upon to make this content.

And of course, it makes sense why an authoritarian would want to get rid of the press. Being questioned on your authority is, the worst thing you can experience as an authoritarian. The relationship between the government and the press is adversarial by design. It is meant to be tense. That is the point.

If the press isn't making the government squirm at least a little and keeping the government in check by making officials think twice before doing something that might make them look bad, then that means you have a press in bed with the government, and that's not their role. Their role is to hold the government accountable.

That requires an adversarial stance, but that relationship has changed in the twenty-first century with increased media capture by elites sympathetic to a white nationalist, capitalist, populist buffoon because it serves them well. Scholar on authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat recently wrote a Substack article about this whole debacle that I'll link in my sources because I think it's worth a thorough read.

On the role of the press asking questions, she says, quote, "Answering questions is experienced as a submission to others and an affront to his power. Far better to pivot by insulting the questioners, to demean them in front of the eyes of the world, or bar offending officials from the privilege of having access to your person."

Ben-Ghiat points to a two-part propaganda process by authoritarians, noise and silence. The silencing is happening with these press bans, but they're being accompanied at the same time with an increase in noise from the regime, flooding the zone, expanding time and resources dedicated to propaganda. You can see this in the Trump TV experiment, in the way everyone is falling in line and doubling down in step with the president.

An efficient indoctrination of the masses requires coordination of the noise, that all the propaganda lines up, follows the same talking points, like with the Nazi policy of synchronization, which today in the twenty-first century looks a lot more like media capture by a few elites aligned with the president and allowed to conglomerate despite strong antitrust laws on the books.

A truly free press gets in the way of that coordination. They keep informing the masses about the consequences of the actions of the regime. That is really inconvenient, and so now the regime is flailing because they didn't consolidate power fast enough. Ben-Ghiat ties this current attempt at silence- and noise with the looming merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery, a further conglomeration of the media landscape into the hands of a billionaire family that Trump has in his back pocket.

She writes, quote, "I have studied propaganda for decades, including authoring a book on Italian fascist propaganda cinema, and I can tell you that a merger that would create a propaganda mega structure encompassing entertainment content and news would be devastatingly effective as a tool for democratic destruction."

She points to former Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, who so effectively captured the media that fully 85% of it was aligned with his regime. The only way Peter Magyar was able to defeat him in the most recent election was because he spent two years in the Hungarian countryside touring rural villages to spread his message and bypass that media capture.

But actually, much to my surprise, it was in researching other authoritarian regimes for this episode that I found what I can only describe as Hope? For example, for the Nazis to consolidate power so quickly required a really strong propaganda apparatus, which they were able to achieve in part by outlawing political parties and shuttering hundreds of newspapers and seizing their printing plants.

The Propaganda Ministry assumed control of the Reich Association of the German Press, which regulated who could be a journalist, kept registries of racially pure journalists, handed down mandates and instructions to journalists under the Editors Law of October 1933, ordered editors to censor anything, quote, "calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home."

Then they rounded up their political opponents and any journalists who didn't comply and sent them to newly minted concentration camps. These were some of the very first people to be rounded up by the Nazis because they understood the power of a free press. In fact, authoritarian regimes the world over and across history share that in common, attacking and literally murdering so-called political enemies, especially the ones questioning their legitimacy and informing the masses, the journalists.

And as much as Trump is doing his darnedest to intimidate journalists into submission and taking steps in an authoritarian direction, he is not, as of right now, rounding them up and murdering them or attacking and murdering their informants and sources, and that is the hope I'm gonna grasp onto. We're not so far gone that this can't be reversed.

It is precisely in these moments when it is essential that we acknowledge and call this repression of the free press what it is, authoritarianism in action, so that it never gets as far as it has gotten in other countries. We have strong First Amendment protections and traditions in the US and a strong history of press freedom.

It is an imperfect history, but the First Amendment is central to US identity, and we must lean into that in the form of speaking out when abuses against the press happen to make sure it is never normalized, to make sure that the door is never opened to allow full authoritarian capture of the press.

And as much as the far right has managed to co-opt new media and find propaganda hucksters ready and waiting to make a profit off shilling their talking points, there is also a strong leftist presence online. There are journalists who believe deeply in their role of holding the government accountable, who are increasingly using social media to meet people where they're at and get the information to the masses.

But the mainstream media, as much as we like to deride them, are still our main source of direct news because they have some of the best journalists with the best sources. And so calling them out when they publish biased bullshit, pushing for enforcement of our antitrust laws to break up the conglomerates is super important, but we also have to recognize the incredibly central role they still play in holding this regime to account, as evidenced by the power of their collective boycott this week.

I hope that they continue to use that power and the strength in their numbers to push for real accountability from this regime and not just act like this is all business as usual. And I will continue to be here screaming about it all from my little

And Finally, Section D, Fandom, Consumption, and Personal Reckoning

I think it's important to hold a measure of grace and take things in context before getting all gung ho about going after somebody. maybe they didn't know there was a boycott. There are probably boycotts I'm not even aware of that I'm unknowingly crossing. Some companies are almost impossible to boycott.

Nestle kinda runs the world. I think strike picket lines are more obvious, though. They're usually temporary and usually quite visible, so I would say you bear greater personal responsibility for crossing those. Also, I think there is room to disagree with the strategic efficacy of certain attempted collective pressure campaigns, even if you agree with the spirit of them.

I don't practice a vegan lifestyle, which for some probably makes me a traitor. Again, different perspectives on things. But I do try to limit my consumption of animal products where possible with the knowledge that the source of those products is, in most cases, animal suffering. Though to be fair, most of the products we consume are the result of human and non-human animal suffering anyway, so you do what you can.

You might mitigate this layer of complicity by making a genuine effort to stay informed about collective campaigns, respecting picket lines and boycotts when reasonably possible, and generally erring on the side of solidarity when your individual convenience conflicts with a collective struggle. You don't need to agree with every campaign, but you should at least seriously consider whether your actions are helping or undermining people trying to resist exploitation.

The fourth layer of complicity may be your role in various hierarchies and the things you do to reinforce them. By hierarchies, I'm referring specifically to the institutionalization of differences between people into superior and subordinate social groups, through which comes domination and exploitation.

And in this layer, you're passively or actively reproducing patriarchy, gerontocracy, the economic class system, and so on. In the subordinate position, you may be treating bosses, politicians, police, clergy, men, or elders as inherently entitled to obedience, or in the superior position, you may be using that position to dominate others, overriding their autonomy because of gender, disability, or social status, reproducing authoritarian norms in your family, workplace, organization, or social movement, basically participating in the normalization and perpetuation of hierarchy on the micro scale and the macro scale through your actions.

You might mitigate this layer of complicity by internally deconstructing the beliefs and attitudes which reinforce these systems, and by externally resisting the structures which reinforce these systems through various acts of confrontation and non-cooperation. This is where it gets really serious. On the fifth layer of complicity, you're some kind of propagandist for the status quo, spreading state or corporate narratives, defending imperialist wars, pushing nationalist or capitalist mythologies to sustain the legitimacy of the system and counteract dissent.

You may not be carrying a gun for our capitalist overlords, but you're fighting for them on the battlefield of ideas, reinforcing ridiculous ideas like the sanctity of borders, or that poverty is deserved, or that alternatives are impossible, or capitalism is natural, or imperial wars are justified, essentially lecturing people on why suffering is necessary and resistance unrealistic.

Again, of course, there are levels to this. Journalists, teachers, influencers, religious leaders, academics, politicians, ordinary citizens all can participate in this reproduction of ideas that makes domination appear normal, necessary, inevitable, or desirable. But of course, this is perpetuated to different extents on a person to person basis.

And some people in these roles actively counteract that kind of messaging. So don't take this as me saying that if you're a teacher, you're automatically on the level of a right-wing propagandist by default. That's not what I'm saying. At this layer of complicity, you need to deconstruct the narratives you repeat, seek out perspectives from those harmed by existing institutions, correct misinformation where you encounter it, and lend your voice to counteract the tide of propaganda On the sixth layer of complicity, you're deliberately choosing roles that directly sustain and uphold the system.

Hands-on participation in domination by serving in the military, police, paramilitary forces, prison guards, border agents, intelligence operatives, strike breakers, judges, prosecutors, high-level state bureaucrats, the kind of positions that actively enforce imperialism, colonialism, and domestic oppression, the kind of positions that defend corporate and state efforts to devastate the environment.

And how much more really needs to be said here? Of course, I think if you're on this level, what you're doing. Of course, not every military is on the same level of complicity in upholding the global system. I would count the US military as far more active upholders of global suffering than, say, the Trinidadian military.

But at this level of complicity, where you're a foot soldier for capital and government, you should leave such institutions, especially if you're part of the American military. if your job is to cage people, to suppress dissent, to wage war, the most obvious thing is to refuse. But aside from leaving or perhaps on your way out, other ways of mitigating this layer of complicity would be sabotaging the machinery of domination, leaking information, refusing orders, and otherwise obstructing the flow of the machinery.

Obviously, such actions come at great personal risk. But if you're a police officer or a soldier or prison guard, you've already taken great personal risk signing up for those jobs. At least take some risk to help other people. But if I'm being honest, I doubt that any police officers or prison guards are watching my videos anyway.

For the final layer of complicity, level seven, this should be obvious. These are the architects of the system itself, the deepest complicity, occupying roles that directly manage or profit from exploitation. Politicians, corporate executives, bankers, landlords, wardens, chiefs, capitalists, those who construct, expand, and manage the machinery of state and capital.

Now, obviously, an individual landlord didn't invent landlordism. An individual CEO didn't invent capitalism. A small business owner and the CEO of a multinational corporation are gonna be on different layers of complicity. So I would suggest modified approaches to specific cases because, again, there are levels to this.

But at this layer, you're occupying positions of significant control over capital relative to others and materially benefiting from the continuation of the system, placing your material interests against those of us who wish to overturn this system. Historically, there have been class traitors here and there, people who choose to provide their property and resources toward revolutionary ends, but these are few and far between.

Still, as an effort at mitigation, I'd encourage anyone with such capital who are sympathetic to the struggle to share those resources to support our efforts in getting free. And that's it. I just wanted to try my hand at the seven layers trend with an idea I thought about some time ago. We're obviously not all equally complicit.

There's a difference between buying groceries in a capitalist economy, crossing a picket line, beating protesters, and profiting from exploitation. 

I quit my job because of J.K. Rowling. I quit my job because of the new Harry Potter series premiering on HBO. I quit my job as a Harry Potter character. Hi. If this is your first time here, my name is Hoots. I make videos on this channel about whatever nonsense I'm fixated on at any given time, and until recently, my day job was at Universal Studios Hollywood.

I've been pretty open about my roles as a scare actor at Halloween Horror Nights and as a tram tour guide at Universal, but less forthcoming about another role I had in the park, where I was most often scheduled: as a wand keeper at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is a series of themed lands found in all four international Universal resorts, where you can soar above Hogwarts Castle, see a wizard be chosen by their wand at Ollivanders, explore the shops of Hogsmeade, and experience pulse-pounding rides and attractions that transport you into a world of spells and thrills.

First opened at Universal Studios Hollywood in 2016, the Wizarding World... I'm just kidding. It's not that kind of YouTube video. Many of you knew that I worked at Universal Studios, the park with all the Harry Potter stuff, but many of you may be surprised and even a little disappointed to learn that I actually worked in the part of the park with all the Harry Potter stuff.

After all, I've spent a lot of time and energy shitting on Harry Potter, and more specifically, on its creator, the patron saint of transphobia, Robert Galbraith, AKA Joanne K. Rowling. How could I don a costume and a British accent and earn a paycheck promoting her work? Well, how does anyone deal with cognitive dissonance?

For as long as I can remember, I'd wanted to be an actor. When I was little, I'd been hammy and outgoing. I refused to ever sit down or do what I was told, but I could be handed a piece of text or simple choreography and repeat it back to you after seeing it once. As I grew older, I became more introverted and found I had to work harder to learn a piece, but it was work I loved.

There was value and catharsis in bringing a person to life who had until then existed as words on a page. I went to drama school in the UK. The training was hard and the tutors sometimes unfair, but my sense of artistry and technique deepened. I felt good at what I do, proud of my work. I wish I could say that that translated into an incredibly successful career as a performer, but it hasn't.

But I'm also not a complete failure. Like the vast majority of working actors, my career has limped along from contract to contract. There have been slow years and better years, but I've never been without the need of the dreaded day job. I'd considered myself very lucky to have theme park work. It's technically a day job in my chosen field and makes it a little easier to rationalize the twenty thousand dollars in student loans I took out that have since transmogrified into about forty-five thousand dollars of student debt despite regular payments.

Also, Universal Studio Hollywood's contracts are union, meaning collective bargaining, meaning regular pay increases, meaning I had health insurance even though I was on a part-time contract. It also meant that when I was offered another acting gig that I needed to take time off for, I was permitted professional leaves of absence.

Most actors are just stuck in perpetual temp work cycles when it comes to their day jobs, and I was very familiar with the constant resume churn. A year here, six months there before I'd inevitably need to go out of town for a month and resign. At Universal, I was under contract with an entertainment union and was allowed to take other entertainment work with no penalties.

But let's do a little role play. Pretend you're a casting director. Where do you think a strawberry blonde with an RP accent honed by a British conservatory best fits at Universal Studios in Hollywood, California? Right. The wand keeper position is actually a coveted one. You spend the day in an air-conditioned room, and wand keepers don't have to worry about aging out of the role like an actor playing a Hogwarts or Beauxbatons student would.

A wand keeper can be 30 or 80. They can be any gender. They can be fat or thin. The role is completely performance-based, unlike virtually every other role in the park. Was I made to step on a scale in front of an entire room of people and then watch someone cross out the weight I'd written down on my resume and write a new one in when I auditioned for Princess Fiona and Marilyn Monroe?

Does an ogre shit in the swamp? Some- Thank you for the memories, Universal Studios Hollywood casting department. Wand keepers do a little five-ish minute show in 45-minute sets around four times a day. The show went like this. The audience would be let in by a wand assistant, basically filling the dual role of a PA, those little character security guards you always see in theme parks, and attraction loading.

Then the wand keeper would welcome the guests and choose the hero. This was a guest who would participate in the show. Usually, we picked whoever looked like they had good vibes and seemed like they were gonna play ball with us. I mostly chose kids, but I know some wand keepers preferred grown-ups because they were a little more reliable.

The hero would be offered a wand and asked to perform a spell from a randomized set of five spells. The spell would fail in some way, involving special effects triggered by the wand keeper, and another wand and spell would be offered and likewise fail. Then a final wand would be chosen for the hero, and the moment it touches the hero's hand, bright lights, music, and a dramatic gust of wind would indicate that the perfect wand chose them, just like in that movie, Harold Potter.

The audience are let out into the gift shop. Rinse, repeat. I told myself it wasn't that bad at first. Harry Potter wasn't even a Universal property. They licensed it from Warner Brothers, who themselves had some kind of a licensing agreement with Rowling. She didn't make any money on park admission, only on merchandise, and I was only there to do a silly little show, not sell any merchandise.

Even if the ultimate goal of that silly little show was to push merchandise in the form of $60 interactive resin wands, maybe I would just be really bad at the part of the show that highlighted the wands, Sabotage the operation by pairing my hero with one of the uglier wands. But that felt kinda shitty.

The guests we tried to choose were nice. Sometimes they'd traveled thousands of miles to be there. Sometimes they'd waited in line in the hot California sun for hours to be chosen, patiently returning show after show until the wand keeper noticed them. Many guests I'd chosen were neurodivergent kids whose special interest was Harry Potter, and they'd commandeer the show to tell me everything they'd learned about wand and spell types so far, and let me tell you, it was a delight getting to improvise with a real subject matter expert.

One time, I told my hero child that the wand that chose her had properties of healing and protection, and her mom teared up and told her to tell me what had been going on in her life. It turned out she'd been in and out of the hospital with a chronic life-threatening illness. She needed all the healing and protection she could get.

Unlike Disneyland cast members, we weren't empowered to give away merch to certain guests, so I told the sales team that if that mother and daughter bought the wand, to give them my employee discount. The work itself was incredibly rewarding, and the wand keepers wanted the guests to have the best experience possible.

After spending time interacting with someone like that You wanna say something meaningful. You want them to feel understood. Even if you didn't give a shit about the Harry Potter brand, you cared about the people who came into the Wand Room. A few of my fellow wand keepers and I would talk about the kind of guests we'd pick as a little fuck you to Rowling.

Our heroes were the marginalized. We'd pick the fat kids, people of color, people using mobility devices, and if you were visibly queer, especially if you were sporting a trans flag somewhere on your person, you were going to be the protagonist of our little five-minute one-act. These little acts of so-called rebellion were our ways of living with ourselves, of minimizing our complicity.

Plus, we could say to ourselves, there are a number of queer people who work in the wizarding world, including trans and non-binary people. Warner Brothers and Universal obviously don't agree with J.K. Rowling, even if their support for queer people only extends about as far as corporate anti-harassment policies, and they allow queer people to work as wizards in Harry Potter Land, whereas Joanne would probably have them doing garbage collection or not existing at all.

Wow, visible queer people. That's almost a middle finger to Joanne. Almost. I remember being at work with a trans coworker on a day that Rowling was rumored to be visiting the park, and she said to me that she wished Joanne could see her working in her land, that she could see the look on Joanne's face, furious and powerless at the sight of a trans woman in Hogsmeade.

And I wanted that for her, too. It would've felt so good for a moment, and it would've made a good bar story forever, and at the end of that very good day, J.K. Rowling would've gone home to her piles of money and forgotten the whole thing. 

John Milton was a devout Christian, but also a big fan of epic poems of ancient Greece and Rome, like Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid, and he thought that Christian mythology deserved the same treatment. But in this poetic tradition, villains had to be as interesting as heroes, especially considering that God, being perfect and all-powerful, makes for a pretty boring character.

About a century later, the poet William Blake famously said, "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Milton was also aware that although Satan waged open war on heaven, his greatest weapon against mankind was persuasion, attractiveness, rizz.

He's supposed to be likable, so we human readers find ourselves seduced by him in the opening pages. But politics may have also played a role. During the English civil wars, Milton was staunchly anti-monarchist. He wrote countless letters and poems in defense of democracy, which would even get him put in prison for a time.

It's easy to imagine some of that revolutionary spirit creeping into his depiction of Satan's rebellion. God is often referred to as a tyrant, and the fallen angels fear becoming his slaves. "To bow and sue for grace with suppliant knee, and deify his power. Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

You have to remember, this was a very familiar story to pretty much everyone in England at the time, but it had always been told from the point of view of God or Adam and Eve. For the first time, readers were being asked to imagine the same sequence of events from Satan's perspective, which perhaps might make them more open to questioning other so-called sacred concepts, like the divine right of the monarchy.

In What in Me is Dark, Orlando Reade collects lots of examples of Paradise Lost's impact on rebels and revolutionaries. Thomas Jefferson copied a quote of Satan's into his journal, "What though the fields be lost? All is not lost. The unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to submit or yield.

And what is else not to be overcome?" Thomas Paine's Common Sense, the pamphlet that persuaded many Americans to join the revolution, contains another Satan quote, "Never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep." Paradise Lost has been an influence on a number of abolitionists, anti-colonialists, and civil rights leaders as well, from Haitian revolutionary writer, Pompey Valentin Vastey, to Malcolm X.

While some identified with Satan's struggle against tyranny, others noted how a rebel could turn into a tyrant himself. By allowing us inside the mind of this most epic of villains, Milton gave readers new ways to think about power, freedom, and morality for hundreds of years. Modern villain stories can also be tied to social change.

In the early '70s with the Vietnam War in full swing, John Gardner published Grendel, a philosophical dive into the mind of Beowulf's mysterious foe. Grendel is portrayed as part man, part monster, cynical, and lonely, searching for purpose in a world where heroism has lost its meaning. Bram Stoker's Dracula may have trafficked in Victorian anxieties around sexuality, but by the late '70s, readers were liberated enough to accept sexy vampire heroes in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire series.

Towards the end of second wave feminism, Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote The Mists of Avalon, in which King Arthur's nemesis, the witch Morgan Le Fay, is simply trying to protect her female-centered culture from the encroachment of patriarchal Christianity. In the 1990s, many perceive the original Wicked novel to be queer-coded, particularly how society labels people as evil for simply being different.

And Madeline Miller's Circe, published at the height of the Me Too movement, depicts the sorceress' attacks on Odysseus' men as self-defense against sexual predators. For these authors, remixing famous stories is not just a way to sell books, though it probably can't hurt. It puts their perspective right up against an older one.

The audience is forced to consider how their acceptance of the previous version of events makes them complicit, and perhaps they will be less likely to accept the official pronouncements of good and evil without question. But not all villains are rehabilitated so easily. Controversy alert, I'm gonna talk about Joker.

Before its 2019 release, a lot of critics accused it of pandering to incel culture. Some even warned it might inspire a mass shooting like the one that happened during a screening of another Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado in 2012. To be fair, there is some overlap. It's about a sad guy who lives with his mother, check, has no friends or romantic prospects, check, and copes with society's neglect through nihilism and morbid humor, check, until he finally makes a name for himself with a shocking act of gun violence.

Check. And Bruce Wayne is a Chad if there ever was one. Fears of a mass shooting turned out to be overblown, and actual members of the incel community were offended by the comparison, taking it as more proof that mainstream society viewed them as monsters. Another problematic villain who got a recent makeover is Johnny Lawrence from the original Karate Kid film.

William Zabka was basically the go-to actor for a certain type of bully role in the 1980s. Preppy, athletic, and very, very WASPy. His characters tended to represent privilege and patriarchy, a dynamic which is upended in the 2018 sequel series, Cobra Kai. Johnny is now a middle-aged working class white guy struggling with the loss of his social status.

Daniel LaRusso, who was once a poor newcomer to the city, has surpassed him financially, and Johnny's days are punctuated with humiliations and insults from women and people of color. Get the hell out of here, loser. Perhaps this was an effort to inject some nuance into our depictions of morality. look at bullies not as two-dimensional villains, but as sympathetic humans with their own struggles and traumas.

But Cobra Kai also happened to coincide with a rising sentiment among straight white men that they were society's true victims, and that traditionally oppressed groups were the ones actually doing the oppressing. Eventually, Johnny learns the importance of empathy and self-sacrifice, but at first, the audience is asked to see the world through his perspective, to root for him to resurrect the authoritarian cult he belonged to as a young man to regain his sense of superiority.

No mercy! Maybe Cobra Kai was inspired in part by this video, which went viral in 2015 and currently has over 15 million views on YouTube. In it, vlogger J. Matthew Turner makes the case that Johnny was the real victim of Karate Kid. 

Pow, a sucker punch right to the mouth. Johnny defends himself, as is his legal right.

Though he was clearly being satirical, a lot of his commenters took the thesis a little too seriously. He eventually had to make a follow-up video in which he implored them to stop asking him to do Hitler next. 

I must at this time decline your request to defend Hitler 

Standing up to bullies has been a pervasive theme in American cinema since World War II, all the way from High Noon to Back to the Future. But our perception of bullies has become somewhat more complicated since the turn of the century. From The Sopranos, to reality TV, to the manosphere, there's a growing admiration for characters who exhibit strength and dominance- 

You're fired.

Go ... 

who take what they want and make no apologies about it. 

Being a bully is presented less as a moral failing and more as a survival mechanism in a world where might makes right. Who knows? Maybe next we'll get a positive spin on Biff Tannen, a sexual-assaulting billionaire casino owner who's actually a champion of the common man.

God bless America. Can you imagine? Our shared stories are a reflection of and influence on our collective values. Who we call hero and who we call villain says a lot about us, and when those designations start to shift, it can be a sign of social change, like the rejection of monarchy in Milton's England, the gay rights movement of the 1990s, or today's global lean towards authoritarianism.

Stories are how we make sense of the world, so they can be especially effective at persuading people to rethink old norms, for good or ill. The best we can do is be engaged, active readers and audiences, weighing characters against our own moral compasses, open to changing our minds, but always thoughtful about who we choose to root for. 

going to be it for today.

Be sure to check out our link in bio right in the show notes for all the ways to follow us on social platforms, contact us, and support everything Best of the Left, including membership and one-time donations.

The additional sections of the show included clips from;

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Resistance History with Tad Stoermer

Doomed

Owen Jones

Brenna Perez

The Chris Hedges Report

The Serf Times

Democracy Now!

Second Thought

PissedMagistus

Benaminute

Leeja Miller

Extra Andrewism

Hoots Hootman

and Storied

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show. Thanks to Ben, our Swiss Army Knife fixer behind the scenes. And thanks to those of you who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

You'll find the link to support us in the show notes along with links to join our Patreon and Discord communities for free where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on all the social media platforms as I prepare to relaunch our social media strategy!

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay! And this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.