Air Date: 11-11-2026

Today we look at billionaires, wealth inequality, money in politics, and what happens to a society when those things get far out of whack. Outside spending on our elections has grown roughly 12-fold since 2008, and the same concentrated wealth that buys elections leaves governments answering to the ultra-wealthy while everyone else struggles with rising prices. That insecurity is the precise recipe that makes authoritarianism look viable. The last time inequality was this extreme was the Roaring Twenties, and what followed the crash was the New Deal era of steep taxes on the rich that built a healthy middle class for decades. We're due for a reset.

Watch: Wealth Inequality in America (Updated 2026)

Books from this episode (affiliate links: buying through them supports the show):

This week's guests discuss their new books:

Country of Lords by Kim Phillips-Fein: print at Bookshop.org · audiobook at Libro.fm

Anti-Fascist Economics by Isabella Weber: print at Bookshop.org · audiobook at Libro.fm

End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor: print at Bookshop.org · audiobook at Libro.fm

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. We curate the best progressive thinkers speaking on the most important issues into themed episodes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

We're talking about billionaires today, wealth inequality, money in politics, and what happens to society when those things are allowed to get really far out of whack.

It was big news after the 2008 presidential campaign, when it was reported that the combined spending of the Obama and McCain campaigns topped $1 billion for that election. And that was two years before the Citizens United ruling that really opened the door to outside spending, which is where it gets even more dramatic.

Thanks largely to that case and the other cases that followed, opening the door wider and wider for outside spending on our elections, there's been roughly a 12-fold increase from that 2008 election through 2024.

Back in 2008, outside spending was a relatively quaint 300-something million dollars. By 2020, outside spending had gone up by almost 10 times, reaching nearly 3,000 million dollars, otherwise known as 3 billion dollars, but that's hard to conceptualize. Four short years later, in 2024, outside spending had reached 4,000 million dollars. Again, that's from little more than 300 million, up to 4,000 million in just 16 years.

This is a terrible way to run elections, and allowing for the type of concentrated wealth that can afford to spend that sort of money on elections is also a terrible way to run society.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's new book frames the level of concentrated wealth that currently exists in the world as weapons of mass destruction and argues that the only sane path forward is a new disarmament movement.

The flip side of that wildly concentrated wealth and the political power that comes with it is the inevitable tendency for governments to respond almost exclusively to the desires of the ultra-wealthy, while the rest of us get left behind, struggling in economic insecurity.

Prices for all basic necessities are continuing to rise, and when the government fails to take action while large swaths of people are struggling, that is the precise recipe to make authoritarianism feel like a viable option. Right now, we're at a level of wealth inequality that has people talking about guillotines again, so the struggle and frustration you feel are not just you. Definitely not a personal failing. This is widespread and well understood. The last time we were here was the Roaring Twenties, just before the epic collapse and depression, which was followed by the New Deal era of steep taxes on the rich that built a healthy middle class in America for decades. We're due for a reset. The iron is hot, and it's time to strike.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 55 minutes today include

Democracy Now!

Behind the News

The Intercept Briefing

The Majority Report

The LARB Radio Hour

and Pitchfork Economics

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

Section A, How the Lords Justify Themselves

Section B, How Insecurity Breeds Fascism

Section C, Taxing and Taming Extreme Wealth

And Section D, What Comes Next, Essentials and Here-ness

For every way to connect with and support us, check out our link in bio in the show notes.

And now, on to the show.

Date 10-21-26

Naomi, let's begin with you. You just spoke at this AI assembly in New York along with Arundhati Roy, the great writer, from New Delhi, from India, who will be joining us tomorrow. talk about, we had you and Astra on when In Times Fascism was first published. You've now traveled the United States, Canada.

You've been in Europe as well. On this issue of AI, if you can talk about the resistance that's growing, and talk about how it's being organized and the response at the top, how the billionaire tech bros who are so, supportive of President Trump now, no- though not always had they been, how they're responding to this resistance.

Well, it's great to be back with you, Amy and Anjali. so, I, the, the resistance to AI is taking many forms. and we're-- And it's really a resistance to oligarch power and which is concentrated in the hands of these tech companies in particular. And people around the world, just listening to your previous guest and the, the Albanian uprising triggered by this plan for an island, resort own- controlled by billionaires, right?

This is the through line, of, of so much of, of, of the resistance is in understanding that, that, that entire nations' m- essential functions are being outsourced to these completely unaccountable, companies. And AI is really just the final stage of it. this is a point that several of us were making at the AI Assembly, is that after 50 years of outsourcing and hollowing out of public functions of the state, the very last stage is the outsourcing of thinking, of intelligence itself, right?

and so it really is a through line whether it is the Pentagon outsourcing targeting to companies like Anthropic and Palantir, or whether it is, SpaceX with this extraordinary power to, to, to, to cut off a, a satellite access to Ukraine in the middle of a war. this is really the final stage.

And so it takes many different forms. In some cases, it's parents organizing to say, "I don't want a chatbot to teach my kid," right? but in every case, it is this understanding finally that, we've thrown around these phrases for so many years, corporate power, right? What does it mean for corporations to become more powerful than governments?

We are seeing it now because we have these highly ideological corporations that- That are very open about their alignment with increasingly fascistic regimes, right? so you have do- you, you have this alignment of Musk and Trump, Palantir, g- inroads in, increasingly deep inroads into the NHS.

We heard about this when we were in the UK. I'm sure you heard about it too, Amy. People are very concerned what data are, are these companies collecting as they go deeper and deeper into those intimate and essential government functions like healthcare. so yeah, it looks different everywhere.

Sometimes it isn't articulated as being an anti-AI movement, but everywhere it is articulated as being about sovereignty, about control, about the outsourcing, of, of, of their democracies. 

And as we see this upsurge of youth-led protests around the world really- Yeah ... Albania, many, many different parts of Europe, India, all rising up.

it's really an example of what both of you talk about in your book of hereness- Mm ... and being here. Can you talk about that idea, both of you, of maybe you first, Naomi, of what is that alternative in this world where we have the fascists, imagining and almost pushing our world towards dystopian futures?

Yeah. Where the future isn't for everyone, and the resistance to that- Yeah ... being an insistence on staying and working with what we have. 

Well, I, I think about the, the French students, right? Who, who, who take to the streets after this historic summer of he- of deadly heat waves. Deadly across Europe, but particularly in France, right?

thousands and thousands of excess deaths in France just because of the heat. But the s- the, the, the heat doesn't stop at the end of the summer, it stretches into the fall, and students are coming back into classrooms that are impossible to stay in, they are so hot. Then you have these torrential downpours, the roofs are leaking, and young people are saying, "We just wanna learn," right?

and so the ways in which young people's lives are, are being mortgaged, right? To the climate crisis. But then they make the connections very directly. You can't fix the roof in our class or get us an air conditioner because you are spending so much on weapons, drones, autonomous warfare, giving it to these private companies, and just invest in us.

We wanna go to school. We're here, right? Where we live. We, we wanna stay where we live. you heard it from the, your, your Albanian guest, we wanna stay in Albania, but we can't afford to. We're being forced to migrate because our futures are being mortgaged, right? And so it is such a simple message of these oligarchs, these politicians, they believe paradise is elsewhere on their billionaire islands in outer space.

We want these humble things. We want classes that work. We want teachers who have the ability to teach us and not chatbots. And so it is extraordinarily unifying, bipartisan, quite beautiful, and, and militant, right? And this is why there is such a drive to paint these movements as something else, something alien, something scary.

I think there's a high level of infiltration to try to push them in that direction, but yeah, I think that's a through line. What do you think, Astra? 

Well, I think it connects to the AI issue really directly, too. These are cost of living protests, right? People are saying, "We need To be able to pay our rent.

This is why there's a huge uprising across Spain of, of tenants and renters who can't afford to live, and these students saying, "We need investment in our schools." Well, where is the money going? As Naomi said, it's being invested in militarism. But here in the US, we have what, what the Financial Times reports is gonna be a $10 trillion AI build out between 2025 and 2032.

$10 trillion, that's a criminal misuse of resources that could go into making lives better, and much of that is debt financed. There are many circular deals, as they're called, and financial shenanigans, creating systemic instability in this, in this build out. So it's a waste of resources that also endangers, the public because, it, it, reporting is now finally saying in, in the Wall Street Journal, in the Financial Times, that the AI bubble is fraying, that there are signs that this corporate debt is distressed, and that this puts all of us at even deeper financial risk.

So that is a, another problem with oligarchy, and that is, as Naomi said, a unifying thread across all of these movements. 

The US Tradition of Inequality with Kim Phillips-Fein Part 1 - Behind the News - Air Date 7-16-26

So in the Declaration of Independence, we famously hear that all men are created equal.

This is foundational to our national creed, or at least what we believe our national creed is, although the words were written by a slaveholder. there were dissenters from the first, though, including John Adams, Jefferson's comrade, who, like him, died in the 50th anniversary of the declaration. So how did Jefferson's statement fit with the temper of the times?

just how much equality were the founders interested in? 

So first of all, Doug, it's, it's great to be here, and this is a great question about the early history of the country. I think when Jefferson wrote about this idea about all men created equal, Jefferson is not thinking that all people are exactly the same.

He isn't putting forth a declaration about what all people should have materially. this is a society that has been structured through inequality and hierarchy of all different kinds. Obviously enslaved and free, but also there are plenty of unfree workers, indentured servants who are not subject to hereditary slavery, but nonetheless have limited freedom.

Obviously, men and women have radically different rights. The language is there, but it also is against a backdrop of a society that is much more hierarchically structured, and also in which there are deep traditions of what some historians have described as a deferential culture, the sense that the society should be organized along superiors who owe certain things to the inferiors, and in, in return for which they are entitled to expect a certain deference from those inferiors This statement is, heavily qualified in lots of ways.

Nonetheless, it provides a, a template. It throws down a gauntlet and a set of claims about equality that other people are able to take up and, and quickly do. And in some ways, the entire set of events around the American Revolution have within them, it is a popular mobilization. People quickly attack not just the king and colonial dependence, but all kinds of other dependencies in society.

There is a real... Certainly in, in New York City, this is the case. There's a kind of popular radicalism that emerges in the city, and a sense of, real class antagonism as people mobilize around the revolutionary cause. Slavery is challenged in different ways during the war, both by enslaved people themselves, and even among slaveholders, some of whom decide to emancipate the people that they own in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Old traditions around primogeniture are discarded in the context of the war. And then after the war, as the new nation tries to consolidate itself, there continue to be popular mobilizations and uprisings, the most famous of which is Shays' Rebellion, the Debtors' Rebellion in Massachusetts. There are ways in which the experience of the revolution and the ideas around it give rise to a sensibility that is really very skeptical, very critical, very hostile towards hierarchy, and towards inherited hierarchy in particular The idea that some people just have the right to control social resources and exercise political power.

But then you have people like, Madison who are alarmed by this and wanna rein it in, and devise a constitution that does rein it in. 

Absolutely. And, and obviously lots of historians have, written about the conflicts in the early republic and the Constitution, and the ways in which the Constitution is justified in part as an effort to retain and regain social order, and to create certain kinds of checks on democratic political power.

The book, starts with a discussion of some of the tendencies that have come down to us since that time, and it, it starts in particular with a little discussion of John Adams, who is an interesting figure in the constellation of the, the Founding Fathers, or the, the people who wrote and thought and talked and led the movement for independence.

Adams was different than some of the other people who I discuss in this book. Many of the, the figures in this book are, are conflicted about elements of their own arguments, but Adams more so than most. Adams, I think, is, is not... He rarely presents himself the way that many later figures do as simply arguing in defense of inequality and hierarchy.

But what he is is very, very deeply ambivalent about the egalitarian claims that he thinks someone like Jefferson is making, and that he perceives percolating through the country, and then eventually taken up in the French Revolution, about which he's horrified. 

Like any good conservative . 

Like any good conservative, the French Revolution is really where things always, that, that's where things end up, and that's where you don't wanna go.

And, you have to think about how to organize your society to avoid winding up there. And i- in, in some ways there's something, I think, appealing about Adams because he does write with a certain realism about Political power and wealth. He says, you might say that everybody is created equal, but really people are not equal in society.

Some people have more wealth and more power than others, and that makes it possible for them to get a certain kind of education and training, which in turn gives them a certain capacity to rule, that the 99% of laboring humanity, as he puts it, will never be able to attain and therefore shouldn't really have.

He's conflicted about what political theory should be delegated to that mass of the laboring population, as he would put it. And for Adams, it's less a full-throated defense of this and more trying to say this is how things are and we have to accommodate that, and if you don't, you will unleash these passions of equality that can become very dangerous for the stability of the society as a whole.

Apocalypse Now Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Investigate the End-Timers Alliance Part 1 - The Intercept Briefing - Air Date 9-18-26

You mentioned this, Astra, laying out the major players in end times fascism as the religious right, big tech, and aspiring bunker builders, as you describe them, namely those leading the anti-immigrant movement and trafficking in great replacement ideology that's shaping US policy.

I want to start with the religious right. this is something we've discussed at length on this show, but I want to ask you all, what is something you think the general public understands the least about the extent to which messianism and the end times fixation that comes with it undergirds, this political moment and shapes the Trump administration in particular?

I think people have a vague sense, right, that Trump wouldn't have been elected if he hadn't have had the support of white evangelicals. he famously got around eighty percent of the evangelical vote in both twenty sixteen and in twenty twenty-four. So I think people have, have a sense that the religious right is behind a guy who is incredibly immoral.

It feels like a, a cognitive dissonance there, right? how is this sexual predator who's been divorced multiple times, the, the hero figure for this group? and it's... Part of what explains that, though, is that they are, really occupying a parallel universe. portions of the evangelical right, you can call, or Christian Zionists, are committed to, a version of theology where, they think that what is-- what's in the Bible is literally going to happen, and that what they need to do is hasten along the sequence of events foretold most, violently and strangely in the Book of Revelation that, bad things will happen on Earth, and that means we're moving closer to the day when there will be Armageddon and Jesus will return.

And, e-even to a lot of Christians, this seems ridiculous, right? but there are people at the upper echelons of the US government today who really believe it and who see acts of violence, acts of, terror as felicitous signs, right? To them, it's like, there's a... We, we quote Pastor, John Hagee, who's a very popular leader of a mega church in Texas, and he's just like, "Everyone, all my, my thousands of followers, call the White House and tell them that you're so grateful for the war in Iran, because that means that the end is nigh, and that means we're that much closer to being hoovered up in a magic escalator to heaven."

And so they have an, this theological investment in war, in the Middle East and, and this idea that Jesus won't return until, biblical Israel is restored, which is, not just the West Bank and Gaza, but large swaths of other countries. and they're making common cause with Messianic, Jews in Israel who, again, aren't the whole of the government but are, are-- have managed to control very powerful portions of it.

And so I think, what, what we're trying to convey is, is that we actually need to pay attention to what these folks are doing. It doesn't-- We're not saying that this is, It, it doesn't need to be the majoritarian strand to be an incredibly dangerous one. And so, one of our recurring jokes, it's not even a joke really, as we, as we wrote this book and also as we talk about it, is that to even quote these people makes us sound insane because they're doing things like importing the perfect red heifers from Texas to bring them to the Middle East.

Yeah. And then, literally the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is flying over to visit these cows and go, "Oh my gosh, I don't see any spots on them. This is so great," "The Bible is coming true." These people are running the government, and we need to take seriously the risk that that poses to all of us.

And again, it's based on this idea, we, we return to this, the, the narrative in the Book of Revelation because it's the fundamental mythological script that these three groups are playing with. It's the root of this apocalyptic strain. And, and it essentially is a narrative that says, in the end times there will be war, there will be pestilence, there will be floods and fires.

But that just means we're getting closer to the end when the chosen few will reach their utopia. And it's a very dangerous script. And for this part of the end times fascist alliance, it's a literal interpretation of that script. But it's, it's one that has suffused our culture more broadly, right? This linear narrative of out of catastrophe, the promised land, and it...

That narrative is being followed in different, in sometimes secularized ways by the other parts of the right, right-wing alliance. 

If there's one thing I learned from writing a book about people who lost their minds during COVID, and then became the US government, it's that, nothing is too stupid to actually, manifest in reality.

And I, I'm not being glib. I, the, I... In, in, in Doppelganger, I quote Philip Roth saying, "It's, it's, it's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous," being a a mantra for our time. But that was before RFK Jr., was put in charge of, y- Health and Human Services.

So, I think that there, there, there can be this smug, response from liberals of just like, "That's just too silly for me to even have to care about." one of the things we dug up in the book is this story that was new to me, which was that in 1969 a Christian fundamentalist named Dennis Rohan actually did succeed in firebombing Al-Aqsa, and that's very, important to this theological story because the idea is that you have to build the Third Temple, where Al-Aqsa is, in order to create the conditions for the Messiah's arrival or return, depending on which version of the story you believe, and that relates to why you need those spotless red heifers, et cetera, right?

So they are trying to, to fulfill this. but as Astra was saying, this is both a literal threat of, it's literally possible that there could be, as these ideas have become more and more powerful and more mainstream within the Israeli and US government, and as people who were once seen as fringe terrorists like Itamar Ben-Gvir enter the government, it's becomes more and more possible, more likely that th- that people will Do the self-fulfilling version of this prophecy, right?

because the prophecy is first you have to basic- you have to have Armageddon, and if you were to actually destroy Al-Aqsa and try to rebuild the Third Temple, that's a surefire, fire recipe for World War III with nukes, right? So they are creating the, the, the con- the, the story that they are, that, that they claim is, i- is, is, inevitable.

It's not inevitable, but they are actually doing their best to f- to fulfill it for all of us. so we can't afford to ignore them. But it's also a pattern of thought, right? this is a really dangerous pattern of thought that out of the worst things possible comes the beautiful, glorious golden city.

And that's the template of all of these action films and, and, and video games, and it, it leads one to embrace the worst and to not fear what we should fear, right? And so, w- when Trump, shares a video of, of a remade Gaza with a Trump Tower, he's doing a version of that story, right?

And that's-- that... And, and, and when, when Sam Altman says, he's, he's summoning a digital god and we're gonna have utopia with AI, and yeah, let me cover the whole world with data centers and accelerate the climate crisis because it's gonna be utopia and we'll all just be lying around just being in awe of the wisdom that I- that AI has unleashed for us, he's doing the story, 

And so we have to, be able to identify it because we're all living with the consequences of this terrible story, and we need better stories. 

Why California's Billionaire Tax Is Crucial Dave Regan Part 1 - The Majority Report W Sam Seder - Air Date 10-21-26

Proposition 40, I think the first thing, Sam, that should be said about it is that we developed it to solve a specific problem. And the problem is that after President Trump and Congress passed the one big so-called beautiful bill, as you and I'm sure most of your, your viewers know, this was the largest ever defunding of healthcare in American history.

And in California, if we don't do anything, three and a half million people are gonna lose health insurance. 150,000- On 

January 1st is my understanding, right? or, 

It, it starts to, it starts to fully take effect then, and it, it won't happen instantly, but over the next, 12 months, 18 months, something like that.

And there's total consensus, three and a half million people losing health insurance they already have, including millions of children, for Pete's sake. 150,000 healthcare workers lose their jobs. We're gonna have a $25 billion permanent hole in the state budget, and we're gonna see hospitals, community clinics, emergency rooms, particularly in rural areas and urban centers, continue to close, but at an accelerated pace because of the defunding.

So Proposition 40 to meet this emergency is a one-time emergency tax on billionaires and billionaires only. There's about 250 of these folks in California. Their aggregate wealth is $2.4 trillion with a T. Their wealth last year grew by $500 billion. It's expected to grow by a similar amount this year.

Prop 40 would raise $100 billion and allow us to fill all of the cuts to our healthcare system and avoid a catastrophe, for the state. this... And, and there is consensus bordering on unanimity, including among our opponents, that these are the consequences of the one big bill. And so we're a, an organization of healthcare workers, and we're trying to stave off this gargantuan problem, and that's what Prop 40 is, and that's what it will fund 

And it is such, it, it seems to me such an obvious slam dunk that it is shocking to me that there's anybody, never mind the governor of the state who is against it, although I have other, ideas as to why he might, might be.

But, walk us through, okay, their money grew by 20% last year as a whole. 

Right. 

And, when you're talking about, 5%, the stat I saw was that it would basically set back your average billionaire of these 250 billionaires, it would set them back. It's almost as if they skipped a month of, of money generating.

So- Right ... in real terms, 'cause it's, this is obviously, it's tough to look at those numbers, but how will it impact their lives on a daily basis? 

Not at all. It's, it's- 

But what if they wanna buy an island, Dave? What if it, in October I wanna buy an island, and then I have to wait till November to buy that island?

that's what we like to call first world problems, Sam. And 

I- That's not first world That's in a different planet. I got news for you, I live in the first world. That is not an issue for me. 

No, it, it, anyway, I appreciate your point. I'll tell you one little quick story. I was talking to a healthcare industry executive who is very, very wealthy- Mm

but not anywhere close to being a billionaire. And the first time I had the conversation with him about this, he said, "So let me understand. We can fully fund our healthcare system for the next five years, avoid all those problems, and the billionaires who have to pay the tax will be just as rich as they are today 60 days later?"

I said, "Exactly." this is a non-event in the lives of these people. And, and I'm not trying to be cavalier about that. These folks are so extraordinary- extraordinarily wealthy, and their wealth is growing at, it's just galloping along. And here in California, there's, the, the billionaires here, the 250 folks, their aggregate wealth in 2019, seven years ago, was $700 billion.

Today it's 2.4 trillion, and it's on the way to being 3 trillion in the next 12 months. This, this is a rounding error, and I'm not trying to overstate it. This has no effect on their lives. And what some people have said, and I think they're right about this, is it's not about the money to them. 

No. 

This is a group of people that never have to be accountable to anybody, never get told no by anybody, and here we are, the ordinary folks in California, saying, "You have to do a little bit."

To give back to the state that has produced these enormous fortunes. And, and the other little dirty secret, and I'm sure you know this, Sam, and they, they don't want people to know this, is that billionaires don't pay anywhere close to the same tax rates that you pay and I pay. 

No. 

They have been getting over on the public for decades, and it's growing.

And when people find out that plumbers and construction workers and teachers pay higher effective tax rates than billionaires, they're rightfully outraged. this... The, the idea that billionaires are, in some ways, actually portraying themselves as victims is insane. It's absolutely insane. 

And that's before you get into the, the, the ideas of, they, stick their money into, brokerage accounts.

Then they borrow against that money, so they're b- they would rather pay... And they get, they, they get beneficial, rates, so they'd rather pay their 3% annual percentage rate on that than, let's say, a 20% capital, capital gains on the, on the money as it grows. there's all sorts of different ways in which they, evade taxes, e- et cetera, et cetera.

Okay, what of the, what of the issue of capital flight? This is the, thing that we're always told that... Well, we're told two things. We're told, one, there's absolutely no way to assess how much money somebody has, and therefore you could never tax them. this of course, I think- Is also one of the reasons why they don't want this tax, 'cause they don't want that lie to go away.

Right. But it's a lie. We do it every day with houses.

Apocalypse Now Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Investigate the End-Timers Alliance Part 2 - The Intercept Briefing - Air Date 9-18-26

this is a good segue into talking about, perhaps one of the most visible manifestations of this apocalyptic project, as you mentioned, Naomi, AI and data centers, which you all situate as part of the doom cycle. You get into this question, but I wanna talk with you both about, how this particular issue has brought so many of us together in unified hatred.

I love this portion of the book where you talk about this, across the ideological spectrum, why do people hate data centers so much? And what exactly is so universally repulsive about them and what they represent? 

This is the kind of thing that gives you hope in humanity. why do we hate data centers?

It's because, listen to the guys running these tech companies. They're like, "Hi, we're going to suck up all of the energy. We're gonna raise your electricity bills. we're gonna build these big, ugly city-sized buildings that have basically no jobs, that screech and scream all night long, re- destroy your property values.

And guess what you're gonna get in return. You're gonna get no jobs in the future for you or your kids. You're gonna live in a world that is hollowed out because everybody's talking to their chatbot, maybe dating a chatbot. and then also, guess what? It might destroy everything because it might turn on you."

So how's that sound? And 

of course- Doesn't that sound great? Yeah. 

Yeah. And of course, people are like, "Actually, that sounds terrible. we never asked for this." And it's, it... And now, what's interesting is these guys also have all their little podcasts where they talk amongst themselves too, so they're like, "Geez, did we market this wrong?"

And you're like, "Yeah, you did, because actually you told us what you really want, which is you foresee a future with no human workers, and full of human alienation and loneliness, where one or two companies control the entire economy, and maybe destroy humanity." So I, I think the reasons people object to this are obvious, and it's also building on, years and years of a mounting tech lash on both the left and the right.

for different reasons, people were critical of the tech sector, and so that is also part of the f- the foundation. But I think it's just really important, when Naomi said that they're, they're utilizing the same template, this Out of catastrophe, some kind of renewal for the chosen few.

when you hear these folks talk about it, one of the founders of Google said it was speciesist to care about the fate of humanity as opposed to, exalting in the p- possibility that some sort of super intelligence, some sort of digital being might take over, right? that somehow we're just closed-minded for wanting to actually make a better world for, for human beings.

they, they literally talk about, AI as a, as a god or as a demon. And so they're playing with these religious tropes. And of course, somebody like Peter Thiel and other high p- high-powered people in Silicon Valley are increasingly, coming out as Christians. he most famously, in his lectures about the Antichrist, which te- tellingly he says is somebody who wants to bring about, control of AI or like Greta Thunberg, some climate rationality.

So they're playing with these overt theological elements, but ultimately, what's underpinning it is A material drive to own as much of the economy as possible, even if it destroys the lives of billions of people. 

on that last point, it's a very profitable dream, right? And I think that that's true honestly for the theologians as well, that this is always is, as Marx said, it's, it's, it's, th- there are opiate qualities to the story that you, you, that heaven awaits a- a, and that you don't have to...

Yes, you're suffering in the here and now, but do these things and you're gonna be in paradise. that's always been a story that has been very helpful to elite interests. And, the fact that the richest men on the planet are now telling it to us about their tech that is, rapidly turning them into trillionaires, it doesn't mean they don't believe it, but they certainly have motivations for telling us these stories, right?

For telling us that we're being speciesist and, and, and that we have to go along in this way. but just in ter- on your point, why are people rejecting it? there's this little detail i- i- that, that we came across in the story of, one of the data center fights that I think people are n- by now very familiar with or should be familiar with, I think Intercept readers are familiar with, what Elon Musk has done in Memphis, right?

it's a story of, unbelievable environmental racism, the siting of this m- these massive data centers that are impacting, a majority Black, part of Memphis, Boxtown, which has these long roots of, resistance, It's called Boxtown because it was built with the discarded, the, parts of, of railway cars that were then turned into homes.

and because it was unincorporated, and this is true of, many Black communities, th- it, it was, also chosen to be a, a place with very high levels of industrial pollution, and it has a very strong environmental justice community, and it has all of this historical resonance because this is where, Martin Luther King Jr.

went to stand with the sanitation workers, which, the organizers that we, interviewed in Memphis are really consciously see the struggle as being part in that lineage and see the sanitation strike in Memphis, that as being the, the, the beginning of the environmental justice movement in the United States because it was a fight, for, against a toxic workplace, and work, work conditions.

but the detail that I was referring to, so in that, in that fight that I think often gets overlooked, is that the reason that Musk chose Memphis to s- to build what he calls c- called Colossus, right? the, the largest supercomputer in, in world history, and then he built a, a couple more Was because he needed to do it quickly, and so he decided that he needed to find a place that would give him all the, giveaways, but also where there was an empty building.

He wouldn't-- He didn't wanna have to build a building from scratch. He wanted to move into a preexisting building. So he f- f- so in Memphis, they found a factory that was empty and in very good condition, and it was an Electrolux factory. And so if you look into the history of the Ele- Electrolux factory in Memphis, this, 

it's, it's a story of, of, of de-industrialization and free trade and broken promises because this is a factory that actually, was producing ovens and other appliances, and it m- was moved from Canada to Memphis, from Quebec to Memphis, under NAFTA rules, chasing lower wages, okay? 

So you see this race to the bottom. All these things were promised. They didn't create nearly as many jobs with the Electrolux factory as they said they would. The wages weren't as good as they said they would be. They said that they were gonna-- that all these other factories would open up, too. They didn't.

So the r- the reindustrialization didn't happen with Electrolux, but then there's this empty building, and Musk moves in, and it's, it's, barely any jobs. It's like we call it a ghost factory, right? Because it-- there's no... L- that, that, that image of the abandoned factory was the image of the, of the de-industrialization of the NAFTA years, right?

But now we have this new image, which is a reoccupied former fac- a factory that once had, almost a thousand workers and now is just a bunch of buzzing computers, and it- whose end goal is to eliminate everyone's job, right? So why would people accept the trade-offs of that, right? Because Musk also rigged together all of these polluting gas turbines in order to get it online quickly.

So, yeah, it's-- this is what we mean by history compounds, We, we... It's-- We don't s- it's not a r- it's not a loop. It's, more like a spiral taking us somewhere. 

And Martin Luther King, those were the famous protests, of course, with the I am a man sign, right? And where the aspiration was like I'm a man, right?

Right ... recognize me as equal and human. And in this moment, we're up against a fascism that is against all humans in a way. we quote Kelly Hayes, an activist based in Chicago, and she says, every fascism has its subhumans, and for techno-fascists, it's just humans in general," right?

and that this is, opening up a, a bigger fight beyond I am a man to just, this is life versus the machines, and there's something very, unprecedented about that and potentially very unifying. 

Kim Phillips-Fein on the Anti-Egalitarian Strain in American Culture and Politics Part 1 - LARB Radio Hour - Air Date 7-24-26

Can we talk a little bit to lump some folks together that I think are, are part of this bizarre way which feels like its own tradition in America of a kind of aspirational class of men who uphold and, and even promulgate and proselytize for an unequal system. Lothrop Stoddard, for example, it's interest- so we have social Darwinism, which has, as you note in it, the Darwinist thrust of it, is that there is a natural selection, and that's where we get almost directly into the eugenics of inequality with somebody like Lothrop Stoddard, who will say that not only are there inequalities that he will specifically name as being about race and gender, but he will also say that any attempt to mess with this system or to create what he would see as, quote-unquote, "false equalities" between individuals is actually a fundamental threat.

And it seems to me that not just to the system, but to the very people that are its, quote-unquote, "saviors." And it, this feels actually like a very contemporary form, or rather it, it echoes in our contemporary moment in the ongoing resurfacing of this great replacement anxiety among a certain class of, of white folks.

The interesting thing, particularly with regard to charisma, is that Stoddard immediately falls out of popularity, but he's also in a weird way generating with these extreme ideas a kind of market for himself. There's an interesting shadow history to the shadow history, which is men promulgating these ideas in order to, juice themselves.

Right, yes. Well, that's actually a very nice way to approach Stoddard. So for, for, for listeners who may not know who Lothrop Stoddard was, Stoddard was a, a journalist, basically. He did have a PhD in history, from Harvard, but h- he never worked as a, a scholar or historian. He was really a journalist.

He was working in the teens, '20s, the 1920s were the height of his success, and the '30s. And he was a scientific racist, so, a- and literally a eugenicist, by which I mean that he was part of the, at that point, thriving group of people who believed that, they, they had a very poor understanding of anything about genetics in reality, but they had a, a strong...

Their, their, their belief was humanity was really separated into genetically distinct strains of humanity that were hierarchically organized, with the Nordic people at the top of the pyramid. And Stoddard was, he, he, he started out writing about Haiti, actually, and the history of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath.

And he was close friends with Madison Grant, the author of The Passing of the Great Race. Grant was in New York, as was Stoddard, during the teens, and was very much in the community of people who found the Natural History Museum, the Bronx Zoo. Grant is also renowned as a conservationist. Grant believed that white people were...

They, they, they were the, the great race threatened by the rising of the rest of the world, by non-white people who were growing in number and would eventually come to dominate The people of European, and especially really Northern European, Nordic descent. They were committed to the idea there was a kind of difference between the people of Southern Europe and Northern Europe, so it's a, a, a hierarchical arrangement of humanity.

This whole set of ideas, which again, was not at all a fringe set of ideas. I think there is this... th- these are really, very elite people who are part of a upper class infrastructure intellectually putting forth and writing about and reaffirming their convictions here, and Stoddard's very much part of this.

And he then goes off and after World War I writes a book, The Rising Tide of Color, which is about how World War I has been this incredible opportunity for the colonized people of the world because white Europeans are fighting each other, and they don't recognize that the real danger is outside and beyond Europe.

And you, so you can hear in all of this, this is, although it, it's in the background I think very much of a lot of the ideas about the great replacement today. And I would should say, ev- every part of this as far as a actual coherent program is, is just, fantasy and, and false, but the ideas and the constellation I th- of, of thinking remains.

What is I think strange about Stoddard is that he then goes on and takes this set of ideas and pushes it still farther. 

Mm-hmm. 

Because he then after Rising Tide of Color, he writes a book which, is less explicitly and centrally a scientific, a about scientific racism, and is, is about how actually the world is separated into the underman and the overman, and the underman, which is at this point for him referring both to people of color the world over, but also to, the working class the world over, that they are- 

Yeah

go, they're never going to accept the rule of the overman easily. They will rise up and rebel and violently destroy their betters, their g- genetic and inherent superiors who therefore have to be on the watch against this at all times. There's also a strong antisemitic strain running through this as well, with Jews as the people who are going to lead this rebellion, as they did or as Stoddard says that happened in Russia in the Bolshevik Revolution.

Y- y- Stoddard then goes on to celebrate Italian fascism, and then ultimately travels to, to Germany in the very late 1930s, and to write in this celebratory way about Hitler and Nazism. At this point, the... i- in the early years of Stoddard's career, he was very decorated. Warren Harding, the president, extols his work.

His books are bestsellers. The Ku Klux Klan at that point is in its second phase and growing rapidly in membership in the first half of the 1920s, culminating in the 1924 immigration restriction legislation, which really effectively cuts off immigration from much of the rest of the world to the United States.

So I think, he- there's a kind of market for his work in its early years, and then he keeps trying, or as you say, he keeps trying in a way to re- to, to find this again as the criticism of him deepens, as people move away from his ideas, as, much of the, the ugliness of what he's saying, I think, starts to, people start to recognize this.

Nonetheless, he does continue to try to put it forward. In a way, it is pumping himself up as much as anything else. Mm. His late career is... There's something pathetic about it really, as he writes these books about the brilliance of this narrow group of people for an ever-shrinking actual audience.

A- and there's something of that, that goes on afterwards, a, a sense of the... one, one can imagine Stoddard, writing on the internet, continuing to find readers, but we ... He, he would have really adored the space of social media, I think, because there was something... He was always desperate for attention and seeking out an audience and a market for his work, even as that crumbles.

Anti-Fascist Economics (with Isabella Weber) - Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer - Air Date 10-20-26

Nick, you brought up Peter Thiel and you said, he doesn't support democracy because- 

Yeah ... 

it, it's good for his profits. It's, it's- Yeah ... good for maximizing his profits. I think There's something you're missing in that, which is there's always been this psychological component to neoliberalism.

Foundationally, it's the belief that because it's a meritocracy, the best and the brightest and the most capable are the wealthy, are people like you, Nick. Yeah. And so you should be running the economy. Yeah. And I think that is fundamental to neoliberalism and has infiltrated orthodox economics that because

That people like Thiel and Musk and, and yes, you, it's your wealth that actually means you should be making the decisions. And so there is this, weirdly in Hayek with The Road to Serfdom, there is this fundamentally undemocratic idea embedded in the Friedman and Hayek ideology. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for bringing this up, Goldy.

I think this is a really important point, and in fact, as I argue in the book, I think this is where neoliberalism and fascism converge, because the- Yeah ... the, the ideology of neoliberalism is social Darwinist at the end of the day. It's the idea that, Mm-hmm ... whoever prevails on the market is the strongest and therefore should have the most resources and the most power.

And then the ideology of fascism is to, add a racist interpretation to this and a group-based, hate-based interpretation to this, where it's then, no longer just the people who happen to perform best on the market, but the superior race, the, the group that is meant to rule, the group that is meant to be on top of the hierarchy.

And everything that is going wrong with society is projected on this, mythical hierarchy being undermined by whatever policies they can identify. So as such, we have this, convergence between neoliberalism that is willing to treat people's livelihoods as collateral damage, as- Yeah ... the interest rate policies actually establish very clearly.

when Larry Summers goes on TV and says, "X percentage point of people have to be unemployed in order- Yes ... for the economy to get back to a more stable place," then he's saying those people's livelihoods are collateral damage, right? Yeah. They ... We don't care- Right ... what is happening to their communities.

We don't care whether they are able to put food on their kitchen table. We don't care whether their children lose, three years of critical child development while this unemployment prevails. And that's actually this willingness to treat people's lives as collateral damage is where Polanyi locates the fascist virus.

Already in the 19- he projects us back on the 19th century and says that with this logic, if you take this to its conclusion and you add- racism and racist ideology, you arrive at fascism. And that's why I think it's not so surprising that someone like Thiel, is at the same time a libertarian and someone that quite openly embraces, fascist ideology.

Yeah. 

A- as does Musk. 

yeah 

I, I don't think anybody's gone more openly Nazi than, than Musk and, and- 

Absolutely. And this is actually also one of the things that I was grappling with in the book, right? everybody has seen these pictures of the inauguration, where suddenly the world's richest man, the, the tech elite, the tech CEOs were standing in front of elected officials, had a front row seat, when Trump was being re-inau- inaugurated.

And at the time there was this big, surprise, how did all of these people who until recently had donated to the Democrats and were in support of the Democrats, champ chip. And I think there are people like Peter Thiel who have very clear fascist ideology that they have embraced and expressed openly, and there are people like Musk, who I think has also turned quite explicitly racist and fascist, and then there are others who, surprisingly, are actually more followers who basically- Right

don't have any core ideology, but their ideology is profit fundamentalism. So whenever- Yeah ... power changes, they will be on the side of power. 

Pure greed. 

And, and, and this is, this is actually really familiar historically. There were many American industrialists who supported fascism and supported the Nazi regime and Hitler in particular, most famously Henry Ford, who was an infamous antisemite.

So that was ideological support among others. But you had, of course, Fred Koch, the, the Koch family. You had the, the head of General Motors, of Standard Oil of New Jersey. You had Thomas Watson, the head of IBM, who actually received a medal from Hitler in 1937. Most of that support wasn't from ideological grounds, it was th- they were heavily tied up in business in Germany, and the Nazis were good for business, until of course they weren't, and they basically seized control of their German investments.

Though, of course, these American companies continued to share in the profits. 

Yeah. 

 

Yeah. Yeah, and we saw something similar in Germany in the sense that there was, a core group of industrialists that supported Hitler, a small core group, but the brunt of them really came around to, either openly supporting or at least very pragmatically accommodating in ways- Yeah

that ultimately propped up fascism once Hitler was in power. So that's- Yeah, 

and you're wa- and you're watching American corporations do that today, just roll over- Right ... for Trump. 

Exactly. So that's why I have this chapter in the book- Yeah ... that is Capital Won't Save Democracy, right? No. We can't wait for- No

capital- Right ... to save democracy. we have to realize that the only choice for democracies to survive is to organize the economies in the interest of the people. And- Yeah ... at the end of the day, this means going up against capital interests. Yeah ... and this means confronting profit fundamentalism heads-on.

It doesn't mean- Yeah ... nationalizing everything. It doesn't mean you're- No ... turning everything into a planned economy. But it means, re- reorganizing the economy around the essentials in ways that it can work for the majority- Sure ... of people. 

Yeah. 

And, and- So- ... and l- and, and this means not just- R- redistributing incomes, it means redistributing power in the economy, 'cause that's where this all starts 

We've just heard clips starting with

Democracy Now! framing growing resistance to AI as a fight against oligarchic power, with students demanding working classrooms and teachers over chatbots as the buildout heads toward $10 trillion.

Behind the News traced how Jefferson's 'all men are created equal' landed in a society built on slavery, indentured servitude, and deference, yet inspired popular revolts like Shays' Rebellion.

The Intercept Briefing warned that end-times believers now powerful in the US and Israeli governments are working to bring on the Armageddon they call inevitable.

The Majority Report made the case before the election that a one-time tax would barely dent the fortunes of California's 250 billionaires, whose wealth grew from $700 billion in 2019 to $2.4 trillion.

The Intercept Briefing in part two of their discussion described the fight in a majority-Black Memphis neighborhood against Elon Musk's data center, which has brought polluting gas turbines and barely any jobs.

The LARB Radio Hour profiled Lothrop Stoddard, the 1920s scientific racist embraced by elites, whose warnings of a rising 'tide of color' foreshadowed today's great replacement fears.

And Pitchfork Economics concluded that saving democracy means taking on capital and organizing the economy around what people need, rather than waiting for corporations whose only loyalty is to profit.

Three of today's featured authors have new books out: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's End Times Fascism, Kim Phillips-Fein's Country of Lords, and Isabella Weber's Anti-Fascist Economics. You'll find them linked in the show notes, in print through Bookshop.org or as audiobooks through Libro.fm, and buying through those links helps support the show.

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

Remember, 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.

If you get value out of the show - and want to make sure we can keep going while getting it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

I sometimes ask a discussion question to kick things.

I asked a while back about where sports and politics collide. Here's a voice message we received from Matt in Pennsylvania.

Hey, Jay, this is Matt in Pennsylvania. I think the biggest thing for me about sports and politics, that causes a problem is how in recent times there have been a number of cities, I'm thinking Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Minneapolis. several years ago, the football teams decided that they needed a new stadium. Not that there was anything wrong with their stadium that couldn't be fixed or upgraded or anything like that, but they just decided they needed a new stadium or they were gonna move,

And so the government, a measure on the ballot asking the public if they were willing to pay for a new stadium for the sports team. And in each of those cases, the public voted against it. think about, how many people you need for a majority. you're including sports fans, football team fans within that number. So everybody voted against it, and then the sports team, basically used their lobbying power with the local government to get it done anyway. Now the public is paying tax dollars for all of those stadiums for teams where the owners have so much money they couldn't spend it in five lifetimes. all the money that goes into the, sports between ticket sales and TV licensing and, merchandise licensing, just all that money, and they can't fund their own place to play? That seems ludicrous to me. And then certainly I shouldn't have to pay for it if I'm not interested in doing so. there are certainly things, but that's the biggest thing that bothers me about the, the influence or the confluence, as it were, of sports and politics.

One of the bad arguments that gets made against trying to get money out of politics is that money flows like water. It will always find a crevice and will always find a way to seep through. The argument goes: trying to wage a battle to keep it out is a fool's errand.

Matt's call reminded me of that because it's a demonstration of how money doesn't just find a way to flow into the political system, but also finds new places to flow entirely. The moneyed interests might have started by focusing on cutting taxes for the wealthy and cutting services for the poor, but once that was pretty well locked in, why not start looking in other places to get benefits for themselves at the public's expense?

Just to reiterate, the idea that because money flows like water, it's not worth trying to fight it is ridiculous: just imagine how stupid a person would have to be to give you that kind of advice about your leaky basement or your leaky roof. Recognizing that money flows like water shouldn't be a call to inaction. The opposite is true. Having a water leak is universally understood as an emergency to be dealt with immediately: patch the holes, apply the sealant, fix the damage, and always remain vigilant for the next threat of intrusion.

Now, here's today's question:

Have you had your impression of wealth inequality dramatically shifted at any point? Was it from one particular thing you heard, or just a general shifting over a period of learning by osmosis?

I don't remember a time when I needed to be convinced to take on the billionaire class and implement policies that would create more wealth equality. But I do remember that it was the viral video published almost exactly 14 years ago on YouTube, titled "Wealth Inequality in America," that finally visualized the extent of the inequality in a way that I could begin to almost wrap my mind around.

The origin of the video is actually polling data rather than economic data. The poll asked people to describe how they thought wealth was divided in the United States. Then the poll asked them to describe their ideal distribution of wealth between the poorest and the wealthiest.

The results showed that people thought the wealth divide was more lopsided than they wished it was. Their ideal distribution would even things out in a way that lifted the poorest out of poverty and still allowed the wealthy to be rich, but kept everyone within sight of one another.

The thought that inspired the video wasn't just those questions about people's perceptions versus their desires, but the difference between the perception of how unequal things were and the reality. The video then went on to explain and visually represent how wealth inequality was many, many times more extreme than people even guessed it was.

It ended up being one of those classic cases where you try to draw a chart, only to realize that some of the data you have is so extreme that it's literally off the chart and nearly impossible to depict accurately. Here's the thing: that video came out 14 years ago, and the richest people it tried to depict were the 1%. Those people still only owned tens of millions of dollars. It didn't even try to depict billionaires.

Lucky for all of us, the creator of that original video just came out with a new series of videos this year. The first is an updated version of the original, with today's numbers and a valiant effort to depict the wealth owned by the billionaire class. Just like 14 years ago, the results are eye-popping and genuinely hard to wrap your mind around. Learning more about how much money a billion dollars is, and how quickly additional money accumulates on top of any pile of wealth that size, only clarifies the tragedy of our inability so far to adequately tax the billionaire class for the benefit of all of society.

We will be sure to include a link to that updated video and the creator's channel in the show notes so you can see the new video for yourself. If you have a story of your own about coming to understand the scope of the wealth divide or the role that that divide plays in our society, be sure to let us know.

If you'd like to share your thoughts, there's a link to leave a voice message in the show notes, or connect with us on socials or by email. All details are in the link in bio in the show notes.

One last quick note,

I'm beginning to take some small steps to gently change elements of the show, hopefully for the better. You may have noticed that my opening for the episode today was a little bit longer and more detailed than usual. As part of my ongoing quest to see the show and what we do with fresh eyes, I began thinking about the structure of the episodes themselves and how it could benefit from a bit more input from the people who put it together.

For a long time, I thought of the show as sort of speaking for itself. I curated the clips I chose and presented them without much direct commentary, but I think there's room for improvement there. I want to begin to share more of our thinking behind how and why we choose the material we do. What story we're trying to tell or what case we're trying to make.

What exactly that ends up sounding like will be the result of some trial and error that we're beginning to experiment with. For instance, I asked producer Erin, who was the lead on this episode, to share some thoughts they had about it. I think their answer was great, they said:

A while back we received some listener feedback that wasn't knocking our coverage but indicated that there is so much news going on in the world and so much conflict that they get tired of hearing "capitalism bad" coverage. And while I understood the sentiment, doing this episode solidified to me that talking about this matters because America is just one small piece in a long historical puzzle that continues to be played out over and over again. You can't separate capitalism from the rise of fascism we are seeing, because fascism is often the thing capitalism reaches for when the alternative is sharing. And a lot of the conflict we see globally is the same, a fight over resources, and a search for somebody to scapegoat in that fight. It's the same story as the one here at home: someone needs what's under the ground or in another's hands, so they find a person to point at while the theft happens. And in both cases, the alternative, sharing, gets ruled out before the conversation even starts. So I'm not tired of this story, just that it keeps not being addressed.

So that was Erin. Members will recognize them from SOLVED! which we enjoyed creating a lot, but had to put on hold this year when money got tight. I'll be sure to share more of these kinds of ideas to incorporate our perspectives a bit more into the show as things develop.

Speaking of which, the next change is coming right up. Similar to the expanded introduction, I also wanted to include a bit more detail when introducing the deep dive sections of the show.

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

Section A, How the Lords Justify Themselves

Followed by Section B, How Insecurity Breeds Fascism

Section C, Taxing and Taming Extreme Wealth

And Section D, What Comes Next, Essentials and Here-ness

To start, we'll hear from Kim Phillips-Fein, Columbia historian and author of Country of Lords, who helped inspire this episode, speaking on Know Your Enemy and Behind the News, on how the rich have justified inequality, from the late-1800s claim that millionaires were nature's winners, to Henry Ford calling his company a holy trust, to the merit tests and IQ theories that came later. And Isabella Weber, economist and author of Anti-Fascist Economics, on The Nation Podcasts, on how economists are trained to set aside their own moral sense.

The Long Struggle Against Equality in America (with Kim Phillips-Fein) Part 1 - Know Your Enemy - Air Date 8-24-26

In a lot of ways, the next major moment when these ideas come to life is the late 19th century, the post-Civil War moment, when you see the rise of a really new economy and massive new concentrations of wealth that are, I think, in some ways similar to our own day.

A world that is being really transformed very quickly by these massive new institutions and new patterns of distribution of wealth and the emergence in a really very short period of time of a really different set of expectations about life and about work and about material possibility. And in that moment, so it, I talk both about William Graham Sumner and Andrew Carnegie, who are sometimes lumped together as the social Darwinists, people who saw the millionaires as the product of natural selection, as Sumner put it.

But both Sumner and Carnegie defended the concentration of wealth, and both of them do so in a way that's really very different from the earlier thinkers. They both say this is inevitable, it is necessary, there is no alternative to it, and it is the only way to attain the level of material production that we now have.

And therefore, it doesn't matter if there are extreme concentrations of wealth. It's just what we need in order to produce as we are. But both of them are uncomfortable with it in different ways. And Sumner is much more vocally strident about all of these arguments, but underneath a lot of his writing, I think, is a, is a deeper ambivalence about them.

Carnegie, on the other hand, is much more, whether you look at it as just hypocritical or genuine. Carnegie came from actually a radical family. He was an immigrant from Scotland. His father had been a Chartist activist. And, Carnegie became extremely wealthy, but as he did, he wrote and spoke about both his worries that the money was corrupting him.

And then later, and in his most famous essay about this, The Gospel of Wealth, he writes that there are these two classes now all of a sudden, and The fraternity that had once bound people together is no longer there. The employers and the employees don't know each other. They're strangers to each other.

And you can hear in this, I think, both a sense of fear, resonant today, that very wealthy people might have that these laboring masses in their midst who they depend on might actually turn against them and hate them. And, the late 19th century is a very violent time. Famously, Carnegie's henchman or second in command in the Homestead mines suffers an assassination attempt by an anarchist.

So I think Carnegie was afraid and writing out of a place of fear of what the ultimate consequence of this inequality might be, but also of political discomfort and a sense that something had been lost, even if it is only his own sense of the ability of the elite to have this paternalistic, benevolent sense of self, that that is gone too.

And so he then goes on to develop this whole argument about philanthropy and how, the wealthy need to give all their money away to found libraries and universities and concert halls, and that in so doing, and it's very important to him, it's not just that people will then have the library.

It's very important that it be the wealthy doing it themselves. 

Yeah. He has to show up to the ribbon-cutting, They have to feel this sense that they're being given this thing, and that charity is the precondition for reconciliation of the social classes. 

And that people will understand that Actually, it's better for the wealthy to have control over these resources because they will know how to spend the money in everybody's best interest.

They will be like trustees or stewards for the wealth of society. So there were lots of Carnegie libraries, but at the time, there were quite a few communities that refused the gift of a Carnegie library. 

Kim, I didn't know that until reading your book. What, two hundred and fifty working-class communities refused it because they were basically saying, "We're not gonna take a library from the guy putting down the homestead strike in the, the vicious way he did."

that was really incredible. I didn't know that. A great little wrinkle of that story. I d- I think the biographical portraits, just for the listeners, they're so well done. again, models of economy, the little telling details are really something. And just, I know most of our listeners probably know what social Darwinism is, but could you actually just unpack it a little bit?

Why social Darwinism, and what did it mean to deploy social Darwinism in the fight against equality in this context? 

So I think this group of thinkers, and I, I don't think they actually call themselves social Darwinists, actually. I think this is something that we bring to it. Hofstadter actually might have been one of the early people to describe this as social Darwinism.

But they do take up both the ideas of Darwin and then also Herbert Spencer, who is doing the same thing. They, they pick up on the competitive element of Darwinism, that organisms are competing against each other and struggling to survive and to be the ones that win the evolutionary battle. And they say, well, economic life and social life is the same, that companies, firms, and individuals are all also competing with scarce resources.

And I think what they bring to it, which is very different from Darwin, is this a normative sense that the best survive. for, for Darwin, I think one of the things which is intellectually so extraordinary about Darwinism is the sense that the, the organisms that survive are the ones that are able to adapt to their environments, but there is really nothing best about them.

There's nothing teleological about how that development takes place. The social Darwinists had a very strong moralistic element to it, where the people that survive, the corporations that survive, they are the ones that are really the best in some moral way as well. their success is not just accidental or random.

And I think with Sumner especially, Sumner saw this force working through all of society. So at the top, the millionaires are the ones that are able to best thrive. But at the bottom, the drunkard in the gutter should not be rescued. He should be allowed to die there because 

That's natural.

That's nature taking its course. 

He's not a fit organism to make it in this world. 

Yeah. Kim, it's so interesting. In some ways, your book also is a catalog of various theories about the origins of inequality, and it's so striking that someone like Thomas Paine, right, at the start of your book, a believer in equality, where does inequality come from?

Well, there's a natural equality that gets disrupted somewhere along the way, right? And that's how you get distinctions like kings and subjects. They're a kind of outgrowth of some intervention in our natural equality. Whereas for the social Darwinists, no, no, no, what's natural is our inequality, and therefore society should reflect those kind of natural inequalities in the way it's organized, who it rewards, who it allows to suffer and die in a gutter.

Yeah. And I think it's also... I think part of the thrust of Sumner certainly, and Carnegie also, is that any intervention is going to be very dangerous. 

You're working against the grain of the universe, essentially. 

Exactly. And it will be exploiting the forgotten man, which is a, a Sumner phrase that FDR later picks up and turns on its head.

But the idea of, the forgotten man is the quiet, hardworking taxpayer who winds up being totally screwed over and taken advantage of by, well-wishers who want to do something to help the person in the gutter. But actually, by trying to help that person, they're hurting the thrifty, industrious workman.

And that if you do anything that tries to disrupt this natural inequality you will be disadvantaging lots of people, and you will introduce all of these new injustices and problems into the, the working of the social machine. 

The US Tradition of Inequality with Kim Phillips-Fein Part 2 - Behind the News - Air Date 7-16-26

talk about the, the period of meritocracy, the '50s, '60s, when, liberals, in a lot of cases, embraced testing, SATs, that sort of thing, in order to come up with a society where the winners were sorted out on the basis of merit, not inherited wealth or privilege or anything like that. And they ignore the fact that the word meritocracy was coined by a s- a satirist.

That was a period where they, I don't know, they're trying to make a, a good hierarchy instead of a bad hierarchy? 

Earlier in the century, we see these defenses of hierarchy that are either based on a sense that it's economically necessary or that it's yielding the best and the brightest at the top through sheer force of competition, or that it's economic inequality and the concentration of wealth is essential because otherwise you won't be able to fund major philanthropic institutions like universities or museums.

You see the scientific racist arguments about how the material distribution of wealth echoes what is the underlying inequality between people. So I think in the post-war years, you find a different set of ideas coming to the fore, and yes, it is this sense of wanting to find a metric, a neutral way of measuring humanity, and then slotting people into the appropriate places in a stable bureaucratic order.

Or perhaps also placing them into educational institutions. And it is interesting that you see this, these things developing in tandem. This is the moment of the great expansion of post-war, higher education. And you see that growing at the same time is this interest in finding a way to put people in the right place in the system via a standard that's supposed to be totally neutral, the SAT.

Some idea, some hope that you could create this test that would find the, the smartest people, and then you could just put them at the top of this structure. Now, as anybody who has ever engaged with the SAT knows, this is a really utopian way to view the SAT, and it does not take account of the deep differences between educational institutions and, d- just all the different, ways in which this is really a fantasy in its own right.

But yes, this is something that liberals in particular ... I talk a bit about this guy, John Gardner, in the book, who was involved with ETS, the company that makes the SATs. He later served in the Johnson administration. He founded Common Cause. he, he's really a liberal, but he's very interested in this question.

He writes a book called Excellence. can we be equal and excellent also, and h- how do you do that? This is a place where there's a lot of investment among the post-war liberals themselves in this idea about creating a true system of merit. 

Okay, and then there's this backlash. The neoconservatives, Irving Kristol, blame, this, this lust for equality on envy, the envy of the intellectuals for the successful.

And then we start seeing the rise, or revival of some old genetic theories of human intelligence, that are often quite racist. And then, 20, 25 years later, we see, Herrnstein and Murray publish The Bell Curve in a world which had become much, much more unequal than we saw that original backlash.

So yeah, what about this, this new backlash trend? 

Yeah, in the late '60s, early '70s, you start to see this set of thinkers writing against equality, and that the problem is that people have blindly embraced equality as an ideal. Many of these neocons who are involved or writing these articles are taking aim at the civil rights movement and the Black freedom movement and the claims that are part of those political mobilizations.

The argument which observed that the distribution of wealth and resources is not just the result of some kind of meritocratic ordering, but it deeply reflects racial prejudice, violence, disenfranchisement, political and economic power. And so it's not just as though it reflects people's innate worth and, and that...

And so are taking, or criticizing the distribution of material resources as it is implicitly. And sometimes that's more at the forefront of those movements, sometimes it's less at the forefront, but I think it is, it is very much there, and that's part of what this group of thinkers picks up on to try to say, "No, actually, the real distribution of resources is, is in the end it is and should be about this abstract idea of merit that we have to hold onto and insist upon again."

And those arguments take up part of the liberal claim, but then they twist it in a way that the liberals had maybe not intended at first, even though there was something in their arguments that allowed them to be used in that way. So Herrnstein, who comes to prominence writing about IQ and making a set of claims about the hereditary And implicitly racial nature of IQ and saying that eventually you will wind up with what he describes as a hereditary meritocracy, where the smartest people are mating with each other and then will produce the smartest children, and those children will have skills that are valued and they're paid more, and so eventually that's gonna be a new aristocracy, and impervious because everybody knows that it's just better.

When Herrnstein first puts this stuff forward in an, an article in The Atlantic in 1971, he really distances it from race explicitly, although it's always implicitly very much there, and p- his critics pick up on it right away. When he writes about this again 25 years later with Charles Murray in The Bell Curve, race is very much present in that book, and I think it is an, a sign of how much more unequal the society had become between the early '70s and the early 1990s.

Anti-Fascist Economics with Isabella Weber Fighting Fascism Part 1 - The Nation Podcasts - Air Date 10-19-26

I still have my Econ 101 textbook written by Gregory Mankiw. it's at, it's right here. I pulled it out. and I was looking, I was looking for it. 

Listeners, we now have a prop on camera. 

I was, I was, I was r- looking through it in advance of this interview 'cause I, I remembered, this portion in it, again, as an undergrad, that I just r- I, I remember reading and, and it was like- price gouging is actually good.

And, and so I, I was looking through this and I was wondering, am I remembering that correctly? surely it wasn't that straight up Ayn Randian. I, I must be embellishing it in my memory. But I f- I found the, I found the section. It's, page 84 in, in part two, How Ma- How Markets Work, and I'm just gonna read a little, a little section here.

In praise of price gouging. If you wanna score points cracking down on mean, greedy profiteers, pushing anti-gouging rules is a very good thing. But if you're one of the people the law protects from price gouging, you won't fare as well. Consider this scenario. You are thirsty, worried that your baby is gonna become dehydrated.

You find a store that's open, and the store owner thinks it's immoral to take advantage of your distress, so he won't charge you a dime more than he charged last week. But you can't buy water from him. It's sold out. You continue on your quest and finally find that dreaded monster, the price gouger. He offers a bottle of water that cost $1 last week at an outrageous price, say $20.

You pay it to survive the disaster. You resent the price gouger, but if he hadn't demanded $20, he'd have been out of water. It was the price gouger's exploitation that saved your child. And it's just th- this is, this is the generalized Econ 101 textbook for freshmen on, the basics of supply and demand.

I went to Brown University, not known for being, a crazy right-wing institution. This is just, this is, what the establishment of economics is, that they're teaching, you... There's no Sociology 101 course or, y- Psychology 101 course where they're like, "You, minimum wage is bad. You can't do minimum wage."

"It will, it will hurt, it will actually hurt people." But they're, they're teaching this stuff as, this is science, when it's just your, your fucking ideology. It's crazy. 

I, I had a, I, I did not take Econ 101, but I had... I was, this Pareto optimal outcome thing. I had P- Pareto, Pareto, Pareto, the Italian guy.

I had never heard of this before. and the way you break it down is, no redist- redistribution of goods or productive resource can improve the position of one individual without making at least one other individual worse off. Just being, a thing that we just, is the collective shoulder shrug for economists for, 100 years as, "Well, I guess we can't tax the rich because it would make them a little worse off."

And it's just, something that some, rich asshole Italian merchant wrote, 100-something years ago, and it's just the collective, wisdom. What up with that? 

Wow, yeah. so many points. 

Yeah. Sorry. 

first, in fairness to Larry Summers, the idea that rent control is as bad as dropping a bomb, or, the second worst thing, to be precise, is actually also a quote from a textbook.

So- Oh. ... Larry Summers is not, a, a, a, a- 

He's 

just a reader. He's- 

He's just, he's just one of many here. 

He's just a guy who wants to hook up with a lady and goes to the best person for advice on that. as one, as one does. 

Which I did want to talk about morality and economics. Maybe that's the keyword word right here.

There used to be a time when the question of the just price was the key question in economics, right? that's Italian scholastic, so medieval period, pretty long time ago. and then basically with the rise of modern economics, you get this separation between any considerations of morality, ethics, and economics.

and Smith, he actually still has a theory of moral sentiment and the wealth of nations, right? It's two separate books, so, you, you, you have the beginning of the separation, but he's still a moral philosopher at the end of the day, right? but now it, today when, as an economist, you go out and you make moral claims, you are basically disqualifying yourself as someone who's, who doesn't understand economics, right?

That's how deep the separation is. And actually, in a way, I also have to plead guilty here, as I do in the book, because, I have been- At many occasions named the inventor of greedflation. Basically, I think the, the, the term of greedflation was invented, as something to ridicule the idea that profits had something to do with inflation.

So it was exactly, playing into this, sense of, oh, do you think people just got greedier overnight? as, as Jason Furman once said, this is like blaming a plane crash, on the laws of gravity, There's always greed, and you say that people just get greedier, and then you s- somehow get inflation.

That's obviously absurd. and I can give a long spiel why we had profit inflation, but the point that I'm trying to make is that, as an economist, I felt like I could not talk about greed. I could talk about profits. I could talk about corporate price taking. I could talk about how corporate price taking in moments of crisis and emergencies works, and why this has something to do with inflation.

But I felt like I could not wa- cross the line to use moral language. And as I've been writing this book, I came to realize that there's actually something wrong about this. when, in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a global energy crisis, in the middle of a situation that clearly is the worst of times for the majority of people, a small handful of corporations and ultra-rich are reaping record profits, then of course we need to have sound economic explanations why this is happening, and that is maybe not the same question as the moral question.

But that this should unleash moral outrage I think is something that, everybody who has some humanity left in their soul should feel, right? So that also means that as economists we are so rigorously trained to, mute our common sense and mute our, basic intuitions, basic emotions as human beings, which is a precondition for walking around and saying Malthusian stuff like in the...

And in your famine situation, but also for going on TV and saying, "People have to be thrown out of work, and that's the only option that we have," right? to say that with a straight face and don't see a problem with it, you have to mute all those more commonsensical considerations that every undergraduate student of economics, will still carry along, which is probably why you remember that quote, right?

Because it's just disturbing to be told that, someone charging $20 for a mother that tries to give water to her child is doing a good thing. that is a disturbing statement for anyone who hasn't been trained to think that's normal. so in that sense, I think, I think that economics has this very strong socialization force also on its members.

more specifically on the price gouging question, I feel like it's worth debunking your Mankiw quote here if, if we have that minute. 

Sure, sure. And I'll, I'll, I'll add that there, there's a little bit... There, there's another little section that's like, "And sure, the government could force people to go there, bring water there and sell water, but that's not freedom, so we can't-

we can't do that." So it's either, it's either you buy water for $20 or there's no water because there's, there's no other option. 

Because that's it. That's it. That's all we got. 

usually when these kind of situations emerge, right, this example we don't have a story, right? what happened?

has the highway- Right ... collapsed or, did the... I don't know. Did, did the trucks- It was, it was- ... break down or what- why is there no water in this place? It was about 

Hurricane, it was about Hurricane Katrina. 

Okay, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So usually there's some natural catastrophe, right? Like a blizzard, a, a, a, a tornado, a hurricane, whatever, right?

Like something that breaks a place off of infrastructure, which gives the conditions that make price gouging possible. Now, what is inherent in that scenario is that water isn't coming to that place even if you charge $50 because you only have the water bottles that are in that place before the place got cut off by the natural disaster.

So in that sense, actually the perfect example for why the laws in s- of supply and demand in situations of disaster and emergency often don't actually work in the ways- Right ... which textbooks teach us. 'Cause the idea is, of course, if price goes up, and therefore the price gouger somehow brought additional water there.

Probably he just had a bunch of bottles of waters still in his shop and was selling them off at extraordinary prices, rather than actually bringing additional supply to the market. Which is- 

Which is just being- ... not just a- ... a piece of shit. that is just w- disaster profiteering or whatever the, the term is.

The Long Struggle Against Equality in America (with Kim Phillips-Fein) Part 2 - Know Your Enemy - Air Date 8-24-26

Well, the next chapter is your chapter on the gospel of production, and your key figures here are Frederick Winslow Taylor of Taylorism, who had the vision of scientifically managed workplace, which depended, quote, "On maintaining a strict social hierarchy separating workers from employers."

One of the things that I thought was really incredible in your reading of Taylor, which I hadn't... it's there, but your emphasis on it really helped me, was that when we think about Taylor, we think of the assembly line, we think of this acceleration of the division of labor, the idea that workers, they don't have to be skilled anymore because they can just work on one tiny piece of a production line.

They don't have to understand the whole process. But what you point out is that as ideology, what is achieved and what was one of Taylor's purposes was to distinguish between the kinds of people who are capable of, or ought to, oversee The production process, the managers, the scientists, the engineers, versus the workers who are, and ought to be, totally incapable and in fact, ignorant of the total production process.

And what that really brings t-to clarity for me is, again, the, the anti-egalitarian element involved here, which is, there's an anxiety about craftsmen, about craft mentality, the idea of a worker who has too much power over the production process and too much autonomy in the workplace because they know things that the manager doesn't know.

And Taylorism, in large part, in significant degree, is about eliminating that possibility of more symmetry in power and knowledge between workers and managers. 

Yeah, I think that's very much what Taylor's project was. So I think, Taylor is introducing his time study and his idea that any process can be carried out in the one best way if you could only discover what that was, and his program of reorganizing the workplace in really the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century.

And he, he's very explicit about this, that the reason that he is interested in this is because he thinks that workers are intentionally slowing down production That output is much less than what it could and should be because workers have too much control, too much knowledge, and are too able to set the terms of the production process.

And that you need, therefore, to reorganize the workplace so that the manager or actually the consultant... And I think Taylor is interesting 'cause he, he is the first management consultant, and he doesn't think with Carnegie and Sumner that the best people are just rising to the top of these enterprises.

He actually thinks a lot of people are controlling businesses just out of nepotism or luck or whatever, and they don't have any idea what they're doing either, and they are thus totally in the thrall of their workers who are the ones who are really setting the production process, and that you need some neutral outside force to come in and reorganize the workplace and shift power upward.

And also that workers in these enterprises are just a resentful, sullen, negative force. Their knowledge is a problem, and they're fundamentally different from the type of people who need to be in charge of these enterprises. There's actually one nice quote that I don't think I actually use this in the book, but it is in the Taylor papers.

He's writing with someone else, Frank Gilbreth, who is another kind of scientific management. He takes up a lot of Taylor's ideas. And Gilbreth writes, "You have such insight into the species of workmen." And I think that really, he, they... It is a way in which they are writing about workers as though they are just a different species from their betters.

And I think in the book I then talk about how, Taylor is one version of these ideas, but then Henry Ford really takes them up more deeply in his adoption of the assembly line and his concept of the corporation. 

And well, Kim, one wrinkle I wanna draw out here is one aspect of Taylor's thought is that he was, as you write, disdainful of the charisma and power that Carnegie and Sumner had imputed to corporate leaders simply by dint of their success.

He, he doesn't valorize a certain kind of corporate leader in the way Carnegie would. So how does that figure into the overall shape of his egalitarian thought? 

Well, part of it is about how the entity of the workplace and the corporation- has to be organized in this extremely hierarchical way so that it becomes a mini society.

So even if there are ways in which the people who are in control of these businesses maybe don't know what they're doing and they need someone else, they need educated elites to come in and tell them how to run things, what really matters is that the company come to instantiate this strict division.

And if it doesn't, the consequence of it not doing so will be that production is just stalled and held up, and it will worsen class conflict. This is a perennial theme for Taylor, that the real consequence of workers restricting output is that the total product of society is so much less, and it condemns workers themselves to greater poverty than they would have if only they would fully adopt the Taylor system and the one best way and produce as much as they could.

And then there'll be abundance, and then you would end class conflict and all of this negative feeling because people would just have so much more. 

It's amazing how the solution to exploitation and want is always more exploitation for these guys. 

Right. Yes. And I think Ford then takes these ideas in a new direction and talks about the corporation as this sacred space almost, where certainly the workers are subordinating their individual needs and desires and interests to this larger good, which is gonna...

Can I read a quote? Please do. So he writes, and this is in his book, My Life and Work, which was actually a totally co-written product, so who knows if Ford actually wrote this. But the journalist Samuel Crowther, with whom he wrote the book, and he signed off on the whole thing, writes, "When one looks at all the babies coming into the world, at the boys and girls going to school, at the young working men who, on the strength of their jobs, are marrying and setting up for themselves, at the thousands of homes that are being paid for on installments out of the earnings of men.

When one looks at a great productive organization that is enabling all these things to be done, then that continuance of that business becomes a holy trust. It becomes greater and more important than the individuals." And I think that vision that the business is sacred, as he puts it, it requires for Ford this holy trust that links the leaders of that company with the thousands, in Ford's case, of workers who labored within it.

And should they have any kind of individual Desire for greater control, greater autonomy, greater say over their pay. Ford viewed almost any effort to articulate that as profoundly disruptive of this holy trust, and something that had to be brought from the outside. It couldn't possibly be the actual expression of the ideas for the people working in the company.

It had to come in from outside. And for Ford, it's a sinister element, the same influence that had driven the Russian Revolution. Jews. Yes, it's Jews. There's a, a one, one racial source is driving this, and it's the Jews who are disrupting this otherwise happy, harmonious hierarchy. 

I think it would be good if we could stigmatize present-day union-busting firms who say the exact same thing.

They don't say Jews, but they do say, they do say there's a sinister element within the company, and it's disrupting the, positive family relations, the natural, organic way we've been resolving conflict within the family of the company. I think we should be able to say that they're anti-Semitic.

I did wanna just say on Henry Ford, just because I've, I've been forgetting to read all the quotes that you very masterfully summon, each time somebody says something like this, Henry Ford, in his book, he said, "There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist all men are created equal."

It eventually always does come back to that, doesn't it? They just come out with it. 

Yeah. They have to say it.

Next, Section B, How Insecurity Breeds Fascism

We'll hear from Isabella Weber again, on Factually! with Adam Conover, on how economic insecurity in one German state fed the far right, and why the free-market answer to fascism has failed. And journalist Naomi Klein and writer Astra Taylor, co-authors of End Times Fascism, on KQED's Forum and Democracy Now!, on a fascism that offers its followers little more than owning the libs, and a few tech giants fusing with the government. And a reminder that those authors' books are linked in the show notes.

Anti-Fascist Economics with Isabella Weber Part 1 - Factually! with Adam Conover - Air Date 10-28-26

tell me, where y- you have a new book out, Anti-Fascist Economics. and we are seeing the, the victory of a fascist party in Germany. and, what, what is your reaction to it, and how do you analyze it? 

Yeah. So the book, Anti-Fascist Economics, was really born in the night that Trump was reelected, and I, did this post saying, "Can we finally have a serious conversation about anti-fascist economics?"

Which was a spontaneous reaction, but was also a reflection on policy work that I've been doing for years, where I'd come to realize that economists think of the economy as this big thing out there that, is ruled by laws that are akin to the laws of gravity, and that, nothing can be done about.

Which then also means that, there's no responsibility for democracy. Mm-hmm. Safeguarding democracy is not a question for economists. and I think what we have been seeing in recent years is that the economy really does matter for the stability of eco- for, of, of democracies, and that's one of the things that we can see again in this election.

it's always of course, more complex than one dimension, but the economy is a very important dimension in trying to understand what's going on here. So the state Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD, a far-right party with very clear neo-Nazi elements that has been designated as right-wing extremists by the, internal constitutional protection service, gained 44.5% of the vote.

It's also the state with the lowest average income, for the whole country. it's a state where GDP has been shrinking, where unemployment is high, where, the future has been canceled more than once. it's in East Germany, so, the way that the so-called reunification happened was really a form of shock therapy, where people's jobs were canceled, where, the industries that did exist in East Germany were canceled and privatized in ways that basically smashed them.

So, in the '90s we have this period of people really just, losing hope, for any future, and then things start to get better. and then in recent years we have first had the energy crisis in the wake of the Russian attack on Ukraine, which has sent prices spiraling, and then we have had, attempts of turning things around.

So under the previous government, there was supposed to be a big investment, from Dell, in, in, in Magdeburg, in the state of A- Saxony-Anhalt, 30 billion, which was then canceled. so 3,000 jobs that were supposed to be there not happening. 

Mm. 

Then, Dow, the chemical company, is just about to close down one of their, factories.

Which, all of these are, singular events, but if you take all of this together, it's this, shock that really amounts to economic insecurity and I think a sense of futurelessness where people feel like, the status quo is just unbearable. And then the extreme right comes in with their narratives of sta- scapegoating.

And, literally the campaign slogan of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt was, everything is possible. Where all the democratic parties, were rallying on a let's protect the status quo kind of agenda, but that status quo is something that people just can't take anymore. so I think that this is a, a huge part of what drove people in the arms of the far right, and we also see this in the exit polls.

So, social safety was one of the, most important things that people named, in terms of what, what they care about. we saw that, a, a, a vast majority of people who identify as workers, voted, for the AfD more than in any election, before in, in, in this state. People who say that their economic sit- situation is bad, 65% of them waited for...

w- voted for the AFD. so of course, the story's bigger than the economy, but the economy can create this breeding ground for racism and hate and extreme right ideology in ways that can become extremely dangerous. And I think that Saxony-Anhalt really should be a wake-up call that we need a different kind of economic policy.

So let's talk about the question of racism. here in the US, when Donald Trump's fascist movement first came into power, there's a lot of arguing in, between everybody left of center about what was to blame, whether it was the, inherent racism, of a large number of Americans, or whether it was because of economic pressure, and there's a...

It got really rancorous between people in each camp. and here in the US, the way w- we see the AFD, we mostly see the anti-immigrant rhetoric. That's how it's mostly framed in the media as being, primarily a racist movement. So what in your analysis is the interaction between, the economic pressures and the race...

how do, how does not having a job lead someone to embrace racist ideology or racist politics? 

Yeah. So let me be, let me be very clear. There is a lot of racism in the United States, and there's a lot of racism in Germany. Yeah. and the AFD is a straight-out racist party. the grounds on which it has been declared as right-wing extremists is in parts that it has this, race-based understanding of who the German people are.

so this is a straight-out racist, party and a straight-out racist movement. and I'm not saying that this can be reduced to economic factors, but I think what we see very clearly is that when people, go down these economic insecurity spirals, when their existence is at threat, when the, essentials that their lives depend on are under threat, they do, become very open for people who promise alternatives to the status quo.

Mm-hmm. And this is not a real solution to people's problems, but it is, the promise of, identifying certain people as belonging to the us group- And fascism thrives on this us versus them, hierarchy. So there's basically this, your dignity, your status is restored by appealing to your whiteness, by appealing to you being part of the white German people or the white American people.

and those others, those who are racialized, those who are considered, LGBTQ plus, who are considered disabled, and so on, are below you. So your status is restored by, giving you your so- so-called ri- righteous place in the hierarchy, by, degrading others.

But this is, of course, a very precarious arrangement because the boundaries, boundaries of who belongs to us and who belongs to them are always shifting. So on the one hand, it's this comforting thing where, if you happen to be in the us group, you, you... before you were no one, and now suddenly you are part of the us, the supreme white, male, whatever the attributes, exactly are, group.

But, as these attributes can shift, you're also always under threat of dropping out of that group. Mm-hmm. So that's where the terror element of fascism comes in, because you can actually never really be sure that, you, you, you, you, you, you keep, your, your, your part of, your position in, in, in this hierarchy.

And then there's this appeal to some sort of a, mythical past, That is glorified in, usually in absurd terms that has nothing to do with evidence or, actual history. and, presents a foil for, the possibility of restoring something glorious. this doesn't mean that it's exactly restoring a historical state.

it's rather, restoring a sense of, the worth of the nation, the worth of the white race or, whatever the precise, constituency here is. and I think that's something that we see, very clearly with the AFD, where again, I think Saxony-Anhalt is actually an excellent, example because it is a state that has these, beautiful villages, some of the most beautiful castles in Germany.

So, it's the perfect foil- Hmm ... for the idea that once we were glorious. and so as such, it, it, I think it works we- very well for this, fascist appeal, to we are going to restore, this, this, y- your, your place in the hierarchy that, that you should actually be occupying.

But if we look at the, actual situation, for example, in Saxony-Anhalt, then we find that migration is actually very low. It's one of the ... way below German average. Hmm. and that's a more general pattern that often people who actually are in places where there aren't a lot of migrants, where there isn't a lot of diversity, feel particularly threatened.

So it's really not about, the, the number of migrants. It's not a problem that you can solve by, kicking people out. it's, it's, it's a, a problem of, anxiety of, insecurity of feeling like you need, a, a, your place in a dominant position to be restored. 

Authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on How to Resist End Times Fascism Part 1 - KQED's Forum - Air Date 9-22-26

Astra, in the fascism of the 20th century, the one we associate with, with Europe, Mussolini, Nazi Germany, et cetera, there was a promise essentially to the, the people of the country, suffering under various economic circumstances that the fascists would make life good for them.

They would punish the out group, and they would, do good things for the in group. But you all argue that that's actually not the pitch in end times fascism. So what is? What are they selling? 

Not much at all. it's important to say we are not nostalgic for the fascism- Yes, I understand. Yeah ... of the 20th century.

Yeah, yeah. Just put that on the table. it was a genocidal blood-soaked vision, deeply authoritarian. It destroyed worlds, right? And but it did offer real benefits to the in group. There were major public work projects throughout Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany. there were also opportunities for recreation, and, and social clubs.

People were organized into, groups that would go and explore nature together, or you could take a, a, a cheap train to the coast if you were a working class Italian family. There were also expansions of the welfare state. Today, the Trump administration is decimating public services.

we saw in 2024 that Trump ran on affordability, but now affordability is being described as a hoax and a scam. there are no jobs unless you count building data centers, which is infrastructure that promises to take all of the jobs. So, what's on offer basically are some sadistic memes, right?

Some- Mm-hmm ... you- 

Owning the libs ... 

owning the libs, right. You'll never own a home in Trump advances America, but you get to own the libs, which isn't much, because most people actually wanna see their lives improve. So we, we call it at one point a kind of futureless fascism. this, this fascism is distinct from the fascism we know in various ways.

One way is the, the, the sense in which the people at the top are, are extremely entrepreneurial in an individualistic way, right? Mm. And very kleptocratic. So they're grabbing a lot. there's a lot of corruption happening, and there aren't many crumbs trickling down to ordinary people. Mm. And that is both a strength and a weakness.

I think we have to see it in this double way, because there- Is there's evidence that increased insecurity and precarity make people more susceptible- Mm ... to strongmen politics, to scapegoating. So for example, the AfD in Germany just won a critical regional election in a place where there was a major affordability crisis, right?

In a place where there weren't a lot of jobs, where people were feeling very precarious. That c- c- caused the far right to win in a way they haven't- Mm ... since, World War II. That said, the broken promises are also an opportunity for a different kind of politics to be organized into being. So that futurelessness can go in different directions.

Yeah. Naomi, many people through history have imagined that they were at the end of history. but you argue that the kind of groups that you have, drawn a circle around in, in this book, are different. Why, why do you think they're different from some of these previous, apocalyptic millenarian types?

Well, some of them, some of them share a lot in common. The, the religious piece of it, right? Which is really the template. And to be clear, we, we don't believe in the end times story. we d- we don't... This is, this is a story, and in many ways, this is a book about stories, about this idea that humanity is on a linear track towards a cataclysmic ending.

And at the moment that it reaches this ending that it is driving towards, there will be massive, destruction, death, rivers of blood, and out of that horror will emerge this golden city for the chosen few, right? This is a story threaded through the Abrahamic religions. It's, it's, it's the ark and the flood.

It is most explicit in the Book of Revelation. but, but it is a through line, and then it echoes through the, through the culture. It's in video games and, and disaster movies. And, even if we are secular, even if we are atheists, even if we have never read the original text, it's in us. Mm-hmm. The story, that linear story is in us.

but that said, we are in a time of real boundary crossing, of ecological boundary cr- crossings, of, of, of immense, existential risk. That's not in our imagination, and that is really the difference with the- Mm ... fascists of yore, Hitler and Mussolini, both the- They were in 

a pre-nuclear world, as you know.

Exactly. They, they d- they died right before the Trinity tests, right? And, and, and the, the fact that humans now hold the apocalypse in our hands, right, changes us. It changes humanity. It changes our dreams. It changes our fears, our imagination. They didn't understand that pollution was causing the entire globe to overheat.

That was not... it, it was, it had already started- Mm-hmm ... but they didn't understand that. So- So fascism always surges in times of real crises. So if we think about the m- that moment in the '20s and '30s in Europe, it's the wreckage of the First World War. It is after, a, a pandemic. It is- Mm-hmm

y- y- th- they're, they're, they're, they're, the cities are choked with orphans, with widows. entire economies have been humiliated. we know this history, right? Mm-hmm. And so the crises are real that it's trying to resolve, and there's th- another crisis for elites, which is the Russian Revolution has just happened.

Mm-hmm. there are socialist parties in every country saying, "We want this too." And what fascism does is it takes the real and legitimate rage at systemic crisis, and it pivots that ball of rage and redirects it towards scapegoats. Mm. So in our age, we also have big crises- Mm ... but our crises are different.

And because they're different, that millenarian, part of religion has now secularized. 

Anti-Fascist Economics with Isabella Weber Part 2 - Factually! with Adam Conover - Air Date 10-28-26

So there was a recognition at the time, in the, in the post-Nazi years, that, hey, economics played a role here, and some of the economic order that we live under was actually, a, a response to that, to try to prevent this from happening again, and that we've maybe forgotten that that's, was part of the point, or that was, we've forgotten that economic lesson now.

That's exactly right. And in fact, there were competing schools of thought of what this would mean. one of them was Friedrich Hayek, who ironic- who wrote The Road to Serfdom- Mm-hmm ... which ironically is one of the books, embraced by someone like Elon Musk, but also, some of the, members of Parliament of the AFD in Germany, which already shows you that some- something is fishy about that form of, anti-fascist economics.

But in any case, the, the basic argument of Hayek in The Road of Serfdom was, that, we needed subordination to markets, because if we did not have everything be regulated by markets, then the alternative would be that it would be controlled by man over other men. So we basically only had the choice between either subordinating ourselves under other men, or we had, or subordinating ourselves under the market.

Mm-hmm. and that very much became the North Star of neoliberalism. Now, what I am arguing is that we tried whether that kind of economics would prevent the return of the extreme Right in a global mass scale experiment since the 1980s, and I think it's pretty clear that this experiment has failed quite dramatically.

Now, on the other side of this debate in the '40s, were people like, Karl Polanyi, who argued that, basically, his argument is a bit more complex, but let me try to - 

Please ... 

to, to, to, summarize it, in ways that, that are easy to follow. So he wrote The Great Transformation, which is probably one of the most famous books in, in social science.

and in fact, most people when they hear The Great Transformation think about the Industrial Revolution. In fact, Karl Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation about the, rise of fascism. Mm. He was originally from Hungary, then lived in Vienna, and then fled from, from Vie- Vienna, from the Nazis.

and his argument was that, in market economies, we live with what he calls a, a, a, a, a basic lie, which is that we pretend that, labor, nature, and money can be organized through money, through markets just in the same way as the market for tomatoes or cucumbers, would work. Mm.

And the reason why this is not the case is if you take the example of labor, right? people, people- Usually do not multiply in response to increases, o- of wages, right? You don't go, "Oh, I'm gonna have a couple of more kids because a wage is going up," right? so, so in that sense, the supply of labor, does not work in the same way as the supply of plastic toys works.

Yeah, great point. So, so that's, that's the first, basic lie of a market economy. Then the second one is nature, which, from the perspective of climate change and the crisis of the environment that we are in, I think is actually quite, visionary writing in the 1940s. His argument is that, we cannot increase the supply of nature because the price of nature is going up.

nature, the, the, the supply, the, the abundance, the quality of nature follows its own laws, and if we just pretend as if this was a market like everything else, we, we are creating a form of lie. and then the third one is money, where he's saying that, ultimately, it's actually governments that, issue money, through central banks.

and the money market works very differently. now, then his argument is that in these, existential crises of, capitalism, these essent- the provisioning of these essentials because of this basic lie, ends up, becoming precarious. Now, this can be an inflation crisis from the monetary side.

This can be a labor market and po- a, a, a crisis, but this can also be a crisis of the ecological foundations of our society. Yeah. And that he argues that when we have those crises, people eventually fight back because this stuff is about, the foundations of their life. So people will not sit by and, just tolerate that, they are no longer able to make a living, because of these crises.

And when that happens, there can be a progressive or there can be a fascist counter movement- Counter movement- Mm-hmm ... is his key term here. And, when there's no progressive counter movement, then you basically leave the stage, to, to the fascists. And that is, the argument that I am reviving in the book, and arguing that we need an economics of essentials that, organizes the provisioning of essentials in ways that recognizes that this is about the foundations of our livelihoods.

Yeah. now a- all of that, what I've said is quite abstract, but it boils down to pretty concrete things. It's about the ways in which we organize the housing market, it's about the ways in which we organize the labor market, it's about the ways in which we organize the energy, market, the food market, and so on, so that we, have safeguarding, universal access to those basics, at affordable prices as the guiding principle.

You're saying so much that is really fascinating. I, I just wanna return to your point that, Hayek, who is one of the foundational thinkers of free market economics, I'd never heard this frame before, that his idea was this w- the point was this was to prevent the rise of fascism again. This was in the post-fascist years.

We need free markets. And if I put myself in those years, it kinda makes sense, right? Because fascism was about, a lot of it was about economic control from the top, and saying, well, let's, he was saying, "Let's not do that. Let's have, let's let the market do what it do, does. Let's let it, let's l- leave it up to all of human society to figure this out."

And in a broad sense, you can see how that seems very democratic, it seems like a counter to fascism. but if that's the purpose, we also have to acknowledge that it now has failed. Because we're seeing the rise of fa- so by its own lights, free, free market economics in that way has failed, right?

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. and actually, Hayek, like Polanyi, was an emigre, right? Mm-hmm. so these people were already writing, during World War II. because, the question of the rise of fascism was just center mind for them, had shaped their own fate. but basically, what Hayek suggests is that, things are so complex that no one single person could ever plan a whole economy.

Mm-hmm. And now if you start meddling with one price, you basically start meddling with the system as a whole. So one of the examples is if you control the price of milk, you'll have to then control the price of yogurt, then you'll have to- Control the price of butter, then you have to control the price of bread, then, and, and so on.

and so basically, you get this, slippery slope where as soon as you start meddling with any one element, you are on the slippery slope towards total control of the price system, which would ultimately be, a total control of the economy, which would ultimately be the road to totalitarianism.

Now, what, Polanyi's perspective, I think helps us to see is that, it's not the case the market is this homogeneous thing- 

Yes ... 

where everything is the same. No, it's actually there are essentials that, like the foundations of labor, like the foundations of nature- 

Yeah

like the ways in which we organize the money market, that really determine how our economy works as a whole. And in those essential sectors, it's not like the market is working in these wonderful ways because it is based on this lie, as I tried to, articulate earlier. Now, the flip side of this is also that we do not have to plan the whole economy, right?

Mm-hmm. we do not need to, plan, whatever, the production of the frames of the picture that you have in your background. Sure. We do not need to, get into planning of furniture. We do not ... Right? most things do not need to be planned and can be left to the market, in, good faith.

But for the stuff that everybody depends on, we, we need to have, a, a ... It also doesn't need to fully be planned, but we need to have, collective decisions over how we are organizing this to ensure that the foundations of li- livelihoods are secured. 

Date 10-21-26

I wanna ask about the elections, both in this country and, in, for example, Brazil.

In São Paulo, protesters rallied outside the corporate offices of Meta Monday accusing the social media giant of electoral interference ahead of Sunday's runoff election between Lula, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and the far-right candidate, Flavio Bolsonaro. The protest came as Brazil's electoral court gave Meta 24 hours to prove that it guarantees equal treatment for the campaigns of the two candidates as required by law.

Now, this follows widespread allegations that Meta's Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms are reducing the reach of Lula's posts and boosting those of Bolsonaro and his supporters. Among those protesting Monday was Daniela Silva, a former Meta worker who once led efforts to shape Brazilian laws in Meta's favor

I left Meta in early 2025. A very important event took place at the company at that time, because Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would roll back several of the company's integrity policies. He also declared that he would align himself with the Donald Trump administration, which was about to take office, to ensure that countries like Brazil and other Latin American countries would stop regulating its technologies, moving in a direction that went against the company's economic interests.

And for me, this kind of intervention crossed a very important ethical line. 

And just a reminder, when we're talking about the power of these, corporations, again, Meta does own Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And in the United States, just this past Saturday, organizers, sought to make Saturday, the No Kings rally, the largest in US history.

In- But at the same time, the social media giant Meta has apologized after the No Kings Coalition's Instagram account was shut down for a number of hours during Saturday's protests. I wanna ask Naomi Klein about this power as we talk about the midterms here, and of course, the midterms here affect people all over the world, especially if there's a total shift of Republi- of Democrats controlling both the Senate and the House, to what's happening in Brazil, the power of these social media giants.

Absolutely, Amy. And, I have to say, this is why Astra and I chose to use the word fascism when we described this system, which we've received some pushback for. But I think the pe- the people understand why w- why, why we did so. It is a hallmark of fascism to have this extreme integration between large, dominant monopolistic corporate players and the state.

Right? So, these are m- these are ideological companies in a lot of cases, right? If we're talking about Palantir, if we're talking about SpaceX. we don't know who is driving the cutting off of, of satellites to Ukraine. And, and there's a debate about this, right? is it the Trump administration or is it just Elon Musk?

They're pointing fingers at each other. in the case of Face- of Facebook and, and Meta, it's pr- it's more likely that they're just following what the Trump administration wants. They want... They've been very clear that they want Bolsonaro to be reelected. He will immediately free his father. This is really about protecting elite impunity.

They do not like the fact that Jair Bolsonaro is in jail, and is one of the few of these figures who has faced consequences for actively trying to undermine an election and leading an insurrection. So that's the first thing that, that his son will do if he, if he is reelected. So we don't know. But what, what we do know is this is very integrated, and this is what happens when you have this level of media integration and, and, and we're just see- we're just seeing the results.

And, and, just for Brazil, it's important to remember that Facebook's, pro- well, it wasn't J- WhatsApp played an absolutely central role in electing Jair Bolsonaro in the first place. That platform was flooded with misinformation, lies, that helped elect Bolsonaro when he was way behind in the polls the first time.

Then there was this era of contrition during the Biden years. "Oh, no, no, no. We're putting up all these guardrails." Then Trump is reelected. The mask is off. We're gonna do... We're, we're, we, we have better technology to spread deepfakes. The n- the number of deepfakes that this, that, that Bolsonaro's campaign has been flooding social media with, they're just, 

I just saw something yesterday where they took out an image of a man, on the float with him, and put in, a hot woman in a bikini, because they thought it looked better, and then held her up as a paragon for what femininity should be. A fake woman who doesn't exist, right? it's just so ludicrous.

So the ability to spread misinformation has increased exponentially thanks to AI. It, and there's absolutely no regulations, and this is what is in store for the US midterms and presidential. So, this is why Astra and I are very clear. it's not just about changing the people at the top.

This is systemic. and, and the Democrats, have to look at, look at themselves, if they do win this thing. Yeah. 

you mentioned, being prepared when the AI bubble- Mm ... bursts. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you, Astra, if you can talk a little bit more about this AI bubble. we're seeing headlines about, $8 trillion being invested into data centers across the country, and these companies taking out massive amounts of debt, and the latest headline from the Financial Times is AI Debt Worry Sparks Surge in Default Insurance Trading.

Why has AI-linked debt rocketed this year, and what does this mean? 

Yeah. The build-out is so intense, so frenetic, and so redundant, right? Each company is building out its own data centers in the hopes that it will win everything. And so companies, which were sitting on mountains of capital, are now borrowing.

and then that debt is being sold into pension funds, retirement funds, right? So it's spreading throughout the economy. Now, that has- The 

risk 

is spreading. The risk is spreading throughout the economy. And, you just read that Financial Times headline, which, essentially it mentions credit default swaps.

Now, anyone who lived through the 2008 crisis has PTSD at that phrase. Those are, sales of credit default swaps, are, are soaring, and they're soaring because the risk is intensifying, so it's a kind of insurance against default. But it's just a sign that, that, financial markets are g- are getting worried.

So, I think we can learn lessons from past A financial crisis. So 2008, the, and the problem was that the bankers who caused the crisis were not held accountable. They benefit fr- benefited from that elite impunity that we're talking about and that Lina Khan was mentioning, right? So those, call it Occupy Wall Street, was banks got bailed out.

We got sold out, and many people lost their homes. Black and, brown families lost half of their collective wealth in this country. It was wiped out. But something el- different happened during COVID. When the COVID crisis happened and there was a shock to the economy, a whole bunch of federal money went out and did buy up corporate debt from big corporations and, and helped Wall Street.

But we also popped up a social safety net, a welfare state overnight, which is a reminder that we can do that with federal money as well. We don't just have to bail out the banks or the bad actors, right? So there's a big lesson there. the last lesson I think we should learn from is right before the 2024 election, Silicon Valley Bank and some other crypto associated banks got a bailout.

and they did not need to be bailed out, right? They were not economically critical banking infrastructure. And then the people who got that bailout, many of them, so figures like David Sacks, who is Donald Trump's crypto czar, then went and joined the Trump administration. So I think there's some lessons.

the lesson from 2008 is there should be c- accountability for the people who caused the crisis. We cannot let them off the hook. The lesson from the COVID pandemic is we can help people. We need a people first- Yeah ... bailout. And we need to be big and visionary. Naomi and I think we need to use this moment, just like during the Great Depression and the New Deal era, to demand a real renovation, transformation of our public services.

The lesson from the Silicon Valley Bank, incident is let some things fall. Now, we don't want the dominoes to fall throughout the whole economy. Yeah. But some entities do not deserve to be bailed out, and we should talk about whether we actually need companies like OpenAI. Do we need Anthropic's, right?

When they are ultimately, when the promise of the tech they are building is we're gonna take all the jobs and take all the money and, replace human beings with robots. Maybe those companies don't actually deserve to be saved. 

And this as Anthropic and OpenAI are approaching massive IPOs. 

we just have- Yeah.

Yes, and lose, but ma- approaching ma- massive IPO- IPOs while also telling us that their revenue projections- We shouldn't ... are completely, un, un, absurd. We 

don't think they should be allowed to IPO, just straight up. Yeah. And, a- and, they're, they're also saying they, they might wipe out humanity.

th- this should, preclude your right to sell shares in a company. the solution to that is not to give everybody a 

Now, Section C, Taxing and Taming Extreme Wealth

We'll hear from KQED's Marisa Lagos, on Brian Lehrer's show, on how California's proposed tax on billionaires' wealth would have worked, and labor leader Lorena Gonzalez and Congressman Ro Khanna, on Democracy Now!, on the healthcare cuts it was meant to backfill and Governor Newsom's opposition. And Naomi Klein, on The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich, on wealth as a weapon, and healthcare union leader Dave Regan, on The Majority Report, on why billionaires wouldn't flee.

Californians Are Voting on a Billionaires Tax - Brian Lehrer A Daily Podcast - Air Date 10-23-26

All right, here's how it reads on the ballot. "Prop 40 imposes one-time tax on certain taxpayers." Why so vague? 

So this is a wealth tax, right? And so the idea is that unlike, most of our taxes that we pay on income or capital gains, that this is supposed to look at someone's overall assets.

and so I, I think, the, the underlying reason that this healthcare union wrote this is that they are looking ahead toward these huge, steep Medicaid cuts coming down because of President Trump's so-called one big, beautiful bill. And they're saying the state needs to come up with the money to backfill, the money taken away by the federal government.

And they argue that, the way that bill is written, it gave tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans in order to pay for these cuts to Medi-Cal... Or, sorry, to pay for the cut- the, the weal- to pay for the taxes, the tax cuts, they cut Medi-Cal- Mm-hmm ... Medicaid- Uh-huh ... nationally. And that this is just a fairness thing that, to do.

That, to make up for that, the wealthiest, Californians should step up and, and pay this one-time 5% tax. 

So it's on billionaires' net worth. How many billionaires are we talking about in California? Is it known? 

Yeah. There's roughly, 200, 220, they think. it can change when the stock market changes, and we can get into, how that's part of the billionaires' argument against this.

and we've also seen some folks like Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, who actually has put the most money of anyone into opposing this, a $100 million of his own wealth. he says he actually moved out of state before the deadline for this tax. So one interesting thing about it is that it's a, it's a one-time tax, and it's retroactive to January 1st of this year.

So if you were a California resident as of January 1st and your net worth is over a billion dollars, you would be eligible. Brin says, "Well, I moved out of the state before January 1st, so I don't have to pay it." 

Would it take 5% of all their net worth? If, if you... I did the math. If you own $1 billion and it's 5% of everything you own, that's a $50 million tax.

Well, how about this? Sergey Brin's net worth is, north of 200 billion, so he would have to pay something like $10 billion. Hmm ... so the way it's structured is- It would include all wealth, excluding, some real estate. but it, most of this money, the backers say is in the stock market.

So that's really what they would be looking at. They say about 70% of, of these billionaires' wealth is in publicly traded stocks that, have to be disclosed. So there's a pretty good way of accounting for that money. but yeah, they would be taxing their private jets, their yachts, maybe their art collections.

things that historically we have not taxed in this manner. and I, and I'll note that this is in partly structured because the wealthiest Americans have structured not just their wealth, but their income to avoid taxes. So one of the things the proponents point out is that someone like Sergey Brin and Eric, and, and, and his Google co-founder took a $1 a year salary for a few years.

So they paid virtually no income tax during that time. some- one practice of the uber wealthy is to, instead of cashing out their stocks, to essentially go to a bank and borrow against those at extremely low rates that you and I could never get. And so, I, I think that it, there's always been a cat and mouse game with, with taxes.

I think it's gotten more sophisticated, and the dollar amount is just so much bigger, but now their wealth is growing exponentially because it is in the stock market and, and, it, it rises and falls with the market.

Yeah. Most of us pay taxes on what we earn, and it's right there on our tax returns. This tax is what- And 

paying, yeah, approaching 30% or something. 

it's not, 

it, 

capital gains- Depending if you're, in an upper middle class, bracket. This tax is what people own. How would the state actually measure people's net worth?

Well, it would be a bit of a honor system. They would... Essentially my understanding is that there would be a new box on your California tax returns that to check to, to test if you're a billionaire or not. So most of us would say no and move on. but the billionaires would have to essentially attach a accounting of their wealth.

And, I'm sure of course the state could investigate if they didn't believe it. I think it's important to say that no matter what happens, if this passes, I think it will be litigated on, on numerous levels, both, the underlying tax, the fairness of a wealth tax, the retroactivity of it.

so I, I think we would see a lot more details if it actually passes in terms of how it could be enforced. 

let me get back to the core argument that you stated against this, that people are making against this, that the billionaires will leave, taking more tax money than they would've provided under this, one-time wealth tax.

we hear the same threats in New York, right- Mm-hmm ... when Zohran Mamdani was running for mayor. Yes. Is there any evidence that people actually leave over a tax like this? Do people on either side of this say, "Aha, here's the evidence that they will. Here's the evidence that they won't"? 

Yeah. I think there's, there's two layers to this.

There's, will the existing billionaires pack up and move out of state? And I think, yes, we've seen somebody like Sergey Brin attempt to move his residency. We'll see if, i- i- if it stands up in court. Resi- obviously a lot of these folks have multiple homes. we also saw some really interesting news this week that Meta negotiated, an agreement with Mark Zuckerberg to essentially rejigger his stock options so that he wouldn't really have to pay this out of his own stock, which would reduce the amount he owned in Meta.

So they've given him this sweetheart deal, to say, "We want you to stay in California if this passes, so we'll essentially, structure your stock options so that it doesn't hurt you, essentially, personally." so I think there's that level, and then there's, the broader, what is the climate if you're a startup founder?

Is this the place that you wanna, start your company? there's, as you said, New York, California, these high-tax liberal states always get this bad rap, and yet we are still the centers of most of the economy of this nation, let's be real, right? The AI boom is happening here. and so I, I, I think it's probably true that there would be some folks who chose to start their companies elsewhere, but I, I have...

when you talk to economists who support this tax, they, they reject this outright. there's a lot of competing economic theories here. but it does seem unlikely that overnight Silicon Valley would pack up and move away. 

A Wealth Tax on Billionaires California Voters to Decide on Prop 40 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 10-20-26

Why do you support this? This would be, as Bernie Sanders says, historic, the billionaire wealth tax. 

Well, look, when, Trump passed H.R.1, we know that they cut, our healthcare. Working people are gonna pay for that to give billionaires a tax break. So when w- healthcare workers started gathering signatures and said one time 5% tax on billionaires could actually backfill that till we get a new president, it makes sense, it's simple, and it, it's past time the billionaires pay their fair share.

So, our, our federation, the AFL-CIO in California, all 2.3 million, working people, two-thirds of our unions and a, a vast majority of our union members support ensuring that we do this one-time tax to backfill, healthcare so people don't lose their healthcare, so we don't lose hospitals, and healthcare workers don't leave, lose their jobs.

I'd like to ask Representative Ro Khanna, y- why you are backing, this, proposition and also, y- your c- your reaction to your fellow Democratic colleague, Governor Newsom, opposing it. 

First, let me say what an honor it is to follow Navi Pillay, who won the Nobel Prize, for finding that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, something still too many Democratic politicians in America refuse to do.

And I appreciate Lorena Gonzalez's extraordinary leadership to help get this billionaire tax on the ballot. It is the first time in the history of the nation that we would be able to tax billionaires. You would tax 250 billionaires who have half the California economy, they're worth $2.1 trillion, and you would tax them 5%, even though their wealth has gone up 144% over the last three years.

And to do that, you would be able to make sure the 3.5 million Californians didn't lose their healthcare and poor kids didn't go without healthcare. It is the most obvious decision for someone to make who cares about the working class and children. So why is Governor Newsom opposed to this tax? He's opposed to this tax because of the billionaires bankrolling, his campaigns.

we need to speak plainly. We can either be a Democratic party that stands for the working class in the tradition of the New Deal, or we can continue to cater to the donor class. Here, Gavin Newsom is literally siding with Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, Trump supporters, because they don't wanna be taxed 

This is why Gavin Newsom, opposes the bill.

He was speaking on HBO's Real Time. This is why he opposes Prop 40, referencing concerns that teachers and firefighters won't benefit from the money raised by the tax. 

I think billionaires do need to be taxed more, but just not at the state level. Capital moves, and the challenge with- Yes ... this particular tax is it doesn't include firefighters and teachers.

They're left out of the tax. It's one time, and we've already seen dozens and dozens of people leave the state. 

So Congress member Ro Khanna, if you can respond to what he's saying and also explain what Prop 41 and Prop 42 are 

Well, he's just making up facts, or he's, ill-informed, because California actually has increased billionaires since Proposition 20 twen- twen- Proposition 42 has been on the ballot.

We've gone from 240 billionaires to 261 billionaires. 85% of the venture capital has come in, to California, 85% of the entire nation's venture capital into California. So this argument that somehow billionaires are leaving are just belied by the statistics. And of course, firefighters and teachers would benefit, if, 150,000 California healthcare workers don't lose their jobs, if medical services and rural hospitals and, mental health services aren't shut down.

They use those rural hospitals and healthcare services, too. the reality is that this, Proposition 42 that Gavin Newsom has become the cheerleader for, it, it would say, "Do not ever tax billionaires based on their wealth in California." It's not just that he's opposed to Proposition 40. He's also supporting Proposition 42 that would ban billionaires from ever being taxed in California on their wealth.

And Lorena Gonzalez, could you talk about, especially given, Trump's, so-called Big Beautiful Bill, what the impact on California, especially in terms of healthcare, would be, if, if you, you're not able to get new revenues from something like this, billionaires tax? 

Well, we are, we're already seeing it.

Obviously, after the midterms, we know the Medi-Cal, what we call it in California, Medicaid, but, cuts will become, more fulfilled, but already 89 hospitals are at risk of losing services or closing down. Hospitals in rural areas are already shutting down maternity wards and emergency rooms. We know that there are workers across California in urban areas and rural areas that will lose access to healthcare.

In a state where, over 50% of our children are born under Medicaid, and 67% of children of color are born under the Medicaid system, Medi-Cal, we have got to make sure that young people have a start in this world. And if all it takes is asking for billionaires to pay their fair share, something that they won't even notice, I think it's something we have to do.

But when it comes to whether or not they wanna hoard their wealth, their concentration of money and power, or simply pay a one-time 5% that they'll never even feel so that Californians won't go without, access to healthcare, they've made their choice. They're spending close to... By the end of this election, they will have spent $500 million on this initiative to try to destroy it and tr- to try to say that we can never tax billionaires.

In Conversation with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Part 1 - The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich - Air Date 9-25-26

Naomi, back to you, if I may. how do we actually accomplish this, not letting them control? they already are in control, so you're talking about a movement that would try to counter- Mm-hmm ... this end time fascism, this, this, this group of people who have extraordinary wealth and power and are trying to secede from the rest of us, and subject the rest of us to their wealth and their power.

What do we do? 

yeah, I'm, I'm interested in hearing your perspective on this, as well. Es- w- when it comes to thinking about what do we do about a concentration of wealth that is clearly deranging? Astra and I, often just felt that we were losing our minds while we were writing this book because even just to repeat the things that they are saying, you feel like you sound, like you've just completely lost it.

we, we made a little video to go with the book because we're just like, "You just have to hear it from them. Don't, don't, don't trust us," Yeah. "Listen, li- get it from the horse's mouth." and y- I have been tracking wealth concentration since I wrote my first book, No Logo, back in the day with this, this wild and new idea of corporations becoming more powerful than governments, right?

and we were s- we were suddenly realizing this, and there were very few people in the Clinton administration who seemed to care, except for you. but that was, the beginning of the alter globalization movement. But, 30 years later, the wealth has concentrated to such a degree that it is clear that our elites do not believe that they live on the same planet as us.

They don't share a sense of, just a shared fate, right? And, and, and so w- I'm less interested in the stories that they tell about what they're gonna do, and how they're gonna ascend and defeat death, and all the wild things that Peter Thiel may claim, than what we're gonna do to bring them down to earth so that they actually live in the same world as us.

and we're seeing the various temper tantrums when you have something mild, like a 5% billionaire's ta- one-time billionaire's tax here in California. But we really do believe that we, we need a wealth cap, that, that wealth itself has become a kind of WMD, and we finish the book with a call for a new disarmament movement.

I grew up a little bit in the disarmament movement. Both my, my parents were involved in, in the peace movement, i- in the '80s. And, and, and, I was dragged to various marches when I was a kid in, in the '70s. but they did some incredible things, and actually were part of ending the Cold War and disarming, tens of thousands of nuclear warheads.

And- Now, I think we need to recapture that kind of internationalism that, that... but that sense that there are certain, there, there are certain things that are just too dangerous to coexist with humanity, right? And so that is the, that is the bombs, but it is also the wealth. the wealth has become a weapon in and of itself.

And here we are, talking this week that, the world is a tizzy with the latest round of AI whistleblowers who are saying, we're building something that we think there's, a, a pretty good chance it could wipe out all of humanity, and they're having arguments about the percentages.

We think we should disarm that bomb, too, that tech bomb. So we're calling for, a triple disarmament movement. and we make the argument that At a certain, point, the most dangerous weapons meet the most dangerous people. They seem to exert a magnetic pull towards one another, and then you end up in this negative feedback loop where, where the tools make the people more deranged.

and this is something that I think we are seeing with people like Stephen Miller and Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And so we can't be satisfied with telling ourselves a story that we just need better people with their, with their hands on the levers. We, we, we, we don't think we can coexist with such destructive tools, and here we're talking about the weapons, but we're also talking about the wealth and the tech.

Why California's Billionaire Tax Is Crucial Dave Regan Part 2 - The Majority Report W Sam Seder - Air Date 10-21-26

property taxes are a wealth tax on ordinary people. And, here in California, you pay between 1% and 1.5% is the standard baseline for property taxes.

Our billionaire tax is a one-time 5% tax that can be paid over five years. 1% over five years. But for regular people, houses are the most valuable asset we own. That's not true of billionaires. And it's easy to, calculate billionaire wealth because 70% of it is in publicly traded stocks, and we see the closing price every day.

The balance of it is in other investment portfolios that have to be valued for tax purposes anyhow. This is actually a very, very simple thing to do. But on the capital- I 

would also add, too, much of that stuff is collateralized. Correct. So somebody somewhere is making an assessment of that. Right. Some bank, some private lender, what- whatever it is, s- d- people make valuations all the time on this stuff.

Right. And, and look, for people who follow the tech industry and all of that, guess what happens when you do an IPO? There's a valuation that the market puts on your company when you issue the initial stock price. This is normal day-to-day life for these guys, but they are counting. I really do think part of what's going on here is billionaires think the rest of us are idiots and that we can't figure this out.

And once people start to learn just three or four basic things about how advantageous it is to be a billionaire and how little you actually pay, p- people do get wound up about it. On your issue of capital flight The serious people who've studied this issue, and it has been studied around the United States, around the world, it's just not true.

The most recent example was in the state of Massachusetts. There was a high earner income tax passed, and there was all of this- The 

millionaire tax ... 

millionaires, but on income, not assets. And there was all this talk about how millionaires were gonna flee Massachusetts. Four years later, there's 40% more millionaires in Massachusetts than there were before.

The opposite happened. Those are the facts. But here's the other thing, just, one little anecdote. Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, who's the principal funder of this avalanche of money against us, he said he was gonna up and go to Nevada. He apparently owns a house on the other side of Lake Tahoe, and, and he was gonna go there.

Well, about a month ago, six weeks ago, it's reported widely in California, guess where Sergey Brin really is, 60 days after he said that? He's back in Mountain View working every day at Google 'cause he wants to cash in on the AI bubble. And so h- the loudest person making that argument just debunked his own argument.

He's not going anywhere. Silicon Valley is the most impressive wealth-generating machine in the history of the universe, and this is where the workforce is, this is where the research institutions are, this is where the ecosystem is that d- supports that And i- it's just not true. And, and, and the other thing people should understand is that billionaires pay an effective tax rate of less than 1%, literally less than 1% on their whole portfolio.

Most Americans are paying somewhere around a third, when you do withholding taxes and income taxes and all that kind of stuff. The idea that you're gonna pick up and move your life because of something that will put your effective tax rate to less than 2% for five years is just craziness. And it, this is a talking point, and it's a talking point from people who are used to never not getting what they want and pulling the wool over the rest of our eyes.

And it's been studied. It's, the question has been asked and answered. It's just not true. 

Dave, we were told, when, Zohran Mamdani became, mayor that we would have a similar capital flight. There is almost no one in New York City right now. I, I'm joking. in fact, the, the, the biggest, outmigration of New York, state continues to be low and middle-income people, because they can't afford it.

And Finally, Section D, What Comes Next, Essentials and Here-ness

We'll hear from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, back on KQED's Forum, on love of place and prepping for disaster together, and Klein again, on The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich, on why billionaires can't secede without taking someone else's land. Then historian Kim Phillips-Fein, on the LARB Radio Hour, on why she finds the tech elite's vision too isolating to live in. And economist Isabella Weber, on The Nation Podcasts, on Mexico's basket of essentials and her principle that because you are human, you qualify for them.

Authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on How to Resist End Times Fascism Part 2 - KQED's Forum - Air Date 9-22-26

let's bring in, Robert in San Francisco. Welcome, Robert. 

Hi, good morning. thank you for this amazing program. I personally have been, really concerned and actually psychologically affected, by the end of times doom loop.

And, it's a relief to know that, leading thinkers are thinking di- and diagnosing this problem. my question is to the, to the panel, since this is a, in a way, a religious or a spiritual problem, if the movement to correct this issue shouldn't come from, a religious angle? 

Hmm. Hmm. That's interesting, Robert.

I... What, what do you all think? 

I think... I, I just want to say thank you for that question and for saying that you've been psychologically affected by the doom loop. I, sometimes scholars talk about fascism and they go "Well, one, it's just this emotional movement, actually."

Mm. And my response is politics is always emotional- Yeah ... because part of what makes us humans and not robots is we have emotions, not just- Mm ... intelligence as some rarefied thing. Mm. But we feel things, and we f- we're feeling a lot in this moment. so I think we need a, an emotional affect of politics and a spiritual politics to counteract, the end times.

It doesn't have to be explicitly religious, though, in this book, as much as we track the religious right, we also show all of these folks who are from communities of faith standing up and saying, "Actually, you know what? That, that's not what the Bible says." The Bible s- doesn't actually say that we're relentlessly heading towards Armageddon and the tribulations and rivers of blood.

It says to love thy neighbor. That's right. So we saw an incredible, surge of, of that kind of faith in, in Minneapolis when the city stood up against ICE. there were people of faith coming from all over the country, to d- to defend the, and protect their neighbors. neighbors in this expansive sense of not just the people who live next door to you, but people who share, share this earth.

So yeah, I think it, it is a spiritual fight, and I think that can be... It's an expansive sense of what that is. There are, there are people who are taking inspiration from their faith traditions, and then there are people like me who say, "To me, what is spiritual is being in community with other people and standing up for justice."

Mm. Mm. Yeah, and here-ness definitely feels to me like it's taking some of the principles of, environmental justice and, what Adam Serwer called neighborism and there in, in Minnesota and trying to, to turn it into, something you can believe in in that sense. I believe- Yeah

in here-ness. I believe in, in this, in this particular kind of packet of, of both material and also emotional things. 

And a lot of w- what we, what we track in the book in, in this final section is- People re-enchanting the world, right? this is the, the people falling more deeply in love with their city and all of its quirks and charm.

what- we saw this in Minneapolis when people came together to fight ice, and this the deep love that they had for the state, for their city, for the practice of, we are the type of people who dig each other out of the snow. We, we, it's, our, our identity is not based on blood. It's based on a way of being in the world.

So that is also spiritual. Yeah. And some people come to it from organized religion. A lot of people did, but, but a lot of people- Mm-hmm ... there were indigenous people who were helping to lead those protests, who were simultaneously educating their neighbors on- ... the history of genocide under their feet- Mm-hmm

that was, unknown, and, and saying, "We need to tell a new story of how we got here, where we are more rooted in place." Because part of the reason why we have this rootlessness, and, and frankly, why I think you have that religious tourism that I talked about before, where people find a sense of history and rootedness somewhere else- Mm

is because when you live in a settler colonial country, it is built on erasure. you don't- Mm ... learn the deep history- Mm ... of your place. So, quoting Wendell Berry- Mm-hmm ... s- I once asked Wendell, what his advice was to rootless cosmopolitans like me and my friends. And he said, "Stop somewhere- Mm

and begin the thousand-year-old- 

Mm ... 

the thousand- thousand-year-long process of knowing that place." 

Oh. 

Which is so good. 

Yeah. I know as different as Mamdani and our mayor here in San Francisco, Daniel Lurie are, they both did run, campaigns based on loving the place. Lurie, there's, that's one thing.

he ran that same kind of campaign. "Let's go, San Francisco," is literally his catchline. So, let's bring in, Kara in Pacifica. Cara, sorry. 

Hello. 

Hello, welcome. 

Yeah, I wanted to share as a 25-year park ranger, that was looking at the, IPCC reports about climate collapse, I ran into the Work That Reconnects during COVID.

And in that work, they say there are three stories that are running simultaneously. There's the great unraveling of how everything's falling apart. There's business as usual, just ignore it. And there's the great turning, and that we have an opportunity to turn towards with love what is in the now. 

Mm-hmm.

And look at what, who can I be that will serve us whether we have a short time or whether we do make it through the challenges that are ahead and live in the future. So it allows me to give towards what I want to create regardless of outcome, coming from the love of place, the love of life. Mm-hmm. And that's had me turn to buying into an intentional community that has a garden- Mm-hmm

that does public service projects, changing my career to be one of helping people heal, and just bringing- Mm-hmm ... things like non-violent communication into the world- 

Mm-hmm ... 

where I can serve regardless of outcome. 

Yeah. Kara, that's amazing. Work That Reconnects, Joanna Macy- Yeah ... ecophilosopher's, work there.

It's interesting. From your perspective, if someone is out there saying "I wanna put my, shoulder to the wheel on here-ness"- 

Mm ... 

Cara obviously was able to, find a, a, a space- Yeah ... where she can do that. Where do you all see that happening? where... What's your advice to people on that?

Well, I think that framework that, that we just heard invoking Joanna Macy's work is so important because we, we are not against prepping. and, and, and as we keep saying, the crises that are being exploited here are real, and the, the response can't be to pretend like everything is fine and there is no need to listen to the signals that are coming to us in the form of these shocks and disasters that we've all been living through, right?

But what we're describing in the book is a response to these shocks that says we're gonna rank human life, we are going to create categories of chosen and damned and, human and un-human, and we are gonna make sure that our chosen group survives the future. And we w- what I think that the, the w- the work that the caller is referencing is a work that says, how do we survive these shocks, do what is necessary so that the shocks don't get so bad that they're un-survivable, and save as many people as possible, right?

How do we prep together? How do we leave no one behind? How do we create networks in our neighborhoods where we know where people are living alone, where people- Mm-hmm ... have mobility challenges and need somebody to go to their home and make sure that they can get out when there's an evacuation order?

I always remember, I did some research on the Paradise Fire, the giant camp fire- Mm-hmm ... in 2018, and, that was the deadliest fire in the state, it- Mm-hmm ... I think ever, and- And one of the researchers who I interviewed said the worst place to be was alone. 

Mm. 

and you really saw that.

The people who died were people who were alone in their homes, and nobody knew that they were alone. But the people who survived w- many disabled people survived, many elderly people survived, but they were people in care and in community homes, in group homes. They were saved by their caregivers, right? Mm.

So how do we survive together? How do we prep? How do we create these networks? And, one of, one of the really moving things we heard from folks in, in Minneapolis was that they know that the signal groups that they've created with thousands of people on them where they know where their neighbors are so that they can protect them against ICE, they know those networks will be used when there's the next climate disaster to, to, to help each other.

In Conversation with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Part 2 - The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich - Air Date 9-25-26

Well, the people who are doing the most bunkering down, at least according to your book, and, really very much accord to my observations, are the people like Musk and Peter Thiel and others who, as you say in the book, really are seeking to, escape- Yeah ... from the rest of us. and I guess one question that occurred to me is why not let them escape?

w- wouldn't it be great for the rest of us if they all just, went to another planet, or certainly, went to their own island? what's the problem for us if they- But not, 

not in Albania, 'cause the Albanians don't want them. 

Good for Albania. 

but- Things don't go well when they have islands, Bob, 

I, I just don't- 

but, but wait a minute. That's a ... But, but I want ... I'm, I'm being at least half serious here. Yeah, 

yeah. 

why not let them- 

They need, they seem 

to get on their own spaceships ... why not let them secede? when people say to me in Cal- well, a, a wealth tax in California, they're all gonna leave California, I, part of me, part of me says, "Well, good.

Goodbye. Good riddance." What's the problem with that reasoning? 

Well, that was the attitude of New Yorkers when the, when, when, when there were all kinds of, hedge fund, owners who threatened to leave if Mamdani won, and people were, were, were offering to help them pack. and I, I, I think very few of them have actually left.

They like living in New York. so Mamdani just called their bluff. and look, I don't... They are trying to secede. they have their little fake country in Honduras. The, the trouble is, there is nowhere on this, on this planet, that, that is terra nullius for the billionaires to just build their dream cities.

So everywhere that they try to do this, and they are trying to do this, they end up grabbing somebody else's land. this is what happened when... I joked about Albania, but we've all seen the video of, of, of Ivanka discovering this beautiful island, in Albania, and going for a swim and a barefoot hike.

And the Albanians have come roaring forward to say, "Our country is not for sale. Everyone should have access to nature," and having this beautiful revolution in the name of the flamingos who migrate through these islands. So this is what we mean by, by the fight for the living world. We really believe that we're starting to see in these movements where people have just had enough of these billionaires treating them as raw resources, whether it's the data or the physical land or our collective, brilliance, everything that we have, humans have ever thought, and them just hoovering up and using it to feed their machines, is the beginning of a true pro-life movement.

Astra and I share a sadness that the, that the religious right co-opted the, the, the term pro-life, because this is the real pro-life movement. It is people rising up and saying, "Our, in our, our community, our farmland and our water, is more precious than your data center." And it's the Albanians rising up and saying, "No, you can't have our nature reserve."

And it's New Yorkers saying, "We love the multilingual, multiracial diversity of this city. We wanna make it a better place for everyone." so it's, it's filled with love of place and a commitment to here. And we need this because, the dream of AI ascendance is only possible because we've al- we're already living so much of our lives mediated by screens and so disembodied.

And so as, as we engage in this pro-life movement, I think people are becoming more rooted and more in love with where they live and this irreplaceable planet. so I think we actually feel Pretty hopeful about the potential to build the broadest coalition either of us have ever experienced.

we-- this is a pretty low bar for entry. do you like life? 

Well, it's not... It's ju- It-- Let me just suggest it's not only pro-life, it's also, pro-interdependence- Yeah ... in terms of human beings and the natural world. It's an understanding that we all exist together, or we're not going to exist at all.

And in some ways, some interesting ways, AI is bringing all of this to the surface. the revolt against AI data centers in Republican areas of this country is to me very interesting. The fact that, in fact, right now, there are more Republicans who are anti-AI than Democrats, and there are more Republicans who believe that the elites of Silicon Valley and technology are threatening their future than there are Democrats.

this is all fascinating. We could be on the verge of a very major realignment here because of what has happened so blatantly under Trump with regard to the billionaires, the acquisition of money and power, and the dangers that they are now wielding through AI. So I'm not a cock-eyed optimist, but I do share, Naomi, your optimism, and Astra, your optimism.

Kim Phillips-Fein on the Anti-Egalitarian Strain in American Culture and Politics Part 2 - LARB Radio Hour - Air Date 7-24-26

Let's talk a little bit about the current version, and since you mentioned social media, what you call the technocracy. Mm-hmm. How do you think that this has all manifested itself in the tech world? 

The book ends with a chapter on technology and ideas about inequality and economic inequality. And I think that one of the things that we see in the writing of some of the figures that I discuss in the book, like Peter Thiel, I think it's both, it both builds on themes that are present earlier, but also takes them in different directions, that there's a sense of the role of the founder of a business as a kind of creative genius, able to be in tune with the marketplace and with the needs and wishes of common people, almost as though they are an artist and able to understand intuitively what people want and need, and that that is why they're able to rise to this position of, dominance within the company.

There's a sense of the importance of having a leader of a company, that those are the companies that do the best, that are able to bring forth the, vision of their founder and that have a founder that wants to pour their life into the company that they're building, that other forms of ownership or connection or employment are not sufficient to sustain that, that you need to have this absolute devotion from a leader Who then is justified in profiting extraordinarily.

And then finally, I think there is something about the technology itself, that there's, that there is a, a veneration of the machine. So it starts with the people who understand the machine, who can understand the technology and how it works, that those are the people who should be in control, in charge of it, and ultimately able to profit from it the most extraordinarily.

But then it goes into a sense that the, the machine itself is superior, and that in a way that's not just understanding it, it's the people who are closest to it, and maybe able to resemble it the most- Hmm ... able to become or, or move into the realm of the machine are actually the ones who are in some way superior to the rest of humanity.

I, I think you can find echoes of this in earlier moments in a, a celebration of industrial technology, but there is certainly something about information technology and computers that lends itself to this, because it is a celebration of symbols, of code, of things that are ethereal and not physical, and that that ultimately becomes kind of...

It, it don't have to do a lot of the things that ordinary people with bodies that have to be sustained, that have to rest, that are ultimately mortal, that those things are inferior to the machine that can live forever- 

Mm-hmm ... 

and doesn't need anybody or anything to do that. This is a different kind of plane for ideas about inequality, and there's a lot of ways themes about inequality surface.

But I think in some ways this is a, a, a turn that we see in recent years, and, is, is different from the past. The, the book as a whole is about these... It, it's organized chronologically, but in a way, I think it's not as though one, understanding of the sources of economic inequality rises and then falls.

In a way, these kind of fa- Coexist and become a reservoir of a, of a a common wisdom that's then articulated at certain points by political leaders so that the different ideas are present and used selectively at different moments. 

One of the things that strikes me as we move into the modern moment is both these echoes or homologies that you've been tracing throughout the history of the country, which is that basically any time there's a new technology, whether that technology is going to be a new form of government that's democratic and egalitarian, whether it's going to be the industrialization of the United States, whether it's going to be the internet itself, and now AI, there is always this...

And I think it's, a core part of the American brand. There's this sense that this is gonna equalize everyone. Now everybody's gonna have this equality of opportunity. 

Mm. 

Though is, I think this is maybe the one thing that I feel like Milton Friedman was, not totally wrong about, is his idea that it's well, an equality of opportunity doesn't mean an equality of outcomes.

Now, he has a particular, way of orchestrating that, and I think that's what your book goes to show, is that, actually the equality of outcomes is what's been suppressed. The equality of opportunity is what's been suggested, but then we don't ever actually get there. And so one of the things that I'm curious about is, as we hopefully maybe to end on a hopeful note, but it doesn't have to be hopeful.

It may very well not be hopeful. Which is well, what can we do? 'Cause I noticed something with Gen Z and younger is that two things. One, they don't have much hope for the future, which feels itself extremely sad. They also seem to be motivated almost entirely by the acquisition of money, and that, that the acquisition of money may be similar to the boom boom '80s, is divorced in a kind of Gordon Gekko way from any sort of moral claim, right?

So whatever one has to do, however one has to cheat, lie, steal, or whatever to make money, all that matters is getting money because that's the only thing that is going to save you in what feels like a tech version of a Mad Max dystopia to come. So with all of that very ugly set dressing, let's talk a little bit about how you see the possibility of resistance, 'cause obviously there has been resistance to these trends across American history, including the unionization effort, including the civil rights movement, and various other egalitarian-led movements- Mm-hmm

in our history, but what do you think is possible in the present? 

Well, I, I think that despite the bleak landscape outlined in the book, and which you point to here- I actually myself don't feel as pessimistic about the future. 

Hmm. 

The constellation of ideas that I describe in this book that's come out in this conversation, a certain stridency and, Abstraction.

My core belief is that it's actually quite difficult to live in the world that these thinkers are outlining. 

Hmm. 

It is isolating. They describe a approach to society that I think many people actually find repugnant at a core level. And in part that is because it really minimizes and, downplays the reality of, of, of actual human engagement and connection, which is always, I think, at some level based upon a recognition of the other person as an equal human being.

And so anybody... I- i- in a certain way, friendship, community, family, and those sustaining forces of the world are themselves a counter to the, dystopian vision. Th- th- that is what most people- Hmm ... actually really live in. And to take away the meaning of those things for people, it, it's, it's, it's hard to do that, which is part of what accounts for the stridency and insistence.

some of the people may, may want to free themselves of all of these relationships, but actually, or might fantasize that you want to, which is part of the appeal, but in reality, it, you can't, and so it's hard to actually do that. So I think I... And that's one answer, one approach. I think forms of, of, of resistance, I do think that the types of challenges to concentrated economic power, the sense that that erodes community and democracy, which is what the source of meaning and, joy and possibility in life comes from, I think that that is part of what we see percolating, certainly here in New York.

We've seen it in the different revivals of progressive politics over the past few years. I do think the labor movement in its different forms has the capacity to speak to this. 

Mm-hmm. 

Different types of social movements do, but so too do different kinds of collective celebration. We, I think that's part of why the, the, again, when in New York, the, the, the Knicks victory and collective celebrations that followed it, in some ways were connected to some of the political mobilizations in the city, I think in this way.

And in a somewhat different way, I think you can say the same thing with, with the World Cup unfolding this past year, that some of the collective celebration that one sees is also, it's connected to- The limits of extreme economic concentration for true human, human flourishing and for the creation of democratic communities.

So I, I think there, there will... I... This is all a little bit abstract, but I think that this type of political challenge is, is percolating in the country now, and we will have to see what happens to it in the years ahead. That that sensibility, and my sense that the ideas that these thinkers put forward, while they may hold a certain transient appeal to people, they are actually quite out of step with other core aspects of life as most people experience it and want it to be.

So I, I think that's, part of why I feel, less pessimistic. I think also my connections with students, there certainly is a lot of, a lot of pessimism and a lot of fear, but I think there is also, I'm, I'm consistently very impressed by the younger people that I meet in their early 20s and, their creativity and engagement and ideas about the future.

So th- it's a, it's a difficult landscape right now, no question, and plenty of reasons to be afraid for the future, but there's also, sources of hope. And finally, I guess, I think that the, the, the American tradition or- outlined in this book, it has never been the only one, and is, constantly asserting itself against a set of very powerful claims about equality, economic equality, and about the cr- connection between that and a democratic politics.

So, that is, that is another reservoir that people can dip into who want to resist w- the world that I describe in the book. 

Anti-Fascist Economics with Isabella Weber Fighting Fascism Part 2 - The Nation Podcasts - Air Date 10-19-26

Yeah, I feel like we've, we've, we've diagnosed a lot of the problems, with the status quo and, the, the inherited wisdom of, 100 years of bullshit. and, now I, I feel like we should, we should shift and talk a little bit about, some of, some of the, the, the answers to this.

one model that you raise in, in your book is in what Mexico has done under AMLO and Claudia Sheinbaum. can you describe this, anti-inflation basket of essentials program, which I, I had never heard of. it's really, really interesting. And, and do you think that there's a reason that this kind of program couldn't work in the United States or, or any other country?

Yeah, so, basically what the Mexican government did is to use the fact that the grocery sector is incredibly concentrated in most countries, so that you can actually know, it's literally a handful of companies that, are in charge of the grocery or, 60, 70, 80% of the grocery sector. And they, struck a deal with those companies, and the companies, pledged that they would keep the price of a basket of essentials stable, so the price of the whole basket rather than the individual items.

In turn, they got a bunch of, advantages from the government, like lower rates for using the national railway system, stuff like that, lower tariffs for certain things. What is interesting is that one of the key mechanisms to make this program work is a press conference where the president herself actually reports about how well companies are doing in implementing this basket.

And if they have, kept the prices stable and have great quality, then they get praise. And if they have, not kept the prices stable, it's being called out, but also if, if they offer, substandard prod- products in, in the basket. And what this effectively does is to say Whether basic food items are affordable or not is the responsibility of the president herself, right?

It's my job as elected representative of the people to make sure that the food stuff that you all can't do without is at a price point that you can pay given where wages are at. And I think this is really, really key in terms of, we talked about how neoliberalism teaches us that governments can't do anything, and that, the best that they can do is to subordinate you to the market.

So what is happening here is a president that is showing agency, that is saying, "No, I can act. I can act in your interest, and I can negotiate literally with companies on your behalf," right? And that, logic I think is really key, and, is something that is encapsulated in this, in this basket of essentials.

But more broadly, the approach that I'm proposing is to say that when 

it comes to- And sorry, Isabella, can I, can I just say- Yeah ... real quick on, on, on the Mexico example, it's just, it's frustrating to me in, in o- obviously a lot of things in the United States are frustrating to me, but, and I can't imagine how frustrating it is in, to be in, in Germany right now.

But just, that we're even having these fucking debates about how do we win, how do we hold off the right when you just... we, i- in the States we can look literally right south of the border at, the most popular government in the history of Mexico. But, maybe it's the most popular government in the world.

we, we ju- we know this shit works politically. it's, if for any Democrat in the United States that is look- that is thinking how do we win and then how do we govern in a way that's gonna, that's gonna keep Biden to Trump to, keep that transition from happening again, it's just, the model's right fucking there 

Oh, and I can tell you that actually while Biden was still in power, I was running around Washington telling the story of the Mexican basket model, and, suggesting that something like this could be done in the United States, and that it could be done even in a very, popular way.

You could brand it. You could do all sorts of symbolisms to show that the president is standing up for people's, for affordable life for all, basically. 

yes. Trump just did a piece of this with the gas, right? With ... There's, a handful of gas stations in Pennsylvania that are, the Freedom, Freedom Gas or some, crazy name, where he basically, there's a

I don't know. There's ... Does it- 

I think what happened there is actually that the, they, stole a bunch of gas- ... and are selling it for cheap. It's, it's, it's not a- 

It's not 

It's a very Trump kind of- Okay. Yeah ... kind of program. Yeah. Got it. 

Makes more sense. 

Yeah. But I think, to bring Trump back into the conversation here, he, of course, campaigned on Make America Affordable Again, right?

And then, suggested that just the moment that he comes into power, prices would somehow fall magically, right? which, I don't think that voters generally can be convinced with super technical, programs that are spelt out to the T. But I think going in with an actual plan of how you're going to achieve affordability is more convincing than the president saying, "Day one, when I am in power, from God's hand, prices will start, start falling."

So in that sense , there was a huge opportunity to come up with some plausible stories, and the Mexican example was right there. to maybe have a bit of hope here in the conversation, CAP actually just came out with a policy brief that, proposes the Mexican basket model, as, as a possibility for food, food affordability.

So it's interesting that at least, now there is a bit, a bit of movement there. And the turning point is, of course, the election of Zohran Mamdani, who had a campaign that was focused on the, basically the prices of four essentials, right? food, housing, childcare, and transportation, and it was basically a price control campaign, right?

I'm, I'm living in a, a rent stabilized ... Yeah, I'm in a rent stabilized apartment in Queens, so, it's, it's still too expensive, but it's nice to know that it won't go up for the next two years. 

Is it ... Yeah, yeah. I just came back from Vienna, where- we don't even go there, right?

Because then we get depressed. But in any case, I had a meeting with the mayor, and he told me how they have two-thirds of publicly owned housing. and what is interesting about the Vienna example, and that gets to a larger point that I'm also making in the book, is that actually, the income levels at which you qualify for those public...

for, for, for, having access to public housing are pretty high. So in that sense, it's not, social housing for the poor, where you have a bunch of people who, for one reason or another, can't pay market rate. It's being cramped together in ghetto-like structures, somewhere in unpopular parts of the city.

No, you have, literally Two-thirds of the whole city be part of public housing, and then you have basically all s- all but the rich, of across society benefit from this public service, which also means that you have massive buy-in into these programs, and you have a logic that says, as a human, you qualify for decent housing.

You don't have to prove that you have really failed on the market, and therefore you have to rely on charity because, we can't intervene in the market, but we also can't let you die because we're not in the late 19th century and in your famine scenario anymore, right? so therefore we somehow do, some social housing or some social benefits that make it possible for you to somehow survive.

No, this is the opposite logic, right? It's the logic of universal basic services as something that you qualify for because a dignified life requires you to have it, and that's for me actually a very central principle in the book and a counterpoint to the end time fascism logic where, in a, in a way the end time fascism and, and the new fa- famine scenario aren't entirely unrelated because, you say that you have to treat large parts of the population as collateral damage to some sort of a racist white supremacist project, which now, you add this very explicit racial dimension to it, right?

You say, those people's lives don't matter because they are taking up space, they are taking up land, they are taking up resources that, we, we are in no project of defending. We are not fighting climate change to secure the material foundations of these people. and the opposite logic is to say because you are human you qualify, and because we are all human we have to organize the material foundation of our lives, and that- Yeah

starts from the essentials. 

That's going to be it for today.

Before we go, remember that all three of today's featured books, Country of Lords, Anti-Fascist Economics, and End Times Fascism, are linked in the show notes, in print through Bookshop.org or as audiobooks through Libro.fm.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

Know Your Enemy

Behind the News

The Nation Podcasts

Factually! with Adam Conover

KQED's Forum

Democracy Now!

The Brian Lehrer Show

The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

The Majority Report

and LARB Radio Hour

Further details are in the show notes.

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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.