Air Date: 8-22-2026

Today we look at how the Republican Party made climate denial its policy more than twenty years ago and is now removing the government's ability to see the problem at all. The Environmental Protection Agency under Bush refused to regulate carbon in 2003, and now the Trump administration is dismantling the science that would help us both avoid worsening the climate emergency and mitigate the inevitable destruction to lives and property now baked into the system.

Full Show Notes

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

Today we look at how the Republican Party made climate denial its policy more than twenty years ago and is now removing the government's ability to see the problem at all. The Environmental Protection Agency under Bush refused to regulate carbon in 2003, and now the Trump administration is dismantling the science that would help us both avoid worsening the climate emergency and mitigate the inevitable destruction to lives and property now baked into the system.

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

Consider This

Democracy Now!

The Hartmann Report

The Rachel Maddow Show

Outrage + Optimism

and Sea Change

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

Section A, ON THE GROUND

Section B, EUROPE ON FIRE

Section C, THE DELAY MACHINE

And Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT

And now, on to the show. 

All this week, we've been reporting on the catastrophic wildfires happening in Western Europe, especially France and Spain, and now Greece. One line in the media coverage really stood out to me. A European scientist said all this heat and all these fires are likely to only get worse in the future to the point, he said, that we will be, quote, "passing the limits of adaptation."

I wondered what that looks like, so we've called him to ask. Johan Rockström is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and he noted that 200-some years since the Industrial Revolution, the Earth has remained fairly resilient, but that is changing. 

Ninety percent of the heat caused by our fossil fuel burning is not in the atmosphere causing the temperature rise which has led us to the climate crisis we see today.

It's in the ocean. Fifty percent of the carbon dioxide from the greenhouse gases we add is not in the atmosphere trapping heat. It's actually stored, half of it in the ocean and half of it on land. So a healthy planet has this extraordinary biophysical capacity to buffer and dampen, basically cool the planet.

We're seeing, unfortunately, increasing indicators of our planet losing this capacity. Not that we've crossed a tipping point, but forest systems are getting weaker and no longer able to take up as much carbon. The ocean is warming faster than we had expected. Ice is melting faster than we had expected.

This is a stress response of a planet that is trying to do everything it can to buffer and dampen change. And when we come closer to the end of this capacity, then of course the risk is very high that the impacts hit back even harder on our societies. 

And what does that look like for humans? If we reach these limits, what do, what does it mean for people on Earth?

To begin with, what it looks like is that we will have more shocks of what we're experiencing right now in Europe. Remember that we are experiencing, in places that have never recorded it before, life-threatening temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, so that's the first thing. The second is droughts, floods- Fires that risk food security and even social stability.

We are at risk of triggering more disease outbreaks, even pandemics, which then spills over into less and less stable economies and therefore also less and less stable societies, moving into situations of displacement, migration, potentially even armed conflicts. And we see the first indications of this in countries like Sudan, Syria, Chad, where you cannot separate anymore the social conflicts and displacements and people suffering from these environmental changes.

There are, of course, many countries worldwide trying to make changes like emissions reductions, but to what extent do you think those attempted fixes are still enough versus humans are simply going to have to make drastic changes like not being able to live in certain places? 

The window is still open to avoid the most catastrophic outcomes.

And I-- what I mean by catastrophic is the point where Fires, drought, and heat waves become so difficult to handle that, communities simply have to move out. and that is what worries me most today, that we're allowing ourselves to look at these extreme events and continue to kick the can down the road and not acting, and that can take us into real danger.

So what should we do? 

One has to recognize that the transition is challenging. we've been for 200 years powering the global economy with fossil fuels and unsustainable production systems. Now we need to very rapidly move away from fossil fuels, oil, coal, and gas. We need to move into circular economic models, and we need to have sustainable ways of managing our oceans, our forests, our wetlands, our peatlands.

We know all this. We even have solutions on how to scale sustainable production and consumption practices, and still we're not moving fast enough. 

This is a very doomsday topic, but I watched a YouTube video of a lecture you gave on this, and in it you are matter of fact, but you're also fairly upbeat.

How do you maintain that sense of positivity and good cheer when the news you're delivering is so alarming? 

Yeah, that's, the advancements in science and our extraordinary ability today to measure down to the single tree and fish in the ocean, the state of the planet, is a tremendous value.

And that risk assessments is not there to scare us. Risk assessments is to avoid doing the wrong things. 

I assume those risk assessments are also meant to motivate us. 

Absolutely. And, when you think of it, in, in all other paths of our life, health risks, or if it is risks to our economy, or if it's risk to our house burning down, we are concerned.

We buy insurance. We want information. Why aren't we, seeing risk assessments as a way of ensuring that we can hand over a stable, resilient, life-supporting, livable planet to our children? 

We begin today with the wildfires sweeping across the Pacific Northwest, which is facing its worst fire season in more than 30 years due to climate change. In Washington State, firefighting crews continue to battle fires that have destroyed more than 700 homes and structures in the Spokane area.

Nearly 65,000 people have been evacuated from Spokane County. Authorities have arrested one man on suspicion of arson in connection to one of the three blazes that have devastated the area. This is resident Cami Feleg, who evacuated with her husband and children before wind-driven flames engulfed her family home.

we didn't expect it to jump the river, but we knew the winds were high. And, about 30 minutes before it jumped the river, my husband and I were seeing how bad it was, and we told the kids, "We don't wanna scare you, but we think you should start preparing to grab some things." And I grabbed my wedding album, I grabbed the kids' baby books, I grabbed pet supplies, and that evacuation thing that had the photos electronically on, memory sticks and all that stuff.

Put that in the cars, and within a few minutes, the power went out, and it was go now. Go now. 

The National Interagency Fire Center reports there are at least 99 uncontained large fires currently burning across the country. 50 of them are in the Washington/Oregon area. Meanwhile, the US Forest Service says it plans to close 57 of 77 research facilities nationwide.

Our next guest spent 42 years working at the Wenatchee Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Washington State, one of two facilities in Washington marked for closure. Paul Hessburg is senior research ecologist emeritus at the US Forest Service. He's also a professor of fire and landscape ecology at the University of Washington.

Today, he's joining us from North Carolina. Professor Hessburg, thanks so much for being with us. If you can start off by talking about just the scope of the fires, more than 60,000 people evacuated, hundreds of homes burned to the ground. Explain what's happening here as these research facilities, as these fire labs are closed in Washington, where you, worked, and across the country.

Thanks for having me on the program, Mimi. what's going on has developed over many decades, and we're seeing the fruit of a lack of action to curb, essentially, a mounting situation. A- across the West, the mountain snowpack was 30 to 50% of what it normally is. And if you think about it, forests grow in the interior where the snowpack is.

And so if snow is in short supply, forests are in short supply. They dry early. They're available to burn early. When you couple that with the fact that hot, dry, windy weather is increasing under climate change, forests are denser now, there's a constellation of things that are coming together to set the dining room table for more frequent and more severe fires.

And when you think about it, people are moving into those environments right now, and the homes, the communities, they're just not simply prepared for fire. And the short answer is, throughout the West and the East, these are fire environments, and we haven't lived and prepared as though they are. 

And could you explain, Professor Hessburg, you've, talked in your research, on forests and fires, about the fact that today's forests look nothing like what they looked like 100 years ago.

you said a little bit about that now, but if you could elaborate, why is that the case, and what are the impacts on the likelihood of wildfires being more intense and far-reaching? 

That's a great question, Nermeen, and thanks for asking that. So go back in the way back machine 200 years ago, and what you would have seen, especially in the p- Spokane area, is there'd be a, a large number of indigenous people, tribes, family groups that were basically cultivating the landscape with fire.

In the Spokane area, the Spokane tribe, the Colvilles, the Coeur d'Alene, the Columbia Plateau tribes, and the Kalispel tribes were all interacting, intermarrying, culturally burning the landscape for food and material resources. After the Gold Rush in the West, that, indigenous people are marshaled onto reservations.

80 to 90% of those tribal groups were killed by introduced European diseases. Population numbers were down, and fire started to be excluded from those woods. Our indigenous people learned that in order to live safely and securely and providently on the landscape, they needed to burn it regularly. So in the case of the Spokane area, open pine forest became dense, layered pine forest.

Instead of having grassy fuels on the ground, there's a lot of dead wood on the ground. Bark beetles are killing trees. Those trees are falling over. They're now becoming fuel. So when you get ignitions, either arson ignitions or lightning ignitions, the table is set for fires that can spread fast and burn severely.

The Spokane area is no different. People are tucking into those woods in various kinds of developments, and the developments aren't ready for fire, and fire is coming to them. So 

if you could elaborate also, Professor Hessburg, on the fact that you've said about 85% of wildfires are caused by human carelessness.

in this case, one man has been charged with intentionally igniting the largest of the three wildfires. if you could talk about that and whether there's been any, change historically, in the occurrence of this. 

Another great question. human-caused fires are actually on the rise in the United States, and they're changing the ecology of fire across the country.

arson ignitions are on the rise in some years, but they're not the big story. The big story is cigarette butts out the window. There are unattended campfires. There are people pulling over by the side of the road with very hot catalytic converters, and catalytic converters have the ... They're so hot that when they pull over and sit over dry grass, that grass will begin to burn, and if there's a puff of wind, it'll spread beyond the road.

So many fires start against, roads and trails, and very often they're just through human carelessness or accidentally unwittingly starting fires. 

But Paul, they wouldn't have the same effect if it weren't for climate change, right? The heating of the planet. And that's where we're gonna end, this discussion, with everything from the fires across Washington and Oregon to what we're seeing throughout Europe right now, some of the hottest days they have ever experienced, and the massive fires there as well.

If you can talk about what has happened with this intensification of the heat. 

So the, the short answer is that there's increasing incidents of hot, dry, windy days. And, so the climate is warming. it's getting moodier. We get deeper droughts, which we're in right now in the West, and we have pluvials, the opposite of droughts.

So we're getting hot and dry and windy weather. We're putting out 95%, 97% of all fires w- that burn under moderate fire weather. And so the landscape is burning under the worst 2 or 3% of weather conditions, and that's why we're seeing most of the fires are big and hot. So this constellation of accidental ignitions, dense forest, the wrong kinds of fuels on the ground, rapidly changing climate, and people tucking into the woods, has set the table for really difficult circumstances going forward, and we need to start acting like we live in a fire climate and have our homes and our residences ready to go for the coming fires.

60,000 people were, ordered to evacuate from Spokane, Washington, just a little north of us here. We've got a million acres of forest land, that's on fire right now in Oregon.

France, Italy, Greece, Spain are all on fire right now. It's gotta be happening in Russia and China, we're just not getting the reports. And next summer or th- this winter, our time, it'll happen in the Southern hemisphere. What we're seeing is the, the drying out of the planet, as a result of climate change, and apparently the, one of the biggest factors that's really whacking us that nobody was anticipating are these heat domes.

They're basically high pressure systems with clear air that, that just sit there and let the sunlight through. No clouds, let the sun r- really 'cause it's a high pressure system, let the sunlight through, and boom. it just dries everything out, turns it tinder-dry, and then, the smallest spark and you've got a wildfire.

And the heat domes are happening for the same reason that the bomb cyclones were 15 years ago. When I was in r- Washington, DC, we had the first bomb cyclone. It was a brand-new phrase. What the hell is this? It's these wild winter storms that just stay in one place and just pound on you and get insanely cold, and why was that?

It was 'cause Arctic air was drooling down past or through or b- the jet stream. It was pushing the jet stream down to the point where instead of being, the jet stream normally running around Northern Canada, it was drooling all the way down to Texas and bringing freezing temperatures with it and freezing pipes and everything else.

that same phenomena, again, because the jet stream has been weakened, is causing these heat domes to l- to stand in place for long periods of time 'cause the jet stream is what historically has been moving weather around the planet, and the jet stream is produced by the difference, the temperature differential between the arctic cold and the mid-latitude heat.

And when that differential is a big number, when there's a big difference between those two temperatures, when it's really cold up north and it's warmer in the center, then you've got a healthy jet stream. But what's happened is because the arctic is warming six times faster than, than we are here, this differential has collapsed, and the jet stream is no longer this strong, powerful river of air, at 60,000 feet that it used to be, and it's now just this kinda wandering, slowly moving thing that drools around and you end up with these heat domes.

Trump is insisting that hundreds of wildfires burning across the United States, Canada, and Europe are all the result of people not grooming their forests properly or not raking the forests the guy's an idiot, right? but he's not an idiot. he's a tool of the fossil fuel industry, which gave him millions, hundreds of millions of dollars and helped him get elected.

But the World Weather Attribution, this is a consortium of scientists, they say the extreme drought, the drought conditions, the humidity, the wind, all this stuff that is fanning these for- forest fires, and we've got it here. Yesterday here in, in Portland, the sun was orange. You couldn't breathe here There are five big lies that are being used on a fairly regular basis by, mostly Republicans to, justify the theft of our public lands, the public lands that Teddy Roosevelt set aside.

Other presidents have as well. Obama set aside, I believe it was Bears Ears, and already Trump has taken a bite out of that. And so let's just review these lies. Ryan Busse is writing about this, on his Substack. Ryan Busse, R-Y-A-N-D-B-U-S-S-E.substack.com.

Number one, national monument designations were forced on us by DC bureaucrats with no public comment. This is a lie. the, just last month, for example, Mike Lee, the, right-wing guy out of Utah, the Republican senator, marched out this old lie, saying that it's happening under the 1906 Antiquities Act, after Trump rolled back monument designations for 3 million acres in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments.

The reality is that more than 2.7 million comments were gathered before this decision was made, including statements from more than 300 Native American tribes, conservation groups, religious groups, many of them in Utah. So Mike Lee is just lying about his own, too, and about his own constituents. Lie number two, gotta drill, baby, drill in America because we need energy independence.

Ryan Zinke has been pushing this. He was Trump's first Interior Secretary, before he was, fired for corruption. And he started lying back in 2017 when he was the secretary. He said, "Today I took a s- action to sign a series of directors that put America on track to achieve the president's vision for energy independence."

we reached energy independence during the Obama administration. We don't need that. Lie number three, log it or use it. Montana's Steve Daines, the, the Republican senator from Montana, is wearing this one out. He repeatedly, cites this, y- to push for a sixfold increase in logging on federal lands in Montana last year.

and what happened? the Skillet Fire erupted in Montana on land that had been logged. Logged land is basically dead land, and it's covered with, the, the remnants of the trees, and they catch on fire real easily. So logging is not going to make your forests resistant to, to fire. Lie number four, you are locked out of your land by the elitists.

No one can hunt, fish, or graze livestock on national monuments or wilderness study areas. No, that's a lie. we subsidize hunting, fishing. this is one, Donald Trump said this just, last week. He said, "You can't go hunting, you can't go fishing, you can't do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it."

He's talking about Utah backcountries, but talking about public lands. It's a lie. Thankfully, the New York Times called him on it. They said, "But recreation has been allowed in Bears Ears since President Barack Obama designated the monument in 2016." See, it's, he took 3 million acres away from it to give to his donors, his drilling and mining donors, and logging donors.

And he said he's doing it because you can't use that. They won't let you. it's a lie. It's just a complete lie. Lie number five, oil companies, mining companies, and grazers pay their fair share to profit from our public lands. Actually, no. Under the Big Beautiful Bill, oil companies pay 12 and a half percent royalties on public land, but on private land they typically pay about 25% royalties.

So your and my tax dollars are subsidizing the oil companies by giving them cheap oil. Grazers get a 95% discount on public lands compared to private lands. And the kicker is mining, since it's governed by the General Mining Act of 1872, w- the people who are mining stuff out of public lands, they don't have to pay the government, therefore us, a single penny.

it's just wild. It's just, they just, take what you want. And that's why, of course, again, Trump is trying to give away the country to these people because they take, they make mind-boggling amounts of money, and where does some small slice of that money end up? In Trump's pockets, in the Republican Party's pockets, in the campaigns of Republicans running for the House and Senate

first of all, you should know that in 2021, Greenland passed a national moratorium, a national ban on all future oil exploration. Nevertheless, after Trump got elected to go back and serve a second term as president in the United States, and he started talking about forcibly taking over Greenland for some reason, a new company formed in Texas called Greenland Energy.

That's not Greenland, Texas, it's Greenland as in Greenland, and Greenland Energy said they were going to drill for oil in Greenland. In June, a representative from Greenland Energy turned up in Greenland, in the part of the untouched Arctic, no roads, eastern Greenland, where these guys wanna drill, and they announced to the villagers there that this company, this Texas company, had permission.

They announced that they have permission. They had le- secured the legal right to start bringing their equipment, their oil drilling equipment, to this untouched Arctic area of Greenland. After those remarks in eastern Greenland, the company later apologized and said, actually, they didn't have permits to do that.

They put out a statement correcting the record saying, quote, "Our enthusiasm for the project led us to communicate in a way that created confusion." So forget we said that What really con- created confusion locally was when this happened. This is a picture of a tugboat bringing in a barge to that area of eastern Greenland, and the barge appears to contain about 15, 12 or 15 shipping containers worth of stuff.

These photos were obtained by a Danish investigative outlet called DanWatch. They show this tugboat and this barge arriving full, totally loaded, on the night of Wednesday, July 29th. Then, the same tugboat and the same barge are seen leaving that same place the next morning, except this time empty.

Because all of those shipping containers, all of that equipment that was on the barge heading in, they apparently left all that stuff on land. Now, the, the government in Greenland had said explicitly that this American oil company didn't have, quote, "permission to unload anything at all, to unload anything whatsoever" in Greenland.

In fact, before the pictures were published showing that tugboat and barge leaving empty after apparently dropping off all that material, the minister in charge of mineral resources from the Greenland government did a local interview in Greenland in which he said he was sure, he was absolutely sure this American oil company would never break the law and try to start this drilling project without permission.

Quote, "Should that happen, Greenland has the means to stop their actions." He said, quote, "This is a society governed by the rule of law. So I have some broad-shouldered men in black uniforms in the first instance who can help me deal with some illegal activities if I ask for them." By which he means, I think, the Greenlandic police.

Then he said, quote, "Ultimately, I'm sure that the Arctic Command will also contribute." By which he means the Danish military, he believes, would also intervene to stop this American oil company from trying to drill for oil in Greenland without any permission to do So that's what Greenland's government had to say.

It turns out on the day this American company, unbeknownst to them, had just that morning dropped off more than a dozen shipping containers full of equipment to get started on their oil drilling operation in Greenland. The American company said they had permission to move in the equipment, then they apologized for that and admitted that they didn't have the permission But then on the same day, the Greenland government said they wouldn't dare.

We'll use our police, we'll use the Danish military to stop them if we need to. That same day, they turn out to have unloaded their drilling stuff anyway. They're just going ahead with it, even though the local government says no, which led to headlines like this in Greenland. This is the, Google translate from the original, w- which I can't pronounce, so I'll just give you the, the English language Google translation, "Oil company moves equipment to eastern Greenland without permission."

That hullabaloo also led to pledges from local hunters and trappers in the area that they would physically themselves block the oil company from trying to land anything else or anyone else on shore. It led to the Greenland government issuing a formal warning to this oil company over what it's apparently trying to do in contravention of local law.

That apparently prompted US President Donald Trump to post this online, showing a l- a, a giant snarling version of himself looming over and menacing Greenland. "Hello, Greenland." A few days ago, this Trump-aligned oil company in Texas sent a cheery, all-smiles letter to its shareholders bragging about how great their talks are going with the Greenland government.

Recent high-level meetings between project leadership and Greenlandic regulatory and oversight authorities have been constructive, and we continue to be encouraged by the progress being made toward the remaining approvals required for drilling. Everything's going great. Greenland government really wants us to do this.

Our talks are really constructive. Turns out that is not at all how Greenland sees it. Headline in the local news, Greenland Department of Resources to controversial US oil company: colon, "Forget test drilling this year." Last week, the oil company Greenland Energy Company issued a letter to its shareholders that painted a rosy picture of the future prospects for the project in northeast Greenland.

In the letter, the company states that its drilling project is progressing rapidly, and its m- and its management expects to be able to begin drilling before the end of the year. But if you ask decision-makers in this country, such as the Minister of Foreign Affairs or the head of the Trade and Minerals Department in the Greenlandic government, according to them, there is no earthly chance of that happening So you put all this together, this Trump-aligned oil company based in Texas saying, "We're gonna drill for oil in Greenland."

Greenland's saying, "Oh no, you're not." The company going ahead and dropping off their drilling stuff anyway. Local residents saying, "We'll fight tooth and nail." Local government saying, "We'll use the police. We'll use the Danish milit-" Ki- you put it all together, it kinda seems like we're invading Greenland this company has somehow hornswoggled itself into a partnership with Dr.

Phil to make what sure looks like propaganda TV shows about this heroic and exciting oil drilling project, which the government of Greenland says is illegal, and they don't have permission to do it. This Trump-adjacent brand new oil company funded in large part by a major Trump billionaire donor, they sometimes admit that they have no permission to be doing what they're doing in Greenland, but they've still gone ahead with it anyway.

In addition to the 12 or 15 shipping containers that arrived in the last couple of weeks that they parked on shore in the last couple of weeks while the Greenland government was threatening that their police or the Danish military should stop that if they tried it, in addition to those 12 or 15 shipping containers, the same oil company now says it's shipping 300 more shipping containers and a whole huge drilling rig that they plan to get there in the next month So honestly, is this how we invade Greenland?

With Dr. Phil doing a ride-along like he did with Ice? All because a Trump donor billionaire says he needs to drill this oil, and who cares what this little country says? And by the way, wouldn't I like to help promote Dr. Phil's TV show about this? The nearest towns to where this is happening, and in fact, towns all over Greenland, have been protesting ever since it emerged that this is the way this is gonna go down.

For the closest locals, I kid you not, the local musk ox hunters are saying that they may use their dinghies, their hunting boats, to blockade the fjord. They'll use anything they can get their hands off to fight off this oil company if it really does try to set up on their coast. This weekend in Denmark, which controls Greenland and defends it, residents of Copenhagen formed a kayak flotilla around the city of Copenhagen, all carrying Greenland flags.

Their way of peacefully protesting against the United States of America menacing Greenland in this way

Donald Trump's war in Iran is a disaster. The only outcome of it thus far that's measurable is thousands of people dead, Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz. We're basically out of anti-aircraft and long-range munitions, and to no effect because we've still lost this war. Losing this war handily shows adversaries like Russia and China just how long we can go in a war before we start running out of the munitions we need to be able to sustain combat operations and protect ourselves and our allies.

The disastrous war that Trump started with Iran, he started right after he invaded Venezuela and took that country's president, which had the effect of turning Venezuela into effectively an oil co- colony for, I wouldn't, I would say the United States, but it appears to be an oil colony for the Trump administration, since nobody knows where the oil revenue from Venezuela is going.

But it was right after that one that he started the Iran war, which apparently he thought would be easy, but it is six months old now and we are losing, and it is a disaster with no end in sight. So amid that disaster, heading toward the midterms and the w- wild unpopularity of himself personally and his agenda, and particularly his war, maybe he thinks starting a new war for a new oil colony might be right on time right about now?

Might make us forget about the other war he's losing and can't get out of? So yes, eyes on Greenland, eyes on this Texas-based oil company, Greenland Energy, which appears to be playing the role of the United Fruit Company or the British East India Company, companies that have gone down in history as providing the predicate and the means for super dumb, wildly destructive imperial wars

Friederike Otto, thank you so much for joining us on Outrage and Optimism. We've wanted to have you on for a very long time. You run the amazing World Weather Attribution service to help the world understand the fingerprint of warming on various different weather events, and you can certainly improve on the way I've introduced you when you say something about what we're experiencing at the moment.

But what I would like to do is to start off by just highlighting this episode is about this astonishing summer that we've had in Western Europe, the waves of heat waves, the fires in France, in Spain, in, now in Scotland. And the question that we want to address to you is, first of all, very simply, has this been caused by a changing climate?

I think the very simple answer to your first question is yes. So what we see in this Western European summer is very much the fingerprints of human-induced climate change, particularly in the heatwave. So I think France just declared its fourth heatwave this summer, and it's only July, and we would just simply have not seen temperatures of these heights that we've seen this summer in Western Eu- Europe and other parts of Europe as well without human-induced climate change.

Climate change also plays a role in the drought that we are seeing, but it's the key driver behind the heat primarily. 

So if it's that clear, and just give us one level of additional detail on how you know that with that, that level of certainty 'cause maybe people don't immediately follow how do you identify the fingerprint of a warming world on these events.

Yeah. so the basic idea behind the studies that we are doing is actually very simple. So we look at an extreme weather event, be it a heatwave, the drought, fire weather conditions, and we are looking at in the world we live in today, so with global warming of 1.4 degrees that we already have, what kind of weather event is that?

Is it a 1 in 10 year event? Is it a 1 in 100 year event? Because of course the weather that we observe is only ever one realization of all possible weather that we could get under the same climate. And so we look at what's possible weather in the world we live in today, and we use statistical models. We use the same models that are used for the weather forecast, and then we might find that, okay, in today's climate, this heatwave that we're just experiencing, I don't know, for the third or fourth time here in London where I'm speaking from, might be now a 1 in two year event.

So that means not that it happens every two years, but that in any given year you have a 50% chance of such an event to occur. And then we ask the same question, but for what would be possible weather in the world as it would have been without climate change. And because we know very well how many greenhouse gases have been put into the atmosphere since Industrial Revolution, we can take these out of the atmosphere of climate models, and we can also statistically look at how would this weather event look differently in a 1.4 degree cooler world.

And for the heatwaves that we're seeing now, we find that basically without the climate change, this is not only not a one in two-year event, but it's also not a one in 2,000-year event. It's so unlikely to occur that it's basically impossible. And therefore, we can say that for these heatwaves, climate change really only made them possible.

Of course, that doesn't mean that there were never heatwaves without climate change. Of course, there were, but they were not as hot as the heatwaves we are, we're experiencing today. 

That's really helpful. Thank you. So you look at the statistical likelihood of the outcome based on the concentration of greenhouse gases.

I totally understand. Thank you for explaining that. I wonder if there's a missing gap in how we think about climate because we talk about the planet being 1.4 degrees warmer, which feels small, but then the impacts can be tens or hundreds of times worse when it comes to individual instances. So is there a disconnect between the sort of overall broad trend and the specific instances, and are we not bridging that gap in our minds when we think about what's happening to us?

I think there definitely is a- Is it just a psychological problem that we probably all have, that if we talk about 1.4 degrees of warming, that doesn't sound very much because, if you go outside and it's 24 degrees or it's 25.4 degrees, it doesn't feel very different. But of course, these 1.4 are a global average and that means that all the changes in temperature over the cool world, and especially with the huge ocean, is included in that.

And that means that the changes locally in, especially in heat waves, but also in other weather event, are much, much bigger and are just not something that are well-represented at all with this indicator of global warming. And that is one reason of why we started to do world weather attribution because by talking about what's the role of climate change in an individual weather event, it allows us to connect our own and other people's experience of weather with what this really abstract figure of 1.4 degree or, when we started, it was only one degree, of warming means.

Amazing. And then here's the really difficult question, because through your work, we now understand that what we are experiencing th- in these exceptional summers and these terrible wildfires is caused by climate change, which is caused by humans. And yet, we at... This episode is largely about the sort of slightly strange sense that we have that the media is not really telling us the full story.

recent analysis in the UK is that 73% of articles that talk about the heat waves don't mention climate change. So what's your assessment of what's happening there? People might say that's a conspiracy. They're trying to keep the truth from us. Others will say that's not just not how journalism works.

You spend a lot of your time trying to get accurate reporting in the media. Help us understand what's going on. 

This is a really good question, and I'm not sure I have a complete answer to that because, as you said, we've spent a lot of time trying to help the media to report accurately on this event and to explain the full causal chain, not only what happened and what that means for people fro- from a meteorological side, but also why these events happen, and that's because of human-induced climate change.

And we have made a lot of progress actually in the reporting. So when we started this work over 10 years ago, it was basically that every reporter said you can't attribute individual weather events to climate change. And that has, over time, changed. Now every time we do a study, it is reported on and it is accurately reported on actually across the media.

But we still find very often, as you said, that when we haven't done a study or when the study has been two weeks ago and the heat wave's still going on, then that, that climate change angle is getting missed again. And I think a little bit of that is that it still hasn't quite filtered through to all reporting that.

You don't need to wait for a study, especially not when you talk about extreme heat, but also for the droughts that we've seen in Southern Europe. There are so many studies now that show that climate change does make them drier. And also for the fires, heat is a key component of these fires, so mentioning climate change is important, and you can do it without having a study.

And I think that this is part of a broader understanding of you can't only talk about climate change if you actually have a concrete study, but you don't need to wait for the study because the evidence is so strong now. That, I think, is still something that is missing maybe in the understanding of a lot of journalists.

And of course, because climate change has been very politicized, especially in the last couple of years, I think a lot of journalists are trying to be extra careful not to overreach, and therefore then I think really err on the wrong side and not mention this unless they are absolutely dead certain. But of course, we can be dead certain now with these heat waves, but I think that is something that- I think we just, especially to, to journalists and other people in the media, we have to explain that again.

there's this gorgeous poem by the extraordinary Lucille Clifton that is in the chapter about connecting with community and seeing ourselves so profoundly interconnected and across generations.

So both geography and topic maybe makes it seem right. And this is called The Mississippi River Empties into the Gulf. The Mississippi River empties into the Gulf, and the Gulf enters the sea, and so forth, none of them emptying anything, all of them carrying yesterday forever on their white-tipped backs, all of them dragging forward tomorrow.

It is the great circulation of the earth's body. Like the blood of the gods, this river in which the past is always flowing. Every water is the same water coming round. Every day someone is standing on the edge of this river staring into time, whispering mistakenly, "Only here. Only now." 

I see. 

Wow. 

I see.

Lucille, always. 

Yeah, 

always. 

So I wanna talk about kinda, so in the book, you identify way finding as figuring out where we are and where we need to go, and I think that's a really good, starting place to think about things. And so I wanna talk about the where we are piece first. So our listeners have probably heard us use the words like climate anxiety, climate grief, but in your book you talk about how there are many more emotions than that.

So could you talk a little bit about the climate emotions wheel? 

Yeah. Yeah, this is a wonderful tool that the Climate Mental Health Network created based on some fantastic research by psychologists and mental health researchers. And it helps us see that there are all of these different ways we feel about climate change and being human on Earth in this time, and not all of them are heavy.

And what's helpful, I think, about anything on a wheel is it tells you that you're not just stuck i- in one of those, right? A wheel kind of wants to keep turning. And I also think it's an invitation to say however we might feel And I think it's especially important for young people because we know that around the world almost half of young people say that the way they feel about the climate crisis impacts their day-to-day lives.

And it's not just young people, right? We know that this is a much broader experience, es- and especially as we shift from most people experiencing climate change as an abstract thing to, no, this is something happening now, impacting places that I love now. I'm seeing this. I'm feeling this. it's not pre-traumatic stress, it's actual stress.

And that just becomes so much more important. And what I notice is that we have so few spaces to take those feelings, right? Fewer and fewer of us belong to a house of worship, and even when we do, they may not be equipped to hold this. You could have every psychologist and psychiatrist and therapist and social worker on the planet turning their attention to this, and there aren't enough of them- 

to go around. Classrooms are so focused on the intellectual piece, right? A lot of times in movement and in, and organizations, we're so busy on the strategy side, that we think we don't have time for feelings." and I think that is a great risk to us, both as just a human community, but certainly as a movement.

It is terrible social movement strategy not to be thinking about the heart in all of it. 

I see. I see. 

Yeah. Colette, how do these emotions show up in the work that you do with frontline communities? 

Oh, my gosh. I just wanna thank you for the question, Eva, because it's impor- emotions are important, and somehow we have been colonized to think that the intellectual answer is the answer, when some of us know deeply that the spirit has to be part of the answer, and the gut has to be part of the answer.

And I r-really appreciate when Catherine said, "You're stressed right now, and the emotions show." Black and brown and poor folks are demonized when they show their rage for systems that could be designed better, for information that we knew a long time ago, for decisions that c- and political action that could have been made already but have instead been sacrificed for the profits of such a few people when so many people could've been saved.

And, it's hard to fit people inside of that and then expect them not to rage. And so at Taproot Earth, which is the organization I help to co-lead, we make space for rage. We make space for it, Let's deal with some of this stuff. You are not crazy. This is crazy. You are not crazy. And so last year in 2025, we did a Sacred Waters Pilgrimage down the Nile, the Mississippi, and the Amazon.

We went to three of the five largest rivers in the world, and we gathered water and did ceremony and ritual there with the indigenous people of those places. And we asked for our ancestors to join us for this next round of fighting that we were gonna need to do. And we brought that water back to East Africa, where the oldest human remains are found, and we gave that water to the eldest woman of the tribes that are originally are from those places.

And those women who were sitting there, the, of the Kikuyu tribe, were praying for us the whole time we were on that pilgrimage. And, my blood is of the Choctaw nation. My blood is of Africa. And what I got a clear call to do was ritual. Now, what I know is that ritual that I did is the ritual you do before war You pray for peace, but this was to fortify yourself for what is to come.

And the emotions that you get to express when you are in ritual or in ceremony, you get to be sad, you get to be happy, you get to be powerful, and you get to break down. And it is ritual and ceremony that'll get us through a lot of this emotional piece. 

And it'll also inform and guide and protect the strategy.

Yeah. That is so amazing, and I think it's hard because climate change is such a scientific issue that w- a lot of science is going into it, and I'm usually talking to scientists about this. And w- what I hear you saying, Colette, is, we need to move away from that, Western enlightenment type of thinking where it's like science and reason are a separate thing from emotion.

And I'm thinking, the marrying of the two and understanding that there are other ways of knowing, spiritual ways of knowing, emotional ways of knowing, to help us get through this crisis. 

Yeah. and I would say the marrying of the two. it's a interesting use of terms. ... because these things were extracted from our humanity, like oil extracted from the ground.

We used to have all of that together. We're really putting ourselves back together again, and that's really the opportunity. 

I love the way you described, Colette, about ritual, holding, and informing strategy. 

Ashe. 

And what's so interesting, we have research that tells us that the thing that gets women stuck between climate concern and climate engagement is that they think they don't know enough.

And part of what I care so much about is saying, "This is not the only way we know." We sell ourselves short on the deeper knowing that is so present in us just because we're alive, just because we're human. That's right. Just because we are part of this community of life. 

Ashe. 

We've just heard clips starting with

Consider This asking what crossing "the limits of adaptation" means for people, from more life-threatening heat waves to disease outbreaks and unrest already visible in Sudan, Syria, and Chad.

Democracy Now! detailed how forcing Indigenous tribes onto reservations ended the cultural burning that kept Western forests open, so today's fires spread fast and burn severely

The Hartmann Report laid out five falsehoods Republicans use to justify seizing public lands, noting miners pay nothing under an 1872 law and grazers get a 95% discount compared to private land

The Rachel Maddow Show traced how a Trump-donor-backed Texas company landed equipment in eastern Greenland in defiance of the country's ban, as local hunters said they may blockade the fjord with their boats

Outrage + Optimism spelled out how attribution science compares today's 1.4-degree-warmer climate against a world without emissions, finding this summer's European heat waves would have been essentially impossible without human-caused warming

And Sea Change made the case that treating science and emotion as separate is a colonial inheritance, and that spiritual and emotional ways of knowing are essential to surviving the climate crisis.

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

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.*

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or you can simply email me to [email protected]

Today, Instead of commenting on the topic, I want to give you a quick update about the show and explain why I plan to do more of this in the short term in place of my usual commentaries. Regular listeners will have heard me talk over the last few months about the financial struggles the show is going through. They've also heard me describe some plans for expanding what we do in a few different directions to try to help with that financial squeeze we're having.

It's been essentially invisible from the outside, but over the past few months I have been working harder than ever building new systems that are intended to help us do more but nothing I've built has been fully switched on yet.

In case you're wondering, yes, AI is involved but in our case, it's not being forced on anyone who doesn't want to use it and it's not threatening to replace anyone. If anything, it's what might help save the jobs of the people currently helping to build the show. But also yes, we're very ambivalent about it.

And the most important thing, we're not changing a single thing about the human-driven curation at the heart of what we do. No AI is making judgment calls about what should be considered "Best of the Left." The AI is being made to do grunt work while the humans keep doing the human work.

I began in the spring with the basic question, what would Best of the Left look like if I were to invent it today and build it from the ground up? The answer to that is that, rather than only being a podcast, it would be a multi-platform curation company that heavily promotes on every social network available. The podcast would be only one of our many outlets.

To that end, I've been building a new primary outlet for the curation work we already do, which is a newsletter. For a podcast listener, the newsletter could act as a sort of supercharged version of show notes. It includes details and summaries of arguments that appear in the show but also features far more details about our featured speakers, like articles and books they written, than could ever make sense in the podcast.

For all the non-podcast listeners in the world who will never listen to Best of the Left, the newsletter is designed to very much stand on its own.

I also plan to publish my commentaries in the form of essays with extra details and links to sources that don't translate well to audio.

Additionally, I've been building automated systems to help us create videos and a social media management workflow to help get trailers, clips, mini commentaries, and other promotional elements out through the social media firehose. Though, to be clear, the videos themselves will not be AI-generated, it's only the systems that help keep everything organized and manageable that involve AI.

I would estimate that essentially everything I have planned is more than 90% complete and just needs enough attention to get it to the point that it's ready for public consumption.

However, I found myself running into a constraint that I hadn't foreseen initially, which is that while I'm in the building process, the only thing that takes time is the building part. But once I begin turning these systems on and creating things that go out to the public, the process of quality checking, finalizing, and publishing everything adds to the amount of work there is to do.

So trying to build and publish becomes a double burden and since I've already been working very hard and am basically at my limit, I've been very hesitant to push any of these systems to the point that they're ready for publishing.

Instead of building a system and launching it before moving to the next, I've just been building up everything to the point that it's 90% or 95% ready to launch and then putting it on hold and moving over to something else, repeating the cycle.

And while all that has been happening, I've definitely been suffering from a bit of burnout, which anyone could have predicted based on the number of hours I've been working. Plus, I also have all of the regular complaints that everyone has about what it's like to work with AI too much. It's definitely a contributor to the burnout.

In the long term, the idea is to not have to actively work with AI very much at all. I'm front-loading that work by building systems, but have the hope that once they're built, they'll only need minimal ongoing management.

Which brings me to why I'm telling you all of this now, and specifically why I'm telling you this instead of writing and recording a commentary for today's episode.

With the help of my partner, who is always the first to recognize when I'm experiencing burnout, I decided to reduce the number of commentaries I record each week from two to one because that's one of the few places I have available to really cut my workload by a substantial number of hours. The plan is to use that freed up time to begin pushing the newsletter and our social media strategy out into the world so I can get through this workload bottleneck I'm facing.

The first thing on the list to go out is a beta version of the newsletter. Existing members will be receiving an email from us first, introducing you to the new email system and giving you the option to either stick around while we work out the bugs of the newsletter, while inviting your feedback to help us refine it. Or, you may opt out of the newsletter while still remaining on our email list for our irregular announcements.

Once we feel like we're in a good flow, we'll be able to open it up the the public. So, if you're a member, keep an eye out for an email from us.

The plan is to continue to give you these weekly updates, alternating with political commentaries, so you can stay in the loop while I take the much-needed time required to get Best of the Left to its new form and function.

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

Section A, ON THE GROUND

Followed by Section B, EUROPE ON FIRE

Section C, THE DELAY MACHINE

And Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT

So on the first of August, the National Weather Service in Eastern Washington and in Idaho issued a PDS, a particularly dangerous situation notice.

Fires were already burning across much of the state and across much of the Pacific Northwest, including on the land of the Colville tribes and the Spokane tribe. On Saturday, three fires struck near the north part of the city of Spokane. The PDS doubtless helped some folks prepare. Other folks I'm sure will have missed it entirely.

But very quickly, people went from nothing to level three go now warnings. This was somewhat compounded by things like a large travel volleyball tournament happening in an area which got a level three go now warning. What that means, if you're not familiar, there are three levels of warnings when you are evacuated for a fire, and the level three is the most severe one, that being like you have to leave your home right now.

Several people have related to me, and I want to caveat here that I'm not being critical of the response, which has actually been very good. I'm giving information because more people are going to find themselves in this situation in the future, and I think it's important that people understand that the level three warning that buzzed on people's phones with emergency alert came not very long before they saw fires and even structures on fire in their neighborhood, right?

I think people sometimes think that, someone will come and tell you when it is your time to leave, and that's not always gonna be possible, right? And again, I'm not conveying that to say that, the response here was poor. I'm conveying that to say that people need to understand this, because we're all gonna have to live with fire in the west because there has always been fire here.

The climate is changing, and we are pushing our homes further and further into the wildland urban interface. And that is where this fire began, right? On Saturday, the state was a tinder box, and it was these neighborhoods along the wildland urban interface that caught the brunt of these fast-moving fires that found a plentiful source of fuel and were pushed along by the wind.

Currently, about a third of the two hundred thousand people who live here in Spokane have been placed under evacuations orders, and the community is obviously feeling the weight of that, along with the hundreds of people who lost their homes and all their possessions here. Notable points of the evacuations included buses evacuating people from old folks' homes, and a VA hospital was also evacuated by buses.

And of course, many people left their homes in their cars with their possessions, their pets, their families, et cetera. And of course, that resulted in very slow-moving traffic. Nonetheless, from what I heard this morning, seems everyone evacuated in time at least to save themselves. I know many people will be dealing with tragedies, right?

They've lost their homes. People will have lost pets. People will have lost things that are incredibly important to them, right? I spoke to people out on the Colville Tribes Reservation who were saying they had lost homes that their father, mother, grandparents built with their hands, right? These intergenerational homes that had gone.

That is absolutely tragic. I want to give an update that I got this morning from the public information officer of the IMT that's managing this fire. So we'll drop that in right now. 

My name's Tom Stokesberry. I'm the lead public information officer for California Interagency Incident Management Team Seven.

So right now there's three fires that make up the Spokane area fires. That's gonna be the Fairview Fire, the Old Trails Fire, and the Autumn Lane Fire currently all totaled in the acres is 10,540. but over the last 24 hours, our firefighters have made tremendous progress in putting control lines in around the entire perimeter of all three fires.

Now, that doesn't mean the fire's contained or controlled. We just have those, those management and control lines there. Still have an active firefight, still have active flames in the interior to the point on the Old Trails and Fairview Fire, we actually had a spot outside the line on each one of those that went to about an acre and a half.

But we had the resources in the right place, and they were able to pick those up at about one acre each. so that just kinda proves that there's still active heat, hotspots in this interior, and that's why we have engines in all three of these fires still protecting the structures that have not been impacted yet because the, any kind of wind can throw embers.

And right now the receptive fuels in this area, and by fuels the vegetation that is so dry, right? Your grass, your brush, very receptive to those, those embers. Proof being is the two spot fires. But we have 1,300 firefighters here. We're expected to be over 2,000 by the end of the week. 

I also asked about the number of structures impacted and when people here can expect to return home, and here's what Tom said.

Right now we're well over 700 structures that have been impacted. we do have damage assessment personnel, ordered and en, en route. It's my understanding they'll be showing up today, and we'll have them on the ground tomorrow. So we're gonna start to get a more accurate number of what those impacted structures look like versus, a total loss to just an impacted structure.

And those structures include not only people's personal homes, but garages, outbuildings- Yeah ... sheds. but we're gonna get a better accurate number on those over these next few days, trying to get these communities back to where we can get them repopulated. But in addition to that, there's a tremendous amount of hazmat in there.

We're talking burned solar panels. We're talking, LPG, possible gas leaks, the building materials from homes that have been burned, the stuff that's inside those homes. There is a lot of hazmat. Yeah. So we have to ensure the public is gonna be safe before we repopulate and let them back in there because our ultimate goal is life first, then property.

and that life is not just firefighters. It's the public safety too. 

While I was at the Firebase camp, I also ran into local community members and businesses who were helping out. People were constantly dropping off food and, snacks and, supplies. Here's one local business owner, who explained his efforts to me.

So my name is Tim Codsi. I'm with JK Boots. I'm one of the owners with my brother and dad. 

I asked him what him and his company were doing to support the community. 

On Wednesday, August 5th, we're doing something called Home Front Day. Okay. We're gonna donate 100% of all the profits of that day to the Spokane residents who lost their homes, so they could do that, they could participate.

Just go on our website and just do something. just get something, and that'll go to those people. Yeah. The other things you can do is you can come here and you can, offer to drop off, again, drinks, wipes, essentials. You can look on Facebook. They've posted those things. Okay, cool. The other big thing is just there's other funds that are set up that have, meal trains and...

'cause there's about 60,000 people that are still not b- not able- ... to go back to their homes. yeah. Yeah, 

yeah. What's happening in Spokane is tragic, and it is going to impact this community for years to come. It will take a very long time for rebuilding to happen and probably even longer for people to heal emotionally.

I wanna make sure that we do not overlook the several large ongoing fires that are impacting the indigenous communities around the city, though. Because as resources shift to the fires that burn the city, these communities will see fewer resources, and indeed, they already have seen fewer resources. I spent the last couple of days visiting the Colville Tribe's reservation, Spokane Tribe reservations.

Today, I spoke to folks who had cut their own fire lines around their homes and communities who were prepared to fight the fire, and indigenous people here have lived with fire for thousands of years, right? They have a deep understanding of fire, and people there had decided to stay and to defend their communities even in areas that were impacted by level three evacuations.

Not everybody, right? Some people who were more vulnerable, some people who were not able to participate in that response or didn't feel safe doing so left, and other folks stayed. As resources continue to be diverted to fight these fires in Spokane, and as news coverage will continue to center on the city, folks who lost their homes out in these tribal communities will also need help, and it might be harder for them to find it.

Some of these people are still in their homes. just today, I spoke to several people who are determined to do their hardest to save their homes and hoping that the wind doesn't pick up. They're cutting their own fire lines. In several cases, forestry and mining workers as well as tribal community members who are on contract fire crews have been using their machinery and their skills to clear space and create better fire breaks around their communities.

It's a really tragic and difficult situation, especially when combined with this reporting that I will link to of Red Cross volunteers making racist remarks at shelters that made indigenous folks feel unwelcome there. I don't think I need to repeat those, but I will link to the story if you'd like to read it.

It is also, of course, amazing to see the strength and resilience of communities coming together to take care of one another in these tragic situations. I particularly want to highlight the work of the River Warriors Society. I spent today with them moving supplies from one reservation to another. I will include a link to the Spokane Tribal Network, which people can use if they'd like to donate to support that mutual aid work.

They're really doing excellent work. They're getting people what they need. They're filling those gaps. They're moving more quickly than big organizations or big government things can. Even tribal governments will require paperwork, whereas what they're doing is literally standing at gas stations using cards to pay for people's gas so they can get where they need to go, right?

Getting people hotel rooms, getting people food, getting people the things they need to get through this and to begin healing. Today, I helped load hundreds of pounds of pet food and animal food into a trailer, for instance, so that people who need to feed their animals don't have to drive for hours away from their homes, right when the risk of fire is high, and they want to stay home and do what they can to protect their homes.

they're really doing excellent work, and I would encourage you to support them if you have the resources. 

Some 20,000 people in BC's Okanagan lived those gut-wrenching experiences over the weekend.

Loss of homes, loss of animals, and loss of any certainty of what comes next. Growing wildfires led the province to declare a state of emergency. The entire town of Summerland had to evacuate. The nearby fire is still out of control. Craig Milton is from Summerland. He has a small animal sanctuary there and music venue, all of which has been lost to fires.

We're reaching him in West Kelowna. Craig, thank you for joining us. 

Yeah, good morning. 

I know you're grappling with so much right now. How are you holding up today, Craig? 

doing pretty good. yeah, it's f- doesn't feel real, but, we're doing okay. 

Where are you currently staying? 

I'm staying at my sister's apartment.

She had, rented a new apartment, but didn't, doesn't take possession till, next month. And so fortunately it was just s- sitting here empty, and, we were able to, land there. 

Can you take us back to the weekend and when you realized you would have to leave? Give us a sense of what you've gone through over the last 48 hours or so.

it, yeah, it happened very fast. we live in a, a rural, part of, Summerland, in, in the back of Summerland towards Falder, which of, of course, was almost completely lost. our neighbor came by and honked the horn and said that there was a fire at a, a kind of a c- a camping area about 15 kilometers away called Crump.

And, it was concerning, but it was far away, we just thought we'd pay attention to that. And, the angle that we were at, we couldn't see this giant plume of smoke that was rising up into the air that everybody else could see. it just looked like there was a bit of a dark cloud on the horizon.

So we kinda walked up our hill a little bit to where we could get a better look, and it was pretty obvious that it was a pretty substantial fire. that, I think that was around 5:30. And from that moment on, we realized we had to start, putting out sprinklers around our property in a capacity that might protect our home and, protect some of the animals.

it all happened so fast, that there really wasn't any time to think about it. we just di- got into preservation mode, and, we didn't have an evacuation order. we had no notifica- formal notification. 

What happened to your animals? 

have- we have geriatric dogs. we had a couple reptiles that we rescued.

we ha- we have about two dozen chickens and about a dozen ducks that, that are our residents. We had, seven goats and four sheep. the, the goats and sheep are up on a pasture that had, no combustible m- materials. It was quite green pastures. we filled up n- numerous troughs of water.

it became pretty quickly obvious that there wasn't gonna be time to, to bring in trailers to, to try to catch all the animals and, move them to another location. so we were just basically, in preservation mode. we put large sprinklers that would cover the entire, duck and chicken paddocks.

We left those open. We left the coops open for them so that they could go in if they had to, but that they could also escape if they had to. then it was m- just a matter of g- basically grabbing our dogs, grabbing the, the couple reptiles that we also cared for. my sister had been there 'cause she had a tortoise that we were watching, and she had come to pick up her tortoise when we weren't really that worried at that point.

still had no fire warning, but we started seeing vehicles rushing past coming out of Faulder. clearly people fleeing, something really bad. And, that's when we started to realize that something pretty serious was happening. 

So your property wasn't just your home, right?

You have a live music venue there, too, I take it. what's happened to that property? 

yeah, we work from home. It w- it's, we have about 3.2 acres. we have a home-based, architectural technology business, in addition to the sanctuary. but we also run a, a, a host concert venue. It's, and we have a venue, a sort of an indoor and an outdoor space.

We host concerts for, artists, fr- from across the country, lots of local and BC, western artists. a- and, it's all gone now. it's burn- burned completely to the ground. We have, there's nothing left. 

Wow. I'm so sorry. it's so early days, but have you started to think about what's next for you and whether you'll rebuild?

w- I'm sure people have seen pictures of some of the other places, that where, the entire, it looks like a bomb went off and everything's gone. In our case, we didn't have any coniferous trees on our property. we bordered the forest, which I understand h- has burned substantially.

But on our property it was all deciduous trees. So it's surreal because y- I've seen pictures and the, the houses are all gone, but our entire property is still green and quite lush and intact. w- we w- you wouldn't be rebuilding on a moonscape. we live on a kind of a long street that sort of goes along the foot of the mountain, and we're, our house was the only house that was destroyed.

Our, our neighbor, lost a workshop, which was right along our property probably because it probably caught fire off one of our buildings. And, so we can rebuild and not it'll be much like it was before. 

In Southeast Georgia, the Berry family, farming for generations. Their grandpa, a sharecropper But this spring, drought. 

So your dad said he's 

never seen 

a drought like 

this before. 

Right. 

Have you? No, not in my lifetime I haven't. Never heard stories of a drought this bad either.

If we were to plant r- on schedule in the heart of the drought, we pretty much would have lost all those crops. 

170 miles west, the opposite problem at the 2,400 acre Longleaf Ridge Farm run by sixth generation farmer Casey Cox-Kerr. 

I wanted to come back and build on the foundation that my parents had built.

She too faces drought, though her part of Southern Georgia finally did get rain a few weeks ago, but it was a downpour that menaced the crops. 

Not only does it, it drown some of the, the plants, it also creates disease and pest problems. We're seeing wetter wets and drier dries, and that can be a big challenge with what we're experiencing on the farm.

Wetter wets, drier dries. You won't be surprised to hear this has something to do with climate change. 

It's affecting precisely those things that people depend on for their livelihoods, their food, their water supplies. These are essential. 

Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

Climate change is, is making these more frequent, both the short duration kinds of droughts that we're seeing in some places, but also the longer mega droughts like the Southwest is experiencing.

The unpredictability of it, you know, the extremes of both the droughts and then the whiplash with extreme rainfall events, that makes it very difficult to plan for these kinds of conditions. 

During drought, ag professor Wes Porter of the University of Georgia says the local soil compounds the problem.

If you look in our region where we're at now in Southern Georgia, we have a really sandy soil. So sandy soils can't hold a whole lot of water. So what that means, we actually evaporated out significantly higher amounts of water than what we had received back in, so we were looking negative. 

Meanwhile, those farmers now face punishing costs like diesel, spurting up almost 50% since the end of February, and some seven in 10 farmers say they now can't afford rising fertilizer costs.

I mean, now we would normally be at market already, and we haven't, haven't been. Things just aren't ready. 

Now, both guys work full-time jobs, Tony at the Port of Savannah, Cedric's an electrician. How much time do you get to spend here as opposed to on your regular jobs? 

for me s- two to three days out of the week.

And for you? 

Evenings and weekends 

They help finance the farm with their salaries. The drought upped the cost. The Berry's usually sell hay, for example. Had to hold some of it back to feed their cattle, their own pasture parched dry. $10,500 in lost sales. 

Fertilizer, fuel, those things like that, that, that money would have covered that for sure.

Is that $10,500, that, is that a substantial- Pit? 

Oh, yes, sir. I mean, if you wanna give me $10,500, then I ask you that question. 

Tony Berry grew up a city boy in Savannah, never dreamed he'd wind up down on the farm. But with cousin Cedric- 

We just naturally came together, and it's like, "Okay, well, let's follow the family tradition and do this."

Back across the state, tradition brought Casey Cox Kerr back, too. 

Like most things, a little bit of time and perspective made me realize how unique this farm is and how special it is that I get to do this. 

But with the changing climate, what hope is there for family farmers? 

This technology is very vital to- 

Uh-huh

survival. Technology. Like precision irrigation. At a University of Georgia research park, BJ Washington and team are helping farmers conserve their water. 

You can program how much water you put out. You can program where it needs to start and stop in the field. You can speed it up or slow it down within the field to put out more water or less water.

you can do all that from this panel. 

Those big circles you see from your airplane window seat, created by center pivot irrigation rigs like the ones here, sprinkling water over crops slowly and evenly instead of spritzing it all at once. And these soil moisture sensors let the ground itself signal just how much soaking it needs so farmers don't over-water.

Given the drought, it's, it's a huge deal, because we wanna, we wanna be as efficient with irrigation as possible. We don't wanna waste water. We don't wanna irrigate if we don't need to. 

We could not grow what we grow without irrigation because of just the frequency of drought. The new irrigation systems, new technologies, we're, we're doing, we're taking the steps that we're able to take to mitigate the risks that we can.

We have to focus on what we can control. 

Which made me wonder, why isn't everyone doing this? One obvious answer: It's not cheap. The irrigation rigs cost at least $90,000. The sensors, up to $2,500 each. But, says Professor Porter... 

It looks like a big cost, but it, it's costly for us to, to misapply our irrigation.

It's costly for us to lose yields because of that, right? And so I have a lot of return on investment data that show that anywhere from, on the low end, 20 to $30 per acre, all the way up to $150, $200 per acre return for utilizing advanced irrigation scheduling, and that's per acre. 

So maybe data will get the nation's farmers to change their ways, and maybe farm tech will stay ahead of further climate changes.

Man, we've got this. We can, we can adapt. We can change. We've been doing it for a long time. The way we farm today might look different than the way we farm in 100 years But I'm hoping that the work we're doing today is helping build a foundation 

And in the long run, Rachel Cleetus says, there are policy steps worth considering.

And so we should, as a nation, not leave farmers on their own to deal with this, whether they can afford it or not. We've got to invest. We have to make sure that farmers are aware of the options that might be there, and that they get grants or, low-cost loans that they can maybe install some of these technologies on their farms if they need them.

Meanwhile, the Berrys keep on pushing without pricey technology, leaning on a tradition older than the farm. 

We do put faith in our good Lord that He will provide a way, because He has done that all these years before us, and I, I'm a strong believer that He will continue to do that. 

We're doing the job that's important, you know?

Providing the food for surrounding communities, you know, letting people know where the food actually comes from, and we need that. And, you know, just feel like if we're serving that purpose, you know, He will provide. 

Well, He moves 

in mysterious ways. 

Yeah, definitely. 

For the Berrys, though, mystery or not, wetter wets and drier dries are an all-too-present reality.

What more do we know this morning about the size and impact of the Bald Range wildfire?

the size is big. It's 130 square kilometers, so about the size of the city of Vancouver. it is still burning out of control. That just means that forest crew, forest fighter, firefighter crews don't yet have a handle on where it's going and how it's spreading. The news this morning, though, is that we've learned that, during the evacuation on Saturday evening, an 80-year-old woman died in that evacuation.

We don't have too many details about how, but she was in this, just a, a little bit north of where our friend Craig was. And, they, that evacuation happened very quickly, some of it by helicopter, and we understand that she died in the course of that evacuation. So we're waiting for more details from the police and the coroner about that.

The weather, as, Doug mentioned, still hot and dry, windy, last night. We, are expecting an update from the BC Wildfire Service in a couple of hours, in terms of how that fire behavior, has changed in the last, 12 hours or so. 

The fire moved incredibly quickly. I think it doubled in size in only a few hours, right?

Have you ever seen anything like that before out there? 

yes, we have. And it's because the forests are so dry. You heard, the mayor of Summerland, Doug Holmes, talk about the many years of drought. Of course, that is exacerbated by, warm temperatures. The number of days above 30 degrees in this valley has doubled in 20 years, so we're getting more hot, dry weather.

That, of course, driven by fossil fuels and climate change. And so we have seen fires explode like this before, driven by that wind, that comes down off the, plateaus toward the lake in the evening. One, in fact, just a few weeks ago at the other end of Okanagan Lake, where a fire just exploded in size, very similar along, Okanagan Indian Band land.

That fire getting far less attention just because there are fewer people in that area. But I think back, too, to 2023 when the West Kelowna fire exploded out of those hills. It had further to go, in terms of how long it took to get to the town, but it, they, these fires now grow so rapidly. and it's, these people just had moments to get out of their homes.

Just, really terrifying stuff. 

Yeah, the images of this wildfire are just like something out of a movie. And we've- Yeah ... just heard how devastating it's been for some people, as you say, losing their homes. How are people grappling with the speed and the intensity and the loss from this wildfire? 

it's very difficult, and I've known, people who have lost homes in previous fires in this area, and it is a l- is a years-long process, and it's very traumatic.

These are places where people have built their f- their families and their memories, and w- a lot of the times where their, livelihood is centered. And so there's this initial shock about how quickly this happened. That means, of course, that people didn't have time to grab mementos, family heirlooms, things like that.

so the scale of the loss is, really tough, and it will take years now for these people to rebuild their lives, Because of course there's grappling with emergency social services to start with, but then insurance companies and banks, and it, it's a long process. And, we heard that Craig will rebuild where, because h- his property is relatively green- despite the fact that the buildings are gone. But, there will be people who, are going back to a moonscape and will really, think twice about whether they wanna start over again. It's very tough. 

BC Premier David Eby has declared a province-wide state of emergency on, over the weekend due to this wildfire.

There's not just this one, though. There's more than 100 fires burning across the province, more than 20,000 people displaced. How well is the province responding to this wildfire to this point? 

at this point it's, really in the hands of professionals at really the local level. Regional districts, which is a level of government here in BC, in between the province and, municipalities, really take the lead here in terms of getting people into accommodations, getting them the food vouchers they need, and the day-to-day survival.

I have heard, obviously there are, Monday morning quarterbacks who will question, and maybe for good reason, question the province's response here. but f- given the scale of this disaster, w- I have heard pretty good things about how the province is responding. Now, there will be conversations, in the years, d- months, and years to come about how sustained that support is.

Sometimes there's lots of support right off the top, and then when it comes, we saw this with the floods in the Fraser Valley a few years ago. The people are still waiting for federal relief there three, four years on. So the proof of the pudding in its, is in its eating, but so far so good it seems.

Now, there are all kinds of questions, too, about whether the province was prepared and is prepared for these kinds of explosive wildfires driven by heat and forest mismanagement, and those are conversations that are just starting. 

We know that wildfires hit BC, of course, particularly hard, but it's not just a BC problem, right?

What should the rest of the country be thinking about right now? 

I think w- the thing to think about here is the scale of the problem. Th- you will have people who just say, "Clean the forest," or, "Rake the woods," or whatever, right? The scale of the, the forests in British Columbia, n- nevermind the boreal forest in Canada, at a landscape level, I think p- people will need to realize how...

that's impossible, essentially. And that, but that, p- places that are close to, dry pine woods, places like Summerland- ... need far more, attention on the management of the forest in what they call interface areas. That is, areas around populations, so that when these big fires come, because they will- Yeah

they don't come right into town.

Next, Section B, EUROPE ON FIRE

Where have you been reporting from these last couple of weeks, and what does it feel like on the ground?

where was I? I guess putting the global into my job, for better and worse. I was in, France and then Malaysia and then Pakistan and then back to Europe. I was not on the ground for the wildfires, but I was on the ground for the heat waves that were the first domino that, that led to them.

c- basically in the last week, where had I been? I'd been in Rome in my home, but collaborating with the Times colleagues in France and Spain and trying to, wrap our arms around the on the ground stuff and then more from my perspective, like the science and the climate, change aspect of that story.

So talk about the heat wave first. That cracked the news headlines in the United States to some degree, but how hot was it, and how unprecedented was it? 

it is the b- it's basically the beginning of the story of the wildfires, was these heat waves. First, there was one in May, late May. school was still going on, and it was described as unprecedented for that period of the year in France.

in some places it even touched 100 degrees, which never happens in May. Then, about a month later, late June, it was the big one. this was the hottest heat wave that France has had ever, not just in June, but ever. It had back-to-back-to-back days where each of those days was the hottest on record.

and it was also exceedingly hot in Spain. That alone wouldn't have been such a terrible thing in terms of creating wildfire conditions, except that heat, like it went... It receded a bit but never really returned to normal. it was hot for weeks upon weeks, and there was almost no rain.

So at that point, heading into late July, you had conditions that were primed for huge fires if just a single spark happened. and they did. So that's what happened last week, these huge fires unfolding simultaneously in France and Spain. And yes, they have been brought under control now, but it took extraordinary resources, and the fire season normally is just starting now in Europe, so it's not over.

Chico, I gave some of the stats in the intro.

What would you add to how much death and displacement these wildfires have caused across the continent? 

the displacement was huge. Hundreds, 300,000 or more people had to flee their homes during these wildfires just in a week. 

So you had, you had these two events, not just as huge fires, but fires that were... And this I think, what made them stand out, near population centers and in areas that were, that, where cities were threatened. it didn't reach Madrid or Bordeaux, but those were the two cities that were close by and where, you would feel the air quality suffer for periods.

those events were surprisingly not deadly, not so deadly, which is incredible and is a testament to the fact that there was a lot of firefighting resources thrown at these issues. A few weeks earlier, there had been a wildfire that was, that, about a dozen people died. The real deadly event in Europe this year has been the heat, and, and that heatwave that I was describing just a few minutes ago, it leveled a, a death toll across Western Europe that is conservatively in the tens of thou- like, 10,000.

There's been another study that said 20,000 excess deaths. we're talking about mammoth, casualties, which never get the same amount of, headlines that they should because these, these numbers are kind of estimates and abstractions. You're not putting... There's not a list of names.

It's not like a plane crash, where there's this immediate sense. But it's, it's looking at population scale changes in what does an average week of look and what does, what did that- ... week look like. but, if you just step back and consider that, you're talking about, developed Western Europe, where a heatwave comes in and 10,000 extra people die.

That's astonishing. and we can get into why that would happen, but yeah. W- the, the wildfire, suffice to say, pales in comparison to the heat in its ability to be lethal. 

maybe it's worth saying, how do people die from heat? 

it depends. not every place is equally vulnerable. we s- we can start by saying that.

And, and for example, if you had a couple back-to-back days above 100 degrees in Phoenix, which happens all the time, you're not gonna have 10,000 extra deaths. It's a city that has built itself for weather like that. And of course, air conditioning is not the only part of the answer, but it is a big part of the answer.

Also, just what do people's houses look like? how equipped are they to shield from the sun and to, to stay cool? Europe, especially Northern Europe, was never accustomed to heat like this. And, they often don't ... These buildings are, were built for colder climates, and they are built to trap or retain heat.

France and Paris specifically, you think about the beautiful pictures of Paris with these, kind of grayish, bluish-grayish roofs. Those roofs are made out of zinc, and that conducts heat almost like an oven. Huh. So people who live on those top floors are roasting. Now, and then, yeah, and as we know, especially in France, but many European, Northern European countries, air conditioning, the rates, at homes is extremely low.

It continues to be low. so now if you have this combination of hot days back to back, apartments that hold the heat, and no air conditioning, the homes can be so hot that over some days it can become deadly. Now obviously, if it's, if you're a young person, you have, some mobility, you go to a mall, you jump into a pool, you go to a friend's house who does have AC, you take emergency measures.

But if you're somebody who is old, has health, disabilities, you might not be able to do that. and that is the population that suffers the most, people who are already frail, who had preexisting conditions or were elderly. so you have people living by themselves on those top floors, dying alone, and those deaths are hard to note in the moment oftentimes, but they are a marker of heat waves like this in Northern Europe.

One thing that, that you didn't mention but we've seen elsewhere when you talk about how more the northern parts of Europe, often don't have air conditioning because they haven't needed them in the past, I've read that even includes in many hospitals and nursing homes- Yes ... for example. Do you know that to be true?

Yes, it is true. and schools too you should mention because, though once you get into July and August it's not a problem, there were schools in, in France in late May where it was, in the 90s every day inside the classroom, 95 degrees, and kids were suffering tremendously. Like just as elderly are more vulnerable to the heat, so are children.

but yes, it's true that some hospitals don't have AC, and some nursing homes don't have it. this has become a political issue where some politicians, especially Marine Le Pen, who's kind of the vanguard or one of the vanguards of the far right in France, has talked about the need to create a national air conditioning plan such that all of these public facilities are equipped And, I think that the more that France and other Northern European countries experience these heat waves, the more it becomes hard to argue with the need to lay out air conditioning on a more massive scale.

Because these are places that were, yeah, they would experience some heat, but maybe just a couple days where it was really unpleasant. You start to plan differently when a couple days turns into a couple weeks of unrelenting heat, and you just can't feel comfortable. You start to go crazy. I've had those summers too myself in Rome, more because of outages, not because of, of lack of AC at all, just because the AC wasn't working.

And you go crazy after a while. The day-to-day stress and the worrying about your health, or more in my case, my kids' health. You're giving them... dunking them in ice baths. Everybody looks unhealthy. It's 100 degrees in your house. and that's just a couple days in my case. So like I can't imagine how difficult it is, even for somebody who's healthy to just spend day after day in 100-degree house.

That's what happened in France this summer.

You were giving evidence to a select committee on heat waves a few months ago. Since then, we have seen successive heat waves in the UK. We've seen hundreds of thousands of people evacuated from their homes. This year feels different to me. Does it feel different to you? And have we passed over some kind of invisible threshold that we will look back and remember later?

How are you interpreting this summer? 

It does feel different. It feels like the impacts of the three, almost four heat waves, and all the things that have gone alongside it are affecting more people. I now live in Bristol and led the London Climate Resilience Review, and I think when we had 40-degree heat, and it was ba-back in 2022, whilst it was broader than London, it feels like more of the country is having a much more detailed response.

But yes, it does feel different, and there are people asking Suffering, feeling confused about what is happening, and I hope this does cut through in a very different way. But I think it needs us to be organizing in a very different way too. 

Have we heeded any of the warnings that you've been giving us over the years?

I don't think we have got in a place that is ensuring that we're prepared for what scientists and others, including myself, have been calling out for quite some time. And I think it's quite shocking. I do listen to your podcast, and I think we all think back to that first chapter in Ministry of the Future- Yeah

and that has been a reference point for me over many years since I first read that book, and it just feels like it is playing out big time in Europe, here in the UK, and I really do wonder whether our political leaders are taking heed of what it is that we're experiencing, and how this is not just an environmental issue.

This is a health issue. This is a, an economic issue. This is a security issue, and every minister, every secretary of state, every leader at a national level, at a regional level, and at a local level should be thinking about how this could be impacting the work, the communities that, that they are responsible for and help protect them.

It's interesting, isn't it? 'Cause our, I think that many of us have perhaps labored under an assumption that at some point things would get to a point where the costs and the impacts were so evident that the arguments that would be made for mitigation and adaptation would become easier.

But as the risk gets greater, the urgency doesn't seem to be translating. What's... How do you explain that to yourself, why that's not happening in the way that we might have thought that it would? 

If you take heat, I think when you're living the heat wave, it feels so real, but almost as soon as they go away, you forget.

you feel better. I've certainly felt- across the summer that I've been living with a heat wave hangover as my body has not responded particularly well to some of the heat that we've been experiencing, and the relentlessness of it. But it is silent. We don't necessarily see it. We now are seeing it in the fires.

We are seeing it in the dryness of our landscape. And I think that is when it becomes incredibly real. But it's very easy to forget very quickly and go back to the next big thing that a government needs to worry about. I think often the impacts that, and the scale of them, it has taken months to get the economic consequences, the health consequences.

So by the time we are notified by the UK Health Security Agency that there are excess deaths, it's nine months later and we're probably in the middle of a cool period. Yeah. So the news doesn't hit in quite the same way. So I am really pleased to see how some of our scientific organizations are now working a bit like we get with, weather attribution, that after an event, that this is seen to be as a direct consequence of our changing climate, that we start seeing maybe a week, maybe 10 days, two weeks after a heat wave, what an es- early estimate of those economic consequences might be.

Th- that's true, and getting some of the feedback of the economic impact is gonna help us and help citizens to understand what's happening. But, you would be forgiven in, where you and I are both sitting in the UK but this is an issue in many countries, for being quite confused at the moment. I don't know who is doing the headlines and the front page of The Times at the moment, but famously in social media over the last few days, we've had various issues of The Times where there's been a big above the fold piece that says, "Net zero risks blackouts," or something like that, and underneath is a picture of an enormous wildfire and people fleeing from the scene, and these two things are coexisting together.

I'm talking to lots of people. It feels like something else is going on. There's a deliberate attempt to stop us seeing this. Do you buy that, or do you think that we're just struggling to connect the dots in the media? 

I wish I knew the answer. But if I'm thinking of the fires that are playing out in France and Spain in particular, but in other parts of the world, and then take the city of Bordeaux, and knowing some of the industries, the businesses, the security organizations that are present in and around that major city in France, there shouldn't be a single chief exec of a company or a leader of a security group not thinking about the consequences of that fire, not just from the health and the lives and livelihoods of those thousands of people who are being disrupted right now, the 240-odd homes that have been burnt down to the ground, but thinking about the real risk- To those organizations from, whether it is explosions, where heat can damage those businesses.

I think whilst worrying about that, that dialogue, also understanding that maybe there's a whole range of other leaders who aren't necessarily thinking about climate from a, from the perspective that you and I have been doing for many years, but will now absolutely have to be thinking about the risks to their businesses, to their livelihoods, to how profitable they are, looking at their risk registers from something that is playing out in Spain, in France, but could over time start playing out here in the UK as well.

Yeah. No, it's such a good point. And this podcast obviously listened to in many parts of the world and, as you say, this is gonna affect, yes, the UK, but Germany, the Nordics. it's already in Canada. There's lots of different scenarios where this is happening. I'd love to ask you 'cause, as you now look so many things that you, in the leadership that you've shown over so many years with the Environment Agency and the commissions you've been part of, including the, the heat work that you're doing right now, you have made recommendations for policy interventions that should be made by governments to help protect citizens.

And as you now look at how the UK is experiencing this summer, but also France and Spain, what are some of the recommendations that you have made, had they been fully implemented, would've made the biggest changes to what we're now experiencing? 

So where we're seeing progress in this country and elsewhere is that mayors are taking action- 

and delivering change. So one of the key areas of, focus from the London Climate Resilience Review, which I was commissioned to do by Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, was to focus on heat. And in the absence of a national strategy for heat, focus on a strategy for London and a delivery plan. Now, I would have loved to...

that to have been implemented immediately, and there were some recommendations that were, including holding an exercise called Exercise Helios, which was inspired off the then mayor of Paris's focus on 50 degree... the potential for 50-degree heat in Paris. This was about having experienced two to three days at 40 degrees, what would London need to do to get ready for a week of 40 deg- degree heat?

So that was implemented back in the summer of 2024. During London Climate Action Week, Sadiq Khan launched Heat Ready London, which was London's response, London's plan to take action on heat across all sectors. It was launched, interestingly, at Islington Fire Station- 

... 

alongside the fire brigade and with the commissioner for the London Fire Brigade.

Because back in 2022, alongside the heatwave when we had a whole range of different impacts playing out, there was a ring of fire all the way around London, and over July 19th, 20th, it was the busiest day for the London Fire Brigade since the Second World War. And what that plan does is... and it's still at its relative early stages.

I think we're going to see, be seeing more details of it come out this summer- Sh- shows what a mayor can do and in the absence of that national vision for a heat strategy. But like many mayors in this country and many mayors around the world, it also depends on the right powers and the right finances being devolved to that local level.

I've almost, internalized that myself to a degree. But like in Italy, if you're, if you have a cold, any, any elderly person will blame it on what they call the colpo d'aria, which is like a hit of air that generally comes from the air conditioning. and they believe that, the vacillation, when here when you go to an airport or a supermarket, it might be 67 degrees inside, and they think that the, moving from that into 100-degree parking lot back into a cold home is gonna make you sick, guaranteed.

Is 

there any science underlying that? 

I haven't looked. I've always assumed that it can't be true, Europeans don't need to use air conditioning the way we do. the people that I know who are f- friends of my parents, like elderly, like A- AC holdouts, they now get it, but they maybe use it for a half hour in the afternoon just to take the edge off.

and then their apartment goes from being, dangerously hot to just hot. To me, that's a great way to use an air conditioning- Yeah ... because you are- For other reasons ... you're not gonna make yourself sick that way. You're gonna avoid getting yourself sick. 

So you reported recently Europe looks to be shying away... Even Europe looks to be shying away from some of its most ambitious climate goals. You have a story from July with the headline, "Europe proposes weaker policy for reducing emissions."

What's happening? 

yeah. it's a proposal, so it has to be still debated, by, by the member states of the European emit- European Union. This would be a change to, something called the ETS, which is essentially like a cap and trade system where the cap shrinks every year for emis- the allowable number of emissions that i- in certain industries.

the EU's idea is to lower the pace at which that cap shrinks. So essentially, that would, allow for slightly more emissions every year for a longer period of time. that's just one of the changes that has happened from Europe on kind of this theme over the last couple years. Like last year, Europe, w- watered down a, a pledge to stop having, stop allowing new sales of petrol four-wheel cars from 2035.

That was, made under heavy pressure from industry where they see that, the, their own European car dealers are not fairing well during the EV transition, especially compared to China, which has a huge advantage in EVs. All these changes, I think they come from the same theme, which is, the, the easy gains of making changes are over now.

And this point of, if you're gonna really hit your goals for, a cleaner economy and, societies and industries, you need to s- make big changes. And if you're not politically ready for that, then you start doing the stuff that Europe is doing. the full context though is that, since the '90s, Europe has done a pretty good job of cutting emissions.

it's a much... it, the amount of greenhouse gases that the EU puts into the atmosphere is about 40% less than, than it was in 1990. And still on paper their goal is for that 40% to become 90%, a 90% reduction by 2040. there's still, some of the same, climate backlash DNA that you see in other parts of the world, especially the United States.

but I think that it's only to a small degree compared to... You don't have, you don't have, the top political figures v- in Europe vehemently saying that this is bunk or, ... the, it's ... What they're trying to do is, this tricky middle ground appeasement of different political factions and industry, and they always end up tweaking things in the margin and making things weaker.

It's not pretty, but that is what's happening. B- it's not an abject rejection either of climate change or of the goals that, we need to bring these greenhouse gas emissions down. So it's k- it's... I think that's the best way to encapsulate it. It doesn't fit pr- pretty, it doesn't fit in a pretty way under, under denialism or under, embracing of the climate goals.

It's somewhere in the middle. 

And I think we have one example on the phones of kind of Europe hitting a, a, a certain degree of climate policy wall. Selma in Brooklyn, originally from Prague. Selma, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in. 

Thank you for having me. so I go to the Czech Republic, and, the, while the policies are being, drafted and sometimes signed into law, the, there's a lot of pushback from local communities 'cause we are a, as in Russia, they call it dacha, dacha country, where people go to the countryside on weekends.

They have homes there. And a lot of the sort of liberals, the same ones who push for these climate change policies say, "Not in my backyard." Because it's unsee, no, they don't look good. The solar, it's less bucolic. so that's one thing. But on a upside, what I wanna say, Europe is so much more about prevention, like in health as well, and some of it is just by chance, or by design, before World War...

So the pre-war buildings in the Czech Republic are built very solidly, and if you're in one of those homes, during sum- if there's a heat wave, yes, there's some more heat, but generally, if you build houses out of raw, brick, there's no need as much for, especially if the heating sticks a little bit better, and the coolness stays longer.

And I notice here, that even the new buildings, they are built like, paper basically, just wooden sticks and 

 

And then of course you need air conditioning. 

and more heat. So you're producing more and more. And finally, also the policies of bringing in, better train service, cheaper train service, which is a huge thing for America.

I understand the size of it is a challenge. But even easy routes like between, let's say, New York and Montreal, it's a 14-hour ride where it could be five hours, and it would save so much, money, would be much less. So that's what I have to say. 

Now, Section C, THE DELAY MACHINE

To understand what the endangerment finding is, we must take a step back to 2007, when a Supreme Court ruling changed how the US viewed pollution regulation

Good morning, and, thank you all very much for being here today. Today's hearing will focus on the aftermath of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts versus EPA, both within the Bush administration and within Congress. In 1998, in response to an inquiry by then Representative Tom DeLay, the Clinton administration's Environmental Protection Agency said that it believed that the Clean Air Act provided it with the authority to regulate carbon dioxide.

One year later, a group of environmental and other advocacy organizations petitioned the EPA to use this authority to set greenhouse gas standards for cars. But it wasn't until 2003, when the Bush administration had already embarked on a course of denial, delay, and dismissal of the risk of climate change and the need to address it, that the EPA repudiated the Clinton administration's conclusion that carbon dioxide was a pollutant that could be regulated, and denied the petition.

That petition became the case known as Massachusetts versus EPA. 

The voice you're hearing is Ed Markey, a Democrat known for progressive policies and a leading voice on climate change in the US Congress, who served as the US representative for Massachusetts 7th congressional district from 1976 to 2013.

In June 2007, two months after the Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court ruling, the House Select Committee held a hearing led by Markey exploring the ruling's implications. Until the 2007 ruling, the Bush administration continued to dismiss what by then was already undisputable scientific evidence of the dangers of carbon dioxide for human health and the planet, asserting that it lacked authority to regulate carbon dioxide, and that voluntary regulations would be sufficient.

The Supreme Court ruling changed that. In a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled that under the plain meaning of the Clean Air Act, carbon dioxide is a pollutant. What that meant was that the EPA now had the duty to regulate this pollutant, as long as it could determine the emissions of carbon dioxide endanger public health and welfare.

That decision was important because, number one, it found that at least states have standing to sue when it comes to climate change issues. It found that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and it said that the EPA cannot decline to regulate based just on policy issues.

There's a statutory duty to evaluate under a specific provision of the Clean Air Act whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or the welfare with respect to new motor vehicles. So basically, you had the Supreme Court back in 2007 telling the EPA, "Look, this is an air pollutant, okay?

We've looked at the text of the Clean Air Act, and carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases are air pollutants, and there's this statutory duty to decide whether there's, endangerment to the public health or welfare. And now you need to go through a process. You need to go through a reasoned regulatory process to come up with a scientific justification for regulating or not these pollutants."

And so that set into motion the process for adjudicating y- or deciding, the endangerment issue 

The process under the Obama administration led in 2009 to what became known as the greenhouse gas endangerment finding. The EPA found that the current and projected concentrations of six well-mixed greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including the three most known ones, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, threatened the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

The EPA also found that the combined emissions of these greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution that threatens public health and welfare. These findings per se did not directly translate into any requirement on industry or other entities, but they became a prerequisite for implementing greenhouse gas emission standards for vehicles and other sectors.

That became the legal foundation for most federal climate change regulation under the Clean Air Act, and there was a sort of a cascading impact. you quickly get greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks. It led to a power plant carbon dioxide rule, the Clean Power Plan. It led to oil and methane regulations, and it led to some greenhouse gas permitting under the Clean Air Act, something called a tailoring rule.

Interestingly, many of these programs, probably all of them, have been challenged, and some of them have been subject to some modification by courts. But what you saw was that the endangerment finding did create this cascading impact of regulation of climate change by the EPA under the Clean Air Act. So it was this foundational trigger that sort of continued over time to create new programs for regulating greenhouse 

gases.

And I personally, as I look back at it, I think it was groundbreaking because there was so much congressional stalemate over climate change legislation, and this was a way to break through that And it's also something that I think was important in that the way the court decided Mass v. EPA, and then following the endangerment finding, this became a statu- a fixed statutory duty, really, and something that didn't just change with, you know, political change and political wins.

It became part of the program, as it were. And that was 20 years ago. I also think that had an impact on how the federal government viewed climate change and other administrative agencies, how they considered impacts of climate-related risk. you saw different agencies incorporating that into their decision-making process.

And of course, there's been an impact on industry as they've complied with these programs and relied on these programs in terms of making changes in their business and production and so forth. So there's been, it's been a pretty big impact

Now, I can give you chapter and verse as to why the existence of billionaires in our country, even in what we perceive to be a capitalist system, which it's not, but that's for another day, is evidence of a failed economic and political system.

But it really boils down to this. The left understands the inherent contradictions of capital concentration and how this phenomenon positions capital to control the political process to the detriment of the masses. That billionaire doesn't have to be directly picking the pocket of a person on the left in an obvious way for us to understand the societal imbalance of inequality.

The right, on the other hand, doesn't just tolerate the billionaire, they root for them because they believe that there's a chance they might someday be one. "Someday, I'm gonna get mine. I'm gonna get that bag." And our shared distrust of elected officials ironically bolsters these sentiments. See, the left believes the political class can be bought, and therefore seeks to eradicate the possibility of it.

The right believes the political class is in on the corruption and will steal their bag just like they're coming for their guns. And so we hold periodic charades of political participation known as elections to determine whose narrative is winning this tug of war, and that's why the Republican Party doesn't irritate me in the same way as the Democratic establishment manages to do.

Give you another example. The DNC is still evaluating the psychographic and demographic data from Obama's election in 2008. if we can just win back those Republicans in red states who went for Obama, we can swing the pendulum all the way back to the middle. That's the motivating mantra of the DNC and the moneyed interests that support it.

And the reason those Republicans went for Obama is because the global financial crisis fell on a Republican's watch. That's it. That's the whole fucking story. Millions of Republicans voting in their own self-interest because the neoliberal politics of deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy failed at precisely the right moment for Obama to ascend to the throne.

The failure to fix this circumstance is also what led to Donald Trump. Now, I'm about to embark on a three-part series handicapping the twenty twenty-eight field of presidential nominees on the Democratic side. So I'm thinking a lot about the conditions that will activate the base of support, and there's no question in my mind that we will be presented with a two thousand and eight-style opportunity as the Trump administration pulls the threads of the stitches that hold this economy together.

This is basically what the UNFCR project is all about. But sadly, social issues don't move politics in the way that we want them to and in the way that we think they do. The politics of endless wars, civil rights, civil liberties, bodily autonomy, even democracy, they are not the principal dynamics in sea change elections.

Good social policies are constructed during the most polarized economic periods, like catastrophe paved the way for Social Security and market regulation. Prosperity, on the other hand, paved the way for civil rights and Great Society programs. Eras of precarity lead to bad decision-making, and they make us susceptible to the loudest voice in the bully pulpit with a bumper sticker answer to very complicated problems.

And right now, we have a confluence of catastrophic issues on a collision course. Ignoring climate change doesn't make it go away. Like David Sirota's Don't Look Up, the meteor is coming whether you look at the sky or not. But the right has won both the propaganda battle and the precarity battle when it comes to this issue.

They've sown doubt in the science, and they've given equal weight to the uber minority of skeptics in the scientific community, many of whom are probably bought and paid for. That leaves the ignorant masses to their own devices to determine who's right or wrong, myself included. I'm not a scientist. So they've also dismantled the economic protections for the working class, thereby leaving even the most interested and empathetic parties too broke, too disillusioned, and too goddamn tired to muster the effort to fight the tide of lies and disinformation.

And the same holds true for the promise of artificial intelligence. The concept of AI has been around for 70 years, and the first glimpses of operational AI, or what we're told has been operational AI, finally delivered in the last couple of years. And if successful, AI will eliminate tens of millions of jobs.

That's the success narrative. If it fails, it'll bring down the economy because of the volume of over-investment into a very narrow sector So either way, it'll have devastating consequences to the environment. So let's dwell on all this for a moment. In the past couple of years, more money has been invested into AI infrastructure than any public or private investment ever, and the sales pitch was 50/50, both bad.

Either we destroy the economy by eliminating lower and middle parts of the workforce, or we flush the largest capital investment in history down the toilet. And in both cases, we're gonna rip apart communities to build data centers that require more energy and more water than we currently produce or have access to.

Again, don't look up. In all the writing that I've done as an admitted non-scientist and somebody who relies on the expertise of things like, I don't know, experts, a few things have become very clear regarding climate change. First of all, we've gone from reversible to resilience. the window is closed to reverse course now that the warming trends have accelerated and are causing extreme weather events.

Second, we'll make it through as a species, but the way that future generations exist will be fundamentally different. There will be mass migration events and population decline due to famines, droughts, displacement, and those type of things. But here's a fun fact that feeds the self-interest of the Republican mindset.

The United States will have one of the best climates for survival. Then again, swaths of coastal regions will just be underwater, and that is according to the naval scientists who've been modeling this since the early 1990s. That's the military, and we all trust the military, right? Another fun fact: We have examples of reversing damage to the environment and the atmosphere, back when science was a nonpartisan affair, of course.

And we did a piece on this. It was the Montreal Protocol an international compact because scientists figured out that's what was responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. And as a child of the 1970s and '80s, I can tell you this was as big of a threat as quicksand.

And guess what? It's almost closed. We did it. Imagine that But we're fifty years past the time when politicians built public policy around science, and this leaves us with the confluence of disasters that will open up a new hole, not in the ozone, but in our politics. And in that, we once again have the opportunity to construct a new politics in the giant hole that Donald Trump is blowing in the economy.

the math on AI doesn't math. The historic amount of capital being deployed into AI infrastructure is chasing something that we already know does not exist. So if you hold one truth in your head about AI, please let it be this one: AI cannot achieve economies of scale. This is the one fundamental economic piece required within a capitalist economy to justify the pain and economic dislocation required to feed the insatiable growth beast.

At some point, any technological or industrial advancement has to achieve economies of scale. At some future date, it has to bend the cost curve. In the 1970s, internal scientists at Exxon proved that burning fossil fuels would increase the temperature of the atmosphere and heat the earth's surface. They knew it, and they buried it.

In the 1990s, the United States military published a report that predicted where and when US military installations would be underwater all over the globe. They knew it, and we all ignored it. So that's not Al Gore saying it. It's not Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. That's the fossil fuel industry and the military.

And there's no tinfoil hat required because these reports have been totally exposed, and the science has been refined ever since. But don't look up, right? So now back to AI. Similar to what we knew about climate change, we know for sure that the current AI infrastructure will be obsolete, not within decades, but within a few years.

And that increasing compute and increasing efficiencies in these frontier models requires even more investment. And the more it grows, the greater the cost. That is the exact opposite of economies of scale. In fact, it might be the single most inefficient and unprofitable industrial revolution ever. And you need be neither an economist nor a scientist to understand how this all unravels in spectacular fashion and in very short order.

And therein lies the opportunity for the Democratic Party to fill this inevitable void that brings together voters who act, yes, in their self-interest and those who vote in the interest of the masses Just like 2008. But the only ones who are prepared for this eventuality, the only ones who have built resiliency into their models, is the financial sector.

don't get me wrong, there will be carnage, but our tax dollars and the power of our central banking authority are at their disposal, and they will not hesitate to deploy them in order to salvage the system. And what's on offer in the Democratic Party? More centrism and a coordinated attack on the left flank of the party, the new Red Scare.

If you do not stand for something, then you stand for nothing, or worse, you allow the opposition to define it for you.

For nearly two decades, the endangerment finding was the legal engine behind US climate action. It wasn't just a policy, it was a mandate that said the government must act. But this all changed this February. 

Hello, everybody. 

Hi. This is a big one if you're into environment. This is about as big as it gets, they tell me.

Under the process just completed by the EPA, we are officially terminating the endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers. Prices went up incredibly for a worse product. This determination had no basis, in fact, had none whatsoever, and it had no basis in law.

On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty and all over the world, and you see it with the blackouts all over where they don't use it, where they went to wind, intermittent wind, which is weak and ineffective and very costly.

Most costly energy there is. 

There is a lot to unpack here, and while that's not the focus of this episode, let's just clarify before moving on that wind energy is now generally cheaper than fossil fuels in most of the world, with onshore wind costs declining over 68% and offshore wind costs declining over 59% over the last decade, according to Harvard data.

But back to the automotive industry. The Trump administration and supporters of the repeal say the finding's repeal would make cars cheaper, bringing down costs for automakers by some $2,400 per vehicle. Environmental groups are skeptical of the potential cost savings being touted by Trump. They argue the repeal will instead result in additional fuel costs for consumers to power what effectively will be less efficient and higher polluting vehicles.

Not to talk about the health impacts. One analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group, found that the repeal will result in up to 58,000 additional premature deaths and 37 million more asthma attacks between now and 2055. Even President Obama, who is rarely seen publicly commenting on the Trump administration's policies, said in a statement that Americans will be less safe, less healthy, and less able to fight climate change because of it.

Also, that the fossil fuel industry can make even more money The fingerprints of the fossil fuel lobby are indeed all over this administration's climate policy. the industry has seen a direct return on its investments, thanks to the systematic rollback of environmental protections and regulations by the Trump administration.

Since the repeal was announced, Trump administration officials also revived the long-debunked myth that carbon dioxide isn't dangerous. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said CO2 is actually not a pollutant, arguing that plants need it to survive and grow, and the more CO2 there is, the more plants thrive So what's next?

On April 20, the endangerment findings rescission took effect. But like many of Trump's policies, the future of the 16-year-old scientific funding is in the hands of the judiciary. Four days before the deadline, 16 health and environmental groups, including EarthJustice, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the American Public Health Association, filed a petition with the EPA urging the U.S.

Courts of Appeals of the District of Columbia Circuit to send EPA back to the drawing board. The petition outlines what the groups describe as severe flaws in its rule to appeal the endangerment finding and motor vehicle climate pollution standards. It focuses on the repeal's claim that reducing climate pollution from U.S.

cars and trucks is, quote, unquote, "futile." The group said that, and I quote, "It's an especially flawed and problematic assertion given that these vehicles are the largest source of climate pollution in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world, and given the clear evidence that reducing this pollution will deliver enormous benefits to American families."

They go on to say that the flawed claims in the EPA's initial proposal are based on findings from a wildly discredited report. What they're talking about is a report that pretty much downplayed the risks of global warming, contending that mainstream climate science is exaggerated and overlooks the positive effects of climate change.

It was written by a panel made up of five climate change skeptics that the Department of Energy secretly formed shortly after Trump took office last year. The petition also identifies how the EPA systematically undervalued the benefits of reducing climate pollution from cars and trucks, and came to the conclusion that the impacts of vehicle emissions are small by comparing them to what they said are phantom numbers and flawed metrics.

For example, some of the metrics the EPA identifies do not appear in the sources cited by the agency. In other cases, simple maths errors seem to have led to some wildly inaccurate estimates, as much as 86% higher than they should be, according to the petition Environmental groups have also filed lawsuits.

In March, a coalition of 24 states, alongside a dozen cities and counties, sued the Trump administration, arguing that the rescission was illegal, and seeking to reinstate both the finding and limits on standards for motor vehicles emissions. Before them in February, more than a dozen environmental justice nonprofits, many of which were also behind last month's petition, filed a similar lawsuit.

In a statement in response to that lawsuit, the EPA said it carefully considered and reevaluated the legal foundation of the endangerment finding, and revoked it to comply with the law 

The main argument is gonna be that this directly contravenes Mass v EPA. Mass v EPA decided that this is an air pollutant, that the repeal says, "No, it's not."

That you can't address... The Clean Air Act wasn't designed to address global pollution and global issues. It was designed to address localized pollution issues. And so also that Mass v EPA said, "Look, you're not supposed to neglect or decide not to regulate based on policy considerations when it comes to climate change.

You need to go through this endangerment process, and your decision needs to be based on a scientific causal relationship." And so naturally, the question of whether Mass v EPA should be revisited is gonna be teed up, and I think that's what the EPA was ultimately trying to do. I think there's a lot of good arguments that can be made that this is directly inconsistent with Mass v EPA.

You can make certainly arguments under the Administrative Procedure Act that this is not lawful administrative rulemaking, that it's arbitrary and capricious. Those are good arguments. However, since Mass v EPA, there have been significant legal developments. The Supreme Court is considered, a conservative Supreme Court, and there's six conservative justices, and they've been more willing to be active in pursuing an ideological agenda that's consistent with a conservative ideology.

And there's reason to believe that there may be more willingness to upset Massachusetts v EPA, or sidestep it altogether. And so these arguments may be received in a different way once it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. I think it's highly likely this case is gonna get taken up to the Supreme Court.

And it's not just that there's a different composition on the Supreme Court, it's also that there have been doctrinal changes in administrative law. You have the West Virginia v EPA decision that says, major questions should need a, that, that are being addressed by an agency need a clear congressional mandate, that an agency shouldn't just decide those issues without direction from Congress.

And you could see based on those sort of doctrinal developments that the Supreme Court could try to both uphold, or say that its decision is not necessarily directly vitiating Mass v. EPA, but that it is somewhat consistent with Mass v. EPA, which did ultimately say it is up to the EPA to make this endangerment finding.

So the Supreme Court could try to justify a policy reversal in affirming the EPA's repeal. But in order to do that, it's going to be very difficult not to basically just overrule precedent, but it's definitely reasonably likely that the Supreme Court could do just that.

This week, the Trump administration said it would stop funding the Arctic Report Card, a longstanding effort to synthesize the latest research about the fastest warming place on Earth. Now, scientists are scrambling to find a way to publish this major annual report anyway, to continue to track how climate change is transforming the Arctic, impacting everything from glaciers to native communities to global fishing and shipping routes.

This decision is the latest in a series of moves by the administration to curtail scientific research into the impacts of climate change, which the administration argues is plagued with misinformation and alarmism. For more on what this means, we are joined again by glaciologist Twila Moon. She's been a lead editor of the Arctic Report Card, and she's the deputy lead scientist for the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This conversation is part of our ongoing series, Tipping Point. Twila Moon, so nice to have you back on the program. The administration argues that the underlying research will continue, will not go away, just their support of the synthesis of it into this report. I-if that's the case, w-what does it matter if the report goes away?

unfortunately, the simple existence of data does not mean that people are finding that data and being able to access it, use it, and understand what it means. So the Arctic Report Card has played a really important role in bridging the gap between raw data, which is really difficult for most people to understand or work with, towards something that can serve non-scientists so that they can be making good decisions with proper up-to-date environmental awareness.

Can we step back for a second and explain why we care about what's happening in the Arctic? Because to, to many people in the lower forty-eight, they might think this is just a distant place that they'll never go to, and who cares really what happens up there? Why is it gonna impact me? 

what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.

Changes that we see happening with permafrost or frozen ground, also changes with sea ice that forms on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, those changes actually themselves influence the weather we experience down here in the lower 48. But we can also see because the Arctic is warming so quickly, we're seeing a lot of increase in geopolitical tensions and increased attention to security and military activity in the Arctic, and that means that the Arctic has become a US administration priority in regards to paying attention to security, international relations, changes with shipping, and also economic development in the area.

we have seen other instances like these former NOAA staffers who out and then started their own independent website called climate.us to maintain a repository of climate data. Do you think that's something that you and your colleagues are gonna have to do now here?

myself, the other lead independent editors, and our incredible authors, we have usually more than a hundred authors from a dozen countries. This is an international effort. We're gonna do everything we can to get those data to the people who need them for making decisions and having environmental awareness.

But I wanna point out that simply being able to do this in another space does not mean that it's going to have the depth, all of the resources and tools, that people expect. So there's a real, loss in moving this to being something that's no longer supported by NOAA, where we have spent two decades building tools, resources, and a really trusted resource for folks.

as I mentioned, a- and as you well know, the Trump administration has taken other steps like this. They've dismissed scientists who were working on the National Climate Report. They put a climate change skeptic in charge of that document. They've dismantled the, the preeminent atmospheric research center, NCAR, in Colorado.

They've stopped updating the federal database that tracks the cost of hurricanes and floods and things that we know are driven by climate change. The, the president argues that climate change is a hoax. Members of his administration argue that all of this work is full of, alarmism and is just meant to terrify people.

A- as someone who does this benchmark science, what-- how do you respond to that? 

the Arctic Report Card and all of the science that we're reporting in it is specifically emphasizing direct observations of changes. So this is not a report that is projecting about the future or making inferences about what's happening on the ground.

This is a resource that is providing real, accurate, and complete peer-reviewed, trustworthy information about what is actually happening in place, and there's no arguing with reality. It's not a political, position. It's a scientific, re- resource. I 

mean, I know you have spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill talking to legislators and their staff about the importance of this.

We have seen in the past pushback by Republicans and Democrats to certain cuts to climate research. What is the argument that you make to, to legislators, and how do they respond to you when they see substantive cuts like this going on? 

I think that many representatives really clearly understand how valuable environmental intelligence is for making decisions right now, especially in a world that is changing quickly and giving us many different risks and hazards that we have never faced before.

And so I honestly hold on to hope that we may still have a pathway to see the Arctic Report Card as a NOAA report. but like I say, we are going to do our darnedest to ensure that this data is getting to those people who need it because there are many people, within the US, within states, local communities, Alaska, our Arctic state, and also folks in other country who look to this report for getting information, making decisions, and educating their students and workforce.

Right now we're living through a pretty important, significant weather event in Britain. I live on the South Coast. I think it last rained in Portsmouth on June the 26th. 

True. 

It might not rain again till August the 5th, which is about 40 days. 

Yes. Yeah. 

Why has that happened?

In all probability, I know, you know- Okay. 

yeah. 

This is when people say, it happened once in 1896," or- 

Yes. Yeah, and you can never say climate change causes one particular event. But if you remove yourself from all of that, it's basic physics, and we're putting a lot more energy into the atmosphere.

And if you do that, you change climate, you change weather patterns. And we've been knowingly doing this for a long time. this is nothing new. so if you go back to Fourier working on it in 1827, or Eunice Foote in 1849, and Tyndall in the early 1850s, and Arrhenius at the end of the 1800s. There's no...

It's nothing particularly new. I think some people think that this new thing called climate science. It's just physics. It's just chemistry. It's biology. It's what we've been doing post-Enlightenment, and people have been working on climate change for 150 or more years. so we have a really good understanding, which improves as time goes on, of how the science underpinning the climate and the weather works.

and we're putting... We know we're putting a lot more heat into the atmosphere, so there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere, and that means we get a lot more unpredictable, sort of weather patterns and extreme climate situations, which is what we're witnessing, already witnessing around the globe.

But I think it's worth pointing out, a lot of people refer to this as the new normal. This is, this really misunderstands where we are. This is not a new normal. On average, this is the least extreme weather That I, you, and anyone else listening to this will ever live through. It's going to get worse and worse every single year until we stop burning fossil fuels.

Not reduce burning fossil fuels, stop burning fossil fuels. So celebrate this as our least extreme weather year that we're gonna live through. It's going to get worse. 

We'll reflect back on the, the inclement and chilly days of, 32 degrees in London. 

Yes. 

Yeah. before we were growing mangoes and bananas.

Yeah. But to be, just to be clear, we, weather is what happens on top of a, a long-term climate signal. So we might still get a, a cold winter or next summer could be- 

Sure ... 

back to what we're typically used to. But on average, we are definitely seeing this significant trend now, at a global level.

Can you put some numbers in terms of, you said right at the top of the answer, we're putting lots of energy into the atmosphere. Yeah. So can you put some numbers on that? 

In terms of CO2 emissions and- Yeah, 

CO2 emissions, Okay ... parts 

per million, et cetera. 

Yeah. Okay. So the reason we're w- how we're warming the climate, primarily how we're warming the climate, is we're significantly increasing the amount of carbon dioxide, but a- also other greenhouse gases from agriculture and so forth, and in- and industry.

We're increasing those in the atmosphere. And for those who like to play around with numbers, s- since the Industrial Revolution, we... At the Industrial Revolution, before we started burning fossil fuels, we were at, the unit we use is parts per million, we were at about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide, and now we're at about 430 parts per million.

That's happened almost overnight. And I think what's also important there, if you were to plot out, the last 10,000 years or so, which is the time when, human society's really flourished, if you like, so it's when modern society has r- really developed. During that time, we've had an incredibly stama- stable climate, and temperature and carbon dioxide level, so hardly any fluctuation at all.

About 20 parts per million fluctuation in 10,000 years. Overnight, imagine in 10,000 years, the end of that little plot, you put 1850 was when we started burning fossil fuels. Between there and now, which would be basically a straight line up, we've gone from 280 to 430 parts per million. And the physics tells us, the scientists I was mentioning before, the physics tells us, as we put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we trap more warmth in the atmosphere, and I say other greenhouse gases as well.

and so that's what we're doing. we've increased this blanket, if you like, of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the concentration of it. That's trapping in more warmth. And until we actually stop burning fossil fuels and pumping the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, till we stop, the levels of meat consumption, 'cause that has a major, greenhouse gas implication in terms of methane primarily.

Until we stop those things or at least stop fossil fuels and significantly reduce meat consumption, then the temperature will just keep going up. The parts per million will keep going up, and we'll get warmer and warmer. 

And methane is a greenhouse gas alongside CO2. 

That's another very, very powerful greenhouse gas.

It doesn't last so long in the atmosphere. Yeah. Nowhere near as long as carbon dioxide. but it's very powerful. So in the short term, it's actually more, much more powerful per molecule than carbon dioxide. but it doesn't last as long. But if you're talking about this, we'll probably come onto this later.

If you're talking about this, the agreements that we have about what temperatures we want to hold below, 'cause we think above that is too dangerous, then methane plays a really important part in that timeframe, 'cause th- those temperatures we're reaching already. So the short term is so important from a climate perspective.

So methane emissions need to dramatically reduce, and we need to eliminate, carbon dioxide emissions- Yeah ... which is basically fossil fuels. 

And methane, obviously, as you said, comes from animal agriculture, but also it's a big part of fracking, which is one of the arguments 

against fracking. it does come...

Yeah, there's a lot of it from fracking, from the oil and gas industry more generally, from, also from coal as well. So the oil industry has a lot of methane. It puts a lot of methane emissions into the atmosphere. Fracking's particularly bad amongst the fossil fuels, but also there's a lot of methane that is produced naturally.

And as you warm up the climate- Yeah ... you increase the amount of what we might call natural, production of methane. s- so there are other issues. As you warm up the, the peat and the tundra in, in, in Russia and so forth, you're gonna see large quantities, very large quantities of methane increasingly put into the atmosphere.

And also, as you heat up the oceans have far more carbon dioxide in them than the atmosphere. Yeah. As you warm the oceans, just again, O-level physics will tell you that you can't hold as much carbon dioxide in it, in the oceans, and they will start putting that into the atmosphere. So at the moment, the oceans are a really important carbon dioxide sink, but that is looking that we're getting towards the point where those could turn from being a, a sink to a source of carbon dioxide.

Yeah. 

Which is almost too disturbing to contemplate. 

So there are people like Nigel Farage or the median Reform voter, and I hope they're watching this, and they'd be saying, "These people are catastrophists." But what you're saying is, if we get to two degrees or three degrees, and this is very well documented, there is a very p- Decent chance of this cascade of feedbacks where methane is emitted from Siberia, methane hydrate from the world's oceans, and all of a sudden- yeah

we go from four to five to six. 

certainly significant increases in temperature. And, I wouldn't say when you get to t- the, w- some scientists saying that's, we think that's occurring already. So we're starting to see s- there's some thought that we might be seeing early die back in some parts of the Amazon, possibly in some parts of the Congo, but the data's really poor on the Congo.

So we're starting to see certain sort of collapses of key, s- sink structures around the planet, which are really important for keeping the balance. So we're starting to see that now. and some scientists think we've probably crossed some of those, what people refer to as tipping points, non-linearities in our fancy climate language.

But tipping points, we're starting to cross those now. But the problem with this is that, though science is very clear on the, on the causes for all of this, the actual t- exact timeframes are always ... you mustn't put too much precision on them. Of course. and so some scientists think we're just getting to that point now, as others think it'll be

It's a few more years away. But by and large, none of them are disagreeing. we are putting this energy in the atmosphere, which is going to have the, which is gonna bring about these natural sets of feedbacks, which in the end make whatever we do almost irrelevant. the, the system will move to a new equilibrium.

It might move to a new equilibrium that we're not in, and probably be a damn sight better without us in some respects. we've caused ... At least in post-Enlightenment, we've caused a lot of, climate issues, but also broader ecological issues. We haven't found a way yet, post-Enlightenment, of large populations of humans living in any sort of harmony with this sort of, yeah, the natural processes of the planet.

and we are deeply reliant on those natural processes. we're destroying our own home

The other thing you should keep your eye on is that we have now added a new kind of gambling market to our gambling on things that are not traditional gambling industry, which is, the only growth industry in the country aside from data centers. There's now a bunch of different services that are letting people gamble specifically on wildfires and where they hit and how much damage they do.

Oh, Jesus. 

Yeah. Yeah, and I wanna quote from an article in Oregon Live. "As Oregon surpassed its wildfire acreage record over the weekend with more than two million acres burnt, Oregon lawmakers also raised a new wildfire concern Monday as prediction markets continue to allow people to place bets on wildfires, saying it could lead to more human-caused fires."

"In a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets, Senator Jeff Merkley led lawmakers from other w- wildfire-stricken states and Senator, Ron Wyden in urging the agency to crack down on wildfire-related contracts. The group warned that the markets could create financial incentives for arson."

And that's the big deal is that, if you're letting people gamble on this shit- 

Yeah ... 

firefighters- ... might be incentivized to fuck with stuff. Regular people could be incentivized to fuck with stuff. We've seen this happen already. I reported a couple months ago about that Israeli journalist who, posted a video of a missile failing to get intercepted and, hitting into some trees, and he started getting death threats because people were gambling on, like, how, whether or not it would be intercepted, and his reporting was inconvenient to them.

Shit's gonna be happening like that with fires in addition to people trying to start them if this is allowed to go, right? Polymarket lets people bet on not just wildfires but a variety of natural disasters. People can choose yes or no on, as to whether or not they think a category five hurricane is going to hit the United a volcano is going to erupt.

It's just a really bleak thing, and there's, one of the things that I read recently is there's a, there's even a new market s- focused specifically on gambling on California wildfires called Wyldfire, W-Y-L-D-F-Y-R-E. Jesus Christ. The company tagline is, "You can't predict wildfire, but you can trade on it." And I wanna quote, from High Country News in an investigation into this company.

"Currently, Wyldfire users can only simulate trading, but according to the site, the ability to bet with real money is coming soon." 

Oh, gosh. "

The platform purports to be the first prediction market of its kind, pricing county and city wildfire risk in real time. 'California burns every year, and it's getting worse.

The question isn't if, it's when and where,' the site reads." Wildfire frames its platform as providing a public good. "Wildfire turns collective intelligence into better wildfire forecasting, one trade at a time," the site reads. 

Oh my God. 

But entities with a real need for wildfire forecasting, including federal and state firefighting agencies, say they aren't interested in prediction market data.

"The Forest Service does not use- ... information from prediction markets for wildfire forecasts." No. Why? And they don't even need to go, "It's useless." Yeah. "It's useless, and everyone saying this is an idiot and a liar." 

It's insane. This, this whole thing, it's like we can chart, the world's collective knowledge- No

because money- 

People are fucking morons ... 

money is, is- Yeah ... speaks more truthfully than just words. It's just complete nonsense. 

No. People are gonna burn down their own neighborhoods to get rich. 

Yeah. if you look at, like, how much prediction markets have been wrong about a sequence of, high-profile elections just in the past year- 

Yeah

shows that this is not useful or r- reliable data. There is no, hidden truth that prediction markets can find through the, quote-unquote, "wisdom of crowds." And, this, this specific thing on these wildfires is, a two-pronged issue. One, kind of evil, right? To just, win money based on the deaths of- Oh, 

yeah

however many people in natural disasters. 

The destruction of their lives- Jesus Christ ... their everything they've built- Yeah ... the fear. Yeah. Yeah. 

death markets is, one, one aspect. the o- other, aspect is if someone has a lot of money riding on a certain wildfire hitting a certain location, then yeah, there is financial incentive to maybe cause a fire to hit a certain location.

Or try to pay someone else to. Yeah. Yeah. 

There's, that aspect as well. 

It's evil for so many reasons. 

Obviously should be illegal. Yeah. it's insane.

I remember when arguing over whether the market is an information processor that, as you're saying, has, like, all of this collective intelligence from market signals, and it's, the most efficient information processor versus arguing that it's a gambling den.

that used to be an academic debate. Yeah. And now it's just "Oh, no, we're doing this on fires." And it's just, God, e- every, every- everything that was once metaphor is now literal, and all of the metaphors suck 

Yeah, this is pretty fucked up. th- this was a concern that was talked about with, the LA fires- Yep

last year or two years ago, 'cause I, I know there was Polymarket or, Kalshi betting on those, and th- that, that created, a little mini news cycle of, talking about this maybe being a problem. But, the scale in which this has, accelerated is crazy. 

Again, I used to do, sports gambling ads, 'cause I don't have a problem with gambling, like ethically.

the same way I don't have a problem with liquor and whatnot. And then it just became very clear before too m- oh, wait, no, this isn't your father's gambling. This isn't going to fucking... things are well beyond he- heading to Vegas for, a weekend or playing cards online with your friends. This has turned into, everything.

this is the omniculture. It's almost the only recreational activity a lot of Americans have anymore. 

In my realm, I think that is one of the biggest concerns I have, is that my academic, lots of my academic colleagues, not m- maybe my immediate ones in Manchester, but certainly more widely, y- yeah, how many of those will postulate all sorts of future technologies?

And they, and it ... they flood the climate space with carbon capture and storage, negative emission technologies, all these things that out in the future are going to solve climate change for us so we can maintain business as usual today. that agenda has not only flooded the discourse on climate change, and there are huge numbers of papers on these things, but if I go look at my colleagues, what they work on, far more people are working on carbon capture and storage and negati- negative emission technologies.

Almost no one is working on radical emission reductions for climate emergency. Virtually no one I know works at that sort of level. But at the other level, at all these technologies, whole swathes of technical people, social science people, all sorts of people are working on those. So you've normalized a narrative about technology that barely exists, and literally, barely exists.

It's just out the laboratory for most of this stuff. and we normalize it as if it will, as if it exists. So when, the Labour Party had their conference a couple of years ago in, Albert Dock in Liverpool, I went along there. The biggest, the, the biggest, stand there was for carbon capture and storage by the oil and gas industries.

they- they're s- they're selling snake oil again, and of course, they're wearing suits, and it looks like there's a few calculations involved there and the odd bit of kit they can show that somehow that, that ... that we're gonna deliver this in the timeframe we have. And I can give you the numbers on this.

There is virtually no carbon capture and storage globally. It's .03% of all fossil fuel emissions have been captured. After 30 years of the industry telling us it's just around the corner, and it's affordable. Now, we do need it on things like cement, and we haven't got into that detail, but there are things that, where it'd be useful.

On the oil and gas industry, it's a scam to maintain the oil and gas industry, and the academic community has fed into that by doing all this work on it, by pretending it's there, by creating these scenarios and narratives and the Committee on Climate Change, the International, Energy Agency and all these other groups, which then feeds into the Global Justice report, f- following the IEA scenarios.

All these scenarios that are wedded into technologies. Technolo- They're not technologies. They're pseudo-technologies. They're delaying technologies. They're designed to delay legislation. They're not designed to deliver. And so it's not just about the politics that sells, that floods the world with information.

It's the, the academic community on climate change, the bit I know about on the mitigation side, about doing something about reducing emissions, that is awash with pseudo-technologies all designed to maintain the status quo. And often you get a, get academics working quite objectively on these things, but the boundaries within which they work, within which they're funded, are deeply subjective.

So it's not just an issue of the media. It's a, it's an issue of the expert class as well. And we've swallowed this hook, line, and sinker on the climate realm, and it's true for the Committee on Climate Change. It's true for Ed Miliband's view on climate change as well, and for his advisors on climate change.

so I hold the academic community as culpable for this as I do the media 

So you talk about these as, delay technologies- Yes. Yeah ... and you put them in contrast to timely technologies. So let's return to that binary in a second. You can explain what- 

Okay. 

Yeah ... timely technologies are. But this idea of, information war being in this space as well, it's interesting.

people know the word PSYOP, psychological operation, but the idea that basically carbon capture is a psychological operation by the oil and gas industry seems obviously true. I remember Gordon Brown being the prime minister talking about this stuff- 

Yeah ... 

before 2010.

Yeah. 

And now we're in 2026. 

I've got colleagues that have been working on it for over 20 years. Some of them- Wow ... almost now a quarter of a century. 

Wow. 

So been working on carbon capture storage for a quarter of a century, looking at what's been going on and the rest of it, and now we still have almost none in 2026.

That's a success story It's a success story for the oil and gas industry. It has managed to delay legislation and deliver nothing. Virtually nothing. And even last 

year, Starmer was giving money to this. 

Oh, hoping to give money to it. Yeah, we, it's, we weren't quite sure how that was gonna work out, but yeah, it looked like public money- They 

were talking a billion pounds 

maybe

They were. Yeah, it did look how that was gonna go in- into this. And, there are... I'm not saying that all CCS technologies are a scam, but some of them are gonna be necessary. On things we talked about the cement before, there are things you can do about cement and we- 

Or bricks, right? And bricks.

You put CO2 into 

bricks. Bricks. So there are, so C- so carbon capture storage for capturing the process emissions from cement, which is about 4% globally- Yeah ... mostly from countries that are rapidly developing, and they definitely need these technologies to capture that CO2. So there are things we can do about it.

Challenging, but we can do something about it. On the fossil fuel side, there are alternatives and they are way cheaper. 

Yeah. 

But they haven't got the same... there's an, there's a whole other story in this. The reason that renewables are challenging for the incumbent energy companies, there's no rent.

If you've got, if you've got fossil fuels, you've got rent. You've got to produce the oil and gas every minute of every hour of every day of the year for, decade after decade to keep the car running. That's not true for renewables. Once you've actually built the bloody thing, the wind pops in and the solar, the sun hits the panel.

And so there's no rent. 

And if you've got a model that's built on rent and your power is built on rent, your prestige is built on rent, everything you have is built on rent, and it comes, someone comes along with another model with no rent in it, that's massively challenging for you, which is why BP went from...

remember for a while it went to Beyond Petroleum, then it quickly realized that wasn't gonna work, so it's gone back to as much oil and gas as it can get out the ground and forget the renewables. never trust the executives in the oil and gas companies. and so that, that shift from one to the other means that, we have to find ways that we can reconcile oil and gas industry with the challenges we have, which is why we've been sold this pup of CCS on energy.

So whilst it might be important on cement, on energy there are alternatives, but those alternatives do not fit into the current economic, financial, and power model that is fossil fuels. And so they will go down kicking and screaming because they've done so well, and I don't mean the people working on the rigs.

the executives and the senior shareholders who have done so well out of these industries. 

Brett Christensen wrote a great book, about actually renewable energy and, he's saying that the way to understand this in terms of its adoption within a market system is not about the, the price even.

I think price was in the name of the book. It's about the rate of return. And another thing besides rent is, of course, that, renewable energies are deflationary, right? That a lot of this stuff is getting cheaper every year. It might not happen forever- Yeah ... but it's happened for a long time. It's called Swanson's Law with regards to photovoltaic cells.

Yes. 

yeah. 

it's happened for a long time. It's gonna happen for a long time to come, and if you're trying to find a high reliable rate of return, you don't really wanna be in a sector which is deflationary. yeah, this stuff is already t-touched on. I quickly wanted to get from you this, this binary of, Delay technologies, the pseudo technologies you call, which is basically they serve the purpose of delaying meaningful action on climate change, and timely technologies.

So what are timely technologies? 

Yeah. So the timely the less sexy end of the spectrum if you like. retrofitting our houses. And you say you just sit here and, having just strolled around where your office is here, you can see the properties that are just crying out for retrofit.

so th- these are all over our country and these sorts of property. where I work in Manchester University, we're surrounded by, thousands of terrace houses that desperately need to be retrofitted just for the current climate and also just for, to allow the people to live in them well rather than living in them as damp and full of fungal spores and so forth, which is bad for everything.

so retrofitting houses, we know how to do that. We know how to build buses, so having buses and trams. We know how to do local planning. So there are all these things that we know how to do. None of them are particularly sexy. They're important. They require lots and lots of labor and quite a lot of technology.

And in doing retrofit well is really important. So you can... Anyone can build a low-quality house. Building a house that's gonna be efficient is actually quite difficult. So there are the skills of the builders in this, and the quality of the inspection are really important, 'cause if you get... You get little cold spots which make it so that retrofitting can be quite challenging.

s- but these sorts of technologies, which are not big, shiny things you can show at some Labor Party event, and have lots of wealthy blokes wandering around in suits showing you bits of kit. These are not that exc- exciting. Oh, buses. Oh, trams. Oh, e-bikes. e- e-bikes to me might well be a game changer in terms of localized transport.

E-cars are, electric cars are. And I'm not s- I'm not opposed to EVs, but the idea we're gonna have one-for-one substitution for EVs. I just think... and that, that's a good example again about this idea of thinking differently. and again, that's an industry that has come to dominate the discourse.

So we're all gonna move to EVs. There are 30, roughly 35 million cars in the UK. 33 million are basically petrol and diesel and a few hybrids. The rest, the other two million are electric. If we're gonna swap them all to electric as the Committee on Climate Change broadly say, that's about another 33 million electric cars.

Let's imagine they're 30,000 pounds each, which is probably about an average for new electric cars. And given there aren't many secondhand ones, they're gonna have to be new. That's roughly a trillion pounds we're gonna spend if we're gonna follow the government and the Committee on Climate Change cl- tran- local transport or, sort of transport agenda.

That's roughly a trillion pounds on new electric cars. And then if you look at how often the car is used, about 96% of the time they're idle. So cars are used between 4 and 5% of the time. So society's gonna spend £1 trillion of its resources on a technology that is only gonna be used for about 4% of the time.

It could alternatively spend it on trams, buses, local planning, moving factories and industries to nearer where people work. So all sorts of other things we could do. Instead we've normalized business as usual. And no one's questioning it. And EVs just seem to be good. I'm not against EVs. If you're gonna buy a car, buy a bloody EV, not a petrol or diesel one.

But the idea you just swap them out one for one, and the rest of the world tries to follow that, is utter nonsense. And this is my point about system thinking. You've got to step back from it. the idea of us spending 1 trillion on these cars is, we... this, that's... What's that? Four times what we spend on the NHS every year.

One third of the current, global J- UK GDP. And our plan is, in the Committee on Climate Change scenarios and the government scenarios, is literally to spend that trillion on cars that are hardly ever used. rather than rental cars, carpooling, all those sorts of things. We might have buses, trams, all those other things that we could have that could use the resources in a far more worthwhile way.

In addition to that, of course, there's no constraint on the size of these things. look at, look how large they are. And the assumption that somehow that they're zero emissions, an electric car has roughly the same particulates as a diesel or electric car. So if you're using them in the cities, you're still gonna have the people there suffering from the particulates.

And because they can accelerate so fast, electric cars are much faster accelerating, can be, then you've got much more tire wear, much more road wear, and actually you could have more particulates than if you had these well, well-maintained diesel and electric. 

Also potholes, right? 

Oh, 

my God. Because they're, 'cause they're heavier- 'Cause they 

accelerate.

Yeah, heavier, they accelerate very fast. Now, hopefully the weight can come down. There are technology things you can do about this. You can drop the weight, some of the new batteries that are coming out now look like they could have an energy density that's almost twice what the current ones are. But they only drop the weight if you're prepared to have a battery of the same range.

If we then increase the range, the batteries go back up, and that's of course what we will do without regulation. And a lot of all... Much of what we've talked about here comes down to the idea government has to have the guts to put the regulation in place. My argument to ministers and MP's is, when the financial directors of any organization come to you, put your fingers in your ear.

Let them squeal, and then let them go away. Just don't listen to them. Listen to the engineers. and by and large, the engineers will deliver if you put the regulations in place. Everyone will moan at the time, and then people afterwards will say, "Would you like to go back to what you had before?"

no, we like the level playing field." So regulations are always opposed, but often welcomed afterwards, as long as they've been well thought through.

And Finally, Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT 

you can't pass a law by yourself. But a relatively small number of people can actually pass a law together, like that very trite, never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

I think that's Margaret Mead. it's actually very true. take me, for example. I wasn't even a US citizen when I was doing a lot of this work. I became a citizen in the middle of sort of this campaign work. and yeah, I'm a professor. I'm a little fancy, whatever, but I'm also just, a person.

I'm not, I'm not Chuck Schumer, I'm not Joe Biden, I'm certainly not Joe Manchin. And so what I wanted to do was tell a story of how policy change happens from the street level, from everyday people. So the other characters in the book follow the policy process from different vantage points.

So we know that people on the streets and, in the academy, activists, outside organizers can be part of policy change. This is obviously a big part of the civil rights movement, and I wanted to show how that can work in climate policy. So that's the storyline that I'm part of and others like Varshini Prakash and Sam Ricketts, et cetera.

But then, of course, Congress matters a lot in writing laws. And I have a friend named Adrian Devenney, who at the time was, Senator Chuck Schumer's lead negotiator on climate. And so he tells the story from inside Congress with a bunch of other folks inside of Schumer's office, like Jerry Petrella, who was his policy director, and others, and even, Keene Bhatt in the House on the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

And then, of course, the White House and the Biden administration matters too. And so to tell that story, we follow Sonia Aggarwal, who worked in the White House at the newly formed Climate Policy Office. And The narrative basically moves between these three different vantage points to give people a sense of how change happens in a democratic system.

It happens, from the legislature, from the executive branch, and of course, from outside of government, people pushing from the streets. 

I also really appreciated not just that academics are human people, I like to claim that as well, but, the fact that, even people, as you say, without tremendous wealth or political power who also have families and kids.

the, one of the neat through lines was that as you were all working on this, you were all entering that stage of life, of parenthood and the challenges and the difficulties and the stress and some of the crises. and it's a helpful re- reminder that the way the country and the world involves people who, they have other problems, too.

and it is, there's a lot of sacrifice and burden and stress, and all the more important then to have solidarity and collaboration and, be there for each other, I think. Part of the, the vision, I think, on the left has to reinforce the solutions, even though there's policy and political, fixes that are out there, really also involves the kind of solidarity and humanness that we all share that is, fundamental to the vision and the approach to making it happen, I think.

I completely agree with you, and I feel again, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is such an amazing embodied example of this. I was ... I went down a Googling rabbit hole the other night because she's doing her IVF so publicly right now. 

and I was like... And she talks about how she saved up for it, so I was like, "Oh, let me research, like, how she makes money."

I was just curious as a person, and she is such a high integrity person. She only makes her salary in Congress. She takes absolutely no outside money, and the salary's about $174,000 a year, which, isn't low income. But she has to maintain a house in both New York and DC, which are, like, the highest cost of living places.

And, she's gotta look nice all the time. She has expenses just to be her. And, I think it's just really cool to see people being willing to tell that story from such a public way about what it means to, be a person in the middle of your life and, becoming a parent. And so that's really the story that the book also tells.

At the time when I was working on this policy, I was having a very high-risk twin pregnancy, and the story of that pregnancy is interwoven with the policy. And that might seem a little strange, but climate change is also about future generations, and a lot of people wonder today, it's such a common question.

Ezra Klein has said that when he doesn't ask me anything, the number one question is, w- "Why did you have kids given climate change?" And so it's a real common question so many young people have. And so what I tried to show in the book is that the way of thinking about that question is not the way that I would think about it.

It's not first of all, we're not doomed. We can still deal with the climate crisis. Every degree of warming that we can stop matters for all living beings. And secondly, there's also this paradigm, the carbon footprint paradigm, that every single person is responsible for a certain amount of pollution.

It's a very neoliberal concept. we take all the pollution, even if it's, the US military, and we divide it by all humans and in the United States- Yeah ... and then they're responsible. So even your baby being born would be responsible for pollution. And so people sometimes think that, oh, if the kid exists, they're just gonna perpetuate this messed up system, as opposed to taking a step back and saying, what if we could not have a messed up system?"

what if we could break the power of the fossil fuel industry and not hand off a fossil fuel economy to the next generation? And I think that kind of way of thinking is, can be common in the left, but so can a doom, a doomerism within the left too. So we have different threads in, in that area and ways of thinking.

but that's what I wanted to show to people, that, parenthood is a big part of the story when it comes to climate action. 

I really like that, just because the left often has a kind of skeptical, melancholic, ... or just, so just because you're being really, cool, skeptical, or a doomer, doesn't mean you're not also falling into the trap of individualism, right?

Yeah. 

Yes. No, I think that's true. I write about the carbon footprint paradigm in the book, and people probably don't know, Rebecca Solnit has written about this in The Guardian. I really love her article about this. But the carbon footprint as an idea, which I would imagine every single listener right now knows what it is.

That's amazing. Just think about that. This is, kind of a academic, weird idea, and it is so pervasive in the way people think about the issues, and that is because the fossil fuel company BP spent upwards of $100 million a year during the mid-2000s, when An Inconvenient Truth, that movie that Al Gore made, came out, when climate, attention was really growing for the first time publicly in the United States, 2005, '6, '7.

They spent that much money every year advertising the idea of a carbon footprint, and they put a carbon footprint calculator on their website so that people could, go and, almost like a confession booth, like pay their penance for, the plane flight they took or, the fact that they eat meat.

oh my God, do you drive to your job? You should feel bad about that. A- and of course, it changes the whole way we think about the problem from A structural issue towards an individual issue that you're supposed to solve by yourself, and that is just fundamentally wrong. The fossil fuel economy is over 100 years old.

My grandparents were born into a fossil fuel economy. The goal needs to be to break the cycle and not pass it on to the next generation, and the only way we can do that is through collective action. So the carbon wave as an idea is the inverse of the carbon footprint. It's the idea of a group of people joining together to change the structure of society, not an individual isolated by themselves trying to, reduce their own individual impact.

And so the book really tells a story of how that works in practice. and I'll say, too, I, I have a website for the book, thecarbonwave.com, and you can go to thecarbonwave.com/calculator, and I've made my own carbon wave calculator to get people thinking about what does structural change look like, and how could I participate in structural change?

Because especially in progressive spaces, we do know that structural change is what we need to do the most. Like, when we think about racism in society, or we think about inequality, climate change, these really big structural issues, we know that it's not about an individual doing a thing. But very often, we end up defaulting to these individual solutions.

oh, we're gonna need to anti-racist train one another as opposed to changing the structure of policing in this country, right? And and that's partially because it's, easier to understand the sort of consumerist individual action than it is to understand the structural change. And what I'm really trying to do is provide a template and an explanation of what structural change looks like.

And it can even look like consumerist behavior, but it's not turning off the lights. It's buying an electric vehicle when you need to get your next car. It's getting a heat pump, and replacing your furnace, or getting your community center to do it or a school to do it or a church or some, or your city hall, right?

Like all the buildings that your city government runs or the state government, right? It is, there is structural things that have to happen that sometimes involve buying things, but they are not like buying a T-shirt. They are buying a heat pump. So that's the kind of structure of the fossil fuel-based energy system that everyday people can try to target, and that's what I want people to be pushing towards.

And Katharine, in one part of the book you have a chapter that's about solutions. And one thing- ... that really stuck with me is the fact that there's so many different solutions to climate change, and that itself can be, like, overwhelming and- ... make you feel like you don't really know what to do. And what I love is you drew on James Baldwin to help figure that out.

I always go to James Baldwin- ... in times of crisis, 

It's al- it's always a good idea. 

Can't lose. You can't lose with that one. You can't lose with that one. 

Yeah. So could you talk a little about that and what you- borrowed from James Baldwin? 

Yeah. Yeah. there was a lecture that he gave that then evolved into an essay in a book, but the line from it that really just has stuck with me over the years is, "We made the world we're living in, and we have to make it over."

And it's so simple, but it's so profound. And, we can do a lot of pointing fingers about who's gotten us here, but this sense of, stepping into our agency, stepping into a sense of responsibility for the future and making the world over. And this overwhelm. In another life, I worked on the Project Drawdown team, wrote most of that book, Drawdown, that shockingly is almost 10 years ago.

and it's a compendium of solutions, and you might flip through it and go like, "Oh, wow. There's so much here. I have no idea where to begin." And that work came from the, the mind of the analyst, right? let's do the math. And it's helpful. That data gave us a grounded narrative of possibility that I think we, we really needed.

But for a person who only has so many hours in the day, so many years in a life, like, where are you gonna focus? Certainly not on 100 climate solutions probably. that the spirit of the artist can come in, right? that's what I hear in James Baldwin's words. what solutions do we wanna be in creative relationship with this world-remaking effort?

And I think that's an invitation to curiosity, to wonder. Like, where is our energy taking us? Because this is a long slog we're in. this is long-haul work. And so you've gotta find a piece of it that, makes your heart kinda pitter-patter a little bit, right? it's gotta be a piece that you really have some excitement around to be able to keep showing up again and again over time.

And Colette, I'm wondering how... Do you ever feel, overwhelmed by the amount of solutions- ... and, like, how do you kinda get through that? 

this is where I make lots of friends who are Black and brown and poor, and lots of enemies who are not. 

and I think we're looking at solutions the wrong way oftentimes.

I think we're making it easy for privileged Global North country residents to think that a new way of purchasing or consuming is gonna get us out of this, when really- ... we have to be much more honest about what the problem is, and it is our consumption patterns to begin with. And so Taproot has really begun to understand that a root cause of the climate crisis is a philosophy of extraction.

And the philosophy of extraction is in almost everything that we have built in our U- US system for sure, I would say Western civilization systems. And a solution to a philosophy of extraction that it drives a capital-based system is to actually shift our economic system away from extraction into repair.

Now, listen, I'm telling you, half the room likes me now, and the other half is "Oh, no," because we participate in this capitalist system. We maintain it. We manage it. We uphold it, and then we wonder why we're in this state, and we look for somebody to blame. If you wanna really deal with the problem, we have to deal with ourselves, and I'm not even a rich American.

I'm just a regular one, and living in the middle of the bayou. We are socialized to consume without any care as to who we just took that from. As to where that just came from, including all of the critical minerals that are gonna be needed for the wealthy Americans to all shift over to electrification and renewable energy.

We will cause war and death and more problems in other places, and we won't care. And we'll feel good about ourselves when we do it because we went electric or we went off the grid or we went whatever. We are misunderstanding the problem still, and I am sad about that because it's going to require a lot of middle-class Americans to actually say, "Okay, what's the problem?"

The problem is we live, we have learned, we have all been socialized into a system of extraction to take to a, a level of harm that either cannot or will never be repaired, and then we try to build on top of harm, and then we wonder why what we produce is more harm. This is why you have to bring in that spiritual work.

This is why you have to bring in that cultural work or else you will believe that the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions gets us to a climate solution. It will not. It will get us to reduce greenhouse gases, but we will have the same imbalances and the same problems at the societal level that you get- with disaster Those are the systems we have in place right now, and we believe that it is, the job of somebody else to stop drilling, which I believe we should stop oil and gas drilling, and I'm saying that from South Louisiana. I know what that means. Everybody's scared. All of our jobs are gonna go away.

But how many jobs does it actually create? And look at the billions they're making to create this imbalance, and can't we think of anything else that won't blow up our boys? Can we think of anything else that won't poison our babies? Can we think of anything else to invest in? And why should we sacrifice things that we love?

I love these trees, man. I love this bayou. I love them, those gators out there. I see them every morning. I love all of them. Why should we sacrifice that so a few companies can make billions of dollars? We gotta rethink this And it's not gonna be as easy as we think it is. It's not gonna be recycling. I'm sorry, it's not.

That's not good enough. Taproot is working to identify frontline communities right now who are building climate solutions around the world in the Gulf South, in Appalachia, and in the Black diaspora. And the solutions are not just how much carbon can you sequest. The solutions are, is the community involved?

Is there a democratic and collective decision-making process? Are there values and principles that are driving this thing? Are you using alternative methods of resourcing? Is the community in control collectively of its resources? Are things being privatized? That gets to solutions. 

And so this is where I'm still, I'm working on making friends even in, I- They, 'em up a little bit.

They don't always like that, this part of my conversation. But I still believe we can do something. 

I love, Colette, that in the book, I unpack a little bit, don't do anywhere near the justice it deserves because it is I think, a sacred text, Donella Meadows' work on leverage points- 

... 

in a system.

And you're just going straight for paradigms, right? Which are the most powerful, the ability to shape- Can you 

explain the, what those two things are? 

yeah. So Donella Meadows was a systems theorist, and she looked at complex systems, both, ecological systems, but she might look at a city like New Orleans.

She might look at a corporation like Patagonia to understand, how does change in these systems happen? And she breaks it down, and she puts them in rank order, and they're not the things that we are often told are solutions, right? they're on there. Changing laws is on there. Shifting capital, that's on there.

But the most powerful thing is what she calls paradigms, which are basically our shared beliefs about how the world works and what's good and what's right, and the ability to reshape paradigms, right? so a very classic paradigm that has existed in this country for a long time is that it is economy versus environment.

that's, goes straight to the heart of what Colette's talking about. And if we can't, rattle ourselves out of that paradigm, that these things are in opposition to each other, and that actually at the end of the day, there is no economy without an Earth. 

Say again, 

sister. And- Say it again.

and that is about questioning these fundamental values that we hold, and I think a lot about- Something I heard Sherry Mitchell, who's also has a Lighting the Way story in the book, she's an amazing author and teacher and Wabanaki leader, and she's "It is so much about enough." 

I see.

What is enough? And I've been thinking about that so much with this data center build-out. my God, what is enough? And the truth is that in our economic system, nothing. 

Nothing is enough. 

The answer is that nothing is enough. That's right. And so we, if we wanna move out of extraction, if we wanna move back into reciprocity and all the repair that Taproot, I think, talks about so beautifully, in this consumer culture, we've gotta have a reckoning with enough, I think.

did you see much in the way of, collaboration or discussion among, you know, different groups related to the problem with envi- environmental harm done through war? 

Yeah. So I, as I said, I think social movements, Peo- a lot of people who are outside of protest or social movements, which I mostly am, I'm very connected to those groups, but I don't do that.

that's not my superpower. But I have a lot of respect for what those people do, and there's other pundits and commentators, they will remain unnamed, but I imagine you know who I am saying, who are really disrespectful to social movements, the Sunrise Movement in particular. And they don't participate in those movements.

I don't either. But they also don't respect them. And, there are things that the Sunrise Movement has done that maybe I wouldn't do strategically, but I also don't have the arrogance to say that I have a crystal ball and know everything about strategy and tactics and the future, and I know how to run a social movement better than they do, which some people seem to feel comfortable doing.

But, that, the Sunrise Movement did put a bunch of its attention into issues around Gaza, a- as did Greta Thunberg, who ran the Fridays for Future and really ran the global climate activism social movement. she really, she, and joined a flotilla, and she really did a lot of work connecting the war and, carbon pollution.

and then the other, where Sunrise has since gone, and we did an episode of our podcast, A Matter of Degrees, about this, it's really interesting, is they've gone into a lot of anti-ICE activism in the past year or two. And some people outside of social movement spaces look at Sunrise and look at them sort of change, air quotes, from a climate organization to a Gaza, pal- pro-Palestine organization to a anti-ICE, pro-immigration, And they're like, "What are you doing? You have no focus," and, "You," "I thought you were a climate organization." And I think they fundamentally don't understand how social movements work. I didn't tr- just to be clear, I didn't change into those other things, but I can also understand why a social movement would do that.

Because they view these issues as interconnected, and it, if you wanna be recruiting people and doing protests and doing work in solidarity, and that's where the energy and attention is, then that's, it's understandable that a social movement does that over time. So yeah, there has been a lot of shifts over time, and there have been connections between war and carbon pollution made by people like Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement.

The, I wanna make sure before we run out of time, my, the most interesting part of the book, I thought, was the discussions around how you actually got this bill over the finish line, and particularly the behavior of Joe Manchin. Yes. 'cause it, it's just such a classic, DC story.

the... it reminded me very much of an episode of Veep. instead of it being like Veep, where, which is just this ultra-cynical thing where sort of n- the stakes are incredibly low and not really much ever happens and nobody cares about anything, is that you have a similarly comedic set of pratfalls where sort of the country stumbles ass backwards into what?

The biggest climate bill in American history. A trillion dollars. Like- Yes ... what was that story? 

Oh my gosh, yeah. The, I don't know if 

people have watched the British version of Veep, what comes before. It's called The Thick Of It. Yeah. Have you guys seen that show? If you haven't- Some episodes, yeah ... you need to binge it tomorrow Malorie Tucker

because the, the Scottish actor who's in it, I don't remember his name, but he has the best swearing of any television character in all time. he just makes up swear words. and it's, and the opening episode of that show involves a minister, 'cause it's the parliamentary system, so it's a secretary of, energy or whatever equivalent.

He's g- but he gets demoted to, being a really silly minister, like the Minister of Social I- Affairs or whatever. And he is supposed to go and do a really big announcement, and so he drives in his car with his advisors, and when they get to the announcement place, they discover they can't make the announcement anymore.

So they're like, we have to announce something. All the press is here." And so they decide they will announce pet passports, that pets will now have passports. And it's the dumbest, and everybody there is like, "What?" 'Cause anyway, that, that exact scene was totally in 

my 

head in the period where people, remember in July 2022, the bill falls apart.

It's really dramatic. We're all very sad, and I tell this story in the book. And then Biden decides he's gonna do executive action because, if they're not gonna do it in the Congress, he's gonna act, and he's gonna go to Massachusetts and announce this climate emergency, which is what the most progressive, most lefty activists in the climate space want.

And he's gonna stand at the, in this wind turbine manufacturing component cable place at the, on a river, and he's gonna make this rousing speech, and then the whole thing just gets canceled except the press thing is still happening. So he goes into this place, and he just says, "Emergency," like six times but never declares a climate emergency.

And all the climate emergency campaigners are, like, so angry. They're like, "What is he doing?" And even the people in the climate policy office who, wrote the speech for him are like, "What is happening?" I interviewed Gina McCarthy, who was the national climate advisor, and she was sitting at that event watching the speech like, "What is this speech?"

And then she told me that Biden winked at her. And that was how she knew that something must be going on in the background. Because when the, as I tell in the book, it's actually really, even when I read this part of the book, even though I wrote the book, it's fun and exciting and interesting and even when I read it 'cause I interviewed people who lived it and got to learn all the behind-the-scenes stuff.

But, basically the bill falls apart on a Thursday- Everyone is very depressed. And then on Monday, Manchin secretly goes back to Schumer, and I tell all the in-the-weeds ways of how that happened, and says, "Are you mad at me?" Like- ... "Can we still do this?" and so that speech that I'm talking about with Biden is supposed to happen two days later, but they don't tell anyone.

it was a crazy walled-off secret where nobody was allowed to know. So even Gina McCarthy didn't get told. All she got was this strange wink from the president. So it's this... I really love telling that story because it's a behind-the-scenes thing that people don't know, and I did a lot of reporting about it, and it's just so interesting.

And Joe Manchin, yeah, as a character, I don't know. It'll be, I'll be... I really am curious when people read the book to hear what they think of it. Maybe you guys can tell me what you took away. 'cause I feel like I tried to make him a person and to understand where he was coming from, not just like a cartoon villain.

And- ... even though I don't agree with him, obviously, many things. But other people who've read it say that when they go through this emotional rollercoaster of what he's doing, "Yeah, we're doing it. No, we're not doing it. Yeah, we're doing it. No, we're not doing it," that they're really angry with him, by reading the book.

So I'm, I don't know, what did you guys think? 

I was angry at him at the time and in advance think you're, you humanize him in a certain way and reveal a more complex set of motives behind his actions. and, w- when you say Ryan, like I... S- so obviously I've always considered him to be bought off, by multiple lobbyists and being a kind of, narcissist.

And I wasn't sure how much he bought into his own, bootstrapping ideology that, thinks that they're, like Romney's there's the takers out there, the, the makers and the takers. we're not gonna- ... give people hor- affordable housing. They're just gonna pay people to sit on their butt on the couch.

We're not gonna- 

Yeah ... 

all that kind of stuff. So that, that was my picture of him going in. but it's clear to me from the accounts that he, like you said, that secret meeting with Schumer, he does care if Schumer is mad at him and he does, I think, want to get credit for getting something done and maybe he has mixed motives, certain things as long as it, helps his constituents.

so I think it is a more complex picture that I... And I thought that was interesting. Another thing that, that I didn't think about at the time or don't remember being aware of at the time is how Putin's invasion of Ukraine- Yeah ... reopened up his interest in an energy bill. So that's something- Yeah

maybe we could discuss, 'cause that, that I either missed it or forgot about that. yeah. 

That's like the story of every energy policy in history. and I am a professor, like I've written academic books on how policy change happens and papers, and one of the key things from our field is that you only get action during energy crises.

So when the energy prices go high, as they are right now, courtesy of, Trump's insane war with Iran, that is when Congress feels the need to actually do something. And prices were already rising in January before Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and me and Sam Ricketts on the outside were talking about this.

I said to him like, "Look, we're starting to see rising energy prices. That could provide a window of opportunity." Because when you think about it, the Energy Policy Act of 1992, this was passed under George H.W. Bush, a Republican, and it created the production tax credit, which boomed wind energy across this country, including of course in Texas.

The 2005 Energy Policy Act created the investment tax credit, which c- created a huge boom for solar, again under George W. Bush, a Republican president. When energy, Pr-- when we have energy crises, that is when we tend to see action on clean energy, on climate action, and I think that was a really big reason why, Manchin was willing to come back to the table and get it done 

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

You can record - and re-record - a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from;

It Could Happen Here

The Current

The PBS NewsHour

The Brian Lehrer Show

Outrage + Optimism

Climate Court Voices

Unf*cking The Republic

Downstream

Left Anchor

and Sea Change

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

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

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

Air Date: 8-19-2026

Today we trace the corporate capture of ideas themselves. What began as a brief legal incentive granting fourteen years of exclusive rights to a creation has become a system that kept a pandemic vaccine from reaching poorer countries and where entertainment conglomerates and technology giants fence off and sell our own culture back to us.

Full Show Notes

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

Today we trace the corporate capture of ideas themselves. What began as a brief legal incentive granting fourteen years of exclusive rights to a creation has become a system that kept a pandemic vaccine from reaching poorer countries and where entertainment conglomerates and technology giants fence off and sell our own culture back to us.

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

Second Thought

PIRGvideos

Tom Scott

LegalEagle

This Is Hell!

Taylor Lorenz

and Tom Nicholas

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

Section A, HOW WE GOT HERE

Section B, WHO PROFITS, WHO PAYS

Section C, THE DISNEY PLAYBOOK

And Section D, WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT

And now, on to the show.

Insulin is a life-saving drug. It can be the difference between a pretty normal, long life and the constant risk of ketoacidosis, diabetic coma, and premature death for millions of people around the world.

And yet, despite only costing $10 to produce a vial's worth, about one in five Americans with diabetes can't afford treatment and need to ration their insulin. That's because insulin is way too expensive. In the US, it's estimated that insulin prices jump between 15 and 17% every single year. Today, a 10ml vial costs around $300, when it used to be just 20 bucks back in 1996.

In this country, monthly insulin costs regularly exceed $1,000 for those without insurance. So many diabetics in the US have had to resort to incredibly dangerous strategies to get to the end of the month, like not eating, not testing their blood sugar level, or simply not giving their body the amount of insulin it needs.

At the core of this problem, and many others, is the concept of intellectual property. Currently, the different patents to produce insulin are held by three companies in the US: Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi. Together, they control about 90% of the insulin market. And through the yearly tradition of patenting minuscule changes to their process and formula, they've made sure that no generic version of the drug can be manufactured by anybody else.

Thanks to intellectual property laws, just three companies have a fully legal cartel, an oligopoly. And all of this despite the formula for synthetic insulin being 100 years old at this point, and the original creators selling the first patent for only a dollar, refusing to rake in massive profits for their invention in the hopes it would be universally accessible someday.

The story is almost identical with COVID vaccines. Just a couple companies own the patents to the most effective ones and have been on a price gouging spree for years at this point. Seeing ahead of time how this would play out, all the way back in October of 2020, India, South Africa, and over 100 other countries went to the World Trade Organization to request that intellectual property restrictions be waived on COVID vaccines, testing, and treatment so that they could actually try to limit the dangers of this already deadly virus.

But the patent owners are powerful, and so is the US, the country where most of these patents are registered. So they made sure they would stay, quote unquote, "protected," notably by hiring over 100 lobbyists to make sure their IP wouldn't be released to anyone. These companies, through the US's leadership, made sure that the WTO would refuse to waive existing restrictions, which it did for over 600 days, dragging out the pandemic for months while infections continued to spread.

When finally these restrictions were waived, not too long ago and millions of preventable deaths later, the WTO's plan didn't even include waiving IP protections for tests or treatments, only vaccines. So like with just about everything, poorer countries are forced to face the consequences of a disease we can mitigate and control without adequate resources, not because we don't have the means to produce them, but because the knowledge required to do so is held for ransom, and the consequences are grim.

According to Oxfam, for every life lost in a rich country, another four people have died in a poorer nation due to COVID. There is no doubt that universal access to COVID-related IP would have made a difference. In their attempt to justify this ghoulish behavior, pharma companies have argued that this is about protecting innovation, that without strong exclusionary IP laws, they'd have no incentive to produce these vaccines, and innovation would just shrivel up.

But they don't even believe this themselves. These same companies now defending IP laws like it's their favorite Minecraft streamer getting canceled on Twitter are the same companies who, right at the start of the pandemic, desperately clamored for IP laws to be dropped in order to develop the vaccines we know today.

This has nothing to do with innovation and everything to do with profit. Like everyone else who defends IP, they're kicking away the ladder, using publicly available knowledge, or in this case, going around existing IP laws to develop something. Then once they're on top, acting like IP laws are sacred natural rights that the state must protect at any cost, including tremendous loss of life.

Climbing the ladder, then kicking it away so no one else can do the same. And who can blame them? This strategy works. The US has been doing the exact same thing for years. To become the industrial powerhouse of the 19th and 20th centuries, the US encouraged and actively engaged in IP theft. Once upon a time, Britain had kickstarted the Industrial Revolution, and in the process, set up laws to make sure its innovations wouldn't get out.

It had used processes and resources it had stolen across the world, and now it was time to kick the ladder. But the US didn't like lagging behind, so some of the country's Founding Fathers made sure that any industrial spy willing to bring over the new technology of water-powered textile mills and those dope mechanical looms everyone was talking about would be legally protected in the US.

So that's what happened. The first industrial machine in the country, this textile mill in Rhode Island, widely considered the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, wasn't the product of American genius and innovation, nor of the strength of IP laws, but plain and simple IP theft. Today, though, now that it's at the top of the ladder, it's America's turn to kick.

On the international stage, the US preaches the sanctity of IP laws and has even built an international system of enforcement to go with it. On the rhetorical front, the US will often claim that China steals hundreds of billions of dollars a year from the US through IP theft, an amount that's calculated by assuming every counterfeit good sold for cheap is equivalent to losing a sale of the expensive original version, which obviously it's not.

Most people buy things when they're cheap, meaning any IP theft calculation is almost guaranteed to be inflated. Regardless, the US is basically complaining about China doing the same thing it did all those years ago when it was in the same position, developing in the shadow of a wealthier hegemon.

Alongside this more symbolic pressure, though, the US and the rest of the imperial core have also set up TRIPS, the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. TRIPS is an international pact signed by just about every country in the world to police the kind of IP theft that the US so handsomely profited from earlier in its development.

While the World Trade Organization tries to portray TRIPS as a benevolent global enforcement system, all it actually does is grant powerful countries legal protections over their IP monopolies while keeping poorer countries down. That's because rich countries are almost always sellers of IP, thanks to centuries of exploitation of the Global South, and poor countries are almost always buyers.

A system like TRIPS that enforces the same IP protections for everyone, regardless of how much intellectual property they're actually able to produce, therefore effectively locks poor countries into total dependence on Western IP since the funds that would otherwise go towards developing new technologies and expanding on the innovations that start out in the West are instead spent buying basic IP from the only legal sellers.

As if all this wasn't bad enough, there's a possibility that IP laws may become even more important in coming years. Studies have shown that copyright-intensive industries, like motion pictures, publishing, and software, are seeing their profit margins grow over time, whereas more material-driven industries, like construction, transportation, and mining, are on the decline.

It is increasingly safe to profit with IP and risky to go down the traditional path. Market rules being what they are, investors will follow the money. 

Big drug companies abuse the US patent system in order to keep lower cost generic drugs from ever making it to our pharmacy shelves.

Patents prevent other companies from selling generic versions of the drug. 

Generic drugs are drugs that can be produced by more than one company, and when you have a product produced by more than one company, you have competition, and competition brings down prices. That's economics, that's evidence, and that's common sense.

Drug price spending will increase by 63% in the next decade. These rising prices are causing a lot of stress for American families. One in four cannot afford their prescription drugs. 

as a clinician, it's ... Sometimes we don't ... We're not even aware when a patient's not taking a drug. They may not want

be willing to admit that this costs too much, and we find out later their condition is not well controlled, and find that cost was a big barrier for them 

When one generic drug enters the market for a particular medicine, prices drop 40%. And when lots of generics are available for that drug, prices can come down 80% or more.

There are three powerful, weapons that drug companies have for extending their monopolies and ability to charge monopoly prices. those are, creating patent thickets, paying to delay generic entry, and hopping from one drug product to another. Turning to the first, patent thickets, pharmaceutical companies create patent thickets by getting lots and lots of patents.

There are so many patents that another company can't really set foot in that space, and when there's only one company that can make a product, they can charge as much as they want for it. 

Humira's a great example of this thicket of patents. Humira treats many types of conditions. rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, Crohn's disease.

If we exclude the vaccines that we've had for COVID, Humira is the most profitable drug ever. The first patents that relate to the product were filed around 1996, which meant, technically, the patent should have expired. You get 20 years for a patent. Should have expired in 2016. But it didn't. Once the drug was approved in 2002 by the FDA, they went on a patent spree.

Some 311, 12 patent applications, of which, to our counts, 165 had been granted. And so come 2016, when we think we should be getting competition, we don't. What's even more significant is AbbVie has made over $100 billion post that main patent in 2016 expiring, and they also increased the price. In, the end of 2002, the drug was priced at $523.

In 2016, the drug price was $1,870. By the time, competitors are gonna enter, the price of the drug is $3,167. And this is not just an AbbVie problem. This is a pharmaceutical industry problem. 

In other games, drug companies engage in what's called pay for delay. A brand drug company pays a generic something of value.

In exchange, the generic agrees to stay off the market. Everybody benefits except for the consumer. 

Here's an example. The drug company Endo had a patent on Lidoderm, a medicated patch to treat shingles. When another drug company attempted to enter the market with a generic version, Endo wanted to protect its monopoly pricing.

The two companies made a pay for delay deal in which the competitor agreed to delay selling its generic drug in exchange for compensation valued at about $250 million. Both companies made money, but patients lost out. 

Product hopping is a strategy that prevents patients from getting generic drugs that are much, much cheaper when they become available.

So you might have been prescribed a, a drug that was patented and produced only by one brand for years. That patent is about to expire, which means y- the cost of the treatment could go down by thousands of dollars. Your co-pay could go down from $100 to $2, be enormous price difference. You go to the pharmacy with the same prescription you've been taking, and once the generic product is available, the law allows the pharmacy to automatically replace it with what will cost you less money.

To prevent that from happening- 

Drug companies make minor modifications of their existing drugs. For example, producing a 20 milligram pill instead of a 40 milligram pill. But companies then introduce this as an entirely new product, pushing doctors to prescribe the new product, maybe even removing the old one from the market altogether.

Now, there's no market for the old drug, and the generic can't enter the new market because it's protected by a patent 

34 million Americans know somebody who can't fill a prescription or have died. That, to me, showed me there's a significant problem, and, it's affecting all of us. 

Our insurance companies are having to pay extremely high prices.

They can't encourage us to use a generic drug because there is none. Those costs are then passed on to all insured people in the US. We have a lot of government programs that are paying for these drugs as well. Medicare and Medicaid are paid for by our tax dollars. So every time a drug price goes up, that means either our own pockets are affected or our tax dollars are affected.

If a patient, is looking for a cheaper version of a drug and it's available, I have very little reservation on doing so. I think that's in their best interest. It's in the best interest of our healthcare system. 

To change the patent system so that it serves everybody, we need to make sure that more voices, more people who depend on patented technology, are part of policy making too.

as I record this, Pixsy doesn't appear to have automated systems hunting through YouTube videos to find unlicensed images and send out legal threats, but they could pretty easily. Maybe those claims could be defended in court with enough money, but in the current system, most people would be forced to fold and pay a license fee and give up.

And viral video licensing companies like Jukin Media do already search through YouTube for unlicensed use of the video clips they own. And while as a company they are vilified by the creator community, they've, they've got a point. Creators have the right to determine how their work is being used, and taking someone else's copyrighted photos or videos and using them commercially without permission, without criticism is not fair use under the law, even if loads of other people have already used them, even if you add some words on top of them, even if you mash them up with three other things.

Are you 100% sure that you are transforming or criticizing the original, not just using it? Are you 100% sure that a court would agree with you? And just to repeat, I'm not saying this is how it should be. I'm saying this is how it is. But that's pictures and videos. What about bits of pop culture? At the end of 2019, Giphy, a GIF aggregation site, briefly removed it...

Actually, hold on. People will complain. I'm pronouncing it GIF because Giphy the site I'm talking about pronounces it GIF. And besides, the real problem is that they're not actually GIFs. They're short video files in other formats. GIF is a really specific descriptor for a data format. Short-looping videos are not GIFs, but apparently now they are.

It's like how emoji now refers to any small image. I'm still grumpy about all of this. Don't at me. Anyway, at the end of 2019, Giphy briefly removed its many GIFs of the child from The Mandalorian, a creature designed to be so adorable that I can only assume the design came directly from Disney's merchandising team.

Those GIFs were removed because of what Giphy described as confusion about certain content. I guess they got a legal letter from someone at Disney before Disney realized what a PR disaster it would be to stop the internet having immediate access to Baby Yoda. But the Guardian article about that brief takedown has a really interesting final line.

"Images in GIFs are widely understood to fall under the fair use exception." Notice how that's phrased, widely understood. There has never been a court case about this. Are GIFs fair use? I actually think that if some company got a bee in their bonnet the same way they did about Napster 20 years ago, and if they insisted on litigating all the way to court, it is entirely possible that a judge would go, "No.

GIFs aren't a parody. They're not criticism. They're not transformative. They're not fair use." GIPHY's entire product, the GIF economy, is based on systematic copyright infringement. Pay the money, shut it down. In practice, of course, it wouldn't get that far. GIPHY would accept a cease and desist and take down what was complained about.

It's just easier. Because remember, they're not an individual creator or a small site. GIPHY has an enormous office in New York with catered lunches and arcade games for more than 100 employees based on a business model that is arguably copyright infringement. I am amazed that no big media corporations have looked at their money and gone, "We can sue them for that."

In the same way, uploading video game footage to YouTube is widely understood to be okay, but that's questionable. Maybe if it's something like Minecraft where there's a lot of original work, it could be. And besides, the license agreement that you accept when playing Minecraft allows streaming and most YouTube videos.

But if it's just a video of cut scenes or following roughly the same sequence of events that every player would follow, it's a bit like putting up a video of you watching a TV show. We've seen companies decide in the past that actually they don't want videos of their games online. It is very easy to make the argument that online streaming of games affects sales, and the impact on sales is a key component in determining whether something is fair use.

Sure, the games get some exposure, but exposure doesn't pay the rent. I didn't buy Untitled Goose Game and experience the beautiful artwork and immaculately timed comic set pieces myself. I skipped through a couple of videos so I could get the jokes, and then I moved on. I didn't buy Superliminal either.

I just watched a video of someone playing it to get how it works, skipped forward to see how it ends, and then I got on with my life, and I'm glad I did. The game mechanics are clever. But the ending is unsatisfying, or maybe I just think that because I watched someone else play it, and that someone else who provided a substitute for the original product made money off that, either from advertising or streaming donations.

Now, video game streaming might be fair use if you've got someone constantly criticizing and reviewing the work as they play it, not just talking about it or, not just, repeating what they're saying in the game or saying hi to the chat, like actively criticizing. Maybe. It would be up to a judge to decide, and no one wants any case like that to get to court because somehow we have an entire industry based around something that is very possibly copyright infringement, but which most video game publishers are just going along with.

Perhaps because they genuinely think it's a good thing, or perhaps because they've seen the backlash that happens when horrible gamer children are suddenly denied something they think is their right, like our friend in the corner. 

Hey. Hey, this is transformative. This is definitely fair 

use. 

Would you do this to a Marvel movie though?

No, mate. They'd sue me for every penny I've got 

In the not too distant future, next Sunday AD. In 

1988, KTMA-TV in Minneapolis aired the first episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which was basically a reaction channel. A host, along with a cast of puppet robots, would watch a full-length movie, usually an old science fiction piece.

They'd be in silhouette as if they were in the row of cinema seats in front of you, constantly cracking jokes about whatever was on screen. It's tightly written, scripted with joke after joke, although the skits that surround the movie are often so laden with in-jokes and character shtick that new viewers who don't know the show and the cast can be completely lost.

Like I said, it's basically a reaction channel. Time Magazine listed Mystery Science Theater as one of the hundred greatest TV shows of all time. A Kickstarter brought it back in twenty sixteen, and then Netflix brought it back for another couple of seasons. Mystery Science Theater was absolutely criticism and review and absolutely transformative, but they still licensed the movies.

Anything that wasn't in the public domain, they negotiated and paid for because, yeah, playing out someone else's entire movie just with wisecracks over it Probably not fair use. And even if it was, a studio would've probably sued them at some point anyway, and they'd have had to defend the case and spend the money to defend the case.

Now, there have been YouTube commentary channels who have defended lawsuits where fair use and fair dealing seem clear. h3h3, an often controversial reaction and commentary channel, won a very expensive lawsuit that was brought by someone they criticized. They were very happy about the result, and they shared that with their fans in a way that pretty much sums up why their style isn't for everyone.

Good job, Hila. Good job.

The court even noted that the video was transformative because it responds to and transforms the video from a skit into fodder for caustic moment-by-moment commentary and mockery. The judge's decision goes into the balancing factors of fair use in depth, but the most important bit is a little bit further down.

"Some reaction videos intersperse short segments of another's work with criticism and commentary, while others are more akin to a group viewing session without commentary. Accordingly, the court is not ruling here that all reaction videos constitute fair use." It's clear that just playing a video and laughing at it isn't fair use.

It's copyright infringement. The border of fair use is somewhere in the gray area between lazy, zero-effort reaction streamers and in-depth, insightful criticism. But it's a fuzzy border, and right now, questions about it can only be settled on a case-by-case basis in an expensive courtroom. Because yeah, there is one thread throughout all these examples.

Under the current system, it often doesn't matter who's actually in the right. Even if the answer to is it fair use is clear, it's actually about whether you can afford to defend a case. You could be 100% sure it's fair use, but unless you're prepared to spend the time and the money to actually fight that in court, it doesn't matter.

In the US, the Copyright Act grants creators a number of exclusive legal rights over their original works of authorship, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and other intellectual works. The law protects the owner of the work if other parties copy, present, or display the work without the owner's permission.

So if the copyright work is an animated film like Disney's Alice in Wonderland, copyright law protects the film in its entirety as well as its titles, characters, music, and merchandise. So that means that if you sell a T-shirt with the image of Alice or paint it on a mural outside your daycare, you're going to get sued by Disney because they own the copyright for Alice in Wonderland.

Yes, it really is a litigious world after all.

The idea, and it's totally debatable, is that if you give authors a monopoly over the works that they create, they will be incentivized to create more. If they didn't have protection, they would be disinclined from creating that kind of art. But there is a catch. Copyright owners don't have control over their work forever.

All copyrights eventually expire, which means the creative works are then owned by the public. The term the public domain refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws. Anyone can use a public domain work without requesting permission from the original author or the company that owned the work.

And when a work is in the public domain, you don't even have to change it into something new, into a derivative work. You can use it and even sell it in its original form. Though at the same time, you should know that something being public and being in the public domain are very different things.

Just because something is public, the fact that you can Google something, on the internet, does not mean that thing is in the public domain. In fact, it's probably not in the public domain. Usually, it takes a lot of time for the copyright to expire for something to no longer have a copyright and to finally enter the public domain.

And there are four ways that creative works usually arrive in the public domain. The copyright expires, the copyright owner fails to follow copyright renewal formalities, the copyright owner donates the material to the public, or copyright law doesn't protect a certain type of work, like facts, basic math, or recipes.

Now, since most reasonable people agree that artists should be paid for their work, why doesn't copyright last forever? the idea behind public domain is that it fosters innovation, creativity, and knowledge. It encourages artists to draw on previous works of art to create something new. It makes it easier for publishers to publish lower cost editions of important books, it makes it easier for teachers to distribute educational materials, and it helps artists build on the art that existed before.

Obviously, Walt Disney himself made excellent use of the public domain by taking popular fairy tales such as Cinderella and classics like Alice in Wonderland, and turning them into beloved movies, because those were in the public domain at the time. In fact, even Steamboat Willie made use of the public domain.

The film used the song Turkey in the Straw, which was in the public domain at the time of production. And the title Steamboat Willie was a reference to Steamboat Bill Jr., a Buster Keaton movie that was released that same year. Heck, that reference might be one of the first uses of fair use parody, in an animated movie.

So Disney designed his movies to appeal to audiences who were already familiar with a popular work. Now, Steamboat Willie was unveiled as a Walt Disney Animation Studios short on November 18th, 1928. When it was released, the US copyright law protected copyrights for 56 years. But by the time the copyright on Steamboat Willie was due to expire in 1984, Disney had become the biggest entertainment company in the world, and Mickey was one of the most recognizable characters on Earth.

So Disney, as well as other companies, lobbied Congress to extend the copyright term. The result was the Copyright Act of 1976, which increased the renewal term for works, copyrighted before 1978 that had not already entered the public domain from 28 years to 47 years, giving a total term of 75 years.

Disney delayed Mickey's entry into the public domain yet again in 1998. Disney, again with other companies, lobbied so hard for the 1998 amendments to the law that it's sometimes called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, although the guy that wrote it- Also had something to gain from it as well. The law is officially known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and it extended the copyright protection from 47 to 67 years, giving copyright holders 19 more years.

that's Sonny Bono of Sonny & Cher, who actually went on to become a congressman. So that meant the copyright for Steamboat Willie was set to expire on January 1st, 2024. Now, for further discussion of the expansion of the various copyright acts, check out Jake's video over at Corridor Crew. He is also a lawyer, and, does a great job of breaking down how the various acts were extended.

But this time around, to the surprise of many, Congress did not extend the Copyright Act, further delaying, Steamboat Willie and Mickey Mouse's entry into the public domain. But if you thought Disney was just going to sit on his hands, you don't know the Disney Corporation. instead, the company took another path, and instead it's now relying on trademark law.

While copyright law protects artistic works that are laid down in some sort of tangible medium, trademark law protects a word, phrase, symbol, or design that's used by an entity to identify its product or service. The idea is a trademark is for the good of a consumer to know where goods or services come from.

They see a trademark or a service mark, and they can identify who is providing that service or good. In anticipating that they might lose its copyright in Mickey Mouse, Disney incorporated this image of Mickey at the wheel of the steamship into its logo. It now runs before every animated feature. The company filed a trademark application in 2022 describing the mark as, quote, "A motion mark of an animator's drawings visually flipping one after another and transitioning into an animated clip of a mouse character tapping his foot and whistling while holding a ship's wheel, followed by the appearance of the wording Walt Disney Animation Studios underneath the animated mouse character."

Now, this might be a smart move because trademarks do not expire as long as you're actually using them in commerce. There are trade-offs in all IP. Copyright is automatic. As soon as you create the art, effectively you have a copyright, whether you register it or not. trademarks require you to actually use them in service.

you can't register a trademark and then never use it. That won't protect anything. So here's where I think we are. Steamboat Willie, the animated short, is in the public domain for sure. You can use that, animated short and display it, as a video

But Steamboat Willie/the original version of Mickey Mouse, might be a trademark itself, and it might be also a copyrightable character. You probably can't use the public domain version of Mickey in a way that makes consumers think that the work is produced by or sponsored by Disney. the reason Disney started incorporating Steamboat Mickey into its animated features was to create an association between that version of the character and the modern Disney audience.

And it's an open question whether you can even make a work of art featuring the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse that doesn't make you visualize the popular Disney character as it exists today. Believe me, this is going to make a fascinating test case for some poor, unfortunate soul. But that's just the tip of the legal iceberg.

Now, nobody really knows how this is gonna play out in court. A lot will depend on whether Disney becomes a trademark hawk or decides to just let it go. In theory, people can use the original image of Steamboat Willie, and Etsy today is filled with products like this retro Disney T-shirt or this cutting board.

However, if any of this threatens to dilute the trademark, Disney could use trademark law to crack down. And as you can see, the earliest iteration of Mickey had solid black eyes and skinny arms and legs, and he didn't wear gloves or even speak. He had a longer tail and nose, and he was more of a trickster than the wholesome piece of intellectual property that we know today.

All the newer versions of Mickey, including the ones that you're most familiar with, which show Mickey wearing red shorts and white gloves, will still be protected by existing copyrights Or will they? What if someone argued that all of the versions of Mickey Mouse that Disney thinks are protected by copyright law are actually just derivative of that first original Steamboat Mickey, and therefore you can make a movie using the character traits that appear in the later Mickey appearances?

What would the courts think? the answer lies in the way that courts apply the originality requirement of derivative works. In the United States, an alteration to an original work is called a derivative work, and only the copyright owner has the right to make or authorize an adaptation of an original.

What does it reveal to you about Disney when it embraces AI which infringes on copyrights but demands IP enforcement which does the same? 

Yes. I think AI has, really been a great example, a really material example for this book. unfortunately, the AI boom really happened after the manuscript was put to bed, so I don't get into it much.

Disney is one of the most, you know, famously and infamously aggressive legal, corporations in the world.

Of all of the, of all of the... A sl- a slight side note here. When you are, when you're a publicly traded company, you have to announce, as part of your public filing, as the SEC, you have to announce your top five paid positions at your corporation and what their salaries are, right? That's just part of the reporting requirements.

Disney is one of the only companies in the Fortune 500 who has their lawyer in that top five, right? Jesus. Disney is a law firm, in many ways. that's one of the core things it does. So anyway, all that said, Disney could-- honestly, it's a slam dunk over these AI corporations. If they wanted to, they could sue them into oblivion, The value of the things they are openly in The New York Times saying they're stealing, right? billions of dollars. it's a no-brainer, right? If they wanted to, Disney, could put, could end the AI boom now with massive lawsuits, right? or at least, slow it down significantly.

but they don't. Instead, they sue, people who make, who make g- copies of their movies on the internet or whatever, or people who, YouTubers who, are too critical and reproduce videos from, from Disney theme parks, right? I think that's a really good, that's a really good way of understanding how IP works, right?

Because it's about giving management power over workers, and it's about giving corporations power over their images. And anything that is in line with giving power over those images, will be, will not-- they will not go after it because obviously because IP is selective, because they get to bring a lawsuit, right?

Because they get to choose when to attack and when not to. They get to decide where their protection begins and where it ends, right? and they claim that the coronavirus vaccine being shared with the Third World, legally, they claim this, is a, is a fundamental threat to their business and their copyrights, right?

but they think that AI is gonna be great because AI is gonna allow them to drive down wages and is gonna allow them to produce more, or at least they think so for now, produce more, produce things faster. or, I think the way that they really worked. So during, when I was writing the book, the WGA, the strike was ongoing, and the, the actor strike was ongoing.

And I talked to a lot of writers. the strike gave them more time to talk to me, which was, which was cool. And they were angry, which was good. They, they were really thoughtful on this stuff. But, one of the writers said, the real threat from AI isn't that they're gonna write a script fully with AI.

that's gonna be bad. We all know that, right? The threat is that the, the executive Will create an AI script, then will hire writers only as editors, right? So they won't get the writing credit. They won't get the-- They'll just come on as script consultants. They'll get paid way less, and the executive can get the writing credit, right?

Even though fundamentally they wrote the movie, they had to rewrite the AI gibberish slop that they were given, right? But, the way that, the, the system is structured doesn't take that in, didn't take that into account. so it was this way that they could, just basically push other creatives out of the way, right?

Executives love AI because it allows them to feel like they made the thing. And to... And feeling like they made the thing combined with IP structures means that they can make much more money from it as well, and that they can cut wages on everyone else, even if those people end up having to do the actual work anyway, which is what they would do.

so there has been one-- Since the book launched, there has been one lawsuit, made on copyright infringement grounds by one of the big entertainment, industry things, and it was by Disney. And it was against one of their competitors. It was a competitor, a competitive AI model that they didn't like.

They sued them, right? But the AI they used, they didn't sue them, So I think that's all you really need to know. 

One last question for you, and as always, it's the question from hell, the question we hate to ask, you may hate to answer. Our audience is going to hate your response. So are we being entertained to death? Does IP lead us to being entertained to death?

Is IP an existential threat to humanity? 

Yes, absolutely and unequivocally. the, IP has driven, the creation of, the b- the greatest biolog- biology and food scientists in the world have created corn crops that can't reproduce, so you have to buy their crops every year from the company. so we have produced, IP has allowed us finally to produce food that cannot reproduce itself and that requires corporate intervention. IP has, produced, a world where, we-- some diseases like glob- diseases that affect the Global South get no treatment and no care 'cause there's no money for them, while, while hair loss is one of the most well-medicated conditions in the world.

we are being IP'd to death. entertainment is a huge part of it. Disney has been a huge part of that. And, if we can't overthrow the regime of IP, then I do fear desperately for where this world is headed. 

The shame of all this is that we could have built the Library of Alexandria, but it has been kept locked up by old laws, bad laws- preexisting business structures that we haven't been able to overcome yet. I don't have any reason to believe that they're focusing on rare books, let alone focusing on destroying them, right?

In many cases, there will be lots of other copies of these books, or there might be ones in libraries or digitized elsewhere. I can't say that for everything, but I've, I have not seen any evidence that suggests that's what they're doing, let alone, as you said, intend to do it. 

So Anthropic is not the first tech company to scan massive amounts of books and destroy them.

Decades ago, there was this effort called the Google Books Project, and I feel like this was one of the first efforts to really digitize books, and the precedents that were set around it ended up having a really big impact on how companies today can treat different books and interact with, the publishing industry.

What did it aim to do, and how did it ultimately play out? 

So the Google Books project was started, over 20 years ago now. The idea was digitize books And make them searchable like the web was searchable. So Google started digitizing books, and you could search through them. It would show, short snippets from book, not a full page, not paragraphs, et cetera, et cetera, and places to go, buy the book or get it from your library if you could.

They got those books in two ways. One was they worked with publishers and rights holders to acquire them, and in those cases, the publishers or the wr- the rights holders would say, "Actually, you can show full pages from the book in some cases." And so you could have the experience of flipping through the book in the bookstore.

The other way, which addressed the vast majority of books in the Google Books database, was partnerships with libraries. So they went to libraries, University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, et cetera, et cetera, and set up these partnerships where they received books from the libraries, from those university libraries.

They digitized the book for Google's use, and then they provided the physical book and the digital copy back to the library. So the books were not destroyed in that case. So it was different in that sense. Google Books is not a product today that most people have heard about or thought about, and it is core to what Google is doing in AI, right?

They have digitized over forty million books. No one has anywhere close to that many books. To the extent books are really important in the capabilities of these models, that's a huge advantage, and that's something that has been really big for Google even if that initial product didn't work out. So I think what Anthropic was trying to do is figure out, how do I compete?

I have to go buy books of my own. And they have... they are a lot of the same people who started the Google Books project, and thus I expect to be quite diligent in terms of how they think about what they're buying and h- you know, what they're preserving and whatnot. But they're trying to catch up and get to a point where they can compete.

Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. I think it's important to note that, Google is not destroying them, in a way, and I think that's what's, making people so upset. It is this horrible visual to see a book you know, and have its s- spine sliced off. there's something sad and tragic about it, and I think that's what people are so angry about, is, it'd be one thing if they were scanning all these books.

I'm sure some people would take issue, as they took issue with Google. But it's the, method in which they're destroying them that seems unnecessary. So why is it that Anthropic can't simply do what Google did with Google Books? 

So there are two reasons here. One is sort of efficiency cost.

The other is legal. There are lots of different commercial activities, commercial efforts to scan books for various reasons, including for, disability uses and other accessibility uses. In those cases, taking the scan where you slice it off and you just feed the pages in is way cheaper and more efficient.

And if you have a student who is Print disabled, is blind, and needs a chemistry book in a week. You just wanna digitize it quickly. And that's not quite the Anthropic situation. There are certainly, libraries that will do... might slice off the binding, feed them through, and then they may rebind it at some point.

But in many cases, I think ultimately those s- slips of paper just actually sit in rubber bands in a basement. They're not always rebound. I'm not saying that, that's a sort of excuse one way or the... Just to set the facts. The real key then is the law. So Anthropic, like many AI developers, has been sued for copyright infringement, including for their use of books.

Again, there were two sources of books that Anthropic had. One was they downloaded s- some books off the internet. There's these different databases, Books3, LibGen, that contain books that were digitized by somebody else. They don't necessarily know the provenance of them, and they use them. And the judge in the Anthropic case had serious reservations about the way they went about doing that.

And I'd say, it depends on how you read it, but, at the very least, that they had these and they didn't secure these files was bad. So the other way, and this is the way where the judge said, "This is okay," they went to bookstores, they bought books, and they made a one-for-one replacement. So they had an analog copy, they digitized it, and at the end they had one digital copy, not one digital, one analog.

And that one-for-one replacement is what the judge said was okay. And given the extraordinary damages in copyright, remember, Anthropic settled the case for $1.5 billion, and there are other plaintiffs still out there. It is totally logical to say, "We're not gonna take that risk." Basically, the law, copyright law, has put them in a bind.

For them to use books, they are incentivized strongly to do this. 

because if they don't destroy the book, the legal liability is so insanely large, especially for so many books, that they effectively have to destroy the book. 

Yes. In copyright, statutory damages can be up to $150,000 per work. So if you're digitizing millions of works, it's guess wrong, go out of business.

It's not just, a slap on the wrist. 

So I'm wondering, what is the judge's thinking in that? Is it just "Hey, we're making a one-for-one replacement. If you have a duplicate, then you have this duplicate out there in the market that's gonna affect the market somehow"? what is the, kind of the framework that he used to make this determination?

Obviously, we can't get inside his mind, but what do you think? 

I think it's about, then you would have two instead of one. There'd be a substitution if somebody's still reading that physical copy, and so on and so forth. Remember, all of this is happening within the Bounds of copyright law.

Copyright says you made a copy, that could be infringement. Okay, fair use, we gotta go through this four-factor test. Impact on the market for that book is one of them. Was it a transformative use? if there's still a copy, was it? How transformative was it? Et cetera. So given that's what the judge said they could do, I totally understand why Anthropic would not wanna take the risk of coming up with some other ways of doing it.

because any other kind of novel way that they tried to do this and tried to save these books could open them up to such liability, and it's sort of untested waters here. Not to be so sympathetic with, this big company, but to me that makes a lot of sense, and I feel like this is why... I saw people tweeting, "If you're mad about it, what's happening at Anthropic, you should be just as mad at, Disney and some of these other companies that really fought for the copyright system that we have today."

So a couple things to know about copyright. I talked about one already. Damages can be huge, right? It's not just actual damages, these huge statutory damages. If you're working with millions and millions of works, that's huge. The other thing is that copyright applies when you commit a thing into a material object, right?

You scribble something on a napkin, on a piece of paper, that is copyrighted as soon as you did it. So everything under the sun is roughly copyrighted. And so then if you think about, books, again, m- most books that have ever been created are not in print, are not in commerce. Maybe you could buy them out, as an out-of-print or an out-of-commerce bookstore, right?

You generally can't find and identify and contact and license from the rights holder, 'cause they're gone. it's true for a l- lots of books, but I'd say particularly in the 20th century. If we want to be able to preserve and use books in the 20th century, get a license is not an answer.

When it comes to copyright, there is no, registry or database or phone book of finding rights holders. A lot of time authors and publishers may disagree on who own the rights, but even if you know this is the rights holder, finding them, contacting them is simply not feasible. And this has been s- this is not just a back of the envelope, this is something the copyright office has reviewed time and time again.

It came up in the Google book search litigation. The authors and publishers themselves firmly agreed with this, that licensing is just not a solution for the vast majority of all books that have ever been published. 

I think it's useful here then to take a step back and to consider the concept of property more broadly. In particular, I think it's useful to compare and contrast the emergence of notions of property as it pertains to ideas and creativity with the development of the same around tangible physical things.

The side benefit of doing so is that it might encourage us to take a slightly more critical view of physical property. Yet what I'm primarily interested in is exploring the extent to which our concept of intellectual property borrows from our concept of physical property and how using the same set of ideas for both might not entirely make sense.

In switching our focus briefly to tangible physical forms of property, it's useful to distinguish between a few different forms of property as they exist in the present day: personal property, private property, and communal property. Let's begin with the first two. Now, in our everyday usage, we might be used to using the terms personal property and private property fairly interchangeably.

In most broadly Marxist and anarchist schools of thought, however, these terms have distinct meanings. As Bhaskar Sunkara explains, the phrase personal property refers to things meant for private consumption. The various bits of stationery on my desk, for example, the food in your kitchen, and most consumer goods such as TVs or sound systems would be in almost all cases personal property.

Your reason for owning them is solely so that you can personally use them. Private property, by contrast, refers to things that give the people who own them power over those who don't. Sinkara continues that the power created by private property is expressed most clearly in the labor market, where business owners get to decide who deserves a job and who doesn't.

To give a further example, we might consider a house that is owned by a landlord purely for the purpose of renting it out. In that scenario, the house gives the landlord a considerable amount of power over the person who lives in it. They can impose restrictions on what they can do in the house or periodically increase the rent.

Whether or not something is private or personal property is thus predicated on whether or not it engenders a social, economic, or other power relationship between the person or people who own it and those who don't. Indeed, many things can be either personal or private property depending on circumstance.

Your personal computer on which you play video games or surf the web, for example, is clearly personal property. If that very same computer was given to you by your employer for you to complete your work on, however, it would be private property because your continued right to use it is contingent on you remaining employed in that job.

Indeed, often employers will actively prohibit employees from using such company-owned devices for anything other than work. And if it's these relationships that define whether a piece of property is personal or private, then it stands to reason that intellectual property can never be personal. The exclusive rights that are bestowed upon the creator of an artistic work, whether that creator is an individual or a company, create a power relation between the creator and anyone else who might want to make use of that copyrighted work.

Let's leave aside personal property then and instead focus on our final form of property, communal property. Communal property refers to anything that is owned in common by multiple people and thus which more than one person has a right to use. A few examples of truly communal property exist in the present day.

Much of the time, we might experience streets and pavements as though they were communal property, administered by the state, yet which we all have a right to use. Nevertheless, anyone who's ever found themselves at a demonstration or protest will quickly have discovered the limits of those rights.

Yet examples of communal property have existed throughout history. We find reference to one such form of communal property in volume one of Capital, in which Marx explains that, "In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the population consisted then, and to a still larger extent in the 15th century, of free peasant proprietors.

They enjoyed the right to exploit the common land which gave pasture to their cattle and furnished them with timber, firewood, turf, et cetera." This common land usually consisted of a village green or similar space which most people living within that particular village would have the right to use. Over the course of a number of centuries, however, a process known as enclosure served to fence off and parcel up this communal property and turn it into private land.

The result of this was that it was no longer possible to raise one's own cattle, say, for milk, beef, or clothing, or that if one did want to do so, one would have to pay rent to a landowner in order to do Thus, property which previously engendered little in the way of a power relationship came to do so, enriching some while disenfranchising others.

The analogy of land and of enclosure is useful here, for the emergence of the concept of intellectual property in many ways mirrors that of private property in the form of land. See, the notion that artistic works might be considered private property is a relatively recent phenomenon. The first law resembling what we now call copyright came about with the passing of the Statute of Anne in England in 1710.

Primarily centered on literary works, it granted the author of a novel or other literary text exclusive rights over that work for a duration of 14 years. A number of economic and historical trends intersected to bring about such a law. The development of the printing press, for one, meant that it was easier to distribute certain forms of artistic works and thus owning the r- exclusive right to do so became highly profitable.

Perhaps more interesting for our discussion here, however, is the manner in which an artistic movement known as Romanticism had altered people's perception of the act of artistic creation. It is during this period, suggests Isaiah Berlin, that we see the emergence of a passionate belief in spiritual freedom, individual creativity.

The painter, the poet, the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature, however ideal, but invent. They do not imitate the doctrine of mimesis, but create not merely the means but the goals that they pursue. These goals represent the self-expression of the artist's own unique inner vision. Such a perception of the literary or artistic work as the sole creation of an individual author struck by divine inspiration to create something from nothing may often seem as though it's been around forever.

In truth, however, as Berlin suggests, the exceptional individual artist who pulls their creations from thin air is, as Roland Barthes had it, a modern figure. Certainly, writers, composers, and other artists have always been celebrated for finding novel ways to articulate or present a certain narrative or set of musical ideas, say.

But prior to only a few hundred years ago, they were more likely to be viewed as grazing on an intellectual or cultural common. The narratives, musical phrases, and other creators' ideas which already existed were seen as nourishing their creations. And in return, that which they created were free to nourish the work of future artists.

For a great deal of history then, art, literature, music, and many more forms of culture were deemed communal property, not private. Whole videos could be filled listing examples of celebrated artists who lived prior to the advent of copyright law who borrowed extensively and consistently from the work of others and who, in return, were borrowed from.

As James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins stress in Theft! A History of Music, Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach all extensively rearranged and reworked the work of their contemporaries and, in turn, had their own compositions reworked by others. Shakespeare, too, would be considered today a career burglar, with many of his greatest plays drawing their narratives directly from preexisting works.

As John Kerrigan writes in his book Shakespeare's Originality, "Shakespeare does new things with and adds extensively to what he draws from preexisting texts, but his originality is partly original-ity." A drawing upon originals. Recognizing the rich history of what would today be considered intellectual property theft thus perhaps allows us to reconsider contemporary copyright law.

For it allows us to see that the present system is not a given, but instead is the result of a gradual enclosure of the cultural commons in which communal property has slowly been converted into private. It reminds us that there is another way of viewing art, literature, film, and all other cultural forms, not as the immaculately conceived creation of the exceptional artist, but instead as the result of a repurposing and reinterpreting of preexisting ideas, and thus not as private property, but communal.

We've just heard clips starting with

Second Thought exposing how intellectual property laws turned insulin and COVID vaccines into cartels, with the WTO stalling patent waivers for over 600 days as millions died.

PIRGvideos laid out how patent abuse blocks affordable generic drugs, noting that one generic drops prices 40% while multiple generics can cut them 80% or more.

Tom Scott pointed out that whether it's Giphy, gaming footage, or Mystery Science Theater 3000, fair use often comes down to who can afford an expensive court fight, not who's legally right.

LegalEagle detailed the difference between copyright and trademark, explaining that Steamboat Willie is now public domain while Disney claims its Mickey logo as a permanent trademark.

This Is Hell! described how IP has produced corn crops that can't reproduce and left neglected diseases untreated, calling intellectual property an existential threat.

Taylor Lorenz traced how Google digitized over 40 million books while preserving the originals, then detailed why copyright law pushed Anthropic to buy, scan, and destroy physical copies instead.

And Tom Nicholas traced how our modern concept of intellectual property borrows from physical property, comparing copyright's emergence to the enclosure of England's common land that turned communal resources into private ones.

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

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As for today's topic,

One of the founding myths of modern economics is the tragedy of the commons. And the argument for why it's a tragedy and not just a regular bad thing is the irony of everyone involved acting rationally in their own self interest only to have everything collapse for everyone. This is always explained with the story of the shepherds bringing their livestock to the common grazing area and, trapped by rational self interest, depleting the shared resource and collectively ruining the system.

This parable gets at the truth of something, but not what most think. Elinor Ostrom actually won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009 for documenting real communities managing real commons successfully for centuries. The thought experiment about the shepherds feels true, but the compiled data says otherwise because people are capable of self-regulating better than the tragedy of the commons myth assumes.

There is a tragedy involved but the emphasis was mistakenly placed on the commons when the tragedy is actually about how rational self-interest can lead to detrimental systems if they're not designed correctly from the start. Cue the explosion of libertarians' heads.

The tragedy of rational self-interest can play out anywhere there's no system of rules designed to manage the system for the good of all and, in our extremely privatized world, the tragedies mostly play out inside the property game where rational actors collectively produce ruinous outcomes for everyone.

I've long thought that demonizing individual corporations for their lack of morality is misguided. They're designed to be amoral maximizers, pursuing profit through whatever means available, regardless of which specific people are running it. That's the system working as designed. Another tragedy of rational self-interest is that this design bends people, who are moral actors employed by corporations, much closer to the shape of the amoral corporate structure. Their job depends on driving profit for the company and if their morality gets in the way of that, most of the time, the profit motive will win out and those people will be replaced by those without the same moral qualms.

That's a system, designed entirely by humans with moral agency, that systematically pushes people away from acting morally. But that doesn't mean, necessarily, that this was intentional. The road to hell is paved with good intentions that are sometimes turned into law.

Rules that create things like the corporate structure or copyright protections often come from a sincere origin and are presented as a solution to real problems. Capitalism promises to reward the hard-working small business owner with equal footing under the law. But that's just during stage one. The system takes on a momentum of its own once unleashed.

It can be said that everyone is protected equally under the law, big businesses and small businesses alike, but if defending your rights in court depends on your ability to pay the lawyers, then the playing field is suddenly very uneven again. Just as it's very different for an individual artist to attempt to protect the copyright of their work compared to a large studio that may have an army of lawyers.

We tend to think about these things as snapshots, like the small business owner getting their start, or the tension between a big business and a small business. But things get worse when you take a step back and watch it play out in a time-lapse over decades.

It's not just that the big business will be better at defending their rights in court with their fancy lawyers. Those lawyers will have argued in dozens of cases over decades legal theories that structurally benefit big businesses over small businesses and corporations over people. They won't win all of their cases, but they'll win enough to set precedents, and those precedents compound over time. Having high-paid lawyers starts as an advantage, like outgunning the little guy on the battlefield, but given enough time, those big guns morph into a fortress, and the divide between the corporations and everyone else gets built into an impenetrable moat.

But they're still not done because winning the game based on the old rules that were intended to create the level playing field ends up granting those winners the power to rewrite the rules entirely. Not satisfied with having all of the rules interpreted to their advantage, corporations begin pouring money into our corrupt, pay-to-play political system and ask for old laws to be stricken, new ones to be written, and in the most brazen version, ask for exceptions and carveouts, all designed to benefit themselves.

This is how a well-intentioned law like copyright protection morphs over time from something genuinely intended to protect all equally into something that does the opposite, without ever declaring that anything has changed.

The best trick the apologists for capitalism in general or copyright protections in particular have is to defend their systems based on their sincere origins, the promise of laws applied equally to all, intended to give protections to the independent artists and the small business person alike so that they could find the footholds they need to build something with their own efforts. That argument only holds if you pretend that the later stages don't exist.

And unlike the shepherds grazing the common, this isn't just a theory because corporations leave paper trails. We know that in 1998 Disney lobbied to have the copyright walls raised higher for their own self-interest, and in 2025 OpenAI and Google formally asked the White House to carve exceptions through those same rules because it would benefit them.

It's rational self-interest all the way down but what we inevitably get is a system that's more and more bent to the will of corporations, never that imagined level playing field.

If you've ever met two libertarians, it won't surprise you to learn that libertarians as a whole can't agree on whether intellectual property should fall into the sacred category of property or into the reviled category of state-granted monopoly. And the reason there's so much disagreement is that they're both right, which really just demonstrates how much of the ideas behind IP are built, not natural truths that we've found and made law. And that which was built one way can be rebuilt.

This whole story is about the tragedy of rational self-interest in systems of private holding for private gain, which inevitably devolve into an ever-greater divide of wealth and power between the haves and the have-nots.

In our system, the rules and rule-makers get captured but, interestingly, systems set up as commons tend to resist capture because power is diffused.

For instance, Wikipedia is set up as a nonprofit and is built and maintained by volunteers, but it didn't start out that way. The original idea was for Wikipedia to be run as a for-profit company, even though the content was built on an open platform by volunteers. In 2002, the owners floated the idea of selling ads, and in protest, the Spanish-language edition's community began copying the entire encyclopedia and leaving to set up their own competitor, Enciclopedia Libre, at the University of Seville. That show of power, combined with the open nature of Wikipedia itself, meant that it simply couldn't be enclosed and extracted. They abandoned the idea of ads and switched to a nonprofit model. The fact that it's designed as a commons meant that no one could ever build a castle and dig a moat around it.

Rational self-interest is going to do what it's going to do, as is the profit motive and the corporate governance structure. Spending time trying to convince people to be better is always going to be a waste of energy. Instead, we need to make sure that the systems we're building have the incentives pointing in the right direction so that people's self-interest pushes them in the direction of moral choices and pro-social behavior.

Rules and systems that have been captured are no longer serving their intended purpose and deserve to be torn down and rethought from the ground up.

[

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

Section A, HOW WE GOT HERE

Followed by Section B, WHO PROFITS, WHO PAYS

Section C, THE DISNEY PLAYBOOK

And Section D, WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT

I call this the five phases of corporate IP ownership. And what do I mean by that term?

the ownership of a set of intellectual properties, in this case I'm talking about artistic intellectual properties like Spider-Man, by a corporation rather than by an individual or the artist who actually created them. And because they're owned by a corporation rather than the artist who created them, you end up with an interesting cycle that I've seen repeated in many different franchises.

The first phase of this cycle is the creation phase. This is when a new individual or group of creators create a new property, and it's usually done for hire, which means when they create it, it becomes the ownership of the corporation that's funding their particular endeavor. And it's usually a low budget affair.

It's brought to market rather cheaply, maybe a one-off issue of a comic, maybe a, a fairly low budget movie that's not expected to return, a whole lot of investment. And the reason it's low budget is because the corporation is looking at something that's, an unexpected return. It's unestablished, it's brand new, and therefore you don't know how much money it's capable of making.

Phase two is the explosion phase. This is when the property explodes in popularity unexpectedly. You can think like Star Wars, which only opened in a couple of theaters and then grew by word of mouth into something that became its own phenomenon. The corporation in step two of phase two immediately moves to capitalize on the growth, pushing the creators to make a follow-up work.

In this case, something like Aliens. And that explosion phase can produce some really amazing movies. think of some of your favorite sequels. They're happening in the explosion phase, for the most part. Next comes phase three, which is the milking phase. And in the milking phase, the creators, having experienced success, demand more money for their contributions.

The corporation, understanding that future sales In media are based on more on past success than they are on the actual quality of the media that you're being produced because consumers can't judge the quality of it until they buy it. they refuse the deal. They refuse to give the original creators more money, and they opt to bring in new, younger, cheaper labor, to continue the franchise in the absence of the original creators.

The original creators, which are now able to negotiate higher premiums for their work on the open market, leave the company and go work on future projects, either self-financing them or, working for another company at a higher pay rate. They move on. Second step of the milking phase begins in earnest.

The types of media produced are amplified. You get books, comics. You get movie adaptations of comics. You get many different, variations of what the original product was in order to milk it. You have many sequels, many different variations on what the original successful movie happened to be. You have merchandise that's really quickly rolled out in order to capitalize on the gains of the popularity of the original franchise.

And during this milking phase, you begin to experience the decline. The next entries into the franchise have a notable drop in quality but are successful at the box office and usually with children, mostly because they don't know what they're getting before they, they buy it, and they're banking on the past success, they're banking on the quality that they've already seen to provide, information for future quality.

And so the milking continues. The decline of it, of the intellectual property continues. As the market for the expanded products shrink, the corporations cut back on production, less toys, less comics. The future franchise entries have lower budgets. And eventually, you enter what I call phase four, which is the death or hibernation phra- phase.

You have a franchise that finally dies You may have studios keep writers on staff if they're making movies, but production never begins on a movie. Certain sequels may be caught in development hell. The last successful creators of the franchise move on to do other things, and the back catalog continues to be fairly successful and continues to generate interest.

In something like comics, you have a titular character during the death phase maybe make guest appearances in other series without having a series of his own, to star in. That goes on for an indeterminate amount of time before you enter, what I call phase five, which is the reboot phase. A reboot phase is after a certain amount of time has passed.

Once the franchise has disappeared for a while, the studio recognizes that consumers still enjoy the first entries of the franchise, and the lack of popularity of follow-up entries to the franchise may have been forgotten. And with the power of contemporary nostalgia, they make a risk assessment and determine that a reboot, a sequel, or a requel, which is a reboot sequel, would be a profitable risk.

They also know that people are likely to forget a lot of the bad things about the past and really hope for a return to form, having had a big break where there hasn't been any media. That there, th- there's a belief by consumers that studios are not gonna commit unless they are able to create a better product than what came before.

Step two of the phase five of reboot is the franchise is revived. The new product comes out. Fans begin hyping the coming product amongst themselves for free. You can think of all the hype that surrounded The Force Awakens. New talented artists are brought on board to produce a high production value, movie or high production value, toys, comics, TV series, whatever, the, the new version of this is going to happen to be.

Old figures from the original movies make cameos and show up in the new versions of these particular movies as a way to let the old fans know that, they ought to embrace this new version. They ought to embrace the new reboot because the old people are still on board. Now, in some cases, like with the Ghostbusters 2016 reboot, the old actors were forced through contract negotiations to make cameos in the movie.

they didn't support the creation of the movie. But y- there's other examples. There's Leonard Nimoy, appearing in the new Star Trek movies, before his death. There's also the appearance of, Han Solo, the older characters from Star Wars in the new requel or sequel trilogy, to draw a thread for old fans to make them believe that there's a continuation, of what they liked before happening in the reboot.

A new style is also embraced at the same time to entice new fans. However, that may also put off fans. If the reboot is successful, the product hits, consumers respond pretty well, think of like Force Awakens, the flaws are initially overlooked because of the hype and the fans are initially pleased, then the franchise returns directly to the milking phase In some cases, the reboot is not successful.

And then the franchise still returns to the milking phase, but with a shorter duration of it, trying to get the last value for the, for the franchise out before it reenters hibernation or just full-on death. And this cycle, once it goes back to the milking, will repeat indefinitely until the IP is sold off at a discount or is completely exhausted.

And I don't know how long it takes for an intellectual property to be completely exhausted. But at some point, the milking will stop

one of the, the big, statements that they made about the Civil War in particular was that slavery did not cause the Civil War, right?

We're all familiar with that battle, I think. And their idea there was that slavery was a unprofitable economic institution that would have died out, if the Civil War had not itself- ... killed it. So the whole idea that, white Southerners didn't want compensation really plays into that idea, because if slavery was so unprofitable, like, why would they have needed- Why do they care about, yeah

compensation in the first place, right? And so they're really trying to downplay, that economic significance of slavery to the white South, to America as a whole. and they're not going to, include those claims for compensation, during Reconstruction, particularly because one of their, other main tenets is that the White South just accepted emancipation with the end of the war and Confederate defeat.

So a lot of my work is just showing no. 

Yeah. And, and for, for good reason, they, contested this, the idea that they should be compensated. it's, a huge... the, what is it? The Fifth Am- It's a huge taking of property- Yes ... you could argue, right? which is what they did.

and that, in fact, and maybe you can go into it more, but that kind of explains how in fact it isn't a dying, institution, the, institution of slavery. That it's doing- ... pretty well, at the, in the eve of the Civil War. 

Yeah. And I think one of the most interesting things about the Fifth Amendment debate is that, this debate over whether or not slave owners had a Fifth Amendment right to property in humans, right?

as opposed to any other form of property, was really a question that was at the heart of the abolitionist movement and the debates that led to the Civil War in the first place. 

Sure. 

White Southerners are insisting that, enslaved people are property like any other kind of property, whereas abolitionists, and, many anti-slavery politicians are saying, no.

Property in humans is, it's very different." And of course, they're also insisting that there cannot be such a thing as property in humans. That's a violation of enslaved people's natural rights. so that's w- a lot of where that debate or how that debate is shaping in the Antebellum era. And after the Civil War, you really see that being rehashed in these debates about the Fifth Amendment, because that it hadn't really been tested.

Although the- ... Dred Scott decision addressed it, right? That decision does say that enslaved people were property under the law. But the Civil War itself became the test of this specific Fifth Amendment debate. 

Although, it's a little complicated because in fact, DC enslavers received, 

a compensated emancipation. How did that kind of... there you have, th- this has already happened. how does that kind of enter into the debate? And maybe, again, for listeners, just say a little about the kind of political, rationale for, compensated emancipation for DC 

So for some politicians, yeah, the, the Fifth Amendment was a large part of it.

that's definitely some of it behind the rhetoric. on the other hand, though, you have folks like, like Sumner saying, "This is a ransom," right? This isn't, this- compensation for DC slave owners is not compensation, it's a ransom, for humans, which, 'cause he's playing up that abolitionist argument of there's no such thing as property in humans.

and, I think you can also look at a lot of what is happening in conversations about compensation to not just DC slave owners, but also slave owners in those border states that, that remained in the Union and still had slavery. folks really, emphasize that the, the federal government is trying to maintain the loyalty of slave owners, s- right

so that, y- for the war effort. I think there's also, and this is something, that I hesitate to talk about because I'm thinking it through right now, but I also think there's a degree to which, Federal policymakers are, trying to express these, th- this c- these compensations to slave owners in DC, in border states, not as a property, argument, right?

They're not saying that they are compensating slave owners for the Fifth Amendment. They're saying that they are compensating, slave owners for the labor that, of th- those enslaved people- ... that they are missing out on, right? So they're they're making this little twisty argument so that they're not making any kind of precedent.

and they're ta- it seems like they're taking little baby steps forward- ... too, because, up until the Emancipation Proclamation, the Provisional Proclamation kind of gives a nod to compensation, and, Yeah ... and of course, even the Eman- Emancipation Proclamation says nothing about, the issue of slavery in the states that were loyal to the Eng- to the, to the Union.

... so then, I guess then if we're gonna move forward in that sort of thing is that, then with the 13th Amendment and slavery is abolished, it would seem that would be the time to say, "Oh yeah, and you're not getting compensated for it." But that doesn't happen. 

Yeah, that doesn't happen, and I think that's largely because, there might be a few reasons, and this is also a question that I'm working on in these revisions as, as I'm at the GLC.

I think that, one, the folks writing the 13th Amendment are the same are thinking the same way that Sumner is, right? They're thinking there's not property in humans anymore. the war is over, but those, congressmen in the border states, like Kentucky, for example, they're making those arguments about the Fifth Amendment, even during the debates on the 13th Amendment.

They're saying, no, this is, you must compensate slave owners," especially in the border states. although what happens after the war, becomes which is, where the bulk of my dissertation and my research lies, is in- How, I don't... I just don't think that a lot of, folks were thinking at that time that former slave owners in the South would come back and say, "We must have compensation," after they were defeated, right?

it's... And then that does happen, and they're like, "Whoa, hold on a second." and it also, I think, speaks to just, yes, we're talking about economics, right? We're talk- Indeed, slavery was an very important and valuable part of the US economy. But especially after the war, a lot of this fight is just a fight over political control.

So- 

Yeah ... 

so former slave owners, white Southerners, and Southern politicians are saying, "We should have compensation as a part of a reconstruction plan," believing that they might be able to push that through once their representatives are readmitted into Congress. And when they d- Sure ... And they don't.

And when they don't, they're going to debate that, and Congress is going to include that in the 14th Amendment, as well- Yeah ... instead of the 13th Amendment. 

I think- So the kind of pushback has been happening, and that's... And so say a little about- ... Section 4, I, I wouldn't have known that otherwise except for- Yeah.

you. It's not the, it's not the section that, rings in everyone's, ears, when w- ... we talk about the 14th Amendment. 

Yeah. 

Yeah, when I present my research to lawyers or JDs, I usually start off with an introduction. Like, when you think of the 14th Amendment, we all think of, Sections 1 and 2- Yeah

particularly. and how foundational they are to, civil rights in the US. And then I'm like, wait, what about this random little clause right here? Seemingly random. yeah, it's... And honestly, that section is really what kinda confirmed that my research would be about, compensation for former slave owners because, again, if they didn't want it, then why did, why is it in the Constitution- right

that they wouldn't get it? Yeah. essentially the 14th, that section of the 14th Amendment comes out of those, early post-war politics, right? Where, w- so white Southerners had, gone back to the drawing board with their state constitutions as mandated by Andrew Johnson in 1875, 1865, excuse me.

And- What I found in those constitutional conventions and in politics was that they usually accepted the 13th Amendment, largely because they had to. Yeah. and their plan was, okay, once, once we accept the 13th Amendment, once we rewrite the state constitution, then we can reenter Congress and petition for compensation.

we had our colleague Claire Priest on, who does a lot with, sl-slaves as property, but insists that, they, pivotal fact is their use as collateral for credit as part of the kinda birth of American capitalism across the board in, in, in thinking about the, the pr- the property regime and how important it was for American growth, which we know and love.

So I guess I wanna get to, to, from you, w-what do we say once we've identified these tainted origins or tainted results, from those who, say we've, there are these other sources or, on balance it worked out well 

sure. I think, it's an interesting way to present it, tainted origins or tainted outcomes.

I just don't think about it as a question of taint. I think that's kind of the wrong framework. I think that these histories, people have a hard time with them. They have a hard time with them because there is very little education about them. they have very few ways to wrap their minds around them.

They've been suppressed for so long that even people who are fairly knowledgeable about a lot of American history and law, all of our colleagues, are thrown out of their element when confronted with these histories. And one really common reaction I get to my work when I present it, I think you've seen this, Sam, is this idea, those histories were just all violent, but that's separate from law, right?

That was just genocide, and we should tell people about the genocide, but, that's different from law. We have all these received understandings about law and how it's good and it facilitates people's lives and makes it better and easier and so on and so forth, the kind of liberal narrative that Maggie was pointing to, in her last answer, right?

The, the solution is to extend that to everybody. that a lot in conversations about credit, right? The answer to, people's financial problems is just to get everyone access to credit. It's a great thing. I actually think Claire's work is so important in this respect when you look back at this long history.

She's completely right to point out, to point to the use of enslaved peoples as collaterals for developing the credit system at all, and there's other scholars who've talked about this. People like Joseph Inikori have looked at the development of these huge bureaucratic credit systems, that come out of the slave trade.

I, as have also looked at this question with respect to land, and I think it's really notable that before the colonization of the Americas, this type of use of land as collateral ending in easy foreclosure that would just throw a family off of their homes, out in the world with nothing, no way to survive, just wasn't something...

That just wasn't something that happened. There were so many protections to prevent against that, recognizing the massive social instability of having such a mechanism in place for, for, for non-payment of an unsecured debt to just cast a family out. There were just a l- lot of different legal mechanisms that made it very difficult, to make that happen, which Claire has written about extensively.

I've written about it, as well But when you begin the colonization, when you launch the colonization enterprise, what you really see is a willingness to experiment, I think, with known forms of transactions, but introduce greater violence. There's just no question that there was more leeway when it came to violence and infringement on aspects of people's lives that law has otherwise protected and that societies have held sacred.

almost as soon as colonists came over, they began to foreclose on Native Nations' land. They began, processes of lending that we could only describe as predatory, and then tallying up those debts and taking land as a result, and transactions that were not understood, not clear. and as I have said in, in an earlier paper, if that was confusing to Native people who were getting their land taken because they owed so many shillings for bolts of cloth they took from the store, it would've been pretty unrecognizable to English people as well.

That was just not something that was routinely happening. And so my interest in these evolutions from this period that we don't learn about is how our law has changed. Routine easy foreclosure is central to our entire real estate system now. There is no flow of credit without the ability to foreclose in this way fairly easily.

It makes the whole thing run, and that has been true for some time, and I think Claire, in her work, is tracking some of the evolutions of that with respect to the slave trade. And there was a lot of really interesting, legal experimentation and developments in how to categorize lands that had just been taken from Native people, enslaved human beings, as collateral in order to keep plantations whole, and her work has done a lot to uncover that, and my work has also investigated this dimension.

That is an unmistakably racial project, where racial formation is used as a resource that makes people more willing to experiment with violence. there is more violence that becomes a way of producing, more liquidity. Frankly, there's-- I just don't know how else to describe it, and those are evolutions we have with our law still, even as, even as the formal boundaries, this kind of practice is only applicable to Native people or to Black people.

Even as those have been lifted, the kinds of mechanisms we have in law that infringe upon people's basic security and ability to stay in their homes. we still have that as a mechanism for producing credit flows, born out of experimentation, that is easier to popularize when you use it against communities of color, the community you're trying to colonize, the community that you've enslaved.

And so what I'm interested in is the way that racial formation is a resource for this type of economic development and still is. It's really hard to argue that it is not. this is a dynamic system still in flux. I don't know how you could argue that race doesn't play a role in it, right? it just does.

And there's recycling of old methods. There's the invention of new methods. This is something I saw as an attorney as well, is constant innovation as to new different kinds of form of lending and foreclosure, used on really vulnerable popula- populations 

, My mistaken language of taint, the trouble there is that , it restricts the phenomenon to the past when the whole point is that it's ongoing in structural ways that, are open, not hidden 

I think that's right, but I also think the very word taint suggests that there's something pure , like there's something essential and good, and then there's the kind of infection that we can remove.

Yeah. 

your story is basically has to do with the slaves as collateral, for credit. Yes. and, y- you do not ... ha- have a very different attitude towards the function that slavery might have played in, the rise of capitalism or growth or whatever we're talking about than the, th- this, this new school of thought.

So could you just talk about, whether you have a critique of them, or whether you're telling just a more important story that they've missed? Or, is there an opposition or more kind of just different arguments that could sit alongside each other? 

Yeah. first of all, I think it's great that there is this literature because it's been a long time coming if you think that Eric Williams wrote his book, Capitalism and Slavery, in 1944, and there's been very little written.

I also wanna just mention that when I wrote this book, I was very committed to the idea of doing what I would... I guess you could refer to as, say, a unifying history. I get disappointed when I see that people were writing either about the founding era or about slavery, which seemed to me this is not representative of what it, the country, and it's very hard to write about this country in one, with one idea.

But I was committed to that, and so it's a bit clunky in places and, but it's a, a goal of mine was to try to write about the whole country at once, or, the 13 colonies and, and with the, perils of doing so. with regard to this n- the, the literature on slavery and capitalism, I would say I'm wanna add to it.

And I recently for people who haven't, read this literature, I think a great introduction to it and a great kind of, sort of literature review is the Matthew Desmond New York Times op-ed from 2019, where he draws from a lot of the literature. And I would say the literature has largely focused on a later period, on the 19th century, and you have financial institutions at that point, so you have banking, and the like, and you have cotton, which was a different industry, in some ways, although it just...

Cotton, w- the scale of cotton, and also the fact that cotton was so lucrative, just eliminated any thought that this was, slavery was gonna go away on its own. in the period... So one way I feel I'm adding to the literature is actually just by looking at this, this period where I think there's been less, and whether or not capitalism is going on at this period is a question.

I would say, people are defining capitalism lots of different ways right now. I, my inclination is to think of capitalism as a time where there are big financial institutions and the like that are consolidating capital by, by i-i, issuing debt instruments, issuing currencies, issuing stock, and they're these institutions designed to accumulate capital.

Now, you have, the Bank of England is, it was, chartered in 1694, so that, that's starting to happen in the period that I'm looking at, but it, but the co- In the colonies, actually, there were efforts to create banks that were suppressed. so there wasn't really banking. But I think that what I'm, So I, when, I think when you think about the emergence of capitalism, you might look, you... There are these sort of financial institutions that are generating a lot of liquidity for the economy, but then I think this other piece of it, which is the way that property rights are defined and the way that these claims are processed, actually w- it lets people from the bottom up use the property that they have to leverage to, to access this capital.

And so when I think about the slavery and capitalism literature, first of all, one, the fact that slaves are part of the capital is, should be a, is a huge Should be a huge part of our conception of what slavery was about. we talk about torture, we talk about rape in slavery, we talk about the inhumanity of having, your autonomy taken away, but the fact that you're...

to be collateral creates insecurity of a magnitude that is hard to fathom, where, you know, whether your owner is going into debt or there's a bad weather year, and the vulnerability that you have, to being seized. in fact, I remember, I think it was in Annette Gordon-Reed's, book about, Washington, that, he, she talked about how, that Washington was known for not torturing his slaves, but he would walk down and say, "I could just sell you."

And that is torture in my mind. Interesting. That is, so that's, in terms of how we think about slavery, I think that this is a big, important part. But also the fact that slavery was a system where the labor is part of the capital clearly allows people to access more capital and leads to the expansion of the institution.

there's an interesting, Gavin Wright has a book, Gavin Wright, from Stanford, has a book called Slavery and American Economic Development, which I, is one of my favorite, books of history actually that where he points out that if you look at the time of the Revolution, if you look at, compare wealth in North and South, that if you include slaves as part of the wealth, then per c- per free c- person capita, the South was much wealthier than the North.

but then when you take away slaves as part of the wealth, then the South is much poorer. So the, it shows you that the fact that slaves are part of the, were part of what made these economies wealthy and that what drove them to expand and thrive. So I think that it's, slavery is connected and I, but I think, what I'm looking at are the way that people are using their property, including slaves, to access the credit that's available, partly coming from, this financial sector as well.

We need three things. We need to update copyright law. We need a good small claims court for copyright, and we need to shorten how long copyright lasts. So first, updating the law. This is a big goal, but the entirety of international copyright law needs to be rewritten to reflect what's fair in today's world.

Everyone will have a different opinion of what that is. I'm actually fairly conservative on it. I'm not convinced that we should massively widen the definition of fair use because every bit of freedom you give to individual creators also makes it easier for big companies to rip them off. But I'm not gonna say where the line should be drawn.

It is a job for consultation and conversation where everyone is at the table, not just the big publishers. And if completely rewriting international law seems unlikely, then it's still possible to push for changes. In 1990, one article by one judge swayed opinion among the US legal community and helped change the most important factor of fair use from whether it was commercial to whether it was transformative.

It is entirely possible that new publications like that could help improve things. The judge's conclusion in the article also makes an excellent point. There should not be a clear and unambiguous definition of fair use, what he calls a bright-line standard, unless we have a good standard. And we don't have one.

The border of fair use has to be messy because people and creativity are messy So if fair use is going to be messy and if it will inevitably lead to conflict, let's make resolving that conflict quick, fair, and accessible. This is already starting to happen in the United States, but badly. The UK has one of the world's friendliest copyright regimes for individual creators.

We have the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court, which is mainly based here at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, and it's a specific court to deal with cases about copyright and patents and trademarks. And that court has a small claims track. If you're an individual photographer or video maker, you can do the research, file the right forms, follow the right procedures, and issue a claim as a litigant in person, which is the fancy British term for without a lawyer.

I've done it because a major company ripped off one of my videos. This court is designed to be more friendly for individuals. The procedures are more relaxed. It's almost like mediation rather than a court, except that if all negotiations fail, then there is a judge issuing a legal order at the end of it.

It is stressful. It is hard work. You need to get all the details right. You should probably get a lawyer if you're going to do it. But if your job is basically reading hundreds of pages of nerdy detail and summarizing it into something the world can understand, then yeah, it can be done. It is really nerve-wracking.

Like most of the people who walk into the admin building of one of the biggest courts in the country without a lawyer to try and file a claim, they don't have the best grip on reality, but all of them think they do. And there I was, walking in, no lawyer, thinking I had a case, thinking I had a grip on reality.

Statistically, the odds weren't in my favor, but I filed successfully, and the company settled with me. They paid me to drop the claim because they were in the wrong, and they knew they were in the wrong, and they knew I could actually get it to a judge in exchange for a bit of work and a court fee of just over 100 pounds.

There is a plan to do something like that in the United States. At the time of recording, the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement Act, the Case Act, is passing through government. Unfortunately, it has massive flaws. Using the new small claims track is voluntary for both parties, which means that if you want to sue a big company, that company can just choose to opt out and require you to take the expensive path.

And to quote an explainer, "If the losing party does not comply with the judgment, the prevailing party can bring an action in federal court to enforce it." So if you actually want the judgment to be effective, you may have to take the expensive path anyway. In short, all the power is still with the people who have money.

Oh, and it means that it's now much, much cheaper for big companies to try and enforce unfair claims against large numbers of individuals. It's a default judgment mill. The Case Act is not a fix. It's a step in the right direction, but it's not great, and it may well lead to more problems.

There's also a wider problem dealing with this across international borders, but that's a separate issue. Having a working small claims process in the United States would help address the massive imbalance between the rights of individuals and the rights of huge corporations, at least on this platform, on YouTube.

And even if that's just in the US, from there, the world will follow. So then finally, we shorten how long copyright lasts. Under current US law, if a modern work has an individual author, then its copyright generally lasts until death plus 70 years. For works by a corporation, it's 95 years from publication.

There are a huge number of complicated factors for older works because of the many changes to the law over the decades, but that's a decent rule of thumb, and that's too long. Singer-songwriter turned politician Sonny Bono, the person who the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was named after, he believed that copyright should be forever, that the great-grandchildren of Shakespeare should still be able to charge licensing fees for adapting Shakespeare's work.

Or more likely, those rights would have been sold to a corporation at some point, and Shakespeare Intellectual Property Limited would now be able to collect license fees into eternity. I think that opinion is so ridiculous as to be indefensible. If copyright lasted forever, if nothing ever entered the public domain, then yeah, someone would still have the final say on how Shakespeare could be adapted or performed.

Perhaps you could perform it however you wanted, but only by paying an enormous license fee. Little community theaters like this? Priced out. Or perhaps someone would want to defend the Shakespeare brand guidelines and insist that all adaptations be entirely faithful to the original text. So no Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet without permission.

No 10 Things I Hate About You without permission. The Lion King? It's very close to Hamlet, that. You wanna, wanna avoid that lawsuit. Making a reference to how all the world's a stage, pay up. Needs a license. And if you think that's ridiculous, find any book that quotes one copyrighted song lyric, maybe to introduce a chapter.

There will be an acknowledgement somewhere that they've got permission from the copyright holder. The point of copyright is to allow people to profit from their creative work. I'm not against copyright. I rely on copyright to earn a living, but the works that fall into the public domain are vital for creativity.

And patents only last 20 years. 20 years before your patent expires and anyone can take your actual, physical, real-world invention and just churn out cheap copies for everyone. If you invent something that literally changes the world, great. You get 20 years to make all the money you can, and after that, you will be out-competed by other people who can do it better and cheaper.

But write a song, you get until you're dead, plus your descendants get another 70 years. That is ridiculous. And meanwhile, all the orphaned works, the obscure things where no one can track down the copyright holder anymore to ask for a license, they can't be archived. They can't be copied. They often can't be preserved at all just because no one knows who to ask for permission.

The longer copyright is, the worse that problem gets. And I know a 20-year copyright term that matches patents would never get through modern politics. When you have enormous corporations that earn billions from their copyrighted back catalog, it is trivial for them to spend a fraction of that on lobbying to make sure copyright doesn't get reduced.

I would like it to be 20 years. I would campaign for 20 years, but I also know that it's not gonna happen. And to be fair, it does feel like the people who made the songs of the '80s and '90s, the songs that are still being listened to in this current nostalgia cycle, they should probably be able to make some money from that.

So I would suggest 50 years. It's an easy number. It allows a couple of nostalgia cycles to happen, and it would mean that right now the '60s would be public domain and the '70s would be on their way. The decades that are no longer pop culture nostalgia, but history. Pachelbel, Chopin, Beethoven, they should already be joined in the public domain by Dylan and Mitchell and Hendrix and Klein.

Shakespeare and Shelley, either Shelley, they should be joined by Lee and Heller and Orville and countless others, including the works that no one can trace the owner of because after 50 years, you shouldn't need to trace the owner of a work. You should just be able to use it. Anyone should be able to make a James Bond movie by now, 'cause they'd probably do a better job.

Yes, the people who have already made ludicrous amounts of money would not be able to make as much anymore, sure. But the artist's work, the thing they're supposed to actually care about, could be enjoyed and built on by everyone. And the few artists from back then who are still popular will be absolutely fine, continuing to make money from their world tours and merchandise and public appearances and newer albums.

And an entire new generation would get exposed to music and writing and art that might otherwise be forgotten about.

Next, Section B, WHO PROFITS, WHO PAYS

the broader issue, the meta issue for Meta- ... and these other companies, has to do with intellectual property rights at large.

Yeah. I don't know if you saw this, but- Jack Dorsey posted on X a couple weeks ago, I made some notes 'cause I wanna get this right. 

Yeah. 

He basically said abolish IP law. And then- 

Whoa ... 

Elon commented to that and said, "I agree." So what are they saying? 

So we can all build Teslas. 

Why are they saying- We can all have 

access to 

all their Yeah.

Why are they saying that? 

Yeah. 

What is informing that perspective? So basically IP law, intellectual property law is the foundation upon which an artist or anybody can create a work and then protect it- Yeah ... as their own, right? Yeah. Just like a property right. 

Books, music, movies, podcasts, everything- Yeah

is premised on IP law. Yeah. the reason they don't like it is because it's an annoying obstacle in this advance of artificial intelligence to commandeer- ... everything that's on the internet and use it for whatever they wanna use it for- 

Yeah ... 

unhindered. to me, it's sorta this sh- shouldn't this be an opt-in situation?

Yeah. Or just because you've posted something on the internet, it's free game for whoever wants to use it for whatever purpose? That seems to be what they would prefer. 

Yeah. 

They don't wanna be restricted in the way The New York Times is going after OpenAI- to have to purchase access to those data sets.

That's the last thing they want, right? No. And so at the same time, and I'm interested in what you think about this, there has been, with the rise of social media, a complete shift in the average person's perspective when it comes to intellectual property rights. I don't know about you, but, videos or reels that I put up on Instagram- people will take them and make their own reels and put them on and don't- Yeah ... they don't credit me or whatever, and I can guarantee you that it doesn't even cross their mind that they're taking something that somebody else created that took time- Yeah ... and money- Yeah ... and resources and energy, and just used it without thinking about, the fact that fundamentally, my lawyer brain is like, it is, that is un- illegal.

it's like- Stolen. But it's so permissive now- Yeah ... that there isn't even an inkling of, of like maybe I shouldn't do this or this is wrong. And so when that's seeped down, all the way throughout culture- there is a ripple effect to that, which is that I think as a culture we think differently about these rights- Yeah

and what they mean and the level of importance, the role that they play, you know- Yeah ... to allow, certain industries to even exist, let alone, artists the freedom to create and, create m- make a living off of their work. 

The, The prevalence of criminal acts doesn't make those acts less criminal.

And there is a massive power dynamic going on here with people like Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk in this example that's reminiscent of history. There's been a lot of entities with a lot of power who have not respected the rights of others in order to have financial gain. This country's built on snatching bodily rights away from- African people to build a country, 'cause you just don't see them as people anymore. But they would never reverse that, right? So I doubt very highly that Elon is willing to give up all the patents that SpaceX has, or Tesla. So he wants an exclusive, a superior ability to extract and exploit, and essentially colonize this frontier of us.

They want to mine us. The thing we've done to the Earth, they want to do to people: DNA, financial transactions, your location history, your tweets, and your X posts, and your Instagram feeds, and your podcasts, so that they can concentrate more wealth. It's not about banishing it for everybody.

Yeah. 

It's about advantaging themselves and treating us as raw material, as a natural resource that they can extract and burn out. 

Did you see, Sam Altman, at the recent TED Conference? 

Thank you for bringing- It was about this- ... so many receipts- Yeah ... to this conversation. So- I did see most of that conversation.

Let's see 

what you found ... so I think this, this story exemplifies what we're talking about. 

Yeah. 

This idea of intellectual property rights. So Sam Altman was at TED. He did a fireside with Chris Anderson. 

Yeah. 

and Chris basically showed this Peanuts comic strip up on the 

screen- ... 

that AI had created that looked exactly like a Charles Schulz Peanuts strip.

Yeah. 

and in 2023, Sam had said, "We think that creators deserve control over how their creations are used and what happens beyond the point of them releasing it into the world." At TED, he's shown this cartoon, and Chris says, "This looks like IP theft." And Sam says, "If you can't tell the difference, how much do you really care?"

And then he said this. Yeah. This is the button on it. Yeah. He says, "Clap all you want. Enjoy." And I think that really speaks to the, The, the kind of level of I don't give a fuck- This arrogance ... that these guys have. Absolutely. Yeah. yeah. 

Yeah. 

I think they would frame it, frame this, what is really theft as democratizing access to creativity.

Ironic 

to use the word 

democracy- 

Yeah, I know ... in this context- it's like there's many, you know- ... when the will of the people is not anywhere 

near this. 

Yeah ... rhetorical linguistic devices- Yeah ... to rationalize this. But this is happening in real time. And what happened to me, it's like it doesn't affect my life, but it i- it sends up a flare of- 

It's indicative

yeah, of 

what- Yeah ... 

of what's happening. 

with image generators like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, almost anyone can create new art in a matter of seconds. But the models that make this art don't just do it out of thin air. They've learned to mimic styles, even specific artists, through a process called training, where the models ingest millions, sometimes billions of images scraped from websites all around the web.

Combined with text describing the images, they now have a data set that lets them create almost any type of image from a simple text prompt. It produces some interesting stuff, but the problem is many artists never gave their consent for their art to be used in an image generator like this. So what should artists do?

So we've seen art theft before, but we've never seen it at this level. 

This is Karla Ortiz. She's a concept artist in San Francisco. 

A concept artist is a person who provides the first initial visuals to what something could be in a movie. 

She's designed art for Magic: The Gathering and even in Marvel's Dr.

Strange movies. Last year, she discovered her art had been scraped into an AI image data set. 

Especially my fine art work, and that to me felt really invasive, because I had never given anyone my permission to do that. 

On Midjourney, another popular generator, it's incredibly easy to find posts using Karla's name to generate work that looks incredibly similar to hers, and the same is true for dozens of other artists online.

So earlier this year, Karla and a group of other artists filed a class action lawsuit against Stability AI and a group of other AI image generators. In the meantime, Karla made the decision to take her work off the internet wherever she could. She figured it was the only way to avoid a computer scraping her work into an image data set without her consent, but what if she could still show her work online and keep it from being used to help generate new AI art?

Honestly, we just never had any idea that it was such an impactful problem. 

This is Professor Ben Zhao from the University of Chicago. He and his lab say they've developed a solution. They call it Glaze. 

At its core, Glaze uses the fact that there is this ginormous gap, difference between the way that humans see visual images and how machine learning models see visual images.

Because we see things differently, Glaze can make changes that are almost imperceptible to the human eye, but that dramatically alter how a machine sees it. 

So if you're an artist, you glaze your art, you post it online, you can rest comfortably knowing that a model that's trying to steal your style from that piece will learn a very different style that's incorrect, and when it's trying to mimic you, it will just fail, hopefully spectacularly.

As you can see, the AI artwork generated from a piece with Glaze is similar in content, but not really in style. 

To learn more, we asked the team to show us Glaze 

in action 

Start here. You can see some changes already on the texture on the, the right side one is the original, and this is the Glaze one.

You can see on the face has, some added, changes around the, on the painting. 

So the, the brush strokes are a little blotchier. It looks like there's these kind of, yellow patches of pixels in 

there. 

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you had laid these out in front of me and just said, "Tell me what's different," I would be hard-pressed to tell you.

All right. 

The promise of Glaze is exciting for artists, but critics say the AI art generators are taking inspiration the same way a human does, by studying other pieces and learning from them. Crucially, they say, these aren't copies. That's led the companies being sued to ask for the case against them to be dismissed.

Karla says, though, that's not a good comparison. 

I don't see one image, let alone billions of imagery, and instantly, archive it in my mind, and then I'm able to generate exact copies or similar copies in the blink of an eye. 

Some artists have said they'd be willing to use their work with AI image generators, but they say the process should be opt-in, not opt-out.

Stability AI says their new generators will be opt-out going forward. And Adobe says its new image generator, Firefly, has only been trained on images from its stock library. But even there, Adobe contributors say this type of usage was never explicit in their agreement. In the meantime, the internet being the internet, people are already trying to break Glaze and get around it.

I'm under no impression that it's gonna be last forever and protect against every form of sort of attack, but, we're hopeful that it will buy artists some time, and in the meantime, really, I'm hopeful that Glaze will not be the only tool of its kind. 

For Karla, that's the point, to buy artists time for regulation and the public to catch up.

Whenever people, jump in on these and say, "Oh, this is, wow," they need to recognize that it is wow because of, the work that is taken, and all of that work was taken without their consent to use to gen- you know, train these models so that they can generate that stuff that makes people go, "Wow."

You've been using the term generative art before all the venture capitalists flooded money into generative AI, and it took over every aspect of our society a- and our media. "Music that makes itself" is how I, I've heard you describe it. Yes. What is your definition of generative music and generative art, as you've practiced it?

So I think most people have the idea that when somebody makes a piece of music, it exists in their mind before they make it. people imagine Beethoven walking around with whole symphonies playing in his mind. And his job is just to notate it onto paper so that an orchestra can reproduce it.

And I call that the sort of architectural way of making music. That isn't the way most people work. what most people work is they get excited about something which they may have hit upon quite randomly. Yeah. a particular riff or something, and then they start building on top of that. so in a sense, that's a sort of generative process of- 

Yeah

watching something grow, and grow out of the interaction between you and whatever instruments and tools you have a- and the, and the situation that you're in, the moment that you're in. In the early '70s, I felt then that I was moving away from the architectural view of making music towards a sort of gardener's view of making art.

what a gardener does, he doesn't, he doesn't make seeds. He doesn't make flowers. He doesn't describe exactly what he would like his dahlias to be like. He plants some seeds, and they turn into flowers. The flower makes itself, basically. The seed has a set of instructions within it, that will produce dahlias rather than potatoes, or monkeys rather than, poodles.

But beyond that, the individual manifestation is a matter of all the things that are happening at that moment in time, in that place. That meant that when, It became possible to start using computers to make music. I naturally started thinking in that way as well. What can I do now, that I couldn't do before?

You've worked with so many legendary artists that many of us have heard of, U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, and you have, as with the architecture view of how to create art, you've emphasized collaboration much more than the individual legendary solo genius.

Do you think that your orientation toward collaboration has made you more willing to embrace Technologically infused and even AI-enabled, art creation, whether it's music, film, or otherwise. 

Yeah. I think that's a very good perception. Great ideas are often articulated by one voice but are always made by a community of voices.

So all of us sit on top of a community of some kind. Yeah. And we grow from it, and we feed back into it, and that process is not acknowledged at all in, in the art market or even in the music market. we reward quite disproportionately the people who happen to be the articulators. 

Yeah. 

And we ignore the, all the many people who created the whole infrastructure, the sort of- 

The environment out of which it grew

environment. Yeah. 

Yeah. Yes. And it, which comes back to the garden metaphor, right? Yes. The, that plant doesn't grow in a vacuum. There are other plants. There's the whole soil system. There's the- Yes ... fungal networks underneath. There's the sun. There's the rain. there's the insects and the wildlife and, the effluent from, from- Yeah

other animals that are all feeding that beautiful flower that you see, but it emerges from a larger context. I really love that. Yeah. 

And we really, we... It's very clear to us if you look at flowers- Yeah ... there's no such thing as a self-made flower. and yet we believe, we act as though there is such a thing as a self-made man.

Yeah. 

people who position themselves as, "I did it all myself. I came from nothing, and I made it all on my own." And that is not true of anybody. 

No. th- I think you, you've called it scenius, right? Yeah. Is that the, the, there's a whole scene, and the genius kind of emerges from that, not a, a solo person.

Have I captured that accurately, yeah? 

That's right. Yeah. So just as genius is the word for the kind of creative intelligence of a single person- ... scenius is the word for the creative intelligence of a whole network of people. And I think if it were not for the particular economic system we have, which always rewards disproportionately the people who are already at the top Yeah

gives them even more. if it weren't for that system, I think we would acknowledge that more readily. And in fact, if you l- if you look at, pre-Renaissance, when a lot of artists didn't even sign their work. They just saw themselves as part of all the people who were working on, say, a cathedral Yeah

the guy doing the windows, the person doing the leading on the roof, the architect. These people were often un- unnamed. They were just part of a community making something. 

What does that scenius look like on AI? How do those intersect? 

you could say that AI is a, is the most extreme example of scenius, in that it sucks the, all its information from everywhere and from...

of course, that isn't quite true. It s- sucks it from, mostly from Western people who've written books. that's where most of the material that is in, for instance, ChatGPT comes from. So it's quite a, an unbalanced... If you're looking for the world's wisdom, that's a very particular subset of it that...

But the th- the problem is not that it does that. it's quite... It's what we do in folk music. folk music is not people pretending to be original composers. I've had a stroke of lightning hit my brain, and I've written this wonderful new piece. It's generally people listening to each other and contributing a little bit, adding a little bit to it in their own performance of a known song.

this is absolutely how it works, I think. But, what happens with, again, with the politics and the economics of culture, is that somebody grabs a little area, puts their name to it via copyright laws, I'm one of those people, and then earns the money from that thing. it's unfair, actually.

A-as you have been someone who's, over generations of music and innovation tapped into waves of technological change, witnessed and tapped into tape recorders, multi-tracks, synthesizers, algorithms- How do you see the recent rise of AI comparing to these previous advents in technology? 

I can see from the little acquaintance I have with using AI programs to make music that what you spend nearly all your time doing is trying to stop the system becoming mind-numbingly mediocre.

it will make things for you straight away, no problem at all. You don't even have to give it any prompt, and it will make something, and it will be really quite shitty. your first impression is, "My God, that's amazing." But then it's not actually that good. there was ... I think it was Samuel Johnson said something.

He was at a party, and somebody produced a dog that could walk on its hind legs and everybody said, "Amazing, it's a dog dancing. It's incredible." And he said, they're surprised by the dog is dance- by the fact that the dog is dancing, but it isn't the dance that impresses them." the, the dog just doesn't dance very well.

Yeah. 

And the, the AI doesn't dance very well either. 

The Professor of Rock, Adam Reeder, and Rick Beato, and then some commentary, from Rhett Shull. They're all ostensibly saying the same thing, is that they're spending hundreds of hours, thousands of hours creating this content that is educational in nature and by way of featuring excerpts of that music that their entire video is penalized as a consequence and that the idea of fair use is completely in the hands of the copyright holder.

So that being the record labels and the artists or the publishers or whoever it is that, that owns the rights to the music, it's in their hands as to whether they accept or deny any sort of dispute for the reasons of fair use. And so it creates this asymmetry where they receive all the benefits of the content of, let's say, somebody like a Professor of Rock who has, almost, what, 2 million subs, or a Rick Beato with 5 million plus subs, or fill-in-the-blank creator, but they don't receive any of the benefits of their time and creation.

And I can say as somebody who is creating interview videos that are certainly similar in nature to, those from Professor of Rock and those from Rick Beato and other creators in the space, where I'm having session musicians that played on hit songs recreate their original parts to the original multitracks, and then discussing sort of elements of the session and working with the artist in the development of the song.

We've not had any of those videos, in 30 or more videos that are one to two and a half hours long, those are not monetized either. And to give you a sense of sort of the, the loss on that, I'm looking through a spreadsheet here just off screen of what these videos cost, 'cause I track them from the editing expenses to the videographer expenses to having to rent a studio, especially if we're flying to somebody who maybe doesn't have a home studio, the engineer expense if we have to have an engineer there, rental cars, hotels, food and accommodations for the time of the shoot.

A- and they average 3,700 on the low end and 6,200 on the high end. And so there's quite a range that's in there, and I'm not doing this with an exorbitant budget. these are like the real costs of what it takes to produce a one to two-hour interview and have all those other resources for recording it and capturing the dialogue and then having somebody put it all together and edit it, and then of course getting there and back.

These are real costs. And when you think about the fact that you're putting this all out there on speculation, or I guess at this point it's not even really speculation, you put it out there and 100% of the revenue generated from the content that's created all goes to the record label. That is a pretty major asymmetry in terms of they, have their fingers on the scales and we don't get anything for it.

And I know that The, th- there's been a lot talked about that there should be some sort of solution. I haven't yet heard at the time making this video of any actionable solution, and I was considering this as, I was speaking to an attorney today about, Klons centaurs and this lawsuit that's happening right now in the pedal world.

And if you don't know, I'm-- my real job is that I manufacture guitar pedals under the name Vertex Effects, and that's what we primarily are even though on YouTube, that seems to be a fraction of the content that we create, and a lot of it is interview related content. A- and, we were doing a, a podcast about the sort of the goings on of, copyright and trademark related stuff.

And at the end of the conversation, I happened to bring this up about k- some of the things that are going on around fair use. And she had some really interesting perspectives about the, the money side of things a- and how that relates to the legal definition. and i- it's curious because her perspective was, as an attorney who's tried cases i- in similar fields, was that when you're saying fair use, you also Cannot be making money.

So not only is the expectation that the label doesn't make money, but if it's truly fair use and you're using it in your videos, then you also cannot be making money. So in other words, e- both parties make no money. There's no monetization on either side. And I thought that was an interesting caveat to the narrative that we've heard, and I don't know that maybe she doesn't have all the information, or maybe I explained it improperly, which led her to the conclusion that she, delivered to me.

But it sounded like from hearing Rick's, conversation about this, is that there was a way to get these claims overturned. And I don't know if he was talking about blocked claims or whether he was talking about copyright claims, which are just, the money now goes to the label instead of going to Rick.

And so I'm curious about a clarification on that point. a- but I'm also clear, or I'm also curious about what is the legal argument then that is being made, if it is in fact that he's getting copyright claims overturned, and he is now getting revenue sent back to him from the videos and whatever they're generating.

What is that claim? Because it, it seems like that would be really important information if our commitment as a community is for people to be able to fight with the same equipment, the sa- the s- the same weapons against the record labels, that we would need to know how it is that we're supposed to strategize in order to win those fights.

And so I'm hoping that if anything comes out of this between the work that Adam Reeder is doing in sort of escalating, this with the record labels and also Rick, that there's some mechanism with which they can share it with smaller creators so that they too can benefit from being able to monetize their content.

from Walt Disney's very, very beginnings because Mickey Mouse had global appeal, right? it was an, he was an international star. people loved him all over the world. in the '40s, Walt Disney took two separate, quote-unquote, "goodwill trips" to Latin America, as a way of shoring up, the Western Hemisphere in the face of World War II and production.

he was also then, after the war and after a really bitter animator strike, as he moved from, reflexive conservative to far-right wing nut, Walt Disney then, operated. he was He is maybe personally responsible for the HUAC hearings, the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings that were so famous, where, Hollywood filmmakers and screenwriters were forced to either denounce other people or plead the Fifth and be blacklisted.

Walt Disney wrote a bunch of letters to the State Department, to-- excuse me, to HUAC, asking them to come to Hollywood 'cause it was full of communists. he was doing that during World War II. They didn't really listen. They had other things on their mind, namely the two-front war.

but, but then after the war, as the Cold War ri- winds up, he starts writing the letters again, and then they show up in Hollywood. So he's part of HUAC. he's part of the Red Scare. he also, did special reporting for the FBI. he-- I know it makes you sound, Now I sound like the wingnut, but, he-- Disney planes were donated to Barry Goldwater's campaign, presidential campaign.

Barry Goldwater, the far, far right. The last time before Trump, we had a basically fascist, presidential candidate, s- in serious contention. in that way, it was a very direct relationship with the state. and then again in the s- in the '70s and then again in the '90s, when Mickey Mouse was coming up for copyright expiration, Disney lobbyists very explicitly pushed a bill that would extend copyright, and they could have argued for, with the amount of power they had, which was b- shaping legislation, right?

they were shaping legislation in the federal government. they could have probably just argued for a, a particular extension for Mickey Mouse, right? They probably could have won something like that. but that would've been bad for their image. It would've made them look like greedy capitalists.

So instead, they just pushed for a general extension of the copyright, both times. now the copyright only expires, it expires 75 years after your death, or 95 years in the case of a corporate, for-hire work. I believe those are the numbers. So now basically they destroyed the public domain.

So anything that has made, since 1930, 1920- 26, 1926 or 1931, depending on whether the person died or not, is under copyright still. which means that Imagine if our culture could only ever riff on Golden Age jazz and The Great Gatsby, right? if nothing since then was like... None of it's in the public domain.

All of it is privatized still. and that's, that's pretty, that's a wild thing to do for a company that is associated with the sort of happy magic childhood, stuff, 

And they must be really good at it because we don't necess- we turn a blind eye to that entire history on a regular basis.

We're speaking with writer, agitator, author of The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World, Vicki Ostweiler. you can find Vicki on Blue Sky at vickiacab and on Letterboxd at nocopszone. So you also point out that in 2019, the Disney Corporation was at the heights of cultural power.

It had earned $3.74 billion in the box office alone, 33% of the entire market, and over the past five years, or previous five years, had, averaged 20% of all US box office income. Its Russian arm, The Walt Disney Company CIS, had just released the highest grossing Russian language movie of all time, called The Last Knight.

Subsidiary Walt Disney Company India had done the same in Bollywood with the movie Dangal in 2016. And The Walt Disney Company Latin America had produced the year's highest, grossing Spanish language film in Argentina for three years running. But this was just icing on the magical cake. Billions of dollars of icing to be sure, but icing.

Does their image, does the Disney image prevail wherever Disney goes? Does it matter what the culture is, or do they adapt to that culture? Or do they impose their own culture on them? is Disney popular even when the, where the US is not? 

in short, yes. I think there was, for a long time, especially in the Cold War, and now I don't, I really don't know who I'm quoting here, but there, the, there was a sort of common phrase that the best ambassadors for the United States are Coca-Cola and Mickey Mouse, right?

that sort of, and Levi's jeans I think were the other really popular product. part of American imperialism in the 20th century, that was that was effective in places they weren't, directly having boots on the ground. In fact, where they directly had boots on the ground it was often less effective because you could see the blunt end of the stick, was, these sort of, these products that were You know, better isn't the word, but were of higher budget, a certain kind of higher quality, more consistency, right?

or more affordable, or they were cheaper, they were more plentiful, right? this, this sort of, Mickey Mouse was part of that, right? Mickey Mouse was this image, this global image that was extremely powerful of, American goodwill. and it goes back to World War II, he, it's not wrong that in the '30s, Mickey Mouse was a g- was already a global symbol.

Disney World, I don't think, I don't know if it's still true because, again, with the border stuff that Trump has been doing, I don't know. it's significantly damaged Disney World's numbers, but, Disney World is the number one tourist destination in the world by, by millions of attendees, and has been for decades.

I think, there's there-- Disney World, Europe, France, it famously failed, but in, it-- there's Disney Worlds all over the globe, that are effective and popular. and the movies are too. they, it waxes and wanes, like as anything.

it is, it is like a... Fashion and popularity are, ephemeral things. but, but Mickey Mouse and Disney in general has remained incredibly constant. and it is precisely the goodwill that Disney has as an image of childhood, as an image of itself, that has allowed it to do some of the things you're describing in that passage, which is so in the, that movie, The Last Knight, which I write a chapter about in the book, the Russian film.

they basically, tell a f- a folk story. it's pr- it's a pretty bad movie, honestly. but, and it, but it spawned two sequels. It's a whole franchise. they tell this movie, this story about Baba Yaga and Koschei, who are, two of the most important figures in, Slavic folklore, right?

and the Frog Princess is also in there. and, Bogatyr for folks who know their Slavic folklore and are also listening right now. anyway, and those, those characters all fall under Disney copyright. But because it's sort of a Disney movie and because suddenly like Disney is paying attention to these like, because wow, Disney's making a movie all about our folk stories, right?

they're making a movie for us about us. Like that is a structure that functions because of Disney's reputation, globally as, you know- Both, both American-ness, but also childhood joy, pleasure, nostalgia, right? And that, that is global. with, with... it ebbs and flows.

but it is certainly a, a global force and has been remarkably consistent in a way that other corporations, have failed to. have failed to be, consistent for that long. and, I think that's some combination of its canny, management of IP and its association with childhood, right?

you get them young, and then they're a customer for life 

Now, Section C, THE DISNEY PLAYBOOK

TJ Detweiler returns to school after a week-long absence to learn that the playground has adopted a form of currency, monster stickers, AKA mon stickers. If you want to do anything on the playground, you've gotta pay with mon stickers. 

Mean they're like money? Only better. Money doesn't feature blood-sucking ghouls from beyond the grave.

Yeah, it's the chicken finger episode from Community, just with stickers. TJ quickly learns that since he doesn't have any stickers, he can't do anything that he used to be able to do for free. Throughout the rest of the episode, TJ moves from the very bottom of this new economic system all the way to the top.

When TJ finds out mon stickers are sold out everywhere, leaving him destitute, he gives a speech that basically summarizes the American dream, vowing to work really hard, get to the top, and be free

This will have to do for now. I may be down on my luck, but I'm not out. I'll be back. I'll work, sweat, and toil like no kid before me. And one day, as I play and breathe, I'll have enough stickers to buy back my hat, my dignity, and maybe even a ball 

We then get a montage of TJ working various jobs for a small sticker wage.

He quickly tires of this, though, since he's not able to save up any stickers as part of the working class. 

Man, I've been busting my hump for days, and I'm still just a working class schmo living sticker to sticker. There's gotta be a better way. Wait a minute. Maybe there is. 

Doing the work himself, creating actual value, TJ is getting nowhere.

So what he's got to do to succeed under capitalism is find a way to convince other people to do the work for him. He does this by buying a stake in a small business. This guy charges people to enter the school, but he's gotta stand there all day to collect. TJ offers to invest 25 stickers up front, do all of the work, and in exchange, get 50% of the earnings.

Then he hires someone else to do the work for much less than he'll earn from that 50%. 

Hey, kid. Wanna make a few extra stickers? sure. I'll pay you two stickers a day to work the door for me. How's that sound? Two stickers just to stand there all day? Deal 

So what just happened here? TJ made an arrangement where he's adding no additional value to the system.

There was a guy watching the door before he arrived, and there's a guy watching it afterwards. Instead, he has extracted value for himself, and he's exploited this poor guy who's not getting paid what he's worth. TJ continues to do this around the playground. After making a sizable amount of money, he uses his position to secure a monopoly on a valuable resource, the balls of the playground.

300 stickers for all the balls. This continues until TJ is exponentially wealthier than anyone else. 

Excuse me, sir, but according to my calculations, you now control four of every five Mon stickers at Third Street School. Excellent. Now we just need to figure out a way to get the rest. 

As the top dog on the playground, he's able to abuse his position to charge for things he really has no right to charge for, like literally standing around.

Eventually, TJ's actions impoverish the rest of the students, and economic activity has essentially stalled.

TJ, the kids can't afford to do anything as it is. Look around. They don't have stickers for balls. They don't have stickers to play on Old Rusty. They can't even sit on the grass. Everyone either works for you or just stands around and does nothing. Good point. Gus, start charging kids for standing around.

We'll call it a loitering fee. You can't charge kids just to stand around. Watch me. 

With his newfound power, TJ becomes increasingly megalomaniacal and cruel. 

But I suppose I could part with one sticker. One sticker? Take it or leave it, cootie head. I'm a busy man. 

But just as quickly as he rises, he falls.

His friends turn against him and introduce a new collectible to the playground, rendering TJ's fortune worthless. 

Two, please. Two Mon stickers, right? 

Afraid not. We're operating on Lick-and-Stick Alien standard now. 

Alien stickers? But no, it can't be. I'm, I'm-

They then get him to sign a contract preventing him from owning 10% of any one market. But the episode ends on a foreboding note since TJ immediately reverts to old habits. 

Welcome back, TJ. Now let's go play. I would love to, guys, but I don't have a licking sticker to my name. I gotta get to work. Oh, good.

King Bob looks sweaty Now, I love this episode. I think it's really funny. But let's acknowledge first that it is a very simplified version of economics and capitalism. Mon stickers are both a commodity and a currency in this story. There are no banks or a stock market, and since mon stickers are sold out of Kelso's, there's no way for new money to enter the system.

There are a finite amount of stickers on the playground. So yeah, this is a 10-minute-long cartoon, and the purpose of satire isn't to accurately demonstrate all the nuances of its target, but to exaggerate its flaws in ways that reveal a deeper truth. And there's so much here that rings true, like the idea that it's basically impossible to get ahead by working for a wage.

That you can manipulate the system so that you're not creating any additional value, but extracting it. That monopolies allow businesses to gouge their customers. That making the rich richer does not trickle down to the rest of society, since TJ is just hoarding his wealth. That the government, i.e. King Bob, never intervenes because they benefit from the system.

And really, at its core, the episode is just trying to show how money can corrupt a good person. What's most interesting to me about this episode, though, is this: it starts out by very clearly establishing the rules of the society. Even though it's an unjust system by charging for things like water, the rules are clear.

Everything costs stickers now. TJ then begins to game the system, but he's still playing by the rules. But then once he's cornered the market, he can just make up whatever rules he likes. He has no right to charge people for standing around, but no one else is powerful enough to stop him. Earlier this year, Disney bought 20th Century Fox, bringing the number of major Hollywood studios from only six to just five.

And Disney dwarfs the competition, capturing roughly 40% of the box office in both 2018 and 2019. Their closest competitor, Warner Media, has less than half of that. This is a problem. Even if you have a lot of nostalgia for Disney, it is a problem. Here's why. One, there are now fewer gatekeepers in charge of which films get made.

This could lead to further homogenization of the films that are released, as riskier films with different sensibilities are prevented from being made. Two, there are fewer movies in total. Disney didn't just buy Fox, they kinda dismantled them. They canceled more than 200 of Fox's films, and will end up laying off about 3,000 people.

The film industry is literally smaller as a result of that purchase. Three, Disney can stiff-arm its competitors.

But I suppose I could part with one sticker. One sticker? Take it or leave it, cootie-head. I'm a busy 

man. Earlier this year, negotiations between Disney and Sony broke down over the Spider-Man IP, and for a while it was reported that Spider-Man would no longer appear in Disney's Marvel films The deal was eventually salvaged, resulting in Disney getting 25% of the revenue from future Spider-Man movies, up from the 10% that they had before the negotiation.

The fact that fan outrage was directed primarily at Sony, since people wanted to see the character interact with Disney's Avengers, may have been decisive in renewing the deal. Four, Disney can stiff-arm theaters. Once upon a time, a law was passed preventing movie studios from owning movie theaters. The result was an explosion of independent productions, a very good thing.

Recently, Disney has shown a willingness to circumvent the spirit of that law, such as the terms they gave to theaters for showing The Last Jedi. Disney wanted theaters to agree to show the film for four weeks in their biggest auditorium. That's a bad deal for theaters since, after a few weeks, it would be more profitable to show a newer film.

But since Star Wars is such a huge property, many theaters can't afford to not show it at all. So the more powerful Disney becomes, the more they're able to dictate terms to theaters, meaning there are fewer screens for everyone else. 

Gus, start charging kids for standing around. We'll call it a loitering fee.

You can't charge kids just to stand around. Watch me. 

Five, the Department of Justice wants to get rid of that law I just mentioned, which could lead to Disney-owned theaters that block other studios from even having their films screened. Six, Disney can profit using artificial scarcity. For decades, Disney has used this tactic.

Films would be put in the vault for years, where they were unavailable for purchase. This would inflate sales when the movie is inevitably re-released. Disney recently stopped using the vault, at least for its own original movies, but they can easily reimagine the strategy for the streaming era. And since buying Fox, they've prevented theaters from playing old Fox movies, effectively putting them in the vault.

that was the hook that I would use to tell people when I was explaining why I was writing a book about Disney movies. be like, okay." And so the thing I would say is, the... it's starting out to answer two questions. Why are all superhero movies the same?

And why did Disney and the rest of Hollywood send lobbyists to stop the Biden administration from sharing the coronavirus vaccine with the Third World? And why do those questions have the same answer, which is intellectual property management?" because I think if you think about a movie company, if you know anything about movies, you instinctively understand that a global pandemic is a disaster for movies, right?

The movie theaters were all closed, right? And obviously, like filming on set, like if they even get back to being able to aggregate to film in aggregate, every single day on set is so expensive. The way filming works, it's so intense, and so like having to protect against an outbreak is really expensive, and one star getting COVID could bankrupt an entire movie, right?

So it just like instinctually makes sense. Like, why would... why wouldn't they be super invested in making COVID end as quickly as possible? It's 'cause Disney's not a movie company. Disney is an IP protection company. In 2018, which was the year that Disney had the largest monopolistic share of the movie industry of any year I looked at, I looked at like sort of the '30s as well, because that was when monopolies got really intense.

So in 2018, when they had the best year any movie company had ever or will ever have in the history of movies, that was 16% of their total revenue. it was not even a fifth of their business. So movies are just really expensive and profitable advertisements for the rest of their business empire.

Merchandising, education, theme parks obviously, cruise ships. They have venture capital firm. the GoPro is a Disney product. They... there's less money in it now, but music and books was also like a big sideline for them. There's just like this sort of massive corporation, and through, across the entire corporation, characters are the lifeblood that brings money in.

So when they bought Marvel in, also in 20- was that 2013, 2012? It's in the book, the right date. I'm not always great at the numbers like that. They said, and I actually wrote down the quote so that it wouldn't, I wouldn't get it right, that, 'cause it's so banal that it's, hard to remember it.

They described Marvel... Now, again, they just spent $4 billion on this company. They described Marvel as a character franchise company. That's what they were buying. They were buying characters. So if we think about, what does Meta own, or any of the software companies, the, the social media companies, they don't own the servers usually that run...

Most of them just give it to Amazon, right? That's how Amazon's in business, is they hold all the other we- websites. So what they own is the designs, the code, and the sort of the intellectual property that is, held by their engineers and their designers. And that code, theoretically, you could just highlight and hit copy/paste on it, right?

There's no... Without the state backing up that right of intellectual property, there is no way a software company makes sense and exists. Similarly, it is quite easy for anyone could theoret- who could make a movie, could theoretically make a movie about Mickey, Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain, but about, Han Solo or whatever.

And lots of people do that with, fan fiction. and it is the threat of state violence that keeps that valuable, and is necessary. So When they sued... And again, they sent five lobbyists, the movie industry. Pharma sent 100 to stop the b- the sharing of the coronavirus vaccine to extend vaccine apartheid, right?

in, in the name of COVID, they, defended, they were defending COVID against its enemies, the vaccine. and the reason that they do that is because there is a probably wrongheaded but strategic legal corporate belief that any threat to intellectual property, even going through this, legal process that it was going through that's actually quite mild and was written into the law about it, any threat like that is a total snowball threat to everything.

And that also explains the extreme legal attacks on what seem to us, and indeed are, very small copyright violations. 

So people, like, pirating videotapes or whatever getting raided by the FBI. 

Yes, exactly. yeah. Or, or, yeah, especially in the 2000s, there was a lot of that. And folks, have effectively, been stopped from pirating on their computers because there are those automated emails which I imagine everyone in here has probably received at one point in their life because you downloaded, an episode of True Blood season five or whatever, and it, you'd upload it for a second, and your internet provider immediately emailed you saying that they were gonna cut off your access to the internet, God, that's an outdated reference. Why did that come into my head? Jesus Christ, True Blood. What the . I should probably rewatch that. It's been, like, a decade, and it's probably awful. It's probably awful, right? I don't know. Sookie Stackhouse, is that her name? In 

one of 

the best ways though. It's awful, but yeah.

okay. All right. you get those, those warnings, and if you've ever posted anything to YouTube or if you know about how, social media video and audio posting works, there are, like, robot lawyers crawling them constantly algorithmically, nuking stuff from orbit that they just claim is a copyright infringement, and the policy of the platform is to delete it, demonetize it and the channel, and it's up to you, the user, to prove that you haven't violated copyright through arcane processes that are totally determined by the corporate power, right?

There's this massive apparatus, to wipe out any pseudo threat and to, demonstrate extreme power because, precisely because it's all built ultimately, on cop with stick, that's, that's the only thing that makes it valuable. 

Buc-ee's often seems to be trademark bullying smaller businesses, which are forced to settle rather than fight Buc-ee's claims because lawyers are expensive and lawsuits can drag on for years.

But some of the businesses in question, like the Barky's Dog Park and Coffee Shop, have even folded in the face of these lawsuits. And that's why John Oliver decided to step in and challenge Buc-ee's to pick on someone its own size, Last Week Tonight, and its parent company, HBO, which is a subsidiary of an even bigger company, Warner Brothers Discovery.

And for his segment, John deliberately created a similar logo and name, and he's openly challenged Buc-ee's to sue him. But if Buc-ee's did that, could they actually win? first, let's look at the logos. Both feature a side-facing cartoon rodent inside a yellow circle. John is using a similar name and font.

This would almost certainly satisfy the first lap test factor. But the market and marketing channel overlap are two other important lap factors. But based on his prior claims against underwear stores, liquor stores, and dog parks, Buc-ee's doesn't seem to think it needs a lot in those areas to justify its lawsuit.

So Buc-ee's probably wouldn't be dissuaded by the fact that merch, apparel specifically, is the only obvious market overlap between Buc-ee's and Buck Off that they have in common. But the lap factor that's most negative for John would be intent. John has made his intent pretty clear here.

If any prominent gas station chain out there has an issue with our new logo and products, and wants to get lawyers involved, then you know what? Bring it the on. 

So it looks like John has set up a pretty strong case for Buc-ee's, but he actually has one major advantage that none of Buc-ee's other opponents had, and that's parody.

The First Amendment does not defeat every trademark claim, but it does make freedom of expression a factor. And that's important because trademarks show up in music, art, movies, and parody. 

Mr. Potato Head. He's sarcastic and moody at times. 

Ow! If every joke about a famous brand could be shut down with a trademark lawsuit, trademarks would stop being consumer protection and start being a censorship tool.

And one of the biggest protections comes from what's known as the Rogers Test, named after a 1989 case in which actress Ginger Rogers sued over Federico Fellini's film Ginger and Fred. Notice the case wasn't about parody at all, it was about the title of an expressive work. The Second Circuit recognized that courts needed a way to balance trademark rights against the First Amendment, so it created a threshold rule.

If someone is using a trademark as part of an expressive work, the lawsuit gets dismissed unless the plaintiff can show either that the use has no artistic relevance whatsoever, or that it explicitly misleads consumers into believing the trademark owner created or endorsed the work. That's a remarkably speech protective rule.

Instead of spending years litigating whether consumers might be confused, a court can end the case at the starting line, and that's one of the reasons why you often see movies or TV shows or books with exactly the same title. Which brings us to a case that the '90s kids in the audience can really appreciate, Mattel versus MCA Records, better known as the Barbie Girl case.

I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world. 

When Aqua released the eponymous song, Mattel sued for trademark infringement. Now disgraced jurist Alex Kozinski, and boy, at some point we'll have to talk about that story, applied the Rogers test, dismissed Mattel's claims, and closed his opinion with one of the great lines of trademark law, "The parties are advised to chill."

But Rogers isn't a free pass for every joke, and the focus isn't on whether the work is expressive or whether it's sold for money. Plenty of expressive works aren't commercial products. The question is how the trademark is being used. Is it part of the joke, or is it doing the job of a trademark, acting as the branding that tells the consumers who made the thing?

Put Coca-Cola's logo in a movie scene or write a satirical song about Barbie, and you're using the mark to express an idea. Put a parody of someone else's trademark on the label of a product that you're selling as your own brand, and now you're using the mark as a source identifier. And that's the exact function the trademark law exists to regulate.

Once you cross that line, you don't get to skip the ordinary trademark analysis. But at the same time, if a trademark isn't recognizable, then the parody doesn't work, so there has to be some similarity there, which is precisely what happened to a dog toy company called Bad Spaniels. Bad Spaniels was a spoof of Jack Daniels, and the toy mimicked the iconic shape and color of the whiskey bottle and copied Jack Daniels' distinctive text styling, except where the label reads, "40% alcohol by volume," the toy reads, "43% poo by volume," and underneath Bad Spaniels it added, "100% smelly."

Jack Daniels could not take a joke, and apparently affronted by both the mimicry and the potty humor, sued. A district court ruled for Jack Daniels after trial, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, finding that the Bad Spaniels toy was an expressive work, spoof basically, and that was entitled to First Amendment protection.

But Jack Daniels petitioned the Supreme Court, and the Court took the case. Now, VIP Products, the maker of Bad Spaniels, pointed to Rogers and argued that the toy is a joke protected by the First Amendment, but the Supreme Court didn't buy it. It vacated the Ninth Circuit's decision and held that Rogers didn't apply because VIP wasn't just referencing Jack Daniels, it was using the mark to brand its own product.

Justice Kagan wrote, quote, "When an alleged infringer uses a trademark in a way that the Lanham Act most cares about, as a designation of source for the infringer's own goods, the infringement claim receives no special First Amendment protection." And that's exactly what VIP had done. It used the Jack Daniels bottle shape, text, and overall look to build and identify Bad Spaniels.

And however funny it was, and your mileage may vary, the Jack Daniels trademark was being used to sell VIP's products. So the Supreme Court sent the case back down, and on remand, the district court ruled against Jack Daniels on trademark confusion but for Jack Daniels on dilution. Basically, the court agreed that a company is entitled not to be associated with dog poo.

VIP appealed the dilution ruling, and in May of 2026, the Ninth Circuit heard argument on a very specific question: Is anything about Jack Daniels besides the name itself famous enough to support a tarnishment claim? Now, one last thing worth being clear about, the Supreme Court did not eliminate protection for parody or expression.

It said those considerations belong inside the ordinary trademark analysis rather than getting a defendant out of the case before the analysis begins. But this has sent shock waves through the market of anyone who makes a parody product. And it's not clear where anyone's gonna land on this. But where does this leave John Oliver and the Buck Off brand?

under the Bad Spaniels decision, John Oliver probably can't rely on the Rogers Test as a shortcut to dismiss the lawsuit, because the Buck Off brand isn't just a joke, it's also being used to sell merch. And in trademark terms then, it's functioning as a brand identifier, so a court would probably analyze the case under ordinary trademark law.

And the court would use the Latin factors to determine if there was a likelihood of consumer confusion. But the fact that Buck Off was introduced after a lengthy segment explaining the parody would probably help John's case, because it helps potential consumers understand that Buck Off is not actually a Buc-ee's product.

So I'm sorry to tell you that in the future you may no longer be able to watch parody pornography. You may have to watch only pornography that is completely original IP. But at least we'll find jobs for all those writers who were put out of work by AI. And the court may also look at whether the Buck Off brand was potentially diluting Buc-ee's trademark or could hurt Buc-ee's reputation.

That might get a little dicey for John, since Buck Off is meant to be offensive, but the fact that the offensiveness of Buck Off is meant to critique Buc-ee's may help John, because it's intermingled with the analysis that would be an effort to balance the importance of parody, critique, and expression.

Which would likely make it a very interesting case. So could Buc-ee's sue? Definitely. But should Buc-ee's bring this case? that is a different question, and you might wanna check in with Bricks and Minifigs to see how their lawsuit is going, and see if, even if they win, if they actually accomplish any of the goals that they set out to achieve.

Now to be fair to Buc-ee's, trademark law puts real pressure on companies to enforce their trademark. Unlike copyright or patent, a trademark can actually weaken if you don't protect it, and in some sense trademark holders are required to police their trademarks or risk losing them. but the fear of that is usually overblown.

But you may have watched that play out earlier this year when Patagonia sued the climate activist and drag performer Pattiegonia, and the internet rushed to judgment. How dare this progressive brand punch down at a drag queen who loves the environment? But the details were complicated. Patagonia only sued after Pattiegonia filed a trademark application covering clothing and marketing, the same categories that Patagonia sells a lot of their merchandise in.

And it also asked for $1 in damages, what we call nominal damages. So it looks like Patagonia was basically just trying to create a legal record that it objected to the use of the trademark, police it, or lose it. But the contrast between Patagonia and Buc-ee's is also notable. Patagonia moved against a filed trademark application in its own product category for a dollar.

Buc-ee's sends three-page letters to underwear startups over squirrels, and asks for damages, profits, and legal fees. And part of the point that John was making is that if Buc-ee's continues this trend, it could end up costing the company a lot of goodwill. Being criticized in a segment on Last Week Tonight generally isn't something most companies strive for, and going after small businesses or venerable and well-loved local chains Also was not a good look.

But there's a difference between a legal court and the court of public opinion. A company can win a trial, but still lose public support. And when you're selling a brand that's based on friendliness and wholesomeness, public support matters. So this seems like a losing move for Buc-ee's PR-wise, but I guess it's also easier to go after small town mom-and-pop stores than Warner Brothers Discovery and John Oliver.

That being said, after John Oliver's segment, Buc-ee's showed no signs of letting up. Instead, it sued another Ohio small business, Beaver's Mini Mart, which had been doing business in Ohio for a decade before Buc-ee's showed up. Oh, and Beaver's Mini Mart, it's in a town called Beaver Creek, where pretty much everything is beaver branded.

And within about two days, Beaver Creek answered. A bakery called Cake, Hope and Love swapped its logo for a beaver. So did Bellbrook Candle Company. This was a joke for the day in solidarity, and they were joining a town that had already had plenty of beaver references. Beavercreek Pizza Dive had a cartoon beaver.

Beaverview Bowl, the local bowling alley, has a cartoon beaver. Feed the Creek, a nonprofit food pantry, also has a cartoon beaver. So remember, you can win or lose a legal case, but the Streisand effect is undefeated 

I think Disney in recent years has had this sort of gloss of progressivism, and I, maybe in particular as a result of the conflict in Florida with Ron DeSantis.

I think a lot of people have this idea that Disney is somehow on the like liberal progressive side of things. but in your book, you talk about the extremely and rabidly right-wing politics at the kind of origin point in terms of anti-communism and labor busting, and things like that.

I'm wondering if you could talk just a little bit about what the political culture of the Disney Corporation, maybe not just right now, but historically has been. 

And like speaking of things that are ours, like part of the reason it has that reputation is because, for example, a lot of queers in Florida have historically gone to work at Disney World.

And so it is like Orlando is actually a gay city in some ways, as a result. But if you work anywhere on Disney property, you have to sign NDAs saying you can't talk about anything. So anything we know about labor practices in the Disney Corporation since 1988 is technically hearsay, 'cause no one is allowed to talk about it because they would be violating an NDA, right?

that, I think that's how you can see that sort of progressive gloss, right? There's all these, there's all these gays there, but their literal experience is owned by Disney as intellectual property. In the beginning, this was, the, it was much more open that they were far right.

Disney himself, Walt, he was right wing, he was conservative. He's understood to be a conservative guy. In the '30s, across the '30s, he was anti New Deal. but there was actually a moment where he got, he also got glossed because the movie The Three Little Pigs, which like if y'all know that cartoon from '36, it has a song about the big bad wolf.

That comes out at the height of the Depression, and a lot of people read it at the time as this sort of like myth of hardworking everyman against the sort of bad, big, bad capitalist or the big bad wolf. One thing we don't know about that is that, in the original version, the big bad wolf, has a scene where he dresses up as a, a Jewish peddler with a big Jewish nose and a yarmulka and a bunch of gold coins that he plays with.

So the progressivism of that could certainly be... You could question that. But even without that, it's still a myth about like Protestant work ethic versus the lazy guy who like makes the straw house, whatever. Anyway, then there's a big animator strike in Disney because Disney for a while, Disney has always had the lowest wages in the industry, even back to its very beginning, it's extremely low waged.

It's very similar to a startup in the '20s and '30s, like this sort of charismatic young CEO who's like on the floor with you and, like every- you're reinventing the technology and like everyone works in this really like chaotic situation that's like fun and creative. but actually you're like getting exploited like up the

you're like totally being destroyed like, and you have the worst wages in the industry, but you don't recognize it. So anyways, the movie industry unionizes. There's a big strike at Disney. One of the most vicious strikes in the history of Hollywood. there's like physical brawls. At one point, pro-studio animators pour gasoline in a circle around the picket, and like they have all these baseball bats and they're threatening to light the picketers on fire.

At one point, Walt Disney like tries to throw down with Art Babbitt, who's like the head animator and artist, and has to be physically restrained by security guards to stop from beating the out of this guy like in the front of the studio. It's this really nasty, violent strike. And after that All the biographers I read, from the most friendly to Disney to the least, all of them agree that the strike is when he stopped.

He lost all interest in movies. He stopped. he was already more mostly a figurehead by 1941 when the strike happens. but after that, he basically st- loses all interest in the movie side of the business. Only a very few times does he really even participate. And he spends a lot of his time when he's not designing Disneyland and Disney World and Epcot.

And he, in '41, sends a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee, the HUAC Committee, which is the group that did the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings against Hollywood. He sends a letter saying, "Hollywood is full of communists," and he identifies Herb Sorrell, one of his animators, and Art Babbitt, the other animator, as leading communists in Hollywood.

Now, Babbitt is, at best a soft Dem. Sorrell was a member of the Communist Party at one point, but, was not an active member, right? there were a lot of, there were a lot of those. Anyway, whatever. And it's 1941. The US State Department has other things to do. world, Pearl Harbor. they're not that interested.

Then, after World War II, as the Cold War starts to kick off, he sends the letter again, and he's like, "You gotta come here." five years later, those guys are long gone from Disney. He's like, "You gotta come. Hollywood's full of communists." And they're like, "You're right," and they show up. like- there are other factors, but like arguably, Walt Disney is like, not saying Hollywood, one of the most responsible for the most famous moment of McCarthyism that we have, which is people being forced in front of Congress to like name names or be blacklisted from Hollywood.

Walt was one of the stones that put that in motion, right? He campaigned for Barry Goldwater, who you may know, his... People didn't really know him until recently when he's been compared to Trump a lot. Ultra-racist, presidential candidate, probably the most openly fascistic presidential candidate since Tru- but until Trump that we had, who got close, who was like a, on a ticket.

Barry Goldwater had free use of Disney airplanes. Disney went to cultural events and wrote reports for the FBI and was an FBI special agent, like policing all of these sort of just like really milk toast liberal political events, right? At one point, he takes the stand during the anti-communist hearings and accuses the League of Women Voters of being a communist front, and it's actually because he meant to accuse the League of Women Shoppers, an even less political organization, who had organized a boycott of one of his cartoons like 10 years previously.

This is a very bitter, nasty man, right? Another, one more example and then we'll move on because it's all in the book. But 1937, when Leni Riefenstahl, who you may know as the director of Triumph of the Will or Olympia, the two most famous pieces of Nazi propaganda, she is going to come to Hollywood and meet folks, as an artist, from the Nazi regime.

A week before... This is '38, sorry. A week before she arrives, the Nazis unleash, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, largely seen as the beginning of the Holocaust, right? So Hollywood says, "Do not talk to Leni Riefenstahl. Don't bring her in. she's gonna come. She's, don't talk to her."

There's an open letter in The Hollywood Reporter, and the owners of the studios, who are themselves conservative, union-busting, anti-communists, are also, a lot of them are Jewish, so they're like, "Absolutely not. Don't talk to this person." Part of the reason Walt Disney is so popular and is the image of America is 'cause he's the one Protestant, he's the Christian, he's the goy, in Hollywood.

And Leni Riefenstahl comes into his studio, and he gives her a tour of the studio, and he shows her Fantasia, which he's working on, and she offers to send him a, a work print of Olympia so he can watch it. And again, this is the '30s, so in order to watch it, you need a projectionist. And Walt demurs because the projectionists were unionized, so if they were to show it, everyone would know he had been visited by the Nazi w- a week after Kristallnacht.

Months later, when he gets found out, he claims he didn't know who she was. 

And just to throw in too, there was the politics. Like you had a whole chapter on Song of the South. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. But yeah. 

Yeah, the, I think like Part of what's so frustrating about this sort of gloss that, 'cause Pixar basically had this reputation- has this reputation as progressive, which it also isn't, but is, nominally more so than Disney.

But in the '90s, there was these series of controversies around Aladdin, Mulan, and Pocahontas, all of which, I don't know if y'all have watched recently, extremely racist and difficult to watch. Peter Pan, extremely racist and difficult to watch. But there's the Song of the ... I have a whole chapter about Song of the South, which is a movie you've probably seen part of without knowing it, because the song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah comes from it, and the ride Splash Mountain comes from it.

But you can't actually officially see Song of the South anymore, 'cause it's a pro-slavery fantasy about how good life is on the plantation for Black folks. They claim it's technically in during Reconstruction, which is completely flimsy. It's never mentioned in the movie, and that's just enough to let you know they knew it was wrong what they were doing and it makes it worse, not better.

Anyway, so yeah. that movie is literally a narrative about how- Black folk stories get stolen and turned into a happy white family. And it was re-released most recently in 1986. So Disney didn't even stop showing this ultra-racist... this, this movie was boycotted at the time by the NAACP. there were, they were like...

Whatever. I, you can get into the details on that, but like there's massive protests against it. It's an extremely racist moment in culture, and they were still doing it as, as recently as '86, right? This is not a progressively run institution. What has happened is in the interim, so many other companies look just like them, and the right has gotten so unhinged that they've given up on, one of their great stalwarts, Disney.

Largely because Ron DeSantis is struggling over sovereignty because there's a territory in Florida around... Sorry that I sound like such a wing nut when I talk about this. There is this thing called the Reedy Creek Improvement District that is s- basically sovereign territory of the Disney Corporation.

In order to get Disney World there, they have their own cops, they have their own medical system, they, have their own tax base. Like- Tunnels ... they literally do have tunnels underneath the place. because so then, yeah, like it's... And it's like it's, so there's this, there's... Central Florida has long had this weird autonomous capitalist state.

I think in the '90s there was some, controversy around this thing called Celebration, Florida, which was this town that they built that was like all Disney workers and, Disney owned all the houses. But, they already had... Celebration was, like, just an acceleration of what they already have in the Reedy Creek district, which is, literally this autonomous corporate territory in the middle of Florida.

So DeSantis' attack on them was, like, largely over control over that tax base because Disney World is the most profitable tourist destination in... Probably not this year, actually. We'll see. But it was until very recently by some distance the most profitable destination in the world, by huge leaps.

It's a lot of money that, that DeSantis wasn't getting enough of a cut in. And then he was backed up by Daily Wire the fascist grifters who wanted to make their own children's network called Bent Key. And if you remember, they wanted to make an anti-woke Cinderella. so they started attacking Disney as woke because they wanted to just, get in on it.

that, that whole grift fell apart 'cause those people are absolute talent- even for the right, talentless hacks. But yeah, like, all of... But all of that controversy, right? All of that stuff, Disney is quite good at, not... They didn't even take a side. They didn't even say, "We detest," "We support saying gay."

they didn't come out in s- in favor of the bill. They just The, the Don't Say Gay bill was the thing that started this controversy. Sorry, now I'm really in the weeds. But the point is, the right is manufacturing these, a conflict with Disney for their own reasons. That and the sort of nature of the way we think about politics in this country, ga- everyone gave it credit as though it was on the other side actively when it never was.

the moment before Seattle. So the WTO was drafted at a bunch of different, They were called rounds, sort of these meetings, of, leadership and everything at, in different countries, and there was one in Uruguay in the '80s.

That was the final round, and that was when the IP protection stuff really got, locked in, to the, To the, WTO formation. and, even at the time, a lot of, third world, the third world countries got organized. They understood that there was, significant threats to their culture, both sort of their agriculture and their t- and their, indigenous technologies, through the patent system.

excuse me, but also their cultural lifeways through trademark and through copyright. so they actually did manage to get, an exception built in, led by, I believe it was, Brazil and India, which is called the TRIPS waiver. I, I'm not gonna... Off the top of my head, I can't tell you, what TRIPS stands for.

I'm not an IP lawyer, so please forgive me for any errors I make, other IP lawyers out there. but, but basically, the TRIPS waiver is a process by which, in the case of a global emergency, say, I don't know, a pandemic, certain forms of, copyright or patent can be loosened in the interest of public health or global stability.

the TRIPS waiver has been, only, successfully evoked twice, and it has never, it has v- very rarely been even remotely successful or a check on that power. in terms of whether it's directly United States imperial power versus sort of capitalist imperial power, I think that's maybe...

at increasingly that is a distinction with a difference, especially as Trump rips the regime apart. but it is definitely the case that the US has, significant economic power, over, other countries using the IP regime. I think one thing that's really, really, I don't know, funny is, if that's the word, about the Trump regime, is the use of tariffs, which is so obviously destructive to the economy, unpopular with his base.

just generally just a, a throwback in all the wrong ways. is a power that the U- the f- the, executive branch already basically had through IP management. There's this thing called the priority watch list. now again, part of the way that this stuff, you talked about you quoted me saying it's arcane and sleepy.

Part of the way that this sort of, stuff works is that, you know, a- and I'm one of, I am one of these people. Your eyes roll into the back of your head when you start talking about IP law or international law, right? it's just, it's it seems esoteric and boring and irrelevant. so that is precisely how a lot of US power, hard power functions.

There was this thing called the priority watch list. It was completely in the control of the West Wing, right? The, the executive branch c- unilaterally controlled it. and it was a list of countries that were not doing enough to stop piracy, right? So that's, either media piracy or, you know, making knock-offs, right?

Knockoff Nikes, knockoff, the bags that you get down on Canal Street, or I guess, I don't know which neighborhood in Chicago, you get the good knock-offs on. But, It's, 

it's on Canal Street, actually. 

Oh, great. Great. yeah, exactly. Perfect. so That list, again, is unilaterally made by the, by the executive branch.

And if they escalate you on... There's three categories on it. And if they, if the, the branch escalates you, the executive branch has power to do basically sanctions on a country, right? They can basically do, do economic warfare, just by s- claiming they're not doing enough to fight piracy, right?

and that is within the bounds of the WTO. although, it's also It's al- it is also internal to US policy as well. and so that, that basically, was this great power over international finance relations that the, the executive branch had, but it was quiet.

People didn't talk about it. It was arcane. so one thing that happens every year is that the Motion Picture Association, the MPAA, formerly the MPAA, they've changed back and forth twice, so I always get wrong which one they are currently, and I apologize. The folks who make you, rate the r- the movies R or PG-13, every year they release a report about w- every country in the world saying, "This is how good these people are to Hollywood, and this is how bad they are to Hollywood."

And they send it to the executive branch, and they say, "Please, punish these countries that have not been giving us enough, enough attention and love." and that's just a formal bureaucratic method of something that the movie industry has been doing for a long time. I talk about in the book, in the '80s, Jack Valenti, who was the long-term, like 50-year president of the MPAA, almost caused an international incident with South Korea when he went over there and demanded that they drop all, all protections on their film industry, and they show more Hollywood films.

the sort of, the most dramatic moment of it is, at one point he forced some Hollywood films into Seoul theaters and, the gangsters who run, who ran those theaters released venomous snakes into showings of Hollywood films to try and stop them from, taking over. yeah. th- there's some pretty wild stuff.

But Valenti himself was also at the Uruguay Round, and he was part of the, the entertainment industry was a massive part of shaping these laws. they wrote the... Alongside the pharmaceutical lobby, the stuff in the WTO, that is about intellectual property was largely written by entertainment and pharmaceutical lobbyists.

and in, in 2021, when the, when, a TRIPS waiver was applied for the coronavirus vaccine, right? Which made sense. COVID was, obviously, that vaccine should be shared as widely as possible. There's no reason Moderna should continue to profit off of it. when the Third World applied for that, the int- the entertainment industry, including Disney, the MPA, sent lawyers to the Biden administration to stop them from sharing the vaccine.

Because for them, protecting IP is more important than anything else 

And that was absolutely stunning when that happened. You write that even friends committed to organizing against capitalist power were shocked to hear that in 2021, Disney, along with the six other members of the MPA, sent five lobbyists to prevent the Biden administration from waiving intellectual property rights that would've allowed generic COVID-19 vaccines to be produced globally, a potential life-saving measure for developing countries.

So Vicky, when that happened, we had a conversation with Ben Ehrenreich, who had just posted the Newt- New Republic article, We're, hur- hurdling toward global suicide for the New Republic. And, that, this article was in, it came, I think it came out in March or April of 2020. And he mentioned how, like Disney and the MPA, Bill Gates was part of the last-minute effort to protect IP rather than, produce a generic COVID vaccine that could have saved countless more lives.

That literally-- They literally chose property over people. Vicky, why was there so little backlash against multinational corporations in the US, insisting that IP be protected even at the cost of human lives? ha- has-- Ha- have we, been convinced that IP must be protected even if it does cost lives?

Yeah, I think, I think part of why is 'cause it's quite arcane, the news only broke, it was a small story broken by I think "The Intercept," I believe. and I think on some level, those-- the news about what lobbyists are doing, in general doesn't, es- and especially around health policy, doesn't really spread wider.

not to go too far afield from the topic of the book, but I think also part of what was going on in that period was, after the uprisings in twenty twenty, the Biden administration was using normalizing the pandemic, as a very effective counter-revolutionary tool, right? They were attacking bodily autonomy.

They were attacking the mutual aid that had sprung up, organically, around, in twenty twenty. and they were attacking the anti-police movement from a sort of sideways direction by demanding everyone just get back to work and get back to normal. And part of why that was effective, of course, was that people were tired of lockdowns, and it was hard to have had social life totally and utterly disrupted by a pandemic.

and so I think a lot of people were not, were not really paying attention to the sort of machinations going on behind the scenes. People were psyched that the vaccine itself existed. They were so ready for their own lives to get back to normal, to stop thinking about the pandemic. and there was this huge political push from the Biden administration, over years to stop paying attention to polic- to, pandemic policy, right?

they would take away reporting, and they would take away... they just, there was this real effort to make us forget and not pay attention, as that went on. and that wasn't necessarily just to protect the IP regime. that was also about getting people back to work, obviously, for profit, for the corporations and to end the massive recession that occurred obviously in twenty twenty.

anyways, all of which is to say, I think people on some level don't Just don't see how that stuff is happening because it's arcane and legalistic, and behind the scenes in a lot of ways. But yes, the other answer is yes. People have been convinced, I think especially by, the campaign that happened in the 2000s, the anti-piracy campaign, and also-- and that continues into the present, that, copyright and, patent, that intellectual property is about protecting artists and protecting creative people and protecting inventors, which it never has been from its very beginning.

that's not what it's for. It's for protecting the people who bring those things to market, which is a very different class of people. but because I think we live in this, this time of, y'all know, you've been here for 30 years, collapsing journalism, collapsing media jobs, right?

The cut-- the gutting of the middle class of any creative industry whatsoever, which AI, is accelerating but is hardly, its beginning. I think that a lot of people, a lot of artists feel like they need protection, and the only form of protection that they are aware of is copyright, so they think that's their protection.

So I think there is a sort of a combination of, a very successful, political, social, and economic c- marketing campaign to convince people that intellectual property protects them, it protects normal people, and a sort of, the, the standard mode of hiding these corporate machinations, which is by making them legalistic and complicated and happening in back rooms in DC, in ways that, you could technically learn about but are quite difficult to understand.

And Finally, Section D, WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT

if you were to ask an economic student what goal of specialism is, they would likely respond with something along the lines of, "Economics can be defined as the study of the choices people make and the actions they take in order to make the best use of scarce resources in meeting their wants and needs."

In this vein, contemporary economics tends to view the world as possessing finite resources, whether those resources be oil, apples, or houses, with the goal of economics being to theorize the most efficient way of ensuring those resources get into the hands of those who need them most. The idea that concentrating the ownership of such resources into the hands of the few might lead to such an ideal distribution may at first seem counterintuitive.

Yet the idea that private ownership is preferable to communal ownership for reasons of efficiency and practicality has strong support across the discipline. The most oft-cited source used to make this case is a 1968 essay by the ecologist Garrett Hardin titled The Tragedy of the Commons, which considers the efficiency and sustainability of a piece of communal land in providing those who use it with food.

"Picture a pasture open to all," writes Garrett. "It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons." Assuming the society in which these herdspeople live is stable and somewhat peaceable, he argues that, "The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd, and another.

But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination to which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all." In short, Garrett argues that the consequence of communal ownership of this metaphorical field is its devastation. Each of the herdspeople attempt to graze as many cattle as possible and eventually all the grass is gone and the land is useless Converting that land into private land deposits averts such a scenario.

For, he argues, if you have stewardship over just your piece of land, you're more likely to be wary of overgrazing it and to ensure that it remains useful to you for as long as possible. Garrett's argument, and those made by economists in his wake seeking to refute the practicality of communal forms of ownership, rely on a number of assumptions which I would suggest aren't quite as solid as he would like to think.

Indeed, in 2009, Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for demonstrating that the communal ownership of land can be both sustainable and efficient and has been proven to be so in practice in numerous real world scenarios. Nevertheless, even if Garrett's argument did bear out in its entirety, it would still provide little rationale for private property rights as they relate to intellectual property.

For the tragedy of the commons argument is predicated on scarcity, and that simply doesn't apply to creative works. The existence of the Star Wars fan film Darth Maul: Apprentice, for instance, doesn't deplete the resource of Darth Maul. It was still possible for Disney to make use of the character in Solo: A Star Wars Story, and it remains possible for other fans to make use of the character in other pieces of fan fiction and fan films.

From an efficiency or practicality standpoint then, the application of concepts of private property which emerged in relation to physical property simply don't cohere when applied to intellectual property. In fact, to my mind, restricting the ability of anyone other than the original creator of a work, whether an individual or a corporation, is less efficient than not doing so.

For we're placing sort of false limits on what can be achieved within our culture. The argument that copyright law helps to ensure a better distribution of copyrighted material becomes even weaker when we take into account the increasing lengths of copyright terms over the past few centuries. For where the Statute of Anne granted authors exclusive property rights for just 14 years after that work's creation, successive national laws and international treaties have extended copyright laws to a staggering degree.

In the United States and the European Union, the copyright law currently considers an artistic work private property for the entire life of the author, plus 50 years after their death. In Mexico, it's a full 100 years after the creator has died. And we can talk a great length about how ridiculous it might seem that until 2015, Warner Brothers were earning around $2 million a year from the song Happy Birthday to You, a revenue stream they were only denied due to the efforts of filmmaker Jennifer Nelson, who took the company to court to prove that the song was actually in the public domain.

Yet things are just as troubling on the other end of the spectrum. For many works which are still under copyright, yet are deemed not to be profitable assets by their owners, are likely to not be made available to the public at all. Numerous books, films, and sound recordings which publishers and distributors don't deem it worth spending money re-releasing, thus sit locked up in vaults being enjoyed by no one.

I hope to have so far shown that strong arguments for abolishing copyright law exist from both a creative or aesthetic standpoint and also from one of efficiency and access. Nevertheless, even if you are totally on board with my argument thus far, there remains a pertinent and vital problem to be solved.

For even if we agree that the creative process is not one of an artist drawing inspiration from thin air, but instead the result of their grazing on an intellectual or cultural commons, that doesn't mean they don't deserve to be compensated for their work The argument is solely that the creative process is different, not that it isn't in any way less remarkable.

There's another sort of commons, and that is a commons by necessity. And this is a little trickier. Are there parts of the world that simply cannot be possessed in any meaningful way? That can't be enclosed? That can't be subject to the... Remember how I described the justice, the grounding of rights to possession over certain things, right?

Are there parts of the universe that are unsusceptible to that sort of grounding? And I claim that there are. These are, I would say, commons by necessity, and here's a couple examples. all of the oxygen in the atmosphere Okay? The element oxygen. All right? Laws of nature. Bands of the radio spectrum. I like this one, 'cause this was the one a lot of IP theorists argue about all the time.

Is there any way for me to exclusively possess a band of the radio spectrum?

What do you think? What can I do? If I wanna exert my control over a band in the radio spectrum, I build a radio tower and I start broadcasting on a particular band, right? And then you come along and you wanna exert your control over it, and what do you do? You pump up the volume, right? You turn up the wattage, and then we end up with a, a, a battle, right?

And this is what a lot of economists call, the tragedy of the commons, right? Is when everybody's fighting for, one of these things that, is supposed to be to everyone's benefit. but I don't think most of the discussions account for the fact that there are these two different types of commons, and we can choose to treat them...

We can choose to treat commons by choice in one way, but we have no choice over commons by necessity. I argue that the human genome itself is a commons by necessity. It is a constantly evolving object that involves every member of a species, and like outer space, like the atmosphere, like sunlight, like laws of nature, and like radio spectra, it cannot be enclosed with the exclusion of others simply as a matter of necessity, not as a, a...

it's just logically impossible to conceive of And in fact, we prove this all the time, right? So if somebody wants to come along and reproduce a gene, what do they do? One of these twenty percent of the genes that are patented. Do you have any control over your present violation of the patent law?

Or you could stop yourselves rep-replicating, right? Yeah. You can try to do that, and you can try not to breathe, et cetera. Anyway, this un-unenclosable object is constantly, reproducing, genes. And, I argue that this is an example, just as clear to me as, radio spectra, of a commons by necessity.

And it isn't a pragmatic argument. Okay? So this is distinct from anti-commons argument. When you think of commons, you think of the anti-- because a lot of you, Lawrence Lessig and people like that speak of the anti-commons effect. That's a pragmatic argument, right? That is not what I'm making.

I'm making an ontological argument. I'm talking about the nature of the thing itself

so when people try to patent genes, when they do what, Craig Venter and others have done in trying to patent genes, they are attempting to enclose an unenclosable space to the exclusion of others, and I argue that this is an ethical wrong So what, where does that-- I'll give you an example.

we have people from the ACLU here today as well, who are courageously suing Myriad Corporation, for Myriad's patents on the BRCA1 and 2 genes. and, let me introduce them, 'cause I really think they're doing, great work. I saw Sandra too, right? Okay. Sandra S. Park, is with the ACLU.

She's an attorney on the case, that is, against Myriad, and Tania Simoncelli, is a lead scientist on this case. they are doing the right thing here because Myriad has violated not only the law, they're doing something that I approve of ethically as well, because there is an ethical problem.

Myriad has attempted to possess, through patents, the BRCA1 and 2 genes, which are responsible, for a great number of cancers. and in so doing, they are trying to prevent others from, using those genes. So they have actually sent cease and desist letters, to researchers, who were doing research on the BRCA1 and 2 genes, who were, in the course of that research, reproducing the genes.

All right? I argue that not only is that illegal, which is Luigi's domain and Sandra's and Tanya's domain, it is unethical because this is an attempt, to curtail our autonomy over our own genome. You and I have as much right to investigate what makes us up as anyone else, and this goes back to the axioms I explored early on in the talk.

What Myriad owns through these patents is a right to exclude you from finding out about what is in you, and they're ex-exercising that right to our common detriment. In fact, it does violence to you when they exercise that right, in much the same way as if Peter ripped this book from my hand So our fourth premise, and this now goes beyond the gene argument and goes into, new territory for me, so be gentle.

IP rights are exclusionary rights that prevent the unauthorized expression of pr- protected idea types. So I realized after I made this argument that this-- the two books I've talked about so far lead me to a conclusion that I didn't realize I was gonna end up having to, accept, but which I now accept wholeheartedly.

When an author or inventor owns their intellectual property, they can exclude others from making unauthorized reproductions of their expressions. they re- they can receive royalties for any reproduction made, and they can enjoin the expression, and they can prevent the expression by others of that idea and type.

Okay? That's basic intellectual property law. Now, we allow for all sorts of restrictions on our expressions, right? Consistent with Mill's liberty principle, and what was that again? Where that expression injures another, does some injury. So typically, when the law says you can't make a certain expression, it has to do with, preventing a physical harm or incitement to some physical harm.

And I've come to the conclusion that all intellectual property law is, some form of government restriction on expression having nothing to do with physical harms or incitement And in fact, all expressed ideas belong to the category of commons by necessity, as there is no meaningful way of possessing or enclosing them

So besides the ethical problems of governmentally curtailing free expression, I say that intellectual property law as a category of law is an attempt to enclose a commons by necessity, just like laws that allow for the patenting of genes. IP rights prevent the free use of expressed ideas, which are commons by necessity, just as much as radio waves are, just as much as the element oxygen is, genes and laws of nature 

That's going to be it for today.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

David Stewart

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

Digging a Hole, The Legal Theory Podcast

Tom Scott

Life with Machines

BBC News

Vertex Effects

This Is Hell!

Just Write

The Final Straw Radio

LegalEagle

Tom Nicholas

and V for Voluntary Library

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

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Air Date: 8-16-2026

Today we look at what Toni Morrison called "sanctioned ignorance," the deliberate manufacture of a version of the past that keeps citizens from connecting the dots between what their government did then and what it's doing now. They're doing it by attacking museums, libraries, and everyone dedicated to ensuring that people have access to accurate information because that's what it takes to implement authoritarian control over a society. It's also the reason that countries under authoritarian rule suffer from the lack of benefits that comes with the free exchange of ideas.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left Podcast. Today, we look at what Toni Morrison called sanctioned ignorance, the deliberate manufacturer of a vision of the past that keeps citizens from connecting the dots between what their government did then and what it's doing now.

They're doing it by attacking museums, libraries, and everyone dedicated to ensuring that people have access to accurate information, because that's what it takes to implement authoritarian control over a society. It's also the reason that countries under authoritarian rule suffer from the lack of benefits that come with the free exchange of ideas.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 55 minutes today include the PBS NewsHour, Letters From An American, The Thom Hartmann Program, The Intercept Briefing, Start Making Sense, On The Media, and Movement Memos. Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in four sections: section A: The Crackdown, section B: Historians Push Back, section C: Libraries Under Siege, and section D: The Longer Arc, Empire, Ideology, and the World's View.

And now, onto the show.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Madam, ranking member and members of the committee. it's a very special privilege, as a historian to have this opportunity to defend one's craft. As historians, we often dwell in the past, and professionally, we should But in spring of 2025, with President Trump's executive order restoring truth and sanity to American history, and now with the White House's report saving America's story, the present has come storming into our work lives with vengeance, and we welcome the challenge.

The present is inherently interwoven with the past. The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the presentation of the nation's treasures at the Smithsonian. The recent report by the White House Domestic Policy Council is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historian's profession, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums.

In other words, President Trump has declared war on free minds and free education. Historians are not voices of the state. We are keepers of memory, and in, at our best, we're storytellers with trained imaginations. And yet, they declare with such certainty what forms of, and these are the words of the report, heritage, destiny, subtle truths, and indeed stories that the Smithsonian should instill, one of the report's favorite verbs, in the minds of the public.

Historians are now fighting back in the interest of scholarly history well told for the broadest possible public. Ours is a beautiful and ancient craft, essential for any society's need for self-understanding. We are equipped with a host of modern methods, but guided ethically by very old rules that no authoritarian political project ought to be allowed to profane.

As historian, a historian reads, listens, searches, measures, imagines his or her way into and through all manner of evidence, facts, sometimes clear, sometimes slanted every which way. We examine, read, accumulate, sift, study these modes of evidence with hopefully empathy and humility. Then we rise up from all our data and our sources and all manner of context and fashion all this into a story, into narrative, in order to inspire and take our audiences somewhere.

And once we get them there, we are bound by our craft to make an argument about why this all happened and why it matters. People often comment on how Trumpism would like to return us to some version of the 1950s when America was great. In this report, they have transparently done just that. The report is rooted explicitly in the Cold War of the 1950s, in the founding of the National Museum of American History, its legislation and dedication speeches.

The founding words and sentiments understandably breathed the rhetoric of Cold War triumphalism. How could it have been otherwise? The report offers no context for what might have invoked such expressions, the Soviet achievement of the hydrogen bomb, Sputnik, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the March on Washington, and the assassination of President Kennedy.

Had the Domestic Policy Council consulted trained historians, they might have provided some context. They might also have consulted Edward R. Murrow's famous commentary in nineteen fifty-four, the, the year after the museum was conceived, on Joseph McCarthy and his assaults on free speech. "We can deny our heritage and our history," said Murrow, "but we cannot escape responsibility for the result."

Erase McCarthyism, and it will come back. Erase any other fifty difficult aspects of American history, they will come back. Triumphalist history cannot tolerate nuance, ambiguity, complexity, but they are lifeblood for real historians. Also, in a deep Cold War context, James Baldwin wrote in an essay entitled, also nineteen sixty-two, As Much Truth as One Can Bear, that the problem with the way Americans approach history is that, quoting him, "Words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, but not to wake him up."

We do not write woke history, whatever that is, but we do try to awaken citizens. In recent decades, we sowed the wind with new kinds of history. Here comes the whirlwind. If we're not careful, we will end up with what the great writer Toni Morrison called statist history, and it will create what she called sanctioned ignorance.

That's what's at risk. Thank you.

On July 4th, the White House Domestic Policy Council released a report titled Saving America's Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. The report says that the National Museum of American History, or NMAH, fails in the basic task of illuminating our heritage.

It continued, "Our central finding is not that the museum has simply added overlooked stories, corrected perceived errors, or broadened its historical scope. Rather, it is that the museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens."

Even more oddly, the report was a direct and personal attack on Dr. Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, whom it accused of exercising an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country The report claims that the National Museum of American History purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression.

In the museum's current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice. It claims that the founders are minimized or excluded and that the story told of the nation is one of regret, tragedy, and shame.

It claims the museum has a longtime staff reading group devoted to a framework that treats museums as places of activism and that the National Museum of American History engages in illegal alien activism and transgender activism. It attributes to the museum guilt by association for organizations that have helped to fund exhibits, including the Mellon Foundation, which, an endnote explains, allotted seventy-two million dollars to racial justice projects.

Indeed, the authors of the report appear to be most exercised over racism, shown in their anger over the museum's presentation of human enslavement. They said the National Museum of American History should tell the story of how the colonies inherited slavery from both global and European slaving practices and how America's founders helped spark a worldwide movement that ultimately ended slavery.

They want the museum to emphasize how seven hundred and fifty thousand Americans died in the Civil War. They did not appear to want mentioned that two hundred and fifty-eight thousand of them died to protect enslavement and how Americans came to reject Jim Crow and segregation. It should tell how the United States has done more to advance and secure fundamental rights than any other nation in the world.

Part of that, the report says, should include America's contributions to global freedom, from saving Europe from multiple tyrannies to illustrating the virtues of a market economy and a free people. The White House report is a nakedly political document seeking to prove that the museum profession has catechized and codified the ideological dogma of DEI to an astonishing degree.

It builds on Trump's belief that the Smithsonian has an improper ideology that Trump says is too focused on how bad slavery was. That political purpose was clear on July twenty-first when Hartig and Yale University US historian David Blight appeared before the House Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Testifying as well were two critics of the Smithsonian, Mike Gonzalez of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Matthew Spalding from Michigan's Christian Hillsdale College. Another hearing the next day before the House Administration Committee continued the same themes. Hartig told the committee that the report was inaccurate, saying, "We unwaveringly attest that it does not accurately or fairly characterize the full range of work at the museum."

In fact, the report ignores large, long-term gallery exhibitions on subjects like the history of the US military currently on display. That exhibit includes George Washington's sword and the chairs Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee used at the Appomattox surrender, in favor of past temporary revolving wall exhibitions in display cases along a wall.

The exhibit that infuriated the Republicans by mentioning transgender youth, called Girlhood: It's Complicated, closed more than three years ago. In her testimony, Harding responded to the report's accusation that the museum fails to substantively present America's founders and founding. As Kelsey Ables of The Atlantic reported, Harding pointed out, "We have a dozen exhibitions that include the founding era right now, 368 objects, 340 labels.

George Washington is mentioned 54 times. You have to walk by a whole section on George Washington in the Kenneth Behring Hall of Military History to get to a 15-foot-tall reproduction of the Declaration of Independence."

 

But in fact, the goal of the report was demonstrably to create a straw man for MAGA supporters to hate.

Ben Davis of Artnet reported that Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican of South Carolina, claimed Harding strives to represent queer pedophiles, indoctrination, and grooming of kids at an American history museum, and demanded, "Do you know how many kids get raped by adults every year in this country?"

Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican of Colorado, repeatedly demanded of Harding where the exhibitions honoring 50 million aborted babies are. Representative Eric Burlison, a Republican of Missouri, demanded, "Do you love America?" "I love this country unconditionally," Hartig replied. She would repeat that sentiment repeatedly over the course of two days of hearings as representatives talked over her to get clips to put on social media.

In a response to the administration's report, Representative Joe Morelle of New York, the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, pointed out that in February 2017, a month after his first inauguration, Trump praised the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture and its founding director, Dr.

Lonnie Bunch, for sharing the great struggle for freedom and equality that prevailed against the sins of slavery and the injustice of discrimination. "Smithsonian museums did not change what they teach about slavery between 2017 and today," Morelle writes. "Instead, the president changed his position on whether they should be allowed to teach it."

Morelle pointed out that the White House report demonized Hartig by taking her words out of context. For example, it made much of her statement, "Loving America is very complicated," while omitting that she said that in a discussion with descendants of enslaved Americans. It attacked her use of the common historical term problematize, which means to show that a simple idea is more complex than people realize.

Criticizing her statement that, "The profession has to figure out how we're going to problematize the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026." Morelle points out that the disjointed fragments of this sentence show how deliberately the authors of the report butchered it.

The full sentence was, "We have to figure out, all together, how we're going to commemorate, problematize, remember, and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026." The report cut those words and then criticized her for insufficient celebration of the US. The president doesn't control the Smithsonian, so the only thing the report's authors could recommend was a label at every entrance that reads, "Warning.

The exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don't want you to love your country." On July 24th, the president issued executive order 14415, titled Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution. It ordered the National Park Service to place temporary signage outside the Smithsonian that corrects inaccurate information presented inside the museum.

As Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post noted, the attacks will take a toll on the scholars, curators, volunteers, security guards, and the rest of the loyal staff who will have to pass signs that demean the integrity of their work. And it's likely the MAGA ecosystem will pick up the harassment.

History is not just a set of facts and events. It's the study of how and why societies change. Why do people act in certain ways? Are there patterns in human behavior? What makes a society successful? What makes one fail? Accuracy is imperative. Without it, we will learn the wrong answers, not just about the way Jim and Juan Crow worked, but also about whether our country's foundation is about race and land, or, as the founders said, about principles and the rule of law.

But I wanna start out with something that seems like a small story, right? It's just another indication of how petty and bizarre and, just fruitcake these guys are. They're, just Looney Tunes, the guys in the White House. That they're putting signs out in front of the S- Smithsonian.

Trump issued this executive order directing the, interior department, Doug Burgum's, organization, to put signs out in front of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, saying that, the information in here is biased and, not credible, and if you want good information, go someplace else.

Words to that effect. They haven't put the signs up yet, but they're planning it. And when this was reported on a couple of days ago, most of the people in the media laughed at it. Oh, yeah. Oh, look, this isn't that pathetic. but it seems so trivial, right? Now, this was based on a bizarre report written by the White House Domestic Policy Council, which is a group made up of, a whole bunch of, you know, basically leftovers from right-wing think tanks and activist groups like American Compass, Heritage, Manhattan Institute, and Stephen Miller's America First Policy Institute.

And it claims that the American Museum of American History has displays that cover the fights for women's and civil rights and to end slavery and talk about the positive role of immigrants and women and queer people in our country, and it finds all that deplorable. Seriously. They wrote, quote, the Smithsonian leadership and museum curators, quote, "have directed the museum's emission, mission away from historical education and scholarship of a shared national inheritance to be celebrated and toward extreme political activism rooted in Marxism to divide, dispirit and discourage Americans, and they have denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians, and Americans while focusing on race in areas where it has little to no historical relevance."

they're complaining about the fact that it's not a white supremacist museum. that's what it really comes down to. I- but this goes, this speaks to a larger issue. Pretty much every dictator in history, both ancient and modern, have rewritten their nation's history because as George Orwell famously said, "Those who control the past can control the future, and those who control the present can control the past, and thus the future."

dictators and wannabe dictators rewrite the past to legitimize their rule, right? Typically portraying themselves as the inevitable culmination of history, the savior of the na- I alone can fix it. In the process, they ar- typically erase their rivals from the historical record. Donald Trump has replaced the picture of Joe Biden in the White House with a picture of an autopen Dictatorial regimes frequently use rewritten history to justify wars of aggression, to suppress minorities, and to gut civil liberties, and Trump is doing all those things.

this is like Sam Alito quoting a 17th century witch-burning judge to justify getting rid of abortion in the United States, or how Trump has reinvented Obama's deal with Iran, the JCPOA. They rewrite history to bind themselves to the country's majority group with simplified stories of a nat- national glorious past when we were in charge, right?

yeah. This is why Trump called Kamala Harris a DEI hire. Remember that. Rewriting history is also a powerful way to shift the Overton window to the right, causing the previously unthinkable to become just common sense. when the history of protest movements, democratic movements, civil rights efforts are reframed as chaos or crises in the nation's history, young people don't learn about how democracy happens.

literally, they don't learn about successful alternatives to authoritarian rule, and it can make democracy or pluralism seem unnatural or even impossible, particularly to young people. And we've seen this throughout history. When, Louise and I were in Egypt back 20-some odd years ago, we, with a church group, we went to, to Egypt and in Luxor, there's a wall where it's like, this kinda like graffiti from the third century BC when Alexander conquered the area.

And on the wall-- And we had the, the guy who was our tour guide was a, a museum curator, and an anthropologist, and he pointed out that on the wall, written in script that the Egyptians could read, it said, basically, "I am Alexander, son of the god Amun." Now, Amun was the god who was the god over all the other gods in, in the Egyp- in the Egyptian worldview.

some people argue that this is why we say "amen" at the end of prayers today, that it's that old, right? So here's Alexander the Great rewriting the history of Egypt to make himself the god king. Joe Stalin, removed purged officials from photographs, rewrote school textbooks, reshaped the official government accounts of the Russian Revolution and World War I to make himself the hero.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis taught a racialized version of German history that portrayed Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and other racial and political minorities as enemies. And that Germany was stabbed in the back in World War I. Mao Zedong, was, saw repeated revisions of Chinese history, especially after the Cultural Revolution, with history textbooks and official records regularly being edited.

they, to this day, they, they- you can't learn about the Ti- Tiananmen Square massacre if you live in China. And even small-timers like Saddam Hussein did this. He was ha- he hung giant banners of his own face all over, all over this capital city and Baghdad, and, basically, linked himself to Mesopotamian rulers and claimed a grand lineage and all this.

the simple reality is in democracies, it's historians and journalists and courts and archives and universities and scholars who write history. 

In dictatorships, on the other hand, it's the dictatorship that writes the history. And this is why it's so important that we push back on this attempt to rewrite the history of America, to claim that America was created as a Christian nation.

It wasn't. To claim that, y- democracy is basically a, a failed experiment, is essentially what some of these billionaires are saying. And, we need to, people need to understand. for example, the Amer- I write about this in my new book, Who Killed the American Dream?

The American Revolution was a fight against corporate power. It was the first m- actual real, in the history of the world, the first real revolution against the most powerful corporation in the world at that time, the British East In- India Company. that was the Boston Tea Party. That was the foundation of our revolution.

The Civil War was a fight against oligarchy in the South. we just, and obviously, World War II was a fight against fascism. We were the anti-fascists, the Antifa. we've gotta push back loudly on this and say, "This is wrong."

We're talking about this history of myth-making in the US, particularly when it comes to the, quote-unquote, founders, right? M- and as you mentioned, most people don't know that the first president, George Washington, was a land speculator interested in seizing Indian land.

can you tell us a little bit more about that history? 

So for people who don't know, and it's not just George Washington, the lot of, a lot of the, the gentry men of this era are involved- The good men ... in this business, yeah, called land speculation. and actually, George Washington's, family did it.

it was a pretty well-established practice. But basically, what they would do is they would buy land that either England and then later the United States claimed in this kind of racist, abstract way where, they would f- sail somewhere and, plant a flag and be like, "This is our land."

But it's still governed and controlled on the ground by indigenous people. And so they would buy that land, and then like a modern-day real estate developer would flip it, they would flip it. And so once indigenous people were forced off that land, they would sell the land to settlers for a profit.

Sometimes they would sell the land while indigenous people were still living there. And so what happened is in the 1760s There is this Indigenous uprising where a group led by an Odawa chief named Pontiac sack a bunch of British forts. So Britain, in a very loose way claims all this land in the Great Lakes region.

The way they claim that land on the ground is by having these forts. They're these, military outposts, and Indigenous nations sack a bunch of them. And the Crown is looking at fighting a very expensive war in North America. It's just been fighting this big global war, sometimes called the French and Indian War, sometimes called the Seven Years' War, and it's broke.

The Crown is broke, and it doesn't wanna fight another war with Indigenous nations. And so what the Crown does is it makes this line, this proclamation, issues a royal proclamation, and that royal proclamation draws a line basically down the Appalachian Mountains, and it tells settlers, colonists, "You can live to the east of this line, but everything to the west is reserved for Indigenous nations."

And what we have is George Washington telling his kinda business guy, "Hey, ignore the proclamation and continue to buy land and speculate in land west of the King's boundary. we're not gonna, we're not gonna follow this law." And so we know that the elite didn't like the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and it also upset regular folks, too, who felt felt entitled to more Indigenous land out west 

You're talking about this project as a way to correct the record, as you said, when it comes to US history and Native peoples.

And it brings it to mind another effort by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who published the 1619 Project, recasting the way we understand how slavery shaped the founding of the country. There was a massive backlash to that project. I'm curious, have you gotten any pushback on this series in that vein?

Not to the extent that the 1619 Project did, by a long shot. But I think 

also- It would be hard to replicate that. 

Yeah. I also just think we, don't have the visibility of The New York Times, it's a different cultural moment. There have been, like, a few, right-wing websites that have criticized the podcast and perhaps there'll be more.

I don't, we'll see what happens. What I will say, broadly speaking, is that I think we're in this moment where we are fighting over how America tells its past. And I think that fight is really important, which is also why projects like the 1619 Project are really important and are definitely an inspiration for the work we're doing with First America.

But I think that the fight over who we are as a country, where we come from, how we started, I think that fight is so bitter because so much power flows from the stories that we tell ourselves, right? the stories that we tell ourselves as a country about who we are and where we come from, I believe really shape public policy and public sentiment, and h- and how we have these conversations around law, around equity today.

And what I will say as a Native person is what I often feel like I experience is both sides leaving us out. And so I think we're left out of the America was great, 250 rah, the founders were perfect version of the story, 'cause obviously, genocide doesn't fit easily into that version.

But I think we're also left out of the more progressive side, too. things like the No Kings protest or this idea of wanting to go back to this democratic foundation, and one of the big claims that the series makes is that foundation is in itself is a myth. Because at the same time that our founders were building a democracy, they were also building an empire.

And the way that you govern an empire, the way that you govern other people by force, is not democratic. And so this identity crisis we're having around authoritarianism and democracy, and how could authoritarianism be sneaking into our democracy, what we argue is that it's actually always been there. I don't think people, on both sides of the aisle, I feel like most people aren't having that conversation.

Libraries. They're often indispensable places for lots of people. They're not just repositories of books.

In a lot of poorer neighborhoods, they're often the nicest and the safest place a kid or a family can go. Kids can get help with homework. They and their families can use the computer. People can learn English. They can get help with official documents, immigration and citizenship, unemployment and social security.

I'm reading here from the Los Angeles Public Library website, but lots of public libraries do this sort of thing. And there's one other thing: it's all free. It's for everybody, provided by the city or county. It's like an island of socialism in the middle of dog-eat-dog capitalist America. One friend told me, "If you wanna find the socialist in Fargo, go to the library."

And of course, libraries also have books, including children's books, and those are the books that have become the targets of attack by Republican culture warriors. For example, attacks on the library and the librarians in Dayton, Washington. That's what you wrote about for The Nation. First of all, where is Dayton, and how did this all start?

Dayton's a tiny little community in the southeast corner of Washington State. It's about as far from any of the big cities, in the region as you can get. it's about a four-and-a-half, five-hour drive east of Portland, Oregon. It's about a four-hour drive from Boise, Idaho. It's in the middle of nowhere.

Got a few thousand people, and it's got this lovely library. It's a New Deal Era library. It was built in the 1930s after a huge amount of fundraising in the community. It's had this really good run for 75 years, but as you said, now it's under attack by a sort of group of cultural warriors who don't like the content of some of the books, and have reached for a sort of nuclear option of shutting down the entire library or trying to shut down the entire library. 

Now, I understand from your piece that the attacks on the library in Dayton, Washington are part of a national campaign inspired by an organization called Moms for Liberty. What is Moms for Liberty and how big is it? 

So Moms for Liberty started in 2021 in Florida, and it grew out of parents' rights movements around the pandemic, essentially.

People who didn't want their kids out of school, people who didn't want their kids to be vaccinated, people who didn't want to have to wear masks, and so on. And it's morphed and grown over the last two, three years, and so now it's this organization with hundreds of chapters around the country, and it's very influential in school board elections, and the Republican Party presidential hopefuls make a sort of homage to the Moms for Liberty, going to attend their conferences and so on.

And it's morphed from being just about the pandemic to being about the sort of great culture war issues of the moment around race and around gender and around sexuality. So basically what they do is they go around looking for, quote-unquote, "offensive books" that talk about issues of sexuality to young kids and talk about issues of race in a critical way, and then they highlight these books, and they go after the libraries and the librarians, and they work to get those books removed from the bookshelves or marginalized by being put out of reach of children in, in the libraries.

And more nefariously, it's one thing to have a debate over the books, but more nefariously, these, anti-library groups have morphed into really personalized attacks against librarians. They accuse, school librarians and public librarians of being pedophiles or of grooming children. They use this very loaded, very, guaranteed-to-stoke-outrage kind of language, and that's what I found fascinating in Dayton: that it's this little community- With a ginned-up culture war, basically.

It's got a few books in the library that talk about sexuality, that deal with issues of transsexual, identity in particular, and those books have caused such a brouhaha that you now have this organization that's led by a young woman called Jessica Rothkorn. You now have this organization of locals that, as I said, it reached for the nuclear option.

They basically said, "Look, if you're not gonna remove these books, we're gonna try and put forward a citizen initiative to be voted on to defund the entire library district." this is extraordinary. Imagine having the sort of hubris to think that you have the right to shut down your community's library simply because it's stocking books that you view to be a little bit offensive.

In your piece, you point out that there are forces on the left that also target, some books and some authors. some authors are accused of cultural appropriation or ethnic stereotyping or other offenses, but you say there's a difference between the left efforts to target and ban some books and what the right has been doing.

What is the difference? 

Yeah, let me be absolutely up front on this. I have no truck with book banning. I don't care whether it comes from the left-wing or the right-wing. It's misguided, it's bigoted, and it impoverishes us culturally. We shouldn't be a community that's so fragile that if we don't like a book, our immediate solution is to ban that book or to cancel the author.

So I'm not in any way, shape, or form defending left-wing book banning. I think it's just as toxic as right-wing book banning. But I do think there's a structural difference, and the structural difference is that the Democratic Party as a whole has not bought into book bans, whereas the Republican Party as a whole now is using this to whip up an electoral base.

So when you have an entire major political party that is on board with the project of banning books or limiting what can be taught in schools, you look at the way in which the, curricula has been restricted in Florida and in various other states, that's a whole different ballgame. And so that's why I think that when the right goes after books at the moment in America, it's far more dangerous than when the left goes after books.

So there is another difference as well. Generally, when the left goes after books, it's because those books contain fairly inflammatory racial language, that, that's been the major provocation leading to book-banning efforts on the left. Now, I don't think those books should be banned, but I do think there's a difference between being offended by racial language And in the right wing's case, just being i- offended by marginalized communities.

So the right has gone after deeply vulnerable, deeply marginalized communities: the transgendered community, the teenage gay community. They've gone after racial minorities. They've gone after basically not groups with influence, but groups already on the margins. Now, that's the quintessential definition of a bully.

When a strong person or a strong group goes after a weak person or a weak group, that's bullying, and that's being institutionalized and legislated on by the Republican Party at the moment. And that's why there's a difference, and that's why I think it's worth focusing more on what the right wing is doing around censorship, because it's far more toxic and it's far more destructive.

So tell me a little bit about the people who are leading this effort, first of all, to censor and now to close the libraries in this one little town in Eastern Washington. Who are the people? 

It's a small group of people religiously motivated on the whole. It's led by a woman called Jessica Rothkorn, who actually worked in a library in the recent past.

She's a young mother. She volunteers for the Little League. She's, perfectly pleasant. I met her on the stoop of her house, and we talked for a while. She's perfectly pleasant when you have that conversation, except when you start talking about the idea of book banning, and suddenly you have this absolutely no-compromise approach to book banning that, is unfathomable to me.

And Jessica Rothkorn and her, group of, fellow book banners have ginned up this sort of manufactured crisis. they identified a handful of books that, were fairly sexually explicit, not in a titillating way. There was nothing pornographic about it, but they were sexually explicit in an educational way.

And they looked at these books, and they said they were inappropriate for children. Now, you can have a perfectly legitimate argument as to whether or not that's true. I certainly wouldn't say all of these books were 100% perfect, and, all of these books I'd be happy with kids of any age reading.

Seems to me that there's legitimate room for having a conversation as to whether or not those books should be on kids' shelves in libraries. But it's one thing to have that debate internally. It's another thing to say, unless you agree with our demands to move these books, we're gonna try and shut down the library."

That's when you end up in a deeply authoritarian moment, and that's what we're seeing. We're seeing it in Idaho as well, just across the state line in Meridian, Idaho, and a few other places. We're seeing it in Michigan, and we're seeing it in a handful of places around the country now, this notion that libraries are the enemy, and that librarians are the enemy, and that we are so vulnerable to books on library shelves that our default response has to be to close down the library.

And so I think, you ask who these people are. They start from a place of, a legitimate debating point around what sorts of books should be in libraries, but they finish in this absolutely authoritarian position about defunding libraries and shutting down the choice of other people as to what books they should or shouldn't be able to access.

A public college in Florida has commissioned a statue of Charlie Kirk for the campus. 

This assassin, he didn't like what Charlie Kirk was saying, and so he wanted to silence him through violence, and he killed him for it. So I think it's appropriate what New College is doing.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday said such a memorial was right and proper because the Charlie Kirk he knew was- 

Bringing conservative principles to college campuses, that's basically like the lion's den for political debate, right? 

DeSantis and Kirk were longtime comrades in the culture wars.

In the fight against, quote, "liberal capture," they boosted conservative agendas in schools, universities, museums, and libraries. A new documentary, The Librarians, follows a group of public servants whose libraries have been targeted by activist groups like Moms for Liberty all across the country, from Florida- 

I wrote an email back and just asked, "Could you please provide us with the reason why each of these books is being removed?"

I was removed from my library for asking questions 

To Texas 

We were gonna pull books off the shelves. It's the transgender, LGBTQ, and the sexuality in books 

To New Jersey 

I see the kid emerge from the stacks, holding Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. 24 hours later, that student's mother was standing in front of the Board of Education and calling me a pornographer, pedophile, and groomer of children 

To Louisiana 

In our parish, we have the highest concentration of KKK, Aryan Nation, those type of groups 

Amanda Jones is a school librarian in Livingston Parish, Louisiana.

In 2021, she was named the School Library Journal's School Librarian of the Year, one of the profession's highest honors. In 2022, she found herself in the crosshairs of book-banning activists after she spoke up at her public library board meeting 

I talked about how libraries already have policies and procedures that, if anyone doesn't like a book in a library, whether it's school or public, there are processes in place 

After the meeting, two men Amanda didn't know created memes about her that circulated all over the internet, and were read by family and friends 

And one meme said that I advocate the teaching of anal sex to 11-year-olds.

The other meme was a picture of me that had a circle that looked like a target around my face, and that post identified me as a school librarian and where I worked, and insisted that I give pornography and erotica to six-year-olds. They circulated all over the state that weekend, and then by the next week, it was all over the country 

It was excruciating 

That first weekend, I cried to the point my eyes swelled shut.

I couldn't see for a day. I didn't know that was possible. I eventually had to take a leave of absence from work for debilitating panic attacks that I had never had before. I had a little pity party for a few days, but then I woke up that third or fourth day with just a burning rage at people that I had stood up for that were saying these awful things about me.

And so I decided to stick up for myself and fight back 

And how did you do that? 

I filed a defamation lawsuit against these two men. It is still ongoing today. It's been three years. Then they turned around and said I was filing the lawsuit to keep sexually explicit books in the children's section of the library

which is not what the lawsuit is about. That's still what they say. It's still what is on one of the men's GoFundMes. just lies

What's at stake here? Lives are at stake, children's lives. People tell me I'm exaggerating, it's hyperbolic. It's not. I've taught, for 25 years I've taught thousands of students, and I have had many students who have grown up and taken their own lives. Over two dozen. I stopped counting at around 20 'cause it was too heartbreaking, and they generally fall into two categories.

They're either veterans that served our country and weren't given resources when they returned, or they were members of the LGBTQ community. Almost every single former student that I know of that has taken their own life fall into one of those two categories. To me, both of those reasons are preventable, and so I do raise money every year for disabled American veterans, but I thought that what I could do for maybe mitigating some of this in our community would be to make sure that kids are represented in the books, in our public library, in our school library, and make sure they can see themselves and feel seen and heard and represented.

Students have spoken to you about what certain books have meant to them over the years. 

Oh, yes. W- I teach middle school, so they're not the most talkative, forthcoming bunch. But a lot of former students, yeah, in their 20s and 30s. One student, right after this happened, wrote me and said, "I was thinking of taking my life, and you gave me a book that made me feel like there was other people like me, and I decided to live for one more day."

And, that's powerful. One of my former students was substituting at our school. She stopped by the library to come talk to me. She hadn't been in our school library in 10 years, and she walked around, and within minutes she said, Ms. Jones, this library's changed so much. I see books with people that look like me.

I see Brown characters on the covers of these books. I never saw that when I went to this school." I wanna preface, I was not the librarian at that time. It made me tear up. 

You've mentioned kids' safety. How about yours? 

I generally feel unsafe most of the time. 

Tell me why. Describe what you've encountered.

Getting a death threat saying that they know where you live and work will change you forever 

It was the work part that got me. My fear is that someone will come after me and that in the process, children will be harmed. I don't think I could ever live with myself if that happened, and I know it wouldn't be my fault, but I think about that almost daily.

Tell me about guns. 

When I go to library board meetings, I have to travel through very rural areas, wooded areas, and I'm by myself a lot of these times. I'm scared they're gonna follow me home. I'm gonna be on this stretch of road where no one's around. And so yeah, I carry a weapon, and I do sleep with a shotgun under my bed because I have a teenager that I wanna protect if someone breaks into my home.

I don't go out in my community. I've been called a groomer and a pedophile in public. People are gonna slap me or whatever, and I don't grocery shop. I can't even take my daughter out in my community. We went prom shopping at a local boutique, and we had to leave 'cause people were whispering, and then she started crying.

So I just don't go out in my community anymore.

 

So the documentary shows the connection between all of these movements to ban books or censor them or move them across the country from where you live in Louisiana to Texas to Florida, even New Jersey. We learn that some of the people behind these campaigns have connections to the, Christian Nationalist Movement, among them Dan and Farris Wilks, billionaire oil tycoons who've donated lots of money to politicians and conservative media outlets.

Here's a clip of Farris from the documentary. 

A male on male or female on female is against nature. So this lifestyle is a predatorial lifestyle in that they need your children and straight people having kids to fulfill their sexual habits. They want your children. 

There's also a company, Patriot Mobile, that's been financing these book-censoring groups.

Here's a clip from one of their meetings. 

God takes what the Devil meant to harm us, and He turns it into good. He blesses us with it. Every time we're attacked at Patriot Mobile, our sales just go through the roof. We increase our sales. And so what does increasing our sales mean? It means we can give more money back to organizations like Moms for Liberty.

How have you seen that play out in your town, in your state? 

They're apparently not worshiping the same God I am. That's not Christianity. So I created an organization called Livingston Parish Library Alliance. We've been tracking campaign donations, and we have noticed that when politicians specifically speak out about the library and insist, there's sexually explicit materials or whatever, we've noticed an uptick in donations.

They play on people's fears that there's these evildoers coming after your children. 

And where are those donations coming from? 

It's a dark money nonprofit extremist group, they don't live or work in my community, that have entered my community, working with local politicians to create this fear so these politicians can get votes, power, and money.

The lady that originally, on our library board, started all of this nonsense, who is now on our parish governing, 'cause we're parishes and not counties in Louisiana, it catapulted her into a higher elected position. Her husband formed a PAC, and the Koch brothers have donated over $60,000 to their PAC. 

It's all money and power. 

From your perspective, what role do libraries actually play in community life? 

you said it, Kelly, so many essential functions of community life, and I think in particular in this moment where the public sphere is being robbed of its last few coins by the ruling class, that libraries are in this position where they've been forced to step up and take on new responsibilities as other areas of public life have been defunded.

But one thing in particular that you said I think is so important, that it's a space where people who can't purchase something are allowed to congregate. We have so few of these spaces where you're not expected to make a purchase, or, really in the library, there's, almost no purchase you can even make.

And in this way, it also means that it's a space where all kinds of people within your community can mix with each other. Another really essential part of community life, for libraries is that it's a space where trans people are defended and celebrated, especially trans children, both in the sense of materials and programming, that is welcoming and celebratory of trans people, and also a space where a lot of trans people work.

So trans library workers have this visible community role. And so I think that one of the big reasons that there's been such a reactionary backlash against libraries is that it's a space where queer adults and queer children can be together and show not just that it's okay, but necessary. 

I think so many of the things that Alison has underlined are absolutely essential, and a reason why libraries are so dear to the hearts of so many of us.

I think that, we could talk for hours about what libraries do, and in some ways, I think it's also important to think about what they are not, especially in this moment. Libraries are not a place of transaction in the capitalist sense, right? They're not a place where you have to spend money.

Certainly, they are a place where we devote our common public resources, ideally to the common good, but you don't have to make a purchase. It doesn't matter what the number is in your bank account. It doesn't matter what your housing status is. It doesn't matter what your immigration status is. Now, this is the ideal, of course.

We do not see this articulated in every library, or those ideals carried out in every library in the way that we would want them to. But I think in the highest and best expression of the public library that we all strive for, you are there simply as a human being, as a neighbor, as a member of your community, and you have intrinsic value.

You don't have to do anything. You don't have to perform anything. You don't have to have a reason for being there. you don't have to be productive. You can just exist, and there are very few spaces in our public life, certainly, where that remains the case today. I think also public libraries continue to be resistant to surveillance, resistant to incursions on people's privacy in a way that many of our other public spaces are not.

Again, this is something I think we, we strive for. We don't always see that embodied in every public library. But what you look at, what you borrow, the programs you attend, all of that is your business and nobody else's. And I think, again, there are very few public spaces, very few taxpayer funded spaces, spaces that we all support, that can say that 

Yeah.

yes to what Alison and Katie both said. I think something that we need to also maybe nail down a little bit more is at a time in our culture, Alison made mention of this, where there's a need for third spaces, a need for actual public amenities in community that people can access, libraries are critical, right?

they are places where you can have public space to meet, where there are sometimes venues in libraries where people, go to theater per- performances, and they go to concerts, and they do a bunch of things that they can do with other people in common. This is so critical and really important, and something that a lot of people have been talking about lately as we've descended further into fascism.

Where can you go in this country where you can bump in to people of multiple class backgrounds, different racial backgrounds, different creeds, right? on a regular basis. You usually can find that at a public library in whatever city or town you're in. That's really important. and it's not to say that libraries can't be exclusionary.

Sometimes they are, by... 'cause human beings run these institutions, right? but they do offer still opportunities for the kind of cross engagement of people that I just don't know where else you find that today. You don't often find it in local churches anymore, or local synagogues or mosques. You don't find it, we still have it in some of our public schools, but they're, quickly trying to dissolve those as opportunities for multiple types of people to come into contact with each other regularly.

so I do think that is really incredibly important to think about, and to think about libraries as public amenities, libraries as infrastructure in a time when we're dealing with climate change. places where people usually can find a place that's hot and not have to be heated during very cold spells, a place that's hopefully in many places has AC, you can cool down.

These are just... We need to think about libraries expansively in order to understand how important they are in our culture and our society 

Thank you. I really appreciate these points. I think libraries are often missing from our conversations about what it actually takes to resist authoritarianism and defend people's ability to think, learn, and question freely.

Why do libraries matter so much to that struggle? 

Thanks so much of what Miriam and Katie said. It's just gonna be that the whole time, by the way, Kelly, like we all agree. we're, three colleagues who are, like, in such amazing community and agreement with what one another are saying. but yeah, what Miriam was saying about, these third spaces, I think that the fact of the library being a community space, interacting with people from all walks of life under its-- Obviously, we're talking about the most ideal conditions, right?

Under the most ideal conditions, it can be those things. I think that it's not only that the library is this infrastructure that's devoted to free inquiry, but I think that we learn best when we are in those kinds of spaces where we're introduced to people and ideas that are not like ourselves.

And I think particularly we-- libraries are that infrastructure in this current moment when we're at a, misinformation crisis levels. There's AI slop everywhere, we're dealing with the theft of our attention from big tech platforms. The library is the most visible institution defending knowledge and truth, and I think, thinking about the way that we, as a society, decided that was infrastructure that was important to us in spite of all the other things in the US society that we get wrong, we have libraries in every single community, and they are beloved, and they literally exist to make free thought and inquiry possible, under the best conditions.

So it really, it really boggles the mind when they aren't front and center in these conversations. I see a lot of times when actually libraries do get centered rhetorically in conversations about resisting authoritarianism, but rarely do people with any power translate that rhetorical reference into material resources.

And, in particular, I'm thinking about where I live in Philadelphia, our mayor, Cherelle Parker, has extolled the virtues of libraries many times. But when libraries, when there was the huge cold snap over the winter here just a few weeks ago, the libraries were all required to serve as warming centers, which the workers were so ready and willing to do, but the city offered them absolutely no resources.

And this, this way that, the austerity takes away from the library, even when it's positioned as something that can meet that moment, it's really unfortunate. 

We've just heard clips starting with the PBS NewsHour detailing how historian David Blight told Congress the White House's Saving America's Story report and Trump's executive order declare political war on historians and free education. Letters from an American traced how Trump praised the Smithsonian's slavery exhibits in 2017, then reversed course, 

culminating in hearings where Republicans berated the museum's director, talking over her to get social media clips. The Tom Hartman Program warned that Trump's plan to post signs at the Smithsonian follows a dictator's playbook of rewriting the past to control the future, as Orwell described.

The Intercept Debriefing argued that both the conservative and progressive versions of American history leave Native peoples out. Start Making Sense reported how Republican culture warriors from Idaho to Michigan have moved from banning books to defunding library districts. On the Media profiled Louisiana librarian Amanda Jones, who filed a defamation lawsuit after activists spread lies calling her a groomer and now sleeps with a shotgun for protection.

And Movement Memos explored why public libraries matter so much in a fascist moment where people can simply exist without spending money, being surveilled, or performing productivity. deeper dive sections. 

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.

If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show, you can record a voice message, re-record it until you're happy with it by tapping the link in the show notes. You can message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or you can simply email me to [email protected].

As for today's topic, whenever I see the stories of the Trump administration working to forcibly change what's allowed to be shown in a museum, the image that comes to mind is that of marauding invaders sacking a city and burning the cultural artifacts of their enemies. In essence, they're sending in lawyers to burn the Library of Alexandria.

It feels more civilized, but the result, all of us ending up worse off for the lost knowledge, is not much different. 

Of course, the more accurate comparison is that of governments that have attacked their own museums and libraries or built them from the ground up with self-serving bias in mind. While researching this topic, I came across the story of a Chinese dynasty attempting to build the greatest library in the world back in the 1700s.

In their effort, they collected over 10,000 manuscripts, 

but destroyed nearly a third and selected only about a third for inclusion because they were never building a repository of all knowledge and open inquiry. Scholars have dubbed the whole project a literary inquisition because the authorities were promoting the idea as a project to collect knowledge, but purging anything they found threatening or undesirable was always the point.

The authoritarians of the last century, both fascist and communist, did much the same. Sometimes it was with bonfires of books on cutting-edge gender and sexuality research, like in Nazi Germany, and other times it was a decree handed down to restrict scientific inquiry to stay within ideological guidelines, as in the Soviet Union.

But it was always about upholding their own power to the detriment of all others. 

Now, when the Trump administration threatens the Smithsonian, scrubs information from the National Park Service, and physically alters the informational plaques on slavery memorials, they're doing it for the same reason and with the same result. And just in case you're still suffering from a Cold War propaganda hangover, the instinct to crush opposing thought isn't linked to an economic system.

Favoring capitalism, socialism, or even communism doesn't have a bearing on whether you pursue your goals through authoritarianism. But it is the authoritarian instinct, and not the economic system, that drives the anti-intellectualism and the desire to suppress free thought and free inquiry.

interestingly, in a mixed society like ours, while Cold War propaganda was touting the benefits of capitalism, America's scientific golden age was actually primarily funded publicly and socialized. The federal government funded the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, and funded research universities directly.

It is absolutely to our nation's credit that we decided to not just allow the unfettered pursuit of knowledge, but to fund it directly. That's also precisely why giving the power of the purse strings to anti-intellectual authoritarians gives them so much leverage, threatening to suppress and restrict what we're allowed to research, hampering our future, and what we're allowed to learn about ourselves and our history.

As a comparison, China is an authoritarian state, and they've made impressive technological advancements in recent decades, but only in the areas that are visible and strongly supported by the government.

What's impossible to see from the outside is what was never built or discovered because of the restrictions on what people were allowed to think, teach, and research. 

Much of their advancements have come from borrowed freedom, talent that had to be foreign trained and allowed to operate in limited zones of government-sanctioned openness. And a former Chinese premier said the root cause of China's technological stranglehold problem 

lies in the weakness of their basic research, which determines the depth and breadth of a country's innovation. And now China is in the middle of trying to correct that error. They're investing billions to build exactly the kind of capacity for basic research that we've taken for granted. At the same time, as Republicans are finally getting their long-held wish to fundamentally undermine the sciences they find to be ideologically uncomfortable and cut funding for basic research on the assumption it's a waste of money just because they don't understand it.

When we start restricting libraries, museums, universities, and research institutions, we can know exactly what lies down that path because so many others have taken it before us. These authoritarian regimes, by nature of their wildly inflated self-assessment of their own greatness, genuinely believe that if their own ideology were to replace all of the parts of scientific inquiry they don't like, their societies would end up better off.

But there's never been a case where that's true, and sometimes we can be quite glad for that. Famously, Nazi Germany purged more than 1,300 academics, including a quarter of German physicists, and later implemented what they called Aryan physics to replace what they had deemed the Jewish theory of relativity.

Many of those exiled went on to help build the first nuclear bomb in New Mexico rather than Germany. With the benefit of hindsight, we know how that played out, but when warned early on about how German science would suffer under these new policies, Hitler reportedly responded, quote, "Then we shall do without science for a few years."

End quote. That for a few years framing is the really telling part. He imagined that you could fundamentally hamper science with your ideology, and you might have a staffing problem for a little while, but would surely bounce back relatively unaffected. Classic authoritarian delusion.

Now, because the authoritarians currently running our country either live in the mirror world or speak primarily to their constituency that does, they run the same basic strategy while declaring themselves the defenders of scientific neutral ground and accusing their opponents of being ideologically driven.

that goes over better here than it would to put Aryan in the name or to attempt to instruct people in the ways of Donald Trump thought the way the Chinese are force-fed Xi Jinping thought. So the propaganda is a bit better, and the strategy is catered to our own modern time and place, but the goal is the same, as is the intellectual dead end they're aiming us toward.

Institutions of learning and research, as well as the people who work to make them possible, are the way we understand where we've come from, while also being the driving force behind the possibilities of what the future can hold. Defending them in any way possible from the forces currently attacking is absolutely heroic.

But we should understand the authoritarian assault as all the evidence we need that defending the status quo of 2024 or restoring the norms of the middle of the last century should be considered woefully inadequate. If education and free exchange of knowledge are our links to both our past and future, then the only reasonable action is to do everything in our power to make them as open and accessible to as many people as possible.

One of the great things about the Smithsonian is that they're all free to enter. Far more museums should be publicly funded and made free for all. In countries throughout Europe, all of them notably non-authoritarian, there has been a movement to make university free for all their citizens.

Germany's gone a step farther and made nearly all of their public universities charge no tuition at all, 

including for foreign students. The dividing lines have never been clearer between those who want to restrict access and those who want to expand access to information. And we know how both versions go. Authoritarians throughout history have driven their brightest minds away with their crackdowns on free thought, 

And we in the US have been the most notable example of the opposite side of that coin, taking in those great intellectuals cast out of their own countries who came here and helped build the future on our soil instead. we should be fighting to be the country the world's free thinkers run toward when their own governments turn on them.

that used to be us, and it's just more evidence that those trying to make America great again never had any idea what made us great in the first place. We should do what we did before and more to make us attractive to those fleeing intellectual persecution.

Knowing that we should go in that direction again, only further this time, doesn't take a genius 

And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics today.

First up, section A: The Crackdown, followed by section B: Historians Push Back, section C: Libraries Under Siege, and section D: The Longer Arc: Empire, Ideology, and the World's View. 

There was this point a few months before we were headed to Washington, D.C., and we were talking about which museums to visit, et cetera, et cetera, when I realized something, and I am ashamed to admit that it took me as long as it did.

I had no idea what the, quote-unquote, Smithsonian was. 

not no idea, Hannah. 

Yeah, okay, not no idea. it is museums. They are museums. I, a, a museum spread across a bunch of different places. And then, of course, I got to thinking about the sheer number of times that I have seen that Smithsonian logo on things.

Do you know the one I'm talking about? 

Yeah, that blue circle with the yellow thing inside. It's everywhere in D.C. 

It, not just D.C., all over the country, and that yellow thing, Nick, is the sun, which has a lot to do with the whole point of the Smithsonian. but it is everywhere. I was recently checking out the USS Constitution in the Charlestown Navy Yard, and I was walking into the museum, and there it was.

And while we are on the subject of my home state, I have seen it in Cambridge, Massachusetts on an observatory. I have seen it in Springfield. I've seen it in Plymouth. I've seen it in Lowell. 

And for those of you not afflicted with the myopia that is being from Massachusetts- 

Yeah. it's true. I cannot be the one to make an episode about the Kennedy family.

I have found in my own family's archives a Christmas card that has the Pope on one side and JFK on the other. 

Camelot aside, I'm pretty sure if you wanted to find a Smithsonian something in whatever state you're listening to this episode, you sure can. 

You sure can. The Smithsonian is in every state in the nation via its, quote-unquote, affiliates, many of those states several times over.

It is also in Puerto Rico and Panama. And we are not just talking about museums. It is also a research institution, an educational institution, and Nick, it is the biggest one. 

The biggest one what? 

The biggest museum, research, and education complex in the world. 

Now, I feel this is a good time to remind our listeners that we are Civics 101, and in trying to address something that is the biggest in the world, we really are gonna have to stick to the 101.

Are you reminding our listeners, or are you reminding someone else? 

I think that question says more about you than it does about me, Hannah. 

All right. 101 it is. So to take us through it, let's meet Richard. 

so I'm, Richard Kurin. I'm the distinguished scholar and ambassador-at-large at the Smithsonian.

We should just go ahead and get this out there right now. We really like Richard. 

Yeah. We really do. I walked out of that interview and I was like, "Oh, no, Nick, did I just get dazzled?" And then I was like, never mind, I don't care." 

Which is important to note, because nothing that big can be without issues.

Nothing that big that is also about the preservation of natural and cultural history and science and the storytelling thereof. yeah, you better bet that the Smithsonian has 170-plus years of controversy, and I will talk about that a bit, and I encourage you to follow your own rabbit holes, but as promised, I am sticking to the 101 with a person who very much believes in this institution.

I've worked at the Smithso- I started working at the Smithsonian in 1976 for the bicentennial of the United States. Now we're heading to the 250th. So I've had almost 50 years at the Smithsonian. I've been the undersecretary of the Smithsonian, I've run several of the museums, I've run various programs, and now I do a lot of special projects and a lot of my own research.

I have a bunch of books to write. that's what I do. 

Richard is also an author many times over, including a book about the Hope Diamond, which was particularly delightful to us that afternoon, as the night before, Hannah had fallen down the tunnels of Hope Diamond lore after watching Titanic. 

That was the same night that I learned the best floating position for conserving body heat when waiting for rescue in the water.

You can just email me if you wanna talk about that. But yeah, Richard has studied and written about many objects that tell the history of the United States and the world, and objects are certainly in the Smithsonian's wheelhouse. 

And real quick, the Smithsonian is what? I know it's, museums and research, education, but what is it?

which museums, which research institutions, et cetera? 

Okay. The there are 21 of them, including the National Museums of Natural History, Asian Art, Air and Space, African American History and Culture, many more, and the National Zoo. 

A lot of people don't realize, wait, the Smithsonian has a zoo.

We operate the National Zoo. how did that happen? the zoo happened because we had this taxidermist in the 1870s and 1880s who had to figure out how to stuff buffalo skins, and he'd never seen a buffalo. He was a guy from the East. He'd never seen a live buffalo. He goes out West, he finds that the buffalo are being decimated.

There's very few buffalo. He goes out again later, ends up bringing buffalo back to the National Mall of the United States, and that starts the Division of Living Animals, or the National Zoo. And people want more animals, and over the years, we start getting involved, he was at the beginning, but others following him, in the conservation of species.

So the irony that you start off with a taxidermist figuring out how to stuff dead skin, and the institution, well over 100 years later and more, still going, interested in the conservation of species around the planet, and that's one of the things the Smithsonian does. 

You know what I find poetic about this story?

A lot of people ask, why do we have zoos in the first place, right? And a big part of the answer is, people mess things up. 

And not just zoos. Why do we have institutions to preserve things? because we destroy things. even with the buffalo, we weren't just killing the buffalo. We were doing it in part to starve indigenous people in America.

Also, a note on the taxidermist who helped to establish the National Zoo. He went on to be the director of the Bronx Zoo, where he unapologetically exhibited a human, a Congolese man, and you can learn more about that story in our episode on why we have a national zoo. All right. So there are 21 museums.

There's the zoo, several environmental research centers, an astrophysical observatory, archives, research programs, cultural institutions, educational initiatives. the Smithsonian is just so many things. 

so many things takes a lot of money and a lot of people, McCarthy, so let's get that part out of the way.

Okay, great. you think that's a simple question. There's been lawsuits about that. So there's actually a statute that founds the Smithsonian. Now, where is the Smithsonian Kind of in the federal government, the, there's something called the Board of Regents that was formed, and the Board of Regents, to some minds, violates the Constitution of the United States.

So who's on the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian, which is our governing body, the fiduciary body where the authority is established? the ex officio members are the Vice President of the United States, the Chief Justice of the United States, three senators, three representatives, and nine citizens.

So you have nine citizens and eight from the government, and the government people represent all three branches, which probably violates the Constitution. 

All right, so Richard told us twice that the way the Smithsonian is run probably violates the Constitution. 

Which is not something that people volunteer all too often when it comes to their own organizations.

just think about it. you have all three branches of government represented, so just on the face it seems like there's an issue, right? I'm not a legal scholar on that. 

A separation of powers issue. 

Which has not, by the way, gone unnoticed over the years. 

The Smithsonian doesn't... it's like its own th- It's c- technically called a public trust establishment, and, th- there's been all sorts of things.

there was a point back in the early, 1900s, Taft, who had been president, then became head of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice. He was the chancellor of the Smithsonian. And Taft, they asked Taft, "What's the, what the heck is the Smithsonian?" And he thought it was a public foundation.

That was his kind of interpretation. Now, we go back and forth. If you look at laws where, for example, oftentimes with federal laws, they'll say, "This applies to the Smithsonian." But other times they'll say, "This law does not apply to the Smithsonian because of its particular characteristic." And there's been a lot of court cases over the nature of the Smithsonian and what kind of agency it is and what kind of power it has.

Jenny, let's start with the big picture. Walk us through the letter the administration sent to the secretary of the Smithsonian and what the goal is here. 

I, It was a pretty sweeping letter that came suddenly, and yet it's really just the latest sort of salvo in, President, Trump's campaign to exert more control at the muse- at the Smithsonian.

So as some background, back in late March, he issued an executive, ex- an executive order called Re- Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, and it covered a number of things. But the m- the sort of big headline there was that he h- was accusing Smithsonian of promoting, sort of derogatory views of America at its museums, and it ordered JD Vance, who is a member of the Smithsonian's governing board, to use his influence to, reshape the institution.

So what happened last week was that, three officials of the White Hou- from the White House, three political appointees, sent a quite sweeping letter to Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian, announcing a very broad review of the entire Smithsonian, starting with eight museums. and basically, they really asked for everything.

they... Within 30 days, the Smithsonian has to release, or provide all plans a- and drafts and outlines for all of its exhibits relating to the 250th anniversary of American independence next summer, details of all of its current exhibition content, details of all, traveling and upcoming exhibitions for the next three years, audience surveys, job descriptions, organizational charts- basic- educational materials, basically everything. And there's 100- So Jenny, that's 

the, that's the text of the letter. What's the subtext? What's the subtext in your educated reading here? 

the subtext here is that the White House is turning up the pressure on the Smithsonian, which sees itself as independent and has operated independently of the executive, to conform to President Trump's ideas of how American history should be discussed, taught, described, debated.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, you were previously director, of a research center and an archive, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem in New York. what do you hear when you hear that administration officials want to enter these exhibits at the Smithsonian and, quote, "remove partisan narratives"?

What does that say to you? 

it is a consistent, pattern for the Trump administration, to control, all aspects of how American history is taught, read, discussed, diplomatically across the world. There have been changes, in how US history is communicated, to people in foreign embassies, et cetera.

So the broad strokes here are that the Trump administration want to ensure that their authoritarian grasp for power in the United States is less likely to be challenged by everyday citizens who can connect the dots between an American past where forms of, g- of government control over populations, and pr- most particularly the African American population that experience, what we call Jim Crow and formal disenfranchisement, and, some scholars would compare to a form of American homegrown fascism.

so these are, consistent patterns where, the Trump administration wants American history to underwrite or to support a form of, quote, "patriotic education," that will miseducate the population to believe that his approach to governance is the only way forward for this country. 

Jenny, what reactions have you heard from historians, curators, about the review that we're talking about?

I think mostly quite negative and pretty much in line with what we just heard from Professor Mohammed. the American Organization of American Historians very quickly issued a statement criticizing this. The American Historical Association, which is the largest, organization of professional historians in the country itself, issued a statement.

It was joined by 25 other groups. And here I think there are two things going on. I think there's tremendous wariness of the substance of what President Trump and his administration wants, but also people see a very broad attack on authority and expertise. The, the argument is that regardless of what changes the Trump administration wants here, it is simply not their place or that of any other, president or administration to demand changes at a museum which is run by professional curators, archivists, leaders, and, reflects the sort of cumulative judgment, arrived at through a lot of debate and discussion over decades of professionals who are trained.

Let's take a moment for this message that we got from one of you. 

People who want to own public memory quite literally want to own it. This is about ownership. This is about owning what is going to be the official story, not just of our nation, but the official story that you have to accept to participate in our nation state.

So when you hear someone like Secretary, Heg- Hegseth say, this erodes legacy, the question is whose legacy? This has always been the debate when it comes to history. There is not a history, there's not a singular history. There are different histories, and this is a battle about whose history is going to be dominant, is going to be central.

the Smithsonian review is the latest in a series of attempts to change references to history. In February, 1A covered Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's decision to rename Fort Liberty Base in North Carolina, giving it back its previous name, Fort Bragg, a name that originally honored a Confederate general.

Tressie McMillan Cottom spoke to us at the time. She's a sociologist and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's also an opinion columnist for The New York Times 

With the recent firing of the head of the Labor Statistics Board, as well as Trump appointing himself as the head of the Kennedy Center, and now the ordering of a review of a, quote-unquote, "independent museum" since the 1840s, I think it's the far more critical question to ask ourselves why aren't stopgaps in place to keep these institutions and reporting boards actually independent from this sort of takeover?

And why aren't we more concerned about this administration's actions, and what tangible repercussions are there going to be? 

Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad of Princeton, what's your reaction to what you just heard there? 

Tressie is correct in that, historians, debate the facts of the past, and that is to say that, museums, like classrooms, like scholarship, are defined by the weight that historians use to measure, movements in history, the impact of, political culture, everything from, Abraham Lincoln's decision to deploy habeas corpus in the time of the Civil War.

i-i- history is not static in this sense, so what, a politician might perceive to be, revisionist, meaning making things up i-in the way that they are criticizing, what they call, woke or divisive, or race-based, teaching, are really, reflections of the changes in, how the historical profession understands the role of previously oppressed and excluded populations of, for example, indigenous populations.

There's more Native American history taught today. It's not made up. It is the work of historians in archives, to discover facts that were often erased or ignored, or simply destroyed. And, what Trump is trying to do is trying to push us back to a time, say, in the 1950s and before, when American history, like one of your callers described, was genuinely whitewashed.

It was about great white men as movers and shakers of history. So today, we have many narratives. We have a much more diverse, narrative about the American past, but for professionals at the Smithsonian and across our universities and in our classrooms, they rely on facts as the basis of those interpretations.

we're hearing from lots and lots of you about this story. David in Minnesota emails to say, "Trump's call to align the Smithsonian with his American values is a blatant Soviet-style effort to impose propaganda instead of history on the institution. It's a standard dictator playbook tactic."

And we got this from Jay in Virginia, who says, "Trump's exerting control over Smithsonian exhibits in addition to controlling the Kennedy Center and attempting to control universities is just another authoritarian move, this time in the cultural area. This is what authoritarians and tyrants do." As in 1984.

And we got this from Barbara, who says, "The Smithsonian is the jewel in the crown in Washington, DC. So many museums across the country have had to raise their admission fees to meet budgetary needs. The Smithsonian museums are still free. The professional staff and curators should be allowed to continue their best work.

Hands off," says Barbara.

Ben, at the end of last year, you and I had a conversation, I think just as Trump had been elected, in which we tried to have a bit of a think about what might happen in relation to culture, and it was very unclear, and we had the evidence of the first term, which was not very much.

And this time around we have a very clear picture, and it's very dark, isn't it? 

Yes. I was thinking back to that conversation and remembering foolishly saying that I think art is under the radar and we'll be fine which was, in hindsight, very much wishful thinking. yeah, from day one, Trump has come out swinging.

we saw it in an executive order that he signed literally on his first day in office, undoing about 78- Executive orders and memoranda issued by Joe Biden, one of which was to reestablish the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. So already on day one, he was taking out this body that advises the president on cultural policy, that Biden had reestablished after it was dissolved in Trump's first term when everybody resigned in protest.

So I guess that kind of set the tone for what was to come. But since then, obviously, it's just been a sort of full-frontal assault on most, not all, I would say conspicuously escaping the worst of things has been the National Endowment for the Arts thus far, although they've also bent to Trump's will.

But certainly, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which are the two other big funnels for federal arts funding in the US, have definitely taken just massive hits. He's basically trying to eliminate both of them. The Smithsonian has been targeted in an executive order, so its 21 museums and the National Zoo are on notice about, what he sees as like dangerous ideology.

In other words, essentially grappling with the horror of American history. and the National Gallery of Art also, which gets something like eighty percent of its funding from the federal government, has also toed the line and has peeled back its diversity efforts and has made a big show of touting its 250th anniversary programming, which is one of the big focuses of Trump's efforts it seems.

Indeed it is. Let's go back to the detail. One of the things that is very hard to do as journalists in this, and this is a deliberate strategy, we know this from the first term, and we know how it's described. It is called flooding the zone with shit. Okay? That is how Steve Bannon termed it, and they're doing it again, but they're doing it with hard policy this time, not just information and all that kind of stuff.

So what we're having is regular announcements from all sorts of government departments and executive orders and so on, and it is difficult, frankly, to keep up with it. But we are trying, and we are going to try through this conversation. But let's pick up on the most important thing. So let's begin with the museums and library service because this is, as you say, it's one of those kind of key government-funded institutions, and the level of interference there is massive.

As you say, it's basically, on the one hand, it's getting rid of it, but it's also installing at its helm people who are going to do Trump's bidding, right? 

Yeah, absolutely. this was definitely, as far as I'm concerned, the most direct attack he's made thus far. certainly his attack on the Smithsonian was quite startling, but it's not an attempt to shut it down.

Yeah, so the Institute of Museum and Library Services on March 14th, so you know, about six weeks- After coming into office, Trump signs this executive order which deemed IMLS and about six or seven other federal agencies, quote-unquote, "unnecessary," and essentially moved to eliminate them to the fullest extent of the law permissible.

There's obviously disagreement on that, and there are lawsuits that have been filed because these are congressionally mandated and funded agencies. And so to what extent Trump has any authority to try to pare back what they do or cancel their grants or shut them down would appear to be none, but certainly he's testing that appearance to the best of his ability, and he's stacked the courts in his favor, so there's Some reason to believe that he will be allowed to proceed.

But yeah, effectively, he has sought to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which has, I think, just under three hundred million dollars in funding last year. All that funding is, approved by Congress and determined by Congress, and it funds museums and libraries in literally every state and every US territory.

it's just this huge funnel that kind of filters down through state-specific agencies and reaches basically every community in the United States. And so the loss of that would just be enormous, but that doesn't seem to be dissuading anyone on the inside and- 

No, absolutely. And crucially, the board of the service tried to tell Trump he could not do this, and the person he had installed at the top of the organization, who's called Keith Sunderling, he sacked the board immediately when they told him that.

In other words, he's put this person in charge, who's just wiping the floor with the whole thing. 

Yeah, exactly. basically less than a week after making quite clear in this executive order that he wanted to eliminate IMLS completely, he appoints Keith Sunderling, as you said, who had been made a deputy secretary in the Department of Labor just a couple of days before.

So very new to government and Washington and these types of agencies, but basically puts him in charge of IMLS with a mandate to do away with it. And a few days later, like you said, the, the board of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is the advisory committee that sort of governs what it does, told him in a publicly released letter that they can't actually do what you've been mandated to do without violating congressional intent and federal statute.

And then about ten days later, Sunderling fired all the members of that board. So there's a pretty flagrant and consistent disregard for, what would appear to be the rule of law.

 

And he is quoted as saying that he wants to restore the institute's focus on patriotism, which is a curious thing because it's working with all these libraries and it's-- how on earth he can try to do that across multiple libraries, the entire service and museums and so on.

It's a complicated organization in so many different ways. How exactly he would go about doing this, of course, that we have no details on. 

Yeah. and it seems like a fairly disingenuous statement to make, given that you're saying that you want to restore it on the one hand, and then you're also laying off pretty much the entire staff.

I mean- Yeah ... IMLS had about seventy staff, full-time staff at the beginning of the year, and I think they're down to twelve now. And those folks, a lot of them were on administrative leave and have been brought back, but it seems like it's just for the sake of winding down the operation. 

Khalil, if the administration changes exhibits at museums, for example, the National Museum of American History and Culture, just down the street from the White House incidentally, or if, federally employed curators feel they need to consider politics before they finish a historical exhibit that the public will see, what does that mean for Ameri- for the public's understanding of history?

I don't know, ta- five floors of the African American Museum, according to my memory, take us through a one-minute tour of that museum and what it would mean if curators there had to switch it up on orders of the White House. 

first it'd be impossible. let's be really crystal clear. there is no way to empty that, wonderful, rich, encyclopedic museum of 400 years of history in a way that would meet the test of what Donald Trump and the administration are insisting.

You simply cannot tell a patriotic story without understanding that there was slavery in the United States, nearly 250 years, longer than, there has been freedom in this country. That history of slavery was followed by 100 years of formal segregation, a segregation history that also inspired Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

And although conservatives prior to Donald Trump have often used that 350 years up until 1965 as a kind of a story of America's past that has now heroically been overcome by great Americans, which of course denies that most white Americans were not in favor of the civil rights movement. Most legislators around the country fought against that change.

And as quickly as the late 1960s and early 1970s, we saw a rollback in some of the freedoms that Black people had gained. That is what the museum tells, and you'd simply have to close the museum for all intents and purposes. You- There's just n- There's... it would be impossible to do. 

Close it? 

Yeah, you'd have to close it.

I don't... It just-- There is no way, there's just no way to do it. It-- I, I'm not exaggerating. so I don't know how they actually plan to pull this off. I don't think they can. 

Given the imperatives, of the job, what a curator does, what a museum executive does, and their role in history, if you're told by a politician, or given a review of your exhibits and told what's in, what's out, do you expect resignations?

absolutely. but let's re- be really clear here. th- I just need to say this ex- as, as explicitly as possible. Donald Trump and the Republican Party imagine themselves as the, caretakers of freedom. This is a party, for all of its history, since the 1860s, that has celebrated a kind of American freedom where individuals have rights, where government is limited.

Remember, Ronald Reagan, who up until Donald Trump had been a kind of archetype of the great American president, famously said that government was the problem, and we should, to shrink it as much as possible. We have just the opposite happening now. We have a government under Donald Trump that wants to make every single decision about what is factual, what is truth, what is history, what is art, what is culture, wh- who can be the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party in a Democratic primary race in New York City.

there is no limit to the control of this organization. They are controlling law firms. They are controlling higher education curriculum. This is what dictatorship looks like. It is, by any standard, anti-American, by the standards of the very Republican Party that has prided itself on carrying the banner of freedom for all of its history.

We got this message from Ian, who emails to say, "I don't agree with others' assessment of Trump as ignorant or uneducated. I feel his move to whitewash history is an aware move that if you steer the narrative of history of the nation, then you can control its future." Jenny Schuessler of The New York Times, we talked a little bit earlier about the reaction from the historical community, roundly negative, you said.

what have you heard from individual curators, people inside the Smithsonian Institution, about what they might do next? Are there any plans developing here? 

I should say, without going into too much detail about sources, I have not been able to speak in any, great detail with curators inside the Smithsonian.

they institutionally, and I think even behind the scenes, have been saying as little as possible. I imagine it appears, excuse me, in keeping with the statement you read earlier, that they are trying to figure out how do we respond to this right house, this White House request in a way that we must, but also how do we protect our independence?

How do we defend the integrity of our exhibits? And I, I would say to me, without going too far into speculation, it does seem as though what this, is intended to do, or at least maybe more what it is doing, is really throwing the institution back on its heels. it's impossible to imagine they will close museums.

It's imp- it's very hard to imagine they will shutter entire exhibits within those museums. But at this very open-ended inquiry, which basically says, "We wanna look at absolutely everything you're doing, and if we decide we object to things, you have 120 days to either remove them or cover them up," that makes it really hard for the Smithsonian to function.

It makes them very har- it very hard to open new exhibits. It makes it very hard to announce any of its plans for the 250th. So I think there's just tremendous uncertainty as to how much of this is, a shot across the bow, which is political, versus how much of it is, reflects an actual intent to remove things.

Now, I'm gonna read back to you a message I sent to you on Slack on our internal communication system, at The Art Newspaper, because I noted when I spoke to Karen Lemmey last year at the Smithsonian American Art Museum about their show, The Shape of Power, that there was certain language in it that felt, to me, incredibly progressive and moving in a very particular direction in that catalog.

And I'll read back to you. It basically said, in one of the lines of the catalog, this is from the introduction by Karen Lemmey, Tobias Wofford, and Grace Yasumura, "Race creates an architecture of social relations in the United States that produces, for example, anti-Black violence, indigenous genocide, redlined neighborhoods, and whiteness as property rights.

That is, the way the US legal system has created and protected the property interests of those considered white." It went on to talk about the way that a particular work by Henry Kirk Brown was a racist, romanticized view which cast native peoples as inferior to European settlers and trapped them in a timeless past.

It was really striking that it was that show that was in this executive order, and to read about a museum and a particular exhibition in an executive order was really quite shocking to me 

Yeah. I th- I think one of the many things that was so striking about the executive order that Trump signed on the 27th of March targeting the Smithsonian was just how precision targeted it was.

It wasn't this kind of blanket statement about, museums should kowtow to a patriotic line of historical narrative. it was really looking very specifically at that exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Shape of Power, taking issue with an initiative under the auspices of the Smithsonian's Women's History Museum, which is one of the sort of two or three forthcoming Smithsonian institutions, taking issue with the inclusion of a trans athlete in a display, and then the narrative of American history told at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is obviously the most recent addition to the Smithsonian Museum kind of complex, and which was actually inaugurated by Obama, and whose founding director was Lonnie Bunch, who is now the secretary, the head of the Smithsonian.

Yeah, I think it's not totally unexpected that the Trump administration would want to bring the Smithsonian to heel and have it push and amplify this glorifying and very narrow-minded and exceptionalist account of American history. But I think it was pretty shocking to see just like the level of detail into which it went critiquing what was happening.

there was almost a kind of weird, I won't say flattery exactly, but the fact that they took, the care to actually examine specific exhibitions and take issue with certain wall text is wild. 

Yeah, it is. But it's striking, and I think this is a way of summarizing what we've just been saying, all these details that you've just given, is that there is an authoritarian push to control museums, libraries, and so on.

It is directly from what was called Project 25, which throughout the election campaign Trump denied knowledge of, said he hadn't even read it, and so on. Yeah. But which everybody on the other side was saying, "This is the blueprint for what he's gonna do, and it's scary." And it's being borne out. And, David Remnick in The New Yorker wrote an opinion piece in which he referred to the fact that, it was telegraphed in Project 25, this stuff.

We shouldn't be surprised. But it makes it no less shocking that it's actually happening. 

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that piece was really quite smart in drawing the parallels to Soviet Russia and what's been happening in Russia under Putin and what's been happening in China under Xi Jinping.

there is, a lot of alarm bells going off. 

Absolutely. And it does seem very clear, and I noted that some of the terminology relates to Modi's India and about rewriting history. They are accusing the people who they see as elites of rewriting history, and now it's very clear that is exactly what they want to do.

Yes, absolutely. I feel this is maybe slightly off topic, but I think the thing that has been most impressed upon me these last, God, not even three months, is just to what extent every time the Trump camp accuses someone of doing something, it's because they themselves are doing that thing.

And I think there's no clearer case of that than this attempt to reshape what the Smithsonian is doing and in accusing it of, a divisive race-centered ideology. that's a kind of like absurdist Orwellian example of the teapot calling the kettle black. 

Yeah. It-- in psychoanalytic terms, it's projection, right?

They're accusing everybody else of doing exactly what they- Exactly ... have been doing over these past few weeks.

Next, section B: Historians Push Back. 

What Trump posted on Tuesday, Professor Brinkley, about the Smithsonian specifically was this: "The Smithsonian is out of control where everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.

Nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future." End quote. Do you agree with that critique to any degree, that the emphasis in the historical exhibitions at the Smithsonian museums tends to focus too much on the negative, on who got oppressed by whom as part of the American story, real as they may be, and downplays the successes of American democracy and American cultural advancement, and advancement of human rights over time, things like that?

No, I think it's a completely false, narrative being spewed by the president. The truth of the matter is, they're all aspects of American empowerment, including Black American empowerment, are covered at the Smithsonian. you could go see Chuck Berry's red Cadillac or the prayer hymnal book of Harriet Tubman, or the great paintings of, many, Black artists like Romare Bearden.

And, it's rich as can be, and it's, it seems to be connected to this Confederate monument. Mitch Landrieu in New Orleans took down a Robert E. Lee statue, some years back. He was on his way out as mayor, and that started triggering this idea of the de-Confederizing of the country, and that's, it started triggering a cultural war, and it exploded at the Char- Charlottesville, which Trump tried to say, there are good people on both sides of the equation.

And now in his second term, he's being very ardent. He wants to scrub 

progressivism, anything that's considered DEI at a university. He wants to, attack the idea that, this isn't a country built by white Heroes. And hence, President Trump wants to build a heroes garden in the Black Hills of South Dakota, putting statues up of people that he admires, including Davy Crockett and, William F.

Buckley and, Milton Friedman, and it's a kind of a, a random list of people, some highly deserving of it, by the way, of such a thing. But, this is where he's playing it. He wants to... He sees that getting control of the universities, busting up the media, and going after the way people are taught history, i- we always have to remember when we deal with the idea of a red and blue America, red America's the South.

It's the Confederate South. just look at a map and you will see. And this is like the old Charlie Daniels song, The South's Gonna Do It Again. but we're not- it wasn't a lost cause in the South. Trump's, saying that your Confederate ancestors were heroes, this is part of what he's trying to do to, minimize that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War.

Instead, there's some- there, there's an... There's something coming out of the right that slavery was not that big a deal, only a couple percentage points of Southerners actually had slaves. So it's trying to even rewrite the Civil War right now. why? What do you think Trump wants from this kind of revisionism?

Is it to clear the name of his own father, who had racial discrimination cases against him as a landlord, as did Trump himself at one point? Or to deepen the political support of those white Americans who think they're the discriminated against ones in this country today? Or just out of personal racial animus, if you wanna get in his head?

Why do all this? all that you mentioned are components, I believe. I think though, in the end he feels it's a winning ticket that he has to keep his MAGA base together. He's a president operating at, on a good day at 40% approval. In order to stay at 40 and not drop down to 35, he has to continue to show that he's a cultural warrior, that he's not ready to say that the United States is a majority, non-white, non-Caucasian nation.

And hence he's attacking, issues that nobody else in politics, except, fringe person like David Duke, you know, would've suggested, and he has the entire Republican Party going along with it. The Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln. they're the party of Theodore Roosevelt, of Ronald Reagan.

they'd all be turning over in their graves if to realize that Trump as America is turning 250 years old on this coming July 4th, is trying to divide us instead of unite us.

and in that sense of division, he feels strength. He feels that as long as he keeps things chaotic, he's controlling the narrative, he can, push buttons.

a lot of this will come back. Trump won't be here forever, and the Smithsonian will come back and put it... whatever displays are taken down, they'll be put back up probably. statues that get re-put up can be retaken down. It's just not very helpful for America in the 21st century to be wallowing in this sort of, g- it, it, look at how can we bring America back to a segregationist era, And how do we, stop teaching Black history or the s- the true story of indigenous people, or the expansion of women's history that's been going on the last decade. So he wants to, riptide all that back to really a, call it 1950s America on a, or even further back than that.

the report not only criticizes specific exhibits that are there and sp- and things that aren't there, they actually threaten budget cuts.

62% of the Smithsonian's annual budget, a billion dollars for all the Smithsonian museums, comes from funds appropriated by Congress. Trump proposed cutting the Smithsonian budget by 12% this fiscal year. Doesn't really seem up to what the critique here, but Congress has maintained the same level of funding this year.

The July 4th report cites how the president's executive order instructed JD Vance, who is ex officio, an official of the Board of s- Regents of the Smithsonian. JD Vance is supposed to work with the Office of Management and Budget to, quote, "prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy," close quote.

Now, that policy, of course, is opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion. So presumably they would like to cut the funding for all exhibits that refer to immigrants, for example. I wonder, is it even possible to tell the story of American history today without diversity? 

the answer is no. It's really not, and the standard for what they're talking about is not did something happen and is it true, which ought to be our basic standard for history, but, as I said, is a kind of purified top-down story of only the good stuff, as you might think of it.

And what's happening at the Smithsonian is something that is also happening at many other major cultural institutions. The National Park Service for the last year or so has had to hang signs that are s- really to that same effect of what you're saying the signs say. if you see anything that unduly disparages, a great American of the past, you know, report this to your federal government.

so they've been under huge pressure, both financially and in terms of control over, what's on display and what employees and guides can say. the National Endowment for the Humanities, any number of these institutions, and unfortunately, I think they've been quite effective at, breaking Bringing caution into these institutions, really making people run scared, which of course is the goal.

Now, I'm an optimist about the telling of history, which is that once people know this history, and we've documented all of this history that is being, shoved to the side here, it's not that easy actually, to get rid of history or tell people that things that they know to be true aren't true. but I do think that these federal institutions are in an incredibly hard spot, and to some degree, they do have a different set of both civic and legal obligations than a lot of privately run institutions do.

the defense of the Smithsonian's History Museum is led by Lonnie Bunch. He was the founding director of the Smithsonian's Museum a- of African American History, and he became the first historian and the first African American to be appointed to lead the entire Smithsonian, all 21 museums, in its 173-year history.

There's an amazing anecdote he reports in a memoir he published in 2019. When, Trump became president in January 2017, Lonnie Bunch gave him a tour of the African American History Museum, and he reports that he showed Trump an exhibit of the history of slavery in the United States, and they passed an exhibit on the Dutch role in the slave trade.

And Trump commented, they love me in the Netherlands," close quote. And that was his only comment. it's just so pure Trump, but still it's amazing. 

If we could only have a museum that would tell the entire American story leading up to the election of Donald Trump as the end of history, the coming together of all things, our great leader, having arrived.

that's really what the American people want, isn't it? 

It is, as you've suggested, it's a familiar view of the American past, the great white men and their his- heroic, achievements. It's the way American history was taught when Trump himself was in high school. no civil rights movement, no feminist movement, no gay liberation movement, no Mexicans, no Muslims.

It's the America Trump recalls when he says, "Make America great again." you might wonder, why does he care so much about history? We worry that no one is majoring in history anymore. the courses are being, shut down, and the TAs are being fired. But you can see why it's so important to him to take back control of how we understand American history.

It's the America that he wants to make great again. Last time we talked, you said history is hard to suppress, and you brought that up again a couple of minutes ago. Wonder if you'd explain that a little bit more. 

I think we've had decades and decades of expanding ideas about American history, expanding the study of American history, and that exists.

So unless we're going to engage, which I wouldn't put it past us, but in, in mass book burning- ... and jailing of history professors, I think that this, these stories are out there, the research is there, and if the federal government isn't gonna be in a position to take up those stories, other people will.

I do think that there is real value in continuing to study some of the touchstones, the most important figures of the American past, the figures that have been gone over again and again. So I am not one for, not looking at George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Davy Crockett and Abraham Lincoln, and I believe in that kind of history.

I'm a political historian. I think it's important. But it should not be studied to the exclusion of studying the worlds in which these men existed, the other people who played really important roles, in creating American politics and society and institutions. And I think we've gotten a little locked in this country to, an either/or division that is both methodological, who do you study, how much power do they have, do you do history from the top down and bottom up?

And then is also ideological in the sense of this great debate that is underway, about how you ought to tell history. It is true that, if anyone thought that history didn't matter, the Trump administration thinks that the study of history, how we teach it, how we learn it, how we narrate it, they believe it really matters.

So I guess that's a vote of confidence for the history profession maybe. 

The way I would answer is that there was more of an American triumphalism, an American exceptionalism, presented. And let's just pick the 1950s, meaning we just won World War II and the country was in a, in a, a consumer, boom. but it was still a period where African Americans could not vote.

There was housing discrimination. Women were, considered to be consigned to the home or a few secretarial nursing jobs. Native American history hadn't been really examined to the point where somebody like, Andrew Jackson, who's still on our $20 bill and still has Jackson, Mississippi, named after him, and Jacksonville, Florida, and we all honor Andrew Jackson, but we hadn't really had the dialogue about the Trail of Tears and the, the, Cherokee removal and the, the, the, the essentially a genocide of people.

you... And it does come out, as the last caller said, you do have to talk about it. So we are, at least at our institutions like Smithsonian, better informed of real American history now, better than ever before. If you're talking about fantasy history or a kind of a, y- you, a nostalgia for, when of manifest destiny that God wants us to do whatever we do, even foreign wars, then things have shifted, and that shift really occurred not at the Smithsonian.

It occurred in the 1960s and '70s when there started becoming a deeper look at how to examine American history, where people would start taking Black studies, or you could take classes on US labor history. it opened the net up. And even as recently as Barack Obama's presidency, Obama signed, executive orders creating national monuments like Stonewall in New York for LGBTQ people, like Charles Young for the Buffalo Soldiers, a monument in Ohio, Harriet Tubman sites.

he created, Obama, the Cesar Chavez National Monument in California for the United Farm Workers. He was opening up the net, President Obama, of a, a, of not taking away from James Madison or Thomas Jefferson, but adding to the stories, of America by, telling a larger, story that wasn't- Yeah

just about white America. So what you're really saying is history is communicated differently now at many colleges and museums because a shift needed to take place, that a revision needed to take place toward a more full, more objective story rather than a cheerleading project of American history, if I should call it that, because it was too cheerlead-y and buried the dark sides too much in earlier generations.

Is that kinda what you're saying? Yep. Yes, and if you're talking about right after World War II, women weren't going to universities like they are now. They weren't even allowed in. a man I've written about named Colonel Earl Rudder, a hero of the US Army Rangers at Normandy at Pointe du Hoc, Earl Rudder's Rangers, he had to come into Texas A&M and help start breaking it open so women could come in after the war.

in the '50s, we had McCarthyism, which tried to do what Trump's doing, is trying to say, you were once a, a, a, a writer who sympathized with, you know, Lenin," or y- "You were somebody who, was for Eugene Debs for president in the 1920s," and tried to blacklist them. The blacklist was another attempt at shutting people up, of controlling, our very diverse and rich history and the way we express things in the arts.

So the difference is in the '50s, McCarthyism ne- while it got, it became a Red Scare, McCarthy was a, in the end, seen as a rogue senator from Wisconsin. his power was limited. With President Trump, he has really unlimited executive power for at least the next few years to try to do an assault on the Smithsonian Institute and redefine public education and public history at a time when our schools don't have the budgets that they need.

Our teachers don't have the budgets, and there's, in a, in, the, most students know nothing about any history, let alone trying to break down institutions that are doing a great job right now, like the Smithsonian is- Yeah ... at all of its, if, as it, at all of its, facilities. 

To pull the lens back to a global and historical view for you Is the way Trump is using government power to influence the narrative about his government and the history, maybe the history of his favorite constituents, is that consistent with authoritarian governments around the world over time?

what word would you use? Yes, it's authoritarianism run amok, and it's going right at the jugular of our national heritage. 

It is an attempt to rewrite history, to do away with truths and replace it with a, a kind of fake narrative, one that, that, may have existed in a past, and I've noticed the Trump administration liking to talk about William McKinley's tariffs and, the manifest destiny of James K.

Polk or, the, the story of Andrew Jackson. But they limit the history. professional historians know what they're doing. They're working very hard to understand all aspects of the American 

project. And the good news is we are the exemplary country. It is astounding how we've overcome adversity.

It, just how important it is that we are the, the Ellis Island or the Port of Houston of the world, a place people wanna come. and so nobody i- at the Smithsonian's trying to ever put down the United States. It's trying to talk and explain what happened. If it's about the s- American Revolution, they might talk about Molly, Molly Pitcher, who gets written out of the narrative back then.

If it's about, a modern era, they'll explain how Julia Childs worked as a spy while she was the great cook. ... you could just go on and on with fun, interesting things that have happened, and it's not broken. It's the opposite. Smithsonian's soaring, having its greatest time ever, and President Trump just is coming in with a, a wrecking ball attitude, which is just an extension of his political views, and he's, in a revenge tour he has against people that he perceives as being liberal and not 100% Trump, and that's authoritarianism.

I'll rewrite the history to match Trump history, just like you mentioned, he wants the Trump name ahead of the Kennedy Center. So to end on what you just said about taking a wrecking ball, when Trump talks about the Smithsonian in particular, he's talking about an institution that the federal government mostly supports financially and is part of a kind of basic tourist experience in the nation's capital.

But then he also posted this last week addressing every museum in America, most of them private institutions, as Quote, "I have instructed my attorneys to go through the museums and start the exact same process that has been done with colleges and universities." unquote. So what do you think he's talking about there?

'Cause I think a, a shudder went through the leaders and the patrons of museums all over the country. Do many history museums around the country get federal funding? Does he have power there? It will vary. There are some that get federal funding. he will probably try to talk to governors, in red states or people he's friendly with to change some of the way history's being explained.

Often the museums are in urban centers, history centers, around the country. and in, yet in those cities may be blue, but the state is red. but it's not a Republican history he's trying to do. I don't... I think it's a really, he wants to go back to when white Americans were largely defined, who was white America were, and he doesn't go so far back.

He will include Italians or Irish, but he, a- and Jewish Americans. But it's a, he particularly is trying to undo Black studies, Black history. He, it comes out of his, the Trump feeling that the Black Lives Matter movement went so far in one direction that I'll take it far in another direction and try to do away with all of that.

And his battle with women that he always has, that, after his first term, the largest march in American history was Women's March on Washington, DC against Trump, so he sees women and gender, women at the workplace as problematic. and this is a president who's mired in Jeffrey Epstein problems right now, and he's screwing around with going and telling museums what they should be displaying and what they're not.

Some of this is smoke and mirrors. Some of it is to grab headlines, to deflect. What is he really gonna be able to do at these museums? Cut some funding, make people feel some pain. But I'll promise you this, Trump administration will be toast, and you will have Harvard University and Columbia University and University of Virginia.

he will be toast, and there will be a Smithsonian Institute explaining real history because most Americans want things straight.

Now section C: Libraries Under Siege. 

we've heard this before. The Gablers had become what Texas Monthly called, quote, "An integral institution of the new right," end quote, a Reaganite contingent of free market loving fundamentalists like Baptist minister Jerry Falwell's Christian Right Moral Majority Party and Eagle Forum, a right-wing lobbying group founded in 1972 by Phyllis Schlafly.

Schlafly, of course, was the brains behind the movement to stop the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have expanded legal rights for women across the nation. By 1982, the ERA was officially dead, and Schlafly moved on to book banning as her next crusade. The same year, Eagle Forum in St. David, Arizona successfully banned required reading lists in their school system, which included classics by Joseph Conrad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Homer, Edgar Allan Poe, John Steinbeck, and Mark Twain.

Similar bans were happening in New York State targeting authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Eldridge Cleaver. 

These right-wing censorship campaigns which oppose discussions of women's suffrage and the women's movement, slavery in America, trade unions, ecology, world hunger, Native people's history and experiences, the Watergate history were radiating out to public libraries as well.

The American Library Association found that the number of books challenged tripled to nearly 1,000 by 1981. A contemporaneous Washington Post article reported that, quote, "A growing number of them were prompted by conservative groups like Moral Majority and Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum." The Post then added, quote, "Not surprisingly, teachers and librarians, fearful that parent vigilantes will raise a ruckus, are beginning to censor themselves.

They refuse to consider some worthy books for the classroom or library shelf because of the potential political consequences. Publishers, also fearful of censors, sometimes modify their texts rather than forgo major markets," unquote. So they do a lot of self-censorship or sort of preemptive censorship, which is more common often than ce- direct censorship.

In the years that followed, book censorship continued to surge. During the 1984-1985 school year, efforts to ban books cropped up in nearly 46 states, many of which were successful. Books were targeted for material dealing with, as a 1985 LA Times editorial put it, quote, "evolution, sex education, or personal values," unquote, as well as, quote, "social, political, or cultural change," unquote, which is a very benign and euphemistic way of saying anything that makes guys who look and sound like Adam Johnson upset, basically, is the criteria.

anything involving race, gender- 

Telling the history or information about anyone else. 

Anything that wasn't something that would be in a John Wayne movie, bad. 

But public libraries weren't just under siege from book banners. Around the same time as the New Right censorship project, libraries began to face major threats to their funding.

As governor of California in 1971, Ronald Reagan himself slashed state aid to public libraries by $1 million. During his presidency in 1982, Reagan cut federal funds to New York City public libraries by more than 50%. And in 1985, some California library systems, already whittled down to half-day schedules, feared they'd have to close down entire branches as a result of Reagan's proposed 1986 federal aid cuts.

And if all that weren't enough, the wheels of library privatization were already in motion. In 1981, the then Pennsylvania-based private company Library Systems and Services, abbreviated as LS&S or LSSI, was founded. The company sold automation technologies to federal libraries such as the Veterans Affairs Department, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.

At that time, Ronald Reagan was in office, and his notorious gutting of federal funding created an opportunity for private companies to fill the library's financial vacuum. Eventually, LS&S expanded this model, targeting the public library systems of funding-starved cities and counties. By the summer of 1997, without any sort of vote from its community, California's Riverside County contracted LS&S to run day-to-day operations, including managing staff and buying books for its public library system, citing, what else, Adam?

Financial strain. 

Notably, during the New Right's book banning spree, most major media raised some objections, publishing editorials lamenting the coercive effects on such blatant censorship. Privatization, however, didn't really elicit that same level of protest, even though the effect in many ways was very similar.

In one example, The Washington Post ran a story marking the 1997 LS&S deal as a neutral, if not positive, development. Only one sentence in the piece addressed the concerns of the public, and even that was hedged by a dismissal by a librarian supportive of the corporate takeover. The paper raised no questions about the privatization other than, quote, "How LS&S can pay the same number of people the same amount of money and increase library services if Riverside County couldn't do it."

The answer? Streamline administrative functions, AKA lay people off, fire people, and gut services. Commentary on the ethics of suddenly putting librarians under the employment of a corporation or whether privatization would restrict public access to the library was nowhere to be found. LS&S gradually expanded to more regions, and by 2010 was no longer limited to those that were economically distressed.

In September of that year, the company was hired to run the library system of Santa Clarita, California. CEO Frank Pezzanite pledged to help the city save, quote, "1 million a year, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees," unquote, according to The New York Times. In the same article, Petzinite evoked classic anti-labor tropes to justify privatization, characterizing unionized librarians as lazy and self-interested.

Quote, "A lot of libraries are atrocious. Their policies are all about job security. That's why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to the library for 35 years and never have to do anything, and then have your retirement. We're not running our company that way. You come to us and you're gonna have to work," unquote.

Petzinite would later insist his words were taken out of context, adding, quote, "Anyone who works in a library is an unsung hero in my book," but just not enough to actually pay them.

 

Not like heroes who deserve union job security. no, 

Yeah, this was... Again, you see the similar parallels to the attacks on teachers' unions, which is they're all lazy, entitled.

They collect checks, and they're just, they a- they're living too high on the hog. 

And you can't fire the bad ones, right? 

Yeah, the working class is not allowed to have a modicum of job security, peace of mind, or economic security. 

You gotta work. You gotta constantly work. Prove yourself. 

They have to constantly be paranoid, precarious, and fearful of being terminated at any moment.

That's right. That's how we run our schools and our libraries. Anything that has to do with education and information, whoever is working there has to be absolutely terrified. 

this is how the ruling class treats anything that's popular or beneficial to society, and especially in the fascist project, they're really... as we've seen, it's end times fascism. It's full on eugenics.

They're only engaged in a project of destruction. So therefore, something as popular as the library, and I love what you said, Katie, it really is true, there's more of us than there are of them, and you can see this in the popularity of libraries. You can see this in the variety of people, all different kinds of people who are willing to stand up for libraries.

But what the fascists want is they want us to not only, they not only want to destroy the library, but they want people to be afraid of what the library represents. But fortunately, I think there are s- many ways where there is so much local community resistance to that part of the fascist project, and we've seen it because the, the fascist attack on libraries has now been happening for years and years, and people in all kinds of local communities have been resisting these incursions.

They love the library because of all the things that we've been talking about here today. People love not having to purchase anything. They love a place that doesn't have expectations of them other than very basic, code of conduct, be nice to each other. They love that the library is a place that, generally speaking, is not gonna break their trust like so many other parts of our society, like all the private platforms that we have to engage with all the time.

And I think that people, even though they have a lot of complaints about the nature of sharing things in common, they also love doing that. And I think that this is part of the reason why libraries are so intentionally underfunded and so many attempts to destroy them are being made because I think that the members of the ruling class understand that radical potential in a lot of ways.

And I think that there's also a very specific strategy to defunding public goods where they wanna make public goods seem inherently dysfunctional. you defund them to a point where then you can say it allows for the narrative that privatization is a better choice, But I think that part of this is that they know that if the public sector, libraries included, were well-funded, we would have a completely different society.

It wouldn't solve all our problems, certainly not, but it would solve a lot of them, and the ruling class can't have that. 

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I-- we've talked a lot about where we are in this current moment politically and the more intense versions of fascism that we're seeing day over day.

But I wanna underline that a lot of what we are seeing in our public libraries is not new. This is not something that has happened in the last four years or the last eight years or the last ten years. The problems in America's public libraries are often the result of a lack of investment over decades.

Many of our library buildings are buildings that were built at the beginning of the twentieth century or perhaps in the middle of the century, and they're falling apart. I can't tell you how many conversations I have with trustees all over the country, and they say, "I don't know where we're gonna find the money.

We need thirty million dollars to fix our elevator that doesn't work, to fix our roof that leaks. We can't use half the building because, it's got asbestos, and we can't afford to remediate it." And these basic problems of just capital infrastructure, like the building itself does not work, does not function, and we are not investing in it to say nothing of what we're spending on staffing, on paying the people who actually make the library function, making sure they have a fair and livable wage, making sure that they have healthcare and benefits and all the things that they are entitled to, making sure that we have funded programs and collections and services.

This lack of investment is a long-standing problem. It has been an issue for decades. And at the same time, it does not exist in a universe where we are not funding all public ser-- We are certainly funding some public services. We are funding police departments. We are funding surveillance. We are funding programs that punish and contain and control people.

We are not funding programs that support and encourage and connect people 

I'm cheering yes to all of that. And I wanna just say, p- picking up on Katie's point about the import- that these are not new things, that this has been a long time problem with public libraries and public goods in general, except for the goods that are, again, in the punishment carceral state.

I want to also suggest that, How to put this? It is concerning to me the conversation about how much people actually love the library. Because I think both Katie pointed out, brought up before the romantic vision of libraries that doesn't necessarily look at the ways in which they are sometimes exclusionary and other things.

there are institutions within a carceral state, so they're gonna have carceral tendencies in s- different kinds of ways, and they are institutions run by human beings, and those human beings are flawed. All that being true, but I don't think a lot of people know how their library, public library actually works or functions.

I don't think people know who pays for the library and how it gets paid for. I don't think people, for example, people definitely don't know about the governance structure of their public libraries. we have found this at For the People. People don't know about library boards. I didn't know about library boards until, 10 years ago.

Do you know? And I know a lot about different public institutions. I didn't even know we had boards that govern many of our libraries. W- I think that kind of not... The, the ability not to understand how institutions actually function make it so that it's easier for the ruling class to be able to defund those institutions.

It makes it easier for those who want to, for example, come into censorship, to censor because they can take control of library governing boards, right? And do their work that way. So we really have to engage and build our knowledge and do political education around how these institutions actually function, how they work, in order for us to be able to defend, but also call for expansion of them because, yes, we do need new capital campaigns to be able to deal with buildings that were built 100 years ago.

We do need to pay people who are library workers a living wage. we do need to make sure that we can run the programs that people want in their communities, right? All that takes resources and money. That's why budget campaigns that we run on the left must include the public library. We must include them on the list of the things that ought to be funded at an actual level that allows us to sustain them.

I think the other thing I want to point out is that something about where we are right now in, if we're in late stage capitalism or some form of, the mutation of the capitalist, model of, e- of economics and politics, I think that it is really... I've heard people, workers, library workers tell stories of people who come to the library and ask to rent books People who ask what the monthly subscription fee is.

Because we have gotten to the point in this country where it's actually inconceivable to people that you can access anything without paying for it out of pocket, and that people will be like, "What's the catch? How is this a scam?" "How is this not a scam?" Because every single thing as we've hit on costs, quote-unquote, money out of pocket for you to be able to get what you want or need from it.

Whereas actually at the library, it's each according to your need. That's the basic way of how it's organized. This is extremely antithetical to the, late stage capitalist model of everything. And I think in... That also makes libraries super dangerous and super threatening to certain groups of people who want to see, a, an expansion of the not e- the idea to each according to what you can pay.

they're in a fight with the each according to your need model of how to live in society. we're not customers at the public library, and I think that means that a lot of people in the country don't know how to relate to institutions or to the government in a way that is not a customer relationship.

A consumer relationship. You're a patron of the library. That's very 

different, and that's why we have to fight for this institution because if we lose this as a public good and a free, as a free public service, we will have lost everything. And so I just want people to really think deeply about that.

We have been talking about this for a very long time, so I'm happy we finally are doing it. Libraries are a rare place of public education that's for everyone, not just children, at least in principle.

That scene increasingly, by the right, it's gotten tangled up into this book banning attacks on critical race theory. There have been some examples of intimidation for various kinds of books and drag sh- that sort of the, the broader drag show panic it got caught up in. But of course, it's not new, right?

It's I think it's, as we argue in this episode, it's gotten more acute of late, but it's part of a broader continuum that goes back a very long time since they were, originally founded. What do you think the sort of main reasons why it has gotten more acute of late, and why libraries of all places, whether they be in schools or be public libraries or what have you, have become a target of the forces of reaction?

I know that's a big question, but if you could just indulge me about what you think the sort of broader trends are of late. 

It's a big question, and who doesn't have it, right? 'Cause you think about the library and You take your kid there for a story time, and you maybe go and pick up a book and read it, and maybe use the bathroom.

And, who could be against that? So it's quite befuddling, I think, to a lot of us, certainly to me, to see that the library is now this place. I think I was reading today that someone in Louisiana is saying that the library is where Satan goes to hang out. it's really- Wow ... just off the charts. 

I've seen him there, that's true, but, 

Yeah, no

verified ... he's, always has trouble with the printer, right? 

It's true. He's, yeah. 

So confusing. But I think in some ways it's because the library is the last public institution standing. The right has attacked public education for a long time. They're very far along in the process of dismantling that through vouchers and privatization and charter schools and all that kind of stuff.

And higher ed the same, right? You've got an institution that's been gutted by adjunctification and lack of resources, and the library is the last one, a little bit. It's also not as if it's been immune to the forces of decimation, right? you've got very few school librarians left, public libraries operating on sort of shoestrings, and so they're...

We don't have the staff there who could fight against these things. I think we're in kind of a fragile moment, and we're also, good places that do all kinds of things that people on the right don't like. 

Yeah. to that point, though, it's also not just the far right. I think, we hear the kind of newsworthy headline stories, these full-frontal horrible attacks, right?

Which then become policy positions. They become core talking points from the right, of course. But austerity inflicted by both parties over many decades has long made it more difficult for libraries to serve many of their core functions. Emily, can you talk about some of the ways that libraries have really for such a long time, maybe since, the public library system was really created in this country, have been a site of social struggle, of also worker struggle and worker power, to protect and expand the public sphere against forces of austerity, which, to be clear again, are not just coming from the right.

So it's interesting, right? So public libraries get their start, like they really get going in the United States out of philanthropy. They are, in fact, established by, like the Carnegie libraries are funded in order to educate the working classes into the ways of, the right ways of reading.

So from their very inception, they've been sort of political projects. And then we see them as I think of them as about both public services and public goods. They're about the circulation of public goods to the public, and they're also Public space. They produce public space. And so the bigger the library, the more space that is reserved for people to come in and hang out and do all kinds of things like that.

So the Schwarzman, or the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, which is the remodel of the Mid-Manhattan library in Manhattan, remodeled to the tune of $125 million. Big space, lots of new seating, just greatly expanded public seating in the middle of New York City. And on the same day that opened, or right around the same time that opened, the city signed design and build contracts on new jails to replace Rikers Island to the tune of $8.3 billion.

So I think of the li- fight for the library as a fight for the public. do we want expanded public space for people to come in and use the library and all of the things that happen there, or do we wanna fund the expansion of a jail system? And we see what the state has chosen to do. And I think you're absolutely right that's bipartisan and has been going on for a very long time.

And those of us who work in libraries, and especially people who work in public libraries, see the result of decades of disinvestment in the public, and the sort of extraordinary concentration of wealth in the hands of very few people. And we see that every day in the library. we're the last place anyone can go and sit during the day without spending money.

And there are many more people than there ought to be who don't have anywhere to go and sit during the day. So in that way, I think it's a site of struggle just 'cause we see what's happening. 

So in an interview with Jacobin, you wrote, quote, "I believe the way to get people to understand why libraries are important is by engaging people in a struggle for their fair share of the social wage.

It isn't a matter of better advertising. It's a matter of stronger connections between libraries and our communities and the communities we serve and the shared struggle that we have because we are all suffering from the maldistribution of wealth," unquote. In that interview, you you mentioned your own labor struggles as a librarian worker.

So I wanna ask you how you think those labor struggles intersect with the broader social purpose of libraries in terms of the theme you touched on of solidarity and building places of community. I know that's a little wishy-washy of a question, but I think we're a little romantic about libraries, so we're asking romantic questions, so indulge us.

Sorry. 

So in 2016, I was part of the faculty at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus that was subject to a lockout. It was the first lockout in the history of higher education in the United States. And it was, like, totally, life-changing. like one of those things that happens and you're like, "Oh, everything I thought about how the world worked was wrong."

'Cause I think I did... I'm a little sentimental myself, and I thought that- If I did a good job and helped students find their articles and pass their classes and write good papers that, I could live a good life. But that was like one day I was being a librarian, and the next day I was locked out. I couldn't go to work.

They wouldn't let us on campus. They locked us out of our email, replaced us with people they found on monster.com and paid, $15 an hour. We had, an Alvin Ailey trained dancer who taught dance class, and she was replaced in the classroom by the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, who was, like, an 84-year-old trained biologist, right?

Just like the most cynical end game possible in higher education, right? That, it doesn't-- you don't even need students and faculty. You just need tuition dollars that you extract. But I was like... It just-- You experience brute power, and you're like, "Oh, fuck." they could just destroy us at any moment, and the only way that we could fight back against that was by organizing collectively And taking a stand all of us at once.

And that was, like, a bumper sticker, and I kinda believed it before, but now I, truly believe it, 'cause I saw what would... it didn't matter if we were right, it didn't matter if it was just one of us, we needed all of us standing together. And so if I wanna claw back space for the public, if I wanna claw it out of the prison system and instead make it, a place where kids can come and sit and read a book, I just don't get it.

who doesn't want that? who says, "More people in cages, fewer children reading books"? nobody wants that. And so if we can understand that, fighting for the library is fighting for everybody and for all of us, that seems like part of the project for me. 

So Regina Wel- Weldert is a transgender woman in her 70s, and she had been, I believe, a fisheries scientist and then retired, and in her 60s transitioned, and was now running a coffee roasting company in this little town of Dayton. And Regina Weldert said to me, "Look, I've never had trouble.

Nobody's attacked me for my identity before in Dayton." In fact, she said, "I've had more trouble when I go to the big cities like Seattle, where people heckle me and insult me." But then she said, "Now I feel scared because suddenly there's this cultural war going on in Dayton, and suddenly intolerance is bubbling up to the surface."

And Regina Weldert said to me, look, if you marginalize the voices of people like me," she said, "or if you marginalize the voices of young people exploring their sexual identity or their gender identity, what you do is you push people into the closet, people who are already marginalized, already psychologically vulnerable, already at risk for abuse, already at risk for homelessness, all the things that transgender youth are disproportionately at risk of.

And you make it more likely, if you invisibilize them, you make it more likely that at the end of the day there are gonna be bad outcomes, that, psychologically bad things are gonna happen, or that they're gonna end up on the streets with no resources to help them." And so Regina Weldert said, "Look, I'm in my 70s, but I've got to fight against this censorship movement because it's trying to invisibilize people like me," she said.

I think there's this sort of concept that, you know, all the issues around gender identity and sexual identity, that's a big city thing. it's absolutely not true. You can go to any small town, any small community anywhere in this country, and if you look, you're gonna find people exploring those same issues about who they are and how they want to portray themselves to the world.

it's not a big town, small town thing. But I think there's this idea among conservatives, among hyper conservatives in a place like Dayton, there's this idea that, if we could just get rid of a few books, everything's gonna go back to the 1950s and everything's gonna be easy to understand again.

That's absolutely nonsense. you can get rid of those books, but life is gonna be just as complicated and just as messy and just as ambiguous today as it was yesterday. We've just made it harder on already vulnerable people. 

One of the people they made it hard around was the librarian of their town, Todd VanderBark.

What happened to him? 

He had been attacked again and again for defending the sort of right of the library to pick and choose books, and he'd been called a groomer, he'd been called a pedophile, he'd had violent threats against him online, he'd been told he should be in prison, he should be in jail, he'd been heckled at public meetings.

And he stood firm. He stood firm for over a year of this conflict, and he made sure the library still had those books. At the end of the day, though, he had enough, and a few months ago, earlier this summer, he packed up and left. He accepted a job somewhere else. He said, I've done it. I've done everything I can here.

I don't want any more of this." And he left Dayton. And he said to me, "Look, frankly, I've got real, no real interest in going back to Dayton." And I felt terribly sad about this because this was someone who had stood firm, and he had, faced some really quite gruesome personal insults for standing firm, but at the end of the day, he just felt it was too much.

And I think this is the danger, that, even if groups don't succeed in defunding libraries, and it's quite likely that initiative will, be defeated in November, because even conservatives in Dayton, many of them are very uncomfortable with getting rid of their library. But even if the library remains in place, at the end of the day, the librarian was driven out of office, and the interim director who came in and succeeded him immediately moved some of those books that had created such a furore, immediately moved some of those books away from the kids' section.

that's bowing to pressure from, a really authoritarian, intimidatory movement, and that's an ugly harbinger of what's to come. And I think that's, that's a real risk that you go round the country from place to place, and as these censorship wars heat up, even if they don't formally work, they create enough soft pressure that librarians say, "You know what?

This isn't worth it. Let me compromise on free speech just a little bit. Let me bow to these demands just a little bit." And that's a really slippery slope

 

One last thing: what was it like for you to go to this small town in rural Washington and talk to these far right-wing activists whose actions you find so reprehensible?

No, I find it fascinating, and I've spent quite a lot of the last few years doing this kind of reporting, where I find these movements in these communities, and I go in and I talk to a lot of people. this is, to me, what makes journalism worthwhile. It's okay to just talk to people that you agree with, but it's boring.

It's far more interesting- ... and far more productive, and it's far more honest intellectually to talk to people from an array of different backgrounds, and it helps you understand where we are. look, if you want to understand where America is in 2023, if you want to understand the potency of these culture war issues, look, if you want to understand why Donald Trump is still electorally competitive despite facing 640-something years in prison, if you want to understand all of those things, you've got to understand these kind of s- cultural war conflicts that are going on.

I lo- I love going to these places. I find it 

fa- but surely they see you as, the enemy. 

it depends. I have a lot of the times people saying, "I'm not gonna talk to you." Jessica Rothkorn originally said to me, "I'm not gonna talk to you," and I persisted, and I just kept asking questions, and I kept talking.

And, if you talk long enough, and if you show an interest in what people are saying, people will talk to you. Not everybody. You can have some people who just will not talk to the media, come what may, but you're gonna have a lot of people who after a while do. One of the things that has increasingly struck me as being important about this moment is the dangerousness of our levels of polarization, that we are s- so confined to our own echo chambers, and we're so willing and able to see a political opponent as the enemy, and that's really dangerous.

we live in a democracy, and we've got to have an ability to, at least have some conversations across ideological divides. no, I don't agree with these censorship movements. I think they're really dangerous, and I profoundly hope that these, they don't succeed. But I think it's really important to talk with people who do buy into those movements and try and understand where they're coming from.

And finally, section D: The Longer Arc: Empire, Ideology, and the World's View.

Ben, inevitably in the 250th anniversary year of a nation, there is a focus on the history of that nation. But one thing I'm aware of, having seen the Super Bowl performance by Bad Bunny over the weekend, is that it's very much out of the kind of territory that the government really wants it to be on already, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. I think we've seen, especially since Trump's, return to office early last year, that the stakes of this anniversary are ideologically enormous. there's a lot of erasing and de-emphasizing and rewriting of history, both recent and foundational going on. and I think we're seeing that manifest in all kinds of expected and unexpected ways around this year's 250th anniversary extravaganza, which will culminate obviously on, on the 4th of July, which will mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

And so the latest news that's happened just this week is in relation to the Stonewall Monument. Can you first of all tell us-- I'm sure most people will know what the Stonewall Monument is, but tell us a bit about it just in case there are people that are in the dark. 

Sure. so the Stonewall Monument is a site in New York City's Greenwich Village that was sort of ground zero for the LGBTQ plus liberation movement.

It was the sort of or-origin point of, an event that was alternately called the Stonewall Uprising or the Stonewall Riots, which is essentially this, this act of police brutality that led to a massive sort of outpouring of support and activism by the LGBT community in New York City. And so I believe it was declared a national historic site and therefore, under the purview of the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior under President Obama, I think.

2016. That's right. Yeah. 

Yeah. So that's kinda become like the de facto nationally sanctioned historical site for LGBTQ rights, and activism. 

And so tell us a-- You mentioned the NPS there, the National Park Service. It might be confusing to people that the National Park Service would be running something which is based in Greenwich Village.

But the National Park Service is a vast umbrella organization for all sorts of monuments, which include national parks, right? 

Yes, exactly. The National Park Service has a sort of bizarrely broad, at times, mandate, and that includes managing things like historic presidential homes, where such and such president was born or lived most of their life, are also managed by the National Park Service.

and so the Stonewall Site is also managed by the National Park Service. There is technically a very small park there, although the Stonewall Inn itself, the bar, is obviously a bar. yes, the whole site is a National Park Service project, which falls under the Department of the Interior. 

Yes. And that's the rub of all this.

So it's really interesting to me that last year at the end of the year when we were talking about 2025, you pointed out that one of the most insidious sort of manifestations of the Trump crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives was the way that certain information was being scrubbed from websites and information relating to National Park Services sites.

And that- Happened with the Stonewall site. So last year, any reference to trans people, for instance, was taken off the website. So this is something that's been happening for a while, but now what's happened is that the flag, the LGBTQ flag, the rainbow flag, has been removed from the flagpole outside this monument, and that's crucial, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. I think we've seen sort of the groundwork being laid for this in places like Florida and Texas, which have outlawed rainbow crosswalks and, that street level mural- have been using arbitrary studies of traffic patterns to have these expressions of LGBTQ solidarity removed.

Yeah. so it's not as if this comes out of nowhere, and as you said, a lot of National Park Services websites for various historic sites have been scrubbed of anything broaching the subject or, any difficult subject really, in US history. And so it's not totally surprising, but, nevertheless, earlier this month, I believe it was on February 9th, the National Park Service removed a large pride flag, like a National Park Service pride-branded flag that had been installed on a flagpole outside of the Stonewall Inn, ostensibly to comply with a Trump administration directive that basically had dec- had decided or decreed that, only certain sort of, official flags could be flown at national sites.

And this one, even though it says, National Park Service on it, because the backdrop of it is not white or some neutral color but the pride pattern, it was found to be afoul of this new directive. 

Yeah, they've tried to hide behind sort of bureaucratic language about what kinds of flags can be shown outside of these sort of federal spaces, right?

Yeah, exactly. In that sense, it's like a, an escalation of what we saw with the, with the rainbow crosswalks last year.

 

And tell me, what's the reaction been? has there been a political reaction to this? 

Yeah, absolutely. I think people are outraged, understandably.

It's such a sort of, petty thing to do. Yeah. and I think it's really struck a chord in New York City 'cause New Yorkers, perhaps rightly are bracing for all kinds of dust-ups with the Trump administration. And so this is definitely a flashpoint for those anxieties and, there are innumerable others from the ongoing ICE raids in parts of the city to the shutdown of construction on this, $16 billion tunnel between New York and New Jersey that's also entirely due to sort of Washington, DC pettiness.

So- 

Yeah ... 

yeah, this just feels like a sort of an added bit of salt in the wound, basically. 

It's interesting to compare it with another scandal involving the NPS, which has been taking place in Philadelphia, and this is in relation to a slavery exhibition, which is an outdoor site and had been long-running but had been taken down.

So tell us about this. 

Yeah. This involves a set of outdoor placards at a site, in Philadelphia, in this section of Philadelphia called Independence Mall, which is, where a lot of the kind of foundational sites of the US are located, including Independence Hall, and, the Liberty Bell, and outside of Washington, DC, basically, ground zero for, American history buffs.

And at that site, there is the outline or remnants of a house that was occupied by both President George Washington and President John Adams. And as part of that, there was, there had been until very recently, a sort of large display and a kind of memorial wall paying tribute to the nine enslaved people who were owned by George Washington and who lived there with him during his time as president in Philadelphia.

That display was taken down summarily last month, and shortly thereafter, the city of Philadelphia sued the National Park Service, basically saying that, this site was co-managed by us in collaboration, and you gave us no warning or explanation as to why this was being removed.

I believe there's actually a protest at the site happening as we're speaking. So yeah, it's become this very kind of contentious fight over... it's not just about a placard, obviously. It's about the version of American history that is told, especially in the current moment of commemorating that history around the 250th anniversary.

is George Washington just this heroic figure who, fought in the Revolutionary War and then was the first president and did all these great things, or is he, a complicated human being who also had some very serious strikes against him? And it's not exactly surprising that the current administration wants to tell the sort of sanitized version of that story, but it's obviously striking a nerve that the revising of that history, is happening so haphazardly and so out in the open.

we have built this understanding of museums as informed by their staff internally and as informed by the relationships you just described externally.

And in, in the Substack essay, you pointed to or at least nodded at how this tension has created a situation in which most art museums have remained fairly silent over the upheavals of the last year or few years. What types of responses would you like to see coming from the sector? let's go there first.

What, what types of responses would you like to see the sector having to, to the present crises? 

let's start with the easiest point to make, which is that I don't have a dog in this hunt. I'm not a director anymore. I was for about 30 years, but it's easy to offer prescriptions to people when you're not in the mix.

And I would be loath to do that to people who are sitting in a saddle and have their own sets of challenges that I don't know anything about. And so to say what I hope people do is different from what seems plausible and practical for a lot of people. What I would hope is that the emergency we're in our democracy is so extreme, it's not comparable to any moment in American history of late other than perhaps the McCarthy era when fear was everywhere in the creative industries.

And that type of shutting down of research, inquiry, shaping views and opinions is completely contrary to the purpose of museums. And without having to be, say, directly engaged in attacking what's happened at the Smithsonian, for example, I think directors can be pretty explicit of their advocacy of the First Amendment and free speech and the apo- the ability of artists to make a case for something that the directors themselves might be loath to do and in the case, for example, of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which I'm president of, we've put dozens of quilts by Black artists from the '20s forward in dozens of museums.

Those could be hung today in kind of acknowledgement of the battle for voting rights in Alabama right now. And it wouldn't have to say anything. It could just have a testament to the fight for civil rights in the 1960s that those women in Alabama staged with their families to protest and march.

And so I think there are ways of being powerful forces for open thinking and progressive values without necessarily putting yourself at risk.

 

Is your wish that directors and other art museum leaders would respond to the moment only internally, or do you have wishes that museum directors become more public figures within their communities and regions?

I think it's fair to say that there aren't that many museum directors who publish thought pieces and articles. I think that's, it's a bit of a rarity. Would you agree, Tyler? I don't think that- I 

would agree that's an absolute rarity, and I rather bemoan that it is. 

And I guess I didn't succumb to that impulse.

I did write fairly often throughout my tenure as a director, and did so in part because I felt it was a public responsibility to articulate the values of an institution, even if it engendered ill feeling or upset. And so I think that the predicament a director faces, and I've heard this offline, is, that's so risky."

yes, but then what are you doing the job for? in, in effect, what called you to this profession if not to lead? Why didn't you stay a curator, in a province that might be safer? And why did you step into an administrative role where Most obviously, you are the party responsible for steering the ship and giving dimension to the, the challenges that are facing the institution from without as well as from within.

A moment ago, you noted that hanging historical material can speak to the present. I think that an issue that your essay nods at without being explicit about is the museo habit of throwing contemporary artists at whatever issue pops up. That is almost always an artist not constructed into whiteness. it's a practice that almost always transfers the institution's work of either institutional self-interrogation or the histo-historical interrogation of artworks to one artist, to often one person to do something that's on view for 10 weeks, and the museum then feels, "Great, we've done it."

in my field, in, in historical American art, I can count the number of U.S. art museums that have done revisionist and interrogative exhibitions about art's role in the construction of the nation, historical art's role in the construction of the nation in the last decade on one hand. I'm not sure I can get to five.

When we think of how museums address present circumstance, is looking at and understanding the past through artworks of the past, does that have to be a part of how museums go forward, or am I being a smaller romantic? 

No, I think that's right. I think the biggest obvious concern museums should have is around the war against diversity on the part of the Trump administration- Agreed

independent of all the other insanities that have come out of the White House of late. And the default seems to have been to present works by artists of color who have a market presence that's sufficient to counteract anybody, to say, "This artist's works sell for a lot. They're appreciated in all sorts of quarters, and therefore they have authority that's warranting their being displayed as and serving as the proxy for institutional conscience."

After George Floyd's murder, we all remember museum websites having a black screen and all of these performative- Yep ... efforts to s- to find some way to be visible and evident in recognizing that tragedy and its implications. But as time has marched on, and certainly as the Trump returned to the throne, that has faded to the point where presenting successful Black artists is seen as the antidote to silence.

And we're all for doing that, but it's not s- it's necessary but not sufficient, is the way I would describe it. 

Yeah, I've s- I think I've said this before on this show, al- although probably not recently, but w- we have 40 or 50, 40, 40, 50 artists a year on this show, and, I, there's always some side chat before and, and after we tape.

and one of the things that artists not constructed into whiteness increasingly tell me off tape is how frustrated they are by the sort of essentialism that Frank Bowling, for example, complained about in the 1970s and that Paul Chaat Smith started complaining about in the early 21st century, and how they see institutions handing off work to them, and that they do not see the white leadership of traditional white institutions joining them in their work, in that work.

They simply see TWI leadership assigning it to them, and that's a significant issue. And I think we also-- I think artists, maybe more than my colleagues in the historical American field, have noticed that while US art museums have within their collections much art that was an important factor in, say, racialization or in arguments around smaller republicanism and who got to be involved in it within the country as that debate evolved between the 1780s and the 1850s, that museums don't highlight or feature or, the role that art played in those histories.

And I also don't see any movement in the foundation sector to change that. I think that when you look at the, the big foundations that lead the way in the funding for especially American exhibitions, you see them strongly oriented around essentialist strategies rather than in- interrogative strategies.

Finally, as we're taping this at the end of May, it's become really clear that the Trump administration is taking dead aim at the Smithsonian Institution because it can.

It's trying to effect changes, including to staff, senior staff across the institution. So I suppose I should point out here that the Smithsonian is not as federal as I think a lot of people think it is. A little over a third of its funding is not from the federal government, and depending on the year, more if you count capital projects.

Is there something from the Trumpist targeting of the Smithsonians from which leaders in the art museum sector should learn, perhaps because Trump minions may target them next? 

we've seen what happened with law firms and universities that- Yeah ... simply caved to the initial pressure, that they ended up- Yes

suffering more than those which decided to stand pat and fight. Now, no one wants to lose their job over an aging president who will theoretically be out of office, in a period of time that we can all imagine. So most, I think, are looking at just coping until the end of the Trump administration and assuming that at that point there'll be a purge of all of the henchmen who have sought to encumber the Smithsonian with these ridiculous quests to cleanse them of mentions of race.

So I think it's as, especially as we near the midterms, the impulse to fight back is gonna lessen, honestly, on the 

part- I think 

that's right ... And one can understand that because we're all watching and counting the days till the end of this national crisis. But I think that what the legacy of it is to suggest new protections are going to be needed in a legislative sense to protect free speech at the Smithsonian and avoid the type of interference that is now upon it, and make sure that going forward there is, if there's a revival of federal support for the arts, which we don't foresee for other reasons because federal support in general is getting tighter in all sorts of areas, that there's a hands-off understanding, much as the European institutions have historically enjoyed.

Mind you, there are exceptions in Europe as well, even with ministries of culture funding institutions. But I think that has to be the playbook. Just as in universities, these proscriptions against free speech have to end, and there has to be greater resilience on the part of educational, cultural leaders to say, "No, this is not gonna stand."

You've given a couple exa- of examples of this, but I wonder if you can zoom out a little bit and connect the dots a bit more on how, as you've put it, the specific Native part of our history helps to explain the current political crisis. 

Yeah. Again, this is from the scholarship of Maggie Blackhawk, who's Ojibwe, and her work is amazing.

I'll tell a story. Yeah. So the same summer our founders were drafting the Constitution in Philadelphia, at the time, New York, is where Congress met, the Congress at the time. And so a bunch of people actually leave the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia so Congress can have quorum in New York.

So you've got these, two meetings happening at the same time. And in New York, Congress passes the Northwest Ordinance to govern an area that's like Ohio to Minnesota. It's like the Great Lakes region. and the founders actually call this area America's first colony, and they're gonna govern it like a colony.

And so the, the person who oversees the colony is appointed, is not elected. There aren't elections, even for the, the w- white people. It's majority Native, but even for the white people who are living there, they don't have elections. They don't have a representative in Congress. It's not democracy the way that we would think about it.

It's top-down government, and that's how we've ruled every territory. That's as we stretch from sea to shining sea, and then as we stretch from the Philippines and Guam and Puerto Rico, and as we governed big, huge swaths of area that way. this isn't a small, subset of the United States. under, Thomas Jefferson's presidency, there, two-thirds of the land mass of the United States was governed by unelected appointed leaders.

And so th- the way that we governed those areas built up certain practices. It's a big legal term. It's called plenary power, but it basically built up a stronger precedent. And so these are areas where the president could get away with a lot and kinda do what the president wanted. It's an area where also the courts have this tradition of saying, "Ah," "This isn't really our business.

we're not gonna intervene. We're gonna defer." and there are also areas where constitutional rights don't apply as much, and Native people were the first example of that. We're the first example where we developed some of these areas of laws, but then it's been applied to other groups of people.

So it's been applied to places like Puerto Rico and Guam. It's been applied to immigrants, and I think what we're seeing right now is it getting applied to everybody here, right? But, and I think, too, the other thing that's happening Is that the Trump administration is pushing on some of these weaknesses in our democracy.

And so you can see that in the controversy over war powers, you can see that in the birthright citizenship case. Even in the, the fund for, like January 6th defendants part of the, precedent for that fund comes from settlement funds with tribes that had been established under previous presidents.

And so the way I think about it is what our government did to Native people, it's like it set up these fault lines in our democracy, and what we're living through right now is the earthquake, is those fault lines moving everything around to where it feels like it's gonna fall apart.

And so there are these very concrete ways where, whether it's birthright citizenship, detaining migrant families, the war in Iran, threatening to annex places like Greenland or Canada or Panama , that actually come from this long colonial history in the United States that I think as Americans we're not used to seeing, right?

And so it's like this, we ha- I feel like we have this like knee-jerk reaction as a public of "This is unconstitutional, this is unprecedented, this is un-American." you heard that a lot around the ICE search in Minneapolis of this is unprecedented. it's not the first time a president has sent federal troops to the land that is now Minnesota to round people up and remove them.

Like we, we've actually done that before as a government, and we never went back and said, "Oops," "That's bad. We don't wanna do that," right? That is against our values as a democracy. That's dangerous. And so it's no surprise that a lot of that history is repeating itself. 

You have alluded to your answer to this question several times already, but I'm gonna ask you directly.

Knowing that you are not, an expert in authoritarianism, but you've raised the question in the podcast, are we really a democracy? Can you give us your answer? 

I think we're both. 

Sorry, both meaning authoritarianism and democracy? 

Yeah, I think there's parts of our government- Yeah ... that are democratic, and I think there are parts of our government that are authoritarian.

Like a lot of empires, I think that we thought we could keep those things separate, that we could have colonialism over there, and we could have colonialism over there and democracy over here. That- ... we could rule this group of people by force, and we could rule this group of people by consent.

But history tells us that's not how it works, and what we're seeing right now is those things come together. And 

there's this theory of where authoritarianism comes from that actually became popular at the end of World War II as a way to explain the rise of fascism in Europe. 

What theorists said is, like- Why are you surprised about the violence and the horrors of World War II and Nazi Germany when Europe has been doing these things to colonize people across the globe?

this is Germany committed genocide in Africa before it committed genocide in Europe. And so this theory is called the boomerang of empire, and the idea like in the way that you throw out a boomerang and it comes back to you, is that colonialism works the same way. we oftentimes think about colonialism as just impacting the people who are colonized.

So we think of, the terrible history of what our government did to Native people as just impacting Native people, that's, the bad thing that happened to Native Americans. But it changed our government. It changed the structure of our government permanently, indelibly. And so what we're seeing in this moment is things, is those arms of our government that we thought could be authoritarian towards some people coming back home and coming back to impact everybody.

That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. You can record and re-record a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes. 

You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestofleft.01 or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Civics 101, 1A, The Week in Art, The Brian Lehrer Show, Start Making Sense, Citations Needed, Movement Memos, The Weeds, The Modern Art Notes podcast, and The Intercept Briefing.

Further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Dion and Aaron for their production work for the show. Thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes. Thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

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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

Air Date: 8-12-2026

Today we follow the latest in Western Hemisphere imperialism. American presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump have invoked the Monroe Doctrine and its claim on the whole hemisphere to justify coups, sanctions, and now an outright military abduction in Latin America. Trump, as always, is bragging loudly about the parts most before him knew to keep quiet.

Full Show Notes

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

Today we follow the latest in Western Hemisphere imperialism. American presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump have invoked the Monroe Doctrine and its claim on the whole hemisphere to justify coups, sanctions, and now an outright military abduction in Latin America. Trump, as always, is bragging loudly about the parts most before him knew to keep quiet.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 45 minutes today include

Democracy Now!

Ring of Fire

Patrick Boyle

The World

and Al Jazeera English

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

Section A, VENEZUELA - THE MONEY, THE OIL, THE RUINS

Section B, CUBA IN THE CROSSHAIRS

Section C, REGIONAL RIPPLES AND HUMAN FALLOUT

And Section D, HISTORICAL ROOTS - THE DONROE DOCTRINE'S LONG SHADOW

And now, on to the show.

the US-led coup on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has resurfaced the historical echoes of decades of US intervention in the region.

The US State Department posting a message online saying, quote, "This is our hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened," unquote. The comment followed remarks by President Trump, who referenced the Monroe Doctrine, a credo enacted by US President James Monroe in 19 tw- in 1823 that's been repeatedly invoked by US presidents in order to justify US political and military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean through much of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This is President Trump

and the Mo- Monroe Doctrine is a, a big deal. But we've superseded it by a lot, by a real lot They now call it the Donroe Doctrine. I don't know. It's, Monroe Doctrine. We forgot about it. It was very important, but we forgot about it. We don't forget about it anymore.

Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again. 

Leftist governments across Latin America swiftly condemned the US military attack on Venezuela and Maduro's abduction. Colombian President Gustavo Petro said Monday he would, quote, "Take up arms for his country if necessary" in response to Trump's threats against Colombia.

Petro also said in a statement, quote, "Come get me, I'm waiting for you here," unquote, as Trump specifically targeted Petro, claiming without evidence Petro's involvement in cocaine trafficking. Trump has also threatened military action against Cuba and Mexico. This is Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

Mexico's position against any form of intervention is firm, clear, and historic. Following recent events in Venezuela, where the United States government carried out a direct intervention that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, as well as the loss of human lives, Mexico reaffirms a principle that is not new and admits no ambiguities.

We categorically reject intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. Latin America's history is clear and compelling. Intervention has never brought democracy, never generated wellbeing or lasting stability. Only the people themselves can build their own future, decide their path, exercise sovereignty over their natural resources, and freely define their form of government.

Our position is clearly enshrined in the Constitution of the United Mexican States. 

That was the Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. For more, we go to Phoenix, Arizona, where we're joined by Alexander Aviña, associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University, who's extensively researched and written about capitalism, the US-backed war on drugs, and state violence.

Author of the award-winning book, S- Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside. So if you can talk, Professor Aviña, about what this attack on Venezuela means for Latin America, what some are calling the, re-hemisphering, of Latin America 

Good morning, Amy. yeah, I think this is, I...

In co- contrary to what Trump was saying, the Monroe Doctrine has never quite been forgotten by the United States. It's just the methods of enforcing it or implementing it in the region have varied across presidential administrations a- and across political parties. I think it, it bears to keep in mind that, US empire in Latin America is a bipartisan project that involved both Republican and Democratic parties.

Just thinking about how President Obama is the one who labeled Venezuela nat- a threat to US national security back in 2015 is one pertinent example. So I think what we're witnessing now is just a quite visible and unabashed assertment, assertion of US power over Latin America. Now, that's one way to read it.

The other way to read, this move, and particularly in light of the national security strategy, it's also, it's a moment to read it, is a moment of US weakness, right? They've- they're basically conceding other parts of the world to peer rivals. They've more or less accepted that they cannot compete frontally with China, for example, in Asia.

So as has happened in the past when the US has forced resistance or defeat elsewhere in the world, they come back, quote-unquote, "home" to the Western Hemisphere, and they use Latin America as an imperial laboratory, as they have since almost the founding of the United States. and it's... So the US has long served as, as, as historians like Greg Grandin have written about, as, as a workshop of empire where the US gets to refine its imperialist tactics abroad, but they also use those moments to try to create internal domestic political hegemony depending on which political party or which political coalition is in the ascendancy.

The moment, the difference now, I think, is that it's, again, to reiterate, this is a US, a moment of US weakness internationally, but I think also for the Trump coalition is a moment of weakness internally. one way, I think the way I read this is a... if you have to continually have to say that you're strong and you're powerful and that you own the Americas constantly online through different images, through different, public appearances, in a way that's a, that's a weakness, right?

The fact that you have to continuously assert how powerful you are. so that's one way to read it. 

Talk about the Monroe Doctrine, what most people, certainly don't understand going back to the early 1800s 

So the Monroe Doctrine is famously, ha- contains multiple meanings. it depends on who's reading it at what moment in time, et cetera.

But initially, this was not a law, right? It was a promulgation of President James Monroe that asserted that Latin America, or the Americas, was to remain a place strictly for Americans, broadly defined, of the region, and it was an, a sort of a anti-colonial statement against European rival powers in the context of Latin American independence wars.

And initially, Latin American independence leaders, like Simón Bolívar, saw this as a positive. They fi- they figured that the United States was going to be an ally in their efforts to overthrow colonial rule. but even someone like Bolívar really quickly learned that the United States was not gonna play that role, and that it was going to just resume the imperialist control over the region that had previously been taken up by European powers.

The other, it, the other important moment in this history is when, with President Theodore Roosevelt invoked his own Roosevelt Corollary in the late 18- or the early, early 20th century, when he essentially made, the United States an international police power over the Americas. and it justified a constant US military intervention in the region using the justification of, the justification that any, quote, unquote, "loosening of ties of civilization" in Latin America would then trigger some sort of US police response in the form of, US Marines invading, Latin American countries to the tune of about 34 between 1900 to 1934.

and then Trump comes in, and he's ... First, he talked about a Trump Corollary, and now he's taken over the entire Monroe Doctrine to call it the Donroe Doctrine. And again, as, as your previous guest was saying, it's difficult to assign some sort of serious ideological coherence to whatever Trump says.

But the, I do see that this is an effort to coalesce a really fractious internal political coalition within his party, within the United States, at the same time that it's witn- that it's wielding, illegal, violent actions against sovereign Latin American nations like Venezuela. 

to enact land reform, against Allende, who died in the palace on another September 11th, 1973, as the US-backed Pinochet forces rose to power.

Do you see this as an extension of this, as we wrap up? 

Yeah, I do. and again, it's just part of this long history of constant US intervention in the region to prevent and not tolerate Latin American assertions of sovereignty and self-determination. Those two examples are also good to highlight that it doesn't matter what type of Latin American leader is in power and how they achieve that power, in the end, if they are deemed intolerable or a- antithetical to US imperial designs, they are going to be overthrown or destabilized by the United States.

You could have St. Francis as the president, and he will still be overthrown by the United States if a president of this country deems that leader to be a threat or an obstacle to US imperial designs in what they have long characterized as, quote-unquote, "Our hemisphere, our backyard." So this is just one more action.

The, the one innovate- the one new thing, relatively new thing, is that they're using narco terrorism charges, against the President Nicolás Maduro, and that's a more recent 1980s origin story. But it still fits within this longer history of constant US violation of Latin American sovereignty and attempts to assert self-determination.

Custodial capacity. Those are two words buried in an executive order that I need you to learn. Custodial capacity. Sounds like nothing. It sounds like a box you've got to initial at the bank. But what custodial capacity means is this money doesn't belong to us. We're just holding onto it until the rightful owner gets it back.

Hell, I've held money for somebody before, and I get nervous as hell. It didn't matter if it's five bucks or $5,000. I literally start sweating. I sit there with my hand physically clenching it in my pocket. And then you know what I did with that money anytime somebody asked me to hold onto their cash?

I give it back to them. Give it back to them at the end of the night. That's like the entire job. That is custodial capacity. And the money in this particular executive order isn't just $5. This isn't just $5,000. We're talking $13 billion that belongs to Venezuela. And six months in, no one in the United States government can tell you where that money went.

And credit to the Financial Times, they looked into this, and since the raid that captured President Maduro back in January, and since this administration installed Vice President Rodriguez in the chair, still really run by Rubio, the United States has controlled Venezuelan oil exports since that day.

That is a mu- as much as a quarter of the entire Venezuelan economy. $13 billion in sales sitting somewhere in American accounts in custodial capacity. And Donald Trump has said out loud in public that we are, quote, "making a lot of money," end quote, off Venezuelan oil. Making money. But what about your gas prices?

And by the way, the Department of Energy, they put out a statement about this money that is absolutely bonkers. I'm talking Jesse Spano on caffeine pills bonkers. They said that these funds will be disbursed for the benefit of the American people and the Venezuelan people. And there's an and in there on money that the executive order says doesn't belong to Americans.

And you know that money isn't going to go to people like you and me. And let's think about this. What about that money? What could that money do? Two earthquakes hit Venezuela back to back. The United Nations put the damage at $37 billion. At least 5,300 people are dead. 5,300 people dead. And economists have told the Financial Times that six months into this, evidence of any real recovery in Venezuela is muted.

AKA, there's no money flowing. And again, that $13 billion could cover roughly half of the earthquake damage. And look, we all know that invasion of Venezuela has always been about nothing more than oil, power, and grift from the very beginning. And now billions in oil money are being controlled by America with zero transparency and zero safeguards.

But there is somebody you should watch. And I'm going to tell you, it's a Republican. Maria Elvira Salazar, Republican in Miami. She represents about as hardline anti-Maduro a district as exists anywhere in this country. And she spent a hearing on Tuesday asking her own administration for full disclosure because of, quote, the importance of transparency over where this money is going.

She's asking the hard questions. So when the Republican from Miami is the one that's asking the Trump regime where the damn Venezuelan money went, this is not a partisan issue. This is a question of basic human decency. And in the comments, tell me, we've already screwed the pooch down there. What should we be doing in Venezuela?

Things, of course, weren't great to start, but then we kidnapped the president and Rubio is allegedly running things. So now what do we do? The one rule about a custodial account is that you give it back. You don't get to decide that the owner wasn't using it well.

You don't get to take a handling fee. You don't get to sit on it while their capital city is under rubble and then put out a press release about how it's going to be dispersed for the benefit of Americans and Venezuelans. 

To understand how the White House ended up running Venezuelan crude sales through a bank in Doha, you have to look at the testimony Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January.

Rubio described routing the first $500 million through Qatar as a short-term fix to a short-term problem, and there was a real problem. PDVSA, Venezuela's state oil company, was running out of places to store the oil. Tankers were sitting offshore full of extra heavy crude with nowhere to unload, and if the oil didn't move, the oil wells would have to be shut down, which risks permanent damage to the wells.

So the US administration brought in Vitol and Trafigura to sell the stockpile, with the proceeds landing in an account in Qatar National Bank under US supervision. So why a Qatari bank account? as Scott Anderson and Alex Zerden pointed out in an analysis for Lawfare, there were two legal problems associated with putting that money into an American bank account, and they're both good ones.

Ordinarily, when a president uses IEEPA to freeze foreign assets, those assets are protected from court judgments. That's how the Bush administration held Iraqi oil revenues after 2003 when the country was being rebuilt. But in 2002, Congress passed Section 201 of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, or TRIA, which is what lawyers call a notwithstanding provision.

The statute opens by saying that notwithstanding any other provision of law, anyone holding an unsatisfied court judgment against a terrorist party can seize that party's blocked assets in the United States, including, and this is the part that matters, the blocked assets of any agency or instrumentality of that party.

A notwithstanding provision is Congress writing a law and adding in advance that it beats whatever else you were about to cite. It's the legislative equivalent of, "I don't wanna hear it." Venezuela has a big problem with that clause. US prosecutors have repeatedly accused the Maduro regime of assisting designated foreign terrorist organizations, the Colombia guerrilla groups FARC and ELN, and criminal outfits like Tren de Aragua.

The Second and Eleventh Circuits have read agency or instrumentality very broadly, holding that it can cover an entity that merely materially assisted a terrorist party or played a significant role in its activities. District courts have taken that standard and applied it to PDVSA, allowing people holding judgments against FARC to go after a Venezuelan oil company's frozen assets.

So the state oil company of Venezuela is, for the purposes of this particular statute, a subsidiary of a Colombian guerrilla movement. Corporate structures can be complicated These judgments run to hundreds of millions of dollars. If that first $500 million had touched a bank in New York or a US Treasury account, lawyers for the terrorism victims would have been filing attachment orders long before the wire even cleared.

The money would have gone straight into litigation, and none of it would have reached Caracas. By routing it through Doha, the US government put it beyond the physical reach of an American court. The second problem is even better, and that's because the White House created it itself. It turns out that the person in Venezuela that the US government talks to on the phone is not necessarily the person the US courts think is in charge.

In Caracas, the administration deals directly with interim President Delcy Rodriguez. Inside the federal court system, official recognition policy has been sitting undisturbed since 2019, when Donald Trump recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido. As far as the courts are concerned, the opposition-led 2015 National Assembly is still the only body entitled to control Venezuelan state property in America.

So the executive branch is negotiating with one Venezuelan government while the judicial branch holds the assets for a different one. The United States is disagreeing with itself about who runs Venezuela. IEEPA lets the president freeze assets to stop them from moving. It doesn't let him take ownership of them and hand money to someone else.

That's a wartime power, and this isn't war. Freezing is a lock on the door. It isn't a deed. So if the administration had put $500 million into a US account and then wired it to Delcy Rodriguez, representatives of the 2015 National Assembly could have walked into court and argued that the executive branch was giving away their money, and they'd have had a point.

Qatar has no such difficulty. Qatar never recognized Juan Guaido or the 2015 National Assembly. Qatar recognizes whoever is in the presidential palace, which is a foreign policy with the great advantage of never needing to be updated, and the Treasury already knew this trick. In September 2023, as part of the deal that freed five American detainees in Iran, the Biden administration authorized the transfer of $6 billion of frozen Iranian oil revenues out of South Korea and into accounts at Qatari banks supervised by the Qatar Central Bank.

Iran never got the cash. The money could only be released to approved vendors for humanitarian goods under US oversight, and when Washington wanted the arrangement stopped after October 7th, Qatar stopped it. So faced with a sudden mountain of unsold crude and a courthouse full of people holding writs, Doha was the easy answer.

Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega made a rare appearance on Sunday to deliver a stark message. There will be no more elections in the country ever. 

Aqui no volveran a ver elecciones

Ortega made the announcement at a rally to mark the 47th anniversary of the end of an earlier dictatorship. Back then, it was Ortega's leftist group, the Sandinistas, that brought down the former military regime. Ortega is now 80 years old. He's held power for more than two decades in what's currently described as a co-dictatorship that he and his wife, Rosario Murillo, lead together.

She is 75. 

To understand how we got here and where things are headed for a country with leaders that decide to simply stop elections, we turn to Cindy Regidor, a Nicaraguan journalist currently based in San Jose, Costa Rica. 

I think that now the world can see that Nicaragua is a full-on dictatorship and that even, the leader, Daniel Ortega, is, openly admitting it.

This is not the moment Nicaragua suddenly became a dictatorship. It is the moment Ortega publicly admitted that there would no longer be even a pretense of democratic alternation. 

Take us back to the beginning, 1979, 1980. remind us who the Sandinistas were and who Ortega toppled. 

The Sandinistas led the revolution that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979.

This is a right-wing dictatorship that remained in power for 40 years. Daniel Ortega is a former guerrilla leader and one of the leaders of the Sandinista revolution, and he was president of Nicaragua during the 1980s. Then he lost a democratic election in 1990 and returned to power in 2007. And since then, he has gradually dismantled democratic institutions, and he has concentrated power around himself, his wife, Rosario Murillo, and their family.

going back to the 1980s with the Sandinistas, they became something of the darlings of international socialist movements. the British rockers The Clash even named one of their most political recordings Sandinista. I want to go back to the 1990s and early 2000s when Ortega was not president.

he actually ran several times and was defeated, but when he came back in 2007, help us understand how Ortega went from being a former freedom fighter, then a well-behaved democrat heeding the popular vote, to then becoming what is effectively a dictator. What happened? 

I think that at the beginning, they were pretending to be a democratic government, and they knew that they had to play by the rules.

but at the same time, they were systematically trying to co-opt all the other branches of power, the electoral authorities, the judiciary system, and the electoral processes that happened during that time were not really fair. And, the most obvious example of that was the 2021 election when all the presidential hopefuls were either detained or banished and stripped from their citizenship.

And so what has happened is that because after the 2018 protests, they knew that they were no longer popular, they just decided to intensify repression, and they imposed a de facto police state. And so they no longer cared about what the nation thought about them. They just knew that they needed to remain in power 

I'm speaking with Nicaraguan journalist Cindy Regidor about the announcement by President Daniel Ortega that his government is not going to hold any more elections.

Cindy, can you just elaborate a bit more on how this co-dictatorship between Daniel Ortega and his w- wife, Rosario Murillo, has operated and how it's further undermined democracy in Nicaragua? 

In practice, Daniel Ortega has remained as the symbolic leader of the revolution, but it is Rosario Murillo who is well known to be the person that is actually taking all the decisions in the country.

She gained notoriety in the 2007 election because she was the one that ran the campaign, and it was considered successful, of course, because they won. This also stemmed after Daniel Ortega was denounced by his stepdaughter for sexual abuse. 

And Rosario Murillo, she decided to side with Daniel Ortega instead of with her daughter.

And so what many people think is that's basically the moment where Rosario Murillo gained leverage, became Daniel Ortega's equal. 

Yeah, pretty stunning. How have these moves towards consolidating control of the country been perceived among Nicaraguans? 

if you look at the footage from the 2018 protest, you can see that it was massive.

The majority of the country, the private sector, the church, the NGOs, and the population in general, they were demanding that the repression stop and that the president should resign. And the only reason why we no longer see that, it's because any kind of protest that is not allowed by the government is completely forbidden, and you can end up in jail or banished from your own country.

So Cindy, Ortega says with this move he's building a wall between him and the opposition. What meaningful opposition still exists in Nicaragua? 

Inside of Nicaragua, there is basically none. And if there are some members of the opposition inside Nicaragua, they must remain silent and under the radar because otherwise they would be put in prison.

And then the prominent leaders are all exiled, and many of them after being in jail for several years, and the government then decided to expel them from the country. And so they're not allowed back in the country, and there's no possibility of organizing any kind of movement from inside of Nicaragua 'cause the repression, the crackdown is very heavy.

I also wanted to ask you, Cindy, about relations between the US and Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua. in recent years we know they've been bumpy and antagonistic, but for some reason, Nicaragua lately seems to have escaped the level of attention and regime change that the Trump administration has directed at Cuba and Venezuela.

Why does it seem the White House does not have Nicaragua in its crosshairs? 

Yeah, no, I think Nicaragua, it doesn't seem to be a priority right now, especially when you have a country like Venezuela. And Nicaragua does not have Venezuela's oil reserves, and Nicaragua doesn't have the same geopolitical significance such as Cuba.

So at this point, there is no public indication that the United States is preparing an operation similar to the one carried out against Nicolás Maduro. But I do think that it does have an effect on how Ortega and Rosario Murillo are now acting, and I think that it does create fear and paranoia. But the reality is that so far what we have seen from the United States is mainly economic sanctions, visa restrictions, trade pressure, but no more than that so far.

So one last question, Cindy. Earlier when we heard Ortega making his announcement, I noticed some applause when he said, "No more elections." Who still supports him and Murillo in Nicaragua? 

They still have a base, a part of the population who either strongly believes that they are still representatives of the revolution that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship.

You may say radical left wing Nicaraguans who still believe that Ortega and his wife are victims of a conspiracy by the United States. And, there's also people who are afraid, and they work for the government, and they need to side with them because otherwise they could lose their jobs or worse.

Can you talk about who De Espriella is? Give us more on his background 

De- De La Espriella is a lawyer. In fact, he, runs a law firm, firm from Miami in Florida, but he cannot practice law legally in Florida, but he has a law firm there. 

the way he- Clear, he's a US citizen as well as Colombian and lived in Florida, in Miami for years?

A- absolutely. He's a US citizen. He claims to be a Republican, and he claims allegiance to the United States and to the Republican Party. And he has very close links to, he says, and they're sh- shown, to, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and to O- Ohio Republican congressman Bernie Moreno, amongst others. it...

Throughout the campaign it was always an issue amongst lawyers and constitutional lawyers in Colombia whether he could actually be a presidential candidate and president when he has to abide by his, loyalty to the United States government. He became a millionaire by representing paramilitaries, drug traffickers, Alex Saab, the famous Colombian, who was a part of Maduro's government in all kinds of corrupt businesses, and others.

And that's how he made his money, and whenever he's been challenged to show the source of his money, he, backs off and disappears. And he's actually, someone who uses legal threats and legal suits against anyone that challenges him or criticizing him, including 109 journalists whom he labels, activists disguised as journalists, including, one Colombian seeking asylum and living in Phoenix, Arizona for 10 years, Beto Coral, whom, in coordination and by direct order of Marco Rubio, is now jailed.

and we don't know where he is in the United States, and he's being denied his right to legal defense because he criticized De La Espriella. And, one more thing is De La Espriella, there are several legal, lawsuits against De La Espriella for criminal charges, including, paramilitary involvement, money laundering, drug trafficking, et cetera.

With all this known, he became a presidential candidate with the support of the United States government 

That's what I wanna ask you about. Can you talk about President Trump's endorsement, of, of de Espriella? and talk about what you think the role is of the Trump administration, not to mention Marco Rubio, in this election.

Eh, actually, the easiest way to answer this is to ask what the, the de la Espriella's role will be in the US administration of Colombia. In fact, de la Espriella appeared and he supported, he supports Israel. He promises to do exactly the same as Milei is doing in Argentina, Bukele is doing in El Salvador, the war on drugs.

A, a emulating and repeating President Trump's, directives. A, so in fact, de la Espriella is, more of a Republican representative of the Trump administration that will now rule Colombia. He promises more, he lies, he, fabricates stories, and he uses legal action against many. And he has become wealthy, not unlike President Trump, by doing all these things.

And let me ask you to follow up on your point about him going after people who criticize him. A Colombian activist living here in the United States, who is seeking political asylum, was detained by ICE last week for his criticism, of de la Espriella, immediately following a memo issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, claiming that Beto Coral was interfering in US policy.

Petro's demanded his release. What is known about this man's whereabouts? 

he was captured in Phoenix, as you say, and in fact, the sequence was first De la Espriella, nine hours before he was captured, announced that something was going to happen, pointing in this direction, because he was criticized.

One has to underscore the fact that, Corral did not criticize anyone in the US. He did not criticize the government. He... There's no wrongdoing against anything in the US. He became involved in the political campaign in Colombia from the US as a blogger, which he's very well known as, and, he criticized De la Espriella.

So De la Espriella announces nine hours prior that something's going to happen. Then Marco Rubio writes an, an order to have him captured. Four agents capture him. There are images of this. Then he goes from Phoenix to a low-security jail in Phoenix, then to El Paso, then, to, Minnesota, and then somewhere else in order for him not to have access to legal representation.

Because in the federal system in the US, lawyers from one state cannot act in another state, and this was all orchestrated from the highest officials in the US administration for and with De la Espriella. And also, Bernie Moreno wrote a note, a tweet, that w- was made public in which he addressed, the, the journalist, Corral, stating that he w- was not allowed to sup- or criticize a friend of the United States in the United States, and that he will pay for it

Yes, the quote from Marco Rubio was, "Allowing Corral to remain in the US undermines US foreign policy interests in Colombia's democratic processes and signals that foreign nationals may use US platforms to conduct politically motivated disinformation campaigns and litigation targeting foreign democratic actors without consequence."

Manuel Rosenthal. But 

that's correct. and the pr- the, the statement is, shows what's happening. In fact, those, these informing, manipulating, lying accuse the ones that present truths, facts, evidence. If there is anyone that is actually undergoing investigations for criminal activities is De la Espriella, but, not Beto Coral.

But Beto Coral, he can actually be sent to jail by the Secretary of State of the US for crimes he didn't commit. The criminals are now attacking the victim. 

Can you talk about what this means for Gustavo Petro? Was this a referendum on his presidency? 

i- if it was a referendum on his presidency, he won it.

nobody, no president in the history of Colombian has had as much support leaving a government as he does. m- most people in Colombia love Gustavo Petro. That's number one. Number two is more than, 12 million votes for a leftist candidate in Colombia is unprecedented, unthought of. It's, at least a million more votes than led Gustavo Pe- Petro to the presidency.

So in fact, this is not that. It's actually, the same as a global confr- confrontation through the electoral systems between manipulation, fear-mongering, lying, threatening, propaganda on the one side, criminal, with a lot of money behind them, and on the other side, decency, respect for nature, respect for human rights, a, a clean career being labeled as criminal.

And we can see once again who's winning. So we knew whether Iván Cepeda won or lost, we knew what we have to do is face this confrontation through but beyond the electoral system, and it's what's happening everywhere. 

I've followed Cuba's many ups and downs, but none compare to today's sense of despair. 

It's not just that the houses are falling apart, it's that they are absolutely full of people.

People have nowhere else to live, so they live one on top of the other in homes or apartments that were once just for one family. In this place, there are probably 30 at least. Sometimes the roofs fall down on their heads. 

This is where I met Leidymary. She lives up here with her mother and is training to become a teacher.

Without electricity, she can't study and her boyfriend can't work, she says. And although she's barely 16, she's weary beyond her years. "

I 

don't really care anymore. You get tired, honestly. When there's no power, I fall into a deep sleep. I just sleep." 

a private restaurant, well-fed foreigners and the very few Cubans with money dine seemingly oblivious to the thin boys waiting outside in the hope of getting a coin. They offer to watch cars for a tip or something to eat. The Cuban Revolution's promise of a classless society that can provide for all is long gone.

The next day I stop to buy some bananas when I spot a man selling lettuce. 71-year-old Reynaldo Taboada says he can't afford to buy on his meager pension. 

I'm retired and I'm hungry. Yes, me, I'm hungry. I'll say it in front of anyone. I'm going hungry because here there's real hunger, serious hunger.

There's real need. I've been without electricity for two days. I live in the Martin neighborhood, and we've had no power for two days. The little food I had in the refrigerator spoiled. 

Really? 

Yes. 

And what are you looking for now? 

Anything, really. Something to eat, something to survive on. I say it in front of anyone because I'm not afraid.

My name is Reymundo Taboada, and I'm not afraid

My friends tell me, "You have to control yourself. They're gonna put you in jail for talking like that." But I don't care. Let them. How long are we going to continue being cowards? Enough. I'm dying for Trump to get here.

Sharing such opinions in public and on camera was unthinkable until recently But years of economic turmoil, now intensified by a five-month-long US fuel blockade, have pushed the island and its people to the brink. It's not even possible to collect rubbish. And this is more than an eyesore. This is a sanitary disaster.

The rubbish system here in this country also needs to s- be completely overhauled, as you can see. And it's not just a matter of not having petrol, it's just that there is no system anymore to account for the amount of rubbish that people generate now. Yuvanka lives in front of the rubbish mound and says she's losing her mind.

Welcome to the house of flies. look, there are flies, flies everywhere. Look, I've had this for 15 days and nobody takes the rubbish away. And right there is a medical clinic. The doctors can't work because no one's picked up the trash. Welcome to the house of flies. 

She's cooking lunch. Banana con ajo.

Banana con ajo. Bananas with garlic. That's gonna be the food for today. Here's the garlic, here's the bananas. That's it. And who's to blame? 

I don't know who is to blame. If I tell you, they'll lock me up. 

But if that was once the norm, it's no longer the case. Today, everyone complains, but not everyone against Cuba's one-party state.

Rolando Barrero, a passerby, blames decades of US economic sanctions. 

Whenever we're about to do business with another country, they immediately put obstacles in our way, and they impose sanctions on countries that trade with us. Trump says he wants to help us, but in reality, they're just squeezing us more and more.

Are you afraid that the United States might use military force or invade? 

No, I'm not afraid. I'm not saying they can't attack us, but it will be hard. It would be a difficult war because the Cuban people are very patriotic. There's a lot of Cubans in the US that want Trump to attack and bomb us, but they don't know the consequences that can bring for their families and the Cuban people because I'm sure our people will fight.

The Cuban people are not softies. We proved it in Angola. 

Perhaps, but in two decades, the population has dropped from 12 million to less than 10 million because of mass immigration. Most of the people I knew well have left. For those who remain, remittances from family members working abroad aren't enough to make up for the impact of the US fuel blockade These patients have chronic kidney disease.

They couldn't make it to this hospital in time for their dialysis treatments, and now they're in critical condition. With public transportation barely functioning, patients and doctors tell us they can't risk leaving the hospital at all. But Dr. Yamil Garcia says she's more worried about the blackouts and lack of fuel for generators.

To put it simply, electricity is vital for us, not only for the machines you see here to function, but because hemodialysis requires water to filter the patient's blood. When the hospital's power plant is down, we need to pump the blood back into the patients manually. 

Cubans are known for their resourcefulness.

But in the countryside, it's now back to the absolute basics. With no electricity, juicy tomatoes are rotting in this tomato paste factory, once the pride and joy of Fidel Castro. Leon Figueroa, a fifth-generation farmer, tells me that this malanga crop will be his last. 

I can't plow the soil for the next crop.

In a few more months, people will have nothing to eat. As it is, we can't get our produce to market without petrol. I don't see any solution or an end to this. There's lots of negotiations, they say, but the truth is we have no idea what will happen. 

In the past, farmers could only work for the state. But the irony is that now that they have more autonomy, they're being held back by the US fuel blockade.

Back in Havana, I notice people with bicycles and motorbikes getting on a bus to cross the harbor tunnel. It's the only way because the tunnel has no ventilation. Only vehicles that can go more than 60 kilometers an hour are allowed. It's a good opportunity for a chat about US President Donald Trump's strategy to force regime change.

It's good to take resources away from our government, but since we're the ones at the bottom of the food chain, the fuel blockade only punishes us. 

You agree or not? 

We're asking for change for sure, but not like that. "

Foreign intervention like in Venezuela is not the way," adds John Manuel. 

If another country wants to impose change here, it's not from the goodness of their heart.

They want Cuba for themselves. We need to change our system ourselves from the inside, like Fidel Castro did with the revolution. But his formula from 60 years ago, it doesn't work anymore. We've been resisting for six decades.

With some of his frustration off his chest, the self-employed construction worker prepares for the long pedal home. I've lived and reported in Cuba for years, but I never thought that political or at least economic change would be this painful. Trump has threatened to take over and do what he wants with Cuba.

And while the Communist Party is at last talking about introducing unprecedented economic reforms like in China or Vietnam, the people of Cuba have no real say in what happens to them.

We've just heard clips starting with

Democracy Now! tracing how Trump's rebranding of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine as the "Donroe Doctrine" continues a bipartisan, centuries-long pattern of U.S. intervention against Latin American sovereignty, from Guatemala to Venezuela.

Ring of Fire detailed how the US seized control of $13 billion in Venezuelan oil money, held under an executive order's 'custodial capacity,' with no one able to say where it went.

Patrick Boyle explained how the administration routed Venezuela's oil sales through a bank in Qatar, putting the money beyond the reach of the American courts where creditors are waiting to claim it.

The World reported that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announced there will be no more elections ever, publicly confirming what a journalist called a full-on dictatorship he leads with his wife.

Democracy Now! described De La Espriella as a Trump-style Republican who made millions defending paramilitaries and drug traffickers and now promises to rule Colombia on Trump's directives.

And Al Jazeera English documented daily life across Cuba amid blackouts, uncollected garbage, and failing hospitals, as residents voiced despair once too dangerous to speak, blaming both the government and the US fuel blockade.

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

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As for today's topic, and I promise this will connect.

For more than ten years now, people have been reading Trump's comment about his ability to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone without losing any voters as evidence of the cult-like status of his followers.

If someone thought deeply about it, they may give Trump credit for developing that cult-like relationship, but I think I've homed in on a very specific element of Trump's relationship with the truth and what he chooses to say out loud that goes a long way to explaining the truth of his Fifth Avenue comment.

The missing detail about that hypothetical scenario is what he would say about it afterward. I think we all know instinctually now how that would go. He would shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue in cold blood and then announce to everyone proudly that he had done it. Of course, he had done it, anyone could see that it was the right thing to do and, frankly, everyone is lucky that he was there to take such decisive action.

He doesn't leave it up to people to judge his actions and rest comfortably with the knowledge that his supporters will defend him no matter what he does. He's constantly playing a mind game with the public that's designed to preemptively diffuse accusations of corruption or wrongdoing of any kind by always announcing proudly what he's done. It's the brag defense that plays on the assumption that guilty people don't brag, they hide.

Trump and company invading a foreign country, kidnapping their leader, taking over their primary industry, and appointing themselves managers of billions of dollars of that country's wealth is something that any former administration would have only ever thought to do if it could be done with the utmost secrecy. By this point, Trump knows instinctually that his greatest defense is to announce all of his crimes and corruption publicly which is exactly what he did.

Within days of invading Venezuela and capturing Nicolas Maduro, Trump was announcing that he would personally be managing Venezuela's oil revenue and explicitly threatened the remainder of the Venezuelan government with further military actions if they didn't cooperate. It was only a few days later when the more lawyerly language came through in an executive order Trump signed, promising that the U.S. would only hold Venezuela's money in a custodial fashion, but it was the unfiltered and unashamed version that came first.

Previous American presidents who have committed crimes had the decency to be ashamed and knew to try to hide their dealings. When Ronald Reagan's administration was blocked by Congress from funding the anti-communist contras in Nicaragua, they found a loophole by selling missiles to Iran and giving the profits to the contras, bypassing Congress.

The echo between Iran Contra and Trump's action in Venezuela is striking. The motivations are different but at the core, it's foreign money moved at executive discretion with Congress cut out.

In Reagan's day, when the details of Iran Contra began to surface, they started shredding documents, knowing that they had committed felonies. The scandal nearly broke the presidency, and they felt that concealment was their only hope.

We heard Trump's version from his own mouth, saying publicly that the revenue from oil sales in Venezuela would help pay for the war itself. It's still unclear what all Venezuela's money will be used for, because Republicans are blocking the oversight, but the fact that Trump's instinct was to believe, and announce, that it could be used to effectively pay for the war is quite telling. Again, the brag defense used up front.

The other, even more famous presidential scandal, Nixon's Watergate, still involved secrecy and shame. He fought all the way to the Supreme Court in an attempt to keep his White House recording tapes buried. The lesson that society collectively learned from that incident and others is the truism, "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up." I think Trump took that lesson entirely to heart and is one of the few people in the country shameless enough to implement the lesson in a counterintuitive way. Most criminals would take the lesson that it's important to be extremely careful in your cover up, Trump's takeaway was to skip the cover-up entirely and do the opposite, announce your crimes proudly.

In fact, note the detail on Trump's 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to a porn star. His only criminal convictions came from the one scandal where he tried doing it the old fashioned way and biffed the cover up. And that was the last time in his political career that he felt cover up was necessary. After he survived the Access Hollywood "Grab 'em" tape by refusing to feel ashamed, he knew he could survive anything.

The brag defense is the primary reason that no political scandal has ever stuck to him in the public eye for more than a week or so. And it's the novelty of this strategy that has turned American politics on its head for the last decade.

For the average person who doesn't pay close attention, they rely on the reasonable shortcut in thinking that guilty people hide things. If there's no smell of cover-up, then there's likely no crime, and they can file it and move on. That's essentially the single most important mental loophole that the brag defense exploits.

Our government theoretically has regulations and checks and balances, but I don't think any of us understood how dependent those checks were on the general public believing that abuses of power were happening. Trump diffuses accusations that he's corrupt or abuses his power just enough to cast doubt in people's minds and for those in the Republican Party who want to defend him, that's all the fig leaf needed to block all potential investigations.

That goes all the way back to his first impeachment in 2019 when he brag defended his "perfect call" with Ukraine's Zelenskyy, releasing the transcript himself. He brag defended firing James Comey in 2017, the FBI director investigating him. He also brag defended his business history of paying very little in taxes as a demonstration of how smart he is, the list is nearly endless and the pattern continues to be in full force today in the wake of his actions in Venezuela, with the clear and obvious potential for corruption and abuse related to the management of Venezuela's oil proceeds.

Democrats are pushing a bill, the Venezuela Oil Proceeds Transparency Act, that would force the Government Accountability Office to audit everything related to those custodial accounts filled with Venezuela's money, currently being managed in secrecy by the Trump administration. As of this recording, not one Republican in either chamber of Congress has signed on to that, and although the GAO is poking around on its own, they're likely to be stonewalled by the administration and without a law giving their investigation teeth, there will be no path to a complete and enforceable audit. The simplest reason for this, as I see it, is the difference between Reagan's people shredding documents and Trump preemptively brag defending every daily wrongdoing, large and small.

At its core, it's not about Trump having convinced elected Republicans that he's committed no crime. It's simply that he's diffused the energy behind what should be accusations of corruption in enough minds in the general public. That's enough to make congressional Republicans feel safe enough taking no action against Trump, knowing that they won't be punished for it in the next election.

Trump's entire presidency and all of the crimes and corruption that have come along with it all rest on what is effectively a mind game. His devoted cult-like followers don't require the mind game so that means the real target is the convincible middle who aren't very plugged in and depend on reasonable shortcuts. Too many of them rightly perceive that Trump doesn't hide much but then wrongly conclude that it's because he must not be doing anything wrong.

And the best way to defeat a mind game is to name it. I actually think that one of the reasons why Trump has been able to have the political success he's had is because this particular mind game of his hasn't been called out and made to be widely understood in the general public with a memorable and sharable phrase. People have an extremely difficult time understanding concepts that they don't have words for, but once something gets a label, it allows the mind to latch on to it in a new way so if you know anyone in the persuadable middle, those people not too plugged in, try telling them about the brag defense.

History is full of arms races. Bigger weapons, stronger defenses, tighter regulations, smarter criminals. It's a never-ending game of cat and mouse. The U.S. has regulations and enforcement mechanisms, but it turns out they largely depend on the assumption that the criminals will attempt to act in secrecy. Trump's core hack of the system turns out to be his utter lack of shame, which is necessary for the brag defense.

Now, the game of cat and mouse will continue as we learn the lessons from the Trump era and work to devise even stronger regulations and safeguards to ensure those put into positions of power in our government are made to act within the standards and ethics necessary for a functioning democracy.

We've gone through periods before where corruption and scandal created a strong appetite for a burst of new regulation. We may be on the precipice of another such era, but we need to make sure that it's not just the highly politically engaged on the left and the Democratic Party who have that appetite for new safeguards. We also need to move the middle.

And the middle does move when pushed hard enough. The middle moved on immigration and family separation during the first Trump term, it moved after the Dobbs decision on reproductive rights, and it moved after January 6th.

We need for the middle to be moved again for a pro-democracy, anti-corruption reform agenda. Getting enough people to hear the brag defense as the confessions of wrongdoing that they are can help build the electoral majority and public outcry for the reforms we need.

The next generation of rules needs to be enforcement mechanisms that don't depend on a functional Congress, because we've seen how hyper-partisanship, combined with Trump's brag defense, has worked to make Congress abdicate its oversight responsibility almost entirely. Our job is to build the pressure for future regulations that depend more on independent investigators and automatic triggers that don't need Congress to approve and can't be dismantled by the president.

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

Section A, VENEZUELA - THE MONEY, THE OIL, THE RUINS

Followed by Section B, CUBA IN THE CROSSHAIRS

Section C, REGIONAL RIPPLES AND HUMAN FALLOUT

And Section D, HISTORICAL ROOTS - THE DONROE DOCTRINE'S LONG SHADOW

The death toll from the twin earthquakes has risen to over 200, expected to rise dramatically as rescuers search for survivors trapped in the rubble.

Thousands of people remain missing. At least 4,300 are injured in the two quakes that struck about 100 miles west of Caracas Wednesday evening as many people were at home celebrating a national holiday. They were the strongest earthquakes to hit Venezuela in over a century. In Caracas, residents look for friends and family trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings.

We are here in solidarity with a colleague whose wife is under all this structure. His children, he has two children, and his wife under there, and with the hope of finding them alive. And we are here, as I say, in solidarity, hoping that his family is well. And as I say, I am not from the area. My building suffered some damage, but nothing compared to what this guy is going through in this place.

Survivors of the earthquake have shared horror stories about being trapped under collapsed homes and businesses.

My name is Eric Paul Martinez Santos, and I am a survivor of the earthquake that occurred yesterday afternoon. I was in my building for four hours until I was rescued by someone from civil defense, or I'm not sure. 

They didn't have many tools. They couldn't find the chisel, the drill, the grinder. They went at it with their nails.

I also helped because they passed me a tool, and it saved me because I had a lot of furniture in my home that protected me from the wall. 

We go now to Caracas. We're joined by Andreina Chavez, reporter based in Caracas, her building damaged by the earthquakes. I'm so glad we could reach you, Andreina. Can you describe what's happening right now?

We experienced this double earthquake. I was on the street when it happened, a few blocks away from

my building. the absolute commotion was incredible. when I was running on my way home, I saw at least three buildings partially collapsed in front of me. thankfully my own building didn't collapse. it

did have substantial damages. and fortunately we are, everybody in my building is safe. however, there are other areas in Caracas, for example, a place called Los Palos Grandes, which is in the east of Caracas. It is severely affected. There is a huge building there that collapsed, and a lot of people are trapped under the rubble.

We also saw several buildings that collapsed in San Bernardino, which is west of Caracas. and from what I understand, in a lot of these places, the rescue team haven't been able to arrive because all the efforts are concentrated in La Guaira state, which is

a di- a

disaster zone. In La Guaira state we have more than 250 buildings that collapsed. there are thousands of people still missing, thousands that are trapped under the rubble. We still don't know exactly how many people died, because right now we don't have a clarity about that. the-

The entire Venezuelan police, the entire Venezuelan military, protección civil, the civil protection, the firefighters, 

volunteers of all kinds, they're all working. They're all concentrating their efforts in La Guaira and parts of Caracas to save people, to rescue people. However, of course, we weren't prepared for a disaster of this magnitude, so it's not enough. That is why Venezuela has been calling people, calling other nations to please send equipment, to send rescue teams, to send, humanitarian aid, anything possible to help Venezuela overcome this tragedy because we obviously cannot do it alone.

And a lot of that has to do that, of course, Venezuela is a country that has been under US sanctions, that has been economically asphyxiated for at least 10 years now. So Venezuela is a country that

has an infrastructure that is very deteriorated. We have, public services that are very deteriorated, and all of that has been something that, that has really added to this tragedy 

And, Andreina, you me- you mentioned, the, the US sanctions and, efforts to, to shut down, Venezuela's economy, but yet you're still y- there's still quite a bit of civic activity by citizen groups, by communes.

Could you talk about that as well? 

Yes, absolutely. every single institution in Venezuela, like I said, the national police, the military, firefighters and e- all kinds of volunteers have been working

tirelessly since Wednesday trying to rescue people. But we also have people from communes, from the Venezuelan communes, from popular organizations. These people are organizing, gathering food and anything, medicine and anything that, people in La Guaira might need. And themselves, they are carrying all of this humanitarian aid and taking it to La Guaira.

Only yesterday at the end of the afternoon we saw a huge caravana of motorcycles, people who are, collecting food and taking it themselves to La Guaira. So there is a huge, network of solidarity going on right now. We also see that there's people outside of Caracas in other states like Zulia, Aragua, other places in which people are collecting food, collecting medicine, collecting clothes, blankets, water, and bringing it to Caracas to help people here.

So there is a huge network of solidarity right now. We have university students in the, Central University of Venezuela who are using the university spaces to collect all of this aid and to volunteer to rescue people. So we have a lot of solidarity right now. so despite the fact that Venezuela certainly needs a lot more help from other countries, we have, a, a huge movement going on right now to try to do everything possible to save people.

This is a story about Venezuela, but it starts with Israel. See, Israel had stolen the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. So in 1973, those two countries attacked Israel to try to get that land back. The United States responded by sending Israel more than $2 billion in military aid to fight Egypt and Syria.

So some Arab countries were like, "Okay, you want to support Israel? Then we'll stop sending you oil." 10 petroleum exporting countries placed an oil embargo on the US and other countries supporting Israel, and the price of oil went up. So what does this have to do with Venezuela? it became one of the few countries the US and others could buy oil from, at almost four times the price than the year before.

This meant that suddenly tons of money were coming into the country. But in Venezuela, it was private companies that extracted and sold the oil, and most of them were foreign. So the profit from all that oil wasn't staying in the country. Most of it was going back to the US or Europe, where those companies were from.

At the time, Carlos Andrés Pérez was the president. People called him CAP, and he decided to nationalize oil. In other words, the government took the oil industry back from private companies. Now it was the state in charge of oil operations and managing the profit. With that oil money, Venezuela built roads, universities, hospitals, public housing.

It was the oil bonanza of the '70s.

This is a time when some middle class Venezuelans would fly to Miami for the weekend just to go shopping. It's when the phrase became popular, meaning it's cheap, give me two. Because the bolivar, Venezuela's currency, was so strong that they could afford to splurge. But in the midst of all that progress, there was one Venezuelan giving the country a warning.

He said, "Oil will bring us ruin." It was Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso. He had been Venezuela's oil minister, but he called oil the devil's excrement because Venezuela was becoming very dependent on it. 

The overwhelming majority of what Venezuela exported was oil. 

The economy revolved around it, so the highs were high, but when the price of oil inevitably fell, it was going to be painful.

Venezuela became Latin America's richest country because of its oil, but the overdependence on it would also be one of the reasons for its downfall. There were also two other concerning things happening in Venezuela at the time, corruption and debt. A lot of money was being funneled into the pockets of a few through oversized contracts and straight up stealing.

The government was also borrowing billions of dollars. Since oil money was pouring in, they expected they would be able to easily pay it back, and then the price of oil crashed.

Venezuela was no longer bringing in enough money to keep up with its spending. The government responded by devaluing the bolivar. Now the wages that working Venezuelans were making were worth less. Prices were doubling from one year to the next, leaving some families struggling to afford food. Less than 10 years after the oil boom began, the party was over in Venezuela.

In 1998, Cap ran for president again. Venezuelans elected him, hoping that he could take them back to the golden years of the '70s. But this time when he took office, Venezuela was out of money and in a lot of debt with US and European banks and creditors. And to stay afloat, they would need to borrow more.

That's where the International Monetary Fund comes in. The IMF is a global organization, but mostly controlled by the United States. They offer to help nations with financial troubles, but under certain conditions. They could lend Venezuela more money, but Cap would need to reverse what he did in the '70s and go back to private companies being in charge of the oil industry.

The government would also have to devalue the bolivar even more, which would make life less affordable for people. And on top of that, they would need to cut the subsidies that were giving Venezuelans some relief amid the crisis. In his first term, Cap said the IMF was a way for industrialized countries to force developing nations to submit to abusive policies that took money from a country's basic needs to send it to Western banks.

But in his second term, he agreed. One of the things Cap's government did was raise gas prices. Venezuela was spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year keeping gas prices low for people. When they eliminated that subsidy, bus owners passed the cost on to their customers. And one morning in February 1989, Venezuelans from impoverished towns that were traveling into the city found out their bus fares had doubled overnight.

They reacted by overturning buses and burning them. The outrage spread, and soon there was rioting in multiple towns. The government responded by ordering the military to shoot. The official death toll was close to 300, but outside groups estimated that as many as 3,000 people were killed. That day became known as El Caracazo, and it showed Venezuelans' outrage that the poor were being forced to carry the burden of fixing the economy

As this sentiment was spreading in Venezuela, the country would first meet Comandante Hugo Chavez as a lieutenant colonel in Venezuela's military, Chávez led an attack to remove CAP, but they failed. Chávez was captured and allowed to go on TV to tell the others to stand down. 

Compañeros, lamentablemente por ahora los objetivos que nos planteamos no fueron logrados en la ciudad capital.

Nosotros acá en Caracas no logramos controlar el poder.

Por 

ahora, he said. They didn't reach their objective of taking over power for now. After this, Chávez became a celebrity. Not only had he tried to remove a government that had become very unpopular, but he also took responsibility for what happened and hinted that he would be back. He went to prison for the attempted coup, but was freed after a couple of years, and in 1998 he ran for president This was a time of large inequality when 5% of landowners controlled 75% of agricultural land.

See, Venezuela used to be an agricultural country, but with the oil boom, farming declined. The country started importing its food. Large plots of fertile land sat unused, and workers moved to the city. They settled in urban slums. And there it was easy to see that the country's oil riches were not reaching everyone.

While Venezuela's elite and upper middle class were living lavishly in the '70s, there were marginalized towns living in misery. Chávez promised to redistribute the country's land and oil wealth. He said, "In an oil rich country, people should not be going hungry." He gained the support of impoverished neighborhoods around the country and became the president of Venezuela.

Within his first few years in power, Chávez would pass almost 50 laws. Two of them in particular would upset the country's elite and the United States. See, at this point, the Venezuelan government had opened up the oil industry to foreign investors. Private companies used to pay the government a fixed fee of more than 16% for extracting and selling Venezuela's oil.

But after the oil opening, some companies like ExxonMobil were able to negotiate that down to as low as 1%. The result was that they made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from Venezuela's oil. When Chávez came to power, he passed a law that raised taxes again on private oil companies, now bringing royalties up to as high as 30%.

The money that these private companies used to keep before Chávez now would go to the state to fund things like healthcare, education, and housing. Chávez also passed a land law. Large estates that were sitting unused could be expropriated. The government could forcibly purchase the land and give it to small farmers or farmer collectives because according to Chávez, the land should be used for the benefit of the country.

Venezuelans in poor communities loved Chávez and were happy with his policies, while upper classes wanted him gone. The country was divided along economic class lines. 

International emergency teams are continuing their search for any remaining survivors of the powerful twin earthquakes that hit Venezuela last week. Nearly 200 buildings have completely collapsed, and the death toll is now close to 1,500. Tens of thousands of people still remain unaccounted for. Now, Interim President Delcy Rodriguez visited the heavily affected area of La Guaira on Su- on Sunday under pressure for what many see as the government's lack of response.

Yinka Oyetade reports 

A palpable grief hangs over Venezuela after two earthquakes struck, and that grief is now giving way to anger. Families say they are being forced to carry out rescue efforts themselves, digging through rubble with little more than their bare hands because heavy machinery has yet to arrive.

I pulled my daughter halfway out. I pulled her out. They just come to take pictures. They don't help us, and they won't let us into the disaster zone. They don't give us any equipment, and we have families in there. 

We want support. We want heavy machinery. We want to take our family members with us. I'm not the only one in this situation.

Their frustration is being echoed across the hardest-hit areas, where residents accuse authorities of responding too slowly. In La Guaira state, access remains tightly controlled, with special permits needed to enter. Volunteers hoping to help have found themselves instead stuck in long queues, unable to reach those still trapped.

Survivors are also pleading for better security, along with urgently needed food, clean water, and medicine. Interim president Delcy Rodriguez insists recovery is underway. 

We have already recovered 75% of the electricity service. Teams will continue working until electricity is completely restored in La Guaira.

It's the same with water, which is 68% recovered. 

Looting is adding to the chaos, with pharmacies, supermarkets, and other businesses being ransacked. While some blame opportunists, others say desperation is driving people who have lost everything in a country that was already struggling long before the earthquake struck.

Elinor Raikes is head of program delivery overseeing the International Rescue Committee's programs in Latin America. She joins me now live. Eleanor, first of all, what's the latest you're hearing from your teams on the ground on the situation there in the earthquake zone? 

Thanks for having me. as you might expect, with this kind of, natural disaster, every day since it happened has revealed more and more of the devastation.

So our teams on the ground are telling us, that each day that passes makes them realize just how, significant the impact has been, how widespread the humanitarian needs are, and how complex it's going to be, to mount and deliver an effective response to this. these earthquakes were very, significant, in terms of their direct impact.

hundreds of multi-story buildings, destroyed, aftershocks compromising, the, the relief effort, and search and rescue continuing. but this is also a natural disaster that happened in a country that was already experiencing very significant economic turmoil, economic collapse, and displacement crisis.

So this is a country that, that had preexisting vulnerabilities that are gonna make this even harder, to respond to. 

What's it like for NGOs like yours or others who are on the ground at the moment? Are they able to get access to the worst-hit areas, or is there even difficulty getting access due to what you were just saying?

We have teams on the ground, and they have been able to get to the impacted areas. We also work very closely with, a number of trusted Venezuelan local organizations, which allows for us to have, you know, even wider spread, and work with organizations that were already working in, i- in the area.

but earthquakes always, have this challenge, where you have a, the logistical challenges in, physically getting to the area. The airport was damaged, telecommunications down, water systems compromised. there's a lot that comes with an earthquake that means that it's compounding the challenge of, of getting emergency relief to those that need it most.

So it is still quite complicated, but we are able to get, at least basic relief items, to impacted communities, critical medical supplies to frontline health services. but this is going to be a response that's gonna require a weeks and months-long effort, not days and weeks. 

Eleanor, as you've been speaking, we've been seeing some live images, coming from Venezuela of the search and rescue efforts.

It has been over four days since these two earthquakes hit. Is there any hope for survivors still at this point? 

I think the, the, the search and rescue continues and, it's important, I think, for, those involved in that not to give up hope. But obviously every day that passes, sadly, the chances of survival do diminish.

There are tens of thousands of people still missing and unaccounted for, so it's important that the search and res- ... continues as, as long as it can. alongside a, a dramatic scale-up needed of, basic food, water, shelter, other relief supplies, for people who are, lost their homes, too afraid to go back to their homes.

and many s- many residential buildings still considered unsafe. we have teams report... My team is reporting that, there are many people sheltering in schools, in, in open spaces, in parks, without, the, basic things they need. Children too afraid to sleep. this is really...

We are still in the early days of this, o- of the aftermath of this earthquake. and the needs are quite critical. 

How many international organizations like yours are in the area now? A- and what kind of cooperation is there between all of you? 

Cooperation and coordination is so important, in the early days of a natural disaster.

I think it's really amazing, the international response to this. and so there's been a lot of, new, responders arriving in the country in addition to, organizations like ours that were already present. and coordinating the relief effort, is so important. I think it is happening, but it's obviously can be chaotic in the early days, after a, a big disaster like this.

one additional challenge, on top of the, the fact that Venezuela was already a country with 8 million people, in humanitarian need, with very under-resourced public services, was the fact that Venezuela, like many other countries around the world, was really hit by, dramatic cuts to foreign aid, to humanitarian funding.

so many organizations in Venezuela, over the last year have had to scale down or even close their services. so that is gonna be an additional complicating factor, i- as we try to mount a, a robust response to this disaster unfortunately. 

If you've driven past a filling station anywhere in the United States, you've seen the red triangle. Citgo runs about 4,000 stations, along with pipelines, storage terminals, and three large refineries in Louisiana, Texas, and Illinois that between them process over 800,000 barrels of crude a day.

The facility in Louisiana on its own is the seventh-largest refinery in the United States. Citgo is a 113-year-old American company that has been owned by Venezuela's state oil company since 1990. It was the most valuable thing Venezuela owned outside Venezuela, and the Gulf Coast refineries had been specifically re-engineered to handle Venezuelan crude, which is heavy sour and generally unwelcome elsewhere.

The assumption in Caracas had always been that whatever happened at home, Citgo was untouchable, which brings us to the single most expensive lesson in corporate formalities ever administered. The reason a creditor normally can't touch a subsidiary that's a corporation is that a corporation is a separate legal person from its owner.

Your creditors can come after you, they can't come after your company, and they can't come after your company's company. This is the entire point of the corporate form, and it's very hard to overcome. Courts do occasionally set it aside, piercing the corporate veil, but it is rare, and it's treated as an extraordinary remedy for extraordinary facts.

Delaware courts pierce the veil in a low single-digit percentage of the cases where somebody asks. You do not get there by being badly run or insolvent or unpleasant. You get there by demonstrating over a period of years that the separation was never real in the first place, which Venezuela did repeatedly, publicly, and on the record.

For two decades, the government in Caracas ran PDVSA as a cash register with a corporate charter attached. When the state needed money for social programs or political favors or to cover sovereign debts, it told PDVSA to wire the money, and PDVSA did. The president of Venezuela appointed the company's president, its directors, its vice presidents, and its shareholder council.

Employees were fired for political reasons. The government committed the company to selling oil to allies at large discounts and handed out mining rights without asking the company first. None of this caused any difficulty inside Venezuela, but it caused a great deal of difficulty in Delaware In 2016, a Canadian mining company called Crystallex won an arbitration award of $1.2 billion against Venezuela after Hugo Chavez nationalized its Las Cristinas gold operation in 2011 without paying for it.

Venezuela declined to pay the award on the grounds that it didn't want to, so Crystallex registered the judgment in Delaware and went after PDVSA's shares in PDV Holding, the company that owns Citgo. The argument was that PDVSA was the alter ego of the Republic of Venezuela, and that its American assets were therefore available to satisfy Venezuela's debts.

Now, when the defendant is a sovereign state, the courts don't use ordinary veil piercing. They use a 1983 Supreme Court case called Bancec, which says that a state-owned company is presumed separate from the state unless the state exercises such extensive control that the company is really its agent, and Crystallex had been careful.

They didn't ask the court to declare that PDVSA was liable for all of Venezuela's debts. They asked for something much narrower, a finding that these particular shares, though they had PDVSA's name on them, were really Venezuela's property. Modest, constrained, nothing to worry about. The Third Circuit then affirmed it in language that wasn't narrow at all, and later courts have read it as settling the general question.

Crystallex asked for the door to be cracked open, and the appeals court removed the door entirely. The alter ego ruling worked on Venezuela's creditors the way a dinner bell works. A queue formed in Delaware, bondholders and expropriation claimants, including ConocoPhillips, Gold Reserve, O-I Glass, and Tidewater on a first-come, first-served basis.

Judge Stark appointed a special master to run a forced auction of PDV Holding and pay them out of the proceeds, at which point Venezuelan politics produced its one moment of national unity. The Maduro government and the democratic opposition, who agree on essentially nothing, both denounced the auction.

The arrangement they were objecting to works like this: PDV Holding is controlled by the opposition, PDVSA on the ground is controlled by Maduro, and the opposition represents PDVSA in American courts because the United States doesn't recognize Maduro. The company was defending itself in court on behalf of a government that considers its own lawyers traitors.

Everyone involved objected to the sale. Nobody could agree who owned the thing being sold The auction took eight years and was not what you'd call orderly. Amber Energy, an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management, a hedge fund that has spent 40 years buying claims nobody else wants and then somehow collecting on them, won the first round in 2024 with a conditional bid of just over $7 billion, which the creditors rejected as too low.

The process restarted. Gold Reserve, bidding through a vehicle called Dalinar Energy, came in at 7.4 billion, and then raised itself to nearly 8. Amber won last November with a bid of 5.89 billion in cash structured alongside settlement with the 2020 bond holders. Judge Stark approved it last November, writing that it offered the best combination of price and certainty of closing that anyone had submitted Certainty of closing being the operative phrase, the highest number on the table lost to the number most likely to survive contact with the appeals court.

Gold Reserve responded by asking for the removal of both Judge Stark and the special master, citing alleged conflicts, including their financial advisors. That motion was denied. Elliott, it should be said, is experienced at this. This is the fund that spent 15 years pursuing Argentina over defaulted bonds, and in 2012 seized an Argentine naval vessel.

The vessel was a three-masted sailing ship on a goodwill tour with cadets aboard. Elliott's subsidiary had it detained in Ghana over a debt of just under $300 million. It stayed there for 10 weeks. Argentina eventually got it back through the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. The same campaign involved going after the presidential aircraft, the assets of the Argentine space agency, and the money Argentina was owed for its stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

when a hedge fund with that record turns up at a distressed auction, the outcome is fairly predictable. Elliott gets a large refining network at a price the sellers dispute. Some of the creditors get paid, and Venezuela is left with nothing. The deal still needs a license from OFAC, the Treasury office that administers US sanctions, before it can close.

The Financial Times has noted that Paul Singer, who runs Elliott, was an early financial backer of Marco Rubio's political career. Rubio is at the State Department and does not sign OFAC licenses, so make of that what you will. the oil money is offshore, and the refinery now belongs to a hedge fund

because it is so illegitimate, cannot win an election.

They got trounced in an election two years ago. Delcy Rodriguez might be the most unpopular politician in Venezuela. the most popular politician in Venezuela is Maria Corina Machado, who is being excluded by the Trump administration. So the goal for the, Delcy and Jorge Rodriguez is to delay, delay as much as they can.

They did that in 2004 with a recall referendum. They did that in, the 20-teens with, indefinite talks that lasted forever and where they focused on legalisms and paperwork and all kinds of stuff except the real issues, and that's exactly what's going on now. We're not focusing on the real issues. 

And the real issues, Elias, what are they? What do Venezuelans want to see change in their country when they're looking at these politicians? 

I, I actually, so I think that, most people will probably, say that they want to see elections, right? Most people, inside of Venezuela at least.

But then what we see and hear, I think I, I need to, take a point that Charles, said, which is that, this is a strategy of the Venezuelan government or Delcy Rod- Rodriguez to delay. But I think, this is 100% coming from the United States, so I don't know if it's so much a delaying tactic, but something that the Trump administration wants.

And then the, I think the big question here is does the Trump administration want an election in Venezuela anytime soon, right? and I think this is the key question that we need to see. and if there was, if they push for an election, what do they want that to look like? And, this, commission is probably gonna be looking at the electoral authority and, the different institutions that ultimately in 2024 they said that Maduro won, and, they put an end to the discussion, like the Supreme Court as well.

And that's supposed to be the mandate of, this commission. I'm not sure, if, they're gonna want a completely, free and fair election, very soon as in 2027, so next year. but, and I think this is where we're gonna probably gonna start seeing some kind of clash because right now, besides Maria Corina Machado, someone who is really popular politically is Trump and Marco Rubio.

What happens if they're saying, "You know what? It's not time for elections," and they keep, delaying, and, they keep doing business deals and, with oil and mining and the restructuring, and it keeps, praising Delcy Rodriguez, but they're not doing the election, which is presumably what most polls say that, the Venezuelans want.

And just looking at the, the structure of these talks, right at the top, it says that they are going to be looking at the assistance of victims from both earthquakes. Vanessa, why do you think that this has been put at the top? is it will disaster work where politics haven't? Is this a way to bring both sides together, do you think?

Yes. there's a, there's sort of a classic in, in, in politics that one of the way... There are two things where you can get opposing sides together, right? One is sport, things like FIFA events. and the other one is, to work together for to resolve a natural disaster, right? Because natural disasters are, apartisan.

nobody caused them. Mother Nature caused them. although arguably the scale of the disaster was caused by so many years of kleptocracy and corruption. And it's something that actually to move the money, and to move the supervision of the money, both, both in order to access the funds... When, again, we tried to do this when I was posted to London.

if you got the two sides to come together, then you would get, access to those funds and get some sort of tracking and tracing of those funds so that both have, their neck in the docket, so to speak. their, if the mo- if money goes missing, they, both sides have something to lose, and they have something to work on together, and they can both claim success if it goes well.

In my experience, we've tried this before. it, which was during the pandemic. It didn't really work. Arguably, the earthquakes are so visible- ... and it's spectacular, on a global scale that, that working together to resolve that would be good for both parts, not to mention the Venezuelan people who need it.

You can't have elections in a country that is already have a, has a destroyed infrastructure, and now we have tens of thousands or up to 100,000 people, we don't know, 'cause figures are, honest figures are hard to come by in Venezuela, who are displaced. where are these guys gonna vote? how are you gonna run that?

So that would be one of the things that would, that the Trump administration is trying to get the actual infrastructure of back up, and to get these parties to work together because it's, other than sport, natural disaster is the second, sec- second place you bring other- Okay ... opposing sides together.

and Charles, with your diplomatic background, do you agree? Is this the right way to approach these talks, to bring these parties together? Of course, we've seen so many failed talks in the past. 

I would have started these talks a week after January 3rd. Look, offline, not with the political parties necessarily, but with, university presidents, top lawyers, respected officials, maybe retired politicians, Is it too little too late then?

behind the scenes. S- you can start now, but having these formal talks set up between the... they, y- you, the other panelists can explain to you the assembly of 2015 versus the current assembly. it's... you can't explain that to somebody without giggling 'cause it makes no sense at all.

The parties in Venezuela are Maria Corina Machado and Manuel, her, her, the, the guy who was elected president two years ago- 

and the United States of America. It's 

the United States of America that's holding the talks. let's, let's talk about her then, Charles. She's not involved.

She's not at the table at the talks. So are these talks even legitimate?

I can't tell you what legitimate means in the Venezuelan context anymore. Look, we're going through this, we, and I don't mean me personally, we're going through this charade of pretending that Venezuelan institutions are legitimate, that the Chavista assembly is legitimate, that Delcy Rodriguez, who is the henchman of Nicolas Maduro, is legitimate, that the way the United States is handling their oil funds with complete lack of transparency is legitimate, and that excluding the most popular politician in the country is legitimate.

all of this is something that we're, trying to tie together and make something out of. and in reality it, the... if you want to have legitimacy after six months vacancy of a president, there's supposed to be elections in Venezuela. Nobody thinks there should be of elections today- 'cause there's no faith in the electoral roll. That is, who votes and where do they vote and how do Venezuelans in the exterior, outside the country vote? There's certainly no faith in the National Electoral Council, which stole the election of 2024. essentially turned out the lights, turned them back on, and when they turned the lights on they said, "We won."

and there's no faith in the Supreme Court, which then, validated the theft of the election. So- 

... 

what needs to be done goes way beyond, the electoral mechanism, defined narrowly, and it's broadly, and change needs to come. 

Okay. Elias, I'd just like to get your- For me 

when- 

S- sorry.

Please- no ... please just continue there, Charles. 

Sure. what I was going to say i- is that, Senator Rubio keeps talking about phases one, two, and three, and that elections can only come after the economy's recovered. I don't think the economy can recover unless there's a transition to democracy.

What you're seeing now is, businesses, not American businesses, but Venezuelan businesses are not investing in Venezuela. European and Latin American businesses are not investing in Venezuela because there's no rule of law in Venezuela, and you'd be foolish to invest where there's no rule of law.

Venezuelans are not returning home. I've spent the last 10 days in Peru and Chile, where there are thousands and thousands of Venezuelans. Everyone I've met, I ask, "Oh, what do you think of Del- oh, don't trust Delcy Rodriguez. When are you returning home?" "I'm not going home." if Venezuelans aren't, don't feel that this is a safe enough place to return home, w- there's a basic problem here, and that problem can be solved through democracy.

Venezuela needs more democracy, not less. 

Next, Section B, CUBA IN THE CROSSHAIRS

it goes back to the 1960s and talks about, in particular, this moment, Cuba's Tricontinental Conference in 1966. it mentions this a couple of different times, and I just want us to understand why the authors of this report believe that moment was so significant and what transpired there.

I would agree with the authors of that report that was a significant moment. it was a significant moment in the, in, in global history and the history of third world politics. the basic context here is the following. The Cuban Revolution triumphs in 1959. 

The Soviets have a lot to thank Castro for.

When he led his guerrilla forces into Havana against the dictator Fulgencio Batista 27 years ago, he achieved virtually the impossible. He established a communist satellite right on the doorstep of the United States. 

It has domestic ambitions first and foremost, which I can talk about. But as the revolution radicalizes to a socialist project in the throes of conflict with the United States, the Cuban government also positions itself as an ally for anti-dictatorial but also increasingly radical and socialist sort of insurgent movements in places around the world, mostly in Latin America and the African continent.

Remember, this is a moment of decolonization. Latin America, it was decolonized in the early 19th century, so Latin American nations are independent. But a number of Latin American countries are run by right-wing military dictators, the kind of military dictator that the Cuban revolution itself overthrew inside Cuba.

This was an event in 1966 that brought together kind of an amalgamation of radical movements, some armed insurgent movements, others not armed per se. From around the Third World. This is where the tri-continental part, right? Asia, Africa. So who, for 

example, yeah, was in attendance? 

representatives of African liberation movements fighting against colonial rule in places like Angola, insurgent organizations that were not necessarily massive or enormous, but trying to create a space in places in Latin America to fight against right-wing military governments there.

Representatives of also a more radical U.S. left, people associated with black nationalism, for example, right? So this sort of notion that the Third World needs to unite, in pursuit of common objectives, common development objectives, common objectives of throwing off the colonial mantle. 

The authors of the report use this term third worldism.

And you alluded to it a moment ago with this tri-continental conference. But what exactly does it mean? What are we talking about there? 

It was that countries of the quote-unquote Third World, which again is a very sort of Cold War term, right? Countries that are either, not the global capitalist West- Okay

and, or democratic West- ... or the Soviet Union and the affiliated Eastern Bloc. And so Third Worldism is a way, in a sense, to try to appropriate that kind of Cold War label of a First World, a Second World, and a Third World, as if it's less important, and to say, we are on the front lines of important, confluence of political and economic challenges that our societies face.

Throwing off the mantle of colonial rule where it still exists, thinking about how underdeveloped, economies in the Global South can actually develop. What's the best model for that? What are the, the political paths to taking power in name of a more radical vision in which, people from the Third World are empowered to sh- to shape their destiny?

that I think, at the surface level is the, the basic idea. 

so at the same time that the report talks about this tri-continental conference that was happening in Cuba in 1966, it also talks about this era in the 1960s in which Cuba, is framed as a nexus point for all sorts of left-wing activism, connecting things like the Black Panther movement with, Pan-Africanism and movements for independence across Africa, guerrilla movements in Latin America, that it was all in their view, united against one common enemy, the United States.

w- what do you make of that? 

So Cuba absolutely was a nexus and a hub for all of those kinds of things. the Cuban government positioned itself as an ally of what it saw as sort of- similar struggles, right? and as I mentioned, Cuba both trained, guerrilla fighters, it provided exile to people who were fleeing persecution for their ideas.

Where- ... the sort of truth quality of the report, I think can be called into question is again, how all of that is framed, right? and the way in which the report seems to insinuate a lack of agency on the part of some of those constituent groups who might have looked to Havana or gone to Havana or, seen the Cuban revolution positively.

I think particularly flagrant in this regard is the notion that Black, the, the sort of Black nationalism was somehow, born or fundamentally influenced from Havana. The report is actually quite vague on, on the wording it uses for things like causality. It talks, just to use the case of Black nationalism, about the role of a man named Robert Williams, who's one of the, the, the...

He comes up with the, one of the founders of the notion of Black nationalism, right? Who goes into exile in Cuba, and the Cuban government helps him broadcast an illicit radio broadcast called Radio Free Dixie into the Jim Crow South. now that might seem like subversion, and it certainly seemed like subversion to people like J.

Edgar Hoover at the time. But if you're in the Jim Crow South fighting, c- for civil rights, maybe you see that a, a little bit differently, right? And a- and it's also not to say that, Robert Williams' ideas weren't born in Havana. He might have turned to Havana, Havana might offered support.

But again, the degree to which Havana is tagged in this report as almost like the mastermind or that one I think can come away from this report thinking that it's somehow the mastermind, again, simplifies a much more complex story. A complex story of collaboration, but also conflict.

Robert Williams is a great example. He leaves Cuba eventually because he's frustrated that the Cuban government is not doing enough to address Cuba's own racial, disparities. and he leaves. he's fed up with the Cuban revolutionary project. So again, these are parts of the more complex story that are left out of this report.

Michael, beyond just the influence operations, this report spells out that Cuba over the decades was building an international spy network, and it names specific people, including, the former US ambassador to Bolivia. can you help us m- make sense of that and how vast this spy network has been? 

There is absolutely history, of the Cuban government having a very sophisticated, well-oiled, intelligence, capacity.

and over the years there have been a number of, very high-profile kind of outings of Cuban agents who have, worked their way, up into the highest levels of the US government. They were US officials that Cuban... that grew to have criticisms of US pol- foreign policy, whether toward Cuba or other parts of the world, and that the Cuban government was able to leverage that to get them to s- to send information.

Victor Manuel Rocha is the one that you mentioned. Ana Belen Montes, is an even more, I think, sort of nefarious case. She rose to be the, the, the head of Latin America for the National Intelligence Directorate in the US government. she was a career official, born in Puerto Rico, and worked, as a Cuban agent for years.

and so there is abs- it's absolutely true that the Cuban government has punched above its weight or what you might expect from a, relatively small country in terms of intelligence capacity.

Why is Cuba's power generation infrastructure in such a poor state? Can you give us some background on that, please?

The first is that they've lost, what was effectively originally 100,000 barrels per day, of gifted oil from Venezuela, half of which they sold on the global markets and half of which was for their own consumption. That has disappeared with the oil blockade. But second, they've simply not kept up with technology and updating their electrical grid.

So without the com- the combustible, the, the fuel, and without the sort of the generation capacity and delivery capacity, they're really in dire straits right now in their electricity. And accord- according to Cuba's own authorities, they only have a few weeks to go of fuel left. So they're, it's going to get, only get worse, and quite frankly, the measures the Trump administration is proposing are not going to provide immediate relief.

So Trump, when he says Cuba's in a bad way, he's quite correct, but Cuba might be in an even worse position because of what Trump has imposed. 

Exactly right. he's basically imposed this oil blockade which cut off a lifeline that had been given to Cuba for a long time that kept the lights on, literally, but also was essential for people's cooking oil, people's re- refrigeration of food, so food is spoiling, and even for the delivery of food, and even for the hard currency that they used to earn when they would sell part of that oil, on international markets.

This has been a, if you will, a humanitarian crisis largely of Trump's making. 

there's been this issue of the aging infrastructure, which hasn't kept up with technology for any number of reasons under the previous, Castro regime. There's been the situation created by Trump with his, decision post Venezuela to squeeze Cuba in that way.

What is motivain- motivating the Trump, the Trump administration to do this? 

Quite frankly, I think part of it is that they wanna project their power, in the hemisphere as they did in Venezuela. And I think the Venezuela model, is one that Trump thinks he can impose or use in, in, in Cuba as he thinks he's going to use it in Iran.

but it's... Cuba's not Venezuela. It's a much more disciplined revolutionary state, one party state, a command and control economy that's been in power for 67 years now. what he wants to do is basically try to root out any governments that are going to be opposed to US interests. We also have to remember that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a Cuban American.

His parents left Cuba actually before the Fidel Castro revolution, but he has really cut his political teeth, if you will, in South Florida politics where there are more than, well over, 2 million Cuban voters, many of whom are very hard line and are seeking regime change. So Trump is being pushed by, if you will, his own ego, his own plan for the Donro Doctrine, an adaptation of the Monroe Doctrine, as well as his Secretary of State, who for a long time has had, on his agenda, regime change in Cuba.

So regime change. That was my next question. You've brought us right there. Is that Rubio's agenda, regime change? 

I think it could be, and I think it was originally, but I think right now, just as they're seeing, they saw in the case of Venezuela as the time came closer and closer for the removal of Maduro, that the imposition of a democratic opposition in Cuba, in this case, in Venezuela in the other, could actually bring more chaos.

the Cuban o- opposition is, very fragmented, very atomized. It's very small. A lot of the, the Cuban leaders have left and fled to- Yeah ... to South Florida facing, repression. It isn't clear what exactly a democratic transition would ha- would be 'cause you'd have to basically, unlike in Venezuela, you'd pretty much have to pull up the Cuban state by its roots to able, to be able to create a democratic government of the sort that many people aspire to see in Cuba.

So yes, it is regime change, but quite frankly, I'm sure they're hearing a lot of analyses from the CIA and other intelligence services that it's a distant hope and one that w- pro- could perhaps bring more chaos and even outflow of refugees than was once thought. 

Donald Trump no doubt has something in mind, along the lines of what his plan was or his plan is for the Gaza Strip.

without going down that particular avenue, can you tell us about the potential perhaps that Cuba would have, if developed with the people in the right way for the good of Cuban people along those lines? Because clearly there is potential there that perhaps isn't being tapped into. 

you didn't wanna go down this road, but I'm going to, which is Trump, for Trump it was oil and Venezuela, and for Trump it's now tourism in Cuba.

In 1994, he actually sent a number of his, scouts to look at opportunities for Trump hotels, casinos in Cuba. So th- he has his eye on this because, it could become a, a paradise for Trump's, ambitions to create resorts. The problem with that is that tourism is deeply, ex- exploitative.

Those on the island oftentimes are left out. They h- often only have service jobs, and the current hotels that are in Cuba that are frequented by, foreign tourists, most of them from Europe, most of the staff of these hotels are not Afro descendant. They're more European descendant. and that's a problem because the bulk of population of Cuba is Afro descendant.

So it's, it really risks a very, creating a very sharp and racially d- defined, inequality, levels of inequality within Cuba if it's going to be tourism only that Trump uses to try to build Cuba back. 

Is there anybody, on the island, 'cause Rubio's talking about different people are needed to make it happen.

Is there anybody there that you can think of that might be able to work with, Trump, his people, in order to create this evolving Cuba, which could be for the good of everybody? 

ironically, Marco Rubio's talking to the grandson of Raul Castro, Raulito, which is funny because first of all, again, it demonstrates first of all that the revolution of 1959 is just created a dynasty.

but he's the man who can probably make things happen. But having worked in Cuba for a long time and having tried to press for a number of changes with Cubans, and in this case for an exchange program with Columbia University, everything has to go to the top. It is a very vertically dominated, structure in terms of decision-making.

So even talking to one person, even if it is a Castro, that will still, that person or whatever change will still have to confront a deeply hidebound and resistant bureaucracy that is very inefficient. So this is not a matter of just flipping a switch and opening up the markets in the tourism sector and allowing for investment.

It's going to confront an incredibly difficult, bureaucratic process and a lot of intransigence. 

How much of a threat in real practical terms at this moment is Cuba to the United States right now? Because that's the other thing about this report. It articulates, a worldview of Cuba as an extremely dangerous country to the United States. and yet I'm also aware that in this particular moment, Cuba does not seem to be in a particularly strong position.

As you say, the US has had a blockade on oil coming into the island. There have been rolling blackouts here on our show. We have, spoken to our correspondent from Cuba. he has spoken to us about these blackouts, food shortages. so what does the report say about this in terms of how really How, of how much of a threat Cuba is to the US in this moment?

I'm glad you're asking this question because this is the big, the big question mark for me too. President Trump himself has said on a number of occasions in the last six, seven months that, Cuba's a failed state- ... Cuba's about to fall. But it's difficult, I think, for the lay person to read this report and the kind of picture that it paints to understand, to match that up against the rhetoric that Cuba's, system is about to collapse under its own weight of economic failure and immiseration.

There was a video a few months back of the Cuban government put out on state media of military preparations for American action in which soldiers were shown pulling, an anti-aircraft gun on a cart that was being pulled by a donkey. That doesn't exactly project- 

Strength ... 

strength or force, right?

Which is not to say that, US intelligence shouldn't take the work of Cuban intelligence agents seriously. and I think they do. 

It seems like the argument from the authors of this report is that Cuba's strength comes not maybe from its military prowess, its economic wealth or anything. It comes from its ideology.

and I say that, Michael, if I can read just a sentence to you from the report. This is on page 99, so near the end. It says, "To mistake Cuba's poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely. Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger. Its power was always ideological, subversive, and parasitic."

It goes on to say more It's a striking argument, I think 

It's true that Cuba, and I hate to keep using the metaphor, but has punched above its weight in terms of being a symbol for the world. But part of the reason it's being a, it's been a symbol for the world either of object evil, of a one, party communist state that represses its people, or liberation that sticks it to the man in the United States, part of that is about the long history of conflict between the United States and Cuba, the sort of David versus Goliath narrative.

And so Cuba generates a lot of sympathy around the world because of the way it's, it, it is perceived, or one can argue that it has been beaten up on by the big guy. W- at a... when the US government seems to have no problem getting along perfectly well with authoritarian one-party states in a number of places around the world, Vietnam, China, never mind sort of the Saudis or others, right?

That US objections about democracy in Cuba seem to be fundamentally inconsistent with a more pragmatic foreign policy elsewhere, and so the sanctions are treating the Cuban people's collective punishment. That has long generated sympathy on the American left, going back to the '60s, and then it withered once Cuba actually became a communist state.

if that threat of Cuba as a, as an ideological example is insidious, I guess I would throw back at the report's authors, to what extent is that also a product of the way that US policy has treated Cuba over the years, and made it, y- allow, given Cuba the ability to say, we're the victims, and we're trying to create an alternate reality."

I don't think we can excuse members of the American left that have given a pass over the years to Cuba's, the Cuban government's, own human rights violations. But again, these are all arguments that we can have on the terrain of political debate, and not as an argument about threats to US national security.

We've been having this conversation with the full knowledge that, this report is not happening in isolation. Earlier this month, we saw the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, announce additional sanctions on the Cuban government. this is all also happening in the context of repeated threats from the Trump administration for some sort of possible takeover of Cuba.

and I guess I, I lay that all out here, Michael, to say what exactly is the US government trying to achieve, in your view, by releasing this report? 

Hard to say for sure. so on the one hand, there's the domestic political piece, right? This, this report is kind of ammunition in domestic political arguments, and the midterms are not too far away.

It's hard to escape that, particularly with the frequency with which, Democratic Party elected officials or aligned folks are mentioned explicitly. But on the foreign policy front, the administration has been building a case i- in fits and starts over the l- the last few months about Cuba's national security threat, in a way that would perhaps tee up some kind of military operation, right?

So in the same way that we saw the United States in the Venezuela case, leverage an old indictment of Nicolás Maduro in court for drug trafficking, but then you pivot to this notion of Venezuela as this drug trafficking hub and that, getting Maduro is a law enforcement operation.

There was, like, an attempt to build a narrative that sort of set the table for what they did, even if when they did it, it was still a surprise. I think we'd be naive to not wonder if the c- if the US is do- is doing that, right? So this report follows on a number of things. It follows on significant reporting, and I would also say speculation about the extent to which China and Russia have listening posts, that is their own intelligence facilities inside Cuba, which w- one could say, "Yeah, that might be a concern for the United States."

it comes on the heels also of the indictment of Raúl Castro in a federal court a few weeks back for his alleged involvement in the, the shoot-down and killing of, US, civilians, in, in civilian aircraft over the Florida Straits in 1996. It comes on the heels of a report, unconfirmed, again, seems very speculative, that, Cuba may have acquired a certain defensive drone, capacity from the Iranians, right?

So all of these elements, and then now this report that says, there's this, this ideological nemesis sort of off, off our shores that's sowing discontent internally. 

90 miles away from Florida, And so is the ideological concerns they have, is there any veracity for the idea that the ideological influence of Cuba has grown over the last decade?

I don't know how one would measure that kind of thing, but what I can say is that the, I find the a- the allegation kind of startling in light of the ideological shifts that are happening in Cuba itself. And what do I mean by that? back 15 years ago, Raul Castro, then the Cuban head of state, started articulating a need for, economic liberalization framed as we're improving socialism, right?

But it was creating more space for the private sector, right? So the Cuban government over the last

10, 15 years has been gradually unwinding the economic model of state socialism, right? There is a private sector in Cuba today that is doing a majority of retail bus- business, still in its infancy by the comparisons about just any other place in the world you go to, maybe say North Korea.

But, but nonetheless, is a shift. And I think some parts of a kind of a very doctrinaire, some may say campus left, d- hang on to some notion that, of Cuba offering an alternative model of development. Anyone who spends a shred of time in Cuba, I think would have real questions about that.

Cuba's best economists argue that we are not a model for anybody, and we need to change things from, root to stem. I think also the, the, the real economic issues, cost of living issues in our society are driving folks to look for other models. I think there are some folks out there who have a very simplistic view of what Cuba is or the kind of model that it exists. But again, my experience is that folks who actually spend a significant time there, who don't just parachute in for a week, come to start hearing these tales of Cuban people who may like a certain thing about the Cuban system or the principle of free healthcare, but are also wondering, are watching as t- like more than a million Cubans have left in the five, five, last five or six years.

And it's not just because of American sanctions.

Now, Section C, REGIONAL RIPPLES AND HUMAN FALLOUT

it's worth reminding, listeners first of all that this would not be Colombia's first experience with a hard-handed security and other policy. Yeah ... there were several decades- Like every other 

president 

Exactly. and during that time, we saw really the resilience of Colombian institutions. For example, blocking a potential third tcurity approach that was very heavy-handed, and tried to extend his stay in office for a third term and was stopped from doing so.

So that is, that and other examples give us sort of confidence that the institutions are robust and that they can handle, I think some of the pressures that will be against them. But let me be clear, I think that is a risk. I do think that, this sort of populist governance, and particularly some of the candidate's statements about, for example, dismissing the importance of Congress, or again, his tendency not to, easily accept a free and critical press, should raise alarm bells and I think, there is certainly an awareness and a, an acute, sense of urgency in parts of civil society to be ready to push back against any such attempts.

So I'm interested in having you put, his election maybe like a broader regional context. I can't remember if it was you that I interviewed or one of your colleagues, years ago when Petro was first elected, the first left-wing president in Colombia's history, which had been ruled by a succession of, right or center-right parties.

But here you have, an avowed leftist, Gustavo Petro, won an election. but now that seems to just be, like, an aberration and, Colombia has returned to history. And, you'll have, another right-winger in charge. But then you have him in, the context of what's seemingly like a right-wing resurgence in much of Latin America, with Milei, with Bukele.

Like, how do you perceive or, what do you think explains this trend? 

Yeah. So two points. I think the first one is that, while it's true that, of course, if we go back to a right-leaning leader, then Petro would be the exception to the rule. What is different this time is that Colombia now has a very established political left that is a force.

They have the largest voting bloc in Congress. They have forty-nine percent of voters who backed their candidate, and this is not a constituency that can be easily pushed aside. They are a relevant political actor in Colombia, and that is different from the past, and that, I believe, will persist beyond any single election outcome.

in a broader regional context, the way that I interpret this shift to the right is really the following: I think it's a reflection of voters across the region, distrusting and not feeling confident in the state. And as they do so, there is this tendency to bounce back and forth between the left and the right.

There are waves of left-wing candidates that we had for some time, Evo Morales, Lula, Chávez, and then we ha- we bounce back to the right, then we bounce back to the left and back to the right. And I really see this as a reflection of the fact that voters, mistrust or distrust the state's ability to actually deliver on promises and to improve their lives.

And this is particularly acute at the moment as we've seen an expansion of armed, sorry, of organized crime throughout the region. And when I talk about organized crime, I wanna really bring that to a sort of day-to-day level. What organized crime means in particularly the Andean region, but also more broadly across Latin America, is a deep predation on the part, on, on where these groups have a presence.

So we're talking about practices like high levels of extortion, limits on movement, kidnapping, recruitment of children, things that fundamentally change the social dynamic and frankly, the economic capacity of households to live And I think voters are frustrated with this situation very understandably.

there is a sort of anti-incumbent sentiment across the region because we haven't found a solution to this problem, neither on the right or the left. and so I definitely see it in that vein. the right is promising this hard-handed crackdown, which we call here in Spanish mano dura, and I think that's attractive because it sounds like a magic wand.

You round everybody up, you build mega prisons, get all the bad guys out, and it finishes. It's not so simple, and we've seen that, in fact, in the first experiment in trying to replicate really the Bukele model has been in Ecuador. In Ecuador, the president declared an armed conflict, sent the military to the streets, and initially homicides dropped.

But a few months later, they skyrocketed to their highest historic levels, where they have remained ever since. So these types of crack-crackdowns are very difficult to implement, very hard to maintain, and come with extreme compromises in terms of human rights and personal liberties. And I think the region is now grappling with what balance is right in terms of addressing the real security threats for civilians and communities, while also re-retaining those democratic structures that are-- that's fundamental, of course, to, to how the society and the political space functions 

so maybe before I get-- let you go, Beth, in the coming, days or weeks, what are you looking towards?

W- what are you waiting to see or hear in Colombian politics that will suggest to you, what this new era, this Abelardo era might look like? 

I think the first, thing to watch will be the secondary vote count. the left-wing candidate, Iván Cepeda, and President Gustavo Petro have said they w- they are not accepting results until that second count is done.

there are reasons-- I think that it is a risk that we could see protests around that result, given the high levels of polarization and also frankly, the closeness of the vote. again, this is a-- half the country did not elect the incoming president, regardless of who that was going to be.

This is a country that's deeply divided in two. and I think that risk increases, the risk of social unrest increases both before the electoral transition, the transition to the new administration, and afterwards if there are incendiary policies or rhetoric from the new office holder. So the president-elect, it is of the utmost importance to understand that he has to win the confidence of half of Colombia.

He has to govern for all Colombians, and that means speaking to his political opponents in a way that addresses them as a constituency that is now his. So de-escalatory messages, it's very important not to see sort of revenge campaigns or persecutions, something that I think is always a risk when you have these very radical swings from left to right.

And that will be fundamental not only to ensuring that, the incoming administration is successful, frankly, but also ensuring that the, that, voters feel represented despite the fact that perhaps they haven't, had their electoral triumph this time, that they can al-- that we can bring Colombia, which is very divided, back together going forward.

So I think those are key points to watch. I think the second point will, of course, be the relationship with the United States. the United States has been very keen and very vocal about reestablishing its influence and agenda across the Western Hemisphere. the pressure right now on, I think, the president-elect is limited because he is the president-elect, but as soon as he takes office, I do expect that Washington will have a concrete list of asks.

And I think the incoming administration will have to really start to balance those pressures and those requests with the interests of actually Colombia itself. Things like high-level captures or very ho- high-profile operations against drug trafficking organizations, they might look good in Washington.

The question is, how are they serving the, the security of communities here in Colombia, and what interventions would be necessary alongside those types of operations to ensure that there is really a sort of fundamental change to the equation, and we're not just replacing one armed group leader with another?

this characteristic is repression abroad, and we haven't really seen that in, let's say, in Venezuela with one exception of a former military officer who was allegedly assassinated in Chile at the hands of the regime.

It seems that Nicaragua is doing this much more pervasively. What are some of the tactics employed to intimidate or to repress Nicaraguans living ex- in exile? And are they using surveillance technology or hacking to find opposition members? And we also understand that the Ortega government is using, unlawfully using Interpol to intimidate and threaten exiles.

Can you paint us a picture of how some of this repression outside of the country's borders is taking place? 

One thing is the strategy that I just explained a bit, and now the tactical part is normally applied through different Arms of the regime. I would just, highlight here the intelligence part first.

The state intelligence network is, monitor communications on social media all over the place. They link the police, the army, Telcor, which is a national telecommunications company, and party structures of the FSLN, together with highly sophisticated technological devices. And there is even technological devices that can monitor geographically movements, of the people.

So exile cycles are penetrated also through hacking and spyware, which is, part of the standard toolbox that you use. But what is not that standard, beyond, what you have already mentioned, false Interpol Red Notices, is another issue that I wanted to highlight, which is use misinformation and the stolen passports alerts to trigger arrests or travel bans.

So the SLTD data bank of Interpol is strategically used in order to make people not move anywhere by misinformation about having or carrying passports that are reportedly stolen or lost or even falsified. Then the government also circulates false information to tarnish target's reputation and, in particular, their financial reputation that may trigger then Anti-Money Laundering compliance warnings, which can block, access to any kind of financial services and can lead to literally de-bank people All these actions are designed to deter any collective organization abroad, and to dismantle safe havens, and to project, domestic control abroad.

That's it. And we have seen this, and analyzed this in a dedicated report published by the end of the year, identifying so broad methods that we think that this is not a coincidence, and is not only, created exclusively in Managua. 

What do you mean by not created exclusively in Managua? 

It is part of a toolbox that we can witness in all over, the world today.

We can witness this as being part of the toolbox used by the Iranians. We can see it used by Belarus. We can see it used by other countries that are well on the radar of the current transnational repression reports that are out there. 

Nicaragua has seen a mass exile since 2018. By the end of last year, more than 340,000 Nicaraguans were seeking asylum abroad, a figure that's widely believed to underestimate the true scale of the exile.

What is the scale of oppression abroad? How many people are being targeted? And what are governments in host countries that have these exiles, what are they doing about it? 

Now, it is important to keep in mind that since, the protests and the crackdown on the protests in April 2018, almost 10% of the country's population has left the country.

If out of

these around 750,000, you narrow down these numbers to asylum application, that is, people who are potentially- Politically persecuted, you reach a number between, 300 to 350,000, and this is a population that is potentially targeted by these activities. Now, what we can do with our reduced resources is to interview people that come up, to us or through our networks that after four years of work we have.

And we have interviewed for the report that I recently mentioned now around 400 victims, but of course the number is much bigger. And just to give you an example of how big it should be, there is a systematic denial of any consular services to people that fit the profile of politically persecuted persons that we have detailed in our report, and these are thousands.

The effect of this is, deliberate That is, many of them, for lacking any documentation, will have lots of problems in applying and having, success, with a political asylum application procedures, for example. What are countries doing to this? It depends a bit of what their concept of, transnational repression is.

There are countries like the US that has a very narrow concept that literally reduces TNR to physical harassment. or where you can access the protective measures by the police. But it is not only this. So how do you protect people, for example, from digital harassment? There is still a lot to do.

or right now, there is an initiative by the G7 countries to have dedicated units on TNR, and, they will come up with best practices. But as far as we have seen until now, there's still a lot to do in this regard in terms of protection of people that are targeted by TNR, by the Nicaraguan government.

Nixon Geovanni Perez Paz and Glendy Marisol Gonzalez-De La Cruz were found bound, gagged, and shot in a sugarcane field in Guatemala. Their 14-month-old daughter was alive and crying next to her mother's body. The couple, whose funeral was last week, leaves behind two other young daughters as well.

Gonzalez-De La Cruz left the United States with her daughters just weeks ago, self-deporting after her husband was detained by ICE and deported last year following a traffic stop. Now, two communities in two countries are reeling and searching for answers. For more, I'm joined by Brian Muñoz. He is with St.

Louis Public Radio, and he broke the story. Brian, first of all, help us understand what we know about the murders of this couple and, in particular, the status of their children. 

Absolutely. So this is just the latest harrowing story out of Missouri about people perishing after interactions with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In this specific case, Glendy and Nixon had came to the St. Louis area and were separated after Nixon and his brother, Rolando, were stopped by ICE officials on the way to work one day last April. They say that, the brother tells me that is, that they were on the way to their roofing jobs when a unmarked vehicle started chasing them down and pulled them over.

After they stopped, agents swarmed the vehicle, and they were taken in and subsequently deported. So- 

And that happened last year, right? 

Yes. That happened last April according to, an ICE spokesperson. 

And so Glendy decided, "Hey, I'm gonna stick it out." She stayed and decided to work two jobs, trying to put food on the table, but the rising cost and the fear of being detained and separated from her children made her do the unthinkable and decide, "Hey, I'm gonna go back."

she had an active asylum claim here according to federal records, and her friends tell me that, sh- like I mentioned, she was afraid. She was afraid for her safety and for the safety of her children. So after having said, "Hey, this is too much," she decided to go, and she took her three kids with her.

And not even a month later, I think a week or two, she was found shot and killed. So her three daughters, young, in grade school, the youngest is only 14 months old or so, are now in the custody of their aunt and uncle, Nixon's brother. 

Do we know anything about the motive here? 

That's an excellent question, and there are so many things that are unknown.

from what I've gotten from family and friends this week is the motives are unknown. Really, these folks were on their way to register a motorcycle that Nixon had with their youngest daughter when they were ambushed by assailants. They don't know who, they don't know the motives, but their families and friends have been left grieving.

Now, ICE sent you a statement reading in part, "ICE remains committed to removing criminal aliens from our community by enforcing immigration laws and maintaining the integrity of our borders." Did either of these two have a criminal record? 

Yes. So Nixon, the only thing I could find, and as it was also pointed out in the ICE statement, was he was cited and charged with driving without a license in 2024 in suburban St.

Louis. There was about a $200 fine that was paid. And ICE said that there were two drunk driving charges in Overland, Missouri. I scoured the court system that's publicly facing that would have those records in it, and I wasn't able to find They also pointed to a 2010 citation in Palm Beach, Florida, where Nixon was charged with an ordinance violation for having an open container, but it appears the prosecutors ended up not pursuing that case.

And we know that traffic stop you mentioned, the fine, that is usually a misdemeanor. Glendy, I wanna talk about her as well. She had filed for asylum, as you said. She was awaiting a hearing next year when she self-deported. What does this case and her fate tell you about the system overall? 

Yeah. I think this case is indicative of a system that advocates say is broken.

So right now, right before this interview, I looked at the track online immigration case tracker, and it says that there are roughly 45 to 50,000, backlog cases in the Kansas City Immigration Court, which oversees the entire state of Missouri and Kansas. of those, about 11,500 or so are backlogs in asylum cases.

So attorneys for immigrants across the state are telling me, "We're waiting years and years to be able to even get a hearing. And right now, the rules are changing so much that it's difficult to best serve our clients and to give them a fair shake- ... because we don't know what's going to happen from one day to the next."

You mentioned new rules. There is a new rule on asylum from the Trump administration this week, which means that essentially most applying for asylum will go straight to an immigration judge and won't get an interview. What do you think that means for the system? 

Absolutely. So it is a challenge for folks that are trying to represent these immigrants in immigration court.

on one hand, of course, the backlog is most likely going to be reduced, but advocates and attorneys tell me that it's going to be incredibly challenging to make a case to these judges that are only taking, a minute or two to go through them because there's so many in the backlog. So yes, this thing's gonna move a little more expeditiously, but advocates and attorneys warn that they feel like they may be a little hamstrung on best representing their clients.

I want to talk about accountability for a minute. As you've mentioned, your report suggests that the acts committed by the Ortega-Murillo regime may constitute crimes under international law, including possibly crimes against humanity, given their scale and their organization. Given that Nicaragua is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and that under the current circumstances of government control, certainly no court in Nicaragua would provide justice to the victims, what avenues for justice exist?

that's true that, Nicaragua isn't an ICC state party, and this usually means hands off, yes. But here's why international law is finding a way into Nicaragua even without being invited. I would say here the gateway is, what we call transporter crimes, precisely what we were talking about a few minutes ago.

The logic here is that if the crime, like for example deportation or persecution, starts in Nicaragua but ends in a country that is a member of the ICC has a foot in the door. And there are precedents. we've seen this before with the Rohingyas being forced from Myanmar to Bangladesh. This is an ongoing investigation of the ICC and more recently, opponents forced from Belarus to Lithuania.

Neither Myanmar nor Belarus are parties to Rome Statute, but so are, Bangladesh and Lithuania. And once you have, like this gateway, the question is how you trigger an ICC investigations, and, there are mainly two roads, but one of it is, lots cheaper than the other There are so-called, Article 5 notices.

That is, anyone can send information to the prosecutor. But the catch here is that since 2002, around, 170,000 of these have been sent, but only seven led to actual investigation. So it's a bit of a long shot, I would say. But then there comes the gold standard, and this is definitely the state referral.

if an actual member state or a group of them, asks for an investigation, like these six countries that did to it in the case of Venezuela in 2018, and this carries much way more weight. But given the overall impunity in Nicaragua, the, you should seek a multi-track strategy because the IC- she isn't the only game in town.

Justice is, in these cases, more a team sport, between several jurisdictions. National courts in countries whose citizens were victims in Nicaragua can prosecute for offshore, or one of them would be, for example, Brazil. And in addition, the door remains, of course, open for any state to take action against crimes against humanity based on universal jurisdiction like, like Argentina is doing, at present But the bottom line here is that coordination is the only practical map for justice for victims who have none at home, and the message is clear: You don't need a country permission to hold its leaders accountable for crimes that spill across borders, be it that the victims are of your nationality or be it that you're throwing out your own people.

As Jan, I was actually intimately involved in the process that ultimately led to the six countries referring a case to the ICC for Venezuela. Venezuela did not have... First of all, it was a member of the Rome Statute, which made things much easier, but it really at that time was not engaged in transnational repression, which is a whole other dimension.

Why do you think countries have acted in the case of Venezuela, but not Nicaragua? presumably a number of crimes have occurred, I would imagine, and maybe you can confirm that a number of crimes would've been committed in neighboring Costa Rica, which has accepted many Nicaraguan exiles, and Nic- Costa Rica is a, a party to the Rome Statute.

let me just put it that way. Venezuela has been on the radar of the region for being the basis of what is called the new wave of socialism in the region, whereas, Nicaragua is a anachronistic regime of old dictators. I think this is the first. The second is, though it has some geostrategic value, it is by far not that important for obvious economic reasons, but also for geostrategic reasons, as Venezuela.

Then, the action taken in the case of Venezuela came out of the regional organization of the OAS. So it was not that the case was created on the universal level, but it was first, by initiative of some states and the former secretary general of the OAS, that the information was collected, analyzed, and then reported that paved the ground for the case being brought to the ICC.

All of this, unfortunately, has not been the case with the OAS- And, hopefully, though Nicaragua has withdrawn from the OAS, we can see in the future some more concrete steps in this direction from the regional organization. 

Can you speak to that for a minute? what should regional organizations, and, do in such cases?

And concretely, in the case of Nicaragua, what should the OAS be doing, especially now that this very damning report that you've published has come to light? 

So I think that the OAS should first address the overall security issue that is created by the situation in Nicaragua. If you have a country that is actively seeking opponents beyond its borders in the region, this is not the only human rights issue, but it is a security issue.

It's a issue of hemispheric security that should be addressed by the appropriate organs of the OAS. Second, it should also be kept in mind that though Nicaragua has withdrawn from the OAS, it hasn't withdrawn from the Inter-American Human Rights System. I think there is still a long way to go by the Inter-American Human Rights System in order to prepare the ground to have more active role being played by the main organs of the organization, which could eventually lead them to more actions, maybe even in the upcoming general assembly.

There is a good opportunity to do this. 

And Finally, Section D, HISTORICAL ROOTS - THE DONROE DOCTRINE'S LONG SHADOW

The United States has a long history of fueling instability in Latin America, often while operating behind the scenes. Here are some of the major US interventions in Latin America, interventions that had long-lasting consequences and left a trail of instability in their wake. During the Cold War, Washington framed much of its interference abroad as a fight against communism, but in reality, its foreign operations were conducted to protect its own political and economic interests.

In 1954, the US decided it needed to dispose of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in favor of a Western sympathizer. Arbenz had introduced land reforms that threatened the exploitative labor practices of the United Fruit Company, an American corporation. With a budget of $2.7 million, the agency armed and trained Guatemalan exile Carlos Castillo Armas and supported his force of 480 men in an invasion launched from Honduras.

Psychological warfare, including fake radio broadcasts, aerial bombings, and widespread disinformation sowed fear among the population and military, causing Guatemala's army to stand down. The coup ushered in decades of military rule and repression, as well as a civil war that killed more than 200,000 people over nearly 40 years.

For the US, however, the coup served its purpose: to set an example and warn any Latin American nation seeking progressive reform that it would suffer a bleak fate. This model of intervention was repeated across the region. In 1964, the US backed a military coup in Brazil against President Joao Goulart, whose policies threatened Washington's economic interests.

The coup installed a military dictatorship that ruled for 21 years, marked by censorship, torture, and political repression. That same year, Washington began interfering in Chilean politics. The US disseminated anti-communist propaganda to prevent socialist candidate Salvador Allende, who had pledged to nationalize Chile's copper industry, from winning the presidency.

When Allende triumphed in the 1970 election, the Nixon administration spent the next three years providing opposition groups with millions of dollars in financial aid and logistical support to destabilize his government. These covert efforts paved the way for the 1973 military coup and the brutal 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

During his rule, thousands of political opponents were tortured, killed, or disappeared. By the mid-1970s, US-backed repression was region-wide. Through Operation Condor, US-backed military regimes in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia coordinated intelligence-sharing, kidnappings, assassinations, and torture to eliminate left-wing opponents, even across national borders.

While Operation Condor was not a US program, it had the support of Washington, which provided intelligence, training, and logistical support. Not all US interventions relied on coups alone. In the 1960s, the CIA attempted to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro using everything from exploding cigars to poisoned pills, but none of their plans succeeded.

In the 1980s, when Contra rebels in Nicaragua sought to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government, the US covertly backed the insurgents with military and financial support. Even after the International Court of Justice ruled that the US had violated international law, Washington was never held accountable for its role in a conflict that killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguans.

By the end of the Cold War, the US was no longer relying solely on covert action, however. In 1989, US forces invaded Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, a former CIA asset, from power under the banner of enforcing democracy and human rights. In 2002, the US supported a failed coup attempt against Venezuela's then president, Hugo Chavez.

In 2018, Washington had accused President Nicolas Maduro of rigging the presidential election. Since then, US policy toward Caracas relied primarily on sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and backing opposition groups to influence the country's political direction. But on January 3rd, US forces carried out air strikes and captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, flying them to the US.

The attack followed months of escalating tensions during which Washington accused Maduro of involvement in drug trafficking and enacted a blockade on Venezuelan oil tankers. Following the January 3 attack, US President Trump warned that Colombia and Mexico could also face military action if they failed to curb the flow of illicit drugs into the US.

Political analysts say Washington's intervention strategies have changed, but the objective has remained largely the same: to prevent Latin American nations from pursuing political paths that challenge US dominance in the region. 

​

There's a weapon that powerful countries use to get rid of leaders they don't like, leaders from other countries. It's called a coup. It's a French word that means a punch or a blow because it means coming in and forcibly punching out a government from power. No elections, no process, just power being seized, just someone being pushed out and someone being put in.

Coups happen in so many different ways, but I wanna show you how the coup has been used by the United States of America as a tool to get what they want on the world stage. So let me walk you through some of the major US-led coups over the years to show you that while it sometimes seems like we live in a world full of order and rules, the reality is that the most powerful countries will often get their way by whatever means necessary.

Okay, so here's how I'm defining the US-led coups that I'm gonna put on our list here. Number one, they were successful. There's a lot of failed coup attempts. We're leaving those out. Number two, there must be at least one US government official involved in the coup. And number three, we need concrete evidence that the US was actually involved, not just speculation.

While the US has been involved in tons of regime change efforts around the world, we landed on a much shorter list. These are the coups that I think best exemplify how this tool has been used for international power over the years. Okay, so we're over here in Nicaragua. It's 1909. There's a bunch of powerful American companies here, but a new president comes to power vowing to regulate them.

The US is not gonna let this happen, so the secretary of state starts spreading rumors to smear this guy, this president, saying that he's building a canal that would compete with the Panama Canal. But really, they're just upset because Nicaragua's taking loans from Europe. The US keeps painting this guy as a war criminal and someone worthy of being thrown out So push comes to shove and the US sends ships to both of Nicaragua's coasts.

They assemble a bunch of Marines in Panama, basically just flexing on Nicaragua and telling the president to step down. And the benefit of being a rising superpower is that it worked. He has no choice but to step down, and soon a leader that the US likes comes to power. The coup is complete, and really, this is the first of many instances of the US meddling in Nicaragua.

A few years later, the US is back in the region for another coup in next door Honduras. This one was plotted by a band of private American citizens, and it follows a similar pattern. A new president comes to town, in this case directly inspired by Nicaragua's president, and he wants to take back control of the country from American businesses.

In this case, we're talking about bananas. The banana companies were not gonna let this happen, and it was mostly this guy, a banana businessman named Sam the Banana Man. He's not gonna let this pesky president run his country, no. So he assembles his own militia. He literally buys a surplus Navy ship, loads it up with weapons, and starts his campaign to get this president out.

He sails from New Orleans to the coast of Honduras, and he literally invades the country with, a private army. Wait, wh- where's the US government in all this? They also didn't like the political direction of Honduras either, so they just stood back, let this private invasion happen and then at the critical moment, the US steps in to order a ceasefire, basically bullying the president to step down.

He had no way forward, no defense, so he resigns. And the Banana Man's leader of choice takes the presidency, giving the banana businessman land and a unique status to import anything he needs tax-free. And wait for it, he refunds him for all of the coup expenses using public Honduran money. This banana man literally overthrew the government and made Honduras pay for it.

Wow. In Guatemala, the CIA tried to pull the same playbook that they used in Iran, once again targeting a leader that the people had elected, but who wanted to take back the country's resources for the people, to break up these American monopolies that controlled the country's electricity and railroad.

The president even starts to seize land from one massive banana company. It was often unused land that he wanted to redistribute to the locals who could farm it and feed their families, and hopefully climb out of the system of endemic poverty in the country. Once again, I made a whole video on this, the geopolitics of bananas in Central America.

But the fact is that the US decided that they had to defend the banana companies, or else more communist reforms would spread. So the US president and secretary of state ordered an overthrow, and the CIA got right to work. The CIA hand selects a leader that they want to be in power, and then they start giving equipment and training to a bunch of Guatemalan exiles and private soldiers.

They set up a secret operation base on the outskirts of Miami. They start delivering weapons to the Panama Canal. But like the other coups, it can't just all be about weapons. They gotta own the information space. So they create a radio station that sounds like it's a local Guatemalan radio station, but really it's being operated out of a small town in Florida, and they start publishing fake news about an uprising, unrest, a rebellion.

And then at the same time, the fighters that the CIA had trained and armed invades Guatemala. Pilots start dropping bombs on fuel tanks and military posts and airports. But they weren't starting a full on war. They weren't trying to cause real damage. They wanted it to feel like a domestic uprising, like a war was on the horizon, to freak people out, and for many, it totally worked.

They thought that this was a real uprising and had no idea that the CIA was behind it all. But the president knew what was up. He had messed with the USA, and now he's hearing about it. Military leaders in his circle are feeling the pressure from the big bully from the north, and they turn on him, and he eventually surrenders.

On his way out, the president addresses his people, makes it very clear that, quote, "The United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us." And just like that, one president is out, and the handpicked CIA option is in. This new regime is brutal and goes on to do horrible things, detaining people they thought were communists, killing prisoners, breaking up labor unions, and in the process, restoring the banana company's land and ensuring that they maintained their hold on this economy.

This kicks off an era in Guatemala of more political assassinations and instability, something that still plagues the country today. And yet to this day, there is no evidence that the Soviets were ever slightly interested in Guatemala. Communism was once again the excuse, but really this was about securing American business interests, tearing a country apart for bananas.

Bananas taste the best and are the best for you

okay, now let's go to this little island in 1983. It's communism again, and the US sends 2,000 troops to invade this small remote island and remove their communist leader. They didn't really know much about this small island, and they literally had to use tourism maps to plan their invasion. Anyway, American forces move in, overwhelm the Grenadian fighters, who happen to be joined by their Cuban allies.

The government collapses, and the US-friendly leader comes to power

Okay, back down to Central America. It's 1989 and we're here in Panama, where the US has control of a very important canal. And luckily, the Panamanian dictator has been very friendly to American interests. But the US starts losing confidence in this guy, wondering if he's really the best choice, ensuring the US maintain easy access to their vital canal.

Oh, and it didn't help that this guy was indicted in Florida on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. We gotta get him out. But the straw that broke the camel's back for this guy was when Panamanian troops killed an unarmed American soldier in Panama City. The US is done with this guy, so they invade Panama with 27,000 troops.

Panama's military is crushed, and the dictator is eventually arrested and sentenced to 40 years in prison, and the US ensures access to its canal after all.

In 1996, amid growing criticism, the Pentagon released some of the aforementioned and previously classified training manuals used at the School of the Americas. These manuals shocked the public and human rights advocates alike. They explicitly advocated coercive interrogation techniques, including torture, kidnapping, blackmail, execution, and false imprisonment.

One manual titled Handling Sources chillingly detailed how to neutralize targets, a thinly veiled euphemism for assassination. Far from being an isolated incident, these manuals formed the very foundation of the school's ideological training from the 1960s onward. The impact of these teachings became tragically evident throughout the continent.

SOA graduates returned home, not merely prepared to fight guerrillas, but indoctrinated with an aggressive worldview that saw any form of leftist political activity as inherently subversive and thus justifiable to suppress by any means necessary. And it should come as little surprise then that the results were catastrophic.

Civilian populations found themselves caught between brutal insurgencies and even more brutal military responses. Torture, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances became commonplace in countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina, and Chile, carried out by militaries heavily staffed and often commanded by School of the Americas alumni.

And the manuals and teachings weren't aberrations. They were central components of the school's strategy to confront communism through psychological and physical dominance. This strategy would yield horrifying consequences, creating cycles of violence and repression that has scarred Latin America for generations.

Perhaps nowhere was this clearer than in El Salvador. Throughout the 1980s, a brutal civil war consumed the country, fueled by deep inequalities and political repression. The Salvadoran military, heavily supported by the United States, unleashed unprecedented violence against civilians, accusing entire communities of sympathizing with leftist guerrillas.

One infamous incident occurred in December 1981 in the village of El Mozote. Members of the elite Atlacatl Battalion systematically executed over 900 villagers, men, women, and children. The soldiers slaughtered families, burned homes, and left the village a charred ruin. Investigations later revealed that officers who commanded this battalion had trained at the School of the Americas.

The violence continued. In 1989, as we recounted at the start of this episode, Salvadoran soldiers stormed the campus of the University of Central America in San Salvador, brutally murdering six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter. The priests had advocated for peace and social justice, ideas considered dangerous threats by the military regime.

19 of the soldiers involved, including the commander who ordered the killings, were School of the Americas graduates Earlier in 1980, four American church women, three nuns, and one lay missionary were abducted, raped, and murdered by Salvadoran national guardsmen. Investigations there revealed two of the three soldiers implicated had also attended the School of the Americas.

And it wasn't just El Salvador. In Guatemala, brutal regimes employed similar tactics throughout their civil war. Death squads targeted indigenous communities, activists, union leaders, and clergy, anyone deemed suspicious or oppositional. Many officers involved in organizing these campaigns of terror were alumni of, yes, you guessed it, the School of the Americas, applying precisely the counterinsurgency methods taught at the institution.

And let's be clear, it wasn't just Latin American nationals who suffered. The various regime's brutality also struck American citizens. Chilean forces abducted and executed American journalist Charles Horman during the military coup of 1973, an event later portrayed in the film Missing. Chilean officers who oversaw the coup, including Augusto Pinochet's security personnel, had direct ties to the School of the Americas.

The sheer scale of violence carried out by SOA graduates is staggering. Human rights organizations estimate tens of thousands died at the hands of regimes dominated by the school's alumni. Across Latin America, countless families continue to search for disappeared loved ones, communities remain haunted by trauma, and societies still struggle with the deep wounds left by years of state violence.

In the United States, awareness of these atrocities eventually grew, finally sparking significant backlash. Critics asked how a training program ostensibly designed to uphold democracy and human rights could instead foster widespread repression and violence. In 1984, under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty, Panama requested the removal of the school from its territory.

The growing controversy surrounding the institution played a crucial role in Panama's insistence on its departure. But rather than closing down entirely, the school was relocated to Fort Benning in Georgia, a US Army installation ostensibly away from both the public eye and perceived political pressure in Latin America.

This move, however, did little to silence critics. In fact, relocating to US soil only heightened domestic scrutiny, bringing the controversy closer to home. Human rights activists began staging increasingly large and visible protests, including annual vigils and demonstrations at Fort Benning. At the forefront of these actions was Father Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest and outspoken critic of US foreign policy in Latin America, who founded the watchdog group SOA Watch.

SOA Watch became a central voice in a broader grassroots movement demanding accountability and transparency from the US government. Year after year, thousands gathered outside Fort Benning's gates, reading the names of victims, carrying crosses, and bearing witness to the atrocities committed by SOA alumni.

These protests drew national and international attention, eventually resonating in the halls of Congress By the late 1990s, the campaign to shutter the school gained unprecedented momentum. In 1996, following intense pressure, the Pentagon was forced to publicly release the notorious torture manuals, confirming long-held suspicions about the nature of training provided.

These documents, detailing tactics explicitly violating international law, provided undeniable proof of institutional complicity in human rights abuses. In 1999, a bipartisan group of lawmakers took their demands directly to President Bill Clinton, stating plainly in a public letter, "Graduates of the school have gone on to commit some of the worst human rights violations in the history of this hemisphere."

They argued that continuing to operate the institution would only repeat past mistakes, perpetuating violence instead of promoting peace and democracy. Though President Clinton did not personally close the school, congressional action became increasingly inevitable. By 2000, public outcry reached a crescendo, and Congress finally passed legislation formally closing the School of the Americas.

However, the victory was short-lived and largely symbolic. Just one year later, in January 2001, the School of the Americas reopened under a new name, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC. Advocates claimed that this new incarnation represented genuine reform, emphasizing human rights education, civilian oversight, and democratic governance in its training.

Critics, however, remained deeply skeptical. Father Bourgeois said, "The new institute is no different from the SOA it replaces. It is a combat school. The infantrymen and women of Latin America come to learn how to fight." Human rights groups argued that the underlying culture, instructors, and operational goals had not fundamentally changed.

The new institution inherited the same controversial legacy, training Latin American soldiers who continued to be implicated in serious abuses and political repression. In truth, the transformation from SOA to WHINSEC was less a genuine reform than a strategic rebranding, an attempt to distance the US government from a deeply troubled past without genuinely confronting the implications of decades of Cold War policy.

And the controversy surrounding the School of the Americas would not fade away. Its legacy was too profound, the scars it left too deep. To truly understand the continuing impact of this controversial institution, we really need to explore how, despite official assurances, its shadow extends well into the 21st century.

In 2009, a military coup in Honduras ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. The leader of the coup, General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, was a two-time graduate of the School of the Americas. This event dramatically highlighted ongoing concerns. Despite supposed reforms, WHINSEC alumni still appeared prominently in anti-democratic actions.

Latin American nations, increasingly wary of overall US influence as well as the legacy of violence tied to the school, started withdrawing their participation. Countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Costa Rica ceased sending troops to WHINSEC. These withdrawals were powerful symbols of regional distrust and underscored lingering resentment from decades of US intervention.

Meanwhile, human rights advocates continued their protests. Annual demonstrations outside Fort Benning persisted, maintaining steady pressure and scrutiny on the institution. Congressional opponents regularly introduced bills to defund or close WHINSEC, though these efforts never fully succeeded. Today, WHINSEC remains a contested symbol, celebrated by some as a genuine reform and denounced by others as merely cosmetic changes.

The debate continues, echoing unresolved questions about the ethical implications of military training programs abroad and difficult truths about intervention, ideology, and ethics. The Cold War is over, but its shadows remain long and dark. Institutions like the School of the Americas remind us that ideas matter, that education matters, and that what nations choose to teach can have consequences that echo through generations.

When US forces launched a military operation in Venezuela and captured Nicolas Maduro earlier this month, a lot of the talk was about the US action, not how Venezuela got to this point. Here's what often gets missed. Venezuela's collapse didn't start with bombs or raids. It began years earlier with corruption, favoritism, and a government that rewarded loyalty and punished dissent.

I saw that firsthand when I reported in Venezuela 10 years ago, documenting how it had all gotten so bad it even collapsed their food system. Given what's happening in the United States under the Trump administration, it's worth reflecting on Venezuela's downfall under the rule of an authoritarian leader.

When Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, Venezuelans were looking for a change. Chronic poverty and high inflation plagued the once prosperous country. By the time I visited in 2016, after more than 15 years of an authoritarian rule, the country was in shambles and people were going hungry amidst widespread food shortages.

People like Yves Marquez waited in line for days to get something to eat. 

A

once rich and prosperous country had collapsed under authoritarian rule. President Chavez and his chosen successor, Nicolas Maduro, had sidelined their own economic experts and made decisions based on loyalty and self-interest, and eventually that corruption caught up with the country.

Grocery store shelves were empty. Everyday folks had to punch new holes in their belts because they were rapidly losing weight.

Here's how insider dealing destroyed their food

system. Officials began using oil money to pay politically connected people to import food. It made the politically connected importers rich. But because of the government subsidies, imported corn became cheaper than corn grown in Venezuela. The local farmers, they couldn't compete. Many of them went broke and production plummeted.

Then in 2015, oil prices collapsed, cutting off the government's main source of revenue. So the country couldn't afford to continue subsidizing all those corrupt food importers. And with many local farmers already out of business, grocery store shelves went bare. The daily search for food took an emotional toll on people, especially those caring for children.

Venezuela's attorney general, Luisa Ortega, accused Maduro and his stepson of benefiting off corrupt food imports. The US Treasury later concluded she was right. How did the Venezuelan government handle those accusations? It had charges filed against her and she was removed from her post. The United States and Venezuela are vastly different in many ways, but those stories stick with me as a cautionary tale for Americans.

For instance, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has refused to do what President Trump wants. The Trump administration then launched a federal investigation against him. Powell addressed it directly. 

This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions, or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.

There have been international headlines about Trump, his family, and his allies financially benefiting from his public office. Some US farmers say they too are paying the price for Trump's agenda, and many worry they could go bankrupt unless things improve. Meanwhile, Trump gave a $20 billion loan to Argentina, one of his political allies.

It's just absolutely mind-boggling that we're sending 20 billion to South America to prop up a competitor essentially. 

Now Vice President JD Vance says armed federal agents in Minnesota have absolute immunity. I saw the same support in Venezuela for its armed government enforcers who were also crushing protests.

I found a secret government food warehouse where Venezuela's police and military were given exclusive access to food stockpiles. Through darkly tinted windows, we filmed them wheeling out more scarce groceries than I had seen during my entire two weeks in the country.

seven million people have fled Venezuela's corrupt authoritarian regime since I was there. That's seven million stories about the danger of authoritarianism, each one a lesson for those who are listening.

That's going to be it for today.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

Democracy Now!

Bianca Graulau

FRANCE 24 English

Patrick Boyle

Al Jazeera English

BBC News

Global Dispatches

35 West

The PBS NewsHour

TRT World

Johnny Harris

The Cold War

and Mother Jones

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Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

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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.

Air Date: 8-8-2026

Today we examine the mass deportation machine that's been intentionally designed to inflict suffering, from the conditions inside immigration jails to the reckless actions of ICE agents, and the systematic dismantling of accountability. All of this in service of a blatant demographic engineering program to forcibly Whiten the country.

Full Show Notes

 

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

Today we examine the mass deportation machine that's been intentionally designed to inflict suffering, from the conditions inside immigration jails to the reckless actions of ICE agents, and the systematic dismantling of accountability. All of this in service of a blatant demographic engineering program to forcibly Whiten the country.

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

CounterSpin

The Intercept Briefing

Fresh Air

Reveal

and The Majority Report

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 3 sections;

Section A, Inevitable Brutality

Section B, Designed to Be Unbearable

And Section C, The World Watches & The People Fight Back

And now, on to the show.

in the wake of Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero's killing by ICE in Maine, itself in the wake of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo's killing by ICE in Texas, you put out a statement that did not call vaguely for reforms to ICE, as I saw some headlines referring to public outrage.

What was the statement you put out actually saying? 

Yeah. 

The statement that we put out was saying that we need ICE out of our streets, that ICE should not be engaging in any removal efforts that they're currently engaged in. And, that entails traffic stops, which were temporarily paused, but that also entails, these deportation removal orders, all these warrants that are being served on foot in these different communities and are also leading to violence and death.

The statement says it's clear that the only way to prevent ICE from killing us in the streets is to remove ICE from the streets. that's a long way stronger than we need to know what they're up to, they need to sometimes testify about things. this is not that. 

Yes, I would agree that we are, we're taking it a step further than we need body-worn cameras and, we need more oversight.

Those things are important too, and they may be more easily attained potentially, although I think we're seeing that even those kind of minimum restrictions on ICE's conduct are being rejected. so we should ask for, what we think is actually gonna be the biggest deterrent to ICE violence, and we do think that is removing them from street operations.

let me ask you about this particular thing that you also mentioned that I think is being lifted up for people, this shooting into cars business. this seems to be a primary way if you're making these street stops. This is becoming a primary way that ICE ends up harming or killing people.

It's a weird thing, isn't it, to be shooting into vehicles? 

Absolutely. And I would say that's, not something that's been accepted e- even by kind of the most pro-force, ardent members of the law enforcement community for over a decade now. There's been a consensus in the law enforcement community that shooting into vehicles, fleeing vehicles, charging vehicles, whatever it may be, is just so highly dangerous that there are few, if any, situations that justify it.

Not only dangerous to the person who's driving the vehicle, but bystanders, passengers, and law enforcement themselves. And so the universally accepted or national standard practices around shooting into vehicles is that there are very few situations where it is justified and where policy should permit it.

most stories that I have seen note or any way suggest that the killing of Guerrero, of Araujo, while they're horrific, are not outliers, that they fit in a broader pattern of violence, recklessness, and racism, from ICE. In your recent conversation with Sonali Kolhatkar on Rising Up, I understood you to suggest that we hold an even bigger picture about policing in this country and specifically that we'd not set up a framing that says ICE bad, regular police good, I, I know you're not saying ICE violence isn't worth the attention it gets, but what are you getting at there? 

Yeah. I think that there's been a real, I think, shift, I'm thinking particularly amongst lawmakers who are, identified Democrats who are on the left, who have really spoke up about the importance of curtailing ICE violence right now, and I think that's o- obviously incredibly important.

but it's a bit myopic in terms of, they're not making those same demands for local law enforcement that are, carrying out similar types of uses of force, similar types of violence and harm against other communities, against their constituents who are, Black Americans, for instance.

And so I think, it's, it needs to be a both/and. This can't be, just a focus on ICE because ICE, they're cops. They are doing what cops do, usually against people who are only suspected of breaking civil laws. but there's a lot of victims, as of local law enforcement violence who, have not committed any crimes or are not even suspected of committing crimes.

And so I think this is very important that we don't reframe some of the violence that ICE has undertaken as being exclusive or specific to federal law enforcement agents because we know three people die as a result of police violence every single day, and those are, largely local police officers that are committing those uses of force.

And it's just useful, just as we can't connect everything to Trump, when particular policies predated Trump, And if we think if there's no more Trump, all of this is gonna disappear, then we've got something fundamentally wrong. It's important to pull out the tactics, the actual behaviors that are problematic, and to disconnect them from a particular agency even, or a particular politician certainly, yeah.

Absolutely. 

the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, and I can't remember where I saw this, but they said in a statement, quote, "We are always evaluating our procedures to keep our officers safe and criminals off our streets. We will not disclose or discuss law enforcement tactics," close quote.

And I have to ask, what if we had a press corps that would say, "You won't disclose or discuss law enforcement tactics?" wait, wait. Everything comes to a halt. I often balk at transparency as itself a goal. we wanna stop actions, not just, have a peek at them.

But when an agency straight up says, "Oh, we're gonna, not even gonna talk about how we make any of these decisions," that is a, a clanging warning bell to me. 

Yes, I would agree. And, I think, generally we're of the same mind at the National Police Accountability Project that we shouldn't be advocating for transparency's sake.

But transparency is a essential prerequisite for accountability, for reform, for even things like abolition. If we don't understand systems, we really can't improve them. We can't know if they were at issue and causing harm. it really is step one for change, whatever you want that change to look like.

Sure. 

And so at the very least, this is information we should have, and I just did a long spiel about how ICE are just cops, and this is something that we're seeing everywhere. But I would say the way that the DHS and, the agency is functioning right now is really different from what, local law enforcement agencies would even try to get away with.

That lack of transparency around policies themselves, around practices, what is an acceptable practice and what is an acceptable tactic under what circumstances is something that y-y-you wouldn't expect a chief of police or a sheriff to not disclose if asked about it. 

Absolutely. y- the sunshine is necessary, as you say, as a first step.

And, this kind of follows along, but I do wonder, and I wonder this sincerely, how police at every level can lie and lie. and and then bystander video, as more and more is often the case, says no, what their account was absolutely false, and yet they're still treated as reliable sources, not just by news media, but by other institutions.

It just seems to me it's hard to think of other entities that can be caught in lies again and again, and yet each time they come up There's an assumption that they're telling the truth. 

Yeah. I think that is something that's very frustrating in our work at the National Police Accountability Project because you're right, there's data, there's anecdotal examples, about the fact that, law enforcement officers and the agencies that are often protecting them or supporting them, have a history of dishonesty or that they're not more honest than any other witness or not more credible than any other public institution.

And I do think one of the things that is becoming more and more common, post-2020 is that the public, I think, is less willing to accept a police narrative at its face. and that's, doubly for DHS and, what's coming out of the Trump administration about what's happening in these use of force incidents and other things.

And so I would say that I think that even though there are some media sources printing the police press release in full detail and, some institutions saying, this is what the police said," the public, has less and less confidence in police. And I don't know the current rates, but I think in 2021, the last time there was a poll, less than 50% of all Americans said that they trusted the police or felt the police were trustworthy.

And so it'll be interesting to see what current data is and how that data stacks up against, a specific look at confidence in federal law enforcement agencies. 

Within the span of six days, federal immigration agents shot and killed two people, fifty-two-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, and twenty-five-year-old Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero in Maine.

That brings the total number of people fatally shot by immigration agents in Trump's second term to at least 11. Two more people died in connection with ICE within the last month. A third man, identified this week as a Mexican man on vacation in the US, was struck by a truck after fleeing an encounter in Florida.

A fourth man died in custody in Georgia after his family says he was denied medicine, reported by our former colleague Jose Olivares at The Guardian. Their deaths are not isolated incidents. A new analysis from the ACLU that documented 1,200 ICE incidents last year across eight states finds a pattern of federal immigration enforcement that consistently flouts civil liberties.

Noreen, one of the report's findings that struck me the most was the emphasis on these most recent killings and deaths not being an aberration, but part of a broader systematic pattern, and that the way the US government is conducting immigration enforcement is moving us further away from a liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism.

Can you tell us more about that finding and others from the ACLU report? 

Again and again, ICE and immigration agents that work for ICE are resorting to violence. They are using the threat of violence and actual physical violence in their interactions with people, not because they are facing a specific threat, but just as a default tool, as a way to compel, immediate obedience, as though that is the main tactic they have in understanding how they engage with the public.

And what we saw was that they weren't doing so in a professional way. It wasn't calibrated. It wasn't specific as though they were following a carefully designed protocol. let me give you an example. There was a situation not far from where I live in Maryland, in Hyattsville, Maryland, where a man is pulled from his car.

He is in the traffic intersection being held down. He's being pinned down by the neck by an ICE agent, and that agent fumbles his gun. His gun falls while he's doing this. He grabs the gun, picks it back up, and points it at the crowd that has gathered to watch this. A second agent then moves in on the crown- crowd with his weapon raised as well.

And so you're seeing them act as careless as they are reckless And that is really dangerous because the other thing we found in the report was that 

ICE is now on our streets, at our grocery stores, at our parking lots, even at school playgrounds. 

And that presence there in, masks, in street clothes, with that kind of aggression is changing the nature of daily life in this country when you have to be afraid that when your 15-year, 15-year-old is waiting for the bus, they are brown, that they may be accosted by a masked agent, that they may be questioned about their citizenship.

I've heard about people wearing their identification around their necks because they're so afraid. That is a change in our country, and it's a change for the worse. 

I wanna back up a little here and just remind people of the arc Of this mass deportation project from the beginning of Trump's second term, al- although, it was a feature of his previous administration.

This attack has reached an unprecedented scale since 2025 when Trump entered office for the second time. We saw, as you mentioned, Noreen, masked and uni- identified ICE agents descend on our cities, attacking pro-Palestine students. We saw, as the report notes, the president send the military to cities run by his political opponents, first deploying the National Guard to California to suppress anti-ICE protests, where we also saw a surge of mass federal agents targeting Latinos and grabbing people off the streets at gas stations, grocery stores, churches, and so on.

We started the year with immigration agents flooding Minneapolis and killing two protesters and shooting another who survived. Although the killings of those protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, really drew national attention to this issue in a new way, you all documented just how widespread this kind of action from immigration agents has been over the past year.

And while we've covered a lot of that at The Intercept, namely the targeting of pro-Palestine students by ICE, ICE has been doing this kind of thing in ordinary neighborhoods across the country. 52 people have also died in ICE custody since Trump reentered the White House, putting the mortality rate of deaths in ICE custody at its highest level in over a decade, more than doubling that rate since he started his second term.

That's according to a new report from Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch. Naina, can you talk a little bit about why you think January was a turning point in terms of people paying attention to this? 

Sure. I'll just start by saying, the Trump administration right now may have moved away from the more theatrical displays of force that characterized those earlier operations in places like Minneapolis and Chicago.

But just as you say, the basic objective has not changed, and that is a fixation on increasing detention and deportation simply for the sake of numbers. This is an administration that has made clear that sheer volume is their goal. What we saw in January was, a lot of Americans waking up to the fact that this is the first time in US history that we are seeing the immigration system taken to its extreme, and sometimes beyond its legal limits, within American communities, against long-standing immigrant neighbors and those that stand up for those neighbors.

In other words, while in the past we have had harsh or punitive Or restrictive immigration policies at our border, this is the immigration enforcement system used to the extreme within the interior of the United States in our communities. And- ... folks seeing that in their streets, this kind of indiscriminate enforcement driven by sheer quotas and numbers, is a wake-up call.

And that, that includes for folks who voted in support of this president and mass deportation. We've heard stories reported early on of communities in places like Missouri that voted in large numbers for the president, who are suddenly out on the streets calling for the return of their favorite local business owner and soccer mom who was swept away by arrest and detention.

In other words, a lot of the protests and pushback we've seen is both because of the extreme nature of these agenda, but also who it's targeting, and those are longstanding members of our communities who pose absolutely no public safety threat. And I think we're seeing a lot more Americans than ever before say, "Wait a minute.

Why do the laws subject these people to this kind of extreme response? That doesn't make sense." 

This is for both of you. I wanna talk about the people who have been dying in ICE custody, which often does not get as much attention as the shootings. What is happening to people when they enter these facilities?

Look, the immigration detention facility had a record of endemic abuse long before the Trump administration, and now what we're seeing is the administration sweeping in, again, people who largely pose no public safety threat, who have no prior criminal convictions, who are being put into a system that no longer records where they are in the system so that family members and lawyers are unable to locate or find their loved ones.

we're talking about a system where now under the Trump administration, the vast majority of people locked up in these inhumane facilities don't even have a right to a court hearing in the immigration system to make a case for their release. The administration is rapidly expanding the use of mandatory detention so that people who would have a good case for release don't get to make that, and that means that then folks are stuck inside.

And sometimes when US citizens or folks with lawful status get swept into these detention facilities, it can take weeks before they're able to show that they shouldn't even be there because they don't have access to that basic kind of due process. And then finally, again, the, the endemic abusive conditions of this system predate the Trump administration, but this administration has taken that to an all-new extreme.

And at this point, we're seeing an average of one death every eight days out of the immigration detention facilities, across the country, and the kinds of conditions we're hearing about include starvation, not just medical neglect, but intentional medical abuse, people not being able to receive life-saving medical treatments, pregnant women, not being given the support they need.

this is extreme inhumanity, and that is what folks are facing when they go inside. And it's a lot harder to shine a light on those abuses, because we don't have viral video footage like we do when we see some of these shootings and killings in our streets. 

If you've ever been to one of these detention facilities, you get a sense just of the geography that's at play.

The geography of a detention facility is that sometimes you're driving hours from the nearest city. These are in the woods. They are in areas that no one is supposed to be able to reach. The Trump administration has a design. They have a plan. They want to put people in detention sites that are remote, where lawyers have a harder time getting access, where journalists are not gonna visit, and they don't want people to be knocking on the doors and finding out what's going on inside.

They don't want congressional staff and members of Congress to be there either because what's happening inside is truly frightening. It is straight out of the most dystopian novel, which is that you go inside these detention facilities, and you have no ability to reach back out into the world and get that lawyer to help you navigate the system or even talk to an ICE officer and say, "I have no idea what's gonna happen to me."

And the most tragic cases are the ones where people need something as basic as their heart medication, and without it, they will die, and they can't get answers. They can't get seen by a doctor. There is just no way to reach out to people to say, "This is happening to me." That is why we're seeing the record number of deaths in ICE detention because once you go in, you are stuck there in the most nightmarish kind of way.

We hear from people, not as much as we would if people actually had working phones in all these detention facilities. The ACLU just published a report with Human Rights Watch about Camp Montana, the largest detention facility that's on a military base. The conditions there are appalling. It really just strikes at your conscience to think that people are living this kind of nightmarish condition where they don't think they're ever gonna make it back out of these facilities, and that, again, is what the Trump administration wants to do.

There was an ICE official who last year said, "We're gonna create the Amazon Prime of deportations." They want to treat people like they are not human beings, and that is partly why they put them as, in these detention sites. It's to be able to get them out of public view quickly and deported quickly. That is just anathema to our Constitution, our entire system.

under our laws, detention is not supposed to be used as widely as it is being used. It's meant to effectuate a final order of removal. That doesn't mean that it's meant to be used as punishment or to deter people from coming here or to terrorize people into self-deporting, but we know that's the Trump administration's aim.

At this point, there are more than sixty thousand people being held in ICE detention centers across the country.

a few months ago, it was as high as seventy thousand. to give listeners a sense just of an, an immediate context for that, when Trump first took office in January of twenty twenty-five, that detention population was around thirty-nine thousand. So it's exploded, in the last year and a half. and it's, coincided with, unsurprisingly, a whole host of horrors that have been reported from inside these detention centers and all kinds of statistics that, that demonstrate just how dangerous the conditions inside have become, the most obvious of which is that deaths in ICE detention are way up.

There have been fifty-two since Trump took office a second time. the comparable numbers that we've seen are things that haven't ha- you know, haven't emerged in decades. and then when you look even more specifically at those deaths, a significant number of them are suicides, to give you a sense, of course, of just how utterly desperate and horrified people are inside detention.

You were able to get, a lens into this, detention center in El Paso, the largest so far, through, some of those who have spent time in there. And your piece opens with a man named Ray, who is originally from Cuba. Tell us about him. Who is he, and why had he been checking in with ICE for years as a condition of staying in this country?

Yeah. Ray came to the United States in 1994, along with 30,000 other Cubans who fled the country that year alone and came on makeshift rafts. It was known as the, the rafters crisis. and he spent, when he was first interdicted by the US Coast Guard, in 1994, he spent about 11 months, on the US Naval base, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, before he was eventually released to live with his father, who had emigrated to the United States in 1980.

His father lived in El Paso, and the conditions there with his father grew tense. He had arrived with his half-brother, who wasn't his father's biological son. There was tension between the two of them, and eventually Ray and his brother leave his father's house, live in a church in El Paso for a very brief period, then relocate to Austin.

And before long, Ray finds himself back in Miami, where a, a number of people he knew from Havana had begun to start an American life for themselves. and for those years, you're talking about someone who, in, in Ray's case, is in his early 20s, has been overwhelmed by everything that's happened to him.

He got into trouble, and eventually got arrested, for his involvement in a robbery, served a five-year prison term in Florida, and then was released. And after his release, because the Cuban government didn't have any sort of relationship with the United States, it, it didn't accept, Cuban immigrants whom the United States would've wanted maybe to deport.

And as a result, he was authorized to continue to live in the United States on the condition that eventually he start to check in with a local ICE office as part of a, a program that ICE had, which essentially recognized that it was impossible for ICE, to detain and deport everyone who might be in some sort of complicated standing with immigration law.

And so for years, i- including after he relocated to El Paso in 2014, he would every several months check in with his local ICE officer, and, more or less live an ordinary life. And I should say that, for years, e- even before the second Trump administration comes into office, Ray's friends would always give him a hard time and say, "You are the most naive person on the planet- to think that, you just keep checking in and nothing's gonna happen, they're never gonna try to arrest you. And he was always really principled in his response to them. He said, "Look, we made mistakes in our past, and the only way to outrun those mistakes is to try to do things the right way."

And so that was what was happening in his life when, in 2016, he gets married to someone who he meets in El Paso. that woman had then a one-year-old son who Ray adopts as his own. he and the son become very close. and they have a life together as a family until October of 2025, when at one of these routine check-ins that he'd been doing for decades at this point, he gets detained and from there gets sent to Camp East Montana.

and that's really where the nightmare begins for him. 

So okay, so Ray is detained. he's in, this, this, tent city almost, at Fort Bliss, and he is immediately alarmed at what he saw. this is a man, as you said, had been at Guantanamo after, after fleeing Cuba, so he has seen, the inside of one of these places.

What did he see in those first hours that really worried him? 

Yeah, he's a really-- he has a really interesting perspective on all of this because, both because of the experience he had at Guantanamo and because of the experience he had in federal prison. and so he's used to a, a general sense of order.

this is a guy who's a survivor. This is a guy who's tough, who's been through a lot. he's not expecting to be treated in a, an overly sensitive way, but he's expecting there to be s- a certain baseline sense of order and regulation to the experience in detention, and that from the very start is clearly not the case at Camp Peace Montana.

And so it immediately sets off kind of an alarm in his head that there's something off here. So f- so for instance, he arrives there, he spends his first night with twenty other guys sleeping essentially on the floor of what is a kind of de facto holding cell before they're then transferred to these individual tents.

Each tent has maybe a dozen or so units in it. and, the first thing he says to the guards when he's taken into custody is, "Listen, I've got, I've got a medical condition. I've got diabetes, I've got high blood pressure. I was recently hospitalized, a couple of months before in New Mexico.

I had sepsis. doctors had to insert a catheter. my health s- situation is very delicate, and all I ask is that you check in with my wife, who has access to my medication at home." And the first thing they said to him in response to that v- very straightforward expression of concern about his own medical situation was, "Y- yeah, we're not gonna do that."

and so he's already beginning to become uneasy. And then, over the next couple of weeks, not only is he systematically denied his medication, even as he starts to feel increasingly sick, but he also sees other people in his tent being mistreated. Someone, for example, who comes in a wheelchair who can't sit in a top-- who can't r- make it to a top bunk, but at the time that this man comes wheeling in, doesn't, the, the, the, the beds are all occu-- all the bottom bunks are occupied, and someone just throws him a mattress, and the guy sleeps on the floor because the guards don't bother to try to, improve the situation.

Ray is seeing all of this stuff and is, is most alarmed by the level of chaos. and that I think, above all for him, given his experience, was I think the, the indicator that something here was awry. 

Abnormal, but would he go so far to say that the conditions were inhumane? 

we haven't even spoken about the conditions themselves, which, yes, I think objectively speaking are inhumane.

By the time Ray gets there, it's October of twenty twenty-five. It should be said about the facility before Ray gets there that a, a large number of detainees who were held at Camp East Montana were being held there w-while construction was going on at the facility itself. And in August, September, there are people-- and we have, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, which took a bunch of declarations early on, we have testimony from detainees who describe essentially there being dust coming into the tents, people coughing, people not being able to breathe, people getting sick, the water working sporadically, toilet and sewage water leaking into the living area.

the, the toilets and the eating and sleeping area are all in a small confined space inside these tents. And leaks from the bathroom are seeping into where detainees are eating and sleeping. in the early days, the outside recreation area isn't set up yet, so people aren't allowed outside at all.

For 

weeks. there's-- For, for weeks on end. the, the phone booths or visitation booths where people are supposed to be able to meet with lawyers and family members aren't set up, and so people are completely cut off from the outside world. The tablets that, that detainees are meant to use to communicate with lawyers and family members don't work.

So people are essentially being held incommunicado in conditions that are, increasingly alarming. medical care, as a general matter, doesn't exist. one after another person described to me essentially that anytime you had any sort of physical problem, if you complained loudly about it, they'd give you Advil, but that was the extent of it.

No one got seen by a doctor. People with medical conditions who needed medication, with chronic conditions were essentially ignored. there weren't, there w- there was infrequent cleaning of the tents themselves, and so a lot of the detainees had to do it themselves, sometimes with their own clothes.

So there's testimony from detainees who are wiping up, sort of fetid bathroom water with their own underwear. every manner of horror. and, we can get into this, but essentially These, these problems evolve or devolve, depending on how you look at it, over the course of several months.

By the time Ray gets there in October, four of the five tents at Camp East Montana have been built. and so there's still construction going on, but it's not as notable for him, say, as it was for someone who arrived there in August when it essentially was an open construction site. 

Right. Okay.

yeah, we're going to get into that, but I'm just thinking everything that you described, this, this isolation, this medical neglect, it really lands on really your argument in, of this entire piece that these conditions aren't incidental because a former senior ICE official told you that the government's goal is to make detention look and feel so bad that people leave.

It sounds like suffering is the strategy. 

I think that's exactly right, and I think that's been the case all acro- a- all across the country and it's actually had a demonstrable effect on the rate at which people abandon cases. a- and this is well beyond, say, Camp East Montana, although it's obviously especially true in Camp East Montana.

there was a, a woman who, whom we'll, I'm sure we'll talk about who, named Lydia, who was also detained at Camp East Montana, who basically described that half of the women in her unit eventually agreed to their own deportation because they just couldn't stand the conditions anymore.

and that, of course, is true all across the country and, different groups who-- Human Rights Watch has a, a, an excellent report documenting the rates at which people in the New York tri-state area, for instance, have abandoned their legal cases, because the conditions where they're being held are so inhumane.

but that's very much the idea. and one of the interesting kind of trends that you hear in talking to people who've been held in ICE detention during the current administration is for all of the neglect, for all of the general mistreatment, and for the general absence of, ICE officers on the scene...

for example, at Camp East Montana, one of the strangest realities of being there is you're actually interacting most commonly with independent contractors who have different jobs because there are all these subcontractors providing different services at the facility. So actually speaking to someone who is an ICE official who can give you information about your case is difficult.

But the trend is that when those officials appear, they appear to do one thing. It's to say to people, "Okay, who's ready to leave? Who's ready to end this?" and it's, it's very much part of the- 

The larger- ... 

the design. 

Yeah, of what, of what the administration is doing. 

It's a hot summer day in Lake Worth Beach. Around Lake Avenue, bakery windows fill with fresh pan dulce. Outside the mercado, conversations move easily between English, Spanish, and the indigenous Mayan languages of Guatemala. Pickup trucks loaded with lawn equipment head out for another day of work, all of this just six miles from the president's home, Mar-a-Lago.

Families have been building lives here for decades. Many first arrived fleeing Guatemala's civil war. Then brothers, sisters, cousins, parents followed. Little by little, this stretch of South Florida became one of the country's largest Guatemalan communities. It's home. That's how Elisa Perez sees 

it. This might seem rude, but it's like pura Chapines in, Spanish 'cause I only see, a lot of Guatemalans.

The Perez kids have only ever known Lake Worth. They are mischievous and loving. First, there's Elisa, the laid back responsible one. Then 18-year-old Jessica, who wears her heart on her sleeve. Romeo, who is quiet but quick-witted. And 13-year-old Cynthia, the baby of the family who's always helping whenever she can.

Since their mom has been in detention in Eloy, Arizona, thousands of miles away, phone calls are their lifeline. 

Mami, ...</ Bye, Mommy, love you. 

Bye, 

Mommy, love 

you. Bye, Mom. Bye, Mom. 

Bye, Mommy. Anybody who knows the Perez kids knows that they adore their mother. We ask Elisa what Olga is like. 

Dang. I never really think about, 

'cause that's my mom. if you know her. I don't know. Very loving. everyone loves her, my whole family members. She's very open-minded, too. She's very 21st century. She's up-to-date. She's al- she's always saying, "I'm lit," and throwing up peace signs. 

Olga worked in an organization called the Guatemalan Maya Center.

She was always there. She'd bring homemade meals, and she was a translator. Olga speaks English and Spanish, and she also speaks Mam, an indigenous Mayan language. She interpreted for families at hospitals, schools, and has even helped detectives solve crimes against victims who only spoke Mam. 

It was the fall of 2025 when Elisa's parents were taken into immigration custody.

Her father, Romel Sr., was detained first and sent to Alligator Alcatraz. Olga stepped in to keep the landscaping business going. For a while, the family managed. They worked during the day, called Romel Sr. every chance they got, and tried to hold everything together. Then one morning, two days before Thanksgiving, everything changed again.

We were heading to work, and I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna take I95 'cause it's faster." So we're, like, getting to the next location, and then they stopped us. 

Florida's highways had become a danger zone for undocumented families. The Perez family had talked about the risk. If they were ever stopped, Elisa would hand over only her own ID.

Romeo Jr. would record everything on his phone. They'd gone over the plan again and again. 

I just remember after he had started banging on the window, telling me that I have to put the windows down so my mom and my uncle can give their IDs. And then from there, I blacked out 'cause it was traumatic.

Elisa means that in that moment she couldn't remember what she was supposed to do. Her mother and uncle were being questioned. The officer was talking. 

I remember him joking about Romeo, ha, he doesn't have a proper ID. Maybe I should take him, too." So I was like, "Bro, don't. You're joking about all of this while you're taking my parents.

you already took my dad." I had told him, too. I was like, "You took my dad, and now you're taking my mom." 

For Elisa, the hardest part wasn't watching her mother being taken away. It was going home afterward. The truck was still full of landscaping equipment, and her siblings still needed dinner. The next morning, customers still expected their lawns to be cut.

There was no one else to take over, so Elisa did. For months, Elisa has been the one taking care of everyone else, but there's someone looking after her, Mari Blanco. She's known Elisa since she was a little kid. 

She was five years old, and she was in her after-school program. We still tease her about this because she was just the cutest and smartest little girl.

Today, Mari runs the Guatemalan Maya Center, where Olga worked. As Guatemalan immigrants became targets for deportation, Mari says the center's work changed. Every week, more parents began showing up carrying folders, birth certificates, emergency contacts, power of attorney forms, preparing for the possibility that one day they wouldn't make it home.

Because at this point, it's become almost inevitable in, in our community. We know it's not a matter of if they get separated. It's a matter of when. 

Just before Olga was detained, Mari pushed her to update her power of attorney paperwork. 

We kept delaying it and delaying it, and one day I said, "Olga, we just need to get this done.

we need to get this done." So we only changed that power of attorney a few days before she was taken. 

Elisa had to run the household and the business, and Mari became the person schools called, doctors called, the kids called, their godmother. The kids spent hours at the center after school, hanging around the offices, teasing each other, and pulling the staff into whatever drama came up next.

One afternoon, as a joke, the kids decide to put Elisa on trial. 

I'm HR right now, okay? Now, I'm gonna give you guys a 15-minute window to give me all the complaints, and then I will decide. 

I can vouch for them 'cause they're useless. 

Thinks other siblings are useless. 

You guys always say how we should listen to Elisa.

She works so hard. I do the same thing. I'm expected to clean. 

What's your complaint? 

That why should she get special treatment when I do more than her? 

Okay, no special treatment. 

I win? 

No, I'm noting, I'm noting- I win. Why is that the first thing you say, "I win"? 'Cause I'm, 

really 

tired today. 

Okay. 

No, I'm not saying nothing because I'll get in.

Elisa hasn't paid me. Ch- oh, child labor. 

Child labor. 

Can I get that one? 

Child labor. 

Where's the child labor? I can't find it. For 15 minutes, the room fills with jokes the kind only siblings can make. For a little while, they're exactly what they should be, kids.

In January, the kids prepared for a real trial, Olga's. She had filed a petition to stay in the country and to have her removal to Guatemala canceled. The kids were ready to testify. 

We are staying here in this same room. Yeah. You're all staying here, and yeah, I brought you guys tissues. I 

need- This first hearing is remote, so the kids have gathered at the center.

They're in a room usually used for conference calls. Olga appears by video from detention in Eloy. Friends and coworkers, even a Lake Worth local official, are there to show their support and testify on Olga's behalf. The kids crowd around a single laptop, hoping that by the end of the day, the judge will let their mom stay in the country.

Mari gives them one last pep talk. 

Basically, you're just gonna be honest, okay? it's nothing that you guys don't actually feel. Wait. Okay, babies, good luck. I love you guys. 

Love you. As the kids wait for the hearing to start, I ask Mari how they've been doing. 

Yeah, the kids came over last night, and I gave them all hugs.

And Elisa said, "Oh, I'm dirty." But she was holding back tears the entire time I was talking to her. And I said, "Okay, baby, I just thought you needed a hug." And she's, "No, I'm good." And then later she texted me, and she says, "I w- I'm coming over. I think I could use that hug right now." 

In the courtroom, one case after another gets heard, and then right when it's time for Olga to come forward, the judge says time has run out and calls for a postponement.

The kids fall apart. Elisa storms out the front door of the center. Jessica starts hyperventilating. Cynthia, Romeo, and the staff rush to her side. 

Three, and release. deep. Come on, mama, you got this. You got this. you're doing great. You're doing great. Now try to relax your body. It 

takes 10 minutes for Jessica to calm down.

By then, Cynthia has become quiet, and Romeo distracts himself by playing video games on his phone. Loosen up. I'm here. And eventually, Jessica's able to talk to her father, who calls to check in on the kids from detention.

Why did it have to be you and Mom?

And Mari leaves to find Elisa. 

Elisa's crashing out. Where is she? You saw her leave? she crossed the street? Oh, there she is.

Sorry, baby. I'm sorry

I'm so sorry

It was the first of many times that either the government or the judge would postpone Olga's hearing, and each time, the disappointment cuts deep. The uncertainty weighs on Alisa. Sometimes after work, with whatever energy that the sun hasn't sapped from her, she takes the short drive from her home to Lake Osborne Park One evening, the sun is still out and reflecting off the water.

People are walking their dogs, bikes zip past. It's peaceful. Elisa's been coming here for years. She tells me that she used to come here for exercise. Now she comes for something else. 

Can you show me your crying tree? 

it's just this one, like right here I sit in between the trees or back there. so whenever my siblings stress me out, instead of crashing out at home, I just crash out here, crying.

Or, like, when my mom first got caught and my uncle, I blamed myself a lot, so I would come here, and then I would, pray to God. I was like, "Why? Why you took my mom?" 

Elisa tells me that this is her refuge away from her house and away from the people who need her to be okay. She also tells me that this spot holds so many childhood memories.

I would skateboard. My dad would play soccer at John Prince. my mom used to sell Gatorades at the park where my dad would play soccer, so we were always outside. 

In the last seven months, Elisa has gone from being a daughter to being something more like a single mother. She knows she has to be there for her younger siblings, be witness to the milestones in their lives, because their lives keep moving on.

This is from St. Louis Public Radio, and this just hit me last night, in the heart. I couldn't... Another horrifying story of what ICE What deportations actually mean in practice and how so many people are coming to this country not because of our robust social safety net, 'cause I've got news for you, compared to European countries, it's pathetic.

They can't get access to Social Security, they can't get access to Medicare, if they're not citizens. They can't get access to Medicaid. In fact, immigrants who pay taxes but aren't full citizens with those benefits pay more into our social programs for us. They subsidize our social programs while being in the sub-citizen status, while oftentimes having their wages garnished and stolen from them.

Wage theft is the number one form of theft in this country, and it's by bosses who exploit workers like this oftentimes who have fewer protections. And so yeah, many people don't have economic opportunity in their home countries, in large part due to US intervention to overthrow socialist governments in Latin and South America, et cetera.

But a, a lot of time people are fleeing literal political violence, and gang violence too as a result of those same systemic problems. And this story was just horrifying. "Overland couple shot dead in Guatemala after local ICE stop led to deportations," and this is what happened. "An overland couple who had recently returned to Guatemala was found bound and shot to death in a sugarcane field.

Nixon Giovanni Perez Paz and Glendi Marisol Gonzalez de la Cruz were killed weeks after Gonzalez de la Cruz self-deported to be with her husband, who was deported by the US, Cus- Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year. Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was found crying beside her mother's body in southern Guatemala.

The child shown s- signs of dehydration and was taken to a medical center where she is recovering according to Guatemalan news outlet ABC Stereo. Guatemala's National Civil Police told local news outlets that Perez Paz, 43, and Gonzalez de la Cruz, 25, had been gagged and had their hands and feet bound.

Authorities said both showed signs of physical trauma. Prosecutors are investigating the killings." quotes from their family here. This is about what happened, right below this image, this paragraph. "In the early hours one morning last April, Perez-Paz was driving his 51-year-old brother, Ronaldo Perez-Paz, to their roofing jobs when they were stopped near their home by ICE.

A group of agents exited an un- exited an unmarked vehicle and swarmed them, taking them out of their white work van and later putting them in handcuffs and shackles, before taking them, to the Phelps County Jail, Ronaldo Perez-Paz told St. Louis Public Radio on Monday from his home in Guatemala."

And I just wanna point out the white van, the stoppage on the way to a construction job is exactly what killed Lorenzo down in Houston, that example that I just mentioned, almost to the T, these details, including working with his brother The agents didn't explain much other than telling him there wasn't a warrant out for his arrest, but they were being arrested for entering the country illegally and that they would be deported.

The two men were in the country without legal status, fleeing violence and poverty from the Central American country, said Ronaldo Perez-Paz. An ICE spokesperson confirmed the stop and arrest in Overland when they located and arrested Perez-Paz for being unlawfully pleasant in the- present in the United States.

The spokesperson alleged he was convicted twice for drunk driving in Overland and put on four years probation, but no records appear in the Missouri court database backing the claim. They also pointed to a 2010 open container charge Perez-Paz received in Palm Blee- Beach, Florida, an ordinance violation that prosecutors dropped.

So this is what they're saying is- Was ... the reason to break up this family. So the mother, his wife, by the way, had to self-deport to be reunited with her husband. They're using a false claim about his crimes, about his drunk driving. No records are available. but I guess he drank a beer on vacation in Florida openly.

God forbid. when I was 19, I was arrested for underage d- driving. I should be... I guess I should be thrown in a gulag. 

I got an open container here in New York first week I was ever here. 

d- off you go, back to, Poland, Matt- But we're- ... where you originally came from, 

your family. This is because, there is a disconnect, and, our media, the, and the supporters of, the common sense, harder boardened, have contributed to this misunderstanding, which is that, ICE is going after bad guys.

So they're actually not. They're going after whoever the fuck, comes up on their, Peter Thiel database. And they're... Regardless of if they don't have anything, and when they are arrested, and people have a problem with it, they're like, they make up some horseshit about a DUI. Because they, the people actually don't support this, this just send them back type of thing to the extent that, the...

Y- even some people in the Democratic Party, but most people on the right, suggest that is just common sense. Because actually when you look at it a little bit closer, beyond just, the dumb, we gotta do something about all these crossings," is the brutality. And people are actually, would actually just be okay if the Democrats, when they have the power, pass the fucking amnesty instead of waiting for the Rep- Republicans to, come to terms on this.

There will be probably terror attacks, because guess what? Yeah, we have a bunch of white supremacists in this country that are gonna be upset about demographics. We have an FBI for that. 

A few weeks later, it's time for Olga's final hearing. It's June 4th, and for the 10th time, the kids squeeze in front of a laptop at the center, waiting for the judge to decide whether Olga will be able to stay in the US.

As the minutes tick by, Elisa's anxiety grows. She even tries to come up with more ways to sway the judge's opinion. 

We have an hour, and those, rosary takes 30 minutes. If he sees us as devoted Catholics praying on camera- 

Elisa, you can't just assume that. 

Romeo is skeptical. They decide not to pray. And instead, they just sit there for an outcome they can't control

Four hours pass before the judge begins reading his decision. He starts by working through the legal requirements one by one. First, he finds that Olga testified credibly, and that she's lived in the United States long enough to qualify for relief. He also finds that she's a person of good moral character.

Mari looks over at the kids. They look back at her. No one says anything. With those requirements satisfied, only one question remains: whether forcing Olga to leave would create what's known in immigration law as exceptional and extremely unusual hardship for her children. The judge acknowledges everything they've been through, the panic attacks, the stress and anxiety.

But then, he says the law requires more. The judge says he sympathizes with what the family has endured, but under immigration law, sympathy isn't enough. Olga will be sent back to Guatemala. The kids are devastated. 

They kicked us out. It ended.

The judge didn't order Olga deported. Instead, he granted her voluntary departure, giving her about 30 days to leave the country on her own rather than be forcibly removed. But he didn't specify when Olga would be released to pack up years of friendships, work, and community. Eventually, the kids calmed down enough to drive home

A few weeks pass. Elisa's still heading up the family landscaping business, keeping everything together the best she can. The stress of the court postponements, worrying about their mom's health in detention are over. Only one last uncertainty remains. When will their mother be released from the Eloy Detention Center?

Then on the evening of June 15th, we receive a frantic phone call from Mari. Olga is about to be released onto the streets of Arizona. 

Okay, I'm gonna go pick up stuff from the Perez's kid's house, her phone and, 

I'm gonna stop to get her passport. In half an hour, logistics and plans are all figured out.

They book Olga an Airbnb in the town of Eloy, look into flights, and then decide on who should pick her up. 

So in the morning, who's gonna go get her? I think it should be Chris. Yeah. I think you're 

right. Chris McVoy. They chose him because he's a Lake Worth city commissioner and a friend of Olga's, and because he's white, they believe that he has the best chance of getting Olga through airport security.

The planning hits a snag when the Perez kids tear apart their house and can't find Olga's current Guatemalan passport, so they have to send Chris with her expired one instead. At 3:00 A.M., Chris and I make our way to the Miami International Airport for our flight to Phoenix. 

How does it feel going to pick somebody up all the way in Arizona on short notice at 3:00 in the morning?

It'll be wonderful to be able to help out with getting her back here to her kids, at least for a few weeks. 

Our flight touches down a little past 9:00 A.M. But even with a handful of hours of sleep, Chris jumps behind the wheel of our rental minivan and we start our journey down to Eloy, Arizona. It's a small city.

The vast desert landscape around it makes it feel like it's cut off from the rest of the world. We're getting close to Olga's Airbnb. 4. The destination is on your left. Olga 

Esperanza Perez. Arrived. 

Yep. 

Chris pulls into the gravel driveway of a small house. When he gets to the door, he gently knocks.

Olga?

So see you. I'm free. I'm free. I'm free. I'm free

Olga hugs him tight. She's petite, and she's wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. Her eyes are tired, but the visit has energized her. She spares no time telling Chris about how the news of her release was as much of a surprise to her as it was to everyone else. One. And 

he say, "You release today." 

In the US?

Yeah. Yeah. And say, "Yeah, I don't know what time, but they need release you very soon." I don't know what happen in the future, but just I want to hold my kids. I'm ready. Just I wanna enjoy this moment. 

A few hours later, Chris and Olga are on their way to the Phoenix Airport. They're both nervous and wondering if Chris will be able to get her past airport security for their flight back to Florida.

We get to the gate. 

In terms of identification- Yeah, unfortunately, I'm not allowed to take this one. I have to have a, either a passport from Guatemala or, one of the green cards from the US. All right. 

this is where we may get a little complicated, 'cause I do have a passport, but we do not have her most current.

After a few nervy moments of explanation, another TSA agent comes along and gives Olga permission to fly. Just like that, Olga is through, and a few hours later, they board a late-night flight, heading back home to Florida. 

If you have a carry-on, please place it all the way under the seat. 

As Olga disembarks at the Miami Airport, she has no idea there's a welcoming party waiting for her at baggage claim.

Her children shift around anxiously. 

I'm nervous. Me too. I'm nervous. Scared. 

They're there with the staff from the Guatemalan Maya Center, holding homemade signs that say, "Love you, Mama," and "Welcome back, Olgita." For seven months, the Perez kids imagined this moment, seeing their mom and getting to hold her again.

Just then, they spot Olga coming down the escalator. 

Oh my God, that's them, you guys. That's 

them. No, don't tell me that. Don't tell me that. I'm nervous. Yeah, that's them. That's them. Oh my God. Whoa.

I'll wait. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Miami. Olga rushes over to her four children, bear hugging them the way only a 

mom can do. Elisa then lets loose all the guilt that she's been carrying for the last seven months, apologizing for being the one that was driving that day in November.

Sorry. Sorry, Mommy. We are now preparing for arrival. No. Sorry. No, my loves, no. I'm sorry. No, mi amor, 

no.

I'm sorry. no, no.

I'm sorry. No,

mi amor. no, no. Okay? Okay, mi amor? Okay, Mommy. It's not your fault. It wasn't your fault, mi vida. It wasn't 

your fault, mi amor. Por favor. "It's not your fault, my love. It wasn't your fault." For a brief moment, the baggage claim of the Miami International Airport disappears. The only thing the Perez kids see, hear, and feel is their mom.

But everyone knows something they don't have to say out loud. Olga has only a short time left in the United States before she has to leave again. The countdown has simply changed, no longer to another hearing, now just until she has to say goodbye.

Olga left the US for Guatemala on July 6th. Elisa has decided to stay and run the family business. Her siblings are still trying to decide what to do.

We've just heard clips starting with

CounterSpin arguing that the only way to stop ICE killings is to remove ICE from the streets entirely, while warning against framing local police as the safe alternative.

The Intercept Briefing examined an ACLU report finding ICE targets grocery stores, parking lots, and school playgrounds, using violence to compel obedience, pushing the country toward authoritarianism.

Fresh Air exposed how a former ICE official admitted the government wants detention to feel so bad that detainees abandon their cases, with half the women in one unit accepting deportation.

Reveal profiled a Guatemalan family six miles from Mar-a-Lago, where ICE detained both parents and left the eldest daughter running the household, the landscaping business, and her three younger siblings.

The Majority Report told the story of Nixon Perez-Paz, who was seized by ICE and deported to Guatemala where he and his wife were found murdered.

And Reveal in part two of their discussion described how a judge deemed Olga Perez credible and of good moral character, yet immigration law still required her deportation, leaving her four kids behind.

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

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.*

If you've been listening at all recently, you'll have heard me talk about my desire to relaunch the voice message segment on the show. In the early days of the podcast, it was a well-loved segment but dwindled over time, probably for multiple overlapping reasons.

After I announced the relaunch recently, we got a few messages, and I continued the push by asking thought-provoking questions on the show and posting them to social media with a link to our new voice message system.

But, over the last few weeks, I'd been pretty disappointed to have not gotten a single new message, if you can believe it. I didn't know what else to think other than that people must just not really be very interested in calling in and leaving their thoughts on a voice recorder, until today.

I logged into the new voice message system for the first time in a while only to find that those few messages we had received had actually filled the inbox and prevented any more from being recorded. So it wasn't necessarily that people hadn't tried to leave a message, they just couldn't.

Then, I noticed the system has analytics to track clicks to our recording widget. Turns out that during the time I'd been asking thought provoking questions on social media and pointing people to the voice message system, about 1000 people had clicked through.

Not nearly all of them would have left a message, of course, but even 1% would have sparked interesting discussions for the show, I'm sure.

this feels a bit like the opening credits of Bob's Burgers as I announce the grand re-re-opening of the voice message segment for the show. Now with the ability to actually leave a message!

that's a tiny bit of excitement but we are still in the middle of an episode about an ongoing atrocity being carried out in our country so to bring the mood right back down, here's today's question:

If you have stories related to ICE raids, detentions and deportations, we want to hear them. Maybe you're participating in ICE Watch, maybe your place of work or community space has been preparing for the possibility of raids, or maybe you or someone you know has been directly impacted already. Whatever your story, if you feel safe sharing it, share it. And if you have a story about something that worked out well or helped someone, those are great for keeping spirits up.

If you would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

As for today's topic,

the reason to defend immigrants is because they're human beings with inherent value. That's the core of the progressive argument. The overt White supremacists attempting a demographic engineering project to remake the nation don't see people that way. They see demographics and bloodlines, cohorts who are worthy and unworthy, those who belong and those who don't. They use dehumanizing terms or even just numbers to describe the millions of individual people with lives and families they're targeting to hide the humanity of those they make to suffer.

And for all their cold, calculating focus on hard numbers over humanity, they are still destined to fail in their goals by their own standards because, in reality, they are unserious, magical thinkers who are driven by racism over logic at every turn.

Case in point, the anti-immigrant fanatics in the Trump administration are proud of their goal to deport a hundred million people, nearly a third of the country, and there's no legal, let alone moral, pathway to get to that number. Their plans are blatantly racist, which should surprise no one. But their vision for the country, and the magical thinking it takes to get there, comes into focus when you scratch just a little beneath the surface and connect some very logical dots.

There's been a lot of attention paid to the attempt to overturn birthright citizenship, which the Supreme Court blocked in recent weeks. But that was only about turning off the tap of new native-born citizens. It doesn't touch the mechanism that lets them target existing citizens, denaturalization, literally taking a person's citizenship away. The Justice Department made that one of the Civil Division's top five priorities last year, and the guidance they were given on case discretion may as well have just said, "go get 'em."

the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, but that does nothing to protect the 25 million naturalized citizens in this country from being denaturalized and deported. And, to be clear, there is no legal pathway to denaturalize a native-born citizen.

Even counting every naturalized citizen, there are only 50 million foreign-born people in the country. Half of their stated goal of a hundred million deportations. Which gives us our first glimpse of their magical thinking.

Do you think they have a secret plan for how to deport an additional 50 million people after all the foreign-born people are gone? Some dusty old law or loophole nobody has paid attention to? Because they don't. They're making it up as they go. They said a hundred million deportations as marketing and as a value statement, not as a policy proposal.

The next bit of magical thinking is the fallacy their entire premise rests on. DHS posted a picture of a vintage American car parked on an empty beach with the text, "America after a hundred million deportations."

To decode that for you, I'll give the non-bullshit version first. It's referring to the middle of the last century, the golden fantasy era they all dream about. The reality is that the fifties came right after World War II, when the rest of the world was still rebuilding from the wreckage and the US, which had sustained negligible damage by comparison, had just ridden the booming war economy into the booming consumer economy. We peaked at producing roughly thirty percent of the entire world economy, and got a head start on the rest of the world that lasted most of the rest of the century.

In short, the US was running a race after the war in which everyone else was wearing cement shoes, and the White supremacists looking back can only marvel at how naturally fast we were. Then, as the gap began to close when the world recovered, they concluded that it must have been the immigrants slowing us down. In Stephen Miller's own words, describing his racism-addled fantasy,

"Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon – but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire third world for sixty years."

So their vision of the future, in which the US metaphorically chills on the beach in its vintage car after having deported a third of the population, requires magical thinking. Because the rest of the world isn't currently on fire, and continued economic output requires the presence of people. And we know they know this, because at the same time as they're trying to remove a hundred million people from the country, they're also very worried about the low birth rate in the US.

Again, the non-bullshit reason first. If your country is experiencing low birth rates, that means you've already won at the game of civilization. It goes like this.

One. The first step is medical advancements and child labor laws that dramatically reduce the number of children dying in your society, which causes families to stop having extra kids as an insurance policy.

Two. You level up from an agrarian economy and stop needing children as farm labor. This flips the cost-benefit ratio, and kids go from being an asset who can work the farm to a liability that costs the parents a couple decades of investment.

Three. Meanwhile, opportunities for women to get more educated and increase their own earning potential grow, which means the trade-off of raising children gets even more expensive from the opportunity cost.

And four. Wealthy countries recognize the benefit of providing social safety nets for the welfare of all their people, which largely takes the place of what children used to be expected to provide to their parents in their old age.

This is the pattern that every wealthy country has gone through, causing birth rates to decline through pure, logical self-interest. This is one of the deepest ironies at the heart of any backward-looking search for greatness that frets over low birth rates. The low birth rate itself is a sign of greatness, your country already made it!

The only downside, in the macroeconomic sense, is that your population begins to shrink, shrinking your tax base and economic output, unless you allow immigration that tends to come from countries with higher birth rates. The whole idea of immigrants being a drain on their adopted countries is basically pure fantasy and almost exactly backwards.

But magical thinking has the White supremacists convinced that, all evidence to the contrary, we'll be much better off as a high-birth-rate society if we can just crack the problem of getting people who don't want or can't afford more kids to have them anyway.

Again, the non-bullshit version first. Pro-family policies, such as paid leave and universal child care, are just good progressive policy. A lot of people want to have kids create needs, and good policy is Government serving the needs of people.

The problem only starts when the government starts to have an opinion about how many children are being born in aggregate and how many you're giving birth to personally. No decision is more private than whether, when, and with whom to have a child.

A government that values individual freedom supports whatever decision you make. When a government begins encouraging or even coercing a higher birth rate, that means the relationship has flipped. The people are now being seen as a resource, working and living to supply their labor and the future labor of their children for the benefit of the state. I can't think of a single political demographic in the US; left, or center, who would sign on to that framing.

The governments who follow through with that sort of policy are, without exception, authoritarian. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and much more recently Putin's Russia have all offered to award medals to women based on how many children they bear. Medals are what countries give to honor sacrifices and services rendered to the nation. Children should never be thought of that way, which is why democratic nations never feel the urge to offer such awards.

Right on cue, Simone and Malcolm Collins, the country's most famous and creepiest pro-natalist couple, proposed a draft executive order to the Trump administration to bestow a "National Medal of Motherhood" on mothers with six or more children, and said the White House was receptive. Public reaction was swift to condemn the Hitler-and-Stalin-esque proposal. Around two thirds of Americans polled disapproved, and there hasn't been any more said about it since.

The mass deportation operation is the visible half of their demographic engineering project, but the other half is moving just as quickly, if less noticeably. To lay the groundwork, the government has already redefined an embryo as a child already in existence, and the funding notice for the federal contraception program under Title X was rewritten around fertility instead of birth control. Plus, this important detail was added among the priorities of that program. They want to enforce a commitment that the money would not benefit any people here illegally. That's the pro-native birth and anti-immigrant demographic engineering in one document.

When the magical thinkers look for inspiration for their project, they turn to Viktor Orban's Hungary as the model to copy. Orban's party already ran this experiment and spent five percent of Hungary's economy encouraging higher birth rates with generous family policies. Hungary's birth rate was quite low, and the vigorous pro-family push ticked those numbers up substantially, though still well below the replacement rate, and only very briefly, before they ticked right back down again.

In fact, in 2017, Orban set a national goal of hitting the replacement rate by 2030, and Hungary is further from it now than when he set that goal. Given that there seemed to be brief upward movement in the birth rate, that begs some questions, and the reason the policy is failing can be explained by the old truism about lies, damn lies, and statistics.

When demographers looked at what caused the bump, it turned out the government benefits only helped people start their families a little earlier but did nothing to make them want more children than already planned. That explains the brief bump in the birth rate but actually shows that it was more of an illusion than anything else, which is why the rate soon went back down.

Also interesting, Putin's Russia ran the same play and got the same result. That's the track record of success the Trump people are chasing.

The hard truth of it is that anyone determined to get birth rates to rise in a fully developed country will have to turn to state coercion or be destined to fail. Orban's people and American pro-natalists might say that they would never want to do that, and they may be telling the truth, but that's the magical thinking at play again. They can get the results they want, or they can continue to allow people to enjoy the basic freedoms and dignity we take for granted. They can't have both.

And even that framing is probably overstating it because the coercive strategy experiment was already run by the communist dictatorship in Romania in the middle of the last century so we know how that worked out. The government decided to boost the population from 20 million to 30 million. Abortion was outlawed, contraception was prohibited, and it was declared a patriotic duty of women of childbearing age to have large families.

Maternal mortality rose dramatically, parents abandoned infants to orphanages by the tens of thousands where many suffered neglect and starvation, and the secret police weaponized abortion and intruded into the intimate lives of Romanians of reproductive age.

basically, a variation of A Handmaid's Tale. These policies worked to increase birth rates for a brief period, but only when the enforcement was intense. If enforcement relaxed, birth rates dropped and this played out for decades. The takeaway is that the government tried persuasion and coercion simultaneously, and the only thing that was effective for keeping birth rates high was coercion. And, as is invariably the case, women and children suffered greatly in the process.

For the record, I've been getting these details from Gail Kligman, author of "The Politics of Duplicity, Controlling Reproduction in Ceaușescu's Romania." She wrote it back in the 90s but has been using Romania as a warning for what happens when abortion is restricted, and drawing a direct comparison with the US today, saying that after the Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade, some states have been implementing similar and, in some cases, harsher measures than the communist dictator in Romania did.

The Romanian government knew the details of their failing policy, of course. But as authoritarians so often do, they only ever doubled down on ideology rather than relenting in the face of evidence. The country only changed their policies after the dictator was overthrown and executed.

I'm not saying that JD Vance, Stephen Miller, or any of the Republicans filling the state legislatures passing extreme abortion bans want to inflict the same kind of suffering the Romanian dictator did. But the thread that ties them together is the magical thinking that leads them to believe their demonstrably failing policies will work if they just believe hard enough. Because magical thinking is structurally identical to conspiracy theories, self-sealing logic that's impervious to new information, so they can't be argued out of it.

It's not an accident that ideas this bad tend to only get pushed through under authoritarian governments unaccountable to those suffering from the effects of their policies.

There's no mechanism inside their logic that would allow them to course-correct in the face of failure, they'll continue to escalate until they're stopped. The Supreme Court stopped them on birthright citizenship, but elections are the only thing that can purge the broader, insidious demographic engineering mentality that's poisoned our country.

The vast majority of us don't want the state to have a single opinion about how many kids we choose to have, or not. And we believe that the whole point of the existence of government is to serve the needs of the people, as opposed to the other way around. Government serving people is merely the way that we've organized ourselves to serve each other. And our duty is always to serve one another, not the state or those in power.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 3 topics today. First up;

Section A, Inevitable Brutality

Followed by Section B, Designed to Be Unbearable

And Section C, The World Watches & The People Fight Back

So after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed in Minnesota, there was a lot of pushback against the way immigration enforcement was being done, including by Republicans, including by some MAGA people.

So how did we get back here again with two killings by immigration officers in such a short period? 

Yeah. there was a, kind of a broader pullback, right? the administration sent Tom Homan into Minneapolis to clean things up. The president ousted Kristi Noem. Markwayne Mullin came in as the new DH Sec- DHS secretary, signaling that he wanted things to be quieter, to keep DHS out of the headlines.

And yet the calls on the right started, ac- throughout the spring were growing for them to intensify their ICE operations. People were seeing the ICE arrest and deportation numbers lower than they had been, prior to Minneapolis. And, Markwayne Mullin, as well as Border czar, Tom Homan, were getting accused on the right of backing off of Trump's promises to carry out the largest, deportation campaign in US history.

And so- What we've seen in the last few weeks was a rapid intensification of ICE activity. They have been arresting about twice as many people as they were doing a few months ago, and they were trying to do it more quietly. It didn't look like Minneapolis, 'cause it wasn't all concentrated in one city.

It wasn't border patrol agents, sweeping through neighborhoods. It was the kind of targeted enforcement that Tom Homan signaled that he wanted to double down on, the kind of tactics that ICE has always done. But this time, it's been more focused on vehicle stops, not on homes. It's on vehicle stops, and these vehicle stops, are inherently dangerous for many of the reasons that we have just seen.

What do we know about the details of these shootings so far? Because we haven't had the kind of videos emerge like we did in Minnesota, where we could see clearly what happened at the moment of shooting. 

I'd say one thing else about that, which is, if you think about Minneapolis, because every- everyone was so stirred up and the protesters were out in the streets, it was almost impossible for ICE to, to carry out some kind of arrest like this without somebody filming it on a cellphone.

Says a lot about how much more quietly they've been able to operate since Minneapolis. And, the, the focus on the body cams, is once again become a, a contentious matter. ICE got, tens of billions of dollars obviously last year through the, one big beautiful bill, and, got another, several, tens of billions through the reconciliation bill that passed prior to the, the shutdown.

So the White House is saying it's the Democrats' faults that, that the body cameras haven't been, distributed across the country, but Democrats are pointing out, that they had tens of billions of dollars at their disposal, last summer that, that they could have used on body cameras.

And Kristi Noem, after Minneapolis, said that they were gonna get body cameras out to ICE officers around the country, and here we are six months later with no body camera footage of either fatal shooting. 

What do we know about each of these incidents? 'Cause it sounds like the traffic stop element is important.

so what do we know? 

what's... I think, one of the first things that's significant about both incidents is that the officers killed someone who wasn't the target of their arrest operation that day. So in Houston, the, the team that went out, and decided to pull over, the work van driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the, the 52-year-old, construction contractor and father of, three US citizens.

In that case, they were looking for somebody who they have not named, and, they were doing the kind of targeted enforcement that they've been doing across the country. Typically, they go, early in the morning to try to catch people as they're coming out of their homes and getting into their cars or heading off to work the, the tactics that ICE has relied on historically to get people, at their homes, that doesn't work anymore.

People no longer open their doors for ICE. They know that, that officers need a judicial warrant in order to force their way into the, into a home. And so ICE has given up on that tactic and they're trying to catch people, as they're leaving for work, and that's what they were doing, with this work van, even though Mr.

Salgado was not the target of their operation. And so what we know is that, they tried to pull him over. There's, surveillance camera footage showing that he, he didn't obey their commands, that he continued to drive. his sons have said that they thought he probably panicked. He was worried that he was getting robbed, for his work tools that were his livelihood.

So he didn't stop, and they tried to, box him in. the Department of Homeland Security said that he tried to weaponize his vehicle and drive at them. reporters who went to the scene did not see any, major impacts on any of the vehicles suggesting that there was a big crash. and there are eyewitness accounts claiming that, the ICE officer who shot Salgado was reaching through the passenger, open passenger window.

shot him in the stomach, and then the officers, pulled him out of the vehicle and tried to handcuff him. There's a bystander video recorded, that shows two officers over him and he's moaning in pain. we know he was taken to the hospital after that, where he died. 

You mentioned that Salgado's sons said he might have panicked when the police tried to stop him because he thought they were trying to rob him.

That's not what a lot of people would picture as a traffic stop. Like you would see the police lights flashing. You would know that it was a police car. so what is a traffic stop like by an immigration enforce- ment agency? 

Yeah, it's a great question. These ICE vehicle stops are not like traffic stops conducted by normal police officers with marked cars and flashing lights.

These are ICE officers typically in, in plainclothes and driving in unmarked cars, and they're really relying on the element of surprise. it's, it isn't like driving past a, a police car in a s- on a highway, and then it turns on its lights and you understand why you're being pulled over.

These, these ICE officers are swooping in out of nowhere, in some cases trying to pin the vehicle of the person that they want to arrest. And, if they do this hundreds of times a day across the country in multiple cities- It stands to reason that in some cases, the people they're after are going to panic, and if they panic and try to drive away, does that, justify, killing them, 

and, the, the answer is no, of course, but it's an... it points to the inherent risks of these kinds of tactics by ICE officers. 

So that's Texas. What about the incident in Maine? 

We saw another targeted enforcement operation gone wrong in the town of, Biddeford, Maine. And in that incident, what we know is that a team of officers went to a residence looking for someone, who had a, you know, a, what's called a final order of removal.

A- an immigration judge had ordered them to leave the country. but it was not the person that ICE ended up shooting. And a Colombian, father named, Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero was on his, way to work coming out of his home. again, the officers claim that he, used his vehicle in a way that they described as a threat to public safety.

we've seen ser- security footage showing the aftermath of the shooting in which the vehicle is doing loops in an intersection after they have shot him. The officer, involved fired through the, through at least four shots through the windshield. He was struck in the head. there's also footage showing them taking him out of the vehicle and attempting to handcuff him as he's dying.

And, we know that the officer who fired was a new hire. in this case, an officer who had federal law enforcement experience working for the Veterans Affairs Department police force but had been, hired by ICE just this year. And, I think, more details are coming out about this officer's training and his background.

Yeah, and those details are pretty alarming. Members of his family told the media that he had a history of mental health issues dating back to when he was a preteen and also a history of violent behavior. so that's that one officer in Maine. Now, more broadly, another thing that's come up a lot is traffic stops.

Both of these killings involved traffic stops. So what's the significance of that? Is that something that these immigration officers are not particularly trained to handle? 

Yeah. What I'm, what I've been told is that, ICE officers not only went through this kind of fast-track training program last fall and r- into the, this winter, because of the White House's urgency in getting, thousands of more trainees out onto the streets, that generally ICE officers don't get as much training in safe vehicle stops as say, large police departments.

And- That at the same time, they are increasingly relying on this tactic in order to make their arrest numbers and to, to m- meet the, the, the pressure from the White House to, to have more and more arrests and deportations. And so they're relying on this tactic. They don't have what, police departments call a vehicle pursuit policy that really establishes, clear guidelines as to when you can use force during a vehicle stop, because what the Supreme Court has established is that you cannot shoot somebody just because they're disobeying your commands or they're fleeing police officers.

They have to... The officer has to be able to articulate, a reasonable fear, of imminent harm to themself, to the other officers, or to the public.

we've learned a lot over the last week as to what exactly happened Tuesday morning, and there's still a lot of outstanding questions. But I can take you back to Tuesday afternoon when the first time we heard about the shooting.

We had a very small statement from ICE just detailing their very short account of what happened, and according to an ICE spokesperson, they were attempting to do a targeted enforcement operation, arrest Salgado Araujo, and they say during that traffic stop, during that moment, during that encounter, they claim that Salgado Araujo was weaponizing his vehicle, attempting to evade arrest, attempting to ram a, an ICE officer with his car when the officer fired his gun.

He was shot in the abdomen and then taken to Ben Taub Hospital, a hospital here in Houston, where he later died of his wounds. But it wasn't until the early afternoon when we, the public, and reporters began to hear about what had happened, and at that moment we had very little to go off of. 

Did people initially take that account as the, unimpeachable truth, or was there immediately suspicions that there may have been another side to the story?

It was almost immediate that immigrant rights organizations like LULAC and the family were disputing the account. 

We do not believe them. They're playing by a playbook. They're using a template in shootings and murders that have happened across the country time and time again, and it is time to stop. We don't expect the truth from the Department of Justice or from the FBI.

We expect a whitewash. 

Mostly we just didn't have a lot to go off of. We had the very short statement from ICE and we had almost no details from the family. The family themselves were looking for more answers. It took them a while to figure out what had happened to their father, when he had passed.

Around 7:00 AM, I was notified by my mom that something bad had happened to my dad. We didn't know what. All we knew is that it was ICE related. I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot. I recognized him immediately, not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out 

So a lot of outstanding questions tuesday night, and the calls for accountability, transparency began immediately.

So how long does it take until we get a differing account of what happened on Tuesday morning? 

The next morning we started to hear from the family. Two of Salgado Araujo's sons, Ronaldo and Lorenzo Jr., spoke to the public and started to offer just details about who their father was and that they believed their father would have complied, that he was trying to just go to work and they didn't believe that their father would be acting aggressively, ramming his car, or, attempting to evade arrest.

They said it didn't sound like his father. But it would take a few more days before we got any more credible accounts about people who were in the car with Salgado 

Araujo. And when did that happen and what did they say? 

On Thursday we started to see reports online that the detainees, the men who were in Salgado Araujo's car who were also detained by ICE, started to kinda come out through their lawyers, speak out about their experience.

On Friday, the lawyer for two of the men who were detained, Hugo Balderas, said that- 

I can tell you with conviction that it, that, My clients' versions of the events are extremely different from what ICE agents are saying or what the agency 

is saying. Essentially, they were saying that there, at no time was there an ICE agent in front of the car, that he came, the approach to the side of the car, that the shots fired from the side of the car, basically discrediting the idea that Salgado Araujo was ramming his car with an officer or was ever trying to run an officer over.

They allege that the account happened completely from the side and that the officer fired immediately upon exiting his vehicle. 

How does the city respond to this differing account? 

Yeah. There's been a lot of calls for Houston Police Department to do an independent investigation for anybody, on the Houston official level to launch an investigation, and it's unfolded over the week in a, a bit of a confusing manner I think for the public.

District Attorney Sean Teare did say on our radio that- 

My office is running an investigation, but we do not have the same level of access that we do in almost any other officer-involved shooting 

We ourselves have seen people from the district attorney's office going to different gas stations in the area and other businesses to ask for surveillance footage.

but the problem that Teare is outlining is that they haven't been invited by the federal authorities to collaborate or work alongside them. So Teare is clear that he may not be privy to all of the evidence that, federal authorities do collect during their own investigation. Right now, the Federal Bureau of Investigations is the one leading the inquiry, but their investigation is clearly into the potential assault on a law enforcement.

It doesn't say that it's into the shooting as a whole to find exactly what happened. 

And how is ICE responding to this account that disputes theirs? 

We've asked repeatedly about allegations that their account is not, fully accurate or that it's missing details or that it, implies that Salgado Araujo was behaving in a way that he might not have been, and we've gotten no answers.

We haven't got any kinda comment about the allegations that the account is not credible or if they wanna add any more to their initial statement. 

So how are we gonna find out the truth, if we are at all? 

It's gonna be a difficult process, and part of the thing that complicates that is that, ICE and DHS has said that the officers on the scene were not wearing any body cameras, and they had no dash cam video of the incident.

So they're saying that the ICE agents on the ground have no video to share with the public. We are starting to see clips on social media from those surveillance videos, from the footage at gas stations or from witnesses who were filming as well start to cir- circulate online that show different parts of the shooting and different parts of the encounter, but we're still not getting the most full clear picture yet.

Could you tell us about this individual, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo? Who was he? 

Yeah. From what we've learned from his sons, he got to Houston in the early '90s and has been here since working as, in construction helping build homes in the Houston area. They said, he would go to work all day, come home and be with his family.

My father was a simple man, a family man, a man of routine.

He dedicated his life in the United States to giving his family the American dream. My father was a private man, a man who dedicated his life to work. You could find him every evening after work resting on his porch, listening to music, petting his dog. 

he's the father of three sons, all of whom have gone on to college and are now working in teaching professions or as engineers, and they describe him as a shy man, a man who loved his family, a man who cared for his sons, a man who loved the Chivas soccer team from Mexico.

someone that they deeply miss.

Now, what happened after these killings is confusing, and I think clearing it up will help us understand where immigration policy is headed. The way it was first reported is that Markwayne Mullin talked to Susan Collins, the senator of Maine, issued a policy to at least temporarily halt these traffic stops that you're talking about.

And then Trump comes out on Truth Social and seems incensed by this. What did Trump write, and how do you explain what happened? 

Yeah. the order of events is that, Secretary Mullin talked to Susan Collins three times on Monday after the fatal shooting in Maine, and he also talked to Senator Angus King, the other senator from Maine.

He had been hearing from senior ICE officials, that the vehicle stops were becoming a problem and are exposing the insufficient training of these officers. so he was already hearing about these worries. And so late Monday night, an order went out from an ICE official to all the ICE supervisors around the country to halt the vehicle stops.

And the president, people woke up to this Tuesday, and by, Wednesday morning, the president sent out his statement on Truth Social, effectively saying that they needed to continue with the traffic stops, that, countermanding the order from the ICE officials and saying that the traffic stops are a, a much needed tool and that they can't back down.

And we know that he did that because throughout the day on Tuesday, as, hard line- immigration hard-liners and members of the, more extreme members of the MAGA coalition were telling him that it would make him look weak. and it's saying similar things to what they said after Minneapolis was that, they're giving in to protesters, to the radical left, that they can't back down from the mass deportation campaign that Trump has promised.

And, clearly they broke through to him and, and he has reversed course. Now, what we're still seeing is that some kind of new guidance is coming to ICE officers that is going to, try to introduce some, some additional safeguards into these vehicle stops. But it also shows that the president is very sensitive to criticism from his base about, any perceived, backtracking on this deportation campaign.

Yeah, 'cause you said it calmly, but it was a lot of capitals and exclamation points. it, it seemed like a very aggressive statement the president was making, which doesn't necessarily clarify the con-confusion, 'cause I'm assuming that Mullin wouldn't have issued that statement without checking with someone at the White House.

So you think just afterwards there was a lot of MAGA pressure, to reverse course, and it's as simple as that? 

I was telling, that on Wednesday, senior administration officials were really throwing Mullin under the bus, on this one and saying that he hadn't cleared, these, this, vehicle stop order with the White House.

But, these are... I, I also spoke to people in the department who said it was im- that was impossible, that it's, there's no way this kind of order would've gone f- forward without people including, Tom Homan and Stephen Miller from being aware that they were, that it was coming.

Mullin is still in charge for the moment. Has he made any significant changes? How is he different than the previous leadership? 

Mullin came in to replace Kristi Noem, who along with her top advisor, Corey Lewandowski, ran the department in a very different way, and, made a lot of enemies there, generated a lot of controversy, and ultimately were removed because of the perception that she was trying to promote her own career, her own interests, and, and had just become too much of a liability for the White House in a way that was undermining the president's broader immigration enforcement goals.

Mullin was brought in, I think, to stabilize the department, to bring, a kind of a, a sunnier presence, while still being somebody who was, close to the president and intensely loyal to Trump and who would carry out, the campaign, with a better face, so to speak.

their goal has been to carry out the president's mass deportation campaign, but more quietly and with less controversy. And I think that they'd been relatively effective in doing that up until these shootings. but it really shows the inherent, tension in what they're trying to do.

They're trying to carry out this incredibly disruptive, intrusive, controversial, deportation campaign in American cities and communities, and there's just no way it's gonna be quiet and that people aren't gonna push back. 

So do you have a sense that the two latest shootings could change policy at all?

Could shift the course of how they're doing immigration enforcement? 

I think that after the president's response to that order and his fear of looking weak, I think no. I, they're gonna continue pressing forward. They have the money. They have the personnel. Trump has made this commitment. This is, the signature domestic policy initiative of his second term.

So they're gonna, they're gonna go forward, and they're gonna try to, keep a lid on this stuff politically as best they can, and the question is gonna be, can they pull it off? how many more of these shootings can Americans stomach?

It was an early morning shock outside Sabrina Medina's front door.

Video captured by Medina and neighbors shows a large number of ICE agents accompanied by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. 

You're seeing grandmas, you're seeing children, you're seeing families, you're seeing business owners. You're seeing people who are just standing in line waiting to go to work being snatched out of those lines, hauled off by men in masks, never to be heard from again, presumably.

Arrest as many people that touch you as you want. Gas on film. Gas 

on film. 

We're filming it. Instead, we've seen an emphasis of the arrests when people are already in local or state custody. That's governed by something called a 287agreement, which allows ICE to cooperate with those jurisdictions and pick people up who are on unrelated crimes and may have a final order of removal.

We're just not seeing as many of those, incidents where we'd see some, a band of ICE agents go surrounding a car and pulling people out, and we're not seeing surges of immigration officers into major US cities that are, in the eyes of the Trump administration, not doing enough to collaborate with federal law enforcement and with federal immigration officers.

So that change has meant that even though the numbers are still high, they're still deporting and detaining thousands of people, throughout the courses of weeks, right? we're not seeing that register in the same visceral way that it did on, under Kristi Noem, in such a way that it actually really tainted the Trump administration's standing with voters on immigration.

Why were we ever seeing that? did Kristi Noem have some sort of mandate from the president to make this look as horrendous as it looked? 

There's a couple things that were going on there. There was a school of thinking that is especially championed by immigration hardliners, the really, the toughest hawks on immigration enforcement, that the only way you deter people from coming to the United States, and not just to shut down the border, but to make it difficult to live in the United States and to create a culture of fear.

that you could be rounded up and deported and separated from your family. These shock and awe tactics, in at least some vein, were intended as a deterrent. 

We will hunt you down. If you come to this country, you will not get the chance to return. 

And Noem's decisions, elevating Gregory Bovino, who was a pretty, random off Border Patrol commander, to be essentially the point person for how deportation operations were taking place, was a sign that she believed that message was important.

We're gonna turn and burn to that next target and the next, and we're not gonna stop. 

There's also the factor that we can't separate with Kristi Noem is that she had higher political ambitions, and clearly her messaging strategy was not about the department, but s- a lot of it was about her.

The advertising campaign that had her at Mount Rushmore. 

You cross the border illegally, we'll find you. 

Her standing with the big cowboy hat at the border. 

What is she hiding her face like her ICE agents now? By the way, is this what the $800 billion went to? Every day we see her after there's some new tragedy in homeland, she's wearing a different outfit with a different hat.

Those photo optics also fit into this idea. She was the face and the implementer of this immigration crackdown. And so that public strategy also played into the secretary's personal ambitions at the time. Markwayne Mullin just isn't that kind of guy. He doesn't need that kind of optical performance to have a good relationship with Trump.

The relationship goes back to, and Mullin talked about this in his confirmation hearing, to when his son had a traumatic brain injury when Trump was president the first time and Mullin at the time was a House member. 

The president found out about it and he gave me a call immediately. And the president didn't understand the severity of it, but he heard it in my voice and immediately he went to work.

I told him we had to get to Bakersfield, California to the Center for Neuroskills. And the president offered us in his plane, his personal plane. 

So they have a longstanding relationship. Mullin's also a man, which as we've seen with the cabinet firings recently, like if you're a woman, your position is potentially more precarious in the cabinet.

And that certainly plays a role in those discussions. And so it's also just a question too of who was leading the department and the tone they were trying to set.

So we're not seeing the Operation Metro Surge style tactics that were toxic for this administration earlier this year and got a reaction all over the country, if not the world. What are you seeing? You're paying much closer attention to this than maybe the average American is, and this isn't headline news every day anymore.

There are still operations in the field, right? it's not like ICE isn't carrying out some arrests at homes or workplaces. that does still happen, but it's just not in the same scale that it was before. It's usually very targeted. It's for specific types of people that they may have missed, an immigration court hearing, and they were wanted on a final order of removal.

They'll arrest that person, bring them to the county jail, and they call ICE and they say, "Hey, this person who you have an order of removal against is in our custody. Come pick him up." And so the ICE officer will come to the jail. They only need one person to do it. He's already in handcuffs. They put him in the back of the car, and they send him to an ICE detention facility.

And that has actually really helped to, run up the numbers still because it's low-hanging fruit that wasn't being prioritized in a lot of cases. And the administration has also given local jurisdictions considerable carrots to actually sign these agreements to h- foster this cooperation, and now they're really maximizing the fruits of that, those agreements.

So tell us what the numbers look like. Are the numbers up? Are they down? Are they about the same? 

They still haven't met the million a year target that the White House has set, but based on the numbers that we've gotten, it's well over in the hundreds of thousands that they've deported thus far. And the scale that we've seen, that we've heard from our sources and that other outlets have reported is that the number of arrests are in the thousands per day.

Certainly in the thousands per week, depending on the scale of operations and where specifically there are targets to be found. But we are getting to a pretty voluminous flow of immigration enforcement that we weren't even seeing at, some of the high points of when Noem was secretary. 

Two Americans were killed in Minneapolis when Kristi Noem was secretary.

I believe many more died in ICE custody, but President Trump had to take the temperature down. Now, we've got new leadership, but someone was shot and killed in Texas last week, and reportedly again this morning in Maine. Does that suggest that it's impossible for ICE to fulfill its mission without killing people?

Is this type of law enforcement, like invariably lethal? 

It's a real challenge to the thesis that we have just spent the last 10 minutes talking about, right? because certainly it's a question of the messaging, right? And how do they keep the situation from devolving into protests or in general from like engendering mistrust.

And we certainly have to think about, what's the profile of the victim. We're still learning in real time about what happened in Maine. We don't know what the demographic background of the person is, what were the details of the situation that then led to the use of lethal force. That's gonna trickle in probably in the next couple days.

But there's certainly disparities, right? That we have to acknowledge. there may be a situation, right? Like, where this doesn't register in the same way with voters if there's not video or we're not talking about two white Americans who are American citizens and who have, it's easy to construct a narrative around that they were perfect victims or they were, they were not necessarily the type of people that we voters expect ICE to be going after.

But when we still talk about the systematic use of force by ICE, right? Irrespective of how this changes the political conversation, it does make it harder for, the Mullin team to argue that there isn't, a structural problem or a systemic problem with the way that ICE has been trained.

And this may reignite a conversation on Capitol Hill about whether there need to be additional guardrails put in. Congress is negotiating an appropriations bill right now that would f- you know, even though they've given ICE money through the reconciliation bill, there's still debate about whether they can put provisions in there to constrain ICE behaviors or to require more training or to, if there is gonna be any, funding that is just pegged to the next federal fiscal year, what restrictions are on that money?

we may find ourselves having the same conversation that we were having in Washington around the use of force and ICE's training that followed after the two shootings in Minneapolis, and then all the legislative debate is gonna get subsumed again by this question of, is ICE acting within appropriate constraints?

The New York Times is reporting the FBI will no longer investigate shootings of protesters or immigrants by ICE agents. According to The Times, it is now FBI policy for the Department of Homeland Security to determine whether an ICE or Border Patrol agent was justified in discharging their weapons and whether that agent was telling the truth when that agent claimed they acted in self-defense.

So far this month, ICE agents claiming self-defense shot and killed two immigrants. Neither one of them had a warrant out for their arrest. They weren't targets of any immigration investigation. According to The New York Times, since Trump's return to the Oval Office, nearly 24 people have been shot by immigration agents, six of whom ended up dead.

Nearly all of those shot were inside their vehicles, and nearly all of the immigration agents who discharged their weapons claimed they acted in self-defense. Alex Pretti was killed by Border Patrol agents, not ICE officers, and he was shot on the street. Now, the official policy for the Department of Homeland Security, which after each shooting automatically insists the victim's car had first been weaponized, the Department of Security, Homeland Security, will make the official determination as to whether or not the ICE or Border Patrol agent was truthful when they claim to have acted in self-defense.

Border czar Tom Homan appearing on the Sunday talk shows to announce that moving forward, when a team of ICE agents perform a traffic stop, at least one of the agents will now be required to wear a body camera. So Homan is a liar, and he told two very large lies on Sunday. The first lie was, "Oh, I welcome body cams because they always end up exonerating the ICE or Border Patrol agent."

that's a lie. Practically every time we gain access to either body cam footage or surveillance video of a shooting involving immigration agents, ICE and Border Patrol, it always reveals the Department of Homeland Security and the agent who fired the shot is lying when they claim that the shots were fired in self-defense.

Always a lie. Always a lie. And, if you have pro- I always welcome corrections. You know where to reach me. So if you have proof that's, this isn't true, we triple check here. If you watched last week's show I did three shows last week, and dur- all three of them, I told you, that, an ICE agent has never, ever been shot and killed by an immigrant they were trying to arrest.

It has never happened, and I invited you to correct me. Nobody could correct me. 

ICE was established in 2003. In its 23-year history, not a single ICE agent has ever been shot and killed by an immigrant they were trying to arrest. Not a single ICE agent has ever been killed after getting run over by an immigrant who weaponized their car or simply tried to drive away and accidentally ran over that ICE agent.

And despite the lies from Border czar Tom

Homan, there is not a single body cam video of an ICE agent shooting someone, and that video turning out to be exculpatory evidence. In other words, it's presented as evidence to clear the ICE agent for shooting. Any time ICE agents are captured on video discharging their weapon, the video every time clearly indicates that those ICE agents are lying and Homeland Security is lying when they claim the agent discharged the weapon acting in self-defense.

There doesn't exist one single video of an ICE agent shooting shoving or injuring a US citizen or immigrant with that, without that video showing the ICE agent exerting unnecessary lethal, dangerous, or deadly force. In November of 2025, then border commando, I'm sorry, commander, then border commander, little tiny Greg Bovino, who at the time was running immigration operations in Chicago, Greg Bovino admitted under oath that he lied under oath.

He admitted this to Federal Judge Sarah Ellis. I invite you to Google this. Greg Bovino admitted to Federal Judge, Sarah Ellis in Illinois in November of 2025, he admitted, "Yes, I lied under oath when I testified under oath that it was necessary for me to fire tear gas at protesters marching in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood on October 23, 2025."

So Bovino Very tiny half-man. he originally testified and lied that he was forced to fire the tear gas after the crowd became unruly, but later vi- video clearly indicated that it was a peaceful crowd, and Greg Bovino- Greg Bovino decided to be a little prick. he was born a little prick and with a little prick, and he decided to fire tear gas.

And when the video showed that, yeah, he had to go before Judge Sarah Ellis again and admit, "Yeah, I lied." So yeah, Judge Sarah Ellis, she had... You can read her ruling, and it was b- it, she was gonna make a criminal referral, a perjury referral against Gregory Bovino, but it would've gone to Pam Bondi, so it would've died there.

So that's the first lie that Tom Homan told on Sunday, that video always clears the ICE or border agent. The complete opposite is true. When ICE agents are caught on video, they always demonstrate a lack of training, intelligence, character. They always reveal themselves to be frightened little men with unresolved childhood trauma, and that trauma emerges through their inability to control their rage The other lie Tom Homan on Sunday told is he would have fitted ICE agents with body cams, but the Democrats held up the funding when they shut down the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year.

That is an effing lie. I don't curse on the show because if I did, I wouldn't stop. Tom Homan is an effing liar. Okay? Democrats shut down funding for ICE because ICE agents weren't being ordered to wear body cams. Tom Homan is a liar. Now, the 2026 budget, we're living in the 2026 budget, it ends on October 1st of this year, and it came out in piecemeal in 2026 'cause of all the continuing resolutions and th- the, they shut the government down, then they shut the Department of Homeland Security down, then it was a partial shutdown of Homeland Security.

The Homeland Security shutdown was over administrative warrants, taking off the masks, right? Having your badge, ICE showing their badge, and body cams, mandatory body cams, and the Republicans and Trump and Homan didn't want mandatory body cams. So the 2026 budget, Trump wanted to spend only $6 million on body cams for ICE agents, and they would never be mandatory.

The final number came in at 20 million- for 2026. Tom Homan is lying. ICE got all $20 million earmarked for body cams, but he slowed down the rollout because he didn't want ICE agents to have to wear body cams. Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who admitted to lying under oath, he apologized under oath to Illinois federal judge, Judge Ellis, and then she ordered him to begin training to wear a body cam at all times.

He didn't want to, but he agreed to it, but then he appealed her order, and so he never had to go- undergo the training to wear a body cam. So he wasn't wearing a body cam. They don't want to wear body cams. $20 million for 2026 to hand out body cams, and they didn't get delivered. Not because the Democrats held up the money Greg Bovino, Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, the Department of Homeland Security, they do not want ICE agents wearing body cams because body cams tell the truth

Yeah, I mean- ... one of the justifications was, I don't remember which case it was, but that one of the men was fleeing, and DHS said, the ICE officer, fearing for public safety, shot the man just bec- Oh, he... Oh, maybe he's gonna go rough up an old lady or vandalize a train car or something. oh, generally, we're worried about public safety, so we have to shoot a man in the back, or I don't know where he was shot.

But, It's fine ... like the justification is so thin at this point they couldn't even say the officer feared for his safety. Dave Weigel, what are... W- what response are we seeing from this politically, if anything? 

W- a, a kind of split fearful response. This has been mishandled by the Trump administration, but wh- why did it start?

I'm not gonna spend the whole segment talking about why it started, but go back to the first Trump administration. They had a policy of, deporting as many people as they, as possible. They actually deported fewer people day by day than the Obama administration. and they didn't want to be super visible.

they, they did deportations, but they didn't advertise them that much as they did in this, in this administration. Remember, they, in this instituted the Remain in Mexico policy. They wanted asylum seekers to be out of sight of the media. It was interest- and their interest in the first term, this is, besides Stephen Miller, a different Trump team.

they, they had this understanding in that Trump team that if people were seeing footage of people who looked pretty innocent and then were pretty innocent of everything except not having paperwork to be in the country, being harmed, being tort- tortured, basically by the conditions, that would be bad and there'd be a backlash, and there was a backlash.

There was a backlash in 2018. This administration, very hubristically, very, cruelly on purpose, wanted to make a sport out of this, and you saw that in how they advertise for new ICE hires. David was talking about this. But th- there's this really, this campaign of kind of brio and backslapping, that you need 47 days of training because Trump's the 47th president.

That's not the most serious basis for how to train people. the number of, of people who- Yeah ... have taken the oath of office, equals the number of days you train. And they were mocking and advertising this. They wanted shows of force on the street, to pe- to make people afraid. Now, Miller's always been interested, Steve Miller's always been interested in making immigrants, migrants afraid to come to the country, afraid to go out in public.

That was family separation, but it wasn't this public, and that's the context for all this. I say that politically they've been a, a, a little shaken because this, in Maine, Susan Collins is running for as, as we discussed, running for re-election. Yeah. and she's tried to finesse this, that she is a Republican in a blue state.

most of the state did not vote for Trump ever in three elections. And when I... After the Good killing in Minne- in Minneapolis, when ICE was in Maine- She took credit saying, "I talked to Kristi Noem," who was then DHS secretary, "and I've got them to roll back the, what they're doing." This time in, in, in Maine, the sh- the shooting over the last week, she again tried to get in front of it and say, I as the influential senator who's not always on board with Trump or on all these policies, I'm trying to get body cameras to these agents.

and actually we would've had them months ago if Democrats hadn't been protesting so much." it's a very muddled response. Yeah. you have this contrast of, "Look at our tough, brave agents in body armor taking out these terri- terrifying immigrants." What they always do is there'll be a roundup, but the advertisement, the people they'll tweet, the people that'll, they'll get their, go to Kinko's and get a blow-up of somebody's mugshot, will be the m- most, unsympathetic cases.

"Look at this drunk driver we got rid of. don't, why do Democrats not want to get rid of a drunk driver?" the administration has been wobbly when there's been one of these, these shootings 'cause they can't really defend the policy to the hilt. Yeah. and they have in Susan Collins somebody who would really rather this, the salience of this go down and also the, the quality of the, of the ICE deportation program go up.

Yeah. but they're hoisted by this petard - ... that, that started on day one of the Trump administration of let's be as rough and tough and Charles Bronson movie as possible about doing this. Yeah. Maybe there won't be any negative consequences. and- There are terrible negative consequences for how people view mass deportation right 

now.

a- and you're seeing that in, in real time. I mean- shortly after the second one of these killings, the one in Maine- 

Yeah ... 

Markwayne Mullin, announced that there was, not going to be, stops by ICE, vehicle stops, for an indeterminate period. And Trump apparently didn't find out about that by being briefed by Mullin.

He found about, out about it on social media He found out about it on Fox News, and he was furious. and he- ... immediately reversed that policy within 24 hours. 

It's sort of a bizarre push-pull within the administration, right? I read a month or two ago that, when DHS was pulling the ICE enforcement out of Minneapolis, that, Stephen Miller wanted them to stay in longer and go harder.

He was advocating internally for doubling down and seemingly maybe lost that internal battle to, to some degree. it seems that the same thing is happening now, where, Susan Collins... Obviously, any amount of generalized anger towards the administration is bad for Susan Collins. if, Mainers are angry in the streets about unjustified killings, that's gonna be bad for her, whether or not she had anything to do with it, simply because she's a Republican.

And she has plenty to do with it, let- ... let's be clear, for confirming all of these, secretaries and being a part of the, helping the administration, being a part of the party. so she would rather it be quiet, but Trump, is making headlines. it's... I got the paper New York Times right here because I'm, uh, trying to get my luda- Luddite bona fides up.

On the front page- ... Trump de- demands ICE restart use of traffic stops. that's- ... that is the administration's- ... response to the killing. Do it more. don't- ... slow down. Do it more. a- y- you really imagine Stephen Miller sitting there just w- fingers steepled going, "Yes, yes, more dead immigrants.

I'm happy." that's what, it's what he wants, right? He wants immigrants to die so that the other immigrants are afraid. So i- it's, it's a- Mm-hmm ... political contradiction for, for his side, is it not? 

No, definitely. It, it, it, it is, y- you heard it from, uh, from David D- Dayen just now. Uh, it's incoherent, that there are people in the administration who think...

If, if the, if the goal is getting the biggest number of non-citizens out of the country, there are ways to do that that don't make good TV, and, and they don't beli- And there are some people in the administration who want to do it that way. Uh, you can... Uh, there, there are things they've done. Uh, we're gonna, uh, deny licenses to truckers who are not citizens.

Well, you kinda know who those people are. You can, you can send law enforcement to round, round them up. The way they have transformed ICE is more in the Miller, as you were saying, in the, in the Miller mold. They like the idea of these visuals. They like the, the idea of really angering the left. So much of this comes down to what makes our opponents the, the most angry, and you've seen from Tom Homan and other people in administration who are, who are not even cross-purposes, they just say different things on different, different days.

They, they tried to make this argument after the Minneapolis shootings that the problem here is that liberals are protesting, and Democrats should tell their voters, "Stop protesting this. Get out of the streets. Don't defend migrants." Uh, that is also much further than they went the first time. Taking a do not protest the government position.

Uh, look, there's, there's a constituency for that. I'm sure there is. Uh, but that is further than any administration in a very long time has, has gone to say, "If you disagree with us, uh, don't say so in public. Don't encourage people to disagree with us. You are part of the problem. We might investigate you for terrorism."

That's how far they're going. Yeah. The, the administration's taken other steps, uh, to, to criminalize different kinds of left-wing protests. The we're gonna tr- try to bu- build cases against An- Ant- Antifa. 

Yeah. 

All of that is so much more than they need to do if the goal is just reducing the number of migrants in the country.

Yeah. I had Fox News on today, and all of it was about of, you know, Marco Rubio fighting Antifa and stuff like that. Right. that is, their response. David Dayen, if you'd just tell us a little bit more. We spent a lot of time on the politics of it. Mm-hmm. But, just how successful has the Trump administration's deportation campaign been?

And, what are the... W- w- what are the effects that are happening to real people that are not making such big press as, you know, these, these three- Yeah ... unjustified killings? And I'm sure there's plenty. 

I, it's, it's been quite successful certainly from the standpoint of, I think, this year we will probably hit a net, negative, immigration in terms of, the, the, the population statistics in the country.

the only people coming in from overseas are white South Africans, right? that, that's, that's become the entire refugee program. And then these other various, ways that they're keeping people out of the country, both direct, actual deportations, and indirect, like some of the things that, that Dave Weigel was talking about.

one example is that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put out a guidance to banks just, a few weeks ago that said, "Hey, banks, you might not wanna give immigrants any loans because they're, they're unreliable. They might not be able to pay you back, so, exercise some caution in, uh

i- if you wanna con- maintain the safety and soundness of your bank." So they're doing- Mm-hmm ... there are things like that, little things like that happening all over in ways that try to discourage, uh, immigrants from coming to this country or staying in the country. And, uh, these are having massive... I think the thing that gets lost is, these are having massive economic in- impacts.

Mm-hmm. I'm aware of a study that's gonna be coming out next week that looks at the ICE surge in Los Angeles, at the, the middle of last year- Yeah ... and what the economic impacts of that were. you're talking about millions of people that just stopped going to work because they were afraid that at their job they would be abducted by ICE.

Yeah. And that had a, a huge ripple effect across the economy, and not just going to work, but just being out in public, going to restaurants, going to, concerts or wherever, that, that you would normally congregate. this kept people locked in their homes in fear, and, that had significant economic impacts, and not just in Los Angeles, but all of the surge cities that we've seen, whether Minneapolis or Chicago or wherever.

Next, Section B, Designed to Be Unbearable

This, ICE officer who shot, Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine apparently, according to his wife who spoke to the Associated Press, had serious mental health issues since childhood, had been abusive she alleges, and had been violent in the past, and threatening relatives including s- there's a voicemail that she shared with the Associated Press that he said he want- he thought someone should slit her throat.

Yeah, he, he said, "I'm not saying I'm going to do it, but I'm saying it should happen to you." 

So this is- Jesus ... this is the guy who, who killed the, that man in Maine, and here is the interview with his ex-wife about, this ICE officer. 

David back in November brought up that he had accepted a job with ICE.

I thought at that it was just a delusional thing 'cause I'm used to him talking crazy, so to speak. So I said, "Yeah, sure you are, buddy." You know? I didn't realize that he was actually working for ICE until, yesterday, and I was completely shocked 'cause I'm like, how do you keep getting into these jobs where you're around guns all the time?

I asked him what was going on. He told me that, that I don't need to be answering questions for anybody, that all I needed to know was that it was a justified shooting and that he did do it, and he claimed that this man had tried to run him over. And I said, "I don't see that in anything, and I've watched it from all angles.

All I seen is how the car was going in circle after the fact." and then he's like, "Well, I need you to lie about my character because this is how, this is what it comes down to is the, my character. I don't want you talking about any of the abuse in our relationship. this is literally about me, Ashley."

I told him that I was not gonna lie for him, that I've waited years to speak my truth. I've been silenced long enough. Mm. And now I need to come out with everything because a man lost his life. It was abuse not only to me, but to our daughter. and even being divorced from him, I've dealt with harassing phone calls, threats of him wanting to kill me.

I believe that this man was murdered. I believe that David's mental health played a part in what happened. I think what happened was he was standing there during that operation, had a PTSD moment, and hit fight or flight mode, and unfortunately a man lost his life due to it. 

So, this is the kind of person that is, has signed up for ICE under the Trump administration.

There's, they're not doing any screening. They're pretending that they are. They're getting a badge and a gun. They're not forcing them to wear body cameras. Someone spoke to The Intercept, I think it was ICE officials, that said that they saw that there were body cameras on the, officers in Maine, but they clearly just weren't turned on, and it just, it shows- 

What I've heard is that they aren't paying for the...

And, who knows to, what to believe, but, they aren't paying for the subscription to that, so they just, actually just work as walkie-talkies so- 

Oh, lovely. I mean- It's- ... but, but, but, body cameras, what are we talking about here? can you talk about that a bit? Because, it's just i- 95, 96, 97% of the time, whatever, those body cameras are gonna be used to facially scan anybody that they're having an interaction with.

Maybe it will pick up on, officers doing horrible things in immigration enforcement, but they might just turn them off. And we also have endless footage of the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and there's still been no accountability. It's just w- we need to only be talking about abolishment, and that's it.

Oh, absolutely. 

Yeah. 

Abolishment and, prosecution- 

Yeah ... 

for those who are, are murdering people in our streets. A- a- a- and this is, again, I, I, I write about this quite frequently in the book because this is not just an ICE issue. This is a local law enforcement issue across the country, right?

what is the screening process, when someone applies to be a member of law enforcement in, pick your, smaller city or town or, or area. who, who, who, who are, who are these people who have guns and badges, right? and how do they even get onto a force? And then when they get onto the force and do something like this, how are they held accountable, if at all?

And what we've seen is, public outrage and, public action leads to accountability and has to be done to lead to any sort of accountability. To lead to any sort of conversation, you need a public to, rise up, right? Mm-hmm. I'm thinking of the gentleman, oh, man, the gentleman who was jogging 

f- 

Oh, gosh

in Georgia. 

Hunted down by- 

And two dudes- Yeah ... just hunted him down. These weren't law enforcement, but these were, like, George Zimmerman-type- Yes ... characters who- 

Arbery? 

V- v- Yeah. Yeah. Ahmaud 

Arbery, yeah. 

Yeah, right? Uh, tell me the name again. Ahmaud 

Arbery. Ahmaud, 

Ahmaud Arbery- 

Yeah ... 

who was going for a jog.

Yep. 

These two, this father and son hunted him down, killed him And the public didn't hear about it, I think, till weeks or maybe a month or more later, and then the outrage led to accountability. And so first, how are you even getting l- the application should dismiss you from even being able to join law enforcement, get a gun and a badge, and then when you get one, how are you being held accountable?

And this is why, after, George Floyd was lynched, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was such an important piece of legislation, moved through the House quickly, and then Cory Booker and Tim Scott, just Couldn't come to an agreement. Wow, what a surprise. And the bill didn't move in the Senate at all.

And, in that bill, we wanted to end qualified immunity- Yes ... if I remember correctly, which is, because right now it's very hard to hold law enforcement accountable when they do something like this. Even in New York City, a place like New York City, there's like millions, tens of millions set aside to settle cases as opposed to holding law enforcement officials accountable.

So ending qualified immunity, someone having... you could be in law enforcement and do something really bad in one city, and then transfer to another city and it doesn't follow you to that city, so now you're in law enforcement again in another place. It's just, further emphasize the need for overall criminal justice reform.

Of course it emphasizes the need to abolish ICE and then prosecute ICE, but also going back to what we always talk about, which is electoral politics. 

Yeah. 

We gotta vote these people out of office, man. and we need everybody to, to organize and everybody to vote, because that's still a issue. We still have not 80% of people voting, right?

We, we don't, we're not reaching the numbers we need to reach to really get champions in office that could really change things. 

Yeah. And it, it does just, when I see something like this, you see how it's basically a federalizing of broken windows policing. Yeah. And what communities, particularly in cities of color, have been dealing with for decades and decades.

And even the use of gang databases, right? Like, the way that they're putting together, these lists of immigrants and trying to round them up. for years and years, gang databases have served to essentially tag, people with some sort of vague criminality to trump up charges against them, whether it's a gun charge or a drug charge, and then that's with them forever.

a- and we're the number one jailer on the planet. I was read- 

Still. 

Still. We're 

not talking about it as much, but we still are. Y- 

but you know who's- Yes ... Zohran come, came up earlier. I was super moved by him going to Rikers- Yes ... and watching the World Cup. Yes. Like, that's something where- 

And that wasn't his first time in Rikers.

No. Like, he's been there multiple times in just, six months. Yeah. 

And, and, and, a, a p- a pollster or a pundit or a consultant would say, "Hey, that's not, there's no political advantage for you to go there and, be seen with criminals," or whatever. But it was just the right thing to do. Yeah. And, he's using his political capital to bring up conversations that have been told, we were told after Jor- or, George Floyd and everything, we're too woke and we're t- p- damaging us electorally.

That it just wasn't the case. you just have to foreground a- how to make people's lives better materially, and then no one's talking about him going to Rikers in this negative way. No one's talking about how he stands up for trans people, which were seen as too touchy for other Democrats to handle, but it's because he leads with his affordability agenda, and then all of that stuff is folded in.

He leads with his humanity. 

Yeah. 

The reason why I've always loved Zohran- ... is because I see his humanity, and you can feel his humanity when you... With the way he shakes your hand. Yep. The way he has a conversation, the way he gives you a p- a pound and a hug. There's a humanity that leads his politics, and what we all want is we want our elected official, officials to be public servants and to lead with human rights first.

Yeah. if they did that, we would, solve, a lot of problems, and, the stuff that they claim to care about, they meaning, the- the- the psycho capitalists, the stuff that they care ab- about like GDP would actually improve. 

Yes. 

Right? i- if- if you, uh- New 

York's doing super well economically right now.

Yeah, 

right, right? Yeah. And it could be doing even better if we gave the people that we've redlined and marginalized access and opportunity in the same ways we give other communities. Mm-hmm. We would have a better GDP. We would have better health outcomes. We would have better education outcomes. We'd have better social outcomes.

We would spend less on healthcare overall, and we would spend less on jail and prisons overall, and law enforcement, because people have less freaking stress in their lives. 

Yeah, yeah. 

Engaging each other as human beings versus this... What are we even doing some of the time? being in the House just be so frustrating, 'cause it's yo, what?

We can't raise the federal minimum wage? Really? Yeah. we c- we can't figure that out? We, we are still at $7.50? 

It's insane. 

Like, what? We, we can't do that? We, we can't provide healthcare? it's just, it's crazy. 

I want to bring in another person from your piece, Lydia. she's a mother and a grandmother from Minnesota who, was driving to work one morning in January when she was pulled over.

tell us what happened to her. 

Yeah, it's a January morning, 5:45. Lidia works, or worked at the time as a, as a cleaner at a retirement home, in a town in Minnesota, maybe about 30 miles outside of Minneapolis. And she realizes suddenly that there are two ICE cars behind her. and she gets pulled over, and she ha- happens to be on a Zoom while she's driving.

it's piping in through her car speakers, it's on Bluetooth or whatever. and it's a, it's a morning prayer session that she does with her husband and, a number of other community members and a group of nuns. And actually, the way she informed her family that she was being arrested was she said on this Zoom, "I'm being arrested."

And her husband, who was already at his job working, this is 5:45 in the morning, hears that and calls their son. So Lidia has three kids. One has DACA. one... two are US citizens, but one is a minor. And the oldest son, uh, Alexis, who's 21 and a US citizen, he is the family's, kind of emissary to the outside world during m- moments like this.

he is the only one basically who is on, unquestioned legal footing. 

Right. He's solid legal footing, but he's also helping them navigate their way through what they had already been afraid might happen to them. So she's arrested. She's held in a van disguised to look like a construction vehicle.

It has ladders. It has fluorescent vests displayed in the windows. And I bring up that up because this detail stopped me. It stopped me because it means that these operations are happening around us, and many of us don't even know it. 

I'm gl- glad it called out to you that detail, 'cause it's an incredibly striking detail.

even before the current Trump administration, ICE has engaged in practices that are, misleading probably, to put it most politely, to try to convince people, say, to open their doors and so on. but what we're seeing now, of course, is a, a level of unfettered behavior that, certainly I haven't seen in my lifetime, which is, not only plainclothes agents in, wearing masks, driving, unmarked cars- Right, which we've seen videos of those

essentially abducting people on the streets. Yeah. 

Yes. 

That's right. That's right. I- i- in this case, Lydia and this other man are being held in this van, and the idea is to try to cause as little outward disruption as possible while these agents continue to try to make more arrests. and, Alexis, her son, drives over to the site of where she was arrested immediately.

He gets there while they're still taking her away. he says to them, "Listen, I'm a member of the National Guard." He's a member of the Minnesota National Guard, and in fact, last year, Lydia had put in a special application for a form of, of legal relief based on the fact that he was a member of the Minnesota National Guard.

Do you have evidence or have you, in her case or others, that, that the application itself actually flagged ICE? 

I, I, I don't, I don't know in this case, I have to say plainly. I don't, I don't know. I do think one of the scariest things for hundreds of thousands of people who are in this country actually lawfully...

we're talking about people who have temporary protected status, people who entered under Biden-era parole programs, people who formally applied for asylum, is that these are all people who've interacted with the federal government, who have gi- willingly given their information to the federal government, which now is most certainly being weaponized against them.

And one of the, the trends that we have seen that I can speak to with authority is that people who have interacted with another agency at the Department of Homeland Security, it's called Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS is the full acronym, people who show up for routine appointments there, legal adjustment interviews, fingerprinting appointments, green card interviews, naturalization interviews, citizenship interviews, is that some people are actually getting arrested by ICE agents at those appointments.

So there is some collusion between this other agency that administers the legal immigration system and ICE, which is enfor- enforcing immigration laws and making arrests. So that is a definite reality across the, across the board. I don't know in Lydia's case specifically i- if that's what happened or if she was flagged.

the other reality in all of this, a darker reality in some ways, is there is also rampant racial profiling that is at the center of so much of the administration's enforcement agenda. and in fact, the US Supreme Court basically gave ICE the green light to use race, to use the fact that someone speaks Spanish- Mm-hmm

as one, one element of their decision to pull someone over. Mm-hmm. And so that's- It's- ... also a possibility in this case. 

Right. It's gone well beyond those who have criminal records. It is, it is those who are visibly from, from other places. 

That's right. 

And her story, she shares, her family shares with you that, she, she witnessed and she experienced within, the detention center real pressure for her to sign to be deported.

And to be deported where specifically? 

Well, she's, Lydia's from Mexico. Mm-hmm. and so You know, it's, unlike, for example, someone from Cuba who faces this really grisly prospect of being deported to Mexico, which is something that's happened in large numbers, of, of Cubans being sent to Mexico and basically now being stuck in a country where they don't have legal status and they're back at square one, only in Mexico.

for Lydia, the threat was that she would be worn down to such a point that she would just agree to be sent back to Mexico. And one of the things that Alexis said to her, her son said to her, the moment that she was arrested was like, "Mom, don't sign anything." And she repeats that over and over in her head.

And, she is basically determined not to be pressured into leaving. and, and this at a time, of course, when half of the people in her unit, agree to be deported. L-Lydia, as someone who was arrested in Minnesota as pa- as part of Operation Metro Surge, was basically shunted to Texas at a time when the administration was using Camp East Montana to deal with the high number of arrests that it was making in another state.

and so the fifth and final tent that was constructed at Camp East Montana was used largely, if not entirely, for people who were arrested in Minnesota. and, in-- Sure, there was already chaos, reigning at Camp East Montana, but they're gonna-- A-all of whatever protocols, however meager they were, are out the window for this population.

And so it was three weeks before Lydia actually got the full health screening that you normally get when you enter a facility. So she, for three weeks, was essentially wearing the clothes that she was arrested in. She slept at night in the jacket that she was arrested in. At one point, she got COVID in her tent, and only found out later that that tent was full of people with COVID and jail authorities put up signs outside the tent to warn contractors not to go in there because people had COVID, but the people inside the tent weren't told.

So she has COVID. She's going through a-all of this. And, again, it just, it, it, it reinforces a point you made earlier that I, I can't stress enough, which is the administration is using immigration detention to try to effectuate this goal of forcing more deportations. Immigration detention, it cannot be said enough, i-is not supposed to be punitive.

This is not like someone who's been arrested for a crime and who is serving a prison sentence that is part of that person's punishment. The idea of, an immigration infraction is it is a civil infraction, and y-you can't use... it sounds almost quaint to say under the circumstances, but the government cannot weaponize detention, legally, morally, cannot weaponize immigration detention as a way of trying to punish people and engineer outcomes.

We're at a really dangerous point with this national deportation policing force, which is what we call the cannibalization of federal law enforcement and state and local law enforcement to serve the mass deportation agenda.

And so what we see all around the country is that, law enforcement agencies, sometimes the entire law enforcement agency, are deputized to work for ICE. There's a huge financial incentive for them to do so. They can get performance bonuses. They can get people's salaries paid for, new cars, new phones.

What it means is that you have signed up to work for ICE. And so we see, for instance, highway patrols in some states just posting up their weekend duty is to set up checkpoints and have ICE in cars nearby, and they stop people for the purpose of funneling people to ICE. You've got local police who are in Florida.

they're seeing people and saying, "Hey, you're walking your dog in the wrong part of the beach. No dog walking here. And by the way, where were you born? You seem to be speaking with an accent. Oh, I've got to call ICE." So what we have now is local police doing ICE's bidding. And I think from a democracy perspective, what's so dangerous about that is that ICE is not just a law enforcement agency.

It is a political tool of the White House. They've made no bones about it during the funding shutdown, last year. the president threatened to deploy ICE to the airports and did so really in a blatant political stunt to try to put pressure on Congress and say, "Look, I've got ICE, and I can send them after you if I don't like what you're doing.

If you're putting the squeeze on me, I'll use ICE to put the squeeze on you." So if you Look not very far into the future and you think about, well, there's more than 50,000 law enforcement agents that are now working for ICE. with ICE directly, from another federal law enforcement agency, as, as you've reported from the FBI, from state and local police, they've got more than 50,000.

Every day there's even more law enforcement agencies signing up to work for ICE, and now they can be deployed by the president, by Stephen Miller, to go after dissent. That's not a hypothetical. That's not a hypothetical 'cause we've seen it in states all around the country. In our report, which was just looking at 2025, we identified more than 780 people who were engaged in First Amendment protected activity.

They're documenting ICE's behavior. They've got their cell phones on recording. they're not, trained legal observers, they're just people. But there's also members of the clergy, elected officials, journalists, more than 780 of them who were targeted or subjected to misconduct by immigration agents, and I think that should scare all of us.

When ICE is tear gassing people, we documented 132 times when immigration agents were directly targeting people with chemical irritants, like spraying them in the face. That is brazen, and again, thinking about that as a politicized force, concentrated power at the beck and call of the president, not just here in Washington, DC, but in states all around the country, it is truly frightening from a, the perspective of our democracy.

You mentioned the reporting that I did in May on, on the FBI redirecting a quarter of its staff, over 9,000 personnel, to target immigrants, and at the state and local level, cooperation between federal immigration agents and local police has exploded under Trump. In his first year alone, the number of local and state police departments partnering with ICE to do immigration enforcement increased by 600%.

As of July, ICE has partnered with more than 2,100 such agencies. Noreen, you touched on this a little bit, but, Naina, I wonder if you can elaborate on how those specific partnerships are making this deportation machine possible. 

Let me start with the diversion of resources from other federal agencies. One thing here that's important to talk about on both fronts is public safety.

These are agencies, federal agencies, that have typically focused on core public safety priorities like political violence, domestic terrorism, human and drug trafficking. Instead, these are now officers that are focused on low-level immigration enforcement with very little understanding of the immigration system altogether.

That is a way to supercharge this mass deportation agenda at the federal level, but also a way in which it undermines safety for all Americans, not only immigrant communities. At the local level, this expansion of partnerships between local sheriffs and the federal government absolutely, as always, can serve as a force multiplier for ICE.

That means police officers out on the street using routine traffic stops that can turn into detention, deportation, family separation, or even death. there was the young three-year-old boy who died because his mother had been deported, and she had been picked up by a local police officer during a traffic stop.

That is an example of how these partnerships have real human harms. Now On the public safety front, what we know is that when local police are deputized to work as ICE agents, of course they lose the trust of community members because communities become afraid that reporting crime or contacting public government services will result in deportation and detention.

Earlier in the administration, we saw a public post from a sheriff in Tennessee who said that a baby died in the care of a non-citizen caretaker who was too scared to call 911 in Tennessee because of recent raids that had just happened at the hands of Tennessee State Police officers and federal agents.

So those public safety implications are real, and at the council, we have been talking to sheriffs around the country who do not want to enter into these partnerships because of how it erodes their credibility and how it works against public safety. These are sheriffs in places including, North Carolina who say, "We can't investigate homicides in immigrant communities if we're in bed with the Trump administration and ICE."

We've seen the most conservative sheriffs in Florida who cozied up to this agenda saying, "Wait a minute, why are we going after people who pose no s- safety threat for these kinds of arrests?" So this kind of collaboration, as Noreen said, it obviously has implications for our democracy. It's growing our federal police force, but it also has terrible negative effects for actually protecting public safety and maintaining public trust of public institutions.

And we can expect the kind of violence we're seeing, not only at the hands of federal agents, but also local police officers if we continue to see the administration expand this kind of collaboration. 

I'm not really sure people grasp just how unprecedented the amount of federal money we're giving to ICE and CBP is compared to when those agencies were created after 9/11.

Congress just gave ICE and CBP another $70 billion on top of the money allocated in Trump's economic bill last year, which allocated $170 billion over four years for federal immigration enforcement. Noreen, can you put in perspective for our listeners that explosion in funding, and how is that money shaping what federal immigration agents are doing, what resources, and, and the kinds of weapons that they have?

The $240 billion injection that the Trump administration has given ICE and Border Patrol make these agencies, which already were the largest federal law enforcement agencies, makes them far larger than anything that we've seen at the federal law enforcement level. Their budgets are bigger than that of many, actually, most militaries around the world.

So most militaries around the world are funded less than ICE and Border Patrol at this moment in our nation's history. If you think about where ICE even comes from, like how it came into being, it came into being after the 9/11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. It's a pretty young agency as they go, less than 25 years old, and even after 9/11, which, it spawned a lot of legitimate concern and also a lot of hysteria about terrorism and immigration, even after that, we didn't see this kind of funding.

Nothing near this kind of funding. We've actually got a bar chart that shows just how enormously, like a staggering amount of money this is in comparison to anything ICE and Border Patrol got before, even if you compare it to the first Trump administration, even if you look at several years combined, it does not meet $240 billion.

So what can they do with this money? I mentioned that they want to create the Amazon Prime of deportations. It means that they can not only expand ICE's footprint directly in terms of hiring, but they can do more of what we've been talking about, which is incentivizing state and local police to join their ranks through a program called 287G.

Millions of dollars on detention, and detention, not to make it more safe. It will be deadly. It will be large facilities where people are just left to suffer all kinds of abuse and all kinds of medical neglect, and of course, just to deport as many people as they can. It's worth remembering that their ambition is to deport 100 million people.

That's what they've said on their social media platform. 100 million, which is about a third of the country, that's how many people they want to get rid of, and they've got a lot of ideas about how to do it. So they will be spending that money unless Congress takes it (CLIP END — Clip #5: Intercept Briefing - National police force & funding) back, and we will certainly be looking for members of Congress now to make that commitment that they will take that money back because it is just too large a sum.

Well, well, as you're making clear, the work of Resisting police brutality, racism, impact on community has a lot of levels and a lot of aspects, and I know that the project fits in there in a particular way.

I wonder if you could just tell us about some of the elements of resisting, of upending this system that you're working on. I know, for example, qualified immunity is one issue area, but what, what are some of the big pieces that the project is focusing on? 

Yeah. I think we, have a, a two-track system for change or theory of change at the National Police Accountability Project.

We are trying to stop police violence at, at all of its levels from happening. In the first instance, that kind of goes back to what our calls were around ICE presence in the streets. I think we have similar policy proposals for local law enforcement that, we get them out of traffic stops, that we get them out of mental health crisis intervention, all these places where we know it is likely for law enforcement actions to escalate to violence.

So we, we are working on the policy front to remove police from situations where we know that they're likely to commit violence, and that, that goes for ICE as well. ending surveillance technologies, ending kind of the, the technical side of over-policing that often leads to physical violence.

So that's the one track. And the other track is to ensure that there's accountability and consequences when violence does happen. And so that is more where we're focusing on reforms like ending qualified immunity. That's where we're more focused on ensuring that victims of ICE and police violence have an advocate.

A, a big part of our work this year has been focused on training, attorneys, civil rights attorneys, plaintiff side's attorneys, and even, kind of people who've, who've never done a plaintiff side case to bring lawsuits against the federal agencies when this type of ICE violence happens because we know that there are so many people who are being impacted by federal law enforcement violence due to these ICE surges in communities that have never really had to deal with that before.

And so that's really been, a lot of our work and a lot of our focus this year. 

And your-- the National Police Accountability Project is a network, right, of attorneys and advocates. so it's a, it's a big group of folks who, who coordinate their efforts around these issues as opposed to, just one organization.

Is that right? 

That's right, yeah. So we have our members who are litigating these cases. We have, community partners across the country, ge- grassroots groups, and then we also have, partnerships with other national organizations working on criminal legal system issues. And then, yeah, we have our 550 members, all across the country.

And so we're a big network and a big group and, are doing work at, kind of varying levels of policing systems. 

Well, let me just ask you finally, folks are... There's a high point of outrage right now and focus and attention on these ICE killings as well there should be, but folks have a lot of other things going on, you know, and there's a, there's a lot of distracting, bad things happening.

And so when there is a flashpoint of attention, folks really wanna, wanna use it, wanna make the most of it, and where folks often wind up is call your representative, call your senator. And I think while that is crucial and that kind of political engagement is important, I think it's frustrating for people to come away from something that feels so visceral, that has, that has made them so angry, that has made them cry, and then to, you know- get on the phone and leave a, a 10-second voicemail on their, their senator's, line.

And I think folks are looking for other ways to plug in, other things to do. Do you have thoughts for people, just regular folks who are, who are trying to, to do something about this, who are trying to use their anger for something? 

Yeah. I think it's so important to, to go that a extra step and attend a protest.

I think the protests that we've been seeing at Susan Collins' office in Maine have been really effective in pushing back on the narrative that, "Oh, I, I got them to stop. Police stopped," right? And making it be an issue that elected officials can't just let go away with, putting out a, a mild statement or, claiming that they influenced a policy that was immediately reversed or whatever.

Those feet in the street can really make a difference. And I would also say that, it may not feel great, but those calls to your senators, calls to your, representatives, they're making a difference. We have more and more people, like, coming out and saying that they really wanna curtail ICE funding, elected officials that would never take that position in the past.

I would also say, though, if you wanna be more engaged and, I know people have limited time, there are so many great grassroots groups, some of our grassroots partners across the country that have accompaniment programs. So, being able to go with your immigrant neighbors to places where they might be, likely to encounter ICE and just being able to be a presence and an observer and someone who can maybe give them a little bit more protection and confidence, if they have to go to a court hearing or a doctor's appointment or all these places that we're seeing more and more ICE agents popping up.

So I, I think that there's a lot of ways to engage and, even a simple Google search would allow you to, to get plugged into that and, it really... Those programs really are based on your availability. It, it's a short training and then, it's, driving someone to the pharmacy or something.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. it is a, an easy way if you have, even a free hour once a week, to, to try to be a source of support and a, a source of resistance for the immigrant community around you.

And Finally, Section C, The World Watches & The People Fight Back

Mexico files criminal complaints in the US over migrant deaths in custody. Go ahead and read the lead for you here. Mexico has begun filing criminal complaints with state prosecutors in the United States over the deaths of its citizens in US immigration custody and during enforcement operations, the Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

Mexico's government has also sent cease and desist letters to US detention centers where Mexican nationals have died, the ministry added in a statement. The filings follow the deaths of at least 14 Mexican nationals in ICE custody and several others during arrest operations, including the recent fatal shooting of a Mexican citizen by an ICE agent in Houston.

That story, of course, has been one of the ones that really has reverberated both here in Mexico and, of course, in the United States. This was a man who was known in his community. We've seen his son actually play a leading role in denouncing that. And I think it's, Right. Very eloquent ... in some ways- Mm-hmm, 

mm-hmm

a, a qualitative change- Mm-hmm ... I think. We're seeing very much like the, the, the ICE killings o- of, Renee Good and Pretti that really galvanized the community. What we're seeing here in Houston, which the city itself is somewhat more on the liberal side, but of course is based in very Republican Texas.

We're seeing a lot of people coming out, these spontaneous mobilizations, these actions. Again, I really wanna highlight the role of this young man, his son, who has done a, an incredible job talking about this case. but I also wanna, before we, move on here and break this story down for you, wanna share with you the actual communiqué from the government of Mexico, from the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, talking about exactly what they're doing.

As we see here, and we saw in the story, a complaint to the United States Department of Justice. So this is not just a diplomatic note, which is what Mexico had been doing previously, but actually submitting a formal complaint from one attorney general's office to another about what's going on.

Complaints to state-level prosecutors as well, not leaving it only to the federal sphere. Filing complaints with state prosecutors, civil, civilian, civil actions as well, law- lawsuits, cease and desist letters to the detention centers, in particular the, in particular the Adelanto Detention Center in California, which has been flagged by the Mexican government on numerous occasions.

Precisely because, as we can see here on the screen, four Mexican nationals have actually died at that detention center. In particular, it's been at the center of criticism. We've talked about that center, previously here on Soberania, and of course, a communication as well to the United States, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, raising this issue w- with Volker Türk, the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations, about the deaths of Mexican people in ICE custody, raising it to the international level as well.

Okay. So you're right, there's a lot to break down here, Jose Luis. the first thing we have to, I think, say very clearly is we send out our, our most heartfelt condolences to the family of Lorenzo Salgado. That's just, beyond the pale. We've been following, on this podcast and on Sin Muros, the cases of ICE, today's modern-day Gestapo, and, their brutal practices, across the country.

And as you said, the cases of, Renee Good and Alex Pretti galvanized the community, in Minneapolis, right? And then after Minneapolis, there appeared to be, a lowering of, of the actions of the tensions. I was in Chicago shortly afterwards, and the migrant community there in Pilsen saying, "Yeah, they've, they've, they've toned it down a bit."

Right? they thought You know, not they hadn't stopped anything, but they'd stopped the most flagrant, high-profile cases. 

And 

the question, of course, always was, how long was that gonna last, right? And as we've seen, was not all that, not all that long, right? and this is, indicative of, of an ICE and a border patrol that's out of control, right?

in the case of Lorenzo Salgado, they weren't even looking for him. he was on his way to work, someone who's been in the, United States for decades. He was on the... just on the cusp of getting his work permit, right? And of course, they always trundle out the story that, he was resisting arrest and was trying to get away and was trying to, act aggressively against ICE officers, which has proven to be, in every single case, bar none, a lie, an absolute lie.

And then after the Lorenzo Salgado case, we had the case, of course, in Biddeford, Maine, with a Colombian, citizen, who was a legal resident and was, shot and killed, I think, with his daughter in the back seat, and then just, hustled out of the vehicle, like a sack of potatoes. And then just very recently, we had another death in San Augustine, Florida, Jose Luis, by somebody, again, who was at, an ICE, stop, attempted, to flee and was hit by a tractor trailer.

So that's three just in this week. So, whatever, change of strategy or tactics might have happened after Minneapolis, ICE is back, and of course, ICE never went away. And we're talking about, some fifty people who have died in ICE custody, and, ICE killed them. Whether they actually put a gun to their temple or not, they're victims of ICE just as much.

And now we have ten people who have been physically shot by ICE, including the cases, of Houston and in Florida... I'm sorry, of Maine, and then of course the, the Florida case where the person was hit, by a vehicle. And so the-- in the face of that, what does the Mexican government do? What can the Mexican government do?

Because it's operating in a different legal jurisdiction. So, their... legally, their hands are somewhat tied. But as you very correctly pointed out at the beginning, this does represent a fundamental shift in the Mexican government at the beginning, in the first few months, the Sheinbaum government was obviously using the cool head strategy in battling off tariffs and fending off Trump's, threats of invasion and the like, and, the boat bombings and the kidnapping of, Maduro and the, asphyxiation of, of Cuba.

There was an all-out assault against the entire region. And within there, the rhetoric about the ICE killings and shootings was, fairly muted. It was there, but it was fairly muted, right? What we see now is a shift in strategy away from this, the diplomatic note, right, the nota diplomatica, towards direct legal action, and you've just laid out what those four were.

an official complaint at the federal level from one attorney general's office to another. You see complaints being filed at the state level. and then you see, cease and withdrawal letters being sent to these private prisons. This strikes me as particularly important. Mm-hmm. beyond the criminal cases at the federal and state level, sending these cease and withdrawal letters to...

We've talked about them abundantly on these shows, right? CoreCivic and GEO Group, these four private disgusting companies running gulags across the country where they're giving people rancid food. They've got people stuffed in small spaces. They're not giving them the medical care that, they're legally required to give, so they are responsible for killing these people as much as if they'd killed them So this is the strategy now, and of course, taking it to the United Nations High Commissioner for, the High Commission, as you mentioned.

Now, will these complaints go anywhere? No, they won't. But it could set the stage for future legal action. You have to go through the hoops. You have to file the complaint first. That could then become part of your legal case down the road. You have to file the cease and withdrawal case first with these private prisons, so that can then be the basis for a future civil suit.

And I hope Lorenzo Salgado's family and all these families, sue the hell out of these people in the civil-- in civil courts, because it's very hard to go after individual ICE officers, criminally. They're protected. Although, they could use, federal tort law to go after the federal government in general for wrongful.

But civilly, they could go after these people, and I hope they clean them out, Jose Luis. And I hope the Mexican federal government continues to step up its actions, however difficult it is. just to conclude, we saw how difficult it was in the case of Mexico's lawsuit against American gun companies, right?

Which was eventually thrown out because, we know how, the US, system works. And of course, because, gun manufacturers have immunity against, what happens with their guns, and that apparently extends across the entire world, what happens with the guns that they sell. Mm-hmm. so, legally, it didn't go anywhere, but it did bring more legal attention to the issue.

And now we see the issue of US guns going into Mexico being talked about like it's never been talked about before, very consistently, both on the US and on the Mexican side. So at the very least, that's gonna come out of this. But Mexico has to keep up the pressure, Jose Luis 

In a memo obtained by The New York Times back in June, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote, quote, "Coral Garrido has used his presence in the United States to conduct political activity in support of the Petro government," unquote, and accused Coral of undermining US foreign policy interests in Colombia.

Since Trump's return to office, Rubio has used his power as the Secretary of State to target individual immigrants for prosecution and deportation like, oh, student protesters such as Palestinian advocate Mahmoud Khalil. But according to The Times, this memo appeared to be the first to recommend the deportation of an activist in relation to a presidential election in a foreign country, in this case, Colombia.

Beto Coral reportedly arrived in the United States in 2015 on a tourist visa and had a pending asylum application. After a month in ICE detention, Beto Coral dropped his asylum claim and returned voluntarily to Colombia on July 16th. He's joining us now from Bogota, Colombia, and we're joined by his attorney, Elizabeth Shaw, a partner at Humanitas Legal Group in Boston.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Beto Coral, let's begin with you. Can you talk about the day of your detention by HSI agents? Where were you? What happened? 

Thank you for joining me. I was detained in, on June 16th by no ICE agents, HSE agents while, they tell me. I was, grocery shopping with my son and when I arrive, home, they, raises their weapons.

But as soon as they saw, that I was with my young son and my dog, they lowered down the guns. they then allowed me to go into the apartment to put away the groceries, leave my son and my dog there because you know the, the weather in Phoenix in Ju- in Ju- in June, in June. And I tried to call my son's mother so she call me, uh, pick me, h- pick him up, my, my son and my dog.

they never present me, with a warrant or any other legal document. They simply handcuffed me once I got into the vehicle, put me in the shackles. What was most surprise was that after we started driving, one of the HSE- EC agents asked me, "What, why you did it?" And I'm very surprised because that guy's, they tell me and they, they don't have reason, don't know the reason.

It's very, I, I am very surprised and th- this situation was very large. Beco, I, 

I want to explain to our viewers and listeners around the world when you say HSI agents, that's Homeland Security Investigations. So they take you, and you end up in ICE detention, which jail, for a month. And explain what happened to you there.

Yes. After that, I, I was taken to detention facility in Florence in Arizona where I was, beaten and, within... Sorry. The days, the, the ICE agents in Florence don't give me water, don't give me, a food. they struck me my legs and put me the shackles on my hands and my feet and my, hips. I was held there for about four hours.

Then around 3:00 PM, they, kick m- kick, kick my, my legs and sh- show me out to detention facility. put me into a van and drove me through northern Arizona, crossing the border into New Mexico. However, when then headed south, which, seemed very strange. Looking out the window, I noticed that we were, approximate to El Paso, maybe 10:00 PM.

soon after, I realized we were arriving at the detention facility in El Paso. In El Paso, I was don't give any food or water. I remain there for, for a day, one day and half. After that, I was transported by plane to Omaha, Nebraska, then to Minneapolis, then to Alexandria, Louisiana. from there I was taken, by bus to Mississippi, and after five days in Mississippi, I was,

transferred to Jena in Louisiana. through this entire time, I was always keep in solitary confinement. During the transfer, I was never, given any food. Only, after we arrived to each detention facility. I was don't given water either, and the treatment I received was, inhuman, and I was always singled out and, handcuffed.

I wanna bring, your lawyer into this conversation, Elizabeth Shaw, one of the lawyers representing our guest, Col- from, Colombia because he was deported there. Franklin, Franklin Humberto Corral Garrido, better known as Beto Coral. Elizabeth Shaw, explain exactly, after being here for over a decade, why Beto was picked up, and the clarity of this memo that The New York Times got ahold of, written by, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, specifically talking about his support for candidates in his own country of Colombia

Right. I think we only really need to look at the timeline of events that took place here. The weekend before Beto was a- arrested in Arizona, he was actually in Miami, Florida with other Colombian ex-pats, and they were, demonstrating and speaking out about their political opinion in regards to the upcoming election that was happening the following weekend.

And when he arrived back home, there was the memo issued by Marco Rubio that morning, and by that afternoon he was detained by HSI agents. and on the same day, the incoming president, de la Espriella, had, made tweets, that honestly looked like they did allude to Beto's arrest. and so it's very clear that he was exercising his First Amendment speech in Miami, returned home, and then was arrested for that speech.

This is a part of a clip you posted on Instagram outside a luxury apartment building in Miami, Bristol Tower, where far-right Colombian President-Elect Abelardo de la Espriella at one point owned property. He's a lawyer and a businessman who's faced scrutiny over the source of his fortune and his alleged links to Colombian clients, including Alex Saab, an ultra-wealthy fixer for former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who's currently in federal custody in a Brooklyn jail awaiting trial.

Let's go to that clip of, of Beto Coral. This 

apartment 

was purchased with money belonging to Venezuela's poor, which is why I'm here in Miami, a city teeming with such stories, fortunes, luxury apartments, and properties acquired by individuals directly or indirectly linked to the Venezuelan regime.

And yet from here they spend their time criticizing. 

So clearly Corral is, speaking, as an activist. if you can, Elizabeth Shaw, respond to, Marco Rubio saying, quote, "Corral Garrido has used his presence in the United States to conduct political activity in support of the Petro government." Petro, democratically elected president in Colombia.

what he is condemning is everyone's right here in the United States to have and hold their own political opinion and the problem that Marco Rubio and the Trump administration has is that that stated opinion, which is widely followed, on Beto's various accounts across social media is that that is against what they are in support of.

And so where does his case stand now? Already deported to Colombia. 

and I would like to clarify that point. Beto was not deported. we, his legal team had negotiated a deal for him to accept voluntary departure, meaning that he is not deported from the United States. He left on his own accord and without expense to the United States government.

And so at this point, he has withdrawn his asylum application in accordance with the grant of voluntary departure, and, is now in Colombia, making his plans for his next steps for safety. 

I see Miguel here in the chat says, "ICE is a rogue institution." Absolutely. I... the only acceptable demand I think in this is for the dissolution of ICE. Mm-hmm. It shouldn't exist. That's it. 

A rogue institution is part of a rogue state.

It's reflective. One is reflective of the other. And you're absolutely right. with, Renee Good, we have how many different videos of it happening? The agent involved was simply shifted somewhere else and continues to be on duty. What good did the, the video cams do there? And to pick up on your point, I think this is very important about, what's to be commendable about La, Claudia Sheinbaum about this.

She has very little to gain on this, in dem- pure terms of domestic political capital, right? The migrants are not a big voting constituency within Mexico. there's not a groundswell here within, Mexico, on this for, historical reasons of a kind of a disconnect between sometimes Mexico and the migrant community that a lot of been- people have been trying to, to work on and address.

So it's high risk and little gain in the most narrow terms of political capital. But with regards to the dignity of the country and with regards to human rights, with regards to protecting Mexican citizens, wherever they may be, it's fundamental, and that's what's so important about this. But there's gonna be blowback.

There's gonna be blowback on this, right? as United States is trying to blackmail Mexico with the, USMCA, revision, right as, Lindsey Graham is dead and, may he never rest for a moment of peace wherever he is. 

But Lindsey- Certainly 

no friend of Mexico ... no friend of Mexico, and Lindsey Graham was leading the charge to, have cartels being declared as foreign terrorist organizations, even before Trump, did it.

And now it turns out that the United States was negotiating with the Sinaloa cartel the whole time, right? Watch our episode, from last week. So it's in this context of constant pressure, economically, diplomatically, militarily, that Sheinbaum is sticking out her neck for Mexican citizens who are amongst the most invisible, right?

Because there's not a huge constituency here within Mexico, standing up for them, and within the United States, they're in the most precarious of situations, being hunted down like dogs, right? and that's why it's so important that it not just stay at another diplomatic complaint. You've gotta take it to the courts, and you've gotta take it beyond the courts, obviously.

You've got to really mobilize, the migrant community in the US. The problem is that, remember a few months ago when Los Angeles was erupting, Sheinbaum was just immediately being attacked by, "Oh, you s- she's, stoking riots in Los Angeles from, the National Palace." Which she obviously wasn't doing.

But this is the thing that the, Sheinbaum said at the Mañanera, "This should be something that unites us as Mexicans, protecting our citizens wherever they are." The sad truth is that it doesn't. It unites the Mexican public, it unites the Mexican left. It does not unite, the PRI and the PAN, who constantly punch down on the migrants and bash them and say, "They were asking for it," basically.

All right? So this is, an area where she's calling for national unity, and there should be that. But you have, a right wing here which is, very comfortable seeing Mexican c- citizens mistreated because, what do they care, right? 

Before we move on, I wanna highlight this comment here from our regular viewer.

Bill Ackman contributed 10,000 to the GoFundMe campaign for the agent who shot Renee Good. So we can see how precisely there is almost a, a confluence around some of these issues from the oligarchs. And I say that because it's cr- really quite curious, and it's a, it's a bit of an aside, so I hope you allow me.

But as I was looking through this article, Kurt, look who's quoted, our friend Tony Payan- . Mm-hmm ... from the Baker Institute. But how about this? I did not realize this until now, but the Center for US and Mexico at Rice University is now named after Claudio X. Gonzalez.

I just couldn't let that 

sit. Claudio X. Gonzalez Center. Oh, that is so pathetic.

Can you believe that? But it, it, it speaks to the point I'm trying to make, right? We see how the very wealthy, the oligarchs in Mexico, the oligarchs in the United States, use their money to drive their agendas, right? To, to, to have these puppets for them speak for their ideas in these public spaces, to fund these criminal assassins who kill people who are just simply trying to protect their neighbors from being kidnapped in the case of Renee Good.

Yeah. And so, just to close out, I was in Chicago a few months ago. The Chicago community is very organized about this, and I think this is gonna spur a lot more organization on this. We're seeing Lorenzo Salgado and that whole case, it's spreading beyond Houston now. It's spreading beyond Houston in the way, in the, the way the Renee Good case became s- became symbolic of, Minneapolis.

Lorenzo Salgado case is becoming symbolic, right, of, o- of treatment of, of the Hispanic community, right? Because it's, it's a Mexican here, it's a Colombian in Maine. We don't know who it was in San Agustin. amongst the 50 people, who have, yes, been killed in ICE centers, I think 16 of them are Mexicans, right?

So about a third. Okay? This can't go on. This can't go on. All right? This is... it's like for the slave patrols of the 19th century. It's like the posse vigilantes along the border, right? Taking their law, taking what's left of the law in the United States into their own hands with absolute and utter impunity.

Can't go on. It can't. There has to be a huge mass rising up against this. Mm. And the Mexican government is doing its part, but there has to be, has, there has to be, The strategy has to be coordinated with the people on the ground there as well 

That's right. But we are seeing an uprising.

And I think, think that while there was a lull there- Yeah ... perhaps because of other events of great import, like the US assault together with Israel on Iran, which appears to be picking up once again. Again. Trump can't seem to help himself. But of course, the World Cup all things served in a lot of ways to shock people.

But we're seeing that obviously now start to wind down, and we're seeing protests start to wind up. It's something we'll be 

following closely. 

We turn now to news that Citizens Bank has severed financial ties to CoreCivic and the GEO Group, two of the nation's largest private prison operators that work directly with ICE to run immigration jails. The national bank has faced significant pushback from social justice groups and activists for providing more than $2.5 billion in financing to the two private prison companies.

Earlier this month, Citizens Bank said it was ending its lending relationships with the GEO Group and CoreCivic, insisting that the move was a, quote, "business decision based on changed commercial circumstances and unrelated to protest actions and the growing boycott of Citizens Bank." Three days before Citizens decided to end its financial relationship with the GEO Group and CoreCivic, the township of Montclair, New Jersey voted to pull its $91 million account from Citizens Bank.

This is Montclair Mayor Rene Baskerville speaking in favor of divesting from Citizens Bank at a Montclair Township Council meeting earlier this month. 

It's not just a one-out. It's, like a wake-up call that I think that we need to be more diligent about who we're doing business with, who we're investing with, what contracts we're giving out.

And really, when we're doing these things, that maybe we should be, just a little bit more aware and take a look at the, the behind-the-scenes types of things. And even when we were talking about, well, what next? You take it from Citizens, and I'm saying, well, let's make sure that we know wherever we go, whether it's Valley, Bank of America, whoever it may be, that we know who, they're doing banking with because there's a lot of other categories, none as urgent as this is immediately in this setting here and now with what's going on at Delaney.

Montclair's decision follows a decision last month by Jersey City in New Jersey to divest from Citizens Bank and close its over $250 million account. The GEO Group runs the Delaney Hall Federal Immigration Detention Center in Newark, New Jersey, and CoreCivic operates the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Jake, let's begin with you, Council Member. talk about how this happened. this is happening all over the country, but piecemeal in a way that people don't realize, how much pressure has been brought on Citizens Bank, whether or not they admit that, this has led to their decision. 

Yeah, it, it really is pressure.

And just first, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's really an honor to be here. before I was on Jersey City Council, I got my start, as a Democratic Socialist of America member organizing the Abolish ICE movement, fighting against ICE detention centers and jails in New Jersey, and just at the beginning of this year was elected, for this first term as a, a city council member in Jersey City.

And the pressure at Delaney Hall was growing. the conditions were deteriorating, and the resistance on the inside led by detainees was escalating, particularly by hunger strikers and labor strikers. and Delaney Hall in, in Newark, includes residents of Jersey City, so this was, of course, a concern of my constituents being there.

And, it just so happened that the De-ICE Citizens Bank movement, these amazing activists who are identifying just how much financing, of GEO Group, which operates Delaney, as you mentioned, and of course, Civic, just how much financing Citizens Bank does. 2.5 billion, I think, was the amount of financing going to these companies.

De-ICE Citizens Bank was doing this great work. I had just started hearing about it maybe days or a week before a city council meeting where I was reviewing the agenda, the week before the city council meeting, and I noticed that we had, a vote, to authorize where our money essentially was being held in different banks.

And I saw that Citizens Bank was on this list, and that raised alarms for me right away. So it was absolutely thanks to the incredible work of the activists with the De-ICE Citizens Bank movement that I would even know to look out for that. and I immediately told the administration. I worked with, my other DSA counterpart, Councilman Joel Brooks, on our city council, and we demanded the full divestment of the 200 plus million dollars that we had in Citizens Bank.

and we put forward a resolution that was unanimously voted on by our city council. And to their credit, the administration under Mayor Solomon, they acted immediately and made that divestment happen. 

So Citizens Bank is the 17th or 18th largest bank in the US. Have you heard, any responses from people who have accounts at Citizens Bank, and were any of them among the activists who pushed for this decision?

There were some, concerns that I heard on the ground, here and there from people who might have accounts. we are not served enough in Jersey City by, by banks, and there's not enough banking, especially in the south side of Jersey City. and there are a couple branches of Citizens Bank there. but it was incredibly important, and I think there was a overwhelming consensus that, those questions, need to be tackled on their own and we need to tackle this, like, serious moral, political, and, material concern of having 200-plus million in Citizens Bank.

recently we had Julie Cohen and Paul Barrett in the studio. They privately had a Citizens Bank account. Paul Barrett had worked for the Wall Street Journal and other places. Julie Cohen is the Oscar-nominated filmmaker who made RBG. Earlier this year, she and Paul Barrett wrote an op-ed for NJ.com about their decision to close their accounts over the bank's complicity with Delaney Hall.

we wanna go to a clip of Julie speaking at Bloomfield, New Jersey Town Council earlier this month. 

I think it's important to be really clear that this is about Citizens' complicity with ICE. my husband and I actually closed our own accounts at the Citizens, b- branch on Broad Street in December after we learned, that Citizens was providing financing for GEO Group and CoreCivic, the private prison companies that are behind, the now notorious, I- ICE detention at Delaney Hall, at Dilley in Texas where there are, parents and children together in a center where there are zero criminals, at Elizabeth Detention, and a lot of places where there are, there's a lack of due process and where there are all kinds of human rights violations.

we didn't want our own money going to that, and we certainly don't want our tax dollars in bank accounts that are associated with ICE and that really enable some of ICE's worst behavior. 

So that's, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julie Cohen, who together with her husband, Paul Barrett, pulled out their accounts from Citizens Bank.

We're joined in Boston by Reverend John Edgerton, senior minister of the Old South Church in Boston, board member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which has withdrawn $3 million from Citizens Bank. if you can, Reverend, talk about your decision. And, we're talking about cities, now we're talking about churches.

What was the decision of the church, and did Citizens Bank respond?

So we've been involved in this with our sister congre- our sister organization, Greater Cleveland Congregations, with the De-ICE Coalition Coalition, which is an all-volunteer grassroots-led organization for many months. We attended the annual shareholders meeting in Rhode Island and informed the board, informed the pres- informed the, the CEO, Bruce Van Saun, i- in the wintertime of our concerns about this.

We asked for a meeting to discuss this, and they never actually made that meeting happen. And so we told them, "If you won't meet with us, won't discuss our concerns, then we will withdraw a million dollars on this date," and we did so, and they didn't reply. And we then withdrew $2 million from that. And then of course, when Jersey City and Montclair withdrew $356 million, municipalities just have more zeros at the end of their bank accounts than churches do, and so this was really a broad movement.

And the pressure became s- too much for Citizens to bear, and they had to do the right thing. 

And so Reverend Edgerton, do you hope that other, churches follow suit? And is there any indication, have you heard anything, about how that may, happen taking your example? 

So this, so this became really quite a broad movement very quickly.

We originally had about $13 million that were organized of people who said that they would be willing to withdraw their money. That quickly drew, grew to $24 million. And those organizations still have those deposits pledged, and so we're going to be watching to make sure that Citizens follows through with what they've said that they're going to do, that they will in fact cut ties completely and quickly with CoreCivic and GEO Group.

We want to verify that they have, that they have done that, and there is plenty of public pressure to make that happen. 

Reverend Edgerton, Citizens Bank said, quote, "Citizens has been disappointed that the activists have dragged into what is largely a political matter." If you can respond to that. And also, did Citizens' CEO say he would meet with you, and did he?

So CEO Bruce Van Saun committed at their annual shareholder meeting to meet with Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, said that he would ha- make it happen within two weeks. That didn't occur, and then later on they sent us a letter saying that they were reneging on that promise to meet with us because we were making false and misleading statements.

They didn't let us know what exactly we had said that was wrong. We stand by the things that we have said. We would very much like to meet still with CEO Bruce Van Saun. There has been a lot of reputational damage done to the bank that we bank with, and we can give them some good advice about how to rebuild that trust.

This is a situation that has become terrible for Citizens Bank. Because of their own decisions, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place, on the one hand of a public that realizes that what they're doing is unconscionable and does not want to bank with such an entity, and a regulatory structure which is vindictive and would punish them if they were seen to go against the administration.

That is because of Citizens Bank own choices to put themselves into that position. Nobody forced them to get involved in the private prison business. In 2021, almost every big bank got out of that dirty business. Citizens stayed in it, they shouldn't have, and now they need to repair their reputation with the people of this country.

That's going to be it for today.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

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Today, Explained

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Fresh Air

CounterSpin

The Intercept Briefing

Soberanía: The Mexican Politics Podcast

and Democracy Now!

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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.

Air Date: 8-1-2026

Today we investigate how the argument moved from what the Supreme Court decides to whether the Court should be rebuilt. Only about one in five Americans has strong confidence in the Court, and the proposals on the table would end lifetime seats, set fixed terms, and add judges across the federal bench. We're arguing that these reforms are necessary for a functioning democracy.

Full Show Notes

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

Today we investigate how the argument moved from what the Supreme Court decides to whether the Court should be rebuilt. Only about one in five Americans has strong confidence in the Court, and the proposals on the table would end lifetime seats, set fixed terms, and add judges across the federal bench. We're arguing that these reforms are necessary for a functioning democracy.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 45 minutes today include

All In with Chris Hayes

Democracy Now!

Amicus

5-4

and Stateside

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

Section A, THE RULINGS

Section B, THE CHARACTER OF THE COURT

Section C, ORIGINS, HOW WE GOT THIS COURT

And Section D, REFORM, WHAT DO WE DO

And now, on to the show.

Writing for the majority, Roberts stated, "The 14th Amendment clearly means what it says." Quote, "Citizenship then and now was the right to have rights, to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to every free born person in this land. We keep that promise today."

That was always what the court should have said to the Trump administration. Their case against birthright citizenship was always just an, an unconstitutional shot in the dark. A, a bad faith, crankish reading of the 14th Amendment motivated by racism and xenophobia. 

The idea that you can have a country where you just set foot on US soil, and any child you have gets to be an American citizen and vote in our elections, collect our welfare, sit in our juries, sit in judgment of our fellow men and women, is such an outrage to the idea of having a country.

It defies description. I don't know what they're gonna do, but here's what I can say. If this country doesn't, one way or another, end birthright citizenship, this country doesn't have a future. Citizenship has to be sacred and precious. 

I- I really, struggle to accurately convey just how extreme, how unhinged, and how, frankly, racist that position is.

But let me try. Stephen Stephen Miller's reading of the 14th Amendment had already been repudiated by the Supreme Court more than a century ago. It's a famous case. It was in 1898, the case of Wong Kim Ark, who was born in the US to Chinese parents. That court then, operating in 1898, said, "If you're born in the US, you're a US citizen."

They looked at the plain text of the law, and they found that. And they handed down that decision, get this, two years after upholding racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. Those justices, the ones who enshrined Jim Crow in the laws of the United States, they cemented separate but equal, but even they upheld birthright citizenship in a 6 to 2 vote because the language of the 14th was plain as day.

That is how racist Stephen Miller and Donald Trump's argument is. It is more racist than a racist reactionary court, the infamous Plessy court, was almost 130 years ago. Think about that. And the other thing is, there hasn't been any real legal or historical shift away from birthright citizenship since then.

There were a few, again, anti-immigrant cranks on the right, which you'll always find, right? Churning out diatribes against anchor babies. But didn't matter. Naturally, Donald Trump courted them, and then last year, remember, he finds himself back in office, and he's got his handpicked 6-3 Supreme Court majority where three of the justices were the ones that he elevated.

And so he went to work pressuring them to reimagine the Constitution. In fact, to rewrite it, to essentially amend the Constitution by fiat in collusion with him and five votes. Remember that he even went to oral arguments to physically intimidate them, to glower at them. It was a, a first for a sitting president.

Now, it didn't quite work. He lost today. we all, as Americans, won. The Court still did the right thing, but barely. by a shockingly narrow margin, by one vote. In 1898, the margin was four votes. Today, by one vote, this court rejected what would amount to rewriting the Constitution on the fly. In, in, in some senses, overturning the victory of the Union forces and the multiracial coalition that refounded the country after that victory in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

Essentially just taking white out to an amendment that was bought with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Civil War It's jarring to think that the very right to have rights in America hinged this week on John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. The lesson here is Donald Trump lost, thankfully, but this court, phew, it has to be addressed.

It has to be dealt with. A- and this movement, the movement that brought us to this point, has to be defeated thoroughly and completely because the goal is nothing less than uprooting the very foundational principles that make this country so special and so worth fighting for. Sherrilyn Ifill's the Vernon Jordan Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University.

She's also the founding director of the university's 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy. She was in the Supreme Court gallery during oral arguments in this case. Sherrilyn, it's just an honor to have you on the program. and first let me just say I feel somewhat sheepish giving a little spiel before you because you've forgotten more about the 14th Amendment than I've ever known.

So let me just turn it over to you and say what is your takeaway from today's decision? 

Chris, first of all, thanks for having me, and second of all, that was an excellent spiel, on the 14th Amendment. you, you hit the high notes. Yes, the decision in this case came out the way it should have come out, but first of all, it came out the way it should have come out last year when this case was Trump versus Casa.

As you'll recall, the Supreme Court then used the, that case to address the issue of district courts, granting and ordering nationwide injunctions, something they've long wanted to get at. and that required- ... the refiling of a new case as a class action that became Trump versus Barbara. What I mean to say is that the court has slow walked this.

this was a case grounded in the actual words, not the penumbra, nothing that they had to interpret, the actual words of the 14th Amendment and an over 100-year-old precedent by the Court itself, which as you pointed out, has never been, uh, broken or undermined in any way, and they took this long. this is not just the Court deliberating and going back and forth and taking this long.

This is the, the Court allowing space to develop for the idea that this was a legitimate argument, for the idea- ... that this was a legitimate claim- ... when as you say, this was a bit of constitutional gaslighting. But every time they do that, they give strength to the idea that they are making legitimate arguments on the right about things like birthright citizenship.

So first of all, to sit there today and have the decision come out the way I wanted it to come out in terms of the, the judgment, but have it come out after over a year is just absurd, a year and a half of leaving the country, confused- ... about the most important thing. Who's an American? So I just thought that was grossly irresponsible.

secondly as, as I think you also were pointing out, th- this case was not unanimous. This was, should have been a 9-0 decision. This was a slam dunk. It wasn't. it was a, 5-4, maybe 6-3, decision, and it matters. It matters that this was a split decision because once again, it gives legitimacy to the idea that birthright citizenship can be overturned.

the fact that there was th- there are these dissenting opinions from Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, and Justice Thomas, some of whom joined one another, but each of whom felt they needed to write their own dissenting opinion, and then a concurring and dissenting opinion from Justice Kavanaugh, who agrees with the judgment, but, and this was very obvious at, oral argument as well, Justice Kavanaugh, who loves the world of politics, believes that Congress has the right to do what the president tried to do.

The president can't overcome birthright citizenship by EO, but Justice Kavanaugh believes that by statute Congress can. And that little space was important for him to leave to the political process, and of course, earlier today, we heard Trump already in, announcing his intention to exploit that space.

I think it’s important for people to understand just one big-picture point here, which is that we have before the Supreme Court this decision about trans athletes’ participation in sports, and the court is making a ruling on both Title IX, which is the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, and the Equal Protection Clause. And, of course, this is a precedential legal system. if the court is offering a constrained reading of these statutory protections and constitutional protections, it’s going to impact everyone, not just trans people. And I just want to start with that.

And then, on the Title IX piece of the ruling, with sports, Congress passed an additional statute called the Javits Amendment, which does give a lot more leeway when it comes to the ways in which sports can be regulated. And the court confined its Title IX ruling to the context of sports and, in essence, said that if we accept the premise that sex means sex assigned at birth, that this is a potentially reasonable way to manage the context of sports, which are zero sum. It’s a very narrow Title IX ruling.

On equal protection, we have the split in the court, in essence, saying that it doesn’t violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment — again, we’re dealing with the 14th Amendment before this court — to exclude categorically trans women and girls from women’s sports. And that is obviously a devastating ruling, but, again, very much cabined to the context of sports.

Put this into the broader context of intensifying attacks against the trans community and other decisions by the Supreme Court.

Yeah, I think we have to understand the way in which sports, in particular, was being used as a way to vilify trans people, with two ultimate objectives, both from the Trump administration and from states around the country. The first is that there is an effort, that we’re seeing escalate, to push trans people out of public life, out of our schools, out of our workplaces, and sports was hopefully going to be the wedge that conservatives used for a broad legal ruling that legitimized those efforts. And also, especially from the Trump administration, we’re seeing attacks on trans people and on immigrants as part of the administration’s central goal of expanding executive power and increasing the legitimacy of the Trump administration’s authority over every aspect of our bodily autonomy and everyday life.

I want to turn to one of the plaintiffs in the case. This is Becky Pepper-Jackson of West Virginia speaking when she first filed her lawsuit. At the time, she was just 11 years old.

I first tried out for a school sport my sixth grade year for cross-country. Everyone in my family is runners. So it was nice to get, help from them. I originally wanted to try out for the long-distance team, because that’s what I had known and love from cross-country and running with my family. But my coach told me that if I were to just go for long distance, I wouldn’t have made the team, because it was much more competitive during track season. So she encouraged me to try shot put and discus, which, as it turned out, I really loved.

Being able to compete alongside my peers was really fun for me, because it taught me teamwork, I made a lot of friends, but, most of all, I just had fun. And that’s all I wanted to do. When my mom told me about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to play the sports that I love, I was devastated. I asked my mom what my options were. And they said that we could talk to the ACLU and Lambda Legal. And that’s when we filed our lawsuit with them.

Becky Pepper-Jackson is now a 15-year-old high school sophomore. She recently won first place in the shot put at the state high school track and field championships and came in fourth in a discus competition in May. The state governor criticized her win, writing on social media, quote, “The state track and field Championship confirms the fundamental unfairness of letting boys co to. If you can respond to who Becky is and the significance of this, and this issue of the focus on going after trans athletes? I heard Illinois Governor Pritzker yesterday saying about the Supreme Court ruling, “We have three trans athletes that this a

Yeah, we’re talking about an incredibly small number of athletes. There is Becky in West Virginia, and there’s one athlete in Idaho. So that’s two people. And again, Becky was 11 years old when she filed her lawsuit. She transitioned before she ever went through puberty. In 2021, when that lawsuit was filed, the rhetoric was very much about this unfairness was about going through an endogenous, typical male puberty. guess what: Becky never went through that puberty. Becky has all the typical characteristics of someone assigned female at birth. And she was terrible at running. She could not make the team and was told, “You s her friends.

And as we wrap up, can you talk about the other athlete, Lindsay Hickox in Idaho?

Lindsay Hickox also — she wanted to play on a club intramural team in college. We’re talking about the least competitive context you could imagine, and she just wanted to be a part of her collegiate experience. Both Becky and Lindsay just wanted to be part of teams, and here we are, demonizing them, when we have serious problems in this country.

where do you go from here, Chase, with your work?

We continue — we continue to fight. Look, these are devastating rulings from the Supreme Court, both this term and last term, and yet, in the lower courts, we’re still achieving important victories that are delaying some of the most egregious harms from the Trump administration’s attack on trans people. in and out of the courtroom, we keep fighting.

But we need people to understand that their freedom is bound up in ours. These rulings will affect them, too. And if we aren’t mobilizing together, then we’re going to get these constrained interpretations of our civil rights protections, and ultimately that’s going to serve the Trump administration’s objectives to ultimately make all of our lives more constrained and less free.

what Justice Alito and this really radicalized right-wing majority did was say, “Because we think that we shouldn’t be able to say anything about partisan politics, we’re not just going to create a loophole. We’re going to create the sunken place where, essentially, any politicians who are controlling the politics of a state can just say, ’We’re not discriminating. We just want to win. And we will win if Black people can’t have a district where they have the ability to say who leads them,’âsolve — create solutions to problems we all share, they’d rather just figure out a way to stay in power. That means state house races. That means school board races. But it also means who leads us in this country and whether or not we have a Congressional Black Caucus, who makes arguments for civil rights, but also for things like access to healthcare, or a Latino caucus, where

Maya, the principal provision in the Voting Rights Act is Section 2, which this ruling has effectively eviscerated. If you could explain what Section 2 calls for?

Yeah, and that’s what I was just summarizing, was basically what Section 2 says. first of all, let me just say this, because especially not just for a global audience, but for a national audience, the context in which Representative Sewell said this is a decadeslong fight to take away our rights and our ability to have leaders who look like us and who represent us, and that is that this Supreme Court said — first of all, took away Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This is a section that said, there has been so many shenanigans in blocking people of color — Black, Latino, Native American, Asian — from being able to vote, that we need a provision that says you have to get preclearance. If you have a long history of racial discrimination in this area, you have to have the Department of Justice say it’s OK how you draw your electoral map or how you design other systems around voting, like early voting systems or where you have polling sites. And when this Supreme Court in 2013 said, “You know what? We’re going to say you haven’t — history has changed. We’re doing such a great job in the United States. You don’t habecause we just had barrier after barrier thrown in our way, including on how maps were drawn. That means we have states that aren’t representing the real population of those states.

that has the effect of making it harder for you to have a real opportunity as a Black community, as a Latino community, as a Native American community, to say who leads us, to participate in the process of voting. If it impacts you and it is clear that it impacts you, then we’re going to say it’s not OK. We’re going to say it’s discriminatory.

What this Supreme Court said is, “Really hard to prove intent. In fact, it’s so hard to prove intent, that we’re going to say, even though Congress said you don’t have to show that someone hates you, you don’t have to show that any politicians are saying, 'We just don't want Black people voting,’ we’re going to say it’s fine to prevent large numbers of Black people from being represented, or make it harder for large numbers of Latino people to get access to a poll, or Native Americans. We’

when they did this yesterday, what they were saying, and what Justice Kagan in her dissent said, is, “Y’all just giving them too, and started doing it. But it’s just creating a new kind of civil war about who wants to have our votes. And if you’re 

The New York Times reported, and this is in terms of the midterms coming up later this year, that hours after the ruling, Florida’s Legislature approved a new map that could give Republicans as many as four new seats in the state’s congressional delegation, and other states are expected to follow. If you could talk about the implications of that?

Yeah, this is — this is why this opinion is a devastating blow, because it has literally — states have been organizing around this for a while. And as we know, Donald Trump asked for states, like Texas, other states, to rig their maps to guarantee an outcome for Republicans so they could hold on to the U.S. Congress, to the House. And it was blatant, right? But what that means is you go for people of color. You go to draw maps that we call either packing or cracking communities of color. We’ve got racial segregation. We’ve got communities that are majority people of some kind of color — they’re not without some diversity, but where there really is a large segment of people who live near each other, have shared interests.

And Republicans started preparing those maps — in some instances, were already passing them. That’s why we had this lawsuit in the first place. And then, as we have seen, they were just waiting for permission to say, “It’s politics. It’s partisan

By the way, let’s remember, for many in your audience may not remember this, after Barack Obama won election in 2008 and as we were approaching the 2012 elections, we saw, all of a sudden, claims that there was voter fraud, that undocumented immigrants were voting, that we had to make it much more difficult to prove you had the ability to vote lawfully. And what that did was disenfranchise a lot of people of color.

But we had — we had Republican — Republican Party head in Florida, Republican Party head in Pennsylvania saying that quiet pa or Missouri, any of these states, saying, “Game on. Now we’re going to use this to make sure that large segments of our po

This was very bad. And I think it's important, I actually don't leave out the birthright citizenship case because to understand how bad this term was, you can't just count up the decisions.

You have to also look at the how, how the court decided these cases. what was the split if there was a split, and what were the, the, I can't think of the word, the license that the court took to get to the decisions that they made. And actually, that's what, to me, takes this term really off into the stratosphere.

Some of the decisions are catastrophic and terrible, but much of the reasoning of even the decisions that seem to be okay demonstrate that this court has separated itself from any sense of the need for consistency, for respecting stare decisis, for judicial restraint, for discipline, for unanimity, all of the things that we think of as virtues of judicial decision-making that would cabin, judges from being able to exercise the kind of extraordinary power that they do in an abusive way.

How about you, Niko? 

Yeah, I agree with Sherrilyn that in order to understand how bad this term was, we need to have a sense of, what should the Supreme Court be doing in the first place. And the book that I've written with my colleague Daphne Renan, called Supremacy, goes through the history of the court's power as well as what did people think of it, from abolitionists through the Civil Rights Movement and to the present.

And we drew a lot of inspiration from the Congresses that wrote the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments after the Civil War. And one of their arguments at the time was that the role of the Supreme Court is to enforce federal law. It is not to defy federal law. The people who wrote the 14th Amendment wanted federal courts to go out and enforce that amendment against states or Presidents or anyone else who would defy it, but they did not want the court itself interrupting or striking down Congress's legislation.

And I think that understanding, that the point of the federal judiciary is to enforce Congress's understanding of what the Constitution means, is a good way of understanding the cases this term. it actually maps on pretty cleanly because a lot of the cases that, people really like that the Court has done involves the Court enforcing federal legislation.

So the Learning Resources decision end of last year that enforced the federal law governing tariffs and said it did not permit the president unilaterally to impose tariffs on the entire planet, the National Guard statute that the Court interpreted to say the president can't just deploy the National Guard where he sees fit, as well as the birthright citizenship case, which, Congress for years has interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to say everyone born here basically is a citizen.

And when President Trump said no, he was not just defying the Fourteenth Amendment, he was also acting in defiance of these federal laws. But the real damage that the Court has done this year involves the Court taking federal legislation and just saying, "I don't care." So the Voting Rights Act, the most important civil rights statute in U.S.

history, the Court's saying, "Even though we understand what Congress meant by that statute, we're just gonna interpret it differently and say it can't be interpreted the way Congress thinks." So now we have this crazy system where states are passing laws trying to make it as difficult as possible to vote, and Congress has said, "Don't do that," but the Court's acting as if that statute doesn't exist.

Same with statutes protecting federal officials from being fired, statutes that prevent people from just spending billions of dollars in elections. The Court has just torn all of these really important federal statutes down. And so we're entering the midterms this fall in a really dangerous place where all of these laws Congress has passed to protect democracy, laws that Congress has thought was constitutional, laws that date, hundreds of years, all of these laws are just now sitting in the library stacks as if they don't exist because five or six justices this term said they don't like them And the constitutional interpretation that the court is applying is not consistent, it's not objective, it's really policy-driven.

and that's the real danger of judicial supremacy that this court has really unleashed this term. 

Steve, anything to add? 

Just really quickly, I think the common themes in what both Niko and Sherrilyn said, first, denominators matter. And so for all of the folks out there on the right and who try to defend the court who say, look at birthright citizenship, look at tariffs, look at the National Guard case," that's three in a term in which, I can count 25, 30, 35 rulings that I think were deeply problematic from a institutionalist perspective, from the perspective Niko mentioned.

one, let's do basic statistics again. But two, to pick up on Niko's last point, there's a shamelessness to how the court behaved this term that, I'm sure lots of folks thought they felt in prior terms, but that I, you know, almost like they weren't even trying to persuade people who weren't already persuaded anymore.

And, the best example of that to me is the sort of Complete lack of humility in Chief Justice Roberts' opinion in the Slaughter case about just how big of a hole the Cook case handed down at the exact same moment blows in the Slaughter case. So in Slaughter, the court says the president has to have all of the executive power, period, full stop, end of story.

Therefore, he can fire everybody. And at the exact same moment, the court says, "Oh, but the Federal Reserve is different for all of these interesting, questionable, dubious historical reasons." you don't have to be a law professor to understand the logical tension there, and yet John Roberts really didn't try very hard to persuade anyone that was a reasonable distinction.

So you multiply that, right? One other flashpoint, just to show where we are, the Texas redistricting case, which got run over by Callais and Alabama, the court writes five paragraphs in November or December to justify freezing a Trump-appointed district judge's 200-page decision about why Texas had acted with, racially discriminatory intent in how it redrew its maps last summer.

And the Supreme Court, first of all, pauses that with five paragraphs, only two of which were analysis, and then on the merits in April says, "Oh, now that we have the full case before us, we're just gonna summarily reverse the district court for the reasons set forth in our, five-paragraph scribble in December."

it's the hubris of this. It's the shamelessness of this. And, it's not the bottom lines. It's really just the behavior of the justices after Callais rushing to put all those decisions into immediate effect. That to me is what makes this term different from the immunity term or the Dobbs-Bruen term or other catastrophic terms of the last 15, 20 years, because it's almost like they don't think they have to try to convince anyone anymore that there are principles behind these decisions.

you talk about this calculation within John Roberts, and there is a calculation, you call it an orchestration that's happening external to John Roberts, but he's a part of this ecosystem, and that's the orchestration of specific and strategic Supreme Court cases getting to the Supreme Court in the first place so that the conservative legal movement can get these Wins at the Supreme Court from the federal judiciary that they are not able to attain politically.

You give an example, multiple examples. One example our listeners will be familiar with is Loper Bright, the case that of course did away with the Chevron doctrine that said courts should defer to federal agencies when agencies are interpreting the power that is given to them by Congress. the John Roberts-led conservatives at the Supreme Court doing away with Chevron doctrine in Loper Bright and saying, "No, the court actually can step in and define and limit federal agencies and their power to do this."

I bring up this example because you don't just talk about the holding in Loper Bright, but you talk about the orchestration that brought Loper Bright and many other cases to the Supreme Court in the first place so that John Roberts can give the argument a big kiss on the lips and the green light and all of this stuff.

And so again, John Roberts, a calculating person in his own right, but can you talk about his role or his participation or his relationship to the actual case orchestration as well? 

Yeah, that is a really great question, and there are so many layers to it. And so what you have is a situation in which, just to call back to this period before John Roberts was nominated, there had been this effort within the Federal Society, which was led and co-led by Leonard Leo back then and still is co-led by it now, where they wanted, quote, "No more suitors."

No more suitors. What does that mean? It means that they thought that they had made a mistake in appointing someone who was gonna follow precedent to the Supreme Court, and they didn't want any more suitors. They wanted ringers, people who were going to be on that court and use that power to advance this right-wing agenda that the Federalist Society was being funded by billionaires like Charles Koch and others to advance.

And so when you look at that decision in Loper Bright, the decision to take down the Chevron doctrine, that Chevron doctrine was something that was embraced by a Republican-dominated court in the 1980s- That's right ... for the Reagan administration to say that it is the job of judges to defer to the agency expertise of these federal agencies on matters unless, certain conditions were met.

Because under our governmental system, we have Congress passing statutes that the administration is supposed to execute, and then it ha- we have agencies that have developed deep expertise, particularly scientific expertise- Yeah ... that the courts d- just don't have. And then they propose rules that there's public comment on based on those s- scientific findings, for example, and then those rules go into effect.

And in this instance, this precedent was at, Chevron was around for more than 40 years. But starting in the, about 10 years ago, there was a particularly concerted effort to try to take down Chevron that was just as, the court's still at a five-four majority. Scalia was on the wrong side of this issue, surprisingly, because he had been in the Reagan administration, had supported this precedent.

And a really telling thing happened, which was reported by ProPublica, which is that at right around the time of Scalia's death, you have Justice Thomas going to an all-men's retreat, the Bohemian Club, where he was at this retreat with David Koch, who was then alive. It was at Harlan Crow's, perch within that Bohemian Grove meeting, and he was telling the men there that he thought he had won Scalia over to overturn Chevron.

So he's telling billionaires that they were about ready to overturn Chevron, basically. Yeah. 

Why would that come up in conversation? 

Yeah. Imagine. 

Yeah. 

That fireside chat, right? Yeah. And so that's happening. And so at that moment, there was a guy who was a law professor. He basically said, "There's no way the court is going to be overturning Chevron.

It's been cited tens of thousands of times. It helps maintain the consistency of the law." And He didn't say this, but he thought it was impossible. But it wasn't impossible because the right-wing legal movement was poised to take advantage of this change. And then when this orchestration happened to block O- Barack Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, install Neil Gorsuch, who c- hails from this same, quote, "tradition"- Yeah.

Yeah ... 

to push through Brett Kavanaugh, to get Amy Coney Barrett on, as people were voting Trump out of office, suddenly they really do have the votes to take down Chevron. And of course, these groups emerge to make this case, to make these claims. And in the case of Loper Bright, both aspects of that litigation were bankrolled by Charles Koch's fortune.

Of course. So there were two main cases that were teed up for the court to decide which case to take, took them both, and the other case was called Relentless. Both cases were fueled by lawyers where Charles Koch had spent millions of dollars to fund this litigation and presented as fishermen, you know, who didn't wanna have a fishing inspector- Yeah

on their boat. Yeah. But it was really about much more than that, and we know that in part because of the impact of the decision, but in part because Charles Koch's own law firm, Quinn Emanuel, talked about the previous decision Which had created the major questions doctrine, which again, was funded by Charles Koch, that decision against the EPA among others.

And they talked about how it was a sea change to allow industry to attack any major changes, but they couldn't attack them all. Chevron's still, Chevron was still in the books, and so they needed to take down the Chevron doctrine and this deference. And so when we calculated how much money has gone into these, this amicus flotilla, as Senator Whitehouse has described it on the floor and in hearings, it's millions of dollars have gone- Yeah

into building up this network to bring cases to court. And this court, as and your listeners know, almost its entire docket is discretionary. Means it doesn't have to take those cases. Supposedly, it, would take cases where there's a circuit split and has to clarify the law, but that's not what's happening.

The Roberts Court is creating sort of its own legislative agenda on an annual basis of which cases it wants to destroy, which precedents it wants to destroy, and this was a case that it wanted to destroy that precedent. And it, in some ways, that amicus, what I call it kind of an amicus racket. It's not illegal what's happening, but a lot of these law firms are getting very rich, sometimes directly from money from nonprofits.

So the billionaire funds a nonprofit. Yes. The nonprofit hires the big right-wing law firm. The law firm gets paid hundreds of thousand do- dollars per brief. They get to declare victory, but when the case is accepted, almost in every instance they're gonna win. So it's a done deal. It's the fix is already in.

When they take the case, they have the votes to destroy that precedent, and you can see this play out. So for example, when Scalia died, there was a case pending before the Supreme Court. It was called Friedrichs versus California. It was an attack on labor rights, and it resulted in a four to four decision.

So it meant that the court did not overturn the 37 or so years of the Abood precedent, which allowed unions to negotiate for all the workers in their workplace and not have free riders who would benefit from being part of those benefits and wages without paying any fees. And so the court rules there's, four-four decision.

So then a year later, they take up another case- ... that was just conveniently in the wings waiting to come forward. Yeah. the Janus case, and which then by the time Gorsuch was confirmed, they had the fifth vote to destroy almost 40 years of legal precedent protecting those union rights and the power of unions.

So they just waited till the next time so they could take that case up again. that in affirmative action. At certain point, they don't have the votes to do it, so they wait, wait until they have the votes, then they take it up, and then that time when they have the votes, they take out affirmative action in college admissions.

And the related point is when John Roberts was trying, in my view, to stop the United States Senate from subpoenaing Harlan Crow And Leonard Leo investigating what the newspapers, what ProPublica and others had uncovered about the gift to Clarence Thomas. Roberts announced on the eve of that subpoena vote, this was just a few years ago, "Oh, no, there is a ethics code for the court," and all the justices have signed it and said that they comply with it.

Which is absurd given the fact that if that's what it means, it allows Clarence Thomas to take all these gifts. But when you read that code, it's lower. It sets a lower standard than for all the other federal judges in the entire country, including a provision in there that says that they can sit on a case even if they have a conflict, if the vote is needed to resolve it.

And so I don't- there's no exception for that in the rest of the world. oh, you have a huge conflict- So 

if you have a particular incentive to- Yeah ... decide one way or another on a case, then you can be and should be the deciding vote, actually. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. Versus just- It's 

wild ... 

leaving, yeah, leaving the law as it is.

And so I think that's a big tell of John Roberts and his agenda. 

Yeah, it's been quite of terms and quite a fi- a, a five years, since Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

That's really when I start the era of this current sadness, and oppression, and that is the word that I would use especially for this, about to be completed term. It is oppression. It is the Supreme Court becoming the enforcement body of the Trump White supremacist regime. What we have seen over and over again is that Trump lacks the muscle to force his views upon an unwilling country without the courts.

That's actually not new for authoritarian regimes, right? They seek to control the courts in order to give their policies the imprimatur of legality. Hitler did it, right? Like this is a thing that constantly happens, and so we shouldn't be surprised. We shouldn't be, hopeful that the courts are some kind of last line of defense.

They are actually often the first over the wall, when it comes to oppressing people, and the Supreme Court has done that repeatedly, this term, not just in its big decisions. 

I want to talk about a specific example of that 'cause we just got a ruling that, that really stands out in this regard.

The... So this is Mullin v. Doe. This is a landmark immigration decision that came down last week, and it essentially allows the Trump administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians of their, who are currently legally in the US, of something called Temporary Protected Status or TPS it's called, and this is a policy that grants people safe harbor in the United States if they can't safely return to their country of origin.

The details of the case a- are worth talking about in, in, in the vein of what you're, what you've just said is, 'cause the plaintiffs had argued, among other things, that the administration revoked TPS specifically for Haitians because of their race, which is an unconstitutional thing. And I am struck by the argument that seems to be playing out between Samuel Alito's majority opinion and Elena Kagan's dissent.

Explain what they're arguing about. 

Yeah, so to get something out of the way, just because, some of your listeners, might have Republican family members or friends, and those family members or friends, the first thing that they will say is, "But temporary means temporary, so of course we can get it rid of, 'cause it's temporary.

What does- Temporary protected status is a temporary thing. 

And, look, yes, temporary means temporary. If law was easy enough that all you needed was a dictionary to understand it, then all these law schools should shut down, right? yeah, I unders- I can Google temporary too. I know what it means.

Yes. The law is actually more complicated, and the, at the heart of the issue, there is a process for ending temporary protected status- ... that the Trump administration didn't follow. And then there's this other argument that even if the administration followed the correct process, he still can't revoke it, because you can't make policy based on unwashed racial animus, right?

using racism as a motivating factor for your policy is unconstitutional. And that is the heart of the debate between Alito and the majority and Kagan in dissent. Alito says, "You can't prove Trump is racist, and since you can't prove that he's racist, we can't say that his policies were motivated by racism."

And Kagan says, "Interesting, Sam. This man you're claiming cannot be proven to be racist, you can't even quote him because it's too disgusting. the things that he's actually said are so disgusting that you can't even quote him, in your opinion, defending the man. But you know what, Sam? I can." Yeah. Right?

Yeah. And then Kagan goes through everything Trump has said about Haitians and their, protected status. And for most of your listeners, you're gonna remember these as some of the lowlights of the Trump administration. This is the Haitians are eating dog stuff. This is the, the they're dirty, filthy people.

This is they live in an S-hole country, and they're poisoning the blood of our country. And then he revoked their immigration protection. So that's at least, to use a turn of phrase, a colorable argument that the president was motivated by unconstitutional racial animus. and that was the basis of Kagan's dissent.

And so when you lose that case, what the Supreme Court is essentially doing is not just affirming Trump's racism, but actually endorsing it. Because if you're saying that the kinds of things that Trump says, that even this level of vitriol and hate does not trip the constitutional prohibitions against racial animus in policymaking- then what does?

I ask the question to, to Republicans all the time. Does the man literally have to come out here and say the N-word? is that the... Is it lit- Do we literally live in a world where there is one and only magic word? And even if he says it, is that enough for Sam Alito? Because I don't think it is.

And that just brings me to, it feels like the latest in a long series of things that this court has done, as you say, over the past five years, that just how far they'll go to paper over whatever it is Donald Trump wants to do. 

So I fight with people on the left about this all the time, Kai, and the way that I put it is y'all still think that arguments matter There are people on the left, there are institutionalists, there are good liberals who still think that having the right facts matters in front of this Supreme Court, and there is absolutely no evidence anymore that arguments matter.

There is absolutely no evidence anymore that law matters. There is no evidence that precedent matters. in the Louisiana versus Cali case, in the voting rights, case that was just c- cited earlier this term, the Court overruled a precedent that the Court made two years ago. And until liberals and Democrats get that memo, they will stay losing.

The only way to change the opinions of the Supreme Court are to change the people on the Supreme Court, because making a good argument to them no longer matters at all. 

 

We've just heard clips starting with

All In with Chris Hayes warning that the one-vote margin in Trump versus Barbara lends dangerous legitimacy to a case that should have been a unanimous slam dunk.

Democracy Now! detailed how conservatives used sports as a wedge to push trans people out of public life and shrink Title IX and 14th Amendment protections that guard everyone's civil rights

Democracy Now! also spelled out how the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, letting states discriminate against Black and Latino voters as long as they call it partisan politics.

Amicus counted 25 to 35 problematic rulings this term, arguing the court has stopped even trying to persuade anyone that principles guide its decisions.

5-4 described the "amicus racket," where billionaires fund nonprofits that pay right-wing law firms hundreds of thousands per brief to bring cases the conservative justices already planned to win.

And Stateside traced how the Supreme Court, since Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has become an enforcement body for Trump's agenda

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

We're still going through a tough time financially so, if you haven't signed up yet but are thinking about it, just know that the emergency hasn't passed and we could still really use your help. Don't worry if you can only afford a few bucks a month, it's the collective contributions of people stepping up that has always gotten us through tough times like this.

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We're also working on reincorporating audience feedback into the show. If you want to encourage others to leave messages, start by becoming the change you want to see in the world.

So, here's today's question.

When and where did you learn what your rights actually are in some particular category, or generally? At work, in a rental, in the voting booth, over your own body?

Tell us about a time somebody set you straight on one of those. Who was it, what did they say, were they right? If nobody ever did, you can tell us that too.

We don't have a voice message today, but we do have a comment that CuisineQueen left on Patreon, responding to the question we asked about making the harder choice and stepping away from the default option when something else lines up better with your ethics, or the quality you want, or both.

CuisineQueen writes,

"Bookshop.org, pick your local bookstore to benefit,"

On that note, we partner with Bookshop.org and support their mission. You can use our affiliate links to both Bookshop for physical books and Libro.fm for audiobooks, found in our show notes. Continuing...

"or any other bookseller app, Libby app for libraries, all you have to have is a local library card to get books not available where you are."

I'm also a big fan of Libby and get most of my books from the library that way.

Continuing.

"And you can use Amazon search if you can't find items you want by search engines, try to avoid going directly to the first page fed to you by Google, all ads.

Then, go direct to manufacturers website or Etsy AND finally the Original seller online, eBay, has so much direct purchasing!! Go there as much as possible, but check reviews and analyze sellers, it is truly a self-correcting system, higher stars of verified buyers is not as likely to be a scam as Amazon's paid reviews are."

I very rarely purchase anything on Amazon but am always amazed at what a festival of scams it looks like whenever I land on that site. How is this the best experience they could come up with? Interesting to hear that eBay might now be less scammy than Amazon.

"I also try to use duck duck go mostly for searches."

I used to use Duck Duck Go but recently upgraded to the paid search engine, Kagi, K-A-G-I, that breaks the ad-revenue business model/search quality problem at the source. Finally, she concludes...

"Steer your own buying power to people that operate online, and locally wherever you can, with ethics.

Local farmers matter a LOT for food, support local markets and small storekeepers where you live. It's YOUR economy, not Walmarts' welfare-dependent employees filling the Walton's money hoarding. In my opinion, resist all of them."

Thanks to CuisineQueen on Patreon for that message. I have also been posting our discussion questions on our socials and community spaces like Patreon and Discord so join us there and weigh in with comments if leaving voice messages isn't your thing.

But, if you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

As for today's topic,

There's a lot of energy building behind the idea of court reform. Elie Mystal has been making waves with his recommendation to expand the Supreme Court to 29 justices and Democrats have been introducing bills to apply term limits and regulate the nomination cadence. One every two years, every presidential term gets two appointments. It's simple, widely supported, and doesn't encourage anyone to wish well-timed death upon any sitting justices. These are all ideas geared toward turning down the temperature on the partisanship of the court, and roughly two-thirds of Americans already back term limits so this is a real movement, it's not a fringe conversation.

Nor is it the only conversation worth having because the conservative stranglehold is interlocking across the government. The fig leaf the court uses when blatantly disregarding the intent of Congress in their rulings is that Congress itself can always choose to write new legislation to supersede the court's ruling which would come back around for another review. That's how the system is designed to work but in our era of hyper-partisan gridlock and the wild overuse of the filibuster, this is little more than a wink and a nod.

There's a seed of truth there. Congress could, in theory, write and pass new legislation and that's what used to happen about a half dozen times a year under both parties several decades ago but it's since slowed to a trickle.

But it's not for lack of trying, Democrats continue to reintroduce legislation they have on the shelf to do exactly that on some of the most important issues for democracy. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to boost the robustness of elections, and The Disclose Act aimed at rolling back the billionaire-corrupting of elections.

These bills don't fail on the merits, and they aren't blocked by the Supreme Court. They're blocked by the filibuster and the Republican Party wielding it in a way completely out of step with historical norms.

It used to be rare and dramatic, then it was reformed back in the early 70s so that it could still operate to block a bill but be less of a nuclear option by allowing other Senate work to proceed while the filibuster was being invoked on a given bill. This was the two-track strategy that invented the silent filibuster where a senator can basically just send a memo to invoke.

After that change, the use of the filibuster certainly went up, but it didn't get wildly out of control until the hyper-partisanship of the modern age fully gripped the Republican Party. The GOP started using the filibuster as a completely routine act during the Obama administration in an explicit attempt to sink his presidency by not allowing it to function.

To give a sense of their mentality, John Boehner, the GOP leader in the House in 2010 said about Obama's Affordable Care Act, â€nd Mitch McConnell was quoted the same year explaining the Republican governing strategy in the senate, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." McConnell then hedged that if Obama turned out to be a moderate like Clinton then they could work together but that was amid the loudest voices in the party calling Obama a communist so there was never really any threat that he'd feel obligated to compromise.

It was during this era that the political media started talking about Senate votes as though it was by law or constitutional design that everything required 60 votes in order to pass. That's only true due to abuse of the system. This new normal is less than 20 years old and should be thought of and talked about as the undemocratic aberration that it is.

Between the Supreme Court having been stacked with ideologues and the Congress having been crippled by the misuse of a Senate rule intended to encourage debate, not act as a minority veto, the Republican Party has put our democracy in a vice and continues to crank the handle.

If you agree that we need court reform but worry that it would never pass the Senate filibuster, you're right, which is why filibuster reform will inevitably have to come first. In the past, this discussion was mostly had in black-and-white terms, keep or abolish, which could feel extreme or even dangerous in an age of rising fascism. There was also the idea to carve out specific areas where the filibuster wouldn't be allowed, like with judicial appointments. But the idea that's been gaining steam and, I think, deserves more attention, is to go back to the old talking filibuster.

I think there would be a lot of benefits to this strategy, but we can start with a basic one. Any average person in the country who wants for both our democracy to function and for the traditions of the country to be maintained, not necessarily my perspective but one many people hold, should be able to support re-implementing the talking filibuster. So that lowers the bar by making the reform feel far less radical than outright abolition.

The more obvious benefit is attaching attribution to individual people or a party as a whole when they decide to block something. Right now, the filibuster costs nothing and is carried out invisibly. Forcing people to get up and speak changes that dynamic entirely and brings attention to both the policy being blocked and the people blocking it.

The old talking filibuster also blocked all work in the senate from proceeding which brings an even brighter spotlight and intense scrutiny, like a mini government shutdown. It's possible that they could bring back the talking requirement while maintaining the two-track system to keep the work flowing but either scenario is better for democracy in multiple concrete ways.

There are two things consistently true about U.S. politics, people hate when Congress is broken and the general public is notoriously bad at knowing who is actually at fault for Congress not getting anything done. I think the talking filibuster would help with both by making obstruction something tangible that people could see on their news feeds with the faces and names of people attached.

This is a simple rule change that can be implemented by the party controlling the senate so this is the lowest bar to reform that exists right now and Democrats nearly did it in 2022 so supporters should keep the pressure on for the next opportunity.

And, obviously, this change would be applied to both parties, so there's not a blatant partisan benefit to this. It would merely favor whoever is blocking something that the general public would want to have blocked and disfavor anyone blocking something that the general public would want to pass. If the talking filibuster has a partisan effect, it'd only be because, in this day and age, the favorability pattern mostly runs in one direction. Democracy is popular and only the Democrats are supporting genuinely pro-democracy policies like voting rights, reducing the corrupting impact of money in elections, and court reform. Not to mention progressive policies like taxing the wealthy and providing universal health care that are also wildly popular.

But that partisan advantage need not always be the case. If the path to blocking legislation requires making oneself identifiable, it would have the effect of forcing politicians to more closely align with the actual desires of their constituents which would be good for democracy.

Imposing term limits on the Supreme Court is strongly popular. Attempting to pass a law to bring that about would require filibuster reform. Re-implementing the talking filibuster would invite all the Republican objectors to explain why they object to term limits, in addition to the rest of the court reforms that are needed.

If they're able to continue their obstruction silently and anonymously in the dark, they will continue to do just that in perpetuity. If they are made to show their faces and speak publicly in the light of day, highlighting to the country exactly what they oppose, then the people will again have a fighting chance to know who deserves their support at the next election and who's been actively blocking progress and needs to be shown the door.

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

Section A, THE RULINGS Followed by Section B, THE CHARACTER OF THE COURT

Section C, ORIGINS, HOW WE GOT THIS COURT

And Section D, REFORM, WHAT DO WE DO

Congress has traditionally created agencies with some measure of independence, not total independence from the president or other parts of government, but with some measure of independence where they thought it was particularly important that the agency have some measure of impartiality, some l- level of insulation from the political process.

Even though they will ultimately be accountable to a political official, they need some level of insulation to perform what have been called quasi-judicial or quasi-legislative functions in which they're exercising some kind of expertise or some sort of quasi-judicial function. 

The court also did push back on presidential authority in the tariff case, though, correct?

Yes. It's not a matter of the president's independence so much, but they did limit the president's really incredible authority to exercise certain emergency powers. In the tariff decision, the question at issue was whether under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which, known to its friends and family as IEEPA, the president could impose tariffs on foreign imports.

What IEEPA does is says that during a declared national emergency, then the president has really broad authority to do a long list of things to any transaction which involves a foreign national or foreign country. He can regulate, he can prohibit, he can void, he can compel, he can direct, do any of these long list of verbs to any transaction involving a foreign national or foreign country that's part of the emergency.

Just a really broad authority, and it's in part so broad because it r- has this emergency angle. So what we have in, with President Trump's IEEPA tariffs is he declared an emergency with respect to, I don't even remember exactly how he cabined it, but apparently with respect to the economy and international trade generally and then proposed these broad tariffs across the board.

That seems like it could be a problem, by the way. We've seen this tactic over and over again, dec- the administration declaring some emergency on very flimsy grounds and then claiming all of the emergency powers that go along with that. 

Absolutely. and I draw the court's willingness to draw a line here- they don't review the emergency.

They don't say it's ridiculous. They accept it at face value. But I gotta think at least a partial motivation here is the emergency declaration process has become so flimsy. That's in part also the court's fault, of course, right? That traces back to what I like to call the Supreme Court's original sin in INS versus Chadha, where they struck down the legislative veto.

IEPA originally allowed a single house of Congress to pass a resolution that would have overturned a president's declaration of an emergency under IEPA. Supreme Court said, "No, you can't do that with a single house of Congress. If you're passing a law like that, you have to go through both houses of Congress and present it to the president."

And the Supreme Court struck that down because it didn't comply with the bicameralism and presentment requirements of the Constitution for Congress to pass a law. And instead of striking down IEPA overall, it just removed that congressional check on the president's power. so the president can now, declare an emergency indefinitely, and unless Congress can go through the entire bicameralism and presentment and override a veto, then that emergency is gonna stick until the president says otherwise.

So that's how we got here, of course. But now with this incredibly flimsy declaration of emergency, with the president exercising those IEPA powers in the broadest way possible, even if they're really broad authorities, the, the court was not having it. 

So let's get into a few of the key decisions from this term.

We'll start with campaign finance. So this was a decision that I think flew under the radar a little bit. Why are legal experts paying so much attention to it? 

Sure. the Supreme Court had previously ruled that a political party has a right to make unlimited independent expenditures during a campaign, meaning without coordinating with the candidate of that campaign, and had previously upheld, the idea that they could restrict expenditures in coordination with the candidate.

By a vote of 6-3 in the recent decision, the justices struck down the federal law that limited the amount of money that parties can spend in coordination with a candidate for office. That overturns precedent from 20 years ago, and in many ways just takes the brake off any remaining fundraising limits for a candidate, because even if someone cannot contribute directly to a candidate, they can contribute to a party, and the party can spend an unlimited amount of money on any individual candidate, including by coordinating with that candidate in the expenditure.

Now, money in politics is just, is, an old story in many ways, and this is just an expansion of the problems created by Citizens United and by other cases, in which increasingly any ability by Congress or by states to limit those expenditures are being limited. 

So in terms of the impact on democracy, what we're talking about here is those with the most wealth and the corporations who are seeking future benefits for themselves can give almost unlimited amounts of money to their candidates of choice, and then we can expect that they will have far more influence, in the whatever administration results from investing all of that money in the campaign.

And when we're living in a country with increasing amounts of wealth disparity, it just means that there's even more of a distinction between people who have power and influence in our government and people who don't, which is unfortunately the majority other than the right to vote in the first place.

Yes. I agree with all of that. The amount of money, the, the extent to which money determines who can run for office is just becoming more and more stark. And people without, not just without any money, but people without access to billionaires to fund them are not gonna have the capacity to run for any sort of statewide or national office.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a 6-to-3 decision that the Trump administration can turn back asylum seekers at the border,immigration officers at border crossings to block asylum seekers from setting foot on U.S. soil. The policy is not officially in effect. In fact, it was rescinded in 2021, but the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn the 2024 appeals court ruling that found the practice unlawful. And the Supreme Court then agreed to hear the case.

The case is Mullin v. Al Otro Lado. Erika Pinheiro is the executive director of Al Otro Lado, the lead plaintiff in the case. She joins us from Mexico City. Talk about the significance of the Supreme Court decision, and talk specifically about the case your organization brought, Al Otro Lado.

first of all, thank you so much for having me today.

We originally brought this case because we documented hundreds of asylum seekers being turned away from ports of entry, and also documented many individuals who were assaulted, raped, trafficked or killed because they could not access protection in the United States. This particular case is so important, and I think that the importance was really minimized by the justices.

iduals cannot set foot on U.S. soil, that they do not have the right to ask for protection at the U.S. border. this was really not about the text of the statute. It was to reach the political goal of ending asylum access at the border reach the political goal of ending access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. He uses a few analogies in the decision, but I think the most apt analogy would be if a police officer were standing outside of a polling place, and the Supreme Court decided, even though he’s pointing a gun at you, and you couldn’t go inside the polling place, you still have the right to vote. it’s just ridiculous. But that, unfortunately, was the decision the Supreme Court.

The practical effect right now is not going to be a huge change, because, like you mentioned, the policy has not been in place since 2021, but the broader effects are really significant. First, it undermines international cooperation around the Refugee Convention. It legitimizes turnbacks for other countries that are engaged in this practice, of which there are many. And it really just solidifies the idea that human beings cannot cross borders to seek safety. And in a time of increasing conflict and climate catastrophe, this will result in many more deaths.

 

And, Erika, can you talk some about how this closure of the border, really, that’s happened, especially in the last few years, has impacted Mexico and people and migrants or refugees arriving in Mexico?

like I mentioned, the Trump administration, starting from the first Trump administration, and continuing into the Biden administration, have hardened the border infrastructure, so that individuals who are in Mexico trying to reach the United States cannot set foot on U.S. soil. They are turned away by U.S. officials at the border. When the Biden administration created the CBP One system, which gave hundreds of thousands of individuals appointments to seek asylum in the United States, there were many — they were all waiting in Mexico. That system was canceled by the Trump administration, and approximately 300,000 individuals who had already registered in the system were then stuck in Mexico.

here in Mexico City, we’ve worked with a very diverse population of refugees who are now applying for protection here in Mexico. Many have received it, but there is a rule in Mexico that you have to apply within 30 days of entry for asylum. a lot of people were already waiting for longer. There’s also very limited capacity here for third-language speakers, those who do not speak English or Spanish, so we’ve been helping those individuals. But I would say that the Mexican asylum system has been overwhelmed, and there are serious safety concerns for individuals forced to wait in more dangerous parts of the country.

And there are also, however, still many people who cross back and forth across the border every day, Americans going to work in Mexico, Mexicans coming to work in the United States, or to shop or to go to school. How has that affected the general transfer — comings and goings on the border?

I would say, after years of living on the border, that it has become more burdensome for people who are crossing for economic or educational reasons. Whenever the United States, or even Mexico, implements a policy that keeps asylum seekers away from the border, it generally will result in longer lines for people who are crossing for other reasons.

But I do want to say that the San Ysidro Port of Entry, which was the initial focus of our litigation, is the largest land border crossing in the world. I think between 50- and 100,000 people cross that border every day. the Department of Homeland Security saying that they don’t have capacity to process asylum seekers, in addition to those tens of thousands of individuals, is really, I would say, laughable, but obviously the consequences are dire.

The court issued a 6-3 decision last week. Their rulings stem from two cases that were argued before them in April. Can you give us the overview of what was being argued and also the role you played?

Yes. As you said, it was two cases involving about 350,000 Haitian TPS holders and about 7,000 Syrian TPS holders, but the question was really a broad one that affects all TPS litigation. It was does the court have authority to stop an illegal TPS termination? No one in the opinion claims that the administration has been following the rules about TPS. They very clearly are acting illegally, but what the Court said, that 6-3 majority, is that it doesn't matter, that courts don't have the power to stop an illegal termination, don't have authority to review the kinds of statutory claims that the plaintiffs had raised in that case.

They said maybe a constitutional claim can be reviewed, but they found, which I think you might have to be a lawyer to work your mind around how you could find this, but they found that the statements that President Trump has made about Haitians are not racist. They're actually policy statements. When he said, for example, that Haitians are poisoning the blood of this country, that was a policy statement.

Wow. Just to put a fine point on that, Jessica, one of the issues that was raised in the Haiti case was constitutional concerns over whether the TPS termination was racially motivated because of statements like that. I think people often also think about comments he made about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs, completely unfounded and certainly found to be racist by many people who heard them. Can you explain what the arguments were for that dimension of the case and why the court rejected those claims?

The court said, which is a real divergence from normal equal protection jurisprudence, that because there was a non-racist reason also provided for ending TPS in this case, that President Trump has made ending Temporary Protective Status program a goal because he doesn't want immigrants to have that protection, that's a non racist reason.

Also, the immigration context in which all these statements were made should lessen the normal way you would look at a statement like that and led the court to the conclusion that these statements that I think the dissent really powerfully called out as very standard racist tropes about filth and disease and criminality, that such statements are not racist. I'm struggling to explain it because I really think for a layperson, it's obvious. What the court did is-- actually, the majority did not mention the statements. They don't quote any of the statements, and they just give a sanitized version of what happened and then conclude that it wasn't racist.

Jessica, it is hard to wrap the mind around how one could hear so many of those comments and hear them as policy statements, but from a powers point of view, was some of what the court was, this conservative majority, deciding simply around expanding the powers of the presidency and what the role of the president has when it comes to determining who is legally able to be in this country.

Yes, certainly, but the normal presumption is, if Congress makes a law, as it did when it created the Temporary Protective Status Program and sets up certain rules for the government to follow, that if the government violates those rules, a court can review it. That's the normal presumption. By turning that on its head and reading the statute instead, really broadly to prevent the courts from considering even whether former Secretary Noem followed the rules, that greatly expands the power of the Department of Homeland Security when it comes to this humanitarian program that was actually designed to restrain the Department of Homeland Security's discretion.

Macollvie, I want to bring you into this conversation because you wrote, I think, for listeners who are looking to get some of those basic questions answered about "What does this mean to me? What does this mean to my friends and neighbors?" a really helpful Q&A about this decision for The Haitian Times. You noted that the Trump administration had actually already ended TPS for Haiti, with an end date anticipated for last February, but lower courts had blocked that move. How did the lawyers you spoke with explain this latest ruling?

Brigid, this is something that, honestly, the community has seen coming. The lawyers and advocates we spoke with weren't that surprised. They were very disappointed, but given the line of questioning during the oral arguments, they weren't as shocked as you would expect that the court actually-- The court's ruling removes the postponement that the district judge in DC had put in place for that initial revocation on February 3rd.

A lot of what they've been focusing on is the legislative route at this point, where they're really pushing people to call their senators, call other members of Congress to get them to pass this bill in the Senate that would extend protections for three years for Haitians. Their concern right now is to find a way to make Temporary Protective Status not temporary anymore. They're really pushing for a path to citizenship or permanent residency for a lot of the people who've been relying on TPS to live and work.

This bill, S. 4814, is what we've seen a lot of them just trying to tell the community and outside of the community, because we need people who are not Haitians who actually engage in this, particularly folks who are in Republican-led states, is what they've been saying to try to join on this bill, so it has bipartisan support to get through the Senate. That's where the focus is, obviously, in addition to responding to the critical needs and questions that people are getting about how they might continue to live their day-to-day lives.

, I want to go back to some of the reporting that you have been doing and what kinds of concerns are you hearing on the ground about what this decision means for how people, as you said, can go about their daily lives. Particularly within the Haitian community, how are people with TPS changing their daily routines?

A lot of the immediate concern is around employment. A lot of people were asking, "Can I still go to work? Is my work authorization that's tied to TPS still valid?" Some people had gotten notices from their employers that they should not return to work as of July 1st, which is tomorrow in some cases. Not just in Brooklyn and New York, but different places around the country, employers have made these different decisions.

When word gets out that some people are getting notices not to come back on a certain day, that just creates more anxiety in turn, and people are just calling and asking service organizations and their lawyers, "Can I still go to work? Is deportation going to start right away? What should I do with my kids? Can I still travel and go to different places?" It really just has this domino effect on decisions people have to make every day, from leaving their house in certain areas and not really knowing whether they'll be met with agents or whatnot, to continuing to drop off their kids at daycare or going into their jobs.

We've seen just the quality of life changes are also coming into effect. One of our reporters in Ohio and Columbus reported to us today that this one gym that's become a gathering spot for a lot of Haitians in that community was just completely empty over the weekend because people are just-- They don't know. On top of the immediate day-to-day piece, there's the need to save as much money as you can. Spending on things that might seem unnecessary, like going to the gym, is taking a hit.

People are just on pause, if you will, until they can get some clear answers about what it means for them as individuals, because each one, each family, has a specific individual case that needs to still work through the immigration system.

Next, Section B, THE CHARACTER OF THE COURT

The idea that a presidential executive order could overcome an explicitly written constitutional provision that has been upheld by a more than 100-year Supreme Court precedent was so preposterous that obviously the Supreme Court should have summarily affirmed the findings or the decisions of multiple district courts that had thrown Trump versus Casa out.

But in my view, the Court took up Trump versus Casa because they were so hungry to get at the issue that's been bothering them for years, the issue of district courts issuing nationwide injunctions. And so once again, I wanna be clear that the Court is not, 'cause they frequently say, "What can we do? Cases are just coming to us, and we just...

Then we have to try to figure it out." No, they are quite intentional, quite aggressive, and this was an example of that. They wanted that case because of the posture in which it came to them. So we have now waited more than a year around the question of, as Mark says, who is an American, right? While the Court played around with an issue that matters to them and probably not to, how many Americans are there?

350, probably 300 and, 45 million Americans don't care about nationwide injunctions, but they did. And so they took this case up, then they came out with this whole idea of the class action piece, which, by the way, don't think this Court is going to continue to broadly look at class actions, nationwide class actions.

So the Court then, this had to go back, then it came back up. It comes back up. The Court takes all of this time to decide this case that should have been summarily affirmed more than a year ago And when it decides the case, it decides this case of whether or not the president can overcome this explicit constitutional provision with an executive order.

And so they come down six-three on that, but five-four on whether or not it's possible to actually carve out from birthright citizenship. Justice Kavanaugh says, I think Congress can do it," right? he wants to weaponize the enforcement clause of the 14th Amendment to allow Congress not to enforce, but to subtract from the protections guaranteed in the 14th Amendment.

I think it's catastrophic. I think this is the kind of case in which, and you've heard all of the talking the last couple weeks, Trump picked up on it immediately, and said, "Now we're gonna try to do it by legislation." It is to create this environment of legitimacy around the idea that people who are born in this country can be shown not to be citizens, and that is the political gain, that they're playing with.

Kavanaugh mentioned it at the oral argument, and I said at the time, he's always looking at the political angle because he's an, a political actor. And the idea of saying, "Yes, but I think Congress can do it," is to keep the issue alive, and it has kept the issue alive for the right. So I don't even really give them the kind of credit that they should have on birthright citizenship.

It should have been a unanimous decision. Maybe it should have been 7-2. But this idea that Congress has the power to do it is profoundly alarming, and it has given aid and comfort to those who have been trying to press this lunatic idea for a very long time. And that's what they do. They do that until they can mainstream the idea.

But there are real people who are involved in this question. The more that you create this idea that maybe some people born in this country are not citizens, the more you feed an environment, a very dangerous environment in this country in which individual citizens are deciding for themselves who belongs and who doesn't belong.

And so the Haitian TPS decision, the green card decision, the asylum decision, all of those decisions are not just decisions where we evaluate what the court said, but it's what is the message that the court is sending to the American public. And the people who will face the consequences of those messages are ordinary people trying to live their lives, trying to be safe, who came here believing that this was a place where they could protect their families.

And we never should lose sight of that. 

In some ways, Sherrilyn, a lot of what you're describing is the culture war just creeping into everything that the Supreme Court does. I think in a lot of ways, Callais and Milligan were culture war decisions, right? There were also a bunch of other culture war issues on the docket this term that we are not even gonna have time to fully flush out: guns, abortion, religion, LGBTQ rights.

And I think it really shows you how urgently important the race and nationalism agendas are that these became like B-roll, even though they almost universally went badly. So Steve and Nico, I know this is a tall order, but I would love if each of you could pick out like the worst of these culture war decisions and, and talk about them.

Dealer's choice. They didn't get as much spotlight as we think they deserved, and, we would be remiss if each of you didn't have an opportunity to rant about how bad at least one of them was. 

I think any of these could get their own dissertation about what the court's doing and why it's bad. But I guess one that stands out right now is the court's decision in Wolford, which involved a Hawaii law that basically set a default rule that you can't bring your gun into a supermarket or a coffee shop unless you have the permission of the owner of the supermarket or coffee shop.

The court said that violates the Second Amendment as, incorporated through the 14th Amendment. It illustrates just how discretionary all of these tests the court is making up are. So a few years ago in Bruen, the Supreme Court said the way we are now going to evaluate gun restrictions for the first time is you have to point to a historical analog.

You have to show how the modern gun restriction is analogous to an older gun restriction, a tradition of gun restrictions. And in the Hawaii case, Hawaii had a really great way of approaching that. They said, guess what? When Hawaii was a kingdom in 1833, we banned all guns. Just no guns in Hawaii." And the court looked at that and said, that, that looks like it was an exception.

it's kinda out there. It's not part of the American tradition in the same way as, let's look at Pennsylvania." And, it's like you can do your best to abide by what the court has said it is looking for And yet the Court can manufacture an exception to its own rule so that when you're back before the Court with your new thing, the Court can say, "Oh, you really missed this footnote in some opinion from the '30s that we said this is not okay, and therefore you lose."

And so it does not feel like a fair tribunal to rigorously apply even what the Court is saying. Sherrilyn talked about the voting cases. the, the Court had struck down state laws as violations of the Voting Rights Act only a few years earlier, had it upheld on the shadow docket this year.

What's the difference? Three years have passed. The inconsistency makes it just hard to move forward. It's hard to predict as a legislator or as a voter what are we allowed to do. If we want to change something bad that the Court has done, how can we do it in a way that complies with the Court's vision of the Constitution?

For some policy decisions, whether it deals with trans kids or guns or voting or anything else, I just don't think there is any way that Congress or a state can comply with whatever the Court has said to the extent that it leads to a policy outcome that the Court is upset about. 

So I just wanna piggyback on that with my vote for probably the sleeper case of the term, which is a case called Landor v.

Louisiana Department of Corrections. So this is ostensibly a religious liberty case. Damon Landor is a Rastafarian Louisiana state prisoner who didn't wanna have to shave his dreadlocks as the Louisiana prison policy required him to. He literally had a copy with him in prison of the Fifth Circuit ruling that said he had a right under a statute called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, RLUIPA, to not shave his dreadlocks, and the prison officials literally took the ruling and shoved it in the trash and then shaved his head.

And what did the Supreme Court say about all that? They said, because the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act was enacted under Congress's spending power as opposed to any of its other enumerated powers, the statute has to elicit consent, not just from Louisiana, which consented by taking the money that it gets under RLUIPA, but from the individual officers who had to consent to the possibility that they would be subject to individual damages liability, for violating the statute.

That is based, Mark and Dahlia, as you guys know, on such a tendentious reading of the spending clause, one that a, wild district court adopted in two thousand and one, and then law professors and circuit judges spent twenty years laughing at. And yet the Supreme Court adopts it in a six-three majority in a way that doesn't just screw over people like Damon Landor and lots of other members of religious minority groups in prisons, but Mark, in a way that's gonna disempower Congress, because this is one of its most important enumerated powers, and the Supreme Court has now made it much, much harder for Congress to pass these kinds of statutes in a way that will subject people who violate them to accountability for violating them.

And that's just completely insane. So that's my pick for the culture war sort of disaster that we haven't paid enough attention to yet. 

does John Roberts read his decisions and think about the inconsistencies between them?

does Brett Kavanaugh read his own concurrence/dissent and the opinion that he joins? there's a lot of dissonance between these two. So here is the Kavanaugh concurrence/dissent in Trump versus Barbara. Quote, "The Constitution is an enduring document, and its principles were designed to and do apply to modern conditions and developments.

The original constitutional principles do not change absent a constitutional amendment, but the relevant principles, both the rules and exceptions alike, must be faithfully applied not only to circumstances as they existed in 1787, 1791, and 1868, for example, but also to modern situations that were unknown or unanticipated by the Constitution's Framers."

Big if true. Also, how does this now relate to the rest of your concurrence? 

he, he's a living constitutionalist in the right circumstances, Melissa, and he's now told us that 

a- and your other decisions. just again Yeah. 

and specifically the Second Amendment- ... because here in Barbara, he is inviting himself to make open-ended judicial exceptions to the Constitution based on policy considerations, saying there are changed circumstances when in the Second Amendment, the Court's jurisprudence, including Kavanaugh's, fails to account for how firearms look a lot different today than they did 200 years ago.

And on that point, the Court just granted cert and will decide next term whether the Second Amendment allows governments to prohibit owning an AR-15 or other semi-automatic rifle. 

James Madison had an AR-15, so I'm sure it'll be fine. 

Basically. 

I- I mean, you're talking about the Second Amendment. I think you could also say the same thing about his 14th Amendment jurisprudence, like if you took an originalist view of the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment in the voting rights cases, it is race-conscious.

It's explicitly race-conscious, and Coach Kavanaugh is always about race neutrality. So it's super selective, it's super itinerant, and whatever. Here we are. We need to talk about the girls are fighting, so in particular, Justice Jackson and Justice Thomas are fighting again some more. And Justice Jackson's concurrence here takes Justice Thomas, who wrote the principal dissent, to the woodshed.

and separately, we are going to need to talk about Justice Thomas. Oh, we will. Okay, great. so Justice Jackson writes, quote, "Despite his long-standing endorsement of a colorblind Constitution," yes, girl, "Justice Thomas- Got Real personal, real fast. "Despite his long-standing endorsement of a colorblind Constitution, Justice Thomas now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure relating only to freed slaves, such as Dred Scott, and those who shared with them certain characteristics.

Justice Thomas' telling elides the entire point of the Second Founding," and she could have just stopped there, but she continues, "The Reconstruction Amendments were an anti-caste, anti-subordination reset for the nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery." KBJ The 14th Amendment is not a Tide pen, you tools.

Like- ... this is a real thing. Like oxy- f- like, not OxyContin, but oxy, oxidant. I love that- Okay ... she pointed out how Thomas, again, is always ready to invoke race when it suits him, and always ready to be race- Yeah ... neutral when he wants to. 

Yeah. Yes. She also has a couple of just, savage footnotes. She basically says, "Justice Thomas," agree- thinks and says, and is right, "that the Court has not always," "made good on the promise of equal citizenship gu- guaranteed by the 14th Amendment" And then she writes in a footnote, "I suspect that Justice Thomas and I disagree about when and how that promise of equal citizenship has been denied by this Court.

My list is long and sadly only getting longer." And she offers a very long list, the most recent installment of which is Louisiana versus Callais. 

A list that begins with civil rights cases and Plessy versus Ferguson. Yes. This is the through line she draws. 

Students for Fair Admissions is in there, too. Yeah, it's really- Milliken- She, she- Korematsu

she wants- All the bangers ... she wants every- Yeah. and, and I just, I, I love this. this is the kind of anti-canon that she is- Yes ... willing into being. It's gonna take a long time. no, beating around the bush about that, but I really think that she is, starting to lay the foundations.

And anyway, there's one more footnote, footnote 53. There are a lot of footnotes in the Jackson, separate concurrence. she joins in full, but she writes a lot also. and she says, "There are myriad ways in which the Court's adherence to colorblindness is mistaken, some of which I have addressed in other opinions."

and she says, "One wonders how the outcomes in the above cases," that long list of, terribly misguided opinions, "might have differed had the Court, like the government and the principal dissent today, relied upon the fact that the 14th Amendment was enacted to ensure that Black Americans are not treated as second-class citizens."

So where was the energy you're bringing today, Justice Thomas, in Students for Fair Admissions or Callais or any number of other cases? 

So in light of the vote count, I was left wondering what the vote count on cert was. Specifically, was this the chief justice thinking, "I am going to grant cert and get an easy layup and win for the Supreme Court's PR," or was it the dissenters granting cert because they wanted to bulldoze birthright citizenship?

I don't know. I 

love the idea of Chief Justice John Roberts thinking that he is the Jalen Brunson of the Court, and he's gonna do this. No. And I, I think it might've been the dissenters. 

In light of the vote count, it could have been. 

Justice Thomas's principal dissent, ooh-wee, wow, we need to talk about it.

So the dissent ends with this quote: "I am not sure that today's opinion will stand the test of time. The Citizenship Clause added greatly to the dignity and glory of American citizenship. Today's opinion devalues that citizenship." So first of all, let's go back to the idea that the Citizenship Clause only applies to Black Americans and their descendants, and therefore rank xenophobia is anti-racist.

that's basically the energy here. And going forward, that's where w- we've got to come back. This will not stand the test of time. This is an invitation to keep pushing on this and to- Yeah ... make this happen again. let's recycle our shitty arguments about same-sex marriage and use them against birthright citizenship.

We should also say a word about the Alito dissent, which no one joins, and which really is- He's 

on the way 

out ... a Fox News s- may- maybe, it's very hard to know where he, what, what is happening this week, so maybe we'll know more by Thursday or f- by next week. But in any event, it really reads as a Fox News segment in Century Schoolbook font.

That is the Supreme Court opinion font. truly. The second sentence is like sneers about, quote, "birth tourists." It then launches this screed about, quote, "A long period during which a coterie of actors, executive branch officials, states and cities, and a variety of private groups sent the message to would-be immigrants that our immigration laws would not be taken too seriously.

This message, coupled with ineffective or unenthusiastic enforcement, spurred massive illegal immigration." it also goes, full great replacement theory, talking about the grotesque results of a child born here to a birth tourist being automatically a citizen, and warning about the intensifying trend of, quote, "the overall foreign-born population of the United States."

it's really a shocking document. 

It's actually a real take for someone who is the descendant of Italian immigrants 

Indeed 

I, just again, just I didn't... I was actually shocked by this, again, recognizing the real politic here. this man, his father, wasn't his father in, came from Italy?

He's not that far removed from coming over, and yet, we're talking about birth tourism. I mean- 

Yeah ... 

everyone came from somewhere else, my guy- Yeah ... except the Native Americans, my guy. 

So I expected that in today's episode we would have to talk about the fact that even though the court told the president he can't unilaterally nullify birthright citizenship, we would have to remind people that the court created the need for this decision, staging the media fawning over them by basically drawing this out and then insisting that the federal government bring it back to them.

I thought we'd have to situate this case alongside many other cases where the justices told the president what he can do, including his racist immigration agenda, including the decisions we talked about last week, canceling TPS or giving the president a giant loophole to evade all of asylum law, or racial profiling in immigration enforcement and so on.

I thought we would have to spend time situating this case along the many cases that did nullify provisions of the Reconstruction Amendments, like the courts of voting rights decisions out of Alabama, the one we are about to talk about, nullifying the 14th Amendment's equal protection guarantee for trans people, at least in the context of sports, nullifying equal protection principles applicable to, to the federal government, allowing the president to smear Haitian nationals with vile racist statements, saying the president isn't subject to provisions in the 14th Amendment barring insurrectionists from office until Congress says he is.

And instead, the focus is how they came within one vote of nullifying the edifice of the post-Civil War constitutional order. And the world I was envisioning was already bad enough, but now there are four votes against the 14th Amendment. And again, for all of the Democratic-elected leaders who still are not on the Supreme Court reform train, it cannot be up to the court which provisions of the Constitution get enforced, which groups have constitutional rights.

It shouldn't be up to the court whether to give the president a hall pass from the Constitution, federal laws. am I supposed to be grateful that the court, in its benevolence, would enforce the 19th Amendment and not allow a state to tell me I can't vote tomorrow? No, and we shouldn't do the same when they do that for birthright citizenship by one vote.

The Supreme Court is corrupt. You might hear that and think, Jamal, you just disagree with the rulings. They're not corrupt. They're doing their jobs." But I want to posit to you that they're not doing their job, that they're in fact doing something very different. They're acting as a super legislature, an unelected group of people who have taken it upon themselves to correct Congress, not when Congress has overstepped its bounds, not when Congress has overstepped its powers, but when the court simply doesn't like what they're doing.

Typically, when we use the word corruption, we are thinking about monetary corruption, bribes, and the like, and it should be said there's some of this. Clarence Thomas, in particular, is known for taking large sums, large gifts from his wealthy benefactors. Sam Alito has also been the beneficiary of wealthy friends.

So there is that kind of corruption as well. But corruption also has a broader meaning. It can mean the malign use of power, the substitution of the public trust for your own private will, your own private interest, and that is more than anything else what is happening with the Supreme Court. You can see it in many different ways.

The Roberts Court is quite fond of simply ignoring the plain text of the Constitution whenever it gets into the way of their particular political and ideological projects. The Roberts Court wants to do a few things. It wants to gut the Reconstruction Amendments. It wants to aggrandize presidential power.

It wants to free corporate speech. It wants to allow the wealthy to interact with the political system in any way they choose, and it wants to pursue the particular partisan interests of the Republican Party. And so when the text of the Constitution gets in the way, they change the text or they ignore it.

The text of the Constitution clearly gives Congress the power to handle racial discrimination in voting, and when it came up to the court in 2013 in Shelby County, the court simply made up a new doctrine, state sovereignty, all states have to be treated equally, in order to undermine a provision that subjected states with histories of voting discrimination to stricter scrutiny by the federal government.

When the court wanted to protect its special boy, Donald Trump, from criminal prosecution, it invented a doctrine of criminal immunity for core duties found nowhere in the Constitution and frankly contradicted by the text, history, and theory behind the Constitution More recently, rather than just shutting down Trump's efforts to unravel birthright citizenship, the court has taken them seriously despite the clear text and history of the 14th Amendment.

Where the text interferes with partisan political goals, this Supreme Court says, "To hell with the text." The other manner in which the court demonstrates corruption is by not having any particularly consistent jurisprudence. Despite grand claims of being originalist or textualist, this court often decides not based on any particular theory of jurisprudence, but simply on whether they have a decided interest in the case in question, a partisan or political interest.

Consider two days in 2022 back to back. On the first of those days, the court held that because you cannot find gun regulation in the annals of American history, therefore, there's no history or tradition supporting New York state's attempt to regulate individual gun ownership. And then the very next day, the court releases an opinion stating that despite the fact that you cannot find very much evidence of abortion regulation in the American past, that doesn't mean states can't regulate abortion or ban it outright.

On one hand, gun rights, which the court likes, history is an obstacle. On the other hand, abortion rights, which the court does not like, history is no limit. In Trump v. Hawaii, the court held that, yes, the Trump administration can use race, can use religion in determining its travel bans. There's nothing against the Constitution involved in that.

Just last year, the court held that you can use race in immigration stops. That's why we're calling them Kavanaugh stops. Brett Kavanaugh wrote that opinion. But as it comes to voting, as we've just seen, states can't use race to remedy past discrimination. States can't consider race to ensure fair minority representation.

States can, however, engage in racial gerrymandering as long as it's done under the guise of partisan gerrymandering. What's the difference? the court likes the president's nativist policies. It likes the fact that Republicans can try to gerrymander themselves into permanent majorities. And so if it needs to use race to do that, the court has m- no particular problem with it.

Only when it comes time to hamper discrimination to protect rights is race impermissible. The other manner in which we see the court acting in a corrupt way is in its clear preference for Republican presidents, for Republican power. Under Trump, aggressive assertions of executive power were given deference.

They were allowed to move forward. Aggressive reinterpretations of existing congressional statutes, reinterpretations that may cut against Congress's intent were given deference, allowed to move forward Broad policy changes such as ending agency independence against the clear text of the law and against ninety years of precedent are given deference under the idea that the president needs to be able to pursue his priorities.

But Barack Obama wants to use the EPA to reduce carbon emissions? that's a major question. Congress has to deal with that. Joe Biden wants to forgive student loans? that's another major question. Congress has to deal with that. Under this court, presidential power when held by Republicans is broad and expansive, and under Democrats, it's cramped, barely legitimate.

I could go on like this, but the last point I'll make, the last example of the corruption I'll give is the total absence of regularity by this court. What makes a court is that there are well-defined procedures, processes. They're predictable. Courts pay attention to precedent. They have the same rules for all plaintiffs, and they explain their decisions.

Not so much this court. There's the shadow docket in which this court issues broad and important rulings with no explanation, shoots down district court decisions with no explanation, and then insists that those courts hew to its new precedents, which it has offered, again, with no explanation. In cases where the justices have clear political or ideological interests, they will make up fact patterns to support their case.

A religious liberty dispute where a coach says that he is having a private prayer, but in fact, he's having a large public prayer pressuring other students. Neil Gorsuch will simply pretend that the private prayer is what was happening, not the actual public prayer. A plaintiff sues not because they have any particular injury because of a law, but because they hypothetically might have an injury because of a law, despite the fact that they're not even engaged in the particular business that would bring them that injury.

the court says, "Hey, no problem. We'll still give you standing, and we'll still decide your case because we have a vested interest in making sure that religious liberty means you can discriminate against LGBTQ people." And again, there is the shadow docket. Major decisions made without a whiff, an inkling of reasoning.

Congressionally mandated agencies disrupted, tens of thousands of livelihoods destroyed, all without a single bit of explanation, simply deference to the president's desires and decrees. It is capricious and arbitrary. It is the essence of an anti-democratic action, of an anti-constitutional action. It is abundantly clear that as long as John Roberts has his majority, nothing the left of center in this country wants to do is safe or stable.

Everything can be killed by the court. We can have democracy and self-government in this country, or we can have the Supreme Court as it exists, but we cannot have both. We cannot have both. 

I wanna just emphasize it, is because at the end of the term when commentators crunch numbers and are- Yeah

"Oh, the Roberts Court doesn't overturn precedent at a higher rate than other courts. They o- only overturn like one or two cases this term." Callais didn't technically overturn any of the earlier cases about the Voting Rights Act. This case doesn't technically overturn Sosa, but that doesn't actually tell you much ju- about how radical this court is, and I think that's an important point to remember.

Absolutely, and this case had the same look what you made me do- Yes ... energy as the court's decision overruling Roe versus Wade, and some other cases have had. Namely, the court says, "Look, we left the door open in Sosa to recognizing new causes of action." Yeah. "But guess what? We haven't recognized one." And it's okay, that's your choice. Yes. That doesn't mean you shut the door. Yeah. And also they say, Sosa didn't take account of the fact that we would announce this rule that federal courts can't fashion causes of action." It's like, that's also your fault, right? Yeah. these are not kind of- It's never their fault when-

these independent developments. exactly. I forget. So- Yeah ... second case in this grouping we wanted to cover is ExxonMobil versus Corporacion Cimex. Exxon is the plaintiff here, so that's a clue about who won. Here, the Supreme Court said that plaintiffs could sue arms of the Cuban government, like basically entities that are operating as part of the Cuban government, and that- Decision is going to benefit a group that is probably going to include a large number of oil companies- who want to sue Cuba and arms of the Cuban government for appropriating and taking their oil, during the kind of Castro takeover and aftermath. And that same group also probably includes some oil companies who don't want to be sued for human rights abuses, and now Cisco cannot be sued. 

Yeah.

So this is implicit in what Leah just said, but if you're keeping track at home, after just these two decisions, if you want to sue a corporation for, say, facilitating a foreign government surveillance and torture, federal court's not going to be able to help you. But if you are a US corporation wanting to sue a foreign government for, appropriating your property like many decades ago during the Cuban Revolution, US courthouse doors are wide open.

And we won't get too deep into this just on this quick, conversation, but the court engages in some pretty tortured reading of a statute- Oh, yeah ... in order to say, "Eh, this sovereign immunity, this thing that usually protects foreign governments from being sued, that's been waived here in a statute that doesn't say anything about it.

But because we would really like to allow US corps to sue the Cuban government, we're gonna just try our best to find that this unwritten language is somehow discernible in a bunch of other statutory text." Curious, in contrast to the court's unwillingness to read things that aren't in statutes into them in other contexts.

Okay, so that's the first two. Third decision we wanna talk about is Landor versus Louisiana Department of Corrections. so this is a case involving e- a Rastafarian prisoner who had his dreadlocks cut off by prison officials in violation of his religious convictions and religious practices, and even after he gave prison officials a document that said they could not cut his hair.

This is an individual who was doing, a, a sentence just like in the number of months for a marijuana offense, was in one facility where prison officials respected that he had a legal document involving a case, it was a case involving another Rastafarian prisoner, but that said prison officials cannot cut the hair of religiously observant Rastafarians.

So when he was transferred to another facility, he showed them the opinion, and officials took the opinion, threw it in the garbage, held him down, and shaved his head. and so he filed a lawsuit, and the court here held six to three that the prisoner could not sue prison officials for damages. And so a, an awful result in this particular case, and more broadly, the opinion possibly renders all federal Spending Clause statutes unenforceable against individual officers who are responsible for carrying them out.

So Spending Clause statutes are statutes where the federal government gives money to states and says, "If you take this federal money, you have to agree to certain conditions." here there was an explicit condition to respect the religious rights of incarcerated individuals, but Landor says that these conditions are unenforceable against the individuals who are supposedly bound by them.

And this is hugely consequential given how prevalent Spending Clause statutes and programs are. And as Kate was saying, this ruling potentially makes it impossible for the beneficiaries of all of these programs, many of these programs, to vindicate their rights under the programs. This decision was 6-3.

It also vindicated a position that had been advanced by Scalia, Thomas, and whatnot. And if you're thinking, "Wait, I thought this Supreme Court liked religious liberty," here's what I'd say here. I think this gets at the issue Kate mentioned up top, which is this is really about government power. And here, the right-wing Republican project of curbing Congress's power to help people through Spending Clause programs, public benefits programs, which is what spending programs are, that desire to curb Congress's power, to curb the government's power to help people, won out over any substantive commitment they might have to religious liberty.

Probably didn't help that the plaintiff here was a Black Rastafarian, but I think that was the kind of cross-pressure and what they chose here. 

Yeah. And in addition to really gutting the enforceability of meaningful provisions in Spending Clause statutes, there is, this, it's about power, but there also is this kind of individual sort of culture war thread, I think- Yeah

to a couple of places in the opinion. And one place that jumped out to me, I think this also was a question that Gorsuch, posed in the oral argument. He basically says, "On the plaintiff's theory, the federal government could regulate all kinds of third-party conduct." And Gorsuch gives an example. He says, quote, "Congress," again, under the plaintiff's theory, "could require coaches at universities that receive federal funds to permit transgender athletes to play women's sports or face personal liability in suits for damages."

so that is clearly what is driving them. This- Yeah, I know. You- I just wanna say like- you're, you're gonna, you're gonna explode out of the screen. Please go. Yeah. 

I'm sorry. I'll let- 

No. no, no, no, go ... I won't explode. no, no. Go. Mic is yours. 

Fuck you. This is literally what spending programs civil rights- Yeah

do. Yes. They offer conditions, and they say, "If you take these money, you have to respect civil rights." Yeah. This is literally just describing how programs like Title VI and Title IX work. 

Yeah. 

Like- He's like, "But you can't use that to protect trans- transgender athletes and require coa- coaches to do so."

What? 

Right. A- And if we, yes, and if we allow the protection of religious liberty here, like all of a sudden this, for Gorsuch, this is a parade of horribles, which is that there's a world in which a Congress could actually require college coaches to permit transgender athletes to participate, and this is like the most horrifying kind of end of the slippery slope that Gorsuch can conjure up.

So anyway, it does feel like that's somewhat driving him. And there is a Jackson dissent. This is an issue, kind of the court's evisceration of statutes passed under the Spending Clause, or at least the kind of enforceability of the rights guarantees in these statutes, has been something that Jackson has been really focused on- Yeah

for basically her whole time on the court. and she also is really, I think, like deeply offended by this kind of analogy that underlies what the court is doing. We're not gonna get like too far into the weeds, but basically what the court says is- Under, a spending program under the spending clause, the kind that Leah was just describing, is like a contract between two parties, the federal government and the states that take the money.

And so contract principles have to inform whether we decide that a provision like this k- rights guarantee provision can be enforced. And because these guards never agreed to the specific condition, they can't be sued. it's ... If it sounds like a hard theory to really follow, yes, it doesn't really make any sense, and she's just both, unconvinced but profoundly troubled by, what underlies this idea.

So she says, quote, "Today's decision magically transforms a federal statute into an invitation to be accepted or declined, binding only if each particular defendant has explicitly agreed to be penalized, no matter that laws as opposed to contracts don't ordinarily work this way." And then here she says, "The court reduces some of Congress's greatest legislative achievements, federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more, to nothing more than the wheelings and dealings of an especially wealthy private party.

I would not so trivialize a federal statute or the constitutional powers pursuant to which it was passed." And anyway, I thought that was quite powerful. 

So there's sort of four cases where the court doesn't let Donald Trump just do whatever he wants to do There's the tariff case where they strike down the tariffs. There's the birthright citizenship where they invalidate the executive order, although very narrowly. There's the mail-in voting case where people are allowed to, they're allowed to count ballots after election day, which doesn't directly involve Trump, but he, of course, is obsessed with this.

and the Fed case where the Federal Reserve Board of Governor member Lisa Cook, can't be fired summarily even though you can fire everyone else, not the Fed. So those are the four kind of places where they step in. Maybe I'll start with you, Melissa, just is there a through line there? Is that a useful way to think about...

We all think about it because the way the news covers it, but is there a through line there, or is it just are these sort of different issues that we should just think about in different terms? 

So I do think there's a through line. I don't think it's helpful to think about this in terms of winners and losers because whenever you're talking about this court, the ultimate winner is the court itself.

the court usually- that's well said ... aggrandizes power to itself, even as it expands the power of other branches and diminishes the power of Congress. So I think that's just a baseline. I think the through line that I've identified with regard to what appear to be two irreconcilable cases, Slaughter on the one hand, and Cook on the other, and you gave a great summary.

Slaughter is the one about being able to remove the heads of administrative agencies for whatever reason the president concocts, and Cook is about not being able to remove a governor of the Fed unless you can concoct some kind of plausible reason, and you give her due process in doing so. I think I would weigh those two cases in tandem with the tariffs case.

I think the through line that unites all three of them is the fact that this court is a very corporatist court. So- ... all three of these cases had something that corporations and their presiding oligarchs would love. So obviously in Slaughter, getting rid of bipartisan control of administrative agencies makes for a more pleasurable regulatory landscape for most.

That's a great adjective. 

I, I think the afterglow of Slaughter was huge, for many- Yes ... of these tech giants, Not 

all of them. Yes, they're laying back and smoking cigarettes. 

Yes. No, not all of them. Indeed. there, there are some places where regulation is actually great for corporations because it- Yeah

limits barriers, or it limits new entrants to the market and whatnot. But I think for the most part, they would prefer a more deregulated environment in which to do business. but at the same time, they want global policy, global economic policy to be stable. They want markets to be stable and not in turmoil, and that, of course, depends on the Fed being independent.

They've talked about that quite explicitly. And with regard to the tariffs- They hated the tariffs as much as the little guy did because the tariffs upended global supply chains, it made the cost of doing business much more expensive, diminished profit margins. So for all of those reasons- Yeah ... there was something for the corporate giants to love about all three of these cases, and I think this is a court that is not unlike the court post-Reconstruction, the Gilded Age court, that was very much corporatist- in its outlook and bent. 

Yeah, that's really well said. look, just to zoom in, Leah, for a second on the, a lot of people have pointed this out, the... So you've got these two independent, quasi-independent agencies, right? The Federal Trade Commission on the one hand, and the Federal Reserve Board.

And, they're not at the same time, they're not created at the same time, and they have slightly different structures. But there's a whole set of agencies where we don't want it, we want it to have a little bit of distance from the executive authority for a whole bunch of reasons, and in one case, the court says that's constitutionally impermissible, like you can't do it.

And then everyone thinks, "Whoa, they're gonna destroy the American Central Bank and the pillar of global capitalism." They're like, "But except for that one." Is there any good faith argument here? they try to make it, and I've read parts of the opinions where they do. Is there anything we should credit here about how they hive off the Federal Reserve from the rest of these independent agencies?

So there is something I think we should credit, and that's Brett Kavanaugh's separate writing, where he just had big OMG, I admit it energy, and basically said- ... we need to resolve this issue because otherwise we are threatening the United States' economic stability." So I think he offered- Yes ... the real rationale.

He's so dumb- Consequentialist reasoning ... I don't think he realized what he was admitting to, but- Don't 

say it out loud, 

the first rule- He did it anyway ... of 

Fight Club. 

Yeah. Exactly, but I think the comparison between those two cases is instructive because the wins for Trump and the court were monumental, even if he lost on particular policies in narrow ways.

So in the tariffs case, for example, they said, "You don't have the authority to use those statutes to impose tariffs." What did he do? He came back and tried to impose tariffs under another statute. In the Cook case, they told him, maybe you can't fire this one particular person for now in the way you did, but we're giving you plenary unfettered authority to decide whether you wanna fire everybody else."

And it also inures to the court's benefit because they get to decide who he can fire, and they've decided they just care more- 

bring it back to us, and we'll- we'll just weigh in from time to time. Yeah, 

Yeah, and like we care more about a functioning Fed than we do about any other functioning regulatory agency.

The case in Slaughter, which overrules a case called Humphrey's Executor, which is, why is it the funny, most comedic name, e- there's just something so funny about that name. 

there's a tra- there's a tragedy, right? that Humphrey passes away while the case is pending, and his executor continues it.

I learned it from an early dra- from you. From, from- Okay ... something that you wrote. You've been spending a lot of time thinking about the sort of independent agencies and civil service. These e- entities that we want that are in the executive that they're placed there for a reason, right? 'Cause we, there has to be some democratic accountability.

You want, th- they're not just some free-floating, they draw their power from Congress and the executive. But you also just don't want it to be the case that it's just, whims of one man. how big a deal, the court upholds this form of government structure in Humphrey's Executor Can you maybe give us a quick what was Humphrey's Executor- Yeah

why it was important, and why it matters that it was completely overturned 90 years later? 

Sure. So it's a 1935 decision involving another president who is frankly unhappy being saddled with- Yes. ... regulators not of his choosing, right? So Trump is not the first president to bristle against having independent regulators who aren't folks he chose.

So Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president in 1935 when Humphrey's Executor comes down, actually, when he's first elected, he takes office and, starts trying to respond to the Great Depression and rebuild the economy via the New Deal. And one of the things he wants to do is to get control of independent agencies, some of whom are staffed by people who don't actually share his vision.

So Humphrey is this stodgy Hoover holdover who's on the Federal Trade Commission, which was actually a really important regulatory body, and FDR wants him gone. So he first asks him to resign politely, and then asks him again less politely, and then finally fires him outright. And Humphrey, first individually and then via his estate when he passes away, challenges this firing as unlawful because there's a statute that says you have to have some cause before firing a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission and other similar independent bodies.

And the Supreme Court unanimously rules against FDR and upholds the statute, and just basically says, or at least what it's come to be understood as saying, is there are sometimes good reasons to design agencies and to give their heads a degree of insulation from the president and the political process.

Independent expertise, merit, sort of insulation from the kind of political whims of one person, those are all important values that Congress can express through the creation of these agencies and the insulation of their heads. so that's like kind of the ethos of- that's Humphrey's Executor, but also the ethos of the era.

Two notes. One is that Humphrey dies between getting fired and the case going to the court, so it's his estate, basically. That's why it's Humphrey's Executor, which is by the way, what a pain in the ass for the executor of that estate. it's enough of a pain in the ass to be executor of an estate, and generally now you gotta go do a SCOTUS case?

My God. Anyway, but also the point also I feel like it's just worth stressing here is like King George didn't create the FTC. Jesus Christ and Moses didn't create it. Congress passed a law, the president signed it, and it was- Yeah ... it's like it doesn't come out of nowhere. Yeah. The democratic process produces the legislative body and the executive that make the law that create the body.

They can also pass a new law that says, "We're gonna change the way people are appointed"- Correct ... or getting rid of the FTC. So like this is such an obvious point, but I feel like it just gets lost in these conversations that like- These things were made by democratic institutions of governance.

and the reason that I think is so important is because a key through line of both the Roberts opinion in Slaughter, which overrules Humphrey's Executor, and fully, bear hugs the unitary executive in a way that I don't think the court ever fully has in quite the way it did in Slaughter.

The president is the sole repository of democratic will. The people select him. He has to have control over every subordinate in the executive branch who executes the law, but the Fed, not the Fed. But that I think is so willfully blind to the democratic kind of provenance of these agencies. they are the product of democracy too, and it's this very blinkered conception of a presidentialist democracy that I think- Yes

is at play in Slaughter. but, I do think in terms of how big a deal it is, just to wrap this up, I think it's a huge deal in way more ways than just the kind of now end of independent agencies as we have known them for, over a century. I do think that the general ethos of there are independent actors inside the federal government, both the heads of agencies, but also, civil servants who don't just have allegiance to the president, but have allegiance to statutes passed by Congress, and are bound by ethical norms to follow the Constitution and the statutes and, regulations and other kind of conventions and practices.

and all of those things I think are in real tension with the vision of kind of power and authority that- Yeah ... gets expressed through the Slaughter opinion. So I think it's much more than just these agencies that this opinion upends.

Now, Section C, ORIGINS, HOW WE GOT THIS COURT

When we talk about this era, when we talk about the Reconstruction period, we talk a lot about, the Supreme Court's role in then what comes after Reconstruction, which is Jim Crow full on.

And we talk a lot about how, to what degree- Did the Supreme Court play a role in green-lighting that, in ushering in Jim Crow, in creating the conditions at least in which, the South could in earnest create this kind of system? So I just wonder, what you think about the degree to which the Supreme Court, how big was the role the Supreme Court played in that?

I think the Supreme Court's role was pretty big in some ways, in that it, it is playing this legitimating function. It is relieving tension that might otherwise lead to progress in the direction of racial equality. But I think it's also important to understand that, the Supreme Court here is pretty much doing what it's supposed to do, I think.

you've got Supreme Court justices who are basically representing the political coalition that appointed them. You got a whole lot of Republicans on the court at this point, but the Republican will to support Reconstruction has gone, and they're not doing it. And a lot of these decisions are pretty lopsided.

So Slaughter-House, that's five to four. But Dred Scott is 7-2, the civil rights cases is 8-1, Plessy's 8-1. And what the court is doing here is really representing elite consensus. It's representing what the national powerful people want. And, as long as the Supreme Court is doing that, that's what it's supposed to do in our constitutional scheme, I think.

I get really upset about the current Supreme Court because I think it's out of step with the national majority. Yeah. A lot of what's going on in Reconstruction is just that's what America wanted, like the people in power- ... at least. We wanted to give up on racial equality. We wanted reconciliation.

The Supreme Court is helping that along. now I think it's really bad what the Supreme Court is doing. It's going against the majority of Americans because the appointments process has given us a court that's way out of line with national popular sentiment as reflected in presidential elections.

Like the Reconstruction Court, the Plessy v. Ferguson Court, for instance, is exactly where it should have been if each president gets to appoint two justices- ... per four-year term- ... which is what I think the system should be, right? Now we're way off of that, and that, I think, is why our current Supreme Court looks political and extreme.

But, in Reconstruction, they're doing what the powerful people want. 

Which is what the court does. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who's the author of Giles v. Harris, says, "I am a supple tool of power." That's what judges are. 

Oof. 

I don't wanna say something really inappropriate.

No. I, look, you shouldn't be saying "supple" in The Reporter. Yeah. I'll just say that. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes also thought that the Southern white man was genetically inferior. 

Hits and misses with Oliver. 

So he had some good ideas. He, he- Oliver Wendell Holmes 

fought in the Civil War. Yes. And, got shot twice, and I think that's- Yeah

in the background of his opinion- ... in Giles v. Harris, 'cause he knows what it takes to make the South do what you want, and he's like, "When I was on the battlefield, maybe I had a shot at that. Now I'm in the Supreme Court just writing an opinion. I can't do it. I need the US Army." Yeah. 

Yeah. I do, I think there's something to that. you could argue, I think, that they could've at least been the better angels on the shoulders of the elite and been like, "You know what you're doing here is abandoning this pro-" 

That's exactly the point about the tension release, right?

Yeah. 'Cause if the Supreme Court says this is unconstitutional, if the Supreme Court upholds the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which wasn't being enforced very much, but if they're like, "Yes, Congress can do that," then there's still conflict, and the conflict can move- ... in a good direction. But instead, the Supreme Court is saying, "This is fine."

"

This is the way things should be." 

And the way that the Supreme Court acts, there is no one speaking up for the real material validity of the Reconstruction Amendments, or at least all of the Reconstruction Amendments, right? You have a sort of political system that basically subjugates them to various other principles, largely non-constitutional principles.

In Plessy, equality, which is, explicitly called out in the 14th Amendment, equality under the law becomes subjugated to, some sort of vague idea of reasonableness or something like that. You have this sort of almost century-long period where no political institution is taking the Reconstruction Amendments particularly seriously.

You can't talk about this time period and not think about what could have been, if the political will had maintained, if there hadn't been a violent overthrow of the, the Reconstruction governments in the South. And I do think, w- if we're thinking about America 250, that's something that should be on your mind, listener, about different points of history, how things could have gone differently.

But I do think that relates a little bit to, Kermit, your book, The Nation That Never Was. Maybe you can talk a little bit about your thesis there. I think you more focus on the national mythos and how we view American identity, but I think that it relates very well to what we're talking about here. 

Yeah. So I have two ideas there. The first, which is the basic idea of the book, is we really underplay Reconstruction and we overplay the Founding as the source of our American values. So the idea of equality that's there at the Founding, I think this is true about the Declaration, maybe people disagree.

It's very clear about the Constitution that's written in 1787, and really no one disagrees about this. There is no idea of equality as a national value that we are committed to as a nation, no matter what the states want. There's no idea of democracy as a national value- ... that we are committed to, no matter what the states want.

All of that comes about through Reconstruction. It comes about basically because Black people fight in the Civil War, and that gives them a path to citizenship, and once they're citizens, their rights have to be protected. That's why we need the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. And this really changes both The constitutional structure and our sort of self-understanding, because it's Reconstruction that makes us into a nation rather than a union, and a nation that has certain values that the states have to follow no matter what they want.

Now then, we lose Reconstruction. We have this thing called Redemption, where the White supremacists take back power. We have Jim Crow and segregation, and how could things have been different? I think it's a really interesting question. one answer is, the American people should've had more fortitude in the 1870s and stuck with it.

Another answer might be the Supreme Court should've stood up more for the principles of Reconstruction. But honestly, I think the realistic thing is we should have treated the Confederates differently after the Civil War. Yeah. Because we had a really divisive war before, and one-third of the American population maybe was on the wrong side, and that was the Revolution.

But the Loyalists didn't cause us a problem afterwards because we drove a lot of them from the country, and we took their property, and we distributed it to loyal people, and we kinda wrote them out of the American story. So no one said, "Hey, Loyalists, your perspective is valid. You fought for what you believed in.

We're gonna take you back. You can be one of us again." But we did that with the Confederates, right? We did exactly that, and they were one-fifth of the white population. They were a smaller percentage than the Loyalists at the Revolution. But instead, we were like, "Welcome back. You're not traitors. You fought for what you believed in."

"You did what you thought was right, and maybe you are the real Americans." And, part of my thesis is they are the real Americans- ... because they're standing in the shoes of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. They're declaring their independence, right? They're fighting the national government, just like the Patriots did.

But in Reconstruction, we made a choice against that vision of America, and that's what we need to see, that the Confederacy really was illegitimate- ... that this is something we've turned our back on. Yeah. Accepting all of them back, giving them political power again, allowing for this sort of pride in history as a legitimate thing, that I think has really harmed our ability to fulfill these values of equality.

I think that's right. You're speaking, you're, you're singing my song here 

And you've convinced me people in the South shouldn't vote at all. Forget the voting rights act. it's, this is... You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, folks. 

No, but we are, we are living in a, an era where, it's been 130, 150 years, and one of the political parties essentially represents the ideals of the Confederacy in a- in a very real sense. Oh, yeah. They, 

they absolutely do. They absolutely do. 

one of the things that I observed back in the Clinton administration when I was a career appointee, stayed for a bit to advise John Ashcroft, Don- the first attorney general for George W. Bush, before leaving to go to the courts and then ultimately go to work for Senator Leahy, who was a Democrat elected from Vermont.

What I observed was that the right-wing movement in the country was treating the courts like players on a chessboard. 

Reagan, I used to call it Reagan, Bush. There was this effort to have litmus tests about abortion in particular and other issues as a test for whether someone would get a nomination to the Supreme Court or other courts.

It wasn't a very sort of effective test. In essence, they got some people on the courts who were anti-abortion but were not part of the broader sort of right-wing infrastructure agenda. But after Reagan, Bush, when Clinton came in, he said, "No, we're, that was wrong to have these litmus tests.

We're not gonna have them." And then he eventually started facing a Republican-controlled Senate, which was blocking anyone who had any progressive credentials basically for the bench. They blocked a judge on the Ninth Circuit named Richard Paez for, I think, 1,532 days. He had dared to work for legal services as a young man, and they did not want him on the Ninth Circuit.

So Clinton ended up appointing a bunch of federal prosecutors and big firm partners, didn't go and appoint a counterweight to 12 years of Reagan, Bush. And I think the notion was judges should be fair. We shouldn't be appointing extremists. We should be appointing moderate people who are going to be fair, and that was their view of the federal prosecution of the big firm partners.

personally, I think that was not the right call, although I was- ... involved in the vetting in that process. I think that we needed to have a counterweight to what was happening. But there has been this discomfort in terms of the right wing really actively pursuing this ca- effort to capture the court and put- people who are super young and devoted to this extreme agenda on the court. And you've had, for most of this, 40 years, Democrats appointing people who are much later in their career, who've been, big firm partners, who've defended a bunch of corporations or been prosecutors, not public defenders or not public- interest group leaders and the like. And the t- two parties have been playing an en- two entirely different games, basically. And the effect is that the right wing has captured the courts, and they did so- ... in order, as you said at the outset, to accomplish things that they could not accomplish with the vote, that they did not have the votes to do, like overturn abortion- or, block voting rights and the like. And so you have Only in recent years, for example, the Biden appointees, do you have this broadening of the perspective of people being put on the bench, that you need to have a broader perspective. Even within that perspective, the objective has not been to put ringers on the bench- but to put people who they think will be fair. And I can tell you, looking at these Trump appointees, they are not appointed to be fair. That's right. They are appointed to advance his agenda, and they right now, in this second term, will not and cannot even admit that Joe Biden actually won the presidency.

They will only admit that he was certified the president in 20, 2021- ... because they're so devoted to this MAGA agenda. And so to the question of the, criticizing the institution, I believe in having a fair Supreme Court. I think we had a fair Supreme Court under Earl Warren, who was trying his best to interpret the law as it was written, equal protection of the law, right to counsel, no establishment of religion.

But that was attacked by this right-wing movement, similarly to this attack on government, on the New Deal, on having these agencies. And so we're in a situation in which there was very significant reluctance to criticize the court as an institution. That's in part because there's so much investment in litigation- to try to protect us, and the lower courts are, for the most part, with the exception of some Trump judges, holding the line in following precedent. Yeah. So people don't wanna criticize sort of what they perceive as the only check left, the court. But the reality is that this court, the Roberts Court, is out of control.

It's not acting like a court. It's acting like a partisan weapon of Donald Trump, with few exceptions where the business community dissents, like with tariffs, and the plain language of the Constitution makes clear. And so I feel like there's a moral imperative to speak clearly about the court, that it's not an institution that we can defend in the way that it's acting because it's acting in a way that is deeply destructive of our rights.

And although I have been alone or, one of the few voices in the wind early on in making this criticism, more and more people are coming on board to recognize that the s- the Roberts Court is on a path of destruction and unless and until we reform it and limit its ability to damage our rights, it is going to continue to dismantle our rights.

Mm-hmm. All right, Lisa, we also get this question all the time. What can be done? What is there to do about a Chief Justice John Roberts, about a Supreme Court that is acting this way? 

I didn't mean to tee up that question. I didn't know you were gonna ask it at the end. But I'm delighted to answer it because there's a lot of reasons to be hopeful despite what's happening, despite this destructive ruling in Callais and the related rulings around Tennessee and Virginia and the like.

What's happening is more and more people understand that this court has to be reformed, and it's not just ethics reform, although that's necessary. 

If we are gonna pass a John Lewis, a voting rights amendment or restoration act, we need to limit the ability of this court to destroy it because John Roberts has shown quite clearly that they will reinterpret the law like blue is pink or whatever, just- 

in order to advance this agenda. We've seen this time and time again, and the Constitution specifically in Article 3 says that Congress can set limits on the jurisdiction of the court, and I think we have to consider that. As my colleague, Alex Aronson, over at Court Accountability, he said, like if you think about the Star Wars analogy, you can't reform the Death Star.

Like- you have to actually address what the Death Star is doing. Mm-hmm. You can't just send in your emissaries and be like, "Please, Death Star, have an ethics code," Yeah. 

Yeah. 

But we do need an ethics code, right? We do need to have a enforced ethics code. We do need to have term limits, and I think we need term limits up and down the judiciary so that people aren't gaming these circuits, so that Republicans replace Republicans, and they, once they've gained control of a majority of a circuit, they hold it forever and ever.

Yes. 

people should not be able to pull that trigger to advantage their party. We should have those rules in place. But we also need substantive changes. We need rules that apply to disclosures of where the spouses and the kids of the justices are working. 

Who's paying their salary, whether there are any conflicts there, but we substantially need changes in addressing the jurisdiction of the court, particularly on voting rights and other issues where, like climate change.

This court- ... has sought to put its hand on the scale of justice to block our ability as a nation to mitigate climate change. 

It knows in a real politics way that with the filibuster in the Senate, that the Republicans who are fossil fuel funded will stop any really meaningful climate change legislation from going forward, despite what we saw with Biden's effort to get investments in renewables.

Then we saw Trump claw those back to basically stop those renewable investments. The only way we can really move forward on climate change, for example, is by having agencies- That can use the laws on the books in order to try to mitigate the climate changes that are underway. And that's the very thing this court has claimed the agencies cannot do.

That only Congress can do. And it, and that means the Senate, which is now more and more anti-majoritarian, where we know Wyoming has as much say as California despite having- ... so many fewer voters. So the Senate is a problem for having progressive reform in almost every way. And so the Senate has to be reformed, too.

So- 

... 

what can people do? Support the reforms. Call for the reforms. The, the other side is counting on us thinking it's hopeless, thinking that we can't change it, that we're just stuck, but we're not stuck. And certainly the right wing doesn't ever think that it's stuck. It has such a bold and regressive agenda for us.

If we do not counter it, they are gonna prevail- ... and turn America into a further dystopian situation for most of the people living here, including for our liberties. And so I think we have no choice but to embrace reform and to say, "If you want voting rights restored, you need to reform the court.

If you want abortion- ... access to be protected at the federal level, you have to reform the court. If you want to do something about climate change for real, you need to reform the court with that." And call your members of Congress, call your senators, demand that they support meaningful, real, bold, robust court reform along with the robust changes we need to help our economy thrive, to protect our families, and protect our liberties from not just a president who's out of control, but from a court that has acted like the king maker- and is furthering this decimation of our, American society in the 21st century and try to drag us back to that robber baron era that was so hard for the vast majority of Americans. 

And Finally, Section D, REFORM, WHAT DO WE DO

Public trust in the court right now is at an all-time low. One of the most recent polls, conducted by NBC in the beginning of twenty twenty-six has shown that only twenty-two percent of voters have strong trust, strong confidence in the court. And the court's, ability to issue decisions, to enforce decisions rests on public trust.

So we can't have a court functioning when so many people are skeptical. court reform can help fix this, help reinvigorate this incredible institution with the trust that it needs in order to function properly. 

whatever one thinks the court ought to be doing, you need it to have trust from the public to do it- Yeah

because it has no army, it has no in-i-in-intrinsic ability to enforce its writ. Yeah. It really depends on the rest of us and on the political branches to take seriously what it says. So one of the, one of the first things, and i-is something we've been working on and we've all talked about, which is term limits for justices.

and it is striking how wide a consensus there is in the country for term limits. Yeah. It's, the... Not to

just end with- There was a recent Fox News poll- Fox News ... showing seventy-eight percent of Americans support 18-year term limits for justices. 

And so that's obviously a lot of Republicans and independents as well as Democrats. How would term limits work, generally, and how would they work as a statute as opposed to a constitutional amendment?

That's, of course, one of the big questions. 

Sure. So I'll start, and then please feel free to- yeah, yeah ... jump in. so the idea would be that every justice would sit on the court fulfilling the role that current justices fill for 18 years. After 18 years, justices would assume senior status, and they would still be making their same salary, they would still be considered Article III judges, but their role would be different.

And for the non-lawyers or the non-judges watching, senior status is a thing. 

Yes. 

It's been upheld by the courts. A lot of judges become senior status. They still do work, but they, but, and they're paid, but it's not the same as their earlier role on the court, and that would be the way to do it.

And we believe, we have argued, that you can do this not only, of course, by constitutional amendment, but by statute. this is something you've thought about and maybe I- Yeah ... as I understand it, your views have evolved over time, or what is it? Yeah, 

I mean, when I- 

Do you think it's doable?

So when I sat, on the Biden Supreme Court Commission, the, the whole way that was structured was just to investigate a set of questions around Supreme Court reform, including ethics and term limits, and it wasn't-- I didn't come in with a particular view on term limits.

I didn't have a lot of expertise on it. It really was hearing from experts, ordinary people. hundreds of people submitted, comments, maybe thousands, submitted comments. and so my views really evolved on term limits in that I didn't really have any. And one of the things I think to really emphasize that's, that, Miriam, you started with trust, and I think, term limits are a good idea.

Even if we like what the Court is doing and even if we trust what the Court is doing, they're just... They make sense from the perspective of any kind of constitutional system. my students, who helped with some of the research, they're credited in it, they researched globally and then in the States.

no system, virtually no system, has, they either have a retirement age or they have term limits. And 18 years would be if you're concerned about courts being too politically accountable or in the sense of, or too much like politicians. I don't think you have to be concerned with that with an 18-year term limit 'cause it's still quite long in comparative- Yeah

context, right? 

I think it was- Yeah ... the median length of a justice's tenure for the first 200 years- 

Yeah ... of the court. So it's, that was the other argument that really... so one is about the, is, trust and legitimacy in this moment, but also just good, a good, system for thinking about how the highest court of the land should operate, something that's had wide bipartisan consensus.

in terms of scholars, it wasn't progressives who first, recommended term limits. I mean- Oops ... there were a lot of conservatives who thought it... Yeah. 

Steven Calabresi, the- 

Steven Calabresi ... the, 

one of the co-founders of the Federalist Society. 

yeah. So it just, it seems like one of those things that's a, a good idea.

The 18 years also has the potential... We've seen these horrible conflicts around judicial confirmations, and I think you should probably talk about the other piece of this is which how you get confirmations to, move forward. But, the, one of the ideas behind 18 years is that you would have more regular appointments by presidents.

So you wouldn't have these, justices sitting, waiting for to retire based on who's going to appoint their successor, or appointing super young justices. Youth is a great thing, but you also- ... want wisdom and experience, and, 

The older I get, the more I- 

Yeah ... 

agree with that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then at the same time, I think, all of us who have served in public life for a long time or have done a particular role also have to think about making way for younger generations. That's a kind of legitimacy too. So all of these things I think come together, the regularity of appointments, issues around trust, what it means to have a Supreme Court that is well-balanced with the other institutions, the executive branch and congressional branch.

All of those speak to it's a good idea not to have nine people on for so long with so much power. 

Miriam, you, the, the proposal in the Six Solutions paper, it would have a regular appointment. Every two years, a president would get to make an appointment. How would that work, and how would that- We hope, at least expect, drain some of the toxicity out of the confirmation process.

I think that, so much of the composition of the court is left to luck, in addition to an incentive to have, strategic retirements when there's a president in power that a certain party or a certain justice might want to be the one nominating the next justice. When there's a knowledge that every two years the president can nominate a justice, there's less fear of bad motive, there's less fear that a death or luck will change a court's composition for up to 30 or 40 years.

And so the temperature for each appointment is lowered because there'll be another confirmation in two years, another one in four years, another one in six years. I think that a message that really resonates with Americans is that no one person should have power for so long, and that's why Washington implemented two terms for president.

Why should a Supreme Court justice not be, following that same ethos? 

I've spoken to you about this before that you are most passionate about, and this is court packing, or adding justices to the court What is your court packing plan, Elie Mystal? 

Ultimately, to change the decisions on the Supreme Court, you need to change the people who are making the decisions.

The easiest way to do that is by expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court. Again, I start with the Constitution, and I just want people to notice that every single one of these reforms I have started, I have grounded them in what the Constitution says or doesn't say. And you know another thing that it doesn't say?

Doesn't say how many justices are on the Supreme Court. We started with six justices on the Supreme Court, we expanded it over time to 10, we came back down to nine. Nine is where we've been for a bit, but that is not written down anywhere. You can change the number of justices on the Supreme Court through simple legislation.

Don't need a constitutional amendment, don't need a super 

majority- Congress just passes, just Congress writes a law, says, "This is how many justices are now in the court." 

218 votes in Congress, 51 votes in the Senate, unless we do the filibuster, which is also not written down, but whatever. a majority of the Senate, however defined, and signed by the president, and then you can have as many justices as you want.

I want- How 

many justices is the right number of justices? 

I want 29. 

Why 29? Now, 

why 29? let's start here. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has 29 judges, and works just fine. 29 is not too big of a number. We'll find enough chairs. 20... If 29 is enough for California, 29 is enough for the entire, country.

So that's 

number one. But why does that make anything better that there are 29 of them? 

So the biggest benefit that I get with 29 is what I call the law of large numbers, right? Laws are complicated. The issues that the Supreme Court decides are complicated. We see even with six Republicans on the current court, they can't always keep themselves in line, right?

the idiosyncrasies between Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, right? The idiosyncrasies between how many beers Brett Kavanaugh had before he heard the case. these things- Okay, 

there's no proof that Brett Kavanaugh, I have to say, The Guardian has not reported anything- ... that says Brett Kavanaugh has too many beers before hearing the case.

that is factually true. the intri- the, the idiosyncrasies between these people mean that they can't always keep themselves in line, right? And so when we think about having 29 justices, when we think about a majority needing to be 15 people, do you know how hard it is to get 15 lawyers to agree on anything?

That's difficult. How many 15, 14 decisions do you think we'd really have on a 29-person court? 

And so it becomes a moderating force, 

is that the point? And so it becomes this amazing moderating force. The things that 15 people are gonna agree on are gonna be much, much more Center mass. much more moderate, much less extremist, right?

And that, I think, most people want. We want the big arguments to be handled in Congress through our elected representatives. we want the Supreme Court to do the easy things, and the more people you have, the harder it is to get a majority for extremism. And then there's this other issue, more of a technical issue, but super important.

Once the Court gets big enough that all of the justices can't sit on the same case, every lower court in the country runs their, uh, hearings by the panel system, which means three judges are chosen at random to hear a case and issue a ruling, and that ruling is the ruling of the court unless a majority of the Court vote to sit, what's called in the jargon, en banc- to overrule that three-judge panel. And while that's a lot of jargon, the upshot of it is that I want people to take away from this, it would mean that you wouldn't know who was gonna judge your case before you filed it. 

They're chosen at random. 

They're chosen at random, and that means that even in your legal argumentation, it has to be more moderate.

It has to be more mainstream 'cause you don't know who's gonna hear it. You don't know if it's gonna be a panel two to one of Republicans or two to one of Democrats. Again, this is not... None of this is theoretical. Look what happened in the actual abortion case. Look what happened in actual, uh, Dobbs v.

Jackson Women's Health, right? Mississippi came to court at first when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was alive and did not argue to overturn Roe, just argued to have its 15-week abortion ban upheld, right? And then Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies and gets replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, and Mississippi immediately changes its argument to overturning Roe v.

Wade outright. 

It went from a moderated argument from its perspective to a more extreme argument because it knew the court that it had. 

That is bad. You shouldn't get to pick your judges, right? And so you can imagine in this 29-person court with, be- hearing cases in three-judge panels, that you have this uncertainty of who you're gonna see, and thus you are encouraged to make more moderate, more mainstream, more center mass arguments without knowing who's gonna hear them.

You have had, multiple opportunities in the course of this conversation to talk about your lack of faith in the political will of the Democratic Party. 

what, so th- this is the reform that you're like, "This is the one that actually would work." How, what does the political fight for that look like? d- is that a realistic political fight?

what do you mean by realistic, Kai? When I s- When I started... I like to put it like this. When I started talking about court reform in 2015, I could not get a poll, I could not get a poll to see how that issue was polling. They wouldn't ask the question. that was the level of whatever. Now, it's polling at 42%.

The problem with moving the Democrats on this, and they're, again, they're scared of their own shadow, they're weak, and they're unwilling to swing big. But the real wall, I always say, comes from the voters, right? If you look at the Republican Party, they have trained their people to care about the court, not over the past five, six, seven years, but over the last 30, 40, 50 years.

Yeah. So the Republicans will lose primaries for being weak on the court. If you can tag a Republican senator especially as somebody who's weak on the court, as somebody who is not gonna, confirm, anti-abortion, justices, that person loses a primary. I can go all the way back to 2016. Donald Trump running for office, coming down the escalator, "He's a crazy man.

Mexicans are rapists. I hate these people. I, and here is my Supreme Court list as provided by Leonard Leo. It is to-" That's right. "And then I'm back to the crazy man." 

That's right. 

It was the one thing in 2016 that Trump was like, "Nope, not messing around with that," because he would lose. Yeah. Because Republicans would make him lose on the Supreme Court.

That has never happened to a Democrat. 

Why do you think Democrats don't take up court reform in the way that Republicans made, the Supreme Court so important to their politics and their primaries? 

Current establishment old Democrats grew up during a very brief time in our history where the Supreme Court was the progressive force in American politics.

They grew up during the Warren Court. They grew up during, that era between 1954 Brown v. Board of Ed, and, I would say which ended with the, elevation of Justice Rehnquist, to chief justice, right? They grew up in a very small period of time where the court was out there taking punches, taking one for the team, doing the things that were maybe too hard to do politically.

And they want to go back to that time, right? Remember, one of the real Benefits of the Supreme Court, depending on which party controls it, is that the Supreme Court can do politically unpopular things because they don't have to stand for election. So Democrats love the Supreme Court in the '60s and '70s when they are forcing racial equality down the throats of white people who do not want it.

And Republicans love the Supreme Court right now when they are forcing guns and death down the throats of people who do not want it, right? These are... The Supreme Court can take some heat, can take some weight that the political branches can't, and so there is a desire, I think, even from the political branch out of power, to prop up this institution that is the Supreme Court so it can one day take the shots again- Yeah

that they don't have the political will to muster. yeah. And I think that explains a Barack Obama, a Chuck Schumer, people who are super smart and totally understand everything that I'm talking about but don't seem to have the will, to champion reform. 

I saw yesterday that President Trump confirmed his 50th Article III judge of his term, this one to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

This is a lifetime appointment, and the guy is 39 years old. 39 years old, and seems to be one of the worst chuds imaginable. Anti-birthright citizenship, anti-abortion, anti-trans rights, has a conception of the Constitution that essentially grants no rights to anyone but the right of wealthy men, and wealthy white men in particular, to do as they please, however they please.

Perfect embodiment of Trump and everything he stands for. And did I mention this guy was 39? 39 years old. He'll be on the bench for decades. And there's obviously a lot more where that comes from. He's confirmed 50 people. One response to this is to say, you just have to impeach them all." But impeachment, you have to remember, is a two-step process.

You impeach in the House, and then you remove in the Senate, which is the sentence. It takes a simple majority in the House to impeach, and it takes a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove. And sure, you can impeach these people, sure, and that, that's meaningful, right? It's a sanction. It's saying, "This person is unacceptable.

This particular guy was unqualified, just a, a toady, a stooge for the president, no reason he should be there." But you're not gonna remove them. That's basically implausible. You're not gonna get enough Republican votes to do a removal, and the odds of winning 67 seats in the Senate, I mean That hasn't happened since the 1930s, if I have my political history correct.

So what do you do? What do you do about all these Trump judges? Here you should take a page from the conversation around the Supreme Court. Now, the case for expanding the Supreme Court in political terms is just that the Trump judges, the Republican justices, are engaged in lawless, essentially anti-constitutional behavior, overturning precedents

With embarrassingly thin reasoning, making up doctrines to get the results that they want. And because removing them is not really feasible, the next best option is just to put more of them on there. Drown them out, essentially. Dilute their influence. And you can take a similar approach with the entire federal judiciary.

A thing to remember is that the only thing the Constitution says about the federal judiciary is that there shall be a Supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress creates. Basically everything about the federal judiciary is structured by congressional statute. The number of district courts, the number of circuit courts, the number of judgeships on circuit court.

Everything is structured by Congress. Even much of the Supreme Court is structured by Congress, right? Other than saying that there shall be a Supreme Court and giving some, thin description of what its jurisdiction is, the Constitution doesn't have all that much to say. It used to be that Congress would routinely expand the size of the entire judiciary to keep pace with the population In the same way that it used to be Congress would expand the Supreme Court to keep pace with the number of circuits, number of states, the population.

The last major court expansion was in nineteen seventy-nine under Jimmy Carter. I believe the judiciary was expanded by more than a third. Hundreds of new judgeships created. Carter filled most, if not all of them, and many of those judges still sit on the bench. It's a huge part of Carter's overall legacy.

part of Carter's overall legacy Since that expansion, the population of the US has grown by a third. We got three hundred and forty million people, and we're still growing, and there hasn't been much in the way of change in the size of the courts. In fact, the US Judicial Commission, the body responsible for governing the courts and keeping an eye on things, is constantly writing about the fact that actually we need more judges.

Caseloads have grown too high. Individual judges have too much work. Cases move too slowly. So how do you deal with Trump judges in the federal judiciary? The same way you deal with them on the Supreme Court, you just drown them out. Any Supreme Court expansion plan should include a plan for the massive expansion of the federal judiciary.

Expand it by a third in keeping with the overall population. Create new circuits if necessary. Create new district courts. All of this is within the power of Congress. You can even take those districts and those circuits where Trump judges pre-predominate and split them up, break them up, reassign responsibilities.

Congress can't take away a judgeship, but there's nothing in the rule book that says you can't just assign the judge somewhere else. So many Republican plans for political dominance rest on the fact that the system has been static for decades. We have fifty states. We have a hundred senators. We have four hundred and thirty-five House members.

We have nine Supreme Court justices, so on and so forth. And the fact that things are static, that they haven't changed, means that if you can game the system, if you can lock in an advantage within that static system, then you win. It's hard to dislodge you. Sure, an exogenous shock might do it, but other than that, you're in good, you're in good shape The solution to this has to be to add dynamism back to the system, and the quickest and surest and constitutional path to adding dynamism is just to create more stuff, more judgeships, more states. Expand the federal judiciary, give at least DC statehood, and look for ways to add dynamism back to the system to make control of a static environment unviable. It's not a panacea, but I do think it's the first step in actually trying to come back from this miserable moment.

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

Legal AF and Lawyers for Good Government

Democracy Now!

The Brian Lehrer Show

Amicus

Stict Scrutiny

Takesâ„¢ by Jamelle Bouie

Why Is This Happening?

5-4

The Brennan Center for Justice

and Stateside

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

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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.

Air Date: 7-25-2026

Today we look at the idea that America has become a gerontocracy, a country run by the old, and then interrogate the premise a bit. The wealth, the politicians, and the voting electorate really do concentrate at the top of the age ladder, and benefits for the old tend to stay protected while younger people wait their turn. But several of our sources argue age is the wrong name for the problem, that it is really a story about money and who the whole system was built to serve.

Full Show Notes

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

Today we look at the idea that America has become a gerontocracy, a country run by the old, and then interrogate the premise a bit. The wealth, the politicians, and the voting electorate really do concentrate at the top of the age ladder, and benefits for the old tend to stay protected while younger people wait their turn. But several of our sources argue age is the wrong name for the problem, that it is really a story about money and who the whole system was built to serve.

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

Takesâ„¢ by Jamelle Bouie

The NPR Politics Podcast

Today, Explained

Civics 101

What Next

and This Is Hell!

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 3 sections;

Section A, THE MCCONNELL & GRAHAM MOMENT

Section B, THE GERONTOCRACY CASE

And Section C, HOW CONGRESS ACTUALLY WORKS

And now, on to the show.

HOST: If Lindsey Graham were nothing other than a warmonger, someone eager to spill foreign blood on behalf of American interests, someone who never saw a war he did not like, who was an eager cheerleader of the war in Iraq- 

CLIP: So knowing what you know right now, Senator Graham, and knowing what Senator McCain knows right now- Right

even though there were no WMD, even though there were no links between Saddam- Absolutely ... and Al-Qaeda or 9/11- Yeah ... you still think it was a good idea to go to war? 

Absolutely. I am glad that the Saddam Hussein regime is over. I'm glad that a democracy's beginning to emerge in the heart of the Arab world.

HOST: A long time cheerleader for war in Iran, and subsequently a massive supporter of the current war in Iran. 

CLIP: Now, President Trump, thank God he was there. He's the right guy at the right time. And when he heard they were that close to 10 weapons, he acted. And you know what? When this is over, we're gonna obliterate their nuclear program and there's gonna be a new dawn in the Mideast.

President Trump, you did the right thing. God bless you. And Steve and Jared, you literally saved the world from terrorism. 

HOST: If that was Lindsey Graham's entire legacy, and you can maybe throw in his shameful performance at the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018- 

CLIP: I would never do to them what you've done to this guy.

This is the most unethical sham since I've been in politics, and if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn't have done what you've done to this guy. Are you a gang rapist? 

No ... 

HOST: if that was it, if that was all Lindsey Graham had done, he would still be an ignominious figure, someone who we would say, "Good riddance.

Glad he's no longer in the Senate. Sorry for his family, But as a public figure, no one who you're necessarily sorry to see go, leave the stage. But that's not all Lindsey Graham was, as we know. Lindsey Graham was one of the Republicans early on who understood what Trump was. Graham ran in the 2016 Republican primary, dropped out pretty early, but saw then that Trump was trouble.

But Graham, who never had much of an independent streak, who was always looking for someone to latch himself onto like the natural born follower he was- Graham ignored his own misgivings, ignored his own statements, and became a loyal supporter of Trump through that first term. He even assisted Trump in the president's effort to undermine and overturn the Georgia presidential election in his failed attempt to make himself president against and above the will of the voters.

Graham participated in that. Loyal soldier, a toady you might say. But then came January 6th, and soon thereafter, Graham announced that he was done with it all, that he had followed Trump, and this was a bridge too far. 

CLIP: Trump and I we've had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it.

From my point of view, he's been a consequential president. But today, first thing you'll see. All I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough. 

HOST: Of course, it wasn't a bridge too far. Not long after that, Graham was once again firmly behind Donald Trump. And as Trump made his political comeback, Graham was right there, loyal follower, eager to suck up to daddy.

Last month, Graham yet again won his bid in the South Carolina Senate primary, and in his victory speech, he thanked two people: God, and not far behind, in his words, Donald Trump. 

CLIP: I wanna start with a bunch of thank yous. I wanna thank the big guy, God. Trump comes later.

HOST: Mr. President, you're not far behind God, but we're gonna start with Him. And so with Lindsey Graham's passing on Sunday, 

how should we remember him? I'd say as a warmonger, and then also as someone who was an eager assistant, an eager aide, an eager supporter of Donald Trump's efforts to subvert and destroy American democracy, 

an eager supporter of, over the last 18, 19 months, Donald Trump's effort to replace American democracy with a personalist autocracy led by him and his array of courtiers and family members.

How should we remember Lindsey Graham? As someone who knew better, who told us he knew better, who understood what Trump was, and yet who, out of venal self-interest, out of some deep psychological need to attach himself to a powerful man, whatever it is, and yet, for whatever it is, and whatever reason, Lindsey Graham decided that he would join up with Trump as Trump waged war against our democracy, against our birthright as Americans.

The most fitting thing about all of this, of course, is that for all of his devotion to Trump, Trump couldn't give a shit. When asked about Graham's passing, all Trump had to say is, "It'd be harder to pass the SAVE Act now." 

CLIP: And he, calls me about the Save America Act. he thought we were gonna get it passed.

Do you remember 

the very- This is a big- Yeah. This is a big, this is a big blow to the Save America Act. 

HOST: No remarks about Graham's life, no comments about his support or companionship or friendship or whatever. Nothing human, just a cold calculation about the votes. Graham gave everything to Trump.

Graham sacrificed what reputation he had to Trump. Graham behaved in such a way so that when he is remembered, he's not remembered for his own right, not remembered for the things he did, which again, not that much, not very much that was good, but is remembered primarily as Trump's little assistant. 

And we are recording this at 12:37 PM Eastern Time on Friday, July 10th, 2026. Sam, I wanna start with Mitch McConnell, the Republican senator from Kentucky, longtime GOP leader, already planning to retire at the end of his term.

He's been in the hospital for about four weeks now, and the rumors and conspiracy theories just really got wild this week. What do you know about his situation? 

GUEST: Tam, we know really little about what's going on with Senator Mitch McConnell right now. We've had some statements occasionally from his office saying things along the lines of, "The senator continues to improve.

He's working closely with his staff. He's keeping tabs on what's happening in the Senate." But beyond that, we really don't know why he's in the hospital or how long he's expected to be there. There were a couple calls supposedly earlier this week between top Republicans in Congress with Senator McConnell, but we haven't seen video of him.

We haven't heard tape of him. And so that has sparked a lot of questions about what is going on with the senator. 

HOST: Yes, and e- even the governor of Kentucky has sent a letter asking for the senator's status. You've been reporting on both McConnell, but not just McConnell, this issue of members of Congress taking prolonged medical absences, uh, in some cases without much explanation.

GUEST: Right. That's why this McConnell episode has really stood out, because it comes just a couple of weeks after a Republican member of the House, Congressman Tom Kean of New Jersey, he'd been absent for almost four months with no explanation. He came back and in a speech on the House floor said that he had been hospitalized for depression.

But many people were still really critical, not of the fact that he was dealing with depression, but the fact that his office didn't say really anything about where he was for such a long period of time. And you can point to all kinds of examples where you've had people in high public office kind of obfuscating about their health, uh, from former Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, to questions that were raised both about President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump in terms of their acuity for office.

And so this all kind of plays into preexisting notions that a lot of voters have about whether lawmakers, presidents, justices are being fully transparent about their ability to do the job when it comes to their health. 

HOST: So Mara, how much transparency do lawmakers owe the public? 

GUEST 2: A heck of a lot more than they're giving them right now.

We know that a recent NPR PBS Marist poll showed that an overwhelming majority of voters wanted an age cap for members of Congress, and what's interesting about that is you've got two giant issues colliding. One is this idea of generational change. People really want younger representatives. We've got a real gerontocracy in Congress and in the White House.

But also, there's tremendous cynicism about politicians. And when there's no transparency, it's one thing if you're old, it's one thing if you're infirm, but if you're not gonna tell voters about it they get angry and cynical, and they were already cynical to start with. 

GUEST: Yeah, there's a former attending physician to Congress named Dr.

Robert Krasner who has told this story about two former Supreme Court justices who were under his care in this position, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, and he said that they asked him to tell them when it was time to step aside, when they could no longer do the job. And he says that when that time came, he did tell them that and helped them write their retirement letters, but- Wow

what his point is here is that that is not a system. It worked out because there was a doctor who was willing to be candid and a patient willing to receive the advice, but that is not going to happen in most of these cases, and that is a problem, and there's really no good way of dealing with this except for elections 

GUEST 2: Sam, I have a question.

There are some people who leave before they're infirm. Nancy Pelosi is an example. But why do you think that members of Congress hang on by their fingernails for so long? 

GUEST: Yeah. I was talking about this earlier this week with Adam Jentleson. He's a former Democratic Hill staffer who worked for Senator Harry Reid, for Senator John Fetterman, and he says that one of the problems is that lawmakers need to make these decisions while they still can, while they're still in their prime, well before they need to step aside and can no longer do the job, and they often do not do that.

And one of the reasons for that is because there are a, a lot of perks to being a member of Congress, not just the ones you would expect, but perks that are very particular to being helpful as you're getting older. Here's what he told me. 

GUEST 3: It mimics aspects of a senior living facility. You've got a attending physician right down the hallway, and lots of people just, catering to your every need.

It is hard to walk away from. 

GUEST: Yeah. You've got drivers. You've got catered lunches once a week. Jentleson told me you have interesting, tantalizing topics on intellectual issues, the kinds of events you might see in a senior center, except this case it is, a hearing or a confirmation, for an important issue that you're voting on in Congress.

HOST: I think it's also just really important to say that it is not mandatory that the President of the United States reveal everything that's in his physical that he gets. It's not mandatory for members of Congress to be honest with their constituents about their health. These are public figures, who are elected by the people who are there to represent all of us, and yet there's no legal obligation, and I think some of them would question whether there's a moral obligation.

GUEST 2: But maybe in this case, the, members of Congress need to look to the public, because the public is pretty clear about what obligation, members have. They want them to serve only until they are no longer able, and they want them to be transparent. 

HOST: And as we've seen with that Mitch McConnell situation, a lack of transparency can really give fuel to conspiracy theories.

GUEST: I talked to a political science professor at the University of Louisville, Adam Enders, who studies conspiracy theories, and one of the things he told me is that the reason so many of these have been sparked online around McConnell and around Kaine is because there's an element of truthiness to them, as Stephen Colbert used to say, that there's already this public perception that lawmakers are not maybe being fully transparent about their health, and it is not the worst thing in the world for constituents to be monitoring this and asking questions and having a level of skepticism about whether their elected officials are fit to serve.

And especially in a really narrowly divided Congress, that can matter when these votes are often decided on the flip of one or two members. 

GUEST 2: Yeah, and that's why sometimes you even see members being wheeled in a wheelchair or from a hospital room to cast a vote. 

HOST: Which is wild, but has definitely happened.

When did you first hear that something was wrong with the former Senate majority leader? 

GUEST: So his team actually put out a statement the day that he was hospitalized on June 14th. It was a very short statement, and all it said was, "Senator McConnell was admitted to the hospital this morning.

He is receiving excellent care." That short statement set off a firestorm of trying to figure out more because we learned so little from just that one sentence. 

HOST: Yeah. Why does this become a big mystery if they were transparent about it from the jump? 

GUEST: Because I think it's one thing to alert people that the senator's been hospitalized, but to go on for so long and not say why he was hospitalized initially or what is keeping him in the hospital just led us to continue to ask more questions, 'cause we were getting no answers.

HOST: And when you say so long, we're talking on the morning of Tuesday, July 14th. And I think we got proof of life on Sunday, July 12th. Was there almost no communication, or was there actually no communication between that near month? 

GUEST: So throughout that month, a couple things happened. First, there was EMS audio that came out that showed that emergency responders went to McConnell's home on June 14th, and were responding to somebody who was unconscious, who needed CPR, and who was under cardiac arrest.

CLIP: EMS to respond for cardiac arrest. EMS to respond for cardiac arrest. 

GUEST: And that really turned this story because it showed that this was a really serious situation, and that was much more severe than what the simple statements that we were getting from McConnell's team were. After that EMS audio, McConnell's team put out another statement, but again, it didn't really address the larger concerns or the questions about why he was hospitalized, why he continued to remain there.

It just said that, the senator was continuing to recover in the hospital. the mystery around all of this just continued to build. And then I spoke to one of McConnell's neighbors who witnessed the morning of McConnell being taken to the hospital on June 14th. This person witnessed emergency responders carrying somebody out of McConnell's home on a stretcher.

This person was wrapped in a blanket, and their feet were exposed, and somebody else remarked, "Oh, that's Mitch McConnell." They saw their face. And the person I spoke to also captured a short video of this moment. 

CLIP: Not riding with him. 

GUEST: If we had known the circumstances around McConnell's hospitalization earlier or in more fulsome detail, how he was transported to the hospital might not have been that big of a deal.

But because we were dealing with such little amounts of information, the fact that he was transported to a hospital on a stretcher was important for this story to fill... 'Cause we were just trying to fill in any blanks that we could and try and provide that transparency in a moment when we were getting very little from the senator and his team.

HOST: So while you at CNN are trying to figure out what exactly has happened to one of the most powerful political figures of our era, people online are also trying to figure out, and a lot of them believe him dead. 

CLIP: Mitch McConnell is dead. that's what all of us think. 

Is this a full-on Weekend at Bernie's situation 

with Mitch McConnell?

Everyone is lying to you about Mitch McConnell, and the reason they're doing so is because it's a soft launch for the eventual announcement that the commander-in-chief, the orange guy, will eventually also be gone. 

The cockroach just, vacated the skin suit, and they're like, "Oh my God, there's this skin suit left over."

HOST: How weird is it for a politician of this stature to kinda just ghost? 

GUEST: McConnell has a very busy day job. He is supposed to be in the Senate voting. he serves on the Appropriations Committee, which is in charge for funding the entire government, and he's specifically the chair of the Defense subcommittee.

Now, the Defense Department, kinda busy right now, in the middle- ... of a major war with Iran, needs more funding from Congress. 

HOST: How long do you expect this to take? And what's the legal 

CLIP: basis- Take what? Take what? The 

HOST: war. 

CLIP: I think it's going very fast. 

GUEST: And McConnell has a major role to play in all of that.

Republicans also have a very narrow majority in the Senate, and where every vote counts, and with such slim margins, not being able to count on McConnell's vote is a huge problem for Republicans as they try and navigate their very narrow and unruly majority. And even, some of McConnell's colleagues have said that transparency is always better.

For example, Republican senator John Cornyn from Texas told our team yesterday that, quote, "I think we need some transparency. I wish Senator McConnell and his team had done that earlier. I think it would have resolved a lot of questions." So that just shows you that even some Republicans are aware that the way that McConnell's team handled the situation didn't necessarily help things when senators know how much is at stake, how much that goes into their day job.

And for him to just not be there for so long is not normal. 

HOST: In these weeks where Mitch goes dark, goes quiet, is anyone talking to him? Is anyone communicating with him? Is anyone vouching for him? 

GUEST: When the firestorm online really started to take off and the conspiracy theories were at their peak, the majority leader in the Senate, John Thune, Republican, said that he spoke to Senator McConnell for about 20 minutes.

They talked about a variety of topics, and that was supposed to quell the noise online. Another Republican leader in the Senate, Senator Barrasso, also said that he had spoken to McConnell. 

CLIP: Leader Thune spoke with Senator McConnell yesterday by phone. They had a lengthy and substantive conversation that covered a variety of topics, including national security.

Senator Barrasso and Senator McConnell had a lengthy conversation early this afternoon. Their phone call lasted roughly 20 minutes. 

GUEST: I think people wanted to hear from the senator himself.

They wanted a photo, a video, a statement that was more fulsome than one sentence to really understand what was going on. And even though there were Republicans in the Senate trying to vouch for him, I don't think it was until Sunday that people started to understand more what was going on.

HOST: Because on Sunday, we get literally a proof of life photo from Mitch McConnell. it's got Mitch and his wife, and he's got his hand on a copy of the Sunday sports section from the Washington Post. Is that how you thought this story would come to an end? 

GUEST: I didn't know how this story was gonna come to an end, and frankly, I don't know if it's over.

We still need to see McConnell return to work, and he is no longer hospitalized, but he is in a rehabilitation center and unable to come to the Senate. And there's one quote from his statement that I wanna circle back to because I think it just, it was his way of indirectly addressing, I think, why it took so long to share what sent him to the hospital last month.

And he said, quote, "You all know how folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older. Even in the public eye, I feel that same instinct. I can't help it." He's essentially saying there that he wanted to maintain his privacy. He felt that he didn't have to share more than what was, than what his office was putting out there.

And that's sort of the balance that lawmakers are grappling with right now, is what level of transparency is required while still protecting personal health and sensitive matters?

And I think what we learned from the public response to this is people want transparency. People are invested in this. They wanna know what their representatives are doing, if they are able to work, what their status is. And lawmakers who get to make their own rules about this, there is no mandate of you must show up for work after X days or explain why you've been gone for X number of days.

There's no protocol here. It's totally up to each member how they do this. And how McConnell and his team handled this situation was one way, and we clearly saw the response to that

HOST: Give us a quick primer on the Articles of Confederation.

HOST 2: All right, absolutely. we have a link to an entire episode on this in the show notes, but in brief, the articles were our first constitution. They outlined our government initially. So right after the Continental Congress appointed a committee of five to write the Declaration of Independence, they also appointed a committee of 13 to draft the articles.

HOST: And? 

HOST 2: And they were a disaster every state for itself, barely any centralized government whatsoever, no executive power to speak of, and they were nigh impossible to amend. So when we were creating a new constitution, our goal was in part to fix our mistakes. 

CLIP: For starters, one has to assume, particularly if you look at things from James Madison's vantage point, what you wanted to do in the wake of the effective collapse, the framers would have said the imbecility of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation was you wanted to create a national government that would be fully empowered to enact, execute, and adjudicate its own laws.

And once you get to the matter of legislation, the conventional wisdom was you need to have a bicameral legislature. 

HOST 2: All right. Why was a bicameral legislature conventional wisdom? 

HOST: first off, the vast majority of colonies, now states, they already operated under a bicameral legislature, which by the way, is two chambers of Congress.

Not to mention, it's what we did in the old place, the Parliament of Great Britain, where we had the House of Commons and the House of Lords. 

CLIP: That raises interesting questions about if you have two houses, what is each one going to represent? And Madison in particular, and along with his allies, people like James Wilson and Robert Morris, Governor Morris in Pennsylvania, Rufus King of Massachusetts and so on, they were committed to the idea that you needed to have some form of proportional representation in both houses of Congress, that you had to absolutely get rid of the one state, one vote rule, which had been the model of decision-making in the Continental Congress going back to 1774.

So that absolutely had to be abandoned. But that leaves open the question of what rule of apportioning representatives across the states or among the states in two houses would you apply? Would it be strictly population? Would it be population plus property? Madison felt that legislative power by itself was very difficult to define, and define in the sense of limiting.

There was a phrase he uses later in life is the plastic faculty of legislation. 

HOST 2: The plastic faculty of legislation 

HOST: Yeah, plastic, as in bendy, changeable. Madison talks about this in Federalist 48 and in other places later in his life. The thing is, when you constitute a government, especially a national government, you wanna be really specific about who has what powers.

CLIP: But theoretically, Madison felt that was actually quite difficult to do because legislative power is by its nature so subtle and so complex that legislatures could always, in a sense, manipulate or mask sort ... Their more, their, their ambitions through devising complicated techniques of developing laws.

HOST 2: So basically, the legislative branch is the most difficult to pin down because that branch makes the laws, and those laws can be complex and technical, and the legislature can nudge the rules one way or another, potentially to grant themselves more power. 

HOST: Exactly. So now we're gonna talk about some plans, Hannah.

Two famous plans come out of the arguments to determine how our Congress is gonna be constructed, the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan. So Madison drafted the Virginia Plan, which has in it a bicameral legislature, and it is determinant on population. And representatives from smaller states are like, "Oh, man, no way.

That means we're not gonna have any people in there." And so small states back the New Jersey Plan, which says we should have one chamber of Congress, and every state gets the same amount of representatives regardless of population. The, 

CLIP: the decision of July 16th to give each state an equal vote in the Senate, we call it either the Great Compromise, or for reasons I don't really agree with, the Connecticut Compromise, 'cause I don't think Connecticut played any special role here, although the Connecticut delegates were quite active, but they weren't the decision-makers.

But, th- was not a compromise in its own name. That's to say, the vote on July 16th, which is when you get the equal state vote in the Senate, was five states to four states, with one state, Massachusetts, divided. So they said, "Look, we, we support most of the legislative outcomes you want, but we're not gonna, we're not gonna agree to this without preserving the equal vote in at least one house."

So it was always about the second house. It was always about what would happen in the Senate. And Madison's position was, "No, we're just gonna use a placeholder." 

HOST 2: Now, do the small states come out ahead here? The Senate is an extremely powerful body, and each state gets two senators no matter how many people live there.

HOST: Yeah, they did, and Madison thought so too. And to that point, Jack asked me a very interesting question. 

CLIP: I used to ask my students, and you could ask, whoever your listeners are, and this is a trick question, Nick, so pay attention. Do we ever vote on the basis of the size of the state in which we live?

HOST: So do we, Hannah? 

HOST 2: I don't know if I know what that means. Can you repeat that? 

HOST: Do we ever vote for a candidate because of the size of our state? 

HOST 2: I comprehend the words that are coming out of your mouth, but I do not understand their meaning. 

HOST: This exact same thing happened to me when Jack asked me, and I was like, no, I don't think so."

But think of it this way. The main reason people are gonna vote for one candidate or another is based on where they stand on certain topics. Big ones, right? Speech, immigration, war, taxes, healthcare, et cetera. What on earth does the size of the state have to do with it? 

CLIP: The way we vote is based on the issues we care about.

And, and they have nothing at all ... if you li- it matters a lot if you live in a city, if you live in the countryside. If you're, if you're far- if you're farming, corn or soybeans on the west bank of the Mississippi in Iowa or on the east bank in my native state of Illinois, farm subsidies or whatever will define what your interests are.

and Madison's argument is, against this ... And he felt he could wear the small sta- small states down by force of argument, and because basically he's right. If you wanna say that the states have, equal vote on the basis of the interest they represent or they possess, then you have to be able to identify what those interests are.

But the large states don't have common interests. So you compare Massachusetts with Pennsylvania and Virginia, they have very different kinds of economies. They have very different populations. If you guys could ever tell me what will bring the small states together on the one hand or the large states on the other hand, you might have a good argument.

The small states can never do it

HOST 2: All right. This is a famous small state versus big state battle. The small states are like, "If we don't have equal representation with the big states, we'll lose out on the small state issues," but there aren't any small state issues. 

HOST: Precisely. But the small states hold out, and Madison didn't wanna toss the whole thing in the mid and then start over with a new convention and a new constitution, so this is just something the guy had to swallow.

CLIP: When Madison came to the equal state vote, he said, "You can't defend it on its merits. We just have to accept it was a necessary compromise at the convention." And so we're stuck with it. we gotta defend it on principle. It's part of the package. The overall good will still be served by ratifying the new Constitution, not by rejecting or modifying it, so there we are 

HOST 2: There we are.

HOST: After this weekend, I think it's pretty fair to say that the United States Senate is not in great health. On Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham died. He had just gotten back from Ukraine. He'd been scheduled to appear on Meet the Press. Instead, President Trump came on the show to memorialize him. 

CLIP: I got a message about 1:00 in the morning from one of the people at his office that he had passed away.

I said, "You got... it... I j- can't believe it." He was like a member of the family to me. It's very tough, actually. It's amazing. 

HOST: And Senator Graham, he was actually the second lawmaker in a month to be rushed to a hospital 

CLIP: Concern over US Senator Mitch McConnell's health is growing. 

There's now been three weeks since McConnell was admitted.

We still don't know why he's there. Today- 

HOST: Senator Mitch McConnell landed in the hospital June 14th. That's when medics were called to his home to respond to an unconscious individual. 

CLIP: And according to the most recent statement from his team, which they pointed us again to today, he remains in the hospital.

His team said, 

HOST: quote, "Senator McConnell- The senator released a statement saying he fell, and he acknowledged he won't be back at work anytime soon. Some folks say they've spoken to him on the phone. None of those people are reporters

Senator Graham is the sixth member of the 119th Congress to have died while in office, and extended absences seem to have become more common, too. Sam Moyn, who is an author and professor at Yale Law School, he says it makes sense once you realize the average age of American lawmakers is rising exponentially.

GUEST: It's been a constant drumbeat, and whether it's cognitive decline or death, I think Americans are now very well aware that their politicians are very elderly. 

HOST: Sam's got a lot to say about all this because he just wrote a book called Gerontocracy in America. Spoiler alert, a whole lot of old people do not like it.

GUEST: I haven't even looked at this phone I'm sitting next to, which is full of, unsolicited voicemails. 

HOST: Sam wrote an op-ed in The New York Times laying out his case. It was titled Older Americans Are Hoarding America's Potential. 

GUEST: And indeed, the, the comments field on f- that op-ed are, worth savoring.

It's an amazing spectacle. 

HOST: But to Sam, the Mitch McConnell mystery, Lindsey Graham's death, they serve as proof that he's right. Older Americans just can't let go of power, and he wants to talk about how we correct course everywhere, but especially in Washington, where he wants to do more than kick out the old folks.

GUEST: It's not good enough to have, high-functioning 60- and 70-year-olds and block the 80-year-olds if you have one senator in his 30s, very few representatives in their 40s, and the median age is over 60. 

HOST: I feel like we should talk about the president too, because Donald Trump is still with us. but he is the oldest person to have ever been elected president.

COMMERCIAL: Yes. 

HOST: And it's weird because he was elected right after Joe Biden was driven from the race because he had an extended senior moment during a televised debate. So it was like we, we said, "Okay, we can't elect that person, obviously," but then the country went ahead and elected a very old person. It's just a strange confluence of events to me.

Do Americans love old people? Is, or is there something else going on here? 

GUEST: Amazingly, Trump even said, Joe Biden has given old people like me a bad name because we should know when we lose our mojo that we should step aside. I haven't." so I think Americans must have accepted that given the choices, that one old man was better than another. But since Ronald Reagan, we've had older and older presidents, some young ones like Barack Obama. But I think the basic issue is that we do defer to older people. 

Maybe more important is the electorate is old, so you have a gerontocracy voting gerontocrats into power

HOST: Oh, that's interesting. So it's because older people are more likely to vote, also older people are more likely to win. 

GUEST: We know for sure that o- everything else being equal, everyone wants to vote for someone their own age to represent them. It's just that older people vote a lot more

HOST: Okay. So Sam, your new book, it's called Gerontocracy in America, and in it you argue the US is increasingly becoming a country for old people, or a gerontocracy. I'm a little curious why you wanted to focus on this topic, and I also think it's important to say that your focus on this, it's not just politics.

It's literally like every element of society. You've written an article about how professors are too old. You yourself are a professor . So you're looking at everyone, right? 

GUEST: Basically. I thought a lot about this, and I'm con- as concerned about politicians as the next person. But first of all, no one needs me with Mitch McConnell's hijinks to point out this problem.

and it's bipartisan. 

HOST: How old are you, Sam? 

GUEST: I'm 54. and so I'm, middle-aged, getting to old age. but I realized at a certain point that it may not matter how old the politicians are if the electorate is old and those who control, wealth in our country in its various forms are old.

if Donald Trump should, for whatever reason, not make it till next June, the United States would immediately have the youngest president in its history because JD Vance would be, younger than Theodore Roosevelt was, early 40s, when he became president. 

HOST: That's interesting. You're saying like the older politicians are a symptom, but not the cause.

GUEST: I think they're their own problem, but they might be a more minor problem, and they're definitely a symptom because they get there through these other levels of gerontocracy. So maybe a better, analogy is not disease, but the levels of hell. you have the politicians, but then who puts them there?

the electorate. And who pays for elections in our country? the c- the donors who are extremely old, even older than the electorate. And who has money? oligarchy, leaving the tech bros out, are old and aging fast. And it seems like we're embarked on an experiment, not just in this country, of the political consequences of the extension of life, which is a good thing.

I wanna live as long as they can, make it happen, but we shouldn't pretend that there's not a dark side. 

HOST: What's the problem you wanna solve for? 

GUEST: I don't wanna attack entitlements, I actually think we have too few 

HOST: Like Social Security or Medicare. 

GUEST: Exactly. Medicare. those are the main two at the federal level.

and that means that six to seven federal dollars are spent on American seniors for every dollar that's spent on American children, which is a crime. But the answer to that is not to take away anyone's benefits, it's to add. I think we could imagine an even better welfare state. Where I have a problem is that older people monopolize elections.

They monopolize wealth. They have most of the houses. That means they control the ur- desirable urban cores. They no longer face mandatory retirements, and so many refuse to retire, and so create blockages, in, the, in sectors of the economy. So all that is gerontocratic, and that's what we should face because we should be fairer to younger people even while, keeping our generosity towards older people when they need care, even being more generous.

HOST: So Sam, to what degree do we recognize the political effects of an aging citizenry, and what do we miss in our understanding of the world today, what... the politics that are happening right now in the United States when we do not recognize the effects of an aging voting, crowd?

GUEST: Well, I think we're embarked on an experiment and it's never been tried, which is mass life extension. And I think no one's really thought hard about the political consequences. So my book is just an attempt to kinda gather together what we know so far in one country about what it means for our politics, intergenerationally to have so many more older people, absolutely and relatively.

And, I think, what I c- from what I can see, the, the outcomes are good and bad. It's great to have longer life. It also means that those who are old have more power, and probably more than they deserve, and I try to make that case. 

HOST: So is Make America Great Again a reflection of an aging society?

Is an aging society more likely to want to return to a nostalgic past, no matter how much that past has become or is in, in reality a myth? 

GUEST: Well, I think, you know, that question has to be, you know, explored on, on multiple levels. For sure in 2016, Donald Trump was put in the White House by older voters. 2024 is a bit murkier, although again, in some of the crucial precincts in, Michigan and elsewhere that, that, that determine the outcome.

Older voters played an enormous role. But I think your question is bigger than that because it's really also about what happens when the Democrats win, because they put old, an old man in power, and our most recent Democratic president is-- still has the record for, the oldest president. Trump will probably beat it.

and e- I think both of those men share a nostalgia for the 1950s, which they interpret a little differently. and, I think, y- what your question's really about is about conservatism with a small C. And I just think it's not ageist, but true that 

as we age, we become more backward-looking than forward-looking.

And why not? We don't have as much to look forward to and a lot to look fondly back on in our memories. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, said that as we age, we begin to live in memory rather than hope. And so I think it, it just has to be taken seriously that an older population will mean a nostalgic politics, and we're living it.

HOST: Do you think that explains Donald Trump's recent remarks about, that, that seemed very McCarthyist when he was, uh, talking a lot of scaremongering about communists and the overthrow of America on social media recently. Is this all a hat tip to the older voter? Is this an attempt to get the older voter to, align themselves or realign themselves with Donald Trump?

GUEST: I think, I'm not claiming that age is the explanation for everything, but it's amazing when you start thinking in the way you're thinking that it explains a- an extraordinary amount. And I agree with you that not just the politicians but their constituents, are s- are so old compared to the American past that it wouldn't be surprising if politicians imagine their audience as their fellow senior citizens.

and so they have co- a common stock of memories. And in, in the case of those guys, it's been Cold War memories when life was good, threats were clear, and everyone agreed what they were, and not climate change, but some like, enemy barbarian at the gate. and it's not just these guys. When you look at, polls about youth versus, age as d- a- as they bear on our political preferences, younger people say the biggest problem f- to solve is climate change.

Older people say it's terrorism. And so I think you're get-- you're onto something, but I wouldn't wanna pin everything on explaining any one statement 

HOST: So how new is this gerontocracy, and is this uniquely American, or is this happening around the world and possibly a factor in, the rise of, global far-right movements?

GUEST: It's a great question. it's certainly global. 

more than half of humanity now lives under political leadership over the age of 70. That's largely because of Narendra Modi in India and Vladimir Putin in, in Russia and Xi Jinping in China, all of whom have aged, beyond 70.

when these guys meet, they talk about life extension. That was revealed, uh, for, the other week, in when Sh- Putin and Xi, hooked up and talked about organ replacement. I think i-in the longest view, and I argue this in the book, gerontocracy is old school. It's probably the most common form of government that humans have had, basically living under councils of elders.

and yet there were age and term limits that mortality built in, in the old days. And our form of gerontocracy is new because our older politicians now, and very much including women like Dianne 

Feinstein and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, can plan on indefinite high function, or at least what they think they can, and, think of death as something that will happen much later because it generally does.

and then maybe more important, our politics is based on elections and money. and, of course it matters if the politicians are old, but it may matter less now when the voters and those who hold wealth, including, as your intro emphasized, housing are so up in years. And so I study gerontocracy as a kind of blast from the past that has been renovated, and it has specific American characteristics, even though it's a general problem.

I think the be-best explanation globally is that everywhere but Sub-Sa-Saharan Africa is, involved in this experiment with the demographic pyramid In the old days, the younger, the, the hu-humans, the more of them there were. and that was true in every society, including American until recently.

Now there are fewer young people, and many more old people surviving longer. They can count on surviving, and that has political consequences of various kinds. 

We've just heard clips starting with

Takesâ„¢ by Jamelle Bouie eulogizing Lindsey Graham after his passing as a lifelong warmonger and Trump loyalist who knew better yet helped subvert American democracy out of venal self-interest.

The NPR Politics Podcast examined the four-week hospitalization of Senator Mitch McConnell, where a lack of transparency fueled wild rumors and broader questions about lawmakers hiding health problems from voters.

Today, Explained detailed how McConnell's team offered almost no information for nearly a month after his June 14th apparent cardiac arrest, leaving reporters, colleagues, and conspiracy theorists to fill in the blanks.

Civics 101 explained why Madison's Virginia Plan clashed with the small-state New Jersey Plan, arguing there were no genuine "small state issues" to justify giving every state two senators regardless of population.

What Next traced how America's aging politicians reflect a broader gerontocracy of old voters, old donors, and old wealth that puts and keeps elderly leaders in power.

And This Is Hell! explored how more than half of humanity now lives under leaders over 70, thanks to India, Russia, and China, and what indefinite elderly power means for our politics.

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

But first, as you may have heard by now, the show is going through some financial troubles. We've taken a big hit on ad dollars drying up since the beginning of the year and I'm still working to turning things around. Our members supporting the show are the main thing getting us through right now but it's really been the people signing up more recently who have been helping to fill the gap that opened up.

So, if you haven't signed up yet but are thinking about it, just know that the emergency hasn't passed and we could still really use your help. Don't worry if you can only afford a few bucks a month, it's the collective contributions of people stepping up that has always gotten us through tough times like this.

So, if you get value out of the show and want to get 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.

We're also working on reincorporating audience feedback into the show. If you want to encourage others to leave messages, start by becoming the change you want to see in the world.

To spark ideas, here's today's question.

A piece of this episode is about a system that's been hampered so that it's effectively impossible for representatives to be responsive to their constituents. I'm sure it won't be about congress but tell us about the last time you felt you had a real say in a decision that actually affected your life, at work, in your town, wherever. When was it, and what made it possible to make an impact, or if you're drawing a blank, tell us that instead.

I'm planning on talking about congressional reforms today but Truman beat me to it with his recent voice message.

Hey, Jay and the rest of the Best of the Left team. it's Truman. I'm leaving this voicemail to highlight some reforms I'd like to see progressives advocate for. there are a lot of obvious policies like universal healthcare, higher minimum wage, wealth taxes, et cetera, that we should of course demand from our politicians.

But I'd also like to see them bring up some less talked about ideas that could meaningfully alter the political landscape. first would be, changing how we elect our representatives. my favorite idea is, uh, multi-member districts with ranked choice voting, and I believe Ireland does this to some extent.

Americans like having local representatives to go to for help or just to complain to, so I'm not sure that full proportional representation would be a great fit. But districts also aren't just red, blue, or swing. Like they're more nuanced than that. three-seat districts maybe with automatic runoffs would reflect that nuance and give third parties a real shot.

Maybe a Libertarian would win a seat in rural Montana, a Green would win in urban Portland, and uh, Congress would get more proportional without necessarily losing local representation. Second would be, uh, expanding direct democracy at the federal level and also the state level. right now we're kinda stuck with elected officials until each election, and people forget in between.

And so there really isn't a check on what they do while they're in power. And it would be nice to have recall elections for Congress members acting against their district's interests, referenda on major decisions like wars and trade deals. And I'd also like to see some form of participatory budgeting so people could have a direct say in some aspects of federal spending.

the goal would just be to give people more institutional levers to pull between major elections that really only happen every two to four years. and my third idea, which, is kind of meant to support the first two, would be to just invest more heavily in K through 12 civic education. Uh, the first two reforms add a lot of complexity and require more frequent engagement than people are used to.

And if people don't understand how instant runoff tabulation works or what a treaty vote means, then these tools get confusing, or they can get captured by whoever's already engaged, be that, political junkies or special interests. I think that civic education is what makes expanded democracy work for everyone.

these are some ideas that I think could build real bipartisan support, at least at the voter level. And I imagine it'd be pretty easy to convince progressive candidates to adopt them. but getting mainstream politicians, and especially the right to act on it, is another story. I hope some of these ideas make their way into public discourse.

thanks for all that you do. Bye.

Thanks to Truman for that contribution. A lot of those have been in discussion for a while and some are newer but I really do have this feeling that the appetite for democratic renewal is continuing to rise and when we hit cyclical moments like that in history, there's an opportunity to make changes that otherwise feel impossible. So, we need to keep pushing to create that opportunity and be ready for when it comes.

If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes.

As for today's topic,

It's widely thought that Congress is broken, and so today I want to go back to the scenes of some of the the crimes that got us to this point.

I'll start in 1995, when Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to take back control of the House running on the Contract with America. Item three on that contract was the promise to cut the number of House committees and cut committee staff by one-third. One of the agencies that ended up on the chopping block was the Office of Technology Assessment, which was abolished that year.

I find the timing of this amazing. Again, that was 1995 and for those who were there, the arrival of Microsoft Windows 95 to retail customers in August of that year is remembered as a turning point in personal computing. One month later, Congress abolished the Office of Technology Assessment. It was only three years later that internet usage via America Online had become culturally ubiquitous enough that the film "You've Got Mail" was released in 1998. From the release of You've Got Mail to the founding of Twitter, the creation of Facebook's algorithmic newsfeed, the purchase of YouTube by Google, and the founding of the Best of the Left podcast, which is how I tend to remember the year, was only 8 years. 1998-2006.

So, from 1995 to 2006 and beyond, we watched some of the fastest technological innovation in the history of humanity and we did it with a Congress that had just intentionally blinded itself to precisely that fast-moving innovation by abolishing the agency directly tasked with tracking it and explaining it to them. A relevant point is that, within the past week here in the summer of 2026, one of the most venerable and influential politicians in the Democratic Party, James Clyburn, said during an interview that he'd just learned what ChatGPT was, and looking at Newt Gingrich's Contract with America is giving me some insight into why.

When Gingrich and company came to power, they promised to cripple Congress's ability to function and then made good on that promise. So, when you feel the sense of frustration that Congress seems incapable of getting anything done, just know that we're living with the promise-come-to-fruition that the Republicans made good on back in 1995 with timing so bad that it feels like a Greek tragedy.

They couldn't have fully foreseen what was coming, so the timing was somewhat incidental, but I'm sure there were some people working at the Office of Technology Assessment who knew the internet was about to change everything and would have been happy to explain it. So, their ignorance is only slightly excusable but it mostly highlights the inevitable downside of adhering to the kind of anti-government neoliberal ideology that has been the default of our politics for decades. Regardless of what the future holds, no one should be in favor of undercutting the ability of the government to react to it.

Because, of course, lobotomizing the government doesn't change anything about the fact that it's still the institution that all of our laws flow through. In the absence of independent funding for research dedicated to the benefit of all people, that gap gets filled with lobbyists and trade associations with their own motivations and no responsibility to the public interest.

This wasn't the first time that Congress had put restrictions on its own ability to get things done, and it wouldn't be the last. The influence of the Tea Party in the early 2010s caused another round of cuts to Congress's ability to function. There was already a statutory limit on the number of staffers a member of Congress can have dating to the 70s, but funding limits have ensured that most members of Congress don't even have the number of staffers they're allowed.

Given that the number of representatives doesn't go up and the number of staffers doesn't go up, but the population does, it makes it pretty easy to understand why members of Congress are structurally unable to be responsive to their constituents. They simply don't have the capacity.

If you're a political nerd, you might know that there are 435 seats in the House of Representatives, but it's far less known that that number didn't used to be as static as it is today. At the founding, the House started at 65 representatives. The number of members grew every ten years, after each census to keep pace with the population, until 1920, when the until-then routine procedure of expanding the House hit a wall.

If you're familiar with the era, you won't be surprised to learn that racism was at the heart of the issue. The 1920 census was the first to show that the country had tipped over into being more urban than rural. Cities had been increasing in population, driven largely by immigrants and Black families leaving the South in the Great Migration. Reapportioning after that census would have meant a shift in power toward those cities. We can basically thank Jim Crow-era racism for the fact that the size of our House of Representatives stopped growing to meet the needs of a growing population.

Originally, a member of Congress represented a little more than 30,000 constituents. By 1910, it was over 200,000. And today it's nearly 800,000, making our representative-to-constituent ratio a real outlier that's several times larger than the average democracy.

In each of these cases, reforms were created that hampered Congress's ability to get work done for its constituents. They either limited their capacity by restricting the number of members, by restricting the number of staffers, by restricting necessary funding, or by fully abolishing agencies that helped them do their work. Now we're sitting around wondering why Congress can't get anything done and doesn't seem to know anything about modern technology. But this problem is frequently treated as the failure of individuals or of the nature of aging politicians when the structural and historical view demonstrates that we used to give Congress more capacity and more resources to do their jobs.

So, if subtractive reforms that put constraints on Congress helped get us here, maybe more subtraction like term-limits and age limits aren't the way to go and we should instead be looking at additive reforms. Here's a starter list. Uncap the limit on the number of representatives to again keep pace with the population and go back to fully funding and staffing the offices so that members could genuinely be more responsive to voters. Rebuild the research agencies dedicated to giving unbiased information to inform members of Congress, particularly on things like the development of new technologies. Move to the public funding of elections and switch to multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting to increase the diversity of candidates and party affiliations.

In the 90s, neoliberalism was ascendant and the idea of tearing down the government was fashionable, in theory, but the consequences of those actions have fully landed now and people are as pissed off at the dysfunction as they've ever been.

Trump is a gold-standard bullshit artist but the bullshit he was peddling was the populist message of making the government work for people again, which many of his supporters took seriously. They were in for a rude awakening, of course, but the desire for an active, responsive government is real and the pressure has been building for 100 years. This is what the age of neoliberalism coming to an end looks like. The party that spearheaded the anti-government mantra with an anti-Democrat veneer has completely flipped. Now, wielding government power is seen as normal and good and naming Democrats as the enemy is the only part that survived.

Neoliberalism is dying and contract campaigns, candidates promising to accomplish specific goals, have come back around. It's time for the left to run on the explicit promise to make government functional to a degree it never has been before. What we've had has always been insufficient for our needs, which, ironically, adds fuel to the anti-government fire that occasionally gives the right the political capital to break it even further. Now is the time to build a level of representation and responsiveness we've always needed but never had.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 3 topics today. First up;

Section A, THE MCCONNELL & GRAHAM MOMENT

Followed by Section B, THE GERONTOCRACY CASE

And Section C, HOW CONGRESS ACTUALLY WORKS

HOST: But before we go into any of this, what d- what do you see as the legacy of Lindsey Graham? I would argue probably one of the more important political figures of the 20th and 21st century, for all of the wrong reasons.

Every single wrong reason. What, looking back, what is your... he's been a punching bag of yours for a long time. You hate Lindsey Graham. I hate Lindsey Graham. How's it feel that Lindsey Graham has now departed this mortal coil? 

HOST 2: it, the wrong senator passed? Is that what my first impression was?

Or- 

HOST: Oh, don't worry everybody, we're gonna talk about the McConnell proof of life photo. that's coming up next. Yeah. But yeah. 

HOST 2: and listen, w- as long as, McCain was by his side, we could say, all right, Lindsey seemed to have his heart in the right place. But I just goes to show you how, how can I say this?

'Cause, we've talked about this before, and I, I have no interest in, Okay. You, with a guy, with enough power, right? You are blackmailable. we've said this before. And, I just feel like people like that c- are... It's dangerous because they're manipulable. For whatever reason you wanna say he was manipulated, in the last 10 years, he was manipulated, I believe, to be the person he became, which is some sort of Trump-loving guy, even though it was clear to him how, how d- des- destructive Trump was going to be, and he's on record a, a couple times saying that back in 2015.

that's his legacy. The, here's a guy that you had, they had probably dirt on, and they were able to, threaten him with that, and he w- f- he fell in line. 

HOST: see, I don't actually agree with that. I think that gets Lindsey Graham off the hook. Oh. I don't think he was blackmailed.

I don't think that he was manipulated into doing anything. I think what got exposed with Lindsey Graham was something that was very observable, which is that this was a weak, sycophantic, bootlicking asshole who sought attention and sought power, particularly through his proximity to other people who were more dominant men with more dominant ideology and personalities.

And, it, Nick, I don't wanna talk about the three amigos, with him and Mitch McConnell and Joe Lieberman, but this was a person who was... he reminds me a lot, I've talked about on this show, like a, a little small bully who runs around with packs of larger guys who maybe they'll start a fight and then larger guys will finish the thing.

I think Lindsey Graham's ideology was always malleable, and I think who he was with John McCain and who he was with Donald Trump, I think there were moments where he spoke what he believed was the truth, which was that Donald Trump, was a disgusting figure. But the moment that he found safety and shelter around Donald Trump, I think he fell in line.

I think that this is a really despicable person who I think embodied maybe the worst characteristics of the United States Senate, which was he was more than happy to hurt people, he was more than happy to... God knows how many people have been killed because of Lindsey Graham's warmongering, right?

And how many of these things that he pushed forward, how much damage he did to regular people on a daily basis, and all of it was worth it because he was a United States senator. He got to hang out with other senators, he got to slap people on the back, he got to be part of the larger club, and that's what mattered more to him than anything else.

I don't... I think it's, I think it's actually more detestable not that Lindsey Graham was blackmailed, because it was an open secret who he was in Washington, D.C. Everybody knew about it. Everyone kept that secret because he was part of this larger club. I think it makes him more detestable that he did this for proximity to power and for public exposure.

HOST 2: okay. I guess you can also, I can then shift my point to then, when you have a certain degree of self-loathing, I suppose could be it, you are then, apt to make decisions that are lashing out at people like, because of the inner t- turmoil that you're going through.

And so perhaps that would be part of it as well, that was troubling. And certainly the LGBTQ community vilified him as well because he would punish them, with his votes on a lot of different stuff that, is, very troubling, for a lot of reasons. But that sort of sums up the entire GOP as they exist.

Because we've talked about this before, there, there's a distinct, unwell, mentally unwell section of this party that causes all manner of torque, in there, that, that causes all manner of strange deci- decisions that are, tend to be destructive for people on purpose, sometimes.

that's where we're at and, it's a, it, it's a legacy that, yes, that will be, hopefully, not followed and used as an example of what, we cannot have that again. but we... I- Can we cut to... Did he die, in, in America, do you think? 

HOST: yeah, think he did die in America. I don't think that he died in Ukraine and was shipped back.

I think he ca- That's another thing, by the way. I think it's very telling that Lindsey Graham sold his soul to get in line with MAGA after criticizing it. He then died, and what did they do with him, Nick? They immediately turned him into an object of conspiracy theories, right? Yeah. Because it, it's not enough that you work with these people, it's not enough that you dedicate your time and energy and resources to what it is that they wanna do, they're not...

They're going to dehumanize you, right? They're going to take you, they're gonna fit you into some sort of a conspiracy that fits whatever worldview they have. But yeah, I think he was back in the United States, and I think he simply had a heart attack. 

HOST 2: and by the way, w- now the i- the irony or the coincidence that he happened to be like, in Kiev of all places, right?

Is, was what also fuels that. And then certainly, if anyone's curious out there what the root of it ends up being, the time doesn't, the timeline doesn't fit, but we don't have enough of the public reporting, so that's part of the reason why we, he, I'm sure could be explained. Because, you don't just fly back, there isn't a direct flight from Kiev to South Carolina.

you have to take a train to Poland and then fly back to probably you know- ... DC or something, and then South Carolina. I don't know. I just find it hilarious sometimes when it comes up like that and then all of a sudden it becomes, people are... There are some people who are very, convinced, of these things.

And either way, the one thing that does stand out about that is that he was still in favor of supporting, Ukraine. which also flies in the face of basically what Trump's position has been and what they did, which, again, can fuel all sorts of interesting things about how, okay, that's the one thing he stayed true to, the whole time.

HOST: and that- I think that goes back to one of the things we've talked about with the Republican Party and politicians in general, which is they tell themselves a story, right? Lindsey Graham forwarded all of these wars, and by the way, I think it's wonderful that he spent most of his public life pushing for a war with Iran, and he lived long enough for that war to take place and to watch the United States of America humiliated and defeated in that war.

There's almost nothing that Lindsey Graham ever stood for that he was on the right side of history with. And when it comes to MAGA, it also disrupts this idea once more that it's a homogenous group, that they all believe the same things and they all think this. In fact, Lindsey Graham was hated by a large section of the MAGA-supporting base because not only did he support Ukraine because he was all about national security, he was all about America's alliances, even as he supported the guy who destroyed them, they also hated him because he was a stalwart in support of Israel.

Yeah. So he was actually loathed by the group of people that he sold his soul to, which it just goes to show there's no reason to ever get involved with these people, not once. 

HOST 2: Yeah. A- again, y- we keep seeing it. He's just, get in line, add him to the list of, people who will prostrate themselves to Trump and then end up getting, humiliated, over and over again.

And, yeah, it- it's, it, good riddance in- as far as the Senate goes. It makes it a little bit harder for the Republicans to get some stuff done 'cause the margin sh- shrunk and, McConnell's not coming back for a little bit. talk about him in a second. I... It's interesting.

the, the Democrats are doing a lot to torpedo themselves with the Senate race, but the GOP seems to be also helping the Democrats somehow either as well, or there seems to be some loosening up there that might, might benefit them. 

HOST: we'll talk more about the midterms here in just a minute because there's news there.

But I think, speaking of the Democrats torpedoing themselves, Nick, I also wanted to talk about how one Democrat after another just absolutely fell all over themselves to post moving tributes to, their fallen, colleague. Elizabeth Warren got in on it, Adam Schiff, Amy Klobuchar, disgusting shit from her.

Personally, for me, the most cringe-inducing one was Cory Booker, who was just like, "Oh, I'm gonna miss my friend, and I hope he's basking in God's love right now." Nick, I, I would love to hear what you think the reasoning for this was that Democrats felt the need to go out and defend and even laud this monster who has hurt so many people.

I have my own personal thoughts about it, and I actually think it was one of the more telling things we've seen in a long time. 

HOST 2: I, listen, somebody passes away, a coworker, the, the, the, the thing you're supposed to do is, yes, honor them. yeah. So I... They're doing what they're supposed to do.

There's a script there, and you say that. And I have no doubt in the room, in the cloak room of the Senate, I'm sure Lindsey was a really nice person, and I'm sure they did like him. He probably was funny and, good to be hanging around with, right? I suppose they focused on that, part of the memory of it and then did, just did that script we're supposed to do.

unlike, what Trump. Trump would just shit on the guy, whenever they, someone on the other side passed away. so that's what they're trying to do, probably trying to separate themselves and show that they're above it all and all that stuff. So lay it on me. 

HOST: Yeah, but if you had a colleague who had murdered multiple people and they died, would you then be like, "Oh man, the times that we had business trips where we had dinner and yukked it up together"?

Yeah. Because Lindsey Graham has literally played a role in killing people all around the world. Wait, like 

HOST 2: we're talking like bachelor party murders? Are 

HOST: we talking... What kind of murders are we talking about? We're talking about just going out and random... we, there's no telling how many people have died because of Lindsey Graham But it's that, it's that sort of projection away from it, it's the distance.

Because the project that Lindsey Graham served, including murdering people through US military interventions and wars, including illegal wars and atrocities, that feels at a distance, right? Because he's just playing a role in this project

Burgess, I know you cover the Senate, but over in the House of Representatives, there's also someone who's gone missing. Could you tell us about that person? 

Tom Kean missed, weeks and weeks, months even, of votes over in the House.

He's a congressman from New Jersey, a Republican. 

CLIP: A congressman is missing. 

This photo is actually the last public sighting of the man, and he has since missed more than 100 votes in Congress, and he's provided no explanation beyond, quote, "a personal medical issue." 

Republicans need Kean's seat to hold the House in the midterms.

He didn't explain why he was gone. He kept saying he was gonna be back and offer an explanation. 

CLIP: I understand the need for transparency on this matter and I look forward to sharing my experience with the public. 

Finally, he did. He was being treated for depression. 

CLIP: Now, when people hear the word depression, many people think simply feel it means feeling sad, but depression is so much more than that.

It is physical, it is emotional, and until you experience it yourself, it is difficult to fully understand how powerful this illness can be. 

This is an interesting one, though, because this is a battleground House seat. He hasn't been in the House that long. So I could see his race, turning into a referendum on his health and whether he was transparent enough about it for his constituents.

He didn't wanna talk about it. He didn't wanna disclose it. It seemed like he was prioritizing his own health over, transparency for his voters. But the conflict there is, of course, that they get to weigh in on whether he was transparent enough. So it's gonna be really interesting to watch, how people in New Jersey respond to the way, Tom Kean handled this illness.

HOST: What rules are there in Congress to deal with situations like these, with Tom and Mitch? 

There, there's no rules really on this. Gov- Congress governs itself, the House governs itself, the Senate governs itself, right? So if somebody's doing something that other members find inappropriate, your options are pretty limited.

You could try to expel them, or the ethics committees can investigate them. we really haven't seen that translate to health. This is, tho- those committees are usually more about, investigating scandals, corruption- ... things like that. So there's really no accountability measure other than these elections.

HOST: Why not? Why aren't there rules in place that say "Hey, the people pay your salary, and you owe them, I don't know, showing up or explaining why you're not showing up"? 

It's really the same reason that Congress doesn't do a great job policing its own stock trades, right? who likes to put more restrictions on themselves?

They'd ra- people would rather say, I, I'm gonna do the right thing. You can trust me on this," because they don't wanna put those guardrails on themselves, if they can avoid it. and we'll see. I'm having a hard time seeing Congress ever moving to put those rules on itself regarding health, but I do think this is gonna become more of a political issue.

I, to me, in my personal experience, it started with Dianne Feinstein and the questions about her fitness to lead the Judiciary Committee. 

CLIP: Yeah, just say I. 

Okay. Just I. 

She's representing 40 million people in California. We ex- need someone who's going to be on top of the job. 

I do think that if it is impacting her ability, to do the job, then, I would support a resignation.

I think John Fetterman had an election after having a stroke in which he had a terrible debate performance. 

CLIP: I, I do support fracking, and I don't... I support fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking 

And he still won handily. There's gonna be a bunch of this in Lindsey G- this race to replace Lindsey Graham, because I think it's gonna be fresh on voters' minds that, Lindsey Graham just died in office at 71.

are they going to choose to send somebody older or perhaps, younger to replace Senator Graham so that they can have more confidence that person will be able to serve longer? 

HOST: Okay, so part of the reason we don't have rules is because who likes to create rules that, restrict themselves?

But also is part of the issue here that our politicians are, one, living longer and certainly sticking around in Congress longer than they used to? 

I think it's easy. There's always recency bias when it comes to these sort of things, and he was around before I covered the Senate, but Strom Thurmond served in office until- he was 100, right? Classic. And, e- everybody told me that he, by the time he was done, he was very diminished. and I think there's a lot of examples of that in recent history, people hanging on as long as they can.

I think, the best example is Chuck Grassley, who's the oldest senator. He's in his 90s. 

CLIP: When I started farming in 1960, the saying was, "Corn should be knee-high by the Fourth of July." 

I was one of the first senators to get a fax machine when they were so useful. 

Much older than Lindsey Graham has... and, I do think when he won re-election, I, to me, there were questions about his health.

I went out and covered his re-election race, and he challenged me to a push-up contest, which- ... makes you laugh, right? But it's also okay, this guy's trying to meet this challenge of are you too old to serve in office? And here we are. it's 2026. He's still there. He's not even ruling out running again for a six-year term.

I'd be surprised if he does, but, I do think, until you put term limits on members of Congress, how long they can serve, it's extremely hard for me to imagine any other way to make people leave office because of age.

HOST: What happens when your elected representative isn't showing up to work? Can they still call in a vote from, their hospital bed, their death bed, their rehab facility, whatever it is? 

The Senate is more antiquated even than the House. There's not even a voting card, for example. So you gotta go in there and give a thumbs up or thumbs down.

So if you're not in good enough shape, to get to the Capitol with all of your staff, with your drivers, with all of these, these, extras that the government gives you to do your job, then yeah, you can't get a vote. You can't represent your constituents. I will say, though, even right now, there's good, experienced people working in Lindsey Graham's office who are probably taking constituent phone calls, helping people with their Social Se- getting their Social Security benefits, whatever, the things that we don't really talk about on a day-to-day basis.

Those are still there even when the member dies or is otherwise incapacitated. 

HOST: you're talking about politicians not wanting to disclose their health issues because they may seem weak, the optics, whatever it might be, a reelection, coming up. but is part of it also This razor-thin margin situation that we have right now where they maybe don't want the party to look weak or vulnerable?

Well, I think with Senator McConnell, I think he's a... E- everybody has their own story, right? And, for him, he's a polio survivor. He's always taken his physical health kind of, seriously in the sense that he doesn't wanna project weakness, and he wants to say, "I beat this disease, and I became the Senate majority leader."

What that has meant is, there's been times when he's walked when he shouldn't have. He probably should've been in a wheelchair or with a walker or a cane. but he doesn't like that, and so I know his staff had asked him for years to be more cognizant of his physical safety, and he didn't do it, and he's fallen a bunch, and that was how he ended up in the hospital, this time.

And I think for him, he doesn't wanna go out resigning in July of his last year. he takes his Senate Appropriations chairmanship of the Defense Spending committee very seriously, for example, and I'm sure he's got a few legacy things that he wants to tie up. So I think to him, he doesn't wanna go out like that.

But w- if his ad- absence were to hamstring Republicans' ability to do X, Y, or Z, I do think that there's some rabble-rousing Republicans who would let you know that they didn't like it. 

HOST: Mitch McConnell, 84 years old. Chuck Grassley, the senior senator from Iowa, is infamously 92 years old. Former Senator Mitt Romney recently said he would not run for president in 2028, not that anyone was asking him to, per se, but because he'll be 80 years old by then.

And he, I think, even cited research saying that your brain capacity shrinks by the time you're 80. 

GUEST 3: 20% smaller. Wow. Just the size of the brain itself. So I basically think people who are 80 and above really should not be, running the world or running the country. 

HOST: Is anyone out there, I don't know, renewing calls for upper age limits in the Senate or in the House?

it's something we see in presidential campaigns usually, but it's, a talking point you use to get elected. And then once you're in office, you don't really- ... get much traction for that. And I don't think Congress is gonna pass a constitutional amendment on term limits until a president is in office whose entire platform is based on that.

HOST: Maybe President Ossoff in 2029. 

Well, yeah. he was the youngest senator when he came in. He'll, if he runs for president, he'll be one of the youngest, presidential candidates. So it'll be interesting to see. I do think, I do wanna sh- shout out some of our representatives who have been leaving on their own accord at more reasonable ages recently, people like Tina Smith, Gary Peters, Jeanne Shaheen.

They could have run for other Senate terms, and they've decided to step away. And, those were surprising at the time, but the more I've digested it, the more I can say, hey, they're, like, kinda normalizing the idea that you don't have to be a senator forever. And I think that's probably a healthy thing.

HOST: Hours after Lindsey Graham kicks the bucket, rest in piss, what a piece of shit, everybody's like, "Hey, we kinda thought this was gonna be Mitch McConnell." We all thought Mitch McConnell was the next one to shuffle off of the mortal coil, and then it becomes a question of, weird, Mitch McConnell hasn't said anything.

And then Mitch McConnell's team is "We probably need to say something. Mitch has been gone for over a month at this point." And then Mitch McConnell's social media account, I don't want to say that Mitch posted it, 'cause I don't think Mitch is posting much of anything right now, they post a picture, and the picture is reportedly, allegedly, purportedly, of the senator from Kentucky who's been missing for over a month in a hospital bed.

his wife is sitting next to him. By the way, Nick, I'm not gonna say he looks good. He doesn't look great. He's dressed. He's wearing a button-up shirt. He's wearing jeans. And then, wouldn't you know, just randomly, 

I'm sure nobody did this on purpose, there is an, an issue of The Washington Post from Sunday, the sports section.

it's just in the picture, Nick. It's just accidentally in there. Nobody did that on purpose. And for people who don't know this, this is what's referred to in the jargon as proof of life, which is when you kidnap somebody and you want to show that person is still alive as you're asking for a ransom, you make sure that a picture of that day's newspaper is in the frame.

So Nick, I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I want to underline all of it by saying I have gotten so much joy out of this picture and the fact that this is what they released and that they had to put that in there because this man is so close to death and so obviously dying that they had to put this out there.

And obviously conspiracy theories, is it AI-generated? Was it doctored? All of these things. What was your reaction? And obviously, we're wishing Mitch McConnell the absolute best. I, we hope you're out, out there real soon. big fans 

HOST 2: Yeah. he already has said he, he's not coming back. He can't come back just yet.

he's still not feeling- 

HOST: Yeah, he's not feeling good enough to go to the Senate 

HOST 2: right now, Nick ... 100% dude. Doctors thought, maybe he needs some more time." y- the other thing that you do is it just reminded me of the Manhunter movie where, they put a little clue, in the Tattler to lure the serial killer, the Tooth Fairy, out into the open, right?

And that's another reason why you do it, right? There's like a s- there's a clue. I can't remember the exact clue. So now I'm trying to think about, what that was. 'Cause then, yeah, all sorts of sleuths. I think he had five fingers and not six in the vid- in the picture, so either AI's getting a lot better or it was a real picture of him.

they somehow got Elaine Chao back into the country, you know- ... even though she abandoned him for, three days after he was in the hospital. Nick, 

HOST: she went to China. And by the way, as he's convalescing and probably dying, she goes to China. And I don't know if you saw this, they were refinishing and repurposing the floors in their home as he's in the hospital.

it's incredible stuff. 

HOST 2: you g- she's gotta get prepared. It's, it's not an easy transition to a single life. 

HOST: you gotta get the turtle out of the house before they come in and take care of the floors. Am I right? 

HOST 2: Yeah. then, and then by the way, she's worried 'cause, they might have to bring him back and he's gonna have that, that bed from the hospital with the wheels and it's gonna, it could scuff the floors.

So yeah, might maybe she'll have to hold off on that. By the way, the- we... I don't know if it's even a thing, but, there's a whole thing now with w- all the, repairs and everything that, that Trump is doing is totally destroying the White House. I don't know if you've seen this. Gosh. All these terrible, they're doing a really bad job with everything because it's, they don't know who to hire for all this stuff.

but speaking of, so getting back to Mitch, I, I'm willing to believe that he's alive. it probably would've been nice if they had some sort of video, like really. But I'm willing to believe he's alive. I'm willing to believe that, the miracle of modern medicine, got him back, right?

'Cause it sounded like he didn't have a pulse when they got there, right? There, there was some reporting now of that. by the way, I... it's really impressive. We could talk about the whole conspiracy thing. There was video that was released, right? Somebody had from across the street of them loading him- Yep

into the, the ambulance that came out, recently. And, you have EMTs out there, who are, like, weighing in on what they're seeing and, the slightest details. It's fascinating because in theory, if you wanna take some of those words, it was like, yeah, the guy, they... he wasn't moving at all.

they put him on the special thing that they use for people who are, like, dead or whatever they are, or, i- immobile. and at any rate, so yeah, so I, I guess I don't even know if that was answering your question. The bottom line for me is yes, I'm willing to believe he's alive. and you know what, who knows?

He, he might recover. He might end up making it, wheeling back in the Senate. We- the same thing with, Feinstein.

HOST: I, you know what? Actually, what you're bringing up I think has a lot of possibility that, he will be rolled back into the Senate. And, it might... It actually, the evolution of these things, it might actually be even worse than the Dianne Feinstein situation. You know what I mean? that is the, the perfect in for Mitch McConnell.

HOST 2: but it couldn't... Hang on, real quick. it couldn't be worse. She was on death's d- Like it w- it was so bad she couldn't even, see, I don't think. And 

HOST: that- But I think, I think what you just said has a lot of possibility of happening. I, and for the record, I wanna say If he were dead, the conspiracy that would be necessary in order to keep that out of the press, I don't buy that.

I think at that point, every time people talk about conspiracy theories, it just becomes so large and it becomes so complicated and so many people are implicated in it and have to play roles. I think this goes to Occam's razor. I think he is not dead, and I think that he's in really bad shape. Everyone has been saying to me, obviously this, this thing is generated, it's AI generated.

I don't think it is. That doesn't mean that it was taken yesterday. That doesn't mean that, it wasn't doctored. But it very well could have been taken yesterday, right? They might have cleaned him up and put him up and did this or did that. I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility that it's an actual photo.

I think it's also important, Nick... I saw people, 'cause I said something about this when I posted this photo, and I wanna get to the actual important situation here. People were like, "Oh, this picture in the paper, like it's supposed to be a baseball player, but it's got an Adidas logo on it. MLB players don't use Adidas, and, the College World Series didn't have anybody in it that had Adidas."

And it's like you're looking for clues in everything, right? That's the environment that we're in, where we're just... I keep talking about this and I've talked about it for years, Nick. I've talked about mystification. 

The more that power moves behind walls, the more that we are left looking for signs and wonders and clues, right?

And everybody's always doing this and always doing that and trying to come up with these big intricate stories. And what does it take away from? It takes away from the main problem here, which is that this country is run by a gerontocratic group of wealth class, 

volunteers and signifiers, right?

We ha- W- this is, it- it's like the Soviet Union before its collapse. You look around and it's a bunch of people who are corrupt, who are just staying in office and doing all of this stuff, and it becomes sclerotic. The problem isn't that Mitch McConnell has died and they're hiding his death. The problem is that we have a political class that i- it is staying so long because they're getting rich and because they're serving the interest of a wealth class, and that creates this larger issue.

So it ge- it moves away from the actual problem, which is Mitch McConnell should not be in power right now He should have been gone a long time ago. And a lot of these people should have been gone. and quite frankly, you called it out when we were talking about Dianne Feinstein, that's elder abuse.

Yeah. She shouldn't have been in that situation. No. And Mitch McConnell, as many minutes as he has left on the Earth, he shouldn't be dealing with this shit. he's an evil person and he's caused incredible evil things, but quite frankly, we should not have this political class that's still grasping onto power by their fingernails, and all of these people around him, 

around them, who are using them to keep serving the same benefactors who've been paying their bills and making them rich.

HOST 2: and just to make you more upset, when they wheel him into the Senate chamber, they're all gonna applaud for him, left and right- 

HOST: 100% ... on both 

HOST 2: sides. 100%. they're not gonna, sit there. And but I think that part of the thing that you... I thought the point you were gonna make about the conspiracy thing isn't necessarily the geriatric nature how all these things...

It is the fact that it's not transparent. They con- Yeah ... consistently withhold information across the thing that, that, has to be filled. The void needs to be filled with something. And okay, conspiracy that he was dead is a conspiracy, but, what about this notion that they're trying to, just run this out until after the, deadline for the special election?

HOST: August 

HOST 2: 3rd. 

HOST: Yep. 

HOST 2: Yeah. th- is that a conspiracy or is that... That's probably real. And we, we- That's probably real ... come up with more real things, that, maybe they can e- all right, he's not gonna die before then, but he can, step down after that and then that still triggers the same thing.

but either way, I would like to say yes, the elderly abuse thing is real and, there, there's no reason why anybody should have had to be forced to do this. And Biden's probably in that same realm as well, and then, here we are.

HOST: one of the things we've been talking about is that ageism winds up being, I think in political discourse, less of This kind of pat generational conflict story, that we've heard endlessly.

We have had a show about generations and how they're marketing ploys more than anything else. There has long been young versus old, old versus young discourse dating back to ancient Greece, ancient China, everything, right? But that all this winds up being useless, right? It doesn't account for class, it doesn't account for racism, for oppression, for anti-LGBTQ currents, other modes of suppressing people's voices.

And once one accounts for that, perhaps it can be useful to talk about ageism as part of that, but this winds up being pat. It's just, vague claims about, as you said, "Okay, boomer," right? Boomer oppression without really qualifying which boomers maybe we're talking about or the real power analysis here.

So Windsor, I'd love if you could just discuss a bit how ageism and this idea of gerontocracy winds up being a really good way to flatten questions of power by shoving it into this generational discourse, but avoiding the real issues that are at stake. 

GUEST: Yeah. So what started me on this issue was just seeing some of the vitriol directed at older people.

generations aren't a monolith, and there are lots of lovely boomers and lovely older people, and it just was really indiscriminate. And I think that's what started me on it, but I really got a lot deeper into it when I was researching the article, and I came across Elon Musk's take on it. And Elon Musk, not only the richest person in the world, but someone who inveighs against the woke mind virus being a threat to human civilization.

And his take in his interview in Business Insider, which, he talked about a lot of things. But he was basically saying that people don't change their minds, they just die, and that older people are suffocating our society, they're holding back progress, and that the answer to that is to prohibit them from holding office I think the limit that he gave was 70 years old.

And that totally crystallized what was going on for me because as you pointed out, Musk is the richest person in the world. He is the very definition of the establishment. And I think 

the framing of our problems as stemming from gerontocracy and not something like plutocracy or patriarchy or white supremacy serves three main functions, and I think they're connected.

And the first is that, as you say, it misdirects from those things. It takes attention away from them. The real sources of our problem are the structures of capitalism, their neoliberal ideology, there's racism, sexism, and the role of the ultra-rich in all of this. 

So it misdirects away from that, but then once that anger is taken away, it's undirected anger.

And then I feel like people like Musk and people like Peter Thiel, who has similarly criticized the gerontocracy, I feel like that they can then harness that undirected anger to make themselves seem like outsiders. 

HOST 2: To support Blake Masters. The guy who's running for Congress who acts and looks just like a school shooter, but yeah, who's like, what, 40-something.

GUEST: Yeah. I think they take that and they harness it for their own purposes, and they're the consummate insiders, and they're using it to draw a distinction between themselves and the people, other people in power, and there's really not much difference there. 

HOST 2: Right. Right. 

GUEST: The final thing that I think is connected is that it divides people, and it...

I think there is something to be said for, the generations being pitted against each other. I think that's a lot of what's happening, and it obscures the fact that I as a millennial share a lot of interests with another boomer who's situated similarly economically. But when you frame it as gerontocracy or, our leadership is too old, and there is a kernel of truth to that, but when you really get into the stigma and the hatred that's attached with those ideas, that separates me from the other people I might unite with to undertake the collective action that's necessary to actually challenge the problems we're facing.

HOST 2: Yeah, 'cause one of the things that bothers me so much about it, 'cause I've had this argument with people a lot on social media, is they'll say, older people have a tendency to be richer." Now, of course, there's a really good New York Times article about why that is, which is that poor people die younger.

GUEST: Mm. 

HOST 2: So by definition, right? But of course, a lot of people who live in poverty are old as well. 

GUEST: Yeah. 

HOST 2: you're railing against this kind of vague cohort- 

GUEST: ... 

HOST 2: where if you eliminate the standard deviation, I'm sure it's not much different. And, part of me's like, come on, are you really gonna act like we don't live in a society that absolutely obsesses over, fetishizes, gives credence to, and loves young people over old people?

look, especially when it's gendered, right? you can't go five seconds without Some Hollywood star becoming irrelevant or some professional person being told to go out to pasture because they're too old. Like our society in many ways hates old people. 

HOST: Mm-hmm. 

HOST 2: And it strikes me as a little daft.

To be quite honest, what I think a lot of it is like fairly moderately wealthy middle class white people who want like a vector of oppression And they latch on to, not being old as, their form of oppression, which strikes me as tedious 'cause they need, an oppressive identity, and it's come on.

really? Yeah. That's maybe a little unfair, but I d- I do think that's a part of it. And it strikes me as something, you It's such a weird concept to live and eat and breathe oxygen in this world, especially in the United States, and not see the sort of systemic contempt our society has for old people.

Even if, again, people who are old disproportionately are in power, disproportionately may have more money 'cause everyone who was poor died off, that strikes me as someone who doesn't really live in the world that I live in because it's everywhere. It's everywhere you see it, There's the lame olds.

They suck. They're irrelevant. They tell old war stories and blah. people just hate old people in general. It's similar to how s- our society hates fat people or hates anyone who isn't deemed attractive. 

GUEST: Yeah, I think that's a 

good point, first of all, that poor people die younger. I think the other factor with both power and wealth, like financial capital and social capital, they both accumulate over time.

That's just how they work. It takes money to make money, and compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. So I think that's true with not just wealth, but power as well. And it's not that age doesn't generate those things themselves. there are no intrinsic benefits to growing older.

What you're going to get is more health conditions to deal with. And then as you point out, socially, it's not perceived positively. 

HOST 2: Mm-hmm. 

GUEST: What age can do for you is if you have been born into wealth or have been lucky enough to acquire it, it can grow that wealth over time. So I think, wealth obviously has intrinsic benefits.

You can buy stuff with it. You can control people with it. Race doesn't have any intrinsic benefits, but you're more likely as a white person, for example, to be born into a positive economic circumstance, and you're more likely, if you're not born into a positive one, you're more likely to be able to get into one.

Age I think, has none of that, but it can magnify those differences. 

HOST: Yeah, one of the things that I keep thinking about as we're talking is the common arguments we hear, and I, I think, as you pointed out, there are some on the right, some on the left, some in the what may nominally be called the center.

I don't know if there's a center, but, center as in ideology, not a middle of the road notion of kind of playing both sides. But, there are these common things, right? So we hear that our political class is too old. They're out of touch. They don't have to live with the consequences of their policies or their votes, right?

So therefore, climate chaos is not so much a concern. So these are, like, common things we hear. But at the same time, this seems to totally ignore That there are plenty of shitty young people, right? There are so many young people who vote for terrible people, who have bad views of the world based on the, communities they grew up in, the narratives that are flowing through our media and our pop culture.

this is rampant. So where do you think this divide happens? are politicians too old at this point, a- across the board, and are not taking urgent issues seriously? Or is this, again, just as you said, misdirection away from what we're really talking about, which winds up being about class, about racism, about wealth inequalities, about ideology as a whole?

GUEST: Well, I think it's a fact that our leadership is disproportionately old, and I think that's the kernel of truth in the propaganda of the idea that we live in a gerontocracy. 

HOST: Mm-hmm. 

GUEST: I agree that it obscures more than it elucidates, for sure, and I think the answers that people are coming up with are the wrong answers.

I see a lot of talk about age limits. It's not just Elon Musk. There was a YouGov poll that found that 58% of people supported an age limit, and the majority was between 60 and 70. So a lot of people are keen on basically disenfranchising older people, and that's not going to solve any of our problems.

I think the only way that we can s- solve these problems is by finding like-minded people who are in all generations and trying to convince them of the best way to go about things. And I think, again, this logic of gerontocracy, it really does... I think it makes it very hard for older people to be open to new ideas.

it buttresses the basis of the criticism in the first place. 

HOST 2: Right. 

GUEST: The idea is that older people are unable to adapt to new ideas, but when you attack people, and especially aspects of their identity that they can't change, they will shut down, and they won't be willing to listen to you.

HOST 2: Mm-hmm. 

GUEST: So I think it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Next, Section B, THE GERONTOCRACY CASE

HOST: So nobody knows what's happening with Kentucky senator, Mitch McConnell, other than that he's in the hospital. People have been trying to get information about his condition to pretty much no avail. What do you make of the weird shroud of secrecy around the senator's health?

Yeah, clearly if they had evidence that he was doing well and actually participating in l-lengthy conversations about matters of state, I think that they would have released that information. So my, my assumption based on the fact that there's no information that's coming out is that things are not going so well.

And, it's generally not a good sign when you hear nothing about a politician, particularly after we have a report that they've been in cardiac arrest, which is what's happened with McConnell 

HOST: So we're gonna get into this, but Congress is old. They just are. But how common is it for a senator or representative to be literally unable to carry out their duties for health reasons, and everybody's like, "This is fine"?

It's incredibly common, incredibly bipartisan, maybe the one bipartisan thing that we have left. 

Dianne Feinstein was allowed to remain in Congress for a while when it became clear for months, that she was unable to really perform her duties. Eleanor Holmes Norton has, also, receded, as well.

There was a congressman, congresswoman, I believe, who was checked into a memory care facility while also simultaneously serving in Congress. So this is incredibly common. you know the phrase that Congress is the world's best, nursing home I think sadly has, has more and more evidence, with every passing year.

HOST: Is this new? I'm aware that people are live- living longer, and what it means to be 75 is different than when LBJ died at 64. But I don't remember this kind of thing happening, 20 years ago when I first was thinking and following politics. 

There were people like Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd who got close to 100 in the Senate.

But my, my sense is like yours that, it was not quite as common. I think if you plot just the average age of the US, Senate over time, you see that it's gotten older and older, as well. And, the fact that we've made strides in cancer treatment, healthcare, et cetera, means that, the thing that's, that we haven't made as many strides on are dementia, Alzheimer's, these kinds of things.

And we have this kind of perverse system where, politically there are great incentives to remaining in Congress. You get more seniority, you get better, committee placements, and it's great. You get a staff, all of these kinds of things, and incumbency is such a great advantage in terms of your ability to get reelected.

So there's really no incentive to move unless you are voluntarily, going to do that, and a lot of people clearly on both parties, find it very hard to move on. 

HOST: What gets me is that every cycle we hear voters say that they want young and fresh candidates, but in reality, they keep electing the same people long after they start qualifying for AARP membership. Chuck Grassley won re-election back in 2022 at 89 years old.

Why does this keep happening? 

It's a really good question. people like incumbents as much as they say that they don't. it's a bit like, in polling when you ask people, "What do you think about education?" "Oh, it's terrible." "What do you think about your kids' school?" "Eh, it's not that bad." "What do you think about healthcare in America?"

"It's pretty terrible." "What do you think about your health insurance?" "It's not that bad." I, I think that there's something similar that happens to politicians. The abstract people think, "Okay, we wanna vote the bums out. We don't like them." But you think about your local politician, whether it's, Susan Collins, Chuck Grassley, politicians in small states that have established kind of long ties to the community and, and there it goes, he's not so bad.

I'll vote for him." I think something like that is going on here as well. 

HOST: I think we also have, and you wrote about this, older voters are wealthier and they vote more often. So is there kind of this feedback loop where you have politicians who are just serving older generations because they're the ones with money and influence, and the older generations are then re-electing those politicians?

It, they definitely play an outsized role in primary elections, and they play a big role in the campaign donation system. So the median campaign donor is 68, I believe. the median primary voter is quite old as well, in their 60s. and in a lot of ways politics is geared around service to older voters.

That's why, Social Security and Medicare are treated as untouchable entitlements, and I think one of the genius moves that Donald Trump has made, and he made it back in 2016, 2015, was to say that Republicans are no longer going to be the party about reforming those programs. and that was a play for older voters.

It was successful, at the time. and I think that particularly in the early stages of campaigning before the general election, the, early money game, the primary game, really taking a stance against the AARP, taking a stance that's seen as disfavorable to older voters 

definitely pays a political, uh, penalty.

HOST: Is this part of the reason, in your view, that young people are struggling right now, that our government is built to serve older people? 

So it's a complicated question because, America is simultaneously a place that has, problems, economic problems, a lot of economic discontent, but if you look at the living standards, they're very high.

They're higher than they've ever been. If you look at actually individual earnings, for people by generation, you see that Gen Z is earning more than millennials, who earn more than Gen X, who earn more than baby boomers. So why doesn't it feel that way if the economists and, my spreadsheets and these kinds of things show the opposite?

and I think that is, There's an argument that, we're much more generous to elderly Americans than younger people. That's indisputably true. Social Security is a, very generous entitlement. At the very, very maximum, it could be $100,000 per couple. compare that to what we spend for children, to alleviate child poverty, obviously much less.

I think the disconnect that a lot of people feel is due to basically the cost of housing, the, the cost of, things that are regulation constrained. So I think that, people look at the system and they say, "Yeah, I might be making more in real dollar terms, than my predecessors, but also a house is four times as expensive."

And that's where I think the blame game of, what went wrong with previous generations, where it all gets a bit more complicated. 

HOST: We've talked about how, um, basically our, our Congress, our Senate are very old at this point. But you talk about how this oldness Actually may be baked in. Like, you talk about how the Constitution, you think, is a gerontological document, which I just love that phrase. I wanted to say it aloud. Um, can you explain why?

'Cause I don't think people think of it that way necessarily. 

GUEST: Well, the American Revolution, which we just commemorated, was conducted by relatively young guys. I mean, Ben Franklin wasn't that old. Uh, you know, and th- then he was still around in 1787 when the Federalists got together and crafted our Constitution, and I think it's impossible not to, like, see them as, as gerontocrats.

Uh, they, they thought that giving power to the elderly would make everyone better off. They believed that they were embarking on an experiment in having a republic. You know, a, a lot of people could vote, but only a few could have property, and their perquisites needed to be protected. So when there were very few examples in the world, the first thing they did is create a Senate, which is literally named after old men, and for all federal office, they institutionalized age minimums.

HOST: But not maximums. No maximum. And, 

GUEST: uh, famously, in the other council of elders beyond the Senate, the Supreme Court, they said there's life tenure. Uh, and that means you can't force a ju- a federal judge to retire absent, you know, horrendous conduct that's impeachable 

HOST: This sort of goes hand in glove to m- me with the fact that the founders, they didn't love the idea of democracy.

They wanted to have controls on democracy so that it didn't get too, quote-unquote, "out of hand." Is that what they're doing here with this age minimums to enter public service? 

GUEST: I mean, I'd say they didn't want to have democracy at all. There's no word democracy in the Constitution. There's no right to vote in the Constitution.

And we, we know the, the sordid stories, not just of the Senate, but of the Electoral College, uh, which really was about transferring power to an elite caste of notables. And it was absolutely because they thought everyone would be better off if the people didn't rule in the United States. And so surprising that th- that they had these views, but what I was shocked by is just how much faith they put in the elderliness of the ruling class and baked that into the Constitution. 

HOST: You wrestle a lot with voting and, um, I think this is probably one of your most controversial takes, where you talk about whether votes should be weighted differently based on somebody's age. Like, you toy, um, with all sorts of ideas that would give certain people more power. Um, I think this would be so hard to do.

Um- 

GUEST: Well, we've done it because, I mean, the voter in Montana is, has a much weightier vote than I do. So- Right ... like- But 

HOST: it's in- We've done ... it's, it feels invisible, I think, to most voters. I don't think we're saying it out loud as much. You and I are. 

GUEST: I think you're totally right. Well, so let me just concede that ma- many things I propose, because I'm a spitballer, are unlikely.

But the response to a problem can't just be that it's insoluble. So let me just get, like, very clear that I offer many modest solutions, much more modest ones when it comes to voting, things like stopping how we punish young people for mobility through the kinds of registration requirements that we have, which systematically benefit older voters.

Uh, institutionalizing mandatory voting and/or providing a holiday for voting because older people either have retired or have power in their workplaces to leave to vote, which younger people do not. One more example of systematic discrimination. 

HOST: Yeah, one idea I've heard, and I'm curious how you feel about it, is like, for instance, I think a lot of people who are interested in democracy talk about primaries, how primaries r- you know, warp voting, and if you just had a primary day- Yes

a national primary day- 

GUEST: Yes ... 

HOST: it would make things so much easier, and I think it would solve some of the problems you're talking about, which is like the, everyone would know when it is, and so younger people would come. It wouldn't be confusing, all sorts of things. There really are fixes like this that exist that I just think we're not talking about 

GUEST: I think most people actually would be open to having fewer elections because our best political scientist shows that America has way, way more.

And the predictable effect of that is that younger people will show up once, but not eight times. And when you look at the eighth election, the median voter is over 60 or 70. And so it's really the rules which be-because of these like effects need to be changed. Now it's true, I flirt with this more edgy idea and say, "Well, wait, w- I'm for equality, but equality of what?

And if I have 80 years left to live and someone else has 10 Why should equality mean we get the same vote where the elderly voter gets to dictate a future I will see and he will not? 

HOST: Yeah, it's interesting because, um, what you're articulating is really-- It's a bigger idea that the project we're doing in government is building towards this future, um, where right now we're in this, this place where we're building towards the past, right?

We're making America great again. What you're articulating is really that we need to be building towards something, something we probably won't see, and I think that's actually a beautiful way to think of the project of government. It's just we're in such a retro place right now that it feels impossible.

And, um, yeah, the one thing I, I struggled with in your writing is that I feel like we have an entire cultural system built up around people growing up, people, you know, from birth to age eighteen going through a K through twelve system. You know, we ha-- It's about civic engagement. Here's what you're about to do.

You're gonna get a job. You're gonna do a thing. We have no step-down system. We have, you retire, you fall off a cliff. Maybe you have money, maybe you don't. Things get bad because you get sick. It just-- it-- There's nothing akin to that, and I think that's a real problem because if you're asking people to really reckon with the fact that they're older and they need to kinda give some of their stuff up, they have to also feel safe, and safety comes from those cultural systems that just don't exist right now.

Your piece looks at the US as somewhat of a gerontocracy. Is that ... W- what does that mean for the long term for the US? Do we have historical examples of other, developed nations that became gerontocracies?

Because we're not alone. a lot of developed democracies are getting older and older. 

So there, there are a lot of contemporary similarities. Europe has very similar, dynamics as we do where we had a, a, a baby boom, and now the baby boom is getting older, and we have pension systems that were also

So you know, a lot of things happened in the last 100 years, right? People started living longer. They started having fewer kids. We set up these welfare states. great. And now we are at a point where fertility's low, people are living longer, they- health costs are high, and, there are demands made by voters to keep these systems, uh, generous and arguably more generous than they have been before.

And so what we see in America is replicated in the UK. In the UK they have something called the triple lock, which, is an amount that the, annual benefits, for elderly, uh, residents are increased. And basically it is the highest of inflation or wages or a number. And so basically it's always mechanically going to be higher than, than inflation.

and France has a similar kind of debate about, every time there's an attempt to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, there are a lot of protests. And one thing that's also happening that's causing, uh, these commitments to be made, these commitments that are consuming a greater share of GDP that, if you extrapolate and look at the actuarial tables for 10 years from now, there's no mathematical way that these, this is possible to, to continue to give.

O- one reason that it, that governments aren't really changing anything right now is that, older voters are a bigger share of the electorate, just mechanically, right? And the cost of going against, uh, these programs, is too high for any politician to play. That's true in America with the change that Trump made to the Republican Party.

It's true in the UK, right? So Nigel Farage might be willing to be iconoclastic about so many things. He's not willing to touch the triple lock. Andy Burnham, the incoming prime minister, we assume is not gonna touch the triple lock. No one wants to touch it, because it's just a loser. And that dynamic, that political dynamic is replicated in basically every country that's going through this right now.

HOST: So to that point, if older people hold the most power and money, and they're holding onto that power and money, and they're using that power and money to keep each other in power, and no one wants to go against them, how do we change this? Because, to your point, it's ... It can't last, and it doesn't feel good for the future of the country 

the way of all things is that there will be a transition at, at some point, right?

So there will be a, a transition of power, to, to younger people in, in time. I don't, like the heir to Donald Trump, right? Is going to be someone like JD Vance. and there will be a transition in terms of wealth going on to, to people. So there's a kind of argument of just wait for it to happen.

It'll happen. there are others who have more radical ideas, ideas about l- literally, reducing the weight of the elderly vote, mechanically increasing the weight of the young vote. And I, I It's provocative, but I, I don't subscribe, to that idea. But, there are more neutral grounds that are, I think more palatable.

But one thing is that the rise of the elderly as a share of the population has also corresponded with an increase in their share of the wealth of this country, right? To an astonishing degree, like more and more dollars are held by older people. and if you t- if you just tax income at higher rates, you will reduce that inequality, in, in wealth terms.

Political inequality I think is much harder to deal with, right? Because there's one person, one vote. you can imagine taxation scheme that actually, equalizes the playing field. And then I think there are also, if the root of discontent is people, young people's inability to access housing, and other, constraints.

There are things you can do to increase, the accessibility of housing that I think, don't require a kind of generational warfare settlement in order to get to. but would be, beneficial to the young and also for the elderly 

HOST: your book is deeply researched, and I was really shocked by the imbalance of how many, quote, old people are in the United States overall, as, as a percentage of the overall population.

But then, of course, in politics, that's even more intense. So I wanna jump to what I consider the most radical proposal, which is to abolish the Senate. You argue that the Senate is a gerontocratic chokehold on the democratic process. So I think this is not maybe obvious to most people. How does the Senate specifically function as an instrument of gerontocracy, and how would we go about abolishing it? 

GUEST: Great question. Just as background, most of humanity has lived under gerontocracy, and it used to be quite open. Like most people around the world for most time have had councils of elders rule them And of course, there were kings, and there could be even young kings. But before that, and alongside monarchy, there were systems of gerontocracy.

And when our founders met in 1787 to draft the Constitution, they decided to reboot gerontocracy in various ways. One way was through saying in the Constitution that you had to be a certain age to serve for federal office, and that excluded a gargantuan percentage of the people alive in 1787. the 35-year-old age minimum for president excluded upwards of 70%.

But then they did something else, which was very literally to create an American council of elders. And of course, it's called the Senate, which is named after old men. So we have a branch of government that's named after old people, and that was intentional. There were very few senates in the world at the time, like one or two, and now there are a lot on the American model because the American founders wanted to get older people in office on principle.

Now, the Senate has played a pretty baleful role in the couple centuries since, and the astonishing thing is that it seems impossible to abolish on paper, because Article V of the Constitution, which talks about how it can be amended, actually says you can't get rid of the Senate. It's like the one thing you can't change about American democracy, 

gerontocracy is hardwired into our culture, but I think it can change. And one thing we could do is just say, all the cool stuff the Senate gets to do, 'cause it has special powers, is just gonna be reassigned, and we're not gonna abolish the thing." Maybe we keep the old guys around, old women, too, in our day, for a kinda consultative role.

But like all the other ways of confronting gerontocracy, we would be saying we shouldn't let age be correlated with power anymore. Maybe if you think older people are wise or older people's bodies, like the Senate, are wise, they can consult, they can give advice, but they can't tell us what to do. And so we could kinda make an end run around that provision in the Constitution, and it would be pretty easy if there were political will.

HOST: Yeah, that's always the question, political will. sticking with politicians serving- Yeah ... you also discuss campaign finance reform as a solution for getting younger people to serve in office. And again, I think this is not maybe super obvious in a way that age limits are. So what's like the 60-second crash course on why money in politics specifically advantages older Americans?

GUEST: as everyone knows, we have a pretty private way of funding elections, and that's so out of step with the global democracy. So on a podcast about saving democracy, I think the biggest thing we have to do is move to public funding, which means the government organizes the funding of elections on fair terms.

Having a privatized system, especially in the age of Citizens United, means that you are out looking for funders if you wanna run, and that privileges older people because as we can discuss more later, it's astonishing how disproportionate the control of wealth is by older Americans compared to everyone else.

And so it's natural that then those who are funding campaigns are gonna be relatively older, and the data is pretty stunning. In some elections, the donors on average are in their 60s or even 70s, and some of the most famous donors, like Donald Trump's, one of his lead donors named Timothy Mellon, was up there.

So I think there's an easy fix for that one if we decided to do something about campaign finance, about Citizens United, about the equation of money and speech, and above all, about our big mistake in this country, which was to let private individuals be the funders of elections. 

HOST: notably, New York City has a new young mayor- True

in large part because there is public matching dollars- Absolutely ... eight to one in New York, and I think a lot of people don't know that. It made it possible for a young person to run. 

GUEST: Absolutely, and it is possible 'cause we have some kinda democracy for ordinary people, small donors, to circumvent our system, and that was famously the case even in producing a then not as old candidacy of Bernie Sanders in 2016.

But now he's, pushing it, but we know we can publicly fund election through, in a sense, a huge number of private donors that's closer to something that's more democratic. But it's rare, and most elections end up being controlled by older people and that's why I'm-- my main message is actually, let's get beyond politicians because it may not matter how much the politicians are if they're serving old money 

HOST: Is gerontocracy, like everything else under neoliberalism, a class project in that only senior of wealth benefit from gerontocracy in America? 

GUEST: I think so. now, you could have, poor old men who win elections and stay in the House, so it's not gonna be perfect. But I think the basic answer to your question, which is a really important one, is that we can't talk about class in America except by recognizing that it's, it intersects with age along with gender and race.

and so I document very, I think, grimly in the book just how unfair it now is, to have a class system in the United States that's age inflected. and of course, that has effects on older people too because if you're old and rich, you live longer than if you're old and poor. and so what I think we need to do is not, choose between the age factor and the class f- factor, but say there's no choice, and we need to figure out how age and class, go together in so many instances.

One reason is that there are a lot of formal perquisites that older people get, especially protecting their housing, especially from tax. and so that means that they've become very asset rich in the tens of millions. and if we care about oligarchy, we have to see just how far it's what I call oldigarchy in the book.

And the receipts are all there, and the info is really staggering, I think, when we just see not just how much more money, in all of its forms that older people have, acquired, but that it's gotten far worse in a neoliberal era. So the period since the 1970s i- is the one in which we've had this aging of the American population, and that's no accident.

HOST: So I've had guest after guest on this show, and going back 20, 30 years now, who, let's say it's a climate change activist who's in their 20s. I ask them, "Do you hold your parents responsible in any way for, the state of the world that we're in?" Whatever the crisis that we're facing.

And person after person have told me, "No, I don't hold my parents accountable." Why don't we hold the generation or generations before us accountable? Why must they be, for example, the greatest generation when clearly they were not? 

GUEST: the greatest generation really is associated thanks to Tom Brokaw's book of that name with those who fought World War II, and, they're all dead basically.

now boomers are dying off in great numbers, but many are still around. and I think, what I wanna avoid doing is scapegoating individuals or groups or generations because I think the boomers, in a sense, got lucky. they were around at the right time, first of all, to come into a, a pretty good life and path forward early in their lives, and then to stay around thanks to life extension, in part because, of the abolition of mandatory retirement, in part because of big real estate bubbles that they enjoyed and that have made them often very wealthy.

and yet, just like I'd say, it's no individual white person's fault that there's white supremacy, yet we should still oppose it, I wanna say the same thing about gerontocracy. The problem isn't old people, it's gerontocracy, which is a malignant structure or system. And a blame game is not gonna help us all face it.

And especially since there are fewer younger people together, for, for, there are fewer younger people, compare-- especially compared to the boomer generation. I think we can't imagine a politics of reform that isn't based on intergenerational solidarity, in part 'cause as we discussed, gerontocracy hurts, many old people as well.

And so what I imagine is not like blaming or scapegoating a generation, more saying, "This is unfair. This is something everyone should wanna change," and figure out how, the, the progressives can, seek that majority that they will need if they wanna face populism and Donald Trump and, the next, decade or two.

HOST: You write that the most common age of donors in recent elections can run as high as seventy. Finally, older Americans are backed by the best-funded advocacy group in world history, the AARP, and enjoy the most governmental benefits by a vast degree. The government is bought and paid for by those who are up in years and is organized for their sake.

Does the AARP not only lobby, when you watch the commercials, it's about promoting elder care, but, also, undermining benefits for younger generations? Are the pro-- are they pro-elderly and view social funding as a zero-sum game? 

GUEST: I think it's a cause group and it's just st-staggering how gargantuan it is in numbers and money.

Lobbying is a small part of what it does. but it's nonetheless incredibly effective. And, it's-- it has pushed through, I think, noxious reform like the abolition of mandatory retirement to-- in which it was a central player. But I think its main function is actually stabilizing the way things are, and that means the form of elder benefits we have.

It's not been very good on the way the welfare state is racialized and gendered. It's not tried to, push through a reform for the sake of long-term care, which I mentioned is excluded from Medicare. Part of the issue is that it became so big that the AARP is always divided against itself because, it has neoliberals and socialists in it.

and, the-- it, it became almost an agent of s- of stasis. and it is-- it, it needs to be understood mainly because of the electoral threat that the older voter poses to politicians. I think politicians live in fear of doing anything that would be campaigned against, by the organization.

and the, the effect is that, in a sense, the, the AARP doesn't have to do a lot because it's so fearful, in making what one scholar called the electoral bluff, that it stands for the voting power of older people, which as I document is immense. in, in one primary in New Mexico in 2024, the median age of the voters was 72.

And so the elder skew of our hashtag democracy is scandalous, and it in a sense plays into The AARP's power. Where I'm concerned is that there's no comparable organization for people under 55. And l- like we, we stigmatize youthful forms of politics like protests and call for law and order, and yet there's this gargantuan, cause group for older people that, has a good reputation.

And so I'm, I really don't think it's the responsibility of AARP to save America, but it's our responsibility to make sure that everyone's fairly represented and everyone gets advocates for their interests. 

HOST: The notion of gerontocracy, that is a society ruled by the elderly, is in many ways baked into human ideas of leadership, of wisdom and experience, and of course, in our politics, has been there for millennia.

Across human society, elders have long held prominent leadership roles in families, communities, kingly courts, and across countries. The very first book of Plato's Republic features the philosopher Socrates noting how crucial the wisdom of the aged is, saying, quote, "They have gone before us along a road which we must all travel in our turn."

End quote. 

The Romans named their most prestigious seat of small R republican government senatus. The word senatus, and in turn our own word senate, is derived from the Latin word senex, meaning an old man, and thereby conferring those ideas of gravitas, experience, wisdom. The Senate, by definition, is an assembly of old men.

Now, the US Senate and the rest of our federal political class largely bears this out. The median age of members of Congress has increased over the past four decades. Between 1980 and 1982, the average age was 47 years old. It's now over 64, with more than a quarter of sitting senators 70 years or older.

Half of all senators are over 65. The current Congress, the 117th, is the oldest on average of any Congress in the past two decades. The average age of members of the House of Representatives is slightly lower at 58 years old. But Joe Biden is the second consecutive oldest president ever elected. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn are both 82.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is 83. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is 81, a decade older than Senate Majority Leader, that young whippersnapper, Chuck Schumer. Now, Dianne Feinstein turned 89 in June. Chuck Grassley turns 89 this September. Plus, we all know older people vote more consistently than younger people.

In 2023, more Americans will turn 65 than ever before. Worldwide, the number of people 80 years or older is expected to triple by 2050 to reach 426 million. But to bring it back to the United States, according to Pew, while people over 50 make up 34% of the US population, they represent 52% of the electorate.

In mayoral elections, the median voter age is 57, despite the median age of the American population being only 38. 

HOST 2: So it's clear that both the average voter and, of course, the average representative in our democracy is much, much older than the mean of our society. That is objectively true. But of course, although it has gotten more acute of late, it is not a new critique.

It goes back many decades. Some of the earlier stirrings of warnings about an aging government began in the 1940s. Already here, you can see age was used as a proxy for politics. The Morning Herald in Pennsylvania wrote, this is from November of 1944, quote, "George Gurevitch, formerly of the University of Strasbourg, points out in detail the role of gerontocracy in the collapse of France.

France had never known the trust in young and new men characteristics of the United States. Dr. Gurevich further points out the dangers of gerontocracy, government by older men, the abyss which resulted in the proliferation of youth groups, young radicals, young socialists, young rightists, et cetera, alike only in their revolt against the faith of gerontocrats, all susceptible to the propaganda of fascist or communist.

Are the champions of the fourth term fully aware of the sinister menace of gerontocracy in this country?" 

HOST: Now, Joe Biden, who's the subject of much gerontocracy discourse that we'll be talking about later in the episode, used age critiques as a bludgeon when he was younger against political opponent Senator J. Caleb Boggs back in 1972.

As Nathan V. Laurenz noted for The Nation in a July 2022 article, quote, "Biden argued that Boggs had lost that twinkle in his eyes and was just not a fighter You can swap the names Boggs and Biden, and these attacks from 1972 would be indistinguishable from those used in 2022. Of course, such comments about age are far from a one-way street.

Biden, who was 29 when first elected senator, faced criticism for his youthfulness and was derisively referred to as a young kid by Delaware Governor Russell Peterson, end quote. 

HOST 2: Use of the term gerontocracy also accelerated in the middle of the 20th century, partially as code for governments we don't like.

At the height of the Cold War and its waning years, the word often appeared in coverage of China and the Soviet Union to portray their governments as bloated, excessively powerful, and ineffective. In this excerpt from 1976, a syndicated piece written on the death of Zhou Enlai, the former Premier of the People's Republic of China, who died at 78 while holding public office.

For some context, Mao Zedong was alive at the time, holding office until his death that same year at 82. The piece would use the politicians' ages, paying no attention to their policies or those policies' potential popularity, writing, quote, "This tendency towards gerontocracy is nothing new in China, when rulers usually have hung on till their deaths.

It has been fostered perhaps by the Chinese tradition of respect for the aged and certain institutional factors, such as a need to accommodate vast networks of personal ties, which are the cement of political power in China." The Los Angeles Times in 1983 wrote an article on, quote, "Kremlin's gerontocracy may be good for the West."

The San Francisco Examiner in 1992, "China talks economic reform. The Chinese gerontocracy is paying lip service again to free markets, but still not to political freedom." That same year in 1992, the media conversely began to characterize the newly elected fresh-faced Bill Clinton as a kind of counter to United States' own graying, out-of-touch governance.

The Washington Post wrote in November of 1992 after the election, quote, "Clinton has Europe thinking change." The piece presents Clinton's third way centrism, something that for decades had been essential to US Democratic Party politics regardless of the age of leaders, as refreshing deviation from politics as usual, writing, quote, this is the Washington Post, quote, "The generational change that Clinton represents goes beyond the biological dimensions," said Serge July, editor of the French daily Liberation.

He believes Clinton's biggest impact on European politics will be to accelerate the shedding of ideologies, to blur distinctions between left and right, as befits a man, quote, "who can so easily blend his support for feminism with support for the death penalty." Wow. Yeah. Okay, yeah. Noted feminist, Bill Clinton.

So here we see this idea that in the absence of meaningful ideological distinction, in the absence of someone who's fighting the rich or fighting for the disenfranchised, we have this very 1990s PR Pepsi marketing idea that Clinton is young. 

HOST: Mm-hmm. 

HOST 2: And they did this very, very more successfully even soon after with Tony Blair, that Tony Blair was young, and he was fresh, and the New Labor Party- Yeah, but Tony Blair didn't, 

HOST: play the saxophone on Arsenio.

HOST 2: Yeah, and they were gonna get rid of all the stodgy old Labor v- guard, and they were gonna embrace the free market as Clinton did. And so here you have the first real kinda effort to use age discourse and anti-gerontocracy discourse To flatten the ideology at work and to sell or make sexy and cool something which was basically a very similar platform to the one that Dukakis ran on in 1988, except for, of course, the, the death penalty being one of the major differences for obvious racist reasons.

But again, Dukakis ran as a neoliberal. He was in the new Democratic coalition. He was a centrist, but he was seen as being older or stodgy, and this is again, where you get this, how do we take something that is... 

has no discernible ideological positioning within the framework of the left, and is selling you a lot of, again, Social Security privatization, deficit reduction, a lot of right-wing ideas, 100,000 new police officers, whatever, what have you.

How do we make it cool to the kids- ... and for media? Well, he's young, and it's oh, young is good and old is lame, and old sucks, and young's good, right? And so let's just- 

HOST: Yeah, Clinton was with it, man. So this use of young politician versus the gerontocracy, we would see a lot more often starting in the 2010s.

In April of the year 2010, syndicated Washington Post columnist George Will cautioned that the, quote, "welfare state" would encourage what else, Adam? A, quote-unquote, "gerontocracy." Apparently because it unacceptably, of course for Will, makes life relatively comfortable for senior citizens, while singing the praises of a young Republican senatorial candidate named Marco Rubio.

Here's what Will wrote in April of 2010 in The Post. Quote, "Asked how the nation might address the projected $17.5 trillion in unfunded Social Security liabilities, Rubio said we should consider two changes for people 10 or more years from retirement. One would raise the retirement age. The other would alter the calculation of benefits.

Indexing them to inflation rather than wage increases would substantially reduce the system's unfunded liabilities." End quote. Will would go on in this article to state this, quote, "The 37-year-old Rubio's responsible answer to a serious question gives the nation a glimpse of a rarity, a brave approach to the welfare state's inevitable politics of gerontocracy."

End quote. 

HOST 2: So the old people who retire on Social Security are gonna live high on the hog- ... and create a gerontocracy unless we raise- 

HOST: And for legislating to allow people to live better lives in retirement, what are we doing? What kind of freedom is that? 

And Finally, Section C, HOW CONGRESS ACTUALLY WORKS

HOST: that allows us then to start getting into obviously the book, and I think the key place to start is with the term back channel policymaking. So can you tell us what you mean by this, and maybe walk us through an example so we have an idea of what this is in practice?

GUEST: Sure. So first, it's important to set the stage with a fact that I think is surprising to many people, maybe even some congressional scholars, and that is that 

a majority of US law is now made by federal agencies rather than by congressional statute. some scholars even say agencies is making up to, 90% of US law.

so how is that possible? So Congress over time has increasingly delegated policymaking authority to agencies for a number of reasons. One big one is that agencies often have more expertise and capacity than Congress. And actually, a lot has been said recently about the decline in Congress's capacity to fulfill its Article I res- responsibility.

So there's been, articles and books even written about this decline in congressional capacity in terms of a shortage of staff and high turnover rate among staff, the increase in demand on members of Congress and their staff from constituents and, due to an increase in policy complexity. members of Congress have also been raising these concerns themselves about the capacity issues in Congress.

So the House's Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress wrote about, these capacity issues, in their report, so things having to do with, retention issues of quality staffers. and very recently, there's actually been a rash of retirements in Congress, my former boss included. I think there's been maybe 30 to 40, retirement announcements even within the last couple of months, and several of the retiring members have complained about the difficulty of getting anything done in Congress.

They've been talking more about gridlock related to partisanship and polarization, but whether it's capacity issues or ideological gridlock, there is a clear sense that lawmakers are struggling to advance their policy priorities in Congress. the US House came to a literal standstill for three weeks in October after Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the speakership.

so Congress as an institution has struggled with gridlock, but individual rank-and-file legislators have really felt the brunt of it. there's actually this great scholar, this, Professor James Curry, so he's a professor at University of Utah, has a fantastic book called Legislating in the Dark that talks about the centralization of power under leadership and how rank-and-file legislators are often shut out of influencing policy.

so this brings us to my argument, and that is that these frustrated members of Congress are turning to the federal bureaucracy, and the federal bureaucracy, as I said, now makes the majority of law, to accomplish policy objectives that they would have a hard time accomplishing through the legislative process and I use this term backchannel policymaking to refer to the strategy members of Congress use in- to influence policy outside of the legislative process.

Specifically, members of Congress are using their direct interactions with agencies. So like for instance, when they call up an agency head on the phone or send an email, to urge or in some cases even pressure agencies to take action on a policy objective And, agencies, for their part, have an incentive to try to do what the member of Congress wants because Congress controls the agencies' budgets, and they can also retaliate in other ways, like demanding oversight or holding up nominees in the Senate if the agency doesn't do what the member of Congress requests.

and agencies actually have several tools at their disposal to try to assist a, with the lawmakers' policy goals. So there's what's known as rulemaking, which is a formal process that agencies use to make policy. there's also informal and also, less visible ways that agencies can make policy. these informal ways include what's called guidance or guidance documents.

Agencies can also use prosecutorial discretion. agencies can delay the implementation of a law if opponents of the law in Congress continue to try to fight its implementation. so for instance, the REAL ID Act was passed in 2005. and the REAL ID Act, it did a number of things, but a major one was that it banned people from boarding commercial airlines using just their driver's license, unless the driver's license was REAL ID compliant.

so the REAL ID Act, I should say, it could not have passed on its own. It could not have passed as a standalone bill. It didn't have enough support in Congress to pass on its own. But it was stuck into a tsunami relief bill that did pass, and there was substantial opposition to REAL ID even from powerful members of Congress who would have otherwise had a lot of influence over the legislation, like senior members of the Homeland Security Committee, for example.

but because of the procedure leadership used, those members didn't have as much influence as they otherwise would. So leadership essentially steamrolled it through. but after REAL ID became law, I can see in the records that I used in my book that several prominent members of Congress, like for instance, Senator Joe Lieberman, who was chair of the Homeland Security Committee, contacted the Secretary of Homeland Security and asked her, basically not to implement REAL ID or to delay implementation.

Um, and to this day, REAL ID has still had not been fully implemented. People can still board commercial airlines with their driver's license, even if it's not REAL ID compliant. to give you another example, so this was an example that I used in the opening of, the book. Senator Amy Klobuchar, representative or senator representing Minnesota, wanted to try to get the gray wolf removed from the endangered species list Rather than introduce legislation, though, she first contacted the Fish and Wildlife Service to urge the agency to delist the wolf using administrative procedures, and that's what the Fish and Wildlife Service did.

it delisted the gray wolf. And we actually have court documents, so these are available because the Humane Society later sued the Fish and Wildlife Service over the delisting. and in these court documents, they reference emails between the agency personnel, so internal agency emails between agency personnel debating whether to delist the wolf, and they even talk about the commitment that was made to Senator Klobuchar as a motivation for moving forward with the delisting.

another prominent example, though most people, probably don't know the whole story, is the DREAM Act. So the DREAM Act was legislation that was supposed to protect childhood arrivals to the US. but it never had enough support to pass Congress and never became law. There was, as some folks might know, there was an executive order issued by President Obama, commonly known as DACA, but what a lot of people don't know is that even before DACA, even before the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security had guidance or policies to protect childhood arrivals.

And I can see from my data, from the records that I use in my book, that members of Congress were contacting the Department of Homeland Security even while the DREAM Act was struggling to pass Congress. they were asking the agency, asking the secretary to protect childhood arrivals. So it's another example of members of Congress going to agencies with their policy objectives when those objectives are failing within the, the legislative process.

I use the term back channel because while members of Congress can make their communications with agencies public if they choose to, the interactions between members of Congress and agencies are actually not easily accessible the same way their voting records or bill sponsorship are. So members of Congress can engage, in this policy-making strategy largely outside of the public eye.

now, most of the time, this might not be that big of a deal or that major of a concern if members of Congress are advocating for their constituencies the same way they would on the House or Senate floor. But if members of Congress are representing interests, perhaps business organizations, for example, that they don't want the public to know about, then it becomes more concerning 

HOST: I certainly was, and here is the first thing that nobody in the 1780s would have expected, the notion of career politicians.

Here again is Madison scholar Jack Rakove. 

CLIP: Okay, now here's Madison's position, though. If you're a political scientist today, you would say the, the independent variable that drives political behavior today i- is the desire to be reelected Right? That, we assume that politics has been professionalized.

That once you're elected to Congress, getting reelected is your dominant personal am- ambition. they, they just want to stay on forever. We actually lived in an era when holding office was thought really to be avocational in nature. It wasn't your profession. It wasn't your career.

You could be a planter, you could be a merchant, you could be a lawyer, and so on. 

HOST 2: All right. So you're a professional first and a politician second. 

HOST: Yeah, and this is good, 'cause you'd come to Congress with a unique expertise. You were a wheat farmer, you sold felt hats, you made boats, whatever. 

HOST 2: And often, you were a lawyer.

HOST: Yes. That was and is true, Hannah. About 40% of members of Congress right now have a law degree. But do you know the number one prior occupation for somebody who is sitting in the House of Representatives? 

HOST 2: Like right now. 

HOST: Right now. 

HOST 2: I'm gonna guess, given that 40% of them have law degrees, lawyer. 

HOST: Something beats it out, something they did since they were a lawyer and before they came to the House of Representatives, and that is they worked in politics already.

And I gotta add, this is really new. 

CLIP: The mean term of service in the House of Representatives from 1789 down to about 1900, plus or minus, but 1900 is the turning point, was three years. Meaning, if you do the arithmetic, the vast majority of members served one or two terms. And then very few senators.

a few did, but very few senators served two terms until the late 19th century. 

HOST: And look, it's understandable that our first few Congresses in the 1800s were absent career politicians, 'cause we were a fresh, new country. But in 1979, a very lucky year for me, only 29 members of the House were former politicians.

But in 2019, 171. 

HOST 2: Huh. Is there a repercussion for that? 

HOST: I am not going to put words in Jack's mouth, but to me, it seems like the career politician is something that could lead to the much bigger problem. So Hannah, what skills would you say somebody who has worked in politics for a long time has?

HOST 2: I would say foremost they are politic. They know how to negotiate, they understand the system ostensibly, and how to maneuver it to benefit their constituents ostensibly or themselves. and frankly, I think a lot of them are pretty good at getting reelected. 

HOST: Yeah. And that last one, Hannah, that leads to Jack's primary concern.

CLIP: and so Nick, I'm doing a lot of work on constitutional failure. So this ... And from a Madisonian perspective, so I've been giving a lot of thought to this, but Madison's standard assumption, this is Federalist 51, you may or may not know this text, "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of man must be connected to the constitutional rights of the place."

And so the very famous passage from the Federalists, almost as famous as the stuff from Federalist 10. Party loyalty is much stronger than, strict loyalty to one's institution 

HOST 2: Okay, so this is it, and have talked about this on the show before. Partisanship, and that includes loyalty to the party, to party leadership, resulting in Congress not necessarily acting in the best interests of their constituents, of the people 

HOST: Yes, and utter devotion to your party has swung back and forth between the two parties over the centuries, but there is a marked rise in partisanship, full stop, party over everything else, in the 1990s, and it hasn't gone down.

CLIP: This morning, through a unique test of partisanship, we are finding out that Democrats and Republicans are not just deeply divided on the facts, they may be actually seeing two completely different worlds. Unrest. Violence. What is causing the polarization of 

COMMERCIAL: the United States of America? 

CLIP: it's more profound for the Republicans than it is for the Democrats because 

if you're a Republican politician, your principal fear in life is the fear of being primaried And particularly if you cross Trump, it doesn't work in every case, but it has worked in a number of cases.

I'm gonna be making an 

endorsement today, 

in Texas. President Trump's tease early this morning turned into a truth heard 'round Texas. Trump picking Paxton over Cornyn, calling the Texas attorney general a true MAGA warrior, while ripping the incumbent senator for failing to endorse him fast enough. 

In another age before, before we lived in, an era of hyper-partisanship, you'd find legislators who worked together would, would learn how to collaborate.

If you want great examples of this, just think about the passage of the s- of the Voting Rights Act, of the Civil Rights Act of '64 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and those were collaborative efforts. 

HOST 2: one way to eradicate partisanship is to get rid of parties entirely. We have had so many listener emails over the years asking, "Why don't we or can't we get rid of the two-party system?"

And yes, there are a bunch of democracies in the world that have multi-party systems, but the way our elections are set up, there seems to be no way to stop being a two-party system. 

HOST: That's absolutely right, and I asked Jack, "Do you think there are any remedies to all of this?" And he said, "Right now, we are having a reckoning with gerrymandering in particular, states drawing legislative districts to ensure one party wins over the other, and that creates voter apathy, and that creates a lack of faith in Congress."

Anyways, here is one of Jack's potential solutions. 

CLIP: is one way to solve the gerrymandering probably, problem is let's get rid of districts. And, I, we have to write more about this. there's a big part of this if you have access to Max Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention, 1787.

It's available online. Go to volume two, page f- 240, 241, and read Madison's long speech. It's a seminal speech because it illustrates two things. One is there's no obvious idea Of exactly how should you elect the House of Representatives? to figure ... remember, the decision about how you do that is left under the Elections Clause, Article I, Section 4, not Section 8, but Section 4, is left to the states, state legislatures to resolve.

Madison did not trust the state legislatures to do anything, right? Always, he was deeply distrustful of the state legislatures. But then also you might decide that there is one optimal way to elect representatives. So if you want to solve the gerrymandering problem, you say, "Okay, constitu- congressmen representing their constituents, it's valuable."

But, a whole delegation can set up mechanisms to do that. you could ... they could create staffs which res- with responsive individuals and, from, coming from different communities. You could allocate telephone calls on that basis or whatever, and you could get rid of the gerrymandering problem 'cause you're not gonna have districts 

HOST: there's the kind of obvious question of why, right?

Congressional members- ... wouldn't do this if it wasn't useful to them in some sense. So why is going through this back channel, is using the bureaucracy so mu-mu- a much more promising venue, a much more ... Like, why are they doing it? 

GUEST: Yeah. So it's important to point out that, what makes a strategy effective is the threat of retaliation.

So agencies are very risk-averse, and they want to avoid angering legislators who could retaliate if the agency is unresponsive. and as I talk about in the book, members of Congress have several ways they can make life very difficult for an agency. so agencies generally wanna keep members of Congress happy in order to maintain support in Congress for their budgets and their priorities.

but members of Congress can do a lot of different things. they can drag agency officials in front of committee hearings or demand oversight or investigations. Senators can hold up nominees, so how Senator Tommy Tuberville has been holding up the Department of Defense nominees recently over the department's abortion policy.

and agencies don't always have, they don't always have the ability to give members of Congress what they want, especially when they're receiving, conflicting policy requests from within Congress. But they want to avoid, angering legislators, especially ones who have the most kind of capacity and motivation, or drive to make life difficult for the agency.

but whether and when the bureaucracy is going to be a promising venue depends on a number of things, like who the legislator is. Are they, a member of the minority, for instance? Do they share a party affiliation with the White House? it can also depend on what their policy objective is and how contentious it is.

If the president or other powerful lawmakers disagree with the objective, that's gonna make it more difficult. it can depend on the agency and how either politicized the agency is or how insulated it is from political pressure, what the agency's mission is. and it depends on also what's going on in Congress.

If Congress is unable to pass anything, like when the House was without a speaker, for instance, it's pretty clear that the bureaucracy is going to be a more promising venue. 

HOST: Mm-hmm. So that in a lot of ways, I think to me at least, explained the scale of this, given how many different reasons this might be worthwhile for policy makers to do.

Um, but obviously they're not doing this for everything. So there's some sort of calculation going on here about, okay, I'm a lawmaker, I have multiple options available to me, which one am I going to use? Can you walk us through some of those trade-offs and f- I guess formulas, calculations in some way that lawmakers are using to determine when to choose this back channel route?

GUEST: Sure. And I should be clear that agencies can't, can't guarantee outcomes, right? And the courts can overturn agency action more easily than, than legislation. although so far courts have not been using arguments about these interactions between members of Congress and agencies as justifications, for overturning agency action.

Instead, they've actually been, saying that this is a part of a member's, job to be advocating on behalf of their constituency. but, in terms of like who uses this, so I find that nearly all members of Congress engage in backchannel policymaking to some extent. in my data, which covers the time period from 2005 to 2012, nearly every single member of Congress in my dataset contacted one of the departments in my dataset at least once to make a policy request during a Congress.

And my dataset that I use for my quantitative analysis is limited to, to select departments. So if we assume that members of Congress are contacting even just the other dozen departments at levels similar to what I'm finding, that suggests that they are engaging with departments regularly, and that's consistent with what congressional staffers have told me.

So one legislative director who had spent a decade on Capitol Hill said his office contacted agencies about policy every, every week, if not every day. So to be clear, nearly all members of Congress engage in this behavior to some degree. but I do find substantial variation across lawmakers. So while some might only contact a department a couple of times about policy, during the year, other legislators are contacting a single department or agency, dozens of times or even more.

So then what explains this variation? So I set out on this research arguing that members of Congress turn to the bureaucracy as a substitute for legislative action as a way of evading the obstacles that they face in the legislative process. So one possibility is that the members of Congress who face the most obstacles in the legislative process would have the greatest incentive to pursue agency action.

So this would mean that we might observe like the low-ranking freshman legislator who's not on the committee with jurisdiction over the agency seeking out agency policymaking as an alternative to legislative options, more so than like the senior committee chair who has more influence over legislating and has these other options, as you say, within the legislative process.

The problem is that the power and resources lawmakers have within Congress, actually aid their capacity to engage and influence agencies. So what I find is that lawmakers who are in a better position to influence policy within Congress are also engaging with agencies more and are also prioritized by agencies.

So there's a sort of catch-22 because the lawmakers who may be in the most need of an alternative way of advancing their policy objectives may also be the least capable of taking advantage of bureaucratic discretion. And I think that's one really important implication of my findings, is that agency policymaking may actually exacerbate the already unequal power distribution in Congress.

so in other words, the rich get richer. and this is partly because really all members of Congress faced obstacles in Congress. even the Senate majority leader can't push through whatever he wants. And of course, the presidency, plays a critical role as well. So what I find is that members of Congress pursue their policy objectives through federal agencies when they face constraints in the legislative process, but also have the advantage in the executive branch.

So for example, I find that senators contact agencies about policy objectives more when they're in the minority in the Senate. so they have the disadvantage in the Senate, but they're co-partisans of the president. They share party affiliation with the president. and they contact agencies then more than, for instance, when they're in the majority in the Senate and White House co-partisans.

So in that case, it makes sense for them to devote their resources to the legislative process where they have the advantage. in the House it is more nuanced, so House members contact agencies more frequently when they're in the minority and White House outpartisans. I should say the, that relationship for the House is weaker, but I think one possible reason for this could be that they're really out of options when they're, they're in the minority and White House outpartisans.

They can't depend on the accomplishments of their party leadership in either the House or the White House. but to your point, I also look at another motivation driving members of Congress to the bureaucracy, and that is the relative obscurity of admini- administrative policymaking, that I argue legislators use to their advantage.

for some time, congressional scholars have found that members of Congress act strategically when choosing how to pursue policymaking and choosing their venues, and that they avoid very public ways of doing things when they face cross-pressures, or conflicting pressures. So when they face a conflict between their party and their constituency and what I argue is that members of Congress try to use agency policymaking to represent interests that could be costly for them to represent publicly.

And I test this idea by examining the behavior of members of Congress who face cross-pressures on particular policy issues. So for example, Democrats have faced cross-pressures when they come from states like Pennsylvania, where fracking has really boosted the economy, because of the Democratic Party's conflicting position on fracking because of, the party, tend to be in favor of environmental regulation.

And so they face a conflict when they come from a state where fracking has really boosted the local economy. And what I find across two of the three policy areas I examine is that members of Congress contact agencies about policy more frequently when they face cross-pressures on an issue. And we...

This is really important that we don't see that same pattern for very public policymaking activities like bill introductions. In some cases, we actually observe the opposite pattern for bill introductions, that they're sponsoring more bills on issues when they don't face cross-pressures. so I think this finding suggests that legislators are using the bureaucracy and agency policymaking as a back-channel way of influencing policy when they don't want it to be public.

I should be clear though that members of Congress do, often publicize their interactions with agencies. they use their interactions with agencies, often the same way they use other, types of policymaking activities. They do it to take credit for benefits accrued to their constituencies and to, take public positions on issues.

The point is that they're also using the bureaucracy in this really important way that we've been neglecting and that could have implications for representation and, democratic accountability and transparency 

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

You can record - and re-record - a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from;

The Muckrake Political Podcast

Today, Explained

Citations Needed

What A Day

What Next

Future Hindsight

This Is Hell!

New Books in Political Science

and Civics 101

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

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

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

Air Date: 7-22-2026

Today we look at how three things Europe thought were features turned out to be leverage that could be held against them: American military protection, Silicon Valley software, and cheap Chinese goods. From a French government office running Linux to a secret European defense coalition that bypasses Washington, Europe is quietly swapping out the old architecture rather than dismantling it, one operating system migration and one secret war game at a time.

Full Show Notes

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

Today we look at how three things Europe thought were features turned out to be leverage that could be held against them. American military protection, Silicon Valley software, and cheap Chinese goods. From a French government office running Linux to a secret European defense coalition that bypasses Washington, Europe is quietly swapping out the old architecture rather than dismantling it, one operating system migration and one secret war game at a time.

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

House of El

Bloomberg Television

Times Originals

Max Fisher

Evan Edinger

and Brit in Germany

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

Section A, Can Europe Stand Alone

Section B, The China Factor

Section C, The Tech Sovereignty Playbook

And Section D, Building European Alternatives

And now, on to the show.

This morning, when staff at the European Parliament opened their browsers, the search engine was different. Google is no longer the default. In its place, there's Qwant, a French privacy-focused search engine that does not track users, does not collect personal data, and does not operate under American legal jurisdiction.

The change affects every computer in the parliament. That is seven hundred and twenty lawmakers and thousands of assistants and administrative staff. Officials told lawmakers in an email that the switch is being made in line with the parliament's commitment to digital sovereignty and the protection of users' personal data.

A few more days from now, on June ninth, a coalition of European technology companies will publicly release Euro Office, which is a sovereign alternative to Microsoft three sixty-five, built by Ionos, Nextcloud, Eurostack, XWiki, OpenProject, and several other European firms. It includes web editors for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with real-time collaboration, which is a familiar interface designed to feel like Microsoft Office, and full compatibility with existing Microsoft file formats, all governed by European law and hosted on European infrastructure.

So in the space of one week, the European Parliament replaced Google, and the European technology sector is releasing a replacement for Microsoft Office. Both are happening in June twenty twenty-six, and neither is a coincidence. The pattern here is that the entire American software stack that European institutions have depended on for decades is being systematically replaced, not in a single dramatic announcement, but in a rolling sequence of decisions that are landing one after another, week after week, each one building on the last.

Start with what's happening today. This morning, June fourth, the European Parliament switched from Google to Qwant. Also today, the European Commission unveiled the Tech Sovereignty Package, the legislation that will formally restrict American cloud providers from handling sensitive European government data, require European preference procurement for digital services, and establish new rules on chips, AI, and cloud computing as part of the Commission's Buy and Use European program.

Two announcements on the same day, the Parliament replacing the search engine on the same morning the Commission publishes the legal framework that makes replacing everything else mandatory. And then on June ninth, EuroOffice launches publicly on GitHub. We have a separate long video analysis on that for the full deep dive.

IANA CEO Achim Weiss said, "With the geopolitical developments we have seen in the last year, there is a clear need for a reliable, fully Microsoft-compatible, and easy-to-use sovereign office solution in Europe." The suite is designed specifically for public authorities, education systems, and enterprises that need to move away from Microsoft 365 without losing functionality or forcing staff to learn an entirely new interface.

The first release includes documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Collaboration features are built in from day one, and because it is open source, any European government, university, or company can deploy it on their own infrastructure without any licensing fees, without American servers, and without the Cloud Act applying to a single byte of data.

If you've been following this channel's playlist on European digital sovereignty, the next few weeks are going to be the most significant period this channel has ever covered. I have very exciting content coming up on this front, so if you're not already subscribed, now is the time. The Parliament switch to Quant is part of what the spokesperson described as a larger framework of actions aimed at reducing EP reliance on non-EU digital tools and promoting European-based privacy-focused services.

That framework is not vague. It is operational, and it is expanding. France announced in April that its entire government is migrating from Windows to Linux, a sovereign operating system switch affecting every ministry and public institution in the country. France also announced it is replacing Microsoft Teams and Zoom with Visio, which is a domestically developed video conferencing platform across all public institutions by twenty twenty-seven.

Ecosia, the German search engine with over twenty-five million monthly users, switched its AI system to a European model provider just last month, and Switzerland has already begun migrating government infrastructure away from Microsoft to domestic alternatives. If you're trying to understand how to read through institutional announcements and see the structural pattern underneath, my book, Awake: The Practice of Critical Thinking in an Age of Self-lies, is available as an e-book and audiobook.

Subscribers get ten percent off, and you can grab the first chapter for free in the description links below. The timing of all of this, however, is inseparable from what happened two weeks ago in the Netherlands. Microsoft was caught sharing the names, email addresses, and meeting minutes of Dutch civil servants with the United States House of Representatives unredacted with full identifying information because the US government considers the EU's Digital Services Act to be censorship and wanted to know who was enforcing it.

Microsoft had no legal ability to refuse the request under American law. The Cloud Act compelled compliance. The civil servants whose identities were handed over could now face travel bans or personal sanctions from Washington for just doing their jobs enforcing European law. That incident, which this channel covered the day it broke, did more to accelerate European tech sovereignty than any policy document or summit declaration could have achieved.

It proved with named individuals and named consequences that running European government operations through American software means American law applies to European officials whether Europe consents or not The replacement architecture is now being built across every layer of the software stack simultaneously.

For search, Qwant is replacing Google at the parliament. Ecosia is switching to European AI. For office productivity, we have EuroOffice launching June ninth as a sovereign Microsoft three sixty five alternative. For operating systems, we have France migrating from Windows to Linux. For video conferencing, France replacing Teams and Zooms with Visio.

For cloud, Thales wrapping Google's technology in a European legal cage around S3NS in France and a new entity in Germany. Stackit providing sovereign cloud to the Dutch government. KPN and Thales building a sovereign military cloud for the Netherlands. For AI, Mistral building hyperscale data centers on European soil financed by European banks, ASML funding it, the EU building five AI gigafactories.

Then for satellites, we have Iris² replacing Starlink dependency, the commission blocking Starlink from the two gigahertz spectrum band. Then, of course, for payments, we have Wero building a continental system that routes around Visa and Mastercard. Each of these decisions was made independently by different institutions in different countries for different immediate reasons, but they are all moving in the same direction.

They are all accelerating, and they are all landing in the same compressed window of time. It doesn't sound like coordination in the formal sense, but it is a form of convergence, the moment when dozens of separate institutions arrive at the same conclusion simultaneously because the evidence pointing towards that conclusion has just become impossible to ignore.

I think EuroOffice will likely achieve adoption across at least three EU member state government systems within eighteen months of its June ninth launch. Qwant's installation as the parliament's default search engine will probably become the template for other EU institutions. The European Council, the European Commission's internal systems, and EU agencies will follow within twelve months.

The Tech Sovereignty Package published today will likely establish the legal mandate that makes these switches not just recommended but required for sensitive government operations. And June twenty twenty-six will probably be remembered as the month the European software stack stopped being American, not because of a single dramatic, huge decision, but because every institution on the continent looked at its screen on the same morning and basically concluded, "This has to change," and then just changed it.

But the software is only sovereign if the data underneath it stays in Europe. I made a separate video on how Microsoft got caught leaking Dutch civil servants' identities to Washington and how the Netherlands had already signed the contract to move that data to European infrastructure before the leak even happened.

China shock hit parts of the US hard. Autor and his co-authors estimate that it accounted for nearly 60% of all US manufacturing job losses between 2001 and 2019.

I think that the US did two things wrong. First, we just let it rip, where there was no gradualism about it.

And with labor markets, you really don't wanna just rip the Band-Aid off because labor markets have a natural rate of adjustment of a couple percent per year, 'cause that's the rate at which people retire and new people enter. And people make those transitions by choosing new occupations at entry or retiring from old ones.

They don't generally, you don't go mid-career from being a lawyer to being a manufacturing worker or vice versa. And so you don't want things to change that fast. You can handle change, but at a gradual rate. We didn't do anything to buffer that shock. The other is we had no real social policies in place to help people, to help communities and to help people adjust.

The China shock dealt a blow to labor-intensive manufacturing like automobiles and textiles. Something similar may be playing out across Europe now as Chinese exports to Europe surge and prices of some goods collapse. French President Emmanuel Macron calls the trade imbalance, quote, "unbearable." And Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission said that the bloc's relationship with China has reached, quote, "an inflection point."

Europe has been one of those markets, and, Chinese exports to, Europe are growing very rapidly, and they threaten to displace a lot of European manufacturing that remains, most visibly in the automotive sector and, in Germany most of all. And, this is going to, I think, have similar risks for them in terms of hollowing out sectors really rapidly.

Europe's China shock seems to have been triggered in part by US tariffs on Chinese goods, leading China to look for new markets. But as Mark Twain said, "History doesn't repeat itself, it often rhymes." And this time it may be different for Europe than it was for the US.

There was this sense of, oh, all of the exports that were going to the US, 'cause there has been a big reduction in Chinese imports coming into the US, there's a feeling that those goods are just being diverted to Europe and elsewhere.

And that, we're not quite seeing that in the numbers.

Stephanie Flanders runs economics and government for Bloomberg News and thinks the story is more complicated than China flooding Europe's markets.

We are seeing that China has successfully offset the impact of US tariffs by trading more with other countries.

But it actually, if anything, seems to be different goods, and it seems to have been done through, cutting the price of some of those different goods that they used to sell into Europe. as ever with trade numbers, it's just a bit complicated. But it is certainly true that China, on the face of it, has not been affected as much as you would have thought from the big reduction in exports going to the US.

The US trade deficit has been falling since Liberation Day, when President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports from many countries. But fewer Chinese exports to the US did not mean China's exports overall went down. To the contrary, it now has a $1.2 trillion trade surplus as its exports have actually increased.

So the increase has been quite widely spread, David, 'cause obviously the rest of the world as a market is bigger than the US. But the headline numbers are you've seen about a four, just over a four percentage point reduction in Chinese exports to the US. but actually overall, the exports last year increased by 3%, so they'd actually more than offset that swing in their exports to the US.

And that's been spread over, I think the place that's had the biggest increase is Africa, albeit from a small base. They've seen a lot more Chinese exports and Europe, other places have also seen more, but it's more on the order of sort of one, 1 1/2% growth.

Another difference in this China shock is the kind of goods China is exporting all over the world.

If you're mostly just importing without exporting, you're just accumulating trade deficits, that means that it's not obvious where all those people are supposed to go. There's not a new set of activities opening up, simultaneously. So I think it's quite a challenge. It was quite a challenge for the United States.

We didn't manage it particularly well. And I think it's actually in many ways more challenging now than it was 20 years ago because China has moved so far up the value chain. When the China shock hit the United States in 2000, China was not exporting automobiles, but now they're a world-class auto supplier and they're the best producer of electric vehicles in the world.

There's a huge car industry in Europe, particularly in Germany, and they feel very threatened and understandably But it will not just be in automotive, but it'll also be in heavy industry like rail cars and shipping, but also be in lots of consumer goods. And so China is a formidable competitor and not just in low value-added labor-intensive manufacturing the way it was 20 years ago, but in really all the high-tech sectors and all the consumer products that are, central to, both what, consumers, purchase, but also what a lot of, advanced economy manufacturers produce.

Martin Buch sees that happening already. To adapt, his company is turning to an area that isn't affected by China's reach and manufacturing dominance, defense.

We do round about 80% of our revenue in automotive, but our, part of our strategy is to diversify into other areas. We are already doing some, supplying to semiconductors, some to medical, to the general industry.

But we would like to do more in defense and space, actually. That's part of our roadmap, a f- 10-year roadmap, and we are already supplying to the drone industry, which has become much more important now because of the Ukraine-Russian war. And we have some more plans for '26. That's gonna be announced in the second half of this year.

We have some plans to come forward with our core competence actually, which is mechanic and mechatronic products.

Defense spending is government spending, which means it has to be paid for through taxation or borrowing. So it's not, you can't run your economy just by making defense goods for yourself.

But that will use some of European industrial capacity and perhaps give, focus to some of what they're doing and also technological advance. They also will face the same supply chain constraints the United States does. A lot of our military inputs come from China, including, for example, rare earth metals.

The German case, it has been quite dramatic in these sectors that had previously been, absolutely at the heart of Germany's kind of, self-identity as a manufacturing power, machine tools and cars. I think the only thing that's offsetting that in term- which is quite a big thing, in terms of growth overall in Germany is, of course, they're the ones who've had...

They're increasing dramatically their defense spending, and they're getting a fiscal impulse from that, which is not really, present in the same way in other countries. So the country... we are seeing a lot of structural change hitting Germany at the same time, partly a res- as a result of Donald Trump's trade policies with respect to China and other places, but also as a result of being in a more scary world.

But where China makes life harder for some European manufacturers, it is lending a helping hand to central banks.

Annoyingly for those sitting in central banks, the numbers, it's hard to tease out the data 'cause it's always tends to be a bit behind the curve. But we are seeing not so much the volume changing, the overall value of trade changing, but within that, maybe more goods at a lower price.

And actually the, the reduction in price may actually be helping to pull down inflation in some of these countries.

And does that relieve some pressure on the European Central Bank?

I think it's one of those things. We've heard some Bank of England policy makers and European Central Bank policy makers talk about it.

there obviously appeared the European Central Bank has been on hold for a long time. they've been adjusting their inflation forecast. A lot of people, including Bloomberg's economists, think that inflation's gonna undershoot the Eurozone's target, this year, and that they should potentially be looking to cut rates further.

If we are witnessing a sort of second coming for China, it's coming in some very different ways. In the products it is making and in the regions it is exporting to, with different economic effects. But as before, some particular sectors and geographic areas could be hit harder than others.

For nearly 80 years, European allies slept soundly under the protective nuclear-backed wing of the United States. America provided the muscle, the missiles, and the guarantee that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on all.

And to even hint at backup options risked alienating the White House, giving Washington an excuse to pack up its troops and signaling weakness to the Kremlin. But welcome to 2026.

Europe needs to step up and take on its responsibility.

Behind closed doors, a dramatic shift is underway. European officials are actively weighing radical proposals to defend the continent against a Russian assault on their own.

What would it take for Europe to defend itself from Russia? And how did we get to the point where Europe can no longer depend on its greatest ally? A constant during Trump's years in power has been his berating of NATO allies and constant threats of abandonment.

we've been protecting these countries for years with NATO, 'cause NATO is us.

And as it turns out, Trump has always been resentful of how much the US was contributing to the alliance versus the rest of the group.

If you look at the payments that we're making to NATO, they're totally disproportionate with everybody else's, and it's ridiculous.

In more recent times, a series of high-pressure moves from the Trump administration have tipped the scales further.

From the aggressive campaign to annex Greenland, a NATO member's territory, to coercing Europeans into a confrontation with Iran, to the sudden cancellation of long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles and the withdrawal of thousands of US troops from European soil, the message from Washington has become impossible to ignore.

Trust, once the invisible glue of the Atlantic Alliance, has quietly corroded. European electorates have noticed. A fresh poll of 12 nations reveals rock-bottom public confidence in the US as an ally. Only 35% of Britons, 27% of Germans, and a measly 22% of Swedes trust that the US would actually come to their defense if attacked.

To put that in context, more Europeans now trust their own national governments to handle a security crisis than they trust Washington. The fear is that a Russian incursion into a Baltic state, say, would be treated by Washington as a minor regional skirmish, not worth risking American lives over, and that the political fallout from such a non-response would destroy NATO and the EU as functioning institutions.

If you can't rely on the American nuclear umbrella, you build your own. Under proposals currently being discussed in security circles, a nuclear hedging coalition could form. Non-nuclear states like Germany, Poland, Sweden, and Ukraine could start sharing advanced nuclear technologies, dual-use infrastructure, and delivery systems.

The goal isn't to become nuclear powers overnight. It's to bring these countries right to the threshold, close enough that Moscow could never be certain they wouldn't cross it. A last resort plan Z warning, launch a warhead at Europe, and you'll be facing an instantly atomic continent in return. It sounds like science fiction, but public support is already surging.

65% of Poles and 56% of Swedes say they would back a national atomic arsenal. In Germany, a country that has spent 80 years deliberately avoiding any such discussion, the debate is now happening in mainstream politics. So let's get specific. Let's imagine a European NATO member has been invaded by Russia.

This triggers Article 5, the alliance's founding guarantee. An armed attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against all members. More importantly, it triggers an obligation for each member to come to its assistance. Article 5 has only been formally invoked once since it was drafted in 1949 after the September 11th terrorist attacks against the United States.

For it to be effective, the decision to invoke Article 5 has to be unanimous. Every member state gets a vote. So what happens if one ally, say, the United States, refuses to participate? The answer according to the proposals now being quietly circulated, you bypass the US entirely. The blueprint suggests reorganizing European defense around regional coalitions built directly on NATO's existing joint force commands.

There are two principal joint force commands in Europe, one covering the central and eastern flank, the other, the Mediterranean. Under the new proposals, they'll be given what are called pre-delegated powers. If a member state is attacked, these regional coalitions activate automatically, no waiting for a consensus in Washington.

The strategy outlines a surprisingly aggressive posture designed to deter Vladimir Putin, not just from invading, but from even contemplating it. The proposals explicitly mention seizing chunks of Russian territory, including the heavily armed semi-exclave of Kaliningrad wedged between Poland and Lithuania to use as bargaining chips.

The logic, if Russia wants to negotiate an end to the conflict, it has to come to the table knowing Europe holds something it wants back. This regional strategy is backed by a major independent study overseen by former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö, a figure with serious credibility given that Finland only joined NATO in 2023 after decades of careful neutrality driven by exactly the threat Russia now poses.

The study outlines wiring together a powerful sub-NATO alliance of Europe's strongest military players, France, Germany, Poland, the Nordic States, and the UK, a coalition capable of generating real military mass without waiting for American permission. Defense analysts are increasingly confident that this core coalition could realistically defeat a Russian incursion with only minimal US assistance.

Basic intelligence feeds, satellite targeting data, logistical support, not boots on the ground, not aircraft carriers, just the tools that keep the machine running. Think of it as a pragmatic de facto division of labor. No grand treaty, no signing ceremonies in Brussels. The British focus on the North Sea and the high north.

The Poles and Germans anchor the eastern flank. The French provide the nuclear backstop and the expeditionary capacity. It sounds seamless, except for one glaring problem, Great Britain While the continent scrambles to prepare, Britain is being widely criticized as a complacent outlier, a country that talks the language of global leadership while quietly hoping someone else does the heavy lifting.

Allied diplomats are reportedly exasperated by London's refusal to engage seriously with these backup plans. For decades, every single UK strategic defense review has started with a whiteboard that says US primacy first and NATO second. The assumption that Washington will always be there has become so deeply embedded in British strategic culture that challenging it almost feels disloyal.

Senior defense experts now warn that Britain has essentially outsourced its strategic thinking to the Americans and is entirely unequipped for a world where that outsourcing is no longer an option. Unsurprisingly, you won't find NATO ambassadors openly debating these radical options during formal sessions.

No one wants to officially reform the alliance's institutions just yet. Doing so would risk sending exactly the signal Washington wants, that Europe has given up on American involvement. And so the dance continues, publicly committed to the old architecture, privately building the new one. Some former senior officials argue that improvising a European response in a crisis might be better than building a rigid, elaborate architecture beforehand, noting that NATO has a history of landing on its feet like a cat.

The alliance has surprised skeptics before, but relying on luck is no longer a strategy. As European policymakers point out with increasing urgency, they no longer have the luxury of sitting around and hoping for the best. Russia has fought a land war in Europe for four years. The United States has made clear, repeatedly unmistakably, that its commitments are conditional, and China is watching everything.

Whether Europe builds a nuclear hedging coalition, activates pre-delegated joint force commands, or quietly wises together a sub-NATO alliance of the willing, one thing is becoming undeniable. The era of unconditional reliance on Washington is over.

to understand what China did, we're gonna use the board to map out the global oil economy, what happened to it from the Iran war, and then what China did to save it from completely imploding. Good? So the main thing about oil is it's traded in one unified global market. That means all the world's producers sell into the same big supply of oil, which the world's consumers all buy from.

And this is why when something happens in any part of the oil world, like, say, a war in the Middle East, it affects everyone. And on any given day, there are about 100 million barrels moving through this system, 100 million barrels produced every day, and that is also 100 million barrels that gets consumed every day And it's really important that these two numbers are the same.

Every drop of oil that gets produced every day gets sold and consumed every day. There is zero slack in the system, and that is why it is such a big deal when the Iran war starts and Iran shuts down the Strait of Hormuz Doing this, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, blocks 20 million barrels of oil per day from reaching the world

So now we've only got 80 million barrels a day in output to meet 100 million barrels a day in demand, right? This equation no longer balances. We now have a 20 million barrel a day deficit And this, this deficit means that pretty soon, 20% of the oil-consuming world was gonna power down. That's one in five flights, one in five factories, power plants.

It's a global calamity. Still, the world is ready with a couple of defenses, including this: oil pipelines that go around Hormuz.

This is the east-west pipeline, known as Petroline.

That big one is controlled by Saudi Arabia, and then the United Arab Emirates controls the other main one.

This is the Abu Dhabi crude oil pipeline.

And these pipelines add about 7 million barrels of oil back into the system. It's a lot. Okay, so now just to make sure we're keeping score, we're at a negative 13 million barrel a day deficit, right? We removed 20 million barrels from the system, we added 7 million back in, 13 million deficit. It's better, but it's still really bad.

Okay, so you guys are still with me? The other big defense that the world has is strategic petroleum reserves, emergency stockpiles of oil. These tanks are all full of oil. America and other countries keep huge stockpiles like this for emergencies, and there are even bigger US stocks I can't show you because they're kept in huge salt caves thousands of feet underground.

Tons of countries have these reserves. Here's Japan's, one of the world's largest. A week into the war, 32 of these countries got together and all opened up their reserves to the world. This was the largest release of reserve oil in history. Hundreds of millions of barrels from dozens of countries. It was a huge deal.

But the war dragged on and on, and it was stretching out these releases, so in the end, they added up to an average two and a half million barrels per day. So these were the world's big defenses for a mass oil shock, like what happened in the Iran war. And together, these bring our deficit down to 10 and a half million barrels a day.

This is still a calamity, more than a 10th of global energy usage, and it gets worse. Those 32 emergency stockpiles from all over the world, they are running out. Here's America's reserve. It's dropping hard and fast towards zero. But here's Japan. It's same thing, absolutely plunging. So not only are these reserves tiny relative to the hole they have to fill, but they're only good for a few months, and then they are gone, man, which is exactly why everyone looked at all this and said, "Yeah, the world is ending."

Until a few weeks in, people started to notice something weird happening.

This is from a conference call a business intelligence firm called Kepler held back in April, walking its clients through what was going on in the oil market, and they focused on one thing in particular.

What's happening with China, right? So I just wanna look at China monthly imports, right now.

China's oil imports, that's those bars in the chart, had suddenly dropped to half. Half.

See, and how much long, how long could that carry on?

I know those guys did not seem super emotive about this. I, market analysts, but trust me when I say this discovery made people lose their minds, and let me give you some context for why.

This shows China's oil imports since 1980, and that rise is one of the biggest stories in the history of oil. This is where China surpassed the US as the world's biggest oil importer and just kept going. Oil has powered China's rise from the start. It fuels their factories, lights their cities. It's the engine of their economy.

Yes, China has been building lots of solar and wind, but renewables like that still produce just a fraction of the power that they get from coal, gas, and especially oil, which is why it seemed impossible that right after the Iran war started, China's imports that had been rising for decades dropped overnight by half.

This decline here, five-and-a-half million barrels a day, is equivalent to more than all of India's oil imports, more than Europe's five biggest economies combined. This was the thing that saved the world, China. China took its imports and magically cut it by five and a half million barrels a day. Which means that what started as a 20 million barrel a day deficit from Hormuz closing is now after all those alternate pipelines, plus emergency stockpiles, plus China doing whatever it's doing, means that deficit is now down to just five million barrels a day.

And look, that's not great, that's still pretty serious, but everybody shaving 5% off of their oil usage instead of 20% is the difference between mass blackouts and economic collapse, which is what we thought we'd get, and a few months of higher gas prices, localized flight cancellations, and some gas lines in Southeast Asia, which is what we got instead.

So yeah, I would call that basically saving the world, really thanks to this guy. But China has not said a thing, hasn't acknowledged they're doing this, hasn't said how or why, just stopped importing oil by the largest amount any country has ever stopped importing oil. Poof, overnight, cold turkeyed this substance that the entire industrialized world, and China especially, have made essential to their daily functioning for 100 years.

And since China won't tell us how they did this, we are just gonna have to piece it together ourselves, starting with a quiet change China made right at the start of the war This article from two weeks into the war revealed that China had ordered a total ban on fuel exports. The context here is China has a huge refinery industry, and what it does is it turns raw crude oil into stuff like jet fuel and gasoline.

And most of those fuels stay within China, but because they're good at it, they export a bunch of it to all over Asia. Until March, when China banned those refiners from exporting a drop of fuel. And at the time, everyone assumed this was to preempt a potential fuel shortage within China by building up stockpiles.

And one reason I say assume is that this ban was imposed, that's right, in secret. That's why this story is credited to four sources with knowledge of the matter. That means off the record. But that assumption about why China was doing this was wrong. Turns out it wasn't to stockpile jet fuel or gasoline.

It was because China was about to stop importing half of its oil, so those refineries were about to do a lot less refining

So rough math, I'm gonna say that accounts for cutting about half a million barrels in daily demand out of the five and a half million that China cut overall Okay, next big move, and if you care about climate change or air quality, you're gonna wanna cover your ears here. Coal.

This is from a few weeks before the war, why China is building so many coal plants, and it found that China commissioned more than 50 large-scale plants last year alone. So once the war started, China spun a bunch of those plants online or pushed its existing plants into overdrive, or probably both. But by April, it was burning a record amount of coal.

China also figured out a way to use coal instead of oil to make plastics, which usually is a petroleum product. They also found a way to use coal to make fertilizer, which usually also is an oil byproduct. All of which allowed them to, say it with me, import less oil.

If you buy a tech product in Europe, you have a reasonable expectation that it should last you at least two years free of defects. And if it's not up to your expectations or breaks down before then, you can demand a return or a replacement. This law protects consumers from shady business practices.

My 2019 Intel MacBook Pro was awful. It was constantly having issues, kernel panics, overheating, forced restarts. It was an awful device. And I didn't pay for AppleCare because I knew I didn't need to. I even made a whole vlog on the day I was returning it because I was so surprised that this consumer rights law would literally get me back the 4,000 pounds I had spent on it.

To date, that is still the only time I've ever needed to enact that right. Companies that sell products over here have to have higher quality control, or they risk losing a lot of money on returns to people like me that understand that law is there to protect us. But it's laws like this where you really begin to notice a pattern that life in Europe is one that gives more rights to the everyday person over giant corporations, and shared benefit over private.

Everyone can enjoy public transit. Everyone can benefit from free healthcare and safer food. And the biggest one of all is workers' rights. I've already made an entire video breaking down the workers' rights I gained moving from the US to the UK, but a quick summary would be 28 days minimum paid holiday, one year paid maternity leave, two weeks paid paternity leave, sick leave, even the right against unlawful termination.

When working part-time at Urban Outfitters in London, even though I worked less than 20 hours a week, I still got two days paid holiday per month. That's insane, right? No, that's just life over here. Meanwhile, I worked five years at a Pizza Hut in New Jersey for over 30 hours per week. Never got a single day of paid vacation in my life.

That, and they only paid me $2.13 an hour, which was insane at the time, is insane now 'cause they still haven't increased it, and it hasn't been increased since the '70s, because saves the corporations more money. Yet again, corporations versus the people. If one day I got a new boss in America, and even though I'd been working at the same company for four years, he didn't like me, he could fire me on the spot, and I'd be out of a job and in an awful situation.

In the UK, it's so much harder for an employer to fire you because the law requires dismissals to be fair in both reason and in procedure. In practice, that usually means your employer has to give you warnings and a chance to improve before they can even think about letting you go, unless it's something super serious, like gross misconduct or something.

Everything in Europe gives you, the individual, more rights over those with more money and power. Growing up, this is how I was taught the US was. I was taught the US is for the individual, is for the individual's freedoms. But in practice, that is really just not the case. And once I experienced just a year abroad, it was very apparent all of that was just propaganda.

Or maybe it's the way it was supposed to be, and things just went a bit wrong. And finally, the conversation around money. The US has a much higher cost of living regardless of your state. There are cheaper states, there are more expensive states, but the basics are still so expensive. Groceries are more expensive.

Data plans, so much more expensive. Cable, healthcare, the costs associated with driving, all of these things add up. But hey, it's also true, salaries for most office jobs are significantly higher in the US than what you can find in most countries in Europe. So if you earn a lot of money and money is your sole defining metric of success, then you can feel a lot more successful in the US.

But because the culture in Europe is work to live and not live to work, you might find that the stress and cost trade-offs and quality of life erode the value of that higher salary quite quickly. I don't care about GDP. I couldn't give two shits about companies. What I care about is quality of my life, the things that make me happy.

I, I don't really care about this whole "Oh, our country has a big GDP and my state has the GDP of Norway." Who cares? is that... That isn't affecting you in the slightest. What is affecting you is not having free healthcare, not being able to get around without forcing yourself to have to use a car, being able to have your kids go to school without getting shot.

I don't know. I just find that is such a bizarre sort of stance to have is "My quality of life is dictated by the money that the richest in the society make." It's I think the main thing though, out of everything, that I miss about the US that I can't really get here is not rights, not freedoms, not anything that's big on quality of life improvements.

It's just Mexican food and good ice cream. But the quality of Indian food in London more than makes up for both of those, for me at least. So now I'd like to ask a question I've seen quite a bit online recently. Do Americans romanticize life in Europe too much? This might make sense. You see a lot of influencers online sharing things about Europe, and you see these posts of Americans going to Europe and being like, "Oh my God, it's so pretty."

And then they come back and they're like, "Oh, I miss my iced coffee," or something like that. But I just wanna pause for a moment here, because something I find really interesting about this whole conversation is just how much the shoe is on the other foot from where it was 20 years ago. Based on what they'd seen from Hollywood films and TV shows, Europeans used to ask the same thing about America.

They were wondering if they were romanticizing life in America too much. That was, of course, when their main source of information about America was idealized interpretations in the cinema. Whereas now with the proliferation of YouTube and people sharing both sides of every situation, it seems like the pendulum has swung in the complete opposite direction.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but I'd say Americans don't romanticize life in Europe at all, but rather they long for America to have some of the basic freedoms experienced by Europeans. They wish they had the option to experience some of the freedoms that Europeans have, but within the US. Every country has its problems.

Every country likes to think their country has a uniquely bad government and inefficient bureaucracy, but that is one thing that's pretty consistent no matter where you move to. A common gotcha when having this conversation online is, "Countries in Europe have racism," or, "Countries in Europe also have a homeless problem," or housing crisis, or cost of living, so on and so forth.

That's not really something I don't think anyone's really debating. No American is looking to life in Europe as if it has no problems at all, and that the existence of these similar problems makes moving there pointless. I think most Americans who are eyeing up Europe are doing so because of the things that America is lacking.

Nearly two in three Americans want universal healthcare. America doesn't offer that. Again, two in three Americans want European-style vacation policies. America doesn't offer that. And 53% of Americans would prefer to live in a walkable neighborhood, but sorry, America doesn't offer that. The list goes on.

If America were an actual democracy, I don't think many of these people would be having romanticized views of Europe at all because they wouldn't need to. They could have everything they wanted in the country they were born and raised. And judging from the results of a recent survey showing that 52% of Americans feel that they could have a higher quality of life abroad and that 43% of Americans think they would be happier if they moved abroad, I'd say these things are very much linked.

I think this majority of Americans have seen how the US government actually operates counter to the will of the majority of the American people and have mentally given up the idea of the US ever improving in these areas that matter a lot to them. And after being continuously exposed through social media as opposed to Hollywood about how life in Europe actually is and these basic freedoms that are enjoyed over here, I think many Americans are happy enough to ignore the perceived downsides of moving abroad.

They don't really want to move abroad. They probably don't even wanna learn a foreign language. But at the end of the day, they'd probably rather do that and all the other hurdles they have to go through rather than have their family go bankrupt if they get sick or get hit by a car or get shot. Moving to a country in Europe or really anywhere at all won't solve all your problems, but it very well may solve one or two of the big ones that you actually care the most about

Even if a European government hosts its data in a European data center, even if the servers are physically located in Frankfurt or Paris, if the service provider is legally domiciled in the United States, then US law can still reach into the system.

So quite frankly, from a sovereignty perspective, this is an existential question. And up until recently, the US seemed to be a friendly and supportive ally, so Europe wasn't really thinking much about it. It basically means that European public administrations, hospitals, tax authorities, and ministries could theoretically find themselves operating on infrastructure that sits inside another country's legal perimeter, which is just wild.

it really throws the whole idea of nation-states, of borders, and democracy into question, or am I missing something here? This tension has been discussed repeatedly by European data protection authorities, national courts, and the European Data Protection Board, particularly after the collapse of the EU-US Privacy Shield framework following the Schrems ruling by the European Court of Justice in twenty twenty.

So that ruling effectively stated that US surveillance law does not provide protections equivalent to EU fundamental rights, making routine transfers of personal data to the U- United States legally precarious. So what this means is that US cloud services are widely used, they are dominant, but their legal status is really not particularly clear.

Even large public sector cloud contracts, they now exist inside a zone of latent legal conflict, and this legal layer intersects directly with the second, more recent shock of artificial intelligence, because advanced AI systems are not just software They are built on extreme concentrations of compute, specialized chips, and energy-intensive data centers, and the overwhelming majority of advanced AI training today relies on hardware designed by NVIDIA, manufactured primarily in Taiwan, although ASML in the Netherlands does play a key role as well.

But they are integrated systems largely controlled by US companies. At the same time, the US has imposed sweeping export controls on advanced semiconductors and AI-related technologies using, access to chips as a geopolitical instrument. So from Europe's perspective, this sends a very clear signal that the future productivity gains of AI and future gains, economic growth in general will depend on access to infrastructure that sits inside a supply chain ultimately governed by US strategic priorities.

So it means that Europe's next wave of automation and industrial optimization or digital public services, that can be throttled by decisions taken in Washington, not in Brussels or Berlin. So while a lot of people are arguing about the EU, not many people have stopped to think about the stranglehold that US big tech has on Europe.

Even if relations do remain friendly, even if no one intends any harm, dependence of this magnitude, it just changes how power works. And to be honest, I'm just hoping that someone in the comments will correct me and tell me that I'm over-exaggerating the situation or that I've missed something Because US, through US big tech, basically, they have access to all of European data, and I'm not talking about social media.

We're talking about health records, about company secrets, innovation, data protection, tax data. Essentially anything that is stored on a US cloud service provider, it really introduces a massive asymmetry. And thank God, it does look like, the EU has realized this. if you look at European documents, increasingly they use language of strategic autonomy or de-risking and things like technological sovereignty, rather than decoupling or confrontation.

So this is not about a confrontation in a kind of emotional sense. It's really just about, sovereignty and de-risking as they keep talking about. So the goal is really not to replace US technology across the board because that's obviously very unrealistic. most European officials, they admit that this is just not possible, but the goal is really to ensure that the most sensitive layers of European society, like government data, identity systems, health records, defense infrastructure, those kind of things, that at least they are somehow shielded from US big tech.

So if this reality is as severe as it appears, then the European reaction looks more like a slow-motion recognition of a structural mistake. wasn't this obvious ten years ago? surely you could have seen this coming. Did we really have to wait for Donald Trump to wake up to this structural reality?

Like there have been several documentaries made about how social media run by American big tech companies have influenced or changed election outcomes. So it seems to me that this is really very long overdue, and this really does matter a lot because the platforms that Europe has relied on are-- they're not just tools, they actually form the channels through which society operates on.

And I think we tend to forget that. Like cloud infrastructure decides where data lives and whose courts can reach it. The operating systems and app stores, they mediate access to work and services and communication, and social media platforms shape the emotional climate of politics long before parliaments even begin to discuss an issue.

And they also change how society functions and how people relate to each other. In essence, they are changing the social fabric of society globally, not just in the US. Modern Europe built a large portion of its post-war identity around constraint, procedure, and legal architecture because the continent learned painfully and repeatedly that the state moving quickly and with ideological clarity can become extremely dangerous.

Now that lesson is embedded in institutional courts, data protection regimes, and the slow friction of due process. These are often experienced as frustrations, especially when the world moves faster and other powers appear less encumbered, but they are also a form of collective self-control and a deliberate attempt to ensure that power remains accountable, contestable, and domesticated by law.

The problem is that platform power grew in a way that bypassed many of these mechanisms. It expanded transnationally, consolidated into a few companies, and became embedded in everyday functioning of institutions before politics had found a language to describe what was happening. This is why the sense of unease now feels deeper than the usual argument about regulation.

So what Europe is increasingly confronting is something much more fundamental. the possibility that the core channels of modern life, in essence, the digital nervous system of society, that may now sit permanently outside European accountability structures while still shaping European society from the inside, and that is not a good place to be.

that is essentially how you abdicate your sovereignty without going to war So underneath the policy language of sovereignty sits a psychological fact that is very easy to miss if you treat this as a standard transatlantic spat. So trust is what makes dependency feel like a partnership. When trust weakens like it has now under this US president, that dependency starts to feel very much like a liability, even when nothing has maybe gone wrong yet in an obvious sense.

Europe can argue about immigration or fiscal rules and identity in national politics all day long, and yet still find that many of the most consequential levers of modern life are being set by entities whose incentives and accountability structures do not map neatly into European democratic expectations.

And so for a long time, Europe behaved as if history had ended, as if the basic architecture of the world was settled, and that all that remained was to manage it more efficiently. Security would be outsourced, technology leadership would be imported, growth would come from elsewhere, and Europe would specialize in rules and standards and social programs.

But what we are now seeing is the first serious sign that Europe no longer believes that arrangement is stable enough to build a future on. And so it's begun to accept that a civilization cannot permanently outsource the foundations of its own functioning and still expect to remain a meaningful political entity.

So I don't see this as Europe turning against, the US. I see this as Europe turning back towards itself, towards the idea that infrastructure is power, that sovereignty in the modern world does not begin with flags or speeches, but with who owns, governs, and controls the systems that organize everyday life.

Europe may still fail to build ecosystems with the scale and dynamism that United States has done. it may be too slow, there may be too much compromise, but the direction itself does matter because for the first time in a long time, Europe is behaving less like a museum of past greatness and more like a political entity that understands it has a future to defend.

And so in the kind of world we are drifting into, that may be the most European form of self-assertion possible.

We've just heard clips starting with

House of El tracing how the European Parliament dropped Google for French search engine Qwant, part of a rolling replacement of the American software stack across European institutions.

Bloomberg Television examined how a "second China shock" is now hitting Europe, threatening to hollow out German auto and heavy industry.

Times Originals detailed how European officials are secretly building defense plans to repel a Russian attack without the US, from nuclear hedging coalitions to automatic regional force commands.

Max Fisher broke down the 20 million barrel daily deficit from the Iran war, and how China quietly slashing its imports prevented mass blackouts and economic collapse.

Evan Edinger compared his Pizza Hut job in New Jersey with the UK's 28 days paid holiday, arguing America prioritizes the welfare of corporations over its own people.

And Brit in Germany warned that Europe abdicated its sovereignty by letting US big tech control the cloud, operating systems, and platforms that organize everyday life.

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

But first, as you may have heard by now, the show is going through some financial troubles. We've taken a big hit on ad dollars drying up since the beginning of the year and I'm still working to turning things around. Our members supporting the show are the main thing getting us through right now but it's really been the people signing up more recently who have been helping to fill the gap that opened up.

So, if you haven't signed up yet but are thinking about it, just know that the emergency hasn't passed and we could still really use your help because our balance sheet can only bleed red for so long. Don't worry if you can only afford a few bucks a month, it's the collective contributions of people stepping up that has always gotten us through tough times like this.

So, if you get value out of the show and want to get 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.

We're also working on reincorporating audience feedback into the show. If you want to encourage others to leave messages, start by becoming the change you want to see in the world.

To spark ideas, here's today's question.

Just like the EU switching platforms away from US companies, individuals like you and me thinking of breaking away from the easier-but-worse option always costs something. More money, the mental energy of deciding to switch, the learning curve of the new thing, etc. This is a big part of the business model that runs most of the internet. The things that are free and set as default end up being used by billions of people because of the costs of switching. If you're one of the people who decided that trade was worth it and picked the harder, more independent path with any software or services you use, tell us what made you want to switch and share any advice you have for others thinking of doing something similar or for those who've never even considered it.

If you'd like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

As for today's topic,

Slowly but surely, people are catching on to the idea that when you buy a digital item like a book or movie, the reality is closer to renting, because a change in the platform you're using could mean that your purchase may suddenly disappear. Producer Deon, who worked on today's curation, caught on to this trend early and is a bit of a doomsday prepper, except instead of shelf-stable food and toilet paper, he collects hard copies of all of the movies and video games he'll want to have on hand to ride out the apocalypse.

This is a problem that no one in all of human history had to worry about before the last 20 years, but it's now hitting everyone all at once. Each person is individually being made to reorient their understanding of personal ownership and control over what we think we own, the same thing is happening at the level of national governments. In a lot of ways, when a European nation decides to cut ties with an American mass surveillance company in favor of using one based in their own country, that's not much different than Deon making sure he has a Blu-ray collection of all his favorite Nicolas Cage movies. They're both defenses against having access cut off by a higher, unpredictable power.

"Unpredictable" is the operative word. If you rented from Blockbuster, you knew it's going back in a few days. If you buy from a record store, you know you own it for life. But when you find yourself in the murky, digital middle ground, the relationship changes and can quickly turn into a power struggle with the seller exerting leverage over the buyer.

When France purchases computing services from Microsoft, it can be a mutually beneficial relationship as long as it stays neutral, but now a very unpredictable Trump administration has inserted itself into that relationship. Which is how Microsoft's own lawyer ended up under oath in front of the French Senate, being asked whether he could promise that French government data would never end up in the hands of the American government. His answer was, "No, I cannot guarantee it."

For many, just that uncertainty is enough to make them rethink international business relations. But the U.S. also proved it's willing to follow through on using its leverage when it ordered Anthropic to cut off access to its best AI models from all foreign users. That was very likely the last straw that pushed France to announce it was dropping its US intelligence software.

When I zoom out from these stories a bit, the picture that becomes clearer is that this is all part of the fallout of the slow-moving train wreck that is the end of neoliberalism. Neoliberal orthodoxy says that markets are to be considered the supreme source of truth and efficiency, which leads to the conclusion that governments should do everything in their power to get out of the way rather than intervene. Margaret Thatcher famously argued that "there is no alternative," but in the wake of the 2008 crash, it was George W. Bush who proved that was wrong. While explaining his government's emergency response to the crash, he said, "I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system."

In the big picture, that was one of the first dominoes to fall, which pushed the entire world back into the understanding that activist governments are sometimes needed because market orthodoxy couldn't be trusted to deliver for people. That cracked the door, and people have been pushing on it ever since. Occupy Wall Street, Bernie's presidential runs, the democratic socialists, Biden's industrial policy, and the populist right at the same time.

Trump didn't invent the idea of using emergencies to claim extensive powers. Bush did it with wars and the economy. Trump just dialed it up to include everything he could think of and all the things Project 2025 thought up for him.

He has clearly ushered the activist state back into existence, and that is forcing others to do the same in response. Free market be finally and truly damned... which puts the left in an interesting position.

We rightly abhor Trump's use of state power because he uses it for self-enrichment and evil ends, or sometimes just to be a dick. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it's the left that has been calling for a more activist government for decades. We want an activist government to rein in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, tax the wealthy, provide universal health care, regulate food and drug safety using science as its guide, and so on down the list.

The fight during the neoliberal era was about whether it was legitimate to use government power at all. Now the ground has shifted and the only debate that matters is over what should be done with government power, because the use of power is no longer in question.

Trump is giving everyone a view of what the ethnonationalist right wants to do with an activist government. Their idea of sovereignty is fortifying borders and keeping "the other" out. Other nations are beginning to see value in digital sovereignty for the sake of not being beholden to a foreign power. The difference between those two visions of sovereignty is nuanced but real.

Like Deon and his film collection, he's exercising a version of digital sovereignty, but it's not to hoard or to exclude, only to protect. In fact, I'm positive he'll be inviting his neighbors over for movie nights to keep people's spirits up after society has collapsed.

Sovereignty and power are neutral terms until you decide what to do with them. Being dependent on others need not be weaponized against you, just as independence need not be used to exclude others. The far right sells the myth that both happen automatically, which is why you should be afraid of everyone all the time.

The left has been calling for an activist government to reemerge from its neoliberal coma to use its power for the benefit of people while international relationships should be built on the reality of interdependence and the same basic tenets that define good neighbors.

For all that Trump has done wrong, and that's been just about everything, he also made activist government okay again. Thatcher's "there is no alternative" is dead and buried. The state can build and spend and refuse the invisible hand of the market at will, and now everyone knows it.

This is vindication. The left has spent forty years making the same demand, that government actually use its power to work for people. We're right to grieve the damage Trump has done and will keep doing, and we should work to repair every bit of it. But the worst mistake we could make would be to focus on the breaking of norms, because that implies that going back to the old status quo is the answer. Repair the damage, but don't let go of the idea that government can do big things if we want it to.

Trump used the emergency powers he claimed for himself to inflict cruelty on others and enrich himself. It's time the left stop being allergic to power so that we can point it where it needs to go. Healthcare, housing, affordability. It's time to abandon free-market principles to save the people from the free market.

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

Section A, Can Europe Stand Alone

Followed by Section B, The China Factor

Section C, The Tech Sovereignty Playbook

And Section D, Building European Alternatives

let's start with the basics. Most people hear the war game, the word war game, and they think prediction, but what can and what can't a war game actually deliver?

It cannot predict, ironically. So I said this countless times, I think, in the podcast. We're not predicting the future here. We're exploring a potential, a possible future.

So a war game, I like to describe it like a thought experiment. So you want to understand the thinking of your enemy, your own thinking, gaps in your thinking, and your own weaknesses. So you take a scenario, so in our case we said, Russia was conducting a military exercise on the Belarusian-Lithuanian border, and they did not withdraw their troops after that.

That was a fictional scenario, right? And then-

But it's something that actually did happen very similarly, w- in the situation, with Ukraine, right?

Exactly, yeah, and that's why we- '

Cause they do conduct- Yeah ... these military exercises- Exactly ... every year.

We felt that might be something that Russia was actually prepared to do at some point in the future potentially.

and of course I had a lot of background talks with experts on that from, Russia, like Ukraine, Lithuania, Europe, so we had a lot of input. And then we took this scenario, and we had experts and former political decision-makers, take decisions on the basis of the scenario. So we presented them with a scenario.

We said, "Look, there's a crisis. You are now the German government, and you are now the Russian government. Play." And what it does is people take decisions, and then the simulation develops. And as it develops, you can really find out patterns that I'm sure we'll talk about in this podcast as well.

Yeah, what I thought was fascinating was that you got some really high-ranking people to play roles that are not too far away from what they actually do in real life, right? you get people, like f- for example, NATO's former spokesperson to play NATO's Secretary General. So this is not your random Joe Miller.

Sorry if there are any Joe Millers out there, but, not them taking on, the roles of chancellors.

Yeah. exactly. And we took former political decision-makers or people who were in rooms where actual stuff was decided, like Oana Lungescu, who played our NA- NATO Secretary General. She was there all the way during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, right?

She was, like, always in the room when decisions were taken or, communicating those to the public, so she really knows what she's talking about. And we had, for example, Eberhard Zorn, who was the, former general inspector of the Bundeswehr, which is basically the army chief, right? We just use a different- Chief of

Defense,

yeah, chief of defense. We just use a different word for it in German, due to our history. and those people are, they were socialized in our political system, and they knew stuff, right? And this is why we chose them, because we wanted the results that we got to be, true to what the German political thinking looks like, right?

and of course, we also wanted people who know what they're talking about.

And it did produce quite some headlines when it first came out in German earlier this year, because this is something that you conducted at the end of last year, and th- the results were then published, and it got picked up by lots of international media, including NATO's real secretary general, who said, "Okay, this exercise has actually produced some, some concerning results."

Yeah, and we were... honestly, we were a bit surprised by the, the media coverage, but also Mark Rutte commenting on that. we did not expect that really because I found that internationally it got picked up a lot more than in Germany, and that, I think, also speaks to our strategic culture, right? but I think that especially media outlets in the UK, in the US were quite concerned about our results because, in the war game, Russia, and I don't wanna spoil the podcast for anyone here, but yeah, I gotta say it, right?

Russia achieved its strategic objectives. So there was a limited, in the war game, there was a limited military incursion into Lithuania, and the German government was not in a position to take on a leadership role, which would've been needed, to prevent this situation or react adequately. So people were quite alarmed, I would say, throughout Europe.

Yeah, because it's not a really far-fetched scenario, and it was one of the reasons, why you decided to publish the podcast in English. The last episode comes out next week, everybody who's listening can tune in real time, basically, and follow your podcast. I want to throw to Roman the question, a scenario where Russia doesn't withdraw troops after a military exercise.

This is a really good starting point, for a war game. But why specifically? Can you tell us about that Suwałki Gap? That is something that has become somewhat of a, a, a term that security circles really love speculating about, that narrow gap.

Can

I- Why is it so crucial? Why is that such an Achilles heel?

it's, it has to do with geography and, with the Russian, Kaliningrad exclave, and the w- and the road there, which is about 60 kilometers long, I think. So it's not difficult, from military, military point of view to try to cut it off and, actually cut off the Baltic republics, from the rest of NATO And that is why it is considered to be a weakness, in NATO eastern flank.

But on the other hand, I think because it is well known, I think, the probability that Russia will attack there, is relatively low, because NATO is expecting something to happen there, has been preparing for such a scenario. I think if Russia would try to do something like that, I think they would choose a different, a different, place where maybe...

so it's also, I don't believe it's Narva, for example, which is a small border town, in Estonia.

Estonia.

And, there are a lot of scenarios, books written about it, how Russians would try to, get hold of Narva and then, humiliate NATO. So a limited military operation. So the experts I've been talking to are expecting something, at a different place and, w- what's interesting about, this, this war game that, that you, you did, you did a great job, I think, and you're the pioneer in Germany because we had similar, similar war games, uh, in other countries. I remember, I was very impressed by the BBC, production, Inside the War Room, where they took- ... the British government and, tried to, look how the politicians in Great Britain would react.

Sky News, the war game also.

Yes. Exactly. What you did, you did it on a brighter scale, so you also involved other countries, NATO, so not just one government.

But for me, the most important thing was to, to show how weak Germany could be, because Germany is known to be weak because of its past, because of its difficult political situation, the German population, how Germany is trying to lead in NATO, especially with the new government under the Chancellor Friedrich Merz saying, "We are building the strongest conventional army in Europe."

But on the other hand, the German army, the Bundeswehr, is still weak. It is still trying to catch up, and, it takes time, and this is exactly the point where Russia might be tempted to do something.

But, Roman, if you're sitting in Moscow, what, m- is the strategy when it comes to the Baltics?

How do you look at that region? Just, let's just put ourselves in the Kremlin's shoes. How do they look at that region? They are, those three countries, they are members of the European Union. They, have, NATO troops stationed there. So just to an international audience, perhaps not everybody's even familiar with these three countries that together, I looked that up, they have barely the population size of Ireland.

the Baltic states were former Soviet republics, and of course, there are still, grievances in Russia about that. and the historic past, plays a major role here. So for, for the Russian president, for parts of the Russian public, it is a target. and there is Russian-speaking population there, especially in Latvia and, that is why they might see that as a leverage to do something on the board.

And this is also part of such war games where, for example, the BBC series, I've mentioned, Inside the War Room, World War III. So where they are trying to, send soldiers with no signs like they did in Crimea in twenty fourteen. And

so green men.

Exactly. The green men, the green men, trying to, remain under the radar, that plausible deniability.

how worried should we be about the answer to the question, rough patch or something fundamental changing?

let me first note the obvious, and that is, even if we're going through a rough patch, America, remains an import- an enormously important partner for us. In any given topic, the, it's better for us to have America on our side than being on the other side.

it will always serve our interests, if we are, if America is aligned with what we want to achieve than if it's not. That's a fact. Let's not, forget about that. On the other issue, it's true, we are seeing, an American foreign policy revolution. It's not the first one, we've seen others, but I think it's fair to say that it's the first foreign policy revolution where the transatlantic relationship, is also targeted.

It's remained intact in previous foreign policy, turns and foreign policy, uh, upheavals. but this time, the relationship, and the infrastructure and architecture and rationale, of, the transatlantic relationship and of the alliance, is also in the crosshairs.

And targeted, what do you mean by that?

America is no more convinced, that, or many Americans are no more convinced, that investment into collective security and into the security of allies actually serves America, uh, America's interests, a- and serves American security and, serves American global power projection. that may be the case because, the global political landscape has changed.

America- the American focus, is moving elsewhere. It's moving, to those regions of the world where it is, seriously and fundamentally, challenged. and that means that, uh, Europe, is no more the epicenter of American geopolitical posture.

And this was of course very different after the Second World War, after 1945.

And before we dive into all, of the issues that you've just touched on, maybe we can just go back for a second because if there is one soundbite that captures that golden age of transatlantic, relationship and unity, it might be this.

Today in the world of freedom, the

proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner.

to a younger audience out there, what did we just watch?

we watched, uh, John F. Kennedy in Berlin, saying, to Berliners, saying to Germans, a- actually, both Germanys, that America, saw security and, and policy of Germany as part of its fundamental interest. So it was hu- it was brilliant actually.

It was hugely, emotionally touching. your concerns are our concerns. That's the subtext of what, the American president said at the time.

So where did we lose those emotions?

I'm not sure we lost the emotions. but, look, face it, President Biden will have been the last American president whose foreign policy compass, and whose foreign policy prism, had been shaped, by, the, by the Transatlantic relationship by Europe.

that was the epicenter, of American, uh, global foreign policy posture. And every future president from whatever party will have been shaped by the experience of the dramatic rise of China, will have been experienced- will have been shaped by the experience of terrorism, will have been experienced, by the technological revolution, and will have been shaped, by the return of a great power competition, again, the focus of which will not be in Europe anymore.

I want to look with you at how the mood in Germany has been changing as a result of this feeling. You just described Joe Biden essentially as the last president with this core understanding at heart, at the heart of his foreign policy directives, but also his very own personal convictions, his, very own personal priorities, that Europe and particularly Germany as Europe's powerhouse is central to American interests.

So the mood here in Germany has changed when it comes to America. A poll in January this year said that 15% of Germans only say that the US is a reliable ally. 76% argued it's not. We asked a couple of people here in the streets just to get an idea, what people were thinking to just underscore these, these- the figures that I just mentioned.

For me right now, the

US is the greatest threat to our democracy, for liberal norms, for a better path into the future.

I'm the father of three children, and that's one reason why we won't be going to the US anytime soon, because you never know what will happen there.

So what strikes you, Ambassador, when you hear that?

I think if you talk, to friends in America, the take would be completely different. It is true, that we do see, a lot of unpredictability right now, and, there are a lot of questions linked to, the way forward. That all is true. But I do wonder to s- to some extent, whether, being thrown off the comfort zone, is actually, part of the Amer- of the German, uh, reaction.

There's a bit of psychodrama, uh, there as well. Because let's face it, this is not only about the present administration and about, uh, the president. the mood has changed in America, and we should really take that in. And the mood is, as I mentioned before, people don't believe anymore in globalization and free trade, and interdependence.

They don't believe it's good for them. They saw what it meant, what it meant for their industries. they don't believe in paying into, global common goods anymore because they saw, what the overstretch meant, for America. And I think we've taken some time, to actually realize, that, what we were doing and what America was doing, and, against the backdrop of the changed geopolitical landscape, it was like a wrongly fitted shirt.

And I think we now have to make sure that we get the shirt, uh, buttoned, rightly, and that's something we'll have to do. uh, will be- that will be uncomfortable. it will demand a lot of us, but let's face it, that's what we need to do-

I'm just- ...

instead of complaining.

We should say the overwhelming contribution to that alliance, both militarily and financially, is from the United States.

But wouldn't they spend that money whether or not they were members of NATO? The

big benefit that the US gets, or one of the huge benefits that the US gets, is the ability to what's called power project, in its current form. and they would lose that cost benefit if they were to leave the alliance.

can you give me an example of that?

I can. The US relies critically on intelligence that comes from the Nordic countries. A- and that intelligence pertains to the movement of Russian submarines coming out of Murmansk. Russia's nuclear deterrent when it comes to the submarine, those submarines are based at, Gadzhiyevo Naval Base, which is near Murmansk.

Now, when those submarines come up the estuary, the Nordic countries have intelligence that tracks those submarines, 'cause those submarines won't be submersed at that point. They'll go deep once they get into deep waters into the high seas. and this is really critical because the nuclear missiles on those submarines, they're not pointed at Oslo, they're not pointed at Stockholm, they're not pointed at Helsinki.

They're pointed at LA. They're pointed at Miami. They're pointed at DC. They're pointed at New York. and I think that's one of the most compelling reasons in terms of intelligence that I've heard in a long time.

Were the US to withdraw, then of course the rest of the alliance would lose what they bring to NATO as well.

And, th- there's no covering this up. There's no masking it. It would be an enormous loss to the alliance. and, Europe realize that, and I think we realize that. So what is that? So we're talking about most of the nuclear deterrent. we're talking about strategic airlift and air refueling.

something that you would think, you know, is quite benign when it comes to warfare. Absolutely critical to conduct the type of operations that we've seen over Iran. The Europeans couldn't provide that air refueling capability during the war in Libya, so it is a, what we call a critical vulnerability.

they would lose the intelligence, which is huge, ISR, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and crucially, the space force that provides a lot of that intelligence on GEOINT, for example, geo intelligence. global strike and bomber capabilities. we've seen the B-2s, you know, dropping huge bombs over Iran, the B-1s and the B-52s based out of Fairford.

Europe doesn't have a strategic bomber capability like that. And then actually going back to the command structure, I think that's another key point that we don't, we don't focus on too often. So the US does have a lot of leverage over other members of the alliance, but I wanna come back to the strategic interest the US has in this alliance because the best argument, I think, and we were speaking about this, for remaining, comes from analysis of what the US gains from the current status quo.

And the best way to see that, I think, is initially we should look at the map, or we will look at the map and the bases to which the US currently have access. So let's start with Canada. four bases. This is the North American Aerospace Defense command, NORAD as it's commonly known, and it's an air defense network deeply integrated across, the US Canadian Arctic.

it's got three core missions, aerospace warning, aerospace control, and maritime warning. and it's got four bases that we can see on the map here. You've got two in the west, one central, and one out in the east. And why they're critical is that you can deploy US fast jets to those, and the purpose of that would be to intercept ballistic missiles coming from the east.

And on the edge of that map, I can see Greenland. Yeah. part of the Kingdom of Denmark, of course. Crucially important to that defense posture you're outlining there. In fact, so important Donald Trump thinks it should be part of the US sovereign territory.

Yeah, and we've seen a lot of posturing on that.

the key base there is called Pituffik Space Base, in Greenland, and you can see Pituffik literally just high up on the western side, of the Greenland ice shelf. why that's important is i- it's US operated and it's important to say that it's not US sovereign territory, and it has such importance because the shortest routes between North America and Russia is over that territory through the Arctic.

So Pituffik Space Base provides missile warning, space tracking, and Arctic surveillance, which are key.

Let's come further east To Iceland

Yeah. We've got, Keflavik, airbase there. This is key because effectively the base gives NATO eyes onto what's called the Greenland, Ice- Iceland, UK gap, and this plays a critical role in the monitoring of Russian submarine activity and the air traffic between the Arctic and the Atlantic.

And sometimes we can see Russian strategic bombers, Russian intelligence aircraft coming all the way over the Nordics and probing those areas.

And under what basis does the US have access to Keflavik and the bases in Greenland?

Yeah, they're memorandums of understanding. they operate these facilities under treaty agreements, either through an agreement with the host country or under mutual defense agreements that come with NATO membership.

Again, important point to note, this is not US territory.

Whi- which brings us to the UK and to Europe What locations does the US rely on here?

Yeah, let's start with the UK. Let's start with a map. now, viewers may have seen or are very familiar with these names, based off, Operation Epic Fury.

Let's start with, RAF Lakenheath. These bases give the US an ability to power project predominantly across the Middle East, uh, North Africa, and the Russian Federation, or at least to deter. And in the most recent example, these bases have been key to operations as, as I say, not just on Operation Epic Fury, but also on Operation Midnight Hammer last year.

It's home to the US's 48th Fighter Wing. It's the largest fighter wing in Europe, and it operates four combat-ready squadrons, the F-15 Strike Eagle, which you can see in the top of the picture there, and the F-35 fifth generation stealth fighter.

And to the point, because the US is a NATO member, it can rely, in normal circumstances, on other bases here in the UK that i- it would have access to under treaty agreements.

Yeah, and I think, RAF Fairford, down in Gloucestershire, that's a good example of that. Let's just, take a look at where RAF Fairford is. These US assets here at Fairford, and we're talking about the B1B Lancer, and the B-52, the strategic bombers that we were talking about, they are not permanently based here.

They are forward deployed, and the criticality of this operating base is huge, 'cause we've seen so much activity of B1s getting airborne out of Fairford to conduct missions on Iran, and the B-52 strategic bombers as well. they're, they're carrying precision-guided cruise missiles.

Okay, let's move into, Europe. Most of our viewers will know that for many years now, Ramstein Air Base in Germany has been the, the center of gravity really- Yeah ... for US operations around the world.

But it's down in the south west of Germany. I think we can take a look at a map, just to show the viewers where it is.

and it serves as the headquarters for US Air Forces in Europe, USAFE, and NATO Allied Air Command. And crucially, there are also some medical facilities there for medevac, medical evacuation, as we call it, specifically for US soldiers injured in combat, and it was particularly critical for US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And also located at Ramstein is some of the most important communications, intelligence, and C2 command and control networks. So it really is a hybrid of capability out there, but predominantly based in the headquarters air command-

Okay ...

space.

Who pays for the US bases in Germany? Because Trump likes to tell us that they pick up the bill for this.

look, it's quite obviously the US- do pick up a, a fair chunk of that bill. and we'll come back to more spending in a bit. But I think it's also important to know that the Germans pay for the infrastructure. They pay for the l- the land, the utilities, any locally employed contractors, the Germans will pick up the tab for.

and the numbers we're looking at really, I think Germany has spent over $1 billion over the last 10 years, supporting US bases in Germany.

President Trump is threatening to draw down US troop numbers in Germany. In fact, he announced on social media not many weeks ago that 5,000 troops were heading to Poland.

Do we have any clarity on whether that is a straight redeployment from Germany?

I think the word is ambiguity. There's actually a, a lot of ambiguity of what the US, operational plan is, if you like. and I know that because I've spoken to a, a, a number of senior commanders in- inside NATO who just don't have the fidelity on what's going on with that.

And there's real confusion over the deployments. If you look at the map of the United States, we can look at a, a graphic here of, Permanent US troops in Europe. you can see that right across the map, and in the biggest countries such as the UK, Germany, and Italy, they've got a real significant presence.

The countries in red, tell us that there are well over 5,000 troops each. although a- again, it's well worth saying that when you look at trends since 1955, we are well down on where we were at the height of the Cold War. I think we've got a, a nice little graph that, that shows the decline of permanent US troops.

And just to cover that briefly, you can see in 1955 it was over 400,000. Then you can see a, a... In 1989, you can see a, a huge decline back down s- down to 100,000 End of the Cold

War.

End of the Cold War, exactly. And then out to today you've got, just under, under 66,000. So I think that's quite a poignant graph in terms of where we're trending.

What I find very striking is that we've talked a lot about US-German ties now. We haven't mentioned Donald Trump at all. and there are enough political talk shows about Donald Trump, so this one doesn't need to be one of them. And- You've also said already that, we won't go back to normalcy. So if Donald Trump disappeared from politics tomorrow, which problems would we still have?

I mentioned the structural reasons, why the transatlantic relationship is no more center stage. That will continue to be the case. What also will continue to be the case i- is there is a lot of distrust, or a disinterest, in America's role in stabilizing, global order and, the American resources that are required, to do so.

What I found interesting, was the comparison of a poll, that was taken, back in, I think February of 2020, which was the last year, of, President Trump's first tenure, and a poll, taken in February 2024, which was, the last year of the, of President Biden's, tenure. And in 2020, 53%, it was a Gallup poll, 53%, of the respondents said, they were satisfied, with the American, uh, global role.

And four years later, in 2024, it was 33%. That was- 33 ... 20% less, and that was, after four years of the apparent return, of America to traditional, alliance policies. I think it was a very tough verdict, on American foreign policy traditionalism.

And I think, that is a perfect segue to what, our colleague, the head of our Washington bureau, Ines Pohl, found when she spoke to Americans and asked them about, US-German ties.

There are, of course, the repeated remarks by President Donald Trump criticizing Germany for not paying what he calls its fair share for NATO and for not being supportive enough of the United States, including during the conflict with Iran. Some voices within the MAGA movement also, have expressed their sympathy for Germany's right-wing party, the AfD, adding another layer of tension, to the relationship.

But there's another side of the story. Many lawmakers, especially those representing states with close economic ties to Germany, have a much more nuanced understanding of the transatlantic relationship. They see it as a modern partnership based on shared interests, economic cooperation, and common strategic goals, rather than one rooted only in historical obligations.

But then there are, of course, the American people. I'm here at the state fair, part of the celebrations marking America's 250th birthday, taking the opportunity to ask visitors what they think about Germany.

I love the freedom that we both have. Not everyr- not everyone in the world has the freedoms that we have, and I'm so appreciative of the German people and the American people allying together so that we can protect that freedom.

I think that, America has done a lot for Europe and, I think a lot of Europeans are grateful, and I'm glad, and they should be, and we're grateful to have the relationship with Europe, and I love Europe.

I think a lot of people I talk to say stuff about America that is not true, and I try to tell them, if you wanna hate America, watch the news.

If you wanna love America, drive through it. Explore each state, become friends with the people."

I work in the energy space, and I think that, we've tried over and over again, and the regulations are just so complex that it's... We would rather spend our money elsewhere than spend our money in EU.

The German American relation is probably not as good as it should be, but I think the World Cup and what it has shown us is that when people of different nationalities get together, we can all come together and celebrate and have a good time, be proud of our nations, and just be kind and loving to each other and be accepting of each other.

So you see, whatever you think about the World Cup, but this is a huge topic here, and everybody we are talking to tells us how important it is to bring people together.

I saw you nodding there, Emily Haber. Can, can you just, share with us what went through your head when you were watching this?

I, I thought it was brilliant actually. D- different voices, all very positive. and, I felt it, was a significant contrast, to the, critical, skeptical, and sometimes complaining mood, that you can observe in Germany.

And we haven't touched upon, what some people are hinting at. Germany owes a lot to the United States.

Most experts would agree that modern-day Germany, especially the y- reunified version of it, wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for the US's role after the Second World War, where not only did they give the, the descendants of the Nazi, perpetrators a big chance to return to the international, community, but they also invested their own money, right?

So are Germans ungrateful?

I'm not sure they're ungrateful. I think everyone realizes, the huge, step America had taken, when only a few years, after the war, it stepped in to protect, uh, Germany and protect Germans. think of the, airlift. But here again, I would, state the obvious.

times have moved on. Americans have moved on and so have we, and what we need to do is to focus on, as Ines Pohl said, focus, on, shared interest, where we want to move together. what's the way ahead? that's what the new transatlantic relationship, is about.

But when you say times have moved on, Donald Trump argues that Europeans, Germans especially, are still freeloading when it comes to being protected because they're not protecting themselves.

They rely on the nuclear umbrella.

Yes, but our contribution to NATO is the second-largest in NATO. I think that is not reflecting reality if he says it's, uh, far below par. It's simply not true.

And of course, we're recording this podcast, it's important to say, before the next big NATO summit next week where- Yes

nobody knows what's going to happen, if Donald Trump is going to stick around till the end. We'll have to watch all of that. but I want to bring in, the sort of more, strategic analysis by my other fellow podcast host, Michaela Küfner.

Germans have admired the United States in the past. They didn't mind much that there is an economic, but particularly also a strategic dependence on Washington.

All of this changed with the arrival of US President Donald Trump, the first and the second time around. Doubts were growing whether United States truly is the world power still standing in for freedom around the globe. In recent months, we saw German Chancellor Friedrich Merz not speak out vocally to defend international law in the hope that he could keep Donald Trump at his side, also at Europe's side.

The big question now, and a lot will depend on this, is whether this Trump America is the America that will remain for the future, whether this is the new American baseline, or whether the US will find back to a path of global cooperation and valuing and trusting its allies in Europe across the board.

Germany has been described as like the logistics hub of NATO, and the reason for that is r- if Russia attacks the Baltic states, and if Article 5 gets triggered, and we have the regional defense plans, NATO now is, trying, To really have a forward defense, like to stop an attack, as it happens, but still you would need reinforcements, right?

So you would need American soldiers, other soldiers to be brought to the Baltics. and Germany happens to be at the center, and troops would need to move through Germany in the hundreds of thousands. We have

borders with nine countries.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So there would be a lot of logistics.

Like Deutsche Bahn would be needed, the ports would be needed, Bremerhaven would be absolutely crucial. and then if some, soldiers get wounded, for example, they would be of course treated there, but, if capacity is not enough, they would ne- then be moved to Germany and treated here as well. So a lot of stuff would need to happen here, water, energy, infrastructure, all of that, right?

Germany has the Oplan Deutschland, the, Germany operations plan, let's say. and in there it's secret, so we don't know details, but we know that it sets out a plan for this kind of scenario. And in order to invoke certain measures and certain laws, it's quite diffult- difficult to achieve that because, the, the, the Spannungsfall would need to be invoked.

Th- this is like the state of tension. You translate it state of tension. Yeah. Or even Verteidigungsfall. So state of tension can be invoked by parliament, by the Bundes- Bundestag if Germany thinks that an attack is, possible imminent, right? and then in this kind of scenario, it's easier to invoke the emergency laws.

So it's a state of emergency basically, right? but you need a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag, and the- Mainstream political parties do not have that majority now. in our war game, it still got invoked, right? The adjudication or white cell, the team that led the war game, the German War Gaming Center took this decision.

and that was a lot already for the blue team to achieve, right? So what they did was saying like, "Okay, we need, in the Spannungsfeld, in the state of tension, you can tell certain companies you need to primarily produce for the Bundeswehr. we need Deutsche Bahn to transport primarily soldiers," and that's massively interrupting civilian life, right?

This is why the thres- threshold is so high, because it should not, this decision should not be taken light-hearted. But Germany was looking at the situation, the blue team, sorry, in our war game was looking at the situation saying, "We have a war in Europe. We have a security crisis. What's Germany's role in this scenario?

We become the logistics hub, so we prepare our country for American, mostly American troops to move through." But American troops were not coming. So they were following the plans. I think Germans are very good at that, right? But they were not looking at the bigger picture, like what is Russia trying to achieve, and what is our own options here?

And what are the Americans actually going to be doing, right? Yeah. that is, wasn't that the other key question? Yeah. Apart from getting Russia wrong, they also had no idea what the American administration would decide to do, right? they were in contact with the actor who played the, American,

Secretary of State

administrative secretary of state Yeah, Jeff Rathke. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. He's a former NATO and US diplomat, and I had long conversations with him even before the war game to anticipate how might a Trump administration present itself in such a scenario, because we don't know. And again, it would be wrong to assume that we predict any sort of reaction, right?

We are not doing that. We're just asking, how would Europe, how would Germany react if Americans did not step up? And I think the necessity to ask this question is very obvious, right? at the NATO summit, Trump in the end was a bit more conciliatory than people had- The

real NATO summit- Yeah ... just a couple of weeks ago.

The

real NATO summit, yeah. Yeah. But still, Greenland was put again on the table. the ceasefire in Iran was ended. Trump was, was heavily criticizing Spain, right? So you can just not know- ... what this ad- administration is going to do. so yeah, we had Jeff Rathke in the war game, and he was saying, the US was very hesitant to give a strong military reaction because in our war game, importantly, there was a ceasefire in Ukraine because most experts say that this- is the prerequisite for further military action of the Russian, armed forces and government to do something outside Ukraine because it frees up capacity, right? So- It

buys time as well, right?

It buys time. and we had a ceasefire in Ukraine in our war game, and then after that, there was the limited military- Limited military incursion into Lithuania.

and the Americans in our scenario were the brokers of the ceasefire. So the imagined, American administration was saying, "Look, we thought we solved the security issue in Europe, and we're not prepared to have another scenario like that. So let's all calm down, wait and see. we don't think it's in Vladimir Putin's interest to have another war," right?

That was what happened.

But if that is the assumption, then surely the blue team could have understood that the Americans had already decided to not be treated like a full-fledged NATO member in the sense of, oh, yes, there's a war in Europe. Let's go. Send everybody in to deter Russia as much as possible.

There were mixed signals, as in real life, like the US president was saying one thing, the Secretary of State was saying another thing. then we have the Pentagon. So it was not clear how the, the Americans would react. But in such a scenario, it's just important to move very quickly, because if you don't...

if you don't act, someone will act for you, right? And that's also what happened in the war game. So I don't think that the German government was naive in thinking that the Americans would step up. but they still expected it, or they weren't used to Americans not stepping up, right?

And I think we also saw that, when it came to military support of Ukraine, and Roman, you would know this better than I do, but, that was a situation where Europeans really had to, sort themselves out and see, oh, what can we do without a strong American support, and we're still in the process of seeing that.

now the coalition of the willing has, announced that there will be military exercises in the fall, right? I don't think Germany will be part of that. What happens if in France, we have a different government, and what if in the UK, Burnham decides that he focuses more on the UK, right? What happens to the coalition of the government?

What is Germany's position in that? we have very real-life examples for these kind of conversations that also happened in the war game, and I think what we learned is that we're not yet there to be fully prepared for such scenarios.

just one point, if I may. you've just said that the prerequisite was a ceasefire in Ukraine.

in all scenarios, this is the case, but I would caution, to see it as a given Because at the moment, as things are running for Russia, and they're running not good, it's not just a stalemate, on the battlefield, but also Ukraine is attacking Russia more and more, so the Russian population is feeling the-- So war is coming back where it came from for the first time, massively, and Vladimir Putin is under enormous pressure at the moment from inside Russia, so he has to do something.

uh, as long as the war against Ukraine continues, he might be tempted to attack, for example, a factory in Poland or in the Baltic states where, for example, drones for Ukraine's, for Ukraine are being assembled or some-- or munition depots in these countries. Would this tri-trigger Article 5? This is s-a scenario we need to talk about because it is, I think, more realistic at the moment as we speak.

And the political situation in Europe, we've been talking about and I've just mentioned it and you as well. In Britain, there is this transition of government. In Germany, elections in September in, uh, Sa- Sachsen-Anhalt, where the far-right AfD could be the winner for the first time and could have its own government, which would weaken Germany, which would be, I, I hope it will not paralyze the federal government, but it will be a major blow for this government.

Next, Section B, The China Factor

broadly speaking, European policymakers have two issues with the EU-China economic relationship at the moment. The first is general concern about China's trade imbalances.

As you probably already know, China runs a persistent trade surplus. That is, it exports more stuff than it imports. In 2025, for instance, China ran a trade surplus of more than $1 trillion, more than double what it was only five years ago. Lots of policymakers in Europe and elsewhere see this as evidence of China's unfair trade practices.

For context, persistent and large trade surpluses like the ones we see in China shouldn't really happen, at least according to orthodox economics. After all, when you export loads of stuff, this either means you get lots of foreign currency if your exports are priced in foreign currency, which you can then use to afford more imports, or it creates demand for your currency if your exports are priced in your currency, which should thus appreciate and allow you to afford more imports.

Even if it's true that Chinese industry is great and the world thus wants lots of Chinese exports, in a functioning economic system, this should just mean that China can afford a lot of imports. Not only is this not happening, but the subsequent trade surplus also looks like a deliberate policy choice from the CCP who have continued to actively devalue their currency while explicitly pursuing a policy of economic self-sufficiency, which means less imports Now, it's probably worth mentioning that European policymakers haven't really been entirely consistent in their outrage here.

European policymakers and politicians weren't that fussed about China's trade surplus in the 2010s when American politicians first started complaining about it. This was at least in part because the EU was actually running some pretty big trade surpluses itself. In fact, relative to GDP, the EU actually ran larger surpluses than China for most of the 2010s.

However, as Europe's overall trade surplus has shrunk and its bilateral trade deficit with China has grown, European politicians and policymakers have suddenly become a lot more interested in China's alleged imbalances. Quite a lot of this has to do with Trump. Trump's tariffs have both hurt European exports to the US, bringing down Europe's overall trade surplus, and caused Chinese exporters to redirect their exports away from the US towards the EU, increasing the EU-China trade deficit.

Anyway, alongside this generalized anxiety about China's trading imbalances, this second point of tension in the EU-China economic relationship is that China is putting pressure on certain specific and politically sensitive European industries. The most obvious case is cars, where Chinese upstarts like BYD and Chery have been gaining market share in both Europe and the rest of the world, especially when it comes to electric vehicles.

This has provoked real anxiety in the EU. The car industry is not just economically significant, cars are the EU's biggest single export, and the industry employs millions of people. It's also politically significant and central to Europe's sense of itself. Chinese companies also dominate in green industries in clean tech, where Europe was once a market leader, and which was supposed to be the basis for Europe's reindustrialization via policy initiatives like the Green New Deal.

China's clean tech exports have grown steadily for the past couple of decades. China now accounts for the vast majority of Europe's solar panel and battery imports, while its clean tech imports have actually declined since about 2016. China's growing industrial dominance is not just bad news for European exporters and the European economy.

It's also created some uncomfortable dependencies in certain strategically significant areas. Like everyone else, Europe is very dependent on China for rare earths, 17 metallic elements that are critical for modern technologies, whose processing and production are dominated by China. European drone manufacturers also rely heavily on Chinese imports for their components, and China accounts for a large and growing share of global steel production.

So you get the idea. European policymakers are both worried about China's overall trade imbalances and about how China's industrial prowess is undermining certain strategically significant industries. This all raises the question: what can Europe actually do about any of this? somewhat confusingly, we're gonna start with the second problem, the threat that China apparently poses to certain strategic industries in Europe.

The first thing the EU has to do here is to decide which industries are actually, quote-unquote, strategic. European politicians generally agree that Europe needs to defend its strategic autonomy, but this disguises the fact that there's a lot of disagreement over what strategic autonomy actually requires and which specific industries require protection.

The French, for instance, have a notoriously expansive understanding of the term. In the 2000s, they famously prevented PepsiCo from acquiring the French yogurt company Danone on strategic grounds, with the then Prime Minister describing Danone as a flower of French industry at the time. Traditionally, Germany has been on the other end of the spectrum, less willing to intervene in the economy and more willing to let the market do its work.

This ideological gap has become apparent in the ongoing debate over European rearmament. France wants EU member states to spend their new defense budgets in Europe on European-made systems, while Germany has been happier to spend these new monies abroad on, say, American or Korean-made systems. The point we're trying to make is that before retaliating against China, the EU needs to actually align on which industries are actually strategic, and then the EU can impose targeted protectionist measures, like tariffs on Chinese exports or subsidies for domestic companies within those industries to either encourage domestic production inside Europe or at least encourage diversification away from China.

European politicians should also make it clear to their electorates that this won't be painless. Protectionist measures will effectively make Chinese imports more expensive for consumers at a time when inflation is already running hot, thanks to Trump's war on Iran, and China will probably retaliate, as it did against Trump's tariffs.

When it comes to the more general issue of China's trade surplus with not just Europe, but also with the world more widely, Europe doesn't have that many great options. The EU could impose some sort of flat tariff like the US has, but this wouldn't be great for the European economy and would probably provoke a dramatic retaliation, as happened after Liberation Day.

This is a reminder of why we created multilateral institutions like the WTO in the first place. To resolve any big and persistent trade imbalance, you need to get both the surplus and deficit countries round the table.

we're not trying to take a position on whether the EU should or should not fight a trade war.

We're just trying to say that if it does, it's not necessarily doomed. That's because, as we see it, there are at least four reasons to think that the EU has more leverage over China than is generally assumed. The first is that after the trade war with the US, Chinese exporters, and thus the Chinese economy more generally, have become increasingly reliant on the European market.

For context, we often talk about the US-China trade war and the trade truce that emerged from it as an issue that's somewhat been resolved. But while it's true that each side's tariff rate has come down from the triple digit highs we saw in the immediate aftermath of Liberation Day, the US still has some pretty steep tariffs on China at the moment.

According to analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the average US tariff rate on Chinese imports currently stands at about 47.5%. Again, way lower than the post-Liberation Day peak, but more than twice as high as it was under Biden, and more than 10 times higher than the average rate under Obama.

This is actually one of the big reasons that the EU has suddenly become so anxious about China's overcapacity. China has reacted to these outstanding US tariffs by redirecting exports away from the US towards the EU, which is basically the second biggest consumer market in the world It's also worth saying that even before Liberation Day, China was relying more and more on European consumers to absorb its export surpluses.

According to OECD data, for instance, the share of all Chinese manufacturing exports going to Europe rose from about 13% in 2012 to 17% in 2022, the latest year for which the OECD has data, and will have risen further since. The point we're trying to make is that the ongoing trade war with the US has accelerated a preexisting trend, and actually made Chinese exporters more reliant on the EU, which has essentially become the consumer of last resort.

This is especially true for high-end Chinese exports, which are probably too pricey for middle class consumers in, say, South America or East Asia. Limiting access to the European market will thus cause more trouble for Beijing than it might have done before Liberation Day, when China would've been able to redirect some of its affected exports to wealthy consumers in the US, which gives the EU more leverage in any trade war.

The second reason on our list is that the Chinese economy currently looks pretty weak, at least domestically. The latest data, for instance, suggests that retail sales fell by 0.6% year on year in May, the first decline since December 2022 when COVID was sweeping through the country. Similarly, fixed asset investment was down 4.1% year on year, the worst result since May 2020.

The one silver lining in the data was exports, which were up 19.4%. But while this might sound great, this combination of falling retail sales, which basically measure domestic demand, and rising exports suggest that Chinese companies are becoming increasingly reliant on foreign demand. Again, this gives the EU more leverage in a trade war because it means that Chinese companies can't easily redirect any affected exports back to Chinese consumers in their home market, given the weak domestic demand.

Anyway, the third reason to be optimistic about Europe's prospects in any upcoming trade war is that Europe already knows how China is going to retaliate. Beijing is probably gonna restrict rare earth exports, as it did to great effect during its trade war with the US last year. For context, rare earths are a set of 17 metallic elements that are used in a whole load of high-end technologies.

As you might already know, China absolutely dominates the entire supply chain, accounting for about 60% of all rare earth mining globally, and more importantly, over 90% of all processing. When the Trump administration started the trade war last year, Beijing responded by both imposing reciprocal tariffs, but also by restricting the export of rare earths.

This sparked panic in America's business community, who warned Trump and co. that their supply chains would freeze up unless Trump could negotiate some sort of truce. This obviously worked well back then, but it means that this time, the EU knows what's coming, and thus should be able to take precautionary measures.

Most obviously, European countries could stockpile rare earths, as Japan has done since 2010 when China first weaponized its rare earth dominance and halted exports following a maritime sovereignty dispute between the two countries. It's also worth noting that since the US-China trade war, other countries across the world have taken steps to reduce their singular dependence on Chinese rare earth exports, which means that the market is becoming more diversified all the time.

Anyway, the fourth and final reason on our list is that Europe has its own choke points that it can weaponize in response. Most obviously, China still depends on lithographic machines from Dutch company ASML for advanced semiconductor manufacturing, a sector where the Dutch company holds something like 90% of market share.

The EU could further restrict ASML exports to China, although this would probably invite retaliatory export controls on other semiconductor inputs, which is how China reacted last time the West restricted its trade with ASML. Alternatively, Europe could also restrict exports of certain machine goods, including high-end CNC machines, bearings, and engines, sectors that are still dominated by European companies.

Finally, the EU's Aviation Safety Agency, which is in the process of assessing China's COMAC C919 aircraft, could withhold certification, which would severely constrain the C919's market access. All in all, while a trade war would be far from painless, the EU would do well to remember that it does hold some cards, and might thus be able to squeeze at least a concession or two out of Beijing.

China stopped importing oil just to protect themselves from high oil prices.

But you know what? This one doesn't hold up. Here's why in one number: $74. That is the average replacement price on China's oil reserves that they have been burning up. Here's the price of oil over the last six months, and here's where the price dropped below $74. If China was just trying to protect itself from price shocks, this is the point that they would've started buying again.

They would've actually made a profit by buying at this price, but they didn't. They just kept burning reserves, which means they had some other motive, right? So second wrong theory we need to rule out, this was all a soft power play for global goodwill. I'm sorry about the panda. I know it's a total cliche.

When you Google image search Chinese soft power, this is the first thing that comes up, so I don't know, I went with it. Anyway, it's also wrong. This soft power theory does not square with China's big ban against its refineries exporting jet fuel or gasoline, because this really hurt the neighbors in Asia who count on China for that stuff and are the exact countries China most wants to improve its standing with.

For another thing, remember, China did all this and didn't talk about it. If you save the world to make countries like you, wouldn't you, I don't know, mention it at least once instead of hiding it in secrecy? So these theories, I think these are out. So now let's look at the theories that do make sense, starting with the big one, Taiwan.

Here's Asia, and here's the Strait of Hormuz, which we learned controls 20% of the world's oil flows. And now this is the Strait of Malacca, even narrower, even easier to close. The ships that go through here carry 80% of all China's oil. And in any war scenario with Taiwan, one of the very first things that happens is the US uses its naval supremacy to close Malacca, like Iran closed Hormuz, shutting off China from outside oil and bringing China to its knees

So yeah, pretty powerful, right? Defeat China without ever coming within a thousand miles of it. And this has obsessed China's leaders for decades. They actually have a name for it. They call it the Malacca dilemma, and it applies to any war scenario with the US, but Taiwan is probably the likeliest. So how can you neutralize the threat of suddenly losing access to outside oil?

one way is to build up renewable power sources like wind and solar, which yeah, check, China has been doing. Another is burning more coal, check. But the best way is to stockpile so much oil in advance that you can go without imports for a year and keep the lights on for as long as the war takes.

Under this theory, China had this whole no oil plan ready in case of war, but they pulled it off now both because they could, and maybe as a little demonstration to the US and Taiwan that the Malacca problem is solved just to threaten them anymore, so don't expect them to hold them back. Okay, ready for theory number two, leverage with Donald Trump and Xi actually just had a big one-on-one summit in May, and, watching this, it's not hard to imagine Xi telling him, "Hey, Donald, I'm single-handedly saving your economy right now by absorbing the oil shock so it doesn't hit the United States.

So you want me to keep this up? You better make it worth my while." Because he knows if there's one thing Trump has shown he's sensitive to, it's the price of oil. Now, nobody can prove this happened. Yeah, a few weeks beforehand, the US did withdraw a bunch of missile defense and other weapons from China's periphery, which China liked to use in the Middle East, but that might be a coincidence.

I would consider this the softest theory. Still, as long as the war goes on, Xi Jinping really could nuke the US economy anytime he wants by resuming Chinese oil imports and exhausting global supplies. Did he remind Trump of that fact when they met? we don't know. Okay, theory number three, and I'm pretty partial to this one, protecting China's export-based economy. China's economy, like we said, centers on manufacturing and exporting basically everything in the world.

Here's every country China exports to scaled by overall value Now let's cross out all the countries whose economy would implode in a sustained oil shock. this one, probably these guys, definitely the Europeans. Yep, here. Okay, China just lost half of its export market and a bunch of its economy with it

Or that's what would have happened if China hadn't propped everyone up for three months by absorbing the oil shock. Now, I can't prove that's why they did it, but I do think it would make a lot of sense. Okay, theory number four, they did this to prove to the world that China now controls the global price of oil.

I had to print this out on my home printer because the photo printer stopped working. That's why the Chinese flag is purple. I don't know. My apologies to China. Credit for this theory goes to a Bloomberg columnist named Javier Blas, who argued this was China unveiling its powerful new oil price weapon.

He compares it to the 1973 oil shock, when Arab oil states like Saudi Arabia and some others shut off oil to the US, a power that got termed the Arab oil weapon and made those states a global player ever since. And he argues that, yeah, on some level, this was probably about Taiwan and Malacca. But if China proved that it can flip 5% of the world's oil demand on and off like a switch, that gives them Saudi Arabia level influence over the world's most valuable resource, which gives them a lot of leverage over any country that buys a lot of oil or that sells a lot of oil, which is pretty much all of them.

I think there's probably some truth to all four of these theories, right? I don't think they're mutually exclusive. Now, we don't know enough. We can't peer inside Xi Jinping's head and know, which one is the truest. But I think if you look at these four together, you have a pretty good understanding of why China did this.

So okay, so the question now is, what does all this add up to? What does it change about our world? And we, the world, learned a few new things here. One, China has neutralized the Malacca dilemma that would have allowed the US Navy to shut down their economy, and that makes war with the US more bearable for China and an invasion of Taiwan, therefore, more likely.

And two, China now has a lot of control over global oil prices, although I don't think we yet know how they would use that power except how they did here to blunt a global oil shock. But, the Iran war is still at a low boil, which means as long as Hormuz is at threat of closing or partially closed, Xi Jinping has a lot of leverage over the United States.

He has that button on his desk that says, "Nuke US economy." And along those lines, the US, China's big rival, it came out of this war weakened on the world stage in a lot of different ways that we talked about in the last video.

Russia, meanwhile, is still mired in Ukraine. That means that among the major world powers, China is looking pretty good right now, which is part of why there is a growing consensus that the war's real winner was China. China won. They're the winner. China's the big winner here. China wins

This is a little too clever, I think. Iran won the Iran war, but China did win something very big, and it's easier to explain if I put it on the board for you

So forever and ever, these have been the three world powers of oil for, the last century: the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia. They are the three biggest producers in the world by far. The US guarantees free flow of oil in the world's oceans and controls the US dollar. Saudi Arabia is the de facto leader of OPEC, the alliance of oil-producing states.

And Russia, in addition to being a world power and a huge exporter, controls land-based oil flows across a bunch of Europe and Asia. But this era might be over, or at least starting to end. The US proved in the Iran war that it cannot guarantee the global free flow of oil anymore, and Russia is under global sanction and can barely sell its own oil.

So these two powers might be out. And who displaced them? arguably, one of them is Iran, which is not the world's biggest producer, they're ranked seventh, but they proved that they can unilaterally turn on or off 20% of the world's oil supply, and nobody can stop them

And the other new global oil power, I think you know where this is going. I think you can make an argument for China. they control the price of oil now, or at least have huge influence over it because they can switch 5% of global demand on and off, and because they were able to do what the United States wasn't in this war, and secure sufficient flows of the world's most important resource, single-handedly saving the oil-burning world from disaster.

That sounds like the behavior of a global oil power to me.

Now, I don't know what China wants to do with that power. we have some educated guesses obviously, but they're not telling us. They might not even know. They might have themselves just discovered how powerful they are here right along with the rest of us. But one thing is for sure, now that they have this power, they've demonstrated it, they've proven to the world that they have it, I am certain this will not be the last time that we see it deployed

Now, Section C, The Tech Sovereignty Playbook

earlier, I was speaking to former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. He's convinced the transatlantic relationship is basically fine a little off these days, but fixable. And not just fixable, he's saying we want more America, not less, and specifically he wants this economic NATO thing where, there would be a free trade zone among the NATO members, including the US, where everybody would align on their different regulations and everything.

He wants to see Europe really tighten the bond with Washington. How do Europe's mainstream leaders see it right now?

I think the idea of having such a such an arrangement with the US is a little farcical when you consider the fact that they have unilateral tariffs on the EU. Look, I think it's a pipe dream, and I think it makes sense from the perspective of Poland has for a very long time been very reliant on the US.

They have really strong bonds. They have strong security bonds. They have strong financial bonds. There's a large diaspora in the US from the Polish community. So I think it's the default position of Poland to be very pro-US, but that's certainly quite far away from the position of the European leader mainstream thinking.

What I'm picking up around town with diplomats from a really broad range of countries, even the Baltics to some extent, who have even more so perhaps than Poland been very US-friendly, I'm hearing people say, "We've got to de-risk. We need to make sure that we can stand on our own two feet," because the US under Donald Trump, but also I think beyond that, people are thinking beyond that, cannot be relied upon to provide security, cannot be relied upon to be a predictable ally financially.

So people are talking about ways in which they can de-risk themselves from the US in the same way that we've been talking about de-risking from China.

Yeah, that's where we first heard that term, that de-risking or decoupling, and indeed, that contrast really sets up the piece that you co-wrote. It's worth saying it was a huge newsroom effort with reporting from lots of capitals and policy areas.

But what were you and our colleagues trying to capture with the story?

We were trying to capture a change of mood because I think, there are those weeks where history happens all at once, and that's what it felt like happened between when Donald Trump first started raising Greenland again and his speech in Davos.

It was within the space of sort of three weeks, really. I don't even think it was that long. And I think in that time, Europe got a taste of what life would be like with a recalcitrant and anti-European leader in the White House who was willing to go so far as to even threaten military force to take a piece of land that does not belong to him and that belongs to Europe.

And so I think that was such a wake-up call, and various diplomats described it to me in different ways. People used terms like turning point. People used terms like breaking point in the relationship. So I think there's a real sense that this United States is a different beast from what we have been used to since the post-World War II era.

So yeah, I think there is a real mood shift among EU leaders, and they are starting to talk about ways in which we can decouple in all sorts of sectors from the US.

yeah, just last weekend we saw center-right European People's Party leaders gathering in Zagreb for a strategic discussion, and one thing that really stood out was how openly they talked about defense About the possibility that under Trump, NATO may no longer be a reliable guarantee.

What came out of that meeting?

So that was quite an interesting meeting. The European People's Party, it's the largest force on the European level. It's got the largest number of MEPs. It has the most European Council leaders. We've got German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who's the most powerful, probably, leader among that bunch, also Donald Tusk from Poland.

And so for them to start talking about, amongst themselves, among these friendly leaders, start talking about ways in which the EU needs to basically act in order to stop relying on the US is pretty huge because we know that they have the power and the numbers to really make this happen if they decide they want to do that.

The other thing that happened in Zagreb is that the European People's Party has appointed two of their leaders, now we don't know who they are, they haven't been revealed yet, but two leaders have been told that their homework after leaving Zagreb is to go back home and to figure out how the EU's mutual defense clause might work.

Because in the EU treaties, there's this little-known, kind of obscure clause that basically some say could be an equivalent to NATO's Article 5, which guarantees mutual defense among allies. So there is a clause in the EU treaties which says that an attack on one is an attack on all, in essence. It's not the quote, but that is the essence of it.

And so that has never been used. I think it's a little-known clause, but we're hearing a lot more of it now. And so that's something that those two leaders are going home to figure out, how are we going to make this a bona fide deterrent, and how do we make it as good as that NATO clause?

Yeah, quite a weighty homework assignment.

And beyond the, the politics and the rhetoric, what would this shift that you've been describing mean in practical terms, especially when it comes to producing and buying arms?

It would mean that Europe needs to really very seriously start funding, increasing funding to its arms industry. It would need to essentially find capital, find investment.

The US, not only does it provide a large number of the actual equipment, it's also the microchips that drive that equipment, and that is really a problem for Europe. It doesn't really have much in the way ... Look, it does have some microchips. We do have some, some champions, but, it really needs to figure out what it's going to do on that because semiconductors are so vital for tech and for the defense industry that it's really difficult if you don't produce your own to de-risk and decouple from anyone.

Yeah, and beyond microchips, technology is a huge area where we're gonna see this shift play out of Europe trying to divest, essentially, from the United States. just reading your article, a few examples that stood out to me. In France, President Emmanuel Macron is planning to ban public officials from using American video conferencing tools like Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.

He wants them to switch to Visio, which is a French alternative. In the European Parliament, some lawmakers are pushing to ditch US software and hardware, including a US-based travel booking tool. In the Netherlands, there's a petition signed by 140,000 people calling on the government to block a US company from acquiring a state identity verification tool.

And at Davos, a German entrepreneur announced the launch of W, and that is the Europe-based alternative to Elon Musk's X. So what does all that tell us about where Europe's head is right now?

I think it tells us that basically Europeans are starting to think a little creatively, but the next step is actually developing tangible, real, and good alternatives for consumers to use.

So I think that's where we're at. It's going to be a difficult journey, I think, because W sounds great in theory, but starting from scratch and trying to get people on board is difficult. we've seen alternatives. It's not like they don't exist. We've got Blue Sky, we've got Mastodon. You don't see a huge groundswell of people in the political kind of field using those social media platforms.

So I think that's the challenge. We've got space to disrupt in Europe, but we don't necessarily have the companies that can do that disruption that, we need to fund basically. So it's a question of investment, it's a question of appetite for risk.

yeah, to that point, we're also starting to hear this phrase buy European, and we're seeing it put into some, public procurement provisions.

Yeah. This is a Macron baby. French President Emmanuel Macron has long championed this idea of "Hey, let's buy European." In weapons, that means buy French. of course, but also in cheese and champagne. But I think that's what this is. There is a growing realization among European countries.

We had this previous mindset of for consumers, the cheapest thing is the best thing. And you can understand why that is because cost of living is a thing. if you can get groceries cheaper because they've come from China or because they've come from wherever, that is an appealing prospect, but it's a sugar hit.

And in the long term, what you lose is the capacity to have an industry. This de-industrialization that we're seeing around Europe now, it's a huge problem and it's a concern. So this is where this buy European thing comes in. There's this renewed will, a renewed kind of campaign to get Europeans to care about where their things are made.

what's this all about? Why did we have suddenly this ban?

It's been a long time since the Trump administration didn't want Anthropic to, evangelize or to disrupt its own ecosystem with leftist thinking about not survei- mass surveillance for the Americans, not, AI, autonomous tools, and especially weapons.

So it's what we just heard about, Hegseth saying that, Dario Amodei is a lunatic, made the possibility for a backlash, and we are now seeing a backlash from the administration sanctioning that company. And indeed, there are risks for banks. You mentioned it earlier. There are risks for security, and I guess we'll talk about that, too.

But basically it's a political issue. And at this moment Trump and his, pundits want to have all the ecosystem behind his ideological choices, and not to, as they said with the, Pope, Leo, uh, create disruption in the, current narrative of the White House about AI and technology.

Rayna Stamboliyska, Dario Amodei and Anthropic are the good guys, and the, its rivals are the bad guys?

Is that how this works?

Look, I'll go into something totally different, not of the above. You're not

answering the question.

I am, but not the question you asked. let me roll back a little. What I'm most concerned about, and what is unraveling here behind all that lunatic and name shaming and things, is export controls.

I'm particularly concerned that we're losing sight of this particular level, lever, of, of influence in even, I would say, interference. So export controls have been there quite strongly since 2022. It's not Trump's doing.

However- So

export controls on cars are one thing, but export controls on cybersecurity are another.

It's export controls on technologies.

So the export con- export controls are ways in which you as the producer, main producer, or oligopolistic producer of specific technologies that are called dual use technologies, meaning they can be used in civil and in military situations. Those technologies are regulated.

Who can have access to them, right? And so since 2022, what we saw was export controls on GPUs, right? China couldn't access American GPUs. This has been widening to include weights for closed models. This is precisely the case for Anthropic's models. But also it's creeping in a way, if you want, towards cloud services being used to train models, right?

And that's where things get c- Less, spectacular in terms of, online debates and naming names. But ca-

actually, no, it doesn't because now, y- you're, we're getting back why are they doing it? Why are they putting these export controls on?

Because-

Is it politics as we were just- It's- ... a- as Bernard was just saying?

I'm not sure what he means under politics because there is internal politics, there is-

I'll tell you, at the heart of the- ...

foreign policy ... at

the heart of the ban, Donald Trump's AI tsar, David, David Sacks, one of the South African-born tech titans- ... who co-founded PayPal, and who according to reports, last Thursday, so a week ago, got warnings about a security lapse from a top executive at Amazon.

Yeah. And then, So- ... and then 24 hours later, voila, export controls.

Yeah, so if you like, there are different... There is a lot of FUD, and there is a problem with the current American institutional setup.

But it's not- There's a gang of people who were all at PayPal who are one side and Dara Khosrowshahi the other?

Part of it

is this. Is that what this is, it's about?

There is the chain of command, how a decision taken is absolutely unclear. And what came out, what transpired with the Anthropic situation is that there are, like, fewer than 10 people who ganged on Anthropic and gave an ultimatum of 90 minutes, that was said in the introduction that you made, that Anthropic must stop, providing that tech to people, including its own employees- Oh

who are not American citizens. American

citizens.

So that's where you get a situation where a tool of political power, if you like, that are export controls of technological industrial power, is being transformed and perverted into something very different, which is some guys with non-clear chain of command get to constrain- a privately owned company so far into its own inner workings, which is also, by the way, a clear stray away from Trump's we will never, meddle in companies' affairs.

Okay. Let's get one more reaction on this. Counting the punches of, from here in France, where he's returned after serving as Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun.

He posted this to LinkedIn. "Dario Amodei," this is the head of, Anthropic's, "ridiculous fear-mongering about Mythos fable," those- that's the AI models, it finally pays off." That's irony. "The US government bans its use by non-Americans, including by foreign employees in the US," as Rayna just said. "One reaps what one sows."

Yann LeCun, who's this respected AI scientist here, effectively saying- ... there are no good guys in this, in, in this fight that's going on over in the US. Yeah. do you agree with that, Alfred? I

think I, I think there's nothing really new under the sun. number one, it's not the first time that the US government, that basically all governments in the world ban or, limit the, the export of a tool that can have consequential national security implications.

And in the US, the concept of national security is much wider. We have an example which is very famous. Early 2000, it was even a, a Macintosh that was banned. And Apple used it in a, in an advertising, putting tanks in front of a, a Macintosh, saying both are a threat to national security, which... So they used that as an advertising.

and the third thing, let's not forget that three months ago there was- A general outcry, and despite what Yann, and he's obviously extremely respected, is saying, where really a lot of, people in the cybersecurity domain were worried about the potential capacity of Mythos to, to k- identify, uh, zero- Yeah ... zero days, that, that were, very deep buried into cyber systems. So it was to... the, the one thing that I think we should focus on, and which I think is the news, is number one, Europe was not informed. So for all those leaders in Evian that they think they still have an importance, no.

In the view of Washington, we are irrelevant- ... because we're not informed. Number two, the fact that we n- we see that as a surprise is just sloppiness. Because again, Mythos was, was suspended already three months ago. And the third thing is the illusion in which we live. I still hear people saying we are at the frontier.

No, the, the best, running model in, in, in Europe is, ranked 54th.

All

right. So I know if you... we ask French people, they always think that, that, one famous model, which I like a lot, is frontier. It's not the case. So i-i- bluntly in our face, our dependency has been, has been published.

What I'm worried is that since three days it should be code red in Europe, a conclave where no leader is coming out unless we find a solution. I don't see any of that sense of urgency. Yeah,

Eur- Europeans very much feeling like they're on the menu in this roast.

officials at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, some of them suddenly discovered that their Visa and Mastercard, their credit cards didn't work, nor did Booking.com, Amazon, or Airbnb.

And this was Trump's reaction to the ICC's arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in Gaza. So yeah, suddenly this wasn't just about a theoretical idea like cloud sovereignty, but it was a real issue. So Marietje, why did this story send such a chill through Europe?

I think it made it very tangible what lever the US government has on us Europeans. this notion of massive dependency, hundreds of billions spent on cloud risks making it so abstract and far removed from the individual that it's hard to imagine what that really means and why it's a worrisome thing.

But the ICC example really hit home in Europe, but especially in the Netherlands, maybe because the ICC sits in The Hague, and people were just like, "Wow, one, is Trump really doing this? And two, are these companies not able to push back or reject this somehow?" It was pretty clear that we shouldn't only think about the companies and big tech as a growing concern, which, I think has really landed in Europe, but also about the way in which the Trump administration sees tech companies as tools of power, geopolitics, imperialism even.

And so I think it made it very concrete what that means.

And you mentioned that you're affiliated with Stanford, Silicon Valley pretty well, but you're also a former member of the European Parliament, Brussels, and you wanted to bridge those worlds. But you've said that your own position has shifted, and that European digital sovereignty is now the most urgent task.

What was the tipping point moment when you realized that the bridge building isn't enough anymore?

I'm trying to think of the tipping point. I think we still need bridges, but Europe first and foremost needs to really start thinking and acting in its pure self-interest, and I think Europeans have not really learned and trained how to do that.

We like soft power. We like economic relations, fundamental rights, the single market, and so on. And where I've changed is that I'm just more and more aware of how naive that has been and how dangerous it is for not just defense, which has had, quite a bit of attention, but also for our democracy, for our self-determination as people, for our way of life, for the way in which we design our social contract, we access information, and for our security.

And so I would love to see Europe more self-confident the way that tech bros in California, can talk and think about themselves as being capable of doing anything, solving any problem. We are now in a very uncertain moment in Europe, and that needs to be overcome

Laurence, I wanna come to you to help us get a sense of when this tipping point occurred for others.

Our colleague Mathieu Peled argued in an article just before the Commission unveiled this package that Donald Trump may have done what years of speeches from Paris and Brussels couldn't, and that is to convince European leaders that tech dependence is a vulnerability. Can you remind us what that debate looked like before Trump?

I think what we've seen is that the discussion around Europe's tech sovereignty and essentially Europe's tech sector and how it can compete with other parts of the world, that isn't new. I remember going back 10 years, going back even longer than 10 years, the discussion in Brussels about should we have a European Google was very prominent, for instance.

Obviously, Europe never really found the solution to that question. I think what's changed now is it is that the world has changed around Europe, and so Europe is having to adapt to a new geopolitical reality. And so what we're increasingly realizing is that technology effectively is a strategic asset of governments, of powers in the world, and it is something that Europe needs to have power.

It is something that Europe needs to have healthy trade relations. And so that is prompting sort of this shift in Europe's thinking, and obviously the big driving force here is the return of Donald Trump to, to the White House. The incidents that we've seen in the transatlantic relationship since Donald Trump took office, it ranges from, sort of the US government railing against European tech regulation, but all the way to threatening annexation of Greenland.

You can really feel that like the, the antagonism, in the transatlantic relation that we've had in sort of the first year of the Trump administration has driven Brussels to really push it and come up with new solutions to essentially old problems, and that is what they're doing this week.

And Marietje, thinking of your book, The Tech Coup, it seems like it isn't necessarily just Trump.

You talked about these tech bros. You've warned that tech CEOs and billionaires are becoming political actors in their own right. So how do you see this deeper issue of the merging of big tech power and political power playing out here?

I think that has woken up Europeans, but still there's a reluctance to call a spade.

It has taken Europe way too long to appreciate the power dynamics that are at play that were already becoming a challenge when these big tech companies were taking decisions about infrastructure, about cybersecurity, about war and peace, about civil liberties, really core roles and matters that used to be the exclusive domain of states.

And so the wake-up call of that power came far too late. But when it merged Silicon Valley power with US state power in the form of Donald Trump, who indeed broke the West as we've known it, is very aggressive vis-à-vis the European Union. Trade wars, but also using AI and other technologies as an instrument of state power, asking for stakes in companies like the sell-off of TikTok, a stake in IBM, giving out executive orders that impact companies.

And yet, this narrative that Europe regulates, the US deregulates, is persistent. And so I think we're still seeing too slow of a response, too much of a spin from Silicon Valley as to what is going on, while indeed the double whammy for Europe between Silicon Valley abuse of power and Washington's abuse of power is a significant one.

And I can only hope that this is the last wake-up call we'll have.

I know that this idea that Brussels regulates and the US innovates is grating, and that there's eagerness here in the European capital to get beyond that, but the efforts to deregulate and free things up are really cast in the frame of competitiveness.

Marietje, what you're talking about is more really existential, and going over to Lawrence, from talking to commission officials, is this push still just really about, again, kind of the market or competitiveness, or do you feel like their tone is also changing?

The whole discussion around tech sovereignty kind of is both.

On the one hand, it is about the dependence that we have on the United States and on US technology, and so there's a lot of discussion, but at the same time, there is this question of can Europe actually have the economy that creates these kind of players? Can Europe create leaders and champions?

That is a question of competitiveness and whether Europe's regulatory framework plays against that. Obviously, we've heard from the commission, we've heard a very, very active narrative over the past year and a half that some of Europe's laws effectively hold European technology back. Right from the start when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen came to office, she had the Draghi report to go off on, and Draghi singled out the AI Act and the general data protection regulation, the privacy law.

As problems.

As problems, as holding European business back. So I think it is both. It is the reliance on foreign technology, but it is also the question on whether our own regulatory framework has held us back from creating alternatives. And we're seeing that the solutions that Brussels comes up with, they somehow try to address both problems at once.

Lawrence, that's actually a perfect segue into talking about what the commission is actually proposing this week. So as to the package itself, we have the Cloud and AI Development Act, and part of that is about what governments need to take into consideration when they're choosing cloud providers for sensitive sectors like healthcare, defense, justice, energy.

Tell us more about what the commission wants to do here.

This is really one of the cornerstone proposals, if not the most central proposal. At the heart is the realization that US cloud providers account for over 70% of the market. there's rough estimations that 70% is taken up by the US three biggest cloud providers, so that's Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

And European players only account for about 15% of the European market. Obviously, that's a big problem for Europe because cloud means data. It means having the in-house capabilities to run technology, including artificial intelligence. A lot of the technology sector hinges on cloud. So the commission wants governments to assess how reliant they are.

They want to look at their services and look at the cloud providers that they're using. How risky is this? How dangerous is this in terms of foreign intervention? And they're proposing sort of four levels of European tech sovereignty, that they want governments to assess their services against. And then from there, they're asking governments to, for some services, switch to higher levels of European tech sovereign services.

Another big element of their response in the cloud sector is that the commission itself wants to reserve the power to whitelist foreign countries, so effectively make its own assessments of whether US service providers are risky or are safe. That is a right that will be very controversial. It will lead to big discussions with the United States, big discussions with US cloud players, but also big discussions with national governments, because if there's one thing that national governments like to do, it's make decisions on their own, not having to delegate them to Brussels.

And so the caveat here is that what the commission presents this week, it's up for negotiation. It'll get watered down, and so the eventual outcome, might be very different from this. But essentially what Europe is looking for here is to create a shift in the cloud market whereby through its own public procurement, it is actually starting to boost its domestic alternatives, and therefore create European alternatives to the big US cloud providers.

Germany’s state of Schleswig-Holstein migrated 30,000 workstations away from Microsoft and recorded 15 million euros in licensing savings in 2026 alone.

Toulouse documented 1.8 million euros saved over three years by moving 90% of desktops to LibreOffice. Lyon’s model shows 1 million euros saved annually per 100,000 users. Italy’s Defense Ministry projected 29 million euros in savings from its own open source migration. Austria’s military completed a full exit from Microsoft Office across its entire armed forces.

The raw numbers tell a pretty clear story here. This is a coordinated, continent-wide cost extraction from a single US vendor. But the savings are actually the secondary story. The primary story is access, and here’s where it gets interesting. In 2025, Microsoft confirmed under oath that European data stored in EU data centers remained legally accessible to the US government under the CLOUD Act.

That was not a leaked memo. It was a sworn testimony. European governments then had to sit with the fact that their health records, defense communications, and tax infrastructure were all sitting on a platform that a foreign government could legally request access to. The software wasn’t just expensive, it was a sovereign liability.

Then Trump accelerated everything. When the administration sanctioned International Criminal Court judges, not states, not organizations, specific individual people, those individuals had their bank accounts closed and their access to US technology platforms terminated. Microsoft accounts gone, services gone.

That demonstration was, diplomatically speaking, very clarifying. European governments now had proof that access to US tech could be weaponized against individuals at will. France’s digital minister, David Amiel, didn’t dress it up. He said the goal is to regain control over digital destiny. French Minister Anne Le Hénanff went even further.

I’m quoting again, “Digital sovereignty is not an option. It is a strategic necessity.” That is not the language of IT procurement. That is the language of national security. If you want to understand the financial mechanisms, go look at what Microsoft has been doing with its pricing.

Microsoft specifically pushed 15% licensing hikes while simultaneously locking governments deeper into Azure. For public sector IT departments already under budget pressure, that combination, rising costs plus legal exposure, plus a US administration willing to use software access as a political weapon, made the switching cost calculation flip.

Staying became more expensive than leaving. The piece everyone misses in the pricing story is the compulsion layer. Microsoft's licensing model isn't just expensive, it is structured so that leaving gets harder the longer you stay. Every year of Azure integration, every SharePoint deployment, every Teams rollout adds another thread of dependency.

The exit cost compounds. That's not an accident, it is just their business model. What's changed now is that European governments have decided that sovereignty risk now outweighs the switching plan. And once that threshold gets crossed institutionally, the thread cutting tends to be thorough. They're not migrating the operating system and leaving everything else, they're pulling the whole thread.

This connects to a pattern I've covered before. If you haven't seen the video on Europe evicting US tech companies from military infrastructure, that's definitely worth watching. I'm going to link it. The logic is identical. The calculation isn't ideological, it is structural. The migration France is executing right now isn't a clean switch.

It covers operating systems, collaboration tools, health data platforms, antivirus, AI tools, virtualization, and network equipment, the full stack. France had already replaced Teams and Zoom with French-made Visio for two point five million civil servants and moved eighty thousand National Health Insurance Fund employees off Dropbox and Teams.

Linux is the operating system layer underneath all of it. And it's worth being precise about what the full stack actually means in practice because the scale tends to get lost in the headlines. Let's talk about that. France employs roughly five point five million public sector workers. Every device those workers use, every platform they collaborate on, every database their work touches, that is the surface area of this migration.

This isn't a pilot program in one agency. It is a mandate with a deadline covering the entire administrative infrastructure of the fifth largest economy in the world. A whole architecture is being rebuilt at national scale on a timeline. This is also why a separate initiative just emerged worth knowing about.

EuroOffice, a coalition of European tech companies, including Ionos and Nextcloud, announced a fully open source Microsoft format-compatible Office suite built and governed in Europe. We have a separate long video analysis on that one. The goal is seamless document compatibility with zero dependence on US platforms.

Think of it as the replacement part being manufactured while the old part is still being removed. The timing is not coincidental. And at the same time, Europe is running the same logic through its defense data layer. If you haven't seen the video on why Europe is ditching Palantir, that one connects directly to this.

Now, if you've been following along and want to sharpen how you analyze these patterns, how to spot when political language is masking financial restructuring, how to read what official announcements are actually saying under that rhetoric, I wrote a book exactly on that. It's called Awake: The Practice of Critical Thinking in an Age of Self-lies.

It's available as eBook and audiobook. Subscribers get 10% off, and you can grab the first chapter for free in the description links below. So here's what the pattern predicts next. The 18 to 24 months following a major government migration function as a reference window. If France's DINUM completes a successful Linux rollout, every other EU government's procurement conversation changes.

The enterprise sector then follows, banks, telecoms, energy infrastructure, all of which are watching this migration as a case study in operational viability. Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, and European cloud providers OVHcloud and Scaleway are already reporting record client growth. The beneficiaries of this shift are European, open source, and not particularly interested in waiting for US policy to stabilize.

Microsoft's position in this is uncomfortable in a very specific way. France is a major public sector client, and the real risk for Microsoft isn't France alone, it's contagion. One successful migration removes the too risky to leave argument everywhere. Germany has already piloted, Italy is mid-migration, Denmark is committed.

The European Parliament voted in January to formally identify and eliminate EU reliance on foreign tech providers. This is now official EU policy, not a think tank recommendation. Anyone with proper training is going to spot the compounding dynamic here. Government contracts are Microsoft's anchor revenue.

They're long cycle, sticky, and they create a downstream effect where enterprises, contractors, and citizens who interface with government systems default to the same platforms. When government leaves, it doesn't just take its own devices, it takes the gravitational pull as well. The contractor ecosystem follows.

The civil service workforce retrained on Linux takes those skills into the private sector. The procurement templates get rewritten Microsoft’s lock-in relied on inertia, and inertia is precisely what this migration is designed to break. There’s also a timing problem for Microsoft that doesn’t get talked about enough, I think.

Windows 10 reached end of life in October 2025. That forced upgrade cycle, pay for new licenses or lose security support, landed right in the middle of Europe’s sovereignty conversation. Governments that were already uncomfortable suddenly had a bill in their inbox. For a lot of IT directors, that was the moment the switching cost calculation finally flipped.

Microsoft handed the migration advocates their best argument on a deadline with a price tag attached. Buried right there in the open data is a company watching its stickiest market, government, become unsticky all at once.

why do you think this ban happened? And do you agree with Andre that it's the US' prerogative to put an export ban on?

Yes, I agree. It's, completely rational, to keep technology to yourself if you have it.

for us, in Europe, this is not really a surprise, I would say. We have been expecting, something like this to happen for a long time. we have been, discussing that we need digital sovereignty. we need to be independent of, foreign, cloud services, foreign technology. We need to develop our own, and this i- this is exactly what Mistral is doing, what, other parties are doing, including ourselves.

we are part of a cooperation with, for instance, the French, Ministry of Culture, to develop, uh, measure- measuring devices and then also, feed into the development of language models.

So Rainie, you hear b- they're bo- b- both, Arvy and Andre saying that, it's the prerogative of the United States to, if it wants to, to-

You'll notice I didn't say the opposite.

Every- But you did shake your head. So why were you shaking your head?

Because I'm, as a cybersecurity professional, I'm sorry to pull rank on here. But it's just crazy to think that you'll go to a chatbot and s- tell it, "Oh, hackie chatbot, do hackie things," and it will all of a sudden own- out of its own volition, start finding things out of nowhere.

When you read Anthropic's own red team documentation, meaning the people who created and instrumented the pipeline that allegedly finds vulnerabilities, right? We have never used this. The only thing that we see is something that is mid-level marketing brochure, mid-level techno- techno speak, right? So when you read this, but this is the closest we get to the actual capacity, right?

So when you read this, what for this, this big, that was very popular in a few weeks again, ago, vulnerability, what is that this team that has been only doing this, spent 1,000 runs onto their own pipeline-

...

out of which came one vulnerability that they couldn't exploit, meaning they just found something that looks dangerous, but they couldn't make it do harm.

Okay.

So this- Brings a lot of questions. This brings questions about posture, marketing. "Oh, my AI is so dangerous. If I publish it, we all die." Excuse me, but OpenAI did this in 20-

So that's why Yann LeCun, that post, was angry.

Yes, and I agree with him. This is we all jumping right into that sort of marketing propaganda, and I'm sorry, but this is below us.

This is beneath us. So this is one thing. Second thing is that when you see how Project Glasswing works, meaning the whole framework where business partnerships are done around the whole Mythos thing, model- This is

Anthropic's,

big model there. So the Project Glasswing thing is all service providers of different cybersecurity needs around vulnerability management.

So there you get a very nice vertical business model where the model allegedly finds vulnerabilities. It doesn't ask anything about the whole ecosystem of vulnerability management, which is a frigging, excuse my French, wicked problem From a operational point of view. But it comes with a set, a closed set of business service providers that will help you handle the problem that they allegedly create.

And all this never asks the question about how much it costs to find those vulnerabilities. So the thousand runs that the Mythos pipeline allegedly did to find this vulnerability costs 20,000 in tokens only, US dollars.

so they're-

Right? So- They're,

they're, they're- I apologize ... they're hooking you into a system where they keep you coming, and where it's hard to disengage afterwards.

Yeah, and even further than that, and I will be giving you ... But even further than that, how many companies do you know that could just, like this, spend 20,000 on tokens and hope for the best that they will find something that is actually useful for them?

All right, so I have a lot of questions for Bernard Benhamou- because the last time you joined us, we picked up on, reporting that France's domestic intelligence service, its equivalent of the FBI or MI5, was beholden to Palantir, uh, for its surveillance system. That's a US company. the prime minister, the French Prime Minister Tuesday announcing it was breaking the contract and turning it over to French company ChapsVision.

I hope I'm pronouncing that, Yeah ... cr- correctly. Bernard Benhamou, first question. Everyone said, "Oh, you ... The DGSI, the, the domestic intelligence, it can't break the contract because they've been in bed with them since 2016. Those contracts are hard to break." Now they can break the contract?

that's not what Palantir is saying, obviously.

They are saying that it will go to its, natural expiration date, which is 2028. So basically, let me say it bluntly. That's good news. Good news that- But

is the prime minister embellishing when he says, "We're gonna s-

no. We have

to- He's talking about breaking the contract, not, not-

he told that-

getting

a new tender when it lapses ... but even

DGSI was saying that they will need time-

Okay ...

to adjust to the new system. in fact, we have to remember the chronology about that. A few weeks ago, the Germans' service were using ChapsVision instead of Palantir. So in a way, for France n- and France DGSI, not using a French tool when the German are using it is something politically difficult.

And from what I heard from insiders, it's obvious that if the German didn't announce that they were using a French company, Palantir would still be in use at this time. So in a way, it was a political decision. I'm sorry to talk about politics, but sometimes it's necessary, and it's a good one because we've been dependent, relying on that solution for 10 years.

If it was- At some point, at the very beginning, useful for just after the, the bombings and the, That's correct ... assassinations, spree in 2015. Indeed, now, 10 years later, not having a European company dealing with those issues was simply politically impossible to justify. So at this moment, in terms of digital sovereignty, after another affair happened a few weeks before where the health data s- platform, the health data hub was, removed from Microsoft Azure cloud service to a French company, Scaleway.

This was also a trend which shows one thing, that digital sovereignty is an issue that no one, i- including high-level politicians, are able to dismiss. And if I may, just one thing. On this Anthropic issue, for the first time ever since we've been dealing with those issue for more than 10 years at the institute, we saw first-level candidates for the presidential election saying that we need to develop our own digital sovereignty.

And Finally, Section D, Building European Alternatives

a bit of background on Europe's tech sector, which has long lagged behind America's. Since the emergence of the internet in the 1990s, the US has held a dominant position in the global digital economy, producing tech giants including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.

In fact, US chipmaker NVIDIA, now the world's biggest company and the first to be valued at over $5 trillion, is bigger than Europe's 20 largest companies combined. Today, Europe is home to just 12 of the world's 100 most valuable tech companies, compared to 56 in America and 16 in China. In fact, less than a fifth of the world's most valuable tech companies are located in the EU.

This is largely because of difficulties in scaling across the EU's diverse national markets, less venture capital and more cautious investments in Europe compared to the US, and less R&D, research and development funding for startups. Specifically, at the moment, the EU represents just 7% of global R&D spending in software and internet technologies, compared to 71% by US firms and 15% by Chinese firms.

This is largely why, as recommended by the highly influential 2024 Draghi report on the future of European competitiveness, European policymakers have begun taking steps to mobilize capital and harmonize the EU's internal market. For example, the so-called E6 of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Poland are now pushing to advance plans for a capital markets union, which would create a single market for capital, a plan that should help fast-growing European startups scale quicker.

However, even if Europe's tech economy remains a long way behind America's, it has seen significant growth over the past decade. Last week, Dan O'Brien, chief economist at the Institute of International Economics, described the 60% growth in European tech employment over the past decade as one of the most important stats which anyone remotely interested in economics should be aware of.

Moreover, a number of promising digital startups such as Vinted, the Lithuanian secondhand clothes marketplace; Octopus Energy, the British cloud-based energy platform; and the German drone manufacturer Helsing have all emerged in the past decade. Essentially, tech is the defining feature of modern service-based economies, and Europe's growing tech sector is carving out new and highly competitive niches.

As such, there are rising calls for the EU to do more to encourage AI adoption, improve digital infrastructure, or increase R&D spending to its target of 3% of GDP in order to help new digital companies grow and scale. Essentially, as we see it, there are three things behind Europe's quiet tech boom. First, a rise in capital funding inside Europe.

Second, increasing digitization. And third, the recent impact of US President Donald Trump. The first thing behind Europe's growth in tech is an increase in venture capital, or VC funding. Historically, capital funding in the US has been far deeper and less risk-averse than in Europe, with many of the big US tech companies, including Uber previously and OpenAI currently, operating at multi-billion dollar losses before becoming profitable.

However, in the decade between 2015 and 2025, VC investment in European startups nearly quadrupled from $22 billion to $85 billion. Still a long way off the US, but around 30 billion more than China. Alongside this, investment from European pension funds has increased. And according to Sifted, European VC has outperformed US funds over the past 10 and 15 years, with 42% of entrepreneurs, according to the trade association Invest Europe, saying it's more attractive to be a founder in Europe today than a year ago.

Alongside that, in December, the European Commission published its new plan to unify Europe's segmented capital markets, which should help startups raise money. While this won't be easy, as it will involve efforts to harmonize tax regimes between different EU member states, it's probably necessary if the EU wants to remain competitive.

Several governments, including in the UK, France, and Germany, are also trying to encourage pension funds to invest more in risky assets such as newly founded tech firms. And the UK government has also recently launched its Savvy Squirrel ads aimed at encouraging cautious British savers to start investing, potentially increasing the overall supply of investment capital in the economy.

The second reason for Europe's quiet tech boom is increased digitization. Countries like Estonia, which produced Bolt, Europe's answer to Uber, and Sweden, which produced Spotify and Klarna, have combined high quality digital infrastructure, strong technical education, and early adoption of digital tools like AI to help lower the cost of starting new tech firms.

Meanwhile, the German government has created a new digital ministry to accelerate digital infrastructure, and the UK is also trying to digitize in healthcare, the justice system, and public sector. The third and final reason for Europe's quiet tech boom is, you guessed it, Trump. For decades, the US, especially Silicon Valley, has been a receptacle for global tech talent, attracting researchers, engineers, and founders from around the world.

But since 2023, according to analysis by Revelio Labs, transatlantic tech migration has slowed, and the balance of movement has actually shifted towards Europe. This is partly thanks to growing tech hubs in European cities like London, Paris, and Stockholm, but also due to the impact of Trump's visa restrictions and immigration crackdown.

Of course, it's not certain that this tilt towards Europe will last beyond Trump, but he does seem to have gifted Europe a once-in-a-generation opportunity to achieve true digital sovereignty, and Europe is clearly seizing the moment.

This is Station F. I am in Paris today, and this is one of the biggest startup campuses on Earth. Sitting in the middle of Paris. Literally, there's construction going on behind me, so I hope they're not too loud. Although... And I'm gonna walk with you into this building that is Station F. Because a few weeks ago, I was in Silicon Valley, as you can see from my videos that I shot over there, and there I thought, "Okay, how can Europe compete with this incredible ecosystem that they have in the Bay Area?"

And I've come to Paris, and I will go to other European cities to find out, because this place absolutely insists that Europe can keep up, and I'm giving them a shot.

So you're a startup founder. What are you building?

we're building software for factories, so manufacturing, heavy industry. We help them with documentation, and we understand and build a map of how the factory works and looks, with the goal of surfacing improvements and optimizations, and finally integrating robotics, into the factory.

You've been at Station F for a few months. Can you explain to the viewers, like how does it work? What are the things you have to do to get here?

Sure. You have a bunch of programs that's offered by Station F. The most common one is called the Landing Zone, which is like the staging area where you come in, you can start working, and they start looking for programs that you wanna be a part of.

That's what we're doing right now. I think you can be in the Landing Zone for two years or so, or something like this, and then you kinda have to find partner programs that you wanna join. Yeah.

And does Station F charge you for that, or how-

They do. They do. Okay.

So-

it's like a coworking space at the end of the day- Okay, cool

so you have to pay for a desk. So

the

programs that you then apply from the Landing Zone, they are ... They come with funding?

Depends on the program. So some programs, they're basically sponsored by companies and organizations that wanna have a space at Station F. some of them pay for your desk. Some of them invest.

we went through Entrepreneurs First. We used to be in Station F. They invest in the company as well. so it really depends on the program. '

Cause I saw a lot of logos around. Yeah. OpenAI, Google, Amazon. They get a space here, and gives them access or ...?

I guess those companies just have a space in the Share Zone, and they're basically like, if you have questions for OpenAI, you go there.

But then there are other companies in the Create Zone. For example, like Universal's there, Essec, or HTC. They have stuff. L'Oréal has a space where you can be part of L'Oréal's space and then- LVMH has-

LVMH

as well. Yeah. Yeah.

This building is actually so impressive. It's this huge hall that is actually a transformed railway building where they were storing railways before. And now, thanks to gentrification, it's all been transformed. And this place is actually so impressive because it doesn't run like a traditional accelerator or a traditional incubator.

It actually has these very big partnerships with established, bigger companies that were startups once or brick-and-mortar businesses, and they fund a lot of the programs here. So you apply to some of the landing program or the founder's program, which is, your way into this. And then you can apply from here in terms of the first programs that you get in when you come here.

So Station F acts more like a co-working space for the companies who come in for the first time. But then you have these partnerships with the bigger players. So you see here Google for Startups, OpenAI. I saw Snowflake is over there. Then up here you have a bunch of VCs. Obviously, VCs also pay to be part of this space.

Then you have here some of the alumni, actually, of Station F. Mistral AI, which was founded here originally. OpenAI, of course. And then these companies all gain access to the startups who are here. And you have 1,000 startups. This is just one hall. You have three halls, actually, the last one being the food and beverage hall that is also open to the public.

So I'm gonna walk through these spaces, and I'm gonna show you a little bit behind the scenes. And in a bit, we will meet with Assya, who's a connection I know here, and we're gonna get a, a sneak peek, a little tour of what this space is all about, and I'll ask her a few questions as well.

interesting innovation I've just come across. I have spotted this machine here that is creating water from air. And I just refilled my water bottle here, so I'm gonna try it out. So this water, obviously we're in Europe, so you get these lovely caps here. But this water I just refilled from this machine purely created from air.

Normal water.

Okay, so very different atmosphere up here. you have some meeting boxes. These boxes actually have a nice view of the space below, and I can see teams working here tirelessly, some of them on calls, some of them live coding. A lot happening, and a lot of branded stuff. So you have Databricks here again, and you can see some things going on, meetings or things happening.

So now I am in the second building. I went up a floor, and this is more packed actually, both with people and also with infrastructure. You have different teams working here in open spaces. Then you have these breakout spaces where you can go down there. Interesting to see. Also, you can see the HEC campus spot here, and, lots of other branded features.

Meta's on the other side there, and then a lot of these French startups incubating out of here, using this as a coworking space, a launchpad, and place to network and meet people. So now I'm heading over to the front desk again to meet Assya.

Assya.

Hi.

So I just finished my tour with Asia. Unfortunately, they have comms guidelines that they cannot be spontaneously interviewed by YouTubers like me, which is understandable, but I'm going to try and relate what she told me. So effectively, as I said, there are three buildings. The first one, the second one, the third one.

The first one is the open one for events. They have actually a whole theater below us here. So down here there's a whole theater that is stage and a whole setup. This is what it looks like when they're transforming the space into an event space. I'm not exactly sure what they're doing here right now, but there's definitely- A lot of change is happening.

It's probably to do with VivaTech that is happening this week. Maybe also something regarding the World Cup. I don't know. But that's how they transform the space on a regular basis to host all kinds of events. Then in the second building, that's where all the programs are running. I'm actually not allowed to film there, so might have to cut some scenes from there.

Let's see if there's anything sensitive in there, but I don't think so. So the second scene, we're not gonna go and vlog there now. So the second building is where all the programs sit. So you have programs that are managed by Station F themselves, so that's the landing zone and the founders program, and then you have the sponsored programs that are being run by big companies and corporates like LVMH, L'Oréal, but also companies like Roche in the health space or Microsoft for their cloud space.

And all of these programs are built in a way that they are not overlapping, so every program is unique in its own way, and that's how they make sure that there's a good ecosystem and as much as possible is covered. What she did mention to me as well was that there is no robotics cluster right now, so they're trying to build that up.

So that is something that will be interesting to watch in the future. And then in the third building is where they have the restaurant, and that's where they serve all kinds of food. You actually have to buy the food that you want through your phone, through a QR code. It's more like ordering delivery and then picking it up.

That's a modern way they've managed to implement here, which is very futuristic, Another interesting point that she mentioned is that there is this cooperation with La French Tech, and they have the sticker behind me here, logo right here, and they are actually the government incubator or backer of innovation and technology, and they are very proud here at Station F, I think rightly that they have been able to...

Even though this is a private campus and a private enterprise that actually is a for-profit company, they don't actually make a profit in the end because they always reinvest everything back into the infrastructure. But it is a private company, and they're very proud to have this government-backed entity also as one of their tenants here.

They're actually renting office space, not funding them with grants or similar things like that. But they are part of the space, and they're able to help founders when it's about anything relating to government issues like founding companies, but also visas and all kinds of things that relate to government work.

​

basically, my entire digital life runs on an US ecosystem, and to be honest, yours probably does too. But to be fair, there actually is a movement in Europe right now to try and change all of this. And let's start with this app right here, WhatsApp. It's literally my go-to for talking to basically everyone, my friends, family, and even work colleagues.

But governments across Europe are starting to move away from it. Countries like France, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium are rolling out their very own messaging systems for officials, especially when it comes to sensitive communication. And one great example here is France, which is pushing its own secure messaging app, Olvid, which is now being used for government communication.

NATO is another good one. their information or their messages are, of course, super confidential, and they have a fully internal messaging system. And at the EU level, the European Commission has stated that it's moving towards a replacement of WhatsApp too, likely going for a mix of secure tools depending, of course, how sensitive the communication actually is.

And in some cases, it goes further than just messaging. And we have to look at France again here, who really does value independence and is now trying to move away from Windows in its public sector to Linux-based systems. Quite a, drastic move. But at this point, we do really have to be real for a second and actually look at how big US influence is when it comes to messaging apps and social media because we cannot sugarcoat it.

It is so big. Take WhatsApp. It has around two point nine billion monthly users. That's more than a third of the entire global population using it every single month. And the crazy part is it's not even the biggest app out there. That title still goes to no other than Mark Zuckerberg for his original app, Facebook, with around three point one billion users.

That's roughly thirty-seven percent of the world logging on to the same platform every month, which, yeah, is just insane. Then in third place, you have this very platform that you're on right now, YouTube, with around two point seven billion users. After that, you get platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and WeChat, and then the slightly smaller ones like Messenger, Telegram, LinkedIn, and Snapchat.

And this is where it gets interesting because if you look at all of these major platforms, seven are American. Two are Chinese, and one is technically based in the UAE, Telegram. But even that one isn't really Emirati. It was founded by Russian entrepreneurs, and its roots are much closer to Russia than the UAE.

And if we zoom out and look at the big picture, the global social media landscape is basically dominated by just two countries, the United States and China. And yeah, if we talk about Europe, not one social media app is in the top 30. just think about that. A continent with over 700 million people who use social media every day, and not one single app is European here in Europe.

It's a very sad story But at EM It's Simple, we do want to stay positive because it's not like these apps don't exist. There are actually European alternatives for almost everything we use. Instead of Facebook, there's Mastodon from Germany. And instead of WhatsApp, there's Threema from Switzerland, or Element from the UK, or Olvid from France.

Or instead of YouTube, where you're on right now, there's Dailymotion or Peertube, both from France. And there's many more. So the apps are there. But if, once again, we are very honest with ourselves, how many of these apps do you actually have on your home screen on your phone right now? Because when I look at the numbers, definitely not many of you.

And I do get it, because if you look at Dailymotion, it doesn't have the same user experience, and it feels a little bit buggy when using it. Now, to be fair, when we look at Instagram alternatives, there is actually some hope right here in Europe, and it comes out of Paris and Luxembourg. First, there's BeReal, and a colleague that I work with in the office was super disappointed when I told them I had no idea what this app was about.

So in case you're like me and you haven't used it, once a day, you get a notification at the same time to snap a photo of whatever you're doing, without filters, without staging. Basically just real life. And it's now hit over 40 million monthly active users. And while that's a drop in the ocean compared to Instagram's billions, it is proof that a French startup can actually export a new way of socializing to basically the whole rest of the world.

But that's not the only example. If you want something more classic, like a photo-sharing space without the addiction algorithms, you could potentially look at Monét. And we actually spoke with their CEO, Christos Floros, about what makes Monét different from other social media apps out there.

We are removing the algorithm by design, and we are pro-democracy and pro-social by design.

In essence, we're saying people should see chronologically what is being shared, and there shouldn't be an algorithm manipulating public opinion and what gets put front and center.

It's honestly quite a cool app, and it's getting better with each version. And here at EU Made Simple, we started using it.

But let's now get to the core of it. Why is any of this actually important? First, obviously, there's the economy. Having these massive tech companies born and raised in Europe creates jobs, sparks innovation, and is truly a way we can get competitive again. But it's also much, much more than that. It's also about European sovereignty.

Social media are very powerful tools for societies to communicate, and we shouldn't be outsourcing the responsibility of where dialogue happens to private entities outside, our immediate sphere of influence. This is hugely geopolitical. Last year, we found out that, Benjamin Netanyahu described social media as the most powerful weapon, and the guy literally have, has access to nuclear weapons.

So sh- we should consider that. Regardless of his politics, I think he's right about that, right? and Donald Trump, regardless of his politics, was not an idiot to say, "TikTok will not operate in my country, with a foreign country having influence over the algorithm." So Europe definitely needs to treat social networks as civic infrastructure, and urgently

And there's a deeper layer to this, too.

Our European data. Under the U.S. CLOUD Act, the American government can compel U.S. companies to hand over data even if the service are physically sitting right here in Europe. And in China, let's not even talk about that. The laws are even more direct. And when the state holds the keys to the data of 450 million Europeans, they don't just have our photos.

They have our very blueprint of our society. They know our trends, our weaknesses, and all of our political leanings. That is an unbelievable amount of leverage to give away for free. So it is critical that we get our startups off the ground and scale them to match the giants in the U.S. The question is, how?

One has to do with money to burn to be able to acquire people on the platform, so marketing, go-to-market, capital. TikTok invested over one billion euro per geography to acquire, users. So but also just great products and, great products that can support network effects because we are in the network effect business.

We are in the social network business. a- and that requires great products, so that's why also, made in Europe alone is not gonna win. We need to create the best possible experience

We probably ought to start by explaining who the public service broadcasters, or PSBs, actually are. The one you're probably most familiar with is the BBC. They're a state-owned broadcasting corporation primarily funded by the UK's license fee, with the remaining chunk coming from commercial activities and government grants.

Then there's Channel 4. They're also state-owned, but unlike the BBC, Channel 4 doesn't receive any of the license fee. Instead, they're funded by advertising. Despite having to fund themselves, the fact they're owned by the state means that they still operate under a tight mandate to champion diversity, alternative viewpoints, and independent production.

Next are ITV, STV in Scotland, and Channel 5. Unlike the BBC, they're commercial companies and are funded by advertising. However, they are still PSBs, as they hold deals with the state in exchange for the right to broadcast on channels three and five. In exchange for these prominent placements on your TV remote and at the top of the TV guide, both are obligated to broadcast a set amount of impartial, high-quality news each year; produce a large proportion of their shows in the UK rather than just importing them; produce content across the UK rather than just in London, with ITV also required to offer regional programming; as well as other obligations when it comes to accessibility and subtitling.

Finally, there's S4C, the Welsh-language broadcaster, who receive a small proportion of the license fee and are obliged to offer similar public service broadcasting in Welsh. Essentially, though, regardless of their ownership or funding models, each of these broadcasters has done a deal with the UK government.

They get to benefit from being the first things when you turn on your TV or open your TV guide, as well as getting huge discounts on TV spectrum. In return, they're obligated to provide some sort of public good. The issue is, though, fewer people are consuming linear TV than ever before. Instead of flicking onto regular TV, people are just as likely to head to a streaming service like Netflix, Disney Plus, or crucially, YouTube.

With YouTube equal to the BBC as the top-ranking video content platform by watch time in the UK. And here's where we circle back to where we started. When you open up YouTube, you're presented with a feed of videos that the platform thinks you'll like. Some of these might be from public service broadcasters.

Some of them will be from big media companies. And some of them will be from creators like us. That means that on the platforms people are increasingly using, the PSBs no longer get the priority that they've grown so used to. So here comes the green paper, and with it, the issue of prominence. Essentially, the PSBs feel that they're no longer getting a great deal.

With prominent placement on TVs decreasingly relevant, PSBs are beginning to wonder why they still have to continue committing to everything in their mandates if they're not also getting extra prominence on other online video platforms, too. As such, the green paper proposes a new regulatory structure whereby platforms like YouTube are forced to give special prominence to videos produced by PSBs in exchange for the public service benefits they already offer.

The green paper does suggest that deals between PSBs and YouTube could be reached via voluntary agreements, but explicitly warns that if these agreements don't go far enough, then the government could introduce formal legislation. They also discuss expanding the scope even beyond PSBs, potentially also looping in other UK-based media outlets, such as national or local newspapers.

Now, the government's green paper claims that they don't see this as a zero-sum game between broadcasters and creators. But while this might sound good, I just don't see how it can be true. If your homepage is filled with content from PSBs, definitionally, it can't feature as much content from other creators.

And ultimately, if you're presented with a homepage full of loads of PSB videos about, say, Starmer's resignation, for instance, you're likely to watch them, right? That's why the government is doing this. They too believe that by surfacing these videos more prominently, you're more likely to watch them.

Otherwise, this whole debate about prominence is pointless. The problem for us is that our videos, as well as other creator videos, won't appear in this promotional push, and once you've watched Channel 4's video about Starmer's resignation, how likely are you to hunt down ours too? Even if you prefer our videos, which looking at these view counts seems pretty likely, it's very possible that you will just have their video surfaced instead.

And as such, the plans might make the PSBs happy, but frankly, it crushes independent creators like us, which really does matter considering that YouTube already contributes more than 2.2 billion pounds to the UK economy each year. In fact, even the All Party Parliamentary Group for Digital Creators recognizes this, with MP and co-chair of the APPG Feryal Clark saying in a recent report, "Bluntly, if we're serious about growth, we need to support digital creators and help their businesses to thrive rather than hamper them by a lack of recognition and support."

These proposals are also likely to lead to a worse experience for you, too. If you really wanted to watch the content that the BBC or ITV were creating, you'd probably already be on iPlayer or ITVX watching their programming. In fact, at the risk of just coming for the BBC directly, if you look at their viewership across their main news channel versus any of our channels, you can see that people are just far less likely to want to consume any one BBC video versus any one of ours.

That's not because viewers haven't had the opportunity to discover the BBC and find out about the news they make. We all know about the BBC. It's because the audience is expressing a preference for one kind of content over another. There are also critics who worry about the potential censorship effect that decisions like this could have.

Effectively, this could allow the government to intermediate these relationships and decide which news sources are sufficiently authoritative before forcing platforms to amplify them. This isn't to say that YouTube is perfect or that every creator on YouTube is perfect, but this proposal risks fundamentally undermining the ability of channels like ours to inform our audiences.

If you, like us, feel that the current proposals are unfair to UK creators and want to have your say, then the government's currently running a public consultation right now, with it set to close at the end of August. So if you'd like to have your say, then now is the time,

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

You can record - and re-record - a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from;

DW News

BBC News

TLDR News EU

Max Fisher

POLITICO Europe

FRANCE 24 English

House of El

Johannes Gemmingen

EU Made Simple

and TLDR News

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

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

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

Air Date: 7-18-2026

Today we examine recent primary elections and how the political smear of crying 'socialism' has been dusted off and aimed at a new generation of candidates. What's changed is that the people being smeared are actually winning elections, and the more the establishment called them dangerous, the stronger their numbers got.

Full Show Notes

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

Today we examine recent primary elections and how the political smear of crying 'socialism' has been dusted off and aimed at a new generation of candidates. What's changed is that the people being smeared are actually winning elections, and the more the establishment called them dangerous, the stronger their numbers got.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 45 minutes today include

The Thom Hartmann Program

The PBS NewsHour

The Majority Report

The Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Red Menace

and Future Hindsight

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

Section A, Who They Are

Section B, What They Believe

Section C, Money, Power, and the Reckoning

And Section D, Critiques and the Path Forward

And now, on to the show.

Get this is an, these are act- this is an actual quote from a speech that Trump gave a couple of days ago at the Faith and Freedom Conference or what, this Christian Nationalist conference that he was speaking at.

He says, "The Democrats, they're horrible. They wanna resume the transgender mutilation of our children. They wanna restart the war on Christmas and churches. And as you saw with the communists elected in New York City recently, and they're communists, they're not social democrats, they wanna completely destroy the traditional American way of life.

You'll live in squalor. There will be no food. There will be no housing. There will be no military. There will be no law and order. There will be no nothing. There will be no nothing. You'll be a third world inhabitant in every way, and everyone will suffer or die. You'll suffer or die, that's what happens for thousands of years, 'cause it's been happening by different names.

The problem is, a couple of years go by, the whole place collapses, always does, always has. But I'm sorry to say, but assassinations of those who oppose them is a very important element of their ideology. Assassination is a big deal for them. They're animals. They're animals. They hate our country, and they hate our people."

And then he goes on to say, "These are not social democrats. These are hardcore, godless communists. They're godless communists. All communists are godless. They don't believe in God. That's the most serious threat to our country s- i- since its existence, in my opinion. 250 years ago, this is a major threat to our country."

Seriously, Donald Trump is calling you and me communists. he's talking about progressive Democrats. He's talking about Democratic socialists, whatever you wanna call it. Why would he do this? he's getting desperate. this is almost cartoonish. You go back... I wrote a book called The Last American President, came out last year, or maybe early this year, I forget which, but, it- it's my next to the last book.

And the first third of it is the history of Donald from his childhood through his time with Roy Cohn, and Roy Cohn was Joe McCarthy's right-hand man, destroying people for being communists, right? It was the Red Scare. It was lit- And Roy Cohn was Donald Trump's mentor, and he was the lawyer to all five mob families in New York City, and Donald and the Trump family.

And when Roy Cohn died, Trump went off in search of a new mentor, and he found Vladimir Putin, and I believe Putin's been his mentor ever since. But, um, and Putin does the same thing, only instead of calling people communists, he calls them Nazis 'cause, of course, the Soviet Union fought against the Nazis in World War II.

So Putin's whole rationalization for killing people in Ukraine is that they're all Nazis, and his rationalization for arresting people and going after, the people in Russia who might speak back to him, including Alexei Navalny, is call, is to call them Nazis. So it's the same thing, right? It's just desperation.

It's, and, and it doesn't work. As I mentioned when Congressman Pocan was on, on with us, communism is actually a form of, economics and government where the government owns the companies, the, what Karl Marx called the means of production and supply, right? And Trump has had the federal government buying companies.

That's what communists do, right? literally he's the first president ever to do this, outside of nationalization efforts during wartime. But, um, he's bought parts. He's talking about buying parts of OpenAI and Anthropic right now. He's got Westinghouse, NVIDIA, AMD, U.S. Steel, Trilogy Metals, Vulcan Elements, MP Materials, Korea Zinc, Lithium Americas, USA Rare Earths, Intel, Ax light, ReElement Tech.

it just... he's, we're, we are now, we, our gov- our government, you and me and our government now own large shares in these companies. Now, that's a long way from when Barack Obama gave Elon Musk $465 million to prevent Musk and Tesla from going bankrupt. That was a loan. We got that money back.

But, the whole, the most astonishing part of the whole thing is how our mainstream media is treating Trump's new Red-baiting as if it was just like, "Oh, Trump is calling Democrats communists now," rather than saying, "Trump is calling Democrats communists now, and it's a naked lie." There are no communists in the Democratic Party, for all practical purposes.

On this program, I'm forgetting his name. I think it was, like, Dave Witt or Dave Watt or something like that, but anyhow, I had the president, the chairman, or whatever his title is, of the Communist Party of the United States. Longtime listeners will remember this. This was back in the Air America days.

This is literally 15, 20 years ago. I had the head of the Communist Party of the United States on this program, and I said, "How's it going?" "How are you? How's your organization growing?" And he was like, "Oh, we're just doing great. We're up to, 2,000 or 3,000 members now." Forgive

me, I'm sneezing here. it's cold. And, i- it's c- American communists are a joke, right? there's... I remember, uh, I remember George Fish at SDS when I was growing up in, in Lansing, Michigan, or in, at, in East Lansing at MSU, and he was a, "I'm a proud Trotskyite."

Another sneeze, forgive me. and a- and I knew a few people who called themselves communists who were in SDS back in the day, but, it, I don't know anybody today who would literally call themselves a communist. the whole idea of communism has just been so discredited by its failures.

Although it's still going on down in Cuba, And, but the, and the Chinese Communist Party, they're really capitalists.

I'm s- forgive my, all my sneezing here. The, they got the AC on in the building. the real threat to today, to America today is not communism, it's fascism. as much as the, as much as the left has, quote, "moved left," in other words, the Democrats are saying, "Hey, maybe we should talk about healthcare for all, and free college for everybody, and, bringing back unionization," if you wanna call that moving left, I wouldn't.

Pardon me. that, that's just basically the Democratic Party moving back to the mainstream. the Democratic Party is going back to FDR and LBJ. That was the mainstream. The Republicans, on the other hand, are going full fascist. That is not mainstream. they're heading back to Joe McCarthy. Excuse me.

I will eventually stop sneezing here. I, I just find this insane. we're j- it's a scam. it's the... and it's a response, a reaction to this Reaganomics scam that we have been dealing with all this time And, yeah, in fact, here's, this is... I did some research on this, and this is what I found.

I'll just sh- share it with you, verbatim from my newsletter. In 1798, John Adams signed the Marine Hospital Act, which took 20 cents a month out of every sailor's pay and was our country's first federal payroll tax. It was used to build and run a government, a network of government-run and owned hospitals.

this was a permanent mandatory federally operated healthcare system by John Adams, our second president, in 1798. And it's the... This is the direct ancestor of today's Public Health Service. And Jefferson was the head of the Senate when this passed. he was Adams' vice president as well. The next year, Congress extended that to the Navy, and they added half-pay disability.

they had... They federalized lighthouses and navigation aids in 1789. They paid, invalid pensions to Revolutionary War veterans. They appropriated relief for refugees fleeing the Haitian Revolution in 1794. Under James Madison, we set up a federal agency to get smallpox vaccine to ordinary people in 1813.

when they wrote the general welfare into the Preamble and Article One of the Constitution, they meant something. They meant literally taxing rich people and helping out the average person, building a middle class, and that's what we've been doing 

ever since. So when you hear this hysteria from Trump and the Republicans, "Oh, it's communists," this is, every election cycle, because basically the entire Republican Party is there for the billionaires and the big corporations, period.

They're not there for you and me and never have been, or at least not since Teddy Roosevelt. So instead of talking about issues, they've gotta come up with a new hysteria every election cycle. We had Willie Horton. We had swift boats. We had death panels. We had death taxes. We got critic- the war on Christmas, migrant caravans, critical race theory, groomers, trans athletes.

And now they're rolling out this BS about communism, and all it is they're basically admitting that they've got nothing for Americans unless you're really rich. if you make over a couple million dollars a year, Republicans are your party. If you're a billionaire, the Republicans are with you.

If you're CEO of a big corporation making, a million dollars every other week, that, that's your party. But otherwise, they got nothing, and that's why they come up with this hysterical BS. Communism? Give me a break.

So Democrats have this immediate challenge trying to replace Graham Platner in this critical Maine Senate race.

The larger question is why, these serious controversies increasingly fail to disqualify political candidates until the pressure becomes overwhelming. but Jonathan, starting with the practical question, what do Democrats need to do now? 

they need to get a nominee who can best go up against Susan Collins.

Now, with Graham Platner finally out of the race, I was happy to see that he submitted the papers to ful- you know, fully get out of the race, this afternoon. That is the first step that needed to happen. Now they have to have, the Democrats have to have the convention, and a bunch of people are gonna jump in, jump into that race and be a part of the process to become the nominee.

But again, no matter who the nominee is, they are going up against a formidable candidate in Susan Collins. We've talked about this many times before. How many elections have we seen her either down in the polls, potentially losing to the Democrat, but on election day she blows the doors off the election?

That scenario is still at work, so whoever becomes the Democratic nominee, whoever the Maine Democrats pick, they better pick the person and then circle the wagons around them to give that nominee the best possible shot, they can to defeat Susan Collins. 

And David, the fact that Graham Platner survived one controversy after another, his political support largely held until there was this allegation that was just so serious that it became impossible for the party to move on.

What does that say about how high the threshold for political shame has become? 

very high apparently. uh, everyone's a sinner, and we all have things that we're not proud of in our past, but he had so many red flags. and it was not only the tattoo and over a decade of Reddit posts, but as we've learned, when some guy's abusive to one woman, there are more.

There's a pattern of behavior all the time. And we learned from some reporting in The New York Times this week that three operatives from the Democratic National Party in DC went up to Maine and told him, "You're the guy. You're our hero. You're our messiah. You should run." And people in Maine who knew him was like, "You might still be in a fragile state.

Maybe this is not a good idea." And they turned out to be right. To me, the bigger picture is when you decide whether or not to vote some- for somebody, there should be three filters. First, do they have the moral character re- ready to do the job? Are they trustworthy? Do they tell the truth? The second filter should be do they have good judgment?

Can they read a situation and see here's what needs to be done here? And the third filter should be do they agree with me? Do they, are they on my political team? But what's happened in politics over the last I don't know how many years is those first two filters are gone And so people only ask, "Are they on my team?"

And that's obviously true on the Republican side with Trump, but it's also true of Bernie Sanders, who stuck to Platner like glue after a lot of these revelations were coming, 'cause he decided, he's a Democrat, therefore, I don't have to worry about character. I don't have to worry about judgment." But let's all learn the lesson.

Character actually is important, and if somebody doesn't have that, it doesn't matter if they're on your team. 

But what about that, Jonathan? Democrats for years had pointed at Donald Trump and made the argument that character matters. Does the fact that so many Democrats were willing to stick with Graham Platner, does that undercut the, their argument fundamentally?

N- no, it doesn't, because we're talking about one guy over a history of candidates where Democrats, didn't put those, the, the considerations they gave to Graham Platner, into work. I look at it, I look at it like this. D- what happened, what was, what should have happened, finally happened.

And when you look on the Republican side, and particularly with President Trump, who's had similar, accusations against him, including some court actions, and yet Republicans stuck by him. And so I wonder if a lot of Democrats looked and thought, "You know what? The guy in the Oval Office has got a lot of baggage.

This guy has a lot of baggage. We're gonna hang in there." Should they have done it? No, they shouldn't have. And the consequences of that, Maine and Maine Democrats are dealing with that now. But I hope that this is a lesson for candidates around the country. If you have skeletons in your closet, you better know what they are, and you better be truthful and forthcoming about what they are when people come to you and say you are the one.

Maybe you should be the person who says, "You know what? I'm not, and maybe you should go talk to someone else." 

July 4th Uh, Mamdani is apparently gonna be the guy for the Democratic Party who is going to provide another way of celebrating, I guess, uh, another vision of what America is at its 250th birthday.

He's gonna deliver a speech just before Trump does from George Washington's, uh, old desk, which is in, uh, I think it's New York City Hall. Mm-hmm. But also this week we should say just not, maybe not coincidentally, Kamala Harris is, it came out that she's been in extensive meetings with him, uh, the uncommitted, uh, folks.

Mm. Like, obviously on a reformation tour. Like, what can I do? Uh, what do you make of that? 

Well, master of timing, Kamala Harris once again. You know, this might have helped in, uh, uh, September of, uh, 2024, uh, when people like you and I were urging she do it. Uh, but it is an indication that, yeah, she can read the polls.

She can read these election results, you know. She knows if she's gonna have a future, but I don't think she's gonna be able to do it, but, you know, she's making the effort. Um, but no, Mamdani has become this, uh, political force nationally. I mean, it is very striking. Like, I w- you know, like we at The Nation had a 250th issue, and it's a very troubling thing to have Donald Trump as the president when you're celebrating the, uh, the birth of the country.

Like, however ambiguously one might feel about the American experiment, still one would like to have something to be proud of. Um, there is much to be proud of in the United States. I mean, uh, you know, like, uh, the, you guys gave the world LeBron and Martin Scorsese. Like, you know, that's, uh, you know, uh, the- Thank you

Jobs. Uh, so I, I say, you know, like, but there's that room- but you st- um, it's very important to have the sort of like, some sort of patriotic message both about what thing have, things have gone wrong, but like how you want a better country. Um, the pessimism about the country is all-time high, and like none of the 

Democrats can speak to that.

I mean, one would've thought. I mean, it's interesting that Obama's sort of silence on this, this moment. And- Yeah ... like, he's, like, producing, uh, a, the series with Larry David. Like, like, that's how, you know ... Like, and you know, like Obama, whatever you wanna feel about him, hugely important historical figure, um, can articulate, you know, much of what's best about the United States.

Like, it's curious that, like, all these, um, uh, uh, mainstream Democrats have gone silent and have, have created a vacuum for Mamdani. 

Yeah, I, you know, I ... 

It is fascinating that- The value of having someone who is a huge historical figure alive is that they can step in- 

Yes ... 

and do stuff. Now, uh, who knows what he's doing, uh, behind the scenes, uh, in between his wheeling and dealing in Hollywood, but it is pretty striking that he is offering really nothing.

Now, maybe his, maybe- Yeah, and, and Trump- Maybe he's thinking- ... 

like, he's like creating a travesty. Like, he's gonna like have a MAGA march on the, you know, July 4th. That, that is a travesty that no other president would've ever done. He's turned the White House into a laughing stock. He's like, you know, turning W- Washington DC into this like gaudy bordello.

Uh, you, you... This would be the time where you kind of have Bill Clinton speak because everyone knows, you know- Right ... Epstein Island. 

Right, right. 

So but at least Obama's there, you know? Like, whatever you wanna say, this guy knows how to deliver a speech. He knows how 

to, you know- But that's the thing too.

It's like- Oh ... I, I, I wouldn't want his politics to return- 

Yeah ... 

but his rhetoric, like you would imagine he, he would deploy it. Now, maybe there's some theory like it'll get Trump mad, or it'll awake the, the conservative movement, which again, I think is just absolutely silly. Uh- No, 

but there's a hunger for that.

I mean, that's why Mamdani is popular. Like, he's offering a positive vision of what America could be, you know? He has become the Obama figure. Like, it's such a hugely positive thing to have like a Muslim American mayor, uh, uh, th- as a, you know, uh, leading the largest, uh, city. This is represents the best of America.

And the Democrats, like it is, for whatever reason, Obama's silence, um, he's... I think he has chosen it because he does actually think it's his job to like le- step back and let the new generation rise. I, I think that's the most, uh, generous interpretation. Pardonable, 

yes. 

But- Well- ... you know, like his voice is really missing at this moment.

What do you think we're gonna see, uh, going forward, uh, in terms of these, um, uh, uh, I, I, I think it's quite likely we're going to see, uh, another- Maybe close to half dozen, maybe a little bit less, uh, incumbents lose their, uh, seats, um, to either, uh, DSA or progressive candidates. Um, it's really just gonna come down to, like, the ground game.

That's what it really s- it feels like. Yeah. These incumbents do not have volunteers. They just don't. 

No, no. Yeah, yeah. No, no, they, they, they don't, and w- uh, whatever, like, machine politics that once existed, you know, for the reason I indicated, no longer exist. Um, and you know, like, I mean, uh, the other side effect is, like, you

victory builds on victory, right? Yeah. Like, you know, the fact that the DSA has won these victories, now they're, like, growing larger than ever. If you could have, you know, DSA of the strength i- that's in New York in other parts of the country, it would become a real powerhouse within the party. 

You said the following, quote, "Our bigger problem," meaning the Democrats, "our bigger problem is not that we are perceived to be too woke, but that we're perceived to be too weak.

We need to stand up to pharmaceutical companies who are despised in rural America, stand up to data centers who are despised in rural America, stand up to tech bros who are despised in rural America," end quote. I might say they're also despised in urban America. So let's start with something that you've agreed with as well as some others, how the Democrats can put together an authentic, well-publicized, daily supported contract for America.

Newt Gingrich in nineteen ninety-four showed how that could be done as he defeated the Democrats with what he called the Contract for America, and we called it a contract on America. It was terrible. But people felt the GOP stood for something. And how many articles are we gonna have to read, Celinda, in the Times and the Post about how the Democratic Party's in disarray?

It doesn't know which way to go, here, there, and people have no confidence in it who despise Trump and the GOP. They have no confidence in the Democrats. So give us your take on very popular issues with names like raising the minimum wage that should be part of a compact for the American people, spearheaded in every way right down to the local activities of the Democratic Party in alliance with the labor union locals and civic groups. 

So I think this is a really, really important idea, and it's absolutely essential to winning. I think you have been suggesting this for a while, and I couldn't agree with you more. You suggested it in '24 as well. And it doesn't have to include everything we believe in, and it should include concrete economic proposals.

And it is noticeable that the two people who won governorships in 2025, Abigail Spanberger and Mikey Sherrill, both had contracts with their voters. And Abigail Spanberger took her 10-point plan around to 67 different cities in Virginia and said, "Here's what I'm gonna do. Hold me accountable if I don't do it.

Don't vote for me if I don't do it." And Mikey Sherrill said, "Day one, I'm gonna do these three things," and she interrupted her inaugural address and signed three executive orders, including capping utility prices. So this is absolutely essential. First of all is raising wages, and we all talk about the cost of living, the rising cost of living, bills, et cetera.

The biggest answer to getting affordability for American families is to get wages up. And of course, the federal minimum wage is just over $7 an hour. It's absolutely absurd. So we need to raise the wage. We should be talking about capping prescription drug prices or limiting prescription drug prices. The VA negotiates 399 prescription drugs.

We can't figure out how to get Medicare to negotiate 10? Adopt the VA price list. This is not rocket science. Capping utility prices, making sure that data centers cannot dump utility rate increases on their voters. The most bipartisan issue out there right now is data centers. So there, equal pay for men and women, still an issue for people.

Women still paid less, even though their families are relying on those two incomes 'cause nobody can make it on one income anymore, unless you're Musk. So there are a lot of proposals out there. Medicare for All testing off the charts. Healthcare been taken away from record numbers of voters, and we often say things like voters lose their healthcare.

People don't misplace their healthcare. They misplace their keys. They get their healthcare taken away from them, and that's what's happened here. So Democrats need to lay out 10 pr- concrete proposals and run on them We have the critique of what's going on. We understand what's happening to real people's lives.

The third leg of the stool is offering our alternative, and a concrete alternative that people can pass on to their friends and family, that people can hold us accountable for. And the last of the 10 proposals on the contract needs to be something about campaign finance reform. We have to get corporate money out of politics, or our system will continue to be rigged against us and rotting from the middle.

And I think that's a good part of the reason why Jeffries and Schumer are standing on the sidelines and not coming forward with a compact for the American people, as they see it as impairing all the floods of commercial PAC money that they hope to be pouring into the Democratic Party. The trouble with the Democratic Party leadership, Celinda, is they want to win elections on their own terms, which means you don't fight Wall Street, you don't take on the big PACs, you don't push for campaign finance reform, as you showed just now should be done, and they wanna appeal to the voter by saying they're not Trump.

They're not dictator Trump. They're not vicious, cruel, greedy, corrupt Trump. that's okay. that's gonna get you some votes. But people want to ask, "Whose side are you on? What are you doing for us? How do you care for us?" And they're not receiving coordinated and organized answers from the Democratic leadership, just from candidates around the country, but not from the National Democratic Party.

Now, here's an example, just to illustrate and extend what you just said, Celinda. 25 million workers would benefit from pushing the minimum wage up to $15, the federal minimum wage. 60 million elderly people would benefit from John Larson's bill, H.R.4583, which would Raise the Social Security taxes above the $180,000 income level today on the rich, and use that money to increase benefits for Social Security recipients that have been frozen since 1971.

Think of all the CEO salaries. Are they frozen since 1971? Et cetera. That's 60 million people who would get increased Social Security benefits paid by a more progressive Social Security tax on the wealthy in the country. 200 Democrats in 2022 voted for that bill by John Larson, but unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi didn't want it on the floor because she was concerned with the Blue Dog Democrats who were blocking.

this is a tremendous winning issue if you want to win elections. Another one is corporate crime, ripping off consumer savings and dollars constantly, irritating people constantly, whether it's the credit card companies, insurance companies denying benefits, the banks. Just all over the-- people are forced to sign these fine print contracts and enter into consumer servitude.

They can't bargain anymore. That's a big issue. Taxing the undertaxed super rich, that along with cracking down on corporate crooks, comes in at over 85% in the polls. That's a lot of conservative people. So a compact for the American people would get left-right votes, not just Democratic families, but Republican families who want the same thing: fair play, honesty, good public services, and above all, this is a winner, childcare and an authentic child tax credit.

That alone will get far more women out to vote, the mothers who have to engage in constant back and forth from work and very exorbitant childcare. Y- Western Europe, Canada, they've had this for years. What's our excuse? That's another winner. That's another part of the compact for the American people. So Linda, how do we get the leadership to champion this or step aside for some energetic leaders?

They can't just win the election in November. They have to win it convincingly so they don't have to worry about Blue Dog senators and Blue Dog House of Representatives members holding a sword of Damocles over the leadership. How do we get this leadership? We tried to visit the Democratic National Committee and send our petition.

The building's like a mausoleum. You couldn't even get anybody to come to the front door to receive the petition, and the only activity was the side doors where members of the Democratic Party sneak in and sit in their cubicles to dial for commercial dollars 

Yeah, totally. I think one of the things that I want to wrestle with a little bit first is, trying to, diagnose what are the conditions that are producing this, right?

Like, where is this sweep coming from? It's not like DSA is a brand-new organization. It's not like electoral organizing is new for them strategically. So I do think there's, an interesting question to try to wrestle with of, what is changing in the current conditions? And I think at the end of the day, there are a couple things that we need to wrestle with in order to determine our response as communists, honestly, and in order to understand how democratic socialism is slotting in in response to present conditions.

And so I think one of the things that I want to point out is that I do think there is a crisis in the ideological foundations of American imperialism right now. Which is to say that I think American imperial ambitions are increasingly unpopular with the populace inasmuch as even the right has moved towards a sort of anti-interventionist framing more and more, and obviously the left has that opposition to begin with.

And I think part of what we're seeing here is the reality of the fact that, and we've said this time and time again, when it comes to anti-imperialism, right-wing populism is not a viable option. The right-wing populists are not anti-imperialist. Their anti-interventionism is always rhetorical and is always willing to be dropped as soon as the economic interests of capital and the imperial ambitions of the state come back into play.

And so I think one of the reasons we may be seeing this sweep is that there has honestly been difficulty for the populist right in the United States to continue to maintain the idea that it is in some way opposed to American intervention overseas and American aggressiveness Ultimately, I think that it's just true that many of the people who are part of the populist right-wing base are upset with Trump and the MAGA movement around Iran.

They are upset around Israel. They are upset around Palestine. They are upset about the fact that what they were sold as a right-wing anti-interventionist, foreign policy simply is not that in actuality, and that for all the populism that you will hear, at the end of the day, the MAGA movement acts like neocons when it comes to foreign policy, regardless of what they say.

We've seen fractures on the right there that I think are very clear, and I think one of the things that has been really eye-opening for a lot of people in the US is the fact that between Biden and Trump, policy around Israel and Palestine has not really looked any different. Honestly, you can see a clear level of continuity there.

And I do think that after October seventh, we really did see a moral crisis in the United States, where people in the broader populace are changing their opinion on this question and are becoming more and more aware of just how fucked up and evil Israel is. And so I think there is a, this shift that is happening and this kind of, difficulty in constructing this ideological justification, and right-wing populism has let people down who do not want to see the US engage in aggressive overseas action.

And I really do think if you look at some of these wins in New York, it is AIPAC Democrats who are getting unseated, and I don't think that's incidental. I really do think that a large part of this is that Democratic socialists are willing to criticize the Democratic Party on these issues, are willing to position themselves, I don't think strongly enough in terms of pro-Palestinian national liberation, but at least as vocal critics of Israel in a way that appeals to broad parts of the population.

And the other thing that I think we need to wrestle with is that I do just think there has been a mass movement around immigration in this country that really has been more sizable and more mainstream than you might think, right? If you think about what has happened in Los Angeles, in, all of the parts of the country, honestly, where we saw these massive rapid response networks happening, where we saw people taking to the streets, that's gone beyond the traditional far-left organizing and become, again, something with more of a mass characteristic to it.

And I think that is creating this narrative where people are willing to criticize Democratic politicians who won't adequately stand up to ICE, who won't adequately critique Trump's immigration enforcement and the policies around it, and that's leaving room for these candidates to come in. So the reason that I think diagnosing those conditions matters is because I think it helps us understand that what is producing these electoral victories for the Democratic Socialists is a broader shift in politics within the United States that ought to be advantageous to those of us who are to their left and would consider ourselves more on the communist side of things.

They are taking victories based on a mass movement, and we ought to be able to determine how to do the same thing. Obviously, communists have been involved in that mass movement. I think everyone who listens to the show probably knows what that looks like on some level or another. But how do we transform the mass movement into victories for communism specifically and towards building a communist politics I think, the question.

The Democratic Socialists have the DSA, which is this massive organization with increasing levels of cohesion and organizational complexity, open factional debate internal to it where they hash these issues out, and that has positioned them very well to be able to respond to these mass changes that are occurring within the US.

And I do think that is really a big part of where we are seeing these successes for them, and it ought to point for communists to the necessity of that level of preparation and that level of organizational, proficiency and professionalism even in order for us to be able to respond as well. So I, I do wanna just start with that diagnosis because I think it really does paint a picture of what communists need to be doing to a certain degree or another.

A- and there is just a straightforward benefit to the success of the DSA more broadly, which is that it is bring... A- and the polls of the Democratic base show over and over again, the Democratic base, particularly those that are, under f- 50, under 60, certainly under 40, are shifting, towards the progressive, populist, democratic socialist wing of the party.

They're fed up with the corporate center of the party, and what that means for us is simply this: the more people that are willing and able to identify, with democratic socialism, with socialism more broadly, it opens up a funnel to, what I would argue and what Allison probably would agree with are, obviously we're Marxists, so I think the most principled, logical conclusion of anybody interested in socialist politics a- and that, that want to win over the long term and want to defend any gains over the long term, you have to turn towards, Marxism.

And there will be people who, are like liberal temperamentally a- and maybe they're not super intellectually curious, and they just want lower rent and access to he- healthcare who will stay within, the social democratic or democratic socialist milieu. There is a faction, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25%, who knows how high that can get, that once that is unlocked for them, and we saw this with the Bernie phenomena, once they're in that realm, once they're interested in that stuff, once they're starting to identify as a socialist, they will keep going, and they will find shows like this.

They will find other figures. They will find texts. They'll 

become curious about a broader critique of capitalism itself. They'll learn words like anti-imperialism, self-determination, the periphery and the imperial core. That will start to fill out the picture, particularly the more intellectually curious, a- and, deeper, deeper-thinking people that are, especially that are very young right now, that are still blossoming into their political consciousness.

They will move in our direction, and we have to not have that door shut prematurely. That door has to be open, and we have to see ourselves as not, teaming up with the DSA per se, but as certainly lending our support vociferously to two things, the left-wing communist factions and caucuses within the DSA.

We want them, to win out, and more broadly, we do genuinely want a- as far as the electoral terrain is one terrain of many to struggle on, yeah, we want to see the democratic socialists, beat the corporate centrists within the party. I would love for the Democratic Party to be even a flawed and limited social democratic or democratic socialist party, over a corporate-centered, AIPAC-dominated, party that we've known for our fucking entire lives.

That is a win. That does open up opportunities for us on the actual communist, Marxist, anti-imperialist left, and I think we could have a- I would argue perhaps a growing center of gravity within a broader, socialist, democratic socialist or br- broader socialist left politic as that continues to build.

now there's, th- this is, this terrain is fraught with problems. There's going to be opportunism. There's going to be co-optation. There's going to be infighting and people that gravitate towards the right wing of the DSA. There's going to be line struggles. we should not shy away from that whatsoever, but we also should not, I think, alienate ourselves completely from a movement that more and more people, especially young people, are getting into.

We should see it, and we should use it as an opportunity. and that actually, that bleeds in well to this next point I want to make, which is that this is, historical... this is not historically unprecedented in the United States. After, the Civil War, at the end of the 19th century, we saw this economic boom.

We, the Carnegies, the railroad systems. We saw this huge economic boom, this sort of industrial revolution that occurred within the United States after slavery was defeated, and there's obviously deep problems with that and reconstruction, and all of that was, all on the table.

But there's this huge economic boom, and the beneficiaries of that economic boom were a increasingly small group of people huge w- that would be billionaires in our time, that existed at that time. And there was, in reaction to not only the enormous explosion of wealth, but the massive wealth inequality that wealth was funneled into, there was a genuine grassroots reaction to that, that took many forms.

From the prairie populists out here on the Great Plains and the People's Party, the first People's Party, convention was in Omaha, Nebraska. I went-- I graduated from a high school called Bryan High, which is William Jennings Bryan High School, because he was a figure that was a progressive populist for, the economic working class at that time.

And again, plenty of contradictions with there. There's a settler colonial contradiction with there, and there's a racial contradiction within there. But, that gave rise to a sl- a slew of left-wing forces coming out of what is now looked back at as the Gilded Age. You had the Socialist Party. You had Eugene Debs, fighting on the electoral terrain at, at that point.

You had the Communist Party of the United States of America organizing, workers across the country and, and having an explosion of membership. You had the IWW, the Wobblies, in the '10s and the teens, 19-teens, doing militant and racially egalitarian, open class struggle at the level of labor organizing.

and you had all these movements that are reactions to the Gilded Age. and, and of course, that eventually culminates in the Progressive Era. it culminates in some ways economically. The Gilded Age itself culminates in the Great Depression. Then you have FDR and the New Deal, and you saw the disappearance Of a lot of those more militant forces, and that was a two-pronged approach.

There was a reds, there was wave and wave of Red Scares. There's the de-radicalization of unions, this reactionary attack on communism and socialism and anarchism writ large. But also you saw a lot of the, policies, a lot of the things that the Socialist Party, for example, were pushing get absorbed into the broader Democratic Party apparatus such that you had the New Deal.

Now, the New Deal, again, another compromise with settler colonialism, another compromise with racism that, we're not sugarcoating over that whatsoever, but that was the sort of culmination of, a historical set of circumstances that we're living again at a different level. We're living that, that historical process in the United States that happened 100 years ago.

So we have had many conversations about money in politics, and we've also discussed the influence of the media, but we have not yet had an expansive conversation about violence.

It's not that violence is new, as you point out in the book, but for sure the threat of violence today is both quantitatively and qualitatively different. 

Between Nancy Pelosi's husband being attacked in their home, the Minnesota state lawmakers being shot dead in their homes, and January 6th, there's no question that we live in dangerous times.

And you start the book actually with a death threat to former representative Eric Swalwell's office. Why did you start there? 

So I started, as you're mentioning, with actually a slew of death threats that were called in to former representative Eric Swalwell's office t- because I think that it is just an example of something that has become unfortunately all too normalized in American politics.

When I speak to representatives, as I did for the book, and we also know this from data from the US Capitol Police and other sources, the number of times that they're getting people calling in death threats, threatening them, threatening increasingly, unfortunately, their children, their spouses, their families, is just really shockingly high.

And so one of the themes, as you're mentioning, that the book talks about is h- not just the incidents of violence but how that's distorting lawmaking. What are the ramifications of, for our democracy of the fact that what happened to Eric Swalwell at the beginning of the book has just become all too frequent, in American politics?

And you listed a few incidents of actual physical violence, but for every incidence of physical violence, there are so many more instances of threats and harassments and insults that have become unfortunately all too frequent for politicians at all levels of government. 

Right, and it's not only Democrats who get- 100%

who get targeted. Even we recently had a conversation about how Senator Murkowski said basically that people are scared, Republicans are scared. Because of threats from the right? 

Definitely. It's a very bipartisan topic, and according to data from the US Capitol Police, members from both parties are receiving alarmingly high numbers of threats and incidents of violence.

Between 2018 and 2023, according to data from the US Capitol Police, the number of threats of violence and incidents of violence against members doubled. and then it's continued to rise since then. And in the book, there are quotes from folks like Liz Cheney saying that there are members who came to her and said, "I would have voted to impeach the president, but I was afraid for the safety of myself and my family."

we know that there have been countless attacks on folks like Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney, who are on the January 6th committee. So there's a lot of violence and threats, both from members of their own party in some instances, and people across the ideological spectrum. So again, it's definitely not isolated, not to one party, not to one demographic group increasingly.

It's really an epidemic that we have to reckon with, just as Americans, as citizens, and as people who want functional politics. 

it's definitely difficult to have functional politics when you're getting death threats and your family is being threatened, and you cannot vote on bills- ... that you think are the right bills to vote for.

Yeah, exactly. So my book talks about three ways in which this violence is distorting politics. you mentioned Nancy Pelosi's husband. The book actually quotes Nancy Pelosi's memoir, where she says that when she speaks to young, dynamic people thinking of running for Congress, what they tell her is that what happened to Paul Pelosi, the violent attack on her husband in their San Francisco home, that's their greatest fear.

That's the reason that they're not running for Congress. I interviewed Angie Craig, who was a representative who was assaulted in her building in 2023. She also told me that she thinks violence is the biggest deterrent to getting people into politics. So the attrition problem, I think, is something that we have to reckon with, and that's not just in Congress.

my colleagues and I at the Brennan Center did a study a few years ago where we looked at violence faced by local office holders. It was a survey of all 50 states, different kinds of state and local office holders. Among local office holders, women in local office, about 50% of them said that they were dissuaded from running for re-election or running for higher office because of violence.

So we have to think about the attrition problem, and particularly the disparate impact on women, on people of color, on young people, on people who we know violence has a disparate impact on. So we have to think about what does it mean to be in a democracy where members can't vote their conscience? 

Yes.

Where members can't vote to impeach the president if they want to because they're afraid for the safety of their families? That they would shy away from hot button issues because they were afraid of violence. So that is something that is distortive to democracy in general. And then the last thing that I'll mention is that members are constricting civic engagement, which is another core tenet of a functional democracy.

So one member told me, "I'm afraid to go to certain parts of my own district because I'm afraid for my safety or the safety of my staff," especially since for this member she said, most of her district staff were women. Other members- Like 

notably, for example, Gabby Giffords was shot basically- 

That's exactly what I 

was-

at a meet and greet with her 

constituents. Yeah. And that's exactly what I was going to say. One member, Representative Scanlon, told me, "How could I not have the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords at a Congress at your corner event in the back of my mind?" 

How can we not have that in the back of our mind when we do a congress at your corner event?

So- Yes ... we're seeing members cancel town halls, cancel engagement events. We saw Ilhan Omar, Representative Ilhan Omar recently attacked at a town hall. Yes. And I view democracy as a continuous conversation between representatives and their constituents, and that conversation is being constricted and diluted by this violence.

I want to pivot here a little bit to the way that you have organized your book- ... around three change making classes, the Watergate babies of 1974, the Contract with America in 1994 under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, and the blue wave class of 2018- ... which came about after the 2016 election of President Trump.

And I want to delve deeper on each, but broadly speaking- ... what do these three classes share in common? 

So- I wanted to write a book that spoke to how we got here, right? The title Stuck speaks to what a lot of us are feeling about our democracy in general and, certainly about Congress, which is that it is stuck, that in so many ways it is not delivering in the way that it was intended to do, not delivering for ordinary Americans.

And so it is an attempt to look backward in order to chart a course forward. It looks back 50 years in order to explain how we got here, and I firmly believe that you need to understand how we got here in order to understand how we can move forward. 

Totally agree. 

And so it's a book about change-making, and in writing a book about change-making, I wanted to look at the times that the Congress is the most changeable.

And as a Congressional scholar, I think that that's when there's waves of new people coming to Congress. And so these three moments in time, the class of 1974, the class of 1994, and the class of 2018, are three of the largest groups of new members who've come to the House of Representatives over the past 50 years.

And so I wanted to anchor the book in these wave elections, these moments of change for the institution to see what we can learn. And the other thing that these three classes have in common that I think is really important right now and why I chose them is that they speak to Congress's relationship with the executive.

They're inflection points in terms of Congress's relationship with the executive branch. All three of these classes are tied to impeachment proceedings in different ways. And given the rampant executive abuse of power and the ways in which we're seeing a Congress that is supine right now, a Congress that needs to understand how to stand up to the president, I wanted to understand again how these moments in time, these key inflection points in Congress's relationship with the president can help us understand how Congress can strengthen itself vis-a-vis the executive once again.

We've just heard clips starting with

The Thom Hartmann Program unpacking Trump's claim at the Faith and Freedom Conference that Democrats are "hardcore godless communists" by tracing the red-baiting playbook back through Roy Cohn to Joe McCarthy.

The PBS NewsHour reviewed the collapse of Graham Platner's Maine Senate campaign and warned that team loyalty had replaced character vetting as the primary filter Democrats and Republicans use to evaluate candidates.

The Majority Report discussed Obama's puzzling silence at America's 250th birthday moment and how Mamdani has stepped into that void with a positive patriotic vision.

The Ralph Nader Radio Hour outlined a strategy for Democrats to win elections by committing to specific policies, from raising the federal minimum wage to capping prescription drug prices, rather than running only against Trump.

Red Menace traced DSA's wins over AIPAC-backed Democrats to growing public opposition to Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, alongside a mass grassroots movement against ICE.

And Future Hindsight examined how political violence against lawmakers is distorting democracy by silencing votes, driving away candidates, and shrinking civic engagement.

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

But first, as you may have heard by now, the show is going through some financial troubles. We've taken a big hit on ad dollars drying up since the beginning of the year, and, much like the world in general, things have not improved. We've had to cut expenses dramatically and I'm refocusing on building the core podcast and I'm experimenting with the idea of launching a newsletter to attract newsletter readers who may never consider listening to a long-form podcast, just like how you may never consider reading long-form newsletters. The point is, you can't tell from the outside right now but there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes here.

So, to our members supporting the show, you're the main thing getting us through right now and we appreciate your patience while we work on building everything that we hope will get us back on solid financial footing.

If you haven't signed up yet but are thinking about it, just know that the emergency hasn't passed and we could still really use your help.

So, if you get value out of the show - and think others would too! - and want to get 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.

Slowly but surely, we're also working on reincorporating audience feedback into the show. If you want to encourage others to leave messages, start by becoming the change you want to see in the world.

To spark ideas, here's today's question.

The democratic socialists are making gains this election cycle and their whole point is that government has the power to make people's lives better. Tell us the last time you actually felt the government impact your daily life, for better or worse. A policy change with direct impacts, a program that saved you or failed you. Something you could feel, not just read about.

If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

As for today's topic,

the reckoning headed for the Democratic Party has been a long time coming. They've been on a predictably disastrous path for decades now, but it wasn't until the wake of the 2008 housing collapse that it became clear to anyone willing to look.

Both parties were impacted by the great recession in their own ways and have been in pitched internal battles ever since. The Republicans were roiled first by the libertarian-leaning Tea Party and later by the faux populism of MAGA, while the Democrats have been busy fending off critiques from the left in the shapes of Occupy Wall Street and then later Bernie Sanders' two presidential runs.

Recessions in particular and economic precarity in general function as drivers of demands for change. The base of the right, always anxious to find a dark-skinned minority to blame their fears on, shifted their focus from Muslims in the post-9/11 era to immigrants of all stripes in the post-recession era. Meanwhile, the base of the left understood the recession to be a wake-up call that the Democratic Party had strayed too far from its pro-labor roots, and escalated demands that people, rather than money, be put back at the center of Democratic policy objectives.

The abandonment of working people had begun decades earlier. Neoliberalism was in, Democrats had lost three presidential elections in a row, and the same pro-market centrism that Bill Clinton rode to the White House got infused into the party itself. People-powered organizing was swapped for big money now available from banks, thanks to the party's new pro-banking policies and embrace of financial deregulation. All that money could buy TV ads, the thinking went, which meant they didn't need as many volunteers, and specialized consultants could be brought in to craft and place all those ads. This turned election campaigns into a for-profit business, with the incentive to do what was most lucrative for the consultants rather than what was the most effective election strategy.

There were always rationales for these moves, sometimes ideological and sometimes out of expediency. But with the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that, at best, they were optimizing for the short term at the cost of the long-term viability of the party, because you can draw multiple direct lines from that series of decisions. Embracing big money from corporations put the party at odds with its working-class base. Embracing big business and deregulating the financial industry helped create the conditions for the 2008 financial collapse. And when people called for heads to roll, the party was in no position to meet the moment that called for an adversarial stance against Wall Street.

There was a brief window of hope in the years just before the crash. Howard Dean ran a failed presidential campaign in 2004. You might remember him from his scream. That campaign didn't go far, but he did end up as chair of the DNC, where he implemented a 50-state strategy which was instrumental in Democrats winning back the House and Senate in 2006 and helped create the momentum that Obama's presidential campaign stepped into in 2008.

Dean's strategy, pushing the message of the Democratic Party everywhere and not writing off any potential voters, was explicitly at odds with the established, consultant-led approach. That's likely why he was shut out of an Obama administration staffed by corporate Democrats, and why his successful 50-state strategy was quickly abandoned by the party.

Campaigner Obama went in that same people-centric direction, and it inspired millions of active organizers and volunteers rather than depending on TV ads alone. They built a list of thirteen million email addresses from real people. When the campaign surveyed that list after the election, more than half a million answered, and fifty thousand of them said they personally wanted to run for office.

That was the seed of what could have been an ongoing organizing powerhouse. Obama for America eventually rebranded as Organizing for America and, after some negotiation, was folded directly into the DNC, where their organizing tools were dismantled and that list of organizers and volunteers was turned into a fundraising funnel begging for donations and selling coffee mugs. Twice the party rejected the people-focused style of organizing that had just proven itself successful.

The problem was that the party had already forgotten how to manage and benefit from people. They knew that Obama's list and organization was valuable, but couldn't metabolize it as anything other than a revenue stream, because they had long ago reorganized into that mindset.

By contrast, the DSA understands that they'd never be able to build power and influence by leaning on fundraising and online activism. They've explicitly gone the other direction, tapping into the people power of enthusiastic supporters. Rather than selling mugs, they host events, lectures, and dances. There's a lot about the DSA that echoes the old Organizing for America, but the fundamental difference is that there's no risk of the DSA being absorbed into the Democratic Party and dismantled. Democrats won't be able to diffuse and redirect that people power into fundraising emails. The DSA holds the connection to people power that money can't buy, and they're not going to trade that away.

The bargain the Democrats struck decades ago, trading their working-class base for their big donors on Wall Street, was always destined to be a temporary arrangement because they positioned themselves in no man's land. Not business-friendly enough to keep the corporate cash flowing indefinitely, and not worker-friendly enough to keep their voters enthusiastic about supporting them.

The most generous interpretation of the people who made that bargain is that it seemed like the best thing to do at the time, though the rise of the consulting class and the revolving door between government and consulting, helping everyone cash in on the deal certainly had an impact. Regardless of their reasons, they were walking the country into a trap where, eventually, neither party would be set up to fight for the needs of the working class. That's the exact gap that Donald Trump and his counterfeit populism exploited.

What gives me hope is that the Democrats' turn toward big money can only last as long as it gets passable results, and that time has clearly come to an end. It was expedient and defensible until it no longer was. The clear-eyed view is that the party used to benefit to some degree from that infusion of corporate money, but now it's being dragged down by the moderately-consentual stranglehold corporations have on the party.

So if the corporate cash grab was adopted out of expediency, it can be dropped for the same reason. This is what the grassroots Left has been calling for, for decades. The party couldn't quit its addiction to big-dollar donors because they had nothing to fill the gap. What DSA is demonstrating right now is the institutional knowledge of how to organize people power, and it isn't just infrastructure for candidates running under their label. It's the replacement for big money that has to exist before the party can let go.

They're already experiencing the diminishing returns of trying to depend on massive election war chests. Kamala Harris proved that by outspending and still losing to the most hated president of the modern era. Eventually corporate Democrats will have run out of excuses and understand that they have no choice but to recalculate and reorient and that day arrives faster the more real the alternative is. So it's our job to keep pushing and, if you're able to join in, keep showing what real political organizing looks like by joining organizations like DSA or, in a slightly different flavor, the Working Families Party. Howard Dean, President Campaigner Obama and now these outside parties punching above their weights have been pointing in the right direction, back toward people-powered campaigns that leave no one behind, for two decades.

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

Section A, Who They Are

Followed by Section B, What They Believe

Section C, Money, Power, and the Reckoning

And Section D, Critiques and the Path Forward

For months, the populous progressive energy inside the Democratic Party has been concentrated in blue cities. But now that movement is testing something bigger. Can a Democratic socialist win over voters in one of America's most competitive swing states? Does the energy in New York, LA, DC, and Denver translate in the Midwest?

Progressive Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan certainly thinks so, and in Wisconsin, Democratic Socialist Assemblywoman Francesca Hong is now leading the polls in the state's Democratic primary for governor. Assemblywoman Hong joins me now. It is great to see you this morning and to have you on.

I, I wanna start our conversation, just digging in a little bit into your background 'cause it's different than the backgrounds of a lot of the politicians that we speak to. You're the child of Korean immigrants. at one point you had to drop out of college to work, and you were sued last year over credit card debts that you've since paid off, but that's something that many Americans can actually relate to, but maybe not too many, governors or lawmakers.

So tell me a bit about how your personal upbringing has informed your politics. 

first of all, thank you so much, Antonio, for having me. And being a service industry worker means that, I am a hustler, and I know what it means to work hard like so many Wisconsinites across the state. And my lived experiences in the service industry as a restaurant owner and, five years now in the state legislature, I think it gives me an opportunity to connect with voters in many different ways.

Tell me about those connections because as I've watched your campaign from afar, you're not just going out there and talking to Democrats. You are- ... crossing through your state, trying to talk to more conservative, residents in Wisconsin. And I'm curious how it goes when you connect with them, and then they hear that word socialist, which in so many of our media ecosystems is, something that they're told to be very afraid of.

I love talking to everyone and anyone, literally sometimes stopping folks in the streets. And what we hear so often is that people are stressed, they're tired, and they're ready for change as opposed to this chaos. I think that, when folks hear socialism, they may be taken aback, but I bring it back to po- potholes and the Packers and public education and, issues that have broad bipartisan support and broad bipartisan opposition like data centers and then support for our public schools and universal childcare, lowering working class people's taxes by taxing the wealthiest few and mega corporations.

These are issues and conversations that I'm having with folks in every corner of our state. 

I wanna talk to you and dig in a bit more on data centers because that's a huge issue, not just in Wisconsin, but around the country. And I know that there are some voters, and some who are not Democrats considering you because of your stance on AI data centers.

You've called for a moratorium on their construction. Your state already has dozens of them, though. And I'm wondering what you think you can really deliver for voters with a moratorium, and if there's any risk of Wisconsin losing out if construction continues all across the country. 

These dozens of data centers across Wisconsin are exempt from sales and use tax.

And the construction of more hyperscale AI data centers, the response has been that communities want community control, not NDAs and promises of jobs, but real concrete, measures that will put regulations that preserve our natural resources, protect ratepayers from skyrocketing utility costs, and that we are thinking about our shared future for our kids where there's clean water, lower cost, and we're not- taxpayers aren't on the hook for what could happen when these data centers are no longer in use.

I wanna talk to you a bit about some of the debates and controversies that have also been a part of this race. because while we talked about socialism and sort of the labels coming from the right, the reality is that there are criticisms that have come on the left as well. You appeared on two controversial livestreams, one with Hasan Piker, another with a guy called Mike from Pennsylvania.

Former Democratic Wisconsin elections commissioner Ann Jacobs said of your appearances this: "When you decide these are the sort of people you wanna hang out with in order to raise money, you have made clear that you either, one, agree with them, or two, can be bought, or three, both. Fran Hong appears to be all.

She is willing to sell out the Jews of Wisconsin for a few bucks." And I wanna give you the opportunity to respond to that. 

I condemn hatred, discrimination, antisemitism, and Islamophobia, any sort of dehumanizing of communities. Being on these, streams, it's important that we get our message out in places where, campaigns struggle to reach voters.

Just because I am on a platform certainly does not mean that I endorse everything that has been said by either the hosts or other people who have gone on. And if candidates and elected officials who are speaking with more controversial hosts, if we are to be responsible for everything that they have ever said, I would point to the fact that Tom Tiffany, the Republican likely nominee, has been on a radio show that has called for the execution of the governor of Minnesota.

So I think it's important to recognize that when we are campaigning in areas where, folks may not have already heard our message, it's important to let them know that we are a campaign that is fighting for working class people, and it's important that folks are staying engaged on our elections here in Wisconsin.

I wanna ask you about how Israel and Gaza have also reshaped this race. It's reshaped the Democratic Party all across the country. it's not just the case in Wisconsin. you have made very clear, you've said that you believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and there's also been this debate in your state over an incident from 2023 in which you called the police twice to report an anti-Israel protest display of some kind on behalf of constituents who told you at that time that they believed that it was antisemitic.

You've since apologized for doing that. Can you explain why? 

I was unaware that this was an act of protest. I did not see the words, "Ceasefire now," and I was responding to community members and my constituents that had expressed deep concern over that, display. And so I was responding to people's fear and pain, and I always will choose to make sure that communities feel safe.

And as a Democratic socialist, it means that my values are rooted in democracy, fairness, and human rights. And whether it's here or across the, across, different parts of the country or across the world, it's important that we denounce genocide and call it for what it is and, vow to protect communities and ensure that everyone feels safe in practicing their faith.

With our final seconds here, can you just tell me a bit about how you plan to build on the legacy of Tony Evers in the state, as someone that many Democrats still have immense affection for there, and maybe wondering how your policies, your process may build on his? 

We will carry forward the governor's passion for public education, ensuring that we are fully funding our public schools and public universities, that our governor has been forced to govern by defense.

And Democrats now have an opportunity to win back the trifecta and ensure that we are delivering for Wisconsinites on healthcare, on public schools, on environmentalism. Our Wisconsin progressive roots run deep, and this is a state where so many progressive ideals and policies have come from, and we're ready to move those forward and deliver for Wisconsinites.

As AP leads today, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani waded into Democratic US House primaries to boost three progressive last week over establishment-backed candidates. All of them won On Tuesday, defeating two incumbent Democrats and essentially ensuring that two self-described Democratic socialists will be elected to Congress in their deep blue districts.

The mayor said it was a question of electing, quote, "Better Democrats who would put working people back at the heart of politics." The approach, as AP describes it, consternated some in the Democratic leadership, but the outcome showcased Mamdani's rising influence, and it certainly did. In New York's 10th Congressional District, Mamdani enor- endorsed Brad Lander, his competitor in last year's New York City mayoral race, defeated incumbent Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman in a race pitting two Jewish elected officials against each other, with Lander making the case that Goldman was too supportive of Israel and their assault on Gaza, among other things.

And this race was not even close. Lander defeated the incumbent Goldman by more than 30 points. 

Wow. 

66 to 34 right now, with 90% of the vote in. In the state's 7th US House District, located in Brooklyn and Queens in New York City, Mamdani endorsed Claire Valdes, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated longtime Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso for the seat being vacated by retiring Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, who had, backed Reynoso for that seat.

Also extraordinary, by more than 20 points. Valdes, for the record, worked at Taco Bell and Trader Joe's before organizing a union and then going on to seek office. In New York's 13th Congressional District, Mamdani endorsed Democratic Socialist Daraliza- Darializa, Avila Chevalier appears to have ousted longtime New York City pol and incumbent Democratic Dominican-American Congress member Adriano Espaillat in, Harlem and the Bronx.

Mamdani endorsed Chevalier just weeks ago. A March poll conducted for her campaign showed her losing to Espaillat, 42 to 28. But now, just a few weeks later, with Mamdani's clearly powerful support, she appears to be heading to Congress, having unseated a five-term incumbent, though only by about five points, with 88% of the vote in.

Nonetheless, AP and others have called it for Chevalier. Another remarkable moment with Democrats unseating two of their own incumbents In New York City, the first two cases of incumbents being unseated by challengers in this primary cycle anywhere. In all, not just a signal of Mamdani's power right now, but of the Democratic Socialist movement, arguably, at least in those seats.

elsewhere in, a very crowded Democratic primary in the New York City, 12th Congressional District, Democratic State Assembly member Micah Lasher, former aide to Governor Kathy Hochul, won the primary to fill the congressional seat being vacated by Lasher's political mentor, 17-term Congressman Jerry Nadler, who backed Lasher in a brutal race.

Millions, were spent in super PAC spending from the AI industry and others, but particularly in the AI industry. The seven-person race also included John F. Kennedy's grandson, Jack Schlossberg, who came in a distant third, and George Conway, the former once very Republican attorney, a former husband to Trump loyalist and one-time campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.

He placed an even more distant fifth in this seven-person Democratic race in a district that represents Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side, parts of Greenwich Village. Mamdani did not endorse in that case. the AI industry made an enormous investment in this race to take out State Assembly member Alex Bores, who finished, in second place, four points behind Lasher.

But as The American Prospect observes today, in his victory speech, Lasher, who himself co-sponsored the AI safety bill that turned the industry against Boris, directly confronted the oligarchs. He noted, quote, "I have some news for the two, two big AI companies who have taken such an unusual interest in who won this congressional seat.

I won't be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs, and our environment." So Democratic socialists, were also, said to be sweeping pow-- into power in the, New York State Assembly, several seats there as well on Tuesday in what the movement was absolutely celebrating, as they should.

that said, I think, the worst news here is for, as I see it, Republicans. it's possible that this is New York and New York City, explicitly, doing something that can't be done anywhere else in the country. But, they're just in the mood to vote for progressive candidates this year.

But there's another way to look at this which jumps out to me, which is that if Democratic voters are willing to toss out their own incumbents How do you suspect the electorate all over the country feels about the incumbent Republican Party right now under Donald Trump, w- who have failed so spectacularly?

We'll see if New York serves as any kind of harbinger for what is to come, but it sure seems to me like much of this nation, may end up in a throw-the-bums-out mood by November. 

Melat Kiros defeated Diana DeGette.Melat was a phenomenal candidate this cycle.

I interviewed her quite a bit because I just really believed in her candidacy. She hits on some like... S- she's a former lawyer, so she can argue in that way, but she's also DSA and was fired from, her law firm, and then became a barista after that because she wrote a post criticizing, the suppression of speech of, of, uh, students who were protesting the genocide.

So she has just so many different I think, skills and talents as a politician. and she was on Chris Hayes' show last night, and Hayes asked her about why she decided to run against Diana DeGette. Now, there were a lot of Democrats, establishment Democrats, waiting in the wings for Diana DeGette to just retire.

Melat Kiros said, "I'm not waiting. I'm gonna primary her." And Hayes is asking why she chose to do and this is what Kouros said, last night on MSNBC. 

You talked about the, the money that had, flow- flowed into, the incumbent, Diana DeGette. one thing that I noted, and I've covered her for a long time.

She's been in Congress. she voted against the Iraq War. She was a member of the Progressive Caucus. She's not, I wouldn't cons- she's not really a conservative Democrat. She's been a pretty progressive Democrat, you look at her voting record. th- w- what was it about her record that I think some people, and I think she herself probably looked at and said, "Hey, I'm a pretty progressive member of Congress," that, that you found so intolerable you wanted to unseat her?

it, it's not the congresswoman herself. It's the campaign finance system that has incentivized members of Congress like Diana DeGette to take millions of dollars from big pharma, big energy and oil, defense contractors. At the end of the day, the reason why we are not seeing legislation like Medicare For All and universal childcare and an arms embargo on Israel pass despite a super majority of support from the voters of this party is because when don- when corporations and special interests donate to campaigns, it's not that they're gonna get an immediate return with legislation that is favored for them.

Sometimes the return that they get is stalling on legislation that would actually make a meaningful difference for families. And so at the end of the day, the only way we can trust that the Congress members are actually fighting for that kind of legislation is to not be taking money from the very corporations and special interests that do not want to see that kind of legislation from passing.

In fact, the National Nurses United policy director said as much about the congresswoman's co-sponsorship of Medicare For All while also taking money from the very health insurance companies that would be legislated out of existence. we can't trust that kind of, donations coming in for Congress members isn't going to result in some kind of return, and sometimes that return is that we're not actually gonna get anything done.

That was a perfect answer, and the way she framed it about... It's absolutely accurate. There are so many co-sponsors of Medicare for All. in the Senate, Kamala Harris was a co-sponsor of Medicare for All, but she doesn't support Medicare for All. It's a way to have, a, a cheap win on your resume or even your voting record.

It's also about the absence of what you're, l- of a lack of fight on a variety of different issues that she mentions there. I found Chris's use of the word intolerable to be a little odd because anybody has the right to run if they choose to, and the voters in Denver decided that, yeah, she was a lot more tolerable than Diana DeGette, who frankly, from my understanding, David, yeah, she has...

She's in the member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She voted against the Iraq War, but l- the issue has larg- more largely been about her kind of relying on seniority and not being a very active member of Congress at all. 

Yeah, look, I... The, to understand Diana DeGette's political formula, it was very simple, very straightforward, and it worked for 30 years.

And her formula was to not be all that present in the community, to rely on the power of incumbency to get reelected, and more specifically, to vote a relatively progressive line, uh, and in, with the assurance that it would be difficult for any candidate, any prospective challenger, to get to her proverbial left, to, to grab onto an issue and say, "You voted the wrong way on this.

I'm running my whole campaign against this." We have seen ca- campaigns like that where a candidate... I worked for Ned Lamont when he ran against Joe Lieberman, and the centerpiece of that campaign was Joe Lieberman's explicit votes for the Iraq War. and Ned Lamont won his primary. Joe Lieberman ended up running as an independent.

The point being that we've gotten used to campaigns where a candidate casts a set of bad votes, and the campaigns become about those votes. DeGette, I think, for a long time, deftly avoided that trap by having a decent voting record. But I think what Melat said is also true, that the lack of presence in the community, the lack of a perception that the votes are followed by actual f- a, an actual effort, actual fighting for the stated ideals, that perception, I think, became, is real.

it became powerful in Denver, in our community here. and but I also think, w- We can get it one level simpler here. There is a generational change element to this that just it's not a very sexy topic. It's not a very hard-to-understand topic. it's hard to ah, pontificate about it 'cause it's so simple.

But, Diana DeGette had been there for 30 years- ... which is essentially, it- it's pretty ridiculous. Ah, and at a time of generational demands for change and a generation, ah, younger generations feeling completely underrepresented, all of these things came together, ah, to deliver the results that Denver delivered.

And remember when David Hogg was kicked out of the DNC because he wanted to address this very core question about gerontocracy and seniority? It was mostly about that. It was less ideological. I'm sure it was about corporate money, too. They wish they were having that fight right now. They wish that they were having the fight with what on David Hogg's terms.

It's now on DSA's terms, bitch. 

That's right. That's right. that's right. And I, and I- Yeah ... and I, and look, I think the, th- again, the, the generational Wave here is really important. and I should mention Diana DeGette, I think when she finally woke up to the fact that this was gonna be a race, she made exactly the most out of touch, wrong last-minute decision.

Yeah. Which her final pitch to voters here was, "I've been in Congress so long, I'm going to be the chairperson of the relevant committee that deals with Medicare for All, and so don't vote me out." Which underneath that argument is, "I've been here for so long, and I haven't done the thing that I promise I now will do," which is underscoring the idea that she'd been there too long.

let's, I know you wanna talk about Iowa. Iowa is really intriguing. s- but let's start with what we know about California. I'm gonna start with the congressional races, because we have two very important swing, races here, two seats that we must flip. one is the former Darrell Issa-held seat in CA-48, and we do have a candidate in that race, which I did not think would happen on the eve.

But Marni von Wilpert advanced to the top two, and she will be our candidate. she is a great, candidate. Speaking of Pride Month, she is, LGBT, member of the community. and, she w- is a council member and, just a really awesome candidate, and, I think she's got a really s- really strong shot of flipping that seat.

We must do it. It's one of our must-win seats. And then- Absolutely ... in seat 20- Yeah. 

can I... I just wanna throw in about that. Yeah. Yeah, that is a, that's a district that includes Palm Springs- ... crucially, and that's, the seat from which we can really flip that district, although everywhere, it's a long north-south district that goes down to, inland of almost San Diego, almost that far south.

and, when you- It's 

almost like it's been gerrymandered in a weird way. Yeah. 

Yeah. Hey, they forced us. We were not gonna unilaterally disarm. That's right. And thank God, Gavin Newsom fought back and did that to even out what Texas Stole, but Yeah ... or is trying to steal. but yes, I do this math every time there's a primary, just add up the votes for all the Democrats and compare it to all the votes for Republicans and you get to see just a little bit of a preview of what might happen in the general.

with the caveat that usually more Republicans vote in primaries. we're seeing exceptions to that right now- Yeah ... with the incredible enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Yeah. So I added those two up And al- also, far less than 100% of the vote had come in. I think it was, like, 57% so this needs to be done again.

these results- ... are far from definitive. But, what I saw was the Republicans, in total, in that district, had something like 1,000 votes more than total Democrats. right there. it's a true toss-up. So we can absolutely win it, and it's gonna take effort, CA-48. 

Thank you for breaking down that math a little bit, because it's true, it is a toss-up district.

It's... It leans Democrat now because of redistricting. I will say that, the red mirage is even stronger this time around than it usually is because of, a lot of people holding onto their ballots to vote for the top-polling governor, Democratic governor. That means that a lot more Democrats were holding out until the last weekend to vote.

So, you know, um, we expect to see a lot more Democratic votes coming in, um, and, uh, you know, we'll see kind of where those break. But, um, you know, uh, it, it's... 48 is, is a winnable seat for us, uh, but we have to go out and win it. We have to, you know, fight. Um, same for CA-22, which, uh, you know, that has been a tough one.

David Valadao has been really tough to unseat, and, um, and we don't know who our candidate is there, as we're recording this. I have to say that because m- a lot more ballots are gonna come in, this could easily, flip-flop. But Randy Villegas is leading Dr. Jasmeet Bains right now. two very different candidates, so it'll be interesting to see who makes it out of this one.

DCCC really, stepped in to back, Dr. Bains in this campaign. of course, Blue Wave, we're s- stayed out of it and will support whoever makes it through. But, she's a... has a compelling story. She's a doctor, community doctor there. she's more conservative. Randy is more progressive, is a school board member, and has the endorsement of Dolores Huerta, among others.

it's gonna be a tough one. No matter who makes it through that's... it's gonna be a fight in CA-22, so we all need to really, do what we can to help either of those candidates win there. 

That's absolutely right, and I did the same math for that with the same caveat- Let's hear it ... that there's lots of votes to still come in Yeah But, total Democratic votes were more than...

They absolutely beat total Republican votes by a few thousand. still very close. Wow. But, but- Interesting ... I think it was 5,000 or more, it looks good. It looked... I was like, "Oh, yeah, we're gonna get rid of Valadao this time." I think the story of all of this is, we are riding, the terrible disapproval rating that Trump has.

the horrible job that he's doing on the economy, the, ripping away people's health cares. All those kitchen table issues are really important to highlight, not to mention, the egregious and horrific stuff with ICE and, and what we continue to see. We talked about Delaney Hall last week.

we need to keep our eyes on that still and make sure that they shut that down. But, so these elections are becoming what we know that they're going to b- be about repudiation of Trump and his policies, but they also have to be about where we go next, what vision we have to make people's lives better.

Because as we've seen, they're just tired of voting against somebody. They wanna vote for somebody. that is reflected in what we have seen in Iowa. That was my big segue to Yeah ... shift to Iowa, because we have a shifting rating in that Senate race. So do you wanna talk a little bit about that?

Ooh, I wanna vote for somebody. For somebody who loves me. Yeah. Iowa Cook Political Rating just shifted it from- Love, love the Whitney ... likely- 

That was... I was like- ... the Whit- did Whitney Houston- 

Is she- ... 

is she alive? ... alive again? Did she just come back for our podcast? 

It's uncanny, I know. I'm a shape-shifter.

So Cook just switched the, their rating for the Iowa Senate race from likely Republican to lean Republican since last night. We have a candidate, Josh Durek will now be the, i- is now the Democratic candidate for US Senate. and very strong candidate. He was a US Paralympian playing wheelchair basketball, competing for the US in Europe, as recently as 2021.

The next year after that, he, won election to a State House seat in Iowa, in a red state leg' district that W- Trump had won. So he points to that as proof that he can win over Republicans and independents. he is in a wheelchair. He is super, super inspiring. he posted one of his campaign videos, showed him Going door to door, knocking on doors- Yeah

that's not easy for so- and I- it showed him actually, pulling himself out of his chair to, climb upstairs and knock on a door. When you, I don't care what political party you are, like, I just got chills thinking about that, right? When you a- answer that door, you're voting for him, right? Yeah.

You talk to him, you're probably gonna be voting for him, because that, something like that has probably never happened to you in your life, meeting someone like that, with that level of conviction. He won't let anything stop him. really beautiful, really, powerful candidate, and Iowa has been out of reach for a long time.

It's- It has ... it's trended really red. Since Obama, 

yeah. Obama- Since Obama 

won it ... was the last 

one to win statewide in Iowa, a Democrat to win statewide in Ioma- Iowa. 

Exactly, right, in these crazy times, where we are seeing electoral swings to the left of, on average, 14 points, something around there- be- between 8 and 25, with outliers up to 31, 37 points sometimes. Iowa is on the table. Iowa is absolutely a target. We need to swing that Senate seat. the path to the Senate runs through- North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, and Alaska. We need to flip those four, and we need to hold Georgia and Michigan.

Iowa is a stretch goal, but it is absolutely doable, if we put the work in, if we put the work in. Yeah. So we absolutely need to keep looking at Iowa. 

let's turn then to Gonzales versus Hickenlooper. She gave him a bit of a scare. Now, Gonzales was a former DSA member. She left DSA prior to challenging, Hickenlooper and, that meant that she had to build her name recognition up from the ground up without a more, an organizing infrastructure behind her.

She made the calculation that having the DSA back her statewide would be more of a negative for her because it's not just in Denver, a really core blue, deep blue area like Melat, where Ma- Melat was running. It's gonna maybe be a little bit touchy outside of the, of, of urban centers. But she got really close without that, and you have to wonder if she had some infrastructure behind her, if that would've been able to put her over the top.

what's your assessment about that race and how it, Hickenlooper got a bit of a scare here? 

So my assessment is actually, a little different. M- my view is that John Hickenlooper was the weakest Democratic Senate nominee in the United States, the most easy, to defeat. and I think a lot of people spent a lot of time, looking, and trying to encourage, people to get into that race.

Colorado has an extremely, extraordinarily really, top-down, wait your turn, rule following, norms following Democratic Party culture. and voters have for a very long time, up until perhaps now, have rewarded that. And so- A candidate was not, did not emerge. and Julie Gonzales got in. In my view, I'm glad she ran.

she's a great legislator. She's a great, person. But I think she got in a little too late. she was... And in, in getting in so late, she wasn't able to raise enough resources quickly enough to allow the campaign to, to simmer and reach the boiling point. If there had been another few weeks, another month, this might have been a completely different race.

And- 

Mala's been running for over a year, for example, right? 

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And so John Hickenlooper was the most vulnerable member of Con- s- of the Senate, based on their state's voting electorate, how Democratic our state is.

And John Hickenlooper is now the most lucky, Democratic nominee in the United States. I wanna be very clear. It is a complete and total embarrassment for the state of Colorado and for the Democratic electorate to have re-nominated this person, who has basically nothing to offer, campaigns on basically nothing, has Democrat in a r- in a similar state.

It is an embarrassment to the political class of this state. It is a huge missed opportunity, and it is the kind of missed opportunity that everyone in progressive and Democratic politics in this state should feel somewhat ashamed of 

th- there's gonna be another opportunity in 2028 though, right?

when Bennet's term i- ends. so I guess that's also a way to tie in Michael Bennet's historic loss to Weiser for, i- in the primary for governor. i- w- how do you... This, these pair of, this pair of senators in Colorado just, got a pretty resounding rebuke. even though Hickenlooper is gonna be the nominee, he had a real scare, and Bennet was just rejected in a primary.

He still has two m- a year and a half left in his term, but rejected in the primary for governor. 

Yeah, so that, that was t- to my mind, uh, the other marquee race in this state, Phil Weiser versus Michael Bennet. And Phil Weiser ran a genuinely, anti-establishment campaign. I wanna be clear, I do- I...

Phil Weiser is a, i- is progressive. Phil Weiser is, I wouldn't call him a Bernie style progressive populist, but he is a progressive, and he certainly was cast and, a- and in the progressive, anti-establishment lane in that race against Michael Bennet. I also wanna be clear that I think Michael Bennet, to distinguish him from John Hickenlooper, is a, i- is, at least talks about, the issues like healthcare, economic inequality, as distinct from John Hickenlooper.

they're, they're not exactly the same. I, but I do think Michael, the rejection of Michael Bennet is a big deal, especially in Colorado where these kinds of things almost never happen. Michael Bennet has, was an appointed senator, was promising to appoint his, successors. it was a su- a campaign essentially run out of a big money super PAC with out-of-state billionaires.

so he ran an incredibly, establishment a- aligned campaign, and Phil Weiser, I think, maximized his candidacy as the anti-establishment choice. And I think a lot of voters, I said this, uh, on so- social media. This was, I think, less or as much a rejection or maybe even less a rejection of one particular senator than an entire way of doing politics, than a rejection of the entire elite system of how politics works in this state.

and I think Phil Weiser on election night claiming the mandate, this is very important, claiming an election mandate of saying essent- saying ex- explicitly, "The future of Colorado will not be decided by out-of-state billionaires." What's great about that is to, is for the gubernatorial nominee to frame the election as a rejection of oligarchy, and I think that's what it was.

And what happens to Michael Bennet in the future if he runs for Senate again? I, I very much expect a primary challenge to him if he runs again. I think the race has essentially upended. That race, Phil Weiser winning, has upended the entire state of, of the, of politics at the statewide level in Colorado.

And that begs the question, how much of this is not just a na- a rejection that we're seeing nationally of the Democratic establishment? How much of it is a rejection of, yes, that, but also Jared Polis? 

Oh, I think that was absolutely a part of this. A- and to be clear, Michael, both Michael Bennet and Phil Weiser, seriously criticized, the governor, for that decision.

at one point, Michael Bennet was saying, 'cause Michael Bennet was saying he's gonna appoint the senator, if he won the gubernatorial race. I, if I remember correctly, Michael Bennet was like, "There's one person who I'm not appointing." Yeah. "It's Jared Polis," right? So Jared Polis is essentially politically persona non grata here, out of step completely with the state.

and I wanna go back to this point, which is that I think, I have lived in Colorado for 20 years, 19 plus, technically 20 very soon. I have never seen the state- The electorate of this state so resoundingly reject the top-down, wait your turn, establishment politics of this state's Democratic Party.

I just, I can't overstate how much of a contrast this is. and clearly it's part of a national wave. but the thing is, what I'm getting at is if it's happening in a place like Colorado, where voters have so consistently voted to fortify, the Democratic Party establishment and have taken orders from the Democratic Party establishment, if it's happening here, it is a sign that it can happen absolutely anywhere.

Oh, that is, that would be a great segue to our next guest, because we're gonna have Oliver Larkin on from Florida, but I did have one more question for you. Please. Because when you talk about the wait your turn politics, part of why Melat Kiros was able to win this primary was because of, as you say, her accurately framing Diana DeGette as not being very present in the district as well as with all of this outside money coming in, including AIPAC shell money or s- pro-Israel money, including pro-big, or big tech money that was spending on her behalf.

How much of DeGette's lack of presence, and perhaps you could extend this to both Hickenlooper and Bennet here, per- may- maybe that's not fair. Maybe... We'll just keep it on DeGette. How much of DeGette's lack of presence in the community do you think also informs her inability to keep up with, the wave of- we don't want this blood money from the genocide anymore.

And also data centers are unanimously, unpopular acro- cross-partisan. People are pissed off. How much of that was her not being in her district and just not knowing what her own voters wanted? 

Yeah, and I would extend that to John Hickenlooper as well, so you're right. Sure. the ... 

Yeah. 

you can't le- the money, the establishment power, and the lack of presence all go together.

Essentially, people, like them, they get comfortable n- assuming that they can simply buy their way out of whatever political problems are happening at home, not worrying that if they get out of step on this or that issue, that they won't simply be a- able to just overwhelm an election with money. and honestly, in the past, that hasn't been an illogical bet.

Like- Yeah ... it's an immoral bet, but it's not, illogical, right? I think now what we're seeing is that the anger ama- and I want... Let's be specific here and precise. We have never, in my lifetime at least, if you look at polls, we have never lived through a period in which the Democratic electorate, the average liberal voter, is this explicitly angry, not just at the Republicans, but at their own party's leaders.

So this is a totally new reality that we're in, where the old formulas do not work. So yes, if you're relying on the old formula, "Hey, I'll just be able to get my donors to give me a ton of money and buy the election for me if I ever get in trouble back at home-" Yeah. Okay, if, i- if that no longer works, then suddenly being out of step with your district on this or that issue, you can't just cure that with money, because people are tuned in, and they are pissed off, and they are motivated.

But for now, speaking of elections, some reported results from a few very selective primaries and primary runoffs held on Tuesday this week in four states. Let's start with, the more boring ones first, and go from there up to the most interesting. in, the great beautiful Beehive State of Utah, the most interesting race there, perhaps of the night in the otherwise very Republican state was the Democratic primary for the court-ordered brand-new US House District 1 in the state, a solidly Democratic district centered smack dab in Salt Lake City, which Republicans had previously cracked into four separate pieces, four different districts back in 2021 to prevent, a Democrat from ever winning there again and taking all of the state's four congressional seats for themselves ever since, until now.

With the Utah State Supreme Court finally knocking down that unlawful gerrymandering scheme in the state, former Congressman Ben McAdams won the Democratic nomination handily on Tuesday in Utah and is almost certain to win back a Democratic House seat in the state this November. He previously served in Congress back in, from 2018 to 2020, I believe.

McAdams will be running against Republican Riley Owen, who ran uncontested in his party's primary in what Cook Political Report characterizes now as a solidly Democratic race in Utah's first congressional district. Only somewhat less boring, the great old line state of Maryland for governor, the popular Democratic incumbent Wes Moore easily defeated a single challenger for his party's nomination.

No surprise there for Moore, who many consider to be of presidential timber someday. he appears to have won by about 88% to 12% last I checked this afternoon. 

I would say that's decisive. 

only 67% of the vote has been tallied, 

So you're saying there's a chance. 

You never know. as you never know.

Moore will almost certainly run against Republican former state legislator Dan Cox in what has become a very Democratic state, though they have elected a number of moderate Republican governors in recent years. Cox, however is not one of them. He has, made false claims about the 2020 election. He went on to, lose by a huge margin, yes, to Wes Moore back in the 2022 governor's race there.

So apparently Republicans have decided to put him up again in what Cook Political Report describes as a solidly Democratic race this year. In Maryland's 5th Congressional District, Adrian Co- uh, Boffo, who was backed by pro-Israel and pro-crypto spending, won a crowded Democratic primary to replace the retiring 23-term congressman, Steny Hoyer.

Boffo was endorsed by Hoyer and easily won the 24-person race in this solidly Democratic district. Among the many defeated by Boffo on Tuesday was Harry Dunn. He's one of the Capitol Police officers from Trump's January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Dunn has been an outspoken critic of Trump and the attack at the Capitol.

Boffo, will run in November against Chris Chaffee, Republican, who, pretty easily won his party's nomination on Tuesday, though, as mentioned, it is a very Democratic district in Maryland. Moving to primary runoffs now in the great Palmetto State of South Carolina in the Republican gubernatorial runoff election, on Tuesday that we reported a bit on, yesterday's show.

Republican State Attorney General Alan Wilson easily defeated the Trump-endorsed lieutenant governor, Pamela Evette, in the state's GOP primary runoff, for governor, which in the solidly Republican state, as Cook Political Report describes it, that means that Wilson will almost certainly be the state's next governor.

As we discussed yesterday, however, Trump Seeing that his candidate, Evette, who barely eked out a 28-point plurality win in the initial primary earlier in June, seeing that she was about to lose just days before the runoff, he decided to also endorse Wilson- ... to avoid being labeled a loser again after two of his previous gubernatorial endorsements over the past two weeks or so in Iowa and Georgia also went down in flames.

Trump's power to get folks elected in Republican primaries is definitely waning, which, means that, or maybe I'm just wish-casting here, but it means that his power to bend congressional Republicans to his will is also waning with it, or it should be. That should be good news, and we're already seeing signs of exactly that in, in Congress.

In case Trump tries to take credit for Wilson's win on Tuesday because, of course, he will, w- we noted yesterday that a poll-- that a polling in this race, a poll released on, Monday of this week, taken at least in part from before Trump's extra second double endorsement- ... showed his preferred candidate actually losing 61 to 29%, which kind of seemed impossible for the winner of the initial primary to lose by such a huge margin.

But in fact, on Tuesday night, results with, more than 95% of the votes in, Wilson is said to be defeating Evette by 69% to 31%. 

Wow. 

Not far from that brutal poll released on Monday, but with, Wilson picking up a few more of the previously undecided votes, in that poll following D- Trump's double can't lose endorsement.

Wilson will now run against Democratic nominee Jermaine Johnson, who won his party's nomination outright back on June 9 in a state which has only elected Republican gov- has Republican governors since 2003. But who knows? Who knows what a blue tsunami could bring if one happens to develop between here and November? Also of note on Tuesday in South Carolina's First Congressional District, Democratic r- runoff there, A- Admiral Nancy Lacore Who was fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth because, or so he claimed, he believed she was not implementing the administration's directives fast enough and was, resisting political pressure, especially on personnel and training policy.

Nancy Lacore, Admiral Nancy Lacore, won the Democratic US House primary in South Carolina's first congressional district on the coast. She will now run against the winner of the Republican runoff on Tuesday, Jenny Costa Honeycutt, for the seat currently occupied by outgoing Congresswoman Nancy Mace- who ran for governor in the state, only to come in fifth in that race earlier this month in the GOP primary. we'll see what happens.

this is the sort of unstated story that I don't think...

you never get because the mainstream media doesn't wanna talk about it. But one reason why I think Trump did well in 2024, and did especially well with, untraditional Republicans, working class people of color, is that, like under COVID that's, he had, the, one of the greatest, welfare programs in American history with the sort of, the sort of COVID checks.

and, yeah, like Biden, uh, didn't even keep the promise to like, keep those up. I, and so Trump got both the, so people's memory of the 2019 economy and then COVID happens and, the, general sense was, this is beyond anyone's control." But we did get the, those a lot of, for working class Americans, a lot of their financial position actually improved in 2020.

Oh, 

dramatically. we cut- Yeah ... child poverty in half. Yeah. And then we decided- And then it goes away ... nah, that was an interesting experiment. Yeah. But we'll go back to, increasing child poverty. Yeah. 

Yeah. no. I'd, yeah, no, so, so unfortunately, this actually gained, the whole way everything rolled out gave Trump a lot of credit, w- with working class people.

Whereas like this guy actually did something, and that Biden was the guy who was like taking stuff away. no, he was, but, but the overall picture is of a party that is discredited. And as you mentioned, like you had all these f- people who should have resigned in addition to Biden, who were kept around because of the staffers, and the staffers, could hold onto their stuff.

And I really think, like you said, what's the ideology and what is the thinking here? And we have to pay tribute to one of the greatest living Americans who like celebrated, his 100th birthday and who's one of your colleagues, which is Mel Brooks, in Blazing Saddles. where the, uh, the people who work for the governor said, "We have to preserve..."

Or Mel Brooks, playing the governor of the state, says, "Gentlemen, we have to protect our phony baloney jobs, harumph." That is the ideology here, right? th- that is what- Yeah ... James Carville and Neera Tanden believe in their heart of hearts. We have to protect our phony baloney jobs. 

and what I find interesting is that the insurgence that we're seeing, for lack of a better term, is, v- very much driven in some areas by, DSA- Mm-hmm

uh, by self-proclaimed, uh, social democrats. In other areas, not so much, but there ... W- w- but you raise a really g- good point about the Tea Party comparison, and I think this gets, is gets lost in a lot of the analysis of what's going on. Um, and, and Emma made this point, in regards to Julia Sanchez, who n- you know, came within striking difference, distance- Yeah

of Hickenlooper. She was former DSA, but she gets lumped in. And the, the difference here is, and that we also had in, in Colorado, Bennet, who was not the incumbent, but he was, he was a senator, sitting senator running for governor- yeah ... and loses. Very, 

junior establishment figure, yeah.

One would imagine that he would have had a, a machine that would've gotten him in or some- goodwill that would've gotten him in. Apparently not. But the interesting dynamic here is that- The, what people forget about the Tea Party, like you say, it started as a, maybe grassroots, but really, not exactly.

Yeah. It was- 

No, the grassroots was enormously helped by the huge, you know- 

the Tea Party- Millions ... the first Tea Party- Yeah ... was actually, Ron Paul's people. 

Yeah. 

And when he died out, the Koch brothers, who are big funders of Ron Paul, they expanded it. And so there was definitely, anger- Yeah

without a doubt. But people forget the Koch brothers at that time had bought, essentially, the entire voter list. They had a more sophisticated voter data analysis program than the Republican National Committee did. Yeah. and so you saw the success of these Tea Party people because they're going up against the establishment figures, but they have- An arsenal- 

that rivals who they're going up against. On the Democratic side, it's much more difficult because there is no outside Koch brothers who are providing that infrastructure except for the DSA- Yeah ... who come with an infrastructure. So Julian Sanchez, loses by just a handful, but she did not have ... people think the endorsement is just, a, a, an imprimatur.

No, the endorsement comes with an entire sort of Yeah ... we're gonna give you- And you, you- ... people on the streets ... infrastructure. People organizing- We're gonna give you organizations. Yeah. We're gonna give you phone trees. We're gonna give you, media. it comes with a huge toolkit.

Yeah. And that's what's been the difference in those races. I don't know if it's ideological. I'm curious as to your perspective on that. Okay. uh, but it's also a function of you've got a real operation here. 

Yeah. no, I think the way to think about this is in terms of the sort of hollowing out of the parties, that the American parties are these kinda like big brands, but they can be

You can leverage a takeover of them. and w- was what Trump did with the Republican Party. Yeah. He basically, took this hollowed out party w- discredited by the Bush, administration, um, and, uh, the, with, losing campaigns, and then, used his celebrity to lever- take it over.

And DSA is doing something similar, except that their leverage is not celebrity or Trump's type of money, but the organizing thing. And there's been a sort of general hollowing out of, organizing. And I think that partially because both political parties depend a lot on consultants, and then you, you use, the money that you have to hire people to do things.

uh, and in pretty good New York City, the sort of, old machines ... people talk about political machines, but, the old machines of, that existed back to Tammany Hall into the '70s and '80s, those were like an entire life world. you would have clubs that you would go to.

And if you needed a job, people there could help you, and you had dances. People, met their life partner there, right? the, they had social events. There's an entire social world, But starting with the sort of, like rise of social media, all that social world has disappeared.

and it, a lot of the other institutions that, function with the machines, like the Black churches, what you've seen is, like among younger Black people, especially among young men, they're much unchurched. So th- those are, like become more uh, freelance voters, and some of those went over to Trump, but could also go over to Mamdani.

what the DSA has is that they have actually built the only real machine that we've seen in the 21st century. Yep. And like where like people who are in that DSA world, like they, they, they hold events, they hold lectures, you, you have dances, you have... This is like where you get, and they are actually people that can go out, and, talk to voters, and you have not people who are like paid 25 bucks an hour to spread the message, but people are like actually believe in this, and like that is invaluable, right?

and so the hollowing out of the parties has made them, susceptible to takeover, and in the case of the Democrats, I think that the establishment Democrats have a big problem in the sense that like they don't know how to organize. they, they know how to, buy ads, they know how to b- and in the presidential elections, they can actually get volunteers for phone banks 'cause people hate Trump and so- Right

don't want the Republicans. But still, they don't have that sort of like actual, functioning political machine. 

Next, Section B, What They Believe

I keep hearing it's DSA summer- ... which seems to be the trend, at least online. And yeah, DSA's coming off Tuesday night, which was maybe their biggest kind of win of the primary season so far with Melat Kiros, knocking off a nearly 30-year incumbent in, DeGette.

Denver voters of all ages, of all races, of all religions sent a clear message: We

will not wait. But it's been, like, a string of victories we've seen over the past few months where starting a few months ago where Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania had a big win, and then that kind of transitioned into, a week ago where these candidates, in New York kind of shocking the world and really putting the stamp on the primary season for Democrats, ousting even incumbents.

Tonight we haven't just won an election, we have declared that this movement is durable. 

No longer will we accept the politics that throws scraps at us and act as if we should be grateful for them. 

Really showing the power of what the left flank of the party is looking to flex in this primary season.

And I think the question is moving forward was how far outside of kind of, places like New York City can this leftist insurgent, how much success can they actually have? At least in Denver, a huge showing where, like I said, a 30-year incumbent was just, kicked out of Congress. 

What does the DSA want?

What is their platform? What do they believe? What are the, what are their main talking points? 

Yeah. I think their platform in terms of policy, is maybe not gonna surprise folks. These are Democratic socialists, so they want Medicare for all. They really push for strong, unions and labor rights.

They push for affordable housing. But I think one thing that's really resonating with folks that I talk to is their stance, their pro-Palestinian rights stance, their opposition to US military aid to Israel. 

I will continue to call for Palestinian liberation.

We will stand up to the genocide, we refuse to abide by apartheid, and we will use our money to improve lives here instead of destroy them abroad. 

And no, we will not wait to end the genocide in Palestine.

I think those are the big platforms, and also just, like I said, a larger affordability. When you talk to DSA candidates or members, a lot of what you hear is they want to put the working class forward. 

No longer will we accept anything less than respect and a seat at the table that our labor built.

We know that no matter where you live, working people are struggling with the cost of living crisis. And in each of these campaigns, in each of these candidacies, I see champions who would not only be partners of our affordability agenda in Washington, but also help to lead our party in a new direction where we understand that at the heart of everything we do must be the dignity of working-class people that for too long have been in the rear view mirror of the Democratic Party.

And I think it's not only just a policy, but it's also the way it's wrapped in this anti-establishment fighter brand. 

How ideological is the DSA? We keep hearing this term sewer socialism- Right ... and I think that suggests something about the things that they want to get done maybe versus the things that they believe.

But, how ideological is this group? 

If you talk to them, I think they're very ideological, very policy-forward. They want to get these, not only do they wanna get these policies enacted, but I think they believe in the long game when you talk to them. They understand that it's about moving the Overton window.

in terms of are they ideological, they also know that they are working with a little bit of house money now because of how disliked and in the gutter the Democratic brand largely is right now. And I think while you see folks, on the right using the fact that these are DSA candidates, and it's socialism, and, using that as thinking it's gonna, hurt them- 

They use the word social Democrat 'cause it sounds so nice, but it's really communism you're talking about 

Okay, here's just a sample of what they're about.

They put this on paper. They're saying the quiet things out loud. Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy. 

In a primary, I think they wear that as a badge of honor. They get to point at the establishment Democrats and say, "Yeah, I'm not with Hakeem Jeffries.

I'm not an establishment Democrat." And, that helps them. It gives them a little bit of street cred, at least in a primary. We'll have to see how that plays out in a general election, obviously, in some of these closer battleground states. But right now, it is a brand that's both policy and the fact that it's, running against the Democratic brand, which is in the gutter for a lot of folks.

I think that's what they see as a plus. You're next. You're next. You're next What I think you're going to see is while you might not see Den- DSA candidates in places like, purple or especially red states, I think you're gonna see a lot of candidates mimicking that fighter, anti-establishment style as much as possible- which is clearly there's so much hunger, at least in the Democratic primary, for that. 

Yeah, we heard this week, or we saw some reporting this week, that Kamala Harris has reached out to Zohran Mamdani, indicating that, she at least is interested in what he and his have going on. But it's still notable that some of these DSA candidates are being criticized by both mainstream Democrats and Republicans.

James Carville said the other day, more or less, he doesn't want them in his tent, and I think that came down to some tweets from the New York, winner, Darielisa Avila 

Chevalier. She has attacked interracial relationships and the American flag. Lady, I ain't in the same party as you. I'm sorry.

There, just, it, there, I just not. And I actually do think it's time for Democrats to talk the S-word, schism. I really do. 

What do you make of their ability to polarize? 

In a primary, I think they like that. I think they- ... want to polarize people that, especially the old guard of folks that had been telling especially younger voters for so long, "Wait your turn.

Don't be so loud. Don't go so far as Medicare for All," I think they, number one, 

that's part of what they wanna do. They wanna, fight back against those kinds of folks. they look at the Kamala Harris campaign, and when I'm talking to these kinds of candidates and these kinds of voters and folks on the ground and surrogates, they were completely turned off by the Kamala Harris campaign, the Kamala Harris campaign that embraced Liz Cheney, that embraced, a lot of folks that for the left flank of the base would never wanna be associated with.

In order to broaden the tent, sure. that's what they were doing to try to win the election. But for them, I think they felt like they weren't getting, Kamala Harris's ear and the Democratic Party's ear in terms of major issues like Israel or Medicare for All or really wanting to push her to the left.

And so I think right now they wanna throw a Molotov cocktail into the party and just say, "We're blowing this up, and so if it's gonna ruffle feathers, so be it." I think a big test for this movement is going to be Michigan, the Michigan Senate race with Abdul El-Sayed. I think that is going to be a huge test for where this insurgent energy can go.

We need Democrats who are willing to take the fight to Donald Trump, who are willing to take a fight to the system that created Donald Trump, and are willing-

Yeah, uh, I'd like to go back to, uh, Sheikh Sadiq for a, a moment. Uh, uh, you mentioned earlier this, uh, uh, uh, socialists getting elected throughout the country and eventually moving to a transition to... from capitalism to socialism. Uh, I, I have a hard time trying to understand how the, uh, elite of the most powerful capitalist country in the world are going to accept, uh, a demo- a transition from capitalism to socialism.

Can you, uh, talk a little bit more about that? If you were successful, uh, w- what example, uh, in the world do you have of, of capitalists relinquishing, uh, their power? 

It, it can't happen without a lot of struggle and without having millions of people, eventually a majority of the population, who wants these changes, who wants to make choices democratically about how we run our society and how we control our own lives, uh, together and make decisions together instead of the, the most powerful people in the world making these choices, uh, r- right now for, for their own profits.

So it, it, it's not just about electing people on, on a good platform and then hoping for the best. It, it's about organizing our collective power together. Um, and that start, uh, elected office is an important part of that. But even more important for us is organizing people in our workplaces to rebuild the labor movement in the United States, which is the backbone of, of all the major movement gains over the past century, all of the major expansions of people's rights, um, things like Social Security and Medicare that were won, um, almo- al- uh, almost a century ago.

Um, but in other countries that, uh, got more expansive things like universal healthcare, um, it happened with a, with the class struggle a- and that, that's with organized workers, uh, with majorities of the population. Yeah

So, so p- p- power is not conceded without, without struggle, and that means people have to organize, um, in our, in our own interests to, to win these things 

And Alexandra, could you talk about y- your focus on, uh, providing infrastructure for, uh, Democratic, uh, can- for progressive Democratic candidates, how important that is?

Absolutely. It's critical, and I think one thing that is important to remember, although these victories have been hard fought over the past year to get here, it's also been a project, you know, for over 10 years in the making. You know, we specifically work with working class people to run for Congress, the federal level, which is very different from local and state.

And from emotional labor to, uh, helping them build out their initial email list, to recruiting them, uh, in concert with local organizations on the ground, to, uh, making sure that they have a team of, uh, local expertise and folks like ourselves that have experience going up against the tens of millions of dollars, uh, that AIPAC, crypto, the AI industry have funneled into our elections.

Uh, people power, uh, beats organized money

every single time. And also, we have, as a movement, alongside, uh, the Democratic Socialists of America and so many others that I could, list at the national and local level, have built infrastructure to be able to support from a field, from a staffing level. But also on the independent expenditure level, where even though we can't combe- compete with tens of millions of dollars, we can put together, um, you know, you know, our own set of volunteers, donors, and organizers who are willing to throw a punch back and not let our candidates be totally left out to dry like we saw, unfortunately, last cycle.

So the infrastructure that we're building to compete against over 35 million in opposition spending this cycle, and obviously even more than that over the history of the organization, really, really matters. It matters in moments, uh, like these where elections are tools for our ability to build class consciousness, public consciousness, and organize our communities win, win or lose.

But they're critical, uh, to laying the groundwork if we want to see more and more, uh, victories like this at every level, uh, local and federal. I want... So, uh, supporting the organizations and the organizers that, that are deep in this work is critical. 

The DSA has had big primary wins in New York, in Colorado just last night, we're speaking on Wednesday, in the mayoral race in Washington, DC. Mm-hmm. That's where I live. Why do you think DSA candidates are doing so well in elections right now?

I think there's both the kind of rage that people have about, um, about seeing any remnants of our safety net, social safety net be dismantled. I think they see their wages stagnating while inflation continues to go up and cost of living continues to go up. Um, and I, I think that has people really on edge.

But I also think that they're looking for, um, for answers and for solutions and for things that are actually gonna change their lives for the better. When we talk about expanding childcare for all or Medicare for all, childcare debt and medical debt, those are, those are very real issues to real people.

So I think they're excited to see someone not just saying, the other guy's worse," um, but really saying, "Look, we're gonna rethink some of these things and come up with solutions together." 

Your economic message definitely seems to have caught fire for Americans who really do feel like life is too expensive.

But the DSA's positions on some domestic issues like borders, like, uh, policing, open you up to claims that the DSA is just too extreme- Mm-hmm ... for regular Americans. Mm-hmm. I know that you're aware of this charge. How do you respond to that? 

Yeah, so a lot of the charges coming from, um, uh, sort of documents or, or, or sometimes panels where they're, they're clipping people and talking about it, um, that are really sort of expressing this long-term view.

'Cause we're trying to-- We're not just trying to, like, fix little problems. We're trying to really get to the root of these societal problems and think about what life could look like and what society could look like if we change them. So things uh, abolishing the carceral state as we know it, right?

Um, people say, "Well, you're just gonna fire all the police?" Like, well, no. The goal is free childcare, free healthcare, free college. These sort of things that will actually make there be less crime. We know crime is inextricably linked to poverty. We're not saying like, "Yes, let murderers run free in the streets."

We're saying, "If we have eliminated, in this, this long-term vision, a lot of these crimes of poverty, crimes of, of desperation, what can the system look like?" And, you know, it will have to be different. 

It's hard to convince people on that score, too- Sure ... because even in a much better world, people will still murder other people.

Mm-hmm. This is an unfortunate fact. Sure. And voters hear abolish the carceral state, whether it's next week or 50 years from now, and they sense that you are unrealistic. Mm-hmm. They sense that you are not where they are. Working class voters in the last election moved toward Donald Trump in part because, as we understand it from polling, many people felt like the Democrats were just, had just gotten too pie in the sky, right?

Mm-hmm. They were too extreme on cultural issues. And so I wonder whether the DSA considers that the economic platform is very appealing. Abolish the carceral state simply isn't. 

Um, we think it's important to connect those two things, right? So the reason you do something matters, too, right? So they say, "Well, you want to abolish the police."

It's well, we, we're not doing that right now, but we have invested in Care, Not Cops programs because the long-term goal is to stop prosecuting people for crimes of poverty. Um, it's not to make you less safe, it's to make you more safe. Because right now the system as it works does not make us more safe.

There are real concerns about some candidates who are affiliated with the DSA. Daria Liza Avila-Chevalier just won a big election in New York City. Mm. She said in tweets at one point that she wiped her dirty hands on an American flag because she didn't have napkins. She suggested that white people shouldn't be in interracial relationships.

There's a lot more. Um- Mm ... she has apologized, and independently she deleted her Twitter account. Um, she told my colleague, Astead Herndon, she finds it better to not spend too much time online. But I wonder if you are, if you are working with anti-establishment candidates, right? There is a level of vetting that just, it just isn't gonna be the same as with establishment- Mm

candidates. Do you think you're gonna have difficulty finding candidates who are strong on your economic message, but don't have to issue these embarrassing apologies? 

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's kind of the, that, that is an interesting spot we're in. Um, we're not forming our candidates in a lab, right?

We're not , we're not, like, raising perfect model UN children and sending them to- Oh, come on- ... to poli 

sci ... perfect, perfect model UN children. 

I know. They- 

I actually- White people, white people shouldn't be in interracial relationships? 

I, no- That's, uh- ... I, I agree. No, that is, that is way out there. No, what I'm saying is, is, like, we are dealing with imperfect, messy people, for sure.

And I, you know, w- we're not, uh, oh, like, I don't know why she tweeted that. I, I'm imagining there was, like, like, she had a bad breakup and was just tweeting too close to the sun or some, some terrible thing. Um, yeah, that, that's a, that's a bad tweet. She apologized for it. Trump did bad tweets this morning, right?

we're just like, "Oh, God." But yeah, you know, that, that is gonna be, that is gonna be the reality of running candidates who did not- come into adult life thinking they were ever gonna be a candidate. 

I wanna ask you about an issue that's become very sensitive over the past few years. The DSA's focus on Israel- Mm

strikes some people as obsessive, possibly even tipping into anti-Semitic. So let me give you a couple of examples that I see cited frequently. On October 7th, after Hamas attacked Israel, the DSA released a statement expressing solidarity with Palestine. It did condemn the killing of all civilians, but it added this was not unprovoked.

Mayor Mamdani recently set some Jewish leaders on edge when he referred to AIPAC as monsters. He said he was quoting, uh, the philosopher Antonio Gramsci. A DSA candidate in Colorado who had a big win last night, um, Melat Kiros, she was recently asked by a reporter whether a firebombing attack on a peaceful Jewish gathering in Boulder was an act of anti-Semitism, and she said, "I don't know what's in the perpetrator's heart."

Now, there's an argument that these types of things taken together illustrate that there is anti-Semitism within the DSA. There's also a more nuanced argument that says the DSA isn't anti-Semitic, but you're fostering a culture that allows your members to talk in ways that are. What do you say to American Jews who think the way that DSA-affiliated politicians talk about Israel goes beyond taking issue with foreign policy and into something darker?

Yeah, I mean, that, that is something that, that I think we think a lot about, but the, what we see is that, that Israel is perpetrating a genocide. Um, people are mad when they, uh, and should be mad. It's a genocide. Um, we, we don't equivocate on that definition or on that, um, understanding of the events. Um, we see an apartheid state.

We see people being in an open air concentration camp, essentially, in the Gaza Strip. Um, so people are mad, and sometimes, yeah, people are mad and they're gonna not, not nuance their words as much as they should. Um, I do think it's very important, obviously, that we stand against anti-Semitism in all its forms.

Um, but I do not see the state of Israel as, uh, something that, that, that I, uh, like I'm, I, I don't think we should be defending it on any grounds. It's, it's a genocidal apartheid state, and I'm not apologizing for that. 

In 2024, the DSA rescinded an endorsement of AOC. AOC, of course, is a fierce critic of Israel.

After she attended a panel with Jewish leaders on anti-Semitism, a lot of people looked at that and said, "You have a fierce critic of I- Israel who attended a panel on anti-Semitism, and the DSA rescinded their endorsement of her." you can see the math here. You can sort of see where the brain goes from here.

Why did the DSA rescind its endorsement of AOC? 

Yeah, so that was actually a complicated process. We didn't actually rescind our endorsement of AOC in that way. So what we did was we made a, an endorsement that came with some strings attached, which was kind of the first time we'd ever done that. And we said, "We want you to pledge to not fund Israeli military anything, not, not defense, not offense, no weapons for Israel.

We want you to not sign on to any of that." Which, which she had voted, I think she voted present on the Iron Dome. She had- she, she, um... Basically we want her in line, in the, in the same voting line as Rashida Tlaib. If Rashida Tlaib votes for it, who is one of the most, you know, fearless defenders of Palestine and the Palestinian people, um, in Congress.

So AOC had voted present on some, and she had equivocated on some. And, um, and so we said, "Okay, you can't do that anymore." AOC has since pledged to vote no on all funding of any kind for Israeli military. 

So ultimately she came around to your point of view. Mm-hmm, yeah. The pressure worked. 

Yeah. Yeah, so. 

Hmm.

The DSA, we're told, and you can confirm it, wants to run a presidential primary candidate in 2028. Tell me what that means about your ambitions. 

We would love... You know, the, the Bernie Sanders campaign, it kind of changed the face of the American left a bit. He was the first person who went out there on stage and said, "I am a Democratic socialist."

And, um, it kind of felt like it gave a lot of people, they felt like they had permission to, to say it out loud. It kind of broke the dam a little bit on, on using that, that big, scary S word. Um, so if we run a presidential candidate, we can at least make sure that there's a voice in the primary holding people to account.

I think when Bernie was in the primary, he, him standing strong for Medicare for All got a bunch of the other candidates to sign a Medicare for All pledge. Like, those things are good. And so it, it... We would love to win the presidency. We would also at the very least love to move the needle by having an actual Democratic socialist voice in the debates, um, fighting for working families, fighting for labor unions, fighting for healthcare for everybody, and fighting against the, um, military industrial complex.

My reason for hope is Democratic socialists winning in Congress, and I can tell you why, but do you wanna do yours first or you want me to go first?

go ahead. 

All right. I think that this is good news because it looks like we're gonna have eight Democratic socialist identifying, affiliated, adjacent congresspeople, in November if everything goes how it looks. Bernie, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, they're in Congress. You're gonna... They're gonna be joined by a bevy of people from New York City, Brad Lander, Chris Rabb, and now Melat Kiros from Colorado, who is an Ethiopian, uh, American immigrant, former refugee, so on and so forth.

I did some digging for my daily brief this morning, and of the eight, everybody is either Native American, person of color, or Jewish. There are Christians in the form of AOC. There are Muslims. There are Jews represented in those eight. My takeaway, Dan, is that you have Americans who see the future of this country as one that has to work for everybody.

Oligarchy cannot stand. Income inequality in the form that we have it does not work. We have to provide healthcare. We have to provide responses to the climate crisis. We have to give power back to the people. Paul Krugman wrote a great piece on Substack outlining that democratic socialism is not nationalist socialism, and most Americans don't want anything like nationalist socialism.

But democratic socialism is what most of our peer countries do. It means a social safety net for everybody. It means healthcare for everybody. It means a response to the climate crisis that works. It means getting corporate money out of our elections and of our politics. That sounds really good, and Fox News is freaking out because 53% of Americans under 30 see a move towards socialism as a good idea.

And what Krugman says, and I agree with him, is that's, that really means a democratic socialism more in line with the UK or France or Germany than it does anything recalling the horrors of the 20th century. I think this is good news because for most people under 40, democracy is an empty signifier. Most people do not see it as something that works for them.

So- 

Yeah, that's my thought. I don't know if you want to respond to that or just give us your reason for hope. 

Yeah, so just briefly, I would say, we've talked about this before, we can get super technical. I-- The only thing I wish they would do is rebrand a bit to social democracy. Sure. 

Yeah.

I prefer the term social democracy because I think it captures that, right? It's an idea- Yeah ... of taking democratic norms into broader segments of social life- Yeah ... healthcare- I like that ... like education and so forth, and helps just dispel that specter. But anyway, if they want to reach out to me, they can.

Now, Section C, Money, Power, and the Reckoning

I think you're absolutely right, and if I can just make two minor amendments to your contract and then answer your question.

Americans aren't even at $15 an hour anymore. They're at $25 an hour. You can't keep up today on $15 an hour, and cert- you're going bankrupt in two days on $7 an hour. It's outrageous. And then childcare, and I'm so glad you mentioned it, and thank you for always being a champion of it. We need help with elder care too.

We're the sandwich generation now, where people are responsible for kids, and these kids coming back home, and they're responsible for aging parents and aging relatives. The caregiving economy has absolutely collapsed, and people have incredible financial and time responsibilities now caring for family members of all ages. I don't think that Washington is gonna lead on the contract for America. I think the individual candidates have to be the one to lead, and I think, I hope as a product of this radio program, I would love you to issue a contract with America, and I think every one of our listeners should take this to candidates.

The candidates will adopt it out there. The change won't come from Washington. It's got to come from outside Washington. And when candidates run on these issues, as you said, we will win votes, and we will get people to turn out to vote. People say that people have no choice, and we can just be negative on Trump.

No, you can't beat something with nothing. We have to offer something if we're gonna get people out of their very busy lives to go vote for us 

Yeah, childcare, paid family leave, like in Western Europe, and an authentic child tax credit benefits 61 million children in this country. It'll cut child poverty in half, and that's a lot of conservative family children, not just liberal family children- 

That's 

right

which the Democrats don't seem to understand. So how do we get to the local candidates? You can't go through the Democratic National Committee or the DCCC and their counterpart in the House and Senate. They're all dialing for dollars with strings attached, unfortunately. How do we get to the candidates?

One by one? 

I think, as you say, we've only got, 140 days left. We don't have time to get to them one by one. I think that we should publish a Contract with America. I think it can be... Candidates can alter it, and I think that it's very important to show the power that this concept has. The Contract with America tests off the charts.

People love the idea, and it doesn't have to be everything we stand for. Just 10 proposals that every candidate's gonna commit to, and that we're gonna take to the floor of the Congress day one when we're elected, to our state legislatures day one when we're elected, to our governors' mansions, to our AGs offices, and create a real movement here, not just another set of campaigns with $300 million in television ads with meaningless content 

Yeah, they couldn't have a better antagonist than Donald Trump.

what other politician in your long career, Celinda, have you heard say, "I don't care about Americans' financial situation," or, "I like inflation"? These are his two latest ridiculous statements that are driving the GOP up the wall. So it's all in our hands, people. It is in our hands. The Constitution starts, "We the people."

It doesn't start, "We the Congress," it doesn't start, "We the corporation." It's all in our hands. You gotta vote, but more important, you gotta put a cutting edge on your vote so that when you meet the politicians coming August in their huge recess from Congress to shake your hands and sweet talk you, you can tell them what your vote is demanding.

Isn't that a winner, Celinda? 

Absolutely, and all these members of Congress are going back between August 9th and August 11th to campaign in their districts, and I think we should run off the contract, and we should hand it to every candidate we can find, and we should demand, "Are you taking corporate dollars?

Because if you're taking corporate dollars, you're not gonna follow through on this contract." Demand that our candidates do not take corporate contributions, and have them sign the contract or publish their own contract. Again, let's commit to 10 things that can make a difference in real people's lives that we can pass in the first three months of Congress, and let's filibuster or let's sit in until they happen, and let's not vote for anybody who won't commit to signing a contract with the American people to make these changes happen.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has issued such a contract. You're issuing a contract. Several candidates have their own contract, and it doesn't really matter. The basics are all the same. It doesn't make any sense where we're at right now. It doesn't make any sense that in Social Security taxes there's a special loophole for the wealthy that they're not taxed all the way up.

The rest of us are taxed all the way up, but wealthy people don't have to pay their Social Security taxes all the way up. That makes no sense, and nobody real even knows that loophole exists. So I think we need to get this out. I think it needs to be a relentless drum beat. I think we will increase turnout, and I think we will gain votes, and we have to win big.

The stakes are very high. We have to win the House and the Senate, and we can't just limp along and win it by a few seats. We need to win by big margins and with lots of seats so we have a mandate to stop what's going on. 

That's the key word, the mandate. The election not only has to be won handily, it has to be won with a mandate which comprises the contract for the American people.

the Democratic Party dug its own pit here when they years ago wrote off half the country and created the red state, blue state phenomena, and they were always on the defensive after that, Celinda. The year when they started, the Democrats started dialing for commercial dollars, 1979, that's when they started to exclude the participation of progressives, citizen groups, progressive labor groups, who earlier cooperating with the Democrats passed all the great legislation of consumer, environmental, worker safety, Freedom of Information Act, and others in the 1960s and early '70s.

So we know who's standing in the way, and the key here, the gorilla in the room, is the corporate conflicted consultants that the Democratic Party has essentially contracted campaigns out to, and they have to be exposed as well. What do you have to say about these consultants? 

I am a consultant, so of course I'm a little cross-pressured here, but frankly, I agree with you about the consulting class.

I think the consulting class is very conservative. I think it's way too tied to corporate America. We're the only Democratic firm that doesn't work for pharma. We work against pharma in terms of pollsters, and I could go on. We work against data centers. We work against big utilities. we work against the military industrial complex.

The consulting class is really way, way too dependent on corporate contributions, and until we get corporate money out of politics, we are not going to get the consulting class out of politics. But individual candidates, what's really exciting right now is there are so many candidates who know who they are.

Our candidates don't take their positions from polling data. You don't tell AOC what to believe from polling data, or Abdul El-Sayed or any number of other candidates. These candidates know what they stand for. They know who they're fighting for, and that's who we gotta go vote for 

What do you think of taking these, say, 10 issues, so on the Contract for the American people, and embodying them in actual legislative bills so that you campaign around the country, and you say, "We're for a higher federal minimum wage, and here's the bill.

We introduced it. This is not just rhetoric. We're not just sweet-talking you. Here is the bill, and you can get a copy of it on X website and spread it around." So the Contract for America is in these bills. What do you think of that approach? 

I really like it, but I also think one of the things that I love about your show, and one of the things I love about when you talk, you make things very simple.

Let's not make it A 25-page bill to raise the minimum wage. Let's make it a one-line bill. The minimum wage is going up from $7 and whatever it is, 25 cents, to $25 an hour, period. That's it. It's not complicated. We're gonna extend Social Security tax all the way up on your income. We're not gonna stop at whatever it stops at now, which is one of the greatest loopholes that people don't even know about.

These are one-sentence bills. They don't have to be complicated, and that allows people to take them to office holders and say, "No fine print, sign the bill. Sign the contract." 

In this case, we're talking about NSPM-7 and the Trump administration's new counterterrorism, memorandum, which don't change the law. They're simply an expression of prosecutorial priorities, and they instruct prosecutors to go after- Antifa to go after far left groups, people who they view as anti-American, whatever that means, people with extreme gender ideologies.

No idea what that one means. I've never heard of any sort of trans supremacy movement that wants to lock up cisgender people. So presumably they're just talking about people who believe that trans people should have rights, and now they're on the same plane as terrorists, as ISIS, according to this administration.

It's all pretty absurd, but at the end of the day, we have a constitution that prohibits people from being locked up for what they think, write, or read as long as they are not inciting imminent violence. So hopefully the appellate courts will reverse these convictions, but the law is only as good as the people who enforce it.

So if the judiciary isn't up to the task, if the judiciary is compromised And lawmakers are unwilling to step in. And of course, at the end of the day, the president has pardon and clemency power, but we know who's president, so that's not something you can rely on. Then, yeah, the law's not as good as the paper it's written on.

So that's the situation we're in. And if the appellate courts don't correct this egregious error that the trial courts have committed, we'll be in a really scary place. remember in Georgia, they tried something very similar with the Stop Cop City protesters. Very similar situation. They indicted sixty-one people who were part of the Stop Cop City movement because a few of those individuals had allegedly committed criminal acts, arson, vandalizing police cars, whatnot.

There was no indication that all sixty-one of those people had anything to do with those isolated criminal acts, but they were looped into a RICO conspiracy solely because they, again, read the same zines, shared the same ideologies, were part of the same movement, had the same alleged belief system. That case fell apart, as it should have, after putting all sixty of those people through a whole lot of headache and expense, but still, it ultimately fell apart.

And it was easy to dismiss at the time as though these are-- this is just some local prosecutor who had an awful idea and made a fool of themselves. Now it's the federal government doing it. And you mentioned January 6th. The sentences here were far more severe than any sentences against anyone involved in January 6th.

That issue was raised with the judge, who said, this case was charged differently. This case was charged as terrorism." So essentially incentivizing prosecutors going forward, if they wanna get headline grabbing sentences and make themselves look effective, to overcharge, to continue charging defendants as terrorism despite the lack of any evidence of them being terrorists, being affiliated with a terrorist group, or having any terrorist intentions.

So we should expect to see more of this. Hopefully other trial judges will do their jobs and not leave it up to the appellate courts to clean up the mess. 

I think language is playing a role here. I have said repeatedly that when news media took war on terror out of quotes, we lost something.

A, a brain wrinkle got smoothed, so now we can just say terrorism. I don't know actually what it is, but I know it's the very worst thing in the world, And I don't need to ask any further questions. and we're now at that situation with Antifa. w- what the actual heck?

now Antifa is being legally identified as a organized thing. what is meaningful? What changes when you allow folks to say, "Hey, we made up a name for everybody who thinks a certain way, and now you're a group and you're conspiring terrorism"? 

I certainly agree the...

even before the Trump administration, the idea of terrorism had lost its meaning. But I think one assumption that everybody for the most part had, was that to be labeled a terrorist, you have to have engaged in or collaborated with others who engaged in violence. And that you had to have some foreknowledge of that violence.

And to get to a point where people are being convicted of terrorism for merely going to a protest where the prosecution didn't even bother trying to prove that they had any intention to commit an act of violence, that they had any foreknowledge that one of them might pick up a gun and shoot at a cop, is really quite alarming because terrorism becomes less of an action and more of an ideology that people like Donald Trump can define as synonymous with dissent.

Anyone whose beliefs are inconvenient To him or that interferes with his agenda becomes a terrorist. Anti-Trump and anti-American become interchangeable in the views of the administration and the, and judges apparently who are sympathetic to them. So it's quite scary to have this kind of power to, uh, abuse the word terrorism, particularly in a domestic context.

In the international context, we've long had the problem of prosecutors and judges and politicians characterizing things as national security threats with no basis to do Going back to the Pentagon Papers, where the truth about the Vietnam War was almost censored because the administration at the time called it a national security threat for the American people to know the truth.

Fortunately, the judiciary back then rejected that. Reporters are threatened with prosecution under, for example, the Espionage Act because their reporting supposedly poses a national security threat when, in fact, it merely is inconvenient to those in power. We see that, for example, in the case involving Hannah Natanson, the Washington Post reporter whose home newsroom was raided.

That's long been an issue in the context of national security in matters of war, international issues. But now you've got any local dissident, any activist, any person in any of the fifty states who opposes the president's agenda being treated the same way, being treated as a national security threat.

The line between First Amendment protected dissent and terrorism is just entirely blurred by this administration. And again, the judges have the power to set it straight. Whether they will or not is to be determined. 

I will say I spoke with Mara Verheyden-Hilliard in 2017 about arrests after the first Trump inauguration, where police were saying if you were somewhere near an act of property damage, I think it was a car being set on fire, if you were near it, it's the same as you committing it.

If you were wearing black, forget about it. You are obviously part of it. At the time, a Washington Post poll was saying that one out of every three DC residents were saying they'd taken part in a protest against Trump since his first inauguration, and that was half of the district's white residents, half of people making more than $100,000 a year, and a fifth of respondents over the age of 65.

So what I want to say, and what I think you're wanting to say also, is you're not safe from this. the idea that you're not gonna do anything wrong Is not gonna protect you in this case. We're seeing the straight up criminalizing of resistance per se. And so I guess I'd ask you, what can we do? What can we be doing in the face of this? 

That is important to remember because it is easy for people to look at this and say, I am not an anarchist. I don't read these zines. I don't go to these kinds of protests. My protests are organized or permitted." 

"

I'm not at risk." But, I've mentioned, Sanchez, who was convicted solely for transporting a box of zines.

Think about the Don Lemon and Georgia Fort cases. They were arrested, of course, while covering a protest at a church in Minneapolis against immigration enforcement there. I don't think anyone would characterize Don Lemon as a far left anarchist type. You can like him or not like him, but that's not something that he is.

But the Trump administration sought a warrant that would have allowed it to gather from YouTube a list of subscribers to both Lemon and Fort's YouTube channels. Now, that warrant was fortunately rejected by a judge, but think about it. What possible evidence could a subscriber to Lemon and Fort's YouTube channels have that would assist the Trump administration in prosecuting its frivolous case against those journalists?

All they saw was what was publicly broadcast. The prosecution already has that. This is clearly an attempt by the Trump administration to gather information about who is in possession, who is accessing news that it does not like. So just as Daniel Sanchez, Dez Sanchez was prosecuted for his box of zines, those who watch Don Lemon and Georgia Fort's show may have faced danger or risk down the road.

Why else would prosecutors want their information? It has nothing to do with their case. So it's certainly a mistake to believe that this is a problem that is limited to, quote-unquote, Antifa or people on the political fringes. Stephen Miller has said the entire Democratic Party is a terrorist organization.

Donald Trump has called the press enemies of the people, has called his critics the enemy within. He is not only talking about anarchists when he says that.

So we are in a time similar to the incoming class of 1974, which was elected in part as a response to the Vietnam War, to the arrogation of power by the executive, of Nixon resigning in August of that year.

There are calls from many corners of this country, as I mentioned, for Congress to step up and reclaim its place as a co-equal branch of government alongside the executive. And if members had the appetite to actually do that, to step up, which it currently doesn't, clearly, under the leadership of Speaker Johnson, where should it start?

So a number of things I think would help Congress to stand up to the executive. Firstly, I mentioned that Congress self-lobotomized itself in the '90s. Yeah. Again, we know from legislative studies in general that legislatures and legislators need independent expertise, they need independent information if they're gonna actually be able to conduct oversight of an executive branch as they are meant to do.

And so dramatically increasing staffing, that includes nonpartisan staff An agency staff that also includes lifting the cap on personal staff that members can hire. They've had the same cap on personal staff that they can hire since 1975. 

Oh, wow. 

So they're only allowed to hire up to 18 staff members.

That includes their district staff and their policy staff in Congress. And for- And how 

many do they actually need, you think? 

the issue isn't how much they need. The, the other issue is they also don't have very large budgets. 

Right. 

And so actually, most of them don't end up hiring 18 staff, but I think we need to increase their budget and increase their staffing, and I think that they would need more than 18 staff.

That includes, their constituent services, their policy experts. They're representing nearly a million people. So if you want them to be able to both respond to constituent requests and understand how to legislate on AI, you need brainpower behind that. You need, desperately, Congress to not just increase its staffing, but retool itself to meet the moment.

It hasn't reorganized its committee jurisdictions since the '70s, again. So when we think about an issue like AI, Congress doesn't have a tech committee to deal with it, because it hasn't reorganized committees since the internet existed. 

I see. 

this is not just specific to the executive. This is how Congress can stand up as a branch.

Yes. The other thing that Congress needs to do when it comes to standing up to the executive in particular, in addition to just resourcing itself, making sure it has the tools and the organizations that it needs, is to understand where there are opportunities to build bipartisan support and to stand up together.

When we look at congressional history, moments when Congress is changeable tend to be moments where there's more new people in Congress. Moments where Congress stands up to the executive tend to be after the president has overstepped, and that's when Congress gets its, house in order. So if you look at, for example, the 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act, that was after World War II, after Congress thought that the president overstepped in World War II.

If we look at what happened in the 1970s with the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, with the 1973 War Powers Resolution, that was after Nixon impounded $50 billion, which is to say that he refused to spend congressionally authorized money after he overstepped in the Vietnam War in terms of presidential power.

We're at a moment where Congress could do that, and historically, when we look at things like war powers and we look at movements around, for example, the repeal of the authorization of the use of military force bill, which was something passed after 9/11, which gave George Bush even more war powers, that was pretty bipartisan.

So I think looking for, even in this hyperpolarized space, there are moments like this, especially with the conflict in Iran, spaces where Congress can band together To stand up against the executive. and I think war powers could be one of them, and I certainly think power of the purse is another.

That's really important, I think, to think about because historically there's some urgency for it to stand up when the president has overstepped, and there can be some space for bipartisan cooperation when it comes to congressional power. So looking for opportunities to do that and leaning into it, I think is really important.

I think at this point it looks only likely if there is a wave election- 

... 

this year in 2026, and that Republicans will lose the majority- ... in Congress. But I don't know if that's really gonna happen. I feel like it looks very likely, but I don't know. I feel like it's so difficult, actually, to predict because so many things- Very-

can happen between now and then. 

Yeah. 

the White House is so erratic, and who knows what is going to happen with the war in Iran. we think that it's going to stay isolated, but if it becomes something much larger, I think we're looking at a very different kind of election than we are thinking about in this moment.

What we know about elections is that things can change very quickly. So as you're saying, it's impossible to foresee what will happen. a lot of people that I know are focused a lot on the election, getting people elected, and then thinking that when they are elected, and we believe in their vision, whatever that might be, that then things will magically change.

We need to start thinking about the day after the election. We need to start thinking about how we can fix Congress as an institution and make sure that it has the resources and the tools that it needs as an institution. Because right now the reality is if you elect someone and, they're in a really hierarchical system where, as I mentioned, party leaders are just writing legislation.

They're in a system in which they have to spend all day dialing for dollars instead of legislating, and they're in a system where they're afraid to vote their conscience because of fear of violence, then that's not a system in which they can make change even if we elect them. 

Yes. 

So I think that that's something for us to reckon with regardless of the fact that we can't really know yet what will happen with the election.

What we do know is that these problems that I'm talking about, unfortunately, are probably not gonna go away by November. 

Definitely not. some of these problems are so- So entrenched for decades. So we are clearly not in a direct democracy where everyone votes on the bills directly. 

We elect representatives, members of Congress, senators to represent us, and we hope that the person we elect really will come close to the way we would vote ourselves. And in the process of writing this book, how has your thinking evolved around our system of democracy? 

that's a great question.

I've dedicated my entire career to making democracy work better for the people it is meant to serve, and I think that our democracy works best when it is as engaged as possible with the voices of ordinary Americans. I was committed to all sorts of civic engagement innovations before, but I think writing this book made me even more committed to them.

We need to be pushing for a representative democracy where members can actually engage with constituents. one of the things that I think we need to change structurally, among many things, is that when Congress was first created, members represented 30,000 constituents. That's a different kind of representative democracy than when you represent nearly a million constituents.

So I still believe in representative democracy as a system that works, but we need to actually make sure that our representatives can represent their constituents. That's far too many people to be representing. We need to expand the House. The other thing that I am more committed to than ever is ending Citizens United and getting the horrible influences of big money in politics out of politics.

That is tremendously distortive, and one of the things that the book speaks to is the fact that this, hasn't always been the case. Just 50 years ago, things were dramatically different. And so again, we want a representative democracy that works. That's a representative democracy in which all American voices need to be heard, and we have a system right now when you are reliant on a handful of donors, and when you are dialing for dollars all day long instead of legislating, you can't represent your constituents in the way true representative democracy is supposed to work.

So representative democracy, I think is something we should be working towards, but it- it's not working right now in the way that the framers intended it to.

And Finally, Section D, Critiques and the Path Forward

We're gonna start out talking Graham Platner a little bit because he's a great framing tool for everything I wanna get off my chest.

I wanna be really clear, I'm gonna say that a lot in this video. I don't like this dude. He feels like a seasonal villain from a prestige political drama like House of Cards or Scandal or something. I'm not saying he's a Nazi, but he's at least, Hydra or Order of the Cyclops for those of you that watched Watchmen all those years ago.

He just is that guy, and it's incredibly obvious to anyone who isn't some of y'all. And this isn't just taking issue with his military service. I don't have a purity politic toward anything, really, if you know me, but definitely not ex-military people on the left. I am anti-American military. I don't wanna misconstrue that.

But there are also Black Panthers who were ex-military. The American military spends billions of dollars marketing and propagandizing young people across this country, so I try to hold a nuanced position for how that works. But I wouldn't apply this to Platner. Four tours and Blackwater and a Nazi tattoo is a lot, and I know that's not a hot take.

I know even more moderate folks would agree with that, so I have to wonder, why and how is Platner being pushed so hard by the establishment and the online left in general? Platner is the latest project out of the Fight Agency. The Fight Agency is a political consultancy that was started by some ex-Bernie Sanders, ex-John Fetterman folks.

And in recent years, they've been behind the success of Zohran Mamdani, as well as people like Dan Osborne, Bob Brooks, et cetera. And aside from Zohran Mamdani, you kinda see what's happening here. All we're missing is Hank Hill. the main mostly valid argument that I will give about Platner is that he's one of the few folks amongst the Democrats that vows to pull military support from Israel.

Not a single taxpayer dollar should be spent on arming and defending a country that commits a genocide. 

And that is extremely important for Palestinian liberation. But I do have to ask, why are we being asked to not just tolerate Platner for that reason, but to see him almost as the future of the Democratic Party, and maybe even the left?

Why has he become the darling of the online predominantly white left in this timeframe? Why did the Fight Agency scout him in the first place? It's because the Fight Agency knows that this image of white American exceptionalism, and especially masculinity, is still highly valued amongst the white masses.

He's doing a reskin of the Marlboro Man, or better yet, like Don Draper, Joel Miller from The Last of Us. Literally, he looks like Walter White. And I want you to remember, all of these characters were villains, and historically, it's always straight white men that fail to realize that fact about those characters.

And when you're not a straight white male, you always take note of those types of fans. They may not be the worst people in the world, but they're people to observe. But the left falling for the same trick like this is not surprising when you realize that white leftists in America have never consistently had a halfway decently developed racial analysis, and this is just a historical pattern at this point.

Again, shout out to a book I've been reading from Bryan Quobah, Hubert Harrison: The Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism. Hubert Harrison was a lesser-known Black socialist who worked and wrote in the same eras as Booker T. Washington, Du Bois, and Garvey, and was to the left of all of them during that time, in- including Du Bois.

But in this, he also found himself confounded by the challenge of organizing with white socialists, who at the time could not see past their anti-Blackness to form effective solidarity and build a functional coalition. And this pattern has never stopped repeating, which is illustrated by this excerpt from Eugene Debs that's in the book.

"In capitalism, the Negro question is a grave one, and will grow more threatening as the contradictions and complications of capitalist society multiply," Debs allowed. "But this need not worry us. Let them settle the Negro question in their way if they can. We have nothing to do with it, for that is their fight."

Debs here exemplified the way in which even radical white people who called for a working class revolution against capitalism could simultaneously distance themselves from the specific challenges facing the most oppressed segment of the working class. I'm bringing this up because I wanna show that this is an infinite loop at this point.

White leftists with little to no racial analytical frame can't help but censor their sensibilities, even in the face of obvious red flags or clearly better options if they don't appeal to their aesthetics and need to censor themselves. Why have we centered Graham Platner when we have Chris Rabb, who, from what I understand, is the furthest left candidate the Democrats have ever had in any political race?

And he low-key still fits the gruff leftist daddy kink that so many of y'all seem to like. Another face that I haven't seen on my feed at all and I had to get from somebody else is Charles Booker. Booker has as progressive an agenda as you can have in mainstream politics, and is in a very vulnerable red state that could use a lot more attention and support from the online left And it's not there.

Booker's not just anti sending weapons to Israel, he's Medicare for all, he's for universal basic income, stopping data centers, decriminalizing poverty, and reparations. It's everything you can want from a mainstream politician, but he's invisible compared to Platner. I don't follow elections much unless it's local, but I have seen Platner's face a million times more than either Rob or Booker.

Rob did spend some time with Hasan. Booker, he's got nothing as far as I can tell. Meanwhile, Platner has tons of interviews, Majority Report, Mehdi Hasan, New York Times. Why is this happening? Why is that viable? From my perspective and experience, a lot of white leftists understand that it's bad to be racist, but they don't actually understand why racism is bad or how it works.

The absence of a critical understanding of how whiteness works is why a lot of them fall for the same trick over and over, to the point where the fight agency clearly has this type built out just for y'all. If you wanna vote for Platner as an odious candidate that will help end military support to Israel, go ahead, but it should be treated as a tainted compromise for the sake of a free Palestine, not a vision for the future of the left.

He should not be in our faces as much as he is. He should not have the defenders that he has that I know will show up in his comment section. He should be the online left's sneaky link that you never see in the light of day and never talk about in public. And the fact that so many white leftists don't feel this is sadly par for the course.

Yeah, no. I think I agree with a lot of what you had to say. I think the historical parallels are interesting.

For me, often, I think, and this comes more from coming from, the Maoist inflection point, I tend to view the New Deal as honestly, the counter-revolution, social fascist response to the progressive developments rather than maybe, a progressive integration of the demands of a budding socialist movement in the United States- I agree with that

or, the social fascist attempt to crush it in some way. But I think regardless of how one understands that framing, the historical parallel is quite clear, and I think that we are definitely in a time where the conditions in the United States are moving towards shockingly high levels of disparity, and that parallel seems very obvious to me.

I think you're right to focus on the techno-oligarchic angle of it, and I do think, increasingly, people are going to find themselves in further economic distress as a result of AI, as a result of all of these other technological forces that are at play. And so I do think the parallels are very clear, and the question is just how we move forward.

I think for me, the thing that I, want to wrestle with a little bit is, I think you're right. The wins that we are seeing are ultimately good for communists. I think some of these DSA candidates actually have been impressed. I think it was, I don't know how you actually pronounce her last name, but Chevalier is how I'm gonna pronounce it, who when she was asked, "Are you a communist?"

Instead of denouncing communism, basically said, "I'm not gonna answer that question. Why are we fear-mongering about this?" ... that to me is awesome, and that is actually exactly what we need to see from candidates like this who are not willing to throw those further to their left under the bus in order to sanitize their own position.

If we see those kind of developments, then I do think we will benefit positively from this. But I think I also want to caution that in my mind, imperialism is not the only site of contradiction that exists with some of these candidates, and I think that it's worth wrestling with a little bit. I organize in Los Angeles in the Tenants Union.

I think it's probably, one of the largest mass organizations in this city, and that means that we have experiences with DSA electeds in Los Angeles that are, not straightforward, right? There are times in the fights that we're engaged in where they do act as allies to us, and there are times when they do act as oppositional forces who are getting in the way of what we are trying to build and the demands that we are making.

And the contradictions, I think, at that micro level within, city politics, for example, when you are doing mass organizing, do go beyond just, whether or not they are getting questions of imperialism incorrect. I think here in Los Angeles, which is really the only place I can speak to as an on-the-ground organizer One of the big contradictions that we're seeing, and I, have heard from comrades in New York that this is an issue there, is that Democratic socialism in Los Angeles is increasingly associating itself with a pro-development perspective or what people call YIMBYism, Yes In My Backyard.

and obviously that is really at odds with what those of us who are doing mass organizing in the sphere of tenants unionism are trying to push for. Development in cities like LA and New York by and large is based on displacing people, and often, in fact, the very communities that we are coming in and defending and organizing in fights are people who are facing eviction because of the YIMBY development agenda and the attempt to tear down historic housing in order to build higher-density housing that will have some level of affordability safeguards that is always on a time limit and never permanent.

and so there is this real contradiction there. I think you've seen that when Zohran actually started to pick some of the people who were going to surround him in positions of power, putting some tenant people in place, but also pro-development positions and speaking to that. In Los Angeles, Nithya Raman has been this very complicated figure in DSA politics.

She's been endorsed by the DSA for city council. She's been censured by them for her positions on Palestine. those of us doing tenants unioncy- unionism have had some pretty serious issues with her around issues of development and housing. And DSA LA did not endorse her in the primary for the governor, but did recommend her over, Ray, who was a less pro-development candidate.

And in a lot of ways, a lot of the Democratic socialists in the city that I know prefer Nithya because of her pro-development position. And when you're doing concrete organizing, trying to stop people from getting evicted as a result of those development processes, these contradictions become not abstract, but very grounded day-to-day realities for socialists who've decided to integrate into mass organizations and do the work there.

And so I think, the contradictions will go beyond ultimately simply the question of imperialism. They are gonna come down to brass tacks and concrete politics at the city, the state, and federal level in ways that are gonna create potentially oppositional scenarios there. And I think one of the things that's going to come down to is that I think socialists need to build mass organizations so big that when they denounce that opportunism on these issues, when they push back against those contradictions, it's taken seriously, right?

Where DSA candidates feel like they not only need to worry about censure from the DSA chapter in a city in which they've been elected, but also from the mass organizations and the broader movement itself being willing to push back and that having weight. I think that's what's starting to be built in places like Los Angeles and New York, again, the only two contexts in which I have a fair amount of knowledge of on-the-ground tenant organizing.

But those contradictions become real as soon as you start to organize in cities where there is a democratic socialist presence. And that doesn't mean that we just say, "Fuck these candidates. We want nothing to do with them. We're never going to engage with them in any way." You have to have, in mass organizing, a complicated back-and-forth relationship that adjusts to the changing conditions of the contradictions.

But I do think we have to acknowledge that just as often as we find ourselves in alignment with them, we do also find ourselves in contradiction with them around concrete, practical realities. And I know, at least in the tenant organizing that I've done in the part of the city that I live in, it's a conversation that we have with tenants of, yeah, there are times we are gonna make demands of politicians, but we also understand that politicians ultimately are generally not on our side, that the people that we organize who can't vote often because of their immigration status, who are not a part of the electoral bloc, are not who the, actual-- even the DSA politicians are accountable to in any concrete mechanism.

And so that will create these tensions there. So I do think it is just important to wrestle a little bit with once you get into the micro level organizing, the way that these relationships become very complicated. And again, we shouldn't think too black and white and too totalizing about it. But we do have to recognize, I think increasingly around tenant organizing and development, that this is a growing contradiction within that movement that you even see play out internally in DSA within their own factional debates.

And so for me, and I'm probably biased 'cause this is the type of organizing that I do, this is one of the other key contradictions that I'm just, really keeping my eye on as democratic socialism grows in popularity right now.

And I'm gonna reiterate again. Now, some people don't like it when I say this, but I'm gonna say it again. If you don't like it, I'm, I guess you're just not gonna like it Maine Democrats, if you want to win, you should replace Graham Platner with somebody who's equally progressive.

You don't want a chance that the people who voted for Graham Platner feel disrespected because you replace him with a Schumer moderate. If you do that, you're doing that at your own risk because the reality is the voters of Maine were very clear that they want change. And we're Democrats, I'm saying this with love, 'cause you guys act up.

You need to actually show your base that you don't just want the gavels, that you intend to change things. Because if you just switch the brand of the, House and Senate, and now it's the Democratic brand, but nothing happens to change people's lives, watch it flip right back to Republicans in two years.

Because people just want change, and I don't think people are as married to the parties as you are. You're in the party, so you care a lot about the party label. The party label's meaningful to you. It used to be meaningful to me. Growing up, Democrat was part of my identity. As I've gotten older and wiser, it's not as much a part of my identity.

My identity is more I'm trying to survive in this country as an African American woman, as a Black woman, as a daughter of immigrants, as a citizen, as a person who cares about the community, who cares about vulnerable communities. That's my... My identity is that I'm a humanist that cares about 

people.

And so the party identity is less a part of my brand now because I don't have to... I don't owe the Democratic Party anything. The Democratic Party owes me. And if you're in the base, the Democratic Party's supposed to work for you, not the other way around. But sometimes, unfortunately, I think the Democratic Party treats its voters as if they are employees, and they're just required to pull the lever regardless of who is being presented to us.

But that is not the case. You work for the people, you work for the people, not the other way around. So it's not on the people to obe- obey you and vote for people who they feel are less than worthy of their vote or people who aren't gonna change any damn thing. people weren't in love with Graham Platner because they loved his freaking tattoo.

They thought his tattoo was stupid But they liked the ideas, and they wanted change. And he was saying, "I'm a working-class guy who cares about working-class people, and I'm gonna literally change things for you." That's all. It's a transaction. We want the transaction. You need to say, incredibly, that you're gonna change things, not that you're just gonna say, "Donald Trump is bad.

Now I'm a Democrat. Here I am. I'm not Trump." Saying, "Here I am, I'm not Trump, and I'm changing the brand of the House and Senate to Democrat," that is not gonna be enough. People want actual change. You have to give them something to vote for. You have to present real, credible change in their material lives.

That is why Mamdani is popular. Everybody's looking for the se- It's not some secret. He's popular because he's 

changing people's lives for the better. That's all people want in a pol- people would like to not think about politics. People would like to just go watch the Michael Jackson movie and get on with their lives and do their favorite dance and watch, People just wanna e- enjoy. I would love to have this show be fun and do, and talk to, our favorite celebrities and do fun shit. We don't wanna ha- I used to be able to go to Star Trek Con when I was doing TV. We used to go to Star Trek Con, y'all. We used to have a great time. We used to have so much fun on our weekend show on AMjo.

We had fu- And we stopped being able to have fun. The fun has been ripped out of the American life. We can't even have fun, 'cause every minute we're worried that there's another war, or there's another economic crisis, or we look in the bank account and it's "Oh, man, my money's not gonna stretch anymore because they've raised the prices.

The price of gas is five..." People are exhausted. And Democrats, you think just changing the brand to D is gonna make people happy and that'll be enough. You're just offering peace but not change. You're offering calm but not change. So the reality is, if that's all you're offering is, "Look, we're gonna put a D there," but what if that D is still sending our money to bomb Gazans instead of giving us healthcare?

A- and here's the connection. The reason we care so much about Gaza is because we're human beings. We care about Sudan, and Gaza, and Congo 'cause we're human. That's why we're Democrats generally, or liberals. We care about these people, but we also actually would like that money spent on us. We actually would like that money spent so that our roads aren't crap while Japan has beautiful, incredible roads and railroads that come on time and are beautiful and clean, and ours are crap.

And it looks like you're driving through a, a f- a country that is a barely developing country when you drive through most of our cities. Our roads are bad. Our hospitals are barely staffed. We don't have enough nurses. And then when the immigrant nurses come in, you don't want them 'cause they don't s- their primary language isn't English, or they have an accent.

You get pissed off. But y- we can't afford to become nurses in this country. It's too expensive. We have all these doctors from Pakistan and In- because they're the ones who can afford to go to medical school. Our people can't even afford to go. People are exhausted. They wanna be able to pay their bills and actually have a little left over to go out to eat.

They want a little left over to be able to go to a movie and not feel like, "Oh my God, I'm gonna break myself financially if I go to dinner and a movie. I can't afford it." Young people wanna go on a date, Jason. We have kids that are trying to date. it's... They have to scramble together the money for dinner and a 

movie.

Hey, Dad, you got, 'cause, this one, I get it, girl. It wasn't like that when we was younger. And they're like, "No." 

We were like... Th- then they're like, "Why are they having kids?" Come on. They're having kids, they don't have any money. They ain't got no money for kids. They're broke. And then if they do have kids, they can't even get a good OBGYN.

They might die on the table 'cause y'all done run all the OBGYNs out of red states because you want an abortion ban. So now they have to risk their life to have kids. Why? That they can't even afford to feed. What are we doing? We have terrible healthcare, and they're like, "These immigrants wanna come here for our welfare."

Why do you think so many people are on we- why do you think so many people are on welfare? People are on welfare because y'all economy suck Nobody's trying to c- they're trying to go to Canada for healthcare. They're trying to go to Europe for healthcare. People are literally crossing the border into Mexico to buy drugs there 'cause they're cheaper there.

They're not cheaper here. No one's sneaking into the United States to get our cheap prescription drugs. The cheap prescription drugs are on the other side of the border. When people had COVID here, when COVID broke, where were people going? Mexico. To the point where Mexico had to say, "Slow down, buddies.

You gotta stop invading our cities. You're making shit too expensive. Get out." They had to kick us out because we're all T- Cancun cruise. Everybody's running down there 'cause it was better to be there, 'cause it's cleaner. They, the air was fresher. We got smog, we got these AI factories making the water poisonous.

W- and y'all got- More 

roommates than righteousness ... 

people got eight roommates just to live in a- ... a little crappy, tiny apartment. This is terrible, y'all. This is te- you know why people are like, why do people stay in Mississippi?" You know why? 'Cause even if you're broke, at least you can afford to have a little house on some land.

You go into the cities, people are literally choking. And so people like Mamdani are easing the pressure and making it fun to be in New York again. You know the happiest city right now is New York City. New York is the happiest city. It's the happy, every- the vibe is happy. It's cleaner. You go there, you can see the difference.

This dude is making change. That's all people want from politics. They just want people who will do what he's doing, and you don't have to call yourself a Democratic socialist to do it, but if you do, we don't care. actually, the whole socialism thing doesn't bother us any- No one cares. I used to be the one to say that, it was gonna be tough for a Bernie Sanders to be- become president, and my whole theory as to why, even though I thought his positions were better, was because you're a socialist. You call yourself a socialist, you're gonna lose Florida. That was my opinion. But I have grown since then to realize that, my generation, Gen Xers care, but I promise you, them Ys and Alpha, they don't give a damn.

They don't care about that. You call people a socialist, they don't care what you call yourself. They're just like, "What are you gonna do for me?" They're smart. They're actually smarter. They're super transactional. They're like, "What are you gonna literally do for me? Are you gonna raise my wages? Are you gonna make the rent cheaper?

Are you gonna make me be able to get a mortgage, make me be able to afford college, make me not have to drown in student loans?" Pay this car debt. Make me be able to pay my debt. Pay this debt so I can get 

to work. Let 

me... Let me have a... All people want is- If I have a job ... all over the world, is to wake up in the morning Stretch their arms, try to do something they're passionate about, feel good about whatever they're doing with their day, make enough money doing it so that they can actually breathe, pay their bills and not be drowning in bills, and then have a little fun with their friends and 

family.

Now see, that's a message that a Democrat should be selling. They 

don't do that. But they don't do that. And you know who did? they basic- Graham Platner. There you go. And you can hate him. He may be a terrible human being- ... but that is why he was resonating. It's not because people are like, "Ooh, that tattoo's cute."

No, they didn't care about that. They just want their lives back, and they're like, "If I gotta vote for this shitty guy to get my life back, I'm gonna do it," and they were gonna do it. So if you're the main Democratic Party, and I'm, again, I know some people don't like hearing this, if you don't give those voters that same Graham Platner energy and that lady gets six more years, don't blame Joy Reid, blame yourselves.

If you give them a tepid, namby-pamby, Chuck Schumer approved, no offense to Chuck personally, but he likes the moderates, give them a moderate, boring candidate that cannot beat that woman, then she gets six more years, and she in there till she 90. That's not my fault. That's your fault. 'Cause people are not gonna be excited.

They want the change. They want the change. 

Platner is popular because he's bread tube personified. He is the former edge lord rehabilitated into hero for oppressed people to make up for his past sins. And mind you, every piece of anti-colonial liberation theory that you will ever read will tell you that the colonized must free themselves, but don't tell that to your favorite bread tuber or favorite bread tube fan, 'cause they'll swear that it's them that's the key to liberation for insert other group here.

But further, Platner shows the failure of the American left presenting a principled anti-Zionist stance to a larger general public. I've noticed in my personal life and online that there's been a rise in what I'm gonna describe as America first anti-Zionism. And normally when I make up a new term, I, want credit for it, but, please, do not repeat.

I'm positive there is somebody more worthy, some actual Palestinian scholar that is saying the exact same thing I'm saying. find them and give them credit for that term. But Platner's a perfect example of what that is, 'cause while he does claim to want to stop aid from Israel, he also wants to improve military recruitment, so he is not against American imperialism like you might think, which undermines any anti-Israeli stance he holds, and that's typical of pretty much all the Democrats right now The sad reality is that the Democratic Party and the alleged progressive leaders in America have allowed themselves to be outmaneuvered on Zionism by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who unlike anti-Zionists on the left, are in fact obvious antisemites.

Tucker Carlson is a crypto white supremacist who has spent years trying to normalize the great replacement theory, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is a former QAnon adherent who brought us Jewish space lasers and believes in blood libel, yet both are being mainstreamed in a way that I wouldn't have thought possible just a few years ago.

People like Carlson and Greene have infinitely more reach and influence than any of your favorite bread tubers, and thus they have been able to frontline this American first anti-Zionism, and it's become a popular position. It feels like for the first time ever, and this is a good thing, and I'll explain why in a second, anti-Zionism is a popular sentiment to hold.

But anti-Zionism that is America first is letting America off the hook for its role in that genocide. I've had a lot of people, both online and in my encounters in real life, smart people, say something along the lines of, "Israel is controlling America." And no, the tail does not wag the dog. Israel is a settler colonial project built on genocide and mass murder.

America is a settler colonial project built on genocide and mass murder, among other things. Game recognize game. There are of course Zionists in American government and plenty of Zionists who are at the helm of powerful American institutions. And our current president does seem uniquely compromised in his ability to not be influenced, not just by Israel, but everyone.

it's, everybody gets a piece of our president. But please believe that confluence of power between Israel and Zionists in America is not some secret, like mystical thing. That's just how power and capitalists have always worked. One example of this America first anti-Zionism is, people often say America was forced or tricked into a war with Iran due to Israel, but this ignores the history of hostility America has had with Iran.

Iran, as a sovereign strong nation, has been able to withstand American influence and thus impedes on America's dominance of that region and the resources that Iran controls, even with Israel sitting at Iran's doorstep. And Israel, because of its Zionist nature, has always wanted to attack Iran, along with everyone else in that region for years.

But for the longest, America has not allowed them to because most American presidents fully understood that we probably can't win a war with Iran, which, if you're paying attention, is clearly correct. But that doesn't mean that we didn't desire to do the exact same thing Israel did. This is why you see so many other American politicians wanting more action from America in Iran, low-key on both sides of the aisle.

America has not just allowed, but has encouraged Israel to be exactly what it is for decades at this point. It's just that this time around, Palestinians were able to show the world what is happening to them. And I wanna be clear, Palestinians do not care and should not care how they get free or who in America is going to bring them to that point.

If they get free because of a right-wing regime ushered in by Tucker Carlson decides to act on their innate hatred of Jewish people and pull support from Israel, that's an us problem. That's not a them problem. There's a great short essay from Laith Marouf. Again, I apologize if I got that wrong. Where he's responding to a recent interview where Norm Finkelstein basically says exactly what I'm saying here.

But Marouf comes back to reiterate that none of that is a Palestinian's concern. Marouf says literally, "Why is it so hard to believe that America first could actually be Israel last?" So if the left, and by that I don't just mean us here on YouTube, although we are somewhat to blame. If the left can't present a crystal clear principle stance against Zionism to combat the nationalistic and ultimately fascist version that's taken a hold everywhere, including somewhat on the left, then we're fucked and we deserve it So again, shout out to Chris Rabb and Charles Booker,I'll leave some links on how to support them in the description. But the bottom line is, how we get anti-Zionism into our government is our business. If it takes hold in a way that is not good for Black people, gay people, Muslims, et cetera, is only good for these white folks that like to act like Nazis online, at the end of the day, that's our problem, not Palestinians, and I agree with that wholeheartedly.

What I wanna make clear is that if you pin all the atrocities Israel is right now on them secretly controlling America to help them out, then you miss the fact that Israel and America's imperial interests are one and the same 99% of the even seeing that as advocating for a free Palestine is shortsighted because while Zionism couldn't function effectively without American aid, they would still be there in that region doing something horrible to those people, the same way America is doing horrible things to people all over the world right now, not just in Palestine, but in Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, the Congo, all of these places where there are global calamities going on, comes back to us in some form or fashion.

And this is not to say that Zionism doesn't have its own specific interests, or that it doesn't have nukes, or that it was not still doing Zionism before it had America's help, but understand the relationship between Israel and America is one of mutual benefit, not some type of mind control that's happening from afar.

And the reason why I connect that conspiratorial framing of Zionism back to a lot of white folks, white liberals, white leftists, is because it allows them to remain virtuous and not reflect on America's own history of genocide and how they fit into it. It's a framing to allow them to still be the heroes of the day, even when they're literally the villains.

It allows them, like a grant partner, to say, "Hey, 

I might've been part of the problem, but now I'm gonna be part of the solution." 

And all this other shit, just ignore it. Just pay no attention to the other things that clearly say that this is not the case. In short, this is white savior shit. A lot of it. Not all of it, not everyone, but a lot of it, and I'm tired of it, and I regret the fact that it took me to submit myself to racial abuse from a bunch of crack- one thing I said years ago before any of this was serious, is that once you've been around the block with white allies, you recognize that they often don't care about you as much as they say they do. Again, word to Hubert Harrison. They just care that you represent a proxy for their fight against each other most of the time.

They will use the premise that they're fighting for a good cause to troll other, usually white, people that they don't like on Twitter. They'll literally act like Nazis, and then when people reasonably say, "Hey, stop that bullshit," they'll cry that they're being tone policed. And y'all are so unserious, and it's my fault for allowing that unseriousness to put me in this position, to have to be like, "All right."

I'm good. And just one last thing, get it off my chest. White leftists, I like y'all. Sometimes I love y'all, but I'm not one of y'all, and I've never been, and I've never been unclear about this. I don't have a white guilt savior complex. I didn't come to these politics through college. I came to them through life.

I don't seek out strong, fatherly male figures in my political outlook. I don't have the challenge of processing and unpacking whiteness in the imperial core like y'all do, but don't actually do the work to do. I'm not scared of losing y'all as an audience or losing access to any future or current opportunities because of any political positions I hold.

so, so let's try and understand some of the broader causes here, right? Because when you see the decline of the center left, and by the way, also on the center right, which is interesting, right? We used to talk just about the story of decline of social democrats, but when you look at Christian democratic parties around the world, whether or not, held up by two party, two-party systems, they're also doing very badly.

But when we're seeing this happen in all of these different countries at the same time, you must think that there's some kind of common cause. So let me throw out a few potential long-term causes and see w- what you both think about this, right? One is it's just about social media, right? You just can't win- As a moderate in the age of social media, it just, favors polarization and a move to the extremes, right?

The second is, the center-left always won when, it was trying to complete and build the welfare state. and in a way, the center-left has become a victim of its own success because as the welfare state has become more and more complete in most countries, with a perhaps interesting footnote of United States, there's just less to fight for.

The third is, the rise of a highly educated cosmopolitan, uh, middle class. historically, the left claims to fight for the simple man, the man in the street, the person without the fancy education, but when you look today in virtually every one of the countries we've discussed, it is actually being highly educated and having a high income which predicts voting for center-left parties, which is the exact inverse of its historical patterns.

which of these three things is going on? Did I miss something? Is it something totally different? 

I'd probably add a fourth. but I think they've all got a contribution to make, in my view. I think the third hits on something which is more fundamental, which is that I think that our societies have completely changed and are constantly changing in terms of, their social class structure and how people relate to politics as a result of that, because the jobs that they do that have changed, the lives that they lived have changed.

In Britain, the big change has been we had a two-party system, which basically reflected our kind of old British class system. And as class has changed over the past really forty years or so, as the economy has been transformed, due in our case to the loss of major manufacturing, it changed class dynamics, but the parties didn't really change with it, and now they are just hurtling to catch up.

Meanwhile, we have new dynamics coming in of, as you say, the attitudes and values of younger people turbocharged by, social media and technological advance. fundamentally, to me, it's about a kind of economic change in our societies that is, causing a lot of this fragmentation, because essentially our economies look different.

Politics has been painfully slow to catch up with any of that, and in British politics, where you ought to have two-party system, that's our whole system is really predicated that you can win on whatever. We had a thirty-four percent vote share in the UK and Britain, at the last election, but we won a huge majority in parliament.

We just saw in our local elections the equivalent of, our midterms. really, it was like a five-party election. That's what the voting produced, because this fragmentation that's happening everywhere is only beaten by the center-left when you're able to, build a coalition that is big enough to beat your rival, usually the center-right party, which is what we did in twenty twenty-four, but which we are losing, in power.

So I always think it's interesting to look at exceptional cases and try to see what's different there, right? So in, in Canada, they have social media, they have a rising educated middle class, they have, increasing salience of different kind of issue set. but there you have a center left that's doing very well lately, and that, not only won an election, but is gaining steam in office.

And I think the big difference there is that, some of Donald Trump's decisions turned, the Liberal Party of Canada into the, the National Party of Canada, into a, a- 

and a few months before the election, looked very likely the Liberals were going to lose- Yes ... and it's only because Trump picked a very stupid fight with Canada that- and, and, 

and it seemed like they were gonna lose in exactly the way that every other center left regime was going to lose, that people were mad about the carbon tax, they were mad about immigration, et cetera.

And so Carney, he made moves on policy, right? he made moves to the center on immigration and energy issues, but he didn't suffer massive defections from the left because standing up to Trump was seen as standing up for the kinds of cosmopolitan values that younger, left-wing, more educated people care about.

But then he was also embracing Canadian patriotism, Canadian national identity, and he was embracing, frankly, democracy, which was just like people wanted less immigration after there had been a lot of immigration, so he turned the dials down. And, they had a bad GDP number yesterday, and he said, one reason for this is we had fewer immigrants," which is true.

But, he was... He's doing what people want, and but, cosmopolitan-minded progressives want him to win because they hate Donald Trump. 

so cool story, but is there any lesson to be learned from this if you don't happen to have the misfortune and perhaps the electoral fortune of being the, small, beleaguered northern neighbor of Donald Trump?

I, I do think that, one lesson is that it is always important to think about national identity and patriotism and how do you play into that. That, one thing that we have on the internet, especially educated people, speak English, we have this global community of ideas, we can come to a conference and talk about our common problems, but there's this sort of like transnational, educated, progressive, cultural identity that many people have gotten very invested in, but that puts i- i-- members of that culture at odds with the majority of the people in their own countries, right?

And so what it will mean in any given place to be rooted in national identity and patriotism, I think varies, but you can see that's actually a very powerful mechanism. people, particularly, a center left party is going to be, in some sense, like a party of the state, right?

And you can't have a party of the state that's not a party of the nation. 

When Build Back Better was on the table, and I went on this and the Democrats got mad at me when I was at the artist formerly known as MSNBC, and I kept questioning how it is that you had Build Back Better that was supposed to not just have bridges and roads that were gonna go mostly to big contractors and subcontractors who were already government contractors and already rich.

The second half of that was supposed to be money for free preschool, for, subsidized childcare, for things that women and children needed to make ordinary people's lives a little bit easier. That all got cut out, and the progressives, the squad who y'all get so mad at, they were ordered to vote for that shit, and if they didn't vote for it, they were demonized for not voting for it because they separated it because Joe Manchin...

Let's remember the history. Joe Manchin said, "I won't vote for that half. Just give me the infrastructure. I just will vote for infrastructure." They separated- 

And then what was the response? "Okay, let's vote for this one first, and then we'll go for that one after- They said they were 

gonna do 

it in two

'cause the Republicans said we'll do, they'll run with us. And, oh, okay. 

They 

lied. 

And once they separated it, the Build Back Better piece was already dead. The minute you separated it, and this was the warning that the progressive caucus gave to the main caucus. The progressives said, "If you separate Build Back Better away from big infrastructure will pass because Republicans can check that box off, go home and take credit for the bridges."

But the other piece, the piece for the women and children, for the young people, for Head Start, for Meals on Wheels, for old people, the stuff that was actually gonna enrich people's lives and make being in America a little easier, that shit got left by the side of the road. And who were the bad guys? The progressives for saying no.

Who got demonized? The progressives for saying, "That's not good enough for my people. I can't vote for the bill one without bill two. Put them back together." They were literally ordered to vote for it. They wanted obedience from those people, but those people weren't saying... Their job wasn't to be obedient.

Their job was to do the right thing for their constituents. They got demonized for it. When those people in the little progressive caucus, the Summer Lee and the, and the AOCs and the, and the, what's the brother in, in New York City, and, and Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman, they said, "Can we just not spend this money on bombs, bombing little Brown kids and little Black and Brown, and little, little tan kids in Israel?

Can we just not spend that? Can we not spend that money and keep that money here so we can feed our people? We come from some of the poorest districts where people are needy. Can we just take that 3 billion and not give it to Israel for bombs, and take that money and cull it back and do America first?"

And they were called almost demonic, and Apex said, "Take them out." And the, the, the leadership said, "You know what?" we can help you a little. they weren't that excited to help them stay in 'cause they're not obedient. You know what a progressive is? A disobedient Democrat. It's Al Green.

he said he's a liberated Democrat? I'm a liberated Democrat, 'cause liberated Democrats are not obedient to the li- W- the leadership's supposed to be obedient to the people, not the other way around. Y'all want obedience. You don't want our passion, you want our obedience. You want us to obey you.

We should not obey, and I'm gonna say the last thing before I get to Moment of Joy. As voters, we have to stop being obedient, and we have to start being powerful, because the only way that elected officials stay in office is us. We're the voters. We have the power. We can't just lope into the, the midterms sad and obedient and saying, "Fine, we'll vote for the Democrats.

We know they're not gonna do anything. We know nothing will change, but at least they're not Trump. At least they're not Trump. Trump, Trump. Trump is bad." I, we didn't even play Trump talking in this show, and you heard all the horrible... Look at all the horrible... He's, he also is horrible. He's horrible, but he is a cog in the wheel.

The bad guys are the people who are operating Trump like a puppet. He is the puppet that they're letting have money and crypto wealth and billions and a stupid plane and letting him tinker with the White House, and now he's doing the columns, and he's destroying Washington, DC. He's like a child running through DC, destroying it, and they're letting him do that while the bad guys are running the country.

The truly evil people, as Ibram X. Kendi tried to say, are tricking white working-class people into working against their own economic interests so they can keep 10 Brown people out of Walmart and keep, four little trans kids around the country who they'll never meet from kicking a freaking soccer ball.

And they've got them so mesmerized by that, and they're all watching Fox like zombies, worried that, "Oh my God, a trans girl is gonna kick a soccer ball. I've gotta stop her. She's in another state. I'll never meet her, but I gotta stop her." And they're so mesmerized and hypnotized by anti-Black racism and hypnotized by women are out of control and misogyny and bullshit that's not even helping them.

And then you go and you look at your life, and your life ain't shit. Your life looks like the reflecting pool. It's shi- i- it's swampy. It's a mess. And Trump is getting rich, and you're getting poor. And some people are waking up, and they're so afraid of that, that they're like, "We gotta pass the Save America Act to make it impossible for these people to vote," 'cause these people are catching on to what we doing.

They're catching on to the scam. Where are my scamming ass at? In Washington, DC. That's where your scamming ass are at. The scammers are in DC. And people are waking up and being like, "Ew, maybe that song is an anthem." They're like, "Oh my God, the scammers are scamming me, and then I'm so busy worried about, Black people or Brown people or immigrants, I'm getting scammed."

And so Democrats, don't think that, that playing into complacency and just telling us, "Put on the blue jersey and shut the hell up," that's gonna help you win. No, you need passion on your side. You need people who say, "I'm passionate about changing the leadership in the House and Senate to people who are gonna change my life.

I'm changing the leadership not to put a blue jersey on, but to literally change my life. I want my life to materially change. Promise me change, something real. What's gonna happen when you get the gavels? What are you gonna do? Who's going to jail, Mitch? Who's getting thrown in that jail if they don't come testify?

Who's getting subpoenaed? At least give me that. Give me what you're gonna do to these people. We need it to stop. We want the pain to stop." All right? so we're not saying we don't want the Democrats to take... Of course we do. We don't want these idiots keeping control. They are morons, and they're literally simps for Trump, and they're simps for not even the boss.

How pathetic do you have to be that you are simps for the un- You're not e- He's not even the boss. Peter Thiel is the boss. Palantir is the boss. Elon's the boss. What'd you say? Literally, the boss lives in Argentina. They're think... Trump isn't the bo- Y'all think Trump the boss? Is Steven Miller the boss? No.

Donald Trump, they're letting him play in traffic and take money while they're literally rinsing this country dry. They're literally, they're selling it for parts. They're selling America for parts, and while you guys are so distracted by Trump's latest idiotic thing he's saying or the other stupid pronouncement he makes, we're gonna be in a forever war in Iran that's literally enriching a small group of people, including Palantir, who want forever war.

It's their business. They've said it. Their business is war. They love Israel 'cause Israel's always at war. Why do you think they love Israel? Because they like Jewish people? No. They like Israel 'cause they're always at war. They can test their m- their war shit on them. They can let the war shit be used on people they really don't care about, Palestinians.

they're just literally fodder to drop bombs on so we can see what the bombs do, like what we did to Japan in World War II. We're gonna see what the bombs will do. Let's drop them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one cares about them. And so they're still doing that. We're get- We're suckers.

We're all being suckered. Okay, I'm gonna stop. They're be- we're being suckered every minute, and I do mean MAGA too, and some of them are figuring out. Not all of them are getting suckered. Some of them are figuring it out. I'm getting suckered, too. They stealing from me as well. The worst thing that could ha- You know why they killed Fred Hampton?

'Cause Fred Hampton went over to them racist white people and said, "Guess what? Y'all broke like me." And then he went over to them, them Chicanos, and he said, "Guess what? Oh, yeah, y'all broke, too." And all the white racist people and the Chicano people looked at that Black man and said, "You know what? We should team up."

And they were like, "Yeah, he gotta die." "Yeah, he's gotta die." Nightmare. Is the working class all rising up against the super rich? Point, yeah, the working class includes, pretty much, doctors and lawyers that are also broke. everyone's broke, and they've taken all the money, and they've run away with it.

They've run away with it. Oh, no, they already got y'all. So you think that they got all your names. They are about to do full surveillance. Palantir has your Social Security number, all of your data. They are watching you in the street. They are watching you through your phone. They've already got the secret surveillance state.

It is established and set up. Next, they're gonna merge our military with Israel's military so they can start using the IDF's tactics on our streets, which they're already doing. They killed that poor man in Houston for driving a van. They killed Priti and Good for walking in the street or driving.

They're gonna k- they're g- they, they're busting in people's houses. They killing at will. They got the men walking around in masks, the new Klan that are probably all gonna be working at your Social Security office. They're gonna be at your VA. They're gonna take off them little masks, and they're gonna take them diapers off their faces and suddenly be administered in the federal government.

Y'all gonna be like, "What happened to my check?" That's what happened to your check, a bunch of incompetent racists are in charge. And if the Democrats sit there and say, "What we're gonna do about that is, we're gonna try to get 60 votes in the Senate, and, if we can get 60 votes, then maybe we can pass a, a bill to study, what's happening."

Stop. "And then, see, after that, we're gonna, we're gonna really, methodically try to do a bipartisan bill." 

Mm, yeah. We gotta get the Republican support on this. 

Yeah, and we're gonna, we're gonna see if we can get some of our friends on the other side of the 

aisle too. Yeah, 'cause we, we have to make their peoples happy.

I mean- Yeah. 

Yeah. 

You 

know, we wanna try to get back the working classes. Yeah. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna s- 

We're gonna basically go back to what we've been doing since 1970. Yeah. We're trying to win back the... 

we got- A strongly worded letter. Ooh, I see that. yes. Melinda's got an excellent idea, Jason.

Yeah. She said we ought to write a strongly worded- Yeah. And see the letter is gonna be written in all caps so they really know that we're serious. 

And then we need to go get, $50 billion for some consultants to, Photoshop it and, see if it- Some politics 

ASMR. 

literally it's And if y'all d- And you can do that. and look, honestly, it's not my party. I'm not in charge. If that's what you wanna do it. But if you don't win that way, don't blame, don't... 'Cause what I'm saying is what people want is s- they want, they... Graham Platner, obviously a, not a great guy, okay?

But what he was doing on that stump is he was speaking into people's soul and their need. And people want that same energy. They want the passion. They want somebody who's just "I don't give a boop. I'ma go up there and fight like a junkyard dog for the working man." 

l-l-let's try and bring a little bit of optimism into this conversation towards the end. I don't want you all to go into lunch too depressed.

what are three things that we can learn from center-left parties, center-left movements, center-left candidates around the world? what are things that the Labour Party or the Democrats should do, perhaps that they already do, perhaps that they don't do, that can be, differences in how they present themselves.

It can be particular policies. It can be how they govern. why don't we start with you, Claire? 

Yeah, I think, to, to Matt's point, like being not the other is not enough, and not the other is not just your opponent, but not just distancing yourself from the sort of leftist parts that are not electable.

having a positive offer on the economy is the fundamental thing that the parties need to do, and there's a bunch of other things they need to do. But if they can do one thing, and it has got to be of and speak for your average working American. And, for us it might have been like the energy rebates, the, tax on the oil and gas giants for an energy rebate.

your cost of living, your sort of totemic policy will be, for you. But it cannot be just the amount you spend or an output or a process. It has got to be something which, gives people, when they have the feeling of wanting to be open to voting for the Democrats again, they have a feeling that is the sort of thing that works for them.

It's not transactional. It's more an emotional, representation that you get their lives, you get what's important, and this is a thing you can do. And actually, you've got candidates who are talking, and representatives all through the day who are giving you examples, like that, so taking some inspiration from those local state, representatives into, the next election.

So just tell me a little bit more about what that positive offer on the economy might be, because one form of it is an offer of welfare spending, right? Which w-what often center-left parties have done, but I don't know that manages to bring in new voters. The other kind of thing is just, "We're gonna make the economy grow," right?

W-we're just gonna be a lot better than that. Now, perhaps that's easy when you run against a somewhat dysfunctional government, but people will probably mistrust that as well. so how do you thread the needle between we're just gonna spend more money, which I don't think has always been a winning message for left-wing parties- Yeah

and, I promise you that things magically are gonna be better, that voters might disbelieve? 

Yeah, and it might be a tax cut that is funded through... it, it doesn't have to be just about spending money. It can also be-- But it has to be absolutely focused on the economic circumstances, the, we'd call them the kind of kitchen table or pocketbook issues.

yeah, we used to call it free microwaves. You don't always give tho- wanna give th-the stuff away. Australians were in a better position to do that. But I think the, those are the sorts of examples, whether it's a tax cut for workers, even if it's, a tax raise elsewhere to pay. It's something of where people are feeling that pressure point for...

Yeah, for us it might have been on energy bills. for the Australians actually it was about solar panels 'cause that's something they can do because, it- it's thinking creatively- Sun. Yeah, the sun. Exactly. It's thinking creatively about how you can use the power of the state with a lot of the time it has to be kinda pro-market solutions, but, ultimately not overcomplicating it.

listen to what it is people want and have something that speaks to them about it. The Aussies also had, urgent care centers, so that was something that was being roll out, rolled out. government is doing stuff all the time. It's spending money all the time. It's not always about additional spending, but it is articulating that in a way that actually says to people, "We can't do everything as government, but here are some things that we can do."

Matt, if one of the 37 people thinking for running for the Democratic nomination 2028 came to you, and I'm sure about 21 of them have, to ask their advice about the three top things that they should do, what would those three top things be? 

you just gotta come to Welcome Fest all the time.

No, I think to, really decisively say, to commit to the idea that you are going to prioritize people's material wellbeing in your policymaking, which doesn't mean that you need to do, a giant socialist program. It means that on questions that are tangential to the economy, you need to ask yourself, is this thing people are asking me to do, i- is that in the material interest of working-class Americans?"

And a lot of times, it's gonna mean doing less, or just doing things that are like, y- if we didn't have all the stuff at the CVS locked up because we locked up criminals instead, that would make people better off, right? And then, the Australia case, I think a fascinating thing about the way Albanese has managed that is a lot of his initiatives are relatively modest in scale.

But they just learned, as a communications discipline, to make a big deal out of them, right? you don't need to spend a trillion dollars to have people pay attention to the thing that you're doing. You should come up with some ideas that are good to do and then make a big deal out of them, right? it doesn't need to be, like, earth-shattering.

We have all these sort of blah governors who are super-duper popular because they're, like, competent, and they show up at disaster relief, and they pave the roads and stuff. people's expectations of government are, in some ways, very low, and, we can just try to exceed them. 

I- is part of this that Democrats just have to become more comfortable expressing anger at things that we all think are dysfunctional, but that might be somewhat right-coded?

I can see that if you advise the Democratic presidential candidate that they should just express anger at the fact that everything is locked up at CVS, they might think, "I don't know. that kind of sounds like a right-wing thing to do. I'm not gonna do it." 

But, I, I think, successful-- Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, right?

you don't wanna exactly repeat the formulas that people used in the '90s, but it's you can just agree with conservatives about certain things. that's okay. right? And then, see, it gives definition to what it is we're talking about. If we're saying, we're on the side of working people," that's how we differ from these right-wing parties that only care about billionaires or whatever.

So that means you could just agree with them about something that's completely tangential, to those core aspects of economic conflict. 

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

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