Air Date: 5–30-2026

Today we examine how Trump turned a sham lawsuit into a $1.8 billion reward fund for his political allies who attacked the Capitol on January 6th while implementing a counterterrorism strategy that erases right-wing extremism from the threat landscape, refocuses on left-wing violence that hardly exists and threatens to "find and kill" those they deem enemies.

Full Show Notes

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

Today we examine how Trump turned a sham lawsuit into a $1.8 billion reward fund for his political allies who attacked the Capitol on January 6th while implementing a counterterrorism strategy that erases right-wing extremism from the threat landscape, refocuses on left-wing violence that hardly exists and threatens to "find and kill" those they deem enemies. For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 60 minutes today include

Trump's Terms

Legal AF

Democracy Now!

The NPR Politics Podcast

Here & Now Anytime

The Intercept Briefing

and The Hartmann Report

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 3 sections;

Section A, ANATOMY OF THE HEIST

Section B, THE BIGGER PATTERN

Section C, ENEMIES OF THE STATE

And now, on to the show.

The IRS won't investigate the past tax returns of President Trump, his family, or his businesses. That's part of a settlement signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, ending a lawsuit brought by the president against his own government. Blanche spent much of a Senate hearing Tuesday defending that settlement and creation of a fund to pay people who claim they were targets of politicized prosecutions.

NPR's Ryan Lucas reports. The nearly $1.8 billion pot of taxpayer money, dubbed the Anti-Weaponization Fund by the Justice Department, was created as part of a settlement agreement with President Trump, who in return dropped his lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Democrats had blunt words for Blanche about the arrangement.

Here's Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen. Mr. Attorney General, this is an outrageous, unprecedented slush fund that you set up. And Washington Senator Patty Murray. This is corruption that has never been more blatant or more right spent. What is happening is you write the check, Trump and his cronies cash it, American taxpayers, who are already being whacked with high prices, are gonna foot the bill.

Under the agreement, the fund will be administered by a five-member commission who will decide who receives payouts and in what amount. Four of the commissioners will be appointed by the attorney general, while a fifth will be appointed by the attorney general in consultation with Congress. President Trump can remove any commissioner at any time.

In his testimony, Blanche defended the setup and said it was unusual but necessary. There is an unprecedented nature of what we did yesterday in response to years and years of weaponization. He pointed to the multiple indictments against President Trump after his first term in office, including the two federal cases against him for mishandling classified documents and attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Blanche served as Trump's personal defense attorney in both of those cases. Democrats and a few Republicans pressed Blanche on who would be eligible for payments out of the fund. In response, Blanche said it's open to anyone who believes they were a victim of weaponization. It's not limited to Republicans.

It's not limited to Democrats. It's not limited to January 6th, defendants. It's, it's limited, only by the term weaponization. Under questioning, Blanche would not rule out potential payments to Trump campaign donors or January 6th Capitol rioters, including people convicted of violently assaulting police.

Trump himself will not receive a direct payout from the fund, but the IRS is barred from pursuing any claims or actions against him, his family, or businesses now or in the future.

we got a fast-moving docket down in Florida in the Trump versus Internal Revenue Service, basically Trump versus Trump, where he controls the Internal Revenue Service, he controls the Department of Justice, all to set up this slush fund for himself for $1.776 billion. And now standing between that and it happening is one Judge Williams, who I know well in Miami At the moment that we said coming off the weekend from Legal AF that Trump would try to avoid having to file the required jurisdictional brief with the judge because the judge basically said, "I don't see how this-- there are adversarial parties here.

I see this as Trump versus Trump in effect, one dominating over the other," and required a brief or two from the IRS from Donald Trump. No, they've been working overtime internally at the Internal Re-Revenue Service to try to settle the case. But how do you settle a phony case? That's always been the problem.

I pointed that out on Legal AF for the last month. Without a legitimate good faith lawsuit, Donald Trump has nothing to trade in consideration for the settlement, and therefore, he'd have to find another statute or he'd just be robbing the treasury of money to set up a slush fund that he controls through a phony commission.

And he's involved his own Department of Justice, which he also controls as the chief legal officer, and they're in on the conspiracy as well. That's the premise of the briefing by the ninety-three members of the House who are Democrats, led by Jamie Raskin, and filed by a friend of mine as local counsel, Andre Rivero from Rivero Mestre.

Let's get to these filings. Trump files first a notice of voluntary dismissal under Rule forty-one. He says he doesn't need the court's permission, and she can't take any other action. I'm not so sure about that because if you fraudulently file in order to fraudulently settle, I think the federal judge has inherent authority to not be used to administer justice, to bring the lawyers like Alejandro Brito representing Donald Trump, the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, the parties before her, in order to show cause and determine whether she's been had or not.

See, she should not be used this way, and there should be a hearing over it, and that's what the new motion filed by the ninety-three Democrats is asking her to do. They're asking that their amicus brief be accepted, and in their amicus brief, they say the following on pages, twelve and thirteen and fourteen.

That's really the heart of the matter. They say there in section two, this is now the Democrats writing to Judge, Williams, the DOJ lacks authority to settle this collusive suit once establishing that the suit is collusive. If this court determines that this is a collusive suit, meaning there's no true adversarial parties here, they're all in cahoots, then the DOJ would lack authority, legal authority to settle it on behalf of the defendant agencies or the United States for two reasons.

First, they say there are particular statutes that are implicated, and they don't apply nor give the power that Trump wants. There's the Judgment Fund statute 31 U.S.C. 1304, which has specific, constraints that foreclose a corrupt settlement, particularly if it's a compromise settlement, which is what this would appear to be, then the attorney general cannot compromise a settlement unless there is a legitimate obligation or liability or imminent litigation that he's settling.

But if it's been withdrawn already and it's phony from the start, then it cannot be the basis of a compromise settlement, so the argument goes. They say on the, bottom half of page 13 A feigned or collusive suit over which the court has no jurisdiction, and one that has been voluntarily dismissed already on Monday, is not fact, is not actual or imminent litigation.

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Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. They then say, look, the second reason it can't be settled and it's a fraud is because it would violate the domestic Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which applies to the president. Article II, Section 1, Clause 7 says that other than his paycheck, that a president cannot receive any other emolument.

When you hear emolument, think benefit, profit, gift, reward, anything of value from the United States or any of them other than his paycheck. And they're saying that this violates, this one point seven billion dollar slush fund creation gives him benefits, to benefit his cronies, political benefits, other benefits, both monetary and non-monetary, that he is not entitled to and then violates the Emoluments Clause.

This is going to be-- we're gonna be reporting on the next wave of lawsuits. This will be the template for them. This was a brief, but there's going to be a lawsuit. The lawsuit's brought by maybe the very same people, Democracy Defenders and Norm Eisen and Matt Platkin, former New Jersey attorney general, and others.

will be bringing suits and they'll argue that this is a violation of the Emoluments Clause. It'll be the second one in a week. There's a case in Miami as well brought by local residents in Miami against the Trump library, casino convention center, whatever it's supposed to be, in Miami, as also a violation because they got a $300 million piece of property for free from Miami Dade College, whose entire endowment is the same value of what they gave up through Ron DeSantis in order for him to build a 50-story building.

That's a violation of the Emoluments Clause, don't you think? And that case is in Miami as well, which we're following very closely. I like this filing, and the way it is argued about the fraudulent and conspiratorial nature and improper purpose of all of it. They say at the top of their filing, and it's very well-researched-- Here's wh- how they start.

"The amici curiae are 93 members of the United States House of Representatives. They are interested in this case because they took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. The president is attempting to undermine the Constitution by bringing this collusive suit against the federal government contrary to the requirement that federal courts may only hear cases or controversies.

The Department of Justice is entrusted with defending the United States against claims under these laws and ensuring that the statutory requirements are met before money is paid. However, the DOJ has colluded with President Trump and his allies, and in doing so, abdicated these responsibilities. Should this lawsuit achieve plaintiff's desired ends, it would result in the improper and unconstitutional transfer of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of the president, his family, and his allies.

Having taken oaths to uphold the def-- and defend the Constitution, the movants cannot stand by and let the Constitution's provisions go ignored." We agree.

Can you respond to these developments, the anti-weaponization fund the Trump family and President Trump himself be- being, protected from any future investigation into their finances and corruption?

This is, dictatorship in action. Donald Trump had declared himself to be our dictator shortly after resuming office last year. He has been acting like a dictator. Now, he hasn't fully consolidated his power, and there are various places, where people have pushed back on him. But he is conducting himself as a dictator, and what he now has is a fund with an interesting number, $1.776 billion, to arm, his goon squads, people like, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, to carry out, acts of violence or intimidation against people on his behalf, with no accountability for who receives this money, no rationale for it, and he's able to do this because, at least for the moment, our Constitution doesn't have adequate safeguards to address what happens when you have the third-generation head of a four-generation white collar crime boss in the White House, and his personal lawyer, who by, law is still Donald Trump's lawyer, Blanche, as the acting attorney general Talk about this fund.

Again, $1.776 billion. Of course, I emphasize that because it's 1776. Under this fund, a five-member board appointed by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, would decide who gets the money. There would be no public notification of this and accounting for it, only a confidential report to Todd Blanche or whoever is attorney general at the time.

There's no rules that would prohibit, as Senator Van Hollen pointed out, those who assaulted police officers, from receiving money. And this is simply a slush fund to pay a criminal enforcement arm, a violent arm of Trump supporters to intimidate people. And remember, Donald Trump always described his failed effort to overthrow our government in, 2021 as a day of love.

Only Donald Trump and people who believe that he should be our dictator would, of course, see it that way Let's go back to Tuesday's Senate hearing. Acting Attorney Todd Blanche, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was questioned by Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. Has it ever happened that a sitting president sued his own government for $10 billion and then directed the settlement of the case and the establishment of a payout fund?

Not that I'm aware, but there's a lot of things that President Trump's the first of. No president had been indicted one, two, three, four, five- Correct ... six, seven, eight times either. Correct. No president's been indicted. And will you commit that none of this money will go to President Trump's campaign donors?

I am not committing to anything beyond the settlement agreement itself. When you say campaign donors, that they are not excluded from seeking compensation if they were injured. Last question. During Police Week, I heard from a number of law enforcement friends who found it appalling that there was the possibility that folks like the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys who had assaulted Capitol Police officers could receive multi-million dollar payouts from this fund.

Will you commit that no one who has been convicted of assaulting a police officer will receive a payout from this fund? So I share the concerns that apparently members of law enforcement gave to you last week, although none of this was announced last week, so that's surprising. But, except that- They had heard rumors there would be a settlement fund.

Okay. But anybody can apply. The commission will set, the commissioners will set rules, I'm sure. That's not for me to set, that's for the commissioners. And, and whether an individual Oath Keeper, as you just mentioned, applies for compensation, is... Anybody in this country can apply.

And of course, it was pointed out that the administration, Todd Blanche, President Trump's former personal attorney, can fire any of the commissioners as well. But your response overall, David Cay Johnston? I think this setup is, completely contrary to law. The problem is who has standing, that is, the right to intervene and try to stop it.

Now, the IRS makes settlements with people, and they promise the de- this is closed. We're not gonna continue this anymore. But the fact that this agreement includes this side agreement that the, Trump organization, Donald Trump, members of his family may not be examined on their past tax returns just screams that Donald Trump is in fact a criminal level tax cheat.

Now this is not the only avenue to address Donald Trump's tax cheating, and this is a man who we know from the tax returns that have been made public because of the House Democrats led by Richard Neal and the leak, as well as the ones I found in the public record, that Donald Trump has been creating non-existent companies, just made-up fictitious companies and taking, tax l- losses that reduced his taxes for all the way back to at least 1984.

That's a pattern of criminal behavior that establishes what's called mens rea or criminal intent. Now the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, or the New York State Attorney General, Letitia James, they can go after Trump over his state and city taxes. And, twice in the past, judges have found that Donald Trump committed tax fraud.

These were civil, not criminal cases. They included, Trump forging the signature of his, tax preparer, his longtime tax lawyer and tax accountant, which could've been prosecuted as a crime. And I've written a piece, it ran in the New York Daily News three years ago, showing how Alvin Bragg could easily get Donald Trump convicted of criminal tax fraud if he would bring such a case, and of course they can also pursue it civilly.

But as it stands, Donald Trump, basically will now not have to pay the, what the New York Times estimates is more than $100 million, and I think that's a very conservative number, in taxes that, from the past and he will get a walk on what are clearly from the released tax returns felony level tax crimes.

Let's start the roundup of this week's news on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers were set to vote on a budget package, but Eric, that didn't happen and now they've all gone home.

What went on? Yeah, they took a week off, basically. They're going home and they're gonna raise money and they're gonna talk to constituents and hold town halls and all that stuff. But essentially, President Trump had set a June 1st deadline for this budget bill. It's immigration enforcement funding, and it's supposed to be for three years so that this doesn't get turned into a political football like we saw earlier this year.

And the Senate had until June 1st, but since they're off next week, they needed to do it- this week, and they just didn't. They were mad about two things, one of which was the president is asking for a billion dollars in Secret Service funding to secure his ballroom project. But that's proved a tough ask because the president has long said that what was supposed to be just a $400 million project would be funded entirely through private donations.

The bigger one was a $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund out of the Department of Justice that the president said was going to be used to pay reparations to people who had been somehow targeted unjustly by the government for persecution. The thing with the anti-weaponization fund is, sure, there are some Republican lawmakers who support this.

It even could be, in a hypothetical world, the majority of them. But when majorities are so small in both the House and the Senate, you only need one, two, maybe three people opposing something to make it a non-starter, and there are way more than that right now. We should be clear, though, the Justice Department was not asking permission of Congress to create this fund.

They created this fund using an existing process, and then that became a problem anyway. Yeah, I would say there's the political problem, and then there's the constitutional problem. The political problem is that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified before Congress this week and suggested that this money could in fact be used to make payments to January 6th Capitol rioters, and lawmakers were threatened by Capitol rioters.

Some of them attacked police. This is not a very popular proposition on the Hill, I would say, from conversations that I have had. Then there's the constitutional problem, which is basically that Article One, Section Nine of the US Constitution gives Congress the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent.

That power does not rest with the president. Congress did not appropriate this money. The president unilaterally decided how to do it, which according to constitutional scholars I've talked to, including Gerard Magliocca of Indiana University, makes this unconstitutional of a thing to do. Yeah, I think that one word sort of defines this week and what's going on both with President Trump and some of the lawmakers who are defying him.

YOLO, and it's not even a word, but we talked about it earlier this week. You only live once, might be thought of, as Stephen Fowler said earlier this week, you only lose once. Yeah. Because there are people who Trump has targeted who are now essentially fine with going against him, Republicans, people like Bill Cassidy, the senator from Louisiana, who lost his, primary race, didn't make the runoff, and now voted with Democrats, on a resolution that would limit Trump's ability to wage war with Iran.

Thomas Massie, representative from Kentucky, who, really has been a thorn in Trump's side on many issues, including on Iran, but also on the Epstein files, and he pledged that he's got seven months left, and he's gonna continue to press on what he wants to press forward on. And you're seeing also Republicans in districts that are, swing districts that are saying that they don't like this anti-weaponization bill.

And then when you have Trump YOLOing it and going and endorsing someone like Ken Paxton, the conservative, very MAGA firebrand, in Texas, who's the attorney general in the state running against incumbent Senator John Cornyn. Senators don't happen to like it when you endorse, people who are challengers to sitting senators.

And then you have, of course, what's happening with the anti-weaponization fund, which could see payouts for people who rioted at the Capitol on January 6th. So you want people to now say, "We are gonna give money to people who were convicted of, trying to attack us, and also you want to attack our sitting senators and get them out politically."

We-- I think we've seen a line here from, Senate Republicans. I think that the feeling coming out of the White House earlier this week was like, Trump is winning. He is firing on all cylinders. He is vanquishing his enemies. And then there's the other side of that, which is that he's making people mad, people who he actually needs in order to enact his agenda.

I'll add one other person to this YOLO caucus. This is North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis. He is retiring this year. I think that had he run, Trump probably would have challenged him, but he opted not to run, and he has been speaking freely, He was interviewed by reporters in the hallways in the Capitol yesterday.

This clip was aired by CNN, and he went off on that $1.8 billion weaponization fund. He said, "These people don't deserve restitution. Many of them deserve to be in prison." And he called it stupid on stilts. This is beyond the pale. This is not good for my colleagues. There's not one positive thing that could be spun out of this between now and November.

And I will say it's not just people who are somehow on Trump's enemies list. It's also folks like Senate Republican Majority Leader John Thune. This is a man who, when asked on Thursday what he thought of this fund, what Congress was going to do about it, he said, "I think that the administration has a lot of questions to answer about it."

And so it's, that's not a ringing endorsement from the man who's whipping votes to make sure your agenda gets passed in the Senate. I think the fact is Trump misread the room. He thought that his grievances were the Republican Party's grievances writ large, when a lot of what Republican members of Congress have been doing is ducking from Trump and saying they didn't read the Truth Social post, or they want to avoid his ire.

And, I think that the White House thought that this would be something that they would go along with, and clearly they were not willing to go along with this. And, Trump went on Truth Social and talked about how this is him trying to help people, and he gave up a lot of money potentially because there was gonna be a possible settlement between him and the Justice Department, but instead he wanted to make this charitable and help people who had been weaponized against like he had been.

And I just think that has fallen on totally deaf ears, and it's also hurt his agenda because Republicans adjourning and going home for the Memorial Day weekend instead of voting on, what would've been funding for deportation action, is something that really you know, hurts what Trump has been trying to do from a policy standpoint.

And I'll say two things on that. Part of the reason they can't vote on this immigration agenda is in the Senate, part of this reconciliation process means that anyone can introduce amendments and get them voted on. Yeah. So Democrats were gonna put up a thing targeting the anti-weaponization fund, and I've heard that could have gotten, 30-plus Republican votes to knock down this thing that the president says is important.

And that would've been a huge embarrassment. So instead of being embarrassed, they are disappearing for 10 days, but it's not clear to me what happens when they get back. And Eric, on the House side, they also adjourned to avoid embarrassment. That's right. And so we've seen folks like Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, he's a independent-leaning Republican, I'd say, from a very swingy district in Pennsylvania.

He partnered with Tom Suozzi, they're both heads of this bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, to introduce a bill to say we're getting rid of this anti-weaponization fund. And, they couldn't take a difficult vote on immigration and customs enforcement, only made difficult because of these unrelated things the president was trying to put in.

I think it really highlights that primaries are not general elections, and these are people who are looking toward November, and they're saying, "The president doesn't have our back," and that they've got to be able to sell these things to their constituents. Yeah, I think the theme of much of the action of this week was President Trump doing things that were good for President Trump, or that made President Trump feel good, things that President Trump wanted, like this anti-weaponization fund, owning these people who dared to cross him.

But in the end, it just exposed that it was less about the party and more about him.

The Department of Justice absolutely does not have the authority to be making these payments or setting up this slush fund. To have a settlement, you actually need a valid case or controversy, and the problem that they had with the underlying lawsuit that triggered all this, Donald Trump's lawsuit against the IRS, is that he was on, functionally on both sides of that case.

So there was no case, valid case to settle. But how are Officers Hodges and Dunn harmed here? These were two men who defended the Capitol on January sixth, could have died that day. Officer Hodges was almost killed in particular. But the threat to them hasn't ended. By continuing to speak out about January sixth, they continue to receive credible threats from rioters or their supporters, and the money from this slush fund, if it actually goes out, is gonna endanger them further because it's going to create an endorsement by the president for what these rioters are doing, and it's going to fund their paramilitary and militia activities.

So if this fund continues, it is absol- absolutely gonna increase the danger, for these officers. Officer Hodges testified on Capitol Hill last year about political violence and what happened to him on January 6th, so let's listen to a l- little bit of what he said. I am intimately familiar with political violence, as when I fought to defend the United States Capitol and many of your very lives.

I was beaten, bloodied, crushed, with my eye gouged and my skull smashed with my own baton. And Brendan Blue, you made this case just a moment ago about how this fund will further endanger Officer Hodges', safety. You explained that. What are you seeking in the lawsuit? Any damages? No, not now. What we are trying to do is get the fund dissolved.

The fund doesn't have a legal right to exist. It doesn't have the right to disperse the money that it claims it's going to. The thing to do here is to stop any disbursement of funds and to make sure that the fund ceases to exist. So at a briefing on Tuesday, CNN's Kaitlan Collins asked Vice President JD Vance why he won't rule out giving taxpayer money to anyone who assaulted a police officer on January 6th.

Here's how Vance responded. Because Kaitlan, there are people who I don't know their individual circumstances, and I don't rule things out categorically when I know nothing about a person's in- individual circumstances. Let's say a person is accused, let's just say hypothetically, a person is accused of doing something that it, they never actually did, that they got a kangaroo court, that they had a judge who mistreated them.

I think that we should look at those things case by case. Brendan Blue, what do you make of the Vice President's response there? I'm frankly shocked that somebody like JD Vance would say things like that, given that the rioters that we're talking about tried to kill his direct predecessor. These are rioters that we had a 100% success rate in convictions and jury trials.

The people who attacked the Capitol tried to kill those inside, attacked officers, and so forth. None of those convictions were vacated on appeal for polit- as being vindictive or politically motivated. So I think it does an enormous disservice to the officers who risked their lives that day.

I think it does a disservice to the prosecutors who prosecuted those cases, and I think it frankly endangers all of us when he implicitly condones the possibility of political violence. Let me ask you one more question about this fund. Critics, and you're among them, see this as audaciously corrupt.

Trump sues the government that he runs. He settles the lawsuit by, among other things, setting up a scheme to hand over $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to his allies. The Trump administration's response seems to be, "You can't rush to judgment. That's hypothetical. We'll just have to see. No decisions have been made.

No payouts have actually been talked about or made." What's your response to that? I think it's already clear how this money is going to be spent. The president last year said that he supported the idea of paying rioters, and the rioters that the president supports says that they're going to apply for money.

It's entirely consistent with everything that these administration officials have said and with what these rioters have said, that this money is going to go to the people who attacked the Capitol and attacked my clients. Brendan, one of your clients, Harry Dunn, is also a Democratic candidate for a Maryland congressional seat.

Does that complicate his case in any way, perhaps making this lawsuit appear political? No. I've been working with Harry for several years now. We brought a case, against the Architect of the Capitol for refusing to install the plaque, to honor the January 6th officers, as required by law.

He has been speaking out and advocating on this stuff well before he was, running for office. He's running for office because he cares about these things. He's not doing this for a political gain. He's doing this to protect his safety and to protect the safety of his fellow officers.

So on Tuesday, my co-host, Akela Lacy, published a story about Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist who was detained by ICE for protesting in support of Palestinians as a part of the Trump administration's targeting of student protesters.

So I know the story goes into a little bit more detail about that targeting. Maya, what can you tell us about the story? I think a lot of our listeners probably remember this moment last spring when he was detained, and he was one of the first of this group of students that the Trump administration was targeting.

And what Akela's story found was that two days before ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, the FBI had gotten an anonymous tip which accused him of calling for, and this is a quote from the tip, "Violence on behalf of Hamas." Now, we don't really have any detail in th- this document on what the tip is. It came in via a FOIA request that his legal team received and passed on to Akela, and the document is mostly redacted.

But what we do know is that less than two weeks after they got the tip, the FBI closed this investigation, and they found that the tip did not warrant further investigation. But by then, he was already in ICE detention in Louisiana, and the Trump administration was already calling him a Hamas supporter and accusing him of being a supporter of terrorism.

At this point, we now know that the FBI at least had found that allegation was not worth looking into. Yeah, that's really interesting, and it feels like we're gonna be unraveling what actually went behind the Trump administration's targeting of these students. This really fits into broader efforts from the Trump administration to target any of the president's perceived political enemies, both abroad and in the United States.

Exactly. And this week, everyone in the newsroom has really been focused on this project that you've been working on with our colleagues Nick Turse and Noah Horowitz about how the Trump administration is taking that political targeting apparatus to the next level and what the next phase of it will look like.

Could you tell us a little bit more about that project? Yeah. We've been poring through this new counterterrorism strategy that's been handed down from the Trump administration, and I know that sounds incredibly boring, but this is a document laying out the president's strategy for coming after his political enemies in the United States and abroad and potentially giving him the authority to kill his political enemies.

So we've been really looking into this next evolution of President Donald Trump's attempt to label his enemies, so anyone who disagrees with him, as terrorists, and I've now successfully dragged both of my brilliant coworkers onto the show to talk about it. So Nick is a senior reporter covering national security and foreign policy, and Noah is a federal law enforcement reporter.

Let's hear that conversation. Nick, Noah, welcome to the Intercept Briefing. Thanks so much for having us on. Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah. So let's dive right into this project. So last week, the Trump administration released its counterterrorism strategy. The 16-page memo outlines who they view as terrorist threats and priority targets.

So the three of us have been combing through this document for an in-document analysis that we just published. To start, Nick, can you tell us a bit more about this document and the objectives of the administration? I consider this a, a truly foundational document, a genuine distillation of Trumpism as both a movement and a system of governance.

The document is the brainchild of the senior counterterrorism director at the National Security Council, Sebastian Gorka, who's a truly bizarre figure, and whose credentials for the job of counterterrorism czar are highly dubious. This Gorka-led strategy brings together Trump's war on the wider world, which stretches from interventions and wars in, Yemen and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea, and it combines it with the administration's war on dissent at home, which has also been lethal, as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis.

The 2026 counterterrorism strategy puts so-called domestic quote, unquote, "anti-fascist" or Antifa organizations on par with actual terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, as well as with, international drug cartels. And it states that there are three, major types of terrorist threats.

So we're talking about what they call legacy Islamist terrorists, Al-Qaeda and ISIS, narco terrorists like the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, and the supposed violent left-wing extremists, which include, anarchists and anti-fascists The latter are longtime Republican boogeymen that don't actually exist in a real way as, say, urban guerrillas or something like that in the United States.

This is a fictional foe. I think we can consider this strategy a new declaration of war by the Trump administration on its enemies, both foreign and domestic, and both, real and imagined. Yeah, I think that's a really good way to look at this document. If we think about it as a foundational text of the Trump administration, then the foundation of the Trump administration is a politics of vengeance, which I think is borne out in so many of the administration's policies, both at home and abroad.

Noah, I wanna bring you in. One thing that this document does is loosely define who is and who isn't a terrorist. And so I wanna ask you, what did we now learn about who's considered a terrorist? Yeah, so one thing that, that I found really interesting about this document is that it specifically calls out previous weaponizations of government counterterrorism, policy, which is I think a pretty clear reference to the prosecutions of, right-wing groups and specifically participants in January 6th.

As we know, FBI Director Kash Patel, prior to becoming head of the FBI, was very critical of the federal government's policies toward violent right-wing extremists, which statistically have been, a majority of the domestic terrorists in the United States, right? And so this document really explicitly does away with that and explicitly names left-wing groups or left-wing people holding left-wing ideologies as terrorists.

There's a specific line about, doing away with the weaponization of counterterrorism policy against American citizens When in reality, we've seen the very explicit weaponization of counterterrorism policy and rhetoric by this administration against its domestic foes, if you will. Most notably, the language used to describe Alex Pretty and Renee Good in Minneapolis following their deaths, and also the prosecution of nine protesters for their roles in a demonstration outside of an ICE facility in Texas last July.

This is the Prairieland case in which eight defendants were convicted on terrorism charges. They might say that they're, ending the weaponization of counterterrorism against American citizens, but in reality, we've seen a dramatic escalation of it

Republicans found one point eight billion dollars overnight for Trump's thugs, so why are seniors choosing between food and medicine? Over at her Substack, the cartoonist and writer Aubrey Hirsch took a look at Donald Trump's one point eight billion dollar taxpayer-funded anti-weaponization slush fund and did something that should make every Republican in Washington squirm.

She started doing the math. "What if," she asked, "we put that money towards something other than enriching Trump, his family, and the mob he summoned to the Capitol on January 6th?" Her list is devastating. "With that one point seven seven six billion dollars, we could," she writes, "replace fifteen hundred, fifteen, hundred and fifty thousand lead pipes in hundreds of communities, build ten thousand new affordable housing units, establish hundreds of community-owned grocery stores in food deserts, fully fund seventy community mental health clinics for a decade, support tens of thousands of foster youth aging out of care, erase all the sc- stu- school lunch debt in this country for the next nine years, or pay the salaries of two hundred and fifty thousand new teachers for ten years."

Instead, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche blatantly refused to rule out paying chunks of this money to January 6th rioters who assaulted police officers or to Trump himself, and Proud Boys le- leader Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to serve twenty-two years for seditious conspiracy until Trump pardoned him, told Reuters he's planning to apply be- between two and five million dollars.

Two Capitol Police officers who defended the building that day have sued to block the payouts, describing the fund as a taxpayer f- funded slush fund for Trump followers who engaged in violence against cops. Aubrey's framing got me thinking about what else one point eight billion in actual pun- public money could do.

Let me extend her list, because the me- media is failing entirely to put this into a meaningful context. That one point eight billion dollars could cover the average cost of weatherizing and insulating roughly two hundred thousand low-income homes, dropping monthly heating and cooling bills for working families through the kinds of winters Louise and I weathered in Vermont, New Hampshire, Michigan, and now here in Oregon.

But Republicans won't do that because it would require finally forcing Jeff Bezos to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could fund a year of high-quality universal pre-K for roughly a hundred and forty-four thousand three and four-year-olds, the single most cost-effective investment we know of for closing achievement gaps and get- giving working parents a fighting chance.

But Republicans won't do that because it would require f- finally forcing Elon Musk to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could cap the out-of-pocket cost of insulin at zero for every Type 1 diabetic in America for years, ending the rationing that is killing young people whose parents can't choose between rent and a vial.

But Republicans won't do that because it would finally require forcing Mark Zuckerberg to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could pay for a full course of trauma-informed counseling for every one of the roughly four hundred thousand American children currently in foster care with money left over to pay the social workers who are quitting in droves because their caseloads have become unmanageable.

But Republicans won't do that because it would finally require, it would require finally forcing Miriam Adelson, the casino heiress who gave more than a hundred million dollars to put Trump back in the White House, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could fund the entire national school lunch programs free and reduced shortfall for a generation of poor kids, ending the practice of stamping a child's hand or throwing their tray in the trash because mom is two weeks behind on the cafeteria bill.

But Republicans won't do that because it would require finally forcing Timothy Mellon, the reclusive railroad heir who gave a hundred and sixty-five million dollars to elect Donald Trump, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could let the EPA replace something on the order of, three hundred and eighty thousand lead home water pipes at the agency's four hundred-- forty-seven hundred dollar average cost, getting toxic plumbing out from under hundreds of thousands of homes whose kids are right now being poisoned every time they drink from the tap.

But Republicans won't do that because it would require finally forcing Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the Uihlein shipping magnates who poured over a hundred and thirty-three million into MAGA-aligned causes in, in twenty twenty-four, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do It could retrofit every elementary school in America that still has lead paint, asbestos tile, or a roof that leaks every time it rains, the buildings where we are right now sending kids to learn to read.

But Republicans won't do that 'cause it would finally require forcing Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire who spent twelve million just to kill a marijuana legalization initiative in Florida, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could let the VA hire enough mental health professionals to clear the appointment backlog for every veteran in this country, the men and women we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan and then expected to wait six months for a counselor.

But Republicans won't do that 'cause it would require finally forcing Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir founder who personally manufactured the political career of JD Vance, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do. It could buy enough domestic violence shelter beds, hotline funding, and transitional housing to clear the waitlist on, of every shelter in this country-- Oh, that every coun- shelter in this country runs every single night, the battered women and abused children currently sleeping in cars 'cause there's no room and money.

But Republicans won't do that because it would require finally forcing Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, who spent tens of millions propping up the GOP while his firm ga- gobbles up American housing stock and rents it back to working families at extortionate rates, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do.

It could extend rural broadband to every last farm, hollow, and reservation in America that still doesn't have it, the kind of investment Dwight Eisenhower would've signed in a heartbeat and that today's Republicans have repeatedly blocked. But Republicans won't do that because it would require finally forcing Jeff Yass, the trading firm co-founder who gave more than a hundred million to Republican causes in twenty twenty-four and who happens to hold a major stake in TikTok's parent company, to pay income taxes like the rest of us do That's the choice in front of us, and it's not theoretical.

A real one point eight billion dollars sits in a real account taken from real taxpayers, and it's gonna be handed to people who tried to violently overthrow an American election. It's not being handed to the children currently drinking lead in Newark and Flint and Chicago, or the working mother in Louisville who skipped her insulin doses last month, or the veteran in Phoenix who hanged himself in March while waiting for a VA appointment.

The Trump regime has made a choice openly, brazenly on camera, and the choice is to compensate the rioters and let the rest of us drink the lead. The fix isn't complicated, and the ProPublica reporting is now five years old and still ignored. When the twenty-five wealthiest Americans grew their wealth by four hundred and one billion dollars over five years and paid a true federal income tax rate of three point four percent, the money to do all of this exists.

It's sitting in unrealized capital gains the IRS isn't allowed to touch, in family trusts and stepped-up basis loopholes and offshore shell companies. It's the money that built the slush fund, Lawrence O'Donnell calls it the thug fund, that Trump is about to hand to his rioters, and it's the money our kids are not getting because the Mellons and Adelsons and Uihleins and Yasses paid for a Republican-controlled Congress that promised it would never come for them and their money bins.

On Tuesday, Vice President J.D. Vance held an unusual press conference at the White House. He was questioned about Trump's stock trades by Andrew Feinberg, the White House correspondent at The Independent. How can you and your administration argue to Americans that you're cleaning up corruption, you're preventing fraud, you're fighting the sorts of things that harm people and people's financial situations when the president seems to be talking up stocks that he owns, selling them, and enriching himself?

The president doesn't sit at the Oval Office on his computer on his, Robinhood account buying and selling stocks. That's absurd. He has independent wealth advisors who manage his money. He is a wealthy person. He has had success in business. He's not making these stock trades himself, and your question imputes that.

It It doesn't say it exactly, but a reasonable person listening to that question would assume the president is sitting around doing that. He's not. Second of all, you're right. I'm a big fan of banning members of Congress from trading stocks, so is the president of the United States. All of us believe that nobody should be taking proprietary information gained from public service and buying and selling stocks.

We want to ban, we want to ban that, we want to ban that process. He answered that question after attacking the questioner. But, David Cay Johnston, if you can talk about, President Trump's stock trades, how much he's made, and responding to Vance saying, "It's not as if he's doing it himself on his own computer."

That's a complete red herring that he's not doing it on his computer. What we wanna know is what kind of information did the purchasers on Trump's behalf, the brokers and agents have, about events that were going to happen? But why is the Trump administration not looking into these enormous, commodities and stock bets that were placed 15, 20 minutes before major White House announcements that influenced the market?

We see no sign that's being pursued. And of course, if the Trump administration thinks members of Congress shouldn't be allowed to trade stocks, and I think that's what the law should be, why isn't he following his own belief? And the reason is, of course, Donald, who I've known and covered for almost 40 years, doesn't believe the rules apply to him.

He believes he's special. He believes that, the rest of us are all, idiots, unless we support him, and that no law applies to him because of his special status in the world. And when I said in 2011, Donald thinks that he should run not just America, but the whole world, there were various people who mocked me.

What did Donald Trump say about a year ago? "I run the country and the whole world." He sees himself as the world dictator. So why would he be troubled by little things like, trading in stocks when he's in the White House, where those stock prices are influenced by his actions? You've written three books on Donald Trump, David Cay Johnston.

You've won two Pulitzer Prizes. What shocked you most about what has just been revealed? And oh, the brazenness of closing the audit the way Todd Blanche did this. You notice Todd Blanche is the one who signed the letter. What that tells you is that no other lawyer in the Justice Department was going to put their reputation, if not their law license, at risk by signing this utterly corrupt agreement.

Now, Todd Blanche, remains Donald Trump's lawyer since the criminal trial where Trump was convicted on 34 felonies, so he has a conflict of interest, and one would hope that the New York State Bar would go after the law license of Todd Blanche. And a future administration, assuming we get past Trump's dictatorship, which I no longer think is a guaranteed event- Ugh

Could go into court and basically say to a judge, "This agreement isn't worth the paper that it's written on," and attack this agreement. I think it is, s- inherently corrupt. There is no controversy as the Constitution requires, because the parties here are Donald Trump, an individual, and Donald Trump, the President of the United States.

That's not a controversy. This is theft of taxpayer money, plain and simple.

We've just heard clips starting with

Trump's Terms covering acting Attorney General Todd Blanche defending the nearly $1.8 billion slush fund before the Senate.

Legal AF walked through the Democratic amicus brief arguing that Trump's IRS settlement is a collusive fraud violating both statutory law and the domestic emoluments clause.

Democracy Now! also examined the fund, warning it functions as a criminal enforcement arm for Trump with no rules barring convicted cop-assaulters from receiving payouts.

The NPR Politics Podcast traced how the slush fund alienated Senate Republicans badly enough to stall Trump's own immigration enforcement priorities heading into the Memorial Day recess.

Here & Now Anytime examined the legal case against the fund, explaining the underlying lawsuit was invalid because Trump was effectively on both sides, making any settlement legally indefensible.

The Intercept Briefing reported on Trump's new counterterrorism strategy, which explicitly names left-wing ideologies as terrorist threats while claiming to end the weaponization of counterterrorism against American citizens.

The Hartmann Report walked through the real-world cost of Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund by itemizing what it could buy instead, from insulin access to rural broadband

And Democracy Now! in part two of their discussion argued that Trump's stock trades, the closing of the audit, and Todd Blanche's conflict-ridden letter all reflect a president who genuinely believes no law applies to him.

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

But first, as if we needed more bad news to dwell on, I’m just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! that we had to put on indefinite hiatus due to sudden economic instability and ad dollars drying up, cutting our total budget by about 1/3.

Right now, I’m taking some time to rethink everything about the show, looking to boost and improve anything I can. The most recent news, talk about going back to basics…, I’m looking to relaunch our listeners feedback voice message segment.

Long ago, we used to have a really vibrant voicemail segment on the show and people would regularly say that it was their favorite part of the show. It faded over time but I think we’re overdue for a revival.

And what's important to understand is that this is a classic social dilemma. I think people don’t call because they don’t hear other people calling which becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.

So don't ask yourself, "Do I have anything good enough to say?" Instead, if you would like for a voice message segment to exist, think of leaving a message as casting a vote saying that you want others to do the same. Maybe even literally say that in your message.

So, I’ve begun asking a discussion question in each episode to kick things off but you should also feel free to respond to anything you heard on the show, including other voice messages.

So, here are a couple of questions for today:

Some Republicans are speaking out against Trump’s slush fund, but it’s not the first time they’ve criticized him only to later go silent or change their tune entirely. Is there any reasons to think that this time could be any different?

Here’s another one: in times like these, thinking really long-term is what brings me some comfort. So the idea of not just pardoning January 6 rioters but paying them is such an explicit inversion of reality and justice that it makes me wonder whether this will energize the cause of reclaiming truth and justice in a post-Trump America or will they have enough time to sow the seeds of their alternate reality so that it actually takes root and spreads beyond the core of their MAGA cultists? I’m guessing it’s probably both but if you have any encouraging thoughts on the future, I think we’d all love to hear it.

You can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

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or you can simply email me to [email protected]

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Now, as for today's topic,

There’s a satirical article from The Onion that was published almost 10 years ago that I find myself thinking back to fairly frequently.

It ran on January 25, 2017. Trump was only 5 days into his first term in office and The Onion wrote this piece of satire in the voice of former president Jimmy Carter, “You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President”

Here are some excerpts.

“For generations, U.S. presidents have gone to great lengths to avoid potential conflicts of interest. When I was elected, I followed suit by placing my small business in a blind trust to assure our citizens that I would always put the country’s interests ahead of my own. It’s a vital presidential tradition…

Boy, times sure have changed, haven’t they? I couldn’t help but notice that the current occupant of the White House owns more than 500 companies, has business interests across the Middle East and Asia, and owes hundreds of millions of dollars to banks he is now responsible for regulating. It seems a touch unfair that a bigger fuss was made about my little peanut operation than all his office towers, hotels, and golf courses combined. All I had was a farm, you know?…

Seriously, it was just a few fields and a warehouse, and you idiots still appointed a special prosecutor and spent six months investigating it…

Meanwhile, your new president holds a lease from the federal government to operate a $200 million hotel six blocks from the White House. I mean, come on!”

Obviously, things have gotten exponentially worse since then but the point of bringing it up is how clearly we on the left saw all of this coming.

Part of the reason is something true on both sides of the aisle. People who pay attention to politics tend to see the best in their own side and ignore the worst. Obama supporters read "Yes We Can" as exactly the thing they wanted it to mean. Trump voters did the same with a guy who talked about so many things in so many directions that you could cherry-pick whatever you wanted and conclude that he thought what you thought. What got wishfully edited out of his pitch in the minds of his supporters was, essentially, his promise to be corrupt. Almost no one in this country voted for a president to be corrupt, that’s not a partisan divide. A lot of Trump voters voted for him trusting and hoping that he wouldn't be, all evidence to the contrary.

And that’s only for Trump voters who actually think of themselves as informed. We don’t have time today to wade into the murky waters of voters who just cast their ballots on vibes alone.

The real question is why people were willing to take the gamble on someone explicitly flouting ethics guardrails in the first place.

There was a woman at a Trump rally who got interviewed a while back that I remember because she called Trump a junkyard dog. She didn't quite mean it as a compliment, but she followed it up saying that what the country needs right now is a junkyard dog.

The trade she was describing is the central thing to understand about this era. She knew he was garbage and she knew he'd break things, and breaking things looked better to her than respectable politicians who never changed anything or delivered for the people.

Now, the idea that “People were desperate" has been thrown around too loosely over the last decade, trying to explain Trump voters. On average, Trump's base was solidly middle class, comfortably above the typical American, even if they weren't the country-club Republicans.

But the situation wasn't objective desperation and rarely is, it’s comparative. People feel their economic position by looking around at who's pulling ahead and who's falling behind. The Economic Policy Institute keeps publishing the same chart showing that since around 1979, productivity in this country has grown several times faster than the pay of typical workers, with the gains pooling at the top. That's what Occupy was pointing at fifteen years ago.

The feeling the junkyard dog woman was being sold was that the culprits were immigrants, or cultural elites, or whoever was conveniently sideways or downward from her, never was she invited to look up at the actual people pocketing those gains.

The moral standard she was trading away in the deal, the old Bush-era, Christian family-man test was always just a disguised jab at Bill Clinton for his infidelity that made for convenient political point-scoring. It policed marriages and church attendance and let Iraq and the torture program right through, so I’d argue that Republican standards of morality have been in question for a long time.

However, there's still a substantive difference between someone saying, and probably believing themselves, that they want a good, moral person in office who will then carry out deeply immoral and harmful policies just as Reagan and the Bush family did, compared with openly advocating that what we need is an agent of chaos to break things.

So grant that woman the trade on her own terms. She wanted disruption and she got it. The question is where the disruption flowed. When Trump cut corporate taxes in 2017, more than 80 percent of the gains went to the richest one tenth of households, while typical workers saw essentially nothing. And the big tax-and-spending law he signed in 2025 ran the same play harder: the Penn Wharton Budget Model found the top tenth again captures around 80 percent of the value, except this time, once you count the Medicaid and food-assistance cuts that pay for it, the poorest households actually come out behind. So the junkyard dog broke things, sure, but he broke them in the direction of the people who were already winning, just as any thinking person would have expected a billionaire Republican to do.

But then you have to layer the corruption on top of it that really was new to the Trump era. The first term was grubby and groundbreaking in its own way with the DC hotel and the obvious foreign influence, the stuff the Onion piece was making fun of. The second term has dropped the pretense entirely.

Historians are starting to describe it as unprecedented in American presidential history. Barbara Perry, who runs the presidential oral history program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, told CBC News she'd describe this administration as "on the take." The Trump memecoin has reportedly netted hundreds of millions in fees, on top of billions in the paper value of the coins his family is sitting on. His World Liberty Financial crypto venture has taken in over half a billion dollars from token buyers, with two billion of that coming from the United Arab Emirates. Qatar gifted him a four-hundred-million-dollar plane and is financing a five-and-a-half-billion-dollar Trump golf resort in their country.

Compare that to Carter. When he took office in 1977, he handed the family peanut business over to a trustee. People often call it a blind trust, although by 1979 his own team admitted it wasn't really blind, because the trustee was Carter's close friend Charles Kirbo, who visited the White House regularly. So the arrangement wasn't perfect. But around it, the system of norms was working. Republican Senator Bob Dole pushed for a federal investigation. The Attorney General appointed a Republican special counsel, Paul Curran, to look into bank loans. Carter testified for nearly four hours under oath, the first sitting president ever questioned that way in an investigation of himself. Six months later, in October 1979, Curran cleared the family. And in the midst of this in 1978, Carter signed the Ethics in Government Act, the law that formalized divestment and disclosure rules for every president after him, partly because his own mess had made it obvious those rules needed to be on paper. Can you even imagine Republicans putting forward a bill like that now or Trump signing it?

There's a lot going on there. On one hand, you could see it as partisan political warfare in a more innocent time, where it was Republicans leading the charge against a Democratic president about an investigation that ended up being baseless. That may be true, but all things considered, I would rather err on the side where people in public office get investigated too much rather than too little, because we have certainly seen what happens when people are investigated too little.

And there were two things happening there. On one hand, Carter was a pretty ethical guy but on the other, the system was actively enforcing the expectation that presidents should be free of conflicts of interest, and both of those things reinforced each other.

So, as a society, we should value the idea of electing ethical people, but the screen for ethics in office isn't who’s Christian and has a tidy family, since Bush passed that test and then ran a torture program, it’s who tells you by their stated relationship to the rules that they respect them. Trump told everyone what he was going to do by mocking divestment and disclosure before he ever took the oath, so nobody had to guess.

On top of that, we should all be long past the idea that our government can continue to run on a combination of honor and gentlemanly handshakes. We need enforceable ethics rules for everyone in office across all three branches. After the era we’re living through, that should be non-negotiable

So the Trump era should be the textbook case for the next century, in three pieces. First, you screen for candidates whose record shows they take the rules seriously because when somebody tells you they're going to be a cheat, you should believe them and recognize that you're the one they're going to be cheating.

Second, you build and defend a system that enforces those rules, the way the 1978 Ethics Act tried to, so it doesn't ride on anyone's personal character.

And third, those have to come bundled with candidates willing to actually use that integrity to move fast on the material lives of regular people. That last piece is where most of the work hasn't been done in the past 4-5 decades, and it's where the junkyard-dog temptation will always find an opening.

And the good news is this isn't a fantasy. A government can deliver for people and stay clean at the same time, and where that happens, people are noticeably happier for it. Look at the Nordic countries. The World Happiness Report came out this spring, and for the eighth year running Finland is at the top, with Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway all in the top ten. Those are low-corruption governments that actually deliver, good healthcare, real support when you're down, the basic security most people are after, and the two things feed each other. The United States, for the record, came in twenty-fourth, our lowest since the report started thirteen years ago. Meanwhile, the open kleptocracies are right down at the bottom. Venezuela, looted into collapse by the people running it, has tumbled into the eighties.

The reason that some people felt like it was time for a junkyard dog is that the third option, someone both accountable and willing to actually improve on people's lives, had been pulled off the menu.

The Republicans yanked it off decades ago and the Democrats keep politely declining to put it back.

I've been thinking recently about the very old phrase that comes in a couple different flavors. One is: "In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve." That's the primary way I've usually heard it, and every time I think about it, I wonder if that's true and shudder.

Recently, though, I looked up the original phrase, and it's a little bit different. It's translated from French, but I think the best translation is something like: "Every nation has the government it deserves." In that context, I think it actually speaks more to systemic forces rather than the vaguely moralizing accusation being thrown at the citizens with terrible leaders. And as political watchers know, there are a whole lot of systemic forces at play that have colluded to give us our current kakistocracy, a government run by the worst, least qualified, and most unscrupulous people.

When, as a country, you allow your democracy to deteriorate to the point that it no longer serves the people’s needs, that creates a systemic force that encourages poor choices by voters. When, as a country, you neglect to have appropriate rules in place to maintain ethical standards by elected officials, you will end up, inevitably, with unethical people in power who will take advantage of that.

But the ray of hope here is that the opposite is also true, not just in theory but in ways that have been proven by countries inhabited by some of the happiest people in the world. So not only is our task clear for what we need to do, but we need to plan to come out of this era not just gasping for breath and hoping to get back to some sense of normalcy of a previous status quo, but energized with the knowledge of what can happen when democracy deteriorates and the drive to truly fix what is broken.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 3 topics today. First up;

Section A, ANATOMY OF THE HEIST

Followed by Section B, THE BIGGER PATTERN

And Section C, ENEMIES OF THE STATE

Would you say I overstated it by saying Trump sued the ve-- federal government that he runs and then basically struck a one point eight billion dollar deal with himself on behalf of January six conspirators and other supporters? Not at all. Donald Trump himself, when he brought this case for ten billion dollars, said that it seems quite odd because it's like he's suing himself, and he then has, achieved a, quote-unquote, "settlement," but there's really-- it's collusive because he's on both sides of the equation.

The federal judge who had the case actually commented on that, saying that it doesn't really seem like a case or controversy because the plaintiff is also the defendant. And so to say that you reached an agreement is, in my view, pretty tantamount to theft of, public money from the public fisc, by Donald Trump.

The only thing that's surprising is why he didn't just pick the number ten billion, and not just, almost two billion dollars. But this is just taking money out of the public fisc, for no good reason whatsoever. It really is not a settlement of a case. If that's the case, why didn't the judge who you just cited strike the deal?

So that is a great question. The-- in a civil case, the person who brings the case, the plaintiff, has an absolute right to withdraw the case if at any time prior to the defendant responding to the case. So the defendant here had not responded, the IRS had not responded. And the plaintiff, it's like all of this is basically Donald Trump, and Donald Trump, moved to withdraw and has an absolute right to do that.

Also, the plaintiff, Donald Trump, never submitted the settlement papers to the court, so there is no court approval of these settlement papers. The judge pointed that out, when she said, "I have to dismiss this case," that she raised real concerns about the fact that there was no adversity here, that the plaintiff's interest and the defendant's interests were one and the same.

So the judge raised concerns, but said there was no structure to disapprove the settlement. Do you understand the IRS part of this deal? What, the way I look at the, what happened with the IRS, and it's notable to me that the general counsel of the IRS resigned, and although he didn't give a statement about the reasons for resigning, it's palpable as to w- what the reason is, that this is something that is collusive.

I think something that is so indicative of how to understand what's going on is the fact that the IRS, in comparable cases, fights these claims. So there are people who have brought similar claims, and the IRS makes all sorts of arguments about why you cannot sue the IRS. In this very case, the IRS's position was that it was out of time.

Donald Trump had to bring his case within two years of the event, but he brought it well after that. So that would mean if that prevailed, and it seems like of course it would prevail, that the amount of money that the IRS owes Donald Trump is zero. And while I do not do math in public, zero I know is a lot less than one point eight billion dollars.

But the document says no examinations or reviews of tax matters that are, quote, "pending or could be pending if filed before yesterday when the deal was struck." So were Trump or his businesses being audited or reviewed by the IRS for anything that you know of? Did they officially get away with something that was currently being reviewed as possible tax evasion?

That is the reporting, that there is that ongoing investigation and from time to time that comes up in the news. We do not know whether there would be liability that was found. We do not know what the amount would be. But the way I think about this one-page document that gives what's essentially a general release of the public's claims against Donald Trump, his family, his companies, is while the president has the power to pardon all of those people, he may even have the power to pardon himself, that only applies to criminal matters.

So what this does is it's like the other shoe to drop, which is, oh, I can have that pardon power with respect to criminal cases that could be brought. This is taking away civil liability. So it's really ends all sort of accountability, civil or criminal, in this area. And they didn't even need the Supreme Court to do it for this.

Your book is about Trump and other politicians who lie to the American public and what you would like to see done about that in your book, Liar's Kingdom, and we'll get more into it. But is there an intersection between what's in the book and this kind of deal with himself that's the headline news we're talking about?

I think there is because the, one of the core concepts here that people gloss over is that, Donald Trump's, point here is that he s-says that the January 6th defendants were the victims. They were the victims of weaponization by what he calls the Biden Justice Department That is not true.

It is simply not true. The people who, were prosecuted on January 6th all had due process. They all had the ability to go to trial, to have defense lawyers, to make arguments, to appeal. And the people who were pardoned, were either convicted by a jury or pleaded guilty, so were guilty based on their own statements.

And they weren't the victims at all, and we're supposed to whitewash all of that history and view what happened on January 6th before our own eyes as what the president has termed, and this is a quote, "A grave national injustice." So to me, that is one of the sort of core lies of this presidency.

And what I write about is, aren't we entitled to something which is essentially like a truth in advertising law for political candidates and for, actual politicians? And I look at what happens around the globe to see that we are really behind the curve in dealing with political lies.

I mentioned your, organization, Public Citizen, announced an investigation today into what you described as Trump's, quote, "Proposed slush fund to protect his allies." What sort of investigation is Public Citizen able to do into any of this at this point? The first thing we're trying to do is figure out more details of what's going on here.

So we filed a public records request, asked for it to be expedited, and we'll see if we don't get a rapid response. For all the materials and conversations that surrounded the settlement. So we can understand... we do now have the short settlement agreement. It, on its face, it's nuts.

But it does leave a lot of open questions, so we're gonna try to get to the bottom of that. So- Then we and many colleagues are trying to figure out, what the heck can anybody do about this? Can- Yeah ... what's the ability to sue about it? And one thing we do know, one entity that does have the ability to stop it is Congress.

So in upcoming- Do they- ... this week's fights and it, and thereafter, Congress could make the, could bar the payments to and through this alleged anti-weaponization. But to do that, w- A, it would have to, be agreed to, I presume, in both chambers of Congress, both of which are of course led by Republicans right now.

Correct. And wouldn't any such, measure have to then be signed by the President of the United States into law? Correct. So it's... To actually get it a-adopted into law, it would have to be able to overcome a veto. Yeah. But it might well be connected to other things that Trump wants, which would make things complicated.

I see. I, frankly, I like your plan better. I know Public Citizen has had a lot of success in this sort of thing with the, Freedom of Information Act requests. I know you're gonna make them to the IRS, the DOJ, the Department of Treasury. What sort of documentation might you find in such an investigation?

And if you do find it, what then? If, if they're saying, "Hey, the president wants us to give him $1.7 billion. It doesn't seem legal, but I say we do it anyway." If you find something as, brazen as that in an email between, folks at the DOJ, what do you do with that?

What can be done with that? We will share that immediately with the broadcast. Thank you. So that the people know. Yeah. The people know. I mean- look, this is a l- totally unprecedented situation. Yeah. So you read a quote from Representative Neguse, which I think very considerably understates it.

It's not one of the most corrupt things of this administration, it's the most corrupt thing. And, at least in terms of, this kind of personal corruption- ... it's almost for sure the most corrupt, thing in all of American history. Yeah. So we will figure out, we're exploring with allies, what can we do?

It's what I said, right? Is there, what possible is it to litigate? What possible is it we get more documents out about it? What can we do in Congress? H- how could it be clawed back later on if it goes into effect in the first place? All that stuff. It may be that, the law is not designed for this because no one operates this way.

And it... but, they, have they found a legal way to, to steal $1.7 billion? Maybe. If so, then w- we've gotta go to Congress and deal with it that way. Yeah, and I'm wondering that, who has standing to sue to block something like... i'm a taxpayer, it's my money. Do I have standing, to sue?

Does Public Citizen have standing? Without getting into the convoluted standing doctrine, the answer to that question is no. Robert, I'm barely old enough to remember, when Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm into a blind trust while he was serving as president. We have yet, related news, I think, late last week that, President Trump has reported thousands of financial transactions totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, including large purchases and sales of tech giants, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, in the first three months of this year alone.

That according to, new disclosure forms filed with the US Office of Government Ethics, showing more than 3,700 transactions, by Donald Trump valued between 220 and $750 million cumulatively, and they all happened, just, not all, but most of them happened just prior, just before, a major corporate deal, or, Commerce Department, approval was announced, for example, of, the sale of NVIDIA chips to China.

I would've called that the crime of the century until the news today, Robert. W- what's your response to this, this newly unearth- unearthed information about all of these stock trades that are timed to, apparently insider information by the President of the United States?

Every grift possible. That's Donald Trump's slogan. And, ex- the degree to which-- we don't know for sure the degree to which he's controlling his stock portfolio, whether it's farmed out. We don't necessarily know that he's making calls to the people who are in charge of making the trades.

But there's no reason to assume that he's operating ethically. He's definitely no Jimmy Carter. One of-- you know, another example, in that long list of trades, like he, he's made, he's made acquisition purchases of Lilly, which is now fast racing to become, I think, the first trillion dollar pharmaceutical company- on the back of GLP-1 drugs that it's selling. And there are a variety of things that the government has done under the Trump administration to expand the market for GLP-1s, this is like Ozempic and stuff. So that's yet another... Yes, there's that, plus other tech plays. And the-- we don't know for sure the president was a billionaire before he took office.

A lot of dispute about how rich he really is and how much he's puffed up his wealth. He's definitely a billionaire now. Yeah. Because I think the most conservative estimate of how much money he personally has made during the presidency is a billion. Some are estimating up to $5 billion. It's hard to figure out exactly 'cause so much of the money is tied up in, in cryptocurrency, which is just, so opaque.

But, yeah, this is... It's like literally a thousand times worse than the first administration easily- Yep ... if you measure it by dollars. And, but unfortunately, in the first administration when this was constant headlines, who was taking out a room at the Trump Hotel The media, and I'm afraid the public to some extent, has become a little bit anesthetized to this.

Yeah. But what's really important about it is not just that he's stealing from us and, degrading any ethical standard, but that the things he's doing are fundamentally driving policy. he's taking money, and the family's taking money and making deals with countries in the Middle East, right?

So he's got- gets the plane from Qatar. He has massive investments in the crypto business from UAE. Jared Kushner, son-in-law, is seeking, billions of dollars in investment from Saudi Arabia on top of the billions of dollars he's already managing on behalf of the Saudis. And then, we're prosecuting a war in the Middle East where those same countries are whispering in his ear and pushing towards more aggressive action- against Iran and to further- ... to support Israel in the aggression against Lebanon. And there is no way to separate the conduct of our foreign policy, let alone our domestic policy, from the corruption that is endemic in the administration. You need-- That's not-- That's one example, but if you look at what we're doing on AI and how we're treating big tech or what we're doing in the pharmaceutical sector, or obviously what's going on in cryptocurrency, where industry that he once called said was a total fraud is now being boosted in ways that are gonna really strip lots of wealth from lots of Americans.

All these things are policies that are directly tied to the corruption that is the defining feature of his administration- Yeah ... along with his cruelty to immigrants

So my understanding from the Senate caucus lunch, obviously you were not in there, i-it's the other caucus, was that they were pretty unhappy with this whole situation. I wanna read you just a few more quotes here and get your reaction to what's going on that side. Tell us, "Imagine that, a fund that's set up to compensate people who assaulted Capitol Police officers, people that have pled guilty to physical acts, may actually be able to get compensated.

How absurd is that coming out of my mouth?" Here's Mitch McConnell. "So the nation's top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops. Utterly stupid, morally wrong, take your pick." It does seem like they found a thing that they won't walk the plank for.

Chris, I think what really upset them was maybe not so much the slush fund, although people like Thom Tillis who are retiring have been very vocal about it.

But the fact that we were gonna offer amendments, to the bill that we were supposed to be working on tonight, that would've put the question to them. Do you want your taxpayer dollars used to make payments to people who have been convicted of violent crimes, inclu- including beating up police officers or people who were convicted child molesters?

They didn't wanna face those votes, and so they decided to go home instead.

I wanna be clear about this 'cause this is, this is part of the Senate procedure that can get wonky. But basically, as they're moving through, there are these things we call vote-a-ramas, and it's a period where, the minority party can offer amendments, and you gotta vote on the amendments.

And the way that the majority party gets through the vote-a-rama is you just party line vote all your, the other party's ones down, right? You were gonna offer amendments like- That's exactly ... should money go to people that assaulted police officers? Should money go to convicted child molesters?

And they were gonna have to vote, yes, money should go to them, is basically what you're saying.

That's exactly right, Chris. I also filed another one that said no monies from this slush fund should go to members of Congress. You may recall there are some senators who've been trying to get federal- It's review

payments to them for what they claim is wrongdoing. So they would've had to also vote on whether or not these public taxpayer dollars would go to themselves, or whether they would continue to be eligible under the fund. The amendment would make them ineligible. So that's exactly what's happening. I'm not sure they would've actually risen up against this slush fund unless they were gonna be put to the test through their votes, and, I made clear, others made clear that we weren't gonna get out of there on the vote-a-rama without taking these votes.

Now, they've just delayed things, right? so this is a sort of short-term solution of just, unplug the gaming console from the wall, right? So that they don't have to keep playing. Yeah. But, the game saved. They're gonna come back and, it's gonna be the same situation. Am I wrong?

That, that's right. As you pointed out earlier, the underlying bill here is to provide another $70 billion to a- ... lawless ICE operation even though there's a huge pipeline of taxpayer dollars already sitting, at ICE. So the answer is they will come back, but I think what they're hoping, Chris, is in this intervening week, that the acting attorney general, who really is continuing to act like President Trump's personal attorney, but that he will somehow develop guardrails, around this fund.

Now, whether he can actually do that now that the cat's already out of the bag, I don't know. But that's what they were, I think, essentially telling him that they need, he needed to do.

The, just to be clear, the negotiation is not to get rid of the fund, which its- itself I think is completely lawless and indefensible and essentially a theft of the public purse, but to create some, side agreement that says, the child molesters won't get any.

We'll keep the pedophiles out. But I wanna, I just wanna play for this... read this to you. Enrique Tarrio, who is one of the Proud Boys who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, very serious, conviction, sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy over the role that he played in that fateful day, said he planned to apply to the fund assuming he can get between, and this is his words, "two and $5 million," and then added, "I'm not greedy, but my life was all F'd up because of this."

It... The p- the people, those are the people that seem to be ready to get in line for this money

that's exactly right, and that's why the acting attorney general is gonna have trouble putting up guardrails. 'Cause if you look at the history of this fund that was just announced the other day but has been thought about for a while, it is precisely, Chris, to try to reward people like the January 6th rioters, including those who were convicted.

I s- I questioned the attorney general the other day about somebody who'd been part of the riot on January 6th, who'd been pardoned by Donald Trump, who went on to be convicted of child molestation, who was saying to the kids that he molested, "You know what? Just don't tell people about what I did, and I'll give you some of the money I'm going to get from this slush fund."

So all of those January 6th rioters have been anticipating these funds, and that is essentially what it was designed for. So it's gonna be hard for the attorney general to put up enough guardrails here, I think. Guardrails. Guardrail is really a crazy thing to think about with respect to this thing.

Next, Section B, THE BIGGER PATTERN

in Donald Trump's first term, his tax returns were released. Donald Trump was President of the United States- when his returns were released. It was illegal, but it was under Donald Trump's IRS. Flash forward to the current administration, Donald Trump, President of the United States, allegedly in his personal capacity, has sued the government, meaning the government of the United States, presided over by Donald J.

Trump- ... represented by the Department of Justice, which he is clear works specifically and directly for him, is answerable to him and only what he thinks. He has sued, he sued seeking $10 billion for the alleged injury caused to him, which is just, again, laughable doesn't quite get to it. Yeah. D- by the way, let me stop you there for a second.

Wouldn't, if you sue for $10 billion, don't you need to be able to show that there was some, in some fashion, $10 billion worth of damage against you, your reputation and so forth? Yeah, exactly. It's just, it's completely preposterous. There's no evidence of... he had a privacy injury, but, his actual harm, his reputation, at the time he said, he bragged about it.

He said it showed how smart he was- ... taxes you were describing. So according to him, actually no injury whatsoever. And in fact, it didn't hurt him from getting elected president, so the injury wasn't too bad. Yeah. And it certainly, it probably has no money value at all, and the 10 billion, which is far more than he's personally worth, is ridiculous.

But the c- the problem of course is, besides just that the claim is nonsensical- Yeah ... he's suing himself, so he's on both sides of the case. And as you're describing, that's actually not permitted. So he brought the case and the judge said, "What the heck is this? How is the Department of Justice supposed to defend, or is there even a case here when you, Donald Trump, are on both sides?"

And the judge was plainly getting to the answer of no, there's no case. So they rushed a settlement deal so the judge couldn't interfere. And what they did, cleverly, was to say, "Okay, we're dropping the case." "This is not a, this is not a settlement for the judge to review. We dropped the case. Oh, and by the way, we're creating a $1.776 billion fund," described exactly as you said, that 1776 for people who didn't catch that.

If there is no settlement- And you described it quite accurately except that it's even worse than you said. It's entirely possible for Donald Trump to take some or all this money that's being paid out by this, preposterous, fund. And the terms of the fund itself, which have just been made available, there's a lot we don't know, but a couple things have just been published, said that because the claims process is voluntary- There should be no appeal, arbitration, or judicial review of claims, offers, or other determinations made by the Anti-Weaponization Fund.

Meaning no one can do anything about what this made-up committee does, including giving all of the money to Donald Trump if they so choose. Yeah. I, Robert, let me try to make sense of this because I'm, like I said, having trouble wrapping my brain around it. They didn't, file a motion to dismiss, 'cause that then would've been up to the judge.

Instead, they just said, "We're pulling the... We're dropping the suit." If they're- Dropped it. Now, they had been talking about this ridiculous $10 billion settlement between the parties that are both Donald Trump, but, Trump as a person and Trump's government. But now, if they have dropped the case how can there even be a settlement when there is no case?

It seems like Donald Trump and the DOJ are just agreeing to, "Hey, how about y'all give me $1.776," whatever, billion dollars. Billion. Billion. Don't miss the billion in there. Billion, yeah. There's no suit. How can there be a settlement? How can this be agreed upon without approval of, somebody, the courts, the Congress?

Yeah. It... when things are functioning regularly and honestly, there is a judg- judgment fund in the Department of Justice. And they can't make payouts without the whole- without a conflict even getting to the courts- Okay ... in the first place. Of course, that had-- That, so that's how it's supposed to...

like many things where Trump is doing, there's an underlying logic for things to work in regular times. And then you have a corrupt, evil force, selfish and grifting beyond belief, turning it inside out and using it for something that no one ever possibly could have contemplated, which is what this is.

Is that what this, the, apparently the DOJ is citing this $760 million landmark settlement fund that the Obama administration had created to compensate Native American farmers and ranchers who were deprived access to federal subsidies for decades. So that's what they seem to be comparing this to.

This is similar to, Native American farmers who were screwed over for decades by the government, except these were violent criminals who tried to overthrow the government, and we're gonna give them money. But that's the comparison they're making. Your response? Correct. So that's the precedent they're citing and you're right, they're implying that the injustice, visited upon the Native American farmers, just a small one in the horrible history, is comparable to the injustice inflicted on Donald Trump.

However, there's some interesting things about that settlement. One, that settlement actually was filed in court, so it was reviewed by a court unlike this. Ah, okay. And when you read through the settlement, it actually goes to length to say " we're two-" separate parties here. We have adverse interests, meaning the government is actually trying to protect taxpayer dollars.

We did a, we had an extensive exchange of information. We looked honestly what the value of the claims might be and the validity of the underlying claims. And based on all that, we came up with this settlement, which was then a structure that individual Native American farmers could apply to and receive payment.

And, that has nothing to do with what's going on here. Although it is the case that now individuals who claim to be aggrieved by Biden administration weaponization, including, as you say, the January 6th per- perpetrators, the Proud Boys, Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump himself, among many others, are now going to make individual claims.

Yeah. And Donald Trump himself could be on this commission, as I understand it, so could his sons, and they could, if we're under- if I'm understanding this correctly, they could choose to give money to themselves as well. Is that a- allowable under this pretend made-up, idea of a fund that they're creating?

Yes. I, I never wanna... i, it's always a mistake to underestimate the extent of their crass corruption. Yeah. I would imagine that they wouldn't put themselves on the f- the fund, committee. A, 'cause it's probably too boring, and B, because why not just put Crony in there who'll do what they want?

But it is correct. They could conceivably put themselves on. And, Donald Trump has, is a man of unparalleled genius. He's a man of many jobs and functions. And, being on the board to pay himself a corrupt fund based on a collusive corrupt settlement of a collusive corrupt case that he filed in the first place might be the kind of poetry that he enjoys.

He is not very bright, frankly, in my opinion, but he's a ge- he is a genius when it comes to figuring out how to defraud the public, and in this case, the taxpayers. It occurs to me that, i- if that commission doesn't ma- manage to give away some of that $1.8 billion, I suspect they would keep it for themselves.

Is there anything to prevent them from doing that, that you know of, Robert Weissman? The commission has to retire by the end of the Trump administration, and if there money, if there's money left over, then it would, go back to the Department of Justice. Oh, good. Obviously, the entire incentive is to get the money out the door before Trump is out the door.

I think what's new in type or degree is that we have such a fundamental core lie that is still with us, which is that there was material fraud in the 2020 election. And a huge number of people, enormous, it's over sixty percent of Republicans, it's a third of the voting electorate, believe that lie.

And so it is true that lies by politicians and by others is something that we've had, for decades and generations, but now we're having-- seeing it in a core way. And we also have a media environment where these, this is obviously not new, a new insight from me, is that we have these media bubbles where it's a lot harder to say, " don't worry that the answer to the falsity that, that politicians put out there is just more truthful statements," because it's not clear that there will be...

those truthful statements will be able to frack down into the media bubbles that everyone is listening to. My guest is Andrew Weissman, NYU law professor. His new book is Liar's Kingdom: How to Stop Trump's Deceit and Save America. Andrew, you say Trump's widely reported use of deceit has enabled the use of law enforcement and the military against the people of the United States, the unlawful deportation of immigrants, and the disregard of international rules meant to promote a civilized and peaceful world, among other things.

Why do you hang all that on his deceit? I could argue that Trump is mostly more direct than other conservative politicians in just saying what a lot of people in the movement believe. We have too much immigration by people of color, who he considers a cultural threat. Law enforcement should have more power, and the United States shouldn't be constrained by international law or treaties as it's been.

He just says all those things straight up. I could ask, aren't those the real issues? I think those are real issues, but I do point out ways in which lies are used, particularly in the legal system, to justify what's going on. Let me give you an example. Mr. Abrego Garcia, somebody who was extracted from this country in violation of a court order and then summarily put in prison with, again, no judicial oversight and approval of any of this.

And the president said, A, he's a terrorist. Th-there's no evidence of that. And his acolytes said he was a terrorist. B, they said that, he was part of an invasion of this country that was taking place, at the behest of the Venezuelan government. Again, no evidence of an invasion. And this, by the way, you don't have to take it from me.

You have all sorts of judges appointed in, by, Republicans and Democrats, including judges appointed by Donald Trump in his first term who has- But this was taken care of in court. The court found, on Abrego Garcia's side. Yes, that-- in many ways, I think that sort of is a good transition, which is that one of the institutions and an institution that I look to as a way forward for us is the court system because that is a place where facts and law still matter, and where if you say things that are false...

So a very eminent conservative jurist said with respect to the allegation that Mr. Abrego Garcia was a terrorist and a, a bad guy and thus could be treated this way, the jurist said, "Maybe yes, maybe no. But that's why we have a court system. That's why we have hearings. And if you bel-- if you are correct, you will be able to prove that in court, and we will make that decision.

But you don't get to do it in the court of public opinion and have that rule the day." And so I'm very focused on how can we use that truth-seeking function and oversight of the court system to get ourselves into a place where there are stronger checks and balances than what we have now.

I don't know why I am surprised at the level of self-dealing and corruption that Trump has because the only thing he cares about, we say it just about every week, is the grift, is enriching himself and protecting his own family and his own interests. And, he proves it every single day.

But now with this, 1.7... it's actually, people talk about it as a $1.7 billion slush fund. Just because he's an epic fucking troll, it's actually a 1.7 s- 76 billion dollar slush fund. Clever. 776. So clever. Like- So perverse. So perverse ... so perverse on the eve of our anniver- our country's anniversary, 250th, anniversary.

He creates this slush fund basically going to January 6th rioters potentially, to anyone who's had any perceived threat, and as a provision of this too, the IRS is now not allowed to audit or investigate him or his family members. They are officially immune from investigation into tax fraud as they create this $1.8 million slush fund that they can do whatever they want with, and all payments from it are confidential, so they don't...

By these rules that they just made up. And to be clear, this is not authorized by Congress. This is not authorized by the courts. He's taking power that he doesn't have. There's, there... He does not have this authority. He's just doing it anyway. There's nothing that says he can just create a $1.8 billion slush fund, and payments can be confidential, and he can't be investigated.

That's completely illegal what he's doing, again. It goes in the face of the Emoluments Clause, first of all, and, it will not hold legal scrutiny. I hope that in some way, w- we can stop this. There's certainly Democrats are fighting tooth and nail against this right now. Also, Harry Dunn has joined other, Capitol Police members who are suing to block this, too, a- and block any, J6 rioters from receiving, what could be, like, a million dollars each, for, storming the Capitol and assaulting police officers with American flags.

It's, it's so fucking sick. And, it's it's a slush fund, but it's really Trump trying to just buy off his folks and create his own, private army of sycophants and people who are willing to do anything for him. So it's, at a time when we are all struggling so much, when gas prices are so high, he's fixated on building this billion-dollar ballroom.

He's co-opting taxpayer dollars to build an arc to Trump. He wants a helipad at the White House and, and now this $1.8 billion slush fund, with no strings attached. Man. Yeah. From his- I don't know, I don't know what we gotta do. I don't know what we gotta do to get people, involved in the midterms to, get some accountability and push back on this stuff 'cause Republicans aren't...

If Democrats had the majority, they could stop this. This is the kinda thing that, that they could stop from happening 'cause the Congress controls the purse strings. So like you talked about the War Powers Act. Okay, so if, Trump is in power, he would veto that. We wouldn't be able to pass a new law like that.

But if he tries to grab $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to, to pay off his cronies, that's something Democrats could stop in Congress. That's right. Accountability starts when we take back power in November. If we take the House and Senate, there is real accountability. There's subpoena power.

Committees can call the entire administration, i- in for hearings and, hold their feet to the fire. We actually get some accountability and we set off the Trump agenda in its tracks. He can no longer do anything through Congress. We completely lock it up for, you know It cannot help him accomplish all his, corrupt, self-serving and evil- Yeah

brutal goals. Amen. So that's what we need to do. In the, national landscape currently, just an update with the gerrymandering, fluid, state of play that we're in. It now looks like Republicans may have a seven to nine seat advantage in November. And while that's terrible because they're, procuring this advantage through explicitly racist gerrymandering- Yeah

Not just the regular cheating, but racist cheating. Yep. It's not ... that does not in any way guarantee them a win. No. Seven to nine seats, that, we can absolutely overcome that. We got 41 seats in 2018, so let's aim for that

Yeah. Yeah. It just underscores how important it is to, and this will dovetail into, our to-do list right now, get involved in these tight swing races. And they are all around us. No matter where you live, there is a swing district close to you. I know our friends at Swing Left just expanded their map a little bit, so you can check out their new targets at swingleft.org.

And, wherever it is, and it's also primary season. Let's take the example we saw in Pennsylvania. If you're in a blue area, now is the time to push for some progressive candidates too. Get involved in the primaries. That's, that, that's where we push our Democratic Party in the direction that we want it to go too.

And I find that I'm often, I know you're probably in the same situation, Jason, torn between, in my blue areas, I always wanna make sure that I'm fighting for the most progressive candidates and the, candidates that are gonna move us forward and create the kind of equitable society that we all deserve.

But then I'm also working in a lot of these swing districts where the candidates that I'm championing tend to be more conservative than I am, and we can do both at the same time. In fact, it's very important that we do both at the same time. But, I think what we're seeing with some of these Working Families Party, candidates in Pennsylvania and other places show that we can build that progressive bench in Congress while also building the infrastructure in the more conservative districts to win there too.

Yeah, that's a great and fascinating point. It's always been interesting to me, this, one of the conundrums of being an activist. Activists are, in general, the most hair-on-fire liberal people in society who pour their blood, sweat, and tears into electing middle-of-the-road Democrats.

Sometimes. In- Sometimes, yeah ... in, in these swing districts because that's who can-- the kind of Democrat that can get elected in a swing district, and these, strategically, that is absolutely the move. Those are the pressure points the Republican Party, where just a few new registered voters, who come out can swing an election.

So yeah, it's absolutely necessary. Push blue areas bluer, push purple areas just over the edge so they become blue. Yeah. Super, super crucial. And, great to keep that in mind that we're not going to agree on every issue, that these candidate, the positions these candidates take on every single issue, and that's fine.

Democratic unity is that unicorn that pushes everything forward. When we unite, like Republicans always do, it's easier for them. They're a monoculture, yeah. They-- especially united around this whole nexus of fears, of a fear-based philosophy, white supremacy and misogyny and homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia.

All the fears kind of bond them together in a unifying philosophy. We're the side of free thinkers, so we have all different perspectives in our tents, and races and sexual orientations and, philosophies. So it is tougher for us to foster that unity. But when we do, we beat fascism, and that's exactly what we need to do right now.

And Finally, Section C, ENEMIES OF THE STATE

But we're gonna begin with San Diego, where on Monday a security guard and two others were killed after two teenagers opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego.

The pair were later found dead of apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime. Mark Remillard, special agent in charge of the FBI's San Diego field office, said they were radicalized online. "These subjects did not discriminate on who they hated." Odette, kick us off because been reporting on this, looking into these two suspects.

What do we know about them? As you said, Mary Louise, they are two male teenagers. Apparently, they met online. Authorities say they were radicalized online. And we know from some of the materials that they, appear to have made connected to this attack, that they are part of a global far-right, accelerationist movement that's trying to bring about societal collapse through this kind of violence or attacks on infrastructure.

You said global far-right accelerationist movement. What is that? So accelerationism is an ideology that is closely tied with neo-Nazism, and the idea is to bring about the total disintegration of social order. Often these people are looking to incite, a race war. They're looking to basically undermine, all elements of the social order that we are familiar with, make it harder for us to get literally electricity to our homes, disrupt, supply chains, anything they can do to, collapse the social order.

And the idea is that, from the ashes, a new world order would be, rebuilt, in, a fascist authoritarian regime. You said we know some of this from materials online. Materials like what? Where did you find this? So specifically, it appears that these two, live streamed the attack and so there is a video of that live stream, and there is also a 75-page document that appears to have been authored by these two teenagers.

Now these were materials that they wanted to reach circulation in the public, and so they were uploaded to an online forum, where users, share and view graphic gore videos, im- and images, things including suicides, torture, rape, murders, and- God, yeah. You said an online forum.

This is a website that if you- Yes ... if you know where to look, you, you can find this stuff? That's right. And so a source found these there and sent them to me. But, the fact that they were there is itself important to talk about, because, it, this kind of follows a script that is well-established among far-right extremists who are, seeking what they call sainthood, in this sort of subculture of w- white nationalist neo-Nazi accelerationists.

What about this is, speaks to the far right? What's the far-right influence here? So these are people who embrace neo-Nazi ideology- ... and Nazi ideology. This is, this comes from notions of, rigid hierarchy based on race, based on gender. And so this has always been, conceived of as a far-right movement.

So this is white supremacy, male supremacy, and so forth? Correct. Okay. Y- you also mentioned they live streamed, and, this of course was an attack on an Islamic center. Are there similarities to... I'm remembering the mosque shootings in, in New Zealand, in Christchurch back in 2019. Yes, and I think similarities is a way of undercutting actually what this is.

So if we look at the, just the very first page of that 75-page document, it features the words Sons of Tarrant, Tarrant being Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of that attack- ... in Christchurch. And then at the bottom of that page it says, "A Sons of Tarrant debut manifesto." So for the most part, this was an attack formulated to replicate what happened in Christchurch as closely as possible.

One more to you, Odette. Y- you're saying there appears to be direct links, direct playbook from the Christchurch, New Zealand shootings. How common are these type attacks here in the United States? I think that we've seen the Christchurch attack as inspiration for many other attacks.

I'm thinking certainly of the attack in 2022 in Buffalo, New York, where, a young white nationalist killed 10 people at, a Tops Friendly Markets in, and, was certainly drawing inspiration from the Christchurch attack. But I think it's important to know that, these attacks are committed by people who are not just looking domestically.

This i- they very much are building on a, a global, movement where these attacks have happened all over the world. And I wanna bring, something that I heard from Heidi Beirich, while I was reporting this out. She's the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

These movements, they're not confined by borders. They are truly transnational. There have been killings in multiple countries motivated by the same idea, in Germany, in Norway, in the United States, in New Zealand, in, Serbia not that long ago, in Bratislava, in Slovakia. But if I can just add one last point here, Mary Louise.

At the same time, this attack feels to me, and to others that I've spoken to about it, a bit strange. It's, I hate to say this, but it almost feels like a kind of throwback. Because the violent extremism space has really evolved over the last few years to be something a bit different.

One where we've seen the sort of aesthetic elements of neo-Nazism and accelerationism, but without a grounded ideological underpinning of white nationalists that really is driving the violence. It, it's been more of sort of an incoherent mishmash of different ideologies and more of violence for the sake of violence.

So this attack actually was a bit surprising because it reflects back on, dare I say it, an older model of violent white extremism. Terrifying

this is very short, actually. This is just 14 pages of actual text, about half the length of previous comparable documents. Now, there's been a lot of headlines about the political weaponization after this strategy was released, and we'll talk about that in a sec. But let's first start by talking about how the document starts, with a presidential forward by none other than Donald Trump, dated May 2026.

Trump lists counterterrorism accomplishments from the first year of his second term, like mobilizing DHS to remove illegal alien criminals and jihadist sympathizers, to arresting the ISIS-K operative who planned the Abbey Gate suicide bombing in Afghanistan, and rescuing over 100 American hostages.

Speaking of, Trump also says he secured the release of the remaining October 7th hostages and, quote, "Began the process of ensuring Gaza can no longer serve as a haven for terrorism and extremism," unquote, and that's through establishing Trump's own board of peace. The president writes that Operation Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury have dealt, quote, unquote, "Devastating blows to Iran," which Trump calls the world's number one state sponsor of terror.

Other actions the Trump admin has taken include designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters and, quote, unquote, "Deadly cartels as terrorist organizations," with Trump boasting that he, quote, "Began using the strength and power of the US military to stop and destroy cartel operations." The example that he includes here is when the US armed forces captured the, quote, unquote, "Narco-terrorist outlaw Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro."

So Trump's opening forward covers the majority of what this 16-page total strategy is focused on. As Trump writes, quote, "Cartels, jihadists, or the governments who support them." And what Trump doesn't actually write about in this forward is what most reporting on the new counterterrorism strategy has focused on, the later inclusion of left-wing terrorism as one of the nation's leading terror threats.

And that's what we'll be mostly talking about today. Good. Though we will cover the other two types of terrorism that this guide focuses on. Now, th- this strategy is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, a far-right Hungarian commentator who briefly served in Trump's first term.

This new document states, quote, "A new type of domestic terrorism has emerged, driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life. The terrorist threat has changed. We face new categories and combinations of violent actors that make established ways of doing counterterrorism insufficient or obsolete."

This is a pretty clear political weaponization of the intelligence community apparatus, and the new counterterrorism strategy doubles down on what NSPM-7 established, writing, quote In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national counterterrorism activities will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.

We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent. We will do the same with state sponsors of such groups and those governments undertaking lethal plots on US soil or against Americans anywhere, unquote.

Sure. Are there any cases of that happening? Are there any Antifa groups killing Americans? They have one case. They have one case. Not Antifa groups, but yes. Oh, they don't have cases of, state sponsors backing- Yes ... backing Antifa, but they do have one instance included of violent left-wing extremism- Yes

which we'll get to in a sec. That's one example across this, 14 to 16-page document. Now, the violent secular ideologies that I just listed are very similar to or overlapping with the common indicators and motivations animating violent conduct included in NSPM7: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility to those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

Now, after this new strategy was published, Sebastian Gorka told reporters, quote, "We are taking ideology and counter-ideology very seriously," unquote. Now, despite that clear political focus, literally calling it left-wing extremism, something that Biden never really did with right-wing extremism- ... at least in documents like this.

No, shocking. Despite that clear focus, this counterterrorism strategy claims that counterterrorism operations will be executed, quote-unquote, "apoliticaly." And actually spends a significant portion complaining about how the Biden admin previously weaponized counterterrorism operations against innocent Americans.

Great stuff. Quote, "As real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies."

Unquote. This is the only example of, quote-unquote, "left-wing violence" included in this entire document. Just this. Just this one killing. Now, on executive disorder, we have reported on a few instances where the Trump administration has tried to weaponize the killing of Christians or attacks against churches as being motivated by, anti-Christian bias, even when the people committing those attacks were themselves Christian, and for all that we can tell, were not religiously motivated against Christians.

Yeah. But they tried to glom onto a few of these incidents. Certainly not the Charlie Kirk assassination. Exactly, right? Yeah. But they try, tried to glom onto these examples to build this narrative of, anti-Christian violence, which is rising in the United States. And as for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we still don't have a clear picture of the motivations behind that attack.

More on that later. After this new counterterrorism strategy dropped, I did the thing that I assume anyone would do and read through the past, three or four counterterrorism strategies. Really? Yeah. Great. Great stuff. From the past 10 years. Good work. Trump released one in 2018, and Biden's came out in 2021.

Now, the first mention of any non-Islamic terrorist group in Trump's 2018 counterterrorism strategy is the Nordic Resistance Movement, quote, "A prominent transnational self-described National Socialist organization with anti-Western views that has conducted violent attacks against Muslims, left-wing groups, and others," unquote.

This document from Trump's first term focuses almost exclusively on Islam and terrorism, specifically ISIS and Al-Qaeda, but also briefly mentions the neo-Nazi National Action Group in one paragraph, and in another reads, quote, "The United States has long faced persistent security threat from domestic terrorists who are not motivated by a radical Islamist ideology, but are instead motivated by other forms of violent extremism, such as racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism," unquote.

But that's really all it has on non-Islamic extremism in what is a thirty-four-page document. By the time Biden got into office, white supremacist violence had risen dramatically, and the Biden admin released a domestic terrorism-specific counterterrorism strategy. This document, released in June of 2021, starts by describing racially or ethnically motivated violence from the KKK during Reconstruction to attacks on Black churches and synagogues and the El Paso shooting at the Walmart.

Then the document covers what it calls anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism, including the Oklahoma City bombing, the Congressional baseball game shooting, and the recent January 6th attack. I'm gonna read a paragraph from Biden's domestic terrorism strategy here to compare. Quote, "Today's domestic terrorists espouse a range of violent ideological motivations.

They also take on a variety of forms, from lone actors to small groups of informally aligned individuals to networks exhorting and targeting violence towards specific communities to violent self-proclaimed militias. Among that wide range of animating ideologies, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, particularly those who promote the superiority of the white race and militia violent extremists, are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats."

These actors have different motivations, but many focus their violence towards the same segment or segments of the American community, whether persons of color, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, or other religious minorities, women and girls, LGBTQI plus individuals, or others. Their insistence on violence can at times be explicit.

It also can at times be less explicit, lurking in the ideologies rooted in a perception of the superiority of the white race that call for violence in furtherance of preservation and abhorrent notions of racial purity or cleansing, unquote. Now, Biden's strategy does later specifically mention, quote, unquote, anarchist violence, though within the broader context of anti-government or anti-authority extremism.

Quote, A significant component of today's threat includes self-proclaimed militias and militia violent extremists who take steps to violently resist government authority or facilitate the overthrow of the US government based on perceived overreach. Anarchist violent extremists who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions which they perceive as harmful to society.

The document goes on to mention sovereign citizen violent extremists and other groups that resist or oppose legislative, regulatory, or other actions taken by the government. This strategy also names a few single-issue ideologies which may motivate violence like abortion, animal rights, environmental issues, or involuntarily celibate violent extremism.

But that little section there is the closest that the Biden strategy gets to, quote, unquote, left-wing violence, as Trump would call it. But rather than referring to violence as somewhere on left-right politics, Biden's strategy tries to specifically name the exact motivating factor driving the violence.

His document reads, quote, The definition of domestic terrorism in our law makes no distinction based on political views, left, or center, and neither should we, unquote. Biden's AG Merrick Garland would often say that combating domestic terrorism is about stopping violence, not policing ideology, and quote, unquote, violence, not ideology, was an often repeated refrain during the Biden administration.

And this is something that the Biden administration definitely acted on. The FBI investigated Stop Cop City under Biden, and a significant portion of the domestic terror-related charges while Biden was in office were levied against Stop Cop City protesters by the state of Georgia with investigative assistance from multiple federal agencies, and almost all of whom were charged with terrorism were not actually charged with any specific violent crime.

The attack in San Diego underscores bigger problems, the rise of far-right extremism, the rise of Islamophobia. But a new White House document on rising threats makes no mention of right-wing extremist groups. Greg, I am talking about the latest version of the United States Counterterrorism Strategy.

This is a 16-page Document. It's brand new, hot off the presses, came out earlier this month. Start with the architect, the man behind this. His name is Sebastian Gorka. Who is he? So Sebastian Gorka is this big, hulking guy, and he has a booming voice, so he certainly has a presence. You tend to notice him pretty quickly.

He's got a bit of a British accent. He has, roots in Britain and Hungary. He immigrated to the US, legally he likes to say, less than two decades ago, and, he made his name by talking a lot about, terrorism, counterterrorism, with a real emphasis on, Islamic extremism. A- and so that's really where he would-- you would see him commentating publicly.

He caught the attention of President Trump. So he'd been in this country less than a decade, and in Trump's first term, he named him as a presidential advisor. Now, a lot of chaos at the beginning of Trump's first term, a lot of people coming and going. Gorka was out, lasted only a matter of months, I believe seven months or so.

And so he disappeared. He was doing more commentating in the interim, but he's been brought back again to the White House as an- Second administration, he's back ... that- that's right, and as an advisor, and now he's emerged as the point person on counterterrorism at the National Security Council. So official post, he's officially a member of the National Security Council in the White House.

That's right, and he's taken over as the counterterrorism person. And with this report that's come out, it's drawn attention to him, and he's given interviews. And so there's a lot of focus on him and the approach, which is, different and emphasizes the thing that President Trump likes to talk about and not what we've often heard about in the past, 10, 20 years when it comes to counterterrorism.

And just one more thing on, on Gorka personally. He has been in the headlines quite recently because the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, resigned in protest over the Iran war. Sebastian Gorka has been in the news when people wondering if he is perhaps angling for that job, so expanding on his White House portfolio and taking over the whole National Counterterrorism Center.

Yeah, it seems so. That is certainly the talk. Now, at the White House, he's more involved in the policy aspect of it. Yep. To run the National Counterterrorism Center is really the operational, where would you put resources? What cases would you be following most closely? And so that would have more actual, clout, generally seen as the operational person.

It would also be a Senate-confirmable post. And so this is-- We don't know where that may go. Watch this space. We do know... I just want people to get to hear from Gorka directly. We dug out an interview that he gave last year to Politico in which he was asked about counterterrorism and he was asked, what's your mandate?

Very simply, to protect the innocent and to deal earthly justice to evildoers, the individuals who threaten our U.S. citizens, whether here or abroad, the global jihadi movement, be it Sunni or Shia. Our job in the directorate for counterterrorism is to suppress that threat until these organizations, the Tier 1 threat groups, are incapable of executing mass casualty attacks against Americans.

It's a very simple mission. So a taste there of Sebastian Gorka and his approach to his mission. A- and Greg, to focus on this new strategy document that he has produced, it identifies three main types of terror groups that threaten the US according to the Trump White House. They are narco-terrorists, number one, Islamist terrorists, and left-wing extremists.

Left-wing. What do we make of that? Yeah, so it's certainly an expansion and a different point of emphasis than we've seen in the past. Certainly, the Islamist groups, the Al-Qaeda or ISIS, they're still there, although we're, they've not- Number two ... has been as active as they have been in the past. the narco-terrorists, we've seen that being acted upon in terms of these US airstrikes on suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

And the part that really is entirely new is violent left-wing extremists. And he's mentioned Antifa, LGBT, transgender ideology, so things we just have not dealt with in terms of this- A terror threat ... tying it into counterterrorism. Completely unprecedented. Odette, what about the emphasis on left-wing extremists?

Unless I missed it, I didn't see a lot of emphasis on the other side, on right-wing extremism. Yes, there is no mention really of right-wing extremism, and that is, I think, what's causing the greatest amount of concern, for people who work in this field, right? So we've seen, we, it's no surprise that the document, would focus on, quote, "violent left-wing extremists."

We've already seen the State Department, designate certain, European-based groups as violent left-wing extremist groups. The fact is that we haven't seen, a body count, frankly, of, th- people who were killed by left-wing extremist activity the way that we have seen with violent far-right, movements.

And so there's a lot of concern that this is simply turning away from where the problem really lies, and I think that the attack in San Diego this week, has been an illustration of the dangers of not paying attention to violent far-right extremism. Do we know what they're doing with this document, Greg?

Are there any concrete steps or signs that they are overhauling counterterrorism efforts, diverting resources from one area to another to act on the priorities outlined in this document? I would say that we've seen, very broadly speaking, whether it's going after the drug traffickers, that we mentioned in the Caribbean or the Pacific, the emphasis on the Western Hemisphere as opposed to, say, the Middle East when it comes to counterterrorism.

the actions that Trump has taken against Venezuela and is threatening against Cuba, not specifically counterterrorism actions, but part of his broader, efforts in terms of national security and the points of emphasis he wants to make. So it does seem to fold into at least the narco terrorists that they talk about.

And again, you could even question whether drug smugglers are terrorists. That's something that the Trump administration has certainly emphasized, but there's no real overt political component to drug traffickers. They seem to be criminals who want to make money and have certainly inflicted, all sorts of, of suffering on this country, whether it's the drug overdose deaths or the violence or whatever.

But lumping it in as terrorism is something that's been new and eight groups with ties to drug trafficking or gang activity have been added to the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. The FTO list, yeah. And that would include the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, the MS-13 gangs, Tren de Aragua, so groups that had not previously been on the terrorist list, but the Trump administration says, "no, these are terrorist groups, and we're going to spend a lot of resources focused on them."

Nick, I was looking at a piece you did last year focused on NSPM-7, the presidential memorandum that effectively created a secret list of domestic terrorists, which included everyone from anti-Christians to anti-capitalists. One of the really haunting questions from your piece was whether the administration has the authority to kill people on the list that it has designated as terrorists.

The line, "We will find you, and we will kill you," appears in this new counterterrorism strategy. I know that stuck out to both of us as incredibly chilling. Does this new strategy give us an answer to your earlier question? Does the administration have the legal authority to kill its enemies? The White House and Justice Department have never answered this question.

It's been left hanging there in both cases since the fall when I started asking. But in December, General Gregory Guillot, the chief of U.S. Northern Command, a four-star general who takes his orders from Pete Hegseth and oversees the United States, seemed to answer this question, and worryingly when he was asked about his willingness to attack so-called designated terrorist organizations within U.S.

borders by Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Guillot said that if he had questions about such an order, he would ask Hegseth. And if not, if he thought it was a legal order, then he would, quote, "Definitely execute that order." Now, as far as four-star generals go, Guillot has a good reputation. People on the Hill, decent people there, like him.

He's not a Hegseth acolyte, not a MAGA general. But the military are, in the end, orders followers. They kill on command. They do what they're told, and you don't get four stars on your shoulder by saying, "No, sir, that's immoral. I won't do what you want, sir." You don't see a lot of military officers at any level pushing back against the orders of this administration to attack and kill people, whether it's, in Iran or Venezuela, or specifically the boat strikes that every legal authority worthy of that name says are illegal extrajudicial killings.

With, secret lists of both foreign and domestic terrorists, we don't know who can be targeted. But it's possible that left-wing extremists could be targeted and killed on Trump or Hegseth's say so. In a world of secret wars, secret enemies lists, secret legal findings, we just can't know for sure, and that alone should scare every American.

Yeah. I think most people in the United States would like to believe that the military would not follow those kinds of orders. But as you've documented throughout your entire career, we cannot count on individual soldiers not following through on those orders. And the fact that we now have an enemies list and a counterterrorism strategy that is rather explicit about targeting the left, that includes the words, "We will find you, and we will kill you I think that should be terrifying to pretty much anyone.

And Noah, you've covered other targets, specifically nonprofits. Can you talk a little bit about how that fits into the broader efforts to not only tamp down, but arguably eliminate any dissent? Has the Trump administration strategy here evolved over the last year? And if so, how? As we mentioned before, the, this anti-terror imperative makes for a very flexible and useful means of tamping down on dissent.

Prior to the Trump administration returning to power, I reported extensively on, what was known as the Nonprofit Killer Bill, which was, a piece of legislation in Congress that would allow the Treasury Department to revoke the nonprofit status of any, 501[c][3] organization found to be providing material support for terrorism.

And that was a bill that had received relatively broad bipartisan support prior to the reelection of Donald Trump. And then in the immediate aftermath of the reelection of Donald Trump, it became much more of a partisan issue because suddenly the Democrats looked around and realized that we were gonna be handing this tool to a new emboldened Trump administration, right?

And so that bill ended up languishing in legislative hell. I see that as an early warning sign of the way in which the Trump administration planned to use this terrorism rhetoric to tamp down on pretty non-terroristic political enemies. And I think that we've seen most clearly that coming through in its prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Now, that is through the DOJ. They are not necessarily using the rhetoric of anti-terror against the SPLC in that lawsuit, which is based on the use of undercover informants in white supremacist groups. They did accuse the SPLC of essentially providing material support to these extremist groups by paying informants, but it was a slight evolution of the somewhat more crude use of this terrorism label against political enemies.

But we do see that they are using e- every tool in the toolbox to delegitimize, to prosecute, to make the lives harder of anyone they see as their political enemies. What's also fascinating, maybe horrifying is the better word, is the fact that they don't even have to pass this legislation. They don't even have to convict these organizations on any charges, and yet there's already damage.

And The Intercept has been reporting on the fact that certain financial institutions essentially complied in advance and begun preventing donations from their donor-advised funds to SPLC. Nick, at different points in history, we've seen the government target civilians it perceived as enemies of the state, from the McCarthy era to COINTELPRO to the war on terror.

Perhaps it's too soon to tell the full impact, but how does what we're seeing now with the Trump administration compare to these other periods? Yeah, I was really struck by some of the language in this new counterterrorism strategy. At one point, it notes that the national counterterrorism activities will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is, this is quoted, "anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist."

This language of neutralization, it really harkens back to the FBI's analogous and infamous COINTELPRO program that you mentioned, which was employed in the 1960s and 1970s to target the civil rights movement, the new left, anti-Vietnam War protesters, basically, domestic groups and individuals.

It's very much the spiritual precursor to Trump's current war at home. It's just that COINTELPRO was secret, and Trump's effort is out and proud. According to a 1976 Senate Select Committee report on US intelligence activities, COINTELPRO turned a law enforcement agency into a law violator. The Senate committee found that the FBI went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to, quote, "disrupt and neutralize" target groups and individuals, and that they used, wartime counterintelligence techniques that were antithetical to a democratic society.

There was a, 1967 internal FBI memo that laid this out. Basically, this type of counterintelligence was meant to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize, that language again, African American groups and leaders. These efforts were meant to, this is another quote, "cause serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets," according to the Senate committee Martin Luther King Jr.,

for instance, was one of the targets of the FBI's campaign, and the Senate Select Committee again uses that same language. They said that the FBI targeted him to neutralize him. The man that was in charge of the FBI's, what they call, quote-unquote, "war against Dr. King," said that they used the same methods they employed against Soviet agents.

It's the Cold War at the time, very much at war with the Soviet Union. To me, I think Trump is really reinstituting COINTELPRO under a new name. The groups that you just mentioned are all generally considered left-leaning movements. What impact did those efforts have on leftist movements in the United States?

Yeah, COINTELPRO and some analogous operations were going on at the same time. They really weakened activist groups. They sowed dissent within organizations, discord among members. They broke up families. They encouraged gang warfare on streets of American cities. It got people killed. They utilized informants and agent provocateurs.

They undermined groups that were trying to bring about social change through democratic means, and hurt people that really just wanted to build a better, more inclusive America. We can talk about, the promise of 1960s radicalism and the movement, and people trying to bring about social change and how it failed, but, we can't seriously address those failures if we don't talk about a sophisticated government campaign that was meant to undermine those groups and destroy those people.

Now, in Trump's new strategy, it states that under the Biden admin, US officials, quote, "used their significant powers to politically target individuals in the interests of those they favored, wanted to keep in power, or to help win elections," unquote.

Now, under Biden, there was an increase of domestic terrorism-related prosecutions following January 6th, plus unrelated felony cases against Trump himself and prosecutions of Trump allies related to the Stop the Steal efforts. In 2022, the DOJ opened a new unit focused on domestic terrorism investigations and just that year, $100 million of additional resources were allocated to the DOJ, FBI, and DHS for countering domestic terrorism.

Now, this increase in focus was correlated to an increase in attacks. The Government Accountability Office reported that between 2010 to 2021, domestic terrorism-related investigations had grown by 356%, with 231 confirmed incidents according to the DHS. In just Biden's first year of office, the number of FBI domestic terrorism investigations more than doubled.

During this time period, the intelligence community classified racially or ethnically motivated violence as the most common type of attack. That's 35% of domestic terrorism, and this category also contributed to the most deaths. The second most common type of attack was anti-government or anti-authority motivated violent extremism with 32% of attacks, and that category covered a lot of different things, including the militia stuff as well as the anarchist stuff.

It depends on who's doing the exact categorization, though. Yeah. Now, the racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists were most likely to conduct civilian mass casualty attacks, while militia types were more likely to target law enforcement or government apparatus. In comparison, Trump's new counterterrorism strategy does not contain a single mention of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism.

Oh, yeah. Weird. Not one. Not one, huh? Which is which is astounding, right? Even like beyond the clear partisan wea- weaponization, like just from a counterterrorism standpoint, like this is bizarre. This is quite, quite a choice. The last pillar of Biden's counterterrorism strategy was, quote, "Confronting long-term contributions to domestic terrorism like racism, bigotry, religious or ethnic hatred," unquote.

Meanwhile, Trump's new strategy says that the fearsome powers of the US government must never be abused, quote, "Whether under the guise of de-radicalization, protecting our democracy, or any other pretext," unquote. Great. Which is, I don't even know how to respond to that. Yeah. And what are we s- yeah, what are we supposed to say?

it demonstrates they're not actually interested in combating what is the most lethal form of domestic- No ... terrorism. No, and they never have been. Even in Trump's first term, at least they moved towards that as the threat wa- was increasing, but now they just have no interest whatsoever and actually target de-radicalization as an example of the fearsome powers of the US government.

Yeah, like the thing that never worked and like never actually did anything is the big boogeyman for you guys? Okay. It's wild. The new strategy includes a few examples of US government overreach. Quote, "Our nation has not been well served by its intelligence community, which has been mirrored in old ways of looking at threats or has been actively weaponized by its leadership as a political tool.

Whether plotting against conservative Catholics attending traditional mass in Virginia, parents standing up for their children at school board meetings, members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates, this administration will continue to prohibit the intelligence community from being used politically against innocent Americans," unquote.

So that's the main example of partisan weaponization of the intelligence community. Let's start with this first one, targeting Catholics attending traditional mass. This refers to a 2023 FBI memo from the Richmond field office on how racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists were displaying a growing interest in traditionalist Catholicism- Great

and how trad Catholic extremist violence could be mitigated by building connections within the church. Now, random Latin mass churchgoers in Virginia were not being investigated. Rather, this memo was discussing the, quote-unquote, "growing overlap between the white nationalist movement and," quote-unquote, "radical traditionalist Catholics," and how white supremacists may use trad cath social media to promote violence and recruit This memo also made a distinction from ordinary traditional Catholics who prefer Latin mass and the extremist beliefs and violent rhetoric from what they call radical traditional Catholics, what we would just call Trad Cats, like colloquially.

After backlash to this memo, the FBI claims to have scrapped it for not meeting the standards of the FBI. Sure. Yeah, we've seen how high those standards are in Kash Patel, Sarah. I'm gonna go on a little bit of, a tangent here. 'Cause I wanted to get more information about this Richmond field office memo and investigation.

So it turns out the FBI did monitor a traditionalist priest at a church, and this church was not considered by the Vatican to be in full communion with the Catholic Church, but it's still Catholic affiliated. This priest refused to speak with the FBI about communications he had with a parishioner who was a self-described radical traditional Catholic clerical fascist, self-described, who was posting about conducting a mass shooting at a special needs school, armed resistance against government, learning how to manufacture pipe bombs, and using untraceable means to purchase supplies to manufacture 3D-printed weapons.

Posting about that on this Catholic account. Yeah, nothing sketchy. This Nazi was actually previously arrested in 2019 after being overheard making comments about political violence while purchasing several AR-15 style rifles, multiple high-capacity magazines, and large quantities of .223 ammunition, as well as making online statements advocating civil war and the murder of politicians.

Now, after getting out of prison, this guy started attending this traditionalist church and planning an attack. The FBI claims he tried to recruit others with similar belief systems and made comments to churchgoers about his intent to commit violence. He was arrested again and pleaded guilty to possessing a destructive device.

So the FBI was looking into this priest because this priest was not talking to them about what the communications were with this Nazi, communications that they know existed, and so they briefly looked into him. This caused a massive backlash among the right. This is where Marjorie Taylor Greene was posting about defunding the FBI.

A lot of the, a lot of the dismantle FBI stuff coming from the right was based on this incident of the FBI, targeting conservative churchgoers. Little side tangent there. The other main example from the Trump counterterrorism strategy refers to parents and school boards. This is in reference to a letter from the National School Boards Association requesting federal intervention into the harassment, threats, and attacks against school boards in 2021, and this letter read in part, quote, "These heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terror and hate crimes."

Unquote. After this letter was sent, the AG, Merrick Garland, announced that the government was gonna look into these threats. This too sparked a huge backlash from the right, claiming that the FBI was investigating parents for terrorism. There was congressional hearings, and a month later, the National School Board Association apologized for some of the language they included in this letter.

Those are the two main examples of this horrendous government overreach and weaponization of the intelligence community against innocent Americans. Yeah, of course. It's just, it's frustrating how, reality doesn't matter at all here. But I don't... what is the point of even, going in and line by line, here's everything that's wrong with that?

I don't even know anymore.

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;

The Brian Lehrer Show

The BradCast

All In with Chris Hayes

The Practivist Pod

The NPR Politics Podcast

The Intercept Briefing

and It Could Happen Here

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: 5–27-2026

Full Show Notes

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

Today we examine what separates successful revolutions from failed ones, ask why so many revolutions of the 2010s fell short, understand how revolutionary energy gets neutralized, and explore the strategic case for nonviolent resistance.

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

The Inquiry

The Politics Show

Leeja Miller

Dan Harumi

and Degenerate Art

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

Section A, ANATOMY OF FAILURE

Section B, REVISITING THE RECORD

Section C, THE CURRENT MOMENT

And Section D, STRATEGY AND PRACTICE

And now, on to the show.

Milošević took control of Serbia's security services and state media and started brutal wars with its neighbors. Srdja's brother fled the country to avoid the military draft, and his parents, once prominent journalists, now made a living by selling smuggled petrol.

Within this environment, we had only two choices.

We could either fight or flee.

And Srdja chose to fight, but not through violent street protests. He and his student friends had tried that in the '90s. They still had the scars. The new plan was more civilized: to bring down Milošević at the next election. They created a movement called Otpor or Resistance.

Their aim: to get the whole country behind them.

Not only political players but people across urban rural lines, people across the educational lines, and bring all of these grievances to the mass of people that participated in the elections in 2000.

They spread through the country, and soon tens of thousands of people had joined the movement.

The training was intense. They learned how to hide from the police and survive violent interrogations without fighting back. When Milošević called elections in 2000- They knew this was their big moment. All they had to do now was decide which opposition candidate to back. There were quite a few.

We did polling, around the opposition leaders, and it appeared to be that the most visible opposition leaders has the same number of negative votes as Milosevic.

So aside of the fact that they were running the strong parties, they were unelectable.

Milosevic had used his propaganda machine to great effect. Any politician with a chance of being elected had been so demonized that no one would vote for him. So Otpor came up with a genius strategy. Since none of the front runners stood a chance against Milosevic, they'd rally behind an outsider, one with an untarnished reputation.

Now they just needed to make sure people would vote for him. Armed with 60 tons of electoral propaganda, they took to the streets.

Mass protest tactics are likely to be meet with the police, and the more you lower the risk for the people to participate, the more the people will participate. So the less-

So the less likely people think they are to get shot, the more likely they are to come and join you.

Absolutely, which is why we stick to the street theater type of actions with the element of humor.

They wore silly outfits, played volleyball outside police stations where activists had been detained. They danced, played music. Then there was the time they painted a metal barrel with Milosevic's face on it, put a coin slot in the top, and left it on the road next to a baseball bat. People took the hint and spent hours bashing it.

And that was the beauty of these actions, is that police didn't know what to do. If he or she reacts to your prank, he's going to look stupid. If he doesn't, people will understand that they can get away with it, and everybody will start doing it because he's going to look weak. So between stupid and weak, you can choose, but both choices are bad.

"It was the only way they could defeat a state as powerful as Serbia's," he said. Instead of getting sucked into violent confrontations they knew they'd lose, they had to change the terms on which they fought. It's the same if you were trying to bring down Mike Tyson, the world-famous boxer, he says. You wouldn't fight him in the boxing ring.

You wouldn't stand a chance. I

would rather play Scrabble or chess with Mike Tyson because my life expectancy in a boxing ring with him is probably around 18 seconds. So picking the right battlefield is what successful movements do, and picking the battlefield of nonviolent struggle and nonviolent tactics is ideal when you're facing the state because the state has a monopoly over violence.

This laughterism, as they called it, seemed to work, and they combined it with campaigning, producing millions of leaflets and stickers telling people how to vote. Eventually, in September 2000, election day came. Millions turned out. Their votes were counted Milosevic had lost, but he wouldn't go down without a fight

His electoral commission says nobody won the elections, and of course, we were ready for the next step.

A few weeks later, they organized the biggest general strike in history And we actually brought the country to the standstill, leaving country without the electricity. The complete country was paralyzed.

On the 6th of October, protesters stormed parliament and set parts of it on fire. As black smoke billowed around the building, the crowds chanted one word.

Serbia! Serbia! Serbia! Serbia! Instead of defending their president, riot police took off their helmets. A few hours later, Milosevic resigned, and this, says Srdja Popovic, was the most important moment of the revolution, the moment when most uprisings fail

We started keeping the new government accountable from day one, that a lot of the people from the movement stayed outside institutions, putting pressure on the new government to deliver on their promises.

So that was not just replacing one elite with another elite. That was forcing new elite to deliver.

Fast-forward 20 years, and Srdja Popovic is now what you might call a revolutionary consultant. He gives advice to activists all over the world on how to run successful revolutions, and he tells them three things: one, unite your opposition; two, have a plan for what happens after you topple your leader; and three, if you're fighting against the state, don't use violence.

If you don't do that, listen on and you'll hear what happens.

Part four: bitter divisions

The first day of protests was January 25th, 2011. It became clear that something quite remarkable was happening, and I wanted to see it. I wanted to understand what was going on.

That's Michael Wahid Hanna, an Egyptian American analyst at the Century Foundation in New York. When the protests in Egypt broke out, he jumped on a plane and went straight to the heart of them, Tahrir Square.

The Tahrir Square protests were really gathering momentum, and I was there through the protests.

Protesters had been on the street for weeks, not just in Tahrir Square, but in the rest of the country, too. Unlike Armenia and Serbia, these protests were violent. Hundreds had been injured and killed by the authorities.

On February the 11th, the square was packed as usual. I was there setting up a satellite dish on top of a disused toilet so we could broadcast live on the BBC. Then suddenly- In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. Egypt's vice president appeared on state TV and made an announcement that no-one had expected.

President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down as the president of the republic. The square erupted.

People were screaming and shouting. There were people crying, people hugging. it was a real joyous moment.

Soldiers lifted children onto tanks. People spilled onto the streets dressed in national colors, and cars honked their way through the city.

Nobody at that moment could have imagined the sequence of events that would really squander that opportunity that had presented itself on that day.

Seven years later, and Egypt is now under the grip of military rule. No dissent, no protests, and thousands have been injured, killed, or imprisoned.

I never call it a revolution. I think it was a revolutionary moment that has ended in failure and a resurgent form of authoritarianism that is worse than the repression that Egypt, suffered under Hosni Mubarak.

So what went wrong? Where was the revolution lost? It was during the 18 days of the uprising. This incredibly powerful but very loose tactical alliance of opposition forces didn't share a lot in common with respect to what should come next. For 18 days, Islamists, intellectuals, businessmen, preachers, and students had come together, united by one thing: their hatred of President Mubarak.

Now he'd gone, the cracks appeared. Unlike in Serbia, there was no post-revolution plan. Instead, there was division and infighting. The opposition fell apart. And the primary beneficiary was the military. Egypt's most powerful institution. It was the military who'd pushed Mubarak out. After he'd gone, they stepped in, and for a while, they were popular.

The military is seen from that moment when it deploys to the streets as a kind of neutral arbiter and not associated with the day-to-day repression and torture, and they are greeted as such in the streets. But all that would change.

It soon became clear the military had a very different vision of the future to that of the protesters. And in July 2013, in a violent coup- The military overthrew Egypt's new president and took power. The military, once seen as the savior of the revolution, had now hijacked it, and the opposition were too divided to stand against it.

The movement very quickly becomes a contest for power. That inevitably leads to fragmentation and competition. And so that bred a kind of existential distrust among these forces that was never able to be overcome. It's been a real failure and disappointment.

It's easy, he says, to look back and blame the opposition for what went wrong, but the odds were always against the protesters. Egypt is far more divided than Serbia ever was, so creating a united opposition movement was almost impossible. But there are still lessons to be learnt from its failure. As we've heard, revolutions live or die by the people who fight for them.

If they can stand together and, most importantly, come up with a post-revolution plan, then maybe, just maybe, they'll succeed.

Right now, Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian politician you heard about at the start of this program, is beginning his time in office. It may look as though the hard work has been done, but this is just the beginning. Its revolution is hanging in the balance.

I think the interesting thing about Brand to me in the... when thinking particularly about this conjuncture of, the post-financial crisis period, what broadly, you could look at as a period that lasted between the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the autumn of 2008 and the initial lockdowns related to COVID-19 in early 2020.

He, w- you know, we know he became famous through things like Big Brother. He was a TV celebrity. In some ways, a lot of the figures who ended up dominating the 2010s in politics had careers in areas such as the media. When you think of someone like Boris Johnson, has a similar sort of charisma, similar, status within the media as someone who simply just had to be himself and be witty and, a- and somehow drew attention towards himself.

A- and that was obviously the Brand pre-2008 Brand. I think the interesting thing about that decade, and this is wh- why I used Brand to try and, encapsulate something, was that one of the reasons he first, gained attention as a political figure was with the, with his, interview with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in which he, said, "Really there's no point in voting."

But is it true you don't even vote?

Yeah, no, I don't vote.

How do you have any authority to talk about politics then?

I don't, get my authority from this preexisting paradigm, which is quite narrow and only serves a few people. I look elsewhere for alternatives that might be of service to humanity.

Alternate means alternate political systems

they being?

I've not invented it yet, Jeremy

Statistically, this wasn't actually a particularly unusual thing to, certainly to do. Turnouts in general elections had been falling, since 1997. The 2001 election was a historically low, turnout.

So you could say that, roughly a third of the, electorate had already made up their minds that it wasn't worth voting by the time that, that Brand gave that interview, with Paxman. But I think that what, the reason it drew so much attention was that he was expressing something about the failings of representative democracy, the limits of the electoral system that suddenly seemed charismatic, mobilizing, energizing in certain ways.

And then he said, i- in the wake of that interview, he said, "Really, the only thing that will work right now is a revolution." And again, looking back on it, i- in some ways it looks rather embarrassing that this would've been seen as, such a, a kind of an exciting, when it's anything to say.

And, the New Statesman has its own kind of role in this.

In 2013, the New Statesman invited Russell Brand to guest edit an issue of the magazine. This was called The Revolution Issue.

And then he wrote a book called Revolution, which was a big bestseller. And so i- I suppose what the language revolution hadn't been used very much, over the p- Over the kind of pre-financial crisis era, but in particular, this sort of recognition that there was a gap between what the people, in the kind of populist jargon, might want or need and what was expressed via the voting system was suddenly ga- gaining this kind of extremely, charismatic expression.

And then of course, we then saw all manifestations of that over subsequent years via Brexit and, Corbynism and that sort of thing. But I think that, he saw which way the wind was blowing, let's say.

But this was also a class issue. In his essay Exiting the Vampire Castle, writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote, "For some of us, Brand's forensic take down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous.

I couldn't remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class superior using intelligence and reason."

Yeah, the Mark Fisher essay, which became notorious and, I think something that I think i- in many ways, whether he regretted it, it certainly led to a lot of difficult, relationships in, in, in various areas, and it's also then got picked up by people I think that Mark Fisher would've been appalled by as you know- a critique of cancel culture and wokeism and this sort of thing. But yeah, i- in the essay the, Exiting the Vampire Castle, he celebrated, Russell Brand as being this example of someone who was proudly working class, proclaiming various truths that some, elite cartel of both, which engulfs both the media and Westminster had previously shut out in various ways.

A- and that was something which Mark Fisher was arguing, a- as you say, on, on a class basis, that this was, giving voice to something that previously had been there, but it had been silent. And it's true that when you ... if you're thinking about, disengagement from democracy, the people who were withdrawing from the, voting system from elections over previous years and decades tended to be the young and the working class.

But Mark Fisher wasn't the only figure on the left to embrace Brand and Brand's style of politics in the 2010s. He was a prominent voice at protests.

H- how much did you pay for your place?

It's rented. But, so but Oh, is it? Yeah. But no. What kind of rent are you paying? Oh, I'm not interested in talking to you about my rent, mate.

I'm here to, I'm here to support a very important campaign, and you as a member of the media have an important duty.

This is a issue that affects the 100%, because none of us can be happy as long as any of

us are treated with discrimination, as long as any of us suffer from inequality.

And during the 2015 election, Labour leader Ed Miliband took part in a major interview with Brand on his YouTube channel, The Trews.

I decided that some people were saying the campaign was too boring, so I thought I'd make it more interesting. A- and, but the, but the serious point to this is as follows: There are millions of people in our country who are not watching this election, who are not listening to this election, and who think voting doesn't make a difference And Russell Brand is one of the people who said in the past that voting doesn't make a difference.

Now, I profoundly disagree with that, and I'm gonna go anywhere And talk to anyone, to take that message out to people about how we can change this country so it works for working people again

What motivated the left to have this association with brand?

We know that if we go back to that kind of the, the first half of the 2010, so you've got, the coalition winning power in May 2010, introducing an austerity, program.

You've got the protests against tuition fees, happening at the end of that, the end of that year, and then the, those fees kicked in a couple of years later. You had this kind of, a drastic kind of delimiting of what was considered possible. The other important expression which happened around about then was, Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, which I think was published in 2009.

It became a book that many people... it was short, it was very readable, it was very, y- it, it brought into questions the affective state of neoliberalism in, in relation to his own depression and some of the cultural manifestations of a depressive culture which says that the future has to be exactly the same or worse than the present.

And that was what, so much of Mark's, writing, over that period was about. I think that, the, there was clearly what partly was being mobilized there was a generational phenomenon, and I think that's partly what Mark Fisher, helped to give some voice to.

But I think it also in different ways, it was partly the brand, we call a coalition, but certainly the kind of moment of excitement that here was, all sorts of people that felt that they didn't really have any kind of voice at all, and that, of course, the mechanism of the mainstream media and mainstream politics were, not serving them in various ways.

Now, one of the crucial ingredients in that was that in the past, if there were various people who's, who felt that they had no means of expressing their alienation from the mainstream media or mainstream politics, other than becoming pamphleteers, which of course, some people did via anarchist book fairs and that kind of thing, or writing letters to the newspaper, you didn't really have any other media with which to express that alienation.

Social media, which came of age during this period, I think I got a Facebook account 2007 and a smartphone- ... in 2010. So it was round about the time of the- You're an

early adopter

I don't know

Relatively ...

relatively, but I think 2010 was the big turning point with phones, with smartphones, and I think the big platforms were, social media platforms were round about then.

I think Twitter was a few years later. But what they did and do so with such u- unique capacity is to give voice to the discrepancy between the account of the world as given by the mainstream, in inverted commas, and how the mainstream feels to millions of people. And that's something which, you know, various anthropologists and theorists and ethnographers and sociologists have been interested in that for a long time.

But the idea that people themselves are able to basically mobilize and say, "That system over there..." I guess anti-war protests, which I come onto at the end of the essay as well, is it would be, where, if you think of the Iraq protests of 2003, one of the most kind of frequently seen, banners and signs in those protests is not in my name.

And again, there's that idea of the, that what is done via the mediums, media and the institutions of representation of the mainstream, I, they do not reflect me in any way. I'm outside of that, system of representation. And that's what I think social media does so powerfully. It's what Brand was picking up on.

I think Ed Miliband dabbled with it in 2015 because I think he thought it might win him some crucial votes for that election, which we know he, he ultimately, although relatively narrowly, lost.

The new assembly, the National Convention, abolished the monarchy and declared the establishment of the French Republic in September 1792.

The National Convention had divisions of its own, with one group arguing in favor of setting up a bourgeois republic, and the other, led by Maximilien Robespierre, pushed for increasing the political and economic power of the lower classes, of the working man. They called themselves sans-culottes.

Robespierre proved to be the more convincing leader. The convention judged the royal family guilty of treason, and by January 1793, King Louis XVI was beheaded by the guillotine, and Marie Antoinette met the same fate nine months later. The increasing outside threat from pro-monarchy military forces across Europe led to greater popularity for the more radical Robespierre-led faction of the National Convention in France.

His faction drove the pro-bourgeoisie faction from the National Convention in 1793 and imposed truly radical changes to the political, social, and economic landscape of France. They imposed government price controls, taxed the rich, created nationalized assistance programs for poor and disabled communities, called for free compulsory education, and confiscated and sold the land of the French nobles who fled before the war.

They even set up an entirely new calendar system and developed the metric system. For many in France, however, these changes were too much and too fast. Uprisings across the country against the radical National Convention led to harsh governmental crackdown against dissidents, known as the Reign of Terror.

The ten months from September 1793 to July 1794, during which three hundred thousand people were arrested, seventeen thousand of them were executed, and innumerable more died in squalor in their prison cells or were killed without trial. By the end of the Reign of Terror, opposition was so strong to this radical, violent government that Robespierre was overthrown in July 1794, and he himself was sent to the guillotine.

The National Convention quickly reversed course, getting rid of government price controls and abandoning the social laws and efforts towards economic equality. Another new constitution was written, which divided executive power from legislative power, putting the executive in the hands of a directory of five members and the legislative powers into two chambers.

But ongoing war with Europe and continued unrest within France weakened the power of the central government, leading to numerous coups, most notably by a little guy named Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799, who abolished the directory and became the leader of France, ending the French Revolution era and beginning the Napoleonic era.

During which time Napoleon attempted to bring the revolution to the rest of Europe with varying degrees of success. Now, what does all of that have to do with today, with this modern era? Where are the similarities? Let's discuss, shall we? So in 1780s France, you have great economic instability due to issues with trade, issues with crops and agriculture, and significant cultural unrest because of the growth of the middle class, of manufacturing, and the expansion of capitalism into more people's everyday lives.

You also have increased exposure to new enlightenment ways of thinking, but no one could really afford anything, while the wealthiest people had all the money and power. You also had numerous wars across the globe leading to significant national debt. That's a lot of similarities. Today, we have 50 years of the neoliberal experiment of fucking around, coming to a head, entering its finding out era, with extreme wealth inequality and large numbers of people barely scraping by, while the power, political influence, and money all rises to the top 1%.

You have extreme economic turmoil spurred on not only from 50 years of neoliberalism and monopolization, but also the COVID pandemic and a 30% cost of living increase in the last few years that incomes never caught up with. Couple that with the revolutionary advancement in AI in an extremely short period of time, leading to a panic of people thinking that it's going to take their jobs, or even worse, completely decimate the planet, either through the coming artificial general intelligence or, more likely, through the environmental destruction that AI will cause.

Add on to that the creation of social media, especially TikTok, and the short form content model, which means more people are exposed to more information more easily, leading to the creation of factions, but also the greater dissemination of more and more radical information, but also the greater dissemination of different political modes, different ways of thinking, different ways of forming a government.

At the same time, there is a dramatic breakdown of trust in institutions. We no longer believe that the Supreme Court can make logical and unbiased decisions. Media has conglomerated to the point that it's exclusively owned by evil, maniacal Lex Luthor types. The DOJ is exclusively going after enemies of the president while letting actual literal insurrectionists go free.

Congress has completely abdicated all of its power in the name of allowing the executive branch to walk all over it, and the executive branch is dominated by unelected fringe lunatics who don't represent the will of anyone. That being said, there are many important ways in which 1780s France is very different from 2026 United States, obviously.

The key areas where I think this is true is in our form of government and our economy. While yes, I think more and more people are being exposed to the ideas of communism, Marxism, socialism, especially democratic socialism, none of these ideas are as revolutionary as the Enlightenment was in Europe at that time, because they've been around for a while.

We've known about them for a while. Democratic socialism is an accepted style of government in numerous countries in Europe. The French Revolution was inspired in part by the revolution in the United States, and both created or attempted to create constitutional democracies or republics that had never existed before.

They were completely new experiments inspired by this revolutionary new thought brought about in the Enlightenment thinking. I don't think we have something that new or different or radical that I'm seeing being proposed by the people who want to see change happen in this country. Socialism, communism, everyone disappearing into the woods to live in communes off the land in harmony with one another, it's all been attempted before in some form or another.

None of this is a new invention of the twenty-first century. Odds are that even if there was some sort of revolution in the United States, that the fundamental form of government wouldn't change as drastically as France did from a monarchy to a republic and so quickly. Let's talk economic system. We are absolutely going through economic shocks right now.

People are uncomfortable. The way we do work has dramatically and completely changed over the last fifty or so years. For example, as a lawyer, I literally wouldn't know how to practice law in the 1970s. The internet, COVID and remote work, and now AI has fundamentally changed the nature of people's jobs, some more than others, in ways we're only really beginning to understand, but in ways that have laid economic inequality completely bare, whether you're getting laid off because of AI, or you were forced to work through a pandemic as an essential worker while making minimum wage.

We are feeling these changes in really dramatic ways. I'm not sure, however, that these changes are as dramatic as the changes that occurred between the feudal system and the system of capitalism in France in the 1700s. We are still existing in capitalism the same way we were 100 years ago. We're just engaging with it differently.

We have settled into our roles as consumers above all else in a way that just wasn't the case in the feudal system. To go from a strict three-tiered caste system to one where there was upward mobility, trade, manufacturing, that fracturing of the societal and economic system was a fundamental shift that I don't think we've seen here in the United States.

The shocks here compared to the shocks leading up to the revolution, they just don't compare. But I do still think there are things we can learn from the French Revolution that can inform how we move forward today Specifically, my central takeaway from this little comparative exercise is that even the most enlightened, forward-thinking, progressive movements can all go to shit.

That's not to say important things didn't come from the French Revolution. It established new norms and new ideas that even if they didn't come to fruition at the time, like universal compulsory education, for example, they planted a seed that later became a reality. And the nature of these types of big, bold political ideas is that you have to be willing to try and fail and tweak and work on them with the North Star of greater freedom and equality for more people grounding that work.

But even if you have the best intentions and the most enlightened ideas, the cult of personality, the fervor of revolution, the drama and fear of instability can lead to, let's just say, heavy-handedness. It can lead to violence, violence that is often unnecessary. Revolution, as you can see displayed in many revolutions across time, may start with lofty ideals and theories, but can end in tyranny when the inevitable backlash happens when you try to change too much too quickly.

The instability that comes from a too much too fast approach can lead to the death of a nation. Many great things came from the French Revolution. It is also a cautionary tale. And when we think about our current moment, I, as someone who runs in pretty leftist circles on the internet and in my own comment section, I often see people calling for revolution, for armed revolution, for a push for dramatic changes as quickly as possible.

I see a sense of impatience, which is totally understandable. I feel it too, and most things feel too little too late. Most things feel like, well, if they wanted to, they would. But even if they wanted to enact some progressive change that seems like it would make everyone's lives better, the reality of politics, of running a country, especially one as big as the United States, that's another difference to France, which was largely racially and religiously homogenous in the 1700s and contained within a much smaller land mass than the US, the reality is that there is always a backlash.

There is always a ripple effect of largely unintended consequences for every decision in governing, and something that seems obvious or straightforward often is not. It makes me think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's stance that the court's decision in Roe v. Wade created a change that was too much too fast, and it would have been better to push abortion rights through the legislature, where it would require a greater will of the majority.

And we did see 50 years of backlash after Roe v. Wade that culminated with Dobbs, but continues today in the fight over mifepristone and the ongoing fights in the States. And that's not to say Roe v. Wade caused all of this, but it's hard to know how abortion rights would look in this country if they had been written into law instead of ordered by the Supreme Court.

Who knows if we would have ever even gotten them? It's hard to know. But the point is that too much too fast can backfire, and we saw that in the ten months of terror during the French Revolution when these supposedly enlightened leaders in favor of equality and freedom guillotined literally 17,000 people because they didn't fall in line.

Okay. So is the United States headed for its own form of the French Revolution? I don't think so. The shocks to the system today are bad, but not like the shocks to the French system in the 1700s. And as a pacifist, personally, I'm okay with that. Though as my video from earlier this week discussed, that doesn't mean we won't see continued political violence.

The people are mad and they need an outlet for that anger, but I'm not sure that it's gonna rise to the level of a full-blown bloody revolution.

When you strip away collective action, when you strip away the ability for people to come together to address a real problem, to address collective anxiety, the problem doesn't go away. The anxiety doesn't go away. What ends up happening is a collective problem becomes shifted to an individual problem.

Collective action becomes individual action. It becomes, "What are you going to do? What is your plan for saving yourself and your family?" Because that's all you can really focus on at that point There's an idea, I've talked about this before, about the permanent underclass. This is an idea that's been going around recently surrounding AI, which is that at some point in the near future, there's gonna be a split, a bifurcation, the K-shaped economy.

Some people are gonna be on the good part of the K on the way up. Some people are gonna be going down. And the permanent underclass is something that you have to escape. If you make the right moves, if you make the right investments, if you follow the right career path, you can be one of the good ones.

You can get to the good part of the K while everybody else is stuck in the permanent underclass. This issue, the way it's being described, it has the same language as the Rapture. It has the same logic as, you know, Jesus coming back and taking the, you know, the saved. It is an event that is being described as inevitable.

It's gonna happen, therefore, your job is to make sure that you're on the boat. Make sure you are setting yourself up for salvation, because you don't wanna be left off the boat. It's gonna be scary.

And this kind of anxiety, this kind of, you know, the anxiety that it produces is real. People can feel economic precarity. You are not imagining that But nobody stops to ask, should there be a permanent underclass? Nobody asks, is this okay? Is this something that we just have to accept as a event that is about to happen?

Nobody stops to ask Can't Jesus just take everybody? Because that's not an option. If that was an option, the event itself wouldn't have the same kind of urgency. You wouldn't be able to sell something behind it. And that's what this permanent underclass thing really comes from. It comes from some kind of guru guy online who's trying to sell you a course.

This is, "If you pay me this ninety-nine bucks, I'll give you the answer so you can escape the permanent underclass." They are trying to resolve your anxiety for you through purchasing. "If you follow my movement, then you can be one of the saved and, uh, you know, Jesus will take you while everybody else, I don't know, they go to hell or something."

But the thing to think about with the Rapture, I've talked about this in the past too, but

The rapture as a concept, the idea that the world is ending and that it is going to happen soon. Sometimes they give you an actual date. "This is when everything's gonna go down, so get your affairs in order. Walk to the top of the hill." This happens again and again throughout history over the last centuries.

People keep thinking it's about to happen, and when it doesn't happen, the idea doesn't really disappear. It just gets pushed further down the road. This isn't because people are stupid. This isn't because people are gullible. The reason it keeps coming up is because even if the event doesn't happen, the anxiety doesn't get erased.

You still end up with the same problems you had before. So the same thing is happening with the permanent underclass. Nobody can ever give you a date for when that split's gonna happen. And when it doesn't happen, if it doesn't happen, all they're gonna do is push it further down the line. All they're gonna tell you is, "It hasn't happened yet, but that's why you still have time to buy my course.

That's why you still have time to save yourself."

But the key to understanding this is seeing that- the solution they're giving you is always going to be individual. It's always going to be focusing on saving yourself, focusing on an individual solution to what is clearly a collective problem. And when you go down that path, you lose the ability to collectively address anything.

You lose the connection that got us to where we are. This is how you end up with paranoia. This is how you end up with conspiracy brain, because you have lost the ability to trust anybody. You have lost the foundational trust of humanity, of collective action When we talk about the importance of learning history, you hear about it as trying to avoid the mistakes of the past, and that's part of it.

But the real value of history is understanding mechanism. It is understanding what the fights were about in the past and how we got to where we are now. Because where we are now is not a permanent situation. The catalytic converter under your car is vulnerable. It can be taken away. The things that we have now, the things that feel invisible, that feel solved, they can take those away too.

Everything is on the table. The importance of learning history is understanding what it took to actually get this and what we might have to do again And that's the thing, the real problem I have with this narrative of the permanent underclass. The problem is that the idea kinda makes sense There is an underclass, obviously.

Society is stratified in a certain way. There is hierarchy and growing inequality. My problem with the permanent underclass as a concept is that it's supposed to be permanent. Because if there's a permanent underclass, that means there's also a permanent overclass. There's a permanent dominant class, where if you get there, you're just in.

Jesus has taken you up, and now you're in heaven. And once you're there, the thing is done. You're safe now. That's ridiculous. History is a story of people thinking they got there and then finding out they didn't get there. They got there for a while, and then they fell back. Increasing inequality, the rapid movement of resources and wealth upwards.

This means that it's never over. You're never there. You might think you got there because you were clever and you did the right things for a while. But once you get there, they can still take that from you. Of course they're gonna take it from you. You will still always have the option of falling back.

And once you do fall back, you're gonna be with the rest of us. Because as much as you fought to be the individual who overcame the odds, the individual who broke the narrative and found the path forward, at some point You're gonna be down here with the rest of us

political violence tends to beget more political violence and add to long-term instability.

The World War was a red nightmare, and it seems incredible that it should have started with such a relatively unimportant event as the assassination of the Archduke Leopold of Austria.

When people think of the strategic removal of one person

I'm delighted to welcome Alex Churchill. Alex is a historian and presenter with a fresh perspective on the opening year of the First World War.

As the government is arguing that Cole Allen did when he went to the Washington Hilton, there's all

these excuses that people come up with for getting involved in the war.

There's very little control that one person has in terms of what they're doing.

But the really big driving factor for everybody is imperialism. It's stuff And is being the biggest player on the world stage at the end of it.

Meaning the results often have little to do with the thoughts or views of the person who went to commit violence.

On the 28th of June, 1914, a 19-year-old Bosnian-born Serb called Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Leopold It's a miracle he pulled it off, because he and his friends were grossly incompetent.

Violence often morphs and warps and does harm far beyond the intentions of the person or party or government that inflicts it.

What Austria-Hungary does is seize the assassination as an excuse to put them in their place. Now, they're not trying to start a world war. I think

what practitioners

imagine as righteous violence You couldn't afford, if you were a major imperial power, not to have a seat at the table at the end, and really, that's the excuse.

often as not gets hijacked, interrupted, and corrupted.

The big, long list of causes, long and short-term, are important, but really the only cause that matters when we talk about the outbreak of the First World War is imperialism.

The second reason is that y- you can't win gains without strategy.

C.T. Vivian, a close friend and advisor to Dr.

King.

You can't be strategic without discipline.

Senator Barack Obama, in 2007, called him, "The greatest preacher to ever live."

Discipline in action is important to build community and coalition.

50 years ago, Vivian was punched in the face by Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark on the courthouse steps in Selma as he tried to escort a group of African Americans inside to register to vote.

And while communal violence can be disciplined and can build interpersonal bonds in some cases, it often does so in really destructive ways that are hard to transition to non-violent models.

The punch was so hard Sheriff Clark broke his own hand. C.T. Vivian began by talking about the power of non-violence.

If you never manage to transition to a non-violent model

What was given to us from its very beginnings is an understanding that we could not win by killing.

communities organized principally around committing violence don't have a great long-term track record.

Light doesn't come because of darkness.

And the third reason is one that really just boils down to personal preference in some ways. Non-violence is what I've studied, and I know what tends to work within its frameworks, and even am aware of its shortcomings. If I'm going to be strategic, I'm gonna use the tools I know how to use. Sometimes that might limit my toolbox, but I feel a responsibility when I swing a hammer.

I wanna know what I'm building and how it's gonna be put together.

May I interrupt you there, Dr. King? There are today certainly people who are forced to endure a kind of injustice that neither you nor even Gandhi in his time had ever seen.

Don’t forget that nonviolence isn’t refusing to embrace or to use power.

I feel that, um, nonviolence, organized I should say, organized, uh, nonviolent resistance is the most powerful weapon, weapon that oppressed people can use in breaking loose from the bondage of oppression.

It’s learning to develop it and use it in different ways.

I think it, uh, should apply in every situation in the world where individuals seek to

break loose from the bondage of colonialism or from some totalitarian regime or from the system which we confront

in America. At the same time, I understand that violence is the default for many facets of American society. In the

wake of the George Floyd killing, most Americans have now come to realize that the police

need sweeping changes.

But the question is, why has it taken so long? We are an extraordinarily policed society

with violence as a core part of daily life. Why did so many people, particularly white people, think until now that police are just

fine the way they are? We can see this in the allocation of money to law enforcement in our municipal,

state, and federal budgets.

Well, one reason is that most Americans don't actually have much actual experience with police. We see it in the fetishization of law enforcement and the military as quasi-religious figures

to whom the state enthusiastically gives power over life and death. How are they forming their opinions about the police?

Well, a lot of

it comes from the same way I form all my opinions about Klingons. We can see it in the impunity that law enforcement has to commit violence

against and kill non-citizens and citizens alike. It's actually crazy how every cop show has police just regularly using violence to help them do their job.

To be clear, nonviolent efforts often get met with state violence anyway.

According to cop shows, whenever cops are breaking the law, it's only because they have to.

We can't just break protocol because we think it's right at the time and expect to get away with it.

Whatever practice you use for social change, I think it’s good to ask what your strategy and tactics hope to accomplish.

In real life, beating a suspect is a great way to get them to confess to something they didn't do, which means you've locked up an innocent person and you've let the real criminal walk free.

So why not commit violence if you might be met with violence anyway? Because I grew up with violence, and I’m interested in creating power that is not violence, that chooses to act outside a frame of violence and actively doesn’t replicate it.

But that is hard and slow work, and it's frustrating for a lot of people.

Since the early 2000s, Erica Chenoweth, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, has systematically and empirically assessed historical and contemporary mass movements, focusing on the efficacy of nonviolent campaigns.

Non-cooperation, nonviolent resistance, boycott strikes, there's so many ways of using power, even physical power, in the pursuit of a political end without committing violence against other human beings.

The idea is that when people use these types of techniques in sequences that increase their political pressure over time against the opponent, while also managing the risk to people for participating, that they can achieve extraordinary political, social, and economic breakthroughs that kind of surprise observers who kind of maybe underestimated how powerful people power can actually be.

I want to build something different than some kind of police state-like society.

The most important thing to know about why nonviolent resistance is so effective, I think, is that it's a truly inclusive method of resistance.

In our current society, law enforcement has the power to commit violence.

Damn

straight!

Political actors often make the public afraid in order to be able to make the argument that you are in danger, and the state needs the ability to commit more violence in order to protect you.

Here now to weigh in is White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller.

Stephen, this week the president doubled down on that promise to take on sanctuary cities, saying, "They do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens."

This brings more power both to those politicians and to law enforcement.

ICE, over and over and over again, goes out into the community to find and arrest these fugitives who have since committed additional egregious crimes after they were released by Fry and Waltz and Ellison.

These are acts of insurrection against the laws of the United States and against the sovereignty of the United States.

It may sound obvious, but in my experience, a system that increasingly puts its resources toward a capacity for greater violence will lead to more violence.

Pete Hegseth told a House committee that the Pentagon is asking for a war-fighting budget.

Hegseth says the military needs $1.5 trillion for the next fiscal year. That's a 44% increase.

I don't want to contribute violence to a violent system because it rarely ends the violence, and instead, usually produces more.

This leads to another one of our long-term causes, which is militarism By this, we mean that countries became kind of obsessed with making sure that they had the biggest army they possibly could.

And, and in some aspects, they're concerned with having a bigger army than their neighbor.

I'm not saying it's never worked, but I'm saying it doesn't have a great track record.

The First World War was and still remains the bloodiest war ever fought in the history of the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Belgium, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

And as I've said before, the involvement and persistence of determined people who keep showing up is under-girded with a different kind of power, a different kind of pressure, implicit pressure, both physical and psychological.

What this really suggests is just that people power isn't just about a huge number of people being in the streets, but it's about that building of pressure and the building of momentum.

The implicit psychological dynamic occurs when you make your position the normal one in society, the reasonable one that people come to accept and get it to be perceived as such, so that those who embrace hate and violence and targeting vulnerable groups feel those ideas are the outliers, and put them outside the social norms in a way that will be upsetting to some of them.

We've just heard clips starting with

The Inquiry examining what separates successful revolutions from failed ones, looking at both Serbia and Egypt as two defining cases.

The Politics Show traced how Russell Brand's rejection of voting, his 2013 New Statesman Revolution Issue, and his 2015 interview with Ed Miliband made him a focal point for left disillusionment after the financial crisis.

Leeja Miller walked through the French Revolution to argue that while today's US faces real instability, the shocks don't rise to the level that would trigger a full-blown bloody revolution.

Dan Harumi drew a parallel between rapture theology and the "permanent underclass" narrative, showing how both manufacture urgency around an inevitable event to sell individual salvation while making collective solutions unthinkable.

And Degenerate Art drew on WWI's catastrophic origins and Erica Chenoweth's empirical research to explain why organized nonviolent resistance consistently outperforms violence as a strategy for lasting change.

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

But first, speaking of failed revolutions, I’m just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! that we had to put on indefinite hiatus due to sudden economic instability and ad dollars drying up.

Right now, I’m rethinking everything and said that I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops. So, in short, I’m reimagining our entire social media strategy from the ground up for unpaid marketing, while also working on building a strategy for a paid marketing campaign, while also rethinking what our members-only content looks and sounds like.

No big deal, just that.

So, to our members supporting the show, you’re really getting us through right now and we appreciate your patience while we work on cleaning up this mess.

Thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations. And if you haven’t signed up yet but are thinking about it, each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor so it’s not particularly cheap to produce and essentially every dollar we can spare right now beyond basic costs will be going toward finding new listeners.

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.

Plus, if you’re worried that signing up for a membership won’t be impactful enough for the struggles we’re facing, that’s why we offer higher membership tiers so that you can voluntarily give us more money. But if those options still don’t seem like enough and you want to cut a check to help fund our marketing campaign, just drop me a email and we’ll sort that out.

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,

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

or you can simply email me to [email protected]

Speaking of members keeping the show going and leaving voice messages, we got a voice message from one of our members who’s helping to keep the show going.

 Hi Jay, Amanda, Dion, and Aaron. This is Jared from Baltimore. I've been listening since I was a sophomore in college in 2002 when a dear friend put me on. Longtime listener, first time caller. Uh, Solved has been a genuine joy. Hearing your team off script, learning about their thoughts and fears and obsessions, and hearing their perspectives. Uh, shout out to Dion for the sports metaphors. I'm not a sportsball person myself, but they always make sense to me. Um, when you shared that, uh, dried up ad revenue is threatening Solved, I decided to triple my subscription, so I have officially graduated from professional protester to radical leftist. Um, I wish I could give more. Your synthesis of the structures beneath the systems we inhabit is some of the finest fucking journalism around. You have brought clarity and understanding during one of the most difficult periods in, in history, and we need it now more than ever. So thank you, and thank your whole team. Please keep it up.

Thanks for that message Jarrett. Just one small quibble, he couldn’t have been listening since 2002 because the show launched in 2006 but that just opens up more questions. But can I just say, on the topic of voice messages in general: In the early days, we used to have a really vibrant voicemail segment on the show and people would regularly say that it was their favorite part of the show. But about 15 years ago, things began to shift and we entered a sort of death spiral where the fewer voice messages we got, the fewer people felt like it was a good idea to send voice messages, which decreased voice messages even more, and so on and so on.

But I think we’re due for a revival so I’m going to begin asking a discussion question in each episode to kick things off but you should also feel free to respond to anything you heard on the show, including other voice messages.

So, here’s today’s question: Research discussed in the show today suggests that nonviolent movements succeed because they're radically inclusive — anyone can boycott, strike, or refuse to cooperate. What's one form of nonviolent pressure you've personally participated in or witnessed working, and what made it effective [or not]? I would love to hear.

If you have a response to share, send us a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes. For you old school listeners who have our old phone number saved in your phone, don’t be tempted to use it because I don’t check that system anymore.

Now to my comments on today's topic,

One of the first things I learned when I did a stint working at a climate change organization was that every event you put on has to give people a way to stay connected. Capture the contact info, hand them the next action, keep the momentum going by keeping the relationship going. It's the most basic piece of organizing infrastructure there is.

I went to a Sanders/AOC Fighting Oligarchy rally in a giant outdoor park last year, tens of thousands of people, the kind of event that takes massive organizing infrastructure to pull off. I've also been to some No Kings rallies and I know that building events like these is genuinely hard work, which is exactly what makes it tragic that after all that effort to get tens of thousands of people in one place, there's no giant QR code on the screen sending everyone to a signup page with a next action.

During my time at the climate org, when we had a rally we would have been frantically sending around staffers with clipboards through the crowds asking people to put down their contact information. These days it would be so much simpler to send people to a signup page that they can do on their mobile device in the moment and be added to the organization list immediately and given guidance on what their next personal action could be to stay plugged in.

Now, there are technically reasons why event organizers don't do something like that, usually having to do with the intricacies of being in a coalition or the legalities of organizations with different statuses avoiding legal exposure from the IRS. So, these people aren't clueless. It's not like I'm telling them something they've never thought of before. But I am urging organizers to prioritize this because the most basic piece of organizing infrastructure is creating the next step for people, and at our flagship events I found the next steps to be missing.

And that’s the whole problem in miniature.

The work to fill a park with tens of thousands of people is enormous. What we keep failing to do is everything that should happen after the park empties out. And it can't always be the short-term stuff like calling Congress to put pressure on your representatives, or donating to the right cause, or even organizing turnout for the next election. Long-term success depends on long-term planning and that should be part of the regular rhetoric we hear from movement leaders.

The right has been doing nothing but that kind of work for fifty years and that asymmetry is most of why we're losing.

First, the big picture. The Heritage Foundation has been doing personnel-pipeline work since 1981, when they delivered their first Mandate for Leadership policy book to Reagan and watched about 60% of its recommendations become policy. They've kept iterating on that book for over forty years. Project 2025 was the ninth iteration, plus a database of pre-vetted appointees ready on day one.

A year later, in 1982, a handful of conservative law students started the Federalist Society as basically a campus debate club. Forty years later they had used it to put six of nine current Supreme Court Justices on the bench.

Skip ahead to 2010. The Republican State Leadership Committee ran a project called REDMAP, spent roughly thirty million dollars on state legislative races nobody was watching, won them, and used the wins to gerrymander congressional districts that locked in Republican advantages for the next decade. David Daley laid the whole story out in his book Ratf**ked.

But it wasn’t all organizing behind closed doors, elements of the conservative movement also called in regular folks to be foot soldiers.

In the early 90s, Ralph Reed at the Christian Coalition kicked off the school board project, using what he openly called "stealth" tactics. Run on vague language, downplay religious motivations, win in low-turnout races. By the mid-90s the Coalition had captured thousands of these seats nationwide. Moms for Liberty inherited the playbook and are using it to this day.

Then in 2021, Steve Bannon spent the year on his War Room podcast telling MAGA listeners to fill empty Republican county committees, the local party seats that decide who gets on the ballot and who staffs the polls. ProPublica found at least 8,500 new precinct officers signed up in just the 41 swing counties they tracked.

These aren't one master plan, they're overlapping projects across conservative factions that often hate each other. But the work is identical, the same boring, patient pattern.

Of course, a lot of what the right has been doing patiently is also nakedly anti-democratic. REDMAP was gerrymandering, and Bannon's precinct strategy has election subversion built right into it. But that’s part of what creates the motivation asymmetry here.

People pushing for revolutionary change like Christian nationalists wanting to drag the country back to some imaginary version of itself, or run-of-the-mill MAGA cult election deniers are always going to be more motivated to show up to a Tuesday meeting than people who basically just want local politics to function the way it's supposed to, with regular people just trying to do their best for their communities, not trying to usher in a theocracy.

That's just how it works, radicals show up. We shouldn't have to fight this battle on this terrain, but we can't cede it to people who are being told that taking over their school boards will help bring about God’s plan for Trump to end the world.

On the left, the boring logistics have always been under appreciated.

Jane McAlevey, the labor organizer who died two years ago, spent her career on one basic distinction. There's mobilizing, which is turning out the already-convinced for an event, and there's organizing, which is the slow patient work of finding the natural leaders inside a workplace and building a base that wasn't there before. Mobilizing makes spectacle, organizing builds power. Inside organizing circles this is basically conventional wisdom, McAlevey has been required reading for years. The problem is it hasn't gotten through to the broader progressive imagination, to the people who go to the rallies and post online and donate but don’t have a local meeting to attend.

A giant QR code at a rally that gives people their next step is one way of bridging the boundary between mobilizing and organizing, and at our flagship events, I’m not seeing how they’re trying to bridge that gap.

So why does the left keep skipping the boring part? Part of it is that capitalism has gotten very good at letting the explosion happen, filming it, selling the documentary, and absorbing everyone back into precarity once the news cycle moves on. But there's a deeper thing going on, I think, which is that the left has an institutional problem with power itself.

It kind of makes sense. If you've spent your political life fighting people who have too much power over others, authoritarians and corporations and billionaires, your instinct is to reject the structures that produce that kind of power. But that instinct ends up rejecting the systems that would create power within the left, too. Building power requires institutions and structure, which means somebody being in charge of something, but that pretty quickly starts to feel uncomfortably like the thing you've been fighting. Occupy is the obvious example. The movement actively refused to build an organizational framework or name any leaders, and when reporters kept asking what their demands were, the movement treated the absence of an answer as a virtue. The point was to model a different kind of relationship to power, one without any of the compromises that come with organizing.

Protesting feels pure and unsullied. You can show up with whatever sign you want and whatever opinion you brought with you, and the experience feels inclusive precisely because nobody has to sit down and hash out which values the organization is going to be built on because rally attendees aren’t building an organization.

But building power requires exactly those conversations, the ones where compromises get made and a coalition has to be assembled out of people who don't fully agree with each other. That work feels less pure almost immediately and less righteous. So a lot of people would almost rather stay on the outside, sign in hand, feeling like they haven't compromised anything, than sit down at the table where messy alliances actually get built. But it’s those messy alliances that are exactly what produces the kinds of change huge supermajorities of the left actually say they want but that we’ve been struggling to achieve for decades.

Another concern, isn't compromise and coalition building just liberal incrementalism in a new outfit? No. Incrementalism is settling for less now. Building power in preparation for a boring revolution is building the muscle that lets you actually win later.

You can't have a successful general strike without unions that have been organizing for a decade beforehand, and you can't have a transformative administration without a personnel pipeline ready to staff it. The right understood that the moment requires the preparation, while the left in general and Democrats in particular have spent decades pretending we could skip that part.

The cleanest contemporary example on the left of doing this right is what the UAW did under Shawn Fain after the Stand Up Strike in 2023. After six weeks of strike, the Big Three auto companies caved on raises and cost-of-living adjustments and ended the wage tiers. The strike got the footage but the more important move came after. Fain deliberately set the new Big Three contracts to expire at midnight on April 30, 2028, and publicly called on the rest of the labor movement to align their contracts to that date, so May Day 2028 could be a coordinated mass strike across industries. That's five years of patient calendar-alignment work to build the conditions for exactly the kind of moment the left usually just romanticizes.

And it's actually moving. At the 2024 AFT convention in Houston, the American Federation of Teachers, with 1.8 million members, overwhelmingly passed a resolution endorsing the call, with the Chicago Teachers Union leading the push. The American Postal Workers Union signed on. Other unions and AFL-CIO labor councils are joining. The general strike everyone fantasizes about isn't going to be a spontaneous explosion, it'll be the product of years of unglamorous calendar coordination across dozens of bargaining units, by people doing the work nobody is filming.

So, what to do? Embrace the boring work. Go to your local school board meetings and run for a seat if you need to. Join your county Democratic precinct committee, most of them are starved for members while Bannon's people are filling theirs. Volunteer as a poll worker. If you're already in a union, ask your local what its position is on aligning the next contract with May 1, 2028, and if it hasn't signed on yet, urge them to. Look into Run for Something, they recruit and train candidates for the small offices nobody else runs for. And read Jane McAlevey's No Shortcuts.

These actions aren’t equally available to everyone, and if you're juggling three jobs or caregiving or disabled, showing up to a Tuesday school board meeting might actually be impossible. But supporting the people who can show up is also the work; money, childcare, rides, whatever lowers the barrier.

And one specific ask for anyone who runs rallies or events. Put a goddamn QR code on the screen and follow up with the people who scan it within a week and actually build out the ladder behind it. The person who scans at the rally needs a local meeting to show up to next, then a small team to plug into, then a real path into a leadership role, because without those rungs in place, the people who show up at rallies and are ready to do more just end up alienated and demoralized when their energy is given no where to go. The most basic piece of organizing infrastructure is bringing people in and keeping them there. It isn't optional and it's a thing we could fix this month.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

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

Section A, ANATOMY OF FAILURE

Followed by Section B, REVISITING THE RECORD

Section C, THE CURRENT MOMENT

And Section D, STRATEGY AND PRACTICE

this is something that is hard to remember for those of us that lived through it, and I find nearly impossible to get like Gen Z to, to believe when I tell them that's, that in, say, 2009 or 2010, almost everyone, almost everyone from left to right, but certainly mainstream, um, uh, media in, in North America of the ty- you know, the types of outlets that I always worked for, really believed that if something happened because of the internet, more specifically if something happened because of social media, it was necessarily good.

It was going to push his- humanity forward. And now we believe almost the exact inverse. I mean, if you think about a hypothetical, quote-unquote, "Facebook revolution" now, if you think about a large group of yarge- largely young men storming the capital of some country because of a post they saw on the internet- Mm-hmm

our first reaction in 2023 would probably be, "Ooh, red flags," rather than this is, this is gonna, you know, usher in global democracy. And so this is something that we discovered over the 2010s, that the internet is a, is a tool that anyone can use, number one, left, right, center, reactionary, communist, atheist, Islamist.

And two, we didn't get the internet in general. We get a particular type of internet that was shaped by powerful men in California, my home state, that re- reengineered a lot of our, the online experience, um, to maximize their profits, and I think, I think that really matters.

Okay, so, uh, uh, let's... You- you've talked about Egypt, and, and I wanna, I wanna go there for s- a second.

So Tunisia was the first uprising in the Arab Spring, but Egypt really seemed to confirm that something big was happening, and something big could happen, right? So people probably remember the scenes from 2011, uh, of like just mass gatherings in Tahrir Square in Cairo, calling for the end of Mubarak's 30-year rule.

Egyptians filled Tahrir Square in the center of Cairo, protesting for weeks. These protests

have gone on all day long. It's now almost 5:00 in the afternoon. It's two hours after curfew has begun, but still the square is packed with people, and these protests will likely go well into the night

And, you know, it worked, right?

It led to him stepping down. But then if you follow that further out, and this is kind of the, you know, the, the thesis of your book, right? You follow that further out, it sort of turns into the, the upside down, right? Like it... How did, how did that pan out after Mubarak is, is ousted?

So as you mentioned in the case of Brazil, the organizers and activists that put together the protests of January 25th, 2011, had no expectation that they were gonna be in a position to even ask for the fall of Mubarak.

They believed that they were going to do a protest against police brutality. Hopefully some activists would come out. Hopefully the, the, the, the, the same group of people that usually come out to the streets would show up and they wouldn't get repressed too violently. Um, they knew that the example of Tunisia should matter a little bit.

Anger erupted onto the streets today. Riot police rushing a crowd carrying banners reading, "Yes we can," using tear gas and then live rounds to disperse them. It was enough to bring down the government and force the nation's president to flee.

They hoped that people had been paying attention to this, by Egyptian standards, relatively small and, and sparsely populated nation in North Africa.

You know, Tunisia's not a big reference point for Egyptians. The, by far the most populous Arab nation. Um, but way more people come than they expect. And then on January 28th, way more people come than they expect, and they end up going to battle with the police, and they end up winning.

Egyptians young and old, men and women, pouring into the streets, their numbers growing exponentially.

It's

a revolution in Egypt now. Just Egypt enough. We, we hate these people. We hate this, all this government. We hate it. We want a complete change. The

people on the streets now convinced they're on the cusp of a revolution.

Now, at this moment, a lot of people now look back and say, "Oh, we could have done anything.

We could have taken anything. We could have taken over the centers of power. We could have taken over the television station and broadcast out some kind of a revolutionary message." We weren't prepared for that. We wouldn't even have known how to decide who would do it. So what they did is they took the square, Tahrir Square.

And those images are incredibly inspiring. And if you look back on them now, even knowing how it all ends, it's, it's, it's very easy to understand why so many people around the world found this to be such a powerful movement of Egyptians from different classes, different religions, rich, poor, uh, old, young, coming together to ask for the end of a dictatorship.

The way in which it actually ends, the actual concrete resolution that is imposed upon this explosion where everything is possible ends up mattering quite a lot. And what really happens is the military seizes power and promises to put on elections.

The generals say their rule is temporary and will only last until democratic elections are held.

But with civil rights groups claiming scores of protesters have been detained by the army, and some are being tortured, the question now is whether the military will keep their word.

The- And as the military starts to commit abuses over the next year, the Egyptian revolutionaries only really have one tactic.

They try to take the square again, but they don't, they can't reproduce the numbers that puts effective power, uh, puts effective pressure on the military.

They return to Tahrir Square, thousands of Egyptians, to chant the same chant of the revolution. People want the downfall of the regime. They feel the revolution is not only incomplete, but

under threat.

So you get the group that has been organized for a long time, the group that has been organized for longer than the Egyptian Republic has actually existed, the Muslim Brotherhood winning the elections that the, the Egyptian military does put on in 2012.

Mohamed Morsi is the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood.

He's the first Islamist head of state

to be elected out of these Arab Spring revolutions. The main- You get a movement in 2013 in Egypt which pretends to be the same kind of deal as 2011. It pretends to be a grassroots group of young people that are organizing to fight autocracy. And, uh, they put it... And then a protest movement builds out of this.

But what happens is this protest movement is used as a pretext for a real military coup, not this provisional kind of 2011

coup. Fireworks and jubilation erupted in Tahrir Square tonight as the military announced it dissolved Egypt's constitution and deposed President Mohamed Morsi after just one year in office.

It turns out that this, uh, apparently grassroots movement had been funded the whole time by reactionary Gulf states, uh, most importantly the UAE. And then Sisi, when he takes power-

The shooting started at 7:00 AM as snipers fired from surrounding apartments. Panic started. Hello. Problem? Yeah, big problem.

Yes,

yes. oversees the massacre of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood who, as imperfect as they are, as much as I don't, uh, I don't sympathize at all with Islamism as a political project, as, as much as they had committed errors during, uh, Morsi's one year in power, were the only movement to ever win a democratic election in Egyptian history.

And Sisi just kills 1,000 of them In another square. And nothing happens. So if you look at Egypt right now, you're looking at 10 years later, essentially the long consequences of the 2013 Sisi coup.

I want to talk about what, what we've learned in, in retrospect. So you, you know, you, you talk to a lot of the movement's leaders after. But I guess before we get into that, I, I want to understand why at the time this, this leaderless horizontalist approach that kind of underwrote all these protests, why that was so popular back then.

Yeah. And I think that, yeah, so I think there's a mix of both ideas and material factors. So you do have a preexisting ideological current on the anti-authoritarian left, which emerges out of s- in some ways the 1960s in the United States and France, that is very anti-hierarchical, that really believes in reshaping power rather than taking power.

This is, this is a trend that has existed, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, um, seems to c- cast even further or a, or, or a longer shadow on the legacy of tightly organized and bloody-minded organizational, uh, attempts at, at, at changing the world. But in places like Egypt, a lot of the people that put together January 25th and January 28th really would have loved to have a revolutionary party, a large labour union that could go on strike and, and force, uh, the government to give concessions, civil society organizations that could throw their weight behind, uh, the movement, or a set of organizations that would help to carry out a true revolution.

They just didn't. And it wasn't because they didn't believe in them, it was because they had been destroyed by the Mubarak government. And so you had a particular response that became very easy to do, and you had actors on the streets and in the media seeing structurelessness, spontaneity, leaderlessness, horizontality as good things when maybe they aren't always good things.

So you've talked to the organizers, uh, a, a lot of them in retrospect. Uh, what, what kind of advice do they have for today's generation of, of young activists?

Trying to summarize 200 and 250 interviews is a little bit difficult, but one, one way that I can attempt to do so is to say many activists, revolutionaries, failed revolutionaries, or revolutionaries that have failed so far came to the conclusion that they wished that they had been more organized before the explosion came.

They never expected that it was gonna come so quickly and come when it did, and when it did, it came too quickly for them to put together- an organization at that moment. They said essentially you have to build in the off season. You need to come together with other human beings that share your vision for a better world and, and create the ways that you can act collectively and democratically no matter what comes.

Because what's coming is not what you expect is going to come. You need to create the kind of bonds with other people that allow you to, to be nimble but also firm. But a lot of them came to this conclusion that proper collective action means building power with other people, and proper collective action might mean delegation, it might mean some kind of a structure, but that's okay as long as you keep it democratic.

It's, you can keep your movement democratic and win if you're prepared for anything that comes.

After overthrowing dictator Hosni Mubarak, Egypt found itself at a crossroads.

The revolution had been led by labor unions, secular activists, military factions, and the Muslim Brotherhood, and while they all agreed that Mubarak needed to go down, ideological disagreements showed the cracks between them the moment the revolution was won. See, officially, Mubarak passed on power to the Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces, who went on to dissolve parliament, and then pinky promised, definitely crossed my fingers and hoped to die, swore that they would only hold onto power until things calmed down.

But then suddenly it's de facto martial law, and when the constitutional assembly is finally allowed to gather, the secular politicians clash with the growing Islamist faction, who disagree on whether this new state should be based on liberal human rights or the Quran. And the armed forces, well, they want to enshrine themselves as the ultimate executive authority in the Constitution, and when the elections are finally allowed to take place, it's the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood who wins, with their president, Mohammed Morsi, taking power.

Needless to say, chaos. The left-wing labor unions clash with conservatives, the secular with the Islamic, the Christians with the Muslims, and Morsi only lasts a couple of years before being replaced by the army's presidential candidate in 2014. Despite promising freedom of expression and end to police brutality, a stable democracy, and better working conditions, very few of these are at all realized because of elite infighting, and there's been democratic backsliding for some years now.

Even though it's in a better place than it was before, it's still fallen short of a lot of those aims. The revolution did not ultimately succeed because the revolutionary masses failed to keep united and continue their push for change after Mubarak's resignation. Existing elites, particularly the military, have become the biggest obstacle to change.

Ideological disagreement is especially poisonous for revolutions given revolutions tend to attract people of more radical ideologies, be it political extremism, religious extremism, or ethnic extremism. Stalin used the power struggle between Bolshevik leaders over smaller and smaller ideological issues to throttle the revolution and marginalize his competition till he ended up with autocratic power.

In a transition period like revolution, people need to have faith in the institutions and political system like democracy that they're supposedly meant to hand over power to, but if they don't think that they can achieve their aims, what they revolted to do, through that new system, even something like democracy- Why would they give up power to it?

You gotta remember that it's very easy for a democratically elected leader to slide into becoming a dictator. Disagreements breeds gridlock, gridlock breeds collapse, and collapse breeds chaos and war, and we're back on that cycle, half-measures and civil unrest once more. And often, old social, religious, and ethnic tensions are gonna bubble to the surface again Revolutions are important forces in society, forcing change in static, often terrible systems.

But beating the dictator is only the start, and they've got a long way to go

before

they're really successful. I know it's a YA book, but I've always admired how The Hunger Games doesn't shy away from those post-revolution difficulties. Symbolically, perhaps, but it does acknowledge them. President Coin assures the world she will pinky promise, cross my fingers, hope to die, only take power in her interim government until democratic transition is possible, right?

The revolution, though, turns on itself pretty goddamn quickly. You know, Katniss ends up having to kill her. People espouse these values, but when they wanna do stuff, things like democracy can suddenly become an obstacle.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, democracy simply doesn't work.

But more than that, how do you deal with a significant faction of people who are gonna want revenge on those who were in power?

And not just the politicians and dictator, but the civilians aligned with them. Like, the Egyptian revolution wanted a public trial for Hosni Mubarak, but what about his supporters? And the districts publicly executed Snow, but Coin wanted to go further. She wanted to hold a new Hunger Games for The Capitol's children.

There's revenge in that, the people who benefited from and perhaps supported Snow's regime. How far do the punishments and trials go? The representatives, their families, the people who profited from it, the children who happened to be benefiting? If revolutions are down ethnic lines, then they'll often end up targeting the people who happen to be the same demographic as those who were in power, even though they may not be directly responsible.

But it's complicated because they benefited from it, and it's not necessarily right for them to keep what they have. If it's down class lines, well, let's just say the phrase, "Eat the rich," is there for a reason. So when you're writing revolution, you're gonna wanna figure out where these cracks start to appear, and importantly, you're gonna have to figure out kinda one of the only three ways that they deal with it.

Do they, one, compromise, two, are they ousted, or three, do those aims get achieved? Counter-revolutions, like in 2014 ousting Morsi, are incredibly common. You know, these factions turn on each other in the struggle over who gets to decide what this new world will look like. While The Hunger Games, yeah, it's not the most complicated exploration of these issues, it does at least acknowledge them and how they can threaten revolutionary aims, easily slipping into an oppressive cycle.

This is kinda what happened with Stalin as well. Despite the revolution's aspirations of a democratic, liberal, socialist republic, ideological disagreements led Stalin to slowly concentrate power in himself, using the chaos of the post-revolution world to eliminate competition and undermine the role of the Soviets till it was just him The ideological disagreement prevented the perhaps more popular other factions from working against him, and his rule was a simpler way out of the chaos.

And while people in Russia rightly wanted revenge against the uber wealthy, Stalin also used that desire to persecute demographics he wanted

marginalized, often against the aims of Lenin's original revolution.

But it's not just ideological disagreement. The elite and powerful will often join a revolution in hopes of gaining something else, power or money or position, to stay within the circles of power when they know it's coming, and the Egyptian military can be read this way.

Egyptian history is a record of the army guarding the interests of the secular state and their own elite position in the system of power. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces did not intend to be sidelined either, nor did it want to lose its self-ascribed role as the guarantor of constitutional legitimacy and security and be stripped of its economic privileges.

In other words, the military could see the writing was on the wall for Hosni Mubarak and wanted to ensure that they weren't excluded from the circles of power. And so- revolution. And we can see this, by the way, in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. Tywin Lannister doesn't revolt against the Mad King out of a sense of morality or justice, but because he's been alienated from the circles of Targaryen power and wants to get in on Robert's new regime.

He knew that if he didn't help, then there was no chance of it, and taking King's Landing put him in a powerful position to do so. When the Soviet Union fell, Russian oligarchs saw a huge opportunity to seize state assets and make a ton of money, and that's a huge motivator. You know, they don't ever care for pesky things like human rights or the vision of the revolution.

It's about getting a better position from a world falling apart. Chaos is a ladder. And the question is, these elites, the powerful, the rich, what happens when they don't get what they want? How does the revolution survive without their support, without their money, without their men, without their resources?

So don't just think about how elites might help the revolution happen, but where their interests might diverge and what that point of tension, how, you know, how is that resolved? Because it can lead to a counter-revolution or an impotent government or another civil war. One detail I really like, and I think it's The Mandalorian, is that after the revolution, after the evil empire is overthrown, we get all these evil scientists and soldiers who have committed atrocities.

What do you mean to do with them? Well, supposedly, they're seen to be rehabilitated and taught the error of their ways. But in reality, the rich and powerful basically tell them in secret, "Oh, we're just happy to have you on our side, you know, on the side of the Republic." Rather than it being about justice like the revolution claimed, they instead bring them in, make money off them, put them in positions of power, and use those skills again, just from a slightly different angle.

They superficially supported the revolution, but spoil its aims when it comes down to the brass tacks. They don't care about justice, just money and power Part two, international puppeteers. Many revolutions live or die on international support, money, people, aid from other countries, and all too often this comes in return for trade guarantees, access to resources for their own security interests, i.e.

the entire Cold War in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Lebanon, and a myriad across South America. Over and over, Western powers have stifled communist revolutions with sanctions and blockades and sabotage, preventing them from integrating with the international community.

What followed the Arab Spring was the Arab Winter, a time of resurgence of authoritarianism and religious extremism throughout the area. We're still hearing about it to this day, but it has different names.

We call it ISIS. We call it the Libyan Civil War, the Yemeni Civil War, the Syrian Civil War. We call it the European migrant crisis. Protests, even massive protests, by themselves don't create change or revolution. Take a moment. It's a sobering statement. But also remember that this is just the spark. How do these rebel groups recruit?

How do they spread from the fringe organization to something that changes governments?

And so when I think about revolutions, what makes some stick and some not stick, or in other words, why some grow and coalesce into this larger movement, forgive my, uh, elementary framing, but you have to have a lot of people that are ticked off at the status quo.

And so some revolutions will ultimately become successful in recruiting because of repression by the government, a lack of rights, mistreatment by the, by the government, extrajudicial behavior by the government. In other words, imprisoning people, killing people, repressing them in ways in which it's gotten to a point where it's intolerable.

Oftentimes, we see success when protest movements pick up within a country. Uh, those protest movements inspire.

So what else do you need? You need, uh, separation between the powerful and the ones in power. That may sound like weird wordplay, but bear with me. Just because you're in charge of the government doesn't mean that you're all of the elite, nor does being an elite mean that you are automatically in power in the government.

Think of the American Revolution. The Founding Fathers were not in charge of England. England controlled the government of the colonies. However, they were all rich landowners. These people were the powerful of the colonies. They held all the resources. As such, they had access to the wealth and power, were highly educated, and possessed the necessary skills required to operate a rebellion.

We're talking people managers, veteran soldiers, commanders, accountants, lawyers. These were people of letters, learning, money, power. I know how much of a gut punch it is to hear that garnering the elites to your side is necessary for a revolution, but history has shown us time and time again that it is necessary to any successful revolution.

It happened in Russia, it happened in China, it happened in the United States, and the French Revolution, and many, many others throughout history. You can probably see how lacking this was a death blow to many revolutions before they even began. The issue becomes, how do you get the elites to care? Well, that's where number three comes in.

You need something that is powerful and unifies people across class. You need something that brings the majority of the population behind the revolution. Corruption, uh, an economic downturn, things of that nature. In my opinion, this is a little duplicative of number one or two. Other similar theories don't include this one, as widespread protests and inclusion of revolutionary elites kinda already covers these bases.

But one can look at the military as part of the elite as well. They are literally the ones with the guns. More often than not, revolutions are suppressed by the military. Historically, they're very good at this job.

I think it's the military looking out for their best interest and making a calculated gamble on what they think will be better for their institution, whether it's a post-conflict setting or a post-protest setting

Care to take a tangent with me?

The United States military has the largest budget of any military on the planet. Our defense spending is greater than China, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Heck, it's larger than the next nine top-spending countries in the world combined. It's over one-third of the budget. In 2017, of the $734.34 billion we spent on defense in the United States, 250.8 billion was spent on benefits and payments, 34% of the total amount of the budget.

It's designed to keep the military in a privileged position, to maintain them at the 70th percentile compared to civilians' pay and benefits. We don't generally think of having a warrior caste in this country, but we, like most nations, do create a separation in their military. They try to separate them from the civilian population by sequestering them on bases and creating their own cultures within those places.

Consider the People's Liberation Army of China. Consider the current protests in Iran and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran's done a really good job of empowering the Ireve- the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, more or less insulating the regime in a different way than Tunisia might, might have had.

Similar to something like the, uh, Chinese Communist Party and the relationship with the People's Liberation Army, where you've empowered this institution in a way that ensures they're getting kickbacks. You know, they're in privileged positions within society. You name it, they're kind of the elite military institution in Iran.

I think there's loyalty there that will ensure the regime is more or less insulated.

Getting the military on your side could be the determining factor in a revolution. But something to consider, non-violent protests historically garner more military support. The more a revolution turns into a violent rebellion, the more the military feels justified in killing civilians.

In fact, the army would be seldom deployed against peaceful and orderly demonstrations, and if it were, it would rarely suppress them violently. To be sure, occasionally even peaceful marches are crushed by the military, but it is certainly a rare occurrence and tends to foreshadow a regime's uncompromising stance towards demonstrations.

So this becomes a balancing act. Do you test what you can do against the military? Do you fight them? Do you attempt to curry favor with them? Depends on the situation. There's no gaining support from an occupying foreign army, but when it comes to a domestic army, the situation is a lot more complicated.

Fourth, the state must find itself in a crisis that weakens its ability to fight off the protest. When the cat's away- The mice will play. Look at something like China during the revolution. China had come off of losses to the Japanese in the first Sino-Japanese War, but the Chinese revolution really comes in during the 1920s.

Mao and his revolutionaries began the revolution in rural areas, counting on the central government's inability to combat them so far away from their centers of power. The first years of the revolution did not go well. In 1927, the Chinese Communist Party lost thousands to massacres by the Republic.

They even tried to stage a large-scale military rebellion in 1927, and they lost. China, even under the strain that it was in, was able to weather the storm of the revolutionaries. By 1928, things looked grim for Mao and his revolution. Then the Soviets invaded. Oh, I'm sorry, did you not know that the Soviet Union invaded China in 1929?

This further weakened the Chinese central government. The communists launched another rebellion in 1930 as a response, and it failed again. Then in 1931, the Japanese army fabricated a terrorist attack on the railways as a pretense to secure their hold on more territory in China. Forces came in and occupied Korea and invaded Manchuria.

This was a precursor to the eventual invasion of China by Japan in 1937. In the last, we usually measure World War II as starting when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. In Asia, the war started years before. The Japanese invasion ravaged the Chinese Republic, and all the while they were still focused on the extermination of the communists, and the Chinese economy goes into a depression because of an influx of cheap American goods.

I'm sorry, the irony. History is a wild story when you really get into it, folks. The pendulum swings. Time

is a flat circle.

So we have a country ravaged by war. A military of the government was shrunk due to massive losses in the conflict against Japan. The economy had grown feeble and had a lack of real international support.

The United States was more interested in keeping its economic interests and really not dedicated to the full support of the Chinese Republic, while the communists had the assistance of regional powers like the Soviet Union, Mongolia, and even North Korea. Which brings us to the fifth factor: international permission.

Foreign support matters a lot. Are these organizations, these rebel groups, successfully attracting international resources? And that can be formal, informal. That can be as little as legitimacy provided to the rebel organization from an outside actor via the recognition of them. It could be something like the Islamic State developing fringe organizations or franchises in other countries.

Just that recognition that you are a member of this, this more powerful organization in another territory can generate recruitment success. It could be something more tangible. Are you receiving foreign support in the form of money or guns? Even recruits in some cases, or, uh, you know, another government sending foreign fighters to your, to your organization.

The Soviet Army, who was stationed in Manchuria, refused to leave after the Japanese surrender. They supported the communists. The central Chinese government could not sustain the conflict. Conscripted peasants were deserting en masse and bringing their equipment with them to support the communists. Then in 1949, after 28 years of revolution, in Tiananmen Square, the new People's Republic of China was established.

And all was well in China from there on, right?

By any measure, revolutions are big events in history.

If I can be forgiven for using the term turning points, that does apply to revolutions. Even people who don't know that much about revolutions can usually name a few major ones. The American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, Russian Revolution 1917, and the Chinese Revolution, which began in 1911 but took about forty years to run its course.

Due to the convergence of a series of revolutions, near and near revolutions in the last decades of the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth century, some historians, notably Eric Hobsbawm, have even named that whole time the Age of Revolutions. Coups, however, are a little different. We tend to associate coups with countries that are viewed as unstable or undemocratic.

Most of us are aware that coups, usually by military leaders, have occurred often in Latin American countries and sometimes the Middle East. Augusto Pinochet of Chile is an example of a leader who came to power in a coup. So was Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Coups may resemble revolutions in one highly visible way.

They both involve a change of political leadership on a national level. But aside from that similarity, in fact, the phenomenon are quite different from one another. Simply put, the difference is this. Coups involve a change of leaders. Revolutions involve a change of systems. To explain what I mean by that, let's look at some historical examples.

In 1789, there was a major political and social upheaval in France. Animated by the ideas of the Enlightenment, and particularly the American Revolution, to which it was related in many ways, the people of France rose up against the monarchy of the Bourbon dynasty and the king, Louis XVI. There was an extended period of political chaos within France, which eventually spilled outside its borders in the form of wars between France and its neighbors.

What happened in France between 1789, the storming of the Bastille, and 1799, the takeover of power by Napoleon, was undoubtedly a revolution. We could spend weeks talking about the reasons why this event happened. But what's obvious is that France underwent a fundamental transformation of its entire society, not just from the top down, but at all levels.

Yes, the king and eventually the queen got their heads chopped off, but the taxation system also changed, the legal system changed, the people who decided cases and built roads and ran the schools, they all changed. For a while, even the calendar changed. That was how transformative the French Revolution was.

Let's contrast that with what happened in Libya nearly two hundred years later. In 1969, Libya was a monarchy ruled by King Idris I. Formerly one of the poorest countries in North Africa, Libya achieved economic prosperity very suddenly after the discovery of oil there in 1959. The king made sure that the revenues from the oil flowed to a very small group concentrated at the top.

On September 1st, 1969, a group of military officers led by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi used military force to surround the key government buildings and media establishments. They overthrew the king and took over the government for themselves. Notably, there were no casualties suffered in this event. Gaddafi was motivated by the ideology of Pan-Arabism, which was championed by the Egyptian leader Abdel Nasser, who also came to power in a coup.

At first, these events, Libya in 1969 and France 1789, might look superficially similar. Both were changes of government. Both abolished a monarchy and established ostensibly, in the case of Libya, a republic in its place. Gaddafi, in fact, tried to spin what happened in Libya in 1969 as a revolution, but this was largely just public relations.

Libya remained a dictatorship under Gaddafi's control until he was overthrown by a revolution, not a coup, in 2011. Yet it's easy to see the difference between the French Revolution and the Libyan coup. The events in Libya in 1969 were a change of leadership from the top down. The end of the Idris regime wouldn't have happened if Gaddafi and his toadies hadn't plotted to overthrow the government.

By contrast, the monarchy in France by the late 1780s was almost guaranteed to crumble from one proximate cause or another, and the causes of the monarchy's decay were primarily economic and social, not political. Admittedly, in some cases, the lines between coup and revolution can be a bit fuzzy, but I chose these examples because they're very stark illustrations of the dynamics of each one.

Now, back to the Capitol rioters. It's abundantly clear that a revolution is not what these people wanted or even thought that they wanted. They were motivated by a single rather narrow goal, to keep President Donald Trump in power despite the results of a free, fair, and legitimate election that went against him in November.

There was no program in the wind for large-scale societal or systemic change. What these people demanded was that a particular leader be installed to the exclusion of another one that they didn't like. That is a coup. It's not a revolution. Historically speaking, fealty to a particular political leader is never the driving force behind a revolution.

The American Revolution didn't happen because people thought they wanted George Washington rather than King George III as their leader. In a true revolution, the specific person who occupies the leadership being overthrown is generally not important or sometimes totally irrelevant. Almost nobody can remember the name of the dynastic ruler who was overthrown in China's 1911 revolution.

His name was Puyi, for the record. And despite their hatred of the abuses of the French monarchy, King Louis XVI was actually pretty well-liked by many people in France before their revolution in 1789. Puyi and Louis happened to be sitting in the chair when the revolutions happened, but the revolutions did not have a lot to do with them personally.

Typically, leaders of overthrown governments have public rage in a revolutionary society focused upon them, such as the Shah of Iran did in nineteen seventy-nine. But the driving force behind the Iranian Revolution was rage at the system the Shah and his dynasty represented, not so much the Shah himself.

That's an important distinction. Revolutions also tend to be led by a revolutionary elite. Sometimes the members of this elite spend the bulk of their lives clawing their way into positions of dominance and figuring out how to use their power. Lenin in Russia, Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong in China, and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran all spent most of their lives building the revolutions that brought them to power.

The elite of the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, and so forth, they all had to do a fair amount of career building before the revolution got started. The revolutionary elite is different from what you might call a cabal, which is merely a group of conspirators, like what happened in Libya in nineteen sixty-nine, or even how Napoleon took over France in seventeen ninety-nine.

Napoleon was not a member of a revolutionary elite. Mao Zedong, however, was. Just for the record, this guy who stormed the Capitol last Wednesday was not a member of a revolutionary elite. For these reasons, revolutions usually take a long time to build. The climactic moment when crowds rush through the streets or a new flag is hoisted over the Capitol, that happens at the end of the process, not the beginning.

Historically, you can argue that Russia's revolution began a century before nineteen seventeen as countless revolutionary leaders, thinkers, politicians, and theorists slowly built and refined the political and economic movement that took power after the tsar was deposed. China, too, was full of revolutionary sentiment for decades before nineteen eleven.

A very large war called the Taiping Rebellion took place in the middle of the nineteenth century and was one of the many false starts before Sun Yat-sen finally brought off the revolution in nineteen eleven. The American Revolution happened fairly quickly by historical standards, but even that began in seventeen sixty-three, almost a decade and a half before the events at Independence Hall that we commemorate on July fourth.

Revolutions take generations, not days or hours, and they sure as hell aren't organized on Parler or 8chan. Another reason why revolutions are long-term and often multi-generational projects is that in order to be successful, they must generally have complex and well-developed ideologies behind them.

They must above all offer the people of the society a clear and positive alternative to the existing order. In communist revolutions, this has tended to be the promise of economic equality. In the American Revolution, it was the promise of liberal representative democracy and economic self-determination.

In Iran, it was the nation-- the idea of a nation built on Islamic principles. The thinkers and theorists of the world's great revolutions, Che Guevara in Cuba, Thomas Jefferson in the United States, Mao in China, have in many ways harder jobs than the military commanders who fight to defend revolutionary principles.

The French Revolution of 1789 went badly awry, in part because it wasn't undergirded by a coherent ideology. The same was true of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. A successful revolution must not only convince the people of a nation to say no to an existing order, but to simultaneously say yes to something else, something that they must be convinced will enrich their lives.

The insurrection at the Capitol in January 2021 had none of the hallmarks of a revolution. It was an attempt at a coup, pure and simple.

Next, Section B, REVISITING THE RECORD

why do you think that Western countries, and particularly the US, misread the situation in Iran so badly and continue to do so today?

Right. Right. Yeah, absolutely. This, this almost sounds, it sounds a bit facetious to say, but I think the reason the American, the ultimate reason why the Americans so missed the boat is because they just could not imagine Iran.

It was, Iran was, the Shah's Iran was such an important ally to the United States They just couldn't imagine kind of life without him, so they didn't imagine it. They-- But the who- the whole apparatus of both inside Iran, or the Iranian government and the American government, everything was geared to seeing no problems.

The Shah hated it when Western ambassadors talked to even his moderate opposition in Tehran. He would, he would, he would call the ambassador in the next day and would give him a dressing down. So very qui-- as the more important Iran became as an ally, politically, militarily, uh, economically, the less the ambassadors would ever risk it.

Certainly, Americans didn't. So the, the whole... And, and then on the American side, everything was geared to only see sunny skies in Iran. So the few-- A-added to the problem that the CIA was doing no domestic, uh, intelligence. One of the-- The CIA station in Tehran was one of the biggest in the world. Did no domestic intelligence.

They were all focused on spying on, uh, on, on the Soviet Union, which is right on the northern border of Iran. They got all their domestic intelligence from the Shah's secret police, uh, which so they were just in this, in this loop. Um, the few people at the embassy, th-there was very few people at the American embassy, which was three hundred people.

Yeah, one of the largest embassies in the world. Ver-- If you, if you could count the number of people who spoke Farsi, the Iranian language, certainly on two hands, if not on one at any given time. Um, the few people who did speak Farsi, they often saw problems because they were out in the street actually talking to, not to government ministers, but to people in, in the bazaars and stuff, and they would warn that this was coming.

And, uh, one-- in one famous case, so a, a, a g- a guy who I spent a lot of time talking about in, in my book, he, he would raise it again and again, and not only was he ignored, he was punished for, for raising these issues and finally sent off to a provincial, uh, city to be a consular officer. So the entire apparatus of cer- of certainly of the Americans was designed to see no problems, and this was...

A-and it was... Once the revolution got started, it just kept perpetuating, and it, it never really stopped. Uh, it, it, um, and, and the bizarre thing is it even r- was replicated in the period after the revolution happened, uh, in, in February of nineteen seventy-nine through the next nine months until the, the American hostages were taken in, in that November.

The-- So this nine-- So this nine-month period where the revolution was, was, uh, solidifying itself and Khomeini was taking over and s- and calling America the great Satan It w- e- even then, it was this weird d- d- delusionary optimism. It's like, well, yeah, okay, the, you know, they'll let them do their little anti-American thing for a while, but they're, ultimately they're gonna come back.

They need us. You know, all their weaponry, all their weaponry is American. They, they need our e- economic expertise. They need to sell their oil to us. Uh, you know, all these things that made them think that, okay, let, let Khomeini k- kind of rant and stuff now, but it's all, you know, it's all gonna work out in the end.

So it's just, you know, delusion from beginning to end.

The subtitle of your book is The Unmaking of the Modern Middle East. To what extent do you think the events of 1979 in Iran have a bearing on what's happening in the region today?

Yeah, I, I, I think it's not just the unmaking of the modern Middle East, I think it's the unmaking of the modern world.

Because what I th- what Iran did was it unleashed this, this era of religious nationalism that you are now seeing not just in Islam, but you're seeing it in every religion. You're seeing ... I mean, even Buddhists. People always have this idea that, you know, Buddhists are so pacific and everything, but, you know, the, the, the Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka were the ones who kind of started the ethnic war against the, the Tamil Hindus.

Um, certainly in this country, the, the Christian nationalists in the United States who this whole marriage of them with, with kind of the Neo-Nazis and stuff. So there's been this ... So I, I can't say you, you, the roots of all this are from Iran, but Iran was the first religious counter-revolution the world has ever seen, and I think it, it hit something that was maybe below the radar at the time, that there was this kind of counter-revolution happening in thought, in, in political discourse around, around the world.

Uh, this kind of reje- maybe a rejection of modernity, a rejection of women's liberation, and that kind of made it burst, uh, open. And so certainly, uh, you know, I've, I've been covering conflicts in the Middle East every, almost ever since the Iranian Revolution, and I see traces of what happened in Iran everywhere.

Uh, and not just ... Though the obvious ones are, uh, Iran's proxy, uh, allies in the region, Hezbollah in, in Lebanon or, uh, uh, the, the Houthis in Yemen. But it, that whole religious fervor, uh, uh, you know, of course ISIS was, is on the opposite side of the, the, the Shia regime in, in Iran. But again, this kind of religious militancy and, and I, you know

I mean, the Iranian regime has, has killed people in the name of Allah, as has ISIS. I mean, ISIS obviously is a far more kind of homicidal group, but y- you know, this, this is le- legitimating murder.

Yeah. I, I find it quite a huge irony that the Iranian regime propped up Bashar al-Assad, who actually was far closer in many ways as a ruler to the Shah than- To what came after, who was then himself felled by, as you say, this kind of religious fundamentalism that ultimately was inspired by the Iranian revolution, whether Sunni or Shia.

That's right. That's right. And, um, yeah, the, uh, that's, you know, the the circle of ironies in that region is amazing and, you know, the one I talk about briefly in my book is that, you know, Iran and Iraq, uh, uh, uh, w- uh, under the Ba'athists in, in Iraq, both before and, and with Saddam Hussein, they were the mortal enemies with the Shah because, you know, he was an imperialist and, and, uh, you know, k- kingdom and everything.

So they helped prov- you know, they gave asylum to Khomeini, and Khomeini was operating out of southern Iraq for fourteen years. But at certain points, Saddam Hussein realized, you know, th- this Shia resurgence in, in Iran has a really good chance of blowing back on us because we have a huge Shia population also.

So he actually offered to kill Khomeini t- uh, to the Shah. And to the Shah, uh, turned him down. Um, so the, the-- Khomeini ends up getting kicked out of Iraq, uh, goes to Paris, where he's available to the entire world's media and, and that just... You know, this is only two, three months before the, the end of the revolution, and it-- this just accelerated everything dramatically.

If he had stayed in Iraq, you know, they could've kept him kind of bottled up, but that just made-- that made the Iranian revolution the world's attention at that point,

what should we understand about the founding of the United States?

We should understand that July 4th 1776 in many ways represents a counter-revolution. That is to say that what helped to prompt July 4th 1776 was the perception amongst European settlers on the North American mainland that London was moving rapidly towards abolition.

This perception was prompted by Somersett's case, a case decided in London in June 1772, which seemed to suggest that abolition, which not only was going to be ratified in London itself, was going to cross the Atlantic and basically, uh, sweep through the mainland, thereby jeopardizing numerous fortunes, not only based upon slavery, but the slave trade.

That's the short answer. The longer answer would involve going back to another revolution. That is to say, the so-called Glorious Revolution in England in 1688, which among other things, involved a step back from the monarch- for the monarch, the king, and a step forward for the rising merchant class. This led to a deregulation of the African slave trade.

That is to say, the Royal African Company theretofore had been in control of the slave trade, but with the rising power of the merchant class, this Slave trade was deregulated, leading to what I call free trade in Africans. That is to say merchants then descended upon the African continent manacling and handcuffing every African in sight with the energy of demented and crazed bees, dragging them across the Atlantic, particularly to the Caribbean and to the North American mainland.

This was prompted by the fact that the profits for the slave trade were tremendous, sometimes up to 1600 or 1700%. And as you know, uh, there are those even today who will sell their firstborn for such a profit. This, on the one hand, helped to boost the productive forces both in the Caribbean and on the mainland, but it led to numerous slave revolts, not least in the Caribbean, but also on the mainland, which helped to give the mainlanders second thoughts about L- London's tentative steps towards abolition.

Hmm. Uh, Gerald Horne, one of the things that struck me in your book is, uh, not only your main thesis that this was a, uh, in large part a counter-revolution, our, our, our, the United States War of Independence, but you also link very closely the, what was going on in the Caribbean colonies of England as well as in the United States, not only in terms of, uh, among the slaves in both areas, but also among the white population.

And in fact, you i- indicate that quite a few of those who ended up here in the United States fostering the American Revolution had actually been refugees from the battles between whites and slaves in the Caribbean. Could you expound on that?

It's well known that up until the middle part of the 18th century, London felt that the Caribbean colonies, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua in particular, were in some ways more valuable than the mainland colonies.

The problem was that in the Caribbean colonies, the Africans outnumbered the European settlers, sometimes at a rate of 20 to one, which facilitated slave revolts. Uh, there were major slave revolts in Antigua, for example, in 1709 and 1736. The Maroons, that is to say, the Africans who had escaped London's jurisdiction in Jamaica, had challenged the Crown, uh, quite sternly.

This led, as your question suggests, to many European settlers in the Caribbean making the great trek to the mainland, being chased out of the Caribbean by enraged Africans. For example, I did research for this book in Newport, Rhode Island, and the main library there to this very day is named after Abraham Redwood, who fled Antigua after the 1736 slave revolt because many of his, quote, Africans, unquote, were involved in the slave revolt, and he fled in fear and established the main library in Newport to this very day and helped to basically establish that, uh, c- that city, uh, on the At- Atlantic coast.

So there is a close connection between what was transpiring in the Caribbean and what was taking place on the mainland. And historians need to recognize that even though these colonies were not necessarily a unitary project, there were close and intimate connections between and amongst them

So why this great disparity between how people in the United States talk about the creation myth of the United States, if you will, I'm not talking about indigenous people, Native American people, uh, and this story that you have researched?

Well, it is fair to say that the United States did provide a sanctuary for Europeans. In- indeed, I think part of the quote genius unquote of the US project, if there was such a genius, was the fact that the founders of the United States basically called a formal truce, a formal ceasefire with regard to the religious warfare that had been de- bedeviling Europe for many decades and centuries.

That is to say Protestant London, so-called, versus Catholic Madrid and Catholic France. What the settlers on the North American mainland did was call a formal truce with regard to l- religious conflict, but then they opened a new front with regard to race. That is to say Europeans versus non-Europeans.

This at once broadened the base for the settler project. That is to say they could draw up on those defined as white who had roots from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains, and indeed even into the Arab world, if you look at people like Ralph Nader and Marlo Thomas, for example, whose roots are in Lebanon, but are considered to be quote white unquote.

Uh, this obviously expanded the population base for the settler project, and because many rights were then accorded to these newly, uh, minted whites, it obviously helped to ensure that many of them would be beholden, uh, to the country that then emerged, United States of America, whereas those of us who were not defined as white got the short end of the stick, if you like.

Hmm.

And, uh, Gerald Horne, as a result of that, during the American Revolution, what was the, uh, the, uh, the perception or the attitude of the African slaves in the US to that conflict? Are you... You also, you talk about during the colonial times, uh, many slaves preferred to flee to, to the Spanish colonies or the French colonies rather than to stay, uh, in the American colonies of England.

You are correct. The fact of the matter is, is that Spain had been arming Africans since the 1500s. And indeed, because Spain was arming Africans and then unleashing them on mainland colonies, particularly South Carolina, this put competitive pressure on London to act in a similar fashion. The problem there was, is that the mainland settlers had embarked on a project and a model of development that was inconsistent with arming Africans.

Indeed, their project was involved in enslaving and manacling every African in sight. This deepens the schism between the colonies and the metropolis, that is to say London, thereby helping to foment, uh, a revolt against British rule in 1776. It's well known that, uh, more Africans fought alongst the side of the Redcoats, fought alongside the Redcoats than fought with the settlers, and this is understandable because if you think about it for more than a nanosecond, it makes little sense for slaves to fight alongside slave masters so that slave masters could then deepen the persecution of the enslaved, and indeed, as happened after 1776, bring more Africans to the mainland, bring more Africans to Cuba, bring more Africans to Brazil for their profit.

there are some accusations of bigotry that can be fairly levied at Che. So let's take a closer look, starting with the accusation that he was a racist. There are many fake quotes that are wrongfully attributed to Che in the attempt to paint him as a racist. One of which goes, "We are going to do for black people exactly what they did for the revolution, by which I mean nothing."

This quote, while damning and definitely racist, can't be definitively traced back to Guevara. It's circulated heavily by Cuban-American conservatives like Humberto Fontova, holy fuck, I killed that pronunciation, I think, who regularly spews outright falsehoods like Che helped to herd gay people into forced labour camps, which we will debunk later in this video.

And Fontova is the source of this banger of a quote, "The lily-white Che Guevara and Fidel Castro overthrew the mixed-race Batista." Is bro trying to imply that Batista's mass murder campaigns were okay because he was mixed race? What kind of identity politics bullshit is this? I refer you back to the CIA document about Batista's brutality.

Also, I have a hard time believing that Fontova gives any semblance of a fuck about racism, considering he collaborated with Bill O'Reilly, who made a litany of unsavory comments regarding race. Fontova also authored a book about Che, and it's genuinely insane. It's just a really bitter, incoherent polemic that author Rolf Potts referred to as slightly schizophrenic.

The Fox article from which I pulled these Fontova quotes also can't make up its mind on whether or not Che was a racist. Right here it says, "Many of the people Che was sending to the firing squad were members of Batista's army, and these disproportionately tended to be black and mixed race. Batista himself was mixed race."

And then literally three lines later it says, "Guevara also at times, however, called for more black people to be represented in institutions and had black fighters under his command." What are we doing here, guys? However, there is a genuinely racist quote that was written by Che, and it is worth talking about.

Remember how I mentioned that Che was born in a well-off white family in Argentina and had a sheltered and privileged upbringing? Well, this upbringing came with blind spots. When he was a young man in his early 20s traveling around South America on his motorbike, he kept a personal diary, which is now a famous book called The Motorcycle Diaries.

In this book, he wrote a horrific and inexcusably racist passage about Black people. It goes like this: "The Blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave, the Portuguese, and the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles.

Discrimination and poverty unite them in the daily fight for survival, but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely. The Black is indolent and a dreamer, spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink. The European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself."

Jesus Chr- Yes, this is really bad and indefensible, and the man Che grew to be and the man Che was when he wrote this are very different. In order to fully grasp the context of this quote, we need to understand that this was written by a spoiled rich kid who had been largely sheltered from any form of intersectional analysis and was extremely racially insensitive.

This is a quote from the beginning of his journey, and if you actually read the book, you can see this young 24-year-old grow into a very different man. He met with many indigenous people during his journey and noted how much better he was treated as a white man compared to them. At the end of his journey, he notes that he is no longer the person he was when he embarked on this trip.

Quote, "The person who wrote these notes passed away the moment his feet touched Argentine soil again. The person who reorganizes and polishes them, me, is no longer. At least, I am not the person I once was. All this wandering around our great America with a capital A has changed me more than I thought."

Clearly a story of growth and self-improvement, yet people like Marco Rubio feel the need to embellish and push a narrative that just isn't true. No, Marco Rubio, Che Guevara did not write extensively about the superiority of white Europeans. In fact, Che's efforts to remedy his disgraceful writings are impressive.

In a 1959 letter to William Morris in Miami, Florida, Che Guevara writes, "Esteemed sir, I received your letter to pass on to our commander-in-chief, which I have done, but I would like to say that if any vestiges of racial discrimination remain in this country, our revolution will put a complete end to them.

You can be absolutely sure that within a few years, any difference between white and Black will be solely a question of skin color, as it should be." It's important to note that the US in 1959 was racist as hell. The Civil Rights Bill had not even passed yet, and the president who ended up passing it, LBJ referred to it as the N-word bill, but that's a different story.

Che was also loudly against apartheid in South Africa, and he even gave a now famous speech on this topic at the UN where he said, "Once again, we speak out to put the world on guard against what is happening in South Africa. The brutal policy of apartheid is applied before the eyes of the nations of the world.

The peoples of Africa are compelled to endure the fact that on the African continent, the superiority of one race over another remains official policy, and that in the name of this racial superiority, murder is committed with impunity. Can the United Nations do nothing to stop this?" He then, in the same speech, went on to detail the crisis inflicted upon the people of Congo and the role of imperialism in the appropriation of their land and resources.

He actually cared so much about Congo that he left his post in Cuba, relinquished his Cuban citizenship and all creature comforts that came with it so he could personally go to the DRC and try to spur revolution. This is not just some guy who overthrew a dictator and then bathed in the glory and lived a comfortable, hedonistic life.

For a guy who supposedly wrote extensively about the superiority of white people, as Marco Rubio claims, everything he wrote and did as an adult seems to directly contradict that claim.

Was Che homophobic? Similarly to his distasteful comments in regards to race, a young Che Guevara could also be quoted making a definitely homophobic remark about a gay person. He referred to a man as a pervert and then followed up the quote by saying, "Apart from being a homosexual, he had been very nice to us."

Yeah, really bad, indefensible, and just like his racist remarks that we touched on earlier, he said this as a young, sheltered, rich kid in the 1950s, and then he grew up. But see, if the conversation started and ended there, I would have no problem conceding the point that Che had said some homophobic shit.

He is, after all, just a man. But that's not what his detractors do. They, they go on to say that he rounded up gay people and forced them into concentration camps after the Cuban Revolution. Some dishonest actors go as far as to claim that he murdered people for being gay.

Che Guevara executed gays, right?

This is a guy, when you wear a Che Guevara shirt, you're wearing a Hitler who was, uh, less successful in being charismatic and duping people.

Now, this is just blatantly untrue. There is no verifiable record of Che killing people for their sexuality. What is often being referred to when people make this point is the UMAP system in Cuba.

The UMAPs were military units to aid production, and people who opted out of military service had to serve their country in a different way, and they were sent to these forced labour camps. At the time, gay people were not allowed to serve in the Cuban military, the same way they weren't allowed to serve in any other country's military, and they were subjected to forced labour in these Cuban camps.

It is worth noting that draft dodgers in the US were sent to prison, where the 13th Amendment turned them into literal slaves But that's another story. Yes, the UMAPS were despicable and unjustifiable. No, just because the Americans did similar shit does not make it okay. There are also reports of gay people being mistreated and abused in these camps.

It undoubtedly was really inexcusably bad considering Fidel Castro felt the need to issue an apology for this dark period in Cuban history saying, "If anyone is responsible, it's me." The dreaded UMAPS system ran from November 1965 to July of 1968. Three years too long if you ask me. But again, this video is not about the Cuban state.

It's about Che Guevara. So what was he doing during this time? Oh yeah, he was in Congo. In April of 1965, Che relinquished his Cuban citizenship and left the country to spread revolution abroad. He left Cuba three months before the UMAPS were established. In a farewell letter to Fidel written by Che on April 1st, 1965, he says, "I formally resign my positions in the leadership of the party, my post as minister, my rank of commander, and my Cuban citizenship.

Nothing legally binds me to Cuba. The only ties are of another nature, those that cannot be broken as can appointments to posts." Che died two years after writing this in 1967 and the UMAPS ended in 1968. During their runtime, Che was in Congo and then Bolivia and then he was killed. He had nothing to do with them.

Now, could Che have done more to stick up for LGBT rights in Cuba, especially during a period of machismo and ignorance towards gay people? Yeah, I'm sure he could have and that would have been cool as fuck. But again, this was the 1960s. That doesn't make it right. Homophobia was never right. But apart from a single homophobic passage written when he was in his early 20s, he was 24, Che was not this raging homophobe who rounded up gay people and threw them into camps or killed them.

That just isn't true. In summary, in his youth, Che wrote racist and homophobic things. We know he grew out of his racism as his later actions showed. We can't say for certain whether or not he grew out of his homophobia, but we could infer that as he matured and became a Marxist, he rid himself of these bigoted ideas and focused on solidarity.

There are no actions or writings from his adult life that suggest that he was a horrific homophobe. But without new evidence, we'll never know for sure. It's not uncommon to meet people who hate Che and the Cuban government for anecdotal reasons. I have people close to me who lived in Cuba under Fidel and they really loved him.

But that's why we don't use anecdotes and we stick to empiricism. History is not made up of great infallible people. It's made up of people reacting to their environments and material realities. There's no such thing as a perfect person, but I agree with Jean-Paul Sartre when he said that Che Guevara was the most complete human being of our age.

DeFreeze brought Wheeler to Oakland to meet the people who had been harboring him since his escape. In a cramped one-bedroom apartment that many former Venceremos members breezed in and out of, DeFreeze shared his plans for something he'd been working on since his time in prison. It was the Symbionese Liberation Army, SLA, a new leftist guerrilla group that he was attempting to form from a bewildering gaggle of revolutionary stragglers.

Vin McClellan writes in his book, The Voices of Guns, that the notebook DeFreeze handed over to Wheeler, adorned with a seven-headed cobra on the front, contained plans for guerrilla warfare that would have made even the most fervent Venceremos member either howl with laughter or break into a frightened sweat.

Quote, I told him it was a bunch of garbage, said Wheeler, as reported in The Voices of Guns. It wasn't realistic as far as revolution was concerned. It was bullshit. It was suicide. End quote. But it was too late. One of the people harboring DeFreeze, Nancy Ling Perry, under the pseudonym Faiza, had already penned and mailed out the SLA's declaration of war to the media, and lists of potential targets were being assembled.

Despite Wheeler's objections, the SLA let their presence be known on the evening of November 6th with the assassination of Oakland's first African-American public school superintendent, Marcus Foster, over his proposal to issue identification cards to students to eliminate drug dealing on school campuses.

Residents of the community originally assumed the murder was racially motivated. The vanguard of East Bay radicalism, the Black Panther Party, called for the immediate apprehension of the culprits. When the SLA delivered a communique to the media the next day revealing their motives, it added to the public's confusion over the murder.

Were SLA members so lost in their never-never land of revolution that they didn't notice how tone-deaf their actions were? Made up of a garbled mess consisting of politically righteous jargon, shoot-on-sight orders targeting the rest of the Oakland Board of Education, and home-brewed conspiracies about Foster's ID program being fashioned to reflect the apartheid system in South Africa, the message ended with, To those who would bear the hopes and future of our people, let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom.

Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people. When this abruptly assembled group of cartoonish radicals somehow pulled off the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, in February of the next year, it resulted in a barrage of articles from Bay Area media connecting the SLA to the recently disbanded Venceremos.

The papers were quick to point out that Joseph Ramiro, the SLA member now in prison for the murder of Marcus Foster, was a former weapons expert for Venceremos, and when a composite sketch of Thero Wheeler was released as one of the three people who kidnapped Patty Hearst, newspapers started referring to the SLA as a break-off from Venceremos.

Still unemployed after being fired by Stanford two years earlier, an obvious embittered Bruce Franklin flatly denied knowing any of those tied to the crimes, bluntly telling the Stanford Daily that the allegations were, quote, getting me pissed off. People will go through the goddamnest mental contortions I ever heard to link the SLA and Venceremos, end quote.

Other former members of Venceremos released a statement simply discrediting the SLA as, quote, anti-working class, anti-revolutionary, anti-communist, end quote, while declaring, quote, terrorism cannot help accomplish the seizure of power by the working class, but only set it back, end quote. Others didn't see it that way.

And still don't. Quote, Venceremos and the SLA were one and the same, Don Criswell says very matter-of-factly. Quote, whether they were or not, that's the way they were viewed by us in law enforcement. Venceremos were on the losing end of things by that time. They had been being busted, harassed, and beaten up, and their following drifted away.

This was them transfiguring themselves from Venceremos into SLA, end quote. This connection only seemed stronger when Hearst magically changed from rich kid to radical overnight, joined the SLA, and signed her commencement communique by exclaiming Venceremos at the end. It might be a coincidence. It might be not.

But still, it's strange. Asked about the connection between Venceremos and the SLA, Bruce Franklin is curt in his response. Quote, we vehemently denounced the SLA. We thought they were counter-revolutionary from the beginning, and I've continuously made my personal opinion about that very clear, end quote.

Others describe the possible links between the two groups as less concrete. Quote, it was a radical community with people floating around, remembers Jim Waltman, a lawyer who worked with Venceremos. Maybe someone goes up to Oakland for a meeting and meets someone, and they meet somebody.

Chapter 4. Back Where You Came From By the time the revolutionary soap opera of the SLA finally came to a close in the fall of 1975, with the capture of surviving members Bill and Emily Harris, as well as Patty Hearst, the revolution seemed like a distant memory for some, the equivalent of a dance craze or hairstyle fad.

Despite articles still being published painting him as some kind of communist Charles Manson, Bruce Franklin quickly landed a book deal for his revolutionary memoir, Back Where You Came From. He also secured a new faculty position at Rutgers University. Throughout his long tenure with that institution, no one seemed to mind his radical, rabble-rousing past or the introduction he wrote for the book, The Essential Stalin, while also racking up a bevy of teaching awards and having books published on topics ranging from the Vietnam War to science fiction to the menhaden fish, before retiring and moving back to the West Coast in 2016.

A few weeks prior to the Beaty breakout, Aaron Manganiello resigned from the Central Committee of Venceremos, stating he felt, quote, incapable of providing strong leadership for the organization, end quote. Quote, I think Aaron fell out of favor with the rest of the group, suspects Don Criswell, especially when Venceremos became more about some vague idea of revolution and less about Chicano causes, end quote.

During the FBI's investigation into the Patty Hearst kidnapping, Manganiello was approached by agents for information and surprisingly spoke very frankly with them. Burnt out on Palo Alto politics, Manganiello admitted to knowing former Venceremos cadre and foster murderer Joseph Ramiro well and expressed regret over the Beaty incident.

According to the agents, quote, Manganiello believes he is somewhat responsible for Hobson, Holman, Burt, and Seebach facing long prison terms inasmuch as they followed his revolutionary rhetoric, end quote. Later, Manganiello operated a substance abuse counseling service out of his home until suffering a stroke that led to his death in 2009.

Looking back on his time chasing Venceremos around the Bay Area mid-peninsula, Don Criswell feels empathy for the younger members who got caught up in the radical adventurism of the times. Quote, a lot of naive young people were brought into this organization and cause and suffered consequences whether they were arrested or prosecuted or spent time in prison, he says.

Hundreds of them went to jail. The leaders of Venceremos are responsible for a lot of people having their lives ruined, including that Chino officer. The leaders were smart enough to know better, and I don't know what they got out of it, end quote. Soon after the sketch of Thero Wheeler was released to the press, eyewitnesses asserted that the other male who had abducted Hearst was not Wheeler, but Bill Harris.

No one really knew where Wheeler was, and over the following year, he bounced around America's radical underground in an unsuccessful pursuit of a doctor to help with his bleeding ulcer. When he got back to Oakland and heard that the SLA was actually after him for knowing too much, he kept moving until he found a job in Houston that offered him health insurance.

Employed under the alias of Bradley Bruce, he finally got the surgery that he had so desperately needed for years. The fact that the job was working on an assembly line making burglar alarms adds on a very thick coating of irony. Wheeler got comfortable in his new life. He got married and had a daughter.

Then in July of 1974, he entered an emergency room with a gunshot wound after attempting to break up an altercation between two men. He was arrested soon after and returned to California to finish out his sentence. William Shockley's number one opponent, Ho Kwon Ping, moved back to Singapore to become an investigative journalist, but ended up doing hard time due to some of his articles.

Quote, "You realize in solitary confinement who you are and who you are not," Ping told the BBC in 2010. "I realized I was not Nelson Mandela. The causes for which I might have been imprisoned for were not the causes that I really could identify with." End quote. Realizing that he was not cut out for the brutal life of a radical political journalist, Ping did a 180.

He embraced capitalism and went on to found Banyan Tree, a global chain of luxury hotels and spas. Seven years ago, Forbes estimated his net worth at $345 million. It's nice to see that the revolution worked out for somebody.

Now, Section C, THE CURRENT MOMENT

"Fascism is, in the last analysis, destabilizing." He continues that fascist regimes could not settle down into a comfortable enjoyment of power, and that the charismatic leader had made dramatic promises to unify, purify, and energize his community. And finally, it's worth pointing out the inherent ambiguity about succession in authoritarian or fascist regimes.

Almost half, 47%, of authoritarian regimes end in collapse when the leader dies or needs replacing or some other crisis happens. In other words, succession is really hard. It depends on the flip of a coin, and personalist dictatorships tend to struggle on until the bitter end, dragging their country down into chaos and catastrophe with them.

Again, order is promised and chaos is the reality

Just eight years after the end of World War II, in 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. Since then, we've learnt so much about genetics, ethnicity, heredity, evolution, and everything in between. This has, of course, had many ramifications, both scientifically and culturally, but there's one huge crucial consequence for our story.

It's meant that many parts of Nazi ideology, these parts that we looked at in how to make a fascist, have been totally discredited. Remember, the Nazis believed in a pure Aryan racial archetype that existed in the deep past, which was being, like the French and the Americans, contaminated and made impure by degenerates, whether Jewish, or gay, or disabled, or Black, really anything that wasn't archetypically Völkisch German.

Modern genetics has shown that variation within races and other groups, the variation between individuals within those groups, is greater than the variation between races and other groups. We all come from the same, quote, unquote, "Ancestral Eve," that all humans share 99.9% of their DNA, that environmental factors are as important, if not more so, than genetic ones in determining the outcome of our lives, even our biological lives.

So all of this has done much to discredit the eugenic and racial thinking of the late 19th century, and has done much for the idea of universal human rights, the very kind of thing fascists were arguing against. The Nazi idea that the Slavs are biologically incapable of ruling themselves, or the idea that the Portuguese or British are biologically suited to colonizing and teaching large parts of the globe, holds, I think, little water today.

That's not to say that similar kinds of things don't persevere, only that something very significant that served to legitimize fascist ideology has changed because of scientific advances. Take this quote on eugenics from historian Richard Evans talking about German racialists. He said that first they believed heredity played a significant role in determining human character and behavior.

Second, which followed on from this, was that society led by the state should manage the population in order to increase national efficiency. The fit had to be persuaded or forced to breed more, the unfit to breed less. Thirdly, however these terms were understood, the racial hygiene movement introduced an ominously rational and scientific categorization of people into those who were valuable to the nation and those who were not.

Low quality, the German term was minderwertig, literally worthless, became a stock term used by social workers and medical men for many kinds of social deviance before the First World War. In other words, we have to remind ourselves, like we did in How to Make a Fascist, that society since Darwin leading up to World War II had become seen through a biological struggle for survival, fit and unfit eugenicist lens all across Europe and America The idea that the state should have any role in persuading the fit to breed and the unfit to breed less has become, let's say, unfashionable.

Of course, race science still persists in the minds of many, but even they have to argue in a completely different scientific field, one with different truth claims, and language, and terminology than the 19th century racialist one, the one that informed the rise of the Nazis, where this sort of view was entirely normal.

More than this, it de-legitimizes the idea of Völkism entirely. Völkisch thinkers, again, thought there was something transcendental about races, something pure, like platonic forms existing outside of space and time, the archetype of Germanness, for example, a model that existed deep in history that had something spiritual and special about it, united people, language, spirit, forest, poetry, philosophy.

Anything outside of that, anything mixing with it could only pollute it. Of course, no one serious today, anyone with any grasp on science or genetics or history argues that, say, Englishness or Americanness are eternal and biological. These kinds of arguments have moved much more from the biological into the cultural realm.

So any political ideology based on that will shift with that too. That's not to say that nationalism obviously isn't still a dominant force in modern life, maybe still the dominant force. But there is an interesting irony here. On the one hand, nationalism is maybe more powerful than ever. You could argue that.

It has good claim on being the most successful, the most enduring ideology, other than religion maybe, that has ever existed But that also means that nation states with fixed borders and identifiable languages and cultures and peoples are much more entrenched. In 1920s Europe, borders were more porous.

Nation states were new. Empires were the norms. Again, you had rulers and the ruled, and you had the weak and the strong. It's much more difficult to make a legitimate claim to the right to rule over a particular area today because nationalism is so strong. In some sense then, the Nazis and the Italians, they weren't nationalists at all.

There's a very important distinction between nationalism and ultra-nationalism because nationalism is based on the assumption that there are nation states and that nations have the right to self-determination. Ultra-nationalism is kind of a mix between this new national identity ideal and old ideas of power and imperialism, that it's a kind of, um, negation of nationalism.

In that kind of world where you have a mix of empire and nationalism, the reasons given to occupy another nation, to protect them or to steward them or to enslave them or to educate them or to civilize them, all of that carries much, much less weight today for the same reasons that racialism has declined.

It has become much, much more difficult today to essentialize a people based on their biology and to justify doing something to them based on that biology, based on their inferiority, say, what the Nazis thought about the Slavs, that they were incapable of ruling themselves. Because we're much more aware of the scientific flexibility of man, the migratory history of people, the evolutionary facts about humanity.

None of this was available in the Nazi period Figures like Putin might try and make these kinds of arguments, but they don't land in anywhere near the same way as they would in the 1920s, say. Instead, they strike us as ridiculous. Putin's interviews are ridiculed widely, whereas in the 1930s, many in the US and Britain, many serious figures, influential figures, looked at some of Hitler and Mussolini's early territorial ambitions and claims in places like the Sudetenland or in Libya as perfectly legitimate.

The ultra-nationalism of that period, in fact, came from a kind of weakness of nationalism. Nationalism was still developing. It hadn't evened out. Most nations weren't countries. Empires were the norm. Take the Italian case. It's easy to remember Mussolini as an ultra-nationalist. We forget that this happened because of how un-nationalized Italy was.

In other words, how little nationalist consciousness Italians had. Italy had only just unified, was very weak, had little sense of national identity. Only 2.5% of Italians spoke Italian. The peasants didn't care about World War I, and Bolsheviks were internationalists, not nationalists. Mid-century ultra-nationalism was also a response to the universalist claims of Bolshevism or the jealousy of globalist empires like the British.

In other words, and the book Five Roads to Modernity by Liah Greenfeld is a great book on this, ultra-nationalism is a response to something from the outside, a threat. Either defense against another nationalist incursion into your own culture or territory, or a response to an incursion by some kind of universalistic claim or aim, like the Bolshevik one in which workers of the world would unite, or something like international law being applied to everyone equally.

Something that, of course, is more topical than ever right now.

the Russian Revolution showed that capitalism isn't eternal. Uh, it showed that working people can overthrow the current system and start building a society that establishes democracy, uh, in the economy and not just in politics. Second, it shows that the strategy to get to that goal is class struggle, not a strategic alliance with liberals or capitalists.

Third, to overthrow capitalism, workers need their own party, and Marxists have a central role to play in making that party effective. And finally, the class struggle is international, and the struggle of workers, uh, in every country is deeply interlinked. So these are huge points, uh, really important. I talk about them a lot in the book.

But I, I think that they're, um, points that we agree on, so I'm gonna focus, uh, for the sake of discussion, on where I think we disagree. I could be wrong. Uh, remains to be seen. Uh, and I would summarize it as follows. To put it simply, I think those in the Leninist tradition, um, including, um, organizations like Socialist Alternative, tend to overgeneralize strategy from the Revolu- Russian Revolution, uh, to context of capitalist democracies.

And the fundamental flaw of Leninism in my view, and this comes from, uh, the research I did and, and organizing experience as well, was to assume that a form of revolution and a form of party that was appropriate to autocratic Russia, uh, can more or less be transplanted to capitalist countries where civil liberties and democratic institutions are significantly more robust, even if they don't go as far as we'd like And so more specifically, I think it's wrong to claim that the revolution illustrates the universal validity of, one, a new conception of revolution as laid out in Lenin's State and Revolution, according to which the entire, uh, existing state would have to be o-overthrown everywhere through a mass uprising, uh, to set up council republics.

And s-two, um, it supposedly showed the necessity for a new form of revolutionary party, one committed to democratic centralism and a revolutionary Leninist program. And by new here, I mean that this was a different form of party and revolution than the position long articulated, uh, by the left of the Second International, most notably by Karl Kautsky.

Um, and the founding myth of Leninism, I think I show in the book, and we can talk about, was that supposedly the secret to success of the Bolsheviks in nineteen seventeen was that they broke from Kautsky's strategy, known at the time as revolutionary social democracy, and that supposedly all other socialists should follow, uh, them in doing the same.

But as I show in the book, this is just historically wrong, and it's politically flawed. Unlike in Germany, where Kautsky's revolutionary theories were ignored by the party leadership, in autocratic Russia, uh, this theory was implemented not only by the Bolsheviks but by all the other nationalities that led working people to conquer power in nineteen seventeen, eighteen, including in Finland.

And this revolutionary social democratic strategy was premised on a correct understanding that class struggle and revolutions would develop qualitatively differently in autocratic and democratic contexts. And it was precisely this understanding, this distinction between politics in autocratic, uh, and democratic capitalist countries, that Leninists tended to drop from nineteen and eighteen onwards, or at least minimize, uh, excessively.

According to Leninists, the Russian Revolution shows that socialists should seek to overthrow the entire existing state, even when a democratically elected parliament exists. The problem with this claim, um, is that As it doesn't actually follow from what happened in the Russian Revolution. Uh, they say that the Russian Revolution proves this, but there was no democratically elected parliament in Russia to be overthrown or to exist.

And pre-precisely because of that, Soviets or councils were able to fill the vacuums. So it's hard to generalize from the Russian experience, at least beyond Finland, uh, to countries where such a democratic parliament does exist. And all the experience then during and since 1917 shows that where a democratic parliament does exist, workers will try to use it to meet their demands, including for socialist transformation.

And that's the basic reason, uh, why a Leninist revolution has never come close to taking place in a capitalist democracy. And we should acknowledge that and, and sort of adjust accordingly. One of the underlying flaws in Leninism then is its assumption that workers in all countries of the world will sooner or later behave as radically as workers did in Russia in 1917.

And honestly, I, I really wish that it turned out to be true. It would be fantastic if it turned out to be true. It hasn't turned out to be true. And so we should acknowledge that and orient to the working class as it is, um, not as we might wish it to be. And If we do that, it will help us avoid a tendency of Leninists and others to excessively blame, like bad leadership, misleaders, which, of which is often a real problem, but to excessively blame that for holding back the revolutionary instincts of the masses.

There's a lot more going on for, um, what it's gonna take to overthrow capitalism in different contexts. The main reason capitalism hasn't been overthrown yet isn't that socialists have strayed from the correct revolutionary line. The main reason is that capitalists are very powerful, and that most workers in capitalist democracies have oriented to making the state work for them rather than trying to overthrow it.

Of course, it's true that if socialists win a majority through parliamentary means and begin to push for socialist transformation, capitalists will resist this with all the means at their disposal. There's no reason to expect that the capitalist minority will peacefully submit to the majority. But it doesn't follow from this that universal suffrage and parliaments are necessarily a form of capitalist rule, as Leninists claim.

It just means you need to leverage the mandate, legitimacy structures of winning a democratic election in order to effectively de- defeat the anti-democratic capitalist minority and the undemocratic structures of the state, like the police and the army. And so what I show in the book is that's precisely...

This is precisely what happened in Finland, the one part of the Russian Empire which had a sustained political freedom, um, tradition and universal suffrage. There, socialists won a majority in nineteen sixteen. They proceeded to try to implement the program in nineteen seventeen. Then when the capitalists undemocratically, uh, resisted, Finnish socialists led workers to power in early nineteen eighteen to fulfill their mandate.

And to be clear, my argument isn't that we should try to copy Kautsky today, uh, or that Finland is some sort of new universal model to be replicated. I, I think m- it's more narrow. I think what Finland does show is that revolutionary social democratic strategy could guide workers to power, and that the class struggle, and this is a big point, tends to develop very differently where there's political freedom and where real parliaments exist, as opposed to contexts where they don't.

And the fact that the US today is the least democratic of the advanced capitalist countries doesn't mean a Leninist revolution is on the cards here either. It just means we need to dramatically democratize the US state to make both social, democratic, and anti-capitalist transformation possible.

Lenin's claim Uh, that quote, "The Democratic Republic is the best possible shell for capitalism," end quote, which is often quoted by Leninists, um, severely underestimates the extent to which democratic parliaments were won by and for working people, that what democracy we have is a conquest, uh, to be defended and expanded.

And it undercuts, uh, this, this conception of Lenin that the Democratic Republic is just a shell, the best shell for capitalism. This conception undercuts our ability to make a coherent case to working people that it's always the right, not the left, that wants to undermine universal suffrage and democratically elected parliaments, which we've seen most recently through the rise of Trumpism and the January 6th insurrection.

And to be clear, I'm really glad that Socialist Alternative, um, explicitly states that they want to base socialist revolution on a majority rule of the population. I think that's great, and we agree on that. But the fact is that both Lenin and Trotsky and, and other Leninists, uh, particularly in these early years, explicitly argued against this.

They explicitly argued, and I can give you dozens of citations, saying that Marxists shouldn't wait to win under capitalism majority of the population for socialist, um, mandate through democratically elected parliaments, that they should win a majority in Soviets, which doesn't represent the full population, and after that, they can forge and win the majority, uh, after having taken power And I think that's a conception we should reject.

It's, it's not helpful, and I don't think it, um, helps move in the direction we need. As I mentioned before, and I'm gonna go more briefly on this last point, the second major flaw in Leninism, uh, was its claim that the Russian Revolution demons- demonstrated the universal validity of a new party model based on democratic centralism Uh, and strict organizational separation from socialists who didn't adhere to Lenin's new conception of state and revolution.

And to summarize a big history, the story severely exaggerates the organizational coherence and programmatic unity of the Bolsheviks. Uh, and in practice, this conception often tends to lead to sectarianism. Because Bolsheviks operated in an autocratic context in which top leaders had to live abroad and which, uh, local committees would constantly get broken up by the police, the actual organizational practices of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries in Imperial Russia were extremely decentralized and fluid, way more than any organization since, uh, Lenin's organization since 1917.

So the historical record just doesn't correspond at all to the image of a tight and united party that Leninists have, uh, tended to try to replicate. Moreover, the secret sauce of the Bolsheviks, uh, if you wanna think about it that way, and other successful Marxists in the empire, like the Latvians or the Finns or others, was that they operated as relatively loose, fluid, and organic currents within a broader multi broad tent, big tent party.

And though exiled leaders tended to squabble a lot, Bolshevik leaders on the ground and cadre on the ground were always focused on building and leading that broader party as good faith partners with other currents. They weren't primarily intervening in this party just to build to their own organization.

And because Leninists from 1918 through the present have tended to excessively wall themselves off organizationally from other socialist currents, and because they insist that only their particular conception of state and revolution is viable, their organizations have frequently devolved into, um, sects, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller.

And I think then we should move away from that organizational conception, and our chances at building a majoritarian socialist movement depend on acknowledging that because there's never been a successful socialist revolution in a capitalist democracy, nobody can claim to have a precise strategic model for the way forward.

And I'm, I think we should be skeptical of claims that, um, that model exists and just needs to be replicated. So studying the Russian Revolution is great, but it's so studying the history of class struggle in a lot of other places, including after World War II in countries like Sweden, where workers and democratic socialists went furthest in capitalist democracies.

And so to conclude, what becomes clear, I think, um, from this history and, and rigorous, like looks at other history since, is that there are no formulas for socialist success in capitalist democracies. There are just strategic dilemmas to grapple with, which look differently in different political contexts.

And that's why effectively pushing the class struggle forward requires concrete analyses of concrete situations, a large degree of tactical flexibility, and an ability to mix revolutionary dedication with a dose of humility and open-endedness.

the article by David Cain, written in 2010 on raptitude.com, titled Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed. Now he starts off the article talking about how he had been traveling for some time as a kind of a backpacker. So he was a lot more conscious about the kinds of costs he was incurring and how he could reduce those costs as he went from country to country.

When he got back from his travel, he returned to a nine to five existence that, as he says, exposed something that he had overlooked before, that he had spent much less per month traveling foreign countries than he did working a regular job at home He had more free time, he was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, he was meeting new people left and right, he was calm and peaceful, and otherwise having an unforgettable time.

And somehow it cost him much less than his nine-to-five lifestyle in one of Canada's least expensive cities. And so it got him to thinking about why it was that he got so much more for his dollar when he was traveling than when he had returned home and gotten back into his job. And he references the example of the way that companies encourage us to spend, consume.

You know, I talk about some of these examples all the time. One of the examples he uses is that marketing psychologists found out that the best way to increase toy sales would be to target their advertising to children so the children would pester their parents. As he says, "Big companies didn't make their millions by earnestly promoting the virtues of their products.

They, they made it by creating a culture of hundreds of millions of people that buy way more than they need and try to chase away dissatisfaction with money. We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what adulthood would be like, to broa- to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is.

How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven't used in the past year?" Now, I'm not much of a consumer. I very much try to save as much money as I can, so the kind of barrage of marketing and hyper-consumerist culture, that doesn't really get at me. But I have noticed that the more that I would work in a week, the more likely I was to spend more money on stuff.

For example, if I worked really hard Monday to Friday, I would be more likely to buy outside food, for example, or treat myself to the occasional matcha. And this brings us to what Cain is talking about in this article, the real reason for the 40-hour workweek. He's only been back at work for a few days, but already he's noticing that the more wholesome activities are quick- are quickly dropping out of his life.

Walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing. The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time. Suddenly I have a lot more money and a lot less time, which means I have a lot more in common with the typical working North American than I did a few months ago.

When I was abroad, I wouldn't have thought twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours. Now that kind of stuff feels like it's out of the question. Doing either one would take most of one of my precious weekend days. The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise.

It's also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake, and that's really all the time I have on a weekday. And this is a problem for so many people who are working nowadays, right? You spend so much of your time working that you don't really have anything left in you for anything else.

As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a short amount of time. You'd think this would lead to shorter workdays, but the eight-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours.

The average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in eight hours. But because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. So Graeber was talking about how much of our work is pointless and how much of our work is literally destroying the planet, and Cain here is talking about how doing that amount of work feeds right into the destruction of the planet.

You know, that kind of work day is profitable for big business because keeping free time scarce is the whole point. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We've been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience, entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don't have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

And if we stopped buying so much, if people stopped buying so much, the economy would collapse and never recover because the economy is built on growth. It's built on this endless consumption. The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business's most powerful tool for keeping people in the same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.

The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulgent during their free time, and somehow just getting by. Now, this article was written back in twenty ten. Let's see how much of this still applies, right?

Dissatisfied but hopeful. I'm not sure how many people are still hopeful, but maybe that hope is not necessary for being a perfect customer after all. Uninterested in serious personal development. I guess the key word there is serious in the serious personal development because a lot of the stuff that is being sold to people now is sold under this kind of markets and packaging of personal development, of things that will improve you as a person.

Highly habituated to the television. I would say while television is still relevant, more so highly habituated to shorts, reels, TikToks, whatever short-form content there is. Working full-time, that still applies. In fact, people are working overtime more and more. Earning a fair amount, that doesn't really apply.

Wages in a lot of industries have stagnated. Minimum wage has stagnated in many parts of the world, including my own. And yet people having less money to spend does not mean that they won't spend money. I've noticed that people of my generation will tend to spend on the little luxuries, you know, the creature comforts almost because they've accepted the fact that they will not be able to actually purchase long-term stability in the form of housing and that kind of thing.

And yeah, people are indeed still indulgent during their free time and somehow just getting by. So my takeaway with these articles was really that the work day, the traditional work day, is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for making the changes we wanna see in the world. And as I've spoken about on my channel before in my video on why nobody wants to be working class, unions have historically fought to change these circumstances, but modern unions are very much caught up in a reformist posture, and the nature of so many of our contemporary workplaces and approaches to work has left, I think, a lot less room for organizing.

I made a short post about this on Substack a couple weeks ago. I said, "Workers' nostalgia for the high point of trade unionism must confront the real conditions workers are facing in the twenty-first century. It's not just legal obstacles and corporate interference that limits unionizing efforts. People are unemployed, underemployed on precarious contracts and gig arrangements tied to BS jobs they want to get out of and/or productivist jobs that literally don't need to exist at all or need to be curtailed significantly, all in the context of a globalized, imperialized world.

I'm speaking to the service sector in the Global North and South, as well as the manufacturing sector and primary sector. A lot of these jobs need to not exist, which means people need to be looking to build escape hatches, not continuing to cling to institutions that presuppose the permanence of wage labour."

I highly question the ability of unions to break free from the terms set by the capitalist economy. I'm not saying it's entirely impossible. I just think the likelihood of it being the case is extremely low because over the decades, they have very much been integrated into the capitalist economy. They have very much capitulated to the permanence of capitalism as an economic system.

I continue in the post, "I'm not saying give up the labour axis of struggle entirely, but these issues can hardly be dealt with by funneling one's blind faith and energy into unions and electoralism, especially for those in the Global North who must attend to the fact that the rest of our economies," our being, you know, those of us in the Global South, "are subordinated for the benefit of your rulers who exist at the pinnacle of economic and political power and, to a lesser extent, your workers who deprive some benefit from imperialist plunder.

We need alternatives prefigured on the ground to set the foundation for a livable relief from this rat race and sustain further social revolution. Fighting to entrench jobs that are ecologically destructive and/or socially meaningless should be a much lower priority than building commons and alternative economies that can create a material basis for autonomy so that people can have the option to refuse exploitative, destructive work.

Not saying it's easy to organize, but to me that should be the North Star and establishing SMART goals toward that end," SMART goals being specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. I feel like having vague goals is not nearly as beneficial to us if we want to construct a better world than actually picking a goal, a smart goal, and sticking to it and seeing it through, developing a specific strategy that will get us toward that goal within a certain time frame.

You have to be step by step in your process.

one of the most powerful forces in moving the Overton window, the media. The more they focus on a story through a certain framing, the more that framing becomes fact and any other considered conspiracy The American mainstream media covered the story extensively and framed the story to be within the same world as the Diddy scandal, Me Too, and Harvey Weinstein.

That this is just about rich and powerful perverts being perverts, and ignored the other element.

And what happened in that massage room I assume was on video. This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever.

That this sadistic and horrifying network routinely abused children Most likely for blackmail and leverage.

The infamous Lolita Express, their private plane used to transport young girls and high-profile friends, including Bill Clinton.

She also told me in that meeting that the plane, the private plane that she and Jeffrey used, um, was wired for s- for audio, video.

And the evidence highly suggests that they were Mossad assets.

They were all essentially commodities to him, traded for the advantage of one single cause, which is Israel. That was the motive, and we know he had, you know, extensive high-level connections to the Israeli regime, to its government, to security, intelligence, uh, its financing circles, its business community.

That was the means that went with the motive. So it's a story about Israeli influence in the highest corridors of power and wealth.

Epstein had a very close relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who would stay at his apartment so frequently that Epstein's staff called it Ehud's apartment.

He was sort of an unofficial ambassador who could use, uh, this network that they had created together to be kind of a frontman and an advance man for the Israeli, uh, for the Israeli regime.

So Epstein served as an advisor to Barak, and he was facilitating introductions to tech investors and financial firms.

One of them was Palantir. That's the US-based data analytics firm founded by, uh, Peter Thiel, and they are deeply involved in government and surveillance. Here is a clip from a call between Epstein and Barak.

Palantir is Peter Thiel's company. Palantir, P-A-L-A-N-T-I-R? Yes.

Epstein tried to procure cyber weapons for Israel.

Aren't we done? Like, that's it. Like, does, y- is there someone who is not connected to a government and their intelligence agencies that tries to get cyber weapons for that government?

The mystery of the woman next to Jeffrey Epstein.

Ghislaine Maxwell, accused of being Epstein's right-hand woman.

Ghislaine Maxwell's father was Robert Maxwell.

A media and publishing tycoon who owned the Daily Mirror.

Was one of the most

important and powerful people in British public life in the '70s and '80s.

A man with long-suspected ties to the Mossad, who mysteriously died when he fell from his yacht.

His body was brought to Israel to be buried in Jerusalem's Mount of Olives.

That's a graveyard reserved for Israel's elite servants. His funeral was attended by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli President Chaim Herzog, and at least six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence and a lot of Mossad agents at that funeral.

Epstein quotes a book called Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy?

in an email titled He Was Passed Away.

Epstein's lawyer was Alan Dershowitz

The informant believed Dershowitz was co-opted by Mossad and subscribed to their mission. So the confidential human source remembered Dershowitz tell Alex Acosta, the US Attorney Southern District of Florida at the time, that Epstein belonged to both US and allied intelligence services.

CHS shared phone calls between Dershowitz and Epstein during which he/she took notes. After these calls, Mossad would then call Dershowitz to debrief.

And Epstein's very close friends were these Norwegian diplomats who were famous for playing a key role in the Oslo Accords, the peace plan that many Palestinians see as having been a trap for Palestinians.

Was one of the architects of the Oslo Peace Accords.

The diplomat, Terje Rød-Larsen, quote, "Wrote official letters of recommendation to US authorities to secure visas for young Russian women in Epstein's orbit, claiming they possessed extraordinary abilities suitable for research roles."

He also calls him his best friend So why does mainstream US media suppress this story?

Can we discuss the blackmail operation that was taking place, and which government, that's a special ally of the United States, put him up to it? And do we really want to be allies with a country that kidnaps young girls, uh, for rape just so they can have dirt on American politicians and control our foreign policy?

Spoiler alert, uh, the topic was changed promptly to, uh, Epstein's relationship with Russia.

Possible connections between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Russian intelligence services.

Growing suspicions of a Russian connection. Fueling speculation that Epstein could have been working for Russia.

Imagine if the story was Epstein tried to procure cyber weapons for China. Do you think we'd be talking about that non-stop? Of course. Everybody would be like, "China, our mortal enemy China." Or just a random country, Kenya. Ev- Like, I imagine New York Times, CNN would be like, "Whoa, Kenya is all over the Epstein files, and it turns out he was trying to get cyber weapons for Kenya.

He was trying to get America to bomb Kenya's neighbors on behalf of Kenya. Wow, what an amazing story." When it, when it's Israel, shh.

No, there, look, there- The Israel connection is undeniable. Ignoring this or letting this fact just slip by allows the idea of this happening to become acceptable and normal

Investigations are now underway in at least 10 countries.

Britain's former Prince Andrew has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

Norway is living through the crisis the US never had over the Epstein files. The country's former prime minister and top diplomats found themselves under police investigation and forced out of their roles.

Lord Mandelson had been sacked as US ambassador because more links with Jeffrey Epstein had emerged.

What happens in the heart of the empire doesn't stay there. What the Epstein files reveal is not just the moral depravity of a few individuals, but how the system that governs all of us works.

Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

This guy's been talking-

And the reception of the files reveals how this system is able to sustain itself. It doesn't try to hide anything, but it reveals just enough in a world that's already been pushed too far to respond

Now we can see this as a push of the Overton window, or we can identify the common denominator involved in all of these elements

That's already been sitting at the far, far end of the spectrum for a very long time, Israel And instead of a push, maybe this is all a pull. Because the levels of moral depravity involved here have long been within the Zionist Overton window.

He described the dog attack as rape, saying soldiers laughed and recorded the sexual assaults.

We found booby-trapped children's toys and canned food planted by the occupation, meaning Israel, to cause more casualties.

It doesn't matter who your enemy is, you need to destroy their offspring to prevent them from creating more offspring

And that pull has become even more clear in the US and Israel's latest collaboration, the war on Iran.

A

heartbreaking deadly strike on an Iranian girls' elementary school on the first day of the war. They

were

students

ranging from 7 to 12

years old.

Lebanon's declared a day of mourning.

She was four years old and called Lamar, an angel to her family. When they found her body, she'd been decapitated.

They've hit the same benchmarks. Horrifying violence to begin. Repeated lies.

If we didn't hit within two weeks, they would've had a nuclear weapon.

Weaponized hopelessness. And media complicity.

For the long-term gain. Short-term pain for the long-term gain. Short-term pain be for long-term gain.

We're gonna have some short-term pain, uh, with long-term gain.

A world that has failed to stop the genocide in Gaza and failed to bring justice to the powerful around Epstein is what's paved the way for what is happening now, where the people of Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine are experiencing levels of savagery that were once debilitating for us to watch in Gaza.

My son was just out playing.

How can he be here now? I can't see him anymore. I can't look into his beautiful eyes. I have no words anymore.

The babies is good to kill. Really? In Lebanon? Yes, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iran. I kill children

What Jeffrey Epstein built on that island and in that house and in that ranch weren't anomalies. They were concentrated versions of how power already operates, spaces where the rules don't even apply. Even when it's exposed at this scale, nothing breaks. What we're collectively living through is a war on truth and justice and basic human decency.

We're being dragged towards accepting barbarism, of normalizing the lack of morality in power They try to constantly overwhelm us with increasing levels of violence so that we may somehow come to accept it someday. But it is our duty and our moral imperative to resist that, even if it's just within ourselves every day

if I believed that armed struggle was a thing to do today, I would be doing it.

There will be a time in the not-too-distant future when that will be the case, but that time is not now. China, say what you want, but is capitalist, imperialist. Read, uh, Lenin on imperialism, the export of finance capital. I would like to think that what's happening in China is just a, a temporary deviation in order to lift the economy so that, you know, they can be able to fight US imperialism or something like that.

And Russia, of course, is far capitalist. Although, US imperialism is keeping it boxed in, so it's not able to, uh, be as imperialist as China is. So these are very conservative times. Now, World War I was the product of inter-imperialist rivalry. The big brother imperialists had the global pie divided among themselves, and the little imperialists wanted their place in the sun, wanted their slice of the pie.

But in order to get their slice, they would have to take it From the big imperialists. And this resulted in World War I, a redivision of the world's resources. And that failed. And the same thing was true for World War II. Japan, capitalism must expand or die. That's the logic of it. And Japan and Germany, Italy, not so much Italy, but needed to expand.

Mussolini just wanted to go into Northern Africa and reclaim the glory of the Roman Empire or some shit like that. So once again, it resulted in an inter-imperialist war. Efforts to redivide the pie. Well, here we are on the cusp of World War III, where China is expanding into Africa, South Asia, South America, and U.S.

imperialism is outraged at this encroachment on what has traditionally been their slices of the pie. And so World War I brought in the Russian Revolution. World War II brought in the Chinese Revolution. What World War III will bring in is difficult to say, but judging from the last war, most likely it will bring a much devastated planet.

I don't have any answers for people, but the issue is Rosa Luxemburg said, quoting Engels, that the choice confronting people today, and as was true today as it was then, is between socialism or barbarism. And I mean, that's, the planet is dying. The left is anemic. I see no means of turning this around. I mean, there's some slight possibility that if armed groups were developed and were able to survive the hunt, that that could inspire others to do the same thing and ultimately bring about the change.

But, you know, where's the mass movement? You know, where's, the conditions are not here right now. And I wish I could be less pessimistic than I am, but I have a friend named Bill Dunn. He's still in prison. And he signs off each letter with, the future holds promise. And it doesn't . It's not looking good. So I don't know what to tell you in that regard.

Well, we'll keep the optimism alive for you, Ed, even if, if- Okay ... if it's hard for you to come by. But, but I hear you. So one of the things about the brigade that, that I really appreciated is your responsiveness to, to criticism, and also the admission of some errors, which in my experience is just something that it happens a lot less frequently than it should.

There's a lot of... I mean, historically in the US, in the left, but also currently among formations that wanna bring about socialism, you just don't see this level of response to criticism as well as self-criticism. So I wonder if you could say a little bit about that. Obviously, you know, you all felt the need to defend what you all believed, but you weren't afraid to engage the above ground from the underground, and you had a culture of accountability, I would say, with the public.

So just say a little bit about that from your perspective.

Well, first of all, you have to be honest with yourself, and you have to be honest with those around you, and you have to be honest with your critics. And we tried to maintain dialogue. But in our case, the tame left was just too freaked out by the brigade to be able to understand.

What they would do is they would take a, uh, they would take a word like terrorism, pounce that word on us, uh, and talk about how evil terrorism was, and not evaluate whether the work we did was terrorism or not. They were actually, you know, just helping the state. They were... But that's not anything new. The Communist Party of Cuba fought against the, uh, revolution right up until Castro and his comrades seized state power.

The Communist Party of France supported its own government against the, uh, national liberation struggle taking place in Algeria. The, the history of opportunism, right opportunism on the left is a sordid one, and it's even worse today. I mean, the American left with respect to, uh, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, is just pathetic.

But, you know, that's, that's the way it is. That's... There's not going to be any kind of genuine socialist movement- Until that left gets a hold of itself. I would go to demonstrations in San Francisco, and the organizers answer the, and I wore leaders would have marshals flanking the marchers to make sure that nobody did something evil, like started a fire in a dumpster.

When such a fire would've put the demonstration in the national headlines. But in fact, there's no mention whatsoever, one mention in one newspaper in San Francisco of the march, and most of that story was about Faulkner, the cop that Mumia Abu-Jamal allegedly killed, was about his brother being in town during the march.

The idea that 15, maybe 20 years ago, somebody drove by the, uh, storefront of the Socialist Workers Party in Chicago and threw a brick through their window. The Socialist Workers Party ran straight to the police demanding, and in their newspaper demanding that the police protect them. I mean, really? What kind of revolution are you gonna make if you can't protect yourself?

If you have to run to the state's apparatus and repression for help? Um, that's a pretty good metaphor for where we're at on the left today. The distinction between legal and illegal work. A revolutionary doesn't pay any attention to that distinction. It's bullshit. Revolutionaries don't go to the state and ask for permission to march.

They just march. They, uh... Okay, let's move on.

Right on. So one of the, you know, I kinda wanted to close in just talking about prison struggle a little bit, because you've been involved in some pretty, you know, I mean, you already talked about several of them. Some pretty amazing prisoner struggles, both inside and outside supporting as well.

You know, and for years you fought to foster, you, you struggled to foster that radical inside-outside relationship between prisoners, organizers, families, and the left. Mm-hmm. So when is that relationship at its best, and how do those of us who agree with that approach, right? What do we need to do to, to put this into practice?

Okay, here's the slogan that should be tattooed backwards on your forehead, so every time you look in the mirror, you see it. In the absence of class conflict, there exists a state of class peace. There can be no revolution As long as such a condition exists, period. Where is struggle? That's where you need to be.

And Finally, Section D, STRATEGY AND PRACTICE

Consciousness enables people to contemplate and alter their activity as needed. Radical education helps people to develop forms of consciousness which enable them to better understand, assess, orient themselves in, and change their society.

Now let's talk prefigurative politics. Mutual aid must be a foundational concept in any social revolutionary project. Put simply, mutual aid is a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions by building relationships, networks of reciprocity, and communal autonomy from the state.

Mutual aid may involve work to support people impacted by harmful systems and work to create alternative infrastructure. It can take the form of ride-sharing, disaster response, food distribution, and much more. However, those engaging in mutual aid must ask themselves if their actions are providing material relief, avoiding legitimizing oppressive systems, mobilizing people for ongoing struggle, and accommodating marginalized groups.

Mutual aid is not meant to be charity. Charity is its own thing. Mutual aid must actively cultivate liberatory skills, practices, and chief among all, solidarity. In Anarchism and the Black Revolution, Black anarchist and former Panther Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin wrote about the need to create survival programs to feed, house, and serve poor and working class people facing life-altering conditions.

Survival programs are based in a specific geographical region where members of community get together to meet specific needs in their area with the aim of building connections, consciousness, and eventually popular assemblies. A popular assembly is a free association of members of a community gathered with the aim of self-management.

Popular assemblies allow community problems and improvements to be identified and solved directly, drawing upon the ideas and experiences of everyone and enriched by discussion and debate. Decisions may be made via consensus or through other forms of decision-making, such as liquid democracy, majority vote, or supermajority vote.

Within a popular assembly, affinity groups may form to advocate their specific interests in a coordinated manner. The town of Cherán in Mexico provides just one example of successful community control, where the community armed themselves, kicked out the police, the cartels, and the local government, and organized popular assemblies to manage their own affairs.

Popular assemblies will need to network and confederate with other popular assemblies and revolutionary organisations in order to build their collective power and autonomy. For example, communities will need to develop their capacity to feed themselves. Urban agriculture might be able to supplement dietary needs, but ultimately, community-supported agriculture provides a more robust alternative in the long term.

Community-supported agriculture or crop sharing is a system that connects producers and consumers within the food system without a middleman by allowing the consumer to subscribe to the local harvest of a certain farm or group of farms. For the purpose of revolution, crop sharing can connect farming cooperatives with popular assemblies to develop an alternative economy.

A cooperative is simply an autonomous association of people united to meet their common economic, social, and/or cultural needs and aspirations through a collectively owned and democratically controlled organisation. Co-housing cooperatives deal with housing. Workers' cooperatives deal with various industries, including food, healthcare, transportation, construction, and clothing.

Credit unions deal with finance, including potentially financing revolutionary projects. Platform cooperatives deal with websites or apps, and utility cooperatives deal with the provision of utilities in a community or region. Makerspaces, coding spaces, and cooperative labs can create room for research and innovation in revolutionary projects, bringing together people of a diverse set of skills to collaborate and find solutions to the issues raised by the broader community As I discussed in my videos on the library economy and the commons, the reclamation of the commons is absolutely vital to revolution.

In brief, the commons refers to any collectively managed natural or man-made resource system, such as a community land trust, a local forest, a shared pasture, or a renewable energy system. Revolutionaries can engage in building fully-fledged library economies based on the commons. This can take the form of tool libraries, vehicle libraries, clothing libraries, furniture libraries, and more, in an effort to curb overproduction, end planned obsolescence, and provide access to an irreducible minimum to all.

Revolutionaries can also establish childcare collectives and free schools. Free schools are autonomous, non-hierarchical spaces intended for educational exchange and skill-sharing for all ages. They reject the subordination of students to teachers and organize classes in a way that promotes critical consciousness across a variety of subjects.

From nursery through college, in community centers, parks, libraries, and other shared spaces, learners and facilitators can collaborate to develop and self-manage an autonomous education system that can dispense knowledge and skills among the community. Free children beget a free society, and education should facilitate their freedom.

Communities must also develop methods of conflict resolution and new systems of justice. Mistakes and disagreements are inevitable, so there must be some means in place for discussing, deciding, and resolving conflict and incidents within and between communities, cooperatives, and individuals in a healthy and effective way, such as through arbitration, mediation, or conciliation.

Community defense against domination and abuses of power requires a system of justice capable of responding to harmful behavior. How that manifests is subject to much debate among anarchists and abolitionists, so I will reserve that discussion for a future video. Now let's visit a free commune, a radical few who chose to maroon.

They wished to abolish capitalism and more, but they left the city and its working-class core. Utopia was the goal, but it couldn't be accessed, solidarity made impossible between the commune and the oppressed. When the time drew near and their comrades would call, the commune folk didn't help at all.

Hey, T. It's me again. We're down here at City Hall downtown. We're striking, and we could really use some of your aid, just like old times.

What's up, Conrad G? You know we'd love to help, but the rains just came down last week, and we've been trying to fix our place. Plus, we're setting up this new irrigation system, just trying to get it up and running, so we just don't have the time to make it downtown this time.

But I promise you, man, we will be sure to help out next time.

Okay, T, but you know this is the third time this happened. What happened to solidarity forever?

Yo, of course, man. Of course. Solidarity forever, but we're just too busy, you know? Don't worry, we always got love for you. We'll support the movement when things settle down for us here at the commune, but for now, we just, we have our own fires to put out

But year after year, there was always a cause why the commune folk couldn't partake in class wars.

They shrunk to the background, doing their own thing, until the phone of revolution no longer did ring. A year or two down the line, money got tight. With no allies or comrades, new ambitions were in sight.

I think we should start a farmer's market.

Before long, these radicals took another tacit turn. A bed and breakfast was born with the money they'd earn.

Book a stay, one and all, at the Bread Book B&B. You pay for your room, the utopia is free. They once were merry, they once were gay, but they forgot to oppose and they lost their way. Oppose and propose. Propose and oppose. Confrontation, non-cooperation, and prefiguration. A variety of organizations and individuals undertaking a variety of roles, tactics, and strategies in a variety of settings in concert to develop the revolution.

Supporters unable to directly engage help and fund the projects of these movements. Ultimately, the social revolution is a movement from below, by and for the oppressed to achieve their own freedom. It is an ongoing process to make society more diverse, open, and free, expanding pockets of social change around the world until new examples of what life could be are made known to all.

Remember that even in struggle, it's not just serious business. Revolution can and should be fun. A carnival of the oppressed. It's about making life worth living. It's about emancipating people. As Emma Goldman said, if I can't dance, it's not my revolution. Remember that it always seems impossible until it is done.

why do we want revolution?

This is a relatively simple question that can be answered with many volumes, but I'll keep it simple. Capitalism is an untenable and unstable system built on the inherent injustice of market allocation, as well as the destruction of the environment and commodification of everything around us. It hurts us, the planet, and pretty much just about anything else.

A deeper introductory analysis of capitalism and its faults can be found in an earlier video I made here. Only through revolution, the overthrow of one class, the ruling class, by another class, the working class, can we finally escape the endless boom and bust cycles, the crises of overproduction, and the ruin of our common earth.

The system that will overtake and supersede capitalism is socialism, in which the market is done away with, the means of production are democratically managed, and the state machinery, in the hands of the working class, is made to work for the working class and society as a whole. For a deeper introductory dive into socialism and its inherent superiority over capitalism, take a look at this video I made here.

Now, that's all well and good, but how do we go about this whole revolution thing exactly? Two, the approach to revolution. As much as you and I would love to just flip a switch to achieve our goals, sadly, the real world is different. Only tireless work towards revolution and the appropriate material conditions can result in a situation that could possibly lead to the overthrow of capitalism.

What exactly does this tireless work look like, though? Simple. The building of organizations, education, direct action, mutual aid, applying the mass line, and ceaseless agitation, amongst other things. All of this will be touched on soon. Let's take this one by one. What's this about building organizations?

Three, building organizations and their importance. Human beings are a cooperative species. We rarely work alone, and anything worth doing requires collective efforts of the masses of people from their various walks of life. It goes without saying that anything you can do on your own can be done more quickly, efficiently, and cleanly by a dedicated organization, and politics is no different.

Now, what forms of organizations are we talking about exactly? Well, that's up to the material conditions of your region and the requirements of your community. Having an appropriate materialist analysis is of prime importance. These organizations can be political parties or women's groups or student unions or even standard workers unions, amongst many other things.

The point being, though, is that nothing can be accomplished without the proper organizations being in place. History has proven that organic mobilization, where people spontaneously mobilize, is, at best, easily fragmented and crushed or, at worst, nonexistent. Organizations exist to lay the groundwork for that crucial moment, or at least to nudge it along.

Once it comes around, though, there is some ready-made infrastructure with an appropriate analysis, the people's trust, and a detailed plan of action at hand. Now, the boring organizational aspects of these groups too depend on the material conditions. At times, a highly centralized leadership is necessary.

At others, a decentralized umbrella organization with numerous streams of leadership, but nonetheless a single goal. Leadership is fluid, sometimes centralized, sometimes running through multiple streams depending on the material conditions. There isn't just one answer at all times. Under capitalism, the issues people face from exploitation to the unjust distribution of resources according to profit rather than need, is painted as moral failings of individuals rather than systemic defects that need to be, and definitely can be, corrected.

In an organization, those that take part, as well as those that directly benefit from the work these groups do, help people develop an appropriate and correct analysis of the situation, and the undeniable failings of the capitalist system. In essence, organizations are the key to and school of liberation.

To summarize, the point of organizations and their purpose is twofold: firstly, to directly aid our communities, and in doing so, broadcast the failures of the capitalist system. And secondly, to build a preliminary form of dual power and equip the people with the necessary tools so that in that crucial moment, we can properly take advantage and win our liberation.

Four, education and its importance. Now, what of education? This doesn't mean only reading theory, although that is of paramount importance too. It also means organic education through organizing. Be it understandings of legal frameworks, public relations, basic medical knowledge, and computer knowhow. The reason theory is important is because it is a guide to action.

It is what allows us to properly understand the world around us and how to go about critiquing and, more importantly, changing it. If you're a new Marxist and want some advice on what you should be doing education-wise, take a look at this video here. If you'd like to get a basic reading list on socialism, take a look at this video here.

The point of educating yourself in the theory is to be able to develop your criticisms of capitalism and to confidently and accurately share your understanding with your community and those around you. This, combined with direct action, is what builds class consciousness, the very first block towards abolishing capitalism.

With that said, what about the other sort of education? Theory can be done on your own or in groups, which is highly recommended, but interpersonal communication skills, how to handle conflict, basic cooperative and democratic participation, accurately finding a solution to a problem found through said cooperative effort, all this is something that can only really be done in groups.

Finally, professional organizations tend to grow the, let's say, more boring but still very necessary stuff as well. From administrative skills and technical organization of transport groups, et cetera, to things like video editing and Photoshop skills, or creative writing in the forms of pamphlets or seminars and more Five, mutual aid and basic organizing.

With all the introductory stuff out of the way, let's get more concrete. Firstly, what is mutual aid? Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other's needs. We fundamentally understand that the systems we have in place are not going to meet those needs, and the aim of mutual aid projects is to develop this point, is to set up alternative sources of that which your community is in need of, be it medical attention or housing or whatever else, accompanied by constant education, explaining why is it that their needs aren't being met in the first place.

The best example that comes to mind, at least for the United States and other Western countries, is that of the Black Panthers. A dedicated Marxist group, they saw the direct injustices being dealt to their own African-American communities, educated themselves with the relevant theory, and got to work developing a free children's breakfast program, community protection, free medical clinics and ambulance rides, aid to the elderly and infirm when they run errands, educational initiatives, and much more.

Notice, they not only provided what their communities needed and weren't being provided in the first place, but also were delivering a clear and scathing criticism of the capitalist system and the systemic racism in the US. To use an old Sufi adage, they not only fed the stomach, but the mind too. This process of educating those who benefited from the mutual aid projects of the Black Panthers instilled in those communities a drive for change, which is what made the Black Panthers so successful in the eyes of the working class, and so dangerous in the eyes of the ruling class.

On a side note, the police, being the radiantly positive organization that it is, broke into the church storing the food for the Black Panther free breakfast program and destroyed it, mostly by urinating and stepping on it, just in case you ever doubted whose side they're on. We need to make something abundantly clear: mutual aid is not charity.

In times of crisis, the ruling class pushes very safe, sanitized, and fairly ineffective organizations revolving around charity, in which the decisions on what is needed, how much, where, and to whom are completely disconnected from the people who are most affected by them. These institutions aren't intended to get at the root cause of whatever the issue is, be it poverty or homelessness or drug abuse or whatever else.

Instead, it's designed as a pretty PR game for the rich and influential to beautify themselves and their ever so generous philanthropy without ever even attempting to correct the issue at hand. It's symptomatic treatment, not a cure, and it's intended to make humane a system that is inherently inhumane.

At the most basic level, a social revolution requires the cooperation of multiple people. One potential form that cooperation can take is the affinity group. Affinity groups are small groups of anarchists who work together to spread anarchic ideas to the wider culture. Their work requires a combination of actions that both oppose and propose, particularly in the realm of education, where affinity groups must simultaneously expand people's consciousness of systems of oppression and demonstrate the possibilities of alternatives.

Additionally, affinity groups seek to develop the anarchic powers and capacities of people in mass movements, unions, and communities to engage in direct action and learn to manage their own affairs without hierarchy. Affinity groups may host workshops and skill shares where they can disseminate skills and build connections in their communities.

Within affinity groups, folks can fill different roles developing agitprop, which is the intentional promotion of ideas through literature, music, poetry, theater, film, illustration, social media, and other forms of political art. Never underestimate the potential ripple effects a small network of affinity groups can have on the broader zeitgeist.

Political action to oppose can generally be divided further into two major groups: acts of confrontation, which require less people but involve more risk, and acts of non-cooperation, which require more people but involve slightly less risk due to safety in numbers. Technically speaking, acts of non-cooperation could fall under acts of confrontation and vice versa, but don't get tied up.

They're imperfect categories. Let's begin with acts of confrontation. Protests are a very public form of sometimes indirect, sometimes direct political action that anarchists may utilize in order to raise awareness and keep the spirit of revolt alive and well. Protest, when executed correctly, is a sign that people are thinking and acting for themselves and against what authorities want them to do.

However, protesting is very risky. Even non-violent protests can be subject to severe violent retribution, either from counter-protesters or from the agents of the state. Organizers have been assassinated, gone missing, or even been imprisoned. Plus, protests don't usually have much control over their messaging, making them vulnerable to the highly developed propaganda machine of corporate media.

Alternative media organized by affinity groups can help spread the truth about protests, but they can't always compete. Still, political protest in the context of a broader social revolution is both powerful and necessary to resist oppression. Keep in mind that anarchists' engagement with protests is not based on a desire to lobby those in power for change.

The lobbying approach typically results in a highly hierarchical and disempowered movement where the masses below do the work and take on the risk while an elite minority of activists rub shoulders with politicians and lose touch with the cause. Lobbying requires compromise while anarchists recognize that the unyielding persistence of a radical movement can produce reforms without ever limiting themselves to reforms.

The Zapatistas were able to gain and maintain the land they now hold because a government, even a progressive government, does not give away some of its power unless it's scared of losing all of its power. Rather than expending time, resources and energy trying to convince or change a government, movements can focus on building up a real threat that can drive a hard bargain through direct forms of action Direct action means working to accomplish goals directly rather than relying on authorities or representatives as intercessors.

But crucially, direct action requires a security culture capable of protecting its perpetrators from the law. Again, I'm not advocating for anything illegal, just describing how a fictional anarchist social revolution works. A security culture is an instinctive set of customs developed and shared by a community whose members may be targeted by the government designed to minimize risk.

The central principle of security culture is that people should never be privy to any sensitive information they do not need to know. Don't ask, don't tell. Don't make it easy for your enemies. Don't let paranoia override your movements, and don't put yourself or others at unnecessary risk. Alongside support networks that can lend transportation and safe housing for those involved, much like the Underground Railroad, having a solid security culture is necessary for the usually very illegal actions that seek to directly confront and dismantle institutions of power.

Obstruction refers to any actions that movements may engage in that seek to delay or cease the operations of those in power by making it physically impossible for them to proceed with their intended actions. Using sheer numbers or shrewd strategies, this can range from a DDOS attack to highway blockades to eviction resistance to the disruption of mining, logging, construction, or drilling activities that are damaging the environment and endangering poor communities.

Another usually temporary tactic is occupation, where a collective may squat and hold critical infrastructure such as factories, transportation systems, school buildings, shopping centers, public squares, parks, and empty land or housing in order to force change and construct counter spaces where protesters may reimagine and transform infrastructure in a way that is conducive to public need rather than state or corporate interests.

If sustained and defended, occupation can eventually lead to reclamation, such as when the workers' occupations in Argentina during the 2001 economic crisis led to the creation of self-managed cooperatives. The Reclaim the Streets movement is another example of reclamation, where communities have invaded roads or highways to stage a party with free food and music, opening up the space we have lost to car-centric infrastructure.

Land and housing can be secured, cooperatives can be developed, streets can be pedestrianized, and the commons can be reclaimed through sustained and defended occupation. Expropriation is another example of direct action in the style of Robin Hood, liberating food, medicine, money, supplies, or equipment from the rich and distributing them to the people.

Historically, many affinity groups have engaged in bank robberies and other forms of theft in order to finance their revolutionary activities, propaganda, and bails from prison. New African anarchist Kwasi Balagoon was imprisoned for an attempted bank robbery in order to fund Black Liberation Army activities, and Lucio Ortubia was a Spanish anarchist known for his practice of expropriative anarchism.

However, sometimes revolutionaries seek sabotage and destruction instead of expropriation. Whether merely threatened or actually carried out, destruction of property during riots or other political activities has a long and proud history of success, from individual acts of sabotage during slavery to MK guerrillas' bombings of the communications, transit, and energy infrastructure that helped run the South African apartheid economy to Indigenous activists in Canada sabotaging efforts to start fracking near their land.

Lastly, there are acts of confrontation that involve violence against humans, which I must repeat that I do not support. Keep your violence fictional, people. This violence can be either offensive or defensive, organized by militias or undertaken by individuals, but ultimately it aims to make being a rapist, a fascist, an officer, capitalist, or a politician a very dangerous position to be in.

In a society where the power hungry already rule, during the process of social revolution, people will gain their freedom by overthrowing every existing and would-be authority and defending against those who seek to re-impose that authority through self-managed forms of self-defense, because the freedom anarchists seek does not include the freedom to oppress others.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

Front Burner

Hello Future Me

LegalKimchi

Sean Munger

Intelligence Squared

Democracy Now!

overzealots

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Then & Now

Haymarket Books Live

Andrewism

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Millennials Are Killing Capitalism

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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 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: 5–23-2026

Full Show Notes

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

Today we examine the real-world cost of dismantling America's public health infrastructure, the dangerous pseudoscience driving RFK Jr.'s health agenda, and the contradictions fracturing the MAHA movement from within.

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

The Rachel Maddow Show

All In with Chris Hayes

Scientific American

Today, Explained

Democracy Now!

The PBS NewsHour

and Brittany Page

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

Section A, The Damage Done

Section B, Ideology and the Misinformation Machine

Section C, Inside the MAHA Coalition

And Section D, How a Country Becomes "Underbabied"

And now, on to the

18 patients from that hantavirus-stricken cruise ship have been brought back to the United States now. What do you think the odds are that the Trump administration will contend with that risk in ways that are sane and organized and even vaguely scientific? This is the Trump administration that fired thousands of scientists from the CDC, scientists in particular who work on infectious diseases and all sorts of global health concerns.

Also, they fired the people who work specifically on the issue of viruses spreading on cruise ships. Yeah, what do we need those folks for? Get rid of them. It would usually be the CDC that would be the lead agency in the whole world on a crisis like this, but under Donald Trump, there's not even a CDC director right now.

Right now, they've got the CDC being run as a part-time job by the guy who is also part-time running the NIH. That is the guy who was most famous for his role in a declaration that said, "Let's try to maximize the number of Americans who get infected with COVID-19," because sure, COVID will go on to kill more than a million Americans in that pandemic, but do we really think that's bad?

Surely, we could have upped those numbers a little higher. That's who Trump has running the CDC, again, as a part-time job. Under Trump, the FDA is being run by a guy who, it was widely reported on Friday, is being fired from his job at the FDA. There's an incredulous headline tonight at politico.com saying basically, "Why is this guy still showing up at work?

Makary keeps working." Yeah. Isn't he fired? Didn't we all hear on Friday that he was getting fired? We don't know. We'll see. We do know that under his leadership, the FDA just approved fruit-flavored vapes because who among us does not wanna make America healthy again by starting a maximum number of middle school boys and girls on grape-flavored e-cigarette mega dose of nicotine bombs?

Maha. Under Donald Trump, the US government's health agencies are also leaning in on tanning beds for kids. Seriously, for kids, so your kid can have healthy-looking skin like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Start them early enough and they'll look like this in no time. Pass the vape. But don't worry, Trump has just nominated yet another person for surgeon general.

This'll be his third surgeon general nominee. Neither of the first two have panned out. the last one he nominated, turns out, didn't have a medical license. the one before that, said she was a graduate of the medical school of the University of Arkansas, but it turns out she was not at all a graduate of the University of Arkansas Medical School.

This latest one he's nominated, is a Fox News personality who sells tinctures on Instagram, and what she says are, quote, "Powerful physician-formulated aphrodisiacs." So clearly we're in good hands, or at least we're in hands of some kind. I... Don't make me think about it.

Two weeks ago, we brought you the news the CDC was delaying publication of a study showing the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine. Well, now they've outright canceled it. An HHS spokesperson said the report that was scheduled to be published five weeks ago is being withheld due to, quote, "concerns regarding the methodological approach."

That's despite the fact that the exact same methodology was used in a report about the flu vaccine published six weeks ago, and also in December for a report about the COVID vaccine's effectiveness for kids. The report had already cleared the CDC's scientific review process, but Kennedy's HHS still hit the brakes, something CDC officials say is highly unusual to do at that point.

It looks to all the world like HHS is doing exactly what we think they're doing, right? In the most egregious way possible. Censoring science because that science shows what we have all known, that vaccines work to reduce hospitalization and death. But Kennedy and his MAGA acolytes are committed to suppressing that science because they are in the clutches of an insane and crankish conspiracy theory that every day endangers Americans' health.

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis served as the head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC until he and two other senior colleagues resigned from CDC last fall to protest Kennie's pol- Kennedy's policies, and Dr. Daskalakis joins me now. Let me try to steel man this at least to start, which is there a non-sketchy reason or a non-nefarious reason for a report like this to be delayed and then withheld?

Simply put, no. This methodology is a methodology that, is recognized as the best way to measure vaccine effectiveness. As you just said, CDC has published through the MMWR, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vaccine effectiveness using the exact same methodology for flu and for COVID. So this is suppression of data.

Why do you think they're doing it? I think that there is a vendetta against mRNA vaccines and a- against COVID vaccines. If you think about some of the, testimony that we heard, this week, we heard that, from the secretary that mRNA vaccines don't work to prevent, respiratory infections, or their bad outcomes, and that's, blatantly untrue.

The mRNA vaccines, which is a, a new method of creating a vaccine that was developed, It really came to kind of fruition with COVID, but is now being r- researched in a bunch of other ways. There's big headlines this week about an mRNA vaccine on pancreatic cancer, making some really remarkable progress in what has been one of the most dire and incurable forms of cancer.

At the same time that... My understanding is that this HHS has essentially launched a war on mRNA research.

Yeah, they, they absolutely have, and if you actually look at what they did, they defunded mRNA research specifically in pandemic, influenza and other pandemic viruses, and instead invested in a flu influenza vaccine platform that, at best, has phase one study results, so very preliminary.

So, there is serving a base. There is a base of people, that, do n- that really have a vendetta against mRNA vaccine, and I think this is an attempt to appease that base. What- mRNA vaccines work, period. Yeah, what do you... I don't think I quite under- Do you understand the vendetta

I don't think I un- I do. Yeah, I, I, I feel like I was in the middle of that maelstrom when I was still at CDC and- Yes ... working with some of the ACIP members, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices members, who historically have said that the mRNA vaccines are responsible for all sorts of adverse events, and that they don't actually, impact anything, like the, the sort of rates of COVID hospitalization, et cetera.

So I think that there's a lot of reasons. Without mentioning names, there's one member of the ACIP who claims that he invented mRNA vaccines, and that is a, in, an untruth. So it's all sorts of crazy. And I think at the end of the day, you can't speak something into existence.

So just because Secretary Kennedy says mRNA vaccines doesn't work, don't work, that doesn't actually mean that they don't, especially when they're suppressing data that demonstrate that in fact they do. So- Right, and the fun- the- Ne- nefarious is the right

word. the fundamental issue here, is that of, there, there's always this tension between sort of the career folks, and the politicals, and an agenda of a president, and then you want, technical experts, right?

Never is that clearer than in, at CDC. And I thought, I want to just play today that, the secretary just won't commit to not overriding scientific advice, right? it, this is him being asked time and time again, and he won't commit to it. Take a listen

Will the new director, whoever she is, have the right to make decisions independently of those dir- of those political appointees and/or replace them, or otherwise reassign them so they cannot continue to actively undermine trust in immunizations?

Your characterization of the political appointees is wrong, and, the CDC director has that power.

Now, so she will have, if she wishes to, if she wishes to make a decision independently of them, she shall be allowed to make that decision independently. That's correct?

Yes. The, a begrudging yes to the new CDC director, who seems like a, we've talked about her, a well-credentialed individual.

But it doesn't seem in your experience or there's any much trust that they're, we're not gonna see more political manipulation.

Absolutely not. I think that is just, so much propaganda coming from the secretary trying to justify the fact that he has stacked the entire agency and HHS filled with people who are not just vaccine skeptics, but who are absolute anti-vaccine advocates.

Stuart Burns, is someone who is, in the office of the director, and as far as I can detect, the only reason that he is there is to really dismantle the vaccine work at CDC. So, the bottom line is, there are people that are assigned by the secretary as senior advisors and other staff that exist simply to destabilize trust in- Yeah

vaccines and the vaccine program. So, you can have a new CDC director, but, it doesn't matter how, you know- Yes, it does ... well-studied she is if at the end of the day she's not allowed to do her job.

There's been a lot of attention about Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., what he says and what he does, but you wrote a really fascinating article about what he believes. Why did you decide to do that? I

had been following RFK Jr.'s career before he became health secretary, so I was very familiar with the rhetoric that he uses in terms of his anti-vaccine advocacy.

Hearing his thoughts about vaccination and infectious diseases, and then drawing on his more environmental legal background, hearing his thoughts on, natural living and, pollution and toxins in the environment, things like that. And I think if you, drill down and get a broader perspective of where he's coming from in his long advocacy against vaccines, you see a more complete picture, and I think it really comes down to his rejection of germ theory.

So germ theory is this pretty basic idea that, germs are in the environment, bacteria, viruses, fungi, and they can cause diseases. And we take precautions to prevent them from causing diseases, including vaccines, but also antibiotics and sanitation. My understanding of his idea is that he understands that germs are real which is an important caveat to include because there are people who don't accept that germs are real.

He's been in the news for saying that he is not afraid of germs because he and he mentions that he, snorted cocaine off of a toilet seat.

And I said, "I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats."

He just feels that another theory supersedes germ theory. So germs exist, but we don't get sick because of them.

We get sick because there's some weakness in us. We have not been eating well. We don't live a healthy lifestyle. We have some genetic disposition that we can't control. Whatever it is, maintaining a healthy lifestyle should be f- the focus of disease prevention, whether it's an infectious disease or a chronic one.

It feels like he's tapping into something we all know intuitively, right? That if we don't treat ourselves well, we can pick up something that our immune system might have fought off. But he's taking that kind of nugget of truth and extending it to, if you're healthy enough, you won't get measles, and that's an incredible circular logic, but it's also a dangerous one because how do you learn that you're not healthy is by potentially getting a

life-threatening illness.

Right. A lot of the things that he says, they're dangerous because there's little kernels of truths that people can glom onto, and they think, "That makes sense to me, so I'm going to believe everything else he's saying." He discusses germs as if they're all opportunistic, and there are opportunistic pathogens, right?

There's germs that you just don't see unless you know that someone has, severe health condition. They're immunocompromised. But there is this, certainly these classes of pathogens that cause disease to live, and they don't care how well you eat. They don't care if you can do shirtless pull-ups in an airport or whatever.

So a lot of RFK Jr.'s theories feed more into another theory, not germ theory, but one called terrain theory, which is this idea that diseases are due to an imbalance in your internal terrain, the things that are supposed to go on in your body, your microbiome. There's a disturbance. A toxemia is what they like to call it.

That is the root of all disease. So it really places the blame of all illnesses on an individual, and, if you're born with, some condition that weakens your immune system for some reason, it just puts the blame on those individuals, which is just horrible. And then also when you enact policy based on this ideas, you're getting towards s- this idea that, there are people who are weak or sickly, and if we're going to have a healthy population, we don't need to vaccinate everybody.

And if you're not vaccinated and you can't handle the disease, then it's bad for you. I guess the logical extension of these ideas is really horrifying. It also seems like he's

tapping into this fixed identity of health as opposed to the idea that even health kind of exists within a spectrum,

you know?

Yeah, absolutely. Infectious disease transmission is complicated, right? Newborns don't have fully developed immune systems, and, then they're hit with a world full of new germs. And then of course, older people, they go through immunosenescence, so their immune responses decline with age, and that's why we see things like shingles, reactivation of the virus that causes chickenpox.

And so we get vaccinated for that. So there's a spectrum of health, and it's absolutely true that there's no amount of healthy living to ward off all diseases. And so I think one of the things that Kennedy does that is really deceptive is that he creates that sort of false dichotomy. It's, "We need to stop emphasizing drugs and vaccines and modern medicine generally.

We just need to focus on, getting rid of food dyes and making sure people aren't eating ultra-processed food." those are good things too, but it's not going to make vaccines or drugs less critical to keeping everybody as healthy as they can be.

You've stated that if you follow the path laid out by Kennedy's ideology, that it is very easy to end up in a place where your, the ideas that you're weighing are eugenics.

And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about, what eugenics is and how his ideas kind of relate to that.

Eugenics is the idea that you want to create a population of people that have superior genetics, superior health, fitness, which means anyone who doesn't fit that doesn't fit into that ideal population.

If you were to bring this concept up to Kennedy, I don't think he would say in any way that he would support it. But the things that he says, the ideas that he puts forward, and the policies he's generating really do f- lead to it, lead to trying to create a population that is superior, healthy, has the best, genetics.

One of the sort of background explanations he has when he gives speeches, he talks about, "When I was a kid, everyone was healthy and everyone ate, good food, and there wasn't so much cardiovascular disease." The idea that he lived in some magical time when people didn't get sick is wrong, but, it creates this vision of the past that we want to have in the future.

So I think he basically sets policies that allow for people to not get vaccinated, and with the idea that if they live a healthy lifestyle, they won't need that vaccine. And that means that people who, aren't living a healthy lifestyle and do get severely ill, they will have consequences. They will have maybe lasting effects of that infection, or they won't make it, and apparently that's an okay outcome.

But I think, a lot of the conversation is dominated by individual health, like choices for yourself, and that's not how infectious diseases work. It's a communal effort to not just protect ourselves individually, but to protect everyone around us, and that may include vulnerable people, and a person is vulnerable because of an immune condition or a genetic condition or they're pregnant.

So it just puts all of those vulnerabilities in one bucket and says that these aren't important, basically. I

had an anecdote, which is whenever he talks about, growing up and everyone being incredibly healthy, I have a buddy who's in his early 80s, and he grew up in Iowa, and one of the first things I remember him telling me was he remembers as a child that sometimes kids would just die.

And I was like, "That was not my childhood experience."

Yeah. I think that it comes up a lot in anti-vaccine groups. They'll shrug off the measles or polio by saying, "Oh, it's not very frequent." So that's what we've gotten- To a point with the progress we've made with vaccines, because in the past that absolutely wasn't the case.

We don't see children dying of measles or getting paralyzed by polio because we have these successful vaccines that have protected m- millions of children. if we saw that every day then, they would be doing what our grandparents did, which was line up for the vaccine as soon as they could.

President Trump issued the executive order on February 18th, promoting the national defense by ensuring an adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides In short, we need to be making more glyphosate in the US. Glyphosate is a pesticide, and making it here is a national security issue, per Trump, because we need it for our food supply.

Glyphosate is particularly hated by those in the MAHA movement. Glyphosate can cross the blood-testes barrier and end up in semen. Oh. Weed killer could be in your baby gravy right now.

Oatmeal is heavily sprayed with glyphosate these days, and it's also being found in our rain and our drinking water.

Lisa Held, reporter at Civil Eats. The MAHA response came fast and furious, and it was mostly trained on RFK Jr., in part because he's their man in Washington, and in part because he's got a long history with pesticides, yeah?

Yeah. He was an environmental lawyer for a long time and, even worked for the NRDC, for instance, a really big environmental organization in this country.

he was part of a team of lawyers who brought the first big case against Monsanto, the company that makes glyphosate.

They knew it was getting into our water, into our air, into our food, onto our landscapes where our children play, a- and yet they were telling people that it was safe as table salt at a time when they knew that it could cause cancer.

That was on behalf of an individual who said that using, glyphosate had caused his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. and they won. It was the first case, that they won.

A California jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million in damages to Dewayne Lee Johnson. He- Finding the company failed to warn Johnson and other consumers of the cancer risk.

Americans should be encouraged by the verdict because it, it's a, it's an emblem that corporations are still subject to our democracy and to our system of justice in this country.

And then, he also had an organization that he ran for a long time called Children's Health Defense, and they do a lot of work on policy and advocacy on reducing pesticide use and pesticide exposures.

All right, so in the past, RFK has been critical of pesticides like glyphosate. Now we see him changing his position.

I support President Trump's executive order to bring agricultural chemical production back to the United States and to end our near total reliance on adversarial nations. His executive order protects two pillars of our national strength, our defense readiness and our food supply.

Possibly the most interesting thing about RFK is his coalition, his MAHA coalition. How does the MAHA coalition react when they see him responding to President Trump on glyphosate?

When this executive order was first released, there was a group within the MAHA coalition that they were very angry.

There's a few kind of prominent MAHA supporters like Kelly Ryerson and Vani Hari who have been speaking out about the executive order and really saying that it goes against the principles of MAHA.

We shouldn't have to beg, hope, or pray for food and water that isn't poisoned. This country clearly has the money, so deliver it now.

It costs the government zero dollars to tell the truth about glyphosate. Tell the people the truth about glyphosate, just like artificial dyes, and watch the market fix itself.

They're angry, but they're also Over time, s- it seems that they are trusting, Secretary Kennedy's response, where he's saying, "Look, we're still working on this, but we need to do...

this executive order in the meantime is necessary."

The Pentagon and others said this is an extreme national security vulnerability, that China controls the US food system. And we can't afford to let that happen, but we all know we've got to transition off of glyphosate.

And I think, the interesting thing with the MAHA Coalition at this moment in time is this executive order is coming at a moment when glyphosate is already a really big issue for them.

So- Hmm ... there's a, a Supreme Court case that's gonna, be heard on April 27th that, would give companies like Bayer immunity from future lawsuits, related to cancer and other health risks, and they care a lot about that. And so they're already, angry that the Trump administration is siding with Bayer in that Supreme Court case.

there's a- another, liability shield that is in a draft of the farm bill right now, which they're also fighting. So I think it's kind of part of this bigger picture, where, pesticide use and pesticide exposure is emerging as the most kind of contentious issue when it comes to the MAHA Coalition and their relationship to the Trump administration.

Within the MAHA Coalition, there is a group of women called the, that are sometimes called the MAHA Moms. Right. These are people who care a lot about what is going into our bodies. They care a lot about health, and often they will say they care because they are concerned about their children.

my understanding is that the MAHA Moms in particular were upset about this executive order, and they saw Kennedy's response as a betrayal. Could you talk about this subgroup of women and how you saw them responding?

Yeah. I did tune in to a meeting of, one of the groups that, makes up this MAHA Moms coalition- Ah

called Moms Across America, about a week ago. And what I heard was that they're definitely upset, and they care a lot about this, and they're not happy about the executive order. They're not happy about really anything that's happening when it comes to, pesticide policy within the Trump administration right now.

Hmm. But they're not- Kind of abandoning the administration in a wholehearted way because they still really trust Secretary Kennedy. And, there's this kind of thinking around, we can't ditch the administration over this because over here at HHS, Kennedy is doing things that we really care about and we really believe in, and we think that what we see as this progress over here is valuable that we're gonna stand by him.

And, there's this kind of understanding within those groups, like among the MAHA moms, that Kennedy has to fight for these things within the administration itself. But they aren't abandoning the administration altogether, and I think that's really because this whole coalition came together around Kennedy, and they just really care about him and trust him.

I wonder about the MAHA moms and their level of organization and their level of political influence. Do they hold a lot of power in the MAHA movement, and do conservatives look at them and say, "Okay, this group might be small, but it is mighty, and we need to not lose them"?

Definitely. I think they- have real power in this moment, and I think the best example of that is, how the EPA has been responding to their criticism. So over the last few months, before this executive order, in response to all different decisions the EPA made to approve new pesticides or reapprove pesticides that they were concerned about, like dicamba, the EPA has actually invited members of this movement, MAHA moms, into the agency to talk to them.

They have, even when putting out press releases that seem to go directly against the MAHA agenda, they have tried to message that it is r- aligned with MAHA in some way. They're trying really hard to, appease and speak to and court the MAHA moms. and the fact that, the agency really feels that's necessary seems to signal that, that they see them as having real power.

If you can start off by talking about, Ebola and the significance of the announcement by the World Health Organization.

For sure. Well, I've been saying that we learned too much too quickly to be anything but remarkably concerned.

As you noted in the intro, this was first declared on Friday, and already by Saturday, the World Health Organization had declared this a public health emergency of international concern. Never has, something been done so quickly, and that's because the number of cases that were reported when this was first declared would make it already the fourth-largest Ebola outbreak in history.

This has likely been circulating for much longer than is being reported, maybe one, two, three months, and I wouldn't be surprised if the actual case numbers are dramatically higher than what we've seen so far. I think in the coming days and weeks we're gonna learn a lot more, what cases actually look like, where they're at, but as has been pointed out, this is an incredibly difficult region to work in.

I've worked in Eastern Congo a bunch of times. I've responded to Ebola. This is gonna be a really difficult outbreak to manage and respond to even under ideal circumstances, and Eastern Congo particularly, given the violence and conflict, is anything but ideal.

Can you describe what happened to you and your particular concern about public health professionals dealing with this, and what you think needs to be done?

Ebola is a disease of compassion in that the folks that are most likely to be infected are people that take care, provide close care for people who are sick, for patients who have diarrhea and for vomiting. think about family members, think about mothers taking care of their children, as well as healthcare workers taking care of patients.

If you have the right protections, gloves and masks, and everything that you need to stay safe, the likelihood of transma- transmission is actually quite low, but most folks taking care of family members as well as most healthcare professionals in this part of Congo don't have access to the same things we may have access to here, including gloves, good personal protective equipment, and sometimes even running water.

That makes the risk really high, particularly for healthcare professionals in a place where there's already not enough of those healthcare workers, and where over the last year we've seen dramatic cuts in the supplies and support going to many of these clinics and health facilities in Eastern Congo

I wanted to turn to Nicholas Enrich, a former civil servant who worked at USAID, the Agency for International Development, through four administrations, serving as, director of policy, programs, and planning in the Bureau of Global Health until January of last year.

On March 2nd, 2025, he was placed on administrative leave for exposing the Trump administration's illegitimate and dangerous dismantling of the agency. He's written a book called Into the Wood Chipper: Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID. This is Nicholas Enrich speaking to Democracy Now in April.

There was an outbreak of Ebola happening in Uganda at the time that USAID was being dismantled, and while I knew we couldn't start a rebu- robust, outbreak response that we usually have because of everything that was being dismantled, there were a few key activities that I really felt that we needed to do, and they would not even let us screen passengers at airports that were traveling on international flights onwards to the United States to make sure that they had Ebola, th- sorry, that they did not have symptoms of Ebola.

So that was a real risk to US national security, and it was just laughed off and ignored, by the political appointees and DOGE.

So Dr. Craig Spencer, if you can talk about this, do you think these cuts have exacerbated this crisis, and about the significance of it being in cities and conflict areas?

Absolutely. Look, Nicholas is fully correct. If you recall, it was just over a year ago that Elon Musk gleefully declared that they were throwing USAID into the wood chipper, and you may recall that Elon Musk also sheepishly said at his first cabinet meeting that he mistakenly, canceled Ebola prevention, but turned it back on.

For many folks, the story ended there, but what actually happened was there was an Ebola outbreak, and DOGE and Elon Musk cut all the support that we normally would have been giving to respond to that Ebola outbreak. The result was that exactly USAID, who in the past would have been supporting things like airport screening in Uganda, was not providing that logistical or financial support.

USAID and other partners would have been providing support to make sure testing was adequate, to make sure a vaccine rollout could have taken place. But we didn't have USAID on the ground. Similarly, CDC has long had relationships in this part of the continent, in Congo and in Uganda, and a lot of those relationships have broken down and withered over the past year because we just haven't been paying.

Similarly, the US has pulled out of the World Health Organization over the last year, which means that in normal circumstances, our CDC folks are not able to even talk to World Health Organization people, something that is absolutely Unbelievable and an incredible, mistake for something that we should be able to do and be prepared for at all points.

And the result is what we've seen over the past couple weeks with hantavirus, we've seen with the dramatic increase in number of measles cases in the US, and now Ebola in DR Congo and across the border in Kampala. This is not all just a coincidence. This is a consequence of us cutting back our support, not only here at home, but also abroad.

If you could talk about your piece in Stat, The Hantavirus is a Wake-Up Call. Will the Trump Administration Answer It?

Yeah, so a year ago I wrote a piece for The Atlantic, saying that we were gonna regret this. We were gonna regret the cuts to CDC, we were gonna regret the abdication of leadership on the global stage, pulling out of the WHO, and dismantling USAID. And I think that right now we're seeing the end result of all of that, and we're starting to see the worst case scenario.

in normal times, we would have had people on the ground, organizations on the ground that the US helps support. There are a lot of NGOs that have worked in Eastern Congo for a long time that do things like provide infection prevention and control training, that make sure clinics have personal protective equipment.

We're seeing what happens when those things unfortunately aren't in place. Similarly, we saw over the past couple weeks with the hantavirus response, the US was not at the forefront. It was not helping lead response, but was f- found itself pretty flat-footed. I was saying that, normally we would be two steps ahead, but we found ourselves two weeks behind.

Similar here with the Ebola outbreak, the CDC reported yesterday on a press call that it learned about the outbreak the same time the rest of the world did, which is horrible given the fact that we used to have very close, collaborative, and trusted relationships in the DR Congo and in Uganda. But again, over the past year, a lot of that work, a lot of that trust, and a lot of that collaboration has broken down.

Siddiqui Kamara's mornings are often filled with fist bumps and high fives.

So what's the plan for today?

He's the president of Bright Center, a day program for special needs adults in Manassas, Virginia.

So this is our main sanctuary. This is where, we do a lot of our activities.

Five days a week, the center provides education and a host of activities for participants, like exercise class, arts and crafts, and meditation.

In 2014, Kamara started the center with his wife, Naomi, who was born with sickle cell anemia. At the time, she told him she'd always dreamed of creating a center like this.

So when she came to me with that idea, at first I was like, "Why do you wanna do that?" but then, when, after her explaining that to me, it's her passion.

She wants to help. She wants to give back to the community. She wants to make a difference.

Kamara says by 2021 he was working three jobs to help that vision become a reality, and Bright Center moved to a larger building so they could help more special needs adults. But then his wife's condition took a turn for the worse.

June 3rd was like the worst day of my life, the worst phone call of my life. I, even to this day, I can picture it.

His wife's doctor had called to tell him that she had died unexpectedly while in the hospital, leaving Kamara with two young children.

I wasn't even able to function for at least a month and a half, 'cause I didn't even know what to do because it's she was everything , And I'm I can't do it without her. You got 10 plus eight minus five. What is that?

But today, more than four years later- Oh, I was giving you- ... Kamara says he is still committed to keeping his late wife's dream alive for people like Imani Bush, who has an intellectual disability.

What kinds of things do you do when you're here?

What kinds of things? Well, I like to color I like to do meditation. I like to sleep during meditation. I like to watch movies and I like to just hang out with all my friends.

In 2020, Bright Center was serving nearly 30 special needs adults. But once the pandemic hit and forced Kamara to close for about four months-

Good job, Francisco

he says it's been a steady decline in enrollment. Today, just 14 individuals regularly attend. All of them pay with Virginia Medicaid waivers, which allow for care outside of institutions. And while the bulk of the cuts to Medicaid aren't expected to kick in until next year, states which administer the federal funds are bracing to lose more than $900 billion over the next decade.

This is the single biggest rollback in federal support for healthcare that we've ever seen, and people with disabilities are much more likely to rely on programs like Medicaid than people without disabilities. Even though the bill did not directly cut their services, it's highly unlikely that there won't be some effects.

Alice Burns studies Medicaid and the uninsured for KFF, an independent health research group. She says Virginia is expected to lose nearly 20% of its federal Medicaid funding by 2034, and that day programs like Bright Center could be especially vulnerable. With this

level of a funding cut, states are gonna have to make some tough choices about how to deal with the loss of federal funds, and we know that home and community care for people with disabilities is a significant source of Medicaid funding, and almost all the services are optional for states to cover.

There's no cuts to Medicaid. There are simply restrictions of the growth of Medicaid over the next decade. The

Trump administration has repeatedly said there would be no cuts to Medicaid, and that it's committed to rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in the program. The Department of Health and Human Services also provided the News Hour with this statement, which reads in part, "The One Big Beautiful Bill removes," quote, "illegal immigrants from eligibility, implements work requirements for able-bodied adults, and safeguards Medicaid for the vulnerable populations it was created to serve: pregnant women, children, low-income seniors, people with disabilities, and struggling families."

But Lori Sill is worried about what those changes will mean for her 28-year-old son, Nicholas.

Quite frankly, Nicholas, he's a wonderful kid. He really is. But he needs some support in just about everything he does.

As a young boy, Nicholas was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and then autism. He's been coming to Bright Center since 2019.

He's

here with people his own age.

He's here with people that he is involved with. He's got staff that cares for him, and he loves the staff here. So it's, it's a place that I know that he's comfortable coming to, and that I'm comfortable bringing him to every day. So, it means a lot to me. Can you scoot over a

little bit more?

Sill says Bright Center is the only nearby day program that accepts the Virginia Medicaid waiver she relies on to pay for these services. And without the center, she'd be forced, she says, to shoulder even more of her son's round-the-clock care. He is never left alone. He,

likes to go into the kitchen and he'll press buttons.

He'll go to the stove. I don't, in general, have babysitters. I don't have any family in the area, so I really don't have any other care for him but me right now. It's

a common story for parents at Bright Center, says Siddiqui Kamara.

once they graduated from high school, it's like the state just washes their hands.

it's like you're on your own now. So that's where we come in.

Virginia's Medicaid program currently reimburses Bright Center $69 per student per day. But Kamara says that's barely enough to keep going. And while he's already relying on donations and his own savings to stay open, it's what could come next that worries him most.

We're at a moment now where the federal government is- Yes ... making some changes. Right. How is that affecting what your outlook is?

It will affect a lot of the families, and it would affect us as a facility because then we may end up losing the small student that we have now.

For parents like Lori Sill,, she's already feeling the impact of budget cuts.

She says last fall, the state reduced the number of hours she'll be reimbursed as her son's primary caregiver going forward. I'm sure there is

some waste, fraud, and abuse. I'm sure there is throughout the system, but every case is not waste, fraud, and abuse. Some individuals really need the care and, quite frankly, that's my son that, that really does need the care.

RFK Jr. is a eugenicist and is the most dangerous member of Donald Trump's cabinet, and every time he steps before Congress to provide his testimony, he proves it. Just like he did again yesterday when he said this It

has nothing to do with me. It has to do that we have a global epidemic. And if you're asking why people stopped vaccinating, it's because the government lied to them during COVID.

That's when the vaccinations rates dropped, because of me. And if you're worried about polio and tuberculosis, you should look at the immigration policies of this country, 'cause the place where it's occurring are the place where the immigrants are going, 'cause they're not vaccinated, and they got tuberculosis.

the, a

lot of... We'll get to the full moment there in a moment, but first, when RFK is asked about the rising measles cases and his role in ensuring measles outbreaks continue by leaning into vaccine conspiracy theories about the government lying to you or, vaccines being dangerous, and then he makes a turn and starts blaming immigration for disease, you need to see that for what it is: eugenics.

And when he starts telling us about the administration's plans to lower healthcare prices by cleaning up the risk pool and kicking people off Medicaid, AKA lower income people with greater health problems, that is also eugenics

And then cleaning up the risk pool, cleaning up people who don't belong on Medicaid, or Medicare, or in the exchanges.

w- when you do that, you improve the risk pool, so that's gonna lower prices. And all of those things, and many others, are being done by this administration.

You hear that, everybody? The Trump administration is going to save money on healthcare by kicking people who are too costly to care for off of their insurance, making healthcare inaccessible.

Why would he care, though, when he believes the strongest will survive, the survival of the fittest, when he believes whether someone lives or dies in the face of a measles infection is due to their diet and exercise routine? Literally. RFK says, "Don't blame me for disease and low vaccination rates, even though I'm opposed to vaccine mandates and constantly fear-monger about vaccines.

Look at the immigrants and the immigration policies of this country." You know what? I think RFK would've liked this quote that I found about Jewish people from 1930. "For hundreds of years, Germany was good enough to receive these elements, although they possessed nothing except infectious political and physical disease."

And we all know who said that, right? Oh, but you can't say his name because- When you say Hitler, people tell you you're being hyperbolic, too far-reaching. or do they even still say that anymore? After telling people that it was wrong to use the word fascism, those types, do they still say that?

Do they still warn about making comparisons or observations that are objectively true because they're uncomfortable? As we see, headline after headline and news alert after news alert about measles cases, the only solution here is vaccination, increasing vaccination rates. And yet, we have a Secretary of Health and Human Services who wants to see more kids die by leaning into and promoting from the most prominent microphone that the government lied to you about vaccines.

sometimes I just sit here and think about where we are, and I'm stunned into silence. But we have to keep pushing because while he is screaming conspiracy, he is now part of the same government that is suppressing scientific information, like a new study, which the CDC is apparently not going to publish because it showed that the COVID vaccine reduced hospitalizations and visits to the emergency rooms among healthy adults by about half.

And we can't have the people read this study now that we have a government run by conspiracy theorists who believe your health is unimportant. So let's revisit that initial clip here with RFK reacting to a question from Representative Debbie Dingell, where RFK wants to focus on measles, but then pivots because that quickly gets uncomfortable, and delivers a word salad of conspiracy instead.

And then I want to tell you about a child named Renee.

What was the question?

Do you believe that the US should remain a global leader in health research? Yes or no.

Can I answer some of the misstatements you made about measles?

You, uh,

I did ... my time is short. Just to clarify. But it's a

documented fact, the US said it was eliminated in 2000.

Well,

we eliminated it, Europe eliminated it, Canada... And now guess what? Canada has been, lost its elimination status. England has lost its elimination status. All across Europe, they've lost their elimination status. It has nothing to do with me. It has to do that we have a global epidemic. And if you're asking why people stopped vaccinating, it's because the government lied to them during COVID.

That's when the vaccinations rates dropped, not because of me. And if you're worried about polio and tuberculosis, you should look at the immigration policies of this country, 'cause the place where it's occurring are the place where the immigrants are going, 'cause they're not vaccinated. And they got to tuberculosis A lot

of people have stopped getting vaccines, and I can't go...

I, I can't agree with you on that, but

It is true that the measles was considered eliminated in the United States in the year 2000, and that we are now preparing to lose our elimination status, and we are losing that elimination status because people are not getting vaccinated, because people like RFK Jr.

continue to promote dangerous vaccine conspiracy theories that threaten all of our lives. We need to maintain a vaccination rate of 95% to ensure containment, to prevent spread, to maintain herd immunity. And according to KFF, we're now in a situation where only 10 states have vaccination levels at or above 95%.

That is as of 2024 to 2025. And as we all know, because we live here, every day we get the news alerts about new cases in our area, or we see headlines about the exploding crisis, and part of this is just how contagious measles is. It can stay in the air for two hours after an infected person leaves the room.

It's horrifying, particularly in an era when people's number one hobby is coughing directly into the air at airports, but also when RFK is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. But I wanna talk about Renee. I read about Renee in The New York Times, and I sobbed, literally sobbed reading this story.

What I say about this story will not do it justice, so y- you must read it yourself, and I will put a gift link in the description so that you can read it and share it. But to summarize briefly, Renee was five months old when she was too young to be vaccinated for measles, and she ended up sick with measles.

Her mom doesn't know where she got measles, but there was an outbreak in England where they lived at the time. And as we've already discussed, it's highly contagious. It can live in the air for up to two hours after an infected person leaves the room. So Renee survived then, and the family was hopeful that would be the end of it.

But later in her childhood, she started exhibiting signs that something was wrong. And just nine days before her 11th birthday, she died of a rare complication as a result of that measles infection when she was five months old, before she could be vaccinated, when she was relying on other people to be vaccinated to protect her.

Her mother, Rebecca Archer, told Renee's story so beautifully that, again, you must read it. But I wanna quote a few passages from it here, because Rebecca wants to use Renee's memory to protect children from this fate, and I think it's really important that we help her do this In the United States, where schoolchildren are required to be vaccinated against measles, the national vaccination rate is 92%.

Many states also allow for exemptions to vaccine requirements, and as a result, US vaccination rates are uneven. Last year, the United States saw its highest rate of measles cases in more than three decades, and the country may soon lose its measles elimination status as well. Despite this, Health Secretary Robert F.

Kennedy Jr. said he doesn't think the government should be mandating vaccines, and that they should be a matter of personal choice. Parents must realize that refusing vaccinations doesn't just put your own child at risk, it puts other children at risk. I don't know where Renee picked up measles. It's one of the most contagious viruses that exists, and it could've been from anywhere.

That's why herd immunity is so important. If there hadn't been an outbreak when Renee was a baby, I don't think she would have contracted it. She was eligible for the vaccine just seven months later, and I gave it to her, but it was too late. For a long time after Renee died, I couldn't really believe she wasn't coming back.

It's only been in these past several months that it's really started to sink in. I have days that I don't want to see anyone, but I try to stay strong for everyone else, including my children, who are now eight, five, and two. The youngest, who was born less than two weeks before Renee's death, has glasses just like her older sister, and many of her mannerisms.

It's hard to tell Renee's story, but I can hear her saying, "Go on, Mom." It's the only thing I can do.

We've just heard clips starting with

The Rachel Maddow Show detailing how Trump's health agencies are in freefall, with no CDC director, an FDA chief reportedly already fired, and a Surgeon General nominee who is a Fox News personality selling Instagram tinctures.

All In with Chris Hayes spoke with a former CDC official who called HHS's cancellation of a COVID vaccine effectiveness study outright suppression driven by a vendetta against mRNA vaccines.

Scientific American traced RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine stance to his rejection of germ theory, explaining how his "terrain theory" beliefs lead logically toward eugenics by blaming illness on individual weakness.

Today, Explained walked through the growing tension between the MAHA Moms and the Trump administration over glyphosate, showing they're upset enough to push back, but too invested in RFK Jr. to walk away

Democracy Now! featured Dr. Craig Spencer connecting the World Health Organization’s rapid emergency declaration over the Congo Ebola outbreak to a year of USAID cuts, CDC relationship breakdowns, and U.S. withdrawal from the WHO.

The PBS NewsHour profiled Bright Center, a Virginia Medicaid-funded day program for adults with disabilities, showing how proposed Medicaid cuts of $900 billion could force facilities like it to close.

And Brittany Page broke down RFK Jr.'s congressional testimony as a eugenics roadmap, from blaming unvaccinated immigrants for polio and tuberculosis to cutting "costly" people from Medicaid to lower healthcare prices.

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

But first, speaking of unintended consequences of immoral policies, I’m just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! that we had to put on indefinite hiatus due to sudden economic instability and ad dollars drying up. Right now, I am getting back to basics and focusing on building Best of the Left to be the best it can be with the greatest reach it can. So, that’s where my focus is going to be and I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops.

To our members supporting the show, you really are more and more of what’s getting us through right now so thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations. If you support us right now, our top priority is stabilizing the finances of the show to ensure that everyone is getting paid for the work they’re doing. Secondly, we have to invest in some growth strategies because our podcast doesn't benefit from the same algorithmic recommendation engine features that most other shows do. That's just part of the nature of our format so we need to get creative and also be willing to spend some cold hard cash to introduce ourselves to potential new listeners.

So, if you haven’t signed up yet but are thinking about it, each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor so it’s not particularly cheap to produce and essentially every dollar we can spare right now beyond basic costs will be going toward finding new listeners which would be good for us and for them, not to mention the world in general.

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or you can simply email me to [email protected]

As for today's topic,

Two children have died of measles in Texas this year. They were the first US measles deaths in nearly a decade. I’m sure you've already heard about them because those deaths are the most direct cost we have already paid for the way this administration is approaching public health.

There are basically two principles that produce good public health outcomes, and the current administration is moving in the opposite direction on both.

The first principle is that public health works when it follows the science. Vaccinations work because we ran the studies and proved they work. Disease surveillance works because we built the infrastructure to track outbreaks before they become epidemics. Recommendations work because we trust independent committees of experts to weigh the evidence and tell us what they found. None of that is ideological. It's how the modern world stopped having polio epidemics and smallpox outbreaks. It works because it's based on evidence.

What the current administration is doing is dismantling the institutional capacity to do science. RFK Jr. gutted the CDC's vaccine advisory committee in June 2025 and replaced them, at least in part, with vaccine deniers. The new committee has pulled six vaccines off the standard childhood recommendation list. HHS's own announcement from March 2025 said the entire department is having roughly a quarter of the workforce cut. The October 2025 layoffs at the CDC wiped out the entire director's office of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and cut the team that publishes the CDC's flagship epidemiology journal. Bloomberg reported in November 2025 that all in, about a third of the CDC's civil service workforce is now gone.

This is the deliberate destruction of the country's capacity to know what's happening and respond to it. It's the same as when NOAA got hit with cuts deep enough that former National Weather Service directors warned in an open letter of, quote, 'needless loss of life' going into hurricane season. The administration is systematically taking apart the instruments that tell us when something is coming on every front.

The second principle is that public health works best when systems are integrated and universal. When everyone is in the same system, when prevention and primary care and specialty care and long-term care all talk to each other, when nobody falls through the cracks because they lost a job or moved between insurance plans, you get better health outcomes for less money. This isn't theoretical, US life expectancy in 2024 was about 79 years, 4 years shorter than the average across peer countries like Germany, France, the UK, Sweden, and Norway where people are expected to live to about 83 years. They live several years longer than we do and we spend about twice as much as they do; nearly $15,000 per person for us vs. around 7 1/2 thousand for the Europeans. In short, the countries with integrated universal systems are getting better health outcomes for half the money.

What's happening here is the opposite of integration. We had a fragmented healthcare system to begin with. Now the administration is fracturing it further, into one track that follows the science and another, the MAHA track, that doesn't. Two parallel realities about whether vaccines work, whether outbreaks need a coordinated response, whether children should be protected from preventable diseases. Diseases don't actually care which track you're on. So the MAHA track is going to produce more sick people and more outbreaks, and the rest of us will absorb the consequences too.

But that’s the macro picture. Public health failure doesn’t hit everyone equally, it hits hardest where protection is thinnest. That's rural America, which has shorter life expectancies, fewer hospitals, and more dependence on federal programs like Medicaid. It's also Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities with long-standing disparities in care, immigrant communities that often avoid the system because of legal fear, and the working poor in general.

When it comes to any kind of policy or infrastructure, demolition is fast and building is slow, and that is the basic structural problem of American politics right now: the right is organized to tear stuff down, the left and center-left are trying to build, and the asymmetry favors the side that's organized for destruction.

So the response to this destruction of our health system has to be two things at once. In the short term, the defense is happening at the state level. Massachusetts and the West Coast states have already formed vaccine accords to issue their own guidance separate from the CDC. State public health departments are picking up federal work. Local health workers, doctors, pharmacists, and school nurses are absorbing the strain. That work needs funding and political support, including against state legislatures that want to gut their own vaccine requirements.

In the medium term, the political window will eventually shift. And when it does, we cannot afford to slowly rebuild what we had, because what we had was already underperforming Germany and France and the Nordic states. The rebuilding target should be what those countries built decades ago: integrated, universal, cradle-to-grave health systems. We need an organized political demand, drafted and ready to go now, for a massive science-based rebuilding project with the urgency and ambition to match the need. So push your representatives now to protect what's still standing, and start asking every Democratic politician and progressive organization if they support the universal health care it is so painfully obvious that we need.

Two kids in Texas should have made it to adulthood. They didn't, because their parents trusted a movement that told them measles wasn't serious, a movement now running the federal health apparatus. What we do in the next few years will determine how much damage will be done, how quickly we can rebuild when we get the chance, and how many more people end up dying needlessly as a result of this administration and the anti-science movement they’re beholden to.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up; Section A, The Damage Done

Followed by Section B, Ideology and the Misinformation Machine

Section C, Inside the MAHA Coalition

And Section D, How a Country Becomes

Dr. Havers, if you can start off, by talking about hepatitis. Talk about what's at stake and what exactly RFK Jr. has done.

Sure. so for the last 30 years, the US has recommended that every newborn be vaccinated against hepatitis at birth, and this is because you can, infants can acquire hepatitis if their mother is infected with hepatitis B at birth or by caregivers in, during their infancy or childhood.

If you're infected with hepatitis B, a- as a child or an infant, you have a 90 per- more than a 90% chance of developing a lifelong incurable infection that can lead to liver failure, cirrhosis or liver cancer, and potentially death. And i- since the early '90s, every infant has been recommended to receive this at birth.

And this is targeted at mothers who are, f- infants that were born to mothers who are infected. But in the United States, when they only recommended that infants who were born to mothers who were known to have infection, were vaccinated, we, there were many infants that were missed. Also, infants can be infected by caregivers later on.

So what they voted last week was to remove that recommendation, a recommendation that's been responsible for essentially eliminating hepatitis B in children in the United States. And this was the first major policy change that this advisory committee on immunization practices has the first major change is likely to have major public health implications for US children since RFK Jr.

fired the entire committee in June and replaced it with a number of people who have anti-vaccine, stances.

And Dr. Havers, these are all the CDC's... doesn't mandate vaccination. It only rec- uh, has recommendations. Can you talk about the misinformation that's often spread by vaccine skeptics who claim there's a federal vacci- a federal vaccine mandate for children?

Yeah, so these are all just recommendations, and it's supposed to be an evidence-based, science-based recommendation. And historically, there was a, a very sort of rigid, strict framework where it was... the evidence was very carefully reviewed, risks and benefits were weighed, and then a recommendation was made.

But for all of these vaccines, parents will have conversations with their provider. They can talk about the risks and the benefits, and informed consent is given. This is not... There's no sense in which any of the recommendations coming from this advisory body or from the CDC are mandates. and so this change is just basically casting doubt on what was a, on a, on the universal hepatitis B vaccine recommendation, casting doubts on its safety, on how well it works and how important it is.

And I think that what we're gonna see is parents are gonna be confused. we're gonna see probably fewer babies being vaccinated at birth, and we're gonna see potentially tragic outcomes, which we may not know about for, a decade or two because often babies are, who have hepatitis B are asymptomatic for years until they show up with advanced liver failure when they're, teenagers or in their 20s or later in life.

So I think that this has potential for real tragic implications. But again, this administration keeps talking about vaccine mandates and informed consent, but parents always have a choice about whether or not to vaccinate their child. And we know that parents wanna do the right thing, but this administration is causing a lot of confusion, and is using basically the CDC to spread misinformation now about vaccines.

could you talk also about the, the measles outbreak? the CDC is acknowledging, as many as 1,800 cases of measles across the United States just this year, a, uh, an illness that's supposed to have been eliminated.

Yeah, no, measles has been raging in the United States for the last 12 months.

We have multiple outbreaks going on in, in several states. And the... we've had more cases this year than, in, in a very long time. If... Measles was officially eliminated in the United States in the early 2000s, but if this vacc- if this, these outbreaks are not under control by the end of January, the United States will officially lose its measles elimination status per the WHO.

And this is a huge embarrassment. It's, it's an embarrassment for this administration that they're unable to control, A disease that we've had an effective vaccine for, for decades that was essentially eliminated. But this is a direct result of the decades of misinformation that RFK Jr.

and the anti-vaccine movement have been spreading about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. In addition, I think CDC and other public health agencies, have been hamstrung by this administration. I think the resources haven't been mobilized to address the measles outbreaks, coming out with very strong messaging about vaccine, vaccines being the most effective way of preventing measles from spreading, and the importance of vaccines.

I think, basically this administration has failed to respond appropriately to this measles outbreak, a- all of these measles outbreaks, and have failed to get them under control.

And can you respond to this latest news today that the FDA is weighing a black box warning on COVID vaccines, which is reserved for, vaccines that...

or any drug that causes death? What exactly does this mean? you have studies showing that the COVID vaccine saved, what, something like 20 million deaths around the world. Has this alarmed you today?

it's very alarming. I think this administration, particularly RFK Jr., has come out very hard against, COVID vaccines since the st- since they were first rolled out during the pandemic.

They have saved millions of lives, but this administration is solely focused on possible safety concerns. They, I think they, they also have said that they have linked COVID vaccines to pediatric deaths and we do know that in serious adverse events can occur with vaccines. it, one in a million vaccines.

I don't know what the actual rates are, but, serious adverse events can occur with vaccines. But this administration has not shown any data about how they have l- what information they use to show that, COVID-19 vaccines have been linked to any deaths. They haven't been transparent about it.

They haven't given any information about how they came to the conclusion that COVID vaccines do cause deaths. And with, with this lack of transparency and only focusing on the risks of vaccines and not talking about the fact that, tens of millions of children received these vaccines safely, millions of deaths were prevented- Hun- you know, as well as, millions of hospitalizations and serious adverse events were prevented.

There was a report that did just come out from CDC yesterday showing that vaccines, the COVID-19 vaccines were 76% effective in preventing, urgent care and emergency department visits in young children, and that was a great report to see. but it sh- you know, that was data showing that these vaccines are effective in preventing severe illness which still occurs from COVID.

Dr- I'm very concerned that this is coming out right as we're going into respiratory virus season because I think, tens of thousands of Americans die from diseases like COVID and influenza every year. And undermining, further undermining confence- confidence in these vaccines, I think could lead to an increase in vaccine-preventable deaths this year.

Dr. Fiona Havers, talk about your decision in June to quit, to leave the CDC, and then the continuous reports we're hearing about the chaos within, the overall agency under RFK Jr.

Yeah. So I was, I had worked at CDC for 13 years, always on vaccine-preventable diseases. I had been scheduled to prevent, to present COVID hospitalization data to this, advisory committee, but when he fired the advisory committee, I knew that he was basically doing a hostile takeover of the CDC vaccine policy process by firing this committee that makes a, the vaccine policy recommendations for the United States.

And I basically couldn't as a physician, as a scientist, present to this committee and legitimize them because they are not a legitimate committee. They are not using evidence, and they're not using science. And I think that essentially RFK Jr. is using his position as HHS secretary to now is, using CDC as a megaphone to promote his anti-vaccine views.

and I didn't feel like I could be part of that. And I think, CDC, I, I, my colleagues that are still there doing the work that they can, and getting good information out when they can and pushing back when they can, I think I admire them. but I think that the agency has essentially, the leadership has been essentially removed or pushed out.

Thousands of r- of experts have either quit or been fired. and RFK Jr. has basically taken over CDC and is using it to advance anti-science views, and public health across America has been weakened in all respects, not just when we're talking about infectious diseases or vaccine-preventable diseases.

talk about the whole issue of the fruit flavored vaping, his concern about kids getting addicted, and who was putting pressure on him to approve this?

Well, the, the reporting has suggested that there was pressure from the White House, and perhaps elsewhere within, the Department of Health and Human Services for the approval of these vapes.

And, Dr. Makary's stance, seems to be well reasoned. whether this was in fact the straw that broke the camel's back or not, it's hard to say, because there were many other issues where he seemed to have been able to offend people on all sides of the political spectrum. On the one hand, wanted more evidence about vaccines and their safety and effectiveness.

On the other hand, wanted to green light drugs with less evidence about their safety and effectiveness. He was just all over the place.

And Dr. Kesselheim, the whole controversy created under the Trump administration over mifepristone, the abortion pill. abortion medication is now the major way, people are able to have abortions in this country.

and abortions are up since Roe v. Wade was overturned, but talk about his position.

Well, I think that, part of, uh, I think that part of the problem as Dr. Steinbrook pointed out, was this controversy about the, about mifepristone, which is a, a drug that has been around for many decades, and has been used, very safely.

there were some, preexisting, restrictions on it from the FDA that had been, uh, lifted in concordance with the evidence, a few years ago. and the question was whether, what the circumstances were of those being, of those restrictions being lifted, and whether or not they would be reimposed.

And, I think this is a- another situation where, Dr. Makary, did not show a lot of firm leadership, from his position in putting science first, and making sure that the FDA, operated clearly and made clear statements about, the, appropriate use and safety of that drug, where he could have.

and, I think that is, one of the circumstances that led to this situation where because he did not lead by putting the science first and, by going through clear, transparent channels about what was going to happen, it, it ended up that, that nobody was happy with what he did.

So Dr., Steinbrook, you now have, the US now has no confirmed FDA commissioner, no confirmed CDC director, that's the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no Senate approved surgeon general Can you talk about the significance of this and overall how you would characterize, Robert Kennedy's tenure?

Well, we shouldn't be in this, situation, 18 months into the- or just about 18 months into the, second Trump administration. if we start with the CDC, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has effectively been his own CDC director from the get-go. There have been people back and forth and various, acting, directors, but he's basically been calling the shots as best we can see from the outside, and that's led to, very bad public health consequences, in terms of, vaccines and recommendations for vaccines and the whole staff and effectiveness of the agency.

We've seen some of these issues come up with the recent, cruise ship, issue with hantavirus and the whole, CDC, office which was, looking into, cruise ships and safety and things of that sort having been, um, disbanded, earlier. the surgeon general- Well, no, go into that

for a minute.

I just would like to stop there since this is right now, such, an important story, what's happened with the cruise ship with hantavirus and the people who've been brought to places like Nebraska, who are in isolation. Explain the role of, the FDA, HHS, basically the, Robert Kennedy's running of, of the health sector and the government.

Well, without going into all the details of the hantavirus outbreak, it's an example of why we need a strong public health agency which collaborates internationally. the CDC would be tr- traditionally working with the World Health Organization to understand what was going on with the disease outbreak even though this was not primarily a US-based, outbreak, to offer advice on control of the, outbreak and to provide effective treatment for people who needed treatment.

And the massive staff cuts, the loss of expertise, the lack of people in charge who are standing up for public health from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on down is imperative when things happen that we need to be prepared to respond, and that's why we need effective agencies which have science-based leadership.

that's really the, the issue here. it's the overall effect of organizations which were strong and robust, and when you pick them apart for particular theories and, the idiosyncrasies of the, uh, Health and Human Services Secretary, you destroy things which take years if not decades to, rebuild

This is former now FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, during an interview on CNBC in February discussing efforts to change, how most prescription drugs are available, making them over the counter for consumers

In my opinion, everything should be over the counter, not re- requiring a prescription, unless it's unsafe, unless you need laboratory tests to monitor how it's being, received by your body, or if it could be used for some nefarious purpose, or it's addictive.

If it doesn't meet those criteria, why shouldn't a drug be over the counter? So we should be asking, "Why not?" instead of, "Oh, you wanna move over the counter, you gotta go through our long, tedious process."

So that's Dr., Marty Makary, the former FDA commissioner. Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, your response to what he's proposing.

Well, a- as with some of the stuff that he did as commissioner, there is a grain of truth, in what he said. There, there are certain drugs that, we have, decades of experience with safe use of them, and for which making them over the counter would help, broaden their, availability to patients and, might help reduce their price, and, or, subject them to some competition that might help reduce their price.

So there is a grain of truth to that. But, I think that the way he says it, is, is very broadly stated, in a way that doesn't appear to be, you, designed to be, put in, in, in, in the context of what the evidence is. Certainly, if there is good evidence, around drugs, that they can be used safely with fair, with fair labeling that, that people can understand, it is reasonable to consider how those drugs should be made over the counter, and the FDA has a process for that.

and maybe that process needs to be reviewed and examined to ensure that it is operating efficiently and maximally effectively. but, I think to, say, in a public way that, basically all drugs by default should be over the counter, oh, by the way, except for all these exceptions, i- is a challenging way to put it because, it does give the impression, that the role of the FDA is not a significant one in ensuring that these drugs, are safely vetted and can be used appropriately.

So I don't know. I think that in general this is a good example of- Him having a, a germ of a good idea, that by the way, didn't go anywhere because he then moved on to some other, crusade that he was talking about. but that was ultimately done in by, his lack of attention to science-based, leadership and to the, established legal and regulatory processes that the FDA has.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, has mostly been off the front pages.

But make no mistake, his department has done serious long-term damage to American health and safety, and things could get a lot worse. Just since he's been in office, Kennedy has overseen the country's largest measles outbreak since before we eliminated the virus in the year 2000. For all effective pur, purposes, it was gone from the United States.

Last year, three people, including two school-aged children, died from it. This year, measles cases are rising faster. The epicenter is now in Utah, where there have been nearly 600 confirmed cases of measles, surpassed only by South Carolina and Texas, where just last year, dozens of kids wound up in the hospital with both measles and signs of liver damage.

Liver damage because they took cod liver oil that RFK Jr. recommended as a cure for measles instead of a proven vaccine. There is no cure for measles. There is only the vaccine, which is 97% effective, but RFK Jr. doesn't like vaccines, and so that shows up in everything the HHS touches. Today, The Washington Post reports that the CDC is burying a public health report that was supposed to have been published two weeks ago, a report that showed the ongoing success of the COVID vaccine.

According to whistleblower scientists, the report says, quote, "The COVID-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half." Apparently, the CDC director had concerns about the methodology which has been used to evaluate the flu vaccine for 20 years.

Abdul El-Sayed is a physician and an epidemiologist. He served as the director of the Detroit Health Department. He's now running to represent the state of, the, he's running to represent the state of Michigan in the United States Senate, and he joins me now. Great to see you. Always good to be here.

we're gonna talk about your run momentarily, but it's opportune that you're here because I think we have to keep coming back to this health question. There are people who think that there are damaging people in the cabinet, and it is costing American lives, on immigration, on this war in Iran, but it's quite possible that the greatest amount of damage is being done at the HHS because of this anti-vaccine nonsense.

Th- there's no doubt about it. if the war in Iran is like the acute illness of the Trump administration, RFK Jr. is the chronic disease. Yeah. And the consequences are gonna last Many lifetimes. It's really hard to reverse mis and disinformation when you put it out there. Yeah. When you start telling people that the things that they take, or more importantly, give to their kids- Yeah

to help them, actually do damage. Yeah. At some point, the consequences last for a very long time, and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle. And it didn't just start when he became HHS secretary, it started years and years before when he decided to declare, I don't know, a jihad against vaccines- Yeah

for God knows what reason. And now-

Well, there's some speculations about the reasons, and one of them is that he, he launches lawsuits and, and makes some money out of it.

That part. and here's the thing, is this is the key point. Him and the grifters around him have made huge amounts of money- Right

lying to the American public. Because, of course, if they tell you that the thing that actually works doesn't work, they're trying to sell you the thing they tell you does work. Right. And guess what? At the end of the day when they've cut all the objective science out- Yeah ... they leave you going back to them anyway.

So let's

talk about cutting the objective science out. the CDC, and one can argue that it's got its flaws and needs to, and e- everything can be d- done better, it was the gold standard. the funding that goes to universities for the NIH, that is the gold standard, right? It is much better than setting up a big building and saying the government will research all these medications.

We have some of the best ways to identify and cure illnesses in the entire world, and they've been slowly dismantled.

Yeah. I want us to understand that we've taken for granted our leadership- Yes ... on science and healthcare for a very long time. That didn't just happen. It's because we invested in rigorous science.

We followed questions where the answers went, and then we invested in those solutions. And over time, when you start cutting that away, the long-term consequences become pretty great. think about this. There are people who are gonna die- Of diseases we might have been able- Yes ... to find the cure for, but for the fact that because of DOGE and- Yeah

RFK Jr., that we defunded the incredible scientific work.

And that might be a disease that I get diagnosed with in 20 or 25 years that w- it can go one of two ways. The doctor can say, "Hey, there's this great new medication. Take it and we cure you," or, "Sorry, you've got six months to live." Because, 'cause I don't know.

Somebody's working on something today, or may have had their funding cut today for something I don't know will result in a cure 20 years from now.

And that's the thing is, when DOGE happened, they started just cutting where they thought, "Oh, this doesn't make any sense." Right. Think about GLP-1 drugs.

Yes. these are pretty close to a miracle drug. Yes. And it happened because of obscure research on something that had nothing to do with- The saliva

of the Gila monster ... obesity. Exactly. And people would say, "Why would we be studying such

a thing?" Why do we care about the saliva of a Gila monster?

Well, it turns out- Yeah ... that when you characterize the world around you, people can connect dots, and it turns into things that can be miracles.

Right. And, and really a miracle, because it will reduce people's weight, it'll reduce people's risk of diabetes and heart dis- Diabetes, heart disease ... heart disease.

Cancer, all of it. Yeah. So, so let's go back to measles for a second. Declared eradicated in this sta- in this country in the year 2000. No cure for measles. If a little child, if, if 10 people are in a room and they're exposed to somebody who has measles, likely all of them will get measles.

If they're unvaccinated, yes.

Yes. And this is the thing about it, is that measles is like, it's like the genie that escapes from the bottle. You can't put it back in. You're talking about outbreaks now that are immensely difficult to trace. And the hard part about this, and I want folks to understand, is that not everybody can be vaccinated against measles.

You are not eligible for a vaccine until you're one year old. Right. Now, think about what happens if your baby- So you're a little baby, you get

on a plane- Yes ... you're not vaccinated, and somebody there, ha- has measles.

That... Exactly. That choice- Yeah ... is now putting all of our infants- Yeah ... at risk. It turns out that we live in a society with each other.

Yes. And the things that we do affect each other. So when somebody makes a choice not to be vaccinated because of mis- and disinformation from the HHS secretary, the consequences can ripple into a baby who gets sick and potentially dies as a function, not because their parents made a bad decision, but because that child does not have an immune system that can even undergo vaccination.

So as a public health official and an e- epidemiologist, talk to me about, th- you talk- you were talking about mis- and disinformation. Back before we had political misin- disinformation, the first mis- and disinformation on the internet was about health. Yeah. It was nonsense about rubbing potatoes on your child's feet to keep them from getting diseases.

That spreads faster than

anything. It does, because here's the hard part about vaccine. You're asking somebody who is healthy to willingly put something in their body, and that is an intervention that, that's not an easy thing to do. Right. It's not a natural thing to think about. It's not a natural thing to think about.

Yeah. And so anyone who tells you that thing might do you harm- Yeah ... especially considering the fact that right now you are taking a bet that you might not be exposed to the disease in the first place, makes it really easy to target. And here's the hard part about it. Pharma has something- To do with this.

Because at the end of the day, they make good medications. They just make them too expensive to be able to afford.

Mm-hmm.

But when you feel like they're trying to pick your pocket, it's not a far leap from that to, well, maybe the things they actually make are bad, right? That leap is one that unfortunately our healthcare system's so focused on the money that gets made, has created an opportunity for, because you've created a push factor for people.

Yeah. And I want us to understand what the impact of that looks like over time. And so you've got folks who are mis and disinformation mongers, folks like RFK Jr. who say, "Well, you can't trust anything pharmas- Yeah ... ph- big pharma does. And by the way, we've got the solution for you." Right. And so you've got grifters who are feeding off of the greed of the industry to create a perfect storm in which- Yeah

people are making decisions that are putting a lot of folks at risk.

Secretary Kennedy, do you know what rabies is? Rabies? Yeah. Do you know what it is? I know what it is. Okay. Yeah. So rabies, people contract rabies, as we know, through bites from infected animals like skunks, foxes, like raccoons. Yeah. And it can devastate a family. It can, yeah. When a pet is infected, it is very serious.

it's 100% fatal in humans- Yes ... if left untreated, and generally it's a horrific experience. Staff at the CDC Rabies Division in Atlanta, Georgia, have historically been able to field emergency calls 24/7 from providers about complex rabies cases using CDC expertise to determine appropriate care.

Secretary Kennedy, since you and President Trump took office, do you know how many people are left to staff this 24/7, line? I do not know, Senator. Okay. So the answer is one. So I, I want you to know that. That there's one person, left to staff a 24/7 line, to respond to rabies, a disease which left untreated is fatal.

You know how many rabies cases there are every year in the United States? So, so I'm asking the questions. The CDC's infectious disease work has been so decimated under your leadership that there's only one person left to staff the line and respond to families about this very deadly and terrifying infectious disease.

everybody's talking about, this hantavirus now, and apparently, uh, there's a mutation, the Andes variant, that can be transmitted person-to-person, whereas previously, the last big story on this was

when Gene Hackman's wife got hantavirus, and he was severely in dementia, and they died together as a result of this, a couple years ago. But, now there's concern that there might be more mutations. Does this virus mutate as quickly or as frequently as COVID or the flu? Do we, should we be concerned about this?

So i- it's slightly mutated from the previous vi- strain that they found in Argentina 'cause this is, the cruise ship passenger picked it up. He was a bird watcher, picked it up in, at a landfill. Landfills are where birds love to hang out because there's lots of rats for food. it's a little bit mutated, but we don't know exactly how much, what's the significance.

Because a little bit doesn't sound like big deal, but a little bit, depending on where it is, could change the shape of the virus that allows it to enter our receptors more efficiently. So we don't know about, enough about that. We only know that it's a little bit different, but it's still mostly the same.

the key thing is that I think I'm annoyed that some people are saying, "Oh, there's no human-to-human transmission." There is. Th- this is well established. The Andes strain of the hantavirus is definitely proven to be human-to-human. There was, like, studies in, birthday parties published in the New England Journal of Medicine that people who were, like, not even directly sitting together- They were at this birthday party, and they gave it to each other.

Hmm. So it's airborne, and those who are saying it's not airborne, no, we, we're pretty sure it's airborne because we've seen studies are... about this. And there's entire articles written, just came out today. They're criticizing the WHO's re- or initial reaction. So it's airborne, and there's human to human.

The other thing is some people say, "Well, if you don't have symptoms, you can't transmit it." No, that's not true because previously we... the hantavirus, this exact strain, has been proven that people were already testing positive even two or three, four days before they showed symptoms. Hmm. So we know that you can be positive and transmit even before you have symptoms.

So there's pre-symptomatic asymptomatic transmission here. Whoa. And, the, the good thing is that we have not seen any non-ship cases. and there are some suspected cases among close contacts, so like family members, someone who's close by to that initial case, but that's not a community transmission.

A community transmission is somewhere where you can't even trace it. It's like God knows where you got it. Someone gave it to someone, who gave it to someone, and you lose the chain, and it's in the community. There's no community transmission yet. All the confirmed cases are still ship passenger cases.

The couple s- suspected cases are not ship, but still close contacts of the initial people. Right. So but the bad thing is that the incubation time is, 42 days. it's, it's... it is so long. And because it is so long, it's over, it's basically, six weeks potentially. Hmm. w- the new cases, we won't be in the clear until 40 days- Yeah

from the last case. Yeah, in

a way that reminds me of the AIDS, vir- the thing back in the '80s, because there was such a long latency period that it was so hard to get a handle on it. Right. Not to mention, the Reagan administration refusing to even mention it. Of course

is this... I- Yesterday Bob Kennedy, I refuse to call him what everybody else calls him. I worked for his father, or, tried to campaign for his father, shall we say. but yesterday Bob Kennedy, basically shrugged this off, said, "Yeah, it's no big deal. We got it under control." and yet much of the public health infrastructure of the United States has been dismantled by this administration apparently- Yeah

to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. Oh, yeah. And we've pulled ourselves out of the World Trade... or the World Health Organization. does this, put us at risk? what happens if this virus or some other virus... And I also wanted to ask you what the current state of COVID and flu transmission is right now in the United States.

But, does this put us at risk?

It's a huge risk. You know, we've slashed 20,000 workers and scientists from HHS. Wow. 20,000. And in the CDC as an agency alone, we have decimated and eliminated 30% of all staff. And the epidemic intelligence ser- service has also been decimated as well. those are the disease detective corps they send out.

Mm. So we're in a world of hurt. And, we, we don't really have a good outbreak investigator. We don't have good pandemic response office, staff. uh, we... And limited by that, last year we eliminated the entire CDC staff that focused on cruise ship safety. that's a little bit too on the nose, right?

Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. we have zero staff in the, CDC cruise ship, safety office. and, it's... So whenever the next one r- really, it gets hit, hits us, we're gonna be in a world of hurt. Now, luckily this virus is not as transmissible as... Some people say it's a R0 of two, which is much lower than COVID's, you know- Mm

four, three and a half, four. But still w- maybe we're just lucking in on that end, and that it's maybe a transmission slower than normal. At least so far. But still, it's still not good. Yeah. And for COVID, COVID influ- so COVID is still with us. Flu, of course, is perennial. By the way, I don't think we're...

This might be the first year that we do not have a COVID booster. Other countries will have COVID boosters, but will we in the United States? Do you think Bobby, Bobby, Junior is gonna, FDA and CDC approve, new COVID boosters? I don't think it's happening. Yeah. I'm 90% certain the United States will not have COVID boosters approved.

Yeah. Amazing. and- We, we- ... so I'm really worried ... we have about a minute and a half before we hit a hard break here. what's the status of bird flu? We were very concerned about that, and then the Trump administration came in, and I believe that they shut down all of the, monitoring that was going on.

What, did they?

Yeah, the bird flu is, was mostly in cows. Mm-hmm. And we just have to assume that it's still in the cows, but, but we haven't had, a significant outbreak beyond just... 'Cause egg prices have recovered, as you, as we've all noticed. But, it's one of those things where it's, we know it's there.

It's just boiling in the background. Yeah. And one bad mutation, and it'll take us all out. Yeah. And I, now I'm praying that bird... Bird flu is my nightmare. Yeah, mine too.

that's what took us out back in the, in the, 19-teens, right?

yeah. that pandemic was a, originally a bird flu.

So- Yeah ... I'm really hoping that, l- maybe this hantavirus is a good wake-up call- Because- Yeah ... Trump administration has to deal with it again, and maybe it's "Oh, maybe we shouldn't have di- dis- dismantled everything. Maybe we could put a few things back where it was before DOGE."

Let me tell you a story of two Dutch tourists, okay? Okay. I'm sure they- Great, great start. they got all their gear. They have, they, they packed light for their trip. They have those vests with lots of pockets in them, like on a fisherman's vest, but they don't fish. They're birdwatchers.

These Dutch tourists are birdwatchers. They went down to Argentina on a birdwatching expedition, as you do. Then they got on a cruise, and then they became sick, and it seems like maybe some of the bird poo-poo had something to do with it. Now, the rats would like a word, because this could also be the... it could be rats, because what they got, which was the hantavirus, generally and usually comes from rats.

But they got on this cruise liner, the MV Hondius, and, that MV Hondius, had, many cases. I don't exactly know how many. I feel like it was, like, a few dozen. three people have died, since, two definitely from hantavirus. The third was just... died from the idea of having to do another global pandemic.

was just like, "Ugh, I can't do it." all the passengers, guys, just in the last 24, are off the ship. So all those who were like, "Let's sink the ship, no more people"- Send us to Tel Aviv. No, no, no. They've... Yeah. Send it to Tel Aviv. they're all off, and they are back to their respective countries, Spain, Philippines, Australia, Canada, and this is fine.

Apparently, this is good. the Americans are now in Nebraska, and it's unclear how long they're going to be there. the US Department of Health and Human Services, again, run by... Is it Dr. Oz, I believe? Said that all 17 US citizens on Sunday's flight would undergo a clinical assessment at the medical facility in Nebraska.

A British national living in the US was also repatriated alongside them. Seven other US passengers had returned home and are being monitored in their home states. Before the American case was confirmed, however, the a- WHO, which by the way, we are not a party to anymore, the WHO head, Tedros Adham- Hanam...

I'm not gonna pronounce his last name. Ghebreyesus. Okay, did it. That was good. Yeah. Look that up. He warned, or they warned that the decision by the US not to follow the organization's guidelines over the hantavirus outbreak, quote, "May have risks." Ooh. The WHO has recommended 42 days of isolation for those leaving the MV Hondius, and it's unclear how many days of isolation these people in Nebraska are going to get.

They're gonna apparently assess them as they come. here's RFK Jr. on the outbreak.

We have this under control, and we're not worried about

it. Great. Great. We have this- Not great. Now, this is spoken by a man who- Eats roadkill

Probably starts- Yeah ... outbreaks of deadly disease. I thought you were gonna play the teen sperm count clip.

Young m- yeah, guys don't have enough sperm. That, that, that is, I was on Epstein's plane and we were talking about sperm. Dude,

so he's not worried about it, but again, he has had all of the, rat-borne, poo-borne illnesses- Mm ... possible. This- For dinner ... this, yes, for, that's just for dinner. he doesn't believe in germ theory, and just so we all remember, the person kinda overseeing this is Jay Bhattacharya, right?

And he's the head of the CDC. He authored, during COVID, what was called the Great Barrington Declaration, which effectively was, like, a whole paper on how we should just reopen and it doesn't matter, and a little bit of the, contagion theory, or I'm forgetting what it was, where it was like, "Get everyone sick.

It doesn't matter." Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. He's at the head of this, and it's unverified, but there are reports that the CDC gutted the, and fired all of their, p- specific cruise liner sanitation- Yeah ... workers. and the, Snopes was, like, trying to figure out whether that could be verified and it, it seems like it was, like, last year.

Unclear. and but anyway, so that's going on.

"Underbabied" Next, Section B, Ideology and the Misinformation Machine

Mr. Kennedy has said that he wants to fire all the members of the United States Preventive Services Task Force, and that group is responsible for providing recommendations for things like which cancer screenings we should get and when we should start getting them.

And their recommendations are what causes health insurance companies to be required to pay for those screenings. So if he disbands a committee like that, there is a likelihood that our health insurance companies will no longer cover things like cancer screenings. The very obvious danger that we are in, and that several senators brought up today in his hearing with the Senate Finance Committee, is that vaccines are being undermined daily by Mr.

Kennedy, and he protests this and claims that he's not an anti-vaxxer, yet he takes actions like replacing every member of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, with people who are anti-vaccine or hold other very dangerous pseudoscientific opinions on this topic. And so it's going to be a very serious issue with regard to the vaccination coverage in this country, and it's truly almost impossible for me to believe that this is happening in the United States.

it feels

like a Dr. Seuss world we're living in- ... in which the White House statement said that, CDC head Susan Monarez was not aligned with the president's agenda of making America healthy again. This is weird. This is just weird.

Yes. And Dr. Monarez, just one month ago, was praised as a very knowledgeable ethical leader at CDC, which I agree with.

So her dismissal is, again, a fun house mirror. If you listen to Mr. Kennedy, he claimed today in the hearing that Dr. Monarez was asked if she was a trustworthy person, and she responded, "No." I find that absolutely impossible to believe. I do not believe that's what happened. I believe what she says, which is that she was fired because she would not agree with orders, so to speak, from Mr.

Kennedy to approve things that were coming out that she did not see the data for, that were going to be released by a group of people who themselves are not trustworthy.

Well, public health and public information, as you're indicating, are very much connected. The man, for example, who shot bullets at the CDC's windows that killed a police officer was, we were told, motivated by beliefs he got from somewhere about COVID vaccines.

So it matters very much what ideas we allow into the ether, and that's where media comes in. That's

right, and it's both, legacy or traditional media and social media. It is my opinion that misinformation, not just scientific, but all kinds, are the greatest existential threat to the United States right now, and we are seeing this play out, and I'll use social media as the first example.

Mm-hmm.

Social media companies make money through engagement, and therefore, they have no motivation whatsoever to stem the tide of misinformation on their platforms. We know, for example, that false information tends to spread on social media orders of magnitude faster than factual information does, and that's dangerous because it promotes controversy and engagement, which makes social media companies money.

Now, with the legacy media, my biggest concern is false equivalence. So for example- When stories are run about vaccines, they may have a doctor on who says, "Vaccines are good. They're safe and effective," but then they'll also interview somebody who says, "Oh, no, vaccines are no good."

Right.

And the problem with that is it creates a false image that those two viewpoints are equivalent, when in reality, if you wanted to show the equivalent of these two opinions, you would have 100,000 scientists or healthcare professionals who are talking about the benefit and safety of vaccines versus one person who says that they are dangerous or harmful in some way.

And so this false equivalence adds to this misinformation and distrust of science.

Well, and I appreciate that, and Defend Public Health's Bruce Mirken wrote a great piece back in June, which I saw on 48 Hills, about the sanewashing, as we call it, of RFK Jr., and it was great because it talked about the, precisely what you're saying.

reporters should note that he says things that are wackadoodle, but then also they do this thing where they say, "Well, he's a skeptic on vaccines," and that ticks a box for a lot of folks, as though RFK Jr. had principled concerns. he's a skeptic, and, and aren't we all skeptics?

I just wanna ask you about the role of journalism here. you've started to indicate it, but what could they do less or more of, do you think?

So I really do think it's critical to present factual information and call things what they are. Mr. Kennedy is not a skeptic. He is an anti-vaccination enthusiast.

He spreads propaganda. He actually actively spreads disinformation to the people of the United States of America. If he were skeptical, he would actually consider the- Just massive amount of scientific data to which he has access, which has shown time and time again that vaccines are safe and effective.

Right.

So the words that we choose are really important, and I just think, there are media outlets who are doing better and better at this. But I just wanna repeat that this is an existential crisis for the United States, and we have got to be clear about the danger that Mr. Kennedy poses. This isn't a minor scientific disagreement.

This is the complete undermining of the entire scientific infrastructure of the United States and our vaccine program.

Well, there are efforts finally, including your own. There are efforts to start with, not end with, getting RFK Jr. out of there, but there's much more that we need to do.

Absolutely.

And again, I- I'm certainly far from alone. People who believe that Mr. Kennedy needs to be removed from office or resign, there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands now who agree with this. And I guess one bright spot from the hearing today is that there are now three Republican senators who spoke on the record about their concerns about Mr.

Kennedy's actions. So I really hope that this keeps up. I hope that physicians and other healthcare practitioners, nurses, will come forward and really talk to their elected officials about their concerns because, again, this is not a trivial worry.

And let me just ask you finally, if there's reporters listening, is there anything that you would ask them to, stop doing or start doing in terms of journalism?

A- and not just RFK Jr., but public health in general. Are there questions you would like them to start asking or stop asking? What are your thoughts on media?

Well, I'm not a journalist, and I have a lot of respect for how difficult this job is. I would just say that to avoid any sort of desire to look for false equivalence or present a, quote-unquote, "the other side of the story" when there are situations where there is no other side of the story.

So to make sure that you're talking with experts in regard to the field that you have under discussion. And honestly, I would just really prefer to see people who are pseudoscientific quacks get a lot less ink and a lot less airtime because they do not reflect the beliefs and the understanding of science among the majority of scientists and healthcare practitioners in

this country.

you spoke about the groups of people who are the most vulnerable. Yeah. Who are these people that we should definitely say, hey, you need to get that measles, mumps, rubella vaccine way back when? Who are those people?

So generally speaking, it's young children and infants. I'm sure we all know because of our own experience that you receive a schedule of vaccinations at specific times in your growth and development.

And so young children who, are on their first round or haven't gotten everything that, an adult would be fully vaccinated against, they're vulnerable. Elderly populations, particularly those who, may have not have been vaccinated for certain things themselves. But certainly just because of, natural sort of physiological challenges that you, that develop as you age, they're certainly a vulnerable population.

Immunocompromised people with immune deficiency, cancer, or other conditions that leave them open, more vulnerable to infection. Because for whatever reason, all of those signals, all of the messaging in their bodies doesn't make it to headquarters. And if it doesn't make it, then, the other thing that, your immune headquarters is responsible for is deciding which assassins to send out, how we're going to mount a response to different threats, just like any spy organization would.

But when you become compromised, that's difficult to do. So they're certainly vulnerable. And I guess I would also say because of the policy shifts of this administration that has deliberately dismantled vital public health protections A lot of the people who are also impacted are poor people at this point, people who've had their Medicaid cut, people who, are gonna be impacted by, all of the inane and erroneous, measures that RFK, is putting in place that disrupts the way that we, regulate vaccine schedules in this country.

And so by doing that means, potentially schools are gonna, not be able to maintain the same level of protection for students or eventually, we have, when you change those, all those recommendations, that also means that changes what, health insurers are obligated to cover.

So all of this anti-vax propaganda is purposeful, it's deliberate, and it's meant to disenfranchise millions of people from access to vaccine protection. And what we need to ask ourselves in these dark times is why?

And that is out- absolutely the question I have. you mentioned the HHS Secretary, Robert F.

Kennedy Jr. I don't know if you saw the quote from Dr. Kirk Milhoan, who is the pediatric cardiologist and acting chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. And he's quoted as saying, and I quote, "What we're gonna have is a real world experience of when unvaccinated people get measles.

What is the new incidence of hospitalization and what's the incidence of death?" And that was his rationale as to why we shouldn't necessarily have to blanket vaccinate everyone, that we need to see in real time what can measles do today as compared to 30 years ago. How does this concern you?

Well, first of all, it's a very, Nazi-coded way of looking at public health, because eugenics is tucked into that. the, the point of that thinking, the arc of that thinking is we don't need to protect everyone. Let's let natural selection take care of that, which I think is hugely rich and ironic considering they have restricted breeding in our species for the last half millennia.

But, that's part of that, ideology, there's always an inherent element of sort of population culling and starting with the undesirables. And honestly, it's not just in the public health sphere. If you look at the way that they've, disrupted regulatory agencies like the EPA and the USDA, the CDC, how we've withdrawn from WHO, all of these things have implications- That make us less safe as a populace, and that is what we look to our government to do.

But with this particular in, administration, firstly, they started, and are continuing to erode institutional trust between the propaganda, between the measures that they're taking. When you think about measles itself, this, the spread of measles that we're seeing in the US is solely attributable to RFK himself.

But what's crazy about it is that not only is his propaganda i- impacted policy, which has made more people susceptible to measles, but his misinformation propaganda has also made it so that there's been a 39% increase in vitamin A toxicity because he's been promoting it as an unscientific alternative to measles vaccination.

Mm-hmm. That's insane- Yes ... to me. I don't know what's happening right now. Right. But in, in terms of, like, all of those culminating effects, you have that impact on vulnerable populations. You have a resurgence of disease, and I'm sure measles isn't gonna be the only one. If you wanna get funny about it, COVID is resurging, but nobody seems to care anymore.

Yeah. Along with other diseases have been am- eradicated. We've seen the plague. We've seen polio. All of these things that people should not have to even think about anymore are coming back. And a lot of the background moves that he and DOGE made in terms of workforce collapse and tr- for the HHS in terms of research stagnation, particularly targeting mRNA vaccine development, which is critical for the bird flus we're getting ready to anticipate, for HIV, treatment developments, and just, even for cancer treatments.

We use RNA, virus technology for all kinds of things, and so they're just really latching onto this and using this as a mantle to, I don't know, ask yourself what the, what their end goal is because right now it just seems like a lot of people are getting sick and perishing.

Right. on a closing note, you brought up a key point of, like, why are we having so much vitamin A toxicity?

And I think it's because those persons, those anti-vaxxers, the RFK Juniors of the world, they have the loudest platform and so parents don't know what to trust. So if- Yeah, true ... you had a moment to speak to the parents that are listening to this show, what are the important vaccinations that you recommend the parents get for their children before they enter into elementary school, and if they haven't had it so far, to get it today?

I

am so glad you asked. Certainly the... Even though, he is doing all these things and there's all these new, Sort of recommendations that are being put forth. A lot of the, physician bodies like the AMA and others are still recommending that we go by everything previous to this administration- in terms of, vaccine schedules. So what we've all had to get into school, measles, mumps, rubella, now, chicken pox, diphtheria, tetanus, all of those things that are on the school list. And then, now that we're smacked up in the middle of flu season as it were, obviously there's always the annual flu vaccine, RSV, the updated COVID vaccine, which I would say people should definitely get because there are new variants circulating from before.

And then, just for, as a note for older Americans as well, the pneumococcal vaccine, shingles of course if you're 50 or older. And certainly getting that RSV is something that I think would be important for those populations as well.

That's in- incredible advice. And for those who need a little extra incentive on the shingles vaccine, it's actually been shown to be helpful for those with Alzheimer's disease in slowing down a process of them losing their memory.

So let that be- Oh. ... what drives you into, to get your vaccination.

Now, Section C, Inside the MAHA Coalition

Glyphosate is horrible. It's super toxic, as is atrazine, as is dicamba, as is, 2,4-D. there's so many toxic pesticides, fungicides, herbicides that are being used that need, we need to stop using, okay? But the problem is, in the last 30 years, we've built this entire industrial agricultural system that is dependent on glyphosate.

So if they banned glyphosate today, what would happen is the massive amounts of farmers would go out of business because they are dependent on glyphosate to grow crops. What Trump is doing, and there, there may be more to the story than this, but on the surface what he's doing i- and the reason that Kennedy defend is defending him, is because we're getting a bunch of glyphosate from China, and if China figures out

If we really got in a major trade war with China and they blocked exports of glyphosate to the US, then our, our farmers would be devastated, and we'd have a major food supply shock, and there would be no meat, dairy, and eggs. and also, grains and other things. So that's the main driver behind it.

It- no one's acknowledging that glyphosate's good. It's not. It's terrible But we can't just get rid of it. It has to be phased out. We don't have enough organic farms to feed the population

Even before RFK Jr. made his fairly delayed statement, which I know, Derek, you're gonna get into, MAHA, or even just, let's say the wellness space at large, seemed to split themselves into two.

There were those like Alex and Vonnie who led with passion- passionate disbelief, disappointment, and disagreement, and then there were those who appeared to give the administration some slack. Chris Wark of Chris Beat Cancer, who you just heard, was the first I saw to make this spin and post it. It quickly took off, well over a half a million views now, and was stitched in a lot of videos.

Chris isn't even really a part of the MAHA movement really. His alternative-ish cancer programs focus on plant-based food, so he doesn't really vibe with the steak and dairy first food pyramid, but he does vibe with the anti-vax moves.

He's also a geopolitical expert, as you just heard in that clip.

Yeah, he has over a half a million followers, so he can kinda be an expert in whatever he wants to be.

Courtney Swan, again, commented on the video, "There is a better way. We should be fighting for the better way and moving towards it, not defending the worse way and letting it continue on. Everyone needs to watch @kisstheground and @commongroundfilm. Farming that makes enough healthy food to feed us and heals the Earth/works with Mother Nature is possible."

So this kind of illustrates the split that we're seeing.

I would really love to see Courtney actually have to work with Mother Nature. take away your indoor climate control, take away your phone, take away your housing. Go out in the woods for a month. actually do it. that's what I would love to see these fucking influencers just actually be with Mother Nature and tell me about all the problems we have with society.

We should also note, though, that with Chris, that's a nearly seven-minute video that you shared with me and I clipped it from. He also digs into his vegetarian ideology, which got him some real heat in the comments as well.

Yeah, getting heat in the comments from inside the house seems to be the theme in MAHA-

this week and last. In a now what seems to be deleted or archived Instagram post, a Dr. Jessica Peatross, gave a similar response in a carousel post, so I couldn't clip it because it was text. She got so much heat in the comments, she had to come to her stories to address it. She reiterated that she doesn't even like glyphosate.

In fact, she doesn't even like Trump, but that if glyphosate was banned from the food supply, it would crumble. Store shelves would be empty, and farmers would start killing themselves. She then says that if there was a, wasn't a plan in the next month to transition away from glyphosate, she's gonna start to wonder if this was all for Big Agriculture.

But what does she recommend in the meantime? Well, grow your own food, and if you can't, make friends with a local farmer, organic farmer. Easy-peasy.

I wanna point out that the kill yourself thing possibly comes from India where there has been real problems with suicides with farmers specifically, and some of that has been tied back to Monsanto because of certain patents that they have.

So when we hear things like that, there actually is precedent that we should be fair about. But I'll get more into this, but the idea that the food supply would crumble, they pin it all on Roundup specifically. Roundup is the most used herbicide in America. As I said, I'm gonna get to this. But there are other ones, and they just...

Now they're just trying to play catch up by making it seem like they literally heard Kennedy say this talking point that the food supply would crumble, and they're just repeating without actually thinking through the nuances and challenges of organic farming and why you can't scale organic farming to the level of agriculture that we need in this country.

So there are some true things that are sprinkled into statements like this, but they miss so much context, it's actually unbelievable they even talk.

Totally. And this was even all before RFK Jr. made his... What I wonder if it was a planned statement or not, and they realized they kinda had to make that statement.

but this was all before that. And even, Troy Casey of the Certified Health Nut, he posted, he commented on Chris's video, "This is what RFK Jr. texted me." And so there must have been, like, some sort of understanding within it that's what the statement would have been. But, there were other MAHA influencers who took this approach.

I think I saw Mark Hyman, Will Cole. They posted something similar, whether it was before or after. but they ended up on defense. there was more of them. You get the point. I won't go into it. But putting the influencer reactions aside, where the fuck is RFK Jr. in all of this? Well, here's his first Instagram post after the announcement was made.

Ladies and gentlemen, now introducing your

USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Listen, I didn't have on my 2026 bingo card a picture with the Mike Tyson claw tattoo on my face, but how amazing is this? Heavyweight champion of

the world, Mike Tyson, 44 knockouts. Mike, why don't you come up?

Wow, okay. Where I come from in Brownsville, Brooklyn- It's the most violent, poverty-stricken neighborhood in the city of New York. We didn't have much money, but we had food stamps, and food stamps can buy you the candy, the sugar, and all that, sodas, and that's just all we knew. I just wanted to be a part of this 'cause that was such a part of my life.

Probably most notably about that post is it's not about glyphosate. And as someone who has worked in social media for over a decade now, pulling scheduled posts during a shit storm is a top priority. That or they pushed it through thinking no one would notice. except folks did notice. Here are just a few of the comments on that post.

"Please stop the glyphosate." "Real food doesn't get sprayed with glyphosate." "Glyphosate????" There were

six question marks there, Mallory.

Sorry, I didn't get all of them. Come on, six question marks. I'm getting lazy. Sorry. "Eat real food drenched in glyphosate? Make it make sense." And finally, "We need to talk about glyphosate."

I could go on and on. That's basically the entire comment section. And at this point, it must be so clear to the Central Maha team that they cannot simply ignore this. They are going to have to say something. So enter RFK Jr.'s delayed response, and Calley Means just pumping his tires.

There's gonna be ups and downs, and there is zero question that this week was a down.

I'm not gonna gaslight or sugarcoat it. This glyphosate thing was extremely disappointing. Bobby's disappointed. And there's no message from me, the White House, or Bobby that you should not be letting your anger out. But I'll tell you, Bobby got on the phone. He's in charge of the NIH. He called Jay Bhattacharya.

He's gonna call him every day. We are going to research a bridge off these toxic chemicals that our farmers are unfortunately dependent on. We are going to s- put a stake... Bobby's been calling the top venture capitalists in the world. We are going to get a bridge off these chemicals. And Bobby, there's going to be ups and downs There's no question about that.

But I think none of us could imagine two years ago where we are today. We are fighting every day, and we have to keep this movement going because it's changing the world.

I didn't catch this the first time when you sent this to me and I clipped it when he said, "We're gonna call the top venture capitalists in the world."

The fucking venture capitalists own all the farms in America. They're responsible for the herbicide. that, that is ... He ... it's just boggling because they can't get their story straight. Calley comes from the libertarian fucking VC world, so of course that's his instinct, but he doesn't put the pieces together.

it's also hilarious just hearing him in this mode, because as with his boss, Kennedy, he came into DC promising swift change, and so far this year I've seen multiple videos of Calley saying, "Who knew change was so hard? Just come on, give us some time, guys." Actual politicians who do this for a living, they know how hard legislation is.

But when you install a bunch of activists, and Calley cut his teeth at the Heritage Foundation as an intern, they don't have any governing experience, and then you give them power, and they're going to have an even harder time understanding the molasses of bureaucracy that you have to move through. And when their base realizes that they've been had just to get their votes, we're watching them stumble over their words and trying to course-correct, and it's always a sight to behold, as he just proved.

And by talking louder about something, it doesn't make it more understandable or you any more correct.

Is the United States government under Secretary Kennedy effectively denying people vaccines in ways that weren't happening before?

Mm-hmm. So they would say no. but behind the scenes, we do know that the- The, the, health department under Secretary Kennedy has remade vaccine policy significantly.

They have, unilaterally decided to recommend fewer pediatric vaccines. They have, dismissed a committee of federal vaccine advisors and then refilled it with some handpicked folks, from Secretary Kennedy himself, many of whom are vaccine skeptics, and they have v- voted to recommend reducing certain vaccines, that are recommended to the public, including the hepatitis B birth dose.

so in a way, what Senator Cassidy was talking about was when these commit- when these panels, when the federal government recommends a vaccine, insurance is required to cover it. When they do not recommend a vaccine, insurance necessar- is not necessarily required to cover it, nor do federal, healthcare programs like Medicaid.

That said, there's additional caveat here that the decisions that HHS has made on vaccine policy, like changing the vaccine schedule, are being litigated in court, and there's actually a stay on those changes that was issued by a federal judge earlier this year. I will say that HHS asked last week that stay be lifted while they work on an appeal, so certainly that is still an ongoing, conversation.

But, certainly the changes that they made impact the ability for people to access those vaccines.

And to be clear, Senator Cassidy made that comment in September of last year that the federal government under Trump and Kennedy is effectively denying people vaccines, but, played that for context.

I know that still stands as his opinion today. your article that I cited the headline on, from in the intro, From Promoting Vaccines to Defending Glyphosate, Kennedy Has Veered from MAHA Messaging. The glyphosate story is very interesting, and I think a lot of people have never heard of it. So what is that?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, glyphosate is a pesticide, that is really loathed by a lot of the Make America Healthy Again, folks. It, they consider it, a dangerous, herbicide. But recently, the White House issued an executive order to boost the production of the, of this, herbicide. That did not sit well with a lot of Make America Healthy Again folks.

There's actually, I believe, a rally today, pushing back on that decision. But Kennedy has defended it, and al- so has hi- so have his advisors. Calley Means, a senior advisor, he was recently at a political, Politico event. and he said that they met f- with, for hours with critics of the herbicide and decided that, to move forward.

Kennedy is certainly trying to straddle a very difficult line here between the White House and his followers. they, he certainly can't make both happy. and if the White House wants to move forward with promoting this pesticide, then that is certainly something that he would, throw his support behind.

But it is causing division in his movement, in this Make America Healthy Again movement that feels as though he has betrayed them. ,

I don't want to minimize the real potential benefits of AI in medicine. We've done segments on that. I don't know if you've reported on that.

You would probably characterize it as having, some very good public health potential. You'll tell me. But saying AI might replace the FDA with the human judgment, of course, that comes with that, did that alarm anyone? Did you report on that?

I specifically did not report on it. I would definitely point you to my colleague, Lizzy Lawrence, who is just our fantastic FDA reporter.

but I will say overall, we know from our conversations with folks within HHS that there are a lot of questions of AI's use in healthcare. I think we, we know that a lot of people feel as though AI can be helpful in streamlining decisions, making things easier, but are also adamant that a human needs to be behind many of these decisions.

when we're talking about things like drugs, medical devices, it's not something you, wanna take lightly. so I think there's probably some trepidation about what that could potentially look like, and I don't necessarily think that's something we're gonna see happen in the next few years. that said, things do mo- have been moving pretty quickly with AI, more than I have anticipated.

so it's certainly something to watch.

I read that he also expressed concern about China outpacing the US on biotechnology. Did you happen to see him say anything like that?

that is something that I have not, reported on as much. it's a little outside of my beat. but again, something that we're watching.

It comes back to the White House agenda of domestic production, bringing things, USA made. and when, z- and certainly the White House has concerns, and you see this with the most favored nation policy, which is a drug policy to reduce drug prices in the US. And it's not just China. I think the White House is very concerned, with the fact that in other countries they do have faster production, they do have lower prices, and they're trying to bring that to the US.

And the reason I bring it up is that yet, at the same time, he defended cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, which conducts or funds a lot of medical research in this country. Here's an exchange between him and Democratic Congresswoman Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania.

You state in your testimony that AHA, I'm not sure of that acronym, but AHA, will focus on high-impact priority areas, including mental health.

Did you recommend cutting 1.3 billion from the Cen- Center for Mental Health? $1.3 billion cut in your budget.

I think that's the proposal.

okay, you're comfortable with that. Your testimony cites a White House MAHA report finding a shortage of behavioral health providers. Do you agree with that finding?

Did you recommend cutting 68 million from behavioral health workforce development? 68 million cut- I think that's the proposal. That's terrific

and I think I slightly misstated what that exchange was about. Not NIH medical research per se, though that's being cut also, but an office of mental health in particular.

But what were they acknowledging there exactly at the same time that the US is concerned about other countries eating our lunch on research?

Yeah. there are two things there. Excuse me. stat earlier this year, we actually surveyed a thou- a thousand researchers who had been supported by NIH funding.

and we found that a quarter of those respondents had been forced to lay off, lab members. two out of five of planned research, opportunities had been canceled, and many had seen students decide not to move forward with healthcare research. So that is definitely a concern. and what you were hearing there, had to do actually with a separate agency.

So as HHS is looking into cutting NIH again, as they proposed last year, they're also trying to create a special agency focused specifically on chronic disease. This is called, the Administration for a Healthy America, AHA or A-H-A. and that is a concern for Senate appropriators who feel as though that it, it's not necessary to achieving the goals that HHS has already set out in reducing chronic disease when we already have the NIH.

We already have a agency that supports substance use disorder treatment and research, and we already have an agency that addresses community health centers. So it's a question of the- these shifting priorities. the HHS, the White House wants to move things around at HHS, and Senate, the Senate is not so sure that is the best use of their time and their money when we have to focus on boosting biomedical research.

Glyphosate is not entirely safe, but it is also not clearly a major human carcinogen at real world dietary exposure levels, at least that we know of. And I am supportive of ongoing research on metabolic effects, microbome d- microbiome disruption, perinatal outcomes, and endocrine disruption, which are all things that the activists claim that it's affecting.

We should have that data, and if they reveal real issues, I would hope regulations change to reflect that.

and the baby

gravy. Shit. Yeah. Fuck. How did I not put the baby gravy in there? I know. I'll-- I got you. Honest researchers should also want that sort of data, and I believe many do. Now, one thing I feel very certain of is that wellness influencers blaming numerous forms of cancer and gut problems on glyphosate is hyperbolic and unfounded.

Just like Trump pinning numerous problems on Soma- Somali immigrants as he recently did at the State of the Union, influencers love to find single issues that supposedly create numerous problems, and then as we're about to get into, they can sell you a bunch of shit.

All right? Trump signed an executive order that pretty much demands that we're using glyphosate, and he's saying that it's a matter of national security, which sets up these companies and these contractors up perfectly to waive liability for the sickness and the disease that this is going to cause on the people.

And speaking of national security and keeping the system alive, what does the system exist for? The system exists to keep the workforce going. And so if we feed the workforce weaponized food that's going to destroy their gut intelligence The bacteria in the gut that's responsible for their thoughts, their emotions, their connection to self, their ability to ask questions like, "Why are we doing this as a country?

Let's disconnect the workforce From that, so they quit asking questions because there's a lot of people asking questions right now. And so yes, this is a matter of national security. The question is, are you going to be aware of this, and are you going to say no to glyphosate and get your gut intelligence back and really follow what your gut and your heart is telling you to do?

This is why I've been working with the solution to get glyphosate out of the body for seven or eight years because the gut is pivotal in a person being fully aligned and the greatest expression of self. So let others know to eat glyphosate-free foods and comment the word toxin below, and I'll send you some information on the solution that we have to remove glyphosate and get it out of your body.

Say no to glyphosate. What a

journey That whole post was. Derek, when we were texting back and forth the day this executive order announcement was made, I said to you, "I think we'll start to see some detox sales come out of this." And the thing is, that wasn't even a superhuman prediction. No,

you're a prophet.

You're a prophet. You saw it.

No, I am the guru. I have come to know these influencers, these wellness influencers, and their playbook pretty well, and there's just no way that they'll pass up an opportunity to shill a supplement. So while some major maha influencers were trying to figure out what to make of this, other influencers were jumping on the sales opening.

The influencer who you just heard from goes by Rah Of Earth off- on Instagram. He has over 160,000 followers, and his Instagram bio reads, "Empowering all to expand concept of self with practical and actionable tips." And I just have to say, his hair is incredible. It appears very long and luscious, and I'll give him that before I absolutely tear his sales funnel a new one.

It's all the tallow that he puts into there, but- Don't.

I get drugstore shampoo and conditioner, and I get comments all the time. So I Don't make me use tallow.

Listeners might recall Rah Of Earth, as compared to all the other Rahs, from our human garage episode because he's pretty embedded with Gary Linneman over there.

His feed is all over the fucking map.

I still can't look at it without thinking human garbage. Yep. that's just what it reads to me now. When you comment toxin on that post, just as he instructs, you get a DM which reads in part, "Hello, thanks for commenting toxin. We developed the only proven solution to remove glyphosate from the human body, and it does so by 74% within six weeks.

Most of us use this program to do so." He then links to a page on his website titled Ultimate Lifestyle Transformation. And if your MLM spidey senses are tingling, that's because Raw of Earth is a distributor for Purium, a superfood supplement multi-level marketing company, and he's claiming that their product can detox your body of a specific pesticide.

In fact, his direct message goes on to link to a particular product he describes as the glyphosate remover. It is, of course, another Purium product called Biome Medic. And then I was actually really incredibly surprised to see on the product page under product benefits, according to Purium, that it may help detoxify glyphosate.

Mallory It may not help- Oh ... detoxify glyphosate.

Oh, cancel my order.

It's amazing, though, actually. the product page you just wrote in quotes may help detoxify glyphosate, but when Raw Earth DMed you- Mm-hmm ... he called it a proven solution. The de- the glyphosate remover, yeah. So of course, I had to look into this, and it's such a perfect example of extrapolating from weak evidence.

Purium is basing this claim on a six-week preclinical trial that reported a 74% reduction in urine glyphosate levels. The study was, surprise, sponsored by Purium Inc. It listed the CEO as the contact, and it was conducted in a private medical practice. There was no official study published, just a press release in which the investigators acknowledge it was only conducted on a small number of middle-aged men for a short duration with no dietary control.

So basically, from a clinical perspective, it's completely useless, but, proven solution.

Oh, trust me, bro strikes again.

And it's not just the study. Glyphosate is water-soluble, primarily cleared by the kidneys and excreted in uri- urine. It does not bioaccumulate in the gut. The idea that a supplement could flush it is not supported by any possible mechanism with established evidence, but this is what influencers always do.

They do it with vaccines, too. They pretend that they just... these things stay in your body when we know that it actually leaves, but they just fearmonger around that. And then finally, you have their claim that this is the first product to receive certification under the Detox Project's Gold Standard Glyphosate Detox Program.

Yes, that's detox twice in their title. It's very official sounding. Is it for a detox? Then you find out it's just an advocacy site focused on sustainable agriculture, and the certification is registered to a company in Bulgaria, which functions as a for-profit certification and licensing operation.

I knew it was gonna be dumb.

Well, that's Raw. But continuing on, because he was not the only one. Another influencer named Misty, who has over 250,000 Instagram followers and describes herself as a detox coach and healer, posted a stitch to Chris's video where the caption reads in part, "Ready to detox glyphosate from your body?

Comment detox, and I'll send you my daily gentle detox that removes glyphosate and replaces with minerals. Feel good now." If you comment detox and you're sent... Again, the automated DM. They're all automated DMs. It links to a product called Rise and Vibe from the company Frequence, which, you guessed it, another MLM There was also several influencers similarly using glyphosate as a prompt before linking to their Touchstone Essentials detox.

Affiliates for this company are like all over the map and have claimed that this detox can do a lot. When the COVID fog conspiracy was taking off in January 2025, we almost forgot that happened because it feels like a lifetime ago. affiliates for this company claimed that the fogs was actually-- the fog was actually parasites.

Somebody on Facebook got their microscope out, and it was parasites. But this zeolite detox could cleanse you. More than just a handful of mothers who are affiliates for this company have claimed that this product is responsible for their non-verbal children speaking. Another influencer who, Derek, we've covered a bit recently, she's claimed that this product healed her Raynaud's syndrome.

Raynaud's? so yeah, I'm sure it's a glyphosate detox too. Well, just

as they have to pin numerous problems on particular, chemicals like glyphosate, they also have to pretend their products are good for everything so that they can keep their sales funnel alive.

It is an interesting concept of this one problem or symptom that you're having a- you're having is contributed to one thing, but the thing that I'm selling can help with everything.

So, it wasn't just influencers getting in on the glyphosate sales funnel opportunity, though. Rho Casa Organics, who sells natural products you can trust, according to their Instagram bio, used a fear-inducing video about glyphosate to promote their fruit and veg-veggie wash product. This same company leveraged the Tylenol headlines in September to promote various Tylenol alternatives that they also sell.

these companies and influencers prove time and time again that they don't actually care about your health, they care about your money.

And Finally, Section D, How a Country Becomes "Underbabied"

you no doubt remember that Dr. Oz is no longer pimping quack miracle cures and magic elixirs on The Dr.

Oz Show and taking what some may call kickbacks and others may call payola from the makers of those magic cures. no, no. Instead, he is now the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Confirmed by the Senate 53 to 45 on a party line vote, he now oversees Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and the Affordable Care Act exchanges within the Department of Health and Human Services.

So, ladies and gentlemen Here's the head of CMS

Okay, go ahead. So l- let me speak a little bit about the reality that one in three Americans are under-babied. What does under-babied mean? That means that you either don't have any children or you have less children than you would normally want to have.

So today we're going to talk about birth rates, marriage, economic uncertainty, corruption, the social safety net, and probably a bunch of other things like thanks Oprah for Mehmet Oz.

Yeah. So this is gonna be a 12-hour podcast, Blue

Gal. No, it's not. Just lean into it. we're definitely abbreviating it, but-

Well, I gotta say, researching this podcast and putting it together as an outline almost defeated me, because it kept sprawling further and further outward.

So to make it manageable, what we're probably gonna do is break this into two or three different parts. Really dig into the year 2008 next time, because that's the year that this long, cold civil war Republicans have been waging against the rest of us really broke out into the open for everyone to see.

What happened in 2008, Driftglass?

Everything, Blue Gal. Everything happened. Every goddamn thing. That's right. Mm-hmm. That's right.

But first, 1947, when the United States was going through a significant baby boom. Maybe you read about it. The birth rate that year rose to 25.8 live births per th- 1,000 people.

This represented a huge increase as troops returned from World War II, with nearly 3.7 million babies born that year. The peak birth year for the baby boomer generation in the United States was 1957. 4.3 million babies were born that year.

That's a lot of babies.

Yeah.

And for the next 70 years and counting, that demographic bulge has been one of the primary drivers, maybe even the primary driver, of culture in the United States, our economy, our domestic policy, and our foreign policy.

The babies that clogged hospital hallways in the 1940s and 1950s because there weren't enough beds to accommodate all the pregnant mothers are now the senior citizens who are wondering why they can't see their primary care physician until November, or who they're supposed to go to now that their doctor has retired altogether, or all their nurses are retiring.

Yes. Well, they're all- And what are we gonna do? They're all- I wanna talk to my

doctor today.

Or they're all from some foreign country that I don't- Yeah ... understand, and I'm suspicious. And I want a white

male doctor. Oh, brother. Right. Dr. Welby. Story of my life. Yeah. I want Dr. Welby, damn it. I want Dr. Welby.

Yep. Yep, exactly. This is just the story of my work day every Monday. That's why he's having me tell you this story, this part- Yes ... of the story. I get calls, "Can I speak to Dr. Smith?"

Yeah

No, you can't, ever. Anyway, compare those numbers with the US birth rate just a decade earlier, those boomer numbers.

During the Great Depression, the US birth rate plunged, reaching a then record low of 18.4 births per 1,000 people in 1936. The total fertility rate dropped to approximately 2.1 children per woman, per all women during this time. And why do you suppose that happened? Well, it's common sense, isn't it? Duh.

Instability, economic uncertainty, the future looked bleak, and too bleak to start a family or have more children when you can barely feed yourself.

Exactly. Exactly.

So how about the birth rate in 1967, the year that Lost In Space episode was shot?

We promise that might be the last reference to Lost In Space, but we can't promise- Maybe

100%. 100%.

It's hard not to talk about Lost In Space, people.

Yeah. that is a great question. according to the website Macrotrends, in 1967, the birth rate per 1,000 was 17.1, which surprisingly was still lower than the birth rate during the depths of the Great Depression. However, this is important, it didn't feel like a crash, since 1967 was still adjacent to the baby boom of the late '40s and '50s, and was happening during a time of unprecedented, in, in the history of the world, unprecedented economic prosperity in this country.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The next birth rate collapse that really did register culturally as a collapse happened during the 1970s, when you and I were alive, Blue Gal. Mm-hmm. And when you think about it for two minutes, the reason for that is also pretty clear. Runaway inflation was starting to make the future look unstable again, economically perilous again.

Add to that the early 1970s oil shock when almost overnight there were long lines at gas stations, and in some cases there was rationing. Suddenly it looked like hard times were coming back. So in 1970, the birth rate was 18.4 per 1,000. By 1975, '76, it had dropped to 14.6, just in time for America's bicentennial.

And just going back in history a little bit, I think I've mentioned this before, there was a TV show called The Story of English that was narrated and hosted by Robert MacNeil of the MacNeil/Lehrer Report- Really? ... if you're old enough to remember that. I do.

MacNeil/Lehrer,

yeah. And there was one segment that stayed with me for the rest of my life.

He was talking about development of language at a time of immigration and emigration from Great Britain.

Right.

And he showed this couple, and th- it was dr- a dramatization, but this couple that's living in a house that's made of stone and has a grass roof And they're a young couple, and he, and R- Robert MacNeil is narrating, and he says, "Like men throughout history, John," our typical 13th, 14th century peasant, "delayed getting married until he had a house."

Exactly.

And I thought, oh my God, that's forever. That's one of those forever facts. Until you have a stable roof over your head, if you're any kind of planner about your life, you wait until you can afford a roof over your head before you get married and start a family, right?

I would just a- add one thing to that.

Mm-hmm. I believe it's Robin MacNeil, not Robert MacNeil.

It was Robert. I think he g- went by Robin, but on the TV show he was Robert.

Got it. And- Anyway ... and secondly, just because I'm a Western nerd- Yeah ... I like well-written Westerns that are at least period accurate.

Mm-hmm.

Getting a house- Yeah

preparing a house for your bride to- Mm-hmm ... so you could get married and start a family was the subtext or text in a whole bunch of episodes of classic Westerns, of Western movies. Gunsmoke,

of all those. Absolutely.

All those, yep. Abso- You could not have a family without a house, without- Yeah ... a house, a piece of property, and a way to make a living.

That was just- And a farm

of some kind, yeah.

Absolutely. That's what- Yeah ... that's what those people were out there looking for. That's why the settlers came in. They were looking for land so they could put down roots and raise a family.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It is no surprise that the divorce rate in the '70s also roughly follows the prosperity, insecurity, birth rate curve.

There was a actually a big post-war spike in the divorce rate that runs counter to the birth rate downturn, but had much less to do with economics in 1946 and more to do with the fracturing of thousands of quickie war marriages.

Mm-hmm.

That strain of long separations during World War II and the intense challenges of re- integrating veterans into civilian life.

If you've ever watched The Best Years of Our Lives- The Best Years of Our... Yeah, I was gonna say. I was gonna say ... you've seen the quickie war marriage- Yeah ... fall apart.

And the reintegration of veterans into- Yeah,

and how hard it was for some of them- Yeah ... to reintegrate. Yeah. Yep, yep. But the biggest spike in divorces during the 1970s happened for many of the same reasons as the declining birth rate, not to mention the rise of no-fault divorce, but- Yeah, well-

that made it easier, but it was economic.

and that is true because, as with any big demographic changes, there's always other contingent reasons for it to happen. There's women in the workforce, there's women's liberation, there's the pill, there's a whole bunch of other reasons.

But the reality of household economics is always there.

Trump hosted an event on maternal healthcare, which is a high priority for the White House. Because what is a woman's birth canal if not a Strait of Hormuz that our government- ... must take control of. Now, the focus of the event was America's lower birth rates. So of course, Trump invited RFK Jr.,

health secretary and guy whose iPhone screen is always greasy. So let me ask, RFK Jr., why are birth rates down? and please remember, when you answer, don't make this weird.

for men in 1970, men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today. Oh.

I'm sorry. did he just do a back-in-my-day for sperm?

Back when I was a teen, we had twice the jism. Our spunk knew how to drive a stick, they don't make man butter like that anymore. Now, he didn't explain how he knows that, but- ... knowing RFK, I'm sure he personally went down to the sperm bank and sampled them like gelato flavors, Oh. Mm.

Can I get it with sprinkles? Please? Okay. But it's interesting that he mentioned teenage sperm in particular, because when you look at the lower birth rates, that's mostly driven by fewer teen births, by which I mean teenagers giving birth and not moms giving birth to teenagers. Aw, congratulations, it's a Mr.

Beast fan. I'm just confused why the government is apparently trying to reboot Sixteen and Pregnant, but- ... but Dr. Oz, maybe you have a good reason. And again, you know what? I'll remind you. Just please don't make it weird.

Go ahead. So l- let me speak a little bit about the reality that one in three Americans are under-babied.

Oh.

I said, "Don't make it weird." Under-babied? What does that even mean? Are we shocked no one wants to have babies anymore? nothing makes the ladies wanna raw dog it like hearing RFK Jr. talking about what the jizz was like at Woodstock.

in the 1980s, with the rise of Reaganite politics, all that began to change. If you were feeling the pinch, if you need scapegoats, Reagan had them prepped and ready for you, one that solidified the hold Republicans already had on the racist South thanks to Nixon's Southern strategy. This is from Washington Monthly, October 29th, 2024, quote, "The tyranny of the welfare queen."

And for decades, the conversation about social services in America has centered on a false and harmful stereotype about who deserves help. The so-called welfare queen is among the most potent, persistent, and pernicious stereotypes ever deployed in modern politics. Popularized by Ronald Reagan, then weaponized by other conservatives, the welfare queen represents Americans' ugliest assumptions about who receives public assistance.

The woman first smeared by this dubious title was Linda Taylor of Chicago, who was indicted for welfare fraud in 1974. Reagan hyperbolically claimed during his 1976 presidential run that she collected $150,000 in government assistance a year, including welfare benefits and food stamps. The true total was about 40,000-

That sounds a lot like Donald- Over

multiple years

I was gonna say, that sounds a lot like Donald Trump.

Yeah Just making terrifying- Making shit up ... shit up about minorities- Yep ... to scare the crap out of the idiots and the racists.

Right. The Chicago Tribune reported that she drove a Cadillac and vacationed in Hawaii, while a photo in The New York Times showed Taylor emerging from a court date elegantly coiffed and draped in a fur-trimmed coat.

But as criminal as she may have been, Taylor was no more typical of Americans on welfare than Bernie Madoff was typical of investment bankers. Nevertheless, the archetype of the welfare queen was powerful enough to elevate welfare reform to a national crisis, and to help propel Reagan to the White House four years later.

"The welfare queen was symbolically terrifying," the historian Rick Perlstein told the Chicago Tribune in 2019. "There were a thousand Linda Taylors waiting to bankrupt your city." In fact, as the political scientist An- Anne M. Whitesell argues in a new book, Living Off the Government?, much of US social policy in the post-Reagan era is a direct reaction to the welfare queen's perceived moral defects.

"The public identity of the welfare queen, the poor, single, African American women, woman whose poverty was caused by her own laziness and promiscuity, is still the driving force in creating welfare policy," she writes. "The results," she argued, "are public policies that calcify racial and gender stereotypes of people in poverty, while failing to provide the help they actually need," unquote.

And the key here is that sentence containing perceived moral defects. That's the key, 'cause this is the conservative, libertarian, and Randite mindset of wealth being a proxy for morality and superiority, and poverty is your own goddamn fault 'cause you're a moral failure. That's why you're poor.

And here is Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec helpfully boiling that entire worldview down to one single sentence.

Capitalism, God's way of determining who is smart and who is poor.

And if you were around in the 1980s and 1990s, we're sure you heard things like, "Your kids are not my problem," more than once, as children increasingly stopped being viewed as a shared social investment and started being viewed transactionally.

In earlier eras, especially post-war America, there had been a strong civic assumption that children benefited society collectively. All the things we mentioned, public schools, vaccines, nutrition programs, playgrounds, libraries, et cetera, were often defended on the grounds that investing in children, white children, by the way-

Yeah, let's be clear

benefited the country as a whole. Yeah.

But beginning in the Reagan era, the neoliberal right-wing turn increasingly reframed citizenship itself as individual market competition. So instead of children are the public good, we should invest in kids, it's important for all of us, the cultural message became, children are a private lifestyle choice.

And once you redefine children as consumer choices, then helping poor families starts getting rhetorically recast as subsidizing irresponsibility, rewarding bad behavior, and especially stealing from productive, hardworking citizens, Blue Gal.

That mentality intensified during fights over AFDC, SNAP benefits, Medicaid, free school lunches, public housing, children's health insurance, and the Affordable Care Act.

And to their shame, even some Democrats adopted the language of dependency, personal responsibility, and ending welfare as we know it because Republicans had successfully made compassion into a dirty word. An important thing historians and sociologists often note is that this rhetoric was deeply selective.

Yeah. Meaning it's racist.

Yeah.

the same people who were saying, "If you can't afford kids, don't have them," often opposed comprehensive sex education, and contraception access, and abortion rights, and childcare subsidies, higher wages, universal healthcare, and housing assistance. So the rhetoric wasn't really about preventing suffering.

It was about assigning moral blame.

And race mattered enormously.

Yeah.

Even when unstated, and especially when unstated. Media imagery in the 1980s and 1990s disproportionately portrayed welfare recipients as urban Black women, despite the fact that welfare recipients were demographically more diverse than the stereotype suggested, and were majority white, by the way.

still are.

Scholars have written extensively about how welfare queen rhetoric functioned as a coded racial narrative during the post-Civil Rights era.

And one of the enduring effects of that era is that Americans today are still incredibly, unusually hostile compared to peer democracies towards the idea that society collectively owes material support to families with children.

You can still hear echoes of the old rhetoric whenever debates arise over school lunches, and childcare, and student debt healthcare, housing, paid leave, or child tax credits, especially- And

I would argue sh- school shootings

Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is not- Trying to prevent

school shootings is not my job

Not my problem That's,

that, that's the right-wing argument,

yeah That's, that Second Amendment and your right to own a bazooka trumps everything else- Every child's

life Yeah Every child's life

And when- Yep

Barack Obama sheds a tear over, they laugh about it

Over Sandy Hook, yep

Yeah, they laugh about it and mock him, This is how depraved these people are, especially in arguments that frame any public investment as, "Why should I pay for somebody else's choices?" And at least since Reagan, Republicans have made it their mission to take a sledgehammer to every form of public investment that could c- create a hospitable environment for young people who would consider marriage and starting a family.

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;

Democracy Now!

All In with Chris Hayes

PBS NewsHour

Thom Hartmann Program

The Bitchuation Room

CounterSpin

Roland S. Martin

Conspirituality

The Brian Lehrer Show

The Professional Left Podcast

and The Daily Show

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 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 a link to join our Discord community where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on all the social media platforms!

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: 05-15-2026

Full Show Notes

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

Today we examine what it would actually take to claw back democracy from billionaire capture — and why some people think it's more possible than it looks. We'll hear about California's proposed billionaire wealth tax, AOC's vision for change that doesn't depend on positional power, and why Peter Thiel's new "AI Tribunal of Truth" may have accidentally revealed exactly what the ruling class fears most.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 45 minutes today include

C-SPAN

More Perfect Union with Inequality Media Civic Action, & Robert Reich

Taylor Lorenz

Brittany Page

Pitchfork Economics

and Washington Monthly

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 6 sections;

Section A, Tech Power, Surveillance, and the End of Truth

Section B, Bezos, Amazon, and the Human Cost

Section C, How the Tax Code Built the Aristocracy

Section D, Ideology of Capital

Section E, Markets in the Mind

And Section F, Bubble, Backlash, and the Way Forward

And now, on to the show.

it's funny because, in this op-ed that, Jeff Bezos paid for in The Washington Post, there was this line that you had mentioned earlier about, as a potential 2028 contender, XYZ.

And in the context of that, it's, it was very clear this was a veiled threat, right? So it's, the elite saying, "If you want this job, you just stepped out of line. And we want you to know where the real power is. And it's in the, it's in the modern-day barons who own The Post and own the algorithms, and we're gonna...

We'll make an example out of you." 

And what's funny about that 

is that they assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat, and my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. And

presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers' rights are forever. Women's rights, all of that. And so anyways, I... the way... But to, A finer point to your question is that when you aren't attached, right?

When you haven't been, like, fantasizing about being this or that since the time you were seven years old- it is tremendously liberating because I get to wake up every day and say, "How am I gonna meet the moment?" And conditions change radically all the time. So I make my response less to an attachment to some positional, title or position and working backwards from there.

But I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window, and observing the conditions of this country and saying, "What move or what decision can I make today that is gonna get us closer to that future stronger, faster, better than yesterday?" And those conditions, I think a lot of times, I, I remember the first time I walked onto the Senate floor.

I remember the first time I walked onto the Senate floor. I was a freshman, I was a freshman in the House, and a fun fact is that House members are allowed to go onto the Senate, but Senate members are not allowed to go into the House unless they're allowed in and invited. And, and so I had walked onto the Senate floor and, I looked around and I was like, "Wow, it's, everyone here thinks they're gonna be president."

And they are making decisions from that place. And I don't want to make decisions from a place of, "What's in it for me?" I wanna make decisions from a place of, "How are we gonna change the country?" And that's in response to people en masse. It's in response to the numbers that we have in the House and in the Senate.

I count votes. I build caucuses. I help elect responsible and principled people that, that, a- and I try to decouple our political system from money and politics. And so my decisions come from a very substantive place. And, that's what goes into weighing it. And the great thing about that is that no billionaire can stop that.

No concentrated, level of power, no elite, no gatekeeper can prevent me from doing everything I can, waking up every day in service of the working class. And I can do that in the House. I can do it in the Senate. I can do it from, uh, the White House. I can do it from a shack in Upstate New York, chopping wood- and being a burnout.

I can do it from anywhere. Wow, that's one I didn't even, that was one I didn't even think of. If it makes you feel any better, and if you find this more liberating, I don't think you were gonna get Jeff Bezos's endorsement anyway, 

billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, they get paid differently. He famously takes a $1 annual salary from Facebook, but he mostly gets paid in the form of shares of his company's stock, and if he never sells those shares, he never has to pay taxes on them.

Same with most other billionaires in California. Despite holding nearly $2 trillion in wealth, the state's billionaires only contribute about 2.5% of the state's income tax base. The vast majority of their wealth is sitting in their investment portfolios untaxed. California could raise the top income tax rate to 95% and never touch that money.

That is the point of a wealth tax. In California, it would be a one-time 5% tax on an individual's net worth if it's over a billion dollars. And it can be helpful to deal in physical objects here, since these fortunes are so huge. This is a superyacht. One of these costs about $500 million. If Mark Zuckerberg were to convert his entire fortune into superyachts, he would have 444.6 of them.

If the wealth tax passes, Zuckerberg would be left with a measly 422 superyachts. In the four odd months it took for me to research, report, travel, and produce this video, Mark Zuckerberg's wealth just sitting in its investment portfolio has already grown by the amount he would be asked to pay. 5%, if they're billionaires, when their wealth is growing 7% a year, is almost a rounding error.

But many of these billionaires are still spending millions to try to defeat this tax, and already taking steps to try to get out of it Businesses are fleeing California And it's gonna cause a mass exodus. This wealth tax is having a huge impact on people fleeing to Florida. It's a badly drafted effort.

It's already had an outsize impact on this state. Okay, to be clear, we're talking about six people, six billionaires who have told reporters that they either purchased real estate or incorporated LLCs outside of California. Plus, the proposal covers any billionaire who was a resident of California as of January 1st this year.

So if they haven't taken steps already, it's too late. Recent polling shows that a majority of Californians favor the tax, but also that they're concerned that they will have to foot the bill if the billionaires flee. And the measure's opponents are spending millions to try to push this scare tactic to the public.

It's an argument that sounds pretty similar to that of the governor, Gavin Newsom, and there might be a reason for that. Former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash, Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, these billionaires have all contributed the maximum amount to Gavin Newsom's campaigns in previous cycles, as have other California billionaires like Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, who also incidentally cut a quarter million dollar check to stop Zohran Mamdani from becoming mayor of New York.

Taxing the ultra rich was a huge part of Mamdani's campaign, and California billionaires took notice and started spending to try to stop him. Now, those same billionaires are counting on their years-long investment in Gavin Newsom, and it looks like it's paying off. What would a compromise look like to you?

I don't know what, I don't know what there is to compromise. Altogether, Newsom has received financial support from 50 of the state's billionaires and their spouses. And in a state with roughly 200 billionaires, that's not a drop in the bucket. As Newsom positions himself as a 2028 presidential contender, those same billionaires are now funding that effort through a couple of newly formed federal PACs.

A sizable portion of Newsom's billionaire backers come from the tech sector, which is an important part of California's economy. Your home is beautiful. Thank you. Do you think that you guys would also, too, leave California if the billionaire tax passed? I think that is our, big fear. It's the nightmare.

We're going through the phases of denial, acceptance, grief, however you call it. 

These guys are betting that doom and gloom projections about billionaire founders being forced to sell their super voting shares and potentially losing control of their companies will be enough to scare voters into rejecting the proposal.

It shouldn't be too, too difficult if on paper you're worth several billion dollars to come up with your tax payment without, selling shares or doing some dramatic move. 

There's even a special provision for startups that would allow their founders to delay paying the tax until after their company goes public.

We're trying to make it as easy and reasonable as possible. We're not trying to cause a liquidity problem for these billionaires. We're not trying to cause them to sell shares when they don't want to. We're just trying to use reasonable modern tools in order to close a gap. Property 

rights are?

Human rights. 

And sure, billionaire-backed PACs are already spending big to try to defeat this proposal, but the billionaire class solidarity might not be as strong as you'd think. This is an interview with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, and one of the California billionaires who would be subject to the wealth tax.

Is it something that's of concern to you? 

I gotta tell you, I haven't thought about it even once. We work in Silicon Valley because, that's where the talent pool is, and, whatever taxes I guess they would like to, apply, so be it. I'm perfectly fine with it.

It di- it never crossed my mind once. 

For Huang, a one-time 5% tax is a small price to pay to live in a region where his business can recruit the most highly skilled workers. It's a perspective that mirrors that of the working Californians who I spoke with. 

Billionaires are making their money off the backs of our public infrastructure, and so we need to make sure that they are paying their fair share for the resources that they are using.

They are making a lot of revenue on workers and working families in the state, and if they cannot help with the 5% to help the workers that are making their businesses thrive, then see you later. 

Why are we doing this? We are doing this because on July 4th of last year, President Trump signed a piece of legislation that's going to take $1 trillion out of the US healthcare system, and that money is being moved to the richest people in the country.

Affordable healthcare, universal childcare, free school meals for every kid. These are not radical concepts. They're a part of everyday life in many parts of the world. But it took decades of work and five failed attempts before the millionaires tax became a reality in Massachusetts. Billionaire PACs are already pouring money into California to defeat this proposal.

These things do not just become a part of everyday life, not without a fight.

Hans Moravec, a roboticist working at Carnegie Mellon, became enormously influential within Silicon Valley's intellectual subculture back in the '80s. In 1988, he published the book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. In the book, Moravec argues that humans were in their last century, which was prescient and that we would soon all create machines that were smarter than ourselves.

These mind children would ultimately replace us, and he insisted that we view these successors as our offspring, and that computers would essentially be the next step in human evolution. Moravec wrote cheerfully about our human extinction. His vision validated Silicon Valley's utopian streak and its relentless push for innovation.

If humans were temporary and building machines to replace us was this higher good, then it allowed these tech workers to believe that what they were building was noble, and they were contributing to this future better world. In a 1995 article for Wired magazine titled Superhumanism, the writer Chris Platt interviews Moravec.

Moravec began the interview by enthusiastically asking Platt, quote, "Wouldn't it be great if you could enhance your abilities via artificial intelligence and extend your lifespan and improve on the human condition?" Again, this is all back in 1995. He predicted that by 2030, quote, "We should have a third-generation universal robot that emulates higher level thought processes such as planning and foresight," and that it will quote, "Maintain an internal model of not only its own past actions, but of the outside world itself.

That means that it could run different simulations of how it plans to tackle a task, see how well each one works out, and compare them with what it's done before. An onlooker will have the eerie sense that it's imagining different solutions to a problem, developing its own ideas." Around the same time in 1993, mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge echoed these ideas in a paper on the technological singularity.

He declared that the creation of superhuman intelligence would definitively end the human era. "The moment that machines surpass us in terms of intelligence, history would belong to them," he said. Humans would no longer be in control, and we probably wouldn't even be relevant. He outlined several different paths to our extinction, and these included superhuman AI, human-computer integration, biotech genetic upgrades, but all of these basically led to the same place, which is the end of humanity, or as he put it, quote, "The end of the human era."

Young engineers and investors in the Valley began to believe his future was undeniably our collective destiny. The internet progressed throughout the '90s, eventually birthing the dot-com bubble and subsequent crash. By the beginning of the next millennium, 26% of households in America had internet access, and the average person was becoming more and more comfortable with technology.

In 2005, Ray Kurzweil published the book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. The book repackaged Moravec and Vinge's pro-extinctionist ideas for a mass audience with an optimistic gloss. Kurzweil's book hit the bestseller list, and people were excited about this magical future where humans would merge with machines and be able to upload our minds to live forever in the digital ether.

This idea of biological humans becoming obsolete was going from fringe to mainstream culture and became more openly embraced by Silicon Valley CEOs, founders, and especially venture capitalists These ideas were also being adopted by the men who built some of Silicon Valley's most notorious empires. In Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, he talks about a party where Elon clashed with Google co-founder Larry Page.

Page literally accused Musk of being a speciesist for arguing that humanity deserved to continue at all. Larry Page argued that digital life was undeniably the next stage of evolution, and that it was parochial and even prejudiced of Elon to cling to the supremacy of the human race. Musk replied that, yes, he was pro-human, but of course, that has since changed.

As technology progressed, especially throughout the boom time of the 2010s, startups began to explicitly seek to construct a post-human world. The iPhone had redefined everyday life, apps were taking off, and the valley's rhetoric about transcendence was becoming more and more pervasive. In 2011, The Atlantic ran an essay gushing over Google's data-driven decision-making, framing it as superior to the, quote, "Irrational, error-prone tendencies of human managers."

The piece suggested that machines would ultimately make better leaders than people, and this tone of machines as our savior and humans as obstacles became increasingly common in the tech press. A 2012 Wired feature titled, quote, "Better Than Human: Why Robots Will and Must Take Our Jobs" proclaimed that robots were destined to replace us in the workforce entirely.

Humans simply could no longer compete with the flawless, tireless machine Wired writer Kevin Kelly wrote, quote, "This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You'll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. 90% of your coworkers will be unseen machines.

Most of what you will do will not be possible without them, and there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do." Kevin Kelly continued, quote, "We need to let robots take over. They will do jobs we have been doing, and they will do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can't do at all.

They will do jobs we never imagined needed to be done, and they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were. Let the robots take the jobs, and let them help us dream up a new work that matters." A year later, Wired ran a piece on self-driving cars with the line, quote, "Humans are the most dangerous part of the system: drunk, distracted, careless, and fallible."

This is true, by the way. Humans are super flawed creatures, especially at driving. I'm actually very pro self-driving cars. But I think it's really important to examine the role that mainstream media plays in framing these issues and the tech industry as a whole and setting these narratives. Throughout the 2010s, journalists and the tech press kept pushing forward these ideas that humans were bad, error-prone, messy, and dumb.

Machines, on the other hand, were positioned in the media as clean, sleek, smart, and evolved. They were like humans equal danger, machines equal safety. And throughout all of this, there's just this- Underpinning implication that if humans were so flawed, which again, they kept reiterating that we were, maybe it's better to just let machines take over.

Maybe they actually deserve to take over altogether. In a 2013 Vanity Fair article titled quote, "Enthusiasts and Skeptics Debate Artificial Intelligence," the writer Kurt Andersen wonders if the singularity will usher in global techno nirvana or civilizational ruin. The piece casts Vinge and Kurzweil as forward-thinking techno evangelists who believe human evolution is up for redesign, and they talk about editing our genes to remove these messy biological errors, AKA eugenics The very next year in 2014, The New York Times ran a piece about predictive algorithms in healthcare with the headline, When Machines Know You Better Than You Know Yourself.

That same year, a video titled, quote, Humans Need Not Apply went viral on YouTube. The video is 15 minutes long, and it compares human workers to horses replaced by engines. It projected that nearly half of all jobs, especially white-collar jobs and creative jobs, would disappear under automation. The video has amassed over 18 million views, and it ended up becoming enormously prescient.

I remember actually watching this at work and being like, . As all of this stuff is happening online and in the mainstream media and culture, you also see this post-human ideology shaping the physical world. Architectural design throughout the 2010s became sterile, and retail spaces like the Apple Store removed any trace of humanity.

Coffee shops adopted minimalist chairs and tables and antiseptic lighting and white walls. Customers stopped paying human beings and started to use iPads at the till. And this sterile aesthetic of minimalism really just was so focused on removing the visibility of human workers. It reinforced this idea subconsciously that humans are messy, chaotic, and unreliable.

Picture this. You're at work. Your colleague collapses. They hit their head. Blood is pooling around them and you're absolutely panicked. You believe that they are dying. You desperately, naturally want to help them, but your boss tells you to turn around, stop looking, and get back to work. According to reporting from Western Edge, this is what happened April 6th at an Amazon warehouse where an employee died, and the workers who desperately wanted to help him were instead told to get back to fulfilling shipments to protect Jeff Bezos's profits.

While this is not being widely covered and we're only learning about this a full week after it happened, we're starting to see other headlines about burning warehouses and Molotov cocktails and bullets flying toward an AI CEO's house. All you had to do was pay us enough to live. There goes your inventory.

A burst of light at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and a fleeing man the FBI identifies as 20-year-old Woodlands resident Daniel Moreno Gama. Around 2:00 AM Sunday, San Francisco police say someone fired gunshots from a car, hitting the OpenAI CEO's home. Amid unprecedented income and wealth inequality, we're seeing people reach a breaking point and turn to violence in the absence of political and policy solutions that empower them in the workplace, protect their rights, and ensure that they can meet their basic needs.

Or, on a more basic level, not be left to bleed out on a warehouse floor while managers tell your colleagues to get back to the Amazon packages passing by on the conveyor belts that just won't stop. And while that would seem like the most important story, The New York Times is over here running profiles of Jeff Bezos's new wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos.

Look at this. "Someone has to be happy. Why not Lauren Sanchez Bezos? As half of an unfathomably powerful couple, Mrs. Sanchez Bezos seems to have influenced the uber rich to stop apologizing and start enjoying themselves." Hey, New York Times, read the room. In one world, we have Amazon employees who heard and saw their colleague collapse and believed he was dying and/or dead who were encouraged not to look at him and to keep working inside an Amazon warehouse.

While Lauren Bezos details her work-free days with Jeff, working out, drinking coffee, and making gratitude lists to ensure that she centers joy. This is truly sick, and once I put these two stories together in my mind, I couldn't shake it, and I had to come and talk to you about it because this is corporate abuse.

This is stripping people of their humanity, and this cannot stand. And make no mistake, our society looks at things like warehouse fires and Molotov cocktails and bullets, and correctly codes that as violence. But when we see the violence of corporations prioritizing profits over people, paying starvation wages, telling people to get back to work while their colleagues die in front of them, our society somehow looks at that and doesn't code that as violence.

But it too is violence, and it too is unacceptable, and it too should have consequences. Where are the handcuffs for these abusers? It's time to wake up. Let's read this critical reporting from Western Edge, Everyone is replaceable, death rattles Oregon Amazon facility. Sam was helping unload trucks when a heavy thud against concrete echoed across the Amazon warehouse.

An employee's lifeless body lay on the floor. Work halted in the loading docks on the south side of Amazon's distribution center in Troutdale, Oregon. Sam and other employees stared at the person who'd collapsed just twenty feet away. Conveyor belts of packages continued to roll. Quote, "I didn't have a direct line of sight of the person's face, but I saw a body form laying lifeless," Sam told the Western Edge.

Employees who spoke for this story requested anonymity to protect their jobs, and their names have been changed. Now, think about this. These employees are afraid to speak out and tell us that they watched their colleague die as their managers told them to keep working, because they will lose their jobs for exposing this violence and inhumanity.

And this man did in fact die. He was forty-six years old, and employees called nine one one. They tried to provide life-saving measures, describing to the dispatchers that this man was bleeding extensively from his head. He was starting to turn blue, and the manager stepped in to tell them to get back to the true priority, Amazon's bottom line.

For more than an hour, several employees said workers in the facility were instructed to continue fetching totes, picking items off shelves, and loading them onto trucks for delivery as the man lay dead, and management figured out their next steps. News of the fatality quickly spread through the building, but workers say top managers did not call operations to an immediate halt.

Within moments of the man hitting the floor, Sam said a woman ran over and began performing chest compressions. The woman began to cry and screamed out for someone to help her. Sam, who has CPR training, asked her supervisor if she could assist. The supervisor watched the woman heaving her weight into the man's chest and gave no response.

"I start sobbing, and I said, 'I want to help, please. I know she's going to get tired and need to be subbed out,'" Sam told The Western Edge. The supervisor, who Sam perceived to be in shock, had a simple reply. "It has to be management or safety team. Please get back to work." "I need to help," Sam said. "Just turn around and not look.

Let's get back to work," Sam recalled the manager saying. This too, like Molotov cocktails and burning warehouses, is violence. It is traumatizing. How are you supposed to feel like your employer gives a shit about your wellbeing and safety when you watch your management team rally to protect the corporation while your colleague bleeds out in front of you?

This is violence, and I encourage you all to read this in full and give this publication, Western Edge, your full support because it is a remarkable thing for them to break this story. And with all the tools and resources available to an outlet like The New York Times, you'd think they would be breaking a story like this instead of giving us a profile on Lauren while Amazon didn't even pay these employees for a full shift after they were sent home early after witnessing this death and being forced to work for hours while he bled out, and they're only offering unpaid leave and optional counseling to those who are interested.

The New York Times is instead diving into the misunderstood Lauren Bezos and her time spent at her $230 million compound, as they describe it, calling it the billionaire bunker. This is grotesque. As wealth and income inequality explodes and people feel trapped in an ever-tightening grip of the capitalist system that allows the corporate overlords to steal from the working class by paying them peanuts and padding their pockets, we need to start recognizing that this is theft.

This is theft. 

I think anybody listening to this would agree with the two observations. A- and observation number one is that we're living in this time in which you cannot walk down the street in certain zip codes of this country without bumping into a plutocrat trying to change the world.

They are doing philanthropy maybe. Their kid is in Africa right now starting a social enterprise that turns poop into recycled coffee. They come back from those Africa trips with these, plutocrat bracelets that they all wear when they go to Africa. They are involved in making finance more humane by doing impact investing or whatever else.

And so all these initiatives are really ubiquitous, and we all know they're going on. Y- you, y- when you go to college campuses, every young person is e- is engaged in some kinda, change the world effort. And so on the one hand, we're living in this time in which the very, very rich and powerful seem to be all in on the idea of making the world a better place, and aware of inequality and interested in fighting it.

On the other hand, we're living in this time in which the same class of people, the same plutocratic class that is doing so much to give and help essentially has secured for itself and continues to benefit from a near monopoly on the fruits of the future, and has essentially rigged the society to function as a casino in which the house, i.e.

them, always wins. And so the inquiry behind Winners Take All started with the question, what is the relationship between these two facts, which themselves are not particularly in dispute? I think where the dispute comes in is what you think the relationship is, and the conventional wisdom out there is, or was, that the relationship was one of a drop in the bucket, that, yes, we do live in this time in which there is this savage inequality.

However, rich people are on the case, stepping up, a- and there's just not enough of them, or they're not giving enough away, or they're not stretching their dollars far enough by not being effective enough, and that if only there were more of them and they gave it away better and they did this and that, then we could solve these problems.

And I started to become intrigued by an opposite possibility, that all this elite Magnanimity and do-gooding activity was actually part of how we sustain the elite monopoly on the fruits of the future. That in other words, the extraordinary helping of our time was how we maintain the extraordinary hoarding.

And I did what I do as a reporter, which is I began to report it out. Tease out more how all this do-gooding sustains the inequality and propels it. To start with, I'll say I get that's counterintuitive to people. Yeah ... I think if you're like a Koch brother, first of all, my condolences on being a Koch brother or being a deceased Koch brother.

But- ... if you are... Sorry, was that not spoken with enough- No, 

you're ki- You're with me, baby ... you're kinder 

than me. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. My- I forgot to drink my Koch compassion coffee this morning. 

Yeah, exactly. 

So I think there's some people who would say "Forget this guy.

Who cares about inequality," right? So let's... i'm not gonna have much luck with those people. But if you're persuaded that, yeah, this inequality thing is a big problem, I think many people, probably most people, the people in a way I was writing to force to question, I think many people would say, "Okay, but at least these people are doing some small thing to help.

Isn't it better than doing nothing," right? That's the basic question that my book is up against because my book is a portrait of a series of people and of gestures which I think at the margin, each of them is an improvement in the condition of the world if you look at it in isolation. And so the question then becomes, what is this guy saying about the fact that not just the system that produces this wealth in which these people are trying to do a little bit, it's not just that it's not enough, it actively may be upholding the harm.

So here's how I make that case. First of all, the simple way to think about it is if an individual act of do-gooding is abetting a harmful system on a larger scale, then it may actually be a counterproductive deed. Now, that is obvious in cases like the Sacklers behind the opioid crisis, where a relatively small amount of money is enabling a system or a reputation cleansing that literally is allowing harm to be done on a much greater scale than the gift.

But the point I was making was broader and h- and here are some of the ways in which individual acts of do-gooding that are marginally helpful to people that really do make some difference in some people's lives may in fact be contributing to a bad system. A, reputation washing, right? So you got a whole class of people who have cause to be resented in this time, who are, as we know in many cases, manipulating their company books so they don't- pay taxes, who are underpaying workers, who are claiming, as Jeff Bezos did, that they're gonna give benefits and then pulling the benefits from Whole Foods workers, et cetera, et cetera.

And so you got a bunch of people who are doing a bunch of things to make money that would really cause them a lot of problems and would create bad stories of the kind that would drive people into the streets and would force reform. But for changing their reputation, but for softening their image, but for acquiring a kind of moral glow as philanthropists, they would be in real trouble.

Sometimes criminal trouble personally, but certainly just reform trouble. 

And if I may interject, and it definitely takes one to know one, they are converting circumstances in which they would have low status into circumstances in which they would have high status, which is all wealth and power really is.

Correct. 

The people who work the hardest to be richest are the most status conscious people in our society. That's why they work so hard. And the thing that is most important to most people is their status, and certainly to status conscious people. And I think that this point you make is really important and profound, is that if your goal in life is to have as much status as possible, these bad stories are...

They're more than just inconvenient. 

They're a real problem. I'm, I, I'm a parent. I have kids. You may have even heard in the background screaming. I- ... really care about what... I, I care less what book critics think of me than I do about my kids. These people all have kids.

Sure. Yeah. Yes. 

N- these people, can't afford to have themselves known as predatory loan sharks. 

Social pariahs. 

And I think here the point is that it's a relatively cheap bargain basement way of changing your name. 

100%. 

The rule of thumb that I would use is you can do bad things in the billions and wipe it out with gifts in the millions.

The 

millions. 

let's turn to politics, 'cause I think that is one area where the billionaires' impact is a little bit more obvious.

You dig deeper on that, and you argue that billionaires are uniquely destructive to democracy, and you list a few ways. They lobby, they finance campaigns, they run for office themselves. How do you think about the destructive impact that billionaires have had on our body politic in just the past decade?

We're familiar with this idea of capture or re-regulatory capture, but we're kinda living through billionaire capture, where kinda every aspect, of the-- our democratic system is over-influenced to the point where essentially most of us have no real voice or vote in the system, which is not to say our vote doesn't matter in certain jurisdictions and certainly at the local level.

But in terms of really influencing what's on the policy agenda or more often what's blocked from happening, is really a function of billionaire capture of the political system. So there are policies like taxing the wealthy, which are, whatever, 79% of the population thinks billionaires and the ultra-wealthy should pay more taxes.

We're not gonna see that in a political system that's almost entirely engineered and captured by the ultra-wealthy. We started talking about fixes, so why don't we keep going on that? You have a lot of ideas about this, and one thing you argue first for is, a perceptual shift in billionaires, right?

The public, we tend to revere billionaires mainly as self-made. Certainly Donald Trump, President Donald Trump, has cultivated that myth, and, people do tend to think of billionaires still as having earned their status in some way. They're supposed to be smarter than us.

They're supposed to work harder than us. But you argue that billionaires are also subsidized by us in a lot of ways, including through, and you've mentioned this, tax policy. And you've mentioned more taxation of billionaires, but what else would you do in public policy and in tax policy so that the billionaires responsible for exploiting the US economy and the rest of us begin to pay their fair share?

You're right, Anne. I think part of it is to understand the story of wealth, how wealth is created. I used to work with Bill Gates's father, Bill Gates Senior. He and I wrote a book about how to defend the estate tax, the US inheritance tax. And he used to always say about his son, "Oh yeah, he worked hard, but a lot of people work hard, and, he benefited from the public investments in knowledge and infrastructure and the internet that kinda created the foundation for the internet economy and wealth creation in that space."

And therefore, no one does it alone. And taxation of substantial wealth is essentially fair payback to the society that You've disproportionately benefited from. So changing the story and addressing, the mythology of individual wealth creation is really important. But, in terms of public policies, I do think, the estate tax, which is essentially a, a wealth, inheritance tax at the end of life is irrelevant now.

It's, it's been, Y- the ultra-wealthy can pretty much opt out of it, plan around it, not have to pay it. So both restoring the progressivity of the income tax, but also having a genuinely robust luxury or real estate, I'm sorry, estate inheritance tax is important, and probably an annual wealth tax, and you start to see more proposals looking at that.

Including the state of California is proposing an emergency wealth tax on billionaires to help with healthcare costs. That will be on the ballot in 2026 in California, so voters will decide on that. So wealth tax and lifetime real estate or lifetime luxury, wealth tax and inheritance tax and a, progressive income tax, those three pieces of the puzzle, along with investing in enforcement, because part of what's happened is the ultra-wealthy have, when you reach a certain level, you have a whole team of people working with you to help move your money to the shadows and, dodge taxes.

I call it the wealth defense industry, the tax attorneys and planners. And so at this point, the IRS is completely outgunned by these professional, wealth hiders to the point again, where the wealthy are pretty much opting out of paying most of the taxes that They should rightly pay 

What about solutions for the two other major problems we've talked about that you've isolated?

The first being capture of particular industries. Like how would you-- how do you think about regulating the economy to eliminate or limit that kind of capture by the billionaires? And then on politics, what w- are your top recommendations for limiting billionaire influence in a political sphere? 

I think we have to look at what is- is essential in our economy that should not be, an arena for wealth plunder.

So just take health- hospitals. Most hospitals were founded by religious organizations and civic groups for the public welfare. Now they're seen as, you know, cash cows. There still is a large nonprofit housing sect- uh, you know, hospital sector. Um, but we should basically say, you know, maybe we create a, a new ownership entity that is, uh, recognizes that healthcare is a commons, that it belongs in a protected commons.

It's not a arena for plunder, and, uh, wall off and protect some of those types of institutions. Along with, you know, maybe we need to say We should tax luxury speculative real estate, invest in permanently affordable housing or what most of the world calls social housing, permanently affordable housing- Mm-hmm

rental housing, cooperatives. Uh, same on politics. You know, I think it's, you know, peop- I, I, I've, uh... you and I have both been around. We've probably watched different kinds of campaign finance reform proposals come and go, and, um, e- e- even get implemented, and it hasn't really changed the balance. I'm afraid what money and influence, it's like water running down a hill.

It just, you put up a barrier, it's gonna find a way around it. Uh, I think the only answer to saving democracy is reducing the concentration of wealth and power. Uh, it's just having billionaires, people having more than a billion dollars is just too much power. You know, it's not about the money. It's not about the consumption.

It's sort of about the, the power element of it. Uh, and especially in a society where there's so much unmet need. I, I like the, uh, the singer Billie Eilish, uh, addressing a group of, uh, you know, billionaires and wealthy singers saying, "You know, if you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?" And I think that is a fair question.

Why? How much, how much is enough? Uh, both from an individual point of view, but from a societal point of view, I can say having a billion is too much to have a healthy, well-balanced democratic republic. 

So we're in a situation now where the billionaires do control everything, and so I want to ask you about how ordinary citizens can bring about the kind of change that you're talking about.

And you are part of an organization, um, Patriotic Millionaires, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and about how you suggest ordinary citizens, grassroots, people who aren't billionaires begin to organize around some of the priorities that you've highlighted and bring some sense back to our economy and preserve our democracy.

Um, well, I wasn't a f- I wasn't, I, I guess I was more of a co-founder or... But Erica Payne and, and Morris Pearl and others really co-founded this network, really interesting network of, you know, high net worth individuals who basically would agree with a lot of what I'm saying in terms of, you know, we need to, uh, wealthy people need to pay more taxes and, uh, pay higher wages in their companies and not have so much power in our democracy.

And they actually kind of put their necks out there and publicly speak out and lobby on behalf of those issues. And I, I describe that as one of the cracks in the system. You know, I don't think this is, you know, uh, actually I'm very optimistic even after the last month of being out talking to people about this book because I feel like there's kind of an awakening.

People understand implicitly the harms that are caused by these great fortunes and extreme concentrations of wealth, uh, and they're trying to find places to push that agenda forward. It, it, you know, it's... Nothing as much is gonna happen in Washington DC at the national level, but in lots of states, people are pushing for luxury real estate taxes to fund affordable housing, taxing private jet fuel to fund green infrastructure.

Uh, as I mentioned in California, you know, taxing billionaire wealth and addressing healthcare. Uh, the incoming mayor of New York is saying, "I'm gonna address the affordability crisis for New Yorkers, and I'm gonna levy a 2% income tax on incomes over a million dollars in New York to pay for it." So people are starting to put those campaigns, and those are popular, and more and more people, I think, are gonna stand up and run for office on the basic platform of, "I'm gonna work for everybody, not just the billionaires.

We've just heard clips starting with

C-SPAN featuring AOC rejecting a veiled threat from Jeff Bezos's Washington Post, saying her ambition isn't a title but changing the country through lasting wins like single-payer healthcare.

More Perfect Union with Inequality Media Civic Action, & Robert Reich detailed how California's billionaires, holding nearly $2 trillion in untaxed wealth, are spending millions to defeat a 5% wealth tax while bankrolling Gavin Newsom's political career.

Taylor Lorenz mapped the decades-long arc from cheerful writing in1988 about human extinction to a 2012 Wired piece declaring robots "must" take all our jobs.

Brittany Page juxtaposed Amazon workers told to step over a dying colleague on April 6th with Lauren Bezos making gratitude lists at her $230 million compound

Pitchfork Economics explored how the same plutocratic class hoarding the fruits of the future uses philanthropy to avoid the reform and social consequences their behavior would otherwise trigger.

And Washington Monthly traced billionaire political power from lobbying and campaign finance to regulatory capture, calling the only real fix a reduction in concentrated wealth itself.

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

But first, speaking of the consequences of hoarded wealth now trickling down, I’m just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! We’ve suffered a dramatic cut in ad revenue largely driven by widespread economic instability and we’re being forced us to put SOLVED! on indefinite hiatus. We stretched ourselves quite thin trying to build a new show and so when Trump threw the world into chaos and marketing dollars dried up in response, we were extremely vulnerable to those shockwaves. Right now, I am getting back to basics and focusing on building Best of the Left to be the best it can be with the greatest reach it can. So, that’s where my focus is going to be and I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops. 

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If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s important to remind you that each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor to produce and supporting us right now is critical to helping us rebuild in a time of uncertainty.

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As for today's topic, an old story but a good one.

It was just over 200 years ago in 1812 when the rebellion of the Luddites was underway. We’ve done full episodes on the movement but, in short, the Luddites weren't the confused machine-haters of popular imagination. That was just how the capitalist class framed them. 

In reality, they were skilled workers who finished woolen cloth by hand at a level of quality the new shearing machines couldn't match, and they had a specific question: when the machines come in and the mill owners get rich, what happens to us? The answer they got back was, basically, nothing. So they started breaking the machines. 

Whether that was the right tactic is up for debate but the Luddites asked the right question, and we're heading into the same fight right now with AI. Their question was: who gets the upside? Two hundred years later, the answer to that question turned out to be, mostly, their great-great-grandkids. 

The Industrial Revolution did eventually raise wages, sometime after the middle of the 19th century. Before that, for sixty years, output per worker shot up while real wages basically flatlined. The wealth went somewhere, just not to the people running the machines.

The same thing is about to happen again and the backlash is already starting. Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders agree on basically nothing, but they're both saying that the AI oligarchs are coming for working people. Sanders wrote in a Fox News op-ed last month that, in his words, the AI oligarchs don't want to replace specific jobs, they want to replace workers. Bannon ran a War Room episode this month titled "Stopping the AI Oligarchs from Stealing Humanity." 

Now, those two are absolutely not saying the same thing. Bannon's version routes back to nationalism and the standard right-wing scapegoat menu, while Sanders's routes to redistribution. They're using similar words for very different politics, and which version wins the populist energy matters a lot for the future.

But the energy itself is real, and it's already showing up in the streets. Maine's legislature passed the first statewide moratorium on big data centers in the country last month before Governor Janet Mills vetoed it. 

A record number of proposed data center projects got canceled in the first quarter of this year because of local pushback, according to reporting from Heatmap News. 

In Indianapolis last month, somebody fired thirteen rounds into the front door of a city councilman’s house and left a note under the doormat that just said "No Data Centers." The councilman and his eight-year-old son were home at the time. 

A week earlier, a Texas guy named Daniel Moreno-Gama drove to San Francisco and threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house, then went over to OpenAI's headquarters and threatened to burn it down. He's been charged with attempted murder. 

The Atlantic ran a piece this week pulling all of this together written by Lila Shroff titled “The AI Backlash Could Get Very is generating the structural conditions that historically produce political violence. We're a long way from any long-run wealth-creation phase, and very much in the part where people start breaking things and lighting them on fire.

A lot of what people experience as AI right now is genuinely garbage. The AI-generated slop, the fake actors, replacing artists and musicians and writers with statistical averages of their own scraped work, that's terrible and worth opposing. I'm not asking anyone to make peace with that. 

But a friend of mine put it this way: the problem with AI is that it’s like having a laptop but only using it like a cutting board. It's super powerful and has real uses but people haven’t learned yet that the boring, useful side of AI looks like a better spreadsheet, the kind of thing that makes the actual work of running stuff faster and less stupid. Those productivity gains are real and there’s a legitimate left-analysis that says we should happily embrace those kinds of productivity gains as long as the benefits are distributed properly.

The trillion-dollar valuations getting attached to OpenAI and Anthropic right now are a bet on future labor replacement. That money got captured up front, by a handful of investors and executives, based on a future in which a lot of work humans do now gets done cheaper by software. Meanwhile, the costs are getting socialized, with communities eating the power draw and the rate hikes. According to the Revolving Door Project, the public-health costs from data centers are projected to hit something like twenty billion dollars a year by the end of the decade, and they're falling hardest on low-income, majority-Black counties. So we've got a system where if the gains turn out to be real, they belong to about fifteen people, and if the gains turn out to be fake, the people who took the hit get nothing back.

We don’t have to invent solutions from scratch, because other places have already done it. In 1976, Alaska decided that oil money pulled out of Alaskan ground belonged to Alaskans. They put it in a constitutional amendment. Every year since 1982, every man, woman, and child in Alaska gets a check from the Alaska Permanent Fund. It's been as high as around two thousand dollars per person. Norway built a sovereign wealth fund on the same idea and theirs is now worth almost two trillion dollars. Even Bill Gates, back in 2017, floated the idea of a robot tax, saying if a fifty-thousand-dollar worker gets replaced by a machine doing the same work, the machine should pay something like the income tax that worker used to. The EU briefly considered it, and then the lobbyists got there and that was the end of that. So, we’re not starting from scratch, people have built versions of answers to these problems when the political will showed up.

There's a polling firm called Blue Rose Research, and they've found that the messaging that actually moves voters on AI is bold and populist. If you tell people that without rules, the corporations will fire everyone, keep all the profits, and leave them with nothing, that lands. Meanwhile, Quinnipiac polled this last year, and the only income group in America that's net optimistic about AI is households making over two hundred thousand a year. The people who think this is going to work out for them are basically the people for whom every technological transition of the last forty years worked out, and everyone else is reading the room. There's a political opening here, and right now the right is moving on it faster than the left. If Democrats don't show up to the midterms with an actual answer about who's going to own the upside, the populist energy goes to people who'll tell you it's all China's fault.

And the answer to that isn't complicated. Bernie Sanders has already introduced legislation calling for a moratorium on new AI data centers until there are protections for workers. State-level data center fights are happening right now in Maine, in Indiana, and in a bunch of other states. Organizations like the Roosevelt Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies are doing the policy work on what taxing AI productivity could actually look like. Don't ask anyone running for office next year whether they support AI regulation, because that's vague enough that everyone says yes. Ask them whether they support taxing the productivity gains from AI and redistributing them, because that's the question that separates a real distributive politics from corporate-friendly window dressing.

The Luddites asked the right question. They lost on power, and most of the people they were fighting for lost too. The question is open again and we get one shot at the answer before it closes the way it did last time so we need to make sure that people are being put first. After all, the whole idea of economies and technology is to serve the needs of people, not the other way around.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 6 topics today. First up;

Section A, Tech Power, Surveillance, and the End of Truth

Followed by Section B, Bezos, Amazon, and the Human Cost

Section C, How the Tax Code Built the Aristocracy

Section D, Ideology of Capital

Section E, Markets in the Mind

And Section F, Bubble, Backlash, and the Way Forward

maybe the easiest way to combat the commoditization of all of our data, everyone put everything out, and let's create a data commons that then there's no value to it because we all have each other's data.

No, no. No. No. No. That's not the way it's gonna go for you because the thing is, maybe that would work if that data wasn't valuable. This data is incredibly valuable. Look at what Google did, just announced, like a week ago, that they're gonna be te- testing, targeted deals, AKA surveillance pricing, right?

Like, where suddenly, Or what Instacart, what happened with Instacart, right? People, certain people are being charged 23% more for certain, for their grocery orders based on their data. So as surveillance pricing and AI and all this stuff integrates, we already see, this type of discrimination happening with people getting different rates for, car loans, for rental, applications, all this stuff.

Your data will be used against you. For, or healthcare denials. It, now they know that you personally were chatting with a friend on Discord, about, health issues. Like, all of this data gets fed into these AI systems that ultimately will be used to exploit you. So we shouldn't want that. 

I know.

They're not supposed to be. It's supposed to be private. They're not supposed to see that. 

But we don't have pri- we're eroding pri- My issue is, we're eroding privacy in the name of- I 

know ... 

kids' safety. I'm all for ki- keeping kids safe. Let's start by not allowing these tech companies to target them and harvest even more data.

So the kids' safety is, another version of, Trump administration saying we need, to get whatever they were called, DOGE, into all the- Yes ... companies and take all the employee data in order to make sure there's no employees making too much money. It's like where's that data going? It's like back into Trump's Qatar bank account?

No, it's into Musk has it all. And then what Musk doesn't have, Larry Ellison has. So Larry Ellison's doing this one I've been reading about called Stargate, which I thought was to get to another dimension, but it's not at all. Remember that? It was a round thing and you could- Yeah ... jump through it and you get to this other dimension.

No, Stargate for Larry Ellison is to all of our biometric data and DNA data into one- No ... big thing. Now, the promise is that, we're never... no one's gonna get cancer or die or anything because they have all our data. 

I... The cancer thing really bothers me because every time someone's "Oh, so you're anti-AI," which I'm not anti the concept of AI-

or machine learning, whatever. And they're like, " what if it cures cancer?" And I'm like, " is that what it... Is that the application that we're discussing?" No, we're discussing a completely different application where they're harvesting biometric data to do healthcare surveillance pricing. Like- right now, AI is being used to deny people healthcare. If AI was being used to grant people healthcare, I would support that application of it. 

And the interesting thing then, going back to the press, and it's... 'Cause it is a kind of a tesseract or a fractal of influences then is...

So the, when you write about the manufactured outrage cycles in mainstream media, the manufactured outrage cycles perpetrated by the billionaires of mainstream media outlets- ... which include Twitter and Paramount and CBS, then fuel the parental outrage and desire for the very child protections that are reifications of the surveillance apparatus.

Yes. It just all feeds in. This moral panic is so convenient. It's so convenient for big tech. The focus is 100% on the users and regulating speech, which allows them to harvest more and more data. None of it targets their actual, business model. And that through Meta funding these front groups like the Digital Childhood Alliance or, just these fake groups that, basically exist to push, again, legislation that doesn't really target the companies.

But to target the companies, it's, it's a more nuanced thing, and people, a lot of these politicians can't even turn their computer on, and they don't... they're getting advice from Peter Thiel. 

I have well-meaning friends, right? Friends in the sort of nonprofit NGO sector that lose their jobs in corporate whatever or lost their job here, and then the opportunity is to start, a kinda, and I know three or four of them now, grifty, child-protecting NGO, Save the Children.

They'll find a couple of, really smart young high school students to come out and do panels in DC at Brookings or somewhere and basically pedal- And They all profit 

It makes me so mad because I, the people fighting this are trans rights organizations with no money. Groups like Fight for the Future that got their funding dropped because they fought the Kids Online Safety Act, again, something that Elon Musk continues to boost.

The people that fi- or, or sex workers, it's like it's no one. They have no funding, they have no money, and then they're going up against, like you said, this non-profit industrial complex that is f- that is, by the way, enacting, Heritage Foundation's tech policy 

too, 

I 

know. I know.

There was like... It's I wake up to this every decade in a different way. Like, when I look at, as a college kid, I look at Bill Clinton and go, "Oh, wait a minute, this is very Reaganite. This isn't..." And it just keeps happening. But these folks, it is, it's like it is out of almost Project 2025 in terms of, uh, the way they understand tech.

It's like then the only one I could find who's speaking our language is, the Pope. 

Yeah, I know. Which is so hilarious. I know. That's that's such a funny, side arc that we have this, amazing, American Pope that, somehow has more clarity, like moral clarity, than, anyone in the US, media even.

Like- 

Yeah ... 

it's hilarious, especially as an Irish Catholic. But, I just, I don't know. Right. It makes me depressed, and it makes me depressed to see, the media's complicity in it, as you mentioned. Like- Yeah ... these media companies are also owned by billionaire owners, and you can see the way that they have exerted influence over the coverage.

Not just at the Washington Post, but a lot of these outlets. And I think that's incredibly disappointing because we're not getting this nuanced coverage of technology that we deserve. And I was thinking of this response that Elena Kagan, the justice, made after, Gonzalez v. Google, which was this, big challenge to Section 230 that the Supreme Court chose not to hear back in 2023.

But she's she makes a joke. She's " we're not exactly the nine greatest experts about the internet. Ha," and, everyone in the press galley's, laughing. And she's "So maybe basically Congress can figure it out." And I'm like, okay, that's actually really disturbing because the internet is, the most disruptive, technology of our time.

It's, ef- greatly affecting our, political and economic ecosystem. And, the fact that you guys are the Supreme Court and you're, like, laughing like, "We don't really know about all that stuff," you need to take it seriously. And, I- they do. Obviously, they hear, these big cases.

But, I think they fundamentally, don't take it seriously in a way and, don't have an understanding of it. 

No, and government and policymakers don't either. Back when I was coming up, it was I had friends who went to work for Microsoft to write legislation for Congress. Yeah.

our friend, Dana Boyd, brilliant person, right? Yeah. She graduated Berkeley and started, got a job at Microsoft. I'm like, "What are you doing for Microsoft?" She goes, " I'm actually writing the, the Internet kids legislation." Oh, and you mail it to them, and then they sh- ... they pretty much print it up right in the law.

And that's- Yeah ... from industry to i- it's coming down that way. 

I'm very focused now on the societal implications of AI. I spent the last several years, I was back at Google, and, a lot of the last 15 years have been involved in AI and the technology and how quickly it is gathering steam, how much more advanced it's getting, how much more advanced it will be in the next decade.

That is something which is going to be wildly more devastating than any of the consequences of the mismanaged technologies of the last 15 years. And the consequences will crash land on societies all over the world. We are not prepared for these things at all, economically, societally, geopolitically, environmentally.

And that's the agenda that I'm really focused on. The tech industry has massively distorted the agenda for how to manage these things. We talk about AI governance. 

Yeah. 

And there's a whole bunch of stuff which is about how you manage the AI systems themselves. That's 1% of the problem. 15 years from now, probably less than 15 years, when a lot of people have lost their jobs to AI and we have no economic solutions, we have no idea how to give people a good quality of life, that is a much, much bigger problem than some of the technical issues we're facing in those systems.

What happens when AI turbocharged industries consume wildly more resources and they destabilize already reeling ecosystems which we know are hanging by a thread and which will impact the lives of millions, if not billions of people? Between 2018 and 2023, the world consumed almost as much resources as one-third of the 20th century, and it's accelerating all the time.

And these are things where, in fact, you know, big tech companies, they go to governments who are desperate for economic growth now, right? A lot of the advanced economies- Yeah ... in the Global North- Yeah ... they've got plateauing growth. They've got declining living standards. They go to them and say, "Build this wondrous technology."

"Build this infrastructure. We will give you back the keys to a good future." And of course, that's not happening. This is something which on the present path promises to enrich a tiny sliver of societies, mostly in the United States and mostly in China. And I think the world we're gonna end up in, in the next, 10, 15 years is going to be much more unstable than today, with rapidly declining living standards for hundreds of millions of people.

I think a lot of graduates will not be able to get, good jobs at all. People who did a whole bunch of things in their lives and were told if they did these things right, they would get a good life and their kids would have better lives than them, that is not gonna happen at all on the path we're on.

And so is the tech industry gonna solve these things? No. And in fact, they have tried to minimize debate about these things. They've tried to point people back towards the technical solutions. Now it is a moment in which societies and our leaders need to have a mainstream conversation about what the heck we're gonna do to manage all of those effects, and that cannot be left up to the tech industry.

But now we're in a situation where, like you said earlier in the conversation, the world affected tech, and now tech is affecting the world. In the lead up to, some of the elections happening in the US, the tech giants have put together some of the most insane, amounts for- for, political campaigns. They're going after every single politician who is proposing any type of restraint or constraint- Yeah ... on, AI. And whether we like it or not, money shapes a lot of, ... an election. So you have the tech industry fighting to define how it should be managed or it should be governed.

And the people who are going to govern it being funded by them. It seems like a, an infinite loop that's, for the most part, already lost, unless something big breaks, as we've seen, in the past. It's only when something big breaks that, that something changes dramatically. 

I don't think we should be under any illusions.

The most likely path we're on, the one we are on right now, leads to disaster for our societies, and all societies globally. I actually don't think anyone gets out of this thing. I've spent the last, six months traveling the world talking to leaders and, a whole bunch of people behind closed doors where you have some really, spine-tingling conversations, and there's a s- there's a strain of opinion, mostly in the US and China, which thinks we can just win th- this race for AI.

And- Yeah ... a bunch of other people will get screwed, but we'll be okay, and that's not gonna happen when, of course, you have societies all over the world that are gonna be in chaos. No one gets out of this thing in one piece. But, we're in a moment now where I think actually a lot of people across societies, who are paying a bit of attention, they're seeing things are failing on any number of fronts.

Yeah. 

You look at all the polling. Why is it the overwhelming majority of societies in almost all the world say things are generally going in the wrong direction? People are angry. They realize that, there aren't nuances. There is no vision coming from the top anymore. And in that context, you then have big tech racing to install these systems where people are now really worried about their jobs.

There's a lot of polling showing that the number one thing that gets people, panicked about AI, which explains why it is in fact incredibly unpopular with societies, is because they're worried about their future jobs. So this is something where I think actually there's a lot of people who already are looking for a very different approach to how you manage these things.

The debate has not shifted there yet because I think a lot of people don't understand the scale of what might happen, the speed at which this will unfold, and how interconnected all these agendas are. When people really do understand that the technologies that might give you your amazing apps on your phone also might be things that destroy the prospect of your kids having future jobs and also will threaten, natural ecosystems- then it becomes a very different, 

as of today, my dystopian Rubicon has been crossed. My predefined one. Boom. Oligarch-owned AI truth machine. This is a concept that I have feared for a while, and, it exists now.

Journalists ruined your reputation, not with evidence, with a narrative. And when they come for you, there's no way to fight back, until now. Introducing Objection, the first AI tribunal. Former CIA and FBI agents will investigate. They gather evidence and make it public permanently. The AI tribunal checks the record and renders the verdict.

You can save your reputation in days, not years. From the team that bankrupted Gawker, mastermind Aaron D'Souza and investor Peter Thiel, comes Objection. Truth isn't what goes viral. It's verified. File an objection.

From the team that bankrupted Gawker. All right, so if you didn't catch exactly what that was, it is an assault on journalism. It's an assault on the media. It's an assault on truth. It is a privately owned company run by antichrist Peter Thiel, and a guy who's proud of the fact he bankrupted Gawker, to centralize the truth, to centralize narratives.

I'm not gonna get too loud 'cause my kids are sleeping in the room next to me, but holy shit, man, this is fucking terrifying. This is really scary. Let's have a look. 

Look at this dystopian bullshit. 

So here is their dystopian website, the AI Tribunal of Truth. "Today, anyone can publish allegations.

Almost no one can afford to challenge them. Objection changes that. It gives everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media." Sure, journalists get stuff wrong. Sure, the narrative changes. Journalists have got stuff wrong about me. It's annoying, I get it. But, this is not a solution.

I cannot stress that enough. Journalism must be decentralized. The truth must be decentralized. I hate this, man. To have this controlled in one centralized place owned by the most rich and evil people? Oh, wow. Here we go. "Without Objection, the court jester rules you. Challenge any public statement. We have the best investors in the world."

Warhawks, bailed out banks, the CIA. "Our investigators have previously worked at these organizations." So these are just logos that are on people's resumes. Let's have a look at your manifesto. "The truth is the foundation of civilization." Yes, truth is not optional. It is the essential condition that allows humans to reason together about reality.

Without shared truth, trust collapses and discourse gives way to force. This is how all of these evil fascist people work. They say something that is, broad enough to be true, and then they just skip ahead to, the worst premise ever. They'll be like, "Hey, killing people is wrong. That's why we've decided to own every bullet and put AI in every bullet, so if it kills you, we know."

Hey, the truth is wrong, so we're gonna own the truth. 

Before courts rule, before regulators act, before markets move, stories are published, narratives form, reputations are made or destroyed, reality is framed, often irreversibly. This is so corrupt. It is basically just saying, "Hey, what's the last system that we can't control?

Oh, yeah, people talking, the media." It's like all of these things. Before courts rule. It's like if you are a billionaire, you can buy the courts. You can control the courts. Before regulators act, you can lobby the regulators. Before markets move, you are the market. Before stories are published. Hell, half of them fricking own the media.

It's just other journalists. This is so cooked. Narratives form, reputations are made or destroyed, reality is framed, often irreversibly. Good. And yet journalism today is not truth adjudicated. It moves at the speed of the internet without a shared process for testing claims. This is a problem, but this is not the solution.

This is so not the solution. So we decided to own the truth. Go on, man. No way. No, no. This is my dystopia rubicon. I've ... It's written down, dog. Courts were built for truth, but cannot scale. Ugh, I hate this language. But cannot scale. Shut up. For centuries, courts served as society's truth adjudication engine.

That's, partially true. There's also, truth that gets adjudicated by communities, and the courts fail people a lot of the time. Laws aren't perfect. Courts aren't perfect. OJ definitely killed his wife. What are we doing here, guys? But it's also, the modern court of public opinion is a reaction to a broken court system or, an inaccessible court system that people who don't have enough money, which structurally was caused by you, you fricking VC-backed dorks.

So people have to bypass these exclusive and expensive things in order to actually just get some sort of fricking modicum of justice, and justice is so rare. These people have enough. They have so much. They have more money than God. They have more power. They have ... They own everything. Why do you want more, Peter Thiel?

What is wrong with you? Oh my God. I'm not saying someone should, but ... Why journalism is our first focus There is so much hope in that one sentence for everybody else. "Journalism is where truth breaks now, and where it can be repaired fastest." It feels like a threat. "Journalism is truth infrastructure and every downstream system improves."

Oh my God. This is so paternalistic of these evil people. They make this stuff, they lobby governments, they, try turn all... they try turn the commons, they try turn life, existence, into corporate assets. And then all people have left is what they can say. All right. All right. All right. What objection provides, total immunity?

Our long-term ambition to be a complete totalitarian government wherein there is just one truth, and we get to decide what it is. Da, da, da. Yeah, that's pretty much what it says. All right. "The direction is inevitable." Hmm. There is a, there's a propaganda technique called inevitable victory.

It's so funny. It's it's not even, that thinly masked. I've been reading a lot of Hannah Arendt lately, because I think everything that she writes is incredibly relevant to this moment, but there's this one line that's been sticking out to me. It's like a throwaway line in Origins of Totalitarianism, where she's describing Hitler.

For context, if you don't know, she fled the Nazis. Amazing political scientist, incredible historian. Anyway, the way that she describes the amount of time that Hitler was in power, she talks about it as the 12 years that Hitler's thousand-year Reich had managed to last. The 12 years of his thousand. So when I read, "The direction is inevitable," I'm like, all right, your predecessor got 1.2% of the way towards his backing goal.

What are you gonna do? You don't scare me, dog. "We begin with journalism because that's where truth now lives and where it is most at risk." How convenient. We begin with the Fourth Estate, something that we don't own. All right. Let's end on hope. Two bits of hope. The first is small and personal, and the second is structural and actually massive, and I think it's really cool.

All right. So the first small personal one, I have struggled with perfectionism for a long time, particularly on YouTube, and right now, hey man, turned on the camera. This has woken up something inside of me. I know that I like to make polished videos, but the urgency and the importance of this moment feels too big to ignore.

It's literally thing that I think can topple society. History is so much more malleable than I think most people realize. It is so vulnerable. This terrifies me enough to make me wanna change my behavior, and I'm doing it. But the second bit of structural hope is, damn, Peter Thiel, you just played your hand.

You told us what you fear. You fear journalism. You fear truth. You fear narrative. You fear reputation. Damn, man. It's, interesting. This is a common pattern with ruling class, with oligarchs, with elites. is fearing narrative. This is what Percy Shelley discovered after writing the poem Ozymandias, where he talked about the temporal nature of power, the fallibility of power, the fact that people who claim to have inevitable rule over the next, I don't know, thousand years or whatever, don't.

They eventually become dust in the desert and all we remember is not them, but the sculpture of them. The tyrant dies and the artist's work outlasts them, that's what Percy Shelley was saying. We see the sculpture, not the king. So it is quite cool to know just how powerful stories are, how powerful journalism is, how powerful the truth is, how powerful understanding is.

Cool to know what they're scared of. It's like they've just gone, hey, I know you suspected we had an Achilles heel. We definitely do. So if you have ever wanted to become a journalist, if you have ever wanted to amplify the truth, now is your moment. Now is your time.

Next, Section B, Bezos, Amazon, and the Human Cost

New York billionaire Steven Roth thinks that saying tax the rich is hate speech. Yeah, apparently he thinks it's just as hateful as racial slurs. Because as everybody knows, the most oppressed and marginalized groups include people like ethnic minorities and real estate moguls. Listen dude, if you think tax the rich is bad, you should hear some of the other suggestions that people have for you.

You might want to reconsider your position. Tax the rich, that's the friendly humanitarian version. That's the people still showing a willingness to extend the kind of compassion to the super wealthy that the super wealthy have proved that they are not willing to extend to the people. I swear modern right-wing politics really has just become a bunch of rich people convincing a bunch of poor people that poverty has nothing to do with economics.

Oh yeah, you're extremely poor and I'm fabulously wealthy. Those two things are not connected. They have nothing to do with each other. Yeah, the reason you're poor is all the DEI and all the brown people and trans people. It's all the government-funded lesbian mountain hiking initiatives and subsidized sub-Saharan transgender farming programs.

Yeah. 

Let's look at some New York statistics, shall we? Since that's where Mr. Roth here made himself fabulously wealthy. In New York in the 1980s, an average worker was making about $20,000 a year, and a CEO of a big company was making about 700,000 to a million dollars a year. Today, an average worker is making about 60 to $80,000, but a CEO of a big company is making somewhere around 15 to $25 million a year.

So the average worker pay has multiplied like three or four times, but the average CEO pay has multiplied like 15 to 30 times. And this is just a drop in the bucket, right? They're not being paid mostly in a cash salary. They're largely being paid in stocks and stock options in the companies they're working for.

Now, since the 1980s, the value of, the 10 most valuable companies, relatively speaking, has grown by about 7,600%, so it's doubled 76 times, whereas the compensation given to the workers that generate most of the value has doubled three or four times. So not only are the rich getting more rich quite objectively because the people are getting a much smaller slice of the overall pie than they used to, but also the rich get paid and pay themselves primarily in an asset that appreciates in value relative to the money over time.

That relative to the money is important there. Inflation is money losing its value, losing its buying power gradually over time. The thing that it loses its value against, loses its power to buy, is not just goods and services, right? It's not just loaves of bread. It's also assets, which means a lot of the increased value that the asset gains comes out of the decreased value that the money loses.

It's the same thing, right? The thing that they pay themselves with gradually over time leaches value out of the thing they're paying you with. And then they just use their assets as leverage to borrow money at very low interest rates because borrowed money is not taxable, and also unrealized gains, unsold assets, are also not taxable.

They also reinvest most of the revenue that the company makes into building and growing the company, which makes the value of the company go up. Because reinvested profit is technically not profit, and therefore not taxable. But if you own shares in the company, it makes the value of the company go up, so for you it's extremely profitable, but until you sell the shares, not taxable.

Now, the way the system currently is didn't just fall out of the sky, right? It's not written in stone. It's gradually been crafted into what it is today over time through massive efforts of lobbying and propaganda. So I guess the question is: Why do we think the super wealthy are fighting so hard against efforts to try and return the landscape of wealth equality back to one that looks more like the one that they themselves succeeded in?

When he got rich, there was way less wealth inequality. There was way more opportunity and competition. Why does he not believe that you should have the kind of opportunity that he had? Were the rich people in the '80s terribly oppressed? Was there some sort of epidemic of woefully underpaid corporate CEOs in 1982?

Or is it more likely that the super wealthy are just trying to pull the ladder up after themselves and are using stupid people's predisposition towards racism and bigotry and xenophobia as a weapon to help pull that off?

Billionaires are up in arms about California's proposed wealth tax. Now, here's the truth and why you should support it. The proposed tax is a one-time 5% tax on people who had a net worth of at least $1 billion on January 1st, 2026. California's roughly 200 billionaires would be able to pay their share over a five-year period.

The revenue from the tax, which is expected to hit $100 billion, would go toward covering the devastating funding cuts for California's Medicaid system caused by Trump's big ugly bill. Now remember, that same tax bill doled out far more in tax cuts for the richest Americans, including the California billionaires now crying foul.

Now, a few California billionaires will make headlines by leaving the state in a huff or by threatening to move assets. But if they lived in the state on January 1st, they'll be on the hook for the tax anyway. In any case, research shows that when states increase taxes on their richest residents, the vast majority of them stay put simply because they can afford to.

Massachusetts increased taxes on millionaires and billionaires in 2023. What happened? The rich didn't move, and the state generated billions in revenue that's now going to public education and transportation. Let's be real. California's billionaires are wealthier than they've ever been. How are you? Take the CEO of AI chipmaker, NVIDIA.

His wealth grew by $124 billion over the past five years, and he'd have to pay just under $10 billion in the next five under the California proposal. That's an outcome that he says is... i'm perfectly fine with it Because he seems to understand the benefits of operating in a state that's also the world's fourth largest economy.

Perhaps his fellow billionaires should listen. Meanwhile, 15 million poor and working class Californians, including five million children who rely on California's Medicaid system, would be able to go to the doctor and afford life-saving medicine. Why are we focused on the complaints of a handful of billionaires instead of the needs of millions of their neighbors?

California's billionaire tax isn't the final answer to America's disgraceful inequalities of wealth and income, of course, but it's a start. It may open the way to further efforts to rein in the obscenely rich, which is what some billionaires probably fear. These efforts are essential not only to funding what most people need, but also to preserving our democracy.

The choice is clear. It's time to tax the rich. 

Now, Section C, How the Tax Code Built the Aristocracy

 

the 2024 version of the numbers is that the top 1% pay 40% of all income taxes, and 40% of Americans pay no income taxes at all. So the top 1% pay 40% of all income taxes, and 40% of Americans pay no income taxes at all.

So first of all, it is, this is highly misleading about the, about who the top, who the top payers are. What it is referring to is people with the most taxable income, and indeed, people with the most taxable income do pay the most taxes. But these are likely to be highly compensated individuals, right?

Whether they're working as lawyers, doctors, finance people. Highly compensated individuals who are reporting lots of income are paying most of the income taxes. They're also getting, It's also a sign of the inequality of our income taxes, of our, of our income. But what it doesn't say anything about is the richest 1% of Americans, because what I talk about in my book is how the richest 1% of Americans are able to avoid income taxes altogether because they avoid taxable income.

And because they can avoid taxable income- They are just as likely to be in the 40% of non-payers as they are in the top 1% of payers. So we are not... That, that statistic is not an example of us soaking the rich. It's an example of the fact that high income earners pay a lot of taxes, but high wealth owners can avoid taxes altogether.

By the way, the statistic is also misleading about the 40% of non-payers because although, that group, is largely made up of lower income Americans who don't pay income taxes, and of course our billionaires who don't pay income taxes, but because it's largely made up of the, of low income Americans, it, it fails to capture the fact that they are already paying significant payroll taxes.

Payroll taxes are imposed at rates as high as 15.3%, and they are imposed at a flat rate from dollar one earned, and they are quite regressive in nature. So even though Americans don't pay, there's a significant portion of Americans that don't pay income taxes, most of them pay payroll taxes, and those of course support the biggest expenses of the country, which is Social Security and Medicare.

So should all income be taxable? And what income is not taxable right now? 'Cause I was very surprised at how little income is not taxable and the income that was not taxable. 

So it's really interesting. Our income tax system, if you were to take a law school class on income taxes, you would start with Section 61, which says, income, gross income includes all income from whatever source derived, and it's very broad.

It includes things like, barter exchanges, and found money on the street, and lottery winnings. It's all these things. However you get money, it's pretty much subject to tax, except if you acquire money from inheritance, that is entirely excluded from income, and if you acquire money from your growing wealth because your stock goes up from, like Elon Musk's has from $180,000 in 2023 to $342,000 in 2025, all of that growth is never subject to tax in our income tax system unless that stock is sold.

And of course, our billionaires don't need to sell their stock because they can always support their lifestyle by borrowing against the stock, and that is a tax-free way of accessing these funds 

So how aware is the public that inheritance and, and investments are not taxed? I... We'll get to this point about the e- estate tax in a little bit, but to what extent do you think the average American realizes that inve- investments and inheritances are not taxed although every other income is?

I think that people are not aware of that. I think that people who experience the income tax experience it as something that is burdensome and difficult to avoid, and they also experience it as something that the more income you have, the more taxes you pay. So I think that they assume, naturally assume, that the richest Americans must also be paying high incomes, hi- high income taxes.

And that's why... And then it gets reinforced by these statistics that say, " the top 1%..." And there's a, there's this convergence where we pretend that the high income earners and the high wealth owners are the same people, but that's not the case. 

You point, you write that, "Imagine as a thought experiment that a millionaire tried to finance her life using only interest generated by her income, as many wealthy people endeavor to do.

At a 3% interest rate, $1 million would return only $30,000 in income a year, barely enough to support a subsistence level existence in mo- most United States cities. Meanwhile, $1 billion at 3% interest would produce an annual income of $30 million a year, enough to support even the most lavish lifestyle, all while preserving the principal which could then be passed on to children who can use the income to support their lifestyle, and in the given situation now, that would be tax-free."

There are many exceptions and e- exemptions that reduce the number of estates with tax liability. The current individual exemption in 2024 is 13.61 million or 27.22 million for a married couple. In addition, a maximum amount varying year by year can be given by an individual before and/or upon their death without incurring federal gift or estate taxes.

Because of these exemptions and others, it is estimated that only the largest 0.2% of estates in the United States will pay the tax. How much is generational wealth currently protected by the estate tax? 

Yeah. First of all, let me just say I'm really glad that you, talked about this difference between a millionaire and a billionaire, because I think that one of the problems with our current system, one of the cultural problems we have, is that it's very difficult to fathom the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion, right?

They all sound the same. And, and and so people think and, and and people think "Oh yeah, a millionaire is rich." But the important thing to realize is that a million dollars, while it's a, it's a lot of money, is not the type of wealth that really makes somebody, wealthy in that traditional sense that we imagine.

And yet the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is extraordinary. But we sort of-- And then of course, if Elon Musk becomes a trillionaire, that's even more mind-boggling about what these numbers are. We have this problem, I think, where well-off Americans, many Americans, who live in high, live in expensive cities, have real estate and retirement benefits that are worth a million dollars, even if they live a fairly modest lifestyle.

And, and so what happens is, though, people think, " I must be like the billionaires because, I have a million, and a million is supposed to be a lot of money." But a million really is not, does not support that type of lifestyle that we imagine a very rich person living, 

we're gonna start with the income tax system, right? No income taxes. We're gonna then see how our estate tax is failing us, by the way, in case you- Yeah. ... In case you're wondering where we're heading with that. 

Yeah. 

And then on top of that, money, as you pointed out, when you have property that grows in value, when you buy Apple stock or Facebook stock or any investment and it grows in value from, $10,000 to $10 million, as you pointed out, that's not subject to tax either, even though you can access those funds by borrowing against them- 

Yeah

because it's not realized, and our system doesn't ever require realization. You have to- No ... sell the property in order to realize the gain. And if you simply pass the property on to your kids, either when you're alive or at death, that doesn't trigger gain for you either. You have to sell it. And this is unlike the rule in Canada, where whenever somebody disposes of property, whether by sale or gift or inheritance, it's gonna be subject to tax.

All of that gain will be subject to tax to the donor. But we don't have that system. 

I- is the, I know the, there's the step-up, 'cause I'm, I live in a- Yeah ... different economy than Nick. There's the step-up- Yeah ... basis- ... on my house. The extent of my estate planning, I have o- I have an only child, is to die in my house, and that wa- which I've owned since, in Seattle since 1997.

That way there's no capital gains tax. Is that true on other assets, or is that p- particular to- Every asset. 

Every 

asset. 

So that's- So- Yeah, but the catch is you have to pass it through your estate at death In order to get the step-up in basis. Step-up in basis means that for your listeners, what it means is that your house, let's say you bought it for $50,000 and it's now worth $50 million because of where you're located, that gain- not quite that good, but Not quite.

Let's say it's worth 15 million so we don't get any estate taxes involved. Yeah. Okay? Then, if you pass that property on at death, your children are treated as if they had bought it for $15 million, and so when they sell it, they pay no taxes on it. Whereas if you sell it, you have to- ... pay a lot of capital gains taxes, or if you gift it to them during life, they would have your, what we call carryover basis.

So if you gift it, it would be, then you would pay, then they would pay tax on the gain if they sold it. The effect of this is that this thing that we call step-up in basis, also called the angel of death loophole, is a- The estate planners are very clever. Is a, it, it's a tremendous distortion in the market, which is interesting because, conservatives are always saying, "We don't wanna distort the market," but the biggest distortion in the market is step-up in basis.

Because that's why people don't sell their houses, because they don't wanna have to pay that extra gain. In addition, people don't sell their stock. Even if they have a stock that they think is no longer doing very well, the market, they are not gonna sell their stock because they're gonna have to pay tax on that gain.

So it's a big distortionary effect on the market, our current rules. 

Yeah. 

Nick, I feel like you're giving a look like I am definitely not convincing you. 

No, no, no. We're generally aligned, but y- I watched some of the videos that you made, and I think we're talking about the same thing.

So for sure the estate tax $15 million exemption is a significant loophole in the system. People pay zero estate tax on assets less than $15 million. 

It's the rule in the system, whether to say that... I don't think that's the source of the problem- 

Okay ... 

is the 

exemption amount. But if you, if you have a billion dollars- and you want that to flow to your heirs- are you asking for tax advice here, Nick? How to- 

No. You're saying why isn't the... You're saying why isn't the estate tax doing its 

job? You're most definitely gonna pay 40% at least- 

Okay ... 

of that- And so he- ... above the 15 million. You're, you're definitely gonna spend, pay 40%.

You would think. 

Yeah. So here is the thing. Dude, if that's not true- You need new- ... I need to hear about it now. 

Yeah, 'cause you need- Yeah ... some 

new advisors, Nick. Yeah. Yeah. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. 

Okay. I 

thought that was the whole point of your foundation. Unless you give it all to charity. So you take Gates, you take Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, right?

These guys are worth whatever it is, more than $100 million. 

Yeah, billion 

Th- they are going to play zero estate tax because their kids are already billionaires, and everything else is gonna go to their foundations 

So there's a lot of issues that we're raising here 

But there's no way around that 40%.

That, 

okay. Yeah. 

Let's, let's hear. Here's the, You can set up trusts for your kids and stuff like that, but, there's limits to all that 

Yeah, but there is a tremendous capacity for tax avoidance. Like what? And so I'm gonna- Like how are you gonna... If you, if you- I'm gonna 

tell you. Yeah.

Yeah, 

let's hear it. Tell me. I'm 

gonna write it all down. 

You taking notes here, Nick? 

Yeah, I am. 

I feel a little bit badly though 'cause I feel like I've gotten us to this subject without finishing that two-tier system that you had wanted me to talk about. Yeah, we can go back to that. Can I quickly finish that and 

then we'll come back here?

Yeah. No, yes. Then you'll tell Nick how to a- avoid paying taxes on his, when he's dead. 

When Americans think about the tax system, they typically think of the income tax system because that's the system that most people live with. The estate tax is a very large exemption. It's not relevant for them. And so the income tax system looms large in the visions of most Americans, as it should, because the combination of the income tax and payroll taxes means that anybody who has a lot of income pays a lot of taxes.

And somebody who even has modest income, let's say $60,000, which is the median income in this country, still will pay $13,000. If they're a self-employed person, they will pay $13,000 in income taxes and payroll taxes. Yeah. And this is a significant burden for working Americans. If you think about it, if you're trying to live on $60,000 and $13,000 of it has to go to taxes, that's really takes a bite out of what you have.

So 

you- And that's just federal taxes because they 

also have state and local And that's just federal. Then there's states on top of it, exactly. 

Which is gonna be, like, another 11, 12%- 

Depending on where 

you live ... depending on where you are, yeah. 

Yeah. And so the thing that I wanna mention also is that high income earners pay the vast majority of the taxes.

And the reason I wanna mention this, so in 2024, the top 1% of earners paid 40% of all income taxes. And the reason I wanna highlight that is because that's a statistic that is often distorted to tell the public that rich people are already paying all the taxes. We don't need to worry about rich people paying taxes because then they'll just say the top 1% are paying 40% of the taxes, and 40% of Americans pay no income taxes.

This is something that misleads the public into thinking our system is very progressive. And the problem is, first of all, for a lot of working Americans, they're paying significant payroll taxes on that- That 40%. But the other issue is that when we're talking about the top 1% paying 40% of the income taxes, these are people with high incomes, lawyers, doctors, bankers, finance people.

They have high incomes. They pay most of the taxes. Yeah. This is not people like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, all of our billionaires, and even frankly, our centimillionaires, who also don't have to pay taxes, because they avoid taxes by avoiding taxable income, and they do so because they avoid salaries, they avoid selling their property, and when they inherit property, none of it is subject to income taxes.

So they are not subject to the income tax world at all. And indeed, they are just as likely to be in the 40% of Americans that pay no taxes as they are in the top 1% of payers. And this is, if your audience takes away nothing from this call, I hope they take away this point about how it is that our system is unfair because they're constantly being told that, "Oh, no, the system is fair.

Top 1% are paying 40% of the taxes. What are you complaining about?" But it is the top 1% of earners, and wealthy people avoid taxes by avoiding taxable income. 

the very first billionaire in the United States was John D.

Rockefeller, worth about $1.4 billion or $30 billion in 2024 dollars when he died in 1937. The country did not see another billionaire for 50 years when Bill Gates achieved a net worth of $1.2 billion in '87. Since Gates, the billionaire class has grown exponentially, both in the number of billionaires and in the size of their wealth, which has far outpaced inflation.

In 2024, there were 750 billionaires, and more than a dozen people had wealth in excess of $100 billion, including Gates, who had personal wealth in excess of $138 billion, even after funding his foundation. So zero billionaires for 50 years, over the next not even 40 years. What changed, Ray? Was it technology that is a whole new economic sector opened up with information technologies like those that made Gates wealthy?

Are there more wealthy people because we just created more ways to get wealthy, including a whole new economic sector? 

I think the other thing that has very much contributed to the growth of the wealth is the failure to, for the tax system to keep up with these changes. And as a result, the richest Americans are able to continue to grow their wealth at exponential rates, right?

If you think about it, somebody who works for a living, they move two steps forward and one step back, right? You get paid money, but you have to pay significant taxes. So they go two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. But for the wealthy, they're moving ahead two steps forward, two steps forward, four steps forward, six steps forward, right?

Enormous amounts forward, not being set back by taxes. And this failure to pay taxes really plays a big role in this, enormous, growth of the wealth of the wealthiest Americans. 

So why has the tax code not kept up? We've talked to people in the past that, regulation does not keep up with technology when it comes to Silicon Valley and new, for, for instance, social media platforms, how regulation cannot keep up with technology. It's always lagging behind, and that regulation is always reactive and never preventative. Why has the tax code not kept up? Does it always lag behind what wealth is doing and where it is being kept? And does the tax code have to be reactive and not preventative?

The tax code definitely has to be reactive, because, the way that it works is that, you can never... Y- It's a really like a dance between Congress and, professional tax advisors, right? So Congress says, " we wanna tax this thing," and then the, tax id- for the right rules, the, taxpayers and their advisors find ways to work around the rules.

And then in a well-done system, Congress should be stepping back in and closing those loopholes that are created that they feel are inappropriate, right? But there's always gonna be people trying to reduce their tax liability, and Congress has to keep up by closing the loopholes. And what has happened with the estate tax is, is that for many years it was well-maintained right up until 1990, and after 1990 a drastic change occurred and, Congress stopped maintaining the estate tax.

But as an example of how well it was maintained, in 1986, in 1976 and then again in 1986, Congress enacted something called the generation-skipping transfer tax, which was an additional tax designed to limit people creating long-term trusts, right? So it would basically say, "If you give money to a grandchild, you have to pay two, two levels of estate tax because we don't think-- we think the tax should be imposed at each generation," right?

A very serious tax enacted in '76 and then reenacted in a different version in '86. In 1990, Congress again enacted a whole new set of rules that were designed to address a problem where people were hiding value, and so they enacted these four new rules, special valuation rules that were designed to address it, very, intense and, and, and what's interesting is both of these occurred under Republican presidents.

So this was a tax that was m- well-maintained under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Beginning in the 1990s, however, a group of 18 of the country's richest families got together to promote the repeal of the estate tax. And that's because they were able to avoid the income tax through ways that, we can talk about, but the estate tax, as I mentioned, was being well-maintained and it was hard to avoid, and they didn't like it.

And back then the tax rate was as high as 60%. Now it's been reduced to 40%, but that still could do a pretty serious job if it was actually doing its job They hired this guy by the name of Frank Luntz, who was a pollster and a wordsmith, and he said, "You know what? This is what we gotta do. We gotta lobby to get rid of this tax.

We have to change what the tax is called, and we have to change the people who are gonna be lobbying for it." So instead of rich people lobbying against an estate tax, they said, "We'll call it a death tax and get regular working Americans and farmers and business owners to fight against it." And that's what they did, and it was a tremendously effective campaign.

You might remember George W. Bush saying, "We're gonna eliminate the death tax." And, and it's been a pretty regular part of the Republican platform until quite recently. The effect of this was that we had one year where there was no estate tax at all in 2010, when a number of our billionaires died tax-free.

But the even greater effect was the fact that, politicians from i- both sides of the aisle became so, concerned about... The-- They turned the public so against the estate tax that politicians from both sides of the aisle said, "You know what? We're not gonna, we're not gonna take the heat of fixing the tax."

So the last time there has been any reforms to the estate tax to close loopholes was 1990, 35 years ago. And as a result, we have this entirely loophole-ridden system that basically provides cover for the rich, making it seem like they pay a lot of taxes rather than actually imposing any burden.

when an individual is filling out their tax form, there are fifty-eight different possible tax forms that an individual can fill out, and there are ninety-four different forms that corporations can fill out. Looking at what does that actually mean, where does that link up to the tax code, and then connecting that to other data sources so that we can get a complete picture of the US tax code, of the US tax system.

We're doing something similar looking at the spending. Usaspending.gov has the, for something like ninety-eight percent of federal spending, where did it go, what was it spent on, how much money went there? And so we can look at where those dollars are flowing. So instead of looking at everything at here's one big number- This, the economy or that's, this program, what is it actually doing to people?

What is it doing to our economy? Who's benefiting, and who's paying for it? Okay. And how are they paying for it? How much are they paying for it? So taking a very... Using the techniques that, computer science and, data science have revolutionized a lot of fields, and it's drifting into economics, too.

But, really bring that to bear on these fiscal models. And the old fiscal models, the CBO model and the Penn Wharton model, they're not using these modern techniques and tools. They're definitely starting to, and they're, they've been taking steps for a long time to, adopt these models. We're essentially doing it from the ground up, and we're trying to make as much of this open source as possible so that they can use our stuff, too.

In this case, a rising tide lifts all boats, where if everybody is starting to adopt these better methods, then everybody gets better analysis, and that's, I think- Yeah ... good for everybody. Yeah. So this is where the economists come in. T- they could use the same tools that you, the tool that you're developing right now and then just plug in their old assumptions and get very different outcomes from the model than we might.

Certainly our hope is for it to be transparent so that- ... by making this open source, if you wanna change one of the assumptions, then, and get different numbers, that's up to you. But, you have to specify, "Okay, I'm gonna change this assumption." Yeah. Yeah. It's been one of my complaints, by the way, the CBO model, whenever it models what a minimum wage increase would do, it always models job losses because built into their model is the assumption that raising the minimum wage has a disappointment effect.

It's just built in. It has to come to that conclusion. And- so CBO is starting to make a lot of their models open source also, and so they- Okay ... they have a GitHub repository where it's out there and people can look at them and see them and so everybody's advancing with the times. And, it is exciting time to be doing this research because a lot of those old assumptions, a lot of those old models are getting rebuilt and revetted.

So just tell us wh- where you are on building the model. What's the status? Yeah, so we've been releasing papers for a while now, and I guess probably last August was when we came out with our sort of three biggest pa- papers, one describing our tax tool, one describing our spending tool, and one looking at the debt and deficit.

And essentially the concept behind the debt and deficit piece was we reached this year, or I guess last year, a national debt of, roughly 100% of GDP, when you don't include things that we owe to ourselves, like So- Social Security and Medicare. That's about where we were in 1946 after the Second World War.

We paid down that national debt in, from the Second World War- In 28 years, we got it down to below 30% of GDP. That was mostly economic growth, but a lot of that was in spending restraint and actually collecting taxes. We've dug ourselves into this 100% of GDP hole over about 50 years. From the same time period that all these other, bad things happened that we discussed in, in, those other papers, we got in a lot of debt, and we looked at a way that you could reasonably get back to that, 1974 level in 30 years.

It took us 50 years to get into this problem. I think we can get out of it in 30 years. And what does it take to get out of it? Oh, I'm guessing taxing you, Nick, but I'll let Carter explain. We looked at different combinations of options. So taxing alone, spending cuts alone, economic growth alone are not likely to get us there, and so it will likely take some combination, of that.

So keeping the deficit below 3% of, GDP, and then letting economic growth and inflation take care of the rest- Yeah ... would be one way to do it. And then it's just, it's up to policymakers to figure out, okay, how do we get our national debt, our national deficit below, 3%? But, Carter, as I recall, one of the, from our earlier conversations, one of the really striking findings was that in an economy where inequality didn't rise in the way that it did over the last 50 years, and, the median worker did retain effectively their same share of GDP, we wouldn't have deficits.

Yes. That's, very likely true, and- Yeah ... it's directionally, not to the dollar, c- Yeah ... but it's directionally correct. Absolutely. The, the- Yeah ... tax receipts would have been higher. The- Yes ... sp- spending on safety net programs would have been lower. Would have been lower.

And- ... and we would not be in the same fiscal situation we are now. Yeah, so just to, just to expand on that thought, which I think is really, really important, in one way, our budget deficits are not a consequence of, by the way, Social Security is threatened, is not a consequence of profligate spending, although we have done that.

A- and it's mostly a consequence of tax cuts for rich people and wage suppression for everybody else. And that if, y- if people, i- I mean, in round terms, if the median worker had retained their same share of income from 1975, and they'd make effectively twice as much money Per year.

Yeah, in, in that ballpark, yeah. What that means, of course, is that if the median family in America made twice as much as they do presently, they'd probably be paying four times as much tax, right? But- Because not only... they wouldn't just pay twice as much in tax. They would probably bump up into a higher tax bracket.

Payroll tax generation would be higher, the, Yeah, everything. Yeah Everything. And Social Security c- contributions would be higher, everything. And of course, now people don't need food stamps, and they don't need EITC and the rest of it. And housing, heating oil. All, everything.

Yeah. I think what's important for Americans to understand is that, our fiscal crisis is largely a product of our inequality crisis, and that if we had managed our economy in a fundamentally different way, then we would really probably not have the kind of budget deficits that we have today.

Because everybody'd be paying a lot more taxes, except maybe people at the very tippy top. Also, the economy would have grown faster than- can you speak to that? So that's not something that we did as part of this. There was, many years ago, I did work on a study looking at that, and that there is substantial evidence that more equal economies grow faster than less equal- Right

economies, and that- Yeah ... that, that's a really interesting area of study, and there are... Economists have put up a lot of ideas about why that is. And it, that's- Okay, but it's pretty simple, isn't it? Yeah. It's pretty simple. If people have twice as much money, they will definitely buy twice as many things.

And when they buy twice as many things, people have to employ twice as many people, and so on and so forth. It's not, this is not a complicated concept. Nick has talked about this for a decade, that he may earn a thousand times more than me, he may have a thousand times more than me, but he doesn't eat a thousand times more food.

No. He doesn't... Despite all of his fancy houses- Yeah ... he doesn't spend a thousand times more on housing. He doesn't buy- Or haircuts or ... a thousand times more clothing. No. There's just no way for him to spend the money, No ... as if you took that and you distributed that out to a thousand people, and they would- Yeah

spend the money, more of that money than- Yeah, no ... he does. And the economy would look different, too, in the sense that- Yeah ... if you have fewer people with, at the very top, maybe you have fewer luxury car dealerships or- Yeah ... just things like that, and you have more, mid-market restaurants and better, mid-market cars than the, the- Yeah

high-end luxury stuff. Absolutely. And- I think you could- Very convincingly argue that not only would the economy be bigger, but it would be more innovative because the more robust and div-diverse demand is- ... there more incentive for innovation that exists, right? I do think it's, Carter, maybe you guys know the number, but I believe now something like, eighty percent of the consumption in the economy comes down to the top twenty percent of Americans or some- or maybe it's top ten percent of Americans today.

It's some crazy skewed number. And of course, that concentration diminishes the reason that businesses have to either create themselves or to be created or for people within businesses to create new products, for large and robust markets. And so you slow down that feedback loop between innovation and demand that is what the economy really is.

Moving on to Section D, Ideology of Capital

Donald Trump might have become the most honest American president ever. We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We're fighting wars. We can't take care of daycare. It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.

They can do it on a state basis. You can't do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection. We have to guard the country. 

And honestly, this feels refreshing, 'cause at least he just said the thing. And as Trump and his administration remind us that we can't have healthcare or childcare because we need to fund a senseless and bloodthirsty war, there's an unsurprising lack of response from the opposition party.

Oh, wait, actually, I'm wrong. The Democrats- They posted about it, and then Chuck Schumer wrote a strongly worded statement. So I think we're good now. And it honestly is starting to feel like American liberals, and liberals more generally, have more in common with fascists than they do with leftists.

They were cool with Liz Cheney being part of their big tent coalition during Harris's doomed 2024 campaign, and now many of those same Democrats are out to get Hasan Piker, claiming that he's just as bad, if not worse, than figures on the far right. And this idea that when push comes to shove, liberals will side with fascism to protect capitalism is explored and explained in Dr.

Clara Mattei's recent book, Escape from Capitalism. This work was really about showing how austerity is not a natural order of things. It comes about in specific moments when the system shows its fragility, and that's what I based kind of the theorization of the cap- of escape from capitalism on, is to sh- say, the capital order is again really stressing the fact that this order's political and is enforced actively by s- governments and other state institutions or economic institutions at large.

Now this book, which has the subtitle An Intervention, argues that capitalism is in no way a natural or scientific system. It's a specific political project masked as an economic system that weaponizes concepts like austerity, unemployment, and development to enrich the capitalist class while further dehumanizing and exploiting working people like us.

Now, this obviously sucks and is true, but Mattei makes the point that precisely because this isn't a natural or necessary system, it can be escaped, deconstructed, and eventually destroyed. Now, to use my own language here, she's basically showing how the capitalist economic project has turned into a sort of political theology, where we treat the free market system like some holy and preordained way of life given to us by God.

And as I've shown in recent videos, a lot of evangelical figures are quite literally willing to argue that capitalism is Jesus's preferred economic paradigm. Take this credit card and build up debt- 'Cause when you do, you will consume of my flesh and blood," or something like that. But of course, this quasi-religious way of life does not serve people, it serves profit.

And the implications of all of this are quite bad, as Mattei points out in her book.

Now, something she emphasizes that I think is really important is the idea that capitalism is a fundamentally inhumane system, like it's quite literally anti-human. Now, if we wanna use the pro-life, anti-life paradigm favored by many of capitalism's biggest fans, it is an anti-life- system. And that's both in terms of human life, plant and animal life, and even the very conditions that sustain biological life in general on this planet.

If we're going to protect natural systems, one of the solutions is to bring nature onto the balance sheet. 

So on this month's Burns After Reading, let's talk about why I think this book not only speaks to one of the very apparent contradictions of our time, but also might help us articulate some of these things in a way that makes anti-capitalism more palatable to our liberal friends who are starting to understand that things are really bad, but might still struggle to understand precisely why.

Okay, let's start here. Economics Is political 

In one year, our agenda has produced a transformation like America's not seen in over 100 years. 

It's not a science or some objective metric of understanding financial and social reality. But for generations, we've been taught the lie that somehow economics can be disconnected from the political, and more specifically, the human, and this decoupling has led to a large-scale depoliticization, where politics happens via voting and posting and donating money, a- and all the economic stuff that actually runs our lives th- that's largely apolitical.

The system is just running itself, jacking off with invisible hands. Now, in the book, Mattei writes that, like the economist of a century ago, modern economists use language that hides an existential concern for a system that is actually neither eternal nor natural. We might think here of the 2024 election where the Democrats repeatedly told us that actually the economy was good, even though for most of us, our lived experience didn't agree with that.

And now in 2026, we're seeing the same thing as markets fall and prices go up, and Trump tells us that it's all good, and eggs are cheap, and gas prices are going down. 

$1.99 a gallon. How would you like to have $1.99? That's- 

You're a worthless pile of . 

Now, as Mattei writes in this book, there are no economic problems that are not inevitably also political problems.

This makes sense of why those in political power will do stuff that makes no sense to us and seemingly makes our lives actively bad. Mattei also writes that what is irrational according to the logic of needs is entirely rational according to the logic of profits. In other words, the market doesn't really give a shit if we can afford gas, eggs, or rent.

It's solely oriented towards the purpose of shoring up profit for those in control of capital. Your ability to enjoy your life is completely incidental to those ends. And as Mattei gets at in this book, it's not just incidental that this system makes most of our lives way worse than they could be. She writes that to satisfy our needs, we depend on a system whose logic is not only indifferent to them, but also requires our exploitation.

And we can put that in simple terms. We are dependent for our means of existence on a system that is fueled by the active exploitation of our human existence as such. There's no such thing as capitalism for everyone or wealth creation for the whole middle class, as that's counter to the operations and the underlying logic of this system- Itself.

Insert your preferred metaphor for this in the comments. And that's why Mattei writes that capitalist wealth is grounded in inequality and human alienation. So again, this shit is not accidental. It's very much a part of the system itself. But this is why Clara points out how the use of austerity and unemployment by the ruling classes are, to put it in academic terms, fucking bullshit.

Because as we saw earlier in the example of Trump, there is always money in the proverbial banana stand, it's just that we don't get it because that money needs to pay for things like war and corporate tax cuts. 

Capitalism and war go hand-in-hand. 

So when governments preach austerity, we need to ask who is being told to spend less, and who is still free to use seemingly infinite money on bombs, tanks, private jets, and making sure the billionaires don't have to pay taxes.

It's the same with unemployment. Mattei gets into this in the book, but think about it in this way, who benefits from full employment and who benefits from continuous unemployment? Because as you probably know, if we all had jobs, there would be less scarcity in terms of work and wages, and then employers would need to compete to attract and retain employees, us.

And those employees would then have bargaining power to use against potential forms of exploitation. On the other hand, when there aren't enough jobs for everyone, employers have the power to take advantage of that scarcity to pay less and treat workers worse because they don't have other options. This of course also hurts attempts at unionization and workers organizations because it's way more risky to organize when you can be easily fired, and then if you get fired, you know that there's not other jobs to go get.

In 1694, the English government re-engineered money by allowing the Bank of England, which was private back then, by the way, to issue notes for government borrowing. The important bit here is that this completely aligned the interests of the state with private owners of capital, who received interest payments in exchange for funding the state's military needs.

State-sponsored. Actually, because early modern states needed a lot of resources for wars, and because of the old Black Death that wiped out a third of Europe's labor force, amongst other reasons- States gave exclusive and sovereign rights to private companies like the Dutch and English East India companies to raise capital and armies.

Lots of armies. State-sponsored and regulated, and the list goes on. Trust me, I've read too many examples at this point. The point is, states have always played a crucial role in the expansion of trade and markets, and as rulers everywhere became more dependent on the fortunes and whims of merchants, or, as they eventually called themselves, capitalists, states made the expansion of those very merchants possible.

And it was, and still is, a great relationship for both parties. Eventually, capital owners ran on the literal roads and rails created by political rulers, and received sweet interest payments from the loans given to those states. And states everywhere have always been cool with this, because they can tax the profits of private venture, and then use that tax money to build more public infrastructure, like roads or rails, but of course also to do war.

A lot of war. Beckert writes, "Not surprisingly, between 1670 and 1815, the British government managed to increase tax extraction by a factor of 17, even though the national income only tripled during those same years." Whoever associates capitalism with low taxation has not studied history. Over the same period, Ottoman tax revenue remained almost unchanged.

So what was it you were saying, Ron? 

Just let business be business and government be government. 

Not so smug now, are we? And it continues to this day. Nowadays, our economy is based less on the production of literal goods and more on financial speculation, of course, but that doesn't mean that states aren't married to capital.

Remember that, 2008 great economic recession thing, when the speculative loans and investments of private banks blew up in their faces? Right after that happened, we saw the loving relationship between capital owners and the government in action, alive and well. When all the private banks failed, the government had their backs and bailed them out.

Thanks, government. And the same thing happened when Russia invaded Ukraine. With rising oil prices, instead of demanding that big oil corporations lower their profit margins, God forbid, states gave them subsidies instead. Yeah, it kept oil prices somewhat low for us consumers in the short term, but also meant that corporations made unprecedented profits during a crisis in their very own industry, and that, of course, just means more inequality between the big guns and the rest of us folk.

And very likely, the same will happen with the war in Iran. This is just classic capitalism. This is really not a free market, it's a very regulated market, but unfortunately, often in the favor of owners of capital. Now, the thing about capitalist propaganda is that you have to dig really deep to debunk it, as I think is evidenced by my 10-minute ramble about the very, very brief history of markets.

I even remember doing an economics course during my undergraduate degree where I was taught about the effectiveness of the invisible hand of the free market and all of that. Even in universities, we're still being fed this crap. And so I guess it's not that surprising that we hear the same talking points from Ron.

As far as Park and Rec goes, I think what's probably happening here in the show is that the writers don't really understand what capitalism is, a- and they think because Ron is a libertarian, he should be into capitalism, which kind of makes sense. We'll get there. But I think the message actually hits pretty hard, because throughout the show, Ron is always portrayed, as the level-headed, logical guy.

He's the guy who builds his own chairs and knows how much a steak should cost or whatever. Sure, he's definitely a goofy caricature, but I'd say the other characters are even more absurd. And exactly because he's the level-headed guy compared to, for example, Leslie's weird and chaotic energy, his libertarian rants often come off as objective common sense truths rather than just one side of a historical debate, and I think that's especially true for this episode.

So the propaganda here isn't really that the video dome fails and that he was right after all, it's that the show frames Ron's market as a jungle speech as the logical conclusion to the episode's events. My point is that by making the most rational character in the office the one who also preaches that the market is beautiful and brutal and should be left alone or whatever, the writer subconsciously reinforced the myth that capitalism is somehow free from Evil government meddling.

But as Beckert's history shows, this logic is complete fantasy. Capitalism does not operate outside of the state. No, it was very much made by the state, and to this day is upheld by the state. And what I think really hammers down the nail here for me is that Ron is actually a good guy, like annoyingly so.

And he doesn't even act on the very rants he goes on about with capitalism and libertarianism. We see that in another episode from the following season when his cabin is up for sale. Instead of selling it to the highest bidder, which a good capitalist very much would do, he just gives it away for free to April and Andy.

That's a good guy move Definitely not a capitalist move, and not a libertarian move either. And look, the episode isn't entirely wrong that government intervention can go badly. It obviously can, but that's not actually the question we should be asking. The interesting question is which regulations and in whose favor?

Because as I hope I've made clear by now, there has always been regulation. The choice has never been between a regulated market and a free one. The choice has always been between regulations that serve capital owners and regulations that serve everyone else. Like historically, granting monopolies to private companies to outsource colonial resource extraction for the purpose of warfare, that is very much regulation.

And likewise, deregulating the investment strategies of private banks so that they can make catastrophically speculative loans until the whole world economy collapses and the government has to apply regulations to bail them out, that's also regulation, as weird as that sounds. Just the kind that benefits the people at the top and sends the bill to everyone else.

And no doubt that it's gonna happen with the oil industry again with the war in Iran. Can we just stop subsidizing big oil, please? Apart from the bad economics, maybe this might be a good opportunity to start thinking more seriously about subsidizing a clean, green energy transition. I know it's not as profitable, but, neither is the end of civilization.

But then on the other hand, things like wealth taxes, antitrust laws, welfare systems, labor protections, these are also regulations of the market, but they're the good kind, in my opinion anyway. I'd say that these are the regulations that have actually kept our societies from completely degenerating into a libertarian, or shall I say capitalist, wet, but dystopian dream.

Now, last thing I wanna say, which might be the elephant in the room here, you might be confused that I'm using capitalism and libertarianism interchangeably all the time here. Ron is more of a libertarian than a capitalist, right? That's his whole thing. As it turns out, these days, the two ideologies are just remarkably similar.

So think about it like this. Let's imagine there were no rules, like libertarians want, right? Let's say that there are no rules for where you should be driving on the road, left or right. It does not matter. So in this scenario, anyone can drive where they want. At a glance, it looks like freedom, but what actually ends up happening is that the person with the biggest truck pretty quickly finds out that they don't need to share the road with anyone else.

They can just drive straight through, and sure, technically everyone has the same freedom to drive wherever they want, but that freedom means something completely different if you're driving a Toyota Aygo versus an 18-wheeler. Eventually, the big trucks will consolidate the best routes, and the Aygo is left with the ditch.

Sorry, Toyota. 

If you think about libertarianism like that, we don't really get freedom. we're actually just handing freedom over to whoever already owns the biggest truck. That's libertarianism for you. For us regular folk, the only free choice we're left with is either to sell our time as labor or the freedom to starve.

And that's exactly what's happened over the last 40-odd years of neoliberal deregulation, also synonymous with libertarianism. Inequality is at historic highs, the environment is fucked, and the regulations we've gotten rid of were mostly the ones protecting us people, while the ones protecting owners of capital have stayed firmly in place.

So when Ron says, 

Just let business be business and government be government. 

It sounds good. It sounds clean and logical, and coming from him like something a sensible guy would say. But it describes a world that literally has never existed, and if it did, it just would not last very long. 

This is Pomona, a small cafe around the corner from where I live. The cafe is owned and run by Elsa, and one of her specialties are delicious Danish open-faced sandwiches that she makes with whatever produce is in season. Elsa and her cafe, Pomona, participates in our capitalist system. She, of course, needs to pay rent and set prices, but, and this is important, Elsa and her cafe are not capitalist as such.

Why? Because Elsa's cafe is organized around use value. Elsa is fine with a steady state where her cafe earns more or less the same profit each year, and with that profit, she can do things that are useful to her, like going on a summer holiday with her family. And this is actually how most small businesses operate.

Shops that engage in commerce to satisfy various human needs have existed thousands of years, even before capitalism emerged. But use value steady-state companies like Pomona are also fundamentally different from the exchange-value driven companies that emerged with capitalism. For example, this company, Espresso House.

In the early '90s, the Swedish couple, Charles and Elizabeth, traveled around the world and were struck by the fact that everywhere they went, they could find Starbucks coffee shops, cafes that served mediocre coffee at inflated prices. They figured that Starbucks must be a money-making machine, and they were amazed that Starbucks hadn't yet opened in Sweden.

So in, 1996, Charles and Elizabeth opened Espresso House, a coffee shop inspired by Starbucks in their hometown, Lund. Whatever money they made from their business, they invested in expansion, and soon they opened in Malmö then in Helsingborg and Ystad, and then along the Swedish west coast. Ten years later, Espresso House had become Sweden's biggest cafe chain.

That's when the couple sold the chain to the British private equity fund, Palamon Capital, who merged Espresso House with Sweden's second-largest cafe chain, Coffee Cup, and then sold the chain to Norwegian private equity fund, Hercules Capital, who expanded the chain to Norway and Finland, and then sold Espresso House to German conglomerate, JAB Holding Company, which has continued to aggressively expand Espresso House, which now has over 500 coffee shops around Northern Europe.

So while Pomona is organized around use value and steady state profits, Espresso House is organized around the capitalist concept of exponential accumulation of exchange value. Here's another way to explain the difference. When I buy a coffee at Pomona, the profit of that coffee is designed to satisfy particular concrete needs for the owner.

But when I buy a coffee at Espresso House, the profit goes into endless accumulation of exchange value, into buying up competitors, into fees for financial intermediaries, into advertising and marketing, and in practice into putting local cafes out of business. The Swedish journalist, Fredrik Strage, once said this about Espresso House.

"Their cafes are the maggots that hatch when culture dies." 

That is how most of us feel. The problem, though, 

is that the virus of exchange value logic takes over everywhere in our economy, and we really hate it. 

We hate it when software we love turns into shitty subscription services that force us to pay for things we already bought.

We hate that the internet, which used to be a place for curiosity and connection, is now designed to trap our attention in endless scrolls. We hate it that our schools and healthcare are taken over by exchange value logic through privatizations. We hate it that our cities are becoming unlivable because homes are treated as financial assets rather than places to live.

And we also hate it when video creators like me start caring more about accumulating exchange value from our videos than about the use value of the videos themselves.

Five years ago, I published my first video essay on this channel. It was a nerdy video about big tech and antitrust law, and let's just say that it was far from a masterpiece. Since then, I've made a number of videos for this channel, and for most of this time, I've had very few viewers. But then last year, my channel started growing steeply, and in just a few months, the channel went from 13,000 subscribers to 130,000.

And after that, the growth rate flattened out. This growth was, of course, very encouraging. But when my channel grew, something fascinating also happened. All of a sudden, both people around me and the voice inside my own head started telling me that you now need to use the growth that you've already had to grow the channel even more.

Now that I have an audience base, I must increase production by hiring outside script writers, editors, and animators... So I can publish more frequently, I need to maximize revenues by promoting things like VPN services, credit cards, meal kits, and whatever crap YouTubers sells these days. 

So if you go to meta.com/jack- Go to google.com 

Try it out at slash verytastic to- Overdue for- 

I must enter new markets by doing short-form content and maybe even doing content in other languages.

And I get it, these are all strategies you probably need to deploy if you want to make a living off YouTube. Because after all, YouTube itself is a hyper-capitalistic platform built to reward exchange value above everything else. Whatever keeps people scrolling the longest will be promoted. The use value of a video is, at best, a happy by-product.

And sure, it would make sense for me to start doing all of these things, but I also believe that we can, and we must, resist at least the worst tendencies of this economic system that we find ourselves in. And we can do that by favoring use value over exchange value. As consumers, we can choose to buy our coffee from local cafes instead of financialized chains.

And as nations, we can resist letting exchange value logic take over our schools and healthcare. And as video creators, we can choose not to turn every video into an ad for a VPN or a vitamin 

Continuing with Section E, Markets in the Mind

Clavicular doesn't have a worldview. He isn't motivated by an ideological commitment to hierarchy.

He didn't reason his way to looks maxing through first principles. This isn't part of a wider political project for him. In this moment, I feel bad for Clavicular. Being needled by Andrew and other media figures about the philosophy behind his pursuit must be exhausting, because there is no why.

Because looks maxing isn't for anything. It's an end in itself, in the same way profit accumulation is the point of capitalism. Asking Clavicular why looks maxing is like having a stockbroker on CNBC and then spending the whole time asking them about the ethics of commodity production. It's just not the same thing.

People talk about Clavicular like he's a ruthless social Darwinist, but if you watch his behavior and frankly his demeanor, you'll quickly find that's not true. He's more like a dispassionate investor managing an asset portfolio, except in this case, the asset happens to be his face.

I have an embarrassing confession to make. I used to be on the looks maxing forums all the way back in early 2021, around the time that clavicular was getting a start actually. And it made me mentally ill. I was a sophomore in college, lockdown was still in full effect, and I was more socially isolated than I've ever been before or since.

In my vulnerable state, I really convinced myself that my problem was that I wasn't attractive enough. I told myself that if I could become mathematically perfect, or at least optimized, then I would be safe. I would deserve love. In the end, I never flew to Turkey for experimental limb lengthening surgery or developed my own peptide stack or smashed my cheekbones with a hammer or any of that crap.

In fact, the only part of it that I really took seriously was the gym, which ended up being good for me in the long run. But for me, the most debilitating aspect of looks maxing wasn't the method being advocated or any of the stuff that I actually did to myself. It was the mentality that it inspired in me, that it inculcated in me.

Because this mentality really functioned to justify my isolation. It protected me from the messy realities of social life, and it gave me a rationale for indefinitely postponing human connection. Somehow the prospect of reshaping my entire body with chemicals and weightlifting seemed easier and less scary than putting myself out there romantically and socially.

Because it gave me certainty and it protected me from the prospect of rejection. I could tell myself that I wasn't ready to engage with the world because I wasn't perfect. And that's just it, you'll never be complete. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that. But back then, I couldn't. And because of that, I didn't date anyone in college.

I worry that we're all becoming clavicular, that we've internalized market logic to such an extent that we've become blind to it. I worry that clavicular actually isn't wrong, that maybe he's just ahead of the curve. I worry that his behavior is a rational response to the increasingly atomized, globalized, digitized, marketized reality of 21st century capitalism.

In this world, human connection is replaced by numerical signifiers. In this world, we are nodes in a market network. In this world, ruthless self-optimization is rational. So let's not create that world. Let's build a better one.

So what is the rational response to clavicular, to looksmaxing, to the marketization of society? And I think it's pretty simple: be a good freaking person, be body positive. All this looksmaxing stuff is weird. Just be chill, bro. Yeah, you like my Brad tube impression? I'll be here all week. So yeah, before I lay out the solution, we need to talk about why the standard normie left-wing response to looksmaxing is totally ineffective.

That's right, it's time for everyone's favorite segment: criticizing the left from the left. I've noticed that a lot of people like to pretend that looksmaxing is some kind of weird, unprecedented trend that only terminally online autistic men participate in. But really, what's odd and antisocial about these guys is that they openly discuss how far they're willing to go, whereas most people subconsciously internalize this logic, participate in it, but then pretend that they're above it.

If you go to any major city, you'll find legions of yuppies with expensive gym memberships and health smoothies and elaborate skincare routines and high boost insoles.

Do you think I wear this watch because I need to know what time it is? We all do it. You're just not supposed to talk about it, which means that movements focus solely on challenging beauty standards or promoting body acceptance, while they are important, can't fully address the material conditions that make the logic of looksmaxing so hard to resist.

Sexual capital is an economic force. It's not just a transient cultural phenomenon. People are rational actors in an irrational system, and no amount of plus size models is going to change this underlying reality. You can't tell someone to just be themselves when they can clearly see that certain attributes are rewarded by the market society.

In short, we need to do more than just critique beauty standards and promote self-acceptance. However, this doesn't mean that we need to accept the system as inevitable either. So what would a robust solution look like? I've argued in this video that looksmaxing isn't about individual personal vanity.

Rather, it's a rational response to structural conditions, which means if we care about living in a society where people don't feel compelled to transform themselves into cyborgs, we must take on these structural forces that generate this pathology in the first place. That requires community. Community, community, community.

And I know what you're thinking. This is not some kumbaya, let's all get along, hippie plan. All right? There's a very specific reason that I say community is the antidote to looksmaxing, and it's because when you're in a community, you're interfacing with real people, which fundamentally changes the logic of the game.

Think about it. If you're living in a post-human digital wasteland, scrolling, swiping, liking, gooning, nothing really matters but your appearance and the numbers in your bank account and your clout metrics. You are a complete bug man whose entire life is defined by the market algorithm. This is the rational kernel of looksmaxing because, yeah, this is the world that we're building.

This is the world that we are headed towards increasingly. But, but it doesn't have to be that way. When you're embedded in a community, factors other than your looks become salient because communities are positive-sum hierarchies. In a community, you gain status by enriching the lives of others and by developing competence and by providing resources and by just being a good hang.

In a community, you can build the trust required for reciprocal altruism, and suddenly you do actually have the breathing room to be yourself. Your physical appearance becomes one part of your identity rather than the sole metric that determines your entire life. To me, that's much better than a zero-sum mog off.

Are you mogging me right now? 

So community is the antidote to looksmaxing. Great. Except this doesn't really solve the problem, does it? Oh, you're experiencing problems because you're socially isolated and your entire life is governed by markets? The solution to that is to not be socially isolated.

Free wisdom for you there, buddy. Just rebuild community. While it is correct, doesn't tell you how to overcome the forces that led to the erosion of community in the first place. These social pathologies are being generated by structural problems. Liberals cannot get this through their fricking heads. So let's return to the refrain of the video, the distinction between the market economy and the market society.

This idea comes from political philosopher Michael Sandel. In 2013, Sandel wrote, "How can we decide as a society when markets serve the public good and where they don't belong? I think the only way we can determine that is by having a public debate about how to value the goods and social practices that we care about.

We need to debate case by case." Aw. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy? Sandel isn't wrong, but there's one problem. What if we rationally decide that markets don't serve us in a particular instance? Building a society where markets are tools, where markets don't define every aspect of our lives, requires building power.

It requires actually doing politics. It requires building a countervailing force that can challenge capital. I think back to, workers unions used to have, daycares and adult education societies and sports leagues, and all sorts of stuff that would embed you in this cultural life.

We can kill two birds with one stone. Political organizing is a great place to prove your worth among other people. It's a great place to build community and actually, be useful to people. But the ultimate goal is to live in a healthier society where social life is not defined by markets because, political life and economic life is not defined by markets either.

In a healthy society, looks would just organically matter less. Because for one, people would have organic social bonds and other sources of value, which sort of make looks just one part of their identity. But for another, people would just naturally be healthier and more attractive because they'd be living more human lives.

If you're playing sports, living an active and creative lifestyle, you're in a walkable city with plenty of nature and green space. Your food systems aren't poison. You have enough time to cook for yourself and sleep well. You have adequate healthcare. You have free time to actually, develop yourself.

You would just naturally be a healthier person. In this society, attractiveness is not the result of autistic self-optimization, but rather just a natural outgrowth of living the way humans were meant to live. You can call that looksmaxing if you want, but for me, it's qualitatively different. That's the world I'm trying to build, and hopefully you are too.

The effect of Citizens United on climate legislation was not a gradual one.

It instead changed Congress almost overnight. After Citizens United, outside spending from the fossil fuel industry was pumped into politics like never before, rising from 2 million to over 150 million over the course of just four presidential election cycles. There are over 100 different groups involved in this, all beholden to the fossil fuel industry.

That includes think tanks, fake scientists, massive propaganda campaigns, and even attack operatives going after journalists and researchers. But no single politician better illustrates the direct pipeline between fossil fuel money and climate obstruction than Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin had holdings in 2021 valued at between $1 million and $5 million in Intersystems, Inc, the coal brokerage business he himself founded.

He also had a stake in another firm run by his own son that provided support activity for coal and metal mining and drilling oil and gas wells. And at the same time, he served as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the very body that writes US energy policy. Huh, that's interesting.

Manchin was also the top recipient of campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry in Congress, and at the time, he had the decisive vote in a 50/50 Senate. And boy, did the fossil fuel industry have Manchin in the palm of their hand. First, he killed Biden's Build Back Better bill entirely.

Manchin killed off a keystone provision of the bill that would've pushed utilities to speed up the shift to renewables, roughly doubling the amount of wind, solar, and other clean energy put on the grid each year. I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can't. I've tried everything humanly possible.

I can't get there. You're done. This is a no 

This is a no 

Without that provision, Biden had no credible path to a carbon neutral electricity sector by 2035. It also didn't help that Biden couldn't fight back against Manchin or the Republicans because he wasn't too sure what year it was, what planet he was on, or what astral plane his withering consciousness was hovering through.

I no more think of myself as being as old as I am than fly. 

But when the Inflation Reduction Act finally passed back in 2022, a dramatically scaled back version of Build Back Better, Manchin had inserted oil and gas provisions and demanded Democrats trim down the original $3.5 trillion plan, all while he was the leading recipient of donations from the oil and gas sector, owned a stake in his family coal business, and crafted provisions explicitly designed to give coal a chance to stay online.

We're doing 

clean coal, everybody. It's called clean coal. It's the cleanest coal you've ever seen. 

We love clean, beautiful coal, don't we, Doug, huh? 

And ladies and gentlemen, there is so much bad that has come from Citizens United, and we will get to more of that bad very soon. But when it comes to global climate denial, we are witnessing quite literally the greatest scam in history.

Here is the number that puts all the political spending into perspective. Fossil fuel subsidies worldwide reached a record $7 trillion. Nearly 60% of the $7 trillion figure is due to undercharging for the costs of global warming and local air pollution. In other words, fossil fuel companies are being allowed to privatize the profits while socializing the catastrophic costs onto the public, onto future generations, and onto the planet.

And since Citizens United was decided in January 2010, there has not been one single serious bipartisan climate bill in the Senate. But let's talk about bills that actually get passed in Congress, bills that have to do with- War. The United States spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its military.

That is more than the next ten countries combined, and we account for 37% of all military spending on the planet, and it never goes down. After every war ends, the baseline resets higher. Eisenhower called this the ratchet effect when he warned about the military industrial complex in 1961. Along with having the sassiest pose I've ever seen from a US president- Eisenhower was also 100% right about the military and its relationship to capital and the government.

The five biggest defense contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, collectively spend over $2.5 billion on lobbying over a two-decade period, the equivalent of employing over 700 lobbyists each year over the past five years. That's more than one lobbyist for every single member of Congress.

Who do you think would win in a fight, 700 defense contractor lobbyists versus the entire federal government? Let's go. The lobbyists. The lobbyists won. It wasn't even a fight. But here's where it gets even more absurd. Every year, Congress adds billions of dollars in defense spending the Pentagon never even asked for.

In fiscal year 2026 alone, Congress added $34 billion above the president's defense request. The year before that it was $21 billion, and the year before that, $15 billion. 68% of those additions were for programs the Pentagon put zero funding toward in their own budget. Congress is literally inventing weapons programs and handing the bill to taxpayers, and the lawmakers doing it don't even have to disclose their names.

Unlike formal earmarks, these program increases require zero transparency. The defense industry donates to your campaign, and you quietly add a line item for their product, and nobody ever knows you did it. And on top of this, the Pentagon is the only major federal agency that has never passed an audit.

Congress first required annual audits in 1990. The Pentagon didn't even attempt one until 2018, and it has failed every single year since. In the most recent audit, the Pentagon could only account for half of its $3.8 trillion in assets. And all the while these defense contractors post record profits, the people actually serving in the military don't even get to eat a meal that looks like it was made on planet Earth.

This photo was allegedly taken by a service member stationed on a ship somewhere near Iran. This shit looks like it was discovered by interdimensional travelers lost in the same astral plane as Biden's consciousness. 

I no more think of myself as being as old as I am than fly. 

What the is that? Soda. Now, Citizens United didn't create the military industrial complex, but it handed it a weapon that Eisenhower could have never imagined, the legal right to spend unlimited, often secret money on the elections that determine its own budget.

And now, just like you might say striking up a conversation with a stranger, sitting around your extended family at Thanksgiving, or trying to think of a good icebreaker for a first date, let's talk about Israel. 

Being pro-Israel is good policy, and AIPAC members make sure it's good politics, too 

AIPAC is the most wild, most recent, most what the is going on example of Citizens United in action.

AIPAC, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has been a lobbying force in Washington for decades. If you wonder why your parents harbor a sort of inexplicable yet ardent affection for Israel, that's probably due to the work of AIPAC throughout the late 20th century. But AIPAC's super PAC, called the United Democracy Project, is beyond mere lobbying.

In 2024, AIPAC spent over $100 million on US congressional elections. No, that is not a typo. One lobbying group, one, spent more than $100 million in a single election cycle. That is the most ever spent by any outside organization in American congressional elections in history. Now, why would that be?

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those funds were dedicated to defeating progressive Democrats who had criticized Israel's military campaign in Gaza. AIPAC poured nearly $15 million into the New York primary race against Jamaal Bowman, making it the most expensive House primary in US history, to oust one of the few progressive critics of Israel in Congress.

Then they turned around and spent over $9 million to snipe Cori Bush in Missouri. Two leftist members of Congress gone, not beaten by Republicans in a general election, but washed away by a tidal wave of outside money in their own primaries. And here's something that should bother you regardless of politics.

AIPAC is not registered as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the 1938 law designed to expose exactly this kind of foreign-aligned political influence. In 1962, Robert F. Kennedy, father of brainworm man, his Justice Department pressured AIPAC's predecessor organization, the American Zionist Council, to register as a foreign agent after finding it had received funds from the Jewish Agency, an Israeli government body.

The AZC lawyered up, ran out the clock, and the matter quietly died without enforcement. There was no registration, no consequences, and the legal loophole held. See, AIPAC's legal defense is that it's funded by American citizens, not the Israeli government. 

AIPAC is an American organization. 

While that is technically true, leaked Israeli government documents from 2018 show Israeli officials actively sought legal advice on how to avoid FARA compliance, specifically because they feared registration would make American donors reluctant to fund their advocacy groups.

Nearly half, or 46%, of AIPAC donations to moderate Democratic candidates- Come from donors who had given to Republican caucuses or candidates since twenty twenty. Republican billionaires are funding a super PAC that calls itself a pro-democracy group, and using it to eliminate the most progressive members of the Democratic Party who are willing to speak out against the genocide occurring in Gaza.

These are Republican billionaires buying democratic elections, and nobody is allowed to say anything about it because it's all perfectly legal thanks to Citizens United. And here's the best part. The attack ads AIPAC ran against both Bowman and Bush didn't even mention Israel. They distorted their domestic voting records instead, criticizing them for their Biden infrastructure bill votes.

The money was about Israel. The ads were about something else entirely, and the whole thing was funded by people who don't even vote in those districts. When the lobby for a foreign country knows that it can't mention the name of that foreign country, then that foreign country probably isn't doing anything 

And Finally, Section F, Bubble, Backlash, and the Way Forward

good.

Allbirds rebrands and rises by a thousand percent. Myseum follows suit and rises by four hundred percent.

But what if I told you that this isn't some sort of novel concept? It's not a brand-new thing. All the way back in 2018, during the blockchain craze this time, the SEC was actually pretty clear about how the process should be treated. Speaking in Washington, DC, then Chairman Jay Clayton, in a speech, said, quote, "Before I move on to the next topic, I want to raise one more narrow distributed ledger or blockchain-related legal issue by means of a hypothetical.

I doubt anyone in this audience thinks it would be acceptable-" For a public company with no meaningful track record in pursuing the commercialization of distributed ledger or blockchain technology to, one, start to dabble in blockchain activities, two, change its name to something like Blockchains R Us, and three, immediately offer securities without providing adequate disclosure to Main Street investors about those changes and the risks involved.

End quote. Honestly, that's very reasonable. That makes complete sense. Seeing a trend, renaming your entire company with no realistic expectation of ever succeeding in that new space simply to then become an investment vehicle under that new banner and run away with tens of millions of dollars in investor capital isn't exactly a healthy free market technique.

And yet, at the risk of over-politicizing the video, the current United States governing agencies do not seem to care about white-collar crime anymore. Let's go back in time because to understand the present, you have to understand the past. How many people have ever heard of a company called Long Island Iced Tea?

Anyone? Maybe yes, maybe no. But even if you haven't heard of it, back in 2017, shortly after receiving a Nasdaq delisting notice because they were a failing company even then, this beverage manufacturer decided, "Let's become a crypto company." Except they had no actual intention of becoming a crypto company.

Just like Allbirds, the shoe company, they pledged some money, changed their name. Instead of Long Island Iced Tea, they were now Long Blockchain, and the share price rose by, 300%. You can see it right here with the massive volume spike. Of course, that's not all they wanted to do. Immediately after they spiked the share price with nothing but a name change, they did a 1.6 million share common stock sale, thereby raising a whole bunch of money, I think $8 million plus, from unsuspecting retail investors, which had basically nothing to do with the company itself because they eventually were delisted from the Nasdaq, and then they got hit by a subpoena from the SEC.

So just well done, guys. Total and complete failure on that one. Long story short, the beverage company that decided, "Let's pretend to be a blockchain crypto company," unceremoniously failed, as if that's even surprising. But to really drive the point home fully, they weren't even the only drink company back then to do this.

A Chinese firm called Sky People Fruit Juice suddenly renamed itself as a financial technology company, and purely because of rampant, wild, unhinged speculation, the stock price went up, 200% because what if it's about Bitcoin? The story is actually pretty simple when you start to look at things with a historical lens.

Right now, 2026, companies are simply rebranding with no credible business infrastructure or foundation supporting them and seeing ridiculous valuations because of that. Back in 2017, same exact thing. Drink companies at the time saying, "Oh my God, blockchain," and spiking two, three, 400% in their share price.

But even further back, as in the early 2000s during the dot-com crash, the same precise thing was happening, this time leaving a veritable graveyard of names because most of these companies could not justify their valuations. In the dot-com situation, there were hundreds of companies doing this all at the same time.

A postmortem of the crash found that simply adding dot-com to the name of a company created, on average, a 74% stock appreciation, like stock rise, for no other reason aside from internet big money go up, AKA just totally delusional hype. Remember, the AI bubble, okay, and it is a bubble that we're experiencing right now, as per the Wicksell spread of misallocated capital, is 17 times larger than the dot-com crash, which again had ripple effects across the entire world.

And if you then look at the parallel catalyst of how that bubble popped in the first place, it gets even better. The simple version is that the dot-com crash was heavily preceded by infrastructure over-investment. Companies were racing to build massive fiber optic networks, anticipating that overall traffic online would double every 100 or so days, culminating in a scenario where most of these companies couldn't justify their valuations despite owning a tremendous amount of infrastructure behind them because they simply weren't making money.

The result of that bubble obviously was catastrophe, and if you now draw a comparison between the 1990s dot-com craze and the mid-2020s AI craze, what is almost the exact same thing. For starters, the relative consumer interest in large language models is declining. At an enterprise level, as in big businesses, it's declining as well because the quality and speed of work assisted by language models doesn't necessarily justify the cost.

The pilot programs are mostly failing is what I'm saying. But at the same time, initially reported by Bloomberg, half of all US-planned data centers are either delayed or canceled outright because of power restrictions, component shortages, and financial drawbacks, which is eerily similar in terms of over-hyped infrastructure when compared to the dot-com bust.

It's not precisely identical necessarily. There are some differences. A lot of these AI companies who are engaging in what's called circular finance as they invest in each other around and around like a pinwheel, or maybe a better analogy would be a snake eating its own tail. A lot of these companies do have some sort of revenue somewhere, but the scraps that they earn pale in comparison to their spending because the goal isn't to make a sustainable business.

The goal is to get the valuation astronomically high, execute a public offering in some cases, and then everybody on the inside gets rich. It doesn't really matter what happens to the bubble afterward, as long as you cash out before it pops at the expense of regular people. So basically, everybody on the inside gets rich, and everybody on the outside loses everything.

Look at this, okay? Just look at this. The former CTO of OpenAI, Mira Murati, leaves, starts her own company. Okay, cool. Good for her. And that company receives a ten billion dollar initial valuation immediately after two billion dollars in seed funding led, overall catalyzed by major technology firms.

And this happened while the company had no product. Okay? But not only that, the company wouldn't even disclose what its own purpose was. Think about this. Investors were breaking records, throwing never-before-seen amounts of money at a company that was actively refusing to tell them what the fuck it even was simply because of AI hype.

That is insane and delusional. Ultimately, it's the same sort of accounting tricks, the same valuation schemes, the same hype-driven irrationality, and the execution of a well-known, well-established pattern because economic hype cycles, for some unexplainable reason, seem to exist outside the world of collective logic.

Back when I talked about how crypto was a massive unsustainable bubble, I literally got hate mail for saying that. Flash forward to now, and practically every single crypto project has categorically failed. The capital wipe out is best measured in the trillions, and yet even with a more precise historical example, that being Long Island Iced Tea, which rebranded, sold more stock, and then got delisted and subpoenaed.

People are lining up behind a shoe company, spiking the valuation by a thousand percent, and throwing their money on a burn heap because the words artificial intelligence were involved. Earlier, I said that if I failed to convince you that AI is a Titanic-level iceberg, you should dislike the video, but let me clarify that.

It shouldn't matter whether or not you think that AI might, in some future version of reality, become a societally shaping construct, right? Back in the nineteen nineties, people said the internet would be just like that, and it is like that. Okay? It is that monumental. But just because the vision behind the bubble can be accurate twenty or thirty years later, doesn't make the bubble itself any less real or damaging You could be the biggest fan of large language model development on planet Earth and still accurately acknowledge that the amount of wasted capital, the number of companies driving up their valuations in what I would say is a fraudulent manner, on top of the debt spiral that all of it's creating, is an iceberg.

And if you hit the iceberg wrong, you sink the ship. My goal here is not to make a universal argument about whether or not any one piece of technology is good or evil, even though I do think the danger and negative downside right now far outweighs the benefits when it comes specifically to AI development.

But regardless, my goal isn't to argue in absolutes. My goal is to showcase that the AI craze, with big air quotes there, is now the largest financial bubble in human history, with warning signs that perfectly echo prior economic meltdowns, multiple of them. And when the music stops, it will stop eventually, regular people get screwed.

Executives cash out, founders walk away with golden parachutes, and billionaires get, government bailouts. But little Timmy, with his life savings in a cookie jar trying to make some extra money by trusting the experts and putting that money in the data center market, he gets screwed. Just because a company puts AI in their name doesn't make it a good investment.

Currently, around 30 to 40% of Harvard graduates end up in what a good friend of mine calls the Bermuda Triangle of talent, so that's consultancy, corporate law, and finance. It's this gaping black hole that sucks up so many bright young people. It's no surprise that talented young people want to have high-paying jobs.

But it's also a bit problematic because researchers have found that how much work pays often correlates with how immoral that type of work is perceived to be. So if our most talented young people follow the money, then they will often end up in what society believes are the most immoral industries.

There's this quote from a guy who worked at Facebook more than a decade ago now, and he said it well. He said, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Now, what do we actually want? We obviously want the combination of ambition on the one hand, and idealism on the other hand, and that's what I describe as moral ambition.

So if we want to live morally fulfilling lives that actually matter, then we should spend our lives in this top right quadrant. But why are so few of us doing that? Rutger argues that this is because we buy into six myths about doing good.

The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. 

This is Gordon Gekko from the 1987 movie Wall Street. In this scene, Gordon expresses a belief that runs deep in our economic system today, 

that selfishness, even greed, can still be moral.

This idea builds on a perverted version of Adam Smith's invisible hand, the idea that if everyone just chases their own self-interest, the market will magically transform this greed into benefits for everyone. 

And with that logic, obviously, we don't even need to think morally because greed is enough.

Profits will make the world a better place. 

Today, we know what even Adam Smith realized, which is that greed and profits alone won't create a better world. But even if you reject the greed is good story and genuinely want to do good, Rutger argues that there are six powerful myths that still hold people back.

And Rutger calls these the six myths 

of the noble loser 

So the first myth we gotta talk about is the awareness myth. Awareness is vastly overrated. The fact that people watch this YouTube video, it's nice, but it's just a very small first step. People are aware that we treat animals horrendously.

People are aware that there are massive disparities, how we distribute wealth globally, and still we choose to ignore most of it. The challenge really is to bridge that gap from awareness to action. Yeah, the second myth is the intention myth. Intentions are also quite overrated. Yeah, there are just many examples of well-intentioned people not achieving much or even doing harm.

Take a simple example like fair trade. You pay a little bit extra for a product, and then that ends up with the poor farmer who really needs that money. Look, economists have studied fair trade a lot, and most studies are really negative. If you really care about the poor, then there are much more effective interventions.

So the third myth is the myth of the right reasons. People forget that in history, very often the right things happen for the wrong reasons. So I'll give you an example. The fight against the slave trade in Britain in the 18th century. This was the greatest movement that the world has ever seen in my view, and it was super effective because it used a technique called moral reframe.

The abolitionists had first tried to convince the politicians in Parliament that slavery should be banned simply because it was morally wrong, but that argument didn't resonate with the politicians. 

But then the abolitionists discovered that around 20% of white sailors were dying on these slave ships, and then they had this epiphany, this is gonna be such a powerful argument in Westminster.

Because when these politicians hear that our boys are dying on these ships, then we'll... they will surely turn against the slave trade. And indeed, that's what happened. Very often in history, the right things happen for the wrong reasons. So the fourth illusion is the illusion of purity, the idea that you can only work together with people who agree with you on all things.

I personally believe that this illusion of purity is fueled by our obsession with left versus right thinking. As I explained in a video last year, the left/right spectrum fools us into thinking that we have to have opinions about all issues that we face today based on where those issues are currently positioned on the left/right spectrum.

That type of thinking fuels tribalism, and it prevents us from actually solving problems. 

Every great movement throughout history the abolitionists, the suffragettes who fought for women's right to vote, they were coalitions of people who very often didn't agree with one another on really substantial issues.

The fifth illusion is the illusion of, synergy. This is a concept that was coined by the economist Albert O. Hirschman. He noticed that very often progressives like to think that all good things come together. We need to solve climate change, but at the same time we also need to re- reform our whole democracy.

We need to implement a universal basic income, a job guarantee, provide equal rights for everyone. We gotta do all of that together, and this is, by the way, the only way it will work because all these different ideas and proposals, they all build upon one another. There are some cases where indeed different proposals can empower one another, but I think very often it's an illusion as well.

Let me give you one example from the abolitionist movement again. British abolitionists had to answer the question what they would fight. Would they really take on slavery, the whole institution as such? Or would they only focus on fighting the slave trade, right? The transport of enslaved Africans to the colonies.

Today you may think, obviously they had to take down the whole system, right? These entrepreneurs, because that's what they were, they came together and they made the very pragmatic decision to initially only focus on the slave trade. So they founded the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

They said, "If you stop the flow of enslaved people to the colonies, then that will force these slave holders to start treating their enslaved people better." And they believed that once you abolish the slave trade, then that will create the fertile political ground that you can build upon to then finally also start attacking the slavery, and this is exactly what happened.

After a 25-year-long campaign in 1807, they did get that law through parliament. The slave trade was abolished, and then another 25 years later they managed to abolish slavery across the British Empire. The perseverance of these people just deeply inspires me, and they achieved their goal by being radical in their ideals but being super pragmatic in their methods, and that's what it really takes.

So the final myth that we gotta talk about is the myth of inevitability. There's this famous saying from Martin Luther King that, "The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice." And MLK said a lot of very wise things, but this was not one of them. There is absolutely no inevitability. History has no destination whatsoever, and if there is justice in this world, then it has to come from us.

That's why I talk about moral ambition. It's about the combination of the idealism of an activist and the ambition of an entrepreneur, and then maybe also the rigor of a scientist and the humility of a monk, right? And when all those things come together, Then, yeah.

Some people watching this may think, "Look, I am just not one of those people. I am not one of those historical heroes. I'm happy to do the basics of being a good citizens, but moral ambition, that's a bit too much." And then I would like to emphasize the great heroes of history, they were people just like us, and it's not because they were good persons that they did good things.

No, it's the other way around. This is something that history has shown many times. For example, during the Second World War, as Nazi Germany occupied more and more of Europe, when most people did nothing, a small minority risked everything to resist. Now, after the Second World War, there've been some really big studies in which researchers interviewed hundreds of resistance heroes who had the courage to hide persecuted Jews in their cellars, for example, really risked their own lives to help those people.

In these studies, the researchers searched for patterns among the resisters, patterns that can tell us who are likely to act morally. Were they mostly young men, mostly poor? What type of person is likely to be morally brave? It really turned out to be a cross-section of the population, people who are rich and poor and young and old and introverts and extroverts.

But then after a while, they discovered that there was one factor that predicted very well whether people would join the resistance, yes or no, and it was the mere matter of being asked. So in 96% of all cases, when w- people were asked to do the right thing, they said yes. So moral ambition is not something you're born with.

It's not necessarily something you're, getting from your parents. No, it's more like a meme. It's almost like a social virus that can spread. This also explains, by the way, why resistance, it wasn't evenly distributed over the country. No, it was a local phenomenon, right? Very often spread by these super spreaders who asked a lot of people like, "Can you help?

Can you help?" For me, this is such a simple but such an important insight, is that you can just get started and then one thing will lead to another. Aristotle made this remark as well, is you do not become a builder because you were born that way. No, you become a builder by building. You become a good person by doing good.

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;

Team Human

Trevor Noah

struthless

PissedMagistus

Robert Reich and Inequality Media Civic Action

This Is Hell!

Pitchfork Economics 

Michael Burns

Marcus Werner

The Market Exit

Harper O'Connor

Benaminute

Upper Echelon

and The Market Exit and Rutger Bregman

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 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 a link to join our Discord community where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on all the social media platforms!

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: 5-20-2026

Full Show Notes

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

Today we examine how the Trump administration is quietly reshaping its unpopular immigration crackdown by moving enforcement out of public view. Plus, we explain how anti-immigration politics is spreading through the post-colonial world, highlighting how it's reshaping political parties and public debate in the UK, Canada, and Australia.

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

Velshi

MS NOW

What Next 

The Brian Lehrer Show

This Is Hell!

and Bold Politics

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

Section A, THE RESET IS THEATER

Section B, DUE PROCESS DISMANTLED

Section C, THE GLOBAL FAR-RIGHT PLAYBOOK

And Section D, STAKES AND RESISTANCE

And now, on to the show.

Following sustained public outrage and sliding poll numbers over violent deployments by federal immigration officers in cities like Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. and Chicago, this administration has signaled a reset. It started in late January. Kristi Noem, then still head of DHS, stepped back a bit.

The border czar, Tom Homan, was brought into Minneapolis with a tacit promise to rein in ICE and CBP after officers killed two American citizens and the administration lied about the circumstances of their deaths. And this week, Trump made clear what the real problem was with that operation because, as the Wall Street Journal reports, quote, "President Trump is seeking to lower the profile of his mass deportation effort," end quote.

The President, the Journal reports, has told advisors that he wants to see more attention on arresting bad guys and less chaos in American cities, according to people familiar with the matter, end quote. The report goes on to note that the change is being driven by Trump's Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, who believes his immigration team turned one of his marquee issues into a challenge for the midterms, and that the firing of Kristi Noem as DHS Secretary is being seen as the moment for a reset.

Pay attention to what they're saying here. For the White House, the problem is the optics, what it looks like on TV, how it, how it's talked about, what the headlines and the polls say. And crucially, the reporting on the reset talk at the White House is sourced to, quote, "people familiar with the matter," end quote.

The official statement to the Journal from the White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, is, quote, "Nobody's changing the administration's immigration enforcement agenda President Trump's highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities, end quote.

Keep that top of mind, who endanger American communities. The United States Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, Trump's pick to replace Kristi Noem, brings to the role all the qualifications that you'd expect from someone who spent the last decade fixing pipes and picking physical fights at Senate committee hearings.

He's described the revamp this way during his Senate confirmation hearing this week. My goal in six months is that we're not in the lead story every single day. Ah, the goal is to not be the lead story every single day. Again, listen to what's being said. This isn't about retreating from a widely unpopular mass deportation effort.

For Trump, the crackdown's become a political liability because we see the violence and the brutality and the cruelty with our own eyes and what reporters show us. Listen to what the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, told my colleague Jacob Soboroff in this exclusive interview in late January, which was essentially confirmed this week by the journal's reporting.

I talked to the White House. I talked to Tom Homan. I talked to numerous people, and not once did they ever say Alex or Renee's name. Not once did they ask how the people of Minnesota were doing. So look, I know who I'm dealing with, and I know the reason that he was calling me was he needed something from us.

The reason he was calling was his poll numbers dropped, and it looked bad on TV. What the White House wants is for these scenes on the streets to stop because it's tanking their approval ratings, and according to the president, it looks bad. As Malcolm Ferguson noted in The New Republic, quote, "Even if Trump has finally realized that masked federal agents kicking down doors and killing people in the street is a bad look for the midterms, Stephen Miller is still in the room."

End quote. Meanwhile, amid this so-called reset, we learned just this week that a 19-year-old who was arrested after being stopped over a minor traffic infraction died while in ICE custody at a facility in South Florida. He's the youngest person to die in ICE detention during this administration. Royer Perez Jimenez died on Monday of a presumed suicide in his cell, according to a statement from ICE.

His official cause of death remains under investigation, but Royer Perez Jimenez is dead after being stopped over a minor traffic infraction. In Minnesota, we saw in a visceral way what enforcement looks like when it was impossible to ignore, particularly after the viral killings of Renee Good and Alex Preddy.

The crackdown became the biggest flashpoint in the debate over Trump's mass deportation agenda. And former Border Patrol commander at large Greg Bovino's ouster came as a new AP-NORC poll found that most US adults say Trump's immigration policies have gone too far. But here's the key Most of the enforcement was never happening in the flashpoints that drew all that public outrage.

New analysis from The New York Times gives us one of the clearest pictures yet of how immigration enforcement is actually unfolding across the country, and it's not what you might think. The bulk of the effort is taking place far more quietly and away from the public view. Here's what the Times found.

ICE arrests are surging nationwide, now averaging more than one thousand one hundred arrests a day in two thousand and six. That's nearly double from about six hundred a day last spring. But enforcement is uneven, and the busiest areas are not actually the ones making headlines. Miami leads the country, more than forty-one thousand arrests since Donald Trump took office, followed by Dallas, Atlanta, San Antonio.

Most enforcement is actually happening away from the cameras. Cooperation with local law enforcement is key. About half of arrests are custodial, meaning they're arrests of people who are already in custody, and those are much more common in Republican-led states where local police are actually willing to collaborate with the Trump administration.

And crucially, many of those arrested have no criminal record, undercutting the claim that this effort is in fact focused on criminals and the worst of the worst. Meanwhile, ICE is operating at a massive scale. More than seven million people are on its non-detained docket, meaning that they're not in custody, but they are considered deportable.

Seven million. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, previous administrations prioritized detaining immigrants with criminal records while releasing most others pending hearings. As of last month, according to Brennan, seventy-four percent of those in ICE detention have no criminal record. ICE air operations has rapid, rapidly expanded, for example, driven in part by the growth of its subcontracted private charter network, according to Human Rights First latest report.

As that report notes, for the month of February, quote, "The findings show a continued escalation of the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda, including one hundred and eighty-three removal flights to thirty-one countries and the continued use of forced third country transfers." In February alone, after the administration's supposed reset, there were three hund-- there were one thousand six hundred and thirty immigration enforcement flights, a hundred and fifty-five percent increase from February of last year.

Private contractors are really doing well, by the way. ICE awarded CoreCivic, which is a private prison company, a no-bid contract to reopen a one thousand and thirty-three bed facility in Kansas, later expanded into a deal expected to bring in about sixty million dollars annually. ICE also signed a one billion dollar fifteen-year contract with GEO Group, another major private prison operator, to run a detention facility in New Jersey.

Fifteen years is an unusually long deal. Trump's shift in strategy is about moving this effort- Out of sight and for the long term. But the mach-machinery has not stopped churning. And as reporting continues to show, enforcement is increasingly reaching into the most vulnerable populations, including pregnant, postpartum, and nursing immigrants.

As of February 16th, one hundred and twenty one people in ICE detention fell into those categories, including nine women who were in their third trimester, despite federal policy stating that such individuals should only be detained in limited circumstances. Between January 2025 and February 16th of 2026, sixteen miscarriages were recorded by people in federal custody.

And as enforcement expands, another deeply troubling development is getting far less attention than it should be: the surveillance of political dissent. There's growing evidence that federal agents are tracking and documenting American protesters, not immigrants, not undocumented immigrants, American citizens who are protesters, filming them, logging their information with the help of tech companies like Palantir, and ultimately relying on that same data system that powers your phone and your texts and your emails.

According to reporting by The Washington Post and The New York Times, and now according to new reporting from NPR, in some cases, it goes further. According to NPR, ICE officers are taking DNA samples from American protesters who they arrest. One protester described being tackled while filming an arrest, detained, and then, without warning, having his DNA swabbed.

Legal experts warn this could amount to what one attorney calls a catalog of political dissidents, a catalog of political dissidents in America. And that changes the stakes for anyone who does not support this administration, which right now is actually a majority of this country and growing.

Hello, folks. Um, my name is John Miller.

I'm a citizen here of Social Circle. Really appreciate you guys taking the time to come out tonight. These aren't longtime activists. Most of them are concerned voters, teachers, nurses, farmers, small business owners, people like John Miller. For months now, he's been organizing these meetings as his town of about 5,000 grapples with something very few people here saw coming.

Immigration policies many of them backed are showing up right here at home. What we're here all to talk about today is the, uh, warehouse at the corner of East Hightower Trail and Social Circle Parkway. That is the proposed detention center. Back in December, Social Circle officials found out that the Department of Homeland Security had quietly purchased a massive warehouse in their tiny town.

The plan: turn it into a detention center for up to 10,000 people, effectively tripling the town's population overnight, and placing new strain on resources that were already stretched thin. We don't have the wastewater capacity for anything close to this size. Now, residents here can't even get a response, let alone a visit, from the very same Republicans this town helped elect.

You know, we're in Georgia and we can't get our attorney general to fight for us. So now we're trying to, we are trying to figure out how we're gonna fight with the little mighty fighting the big federal government, when we should've had our government fight for us. That's right. Right. What about Governor Kemp?

How can he help us, and how can we reach him? I can tell you that there hasn't been a lack of effort to get in touch with Kemp. Um, but there's been very, very little response. And every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family, and your future. Social Circle overwhelmingly supported President Trump by large margins in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

And immigration has not been an abstract issue after the 2024 murder of Laken Riley took place in this district at the hands of an undocumented migrant. But some hope two things can coexist: stronger immigration policies without decisions that strain their resources. One of the comments that I've seen from some people in Georgia is they say, "Well, you know, a lot of people in Social Circle, they supported the president and they support ICE, so they should support the facility.

This is what you- No ... what you asked for." Well- No ... I do support ICE. And I do support the president. And I, I'm, I'm, I've, I've already- But this is not the place to bring those people. Back up. Back up. But under the Trump administration, experts say this is exactly what immigration enforcement looks like. A president calling for the mass deportation of millions of people, including lawful immigrants.

Violent arrest tactics spreading throughout American neighborhoods. And now, a sweeping plan to build eight large-scale detention centers and 16 processing sites across the country, using warehouses not designed for humans, but repurposed to hold them, because once arrested, the masses need to go somewhere.

This is the end of our property and the beginning of the, what will be the ICE detention facility property. So if I take two steps further this way, I'm in the ICE, the ICE detention facility, and you're on my property. This is very literally in your backyard. It's our next-door neighbor. Eric Hutchison served more than two decades in the Air Force and did three tours in the Middle East.

When he retired from the military, he bought this land in Social Circle, searching for peace. He identifies as a conservative and voted for Mike Collins, the Republican congressman representing this district, but he says he didn't vote for this. What would you say to someone who said you voted for this to happen?

I think that's a very narrow view of, of what is happening and what has happened. I do support our legal system. I do think that there needs to be processes in place to handle those who've broken the law. But that's not incompatible with not wanting a, a, a penitentiary in your backyard. These facilities have to go somewhere.

They're gonna be in somebody's backyard. I don't think that's true. I think between here and Augusta, there is wide open spaces. You know, there are penitentiary facilities already that are higher security.

His seven children are homeschooled, so to them, this is home, this is the classroom, their playground, and a science lab. What has all of this meant to your family? Uh, well, this has been our dream home. It looks like a child's dream. It is. It really is. This, this whole space. We used to fish out of here all the time.

We would catch five-pound bass, you know, um, and those are all dead now. Dead because during the warehouse's construction by developer PNK, Eric says sediment and material spilled down onto their land, killing all life in their pond, and shrinking their body of water from six feet deep to three feet. He says PNK agreed to do partial remediation, but when he thought the worst had passed, PNK sold the property to DHS, meaning the real fight just got started.

PNK did not respond to MS Now's request for comment. I know Mike Collins is busy putting in a bid for, for a senatorial race and everything, but when you see signs that say, "Veteran in need, call me," and you call and they don't have any response, then you feel betrayed. Have you personally tried to reach his office?

I have. No response. You've served your country, and now you have the government coming in and potentially damaging the home you were retiring into. How does that feel for you? I served for 21 years, and that wasn't just me. That was my wife. That was my family. We fought... I have fought to provide safety and security for my family from threats overseas, and now we have a threat next door, and we're, we feel like we're alone in this battle.

Helping lead the fight is Newton County Commissioner and real estate broker, Lee-Ann Long. DHS paid almost $130 million for an empty building that had not been able to sell. What's going on there? They paid almost three times the amount for that building. So as a taxpayer, first of all, that's my first thing is, good Lord, you're wasting our tax dollars.

In 2025, Newton County assessed the property's value at $29 million, before construction was completed. This year, officials increased that estimate to 65 million, but DHS paid $128 million, a price tag that didn't even cover the cost of renovations to retrofit it for human habitation. When we asked why, DHS ignored us.

Have you ever seen a deal like that- Never ... in this area? Never. The, the, the owner of that building, he cashed out, boy, big time. A long-time Republican organizer, now she says she can't even get a call back about what's happening in town. All of a sudden, we're calling and nobody cares. Nobody's answering.

Nobody knows. They say they don't know. Um, we're just wondering, how do they not know? So do you have some buyer's remorse right now? I do. I do. I've helped a lot of these candidates in their races, and I can tell you, I won't be helping them now. Really? I won't be helping them. They don't have our back.

They're not calling us. What would you say to them? I would say that, Mike Collins, if you want our vote ever again, you need to help us and come down here and do something. You need to go to President Trump. You do all these videos with him like you're besties, so why don't you go with him and tell him, "Help us."

Let's talk a little bit about USCIS, because I don't think most people who haven't interacted with the immigration system in this country even really understand what it does. What is it? USCIS is one of 22 agencies at the Department of Homeland Security. The agency is a s- comparatively small, kind of low-profile agency.

There are about 20,000 officials there, and they have basically just been in charge of administering the legal immigration system. So, people applying for visas, people applying for green cards, people applying for, refugee and asylum, all of that runs through this agency. And this is an agency whose budget has almost entirely been funded by fees paid by immigrants applying for benefits.

So the very existence of the agency is predicated on people going through the legal pathways to get prescribed benefits that exist in the legal immigration system. And what we're seeing now, really from the start of the second Trump term, we're seeing basically, first of all, the evisceration of the career staff inside the agency.

So the people who are actually, well-versed in the kind of legal minutiae and bureaucratic kind of nuts and bolts of the legal immigration process, those people have been sidelined, intimidated, fired, reassigned, marginalized in all kinds of ways we can talk about. And now, if you look at, for example, job postings that the current administration is advertising for positions inside USCIS, they're now ad- they're calling the jobs "homeland defenders."

This is all in scare quotes. This is what they're calling it. And one of the kind of agenda items, so to say, on this job description is, quote-unquote, "Defend our culture," which is... let's be honest. This is like white supremacist ideology now. This is white nationalist rhetoric, yeah. And, and that, by the way, it has been a, a reality in all communications and messaging from the Department of Homeland Security.

That has been, that kind of white nationalist messaging has just been a fact of how this Department of Homeland Security brands what it's doing. But the idea that it's now affecting this agency in particular, I, I think is a sign of how grave things are, and I think everyone obviously is, is fixated on the enforcement bodies, as they should be.

The abuses committed by ICE and by Border Patrol are staggering. There needs to be accountability. A- all of that stuff is front and center for good reason. But if you want to understand the lasting damage this administration is doing, you have to look at USCIS because what they're doing isn't just turning it into an enforcement body.

They're also trying to dry up existing forms of legal immigration. Well, I want to talk about that because it has never been easy to get visas, green cards. This is a long and complex process. How have the legal immigration pathways changed in this second Trump term? That's a good question. All right. For one thing, green cards for people from a growing list of countries have been indefinitely suspended.

So at the current moment, people from some 75 countries cannot get green cards to come to the United States, and that is specifically for people who have spouses or family members who already live here and are either citizens or green card holders themselves. So, just right out of the gate, we're looking at the indefinite pause in the government's processing of legal immigration, permanent residency applications from people from 75 countries.

Now, what does that mean bureaucratically? Yeah, how does that trickle down? Not only obviously does it just leave families in horrible limbo, but there is a finite number of family-based green cards that the US government issues every year. It's, a little over 200,000. What happens if the US government does not use them in a given fiscal year is they pass from the family-based immigration system to what's called the employment-based immigration system, which means that they then are available not to people who aren't in the United States who are petitioning to come here or to regularize their status as relatives of people who are already here, but rather it goes to people who are mostly already in the United States and are, are living here on some sort of work visa.

Maybe it's an H- it's an H-1B, whatever. There's a whole list. But what this administration is also doing is it's also slow-walking those visas. And so you take something like 225,000 green cards that the US government can issue every year, and the government is basically letting them die on the vine. So you're effectively shutting down a key aspect of the legal immigration system.

So that's just one thing that's happening. What is interesting to me in reading your reporting is that these sort of administration gum-in-the-works moves also seem to have had pretty dramatic consequences within the agency itself. Yes. One of the things that's so, I think, dramatic and striking about what's happening at USCIS is People who work at USCIS have actually found themselves at the center of two ideological crusades at the same time.

One is the general ideological crusade against immigration in all forms. The other is the campaign to terrorize and demoralize the federal workforce. And so, we remember Elon Musk with DOGE and these efforts early on to streamline the federal bureaucracy. There was something like three hundred and fifty thousand federal workers who basically left government in twenty twenty-five, and a significant number of them, about eighteen hundred of them, left USCIS.

This is to say nothing of people who've been reassigned from USCIS to different agencies at DHS or whose jobs have been collapsed into something else. But basically, people who worked in this agency, and specifically who had any sort of dealing with immigration-related benefits, were immediately viewed with suspicion.

They were immediately sidelined. Many of them were threatened. Many of them were polygraphed. Wow. There was a point at which, a half dozen USCIS officials who, as far as I can tell from my reporting, did nothing wrong, were basically identified for polygraphing. And those polygraphs were essentially long exercises in, the way it's been described to me, a kind of punishment.

People were hooked up to polygraph machines for hours on end. This is a blood pressure cuff on your arm. Your fingers are going numb, and you're basically being asked general questions like, "Are you trustworthy? Have you ever lied? Have you ever lied to a superior? Have you ever lied to a loved one?"

And insofar as some of these agency staffers were sworn in at the start of these polygraphs, they're thinking, "Okay, are my answers gonna somehow be used against me? Is this gonna become the basis for some sort of, sustained retributive campaign if I do something they don't like? Are they gonna come back at me and threaten to, legally charge me for perjury?"

This was very clearly an effort to intimidate people who worked at the agency with specific expertise and to try to pressure them to leave.

Kieran, one of the central questions in these two cases before the Supreme Court is whether the Department of Homeland Security sufficiently consulted with the department, the State Department about conditions on the ground.

So let's begin with the conditions on the ground in Haiti. IRC reports that armed gangs control, an estimated 90% of the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, and are expanding to other parts of Haiti as well. For listeners who aren't familiar, what sorts of conditions are these gangs creating for Haitians?

Thanks, Amina. The IRC publishes an annual report called our Emergency Watchlist, and that, that report, details out the countries in the world, 20 countries in the world that are most at risk of humanitarian deterioration, over the course of the year. Haiti this year, was number five on that list, and so it's ranking up there with crises like Sudan and Gaza and places like that in terms of both the levels of humanitarian need on the ground and, the risks of further deterioration.

And, and the drivers of that really come from, as, as you've described it, the, the domination of large parts of the country, in particular the capital part of Port-au-Prince, by armed gangs and the conflict between those gangs and the government. The, the, the, the result of this violence over the last five years since it, since it surged in the wake of, of the assassination of Haiti's, Haiti's president is essentially that the government is not able to fulfill its basic functions of safety and public service provision, across most of the country.

We did an assessment. Our team there, provides services, healthcare and emergency protection services for women and children, and we did a survey, earlier this year in which 73% of households reported feeling unsafe where they sleep, 60% don't send their children to school because of safety concerns, and 75% of people can't afford health services.

There's 12 million people in Haiti. Over six and a half million people are in acute need. 1, 1.4 million have been displaced from their homes. Many have sought safety elsewhere in the region and here in the United States. I- I'll, I'll stop here with one final statistic, Amina, which really stopped me in my tracks when I first read it.

Last year, UNICEF reported that sexual violence against children in Haiti had increased by over 1,000%, and that's just a staggering, glimpse into the kind of dystopian situation that many Haitians face, on a day-to-day basis. Well, Ciarán, to pick up on that last stat, what stood out to me in the IRC report was, Haiti's traditional...

no, transitional presidential council, excuse me, has given power to the US-backed Prime Minister Alex Didier Foucami in February. How has the government been responding to the gang violence? The government is, working to do what they can to provide, social service provision, but they, they just simply don't have the capacity to be able to exert, control over territory, particularly in Port-au-Prince, where it's very difficult even for government officials to be able to move around safely.

They're subject to attack a- and to kidnapping and, and, and so on as they move between different neighborhoods controlled, controlled by gangs. A- and of course, the, the, the challenges in Haiti extend way beyond, the last five years since the assassination of the, the former president. There's a long history of, of violence, and conflict, and of course the, the legacy of the 2010 earthquake continues to cast a shadow over, the efforts of the government to, to exert control.

So the government is really constrained in their ability to fulfill that most basic function of governments to exert a monopoly on the use of force, and, and to be able to provide safety for their, their citizens. And that, is, is really the single biggest driver of the humanitarian need that we've been talking about.

Daniel, before these two cases reached the Supreme Court, a federal judge first ruled that the policy change was motivated at least in part by racial animus, and we are getting a few listeners texting on this. That was brought up again yesterday by the Supreme Court's liberal judges. So let's take a listen to Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during yesterday's oral arguments.

The statements about Haiti and, eating pets and, the names, that were called with respect to these immigrants, even though they are lawfully in the United States, that, those are pretty recent. So ev- let's separate it out then. What do you say about those kinds of things? Again, by the-- as the court held in Regents, these are statements made in different contexts that are remote in time.

They are unilluminating. Daniel, if-- the legal ana- analysts are saying if the decision by the Trump administration to end TPS was made based on race, it would violate the Equal Protection Clause. So that's on the legal issues. But I wonder if you can weigh in on the national politics of that case.

Yeah, I can't speak to the, the administration's motivations and why they're terminating TPS. And we'll see what the court has to say about that. What I can say is that the Haitian clients that we work with across the country, are vital members of the communities. They are well integrated.

Many of them have been living in the US for, for a long time. If you even just look at the, the plaintiffs in this case, the, the lead plaintiff, Fritz Miott, he is a neuroscientist who brought, was brought to the country as a child, has been living here his whole life. Many of the people we work with are, are working in, in critical, critical w- workforce areas.

There are, I think one in five Haitians in America are working in, in the healthcare industry. They are members of our churches, of our schools, of our, our communities across the country. So, I, we'll, we'll see what the court has to say about the, the motivations for, the termination of, of TPS.

But what we've seen is, both the Haitians and, and many of the other TPS holders that we work with are, really just long-term, and vital community members. To underscore that, we have a listener who texts, "If we helped our southern neighbor countries to prosper economically, we would not have the immigration problems we now have, but then we would not have the cheap labor for the hardest jobs that we now enjoy."

As you said, the plaintiff in the case, I believe, was a surgeon. But adding, just underscoring, I guess, your point, that TPS is legal status to work in the United States. Can you just define that one step further for us? Because I do think that the Trump administration will often lump in its comments about the Haitian community in particular, with its sort of animus towards, illegal immigration.

Yeah, I'm, I'm glad you asked, asked that question. People with TPS status are legal. They are lawfully present in the United States. And if they have, applied for work perm- permits, they are allowed to work. What we know is that Haitian TPS holders each year contribute about $5.9 billion to the US economy.

They pay hundreds of million doll- of dollars in taxes, in state and local and, and federal taxes. They're also job creators. We know that TPS holders, generally are more entrepreneurial than US citizens. About 15% of TPS holders are entrepreneurs, compared to about nine point, 9.3% of US-born workforce. So, those characterizations are really just, just false.

and in my book, If We Tolerate This, the way that I've tried to characterize that, um, is that right-wing populist parties like Reform or the movement behind Donald Trump in the US or, uh, anywhere else you see this kind of politics at the moment, what they're really doing, they're attracting voters by promising some form of national revival.

So the central pole of attraction is nationalism, right-wing nationalism. Um, and what they tend to do is promise a mix of ways in which that revival is to be achieved. So there's an economic component. There's an idea that they're going to, uh, reboot the economy, so to speak. Um, you know, they are going to make a country a s- a certain- Famous politician said, "Great again."

Um, often that will be a kind of hypercapitalist sort of, um, platform. So if, if you think about the Argentinian leader, Javier Milei, when he was running for election, he, he would pose on stage with a chainsaw, which was supposed to signal how he was going to slash away at state spending in Argentina, and that by doing so would revive the economy.

Obviously, the, the Elon Musk-backed DOGE initiative at the beginning of Trump's second term is a, an example of that. So that's part of the, the appeal. Uh, but I think a much more important component, and the one that gives right-wing populism its real sort of emotional drive, um, is a promise to, uh, do battle with or punish, um, a set of national enemies, um, you know, as defined by these, um, parties and movements.

So anti-immigration politics, you know, is a huge part of it in, um, Western Europe and, and North America, for instance, that, um, you will find right-wing populist politicians in, in both those parts of the world, um, make... Not, not, not just, you know, cutting immigration or applying a conventional set of policy tools to the issue, uh, but kind of ostentatious cruelty directed at one or more groups of migrants.

Um, you know, whether that's through immigration raids, detention, uh, severe legal penalties, and so on. Uh, but it's not necessarily immigration that, that kind of fulfills that central role. Um, it might be a promise to re- restore traditional gender roles to make men feel like winners again, for example. Uh, or in India, where you've had a, a right-wing populist government of Hindu nationalists under Narendra Modi for quite some years now, it's all to do with, um, Indian Muslims, uh, being cast as a threat to Indian national identity and an effort to reshape Indian national identity around a more strongly Hindu religious set of, um, uh, principles.

Um, but that idea of the threat to the nation is always there. The idea that there are enemies inside and outside the country that need to be, uh, combated or punished is always there. And I think crucially, it's, it's the, it's the form of punishment that is offered, um, that- Uh, really sums up the appeal of right-wing populism because it's, it's not about, um, dealing with actual threats to the nation.

You know, for example, a country that is under threat of invasion by a, a military power, you can say there's a kind of genuine threat there. Or, I mean, wherever we live on the planet at the moment, um, climate catastrophe threatens us existentially. But the targets that right-wing populists choo- tend to choose are targets where i- uh, the punishment is much more symbolic, and it's about causing misery to another group of people in order to make yourself feel better about your position in the world and prospects for the future and so on.

In your new book, If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable, you write that at the 2010 general election, one party proposed to deport all illegal immigrants, increase voluntary repatriation, end the, uh, asylum swindle, and resist the Islamic colonization of Britain, warning that indigenous British people were set to become a minority.

You add that that was the British National Party, again back in 2010, fascists whose leader boasted a conviction for incitement to racial hatred and who were motivated by white supremacism and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Its brief presence on the electoral map shocked Britain's political class, and its ideas were rejected by the vast majority of voters.

In 2010, the BNP, uh, received just 1.9% of the vote. But now it appears the Reform Party, which is leading by a wide margin, was, uh, embraced in the early polling, at least they were, all those policies and will be the new British government, potentially, if it, you know, this continues on, if their popu- political popularity moves forward.

Some are blaming this on the Labour Party and Pr- Prime Minister Keir Starmer, vilifying the left in the form of the Green Party and its leader, Zach Polanski, while giving Reform leader Nigel Farage a relative pass. Is that a fair analysis, Daniel? Was the Labour Party more interested in stopping the left than it was the right?

Because here in the States, it often seems the Democratic Party is far more interested in undermining the left than in opposing the right. Yeah, I mean, there's a, certainly been a degree of that going on. Um, again, a little bit of recent history, um, I think probably your, your listeners w- will be aware of this on some level, but the Labour Party itself over the last decade has gone through some quite turbulent times.

So in 2015, uh, Labour members elected Jeremy Corbyn, who was from the hard left of the party, as Labour leader. There was then a very kind of fractious period where, um, Corbyn was being attacked, um, across almost the entire political spectrum from, uh, you know, by the media. Uh, but also people within the Labour Party hierarchy were very opposed to his leadership.

And, um, when he resigned after a quite, uh, bad election defeat in 2019, Keir Starmer took over with, uh, you know, a kind of mission to make the party electable again. But a huge part of that was to purge, um, not just kind of, uh, sort of, dyed-in-the-wool hard leftists, but really anybody who had the hint of socialism about them.

Um, and so that kind of, um, uh, the, the habit of attacking the left was sort of ingrained into the Starmer leadership from, from the start when he took over Labour in, um, early 2020. Um, what's happened, um, since the Starmer, uh, led party, uh, took power in 2024 is that the, you know, the rise of the Greens is very recent, but what happened within the first year of the, the Labour government was that Reform's popularity started to grow in the polls.

Uh, partly out of this frustration that I was talking about, the kind of lack of, um, uh, lack of apparent change and, you know, the continued problems with, uh, cost of living and public services and so on, but also because we've had quite a few disruptions to the immigration system in Britain in recent years.

So there was a kind of big spike in immigration after the pandemic, uh, which has subsided now quite, um, a bit. And then also there's this ongoing issue with, um, refugees crossing the English Channel from France in small boats, which has been a huge kind of controversial political story here for, for quite a few years now.

Um, and so Reform were, um, picking up votes from people for whom those issues were a particular problem. And Labour's response, I mean, Labour would obviously say they're just as concerned about Reform as they are about challenges from their left. Um, but- The way they deal about, uh, the way they deal with it is quite different.

So Labour's response to the rise in support for Reform, uh, towards the end of 2024 and into 2025, was to kind of chase after what Reform were offering, to try and meet voters attracted by Reform halfway. So Labour itself has now kind of taken a sharp right turn on immigration. Um, it's trying to make it much harder for refugees who reach the UK to, um, stay here long-term.

Um, and it's also trying to make life much harder for migrants who are in the UK legally. So people who the, who Britain has invited to the country to work, to, you know, help our economy grow, to help our society thrive. The current Labour government is trying to ensure that those immigrants live on temporary forms of status for, for many, many years, even though they're here in the UK legally.

And all of this, and lots of kind of, um, uh, tabloid-like rhetoric over how many people Labour are depor- deporting each month and so on, all of that was intended to win back voters attracted by Reform. Uh, but it's, it's had almost the opposite effect. You know, Labour have showed very little ability to, uh, win over people who are already sympathetic to Reform.

Um, rhetorically, they've just helped kind of toxify the political discourse around immigration, um, which is something I didn't think could get much worse, um, after 2024 anyway, but it, but it has done. Um, and then at the same time, they have really, really upset a lot of their liberal and left-leaning, uh, core support, you know?

And I think they did that partly because they had this quite contemptuous attitude to their people that were on their own side, that they're either kind of, uh, crazy left-wingers who need to be suppressed, or they're just weak, uh, you know, sentimental liberals who, who should just shut up and kind of do whatever Labour tells them to.

And this has just backfired spectacularly because now what's happened, with the emergence of the Green Party, um, under the leadership of Zach Polanski, who became leader last year, um, they now have somebody else to vote for. And so Labour, since the start of the year at least, have been pulled apart from, from both sides really.

whenever I'm about to do an interview with a horrible right-wing journalist or any of the various people that we speak to, if it's about immigration, I tend to go on your social media first, 'cause I'm like, "What has Zoe been saying about this?"

'Cause you have been incredible in the way that you go there, you're so clear- Unapologetic about standing up for people who need us to stand up for them, uh, whether that's refugees, people seeking asylum, um, and migrants. I guess that's my first place to start. People are always jumbling these terms. How do you get people to have more clarity about the different groups of people we're talking about?

Basically, 95% of our conversation about immigration in this country focuses on the 5%, roughly, who come in on small boats, and people get very, very confused about the proportion, um, that are made up by each group. I think it, it is quite an effective line to just always remind people every time that I'm being asked about it on TV or, you know...

Ask people, "Why are you talking about boats again when that makes up only 5% of immigration?" You know, "Do you think that it represents 5% of your coverage of immigration? Even if it was 10 times more important, uh, than other types of immigration, does it make up only 50% of your coverage? No, it probably makes up at least 95% of what you're talking about."

So I feel like that message has at least started to bed in with some people who are journalists and so on. They're starting to say that in their interviews, and they need to say it a lot more because we've seen that the public perception is way off on this, and actually most people think that the majority of immigration is coming through irregular means to the UK.

So I guess it's just, you know, the, the right have this megaphone across the media. They repeat their message endlessly. We have to repeat the truth endlessly. Something I'm always trying to balance is when we talk about people seeking asylum, I find that the easiest group to defend often because they're fleeing war and persecution.

And then the kind of twist to it now is people go, "Yeah, but what about people who are just seeking a better life or just seeking to migrate?" Now, in my opinion, I'm pretty sure you share this, is actually anyone who wants to come to this country for a better life and is contributing to our system, et cetera, should be welcomed here.

Is there a problem, though, that we are being divided between people who really need to come here and, and everyone else? Yes, and I think, actually, my per- perspective on this has changed a bit, um, over the years. It is and remains true that there are people who just simply must never be sent back to where they have come from because they may be tortured, they may be locked up, they may be killed, and those people should have a status that protects them in the law that prevents them from ever being sent away.

But at the same time, I think that we have leant too far into this dis- distinction, and it sometimes plays into the idea of the deserving and the undeserving, um, where actually it's always a gray area. It's always a gray area. The fact of the matter is in, in this world that we live in that is governed by a capitalist economic system, you need work to put food on the table for your family, and you need that to survive, to have a house, you know?

So our economic needs are not really any less about survival than, you know, I, I need to be safe from war, or I need to be able to grow crops if, you know, if you're escaping from climate change, and our refugee system doesn't- reflect that reality. And the truth is, I mean, everybody makes a combination of movements for immediate physical safety, and then for a choice of where you can rebuild safety.

Safety is you know, being able to have your feet on the ground, being ab-h-able to have a place you call home, being able to support your family. That's real safety. So our understanding of what is a refugee can be too narrowly defined. Um, and I think we actually need to broaden that out and recognize that, you know, people, people who come here for all sorts of different reasons can then become part of this country and make a massive contribution to it.

But, um, if we're trying to sort of nitpick them out, the system doesn't, um, actually serve us very well, and it ends up wasting more time, wasting more money. I love how you put that. That's brilliant. I'm like, download it into my brain. Um, the thing that I'll always get thrown is, "So do you just want open borders then?

Is everyone allowed, uh, in this country?" Now I have my answer that, that's pre-prepared, but I'm just wondering what your answer is. I won't do my best Nick Ferrari impression, but... Well, I mean, what I fundamentally believe is that you shouldn't lose your rights, whether that's as a human being, as a worker, in any way, um, just because you crossed an international border.

That's what I believe. I don't, I, I think, you know, nations can continue to exist, they can continue to have borders without those borders being spaces of death and of pain and of people losing their rights, and that's what I care about. So I think, I think, yeah, I mean, you know, you can characterize it as open borders because I do believe that migration, uh, fundamentally, if it's managed well, is self-regulating.

You don't have to have a cap on the numbers. So you can allow anybody who is seeking to come to the UK to come here if you do m- have systems to manage that well. Um, and I think that the, the real challenge, um, to an expansive open borders position is that it needs to be done internationally, um, and it needs to be done in cooperation and regionally.

But I mean, I think that there's endless evidence to support the fact that open borders or, or borders that do not prevent people from crossing them work excellently well. In, in the EU, when we were part of the EU free movement zone, a lot of EU people came to live here, and overall that was extremely beneficial to us, I'm sure beneficial to many of them.

Um, but also, you know, out of, what is it, five hundred and eleven million people who could theoretically have just shown up on our doorstep, they actually didn't, and this is the thing that people are terrified of when you talk about really much more, um, radically, um, rights-based migration systems. People are just very, very scared that everybody's gonna show up tomorrow and demand something, and that's not how the world really is.

And we need to push back against that idea that, you know, there's, we only have this much cake, and so if you take a piece and then someone else takes a piece, and then we run out of cake. And the, the idea is, like, you know, we're bringing in a lot of bakers. Like, it is people make things. We, the country only is people.

You know, like keeping people out. Healthcare is provided by people, houses are built by people, like, the, the entire country only is people. So actually, a growing population is a very good thing. Um, and people who have segregated rights just because they crossed a border is a very bad thing for all parts of society.

And presumably if you're... Well, I was gonna say presumably, I'm from the north of, uh, England and I don't feel like this, so I don't know why I'm saying presumably, but there are some people in the north of England or other places who go, "But we don't have any cake," or- Yeah ... decades of austerity have destroyed, destroyed things.

Yeah, I was just, um, arguing online , arguing online- Always a great start to the day ... with a stranger. Yeah, what to do with your morning before you get out of bed, while you're drinking coffee. Um, uh, yeah, with somebody who was saying- I'm glad you added coffee to that statement. Coffee and a fight with a stranger.

Yeah. That- that's my morning. Um, and it, it, it was someone, and they, they were from somewhere in the north, I presume, because they were s- speaking for them, and they were saying, you know, that, "We in the Red Wall have been, uh, you know, the most impacted by immigration." I was like, "No, you haven't. You've been the most impacted by the rich people who are taking wealth away from the, you know, common people, right?

The, by the fact that, you know, housing has been bought up, land has been bought up, uh, by the fact that people are avoiding tax and that that money is therefore not being fed back into your communities. You have been the most impacted by that, more so than us down here in London, but you have not been the most impacted by immigration.

We have, and that's also another reason why we're doing better than you frankly, because that immigration is helping us to do well." So much more immigration comes into the south and comes into London in particular. I think it's, I think it's 40% of all foreign-born, uh, nationals who live in the UK live in London.

Um, so the, these are places where people's grievances, which are legitimate because they have been left out, left behind, and they have had a total lack of investment in their towns and so on, are places where- They're, they're being told the only sort of language people have to express that grievance at the moment is foreigners bad.

And in fact, there are places where they have very, very few foreigners and the problems come from somewhere else. They come from the rich.

We've just heard clips starting with

Velshi tracing Trump's immigration "reset" to sliding poll numbers, not policy change, as ICE arrests surge and federal agents catalog the DNA of American protesters.

MS NOW reported from Social Circle, Georgia, where Trump-voting residents are fighting a plan to convert a local warehouse into a 10,000-person ICE detention center, feeling abandoned by Republicans they helped elect.

What Next detailed how USCIS, the agency running the legal immigration system, is being gutted through mass firings, indefinite green card suspensions, and hours-long polygraph sessions used to intimidate career staff.

The Brian Lehrer Show detailed the catastrophic conditions Haitian TPS holders would face if sent back to Haiti

This Is Hell! connected the mainstreaming of Britain's far right to a wider pattern: center-left parties across the West legitimizing anti-immigrant politics rather than confronting it.

And Bold Politics highlighted Zoe Gardner's case that small boats represent only 5% of immigration in the UK but consume 95% of media coverage, and that a well-managed open borders system is largely self-regulating.

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

But first, speaking of unintended consequences of immoral policies, I’m just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! that we had to put on indefinite hiatus due to sudden economic instability and ad dollars drying up. Right now, I am getting back to basics and focusing on building Best of the Left to be the best it can be with the greatest reach it can. So, that’s where my focus is going to be and I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops. 

To our members supporting the show, you really are more and more of what’s getting us through right now so thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations. If you support us right now, our top priority is stabilizing the finances of the show to ensure that everyone is getting paid for the work they’re doing. Secondly, we have to invest in some growth strategies because making that line go up is the only way to get us the cushion we need.

So, if you haven’t signed up yet but are thinking about it, each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor so it’s not particularly cheap to produce and essentially every dollar we can spare right now beyond basic costs will be going toward finding new listeners which would be good for us and for them, as I’m sure you’d agree. 

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Now as for today's topic, I always like to set the stage. 

Last May, Damon Hininger, the CEO of CoreCivic, one of the two biggest private prison companies in the country, got on an earnings call with his shareholders and said this: "Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now." That was a year ago. Since then, things have only gotten better for him. CoreCivic just posted profits up nearly 70 percent from the previous year. GEO Group, the other big player, posted a record $254 million in profit. The man who locks up immigrants for a living is having the best year of his life.

And in the same stretch where Hininger was telling his shareholders they’d never had it so good, the libertarian Cato Institute who mostly talks about not taxing the rich, not exactly a bunch of socialists, published a study finding that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, reduced the federal deficit by $14.5 trillion over the last 30 years, saving the government $878 billion in 2023 alone. Without immigrants, the country would currently be about three trillion dollars deeper in the hole than it already is. By Cato's own math, the people we're paying tens of billions of dollars to deport are the people who've been quietly propping up the federal budget for a generation.

In the big budget bill last summer, Trump and the Republicans allocated $45 billion to ICE for detention on top of the enforcement costs. That's a 265 percent increase. About 90 percent of immigration detention in this country is run by private companies, which means the vast majority of that $45 billion is going directly to CoreCivic and GEO Group. Before the bill even passed, those two companies and their executives had donated almost $2.8 million to Trump's 2024 campaign and inaugural fund. By the end of June 2025, ICE had already handed them nine new or expanded contracts. The donations turned out to be a hell of a good investment. Two-point-eight million in, tens of billions out.

Now, a small town called Social Circle, Georgia is currently suing the Department of Homeland Security because DHS spent $128 million in taxpayer money to buy a warehouse there, multiples of its assessed value, to turn into a 10,000-person detention center. The town currently has about 5,000 people. Seventy-two percent of the town voted for Trump in 2024 and they're now suing his administration. Multiply that by the eight mega-centers ICE is building plus hundreds of smaller facilities and you have a sense of where your $45 billion is going to build a program to incarcerate people who would otherwise being helping to reduce the deficit.

When you point this out to a right-leaning friend, they'll often respond with some version of "we just have to follow the rule of law." It's a clean-sounding argument, and it implies that the people raising objections are the ones who want chaos. 

The progressive view is that the laws criminalizing human movement are themselves the problem and need to be rewritten from the ground up. But you don't have to agree with that to agree that the laws we have right now are practically the worst possible version of immigration policy. The law is designed to route hundreds of billions to ICE and two companies who helped shape the policy to direct the benefits to themselves. The goal of which is to deport the workers whose taxes are propping up Social Security. According to David Bier at Cato, the enforcement bill itself is projected to add about $900 billion to the deficit. We're spending close to a trillion dollars to make ourselves poorer.

Progressives and conservatives can disagree about what immigration law should look like and still agree that whatever the destination, this is not where we should want to be. If you genuinely believe in rule of law, the question is; who benefits from the laws and who loses?

And to thinking conservatives out there, and I do mean thinking, the ones who haven't given up entirely on the idea that facts should still matter: Cato's data is Cato's data. The same Cato that publishes papers against the minimum wage and in favor of cutting Social Security is the one saying immigrants reduced the deficit by $14.5 trillion. So the question is, do you want to be angry about immigrants existing or do you want to be right about what they really do for the country? 

Trump-era populism made it acceptable to substitute accuracy for emotional reactivity on basically every issue, and the cost of that trade is now visible in the budget. 

And to working-class folks who genuinely believe immigration is suppressing their wages, if your wages are being suppressed, the primary culprit is the same political and economic system that just handed $45 billion to two contractors. Aim your focus higher.

I'm making this fiscal argument because it’s not being made loud enough, not because I think people only matter as taxpayers. The case for treating immigrants like human beings regardless of their economic contribution has been made for decades and it stands on its own. But there's a separate argument sitting right there in the budget data, and it should work because people absolutely hate having their money wasted.

In political circles the silence has a specific mechanism behind it, beyond just party-line cowardice. Any politician who names CoreCivic or GEO [or pharma or the insurance industry for that matter] by name knows what comes next. The same campaign contributions that just bought $45 billion in detention contracts can fund a primary challenger or a general-election opponent. 

The ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW, has been documenting the donation-to-contract pipeline in detail. Two-point-eight million from these companies to Trump, then tens of billions back. The defensive version of that mechanism is industry money quietly aimed at any incumbent who steps out of line. Naming who profits gets you primaried, which is why so many Democrats sound vaguely worried about immigration without ever standing up and making a real enemy of CoreCivic and GEO.

The political opening is wide open, though. Pew Research polling released in late April found that Trump's approval among Hispanic voters who supported him in 2024 has collapsed from 93 percent in his first month back in office down to 66 percent. Among Hispanic adults overall, he's at 22 percent. Reuters/Ipsos polling from around the same time found 57 percent of independents prefer a candidate who opposes Trump's deportation approach, and 70 percent of voters say a less aggressive approach would be a positive change. The space exists to demand fundamental change on immigration; not the horrors that Trump has brought and not back to the old status quo either.

So make this the argument every single time. When somebody says "we just need to follow the law," answer with "we need better land the $900 billion enforcement-cost projection. Ask your representatives whether they own CoreCivic or GEO stock. A lot of them do, and the answer should embarrass them. Support Representative Delia Ramirez's Dignity Act language to redirect detention funding back to communities, and support CREW's work documenting where the money goes. And always aim your focus upward, at the corrupt cabal of people writing the checks, getting the contracts, and passing legislation that shoots us all collectively in the foot, not down at the people being put in cages.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

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

Section A, THE RESET IS THEATER

Followed by Section B, DUE PROCESS DISMANTLED

Section C, THE GLOBAL FAR-RIGHT PLAYBOOK

And Section D, STAKES AND RESISTANCE

You, you've written a book about it. You studied it in great detail in Donald Trump's first term. You've covered the, the, the separations, family separations. I don't know if even you thought it could get more cruel. No, and I think that the way that this was, was laid out, by you and your team is extraordinary because y- , before Donald Trump came back for the second term, I used to say mass deportation, those signs that I saw on the floor of the convention as I reported, from the Republican Convention during the last presidential election is, is, is family separation by another name.

But as you have so brilliantly stated here, it's not just family separation. It is abject cruelty. It is a violation of all of our civil rights and civil liberties. It is stripping away some of the basic fabric of American society in a way that while I think, if you look at this stuff closely, you understand that this is where this was headed.

It has gone to a degree that I don't think perhaps many Americans did expect when they saw those signs and they saw those balloons dropping, with Donald Trump in that celebratory nature. And the reality of this is it is now starting to play out below the surface as they have always intended inside, jails, local jails, prisons around the country, where, in many cases, people may not get their due process rights afforded to them under the Constitution of the United States.

They, we may see pretrial, preconviction, deportations of people who haven't had a chance to go through the system, and that is what they have always wanted to do. They use the cruelty that you're looking at on the left-hand side of your screen as an excuse to go in and do this under the radar, and that's exactly where we are in this moment today.

Kristi Noem and her jet, and Corey Lewandowski, and all the rest of it might be on the way out, but Markwayne Mullin, is just another face for the same exact strategies that Stephen Miller has always wanted, to effectuate in this country. This story of immigration is not disconnected from the story of oligarchy and big money that we follow very closely.

We know that for-profit prisons have profited handsomely from Donald Trump's deportation, campaign. In fact, just, this last month, one of the companies that I, I was talking about that well, CoreCivic, held its quarterly earnings call, and it laid out just how much money it's making, along with its expectations for the coming year.

I want to play a quick clip from that call with CoreCivic's CEO, Patrick Swindell, speaking about this. ICE was our first customer 43 years ago and has been our largest customer for over a decade. As we continue to look for additional ways to meet our government partners' needs, we believe we can make available substantial capacity to meet future demand.

We've informed ICE that we could provide it with nearly 13,000 additional beds, and this does not include additional capacity we may be able to provide through other means. Help me with that, Jacob. When you hear the CEO talking about expanding capacity to meet future needs, what does that tell you about the role of profit and investor expectations in shaping what we think shouldn't probably be policy that's shaped by them?

That the, this current state of the American immigration system is on its way to being supersized, and that is a immigration system that is defined largely by for-profit, immigration detention. And I have been inside, one of the most notorious ICE detention facilities, for-profit, run not by CoreCivic, but one of the other large companies, The GEO Group, the Adelanto ICE detention facility in the high desert here outside of Los Angeles, just a couple hours away.

Hop in your car and you drive up there, as I did with Lindsay Tuszlowski from the Immigrant Defenders, Law Center during the first Trump term. And inside, what I saw is what was reflected inside Inspector General reports, just deplorable, conditions. I saw a man curled up in a fetal position in solitary confinement.

These Inspector General reports talk about people, hanging themselves, making makeshift nooses. You already talked about a suicide at a time when, death in ICE custody is at record levels, just in the course of the w- very recent past here. And so we've heard these stories before. I have seen what it has looked like inside these facilities.

And now, with profit driving the expansion of all of this, with this so-called big, beautiful bill, putting literally, unprecedented amounts of money in the hands of this immigration apparatus, there will only be more of it in more places. And it will only become more deadly. We, we, we've noted that Kristi Noem is gone from the scene.

Markwayne Mullin is saying to some people the right things, like we're gonna have judicial warrants or, or whatever the case is. Stephen Miller's the architect of this thing. He's still there. Yep. Stephen Miller, in the first Trump term, Ali, not only wanted to separate the 5,500 children from their parents that they deliberately did in that family separation policy that was deemed - don't take it from me, take it from the Republican-appointed judge who called it, "One of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country."

Physicians for Human Rights, which won a Nobel Peace Prize, said it met the United Nations definition of torture, and the American Academy of Pediatrics called it government-sanctioned child abuse. He wanted to separate 25,000 children from their parents, not 5,500, before it was stopped, by people all around the country and around the world.

A- and, and that to me, ultimately, is I think w- was one of the most instructive things that you said earlier in this broadcast, which is Donald Trump is not backing away from this because of some moral opposition. This is a repeat. This is deja vu from- Yeah ... the first Trump term. When he stopped the family separation policy, as Kirstjen Nielsen stood behind him- That's right

the person who effectuated it by signing option three on the decision memo, he didn't say, "Whoa, I'm morally opposed." He said, "I didn't like the sight and the feeling of the families being separated." Didn't look good on TV, didn't look good- Yep ... in that audio from ProPublica that Ginger Thompson found. But Stephen Miller was still there, and they still tried to find ways to do it below the radar, and now we're back doing it again, and Stephen Miller hasn't gone anywhere.

that's actually the problem really of where we start, that the public has not understood the detention crisis that's existed well before Donald Trump. This has been a broken and abusive system since its creation. Now, Donald Trump has accelerated that- When, when was that created? Uh, Chris Rabb, we just had a guest on who's running- Yeah.

It began, right ... for congressional district in third, and he said, uh, he said, you know, we're, we're going back to the Clinton years- Absolutely ... where a lot of these detention centers were set up and almost the advent of private prison complex. That's exactly right. So I think if, um, I think if memory serves, we started opening ICE detention centers in the late '80s at some point.

I mean, this is a new thing, right? You and I have both been on the planet before ICE detention centers. Um, but they took off quite literally because of the money that is inherent in them. You know, we talk about following the money in the private prison complexes. That applies to immigration. GEO Group, CoreCivic, they're laughing all the way to the bank with the Trump administration, but it's not just them.

The, there is money flowing to all of these vendors, whether it's an ICE facility or what's called a intergovernmental services agreement, like when a county runs it. Everybody's getting rich off these detention centers and their facilities of human suffering. People, people who are supposedly providing the food, uh, phone calls, whatever it is.

I mean, I distinctly remember, and people can go back, I'm sure, and find this with an easy search. Around 2010 maybe it was, you could go into the shareholder, um, uh, meetings- And, uh, these places like, um, uh, like you say, uh, GEO Group and, and, uh, the- CoreCivic ... CoreCivic, they were saying to their shareholders, "We project our profits in the future to be out of, like, um, uh, civil pr- prisoners," or I guess prisoners, you know, citizen prisoners, "and move into the immigration space."

I mean, so that gives you a sense of, like, the... I, I, I mean, I, I was just, like, wondering, like, how could they project at that time? W- And, and this may be outside of your portfolio as, as somebody who's dealing with it where the rubber meets the, the road. Yeah, on the ground. Sure. But, like, how did they know?

Right? Like, in 2010, like, how did they know? Now, maybe they got those signals from, uh, Obama, 'cause Obama was certainly was deporting a lot of people. I don't know how much he was growing the detention, uh, part of it. But they certainly, they were out there spending millions to make sure that this type of situation showed up.

Yeah. And let's put it in perspective for all your listeners, right? American taxpayers are paying approximately $200 a day per person. The most recent quote of the people in ICE detention right now is 70,000. When we started this, when we were in the Biden years, right? Even in the first Trump administration, that number usually hangs around 13,000.

20- I mean, like, 20,000 was a lot We're at a place of exponential growth in, uh, hugely abusive centers that's going straight to the pockets of, you know, our 1%. But how did they know? There's several things that are happening, right? One, frankly, the American system has figured out that carceral systems are highly profitable for a long time.

They're taking their lead from the criminal justice system. Two, as soon as we started opening detention centers, as soon as we had the emergence of ICE... You know, people need to understand ICE is new. When we talk about abolish ICE- Yeah ... it's not that radical. They haven't been around that long, and they screwed it up horribly, so get rid of them.

Like, you and I, again, we've been... We were teenagers when ICE was created. Well- I think the first day it opened ... uh, sadly, I was, uh, a little bit older than that. But, um, you may have been. Um- I was, I was but a mere babe. Yes. I, I, on the other hand, was over, well into my 30s. But, uh, go ahead. Well, all right, so we're talking around 2003-ish, right?

Mm-hmm. When Congress makes the first allotment to ICE. Well, what does that tell everybody that's in the business of incarcerated systems, and where has that budget gone? That initial budget was around $3 million. We're looking at 45 million from the big, beautiful bill, and where that money is going, that money is going to those who profit off incarcerating human beings.

And you mentioned civil detention, Sam. That's a huge piece. I have so many people who don't understand the system because the anti-immigrant propaganda machine started to be able to fill these centers, right? And so what do people say in response to me when they see this picture of my client beaten half to death?

"Oh, he's a criminal. Send him back to where he's from." He's not in criminal custody, friends. This is civil detention. Will, will you explain that difference to people so they really understand? 'Cause I've been saying- Sure ... for years, and, and I think we are still, uh, there in terms of the law, that entering this country illegally, or I should say without documentation, or overstaying a visa, is not a criminal offense.

It's civil. It is the functional equivalent of a speeding ticket. And, and really, like, you know, depending on how much you're speeding, uh, the, the- Is that to cross without inspection is quite literally a Class B misdemeanor. The most time you could ever do that nobody judge will ever even grant time on it is six months.

A Class B misdemeanor is, like, public intoxication Is the worst you could think of for this sort of, uh, offense, right? And plus, it's not even the issue, right? When we talk about the difference of criminal and civil detention, it's critical for people to understand who are these human beings that are detained.

Yes, some people may have a criminal record, and they are going through the process of dealing with that in their immigration case. They have served their time or they're, they've entered a plea, whatever it may be. Everything that had to do with their criminal stuff is done and gone. They're not here for any criminal charge.

Plus, this idea... You know, Trump's people love to say, "We're gonna detain the worst of the worst." That is so inhumane and categorizes human beings that are applying for asylum. I have tons of clients who are simple asylee, s- asylum seekers. I have folks getting picked up and detained today with work permission, with driver's license, with Social Security cards, right?

We're talking about members of the community, period, end of story. They're your neighbors. Um, I want to talk about the brutality that has been going on in these detention centers. Uh, but- Yeah ... but just to, to, to put a point on this, when we talk about... Because the, there's obviously been for a long time a certain amount of xenophobia that has been in this country for, you know, since its founding.

Um, uh, whether it was about Chinese or Irish or Italian or Japanese or, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Mexican, uh, what- whatever it was. Sure. Um, this has been exacerbated because there is so much money to be made, uh, in this, uh... You know, in 2005, George W. Bush and, um, uh, uh, wanted to essentially bring, uh, Latinos into the Republican Party and was looking to do immigration reform, and there was a lot of people who made money, uh, whether it was, um, uh, Mark Levin and, uh, Laura Ingraham in particular, and Ann Coulter who- Well, just look at Miami, the first, what we call the first wave, right?

Of Cuban immigrants fleeing from the revolution. That was a huge move from the Republican Party of trying to sign up Latino voters, specifically Cuban voters, and look at the success they had in the- They, they were successful ... uh, uh, incredibly successful. And George Bush and Karl Rove knew this was the future of, uh, of the country.

Uh, a- and, uh, but they were stopped by sort of like the, the movement conservatives. Mm-hmm. And, uh, that takes us to Tom Homan getting a bag... Now, I should say this is only of the FBI, so I don't know. Uh, I'm, I'm just going by what the FBI reported. A bag of, uh, from a fast food restaurant that was full of...

Maybe it wasn't full. I don't know what the size of the bag was, uh, or, you know, uh, what bills were. $50,000 from Someone, we don't know who, but we know, um, their ilk- Mm ... is someone looking for a contract from, uh, DHS, presumably either for a, a, a detention facility or many detention facilities, or maybe just to serve, you know, the, the meals at a detention facility or provide the phone service or whatever it is.

We're gonna wash the linens at them. That's right. Um, and he got $50,000 cash- Mm-hmm ... basically on the promise of like, "If I get into Homeland Security," which of course at that time he was, uh, being touted as being, uh, the guy from, uh, from CBP or from Homeland Security. Sure. And, uh, it gives us a sense of like this is a racket, and people- Absolutely

are making... All right. So, uh, tell us about- Well, let me give you one more example now. Please. For people, like take the... You know, look this up. This is all stuff that is easily at our fingertips, right? So people have probably seen in the news the effort by the Trump administration to open human warehouses.

They call them warehouses. They wanna Amazon basically ICE detention. So there's already been some investigative work in looking at those contracts and the spaces that they're purchasing. I think one example was a space was purchased three to four years ago, this is in northern Florida, for around $20 million, okay?

The government comes along and purchases it 24 months later for $180 million, right? Like that's what we're talking about. 

It comes as new NBC Decision Desk polling shows the president's approval on immigration issues falling, and Americans largely supporting the idea of reforming ICE. NBC Chief Data Analyst Steve Kornacki joins me with more from the poll. Steve, so great to see you at the big board in your element. Uh, but what does this poll tell us about how Americans view Trump's handling of immigration in his second term?

Yeah, I think something we're seeing here is it's taking a toll maybe on his broader standing. Start with that maybe. This is the overall job approval rating for President Trump, uh, in this new poll. Now, again, uh, keep in mind on this, this is a, a little bit different here. We're looking at all adults, not just registered voters.

It's a little wider net than we usually cast in polling. But still, I think it, it, it captures something here I think pretty significant. 39% among all adults is President Trump's job approval rating. That's one of the lower numbers that you're gonna see out here. That's one of the lower numbers I think you've seen since Trump came back to the White House to start his second term a little bit over a year ago, and I think that low number there is clearly related to this number.

This is more issue-specific. This is getting into immigration, border security. Trump's approval rating there, 40% in this poll. That is down from where it was earlier in his presidency. Uh, it's down from where it's been in other polls, uh, uh, throughout his presidency. Remember when Trump came back to the White House and in the 2024 campaign, immigration and the border were relative strengths for him.

Now that number is coming down for him, and I think that's also exerting, it seems, maybe a broader effect on his overall job approval rating. And then you look inside that number there on his handling of immigration and the border, a- and that's the big problem you see. Um, that's red on red there. I don't know if it shows up, but I'm circling the 72.

That's basically three quarters, almost three quarters of independents here in this poll saying they disapprove of how the president is handling border and the immigration. So, a- and also there if you, i- if you looked among, uh, independents here, too, um, a large number who have, have shifted, not just i, in, in opposition saying they disapprove, they strongly disapprove, so that depth of op- opposition there, too, I think thickening a little bit to the president o- on this issue.

Asking about that issue there then of, uh, tactics used by ICE and Border Patrol agents, again, wide consensus there. Two-thirds in this poll saying those tactics have gone too far. Again, this conducted really immediately in the wake of the events, uh, in Minnesota recently. A- and then a question I think here, uh, you showed this a- at, at the start of the segment, but going into that DHA- DHS, uh, funding fight here, what do you think, we're asking folks, do you think should happen here, uh, with ICE?

The plurality saying reform. Now, reform, obviously that's a broad answer. That could mean a lot of different things, but the, the plurality are basically saying they wanna keep it, but they wanna change it. There are 29% here, this is heavily Republican, who say keep it in its current form. And then there's this answer right here, abolish ICE, and you hear that slogan from the political left a lot.

29% here, uh, you know, a little bit less than one-third choosing that. I think what's interesting is a lot of that 29% Is coming from Democratic voters. Almost half of Democratic voters say that what they think should happen to ICE is that it should be abolished. So as you look at Democrats in Washington navigate that DHS fight, as you look at Democratic candidates in primaries on the campaign trail this year getting ready for 20, uh, 2028, I think one of the things they're increasingly looking at, we've seen this on a range of issues, is their own base is pushing them more and more, uh, into sort of maximalist positions and, and, and confrontation.

And again, half of the Democratic base wants, they say in this poll, to abolish ICE. 

Some Trump fans are absolutely losing their minds, not just at migrants at, or the radical left. No, in this case, they're actually raging at Donald Trump. What? Well, turns out some of Trump's shiny new ICE mega detention centers, or what I like to call concentration camps, are being dropped right in the middle of their quiet family values small towns.

You love to see it. Uh, so here's what's going on. So obviously, Trump's mass deportations are being complemented with what this administration has been pitching as Amazon style, oh my God, ICE mega jails. Wait, so people are peeing in bottles now? Is, is that, is that part of it? Uh, now these are nothing more than concentration camps, let's be honest, to house the product of his industrial scale roundups.

Obviously, those facilities, they have to be built somewhere. They don't get built in a PowerPoint or whatever . Uh, no, th- they get built on actual land in actual communities, and so they gotta go somewhere. Uh, and wouldn't you know it, a whole bunch of them are being slated for deep red pro-Trump areas, same areas that voted for his agenda.

So now on January 10th and 11th, more than 1,000 anti-ICE protests erupted across the country. I think we all know why, okay? But for those who might be confused, uh, you had ICE, an ICE agent murder someone, uh, Rene Good in Minneapolis. Okay? ICE agent Jonathan Ross stepped in front of her vehicle and fired three times, killing her.

Okay? This is the ninth killing by ICE since September, and by the way, they have been using the excuse of, "Oh, well, uh, they were trying to, uh, run, run over our agents." Uh, they've been using that, but there was a report back, all the way back in 2014 where ICE investigators found that these agents would purposely put themselves in the path of people's vehicles in order to justify shooting the occupants.

So let's be very clear about that. So now at the same time, we find out that Trump wants to put even more ICE agents out in the streets. Disaster. Uh, and then of course, he also wants massive new detention centers in towns that were told that this was all about law and order, and, "Oh, we gotta keep the bad guys out."

Right? Well, well suddenly those same back the blue slogans and signs are looking a little different. When the armored trucks and armed agents are parked outside of your kids' schools. Here's the twist. A lot of the loudest pushback here is actually coming from members of Trump country. These folks, again, cheered build the wall, and voted for mass deportations, and loved the idea of ICE, you know, going door to door, as JD Vance had said.

But they only really liked it, apparently, when it was an abstract boot on someone else's neck, not on their own. Now they're realizing that, wait a minute, I, I, I don't want these mega prisons near me. N- n- not in my backyard. And there are different reasons for it, one of them being property values. They realize that property values do drop when your town becomes a hub for prisons.

And when your local school and hospital gets militarized, that's also not good. And when small businesses lose their workers and their customers overnight because they don't want to be in the middle of a prison town or near a concentration camp. I mean, when your quiet little suburb starts looking like an occupied zone, people generally tend to stay away from it.

Suddenly now we're seeing Trump voters at town halls screaming, "No, not in my town. Not in my town. Put it somewhere else." Oh, fun. Uh, they didn't think law and order meant guard towers on the edge of their, uh, subdivisions or cul-de-sacs. Okay, um, in fact, uh, one person, Victor Crowley, 57, told the Washington Post, "I support the president, but I don't want this."

Adding that residents only learned about this potential project through the newspaper and had received no communication from federal authorities. Yeah, yeah, they, they, that's what they, that's what they do. They just make plans and then start to do them and tell everybody later. Now, politically, this entire thing is a disaster in slow motion.

Trump's approval rating has crashed from about 50% in March of 2025 to 41% by December. ICE's net approval rating stands now at negative 14. People hate this agency more every single month. Hey, it turns out the people saying abolish ICE back in 2018 were correct. That, that, that's one thing about being on the left, being a progressive, is we are right before everyone else, and then everyone else has to catch up to us.

But of course, before that happens, they kind of run progressives through the mud, you know. "Oh, you guys, you, you're not realistic." Oh, it turns out that you were absolutely right all along, and of course we never get the credit for it. But anyway, uh, look, that was before, by the way, that, that approval rating going to negative 14%.

That was before a thousand protests and another high-profile killing of a white US citizen. Okay? Uh, now Republicans are looking to the midterms, and they're realizing, "Oh, oh crap. Oh, this is not good. Oh, this is really bad." Um, yeah, turns out you can't run on freedom while turning your base's hometowns into a police state, and as, as well as the rest of the country, by the way.

Uh, I know freedom r- loving Republicans are like, "I didn't vote for a police state." Actually, yes, you did. You just... You thought it would be directed at someone else, of course. Uh, now, here's the thing. Trump can't back down from this. Of course not. He ran on this, um, you know, mass immigration raids, detentions, being tough.

If he suddenly says, "Oh, okay, we're, we're not gonna put the camps, you know, uh, in your town. We're, we're gonna put them more politically convenient places, okay?" Uh, well, then he's gonna look weak to the very base that he is already losing. Uh, and look, he, he built a trap out of cruelty and anti-immigrant slogans, and now he's getting caught in it.

This is what authoritarian looks like, uh, when it stops being a Fox News or right-wing media fantasy and starts being, uh, construction equipment and razor wire at the edge of your town. Look, you can't have industrial-scale detention, thousands of armed agents descending on your cities, and open contempt for civil rights, and then act surprised when the same machinery turns your communities into collateral damage.

The truth here is simple. When you try to normalize state violence against them, it's only a matter of time before it turns around and, well, comes after you. Affects you. So when you see Trump voters suddenly discovering their inner civil libertarian, don't tread on me, because ICE is building a mega jail next to their church, remember that they were fine with this when it only...

when they s- claimed to only target migrants, Black and brown communities, and Democratic cities. But now they're learning, some of them at least, the hard way that fascism never, ever stays in its own lane. Our job here as, uh, progressives, which I assume you are if you're watching, uh, we should stand with the people who are resisting these detention centers.

We should be exposing the hypocrisy and their cruelty, and to keep building a coalition that says no to this entire authoritarian Project 2025, well, project, not just when it touches your own zip code. And we also need to remember that democracy only survives- If we fight for it before the guard towers go up.

Well, the hot event of the summer, or I guess spring, happened yesterday. Was, was... Well, you saw The Devil Wears Prada 2. That was- I did see that, but I was, of course, referring to Border Security Expo in Phoenix. Ooh, that's...

I miss- I missed that again? I know. We didn't s- we didn't send anybody this time. It's like Coachella, that. I'm not going to anything that I should be going to. It's like Burning Man and Coachella mixed into one. Mixed into one with a bunch of racists. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Right. Including Tom Homan and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

They were there, and they had a lot to say about immigration enforcement, signaling a continuation of record high arrest and removal rates, promising to fulfill Trump's campaign promises of mass deportations. And Todd Blanche specifically emphasized cross-agency collaboration to prioritize criminals with significant ramping up of interior enforcement and denaturalization cases.

Nice. Oh, good. No, it's good. It's great. You know, they're, uh, they're so committed in their war against Brown people, um, that you wonder, you know, what, what it is that, that, you know, that will finally satisfy them. Is it... Will it be that every person of color leaves this country? Uh, or that we just strip away the rights of every person of color?

Because when you think about it, they're taking a pretty comprehensive approach. They're pushing through the Supreme Court the end of Voting Rights Act. Uh, they are actively, actively racially gerrymandering America to sort of negate the votes of, uh, people of color. They're trying to toss out people of color.

They're barring the entry to the country of people of color. Apparently, the only shade of brown these people like is brown as in Brown Shirts, like the Brown Shirts that were the sort of ground, uh, uh, troops for, for, for Hitler in his takeover of Germany. Ugh, what a country. Ugh, this does feel like a piano on my back.

Lighten my load, Minna. I'm adding another piano. Oh, great. A federal judge ruled yesterday that the Justice Department may keep over 600 boxes of 2020 election ballots seized from Fulton County, rejecting the co- county's claim that the FBI's actions violated the Fourth Amendment. The judge determined that because the government provided digital copies of the materials, Fulton County failed to prove it was harmed by the loss of the physical records.

The seizure is part of a broader criminal inquiry into the 2020 election, quote-unquote, "irregularities" led by the Trump administration. Oh, God. First of all, Trump- Another day in Smallville ... yeah, Trump-appointed judge. Um, secondly, the judge said there were procedural issues with this, but said not bad enough to stop the, you know, uh, to issue an injunction and have them return the, the, the voting materials.

Um, but secondly, or thirdly, you know, the, the, the, the ones who are really damaged here are the voters. Because clearly, while the Trump administration is doing this in some kind of twisted effort to resuscitate long-dead claims that the 2020 election was stolen, it's also part of their broader effort to get their hands on as many voting records as possible to challenge the ability of people to vote.

Now, go back to our last story. Who are gonna be their principal targets? People of color. People who vote for Democrats. Uh, so this is all part of the same effort. It pretty much, if you go and, and, and take a story that we do here and have a little short list that you use to follow it, and it-- or, or two baskets, and it goes either into a basket saying it was driven by corruption and greed, or it goes into a basket saying it was driven by racism and a desire to divide the country.

Uh, those are the two main baskets. Yes, there are ignorance baskets and so forth, but those are the two main baskets that most of the stories pertaining to this administration, uh, go into

US President Donald Trump has endorsed the idea of renaming the US Immigration Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, to NICE. Taking to Truth Social, Trump has thrown all his support on the suggestion. The US president says that it's a great idea to call the agency National Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The proposal originated from a conservative influencer who said the change would force media outlets to refer to, uh, to ICE agents as NICE agents. A federal agency name change typically requires congressional action through legislation to amend the authority that established the agency. The move comes as Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, is facing funding uncertainty in Congress.

The agency remains a flashpoint in US politics, with Democrats pushing for tighter restrictions or even abolishing ICE, while the Trump administration continues to back aggressive immigration enforcement. As of April this year, Trump's approval rating on immigration has declined. A Reuters/Ipsos poll indicates that Trump's policies on immigration, deportation, and others could harm Republicans in the November election.

52% of Americans said they were less likely to support a candidate who backs Trump's support to deportation, while more than 42% said that they were more likely to support such a candidate. Meanwhile, concerns are growing over detainee conditions under ICE agents. According to NPR, ICE has reported twenty-nine deaths in custody since October, the highest since the agency was created back in 2003.

Next, Section B, DUE PROCESS DISMANTLED

I had a conversation with someone, he's, he's mentioned in the story, just by his first name, Juan. He lives in San Diego and he is a Mexican national, came to the United States when he was 12 years old, has lived in San Diego ever since, has never left the country, and basically married his high school sweetheart in 2021, who's an American citizen.

And so he went through the process that spouses of US citizens go through of, applying for his green card, submitting all of his personal information, subjecting himself to all of the biometric scans, the whole rigmarole. And he and his partner are basically called in for a completely routine green card interview.

And about a week before he's due to come in for this green card interview, and to be clear, this is something they've had to wait a long time for, so they're relieved when their, when their names and numbers are finally called 'cause they think, "Finally, we can begin to get this process, we can set this process in motion.

We can n-normalize, I can normalize my legal status." About a week before this appointment, his lawyer calls him and says, "Listen, I need to let you know that there have been rumors that at some of these routine interviews at the San Diego field office for USCIS, people are getting arrested by ICE."

That there seems to be some sort of coordination between USCIS and ICE, such that when people show up for their USCIS interviews for legal benefits, ICE officers are showing up unannounced and taking people into custody. They call this phishing, right? Yeah, that's essentially what it is. It, these are, these are easy marks.

These are people who are not trying to hide. These are people who have shared all of their information with the government and who are showing up for these actual appointments. And so here Juan is trying to weigh his options and ultimately decides, look, if they're gonna arrest me, they're gonna arrest me whether I show up for an interview or not.

I may as well try to move forward with this process. And so they show up, they do their interview. The person conducting the interview, who works for USCIS, actually says to him at the end of the interview, "Congratulations, you've passed." And he described to me this feeling of relief, "Finally, I've, I've, I've, I've done this," like we've, we're, we're finally moving forward with this process.

And then the Agent who is, or the official who is interviewing him basically excuses herself and says, "Okay, I, I have to step out for a second." And she gets up from her desk, and as she's leaving, she says, "There are two other officers who just wanna ask you a question." And these two guys walk in, they're wearing jeans and flannel shirts, and they say, "Do you know why we're here?"

And he says, "N- n- no. Why, why are you here?" And they say, "Well, we're taking you into custody. You've overstayed a visa." At one point, one of the agents actually said, and these are ICE officers, one of them said, "This is the process now." Which I have to say, to me personally, covering this stuff really stayed with me, the idea that, th- this is not the process, to be clear.

This is a complete audible. These are, these guys are completely running roughshod over what the legal, mechanisms and processes should be. But the reality now is that it's, open season for immigration enforcement officers, and USCIS is a part of that process. Is that legal? In a certain sense, n- none of this should be considered legal, but, the government is doing it without really regard or reference to any legal procedures or protocols.

And now what you're seeing across the board is, people showing up for immigration court hearings and getting arrested by ICE officers there. There, there was a case of someone actually, who already had a green card and who had a green card for a decade, who showed up for a citizenship interview and was arrested there.

And so basically everything has been on the table for this administration, and it, it, it makes people incredibly vulnerable, and it thoroughly effaces this boundary that was probably pretextual to begin with, that was separating at least some of the policy between handling unlawful immigration and legal immigration.

It shows you that ac- in the view of the ideologues inside this administration, there is n- no legal regard for people's rights or legal protections. So I guess that makes me wonder, hearing the stories of Anna and Juan, and thinking about so many other stories, is there such a thing as legal immigration to the United States right now?

It's a good question, and I think it's basically an open question. In, in theory, these kinds of legal immigration channels continue to exist. They should continue to exist. But I think by and large, the idea that anyone who is availing themselves of the legal immigration system, that they can be arrested and intimidated and bullied into abandoning their legal case, means that we're entering a zone, basically, as far as I'm concerned, without really any modern precedent of, the, these legal channels not really meaning anything.

And, and this, I have to say, is true, when I, when I look at other reporting that I and others have done, I remain really haunted by the fact that of those 252 Venezuelans who were sent under the Alien Enemies Act to El Salvador and prison last year There were a handful of them, not only had pending immigration cases before judges, but some of them actually had legal status.

One of them had temporary protected status. Some had been refugees. So the idea that someone with legal status could be subjected to the same mistreatment and summary deportation is something that should scare everyone in this country, because this is just a basic question of rule of law. Let me ask you a provocative question.

Does this happen with people trying to avail themselves of a legal immigration situation if they're white? I definitely think that there's a, a racial element to this. There's no question. That said, there have been stories-- I was just reading a story in The Guardian this morning about an Irish man who has been detained by ICE for an extended period, really without clear explanation or justification.

I, I do think that there is a very clearly racist element to a lot of this. The populations that are getting demonized and villainized and then actually targeted in very substantive, legally calculated ways by the administration are almost always non-white immigrants from, say, Somalia or Afghanistan or Venezuela.

But what's so scary to me, and what should be scary, I think, to everyone, about this idea of weaponizing the legal immigration system against people who are trying to do things the right way is, this is gonna capture anyone and everyone who's trying to go through the right channels. Because you combine the fact that there's this deep ideological and, and, and racist aversion to immigration in all forms, you combine that with the fact that there are clear directives from the White House for arrest quotas and deportation numbers to hit.

Y- they're looking for people, and the easiest people for the administration to target are people who aren't trying to hide, are people who are actually trying to do things the right way and are trusting that the legal process and their rights have some sort of meaning. So I think actually, even if what motivates this is a kind of racist ideological conviction, I think actually the implications are gonna start to grow even wider than that, and really affect everyone.

We begin today's show with Trump's repeated attacks on DACA, that's the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has granted deportation relief and work permits to an estimated half a million immigrants who came to the United States as children. The targeting of people with DACA has intensified under Trump's second term, with nearly 300 DACA recipients detained last year.

Of that group, at least 174 have been deported, many after living nearly all their lives in the United States. Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez is among them. She came to the US at the age of 15, and had been living here in the United States for over 20 years when the Trump administration detained her in February despite having DACA.

She was taken during her green card appointment and deported to Mexico within 24 hours. A judge later deemed her deportation illegal, and ordered her return to the United States in March. Juarez spoke to PBS News from her home in California earlier this month. We show up to the appointment at UCIS in Sacramento.

Uh, we walk into the office. Uh, we had my interview. At the end of my interview, the agent, the interview agent asked, uh, told me that he needed to speak to his supervisor. And sooner than I know, um, they knock on the door, and I got arrested, and I was told that I was being detained, and I was gonna get deported back to Mexico.

I know that the Deferred Action, DACA, it protects, uh, people that they were brought into the country when they were children for deportation. That's what the DACA program was created for. DACA was enacted by the Obama administration in 2012, and has been at the center of ongoing contentious litigation, with advocates worried about the program's future.

Well, a new decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals, that's BIA, may make it easier for the Trump administration to continue deporting DACA recipients. The new precedent decision by a three-judge panel outlined that DACA no longer guarantees protection from deportation for hundreds of thousands of people in the program.

The BIA operates within the Department of Justice. The decision came in the case of Catalina Social Santiago, a DACA recipient and longtime immigration rights advocate who was released from an ICE jail last October after about two months in detention. For more, we go to Capitol Hill, where we're joined by Congress member Delia Ramirez.

She is a Democrat from Illinois fighting to bring legislation to the floor to protect DACA. Her husband is a former DACA recipient himself. Congress member Ramirez is the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants. Welcome back to Democracy Now, Congress member Ramirez. If you can talk about the significance of the BIA decision and overall the Trump administration deporting over 100 DACA recipients.

Look, this decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals is a very concerning decision because, as you just mentioned, Deferred Action for, for children arrivals, the purpose of that was to protect these children from being deported. And the idea that now 500,000 or so DACA recipients who've had deferred action are now at the whim or at concern that if they get in fact stopped or if they go in to a check-in or some sort of procedure with immigration that they too can now be deported sh- should be concerning all of us.

I mean, these are folks that have been here, Amy, you know this, t- since they were two or since they were 14 like my husband. They don't know any other world, any other countries than the United States of America. And all of a sudden that deferred action, that protection that was afforded through this program no longer applies because of this panel of three judges who are ruling under whatever Donald Trump wants them to do.

And, uh, uh, representative, uh, The Washington Post is reporting that, uh, quote, "More than 140 new deportation judges have been appointed, um, uh, f- uh, following the DOJ's firing of 100 immigration judges since Tr- Trump took office." Your view of how Trump is trying to completely remake, uh, the immigration, uh, judicial system?

L- look, he's weaponizing the court system. He is firing judges for doing their job, for, uh, uh, practicing what they have taken on in their oath as a judge following procedure, and then he's replacing them, you know, one would call to question, with judges who are more concerned with being loyal to the president so they can keep their job than actually following the law that they swore to, to upkeep.

That's really concerning. Look, I've done a number of court visits to monitor what's happening in the courtrooms, and oftentimes what you're seeing is judges who are just rushing through cases, um, especially these merit cases, so that they can speed up these deportations of people seeking refuge in this country.

It calls to question what does our Department of Justice system truly look like when there is no justice because now you're hiring judges who are loyal to the president and not loyal to the law? Well, at the same time though, there was a federal appeals court ruling, uh, in Washington DC, uh, that, uh, President Trump's claims that there's an invasion, uh, uh, of the United States, uh, a- as a reason for shutting down asylum requests at the US-Mexico border, that court has ruled that that's, uh, unlawful.

I'm won- wondering, uh, your response given the fact that Trump issued that proclamation on his first day back in office. Yeah. No, look, I... First, I, I wanna tell you, uh, judges and the courts are in a really difficult position right now. I mean, you're, you're talking about immigration judges who have been serving for 15, 20, 25 years now being called to question because they are following the law, they're following the procedure that's been put in place by this Congress, right?

By the Constitution. And so when you hear the president use invasion or the Department of Homeland Security, this guise of protecting u- protecting us from domestic terrorism to be able to shoot people or justify the shooting of Alex Perdy or Rene Good or Silverio Villegas, you know that we have entered dangerous, dangerous territory.

At the same time, I have to make sure, Juan, that I say this clearly, this Congress also has a responsibility. We've had the Dream and Promise Act here for a number of years, and we have not been able to pass it through both chambers. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley just recently used a discharge petition process to be able to extend protections for TPS holders from Haiti.

We have to do the same thing here in Congress to finally bring the Dream and Promise Act to the floor, to be able to bring the protections to these DACA recipients that should have already had a pathway to citizenship a long time ago. I, I also wanted to ask you about a particular, um, immigration facility, the ICE North Lake facility in, in Baldwin, Michigan.

There's a, a hunger, uh, and labor strike going on there for, by the detainees. Uh, could you talk about what you know about that and what you're calling for? Yeah, look, as you know, it's been very difficult for members of Congress to conduct these oversight visits. Um, in many cases, they continue to say, "You need to send an email."

They've denied entrance, which again, is a violation, right? Of the authority that's been afforded to us through the appropriations process. What is happening there is unconscionable. I have a bill to melt ice, and what it does, in fact, this ends detention. What you're seeing around the country, whether it's the conditions that children are being treated inside detention and families and individuals, uh, what is in their food, the conditions that they're sleeping in in these private detention centers, we have to address it.

It's why this bill is so important to me, and we're calling more members of Congress to join it. It ends detention, it disrupts enforcement, and then redirects all those billions of dollars used for private detention, um, to really incarcerate people in these- What feel like concentration camps back into the communities that have been impacted by ICE enforcement.

It's why we call the bill the Melt ICE bill. But we should all be looking at doing more oversight at these facilities, especially these private facilities that get to do whatever they'd like so that they can maximize their profit, and in many cases, you have seen the corruption between employees of DHS and the contracts afforded to these detention facilities.

Congress enacted the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990, and every president since then, Republican and Democrat, has embraced TPS.

President Trump, however, is trying to end it. Today, his solicitor general, John Sauer, told the justices that the statute clearly bars any court review of the administration's decisions, and he dismissed the idea that a separate law established to provide procedural fairness does not allow the courts to review the Homeland Security Agency's decision-making either.

Pressed by the court's three liberal justices, Sauer insisted that the courts cannot review anything. Here he is being questioned by Justice Sotomayor. None of those procedural steps required by the statute are reviewable. That's your position. Correct. What you're basically saying is Congress wrote a statute for no purpose.

Justice Kagan noted that under the statute, the Secretary of Homeland Security is supposed to consult with the State Department about what the conditions are in home countries where people have been forced to flee. "What if she didn't do that at all?" she asked, "Or what if the response came back, 'Wasn't that baseball game last night great?'"

Justice Jackson asked what would happen if the secretary used a Ouija board to make decisions. To all these hypotheticals, General Sauer stood firm, which prompted this from Sotomayor. Now, we have a president saying- at one point that Haiti is a, quote, "Filthy, dirty, and disgusting S-hole country." I'm quoting him.

He declared illegal immigrants, which he associated with TPS, as poisoning the blood of America. I don't see how that one statement is not a prime example showing that a discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision. Sauer pushed back, noting that the DHS secretary had not mentioned race at all, prompting this response from Justice Jackson, the only Black woman on the court.

Position of the Justice courts here- So your, the, the position of the United States is that we have an actual racial epithet, that we aren't allowed to look at all the context- Justice Barrett, the mother of two adopted Haitian children, interjected at that point to clarify the administration's position.

Are you conceding that individuals with TPS status could bring a challenge based on race discrimination? Sauer appeared to concede the point. Representing the Haitians, lawyer Jeffrey Pipoly described the administration's review as a sham. The secretary herself described people from Haiti and from other n- non-white countries as killers, leeches, saying, "We don't want them, not one," while simultaneously enacting a, another humanitarian, form of relief for white and only white South Africans.

That was too much for Justice Alito. If you put Syrians, Turks, Greeks, and other people who live around the Mediterranean in a lineup, do you think you could say those people are, are, that all of them, are they all non-white? An uncomfortable Pipoly resisted categorizing each group until Alito got to his own roots.

How about southern Italians? Well- Well, certainly, certainly 120 years ago, when we had our last wave of European immigration, southern Italians were not considered white. I think our concept of these things evolves over time. 

Amna, the president often touts a sharp drop in illegal entries to the country, which have gone down by 50,000 entries per month since the end of 2024.

But a new analysis from the Cato Institute suggests that's only part of the story. Legal immigration has fallen even more dramatically under the Trump administration, with 132,000 fewer people being admitted per month through legal pathways. For more on what's behind those numbers, I'm joined by that study's author, David Bier.

He's the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. David, thanks for coming back on News Hour. Thanks for having me on. This study shows that legal immigration has dropped sharply under this Trump administration. What specific policy changes are driving that gap? Well, the biggest one by far is the suspension of immigrant visa processing for 75 countries around the world.

These are for, mainly for family members of US citizens who are coming to reunite with their family members here. Many are spouses and minor children of US citizens. In addition to that, they've also suspended all, uh, entries from about 40 countries. So 92 countries now face a de facto legal immigration ban, uh, by this administration en- encompassing about half of all legal immigrants to the United States.

In addition to that, he's banned almost all refugees except for white South Africans, but even them, uh, even that group are, are being admitted at just about 10% of the rate that was previously, uh, being admitted before under the Biden administration. So those are some of the main ones, but every category.

You look at H-1B visas for high-skilled workers, international students also facing very severe restrictions through a variety of different policy means to reduce legal immigration to the United States. The president has been eager to tout this major drop in border arrests since he took office, going from about 47,000 arrests at the end of Biden's term to only about 8,600 last month.

Illegal immigration, as you note, was already dropping under President Biden, so how much credit does President Trump get here? Well, look, it's a continuation of a trend, so that's one of the main things that people need to understand. If you look at the peak and compare it to now, look, it's been a- an over 90% reduction, but almost 90% of that reduction happened under President Biden's administration before President Trump took office.

And so that is in, uh, in stark contrast to these cuts to legal immigration, where il- Illegal immigration was falling and legal immigration was rising under Biden. The, the trends are now both down under President Trump. You mentioned, um, asylum and refugee status. A big part of this administration's approach has been focused on restriction- restricting access to asylum.

Your study shows that asylum seekers have essentially been completely blocked from entering at the US-Mexico border, and fell 99.9% in the course of a few months. Who are these people that are getting turned away? And also, are they finding other ways to legally enter the United States, or are they just turned away completely?

Yeah, they're turned away completely. So these are people who are trying to come in, uh, request asylum at legal ports of entry. They're not trying to evade border patrol or cross the border illegally. This is something that every administration prior to this one had allowed people to do. In fact, even in 2019, Secretary, DHS Secretary Nielsen had encouraged, uh, people who are applying for asylum to go to ports of entry to apply, rather than cross the border illegally.

And what ended up happening is now we've completely eliminated that option for people to apply to enter legally. The only way to get into the United States now is illegally if you're one of these, uh, people seeking, uh, uh, protection from persecution in their home country. When you step back and look at the broader picture here, what do these trends tell us about the direction of US immigration policy right now?

Is this about reducing immigration as a whole? Absolutely, and you can even look at what the president himself has said. He said he wants to block immigration from the Third World. This is the type of rhetoric that we see from the far right online and, and in various policy forums. They want a reduction in both legal and illegal immigration.

Many of the responses that I've received to my study are cheering it on and saying this is a great thing for the country. But it's really quite different from what President Trump sold his entire campaign around as being focused on illegal immigration and being in favor of legal immigration. What are the potential economic impacts of this drop in legal immigration, too, in terms of the deficit, the birth rate, the social safety programs that we have in this country?

Well, our analysis shows that over the last 30 years, immigrants have reduced the deficit by $14.5 trillion. Almost all of that came from legal immigration. So, illegal immigrants did also help reduce the deficit by about $1.7 trillion, but most of it came from the legal immigrants. And if you look at the people who are specifically being targeted- by these bans.

They are not, uh, people who are likely to burden the country with, with deficits and debt. These are people who are actually going to contribute to the country through work and entrepreneurship. Many of them are prime age adults ready to enter the labor force, who we need right now to revitalize our economy.

Now, Section C, THE GLOBAL FAR-RIGHT PLAYBOOK

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So talk about, well, the title of your book, If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable.

If you can talk about who Farage is and what he represents. Yeah. So one of the big changes in British politics in recent years has been this very alarming and, and rapid rise of, um, ideas and rhetoric, um, associated with the far right. So, you know, very strong anti-immigration rhetoric, attacks on, uh, supposed elites running the country and so on.

You know, things that would be very familiar to your viewers in the US, um, from Donald Trump and his works. Um, and that's really, you know, the pressure there has really come from two sources. Um, one of them is a lot of, uh, far-right activity outside the electoral system. Um, you know, we've had kind of big street protests and rallies and, um, mob violence in some cases, attacking hotels that are being used to accommodate asylum seekers.

And then we've had a lot of pressure from Farage's political party, Reform UK, who have been, you know, trying to shape some of these resentments and some of this anger into a right-wing populist political project of the kind that we're seeing in lots of different liberal democracies around the world at the moment.

Um, you know, for Farage, this is just the latest stage in a kind of long political career where he's come from outside the mainstream right and has tried to make his brand of right-wing populist politics, um, the leading force, uh, in Britain. You know, so he was previously leader of the UK Independence Party, and via his leadership of, of UKIP, he, uh, played an instrumental role in, um, winning the Brexit referendum for the Leave campaign.

Uh, he then formed another party called the Brexit Party after that to kind of push for the hardest exit from the EU possible. And Reform UK, the latest vehicle, in fact, it's a renamed Brexit Party, but what he's doing here is actually trying to build a political platform that will allow his, him and his party to win power in Westminster nationally.

And the key themes that that's built on, um, you know, is heavily anti-immigration, and they make a real point of trying to kind of flex their muscles and show, uh, how ostentatiously cruel they're going to be to, uh, what they call illegal immigrants, which is a, a wide range of people who are living in the UK, some of whom have lived here for, for quite a long time.

Earlier this year, one of Reform's big pre-local election announcements was that it wanted to create a British ICE. So that kind of tells you- Ah ... uh, where they are on that. Let- You know, they made that an- Now, Daniel, let me play a campaign ad from Nigel Farage I'm in Essex today, and this is the Bell Hotel in Epping.

Now, you might remember these scenes being on national news last year. Anyone that comes illegally into Britain on a boat or in the back of a lorry will be detained and deported. But that's gonna mean having to detain quite a lot of people who are here already. They should not be free to walk the streets.

Policy's very simple. You vote for a Reform MP, you will not have a detention facility in your constituency. But if you vote Green or those that support open borders in the world, that's where the detention centers are gonna be. Equally, I could say the same of Labour and the Conservatives, 'cause they've done nothing to stop it.

Daniel Trilling, your response. Um, yeah, I mean, that kind of sums up what Reform are about. So like I was saying before, you know, it's kind of making a virtue of how, um, punitive and cruel they're going to be to, uh, certain groups of immigrants, but also kind of directing that at their political enemies as well.

You know, so this announcement, which Farage made a couple of weeks ago, was all about kind of stigmatizing his opposition. So the Green Party, who have also kind of broke through from outside the mainstream by taking a kind of strong left-wing position, you know, he's trying to class us, you know, o- open borders fanatics.

And I mean, what are they saying there? They're kind of threatening to use the power of the state, if they ever get hold of it, to intimidate their political opponents. You know, placing detention centers in areas that vote for parties that Farage doesn't like, um, you know, it's kind of punishing people for voting the wrong way and perhaps even trying to scare voters into, into not opposing him.

The question becomes now Reform. Reform, the Reform Party, which is again, a white nationalist party, folks, um, led by Nigel Farage, a career racist. Um, that's all he's known in his life is to be a racist, and absolutely has made racist statements, has had a long history of racism. It's undeniable. This guy is a carnival barker.

He's also a billionaire, a re- very rich man at least, but don't tell anybody that. He got 5 million pounds From a Thai businessman or a Thai, uh, located businessman, a Brit in Thailand, uh, from some cryptocurrency place, uh, that he owns. And Farage owns around 12% of a cryptocurrency business. I mean, Ni- Nigel Farage is the one who championed Brexit and lied to you and scared off white voters.

W- of course, of course, he tapped into their, uh, i- internalized racism and, and said to them, "Oh my goodness me, if you, if you don't vote yes for Brexit, you're gonna have immigrants swarming all over you. You know, they're gonna steal all the money that you're entitled to. You know, um, we, we've got the... We're gonna make four...

You will get 400," um, what is it? What did Boris Johnson say? "You're gonna get millions of pounds a week or a month, uh, if you vote yes for this, uh, Brexit." I mean, all of these conservatives who are now moving to the Reform Party all lied to you in the United Kingdom in, uh, 2016 when Brexit happened 10 years ago to, i- almost 10 exact years ago, almost exactly to the day.

Uh, June, uh, I think June 23rd of 2016, the infamous, uh, 52 to 48 vote for Brexit. Of course, people in United Kingdom thought that they were voting for something that they really weren't voting for, but some of them, many of them were voting for racism. Many of them, with the racist campaigns that were out there, were voting for racism.

Many of these people were. And so the phrase that James O'Brien of LBC, who is a really good person, I really like him, uh, is a good man.

Um, once had the phrase called compassion for the conned, con for the conned, and I guess contempt for the con man. Uh, uh, whatever, something like that. And, you know, even he had to park that phrase. A- and I never liked that phrase anyway because it seemed to, in my mind, let the people who vote for Brexit off the hook because no, they weren't fooled, and no, they're not dumb.

And yeah, I get it, some people in the United Kingdom don't read either. But- They do know how to vote, and they voted lustily for Brexit. Now, 52 to 48 is not exactly a blowout, but it isn't exactly as tight as you might think. And yeah, 52 to 48, yeah, it's reasonably close, but people knew what they were voting for.

And to say that they didn't know what they were voting for is the same thing as people would like to believe out here and tell you here in the US. "Oh, we didn't know what we were voting for. We didn't vote for this with Donald Trump." Well, yeah, you did vote for this with Donald Trump, and yeah, you did vote for Brexit, and you knew what was going on with Brexit because literally a week before Brexit happened, on June the 23rd, 2016, literally a week before that, a white female Labour member of Parliament was killed, murdered in her own surgery.

Now, that's her office. That would be her office. By a white male nationalist. Yeah. One week before. And so with that murder of the member of Parliament from the Labour Party, Jo Cox, first name J-O, last name Cox, C-O-X. With that murder that took place on June the 16th, 2016, people still continued to decide to vote for Brexit, even when that racist who murdered that female MP, white female MP, was supporting Brexit.

And that did not disturb the chains of the people who voted for Brexit because misogyny, because racism, because white fear, because white racism. And so you knew what you were voting for. And Nigel Farage was at the heart of the Brexit movement. He even had a party called the Brexit Party, which had become, previous to that, was called the UKIP Party, United Kingdom Independence Party, a racist-ass party that then morphed into the Brexit Party.

And then when Brexit was achieved, Nigel Farage decided to change its name again because, hey, the Brexit Party outlived its usefulness now that Brexit was implemented, albeit really disastrously, because it turned out to be a nightmare for my native country. But then what did Nigel Farage change it to?

Oh, the Reform Party. It's like a business that continues to fail, but just keep changing the name in the hopes that it will succeed. Oh, and Nigel Farage wasn't even a member of Parliament at that point because Nigel Farage was a member of the European Parliament, and he'd give all these speeches before the European Parliament in Brussels, and he would talk about how the EU was terrible and Brussels was awful, and this is just despicable, all the while, while trying to run to be a member of Parliament in the United Kingdom.

And he failed at it eight different times, eight previous times, seven or eight, before he finally, in 2024, became an MP in the United Kingdom. Finally. Seriously. It's just crazy. You cannot make this up, folks. And so MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage, or Farage, or Farage, however you wanna pronounce his last name.

And yes, he does have French roots. Oh, yeah. The guy that hates immigrants, the guy that stood b- in front of a poster that said "breaking point" on it and had all of these brown-skinned or olive-skinned people and tried to scare white voters with their own internalized racism to go, "Oh, you cannot vote for no on Brexit because if you vote no, all these brown, these olive-skinned people behind me on this big billboard that says breaking point in large red letters is somehow gonna be coming to a neighborhood near you down your street.

Oh, you've got to vote yes for Brexit." And, you know, lots of white people in the UK did, and there were lots of white people in the UK who did not vote for Brexit. But the racist scam and the lies of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson and a whole lot of other people worked to a T. And by the way, that photo of him standing in front of a poster with all these olive-skinned people, they were literally refugees coming in from some kind of war somewhere.

But, you know, people don't study history either in the UK, it turns out some people don't, and so it worked out just fine. And Nigel Farage absolutely pulled off one, didn't he?

With so much attention on the surge of far-right rhetoric in the United States and the rise of far-right politics across Europe, there's one country that's often missing from the conversation: Canada.

But in the years since what's been called the Freedom Convoy of 2022, reporting from Canada has pointed to a growing ecosystem of far-right and white nationalist groups inside the country, including the spread of so-called active clubs, groups of white nationalist men who basically operate fight clubs or fitness-focused clubs in anticipation of violence.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, an NGO, now says the white nationalist movement in Canada has never been larger or more dangerous. I'm about to get into all of that with Rachel Gilmore, an independent journalist who has been reporting on the far right in Canada and who's had to deal with all sorts of threats and harassment online as a result of that work.

My name is Mohamed Hashing, and this is Real Talk. And she joins us from Montreal. She. Rachel Gilmore. Thank you so much for coming on Real Talk. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Me too. L- l- there's so much that we're gonna get into, but I'm so happy that we kind of found the time to have this chat.

Um, you know, as I was prepping for this interview, Rachel, w- w- one thing I thought of asking you, you know, when, when w- when you have conversations in Canada when you're back home, you or me or whoever's listening, I, I feel like one of the things that you're, you ... The common phrases that people tell you over coffee is like, "Oh, man, thank God we're not the US.

You know, all this white nationalist stuff, all this far-right stuff, that's, that's south of the border. That's not us." How do, how do you react when you hear that? I know how I react, but how do you react? Yeah. I just, I mean, first of all, I'm very jealous of the world that they live in, where they think that doesn't exist in Canada.

Um, but yeah, and then I immediately destroy that world for them and tell them about the fact that we very much have our own white nationalism here. And in fact, a lot of the US white nationalism, I mean, we've exported some really awful guys down to the States. So- Mm ... you know, I mean, if you look at the Proud Boys- The Proud Boys

the guy who started that group was Canadian. So, you know, it's a, it's very much a, uh, mutual exchange of, of awfulness, uh- Right ... between our two countries. And, and Canada very much has its own problem with white supremacy. It's Gavin McInnes, if I'm not mistaken. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but okay. Well, let's, let's delve into it.

You know, w- when it comes to issues relating to the far right in Canada, what's the landscape? What can you share about what's happening right now? So, the Canadian far right is really interesting, and it has some aspects that I think are kind of unique to Canada. Um, not necessarily because of- the country itself, but just the way that our far right has sort of coalesced here is I haven't seen anything like it.

And the extremism researchers who I lean on heavily, who are much smarter than me, um, but hopefully I can do a good job of parroting, uh, what they've told me. But, um, you know, they've told me that they don't see this really happening in the same way elsewhere either. And it's that we have this group called Diagolon that has sort of subsumed.

It's sort of, um, it's, uh, grown in this way where it adopts these other organizations that crop up. And it's sort of like we have this more centralized white nationalist movement in a way that other countries don't. They, they might have more infighting and more of these separate groups with big leaders and big personalities.

Whereas here in Canada, we kind of have these guys that are really controlling things and really like, uh, they are the main white nationalist network in this country. Well, actually, you know what? That's interesting. L- l- let's talk about it because there's, there-- you mentioned Diagolon. There's also others as well.

There's Second Sons, there's Dominion. Um, but for Diagolon, I mean, I think, uh, at face value, when you do a bit of research,

it's the way they introdu- And correct me if I'm wrong, the way they introduce themselves or the way they carry themselves is more like, "Oh, we're, we're comedians," or, "We're some sort of- Yeah ... m- meme creators," or w- th- it's something, it's something light-hearted, something that's not serious. Am I right?

Absolutely. Yeah. And, and actually, like Diagolon, Second Sons, and the Dominion Society are all tied together. They're- Okay ... they're basically, especially Second Sons and Diagolon, are really one in the same. It's the same leaders. Um, but I'll, I'll break that down in a second- Sure ... if you'd like me to. But in terms of Diagolon itself, they really came to prominence as a group of just live streamers.

They would do these livestreams where they would say some pretty egregious stuff, but they would later claim it's a joke. And particularly during, uh, the COVID-19 pandemic, they really hopped on that anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown rhetoric, and were involved with the Freedom Convoy, for example.

Mm-hmm. And, um, they... So they sort of formed this, uh... They, they play this sort of propaganda role in a big way, where they, uh, claim to be joking, but the ideology underlying what they're joking about is very serious. If you listen to them for any extended period of time, they're very much accelerationists who have this sort of doom, uh, you know, pessimistic view of society, that we're headed towards collapse, so they wanna hasten it.

They, uh, have some members who are very much, like, white nationalists. I mean, Alex Brand is one of their most prominent, uh, members, and he's said things like, quote, "Are you gonna, are you gonna suggest deporting the Jews? Yeah. Yeah. I think we do all the time." Like, I've got that pulled up right here, and, and he's also spoken about, uh, you know, I've seen him watch footage of people from India being killed gruesomely by a train, and he's sitting there laughing.

Wow. Like, these are the things they do on their livestreams. And, um, but then they also at the same time, uh, you know, they, they explain their organization, like it's called Diagolon because they made a fake map when Jeremy Mackenzie had, like, smoked a bunch of weed. Jeremy Mackenzie is sort of the leader and founder of Diagolon.

Um, and so he was high and he looked at the, the places in the United States and Canada that didn't, at the time, have mask mandates, and noticed it sort of created a diagonal line across North America- Oh ... and he said, "Oh, we need to make our own country." Does that explain their flag? Exactly. So their flag is sort of this white diagonal line on a, on a black backdrop.

And, and so it's a joke country. And then what's difficult is some, uh, reporters came in and they were like, "These guys wanna make their own country of, of anti-mask people," and it's like, that is, that part is the joke for them. But what's real is the underlying ideology of anti-science, anti-vaccine, of white supremacy, and, um, you know, and they would say things like, "Our vice president will be a cocaine addicted goat named Philip, who's, like, demonic."

And, and so any time you call out Diagolon and point out these ideologies they're espousing, you'll end up being laughed at for, you know, falling for the meme. But the reality is, is that, like, while they do these joking sort of ideal- these, these joking, um, ideas of a, of a potential country- Mm-hmm ... and engage in, in that sort of thing, um, they're actually coalescing a following who are listening to their livestreams that run, like, sometimes they're, like, four hours long, sometimes even longer.

Um, and they do this. There's, there's various influencers in this space who do this several times a week at times. Um, and you can really immerse yourself in this world where they very much have a worldview that they're espousing that is one that is- far-right extremism And, and how successful have they been in building that following that you're talking about?

Unfortunately, quite successful. I mean, uh, we, I don't have a ton to go off of. Sure Um, but the re- the extremism researchers I've spoken to, between monitoring their gatherings, looking at the, um, the numbers who tune into their livestreams- Yeah ... they, uh, also, um, listen to the claims that these guys make about their numbers.

Obviously, they tend to be pretty, like, braggadocious, so they might say some numbers that, like, they could be inflating a little bit. But, uh, my understanding is that even if they have a lower number of participation, just based on who extremism experts at particularly the Canadian Anti-Hate Network have been able to track, this is the largest white nationalist network in Canada.

Um, so i- i- it's, it's a big group, and that is very worrying, and I think that there's these soft entry points because of the claims that it's just a meme and that it's a community es- especially during COVID, when there was a lot of people who may have been vaccine hesitant without actually being extremists, uh, that was a soft entry point that then led them down this pipeline towards broader extremist sentiments because they were taken in by this group at a time when they might have been socially ostracized because of the fact that they weren't getting vaccinated.

Um, and then these guys, in order to maintain that community, uh, they have to engage in the sort of groupthink that involves these more extreme ideologies. So it's, it's been- Mm ... uh, uh, they've been very powerful and very effective at, um, taking advantage of the grievances and, uh, vulnerabilities within our society to radicalize people towards their, uh, darker ideologies.

Look, once One Nation started to take Liberal votes, there was this real question of how the Liberals would respond to that threat, whether they would move closer to One Nation policies or, or push against it. I guess we have our answer. We do have our answer after Angus Taylor announced the Liberals', I guess, the, the first planks of what their immigration policy is, is going to be, and it really, both in the, the substance of the announcement, the tone that he was relaying as he spoke about it, and even the fact that, I mean, he's been the leader for a couple of months now, this is the first major policy offering.

And the fact that he's chosen to prioritize a hardline immigration policy gives a very strong indication of where the Liberals want to go, what they're concerned about electorally, and I guess the answer to both of those questions is One Nation. One of the things being talked about is how there was real similarities to Donald Trump's immigration policy, such as social media checks, uh, forced deportations.

Mm. One thing that puzzles me is why would the Liberal Party decide to mirror some of Donald Trump's policies when that led to such a disastrous federal election result? It didn't work last time. It's a great question, and I think it's something that we were trying to wrap our heads around when the announcement was, was made.

I think the first point to be made is that Angus Taylor and the other frontbenchers were playing down the comparisons with Trump and, and the idea that there would be ICE-style raids, you know, in Australia. But the comparisons and the echoes are very obvious. You mentioned two of them, the, the speeding up of the deportations, the checking of the social media history, and why they would want to go down that path again, given what we saw happen to, to Peter Dutton in the 2025 election.

It goes to this challenge that the Liberal Party has y- because they are shedding votes to their right, so one-time Liberal supporters and National supporters going to One Nation. And one of the motivations for those voters, I would argue it's not the only motivation, but one of those motivations is around immigration and national identity and Australian values.

And in order to, in the mind of Liberals, to develop a policy offering that assuages the concerns of those voters and is strong enough, what it requires them to do is do something that mimics or reflects the kind of ultimate hard man on immigration, and that is Donald Trump. And also I think we need to add into this equation Nigel Farage as well, the leader of Reform in UK.

So- The comparisons are there, whether the Liberals try and downplay them or not. There are echoes of Trump in what they're trying to do, and I think that carries enormous electoral risk. Before we move on to some of the detail, is any of this going to work? Because surely it will turn off a lot of migrant communities and voters who might naturally be conservative-leaning metropolitan voters.

I think the first point that we make on this is at this stage where we're at, where the Liberal Party finds themself in, is yes, they are the opposition to a Labour government, but really their main focus at the moment, their real opponent, whether they, they want to admit it or not, is One Nation. So we have to assess the policies that Angus Taylor is choosing to prioritize, and the rhetoric that he's choosing to deploy is in the context of a contest with One Nation.

Let's assume that he's successful, and they are able to kind of win back, stem some of that drift to, to One Nation. I would argue that it's not necessarily guaranteed that it's gonna happen. There's a saying that's sort of going around in, in federal politic circles at the moment that you can't out-Hanson Hanson.

But in doing so, as you mentioned, this has the potential to further alienate the broader electorate, which has abandoned the Liberal Party at the past two elections, and that includes electorates with high proportions of multicultural communities. And we see this happen time and time again after elections when those communities have rejected the Liberal Party.

There is a kind of flurry of commentary that we need to reconnect with those communities and, and really, to be frank about it, to not come across as not liking them. But then they come and, and announce policies such as these, and it has the potential to undermine all of the things that they attempted to do.

So electorally, I'm dubious that this will even work in terms of stemming the bleeding to One Nation. But even if it does work, it has the potential to cause far greater damage in the kind of wider electoral contest with Labour and the other parties. So when you think about it in that way, it begs the question, what on earth are they doing?

But of course, this is a strategy that they've chosen to adopt, and, and I think it's gonna be fascinating and a little bit concerning to see how it plays out over the next couple of months. Yeah, I mean, presumably Angus Taylor has a, has a plan, even though it, it's not entirely clear in that context. Just some of the, the detail we were looking at.

We mentioned the forced deportations. They're t- talking about 65,000 people the coalition says should be forced to leave now. Did Angus Taylor set out any detail about- How something like that would be achieved? What exactly would be done? No, and I think that was one of the features of this announcement.

So there was detail to a point. So he talked about it's kind of codifying the Australian values statement, making sure that visa applicants sign up to values. You talked about the, the kind of fast-tracking of deportations targeted at the cohort of people who have exhausted all legal avenues to remain in Australia.

He thinks there are about 65,000 of them, and also the social media vetting was another element. But in terms of the logistics and the practicalities and how that would work, there really wasn't any detail. There was no costings to, to back this up. Now, you would assume that if you're going to dedicate more resources to checking the social media histories or finding people who have exhausted all legal avenues and, and deporting them, that would cost money, it would cost resources, it would require an investment in the public service.

There was none of that detail, and in a lot of ways, this left more questions than answers. But I think perhaps in pursuing answers to those questions, we're slightly misreading what the intention of this announcement was. This wasn't an announcement, a speech that was detailing a policy which they intend to implement in government necessarily.

This was about sending a message. This was about symbols. This was about signals. But I, I'm not necessarily confident that we're gonna be able to get answers to those questions because I'm not entirely sure that the Liberal Party and the Coalition is doing the work or intends to do the work to answer those questions themselves.

Because where they're at electorally and where we are in the electoral cycle, the election's not for a couple of years, at this stage they're not talking about implementing a plan for government. It's about symbols and demonstrating to the electorate, and in this case the cohort of conservative voters that are leaving them, what they stand for, how they want to be perceived as a political entity.

So how much is Reform a surprise when it comes to the traject- trajectory of conservatism in the UK? Was Reform always in s- to some degree, even if it wasn't using that name, the horizon for the center right and conservatives in the UK? Because here in the States, where the Republican Party is today politically, I mean, this has always been what their more far-right members' rhetoric has been.

They've just embraced it and put it into action now. So was Reform always the horizon for the center right and conservatives in the UK? Yeah, I think, um, historically the conservatives, uh, like a lot of similar parties in Western Europe, have been quite, um, quite strong at drawing a line, uh, to, to show what, what they find acceptable and what they don't rhetorically.

So the kind of big historical example from the UK here is a politician called Enoch Powell. I don't know if that name will mean much to you, but he was a, um, a high profile conservative in the late 1960s. Um- And, you know, tipped possibly as a future prime minister. But he gave a speech in 1968 when he predicted that immigration to Britain from, uh, former colonies would lead to what he described as rivers of blood.

And this caused... You know, actually, his speech was very popular with a certain section of the population at the time. Um, but it was also very controversial. He was seen as, um, endorsing racism, and the then leader of the Conservative Party, Edward Heath, sh- uh, sacked him from his, uh, top team. And Powell was then treated as an outcast, um, for the rest of his political career, at least by the mainstream center right.

Um, what I think's happened, um, in our own time is that since the 2000s really, certainly the, the, over the time span that I've been covering these issues as a journalist, you have seen a kind of slow re-entry into mainstream politics of, um, uh, anti-immigration and xenophobic and racist ideas and forms of rhetoric, um, that have...

You know, they- yes, they've, they've come from, um, within the establishment. So Britain's press, for instance, has always been a kind of key purveyor of this stuff. Um, you've had, um, the conservatives and also s- to some degree Labour, as I was describing, kind of play this game of triangulation and trying to kind of keep a lid on everything by pandering a bit to anti-immigration rhetoric.

And then you've had the growth of right-wing populism for, or for people in Britain, uh, that means... Or rather, right-wing populism in Britain since around 2010, um, has been encapsulated by Nigel Farage. It's, it's his projects that have really kind of, um, flourished during this period. Um, and that's partly because Farage is very adept at kind of creating a form of right-wing populism that works within British politics.

So he's always very strongly condemned fascists and neo-Nazis like the BNP. You know, draws a clear line against kind of any association with them. Uh, Reform has never been, you know, Reform and its predecessor parties run by Farage, they've, they've never had anything to do with fascism, but they do still trade in these kind of far-right themes, um, that we've been talking about.

And, um, over time, that has, um, you know, kind of ground- Down the mainstream as well, particularly after the Brexit referendum of 2016, which Farage was i- instrumental in bringing about. It's prompted a kind of radicalization of the center right itself. So Boris Johnson, who I mentioned earlier, who tried to do his own version of, um, right-wing populism in charge of the Conservative Party was, was the example of how the conservatives themselves went down a far more radical path in recent years than previously.

Um, but then there's been something else that has happened in, I would say, the last two to three years, in fact, um, which is partly what prompted me to write the book, which is although this has been a fairly slow process accumulating over time, it's a bit like somewhere in the last three to five years, the, the floodgates opened, and you've just seen this kind of entry of, um, far-right rhetoric, extremist ideas, racist, uh, language and, um, and, and forms of rhetoric, um, just kind of, um, enter the mainstream very rapidly in a way that I've, I've not experienced in my lifetime, at least.

And it's partly a result of this accumulating over time. I think it's also what happens when you've got this, this kind of strong anti-immigration politics and a kind of strong demand for right-wing nationalism already established, and then a country comes under severe kind of social and eco-economic pressures due to other external factors, uh, you know, like cost of living, energy prices and so on and so on.

Uh, but I think the other big part of it is it's, it's also the way that, um, you know, media technology has developed and has just completely disrupted the, the settled ways of doing politics. So, um, the role that algorithmically driven social media has played in forming this kind of new far-right discourse and sort of dragging established politicians along with it, uh, um, can't be understated, I think.

You also point out in your book, if we tolerate this, like the proverbial boiling frog that sits in water as it slowly heats up rather than jump to safety, we have allowed something incredibly dangerous to creep up on us. Yet our political class seems at best indifferent and at worst too welcome it. So to what ex- extent is this due to any reluctance by the center to be critical of capitalism or to offer an alternative to neoliberalism and austerity, or to challenge nationalism?

Uh, to what extent is this because the, uh, the Labour Party, the left, the alternative to, uh, Reform, is not willing to critique capitalism to offer an alternative to, uh, neoliberalism and auster- and austerity and to critique nationalism, to critique the actual things that Reform embraces? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a huge part of the story, really.

Um- You know, what we've had in Britain is this long period where it's, it's become clear to most people that the, all of the sort of received wisdom of neoliberalism never, uh, no longer works. You know, and we, whether it was desirable in the first place or not is a different question. But you could say up until the 2008 financial crisis that it was a, a system of governance that, um, you know, allowed, allowed, allowed economic growth.

It allowed some people to get very wealthy, and governments could argue, well, if, you know, the rich are getting richer, um, this, uh, th- this will benefit other people in society, either through that wealth trickling down or through, um, a, you know, a, a center-left government doing a little bit of redistribution.

Um, since 2008, that has really not been the case. Um, Britain's been through, uh, the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars, I believe, in the 2010s. Um, you know, wages have flat-lined for most people, uh, but prices have gone up. Housing costs have gone up. Um, money has also been taken out of public services, which has added another pressure to people's lives, and so on.

But until quite recently, politicians would still kind of talk as if the old way of doing things continued uninterrupted. The idea that there, there is no alternative, that was another of Margaret Thatcher's sayings, um, to the neoliberal way of doing things. And that has started to break down. I mean, the, the first kind of, um, shock to that was, was the Brexit referendum.

And ironically, it's, it's the conversation around immigration and the ideas pushed by the populist right that have for a long time were the only kind of critique of neoliberalism or globalization, which is often k- kind of used interchangeably as a term there. It was the only kind of critique of this stuff that was really, really allowed in, in mainstream politics.

You know, so particularly after, after the Brexit referendum, you would then hear lots of commentators in, in the mainstream media talking about, "Oh, well, this, this is a rejection of globalization. It's gone too far. There are sometimes, there are more important things in life than, uh, market forces and economic growth and so on."

But that was, they, it was as if you were only ever allowed to say that in relation to immigration policy and kind of national identity and national culture. Um, and I think Labour really failed, um- To seize the moment there. I mean, they made a good go of it under Jeremy Corbyn, but that didn't work. Uh, the Starmer government, uh, you know, they've, they've kind of made noises that we're living in a changed world now, and we need to do things differently, but there's no substance to it.

And I think this is really, um, a big part of why right-wing populism is doing as well as it is, is that there has been no convincing alternative to date put forward by the left.

So, um, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, uh, is a great resource on a lot of this stuff. Yeah. And they actually published a piece breaking this down and, and breaking down the ties between them.

But effectively, as we just- explained, Diagolon really is a sort of propaganda arm where they post memes, they do the livestreams, they do a lot of irony poisoning and just, like, pretending that it's all a joke when in fact it's actually very real. And so people can joke their way into becoming radicalized where-

or they don't realize they're internalizing the, the things that they're joking about as they do so. Um, but then an interesting thing happened while I was monitoring Diagolon over the last few years. They did th- this thing they called, um, uh, the, the Rage Tour. And they, um... I might be getting that name wrong, but it's it was like the Road Rage Tour or something like that.

But, uh, they, they went on tour across the country and held events where they spoke to the public, to anyone who paid to, to see them at these events. And, um, you know, I got my hands on leaked audio of one of these events after, uh, you know, an activist had infiltrated, uh, one of these, uh, you know, weird little tour things they went on where they did a mix of shitty comedy and very real and scary, uh, hateful espousing of ideas.

And one of the things that stood out to me was Derek Harrison, who's one of the sort of... There's sort of three guys at the top of Diagolon: Derek Harrison, Jeremy McKenzie, who's really the leader, and Alex Friend. Um, those are sort of the, the big three guys, and then there's Jeremy's girlfriend, Morgan, uh, May.

And Derek Harrison, in this leaked audio, was saying that, uh, you know, at first it was all a joke. We were just kinda messing around. But then We had politicians. Trudeau said our name in the House of Commons But in the audio I obtained, they admit it themselves on stage. Listen to this This all started as a joke, you know, making YouTube videos, but then we got noticed, right?

The Prime Minister has said our name in the House of Commons multiple times. Right. So we realized that we can move the needle in politics in Canada. So we decided to take it a little bit more seriously. As you can tell, this isn't my style. 'Cause he, uh, highlighted Diagolon as a group, uh, that was concerning in the House of Commons.

And, uh, and he said, uh, Derek Harrison, "That's when we realized we should take this a little more seriously, 'cause we can really move the needle." And that was sort of the shift that I've observed, where now they have taken what was originally this shitty live stream, uh, you know, group that would just espouse these awful ideas, but generally kept that to the online world, um, aside from a few like little in-person meetups from fans and, you know, the guys who know each other.

Um, they ch- took that, and they have brought it offline and created this organization called Second Sons- Mm ... which is an active club. It is a group of guys who are doing military-style drills and practicing fighting with the underlying ideology of, you know, opposing immigration. Uh, it, it really is just like quite, um- A- and these active clubs- Y- There's, there's, there's, I guess, multiple active clubs, 'cause there's Nationalist 13, right?

NS 13. There's, there's, there's... It's not just one active club across Canada, from, from my understanding. Yeah. So basically, so the Second Sons have chapters. Um, it's hard to say whether those chapters are just like one guy in certain towns or if there's a couple. But you can see, like I monitor their Telegram chats, and, uh- Yeah

this is a, a social media app where a lot of... It's very loosely moderated, to put it lightly. So a lot of these guys coalesce there and, and can say things that they can't say on other social media. And they post pictures of their meetups, their training, you know, at gyms. And, uh, you know, they, they have outwardly said, Alex Vran, that they're inspired by groups like the United States white supremacist group Patriot Front.

They've gone on the record and said that they're inspired by Patriot Front. And, um, that's really concerning, because they are Training offline seemingly to engage in violence because of the fact that what they're training in is fighting and military style drills. And yes, there are chapters across the country.

And, and another thing that's fascinating that goes back to my original point about how this is, uh, really Diagolon and its, uh, you know, associates are absorbing the white nationalist and, and extremist, far right extremist movement in Canada. Um, there are other active clubs that were preexisting- Mm-hmm

uh, like the Frontenac Active Club, that have been absorbed by Diagolon, and they actually, like, formally announced that now this group is a Second Sons active club or part of their group. And these guys have uniforms. They've started trying to intimidate people with these public demonstrations where they all wear black and mask their faces. They've gone in front of- And that's a key thing, Rachel, right? Because they- Yeah ... they have held public rallies. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Like, they have gone to, uh...

In the Niagara region, they- Yeah ... uh, held a demonstration around the statue of Isaac Brock. They went to a CBC, Canada's national, you know, public broadcaster- Yeah ... uh, location in Ottawa, which is also a block away from our Parliament buildings, and they were standing directly in front of some parliamentary buildings where MPs do their work.

Um, and they were holding a sign that said, "CBC hates white people." And, you know, just railing on, standing there. Like, the Jeremy Mackenzie gave some big speech. And, um, you know, there was also a demonstration that same day in Regina, Saskatchewan. Uh, and you know, these guys are all in their uniforms. Uh, very Patriot front-style, uh, aesthetics to their uniforms as well.

You can see the inspiration there. And, uh, you know, the banner is also very similar to the kinds of banners that the Australian neo-Nazi group, um, uh, the NSN tends to w- hold and walk around with. So there's a lot of cross-pollination and- Mm ... uh, inspiration there. I mean, Alex Friend has interviewed Thomas Sewell, who's a very prominent Australian neo-Nazi, on his livestreams.

And, you know, it's just like they say the N-word nonstop and just say all kinds of stuff. Um, but yes, it was, it was in person, and it was, um, it was concerning to me just that they have this level of organization because when you combine that with the sort of hateful ideology they espouse, I'm very concerned about, first of all, one of their members taking it upon themselves to act on what Jeremy Mackenzie, for example, says all the time in his livestreams, which is that someone has to do something about this.

This world is... You know, there's so much wrong with the world, someone has to do something. Um, but also the fact that they are, um, that something could happen in a more organized way, and it doesn't necessarily have to be anything as formal as an attack. I'm not saying that they're plotting anything along those lines, but you know, groups like, uh, the Proud Boys would go and they would antagonize what they would call Antifa or any progressive- Mm-hmm

protesters and get in these street brawls. So I am concerned that we might see an escalation in violence because these guys are training themselves for it. And what is the end goal of that if not to, uh, act on the violence that they're training themselves for? And ultimately, what is it that they want?

Like, I looked at some of the stuff that Dominion has put up. Yeah. And the, it's, you know... I, I guess the, the, the big-picture stuff is that they wanna establish mass deportation, and they wanna basically get rid of the permanent residency status, uh, in, in Canada, right? And they also, which I found interesting, they wanted to set up a voluntary, I guess, renunciation of your Canadian citizen- citizenship if you're a descendant of, of immigrants.

Um, so it's, it's, um, it's, it's obviously all related to immigration, most of it at least. Um, ob- there's also xenophobia, there's Islamophobia, there's- Yeah ... antisemitism. But, uh, a- again, from, from what you, you, where you are, what's the overarching thing that these groups want at the end of the day? Yeah, I mean, uh, it's white in nature.

It is the dominance of white people, and they believe that Canada is a country that- Belongs to white people, which is ironic, or not, maybe that's not the right term for it, but it, it's ludicrous when you think about the fact that white people haven't even been here that long and that we are only here because of colonialism.

But, uh, yeah, they, they basically don't want people of color in this country.

On that point, Angus Taylor gave some examples in his speech and, and since then about the specific incidents or examples of, of which migrants he might be thinking about- Mm-hmm ... when he talks about these policies. But did he say at any point specifically which country or which religious background he's targeting?

No, he talked in, in broad strokes, and I think when he talked about multiculturalism and immigration to Australia, he really- Broke it into two groups. He talked about what he characterized as examples of good migrants, and he used the example of his grandfather was the head of the Snowy Hydro scheme, and there were...

That was essentially built by migrants, and he saw firsthand how they integrated in Australian society, and they were mostly, mostly European migrants. And then what Taylor has done is characterized or contrasted them with essentially what he believes are bad migrants. He used this phrase, "migrants who have subversive intent," and it sorta creates this idea or this picture of people who come to Australia with sinister motives wanting to undermine our way of life.

Now, he did single out the refugees that had fled Gaza during the war and come to Australia as an example of people who had come from a country with a value system whose values were incompatible with his idea of Australian culture. And he said that that cohort presented a high risk to the country. Now, the government has responded to, to those claims by noting that that cohort has been the most kind of highly scrutinized in, in Australian history.

But that is the kind of big picture distinction that Taylor is attempting to draw, and it has really caused alarm in sections of the community. And for a long time in Australia, it was a bipartisan position that we have the most successful multicultural country in the world. Multiculturalism has not been part of a- Australian society, it is Australian society.

And Taylor is essentially arguing that that idea hasn't worked, and it hasn't worked because there are good migrants and there are bad migrants, and that we cannot continue to assume that this ideal that we have worked as a multicultural society because there are elements of it that just haven't worked and in his view have failed.

Well, and, and also abandoning w- what we always thought was a bipartisan support- Yeah ... of a non-discriminatory migration system. Yeah, I mean, he, he is saying that there, there isn't going to be discrimination based on country or ethnicity, but what he is saying is now that we should have an immigration system that discriminates based on values.

But if we take a step back and kind of look beyond questions about the practicalities of things like social media vetting and so on, what is Angus Taylor actually talking about? What is he actually arguing? It's about a different kind of Australia. He's proposing a different kind of, of country, he's proposing a different direction for the country, and I think it's a very significant and a very serious debate that, that he's proposing.

Let's, um, talk about some of the reaction. Are some analysts and journalists saying that Angus Taylor has sort of crossed some sort of traditional red line here for the Liberal Party when it comes to supporting our current immigration system? Certainly when he talks about the fact that we have a non-discriminatory immigration system has been the pillar of the system since the end of the White Australia policy.

It's one of the things that can happen in federal politics which I think as journalists we need to be really conscious of, is things happen in small increments to the point where they never necessarily seem hugely significant when it's announced. When Angus Taylor made that speech yesterday, it was largely unsurprising.

It was largely consistent with the themes that he'd been talking about for weeks. It's consistent with the sorts of things that Tony Abbott has been speaking about. He's a very significant thought leader in the Liberal Party. So it wasn't surprising, but then when you take a step back and think what he's actually talking about, it is a very, very significant shift in terms of the way that an alternative prime minister, in his case, the leader of a major party, is talking about a fundamental pillar of Australian society.

And in terms of the, the reaction that it's prompted, I mean, the, you had, um, the Greens immigration spokesperson David Shoebridge talking about this is essentially the White Australia policy in 2026. I, I was interested in that. What made the Greens say that they think it's a throwback to the White Australia policy?

So essentially, I th- I think what the Greens are when they're making that point is when you strip back what Angus Taylor is, is trying to hark back to, it is an Australia of decades gone by, and the, the Greens are essentially accusing Angus Taylor, and this is something that he would push back on quite strongly, but of harking back to an Australia from the White Australia era.

He is appealing to this sense of an Australia that has been lost, and it's been lost because it's been undermined by waves of immigration, and waves of immigration of individuals who have brought- Other cultures, cultures that he would argue are incompatible with Australian identity, and that has had the effect of undermining our society and our culture And Labour's pushed back.

They've called it dog whistling. Yeah. And that's, I think it was, it was always gonna be interesting to see what the response from the government was going to be. And I, I say that because they are sensitive to the, the political sensitivity of the immigration debate. They know that there is angst in sections of the community, people who aren't One Nation supporters, people who aren't themselves racist.

So it was, it was always gonna be interesting to see how hard the government came out in condemning Angus Taylor. And as you said, Tony Burke, the home affairs minister, was quite strong, and we've seen a number of other Labour MPs, the Social Services Minister, Tanya Plibersek, other backbenchers, such as Jerome Laxale, whose electorate of Bennelong is, is very multicultural, being very strong in this idea that multiculturalism hasn't been a positive and a core pillar of Australian society.

And Finally, Section D, STAKES AND RESISTANCE

I got out of my car. I had my... I always have my purse around my neck like this, and I had my cellphone, and I walked around to the side of the driver's side, and they had this young woman on the ground. And I held my cellphone out, and I was gonna start recording, and one of the agents that were right there immediately turned around, grabbed me by the neck, and threw me back on the ground and got on top of me.

Proceeded to try and handcuff me. I wasn't resisting. I, I was looking at him like, "What the hell are you doing?" In lengthy, detailed testimony, Moriarty recounted being handcuffed, pushed into a vehicle, and an agent cutting her purse from around her neck with a knife. Moriarty was never arrested and never charged.

As her testimony ended, commission member Ahmed Bassett asked Moriarty how the experience had affected her. It's insane. I too chose this. My grandfather was an appellate court judge for the state of New York. I grew up admiring him as an amazing man, and I wanted to be like him. Law and order.

Everybody follows the rules. We, it works out. And that's not what's happening now.

It's Consider This from NPR. The Illinois state government has been investigating the United States federal government. Specifically, a panel called the Illinois Accountability Commission has been conducting interviews and reviewing footage from last year's federal immigration enforcement crackdown in Chicago known as Operation Midway Blitz.

The Illinois Accountability Commission was created by an executive order of Governor JB Pritzker. Governor Pritzker joins us now. Welcome to All Things Considered. Glad to be with you, Scott. Today was the last day of the hearings. Lots of video, lots of testimony as we heard. What sticks with you? Well, I, the testimony of the eyewitnesses, the people who experienced the onslaught of CBP and ICE in our streets, was very powerful.

I- we heard from Miramar Martinez, who was a young woman who i- was sitting in her car. She saw ICE and CBP doing things that she knew were wrong. They were going after tackling brown, bla- brown and Black people, people with accents, people who were US citizens and here legally, people who hadn't broken any laws.

Mm-hmm. And she started yelling and, and beeping her horn, and you know what they did? They shot her five times, and she wasn't the only one in Chicago. There was, Silverio, G- Villegas Gonzalez, who was killed by ICE and CBP, and this all happened before people paid attention in Minneapolis. We really had to develop a playbook to deal with this, and one of those items in our playbook was, "Everybody pull out your phone.

Take a video when you see them doing something wrong. Keep evidence." And then this accountability commission took that testimony, and video Live testimony from people who were there, legal experts- Mm-hmm ... and so on. And this was led by, a federal judge, a state, senior judge, and they did deep dives into 16 different investigations.

They interviewed 60 eyewitnesses. They reviewed over 100 hours of ICE and CBP body camera footage. Can I ask- 250 different videos. Lot, lots of work done. What does accountability look like to you? Because these federal agents have broad immunity, if not the complete immunity that President Trump claims.

What is accountability? I'm glad you asked, because, first of all, that evidence has already been used in federal court cases to limit ICE and CBP and what they can do on our streets. It also has been used to fight back against Donald Trump trying to, deploy National Guard into our streets. Indeed, it was our attorney general who won the case at the Supreme Court that keeps National Guard from being deployed in any American city right now.

So, that's part of what's been done. That's an accountability item. The other, of course, is that these folks need to know that they may not be held accountable by this administration, they may not be held accountable by this Department of Homeland Security or CBP or ICE, Bovino, Homan, the rest of them.

Mm-hmm. But they can be held accountable when those people are out of office, when there's a new administration or a new Congress. Do you think or worry that President Trump will issue broad pardons to ICE and Border Patrol agents before he leaves office? I think he's gonna do that. The question is, can you really pardon the entire federal government?

Can you really pardon all of CBP and ICE? Maybe he will, but r- also, people can be held civilly liable- Mm-hmm ... for their personal actions here. So they... Look, what I want people to know is if you're an ICE agent, a CBP agent, and you're on the streets of any American city, we're keeping track, and if you do something wrong now, you're gonna be held accountable r- later.

So think twice before you break the law. On that topic of later accountability, I'll just note, it's not the point of the question, but I'll just note you're mentioned in the conversation about people thinking of running for president in the next election. When a new administration comes in, what do you want to see the federal government do reviewing what happened in Chicago, what happened in Minneapolis, what happened elsewhere?

Well, I think it would start with a change in the House of Representatives, a change in the Senate, which could happen as early as January of 2027, and that is with hearings. This Republican Congress is unwilling to hold any hearings or ask any questions. Mm-hmm. It's one of the reasons why everybody's paying attention to our accountability commission, 'cause we're the only people who are asking those questions and taking a record.

So I believe you're gonna see that investigation begin in '27. I think it's appropriate. Look, we all should know what's happened. People should know across the country, even if they live in neighborhoods that haven't been under attack yet- But to that- ... because this should never happen again ... to that point, though, how partisan the environment is.

How much, how much AI and other factors are just making up facts right now. That a lot of people are going to see this report and say, "That's a report that came from a Democratic governor, a partisan actor, and therefore I'm not going to read it. I'm not going to believe what I heard from it."

How do you get information to break through in this environment? Well, first we had testimony from Republicans at this commission, so it isn't some sort of partisan endeavor. We had, the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, he's now, retired, but he came back in order to appear before the commission.

He talked about free and fair elections and the problem of deploying people who are wearing uniforms and masks and, and, automatic weapons, and doing that- A r-, in and around an election, which I believe is going to happen in November, and he warned us against that. And you've seen Republicans stand up against this administration.

Mm-hmm. I do not believe that standing up for democracy has to be some partisan endeavor. You just mentioned your concerns about the November election. I'm curious what you have learned from this commission, what you will take going forward about how state government, how local government can react if there's a strong federal presence again in November or another time.

Okay. Well, I think everybody needs to understand that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution does allow the federal government to have their laws are supreme over state laws. Having said that, there, there are, ways for states to stand up and push back. I'll give you an example. I believe that in the November elections, you're gonna see, in state after state, you're gonna see Democratic governors deploying people to protect polling places, to make sure that even if there are, people wearing uniforms, ICE and CBP standing around near polling places, that we're gonna be able to escort people into the polling places.

We're gonna be able to communicate with people to make sure that they know that what ICE and CBP are doing is simply designed to scare you and that it's your opportunity at this moment to stand up for democracy, to do the right thing. This may be the toughest moment, but it is the most crucial moment for people to get out and vote.

You're talking about state authorities perhaps confronting federal authorities outside polling stations. Is that a scenario you're talking about? It's very important to recognize that we're not talking about confrontations with any weapons or anything like that. We are talking about peaceful protests.

Mm-hmm. We are talking about... B- remember, these elections, all across the country, elections are controlled by the states. Mm-hmm. And I have always advocated that we, first of all, keep it at the state level. I know Trump would like to federalize elections so that he can take control.

I've been in these centers for a long time predating Donald Trump and, um- Like I said, this has always been a system that we have been fighting.

You know, I've been an abolitionist of ICE detention since starting this work for very good reason. Um, but what we're seeing now is a true, a true human rights crisis. So more people have died in ICE custody under the Trump administration than we have record of of, of a president, and we're talking about a year and a half.

All right? I have clients who have died in ICE detention, and when I look at the medical records and see what happened to my clients, it is atrocious. It is gross medical neglect. I have a client who seized out in his dorm, having a massive seizure. They said, "He looks drunk," and left him alone and did not get him to emergency services for another four and a half hours.

He was brain dead when they took him to the hospital. He was forty-four years old, fleeing the war in Ukraine. Now, and then you talk about the overall, uh, inhumane conditions and treatment. So again, going out to the Everglades, I will not call that place what they call it, Alligator Alcatraz, 'cause it's disgusting.

It is the Everglades internment camp, and it is an absolutely abusive center that is operating with impunity and abusing people. Um, I just had released and filed a declaration in a s- in a case about this, uh, facility that's around First Amendment access to counsel, and showed the court the beatings that my clients took for absolutely...

Y- you know, there's no reason to beat anyone ever, but completely unprovoked regardless. People are crammed into literal cages. The facilities are disgusting. The toilets overflow. They live amongst sewage. They're giving fed portions of food that multiple clients tell me, "Katie, it looks like what you serve a baby in a baby jar."

They're losing weight by the, just pounds by the day. Um, and they institute a level of corporal punishment that I think most Americans wouldn't believe happens on our soil, and it is happening. They're taking people outside the Everglades, putting them into shackles, and leaving them in the sun as punishment without access to food and water, and just saying, "Stand there shackled."

In the Everglades, Sam, with the mosquitoes, with the conditions, with the heat, I mean, it's, it's really atrocious. And my client that I had shared with the court and that was is- wa- was, was released in the press, Rico, when they took him out and beat him so severely, and the picture that you may have saw, that you may have seen, excuse me.

You know, I talked to him eight days later, and he looks like that. Oh. He didn't get medical care, and right now as we are speaking, he is sitting in what they call the box. They only took him to s- they took him straight to solitary for no reason, which is a two-by-two-meter cage. And when he came to me last Friday, he said, "I have to sit for a minute 'cause I'm too dizzy.

I haven't seen the sun in eight days." The... And I think this is the thing that people don't understand, that th-this system of detention, uh, uh, and, and I think we maybe explained it in terms of, like, the money that's being made there, um, are, are they... Are your clients... Uh, because I've heard stories of, uh, of clients who have every legal right to be in this country.

They've either have work permits, they have... or they're in line for citizenship or whatever it is. Asylum pending. But they get thrown into these... They, they, they're in detention center, and they're just like, "This is just... This is torture. I'm literally being tortured, and I'm gonna s- I'm gonna, uh, just go to them and say I wanna, uh, deport."

And I've heard stories where they're not even letting people do that, to self-deport. The... So we haven't even gotten to the actual immigration court system in detention, right? So most detention cen- what most people who are in detention, when they go to court, it's a court in a detention center, and what has happened to the, to the immigration space in court is a whole other level of torture.

So we started the Trump administration with the Laken Riley Act, right? The Laken Riley Act was an attempt to lock up as many, many, many people as possible, regardless of what the, uh, the background of the charge. You didn't have to have probable cause. It was just like, if anybody's ever mentioned you did XYZ crime, you go to detention, you can't leave.

You're, you're mandatorily detained. Then they killed humanitarian parole. There's only two ways you can get out of ICE detention typically when your case is pending, humanitarian parole from ICE or bond from an IJ, an immigration judge, right? Humanitarian parole has been a, an option for immigrants in detention since detention centers started.

Trump killed it. It doesn't exist. They will not grant it. I've had people on their deathbed, they won't grant it. Bond, destroyed. They killed bond. There's a case called Yahiri Hurtado from the BIA that says the only people that are eligible for bond are those that were on a visa and overstayed it and had no other infraction for the time they were here.

That is millions, millions of people that would previously be bond eligible. So the system right now is intended to keep them there. Keep them there, keep them there, keep them there. And why do we think that is? 'Cause of the conversation we just had. Because the longer they're there, $200 a day. $200- Just keep it in your head, right?

$70,000. 200 bucks a day. I mean, that's, uh... W- uh, uh- If somebody who's good at math, tell us the math on that. I know. What is that? Like, one point, uh, five... Or is that 15 million a day? Um, uh, uh, it's just astonishing. Um, uh, I, uh, I, I'd love to have you back on, and we can talk, uh, more a- about this. Um, but, um, so what, what, what can be done at this point?

Like, I mean, uh, or, or I should say, what, what we saw in Minnesota It obviously sort of like, uh, made it harder for ICE to be in urban centers where there is a higher concentration of media. Uh, I've talked to reporters who say like, "In the rural areas, ICE is still working. They're still out there. These people-" Oh, yeah

have not gone away. Um, and so, uh, the, the problem is le- maybe slightly less intense out there because there's only so many people, you know, the, the, without the density, it's harder for them to arrest at the same, uh, rates they were doing before. You know? Well, and we have to consider the- ... thousands and thousands of people across the United States in hiding too, that have, that have seen this.

Yes. I mean, there are, there are families living like it's, like e- extreme COVID again, right? That's how they're living. Windows closed- I, I mean, it's like- ... staying home ... it's Anne Frank, uh, you know, we've been- Exactly ... talking to people- Exactly ... in Minneapolis who are like, "This is like an Anne Frank situation," uh- Yeah

where we have, uh, families hiding other families in their homes. They don't leave because, uh, they can't go to work, uh, they can't go to school. Um, on the back end though, like I've seen, we, you know, and, and I think we've talked to a couple of people who have organized against, uh, the, the purchase of a warehouse for a detention center, and we're hearing more and more about pushback from localities.

And seeing some success. Yes, and seeing some success. Um, but it does feel like it's, you know, a couple of small victories in this sort of like almost this tidal wave that's coming in. Yeah. Um, w- Yeah ... what else from your perspective can be done on this back end? I mean, like we just saw in Florida, uh, the Fifth Circuit, notoriously right-wing court, uh, deem that the federal government somehow had no involvement in the establishment of the Everglades internment camp, which of course is absurd.

Uh, I mean, on its face it's absurd. Of, uh, it would not exist but for the federal government saying- Yep ... "Well, build a, an internment camp here." Um- They're fed- they're in federal custody. Give me a break. I, I mean, it's absurd. And, um, so in b- in, in red states it becomes that much harder I would imagine- Right

f- because- Right ... the political will is, we wanna lock these people up. But from your perspective, like out- and outside, and I can't encourage people enough to support an organization, uh, like yours, um, there are, are many- I appreciate it ... um- Yeah ... a- a- you know, because obviously, y- you know, uh, a God know, a, a, having known a, a, knowing a couple of immigration attorneys, it's like, um, a, i- i- it's like triage, what's going on now.

Yeah. Uh- Yeah ... in a war zone. And, um- Yeah ... but so what else can we do, like hearing this, what else can we do? Obviously, you know, uh, we- Yeah ... we'll put a link to the Sanctuary of the South and, and, and, uh, w- w- we can feature others. Yeah, absolutely. But what else can we do? Yeah. So, I mean, one, I think there are major, major lessons and hope to be gleaned from Minnesota.

You know, one of the warehouses you're talking about that's been, uh, prevented is in Florida. That's crazy, right? That's Florida coming out and showing- Yeah ... that the citizens of Florida do not align with the DeSantis philosophy and the Trump philosophy. So we have real roadmap of saying, um, that resistance can work.

But the reality that people need to understand is that Trump started with immigration and this authoritarian surge for a reason Because one, it's primed already. We've already talked about why. Abusive system, highly profitable, et cetera, right? But the other thing is he has complete control here. The immigration system is under the executive, so you have to understand, he really gets to, in large measure, go forward as he desires.

So it's very hard legally to push back holistically, right? Right. So we have to take the fight to the street as we have. We have to continue pushing where you are in your communities, find people who are organizing, support your communities, and figure out a way to get involved. I guarantee you that there are people that are involved.

Reach out to us if you need connections. Um, but we also have to understand that what we're seeing and what we're doing now is laying a framework for the future, all right? We will be at a point where we're past the Trump administration, all right? We may all be so exhausted we can't stand by then, but it will happen, and generations will come behind us.

And by getting the public engaged in this issue, in what has been an abusive immigration system and, and to a complete humanitarian crisis under the Trump regime, we can change the system. We can defund ICE. We can abolish ICE. We can change detention centers. We can shut them down. So we have to keep this pressure up.

You get one question, and that's it, 'cause I don't really like MSNBC or MSNow, whatever it is. Collins didn't respond to our multiple interview requests, but when MSNow caught him outside his office on Capitol Hill, he seemed to prove Long's point, turning questions into a campaign speech. What is your response to residents of Social Circle who say you're not doing enough to prevent the building of this DHS facility?

Well, first of all, the, the community of Social Circle wants to help get this problem resolved- Mm-hmm ... that Jon Ossoff put on them. Mm-hmm. The pain that he inflicted on that community and my district. As a matter of fact, Laken Riley was murdered in my district, so you wanna know some people that actually feel the pain- Mm-hmm

of what these illegal criminal aliens have done, they understand that and they know that. We have been in constant c- contact with DHS and the city officials there in Social Circle to make sure that all of their questions are being answered. We've had some of our Democratic leaders come out and do more than our Republican leaders have done.

It's eerie. Is that uncomfortable for you? It's very uncomfortable for me. Is that kinda weird? I've had lots of discussions with Warnock's office, and I, I am proud of him for coming down here. It's very uncomfortable. You know, it's, it's not gonna make me vote Democratic. You didn't vote for Warnock. No, it won't make me vote for him, but I'm proud of him.

Senator Ossoff was one of the first elected officials to get in touch with Social Circle leaders and write letters to DHS demanding answers. He's also backing a bill that would require local approval before the federal government can open ICE detention facilities. Senator Warnock has gone even further, touring infrastructure sites in the town's elementary school, which sits less than a half a mile from the detention site.

Why are you helping them? Oh, I promised the people of Georgia that I would work for all of them, and so for me, this is not the difference between right and left. It's the difference between right and wrong. And what is happening in Social Circle, Georgia, what, uh, the Trump/Vance administration is proposing is wrong.

It's dead wrong. Why aren't Georgia Republicans doing more? I, I think you should ask them. That's a good question. Oh, we've tried, and they won't, they won't tell us. Well, look, in a party that Trump owns, that functions too often more like a cult than a party, and I think that at some point you have to ask yourself, "Why did you get in this work in the first place?"

If, I mean, if you cannot advocate for your own constituents, why wear the pin? In a way, this warehouse is the logical endpoint of what Trump himself promised on the campaign trail. I will never forget seeing the Mass Deportation Now signs everywhere. You know, in order to lead an unprecedented campaign like that, you need spaces to hold shocking numbers of people.

Is this essentially what many of the residents there voted for? I, I think that even the folks who voted for Donald Trump did not vote for this. I don't believe that the people of Social Circle, Georgia, thought that they were voting, uh, to triple the size of their town, uh, by bringing a 10,000-bed mega detention center- Uh, to their little neck of the woods.

On March 5th, Kristi Noem was fired as head of DHS. Then President Trump picked Markwayne Mullin to lead the agency. At his confirmation hearing, he tried to put distance between himself and Noem. We gotta protect the homeland, and we're gonna do that. But obviously, we wanna work with community leaders.

So it's important that we're talking to the communities, and if we're having, uh, additional needs, we can work with the cities, we can work with the municipalities- And then this, this town current- ... but we should always communicate with them. But Senator Warnock isn't holding his breath. Do you believe that Mullin will lead DHS in a different direction?

Well, I hope so, because the stakes are so very high. But I'm, I'm not focused so much on a person, I'm focused on the policy. And what we've seen from this administration is that Donald Trump makes his own policy. Under Mullin's new leadership, DHS has paused warehouse purchases and is reviewing projects already in motion.

What that means for Social Circle remains an open question. When pressed, DHS told MS Now that, "As with any transition, we are reviewing agency policies and proposals," and added that, "Secretary Mullin will work with community leaders. We want to be good partners." Social Circle City Manager, Eric Taylor, hopes they keep those promises.

If they fall through, the consequences will be impossible to ignore. So is all of this what I think it is? Yes, this is, uh, City of Social Circle sewer. This is the actual, um, the, the first stage in the treatment process. But- I can see the, the line right here. Yeah, this is it. So this is, we, we had the ability to treat 650,000 gallons.

When you've spoken to your own engineers, your own experts, worst-case scenario, what are they imagining would happen? Overflow. Overflow... Overflow of this. I'm, I'm tempted to make a joke about you being up shit's creek. Yeah, I am. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need to be an expert to do this math. Social Circle has a treatment plant licensed to handle 660,000 gallons of sewage, and is already operating at capacity.

DHS wants to add another million gallons a day to that, with no clear plan as to how. The town also has a permit for only one million gallons of water use per day. They currently use around 800,000 for 5,000 people, and DHS would like to use that water source too, for up to 10,000 more people. Do you think they just haven't done the homework that your teams have done, or do you think they don't care?

I'm not gonna say they don't care. Um, I don't believe they have thoroughly bothered to understand what our engineering concerns are. Before Taylor reached out to them, nobody from DHS had called, paid a visit, or coordinated with local engineers, police, or the fire department. Four months later, they've only had one phone call.

After that one phone call, you've never heard from DHS again? No. Um, they've indicated that they're, uh, willing to, uh, put their engineers in contact with our engineers. Um, to this point, that still has not happened. Do you feel like your community is being steamrolled? Absolutely. Absolutely. Um, I feel like at times that, um, I am one man standing in front of the freight train that's the federal government.

The facility was originally set to open in May or June. Under Mullin, the timeline is unclear. For now, Taylor is using every tool to make that impossible. I've put a lock on the water meter over there. You went over and locked their water at the facility? Yes. Can you do that? I don't know. I don't know.

Okay. I did. You did it. All right, it's done. I did, I did. And, and, and, and I, and I told them that I wasn't gonna remove the lock until I get a satisfactory answer about how they're gonna be servicing the water and sewer. You know, I, I'm a big admirer of John Lewis and, and his, um, get in good trouble, and that's my, uh, that's my one way of hopefully, you know, getting into some good trouble on behalf of, of this community.

The other question that's so often asked is about people arriving at the first safe country, and there is so much information both around the Schengen Agreement, but also people saying, "Why don't people stop in France? France is a safe country." I, I hate repeating these things. Um, I guess let's take those in turn.

So first of all, around the misinformation around the Schengen Agreement. Yeah, so essentially, um, within the EU there is a, a system for managing which state has responsibility for an asylum claim, and one of the criteria that can be used to determine who has responsibility for taking on an asylum claim is the first country of entry to the EU.

We're not in the EU anymore. Um, so that's pr- frankly irrelevant to us. Our refugee system is governed primarily by the Refugee Convention, where there is no obligation whatsoever of a refugee to claim asylum in any particular country, and certainly not necessarily in the first country of safety. If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense because the purpose of the Refugee Convention is to ensure that all signatories will protect refugees.

If the purpose of the Refugee Convention was to say the country right next to a country experiencing war, for example, must accept refugees, we wouldn't be signatories of it. It wouldn't... We wouldn't need to be because Well, lately Ireland and France have both been countries at pith. So the purpose of the Refugee Convention is so that people can, you know, share responsibility, so that we can share responsibility around the world for refugees.

Uh, um, the place that has the most refugees is, I think it's Iran, right? Um, Iran is usually top of the list. So ironically, yeah, the most Afghan refugees find shelter in Iran, and most Iranian refugees find shelter in Afghanistan. Um, yeah, and then the list continues with, I mean, the top five are all Middle Eastern and, uh, African countries, and then Turkey is in there.

Uh, Germany just about makes it into the top 10, but other than that, yeah, it's all, um, countries that are closer to... Because again, just as most migration is, uh, circular when it's done naturally, actually most people, uh, where if they leave their country at all, they go to the n- next country over or a country close by because most of the time, and this isn't just refugees, this is all types of migrants, we want to be close to what's familiar to us.

We want to, you know, i- th- the food, the customs, the traditions, the people that we know and love, that's what we wanna stay near, is actually a tiny, tiny proportion, even of people who are migrants at all, which is a very small proportion of people who ever go on a very long journey to, uh, far, far away from where they come from.

And then there was, the other part of your question was about the- People wanting to get to England, which- Yeah, rather than France. I mean, France is a safe country, and so is y- the UK. You know, and this is the trick, it's like, do you really think that, that France should just have to take refugees, but that the UK shouldn't?

Like, on what basis could that ever be a realistic... It's just not, I m- I, I get accused sometimes, um, when I say things like, you know, "Migrants are just humans, no worse than anybody else," um, of being naive. I'll tell you what's naive, is believing that the French are going to accept all the refugees who want to seek asylum in France, plus all the refugees who want to seek asylum in the UK, and that that's gonna be fine, and we don't have to bother about it.

I'm afraid that's, you know, fantasy land. It's absolutely fantasy land. The truth of the matter is the UK has to be part of this equation, always will be. And I mean, quite aside from anything else, we have, you know, colonized, um, a quarter of the world. A lot of people around the world who are in countries, whether it's unstable human rights, um, are, are poorly protected, speak English and have community here in the UK.

And that's not just us who experience that phenomenon, right? Um, most people who seek asylum coming from previous French colonies, well, they seek asylum in France. If you're seeking asylum from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the likelihood is you're gonna seek asylum in Belgium. You know, and, and people who are seeking asylum from Venezuela, they almost all go to Spain in, in Europe.

You go to, you know, if you can't go to the closest neighboring country, you go to the place where you will have some kind of cultural affinity, where you speak the language, where you have, um, community, so you can support you. That's natural, and yeah, I mean, it's just a simple fact of history. The UK's going to be part of that picture.

The podcast is called Bold Politics, and I feel like this is one of the subjects that politicians are often least bold on. There's just kind of... And I don't know if that's because they don't know the facts, they're too worried to get into the conversation, or they're worried about essentially racism in, in the country, and they think that's higher than maybe the sentiment actually is.

Uh, what's your take on it? Oh, I totally agree. I think, um, I think actually this is, uh, the truth is, is that over time, um, even moderate voices on migration have been silenced. They've been told, "You're out of touch, you're tarring anyone who's anti-migration as racist. How dare you speak like that?" And they have been shut down and silenced, and people who are in positions of power, and therefore really have no excuse, have been cowed, have been...

You know, they, they have, they have rolled over like huge cowards, and I'm so angry with all of them. Honestly, it makes me so furious that, you know, Labour politicians would triangulate this hard on migration. Show me the Labour politician that wanted to get into power, and the first thing they wanted to do in their first year in power was remove the right for refugees to ever obtain citizenship in this country.

D- what did you grow up wanting to be? Like, I, I, I really wanna give them a shake, honestly. And, um, it is a total cowardice, an idea that, well, we just have to. And, and the thing is about the we just have to thing is that, one, obviously it's morally repugnant. Two, everyone can see when you're doing it because you think you just have to, and you don't mean it, and so they're gonna vote for the one who means it.

Right. And then three, obviously, as we've seen, like, so many times, study after study, historical case study after case study, and looking at the polling in the UK, if you lean into the far right's messaging on migration, you empower not yourselves, but the far right. Um, and that's the part where I'm like, even if I can have no more trust in them as moral actors, even if I don't believe that they're skilled politicians anymore, don't they have the self-interest to recognize that they are fueling the far right and not themselves, and this is not going to work?

I think, I think they're scared that they can't achieve the change that needs to be achieved. They're scared that to turn this around, you really have to get to the root of it and change our immigration system and how it works very, very radically, and they don't know how to do that, and it, and it sounds really difficult, and there will be pushback.

And so in the lack of being able to do what they know they should do, they've just fallen into this incredibly cowardly, um... Lazy, pathetic, I mean, despicable dehumanization of migrants and refugees. Tell us what you really think. It's called politics. That was so, so well put. Um, there's a former Reform MP whose name I don't wanna say 'cause I don't wanna make him any more famous, but I, I saw that he messaged, uh, the prime minister on social media to say, uh, "This is demonstrating that we've won the argument."

Um, are we losing the argument on migration, and how do we get it back? You know what I think is really heartening? Now, we... Don't get me wrong, we're going through a really, really bad time on this issue specifically, but what's quite incredible given the absolute onslaught and pile-on and, and unanimity of the media voice and the political voice, uh, almost against migration, is how resilient the British public's fundamental decency on this issue actually is.

Uh, there is, there is a small hardcore of people who are horrific racists, and, like, I'd ever wanna engage with them. They, they are not, uh, the majority. The majority of people do not want people to be coming over on boats. That includes me. Hi. Uh, uh, we want this to be managed well. The majority of people realize we need immigration.

They may not realize to what extent we need it, but they realize that we need it, and that it's overall beneficial, but they just wanna see it managed well. The majority of people do not hate people just because they're Muslim or just because they were born somewhere else. They just want to know that it's m- it's being managed well.

Unfortunately, in a circumstance where it's being managed so disgracefully poorly, and the boats being the most visible part of that, essentially it's the entire system that's managed very poorly, um, people then react against it, and people are in opposition to it. But you dig down a little bit, you know, the polls that say, "Oh, people, people overwhelmingly say they want less migration."

Who, who do they mean by migration? They mean the small boats. Actually, if you ask them, do they, do they want fewer students? Do they want fewer doctors? Do they want fewer, uh, farm workers, uh, construction workers, hospitality workers? You know, all of the actual large groups that make up migration. They don't.

Um, so people are much more decent on this, uh, than we give them credit for. Unfortunately, there is a, a very racist messaging that is cutting through at the moment that is being funded by, you know, the, the newspaper owners and the billionaires who are funding the Reform Party, um, and a whole lot of, like, far-right influencers as well who are being funded to, to produce this messaging, and that is very difficult to fight back against, but that's the only option we have that isn't, as I said before, completely despicable.

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

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What Next 

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The Politicrat

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Full Story

This Is Hell!

Consider This 

MS NOW

and Bold Politics 

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 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: 5-12-2026

Full Show Notes

[00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine the redistricting scramble unleashed by the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act. We'll hear how Southern states moved within days to crack majority-Black districts, how Tennessee banned public input to rush through new maps, and why every governor's race, state legislative seat, and secretary of state contest in 2026 is now a redistricting fight.

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

PBS NewsHour

Boom! Lawyered

The Dean Obeidallah Show

Pod Save America

Southside

Ana Cabrera Reports

and Democracy Now!

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

Section A, THE RULING & THE LAW

Section B, HOW WE GOT HERE

Section C, THE STATES SCRAMBLE

Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT

And now, on to the show.

Immediately after that Supreme Court decision last week, which made it much harder [00:01:00] to challenge alleged racially gerrymandered congressional maps, we've seen a number of states make moves in their own territories. Let's take a quick look at the map here. Louisiana quickly suspended its House primaries, but early voting was already underway so lawmakers could approve new maps there.

In Alabama, there's a special legislative session today to redraw maps. Tennessee will have the same tomorrow. Mississippi considering the same move. For context, before the Supreme Court decision, the states shown here in red had already redrawn maps to benefit Republicans. States in blue had done the same for Democrats.

States were already considering changes in yellow there, though Florida was weighing a new map before the Supreme Court ruling. Amy, when you look at this whole picture, what maps are we gonna end up with? Who are they gonna benefit? Well, they're gonna benefit incumbents. We're gonna have fewer and fewer, , com- really, truly competitive seats because the goal here is to make as many safe districts for, for one party or the other.

Today, if you look at those seats that you mentioned in Louisiana, [00:02:00] Alabama, , and maybe Mississippi, but definitely Tennessee, the potential there is for at least three African American Democrats to be drawn out of their districts across those three states. If we think about this more broadly though, and get past the 2026 election- Mm-hmm

into '28 and '30 and beyond, I think the, one of the biggest questions now is in front of Democrats. Because what we're seeing is a war right now on partisanship. Who is going to come out ahead in terms of the number of seats they have in the House? How many Democratic seats? How many Republican seats?

Democrats can get into this, continue to do this tit for tat, but in order to get more seats, they have to take districts that right now are held by Black or Latino lawmakers who are Democrats- Mm-hmm ... and basically open them up, dilute those districts, move those Black and Latino voters into other areas of the state to make those more Democratic.

And [00:03:00] that's going to be a really big question mark for Democrats going forward because if they're defending, if what they're saying is the dilution of the influence of Black and Latino voices is a problem, and we need to ensure that those voices remain here, can you go into some of these states in order to get a partisan advantage by also diluting- Those voters Meanwhile, Tam- Those votes

you have been reporting on a Republican effort in Indiana where the Republican state senators there defied President Trump, did not redistrict there. Trump-aligned groups we know are now pouring in a lot of money to try to oust them. Tomorrow is the primary election. Here is what one of those state lawmakers, Senator James Buck, told you.

I represent Senate District 21. , I don't represent Washington's wishes. , If that's the case, , everybody after me would be looking over their shoulder, , "If I vote with my district, is Washington gonna try to crucify [00:04:00] me?" And, , you can't, you can't let that happen. You gotta, you gotta have a spine.

You gotta stand up for your constituents. You have to do what's right and let the chips fall where they may. Yeah. It's a fascinating dynamic, Tam. What's, how is this gonna play out? Yeah, tho- those chips are falling. We, we don't know how ultimately these races will turn out. We'll know late tomorrow night.

, What we do know is that people like Jim Buck and, , State Senator Spencer Deery and the other Republican state senators who are generally very Republican but just crossed the president on this one thing, they are facing the full weight of President Trump's political machine coming down on them, and it is painful.

It is... They are, they are facing- Millions of dollars in negative campaign ads. They are then raising money and trying to fight back. They're definitely, , being outspent in a significant way. And, , , this is a true test of President Trump's power of political retribution. And [00:05:00] one Trump advisor I spoke to said, , that these incumbents are headed for their, quote, "political slaughter."

When I pressed on, "Why are you spending money on Republican primaries in a red state?" Mm-hmm. , He said, "There is more than enough money to send a message in Indiana and then defend the Republican majorities in the fall." We're gonna continue to follow your reporting on that.

IMANI: So last week, the Supreme Court's conservatives shanked what was left of the Voting Rights Act right in the kidney. And I'm, I'm honestly gonna lose my mind. If I don't lose my mind in this segment, someone should send me s- cookies or something, 'cause this is just m- more than I can bear.

When I say the conservative jamokes on the Supreme Court shanked Section 2, I don't mean that in a vague, "Oh, this is bad for voting rights" kind of way. No. I mean that they took the core legal standard that has governed voter dilution cases for 40 years and just rewrote it. Conservatives looked at [00:06:00] the redrawn map in Louisiana that Black voters fought for, litigated, and won, and said, "Actually, nope.

Remedying racism in voting by accounting for race is itself racist." So let's get into actually what happened in Louisiana. Louisiana was forced to draw a map including a second majority Black district in 2024 pursuant to a court order. 

JESSICA: Mm-hmm. 

IMANI: Then a group of white voters got all in their feelings and sued to kill that map, not under Section 2, but under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

These white voters said that the map, which again drew a second majority Black district in a state where over one-third of the residents are Black, these white- ... voters said that that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. They claim that [00:07:00] Louisiana had used race too prominently in drawing the district, which if you think about it, makes no goddamn sense because how in the fuck are you supposed to draw a majority Black district without finding out where the Black people are at?

Right? We've 

JESSICA: talked about this. Where do we have 

IMANI: maps? You can't do it. You literally can't draw a map to remedy racism in districting without taking race into account. This is yet another example, as Jess mentioned earlier, of the 14th Amendment being rewritten to protect white people. I've talked about this a lot on the pod, on social media, to literally anyone who will listen.

JESSICA: It's true. 

IMANI: The same amendment that was ratified to protect Black people from state-sponsored racial discrimination was wielded by white voters to kill a majority Black district that a court ordered Louisiana to draw in order to [00:08:00] remedy discrimination under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It is infuriating.

JESSICA: Boom! Lawyered family, if it feels like you're on a hamster wheel right now, that's on purpose by the conservative legal movement. The court is saying that the fix for discrimination is actually the problem, right? That you cannot consider race when fixing racism. Because why would you? Why would you? 

IMANI: Yeah.

JESSICA: We don't need to know where the Black folks in Louisiana are. We don't. Just 

IMANI: vibes. 

JESSICA: It's just vibes. 

IMANI: Yeah. 

JESSICA: It's just vibes. And the idea that Clay is a 14th Amendment case doing damage to the Voting Rights Act, but a 14th Amendment case in line with all the other 14th Amendment stuff happening from this court right now is exactly why we talked about this [00:09:00] season as the deconstruction era in- Absolutely

the Roberts Court. 

IMANI: Absolutely. 

JESSICA: Just is. 

IMANI: Okay. So here's what was supposed to happen under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Congress amended Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 specifically so that plaintiffs did not have to prove racist intent on the part of lawmakers drawing those maps. Mm-hmm.

Because lawmakers learned a lesson. States aren't dumb, right? They don't walk into court twirling a mustache saying, "Oh, no, we did a racism on purpose." Right? They draw maps And they pass race neutral rules, and those rules just happen to dilute Black people's votes. They didn't do it on purpose, it's just, it just happened.

Who'd have thunk? Who'd have thunk? So Congress saw this- 

JESSICA: Yeah ... 

IMANI: and they amended Section 2 to be a results test. Why? Because Congress got tired of states [00:10:00] race neutral, yet still racist voting fuckery. 

JESSICA: Yep. 

IMANI: Right? Mm-hmm. They said you're supposed to look at a map and look at reality, and you ask if Black voters have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

And if the answer to that question is no, because their votes are being diluted, right, Black people are being cracked and packed into districts, right, you got a huge district and then you just split them up and you put Black people in this white district and Black people in that white district, and then Black people can never elect someone that represents them, that's a violation of Section 2 

JESSICA: I'm sorry, I was just chuckling at the idea that Congress was like, "Well, so look at reality, and if the Black folks aren't able to vote effectively, guess what?

That's voter dilution." And it is. And the other thing, this fix for Section 2 that happened is so important because it also put the VRA in line with other civil rights statutes that have an impact [00:11:00] analysis, right? So again, you don't have to prove anyone was sitting around and being racist, you just have to show that the system doesn't work the same way for Black voters.

It doesn't have to have an intent, it can have an effect. And that's how civil rights laws have treated systemic baked in discrimination historically, up until the conservative legal movement went on a project to rewrite those tests. 

IMANI: Imagine having a Congress now that's "Hey, let's look at the impact of racism on Black people and fix it."

Imagine having that Congress right now. 

JESSICA: Instead of a Congress that says DEI is racist. 

IMANI: Right. And if you're white, please sue your employer- ... because you've been discriminated 

JESSICA: against. Go to the EEOC website and it's like, "Are you white? Are your feelings hurt? Sue. Sue." Right. "Sue." It's just 

IMANI: absurd. 

And to be clear, it wasn't easy, right? The Gingles framework for Section 2 was not easy. Courts threw [00:12:00] out plenty of lawsuits, but it was possible, right? It was possible to succeed in these lawsuits. The thing that Section 2 promised, an equal opportunity to elect candidates of your choice, the Gingles framework told courts how to do it.

JESSICA: So that Gingles-Jingles framework is how courts have been analyzing Section 2 cases for decades. 

IMANI: For decades, precisely. That framework has been reaffirmed over and over, most recently three goddamn years ago in Allen versus Milligan in 2023. And when I say, I said earlier that that case is almost exactly the same as Louisiana v.

Cali, I'm not kidding. 

JESSICA: No. 

IMANI: Allen v. Milligan was a case about Alabama redistricting. Alabama, I think, is 27% Black. They had one majority Black district, right? And, and Alabama was required to draw a [00:13:00] second majority Black district after some map drawers proved that it could be done. It was the same issue: Black voters challenged a diluted map.

Roberts, Roberts wrote the majority. Kavanaugh concurred and said that the Gingles framework, quote, "effectuates the delicate legislative bargain that Section 2 embodies," right? Mm-hmm. Congress had never disturbed it, and stare decisis, which used to be a thing, right, the principle that you don't throw out your own statutory interpretation without an extraordinary reason, stare decisis counseled strongly against touching the Gingles framework.

That's what Roberts said, and Kavanaugh concurred. Now, would it surprise you that Alito dissented in Allen, proposing almost exactly what he just did in Cali? 

JESSICA: Mm-hmm. 

IMANI: The Court looked at Alito's argument [00:14:00] three years ago and said, "Nah, bitch." Right? Mm-hmm. And now it's three years later, and he's writing the majority opinion.

Nothing changed- No ... between 2023 and 2026, right? The statute didn't change. The Constitution didn't change. The fact that both Alabama and Louisiana are states with nearly a third population of Black people didn't change. The only thing that changed is who's holding the pen writing the majority. 

DEAN: There is a hostility that has long simmered by the white right. The year after the Voting Rights Act, the case did go to the Supreme Court challenging the le- the constitutionality. S- the State of South Carolina had brought a lawsuit right away, like, "How dare you allow Black people to vote?"

And that was, Supreme Court said, "Nope, it's legal," and it was constitutional. Yep. So then the group that took it back was the Shelby 

ELIE: County- 

DEAN: The, the year 

ELIE: before, in 1964, the year before the Voting Rights Act was passed, there were four Black people in Congress, right? Four. Right. , The year af- the, the 1968, so the Congressional election [00:15:00] after, , the Voting Rights Act ha- has been passed and is legal and is upheld, there were nine Black people in Congress.

So, like, you literally doubled the amount of Black representation in Congress- In a cycle after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and today there are 67 Black members of Congress. That's the highest in American history, and there are 56 Latino Americans in Congress. That's the highest in American history.

The other thing that the Voting Rights Act did, and a lot of people don't think of it 'cause they think of it as, as a purely racial act, but it also opened up the aperture for women to vote, especially Black women and Hispanic women, right? So before the Voting Rights Act, the 19th Amendment meant nothing for Black women.

The 19th Amendment was some white feminism that they were on that even the people who were, who... The white suffragettes who were fighting for it weren't really fighting for the rights of Black women to vote. But the Voting Rights Act changed then. , Cha- ch- change, changed the ability for women to represent themselves in Congress as well.

Before the Voting [00:16:00] Rights Act, 13 women in Congress. Today, 154. Wow. This has been the most important and the most successful piece of legislation in American history, and that's why they hate it. 'Cause it works. 'Cause it actually works. It actually gives political power to non-white, non-cis-hetero males, and that's why they hate it, and that's why they've, they've destroyed it.

DEAN: So , Elie, is it, is it overly simplistic to say that the goal of the white right on the Supreme Court and also in the GOP is the idea of taking us back to a time where white male Christian power was unchallenged? 

ELIE: Look at the maps, Dean. Look at the... , you, you, you, you... We were talking offline about The New York Times projection maps in the wake of this, this decision.

Look at the... Look at what the people who are in favor of this, this decision immediately wanna do. The first thing they wanna do is go through every majority-minority [00:17:00] district in the South and take it away. Take it away. So I don't s- I, you don't, some, you don't even have to believe me. You can just look at what they're doing with this new power that the Supreme Court has given them.

The first thing they did on the first day after their decision is put plans in place to take away Black and brown congresspeople throughout the South. 

DEAN: Mm-hmm. And, , going back to Shelby County versus Holder, the 2013 Supreme Court decision which was born from a case brought in Alabama a year and a half into President Obama in the White House.

Like, "This is too much. There's a Black guy in the White House. We have to do something." Shelby County, as soon as it's decided and they end pre-clearance, Texas and other states instantaneously, , apply voter ID laws and other things they could not do before. So it's the same mirror of that. So that, so, and they knew this was gonna happen.

The members- 

ELIE: Trump doesn't win in 2016 without Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. He just doesn't Well, Trump, Trump does not get elected [00:18:00] in 2016 without the Supreme Court helping, allowing white people to suppress the Black vote, thanks to Shelby County v. Holder. It is, it's, it's a linear progression here.

It's a, , you don't even, it, you don't have to connect the dots because you can just look at what they're doing and what they're saying. They're, they're not hiding the ball. They don't want Black people to vote, and every time they have a, they have the opportunity to deny Black people the right to vote, they do.

And then Republicans win. So it all works out for them. Like, they're not, they're not ashamed of it. And I, and I just, I haven't published this yet, but I, I wrote in my newsletter, , for this week, Dean, that the happiness from the Right about this, it, is, is the proof in the pudding. It is the proof of their racism, because even if you wanna say that they had a, a, a, a true legal reason to stand on, which they didn't, but even if you wanna give them [00:19:00] that, you're happy about this?

You're, you, you're, you're happy about the destruction of, again, the most important, the most successful civil rights piece of legislation in American history? You're gleeful about it? You're, you're, you're, you're high-fiving and, and back slapping and, and already putting out maps to take away people's, , , , representation.

Like, it, they're, they're telling on themselves, right? And what they're telling us is whites win again, and that's all they care about. 

DEAN: Another win for Whitey. That's what we're gonna call this segment. Another win for Whitey. I'm chatting with Elie Mystal. So E- Elie, let's go back for a second here. What leads up to the Voting Rights Act, and I went through yesterday the history of what took place with, you, I played Martin Luther King from 1957, give us the ballot, and, and all, but also during the era of Jim Crow, the efforts used to oppress Black people from voting, literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clause, and of course violence, rampant violence that was going on.

So the Voting Rights Act, a [00:20:00] lot of it was at that focus. Do you think there's any chance that with the Voting Rights Act being gutted now, that we see something like that? Now poll tax is barred by the 24th Amendment, that's the only thing. But could there be some new version of a literacy t- literacy test imposed?

Something by Repub- 'cause everything they do is go backwards. They're not original, they just look backwards and go backwards, and they're gonna try to find some new modern-day version of that, I think. 

ELIE: Literacy tests, these other things that you're ta- talking about, what the Supreme Court said as, as a legal proposition is two... There are two important things, and one doesn't even come from this case. One comes from a case a couple of years ago. Kagan laid this all out in her dissent, but one comes from a case a couple of years ago, , called Brnovich, , versus Arizona, or Arizona v Brnovich.

And what they said was that the Voting Rights Act couldn't be used to support basically an individual claim against, of discrimination. So I can't go to the court as an individual person who's been denied or had my vote oppressed or suppressed and say like, "Hey, Voting Rights [00:21:00] Act, that's supposed to help me."

No, no, no. Brnovich says I can't file that lawsuit, right? Now, with this decision on, on, on, on Wednesday, they're saying that the Voting Rights Act cannot be used to show what the l- lawyers call disparate impact, right? So disparate impact means, like, here's a law. It's facially race neutral, but it just so happens coincidentally, who can tell how, to disproportionately affect Black and brown people, or disproportionately affect poor people.

Doesn't say we hate Negroes. It just happens to only affect Negroes, right? Like, that, what the court said on Wednesday was that the Voting Rights Can't Act can't be used, , , in cases of disparate impact, right? So that to prove a violation of what remains of the zombie Voting Rights Act, you have to be able to show intentional discrimination, which basically means that the racists have to say, "We are doing this because we hate Black [00:22:00] people.

Ew. Icky." And if they don't say that, then guess what? You can't prove it, and you can't prove that they were trying to be racist in, in their law, right? So if you say there's a literacy test, and you say that that is facially racist, everybody has to take it. It just so happens- Right ... black people have to take it more, that that's, that apparently is okay now.

So tho- so at a legal level, what they've done is make racism unprovable, right? I can't sue for it, and even if I could sue, I can't prove that it, it exists. I can't prove racism unless Hulk Hogan, like, spray paints the N-word on a trailer. Anything short of that, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm SOL. And, and that is the...

That is going to be the going forward problem, not just in the, in the category of voting, but across all of our politics 

HOST 2: There's so much to say about this ruling, and I'll get to the political impacts in a second. But John Roberts, who has gotten a bit of a, [00:23:00] um, improved reputation over the years about some of the, the rulings in the tariff case, a couple other anti-Trump ones.

But long before Trump, John Roberts' main project as chief justice was the dismantling of the Voting, Voting Rights Act. Through these decisions, Shelby County versus Holder, there's Brnovich, there is now this one. This is destroying one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in American history.

Like, in this, all the headlines are like, they hollowed out, which I, I said here. They limited. That is, that is maybe true in the words that Alito used, but in actual practice, they struck down Section 2 as we understand it. The ability to... Like, what was left here is they allowed partisan gerrymandering as a principle in Shelby County.

Now what they have done is essentially said that The last possible way in which you could stop, prevent gerrymandering, which was designed and inherently always will dilute the power of Black voters, if you were trying to dilute the power of [00:24:00] Democratic v- voters in a state, the way in which you do that is you dilute the population that votes at 80, 90% for Democrats.

And so they say, they're now saying, "That is okay. That is what is happening here." It has dramatic implications. As you say, Louisiana, 30% of its st- of its population is Black. They're gonna only have one representative at best when this is over. In several states, like Arkansas- like Alabama and Mississippi, are gonna, after this is all said and done, at some point in the future, will have no Black represent- representatives, even though they have 30% of their population is Black.

They are going to eliminate the Democratic delegations in most Southern states because of this. They are going to cut down the number of Black members in, uh, places like North Carolina and elsewhere. And, you know, by some estimates, 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus would be gone if the Republicans push forward but to maximum advantage on a, uh, with gerrymandering with these new laws.

So the question is, in this midterm, what is the actual impact? [00:25:00] The Republicans are gonna get one more seat out of Louisiana. I think they're, the, we're gonna talk in a minute about the map in Florida, but this is going, this gives more legal cover to what's a pretty illegal map in Florida. And then in Tennessee, there are a handful of states, because this is coming so late in the cycle, there's limits of what Republicans can do.

Many, the filing deadlines have passed in all 50 states. Many states have held their primaries. Other states have held their, have not held their primaries, but early voting has already started. Um, and so it's very, like it would create mass chaos to do, to redraw the maps at this late stage of the game, but there are some places where they could do it.

Tennessee is one of those places. There is one Democratic district in Tennessee. Steve Cohen in the Memphis area, I believe, hosts it, or represents it. The, uh, Trump spoke to the governor of Tennessee today to get, try to encourage him to redraw the maps before the election. Marsha Blackburn, who is the senator from Tennessee who's running for governor in Tennessee, called for this.

You could see that happening here. They could do something similar [00:26:00] in Missouri, in South Carolina. I'm not sure they'll be able to do that. In Georgia, where early voting has started, it started this week, I believe, the, there are some Republicans calling for a special session to redraw the maps. Would Brian Kemp do that?

I don't know. But you can sort of s- it's gonna help Republicans in this election, but the longer term consequence is a House that's gonna be less democratic, small D, less Democratic, big D. It's gonna be much whiter, which one of my Substack subscribers said would be like adding white food coloring to mayonnaise.

So, which I thought was great. Very funny. Um- And not 

GUEST: aioli. We're not talking aioli. Yes, not, not- We're talking about Hellmann's 

HOST 2: Yes, we were talking about super white Hellmann's mayonnaise. Um, and it's just, it's, like this is terrible for democracy, and it's going to mean going forward a structural ad- advantage for Republicans in the House that is akin to the one they currently hold in the Senate.

Can Democrats take the majority under that scenario? Absolutely, and we might win enough seats this time to do that even under the, under a post-Supreme Court decision [00:27:00] map, but it's gonna b- you're gonna need a bigger wave every time to do it. It is... This is a, this is a very, very bad decision in the long run.

I don't think, it's not gonna cost us the House this election, but it's definitely, but it's gonna hurt in the long run. 

GUEST: Can I ask, I mean, 'cause I'm- Hmm ... a loyal Messagebox subscriber- 

HOST 2: Yep ... 

GUEST: uh, a paid subscriber as all true Americans should be. Yes, all true Americans. And as, a- a- and, and years, you said it, um, I'll quote you, Dan.

Oh, please. "Pretending we're still playing- Legal 

HOST 2: documents and Messagebox in the same episode. 

GUEST: Listen, I came with fucking receipts, dude. You did. What do you think? You think I'm gonna Favreau my way through this? It's- I show up when Dan Pfeiffer asks me to be his guest on Pod Save America. Yes. "Pretending we're still playing the old game is how we lose the House for a generation.

Every governor's race, every state legislative chamber, every secretary of state contest in 2026 is now a redistricting fight. Act accordingly." Mic drop. Okay, those are good marching orders. If you weren't fired up about a secretary of state contest in your, in your state, get fucking excited 'cause it matters.

And 

HOST 2: it's, and [00:28:00] this is gonna mean that Democrats across the country are gonna have to do what Democrats in Virginia and California did, which is they're going to have to redraw their maps to maximum effect. That's gonna mean Illinois, New York, Maryland, where there was resistance this time. In states that have redistr- anti-gerrymandering ballot initiatives or constitutional amendments, we should try to undo those if they were in blue states.

Like this is- Sad ... and look- The 

GUEST: high road, 

HOST 2: gone ... I, I think gerrymandering, gerrymandering is bad. 

GUEST: It is. 

HOST 2: But we have to do this up until the moment where we have enough power to pass a national ban on partisan gerrymandering. Like, and just worth remembering, every single Democrat voted for a bill that would ban national gerrymandering, and every single Republican voted against a national ban on gerrymandering, so.

GUEST: Can I ask something even more explosive then, Dan? Yes, 

HOST 2: of course. 

GUEST: I know you're looking at Republican, uh, state houses, but what about the Republican Supreme Court? Isn't it time to think about this body of... This body is so underco- I, I understand they are [00:29:00] constitutionally outlined to have these powers, but what the court is doing is so undemocratic, and I think Alito and Thomas, or Alito or Thomas could retire at the end of this, uh, court term and allow Trump to appoint two zygotes and solidify- Jesus

a conservative majority, six. Again, s- zygotes are, are human beings. Um, and like should there not be a conversation if Democrats retake power around court reform? 

HOST 2: Yes, 100%. I have, I thought that we should have undertaken that effort when we had power in 2021. Now, we didn't have enough- Uh, Democrats to get rid of the filibuster to do that, and there certainly wasn't support for court expansion.

But I- there, like this is one of those things that I don't think we need to run on, but when- once we do win, we should do it, which is, like there should, we should look at term limits, we should look at court expansion. There should obviously be a code of ethics for these corrupt assholes who are doing things.

Like, like yes, like there, this is a gigantic [00:30:00] problem. And long after Trump has moved on to, uh, work full-time on ballrooms and home reno projects at Mar-a-Lago, the, his legacy for decades afterwards is going to haunt us because of this court. And so every option should be on the table to deal with that.

HOST: So I'm here in Washington State in Seattle. Help me understand why this matters, this is a case in Louisiana, why this matters all the way up here. You wrote that once such horrible maps are in place, reversing them is extraordinarily difficult. Can you tell us why? 

STACEY: Sure. We live in a country of 50 states, and we have determined that we have bound ourselves in outcome, which means that part of the congressional makeup has to reflect the needs of all Americans.

When minority populations are isolated from power, it has an effect upstream, but also across the country. That means extremist legislation becomes easier to pass. It [00:31:00] becomes easier to rig maps everywhere else, and it limits accountability across the country. Often, it, the challenges start in the South, but we are both an incubator, but we are also a carrier.

And what happens is what starts in the South tends to move across the country. Hmm. We have to fight for the whole map because we have to fight for the entire country. This is not a Southern problem alone. The erosion of voting rights affects communities across the country. And when we diminish full participation in our voting, we diminish the pluralism of our democracy.

And so I would urge anyone, irrespective of where you live, to be deeply concerned when your fellow citizens are told their votes do not matter, and when politicians are allowed to draw the lines to cherry-pick their voters. 

HOST: And a, a quick question to follow that on what a map based on the ruling would look like.

Would they be blocks of [00:32:00] geography? 

STACEY: It would actually gut the members of Congress who currently represent communities of color. Hmm. So right now you have 67 members in the Congressional Black Caucus. Mm-hmm. And that has taken 60 years to achieve. Now, let's remember, Congress is f- 435 members in the House.

There are only 67 Black members. 65, I think 64 in the House itself. Under the new ruling, we know that up to 20 of those, 19 of those seats could be eviscerated. The Latino caucus could lose five seats, and then across the country at the state legislative level, the state legislators who draw those congressional maps could see 191 members lose their seats.

That means that if you care about affordable housing, if you care about healthcare, if you have any concerns about social justice in this country, if we lose those members of Congress, we also lose those [00:33:00] values being represented in Congress. Hmm. That's the problem for every American, that we're not just losing seats, we are losing political power for there being a debate in Congress about what's possible.

HOST: Hmm. To pivot a little bit, after establishing a national profile following your runs for Georgia governor in 2018 and 2022, you seem to have stepped back from the spotlight. Why? 

STACEY: Well, I would say this. When you're running for governor, especially when You have a candidacy like mine, which was unusual since I was the first Black woman in American history to stand for that o- to make it- Mm-hmm

that far in standing for that office. , The spotlight goes where it wants, but the work remains. And while the spotlight may have shifted, I have not stopped doing the work. I founded Fair Fight to fight for voting rights. I fou- founded Fair Count to fight for a census that fairly reflects America. I founded, , the American Pride Rises Network to defend diversity, equity, and inclusion.

[00:34:00] I recently launched the 10 Steps campaign to fight back against the authoritarian regime that is trying to strip us of our democracy. And to bring it back to the Callais decision, that is a pillar of doing so because when you can reshape Congress without having to actually compete in the valley of ideas, what you accomplish is a step towards what Viktor Orbán did in Hungary- Hmm

and what Russia does every day with its Duma. Hmm. When you can create any opportunity to limit the voice of the people, you are eroding democracy. And so while the attention may have shifted, the work has never stopped. 

Steve Cohen, the state's lone Democratic member of Congress, whose Memphis seat is on the line in this Republican redistricting push. Congressman, thank you for being with us. As your state lawmakers plow forward on redrawing Tennessee's congressional map, what's at stake if this Black majority district is broken up?

Well, it destroys what was some of the highlights of the '60s, one of the greatest [00:35:00] legislative accomplishments of Lyndon Johnson and Congress in the 20th century of passing the Voting Rights Act, with Martin Luther King and John Lewis there to fight for it, among others, , the people who died for that right to vote, John Lewis' march across the E- Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the march to Montgomery, and it's all wiped out.

This was to make up for years of slavery and Jim Crow, and give African Americans voting districts where they had the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice. And they've done that in a wonderful way. Black people are very engaged in politics. It's an important part of their, of their livelihoods, and their success, and, and their advancements in America.

This is a great turnaround, and a turn back to Jim Crow-era politics of the '50s. And the southern legislatures, like the one in Tennessee that wrought the lines in T- in the South and all over the country, won't be able to raise e- racial arguments, even when they are obvious. Mm-hmm. It is obvious as the shoe on your foot that this is a racially d- d- d- ba- based [00:36:00] gerrymandering to eliminate the Black vote, which is a core Democratic vote.

But that's why they're being eliminated. This district was not a voting rights district, it was a district of compactness, of community of interest, of Memphians who live together. It's a large Black population, and they've had that district. I've represented it 20 years, and I feel like I'm going to my own funeral.

I, I, I, I hear what you're saying. Can you explain why you feel that Black voices and Black votes won't be heard or won't be counted in the same way? And what options, if any, do you and your Democratic colleagues have to fight back? African Americans have been a majority of this district, 61% in the general, , District 9, and in a primary, 80%.

80% in a Democratic primary where the candidate's basically chosen. And, and I've won that district nine times and reelect with 80% d- Black vote, and never lost a precinct. African American voters don't vote on race, they vote on the candidate who they want [00:37:00] to deliver services, to deliver to Memphis, and deliver constituent services.

And they've done it. With this district the way it is, divided Memphis in three different maps that stretch out up close to y- , to the Kentucky line and over towards Nashville, on the Mississippi line and, and towards Chattanooga, and then in the center going out, drawn for one particular man, a man named Brett Taylor, who's a House member.

He drew that map for himself. Those districts will make the Black voting population of Memphis a tail of a comet. They will not get any regards from the people who, who running in the Republican primaries who will be the winner, 'cause these are majority, big-time majority Republican districts, and the Black vote will not be sought, and it will not be listened to.

And there will not be offices in Memphis to deal with constituent services, Social Security, Medicaid, VA issues, whatever, and there won't be community projects that Memphis needs. Memphis is a big city, the second-biggest city in Tennessee, an iconic city in America. I have delivered. My predecessors, Harold Ford Jr.

and Sr., delivered. Nobody will deliver because it's [00:38:00] not gonna be an important part of that voting bloc. They will not get community projects. They will not get the needs they want. And one thing that shows how foolish this is, you have a baseball team, nine players. We have nine congressmen. You have nine players who play nine different positions and can help you different ways.

When we needed a bridge built across the Mississippi River, one of the biggest projects this state's ever saw, they came to me, the lone Democrat, to lobby Pete Buttigieg under, un- under Biden. I was able to get Buttigieg and the Biden administration to give $450 million, million dollars to this project.

There will be a new bridge built over the Mississippi River because the Republican governor and the Republican team came to the Democrat, the only Democrat they had who could deliver. They asked me to deliver, and I delivered. There's gonna be a Democratic president in 2028. There will be nobody to deliver.

They're doing all this for Donald Trump for one reason, to stop oversight of him in the Congress next term. We can oversee his [00:39:00] kleptomania, his cryp- cryptocracy and the money he's made, his emoluments violations, his pardon violations. They don't want that. For one man, the most heinous criminal man ever to hold the White House, ever, they're turning Tennessee around, they're turning Black votes around, they're turning Memphis around.

Killing a city- Congressman- ... a great American city. Congressman, Congressman Steve Cohen, I appreciate your passion. Thank you so much.

AMY: So put that, back talk, , against- The Voting Rights Act and what has happened with it. Mm-hmm. And, , for people who don't understand what exactly has happened, and if you can also talk about the Supreme Court finding that Louisiana's current congressional map is unconstitutional, - Mm-hmm

which followed Governor Landry suspending the state's primaries for the US House of Representatives. 

KIMBERLE: Absolutely. Well, , the Voting Rights Act was the [00:40:00] crown jewel of the civil rights movement, in part because it said, look, it doesn't matter the specific thing that you're doing to undermine the voting strength, , of traditionally excluded, , populations.

The Voting Rights Act protects against intentional or effective, , disenfranchisement of, , protected groups. Well, what this Supreme Court has now said is that if you take race into account in trying to address racism in the, , voting rights system, that you are the one that is guilty of creating, , a racialized system.

So what they're effectively saying is that if you draw a district in order to protect an incumbent, , that's okay. If you draw a district in order to maximize minority voting strength, that's not okay. Now let's be clear about one thing. , Incumbency is often the product of racial power. , Incumbency, particularly in Louisiana, i- is, is, is, , [00:41:00] made and reinforced by packing, cracking, stacking, , African American voters.

What they're basically saying is you, you, you have to take the baseline as is, , even though that's a product of race discrimination. If you try to r- if you try to remedy the racial discrimination that's built into incumbency, that's when you're being racist. That's the problem. So it's turning reality completely on its head and destroying the Voting Rights Act.

while they're doing so. 

AMY: Talk about what exactly intersectionality is, , and critical race theory.

Mm-hmm. And what it means today under President Trump. The- Yeah ... vicious attack, and how that was really the underpinning of DEI. 

KIMBERLE: Yeah. Well, intersectionality just refers to the idea, , that disadvantage, discrimination, marginalization, , often is based on more than one axis of inequality. Those often, , [00:42:00] overlap.

They reinforce each other. So I began to write in this arena when I was trying to understand how Black women who sometimes sued employers because they were subject to gender discrimination and race discrimination, , many times Black jobs were for men, and women's jobs were for white women, which meant that there was precious little space for African American women.

But courts couldn't really understand that. They were saying, , , "How can you claim race discrimination because we hire Black people? They just happen to be men. How can you claim gender discrimination? We hire women. They just happen to be white." And I couldn't understand what the courts couldn't understand.

So I, I was looking for a metaphor, a way that would allow judges to understand that discrimination isn't just a- along one axis or another, but just like intersections, they might crisscross each other. So intersectionality was a really a remedial [00:43:00] framework for judges that are supposed to be very smart, but they weren't that smart at all when it came to understanding what Black women were experiencing 

AMY: Hmm.

Can you talk about Clarence Thomas and the tensions around his confirmation as justice of the Supreme Court? Yeah. You write a lot about this. 

KIMBERLE: Yeah. So when, , , when Clarence Thomas was, , , nominated for- Mm-hmm ... , to take over the, the, the seat that, , Thurgood Marshall had occupied, the great civil rights giant, my initial thought was, "This isn't gonna work.

Everybody knows there's a difference between Clarence Thomas and Thurgood Marshall." , And to my surprise and disillusionment, a lot of people didn't understand the difference between the two. , Eventually, there became a, a moment when it was known that there was someone, a for- former employee who, , had told someone that she'd been sexually harassed by him.

That person turned out to be Anita Hill. Turned out I [00:44:00] knew Anita. There weren't a whole, a whole lot of Black women law professors, , so I contacted her. I offered support. Before I knew it, I was on my way to Washington, D.C. to support her. , But the shocking thing that happened was when Clarence Thomas denounced the entire, , inquiry as a high-tech lynching, and what that did was it provided a metaphor for him to speak to the history of anti-Blackness, to place himself in the middle of that narrative, and to draw a support of large numbers of African Americans to his side, and she had nothing equivalent that she could say.

I 

AMY: wanted to turn to then senator, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden- Joe Biden, 

KIMBERLE: yes ... 

AMY: questioning Anita Hill back in 1991. 

CLIP: Can you tell the committee what was the most embarrassing of all the incidences that you have alleged? I think [00:45:00] the one that was the most embarrassing was his discussion of, of pornography involving these women with large breasts and, and ha- engaged in variety of sex with different people or, or animals.

That was the thing that embarrassed me the most and made me feel the most humiliated. 

AMY: Law professor Anita Hill testifying at the confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas. , Professor Crenshaw, the lessons you draw from what happened there and what it means for today. 

KIMBERLE: , Amy, I wanna take you to the moment that Clarence Thomas was finally confirmed.

My, , co-founder of AAPF, Luke Harris, and I were sitting on the stairs of the Supreme Court. , At that moment I said, "This is gonna change the rest of our lives." Luke said, "All because they refuse to believe [00:46:00] a Black woman." , I call this a massive intersectional failure. , A coalition of, , civil rights groups, feminist groups, they successfully blocked Bork.

Clarence Thomas was basically an acolyte of Bork. There wasn't really much daylight between them. What was different was Clarence Thomas was able to wrap himself in a sympathetic, , framework as someone who was being unfairly treated by the testimony, and Anita Hill, partly because the history of Black women, the experiences that they've had with sexual harassment off, , really since we arrived here, and the fact that Black women were some of the first plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases, that just wasn't part of the common knowledge.

So she was framed as someone who was complaining about something that Black women, , don't complain about. There was a op-ed in The New York Times that said that what Clarence Thomas had done to Anita was just basically down-home courting. [00:47:00] So there was a cultural defense that was being made, , to block the significance of her testimony.

So what we often say now is when we look at some of the consequences of that failure, some of the, , long-term, , , results of that, we've lost, , campaign finance reform on a 5-4 vote. We lost, , , Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, 5-4 votes. We look at all the 5-4 votes that were made possible by that failure to believe Anita Hill, and we have to recognize that this intersectional failure not only impacts Black women, not only impacts communities of color, it undermined the security and the democracy of the entire nation 

HOST: Democrats are often criticized for at least a perceived lack of values, for being milquetoast, poll-tested, boilerplate candidates, , reciting the party line, and that's part of why they're not winning.

What do you make of that [00:48:00] critique? 

STACEY: I, I would also remind folks that over the last 20 years, we have basically held power almost as often as the other side has. Hmm. The issue is what do we do with that power when we have it, and that's why I am so bullish about voting rights. They borrow our power.

Elected officials borrow power, but the people have to remember that it is borrowed, and we can take it back. Democrats have values. We believe in shared success. We believe that everyone has the right to do their best, but that we should remove barriers. The right has a similar set of conditionalities, but they have a different composition.

We are the most diverse party, which means we've gotta try to meet the needs of a broader coalition. But we can meet those needs by understanding and recognizing that identity matters and outcome matters. And if we are working on both of those things, fighting for a voting rights act that actually guarantees that your [00:49:00] identity does not diminish your access to democracy, but also delivering on affordability, delivering on the needs of the people to make progress possible in their lives, that's how Democrats win.

HOST: Stacey Abrams, what would you say to someone who thinks, "I haven't been able to vote, to individually vote the US out of an extremely unpopular war with Iran. My vote has not guaranteed my prices are going down. The structure of the Senate means that voters in more populous states have more diluted power."

My producer and I are hearing our, our friends and colleagues say, "It's just hard to even watch the news. , You wanna turn it off." What do you tell them when you ask them to lock in? 

STACEY: Because that's the point of what they're doing. The reason we have seen this aggressive destruction of our democracy is to create the sense that we can't do a thing about it, and I point to Hungary very intentionally.

For [00:50:00] 16 years, Viktor Orbán ruled a country that had emerged from communist rule in 1989, had finally come close to a functioning democracy, and then you had Viktor Orbán, who, , Donald Trump and JD Vance have lauded. This is a man who attacked the media and basically took control of public media. He attacked the legislature and basically sh- reshifted it and reshaped it so that only his party could be heard.

He attacked the judiciary and made them a puppet. He did all of the things we are watching happen in America. But what happened two weeks ago in Hungary was that 78% of the population said, "No more." They said after 16 years of watching their prices go up and their values be crushed, watching corruption run amok, they were refusing to do it any longer, and it worked.

They not only over, they not only removed him as the president, they flipped both chambers. They changed the [00:51:00] composition of their legislature, and now they are on the path to restoring full and participatory democracy, which is how we get the things we need. I am the daughter of the South. My parents were born During Jim Crow, my parents weren't a- able to vote.

, My grandparents were in their 40s before they were full legal citizens of this country- Hmm ... even though they were born here. And so I know how slow and plodding and hard it can feel, but I also know how we can win because we've done it before. Every time we win, they come back and they try to take more power.

We have to meet them on the battlefield of voting, on the battlefield of democracy, and believe more in our democracy than we believe in their right to deny it. 

We've just heard clips starting with

The PBS NewsHour examining the redistricting free-for-all and last week's Supreme Court decision, warning that fewer competitive seats and the potential erasure of Black Democratic districts could define [00:52:00] elections through 2030 and beyond.

Boom! Lawyered traced how the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, abandoning the results test they had unanimously reaffirmed just three years earlier.

The Dean Obeidallah Show connected Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 to Trump's 2016 win and the latest Supreme Court ruling, arguing the destruction of the Voting Rights Act follows a clear, linear progression.

Pod Save America broke down how the Supreme Court's latest Voting Rights ruling effectively legalizes racial gerrymandering, threatening Black representation in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and building a structural House advantage for Republicans.

Southside in two parts spotlighted Stacey Abrams pointing to Hungary's recent ouster of Viktor Orban as a direct answer to Americans tempted to give up on voting as a meaningful tool for change.

Ana Cabrera Reports hosted Congressman Steve Cohen, who called Tennessee's redistricting push a return to Jim Crow and a naked [00:53:00] racial gerrymander designed to eliminate Democratic oversight of Donald Trump

And Democracy Now! presented Kimberlé Crenshaw arguing that refusing to believe Anita Hill in 1991 enabled decades of 5-4 rulings that dismantled the Voting Rights Act and undermined American democracy.

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

But first, speaking of injustices of historical proportions, I’m just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! We’ve suffered a dramatic cut in ad revenue largely driven by widespread economic instability and we’re being forced us to put SOLVED! on indefinite hiatus. We were already stretching ourselves quite thin trying to build something new and so when Trump threw the world into chaos and marketing dollars dried up in response, we were extremely vulnerable to those shockwaves. Right now, I am getting back to basics and focusing on building Best of the Left to be the best it can be with the greatest reach it can. So, that’s where my [00:54:00] focus is going to be and I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops. 

Regarding members supporting the show, you really are more and more of what’s getting us through right now so thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations. 

If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s important to remind you that each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor to produce.

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or you can simply email me to [email protected]

As for today's topic,

The thing about being a progressive is that we’re very often [00:55:00] right too soon. On almost any issue you can name, civil rights, women's suffrage, marriage equality, healthcare as a basic human right, the position that eventually becomes the obvious consensus is the position progressives held a generation or two earlier, back when the moderates were calling us radicals for holding it. Which means a lot of the actual work of political progress in this country is the work of dragging people who would eventually agree with us along behind us. That takes years, sometimes decades, and the path to progress is always paved in injustice, sometimes in blood.

Given the makeup of our politics, the Democratic Party is the institution where this dynamic between progressives and moderates plays out, over and over again. So the question of how progress actually happens in this country keeps coming back to the question of how the Democratic Party gets moved.

Right now we're in the middle of a particularly [00:56:00] painful round of this. The Voting Rights Act is being dismantled in real time. The Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais, handed down on April 29th, basically eviscerated Section 2 of the Act, the part that lets voters challenge racially discriminatory maps. Justice Kagan, writing in dissent, said the ruling renders Section 2 "all but a dead letter." And the states moved within days, with primaries getting suspended, emergency redistricting sessions called, and Black-majority districts being eliminated across multiple Southern states, all of which this show is covering in detail.

We had a chance to defend voting rights against exactly this, four years ago. In January 2022, the Senate held a vote on a package called the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which would have restored the pre-clearance protections the Court gutted in the Shelby County case back in 2013 and set baseline national standards for elections that would have made Callais much [00:57:00] less catastrophic. Every Democrat in the Senate supported the substance of that bill, including Joe Manchin, who co-sponsored it himself. What they were fighting over wasn't whether to pass it, it was whether to change a Senate procedural rule, the filibuster, to actually let it get to a vote.

Two Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, refused. They both said they supported voting rights, they just couldn't support changing a Senate rule to pass them. The vote on the rule change was 48 to 52. Manchin and Sinema voted with all 50 Republicans, the carve-out died, the bills died, and five months later the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Four years after that, the Court handed down Callais.

But the real argument here isn't whether Manchin and Sinema made the wrong call on one specific procedural vote, it's that the filibuster itself is fundamentally undemocratic and shouldn't exist, particularly not in its [00:58:00] current form. The Senate is already the least democratic institution in the federal government by design. Every state gets two senators regardless of population, which means Wyoming, with about 600,000 people, has the same voting power as California, with 39 million. The Senate already heavily over-represents small, rural, disproportionately white states. The filibuster takes that structural tilt and makes it dramatically worse. Right now, 41 senators can block any major piece of legislation, and those 41 senators can represent as little as 11 or 12 percent of the country. So we have a body where a minority can already win most of the time, and on top of that we've layered a rule that lets an even smaller minority block whatever they want. That gives a small minority a veto over democracy itself, held by the same people whose interests are already the [00:59:00] most over-represented in the system to begin with.

The argument for the filibuster is that it helps force compromise and bipartisanship. It could still do that if it ran under the old rules that force senators to actually get up and speak to hold a filibuster. But when it acts as an effortless method to block nearly any legislation, it tips over from encouraging compromise to breaking democracy itself.

And this is a big part of what's driving polarization. When people can't actually get the legislation passed that they believe in, even when their side wins elections, they don't conclude the system is working. They conclude the system is broken or rigged, that the other side is illegitimate, that voting doesn't matter. Polarization isn't just a cultural disease, it's the predictable consequence of a political system that's been engineered to make sure majorities can't govern. The filibuster is one of the central pieces of that engineering.

[01:00:00] And in 2022, the undemocratic filibuster at the heart of our undemocratic system was used to thwart the best attempt in years to protect voting rights and return some modicum of power to the people and it has to stop.

So when Manchin gave his floor speech in 2022 about how curtailing the filibuster would "pour fuel on the fire of political whiplash" and tear the country apart, he had it backwards. The fuel on the fire is the filibuster itself, and every time it gets used to block popular, broadly supported legislation, that fire burns hotter.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the 2022 failure was a procedural failure, not an ideological one, and procedural failures are easier to fix. The Democratic Party isn't secretly opposed to voting rights, progressives already won that battle, the problem is an unwillingness, in a specific moment, to break one Senate rule to [01:01:00] pass them. 

And now the political conditions have changed too. The 2022 fight happened when redistricting was abstract for most voters, the consequences of Shelby County hadn't fully metastasized, and Callais was still hypothetical. That's not the situation anymore, since the redistricting battles happening right now have moved voting rights out of the wonk category and into the category of things people can see on the news actively affecting their representation.

And the state-level battles aren't just news to process, it's also an organizing pathway. State legislators in every affected state are fighting back and they could use help. Some states are running ballot measures to take redistricting out of the legislature's hands entirely and hand it to independent commissions. State supreme court races have suddenly become major battlegrounds, since that's now where voting rights cases get fought after Callais. Finding the local group working on any of this where you live and giving them time or money, or just showing up to a public hearing, makes a real [01:02:00] difference at a level where Democrats actually do have power right now.

The federal piece can't get dropped though, because the filibuster isn't going away on its own. Don’t bother asking Democratic candidates whether they support voting rights, because every single one of them already does. The question that matters now is whether they'll commit, on the record, to circumventing the filibuster on day one of the next Democratic trifecta in order to institute protections for those voting rights. Make that the litmus test every time you talk to anyone running for federal office, and get the commitment in a form you can hold them to later. 

Being right too soon means the work is making everyone else catch up, and there's no rule that says we have to be polite about waiting. The substantive answer on voting rights is already on the record, every Democrat supports voting rights. What's left between us and enforcing that with law is a Senate procedural rule that shouldn't exist in the first place. So make them answer for it.

Note that we've [01:03:00] begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

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

Section A, THE RULING & THE LAW

Followed by Section B, HOW WE GOT HERE

Section C, THE STATES SCRAMBLE

And Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT

HOST: So in this opinion, joined by the other conservatives, Samuel Alito basically holds this. And, and what, what gets me isn't just the effect, it's the gaslighting. He essentially says, "Okay, no, we're not gonna strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act," which is something that they could have done.

They were considering the constitutionality of this section, which, as Joyce said, uses the word opportunity. The, the, consc- conscription, the, the, the... What the Voting Rights Act protects is f- that voters of color have an opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice. Doesn't mean they [01:04:00] get it, doesn't mean there isn't all kinds of other shenanigans that keeps them from get...

Just enough critical mass in a district to even have their votes be as powerful as that of white vo- white, white voters, right? Leveling the playing field. Mm-hmm. So that's what we're trying to get to, and that's what Louisiana did with these two districts, right? Two out of six is a third, so that makes sense that they would do it that way.

So what Alito said is "Okay, well, that, that's not unconstitutional, and it's not even unconstitutional to have the remedy that if you find a violation of the Voting Rights Act, that a state has to redraw its maps. That's all okay. But if in that remedy you consider race, you violated the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, which prohibits," wait for it, "discrimination on the basis of race."

And then he threw in another zinger. In the past, we have talked about, [01:05:00] gerrymandering for political purposes, right? Partisan gerrymandering. And we've talked about how the Supreme Court not only did not rule that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, they ruled that courts can't even consider partisan gerrymandering m- mandering challenges, right?

Partisan gerrymandering, A-okay. So Alito added in this that not only is it important to guard against the racial discrimination that takes place in rectifying racial discrimination, but especially it's terrible to do when you have, incumbents in Louisiana who may risk losing their seats based on this redistricting.

Excuse me, I did not know that there was a constitutional protection- ... of incumbent Republicans in Louisiana, but apparently Alito does. And how that consideration, protecting the incumbent Republicans of Louisiana, is more important than [01:06:00] the V- Voting Rights Act's 60 years of work in keeping voting suppression from hap- He...

They actually wrote that in the opinion, and five, count 'em, five justices signed on. And to boot, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch were just like, "Yeah, we would've gone further," and just, said that you can never, allow for redistricting as a remedy for, for racial gerrymandering. Th- this is your Supreme Court, ladies and gentlemen.

HOST 3: I have deja vu all over again because w- where you started, Kim, it's so reminiscent of Shelby County versus Holder, where the court didn't say Section 5 was unconstitutional, they just gutted it by saying- Right ... the criteria that were being used to protect voters under Section 5 were unconstitutional.

We have that same monkey business going on- Yeah ... here with Section 2, right? 

HOST: And Brnovich, too. Brnovich, they did that, too. 

HOST 3: Like- With the- How- Yeah ... they just keep pulling the wool over most of Americans' eyes and thinking that they'll get away with it. [01:07:00] They will not get away with that stuff here at hashtag Sisters-in-Law.

We will- Nope ... call it out. Jill, how, how do you react to the majority's opinion? What are your views? 

HOST 4: Well, I would not say I was shocked because, as we all have said, we predicted that this would be, despite whatever hopes we might have had, that this was gonna be the outcome. But I am revolted. I am totally, I, I don't know what other word to use.

It's something, I, I'm the oldest of us, and I was definitely an activist during the Civil Rights Movement, and I never would have predicted that the Civil Rights Movement would be undone by the Supreme Court of the United States, and that's what's happened. Even though they said, "Well, we're not undoing it, we're just updating the requirements."

- 

HOST 4: Update No, they're not. That's- Need to 

HOST: update- Just 

HOST 4: in- It's time for an update. President- It is time- Voting Rights Act version 13.2 Turns and turns and keeps on going and update, right? Right. And it always makes me wonder- Turning to Jim Crow and 

HOST 3: update. I [01:08:00] just 

HOST 4: don't get it. The decision makes me wonder really how many ways MAGA has around the Constitution, especially when the court and Congress are doing nothing to stop it from happening.

But the Court, the Court is supposed to be the court of last resort, the court that will stop unconstitutional acts, and, it's, it's-- I wanna just say the Voting Rights Act was not only passed in '65, it's been re-upped multiple times, and it was amended to specifically make sure that you didn't need to prove intent.

All you needed to prove was that it affected your opportunity to vote. That's right. And now they've gone, "Eh, no, not so much." So they're completely obliterating the act and everything that Congress... if congressional intent ever meant anything, it would have ruled here that no, it cannot be undone in the way they have.

So I'm, I'm really, I'm just, I'm revolted and [01:09:00] upset and concerned about our democracy. 

HOST 3: I think that's all fair. Barb, what's your reaction to the majority opinion? 

HOST 2: Yeah, very much in line with what we've heard so far, but I think one of the things I, I wanna add is this distinction between intent and effect.

Right. I think it is so important here- Mm-hmm ... and in all other contexts about how we think about race in the law and in society. Keep in mind that in 1982, in response to a Supreme Court opinion, Congress specifically renewed the Voting Rights Act and clarified that it was enough to show discriminatory effect without showing discriminatory intent.

Because after all, who, what are, who are we thinking about here? The people whose rights are violated or the, the hurt feelings of those who violated them? And I really- Right ... think so much of the discussions around race come around to this. People say, "How can [01:10:00] this be racism when I didn't intend racism?

How can this be discrimination when I didn't intend discrimination?" It isn't about you It's about the people whose rights are being restricted. And that's the whole concept of systemic racism or systemic discrimination. It is that in Louisiana, where a third of the state are African American, of its six districts, only one is majority minority.

Right? I don't care if it was intentional, and frankly, it's hard to avoid concluding that it is, that it's not intentional when you end up- Right ... with five majority white dis- But be that as it may, it can be very difficult to prove intent to discriminate. Why do we need it? Congress said we don't. And if we're trying to improve and truly have a colorblind society, as Chief Justice Roberts likes to say, then why do we need to talk about whether there was this intent?

I hear this in conversations with white friends and white colleagues from time to time [01:11:00] about this argument that why should there be, a, a remedy if there's no intent to discriminate? That, that's what it is. It's because we want to equalize the playing field. And there's also, I think, this idea that the worst thing you can call me is racist.

Yep. I can think of some worse things that people are called by racists. Ah. Get over yourself, right? It isn't about you. It isn't about whether you intend it or not. It's all good. Whatever happened, we're all doing our best here, maybe. But regardless of what you intended, what matters is the outcome.

I also sometimes hear people say this: "Look, it's 2026. My ancestors came from, Yugoslavia, Poland," wherever it is. "I did not in any way, participate in racism or Jim Crow or any discrimination against Black people. Why is it being held against me?" It's not being held against you. You are benefiting from a system that favors white people.

We are trying to have a [01:12:00] system where all are equal, and that's this, this distinction between intent and effect that I think it g- gets missed so often by even people of good faith. And I most certainly don't think that Justice Alito is a person of good faith. Right. But that's what matters t- i-in my view, and I think that because it's so difficult to ever prove intent, that as a result of this case, it will essentially eviscerate Section Two of the Voting Rights Act.

LEEJA: But of course, white people weren't ready to go quietly into the night and accept that maybe they would have to cede some of their power. So the backlash against the amendments and against the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was swift.

And today, the common conservative argument against the Voting Rights Act and protections against racial gerrymandering is that being race neutral and color blind is the only correct non-discriminatory stance to take. In effect, by taking race into consideration at all, you are discriminating against me, the white person, and that is against the Constitution.

However, [01:13:00] unfortunately, we do not live in a race blind utopia where everyone has gained parity and the only difference in outcomes depends on how hard you work. If you can believe it, a few decades of laws protecting voting rights did not undo a few centuries of literal human bondage, and then 100 years of overtly racist anti-Black laws.

Black people continue to live with the consequences of overt racism in housing, leading to less accumulated generational wealth, concentration into the cities, and low affordable housing stock forcing them to live in less than ideal conditions and then be blamed themselves for the horrible conditions their landlords are responsible for.

Black people continue to live with the proven biases against them in hiring practices, violence against them enacted by police, not to mention the day-to-day racism they have to endure from infancy through to adulthood, whether it's the unconscionably high rates of infant and maternal mortality in Black populations compared to the rest of the population, or just the racist epithets thrown at people as they're trying to navigate the world.

Not to mention intergenerational transmission of trauma, but Lord knows that's too many syllables for your average racist to [01:14:00] understand. The point is, we have not arrived at a place where we can say race is no longer a factor and everyone is equal, therefore any consideration of race at all is racist against the other races.

You don't get to rig the game for 200 years and then claim, "Well, now we've stopped discriminating, so everything is fine. Now if we keep talking about how we rigged the game for 200 years, that's actually discrimination against me." But that's exactly how the MAGA movement thinks. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg quipped in an older case trying to gut parts of the Voting Rights Act, you wouldn't use an umbrella in a rainstorm to stay dry and then get rid of that umbrella because you're dry.

The Voting Rights Act was the thing allowing for some semblance of a pluralistic democracy in this country. You don't throw out the thing that's working. It hasn't solved the problem. It is the solve to the problem.

Next, Section B, HOW WE GOT HERE

JAMELLE: In thinking about all of this, I've also just been thinking about this Supreme Court, the Roberts Court, its larger jurisprudential agenda. And I don't wanna give too much credit. I think you can make a very good case that what [01:15:00] we're seeing is mostly just the actions of a bunch of Republican partisans, and they wanna make sure that the Republican Party does all right in elections.

They do have their particular idiosyncratic interest, and John Roberts and Sam Alito in particular seem, have always seemed almost aggrieved by the existence of the Voting Rights Act. John Roberts, the young lawyer in the Reagan administration, was very much opposed to the congressional bill that strengthened Section Two, and this recent ruling is basically Roberts and Alito, Alito similarly opposed to that, rewriting Section Two to be what they think it ought to have been to begin with, which is to say a nullity.

They've always had this grudge against the Voting Rights Act, always seen it as terribly intrusive, as unfair. Alito in particular is very much on this kick that it's unfair to accuse people of racism, that practically is as bad as racism itself. Not for nothing, Alito joined a group that opposed the admission of women and minorities to Princeton, so he might be a [01:16:00] little sensitive about this.

And so that's their idiosyncratic, right, own views. There is clearly an agenda with regards to aggrandizing presidential power, as I've said before. You have someone like Clarence Thomas, who is very much this, misanthropic figure with his own strange ideas. So that's not to... it's both the case that there are maybe more interesting things going on with some of the justices, and also true that in a lot of ways they're functionally Republican partisans.

But if you're so inclined, there is a story you can tell about what this court is doing. Before the Civil War, as I'm sure states in this country were really the locus of power. The federal government was not weak, and this is a common misconception, this idea that the federal government was exceptionally weak, didn't really do much.

That's not really true. But it is true that it was not nearly as large in its scope as it is today, and it is true that there wasn't the immediate federal supremacy or deference [01:17:00] that we experience today. Rather, the federal government and the states had overlapping spheres of influence, and a lot of the jurisprudence of the era is an attempt to kinda delineate where the federal government's sphere of influence dominates, where the state governments do, where the local governments do.

It's interesting stuff, but that's a general picture of federalism in this period. And the states really are extraordinarily powerful. And in particular, they have wide-ranging what's called police powers. The idea is that a state's police powers are its power to, to use the word, to police its internal affairs.

And police... And that's police in almost all senses of the word. That's police in terms of public safety and law enforcement. That's police in terms of who was allowed into the state to begin with. So plenty of states in the antebellum era had prohibitions on the migration of Black Americans into their states.

There's a great book by an historian, Kate Masur, about this, here it is, [01:18:00] that if you wanna read more about this dynamic, I really recommend it. States could forbid who comes in. They could explicitly forbid pauperism, right? Just being poor. States had control over citizenship, right? You were a citizen of your state first and foremost before you were a citizen of the nation, or rather, state citizenship was the dominant and most important form of the citizenship, and national citizenship was ill-defined.

And there are a number of great books about the quest to define national citizenship, which was really a product of Black Americans and abolitionists who insisted that there was a equal national citizenship and that it included people such as Black Americans and the enslaved. I'm gonna recommend a somewhat older book, just in the last 10 years, from my friend Martha Jones on the subject, as well as a very recent book by my friend Anna Law on the subject.

Highly recommend you check them both out. And most critically to our discussion right now, police powers involve the power to structure electorates, determine who had the right to vote and the [01:19:00] circumstances under which they did vote. What the Civil War did, and in particular what the Reconstruction Amendments did, by establishing clear prohibitions on certain kinds of voting restrictions, for example, the 15th Amendment says you cannot abridge the right to vote on the basis of race, and the 14th Amendment establishes the equal protection of the laws and due process of the laws for people in all states, as well as the privileges and immunities of citizenship.

What those things do is to create a minimum federal baseline, right? There is a- There is a floor beyond which you cannot go below when it comes to structuring the internal affairs of a state. In subsequent jurisprudence, especially in the twentieth century, the rights expansion of the '40s, '50s, '60s, and '70s further establishes baselines below which states cannot go.

And this is important because states were often not the laboratories of democracy, as the cliche goes, but laboratories for autocracy. That's what Jim Crow was, for example. [01:20:00] Chinese exclusion in the 1880s had its roots in efforts to expel and exclude Chinese Americans from Western states. So the Court in the twentieth century does begin to establish these floors for rights, a floor for a right to privacy, a floor for a right to an abortion, a floor for a right to an education, I think through Brown v.

Board of Education, a floor against harmful or invidious discrimination on the basis of race or sex or gender, so on and so forth. And one way you can look at this current court, the Roberts Court, this court which is the product of a fifty-year effort by the conservative movement to capture the Court and turn it into an engine for its own interests, one way you can look at this court is an attempt to tear up that floor, to eliminate that floor, to say that there is no longer a national floor for rights, and rather that the full scope of your rights, from your right to vote, from your right to get an abortion, from your right to travel and move [01:21:00] freely, all of these things are structured by the states and that the federal government cannot really intervene.

Now, I'll note that let's say you're a state and you wanna make sure that there's gender-affirming care for transgender youth, the courts might not be too happy about that. Let's say you wanna regulate gun rights. The courts may not be too happy about that. So this is not really a full expansion of police powers for states to do whatever they please.

Rather, it is establishing for the rights that the conservatives view as most important a minimum floor, and that's gun rights, right to property, a vision of free speech in which money equals speech and there are no limits on speech, and thus no limits on money, and a very narrow and exclusionary vision of religious liberty in which religious liberty means the right to discriminate against people on the basis of religion.

The Court wants to establish a floor for those rights, but then for anything that might enable human flourishing, [01:22:00] that might enable people's ability to live their lives as they see fit, which might enable people to challenge existing hierarchies, whatever it is, the Court is saying, "No more. No minimum floor."

And so if your state wants to obliterate, effectively, your ability to get representation, it can't. If the state wants to obliterate, effectively, your right to bodily autonomy, you can't. And your freedom, such that it is, is a freedom to move, right? If your- fortunate enough, affluent enough, capable enough, able enough to move to a place where those rights are a little more secure.

But then this interacts with the court's jurisprudence when it comes to the presidency. And so in addition to this, they create a situation where the executive branch, or at least Republican-led executive branches, can do whatever they want. And so it's a catch-22 if you believe in rights that extend to ordinary people and aren't just excuses for the wealthy and the powerful to dominate the rest of us.

DEAN: So if you haven't seen it, just breaking news a short time ago, they voted in the state legislature in Tennessee [01:23:00] because the Supreme Court said you can be as racist as you want when you draw your maps, but just don't say you're being racist. That's all they said. "You can't say you're being racist. Just say you're being partisan, and then you can do whatever you want," wink, wink.

In reality, the conservative GOP Supreme Court has legalized discrimination against Blacks, and against brown, and against anybody, but, , based on race, by saying it's just about partisanship. So what happened is the 9th Congressional District in Tennes- in Tennessee is Memphis area. It is the only Black majority district, and the Republicans wanted that to go away, and now they got their chance.

Donald Trump, after the decision last week, calls up Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, and says, "You have to have a session to get rid of that seat." And sure enough, that's what they did. Now, they voted on the new map. They have a super majority Republicans in the state legislature in Tennessee, so Democrats can't do much.

They asked some questions yesterday. They were able to protest outside. But Republicans, and get this, not only did they go through at an [01:24:00] expedited process, they banned public input. They did not want the public to comment like they often do on proposed legislation. They banned it because they knew it would get really ugly as people start saying, "What you're doing is Jim Crow era bullshit."

They, so they banned it. No public conduct. So, but the public came, and they cheered, or jeered I should say, in, outsi- in the gallery and outside, and they were chanting, , "Hell no, Jim Crow has to go." People are talking about Jim Crow in 2026 because of the Republican Party. This is where we are. And they're so giddy about it.

Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican who's a leading candidate for governor, she said about this redistricting, she goes, "This is what it means to be America's conservative leader. Let's get it done." So to her, being America's conservative leader is getting rid of the one majority Black district in the entire state.

And the way they fractured it, they broke members down to three different components. So now part of Memphis is also being represented by a, a new member of Congress 100 [01:25:00] miles away in the white, deep red areas, 'cause that's the only way how to do it. You can't keep Memphis together, 'cause it'll then be still a Democratic district.

You break it up, so you literally draw lines, so you connect part of Memphis and draw a line, and then you put it with a whole white, red district. That's how they're doing it. So their voice means nothing. They can vote, but they're not gonna have someone who represents them and their views on it. But a short time ago, I thought this was great, Representative Justin Jones, and he is a Democrat representing Nashville.

He handed to Republican majority leader William Lamberth a Confederate flag on a piece of paper, and he said, "Mr. Speaker, I just handed Representative Lamberth the Confederate flag saying, 'We will not go back,' 'cause you're trying to bring us back to the Confederacy." And, and I wanna get people's comments on this, because it, it really, it's deeply upsetting as we watch the right try to take America backwards in a very conservative, , concerted, strategic effort.

And it's not just voting rights. They did it first with Roe v. Wade. , In [01:26:00] 1973, women had a constitutional right to control your own reproductive freedom. Constitutional right, like any other right. That's what the Supreme Court re- re- recognizing that. Over the years, the GOP clamored to get that overturned, and finally in 2022 they did.

So now, and not coincidentally, the same states who wanted to redistrict right now and erase Black voters and Black members of Congress are the same ones that impose bans on abortion. It's the same right-wing, reactionary idea of racial and gender apartheid. That's what the right wants, racial and gender apartheid, where they control your race and they control your gender.

A- and they're men, white men controlling everybody else. And it's unreal. So you've got... I wanted to, I found this really powerful, and I wanted to read this to people. There was a publication in Memphis, The Capitol Press, and they interviewed Black voters over the last day or two, 'cause there's a primary on Tuesday And I-- [01:27:00] forget the law.

I'm a lawyer. We all know this is horrible. We all know the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress in nineteen sixty-five, the most important civil rights piece of legislation to end the electoral apartheid we had in our nation, as Elie Mystal made the point on my show last week. But what we have here is very human reaction.

That's what I wanna read to people. And these here... And I'll read the names of the people who told the Capitol Press this. 

Fred Doris, eighty-one, he was voting at the First Baptist Broad Church on Tuesday in the primary. They talked to him there. And this is very painful to read. He says, "I was here when we first fought with the Department of Justice to get this district drawn so the African American community would win it."

He says, "It hurts my heart at almost eighty-one years old to see us lose this again. It hurts my heart," he said. "The same fight we had then back in the late sixties and seventies, we are now fighting in twenty twenty-six. We have to pre-preserve it." Francine Wilson, who's s- in her seventies, voting at Glenview Community Center in the Memphis area, [01:28:00] told a reporter, "I don't like it because I come from the old school.

I feel like they're trying to wipe the Blacks out. I'm gonna say it like that. It's taking us back, way back to the Jim Crow days. I don't like it. My children have to come up behind me, and my grandchildren, and I pray that everything goes well for them, that they don't have to fight as we always have." And then she adds this.

Everyone goes back to The Color Purple, the famous book. She said, "I had to fight all the days of my life," quoting from the book. "I had to fight all the days of my life." Then she said, "So if we had to fight all of our days, why should we have to still continually fight today?" Now, that's the question. It doesn't end.

I'll, I'll read one mo- one more. Joyce Jordan, sixty-nine, voting at the Grace Missionary Baptist Church on Tuesday: "It's taken us back to where our leaders fought, where we as a people fought. People died for these rights, and now it's being taken away, taking us back to the nineteen sixties and beyond. I feel, I feel as though this is very evil, and it is wrong."

I read them because forget the law, I want people to hear the human impact of [01:29:00] people, the pain this is going to cause, how the Black community knows exactly their history, especially older ones who lived through the civil rights movement, saw people march in the streets, bleed- Cry, die for ensure representation.

And this Supreme Court, this GOP Supreme Court, last week gutted the last part of the Voting Rights Act. They get an assist in 2013 by the G Su- GOP Supreme Court, which took the heart and soul of the Voting Rights Act. They got rid of it in the Shelby County versus Holder case, which had to do with pre-clearance.

But now the last part of it is done. So once again, just so everyone knows, you don't need a legal degree to get this. What the Supreme Court said last Wednesday is, "You can redraw maps any way you want as long as you're not saying it's intentionally racist." Like, if you're saying, "We're just drawing this map for political gain," then you could do whatever you want.

You just can't say it's intentionally racist. So it's, again, wink, wink. Of course they're ra- they're gonna cut all... They're [01:30:00] gonna... It's called cracking. They crack the districts and dilute the voice of the Black voters. And last week I wasn't sure where this is gonna go. Now we know exactly where it's going.

It happened in Tennessee. It's gonna pass the Senate probably later today. It passed the State Assembly. Governor's gonna sign it. It's giddy. They get rid of the one Democratic district in Tennessee, in Memphis, so the Black voters have no more say in Congress whatsoever. Louisiana delayed their primary last week so they can get rid of it.

South Carolina, now their legislature's talking about it. Alabama, Mississippi, Florida. What do these states all have in common? All these states I just read to you, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida. What do they have in common? These were all Confederate states. These were all states that seceded from the United States.

These are all states that w- took a war against the United States of America. These are all states where their ancestors killed US soldiers. And then after [01:31:00] the Civil War, these are the same states that imposed a brutal, repressive Jim Crow to ensure there was no equality. 

Now, Section C, THE STATES SCRAMBLE

HOST 2: Well, Ben Aguiñaga is the Louisiana solicitor general who argued to strike down the state's majority Black congressional district, the one we're talking about here. He is speaking outside the Supreme Court after oral arguments back in October. 

CLIP: If Louisiana's story, that for the past couple of years, we have been struggling to find a map, a congressional map that satisfies the court's precedence.

It's been extremely difficult. We argued it once earlier this year. We're back here, and what I told the court at the podium is, "Look, at the, at the end of the day, we really need clarity. The states need clarity on how they're supposed to comply with the Voting Rights Act and with the Equal Protection Clause."

HOST 2: So, Kareem laid out the legal reasoning that Justice Samuel, Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, how the legal reasoning goes here. Carrie, the ripple effects of the court ruling here have [01:32:00] been significant. They've been swift. Alabama just today after the decision dropped, the attorney general therel- there, Steve Marshall, and the secretary of state there, both Republicans, filed emergency motions to lift injunctions blocking their 2021 map.

So jurisdictions all across the South are now moving to get rid of districts that before fell under Section 2 of the VRA. Give us a sense of, of, just how quickly districts could fall ahead of the midterms here. 

GUEST 2: Right. So that's a really complicated question at a chaotic moment. I think one thing is, in our reporting, I think what we've realized is states are going to move, as Alabama is, to try and redraw before the midterms.

It's very likely that some of that won't be possible. As you point out, Alabama's options here depend on some more court rulings and some things that are in play. They're gonna need a court to say that they can do this in some [01:33:00] cases. In other cases, states have already held their primaries. People have already voted.

Filing deadlines have passed. Candidates have filed to run under the current district b- boundaries. In some cases, early voting is underway. Now, what we saw in Louisiana was, as early voting was starting, Governor Landry, as, as you pointed out, issued an emergency declaration, said that votes for House candidates on th- this ballot will not count, and there will be another primary for House candidates after this redrawing happens.

There's currently litigation over that, whether he can do that. Either way, I can tell you that what's happening right now is incredibly confusing for voters. Louisiana voters are looking at ballots with House candidates on them, but getting told that if they cast votes in those races, those won't count, and there'll be another primary.

This is hugely- And 

HOST 2: some have already voted. 

GUEST 2: Some have already voted, and this is hugely confusing to voters who have done nothing at all wrong- Right ... show up and get handed ballots, right, or a different ballot. Well, but Carrie, 

HOST: what does it [01:34:00] also mean for those charged with seeing election processes actually happen and happen efficiently for voters?

GUEST 2: So that's a great question that's really important to us at Votebeat that we cover closely, and the answer is this is an enormously difficult question. When people file to be candidates, they have to meet requirements. Election officials have to make sure that that happens, that these people should go on the ballot.

And in addition to that, ballots have to be designed, proofed, printed, and there have to be a bunch of different ballot styles with the right races on there for each voter. Voters have to be assigned to the right district so that they get the right races on their ballots. This is a hugely complicated process that does not happen overnight.

HOST: Complicated and expensive. 

GUEST 2: And the other thing is, I haven't heard anyone from Louisiana talk about how they're gonna pay for this. 

HOST 2: So Kareem, from where you sit, to talk a little bit more about what Carrie is mentioning, there was a redistricting war [01:35:00] that was going on before the Callais ruling that we're talking about, before the, d- the dilution of Black voting power in Louisiana and the South.

Of course, Texas started it. Donald Trump started it when he asked Texas Republicans to give him five seats. They did. Then Democrats in California responded, and now we're off to the races. So from where you sit, where are we at in terms of representation and people's votes counting heading into the midterms?

GUEST: Well, it's important as we talk about this, to distinguish the discussion about partisanship as it's driven, as you describe The fight that has started by the White House asking Texas to jump into the fray mid-decade and all the other states pushing back from the conversation that, began with the Callais decision, which really is about racial fairness.

And while there is connection between the two, I think unfortunately, the Callais decision conflates it. But where are we right [01:36:00] now is, a really complicated question. I think, after Virginia, had its public ballot measure presented to the people and, narrowly passed it to change its districts, I think most people view things as more or less at a standstill.

So there was a lot of effort put into fighting in state legislatures to get these, new districts adopted with all of the confusion and chaos that it, likely will lead to for voters, and basically the numbers are pretty much even. However, now that Callais is on the books, I think there are a lot of states that are looking at this, and they're probably also looking at the nation's politics at present, and I think they're trying to get an edge wherever possible.

So we won't know for all of the legal reasons that were mentioned earlier where this is going to land, but I think at present, I think everyone is being energized to act, largely because of the interest in having, I think an outsized influence in Congress, and we'll just have to [01:37:00] see, after all the legal wrangling is over where things end.

HOST: Well, Kareem, I, I want to pull on this thread a little bit because you said you think people are conflating that, the Callais decision with this larger push to redistrict. And, and why do you think it's important to separate the two? 

GUEST: Well, it's important because the Voting Rights Act itself was always viewed as a bipartisan piece of legislation that was getting at something larger than partisanship.

It was, , trying to make good on America's commitment, long delayed, to g- give meaning to the 14th and 15th Amendment, that people should be able to have, regardless of race, a meaningful and equal vote cast, which would include the ability to be represented. And it's important to note, as much as, again, this is by some being viewed through a partisan lens, the last time the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized was in 2006, and no one less than George W.

Bush, not viewed as the most flaming liberal on the planet, and a [01:38:00] Republican Congress, , a- authorized that act. It had been viewed as a consensus view of the American public. It is unfortunately now, , partly because of our politics at present, but also because I think of some unfortunate misreasoning, offered by Justice Alito, has been folded into a partisan framework, and I think in a very unhelpful way, most unhelpful with respect to the Voting Rights Act, to the very p- communities that the Voting Rights Act was designed to support.

HOST: I, I'm also curious to hear from you, Kerry, what you make of the, the, the speed at which the Voting Rights Act has been really torn apart. I did a little math and realized that my oldest siblings were born before the Voting Rights Act passed. So this is not a law that's been on the books for, , generations and generations.

This is still in, in the larger scope of history, a relatively new law. 

GUEST 2: That's [01:39:00] such an interesting point, and I think we've seen the nation change around the law and the way it thinks about these issues at an, at an incredible speed. And I think that there's more change yet to come. I, I think one thing I would say to that is, Justice Alito's decision really made me think a lot about an, a previous decision that the court had, had made on redistricting in, in a case called Rucho versus Common Cause, in which the court essentially said, federal courts really can't be deciding, and Kareem would, I think, put this more elegantly than, than I would, but federal courts really can't be deciding when partisan gerrymandering crosses the line into too much partisan gerrymandering.

Partisan gerrymandering is distasteful, and we don't love it, but we can't really step in and start arbitrating it. And I thought that the decision that Justice Alito wrote really treated partisan, districting decisions as if they were a much more legitimate reason to draw a district line. It didn't treat it i- [01:40:00] in quite the same distasteful way as the court had in Rucho.

It was recognizing it almost, to my reading, as if it was a legitimate thing for lawmakers to do, a legitimate reason for them to have. And so it, it elevated that, and I thought that it was somewhat reflective of the times that we lived in. To your point, I, I think about the speed at which this law has, has had its life cycle has come to this point.

I think that we're seeing the evolution of our thinking about a lot of things as a society and how that's shifted over time in these decisions and in how this law is being interpreted by the Court. 

HOST: Kareem, anything to add? 

GUEST: Yes. Thank you. I, I appreciate the point about, partisan gerrymandering. I, in a previous job, was, very intimately involved with trying to present to the Court an argument that it should act.

It chose not to. But in fact, it has not just, I think, allowed it to be a legitimate interest, it has incentivized in Callais the [01:41:00] attention to partisanship as a cure-all. That is, the concerns about race discrimination are less important than a state policy that says, "We are," let's just say Republicans, "and we like Republicans, and if we wanna have more Republican districts, and the cost of that business is that we ignore concerns by African Americans because they aren't Republicans, so be it."

That has to be a very anemic understanding of what the Voting Rights Act was intended to do. But for this Court that purports to be standing outside of the space of partisanship, they do a lot of work that seems to encourage it, and that's really unfortunate. 

HOST 2: Also on Wednesday, just to add to the bad news here, Florida advanced its aggressive new congressional map which could net Republicans four seats in the House.

There's been some speculation that this new map will be a, quote, "DeSantis dummy mander." What do you make of that? 

GUEST: , I, I, I, I meant to look, shit, I meant to look up Meatball Ron and whether that was his nickname, and I didn't do it. That, 

HOST 2: that, that was a- , so- It was a pri- I looked it up. It was a [01:42:00] private nickname that Trump u- was reported to use for Ron.

Oh my God. I'm not, I don't know if it ever made it to, through the social, but he, it was- I'm sorry, w- ... reports were reporting. 

GUEST: I expect all bad things to come out of Florida. Are you asking me whether, I, , like, do you think, do, do I think this is going to happen? Yes, I, I think this is going to happen. I think we should expect the worst, craziest shit to emanate from Ron DeSantis' Florida, so this is no exception.

HOST 2: Yeah. So a dummy mander is a term- Oh, sorry ... of art for when... No, it's okay. No, no, I'm happy to jump in here. Du- dummy mander's a term of art for when the new map performs worse than the old map. And so there's some question here, because most experts thought that DeSantis Could add two seats safely. , And once you add four seats, you're at risk of spreading the peanut butter too thin here.

So the math of gerrymandering is, or redistricting, is pretty simple. You have a static number of Republican voters. To make more Republican districts, you must move them out of safe Republican districts and put them into Democratic districts. Then you must take those Democratic voters and move them from Democratic districts and put them into Republican [01:43:00] districts.

And if you do that poorly, then you put a bunch of seats at risk. I don't know if this will be a dummy-mander, but the seats that, the way DeSantis did this is he did not shore up the two most vulnerable Republicans in the, in Southern Florida. And the four new safe seats are probably not even gonna be ranked as safe by the Cook Political Report.

They'll probably lean Republican at best, , or like, maybe likely Republican. But they're, they're gonna end up being about seats that Trump won plus nine in, , 2024. And that's within the realm of what is possible for Democrats. The other thing here that I think is just worth noting is the... We're using the 2024 results in Florida as the baseline for how safe these seats are.

The, Trump won Florida by, like, 13 points, and, but that was because, which is a huge margin, a gigantic margin in what was, like, the prototypical swing state for many, many races, [01:44:00] is Trump won because he won Latinos by 13 points in 2024. To give you a sense of how nuts that is, he only, he lost them by five in 2020, and he lost them by 27 in 2016.

So we're, we, there's a 40-point swing over the last eight years of, among Latinos in Florida. And there's a mountain of evidence, both in polling and in e- election results in Florida and elsewhere, that 2024 was an outlier in terms of Latino support. So if you really do s- and the Latino vote in F- Florida is mu- is incredibly complicated because it's very diverse.

, So it's not, you can't just look at numbers in other parts of the country and transpose them to Florida. But there is, there is risk here that if Latinos really are swinging back to Democrats, if not to 2016 levels, but close to that, then some of these seats Republicans are counting on may turn out to be Democratic.

So there's, there's some risk here for meatball. 

GUEST: [01:45:00] Me- meatball and, , and, and also Mike Johnson. Yes. Another meatball.

And Finally, Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT

JESSICA: Is there any path forward? How do we get out of this? 

IMANI: Well, I wanna agree with you there because at least after Shelby, we still had Section 2. 

JESSICA: Right. Like- Right? ... we don't have fuck all right now. We 

IMANI: have fuck all right now. We have nothing but hoping that legislators will be stupid and go on, Fox News and say, "Yeah, we don't want Black people voting.

That's why we're, we're cracking and packing these districts." They're not gonna do that. They're not that stupid. 

JESSICA: No. 

IMANI: So you asked me is there a path forward. Yeah, there's a path forward. Fucking court reform, man. Court reform. Every voter in this country should hold every Democrat who is running for election to a promise that they will support court reform, and not just bullshit court reform, expansive, wholesale court reform.

And, any time I'm given a chance to talk [01:46:00] about the Ellie Plan, which is basically what I call it now, the Ellie Plan, there are people who say, "Well, no, we should just add a couple more justices. We should have 13 justices to match the 13 circuit courts of appeal." No, no, no, no, no. The problem with these conservatives is that they are unified in thought.

JESSICA: Yes. 

IMANI: All of these Federalist Society judges already have their talking points by the time they reach even a lower federal court- Yeah ... much less the Supreme Court. The Federalist Society learned its lesson from David Souter after David Souter was nominated by a Republican, and then proceeded to vote with the liberals on a whole bunch of shit, right?

Yes. Conservatives are like, "We're not letting that happen again." And so that's how this extreme vetting of these justices began when it came to Republican appointees, right? 

JESSICA: Right. 

IMANI: So the Ellie Plan would say, "Let's add 30 new justices, and we can do it in a bipartisan way by allowing Republicans to have maybe five [01:47:00] or six more justices than the liberals would have."

So maybe you have, 12 liberal justices and 18 conservative justices, but the thing about those 18 conservative justices is it's going to be difficult to find 18 conservatives who all think the same way and can pass nomination, right, can pass the nomination process. So we can get back to a period where there were Republican or conservatives, Republican appointed or conservative justices, who all didn't think the same way, because there is a diversity of thought among conservative jurists.

Mm-hmm. It's just that we're not seeing it at the Supreme Court. So if you wanna issue a ruling that strips Black people of voting power, you gotta get 17 other justices to agree with you, and that's going to be a lot harder to do than getting five other Federalist Society jamokes to agree with you.

Right. Right. That's one thing. I was talking about this on social media, and someone was like, "Well, you're missing that if court reform legislation were passed, [01:48:00] then it would go to the Supreme Court, and then the Supreme Court could strike it down." And I was like, "Goddamn, that is absolutely true," right? So then I'm thinking to myself, "Well, how do we do that?"

And my suggestion, and I know you love when I bring up Marbury versus Madison- Love! This is 

JESSICA: gonna be amazing. 

IMANI: My suggestion is to send Marbury to the wood chipper, 

JESSICA: right? Amazing. 

IMANI: Marbury versus Madison is an 1803 case where Justice Marshall And the other justices at the time made the biggest power grab, the ballsiest power grab It's 

JESSICA: such a baller move, this 

IMANI: decision

in American history. They were like, "Fuck it, we ball." It- They... That's the case that invented, out of whole cloth, judicial review. Yes. Now, in the year of our Lord 2026, we just assume that it's the Supreme Court's job to review acts of Congress. That was not the case before 1803. In 1803, Justice Marshall was like, [01:49:00] "You know what?

We're gonna do this shit." Yeah. "You pass a law, and we're gonna review it to make sure it comports with the Constitution." Yeah. But the difference between the 1803 court and this court is that John Marshall believed in deferring to Congress, and almost always did. 

JESSICA: Mm-hmm. 

IMANI: This court throws up middle fingers to Congress and says, "You know what?

We're gonna take your power for ourselves," as they did in Loper Bright. "We're gonna take agency power for ourselves." This is a Supreme Court that is out of control. 

JESSICA: But we only get to Loper Bright via Marbury versus Madison. This is literally the first case that I read as a law student in constitutional law.

The very first one. 

IMANI: It's the first case every law student reads. I w- mine, too, in my con law ca- class, the first case. Because it established judicial review where there was no judicial review. There is nothing in the Constitution that grants the Supreme Court the right to strike down laws of [01:50:00] Congress.

JESSICA: Talk about a baller move by Marshall, too, because he's "Yeah, I know, folks in Congress, you're subject to elections. Sucks for you." Right. Right. Sucks for you. I am on board with all of this. I just have one little detail to add, which is whatever happens in this court reform vision and, on the podcast we've been talking about this for years under the guise of unpacking the Court, to your point, because it's been so packed with groupthink from the Federalist Society, is I want a real binding code of ethics as well.

I am really tired of these conservative justices es- especially taking in millions, tens of millions of dollars sometimes on the side, whether it's through gifts, donations to family members, businesses, whatever it is. It is just gross. It's 

IMANI: absolutely gross. 

JESSICA: And it's infected everything from Citizens United forward, and it's time that they just play by the same rules as everybody else.

IMANI: But [01:51:00] Jess, it was only a couple of years ago that the Supreme Court did come up with a code of ethics, right? This... They have a code of ethics, so I really think you might be being unreasonable here. 

JESSICA: Yeah. They, they have a code of ethics that nobody can enforce. 

IMANI: Yeah 

JESSICA: So it's a suggestion- 

IMANI: Yeah ... 

JESSICA: of ethics.

IMANI: Just a 

JESSICA: guideline. It's an aspiration- ... to be ethical. Just a whisper of 

IMANI: ethics. 

JESSICA: It is a vision board- ... for future behavior- It's a Pinterest- ... is 

IMANI: what it is of ethics. Oh, for Christ's sake.

ELIE: When you have critical numbers of non-white people involved in making the decisions that run our government, the government gets more fair, more equitable, and more just, and they don't want that to happen. So the way to stop that from happening is having an all-whites, , government. Like, that, that is the simplest way to make [01:52:00] sure that white interests are always protected if white interests are the only ones that can be heard.

DEAN: And so one Black president did all of this. It so freaked them out to this point. You know, I was just looking up while you were speaking, the number of, of the 500 CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies, how many are Black? And it's g- been going down. It's 10 now. Yeah. In this year, 10, 2%. So when they're the one ending DEI, and I was saying this yesterday, the goal of ending DEI to me is really going back to segregation.

It is really the idea, we don't even wanna see you in our workplace. We don't want to have you. We wanna be segregation today, tomorrow, forever. It is the George Wallace mentality. It has not changed among the white right. And not all white people, folks. The white right, the last time a Democratic candidate won, presidential Democratic candidate won the white vote, a majority, 1964, and that's not a coincidence.

You know, LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and that's it. Party realignment begins then in earnest. So [01:53:00] this is the situation. So let's get back to Democratic Party. I didn't wanna cut you off. I was kidding. So what, where did Democrats fail in all of this? 

ELIE: Well, when the Democrats took back, , the House and had the Senate and had, , Joe Biden in the White House, they tried to pass the restoration of the Voting Rights Act, the John Lewis voting rights bill, and Joe Manchin flummoxed it.

Joe Manchin wouldn't go for it. , They wouldn't... They, they were unwilling to break the filibuster to pass it over Republican object- , , objections, and it went nowhere. , That was an era. W- we ... That, that was the point to break the filibuster and break Joe Manchin's knees, if necessary, to pass the restoration of the most important piece of legislation in American history.

That was the time, and they screwed it up. They missed it, right? , Going forward, obviously the Democrats need to retake the House, retake the Senate, and I keep saying, even in the face of this, [01:54:00] this is the best chance, it turns out, that the Democrats are going to have to retake the House and the Senate because it's only gets harder from here thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling and thanks to the destruction of the Voting Rights Act.

So 2026 actually, against all odds, becomes your best opportunity to retake both chambers of Congress. So you need to do that, then you need to stop any further erosion of voting rights, then you need to beat these people in '28, and then if you're very lucky, you get, it, you get to, in 2029, where you were in 2021, which is with a Democratic president, a Democratic senator, and a Democratic House.

At which point you need to restore the Voting Rights Act, just like you should have in 2021. So you're gonna have to spend a long time trying to get back to where you were five years ago, but maybe four years from now or five years from now you'll get there, and then you [01:55:00] have to do what you should've done then.

DEAN: Yeah, and, and for people who don't remember, , the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives from 1994 when they won that election to 2006. So they're... It's not like now where it's flipping back and forth. They could hold the House for 10, 12, 16, 20 years. , Generations. , Right now...

So let's talk about the Supreme Court and reforming it, expanding it, whatever. We've talked before, it takes great urgency. I said yesterday and I'll say it again today, if a Democrat's running in 2028 will not commit to expanding the Supreme Court- I, I say expanding, but at least reforming it. , They have no sincerity, they have no credibility on any issue because this Supreme Court, they know it will overturn anything good that we wanna do.

So- Yeah ... what is your idea now after this decision? Yes, has it changed? We talked about the Super Court before- Yeah ... which I like Super Court. But has anything changed, and if not, what is your proposal? 

ELIE: No, I've always been on we need to expand the court. My current proposal is plus 20 members. I know that number sounds [01:56:00] large, but I've explained it before.

It's actually, , the, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has 29 just- judges. There's no reason the Supreme Court can't have 29 justices. So I am for aggressive court expansion. I think that is necessary, and I've been on that point since before Dobbs, but certainly after Dobbs. That, to me, that is the, that was the moment where court packing should have been adopted by the entire party.

Certainly after the destruction of the Voting Rights Act, again, y- you, you can't pass these laws i- in front of this Supreme Court 'cause they will just overturn them. Again, the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. It was reauthorized in 2006, 98 to zero in the Senate under George W. Bush. Under George W.

Bush, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized 98 to zero, and the Supreme Court still said, "Yeah, dah, we don't like it." Like- Nobody elected them to do this. So if you [01:57:00] leave these Republicans on the Court, if you leave Republicans with a super majority, n- doesn't matter what you pass, you won't get it through.

But the other thing that I've suggested, Dean, and I suggested this in the article that I wrote in The Nation, is that this is actually the time where we, we need to do jurisdiction stripping. Jurisdiction stripping is the idea that Congress can, by legislation, prevent the Supreme Court from ruling on the constitutionality, , of certain pieces of legislation.

, I al- it blows people's mind who haven't heard me say, or haven't heard somebody say this before, but the word unconstitutional does not appear in the Constitution, and nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the Supreme Court is the final and only arbiter of what is and is not constitutional.

Indeed, in most other countries, it is the legislative branch, the elected branch, that decides what is and is not constitutional, not some egg-headed justices that nobody elected sitting in an ivory tower, right? So the [01:58:00] idea of jurisdiction stripping is that Congress not only passes the law, but says, "We pass the law under this interpretation of the Constitution, and our interpretation of the Constitution is final, Mr.

Supreme Court," thus preventing the Supreme Court from overturning it. Now, I imagine that with this particular Supreme Court, they'll just say, "Actually, jurisdiction stripping," like, it, I, I imagine the Supreme Court- Right ... will resist that interpretation quite strongly. Which again leads back to court packing, which again leads back to court expansion.

You put ... You, you appoint enough justices that agree that jurisdiction stripping is constitutional and agree to stay ... K- k- keep their nose out of the- Interesting ... laws that Congress passes under this, under this, , idea. 

DEAN: Jurisdiction stripping is a really intriguing idea that I've got to do ... I, I saw you touch on it and I, and I have to do more research.

But look at Marbury versus Madison. , You've got the idea of judicial review of, of statutes going all the way back to the, the most famous, first [01:59:00] famous Supreme Court case. Would that ... , under Marbury versus Madison, the Supreme Court can go like, "Well, we can overturn this law that you ... says you have to take our power away.

We're the ultimate arbitra- arbiter." Isn't that where it comes from, that idea that ingrained in us that it was because of Justice Marshall, right? It was Chief Justice 

ELIE: John Marshall. That's the first ... Marbury versus Madison is the first use of judicial review, and all I'm pointing out is that judicial review is not in the Constitution.

That is a power that the Supreme Court- Right. Right ... gave to itself in that case. Chief 

DEAN: Justice Marshall, isn't 

ELIE: it? Right? So if the Supreme Court can give that power to itself, guess what? Congress can take it away, 'cause it's not written down anywhere. It's not textually written down anywhere that the Supreme Court has this authority, and Congress can take it away, and this is, this is the, this is the time where we should use that club in our bag.

DEAN: I- it's interesting, my friend. 

ELIE: So- But what would happen, Dean, what would happen in practicality is that you'd pass the law, , and then the Supreme Court would say, "We don't agree with that law. We don't agree with the jurisdiction stripping. We're gonna make a ruling." [02:00:00] And then the states, the blue states would say, "Well, no, the Supreme Court is out of pocket here.

We're not gonna listen to the Supreme Court." And the red states would say, "No, the Supreme Court actually is correct here, and we're only gonna listen to the Supreme Court and not Congress." And then, a- a- and that becomes the, the, the problem, because then who gets to win in that becomes who, where are you gonna send the troops?

Right? Yeah. Like that, that, that ... It, it, it quickly es- You see how it's, it's a little bit of the Ron Burgundy, it escalates quickly. , W- if the Supreme Court doesn't go for it, , you have a rift between red states and blue states. But I say to that, we have a rift now. The rift is- True ... already there.

We should try to win the rift as opposed to pretending that it doesn't exist.

Yeah, it- 

DEAN: Last thing- Would- 

ELIE: It's bad. Like the ... There, there, there are no g- And, and, a- and I guess, like, it's supposed to be bad. [02:01:00] There are no good solutions. Why should it 

DEAN: be good? 

ELIE: Well, well, , 'cause there are no good solutions when racists win. There are- Right ... no good solutions when racists are given power.

Um, if we wanted good solutions, we need to stop electing racist people. Since we seem unable to do that- We find ourselves in these situations having these kinds of conversations. 

That's going to be it for today.

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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 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: 5-9-2026

Full Show Notes

[00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine how political violence has always been woven into the fabric of American life and who gets to decide what counts as violence in the first place. We'll hear about presidential assassinations, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, and the long history of state-sanctioned violence. And I'll discuss the only real way to bend the curve back away from endemic violence in the US.

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

Taylor Lorenz

The PBS NewsHour

Front Burner

The Chauncey DeVega Show

and Democracy Now!

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 5 sections;

Section A, The Framing Wars

Section B, The Long American Tradition

Section C, State Violence and Anti-Blackness

Section D, The Right-Wing Engine

Section E, The System and What Comes Next

And now, on to the show.

Speaker 46: When political leaders [00:01:00] and the media wring their hands about political violence, they're not actually talking about violence in any, universal sense.

They're talking about violence specifically against elites or people who look like them or people who maintain these existing power structures. The violence that is already a daily feature of life for poor, immigrant, Black, disabled, and queer communities is completely invisible to them. Police tear-gassing a crowd of teenagers demanding accountability for the murder of George Floyd is never deemed political violence.

Federal agents shooting pepper balls at medics in Portland is not seen as political violence. But the second a right-wing figure is harmed, it becomes a crisis for democracy on cable news This double standard, of course, has always been there, and it's why so many people, especially in the Middle East and other countries that we've inflicted horrific levels of violence upon, hate the American government.

But cell phones and social media have finally made this hypocrisy crystal clear to members of the American public. And I'm not even just [00:02:00] talking about atrocities abroad. After George Floyd's murder in 2020, millions of people took to the streets to demand an end to racist police killings. What they were met with, however, was an unprecedented wave of state-sanctioned violence.

The Department of Homeland Security deployed tactical teams into cities. Police kettled and beat and arrested journalists. Protesters were shot point-blank with less lethal munitions, losing eyes and sustaining permanent injuries. People died in protest-related incidents, but how many of those deaths were mourned by the mainstream media as martyrs of democracy?

None. And just months after the peak of Black Lives Matter protests on January 6th, 2021, a violent mob stormed the Capitol, calling for the lynching of elected officials and overturning the election, but their violence was excused. Those rioters overwhelmingly received lighter sentences than Black Lives Matter protesters.

Some even used the event to launch their careers as influencers. Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges for shooting anti-fascist protesters dead, while peaceful [00:03:00] college students ended up in jail. And of course, none of this is new. You can look back at American history and see the state enact violence on our own citizens over and over and over again.

I think a lot of what happened in Standing Rock in 2016, the government, under Obama, mind you, sent armored vehicles and a militarized police force to attack indigenous people who were defending their sacred land and water. Protesters were blasted with high-pressure hoses in freezing temperatures. They had dogs set on them.

People got concussions and other injuries. The media framed the event as clashes, but thankfully, we were able to witness what actually happened as it was live-streamed on Facebook. When the COVID pandemic hit, violence against marginalized people was fully normalized. Immigrants, people of color, and the poor were and are currently being sent into deadly workplaces with no airborne disease protections.

Prisoners are being left to die of COVID-19 in overcrowded facilities with, again, zero airborne disease mitigations, even today. Joe Biden successfully convinced liberals and even [00:04:00] leftists to completely devalue the lives of people around them to the point that, again, even leftists today believe that it's morally neutral to infli- Infect and kill or permanently maim those around you by infecting them with airborne disease because you don't wanna wear a mask.

Killing and disabling millions of Americans by encouraging the spread of an airborne vascular disease is also violence. In Atlanta, in 2023, when activists protesting Cop City were stalked, arrested, and even killed, these pundits mourning political violence were nowhere to be seen. Manuel Teran was shot and killed, and the state labeled them a domestic terrorist for peacefully resisting a police project.

According to Mapping Police Violence, more than 1,000 people are shot and killed by the police every year, overwhelmingly people of color. When ICE raids rip apart families in the middle of the night- That is also police violence. Since January 1st, 2017, at least 70 people have died in ICE custody. [00:05:00] ICE detention facilities recorded 13 more deaths just in the first half of this year alone, and these figures are a massive undercount of the harm that ICE does.

ICE will also release people shortly before their death just so they're not counted as dying under ICE custody. Just last month, a man fleeing an ICE raid at Home Depot right here in Los Angeles was killed. The ACLU found that 95% of people's deaths under ICE detention were preventable. And then, of course, we have school shootings, which are completely normalized in this country.

Almost the exact same time that Charlie Kirk was shot, students at Evergreen High School in Colorado were running for their lives from yet another school shooter. Kirk defended these shootings and said that victims of gun violence were necessary casualties to defend the Second Amendment. But we've had dozens of school shootings over the past couple decades, resulting in hundreds of casualties and injuries to children.

Just last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report saying that school shootings were at an all-time [00:06:00] high and becoming even more deadly My point is that Americans are already exposed to unfathomable levels of political violence every day.

Speaker 4: complicated story of MOVE begins in the early 1970s. The organization followed the teachings of their founder, John Africa, who advocated a lifestyle rooted in nature. All members took Africa's last name and lived communally in West Philadelphia.

We must fight back. They were known for staging disruptive demonstrations and frequently clashing with authorities, protesting everything from police brutality and war to pet stores and zoos.

Speaker 5: MOVE is and was an organization that's very much committed to life in all of its forms, in whatever that looks like.

Speaker 4: Tommy Oliver is the director of 40 Years a Prisoner, a 2020 HBO documentary that traces the group's origins.

Speaker 5: They're committed to eating naturally, to living naturally, [00:07:00] to not being reliant on technology.

Speaker 6: We walked around naked a lot. As children, the, the organization did not... They believed in vitamin D from the sun.

They believed in allowing your skin to be tougher and stronger. And

Speaker 4: Mike Africa Jr.'s parents were both members of MOVE ...

Speaker 6: Yes, it was unorthodox and yeah, it was some things were strange to some people, but for me, that was life.

Speaker 4: That way of life often put MOVE at odds with local police and their neighbors, who accused them of creating unsanitary living conditions.

Speaker 5: Them trying to live in the way that they wanted to live didn't sit well with a lot of people. So sometimes the neighbors, sometimes the city, and it escalated pretty significantly pretty quickly.

Speaker 4: In 1978, more than a year after the city issued an eviction notice, Philadelphia's then mayor, Frank Rizzo, ordered an attack on MOVE's home.

Speaker 7: They're going to [00:08:00] go either easy or hard way. That can be standing up or laying down.

Speaker 4: The months-long standoff culminated in a shootout.

One police officer was killed and MOVE's home was demolished. While MOVE maintains that the officer died by friendly fire, nine of its members were convicted and sentenced to up to 100 years in prison, including Mike Africa Jr.'s parents.

Speaker 6: The mayor admitted that he believed my parents were innocent He believed that my parents were not in prison for the charge that they were charged with.

Speaker 8: Police are inside MOVE headquarters in West Philadelphia conducting an intensive search for weapons

Speaker 4: He says the media's portrayal of MOVE was often exaggerated, and he says the organization was misunderstood even among many African Americans.

Speaker 6: MOVE members are not the turn the other cheek type people, and a lot of people felt like m- pacifism was the answer, and MOVE members were not pacifistic.

[00:09:00] If a p- if a cop attacked them, they would fight back.

Speaker 4: Tommy Oliver says those early confrontations, including that 1978 shootout, are critical to understanding what eventually happened seven years later.

Speaker 5: You had officers and members of the police force who wanted revenge.

Speaker 4: In May of 1985, Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode ordered the organization to be removed once again from a home where they were living.

Speaker 3: What we have out there is war.

Speaker 4: And on May 13th, local news stations like WCAU in Philadelphia covered the escalating crisis throughout the day. The sporadic fire lasted about an hour Police would fire more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition into MOVE's row house before eventually dropping a bomb on it.

The city's police commissioner at the time, Gregory Sambor, defended his officers that evening.

Speaker 9: At no time did any police [00:10:00] position fire in an offensive posture. It was purely in a defensive posture.

Speaker 4: 11 MOVE members, including five children, were killed. While no city officials were criminally charged, a Philadelphia investigative commission later concluded the police actions were clearly excessive, and quote, "unconscionable."

Speaker 6: I don't think I'll ever recover or heal from what happened.

Speaker 4: Mike Africa Jr., who was six at the time of the bombing, is now working as the legacy director of MOVE. He's reunited with his parents, who were released from prison in 2018, but remain on parole.

Speaker 6: I've never heard of another case where a government has dropped a bomb on citizens in America.

This is not something that you can repair back to normal. You have to find other ways to cope, and that's what I've been doing for the last 40 years.

Speaker 4: In [00:11:00] 2020, Philadelphia City Council formally apologized for what happened, as has former Mayor Wilson Goode. But Africa Jr. says four decades later, he'd like the city to create a permanent memorial to commemorate all that was lost that day.

Speaker 9: In your opinion, why do you feel that so few Americans know about,

Speaker 4: the events that took place 40 years ago?

Speaker 6: I think the city of Philadelphia does a really good job- Of limiting the amount of exposure to what happened. I also think that MOVE history is a very controversial history that brings up a lot of trauma for a lot of people.

Black people were killed by law enforcement and, if you saw what happened to George Floyd, and at a certain point you're tired of hearing about the people that were getting killed by these police officers.

Speaker 4: But that doesn't stop Mike Africa Jr. from his mission of making sure the history of MOVE and the tragic event [00:12:00] that claimed 11 lives isn't forgotten.

Speaker 32: "Death in politics has long been a possibility in American public life."

And just flesh that out for me. What did you mean by that?

Speaker 36: While the assassination attempt on President Trump this past weekend was as harrowing as it surely was inexcusable, it's not an aberration in American politics. Over, a little over 40% of all American presidents, no fewer than 19, have been targeted by assassins.

Speaker 32: Wow.

Speaker 36: And following the failed assassination of Andrew Jackson in 1835, the time between the shooting of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump this past weekend is actually the longest period in American history where a bullet has not been directed toward a president, and that's a remarkable 43-year span.

Speaker 32: Why do you think that is? What do you think explains this e- era of relative calm?

Speaker 36: That's [00:13:00] a really good question. So on the one hand, the short answer is I don't think we have a really good explanation. The 1960s, of course, were a period of extensive political assassinations in public life in the United States, beginning in November of 1963 with, the killing of John F.

Kennedy. After Kennedy, Malcolm X, then to Reverend Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy in June of 1968, Fred Hampton in late 1969. And I think in American political discourse, the shift in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s was in many respects- That political murder or assassinations are something that happen elsewhere, but they're not necessarily something that happens within the life of the United States.

On the other hand, we do know that throughout the 1970s into the 1990s, that there are [00:14:00] ascertained plots to assassinate presidents and additional failed attempts. Ascertained plots against Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Presidents Barack Obama and President Donald Trump.

Speaker 32: Huh.

Speaker 36: Fortunately, in each of those incidents, the assassinations were shut down before, they could be pushed forward. So I think the relative silence can sometimes be misleading, because I think the failure of plots, quote, unquote, "failure of plots," can seem to suggest that the possibility of assassination goes away, and I actually don't think that's the case.

Speaker 32: political violence is a broad term that would include, as we talked about on the show yesterday, incidents Charlottesville, the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, Dylann Roof's assault on a Black church in South Carolina.

Speaker 37: The suspect is Dylann Storm Roof. [00:15:00] This Snapchat video taken last night shortly before the shooting shows the suspect in the church basement sitting at a table, part of a small prayer meeting.

He'd been with them about an hour when he stood up and, according to witnesses, said something like, "I have to do it. You're raping our women and taking over our country, and you have to go." And then he opened fire.

Speaker 32: But assassination as a specific phenomenon, I wonder when dealing with assassination specifically, what kinds of issues have we seen compel American citizens to try to kill their own leaders?

Speaker 36: So in the history of the United States, would-be assassins have often been, inspired by any number of ideas about rights, ideas about personal rights- Human rights, economic rights, social rights, state rights, and national rights in the belief that particular [00:16:00] presidents were causing an obstruction of the political rights of the people.

So when Leon Czolgosz, for example, assassinated William McKinley in 1901, he believed that McKinley was obstructing popular labor political rights, and one of the best way to address the negative impacts of capitalism on American society would be by removing, a president. John Wilkes Booth saw himself as removing a political tyrant and vindicating a secessionist South and its violent racial hierarchies.

Charles Guiteau believed that by murdering James Garfield, he was going to unify the Republican Party. And those types of incidents really ask us to stop and think about what are the types of inner historical arguments that assassins are making, to think about, political murder as a real possibility in public life.

Speaker 32: But it's interesting, right? Because [00:17:00] historically, and please correct me if I'm wrong here- They have these visions, but they don't succeed, right? is it fair for me to say that those two examples that you just gave, that, that, that didn't come to fruition?

Speaker 36: I think that's absolutely right, and I think that's a consistent theme that we see in the history of assassinations, that assassins may be able to control the time and space within which they pull the trigger, but at the end of the day, they have no control over the ultimate outcomes of their assassination.

Very briefly, I think a global or a larger example is more interesting, and that would be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

When Gavrilo Princip pulled the trigger, he had in mind the unification of Slavic nationalists in Eastern Europe. Little could he have imagined that the pulling of that trigger would result in around 40 million casualties, the beginning [00:18:00] of the end of numerous colonial empires, the repartition of the Middle East, and the economic contexts for a second World War.

So I think you're right. There's a real disconnect between the vision of assassins, but what this actually brings about in ways that we really don't quite know, and I think that's also part of what makes the conversation with Trump really interesting, that very shortly after the failed assassination attempt on his life, political pundits and popular commentators were writing that this will secure the election in November, and there's really nothing the Democrats can do about that.

But we know in the past it also hasn't quite worked that way. Theodore Roosevelt was shot within a 10-minute walk from where President Trump will speak at the GOP convention in the coming days, and even after being shot with a bullet in his chest and giving an address for 60 minutes, he was still unable to secure electoral victory in that election of 1912.

So I [00:19:00] think even when it comes to talking about the failed assassination on President Trump, w- it's not quite clear how this is going to play out.

Speaker 32: That is such an interesting historical example. I did not know about that. much has been said since Saturday about what may or may not have been the motivations of the shooter.

But, one thing I wanted to ask you is, in terms of reverberations, in terms of consequences of what might come of the event itself, does it even matter what the motivations are? I

Speaker 36: think this is a very important point, and it's one that echoes back to the failed assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.

We don't know Thomas Crooks' motivations, but let's just say they're not political at all. I think what the Reagan assassination attempt shows that, if any president had a bullet fired at him for non-political motivations, it was Ronald Reagan. John Hinckley's motivation was to prove his love to Jodie [00:20:00] Foster.

But even then, it had very real political outcomes for the next several decades surrounding the controversies of the Brady Bill, the regulation of gun reforms.

Speaker 38: Brady was wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan. Afterwards, he became a crusader, along with his wife, for gun control efforts.

Speaker 36: So I think this idea that if somehow, it comes out that Thomas Crooks was motivated because he wanted to, win the love of Taylor Swift or something that, it doesn't matter. It's still going to play out in very real political

Speaker 96: let me begin at the beginning for me with this book, and it was through the killing of Philando Castile, and who was the Black man in Minnesota that the cops had pulled over. And when the police officer asked to see his ID, he alerted the officer that via NRA guidelines, that he had a license to carry weapon with him.

But he was reaching for his ID as the officer had asked, and the officer began shooting. Just killed him. And he wasn't [00:21:00] threatening the officer. He w- didn't pull out his gun and point it at the officer, none of that. He just merely had a license to carry weapon, and the NRA went virtually silent on the killing of Philando Castile, which then led pundits to ask, " don't Black people have Second Amendment right?"

And I went, "Ooh, that's a great question," because my research had been all about basically the fractured citizenship of Black people, how the lack of citizenship, how the struggle for basic human rights and civil rights, but this was a right that I hadn't looked at. And so I went hunting and ended up back in the 17th century, and what I saw was this inordinate fear of Black people and wrapped in the language of Black people as dangerous, as a threat, as inherently criminal, and that white society had to be protected against Black folk.

And that language of inherently criminal, inherently dangerous, as a threat to whites, as a threat to American society, that is the [00:22:00] anti-Blackness that is coursing through. And when I got to the Second Amendment and I saw the battles over it, the battles over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and it was the language of Patrick Henry and George Mason at the Ratification Convention in Virginia, who were arguing that the militia was absolutely essential to being able to put down a slave revolt, and that having the militia oversight put under federal control, which is what James Madison did, would leave them defenseless, would leave them to the mercy of these Black people.

And the role of that militia then became central to the way that you understood whiteness and the way you understood white safety and the way that you understood Black subjugation. And after the Second Amendment, one of the first things that Congress passed, one of the first pieces of legislation that Congress passed is the [00:23:00] 1792 Uniform Militia Act that says that all white men between the ages of 18 and 45 must join the militia and they must have a gun.

This is an act of citizenship. This is a definition of citizenship that is white, male, and a gun owner. Meanwhile, we've got laws just propping up all over the place that are about how Black people cannot have- Gun. And we end up with the 1857 Dred Scott decision that deals with whether Black people can be free.

If you're enslaved and you're then brought to free soil, does that make you free? And Chief Justice Roger Taney, in that horrific decision, wrote, "They weren't citizens at the founding of this nation. They weren't... If they were citizens, they'd be able to get a passport. If they were citizens, they'd be able to carry the mail.

If they were citizens, they'd be able to go from state to state, and if they were citizens, they'd be able to carry a weapon wherever and whenever they wanted to. [00:24:00] But a Black man has no right that a white man is bound to respect."

Speaker 94: And think about brother Philando Castile. What do we do with the fact that he was armed, borrowed from a right-wing propagandist, with his big, Black, scary self?

And he dared to have a gun. And

Speaker 96: so this is what I've been laying out in the second, that it is Blackness that is the designated threat in American society, the default threat in American society. So whether we're armed or unarmed, we are a threat. Having a gun only heightens that threat exponentially, but how many folks do you know who were killed who had a cell phone in their hand?

" I thought he was armed." Who were absolutely unarmed, "But I was afraid." I think of Jonathan Ferrell, who was the Black man who was in a car accident in North Carolina, and he went to get help. The woman was afraid, called the cops. He sees the cops coming, he thinks they're there to help him because he was in a car accident.

He's moving towards them going, "Oh, I'm [00:25:00] so glad you guys are here," and they shoot him down, "Because we were afraid."

Speaker 94: How do we think about that gun ownership and guns along the color line in terms of projection and fear?

Speaker 96: One of the things that became really clear, like I said, I went back to the days of slavery, was the fear that when Black folks rose up, it wasn't about freedom, it was about retribution.

It was that Black people would do to whites what whites had done to them. And that fear, so you had a combination of the fear of Black people, you also have this underlying guilt and this fear of retribution. Because when you have guilt, you have a knowledge that what you're doing is messed up. So when Thomas Jefferson says, I'm paraphrasing the quote, "I fear that God is just," when you fear that God is just, then that means that you know what you're doing is unjust.

Speaker 94: So how does the gun play in terms of the Black freedom struggle in our imaginary, in our struggle? And the imaginary's important in terms of the stories we tell.

Speaker 96: One of the key pieces [00:26:00] is that we get these stories of this completely non-violent civil rights movement as the hallmark of the way that Black folks should be protesting, right?

Now, the language of non-violence and the strategy was deployed as a way to discombobulate that narrative of a violent Black person. So that when the cameras were on, what you saw were Black people in their Sunday best getting the crap beat out of them by white people, and you couldn't get the default, " if only they had done..."

Because what you saw was that Black people were doing, and they were getting beaten for it. That language of nonviolence then elides over the role that, say, the Deacons for Defense played in providing protection for nonviolent Civil Rights workers who were trying to register folks to vote, and the Klan was trying to kill them.

The Klan was coming after people trying to register Black folks [00:27:00] to vote. That narrative of nonviolence becomes the kind of hallmark as a way to understand the appropriate way for Black folks to agitate for their freedom. But what we also know is that Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest the killing of Black people by the state, and the thing was, how dare he?

That was inappropriate. So it isn't the type of protest. It is in fact that there is a protest that becomes the problem in this society. It is the fact that Black folks see it. They see it. They see the fissures. They see the crack. They see the inequality. They see the injustice. They see that the narrative does not match up with the reality, and the protests are to make that reality match up with what the nation says it is.

Speaker 94: One of the areas of American history, social history in particular, I'm very fascinated by are the Red Summers. Black folks, World War I, we come back. [00:28:00] The hundred years of Tulsa, for example, for some folk, this was very provocative. The idea that Black people fought back, that these were veterans of World War I who were in the trenches.

These are some bad men, honorable men, gonna defend their families and their communities, that all across the country we've... Washington, DC, World War I vets forming blockades, building bunkers to protect their neighborhoods. We fought back against the Klan and other white terrorists during Reconstruction and afterwards.

We're always resisting, right? So you've got that narrative, and we make a simple statement. We have the same rights as you. We're gonna... Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We have inalienable human rights, and just like you, we're gonna pick up guns just like you would to defend our freedom.

Why is that, to this day, so frightening and provocative to some?

Speaker 96: When Black folk do self-defense, when they are engaged in self-defense, the response is just sheer raw anger that Black people have the temerity to believe that they have the right to self-defense, and that you then get inordinate state power [00:29:00] raining down on that Black community as a way to say, "No, you don't have the right to self-defense."

This is what we saw in Knoxville. This is what we saw in Elaine, Arkansas. This is what we saw in Colfax, Louisiana. This is what we saw in Hamburg, South Carolina. This is what we saw in Atlanta. No, you do not have the right to self-defense. And it is, again, because when Black is the default threat in American society, that threat does not have the privilege, the honor, the right of self-defense.

That threat must be neutralized. That's the power of anti-Blackness in this society. Basically, the modern day, looking at those kinds of standards for gun rights, stand-your-ground, the right to self-defense, the castle doctrine, the right to self-defense, and open carry, which is the right to bear arms, and looking at these examples of what happens when Black folks believe that they can stand your [00:30:00] ground, or what happens to Black folk who believe that their castle should not be invaded, and what happens to Black folks who believe that they can open carry.

The results are disastrous. The results are fatal.

Speaker 10: President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the suspected shooter was anti-Christian. This is Trump appearing on Fox News Sunday.

Speaker 12: The guy w- is a sick guy. When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians, that's one thing for sure. He hates Christians, a hatred.

Speaker 10: Jeff Sharlet, can you respond?

Speaker 11: It's, a startling and on h- his part savvy claim. He, of course, had access to what we believe to be, it's not even really a manifesto, it's just a statement of intent by this man Cole Allen, and was able to characterize it as anti-Christian, which was then picked up, across right-wing media and, across as well as legacy and mainstream media [00:31:00] declaring this as an anti-Christian, attack.

So when you come to read the document itself, it's startling to see that in fact, Cole Allen understood his mission in very explicitly Christian terms, and not just Christian terms, but terms, familiar, i- if you've ever read the manifestos of abortion clinic bombers, the idea that you can't turn the other cheek when it comes time to save the lives of the innocent, that the Christian imperative to turn the other cheek doesn't apply, i- if lives are on the line.

and he goes further than that. He goes into deeper specificity. he... and a list of five objections that could be made to his, his awful attack, he offers what are in his mind his justifications. and one of them is, "Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar's," and it's a paraphrase of a biblical passage that appears in the Gospels of, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

the idea of render unto Caesar's what is Caesar's. The, the Christians are called upon to defer to the authority of the land. He comes with an [00:32:00] argument that says, "Yeah, but that's not when the leaders of the land are breaking the law," because the land, the Caesar there stands for the law of the land.

And since, these administration officials, are in his mind breaking the law as they are in fact, that he sees this as justification. This is almost the exact same justification used by Vance Bolter, the assassin, the far right, the fascist assassin in Minnesota who killed state legislators.

This is the much the same rhetoric that you'll find and the old language of the Army of God, the, the militia that would attack abortion clinics. He's turning it to different ends, but the last thing you can say is this is anti-Christian.

Speaker 10: In a Sunday opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald headlined America's Burning With Political Violence: It's a Fire that Trump Keeps Stoking, a former White House staffer, Cory Alpert, writes, quote, "Political violence has risen sharply over the past decade, more so than any of the [00:33:00] five moments in US history where a sitting president has been shot, leaving four dead and one gravely wounded.

Donald Trump has been the leading accelerant of that rise, throwing fuel on the fire at every opportunity." Professor Sharlet, can you respond?

Speaker 11: yeah. it, it's indisputable and it's, in fact, the point that far rightists and fascists, make themselves, pointing to the number of assassination attempts he's survived, which is either three or four or five, depending on how you count it, and they can debate amongst themselves.

but I, I think what it points us to is, we're losing the, the usefulness of the term political violence. The better term is violence. As you opened the show, what do we call... I- This is violence. This was a... This was attempted murder, and we can oppose it plainly and simply as that.

what do we call, the boat strike, with which you opened the show, that was barely reported, yesterday? is that political violence? It's [00:34:00] murder. I think what Trump, Trumpism has done has given us a spectacle politics, that has gotten us far past. What we're hearing all these cries, "We mustn't normalize political violence."

That ship has sailed. It is normal, as evidence you can see the number of people who are boasting online, " I didn't really pay attention to this. I was watching something else. I was out being normal." this idea that this is just the humdrum, the boat strike doesn't need to be reported, the shooting in Indiana, as you mentioned, barely reported.

It's just the weather. And I think that is the spectacle of Trumpism, and Trump knows, that weather is good for fascism.

Speaker 10: And what about this issue of gun violence? You just heard Congressmember Khanna calling for a commission on political violence. where does the easy availability of guns, whatever a shooter's political views are, fit into this story, [00:35:00] Jeff?

Speaker 11: w- whatever the number, the latest number is 450 million, maybe 500 million guns in civilian hands in the United States. guns so readily available, such powerful guns. we know this is true, in sit- situations of domestic violence. If there's guns in the house, they're more likely going to be used, and there's gonna be murders committed.

If there's guns there, someone is going to take whatever logic, whatever grievance they have, and apply a gun to it. a gun in the the American vernacular is the cure-all for whatever pro- whatever ails you. I think, again, when you look at the manifesto of, this shooter, what's striking about it is that so much of it is fairly conventional.

People have been combing over his social media. N- nothing really stands out. He was a fan of very many popular liberal and, mostly liberal, some left, websites. and yet then there's that moment where he says, "Okay, but I'm gonna add a gun to this, because I've got a gun." and it, [00:36:00] even through the manifesto, you see him following the logic of his own gun.

He says, "Okay, I'm gonna try and not harm innocent bystanders," or whatever he says. But then at the end he says, "But I will go through anybody. I'll kill anybody to achieve this." Gun in hand, he lets the gun lead him. And it's, we saw it on video, this man charging like he thinks he's an action hero in a movie, with his gun into the ballroom.

A fool on a deadly errand.

Speaker 10: Very quickly, what is being made of, in social media, this, alleged shooter, saying, the man that they now are going to be arraigning today, he was going after Trump administration officials except for Kash Patel, the head of the FBI.

Speaker 11: I have no idea what his intention was.

but, what we're seeing... A- and I get it, the temptation is to read this as a, a joke, like he's owning Kash Patel. and, that's as much the normalization of political violence, of [00:37:00] gun violence, as, I'm thinking of T-shirts and bumper stickers by gun zealots with sexual innuendos around bullets that are too grotesque to say on the air.

To make a joke of guns is to diminish any possibility we ha- ever have of reducing their absolute prevalence, everydayness. They are normalized in our lives. So I think that's what's happening, and I think that's- That's the kind of... That's Trumpism, even if it's an anti-Trumper saying it. It's the idea that all this is just entertainment.

Speaker 10: last question. We just have 30 seconds. We're going on to Sister Helen Prejean responding to the Trump administration reinstating firing squad. But, the shooting took place at the Washington Hilton. The venue, was of course the venue of the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. How does this shooting fit into what you describe as the slow civil war, that [00:38:00] you believe is occurring in the United States, Jeff?

Speaker 11: Yeah, I think the s- the slow civil war is best understood a- as almost like episodic. i- in the same way that what played out on Saturday night was, was, as my colleague Anthea Butler calls it, the story arc of the week in Trumpism. and it will be forgotten by next week.

That's why it's important to remember, to keep tally of all these violent incidents. And by violent incidents, I don't mean shooters, just shooters like this, although certainly them. but to put them in, one long list that includes wars in Iran and Venezuela, the, the, all the bombs sent to Gaza.

To understand that this, to put them into, a conversation with the war on trans folks. All those are part of this slow civil war. This is just one more episode.

it has been breathtaking to see how quickly the West has dismantled itself to sustain its own power and the power of its elites. That I wasn't prepared [00:39:00] for. I didn't really think they meant equality when they spoke about equa-- I didn't really think they meant democracy when they spoke about democracy.

I come from parts of the world where I've seen that not to be true. But I am surprised how phenomenally quickly they cannibalized their own society to protect power. And I think it's not just a dystopian moment, it's really a whiplash moment. We're living through unprecedented change and transparency and exposure, but really we're not built for it.

We're not built to have this level of whiplash every day. Very tough to keep up with it on a daily or hourly basis. What is the cost of this been to your mind and body? I have a friend/colleague doing this type of work about these subjects. He's had multiple heart attacks and he won't stop. He's "Somebody has to do it."

So what has the cost been for you to us? For me personally, I've suffered, I've struggled with anxiety really most of my life. I was a [00:40:00] very young girl. I would get debilitating stomach aches that were fear, that were anxiety and panic attacks really. I suffered them in college. I've really spent a lot of my time being afraid on earth.

And all the coping mechanisms that I spent decades cultivating and understanding and trying to incorporate into my life, they fall apart. They fall apart all the time, but I think that's normal. But I've been surprised by the extent to which, just two weeks before we're talking, I woke up with an anxiety so crushing, I went to my husband and said, "I think I can't breathe."

I said, "I've had panic attacks for years now. We're talking decades. I literally wrote a book about it." Very seriously telling you that I think I'm having a heart attack. He had to tell me, " maybe go to the doctor." And I went to a doctor and said, " I cannot breathe. I don't know this feeling. I'm really worried there's something wrong with my heart."

And the doctor, like I was a 17-year-old again, had to say to me, "I think this might be anxiety." and I [00:41:00] was convinced it wasn't. I was really convinced that I was dying. So I think a fear that is constant, that is unmanageable has been the cost to me. And on the other hand, it feels so ridiculous to say this when there are children dying of cold.

We're in the 21st century. We're talking oceans apart over a phone, a computer, and there's babies dying of hypothermia. I feel so embarrassed to tell you that I'm scared or that I have anxiety because it's nothing. What is it compared to hunger, compared to, a child that doesn't know if their parents are gonna be taken away from them from one morning to the next.

So it, it feels absolutely ludicrous to talk about me or I or us when we see the world as it is. But I do think if there's anything that the experience of talking in community and writing does, it's to build a link between our feeble- worries and puny sorrows to others, to people who are experiencing much [00:42:00] more than us.

It's to transcend divides and gulfs in order to make us feel for people that we might not think about otherwise. So I have to hope whatever we're all feeling, whether it's that heart attack or that nervousness or that worry or, I have to hope that it becomes a fuel, that it galvanizes us, and it pushes us towards some kind of action, some kind of collective action.

I don't know what shape that will take yet, but I know that without it, we're going to be lost. Let's have a moment of synchronicity here. We're not saying anything other folks are not thinking and sharing as well. We're channeling something here. How for yourself have you balanced the need to take care of oneself with feeling the pain of the world?

But on the other hand, I can say, "Boy, there are people being bombed out of existence. There are people who are suffering far more than me, but I'm still feeling what I'm feeling. I still got the fear I got." I think this is in a way a lot of the heartbreak and a lot of the grief that people all around us are feeling, which is we feel a kind of sorrow that is an act of compassion.

It is an act of empathy. It is an [00:43:00] act of suffering because you cannot stop something terrible around you. But at the same time, we also live with this crushing guilt that we are so lucky. We have it so easy, and I personally have never been very good at managing this. Again, it, I think it comes from growing up in an environment where the fate of the world was always right next to us it felt like.

I didn't feel I could say as a child that I was unhappy about something because it was very easy to remind me of the country I lived in and the place I lived in and the time I lived in, and I was lucky. So I didn't really have any reason to complain. But I do struggle. I just, yesterday I had a long day.

I had been a bit ill. I had to travel. I was a bit exhausted. Nothing any of us haven't felt, nothing special. But I was tired, and I was overwhelmed. I got into my bed at night feeling a little bit droopy, and I looked at my phone, and I turned on my social media, which used to be a place that I saw people's salads and summer vacations, and the [00:44:00] first thing I saw was a father mourning his fourteen-year-old boy in Gaza who had been shot by an Israeli sniper.

And I just thought, "What right do I have to feel overwhelmed by anything?" It really shamed me. I don't know, to answer your question. I know we feel what we feel, but I felt really ashamed to feel tired in the face of that kind of violence. And I do think in the end that part of it is a reminder to us that our fate is connected to each other.

Our fate is connected to the world, and what happens in Minneapolis or Minnesota or Ramallah or Pakistan or Greenland at the end of the day can very easily travel to us. Wherever we are. And it really bears remembering that in this moment we live in. It cannot be said enough that your privilege doesn't protect you, your silence doesn't protect you, your comfort doesn't protect you.

Nothing is gonna protect us unless we are willing to face this together. What advice would you give to [00:45:00] folk who are feeling things they never felt before? "I don't know what to do." I would say two things really helped me. The first is that whenever I would start to feel anxious, my body and my system and my teaching was to stop it, to immediately put up a defense against it, to try and confront it by pushing it away.

And with any force, if you are trying to walk into a hurricane, who's gonna win? Not you , the hurricane. Part of what really helped me was understanding that I cannot move a mountain with my hands, and if I'm feeling anxious, to just let that feeling come to me, to welcome it, and to say, "You're coming to me for a reason.

What do you want me to know? What do you want me to feel? I w- I will feel it." And to embrace it in a way. So if I start to get a panic attack again, and I speak as someone who their entire life has had, I'm in my 40s, has had anxiety, I still have to re- remind myself when the anxiety starts to come [00:46:00] to drop my defensive nature and just say, "I'm here, and I'm listening, and you want to tell me something, and you want me to feel something, so I'm gonna feel it."

And that act of surrender is very difficult. It allows you to experience something quite remarkable, which is that the anxiety is like a wave. It will hit you and then wash over you, and it'll leave you. And surrendering to it is part of what allows you to be separated from it. That would be the first thing.

The second thing I would say is what you alluded to earlier, is that you would be absolutely brain-dead and heartless not to feel anxiety at this moment, not to feel a kind of panic and a dread and a worry. And so part of it is to accept it and let it come to you and to embrace the feeling, but the other part is to know that you're not alone, that we are all feeling this.

Every single one of us is walking through their life thinking, "How do I go from here to tomorrow?" [00:47:00] And I think speaking about it, removing some of the stigma, some of the shame, does help. It does allow us to build links to each other instead of isolate ourselves from each other. I have met, 'cause I say hi to everybody, to strangers, to people I see in my daily walks and travels, so I say hi.

I may not know your name, I'll say hi to you, and I love this. You know all the animal people, so I know all the dogs in the neighborhood, all the cats, I talk to the squirrels, to crows. I know the dogs more than the people. The dogs are like, "There's that man. I'ma get belly rubs." And I had an experience about a month and a half ago, one of the few, warm days here, relatively warm here in Chicago.

I'm sitting outside on a bench, 'cause we're going through something, and I feel the pain of the world like you do. If I feel like crying, I cry. Gotta find a way to get it out. I'm sitting on the bench having a particularly rough day. I didn't- Think it was that obvious. And I'm just sitting there trying to meditate.

I don't think this would've happened under other circumstances. This older gentleman walks past me, older meaning late 60s, early 70s. He stops and he looks at me, and he says, 'cause I'm relatively younger than him, he says, "Young man, I can see you're going through something. I'm a very empathetic person, and I'm feeling it, too."

And he said, [00:48:00] "Whatever it is, it'll pass." And we s- ended up talking for 90 minutes, and now we text each other. I don't know if I would've had those types of interactions under better circumstances.

We've just heard clips starting with

Taylor Lorenz who drew a sharp line between the violence mourned by media elites and the daily state violence against Black, immigrant, and disabled communities that goes completely unnamed.

The PBS NewsHour revisited the MOVE bombing as a case where the government dropped a bomb on its own citizens, killing five children, with no criminal charges ever filed against city officials.

Front Burner traced assassination attempts from Andrew Jackson through Reagan to Trump, revealing that assassins consistently fail to achieve the political outcomes they envision.

The Chauncey DeVega Show explored how anti-Blackness embedded in the Second Amendment means that from Dred Scott to Philando Castile, armed Black people are treated as threats to be neutralized.

Democracy Now! challenged Trump's anti-Christian framing of the latest assassination attempt by showing the shooter used the same [00:49:00] biblical justifications found in anti-abortion extremist manifestos.

And The Chauncey DeVega Show also reflected on the crushing anxiety of watching the world's crises unfold daily while urging listeners to channel that pain into collective action rather than isolation.

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

But first, speaking of world crises unfolding daily, I’m just repeating some sad news about our new show, SOLVED! A confluence of events, which we think were largely driven by widespread economic instability, caused such a dramatic cut in ad revenue that it forced us to put SOLVED! on indefinite hiatus. We were already stretching ourselves quite thin trying to build something new and so when Trump threw the world into chaos and marketing dollars dried up in response, we were extremely vulnerable to those shockwaves. Right now, I have to get back to basics and focus on building Best of the Left to be the best it can be with the greatest reach it can. So, that’s where my focus is going to be and [00:50:00] I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops.

Regarding members supporting the show, you really are more and more of what’s getting us through right now so thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations.

If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s important to remind you that each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor to produce.

So, if you get value out of the show and want to support all of the work that goes into it and 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.

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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, you know I like to begin with a story when I can.

In 1893, during the [00:51:00] economic crash, a wireworker named Leon Czolgosz lost his job at a Cleveland mill and was blacklisted for participating in a strike. Over the next eight years he was radicalized by the labor disasters of the era: the Haymarket bombing, the Homestead steel strike, the Pullman strike, and the killings of nineteen Slavic workers by deputies at the Latimer Mines in 1897. By 1898 he'd quit working, moved to his family's farm, and started reading anarchist literature. On September 6, 1901, he walked into the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and shot President William McKinley twice in the abdomen. McKinley died eight days later. Czolgosz was executed six weeks after that. His confession: "I killed President McKinley because I done my duty. I didn't believe one man should have so much service, and another man should have none."[00:52:00]

The political response to McKinley's killing came from two directions. The first was crackdown. Teddy Roosevelt, who became president upon McKinley’s death, signed the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act, the first U.S. law since the Alien and Sedition Acts more than a hundred year prior to question immigrants about their political beliefs. The second was structural accommodation. Roosevelt was already a known progressive when he became McKinley's vice president. In fact, the Republican party bosses had pushed him into that office specifically to bury him politically because VPs traditionally have very little power. Within a few years of being elevated to the presidency, Roosevelt was breaking up monopolies, signing the Pure Food and Drug Act, and intervening in a coal strike on behalf of workers in a way no president had before. He wasn't a labor radical, but the resulting deal raised wages by ten percent and cut the workday from ten to nine hours, defusing what [00:53:00] he feared could turn into "social war."

The historian Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1955, said Roosevelt and the broader Progressive Era reformers might never have been as progressive as they were if they hadn't been trying to fend off more radical movements coming up from below like calls for real socialism rather that just slightly less brutal capitalism. The reforms of Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive era weren't a moral awakening, they were strategic concessions made by an elite that understood crushing the radicals alone wasn't going to keep the lid on. The injustice was becoming too great to justify and the discontent was destined to spread.

When the political class reads that dynamic, they end up with two basic choices: structural accommodation to reduce injustice or build their own fortress to protect them from their own citizens.

When we look at the contemporary version, there’s plenty of injustice that’s being tolerated. Around [00:54:00] 45,000 Americans died from gun violence last year, according to CDC data. A 2020 Yale study in The Lancet estimated that universal healthcare would prevent about 68,000 deaths a year in this country. But those supporting injustice call the lack of universal health care and insurance claim denials market efficiency and the gun deaths are the price of freedom.

We already have a term that captures this dynamic. Stochastic terrorism describes public rhetoric that statistically increases the likelihood of violence without being predictably tied to specific actors. For instance, when Charlie Kirk argued that transgender people are mass shooters, he was statistically increasing the likelihood that someone, somewhere, would attack a trans person, even though no specific attack can be cleanly traced back to him. The same dynamic applies to structural violence. Economic immiseration, denied healthcare, eviction, untreated despair are all conditions [00:55:00] that statistically generate violent reactions over time. We can explain the pattern without endorsing or excusing any individual act. So, we’re anti-violence on this show but we can certainly help explain why it’s continuing to rise in predictable ways.

Now, to the immediate moment. There’s been a third apparent assassination attempt on Trump in less than two years, and his response on 60 Minutes the next day was to use it to argue for his ballroom. He told Norah O'Donnell that the Hilton was "not a particularly secure building," which is why he needed his own.

Nine days later Senator Chuck Grassley released the text of a $72 billion reconciliation package which contained $1 billion specifically earmarked for, quote, "above-ground and below-ground security features" of the East Wing Modernization Project, which is the formal name for Trump's $400 million ballroom. The security request alone is more than twice what the ballroom [00:56:00] itself costs. Grassley's office is arguing the billion isn't technically for the ballroom, while the White House's statement supporting the funding cites the Correspondents' Dinner shooting directly. The whole thing is moving through reconciliation specifically to bypass the filibuster so Democrats can’t block it.

This is happening five months after the same Congress let ACA subsidies expire on January 1, raising premiums an average of 75 percent for 22 million Americans according to KFF. It's happening on the heels of Trump’s Big Ugly Bill, which the Congressional Budget Office scored as adding $4 trillion to the deficit through tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting Medicaid by more than at any time in the program's history. And it's happening less than six months after Congress put 42 million people through 43 days without reliable food assistance during the shutdown, because the administration refused to use [00:57:00] a contingency fund Congress had set aside for exactly that purpose.

Historically, there have been two release valves for these levels of injustice. One is structural accommodation, which means a system that actually works for ordinary people, with regulators that can stop the worst corporate harm and a healthcare system that doesn't kill tens of thousands of people a year because they can't afford to see a doctor. The other is bloodshed. The political class of 1901 made the structural choice partly out of strategic self-preservation, because they understood they couldn't keep crushing people forever.

Some of the wealthiest people in the country can clearly see the same dynamic playing out right now. The tech investor David Friedberg, who co-hosts a podcast called All-In with three other venture capitalists, said this recently. For context, his co-host David Sacks now chairs Trump's science and technology council, and raised $12 million for Trump's campaign back in 2024. [00:58:00] So this isn't a left analysis. This is a billionaire talking to his three billionaire friends.

[CLIP: David Friedberg][00:59:00]

A billionaire on a podcast that's literally hosted Trump in the Oval Office, whose co-host is now chairing his science council, just said out loud that wealth redistribution may be necessary to prevent civil war. We might be frustrated that people like him are only just now coming to this conclusion but it’s better late than never. He’s making the historical argument for accommodation to avoid bloodshed in real time and the fact that it’s coming from the billionaire class is a critical shift.

However, the political party his fellow billionaires fund is making the opposite choice, fortifying the ballroom while the floor underneath everyone else is allowed to crumble.

So, what does real accommodation look like? Most of what insurance companies and corporate landlords are doing right now to maximize profit at the cost of people's [01:00:00] lives isn't actually against the law, people are playing by the rules of the game that are designed to create structural injustice. So, laws need to make that kind of injustice illegal, with regulators funded to enforce them. Healthcare needs to stop being attached to employment, so losing your job doesn't mean losing your insurance. And the donor-funded political corruption needs to be ended so the people writing the rules aren't owned by the people who benefit from them.

But all of this requires people in power who actually want to do it, and in 1901 that's accidentally what we got, because Teddy Roosevelt was already a progressive when the assassination promoted him. There's no Roosevelt in the wings now. JD Vance would govern in essentially the same direction Trump has, and while Trump rode populist discontent into office, every move his administration makes intensifies the conditions producing it.

The only path that runs through accommodating people rather than fortification for the elite is electing and pressuring [01:01:00] real progressive reformers. Not every Democrat fits that bill, but the overwhelming concentration of people willing to do this work is on that side of the aisle. So the work is concrete: support politicians publicly committed to making healthcare universal and restoring labor power, and pressure everyone else in office to either get on that program or get primaried, because primaries are where this fight actually gets decided.

Czolgosz didn't have much when he shot McKinley. No union to support him, and nothing in the institutional landscape that might have given his rage anywhere to go besides violence. The Progressive Era happened, to the limited extent that it happened, partly because there were enough genuine reformers in 1901 to channel the moment when it came. Most of the people in power right now are choosing the fortifications instead but the fortifications plan is always temporary, they never hold indefinitely and so the smart money is always on helping to [01:02:00] make life manageable for people so they never want to grab their pitchfork and march on your fortified compound.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 5 topics today. First up;

Section A, The Framing Wars

Followed by Section B, The Long American Tradition

Section C, State Violence and Anti-Blackness

Section D, The Right-Wing Engine

And Section E, The System and What Comes Next

Speaker: By the time I stopped counting, I had seen more than 50 posts from across the Democratic establishment, senators, House members, governors, mayors, the operators around them, the talking heads who do the amplifying, all hitting the same five beats in more or less the same order: express thanks that no one was harmed, salute law enforcement, classify what happened as political violence, condemn political violence, invoke democracy.

Check your own feed right now. You're gonna [01:03:00] find it. The wording shifts a little. The priorities don't. They all got the same push alert. The first two beats are pro forma these days, like thoughts and prayers, but the last three are different. They're a choice, a particular choice, a coordinated choice, made before anyone could possibly know what had happened, all reaching for the same vocabulary at the same time.

What makes the forced consensus so jarring is how wildly disconnected it is from the actual public conversation. While the establishment locked arms around their script, the rest of the country's feed fractured instantly into two competing realities. The right immediately seized on the chaos to argue this is exactly why Trump needs his $300 million secure ballroom.

Meanwhile, massive segments of our public took one look at the breaking news and immediately asked whether the whole thing was staged. Those competing narratives, a reflexive grift on one side and the deep disbelief on the other, tells you a lot more about the actual state of our democracy than any coordinated social media post.

But here's something worth remembering about presidents getting shot at in [01:04:00] this country. The famous lone wolf cases of the last hundred years or so have mostly not been driven by anything you would call a coherent political program. The clearest example happened at exactly the same place. John Hinckley fired six rounds at Reagan outside the Washington Hilton in 1981, trying to impress Jodie Foster.

The pattern is not necessarily the absence of politics, but maybe the collapse of politics into fixation, pathology, parasocial obsession, and a grandiose belief that one person is the problem and removing them is the answer. The last point is what produces lone wolves. There's a studied psychology to it.

Individuals do not reach for it unless they've decided every other channel is closed to them. Not a- actually closed, but closed in their heads. They've reduced their world to a single face. Remove the face, fix the world. Nobody else is gonna do it, so I will. But as far as resistance history is concerned, it's also the worst possible form of anything you would want to call political violence, and it's not what political violence means inside [01:05:00] any serious resistance.

Lone wolf violence isn't resistance. It's what someone does after he has stopped believing in resistance and collective action. Real resistance understands that abuse of authority is structural, that removing one functionary produces a replacement functionary, that what has to be intervened in is the apparatus itself.

It's in the Declaration of Independence, the right of the people to alter or abolish destructive governments. Not alter or abolish people. Alter or abolish the structure. Direct action is intervention in the abuse, not violence as an outcome. It's making the mechanics of abuse costly, slow, and impossible for the people running it.

Escalation is a calculated tool used only when every permitted channel has been foreclosed. Isolated violence is not how serious resistance movements build the capacity to act at scale, to push back abuse operating at scale, like across a nation. Because it's a strategic disaster. It often triggers crackdown that damage the very movement trying to change the structure.

[01:06:00] Resistance organizers have learned this from history, particularly on the left, and they've learned it expensively. So when Democrats across the establishment reach for political violence within minutes of an event they cannot possibly have understood yet, they're accomplishing two things. First, they're inflating a lone act into a strategic threat that almost certainly was not its origin.

But the bigger point for resistance is the second one. They're flattening the entire spectrum of opposition. By characterizing an armed charge at a hotel checkpoint as political violence, the Democratic establishment creates a massive rhetorical umbrella, but once that umbrella is open, it becomes remarkably easy to sweep any unsanctioned, disruptive political action underneath it, anything they don't filter and organize and promote as their own.

They intentionally conflate the image of chaotic desperation of a lone gunman with the organized strategic escalation of actual resistance movements, the kind of patient structural work that has historically changed conditions in this country. So the intended effect is to preemptively discredit all opposition that isn't theirs.

[01:07:00] They are the legitimate opposition. They are the defenders of democracy. Anyone else, by definition, isn't. They get to call those shots and only them. Whatever anyone else is doing to oppose Trump and MAGA suddenly becomes the exact same thing under the exact same label, condemned in advance by people who have no interest in distinguishing them.

Trump might call it the radical left's political violence, but establishment Democrats don't necessarily disagree with that, because that's not them. They're not the radical left. So if all escalation not related to their election in November is immediately branded as synonymous with unhinged gun violence.

Legitimate resistance is treasonous even before it begins. It traps the non-establishment opposition in a perpetual defensive crouch. They're forced to spend their time joining in with the condemnations, publicly distancing themselves from whatever lone wolf whack job, as Trump called him, just snapped.

The establishment sets the terms, and the opposition is forced to waste its energy proving they aren't the monster. And that leads directly to what I think is the ultimate goal, chilling the opposition. [01:08:00] By demanding that everyone universally condemn the event under the banner of protecting democracy, the establishment aggressively polices the boundaries of what that means.

Anyone who tries to introduce complexity, discuss the systemic failures that drive people to those breaking points, or advocate for structural disruption is immediately painted as a sympathizer to violence. It's a trap. Don't fall for it. They use the fear of being ostracized, the fear of being lumped in with a shooter, to keep the opposition docile, compliant, and safely contained within the permitted channels that the establishment almost completely controls.

So, back to the hard question. Why are Democrats writing the administration's lines for it? Trump's people are reading from virtually the same script. The classification, the condemnation, the democracy invocation, law and order reinforcement. If your political identity and your electoral strategy is built around opposing Trump, wouldn't you pause before parroting language he's using to target the left?

But the Democratic establishment didn't pause. It went straight to it within minutes. [01:09:00] It's because the script serves them too. It centers the people reading from it as the heroes. It positions the security state law and order as the natural response to disorder. And it treats any disruption to the smooth running of the offices they hold as the enemy of democracy itself.

It makes the establishment and the administration and everyone occupying the rooms they are in as the thing democracy is. They might not be defending democracy. They might be actively destroying it. But as far as you plebs are concerned, they are democracy. So you better treat them right. One of the posts from Chris Coons closed with the line, fear cannot win.

Others work the same theme. Urgency, threat, condemnation, unity. And they drive the implication for you scanning it. Not hitting the like or share button makes you part of the problem. And that's deploying fear, not defending you against it. But fear is what makes all these scripts land. Fear is doing their work for them.

Fear is winning every time you repeat it. [01:10:00] Fear is what collapses lone violence, direct action, mass protest, and organized resistance to abusive authority into one category for you to condemn. And fear is what keeps you from asking the more dangerous question. Not about what happened at the Hilton, but whose interests are being served by naming what happened before we really know it.

Speaker 63: we had the terrible shooting at the Catholic school in Minnesota. We've had other attacks. Is there a sense in which... I don't mean Democrats, the left perhaps more generally. The radical left somehow has perhaps been told that Donald Trump is fascist and that Republicans are taking away people's rights and they're trying to destroy democracy.

Has that, do you think, fed this radicalization? Is there a problem, frankly, with some people, some very prominent critics of Donald Trump, who are somehow through their rhetoric perhaps radicalizing and actually encouraging people to go out and commit acts of violence?

Speaker 64: that's certainly a story from the right it's interesting in the episodes that you mentioned just now, you didn't even ask about the Minnesota lawmakers, the sitting [01:11:00] Democrats who were assassinated by MAGA extremists.

And of course, the president didn't ask if there was a problem on the right. The president didn't even bother to lower the nation's flags when these innocent people were, killed or tried to be killed in their homes. the statistics are actually very clear that there's more of a problem with political violence on the right than the left.

But as a Democrat, Jerry, I am not afraid to stand here and condemn whatever violence is coming from the left. I just wish I could hear that from Republicans on the other side.

I wish that even people like you would just say, in the wake of Minnesota, is there a problem with MAGA extremists trying to kill Democrats?

And does the rhetoric that we're hearing from people like Jesse Watters on Fox or the president in the Oval Office or J.D. Vance when he hosted Charlie Kirk's podcast, is that rhetoric contributing to this? there were a lot of polls after January 6th, for example. There was a [01:12:00] December 2021 poll where it said, 40% of Republicans said, quote, "Violence against government is sometimes justified."

Only 23% of Democrats agree. 33% of Republicans agree with the statement that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country. Only 13% of Democrats agree with that. So if we're going to honestly admit that there are problems on both sides, we have to be willing on both sides to actually go after our own base, to police our own.

That's where this should start if we're going to tamp things down. And while I'm a Democrat Unafraid to say that, yes, we need to stop violence on the left. I sure wish I would hear from some Republicans who would take on violence and incitement to violence on the right.

Speaker 63: Since you asked, I will respond and say 100%, I totally condemn.

I frankly hate this phenomenon of both sides, because it actually in the end it somehow is used [01:13:00] to, if not justify, then at least to somehow to lower the moral turpitude of people who do these things when people say both sides. But I think there is, I personally, I do think there's a problem on both sides.

I think that's extremely clear. I didn't mention the terrible murder of the Minnesota state senator because I was saying I think it is a problem on both sides, and I was talking to you particularly as a Democrat. But I think it is absolutely, I think it's a problem. I don't think any of my colleagues on the Wall Street Journal editorial page have been any doubt about that.

We've written about this, and I have certainly condemned on both sides. I think there absolutely is a problem on both sides. We saw the assassination attempts on Donald Trump last year. Whether there is something about the way in which people talk about what Trump is doing that actually creates this mood among a tiny fraction here.

And again, we need to be careful what we're talking about. We're not talking about mainstream Democrats or members of Congress or people like you. But whether or not this is ginning up the sense of a country facing an existential crisis, and when a country faces an existential crisis, people do extreme things.

And I wonder whether just some of that rhetoric from some on the left is [01:14:00] contributing to that.

Speaker 64: You preface your question by talking about the two assassination attempts really on the president. One was a registered Republican who expressed anti-immigrant views and a lot of things aligned with the president.

We don't really know why this is the one who was killed. We don't really know what his motives were. The other was a, an independent who had no clear connection to the left whatsoever, but also no clear connection to the right. So I guess the question I have is why in the wake of this violence, whether it's in the wake of the assassinations in Minnesota or the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Are Republicans unwilling to ask this question if there's a problem on the right?

Speaker 71: Do you think in America there's an overstated fear of political violence?

Speaker 72: I think that there is a dramatic overstatement in the threat that political violence poses to our country and the extent to which Americans actually support political violence.

So there, there are two things that I would say. The first is that the definition of political violence has become very fuzzy. [01:15:00] So it's not just violence committed because of partisanship or because of partisan affiliation. It's much looser. It's violence related to race or gender or other forms of identity.

And surely those are inherently political. There's certainly a political component to all of those, kinds of violence, but it's very different from an assassination attempt on a political leader. So if we're trying to cure political violence in the more, narrow sense, we want to target those who are, willing to attack members of the other party, who are willing to support those who might attack members of the other party.

But if we're to take a larger view of political violence, it might be that we're misdirecting resources. So if we want to stop hate crimes against Asians or if we want to stop hate crimes against African Americans, calling those incidents political violence lumps those acts in with assassination attempts and maybe [01:16:00] misdirects us to focus on the partisan component and not the, institutional racism or not the other factors that are driving race-based crime.

So I, I fear not only that we're overstating the problem, but that we're expanding the label to a point where we're absorbing and perhaps co-opting other really important divides in society.

Speaker 71: Yeah, that's something I hadn't even w- tried to focus on for this episode, and that's, yeah, that's an interesting point.

I, I was gonna... The main thing I was gonna focus on for this was going to be the many surveys and survey int- interpretations that have been shared pretty prominently in the mainstream media and by leaders and activists that state there's high support amongst Americans for political violence. For example, often see in the 20% to 30%, f- framing, but also even 40% sometimes in, in some framings of Americans who, sup- lend, have support for political violence.

But considering the work that you've done and some other work [01:17:00] by, for example, I think it's, Democracy Fund and then another, survey study that I just saw come out recently, tho- those show that it's more like 3%. And maybe you could talk a little bit about the discrepancy there and how you see that discrepancy.

Speaker 72: Yeah. So I think we have to just be very careful when interacting with any polling result that doesn't seem to match reality. So day to day, we don't see much political violence, but if we're to believe that nearly half of the country or a quarter of the country supports partisan violence, it's really hard to reconcile that with what we're observing.

So I think that's the first, real source of concern that I have with these results. But the second is if you actually look at the questions, they're almost designed in a way to inflate, the proportion of Americans who say that they might support partisan violence. So I'll give you a, a couple of examples.

So when we try to measure partisan violence, we try to use very concrete examples. So we're [01:18:00] describing an individual who has committed a crime. We describe what that crime is, and then we ask individuals do they support or oppose what that individual did. So it's very clear in the respondent's mind what they're being asked to evaluate.

But some of the more alarmist work leaves that information out of the question. So instead of describing a specific event, a specific scenario, a specific act of violence, they ask more general questions. "Would you be okay with your party committing violence if your party lost in 2024?" for example. If you think about that question, what does that mean, right?

So what does it mean for your party to commit violence? For some individuals, that might mean going and storming the Capitol. For others, it might mean saying, nasty things on Twitter. It might mean going to protests and really vocally attacking the other side. So by not defining violence, you're allowing individuals to [01:19:00] use their own imagination when they're answering that question.

And it turns out that if you use that very vague question, then you ask a very simple follow-up, "You said that you supported violence," if someone says they supported violence, "What violence do you support?" It's the case that almost 80% will say that they support something that isn't actually violence, right?

So they'll say that they support the examples I was just, I just gave. So saying something nasty on Twitter, or even more importantly, they'll say, " now that I think about it, I don't think I support partisan violence."

Speaker 71: They're venting the... Is it-- They call that expressive response or something like that?

Speaker 72: Yeah. It's expressive responding. So they're mad, and they wanna show that they're mad, and one way to do that is to, signal in answering a question that they're, upset with one side and they're loyal to the other. But the other thing that, that's going on with these questions is that a lot of them are not structured in a way that gets around people who aren't paying attention on surveys.

So if you ask a question [01:20:00] and the response scale or the way that you would answer that question ranges from never to always, and if someone's just, randomly clicking through the questionnaire, if only one option indicates you don't support violence and three options indicate that you do support violence, just randomly clicking is going to inflate the amount of, violence that we researchers are going to measure because three of the four options indicate violence.

So you have a 75% chance of indicating support for violence if you're randomly clicking. So it, it's partially due to the lack of detail, and it's partially due to just really bad methodological choices by some of these researchers. Now, to be fair, they have corrected, some of the, those researchers have corrected that last problem, and that does lead to much smaller estimates of support for partisan violence, though I still think the lack of specificity is in inflating their estimates.

So that takes us from a world where someone's saying 40% or 20% down to a world where they're saying that the actual support [01:21:00] level is around 10%, which I still think is too high, but it's much more reasonable and potentially more credible.

Speaker 71: And, y- I think you found, specifically your work, what was the percentage range you found, and do you think that's pretty accurate when you factor in expressive responding and all that?

Speaker 72: Yeah. So we've been doing this now for almost two years, actually just slightly larger, slightly longer than two years, with 1,000 survey interviews per week, and we're ver- we're able to very precisely estimate support for political violence at around two percentage points. Now, when I say that, it, it seems small, right?

2%, that, that's not something that we should be hugely concerned about. But I think it's really important to contextualize that. So I'm not saying that nobody supports partisan violence. I'm not saying that partisan violence is impossible or that there aren't individuals who are out there willing to destabilize our, who are willing to destabilize our country.

What I'm saying is that it's not the kind of problem where we want to [01:22:00] run massive PSAs during the Super Bowl trying to reach everyone, right? It's the kind of problem where we need to identify who these people are and in- introduce very narrowly tailored and specific interventions aimed at those groups.

So it's not a problem the country is facing. It's a problem that a small portion, a small but reasonably large proportion of the country is facing.

Speaker 71: Yeah, I think it's important too because some people listening to this might think we're downplaying fears of political violence, which, I myself am concerned about those things, especially a- as they can escalate in unforeseen ways too.

But I think the important thing to me is trying to get a realistic and not overstated sense of the problem because having an overstated sense of the problem can lead to its own forms of escalation in escalating fears and animosity and all of these kinds of things and

Speaker 72: yeah. I think something else that's really important to point out is that the kinds of people who are going to commit acts of political violence, are probably not the kind of people who are gonna be completing these surveys in the first [01:23:00] place, right?

So if you're someone who's, suffering a mental health crisis and you're going to go out and attempt to assassinate the president, you're in all likelihood probably not the person that's gonna be completing surveys. So when we're looking at these measures, we're probably not capturing, data from those who intend to actually commit violence themselves.

We're capturing data on those who would approve of someone else engaged in, an act of partisan violence, which also I think really helps to contextualize how bad the problem is. So we don't have 2% of the country that they-- that would be willing to go out themselves and shoot a politician or a, attack someone from the other side.

We have 2% of the country that would say, "You know what? I get it. That was okay," right? That they went out and-- or that someone else went out and did that on behalf of their party. So we certainly don't want to be in a world where that is, a common attitude, but it is important to note that this doesn't mean that we have 8 million Americans who are willing to go out and incite violence in the [01:24:00] streets, which is really important in suggesting that this isn't a group that's going to begin the next civil war.

This is a group that's gonna sit to the side and say, " maybe I would understand if some people, did something terrible."

Speaker 77: the bizarre thing about this is how routine it feels. Another day, another attempt on Trump's life. Have we become so deadened by what's gone on in the second Trump administration that nothing really stuns us anymore?

Speaker 78: I think we have. It is the third attempt on his life, and he likes to believe that it makes him stronger.

Unfortunately, events like this seem to contribute to his personality cult, to his idea that he is a martyr, that he is transforming America, and people who try to stop him are mad. I think a part of him, obviously, being shot at and someone trying to take your life is obviously going to be frightening for anyone.

But part of him, I think, also enjoys the spectacle. Fundamentally, he believes, I think, that attempts this make [01:25:00] him stronger, and it all takes place, of course, in a country that is in thrall to guns. There are over 600 mass shootings every year in the US. I think in 2023, nearly 47,000 people died from gun-related injuries.

It's one of the things about America that's, I think, very hard for us in the UK to grasp just how endemic gun violence is.

Speaker 77: For once, the extremist reactions online are in a weird form of agreement. The crazy left think it's a false flag so that Trump can overturn the block on construction of the ballroom by a federal judge, and the crazy right thinks it proves he needs the ballroom.

And the other bizarre thing is that it just feels for all of this, this shock and this spectacle and this horror, nothing is really going to change. Is it gonna do anything but just turn up the temperature with the crazy people?

Speaker 78: No, I, it drives people to extremes. Trump's personality, Trump's actions drive people to extremes.

And this morning, [01:26:00] the text of the manifesto, which- ... the shooter wrote has emerged via CBS, and it is, an, a quite logical explanation by the shooter as to why he carried this out. He puts forward various arguments against what he decided to do, and as he sees it, he rebuts them. It's quite literate. He, talks about Caesar in it.

He's a clearly pretty intelligent guy. He was a former computer science student at Caltech. But he has clearly been driven mad by what he sees in the Trump administration and by the fact that it's so easy to get hold of guns in the US. And this unfortunately, you can say that assassination has for a long, long time been a part of American politics, going all the way back to the 19th century.

It's always a risk in America. But Trump seems to have intensified this atmosphere of violence.

Speaker 77: A lot of the [01:27:00] reaction has been along the lines of, how could this happen yet again? But it does actually seem that the security operation in the room worked as designed. The protection team reacted within 20 seconds, got the president out, neutralized the attacker.

But the security system around it seems to have been very lacking. No airport security, measures, or rather very laxly enforced airport security, not much of a, of a kind of control area. But it does... weirdly, you're more concerned about what the conspiracists are gonna think than what the real world of rational-based, human beings are gonna think.

Does the fact that the system actually fundamentally worked quite well enable people to, next time you've got your crazy uncle at, Sunday lunch saying, "Oh, it was all staged," to say, "No, hang on. Look, this is very basic. The system worked, and actually it is unsurprising in a country so full of guns that something like this would happen"?

Speaker 78: Yes, it's completely unsurprising. Security did work, and if a president does want to be seen in public, as Trump obviously does, they can never be immune from these attempts on their lives, particularly when, as we discussed [01:28:00] just now, so many people in the US are packing guns at any one time.

Next, Section B, The Long American Tradition

Speaker 90: If you've taken any type of history class, K-12 education or university, you've heard the name John Brown. And before we get into the story as outlined in your book, here's something I'm curious about. Based on your research, what is something that people would be surprised to know about John Brown? If you look at more, traditional Civil War stories that are more pro-Southern, he's looked as really a lunatic or almost a jihadist.

Northern sources, the more contemporary one, looks on John Brown more favorably, but still see him as a bit misguided. And the most pro-John Brown sources or accounts would be someone Malcolm X, who consider hi- considers him a righteous among the nations for the, African American cause in the United States.

But there's different accounts on him, but what is something about John Brown that you think surprises [01:29:00] people that when they learn about?

Speaker 91: Scott, if you'd asked me this question twenty-five years ago, I could have given you a confident answer. And the reason I cannot now is that I have very much less confidence in what I know about what people know about history.

So you ask me, what would surprise people? To answer the question, I need to have an idea of what I think people know. And I've been teaching college students for thirty-five years, and I'll tell you that they tend to know less and less about history. Now, I don't blame my students. the teaching, the curriculum is different.

And I get a lot... I teach at the University of Texas, and I get a lot of international students. For whom, they may have had almost no American history before. But I will say this, that John Brown is this polarizing character. He is... I'm not gonna say he's as polarizing today as he was then, as nobody more polarizing than John Brown in 1859 and 1860 and 1861.

But I will say that there are differences of opinion [01:30:00] on, to put it very bluntly, was the guy crazy or not? And there were motives, there were incentives for people in his day to dismiss him as crazy. Southerners, whose institution of slavery was being attacked by John Brown, they, some of them wanted to say he was crazy, but in fact, that almost let him off too easily because many of them wanted to indict the North, and the Republican Party in particular, for spawning people John Brown.

So if the Republican Party, this is the line of many people in South, the Republican Party is this avowedly anti-slavery party. They're naturally gonna spin off people like John Brown. And you don't have to decide if you take this view, whether John Brown was a lunatic or not. But in either event, he takes up arms, and he tries to incite a race war that, if successful, will certainly [01:31:00] kill hundreds of people, perhaps thousands of people.

So people then, some they had mixed, but I should add that Abraham Lincoln, who's the co-star of my book, he didn't think John Brown was crazy, but he certainly thought John Brown was wrong, misguided, and counterproductive to the very cause that he espoused. Lincoln thought that John Brown was a net negative force in, on, on the, for the cause of freedom.

Because first of all, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry failed. It didn't start the uprising that John Brown wanted, and it didn't free any slaves, which was the point of all of this, and it got John Brown killed. But from Lincoln's perspective, the worst part of it was that it undermined the cause of moderate anti-slavery people Lincoln himself.

Because Lincoln believed, he certainly [01:32:00] hoped, that Southerners eventually, I'm speaking of white Southerners, even especially including white Southern slave owners, the political classes in the South, he hoped they could be persuaded to see that slavery was no longer in their interest, if not in 1860, maybe in 1865, 1870.

Lincoln had seen, he lived through the time when Northern states had abolished slavery. And they had done so out of self-interest, not because anybody else was hectoring to do but because their economies had changed. And Lincoln believed, and he certainly hoped again, that Southern economies would change in the same way, and Southerners would emancipate their own slaves.

Lincoln's belief was this was the only way it could be done constitutionally. It was the only way it could be done legally, and it was the only way it could be done effectively. So Lincoln was one who [01:33:00] he didn't have to decide whether John Brown was crazy or not, but he certainly wanted to distance himself from John Brown because he thought John Brown was a, an evil, an ill force for the anti-slavery movement.

Speaker 107: political violence is nothing new in America, is it?

Speaker 121: I think that's exactly right.

if you look at the full sweep of United States history, more often than not, violence was endemic to political culture. This was certainly never true more than in the 1850s when the contest over slavery, and particularly over its expansion into the western territories, became an all-consuming feature of American politics.

It really stepped up when Congress passed something called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which essentially abrogated a decades-old agreement that slavery would not be permitted in certain territories north of a certain, demarcation line. The situation in Kansas and in Washington became increasingly fraught and violent.

Ultimately, of course, this [01:34:00] concluded, as it almost seems in retrospect it naturally would have, in a civil war by 1861.

Speaker 103: And then Josh, it's Justin in London here. Can I move us forward 100 years, so to the 1950s, and focus not actually on violence itself, but on violent speech and the conspiracies that make people do violent things?

Because it's fair to say, isn't it, and I'm thinking about the John Birch Society, people who said Eisenhower was a communist, the people who said all peculiar things about life in those days. Long, long before social media, w- we did have conspiracies, didn't we, in the US?

Speaker 121: We had them in the 1850s, we had them in the 1950s, certainly.

And if you look at the years leading up to the Kennedy assassination in 1963, there was a very clear escalation of ultra-right, rhetoric and incitement against John Kennedy, against his running mate, Lyndon Johnson. there were, famously, the Birch Society put out posters, wanted posters that, purported to basically be a law enforcement wanted [01:35:00] poster, for John F.

Kennedy, wanted for treason. So that rhetoric obviously, heated the political environment, and, it, it would be hard, it'd be hard to make a case that it didn't contribute to some of the violent political outcomes in the 1960s in the US, from the Kennedy assassinations, plural, to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

Speaker 122: Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. Police have issued an all-points bulletin for a well-dressed young white man seen running from the scene

Speaker 121: One point though that is worth making, and this brings us back to the 1850s, we can look at different decades and different periods when violence was a central component of American politics or when violence, polluted American politics.

What was different about the 1850s and what makes it such an interesting parallel to today is that militia violence was both sanctioned and in some cases egged on and led by elected [01:36:00] political officials or party officials. So what we see today is increasingly much more like what we saw in the 1850s or the 1860s and '70s where a political party has decided that it doesn't mind associating itself loosely with militia groups that are clearly seeking to, to bring violence into the political process, and that's something we haven't seen for some time.

Speaker 103: there are also of course, let's be blunt about it, an awful lot of guns around in modern America, and an awful lot of guns that can do a huge amount of damage. When you look at what's going on at the moment and you look at possibly a post next presidential election system where there is a real fight to be had, at least metaphorically, about whether the system has been fair and who the president is, et cetera, does it worry you the simple access that people have to, to the ability to harm each other?

Speaker 121: I think worry generally speaking about the simple access that Americans have to guns. We're a far more armed country, than we were in, in the 1850s, which raises the stakes. I would argue that there are [01:37:00] other countries in which violence is endemic to politics, but in the United States, you have a heavily armed citizenry, or at least a portion of the citizenry that's heavily armed.

It's extremely worrying.

Speaker 107: Now, we're talking about violent threats and violent acts that are coming from the right wing of American politics and being excused or, mocked and, encouraged by p- politicians on the right. And then of course, there are people saying, "Ah, what about the left? They're, they're not blameless.

There is violence that comes from the left as well." They'll point to, the shooting of, Steve Scalise in, 2017, five years ago, and that was a left-wing attacker.

Speaker 123: Emergency crews rushed injured House Majority Whip Steve Scalise into a helicopter after a shooter opened fire during an early morning baseball practice for congressional Republicans.

Speaker 124: Steve Scalise was on second base, playing second base, fielding balls, and, all of a sudden we heard a li- very loud shot. Everybody thought that sounds like a gun, and the gunman-

Speaker 107: Is there any real equivalence between the amount of violence we've seen driven by left-wing politics and those that are [01:38:00] happening on the right?

Speaker 121: in terms of volume, there's no equivalence whatsoever. There's certainly examples of left-wing violence or threats of violence. There's what happened to Steve Scalise several years ago. there was a left-wing, protester called a terrorist who threatened the safety of the life of Justice Brett Kavanaugh more recently.

And again, pointing back to the 1850s, I think the key question is that violence being done in concert coordination, or at least with the winking support of a major political party? And the fact of the matter is that you didn't have Democratic members of Congress rushing to defend it or call it fake news or argue that there must have been some other reason that Steve Scalise was shot, and we just don't know what that is, but we could speculate wildly about it.

That just didn't happen. And what you have today is a whole complex of conservative media, in- including con- new conservative media, and a rising generation of Republican members of Congress and other elected officials at the state level, the Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert caucus, who openly defend and support, the actions of people on the right [01:39:00] who've perpetrated violence in, in, in the political process.

There have been Republican members of Congress who've come out, and called the January 6th rioters and insurrectionists heroes. there was one Republican congressman who gave one of them a flag. I just don't see the equivalency and the ... where I do see a really clear comparison is to the 1850s, '60s, and '70s when, a political party became increasingly comfortable in its, coexistence with, violent white militias.

Speaker 90: I'd like to take the subject of your book and address a very large philosophical question, is the tension between those who want reform through non-violent violence Lincoln did originally and those who are willing to use violence to achieve their ends John Brown.

This tension has played out all throughout history. you could think of dozens of cases of Martin Luther and the Reformation versus the radical reformers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Gandhi in India versus, let's say, the IRA in Great [01:40:00] Britain, and on. some people say that violence is never justified by its nature, even if it is against an evil cause.

By using violence, you yourself have become evil. Philosophers would call this a deontologist. Others would say if it achieves the greater ends, then it can be justified, a consequentialist. And these questions are being addressed again in 2020 about protest for social change, where some would say that protests must be peaceful, they cannot be violent.

Others would say that violence can be used to achieve our ends. what does this story of the tension between John Brown and Abraham Lincoln do you think says here about the questions of using violence versus not using violence?

Speaker 91: Yeah. So this is an obvious question to pose, es- especially to John Brown or of John Brown.

Were his actions justified? And to come to a conclusion about this, you have to answer yourself, was a civil war necessary to end slavery in the United States? And I don't know the answer to this. None of us knows the answer to this question. A civil war [01:41:00] did occur, and slavery was ended in the context of that.

Would slavery have ended otherwise? I don't know. I'll just point out something for your readers and, for your viewers and listeners, and that is that in 1800, slavery was accepted, was legal in big- nearly every country in the world, and there weren't very many people who were questioning it. It was just something that had been around for thousands of years.

Okay? That's slavery. In 1900 Slavery was legal almost nowhere. A few remnant places in odd parts of the world, but world opinion had changed. Some of this had to do with, I could say maybe a rising level of awareness of what human rights might consist of, but a lot of it had to do with changing economies, and I was talking about a flexible workforce against a non-flexible workforce and so on.

But in this context, it was only in the United States of America, of all those countries in the world that had [01:42:00] slavery in 1800, and none of them had slavery in 1900, it was only in the United States that this massive war was required to end slavery. I have to make a partial exception for Haiti, where slavery was ended, but it was in the context of an anti-colonial revolution as well.

but anyway, that started in the 1790s. But leave aside that exception. So this certainly suggests that there was nothing inherent about slavery that said you have to have a bloodbath to end slavery. Everybody else figured out how to do it peacefully. Even Brazil, where slavery was a lot worse than it was in terms of the conditions that the slaves worked under than the United States, they managed to end it peacefully.

So that makes me think that if decisions had been made differently, then slavery could have ended peacefully. Now, those decisions weren't made, and it wasn't. But if you think, if you do think that slavery could have ended peacefully, then you have to handle [01:43:00] John Brown with real kid gloves because he helped bring on this, what I will now call this unnecessary war in which seven hundred thousand people died.

Now, in his final words, John Brown smuggled a note to his jailer as on his way to be hanged, and the note said that the sins of this country are so great that they cannot be purged except by blood. Now, once the Civil War came, and once the blood started flowing, John Brown seemed like a prophet. And even Abraham Lincoln, who began the war thinking that, this does-- this isn't necessary to end slavery, in his second inaugural address, he said it may be God's will that for every drop of blood drawn by the slaver's lash, another drop of blood must be drawn by the sword before this burden shall pass from us.

So Lincoln was coming around to [01:44:00] John Brown's view of the inevitability of all of this. If you think it was inevitable, then it's easy to embrace John Brown, 'cause you can say the guy was on the right side of history, and he helped move things along. And John Brown, abolitionists, defended John Brown as saying, "Wait, the war over slavery had already begun."

Maybe it began in Kansas. Maybe it began in 1619 when the first slaves arrived in Virginia, because violence was part and parcel of slavery. So for the first time, John Brown is one of the first who's fighting back on behalf of the slaves. So if you wanna like John Brown, and there's a lot to like here because here's a guy who was ahead of his time, and he certainly was on the right side of history.

Pretty much everybody today agrees that the cause of ending slavery was a good cause. But that still raises the question, in a good cause, are all tactics [01:45:00] justifiable? And I would say no. it depends very much on the circumstance, on the context. As a general rule, I would say if you live in a country that still operates under the rule of law, where there is freedom of expression, where there are free elections, if in those countries, then I think it's possible to make an appeal to conscience.

And so I happen to think that Martin Luther King was much more influential in the civil rights revolution in the 1960s than Malcolm X, because King understood that for Black people in America to get their rights, they're gonna have to bring white people on board. There simply aren't enough Black people in America to make the changes in the laws.

And Gandhi, his movement worked in India because there were elections in Britain. Would Gandhi's [01:46:00] nonviolent movement have worked as resistance to Hitler and the Nazis? No. He would've been killed the first time he stood up against the government. so it really depends on the situation. It also depends on how far things have gone.

And, I sincerely believe, and I certainly hope, that the racial tensions in this country and other tensions in this country have gotten us nowhere near the edge of a civil war. but we certainly aren't there yet, and I hope we never get there. if we did get closer to a civil war, then conceivably John Brown's example might be more germane, but we're nowhere near there.

And just one last thing. John Brown had no idea of the consequences of his actions. He wasn't trying to start a civil war in the United States. I hope that John Brown would have been appalled to know that seven hundred thousand people died in [01:47:00] partial consequence to the actions that he took. And if he knew that, and I have no confidence in saying this, if he knew that, maybe he would've, taken pause instead of starting this thing, start that ball rolling.

But nobody knows what the consequences of our actions are gonna be And we can't say, "Okay, time is gonna justify me, and therefore anything I do is fine," because there's a lot, there can be a lot of collateral damage along the way.

Now, Section C, State Violence and Anti-Blackness

Speaker 27: While I was interviewing the survivors, my partners went to the apartment, and when we gathered all the evidence, it turned out that the police had fired 90 shots into the apartment with a submachine gun, shotguns, pistols, and a rifle.

There was only one outgoing shot, and that came from a Panther who had been fatally wounded, and it was a vertical shot, after he was hit himself. So Hanrahan, who was, the police were assigned to the state's attorney, a [01:48:00] politically ambitious law and order prosecutor who wanted to get the political advantage of having attacked and taken out the Panthers, was on the p- on the TV that morning saying the Panthers opened fire.

It turned out we proved that quite to the contrary, it was a poli- it was a shoot in, not a shoot out. What we uncovered years later, we also filed a civil rights suit, after the charges were dropped against the Panthers. And in addition to proving, as I said, that it was a one-sided raid, that the police came in firing, the e- evidence also showed that Fred Hampton was in fact killed with two bullets, parallel bullets fired into his head at point-blank range.

He wasn't killed with the bullets through the walls. But what we uncovered was that the FB- that the FBI had obtained a floor plan of Fred Hampton's apartment. That floor plan was complete with all the furniture, including the bedroom where Hampton and Johnson slept and a rectangle showing the bed. And it turned out that this FBI informant, William O'Neal, and his [01:49:00] control took that floor plan and gave it to Hanrahan's raiders before the raid, so that they came in knowing the layout, knowing where Fred would be sleeping.

And when we looked at the directions of the bullets, in fact, they converged on the bed where Fred Hampton was sleeping that morning

Speaker 22: As I recall, many, a lot of the bullets were shot from the floor below as well? Is, they were-

Speaker 27: No, they were mostly, they were the front door and the back door, and then they took the, one of the machine gun and stitched the wall in the front, and that went through all of the bedrooms- Really

In the apartment.

Speaker 22: And the role of the FBI and of COINTELPRO, the, the FBI's, massive program against dissidents, in the United States, how did you un- uncover that as well?

Speaker 27: First there was a burglary at the Media, Pennsylvania FBI office in which some draft dodgers uncovered that there was this program that talked about, basically it was an attack, on the entire Black movement, and particularly on the Panthers.

And it talked about disrupting, destroy, and neutralizing the Panthers by [01:50:00] any means necessary. And one of their objectives was prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the Black masses. Fred Hampton at 21 was a tremendously charismatic and powerful figure in Chicago. He could talk to welfare mothers, gang kids, and he could talk to law students and college students.

He had the ability to pull people together. you got a little glimpse of that in, in the, in what, the clip that you saw. But he made people believe in themselves. He made people b- feel powerful, and that they could bring about change, and that was his real threat. And so we knew there was this program to, prevent the rise of a messiah.

We knew about the floor plan. Then we uncovered a document that they gave the informant a bonus after the raid because his inva- his information was invaluable to the success of the raid. So internally, the FBI actually took credit for this raid, for the results that Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed.

Speaker 21: Talk about Willie O'Neal.

Speaker 27: William [01:51:00] O'Neal was the... When we, he was uncovered because he became a witness in another case. And I guess, I, we all knew William O'Neal. He was a very flamboyant person, and I guess my idea of an informant was somebody who sits quietly in the corner and takes mental notes.

That was not William O'Neal. He was a provocateur. He built an electric chair that was supposedly to threaten potential informants in the party when he was an informant. He attempted to build what he called a rocket that would go from the Panther office to City Hall until Fred Hampton- Explain

Speaker 21: his position in the Black Panthers.

Speaker 27: He was the chief of security, and at one point he was Fred Hampton's bodyguard, and he was present the night of the raid and left. And there was evidence that Fred Hampton was drugged, and he's never admitted it, but some of that evidence suggests that O'Neal was the one who drugged him the night of the raid.

Speaker 21: I wanna- And- ... ask, just play for a minute a response, get your response to Cook County State's Attorney, Edward Hanrahan. After the raid, he repeatedly claimed the Panthers had [01:52:00] opened fire on the police. This is how he described what happened. The

Speaker 29: immediate violent criminal reaction of the occupants in shooting at announced police officers- emphasizes the extreme viciousness of the Black Panther Party.

So does their refusal to cease firing at the police officers when urged to do so several times.

Speaker 22: that was Ed Hanrahan, the Cook County State's Attorney. your response to him, and also what happened to Hanrahan, as you b- sought to pursue the truth of the murder of Fred Hampton?

Speaker 27: When we gathered the evidence, and you can tell which way a bullet enters from the smaller hole and exits, with a larger hole, and the wood splayed outward, it became clear that, as I said, 90 shots came in, and at most one, a vertical shot, went out.

The Panthers were smart enough to in- invite the community in. The police never sealed it. And the Black community, which had been divided on the Panthers, was not divided on the fact that a young man was murdered in his bed, a young leader, at 4:30 in the morning. So there was [01:53:00] a tremendous reaction, and Hanrahan became defensive and told the story that you just saw.

And later on, he even went further and said, " Fred Hampton personally was firing at the police," and he gave the Chicago Tribune a photograph. The photograph had two black dots on it, and he says, "These are the gunshots that Fred Hampton fired." We invited the press out there. It turns out those dots were nail heads, and I think that was the beginning of the end of, of Edward Hanrahan.

He never got elected to anything again. Even a Republican was elected State's Attorney of Cook County, which was unheard of. He ran for mayor, he ran for congressman, and basically, hi- his political career ended on December 4th, just at the time when I, he thought it would rise.

Speaker 21: Juan, I wanna talk about the overall context, with Jeffrey Haas.

But in 1969, you, you were one of the leaders of the Columbia student protests, one of the founders of the Young Lords. What was the effect 40 years ago today? Where were you, on this day?

Speaker 22: [01:54:00] I remember very well the news coming, about Fred Hampton's death. And of course, a- as you mentioned, his ability to unite people, very few people are aware that Fred Hampton was the original creator of the concept of the Rainbow Coalition- That's right

that Jesse, that a young Jesse Jackson then adopted later because he was building unity between the Black Panthers and the Young Lords and some, white, radical organizations in Chicago, and he called them the Rainbow Coalition, which is- That's right ... what Jesse then adopted, into, as his main, his main program.

But he had this ability to unite all kinds of different groups, r- as you say, racial groups, as well as across economic lines. and in terms of the, the legacy of Hampton, obviously Bobby Rush, who later became a, a congressman, in Chicago, still is a congressman, what has been in Chicago, the way that the political establishment has dealt with the reality of this assassination and of the historical impact, of Fred Hampton?

Speaker 27: I think for one thing it marked the independence of the [01:55:00] Black, political leaders in Chicago who had up until then had been pretty much lackeys of the mayor and the Democratic machine. And a young congress- a young state senator named Harold Washington spoke out, and Danny Davis spoke out, and Jesse Jackson welcomed Bobby Rush.

And all of a sudden you had an independent and much more progressive, Black political machine or part of the machine that w- that, that, was independent. And I think that group and white liberals were given credit for eventually g- electing Harold Washington mayor as Chicago's first Black mayor.

Of course, there's also the legacy that without a young leader, I think the West Side of Chicago degenerated a lot into drugs, and without leaders like Fred Hampton, I think the gangs and the drugs became much more prevalent on the West Side. He was an alternative to that. He talked about serving the community, talked about breakfast programs, educating the people, community control of police.

So I think th- that's unfortunately another legacy of Fred's murder.

Speaker 22: And Jeff Haas, you [01:56:00] talk in the book also about how you, a, a white radical raised in the South, ended up in Chicago that day as part of the People's L- Law Clinic there, working with the Panthers. Could you talk about your own trajectory, and how you got involved in this story?

Speaker 27: I grew up in the South. I came from a progressive family, but also it was a segregated South. And I think being a white person there, we all accommodated ourself in some way to segregation. I think it made cowards o- of us all. When I got to Chicago, I was influenced by what was going on nationally.

Chicago was the hub of all this political activity. You had the Democratic Convention there. Dr. King had marched there. You had the conspiracy trial starting. You had the national office of SDS. All the forces were converging, and I was very much moved by the Black Power movement, the civil rights movement.

So we wanted to be lawyers for the people. We wanted to be... So we started the People's Law Office in a sausage shop. And I think we started it with a sense of collectivity. So it wasn't just me. [01:57:00] There were four or five of us who, from the get-go, worked together. And our mandate was to expose the murders, who the killers were of Fred Hampton.

We did not know that it would take us to J. Edgar Hoover and John Mitchell and the seat of government. But of course, it, it turned out that way. And the more we dug and the more we uncovered, the more interested we got, and the more we realized that this was a, a national program. Some people have compared Hanrahan's group to a local hit squad and ordered but was utilized by the federal government and by Hoover.

And I think unfortunately, or not surprisingly, no one has ever done a day of time for the murder of Fred Hampton for that raid. So I think another legacy is to try to hold our government officials accountable. And interestingly enough, when the Church Committee in the '70s began to investigate COINTELPRO- We have 10 seconds

as well as Watergate, it was Dick Cheney and, and Donald Rumsfeld, Ford's chief aides, who opposed any kind of exposure of this illegality or any kind of restraint on the intelligence committees.

Speaker 94: In [01:58:00] your research and your other work, how do we explain to people what we know empirically from the research? About race and gun ownership and violence, especially stand your ground.

Speaker 96: What we know, for instance, with stand your ground, is that when white kill Black people, that they are 10 times more likely to walk under justifiable homicide than when Blacks kill white under stand your ground.

What we also know is that when white kill Black folk under stand your ground, that they are 281% more likely to walk than when whites kill whites. So when Black are the victims under stand your ground, there is an assumption that the white person was threatened, that this is part of what I call that narrative of Black pathology, that Blacks are vicious, Blacks are criminals, Blacks are inherently violent.

and this is the language we saw coming out of the 1740 Negro Act in South Carolina, inherently criminal. And so as inherently criminal, then you have the right [01:59:00] to protect yourself from these criminals. You have the right to be armed. And I look at it this way as well. We are in a society where we have mass shootings all the time, but you have to ask yourself, "Now, self, why haven't we moved forward in this?

Why haven't we done something about this?" And I really believe it is because of the power of anti-Blackness, the power of seeing Black folks as the threat so that you have to defend yourself from this ominous threat that is all around you. And I look at Jonathan Metzl's Dying of Whiteness, where he lays out that in a study that he's doing in Missouri with white families that have had gun violence in the family, and talking about gun safety laws, and they just are adamant, "No.

No. We have got to hold onto our guns because those people from St. Louis will come down here and try to [02:00:00] take everything that we have." It is that fear of being left defenseless. It is the same fear that George Mason articulated in 1788, being left defenseless before this mass of Black people who are the default threat in American society.

Speaker 94: Jonathan Metzl in that book, you actually hear folk in their own words explaining, I say, their pathology. You had the one white brother say he'd rather die than get Obamacare. Dying of cancer could save his life, and he said, "I'd rather die."

Speaker 96: Yes. That book is so powerful because you see the way that it operates in terms of maintaining the resources and the power for white, and being willing to die in the process for that.

That book, Dying of Whiteness, just lays it out, and that's what the mass of gun violence that we're dealing with really lays out to me as well.

Speaker 94: That point being, so on the right, their exclusive right, they're saying, "If we don't win, we can [02:01:00] use guns. We're white, we're powerful." We're gonna, to quote-unquote, "Defend this country as patriots."

But now you're seeing more Black and brown folks forming their gun clubs and anti-racists forming their gun clubs.

Speaker 96: Negroes with guns, that is the fear because... And now look at it this way. What we're dealing with is a fear of Black power. That is what leads to the massive disfranchisement efforts that we're seeing in voting right, and that is also what is leading to this sense of being willing and able to shoot down Black folk who are armed or who are unarmed.

It is understood that they are a threat. I juxtapose Kyle Rittenhouse, who is the white 17-year-old who crossed state lines to go to a protest march in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a Black man, Jacob Blake, had been shot in the back seven times by police. And Kyle Rittenhouse saw himself there not in terms of protesting with the [02:02:00] protesters, but protecting the property against these people.

And as he sashays up there in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the police see this guy with this AR-15, and they welcome him. They're like, "Oh, we really appreciate you guys being here. Hey, it's hot out here. You want some water?" Rittenhouse then goes and he guns down three men, killing two, seriously wounding a third.

He walks back towards the police with his hands raised as if to surrender, and they go right by him. They don't see threat. Meanwhile, you look at what happened to Tamir Rice in Ohio, also an open-carry state. 12-year-old playing by himself in the park with a toy gun. Now granted, it didn't have the orange tip on it to say, "Hey, I'm a toy," but Ohio is an open-carry state, and the law says as long as you're not pointing it at someone, threatening someone, you are legally able to carry that weapon openly.

Tamir Rice is playing by himself in the [02:03:00] park. Cops roll up, and within two seconds, they gun him down, and they're saying he was a threat. He was dangerous. Kyle Rittenhouse is not a threat, but Tamir Rice is.

Speaker 94: that's the old story of the adultification of Black children and the infantilization of white men.

They even talk about Donald Trump's 40-some-year-old sons as kids.

Speaker 96: Right? And I think about as well, Stand Your Ground, Trayvon Martin, whom they thugified. So you take the real narrative of the story, which is you've got a 17-year-old who goes to a convenience store during the NBA All-Star Game, the halftime, to go get some Skittles and some iced tea, and George Zimmerman sees Trayvon and says, "Oh, this guy looks suspicious, and these kind, they always get away."

And he pulls out his loaded nine millimeter, and he stalks this child through the neighborhood and kills Trayvon. The [02:04:00] story becomes Trayvon was this big, Black, scary guy, grilled up, hoodie up, thugified, dangerous, drug-dealing criminal, all of the language for thugification. They made him taller. They made him heavier.

They darkened his image, and it was like, "Poor George, what was he to do?" So what happens is that you've got a grown man who willingly stalks a child with a loaded weapon and kills that child, and that man walked because Trayvon is this big, Black, scary guy. That's what happens in these narratives.

That's what happens in reality.

Speaker 94: And on that note, thinking about poor Trayvon, and I got all these emails, comments when I did interviews, and I actually believe these people believe this, and I will assume they are white or folks invested in whiteness, "If he had just submitted. Why did he run? If he had just listened."

And I would respond to some of these emails and say, "Number one, he has no obligation to. Why do you have this assumption that someone minding their [02:05:00] business, walking down the street should submit to anybody?" 'Cause if he was white, that wouldn't be the narrative. But again, that assumption of white domination and Black submission.

Speaker 96: So think about Ahmaud Arbery here in Georgia, who was the Black man who was jogging and a group of white men followed him and stopped him and shot him dead. And the language, he was burglarizing, so they criminalized him, and the story that they told did not match up with the video of the killing.

The police had that video but did not move on arresting those men. And you got this, " they were trying to ask him a question. If he had just stopped and answered." Why would he have done that? What is... And this is the narrative, this is the DNA of the slave patrols coming through. The slave patrols had the right to stop Black people wherever they were and question them.

"Where are your papers? Why are you here? Who said you could be out?" The slave [02:06:00] patrols had the right to go into the slave cabin and look for contraband, look for elements of liberation, books, writing paper, weapons, and confiscate them, and this sense of whites having the right to question the presence of Black people wherever Black people are is a legacy of the slave patrols.

Moving on to Section D, The Right-Wing Engine

Speaker 52: two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota were targeted and shot. One, former Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman, was killed along with her husband. The second, State Senator John Hoffman, was severely wounded, along with his wife. Odette, studies have suggested politically motivated violence like this is only increasing in frequency, right?

Speaker 53: Yeah. Elena, you, I'm sure, recall the discussions that we've had on this podcast and elsewhere about election officials experiencing an increase in harassment and abuse. We've talked [02:07:00] about members of Congress. We've seen, reporting from the Capitol Police about increases in harassment and targeting of, public officials.

For this one, w- the people that we know to have been targeted so far, these were state legislators and their families. And so I was able to speak with someone at the Brennan Center, for Justice. They did a survey back in 2023 of hundreds of state legislators to ask, if they were experiencing this harassment and abuse, and they found that across both parties there was a reported increase in threats and intimidation and harassment.

This is something that I think has just gotten woven, unfortunately, into the political fabric of America right now. The baseline level of threats and harassment that local officials, federal officials, and state officials have been experiencing in recent years has been really elevated.

Speaker 52: Is this [02:08:00] something that neatly fits into po- Party lines, along party lines, or is it more nuanced, Odette?

what are the political leanings broadly of the folks who have been targeted compared to the people who are suspected of these violent acts?

Speaker 53: when I spoke with folks at the Brennan Center, they said that there was no distinction in party when it came to people who were receiving this abuse.

both Republican and Democratic legislators were on the receiving end. But there was some really interesting nuance when it came to the source of those threats and the source of those insults. When I asked Gauri Ramachandran, she's the director of elections and security in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, I asked her who was directing this harassment and abuse at those state legislators, and here's some of what she told me.

Speaker 55: We definitely, from Republican legislators in particular, heard about a [02:09:00] lot of intra-party, abuse. we talked to some folks who, pretty much expressed, I got into this 'cause I wanna cut red tape for businesses. I wasn't really planning on addressing these really hot button issues," or, "That, that wasn't really the core thing that drove me into public service."

but we did hear about this in particular from, a number of, members of the Republican Party as there's been some really more extreme elements, extreme positions, on issues like reproductive rights or gun control, gun safety. that, sometimes some of these more traditional Republicans really found themselves, being subject to abuse.

Speaker 53: And so I think, we don't typically think of political violence that way. we usually think of it one side being targeted by the other side. but, as Ramachandran's saying here, actually a lot of it is, happening just within the Republican Party.

Speaker 54: Yeah, and we've seen this for a while now with, Trump in particular.

this is 10 years that Trump has been on the political scene. He's done a full takeover of the Republican Party. He's really fractured the party [02:10:00] in a lot of ways. And with social media, with the anonymity that comes with that sometimes, we've seen a lot more bullying in general, in trying to purify the party's views and to really target and go after people who are seen as RINOs, those Republicans In Name Only, which now are really maybe should be TINO or something because they're Trump In Name Only.

Because they really feel there are a lot of people on the right who are standing in the way of what the MAGA movement wants to do.

Speaker 52: Odette, you've also reported on how a lot of recent political violence, i- including allegedly what we've seen in Minnesota, has religious undertones. what's the connection there?

Speaker 53: Yeah, so I think we have to look at what happened specifically in Minnesota over the weekend. what we've been hearing from Senator Amy Klobuchar, from federal law enforcement today indicate that there was a wider number of people that were supposed targets of this suspect. And that this included people who were reproductive [02:11:00] rights advocates and some women's health clinics.

And so we really ought to be thinking of this within the context of the extreme militant anti-abortion movement in this country, which has always been very closely linked to a far-right Christian militancy. And so what's been a very interesting thing to be learning about the suspect who's been arrested with respect to these shootings is that he appears to have been influenced by something that we refer to now as the New Apostolic Reformation.

And this is a network, a decentralized network of neo-charismatic churches across the country and even across the world. It's very fast-growing right now across the world, and it has been very closely linked as well with President Trump. Some of his innermost circle of advisors come from within this network.

But this is a network that really was on the fringe of the Christian right [02:12:00] up until Trump ran for president. Because they embraced him early, he embraced them and brought them into the center of gravity of the Christian right. Some of what we have seen with videos of this suspect delivering sermons on mission work in Africa suggests that this is the kind of theology that he is part of, and this really represents, a concerning development in terms of real-world violence by somebody who may be affiliated with that network.

Speaker 52: Another figure that has ties to this group is Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, right? Can you explain that?

Speaker 53: Sure, yeah. you'll remember, Elena, there was reporting soon after Mike Johnson was selected as House Speaker about the flag that was flying outside his house office, this white flag with a green pine tree on it called the Appeal to Heaven flag, which really has become a symbol of the Christian nationalist right.

He has said that it was a gift given to him by [02:13:00] Dutch Sheets. Now, Dutch Sheets is a name that is very well known within the New Apostolic Reformation. He's a leading voice within the NAR. And the fact that you now have the Speaker of the House who claims to have a close friendship with Dutch Sheets is quite significant in terms of, that network's proximity to power.

One of the people that is in Trump's, inner circle really is, Pastor Paula White-Cain, who is part of the fabric of these NAR leaders. And, she was appointed earlier this year to be part of the White House Faith Office. And so we're seeing both with House Speaker Johnson and in the White House itself very close proximity of leaders within the NAR network to federal leadership.

McVeigh, to the extent he's remembered, is often described as anti-government and a lone wolf, both of which I think are more wrong than [02:14:00] right. he was not anti all government. He was not an anarchist. He was not someone who was a true lone wolf, like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who was active at the same time, and whose story intersects McVeigh in peculiar ways.

McVeigh was part of a movement. McVeigh was part of the right-wing extremist movement of the r- of the mid-'90s He was someone who was a regular listener to Rush Limbaugh. He was a, a devoted listener to Bill Cooper, a shortwave radio, extremist. He was someone who read the publications of the right wing, the Sol- Soldier of Fortune, The Spotlight.

And perhaps most important, a- he was as motivated... a lot of people know he was motivated by his anger about Waco, but he was just as angry about something that happened on September 13th, 1994, which was Bill Clinton signing the assault [02:15:00] weapons ban. He was absolutely obsessed with fears that the government would, the federal government would take individuals' firearms away.

And the specific inspiration to bomb this building in this way came from this terrible novel called "The Turner Diaries," where, Ear- Earl Turner was the hero in nov- the hero a- and protagonist of "The Turner Diaries," in, in a frenzy of racist and antisemitic violence, sets off a bomb, a truck bomb outside the FBI building in Washington, which in turn sets off a rebellion against the federal government.

This is exactly what McVeigh wanted to replicate. That's why he set off a bomb, in the federal government. But the core of my revisionist view is that he was not some loner, not some anti-government person. He was a right-wing extremist. Okay, I want to ask you [02:16:00] about that. First, let me just say that perhaps the most amazing and important thing about the book is that you are, as you suggested earlier, you have access to these extraordinary records.

So you have the intimate communications, and there were lots of them between McVeigh and his legal team, lots of recordings and writings and the like. So you really are able to reconstruct, I think, better than we've known to date, a lot better. I'm not an expert on this, but a lot better what motivated him, 'cause he talked about it a lot.

But let me just ask you, not a lone wolf, but just to be, just to try to get a better handle on this, he also wasn't a leader of this movem- movement. He was clearly influenced by it. you show "The Turner Diaries," Diaries especially. He was clearly influenced by this right-wing revolutionary movement, but he wasn't...

I would, I came away thinking he was somewhere between a lone wolf and, he was definitely part of the movement. He considered himself [02:17:00] simpatico with the movement, but he seemed more or less to be acting on his own. he was, but that was not for lack of trying. o- one of the key differences between 1995 and let's say January 6th, is the existence of the internet a- and, social media.

McVeigh said to his lawyers in a quote that really stuck with me, is he said to his lawyers, I know there is an army out there, but I was never able to find it." And McVeigh did circulate at gun shows, which was, I think logically, a place where he could look for allies, but he didn't have the personality, the temperament to recruit other people.

He did recruit Terry Nichols. He did have a, a friend, in Arizona named Michael Fortier who was aware of the plot, although not a participant in it. But he didn't have the tools to, recruit others and find like-minded people. [02:18:00] That's the reason why the internet is so important. If you look at January 6th, if you look at the plot to kidnap, Governor Whitmer, which was organized over f- Facebook private chats, if you look at the extremists who shot up the Walmart in El Paso or the grocery store in Buffalo or the synagogue in Pittsburgh or Dylann Roof in South Carolina, all of them were radicalized and found allies, on the internet.

McVeigh didn't have access to that and I think that's the big difference. And, and you're right, he didn't have the allies, but he didn't have the tools that later people had. And yet he seemed to think, and I found this almost unbelievable to the point of crazy, but I'm not in this mindset. He seemed to think quite firmly or hope that this event would spark a revolution.

he literally believed, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that this bombing, or he hoped that the bombing would, through some mechanisms which re- [02:19:00] remain mysterious to me, set off a revolution in the face of these things going on in the country that he detested. For- fortunately, he, he was wrong about that.

But there is no doubt, that he believed that and that came right out of The Turner Diaries because that's what happens in The Turner Diaries, is that the truck bomb at the FBI sets off this counter-revolution. I, I think Jack Mc- McVeigh was certainly not insane in any legal sense.

he was rational. He was someone who knew what he was doing. But he was evil and he was deluded and he was twisted and I think part of what happened In, in, in his own mindset is that the intricate planning for assembling the ingredients and choosing the target and, and figuring out how to make a bomb, the process took over for him, and the [02:20:00] ultimate goal and what might happen afterwards, I think receded some, somewhat.

But, I, I share your befuddlement that, how he thought this would lead to a counter-revolution, but he did. So you open the book, the prologue is called 1776, and you basically show that McVeigh and other right of center domestic terrorists, both then and since, including the ones who, invaded the capital on January 6th, were inspired by and invoke the rhetoric of 1776.

And there's no doubt you document that's true. I wasn't sure what to make of this. What are we to make of this? There's a wonderful book that, that just won the Pulitzer Prize by Jefferson Cowie, called Freedom's Dominion, about, rebellions against the federal government. He focuses on a specific area of Alabama, a county that turns out to be George [02:21:00] Wallace's home county.

And, a-and he talks about how the, the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers is something that ha-has been found to be useful to right-wing extremists, throughout, throughout American history. As for what we're o-obliged to make of it, I don't really know other than the fact that it's a real constant in this right-wing world that, it is not a coincidence that they all fly the Gadsden flag, which is that yellow flag with the snake that says, don't tread on me."

Tim McVeigh had memorized large portions of the Declaration of Independence, not just the famous part, the, the first few lines, but the parts where Thomas Jefferson is justifying violent rebellion against the British. Those lines, from the Declaration of Independence, not familiar to most of us, certainly not to me, were also invoked by [02:22:00] people on January 6th as part of their justification to a-a-attack the Capitol.

I, I, as you say, I don't know exactly what to make of it. Certainly, it doesn't discredit the framers of our country... the Founding Fathers, the framers, because their words have been misused, but their words have been misused in this particular way for a long time, and I think that's worthy of note.

And there is this central idea in the declaration, I'll quote from it, that- Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, basically the consent of the governed, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government. And I assume that's one of the lines that he was inspired by?

That's the main one. That's the main one. And, y- you hear that... A- and that one, again, was, invoked o- on January 6th. the perversity [02:23:00] of, I... it needs hardly be elaborated that, that line does not justify setting off a bomb in front of, with a building full of people.

Those words do not justify attacking the Capitol on January 6th, but they are malleable words that impressionable, already motivated people can use to their own ends.

Speaker 54: the problem is people feel their values are under attack, and when you feel your values are under attack, then it's something that's deeper than just, something that's politics and we can get over that. That's saying, "Fundamentally, these people are bad people who disagree with me."

When we're that highly sorted, we don't know a lot of neighbors who think differently. It's a lot easier to devalue them as human beings, and it's easier to accept what should be intolerable acts.

Speaker 53: I think there's also something very specific about the dehumanizing, rhetoric that exists within the anti-abortion discussion.

and I've spoken about this with [02:24:00] Carol Mason, who is a professor at the University of Kentucky who's studied the rise of the right since the '60s with a focus on anti-abortion violence. and she said that there has been a shift, over the last several decades.

Speaker 60: Opposing abortion used to be seen as a sin, like adultery or blasphemy, but over time it became not just a sin, it became evil, and to some it became the worst evil.

Speaker 53: You hear that language very commonplace right now in, anti-abortion circles on the far right that characterize abortion as a genocidal industry that is about, ritual child sacrifice to demons. this is not uncommon to hear. And so that shift in, the rhetoric around abortion specifically has been itself a radicalized ideology.

and so you get, more potential for people to, say they're gonna take it upon [02:25:00] themselves to stop what to be an un-Christian thing that's occurring.

Speaker 54: And I wonder how you see that thing differently than, for example, you'll hear a lot of people on the right talk about some of the Democratic lawmakers', rhetoric, in talking about, for example, Congressman Mfume, who had earlier this year called for street fights, to be able to push back against DOGE, which he was describing as the Department of Government Evil.

so it's the same term, but is that... Do we see this differently as that just being words as opposed to deeply felt beliefs, on this, more radical extreme right?

Speaker 53: So I think what is important to look at is data around the violence itself, and former, Director of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, has said this in testimony before Congress, "The most persistent and lethal threat has come from the right."

And we've been hearing, especially in recent weeks, about, anti-Semitism and how embedded it is on the far right [02:26:00] and on the far left as well. but the fact is, recent attacks notwithstanding, the most lethal attack on Jews in the United States happened at the Tree of Life, synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and that was somebody that was, on the far right who was motivated by anti-immigrant rhetoric that was happening at the time.

And it is absolutely true that you can see political violence from both sides. You can see dehumanizing rhetoric from both sides, but the body count is disproportionately a result of far-right violence.

Speaker 52: Mm. I wanna just end here a little bit broader. you're talking about this shift that we've seen i- in some of these views, and i- it's, very serious, but is there a way back, is there a way to lower the temperature, so to speak, or stem the tide of misinformation, that's fueling a lot of this violence?

Speaker 54: I think what's really important when it comes to this thing is [02:27:00] leadership, and you need people who are gonna say, "This is not appropriate. Violence is never appropriate," and to really mean it, right?

And to continue to be able to spread that message. we've seen different points of leadership on the campaign trail, in the past where people will stand up to their base and say, "No, that's not appropriate," but we really haven't seen it in the last decade.

Speaker 53: Yeah, I think that it's important that we did see President Trump condemn this violence, after these shootings in Minnesota.

We saw this actually across the political spectrum, that political leaders were doing that. I think, though, that, one of the tricky things about this particular example of political violence is that, you referred to it, Elena, as religious extremism. This more specifically could be referred to as Christian extremism.

And so I think that we need to look to the religious community that, this suspect was tied in with and see what condemnation they are, issuing [02:28:00] around this particular violence and, if there's any reflection about whether or how, the views espoused within that community may have caused it.

And Finally, Section E, The System and What Comes Next

American society normatively metabolizes a tremendous amount of mass death. And part of how we do that is by we conceptually silo it into a variety of categories. We apply narratives, throw blame or responsibility in this catalogic way.

Violence, which is understood to be a thing that is just abstract, though it can maybe sometimes be represented when someone says something that's too offensive or they make some gesture, in a metaphorical way, can be subdivided or exist in relation to this thing called political violence, right?

Which is an interesting thing to think about when we're if someone killing somebody else, if the whole idea of, if the essence of politics is our living together, then when is murder not fucking political? But also that we'll even go so far that, the violence of order maintenance, when cops kill people, et [02:29:00] cetera, gets erased even as a type of violence, or it's treated as non-political.

And, this can go in a lot of different directions, right? But- Because it's the state which is the entity with a l- monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. So even when the state says, "Actually, that cop did wrong," it's a deviation from the legitimacy rather than a, than violence coming from a fundamentally illegitimate actor.

Yeah. It's this odd paradox where, violence is both understood as being entirely necessary to the social order, but also it's the coin of the realm that the state operates, and, maintains the social order. But also we have to disavow its violence, and we understand that violence is continually exceeding its bounds of containment, whether it be in stuff that, police will, when they're, they turn bad apples do, or when they do when they get home, 'cause, we know about the statistics of domestic violence, or, the violence that people who are not enjoying the supposed monopoly in the Weberian sense on the legitimate use of force, right?

more broadly speaking, let's start with this idea of, what we call, gun violence, right? in a, a representative year, well [02:30:00] over 40,000 people are gonna die because of a gunshot. Now, that could be self-inflicted. That could be, immediate, literally they're DOA on the scene, or they die shortly thereafter.

But, in 2022, it's 48,000, of which more than half are gonna be suicides, which means that in a representative year, 18 to 20,000 people are gonna die in, homicides. Most homicides, we should say, are done by people who know the victim of the homicide. So murders by stranger are comparatively rare.

If you're killed by someone who doesn't, know you personally, there's a one in three chance that they're a cop, right? That's another data about this. So also we're just saying that, firearms deaths are- the leading cause or a leading cause of death now for kids, and that more broadly speaking, the toll of Americans who die because of, let's say, this word gunshot outstrips but has long time been on par with other types of death.

But we could see a glimpse of other types of normalization, right? This stuff called car accidents, right? As though they're acts of [02:31:00] nature or God as opposed to outputs of design or driver choices or how even how we build our cities to, quote-unquote, overdoses, right? which can be called deaths of despair, but we don't call them death by Sackler.

Th- but these three ways of killing ourselves and others are continually vying for the top, and gun violence is now th- the winner in that category if you want. So th- that's the broad thing to say here, too. By the same token, we could look at some data about December 4th in particular, and I can, encourage people to check out the Gun Violence Archive, which draws this data from, publicly available news reports.

You can generate your own charts and whatnot, and, per that, I was looking at it before we talked, there are 30 people who were killed by gunshot on December 4th, right? Of whom 24 are not the perpetrators of the incident in question. So in those other cases, the person either shot themselves or were killed by authorities, right?

So 30 people though dead gunshot, and then another 40 people are injured. It's also worth saying, just as a caveat here that the data on how many of those people were killed by, [02:32:00] necessarily by police or other police shootings, that, that's lagging by about a month behind that, so we won't know that until later.

We could get more granular about who shot who on this day, right? We could subdivide it into a variety of categories. A lot of them are domestic, right? They're intimate partner violence. There's a man killing someone who he's involved with generally, and then possibly himself, maybe his kids.

Most cases, yeah, could there-- If you wanna use a term a mass shooting, most of those happen inside, for example, American homes. You also get a couple events that are, let's call them exceptional relative to those more quotidian ones. It's worth saying this on December 4th. In Northern California, a gunman who, appears to have been extremely disturbed and articulated his motives, to whatever extent this matters in terms of trying to impose some child sacrifice on Seventh Day Adventists in retaliation or to deaths in Gaza of Palestinians.

Again, this is-- I'm not making any equivalency. I'm saying this happened on the same day, right? he shoots and injures a five and six-year-old before killing himself, right? This all happened on the same day. [02:33:00] Now, we could look at all these events, and we could probably be descriptively, if you're an alien orbiting Earth, right?

Or if you're tr- again, operating at some level of bracketing, this is a society where people get shot regularly, and it's a society where certain types of people seem to get shot more, and certain other types of people seem to do the shooting more, or at least a situation in which there are tons of guns that circulate, and there's a distinct stratification to how the gunshot fatalities and injuries play out.

Oh, yeah, and we could interpret that as reflecting certain val-values or hierarchies of the society in question. So we could say, for example, that, if someone's gonna go out with a gun and kill a bunch of strangers, probably gonna be a guy. Most likely gonna be a white guy, but not necessarily. If a guy's gonna shoot himsel- if a person's gonna shoot themselves in the den, overwhelming likelihood it's gonna be a man.

We could make-- In other words, read an entire actuarial calculus of relative value and [02:34:00] disposability, but also relative access to, the prerogative to wield a gun to end someone's life, whether your own or theirs, as reflecting, the hierarchies of American racial capitalism, right?

And its patriarchal f- foundations, et cetera. This is a system of generalized human disposability that reflects certain basic hierarchies, but also there are enough guns circulating that sometimes you're gonna get stuff this guy going into the-- breaking containment, going into that sc- that school and killing those two kids.

Now, again, I'm not trying to collapse these different shootings or different kinds of shootings into one or another, but rather to be to say it's striking that some of this gun violence gets understood to be political, some of it's understood to be not political, or some of it's understood to be just, personal, but has to be dealt with under the political discourse that we call gun control.

These are all these styling mechanisms. Now, there's-- I'm already engaged in an artificial distinction here, though, too, because this, in addition to being a problem of fatalities, is a problem of injuries that does also have an extensive rapport with the healthcare system, too, right? So let me just throw a couple-- a little bit more empirics about this, too.

And just think, forty people injured in that day. [02:35:00] Let's say in an average year between, two thousand and nineteen and twenty seventeen, we're looking at about eighty-five thousand emergency room visits from people who have been injured by a gunshot. At a minimum, and this is the Government Accountability Office, not including, physician fees and many other data, Americans are spending a billion dollars a year at minimum on hospital care in the immediate aftermath of a gunshot.

And what we should say here, though, is, again, this-- note this these-- the mental categories we think about these things. someone's shot, are they wounded or they're gonna get better? Are they killed? They're done, right? No, many people will spend their entire lives debilitated or struggling with gunshot injuries, right?

They don't go away. In fact, they keep re-encountering in the healthcare system, right? And then you have to start doing complicated costs involving-- And again, I'm not reducing these to costs, but I'm trying to give us one way of thinking about the enormity of this problem and its ramification.

The leading cohort [02:36:00] of, a firearm injuries are, young people. What's the cost of care if you're exposed to, say, if you're wounded as a child, right? How much is going to be spent, quote-unquote, "on care"? At that point The numbers can, if you extend to lifetime and you adjust for average life expectancy, et cetera, a human being can be, the object of expenditure or be on the hook for, depending how it cashes out for, $20 million.

If you start factoring in things lost work benefits, hours, et cetera, or people, who are paying this out of Medicare, taxpayer burden, et cetera, you get estimates of nearly $78 to $80 billion for firearms injury in any given year. Again, the causal links here and the data are hard to work with, but this one system of, human liquidation is also a system of, human debilitation and injury that intersects with this other system.

We call it care, but that is also about managing and [02:37:00] putting a price on the basic needs for people who have still res- who are s- for whom the trauma of their gunshot wounding is not in the past.

Speaker 98: One small state of the culture observation on last night. Shortly after leaving the Hilton, where a gunman attempted to enter the room in which the president, vice president, and several caval- cabinet members, congressmen, dignitaries, business executives, and hundreds of America's leading journalists were gathered, I went to a bar with a small group of colleagues to touch base, get our bearings, and ideally watch the news coverage.

When I lived in Washington a decade ago, bars like this one usually had at least one TV tuned to CNN or Fox News. These TVs were on a hockey game, and no one in the bar seemed aware of what had just taken place mere blocks away. We asked a bartender- Oh ... to change the channel to CNN so we could watch the president's briefing with captions, which they did.

But then a few minutes later, the bartender said he'd been informed by the manager that the bar had a policy against showing political content, and he'd have to go back to sports. I tried to imagine what this bar might have looked like on March 30th, 1981, an hour or so after Hinckley [02:38:00] fired shots at Reagan at the very same hotel.

I imagine every television would've been on CNN or wall-to-the-wall special coverage on the broadcast networks, and that passersby would've come in to watch as well. The media is giving this ample coverage it deserves, but it's unnerving how desensitized so many people have become to shootings, obviously, but also to political violence and the abnormality of the moment.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we just picked the wrong bar, but I doubt it. Pew Research recently reported that the attention to newes- news in the US has declined across all age groups since 2016, and that young adults have consistently the, had the lowest levels. Go, going on, he says here, "And I

Speaker 99: sup-" Mother, motherfucker, you made the sandwich.

Speaker 98: Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose this is how you find yourself in a bar in the nation's capital an hour after crouching behind a chair as Secret Service members evacuate the President of the United States from a room- Ugh, spare me ... being told that you have to watch Penguins versus Flyers. Yes, Dylan, you do have to watch Penguins-Flyers- Yeah

or Nuggets-Wolves, or any of the great NHL or NBA playoff action that's going on right now. Sorry everyone's so [02:39:00] desensitized to this, but, we've... As we've mentioned on the show, this is the third time someone has tried to do this. Nothing happened- No, it's

Speaker 100: the Fourth? It's technically the fourth.

Yeah, you're

Speaker 98: right.

Speaker 100: That's what I was gonna say earlier There was also a guy who went to Mar-a-Lago- Oh, yeah ... who was another former Trump fan turned- Yeah ... trump enemy, lovers to haters arc, w- that, that got blasted by Secret Service 'cause he walked up with a shotgun to Mar-a-Lago with, Molotov cocktails or something, like incendiary explosive devices, and we forgot about it.

That didn't even make a blip in the media because Trump seemingly is, on the verge of death by one of their, one of his former fans at any given moment. Yeah. literally anywhere he goes, there's If he sees, a weird-looking white boy w- who's just, looking at him strange, I would be worried if I was Trump.

Yeah.

Speaker 99: And that's talk about needle in a stack of needles. But I... by the way, I didn't think any article could be more pointless than that one we read about that fucking stupid conservative lady who goes to a restaurant and doesn't eat anything. This is even [02:40:00] worse. This is... oh, I don't know how people cannot be paying attention to the news when there's great articles like this.

... loser and loser friends go to bar, where CNN is gone. Yeah. How are they not... How is... how are people not spending $20,000 a year on subscriptions- But ... with content like this? But also, yeah, fourth assassination attempt. It's very fucking rich though, especially for the American media, to go, it's really fucking, unsettling how desensitized, people are to violence."

Speaker 98: Exactly. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 99: Oh, yeah. Yeah. By, by the way, that, hospital that g- got blown up, that was a Hamas missile. That, girl's school, that was an Iranian missile, and also, all the casualties are fake. Yeah ... only, Yeah, actually only, 50,000 people died i- in fucking Gaza, and they like it anyway.

Yeah. They like doing it, and have- Yeah ... more militants.

Speaker 98: We are o- obviously a culture totally awash in insane violence every day. And, for the most part, it doesn't really touch our lives. you go to this bar and people... He's "I was crouching under a table as Secret Service escorted the [02:41:00] cabinet out," blah, blah, blah.

Oh, poor you. And it's just, everyone in the bar is "Wake me when they actually kill this fucker, otherwise- Yeah ... we got Bruin Sabres on right now."

Speaker 99: Yeah, and it... By the way, that is, there is so much sneaky language in this. Yeah. But, "Half an hour after, I was crouching under a chair."

Speaker 98: No one

Speaker 99: cares. Because it's he knows if he said, "Fearing for my life"- ... everyone would just be Yeah ... "Okay, jerk off."

Speaker 98: Yeah.

Speaker 99: But, wh- okay, why is the bar supposed to put on the most boring... wh- where they put CNN on? Waiting rooms and airports because they want you to be, they don't want you-

Speaker 98: lulled into,

Speaker 99: Yeah

a

Speaker 98: passive-

Speaker 99: It's a- Yeah ... natural depressant.

Speaker 98: Yeah.

Speaker 99: It brings you down. It's if they played something exciting, if they played, if they even played, the Lethal Weapon with Keanu and Ivory Wayans, that series in waiting rooms-

Speaker 98: The TV series,

Speaker 99: yeah. Yeah, the, the scene from The Pit where the guy just clocks the nurse, that would happen every day-

Speaker 98: Yeah

Speaker 99: to every doctor. if they played it in airports, it would be the 1970s. Every plane's getting hijacked. But because these are they bring [02:42:00] you down, it, it, it, it makes everyone compliant. A bar is, that is a time for merriment and joy.

Speaker 98: Yeah.

Speaker 99: Not to be brought down, not to be treated as cattle.

There is no, there, there is no man with, transit- transition lenses that needs to touch your genitals at the bar. So you don't need to be brought down and herded like a cow with CNN, Dylan. get out of here.

Speaker 100: You brought this up already, but, it's ultraviolence everywhere. the American media is very clearly super comfortable engaging in military action, deposing leaders.

Speaker 98: Assassinations. Yeah,

Speaker 100: assassinations. Kidnapping. Yeah.

Speaker 98: Torture, rape.

Speaker 100: Yeah, all of that stuff. go down the list. Against- A

Speaker 98: Clockwork Orange shit.

Speaker 100: Against foreign heads of state- yeah ... including little children at school, and there's this, normalization of all of that violence. But then also on top of that, we have a very violent culture here in the United States as well, where, there's a mass shooting happening on a daily basis in this country.

there's school shootings that [02:43:00] take place so frequently it... and at this point, the average American is just "Yeah, I guess it's just a part of life." The only thing that's extraordinary about what's taking place when, Charlie Kirk is assassinated, is the targets. For the first time ever, if it's the, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson or Charlie Kirk- people are now deciding to go after higher visibility, higher priority targets, or trying to attempt a, an insane assassination attempt on the president, as opposed to murdering their immediate loved ones, right?

Speaker 99: Yeah,

Speaker 100: it- Which there's still a good deal of that happening on the background as well. We don't even care about it. Yeah,

Speaker 99: but it- it's it- it does, it's a companion piece. The, the problem that the Republican Party and the conservative movement in general has been having, where they can no longer reconcile this idea of "Okay, we can be horribly, viciously racist to everyone, except Jews," because they're they're, the- that's above everyone else that, that they are now running headlong into how unsustainable that is.

How, how you can just [02:44:00] not do that now. and maybe it was... it never was truly sustainable in any medium or long run. The same thing happens when, people who die due to the hyper-maximal profit- profiteering of the American healthcare system, the, the gears of the American empire, all these people are killed day in, day out, mass slaughter, thousands at a time.

it, it happens so much they just purely become numbers, and any change to that, any even small marginal reformist adjustm- adjustment where it's okay, I don't, I don't think that it should cost $150,000 to be in the hospital one day. I don't think that we should, we should have these fucking carrier groups all over the place, able to strike and kill thousands at a time at moment's notice.

No, we can't do that just because of the way things work. sorry. Sorry, there's no avenue for- Felix- There's no avenue for this in political change, and if you keep telling people that, eventually they're gonna go, "Oh, okay."

Speaker 98: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 99: Bing.

Speaker 98: That's what I said, [02:45:00] left, center in this country, everyone has just basically come to the conclusion that, all that's left to do is just fantasize about Donald Trump being killed or die- or dying of natural causes.

Yeah. But, that's the only solution to the problem of him being president. If you- And, to your point, Felix, Kelsey Piper in her attack on, Hasan here, she described the, the... everyone who was killed by the American healthcare industry, she described that as, quote, "suboptimal policy."

Oh. Good to know. It's that's the most... that, from the effective altruist, abundance lives, that is the most Stalinist thing you could possibly say. one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

Speaker 99: Yeah. i- if you keep telling people, "Yeah, sorry, there's just, maybe in 30 years- Yeah

it can get slightly better," what the fuck do you think is going to happen eventually?

Speaker 67: you and I started talking about, I can't remember, it might've been a year ago, maybe a year and a half, it was when the, Abe, the former prime minister of Japan, got assassinated.

And I had said we're entering into a territory where there's going to be not just more political violence, but probably targeted assassinations, right? So one of the things that I look for as a, as an analyst, I lo- I spend a lot of time reading [02:46:00] manifestos. I spend a lot of time studying people who carry out political violence, who are assassins, because they're very good signals of the political economy and temperature, right?

Who are they? Why do they do it? What background do they come from? How do they present themselves? Nick, Cole Allen, again, allegedly the, the attempted assassin. This was a 31-year-old man from California. He got degrees from Caltech. he was a NASA intern. He was a teacher. the manifesto that he published, he apologized to his friends, family, and colleagues and students.

He made a vigorous Christian argument saying, he, he considers himself a Christian. He said, quote, "Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I'm not the person raped in a detention camp. I'm not a fisherman executed without trial. I'm not a school kid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.

Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppo- oppressed is [02:47:00] not Christian behavior, it's complicit-complicity." He also says, "Why did I do this?" Quote, "I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflect on me, and I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, coat my hands with his crimes."

So here's the thing, Nick, and this is the larger conversation to have. This manifesto comes out. It seems written by a grounded, rational person who has a motivation and an ethical and moral obligation within themselves to do something. This person does not-- I have not heard anything about him being unwell.

Maybe we'll hear that he was very quiet and kept to himself. we... This is often how these things are done. On top of that, I don't see anything in here, to be honest with you, that seems some an extremist philosophy. It might be extreme within liberal democracy, but he's not wrong about the crimes that the Trump administration has committed and that normal people of conscience should stand up to it.

So [02:48:00] then that asks us a question, while it also makes it clear, it gives us a signal that the state of play that we're living in has changed, which is: What do you do if you are a person with ethical and moral obligations, if you are living underneath a violent, fascistic dictatorship, more or less, in which representative government is corrupted, there's not an opposition party that you can believe in, and every single day people are dying or suffering?

It then offers a question, which is a question every time it's asked in the United States of America in its history, it leads to massive change. So this being presented to us, I think, is a game changer of a situation that I don't think most people are wrapping their heads around the importance of

Speaker 68: I, I agree.

I, I think in a functioning democracy, what you're supposed to do is lobby for, change and get people organized- Yeah ... and use your vote. that's really what is supposed to happen. And it, in, in fits and starts that's been successful across the, our history of our country. [02:49:00] But, it's easy to see why, you could look around and say, "That's, that was just simply doesn't work anymore," and that's what he was saying.

And I'm glad that he brought, more attention to the detention camps. I l- I'm remiss that we don't talk very much about it either because it's a story that's just not being covered. Yep. What's going on right now with people who have been detained here, and immigrants who have been contained here, it's, it is torture, and nobody's doing anything about it.

And that is a, if you feel strongly enough about it, it's not hard to follow the path that he would've taken. whatever. that said, to at least to get to the point where it feels as desperate as he felt, clearly, and without it being any mental illness per se, right?

That's the difference here, right? Obviously there's gonna be something we have to discuss where he's willing to basically sacrifice his entire life for this. Yep. and that's, that is related to something. But, it's not foreign. I can follow that path pretty easily, and it's, it's frustratingly

Speaker 67: and I think there's a couple of things to talk about here, very large things. And, and for the record, I've been looking forward to having this conversation with you because you're not just my podcast co-host. You are my friend, and we're [02:50:00] moving through this political environment together.

We've been doing this for years now. One of the reasons that we do this is to make sense of these things- ... right? And to chart where we are and where things are going. I would argue that one of the main theses of this project that you and I have been embarked on is chronicling the fascistic growth in the United States of America with the decline of American empire and what that means for us.

Anticipating where things are going and hopefully finding places to get off of a certain track. I wanna lay my cards on the table, Nick. You just brought up these concentration camps that are being built around the country. If a story came up tomorrow that somebody set one on fire, I wouldn't lose sleep.

I, I wouldn't feel bad. I wouldn't be upset about it. I wouldn't get on here and be like, " private property is private property." That's bullshit. That's not how this works. If I heard that, somebody had I don't know, sabotaged a plane that was going to deport people and send them to El Salvador to some [02:51:00] dystopian hell camp, I wouldn't lose sleep about that, right?

When we get to this, a person who seems like it's not that they're unwell, it's not that they're a lone nut, when it is a pretty middle-of-the-road liberal who says- ... "I can't just stand by and let this happen anymore." And by the way, he didn't even mention this, Nick. Estimates are right now that the starving, starvation deaths after the dismantling of USAID are as high as 750,000 human beings 750,000 human beings- that have starved to death because USAID was, cut off. On top of that, listen, you and I don't like to give flowers to George W. Bush. In fact, the soul repels against it. But one of the best things that George W. Bush ever did, I would argue probably the best thing he ever did, was set up aid and HIV relief for Africa.

And what's happening right now since the Trump administration got rid of it, AIDS and HIV are blowing up in Africa. It's going to lead to God knows [02:52:00] how much suffering and how much death. At some point or another, the apparatus and system of liberal democracy, if it's not kept in check with regulation, it gets corrupted and it starts to die.

Why do we have a legal system, Nick? We have a legal system to keep people from perpetrating violence against each other. Why do we have representative government? In order to give people a sense that they are able to change things and have representation so that they don't give up on having agency. If you start to take those things away, and am I wrong that they've been taken away?

Speaker 68: They have.

Speaker 67: They've been taken away. The, our judicial system is corrupted. Our representative democracy is corrupted. You take all of those things away, you have fascists who are killing people and who are hurting people. All of a sudden, people of conscience will start asking themselves, "Is it my responsibility as a person with conscience to interact with that?"

And it appears that this Cole Allen person [02:53:00] allegedly made the decision with, it seems like mental clarity, that it's time for people with a conscience to- ... engage with this and to use physical violence as a means of trying to set the record straight. That is a massive change and a massive moment that we've only experienced a few times in this country.

And if that's where we are, then we are at a crossroads between, two very different futures.

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;

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The Bunker

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The Lawfare Podcast

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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 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: 05-06-2026

Full Show Notes

Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine how the U.S. war on Iran is producing an economic crisis with echoes of the 1970s stagflation era which explains why Trump is now less popular on inflation than Jimmy Carter. We'll also be exploring various element of the structure of our economy, including how GDP became a deeply misleading measure of welfare, why consumer spending increasingly goes toward things people don't want to buy, and how gambling and junk fees are literally counted as economic growth.

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

All In with Chris Hayes

Economic Update 

The NPR Politics Podcast

The Brian Lehrer Show

THE DAILY BLAST 

and Pitchfork Economics 

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

Section A, The Pump and the War

Section B, Lies, Spin, and the Roaring Economy

Section C, The Boomcession

Section D, What This Costs Real People

And now, on to the show.

BRIAN: Let's start with Friday's inflation report for the month of March.

Do you agree with that Washington Post headline, Trump faces surging inflation report fueled by Iran Conflict. 

GUEST: I do, the numbers were very clear. We had a full percentage point increase in the headline inflation. And that's really unusual to get such a jump in one month. Moreover, if you look forward, we will get another jump in the headline inflation.

The other interesting thing is there's a second measure, as you know, called core inflation that tries to. Exclude the, the very volatile energy and food prices and that did not move very much. I don't think that's gonna last. So I think what you're gonna see going forward is not just headline inflation being driven by energy prices, but we're gonna start seeing a broader inflationary process take hold.[00:02:00] 

BRIAN: Why? 

GUEST: Because first it's way beyond energy, what the prices that are being disrupted, the supply. Lines that are being disrupted, speak to a number of other things. Fertilizers, which will, will speak to food prices, aluminum. So there's a set of other products that are being disrupted in terms of supply.

And second energy has a way. Of encouraging what economists call co cost push inflation, but simply your costs go up as, as a producer, as a restaurant, and you decide, i'm gonna pass that on to my consumers. I'm not gonna take the hit on my own. And if oil prices and gas prices stay high for a while.

More and more companies will pass on that, hit two households in different ways. 

BRIAN: How much do you think this is inevitable, what you were just [00:03:00] describing or already baked in? Even if, let's say they were to come to a peace agreement tomorrow, 

GUEST: Brian, there's an economic logic that is very, very clear.

When you get the sorts of supply disruptions associated with the war, the first thing that moves are energy prices and interest rates. So the average person pays more at the pump, and if you try to get a mortgage, the cost of your mortgage has gone up. That's phase one. That's done phase two, which we are in the midst of, and it is a done deal.

Is that you start seeing the increase in very selective things, energy and mortgages starting to spread through the economy, so you have a broader hit that takes longer to overcome Stage three, which thankfully the US is not in. [00:04:00] But Asia and Europe are looking, are staring at the face of it. 

BRIAN: Ah. Hold that.

Hold that for just a second because this is, this relates to the clip that I mentioned in the intro of your appearance on Marketplace that we aired last week, citing four stages of economic harm from the war. And you've just touched on the first two as they pertain to the United States. I wanna replay numbers three and four now, which sound more global and much more scary.

And then I'll invite you to expound on them. This is you from last week. 

GUEST: Parts of Asia unfortunately, have moved to phase three, which is not only do you get phase one and phase two, but you also get demand destruction. So you start worrying about economic growth. And of course, phase four, which I hope we never get to, would be financial instability, undermining the economy.

BRIAN: That's part of what made me think, okay, I gotta talk to this guy in more depth, in a longer segment on the show. So take us further into that. [00:05:00] What's happening in Asia or elsewhere that you're referring to there? 

GUEST: So in Asia, ships practically have come out of the Strait for about six weeks. And what they are looking at is not just high energy prices.

But a potential disruption in actual availability of fuel. And think a little bit of how you would react, Brian if suddenly someone tells you, you, it's not that you're gonna pay more at the pump, but it's not clear that the gas station will be open. That would, that changes behavior. We found that when you go from, from a price shock to a quantity shock, the risk of tipping points.

Increases meaning that you start seeing damage to economic growth to economic activity. And that is a much bigger hit to the economy. And the minute that happens, then you start weighing about default phase, which is financial [00:06:00] instability. There is a, an economic logic that. I suspect 99.9% of economists would tell you yes, that's absolutely the case.

The question is how quickly do you go through it? What are the tipping points and what are the circuit breakers? And that goes back to your question, what if the war ends to end tomorrow? Well, it will take us some time to restore production of energy in the Middle East. It would take us some time to get the ships in the right place.

It's not like a light switch. You don't switch it back on and everything comes on, it takes some time. Mm-hmm. But we would be stuck with the phase one and phase two, but we would avoid phase three and phase four. 

BRIAN: On this phase three that you said some countries in Asia have already moved into, I've heard a theory that that's why Pakistan was eager to broker these peace talks because their economy is being hit so hard by the war.

Does that sound right to you? 

GUEST: That may be a reason. It certainly also [00:07:00] explains the, the reporting why China pushed Iran to agree to the two week cease fire, fearing that there are worse things ahead. The rest of the world is really concerned. I think here in the US we are lucky beca because we have energy independence.

We are an exporter of energy. The rest of the world is mostly an import of energy, and I can tell you the, the extent of economic concern is a magnitude higher than it is here. 

BRIAN: What are the impacts on China that would've led them to pressure Iran to get involved in the talks? 

GUEST: So they are worried that they're gonna lose their second supplier of cheap oil.

The first one was Venezuela, because both Venezuela and. Iran are subject to sanctions. China has been able to buy oil from them at a significant discount estimated to about 30% of [00:08:00] the international price. India also has taken advantage of that, so they risk losing their second supplier, not just of oil, but of cheap oil relative to their alternative.

Now. As you know, the Chinese tend to plan, so they have one of the highest storage levels in the world. They've been accelerating not only the transition to green tech, but they've also restarted coal mines. So they, they have taken some steps to protect themselves, but they are looking at disrupted supply of oil and higher prices.

Of oil and it's sign significantly higher. And that's where the economic concern comes in over what's been going on between the us, Israel, and Iran 

It's like a mess of jigsaw puzzle, isn't it? What are the key interventions that need to change to create a circular shift in that market, in that city? How do we [00:09:00] finance that and how do we make the most of that opportunity and then become the challenges that we're seeing? What do you really need to get right?

What are banks doing? What are investors doing? What kind of innovation is being financed? What are the opportunities like? What's really growing? What is this concept? How do we grab the opportunity of it? Why are we not seeing a broader shift across the economy? As a whole, welcome to the Circular Economy Show.

Today I'm thrilled to be joined by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Strategic Finance and Investment Team, Emily Healy and Joe Rogers. In this episode, we're asking why is it that despite the success of individuals circular business models, we aren't seeing a wider shift across the entire economy? We'll explore how systemic investing and capital orchestration could be the tools we need to take this transition forward.

And we'll be looking at where we are currently seeing this sinking brought into on the ground real life demonstration projects.[00:10:00] 

Well, thank you so much, em and Joe for joining me today and, for looking like you've just rocked up from the catwalks of Milan. For those of you who are just listening to the Circular Economy Show today, em and Joe present both the beauty and the Brainiac package for the foundation and we're thrilled to have them here now.

You guys have been working together. On finance and the circular economy for roughly four years. Em, you've been here eight, Joe, you joined the foundation about four years ago. Mm-hmm. You must have navigated some huge changes in that time. What are you sensing now as we move on? Well, thank you for embarrassing us.

I No worries. To start off, the colleague you can rely on, maybe, maybe helpful to start about how things have shifted over over the last few years. 'cause when we really started, when we set [00:11:00] up, our program on finance, it was in 2019 and the world was in a very different place. It was pre COVID. Mm-hmm.

It was pre a lot of the geopolitical things that we've seen and there was a real groundswell in the finance. Sector, circular economy was starting to, to, to become a more known concept. And it was a really interesting and exciting time to be thinking about it. And I think it was the reason we did start the program was because there was an, there, there was this interest from the financial sector and we kind of started by highlighting where is finance already flowing?

What are banks doing, what are investors doing? What kind of innovation is being financed? What are the opportunities? What's really growing? And, and then we sort of have seen it at that peak, that kind of excitement. And growth in, in financing peak at about 2021.

And then sort of go down slightly as it's become a more challenging economic environment. And it's obviously not true. It's not true just a circular economy. But, but sustainable investing in general is, [00:12:00] when, when people are, when it's harder economic times. The people shift to things that are more familiar and there's less willingness to take risks.

So I guess that's, we're seeing some of that. Yeah. You've literally ridden that financial rollercoaster. Well, and I think so much of the shift as well has been, has reflected in the, in the shift that the foundation's been through as well. It started about what is the circular economy, and a lot of the questions that were coming from, from the finance sector then was what is this concept?

How do we, how do we take, grab the opportunity of it? And over the last four years we've really seen that shift to going to, how do we finance that and how do we make the most of that opportunity and overcome the challenges that we're seeing? And I think in that past, we've seen a lot of those exciting opportunities come, be realized.

and that is reflected in the, in the business world and, and some of, some of the amazing, . Growth that's been seen around certain economy and specific certain economy businesses as well. Yeah, I mean, to date, I, correct me if I'm wrong guys, but we have highlighted successful [00:13:00] circular business models, fashion resale, the refurbishment of electronics.

So if these guys are manage managing to gain successful traction and finance. Why are we not seeing a broader shift across the economy as a whole? Yeah, I mean, I think, and as you said, we've seen those great individual success stories, and that's been realized from everything that we've always, always talked about with the CER economy.

consumers gaining access to assets and products at low value, those products existing in the C economy for longer, and then the benefits, um, from nature and climate as well. And, and that's a lot of the reasons why. Finance is attracted to certain economy. It's kind of got that economic value and then also the environmental impact as well.

and it's even to say those success stories come from, hard, difficult to finance opportunities. It's not like it's really easy. So, it's an, as you said, Emily, it's a difficult funding environment now, and a lot of those. [00:14:00] Circular business mo models and circular businesses require high, upfront investment.

often it's starting at a very small scale and needing to bridge to larger scales to really build that demand and that supply. Yeah. and so the, and then needing a lot of technical knowledge to, to make those successful. So while they've, Being, there's been those bright spots of success and they, and those individual stories, they still face an uphill struggle against the, a broader system.

Yeah. May maybe jump in and say, and no, we would've ex and I think something we would've liked to see over the last six years I've been focusing on it is just more of those examples and no, we've. Got some really strong case examples that we love talking about, but I think something that's become more apparent and, and, and we've heard that reflected through financial institutions that we've talked to, is that.

If individual success stories themselves are not, are not enough. If you invest in just, if you are looking at just one solution and trying to fund that, you're [00:15:00] missing the whole systemic perspective of circular economy that, that, you have. Circular businesses that are still trying to operate in a linear economy.

And that's always gonna be an uphill struggle. They're always gonna fa face potentially higher costs, lack of demand or, uncertain demand. Maybe an uncertain policy environment about whether those policies are going to create incentives for their no, create incentives for their business model or not In future.

There's a, a hope that that will happen, but it's not always the case. inter. policies that help internalize, carbon emissions would, would, would again, increase the, would, would enhance the business case for certain chronic business models, but it's. have to think about it in a system.

For example, if think about a recycling plant that's, it's downstream. It's not an example that we really like to give, but it is something that gets funded typically, um, as a yeah, absolutely. A second project that it does get funded, whether it's by, development finance, whether it's by public sector government funding, or it might be bank funding.

but that plant will never [00:16:00] be. If you're just thinking about, investing in that in, in, in one single facility, it will never be optimized. It will run at, at a lower margin than it possibly could. or, or, or potentially it would have to be subsidized 'cause the economics won't stack up if you aren't also thinking about where's the feedstock for that plant?

Like what now? Where, where's the materials? What quality? Do you have enough quantity? Where's it coming from? How complicated is the legit logistics? What cost does that add? Does that add, how well is it sorted? how well do, if you think about the whole chain, people in their houses, are they, is their education campaigns are they aware of, of what they need to do to, to help that?

That whatever their packaging or whatever it is, that they have actually be recycled at the end of the day. And then at the other end, on the demand side, you also think about someone's gotta use this material. who are the companies that are going to use it? Have they, have they is there commitments?

Is there certainties that, that someone is going to buy that recycled material? and no further down the chain for someone to. Buy it. [00:17:00] They also have to, to figure out how they integrate it into their products. Think about how their products are designed, think about their factories and their manufacturing processes.

Can they just substitute one for the other? Do they need to rethink how they do that? So it's, it's a, it's a really complex system and I think, that's why we're not seeing the broader shift is because there's too much focus on individual solutions rather than Yeah. Yeah. The whole, this whole system.

So if we were to think of it. I mean, it's like a massive jigsaw puzzle, isn't it really? If the system isn't currently designed to bring all those pieces together, which it's not at the moment, is there an alternative? Yeah. I dunno if you wanted to Jo jump. Sorry, Joe. No. Is there an alternative? I, we were looking at each other then I, I mean.

In many cases, the right financing does exist. to, as Emily mentioned in that example, we do see infrastructure being funded, but that the complexity which Emily [00:18:00] spoke about in that system is just down to one material stream, to one investment. And that is absolutely the mandate of finance.

finding those single point, solutions, and matching their return and risk expectations. but the sort of. Way to knit those things together. we're seeing, some really interesting emergent ideas in systemic investing. so this is the sort of concept that you can bring together different stakeholders from across the system, not just finance business as well, and, and, and policy.

and then actually starts to create, Interventions at all points. So upstream, downstream, and, and, and in the middle, to maximize that opportunity and get that multiplier effect. So to come back to the recycling plant example, if you have a really, well resourced collection and sorting system, then that is no longer a cost that has to be absorbed by that recycling plant.

and then you, then you on the, on the other side, you have a demand for the, for the product that's come, [00:19:00] that's coming out. So. It's something which is, that we, we see, this, this concept of systemic investing as a really good fit for circular economy. and, and an emerging idea that we are starting to, explore and understand more.

and we think there's a really great, great opportunity to bring those financial, stakeholders together and. Move beyond that single point of financing and start to really build, longer lasting systemic shifts. Yeah, I was, oh, sorry. Maybe, maybe if I jump in, I think it's, It feels like a really natural fit.

And in terms of the shift that we've gone through, initially it was f it was really trying to meet finance where they are and we're still trying to do that, un understanding what are their risk return expectations? what are the types of capital that they have available to allocate to circular economy, how does that align with.

The sector, geography, et cetera. And then highlighting the relevant opportunities, for, that's where circular economy was growing and that fit within our vision of a circular economy. 'cause I think that's a, a crucial piece of helping [00:20:00] the fi that we've done to date is help financial players understand what counts for circular economy and what's not.

What's actually gonna get us towards the, the system we're trying to build. But we've hit up against this wall of, of, that just ends up highlighting single point solutions and misses the systemic perspective. So this, no, so, so trying to bring the, the ideas of systemic investing, which is no. Lots of players have, have been really building on this.

we've been inspired by the Trans Cap Initiative in particular, over the last couple of years. and trying to think about how you bring a systemic perspective, not just to ha the changes we're making, the real economy, but also bringing the financial perspective. can I just take you back, what is the TransCap Initiative?

for those who don't know. So they are a not-for-profit and they are, I guess, a similar type of organization to us, but they are, developing and, communicating about the concept of, of systemic investing. Right. Okay. Sorry, just I'm, and building the field and, and knowledge base. Thanks. And highlighting case examples.

And I [00:21:00] think there, there are, there are some emerging examples that that, that they've highlighted of how systemic investing is being. Is being employed to help place-based systemic transitions in particular. I think that lines up really nicely with where our work is going, where we're really trying to demonstrate implementation on the ground.

Yeah. and, and when you actually talk about financing, if you want, if you're gonna get practical, it's, it actually has to be in a place what are you financing? Is it, is it. Is it infrastructure or is it a company or is it, Yeah. What is it? Yeah. So how is this showing up in our work at the moment?

I think for us it's really about trying to put the ideas into practice in the real life projects. Mm-hmm. And, and maybe something to say is that. We talk a lot about the financing of the real stuff in circular economy, like infrastructure, business models, and innovation. I guess being the three, the three design and innovation that we talk about a lot, but it's also thinking about a much broader [00:22:00] spectrum of capital.

Also thinking about how we bring in philanthropic capital and the typical, players that would fund. policy engagement and shifts or consumer behavior check campaigns or, or, or, shifts to understanding how you shift governance models to, to better suit a, a, a circular economy. So it's, it, it, it's, it's bringing the whole picture together, not just, not just the, the real things that, that, that money can go to.

Yeah. And I think to build on that, When we talk about bringing different types of capital together, and, and I think this is a, a lot of the conversation, blended finance is brought up a lot. And I think what the, the, the key thing to note here is that systemic investing in capital orchestration goes beyond just, bringing together public and private money in, in, in one, in one facility.

But it's also about how do you then engage, corporates to sign offtake agreements or as you said, philanthropy to provide grants for, so social programs that would also support these shifts in these systems. and I think that's like one of the early examples that we're [00:23:00] looking at is, working in Brazil on, on, on waste management infrastructure.

there was, again, as, as Emily said, building a place-based project around a city. Yeah. and bringing together all of those different three main players of business, finance and policy. but also still talking to philanthropy about how do we, Fundamentally change, the way that that waste streams are managed in one particular place and.

That also echoes that broader shift that we're seeing from like, what to how and we can actually start to get real in places and, and, and put numbers to, to these projects, which, allow, allow us to see this in, in a practical, sense. I think at the moment the, a lot of this work is, is, is just in the idea phase.

So we're really excited to be taking it from the end idea phase into actual real projects. Yeah. Maybe Yeah, I can I also jump in on that? 'cause I think it's, in terms of how the, the process like works in on those projects is we've typically brought no defined a vision for circular economy in [00:24:00] our key sectors.

SAR plastic packaging. Yeah. And brought business and policy around that. And that's still the, that's still the, the foundation. And that hasn't gone away. And the way we see it is that now when we're moving into specific places, you first need to understand. What are the key interventions that need to change to create a circular shift in that market, in that city?

And which ones are likely to have the biggest outsize impact? Mm-hmm. what do you really need to get right? Yeah. For all the other pieces of the puzzle to flow and follow, because it's really complex. You're not gonna be able to do it all. And then once you've identified those really key.

Intervention points. Mm-hmm. And how they connect to each other. playing that convening role, which we've always done at the foundation and with point business, with policy, with finance around the, this is the shift that we need to see. These are the interventions, but then the additional layer that we need to figure out, and this is a.

No, this is all, this is all new work for us, so it's exciting. But yeah, it will be very emergent. We're not pretending that we have all the [00:25:00] answers by any means. but, but I think But you are working towards them, right? Hope. Yeah. Hopefully. And I think there's, know that there's, there's a, now I think there's a growing community of practice Yeah.

Who hopefully we can learn from. Mm-hmm. And, and hopefully we can also. Share learnings from the, from our projects as we're coming out and as we figure out, what are the different types of capital that we think are needed and, and from, for that system shift in, for the, for the project in Brazil.

And, and, and the, where we're thinking about is, is, is ca can we, can we mobilize? Business and philanthropic, contributions to funds, to fund, that system to create the, make the business case stack up that then you can crowd in public and private financing like development, finance, also private finance, to, to.

Demonstrate. Yeah. well, working circular systems that whilst we also work on the, the, the policy engagement side. and no, it's, it's, it's, it's exciting but it's very new and I think we, over time we hope that we'll be able to. Replicate, develop our thinking and replicate that across other program [00:26:00] areas in crystal minerals and fashion.

Yeah. And other plastic programs set up a blueprint type of thing. Yeah. And share that pub and, and hopefully share that, more broadly. Hopefully we'll be back here in a year and have some real, some real, real things to share. Although this is obviously really long term work, we're talking about for this project is five to seven years.

Yeah. Just in, one place and, and, and hoping to replicate that in other major reasons in the global south. Joe, what's key to success? I think as a, as a, as Emily just said, it's really co it's really complex work and I, and I think it's, already key to highlight that. It's not there's a load of time and money sitting around waiting to do this.

This is, this is an extra layer of coordination, and of convening that needs to, come together around those specific systems and problems, and, and work together to, to maximize those and, and to, to find those out. So I, I feel like for us at EMF as a, as a, as a, as a foundation. Do [00:27:00] playing, playing that role of bringing those, key stakeholders and actors together, is a, is a really.

Key factor to, to, to providing that, that time and resource enable in being able to do that and building the trust and the confidence in this idea. Yeah. to, to showing that it's something that can work in, in the real world. I think also like-minded. no financial players. It's always, and I even know exactly the right wording because we're talking about such a, some, a spectrum from funders to financial institutions to no calls, different types of players, which means complicated, but I think we'll probably find a natural.

Fit, with financial players and stakeholders who already have, a, a systemic mindset, an ability to, to, ha have impact really embedded into their mandate. So philanthropic, no foundations and philanthropy who we already work very closely with, but also development, finance, and public sector finance who again, have a mandate to, to, to.[00:28:00] 

Yeah. To build that. Yeah. Create, create, yeah. Create impact and yeah. not, no, there's obviously, we've always engaged very closely with a private finance audience, but I think they will follow, no, they will things need, all the pieces need to line up for them to be able to engage. So I think there, in terms of working this through, we'll probably find a bit of a coalition of the willing with the, with the, with the stakeholders who are, who are already more aligned to our, to this thinking.

Absolutely. As we. Start on this journey. It's about learning together and understanding how this, these ideas and this theory land in the real world and, and the real challenges that need to be worked through. whether that's, the right governance, the right, d different types of finance and different types of projects.

but identifying those stakeholders and players that want to go a lot on, on that, journey with us and, and be that coalition of the willing. Thank you guys so much for joining me today, and if anyone can take on the challenge, I know it's you too. and I want you back in a year to report with your progress, please.

Sounds like we'd love to. [00:29:00] Good. See you later. Thanks so much to Emily and Joe for taking us through how in many cases, the right financing is definitely out there, but more thoughtful allocation and coordination could result in better and more resilient outcomes. As we discussed, concerted action within a system builds true economic resilience and through capital orchestration.

Finance doesn't just enable change. It can drive it. Thanks so much for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a like or a comment and share with your colleagues and friends. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next time.

One thing that strikes me listening to these clips, these, these voters seem pretty read in on what's going on right now.

I guess, can you talk a little bit, as you watch these focus groups, uh, does it feel [00:30:00] like these are people who are reading and watching the news every single day? Or I guess how, talk a little bit more about the sort of information environment that these voters live in. Well, Iran has certainly broken through.

Mm-hmm. I mean, I, I wouldn't say that these voters listen to news 24 hours a day. There are a lot of things they don't know. You know, you show 'em pictures of their representatives in Georgia, they don't know who they are. Oh, that's interesting. But the war has broken through and that's also because the war is affecting their daily lives.

It's causing prices to go up. They understand that there's a connection between what's happening overseas and gas prices being high at the pump. There's an economic cost that people are being asked to pay for the war, and Donald Trump says it. He says, you know, it's a small price to pay. For, for making sure Iran doesn't have a bomb.

That's not something these voters agree with. Yeah, and in general they believe it's just not worth it. They don't think all the money and all the resources and the focus that Trump is putting into this war is worth the time. Uh, one woman, she's a Republican, she said this clearly, she's like, I don't think this is worth it.

Her name was Jia. It just doesn't seem like it's, [00:31:00] it has resulted in anything positive. I just haven't seen, I don't, I guess I don't have anything that's saying it's going poorly, but I have nothing that's saying it's going positive. And I don't think the cost is worth what they're doing. Yeah. So she's one of those voters who isn't, I can't, you know, like unlike Nick, she can't like tell you, I've been reading this in the New York Times and I see what's going on.

She's like, in general, I'm just reading the room and I get a sense that this isn't good for me. This isn't gonna help me in the future, and it's definitely not helping me. Now as I'm seeing oil prices rise, I mean, is that the economic connection completely? Is it just gas prices rising or is there something broader about this economic connection?

No, I think there's something broader. Joe talked about. How he feels about the economy and specifically talking about what Trump promised to do. He said day one, he was gonna bring the prices down on eggs and other things. Um, he's cut subsidies to health insurance, so that's gone up. Um, you know, I don't, I see my pocket, but.

Pocket book being hit and he's building a new ballroom for some reason that we don't need, you [00:32:00] know, how about you put some money toward us? How about you put some money toward us? I think that's the biggest takeaway. I mean, these are voters who were asked what are Trump's priorities and do they align with your priorities?

And that was his answer to that. In other words, no they don't. And um, you know, the problem is that Donald Trump promised to do a lot of things about. High prices and he's done the opposite. This war is so inextricably linked with the major issue that voters think is important right now, which is the cost of living.

I mean, just to say this again, because I think it was the theme of this conversation that these voters were having, which is it is distracting Trump, like Iran is distracting Trump from solving economic issues. It is not just that. We're spending all these resources, it's that if he's focused on this, he's not focused on these other issues that are only getting worse.

No one thinks any part of their budget is getting better in recent months and they don't think it's getting better in the future either. Well, that's what I was gonna ask. Is it trump's, it seems like [00:33:00] part of Trump's argument is this is short term pain. A lot of the, A lot of the what? I mean this is the same argument about the tariffs short-term pain for some sort of long-term gain.

Do voters buy into that idea that things are going to get better at some point? No, and actually there are a couple things that came up, especially related to AI that seems to be like a pressure point for them or, or at least a looming anxiety about the economy. One, they're seeing job losses. This has come up in every focus group now for at least the, the past three that we've seen in the past three states.

We've, we've heard from voters, they think that AI is gonna lead to more job losses than they have already. And uh, there were a couple questions in these focus groups about data centers. A lot of voters said that they're worried that the companies who run these data centers won't be taking on their fair share of energy costs.

So it's like a mix of like anxieties here, it's present and then future. And Trump, in their view, uh, seems pretty distracted. Every single one of these voters. Said that they feel more anxious now about the economy than they did when Trump came into office. And [00:34:00] again, the job of any president is to make voters, citizens feel safe and secure, not scared and anxious.

So now it's the war. It's Trump's behavior. It's the extreme posts. All of those things are making voters more anxious, not less.

And Maura, all the people we're hearing from are people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024. How do they feel or how are they engaging with the promises he made on the campaign trail? Now? Well, on some promises like closing the border, they feel pretty good about it, but on a lot of other promises, not only do they not feel that he's delivering, they feel he's doing the opposite.

Here's Corey, so his his priority with the war. Uh, in Iran, that, that is not anything that I approve of. Uh, I prefer to take care of home first. And Dawn said almost the same thing. I just feel like he made a lot of promises about our economy and, you know, make America first and be, you know, strong American drill, baby drill, all those kinds of things, just [00:35:00] domestic.

We've heard this now in multiple focus groups where folks who were. Explicitly voting for Trump because he did not sound like a warhawk. They feel particularly betrayed by that right now. It's come up at least two or three times now, which I think is interesting. But it's also interesting, you know, president Trump did also run.

Heavily on this immigration promise. Unauthorized crossings at the border are way down during no doubt about that presidency. No doubt about that. How much credit is he getting for that, or how much does that matter to these voters in terms of as they're weighing everything else? Well, this is the big question that we're gonna be pursuing as we get closer to November every month with, with these different focus groups, because they do give him credit.

They like what he did on the border. They're not crazy about what he did in Minneapolis. They like what he did on the border. The question is, is that gratitude going to. Outweigh their anxiety about the war and the economy. We don't know that. We don't know yet how their feelings about Trump will affect their votes for governor, Congressman, Senator.

Um, and that's something we're gonna be [00:36:00] drilling down on with the future focus groups. I think what we're seeing is their frustration with everything else overshadowing how. Maybe happy they are about what's going on in the border. You know, in other fo focus groups we heard, we heard voters say, you know, I'm really happy with the way that Trump is handling the border.

But I feel like the further we've gotten into this year, the closer we get to the midterms, I'm hearing more and more people say, I on the whole disapprove of the job that Trump is doing, even though I am happy with what's happening on the border, and you know, tell me if we're still gonna be at war. At the end of October.

Mm-hmm. Tell me what gas prices are gonna be at the pump. I mean, those are gonna be the important data points that people are gonna make their decisions on. I mean, it is clear also in public polling about that the Iran war is not popular with America. That is not, there's nothing in these focus groups that contradicts public opinion.

Polling it, illustrates it. It doesn't contradict it. But what. If, if, if they're unhappy with that. But what do they want Trump to focus on? I mean, I hear these kind of vague America [00:37:00] first, that domestic things. Are they more, no. They want him to bring prices down. That's what they say over and over again.

You said you'd bring, bring prices down on day one, but instead as. Our voters said, you're cutting, healthcare prices are up. You don't seem to be paying to attention to us 'cause you're building a ballroom for some reason. I actually think that could be a big difference is just even if Trump was attempting, making the show of caring about the economy.

'cause right now every conversation is about his political enemies as usual, but then also his now foreign enemies abroad. It is. A big frustration among voters that he's just not even talking about it. This is what they're talking about. This is what they care about. And they feel like the president, it's not even at the top of his list anymore.

And I did hear at least one or two voters say that at one point. 'cause part of the conversation that the voters had with Rich Thau, who was the moderator from Engagious who, who was, um, talking to these folks during the focus groups. The question was, what do you think his priorities have been throughout his administration?

And a lot of folks said, you know, I thought the economy and immigration was at some point, but now it sounds like [00:38:00] none of that is, is at the top of his list and that is where the rub is. That is what they're most frustrated with, is like they, they have these priorities and the president has seemingly different ones.

I mean, looking ahead to the midterms, is it fair to say like, it's so interesting hearing from these voters in Georgia. Is it fair to say in a state like Georgia that these voters, uh, you know, matter more than many other places? Well, the reason we pick these states is because they're battleground states.

They have important senate races or an important, uh, bunch of house races. Yeah, we've been to Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan This month we went to Georgia. Um, yeah, these, these are important states. This is where the house majority. Might be won or lost. This is where the Senate majority might be won or lost.

So these are important states to follow. Yeah, and they're also important in presidential elections. And these are states where elections are close and when you have close elections and all it takes is a couple thousand votes here and there for, for not just house races, but Senate races to swing it is important what even small subsets of voters have to say.

Yeah. And Georgia, just as a reminder for folks, has [00:39:00] a lot of statewide races on the ballot this year. Governor, Senator, secretary of State, attorney General,

WOLFF: For years, the Iranians said to anyone who would listen, if we get attacked again, we will close the Strait of Hormuz. That is a narrow passageway linking the Arabian Sea to the Persian Gulf. Here's something to know. 20% of the world's, excuse me, oil passes through those strait that strait, a higher percentage of the world's liquified natural gas goes through there.

70 to 80% of the food eaten by the people who live in the Gulf monarchies, the seven or eight countries that ring that part of the world. [00:40:00] Through the, in other words, fuel, oil, gas, and food depend on that passageway and Iran dominates that passageway. In every way, economically, politically, militarily, geographically, you name it, they're in a position to close the gulf.

Uh, Strait of Hormuz. And when the United States and Israel attacked them this time, they did what they said they would do. They shut it immediately. Huge amounts of oil and gas. Sitting on ships heading towards the Strait of Hormuz, couldn't get through. It was too dangerous. Insurance companies wouldn't write policies to cover the boats in case they [00:41:00] got hit by Iranians who said, if you go through there and we don't allow it, we will shoot you down.

By the way, is there oil that they do allow going through the, the, the straight Yes. For example, Iranian oil being sold to China, which is where most of it goes, has been passing through the Strait of Hormuz without a problem. China has paid for it with money that Iran can and does use. To fight against the United States and Israel.

By the way, when the Gulf, when the Strait was closed and oil sat on tankers and couldn't be delivered, the world suddenly experienced an oil shortage. And the price of oil, as I'm sure you all know, shot up 10, 20, 30%. [00:42:00] The longer the war lasts, the more the price of oil will go up. It makes countries that export oil like the United States richer.

It also makes the country of Iran the other side richer. And above all the largest exporter of oil in the world, Russia is making a fortune, which enables it to fight the war in Ukraine That much better. Was that taken into account? Who knows. It's just the economics that I'm telling you about. Also, when you bomb a country and you bomb its oil facilities, which Israel or the United States have done, you create spectacular pollution, huge quantities of burning oil.

You all know what that means, and it's blowing across [00:43:00] Asia. It will eventually get everywhere on earth. This is already an ecological disaster, which will have all kinds of economic costs. Here's another thing. It costs billions and billions of dollars to fight a war. Mr. Trump just finished spending billions to, to.

Take away the leader of Venezuela, and that's a crisis waiting to happen. He's threatening Cuba. That's an expensive armada, half of which frightened Venezuela and Cuba, and then was sent to frighten Iran. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Kind of hard to tell, but does it cost a ton of money? Oh, yeah. And so they gone to Congress and remember.

Congress has not declared a war, which the US Constitution says is the responsibility of Congress, but Mr. Trump is going to [00:44:00] Congress to get the money to fight the war that the Congress didn't authorize. It's not clear what's gonna happen, but he's asking $200 billion. And how does this work? Let's see. A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court said the tariffs which raised the $150 billion were unconstitutional, and there are lots of lawsuits demanding refunds.

So the 150 he thought might come in to deal with what? The fact that the United States is the largest debtor country in the world is not there, will not deal with him. Meanwhile, he's got an extra 200 for this war. And then he said for holding on to the empire, doing all those other things. He said, take Greenland.

Make Canada a 51st state. Take back the Panama Canal. I could go on. He wants to raise the defense, or excuse me, [00:45:00] war budget from 900 billion, roughly what it is now, to 1.5 trillion. That's an extra 600 billion, and then there's the 200 billion for the war in Iraq and the money not coming in from the tariffs.

We're gonna be not just the biggest debtor country in the world. We're gonna have one of the biggest deficits we've ever had this year, and who's gonna pay for all of that? What we're gonna borrow, it says the president, but the rest of the world doesn't wanna lend to the United States anymore. Let me quote to you, the Defense Minister in Germany, arguably our most important economic ally.

We didn't start this war. We weren't consulted about this war. We're not gonna pay for this war, and we are not gonna invest in this war. Whoa. That's a NATO [00:46:00] alliance fraying, and not just at the edges. The cost of this war is spectacular.

GOLDY: You talked about providing public options in a number of areas. One of the things you bring up, which seems to be a recurring theme on the podcast these days is sectoral bargaining. Uh, explain why that's important and how it would work. 

GUEST: Yeah, so one thing I argue for in my report is this idea from, of shifting from this liberal obsession with like delivering programs really well to taking a more sectoral approach.

And I mean that in two ways. So one is we should shift towards sectoral bargaining in our labor policy. Sectoral bargaining is the idea that instead of a union having to. Negotiate individually with employers that they should be able to negotiate at the sector wide level. And I think this makes pretty basic sense.

Like why would [00:47:00] nurses at one hospital, uh, have worse pay and benefits than nurses at another hospital a few miles away? We should be able to bargain at the level of healthcare workers. So I think sectoral bargaining is a really important way to rebalance power for workers. But I think a sort of additional idea is the idea of taking a sectoral approach to anti-poverty policy.

We know which sectors of our economy create conditions of poverty. It's like healthcare, childcare, utilities, groceries. These are the areas of of life that sort of dominate the affordability debate right now. Mm-hmm. But, you know, affordability I think is like this. It is sort of a sanitized way of saying that conditions of poverty are creeping up the income ladder.

And so I think instead of just delivering grocery assistance, we need a much more comprehensive approach to rebalancing power in the grocery sector. And so that sectoral approach would mean organizing the way the state engages in a [00:48:00] fundamentally different way than what we do right now. And as I mentioned before, there's this basic disconnect where the people who subsidize.

Markets often are like not in the same room as the people who regulate those markets, and that allows corporations to capture a pretty big share of public investments that are intended to counteract poverty. 

GOLDY: Yeah. If you think about it, if you think about, you know, obviously our I approach to market economies is that it's this complex adaptive system with various feedback loops.

You make one small change here, it creates another change elsewhere. It totally, it doesn't make any sense that we wouldn't bring these, uh, interventions together, that the regulators wouldn't be working with the people who are delivering the safety net programs, that we wouldn't be thinking of the tax system as part of, uh, this entire system.

Yeah, it's, um, it's a different way of approaching [00:49:00] it, but again, it is a lot more complicated and. Um, I think there's one benefit to our very complicated system of, or at least it has been our complicated system of delivering, uh, uh, safety net programs and uh, aid and so forth. And that is the more complicated it is, the harder.

It is to dismantle. Uh, it's one of my critiques of universal basic income when people tell me how much more efficient it would be just to give people money than to provide all of these services. And that's, well, once you've eliminated the social safety net and you've replaced it with a universal basic income, as efficient as that might be on paper now, all you need to do is erode the universal basic income and you've eliminated everything.

GUEST: You know, I have my own reasons for why I think universal basic income is not a silver bullet, but I don't think I agree with you that complexity [00:50:00] makes us safer. I think part of why Trump has been able to take a sledgehammer to the safety net is that it's so complicated that people don't really understand how it works.

It's so complicated that some of these programs. Just don't feel that good to receive, and so they are easier to attack politically. Notice how much harder it is to attack social security than it is to attack more complicated, fragmented programs. Social Security works because it's really straightforward.

You turn 65, you get your benefits and I think that we need, 

GOLDY: well, 67 now. 

GUEST: 67, yeah. Well, and fair enough. And, and actually we should, I think, be having a debate about lowering the retirement age, um, in this country, but we need more parts of our safety net to operate in that straightforward, accessible, guaranteed way.

GOLDY: Right. I can tell you. I'm 63 and so I've, [00:51:00] I started to investigate Medicare recently, and I gotta tell you, I was shocked. I just assumed that I would turn 65 and European style, socialized medicine. I'd suddenly, you know, no more premiums, no more deductibles, no more messing around with anything. Just one simple system.

Oh my God. Is it complex and it seems to be designed to drive people into Medicare Advantage where they can then take advantage of you. I think that's where the advantage comes from in the branding a 

GUEST: hundred percent. And just wait until you start getting calls from all of the insurance brokers who are gonna try to sell you a plan you don't actually need, because it turns out that they're taking kickbacks from Medicare Advantage providers to do so.

GOLDY: Yeah, 

GUEST: you touched on this briefly and I, I just wanted to sort of get it on the record because for a long time, giving people money was seen as the solution in, in various parts of the Democratic sphere. I know Vox was big into it, and I mean, we did [00:52:00] see some success, I think during the, the pandemic, during the lockdowns when we did send people money and it did, it did strengthen the economy.

But I was wondering if you could talk about why giving people money isn't the end all solution. Well, I think it's a big part of the solution, so I wanna be clear about that. I mean, cash is the most dignified, efficient way to help people who are struggling in our economy, and I think we would be in much better shape today if more of the safety net operated as cash-based programs.

But I think the challenging reality is that. If rents keep rising because we haven't fixed that marketplace. If healthcare costs keep rising because we haven't fixed that marketplace, then pumping more cash into people's pocketbooks is gonna get absorbed by broken markets. So I think cash. Is a floor that we should provide to more people, but it needs to be part of a much broader intervention into the economy.

I'm very skeptical that cash on [00:53:00] its own can do all of the heavy lifting for rebuilding an economy that is fair. 

GOLDY: So we're gonna put you in charge. No political constraints. You can fix the system however you want. What might it look like? The, uh, the next new deal that comes out of your report? 

GUEST: If I could sort of make one change today to the safety net, I would think about expanding social security for families with children.

We are such an outlier globally in our failure to provide a child allowance. Having a kid in this country is so expensive. Actually having a baby in this country precipitates a period of poverty for something like 40% of moms. That's ridiculous. We're the wealthiest nation on earth. Social Security has been one of the most effective anti-poverty programs in the country, and I think that a bold idea is that families with little kids need that [00:54:00] same kind of help.

Child tax credit showed us what is possible when we expanded it, uh, during the pandemic. We cut child poverty in this country in half in one year. That's remarkable. I think that there's no reason to believe that we shouldn't expand the promise of social security when people start a family. 

Donald Trump is in the midst of learning a political lesson that you would think he above anyone else would know, right? The lesson is that people really care about gas prices. Have you heard that one? Oil, natural gas, gasoline are the most important commodities in the world.

They are what modern civilization runs on. I think that's about to change because of how cheap and incredibly clean energy has gotten. But right now, you quite simply cannot run your society without fossil fuels. There's no other option. When the prices go up, people get pretty upset about it, and right now, prices are, as you may have noticed, way, way up because Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu started a pointless war in Iran.

A war that [00:55:00] killed 6,000 people, injured countless others. Displaced a million more has caused untold human misery and upended the lives of many, many people. It is also, as you might have heard. Happened to disrupt the global supply chain for the world's most important commodity. The thing, modern civilization runs on a disruption that continues day after day after day, to this very day, even with a seemingly indefinite seaside because.

As soon as the US started bombing, Iran started to control Strait of Hormuz. Something that was not the case before this war. Something that was long in this country, and they're pretty mad at Donald Trump for starting this war. Take a look at this chart. We, we, we were sort of marveling over this one today.

A lot of charts don't read on tv, but I think this one gives you the point. So that's from pollster G. Elliott Morris, who tracks Trump's approval on a bunch of different issues. And you can see there's a bunch of issues. They all go in the same direction. They all go down. But the one that's the lowest, the one all the way at the bottom [00:56:00] of your TV screen, the green line that is Donald Trump's approval on inflation and the cost of living.

Of course, that includes gas prices because not only is gas a major expenditure for nearly every American rising diesel costs in particular also make everything else more expensive. That doesn't even include the sort of inputs you get when you start getting into fertilizer and chemical products. And as you can see, Trump is just almost incomprehensibly unpopular when it comes to prices.

Literally off the chart. He is so underwater in fact, that he is off the chart. In fact, that chart doesn't go low enough to show his massive minus 40 approval on the issue. According to one analysis. This is an amazing historical tidbit. To give you a sort of sense of comparison, Donald Trump is currently less popular on inflation than that man on your screen.

Jimmy Carter. [00:57:00] Carter, the guy who oversaw stagflation, the guy who was in president during the 79 energy crisis, the guy with the sweaters and the Malaise speech. I mean, just ask any voter at the gas pump. It is bad, you know? Um, people gotta live, people got to eat, you know what I'm saying? And believe it or not, um, transportation is very, very important.

And you know, you have to choose whether you, uh, drive or eat, you know? So I mean, gas prices or are crazy. I mean, that was the whole thing that Trump promised everyone, that people voted for as they lower gas prices. And here we are. So. Yeah. Crazy low, lower prices on everything is what he said. Groceries, gas, everything.

I feel like everything is just more expensive. So now Trump is stuck. His shifting posture with Iran, I mean, we, we can hardly keep track of it. We're, we're, that's our job is to keep track of it and you almost can't and, and that sort of merry-go-round. He's [00:58:00] been doing negotiations obliteration, that's made any kind of deal to reopen the Strait exceedingly difficult.

We're, we're not currently negotiating as far as anyone knows. And none of this is winning over the American public, as you saw from the chart. So basically what they're left with is a strategy to just lie. The fact of the matter is that all of the cylinders are kicking. It is good news. You can even feel in our environment how good things are getting gas prices continue to come down, which means that your groceries will come down a little bit as well.

Okay, two things. First of all, I love the fact that they're showing the, the crypto stocks while he's talking like, yes. Wow, a crypto rally. Second of all, did you catch what he said? Gas prices continue to come down. Senator Tim Scott. That is simply not true and you don't need to go do a bunch of research to come to that conclusion.

It's plainly a lie in the most obvious [00:59:00] sort of inexplicably, condescending way. Nationally, the average price of gas, that's something we tabulate closely. It's four 30 at a gallon. Honestly, it might be even higher as of tonight, according to the live tracking data, because it's been going up by the hour, even the conservative number is up 30 cents from a week ago, up by, well over a dollar since the war started.

Again, that's just the average. Believe me, out west, they would be happy to pay $4 and 30 cents instead of over six bucks a gallon like now. Even if we just look at Senator Scott's state of South Carolina, the state he proudly represents the average price of gas. There is about $3 90 cents a gallon. It was $3 and 65 cents a month ago.

Meanwhile, a year ago, it was 2 83, more than a dollar cheaper now to bend over backwards, to be fair to the senator, we did find this one little nugget in the data. It does appear that the price of diesel in South Carolina is down slightly from the highest ever recorded average, which it hit. Three weeks [01:00:00] ago, thanks to Donald Trump, but come on, Senator as Petroleum Analyst, Patrick De Haan points out today, the price of gas is up in every single state compared to a week ago.

In fact, he says prices are going up so rapidly that the algorithms he uses to track them are having trouble keeping up. In fact, I'm gonna talk to him about that in just a moment. So while there might be some small fluctuations day-to-day, it is simply wrong to say that gas prices are down. That's not even spin.

Right. It's just a lie. Even the, the very Trump friendly CNBC host, Joe Kernan wouldn't let the Republican majority leader get away with lying about gas prices. People that will remember you go back two years ago, we were paying almost $6 a gallon for gasoline. Right now it's in the threes. Obviously we've seen a, a jump with the Iran conflict, but when were we, we paying six, it's still 50.

What is that? Well, two, two and a half years ago, I don't think we were, but if you look [01:01:00] at it, that wasn't the average price. Look at where we're now. We're, we're over 30% below where we were just two years ago. Today we are 30% below where we were two years ago. We must have been on vacation in California, I think, I think two years ago in, in April of 2024, we were at about 365.

So we're actually above. Uh, where we were then. Yes. Thank you. Now, there are ways one could spin the Trump economy of positive light. You know, there there is a difference about spinning and lying, right? Uh, and, and spinning is part of politics. I mean, you, you could, there's good faith spinning. You could talk about the stock market, which has been going up.

You could talk about massive and spiking business investment, which we saw in some of the numbers that came out today. That's real. That's happening. But if your message going into the midterms is to just plainly lie to people's faces on camera, right in front of them about gas prices, the price that they see every day driving around, I think voters are gonna laugh you outta office.

I mean, even Trump is simply trying to sort of [01:02:00] kick the can down the road. The gas will go down as soon as the war's over. It'll drop like a rock. There's so much of it. It's all over the place, sitting all over the oceans of the world, and it'll be, it'll go down. It's also not really true. Gas prices rise quickly, but they often take a long time to go down.

Plus, again, as we've covered now for two months, Trump has absolutely no plan to end the war. He can't even articulate what the strategic end he's trying to meet as it changes every day. Right, and just last week, remember he said he is no rush at all. His new big thing is he's gonna blockade the blockade.

Then today they're trying to get a coalition of willing to un blockade it.

If you are a Republican running for Office of November, and I suspect a few of you do watch this program, I would just say I would not hope for an assist from Donald Trump, especially because, and I think this is important, I would estimate he spends right now conservatively about.

[01:03:00] 90% of his waking moments thinking about his ballroom. In light of today's Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act, do you want Republican states in the south to look at re uh, drawing congressional districts before the midterm? You have to tell me when did the ruling come out? I've been with the astronauts.

I've been. Contractors because we're trying to get the ballroom built. Yeah. Ahead of schedule. It's, it's right on schedule. It's ahead of schedule now. I want to keep it that day way. There's been some talks about changes to your security after what took place. Changing my security. Changing your security after what took place.

Well, they did a pretty good job actually. You know, they stopped. They NFL running back. I mean, he was like a running back. In fact, if you ever got out, they're probably gonna sign him. It's a pretty tough. Situation now, right outside, we have something that's on time, on budget, actually ahead of time and ahead of budget, depending on finishes.

You know, finishes is a big difference between marble and Onyx in price, [01:04:00] but it's right on budget, right on time. Do you see how like he go and then he comes back to the ballroom? And a question pulls him this way, but he comes back to the ballroom. Oh, the, there was a a huge, there was an attempt on your life.

Very scary. True. There was, let's talk about the ballroom finishes. For what it's worth, the ballroom, the thing they're pivoting to the things he's obsessed with. The thing that every Republican now wants to talk about is the central priority for America in the year of our Lord. 2026. That ballroom is also very unpopular.

Who to thunk it? Voters are actually against it two to one in the latest polling. Donald Trump doesn't care. He is literally measuring the golden drapes for his ballroom. I'm sure he's actually talked to the contractor about finishes for those instead of, for instance, trying to lower gas prices. And I don't think voters were gonna let Republicans off the hook for it.

It wasn't this high before he became president, man. Gas was was three something [01:05:00] B, barely $3. Now it's four. You know, it is. He don't need to be talking about ballroom man. You need to be trying to fix the economy. Better yet, you just need to retire and let JD Vance let somebody else run the country. Well, that's one vote for JD Vance.

GREG: this economy is largely the creation of one person, Donald Trump, and I want to get into that in a bit. Political reports on this new Republican memo that shows striking findings. It's from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch backed group, and that's its own story, which we'll get to. But for now, I wanna read this line from.

Our internal polling in several battleground states and one-on-one conversations with voters show that for the first time, Democrats are more trusted on the economy and inflation. Monica, that's striking. Other polls have shown this as well. Trump's 2024 victory was all about the economy and inflation and Democrats were in just terrible shape on both.

Due to what you talked about, the post COVID [01:06:00] inflation shock, how do you account for this turnaround? 

MONICA: Well, I think that, uh, Trump was riding a long term advantage that Republicans had on the economy for at least since Reagan, people have, American voters have tended to think that Republicans are better for the economy, largely because of their rhetoric on small businesses, on cutting taxes, and people tend to think that that's good.

So I think that he had, he came into office with a huge advantage on the economy that he really blew, um, that in the first few things that he did as president were to kind of squander that trust that people had, people saw right away that the things he was doing wasn't what. You know, they, the things he was doing weren't what they wanted from him.

And so I think that that has given an opening for people to think about the democratic rhetoric on the economy more and to maybe start trusting the Democratic Party more on what they say the economy needs. 

GREG: It's just kind of amazing because not only did [01:07:00] Republicans have this deep built-in advantage on the economy that you talked about, which is largely unearned, but goes back many decades.

Trump also had this big unearned advantage on the economy, and I was doing some reporting up in Reading, Pennsylvania about what happened with the Latino vote there in 2024, move towards Trump. And what I was struck by was how deeply this cultural picture of Trump as this. Crack businessman who builds big things and makes things happen and is an entrepreneurial spirit, how deeply that had taken hold with a lot of low information voters.

That that's just something that I think Democrats were un, were really unable to do anything about. And yet that's been pissed away too. 

MONICA: Yeah, that's right. And I think people forget that the vast majority of voters aren't reading the really long investigative pieces that show that Trump actually wasn't a very good businessman.

I mean, you can find all of the evidence. [01:08:00] You want to show that Trump inherited most of his wealth. He squandered it. His early successes as a builder or as a real estate person, really based on his father's work and, uh, he was never really the businessman he portrayed on tv, but people still had this idea, this really long held idea of him as a businessman.

That was his. Know public persona. That was really ingrained and I think that it was always gonna take a lot of work to try to chip away at that. I'm not even sure the Democratic party even really tried, and I don't know if it would've worked if they had, so, you know. People, just, a lot of people had an idea that he was a businessman.

They have an idea that the country needs a businessman or at least, uh, someone who thinks like a businessman to run it, which is really not how the country want runs. But that's a whole other story. And so, you know, he, it's kind of amazing that he really has squandered that in, um, just a little over a year.

But he ha But he has, people don't believe that about him [01:09:00] anymore. They think he's making the wrong decisions. 

GREG: And also the other cultural picture of him is as the guy who fires people, who just makes things happen really quickly, you know? And so, well, here's another line I want to read from the memo quote As it stands today, our view is that the Republican Senate majority is at risk.

Monica, I think the Senate map is still awfully hard. Democrats have to net four seats in some really tough states for them. But if there's anything that can get Democrats there, it's this kind of widespread economic distress. Can you talk about that? 

MONICA: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we had talked about it a minute ago, but the truth is that there was a pretty substantial number of voters who thought, uh, at the end of the Biden administration, the economy is not where I want it to be.

Trump's a businessman and he can get us back. And so that was his huge advantage with a lot of voters in the middle, a lot of independents, a lot of, uh, swing voters to the extent that they exist. Um, and a lot [01:10:00] of people who were upset about Biden's economy and so who just. Didn't turn out to vote for Kamala Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris.

And so, you know, I think that, um, the fact that Republicans are in this position is completely attributable to Trump squandering that trust with voters. And I think it's really kind of amazing because Democrats always probably had an advantage in the house. The party that isn't in the White House has an advantage in the house, in the midterms.

Kind of one of the things you can take to the bank. For the most part, the Senate map is really difficult, but if the candidates are right, if the wins are right, if we are still stuck in Iran, if we're still stuck in a lot of conflicts globally, if tariffs are still bad, if the price of oil stays high, if people, if inflation is up, if people don't have faith that the economy is gonna get better, you really start to see where Democrats have an opening, I think.

GREG: So let's just talk a little more about that point you're making, which is that Trump created this [01:11:00] economy and Trump is the reason that Republicans are still in such bad shape on it. It really is a a, an odd situation because for the most. Presidents don't have that much control over economies, and yet Donald Trump managed to figure out a way to really damage it in just about every conceivable way.

Right. You, you mentioned the tariffs, which really had an inflationary effect for a lot of people. And then there's a immigration, which I don't think people usually connect to the economy, but that. Also had a negative economic effect. It had a negative effect on jobs by just reducing the number of immigrants in the country and so forth.

And then of course, there's the war as well, which you know, has really spiked prices and we're really stuck. He doesn't seem to be at all aware of the. That he doesn't really have a lot of leverage in this situation. He's just tweeting that he's got all the leverage and he's happy to wait for, I don't know, as long as it takes [01:12:00] until Iran finally realizes that he's the boss and concedes.

But I would, if I'm a Republican office holder, like a, a vulnerable and incumbent Republican in the house, I'm like, dude, you've got to stop this war already. We're just gonna get wiped out. It's just, can you talk a little bit about how Trump. Did this. 

MONICA: Yeah. It is one of the ironies of our time that people blamed Biden for the economy that wasn't, it was largely out of his control.

A normal president who is doing what the job of a president is, is trying to con create the conditions for a good American economy for people to share in economic growth. And is kind of hoping that private industry takes us the rest of the way because we're, you know, America's very, very much believes in its free market economy ideals, and.

What Trump has done is a number of things. He, uh, enacted tariffs unilaterally, which have had a really big impact both on, um, the price of goods global or [01:13:00] the price of goods in America, and also the impact. Of, uh, on our trading partners globally has had a, has had an effect as well, because people don't really know what's gonna happen next with Trump.

Um, some writers, uh, have called it the, uh, the tariffs, the Trump Chaos Tax, um, and you could call it the chaos economy because you know, businesses, consumers. Anyone who interacts with the economy wants to have some idea of where we're going. They wanna know if it's a good idea for them to buy a car this month, or if they're, if they should refinance their mortgage because rates are going down and they're gonna stay down.

And so, uh, you know, when you're making big decisions or even small decisions, you kind of wanna have a sense of where we are in the economy. And because Trump is so erratic, he announces policies on his. Social media platform. He keeps changing his mind about tariffs constantly. He just, uh, started wars in Venezuela and Iran kind of overnight without [01:14:00] taking his justifications to the American people.

All of those things have both real and kind of perceived effects that become real because it changes the way people interact with the economy. 

Speaker: We've just heard clips starting with

All In with Chris Hayes documenting how Republican senators are flatly lying about falling gas prices when the national average is $4.30 a gallon and rising.

Economic Update traced how closing the Strait of Hormouz turned an oil price shock into a potential quantity shock, a transition that economists say sharply increases the risk of deep economic damage worldwide.

The NPR Politics Podcast revealed that every single voter in Georgia focus groups said they feel more economically anxious now than when Trump took office, with no sense that things will improve.

The Brian Lehrer Show walked through the four stages of economic harm from the Iran war, warning that the U.S. is already in phase two as rising energy costs spread through the broader economy.

THE DAILY BLAST analyzed why the Republican Senate majority is now at risk, [01:15:00] with the Americans for Prosperity internal polling showing Trump's economic betrayal of swing voters has opened real opportunities for Democrats

Pitchfork Economics made the case for sectoral bargaining as a way to rebalance power for workers, arguing that cash assistance alone can't fix poverty when broken markets just absorb the money.

All In with Chris Hayes in part two of the discussion showed that Trump's White House ballroom project is itself polling two-to-one against, with voters on the street saying he should be fixing gas prices instead of talking to contractors.

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

But first, speaking of economic anxiety, some sad news about out new show, SOLVED! A confluence of events, mostly the recent, dramatic cut in ad revenue we’ve been dealing with, has forced us to put SOLVED! on indefinite hiatus. We love doing it and if we can see a viable path to bringing it back, we would love to. Right now, with the financial squeeze we’re feeling, we have to get back to [01:16:00] basics and focus on building Best of the Left to be the best it can be with the greatest reach it can. So, that’s where my focus is going to be and I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops. 

Regarding members supporting the show, you really are more and more of what’s getting us through right now so thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations. 

If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s important to remind you that each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor to produce.

So, if you get value out of the show and want to support all of the work that goes into it and 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.

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

or you can simply email me to [email protected]

As for today's [01:17:00] topic,

Around the start of this year, the ad revenue that helps keep this show running started drying up quite suddenly. I’ve mentioned it on the show, and we’ve been asking listeners to become members to help fill the gap. As far as we can tell, what’s happening to us isn’t really about us. Marketing budgets are the first thing companies cut when they think the broader economy is about to turn. Companies will cut ad spend before they touch other expenditures, think about layoffs, or pretty much anything else. So when ad revenue starts disappearing across the small media ecosystem, a small show like ours might be the first to feel it but what we’re actually looking at is the leading edge of a serious potential for economic contraction that hasn’t fully arrived yet.

And someone with a lot of credibility has been telling us, in plain English, exactly what comes next.

We just played a clip from Brian Lehrer’s show featuring an economist named Mohamed El-Erian who walked through the sequence of shocks the Iran war is putting us through. [01:18:00] 

We’ve already moved through the first two phases he laid out: an energy shock, when oil prices spiked after the Strait of Hormuz closed, and an inflation shock, when those costs rolled through into everything else. 

The third is demand destruction, which is the moment when prices get high enough that people stop buying, businesses stop investing, and the economy stalls out.

The fourth is financial instability of the kind we last saw in 2008. 

This isn’t a force of nature. The war was started by Trump and Netanyahu, the Strait of Hormuz closed in retaliation, and the war keeps going because Trump keeps choosing to keep it going while all of the predictable consequences are playing themselves out.

Republicans in Congress have, with a few exceptions, been choosing not to stop him. When phase three lands, we’re going to know exactly who’s responsible. 

There’s an active legislative fight happening over all this. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia has forced six War Powers Resolution votes in the Senate trying to [01:19:00] require congressional approval for further military action. The April 30th vote failed 47 to 50, but for the first time, Susan Collins of Maine voted with the Democrats. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been voting with them all along. 

In the House, Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie have a bipartisan version that lost 219 to 212 in early March. Meanwhile Trump keeps asking for more funding to keep the war going, refusing that supplemental is the cleanest way to starve the war.

If you want to channel pressure into those votes, many organizations are doing great work right now. Just to mention three coalitions comprised of dozens of organizations; The Friends Committee on National Legislation at fcnl.org organized a sixty-plus organization faith coalition against the earlier funding request and has been doing antiwar lobbying for decades. 

Win Without War at winwithoutwar.org is a progressive foreign policy coalition with active take-action tools on the War Powers Resolutions and [01:20:00] the supplemental funding fight. And the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee at adc.org has a single streamlined form that will contact your senators and your representative on both the Kaine and Massie-Khanna resolutions in about thirty seconds.

If you want to support direct action, About Face: Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace held a 62-arrest action inside the Capitol Rotunda on April 22nd, one of the largest veteran-led civil disobedience actions in years so check out what they’re cooking next. 

And the National Iranian American Council is the place to amplify Iranian voices in this fight rather than letting Iranians get spoken for by people who’ve never set foot there.

And while we’re pressuring people in Washington, we should also be getting our communities ready for what’s coming. Phase three doesn’t hit everyone equally. The people who’ll get hit hardest are the people already squeezed on housing and groceries and medicine, with the least margin to absorb a shock. 

Mutual aid [01:21:00] networks have been quietly building infrastructure for years that’s about to become a lot more relevant. If your city has a community fridge, a free pantry, a tool library, or a debt clinic, that infrastructure is going to matter when a recession hits.

Tenant organizing matters here too, because phase three usually comes with a wave of evictions, and tenants who are already organized weather that wave a lot better than tenants who aren’t. 

The Tenant Union Federation at tenantfederation.org can connect you with a tenant union in your city, or help you start one if there isn’t one yet. The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee at workerorganizing.org will help you organize your workplace for free, which becomes a lot more important when companies start using a recession as cover for layoffs they were already planning on. 

And The Debt Collective is organizing student debtors, which becomes a lot more relevant when interest costs start eating what’s left of household budgets.

When economic crisis hits, we usually figure out what hit [01:22:00] us afterward. This time, we see it coming and so we have a brief window to get ready and to make the people who chose this war and all the fallout from it bear the political cost.

And as another quick reminder, we here at the show are acutely feeling the impacts of this economic turmoil and, by far, the best way for us to gain some stability is to be able to depend more on members chipping in a few buck each month or annually so that we’re less dependent on the fickle nature of ad revenue. For all the ways to support us, go to bestoftheleft.com/support, link in the show notes. 

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

Section A, The Pump and the War

Followed by Section B, Lies, Spin, and the Roaring Economy

Section C, The Boomcession

And Section D, What This Costs Real People

Yesterday, white House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said this, rest assured to the American people their a recent increase in oil and gas [01:23:00] prices is temporary and this operation will result in lower gas prices in the long term. Once the national national security objectives of Operation Epic Fury are fully achieved, Americans will see oil and gas prices drop rapidly, potentially even lower than they were prior to the start of the operation.

A lot there, including some promises from the press Secretary Domenico, what do you make about this messaging strategy on the gas prices or on the oil prices? Well, I think they're trying to keep their base, in line and, keep the poll numbers as we've seen them where, eight in 10 Republicans continue to back this president continue to back the war in Iran.

Right now, they're giving Trump a long leash and they've been giving him a very long leash for a very long time. But, if you've got. Oil and gas prices that continue to stay high, that is gonna be something that's gonna test a lot of people's patients, with this president, with this administration.

And I think what you're hearing there is a lot of pleading for trust and patience. It almost it. [01:24:00] Gets rid of any plausible deniability also from President Trump. He says right there that this was part of the expectation. He is basically telling the American people that, yes, I knew gas prices were going up, and basically this is a sacrifice you have to make.

Whether he really knew that or not, or if he's just saying that now because it's what's happening and he wants to make it sound like that was the expectation. He never sold that to people. Never told the American people, never readied them for that. Potential thing, especially considering a few days before he was touting how much lower oil and gas prices had been, since he'd come into office at the State of the Union.

I, it's not a big stretch to assume that an attack on Iran would result in higher oil prices. That, that it's, that's a pretty obvious, night follows day sequence. When Karoline Leavitt talks about. Prices coming back down. As soon as the national security objectives are met. We still don't really know what the national security objectives of this war are and how long, really would it take for gas prices to come down?

Because it feels like [01:25:00] they go up fast, but they don't necessarily come down quickly. That's usually the pattern up, up like a rocket, down, like a feather. And it's not just gas prices we we're. That's obviously the most, we see it when you're driving down the street on the signs, but there are a lot of other impacts of high oil prices, right, Scott?

Absolutely. For one thing, not only does a lot of oil and natural gas pass through the Strait of Hormuz, but a lot of the sources of the fertilizer comes from the Middle East and the, the Farm Bureau Federation was out just yesterday with a warning that this is coming at a very bad time for American farmers who are just getting ready to.

Enter their planning season and they're seeing their input costs go up again, as they already were because of tariffs. At the same time, their crop prices are down. So that's very tough on farmers. And then the other thing is not only has gasoline prices gone up, but diesel fuel prices have risen even more sharply, and that affects the cost of transporting everything that moves by truck or train, which is basically everything.

So if these high diesel prices are sustained. That is going to, again, put more upward pressure [01:26:00] on the price of goods and more upward pressure on inflation overall. How does this interact with the tariffs? It's kind of been hard to keep track a little bit. I know the Supreme Court paused some tariffs, but, president Trump end up promising more of them.

How, I guess, are these inflationary pressures we're talking about now interacting, or could they interact with where we've landed on tariffs? Well, it was important that the Supreme Court a couple of weeks ago struck down about half of the tariffs that President Trump had ordered, but he did move quickly, as you say, to replace them with other import taxes using different statutes where the President's authority is a little bit more clear and and spelled out by Congress.

So the overall tariff rate. Today is a little bit lower than it was before the Supreme Court ruling, but it's still a lot higher than it was before President Trump went back to the White House. All of that has had a meaningful effect on inflation and prices. It's not been outrageous because it, it only affects imported goods.

It doesn't affect. Homegrown goods, and it doesn't affect services, but it's been meaningful. You [01:27:00] can see the price of imported goods is higher than it would otherwise be. The other thing that's happened is last week the Court of International Trade said that the government has to give back the money that it collected illegally from those tariffs that were in place for the better part of a year.

And that's a pretty big refund. It's gonna be $166 billion that's gonna go back to the US businesses that paid those tariffs. Another key component of the economy, Domenico, is the labor market, which you mentioned a second ago. This was something that Trump was aiming to bolster with his tariff policy by getting, American companies to be motivated to build factories in the US and and hire people.

What have we seen on the labor market front during his second term? Well, I think it's been pretty stunning. When you just look at the. Numbers for the jobs reports that have come out. There's been a softening really in the labor market, which has not gotten as much attention. And remember, if you wanna buy things, that are going up in price, then you need a job to be able to do that.

And there are real warning signs there. Just in the past year during the Trump [01:28:00] presidency, we've seen five months where we've seen negative jobs, reports where the country's reported losing jobs. Before that there were four straight years. Of, positive jobs reports except for January of 2025, which was partially Biden and partially Trump.

And, we've talked about cost of living and high prices being the things that, make it difficult for people to feel like the economy's going in a good direction. Well, if the labor market softening. You need a job to pay for those things. Yeah. And this really creates a headache for the Federal Reserve because, when, when the job market is weak, the Fed would like to lower interest rates and kind of go the economy.

But when inflation is high, the Fed wants to keep interest rates relatively high to, to bring prices under control. And right now they're really caught in this, this tug of war between, on the one hand, a very weak job market. We saw a net loss of 92,000 jobs in February and. Inflation that's moving in the wrong direction and it's moving in the wrong direction [01:29:00] faster as a result of tariffs and now this war with Iran.

Yeah, it's interesting to see this impact people differently, but when the cost of debt goes up, you see credit card debt increases and that really impacts low income consumers. But Scott. We're also seeing a pretty substantial drop in the stock market, which we know impacts high income people. The people who own the majority of stocks in the us.

We've seen the S&P 500 drop something like two and a half percent in the last month. Do you have any sense from investors on why that is or how that's connected to all, everything we've been talking about? Well, a lot of that is also connected to the war. We've, we've seen a bit of a sell off since the war began.

Businesses are worried that, if people are having to spend more money at the gas pump, they're gonna have less money to spend on everything else in their lives. Corporations are, are feeling the effects of this, both the, the. Cost increase and the, the weakening demand for, for other products?

I will say that the, the stock market remains volatile. We saw a big jump, earlier this week when the president seemed to suggest that the war was almost over. Investors, lept at that opportunity and, [01:30:00] and, and bought stocks. But then there were hopes were dashed when the president elaborated more and it wasn't really clear how much longer the war might go on.

But investors are, are watching all this with some nervousness for sure. I do want to get into how this is all gonna play out politically too, because this does seem to put Republican candidates in a little bit of a bind. President Trump ran on the idea of lowering prices in 2024. He has not really sold this war to the American people.

Domenico, how do you think Republican candidates are going to talk about cost of living issues? Because it seems unavoidable, ahead of this year's midterms. Yeah, I think that those, those Republican candidates in those house races, in swing districts, they're in a real. Bind because, Trump has proved toxic with independence in the past year.

They are a key group in trying to win those districts. He kind of has been trying to sell to them to talk about culture issues, whether it's, being against trans rights or talking [01:31:00] about immigration and how to change talking about immigration because his deportation tactics are also unpopular.

There's only 40% approval. On immigration in our poll for Trump. And we've seen majorities say that federal immigration agents have been going too far and been too harsh. So overall, I think Trump again believes that the core of why he was elected was things like immigration and culture, and he wants Republican candidates to continue to stress those things.

The problem is those things don't play in. Swing districts as well as the economy does because that is the top concern and that's where you see this persuasion as, something that's, that's possible where we've seen fewer and fewer persuadable voters, and we know two of those groups, Latinos and independents, have heavily moved away from the president in this past year.

We've been talking on the podcast for the last couple years about how Americans are struggling with rising prices all over the economy.

I'm thinking about housing [01:32:00] and energy costs, medical bills, everything. How do we have any sense on how people are receiving now yet another price increase? Well, they're not happy about it. I don't know who would be happy about going to the pump and, paying more. And it's certainly, something that affects people who make less money more, right?

Because everyone pays the same at the pump. And look, the economy and prices, like you said, have been the top concern for people for years at this point. And people say Trump is not focused enough on it. In polling, majorities are saying that in our latest N-P-R-P-B-S news, Marist Poll, 35%.

Only give Trump a positive job approval rating when it comes to his handling of the economy. That's the worst we've ever seen, and that was something that was always seen as a, as a strength of Trump's in his first administration. And you've got a majority of people, 56%, saying that they're against this war in the first place That.

The administration didn't make a huge case for getting into this war. And now people are paying the price at the pump. The longer this goes on, and Scott can tell you better, [01:33:00] the more prices are likely to go up and the angrier people are gonna be, the clock is only ticking closer to the midterm elections.

Yeah, president Trump campaigned on a promise that he was gonna lower prices. For the most part, the cost of living has continued to creep up on his watch. Gasoline had been one of the few things he could point to and say, look, gasoline prices are lower than they were. Before I came into office, and that was true for, for most of the last year.

So for most of the last year, relatively cheap gasoline has been a counterweight to the overall inflationary trend. But now gasoline prices are higher today than they were this time last year. So gasoline is actually pushing inflation up. And if these high prices that we're seeing at the pump right now are sustained, they're gonna push inflation back above 3% by the end of next month.

I also feel like, the president doesn't have complete control over every aspect of the US economy, but Domenico, because he has been so personally involved, in the decision to go to war in Iran, do you feel like [01:34:00] Americans are really going to pin, the gas prices issue on him more than maybe, other things like the stock market?

Well, I think that. He's already been suffering the consequences for, higher prices, and people not having a good outlook on the economy. Just overall people's feelings about the economy have been very negative. The labor market has been softening, and people's views on how they feel they're paying more at, grocery stores and all that hasn't really.

Abated since the COVID Pandemic. And they blamed Biden pretty heavily when he was in office. They're blaming Trump while he's in office and they're saying that his policies Trump's policies, a majority are saying are making things worse. And that's in particular because of those tariffs. Scott, is there anything the Trump administration can do to bring down the price of oil?

You know, it's a, it's a global energy market. It's, it's, it's very difficult for the president to do anything in the United States that's gonna have a meaningful effect on the global energy market, when there's been a disruption of the scale that [01:35:00] we've seen as a result of this war. And yeah, you can talk about how inflation went up on Biden's watch and whether.

You know, additional spending by Congress was played a role in that. Whether some of the policy choices that, president Biden made contributed to higher inflation, there's no question about who's responsible for the rise in, in oil prices and rising in gasoline prices. This was absolutely a. The president's decision to go to war with Iran that has, has caused this spike at the pump.

And presidents often get more blame and credit than they deserve when it comes to the economy. But on tariffs and on oil prices, these are two things that people can clearly point to Trump as the reason for seeing those things, be more problematic. And it has to be really destabilizing for Trump because.

It during his first term when he left office, he had a 50%, approval rating when it came to his handling of the economy, and it was never below 47% in our N-P-R-P-B-S News Marist Poll. So this is a totally new position for him to have to try to figure out how to deal with, and his party are gonna be the ones [01:36:00] who are gonna deal with the.

With the political consequences 'cause he's not on the ballot. Those frontline republicans in swing districts are. That's so interesting because basically what you're saying is his numbers on the economy were outpacing his overall approval rating always in in, always. Whereas now they're actually lower than his overall approval rating.

Is that right? That's right. And when he came into office, by April was the first time we started, polling on his economic handling because he was starting to implement those tariffs, it was already at 39%. So he has been below 40% on his handling of the economy, all the way back to April of last year.

Well, Scott, the president and the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, everyone in the administration has insisted this is not going to be a forever war, that this is all gonna be over, at least. From the United States' involvement in the next few weeks, will the price of oil just come down after that?

You know, if hostility in the Middle East ends, it's certainly possible that oil prices could go back down to where they were. That won't [01:37:00] happen overnight. It, it will take some time. Oil prices tend to go down more slowly than they go up. Same thing with gasoline prices, but look. Right now you have countries like Kuwait and Iraq that don't have a lot of, onshore oil storage capacity.

And because the tankers that they would usually rely on to carry that oil away to, to markets around the world are not making their usual passage, some of those countries are having to actually shut in oil production. And once they take that step, then we're talking about at least a, a matter of weeks, if not longer, to restart that production.

So. Even if hostilities were to cease tomorrow, you wouldn't see oil go back down to the $60 a barrel range overnight. It would eventually come down. But, but the damage is gonna be done. And you're gonna see American people asking, what did we gain from all this? If, if at the end of the day you say, okay, we have a more stable and more peaceful Middle East, maybe that's worth a month or two of higher gasoline prices.

But if you wind up with [01:38:00] an Iranian regime that is. More or less the the same regime, just a generation younger. If you wind up with the Iranian revolutionary guard that's still in place and calling the shots, then I think people are gonna say, what? What did we spend all that extra money for? We saw Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, for example, on CNN yesterday, saying that, people might have to make sacrifices.

Well. I think that a lot of people feel like they've been making sacrifices for years when it comes to the economy, and they're certainly not looking to make sacrifices, on having to pay more at the pump without knowing what the goals are long term or what they're gonna get out of, in Iran where the administration, again, never made a case to the American people for getting into this war in the first place.

WOLFF: When the price of oil goes up, all kinds of adjustments are made, and people should understand that those adjustments are not all reversible. In other words, what that means is after you adjust [01:39:00] to something suddenly becoming much more expensive.

You can't or don't want to go back to how things were, even when the prices, if they do come down. Let me give you some examples. China is helping Cuba. Cuba has been suffering from an embargo impose imposed by the United States for the last 70 years, but. But more recently, no oil could get in to Cuba, and they've suffered blackouts because they can't generate energy since they used to rely on oil.

Well, what did the Chinese ship them? Solar panels. To remind you, China is the world's foremost producer [01:40:00] of solar energy. They've invested huge amounts of money, huge amounts of scientific research and personnel to developing solar panels to harness the energy of the sun. Cuba, as you know, is an island in the middle of the ocean.

And he is therefore blessed with sunlight, an enormous amount of the time. They need, they should have had solar energy all along, but now between the embargo of the United States, Mr. Trump wants a victory in Cuba and the rising price. Even if they could get oil. Cuba solves a longstanding problem at the same time that it solves an [01:41:00] immediate problem.

It becomes energy independent in relationship to oil and gas. It will use the sun, and China is in a position to do that and China.

And the United States cannot at least not yet intervene and block the Chinese because if you're having trouble winning a war against Iran, please think long and hard about a war against China. Right. You understand that just as much as any general or admiral or anyone else in the military. [01:42:00] So you, Cuba will never go back to buying oil the way it once had to.

That's the irreversible change. Let me give you another example. Petroleum is the major source of fertilizer. It's a long, complicated story, but if the price of oil goes up, so does the price of fertilizer and as the price of fertilizer goes up, the economics of farming collapse. Much of farming around the world is a low margin enterprise.

You don't make high rates of profit. You barely make it. Well if you're barely making it on a farm somewhere in the world, and suddenly the price of the fertilizer zooms up because it depends on [01:43:00] petroleum. You're done. You throw in the towel, you don't plant the corn or the wheat or the soybeans or the vegetables, and you take a job in a town nearby, as for as your forefathers in the farming business have been doing for decades.

Anyway, that's not reversible. When the price of oil and maybe even fertilizer comes back down, will they quit the city job and resume farming? Some will, but many won't. It's not reversible. And you know what it means? Rising food prices. But we knew that anyway, didn't we? Because since food has to go by truck.

From the farm to the wholesaler to the retailer, so you can buy it in the store. [01:44:00] That truck depends on diesel fuel. Before the war in Iran began, it averaged three 50 a gallon. It now averages five and a quarter a gallon. You understand the price of food was gonna go up just to help. Pay for the transport, but now it'll have to pay for the rising price of food because food is going to become scarcer, 'cause of the cost of the fertilizer You understand? We live in a world now where everything is intertwined in this way, and the therefore the cost of the war in Iran is, excuse me, far beyond just the cost. Of the ships and the planes and the bombs and the missiles of all the people directly involved.

Speaker: Next, Section B, Lies, [01:45:00] Spin, and the Roaring Economy

BRIAN: And before we get more into the blockade, professor Ian, let's just stay on the Friday inflation report a little bit more. You wrote that consumer confidence has dropped to a record low, further illustrating the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street. How would you describe that gap 

GUEST: if you start with Wall Street?

Stock prices are. Basically unchanged for the year, and they are back very near where their level at the beginning of the war. So if you, if you had just gone to sleep at the beginning of the year and woken up, you wouldn't have thought that there's a major war going on that's disrupting oil energy, that is pushing energy prices higher, that is risking, what's called stagflation, higher inflation, lower growth.

You don't see it in the stock market, but go to Main Street [01:46:00] and you see a few things. You see, of course, people worried about higher gas prices, which hits the most vulnerable households particularly hard. You see young people now staying at higher mortgage rates than they had before. And you see a significant loss in confidence.

The University of Michigan issues every month, surveys of households, and they ask them two questions. The first has to do, how confident are you about the current economic situation and the outlook? And second, what are your expectations for inflation? And what we saw in the report issued last week is the fall to a wicked low.

In terms of people's confidence driven, both by how they feel about the current situation and how they feel about the future. And on the inflation side, we've seen a [01:47:00] big jump as as to what people expect inflation will be in the next year. Now I have to add two qualifiers. One, there's nothing automatic about the link between the surveys and how people act.

Yeah, normally you would expect if you are that worried about the future, you would stop spending. But that link is pretty weak. And the second link, the second qualification you will hear is any other survey is impacted by the politics. And the polarized politics that we're in right now. So when you break down between Republicans and Democrats, you get very different results.

BRIAN: Presumably Republicans are more optimistic about the economy than Democrats. 

GUEST: I would put it slightly differently, Brian. They're less pessimistic about the economy than Democrats. Ah, the worry about the economy is clearly there is the extent of the worry. 

BRIAN: Are you [01:48:00] saying though, that when we hear these reports in the news about consumer confidence level levels and we get them every month, that they're really just a measure of people's feelings and they are economically meaningless?

GUEST: Meaningless is a strong word, I would say. They provide you some insight, but no one should act on them alone. They have to be combined by actual indicators. Not of what I say, but what I do. Because the translation between what I say and what I do is not perfect. And we've seen this historically over and over again.

BRIAN: You mentioned stagflation. Which is slow growth coupled with high inflation. Usually inflation is, something that's produced by rapid growth. A bad side effect of rapid growth, though growth is good generally, when the economy isn't growing and inflation is. Ballooning. Anyway, that's stagflation.

And our first caller has a stagflation question, [01:49:00] George and Riverdale. On line one on Stagflation, George on WNYC with economist Mohamed El-Erian. Hi, 

CALLER 2: good morning. Gentlemen, Mr. El-Erian, I've been following your career ever since you ran one of the world's great bond funds, before you went on a present career and always been storied, and I've always enjoyed listening to you.

My concern is, of course, the possibility that the Fed will face its worst horror, which we know is stagflation. Last time we had it was in the late seventies. Where you had a stagnant economy, then a high inflation, and the feds supposed cures, worked against one another. What is the chance of our running into the same kind of stagflation again, obviously we don't know what ultimate decisions are going to happen or what's going to happen with the current war in Iran, but what would you assess are the chances that such things could happen to create stagflation?

BRIAN: Thank you, George. 

GUEST: Thank. Thank you, George. Thank you for your kind words and, and [01:50:00] you're absolutely right. You called it the worst horror, and it is the worst horror for central banks. So, as, as George, hinted, the Federal Reserve has what's called a dual mandate. It is designed to deliver price stability, so low inflation and maximum employment.

When you get stagflation, both your mandates are threatened, and yet the solution is very different depending on which mandate you wanna respond to. As George, pointed out, if you wanna respond to high inflation, you raise interest rates. If you wanna respond to a threat to employment, you lower interest rates so you can get stuck.

In these competing claims on your policy tools and end up either paralyzed or making one or [01:51:00] other mistake. So, so right now if we continue, if the war continues and its economic effects, start multiplying. George is absolutely right. It will be the worst horror for the Fed. We get indications of what the Fed is thinking because they.

Publish the minutes of the deliberation and right now, while they worried, they're worried about the uncertainty. While they would completely agree with George that that both mandates are threatened, they are more inclined right now and this may change, but they are more inclined if they have to respond to respond to the employment side, then to respond to the inflation side.

And because of that, the market is pricing. One weight cut this year. Not a weight hike, but a weight cut. But as George says, if we continue down this road of disruptions to energy prices, broader inflation [01:52:00] growth, starting to get threatened. Then it, it is gonna be a really tough situation for the Federal Reserve.

All this in the midst of a major leadership change to make life even more complicated 

BRIAN: You, you said earlier, you mentioned the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street. Why do you think Wall Street has been so resilient? If people on Main Street are beginning to take these hits that we feel in our lives, wall Street hanging near its record highs, is that unrealistic optimism or a calculation that even if consumers' pockets get hit, corporate profits won't or something else?

GUEST: Yeah, and, and Ryan, there's a number of things in play here. One is yes, the stock market is inherently optimistic. Compare the stock market to the bond market. You'd think that their biases would be similar. They're not, the bond market is not back to where it was at the beginning of the war, but the, the equity market.

Is virtually there. [01:53:00] So, so there is some inherent optimism, some inherent biases. And it's of course helped by the fact that if you're optimistic and you sound optimistic, you attract more investment dollars, that you get paid a fee on this. So, so, so there's a whole structure that supports, that optimism 

BRIAN: until a bubble bursts, right?

GUEST: Correct. And, and you have the classic, classic quote by the, who was a then the CEO of Citigroup, in August of 2008, just before the global financial crisis. And he, he, he gave the following image. He said at some point the music will stop and it will be problematic, but as long as the music is playing, we are dancing.

Okay. And that, and, and of course he lost his job a month later when, when the music stopped. Ah, the second argument is that what normally mitigates risks in a [01:54:00] portfolio, the bond prices gold, the risk mitigators have not worked. So the typical manager says, well, if the risk mitigator isn't working, I might as well stay in equities because I get the upside.

And then the third argument. That, that we see is this notion that investors are paid to take risk. And if you had done that, every single dip in the last 10 years has been a buying opportunity. So what we've seen is we've seen this conditioning become so deep that the dips are less frequent. And smaller in magnitude because people see it not as it's signaling a yellow light.

Be careful. They see it as signaling a buying opportunity, and that's why you get this incredible decoupling of the financial markets, the equity markets in particular from the rest of the economy. 

GOLDY: And as you point out in the [01:55:00] report, it's part of an integrated system, or at least was initially intended to be part of an integrated system. And that we've lost those other parts and we treat them all separately.

It's not just that it's market failures that create the conditions of poverty, it's actually the market working how markets work. 

GUEST: That's exactly right. I think the argument I'm making in this report that I think is likely to ruffle the most feathers is an argument that the safety net is sometimes inadvertently subsidizing the same corporations that are creating economic precarity in the first place.

And I know that this can feel uncomfortable because millions of people rely on these programs every day, and their lives are made better by these programs every day. Mm-hmm. But I think when we take a big step back. The safety net functions as an inadvertent form of corporate welfare, and I'd like to point to a couple ways that that happens.

One is that the safety net lets some companies offload their costs onto the public, so when wages are insufficient and jobs are insecure. People still [01:56:00] need to eat. They still need healthcare. They need a roof over their head, and it's public programs that are filling that gap. And effectively what that means is that employers get to offload part of the cost of sustaining their workforce onto the public.

It's this hidden subsidy for low wage and high precarity business models. And I look at a place like Walmart. One in four SNAP dollars are now spent at Walmart. They are an enormous corporate beneficiary of the program. And at the same time, Walmart itself is one of the most prevalent employers of individuals who use food stamps to make ends meet.

And at the same time, Walmart has a long history of preventing union organizing among its workers. So SNAP is doing a lot of really helpful things for Walmart, and I don't think that that's the way we want our anti-poverty programs to operate. 

GOLDY: Right. And it's not just Snap, of course, the earned income tax credit, that is a direct subsidy to employers.

You only get it if you have a poverty wage job. You have to be working at a job that doesn't create an income sufficient to support you to get it. So it's [01:57:00] people that that work at low wage employers like Walmart, who. Qualify for the EITC? 

GUEST: Well, there's a long and spicy history of debating whether the EITC subsidizes low road employers.

I think the argument I wanna make is it's not just in the context of the labor market, that the safety net is providing these subsidies to corporate actors who are really creating economic precarity. Let's look at Medicare Advantage for a moment. 

GOLDY: Mm-hmm. 

GUEST: Medicare Advantage was created under the argument that the private sector could deliver healthcare more efficiently than the government could.

And, we were approaching a, a place where a majority of Medicare recipients, are actually receiving benefits through Medicare Advantage rather than through direct Medicare. But in 2024, Medicare paid over 80 billion more to Medicare Advantage Insurance for the cost of coverage than if those same seniors had just been enrolled in traditional Medicare and at the same time.

Medicare Advantage Marketplace has become completely [01:58:00] concentrated. There are just two insurers, UnitedHealth and Humana, that now carry 40% of all Medicare Advantage plans. And these same Medicare Advantage companies are being investigated by the DOJ for engaging in really egregious anti-competitive practices.

So I think we have to ask ourselves funding that is supposed to. Meet the needs of low income people or economically precarious people is really being siphoned up by corporate actors in our economy who have found ways to make their interactions with the safety net very profitable. Part of your critique is that there's been a divorce between, social policy and market policy in terms of the safety net, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that means and why it's important that they not be divided.

I think one of the things neoliberalism has taught us to think is that markets are natural and they're inevitable, and then social policy should come behind those markets and do a little bit of cleanup for anyone who's fallen through the cracks, but that's a political construction. Markets are shaped by rules.

And I think [01:59:00] what's happened over the last several decades is that we really systematically deregulated and restructured markets to favor capital while relegating social policy to this compensatory model. And this shows up in really basic ways in the way we organize policymaking. So. Federal and state systems that provide subsidies into a marketplace through safety Net programs generally don't coordinate or share strategies with the regulators of those same marketplaces.

So for example, an employer who has been found to have engaged in wage theft against their own employees can still receive federal workforce training investments. That disconnect between social policy and market policy, I think is making the safety net really much less effective than it could be if we had shared market strategies and social policy strategies that we were bringing to bear in the sectors of our economy that create conditions of poverty as opposed to focusing on regulations and programs as these separate functions of the state.

So the title of the report, it's very catchy from from Safety [02:00:00] Net to Power Base. Could you talk a little bit about, about what the difference between a safety net and a power base is? Part of my argument is that if we look back historically to the origins of our safety net, we find many of these programs are built in the New Deal era.

And the New Deal is really, it's not just a set of new programs, it's a power rebalancing project. FDR uses market regulations. Public options where markets had failed and social insurance programs. He uses these tools together to create counterweights to concentrated economic power. As that framework eroded as New deal liberalism gets replaced with neoliberalism, we really lost the idea that governments could actively shape markets in the public interest.

And so I think part of our task is to really restore the power balancing promise of the New Deal, but for the conditions we face in the 21st century. And I think there are a couple ways that we could start thinking about how to make this shift. The first is. In so many [02:01:00] contexts, private subsidies into unregulated markets is not working, and we should be building strong public options.

So some of the most impoverishing parts of our economy are the care sector, childcare, healthcare, elder care. These are just crushing families budgets, and I think we've learned time and time again that the markets are not really capable of serving the interests of low income people. In care sectors, so we need public option childcare.

We need public option healthcare, we need public option elder care. I think one of the biggest sectors where we need a public option is actually in financial services. James Baldwin famously observed how extremely expensive it is to be poor, and that's true. Poor people get hosed by credit card fees and overdraft fees, and we need public options, public option banking to give people a better option for financial services.

I think another way that we might shift from a safety net to a power base is to really build towards a system that is capable of planning and making investments. So instead of a [02:02:00] reactive safety net that catches people if they fall, we need a safety net that is actively monitoring the economy for disruption and planning ahead.

And I just think about the magnitude of disruption that may be on the horizon as ai. Raises the potential for job displacement. Our safety net has almost no tools to proactively mm-hmm. Manage and transition this potential disruption in our economy. That's a real problem and it makes people very vulnerable.

GOLDY: Right. Well, one of the things we, we've known for a long time is coming, for example, is long haul trucking. Is going to be eventually, it's not yet, but it's going to be displaced by autonomous vehicles and there are millions of truck drivers in this nation. It's one of the largest job categories in many states, and we know it's coming and we are doing nothing about it.

From the perspective of the workers who are going to lose their jobs. 

GUEST: It's exactly right 

GOLDY: and that's what you mean when you talk about our system being too passive, 

GUEST: right? The way our system would work today is, [02:03:00] let's say tens of thousands of long haul truckers start losing their job because of the adoption of autonomous vehicles.

What we have available for them is unemployment insurance, which is time limited. It's a system that is already struggling to keep pace. Just a huge number of unemployed people cannot actually access unemployment insurance. That's especially true for gig workers, and we have very few tools to help people transition or upskill or participate in another part of the economy.

And this idea that. We should just wait for people to get hosed by economic transition and then offer them piecemeal support. The rate of change in our economy, I think demands something that's much more active. You actually make the case that when you strip people of economic power, it creates the conditions for an authoritarian state, purely hypothetically.

Of course. And I was wondering if you could, if you could talk a little bit more about that link, how that, how the one feeds into the other. I think this relationship is just so basic. If people's primary interaction with the government. [02:04:00] Is trying to get safety net assistance and the safety nets treats them with disrespect and it's hard to get the help you need and you feel like your social status and your economic status is diminishing and the government is not there to help you.

Why would you continue to have faith in that system? So, I argue that feelings of economic powerlessness really are a breeding ground for right-wing populism. And there's actually really compelling evidence that when people feel like they're experiencing regional decline or a loss of economic standing, they're more likely to support anti-democratic movements because those movements promise to tear the system down and to restore people's sense of pride and prosperity.

But I think the other connection here between wealth inequality and threats to our democracy is just that we've wrongly treated. Money, like speech in this country. And so, wealthy people just have more power in our democracy than poor people do. And that's a pretty frontal threat, I think, to longstanding democratic legitimacy.

[02:05:00] I think that it seems to me that this economy is amazing for rich people, people who have a lot of capital. And in fact, we can see in 2025, billionaire wealth grew three times faster than the average rate of the previous five years. And wealthy households hold a massive portion of the nation's wealth and.

This, I think is the tipping point that our economy actually faces right now. And I can tell you that in Minnesota, a lot of people are telling me that it is harder and harder for them to afford the basics. They aren't rich, they don't have enough money to pay their bills, to pay their doctor's bills. So I wanna look at this with you for a few minutes and I wanna, I wanna start with inflation.

So. Last week, president Trump said that gas prices are, quote, not very high, and quote, we're having some fake inflation because of the fuel. So understanding what you've been saying about data and measurement and all of that, let me just ask you, do you think that gas prices going up [02:06:00] 20% is fake inflation?

Senator the gas prices, beef prices, eggs, milk, and the rest they move. And when they move in the wrong direction, American people are hurting by, it's, there's no question about it's, that's right. American people feel it. It doesn't, it's not fake to them, it's money that they don't have in their pocket because gas is up.

20%. I think my, my constituents would say that that inflation is real and not fake. Okay, so let's look at unemployment. At the state of the Union, the president said, quote, the economy is the roaring economy. Excuse me, this is the quote. The roaring economy is roaring like never before. So do you agree with that statement?

Is that how you see the economy that is roaring, like never roaring before? So, so Senator, if I can clarify two things. One, there's a difference between the change in prices and inflation. The change in prices happen in a market economy when inflation moves up. That's 'cause the Fed had something to do with it.

Now on, on the state of the economy, [02:07:00] I would say that the broad contours of the economy are improving the potential of the economy. The real results of the economy are improving, but I think it can improve more. And I think, in the years ahead, I think the economy's potential is strengthening. So, the reality is that the economic data, understanding what you're saying about economic data being not imperfect, that there was almost zero job growth in 2025.

And so that looks to me like not a roaring economy. It looks like a weak economy, which is what my constituents are telling me back in Minnesota.

GREG: Well related to all this, one of the things that's interesting in this memo is it calls on Republicans to focus much more on the economy. But everyone knows at this point that Trump isn't mentally capable of focusing on anything really, except for maybe the ballroom, but he certainly doesn't have much of an interest in the economy.

You can just visibly see that at these events that they try to set up where Trump's supposed to, refocus everyone on the economy and you just can't do it. But even if he were [02:08:00] able to, he. Couldn't do it effectively. 'cause of what we're talking about here and what's just so amazing to me about this is that Republicans all know that Trump is no longer a credible voice in the economy, but they just have to pretend not to know that.

They have to say, we really want the president to talk more about the economy, even though they know it wouldn't do them any good. 

MONICA: Yeah, I, I don't know, why they, I feel like they still are relying on Trump to be kind of this magic, interlocutor with the American people, that he has some ability to kind of sway them.

But, and, and some of this too, is the inability of the Republican party to come to terms with the ways that their other. Policy priorities do clash with the economy. I, you mentioned before, and I, I didn't comment on it before, but I, should, is that a, a lot of the immigration policy is hurting the economy.

There was just an American tax fairness report that came out today that a lot of the industries that rely on Latino labor, that employ a lot of Latinos are suffering because [02:09:00] immigration enforcement and immigration policy is so draconian and up in the air, and so. All of the things that Republicans have concentrated on that they wanted Trump to concentrate on are also hurting the economy.

And so at some point they have to say, we are actually doing this. Our president is doing this, and we are doing this with our policies. It's not just a. A side effect, or it's not just circumstances, it's, it's our policies. 

GREG: Right. And I think the, the, the report you just talked about on immigration is really important because it highlights how Trumpism as an ideology is getting us here as well.

Because for Trump and for Stephen Miller and for the anti-immigrant nativists around him and so forth, they think that having fewer immigrants in the country is an inherently good thing. It's intrinsically good, even if. The negative effects on the economy persist right to them. It's worth it. It's so important to have fewer immigrants in the country that they're willing to have lower job growth as a result.

They [02:10:00] actually kind of almost say that openly. And so there you have the ideology of Trumpism having a directly negative impact on everybody's material fortunes basically, right? 

MONICA: Yeah. And I think the fact that they say it openly that the effects of their policies are having such an obvious impact on impact on people's lives.

People are seeing it in their local economies. Local business owners are having trouble because their, employees are disappearing. Or, people aren't buying because they're, worried about what's gonna happen down the road. That makes it clear to voters in a way that nothing else.

Possibly could have, and I think that that's, gonna be hard for Republicans too, because they were trying to do doublespeak for a long time before just to say, oh, we need, immigrants are taking your jobs, which was part of the rhetoric from the Trump campaign at least since 2015.

It's been core of his identity. I think people have to see now that that's not true. 

GREG: Yeah, that [02:11:00] has certainly been disproven. So just to go big picture and talk about your reporting, there's this nugget in the memo that I wanna bring up. It hails Trump's tax cut as a landmark piece of legislation, and then in the next sentence, admits that people's economic concerns are really profound.

Of course, that tax cut represented a massive upward transfer of wealth, which is exactly what Americans for Prosperity the, the authors of this memo. Wants, right. And so what that tells us is that people are struggling under the economy that the plutocrats want. It seems like there's a big opening for a more populist economic program from Democrats now.

Right. You, you did some reporting on this. Is there a way that Democrats could talk about a new direction entirely? 

MONICA: Yeah. I did reporting on earlier this week on a report from Way to Win. It's a, a left-leaning strategic group that does polling and strategy for Democrats. And, one of the things that they [02:12:00] found was that messages that concentrated on, a populist economic message saying, we need to.

Tax corporations, we need to make, the economy fairer for the working class. Messages that really did sway people and people are open to that messaging because they can see now I think they can feel and see that there's an economy. Right now where the wealthy are looking out for each other, the tax cuts are helping the wealthy that some of Trump's billionaire friends are benefiting from the most from this economy.

And in the meantime, people are drowning in debt just tr trying to pay their energy bills and trying to pay their grocery bills. And so I think that. There's an opening to say that we need to tax corporations. More corporations are treating working people unfairly. Those, there's a lot of polling even in swing states, even in states that are more approving of Donald Trump's presidency than the nation as a whole.

Those states. Voters in those states, voters that are getable [02:13:00] voters that need to be persuaded to vote for Democrats, they're swayed by messages that that say, we need to re-sort our economy and refocus our economy. 

GREG: It seems like there's really a a, an opening in another way too, which is that everything is really in, in flux to an unusual degree, I think.

Right? Because if you think about the trajectory from Reagan to now, all of a sudden everything's up for grabs and up in the air. The debates are in a way, we had the COVID shock and the inflationary shock of that, and that was a really profound. Experience for a lot of people. I think it was really disorienting and dispiriting and shook people up a lot.

It allowed Trump to swoop in and do this amazing comeback or whatever, but then you have a, a right-wing populace to put it in polite terms, right? Coming in and actually doing the stuff, doing the agenda of right-wing populism, tariffs, in immigration restriction is [02:14:00] America first pissing on our alliances and so forth, and that's a disaster.

So is there a different opening now to take charge of people's understanding of these big questions that maybe wasn't there before? 

MONICA: Oh yeah, I think so. I think, there's a new hunger from voters and especially younger voters who don't remember Reagan, to focus on workers to think about worker power, to focus on, government provision of expensive services like childcare.

A lot of millennials now are the youngest millennials I think are. In their thirties almost, or in there already. So, these are people who are ready to buy homes and start a family, and they're seeing, the long-term effects of the Reagan era policies that, concentrated, power among a lot of bus big businesses, that diminished worker power, that diminished wages over time.

And I think that there's a new. Opportunity then to tell us a [02:15:00] different story about the American economy, which is, one that allows for thinking about building the economy from the worker up to think about the kinds of institutions that can be countervailing forces against big corporations.

To think about refocusing political power on the working in middle classes. I think there's a lot of people, but especially young voters who are very hungry for that. Yeah. And, 

GREG: and the younger voters are among the constituencies that move to Trump, just like the non-white working class and. So to those voters, maybe the right wing popula stuff sounded somewhat credible, right?

It's anti elite, it's about workers, it's about power, it's about worker power in some way, even though we know that it's a sham. And so has it been sufficiently discredited? Has, has Trumpism, has right-wing populism? Have those things been discredited enough to create an opening [02:16:00] to do something new?

MONICA: I think so. At least right now, a lot depends on what happens in the next year or the next, two years. And a lot probably depends on what happens on how the Democratic candidates and the Democratic party as a whole take up the story. Because there was a lot of the things that Trump said that did sound good to people and he's.

Putting his money where his mouth was. He's not, he's not fulfilling that. And so I think, and the people around Trump are traditional Republicans doing traditional Republican things. And so, tax cuts to the wealthy, concentrating power, taking away rights from women, taking away, away rights from minorities, immigration enforcement, that's draconian and not in accordance with American ideals.

And I think that that. Just really does give an opening for the Democratic Party to potentially solidify those young voters as their voters for life. Because they're getable I think in a lot of ways now still. 

Speaker: Now, Section C, [02:17:00] The Boomcession

Well, Matt, mostly, today we wanted to talk to you about this really fantastic piece you wrote called The Boomcession, right? why Americans Hate What looks like an Economic Boom. I thought was incredibly well written and really interesting and pointed to some things which are non-obvious, but probably should be.

Right. Those things that, that become obvious after they're pointed out. Yeah. Yeah. So just, just briefly take us through your argument and the evidence that you marshaled to substantiate it. So there's this dilemma that I think a lot of people have today in, in elite circles where the economy looks like it's doing fine.

Okay? Or at least it, it was, let's put the Ira Iran thing aside for a second. Since the COVID crisis. The economy GDP growth, which is the way that that policymakers measure how the economy is doing. It's an aggregate of all transactions in the economy. You know, when that goes up, typically [02:18:00] people are happy.

It means there's more economic activity going on. People are richer, they have more stuff, houses, cars, whatever. This weird thing happened in really in 2021, where the economic growth GDP growth. And consumer sentiment diverged. So people were less and less happy even though the economy was doing well.

Typically, people are unhappy when there's a recession, which is the economy is the amount of stuff that we're creating, is going down, but they're happy when we're in a, a growth period. And, and the weird thing is we've been in a growth period. But people are unhappy, and so this was a dilemma for Biden because Biden was trying to figure out what do I do?

All of the buttons I'm pushing to improve the economy are working, yes. Inflation was high in 2022, according to this other index called the Consumer Price Index, but it's coming down right, 20 23, 20 24. It's returning to normal and GDP growth is up and [02:19:00] wage growth is up. Why are people so mad?

And the political consultants were saying, well, you gotta tell people that they're actually getting a bad impression from the media, or, so you have to tell them that things are good or you have to sympathize with them, or all of these pieces of advice that we're resting on this. Fundamental thing we haven't seen since, before we started measuring economic statistics, which is, is that the economic statistics and the public sentiment are just have diverged.

And that did not change when Trump came into office. So in the first term, in Trump's first term, people were happy with the economy. They didn't necessarily like him. They thought he told dirty jokes, but they're like, whatever, everything's funny when I'm making money. Right? That was the, the general vibe.

But they, they reelected him because they thought. At least I was richer when this guy was in office. But in his second term, not only did he not quote unquote improve the economy of consumer sentiment is actually lower than it is under Biden. It is actually at a, I think probably, let's see here. I have a chart.

Public Satisfaction with the Economy by President [02:20:00] was on since we started measuring it. It was the lowest ever under Biden. And Trump in his first term, was the third highest ever. You can go back to JFK. He was the third highest ever in his second term. He's actually lower than Biden, right? So this is this phenomenon I call the I call a boom session, which is traditional stats look like they're doing well, but people are really unhappy.

They feel like it's a recession. There we go. That's the argument. It's interesting. So decom, but decompose it a little bit more. you said a couple of really interesting things in that. Piece, they're related, but separate. One of them. In 1934 when we cooked up the idea of GDP, right? It was, it's just worth noting parenthetically that the people who did cook it up Kuznets and others insisted that we not use this as a measure of welfare at the time.

Right, right. Just to be clear, they said, this is not a measure of welfare. Never use it as a measure of welfare. We ignored their pleas and now we use it as a measure of [02:21:00] welfare. But in 1934, it was almost certainly true that when the economy produced more. The majority of that was useful to people, ordinary people, right?

That that there was a connection between GDP going up and your lives getting better, and that connection has become more and more tenuous for a variety of reasons. And the second point you made, which I think is really important, is that consumer spending may be going up for middle and working class people.

But all of it is devoted to shit they don't wanna buy in the first place. Right. Paying more interest, paying higher healthcare to you, whatever it is. Right. So they, they may be spending more, but their, their lives are getting crappier at the same time. Yeah. So, to me those were two things that you said in that essay.

I thought that were pretty, pretty cool. There's a number of reasons that. Explain the [02:22:00] sentiment that people don't like what's going on. And the first one that you pointed out is the idea that just the production of more transactions, the more stuck goods and services that are sold in the us, is that necessarily something that people like?

Right. It more, more of, yeah. The GDP in 2025 is that. Translating into what makes people happy? Well, to give you a sense of the kinds of things we were making in the 1930s and forties and fifties was things like toilets. A lot of people didn't have toilets and then they got toilets. That's pretty awesome.

Yeah. That's a big change. So, it's a big deal, and, and electricity, that's pretty solid. You don't have electricity. Yeah. And then you have electricity. A, okay. Right. I was struck by this stat, which I can't totally remember now, but it was in Mississippi, in the, the 1930s, very few people had toilets and by in 1960, most of them did.

And it's just like a huge change for people's welfare. Things like washing machines and refrigerators and stuff [02:23:00] that, that's, that's a really big deal. And a dollar spent on that is a really high return in, in terms just in terms of people's welfare, but. Not, it wasn't just that there was more basic stuff that people didn't have that we could create.

It was also that, we banned things like gambling. Yes. Right. So, so we, and we regulated markets in a much more aggressive way. So we just the financial sector was not a significant part of the economy. It's only like 2% of the economy today. It's 9% of the economy. I don't think that having more options for credit cards makes people happier, but it might increase the amount of GDP.

Yeah, that's a reg. Like what we've, what we've done is we've essentially said we're gonna. Stop trying to regulate for a moral economy, a moral economy being the, that kinds of things that people want more of or, or even a useful economy. A useful economy might be, might be a a, yeah. One way to put it, moral economy, however you wanna characterize it, but the second largest segment, the second fastest growing segment in the economy from [02:24:00] 2019 to 2024 was, is, is actually gambling.

Right. So GDP growth in gambling is going up and you par some part of that, 2.3% or whatever the GDP growth last year in the US economy as a result of more people clicking on DraftKings and Kalshi, right? Yes. Which doesn't, which makes their lives worse. It's not like, yes, introducing a toilet, it's introducing a guy that steals their time and money and attention, right?

Yeah. So on a, on a broad macro level, and this doesn't explain the, the, the post COVID thing, but on a broad macro level. We do have this problem where. In the 1930s, even though Simon, 'cause it didn't, he said, don't use this as a measure of welfare. You could use it as a measure of welfare. Yeah. And it was not unreasonable to do that.

It wasn't terrible. No. No. Yeah, 'cause, 'cause we regulated on a micro level, to make sure that products got better and were more useful. Overtime, right? Yeah. First it was cars, then it was better cars, then it was cars with seat belts, and so on and so forth. So now, it's just whatever, man, it it, [02:25:00] if you can make money doing it, if you could make it, it, it, it's by definition good and righteous.

Right. So, so Kalshi and Polymarket being canonical examples. Yeah. Right. And that's right. And so. Like Live Nation, Ticketmaster sells a ticket for more. It's like a higher GDP. Is that really like making your life? Is that better? Is that better?

So we've, again, we've, we talk a lot about how GDP is a terrible metric, and now you're telling me that consumer spending is a terrible metric because it's not actually making a distinction between discretionary spending and things which essentially behave like a tax.

So something you have to pay whether you want to or not. What should we be measuring? I think we should start with, consumer sentiment. I, I actually really like, there's this whole weird thing where for years people have said, well, the, the public is unhappy. But, but we need real hard data, not soft data, and soft data being consumer sentiment numbers.

And I think we should start with the soft data. So if people are unhappy, we [02:26:00] should try to figure out why they're unhappy. Instead of starting with harder data, which is just pricing and, and stuff like that, right? Where, 'cause the pricing can be all, can be gamed, right? But if you just ask people how are you feeling?

You can, obviously it's it's feelings and that's all soft. But if they're mad, they're mad. Right? So I, I, that's where I think we should start. And, and I don't think that consumer spending is a, is a terrible metric or GDP is a terrible metric. I just think it's limited. The interpretation that we're using doesn't work anymore.

So, I wouldn't necessarily stop collecting that data, but I might. I might start trying to understand how do we measure consumer spending that for things that people want to get? How do we start to measure things that don't increase people's happiness like. I, I don't know exactly how you would do that, but you could presumably find, take things like gambling and, figure out what people value and what they don't value, [02:27:00] and create different metrics based on what they value, what they don't value.

I think just studying, changing the way we collect pricing information could be really useful. I know that the BLS sends Bureau of Labor Statistics sends people out to just go and look at price tags. And it's a lot of companies now, they will show you one price in the, in the aisle. They'll say, oh, this drink is a dollar.

And then you go to check out and it turns out it's a dollar 20. And a lot of people don't notice. Well, if the BLS person is, and that, that's fraud. But a lot of companies do it shockingly. But the BLS looks at it and says, oh, it's a dollar. And then they, they say it's a dollar, but then the actual thing that people pay is a dollar 20.

There's also all, all sorts of reward programs. Pricing games and rebates and all this other stuff that it's hard to put in there. So I would, I think I would just try to understand, try to collect pricing data differently and then try to divide up consumer pricing into things that people, that make people happy and things that, that are at are non-discretionary, that [02:28:00] are tax, like we don't include taxes in CPI.

Yeah. Like healthcare and, right. Yeah. Right. So do, do you know in. I would also just ban in other countries, I would, I would ban price discrimination. I would just say, yeah, it was better in the thirties when people pay the same thing for the same item. Right. I'm curious, Matt, do you know in other countries where, a lot of the things that we talk about that are essentially like taxes.

Like healthcare, right? College education. Yeah. Childcare, daycare. You have to pay it whether you wanna, you want it or not. In a lot of other countries, those are provided by the state. So in those countries, those things are not counted as part of consumer spending. I don't know the answer to that.

If you look at the OECD's, AIC index, which is actual income. Consumption or something like that, which nets out public goods. How, how the US ranks [02:29:00] changes for, for example, changes radically because, well, USA is, I dunno, top three or four in GDP per capita. If you, if you normalize for all the things that other societies provide for free that don't go, that, that therefore don't go into GDP, the picture changes dramatically.

Dramatically. And I think that's a big part of the problem in the United States is that, there, yeah, people earn higher wages and stuff like that, but it all goes to pay for this stuff that is escalating in price faster than the wages are going up. Because those are private markets where the objective is to make the prices go up, right.

Where the whole point is to charge people more money every year. Right. I just, I told, Nick, I just had surgery. Two hours, less than two hours in the operating room. One night in the hospital, they billed my insurance company $82,000. There is no way that if I was in Germany [02:30:00] or France or any European country without insurance, and I went and and did the same thing, that my bill would be $82,000.

No, it would be a fraction of that just as somebody who was uninsured. Yeah. Yeah. So it would've been $3,000 or something like that. Yeah. And, and I, just to be clear, the US does have a lot of public goods. Like we high school, we have public schools. Which we didn't use to have public schools.

People, we pay taxes. And you can, there's a lot of, there's roads and there's lots of stuff that we, that we do that, where we, we don't think about election infrastructure. We talk about, oh my gosh, there's so much money and, and politics that's terrible, right? Which, yes, it is terrible, but we don't expect donors to pay for like voting machines, right?

So there, there's all sorts of infrastructure that we just don't think about that is public and paid for with taxes. That is not the case in in a bunch of other countries. It's just a matter of how we choose to characterize these things as taxes or not. And it has significant political impacts [02:31:00] because there in a lot of Democrats and Republicans who just absolutely would never raise taxes, but they don't think it's a tax when your healthcare premium goes up by 7% or 8% or 9%, they just think that's sad.

And yeah, it's, it's crazy to think about the world that way, but it does feel like our, our economic statistics. Point us to that framework when when that price goes up, 7% GDP goes up, which is good, right? And yeah, by definition versus, versus when your taxes go up. Like there's all sorts of dead weight loss.

But that's bad. Bad by definition. Yeah, no, it's bad. Oh, see, the other thing that I think I wanted to I'll put in in here about the consumer price index. This is the one time Larry Summers has quoted me. Which is funny. Not sure if it's good or bad, but go on. Well, it's only once since it's, since it's virtuous to me.

I'll, I'll say that he, at the, at the, at that, that five minute period when he decided to quote me, he was brilliant. Other than that monster, right? No. The, the Consumer price Index, right? Reagan made a [02:32:00] couple of changes to the consumer price index. They effectively said that the price of money, the interest rate does not.

Does is has nothing to do, is not included in the, the inflation rate, right? So what that means is if you is, if you buy a car, I remember seeing 2023, I was like, why is this, why are people so mad about inflation when, when the CPI is low? And then I saw people striking the UAW had a strike about, the auto industry went on strike.

You remember that? And, and. There were people saying, I can't buy the cars that I make. Right? And I was like, huh, that's interesting. And I looked at the price of cars. And the price of cars was flat from 2022 to 2023. They had increased dramatically in 2022, but it was flat. And I thought, that's interesting.

It didn't actually get more expensive. But then I realized, oh, people don't buy a car, a sticker price. They buy. They lease it or they, or they, pay with, with a, with auto financing and financing costs increased dramatically. The [02:33:00] Fed raised rates from whatever it was to. 0% to 4% that year or 3%.

And that drama that increased. Yeah, the cash amount that people pay massively. So people, the CPI looks at it and says, oh, cars did not increase in price. But actual normal people, the amount they have to shell out Yeah. For cars is much higher from 23 2 to 2023. And that's true for in somewhat similar for housing.

And so if you look at it and you're like, wait, the cost of credit cards due, debt, housing and cars are not included in. The CPI. That's weird. They always do CPI and they call it core inflation, which is the inflation without food and energy. So if you don't buy a, have a car or a home or eat anything or use energy, then the CPI is perfect, right?

But other than that, it doesn't actually reflect the lived experience of normal people. And I think there's a moment for. Congress and the Bureau of Labor Statistics to go in and start to say, okay, how are we gonna [02:34:00] actually. Create, an inflation metric that reflects the lived experience of normal people.

You could do it in a lot of different ways. You could just get rid of price discrimination and then measure. You could also just measure what it's like to be, for different baskets of people. They, they do have urban consumers. They do have a CPI for elderly people. You could look at a CPI for poor CPI for rural, if you wanted that.

That gets complicated. But there are ways to go in and look at this basic things though, like the price of money that should be in there. Food and energy that should be these, these things. We need to stop at these games. It's, it's absurd.

JANINE: Well, media talk about companies as not just successful, but as evidence that profit driven capitalism and the deregulation that enables it really is the best thing for everyone because look, they're providing a product or a service.

They're creating jobs. So really any criticism is. Wrong. And, and, and maybe just jealousy, your, your [02:35:00] new report is not about a small ancillary thing that companies could improve on. It really drives a stake through the heart of this mythology. So, so tell us, what did you look at and what did you find?

GUEST: Yeah, well, just continuing with the Walmart example, you mentioned that the CEO made $27.4 million in 2024. So yeah, if we criticize that, then sometimes people will say, oh, oh, you, you're just envious. You wanna make that amount of money, and it doesn't have anything to do with you. So why? Why should you complain?

Well, it does have to do with all of the rest of us because for one thing. Walmart and many other large US corporations are really based on a business model that extracts wealth from low wage workers and funnels it up to guys like Doug McMillon and they are paying their low level workers so little.

Many [02:36:00] of them have no choice but to rely on public assistance. And so that's what our report looks at, is we looked at the 20 largest US corporations, with the lowest median worker pay, and we found that the vast majority of them have median pay that's so low that a worker at that level. Would qualify for Medicaid for a family of three.

Most of them would qualify for snap food, aid benefits. And what that means is that not only are workers getting the shaft from this business model that it's all about. Keeping wages at poverty levels at the base to overpay their CEOs. But the rest of us are affected because it's our taxpayer money that is going into those public assistance programs that these companies are using to make this model workable.

And I think that this is a big part of the current affordability crisis that so many [02:37:00] people are talking about as they struggle with the rising cost for things like housing and. Groceries and there's a lot of focus on how can we bring these costs down. But we've also gotta look at why do people have so little money in their pockets in the first place?

And that's because of wage suppression by companies like Walmart. 

JANINE: Well, I just wanna say, if we can say poverty wage business model like 10 times, I just, I want that to enter the lexicon, but I feel like. Some media feel like they found a hack. The Washington Post had a thing a few months back, why you may not want lower prices as much as you think you do.

And I get it. They're saying prices are one factor and we have to look at other factors. But if you just report it that way, oh, you're so dim. You want prices to go down. You don't understand how the economy works. Mm-hmm. It's like, it's like giving the ball score [02:38:00] Yankees four. There are other elements of course, at work here, and, and this is in a context as the report lays out, it's in a context of cuts to benefits, union participation, stock buybacks.

There's a lot going on here that is part of the affordability crisis. Yeah, absolutely. 

GUEST: And, and the companies are saying, oh, it's rising. Cost for so many things. We have to pass those costs on to customers or we have to cut jobs. There's no other way to find money to, 

JANINE: mm-hmm. 

GUEST: To, cover these things when, if you look at what they really are spending money on these 20, companies altogether have been on a massive stock buyback spending spree.

All together. Let's see, I think it was, over $200 billion over the past 20 years. Some companies are just completely outrageous examples, like Home Depot spent 38 billion on [02:39:00] stock buybacks over the past six years. And every dollar that's spent on stock buybacks, first of all, I should explain what they are.

This is when companies go out and repurchase their own stock on the open market. And when they do that, it artificially inflates the value of their shares because they're reducing the available supply. And what that. Also does is it inflates the value of their CEO paychecks because CEOs get most of their compensation in some form of stock-based pay, and every dollar that's spent on those buybacks is a dollar that's not spent on worker wages.

And so at Home Depot, if they've taken all the money that they spent on buybacks over the past six years and instead gave it to their workers, they could have given every one of their 419,000 US employees. A $15,000 bonus every year for those six years at Lowe's Home Depot's competitor and the home improvement field, the the figures [02:40:00] are even more insane.

I think that they could have doubled the level of median pay at that company if they had spent money on worker wages instead of stock buybacks. So it's not that these companies don't have the resources. To be paying, something other than poverty wages. It's that they're choosing to use their resources to enrich those at the top.

JANINE: It's so important to indicate that these are choices, when you read mm-hmm. Economic reporting, it's often like they had to pass the cost on to customers like they had to, like, no, these are choices. Priorities that are being made. Yeah, we could talk about them that way. 

GUEST: Absolutely. They also say, well, of course pay is low at these companies because, the workers are mostly part-time.

Well, again, that is a choice to have a business model that's based on an overwhelmingly part-time workforce, which comes with all kinds of costs. It [02:41:00] tends to. Contribute to higher levels of turnover and people not feeling as in invested in their workplace. And so there's all kinds of business arguments as to why it might make more sense for them to have more full-time employees with benefits.

But, it's a choice. They want more. Part-time workers so they don't have to pay benefits so they can keep their labor costs down. So it is a choice. It's not just, something like the weather that just happens out of our control. 

JANINE: Right, right. And it's a storyline. It's such an old storyline.

We don't need to pay fast food workers, livable wage because. It's, they're teenagers and they're just getting to pick up money to go to the movies, and it's so outdated. It's so outdated and, and unrealistic, and I just, I have such frustration with the. The unending power of these narratives.

GUEST: Exactly. There's such a large, the, these low wage workers are [02:42:00] parents, many of them single parents who are really struggling to make ends meet. We've talked about our country's largest private sector employer, Walmart, but if you look at Amazon too, we were able to get. Data from a, a handful of state governments that report how many employees big companies have on public assistance programs.

And so with Amazon, the, the state of Nevada actually is the only one that reveals this information from Medicaid and Amazon had 8,900. Employees in Nevada on Medicaid, and that was 48% of their whole workforce. So imagine that they're the second largest private sector employer with, a, a gazillionaire founder and Jeff Bezos.

They're, generating enormous wealth for people at the top, and yet 48% of their employees in this one state are on Medicaid. 

JANINE: Okay. I'm gonna need to talk to you more about this, I suspect, but for [02:43:00] now, I just would ask you what could happen today, tomorrow, policy-wise? Legislatively, what? What could happen that could start to address this situation?

GUEST: Yeah, there's a lot that could be done. First of all, raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at 7 25 an hour for 16 years now, we could strengthen our labor laws so that workers like the ones that Amazon and Starbucks that have voted to unionize of four years ago now, but still don't have a first contract because our protections for union rights are so weak and these companies have just used.

Every trick in the book to undermine the desires of their employees, to be members of unions, to bargain collectively for for better pay. And then I'm very excited about efforts to also use the tax code to address this issue of, overpaying CS and [02:44:00] underpaying workers. And this year there are ballot initiatives moving ahead in both.

Los Angeles and San Francisco that would raise local taxes on businesses based on the size of the gap between their CEO and their worker pay as an incentive for them to either, narrow those gaps by lifting up worker pay or bringing down CEO pay. Or if companies refuse to do that and wanna.

Stick with the status quo of having really large pay gaps, then they would pay more taxes into public services and infrastructure that is so needed by so many states and cities because of the federal cutbacks in funding. 

Tech companies are rushing to trade their people, meaning workers, including the highest skilled workers. For more chips, some of those companies might come to regret the exchange. That's the Wall Street Journal, and then they go through Microsoft and [02:45:00] Meta and the other companies that are laying off tens of thousands of workers, significantly reducing their workforce.

And again, there's none of the AI investment, whether it's in data centers or anywhere else. That's showing its quote profitability, which of course is the only real metric that matters for capitalism or in the capitalist economic model. And so the Wall Street Journal's warning, you're getting rid of all of these high skilled workers, massive cuts massive layoffs, all to replace them with ai, and the AI thing has yet to prove itself.

Anyway, as an economist and as a Marxist, I want to get your take on this. Well, there are a number of issues, and I'm sure they're all in your mind, Brian, which is why you bring this topic up as well. You should. Let's start with this. The question about whether AI is or is not a successful capitalist [02:46:00] investment.

You're quite right. The way we handle technological inventions in capitalism means that the technology is immediately interesting if and only if it is subordinated to the profit, calculus of capitalists, they will buy the equipment, the software, the hardware, whatever it is. If and only if it will save them on labor costs.

That's what this is about. And AI is a perfect example, but computers were an example. Electricity was an example. the jet engine was an example and, and many others. But let's stick with ai. The promise of AI is that for a capitalist, he can do or she can do the following, fire, the worker. Who costs a wage or a salary, whatever that might be, and replace him or her [02:47:00] with a machine or with a piece of software or however you understand ai.

Alright. The question is, is that true? The problem for the capitalist is it costs money to have ai. It costs money to get the AI and it costs money to run the ai, very heavy cost of electricity, for example, to operate the data centers, that they're creating, and they're worried because the investment is made now.

To build the AI's, the data center, to build and to buy the machinery to set up the electric supply to worry. For example, these days, will there be oil or natural gas fuel for producing the electricity that ai. Because of course they're worried not just can we get the [02:48:00] electricity, but what will we have to pay for it?

Because that goes into the cost of the AI and there goes the comparison with the worker you just fired. So here's what the Wall Street Journal and many other financial documents these days are worrying about. The money is being invested now, but we don't really know yet. How many workers of what kind earning, what salary will actually be dismissed by the capitalist if it isn't that many?

And if it isn't the ones that you're saving money on because they're high paid, you may be very sorry that you made this investment. And that's not just bad for the capitalist to invest, but much of the money being used to build out artificial intelligence is money [02:49:00] borrowed from the biggest banks in the United States.

We, you and I, when we put money in the bank may not understand it, but the bank lends that money to the AI companies. And if the AI companies have made a mistake, they won't be able to pay that money back and the banks will then be in trouble and then they will shift the burden onto you and me. So we are at risk.

Without knowing it, we are at risk. Without controlling it. And we are in the hands of people who think only in terms of the profitability. If this isn't profitable, they won't pursue it beyond a certain point. And the truth of it is, if you are honest, we don't know yet. And by the way, this is very typical.

If you remember back in the early year 2000, we [02:50:00] had something called the.dot-com collapse or the.dot-com crisis. Why? Because enormous money was being spent on computers because they were gonna replace all of these workers who used to sit there with their pre-computer technology, and that turned out to be a hype.

And the banks went down and all kinds of other companies collapsed. That's the real risk here, and I wanna make clear the capitalists are making the decisions, but we are all at risk. If they're miscalculating, if they're overshooting, whatever the benefits of AI are, we will all suffer. Probably more than they will, and they're at least in charge, and they will know before we do that.

This is a bust and they will get out of the business. [02:51:00] They will sell, they will declare bankruptcy. They'll use all the normal tools of capitalism that protect them when they screw up and leave us out there with the risk. But before, even on that one more thing, which is an older Marxist understanding. If it is true, let's, let's be real simple.

Let's assume AI can make some or all workers twice as productive as they used to be. So what does the capitalist do? He fires half his workers and buys ai. Now the remaining half working with AI can produce just as much as the full compliment of workers used to do, and our capitalist is very happy because with half the workers, he saves on half his payroll.

He doesn't have to pay the [02:52:00] workers he fired. And that money, which he still gets, 'cause he's producing as much as he did before selling it, as he did before. Let's make it simple at the same price as he did before. So the money's coming in, but half of his payroll, he doesn't have to pay out to workers anymore.

He gets to keep it. That's the profit incentive to buy ai. But now let, let me give you an idea. What would a socialist collective of workers do if they were running the company? Would they not be interested in ai? No, no, no. They'd be very interested in ai. And if AI could make each worker doubly productive, here's what they do.

Would they fire anybody? Absolutely not. Everybody stays working. Everybody gets the same wage. But everybody works four hours a day instead of a why. Because in four hours with [02:53:00] AI, you can do it twi. In other words, the technology, instead of en enhancing the profit, transforms the lives. Of the vast majority, the employees who now get four hours a day to pursue their political interests, their passions, their hobbies, their family life, their, their physical and mental health, and all the rest of it.

That's what technology is often undertaken for. That's what, if you ask the inventor who comes through with something, that's what he or she is hoping for to really improve life. Capitalism doesn't do that because it subordinates the technology to the profit game, and that is good for those who already have a business.

That's already our richest people and not good for the average person, and that's why capitalism isn't so good. 

Speaker: And Finally, Section [02:54:00] D, What This Costs Real People

YouGov poll finds inflation is the number one issue, and that between his war and his tariffs, Trump is 35 percentage points. Underwater on inflation. That is his approval to disapproval gap is that high. When asked about the inflation on Fox business last week, he could only muster this much optimism about the effects of his own policies.

The question came from Fox Businesses Maria Bartiromo. Do you believe the price of oil and gas will be lower before the midterm elections? I hope so. I think so. It could be, it could be, or the same or maybe a little bit higher. I think this won't be that much longer. Maybe even a little bit higher.

Trump on Fox Business and on the Alliance with Israel in this war. A headline on Vox says, Israel's critics are winning the battle for the Democratic party, democratic voters. Turned against [02:55:00] Israel. Now their politicians are following that from Vox, and that follows a Pew poll last week that the times of Israel broke down this way.

60% of US adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel. Only 37% view it favorably. It continues about. Percent of Democrats and democratic leaning independents express unfavorable views of Israel 80%, while 58% of Republicans and Republican leaning adults view Israel favorably overall. So a big partisan split there.

However. The Times of Israel summary of the PU poll continues, however, majorities under age 50 in both parties now rate Israel and Netanyahu negatively again, that on the Pew poll from the Times of Israel now. This all has major implications for the midterm elections here in the United States where the primaries are already well [02:56:00] underway.

And of course the midterms have major implications for how much Trump can keep up the pace of right-wing and culture war change that he's been on, and whether Democrats can reverse the government's course and enact any kind of agenda of their own if they do take the Congressional majorities. Our focus for this conversation.

Will be what some of this means politically in this country with Dave Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for the Cook Political report with Amy Walter among his recent articles, five Ways 2026 looks like 2018. That was Trump's other midterm elections and Five Ways it Doesn't. Dave, thanks for joining us.

Welcome back to WNYC. Good to be with you, Brian. Thanks. I threw a lot of numbers out there. So in words, how would you begin to describe how the public ranks inflation as an issue now and how the president is doing on that issue? Well, inflation is still voter's top issue, but it's really a series of issues.

It's [02:57:00] healthcare, it's the cost of groceries, it's the cost of gas, and up until. The launch of the coordinated attacks on Iran, it appeared that Democrats messaging in the midterms would be centered around the reconciliation bill and Republican cuts to the social safety net, particularly Medicaid, the premium spikes associated with the Obamacare cliff, and the expiration of enhanced subsidies.

These were unpopular measures under. Unified Republican control of government that, Democrats were going to exploit and they still will. But now there's this, additional aspect of an unpopular war and the supply chain disruption and higher oil and gas prices that come with it. And it has compounded Republicans problems politically because, president Trump.

Won over independent voters in [02:58:00] 2024 by promising an economic golden age, extracting America from for foreign conflicts and not really making broad changes to entitlements, Democrats can now capitalize on all three of those. You heard the Trump clip from Fox Business. I heard a TV analyst say, this is the same playbook that President Biden failed with when he was running for reelection.

Don't worry, this inflation is only transitory. It'll calm down on its own. Trust me on this. Do you see a parallel? Well, the stimulus spending under, the Biden administration didn't do much to improve his standing with voters who were facing higher prices. And, I think one difference between, where we are today politically and where we were eight years ago.

Back then, voters still had generally positive views of life under the Obama years. Today, voters are cross pressured [02:59:00] because they don't view the Biden years favorably. They view them as, the, the, start of in this inflationary environment. And so they are having a hard time trusting either political party to make their lives better.

Question from a listener who writes the Times, had a front page story last week, questioning Trump's mental stability. Has that issue made an impact on the public? I. Every time Democrats have sought to, run ads that focus on, the president's mental state or on fitness for office, they are typical.

They're reaching, they're preaching to the, their own choir. And it kind of makes Democrats feel good to, to diagnose the president with, a mental disorder and, and try and rally their own troops that way. But what we've seen in focus groups and in polls is that [03:00:00] that argument doesn't really change, the, the preexisting ways in which voters see the president doesn't change many minds.

Instead, what, what has hurt Republicans is the. The argument that the president's policies have negatively impacted their pocketbook and their outlook in terms of their healthcare coverage, their ability to, to, to pay for their housing or their car, and. Some of the, the changes that we've seen, under the, the one big beautiful bill won't take effect until 2027 or later, but the threat of hospital closures or Americans losing insurance.

Is a rallying cry that, that has moved votes in the past. In [03:01:00] 2017 and 18 when Republicans embarked on repeal and replace, it didn't even, it didn't even pass. They didn't succeed in gutting Obamacare, and yet Democrats barrage of ads when it came to preexisting conditions helped them win the midterms by a wide margin.

So first of all, if I may call you Steven, thank you very much for your time, for joining us to talk about your book. So let me, it's a, let me begin. Would you say that sickness is an individual problem or a social problem when you look at the United States? Whether you look at the United States or other countries, it's always a social or political problem.

Rudolf Virchow the father of Modern Cellular Pathology, said in 1848, all diseases have two causes. One. Biological and the other political, so trying to understand that politics is the, [03:02:00] the most important factor in producing health in a society is quite challenging, especially for Americans. All right, let me, let me draw you out.

Tell me why that's true. Why is it, especially for Americans, are we. A, a, sick people, and B, is our politics playing a role in creating that situation. So as an emergency physician, the easiest diagnosis I could make in the ER was that somebody's dead hard to fake. So I filled out a death certificate, that was then linked with the birth certificate, and we could calculate.

Mortality rates, who died at what age? Add them up all together. And you get a number called life expectancy. And that's the average length of life. If, mortality rates stayed the same from year to year. So I like to use this as a measure of health for a country. Basically, you can't [03:03:00] be healthy if you're dead.

So it's a measure of how long people live. So. If we, if, if we look at life expectancy, we have to ask what's a normal life expectancy? Because, if you go to the doctor, they'll take, take your blood pressure and decide whether it's normal or not. For a country, you can take the life expectancy measure and ask, is this normal?

Well, normal should be, what the best achieve the best countries achieve. And we're about seven life expectancy years behind the longest lived country, which has been Japan since 1978. Well, if we, so how important is that seven year difference? You might think of it as a few more years drooling in a nursing home, but in fact, our leading disease killers are number one, heart disease, number two, cancer.

And number three, unintentional injuries. [03:04:00] Those three will kill roughly half of our, population, about 3 million deaths a year. And if we eradicated our three leading killers as a cause of death, we would be right up there with Japan in terms of length of life. So taking my measure for length of life, some 50 countries have higher life expectancy than we do.

Now to, then why, the question you asked. Well, medical care, we spend about half of the world's medical care bill in the United States. It's about, $7 trillion. It's, a sixth of our total economy, and we are less healthy than. 50 other countries. So just by simple logic, medical care cannot have a big effect.

So what else matters? Well, studies show medical care can avert about 10% of mortality in the United States. [03:05:00] So that leaves 90% attributed to other factors. And, but Americans. When you poll Americans on what's most important for health, they put medical care first. And guess what? They put politics last.

So we have to, we have to, dissect what's going on here. Medical care isn't that important. I have to say that, I worked clinic clinically as a doctor and I taught doctors and I have to reflect and say, gee, what I did and taught wasn't really that important. So what really matters, studies show that the amount of inequality in a society is very strongly associated with its health.

Say, measured by life expectancy. And you were talking earlier about the vast increase in economic inequality in this country. And we are, certainly among the [03:06:00] rich countries, the most unequal country among them, and we have the worst health among them. And the two are actually linked causally. So mostly we say, well, an association between inequality and health does not imply causation.

But if you ask, how do you decide that something causes something else? The relationship I've just mentioned between inequality and health can be proven to be causal. And I use the criteria, that the Surgeon General's report in 1964, linking smoking in bad health. They laid out the criteria for saying smoking caused worst health, and that's what I use to make this link right.

I, I make the link and there are many other researchers that verify that. So inequality kills. How does it do that? Well, [03:07:00] inequality produces a lot of stress in society and the, and we in the United States are, one of the most stressed countries in the world. So how do we cope with this stress?

Well, not in very, healthy ways. I mentioned unintentional injuries, being, our third leading cause of death, and so we kill ourselves with opioid overdoses. The, the fentanyl, issues that, are, are, big time in this country in many other ways and. So that's one way consuming opioids.

Another way is, well, there are a lot of dysfunctional ways of, of trying to cope. Some, some perhaps better than others. Walking the dog gets you out on the street and maybe talking to other people, but so highly stressed society caused by the inequality. That we willingly choose. In other words, and this is a tough thing to, to, to recognize.

[03:08:00] We have a so-called democracy and, and so we choose policies and what you were describing in the previous part of, today's, session was the inequality. And we seem to have. Chosen through our political process to have less so the rich can have more. So that makes us responsible for the poor health that we're having.

So suppose we decreased inequality, what would we do with the proceeds? Well, besides inequality being so important, the other factor is attention to early life. As we go from the erection to the resurrection, roughly half of our health as an adult has been programmed between conception and your second birthday.

That's called the first thousand days. And. Studies, many studies show that that period is critical for [03:09:00] how healthy you become as an adult. So who's responsible for that period, that first thousand days? Well, we, we think family values should make the parents responsible for creating healthy conditions for that period, but.

Fam, a poor, a a, a poor family, a family struggling to make ends meet, to pay the electricity bill that you described. They're just trying to survive. And if, if you want them to stay home and raise the child. To be healthy. They can't do that. There's only two countries in the world that don't give a working woman who's pregnant, paid time off after she has her baby.

One is of course, the United States. We say we can't afford that. The other country is Papua New Guinea, half of a big island, north of Australia. So we don't. Have a national [03:10:00] policy of providing time. Pay for a woman to, for a mother to, spend time with her child. And so our, our young people, our infants and toddlers are raised in very dysfunctional situations.

Take a healthier country. Sweden, there it is mandatory to take 480 days of paid. Parental leave. The father's gotta take some too. And that's at your full pay. So, then in your, when your child is, is put in a, when your child is two or three, you can put 'em in a daycare center and in Sweden it costs $160 a month for Swedish daycare that's run by the government.

We have nothing like that. So we have chosen because, we've decided that. It's too expensive for the United States [03:11:00] to have, to support early life. And, so we are in a sense making the political choices so we have poor health and die young. I don't think if most Americans really realized that the political choices they make.

Lead to an early death and before dying, much more disease than we should be having, considering we're the richest and most powerful country in world history, although that is fast declining.

RALPH NADER: You do say in your book that industry will be anxious to advance a popular narrative that holds individuals responsible for the systemic problems.

It creates itself industry. So you talk about the retirement pension industry, you talk about the health insurance industry, you talk about the credit industry, you talk about the cigarette industry, and as you mentioned, the renewable energy versus fossil [03:12:00] fuels. Can you run us by several of these to make your points more specific?

GUEST: Yes, absolutely. So I think the framing here is that I think the, the key bit of psychology is that it's very hard for us to see a problem from more than one point of view at a time. And so many social problems. We could potentially think of them from both from an individual perspective. So I need to change my behavior to reduce my carbon, to save for my future, to, to smoke less or not at all, or to reduce my intake of fatty foods and so on.

So I can think of it as a problem for me, the individual and everybody else's individuals, or I can think of it as a problem of the system. The political system is working. There's incentives. We have regulations, lack of regulations, international agreements. So the, the trouble is that given the way we're, we're wired, if we think about things from an individualistic perspective, we tend not to think about the system.

For example, if you take obesity, say we, we know it's clear that obesity has been increasing rapidly in the US and UK across [03:13:00] many parts of the both Western world and developing world. You might think, well, from a political campaigning point of view, it's clearly obvious that one of the forces that's driving that.

Is the massive growth in high energy, dense foods and the gigantic marketing campaigns which are, pushing those foods at large numbers of people. But that's the, the systemic frame, the system frame. But the individual frame is focusing on individual, weight loss, individual control of our diets and, and the amount we exercise and so on.

And the crucial bit of psychology, as I say here, is that these frames tend to mutually block each other. So this means that if I'm thinking about my own obesity as an issue of self-control and an issue of my own responsibility, then I tend to defocus on the systemic forces that are causing obesity at at large.

So this means that it's really attractive for industry in, in any domain where these sorts of issues arise to push what the sociologists have termed an agenda of responsible. So it is very helpful for industries who want not to be regulated very heavily [03:14:00] to tell people it's an individual problem. You have to worry about your own weight, you have to worry about your own carbon emissions.

It will help you do it, but it's really your problem. Similarly with you have savings, it's up to you to put the right amount of money aside and so and so on and so on. And you see that all over the place. So. Many of your listeners will be very well aware in, again, in context of climate, the idea of an individual carbon calculator, so we can each monitor our own carbon footprint that was both created and propagated by bp, which is one of the world's largest oil companies.

And it was not done, of course, with the intention of particularly helping reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. What it's doing is individualizing the problem, saying, it's not our problem, it's your problem. Each of you systems needs to take up that problem and solve it yourselves. And if you are, if we're all worried about that.

Then we're worried about both ourselves, but about other people. We can start blaming each other. We can start vilifying climate scientists for flying to conferences, and we can just generally get into a tangle in which we're wondering which individuals are to blame. And that [03:15:00] distracts us away from the big question, which is these big systemic forces.

Similarly, with litter, the big campaigns, the Crying Indian campaign and, and, and onwards in the US are funded as, again, many of your listeners will know. They're funded by the packaging and drinks industry. So that, again, the ostensible story is, we're very, very worried about littering and plastic waste, and we're gonna help with this helpful campaign.

But of course, what it's really doing is individualizing the problem. It's saying, this problem of all this plastic leaking into the world's ecosystems is a problem for individuals lit more carefully in the trashcan rather than, well, hang on. Why is it possible to create such vast amounts of, of non-recyclable or non recycled in practice plastic?

Same. I think another great example that you mentioned was every retirement's savings. It's not so long ago, of course. That the start of retirement savings was a fixed, a defined benefit scheme, which allowed people to be sure of what they would, get when they retired, and that would be allow them to live reasonably well that has [03:16:00] been deemed to be unaffordable by businesses in the pensions industry, where unaffordable means it would be cheaper to do something different.

And what the cheaper thing we've got is the shift to defined contribution schemes, which are essentially, as you understand, we very familiar with, you have your own, you have your own pile of money and you just try to invest it as best you can. So that, of course, is it doesn't share risk across people. It doesn't give you any way of, of dealing with the risk, about uncertainty, about your own lifespan and so on.

And indeed, usually the performance of these schemes is, is not particularly good. But the respons trick, as we think of it as Leigh of hand, is to say, well, if you are having trouble with your financial position in it retirement, it's really, it is your own problem. You've gotta put more money aside or should have invested it more wisely.

And the fact that we've shifted from a scheme, which was actually pretty advantageous for most workers who had those schemes, clearly one could always have had them on a larger, broader scale. And we've shifted to a totally different scheme, which is essentially makes the problem well now impossible for most of us.

RALPH NADER: One of the subtext [03:17:00] is Nick, is you're attacking the whole concept of consumer education in our schools, for example, and all the self-help books that come out, all the articles in the New York Times and Post, and how you can maneuver to minimize your exploitation by banks and insurance companies and credit card companies, consumer advice columns.

Now, you've heard this probably many times, it isn't an either or is it? In other words, if people start trying to control their own garden, so to speak, what they can control because they can control what they eat and what they expose themselves to. Bad food, for example, or drugs that aren't working and so on that they hear about over the counter drugs.

That if they focus on their own deficiencies and try to self-correct and self-improve, they become more aware of how they're being exploited systemically and therefore move from simply consumer [03:18:00] self-improvement, say, or worker self-improvement into the arena of advocacy for systemic change, which of course you talk about in your book, you indicate in some parts of your book you're sensitive to that, that it isn't really an either or.

It's a attempt to get rid of the zero sum relationship that basically it doesn't matter what you do individually on climate change, it's what the government does to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind power and conservation of energy. Can you elaborate the plea by a person who says, look, I'm way overweight.

I know why I am overweight. I don't exercise, I eat fatty food, I can reduce my obesity, and now he's telling me it's really the fast food and ultra processed foods fault. 

GUEST: Yeah, I think the key here is exactly the problem that psychologically we do find it very hard to hold these two frames in our mind.

And they do tend to compete, but they [03:19:00] absolutely needn't do. So I think you're absolutely right that it's a perfectly rational and probably the most rational perspective, to think well clearly that there's more obesity across the world and the reason there's more obesity in some countries than in in other countries.

These are driven by systemic forces. The reason that I myself are more obese than I used to be, say that's something that is about my own recent behavior. So there are certain things I can control, but what what's dangerous I think, is that if we get sunk into thinking about the individual perspective, if we do that, we can get sucked away from we, we can start to think that, oh, it's my problem and everybody else's obesity is their problem.

In fact, we've all just gotta take responsibility for our obesity problem. And that means that the industry doesn't really have to take responsibility at all. So I think that the synergy that we do want is, and that can happen as as you integrated, and I think in cigarette smoking, actually it's probably a good example.

We can get a situation where people who are themselves, for example, trying to give up smoking, are often become quite keen advocates for anti-smoking measures just [03:20:00] across the board. 'cause one sees oneself as. As a vixen or at least pushed around by powerful forces which are not working in one's interest and one wants to stop that happening to other people and and to oneself.

And I think that is in principle possible. I think what's actually happened, at least looking at what's happened. This is to go back to the mea culpa point. What's happened with academic research, or at least mine, is that given the amount of attention and budget you have to devote to it, if one starts to focus on these individual questions, your mind just gets captured by how can we solve the obesity crisis by helping individuals pull themselves together, as it were, and does a dangerous direction.

I think to be going in, 

RALPH NADER: you would add grief, wouldn't you? Mothers Against Drunk Driving that led to much tougher enforcement against drunk drivers pressure on the alcohol industry to stop promoting in their ads, ways to get people, young people especially to drink. You'd include that, the grief. 

GUEST: Oh no, completely.

No, absolutely. And I think one of the interesting reactions when terrible tragedies do happen is that it does galvanize many people into [03:21:00] campaigning mode and those campaigns are very, very powerful. So I think, and this is hardly, hardly news in the context of your career in this show, but I think seeing one of the most powerful things that each of us has is the ability to propagate our own perspective and to to campaign and to.

Argue for change. And this is really, really crucial. And I think the, it's very different from a inward looking perspective, which is saying, well, I'm gonna look after my own garden, but not worry about anybody else's garden. But they've got to look after their gardens. I'm just gonna look into my, and look, stay in my parochial patch.

I think the getting people pulling together and pushing for change can be of course, and you've, you've been more of a part of this, almost anyone can be incredibly powerful. So seeing ourselves as, as citizens who are actively able to have our voice, make our voices heard, I think that's where the real power lies.

And I think that that, campaigners have, say political activists and so on have always known this. And of course also big businesses also known this too. And they certainly don't want us to be doing too much of that. They want us to be [03:22:00] focusing quite, quite the opposite. They want us to be focusing on our own gardens and not worrying about the, the big picture.

They don't want organized opposition. 

RALPH NADER: Before we get into the systemic change in civic advocacy and lobbyists and role of congress in parliament, there's one area that didn't seem right to me, and it is, you have this distinction of the I-frame trap, and you say to believe that the issue also includes the matter of evil business executives is to fall into the iframe trap.

The iframe, meaning it's blaming the individual, blaming the victim. But there are evil corporate executives. Let's face it, some of 'em are evil by conventional standards. They're actually corporate criminals, killing, injuring, stealing, lying in all directions. So how can you ignore the issue of evil personalities, fraudulent personalities, running entire corporate [03:23:00] enterprises?

GUEST: I think the I-frame trap, I think doesn't in, in any way cut across that point. 'cause I think it's absolutely true that the variety of people in charge of powerful organizations, including governments from a moral perspective, is extremely broad and it makes a huge difference. I think the thing we're trying to caution against is the line that if people seem like decent folk and they love their families and they seem, they, they don't seem inherently monstrous.

There may be cases where this isn't true, but there are clearly quite a lot of regular business people who are, they're not unusually virtuous or venal lab. There's regular people, but the logic of their organization just demands. The logic of the demands that they maximum for bit shareholder returns and so on, just forces a particular kind of direction of travel for, for the decisions they're going to make.

So of course it's absolutely true that beyond that there can be all kinds of violations of the law and immoral behavior by any standard, and many clearly happens. But even if you don't have that, [03:24:00] then you can still have organizations which are, inherently going to be pushing against, essentially trying to push, pushing against consumer interest and citizen interests.

I suppose I'm slightly, I'm just wanting to defend against the thought that what's wrong with the world is it's just, it's the wrong people. I think it was probably David Hume had this line that we should be designing our political systems to defend against knaves. Not, not assuming that everybody is a knave, but we have to have a system which is knave proof.

And we certainly don't have that at the moment. So, so I think it's absolutely true. There are, knavess, but it's also true, I think that even morally relatively neutral people inside an organization, which, where the incentives are all wrong and the the regulations are all wrong, they'll just be doing things which are building, well here I am, I'm, I'm marketing chocolate, I should be trying to sell as much chocolate as possible.

That's what I'm here to do. And if I don't do that, those dereliction of duty, and then I'm gonna be you telling people that they reason to eat so much chocolate is due to a lack of restraints and I need to, need to improve their efforts to restrain themselves. And so that, that all these, these, these patterns can, can arise even without [03:25:00] the additional layer.

And then that expeditional layer may be very, very important in some cases, additional layer of, of active, of advice at the, at the top. 

Speaker: 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;

The NPR Politics Podcast

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The Brian Lehrer Show

Pitchfork Economics

PBS NewsHour

THE DAILY BLAST 

CounterSpin

The Socialist Program 

and the Ralph Nader Radio Hour

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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 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: 4–29-2026

Today we explore the extraordinary clash between Pope Leo XIV and the Trump White House — a feud involving military threats, medieval papal history, and an American-born pope who refuses to back down. We'll hear why analysts say MAGA's religiosity is pure aesthetic, and what that hollowness means for the millions of Americans still taking their faith seriously.

Full Show Notes

#1787 Full Episode

[00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we explore the extraordinary clash between Pope Leo XIV and the Trump White House — a feud involving military threats, medieval papal history, and an American-born pope who refuses to back down. We'll hear why analysts say MAGA's religiosity is pure aesthetic, and what that hollowness means for the millions of Americans still taking their faith seriously.

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

Democracy Now!

The Holy Post

The PBS NewsHour

The Kavernacle

Conspirituality

SWAJ 

and Man Carrying Thing

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

Section A, Trump and Company's Love/Hate Papal Relationship

Section B, Anti-Catholic Sentiment in America

Section C, The Pope vs The Trump

Section D, Some Misc. Historical Context

But first, a reminder to check out [00:01:00] our new show, SOLVED! on the Best of the Left YouTube channel! We're really proud of the show we're making, and think you'll get real value out of it. Plus, you checking it out will help us find new viewers on YouTube so thanks in advance for your all your views, likes, subscribes and comments. That's all on the Best of the Left YouTube channel, linked in the show notes.

And now, on to the show.

Speaker 113: the New York Times gathered data from two dozen diocese, Catholic diocese, including some of the country's largest like Los Angeles and Phoenix, as well as some very small ones like Gallup, New Mexico, and Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Each reported a significant jump. They do, new. New members at Easter, it's, it's a big deal. It's an annual thing, and that's coming up. So they're getting the numbers on how many people are signed up to become, members of the Catholic church. And it's off the chart, what it's been. Years ago, respondents pointed to a range of possible reasons, including the desire for community, social and political instability, outreach to young people and technological change, but they really don't [00:02:00] know.

And then our friend Ryan Burge reports that, Hey, guess what? Everyone for the third consecutive year, the share of Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular has declined for the third straight year dropping to 31.8% in 2025, A level not seen since 2017. The decline is statistically significant and consistent across multiple large scale surveys.

The de decreases observed across all three categories. So atheists have declined in America, agnostics have declined in America, and those saying none. None of the above. Have also declined in America. So we're getting more Catholics. We're getting less atheists. Yeah. 

Speaker 112: Yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 113: One, one other piece I wanted to bring up that the number of, this is from Washington Post, the number of, right wing political [00:03:00] influencers that are converting to Catholicism and using lots of religious language. Mm-hmm. Their comment that the new religious right is distinct from the one that was once led by evangelicals and the new one.

Mm-hmm. Is led by. People like Candace Owens, for example, who attends the Latin mass and spins anti-establishment and anti-Jewish fantasies while sitting in front of an ornate crucifix and a gothic reliquary containing a stone associated with the cult of St. Michael, the Archangel, Megyn Kelly, another Catholic has grown more demonstrative in her piety as she's grown more critical of pro-Israel Jewish commentators.

In December, she announced to the world that she was about to pray the rosary quote, like virtually all Christians do. Go through a list of similar talking heads that don't talk about scripture much, but they, they use the imagery of yes. Of particularly of the Catholic church.

And asking the question, [00:04:00] are we moving into a Christian identity? Politics? Politics? Mm-hmm. That's more about images and symbols and less, of course about theology. Yeah. In scripture. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to put all this together. More people, it'd be great to know all these new Catholics.

Mm-hmm. How many are, are politically liberal? How many would qualify as, as progressive? And what are they attracted to about the Catholic church? How many would qualify as very conservative and what are they attracted to about the Catholic church? There was another article that I was gonna pull up, but didn't about how this year, the US bishops are speaking out on issues that code left much more than they're speaking out on issues they did in previous years that coded.

Right. So they used to speak out most loudly about abortion, about sexual ethics. This year they're speaking out about, immigration and, and the war mm-hmm. In [00:05:00] Iran. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And things that typically make conservatives cranky with them. So I, and so are, are liberals being attracted to the Catholic Church mm-hmm.

Because of Pope Leo and Pope Francis? Or are, really far right. Conservatives being attracted because of Candace Owens and JD Vance? What's going on, Caitlin? You get to answer that question, and then after that thank you. We'll see what chat gpt thinks. 

Speaker 115: Right, right, right, right. I My impulse is to say none of that is true.

I really, I really wonder if the vast, well, not all, not 

Speaker 113: none of, not none of it. You say none of what I just said is true. 

Speaker 115: No, I think what might be going on 

Speaker 113: now I have, now I have social friction with 

Speaker 115: you. I, I know. Well, it might be going on. I wouldn't be surprised. I don't have any data to back this up or anecdotes, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the very public expression of this, Candace Owens and conspiracy theories and Right, right-leaning interest in Catholicism and the Catholic Bishops making [00:06:00] statements about immigration and left-leaning interest in Catholicism are what's animating online conversations amongst people who write op-eds and are on Twitter and think about things in that way.

But that might have very little to do with. People on the ground who might be more interested in Catholicism for the reasons we mentioned earlier. Looking for rootedness, looking for community, looking for tradition. I, I just had a conversation this week with a bunch of people who were, who all went to seminary or some theological education, and we were all expressing just like disbelief sometimes at the number of people we know in our lives that don't have any theological education who will switch between churches or traditions with an ease that we just are like, mm-hmm.

What do you, you are at a Presbyterian church and now you're considering becoming Catholic. Mm-hmm. Like, how does all this work together? Mm-hmm. And we kept coming up against the fact that most people make decisions about church. Sometimes it is about politics. We've talked about this in the past. It's more about political, social leaning, but honestly, a lot of people aren't even queued into that register.

They're just like, there's a church nearby. Someone was nice to me. [00:07:00] Mm-hmm. Or I would like to be in a small group, or I would like to, I'm attracted to when it comes to Catholic and Orthodox churches, I'm attracted to the history and the tradition. I don't know that I could really articulate for you some of the other things that are going on.

So I just wouldn't be surprised if some of the, we should figure out if it's the right or it's the left is just what talking heads do. 

Speaker 113: Yeah. 

Speaker 115: And most people on the ground. Whatcha you 

saying 

Speaker 113: about me? 

Speaker 115: We are talking heads. Oh no, I'm so sorry. We have no bodies under this. I'm body 

Speaker 113: entity. 

Speaker 115: I just wonder if the people on the ground are oblivious for the most part at the Candace Owens versus Catholic Bishops fight.

Speaker 113: That's probably true. I think that's probably true. 'cause I, I will say I follow the news a lot more than you do. Most people. Partly 'cause it's part of what I do for work. Mike? 

Speaker 112: Thoughts? I thoughts? I actually, and Caitlin, I adore you. 

Speaker 113: Don't, don't go chat. GPT on Caitlin. 

Speaker 112: Caitlin, I had that exact same.

Inclination to say, I don't [00:08:00] know that it's politics that's driving it. I think it's disenchantment and people trying to find re-enchantment that's driving it. Because I don't think, if we, if we adapt those frames from Charles Taylor, I don't think the evangelical church re-enchantment anything.

Yeah. We're part of the de disenchantment of, we, our buildings aren't unique. Our worship services are blend. Mm-hmm. I mean, it's just the, and so I think there's something about, we don't even expect orthodox get 

Speaker 113: healed anymore. 

Speaker 112: No. Some do, but 

Speaker 113: Yeah. Well, yeah. 

Speaker 112: There, which is why Orthodoxism is 

Speaker 113: growing.

Speaker 115: That's true. Yes. There's some 

Speaker 112: enchanting 

Speaker 115: there. 

Speaker 112: I just think, I just think, I think that the evangel, the standard evangelical church cannot ree ch anything. 

Speaker 115: Mm. 

Speaker 112: And I think these historic traditions, they, they appeal to the senses. They appeal to. Aesthetics, they appeal to smells and sights and sounds differently.

And I, I, my personal opinion is, I think that's, [00:09:00] if I had to guess, I would say it's that I think people are just done with warehouse churches and cookie cutter music and self-help sermons. They want something that feels deeper, richer and truer than that. 

Speaker 115: And Mike, to your point, I, this was buried in the, the article about Roman Catholic, observance, but the Roman Catholic Church requires a pretty robust.

Program before you're confirmed. Mm-hmm. S good. Like there's a lot of study and obligation and like really making promises and knowing what you're getting into. And as much as the evangelical church spent many years in the seeker sensitive vein saying like, let's get rid of all of them.

Come just as 

Speaker 113: you are, 

Speaker 115: right? Like this is a performance or it's a product, or it's, yeah. And I think if you're feeling unrooted and lonely and you're like, I'm done with this AI chat bot, that's really not fulfilling my need anymore. If you show up to an evangelical megachurch where you can sit in a not a pew, usually you can sit in a chair every week and not have anyone talk to you.

And you can become a member by coming for like one meeting and signing a [00:10:00] paper. But then the Catholic church, not only to your point, Mike is beautiful and rooted and engages the census and also says, well actually. Belonging to us really matters. It will ask things of you. Mm-hmm. And so actually you have to go through this whole process of learning and, and I'm, I've been doing all this research on the early church process of this.

There would be a moment Yes. When people were joining the early church. Yes. Where not only would they have had to learn all of this theology and make sure they knew what they were signing up for, but their sponsor, the person who was like helping them enter the church, would have to be able to tell the bishop, I've seen them feed the poor.

Or like I've seen them sacrifice for their neighbor. I've, and that real buy-in, even though it will filter out a lot of people who do wanna just still come and see a performance every Sunday is attractive to a lot of people, especially in a world where no one else is asking anything of them and then giving them nothing in return because they're not being asked of anything.

Speaker 36: Over the last 10 years, Pope Francis has gained the adoration of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world for his humility, care for the poor, and for steering the church to reform its stances on some social issues. [00:11:00] While the most recent polling from 2021 shows, Francis has the support of the majority of Catholics in the us, conservative clerics and lay people in America are some of his most vocal critics.

In November, the Pope moved against two of his loudest detractors, Bishop Joseph E. Strickland and Cardinal Raymond, Leo Burke, both Americans. Last month, Strickland was removed as a bishop of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas. Then a few weeks later, Cardinal Burke was stripped of his Vatican privileges, housing and salary.

David Gibson is the director of the Center of Religion and Culture at Fordham University. David, thank you so much for joining us. Let's talk first about the type of Pope Pope Francis has been. What reforms and changes to the church has he focused on? 

Speaker 37: Pope Francis is really focused on being a pastor, being providing a more pastoral, inclusive, merciful church, going out to the peripheries, those who are in suffering.

So that's been his signature, is really going out and [00:12:00] helping those of the poor, the homeless. The immigrant, the refugee. So he's seen as this very merciful figure. What? He's not terribly. Merciful towards are the elites in the church, the powerful, those who have all the privileges and all the perks. And we've seen how he's moved against some of them in recent months.

Speaker 36: And is it that the American Catholic bishops leaders who have criticized him, are they considered elites in church standing? And why is it that they seem to have been among the most vocal critics of Foote Francis? 

Speaker 37: Well, the opposition to Pope Francis is very loud and it's very influential, but it's really very small and very much located in the Anglosphere, especially in the United States.

There's a lot of big money behind this conservative movement, so they have this great profile. And a, again, a certain degree of influence, but they're [00:13:00] relatively small, but they have a certain approach that kind of tracks the political trends in the United States, and they don't like what Pope Francis is doing.

He's really upending. All of the customs and all of the privileges that these bishops and cardinals were used to, and they really don't like that. If you step back from the disagreements over politics, over doctrine, over ideology, a lot of this is simply the fact that these are bishops and cardinals who had the inside track under the previous Pontificates, John Paul II and Benedict XVI for over 35 years.

Now you have a Pope who was elected 10 years ago who upends all of that. He's the first Pope from the Southern hemisphere. He's from Argentina. He's not going to play favorites in the way that the other popes used to. 

Speaker 36: And what does it say about the state of American Catholicism that Pope Francis [00:14:00] enjoys relatively high approval ratings among the majority of American Catholics, and yet he's coming under criticism from, from some American leaders.

Speaker 37: Well, what those high approval ratings say is that Catholics always like the singer, even if they don't like the song. It also indicates, again that this conservative opposition to him is really vocal opposition to him based in the United States is very small. That doesn't mean it's not influential and it's not damaging.

You have to remember that the American Catholic Church is just 5% of the global 1.2 billion. Member church. So we tend to forget that. And even within the 60, 65 million member Catholic church in the United States, these real conservative, elements are a minority. 

Speaker 36: We mentioned these two Catholic leaders in the United States that Pope Francis has punished.

Can you tell us a little bit more about them and what they've said about him that elicited [00:15:00] this response? 

Speaker 37: Well, these two cases, one Bishop Joseph Strickland in Tyler, Texas, diocese in East Texas, and Cardinal Raymond Burke, who's lived in Rome and also in Wisconsin. They're, they're, they're distinct, in the sense that, they're both been longtime critics of Pope Francis, but Bishop Strickland.

His diocese really was not being well run. Pope Francis has been extremely patient over 10 years with his critics like Cardinal Burke, who's been a long time thorn in his side, and even with Joseph Strickland, who's endorsed some of the most virulent attacks against Pope Francis. But. In the case of Bishop Strickland, his diocese, the morale was, was, was down.

The diocese is divided administratively, it's a mess. Pope Francis finally said, you can't be a bishop of this diocese. You remain a bishop, but we need to replace you. In the case of Cardinal Burke, you've got a 75-year-old Cardinal who's living in a [00:16:00] 4,500 square foot apartment in Rome with a $60,000 a year stipend.

He spends. No one knows, maybe a month total in Rome. He has no job there. He's got all these perks and privileges. The Pope finally said to him, look, you can still be a cardinal. You can still vote in the next conclave. You could even be elected Pope. After I leave the scene, but we, the Vatican are not gonna give you a stipend anymore, and we're not gonna give you a free apartment.

You can keep the apartment. You just need to pay for it. 

Speaker 36: In terms of his response to these critics and, and what you've laid out as inefficiencies in their diocese, what does that tell us about the type of pope that Francis is and the type of leader and the type of human that he is? 

Speaker 37: Pope Francis has really been patient.

He's resisted moving against some of these critics. Again, the criticism against Francis is of an entirely different category than the dissent was from the left against John Paul II [00:17:00] and Benedict XVI. These, bishops and Cardinal. Aren't just disagreeing with the Pope. They're saying he's not a legitimate teacher of the faith.

Some of them are even saying he's not a legitimate pope. It's almost like accusing the president of Sedition. Any bishop in a sense can be his own Pope. In the social media sense and Francis has not wanted to create other rival voices out there, but at a certain point he has to lose patience. 

Speaker 17: on their recent feud, obviously Donald Trump took to true social to write this.

After Pope Leo has been criticizing the US War in Iran, Pope Leo is weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy. He talks about fear of the Trump administration, but doesn't mention the fear that the Catholic church and all Christian organizations had during COVID when they're arresting priests and ministers and everybody else for holding church services and even going outside and being.

10 and even 20 feet apart. I like his brother Lewis much better than I like him because [00:18:00] Lewis is all maga. He gets it and Leo doesn't. I don't want a pope who thinks it's okay for Iran to have nukes. I don't want a pope who thinks it's terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a country that was sending massive amounts of drugs into the US and even worse emptying their prisons.

Into our country, and I don't want a pope who criticizes the president of the US because I'm doing exactly what I was elected to do in a landslide. He wasn't on any list to be Pope and wasn't, and was only put there by the church because he was an American, and they thought that'd be the best way to deal with the President Donald Trump.

If I wasn't in the White House, Leo wouldn't be in the V. And unfortunately, Leo's weak on crime. Weak on nuclear weapons does not sit well with me, nor does the fact that he meets of Obama Sympathizes. Leo should get his act together as Pope and use common sense and Leo responding. I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the church is here to do.

We are not politicians. We don't deal with foreign policy with the same perspective. He might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the gospel as a peacemaker. And then he also tweeted [00:19:00] after this recent feud, hundreds of millions of people throughout the world are immersed in extreme poverty, yet disproportionate wealth remains in the hands of a few.

It is an unjust scenario in the face of which we cannot fail to question ourselves and to commit to change things. There is no lack of resources at the root of disparities, but the need to address solvable problems related to a more equitable distribution of wealth to be achieved with moral sense and honesty.

So clearly a more left wing Pope who, American conservatives are generally not liking, but it seems to be. The American Christians who hate Leo and are backing Donald Trump are the Zionist ones, where the other ones who are either. A bit apathetic to Israel or don't like Israel of of course our backing Pope Leo, despite him being more left-leaning pages like this.

Grab the Greg, the GR put Pope Leo needs to excommunicate JD Vance from the Catholic Church. And this is, symbolic of a lot of the far right backing Pope Leo against JD Vance, who is as Catholic [00:20:00] convert, who is backing all Israel's terrible crimes on Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine. So there's an account called Trad West, which is a Catholic.

Twitter account with 500,000 followers. So I want to use this to show you how even on the far right they are embodying what Chris Pratt was saying, they act like politics and supporting Pope Leo because he is the pope is completely separate. So this page was celebrating Chris Pratt for putting a massive cross up.

I missed this. They're celebrating Henry Cavill, which is really funny. They're celebrating things like was cast as Geralt in the Witcher. Writers try to modernize and ruin the law, and he leaves the lead role of a massive franchise because of his principles. Moves to Warhammer 40 K and refuses to allow them to push modern agendas unfathomably based.

And no one ever said conservatives understood the media they love because the Wi the Witch one is funny because. Out of all these fantasy franchises, obviously Lord of [00:21:00] Rings is like super pro Catholic 'cause it was written by a bit of a Catholic zealot in Tolkien. The Witcher is actually like the opposite of that.

One of the running themes in the Witcher is a massive criticism. Of the Catholic Church and its role in just Polish history and Polish nationalism. There's a church called the Church of the Eternal Fire. They're nearly like a one for one standin for the Catholic church, and they're like fanatical racists who burn non-humans and witches at the stake and ally with these witch hunters who are like the one of the most evil factions in the game.

Right? The witch is criticizing a lot. Polish history and contemporary Polish Catholicism. It's funny if Henry Cavill was not backing down on the source material to say that's a good thing for Catholicism generally, because it definitely isn't like if, if he didn't back down on. Putting in the Church of the Eternal Fire into the show, which I don't think they're in the show, would this Catholic page be happy about that?

But also the Warhammer one's funny. I've only played Space Marine two, so I dunno the law too much. But even playing that and how like [00:22:00] religion is depicted in that, I wouldn't say that Warhammer probably. Has the most rosy outlook on Catholicism, especially considering the things that are inspiring Warhammer, like the Dune series and stuff.

But that was a funny thing I thought I'd talk about and remember, Pope Leo has just talked about redistributing wealth and Trad West posts. Many think communism. It's just political theory. It's not. It's a spiritual weapon of the devil designed to enslave souls, destroy the church and erase God from the hearts of men.

This is why the saints stood up to it. Why is communism demonic? Because communism begins with atheism and it denies God in his church. Man is reduced to a number in the collective, and the state becomes God. The church becomes the enemy. This is just not political. This is not just political theory. It's Satanic and yes, like with the Chris Pratt thing, a lot of these posts seem to be written by AI as well.

You have stuff like this, mosques in Germany. Versus churches in Saudi Arabia, Reconquista 2.0. Soon the Crusades were awful. Europe without the Crusades. So I don't have time to talk about [00:23:00] this, but yes, the, defensive war narrative around the crusades is absolutely bullshit and stupid. I'll throw up, a thumbnail of the video I've made on this, so if you care about this.

And you've always wondered why Catholics always say shit like this. Like we were defending Europe from Islam. That would've taken over the whole of Europe. It's just so stupid. But again, they love it. And they're talking about Reconquista too, so. Assuming they're talking about like doing violence to Europe's Muslim population.

So saying stuff like this, after careful consideration, I've decided to become more extreme in my political beliefs. Think about everything I've just read you. It's all far right? Garbage. It's all fanatical far, right? Catholic garbage. So who would you think these people would support if it's a mashup between Donald Trump and Pope Leo?

Who would they support? This is why it's so surprising, but that's why I had to play that Chris Pratt clip where he says, I don't care about politics enough. I don't care about politics enough to take a stand, but I will take a stand in my faith. So here's what Trad West writes about. Leo Pope Leo [00:24:00] walks into the collapsing moral landscape and doesn't flinch.

Immediately sets a tone. No ambiguity speaks about truth like its objective. Reminds the world that Christianity is demanding openly. Challenges the culture of convenience and excess. Calls out spiritual laziness pushes for larger, stronger families. Warns that demographic collapse as a spiritual issue, confronts modern ideologies without dressing it up diplomatically names, enemies of the church without hesitation, emphasizes prayer.

Not as a symbolism, but as a necessity. Constantly redirects attention back to God, not institutions. Rejects. The idea of adapting doctrine to modern trends. Insists truth, shapes the world not the other way around, and draws a clear line between truth and error. Forces people to choose where they stand and doesn't seek popularity popular anyway.

And then here's another one. Pope Leo is a Catholic. Why are people shocked when he takes Catholic stances? Liberal. Pope Leo is woke Republican. Pope Leo is not woke. Pope Leo. I love God in his church, and Jesus saying, I love you too. [00:25:00] So just one more, A page called Catholic for Catholics, which is an, again, an American conservative Twitter page.

They wrote a statement saying, president Trump's attack on Pope Leo. Was disheartening and merits an apology. The attack on Pope Leo is primarily a reaction to the Holy Father's courageous calls for peace amidst the Iran War and Israel's bloody destruction of Southern Lebanon. It's a war that is highly unpopular, especially among Catholics who sense the immorality of the whole conflict, let alone the net lost for America.

Israel has pulled us into the war and continues to threaten the peace with their insatiable desire for territorial expansion. The role of the Catholic Patriot in America is more crucial than ever. Our faith gives us the freedom to never be sheep that follow blindly, a political leader or even a pope.

We are sheep, but sheep that follow the good shepherd, Jesus Christ. So again, I find that interesting because like I said, so many of these Catholics are absolutely fanatical. Far right. Racist who hate Muslims, who idolize the [00:26:00] Crusades, talk about wanting to do another one, and here they are. Backing a lefty liberal pope against a far right, president because of things like Israel.

And why I find it interesting is it is, it's not even about consistency. It's not like the Catholic church has an allied with war mongers like Donald Trump. The Catholic church historically backed so many fascist dictators. The Catholic church doesn't mind war. The Catholic church doesn't mind a whole host of, of terrible things, but maybe that's the good sign sometimes that all these American Catholics who are right wing, they're being influenced by a left wing pope who is saying that these things like the Iran War is bad.

And that's even making them go against Donald Trump, who the majority of them supported for president in the first place. But yeah, like I was saying, I find this interesting, but also really, really bizarre that these people who have such fascist politics can still be influenced by the Pope. But I think part of this is also.

My ending point. So many people who love Catholicism, they love the history, they love the element of the [00:27:00] Roman Empire, and they like Pope Leo because they view him as a king. He's like the king of the Catholics. And no matter what you think of the king, he plays a spiritual role. He plays a leading role.

You have to show him deference. And I think that plays such a role in it. Like these people are very, very conservative. They secretly yearn from a monarchy and that's why they show this man respect, even though they massively disagree with him. And I think because Pope Leo is an American, he gets even more of that because I don't think these same people would be saying this about Pope Francis, like they're saying it about Pope Leo.

Speaker 30: We saw this clip of Pope Bob giving a brief audience to convert Tra c JD Vance, possibly the most annoying convert in the world, uh, with Usha standing beside him in a black mania. Jeanette Rubio's in Amenta as well.

Marco is very stiff. He's holding his breath. He always looks constipated. Vance has this ubic manner that I think [00:28:00] belies all of his boot licking aggression, and he hands the pont of an oversized envelope, and he says that it's an invitation from Donald and Melania to a White House dinner. Pope Bob smiles guardedly as he takes it, and without looking at it, sets it on his desk saying quietly.

I'll read that at some point. And Vance Sputters of course. Of course. And then they give him a Bears Jersey signed by their kids, even though he, he's a baseball guy. And then they pose, I don't know if you saw the photo, but Yeah, it's a very awkward photo. There's like eight inches between them all and they're standing quite stiff, I don't know, like on a wedding cake or something.

Mm-hmm. The scene sums up the church state tension of whatever phase of global fascism we're now entering. I think and marks a high point in our consideration of the religion of politics. Here come these shit heels jailing students, rendering immigrants and blueprinting the Trump Gaza Resort, and they shuffle into the Vatican with hats in hand to meet a fellow [00:29:00] American who is nothing like their boss, and they're asking for pats on the head.

And we have this enigmatic response from Pope Bob that I think sums up where we all are as we read the incense swirls for whether he's gonna keep steering the world's 1.4 billion Catholics against the tides of late stage capitalism, somehow Francis style. And will he do it while seeking common ground with conservative movements around the world on the key points of anti wokeness?

Speaker 62: Senator thing In recent weeks, your party has come under fire for supporting an unpopular and many say unwinnable war in the Middle East. Care to comment. Look, we wouldn't be doing this unless we 100% had to. As a recent convert to Catholicism myself, I know how important it is to protect the world with our bombs.

Pope Leo the 14th commented indirectly about the Iran War. It's not a war, it's just a thing. Can I play you the Pope's comments, 

Speaker 63: Leo? Our Chicago boy old deep dish, Leo? Yes. Yeah, just show me 

Speaker 62: I think, war is, bad. Like I don't [00:30:00] think only we should, people should do war

care to comment.

I have never struggled with my faith as much as I have today. Didn't you hit someone with your car once to process my rage. I wrote some complaints I'd like to address to the pope one. No more wokeness. No more. Two, sorry. How many complaints do you have? 

 

Speaker 62: 95.

Speaker 123: I applaud the pope for his courage. To say what his position demands him to say, as a leader of faith, as someone we look up to, to speak through truth to power and to call for a vision of peace, and what we've witnessed is actually two versions of Christianity.

One represented by the Pope, shaped by the ethics of Christ, shaped even by all Testament prophetic tradition that emphasize justice, care for the poor, for the oppressed. And as I said, shaped by the vision, the ethics of Jesus. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are those who are thirsty for righteousness and peace.[00:31:00] 

At the other hand, we see another version shaped by Christian nationalism, shaped by even a fascination of returning to the days of the crusades. That by Pete Hegseth, and many Christian Zionists. I'm grateful that, the Pope is bringing back sanity and trying to reclaim, as I said, the ethics of Jesus into this conversation.

Our God is not a God of war, and this is really frightening to have this. War framed, as a religious war, even as a Holy War. Ironically, they accused the Iranian regime of invoking religion into their politics. And now we have the same thing done by, the American, secretary of War. So I'm grateful for, the voice and courage of Pope Leo on this matter.

Speaker 118: Mm. I also wanna ask you about what's happening in Jerusalem on Sunday, Israeli police. Stop the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on Palm Sunday to celebrate mass [00:32:00] due due to Israel's ban on gatherings at religious sites during the Iran war. The Latin Patriarchate said it was the first time in centuries that the heads of the church were prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday mass at the site, calling the incident a grave precedent.

Following the backlash, prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Latin patriarch would receive full and immediate access to the church. Now, interestingly, I think probably the most powerful response for Netanyahu were the people you refer to as the Christian Zionists, like the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz.

If you can link these two. 

Speaker 123: Yes. Well, first of all, we must emphasize that. The actions of Israel stopping, the patriarch from going to the church has nothing to do with safety and security. So let's be clear. They were four leaders going to pray in the church [00:33:00] alone. The church has respected every security measure of attempt for safety, and the number of people allowed to gather.

If Israel is really concerned, they would go to the. Israeli Jewish neighborhoods and stop people from gathering. But let's be clear again. If Israel is concerned for our safety, they would stop the settlers from attacking us in the West Bank. They would not kill us in mass numbers committed genocide, in Gaza, this is about control.

They stop them on the way to the church. They want to emphasize who's in charge of Jerusalem. This is what it's all about. And you mentioned the response of Prime Minister Netanyahu, saying that now he's kind enough to allow us to go and pray on our churches. Do we really need permission? From an occupying authority because let's remember Jerusalem.

Israel does not have, sovereignty over, should not have sovereignty over Jerusalem. It was annexed illegally, and now he comes across as someone who's allowing Christians to worship in the church, go knowing that we have been worshiping here for centuries, uninterrupted, this is what it's [00:34:00] all about.

And I think. The backlash shows sometimes that Israel does some missteps when it comes to its image. They're always concerned about their image, so they've seen the backlash to the extent that even. The biggest cheerleaders, the Christian Zionist, had to interfere. And I find it troubling that only now they come to the defense of Christians, given the great numbers of violations against Christians by Israel that we have articulated, that we have said, Christian Zionists are big danger to our region, at the Bethlem Institute for Peace and Justice.

We do our best to counter that theology because we think it's a theology of war of virus. What's needed at this time, is to reclaim the, teachings of our religions, of our faith that promote justice and peace, not the idea of a tribal God. Of favoritism. So, as much as we were surprised by the comments of, the, ambassador Hakai and Ted Cruz at the same [00:35:00] time.

Let's not kid ourselves. They are not really on the side of Christians, in the Holy Land. This is all about the image, of Israel in the West. 

Speaker 118: Your final thoughts as you speak to us from Ramah, from the occupied West Bank in this Holy Week, your trajectory from Christ in the rubble in 2023, and then writing the book about it to finally where we are today with the war on Iran.

Speaker 123: Yeah, sadly, things are not that much better since, I made that sermon. Or wrote the book, let's not, be under the illusion that the war on Gaza has ended, or the genocide has ended. The siege is not, lifted yet. Aid is not entering, people are still suffering as a result of,

ruthless decision makers who have total, no regard, to human, lives. And, on Good Friday, we're reminded of this, idea that Jesus himself became [00:36:00] the victim. Of the violence of empire and religious extremism. And although things will look many times dark, silent, there will be, times in which even we doubt.

Where is God? Jesus himself on the cross, cried, my God, why have you forsaken me? We cannot lose faith that justice will ultimately win. Resurrection is about the victory of life. In these dark moments when millions are. Displaced not from Gaza. Now, now even in Lebanon, are displaced in which we see children pulled from under the rub.

In Iran, we see, more and more, embrace of the culture of death and violence, even celebrating death. More than ever. We need courageous faith leaders to say, what the pope said, that God takes sides with the victims, with the poor, with the marginalized, and that God is looking for. Voices of peace, voices of sanity, voices that elevate human dignity and life above every national [00:37:00] religious ideology.

And I hope this is the message that is preached from pulpits around the globe, in this eastern in which we celebrate life and the resurrection of Jesus. 

when this is coming out, it's easy to see this in the context of condemnations, of hexes behavior at the Department of Defense to see this in the context of condemn nations of Iraq.

This is the context to that, right? We are now going back and getting a better sense of where the conflict is coming from and the way that an American threat about the papacy needing to back American military power threats and violence has backfired so much that Pope far from bending to, to their will has taken this as effectively the challenge.

Like I am the I am Christ vicar on birth, I will use my megaphone to tell you exactly what I think of your genocidal campaigns. I. Rarely loved a Pope more than I love having this background effect, which is, which is a threat, which is a fundamental threat to the safety of the papacy. [00:38:00] The response to this being, I I you and what Army, and their response is the America covers is like, I have God.

It's great. This is, this is actually a beautiful moment, you then get little bits and pieces of not only the threat, the military threat aspect. The side comment by some other anonymous US official of Avignon papacy, which is a truly insane thing to bring up in this context, but is why all the medievals are losing their minds.

And then what it means when you have, especially within the context of the Pentagon and how weird the Department of Defense is. Under Pete, he Rain. How you piece this together with all the other parts. So what we have are, are two reports. One coming from the Free Press, one coming from Christopher Hale, letters from Leo.

These have been picked up. They are now all over the place in terms of mainstream media, legacy media and so on. But in those reports there's a mention that an American official, it does not seem, and I'm happy to defer to you here, Thomas, that it was Elbridge Colby my, it was someone else who we don't know yet [00:39:00] mentions the Avignon.

So. We need a decoder ring for that. Why? When you hear that, does that signal a threat to the living Pope Pope Leo? So Avignon, this fascinating moment where for most of the 14th century, the popes who are considered canonical now are no longer in Rome, but in the modern day French city of AV at the time.

It's within the kingdom of a, which is part of the Holy Roman empire. But it's a series of seven French popes who are moved into an area much closer to French power. It comes about because the conflict between Boniface VIII, thei, and Philip IV. BFIs and Philip have fought over papal authority over money over.

Really who's in control of the French church and the assets of the French church. It's a fairly long form fight. There are some excommunications back and forth, and it ends with the fourth sending his agents into Rome where they attack Boniface. They beat him. They imprison him for [00:40:00] three days and then.

They withdraw, but he dies a month later from a fever that is almost assuredly as a result of the kind of beating and abuse and imprisonment. So the threat of an Avignon papacy starts with the idea of a recalcitrant pope who does not acknowledge the temporal authority of the King of France. That the response to this is the, the effectively the beating to death of the Pope.

And afterwards you get the fairly aggressive pressure after the death of the next Pope Benedict XI, you. A King of France who pushes the conclave to elect the Archbishop of Eaux, who's a friend of his as Pope. Clement V, Clement refused to move to Rome in 1309, he moves to the papal enclave at Avignon, and for the next 67 years, it stays there.

We talk about this as the Babylonian captivity of the papacy, which. Maybe hyperbolic, but there is a degree to which you have a specific plate where the King of France has a much more direct hand in the control of the church with armies across the Rome that could be brought [00:41:00] in if they ever needed to.

It's worth mentioning that Clement V is also the guy who bans the, the Knight's Templar. It's like the end of the night's Templar. We all get really weird with like, oh, it was heresy, and were they worshiping demons and are they still around? Like that's all French revolution, fanfiction conspiracy rod, and like people should get offline.

It's also like this is the Pope who as soon as he becomes Pope and the king of friends, like, hey, at that time I was at war with all of my neighbors and I asked to like tax the church. What if we tax the Knight's Templar out of existence too? And the Pope was like, I would like to not die. Sure.

There is an actual there. This is a language of a metric of state capture of the Catholic church. Does it make sense in American context? Absolutely not. These are people who are deeply brain rotted. It is a actual active threat. Let me translate and see if you agree with my, I'm an, I'm your student. I'm, I'm in an oral exam.

I'm, I'm spitting this back to you in office hours. You tell me if this [00:42:00] holds up in like common parlance. The United States in January is trying to get the Pope to come home for the 250th anniversary of the country. The birthday, the Semiquincentennial, the Pope is the first American Pope. He's the only Pope.

Who's ever eaten a, a hot dog at a ball game? At least as a kid, at least as a, an 8-year-old, the only Pope who knows how good corn on the cob taste on 4th of July, and he's like, not gonna happen. Just we're not doing it. And things get worse and worse. He's actually fairly critical starting around the new year in January of the Trump presidency foreign policy.

And it goes from, Hey, Leo, do you wanna come home? Seek a centennial? Maybe we'll get you eating a hot dog. Ball game. I don't know, downtown Chicago. What do you think? To, alright bro, if we need to, we'll capture you, put you in a castle and beat you until you're no longer with us, and then we'll pick our own Pope.

Is that sound like [00:43:00] the weird, bro, culture threat that was made or what? What did I exaggerate? I don't think, here's the thing, I don't think you exaggerate the thing. I don't think anyone said the last part out loud. I think we have to go with like, it'd be a real shame if something happened, happened to you.

Exactly. The, the mafia implication. But that's the only, that is the only difference I would make is that it's the mafia implication. It's like, it's real dangerous in these parts around Avignon, if you know what I mean. Don't you wanna come home for the 4th of July? You, you've been to the south side of Avignon lately.

Hmm. Have you? Yeah. Eats. That's insane. But these are also, these are both deeply unserious people who also just have killed a lot of people in this year. And that's the problem. Right? It's, it's the two parts. It's the stuff that seems like clown fodder, but also you have the death tolls of what are, what the US military is doing all around the world.

Yeah. So like that's the problem. You are going from [00:44:00] the actual Sears per because. Elbridge Colby is as serious you would be regardless of the politics. He, he's a grownup. We have a direct quote from him. The direct quote that we get in these stories is that America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world.

The Catholic church had better take its side. That's a very particular argument. And then the account is that one US official, and they don't name which one invokes the AV papacy. So you have one person who's making the very serious argument that. We have the military power to do whatever, which is a threat, but it's also a call for the Catholic Church to align itself with a dominant temporal power, and, and Elbridge Colby is Catholic.

This is not necessarily, and I have not done a deep dive into his life because I don't need to be sad about everything every day. This could be an argument of like, surely my church will support me in this. The other one is then like, sure, surely you wouldn't want an accident to happen at two o'clock on a Friday.

That's, that's the combination. It's the, it's the. Bad cop and cartoonish villain [00:45:00] cop.

We've just heard clips starting with

Democracy Now! contrasting Pope Leo's call for peace with the Christian nationalism used to justify the U.S. war on Iran.

The Holy Post dug into rising Catholic membership numbers and asked whether the growth reflects a hunger for tradition and belonging rather than the right-wing Catholic influencers dominating online conversation.

Going back to the previous Pope, The PBS NewsHour unpacked why Pope Francis, patient for ten years with critical Cardinals, finally stripped them of privileges, framing it as a clash between reform and entrenched church elites.

The Kavernacle explored the strange split among far-right American Catholics who back Pope Leo over Trump on the Iran war despite sharing little of Leo's left-wing politics.

Conspirituality examined J.D. Vance's Vatican visit, where Pope Leo's cool response to a White House dinner invitation framed the tension between the new pope and Trump world.

SWAJ dove into the history of the papacy to explain the bizarre [00:46:00] attempt at a mafia threat against Leo

And Man Carrying Thing satirized a Republican senator's crisis of faith after Pope Leo said "I think war is bad," with the senator vowing to file 95 complaints

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,

The first [00:48:00] American pope has spent the past year publicly fighting the most Catholic White House in modern history, and the constituency hit hardest by that White House's policies, Latino Catholics, moved harder toward Trump in 2024 than any other group. That's the situation, and the interesting thing is what made it possible.

To get there, you have to start with what neoliberalism did to American working-class life over the last forty years. Unions gutted, wages stagnant relative to productivity, pensions replaced with 401ks, healthcare tied to whether your boss feels like keeping you around, and the civic and religious infrastructure that grew up around stable working-class employment basically dismantled along with the jobs themselves. People are squeezed, and the institutions that used to give working-class life some ballast, like unions, religious communities and the neighborhoods where people actually knew each other, got hollowed out alongside the wages that sustained them. Democrats spent decades [00:49:00] treating that vacuum as background noise, as if people would just absorb the disruption and find new sources of meaning on their own. They didn't, and the vacuum got filled by other things. We're now living with the political consequences of pretending it wouldn't.

In 2024, Trump won 41% of the Latino Catholic vote, the highest share for any Republican presidential candidate in modern polling. Latino working-class families got hammered by inflation, watched a Democratic administration that had passed real economic legislation completely fail to communicate any of it, and noticed that on Gaza, the same administration was funding a campaign that Pope Francis was openly condemning. So, if you're a Catholic voter for whom both economic conditions and the Pope's moral authority matter, the Democratic Party's pitch in 2024 was basically asking you to ignore both. 

Now, in this face off with Trump, Pope Leo is practically sounding like a progressive, but he isn't. He's a centrist [00:50:00] within Catholicism, pro-immigrant, anti-war, anti-inequality, broadly aligned with Catholic social teaching on workers' rights. He's also not progressive on women's ordination, LGBTQ inclusion, abortion, or contraception. So, Leo is a coalition partner with real disagreements rather than a fellow traveler and that’s an important framing.

The version of "the left needs to get faith back" that you usually hear is basically a translation argument, where progressives just need to learn to speak Christian-ese so we can pull religious voters back into our camp, but that’s a tough ask for a lot of people with no interest in joining a religion. What we need is better coalition building skills. Many religious people are regular people whose politics already line up with the left on a lot of things. And just as the mainstream left isn’t great at translating ourselves into religious communities, being a religious member of a coalition shouldn't require you [00:51:00] to translate yourself into the dominant cultural register of secular progressivism in order to be heard.

Real coalition-building means a Catholic social teaching tradition, a Black church tradition, a labor tradition, and a secular progressive tradition can all be authentically themselves and pull in the same direction. Pope Leo speaks Catholic social teaching fluently, and he's been making sharper anti-imperial, anti-inequality, pro-immigrant arguments than most elected Democrats have managed in years. The pope is making many of our arguments in his own voice that’s capable of reaching people that we’re not. And Catholic voters whose politics already fit in the Democratic coalition shouldn't have to convert to MSNBC-speak to be treated as full members of a coalition.

So when Pope Leo tells the Trump administration that treating immigrants who've lived here for fifteen or twenty years as criminals is "extremely [00:52:00] disrespectful," and the response from elected Democrats is mostly silence, that's a strategic failure as much as a moral one. Hispanic Catholics outnumber or match white Catholics in the electorate in California, Texas, Nevada, and Arizona. The 2026 midterms run through those states. PRRI's polling shows Trump's approval among Latino Catholics has dropped from 31% to 23% over the last year. So, the opening is real.

What meeting that moment looks like isn't another round of scolding ads about Trump. It looks like showing up in parishes that have been part of these communities for generations, running candidates who don't have to code-switch when they walk into a working-class Latino neighborhood, and backing the immigration position Pope Leo is articulating with actual legislation rather than vibes. It also means understanding the fact that real coalition is uncomfortable, because it requires people who don't share your worldview to be welcomed at the [00:53:00] same table while still being themselves.

The first American pope is saying out loud what a Catholic political tradition has been saying for over a hundred years, and Catholics recognize it because it's theirs. Pope Leo isn't doing anything especially clever or strategic. He's just speaking to people in the language they actually use about issues that matter to them. The Democratic Party should be taking notes.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

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

Section A, Trump and Company's Love/Hate Papal Relationship

Followed by Section B, Anti-Catholic Sentiment in America

Section C, The Pope vs The Trump

And Section D, Some Misc. Historical Context

Speaker 106: one of the major theological advisors at the second Vatican Council, a major American Catholic theologian, John Courtney Murray, was, the Kennedy people were soliciting his advice, asking for notes, essentially on this [00:54:00] major speech, a former Commonweal editor, John Cogley, I think was another reader of that speech.

So there's not just like the timing's, not just fortuitous or providential as you might view it, but actually there are links, very particular links in terms of. People that were connected to both, one John's reign, the Pope John his reign, and President Kennedy, his reign. There's actually material, personnel based links between them in very interesting ways as well.

Speaker 105: Yeah, it is a really interesting parallel because Vatican II was, as you said, the Catholic church, the oldest institution in the world, like stepping into the 20th century. And I think the JFK presidency was seen as such as, well, because he was young, because he had young children. 'cause he had this new sensibility, the new frontier.

Speaker 106: He's a little like Zorro in that sense. Like it's a little hard to make the bigoted attack stick because you look at him, right? This handsome guy in Kennedy's case, right? The cute kids running [00:55:00] around in Zorro's case, lovely guy, beautiful wife, et cetera. It's a little hard to make the bigotry stick when that's who you're saying is this odious, nasty person.

It just is a little, I think Kennedy's appearance and the marketing around it and the youthful, yes, new, fresh. This isn't Adlai Stevenson running for the third straight time, right? That merely mattered in terms of shedding, I think, or at least repelling some of the anti Catholicism. But there's a line I wanted to share about.

This in particular that I thought was really interesting, and it was by Peter Steinfels, who's another former editor of Commonweal. And after that, the New York Times Religion reporter for a couple decades. But he published a book in 2003 called A People Adrift, the Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America.

But he formulated the Kennedy moment in an interesting way, and I'll just read it. Here's Peter Steinfels. He says, suddenly, between 1960 and 1965, all the residual stress points between Catholicism and America's public ethos [00:56:00] seemed to collapse. The campaign of John F. Kennedy for president had first revealed how much of the old suspicions remained alive, but Kenny's victory rendered all that anachronistic.

The liberating effect on American Catholicism was enormous. And I like that formulation that the Kennedy candidacy at first revealed how much of this bigotry remained. But then once he won, how much it seemed to put that behind us in a way as a country. Now whether, how much that actually happened or not, it's interesting, but that formulation, it's true.

I mean you can look at Eleanor Roosevelt dipping her tone to the water of anti Catholicism a bit. 'cause she wasn't sure Kennedy was a good liberal or good enough liberal. Right. Anti Catholicism was said, oh, this is the last acceptable bigotry. In a way, conservatives like to say that, especially, which it's not true.

Yeah. But like the fact that you could be well into the middle of the 20th century and anti Catholicism be an a live issue in a campaign. Right. That was true. It really was a problem for Kennedy. He worried about, his advisors, worried [00:57:00] about it, and as I mentioned, took him going down to Texas of all places in front of these Baptist preachers and saying, the Pope ain't gonna tell me what to do like that was it.

I think he did have to do that actually. It was his, Obama's, Jeremiah Wright speech. 

Speaker 104: Well, I was about to say, the quote you read has such clear echoes of Obama's election in the sense that the most optimistic possible narrative at the time was that the election exposed all the racism that still existed, but his victory.

Transcended that, and officially we are in a post-race America. And much like JFK, he was also young. He also had young kids. The parallels are quite striking just in the sense of the mainstream media narrative. I think there's totally many other differences otherwise, but, 

Speaker 105: right. 

Speaker 106: And how quickly that narrative collapsed.

Think about it. So Kennedy is assassin, assassinated. He's elected in 1960s, the first Catholic president, 1963. He's assassinated. 1973 is Roe v. Wade. Right. Like, yeah, Catholic says, well, we got this thing [00:58:00] settled, religion, politics, we got it. Everything's fine. And then within a decade right of his assassination, an issue that was seen as a Catholic issue, abortion, right.

Becomes a major, major flashpoint in the culture. Wars were the onset of the culture wars even. Right. And it was suddenly, yeah, maybe assuming there's a little too easy relationship between your Catholicism and secular liberal democracy in the United States, those celebrations were a bit premature.

Speaker 105: We have only had one Catholic president since JFK. 

Speaker 106: That's true. 

Speaker 105: This is so crazy. And I wanna say, I do not think these two are. Equal comparisons, but we have one more Catholic president than we have had black presidents. 

Speaker 104: Yeah, I, I have a friend whose favorite party question is, do you think we will have an Italian American president or a gay president first?

And I'll just leave that, I'll just leave that with the group. I wanna say before we get it, I know we're historically now we're post JFK victory, but before we keep going, I do wanna talk a little bit about. The [00:59:00] election itself and Sure. The Catholic question, 'cause I think the Kennedy's dealings with both the church itself and Catholic groups during the election really have defined the relationship they would have during the rest of the dynasty to this day.

And so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the specifics of the anti-Catholic attacks, both from Republicans and Democrats and people running against Kennedy. What did that look like? Because it's the type of prejudice that I think people in our age group didn't grow up with. So it seems very foreign to us.

Like I know there were accusations of him having a dual loyalty, like what were the attacks like at the time? 

Speaker 106: Yeah, that's a good point, George. It seems a bit quaint in some ways to haul out arcane theological slurs, and that's, that's your nasty contribution to public discourse. But I think it is essentially a dual loyalty charge that the Pope was, and especially this was more true this.

In the years preceding Kennedy's running for president before the second Vatican [01:00:00] Council where the Pope was considered a monarch of sorts, not just like an authoritarian in a neutral sense of that word, like leader of the church, the decider in the Catholic church, but literally a monarch who had terrestrial power, right?

That the papal states, and then when that was taken away from him, he was holed up prisoner in the Vatican. They called it that period of time until the latter in treaty, which created Vatican City. Right. That's why the Pope is the head of the Vatican City. For decades, he wasn't, he was essentially stuck in the Vatican not knowing what to do.

So he was a monarch in the fullest sense of the word for much of the Catholic church's history, at least in the West and in Europe the past few centuries, millennia, whatever. This was a religion that supposedly didn't believe in liberty of conscience, right? As a Catholic, you couldn't have the same relationship to your faith that certain kinds of Protestants did a freethinking religious liberty.

You can't dictate what someone really believes deep down inside thing. It was the dual lawyer charged that the Pope would essentially the Pope who was the John f [01:01:00] Kennedy's real dictator, right? The real person telling him what to do. He would be taking orders from the Pope, if not literally directly then.

Indirectly in the sense of implementing Catholic teaching or being unbound by it in a certain way. And yeah, so it was, it was a dual loyalty charge that he would be unreliable. That he wouldn't be the liberal. 'cause this is the period of time too when liberals in the Democratic party really are surging, right?

This is post Hubert Humphrey's intervention in the 1948 convention, right? This is, after Adlai Stevenson had already run twice a champion of a certain sort of liberalism as the party is coming around on civil rights and the freedom struggle of African Americans, right? All this is happening, and suddenly the sky as the democratic parties, like embracing its liberalism, this is the guy who has some ties to the old world, stodgy, authoritarian religion that's out of the mainstream of American public life.

It just, it was, I think, not just. Vestigial or lingering anti [01:02:00] Catholicism or the anti Catholicism that prevailed, especially before the Second Vatican Council. It was a Catholic running at this moment, not just in our history, but in the Democratic party's history and where the trends were going in the party at that time.

Its liberalism. It's more progressive and embracing more progressive positions. Kennedy's Catholicism was considered a problem and precisely in relation to that too. And that's why someone like Eleanor Roosevelt wanna mention her, dipping her toes into, I think people eventually just came out and said it.

Yeah, I'm a little suspicious of this guy 'cause he is Catholic. Yeah. And not so many words perhaps, but that was behind so much of it. I'm pretty certain 

Speaker 55: it's still amazing to me that we have an American pope. 

Speaker 48: Yeah. 

Speaker 55: Right. And Trump said he wouldn't be there without me. That could be true. That could very easily be true. I, I'm a Catholic, and when they mm-hmm. 

Speaker 48: As am I, 

Speaker 55: I did not know that I'm, and. I just felt like that was such a gift when he became the Pope.

I just couldn't believe it. It was like such a, it felt like a really generous show, for the College of Cardinals to, show like, Hey America, but we don't [01:03:00] all think you're like him. And also it's just such a power play, unbel unbelievable power play. Like, Trump thinks he knows how to like, play these political games, but it's like, do not mess with the College of Cardinals management they're doing.

Don't 

Speaker 48: play with the Cardinals. 

Speaker 55: Totally. 

Speaker 48: And, 

Speaker 55: and the other thing that like sets a stage for this that I think is, in terms of power building is because after Pope Francis. We had Benedict, it was the, the more conservative, if I can like generalize, just get in trouble for this, but like more conservative popes and then Pope Francis, more liberal pope.

And you thought, okay, are the college of, they were, taken surprise by how active Francis was. Are they gonna swing back? But of course what had happened is a lot of the Cardinals had been replaced by Francis and just like the judiciary in the United States. 

Speaker 48: Right. 

It was like the inverse of the Federalist Society only.

Speaker 55: Yeah. The Catholic 

Speaker 48: church. 

Speaker 55: Right, right. Fascinating. But it [01:04:00] is a, it is, it is a little lesson in, in, in power building. And then you see, I, Leo. Didn't seem to want this political fight. Right. And he took a year to get really into it, but now he's so direct and the thing that I found so amazing about, it wasn't necessarily where he said like, I don't fear Trump.

He said that. But when he said somebody asked about truth social, he's like, just look at the title. Ironic, isn't it? So he's speaking really plainly now. Yeah. 

Speaker 48: Yeah. 

Speaker 55: I don't know. I don't know that it moves Catholic voters that are hardcore Trump voters, but it, it's another, I think anytime there's moral leadership that opposes Trump, it's like another drop that is at that, that I think particularly now in 2026 after Alex Prety, after Renee.

Good. That is meaningful. So I, I don't know that it just, that it means it's isolated to how Catholics feel about Trump. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or that it's gonna move, gonna move, [01:05:00] Catholic voters that support Trump. But it's a, it's a high moral voice coming out to say no. 

Speaker 48: Let's talk about the Catholic vote, because I think people, yeah, it's the Catholics in America, not just Alex Wagner and Jen Palmieri.

And I'll say, I wish I went to church more often. Sorry, Pope Leo. But I love, and, and, and, and it really is a, a, a, a true restatement of Catholic values to be so opposed to this war, so opposed to Trump. I think it's a very good move strategically for the Catholic Church, which is rightfully under fire for the sexual abuse that happened for decades and the covering up of that sexual abuse.

But, the Catholic vote in the United States is 20% of American voters, one in five. It's, 

Speaker 55: it's amazing. That's a huge, it's making that high. That high. Yeah. 

Speaker 48: And they used to split, they're swing voters. They used to split pretty evenly between a Republican or a Democratic presidential candidate, but 56% of them backed Trump in 2024.

These numbers aren't [01:06:00] firm 'cause they're exit poll data. And about 42% com voted for Harris, which I think was like between a 10 and 20 point swing from the previous election with Joe Biden. Right. I agree with you that I don't think the PO the President going after the Pope is gonna be maybe enough to swing all of them back.

Speaker 55: Right, 

Speaker 48: right. But you do take into consideration the way the Pope is framing this, this conflict. Yeah. And the one with Trump, which is about a moral question of war. Yeah. It is about the administration's treatment of immigrants and the most vulnerable in our society. And what you have is a suite of arguments in favor of like the basic foundational values of Catholicism and the values in contrast to the values of the Trump administration.

So maybe it's not like the tweets that will get Catholics. Right. But I don't know. Jen, I wonder how you think as a Catholic in the US as a strategist, as a political animal, how the bundling of all these issues. Is a potent mix to move Catholic voters away from a Republican in 2028. [01:07:00] 

Speaker 55: The other piece of it is that a lot of those Catholics are Hispanic voters.

Speaker 48: Yes. Hispanic Catholics I think are moving in greater numbers away from Trump. Yeah. Because the deportation rates hit harder. And also the economic pain is very, very real. 

Speaker 55: And I saw, I saw recently a, a focus group with, Hispanic voters and it was, most of them are Catholic too. And what was really interesting was one of them said most of them have voted for Trump men, Pennsylvania.

I used to look at the US as bright. 

Speaker 58: Hmm. 

Speaker 55: And like full of light. And now it feels full. Now it feels very dark. And I wonder like where the bright colored America went, because that's 

Speaker 48: devastating. 

Speaker 55: Isn't that, isn't that really, isn't that really something that, that, and they said, a lot of 'em said they, how do they felt about, just like, they felt like, but how do you feel about life in America right now?

And they use words like scary, [01:08:00] unsettled, afraid. And, I think, I think that that ice deportations hanging over their lives in a way that maybe sometimes people don't even want to acknowledge because it's too scary. Mm-hmm. Very concerned about Iran and what America was getting into there.

But the, the, but the notion of things being dark, as opposed to moral and light struck me. So I think if you, I think what's more likely to happen is. The fight with Leo, Leo standing up and being a moral voice, the way people who were unexpected stood up to be, moral voices to condemn, the killing of Alex Preti and Renee.

Mm-hmm. Good. I feel like, what are we doing in Iran with no certainty and, no, direct, objective. All of that wears on people and becomes baggage for the [01:09:00] Republican in, in 28. And I think it leaves, in, leaves the demo, it leaves people open to hearing something else from a Democrat that is more, that has a, that has a moral voice, moral authority has, is like, and, and, and, and is willing to.

To share that and, and talk that and inspire people to a, a place that we, where we can go. But it sure does feel like people are worried and are ready for that when they're talking about America. You seem to be bright and now it's all dark and black and white. 

Speaker 48: Can I say on that note, I would love it if Democrats and Progressives could find a way to bring religion back into, onto the left.

Not to, not to say let's make the left a religious party or a Christian party for that matter. Right. But to not let the right co-opt the values. I'm speaking as a, as a Christian, as a Catholic, to co-opt the, the, the, the, some of the values of, of Christianity, which, when you look the, the, the rights embrace of [01:10:00] Christianity, and we'll talk about JD Vance in a second, is such an abomination given the clear values that, that that party has.

Established for itself. And in the same way that it's like you don't get to have the flag and you don't get to have the church. You're probably the least patriotic party in the modern era. And you're certainly the least moral. And I think it's, it's okay. And maybe even high time for progressives to say we can be religious and have religious values and also embrace progressivism.

Just like we can feel patriotic about this country, but also in our patriotism find fault where it exists in our institutions.

Speaker 3: Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Defense. He calls himself Secretary of War. But as I like to remind y'all, that cannot be changed by Executive Fiat. The name of the department remains the Department of Defense, and thus Pete Hegseth remains the Secretary of Defense.

Our Secretary of Defense is doing one of his regular, now religious devotionals at the Pentagon where he. [01:11:00] Calls on the Lord to bless his various murderous campaigns against people in the Caribbean, against Iran, and so on so forth. Bless his love of war crimes, his blood thirstiness, his desire to be some medieval crusader.

And during his latest such worship session, whatever you want to call it, he quotes a Bible verse. He quotes Ezekiel 25:17. Now there is a book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible, and there is an Ezekiel chapter 25 verse 17. It is the conclusion of a story in which the Lord is getting his vengeance on one or another of the groups of enemies of the Israelites.

Typical stuff for the Hebrew Bible. But what Pete Hegseth quotes isn't from the actual Ezekiel 25 17. Pete Hegseth said this. What he said was a prayer given to him by an aviator. 

Speaker 4: The path of the downed aviator is [01:12:00] beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of comradery and duty, shepherd the loss through the valley of darkness.

For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon the with great vengeance and furious anger, those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy one, when I lay my vengeance upon me.

Speaker 3: When I was reading that I was really trying to not invoke the rhythms of Samuel L. Jackson's delivery because Samuel Jackson delivers. That San Sands, the aviator stuff in Pulp Fiction. It's a very famous scene from Pulp Fiction, and the [01:13:00] thing about this Ezekiel 25:17 is that it's not in the Bible. In fact, it's Tarantino quoting, as he often does in his films.

Another movie, A movie from the seventies, a movie from the famous Japanese Action Star. Sonny Chiba, which begins with the narration of this constructed, made up Bible verse, 

Speaker 5: who poison and destroy my brothers, and they shall know that I am Sheba the bodyguard when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.

Speaker 3: What it isn't. Is, anything, from, the Bible? It's not that at all. I find this very funny. This is very funny to me. That Pete, Seth who went to Princeton, right? Like ostensibly he has some smarts about him, but I think he's made himself and to, I think he's made himself into a Tite. So it's funny that he would c sip this, and it [01:14:00] also gives lie to the ostentatious religiosity, the Christian nationalism of he accept and its fellow travelers.

I failed to mention that at the podium at the Pentagon. He had a Jerusalem cross. He had some crusader slogans. He's, this is really a big part of his personal identity. And it goes without saying, it is an affront to the separation of church and state to the notion that ours is a secular government because it seeks to represent people of many different faith traditions or no faith traditions at all.

And before some commentary is like, well, excuse me, separation of church and state isn't the constitution. The First Amendment prohibition against an establishment of religion is like a clear nod to the idea in circulation at the time, very much part of the proceedings that no, there isn't gonna be any state-sponsored religion, in part because these are people who are not that far for far removed.

Historically speaking from disastrous wars of religion that killed millions of people in Europe, like they. Very much are aware of the past here. They're aware that they're trying [01:15:00] to create a nation full of all kinds of people of different religious beliefs, right? Different Christian denominations, even some Jews, even some Muslims.

They didn't like Catholics too much, but, but that's how it was. They wanted the government to be for everyone. So outta here with it, that nonsense. But beyond it being an Aron to the separation of church and state, it is just a remarkable display of ignorance, remarkable display of ignorance.

And what's been weird about this week, in fact, is that this display of religious ignorance has been like the theme. Of course, at the beginning of the week, president Trump shared an image of him as Jesus blessing some unnamed figure who, to me looks suspiciously like Jeffrey Epstein, but Trump as Jesus blessing some figure.

You have Trump beefing with the Pope. You have JD Vance lecturing the Pope, JD Vance, who just became a Catholic seven years ago, lecturing the actual Pope. This administration, [01:16:00] again, leans on these ostentatious displays of religiosity, but also pumps out foe religious slop. Some of it literally made by AI and shows no particular knowledge or consideration for, or even respect for the religious traditions.

They're constantly referencing it's religion, it's Christian religion in particular as a pure aesthetic, completely disentangled, completely removed from any possible substance, simply a cultural signifier, a tribal signifier. Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary Bo, these big garish crosses while she's justifying any manner of cruelty towards innocent people.

The substance isn't there anymore. It's all tribal signifier. A way of saying you belong in the in group. And of course the principle thing actually connecting you to the ingroup isn't religious belief. It's a political commitment to Trump, [01:17:00] right? It's politics. It's a set of cultural signifiers. And so thus, the Pope who is, Protestants have no particular allegiance to him, of course, but he's still the leader of the Catholic church with, well over a billion followers worldwide.

And most previous heads of state presidents recognize that you gotta, you respect the guy, right? But the Pope. Because he is not submitting to Trump to this cultural identity, to this political allegiance, is now outside of this sphere of concern. He's not really a Christian to these people. And the same goes for Americans.

The Pope isn't American, but the same goes for Americans who belong to any number of Christian traditions, which are non-evangelical, which are not politically conservative, which aren't committed to the Republican party. Thus fall outside the the ingroup. It's something like the end stage of a trend that began over 20 years ago under President George W.

Bush of Christianity as a political and cultural signifier first and foremost, and I'll note [01:18:00] that it's really no accident that in the 25 years since. Bush first entered office. There's been a steady decline in church going and Christian identification, and I don't think it's because Americans are less spiritual or whatnot.

I don't even think it's because Americans no longer want what religion has to offer. I think it's really because of the extreme politicization of Christianity and evangelical Christianity in particular, and how that has come to color so much of American religion. But I'm now just putting my religious sociologist hat on.

Maybe we'll talk about this in a different video for now. Hi, Seth. Dumb guy. Trump blasphemous. And one thing I'm interested to see is if the final stage of all of this of MAGA is something like a religious cult, are we gonna see relics blessed by Trump after his death? Maybe an [01:19:00] AI Trump offering his blessings to whomever hopes to claim the mantle of the Republican party.

That sounds frankly terrifying, but given how these things develop. It, it wouldn't surprise me all too much to see that that is where all of this ultimately leads the Lord. 

Speaker 6: When I lay my vengeance upon the.

Speaker: On the night of the 2024 US election, Donald Trump told his supporters that God had saved his life for a reason. Alluding to the assassination attempt on his life a few months earlier. In the latest edition of Too Long, we explore how faith fueled populism from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin has slowly been reshaping modern democracy.

That's just one of 72 pages in the magazine. Because as always, there's more to too long than you'd expect. Purchase your copy by clicking the link in the description. So the key thing to understand here is that while it was hardly [01:20:00] unforeseeable, the reason falling out between the Vatican and the US will nonetheless come as a real disappointment to the Trump administration and the American, right.

More generally, the Trump administration really didn't get on with Leo's predecessor, Pope Francis, who is a relatively outspoken critic of Trump's immigration policies. But were apparently optimistic about engendering better relations with the new Pope. Despite the fact that, as you might remember, Trump was posting AI generated memes of himself as Pope while Leo was being elected.

Anyway, to this end, barely two weeks into the new papacy vice president JD Vance invited Leo to celebrate America's 250th birthday at the White House on July the fourth. 2026. However, and this was probably the first sign, that relations between the White House and the holy seat weren't going to be smooth sailing.

Leo apparently wary of becoming a political PA ahead of the midterms, quickly poured cold water on the idea and delayed his first trip to the US indefinitely. [01:21:00] Instead for July the fourth, the Pope has scheduled a trip to Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island in the Mediterranean that serves as a gateway for migrants coming from North Africa to Europe, and which has seen its fair share of migration related disasters, including the capsizing of a migrant boat in 2013 that led to over 300 deaths.

It's hard not to read Leo's decision to shun the White House for Lampadusa as anything other than appointed criticism of the Trump administration's hardline immigration policies. It's also worth noting here that Leo's first major foreign tour is actually going to be an 11 day trip around Africa, including a number of countries affected by Trump's US aid cuts.

Anyway, things didn't get much better in the second half of 2025. American bishops became increasingly vocal in their criticism of Trump's immigration policies, especially after the widespread deployment of ice towards the end of the year, culminating in a rare special message. From the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, their first in 12 years, and with [01:22:00] overwhelming support amongst the bishops expressing sadness at quote, the vilification of immigrants and advocating for a meaningful reform of our nation's immigration laws and procedures in late September.

Leo himself who'd previously been quite cautious with his own rhetoric, describe Trump's immigration policies as inhuman provoking. What was perhaps the first public spat between the Holy Sea and the Trump administration? When asked about the Pope's comments, white House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back and suggested it was really the Biden administration who had pursued an inhumane immigration policy.

This didn't deter Leo, who came out swinging against Trump's immigration policies again in November, calling for deep reflection on the treatment of migrants in the US, and later claiming that at least some immigrants were being treated, quote in a way that is extremely disrespectful to say the least.

In December, the Pope even took the unusual step of criticizing Trump's foreign policy. When after meeting with Vladimir Zelenskyy Leo said, Trump's remarks about [01:23:00] European leaders being weak. Were trying to break apart what I think needs to be a very important alliance today and in the future. However, relations properly created in January, 2026 after Leo's first annual state of the world address, which was given just a few days after Trump's operation against Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela.

In that speech, Leo made a number of thinly veiled criticisms at Trump's foreign policy warning that a diplomacy that promotes dialogue is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force and lamenting the decline of post-war multilateral institutions like the un. According to that free press report we mentioned in the intro, it was this speech that really drew the ire of the White House with Elbridge Colby hauling the Vatican's then ambassador into the Pentagon, the first recorded visit for a Vatican official to the Pentagon ever for a verbal dressing down.

After this meeting, relations continued to deteriorate at a rapid pace. Only a couple of days later, the head of the [01:24:00] military archdiocese in the US said that it would be morally acceptable for soldiers to disobey an order. After Trump threatened to invade Greenland in February, the Vatican pointedly refused to join Trump's board of peace.

A decision that leave it described as deeply unfortunate. In March, soon after Trump's assault on Iran began, Leo called for dialogue instead of war, and one that God ignores the prayers of leaders who wage war and have hands full of blood and apparent rebuke to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, who prayed for quote, overwhelming violence against America's enemies during a public Christian worship service for military and civilian workers in late March.

More recently, Leo directly condemned Trump's threats about ending an entire civilization as truly unacceptable. So you get the idea relations between the White House and the Holy Sea have truly collapsed. Usually this wouldn't present too much of a political risk to the president. After all, historically America and the Vatican have had a pretty complicated [01:25:00] relationship, but it's more of a risk for Trump, not just because he fared remarkably well with Catholics at the 2024 election.

But also because his administration is dominated by Catholics and has lent heavily into Christian nationalist themes in recent months with Hegseth repeatedly invoking religious rhetoric to justify the war in Iran and Trump himself holding bizarre prayer sessions with evangelical pastors in the White House. 

Speaker 67: defense secretary Pete Hegseth had hosted a prayer meeting at the Pentagon. In which he repeated the prayer offered by the commander of the raid that had captured Nicholas Maduro. Here's part of that speech.

Speaker 70: Let Every Round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation, give them wisdom in every decision. Endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve, and let justice be [01:26:00] executed swiftly and without remorse, that evil may be driven back and wicked souls deliver to the eternal damnation prepared for them.

For the wicked F Flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion. 

Speaker 67: So Leo, whose name of course means lion, responded saying, quote, brothers and sisters, this is our God, Jesus, king of peace, who rejects war whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying, even though you make many prayers, I will not listen.

Your hands are full of blood. And then Leo pivots into a full on Liberation Theology Register, which will characterize the rest of his Holy Week appearances quote, as we set our gaze upon him who was crucified for us, we can see a crucified humanity. In his wounds. We see the hurts of so many women and men today.

In his last cry to the Father, we hear the weeping of [01:27:00] those who are crushed, who have no hope, who are sick, and who are alone. Above all, we hear the painful groans of all those who are oppressed by violence and are victims of war. Christ king of peace cries out again from his cross. God is love, have mercy.

Lay down your weapons. Remember that you are brothers and sisters, so that's. Palm Sunday. On Thursday, he's back on Twitter with this extraordinary tweet, which I'll spend some time on. The cross is part of the mission. The imperialist occupation of the world is disrupted from within the violence that until now has been the law is unmasked.

The poor, imprisoned and rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death. Yet, in so doing, he brings a new creation to light. And I'm gonna take some time with this because I think it's extraordinary, but I'll start by saying that every once in a while [01:28:00] something lights up the social channels in a way that shows what people are otherwise hiding.

The number of respondents to and sharers of this tweet in particular, who revealed their post Catholic or. Collapsed Catholic or gutter Catholic selves lighting up was amazing. These are people who never talk about their heritage because it's private and they're suddenly overcome with the need to gesture to point at and wonder.

And my favorite among hundreds of responses, was from Nora Loreto, who's a, an independent leftist journalist here in Canada, who does a lot of great work covering the NDP, but also right-wing extremism. She retweeted the Pope with a quote, tweet. Quote, be right back. I'm just pouring contempt on all my pride and she's remembering a hymn that we all sang on Good Friday quote.

When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count, but loss and pour contempt on all my pride. This is written by the [01:29:00] English non-conformist and father of English Hymnity Isaac Watts, who published it in his hymns and spiritual songs in 1707. But my favorite aspect is that Laredos quote tweet is expressing humility not toward the cross, but towards Leo's capacity to intervene on Twitter, which is a cesspool of pride.

So as to the tweet itself, since Leo the 14th is highly educated in and fond of liberation theology. I read it through a Marxist lens because to my ear, it's a powerful description of the development of liberatory consciousness through contradiction. So he starts by saying the cross is part of the mission, and it's an opening that sets the stage for a meditation on transformative conflict.

So the cross of history can be seen as the symbol of a horizontal flow of events interrupted by vertical revolutions. And also in liberation theology. The cross is the instrument of state torture, which is [01:30:00] ongoing and suffered by all bodies under capitalism, especially those in the global south. Also, I think the meaning of mission here is close to the German, zen or the, the idea that workers in the poor are sent to transform the unjust society.

He goes on the imperialist occupation of the world is disrupted from within. Come on. I see two braided meanings here. So first, capitalist imperialism always contains the seeds of its own destruction and the form of class conflict. And the crises of inequality. Secondly, the microcosm of this is one's own conscience.

As one contemplates, the ways in which one and everything, one loves are exploited and one can no longer pretend it's okay, one's heart becomes disruptive. The violence that until now has been the law is unmasked. In Christian terms, Leo is likely referring here to, a very old covenant of patriarchal control that's [01:31:00] undone by the innocence of the human child.

But through Marx, we can think about how genocide and immoral war and extreme exploitation of the poor are not only permitted, but encouraged, incentivized, made to seem normal and inevitable. He goes on the poor, imprisoned, and rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death. And here I see that the worker must experience her labor as alien, her working conditions as hostile.

Her social relations is transactional. She has to feel the full weight of what capital does to human life, and then things will become clear. Lukacs, said that the worker is both the product of capitalist relations and the only agent of its transformation. And so a dissent into full alienation is the condition for seeing through it.

There's no way out but through, as they said, in and or, and what kind of death are we talking about? In liberation [01:32:00] theology, this is the death of the naive self that thinks it is free, that thinks it is an autonomous individual who owns its labor and enters contracts voluntarily. The self who believes it's a frustrated millionaire or who thinks that power will bless you if you are polite and follow the rules.

In short, it's a self that believes its freedom is real, its suffering is deserved, and its liberation will come individually. And once that false self dies, here's Leo's last line quote. He brings a new creation to light

so Trump had to delete the AI slop icon of himself, but that's not gonna stem the tide. About 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and a large portion of them are Christian Zionists. Catholics were much more split in their vote, roughly 50 50 or 60 40 on partisan affiliation, and that voting block is teetering.

And adding [01:33:00] fuel to the fire. We have far right Catholic converts like Candace Owens, who are actively inflaming the Catholic Evangelical split by framing opposition to Israel as a distinctly Catholic position, while consistently lashing out with antisemitism. JD Vance for his part is trying to quell tensions between Trump and the Pope, but he is also telling the Pope, Hey, you should stick to church stuff.

There are also reports of quiet quitting among Evangelicals and Catholics alike. And what this looks like is, pastors and priests avoiding political sermons, but at the same time helping folks disengage from maga, particularly over images of federal agents arresting immigrants near churches and schools.

The Trump administration's decision to lift bans on ice operations inside churches, jolted a lot of those who supported him back in 2024. So here we are with at least [01:34:00] three deepening freres. First, the Vatican Trump feud over Iran and immigration now personalized through an American Pope. Secondly, a deeper evangelical Catholic theological split over Israel and Christian Zionism.

That. Trumpism has just tried to paper over and third, a grassroots disillusionment among moderately religious voters, horrified by immigration enforcement, atrocities, and really bad memes. So it's all very volatile at the moment. And my personal hope is that the progressive churches throughout the US of whatever denomination are strategizing hard currently to think about how they're gonna provide spaces of welcome for the inevitable flood of refugees that will stream out of this impending Trump MAGA church implosion.

As somebody who's done a lot of journalism on cults and people recovering from cultic dynamics, I know that there's gonna be a lot of people who. Need a place to [01:35:00] land. 

Next, Section B, Anti-Catholic Sentiment in America

Speaker 11: obvious fake fraud.

Catholic, JD Vance, who's pretending to be Catholic, 

Speaker 10: be careful when talking about theology. 

Speaker 11: You don't have to be careful when you talk about childless cat ladies. But you do have to be careful when you're the Pope, and you've spent your entire life. Working to be the Pope. 

Speaker 9: You don't have to be careful with your words when you're alleging that certain, residents of a town are eating pets.

You don't have to be careful with your words then. Ooh, 

Speaker 11: yeah, of course not. 

Speaker 9: Anyway. So the Pope, as he tends to do tweets like war, don't do, war. The everyone needs to not do war. He, he doesn't, he's not like lambasting, the Trump administration saying the United States 

Speaker 10: of America. Yeah. 

Speaker 9: It's hard to avoid because of the war that.

They just started. But anyway, he, he tweeted, the Pope did. God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the prince of peace is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. [01:36:00] Yeah, so JV pretty good message. JD Vance thinks the Pope is wrong about that.

At a, turning point, USA event which was attended by people, 

Speaker 11: Canceled. Erica Kirk had to cancel. Erica Kirk 

Speaker 10: had to cancel. 

Speaker 11: She felt 

Speaker 10: unsafe. 

Speaker 11: So Erica Kirk had to cancel due to, security concerns. So instead they got the vice president? 

Speaker 9: No, the 

Speaker 10: vice president. 'cause she didn't actually cancel.

He 

Speaker 11: was already gonna do it. 

Speaker 9: He was already gonna be there. He was going to be in conversation with her, her team. They say got like word of some security thing and they said, well, she can't go now. And so the vice president's like, I'll just talk to some other guy there. According, I'm sorry, it's sorry for me gentlemen, 

Speaker 11: because 

Speaker 10: It's okay.

For, according to Candace Owens, according to Candace Owens, and I didn't listen, this is just, I've, I've osmosis this information according to Candace Owens, that's bullshit. She didn't go 'cause ticket sales were so low. 

Speaker 11: A, that I would believe. But Candace Owens, I am pretty sure doesn't [01:37:00] believe in like dinosaurs or like the moon or something.

So I, she 

Speaker 9: believes the dinosaurs are here 

Speaker 10: now. None of these are sentences I wanna be talking about. I'm just saying to your point. Erica Kirk didn't feel safe, but Okay. The president, vice President of the United States. Oh 

Speaker 11: yeah. It, it's so silly. It's, 

Speaker 9: it's ridiculous. So, but, so that's funny. Yeah, it's a 8,500 seat, arena.

Maybe 2000 people were there. It was less than a quarter full. It appears. It didn't 

Speaker 11: look great. 

Speaker 9: It didn't, it didn't 

Speaker 11: look great. But, 

Speaker 9: and so the vice president is talking with, I'm sorry, some guy, I don't know who, he's asked about the Pope, he can't just say like. The pope's a pope. Of course, the Pope wants peace.

Who wouldn't want peace? Mm. And then move on. He has to defend his boss. Do we wanna watch his? Sure. 

Speaker 12: I think it's very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology. And I think that one of these issues here is that there has been, 

Speaker 11: sorry. Stop, stop, stop. Sorry. Pause, pause, pause.

We're pausing. So 

Speaker 9: there's a heckler 

Speaker 11: as 

Speaker 9: well. That's also 

Speaker 11: good. There's a heckler as well, which complicates [01:38:00] things. JD. He is, he is careful about it. He's the pope. It's like this bizarre, this bizarre world where, first of all, JD has apparently appointed himself like arbiter of everybody's behavior.

It's not his role or job. And he like again, is like one year senator and now he's like, I actually should be in charge of telling. Everybody how to act. I'm gonna tell people to say thank you and how they should dress up and how the Pope should talk. It's absurd, but it's like he thinks that like the pope was chosen gives a shit what he says via like lottery.

Like no, he's actually quite studied, in theology and knows what he's talking about because he became the fucking pope. It's not like a random guy. It's somebody who. Wanted to be the pope probably and has like spent his life like studying this specific thing. We're gonna continue, but I just like, it's, 

Speaker 10: well, I just wanna [01:39:00] say, I wanna piggyback off of that 'cause it's, blows my mind.

Look, I'm not religious, I'm not Catholic, but I actually do feel offended to a degree about this. The, the audacity of the 

Speaker 11: audacity, 

Speaker 10: this Rube, who just. Found God, so to speak, 

Speaker 11: this fake 

Speaker 10: fucking 

Speaker 11: Catholic 

Speaker 10: piece of shit. Fucking asshole. Like he's out here saying, I would tell the Pope to be careful when talking about theology.

The fuck 

Speaker 11: He's dumber than 

Speaker 10: dog shit assholes. It's beyond just like beyond. Anyway, that's 

Speaker 9: why it's like, it's easy for us to say, it's like he is the pope. You can ignore him if you are. The thing JD Vance is if you are like, 

Speaker 10: you're not supposed to ignore the Pope 

Speaker 9: a Catholic, right? It's that's the pope you're talking about.

Speaker 10: It's just so condescending. 

Speaker 9: All right. He is gonna, he's going to yell at this heckler and then keep going 

Speaker 12: is again, hey, random dude screaming. I told you I'd respond to your point. I just wanna respond to this question first. But [01:40:00] I, I think one of the issues here is that if you're going to opine on matters of theology, you've gotta be careful.

You've gotta make sure it's anchored in the truth. 

Speaker 11: This weird, like. Stay outta politics. He's just saying war is bad. First of all, he's saying peace is good and blessed be the peacemakers and all that, all that jazz. You talk about religion all the time. You try to bring religion into the political conversation constantly.

Your boss father is likening himself to Jesus Christ. On the regular. So the idea that like, if you're gonna like, be the Pope, don't get into politics. Fucking shut up jd. 

Speaker 24: I was very fortunate to be guided here by one by generations, really have wonderful historians who have, especially historians of English Catholics who really devoted a lot of time to understanding what does that mean to be a Catholic, in a Protestant country. And what his have, what I. To be a [01:41:00] Catholic under those conditions means that you have to find a way to translate and transfer some of those essential processes, encounters into a domestic context.

You cannot celebrate the mass in a church with the priest, but you can try to find a way in your own home by either dedicating a room in that house to be the place where you and your family gather on a Sunday. To, you cannot receive communion, at the hands of a priest in that room, in your home on a Sunday.

But you can read together the Catholic missile or, or, prayer book, and you can imagine it's, receiving communion. It's a ma, it's a act of imaginative, reception. And you can try to think about that. There are other people doing this at the same time in their homes that you don't necessarily know personally, but you have a sense that there is a community out there.

So this domestication a ritual. The domestication of the experience of the mass was. The biggest innovation that [01:42:00] colonial Catholics and English Catholics made in this time, and it had really far reaching consequences. For one thing, it meant that women assumed a really central role. Women were in a sense, the priests of the, of the Catholic community, and that they were the ones who gathered the family together.

They were the ones who kept, the. Essential, the, the missiles, and the, and the bread that you might try to pretend is a, is a wafer, and organize these events and presided over these events. And they were the ones who kept the feasting and fasting schedules of the church. So, so two things are happening.

One is that the, the a. Experiences that would take place in a church are taking place now in a home, in a much attenuated, much modified form, but also other rituals that were not centered on the church, become more important. And this is where, for instance, the calendar of feasting and fasting becomes absolutely central to preserving a Catholic identity.

The Catholic, calendar, liturgical calendar is [01:43:00] full. Something like. Two thirds of all days. I may be exaggerating. Two thirds of all days on the Catholic liturgical calendar. Someone is, you are supposed to either fast, fast or feast. By feasting they really mean receiving communion. That's what they mean by feasting.

They don't mean eating an as sumptuous meal. And there are many rules about fasting, but that's the thing that a Catholic household could maintain without fear of exposure, right? No one's peering in at dinner time to see whether you're eating. Meet on a Friday or not. No one's peering in unless you invite neighbors to join you for dinner to see whether on a day of obligation, holy day of obligation, you are as stewing all meals except for one meal, in the middle of the day.

So those are the kinds of rituals that families could continue, and preserve, and be relatively safe from exposure. And again, it meant that that other, that women in particular are stepping up to be the guardians of this faith, in ways that, were not as true, in other communities and other households.[01:44:00] 

Speaker 22: Religious identity, of course, is not the only identity that people have. And so you talk about interesting situations where an enslave is Catholic, maybe is okay with their enslaved workers being baptized, maybe marrying, but it, it, it gets complicated, right? Because they're also part of other communities.

Could you talk some about that interplay and how complicated it is? 

Speaker 25: Yeah, 

Speaker 24: that was something I really spent a lot of time on trying to figure out. It was one of the biggest challenges of this project. It was very important to me to incorporate people who might be considered Catholic, by one measure or one metric into a story that had largely been told.

About a community that was only English and white. So the usual story of colonial Catholicism is that outside of Maryland, one, Catholics aren't, don't, aren't to be found. And two, that those Catholics that are there are very specific community. They are wealthy. White represents Englishmen and women planters [01:45:00] who came and settled in Maryland, the one colony founded by a Catholic proprietor where they could.

Live their lives relatively untouched, untroubled. But it was so important to me to understand that that was not the sum total of the Catholic community. And this was a, a, a bit of a fi a surprise finding for me. I should have known as a colonial historian who'd been studying this field for 30 years.

There were many, many Irish Catholics in the colonies that there were many enslaved African Catholics and many indigenous, converts, in these communities. I think I knew it at some level, but had never really focused on it. So in understanding what it meant to be an enslaved Catholic was something that I really struggled with.

At a certain level, we will never know. Right? We will never know. What did it, what did baptism at the hands of ones enslavers, often under forced conditions mean to an African man or woman laboring in the household of an English planter. Those are, those are questions we, we will never really understand and the answers to, but what?[01:46:00] 

Research reminded me was that many of the enslaved Africans who were brought as captives to the English colonies were, in fact, came from areas of of Africa that were in fact Catholic, that had been the Kingdom of Congo, had been a a Catholic country since the 1490s. Angola was a Catholic country at this time, nation at this time.

So there was a whole stream of, of migration, forced migration from Africa into these households that consisted of people who, in their own mind and their own lives would've considered themselves Christians, specifically Catholics. There was also another steady stream of, of captives into English households from various Spanish, French, Portuguese islands in the Caribbean where Africans would, from wherever they part of Africa they had come from, had been forcibly baptized upon their arrival in these colonies, and then sold, either sold into English households, captured by English priers, and then taken into English households, a variety of methods that brought them [01:47:00] into English households.

So really a challenge for me is to think about do we, one, should we even consider someone who has been forcibly baptized against their will under terrible conditions, right of, of duress as Catholics and I tried to keep an open mind without prejudging the issue. I, I think it is fair to say that most Africans who had been forcibly baptized did not consider themselves Catholics.

It was that their baptism was a marker of their enslavement. And it was something that was imposed upon them and it was something that defined them in ways they would never have defined themselves. I think that's absolutely fair to say, but I was really intrigued by the very clear evidence that for at least some of these captives, Catholicism was something that they had embraced at some level.

We have evidence of Africans fleeing South Carolina, fleeing the North American South. Into Florida, which was a Spanish colony, and seeking out a Catholic community to [01:48:00] rejoin, seeking out Catholic marriages for themselves and their and their spouses, seeking out baptism, seeking out the other sacraments of the faith.

So we do know that, at least for some Africans, that there was a sense in which Catholicism was an identity. Took on for themselves under whatever, regardless of the circumstances in which they were first introduced to that faith. And of course, I, I was really intrigued by what it meant to be a, an enslaved Catholic living in the household of, an enslave.

And the English MA manners and plantations in Maryland were the best place to explore that dynamic. The Jesuits, which was the religious society that served the English colonies, the only priests who were allowed really to, to operate at all were themselves slaveholders. So the English, the Jesuit community in Maryland owned hundreds of slaves themselves, and they became, they were they tutored.

Their English followers, English white Catholic [01:49:00] followers, and how to be a Catholic household with enslaved peoples living in it. It was a source of tremendous contradiction, right? The record of Catholic Slave Holding is as brutal as you would expect it to be. There was no attempt to protect families, marital husbands, and wives when it, when it came to selling their property, as they would've put it.

But there was an effort to incorporate enslaved peoples into this, into the sacraments of the household. I found that very intriguing. So baptism and marriage. Interestingly enough was in fact a sacrament that enslaved Africans and and indigenous people had some access to. On the other hand, the bonds of marriage were not respected when financial trouble came and English households decided that for whatever reason they needed to sell their property, they didn't hesitate to separate husbands and wives.

So it's a very mixed record and trying to parse out. How to, how to make [01:50:00] sense of that record was a challenge for me. Should I be more impressed by or more drawn to the evidence that suggested a sacramental fellowship between black and white Christians within these households? Or should I be more impressed by how fragile, whatever the evidence of that spiritual fellowship was when, when life hit?

And to this day, I, I remain conflicted by this and I think it's one that readers will have to make their own choices about. I tried to present the evidence on both sides, the evidence both for fellowship and the evidence for Christian hypocrisy and Christian exploitation. And I think it's going to come down to how you read that evidence.

Speaker 73: let's talk about these anti-Catholic fears for those of us, who were born after, JFK, John F. Kennedy became president. Talk to me a little bit about. The, the fears in this country of, of Catholics. 'cause it just seems amazing to me this fear of a, of a [01:51:00] Catholic takeover takeover by the Vatican of this country If a guy like JFK became president, but, but this is all very real.

Tell me a little bit about this history. 

Speaker 78: Yeah. And, and in that moment, 1960 is really a high, long remark of it in a lot of ways, or a culmination of it. It, it often can seem like something 19th century, something really distant. Phrases like papists and, and those very, those, those much more.

Archaic ideas, but as, as recently as, as half a century ago, there was a pretty sustained debate in our mainstream political media, body politics from multiple organizations of the genuine concern on behalf of many of those entities that any Catholic. Including John F. Kennedy, the candidate for president would, would owe a first allegiance not to anything within the United States, not to America, not to the American government or the American people, but to that entity, to that foreign scary place and entity that was [01:52:00] the Vatican and the Pope and the Catholic Church.

And there really was quite a bit of debate, again, on, on every level of our political and social. Conversations in 1960 about that question. Could Kennedy be trusted to answer to America, answer to the American people, or would he always first be a Catholic first, be answering to this foreign body? And so, and that was, as I argue in the piece, the culmination of centuries of such attitudes, but was just as strong, I think in 1960 as it had ever been.

It was just a central park. Of these debates in a serious way and in a widespread way in 1960. So that recently, it was very much a question of whether we could trust Catholic Americans to be a part of our city rather than owe to a different one. 

Speaker 73: And, and was there as, as we heard from Ben Carson, recently.

Republican, almost the leading Republican candidate, I guess he's now in, in second place in, in most polls behind Donald Trump, calling for any such candidate who, who, who would be Muslim and who would, who would [01:53:00] want to become president that they must first quote unquote, renounce Islam. Were there similar calls, to President Kennedy, I guess, to candidate Kennedy, before he became president that he must renounce.

The cast Catholic church E Exactly. How did that, how did that play out? In the campaign and in the years leading up to his presidency? 

Speaker 78: It were, there definitely were, from. Political parties from churches, evangelical churches from newspapers. There were explicit, statements that such pledges would be needed, that Kennedy would need to pledge his allegiance, adu as if he were not already a part of our society and body politics to, to doubly pledge his allegiance to America rather than to the Vatican or the Catholic church.

And he even did as, as I guess any candidate does have to respond to even the more outrageous. Perspective. He, he responded and, and made the case. This campaign overtly made the case that, that when it came to political decisions, when it came to [01:54:00] national policy, he would be, thinking of America, not thinking of this foreign, perspective that was being defined and feared and, be told his audience, in a 1960, speech, for example, September, 1960 speech 

Speaker 79: mm-hmm.

Speaker 78: That it in America, where the separation of church and state is absolute. Where no Catholic prelate would tell the president, should he be a Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote. We know that the latter is not always true, but he was making the case for the former overtly that a Catholic, a cardinal of relay or the Pope would never tell the president how to make policy and he felt the need to, to state that.

So he did in a way even offer up such a, mm-hmm. Pledge of allegiance in response to those fears. So they were certainly there and, and he engaged them as like, if he had to in order to, to be a part of that campaign. 

Speaker 73: Yeah, he, he was forced to do that. And, I guess that also parallels what we saw with Barack Obama before he became president.

He had to come out and make a similar speech, a similar, Kennedy esque speech about his own [01:55:00] background and, the, the. The black, liberation church that he had spent so much time in all of those years and he had to put that to rest. But I, I, I, I'm wondering how analogous this all is and the current fear of Muslims, which of course, I think is.

Absolutely ridiculous and absurd. And you cited the story of Ahmed Mohammed. That just, frankly, idiocy, but I wonder still how, how analogous it is. At the time that this nation feared. Catholicism feared a, a proxy takeover of the nation by the, by the Pope via a president. You, you didn't have an extreme, at least to my knowledge, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Ben Ton, but, you didn't have an extreme, fringe element.

Of the Catholic, religion actually at war with a number of countries. And we do have that in, in Islam, with radical Islam in a number of countries crossing extraordinary [01:56:00] violence. Of course, Catholic, church was involved in its own share of violence over the years. But is it, is it exactly analogous?

In other words, isn't there a. An actual real justified fear that some people may have of Muslims, of of Islam that wasn't really justified when it came to Catholicism. 

Speaker 78: I I certainly think any historical comparison, any, any use of history for analysis of the present needs to be able to be nuanced about both things.

Present and to be specific to them and to not try to act as if they ever are, are one to one equivalents. Mm-hmm. I agree with that and, and I certainly in the piece tried briefly to at, to acknowledge those, those differences and, and aspects of our specific moment. So I, so I agree with that and I don't think that it's either or.

I certainly don't think that we should try to pretend again that there's an equivalence that is absolute or that we can ignore present. Realities and situations. But on the other [01:57:00] hand, I would say a couple things. One thing I would say is many of the fears to my mind that are directed at Muslim Americans and Muslim communities are directed at the idea of these communities and their, their customs and their beliefs themselves representing an internal.

That is present here in the us. Which to my mind is a different argument from saying, fighters for ISIS on the ground in Iraq are, at war with, with the entities around them and with mm-hmm. With other nations that are present there. 

Speaker 79: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 78: And so I do connect that to, for example, in the piece, I talk about this book written by Harry Beecher's father, Lyman Beecher, where he argued the Jesuit priests in the west of the, continent at the time who were practicing their Jesuit religion were in fact creating past.

Strongholds that were aimed to take over the country and to make Catholicism the law of the land. A, 

Speaker 73: a 

Speaker 78: papist 

Speaker 73: a papist takeover as they called 

Speaker 78: it. Exactly. Yes, exactly. And I see that very much like the fears of, building mosques in places like Tennessee or [01:58:00] of building a Muslim. Cultural center in New York City.

The fears that somehow would be active doing that is, is not simply a group of people, a community, embodying parts of their customs and their beliefs and their communal identity, but represents a threat in, and in and of itself, just the existence of these communal practices or these communal spaces.

Mm-hmm. And so I think that would be an example where. Where that part of this particular set imperatives are not to my mind, directed at at radical terrorists or radical fighters in a foreign country. They're directed at an American community and the idea that that community. Practicing its identity is itself a threat is itself doing something that constitutes a internal danger to us.

I think we can think both. I think, we are able to, to see actual threats and external threats and engage with them in, in the ways we should. And also recognize on the other hand that we have this wide variety of communities here as we always have, [01:59:00] and that they are all. Developing their identities within this American setting.

So, so I would say that's one thing is that, we can do both. I think we can think both about our specific present situation and recognize some of these patterns of how we treat communities within the United States as they are, again, embodying their identity, creating their identity, becoming a part of this nation, in their own way, each of them in their own way.

Now, Section C, The Pope vs The Trump

Speaker 7: Leo says, much of the coverage has been commentary on commentary, which is an elegant way of saying that the press and political class have been feeding on their own noise. That is a deeply papal move. The office of Peter is damaged when it starts to look like a permanent rebuttal unit. The Pope who spends his days batting back at the presidential insults starts to look smaller, not larger.

Leo seems to understand this. He's preserving hierarchy, not in the sense of earthly domination. But in the sense of spiritual [02:00:00] order, Trump posts Rans boasts imposes. Leo continues. His pilgrimage continues. His liturgies continues speaking of peace, justice, eternity, and the duties of conscience. He declines the bait, but keeps the principle this matters, especially because Leo is on a major African tour from the 13th to the 23rd of April across Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea.

Vatican and agency reporting describe it as one of the most complex trips of his pontificate so far with four countries, 11 cities. While Reuters notes, his visit spans four countries and 11 locations. He's trying to keep the trip centered on Catholics in Africa, interfaith dialogue inequality, peace building and pastoral presence, not on the vanity storms of Washington.

In his own words, he came to Africa primarily as pastor and head of the Catholic Church to encourage and accompany African Catholics, and this is where Leo's [02:01:00] grace becomes clever. He doesn't retract the truth. In order to avoid conflict, he refuses conflict in order to project, in order to protect the truth.

It's harder anyone with a temper can trade blows. Far fewer people manage the older Christian art of Measured rebuke Leo Rebukes the threat to Iran. Leo Rebukes the idolatry of power. Leo Rebukes tyrants. He doesn't let Trump decide the frame. That is a form of mastery. And secondly, Leo's grace does not mean neutrality.

It means moral seriousness without narcissism. This is the key point some people will hear, not in my interest to debate Trump and assume the Pope is rowing back. He's not the same Pope who now avoids a personalized feud as the Pope who won the 7th of April. Condemned threats against an entire people is truly unacceptable.

He is the Pope whose bender speech on April the 16th declared that the world is being [02:02:00] ravaged by a handful of tyrants and who warned that billions are spent on killing while little is spent on healing education and restoration. These are not the words of retreat. These are the words of a man who thinks war has become morally degraded, spiritually corrupting, and economically predatory.

And Amanda Leo's language was rich and precise. He spoke of masters of War who destroy in a moment what a lifetime cannot rebuild. He spoke of those who rob lands of their resources and invest the profits and weapons creating an endless cycle of destabilization and death. This is larger than Trump. It includes war profiteers, cynical states, regional elites, and all who manipulate religion and patriotism for gain.

So when Leo later says the speech was written two weeks before Trump's remarks, he's not offering an excuse. He's reminding everyone that the church's criticism is older and broader than one American president, and that universality is [02:03:00] important. And I should also add that, Leo is speaking in Africa, having started his pilgrimage at the place where Saint Augustine was raised.

And Saint Augustine is the person who defined the just war in the first place. Whatever JD Vance may want to say about it, Trump wants to personalize everything. Leo Universalizes it. Trump says, you are attacking me. Leo replies. No, I'm speaking about a pattern of sin in the modern world. Trump speaks as though criticism of war is disloyalty to America.

Leo speaks as though criticism of war is loyalty to humanity and to God. And this is why the Pope's position has a certain calm force. He doesn't need to win a news cycle. He needs to keep intact to moral vocabulary, which politics has almost destroyed. There's also a theological dimension. Trump has repeatedly wrapped his [02:04:00] politics in religious imagery and the Jesus like AI figure deepen that tendency into self parody.

Reuters reported that the image showed Trump in a white robe with a glowing hand over a sick man before it was deleted, after backlash. I posted a copy of that picture the other day. A Pope faced with that kind of material has two options. He either enters the carnival, denouncing each grotesque flourish one by one, or he quietly refuses to dignify it while continuing to preach peace, justice, and fraternity.

Leo has chosen that second path that was wise. A ponti shouldn't be reduced to the critic of memes, and yet Leo has not hidden. On the 18th of April, he said that he would continue preaching peace. That's today. Earlier he said that he had no fear of the Trump administration and would keep speaking out loudly against war.

So the pattern is plain. [02:05:00] He doesn't fear Trump. He doesn't chase Trump. He doesn't flatter Trump. He doesn't live inside Trump's orbit, he speaks, then moves on. That is grace with a backbone. Thirdly, and finally, this episode shows why Leo may prove more formidable than Trump expects. Trump's instinct is always the same.

He assumes public authority works by dominance, humiliation, and narrative capture. If he attacks hard enough, he expects one of two outcomes, either the target submits, which flatters him or the target lashes back, which gives him fresh material. Leo has offered neither. He has not submitted. He's not lashed back.

He has done something more irritating for Trump. He has placed the president below the level of the papal mission, and that is why this feels like grace, but also like judgment. Leo is in effect saying that the office he holds is too serious for this sort of circus. He's not too frightened to reply. He's too occupied to perform.

That [02:06:00] distinction matters. Trump's own conduct has made the contrast sharper. His attack on Maloney over her defense of the Pope widened the dispute beyond Washington and Rome and, Maloney called Trump's comments on Pope Leo unacceptable. And Trump then lashed out at her as well. So the president has matter, has managed in a matter of days de Quora with the Pope and with one of Europe's leaders most disposed to work with him.

That isn't strength, that is self-indulgence and stupidity. Lu by contrast, has looked larger because he has looked less needy. He praises Cameroon's welcome. He meets Imams. He speaks of Saint Augustine African wealth and the unequal distribution of that wealth. He denounces war extraction and false peace.

He carries on with the work. Trump keeps trying to turn the weak into a feud. Leo keeps turning the weak back into a pilgrimage in political terms, that is [02:07:00] message discipline. In ecclesial terms, it is fidelity to office, there is to a deeper lesson for the church. Modern politics, rewards speed, vanity, and instant retaliation.

Christianity at its best offers another grammar, patience, witness restraint, truthfulness, and the refusal to worship force. Leo has not been passive. He has named Evil, named War, named Tyranny, named Injustice. But he has done so without accepting the degrading terms of modern political showmanship. That is what gives his intervention weight.

He's not louder than Trump. He's steadier. He's saner. So the Pope's grace to Trump is not indulgence. It is not weakness. It is not an apology. It is a deliberate act of superiority, moral superiority, institutional superiority, and in some sense psychological superiority. Leo is [02:08:00] granting Trump something.

Trump has not earned the chance to be treated as a personal enemy, but he is also withholding what Trump wants most, an equal competent on the world stage. The Pope has condemned the threat. To Iran. He has condemned the waste and the cruelty of war. He has spoken of tyrants. He has kept faith with the gospel of peace.

Yet he's also refused to become a character in Trump's drama, and that I think is the heart of it. Trump wanted to fight. Leo has offered a rebuke, a prayer and then distance, and in the present climate that counts as grace. I think it also counts as power. 

Speaker 90: talk about. How Catholics were, were, introduced into the United States, during like the settling period of the nation prior to, prior to the revolution. [02:09:00] 

Speaker 91: Absolutely. So Catholics enter what would become the United States through, a, a number of different empires, right?

The, the French Empire, in northern New England, mainly in Canada, but in including parts of what would become the United States, the Spanish Empire, right? The Southwest California. But also, and I think this is what most surprises people, in, in parts of the 13 colonies. Where they mainly met went was Maryland, which was founded in great measure as a refuge for, for Catholics.

The, the Calverts who were a convert family, chartered the colony. So there are Catholics in Maryland from the very beginning. They lose control of the colony fairly early on politically, but they're always socially and economically powerful there. And in fact, part of that tradition was a fairly, tolerant, plural approach [02:10:00] to religions, because Catholics in that context understood that they were not going to successfully be a state religion.

And so work to create a colony in which, a variety of forms of Christianity, right? Not all religions, but forms of Christianity could find a home. So they, they are there from the beginning. They actually participate in great numbers in the revolution. If you, if you wanna move ahead to the American Revolution, Catholics in Maryland, and by that point, they'd moved into Pennsylvania, parts of what would become Kentucky and so forth tended to favor the cause of independence.

Speaker 90: WW was there a, a hostility, towards Catholics? I know in New England in particular, the Pope's Day, November 5th. Yeah, the anniversary of Guy Fox, what they would call Guy Fox Day. Talk a, so in New England. We think of the pilgrims, we think of John Winthrop. We, we think of the Massachusetts Bay, colony, Congregationalists, this really [02:11:00] Puritan, part of the country.

They didn't like the Catholics. Right, 

Speaker 91: right. No, Catholics were, everything that the British, did not want to be, did not really want to have in their territory. It was this remarkable antithesis, of everything British and that, that transferred to, to the colonists, to most of the colonists who were, as you absolutely correctly, point out, overwhelmingly Protestant.

So Catholics were. Thought to, lack the independence of mind, that, British, people considered an element of, of Britishness. They were thought to follow their priests through their pope, and that not only made them not good individuals in this view, but it also made them unpatriotic because the argument went that their first loyalty was always to, this guy in Rome, not, not to whomever their, their [02:12:00] leader was.

And so this is a political argument. It's a spiritual argument that Catholics do not have an individual relationship to God, but only an individual through clergy. And it's also very much a geopolitical argument. So that Catholics were thought to be this potential fifth column that who would align with the French or the Spanish, or really anyone who came by who was, who was speaking to harm British interests.

Speaker 90: And, and, and it didn't help in that part of the. Of, of the country because you had, Canada was French Canadian. Yeah. And it was, it was not far away. It was only hours away from Massachusetts, so 

Speaker 91: it was not, yeah, it was not far away. And it came closer, in raids. Right. This is, this is not simply an imagined threat.

There, there, there actually were French alliances with indigenous peoples, in wartime. And sometimes there were, there were [02:13:00] raids on, new England colonies. So, so there, there was a real component to what was also a, a set of cultural attitudes. 

Speaker 90: I would have to, recommend to our listeners, John demos, the unredeemed captive.

If you wanna get an idea of the tension between Catholics and Protestants and this time in American history, that, that, that is a great historical narrative to go to. So let me ask you about Pope's Day. I, I love telling my friends about Pope's Day because, me and my son, we go out and we play, we shoot basketball, we play horse, right?

Or, or, or, or we try to play go fish, me and my kids and my wife. But on Pope Day in New England, the kids played a game called Break the Pope's Neck.

So maybe just as a way to, emphasize this host, this Protestant Catholic hostility, maybe tell our listeners a little bit [02:14:00] about the, what would happen in Boston on November 5th before the American Revolution In the years, prior, yeah. AB yeah, 

Speaker 91: absolutely. And so the, the reference was to this effort to blow up the British Parliament, which had failed and was connected to, what the British felt very strongly was a a, a broad Catholic conspiracy.

So Pope Day is the annual celebration of that failure and of the fact that the British were not Catholic. In addition to these children's games, adults would, make effigies of the pope, pope puppets, and march them through the streets, burn them publicly. There would be all kinds of toasts, some of them rude.

And after you do enough toasts, everything is rude, right? Again, attacking the papacy and attacking Catholics and this, this went forward, through the revolutionary period. George Washington, as I recall, actually was uneasy about these celebrations during the revolution, right?

Because when you're fighting a war, you do not [02:15:00] want denominational divisions, among your troops and. Washington in, in general, made a point throughout his career, also as statesmen of reaching out to the Catholic communities. But this was, this was absolutely part of the fabric of, of British life and of life, of life in the colonies.

If you were British, you were not Catholic, you did, make fun of the Pope burn the Pope in effigy. That was, that was just absolutely unquestioned. 

Speaker 30: we also looked at the anti-abortion movement. How it has its intellectual, but not quite. Its activist roots in Catholicism because US Protestants and evangelicals didn't take it up as an issue prior to the enactment of a lot of the civil rights statutes that took away Stax tax status privileges for their non-integrated Bible colleges in the 1970s.

And at that point, US event [02:16:00] Evangelicals had to find a political cause that would reestablish their power but not appear to be racist. They needed this other issue. And saving fetuses was an obvious choice. They turned to the Catholics for the moral and theological arguments that they needed about, you know, when does life start and the status of the woman's body.

The Protestants really weren't interested in any of that. They didn't have that sort of hammered out, and this forged an alliance where previously enmity towards Catholics was so severe that it was like a big obstacle to the presidential bid of JFK. 

Speaker 31: My enemy's enemy is my friend. I got really fascinated with Opus Dei, which is this deliberately secretive and Machiavellian association founded in Spain from within the Catholic Church in 1928 by this priest named José María Escrivá, who claims as many people do, to have been guided by a vision from God.

It has had an absolutely shameful alliance with the fascist government under Francisco Franco, who ruled for 36 years [02:17:00] and Opus Die Opus Day, excuse me, amassed extraordinary wealth and power via its strategy of recruiting very rich and influential members through this sort of multi-tiered organization where some are priests and some are laypeople and, and some live together in these, in these dormitories under very sort of austere conditions, and others are out in the world making money and donating tons to Opus Dei.

They're estimated to be worth $3 billion and they've had this uneasy but largely conciliatory relationship with the Vatican. 

Speaker 30: Yeah. 

Speaker 31: Their founder, Escriva, who I mentioned was even canonized as a saint by John Paul II. Politically, the group has very reactionary conservative puritanical policies and practices according to the reporting of Gareth Gore, who's this journalist who wrote, in some ways the Definitive Expose book, which is controversial about them, but they've been accused by him of enacting cult-like demands and controls over members.

They have been charged legally with human trafficking and labor practices that verge on [02:18:00] slavery. In terms of our current American political landscape, though, what's interesting is that several prominent figures are actually involved or alleged to secretly be involved with Opus Day through actually some pretty reasonable educated guesswork.

These include former Heritage Foundation President and Project 2025 Architect. Wouldn't you know it, Kevin Roberts former Ag Bill Barr. Uh, Supreme Court alumni Scalia and Thomas and Alito, and the man who is himself behind the conservative Catholic takeover of the Supreme Court, Leonard Leo. This is all consistent with Gareth Gore's book about the group characterizing them as seeking totalizing worldly power for their particular religious ideology.

The group has publicly refuted Gore's bombshell reporting, but he stands his ground on it. Now, Benedict XVI was very supportive of Opus Dei, but then perhaps surprisingly so too, was Francis. He even said about Jose. José María [02:19:00] Escrivá the founder, that he was a precursor to Vatican two, due to how his organization called non-Res into a life of sanctity.

And Francis would go on to Canonize Rivas successor, a man named Alvaro del Portillo. But there are some complexities here because he's also made some changes to Canon law in 2023 that seemed to be designed to limit Opus Dei's power. 

Speaker 30: Yeah. 

Speaker 31: So now Pope Leo, following on from some of Francis' recommendations seems set to go a step further.

Speaker 30: Well, they're more than recommendations. They were, they were ordered changes to Canon law that actually would take away Opus Dei or to to, to, um, name its own bishops. It was gonna put all of the administrative and financial sort of oversight, uh. Over Opus Dei and shunt that all to the Vatican, which is significant.

And you know, we're gonna talk about the money in a moment, but Yeah. You know, just reviewing that this is an organization that's [02:20:00] estimated to be worth $3 billion. That's one fifth of the estimated asset holdings of the Vatican itself. If, yeah, the Vatican is estimated to be worth 10 to $15 billion, there's a thing about like priceless artifacts mm-hmm.

That we'll get into in a moment. But like, uh, you can see what kind of line these people have to walk with. Not only this very sort of. Conservative, uh, and reactionary organization, but this very wealthy and politically connected organization that could very easily, uh, become a parallel church, right?

Speaker 32: Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Speaker 30: So last in our, our list of Catholic threads is, is a more sort of, um, I, I guess, frayed thread, which is that every other man flu out there is getting baptized these days and talking about the Latin mass and mobilizing theological arguments of against birth control and why women should stay at home.

There is an intense level of manosphere, fetishizing of [02:21:00] trica ideology being used to justify misogynistic backlash, uh, against feminism and to construct these romantic and fascist visions of authority. When these guys really get agitated, they rehash the Satanic panic themes with their own versions of Q Anon and they, they elevate their own MAGA style Pope figures like Bishop Strickland to oppose the woke corruption of the Francis Church.

Now we have the arrival of Pope Bob, uh, and the world I think is going to get exposed to. A slightly different side of Catholic modernity that Francis started to pull the veil back on. Now his choice of the name Leo the 14th has implications that, you know, we'll get into in a bit. But overall, his arrival, I would say, is a break from the fairly cursed lineage that we've so far been [02:22:00] chewing on on this podcast.

He does not come out of the Satanic panic. He is not strongly linked with anti-abortion and activism that way. He is anti-abortion. But this is a standard position. This is not his, this is not the thing that he rides or dies on. Uh, he has nothing to do that we've seen so far with Opus Dei uh, he's formed by monastic community and experience and, and then on the ground ministry in the global south with some political activism under his belt as well.

So I think he's giving people exposure to a different. Church on one hand, like a futuristic and aspirational non-European movement that's marked by its receptivity to post Vatican II radicalism, as radical as it can be. But on the other hand, he's also through his name choice. He's referring back to a church of the late 19th century that realized that massive political and economic [02:23:00] changes were reshaping what it meant to be human through the industrial revolution.

And so, you know, at that point, Leo the 13th has this choice about becoming either more politicized through his church leadership or more cloistered in response to this. Set of conditions. And the 13th Leo headed up a politicized Catholic response to unbridled colonial capitalism on one side, and also positioned himself as resisting communist materialism and atheism on the other.

And through that sort of third way passage, he is seen to have inspired a lineage of left-leaning socialists, sometimes even Marxist Catholics from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers Party to Daniel Berrigan and the anti-Vietnam War movement. You know, these figures who had pretty outsized impacts here in the us.

Speaker 31: So you're suggesting that his, his choice of name telegraphs. At [02:24:00] least some of this in terms of his, his affinity for this figure 

Speaker 30: 100%, like Leo the 13th is said to be the father of Catholic social teaching. Mm-hmm. Uh, which is part of its modernization move, uh, at the, at the end of the 19th century.

​

Speaker 43: do you think it's true that Donald Trump was watching 60 minutes and that's what, 'cause it was around that time and he may well have been catching, watching catch up.

Speaker 44: It may have, it may have had something to do with that. I also noticed that he mentioned David Axelrod. 

Speaker 43: Yes. 

Speaker 44: You know, Obama's Chicago fixer. 

Speaker 43: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 44: And I think the fact that the Pope, for reasons that nobody can quite work out, made time in his diary to see Axelrod at this time of, you know, heightened sensitivity, clearly infuriated Trump.

Because one of the things he mentioned in his quite extraordinary truth, social. Post. And if I could just mention that [02:25:00] just this morning the Pope was on the, on the papal plane on either on the way to or back from Algeria. And uh, he just made a joke to, you know, they call it truth social, said the Pope Guffawing.

Speaker 43: It is a very strange name actually. Uh, the more you think about it. But I, I think there was, there's a lot of things going on here. One is this sense among a lot of Republicans, not just Trump, not even just pro-Trump Republicans, that there is a sort of democratic. Stop going on to peel off. Catholic voters who voted the majority of Catholic voters voted for Trump in the presidential elections at the midterms coming up.

There's a lot of disgruntlement about the economy, about the Iran more and so on. Particularly among that swing group of voters that is Catholic voters, I realized the American Catholic vote is very complicated to talk about, but it is, does seem that there is some sort of, there are democratic maneuvers, which is why Axelrod would've reached out to meet the Pope to try and get the Pope on side or get the Catholic church on side.[02:26:00] 

The build up to the midterms and that's generated this angry reaction. 

Speaker 44: It's possible. It sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory to me. The Pope has never been particularly associated with the Democratic party. I think I'm right in saying he was a registered Republican and we know that his older brother Louis, who was very flatteringly mentioned by the president, is, uh, paid up maga or was at least until the president attacked his brother of the Pope.

I think the, um, the operation to peel off. Catholic Republican voters seems to have been led by one Donald J. Trump because his, his tweet was really perfectly designed to alienate those, uh, Catholic voters who were never maga, but you know, automatically voted Republicans simply because they were so horrified by the, you know, the wokeness of the Democratic agenda.

And clearly there's a danger for Trump. You would've thought he would see it coming would be that they, you know, they'll sit on their hands in November, not that they'll vote Democrat, they just won't turn up. 'cause [02:27:00] they'll remember the insult to the Pope and it was insulting to the Pope. 

Speaker 43: Mm-hmm. Well, let's get onto how insulting was to Pope Stoke.

But then as you say in your piece, he then decided to potentially, Trump then decided to potentially offend Protestants too by posting this picture of himself very obviously as Jesus. 

Speaker 45: Yes. 

Speaker 43: Um, and then saying completely, uh, unashamedly. Just obviously lying that this is not an image of Jesus. This is me as a doctor, and nobody can believe that unless Trump is so capable of self-deception, because of the power of positive thinking or whatever it is, that he can actually convince himself that yes, he, he, he just thought he was a doctor.

Speaker 44: Well, I think he put your finger on something there. The power of positive thinking. Norman Vincent Peale's Church was attended by Trump. And, you know, years before that by Richard Nixon, very much a, a message beautifully tailored to, you know, um, Republican business. Tycoons and politicians. [02:28:00] Also don't forget that Trump has appointed as his spiritual advisor, the appalling Reverend Paula White, who represents the Prosperity Gospel in its.

Crudest form. And who has been telling the president that he, you know, he has been chosen by Jesus to do this and that he is being persecuted much as Jesus was persecuted. Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 46: And Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused.

It's a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us. But it didn't end there for him and it didn't end there for you. 

Speaker 44: It's probably not difficult to plant that particular sort of thought in the president's head, and it seems to have worked 

Speaker 43: well. 

Let's 

Speaker 44: talk or not work. Shall we say 

Speaker 43: a bit more about Norman Vincent Peale?

stuff because it does seem that it is Trump's [02:29:00] religion and it, it has absorbed an element of Christianity at some stage. Paula White or Paula White Cain, which she sometimes called. Uh, she seems to be a kind of semi positive thinker. Televangelist, 

Speaker 44: absolutely. Yeah. 

Speaker 43: Um, uh, slightly prosperity gospel.

Speaker 44: Oh, more than slightly prosperity gospel in flagrantly prosperity Gospel. 

Speaker 43: As in you pray hard enough, you riches will come to you. 

Speaker 44: Yes. 

Speaker 43: And that's very much what. Trump thinks, you know, if you're positive enough, if you refuse to back down on everything, riches will come to you. 

Speaker 44: Yes. I'm not sure that praying is a particularly important part of his modus operandi, but nonetheless, you know, if you have to be, if you have to pray for anything, then praying for money probably makes sense to him.

Speaker 43: Yes. 

Speaker 44: Um, she's, I mean, she really is an absolutely dreadful figure and how he managed to choose her as his spiritual advisor. I do not know. 

Speaker 43: He does seem to have, have a, had a sort of spiritual moment after the attempted assassination. Uh, 

Speaker 44: where, but they, they go back, they go back years and years and years.

Paula White and [02:30:00] the president, I think she has, I, I know a similar role in the, in the first Trump administration. 

Speaker 43: You, you are actually right, but I'm saying sort of Trump's spiritual journey. I think he has. Certainly he went through the sort of straight, and some of his advisors were quite worried that he'd become too good and placid, and he was saying kind things about his enemies and things like that, and they thought, what's going on with Donald Trump?

Speaker 44: He has allayed those fears. 

Speaker 43: He has allayed his fears very successfully. But he thought that God, and he said so in his inauguration, God saved me to make America great again. 

Speaker 47: Just a few months ago in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin's bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason.

I was saved by God to make America great again.

Speaker 43: And this is certainly what Paul White is feeding him all the time. And if enough people tell you that, if I was to tell you, Damien, that you know God had [02:31:00] chosen you to come on my Americano podcast. Then you would eventually feel that, uh, that maybe he had, if enough people said it to you? 

Speaker 44: Well, you know, feel free to try the experiment is all I can say.

I think what one of the things that doesn't delight me, but d amuses me about this horrible sort of train wreck of a situation is that you have the president whose ideas about theology are rudimentary, shall we say, and, and whose advisor is Paula White. And then you have the vice president, JD Vance.

Influenced by, you know, the, the cleverest Dominicans in America converted in 2019, so powerfully affected by the writings of Saint Augustine that he presented the the City of God. And another book, I forget which it was to the Pope. When he met him, I would've thought the Pope having been head of the Augustinian order, could say, thanks, I've already got it.

I already read that one. But the theological sophistication [02:32:00] of JD Vance has, I think, bitten him in the ass, as it were. Mm-hmm. Somewhat. Um, because he thought, so my contacts told me. That he had the specialist theological knowledge to manage the relationship the of the second Trump administration with the Vatican.

But in fact, things had already got off to a bad start before Leah was elected because Leah had clashed with him on Twitter over basically his interpretation of the ot of and of, and of Saint Augustine. Then there's this meeting, uh, news of which was leaked last week that there had been. A very, um, free and frank exchange of views at a meeting in the Pentagon between various officials and the Popes now retired Ambassador Annun to the United States Cardinal Christophe Pierre.

And, um, it, it was that moment that it became, you know, the whispers that have been circulating for months. You know, were generally recognized to be true that [02:33:00] relations have been steadily deteriorating between the White House. And the, um, Vatican, even before the Iran venture, and the, perhaps the main reason for this was the Don Doctrine because.

Could remember that after the disaster of Francis Pontificate, it was generally accepted that they, you know, the Catholic church wouldn't have a, another Latin American Pope. But it kind of has, because Leo has spent, you know, actually a majority, I think of his, his, um, career as a, as a priest in Peru. He is now a citizen of Peru.

He particularly objects to the idea of United States, exercising, you know, economic and political, he over the Western hemisphere and that, you know, the, the knowledge that he would oppose. That was probably one of the reasons that the Latin American bishops as a lobby pushed him so hard and very successfully in the conclave of last year.

Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 43: Well, that's, I mean, that's why I wanted to go back to what Trump actually [02:34:00] said in his rant. He said that if it weren't for me. Being in the White House, he wouldn't be in the Vatican, meaning Pope wouldn't be there. And that's like as Trump, you know, everything Trump says. Shocking. Vulgar, probably true.

Speaker 38: Living out the Pope's words might be difficult, but reading them, it's pretty easy. In chapter one, polio sets the stage with what he calls essential words, laying the foundation for a discussion on poverty in the church, which naturally begins with love, it is Jesus who loves the poor and loves those who love the poor.

Even the smallest acts of kindness to the downtrodden do not go unnoticed by him. Unfortunately, our world has and continues to mistreat people forcing the poor to cry out to God for help. It is those who hear their cry and respond to it, not only serving the poor, but changing cultural mentalities that lead to poverty.

Who will be close to God in this opening chapter, Pope Leo exhorts us to not let our guard down when it comes to poverty. That we must be aware of new forms of emerging poverty and resist false ideologies that suggest that people are poor because of chance, or blind and cruel fate. The poor [02:35:00] exists, at least in part.

Because the wisdom of the world that does not cherish them as God does. Lest we make the same serious mistakes, we must go back and reread scripture to see how God treats them. In chapter two, pop Leo offers a brief but sweeping look at how God relates to the poor throughout scripture In the Old Testament, for instance, God uses the prophets to denounce the injustices committed against the weakest and exhorts Israel to renew its worship from within.

Because one cannot pray and offer sacrifice while oppressing the weakest and poorest, particularly in Amos and Isaiah, he points out. We hear of a God who hears the cries of the poor and inflicts punishment on those who cause them to cry. This is of course, because God has chosen the poor as his own going as far as to identify with them in his own human experience as Pope Leo reminds us, God became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, not as a rich king in a palace, but as a carpenter.

Someone who was rejected, excluded, and died and outcast. He preached good news to the poor and the beatitudes and exhorted his followers to always care for them. In fact, in one of his final discourses, he told them that when they care for the [02:36:00] poor, they do so for him and that those who neglect the poor will be condemned, not exactly a passage to take lightly.

St. Paul builds upon these teachings in his own writings, helping the early church understand that those who show generosity to the poor do so, not only for the benefit of those with little but for themselves as well, stating that God loves a cheerful giver. And so it was because of this, that the first communities of Christians were known above all, not for their liturgies or their theological treatises.

But for how they treated the poor. A commitment that has defined the church ever since. Thus, in chapter three, a Church for the Poor Polio moves beyond Scripture to highlight the many works of charity the church has exhibited throughout its history in all its varied forms. For instance, in the early church, there was a clear link between martyrdom and the poor, as witnessed by St.

Lawrence, Polycarp, and St. Justin, all men who gave up their lives defending the poor. People like St. John Chrysostom made sure that the church's worship was always tied to the life of the poor. Famously admonishing his people that if the faithful do not encounter Christ in the poor, who stand at the door, they will not be able to worship him at the altar, [02:37:00] and that the church must feed the hungry first and only afterward adorn the altar with what remains taking seriously the words of the prophets.

The early church understood that charity was a requirement for true worship. Of course, poverty involves much more than just the lack of money, and so throughout the history of the church. Faithful Christians have served the poor in a variety of ways, such as the early monks who welcomed outcasts into their community.

The Daughters of Charity, the Hospital Sisters, and Little Sisters of Divine Providence, among others who founded hospitals and cared for the sick orders like the Trinitarians who worked to free people from prisons and slavery, the mendicant orders who challenged both clerical, opulence, and the coldness of urban society.

St. Joseph Calasanz, the Marists, and others who founded free schools to offer education for all, regardless of wealth. And those like St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, who dedicated their lives to accompany migrants, welcoming, protecting, promoting, and integrating those living in a foreign land. From the very beginnings of our faith, until today, Christians have been known by how we care for the poor and vulnerable, providing charity to those in need.

But as Pope Leo points out in chapter four. The Gospel compels us to [02:38:00] do more than just charity. We must seek justice as well. In chapter four, a History that continues, the Pope picks up our story in the late 19th century when a new focus begins to emerge, rather than just seeking to help the poor, the church started to ask why the poor were poor in the first place, and what needed to change in our world to ensure an equitable society.

This concept called social justice. Is encapsulated in Catholic social teaching and began with the Pope's namesake Pope Leo the 13th from 1891. Until today, popes have been looking into the signs of the times and asking the question, how does our society reflect the values of the gospel when they're at odds?

The Pope's call for change, such as in Rerum Novarum, the first social encyclical in which Leo XIII called for safe working conditions and a just social order in Mater et Magistra St. John XXIII advocated that rich countries could not remain indifferent to the suffering resulted from poverty around the world.

They were obligated to do something about it. The church at the Second Vatican Council identified itself as the church of all. In particular, the Church of the Poor [02:39:00] reaffirming the universal destination of goods God destined the Earth and all it contains for all people. Justice tempered by Charity John Paul II continued in this tradition tackling issues related to the progress of peoples and dignity of laborers.

And more recently, Benedict XVI advocated for the more equitable distribution of goods and the preferential option for the poor. Building upon the work of his predecessors, pop. Leo concludes the chapter with a number of profound and desperately needed exhortations. First, that we need to consider marginalized communities as subjects capable of creating their own culture rather than objects of charity on the part of others.

The poor are not, therefore, our benefits, and they're not entirely dependent on us. They have agency and worth in themselves. Second, their experience of poverty gives them the ability to recognize aspects of reality that others cannot see. For this reason, society needs to listen to them. Not only are they subjects capable of determining their own lives, but their very experience of poverty provides them with insights into the world that most others will never know.

While [02:40:00] lacking in wealth, they're rich in other things. Leading ultimately to this crescendo drawn from Pope Francis. In light of this, it is evident that all of us must let ourselves be evangelized by the poor and acknowledge the mysterious wisdom, which God wishes to share with us through them as rich and as educated as we may be.

It is not the poor who always need to learn from us, but often we who need them to understand God because God has identified with them. We must identify with them as well if we want to be with God. For polio, it is only in our closeness to the complaints of those who suffer hearing their cries and experiencing them ourselves.

That we can accept the challenge God has for us to simplify our lives. But this is not the only challenge. Chapter five, A constant challenge calls us to action. Putting it all together, pop. Leo concludes with his purpose for writing. We must never forget who we are and why Jesus has loved us. We must also identify with the poor to love.

The poor is not just something the church does. It is the catalyst that sparks all [02:41:00] renewal Throughout our history, every movement of growth has been associated with people who give preferential option to the poor. And so the task of the church is before us. We must feel bound to invite everyone to share in the light in life born of recognizing Christ in the faces of the suffering and those in need.

It is how we will renew our church and how will we bring about change in our world. We do this first of all, by teaching the world that the poor are not a societal problem. They're a part of our family. They are one of us. Because of this, it is our responsibility to reject the indifference of the world that would prefer to overlook their suffering and all that causes it.

It is up to us to offer alms taking from our surplus to care for those who have little or nothing, but also to challenge our governments and markets to act justly. Those with power have a responsibility to care for the poor and to act justly. Yes, you heard that correctly. And no, this is not new. The church has advocated for more than 130 years that it is the right and responsibility of leaders to ensure the common good of all.

And Finally, Section D, [02:42:00] Some Misc. Historical Context

​

Speaker 8: For almost two millennia, the Pope has been a figure of supreme spiritual authority for Catholics around the world. But in the late 14th century, Catholics found themselves with not one, not two. But three popes, where did this plethora of popes come from, and who among them was the genuine article? The origins of this papal predicament began in 1296 when Francis King Philip IV decided to raise taxes on the church.

Given the clergy's political power, this offended Boniface leading him to write the unum san a radical decree asserting the Pope's total supremacy over earthly rulers. But King Philip struck back. [02:43:00] He declared Boniface a heretic and tried to have him arrested in a violent raid. Bonos survived the assault, but died soon after.

And following a short-lived successor, Pope Pope Clement V, a French diplomat seeking peace in the war between England and his homeland. Clement wanted to stay close to the conflict. And escaped the demands of Rome. So in 1309, he moved the seat of the papacy to Avignon a city close to France, but owned by a vassal of the church.

The papacy remained here for the terms of seven popes until the reigning pope finally returned to Italy in 1376. But just several months after his arrival, he suddenly died. This shocking development. Meant a new Pope had to be elected immediately [02:44:00] and in Rome where there hadn't been a papal election in over 70 years.

The Romans were determined to elect one of their own and restore Rome as sec seat of Western prison. Them local officials pressured cardinals to choose an Italian poop while rowdy mobs raided the conclave and plundered the papal wine cellar. Amidst this chaos, the Cardinals elected the Neapolitan Archbishop of Bari to become Pope Urban VI.

Initially, urban was seen as a safe choice, but he quickly proved to be a reformer who sought to limit the Cardinals finances. Desperate to maintain their luxurious lifestyles. The Cardinals declared the recent election illegitimate since it was decided under pressure from the Roman mob. They denounced urban as a usurper and held a new conclave [02:45:00] to elect Pope Clement VII.

Clement attempted to excommunicate urban, but he refused to recognize the authority of Clement or his greedy cardinals urban, named new Cardinals to his court and entrenched himself in Rome while Clement and his supporters. Return to Avignon, the schism had officially begun. Western Christendom now had two capitals, Avignon and Rome, each with their own Pope and Court of Cardinals.

As popes from each line died, their cardinals appointed successors continuing the crisis for decades. This strange situation didn't impact most ordinary Catholics as there were no significant doctrinal splits. Instead, the drama played out in the diplomatic realm. [02:46:00] European rulers were forced to choose sides as both popes V for spiritual and political supremacy only a Pope had the authority to call a general counsel to officially resolve the issue, and both sides refuse to take this step.

So in 1409, a group of cardinals from France and Rome took matters into their own hands. They claimed that since both popes were disputed, Cardinals did have the right to call the council. And at their gathering these cardinals depose the pretenders and elected a new Pope. Unfortunately. Both Avignon's Pope and Rome's Pope refuse to recognize this council.

So instead of solving the crisis, the number of popes rose to three. This unusual arrangement lasted five more years until the [02:47:00] Council of Constant. In 1417 here, the Popes from the Roman line and recently created third line, resigned and agreed to unite the church under a new Pope Martin V undisputed, Martin swiftly excommunicated the only person still against him.

The Pope of Avignon and finally ended the schism after 39 years.

Today, the church's official records say the Roman line was always the true papal power. But regardless of how the schism ended its existence proves that even those who are supposed to be pious are prone to petty power struggles. 

Speaker 24: I had spent a lot of time reading about the rhetoric of anti Catholicism ca you know, Catholics were the great bug [02:48:00] bears of the, of the 17th century and 18th century.

They embodied everything that English Protestants detested. They were disloyal. They were overly emotional. They were obsessed with ritual and materialism rather than with true doctrine and true ideolog. They were feminized because they were so emotional and so sensual. So they embodied everything that English Protestants despised.

And so anti-Catholic rhetoric is everywhere in Colonial records, but in fact, I had found very few examples of actual violence against Catholics. So there was this sort of glaring gap between the rhetoric, which was so hateful and so persecutory, and the experience, which seemed to be one of sort of benign neglect or indifference.

So I was very curious about that. There's one episode in part, and that's sort of the exception to the rule. Pitched battle between armed Protestants and armed Catholics in Maryland in the 1650s where the Catholics were routed by the Protestants and the loss of [02:49:00] some 20, 20, 22 or so lives. But that was the total exception to the rule.

So I was interested in how it was that colonial Catholics sort of occupied this space between heightened rhetoric and a kind of lived neglect. So that was what. Sort of led me into this project. 

Speaker 22: How did you go about actually finding anything, you know, the, these are people who, as you said, were flouting the law, they don't leave a lot of trace.

In some cases you're talking about some that are servants or enslaved. So what all did you have to look at to go about to put this story together? 

Speaker 24: Yeah, that was the real challenge. How do you find people who don't wanna be found in the archives? Archives that are created by colonial administrators who are, have one set of objectives and one set of motives and aren't particularly good at detailing and narrating the lives of ordinary people who don't otherwise come to their attention.

So [02:50:00] it was a, it was a scattershot approach. It required me to be a lot more creative than I think I'd been in, in, in other books to look beyond the documentary record for one thing. To look at the material record. I'm, I'm certainly not an archeologist, but I ended up reading a lot of archeology over the course of this book to sort of discover and find what are the material remains, that had been left by individual Catholics or individual or Catholic communities.

So, and that, that revealed one set of sources. There were scattered examples of. Rosary beats, discovered in archeological pits. There were stray references to a crucifix here and there found in probate records or in inventories, of people's households. So the material record gave me some clues. The material record is always.

Ambiguous. You, you, you can, I can know that a, a crucifix was owned by a particular person. I have no idea what that meant to them. Was this a relic of a, of a, of a grandmother, right. [02:51:00] Perhaps as someone who holds on very dearly to the, the rosary that my mother left behind, but does not consider myself in any way, a member of that community, that rosary, I own it.

And if you were to look at my probate interest story, you would see it, but it couldn't tell you much about my own personal beliefs. So, so objects are very difficult to decode, and to the meaning of them. But then nonetheless, they do offer us one clue. The other way to find Catholics, in addition to what they've left behind in their material possessions, is to read about the accounts of encounters with them from the people who were opposed to them.

And that is often true of minority groups, right? Who are persecuted, what we know of them. Is left to us by their prosecutors, by the law, by the colonial authorities in many cases, minister Protestant ministers who took it upon themselves to try to identify and convert or at least oppose the Catholic settlers that they found in the midst of their congregations.

So reports by Colonial Anglican [02:52:00] ministers were a great source always with, always keeping in mind that they are writing from a very. Particular viewpoint that they, they're trying to find these people in order to expose them, either if they're more generously minded to convert them or somehow incorporate them if they're less generously minded to prosecute them.

Wills were another, great resource. Colonial wills, like many wills in the early modern period, often began with a preamble that sort of lays out a statement of belief much different than Wills not, well, I'm not sure that they're that different than Wills today, but nonetheless, their, their preambles tend to be quite theological.

And so even someone who might have hashed their whole life, as a, as a secret Catholic, who wouldn't have been known to be Catholic from their, to their neighbors or to their larger community might in their last will and testament the last time someone has to sort of make a statement about their lives and their beliefs might lay out a kind of theology of what it meant to be a Catholic.

So I [02:53:00] read a lot of wills and looking for those theological cues in the preambles. Read a lot of, and at the point when newspapers become available, which is not until the 18th century, really 1730s on looking for any stray references on the Catholics, I did have to learn to, when I was using more digital databases to use the term papist and not Catholic, papist was far more.

It was the term that was most commonly used in this period of time to describe Catholics. It is a term of insult. It's a term that suggests that these are people who still owe their political loyalty to the pope. So therefore our papists. So it was really a scattershot approach to looking for evidence wherever I could find it.

Often being very mindful of fact that most of this was coming from people, institutions, organizations that were hostile to the people I was trying to understand. 

Speaker 22: I was raised Catholic and a lot of what it meant to be a Catholic as I was growing up was going to church every week [02:54:00] and being baptized and being confirmed and, and all of that.

What does it mean in this colonial period when there are by and large not Catholic churches when there are maybe not a whole lot of priests around? What does it mean to be a Catholic for these colonists? 

Speaker 24: That is the most important question. That is the essential question. What does it mean to be a Catholic when you don't have access to the sacraments, which are the building blocks of a Catholic identity in a Catholic life when you don't have access to priests who are the only people authorized to perform those sacraments to perform, most importantly, the miracle of the mass?

The, the, the, the fundamental central ritual of Catholicism, which is the turning of. Bread and wine into body and blood. So, and, and churches, and there are no churches in which to gather and celebrate these sacraments, these moments of transformation and transcendence as a community. That is the most essential question.

And I was very fortunate to be guided here [02:55:00] by one by generations, really have wonderful historians who have, especially historians of English Catholics who really devoted a lot of time to understanding what does that mean to be a Catholic, in a Protestant country. And what his have, what I. To be a Catholic under those conditions means that you have to find a way to translate and transfer some of those essential processes, encounters into a domestic context.

You cannot celebrate the mass in a church with the priest, but you can try to find a way in your own home by either dedicating a room in that house to be the place where you and your family gather on a Sunday. To, you cannot receive communion, at the hands of a priest in that room, in your home on a Sunday.

But you can read together the Catholic missile or, or, prayer book, and you can imagine it's, receiving communion. It's a ma, it's a act of imaginative, reception. [02:56:00] And you can try to think about that. There are other people doing this at the same time in their homes that you don't necessarily know personally, but you have a sense that there is a community out there.

So this domestication a ritual. The domestication of the experience of the mass was. The biggest innovation that colonial Catholics and English Catholics made in this time, and it had really far reaching consequences. For one thing, it meant that women assumed a really central role. Women were in a sense, the priests of the, of the Catholic community, and that they were the ones who gathered the family together.

They were the ones who kept, the. Essential, the, the missiles, and the, and the bread that you might try to pretend is a, is a wafer, and organize these events and presided over these events. And they were the ones who kept the feasting and fasting schedules of the church. So, so two things are happening.

One is that the, the a. Experiences that would take place in a church are taking place now in a home, in a much [02:57:00] attenuated, much modified form, but also other rituals that were not centered on the church, become more important. 

Speaker 104: That was one of the number one things, the relationship of the Kennedy men to women. Obviously people know that JFK had affairs and that there were rumors, whatever, but I, I don't think I had realized how like cults, like the environment was, I mean, they were raised to believe the JFK generation Joe's children were raised to believe that women are like objects to be passed around.

Joe would wanna participate and sort of be involved with his son's. Girlfriends and lovers. I mean, it really was way more crazy than people realize. 

Speaker 106: It's just deranged. I don't think people recognize just how much sex there was. Like yes, right. To say John Kennedy had affairs, JFK had affairs really is not even scratching the surface of what he got up to.

It seemed like some of the people around him, like Secret [02:58:00] Service members, his aides, procuring women, was almost a full-time job for them. It seemed like a different one almost every day, seemingly, or that would've been the dream, you know? I think some of them stuck around more long-term affairs. Right.

But I mean, the number was just insane, frankly. And there's a lot you could say about, you know, what was John f Kennedy's? Personal faith as a Catholic or what was Bobby's? What was Teddy's? What was the dad's? And we can talk about all of that. But I think in some ways, as I was thinking about some of this, again, to me it's always the Catholicism of the Kennedy's is most fully expressed in the people you don't see in their mythologies, which is the women.

And I do think that is a function of their Catholicism in a profound way. I mean, wills talks about Rose Kennedy as almost being in Alister within a nunnery convent within their domestic arrangements, sometimes even at their vacation home, right? Having her own little cottage on the beach she would go to and live in almost by herself.

So there's a way in which I think the most conspicuous elements of the [02:59:00] Kennedy's Catholicism often do relate to women. But the people in the Kennedy family, you don't know that much about, or you don't hear that much about are the women. And I can't think that can be separated from their Catholicism, frankly.

Especially that era, that vintage of Catholicism, pre Vatican, two very old school that was very much in play. 

Speaker 105: Totally. I was actually talking to George about this right before we started recording, which was, it seems like a lot of times when we talk about the Kennedys, we are just talking about the men.

Speaker 106: Yeah. Three or four of them. 

Speaker 105: Yeah. We're talking about Joe, Jack, Teddy, Bobby, but in terms of. Their relationship to Catholicism, it seems like the ones who were most strictly held to the principles of Catholicism, it was the women in the family. 

Speaker 98: Yes. 

Speaker 105: In a way that the men just simply were not, and that I'm sure was both a function of the time.

A function of this particular family itself? Yes. This was just a very [03:00:00] patriarchal, in the truest sense of the word family. And it's funny because Joe, and you can correct me if I'm wrong about this, but Joe's relationship to the Catholic church was entirely political from all accounts. It seems like he had no real spiritual interior life and treated Catholicism, the way that he treated women and the way he treated anything else, which was as a political pawn, as a means to an end.

And I, I thought that was really interesting. But yeah, the women who were held to the highest standards of being good Catholics, quote unquote, were the women 

Speaker 106: and and often were held to that standard by themselves. Yes. Like they did. Their duty would've been, I think, the language, right. And mm-hmm. That duty, they understood it in terms of the obligations imposed upon them as women, mothers, wives, by the Catholic faith.

Speaker 104: I'm just thinking about the times we have talked about Catholicism on this podcast. We had an episode on Kathleen Kennedy and it was such a big controversy within the family that she ended up marrying a non-Catholic. And [03:01:00] depending on who you ask, people say she was disowned by the family.

Other people say that's exaggerated, but the point is that there was a real fracture in the family and it's so. Crazy to imagine what a big controversy it was that she wanted to marry this man, that she, by all counts, loved. And meanwhile, as you're saying, there's a team procuring various loose women for JFK to have affairs with inside the White House.

And that is not seen as contra to his faith. But Julia mentioned Joe KI wanna start kind of at the beginning. I wanna start at Joe Kennedy. So to me it's interesting that the Kennedys are so synonymous with the Catholic church and the American imagination because from what I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, Joe initially really wanted to assimilate in WASP culture.

Like I, so much of his initial thirst for power was because he was in his mind, rejected from the country club set. Well, literally, yes. Yeah. I mean, I think there was a point in time where he wanted to [03:02:00] join the beach club, you know, where people would summer, you know, when summer's a verb and not a season, the kind of elite.

Speaker 106: Rich person, but therefore mostly protestant club. And he couldn't. Right. And like that was a chip on his shoulder. There's a story of him going back to his college reunion, right. And being kind of booed or his stat, like these little slights to him, whether it was his college reunion or joining the elite social clubs, beach clubs, those kinds of things.

He didn't get what he wanted. Right. And this was a man who got what he wanted most of the time. And wanting one of his sons to be president is a kind of elaborate revenge fantasy on his part for all the slights of the high society types, the Boston Brahmins, who wouldn't accept him. Mm-hmm. And his Irish Catholic clan.

That's a major factor in the whole story of the Kennedys, is we've come to know it. 

Speaker 105: And I think, as George alluded to, it's so funny that this is the most famous Irish Catholic family in America in the last a [03:03:00] hundred years. And Joe. So badly wanted to distance himself from that because he saw it as like a personal hindrance and only became to embrace it when it became politically useful to him.

But exactly as you were saying, he was rejected by the WASP in Cohasset, Massachusetts. He was denied the position he wanted in the Roosevelt administration. Yes, the Secretary of the Treasury. And then his second choice was ambassador to England, which is again, as an Irish person. What's a bigger stab in the back?

Speaker 104: Yeah. 

Speaker 106: Yeah. Uhhuh. 

Speaker 104: Well, the relationship with England is funny because there was a part in the Wills book in the very beginning where Willis is saying that the children thought of Joe's. Relationship to sex as very English or something. It was, I'm trying to remember the exact phrasing, but it was like, it was very Randy.

Yes. It was something about how it's ironic that the IES are considered this iconic Catholic family because he always thought of himself as having a [03:04:00] very sort of English disposition. And I do think that was also part of him wanting to be this cosmopolitan, worldly connector of people who was above specific ethnicities and religions.

But in terms of Catholicism in America, because obviously if we fast forward to the JFK election, a huge hindrance for him was the so-called Catholic question. And people fa, he has some sort of dual loyalty to the Catholic church and to America. But before that, what in your opinion, was the status of the Catholic church in the American imagination sort of leading up to that?

Like from the forties through the sixties? Like yes, there was prejudice against Catholics. What were the stakes? 

Speaker 106: Yeah, in some ways I mentioned already, you can look at the particular face of any individual Kennedy and see what's going on there. But I think the more interesting questions are about the moment that the Kennedys and their Catholicism met with the history of [03:05:00] our country, and especially the history of Catholicism in it.

One of my favorite lines of Gary Wills is the reign of the two, Johns, meaning John the 23rd, who was the Pope who called the Second Vatican council. We've described that a little bit already, but one of the phrases associated with it is throwing up the windows of the church, throwing up, open the windows so that the, the church can look out and the world can look in.

And it was at the Second Vatican Council where, again, religious freedom, religious pluralism, human rights, liberal democracy, how the Catholic church related to the Jewish people, right? Or were all reformulated and reworked and. Adapted and updated in a way in the Second Vatican Council, which was, you know, we're talking late fifties, early, early sixties.

So as America is electing, its first. A Catholic president, uh, the Catholic church is literally calling the bishops and cardinals from all over the world to convene on Rome and deliberate about the very matters I was just discussing among others. So it's a [03:06:00] very interesting moment and the phrase, the reign of the two johns, I've always loved that.

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;

United States of Kennedy

Runaway Country 

Takesâ„¢ by Jamelle Bouie

TLDR News Global

Conspirituality

Some More News

Unsung History Podcast

The BradCast 

Professor Tim Wilson

The Road to Now

The Spectator

Breaking In The Habit

and TED-Ed

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show and co-starring in SOLVED!, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes including her co-starring on SOLVED!, thanks to our editors and and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships

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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.