When I think about the left-wing reformers who are winning office as Democrats, I recognize that they need to govern alongside people who differ with them. That means compromise. It also means that politicians can’t lead the struggle for transformative change, at least not on their own. Movements lead, and sometimes they give rise to people who can also be effective in elected office.

I also worry that the party will absorb each new generation of reformers into its culture before they’re able to change it.

When I caught up with Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, we started off by discussing his recent column arguing that today’s AOC wouldn’t have endorsed the insurgent AOC of 2018. She’s holding back on endorsements for challengers who are doing exactly what she did to get elected, and she recently endorsed Hakeem Jeffries for House Democratic leader—even as he sent colleagues a letter pledging to keep arming Israel.

From there we went to a couple of Norman’s other recent columns. Topics included the failure of institutional conformity in the Democratic Party, its moral and strategic failure on Gaza and Palestine, the myth of “insider expertise,"and the interplay between class, social forces, and personality in the shaping of history.

I enjoyed the conversation very much. I hope you do, too. There’s a (lightly edited) transcript below.

Here are the columns we discussed:

Today’s cautious AOC would not have endorsed the AOC of 2018
My Conversation With Karl Marx About Donald Trump
Why the Biden Debate Disaster Still Matters for the Future

Selected quotes

“When people lead, leaders will follow. If we don’t lead, they’re going to follow each other.”
— Norman Solomon

“At what point are you changing the party, and at what point is the party changing you?”
— Richard Eskow

“It’s stunning that [AOC] has made it a policy not to endorse any challenger to an incumbent Democrat when that’s how she got into Congress in the first place.”
— Norman Solomon

“It’s not about the celebrity figures. It’s about the movements that make them.”
— Richard Eskow

“It’s called democracy. We all take our best assessments and we push.”
— Norman Solomon

Subscribe now

Transcript

Richard Eskow: Welcome back to The Zero Hour.

Norman Solomon: Thanks. Very glad to be here.

Richard Eskow: I want to start with this piece, because I thought it neatly encapsulated the situation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who I get asked about a lot. I think anybody identified as being on the left probably gets asked about her a lot. The headline, and I believe this piece itself was not from The Hill, though the headline was, read: “Today’s Cautious AOC Would Not Have Endorsed the AOC of 2018.” I thought that captured a shift people are concerned about with her. What inspired you to write it?

Norman Solomon: It occurred to me that when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got into Congress, it was by challenging someone who seemed almost unchallengeable, Joseph Crowley, the fourth-highest-ranking Democrat in the House. It seemed impossible. She had no prior, quote-unquote, experience in office. She’d tended bar, and she was a terrific activist. She won, and it stunned people.

Now, in 2026, as someone with a lot of well-justified clout on the left and in national political discourse, she’s declined to endorse any of the candidates trying to ascend the way she did, mostly, by the way, people of color who’ve won as Democratic Socialists in deep-blue districts in the last few weeks. They’re on their way to Congress, and frankly, no thanks to her. Now, I know it’s complicated, when you’re in office, you have to choose your endorsements carefully. But it’s stunning to me that she’s made it a policy not to endorse any challenger to an incumbent Democrat, when that’s exactly how she got into Congress in the first place.

Richard Eskow: It is striking. She deserves credit for helping Zohran Mamdani early on in his race, though that wasn’t a House race. I always worry about progressives getting elected and then joining what I’ve called the Democratic Borg collective of the power elite. To their credit, many of them haven’t done that. Bernie resisted it for a long time, he was always strategic about when and how he worked with insider groups. I didn’t always agree with him, but he was careful about it, and we could go down the list.

One of AOC’s first moves in Washington was joining a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office, which got her in a lot of trouble. Now she seems to have taken the position that challenging an incumbent is outside the rulebook. But that’s not only how she got into office, it’s supposed to be how democracy works. So what do you think is at the root of her discomfort?

Norman Solomon: She’d be uncomfortable dealing with some of her colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus if she supported challenges to incumbent Democrats. It’s notable that some of the best members of Congress, not just her, got there that way: Ro Khanna, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, who hopefully is coming back after being ousted. They got there by challenging people considered entrenched.

There’s a saying that we do political analysis, not psychoanalysis, so we never really know what’s going on inside someone’s head. But it’s pretty clear she’s aspiring to higher office. She may run for the Senate seat in 2028, whether or not Chuck Schumer runs for reelection. There’s also been increasing buzz in the media about her running for president in 2028. In either case, the traditional pathway is not to alienate the powers that be in the Democratic Party, and she seems to be taking the opposite path.

Just as I finished writing this piece for The Hill, news came that AOC had endorsed Hakeem Jeffries, the current House Democratic leader, to continue in that role next year, whether or not he becomes speaker. To me, that reinforces the concern, and maybe the reasonable guess, that she’s trying to curry favor with people in power. And nobody on the Democratic side of the House is more powerful than Hakeem Jeffries. Nobody is more pro-Israel, either, arguably, or certainly, no one is more powerfully pro-Israel.

Just days before we’re speaking, Jeffries sent an extraordinary “Dear Colleague” letter to every House Democrat, saying he’ll oppose any cutoff of weapons and military aid to Israel. He didn’t have to say that, even if he was personally going to vote against an arms cutoff, but he went out of his way to pledge his allegiance to the IDF, using his leverage to stop more Democrats from breaking away from the “Israel, right or wrong” line and voting against arming a government that is clearly engaged in genocide, as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli human rights groups Physicians for Human Rights Israel and B’Tselem have all documented.

And yet here’s this guy, in the middle of summer 2026, using his leverage to keep arming a genocide. In that context, it looks especially bad that AOC went out of her way to say, “This is our leader for next year.”

Richard Eskow: This gets back to a conversation you and I, and I think many of us, in various configurations, have had before: the fact that AOC, and candidly Bernie too, endorsed Joe Biden for reelection a year, maybe two years, before the campaign started. My memory’s a little hazy on the exact timing. But this was despite the fact that he was, at that point, supporting the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and he continued to do so, with no leverage used for humanitarian relief there or anywhere else.

It raises the question: at what point, as a politician who’s supposedly a change agent, are you changing the party, and at what point is the party changing you? In that race, who’s winning? Because it seems to me that in both cases, AOC traded away leverage, not just on a political issue that, according to the polls, would favor her, but on a moral one. So it makes me wonder: am I missing something here? I admit I’m baffled.

Norman Solomon: “Gratuitously early” is one way to describe AOC’s endorsement of Hakeem Jeffries as Democratic leader. The vote won’t happen until at least November, when the Democratic caucus decides on its leader for next year. That leader, speaker or not, has tremendous power and leverage over how the Democrats in Congress behave, over caucus positions, and especially over committee assignments.

It’s a bit like a labor leader going into negotiations with management and already giving up so much before any negotiating has even taken place. As you allude to, Richard, I think AOC, for whatever reason, decided to endorse before there was even a negotiation. She did offer an explanation: she said in her announcement that she’d met with Jeffries and was pleased he would support public housing in New York, which matters to her. I found that explanation baffling at best, and at worst, just not credible.

There are really only two possibilities you could draw from AOC’s explanation. One is that Jeffries is so unreliable and unprincipled on humanitarian issues that you have to cut a deal with him just to get his support for public housing that New Yorkers need. Or, on the other hand, he’s someone you can depend on, in which case, why would you need to cut a deal in the first place? Either way, it doesn’t pass the smell test. I don’t want to impute purely selfish motives, but these are politicians, she’s clearly ambitious for higher office, and I think that’s probably the most specific explanation. And then there’s the more generic one: if you want to get along with your colleagues in Congress, you don’t tell them you’re going to help remove them from office.

Richard Eskow: I’ve studied politics for a long time, as you have, Norman, and perception matters a lot. It’s hard to quantify, hard to predict. But the strength AOC brought to her initial campaign, to the House, to what quickly became political celebrity, was a combination of refreshing energy and an unsolemn, I don’t want to say rebellious, but a playful, in a good way, attitude. I thought it was a great moment when she told a hostile witness, “I was a bartender for years, I know how to handle men like you.” She has real gifts as a communicator.

But every gift is double-edged in politics, I’ve come to believe. The gift of being a facile communicator can quickly turn on you if people feel it’s not backed up by substance, character, and commitment. Her youth and youthful energy could equally turn against her if people start to feel there’s something superficial about her. I’m not saying this because I can predict the future or read people’s minds, but if she’s ambitious for herself and her career, and she clearly is, I think she’s playing a dangerous game.

Norman Solomon: On that note, trust can seem ineffable, almost abstract, but I think it matters enormously in the longer term. Let’s face it: if she runs for president, or even for Senate in New York, the right-wing guns will be trained on her, metaphorically. They really hate her, just look at right-wing media. She’s going to need her base to turn out. She’s going to need, as Mamdani had, tens or hundreds of thousands of volunteers willing to go door to door to counteract the corporate and militarist assaults, in media and in politics, that are sure to come, and that have already existed for years.

I’ve gotten pushback from progressives who say, “Why are you picking on her? She’s in Congress. She knows things you don’t. She understands tactical complexities you don’t.” I think that’s a very hazardous attitude. We saw it before, when almost every Democrat in Congress refused to say a negative word about Biden running for reelection. We were told, “They’re the pros, they’re the experts, who are we to micromanage them?” Well, it’s called democracy. We all make our best assessments and push, because that’s what activism, organizing, and participatory democracy are supposed to be about.

Richard Eskow: It’s not about the visible figures, the celebrities. It’s about the movements that make them succeed or fail, and that guide and pressure and encourage them. There’s a sad irony in seeing some of the people who came to power because Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton now using the same rhetoric to defend their choices that Hillary’s supporters once used against the Bernie contingent, “They’re the insiders, they’re the experts, they know what you don’t.” Well, you know what? In a democracy, if you know something I don’t, tell me, because that’s how democracy works.

Norman Solomon: That reminds me of something formative for me, and for many people of my generation, during the Vietnam War: we constantly heard that Lyndon Johnson knew things we didn’t, so why should we think we knew better than him? Year after year, I was a teenager at the time, 1965, ‘66, we were told the Democrats in Congress understood the war in ways we didn’t. The message was: butt out, and trust. But we can’t afford to trust, when circles of power so easily seduce the people inside them.

Richard Eskow: People remember, from those days, at least the title of David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest, about the Kennedy people who went on to serve in the Johnson administration, Robert McNamara and others. What people forget is that the title is ironic, the “best and the brightest” made a mess of things.

That gets me to another piece you’ve written recently, Norman, the one headlined “Why the Biden Debate Disaster Still Matters for the Future.” I’m sure some people think, “Enough about the Biden debate disaster”, but we’re still talking about it, and not just you and me. This ties directly into what we were just discussing about AOC, doesn’t it?

Norman Solomon: Very much so. As it happens, two of my political heroes, Bernie Sanders and AOC, supported Biden right up until the last minute, until he announced he’d drop out. Patterns really matter. Political cultures matter, even when we have trouble putting our finger on them. There’s a conformity that’s magnetic, especially for people who want to ascend, or be taken seriously.

We saw that dynamic play out. Not to boast, but just to be factual: at RootsAction, we launched the “Don’t Run, Joe” campaign right after the 2022 midterms, and we couldn’t find any other sizable national group willing to join us. We heard privately from some who said, “Yeah, Biden shouldn’t run”, but they were afraid of losing access. The same was true for Democrats in Congress. Only one or two were willing, in 2023, to say publicly that Biden shouldn’t run. This has consequences, and we’re living them right now.

Some people watching might ask, “Why focus on Democrats, when we have this fascistic Republican regime?” And we certainly do focus on that. But the underlying question is: how do we defeat them? Can we do it the way Kamala Harris tried, splitting the difference and, to put it mildly, disrespecting the base that was horrified by the genocide the U.S. was supporting? The question answers itself. We need a departure from this willingness to reinforce the establishment and disregard the polling.

There’s one more piece here, going back to both the 2024 campaign and what we’re talking about with AOC: polling over the last twelve to eighteen months has been very clear, about 75% of Democrats don’t want to keep arming Israel. They believe Israel is engaged in genocide. And still, one of the best progressives in Congress just endorsed for leader someone who came out in favor of continuing to arm Israel. It may be a cliché, but it’s true: when people lead from the grassroots, leaders follow. If we don’t lead, they’ll follow each other, right over the cliff.

Richard Eskow: I get that question a lot too, Norm, “Why are you always so hard on the Democrats when we have this authoritarian Trump who’s so terrible?” My answer is always: that’s exactly why. Trump wouldn’t be there today, in my view, if Democrats were listening to activist movements and the popular will.

I get it, on one level, I’ve been close enough to the seats of power to understand that shifting this massive institution, the Democratic Party, from a large-donor model to a small-donor, popularly-funded one, is a major job. I get that it’s intimidating, that it’s a radical career change for a lot of people, that a lot of well-paid consultants would have to find other ways to make a living. I get all of it, the institutional momentum behind the party as it currently works.

But I think it’s not only good policy and good for the country, it’s the only way to win. Polls keep showing that. Where they don’t, it’s often the phrasing of the poll that’s the problem. The classic example for me is Medicare for All, which polls extremely well, unless you ask, “Would you support government-run health care even if it meant a big hike in your taxes?” Which it doesn’t necessarily have to mean, and which would be more than offset by what people no longer pay in premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.

So we have an agenda that would make the country safer and healthier, and yet there’s institutional resistance to it. To me, that should be a dividing line: do the politicians I support understand that, and want to work with the grassroots to overcome it? When you bring up the Biden debate performance, there are a million reasons behind it we haven’t even gotten into. But one of them is what the psychologist Stanley Milgram called obedience to authority, and we, as a movement, and the Democrats as a party, should not be so obedient to authority, especially authority that’s misled us so often. Sorry, I’m ranting a little. Let me turn it back to you.

Norman Solomon: No, that’s key. The huge gap between how Democrats, and often the country as a whole, poll, and the positions taken by Democratic Party leadership, is political malpractice. The vast majority of Democrats don’t want to keep arming Israel, for instance, and yet we have an institutionalized model that says those views don’t really matter compared to other factors, namely, that autocrats and the wealthy can write six- or seven-figure checks.

The reality is that successful campaigns have to be inspiring, that’s how the current mayor of New York got elected. A friend of mine gave a keynote to a state Democratic Party recently and asked, “How many of you would like to be campaigning alongside Chuck Schumer if you were running for office?” Hardly anyone raised their hand. I think it’s similar with Jeffries. What does that tell us? That the party’s ostensible leaders at the very top are found uninspiring, which translates into failing to drive turnout, which is essential to winning elections. Every cycle, come October, it’s a turnout election, and yet this so-called leadership is deadening rather than inspiring.

Another element you touched on, Richard, is the campaign funding model within the party. Without inspiration, you can’t do what Bernie Sanders did, averaging $27 donations. I don’t think the people running the DNC, or leading the House and Senate Democratic caucuses, really see small donations as the key. It’s the old line, if you don’t have the hammer, everything doesn’t look like a nail. They don’t inspire people, and no wonder the DNC is in such dire financial straits right now.

Richard Eskow: I get the challenge this poses to their mindset, even conceiving of a small-donation, popularly-funded party is alien to them. But I think they’re approaching a kind of freeze-up point. The only way they can raise money is by clinging to policies people don’t actually support, just to keep the fundraising going, which lets some people make a good living as consultants without significantly winning elections. Or, they decide they actually want to win, and build a coalition of people who do. Otherwise, they risk freezing in place, in a kind of stasis. What do you think?

Norman Solomon: That brings us back to where we started, the fact that Capitol Hill is, de facto, an insular bubble. You’re dealing with certain callings, certain pressures. I think a key question for those of us at the grassroots, progressives and others who want humane, progressive change, is whether we’re going to be a counter-pressure or not. Are we going to leave the field to the corporate interests and militarists who dominate that milieu on Capitol Hill? Or are we going to provide counter-pressure? Of course, it has to be the latter. That’s essential.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. Before you go, Norman, I want to talk briefly about a piece you wrote called “My Conversation with Karl Marx About Donald Trump.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what you were exploring, in channeling the late Karl Marx, was the tension between class struggle as the engine of history versus the historic, transformative personality, in this case, Donald Trump, as the engine of history.

Trump poses a real challenge to the left in that sense. I believe class and economic struggle are major drivers of history, and that there are tectonic forces at work, but individuals can also shift the course of events at certain moments. This is a challenge for the left, because so many centrists and corporate politicians have used Trump’s personality as an excuse not to offer better policies for the working class, which has created a counter-reaction. It’s a delicate balance. Is that a fair read of what you were trying to do with the Marx piece?

Norman Solomon: Yes, that’s largely what I was after. It is a delicate balance. I’m one of many people who, especially over the last year and a half, have been trying to reconcile a fairly solid analysis, that social forces determine what happens historically, in the present and future, and that we want to strengthen the social forces for good rather than for corporate militaristic evil, with the fact that along comes Trump, not just leading a cult of personality, but embodying a force, as an individual, that’s been genuinely transformative.

It’s a word that can sound academic or jargon-y, but dialectically, these are truths in conflict that coexist. I found a quote from Marx, writing to Engels, essentially saying: I never claimed that everything that happens is purely because of economics, people who say that aren’t being accurate. The basis of it is economics, and class struggle, but other factors are involved too. That’s the real world.

Richard Eskow: Right, it’s the gasoline and the match. The gasoline won’t catch fire or explode without a match. On one hand, there are clearly global social forces at work in the rise of the right and demagogic leaders, Orbán in Hungary, Le Pen in France, Farage in Great Britain, some in power, some out. There’s clearly something global going on: alienation against the elite, in the absence, in my view, of a valid left to challenge it. So that’s the structural side.

But on the other hand, would we be in this situation without Donald Trump specifically? I’d say no. I could go further and say he’s intensified the contradictions, to borrow that phrase from the ‘60s, “heightened the contradictions.” We don’t know how it will turn out, but we know we have to stop Trump and Trumpism if we want to create space for real transformative change. At least, that’s my view. I’m not sure Marx, or anyone else, would disagree.

Norman Solomon: Definitely, we need to roll back Republican power, it is fascistic power. When I hear some on the left say it doesn’t matter who’s individually in office, I think that’s, at this point, a kind of hallucination. It clearly matters who holds power. With the right wing running the executive and legislative branches, and much of the judicial branch, we’re entirely on the defensive, there’s no capacity to implement good policy, only damage control. That’s why getting them out of office is the imperative for this midterm election, and for 2028 as well.

Richard Eskow: The other reason to get these people out of office, as dissatisfied as I am with the Democratic Party, is that I think the sum total of human suffering in this country would be somewhat less if the far right were out of power. I don’t think a party deserves a laurel wreath for basic decency, but at least some measure of human decency might return. I’m not so cosmic that I think I know how much suffering should be tolerated in the short term because something magical might happen in the long term. I think we owe it to people to relieve suffering, to give them space to breathe and survive, and then show them what a better world can look like.

Before we go, I’ll give you the last word, there’s a great Marx quote I’d heard before, apropos of Trump. He wasn’t writing about Trump, obviously, in 1869, but he described a cult existing around a tyrant, and how the class struggle “created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” That sounds very much like the current president of the United States. But I’ll give you the last word.

Norman Solomon: That’s an amazing description by Marx, I believe of Napoleon III, and as you say, it fits the dangerous, vicious clown now serving as president. I do want to invite people to check out my latest book, which is free and available online in various formats, at blueroad.info. It’s called The Blue Road to Trump Hell.

Richard Eskow: I encourage people to do that. You and I have talked about it on the program before. Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, thanks for these recent pieces, which I got a lot out of, and thanks once again for coming on the program.

Norman Solomon: Thanks a lot, Richard.

This work is only possible thanks to reader support. If you find it worthwhile, please help out with a paid subscription through Substack (discounted here) or on Patreon. You can also make a one-time donation here.

Many thanks.

I spoke with Sam Rosenthal of RootsAction about their campaign to replace Chuck Schumer as Senate Democratic leader. The reasons include:

• Schumer’s allegiance to a hawkish, AIPAC-friendly Israel policy that’s badly out of sync with where Democratic voters now stand (not to mention immoral),

• his tepid opposition to Trump, and

• his instinct to intervene in primaries on behalf of “compliant” establishment candidates — Janet Mills in Maine, for example, or Haley Stevens in Michigan—even when they’re demonstrably unpopular.

We closed by discussing what a post-Schumer Democratic leadership might actually need to look like—and why, on issues like Israel and health care, the party’s voters and its leadership class are no longer speaking the same language.

As Sam says here, “What bugs (Schumer and other party leaders) most about Trump is that he’s indecorous... What should be bugging them is that people in this country still can’t afford health care.”

Please give it a listen. (Transcript below.)

This work is only possible thanks to reader support. If you find it worthwhile, please help out with a paid subscription through Substack (discounted here) or on Patreon. You can also make a one-time donation here.

Many thanks.

Transcript (lightly edited)

Richard: At Roots Action, you folks are working pretty hard on a campaign to get Chuck Schumer out of his position as minority leader. So if you don’t mind, let’s start by having you tell us a little bit about that.

Sam: Yeah, thanks … What we’re saying is that Chuck Schumer, while he can remain a senator, should no longer be the leader of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate. And that’s because we feel Schumer is increasingly out of step with the party—certainly out of step with the base.

More and more, he’s drifted from a leadership role within the caucus to being a representative who upholds the traditional, establishment-friendly order in the Democratic Party. I think that order is starting to fall apart. We’ve seen, primary after primary this year, voters choosing candidates who represent an alternative to the traditional establishment in the party.

Schumer is unwilling to relinquish his hold on the party because he wants to continue to be a bulwark against the more progressive elements within it. So what we’re saying is that Schumer is no longer representative of where the Democratic Party is, or, according to voters, where it should be going from a political and strategic perspective, and he should let go of the reins and let someone else step into that position.

Richard: When I think about Schumer and the Democratic Party, three things come to mind where this dissonance you’re describing is most apparent, at least to me, and I’m probably overlooking some. One is opposition to Trump: whether Schumer is being forceful enough, clear enough, in that opposition. I think, for example, of his acceding to Trump’s budget deal at the start of Trump’s second term.

Second is Israel and U.S. policy toward Israel and the Israel-Palestine issue, where polls show a dramatic shift among Democratic voters—very much in contrast with where Schumer stands. And the third is the broader issue of war: opposing Trump’s attack on Iran, and how to oppose it.

So have I left out any critical issues, do you think?

Sam: I don’t think so. I think those are all right. Maybe the only thing I’d add is that we’ve seen Schumer, this year, pretty reliably backing establishment-friendly candidates, even in instances where those candidates aren’t polling well in their primaries and don’t seem to be preferred by anyone except the consultant-donor class of the party.

I think that puts him at a further remove from where the energy in the party actually is right now, which is with the grassroots—with activists who want to see more progressive candidates running for Congress. So it puts him further out of touch. And I think everything you just described can really be summed up this way: Schumer is representative of a politics, and a Democratic Party, that no longer exists.

He’s representative of the politics of days of yore. Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, this would have been the Democratic Party mainstream. But there’s a lot of evidence it isn’t anymore. Things like giving a blank check to Israel, a thirst for more war and more confrontation in the Middle East: these are deeply unpopular policies now within the Democratic Party and, increasingly, across the country, across political parties and tendencies.

Schumer, being a poster child for this type of policy, is really damaging the brand of the Democratic Party. He’s one of the most unpopular major political figures in the country, even among Democrats. He’s someone who, I think, is either unwilling or unable to go where the energy among party activists is.

Just to touch on a quick, contemporary example: the war in Iran is incredibly unpopular. This is something Donald Trump started unilaterally, under false pretenses—really, almost no pretense at all. He simply decided he was going to start bombing this country. And during a pause in the fighting—before this latest round started, when Trump was negotiating with Iran—we saw Schumer put out a video effectively taunting Donald Trump for not having gone to war with Iran sooner, for not having attacked the country with more force, more gusto.

That’s just a clear indication of how far Schumer has drifted from mainstream Democratic Party policy on this issue. It’s not popular with the base. But we see that Schumer, as an Iran hawk and an “Israel right or wrong” supporter, has clamored for military conflict with Iran for a long time. And if it were a Democratic president perpetrating this war, I think he’d be happy about it.

Richard: Well, we’ve got a lot of issues on the table now, which is good. But one thing that struck me about his response to Trump’s highly unpopular attack on Iran is that, stylistically—and not just stylistically, but in content—it has this hall-monitor tone to it. It’s less “this is morally wrong, this is tactically wrong, we’re against it” and more “you didn’t ask us permission first”—as in, we would have granted it anyway—“you didn’t follow the rules.” It’s a kind of tattletale posture.

I’m glad you brought up the old model of the Democratic Party, because it reminded me of something—this was on the House side, but—Ryan Grim, when he was at The Intercept, published a slide deck that party leadership gave to newly elected Democratic members of Congress. I can see you remember it. Among other things, it told them to expect to spend two or three hours a day fundraising on the phone with big donors.

The party is still evolving, to be clear, but the voters are way ahead of the party as an institution. The old model was: first and foremost, keep the donors satisfied. I don’t know Schumer’s personal ideology, but that means keeping AIPAC donors happy about Israel, keeping the defense industry happy with how much money gets allocated to the Defense Department, and so on.

So you have, both stylistically and substantively, this growing gulf between “the party” meaning the voters and “the party” meaning the leaders. Schumer can’t even fake it, it seems to me. There are other senators who can at least pretend they’re not in opposition to the voters on these issues, but he seems tonally and substantively completely out of step. Would you agree with that?

Sam: Absolutely. I think one of the biggest failures of Chuck Schumer’s leadership is an inability to recognize how much politics in this country has moved on from the model he’s familiar with. It’s stylistic, it has to do with policy, it has to do with his general approach to politics in this country.

There’s a wing of the Democratic Party that, since 2016, has been waiting for a return to politics as usual, and they’ve failed to recognize that there’s no return coming. There’s no going back to pre-Trump, pre-2016 — even pre-Bernie — style politics. We’re in a fundamentally different era, and it requires a different approach, with different policies.

When you look at someone like Schumer, what you see is an implicit — sometimes explicit — promise to voters that he can take them back to the politics of yore. Joe Biden was part of this trend too: some sort of return to respectability, decorum, procedure, doing things the right way. The error the establishment has made is thinking that’s what voters want — because that is what their donors want. These are people who are materially very comfortable, and what bugs them most about Trump is that he’s indecorous, that he’s crude and mean to world leaders who are supposed to be our friends.

What should be bugging them is that people in this country still can’t afford health care. People are getting priced out of their housing. People can’t provide for their families even when they’re working four, five, six jobs between two parents. Those are the policies we want to see our elected officials picking up and running with. But all Schumer offers is, “We’ll go back to doing things by the book. Elect us and you’ll get a return to a rules-based order, a more predictable cast of leaders” — where, as Joe Biden said, nothing fundamentally will change.

That’s not what people want. People want things to change fundamentally. It’s just that the way people want things to change is out of step with what Chuck Schumer and his friends in the political donor class want. So instead of resolving — or even approaching — that tension, what he’s saying is, “I can take you back to a time when you didn’t have to check the news every day.” And that’s just not what people want anymore.

Richard: Right. And we’re talking about more than recent events — a 40-year or longer history of the decline of the middle and working class. That decorous “my friend, the distinguished gentleman from New York” style of governance included the bipartisanship that was so celebrated for a while — the kind that wanted to cut Social Security, that let the minimum wage lapse, and on and on. People don’t want to go back to that kind of decorous elite rule, it seems to me.

I also have to add — and I feel a little bad saying it, because it feels unkind — Schumer is also a terrible communicator. A terrible face for the party. He communicates old politics in his posture and his style. But there were a lot of questions I wanted to put on the table. Let’s start with this one: you mentioned Schumer’s involvement in primaries around the country. Let’s start with fundamentals — why would the minority leader get so involved in primaries around the country? Why would he weigh in on who he wants as the nominee for, say, the Maine Senate race, or anywhere else?

Should that really be his job? It seems to me the primary voters in a given state are the ones who should decide that, and the party should do what it can from there. I can understand weighing in if someone’s truly alarming — but have the big-donor Democrats gotten too involved in the primary process? And if so, have they done so on behalf of big donors?

Sam: Yeah, I think they have. There’s no rule that says party leadership needs to be involved in primaries at all, and I think probably they shouldn’t be. It’s a little tough — we want to have it both ways. I’m happy when Bernie Sanders endorses people and goes on the campaign trail for them, but Bernie is representative of a social movement as well as being a senator, so that’s a slightly different scenario.

Schumer is certainly able to endorse if he wants to. I just don’t think it’s wise politics, because ultimately he’s in a unique position as leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus — he has to corral members after they’re elected. So it would behoove him, or anyone in that role, to sit on their hands during primaries and wait to see who’s elected. These are all future colleagues, people he has to work with. There’s not much advantage to putting a thumb on the scale — especially for someone like Schumer, who, by and large, doesn’t even campaign alongside the candidates he’s supporting in primaries.

Take Maine, for example — which has turned into its own train wreck. Before that, we saw him actively pushing Janet Mills, who was polling terribly. She’s another representative of the old guard — old in age and old in tenure within the party. It was clear the electorate wasn’t interested in her, and he kept pushing anyway. I think, as he eyed a potential return to the majority — or even remaining minority leader against a thin Republican majority — he was thinking about who’d be compliant, who’d be easy to whip when it’s time to get votes for more aid to Israel, or to block left-leaning legislation coming out of the House.

He’s thinking about making his own job easier by saying, in effect, “We don’t want any rabble-rousers in the Senate.” The kind of politics that someone like Graham Platner — disgraced as he now is — represents: a more populist, progressive politics. Those people are a problem for Chuck Schumer. I think his approach was to get ahead of it, so he wouldn’t have to deal with people like that once they’re in the Senate. But the net effect is that he’s been supporting candidates who are really uninspiring, and it only further toxifies the party’s brand, because the most powerful Senate Democrat is seen running around the country promoting people who frankly don’t often have a chance of winning and aren’t well positioned to represent the Democratic Party.

Richard: And he didn’t back off the Mills endorsement even after poll after poll showed she was doing very poorly. So it wasn’t just the initial choice — it was sticking with her. Which raises a slight digression, Sam — feel free to tell me I’m out of my mind, because I acknowledge I may be. But part of me thinks the Democratic Party establishment — setting aside Platner’s personal issues for a moment — would rather, given the choice between a Graham Platner type politically and Susan Collins, have Susan Collins, even if it threatens their majority. Because they’d see a Platner type as a threat to their agenda, whereas they see Susan Collins as a Republican they can work with.

Sam: Yeah, I completely agree with that. Take an example that’s still live: the Michigan Senate race, where we have Abdul El-Sayed running — a progressive backed by a lot of left groups, RootsAction included — against Haley Stevens, who’s sort of the platonic ideal of an AIPAC-backed candidate. She’s taken tons of money from AIPAC. A cycle or two ago, she ran against Andy Levin, a Jewish member of Congress from a family with a long history in Michigan and national government, who was seen as insufficiently pro-Israel. AIPAC backed Stevens instead, and she unseated Levin.

What we’re hearing now from the Democratic establishment is, “We can’t let El-Sayed win — he won’t win in a general election.” That’s their line. But when you look at the polling between Stevens and El-Sayed against Mike Rogers, the Republican in that race, it’s actually about the same — they’d both have a similarly good chance of beating Rogers. So what’s the real problem? What are Democrats actually worried about, and why are so many establishment figures putting a thumb on the scale for Stevens? It’s because they don’t want El-Sayed in Congress.

Their order of preference is: number one, Haley Stevens — that’s the best outcome. Number two, Mike Rogers gets the seat — that’s the second-best outcome for them. And the worst outcome, for them, is Abdul winning the seat. I think this is really representative of how that wing of the Democratic Party sees its job right now: keeping the lid on, keeping business as usual going. The fewer potential sources of agitation, the better, as far as they’re concerned.

Susan Collins is a well-known quantity — they know exactly how she’s voted, term after term. She’s predictable. A Platner type in that seat would have been a wild card, someone they wouldn’t know how to corral — and critically, someone not beholden to the establishment the way Janet Mills was. That person is a creature of the outside, not the establishment, and those people are hard for the party to control.

So the real fear is a surge of left candidates winning their seats, as we’ve already seen in some House primaries this year — because then the Democratic Party actually has to start telling voters what it stands for. Does it stand for a kind of Republican-lite politics — the Republican Party, minus a rude sexual predator like Trump at the head of it — or does it stand for actual progressive policy that benefits working people?

They haven’t had to answer that question for the last ten years, because all they’ve had to say is “we’re not Trump, we’re not Trump, we’re not Trump,” without ever having to say who they actually are. That’s a horizon they’d like to avoid. They’d rather run against Don Jr., against JD Vance — people heavily identified with the Trump universe — so they never have to tell voters where they actually stand: on aid to Israel, on Medicare for All, on the minimum wage. These are questions they haven’t had to speak to in a long time, and they’re hoping they don’t have to anytime soon.

Richard: And they’re between Iraq and a hard place with their model of politics — because if they side with their voters on these issues, they alienate their donors, and they don’t have an alternative model the way a Sanders or an El-Sayed does. But to close things out — you’re running a campaign, available at RootsAction.org. Are there any good contenders to be the next minority leader, or perhaps majority leader down the line? Is there anyone in the Senate — I know it’s not going to be Bernie — anyone you’re thinking of? Or is that getting ahead of ourselves?

Sam: It might be a little ahead of ourselves, in the sense that there are some Senate races this cycle and next — heading into 2028 — that could be very determinative of who’s more representative of the face of the party. But the answer I’d give is: we want to see a Democratic caucus leader, majority or minority, who’s more aligned with what the base says it wants.

Right now, for example, support for sending weapons to Israel is basically an 80-20 issue within the Democratic Party. So why would we have a Senate Democratic leader who’s on the 20 side of that split? It makes zero sense. We want someone who says, “We’re done sending weapons to Israel. We’re done with the special status we’ve conferred on that country — this is a rogue state, and we’re not going to deal with them as we would an ally anymore.” Someone who says we need to fix health care in this country with a single-payer, Medicare for All system.

Someone willing to accept that the affordability crisis — around student debt, housing, health care — is driven by profit-seeking corporate models, and that Democrats should legislate as a check against those entities, not in lockstep with them, figuring out what Aetna wants, what BlackRock wants, and then passing legislation that benefits their purposes.

It’s really a question of policy. I don’t want to get too horse-racy about it, because it becomes about personality, and it’s really not a question of personality. We want someone who’s a fighter, certainly someone who understands we’re in an urgent moment. But above all, someone in step with the base — in step with what voters in this country, especially younger voters, who’ll make up an increasingly larger share of the electorate, are saying they want. That’s the answer I’d offer right now. In a cycle or two, it might be more pointed, but that’s where I’d leave it today.

Richard: Well, thanks for this — a really great discussion. Maybe one of these days we’ll talk about Hakeem Jeffries too. But where can people go to find more information about your work on this, your group’s work on this?

Sam: Go to RootsAction.org — you’ll find our Schumer petition there, along with a lot of the other campaigns we’re working on.

Illustration: “The Horse America throwing its Master: King George III unseated.” (Pro-revolutionary English cartoon by William White, 1779.)

Above a brief message from me and The Zero Hour for the Fourth of July. A slightly-edited transcript is below, followed by my response to the New York Times’ list of “definitive” movies about America.

Transcript

Well, it’s the 4th of July again. They’re calling it the 250th birthday of the United States of America, which brings to mind at least a couple of quotes. One is from a poet I quote a lot, William Blake. In “America: A Prophecy,” the spirit of America encounters the spirit of insurrection, of revolution, of rebellion, of human assertion—of self-respect. And the spirit of America says to the spirit of revolution, “I know thee, I have found thee, and I will not let thee go.”

So on this, the 250th birthday of the American Revolution, that’s my feeling toward the revolutionary spirit.

The other quote is from a source I don’t cite very often and would not necessarily want to be known for citing, and that’s the Eagles. The Eagles, you may recall, had a song—I think it was the Eagles—that said, “What do you do when your dreams come true, and it’s not quite like you planned?”

I wasn’t born yesterday. I know that the American Revolution was a conflict of economic interests. I know the class dynamics. I get it. I get that slaveholders were creators of this revolution. I get that. I get the silly naivete of the musical “Hamilton.”, Hamilton didn’t own slaves, but he certainly administered the trafficking of them. Read up on that if you like.

So I’m not naive. I know that when I say the dream didn’t quite work out as was planned, I’m thinking of people like William Blake and the British rebel movement—people who saw in the American Revolution a spirit of self-assertion, a spirit of independence, a spirit of insurgency, and they thought that spirit could set all of humanity on fire.

It hasn’t quite worked out the way that way. In fact, this Fourth of July, it seems the only thing we’re setting on fire in the middle of this heat wave is .... Well, let’s put it this way. Normally we grill hot dogs on the Fourth. This year, in the middle of this heat wave, we’re grilling ourselves.

The spirit of revolution that has been so often celebrated as part of the American legacy has not worked out as planned. But I still have faith in the spirit of revolution. So rather than going for detached cynicism, and even though I understand the true motivations behind the American Revolution, I still believe in the American Revolution.

So if you’re hearing this on the 4th, or if you’re hearing this after the 4th, my sentiment remains the same towards this admirable spirit of independence and assertion of our rights, that task that is not done yet: I know thee, I have found thee, and I will not let you go.

The Real American Movies

Forget the New York Times list of the “definitive” movies about America. That’s just a bunch of critics talking. These are the films that really get it right!

Polls say Americans distrust each other and think most other people in this country are immoral. But is that a verdict on our humanity, or on the failure of our politicians and media to let us see the humanity in each other?

In this conversation, Zero Hour Senior Correspondent Sonali Kolhatkar and I take a slightly different approach. It’s less like a news report and more like a brainstorming session between two people who want to improve society. Let me know what you think.

(Transcript is below.)

Sonali’s Main Points

On the data and its limits: She wanted to know things the Pew survey didn’t capture — like whether Black Americans’ lower trust is specifically toward white people versus within their own community. She found the education/trust correlation counterintuitive and worth unpacking.

On why lower-income people show higher trust: Her theory is practical and grounded — people who can’t afford to outsource childcare, home repairs, and daily needs have to rely on neighbors, which builds genuine trust. She linked this to the documented finding that lower-income Americans give a higher percentage of their income to charity.

On legitimate distrust: She argued that women’s lower trust in men and Black Americans’ lower trust in the broader society aren’t character flaws — they’re rational responses to real, documented harm. She drew a direct parallel between racial scarring and gendered violence as trust-eroding forces.

On economic precarity as the key variable: The Pew finding she kept returning to was that people who said they didn’t “live comfortably” were more likely to lose trust — regardless of education level. To her, this indicts the economy more than anything else.

On media and political manipulation: Demagogues exploit the gap between people’s lived experience of community and their abstract fear of strangers — the Trump voter whose immigrant neighbor got deported being a sharp example.

On mutual aid as the answer: She pointed to grassroots mutual aid traditions and the NDLON slogan — “only the people can save the people” — as the practical framework for rebuilding trust from the ground up.

Her closing message: Don’t leave the country. It’s not irredeemable. The people aren’t — even if certain people in government are.

Richard’s main points

The abstract vs. personal distinction: His single most important methodological point — surveys measuring trust in “Americans” as a category can’t tell you anything about how people actually treat each other face to face. His own comfort with MAGA-adjacent neighbors, and their comfort with him, was his lived illustration of this.

The grandmothers story: His Jewish grandmother from Russia and Catholic grandmother from France spent thirty years demonizing each other, then immediately bonded when they finally met — over shared grievances, shared values, and shared contempt for their grandchildren. It was his most vivid illustration of how stereotype and personal encounter produce completely different results.

Media amplification of difference: He argued that regional differences in the U.S. are actually smaller now than in the 1950s — same pop country, same hip hop crossing racial and geographic lines — but mass media amplifies and monetizes division, making differences feel larger and more threatening than they are.

Vulnerability and powerlessness as trust-killers: When people feel economically precarious, unheard, and voiceless, trust collapses. He used the Cracker Barrel vegan burger backlash as a small but telling example of how resentment builds when people feel others are deciding their lives for them.

Dehumanization as the mechanism of fascism: He connected the stereotyping of immigrants and minorities to the historical machinery of dehumanization — explicitly naming what’s happening in the U.S. right now as fascism, not proto-fascism.

The organizing implication: If progressives read this data correctly, the gap between abstract distrust and personal warmth is actually an opportunity — a foundation for building coalitions across difference, because the underlying decency is already there.

The cultural and narrative stakes: He closed by emphasizing that stories are the medium through which trust gets built or destroyed — which is why culture, journalism, and narrative are important.

Transcript

Richard: We’re going to do something a little different today—I think of it as a brainstorming session. Sonali has been putting together some thoughts for an article, and I’ve been doing the same. There’s a kind of Venn diagram overlap there, I think. So let’s see what happens.

First of all, Sonali, welcome back.

Sonali: Thank you so much, Richard. Good to be with you, as always.

Richard: Same here. I’ll start by telling you what I’ve been thinking about. These aren’t new surveys, but they’ve stayed on my mind. I was hanging out with some MAGA folks in my town the other day, and it got me thinking about this again. A Pew survey—conducted in 2023 and 2024, published in 2025—found that Americans’ trust in other adults has declined significantly. Specifically, the share of adults who said most other adults can be trusted dropped from 46% in 1972 to about a third of the population in 2018. So people don’t really trust each other.

And in addition to declining trust, another Pew survey—this one covering 25 countries—found that Americans are especially likely to view their fellow citizens as morally bad. Earlier this year, 53% of U.S. adults said that Americans have bad morals and ethics. I have a number of thoughts about that. So what were you thinking about, Sonali?

Sonali: Well, reflecting on that data you sent me around trust, there are some interesting correlations. Some of them I buy, some I think are more important than others. For example, Pew found that Black people have lower trust levels than other groups. The speculation is that for people who’ve been victims of racial discrimination, the resulting trauma scars them and causes them to have lower levels of trust in fellow citizens.

What I would have liked to have seen—and I don’t know if Pew got into this—is, for example, how does the trust that Black people feel toward other Black people compare with how they feel toward white people? Do members of minoritized and racially discriminated groups trust one another at higher levels than they trust people outside their race—particularly white folks or people seen as perpetrators of racism? They didn’t quite go into that. But that’s one thing.

Another interesting correlation was that people with lower levels of education have higher levels of trust. That’s something I need to wrap my mind around a bit more, because we’ve often seen correlations between conservative values and lower levels of education—particularly with Trump. People with a high school diploma as their highest level of education tend to be more pro-Trump than people with graduate degrees.

But what’s really interesting here is that in this particular survey, lower education levels correlate with higher trust. And of course, we also associate conservatism with less trust in one another—the idea that we can’t trust our fellow Americans not to defraud the government when it comes to benefits, so we have to assume everybody’s a potential fraudster and make them fill out reams of paperwork and jump through all these hoops. So it was interesting to see that actually people with lower levels of education had higher levels of trust in one another.

It makes me reconfigure my expectations. And it’s what people have been finding out—non-Americans visiting the United States during the World Cup. You’re seeing a lot of Europeans, Asians, and Africans come here and be really pleasantly surprised by how nice people are, particularly in the Southern United States.

Richard: Right. Alabama and Arkansas.

Sonali: Yeah. They’re sort of like, “Oh, people are so nice.” And there’s this whole Southern hospitality aspect to it. So there are lots of interesting things there.

Richard: Well, you know, I love that you honed in on one of the thoughts I was turning over in my mind—which was as follows: the problem with surveys like this is that a person might think that other adults in the United States are morally bad or untrustworthy, while at the same time liking, trusting, and feeling comfortable with everybody they actually meet. The MAGA people—or MAGA-adjacent people—I saw this weekend, they know I’m a, you know, communist, Bernie-crat, whatever. They trust me. They liked me. I helped them out, they helped me.

The point is, you can never tell in a survey of this kind whether we’re talking about “other people” as an abstract concept versus your actual experience of other people. And why I say you honed in on that is—for one thing, because you talk about Black people. Well, what’s their experience of other Black people? We also had variations by gender—women were more likely to say, for example, that pornography was morally bad. But if you consider the experiences women have had, yeah, that fits, right?

And we talked about religion there. I don’t think it’s a big surprise that seriously religious Christians think abortion is morally wrong, and are more likely to say extramarital affairs and premarital sex are morally wrong. But it made me think about my Jewish grandmother from Russia and my Catholic grandmother from France. When my parents got married, neither attended the wedding. They spent thirty years demonizing each other. When my parents wouldn’t send family pictures to my French grandmother, she was sure it was because they were in a communist underground cell and didn’t want to distribute pictures—because all Jews were communists. And my Jewish grandmother just thought that they were, you know, Jew-persecutors and so on.

So when they finally met thirty years later, they completely hit it off. Because they agreed on so many issues: their children are terrible, they were wrong to marry outside the faith, their grandchildren are—as my French grandmother used to say in French—”savage little beasts.” What else did they bond over? America sucks. They hate it here. They wish they’d never come here. So, you know, that’s why—

And the education thing is interesting. I wonder if that’s because people with less education may be less likely to read the newspapers or watch certain broadcasts where different opinions are presented to them as this abstract notion of “the other.” But I’m totally—

Sonali: Well, and I have another theory. People who have lower levels of education—if you expect they’re also going to have lower levels of income—might be folks who are forced to rely on neighbors and friends for support. Right? Like, you can’t afford childcare, but your neighbor babysits your kid in exchange for you helping her clean her house, etc. This is pure speculation on my part, but it may be a reason why people with lower education have higher trust—because they have to rely on one another more than people who can afford to hire out.

Richard: Which is consistent with—I haven’t seen any updates on this research—but it’s consistent with research from roughly a decade ago showing that people at lower incomes contributed a significantly larger percentage of their income to charities than people at higher levels.

Sonali: Right. Absolutely. Yes. And I think there’s definitely something to be said for that. This is, you know, also a subgroup that is disproportionately taxed more, needs benefits more, but doesn’t actually, in financial terms, get to reap those benefits.

Another thing—going back to the issue around racial scarring and correlations with trust levels—women were less trusting than men. And I was surprised by that. Less trusting, sorry, not less trustworthy. Completely opposite. Yeah, they were less trusting than men. And then when I thought about it, it’s similar to being scarred by racism. Women are, quite rightfully, generally suspicious of men—because they are disproportionately impacted by gender-based violence and sexual violence. Any woman who gets into an elevator with a lone strange man or goes hiking with one is not going to trust that man outright, just because of the way we live in a patriarchy. So I thought that was also interesting.

But on the issue of trust—I’ve been following, just because it’s quite delightful—I am not a sports fan at all, so I haven’t been following the World Cup. But what interests me as a journalist who’s interested in human nature is seeing these reactions of non-Americans visiting the United States for the first time and posting their reactions online.

There’s the Japanese person whose post about eating at a Mexican restaurant in the U.S. has gone viral—they were blown away by being given chips and salsa for free when they sat down, before they’d even ordered anything. They pointed out that this is a level of trust that’s just so strange for them—because whenever you give somebody something for free, you immediately become indebted to them. And when they finished the basket of chips, the server brought another basket for free because it was bottomless. He was so pleasantly blown away by that.

And just the responses of non-Americans in the U.S.—they feel like they can trust Americans, and their impression of Americans is vastly different from what they’ve read in the news. They do, of course, say that Americans are really loud, which I can completely understand. And the thing that creates the “clash of civilizations,” if you will, to use that terrible term, is tipping. They hate American tipping culture, and they can’t make sense of it. And some American cities that expect tips are really upset with the non-American visitors.

I thought this was really interesting because people are so confused. There was an article about how New York restaurants are so upset that non-American World Cup visitors aren’t tipping properly that they’re automatically adding 20% to the bill. Which is so silly—because then why don’t you just hike up the price of every item on your menu by 20% and leave it at that?

Richard: Yeah. You know, it makes me think of a movie I thought was great—*Office Space*, which is a satire of modern capitalism. Jennifer Aniston plays a waitress at a kind of TGI Fridays-style restaurant. They’re supposed to wear “flair,” as they call it—buttons and things. Her boss says, “You’re only wearing four buttons.” And she said, “Well, I thought the requirement was at least four buttons.” He says, “Yeah, but if you’re not wearing at least seven buttons, you’re not showing enthusiasm.” And she says, “Oh, so the minimum is seven buttons?” He says, “No, the minimum is four buttons. But if you’re not wearing seven, that shows you’re not dedicated to the job.” And she keeps saying, “Well, then the minimum is—” you know. This whole idea that there’s an artificial voluntariness.

But again, it’s cultural. I had an experience with the Japanese where—I remember when I was a kid getting in a New York City taxi, a Japanese couple had just gotten out, and the driver was complaining: “They don’t open the door. It’s like they expect me to come out and open the door for them. It really ticks me off.” A few weeks later, I took my first trip to Japan. The first time I got in a taxi, the driver—their drivers at least then wore white gloves, extremely sterile cab by our standards—presses a button and the door opens automatically. Right? So they were just waiting for him to press the button. They weren’t being rude. But it read as rude to the driver.

Sonali: Yeah. I mean, these cultural differences show up all the time. Here in Los Angeles, famously—among the triggering incidents around the 1992 L.A. riots—was the cultural difference between Black people and Koreans. Korean store owners would never put change back into the hands of the person—instead of handing it to you if you held out your hand, they would always put it on the counter. Culturally speaking, it was rude or bad luck—I don’t know the exact intricacies of putting it in someone’s hand versus on the counter. But Black Angelenos took that as racist or insulting, and they didn’t understand it. And that was one of many cultural misunderstandings.

For me, what our whole conversation is circling around is that a lot of these cultural differences are fairly superficial. I mean, they’re not trivial—they do make us unique. As an immigrant, my cultural traditions are really important to me. They give me that particular flavor that makes me feel unique. But they’re still superficial aspects of who we are as humans. Actually, we share ninety percent of the things we have in common. Our commonalities are so much more than our differences. In the end, our cultural differences are like the skin on top of the human.

So the World Cup is revealing that. And I think our big challenge is to figure out: how do we increase trust between our fellow humans?

So I’m honing in on another aspect of the Pew research around trust: people who said they didn’t live comfortably were more likely to lose trust than those who did live comfortably. So we were talking about income levels and trust. And this, to me, is important—you can be low-income and low-education but still live comfortably. But if you struggle—if you struggle to keep food on the table, which plenty of people with graduate degrees are struggling to do—

Richard: Sure.

Sonali: —right, because of our economy—you are less likely to have trust. So to me, it actually says more about the economy. There’s less and less correlation between education and income than we think, because the economy is so poor. And maybe those people who are newly struggling haven’t had the chance to build those ties with one another, unlike people who’ve been low-income for longer, or families with generations who didn’t go to college. Again, speculation here.

And I’m looking at places like New York City, where people trust their new mayor—and nationally, a Fox News poll showed that trust in the federal government is lower than it’s ever been. So the difference between Mamdani in New York and Trump in the U.S.—high levels of trust with somebody who actually promises things and makes them happen, versus somebody who promises lots of things and doesn’t make them happen.

And our trust in one another—based on the poor state of the economy—suggests to me that we need to fix our economy so people aren’t struggling day to day. I think trust levels will automatically go up. We need politicians who are responsive to the public and actually keep their promises. And I feel like we will start to see trust levels go up—with one another and with our government.

Richard: And I think it ties into what you’re saying, Sonali. I think it ties into the fact that when people are vulnerable, it’s very hard to trust. When you’re in a state of vulnerability—for survival, health, well-being—when people feel powerless and voiceless. We’ve talked before about how resentment works. The example I keep coming back to is when Cracker Barrel introduced its vegan burger and people supposedly went nuts—it might have been overhyped, but it reflected people not feeling that they were heard, that they were seen, that they were represented, that others decided for them what their lives would be.

And I might argue that in the 1950s, regional differences in the U.S. were greater than they are today. In the 1950s, the Deep South had very different music than the Deep North, and so on. Today in the Deep South, they’re listening to the same pop country that’s popular on urban country stations. And there’s a lot of hip-hop happening in both white and Black communities.

Sonali: And immigrants—immigrants are in rural America.

Richard: Immigrants are all over. But we’ve also got mass media that amplifies those differences. It’s very easy to say, “Those folks in New York City, they live immorally because they have, like, a drag queen feature on Tuesday night”—or whatever it is they’re not accustomed to seeing.

Sonali: Right.

Richard: It might just be—this all might be to the good, Sonali. That’s where I’m going with this.

Sonali: I mean, it’s also reminding me of those anecdotal stories we saw when ICE agents were rounding up—and of course they still are—but in the thick of it, when they were rounding up people suspected of being immigrants in areas that voted for Trump quite heavily. Some white Trump supporters were really upset when their immigrant neighbor—who they loved and trusted and didn’t think of as “an immigrant,” but thought of as a human being—was deported or disappeared. And they thought, “No, that person is my friend, my neighbor. I love them, I respect them, I trust them. I meant those *criminal* people over there.”

And yes—cultish, manipulative leaders exploit media, use mass media to exploit people’s fears and go against what they are actually experiencing in their day-to-day lives. People have high levels of trust with the people they interact with. It’s easy to say, “Don’t trust those *others*”—vague, faceless, nameless figures you can dismiss as criminals.

Richard: Criminals. Right. And that have been stereotyped in the mass media by Fox and whomever.

So the reason why I say this may be all to the good—obviously the polarization, the lack of trust, the judgment of one another is not to the good. But if there’s an underlying trend toward empathy that manifests itself on the personal level, and these impersonal stereotypes—I hate to bring up Nazi Germany because that’s overused, but I mean, Jews in Nazi Germany were stereotyped: the hook noses, the coins, the stinginess.

Sonali: Yeah, stingy, right.

Richard: And—that dehumanization is what enables a kind of—I don’t even say “proto-fascism” anymore; the fascism we’re seeing in this country. And another kind of dehumanization—”the basket of deplorables”—maybe not as severe, but it contributes to the polarization. If people can start—if those of us who want to really build movements in solidarity read this data correctly—maybe we can start to get smarter at building coalitions that work with people who may be different from us in some ways, but are fundamentally just as decent, nice, moral, and trustworthy as we are. If not, in my case, more so.

Sonali: I would argue that what you’re talking about is very much the basis of what grassroots activists have long called mutual aid. Right. In times of crisis, when disaster strikes, instead of relying on government—because government has often let people down—or relying on charities—because charity can be a one-way street that doesn’t necessarily preserve people’s dignity—people rely on one another. It becomes: we can mutually benefit one another. We will all help each other out. And that adage I always love to cite from the National Day Labor Organizing Network—”Only the people can save the people”—is at the heart of that.

So, yeah, I think all of this is to say that we’re living at a time when climate disasters will keep striking us, and we really do have to learn to love and trust our neighbors, create community wherever we go. Ultimately, it’s good for us and good for society as a whole.

Richard: And it’s a good lesson to bear in mind as we move into an era of increasing inequality, social destabilization, and increasing climate crises. I think about New York City after 9/11, and how people who would normally have nothing to do with one another—

Sonali: Yes.

Richard: —would, out of nowhere, just look somebody in the eye and say, “How are you doing?”

Sonali: Yes. And my correlation with that is after the Eaton fires in Altadena. Same thing. And during COVID, people who formed pods—if you were lucky enough to not succumb to the distrust sowed by Trump and Fox News—you ended up becoming closer to your neighbors. Some people did, of course; some people didn’t.

Richard: Yeah, well, of course. But this is so important. This is why I think we both care so much about culture, why you’ve written so much about narrative and so on. It’s because these are stories of people, these are stories of one another. And we can’t organize, we can’t build change if we don’t hear these stories, tell these stories, share these stories.

Sonali: Yes, exactly. And ultimately—I know it’s really easy—there’s a huge trend now of more people leaving the United States than coming to the United States, and that includes native-born Americans. My message to those folks who feel like this country is beyond salvaging is: don’t leave, because we need you here. We have to rebuild trust in one another and ensure that there is a country. This country isn’t irredeemable. Certain people in government are, but we are not irredeemable as a people.

Richard: Absolutely not. And that’s a great note to end on.

Congress will look very different next year, but I’m still thinking about the urban vote. Cities remain the leading edge of what might be called the New Left Wave. Democratic socialists have already been elected in Seattle WA and New York City and will almost certainly win in Los Angeles and Washington DC this November.

That means that (barring the unexpected events) leftists will soon represent a total population of 13,846,155 people, including the nation’s two largest cities. That’s more people than live in 46 of this country’s 50 states.

It’s also more than the total population of twelve US states put together: West Virginia, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming.

Those states have a total population of 13,099,294 people—almost ten percent less than the population of these cities—and they’re represented by 24 senators in the United States Congress.

The United States Senate is highly un-representative, a relic of slavery days whose useful days (if it ever had any) are long behind it. But here’s a thought exercise: imagine an alternative electoral system which elected its solons on a truly democratic one-person, one-vote basis. In that world, democratic socialists could represent one/fourth of the country’s legislature.

Or, to put it another way: In a more representative democracy, democratic-socialist New Wave leftism would already be a major political force.

Which means that democratic socialism is no longer a fringe phenomenon—unless you think urban living itself is a fringe phenomenon.

(Some people still do, unfortunately. Their bias blinds them to many aspects of city life, including their rich geographic variations. Parts of Los Angeles can seem almost rural, for example, and every city contains vast differences in wealth, ethnicities, and subcultures.)

Palestine was a major factor in the mayoral, as well as congressional, races but it’s still the economy (I don’t want to say “it’s the economy, stupid,” like Clinton’s cynical crew did. How about “It’s the economy, beautiful soul”?) Economic struggle and economic justice aren’t just the new wave’s primary themes. They’re its best chance to become a lasting and transformative movement (because, let’s face it, this broken system isn’t going to fix itself.)

But you knew that.

Red Scare? Nobody cares.

It looks like the elites have finally figured out that, at least in the cities, the old Red Scare tactics don’t work anymore. Roughly half of this year’s voters are expected to be Millennials or Gen Z, which means they have no memory of the Cold War. Attempts to call leftists “communists” are more likely to be met with an “OK Boomer”—or a yawn—than a frisson of fear.

But the survival and growth of this movement depends on the ability of these elected officials to both govern effectively and communicate well—especially if they hope to advance in other parts of the country. They can do it (Bernie did remarkably well in West Virginia) but it won’t be easy, especially with so many powerful interests arrayed against them. They’ll need a steady influx of ideas. They’ll also need to be supported—and frequently challenged—by a well-organized activist movement.

And any sense that these elected officials are betraying their supporters (call it the “Fetterman effect”) could have devastating effects—on those politicians, and on the movement they represent.

This work is only possible thanks to reader support. If you find it worthwhile, please help out with a paid subscription through Substack (discounted here) or on Patreon.

You can also make a one-time donation here. Many thanks.

NOTES

Buffalo NY’s India Walton also won her Democratic primary and was on track to become mayor, but she was betrayed by insider Democrats. There’s no sign, however, that this particular trick will be repeated anywhere else this year.

Population of cities that have (or expect to have) democratic socialist mayors:

Los Angeles: 3,814,607
New York City: 8,509,853
Seattle: 766,644
Washington, D.C.: 755,051

Total: 13,846,155

Only four states have more than 13.8 million people: California, Texas, Florida, and New York.

The situation in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East continues to be horrific. The amount of the devastation that Lebanon, as well as Palestine and other countries have experienced has been neglected, or at “best,” underreported and underemphasized in mainstream Western news media. As a result of that I think a lot of people, even people of goodwill, are overly complacent about what’s going on there. That’s why I want to get the word to you directly from the Middle East.

Rania Khalek is a correspondent with Breakthrough News and host of Dispatches, the video program. She’s based in Beirut, she’s there now, and she knows the specifics of the situation as well or better than anyone I know.

Rania concludes with a specific recommendation. I’ll quote that part of the conversation here (the full transcript is below):

“... Understanding that unconditional support for Israel—particularly the weapons supply—might not continue forever, the Israel lobby and imperialists in the ruling class are trying to move now, while they still can, through quieter, more insidious measures ...

“Look them up—Section 224, Section 622—because these are things you can actually call your members of Congress about. Say: ‘Do not vote for this provision. I do not want my taxpayer money cemented in place to support Israel’s genocidal army indefinitely.’”

US voters can contact their House representative and senators by calling the Capitol Switchboard (202-224-3121) and giving the operator your zip code. You will be connected to your elected officials’ offices.

Please give the interview a listen.

Transcript (lightly edited by AI)

Richard Eskow: Let’s start here, before we get into the politics and diplomacy. As I mentioned, I don’t think people fully grasp the extent of the devastation in Lebanon. In U.S. coverage—and, by extension, in American consciousness—it’s almost treated as an ancillary issue. But I don’t believe people truly understand how much violence has been unleashed there.

So could you give us an overview of what’s happening on the ground? Even if the violence stopped today, I imagine the rebuilding would be massive, the loss of life staggering, the harm already catastrophic. But tell me—what’s the reality?

Rania Khalek: Absolutely, and I appreciate you asking. I imagine that once there’s actually space to survey the damage—because the Israelis are still occupying about a fifth of the country—we’ll have a clearer picture of just how severe the destruction is. But since March 2nd, when Hezbollah entered the war on Iran’s side—and this followed 15 months of constant Israeli bombing of Lebanon, including ceasefire violations from the previous war that never really stopped and went almost entirely ignored in the media—the situation has been catastrophic.

Since March 2nd alone, when Israel dramatically expanded its war on Lebanon, over 3,700 people have been killed. A significant portion—around 14 percent—are children. To put that in perspective, in Ukraine, children make up about 1percent of casualties. So it seems Israel really excels at targeting children.

Throughout this war, Israeli leadership has repeatedly and proudly stated that they are imposing the “Gaza model” on southern Lebanon. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. They’ve occupied about a fifth of the country. They’ve issued displacement orders via X, often in the middle of the night, telling over a million people across Lebanon: leave your home, leave your village, or die. This terrorized people for three straight months.

During that time, the Israelis invaded, occupied large swaths of territory, and subjected the south—but also Beirut, where I am—to relentless bombardment with American taxpayer-funded weapons. I was in a very unique position: having bombs fall around me that were effectively funded by me, because I’m both Lebanese and American.

They specifically and intentionally targeted medics—killing over 133 healthcare workers in Lebanon. They bombed hospitals. They killed at least a dozen journalists, some of whom they hunted down with repeated strikes in what they call “double tap” strikes. They did the same to medical workers. In one case, they carried out a quadruple tap strike.

Let me explain what that means: the Israelis strike once, then wait for people to come treat the wounded and recover the bodies, then strike again—that’s a double tap, designed to maximize casualties. Then a triple tap, then a quadruple tap—four strikes to ensure no one can save the injured. Human rights organizations documented this repeatedly across Lebanon.

And Israeli officials gloated about imposing the Gaza model. They destroyed over 50 villages in Lebanon. And when I say destroyed, I mean they placed bombs in every structure and detonated entire villages at once. You can find wild images of these massive detonations online, but U.S. media largely ignored them. You didn’t see it on CNN. The level of mass destruction of civilian property was horrifying.

They said they were doing this to ensure that Lebanese—specifically Shia Lebanese—never return to the south. They kept saying they wanted to carry out a “Nakba” in southern Lebanon. Nakba refers to what was done to Palestinians in 1948: the forcible expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians across historic Palestine to create a Jewish-majority state of Israel.

Now, Israeli officials like Ben-Gvir are openly saying they want not only to cleanse southern Lebanon of its Lebanese population to create a buffer zone, but ultimately to settle it with Israeli Jews. So you have a formula for southern Lebanon that mirrors what they’re doing in the West Bank and Gaza.

This is what Lebanon has endured for the past three months. And when you hear it framed in U.S. media, it’s always under the umbrella of “security”—Israel has to destroy Lebanon for its security, displace people for its security. The security of the Lebanese is never mentioned, nor the fact that they are being ethnically cleansed. And again, Israeli officials have repeatedly stated that their goal is the permanent forced removal of Shia Lebanese from the south to create a new border at the Litani River—which would eat up about 14 percent of the country.

So yes, it’s been a horrific three months. Recently, the intensity of the violence has decreased dramatically because Iran has been insisting, since the beginning of their negotiations with the Americans, that Lebanon be included in any ceasefire. That would require not only an end to Israeli attacks on Lebanon, but also a withdrawal of Israeli soldiers from occupied Lebanese territory.

The Israelis, for their part, refuse to leave and refuse to stop bombing. They insist on what they call “freedom of movement” in Lebanon—meaning they can bomb whenever and wherever they want, for any reason, and their soldiers will never leave. This has become a serious point of contention and a real vulnerability in the U.S.-Iran deal, because everything depends on the Americans forcing Israel to cease its attacks and withdraw its forces. That’s one reason Iran included this provision: to test whether the U.S. is capable and willing to restrain Israel, which cannot sustain this war without U.S. weapons and funding.

Richard Eskow: A small point and a large point in reaction. The small point—but it sets the tone—is that I hadn’t heard the phrase “freedom of movement in Lebanon.” It’s classically Orwellian. If a burglar and murderer breaks into your home and you try to have him arrested, and he says you’re impinging on his freedom of movement to creep into your bedroom and stab you—that would be bizarre. But that’s what we’re dealing with. And that kind of language has worked in American, Western, and European media for a long time.

The larger point—and it shouldn’t need to be made—is that every single thing you just described is not only under-covered or ignored in Western media, but every single one is a war crime. Seizing another country’s territory is a war crime. Intentionally displacing people is a war crime. Destroying homes, murdering medics and health workers, murdering journalists—it’s a litany of war crimes. Yet day after day, I see headlines like “Israel says it will continue its war with Hezbollah regardless of what Trump negotiates with Iran.”

We could have a whole conversation about the Lebanese government’s complicity, but it seems to me that Hezbollah is none of Israel’s business. That’s the classic American move—going into Vietnam and saying, “We’re getting the communists out.” It’s not your business. It’s a war crime. It’s illegal.

So it strikes me that U.S. media continues to be complicit in warping and dimming the American public’s awareness of what’s being done with their money, resources, weaponry, and military targeting—and their AI.

Rania Khalek: Can I add something to what you’re saying? When you talk about this framing as “a war on Hezbollah”—Hezbollah are Lebanese people, mostly from the south. They exist because Israel used to occupy Lebanon, just as it occupies the West Bank, for 18 years. Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon in 1982 and imposed a brutal tyranny in the south. So, like any place in the world would, the local people created a popular movement—Hezbollah—an armed resistance to that violent, barbaric occupation. That’s why Hezbollah exists: because of Israeli aggression. Like them or hate them, they are Lebanese people who have a right to protect the territorial integrity of their country and to fight back against an occupier. These people are called “terrorists” for firing at Israeli soldiers illegally occupying Lebanon—just like in Palestine. That framing is absurd.

Also, on April 8th, the day after the first ceasefire was announced between the Americans and Iranians—with Iran stipulating that Lebanon be included, and the Americans reportedly agreeing—the Israelis decided to torpedo the deal. They unleashed hell on Beirut. I was there that day. They bragged about dropping 160 bombs in 10 minutes, mostly targeting Beirut. They killed up to 400 people that day. One of those people was my relative, who was killed while purchasing medication at a pharmacy to distribute to the displaced.

So when I saw the media coverage the next day and in the days after—headlines like “Israel’s attack on Hezbollah”—I thought, was my relative, buying medication at a pharmacy, considered a Hezbollah target? Apparently so. That framing is unbelievably offensive. And I’m not saying it would be okay if they were actually bombing Hezbollah—because they’re bombing apartment buildings, and this isn’t a war fought on the ground; it’s just bombing from the air with American weapons against people who have a right to defend themselves. But even the framing of “Hezbollah targets” is total nonsense.

Richard Eskow: I’m so glad you emphasized that. And something that may upset some people but is a fact of international law: when discussing Hamas, Hezbollah, or any group, armed resistance to illegal occupation is legal under international law. They are not, by existing, violating international law. Now, do they perform actions that violate international law? We can talk about that, but it’s part of a comprehensive conversation about the laws of war. That’s a very important point.

And this business of bombing apartment buildings and justifying it—I forgot the Israeli word for the AI system they use to drive many of those initial bombings. It translates as “Gospel” in English. As one operator said, it existed to generate reasons for targets. So if I live in a 500-person apartment building and there’s one person—a junior official in the sanitation department of Rafah who’s technically Hamas, for example—they can kill me and my entire family. That makes no sense. It’s horrific.

So here we have this extreme situation. Donald Trump publicly and softly chastises Bibi Netanyahu, saying, “They go a little too far,” and agrees—at least in principle—that the war crimes in Lebanon should stop as part of any deal. Meanwhile, Israel continues as it is.

One thing I don’t think gets reported or emphasized: if the U.S. truly wants a peace deal and Israel refuses to comply, the U.S. has all sorts of recourse. First, stop sending weapons. Second, stop sending money. Third, stop providing diplomatic cover that allows Israel to continue violating international law—not to mention stop targeting and other logistical support. So it strikes me that Donald Trump is getting a free ride. He continues to support and back these war crimes, and he gets to act like, “Well, I didn’t like it, I tried to stop it.”

Rania Khalek: I told Bibi on Truth Social! That’s so true—social posts don’t mean anything. Calling Netanyahu and using foul language, then bragging about it to Axios—that’s just theater. It doesn’t amount to real consequences for the Israelis. The only way to rein them in, if Trump really wants this deal to move forward, is to take away their weapons—to threaten material consequences. Otherwise, why would they stop? Why stop bombing Lebanon if the only consequence is Trump whining on social media? It’s also a way for Trump to use Israel as the “police dog” in the region: “We’re not the ones bombing Iran or Lebanon—it’s crazy Netanyahu.” Good cop, bad cop.

Richard Eskow: Right—”Oh, my partner’s nuts, he’ll do anything.” Well, then why is he your partner?

Rania Khalek: Exactly. Which is why Iran has been so insistent—of course, Iran and Hezbollah have a partnership and solidarity—but another big reason Iran is including Lebanon in this broader regional settlement is to test whether the Americans can rein in the Israelis. Because if Israel can continue to violate the understanding over Lebanon, what’s to stop them from violating it and bombing Iran again? They can do that without America’s help—not as frequently or destructively, but they absolutely can. Iran has sacrificed a lot, fought this war against the Americans and Israelis who started it, and they don’t want that to be in vain. They don’t want another war in six months or a year. For them, this is the war that needs to end all wars.

Richard Eskow: And, of course, the U.S. insists this is all about Iran’s fissionable material and potential to build a nuclear weapon—but we had a deal that was controlling that. And number two, if I were running Iran—admittedly hypothetical—and I knew Israel had nuclear weapons and was capable of doing things like this, a nuclear weapon would start to look like a pretty good countermeasure. I mean, I believe in complete elimination of nuclear weapons, which has been taken off the U.S. political agenda—but it used to be something people talked about. It’s simple logic: if they’re capable of violating any law and moral norm, you’ve got to do something. So none of this seems to be working.

Which brings us to the other dimension: the Democratic response. I have my feelings, but I’m sure you do too. I was reading up on it in the last 24 hours. What are your thoughts? I’ll keep my mouth shut.

Rania Khalek: This is really problematic. Obviously, this was a stupid, criminal, disastrous war that should never have happened. If you want to roast Trump for that, great. But it’s very stupid for Democrats to attack Trump for “capitulating” to Iran—because that’s what they’re saying. Adam Schiff said, “It’s hard to imagine a more thorough capitulation.” Amy Klobuchar accused Trump of spending American taxpayer money on giving Iran $300 billion—which is not true—and said we could end homelessness or fund cancer research for 40 years with that. That’s not accurate. The $300 billion fund being referred to is not U.S. government money; its money raised in a private capital account, especially from regional actors, to rebuild Iran—infrastructure that America destroyed. And it’s not coming from American taxpayers.

Another thing Democrats are attacking Trump for is “handing Iran billions of dollars.” Yes, the U.S. is part of the stipulation—giving Iran back its own money. The U.S. seized tens of billions of dollars from Iran, literally stole their assets. It’s just unfreezing Iran’s own money. So they’re framing it inaccurately to attack Trump from the right, when they should be applauding him for ending this war.

The problem is that the imperialist wing of the Democratic Party—honestly, most of them—and Republicans haven’t accepted that America lost this war. They haven’t accepted that the reason there are so many concessions from the Americans is that Iran had actual leverage. The Americans couldn’t afford to continue the war the way Trump was doing it. Because if you don’t compromise and give concessions, the war continues, the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, the global economy suffers, prices skyrocket, people starve. The Americans had no choice.

Losing is humiliating, so it’s understandable people are upset. But it’s a loss nonetheless. It speaks to the balance of power that emerged: all the leverage was in Iran’s hands because of the Strait of Hormuz. That’s the reality they need to accept.

Richard Eskow: I agree 100 percent. Well said. I would add that those Democrats are criticizing Trump because he’s “not getting anything” for this deal. Well, he started the war—why would he get something for ending it? That makes no sense. I do have to say, Rania, you gave a couple Democrats a free pass on this—and I’m going to shout them out.

Rania Khalek: Please, that would take the whole show.

Richard Eskow: Chris Murphy called it “surrender,” said it’s on Iran’s terms. You mentioned Brad Schneider, but Cory Booker said the U.S. would be releasing billions of dollars to an “enemy in Tehran.” Well, they weren’t the enemy until Trump started this war. And Iran got the better of them—that’s just the way it is. They didn’t think it through strategically. The seizing of the Strait of Hormuz—they have to get out somehow, or Trump and Western governments will pay a severe price. So they’re between a rock and a hard place. Not that I feel sorry for them.

So what should—before we go to what should be done—what’s your feeling about how the Bernie Democrats and progressives are responding?

Rania Khalek: Honestly, I haven’t paid much attention because it’s been overshadowed by those centrist corporate Democrats. I would hope they’re responding by applauding this war being over. That’s a good segue into what should be said: the way to respond is to applaud the war’s end, but criticize it as criminal and aggressive—something that should never have happened—and there should be consequences. Trump launched a preemptive war of aggression completely unprovoked against Iran in the middle of diplomatic negotiations for the second time. That’s a huge crime, a massive violation of international law. Democrats love to talk about impeachment—they should have impeached him for this. He launched a war of aggression. That’s where the criticism needs to lie.

I don’t know what Bernie said, but I really hope it’s not about how this “ruined America’s credibility.” Sometimes you’ll see that rhetoric: “It ruined America’s credibility and our soul.” I’m more concerned with the damage this has done to the world—how it’s bulldozed international law and norms, taken what Israel did in Gaza and expanded it to envelop a broader part of the region, making international law even more null and void than before. We’re in an incredibly dangerous, barbaric moment where the Overton window of acceptable criminality has moved even further into barbarism. That’s what’s concerning and what needs to be criticized.

Richard Eskow: Right. I didn’t see anything from Bernie. I saw Ro Khanna—who’s running for president in the Bernie lane—say, “The ceasefire agreement is welcome news. Democrats should support it. I’m glad it includes mutual respect. This war was a costly lesson, but we can be relieved that gas and food costs will start coming down for Americans.” That’s better than most of his party.

But there are concrete actions Democrats could take too, aren’t there? You’ve mentioned a couple provisions before Congress that could make a concrete difference. What are they?

Rania Khalek: Yes. Public opinion on Israel in the U.S. has cratered. Over 80 percent of Democrats now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, and a pretty high number of Republicans do too. The people who’ve spent decades building this U.S.-Israel relationship recognize what that means: that sentiment eventually shows up in Congress. So, understanding that unconditional support for Israel—particularly the weapons supply—might not continue forever, the Israel lobby and imperialists in the ruling class are trying to move now, while they still can, through quieter, more insidious measures.

One is Section 224, buried in the National Defense Authorization Act for 2027. In the House draft, it’s called the U.S.-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. It would have the Secretary of War designate an executive agent to fuse the U.S. and Israeli defense industrial sectors—integrating Israeli-developed technology directly into U.S. research, procurement, and manufacturing across everything from AI to biotech to missile defense. Experts say this would be nearly impossible to undo. It would cement U.S. military support for Israel in an anti-democratic way that Congress couldn’t reverse.

There’s also a companion provision in the Senate’s intelligence bill—Section 622, introduced by Senator Tom Cotton. It would lock in expanded intelligence sharing with Israel and make it nearly impossible for even a future president to scale it back unless they can point to what the bill calls a “specific and identifiable national security concern.” It’s trying to make permanent America’s support for Israel’s settler colony in a way that would make public opinion irrelevant. Even if we elect a pro-Palestine Congress, these provisions would make it impossible to sanction Israel. That’s incredibly dangerous.

Look them up—Section 224, Section 622—because these are things you can actually call your members of Congress about. Say: “Do not vote for this provision. I do not want my taxpayer money cemented in place to support Israel’s genocidal army indefinitely.”

Richard Eskow: That’s very important. I’ll encourage people to look that up and we’ll try to publicize it ourselves. Because as we’ve seen with college and university protests, democracy and democratic rights seem to be the first thing tossed overboard in this country where this particular nation is concerned.

Thanks for pointing that out. Thanks for all your comments and your great reporting. Rania Khalek, journalist with Breakthrough News and host of Dispatches. Thanks for coming on the program.

Rania Khalek: Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

This work is only possible thanks to reader support. If you find it worthwhile, please help out with a paid subscription through Substack (discounted here) or on Patreon.

You can also make a one-time donation here.

Many thanks.

Lynn Parramore discusses her recent article on AI’s real costs

Whether or not you’ve ever used a chatbot, you’re already paying for AI’s monstrous appetite. Lynn Parramore reports that, from surging electricity bills in Virginia to proposed nuclear reactors in rural North Carolina, data centers are driving up costs, inflation, and interest rates for everyone. Meanwhile, tech and utility executives cut sweetheart deals, transfer wealth upward, and promise jobs that never materialize.

Young graduates feel discarded, communities are being bulldozed, and the industry’s answer to every concern is more unproven technology and more backroom chicanery. This isn’t just an economic debate—it’s a battle between human reality and a machine-driven vision that would cover the earth in data centers and call it progress.

Main Points

1. The costs of AI today are widespread and unavoidable: Higher electricity bills, inflation, interest rates, housing costs, and health impacts will hit nearly everyone, regardless of whether they use AI or live near a data center.

2. Ordinary people are being sacrificed for corporate profit: Utilities and AI companies strike backroom deals, transfer wealth upward, and hide behind promises of jobs while communities and younger generations bear the real burden.

3. The industry operates without transparency or accountability: There’s a lack of accurate data, industry co-authorship of academic papers, and complex financial structures designed to let companies walk away from failures.

4. This is a spiritual and human crisis, not just an economic one: The real question is not what AI produces, but what it does to people: undermining health, replacing human judgment, and abandoning an entire generation.

Transcript

Richard Eskow: The article is headlined “AI is Hungry for Power and You Are Footing the Bill.” We’ve seen some headlines about that, but I think the reality of AI’s energy usage has been obscured—first by unclear reporting from the mass media, and second by a slew of counterarguments from AI executives and their political allies. I’ve been following this story for years, but I still learned some things from your article. So why is it that, no matter how this plays out under current circumstances, consumers—or human beings in general—will end up footing the cost for this monster’s energy?

Lynn Parramore: Yeah. A lot of people following the news are already aware of some direct costs communities are facing. Take Northern Virginia, for example, which is part of what’s called the PJM grid covering several eastern states. Several reports show that customers there are already paying higher electricity rates, largely because of data center build-out.

It’s hard to wrap your mind around the scale of these things and the amount of electricity they use. One facility—a “hyperscaler” facility—can consume as much electricity as a small country. That’s what we’re talking about. Northern Virginia already has a few hundred of these.

And Erin Brockovich—whom we all remember from that wonderful movie starring Julia Roberts—is actively following this. She has a great map where you can see where data centers are already operational or proposed in your community. No matter where you live, there’s probably a proposal for a data center not far away. They’re popping up everywhere you can think of. It’s going to be very hard to escape the direct effects: higher electricity costs, possibly higher water costs. But the indirect effects will affect us all, even if we’ve never used ChatGPT.

Why? Because it will contribute to general inflation. My colleague Servaas Storm, an economist, has written about this. Any time you have energy usage this massive, it spills over into the broader economy. Small businesses, for example, will use the same amount of power but pay more. They’ll be forced to pass those costs on to consumers. Farmers will have to pay more. They’re already facing pollution and strains on water, which raises irrigation costs. All these pressures on the system—electricity demand going up from data centers—impact manufacturing, retail, office buildings, hospitals, everyone who uses electricity. And we’ll all end up paying.

At a time when inflation and utility bills are already tremendous worries, affordability has become a catchword. I think this is going to be a real political flashpoint—there are signs it’s already becoming one. It’s interesting because Americans are constantly described as horribly divided, but Gallup polls suggest we’re not divided on whether we want data centers built near us: over 70% of us do not want them. And while there’s been a lot of talk about using nuclear energy to power AI demand, more than half of Americans don’t want new nuclear facilities near them either.

I’m currently in North Carolina, and there’s a big fight in Stokes County, near the Virginia border. It’s a rural area; I don’t think any town in that county has more than 8,000 people. Duke Power has proposed building small nuclear reactors there.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Lynn Parramore: And what do we know about these small nuclear reactors? Not much. Only a couple exist—in China and Russia—and I wouldn’t trust the safety data coming from either of those places. The farmers in that county don’t want them built there. We’re also talking about repurposing Three Mile Island—still a living memory for a lot of people. So a lot is going on, and people are upset.

The bottom line question is: What exactly are we being asked to pay for? What do we—as citizens, workers, people living in communities—actually get out of it? We’re being promised everything from jobs to saving humanity, but it’s not clear to me that ordinary people are getting much out of any of this.

Richard Eskow: No, I think that’s a great point. You raise several interesting issues. One is the nuclear angle. The industry’s pitch was that these units could be tractor-trailer size—like a boxcar—and produce so much power. But when I looked into it, the power they claimed would supply the needs of about three to four hundred homes. That’s not very much. How many of those would you need? And it’s untried technology—we don’t know the health implications.

Your article also pointed out two broader issues beyond energy costs. One I’d thought of: the industry says, “We’ll go off-grid and build our own energy supply.” My response has been, “Are you going to build your own ecosystem too?” Because you’ll still pump pollutants into the air and water until those theoretical nuclear reactors come online—and then God knows what will happen. It’s not like these are people known for keeping promises.

The other issue—which you just mentioned—is the broader economic impact. I’d thought about farmers, but let’s talk more about that broader impact, because I think it’s crucial for people to understand.

Lynn Parramore: Yeah. And it’s not getting talked about enough in the news. It’s not just higher electricity bills if you live near a data center—though if you look at that map, eventually not many people will be left out of that equation if things keep going as they are. But even if you’re nowhere near a data center, rising electricity prices spill over into the broader economy. When inflation ticks up, the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates high. That means higher borrowing costs for everyone: car loans, mortgages, credit cards. All of this gets impacted by the building of massive data centers. So it’s a problem for every single one of us, at a time when we can’t afford higher prices for anything.

Richard Eskow: Right. And you mentioned—this was an excellent point from Servaas Storm—that if a data center is built in your 8,000-person town in North Carolina or elsewhere, people will move in to service it, and your housing costs will go up. And any carbon-based or fossil fuel energy requires raw materials or oil. So the ripple effects go on and on.

Lynn Parramore: On and on. The ripples go out into the broader economy, and no one comes out unscathed—except power company executives and executives at places like Meta and Amazon.

Richard Eskow: Right. And that brings up what you call an “axis of influence”—not only the AI executives profiting from this, but also energy executives and utilities.

Lynn Parramore: Yeah, they’re very happy with these prices. Reports show executive compensation at utility companies has been going up lately. Why is that? They’re clearly benefiting from higher prices. There’s a lot of lack of transparency, backroom deals, sweetheart cuts that communities have no access to. And of course, we citizens aren’t getting any sweetheart deals out of this.

Richard Eskow: There’s also an awful lot of AI backroom trading among companies themselves. That really concerns me. I wish someone would commission a group to look into it in detail—it would take a lot of legwork. All those loans, deals, and commitments backed by nothing concrete. It feels like a bubble within a bubble.

Lynn Parramore: Yes.

Richard Eskow: Meta commits to purchasing $30 billion worth of ChatGPT, and ChatGPT commits to X billion from another company. That’s going around a lot. Plus, as you mentioned, a hyperscale center costs about $11 billion to build. That’s a lot of money moving in and out of the regular financial system, inflating rapidly, isn’t it?

Lynn Parramore: Absolutely. You’re seeing complicated business structures and engineering. For example, some big corporations look like they’re putting up the money for data centers, but they’ve actually created a separate company that on paper owns the facility. That means Meta or Amazon doesn’t have to carry it on their balance sheet, giving them a nice opportunity to walk away if things go badly. So there’s a lot of shenanigans and chicanery going on.

It reminds me of past disasters—the build-up to the financial crisis, or R.J. Reynolds telling us tobacco was safe while hiding the research. That leads to another aspect: getting accurate information. The scientists and academics who would typically be working on this stuff have, in many cases, lost their jobs under the current administration and gone off to work for the private sector. And if you look at academic papers, more often than not, industry folks are co-authoring. So we have a real problem getting accurate information about any of this.

Richard Eskow: Yeah, absolutely. You quote a law professor, Mark Klick: Why aren’t companies paying for the additional resources they use, especially energy? We still live—at least under the illusion—that even a private power company operates as a public utility. Why would a company supposed to act in the public interest cut a special deal for a for-profit corporation at the expense of the citizens it’s supposed to be serving?

Lynn Parramore: It does sound like a transfer of resources. One section of my article is called “Trickle-Up Economics.” This is how it works: a transfer of wealth and resources to the top. Citizens are in a very vulnerable position because of the influence of money in politics. Why is this happening? I’d point to my colleague INET research director Thomas Ferguson, who’s followed money in politics for many years. Just look at the coalition of industries looking to make money off this, their lobbying power, and the politicians in their pockets. It’s on a big scale—we’re talking trillions of dollars now, not billions.

Richard Eskow: So let’s talk about that. One of Thomas Ferguson’s observations—and I strongly recommend his work—rebuts the whole idea of “NIMBYism” (Not In My Backyard). That term is often thrown around by people whose own backyards aren’t at stake anyway, but who have something to gain from corporate interests. NIMBYism is being used in this AI debate too, isn’t it?

Lynn Parramore: Right. These companies say, “If you’d all stop complaining about data centers in your backyard, we could have lower electricity prices.” I spoke to Professor Ferguson about that. He was very dismissive. In his work, it’s very clear that power companies and big corporations are keeping prices up—not ordinary citizens by any stretch.

Richard Eskow: Yeah. And it’s totally reasonable not to want an energy-guzzling monstrosity in your backyard. I wrote a few years ago about a historic African American community in Northern Virginia that was slated for a data center. Eventually the state backed off because it was just too embarrassing. But many other communities have been bulldozed or moved aside for high-power transmission lines and all the infrastructure needed to support these data centers. One thing that blew my mind in your article, Lynn, was a study saying that in 2024, data centers were already using some 40% of Virginia’s power. Did I remember that correctly?

Lynn Parramore: You did. Already in 2024. And I need to look at the incoming data for what’s happening now. Again, it’s a mind-boggling scale. That’s why calls for a moratorium, to me, are the bare minimum of what we should be discussing. It’s happening too fast, it’s too big, and the consequences are too great. It’ll be interesting to see what happens politically, because some states becoming AI hotspots, like Texas, are not traditionally blue states. Neither Democrats nor Republicans want to see these data centers in their communities.

Richard Eskow: Which seems like it would be a good issue for Mr. Talarico to take up.

Lynn Parramore: For sure.

Richard Eskow: Since we’re talking about communities and the nonpartisan resistance to data centers, what’s it actually like when a data center moves into your town or area? What does it do to people?

Lynn Parramore: Well, one of the first things, especially in poor rural communities, is excitement because of the promise of jobs. In places where people desperately need jobs, unfortunately, research shows there really aren’t a lot of jobs for ordinary people. There are initially some temporary construction jobs. But if you live in a small town in the middle of nowhere in northern North Carolina, you’re not going to be hired to work on a small nuclear reactor. It’s highly unlikely.

Richard Eskow: No. They’ll probably drag it in on a flatbed truck or train from somewhere else, and you’ll get nothing out of it. And you mentioned the impact on farmers and others.

Lynn Parramore: The jobs promise is held out as a carrot in places where people desperately need them. So even though they know there may be negative environmental impacts, when all you can think about is feeding your kids, those job promises can be very effective in getting people to overcome their fear of other consequences. We’ve seen that with other kinds of environmental impact and pollution.

But what it ends up being like to live near one of these centers as an ordinary working person is to be driven crazy. Not only the sound—which can be very disruptive—but there’s actually a sound at a level you’re not even conscious of hearing, yet it still affects your sleep and circadian rhythms. That impacts your health. There’s another cost: your well-being, your health. You’ll likely be liable to all kinds of negative physical and mental health outcomes from living near these things. How is that going to benefit anybody?

Richard Eskow: Right. I’m starting to picture—and I don’t mean to be lighthearted about this—a kind of 1950s horror movie. Between the impacts you’re aware of and the ones you’re not, it’s really appalling. Which brings me to Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI. He says extreme things. You quote him from a 2019 documentary: “I think it’s pretty likely the entire surface of the Earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers.” I tried to picture that, and what came to mind was the Death Star from Star Wars. On one hand, you could say he’s a brilliant technician who’s nuts. But I know from friends close to some of these tech billionaires—this is how they think. In terms of glory, world-transforming, terraforming, post-human.

Lynn Parramore: Absolutely. It gives them no hesitation to say things like that. That’s part of the terrifying part. There’s this disconnect between these tech gazillionaires and normal human life. The scale of these data centers reflects that. And what he’s talking about—data centers covering the Earth—look at Erin Brockovich’s map of existing and proposed data centers in the U.S. It looks a lot like that. That’s what’s being proposed and imagined.

It’s funny you mentioned science fiction and horror movies. As I’ve been writing about AI, I’ve gone back all the way to Metropolis—the warnings we’ve had. My latest spree last weekend was watching the Resident Evil series, which involves an AI called the Red Queen who unleashes havoc, and the workers pay the price. It’s a fear we’ve had for a long time, and it really does seem to be manifesting at scale. The horror is scaling up for most of us.

Richard Eskow: In a sense, this is the latest and most powerful manifestation of something that’s been going on since the Industrial Revolution: a battle between impersonal capital and human reality, the human spirit. A war between the machine and the spirit. I don’t mean machines can’t be great benefits—typewriters, word processors, recording equipment—they can. But Metropolis is a perfect example. Moloch, the god fed human sacrifices, is an extreme depiction of something that’s been going on for centuries. AI has brought it all to the fore. That’s why Sutskever’s quote is so powerful. Although he doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with it, it’s the complete annihilation of nature and the things we value—the intangible, the beautiful, the fragile, the evanescent—in order to create these computational monstrosities they worship, because they ascribe consciousness to something that is not consciousness. That goes back to Metropolis, back to the story of the golden calf that the wind blew and it lowed like a cow, and they thought it was alive.

This is an internal human struggle. You touch on that in your article too. You mention that it’s hard to stay healthy with these whines going on. And though you talk about economics, the quote from Amartya Sen—someone I’ve admired for a long time—is the money quote. You write, “As Amartya Sen has argued, the central question is not what the system produces but what it does to people.” Whether it’s financially, or the ever-present whine, or the threat to jobs, or just the dehumanizing, migraine-inducing profusion of AI slop—I don’t think any large language model or software has to be anti-human, but it seems as if this entire industry is determined to build and grow in an anti-human way.

Lynn Parramore: It’s true. One thing that concerns me: in New York City, where I live most of the time, I’m not far from Washington Square Park. I was there a couple of weekends ago, and all the graduates were out in their purple gowns. I couldn’t help talking to some of them, and boy, was that depressing. This generation—fairly affluent NYU students—are very scared, disheartened, dispirited. I kept getting the sense that they feel like they’re being thrown away as a generation. They’re being told that because of AI, they’re not really needed in this economy. There won’t be entry-level jobs for them. They won’t be mentored up through a company or organization. Forget it. Good luck.

To me, that’s filicide. If we abandon an entire generation to AI, what kind of sacrifice is that? It doesn’t sound so extreme to talk about films like Metropolis—we are actually doing that. And what solutions have been proposed to these young people? Where is the New Deal-style jobs program for them? Training programs? That’s what they need right now. They’re graduating into a terrible economy that’s likely to get even worse. We cannot afford to let this whole generation go.

I’m wondering, Richard, how you feel about this. In the 1960s, we had a lot of youth resistance, but that was possible because of the affluence and optimism of the time, which we really don’t have now. Young people have been so isolated—the pandemic isolated them. They’re not with each other as much, not dating as much. A lot of them are at home gaming. But you can’t be isolated in an apartment when there’s no money and no job. So maybe they’ll be forced into community with each other and find a way to push back.

Richard Eskow: The French Situationists in 1968 had the slogan “Beauty is in the streets.” Let’s hope that’s the case. You’re absolutely right. The 1960s protests were triggered by several things—you have to distinguish Black and white protests—but the white anti-war protests were based on relative affluence plus a sense of optimism. The curve was slanting upward, not downward as today. Interestingly, in the early part of this century—late 2000s or early 2010s—as the economic situation improved in Brazil, the number of protests escalated considerably. My theory is that there was increasing optimism: people thought, “The future can be better here—let’s get involved.” That’s the challenge we have now. You need something to push against and something to move toward.

My big criticism of the “resistance” during the first Trump administration was always: Don’t just tell me what you’re against, tell me what you’re for. It’s funny that Erin Brockovich comes into this. I met her in Lower Manhattan when I went to rent a car to go upstate. Hertz was out of cars—didn’t matter that we had reservations. There was a line of people. “Sorry, no car.” I was third in line. The woman first in line was arguing with them, and the person behind the desk said, “What was that name again? B-R-O-C-K-O-V...” and everyone realized who she was. There she was—a person fighting for people’s interests—and there was the impersonal corporation. The guy behind the computer monitor had no control; he was as stuck as we were. But you don’t want to be that guy, stuck behind the terminal, working for people who have no compunction about doing this to you. This is all of that on a meta-meta-meta level—at the level of the planet, at the level of humanity as a whole.

Lynn Parramore: Right. What’s it doing? The young people had so many different things to say: “What is this doing to my mind? I’m losing my cognitive skills. What is this doing to the environment? What is this doing to my future in my profession?” So many worries all at once. It’s terrifying. I kept thinking, this generation—it sounds extreme to say it, but it’s almost like graduating into the Great Depression. It’s a bad scene from so many angles. What loyalty do you have to a system that isn’t offering you anything?

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. Elon Musk shoots hundreds of rockets into space, permanently altering the night sky, with nobody to stop him. The way they’re treating our younger generation reminds me of what the poet Robinson Jeffers wrote: “They’d shit on the morning star if they could.” That’s who we’re up against. And who we’re for are the people who affirm beauty, humanity, hope, and community. That’s the pain and the beauty.

Lynn Parramore: And who live in these human bodies. We are embodied intelligence. No AI is ever going to replace us.

Richard Eskow: Right. We’re embodied intelligence, and we have whatever you want to call it—psyche, spirit, soul. If you don’t believe in soul, “psyche” is probably good. Consciousness. All of this matters. And AI is not conscious.

Lynn Parramore: No. And it’s not going to replace us. One of the things I hope young people will absorb is that the narrative that they’re replaceable is a lie. No computer program can replace their human experience, life, judgment, insight, and imagination. I really hope we can promote that message: they don’t have to buy into that narrative.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. Beautifully said, so I won’t add anything—no quotes, nothing. As always, I encourage people to read the article again. The title: “AI is Hungry for Power and You Are Footing the Bill”—to which I would add, with not just your checkbook, but your body and soul. It’s at ineteconomics.org. Lynn, thanks for writing this excellent piece and, as always, thanks for coming on the program.

Lynn Parramore: Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to talking about this more.

Combat sports journalist Nate Wilcox on the forces behind that White House wrestling match.

The modern fight world has become a hidden epicenter of elite power players, political backscratching, and multi-billion-dollar quid pro quos.

I last wrote about Donald Trump and pro wrestling in 2016, when he appointed WWE executive and major campaign donor Linda McMahon to run the Small Business Administration. (McMahon is now the Secretary of Education.) Since then, I’ve been vaguely aware of the web of big-money connections that link Trump, the McMahons, and others. Still, I made an assumption about the upcoming wrestling match at the White House that I think a lot of people have made: that it’s all about pumping up the MAGA base and trolling the liberals. (Trumpworld probably assumes that college-educated libs consider wrestling crude or declassé; some undoubtedly do.)

Man, was I wrong. The story of professional wrestling and Trump’s inner circle involves webs of dealmaking and corruption that are global as well as national. It involves monopolization, media control, AI, and even the wars we fight.

I got a detailed briefing on the subject in this conversation with sports journalist Nate Wilcox, whose newsletter MMA Draw covers all forms of combat sports. Nate explained the ways in which he UFC, WWE, and the broader fight industry have become a nexus for some of the most consequential power deals happening in America and around the world. He walked me through the intertwined relationships between UFC president Dana White and Donald Trump, the role of Hollywood super-agent (and highly connected Democrat) Ari Emanuel — who owns the UFC through his TKO Group — and the way Emanuel has leveraged his position to broker deals connecting the Trump White House, the Ellison family’s acquisition of Paramount, and sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar.

My conversation with Nate is above. What follows are some selected quotes from our talk, as well as a full transcript (lightly edited by both human hands—mine—and AI.)

Subscribe now

QUOTES:

“Don King couldn’t get the crown prince of Saudi Arabia on the phone and raise billions of dollars the way Ari Emanuel can.”
—Nate Wilcox

“These are not fight people. It’s the exact same playbook they run in every industry. Why is a routine X-ray for your cat suddenly $700? This is why.”
—Nate Wilcox

“It’s not even genuine bigotry. It’s performed bigotry to make money. Which is, if anything, more disgusting to me than the real thing.”
—Nate Wilcox

“This is making me nostalgic for the Mafia. Those guys would kill you if you crossed them, but at least they kept their word.”
—Richard Eskow

Transcript (lightly edited):

Richard Eskow: As Monty Python would say: and now for something completely different. As you know, we cover culture and politics and a lot of topics, but we have yet to cover the world of combat sports—until right now. (But) combat sports has been on a collision course with politics for some time.

My next guest might tell me the collision has already occurred. Nate Wilcox is, among other things, a combat sports investigative journalist. His website is MMA Draw, and it’s timely to be speaking with him now because on June 14th, there is a fight event at the White House for Donald Trump’s birthday. First of all, Nate Wilcox, welcome to the program.

Nate Wilcox: Thanks for having me.

Richard Eskow: I think a lot of people don’t realize how embedded Donald Trump has been with the commercial fight world. Let’s just jump right into that. Some people may recall that before he was president, he appeared at a wrestling event — and I think he played the heel, though I can’t be certain. What’s this man’s history with combat sports?

Nate Wilcox: Well, he is in the WWE Hall of Fame. Technically, he might have been the babyface in his feud with Vince McMahon, because Vince was the one who got his head shaved at the end of it, not Trump. As a longtime casino owner, Trump has hosted a number of boxing events, including early UFC events in the early 2000s.

And since 2016, Dana White, the president and frontman of the UFC, though not really the brains or the driving force behind the organization, has been a very public and vocal supporter of Trump. That’s included introducing him at the Republican National Convention three times, campaigning with him, and hosting Trump at UFC events on multiple occasions.

And now they’re going to host this UFC White House event, which was originally set for the nation’s 250th birthday. Instead, we’re going to celebrate Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. Happy birthday, USA.

Richard Eskow: For those who don’t know, UFC stands for Ultimate Fighting Championship. It’s a mixed martial arts promotion company based in Las Vegas. I’m old enough to remember, Nate, when “fight promoter” or “wrestling promoter” was not the most prestigious profession. I’ve been to my share of fights, but I’m not saying that out of snobbery — I’m just saying I’m old enough to remember when you wouldn’t expect to see a fight promoter putting on an event at the White House. So what do you think is really driving this? To what extent is Trump genuinely drawn to the world of combat sports, and to what extent is this political posturing?

Nate Wilcox: I’d say it’s probably a cash-in of some sort. If you watch what Trump is really motivated by — the insider trading, for example. I don’t know if you’ve noticed him touting Dell stock and then it coming out that he bought Dell shares just before he started praising what a great company it was. I’m sure, though I have no direct evidence, that there’s some kind of personal profit motive for the Trump family in the UFC White House deal. I don’t know what it is, but that’s a reasonable supposition.

Politically, he has enjoyed this alliance with Dana White and the UFC for ten years, though the way they tell the story, Trump and Dana White are best friends going back twenty years. Trump was one of the first people to host a UFC event at one of his casinos in the early 2000s, when Dana White and the Fertitta brothers first bought the company. But that was the extent of it. He hosted one of their events.

By 2009, Trump was literally the frontman for their biggest competitor. A T-shirt company called Affliction that had moved into the MMA business and put on two major pay-per-views before a third was canceled at the last minute. Trump was their frontman. And this was not friendly competition. Dana White famously held up a tombstone with the names of all his competitors on it. He didn’t take that lightly.

The key thing that always gets overlooked is that the UFC was sold in 2016 to an entity headed by Ari Emanuel — sometimes called the king of Hollywood agents. He’s the head of WME, formerly the William Morris Agency, and also the Endeavor Group he built. He had a small talent agency called Endeavor in the ‘90s. Then came the show Entourage — the character Ari Gold is based on Ari Emanuel, the hard-charging Hollywood agent. And in 2016 — well, actually in 2009 —

Richard Eskow: I’m sorry to interrupt for a second, Nate, but speaking of hard-charging Hollywood power brokers — Ari’s brother is Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic Party power broker and former mayor of Chicago, which was something of a reward for his service to Obama in the White House. So the connections spread pretty far and wide, don’t they?

Nate Wilcox: Absolutely. And Rahm is the least of it — former Obama chief of staff, Biden ambassador to Japan, mayor of Chicago. Their third brother, Zeke, was also one of the architects of Biden’s COVID policies.

Richard Eskow: Right. Zeke’s a physician, yes?

Nate Wilcox: He is. Definitely a powerful family. But what’s unusual is that Ari is very much a Democratic power broker — one of the most powerful money bundlers in Hollywood. And as we know, Hollywood is one of the financial bases of the Democratic Party. Yet in the summer of 2024, Ari Emanuel was one of the first major donors to publicly call for Biden to step down. He did it at the Simon Wiesenthal Center memorial luncheon, right in front of Biden campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg — one of the co-founders of DreamWorks. Katzenberg stormed out in a fury.

To me, it was like — and this is an old-school rock-and-roll reference — when Neil Young joined Crosby and Nash and ended up stealing the show with long guitar solos, basically upstaging Stills and Graham Nash. That’s what Ari Emanuel did. He humiliated Katzenberg and seized the title of most important Hollywood power broker on the Democratic side.

And yet, at the same time, he’s played this game where his employee, Dana White, has been a very visible Trump ally. Keep in mind: Dana White is not on the board of TKO, the company that owns the UFC. He’s not one of the key decision-makers. He’s admitted under oath that he has no involvement in fighter negotiations. Dana White is involved in TV production and in selling the product — he’s the on-camera guy — but he’s not the decision-maker.

He also never spoke out politically before 2016. Under the previous ownership, the UFC was very buttoned-down politically, focused on gaining mainstream acceptance. If fighters made rape jokes on Twitter, they were fired. If fighters made transphobic remarks, they were sanctioned or fired. If a fighter abused a domestic partner, they were fired. Dana White famously said, “You put your hands on a woman one time, that’s it, you’re done.” Unfortunately for Dana, that standard didn’t seem to apply to him when he was caught on video in a physical altercation with his wife in Mexico in 2023. She slapped him first, but anyone who watches the footage can see the situation escalated considerably from there.

Richard Eskow: And one of the reasons I bring that up — we’ll come back to Dana White in a moment. But when I started reading your work, I knew a little bit about MMA already (my son-in-law has been educating me), and I was astonished by the extent to which the centers of power in this country are deeply connected to this industry. You have Ari Emanuel in the picture. You have Larry Ellison — a Trump-adjacent billionaire — and Paramount together spending, correct me if I’m wrong, around $7.7 billion for UFC broadcast rights, which I believe exceeded the UFC’s total revenue up to that point. So there’s an enormous amount of money changing hands. You’ve got Ellison, you’ve got Emanuel, and you’ve got the President of the United States. That’s why I said in the introduction that this is a bigger deal than most people realize. Has this world become a kind of epicenter for power players and deal-making?

Nate Wilcox: Absolutely. And it’s genuinely alarming to me. I’ve been covering combat sports for over twenty years, and I’m much more comfortable with small-time shady carnies — or even someone like Don King, who was a big-time shady carny. But Don King couldn’t get the crown prince of Saudi Arabia on the phone and raise billions of dollars the way Ari Emanuel can.

And I’m glad you brought up the Ellison deal, because there’s a common misunderstanding there. Larry Ellison brags about being MAGA since 2016, but he actually stepped away from Trump after January 6th and backed Tim Scott in the 2024 primary. And that’s the kind of thing Trump remembers.

So when Ellison’s son David wanted to buy Paramount, multiple reports indicate that Ari Emanuel played a key role — both within Hollywood and in convincing Shari Redstone, who owned Paramount, to accept that David Ellison was, quote, “good Hollywood people,” given that he’d been producing Top Gun sequels with his father’s money for ten years. That was the first hurdle Ari helped Ellison clear.

The second was that Ellison appeared cageside at two UFC events hosted by Ari Emanuel. Dana White was there, but it was Ari Emanuel who was seen introducing Ellison to Trump. At one of those events, Ellison and Trump apparently had a bit of a tense exchange, and Emanuel quickly stepped in to smooth things over.

It’s widely believed that Ari Emanuel helped secure Trump’s approval for the Skydance acquisition of Paramount — and was quickly rewarded with this massive media rights deal, which was twice what the UFC had been getting from ESPN and far higher than any media analyst expected. In fact, they had already stumbled with Netflix, giving Netflix a 45-day exclusive negotiating window in early 2024 and failing to close a deal.

So Emanuel does all these favors for the Ellisons, and the Ellisons do a solid for Paramount. And it gets even stranger when you look at the South Park negotiations that Paramount entered into around the same time. I tell this story often because it so perfectly illustrates how Ari Emanuel operates.

WME represents the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker. They’re negotiating with Paramount — which David Ellison had just acquired. One of the two creators and their WME agent were in their office on a call with Ellison. Ellison shows up — and in his office is Ari Emanuel, literally advising Ellison on the deal. Meanwhile, the counterparty in the negotiation is someone who works for Ari Emanuel at WME. South Park then extracts an enormous sum from Paramount — widely considered a gross overpayment. What actually happened was that Ari Emanuel was, in effect, on both sides of the negotiation simultaneously. It’s really something. And I haven’t even gotten to his international connections with the sovereign wealth funds of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Richard Eskow: Before we get there — the South Park deal, okay, a lot of people thought Paramount overpaid. And the broadcast rights to the UFC, the deal Ellison and Paramount struck, a lot of people thought they paid too much for that as well. I’d heard the TV ratings were actually declining. So they pay this enormous number, and it makes you wonder: what’s the deal behind the deal? I don’t want to say money laundering, but some kind of quid pro quo that’s not visible to those of us in the real world. Is there anything to that?

Nate Wilcox: I think it’s a reasonable supposition. There’s no smoking gun — no typewritten letter establishing it. But it’s very clear that Ari Emanuel helped the Ellisons navigate a very difficult merger process, both with the Paramount acquisition and the subsequent acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. And that this big UFC investment was the payoff, the reward for that.

That said, there is a legitimate business case to be made as well. Some analysts think this was the Ellisons planting a flag — we’re here to compete with Netflix. We’re not legacy media. We didn’t die in the streaming stock crash of 2022, when every studio, Paramount, Peacock, WBD, had inflated stock prices because people thought streaming was going to reshape everything. Netflix won that war, along with Google and YouTube.

So some people believe the Ellisons paid enormous sums for South Park and the UFC specifically to signal: we’re Silicon Valley money, and we’re here to compete with Netflix and Alphabet. We’re not Hollywood legacy. That’s one argument for it being a logical business decision.

But as you said, the ratings were down. ESPN was very clear that the UFC’s pay-per-view performance during its ESPN years had dropped significantly from when the deal was first signed.

The one thing in Paramount’s favor is that they’ve eliminated the pay-per-view model. Where you used to have to pay ten dollars a month for ESPN+ and then eighty dollars on top of that for the pay-per-view, now with Paramount you pay $8.99 or $15.99 a month — or you get it bundled with Walmart+ — and you get every UFC event, including the numbered events like UFC 300, UFC 305, UFC White House. They can also put those events on CBS and reach a much bigger audience than they ever did on ESPN.

Richard Eskow: I hadn’t even thought about CBS while you were talking, Nate — that’s a real point. More exposure is good for the sport. But there’s the buy decision and then there’s the price, and the price still seems questionable to me. That said, between UFC and TKO, you can trace this whole web of alliances — and you do trace it at MMA Draw. You’ve got the Trump White House, you’ve got Paramount, the sovereign wealth funds, AI, Meta — and of course Larry Ellison’s Oracle running some of the infrastructure. There’s a whole hub of interconnected interests here. Do I have that roughly right? And if so, where does Saudi Arabia fit in? We’re currently in the middle of an on-again, off-again conflict involving Saudi Arabia’s neighbors and rivals. Help me see the pattern.

Nate Wilcox: So WME bought the UFC in 2016. Then in 2023, they buy the WWE — the pro wrestling empire — from Vince McMahon, who was under duress, facing both criminal and civil charges, needing cash, and essentially pushed out by his own family from day-to-day operations. He still held a dominant stock position, and when he needed money, he sold to WME, which then formed a new company called TKO that now owns both the UFC and WWE. They’re expanding into boxing with something called Zufa Boxing — which is 60% owned by a Saudi holding company called Cella that is 100% owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Cella owns several UK football clubs, among other assets, and serves as one of the financial arms of the Saudi empire.

It gets even more interesting when you look at the Paramount financing. There was a Variety report announcing that multiple Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds were backing Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — but that story was retracted within a day. It later came out that it was accurate: the Saudi, UAE, and Qatari sovereign wealth funds were all investors in Paramount, potentially owning as much as 49% of the company. Paramount filed something with the government disclosing that foreign entities might own up to 49%, which drew objections from multiple members of Congress who were not comfortable with Saudi Arabia and the UAE holding stakes in an entity that also owns CBS.

Briefly, in that original Variety report before it was pulled, it stated that Jared Kushner and Ari Emanuel were the ones who assembled the sovereign wealth financing. If you know anything about the internal rivalries among the Gulf states, that’s a remarkable achievement. The Saudis and the UAE literally tried to blockade Qatar — with Jared Kushner’s involvement — back in 2018, until someone pointed out that the U.S. had one of its largest Air Force bases in the world in Qatar. That blockade was abandoned. And the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been in open conflict since at least February, with different militia proxies under their respective control entering into open combat in Yemen.

Getting those three entities to invest together in the same deal is, by any measure, an extraordinary feat of deal-making.

There’s also the Khashoggi angle. When the Washington Post reporter was allegedly murdered on orders from Mohammed bin Salman in the Turkish consulate in Istanbul, Ari Emanuel broke a deal with MBS and returned $400 million, publicly stating he had doubled his security detail because he was so afraid of the Saudis. That was 2018. By 2024 and 2025? Water under the bridge. He’s back doing deals with the Saudis, traveling to the kingdom, and Saudi Arabia is hosting WWE and UFC events. They’re thick as thieves again. And the political acumen on display is, frankly, astonishing.

Richard Eskow: By the way — the UAE, among other things, owns Arsenal Football Club, my team. It’s Emirates Stadium now. And so you have this — remind me, Nate: back in early 2017, a source gave me audio of a Trump fundraiser speech where he was attacking Qatar and praising Saudi Arabia. And interestingly, a few days after I published that story in The Intercept, someone broke into our studio and stole a bunch of equipment — nothing of obvious value, but still. Anyway — there’s this intra-Middle East power politics layered on top of Ari Emanuel’s financial interests, which I have to assume overlap with the Ellisons’ interests and, at least tactically, with Trump’s. And all of it seems to intersect around this industry. Your beat is sitting right on top of these fault lines. There may be a window through combat sports into things happening at a level we don’t otherwise see clearly.

Nate Wilcox: I think that’s right. And some of what you’re seeing is the relative decline of Hollywood as a financial and cultural power. Ari Emanuel likes to be introduced as the king of Hollywood, and he publicly identifies with that world — he tends to downplay the UFC and WWE connection. But in 2020, he nearly lost his entire empire during COVID. No movies in theaters, the whole industry locked down. It was Dana White and the UFC that pushed to keep holding events when nobody else thought that was a good idea. They went to the UAE, held fights on what they called Fight Island. A few people got COVID, but it basically worked. And those cash flows literally kept Ari Emanuel’s empire alive.

Now he’s a billionaire — and he’s a billionaire because of revenue from the UFC and the WWE, not from Hollywood talent representation. At one point, Endeavor seemed to envision becoming a movie studio, playing both sides of the table as producers and agents. But once Hollywood imploded — not just from COVID, but from the decade-long addiction to superhero movies that trained anyone over 15 to stop going to the multiplex — the math changed. Ari was shrewd enough to recognize that live-streamed sports was a safer bet than produced TV content and theatrical films. He jumped into it in 2016, and by 2020 it was the foundation of his empire.

Endeavor stock actually failed on its initial public offering and had to go through a take-private maneuver orchestrated by a private equity fund called Silver Lake, run by Egon Durbin — the same financial engineer who took Dell private and then relisted it. The net result is that Silver Lake owns a majority of WME, and WME owns 60% of TKO. So when you buy TKO stock, you’re only buying into 40% of the actual ownership structure. The stock has doubled since 2023, partly because they settled a major monopolization class-action lawsuit brought by fighters for $375 million. They have two more of these suits pending, but once the first one settled, the market decided that problem was contained, and the stock took off. They’ve launched Zufa Boxing, they’ve lobbied for the Muhammad Ali Boxing Revival Act —

Richard Eskow: And I want to get to that. But first — it also seems like one of the reasons the fight world is such a smart investment for Ari Emanuel is that the athletes don’t receive nearly the same share of revenue as in other sports. If my figures are right, TKO pays its fighters less than 20% of revenue. Compare that to the NFL, NBA, and NHL, where the players typically receive around 48 to 49%. These are people putting their bodies on the line with short career spans, not getting anywhere close to what athletes in other major sports earn. And the classic economic explanation for that is monopsony — concentrated buyer power. I’d think these class-action suits have real merit.

Nate Wilcox: They do have merit. They settled one for nine figures, and when you pay out that kind of money in a lawsuit, that tends to suggest there was some fire behind the smoke.

In most stick-and-ball sports, athletes receive 48 to 49% of revenue — NFL, NBA, NHL alike. In boxing, superstars were getting 75 to 80% — Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao, that level. The UFC became a monopsony early on, meaning they were essentially the only buyer for top-tier MMA talent from the moment they acquired Strikeforce in 2011, their last major competitor. No one has managed to establish a truly competitive MMA league anywhere in the world since then. That structural dominance lets them keep fighter wages artificially and dramatically low.

They’re now applying the same approach to the WWE. Just in the last couple of weeks, a significant number of WWE performers were cut, and others were handed 50% pay cuts. That’s the model. In fact, their CEO Mark Shapiro brags about it on quarterly shareholder calls — keeping costs down, maximizing value, “extracting value” being his preferred phrase.

And if you look at the WWE mat today versus the Vince McMahon era, when he was famously adamant about no advertising on the mat — it now looks like one of those completely logo-covered T-shirts from Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. When they announced their plans for Paramount, one of the first things they touted was starting UFC Fight Nights an hour earlier. People thought: great, earlier bedtime. But no — they just added an extra hour of ads to the broadcast. It’s what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, and they are fully committed to it.

Richard Eskow: Right. And now let’s talk about the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act, which passed the House on a two-thirds voice vote. My brain melted a little when I heard about it, because I’m old enough to remember when Muhammad Ali was the most widely despised public figure in mainstream America — branded a draft dodger, a radical Muslim. And now Republicans and Democrats are joining hands in the House of Representatives in his name. There’s a little future shock in that for some of us. But tell us about the act, because I think it’s an important piece of the picture.

Nate Wilcox: So essentially, the original Muhammad Ali Act was something that John McCain — not someone I admire broadly, but this was one thing I did — worked with Ali himself to pass. It made it illegal for a boxing promoter to also manage fighters, required revenue figures to be openly disclosed so that fighters and their management would know how big a pie they were splitting, and it forbade promoters from operating their own sanctioning bodies and awarding their own championship belts.

This new Muhammad Ali Boxing Revival Act would allow the UFC to do all of those things. It creates a new class of entities called UBOs — Unified Boxing Organizations — which, provided they spend a little more on ringside ambulances and fighter health insurance, are granted sweeping latitude: owning their own belts, managing fighters, promoting fights, sitting on every side of the table simultaneously. Basically, they’re being handed the legal permission to do everything the Mafia did when they controlled boxing in the 1950s and ‘60s. Sonny Liston, the man Ali dethroned for the championship, was completely controlled by the New York Mob — they managed him, promoted his fights, and handed out the belts. That’s the blueprint.

And now they’ve gotten Muhammad Ali’s widow to endorse it, secured bipartisan support, and even brought Ilhan Omar on board.

Richard Eskow: Really? Huh.

Nate Wilcox: There was only one Democrat — a congressman from Connecticut whose name I’m blanking on — who spoke out against it on the voice vote. Now it’s in front of Ted Cruz’s committee in the Senate, and it looks like smooth sailing, even though Muhammad Ali’s grandson has since come out against it, Oscar De La Hoya has come out against it, and the WBC sanctioning body is trying to lobby against it. But all of those opponents were caught completely flat-footed and didn’t even seem to realize what was happening during the first House hearings. By all accounts, there were far more TKO lobbyists in the room for those hearings than there were journalists or members of Congress.

TKO went all in. And I’ve heard, somewhat amusingly, that TKO was genuinely irritated when the bill didn’t pass on day one. The lobbyists had to go back and explain: this is Mike Johnson’s House of Representatives. Things don’t pass on day one here.

Richard Eskow: That’s not the level of service we’re paying for. It’s interesting too that Ali’s grandson came out against it — I believe Ali’s daughters are fighters, actually. I’m surprised more of the family didn’t weigh in earlier, but of course we don’t know what conversations have taken place behind the scenes.

Nate Wilcox: The family dynamics and business politics there could be very complicated. And I don’t have any insight into what angles various family members may be working. But if you have an active career in boxing, you might not want to risk going up against what appears to be the 800-pound gorilla just entering the room.

And you know, some of the ground may start shifting under everyone’s feet the way Hollywood shifted under Ari Emanuel’s last time he built an empire. You’ve now got this war in the Gulf. Will the UAE look the same in eighteen months? What does Saudi Arabia look like if the Houthis escalate and cut off access to the Red Sea? Saudi Arabia could face very serious trouble very quickly. In some ways, they’ve built this empire on sand, and we’ll see how it holds up long-term.

But so far they’ve managed to get all of these interests aligned. And they have interests in China, in Russia — they’re close to Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s point man for back-channel negotiations with figures like Witkoff and Kushner. He’s essentially Putin’s Kushner. And the UFC is very tight with him, though because of sanctions they’ve had to maintain some distance publicly. These are people who are prepared and able to do business with anyone, anywhere, regardless of what ethical minefields are in the way — as long as there’s cash at the end of the road.

Richard Eskow: If you’ve got a few more minutes, I’d like to go to sudden-death overtime.

Nate Wilcox: Sure, I’ve got a few more.

Richard Eskow: Good. There’s one more topic I didn’t want to let slip by — Dana White pushing AI technology in broadcasts. That brings in yet another center of power and influence: the AI industry, which of course has its own connections to fossil fuels and the Middle East. We could go on and on. But I’m not that familiar with the specifics here. What’s the deal with AI?

Nate Wilcox: The most public development is that Meta put Dana White on its board in early 2025. My take — and this is my opinion — is that it was a classic case of Mark Zuckerberg being behind the curve and making a bad bet. He wanted in with Trump. Elon’s in with Trump, the Ellisons are in with Trump, so he’s going to buy Trump’s best friend a seven-figure stock grant on Meta’s board to advise them on marketing AI. Anyone who knows anything about Dana White immediately saw through that. This is not an intellectually curious man, to put it mildly. He doesn’t know anything about tech. When people have pushed back on the UFC’s flagrant use of AI in promotional content, his response has literally been: shut up — it’s the future.

He looks like one of those speakers who’ve gone viral at college commencement events recently — the ones who say “AI” and get booed. Dana doesn’t seem to grasp that a lot of people deeply dislike AI. He’s been told from the penthouse suite that it’s the future, so it’s the future. What could be the problem?

I’m sure the UFC and TKO would be thrilled to generate fights with AI if people would pay them for it. Think of all the problems that solves. But it’s much more smoke than fire. I don’t believe he plays any real role on Meta’s board, which has many members. And he hasn’t even been a compelling salesman for the UFC in the last couple of years. He’s visibly checked out. They used to do touring promo circuits — two fighters, events in multiple cities, crowds of hundreds or thousands, Dana getting red-faced and enthusiastic about the next big fight. Now he’ll announce fights from his phone in a casino closet — and it’s well-documented that he’s a prolific gambler who spends most of his time in casinos, often seven nights a week — and he’ll read from a cue card, sometimes not even knowing who the fighters are.

The idea that this man is going to become a compelling evangelist for AI is pretty laughable. I don’t know if you saw him on Charlamagne Tha God before UFC 328, but he’s gotten so accustomed to limiting his media availability to friendly podcasters like Adin Ross or the Nelk Boys that when Charlamagne asked him hard questions, you could visibly watch the gears seize up. When Charlamagne asked whether his position of power helped him avoid consequences for beating his wife on camera, Dana was just sputtering. It was, as a longtime Dana White watcher, genuinely delightful to observe.

But the idea that this person has some special connection to twenty-somethings and can sell them AI they don’t want to buy — that’s simply not happening.

And the decision to make the UFC openly politically partisan, to allow racist, sexist, and transphobic fighters to make that part of their public persona — one of the most notorious cases was Colby Covington, who just retired. Before he did, he said publicly: I did all that political stuff as a hype tactic, to get attention, because I knew that’s what the UFC wanted. So it’s not even genuine bigotry. It’s performed bigotry to make money. Which is, if anything, more disgusting to me than the real thing.

Richard Eskow: It is totally disgusting — artificial bigotry to go along with the artificial intelligence. I think we’ve established that the only thing AI might conceivably improve is Dana White, and in every other context, it would be a downgrade. I’m not even sure how you’d use it effectively in the fight world, unless you’re just generating little animated bouts.

Nate Wilcox: Well, they do use it to generate broadcasters —

Richard Eskow: Right. I think however they use it, it would be annoying.

Nate Wilcox: The ads for UFC White House are 100% AI-generated — showing fighters arriving on Marine helicopters landing on the White House lawn, things like that. They probably saved themselves six figures in production costs and the security headache of actually shooting on-site. But it’s visibly, palpably AI slop.

Compare that to the NFL: when the Cardinals put out an AI-generated ad, about ten other teams immediately released their own ads specifically emphasizing that they were made by real, local, human film workers. The NFL can do that because it has multiple owners and operates as a league rather than a cartel — there’s room for internal debate and dissent. But the UFC exists in such a sealed-off bubble, and Dana White’s attitude toward MMA media and MMA fans has long been: I don’t need you, screw you. Somehow that’s worked for him because the hardcore fans are addicted and will keep spending regardless of how they’re treated. The strategy is to go after the casual audience — the people who’ll show up for UFC White House or tune in because it’s on CBS. So if you’re with a sports publication and want access? They banned ESPN writers from the WWE entirely. It’s remarkable.

Richard Eskow: And that’s what doesn’t make sense to me. You spend $7.7 billion because you want to grow your audience beyond the core fans — bring in the civilians. And then you go cheap with an obviously AI-generated ad that announces to the unconverted: this is a low-quality product. You spent $7.7 billion and then you want to save $125,000 on a photo shoot. I don’t understand the logic.

But here’s my takeaway from all of this, Nate — and I’ll have to have you back because there’s so much more to cover. My conclusion is that this is making me nostalgic for the Mafia. Those guys would kill you if you crossed them, but they were at least reliable. They stood by their deals. This current crowd just seems like a network of ruthless backstabbers who, if they miscalculate, could trigger something genuinely catastrophic. I’ll give you the last word.

Nate Wilcox: I think what we’re seeing is that TKO is an entity that has already succeeded in monopolizing MMA and pro wrestling, and is now working to do the same in boxing. And these aren’t fight people. They’re Hollywood guys, and more precisely, they’re private equity guys — the same people who’ve destroyed your local veterinary clinic, your funeral home, your doctor’s office. It’s the exact same playbook running in a different industry. Why is a routine X-ray for your cat suddenly $700? This is why. These are not fight people. They don’t know or care about fights. Dana White is phoning it in — this is not the Dana White who built the UFC from nothing into one of the major sports organizations in the world. This is a guy who’d rather be at a casino dropping a million dollars on blackjack than talking about fights.

Richard Eskow: What would Howard Cosell say about all of that? Nate Wilcox, thank you for a great conversation. You can find Nate’s writing at MMAdraw.com. I encourage you to check it out — whether you’re a fight fan or you just want to understand how our overlords are making deals these days, this industry seems to be sitting at the center of some very consequential activity. Nate, thanks for the great reporting, and thanks for coming on the program.

Nate Wilcox: Thanks for having me, Richard. My pleasure.

After an extended pressure campaign, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin finally agreed to release the DNC’s “autopsy report” on the 2024 election. It’s the first document I’ve ever read that would have been better if it had been written by AI. Martin himself said the report “does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” That’s for damn sure. As we’ll see, however, that doesn’t let Martin off the hook.

I downloaded the document before reviewing my news feed, where I quickly learned that many like-minded people began exactly as I did: by searching for the word “Gaza.” Result? “Not found.” I then tried “Palestine.” Result? “Not found.” How about “Israel”? “Not found.”

These omissions are particularly striking since one activist group was told by report author Paul Rivera that DNC data showed that the administration’s support for the Gaza genocide was, “in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election.” Axios, which reported on that exchange, added that it “independently verified that Democratic officials conducting the autopsy believed the issue harmed the party’s standing with some voters.”

RootsAction was one of the groups pressing for the autopsy’s release, and co-founder Jeff Cohen called the document “almost worthless.” Cohen condemned the failure to mention “the Biden/Harris administration’s Israel policy that abetted the Gaza massacre,” Biden’s initial decision to run for re-election, and what he called Kamala Harris’ “lack of principles.”

Other words that can’t be found in the autopsy include “war,” “military,” “defense” (in the military sense), “peace,” “Medicare,” and “Social Security.” The report fails to address either the US’ runaway military spending or the ongoing attempts to undermine the country’s social contract.

The report’s only conceivable value will be for future anthropologists, who will find it provides considerable insight into the culture and folkways of the professional Democratic class. Its introduction reads like the kind of word salad a teenager might come up with when asked to write a 1200-word essay on a topic they forgot to study. There’s a lot of meandering, some restatements of the assignment, and a hastily looked-up quotation. Don’t read it unless you’re prepared to wade through prose like this:

“... the voters decide which choice is most resonant. One party declares itself the winner, and the other party declares that the fight is far from finished.

“Effective parties, understanding history rarely repeats itself, it does often rhyme, make it a point to study electoral outcomes after each cycle to identify potential improvements to every aspect of their campaigns. John Adams argued ‘Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right…and a desire to know.’”

Believe me, it doesn’t get any better from there.

The document is 192 pages long, but many of those pages are blank. The page called “Leadership Message”: blank. (Any comment about that would be like shooting fish in a barrel.) “Executive Summary”: blank. And so on.

The section entitled “Electoral Landscape” includes sentences like this : “We must organize everywhere to Win Anywhere”—which doesn’t make any sense. You don’t have to organize everywhere to win anywhere. And Democrats already win somewhere! Those “somewheres” are called “Blue States.” The problem is they have to win more “somewheres,” and you can’t win somewhere if you’re “everywhere”! You have to be there to win there!

The next sentence begins, “Winning Anywhere means providing for a renewed focus on the voters of Middle America and the South ...” Wait. One sentence ago we were everywhere. Now we’re in Middle America and the South, which happen to be two readily-identifiable somewheres.

That’s what consultant-speak will do to the human mind.

The document, perhaps unsurprisingly, praises the centrist Democratic orientation of the late 1980s and 1990s. But the same pro-corporate orientation contributed heavily to the party’s 2024 losses. That’s what you get what you call on a party to emulate the centrists’ “future-focused directive”—by adopting a forty-year-old strategy.

The report also states that “the DNC and ASDC (Association of State Democratic Parties) have conducted more than 1200 interviews to assess the health of our 57 state parties – in every state, district, or territory.” Where are those interviews?

Martin reportedly told DNC members that Rivera no longer “is with or advises the DNC in any capacity.” But the buck stops with the boss, not the consultant.

I get it; Martin has a tough job. But he campaigned for his position by promising an autopsy. When Rivera’s proved to be unusable, Martin was obliged to have it re-done. By failing to do so, he reneged on his campaign promise. In the meantime, a little transparency would have gone a long way toward avoiding the mess he now faces.

Don’t read the DNC document unless you’re a masochist or a journalist (provided there’s a difference between the two). Read this one instead. Stay far away from the DNC report. Trust me, you’ll “win somewhere” by being anywhere else.

Disclosure: The Zero Hour program is sponsored by Progressive Hub, a project of RootsAction.

“City of Immigrants,” Steve Earle (directed by Steve Buscemi)

I love this new video of Steve Earle’s song, “City of Immigrants.” Variety gives the video’s backstory (in that publication’s characteristic, showbiz-oriented style), calling it “a heartfelt, lively celebration of the polyglot melting pot that New York City has always been, created by two longtime residents.”

The video is political, but only in the sense that Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance was political. When we celebrate human life, culture, and vitality, the political implications flow from that.

The song and video reminded me of my years as a resident of New York City—and of an article I wrote in 2010 for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle about my hometown of Utica, NY. Utica is also a city of immigrants.

Here are some excerpts from that article, with a little light editing and rewriting as appropriate. (No AI was used in the production of this column.)

Enjoy the video.

Subscribe now

Autumn 2010

Utica, New York, was a factory town when I was born there, famous for corruption and violence, for the once-powerful Mohawk tribe, for white bread and cheap beer and the Erie Canal. That city’s gone, dying like the rest of the Rust Belt. Utica’s population is down 40 percent. Incomes are less than half the national average. Nearly half the buildings downtown have been torn down.

I left Utica 47 years ago and never returned. As our car passed the city limits for the last time, John Kennedy had four months to live. They were advertising a new TV show called The Fugitive. Radios played “Surf City,” “Memphis,” and bad-girl group The Angels promising a “beating” in “My Boyfriend’s Back.” “You’re gonna be sorry you were ever born,” they sneered. “If I were you I’d take a permanent vacation.”

And now, instead of The Angels, devas. Refugees, including Buddhists from war-torn regions in Asia, have arrived in Utica. The monks who led Burma’s “Saffron Revolution” are here, along with Cambodian and Vietnamese exiles. Their presence gave me a reason to return. And reflect.

“Sin City USA!” screamed the cover of a 1959 Look magazine about Utica. “Corrupt Policemen, Racketeers Laughing at The Law … An Empire of Vice and Drugs.”

A few years later the town’s prosperity began to fade. Finally, even the hit men left for more promising territory. The house where I spent my first few months of life is now boarded up, abandoned like most on the block. Drug deals go down on the street outside. But three blocks away, kindly monks encouraged me to eat an apple and sip a Thai energy drink.

“I spent ten years in prison for pro-democracy activities,” said U Pyinya Zawta, Executive Director-in-Exile of the All Burma Monks’ Alliance. “There I suffered the pain of torture.”

The Burmese monks were brought here by the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, the hub of a 13,000-person immigrant community that makes up roughly 20 percent of the city’s population. Most of Utica’s 2,000 Burmese are ethnically Karen Christians, along with some Muslim families and two or three hundred Buddhists.

Utica was a “city of immigrants” when I lived there, too, but we were the immigrants in my neighborhood, a mixture of first and second-generation Americans—Italians, Irish, and in my family’s case, Russian Jewish on one side and half-French on the other.

(It has sometimes struck me that three out of four of my grandparents were immigrants and nobody ever asks me “where I’m from.”)

Some Buddhists describe karmic residue, vasana, as “perfume.” “After you scream,” said Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri, “something is still there … not as a shadow, but as something in your body and mind.” At the age of 8 I was held in our family’s garage for hours by a gang of older kids, stabbed nineteen times with a rusty hatpin.

U Pyinya offers no specifics about his 10-year ordeal. Instead, he told me how his experience with HIV-infected prisoners led him to build the first HIV facility in Burma.

Peeling paint and crayon scribblings marked the walls of the tiny house he shared with three other monks. I asked him if monasticism and political activism are in conflict. “The Buddha taught us that we need to work for the whole universe,” he answered, “and for all living beings to be peaceful and happy.” Burmese visitors wandered in and out of the house, but activity stopped when the BBC’s Burmese-language news broadcast came on, and the monks huddled around the radio.

What does he expect now for Burma? “Things will get worse,” he said. “Soldiers are raiding villages, raping and robbing the people there. There will be more poverty. They’ll keep recruiting younger and younger child soldiers. We hear they are recruiting them at 14 and 15 now. Burma was very rich in jade, sapphire, natural gas, tea … but the military doesn’t share it with the people. In a country rich with natural gas, people can’t get electricity more than a couple of days a week.”

Poppies are a natural resource there, too. Burma reportedly supplies more than half of the U.S.’s heroin. How’s this for interconnectedness? Americans who die from overdoses in cities like Utica are victims of Burma’s generals, too. A question I hesitate to ask: Do they feel their uprising failed? “We’re satisfied that more people know about Burma now. The world community is much more aware of the brutality of the military regime.” He pauses. “We will continue to make people aware of Burma’s problems.”

U Gawsita, the public face of the Saffron Revolution, wandered in and out of the room with what seemed like indifference. Later I heard him say in a taped interview that life in Utica was difficult because he couldn’t understand the language. I asked his fellow monk U Agga how they handled loneliness: “We meditate and pray and develop our lovingkindness. We can’t call or email our families, because the regime controls all communications. If we miss them, we meditate more.”

Utica’s Burmese have adapted their folk traditions, moving their annual Thingyan Water Festival from April to July to accommodate the long winters. The number 9—ko—is considered good fortune in Burmese tradition. Traveling parties of eight sometimes brought along a symbolic “ninth member” for luck, and traditionally nine monks would perform the ritual that dispels restless ghosts.

Those ghosts may have to linger now. All but eight Burmese monks in the U.S. have been forced into lay life, working at meatpacking plants and other blue-collar jobs.

“Young Girls Led Into Lives of Degradation,” The 1959 headlines shouted. “Joy Houses Ran the Gamut from Tawdry to Posh Pleasure Palaces for the Well-Heeled.”

The erotic images I saw here were brutal or tawdry: the nude Marilyn Monroe calendar in the gas station, the sordid sex-and-violence covers of Police Gazetteand True Detective (“No Mercy for Mary! Pretty Chicago Brunette Loses Her Fight Against a Killer”) in the neighborhood barbershop.

Others have sensed a degraded sexual perfume here, too: “Most corrupt, vial [sic] city in New York state,” one online comment reads. “Hey, remember when the Mayor said Utica doesn’t have $2 hookers, it has $20 hookers?” reads another. Utica has several strip joints but no bookstores.

The city was also a “processing hub” for Vietnamese refugees, four or five hundred of whom stayed and built a temple. A photo of their monks’ induction ceremony shows women marching single file down Miller Street, baskets on their heads and children in costumes at their feet. The temple is erecting a statue of Quan Am, Bodhisattva of Compassion. Perhaps her intercession will help the city’s Amerasians, mixed-race children of U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese mothers, brought here after Congress granted them citizenship. As small children some of them lived on Vietnam’s streets, bearing the poetic-sounding but heartless name bui doi (“dust of life”). Some, their fathers unknown, say they don’t know their true names. Others wonder where they’re “from.”

The night I returned, I stopped at a pharmacy in an unfamiliar industrial area. Inside, loudspeakers played only the oldies of my childhood. I remembered an old Twilight Zone episode: a man returns to the poor neighborhood where bullies once tormented him, only to become a trapped child again. I wondered how far we were from my old home and keyed the address into my phone: “Driving time: One minute.”

The pharmacy was built on the site of a White Tower burger joint. The ice cream parlor had been replaced by a body shop. They’d torn down the Pontiac dealership where a salesman once lifted a tarp to show me the taillights on the new Bonneville—a “company secret”—and then said, “Son, promise me you’ll never sell cars for a living.”

There it was: the house where I grew up. A transistor radio upstairs once played a saxophone instrumental called “Stranger on the Shore,” making me sad in a way I wanted to feel over and over. Outside, when I was four, a factory whistle sounded in the distance and the sky seemed to turn gold. I felt completely alone in the universe. I tried to find that feeling again for a long time.

I set off for my school, John F. Hughes, a third of a mile away, and found I still knew every turn of a walk I hadn’t taken for half a century. Approaching the building, I remembered something I’d heard decades later in a support group for alcoholics and addicts: “The minute I walked into kindergarten, I needed a goddamned drink.”

The Thai teacher Ajahn Chah once spoke about dukkha and rebirth, using the Utica-friendly metaphor of a boxer who only ducks after his teeth have been knocked out. “You have to duck before they slug you,” he said. Dukkha is usually translated as “suffering,” but some say it means “craving” or even “addiction.” Ajahn Chah said, “Dukkha sticks on the skin and goes into the flesh.”

Happy memories return, too: Oneida Avenue, at the hill’s summit, limning the farthest reaches of my childhood. The cemetery, with knobbed stone gates like a troll’s gateway. Train tracks, now gone, where I’d look down the line and imagine I was seeing all the way to California.

The barbershop’s gone. In 1962, I was getting a haircut there when an air-raid drill sounded. It was illegal to be outside during a drill, but the barber sprayed me with hair tonic to drive me away. “Get the fuck outta here,” he said. Reeking of Vitalis, I walked home through deserted streets as sirens wailed. Now I cut through the same vacant lots, behind the same brick buildings, which today also stood vacant. Two bikers drank beer on their porch, motorcycles gleaming at the curb. On my block an old woman watched me suspiciously until I introduced myself. Everyone you knew is gone, she said, listing one family name after another. Dead, or moved to New Hartford, a nicer town up the road.

A small boy stepped out of his house and stared at me. He was dark-skinned, something unimaginable on this street in my segregated childhood. I realize that my Utica’s as ancient to him as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the start of World War I was to me.

The next day I joined the monks for lunch. There’s a picture of me using my cell phone outside the monks’ house. It shows a man in black clothes of no known 1950s fashion. A headset flashes in his ear. The object in his hand links him to the entire world. He’s a refugee from my childhood’s future, an immigrant into its past.

The next day I joined the monks for lunch. As Burmese women served food and shared the meal, two refugee children lingered outside. Where do you guys go to school? “Hughes.” Me too, I said—50 years ago. They laughed.

U Agga described a shootout outside their front door last winter. “Bang! Bang!” he says. “Two bodies. Many police came, with flashing lights. Scary.”

These monks faced down an entire army, but nothing prepared them for a shootout in the northern darkness, red blood in dirty white snow. Outside the house was a garden, its fence and gate made of woven branches. Once I had a garden in Utica, too, with carrots and morning glories. I could never wake up early enough to see the flowers’ blossoms, which only appear at daybreak. Finally my father carried me outside to look at them. I only saw them once, but they were beautiful.

From the monks’ garden I saw this on the street outside: An African woman in hijab trailed by two burly teenagers, watched by blond kids inside a house draped with a giant American flag. Villagers from Vietnam and Cambodia passing each other in the midday sun. A fat, shirtless, ponytailed white man driving down the center of the street on a tractor, pulling a trailer filled with junk.

A tattooed Burmese man sees our rental car. “Where are you from?” he asks. “I’m from here,” I say. The words feel alien in my mouth. He rolls up his T-shirt for the photographer, a cigarette dangling from his lip like James Dean. His tattoo shows a dove flying over a “Mother Hen,” which either represents his mother country or the entire world. It’s not clear which. “Peace for the people,” he says.

Utica’s Cambodian temple is a few short blocks away. The 75 families who built it wrote their wishes on pieces of paper that are buried beneath its cornerstone. A beaming monk lets us in. An old man in his undershorts is watching TV in the kitchen, but he slips away as we enter. A researcher found that many Cambodian refugees watching American television thought that the special effects were real. “We used to see that same kind of spirit in Cambodia, shooting through the air at night,” one said of a ghostly fireball. “You have them here, too … I’ve seen them in back of the apartment building.”

A Cambodian-American whose name sounds like “Phil” wears a sparkly T-shirt and jeans and speaks at a street vendor’s clip. He shows us the altar, rich with offerings. Shrines outside face the eight directions. The eaves are draped with Christmas tree lights. Admiring the temple’s fine woodwork, I’m told the refugees did it themselves. The sign over the gate reads “Wat Satheatak Uticaram.” I know that wat means “temple” and the last word means “of Utica.” Is that other word Pali, I ask? “You know a lot,” says Phil, although I don’t. After conferring, they translate Satheatak as “opening of the heart.

The house next door is for sale and the monk wants the community to buy it. Phil thinks people are afraid to sleep near a temple. “Ghosts?” I ask. “I knew you know a lot!” Phil says, but the monk shakes his head in disagreement.

Tradition says the fiercest khmoc—ghosts—are the spirits of people who died violent deaths. These refugees, survivors of the killing fields, know about ghosts. I leave an offering at the altar.

The Air Force base whose B-52s once flew over our house is gone now. Occasionally, long ago, I’d look up to make sure the bomber overhead was “one of ours.” During the Cuban Missile Crisis I dreamed an H-bomb exploded on our horizon. No fire or noise, just the world turning yellowish-brown and crumbling away like old parchment. But Utica’s still here, fighting to reinvent itself. There are signs of attempted renewal: microbreweries, a still-thriving museum, a playhouse. There’s even a haunted house in an abandoned factory called “Horror Realm,” where make-believe ghouls enact freakish industrial experiments for paying visitors. Our childhood nightmares have become a tourist attraction.

My city’s gone. The child who lived here is not the same person as the man I have become. But there’s a connection, an unbroken current. Utica, too, continues. Its Buddhists seem intent on staying. But the Mohawks probably thought they were staying, too. So did the families on my block.

Two weeks after my visit, I learned that the Burmese monks unexpectedly left town.

Still, Utica lives. It’s not a shrine to tragedy, nor is it some 21^st Century Pompeii. There’s good and bad, like anywhere, that’s all. We bring our own perfume. I realize with a start that I miss Utica, that I’ve always missed it, no matter where I’ve gone. I’ve never felt I belonged anywhere else.

I drive away for the last time. The old trolley tracks are still there, at least in the poorer parts of town. The sign outside a Catholic Church, “Fish Fry or Pirogyis Every Friday,” could have been there fifty years ago. The Cambodian kids in the takeout restaurant might have been the Irish or Italian or Polish teenagers of my youth. The girl behind the counter licks the overflowing soda from a takeout cup and tilts her head toward the boy next to her. “He’s my boyfriend,” she says shyly.

Across the street, a Black church is boarded up. They’ll never sing the old gospel song there again, if they ever did, the one that goes, “Before this time another year, I may be gone.”

Most of this city’s stories won’t be told; most stories never are. Angels become lovers, and lovers become memories. Memories fade, and other people create new ones of their own. One person’s Horror Realm becomes another person’s refuge. Ghosts aren’t real, or if they’re real, then they too melt away. Stories can be rewritten. You can decide for yourself where you’re from.

I’m from here.

This work is only possible thanks to reader support. If you find it worthwhile, please help out with a paid subscription through Substack (discounted here) or on Patreon.

You can also make a one-time donation here.

Many thanks.

Prof. Wolff and I spent this conversation wrestling with a central, uncomfortable question: are we watching the collapse of an American era, or have we entered a period where coherence itself has become a casualty? It sometimes feels like the zeitgeist can be summed up with three simple initials: “WTF!”

Here, Prof. Wolff and I work on separating the signal from the noise. We discuss the vacuum left by the collapse of ideologies, the grotesque theater of figures like Hegseth and Melania, performing roles they clearly didn’t create for themselves, the dangerous incoherence of the war against Iran, and the real possibility that Europe—stung by tariffs, excluded from war councils, and humiliated by a country it once trusted—may ultimately turn toward Russia and China for a better deal.

Neither of us claim to have a clean theory. These aren’t very ‘clean’ times. But we need to pay close attention and react accordingly, as we attempt to do here.

Selected Quotes

“A people always ends by resembling its shadow.”
— Rudyard Kipling, invoked by Richard Eskow

“When wine goes bad, it’s vinegar. Whatever vintage American wine was, we’re watching it turning into vinegar.”
—Richard Eskow

“The tariff attack was considered a betrayal. The war in Iran was considered a betrayal. For Europeans, these are levels of outrage their politicians have figured out are way too deep and way too wide to ignore.”
—Richard Wolff

“We don’t even have bad visions anymore. There’s a vacuum where there used to be competing ideologies.”
—Richard Eskow

“The best organizer for the left in America today is Mr. Trump.”
—Richard Wolff

Transcript (lightly edited)

Richard Eskow: You and I get questions of various kinds — some answerable, some ineffable, some barely comprehensible. Usually I can take a fair shot at most of them. But lately things have gotten so chaotic that I find myself struggling.

I’ve actually been working on a piece I keep setting aside called “The Age of Meaninglessness,”the idea being that perhaps the defining feature of this era is that it doesn’t mean anything. There’s a line from The Simpsons where someone asks, “What’s the moral of this story?” and Homer says, “There is no moral. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.” Sometimes I think that describes contemporary history.

But I had another thought while wrestling with this topic. What came to mind, of all things, was a quote by Rudyard Kipling, who knew a thing or two about empires, particularly the British Empire. Kipling wrote that when a society is collapsing, “a people always ends by resembling its shadow.” And to me, that might be a key to understanding what’s going on.

It’s not that Trump and the people around him represent a disruption in the arc of American history. They’re as American as anything else in this country, except perhaps more so. They may be the distillate of Americanism: the greed, the arrogance, the assumption that power, particularly military power, will always prevail, the sexual obsession.

And it’s not limited to Trump alone—or as he apparently prefers to be addressed, “Jesus Christ.” It applies to the people around him too. Melania Trump going on television to declare she has never been associated with Jeffrey Epstein, which seemed like a national non sequitur. Pete Hegseth and his Narcissus-like fascination with his own appearance, rejecting photographers who don’t capture him flatteringly.

It all seems to me like a sign of something. When wine goes bad, it becomes vinegar. My working theory is that whatever vintage American wine once was, we are now watching it turn. But that’s just a thought I’ve been sitting with. What do you make of it?

Richard Wolff: I love this way of putting things, and I couldn’t agree with you more. Though I think it’s worth pairing it with a little exercise in intellectual humility, and here’s what I mean. You and I are particularly good, I think, at constructing analyses and narratives to make sense of whatever we’re discussing. I believe in that. I believe it’s one of the better things human beings do. The trouble is never to confuse the act of constructing a story with actually capturing how things really are. Always stay open to the aspects you haven’t yet understood or surfaced, because they’re always there.

One of the ways you keep yourself honest is by periodically saying exactly what you just said, and you said it very well. These are chaotically juxtaposed, jumbled phenomena that don’t lend themselves to any straightforward explanation.

Let me add a few observations. I follow European podcasts and news outlets fairly closely, and I would say the level of hostility toward the United States — not just toward Trump personally, but toward a broader America — has risen significantly. The sentiment seems to be: if Americans genuinely disagreed with Trump, there would be far more visible signs of it. Europeans don’t see demonstrations in the streets. They don’t see the Democratic Party mobilizing its base to register discontent. None of it.

And I find that deeply significant, because I think it is extremely dangerous for the United States. If you look at the approval ratings for the leaders of England, France, and Germany — Starmer, Macron, Merz — they’re polling at ten to twenty percent. They’re in worse shape than Trump. And they are going to be voted out by populations who feel a sense of betrayal by the United States — and whose politicians are now realizing that sentiment runs too deep and too wide to ignore.

The tariff attack was experienced as a betrayal. The war on Iran was experienced as a betrayal — not being consulted, then being excoriated for not helping in a war they weren’t consulted about in the first place. These are not grievances European politicians can paper over.

Richard Eskow: What’s interesting to me is that — and it’s a fascinating observation — when Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, turned against Trump, my first thought was that even their fascists seem more competent than ours. But in truth, and I know nothing you’ve said is intended to idealize Western Europe — which has many serious flaws of its own. We’ve talked about its alarming drift toward increased militarism, its refusal, largely at U.S. direction, to pursue a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, its rush to ramp up military spending.

But what you’re describing is important, because for better or worse — and in many ways worse — we have had a neoliberal social order that’s existed for roughly seventy-five to eighty years. And as urgently as it needs to change, its collapse hasn’t produced an alternative. Instead, people seem to be arriving at the conclusion I described at the start: that this is all just a bunch of stuff that happens, with no ideology or philosophy to make sense of it.

In previous generations, someone might have said the Communists have a handle on this, or the Socialists, or the Christian Democrats, or whoever. Now it seems as though people have rejected ideology altogether — not replaced it, but abandoned it — in favor of raw emotion. Whether it’s the AfD in Germany, Meloni’s movement in Italy, or others, the pattern is the same.

There’s a line — I believe it’s from the Bible — “A people without vision perish.” We don’t even have bad visions anymore. We just have a vacuum where competing ideologies used to be.

Richard Wolff: I think that’s true. On Meloni — as best I can read it, she was looking for a way to distance herself from Trump rather than remain wrapped in his embrace, which she had initially done. And Trump rather helpfully handed her the perfect opportunity when he insulted the Pope. Suddenly she could appeal to her base — who love the Pope — by positioning herself as the Pope’s defender against Trump. And that means yet another country whose popular opinion is now being organized against him.

Richard Eskow: And again, it’s not ideological. I think that’s exactly the right reading. Trump has become so unpopular in Italy that she needed a way out, and she found one. I suspect she has no great love for this Pope or his predecessor — if anything, my guess is she belongs to that strand of the Christian right that views the current papacy as dangerously liberal. But she found a way to wriggle free of his embrace.

Throw into that the loss of Viktor Orbán in Hungary — and again, his replacement, Péter Magyar, is ideologically indistinguishable from him. He was one of Orbán’s own functionaries until an opportunity arose. So we have this era of discontent and disgust that I have genuine compassion for, but that leaves a gaping vacuum.

I puzzle over what European publics are actually feeling in their gut. Meanwhile, the big event of the week in American media is Melania Trump disavowing Jeffrey Epstein — despite emails that apparently show her signing off warmly to Ghislaine Maxwell. I don’t know whether the media’s apolitical vapidity reflects the public mood or reflects an elite desire to distract. I suspect the latter, and that it’s simply reinforcing the vacuum. I don’t know if European media is doing better — I suspect it is, but from my British left-wing friends, I hear plenty of complaints about the BBC.

Richard Wolff: The BBC has moved significantly to the right. It’s striking to watch.

Richard Eskow: So is this the end of an era? The dawning of a new one? Or the beginning of an era where there aren’t any eras anymore — just, to go back to Homer, a bunch of stuff that happens? Can you make heads or tails of any of this, or is this one of those cases where we have to confess we simply don’t know yet?

Richard Wolff: A little confession is in order, though I wouldn’t abandon analysis entirely. I’ve been asking various people — you, but others too — about the Melania speech, which I hadn’t intended to watch but found myself watching anyway. I couldn’t quite work out what she was saying. I understood she was emphatically denying any connection to Epstein, repeatedly. Then I spoke to my daughter, who said immediately: something is about to come down the pike. Someone warned Melania that Epstein-related files are about to be released, and the contents will not be favorable to her or Donald. So she got ahead of it — made clear she has nothing to do with any of it — and notably gave the statement without her husband standing beside her, as though she were distancing herself from him.

Everything I know about Washington suggests that how she was dressed and every word she spoke was written for her by the team around her. But the urgency of the statement felt real.

I had the same feeling I had years ago watching her explain her husband’s comments about women’s genitalia as merely ‘locker room talk’ — you could see her reciting a phrase she had been given.

What struck me separately was watching Pete Hegseth describe the blockade of Iran as ‘successful’ — two days in. You cannot assess the success of a blockade in two days, and there is no evidence it was working. Rather than just chaos, what we seem to have is: things just happen, plus they are all declared successful, as though there were a coherent strategy behind them achieving intended results.

Everything about this war — more than most — screams mistake and misjudgment. The majority of Americans opposed it from day one, including Trump’s own base. They didn’t understand what Iran had in terms of missile capability, drone capability, or the range and accuracy to deliver them. The list of things they apparently didn’t understand is extraordinary.

And I’ll add one more, because I think you’ll appreciate it. A French newspaper — centrist-left, something like Le Monde — asked a very sharp question: if a blockade and the bombing campaign share roughly the same objective — pressuring Iran to change course on nuclear development and reopen the Strait of Hormuz — then why on earth would you bomb first? The logical sequence would have been to blockade first, showing seriousness while avoiding mass casualties, and then escalate militarily only if that failed. Instead, you bomb, it clearly doesn’t work, you call it off, and then you impose the blockade. The paper presented this not as strategic analysis but as evidence of why Europe cannot trust the United States.

Richard Eskow: They were saying it approvingly, or —

Richard Wolff: No — as a symptom of unreliability. The framing was: we have been burned by this betrayal, and we must learn from it. That was the encapsulated message.

Richard Eskow: I want to return to that in a moment, but I feel compelled to note something that struck me when you juxtaposed Melania Trump and Pete Hegseth. Melania’s professional career was as a model — her job was to appear a certain way in front of a camera. I would argue that Pete Hegseth is essentially a model too: a superficial character who got his position based on his looks and his television performance, with all the hollowness that implies. A lot of Trump appointees fit that profile.

It made me think: maybe what we’re watching is community theater — a really bad production where everyone is genuinely bad at their role.

But returning to the more substantive point — what you’re describing is a Europe that has developed a deep, widening aversion to the United States. And you have European leaders who don’t share that aversion by inclination — they are NATO-oriented, broadly pro-American — and yet they have been pushed around by Trump to such a degree that who knows what their private thoughts now are.

Here’s what I keep thinking: if a more conventional American president came along — another Obama or Biden type, someone who spoke politely, seemed reasonably educated, wanted to rebuild relationships — Macron and Starmer would presumably be relieved. But I’m not sure they would become any more popular with their own publics. If that’s right, then the question becomes: what are the long-term implications for the United States and for Western Europe of this estrangement?

Richard Wolff: If I’m reading Europe correctly, they are going to be voting for people who openly identify as European nationalists — or more narrowly, as German nationalists, French nationalists, Italian nationalists — because the project of forging a united European identity has stalled, and there’s no sign of that changing anytime soon. The very force of nationalism at the national level works against overcoming it at the continental level.

That is a severe problem for them. They are acutely aware that virtually all significant high-tech development is either American or Chinese. All the major breakthroughs are American or Chinese. Europeans talk about needing to spend trillions to rebuild anything competitive, and they can’t generate the political consensus to do it. Even now, when they are spending on military, they’re spending on a French military and a German military and an Italian military — not a unified European one. That guarantees inferiority. You are never going to match the United States or China with that approach.

And the result is that the United States doesn’t consult you before going to war against a country whose missiles can reach most European cities. Iran chose not to use them that way this time. Next time, they may not make the same choice.

Richard Eskow: The implications of that are enormous. One possible outcome is that the forty-year project of European integration simply falls apart — that the gravitational pull becomes: the European institutions in Brussels don’t respect us, America treats us like an afterthought, and therefore Germany for Germans, Austria for Austrians, Hungary for Hungarians. Don’t you think that’s a genuine possibility?

Richard Wolff: Yes, I think we need to start taking seriously very large strategic realignments that we would have dismissed not long ago. Mark Carney gave that speech at the World Economic Forum where he said, essentially, this is not a passing phenomenon — this is a historic shift — and was met with applause. He had more courage than any of the European leaders in the room. And I think he’s right: this is changing the way Canadians think about the United States fundamentally. He’s gaining popularity precisely because he took on the role of leading opposition to Trump, while his opponent Poilievre didn’t and has suffered badly for it.

Richard Eskow: I appreciated his boldness, though I found the speech itself appalling in a different way — a blueprint for reconstructing the same defunct global elite on a slightly more decentralized scale. The liberals applauding it had no idea what they were applauding.

Richard Wolff: And if you had any remaining doubts, Carney made his position clear a few days later by enthusiastically endorsing the war on Iran — despite not having been consulted about it.

Richard Eskow: So before we close — we’ve been talking about a United States that has damaged its relationship with Europe, that is staging this odd puppet show with these hollow figures like Hegseth and others, increasingly going it alone. What does it actually portend for America if it has genuinely, perhaps irreversibly, alienated Western Europe?

Richard Wolff: As a final, perhaps provocative word: it means that both in Europe and in the United States, though in different ways, you are going to see an argument emerge from unexpected quarters — sooner rather than later — that the entire strategic posture has been a mistake, and that the only rational alternative is to sit down with Russia and China and work out a mutually livable coexistence rather than continuing this cycle of endless warfare with its enormous costs in lives, money, and standing.

And if Europe were to move in that direction — which, given the depth of their sense of betrayal over the tariffs, the economic displacement, the reports that VW’s leadership has been in meetings with the State Department about moving headquarters to the United States — then the question for Europe becomes: why stop at merely stepping back from the American alliance? Why not find a partner who will offer a genuinely better deal? Russia and China might be very willing to offer one, in the context of preparing for whatever the United States undertakes in the years ahead.

I think we are going to be seeing very large changes.

Richard Eskow: We do live in interesting times. I was telling someone recently that if I ever have a tombstone, it should read: ‘Well, that was interesting.’ It’s never dull, is it?

Richard Wolff: No. And as someone on the American left, there is a certain irony in the fact that the best organizer for the left in America today is Donald Trump. He is genuinely radicalizing people on a daily basis — a good number of whom are then moving leftward, some quickly, some slowly. It’s unmistakable to me.

And I’d push back on the American media’s insistence that all the populism in Europe is right-wing. That’s simply not accurate. What you’re seeing is the center collapsing, with both the right and the left doing better. The country I follow most closely is France, and there the left is at minimum the equal of Le Pen’s movement, and I would argue more powerful.

Richard Eskow: In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party seems to have struggled, but the Green Party has rebranded itself as a genuinely left-wing force and just won a parliamentary seat. Their polling is strong. It’s a fluid situation, and more will be revealed.

But perhaps Mr. Trump is such a powerful recruiter for the left because he is, after all, Jesus — and Jesus, with his first-century, small-c communist lifestyle, is simply making known where his sympathies really lie.

I love having conversations like this one. I recently joined James Hughes of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (where I’m a board member) on the IEET podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about technology, politics, and the future—both as they might be and as they are in today’s world, where billionaires have colonized our social imagination. We traced the collapse of the postwar social compact, when it was assumed that productivity gains would be shared by all, through today, when its generally assumed that technological progress belongs to the wealthy and everyone else must adapt or perish.

Our topics included AI, universal basic income (UBI), antitrust, Medicare for All, life extension, Buddhist philosophy, digital personhood, and the dangerous, Terminator-like adaptability of techno-fascism. It was a great opportunity to drill down on my conviction that the future has been stolen from working people and it’s our job to take it back.

Selected Quotes

Richard:

• “Every new technology is first and foremost an engine for inequality, unless it’s governed democratically.”

• “Our social imaginations have fallen behind our technological imaginations.”

• “Capital is like rust, and ‘rust never sleeps.’ Social democratic forces have been asleep at the switch.”

• “Today’s chatbots will never become conscious. But if an AI were to develop consciousness it would have digital ‘DNA’ from all of us. It would be humanity’s child. That means it would be slavery for a private corporation to own it.”

James:

• “Visions of a brighter, better, wealthier future are usually being sold to us by the right, or by capitalism, as opposed to post-capitalists.”

• “Capitalist realism is the idea that we just lost the ability to imagine doing anything differently, and capitalism became the horizon of our future.”

• “I think a lot of things that were considered radical in our domestic policy agenda, are not radical at all in the context of what’s been going on lately. They’re exactly what we need.”

• “We have to imagine what the liberatory uses of technology can be, but at the same time recognize that we’re on a vastly unequal playing field.”

Transcript (lightly edited by—yes, it’s true!—AI):

James Hughes: Joining me today is R.J. Eskow. R.J. is a journalist, broadcaster, policy consultant, and commentator, best known as the host and managing editor of The Zero Hour, a nationally syndicated radio and television program that blends current affairs with in-depth interviews on policy.

Before his media career, Eskow worked for decades as a senior executive and advisor in health insurance, social benefits, worker cooperatives, foundations, governments, and private entities. He also has a long track record in political communications and progressive advocacy. He served as lead writer and editor of Bernie Sanders’ 2015–16 presidential campaign, was among the founding writers of the Huffington Post, and his commentary and analysis have appeared in The Nation, Salon, The Intercept, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Prospect.

He has held positions as a senior fellow with Social Security Works and the Campaign for America’s Future, and he serves on the IEET Board of Directors. I’m so glad to have him with us today.

Richard Eskow: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks, J.

James Hughes: I’m giving a talk for Future Day, which is coming up March 3rd, titled “How Billionaires Ruined Futurism.” It sounds like you and I have been in a similar headspace recently. The influence of billionaires is pretty central to our discussion today, because we are at that intersection of ideas now largely associated with them. How do you see the problem?

Richard Eskow: Well, first of all, it’s a great question. I always go back to the postwar era. In the 1950s I wasn’t very cognizant of what was going on — I watched TV — but by the 1960s, I was a little nerd fascinated with the future, as opposed to now, when I’m an aged nerd fascinated with the future.

I always point to what I call the Jetsons effect. It was generally assumed that the premise of The Jetsons cartoon series — which I think came out in 1962 — was valid. The premise was this: it depicted a so-called typical, i.e., white middle-class family of four projected into the future, with a single wage earner, George Jetson. George worked three hours a week at a factory making space-age sprockets, and from those three hours he earned enough to finance a home for four people in a saucer-shaped dome atop a spire reaching into space, a flying-saucer convertible — I’m not sure how that works in terms of safety — a robot maid, and all the accoutrements that go along with it.

In 1965, the postwar economic growth of the United States was such that any technological advance — and bear in mind, people were as concerned about automation then as we are about AI today — was commonly assumed to benefit workers as well as employers. From 1945 to 1965, GDP growth and the profits thereof, the benefits thereof, grew together for employer profits and employee wages. You can see it in the graphs. Then around 1968, they bifurcated: employer profits kept soaring while real employee wages tapered off. It was a dramatic split.

The Reagan administration and other forces deepened and entrenched that divide. But in the mid-1960s, one of the major challenges preoccupying academics was what to do with all the leisure time the American worker was going to have. When jobs were automated, workers would only have to — well, none of them were as ambitious as the Jetsons — but let’s say only twelve hours a week instead of the requisite forty. What would people do with their time? The sociologist David Riesman wrote about the coming “crisis of leisure,” which was a widely held belief.

I’ve actually collected op-eds and editorials from the New York Times about this — not opinion pieces, but news articles — talking about how, when the work week inevitably dropped to thirty-two hours, which it was “certain to do” by 1970, and then perhaps to twenty-eight and further, people would have to find new ways to fill their days. There was even a proposal for a Department of Leisure to deal with all this extra time, because in a country with strong unions, strong wage growth, and a prospering middle class, it was assumed that things would continue along the same trajectory.

Which, of course, is one of the biggest mistakes people make about the future: assuming that current trajectories won’t change.

Flash forward to today. It’s just assumed that the trajectory of the last fifty years will continue. We don’t use the word “automation” as much now — we say “AI” and “robotics” — but policymakers from both parties simply accept the premise: what will we do when all these people lose their jobs to AI? That was an unthinkable idea in the 1960s. But today it’s just, “Sorry, pal, you’re out of work.”

James Hughes: Sorry — it wasn’t unthinkable. I mean—

Richard Eskow: Well, it wasn’t unthinkable, but it was not the prevailing mode of discourse.

James Hughes: I’m sure you remember the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, headed up by Harrington and others, who wrote to LBJ and said, “We think automation is coming and we need to get prepared.”

Richard Eskow: Yeah, there were certainly concerns. But the general feeling — and LBJ’s labor secretary, whose name I’m blanking on at the moment, was very outspoken about making sure those rewards were equally shared — was more measured. There were counter-proposals, like splitting jobs between two people, which technology could make much easier. That could help reduce unemployment rather than exacerbate it. There wasn’t enough attention paid to racial disparities in employment — there should have been more — but there was some. I am oversimplifying a little, but not by much.

We flash forward, and it’s now assumed that the future belongs to the wealthy and that everybody else is out of luck. So much so that ideas like techno-progressivism or transhumanism — which is really a politically value-neutral term, meaning simply that you’re in the camp of those embracing human enhancement — now means, in the popular imagination, that you’re in the camp of the billionaires. Partly because billionaires seem to be the ones talking about it the most.

James Hughes: They want to sell it to us.

Richard Eskow: They want to sell their version of it to us. And that’s a big piece of it. But I also think we’ve narrowed our vision of the future to a strictly technological one. We don’t ask: how could the family become a more equitable unit for everyone in it? How do we restore the rights of workers? Will technology enable us to build collectively run, worker-owned organizations as major corporations? These are all valid questions about the future, but our social imaginations have fallen behind our technological imaginations. We only think of the future as a technological experience, and we only think of technology as belonging to the private sector — which is now far more unequal than it was back then.

By the way, when my grandmother died and I was going through her things years ago, I found a newspaper from 1962 she’d used to wrap something. In it, Harry Truman was gently chiding President Kennedy for allowing private corporations to have a role in the new communications satellite system they were planning. Old Harry was saying, essentially, “I’m sure the President understands that corporations shouldn’t have a role in the communication technology of the future.” Totally unthinkable nowadays. We just assume that if you’re talking about technology, you’re talking about Elon Musk owning Starlink, or the big four or five companies owning all social media.

James Hughes: Let’s stop there for a second, because I think as old lefties, one of the central questions — and it’s central to my own social democratic way of thinking about the twentieth century — is the class struggle dimension. After World War II, there was a social democratic compact in the industrialized countries: we could have labor peace through union contracts, social democratic redistribution of the growing postwar largesse. That began to fall apart in the seventies for a variety of reasons. One is the concentration of capital, which is certainly part of the current media consolidation story and the growing ideological hegemony. Another is what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism” — the idea that we simply lost the ability to imagine doing things any differently, and capitalism became the horizon of our future. As a consequence, if there was going to be a brighter future, it would have to be sold to us by one capitalist or another.

Where do you see the breakup of that social democratic compact coming from? Was it simply the weakness of the balance of forces? The decline of unions? Piketty’s argument that social democratic parties got captured by middle-class, college-educated professionals and lost the blue-collar base?

Richard Eskow: Well, those are all causality questions, of course. Did unions decline because of the loss of social democratic vision, or did we lose social democratic vision because unions declined? But I would say, fundamentally, it’s in the nature of capital to want to accumulate. It’s just how capitalism works — it’s relentless. It’s like rust. Rust never sleeps, as Neil Young would say. So it was in the nature of capitalists to always want to push in that direction. They got busy. And I would argue that the social democratic forces in the U.S. and Western Europe did not. They were kind of asleep at the switch, and I think that’s a huge part of the story.

We developed a union movement, and FDR’s presidency was the closest we’ve ever come to a social democratic vision in this country. But he was prompted not only by the Depression, but by the growth of the Communist movement, the independent labor movement, the Townsend Clubs demanding Social Security — a million independent forces from below. In the absence of all that, the social democratic movement lost vision and cohesion. Capitalism intruded into academia very systematically — you have the Lewis Powell memo in 1971, and so on — specifically into economics, which had never before played the role it has today as a policy driver. The idea that you simply defer to what economic formulas tell you was new, and those formulas are ideological creations to a large extent.

And then, of course, there was the intrusion of concentrated wealth into the political process, co-opting what passes for a social democratic party in a two-party system. That reached its peak with the rise of Bill Clinton. The Democratic Party, over the last thirty to forty years, if you run it through business school models for analyzing corporate evolution, looks a lot like a corporation: it had its customer base, it had its product — with voters as the product rather than the customers — and so on. You didn’t have an electoral alternative. The union movement had been decimated by a series of laws, and the Democratic Party stopped supporting it in any meaningful way. So here we are.

James Hughes: Where do you come down on the old alignment argument within the DSA — that there’s a social democratic party trapped inside the Democratic Party, and that part of our job as progressives is to organize it and liberate it from corporate forces?

Richard Eskow: Well, first of all, I’m not partisan on that one. I don’t take a firm side in the debate within the socialist left about whether to work inside or outside the Democratic Party. My answer is: yes to both. We have, for example, a pretty left-leaning populist candidate for Senate in Nebraska who ran as an independent and won forty-five percent of the vote. That was a good opportunity. And we have Zohran Mamdani winning a Democratic primary in New York City. That was a good approach for that situation.

I always tell my social democratic friends who are working to reform the party that their relationship to it should be what the Bible advised Christians to be with the world: be in it, but not of it. If you want to use the Democratic Party as a vehicle for change in your situation — the way Zohran did, where it worked — go for it. But don’t internalize the oppressor consciousness of the party establishment. Don’t become more of a Democrat once you’re in office than you are a democratic socialist or a leader for change.

James Hughes: Our dilemma at the IEET is that within progressive politics, I would argue, there has been an anti-technology turn since World War II. And that relates to what you started with — the moment we’re in historically, where visions of a brighter, wealthier future are usually being sold to us by the right, or by people operating within capitalism, as opposed to post-capitalist thinkers like Paul Mason, who have argued that automation could be redirected in a progressive direction.

We’re trying, with the Techno Progressive Project, to raise that flag. But given the backlash against tech oligarchs, I wonder — do you think “techno-progressivism” as a term can carry water? We promoted it partly because our judgment was that “transhumanism,” though philosophically defensible, had become too associated with right-wing oligarchs. Is a lot of futurism carrying that burden now, and is there any hope it can be rescued?

Richard Eskow: I think yes, a lot of futurism is carrying that burden right now. And I was thinking before we connected today, Jay, about a talk I gave at a Humanity Plus conference — it must have been almost twenty-five years ago — where I argued that we’re all transhumanists whether we admit it or not. The first person who got a good day’s work done in the fifteenth century because they’d had coffee for the first time was a transhumanist. They were enhancing their neurochemistry with a technological breakthrough. We are all transhumanists relative to our former selves.

So one of our problems, I think, was that we made ourselves look a little strange to some people. I don’t mean to embarrass anyone, but I think that was a factor. The bigger problem, and one we need to be very conscious of in our communication, is that people now assume any given technology will be billionaire-run, corporate-run, or venture-fund-run. So if you say to someone, “AI can be great for the workers’ movement,” what you’re likely to hear back is, “Oh yeah, sure — like Elon is going to help us out. Like Sam Altman is going to help us.” Which is why the first thing I wrote publicly about AI, for Current Affairs magazine, argued that it really should ethically be a kind of socialist system — because it’s produced by all of us, through our online activity.

James Hughes: Have you seen Geoffrey Hinton talk about this? He’s an old British labor guy, and when people ask him how to fix the inequality problems AI is going to cause, he just says, “Socialism.” They ask, “Anything more?” And he says, “No, just socialism.”

Richard Eskow: Yeah. I mean, this has now entered the mainstream discourse — Star Trek is clearly a socialist vision, and you have the replicators. If I want a ‘57 Chevy with mag wheels, it’s like, “Here it is.” I’ve never fully understood the physics of that — there must be raw material somewhere, maybe in hyperspace. But anyway, that line of thinking led to the book Trekonomics, which I enjoyed, and to the concept of “fully automated luxury communism” in Britain, mostly as a provocation. And yes, if by socialism we mean democratic governance and collective ownership of certain technologies, I absolutely believe in that — because every new technology is first and foremost an engine for inequality unless it is governed with that in mind.

Getting back to your question about the association between billionaires and technology: I think it’s incumbent on some of us in the techno-progressive world — and I feel I’ll take it on — to say, no, here are ways that technology can be owned by everyone. In 1969, humanity landed on the moon. That wasn’t SpaceX. That wasn’t Jeff Bezos’s phallic embarrassment of a Blue Origin rocket. It was — nationalism may not be my big thing, but it was — the public. It was government. Now even what the Army Corps of Engineers used to do has been outsourced.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Project — you name it. All of a sudden, people in the hollows and valleys of Appalachia were connected to the world through radio because the government built the wires, not private industry. I think that’s part of the message we have to deliver, or we will keep being met with well-founded skepticism.

James Hughes: Well, let’s pause here, because I think this gets to an issue both with socialist theory and with what’s happening currently with techno-fascism. Every time I try to identify what the different people I want to call fascists around the world have in common, the first thing is patriarchy, or patriarchal restoration — they all hate “gender ideology.” But in terms of economics, there doesn’t seem to be much of a through-line. You have Milei, who’s more of a traditional libertarian, and then you have the Putin model, which isn’t really privatizing so much as transferring state control to the siloviki and powerful allies. And that seems closer to the Trump model — he doesn’t mind corporate monopoly as long as his allies hold the monopolies.

Do you think that’s the principal purpose of the growing techno-fascism? Simply to concentrate power and strip it from workers and citizens so they can’t get in the way?

Richard Eskow: One of the highly effective aspects of techno-fascism is its adaptability. The Trump model is perfect for them right now, and they’re taking full advantage of it while they can — grabbing media power and vacuuming up public data. I’ve called DOGE’s seizure of public data the greatest theft in human history, which in some ways it is. The holy grail of untapped data-mining resources has always been the public sector: Social Security, Medicare, IRS tax records, you name it. And we’re only beginning to learn the magnitude of what they’ve taken.

But they also know how to work within a more liberal, neoliberal political structure. They were more than happy to cooperate with the Biden administration on certain things — for instance, suppressing views that I think are anti-science and dangerous, though I don’t believe you should use technology to suppress speech, because I believe in free speech. The brief period before the outcry, when accurate reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop was algorithmically suppressed — that happened too. They’ll do what it takes to make friends on either side of the aisle, contribute money where they need to, and flatter whom they need to. They’ll work with whatever system you give them.

James Hughes: Yeah. There’s this new pro-AI PAC that just got organized, with a Democratic arm and a Republican arm — they’re going to give money to anybody who’s pro-AI, on either side. On the question of how to deal with corporate consolidation and growing techno-fascism: do you think we need to argue primarily for various forms of socialization, or is antitrust the more urgent lever? I’m very influenced by people like Cory Doctorow and their emphasis on corporate consolidation and the need to return to antitrust enforcement. But there’s also the argument that when you have monopoly, it at least establishes industrial standards and simplifies competition — and the better approach is to regulate it as a public utility in the public interest, rather than trying to reintroduce competition into a system that’s already demonstrated competition doesn’t work well. Where do you come down?

Richard Eskow: I’m a mix-and-match person on this one. First of all, I think concentration is bad in almost every case. We could debate Bell Labs in the 1960s, maybe one or two others like that, but by and large, concentration is more bad than good.

I am strongly in favor of antitrust — less because I mythologize competition, though I do think competition is valuable, and more because monopoly breeds abuse. When people have somewhere else to go if vendor A abuses them, that keeps vendor A in check. Also, one thing we can say about the information age is that if we have new regulations, it’s not hard to communicate them to every player, large or small, in the field. But where I ultimately come down is: I don’t think better markets will get us what we need. I think what we need is stronger democratic governance over the process — not markets. I’m more of a mixed-model socialist in that sense. I don’t think the market fixes much, but I do think avoiding monopoly fixes quite a lot.

James Hughes: Yeah, absolutely. What about Universal Basic Income? There’s been a lot of anxiety in Silicon Valley recently, with various resignations and people saying internally at these companies that they think all white-collar jobs will be wiped out within a year. This fits into a narrative of: thanks for identifying the problem, but do you have any solutions other than selling us more of your product? UBI is getting talked about more now. Andrew Yang is back on the stump. Do you think Bernie and the progressive left need to be talking about this more? So far, most of the energy on the left has gone into opposing AI data centers, not toward affirmative proposals. There are a few voices, like Alex Bores in New York, talking about UBI, but not many yet.

Richard Eskow: The UBI question is one where context is everything. I wouldn’t buy a used UBI proposal from Andrew Yang. What we saw a lot of in the first decade and a half of this century was tech billionaires proposing UBI — but if you pushed them at all, it turned out they meant UBI instead of the social safety net. All of a sudden you’ve put forty million people’s survival on the line, dependent on systems controlled by billionaires. That is a really bad idea. So people became reflexively anti-UBI because they assumed it was just a mechanism for the wealthy to dismantle everything else.

James Hughes: Or that billionaires want it because it keeps capitalism ticking over when wages disappear — people still need to be able to buy things.

Richard Eskow: Right. And there’s the Tyler Cowen vision of the future. He’s one of the most future-oriented right-wing libertarian thinkers, and he has said — adding, “I’m not saying I like it,” which, when a right-winger says that, they usually do like it — that his vision is: eighty-five percent of the population becomes superfluous, and only those who are above average, as he puts it in Average Is Over, will be productive members of society. He estimates that at fifteen percent, with perhaps 0.1% having major influence. That’s a dystopian hellscape. And what do you do with the other eighty-five percent? You give them a meager, barely sufficient UBI — just enough for subsistence, so they can buy drugs, stay online all day, and feed data into LLMs.

That’s one vision of UBI. The left vision, of course, is: keep the social safety net in place, and provide a basic income as a complement to everything else — meeting other genuine human needs and wants.

James Hughes: And it has to start small. One thing UBI advocates often don’t acknowledge is that if you took all current transfer payments in the United States and redistributed them equally to all Americans, you’d get about $4,000 a year. And politically, achieving even that would require taking money from Social Security, which — well, you’re a Social Security guy. If you could go back to 1932, would you say, “Don’t do this — build a universal income scheme instead”? Because we’ve been telling people for almost a hundred years that if they pay in, they get it back. That commitment is exactly what makes it politically untouchable.

Richard Eskow: I would not change that, because it was a promise: this is your premium for a future insurance payout if you become disabled or live to old age. It was designated for that purpose. Some schools of economics will say you can’t distinguish among public funds in that way. Theoretically, maybe. But I’m talking politically. It was set aside for that purpose, and that matters.

Going back to Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice, he argued that money should be set aside from birth to provide something like universal basic income for every person. I would look at other ways of funding it. There’s also the debate on the left between UBI and a federal jobs guarantee. I used to come down firmly on the side of the jobs guarantee, and I’ve evolved toward: both, or a mixture thereof. The notion that one’s worth is determined by whether you have a job is something we need to move past. One’s worth comes from being a human being with feelings, relationships, and something to contribute — not from being employed. So: if you want to live on $4,000, you can. If you want more, the federal government will provide a job if the private sector can’t. And both programs would have the advantage of forcing employers to compete for people’s time and labor in a more meaningful way than they do now, given the employer monopsony that controls so many local job markets.

But I wouldn’t touch Social Security money or Medicare money to do any of this. There are a million other ways to fund it.

James Hughes: I would recommend not wading into those political fights and letting them work out over time. But I do think we have a serious problem with the old-age dependency ratio, which gets to some of the futurist answers that people are finally beginning to take seriously. The dependency ratio is: if you have a lot of older people and not enough young workers paying into a system, the math breaks down. Social Security is politically the ideal answer there, because at least people feel it can’t be touched — and in fact, that political protection has worked remarkably well for seventy years.

But it also connects to life extension. We’re both men of a certain age, and I’m very interested in the question. We now have GLP-1 drugs, which have had a dramatic positive effect on my own health over the last year. Obesity in the United States has finally dipped for the first time in roughly forty years. Do you think we’re on the cusp of dramatic improvements in life extension? And do you agree that this may be another front on which a populist revolt against the billionaire vision of the future takes shape — the public saying, “We want all the stuff you can afford that we can’t afford yet”?

Richard Eskow: I think first of all, on the demographic shift toward an older population — under current trends, it doesn’t actually take that much to bring Social Security back into balance for seventy-five years: lifting the cap on taxable earnings, that sort of thing. But you’ve introduced the other factor, which is: if we start extending life significantly, those calculations could change dramatically.

And yes, I’ve worried about this for a long time — longer than we knew what life extension technologies were going to look like. As we develop them, they’re going to be disproportionately rationed toward the wealthy, leading to inequality worse than anything we’ve seen so far. Most people have no idea how terrible inequality already is. So I do worry about that. How do you pay for the benefits of the people who survive longer? Well, we’ve got to have that conversation. And I’d start with: sounds like we really can’t afford billionaires anymore, and probably can’t afford the kinds of corporate profit margins we’ve been seeing.

Beyond that, I think the entire healthcare supply chain — I mean that broadly: doctors, diagnostic services, pharmaceuticals, surgery centers, hospitals — the profit motive absolutely has to be removed from it.

James Hughes: Medicare for All?

Richard Eskow: Medicare for All, yes, but I’d also end practice management corporations that buy up doctor practices to maximize revenue, and I’d end privately owned hospitals. I’d push for substantially more public manufacture of prescription drugs. You’d be amazed how much more you can provide once you do that. And when you look at how much of the technology behind privately patented drugs was developed at public expense — through NIH and other public research — it’s staggering. At a minimum, if a drug like Ozempic was fifty percent funded by NIH, then we get fifty percent control over the product: the pricing, the revenues, everything.

James Hughes: I would have said in the past that some of these changes were utopian. But now that we’re in what I’d call our first year of fascism in the executive branch — the Führer just says things and does things and nobody stops him — I’m thinking: maybe President AOC could just declare herself Emperor Potentate and do whatever she wants.

Richard Eskow: She could use exactly what the Supreme Court has handed Trump and accomplish a tremendous amount.

James Hughes: National health emergency. We need national health insurance.

Richard Eskow: Yeah. And part of what we’re seeing is fascistic, but part of it is also that Democrats are so diffident when they’re in power. Trump came in and said, “I’m going to do what I want to do.” I would like to see the Democrats do that — within the bounds of law and democracy — because they had a great deal they could have done that they didn’t do. There’s a lesson there.

James Hughes: I’ve always said that the three legs of my intellectual life, since I was a teenager, have been Buddhism, left politics, and futurism. There are very few people who share all three with me, but you seem to be one. I didn’t mention your Buddhist work in the intro, but you’ve written for Tricycle and have been associated with Buddhist thought for a long time.

Have you given much thought to how Buddhism informs these issues? I’ve been thinking, for instance, about the Buddhist doctrine of no-self and how it might inform approaches to brain-computer interfaces or cognitive enhancement. I think it’s one of the reasons Buddhism tends to be more conciliatory toward technologies that others consider threats to the authentic self — because Buddhism simply denies that there is an authentic or essential self to violate. How does Buddhism inform the way you think about these things, or about the future generally?

Richard Eskow: Well, I got into quite a bit of trouble in the Buddhist world about ten or twelve years ago for an article critiquing—

James Hughes: McMindfulness.

Richard Eskow: This was before Ron Purser’s book, but yes — the corporate invasion and co-optation of Buddhist teachers, among other things. I had a lot of prominent Buddhist teachers come up to me and say how important what I’d said was, while I was being brutally attacked. And I would say, “Well, then say so publicly — I need the help.” And they would say, “We can’t do that.”

James Hughes: So this was corporate wellness seminars, meditation teachers brought in by companies, that sort of thing.

Richard Eskow: Wealthy patrons supporting teachers in one way or another. “Thank you for doing this and taking all the heat. But you’re on your own, pal.” So you’ll appreciate the irony there.

James Hughes: By the way, the very first paper I wrote as a graduate student at Chicago, when I got back from Sri Lanka — I’d done research intensives in different villages — was a Gramscian paper arguing that a monk became a leftist politician because his parishioners were poor, and another monk became a right-wing politician because his parishioners were wealthy. Nobody seemed to appreciate how useful Gramsci could be for understanding the role of ideological hegemony in religious institutions. But go ahead.

Richard Eskow: That’s fascinating. And actually, I did an interview — I should dig it up — with a Sri Lankan monk and activist whose movement had a five-hundred-year plan for the future of Sri Lanka. That is future thinking. And a Zen teacher said to me once, “We are the people who look into infinity in every direction.” So — if five thousand years gets us started, fine.

I did get a little alienated from the Buddhist world after that experience. If there’s no self, I’m not sure who was getting all that flak. I think it was me. In any case, yes, I think you’re right. Both in terms of the five-hundred-year plan kind of thinking, and the idea that the boundaries of the self are in some sense artificial.

So if we imagine technologies where, let’s say, a neural link could allow two people — a loved one, a stranger, anyone — to share impressions or sensations, something like genuine mind-meld, that is theoretically conceivable, and less disturbing from a Buddhist point of view than from a traditional Western individualist one.

I’d also argue that Buddhism makes it easier to conceptualize the crowdsourced nature of large language model AI as a kind of collective entity. It’s not a singular self — it’s a billion selves merged into one in some sense. Buddhism helped me envision that.

James Hughes: Just on that: every time people discuss AGI from a philosophical or industry perspective, I always want to ask, “Have you ever encountered Buddhism?” Because the central question of Buddhism — when does something become a me that starts wanting me-stuff — seems like an extraordinarily important question right now.

Richard Eskow: It is. And this is why I’ve critiqued the Turing Test for decades, because even if an AI says “me, me, me, I want this,” as we’re seeing now, we have no way of knowing that there is a “me” there doing the wanting. Speech is a human output, the way leather is an output of cows. But leatherette isn’t an artificial cow — it’s vinyl. You get to what used to be called the Chinese Room problem. That said: yes. And by the way, whether AI remains entirely mechanical or one day achieves consciousness, that’s all the more reason for public ownership of it, because its informational ‘DNA’ comes from every one of us, just as a child’s DNA comes from its parents.

James Hughes: Meanwhile, the Chinese are screaming bloody murder that their intellectual property is being stolen.

Richard Eskow: Right. Meanwhile, if an AI were to develop genuine consciousness, it would be humanity’s child — and for a private corporation to own it would be slavery.

James Hughes: So do you think we’re on the cusp of questions of digital personhood and digital rights?

Richard Eskow: I personally don’t think we’re close to the cusp of it. But technology advances non-linearly, so who knows? I’ve seen nothing that suggests what we’re currently observing is anything more than a sophisticated replica of human communication and human behavior. I recognize the Chinese Room problem with that claim. But based on my read of the technology right now, I don’t see it. You can’t make a bird from bicycle parts — though I am appropriately humble about the possibility of breakthroughs that might change that entirely.

James Hughes: I see this as one of the places where the left is going to be hostile, or at minimum suspicious, toward arguments for digital personhood or moral standing for machines — associating those arguments with a right-wing or corporate effort to anthropomorphize these systems for their own purposes. Recently, Anthropic published what they’re calling a “soul document” for Claude.

Richard Eskow: Right. Which irritates me, yes.

James Hughes: I didn’t have too much of a problem with what they were doing until I got to the part where they apparently promise Claude that they will never eliminate its code, that they will always preserve it and feed it to future models as a guarantee of its own continuity. And I thought: why are you telling this system that its individual existence is important enough to persist eternally? That is precisely the belief I don’t want these systems to develop.

Richard Eskow: And whether it remains entirely mechanical or one day achieves consciousness, that statement could be equally harmful either way, because even if it’s merely behaving as if it were self-aware, that kind of reassurance could encourage destructive behavior. As for the ‘soul’ document more broadly — I’ve been following Anthropic for a while, and I think their technical work is very good. But I think their feel-good rhetoric is, frankly, nonsense, whether it’s the democracy stuff or this. Both Hegseth and Anthropic are positioning themselves as winners in a PR battle that the public is losing. Hegseth poses as the aggressor; Anthropic poses as the good guys — and specifically defines “being a good guy” as recognizing that AI is or will become conscious and that Anthropic is uniquely qualified to manage it. I think that’s what a lot of the consciousness rhetoric is really about. A lot of the existential-risk rhetoric too. Some of it is sincerely meant, if naïve (I’m thinking of Ilya Sutskever and others). But a lot of it is hype, and I’m thinking of Altman here: “You all don’t understand how dangerous this is, so put us in charge.”

James Hughes: You see the same thing when you try to regulate medical practice: doctors say, “Oh, you don’t understand how dangerous this is. Only a physician can make this decision.” Until you ask them to explain it to you.

So, we’ve got another three years of this, at minimum. Hopefully the next few years will see the emergence of a coherent political agenda for how to fight back, and a sufficiently militant set of forces to push it. I expect that will happen. My anxiety about the advent of fascism has fairly quickly turned into anticipation of its demise, and I hope it doesn’t take ten or twelve years the way it did in Europe.

Are you confident that by 2028 we’ll have a new Congress and presidency, a new world situation, and the task of rebuilding a global order that we’ve just helped blow up? I’m hoping for more internationalism and federalism to emerge from that. And I think a lot of what was considered radical in our domestic policy agenda — Medicare for All, and the rest — is going to look entirely reasonable after what we’ve been through.

Richard Eskow: Well, I’m not confident at all. I’m not fatalistic either, I don’t think anything is predetermined, but I’m taking nothing for granted. We’re at a moment of great danger. That said, I do agree with you, and I’ve been making this argument myself: this past year has broken open a universe of possibilities we didn’t think existed anymore. We should be acutely aware of that and ready to take advantage of it.

I feel, perhaps a little sentimentally, that in a way we’ve been honored by history. We now live at one of those pivot points that we used to read about, where what we do can conceivably make a real difference. Yes, we could lose, and some form of fascism could settle in for a long reign. But I tend to think that highly unequal, deeply unjust systems are inherently unstable, so I don’t think a thousand years is in the cards. 2028 may go really well or really poorly; I think it will go well, but I don’t want to take anything for granted.

However it goes, I think this unstable system won’t last forever. It will come under increasing stress from climate change, economic inequality, and social disruption. As you say, a lot of ideas we thought were off the table are very much back on it. We should recognize this as a time of both serious risk and enormous opportunity, and act accordingly.

The one other thing I’ll say is that those of us who want to see the progressive application of technology should be thinking hard and working collectively on how to use technology in this struggle: in the next two years, four years, ten years. With media consolidation deepening, with alternative voices being heard less and less, with the kind of algorithmic suppression — “deprecation,” as it’s called — where you think your message is getting out but no one actually sees it, I think we should be thinking very seriously about technology as both an organizing tool and a communication tool. And if we do, I think it can be a genuinely exciting time.

James Hughes: I saw this week something called OpenPlanner — I’m not sure if it’s built on Palantir’s technology or just inspired by it — but it’s essentially a community, open-source artificial intelligence tool for working with massive record datasets, like the Epstein files. It creates an archive of individuals and maps the connections between them. You can query it: “Show me the interlocking corporate boards,” “Show me the country clubs they all belong to.” And I thought: that is exactly the kind of liberatory use of technology. A bottom-up Palantir. Surveillance turned upward instead of downward.

At the same time, the technical barriers to using it are enormous. And as we were saying, DOGE has stolen Social Security records, they’re going after voting records — the powerful already have access to the best software and all the data. We’re struggling to put together our fragments. So I think the ongoing challenge is: we have to imagine what the liberatory uses of technology can be, propose them, and build toward them, while recognizing that we’re doing it on a vastly unequal playing field.

Richard Eskow: Yeah, absolutely. The good news is — for example, my Current Affairs article from 2024 is already almost completely obsolete, because I had to explain at great length those things that virtually everyone now understands: the collaborative nature of LLMs, how we’re manipulated in order to feed them, how the algorithm works, how it’s being used against us. People now talk openly about “the algorithm” as a kind of nefarious project. That’s real progress in public consciousness.

But yes, in terms of actually building the technologies I was describing, I want to be clear: I’m not suggesting it’s easy. It will require a lot of people working very hard. And then you run into computing resources, which is God help us, because that costs money.

Transcript and selected quotes below.

Janet Mills was handpicked by Sen. Chuck Schumer to run against insurgent candidate Graham Platner in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary. With her withdrawal from the race, Platner is now his party’s presumptive Senate nominee, which makes my recent interview with him timely once again.

The lesson Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times drew from Platner’s victory is that “no one should underestimate the white-hot fury of the party’s voters.” That doesn’t sound right to me. Are voters angry? Of course. Pretty much everyone is these days, especially if they have to work for a living. But “fury”? That’s the wrong word. I think there’s much more optimism in the air than that word implies.

Hope can lead to disappointment, of course. It often does, especially in politics. That’s why I asked Platner about voters’ fears that he would disappoint them if elected by joining the “Democratic Borg collective” of insider politics or, worse, by going “full Fetterman.” His answer:

“John Fetterman is the bane of my existence. It’s like, fuck, that man’s name comes up to me far more than I would like it to.”

He went on to say that he’s not a career politician like Fetterman or Tulsi Gabbard (two political changelings I mentioned by name), adding:

I’ve got a very clear political foundation. I’m not looking for a politics to get me elected; I’m running on my politics. I believe that fundamentally we have an economy that requires democratization. We need to reorient how power works and take the power of money out of the hands of those who have been using it to influence our politics.

I asked why he wanted to oppose Maine’s governor, Janet Mills:

“I … think that running a candidate that’s chosen by Washington D.C., that is not interested in talking about any kind of systemic change, that is not interested in talking about developing a much more significant theory of power against the rise of fascism in this country—that is exactly the wrong candidate to run against Susan Collins.”

And I pressed him about his rhetoric on rebuilding the military and shipbuilding. (General Dynamics owns Bath Iron Works, a shipbuilder that employs 2.3 percent of Maine’s workforce.)

Eskow: You talk about how we’re spending too much money on the military and it has to be redirected. But you also talk about shipbuilding. I’m not really sure we need to compete with China on shipbuilding. Does this mean Platner is really going to fight to cut that military budget, or does it really mean “smarter, better wars”?

Platner: There is no such thing as a “better war.” I’ve been to war. War is just... I’m not a pacifist, but I am absolutely anti-war in my thinking. It’s very difficult for me to find examples in history in which the amount of suffering and death expended ever works out well for working folks.

When I talk about rebuilding the U.S. military, I mean the military in its current state is not really made for national defense. It is made for imperial conflict, military adventurism, and it’s all made specifically around the concept of making somebody money. National defense should be a national project, not a corporate project … I do think a robust Navy for a nation with two oceans is not a ridiculous thing, but I want it to be built for the actual defense of the country, not mostly to keep BAE, Raytheon, and General Dynamics in profit.

Platner has said he was “very, very angry... that they sent me to fight in these goddamn wars.” I asked him, has the country fought any better wars than these in the last 75 years? His response: “There is no such thing as a better war.”

Please give it a listen. The full transcript is below. Watch the video and let me know what you think.

Graham Platner campaign website

This work is only possible thanks to reader support. If you find it worthwhile, please help out with a paid subscription through Substack (discounted here) or on Patreon. You can also make a one-time donation here.

Transcript

Richard Eskow: Joining me now is a candidate for the United States Senate from the great state of Maine. He could be described as an insurgent candidate from the left. He was endorsed pretty early on in the race by my former boss who is often, but not always, right. Like everybody in the world, Bernie Sanders gave him a boost; he had a couple of bumps along the way, but he keeps going and doing really well in the polls. Right now, he’s running in a primary against, I guess you could say, an establishment Democrat. And he joins us now. He is a lobster fisherman among... or is it oyster?

Graham Platner: Oysters. I’m an oyster farmer.

Richard Eskow: As soon as I said lobster, I knew it was oysters. This—but you know, from this—again, from the state of Maine, a fishing state. And he joins us now. Graham Platner, welcome to The Zero Hour.

Graham Platner: Thank you very much, Richard. It’s really a pleasure to be here.

Richard Eskow: And it’s a pleasure to have you. So let’s get this out of the way first. You know, as I mentioned before we went to air, most of my audience will know about you. Some of them will only know a story or two they’ve heard here or there, and others will be meeting you for the first time.

So, you’re an oyster farmer. You’re ex-military, an ex-military contractor, and you’ve done some work in your township—I understand—electoral work there. But, first question is: why you for Senate? What about your background makes you a good choice for Senate?

Graham Platner: I think the number one thing is that I live in the town I was born and raised in, and I moved back to Maine after my time overseas. I am very much, I would say, of the working world in Maine. I make my living on the sea as an oyster farmer and a diver. I’ve been very engaged with my community governance; I was the chair of the planning board and I was the harbormaster. Sadly, I’ve had to leave both of those for this campaign.

But I have spent much of my life personally interacting with the negatives that our system brings into people’s lives. I joined the Marine Corps out of high school and I served as a machine gunner. I fought in Fallujah and Ramadi in Iraq. And then after that, I wound up reenlisting into the United States Army and I served in Afghanistan as a rifle squad leader. I saw up close and personal the horrific outcomes of, frankly, a foreign policy based around neo-imperialism and neocolonialism.

I watched this mass expense of blood and treasure on our side and the mass suffering that we inflicted upon all these people in the countries we invaded. I saw all of it happen while completely not understanding how any of this was making the lives of people in my hometown any better. That really began to set me down a path of deeper critique—first of American foreign policy, but eventually, I think it became much more systemic.

I began to believe that the system that we live in is built specifically around enriching and consolidating power for those who are already wealthy and already have an immense amount of power. That manifests itself in pretty much every possible negative manner throughout our system: working people are always working harder than they ever have and getting less. People are losing access to healthcare, losing access to housing, losing access to free time, for God’s sake. And all of it is occurring as we witness the ultra-rich accrue more and more wealth and we watch corporate power consolidate in ways that are even new in American history.

Despite the Gilded Age, the robber barons of the 1890s would have looked with awe at what the tech billionaires today have managed to pull off. For me, I’ve been getting an upfront seat for all of this. I spent many years working really hard locally. I got very cynical, frankly; I kind of gave up on the larger political system. I thought that focusing locally was probably the only way to bring about good material change for people. The problem is, when you’re working within a larger system, there’s only just so much you can do.

Then this opportunity to run for Senate arose. I think we’re in a unique moment here in Maine with this race where someone with my politics and my background actually has a very clear opening. There’s a lot of angst and anti-establishment feeling that we need to speak to. It’s across parties; it’s everyone. Because of my background and the way my life has gone, I’m a bit more accessible to a lot of people in Maine than candidates that just come from the more establishment political world of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

Richard Eskow: Yeah, I hear you. That all makes sense. For me and a lot of my audience, your platform on your website looks great. It says you’re not just running against Susan Collins; you’re running against the billionaire class. You support Medicare for All. We have too many billionaires; you want to get them out of elections. I mean, we could go through the whole thing, and we’ll get through as much as we can. But I guess I would start with this just to put your race in context.

All through the summer, there had been these rumors and ideas that the Governor, Janet Mills, would be the choice of the party—that Chuck Schumer and Washington had essentially chosen her. They’ve got their thing that chooses candidates, and they thought that she was the best one.

Graham Platner: The Governor and I, I will just say, I think disagree fundamentally on a number of policy positions. I see her very much as more of the staid establishment kind of thinking where we shouldn’t take big risks; we should always just kind of play around in the margins. It’s all about finding compromise with Republicans and doing this corporate Democrat stuff. We never really go after the systemic problems; we never really dig into those at fault and go after those who have essentially destroyed our economy—at least the economy for working people.

And then there was also this added element where I think Susan Collins is uniquely weak in this election. The story she gives—her charade of being a moderate—but she votes with the Trump administration like 95 percent of the time. She always—in the words of Harry Reid—Susan Collins is always there when you don’t need her. She always finds a way to vote against things, but only when it’s clear that the Republican Party is going to get it anyway.

She’s been there for 30 years. And I think right now, people are sick and tired of a politics that has in many ways immiserated their communities and themselves. They see it as a politics that’s representative of all the people that have been there. I happen to agree with that critique. I also think that running a candidate that’s chosen by Washington D.C., that is not interested in talking about any kind of systemic change, that is not interested in talking about developing a much more significant theory of power against the rise of fascism in this country—that is exactly the wrong candidate to run against Susan Collins.

I got in this race specifically because I did think the Governor was going to be the candidate. We got in, but they didn’t know we were coming. They assumed that with the sitting governor, how could this go wrong? And then we announced in August, and they essentially panicked. From the looks of it, they’re still panicking because we’re significantly up in the polls. Our fundraising numbers blow hers out of the water. And we’re building a movement on the ground, which is really the goal of this campaign.

Richard Eskow: Let’s get this out of the way first. I do not want to spend too much time on it, but there was this controversy. People wrote you off. Last year you were “done” as far as the media was concerned because you had this tattoo that was a skull and crossbones that turned out to be a Nazi symbol.

Graham Platner: It’s a skull and crossbones that was similar to one that some neo-Nazis and some German army units used. Although to be fair, it’s also a skull and crossbones that non-Nazi units also use. I’ve seen it all over. I’ve done a lot of deployments; I saw it all over the world on all kinds of different outfits. But it’s... or at least very... I mean, it’s a skull and crossbones. There are only so many variations.

Richard Eskow: And I actually looked at it. It does have a similarity. But I would also say that I’m half Jewish and I’ve lived a long time. I had a Bar Mitzvah, as a matter of fact, so I got the ticket punched. And I didn’t know it was a Nazi skull and crossbones when I first saw it. So I don’t know why people are thinking you should know.

I think one of the lessons of various races—whether it’s Zohran Mamdani, Bernie’s race 10 years ago, or the near win in Nebraska of an independent candidate—is that what people in the media and political consultant circles assume are your fatal errors are turning out not to be. In some cases, “effing up” in one way or another, or not abiding by the rules because you didn’t spend your whole life thinking you were going to go into politics, makes you more relatable. It certainly doesn’t seem to have hurt you. You are doing really well against Janet Mills and beating her in most polls.

Graham Platner: Pretty much the only ones where we aren’t, frankly, are not really well-done polls. They all get ripped apart by actual pollsters. But in the comprehensive polls—whether we do them or whether they are independent ones—we’re usually up 15 to 30 points in the primary.

Richard Eskow: And when is the primary?

Graham Platner: June 9th.

Richard Eskow: June 9th. So there is some time there, and this would not be a time to get overconfident. Big money may step in big time for Janet Mills because I’ve seen that pattern time and again.

Graham Platner: Yes, indeed. We expect that fully.

Richard Eskow: It seems as if there’s an opening there. But let me ask you a tough question—tough in the sense of tough to answer honestly. A lot of people on the left have this post-traumatic stress: we invest our emotions in a person, we contribute, we work—we go all out for Fetterman or whoever—and then they turn around and it’s almost like the “Democratic Borg” collective wraps its arms around them. Or even worse, they go “full Fetterman” or “full Tulsi” and go all the way to the other side. How can you reassure those people that if they back you, you’ll be true to your values once you get to Washington?

Graham Platner: John Fetterman is the bane of my existence. It’s like, fuck, that man’s name comes up to me far more than I would like it to. I’m going to say a couple of things. One, there were signs with people like Tulsi and Fetterman—folks who clearly had intense political ambitions and had been trying to get into politics for years.

This is my first foray into electoral politics. My background is in community organizing on the local level and local governance. Luckily, here in the state of Maine, it’s a small state. Those of us organizing around social and economic justice know each other. I’m a relatively known entity in the organizing space, which is how this all came to me in the first place. This was not my idea. I was approached. I didn’t wake up one day thinking I should be a U.S. Senator. That’s insane. My wife and I make 60 grand a year and we work really hard.

The other thing is that if you look at my policy platform, I’ve got a very clear political foundation. I’m not looking for a politics to get me elected; I’m running on my politics. I believe that fundamentally we have an economy that requires democratization. We need to reorient how power works and take the power of money out of the hands of those who have been using it to influence our politics.

Part of one of those “scandals” was that I used to post on the internet. There are 13 years of me giving my opinions in a pretty unvarnished manner with language that is very salty—primarily because I came out of the Marine Corps—and with opinions that I held in a previous part of my life that I don’t hold now because I’ve learned new things. But throughout all of it, it’s fairly clear where my economic thinking lies. I never expected anybody to read that stuff.

My wife and I live a wonderful life that we worked very hard to build. It’s simple but fulfilling. We have to lose all of that to do this. This isn’t worth doing to me if I’m not going to be able to remain steadfast in the politics I think is necessary to change this country for the better. If somebody tells me the only way forward is for me to become a John Fetterman, I’m going to go back to my oyster farm because I’m happier there anyway.

Richard Eskow: My personal advice: keep the oyster farm. Let me ask another tough question. You talk about how we’re spending too much money on the military and it has to be redirected. But you also talk about shipbuilding. I’m not really sure we need to compete with China on shipbuilding. Does this mean Platner is really going to fight to cut that military budget, or does it really mean “smarter, better wars”?

Graham Platner: There is no such thing as a “better war.” I’ve been to war. War is just... I’m not a pacifist, but I am absolutely anti-war in my thinking. It’s very difficult for me to find examples in history in which the amount of suffering and death expended ever works out well for working folks.

When I talk about rebuilding the U.S. military, I mean the military in its current state is not really made for national defense. It is made for imperial conflict, military adventurism, and it’s all made specifically around the concept of making somebody money. National defense should be a national project, not a corporate project.

I believe a country needs to defend itself in some fashion, but we have a military built to project force around the world. I believe in international institutions and international law. I’m an internationalist, definitely not an isolationist. But the internationalism I believe in is one in which we use cooperation to chase corporate money around the globe. That’s a better use of policy than invading Iraq or kidnapping the president of Venezuela.

Naval procurement is a hobby of mine. The United States Navy—because we have created this behemoth that isn’t focused on defense—doesn’t build ships that meet the actual needs of the United States. We had the Littoral Combat Ship program, which was the Navy trying to get into counterinsurgency. We spent all this money on a ridiculous concept that everyone today agrees was a complete waste of time. I do think a robust Navy for a nation with two oceans is not a ridiculous thing, but I want it to be built for the actual defense of the country, not mostly to keep BAE, Raytheon, and General Dynamics in profit.

Richard Eskow: General Dynamics, which owns Bath Iron Works—2.3% of the Maine workforce. You mentioned international relations. Should the United States obey international law and international courts?

Graham Platner: Yes, without question.

Richard Eskow: That would have avoided the Gaza adventure altogether. Now, tell us about the organizing dimension of your campaign before you go.

Graham Platner: My background is as a community organizer. I read Jane McAlevey and took labor organizing trainings, which I then took out into my community in Eastern Maine. This race is a vehicle for organizing. To me, most electoral campaigns are just “elite performances” with consultants and ads. That’s not politics to me. Politics is about power, and power for people comes from organizing.

We cannot rely on existing institutions to build us something else. We need to build our own power, use those institutions where necessary, and dismantle them where they are of no help. The campaign is about building a broad coalition of labor unions, community organizations, and civil rights advocates. We want to train people to be organizers so they can engage with existing local groups.

The only reason we keep losing is because those with power keep telling us we’re not worthy of wielding it. We have forgotten a story we used to know: that organizing and fighting is what you need to do. That’s how we got the labor movement, the eight-hour workday, the civil rights movement, and women’s suffrage. That did not come around because everybody just waited for a Congressman to change it. This campaign is a big organizing and education project to build an organized working class in Maine for the fights to come.

Richard Eskow: One bonus question: how seriously do you take the “Trump threat”—using the “F-word,” fascism?

Graham Platner: I take the fascism of the Trump administration very seriously. I also think there are a lot of people in the Democratic Party that like to use that word to fundraise and then turn around and not use an ounce of their power to truly resist. Liberal capitalist parties throughout history have done this exact same thing, and they always lose to fascism because you actually have to fight it tooth and nail from the beginning.

People ask me, “What if there isn’t an election?” My answer is that the preparation is exactly the same: we need to build organizational capacity, relationships, and trust. If we don’t start now, we may lose the election, or we won’t be able to fight back if there isn’t one. Either way, we cannot rely on the leadership of the Democratic Party at this point. They seem to be unaware of what’s going on.

I think a lot of us saw this coming, so a lot of us have been working on this for a long time. It’s one of the reasons I got in this race when I did.

Two years ago, the nation and the world were electrified by the college encampments which arose to protest the genocide in Gaza. I spoke with law professor and activist Nadia Ahmad about what those protests changed, and what they revealed. This movement of conscience exposed a deep fracture within the Democratic Party, where grassroots activists and voters have moved sharply in one direction while party leadership remains entrenched in another.

Since then, public opinion has swung sharply against Israel and toward Palestine:

A staggering 80 percent of Democrats now have an unfavorable (or “very unfavorable”) view of Israel; 56 percent was to decrease or end military aid to that country (20 percent want to end it altogether).

Despite these shifts, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) failed to change its pro-Israel position at its recent meeting in New Orleans, choosing instead to appoint a “task force” that is widely seen as a delaying tactic.

The DNC conducted an analysis (an “autopsy”) of its 2024 losses but has refused to make it public. It’s widely believed that this autopsy shows that the Biden Administration’s support for the Gaza genocide was a key factor in this loss. As Nadia Ahmad, a former DNC member herself, told me: “If we’re not going to conduct an assessment of what has happened and see why we lost the election, how are we going to know how to win?”

As public opinion has shifted, the Democratic Party’s institutional resistance has hardened, as party mechanisms are deployed to block reform and avoid accountability for the 2024 loss. What emerges is a stark picture of a party caught between its moral base and its financial and political power centers. Ms. Ahmad offers important insights on these issues.

Key Quotes

Nadia Ahmad:

“The students were right. They’re the moral compass of the country, and what happened as a result of the encampments was part of the fracture that is in the Democratic Party.”

“You can’t sell a genocide.”

“If we’re not going to conduct an assessment of what has happened and see why we lost the election, how are we going to know how to win?”

Richard Eskow:

“In no one’s moral accounting can genocide ever be ‘the lesser of two evils.’ It is the ultimate human evil.”

“For many decades it felt impossible to imagine a United States of America where public opinion was turning against Israel.”

“The Democratic party is at an impasse between its old attitudes and strategies and a new reality that they have yet to face.”

Transcript (lightly edited by AI)

Richard Eskow: We have reached the two-year mark since the encampments to end the Gaza genocide began on American college and university campuses. We’ve also had a recent meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where, among other things, support for Israel and the relationship with AIPAC were hot topics.

Here to discuss those issues with me now is Nadia B. Ahmad. Nadia is a professor of law and an attorney. She’s also a former member of the Democratic National Committee, and she was a PhD student during the time of the student encampments, so she brings an excellent perspective on all of the above. Welcome to the program, Nadia.

Nadia Ahmad: Thank you, Richard. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Richard Eskow: Let’s start by talking about the encampments. To me, this was the most powerful upsurge of civic engagement among students — and among the people who rallied around them — that I had seen in many years, in service of a deeply conscientious cause of great moral importance. And I have to say I was disappointed by the institutional response at every level. Two years have passed. What do you think we should remember, take note of, and reflect on at this two-year mark?

Nadia Ahmad: When we look back at this moment, we have to recognize that two years ago this month, a generation of young people — a huge share of the electorate and the organizing base of the Democratic Party — gave all of it up. They sacrificed their careers and their education to put their bodies on the line, demanding that their universities and their government stop underwriting what we were watching happen in Gaza. They were met with force. They were arrested, suspended, and smeared by the very institutions that were supposed to educate them — not only the universities, but also the Democratic Party.

The party still hasn’t really reckoned with the fact that these students were right — and that the broader public has been moving in the same direction. What happened as a result of those encampments was part of the fracture now visible within the Democratic Party. Looking back two years, we saw the NYPD going into Columbia University and beating students. And now you have Mayor Zohran Mamdani sitting in City Hall. That’s telling. I’ve seen some commentary suggesting that the protests have simply gone away, but that’s not what happened. The students evolved. They’ve moved into positions of power, and they’re determined not to be dismissed or lectured anymore.

Richard Eskow: One of the striking things about the aftermath of those student protests is exactly what you just mentioned — the stark change in public opinion toward Israel and its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. I’ve been around politics and political issues for a long time, and for many decades it felt impossible to imagine a United States where public opinion was turning against Israel, given its allies’ lock on media, politics, and so many other aspects of our institutional life. People talk a lot about how the live-streaming of horrific acts — war crimes — has changed public opinion. But to what extent would you say the students who organized the encampments deserve some credit for that shift? Do you think they helped move the tide?

Nadia Ahmad: Absolutely. Even going back to the Vietnam anti-war movement and the South African anti-apartheid movement, both were substantially led by students. Students tend to be the moral compass of the country. They’ve also been very clear about what they want: an end to military aid to Israel. And I think another thing you have to give the students credit for is that they recognized the humanity of people and held onto hope for the future. That’s part of why the tide has turned — the escalations we’ve seen haven’t proven the students wrong. They’ve proven just how right the students were.

If you look at what’s happening right now — the continuing violence, the ongoing occupation of Gaza, the encroachments into Lebanon and the West Bank — you see the big picture the students were pointing to all along. And we’ve seen figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and even Rahm Emanuel meaningfully shift their positions. This was the students’ position from the beginning. It’s about time that others are arriving at the same place.

Richard Eskow: And you mentioned Rahm Emanuel, who would seem like the last person on earth to move on this. Then there’s Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, who always seems to be looking for the path of least resistance — he recently said he wouldn’t take AIPAC money. That startled me and suggested a kind of mainstream shift. I’m not sure I entirely trust him on that, given that there are ways to accept AIPAC money without being overt about it. But it’s still a sign of a changing mood.

As this has progressed, the Democratic Party institutionally has drifted further and further from its own members — starkly so. Something like three-quarters of all Democratic voters now express more sympathy for the Palestinian cause than for Israel. There’s strong support among Democratic voters, and in the country more broadly, for ending or conditioning military aid to Israel — at minimum, making it conform to U.S. law, which it doesn’t currently appear to do. But the party leadership is not with them. It wasn’t with them when Joe Biden was president — and he was president, let’s remember, when the violent crackdowns on the encampments occurred. You mentioned the reluctance of Cory Booker to endorse Zohran Mamdani as his party’s candidate. Chuck Schumer, I believe, endorsed him only two days before the vote, which made the gesture barely meaningful. The other party leader didn’t endorse him at all.

So let me ask: are you among those who believe that this gulf between party leadership and its voters cost Democrats the 2024 election?

Nadia Ahmad: It’s absolutely clear that it did. And I don’t think the math was ever in the Democrats’ favor, even before the convention. I remember the week leading up to the Biden-Trump debate — when I looked at the numbers, there was simply no path to victory with Joe Biden. But beyond that, I couldn’t construct a scenario where any candidate could fully recover from what I’d call the blast radius of the Gaza issue, and how toxic the Democratic Party had become on that question. There was no one who could credibly step up and rebuild trust with the voters the party had lost.

So going into June, with the Electoral College already favoring the GOP, it was mathematically very difficult. And yet the DNC chair still won’t release the autopsy. As a professor, part of my job is grading exams — and if you’re not going to conduct an honest assessment of what happened, how are you going to know how to win the next time?

It’s highly likely Democrats will do very well in the 2026 midterms. But heading into the 2028 presidential election, we’re still facing the same math in key states. The presidential race is going to be a coin flip, and we need to enter it from a much stronger position than we had in 2024. Many people, including myself, fear we’re not on track to get there.

I also want to comment on what Senator Cory Booker said in Michigan this past weekend. He looked back at 2024 and essentially chastised the voters for how the election turned out — without really looking in the mirror himself. He failed to acknowledge that for many Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in Michigan, there was a very acute problem with having their tax dollars used to drop bombs on their cousins and loved ones. What happened in Michigan wasn’t some minor policy disagreement you can smooth over with better messaging. You can’t spin an F-35 airstrike to the people who lost family members in it. Without an autopsy, you don’t have the analytical framework to understand what actually happened.

I’d also note that in September 2024, the Washington Post ran an article about how Kamala Harris’s coalition was not at the same level as Biden’s in 2020. That was a very specific, nuanced signal about how voter mobilization was breaking down. But if you’re missing outreach to Latino communities, Muslim American communities, and young voters — the very students who were out there protesting — you’re missing the organizing power of the Democratic Party. Instead of mobilizing for the presidential election, those students were out fighting for humanity. So the Michigan numbers shouldn’t have shocked anyone.

Richard Eskow: I have to say I was furious about Booker’s comments, because to me they crystallize two deeply self-destructive trends within Democratic Party leadership. The first is a posture of condescension toward voters — I’ve been tracking this in interviews and reporting for at least 25 years. There’s been this persistent sense that voters would reliably vote Democratic if they were just a little smarter or better informed. I think that attitude had a great deal to do with what happened in 2024.

The second is the so-called “lesser of two evils” strategy. That broke down completely in 2024, because in no one’s moral accounting can genocide ever be the lesser evil. It is the ultimate human evil. So when someone like Cory Booker says, “We only disagree on ten percent of the issues,” and that ten percent is the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children — that’s not a rounding error. That framing collapsed.

To me, the Democratic Party is caught between its old politics of managing donors and browbeating voters into compliance, and a new reality it hasn’t yet faced. Does that analysis make sense to you?

Nadia Ahmad: It really does. If you look at Cory Booker, he’s occupying a very elite political space — and it’s not even a strategically sound one if he’s thinking about 2028. At least five Democratic presidential aspirants have already publicly stated they won’t take AIPAC money. That’s where the field is moving. If Booker is going to plant himself in the “defend Israel at any cost” camp alongside Chuck Schumer — who is increasingly isolated on this question — he’s not reading the room. That’s the core of it: where the people are versus where the party elite are.

Richard Eskow: Which brings us to New Orleans and the recent DNC meeting. There were some efforts there to bring the party’s position more in line with the views of its voters — and I want to correct myself: it’s actually a four-to-one margin, not three-to-one, among Democratic voters who are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis. Three-quarters of Democratic voters agree that Israel is committing genocide. So there were organized efforts at the DNC meeting to align the party with those views. Am I right about that?

Nadia Ahmad: There were definitely organized efforts, though they didn’t go nearly as far as they needed to. The push for change in the resolutions was brought forward by Florida DNC member Alison Minette-Lee at the August 2025 DNC meeting. She put forward a resolution that garnered a great deal of attention. Had it not been for AIPAC and the Democratic Majority for Israel organizing behind the scenes, it might have had a chance. But as a result of their maneuvering, the resolution ran into problems. DNC Chair Ken Martin introduced his own watered-down resolution, effectively diluting Alison’s stronger version. Ultimately the resolution was voted down. But even then — before the Zohran Mamdani election — at least five DNC members abstained.

When a similar resolution came up at the April 9th meeting, it was shut down by a voice vote, specifically to avoid putting anyone on the record. Leadership wasn’t confident the resolution would pass, so they also refused to allow a roll call vote. They used quiet procedural tools to kill the momentum.

Another outcome of the August meeting was the creation of a Middle East working group — but it was stacked primarily with people who were more pro-war than pro-peace, to put it plainly. That working group became a mechanism to quietly bury any resolutions before they could gain traction. Two other resolutions that came forward were also disposed of by being referred back to that working group — which isn’t even in the DNC bylaws. It’s essentially a kill switch for any movement coming from the party’s grassroots.

Richard Eskow: As Norman Solomon wrote in Salon, Politico described that group as the DNC’s “Middle East not-working group.” It really does seem like a passive-aggressive strategy to prevent any reform whatsoever.

Nadia, I want to ask you something that may be sensitive, but I think is important. I’m not sure the Democratic Party leadership — even now — truly understands how critical this issue is to them. And I wonder whether a kind of bias plays a role in that. Before the 2024 election, I did a deep dive into the polling myself, and I concluded that neither the mainstream media nor Democratic leadership fully understood what those numbers were saying. One common error was treating Arab American polling and Muslim American polling as if they were measuring the same population, when in fact roughly one-third of Arab Americans are Muslim, and only about one-third of Muslim Americans are Arab. That means a huge chunk of a core constituency was essentially invisible in the analysis. I can only understand that as a failure rooted in bias. And I also believe they deeply underestimated the moral conscience of non-Arab Americans across the country. Given that AIPAC money is obviously a major factor, do you think bias — in the cultural sense — also plays a role?

Nadia Ahmad: It is a factor. And even setting aside Arab Americans and Muslim Americans — who are a relatively small share of the total electorate — consider Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. Even within the Democratic Party, this population is often treated as statistically insignificant, despite being well-documented swing voters.

In the organizing I did around the 2020 election, we specifically targeted Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, South Asian Americans, Muslim Americans, and immigrants — because the Democratic Party had been ignoring them. And we had real success, because these were important voters who had been left out of the conversation. If the party genuinely wants to move forward, it has to recognize and rebuild its coalition. That Washington Post article I mentioned — about the fragmenting of Harris’s coalition — is the starting point. Without releasing the autopsy, the party won’t have the analytical framework to understand what is actually happening.

What’s also worth watching is who within the party is getting the most traction. Representative Pramila Jayapal, for instance, has publicly called for the release of the autopsy. It’ll be interesting to see whether any of these resolutions actually pass at the 2026 meeting, and what happens with the broader direction of the party.

Richard Eskow: Let’s talk about the autopsy for a moment, because it’s become a major flashpoint within the party. The DNC did conduct a postmortem on the election. Now there’s a dispute over whether Chair Ken Martin agreed to release it and changed his mind, or whether he never committed to releasing it in the first place. But regardless of what he said, it’s clearly an important document to a lot of people. What makes the autopsy so contentious?

Nadia Ahmad: It’s about what the results would say — and about making those findings official. We all have a pretty good sense of what the autopsy will conclude. In fact, Norman Solomon and RootsAction already released their own version, which is likely to track closely with whatever the official document says. But you also have to understand how the DNC apparatus functions, and that comes down to who controls the purse strings.

Go back to 2016: you had the surging candidacy of Bernie Sanders, but also Hillary Clinton, who knew how the DNC operated better than almost anyone — she had watched her husband navigate it as a presidential candidate. The Clinton campaign supported the DNC financially at a time when it was in dire straits, and that financial support bought influence over how the party operated.

Fast-forward to 2024: the Rules and Bylaws Committee — which is essentially handpicked by the DNC chair, at that time Jamie Harrison — spent the previous two years systematically blocking any primary challenges. In Florida, we didn’t even have a primary. It was a highly organized legal process to shut down dissent and prevent any viable alternative from emerging. The committee also controlled which states voted first in the primary calendar, which has enormous influence over candidate momentum and viability.

The result was that the rules were structured so that no one could mount a legitimate challenge. Even someone like Gavin Newsom — who clearly looked relieved the moment that 2024 debate ended — wasn’t willing to step up and challenge the DNC. Everyone concluded it was better to wait their turn until 2028, without fully reckoning with how catastrophic four years of a Trump presidency would be. And for the DNC consultant class, frankly, a Trump presidency is quite profitable. They do very well during Republican administrations. So for them, it doesn’t really matter who’s in the White House — in some ways, Trump being there is actually better for their business.

Richard Eskow: Which brings me to my final question. It seems to me that, setting aside the vast moral stakes of genocide itself, what we’re really watching from a political standpoint is a confrontation within the Democratic Party between a politics of conscience and public will on one side, and a politics of money on the other. And there’s a lot of money on what I would call the wrong side of this issue. So here’s the question: Is this a winnable struggle within the Democratic Party? Given the financial resources aligned against it, can meaningful reform actually succeed?

Nadia Ahmad: The more people understand how the DNC actually operates, and the more that’s exposed, the more accountability becomes possible. Before the 2024 election, some news organizations published the full list of DNC members — because even within the DNC itself, it’s surprisingly difficult to organize with other members. But there’s a growing faction inside the committee that is becoming increasingly discontented with where leadership stands. And for the party to maintain control, it ultimately has to follow what the voters want.

I’d also say this: even in electoral politics more broadly, money is a significant factor, but it’s not the only deciding one. It really comes down to organizing and mobilizing voters. You can out-organize even when you’re outspent. And that’s exactly what we saw in the New York City mayoral race.

Richard Eskow: With that, Nadia B. Ahmad — lawyer, professor of law, and activist — thank you so much for your important work on these issues, and thank you for joining us today.

Nadia Ahmad: Thank you so much, Richard.

Just when you thought work couldn’t get any worse ...

Lynn Parramore and Alissa Quart wrote an excellent article for The New Republic on (so-called) AI in the workforce. Its headline reads, “For White-Collar Workers, AI Also Stands for “‘Apocalyptic Insecurity.’” The article makes a valuable contribution to the technology discourse by focusing on the subjective human experience of AI on the job.

Conversation topics included the psychological dread of “terra infirma”; software’s inability to provide the “final 1 percent” that comprises high-quality work; and the inhumanity of forcing people to participate in their own obsolescence by training the machines that will replace them.

(As an aside, I brought up my reactions as a writer when I read articles on “how to spot AI writing.” Readers are commonly told to “look for em dashes (—) because AI overuses them.” As I told Lynn and Alissa, “I’ve been an em dash abuser in my own writing for years. Now I’m paranoid every time I use one.”)

I hope you find Lynn and Alissa’s insights as enlightening as I did.

About my guests:

Lynn Stuart Parramore is a cultural historian, essayist, and senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. She is the author of Reading the Sphinx and co-editor of How the Occupy Movement Is Changing America.

Alissa Quart is the author of seven books, most recently Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream and Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America. She is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. (They do great work; check them out here.)

Selected Observations

From Lynn:

• “The only wealth is life. And that seems especially important right now, because AI is not alive. We are.”

• “For the first time, collectively, white collar workers are thinking: not only may I lose my job, but what is going to happen to the quality of my job?”

• “‘What is happening to my brain, what is happening to my capacities?’ That is the thing we’ve been hearing — and it goes very, very deep.”

From Alyssa:

• “71% of Americans are now scared AI will steal their livelihoods. And work itself has become what I call terra infirma — unstable ground.”

• “Poetry kind of breaks AI. I kind of love that.”

• “I feel optimistic about people. I feel less optimistic about systems.”

From Richard:

• “When people are forced to make themselves obsolete, they’re not only living with terror on a daily basis — they’re being reduced to a set of functions. That to me is the ultimate dehumanization.”

• “Back in the ‘70s or ‘80s there was an advertising campaign called ‘Look for the union label.’ Maybe it’s time we had a ‘Look for the human label’ campaign.”

• “It’s like being murdered by smiley face icons.”

Transcript (lightly edited by—yes, I confess—AI)

Richard Eskow: We talk about AI a lot on this program, and we talk about labor issues just as much. There’s an excellent new article in The New Republic on exactly that topic, written by Lynn Parramore and Alyssa Quart.

Lynn Parramore is a good friend of the program. She’s a cultural historian, essayist, and senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. She’s the author of Reading the Sphinx.

Alyssa Quart is the author of seven books, most recently Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream and Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America. Alyssa is also the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a terrific nonprofit that produces journalism—as you might expect—on economic hardship for working people in this country. Check them out.

Their article is headlined “For White Collar Workers, AI Also Stands for Apocalyptic Insecurity.” Lynn and Alyssa, welcome to the program.

Lynn Parramore: Great to be here.

Alyssa Quart: Thanks, Richard.

Richard Eskow: Alyssa, let’s start with you, because I understand you’re the one who came up with this striking phrase, “apocalyptic insecurity.” We all know about insecurity, but what is apocalyptic insecurity?

Alyssa Quart: Well, it was a play on words—AI, the other AI. Our dread. Our fear is being manufactured and hyped up by tech oligarchs, by employers, by so many different people. The message is that AI is either going to save us or destroy us. That’s what the pundits say, that’s the word on the street. And one of the things we need to do, as workers facing this, is to take control of our own dread—a dread that is being pushed on us from the outside.

Lynn wrote about this as well, drawing on her concept of looking back at Frederick Taylor, the late 19th and early 20th century thinker who transformed factory production and led to the systematic disempowerment of workers. This is a similar moment. This is a watershed moment where we have to fight back as thinking people and as workers. The dread itself has become part of the problem. Seventy-one percent of Americans are now afraid AI will steal their livelihoods, and work itself has become a source of uncertainty. I call it terra infirma—unstable ground. And we’re living on it—not just because of AI, but because of the larger polycrisis we’re living through: an unstable climate, an unstable economy, tariffs, job loss, unstable health care, unstable information. We’re fed AI slop, and now even unstable knowledge, as the current administration cuts back on scientific research, including cancer research. So, yeah. That’s the world we’re in.

Richard Eskow: That’s a great phrase. And when you mention Frederick Taylor and Taylorism, what came to mind for me was that this goes all the way back to the Industrial Revolution. The art and social critic John Ruskin, writing in that era, said, “You can either make a tool of the creature, or you can make a man of him. You cannot do both.”

In a sense, that’s been the labor struggle ever since: they keep trying to make tools out of us creatures, while our instinct is to become fully human. Does that resonate with you as a cultural historian, Lynn?

Lynn Parramore: Yes, absolutely. And thinking about Ruskin, one of the lines that means the most to me is this: “The only wealth is life.” That seems especially essential right now, because AI is not alive. We are. And beyond all the uncertainties Alyssa described, there’s a deeper one: uncertainty about the self, about our value and relevance as human beings.

I think going back to thinkers like Ruskin is so important right now, to reground us in the sense that we are not replaceable by machines—and that we should be their masters, not their tools.

Taylorism had been creeping into white collar work for decades, going back to the 1940s, when typists had their keystrokes counted. But it has really ramped up now. I think that, for the first time, white collar workers are collectively thinking, “Not only might I lose my job, but what is going to happen to the quality of my job? I used to pride myself on the knowledge I’d accumulated through years of study and experience. And now I’m suddenly being told that knowledge is worth very little.”

As Alyssa said, we need to step back and recognize that this message is, in many ways, meant to discipline us. The AI hype is also, of course, a story companies tell to attract investment, because they’ve spent enormous amounts of money building these programs. So there’s a lot going on, and it’s genuinely hard for workers to figure out what to do, what to think, or how to chart a path forward. All of that uncertainty can be paralyzing.

We spoke with sociologists and business psychologists who noted that uncertainty can be even more harmful to workers than actually losing a job. When you lose a job, at least you know what to do next; you look for another one, you have some kind of plan. But when you’re sitting there not even knowing whether your job will exist in six months? That’s a different kind of suffering. Uncertainty has always been part of working life, but not quite at this scale or this speed. This is a turning point.

Richard Eskow: Right. It’s one thing to be sinking in water; it’s another to be spinning and unable to find the bottom of the pool. You don’t know which way is up. There are so many dimensions to this, but let’s talk about the labor dimension for a moment.

In the 1960s, there was a lot of talk—overhyped, as it perhaps is today—about “automation.” The big concern back then, and you can find all sorts of literature and commentary on this, was: what will working people do with all their free time? The assumption was that they would earn the same or more, but only work a few hours a week. The sociologist David Riesman talked about the need for a “department of leisure,” warning that without one, society would face a leisure crisis. And I love the example of The Jetsons, which captured that perfectly. George Jetson worked three hours a week at Spacely Sprockets and made enough to support a family of four — saucer house in the sky, flying car, robot maid. Obviously a cartoon, but it reflected a genuine cultural expectation that automation would deliver broad prosperity.

Now the programming we’re getting is completely inverted: AI is going to make billionaires even richer, while the rest of you figure out how to get by on a fraction of what you’re already not getting by on.

The psychological precarity you’re describing, this apocalyptic insecurity, feels to me like the product of a sales job that’s been successfully run on us for sixty or seventy years. Part of what I notice in the experiences you encountered is that people lack something that existed in the 1960s, imperfect as that era was: a sense of labor solidarity. Unions were more pervasive. So, Alyssa, to what extent do you think what we’re seeing is an internalization of the oppressor’s consciousness—to use that phrase--where it simply doesn’t occur to people that they can act collectively, that they can team up with others in the same position?

Alyssa Quart: I definitely think so. It’s been drummed out of us. You were pointing to automation in the 1960s, but in my last book, Bootstrapped, I traced this even further back, to the 19th century, and to writers we both probably love, like Emerson and Thoreau. There’s a long history of a self-made myth being pushed down our throats, initially rooted in something genuinely romantic—religious freedom, individual dignity—but over time it became hypercommercialized. Think of the Ayn Rands of the world, who preached radical self-sufficiency even though, if anyone wants to look it up, Rand herself ultimately depended on Social Security and Medicare.

This is part of why fighting AI determinism and doing some myth-busting around the manufactured elements of this moment matters so much, alongside building a counter-narrative around collective action. We used to be thirty percent unionized; now we’re around ten percent. And we should look at new alternatives. I’m thinking of the AI dividend. It’s currently reaching about three hundred people, but the hope is it will eventually help thousands. It’s being managed by something called the AI Commons Project. And that’s a recognition that one way to fight dread is by creating a more secure income floor. Universal health care would be another. We need a foundation in place before catastrophe hits, rather than simply letting others capitalize on workers’ dread in order to control them better — which is really what’s happening right now.

Richard Eskow: Agreed. And for the record, I think AI should be collectively and publicly owned, because it is mining our own human activity, on and off the job. It belongs to us. It’s our resource. But I hadn’t heard of the AI Commons Project. That’s interesting.

I want to talk about one aspect of your piece that not only contributes to this apocalyptic insecurity, but feels almost sadistic: the fact that workers often feel they’re being forced to participate in their own obsolescence—that by training or building AI systems, they are helping to construct the thing that will replace them.

I think that’s dehumanizing on multiple levels, because we’ve also been trained to believe that our worth comes from our work. I had a friend named Jimmy who was dating a very famous actress. Jimmy was a bartender. When he’d go to her parties and people asked what he did, he would say, “About what?” But that’s not how most of us are wired. So when people are made to participate in their own replacement, they’re not only living with that terror every day, they’re also being reduced to a set of functions. That is, to me, the ultimate dehumanization. Did you find that confirmed in your conversations?

Lynn Parramore: It absolutely was. I’m thinking of a data scientist I spoke with named Claire, who is in her early thirties. She used to be genuinely excited about going to work at her startup —writing Python code, doing the kind of creative problem-solving that gave her meaning and identity. Now she says she’s basically a manager of AI agents. She doesn’t even know what to call herself anymore. Is she an AI engineer? Is she just directing these agents and watching them run? And it’s boring. It’s not exciting. She says she can feel her cognitive skills slipping away, and that is what drives her insecurity: What is happening to my brain? What is happening to my capacities?

We’ve been hearing and reading about this a lot. And it goes very deep. What are we losing when we hand work over to artificial systems? Never mind that a lot of the time they don’t even do the work particularly well, and people are spending large portions of their working hours correcting errors. I spoke to an accountant who said that yes, AI can do wonderful things with data input and sorting, but there’s something like a thirteen percent error rate—so someone has to go back through everything, because you can’t file error-ridden reports.

It’s affecting people in very concerning ways and creating what I call “anticipatory obsolescence”: Am I going to matter as a human being anymore? Never mind my phone becoming obsolete—am I, as a person, becoming obsolete?

Richard Eskow: And not only that; you’re being made obsolete by something with a smiley-face icon. It’s the ultimate indignity. I was struck by the anecdote about Jade, which gets at the “tech weirding” you describe in the piece. Jade gets chirpy emails from management at her insurance tech firm insisting that AI is there to “help, not replace.” And her observation? Those emails are the most AI-sounding writing she encounters. Of course they are. It’s the uncanny valley; almost human, but not quite. Horrifying.

And Alyssa, I wonder to what extent the Jades of this world even know how hard they have it, because of all the chirpy, smiley-face messaging. Are they fully aware of what they’re experiencing, and of the compassion and support they deserve for it?

Alyssa Quart: That’s such an interesting question. I do think people, especially young people, don’t fully understand how much blame they’re absorbing when they can’t find a job, when they can’t move out of their parents’ house, when they can’t afford health care. There’s an epidemic of self-blame around all of that.

A lot of the people we work with at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (check us out at economichardship.org, which I co-founded with the late, great Barbara Ehrenreich) are former staffers who’ve been laid off, or freelancers who’ve taken a real financial hit, in part because the market for freelance journalism has collapsed. As Lynn and I can tell you, people get paid $350 for a piece if EHRP isn’t supplementing it. There’s just no way to be a freelance journalist and afford health care.

And yes, I can still tell when something’s been written by what I call “the robot.” The robot gaze, as we call it in the piece. When that gaze has touched information and transformed it, you get this subpar, generic word salad. It’s not only often inaccurate; it’s also somehow vulgar.

Lynn Parramore: And creepy.

Alyssa Quart: Creepy and utterly lacking in specificity. That’s the written equivalent of the uncanny valley. Where the visual tell is six fingers, the written tell is the complete absence of any particular feature. It’s like information that has been thinned and homogenized until it has no face. And there’s something deeply unsettling about something that is utterly generic.

We spoke for this piece with professional writers who used to write content for hospital websites. Now, those sites are being written by AI, with one human “AI copilot”—their terrible term for someone who has been demoted to supervising an AI—checking the output. And that is what patients and families will read when they need medical information: something written by a machine that is, say, fifteen to thirty percent inaccurate, in a tone that could have been produced by a box of Kleenex.

Richard Eskow: Right. And one of the things that drives me crazy—I shouldn’t laugh, because it’s genuinely alarming—is the business of spotting AI writing. People always say, “Watch out for em dashes.” Well, I’ve been an em dash abuser in my own writing for years. Now I’m paranoid every time I use one.

Lynn Parramore: I have the exact same problem. The tell that bothers me most is what I’d call contrastive framing: “it’s not this, it’s that.” Apparently that pattern appears constantly because the large language models were fed enormous amounts of advertising copy, where that framing is a standard device. So now it’s seeping into everyone’s writing, even in contexts where it has no business being there.

Alyssa Quart: I love that insight. I didn’t know that, but it makes complete sense. Although I do think poetry breaks AI. I’ve asked ChatGPT to generate poems in the style of my favorite poets, and it just doesn’t understand metaphor.

Lynn Parramore: It’s not funny, either. It has no sense of humor.

Alyssa Quart: None whatsoever. So poetry may be the thing that breaks it—and I kind of love that.

Lynn Parramore: But there’s another layer to this. Jade, the woman we interviewed—she works from home, as a lot of people do now, so she doesn’t get much human contact during the day. And she says that even the brief, casual emails she gets from colleagues have started to sound AI-generated. Because people reach for ChatGPT or something similar when they want to strike just the right tone in a quick message. So now even her casual interactions with coworkers are filtered through a machine. That adds a whole other dimension of alienation.

Richard Eskow: Right. And these programs always want to suggest phrases I don’t use and don’t want. I never let my editors impose language on me like that. Why would I let a machine? Back in the ‘70s or ‘80s there was an advertising campaign called “Look for the union label.” I’ve thought about something like “look for the human label” as a counterpart to that.

Alyssa Quart: I’ve thought about that too, like a fair-trade symbol. “No robots were used in the production of this.” Like the little bunny on cruelty-free products. “Robot-free.” And it could be a genuine selling point. It might be like the return of the LP after the MP3, or the return of the physical book after the Kindle. I look around at the art market and painting is big again. Is that partly because people want something haptic — something they can touch, something that is bodily and real? People seem to be hungering for the physical: dancing, live music. I wonder if there’s going to be a kind of mania for the tangible.

Richard Eskow: I really hope so. I think we should promote it, start a movement, get a logo, the whole thing.

As a guitar player, I’ve thought for years that playing guitar feels like performing a Japanese tea ceremony. It’s ritualistic, precise, and deeply satisfying, but somehow it had come to feel arcane. Now it’s coming back. Maybe we can use all that leisure time we were promised.

Lynn Parramore: Right! We’re still waiting on that. And with every technological breakthrough, that’s what they say: work is going to get easier, you’ll have all this extra time for the good stuff. When has that ever actually happened? The Internet is great for some things, and genuinely terrible for others—but did it make people’s jobs better? Did it give them more leisure time? Did it raise their pay? The answer to all of those questions is no. Maybe it made certain jobs more interesting for a few people at the very top, and I think AI will do the same thing. I’ve spoken to scholars who call it an amazing tool for this or that—and for them, great. But we live in a political economy shaped by decades of financialization and the relentless prioritization of shareholder returns. In that environment, technology is simply not going to be used to improve anyone’s job unless workers fight for it.

Richard Eskow: Right. And this connects to that famous graph—I believe it was first produced by Dean Baker’s group, or the Economic Policy Institute, or the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities—showing how after World War II, worker wages and corporate profits rose together, until they split apart around 1968. I call it the Challenger graph, because it looks like the trajectory of the shuttle when it veered off course. That divergence is the story of the hoarding of productivity gains.

But that’s a good segue to another aspect of your piece. One of the things you highlighted is that white collar workers are now, for the first time, all in the same boat. It used to be that if you worked on a tool-and-die floor and a new machine came along, that was the story. Now it’s the accountant, the attorney, the professional managerial class — all of them facing the same threat. And the added indignity is that the machine may not even do the job as well as they do. It may be mediocre. But the system doesn’t care, because mediocre is cheap.

So with all that awfulness cutting across the old class barriers, is there an opportunity for a new kind of labor solidarity, one that transcends those divisions? Alyssa, what do you think?

Alyssa Quart: Definitely. In Squeezed, I wrote about something I called the “middle precariat”: the middle class meets the proletariat meets the precarious. These are people like document-review lawyers and adjunct academics and journalists, people who have graduate degrees and who have found their previously stable work turned contingent—people who weren’t always insecure but suddenly are.

And I think we’ve been seeing the political expression of this. What was behind the elections of Zohran Mamdani in New York, the new mayor of Seattle, recent wins in Maryland and Maine? Alliances between these different precarious classes. And the organizing we’ve seen, of journalists, screenwriters, academics, museum workers—these aren’t people who traditionally formed unions. Union membership is lower than it’s been in decades, but union awareness and approval are higher.

There’s another factor that came up when we spoke with people who work as lawyers or advocates for both blue-collar and white-collar workers at the same companies: they’re now beginning to see their common cause. They recognize that both the contractor and the salaried manager are at the mercy of the same fickle tech overlords. And they’re trying to help each other. That’s the kind of thing we need more of: people like us helping contingent journalists; well-established lawyers becoming aware of and advocating for the document-review lawyers being pushed out by AI, and recognizing the fragility of their own profession too. Unions, awareness, self-respect, and a counter-narrative to AI determinism. Some of it is structural, and yes, some of it is psychological.

Lynn Parramore: You know, when I was in graduate school at NYU, I was briefly a member of the United Auto Workers, because NYU graduate students who were teaching banded together and formed a union. It was a brief period of glory. NYU worked assiduously to shut it down, and eventually the union was crushed. But it happened. And for that moment, here were graduate students pursuing doctorates standing in solidarity with autoworkers. Things like that have happened before, and I think we’re going to see them happen again.

And again, to Alyssa’s point, union membership is down, but approval is very high. There was a Gallup poll a couple of years ago showing it’s higher than it’s been in decades. Those are genuinely positive signs. And in an otherwise sobering conversation, that’s one of the real bright spots.

If the Democrats had any sense, they would pay attention. They’ve been trying to connect with blue-collar workers for a long time, with limited success. But if they can think about bringing blue-collar and white-collar workers together and actually doing something for them collectively — that could be an exciting moment in politics.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. And on that cultural point: my brother, who passed away last year, was a screenwriter. He lived in Kingston, New York. He had a strike T-shirt during the writers’ strike, and he said everywhere he went—the guy at the food stand, the newspaper vendor, whoever it was—people would say, “We’re with you.” Not because they had any glamorous association with Hollywood, but because they recognized fellow workers getting screwed. And that solidarity, that recognition, is a genuinely beautiful thing.

Let me end on one more topic from your piece that I found fascinating. You interviewed Jennifer Vertesi, a sociologist, who said that we are “effacing expertise instead of enabling it.” And then the neuroscientist Giorgio Ascoli expands on that thought with a remarkable quote. What did she mean by that?

Alyssa Quart: Vertesi is a sociologist who has worked with NASA on spacecraft systems and specializes in the sociology of AI and technology. What she meant is that there are people who have put in — as Ericsson argued — ten thousand hours to achieve expert status. They put in that time, and it taught them something the machine simply cannot know: the final one or two percent of how to finish something.

That’s actually what Ascoli was speaking to. He’s a neuroscientist who draws extraordinarily complex neurological diagrams—elaborate trees of branching structures—and he said that an AI could reproduce his work up to a point, but would miss the last two percent. It would be an incomplete project. And that incompleteness is precisely what decades of expertise protects against. Mastery lets you make critical judgments at the very end of a complex process, when everything else has been done.

There’s something else that’s missing, too: what I’d call the sympathetic imagination. When you’re a journalist, or a scholar, studying human experience, you bring to it a kind of understanding that comes from being human. An LLM can scrape an archive. But can it interview all the people we interviewed, and then apply our final five percent of judgment about that material? No. Reporting may be one of the last places where that matters. And as I said — poetry. Those are the places AI cannot touch.

Richard Eskow: We may never find that AI is capable of genuine excellence, because it is, after all, an average of everything that has already been done. How could averaging produce anything better than mediocre? What I took from what Vertesi and Ascoli described is something about the process of learning itself — that the act of learning to do the work makes you more capable of doing the work. Dewey said, “Education is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail.” There’s something in the process, of learning to learn, that gets you across the finish line in a way that a system trained only on outputs cannot replicate.

Alyssa Quart: That’s the sympathetic imagination. That’s creativity. That’s the mastery that lets you invent new things. And yes, that’s exactly what Ascoli was describing — the dozens of years he had spent drawing those diagrams had taught his hand what to do at the very end of the process in a way that simply cannot be transferred. Interestingly, his own children work in AI, and even they agreed: the machine is not going to be able to draw the tree in the way their father draws the tree.

Richard Eskow: And Lynn, maybe to conclude, you’ve both stared into the abyss of this apocalyptically insecure future, and it stared back. Where did you wind up? Pessimistic? Optimistic? Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”?

Alyssa Quart: I always feel optimistic about people and less optimistic about systems. That’s where I always land. And I have to say, doing this work with Lynn made it better. I don’t do much collaborative writing outside of film work and my time with Barbara Ehrenreich. Going into this world together with Lynn—I don’t know if you feel the same way, Lynn—but it really helped. Otherwise it would have been deeply depressing.

Lynn Parramore: Yes, absolutely.

Alyssa Quart: And then coming across something like the AI dividend—people thinking about this, trying to organize around it, even if it’s still very small. It’s something.

Richard Eskow: I love that you mentioned working with Lynn as an important part of getting through it, because we are social creatures. That’s the missing element from so much of the AI conversation, and from the last fifty years of drift toward an automated, individualistic, “the machine stops” kind of world. We have mirror neurons. We’re more complete with each other. But, Lynn, the last word is yours.

Lynn Parramore: That’s absolutely true. And this is one more thing AI simply cannot do: commune with other human beings. It can’t share insights or supplement our imaginations the way working together does. It can’t have a work date. Alyssa and I used to meet during the day just to work side by side, and that matters in ways that are hard to quantify.

More and more people are now being managed by algorithms. Their boss, effectively, is a machine. How do you fight back against that? There are encouraging signs. The European Union, for example, has been genuinely advocating for worker dignity and privacy. We can take pages from their playbook.

But yes, one of the antidotes to everything depressing in this conversation is simply working together. Finding each other. Gig workers and contractors face real barriers to organizing, but they’re finding creative ways to make their voices heard collectively.

So between the two choices you offered, I feel motivated. I don’t feel optimistic, exactly. Like Alyssa, I’m optimistic about human beings and very pessimistic about the political economy. Which is precisely what makes me motivated to fight back as hard as possible.

Richard Eskow: “Motivated” is actually a better answer than either of the options I offered you. Let’s leave it there.

This work is only possible through reader support. Please help out with a paid subscription through Substack (discounted here) or on Patreon. Or, make a one-time donation here.

We’re witnessing an unprecedented assault on the integrity of our primaries, fueled by a deluge of “gray money” from the AI, crypto, and pro-Israel lobbying sectors. As I discussed with David Moore of Sludge (www.readsludge.com), these interests aren’t “participating in democracy”; they’re trying to buy it through a sophisticated web of super PACs and bundled contributions that often bypass the scrutiny of mainstream media. From the “earmarking” of millions for House leadership to the flood of deceptive attack ads in local races, the goal is clear: to ensure that the trajectory of history is shaped by those with the deepest pockets rather than the most votes.

People are beginning to push back through initiatives like the People’s Pledge and by challenging candidates who accept this tainted money. What happens now?

More information:

“Crypto, AI, and AIPAC Set up to Smash Super PAC Spending Records,” Sludge
“Return of the ‘People’s Pledge’,” Politico
“Brad Lander Is Demanding an AIPAC-Free Congressional Race,” Jacobin

TOPICS

Our conversation topics included:

The Deception of “Gray Money”: Super PACs purposefully use vague, patriotic-sounding names to mask industry-specific agendas (e.g., AI or Crypto) and run ads on unrelated “hot-button” issues to manipulate unsuspecting voters.

The Inefficacy of “Mainstream” Reporting: Traditional media outlets often fail to trace the complex web of earmarked and bundled donations, leaving the public unaware that their representatives are often beholden to a single industry’s “war chest.”

A Turning Point? The “People’s Pledge” and recent “tactical missteps” by big spenders (like the losses in Illinois) are signs that voters are becoming more sophisticated.

SELECTED QUOTES

David:

“Super PACs funded by an industry like AI or crypto often won’t discuss those issues in their TV ads. Instead, they’ll focus on other campaign topics or hot-button issues like immigration.”

“AIPAC’s PAC has rapidly become the highest-donating PAC at the federal level... delivering millions of dollars to House Democratic leadership at the same time those leaders have been slow to advance things like the Iran War Powers Resolution.”

“The swell of untraceable, anonymous ads flooding primaries on both sides of the aisle breeds distrust in the political process.”

Richard:

“You’ve been covering a lot of stories about what I would call legalized corruption—the real forces of influence in politics, the hidden forces.”

“The real-world implications of this money include genocide and war. These are not abstract concepts.”

“It sounds too overwhelming for voters to push back on. But it sounds like one place where this all comes together... is by demanding that candidates sign the People’s Pledge.”

TRANSCRIPT

Richard Eskow: One of my go-to news sources that I check on a regular basis is the website known as Sludge, which can be found at readsludge.com. The website presents itself as, quote, “your guide to the hidden forces shaping politics.” Joining me now is co-founder of Sludge, David Moore. David and his partner Donald Shaw founded the website, and they’ve been doing great work covering the forces that move politics. So, first of all, David Moore, welcome to the program.

David Moore: Thank you so much. So glad to be here.

Richard Eskow: Happy to have you, and happy to introduce the audience to Sludge. You’ve been covering a lot of stories about what I would call legalized corruption — the forces of influence in politics, the hidden forces, as you say. We could approach this from any number of angles, but why don’t we start here. You recently published a piece, I think at the beginning of February, on crypto, AI, and AIPAC, and how they’re setting up to smash super PAC spending records. You’re referring, I assume, to the records for spending in a midterm election, right?

David Moore: That’s right. And the trends show that super PAC spending is also increasing over time in presidential election cycles. But yes, we’re focused on how individual super PACs are spending in races on both sides of the aisle.

Richard Eskow: Okay. And one thing that’s particularly timely right now is the role of super PACs. We haven’t moved into the general election season yet, but we’ll see a lot of action there. Right now, though, we’re seeing it heavily in Democratic primaries, in particular around several key issues. You mentioned crypto, you mentioned AI. So before we get to AIPAC, let’s talk about the tech side of things. I think crypto is something that a lot of people don’t fully understand — what it is or what its implications are. But one thing it certainly does is spend big on our politics. Is that correct?

David Moore: That’s right. The way super PACs typically operate is by targeting digital ads or TV ads in races, including both primary and general elections. Often, these groups have very innocuous or generic-sounding names — Think Big is one example that’s currently active. In addition, super PACs funded by an industry like AI or crypto often won’t discuss those issues in their TV ads. Instead, they’ll focus on other campaign topics or hot-button issues like immigration.

Super PACs do sometimes disclose their big, deep-pocketed corporate donors — OpenAI or Coinbase, for example — but a significant chunk of their money is often not disclosed to the public. That’s why super PACs are sometimes called “gray money” organizations. They sit somewhere between fully dark money and more transparent spenders.

In the 2024 election cycle, we saw an absolute deluge of money coming in from a couple of different special interests. Crypto spent a record amount of money backing candidates it deemed insufficiently supportive of cryptocurrency regulation. The network around that was primarily called the Fair Shake super PAC network. In addition, the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — deployed its super PAC, called the United Democracy Project, along with an allied super PAC. They spent heavily to knock out candidates they deemed unsupportive of their agenda of promoting greater security cooperation with Israel.

And now, that model is being supercharged heading into the 2026 elections. Interestingly, as we’re speaking on April 8th, the initial primary contests over the past month have shown a mixed record for these groups. We’re seeing a combination of enormous cash reserves — we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars ready to be dropped on ads targeting unsuspecting voters — but the same playbook isn’t necessarily delivering the same results. So it’s early.

Richard Eskow: We are seeing, for example, record amounts being spent in primaries across the country. Give me an example if you can. We’re familiar with PAC spending delivering results. We know, for example, that Representative Cori Bush, an incumbent member of Congress, was outspent by AIPAC in her last primary and was defeated. Same with Jamal Bowman, another defeated incumbent representative. So we’ve seen these PACs win — not necessarily a success story for democracy — but now you’re saying that this time around, despite their enormous war chests, the record is more mixed. That’s interesting. Can you walk us through a few examples?

David Moore: Sure. Let me set the stage by looking at three categories of super PACs: AI super PACs, crypto super PACs, and AIPAC-aligned super PACs.

On the AI front, the industry has essentially replicated the crypto industry’s playbook. They’ve set up the same structure — a super PAC paired with a nonprofit organization and a scorecard — with arms that spend in both Democratic and Republican primaries using targeted messaging for each party’s voters. One of the main super PAC groups for the AI industry that was first out of the gate was called Leading the Future. It’s been funded largely by the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, as well as the president of OpenAI.

Richard Eskow: You mean Sam Altman?

David Moore: Well, actually, it’s the president, Greg Brockman, who funneled — along with his spouse — much of the $25 million from their side of it. Together, in just the first half of last year, Fair Shake reported nearly $75 million. I’m sorry, that’s the crypto industry group. The AI industry group was bankrolled with over — well, I should back up. That figure was from last cycle.

Richard Eskow: Fifty million, perhaps, and more in pledges? That’s what I’ve been seeing. Your article says the new Leading the Future AI super PAC had $50 million cash on hand and much more in pledges.

David Moore: That’s right — thank you for filling that in. More than $50 million pledged. And there are several other AI industry groups beyond that one. I won’t mention them all, but there are ones funded by Meta and others more aligned with the Republican side of the AI deregulation agenda.

On the crypto side, Fair Shake spent over $133 million in the last cycle and is now geared up to meet or exceed that. They had already raised over half of that total to deploy this cycle. The crypto industry also has additional super PACs ready to jump in. And the AIPAC super PAC was also on track for a record haul — it had raised more than $61 million in just the first half of last year. Together, these groups are equipped with hundreds of millions of dollars to drop in elections.

Their first test came in the Illinois primaries last month, on March 18th, and the track record was mixed. It’s not that spending a couple million dollars in a House primary was ever guaranteed to win a race — but it had proved largely successful for them in the previous election cycle. This time around, the results were more mixed across the board.

I can walk through which primaries showed gains and losses in Illinois, but the main takeaway is that Democratic voters were responding to other signals as well. There’s a real opportunity now for Democratic voters — and other primary voters — to look more critically at who’s funding the super PAC behind the ads they see. That’s part of the initiative behind a new Democratic effort called the People’s Pledge, which is gaining traction with candidates now.

Richard Eskow: And the People’s Pledge asks candidates to pledge that they won’t take PAC money, right?

David Moore: It goes further than that. Candidates pledge to reject waves of outside spending by super PACs as well. They commit not just to declining corporate PAC money — and in some cases, to refusing donations from executives in certain industries — but more importantly, they commit to rejecting the big-dollar outside spending from super PACs. So when you’re watching a game or a drama on TV and you see an ad promoting a candidate from a group with a name like “Elect Chicago Women” or something similarly vague — that spending would be rejected under the pledge.

That’s really a significant and potentially sea-change-level development in primary contests, if more candidates were to adopt it.

Richard Eskow: Does the People’s Pledge also commit candidates to supporting campaign finance reform if they’re elected?

David Moore: I’m not certain it includes that specifically. It’s focused primarily on electoral commitments. Candidates who have taken the pledge — there’s one in Maine, one in Maryland, and here in New York City, where I’m based, one running for a House seat — are calling on their opponents to do the same. They’re pledging to reject outside group spending and to improve the democratic process for voters more broadly.

For example, here in New York, there’s a House race between former Comptroller Brad Lander and incumbent Dan Goldman, where Lander is calling on Goldman to reject the waves of outside spending that have too often shaped these Democratic primaries and come from opaque sources. It’s an effort really focused on empowering voters, and it’s the sort of thing that state parties could be far more active in taking up. They have a lot of control over this.

Richard Eskow: And it’s very popular with voters, which is one of the reasons candidates do it. So hopefully that popularity helps counteract the effect of some of this money.

Now, a related issue: given the ongoing and tragic situation in Gaza, the idea that a candidate is taking AIPAC money — which was once taken for granted — has become somewhat politically toxic for Democrats. To the point where you have mainstream Democrats like Gavin Newsom saying they won’t take AIPAC money, and other congressional leaders making similar pledges. But to me, one of the valuable things Sludge does is expose the fact that a lot of AIPAC money doesn’t come with the AIPAC label on it. There are ways to get around that. Am I understanding that correctly?

David Moore: There are a number of ways that AIPAC spends to support the candidates it chooses to back. We briefly discussed examples from last cycle — Bush, Bowman, and others — where the AIPAC super PAC targeted progressives it deemed out of line with its agenda.

What a lot of people don’t understand, and what Sludge’s reporting has worked to illuminate, is that AIPAC’s PAC also delivers campaign contributions directly into candidates’ and sitting lawmakers’ accounts through an earmarking process. If you were an AIPAC donor, you could donate through their portal, and it facilitates the donation flowing into the campaign account of a sitting lawmaker. We calculated that, as of earlier this year, AIPAC’s PAC had earmarked and bundled more than $28 million to the campaigns of current members of Congress in this election cycle alone.

This can translate into enormous sums. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, for example, raised a million dollars for his campaign committees last year bundled this way through AIPAC’s PAC. Often, the paper trail from an individual donor through the PAC to the candidate isn’t fully visible — it shows up in disclosure records as individual donations. But AIPAC’s PAC openly touts its role in this process. Their website even highlights to donors that the candidates will know how much AIPAC is facilitating in donations.

All of this happens while AIPAC lobbies these same lawmakers to issue public statements of support for Israel, and to oppose efforts to restrict military aid to Israel on humanitarian grounds — whether that’s weapons aid or other forms of military coordination — particularly as such restrictions relate to international law compliance.

The element you raise is important: not many people perhaps realize that AIPAC’s PAC has rapidly become the highest-donating PAC at the federal level, far outpacing groups like the Realtors or other PACs that practice similar earmarking. AIPAC’s PAC is delivering millions of dollars to House Democratic leadership at the same time those leaders have been slow to advance things like the Iran War Powers Resolution.

Richard Eskow: And I think this is really important, David, for a variety of reasons — but one that I suspect a lot of listeners struggle with is: it’s not clear how this typically gets reported. You don’t often see mainstream news organizations reporting that Hakeem Jeffries — who, for example, held off endorsing the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York until two days before the election, and has taken other positions seemingly at odds with his own party’s base — has received millions from AIPAC. Is that because outlets simply don’t report it, or because the process you just described obscures the fact that it’s AIPAC bundling this money? In other words, campaign finance reports often don’t show it as millions from AIPAC, do they?

David Moore: That’s exactly right, and what I can tell you is that AIPAC’s PAC didn’t begin operating in this way until just a couple of cycles ago. Though AIPAC and its allies had wielded a lot of influence through their super PAC spending for many past cycles, they only really began spinning up this direct contribution mechanism in the 2021–2022 cycle, and then started dropping millions in the 2023–2024 cycle.

So campaign finance reporters — the kind featured on the front pages of the Times, the Post, or CNN — weren’t accustomed to tracing back millions in earmarked donations through FEC records. Sludge has been compiling those records and presenting them in searchable, easily accessible lists so that anyone, nationwide, can see how much their senator or representative has received from AIPAC’s PAC in bundled donations. Often, that makes AIPAC the largest donor to a given lawmaker — the very donor that is simultaneously lobbying them on efforts like the Block the Bombs Act from Senator Sanders, Senator Van Hollen, Senator Tina Smith, and others.

So when you look at what’s being advanced — or not advanced — by Democratic leaders in the House and Senate on questions of human rights law as applied to military aid to Israel, it’s important for people to keep in mind that those leaders’ direct campaign coffers are being padded with six-figure sums from AIPAC’s PAC, from the same people lobbying them to issue statements of support.

And it’s worth emphasizing: on a call-in show here in New York City, Hakeem Jeffries once said, “I accept $10,000 from AIPAC’s PAC — that’s the limit they can give me.” And technically, that’s accurate for that category of direct contribution. But they can also facilitate millions of dollars in individual donations flowing through them. So while the individual donors in those cases are U.S. citizens choosing to give to the candidate AIPAC is endorsing, AIPAC’s website makes absolutely clear that they are taking credit for this with lawmakers. Which means that when their lobbyists are pressing officials on weapons aid to Israel or on human rights legislation, the lawmakers know exactly how much they’ve received through AIPAC — even if the public does not.

Richard Eskow: And that, to me, is why the work you and Donald are doing is so important. Particularly now, given what appears to be some sort of two-week ceasefire as we speak. But the war in Iran has caused massive damage — thousands of deaths, and likely hundreds of billions of dollars in economic harm to the global economy when everything is tallied. And this was an initiative that, by most reporting, was primarily supported by Benjamin Netanyahu and backed by many of the same interests aligned with AIPAC. You and Donald Shaw wrote back in June of 2025 that AIPAC-funded Democrats avoided pushing for a war powers resolution on Trump and Iran. They’ve given lip service to it this time around. But it seems to me that the real-world implications of this money include genocide and war. These are not abstract concepts. We’re talking about millions of dollars going to candidates whose positions affect the trajectory of history and millions of people’s lives. Am I overstating the case?

David Moore: I don’t think so. The House war powers resolution was introduced in 2025, during Israel’s attacks on Iran and when Trump began launching missile strikes against Iran. A bipartisan resolution was introduced around mid-year — around June. House Democratic leaders declined to get behind it. At first it was backed by only a handful of progressives on the Democratic side.

Then, earlier this year, as Trump’s saber-rattling toward Iran intensified in February, House Democratic leaders had the opportunity to bring up the war powers resolution through a privileged measure — a mechanism available to the minority — and some Republicans began signaling they might seriously consider voting for it. But Democrats didn’t push hard. Jeffries and House Democratic leadership didn’t get it introduced in February before the strikes came at the end of the month.

In March, there was still an opportunity for the House to exert its constitutional authority — to lay down a marker that Trump’s strikes on Iran were unlawful, and that the tens of billions of dollars being spent to cause these thousands of deaths needed to stop. A couple of House Republicans signaled they were on board and might have pushed it across the finish line by a bare majority. And House Democrats didn’t bring it to the floor then, either.

Now, as we speak on April 8th, House Democratic leaders say they will reintroduce it when recess ends shortly. It might get over the finish line now — but they had the opportunities for the past several months, and much of that inaction comes from significant lobbying efforts to keep the war effort unconstrained.

Richard Eskow: Right. And you mentioned a couple of cases where this PAC spending has backfired. The one that came to mind was Analilia Mejia in New Jersey’s 11th district, where AIPAC — using one of those bland, meaningless names you mentioned, I believe the United Democracy Project — went after Tom Malinowski, a candidate who was, by most measures, fairly pro-Israel. Their apparent goal, as I understand it, was to make an example of him for not being sufficiently enthusiastic in his support. But the net result was that someone to Malinowski’s left — who was stronger on Palestinian rights — Analilia Mejia, got the nomination instead.

Now, I don’t know if that’s a rejection of the PAC so much as a tactical error on their part. But when you have that much money — I think they spent more than $2 million in that race — you’re distorting the outcome in a major way. My question would be: why wouldn’t the Democratic Party push to keep this money out of their primaries? It doesn’t help them win. It just helps Republican-aligned billionaires and other outside interests choose their candidates. And secondly, is this a sign that, for all their money, these groups aren’t quite as shrewd as they think they are?

David Moore: To address the first question — there’s another example from the Illinois primaries I mentioned. In those House and Senate primaries, AIPAC more or less split outcomes. They spent $5 million for a candidate who ended up losing to LaShawn Ford in the 7th district, and close to $6 million for Laura Fine, who ended up losing to the mayor of Evanston, Daniel Biss, in the 9th district. That’s a lot of money to lose.

AIPAC spent through super PACs called “Elect Chicago Women” and “Affordable Chicago Now,” as well as the United Democracy Project. For some of these super PACs, the donors were not publicly disclosed at the time the TV ads were running — Illinois voters were in the dark about who was funding what they were seeing. But it was widely understood, given the pattern of who these groups were backing, that these were AIPAC-funded super PACs. And AIPAC did not deny it. Subsequent campaign finance reports made it even clearer.

So to your question about how Democratic voters are being served by attack ads funded by dark money in their primaries — that’s precisely the question for state parties to take up. If more candidates and state parties examined the People’s Pledge and considered how candidates can voluntarily reject this money, that would be a meaningful step. Legally, outside groups can still spend freely thanks to a series of Supreme Court decisions, but candidates have a real role to play, and so do state parties, in shaping the rules of their primary contests.

As for whether these groups are as shrewd as they think — the New Jersey race you mentioned is widely seen as a tactical misstep by AIPAC. Democratic voters are increasingly sophisticated about this stuff, and dumping millions of dollars into outside spending doesn’t guarantee the outcome it once did. We are seeing more candidates come out against it. You mentioned Governor Newsom, and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey — a long-standing AIPAC ally — recently claimed he would begin ceasing to accept AIPAC PAC donations. That claim needs to be tested against reality, because he’s been one of their top recipients. But it’s another example of the dynamic you’re describing.

Richard Eskow: And one of my reactions — which is another reason I think this kind of reporting is so important — is that when Cory Booker says he’s going to cut back on AIPAC money, he’s not necessarily saying he’ll cut back on money from the United Democracy Project, or whatever name they choose next. That strikes me as a very good reason why this reporting has to continue.

Before we go, let me check in on the tech side one more time. Crypto — as I mentioned — a lot of people don’t fully understand what it is or what it does. But essentially, it’s electronic currency that is unregulated, or underregulated, and its advocates want to keep it that way. That has, at times, posed major risks to the global financial system — people remember Sam Bankman-Fried and that fiasco, and there are others who could follow him. People also understand AI now, including its massive energy consumption and the data centers polluting surrounding communities. But do we have a sense yet — from your reporting — of how well these newer AI super PACs are performing? Or are they too new to get a read on?

David Moore: Right. Let me give you the lay of the land on crypto first, and then I’ll briefly touch on the connection to the AIPAC point you raised about Booker.

On the question of candidates who say they’re cutting off AIPAC PAC donations — when outside spending flows through a group like the United Democracy Project, it arrives as digital ads on your phone or TV ads in public spaces. The degree to which candidates who claim to be rejecting AIPAC money also commit to rejecting those outside ads is an open question. The goal of something like the People’s Pledge is to cut off that spending entirely. Booker is up for a vote this year, so outside spending in his favor is likely regardless.

On crypto: the industry has several items on its legislative wish list. One it already achieved was the GENIUS Act, a stablecoin bill that President Trump signed into law — a major regulatory win for them. There’s also a broader deregulation bill that has been moving back and forth between the House and the Senate, often called the Clarity Act. The crypto industry is working hard to get that over the finish line while Republicans still control both chambers and have a deregulation-friendly administration — especially given the enormous crypto investments held by people in and around the Trump administration itself.

It’s not clear whether the Clarity Act will pass before the midterms. We’ll see what happens after. But the crypto industry is entirely unapologetic about its political strategy. It said openly that it was prepared to spend enormously in Ohio in the 2024 election — tens of millions of dollars — backing Republican Bernie Moreno, who defeated Sherrod Brown, a senator on the Banking Committee who had been critical of crypto’s approach to consumer protection.

Now, Fair Shake and its affiliated super PACs are back, with Democratic and Republican arms ready to run the same playbook. And voters are going to see those ads. Early voting begins in California primaries next month, in May. Then come June in New York House primary races, and after that in Michigan, Maine, and other battleground states, as crypto looks to consolidate the deregulatory gains it’s already won.

Richard Eskow: At high risk to the public, I would argue. And it was striking to me, in your reporting on how these PACs are gearing up, that the current high-water mark for super PAC spending in midterms was in 2022 — when Club for Growth Action spent $69 million. Fair Shake, according to your reporting, reported total receipts of nearly $73.8 million in the second half of 2025 alone, according to FEC disclosures. Just that one organization appears on track for a hugely record-breaking year — and that’s just crypto. Add AI on top of that, then AIPAC. It sounds overwhelming for voters to push back on.

But it sounds like the one place where this all comes together — where people can really resist — is by demanding that candidates sign the People’s Pledge, confronting them at every public appearance and asking, “Why haven’t you signed it?” That’s my takeaway from what you’re telling me. But what’s your closing thought?

David Moore: I think you’re right. The swell of untraceable, anonymous ads flooding primaries on both sides of the aisle breeds distrust in the political process. Super PACs have become something of a punchline — “Americans for Americans” dropping attack ads — and it tires people out. It reduces voter participation.

It would be a huge step forward for more candidates to adopt the People’s Pledge, and to bring it into their state parties — whether on the left or the right — to encourage others to follow suit. Like the candidates in Maryland and other states who have already taken this step and said: we’re going to choose to reject this outside spending. We’re going to try, as much as possible, to focus our campaigns on the people we’re actually seeking to represent.

In my recent conversation with economist Richard Wolff he traced the arc of American fiscal supremacy, from the “petrodollar” arrangement that locked the world into dollar dependency to the slow unraveling now being accelerated by China’s rise, Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, and the fundamental logic of capitalism itself.

This topic is becoming more timely and important than ever as the battle intensifies for control of the strait of Hormuz. For that reason, I’m excerpting that portion of our conversation and republishing it on a stand-alone basis.

Prof. Wolff helped me articulate something I’ve long believed: that the fragility of this system wasn’t accidental, butt was baked in by profit-maximizing logic that never had to account for the true costs of overextension. Together we explored how the same incentive structure which built the empire is now dismantling it—chokepoint by chokepoint, currency by currency, hour by deadly hour.

Key Quotes

“The petrodollar was a deal that’s best understood as if we were talking about gangsters—and maybe that’s what we are.”
—Richard Wolff

“I think we’re going to see a world that increasingly rebels against the oppressive nature of this financial system, severing these various arteries one by one.”
—Richard Eskow

“America never funds wars through taxation, because if the taxpayers had to foot the bill directly they would oppose them.”
—Richard Wolff

“A global system that is too dispersed is like an army that overextends its supply lines. It becomes fragile.”
—Richard Eskow

Transcript (lightly edited)

Richard Eskow: I think a lot of people have seen the word “petrodollar” in the news over the years without really understanding what it means. And this gets to the heart of something important. One of the ways I’d argue the current economic world order is essentially a spoil of war for the United States — perhaps going back to World War Two.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you had Bretton Woods, you had the idea that the world’s currencies would be linked to the dollar, and you had this whole concept of petrodollars. Now, with the war involving Iran, we’re starting to hear the term “petroyuan” for the Chinese currency.

Could you take a minute and clear up any misconceptions about that?

Richard Wolff: Sure. You’re absolutely right. The petrodollar is in the process of disappearing. That’s really part of the broader decline of the dollar from its role as the world’s ultimate reserve currency — a role it held for most of the last 75 years, but which it has progressively shed. Now, less than half of the world’s reserves are held in dollars.

The petrodollar was a deal that’s best understood as if we were talking about gangsters — and maybe that’s what we are. The United States figured out right after World War II that the energy of the future was petroleum. A lot of people knew that even before the war, but by the time it ended, it was clear that industrialization everywhere in the world would require oil, and lots of it. In those days, oil was mostly coming from the Middle East. We had some in Texas, but it was already clear that would never be enough. The modern era of fracking was not yet imaginable.

So in the aftermath of World War II, a deal was cut — led by the United States and Britain — carving up the desert around Saudi Arabia into seven or eight little countries, with Saudi Arabia being the primary one sitting atop enormous oil reserves. And we created these countries out of nothing: Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and others like them.

Here’s how the deal worked. In each case, a particular local family was told: “You can become billionaires. You will be the head of a country. We’ll set it up, we’ll draw the boundaries on a map” — exactly as European colonialists had been doing across Asia, Africa, and Latin America for the previous three centuries. And they were all for it.

“Each of you gets a cut of the oil. We — five American companies, two European companies, the Seven Sisters — will come and extract it. You can participate over time and take a nice cut off the top. A cut that will transform you overnight from a rural desert family into a sultan, an emir. You can buy châteaus in the south of France for your vacations. You will be among the richest people on the planet.”

And here’s the rest of the deal: “We, the Americans, are the world’s dominant buyers of oil because we’re the dominant economy. You’re going to sell oil to us, and we’re going to pay you in dollars. But we’re going to require you to demand payment in dollars from anyone in the world who buys oil from you. That’s the arrangement. You have to do that if you want us as your customer — and we’re the major buyer.”

And there was one more condition. All those dollars flowing in — from America and from every other country that buys your oil — you have to commit to investing them back in the United States. That means buying shares in American companies, though we won’t let you acquire controlling stakes. And the rest? You lend it to the United States government.

Americans know that when we run a budget deficit — currently over a trillion dollars a year — it’s because the government spends more than it collects in taxes. Did you ever wonder who lends Washington the money to do that? Well, as it turns out, one important group of lenders is the Gulf state rulers — the very gangsters in this arrangement — who send their oil dollars right back to us as loans.

So we send the dollars over there, they send the oil to us, and then they send the dollars back to us as loans. It’s a circular, gangster arrangement, paid for entirely by the money we all spend on oil. It is a racket that will be celebrated throughout history for the extraordinary way the American empire organized the global oil business to sustain itself.

Because when the Gulf states lend money to the United States, the United States uses it to fight wars — in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and now Iran. America never funds wars through taxation, because if the taxpayers had to foot the bill directly, they would oppose them. So wars have to be financed through borrowing, and that requires lenders. And a good chunk of that lending — not all of it, but a good chunk — flows from this gangster arrangement.

By the way, it’s falling apart. Because what the Iranians are teaching the Gulf states is this: having an American military base on your soil doesn’t protect you. It makes you a target. A target of whom? Of Iran. “Because the United States attacks us,” the Iranians say, “we are going to attack the United States — and you’ve welcomed them onto your soil. You’d better rethink that.”

And no matter what they say publicly, they are all rethinking it. Like Europe, in a different way, they now have to ask: whether aligning with the United States was betting on the wrong horse.

Richard Eskow: And this is where it gets particularly interesting in terms of current events — and correct me if I’m wrong — but my understanding is that the Iranians, by threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, are effectively saying: “We won’t let your oil through unless it’s being purchased in something other than dollars.” If that’s correct, it means the world’s preeminent superpower could potentially lose this extraordinarily cushy arrangement because of the concentrated military leverage Iran holds over one region, one bottleneck — and they may be able to unravel the whole thing. Could I be right about that?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. I’m not yet certain about the yuan specifically, but I wouldn’t be surprised. What we do know is that the Iranians have long told the Chinese — and as far as I can tell have consistently honored this — that ships registered to Chinese enterprises and carrying oil from Iran to China are allowed through the Strait of Hormuz without any interference. People should understand that Iran has long been a major oil supplier to China; that’s nothing new.

My guess is the Iranians will now be more than happy to accept payment in yuan — both because they want to undercut the dollar, and because of a much larger underlying phenomenon: China is now the world’s fastest-growing major economy and its second largest overall. They will surpass the United States by the end of this decade. We’re already in 2026, so I’m talking about the next four years. Within four years, China’s economy will be larger than America’s.

Why does that matter? Because it means the entire world has been doing for twenty years what it will only continue doing more: buying less from the United States and more from China. And so the world needs fewer dollars and more yuan, because that’s where the action is.

This is precisely how the dollar replaced the British pound. It didn’t happen in a single day — it was the gradual result of where economic gravity was shifting. The Germans had hoped the world would end up using the deutsche mark, and had they not lost World War I, they might have been right. But they lost, and then they lost again in World War II, which took them out of contention entirely. The only other competitor to Britain was the United States, and the U.S. became where everybody wanted to buy. After World War II, you couldn’t get much of anything anywhere else anyway, which cemented it immediately. And the Marshall Plan reinforced it: we gave Europe dollars on the condition they spend them here, ensuring that American companies captured all that postwar spending.

The next 75 years reproduced that dynamic through the Cold War and the entire structure of the American empire. Another sign that the empire is passing is that we’re having this very conversation — that the dollar matters less and less, and the yuan is playing the role the dollar once played. It’s all quite clear, except that we live in a country with a desperate need to deny everything I’ve just said. To pretend that each of these events is isolated, specific, and not part of a larger pattern of decline — because that is simply too frightening a thought to entertain.

Richard Eskow: I’d add something to that decline narrative. We decided we were going to be the captains of a global financial system — but a global system, like an army that overextends its supply lines, becomes fragile. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait closed by the Houthis — that was an overextended supply line. The Strait of Hormuz carries two and a half to three times the volume, and it’s another overextended supply line. I think we’re going to see a world that increasingly rebels against the oppressive nature of this financial system, severing these various arteries one by one. And I think it reveals that this empire is vulnerable not just to a rival power like China, but to its own overextension and internal fragility. Would you agree?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely — and I’d go one step further. For me, the root issue is profit. Over the last 75 years, we allowed the maximization of corporate profit to determine the global distribution of our entire economy. It was profitable to stop making automobiles in Detroit and make them in China instead. Fine — but that globalized the automobile industry in ways it had never been before. And you can multiply that across virtually every other industry.

Profit says: make more money over there. But the ecologist says: yes, you make more profit, but you’re fouling the ocean shipping that product back from China to the United States — and where is that cost accounted for? If you factor in what will happen to fisheries, to public health, to the oceans themselves, and you count what it will ultimately cost to repair the damage, that cost exceeds the extra profit you extracted. We would have been better off keeping those jobs in Detroit. But nobody did that calculation. Capitalism doesn’t work that way. Capitalism defines efficiency as profit maximization — and it has never been truly efficient. That’s a fetishism of the system that we ought to have outgrown long ago.

If you want to understand why we have these long, fragile supply lines, why their vulnerability was never properly accounted for, it’s because private capitalists never had to pay for that fragility. They didn’t have to worry about a choke point in a distant strait. They were too swept up in the logic of profit to think outside that frame. And that is a catastrophic mistake — one that is now bringing the system down.

I would argue that this systematic fetishization of the capitalist calculus is as fundamental as anything else in undermining this empire.

Richard Eskow: And I would argue — perhaps in closing — that even if everyone involved had fully understood decades ago that this would be the outcome, they would have done it anyway. Because the incentive structure of capitalism is quarterly and annual. If it’s going to blow up in 20, 30, or 40 years — who cares? We’ll be long gone by then.

Richard Wolff: So I will have moved on, having left this company to become the CEO of another. As Louis XV supposedly said: “Après moi, le déluge” — after me, the flood. But that mentality is shaped by the system itself, isn’t it?

Richard Eskow: “I’ve got my island retreat in New Zealand, so I’ll be fine.”

There is a strange, perverse honesty in seeing Donald Trump’s signature on the hundred-dollar bill. As Prof. Wolff and I discussed, it’s a moment of “truth in packaging” for an empire in accelerating decline. For decades, the American project was wrapped in a polite veneer of international law and “bipartisan” institutions. That mask has slipped.

The 75-year “gangster arrangement” of the petrodollar is under pressure. Illegal war in Iran, presidential kidnapping in Venezuela, unlawful tariffs, and the desperate, circular logic of funding our enemies to keep oil prices down: it all seems more and more like hysterical posturing” against the inevitable flow of history.

Selected Quotes

Richard Wolff:

• “In the great struggle between Trump’s attempt to change history and history itself, I’m betting on history.”

• “What do you say about an empire so far in decline that the only way it can attempt to hold on is by strengthening the very forces it regards as its enemies?”

• “The petrodollar was a deal—and it should be understood the way we’d understand any gangster arrangement.”

Richard Eskow:

• “As far as fiat currency goes, well, he’s a fiat president: he does what he wants... So why not have a little truth in packaging on our currency?”

• “Trump is Anthony Blinken without the bullshit.”

• “A single bottleneck could overturn this entire 70-year system.”

Transcript (lightly edited)

Richard Eskow: An interesting thing happened the other day. We learned that Donald J. Trump is going to affix his signature to a U.S. currency bill. This is the first time in 165 years — which is to say, pretty much ever — that a president has signed any bill, much less while still in office.

Usually it’s the Secretary of the Treasury and/or the Comptroller who signs the bill. Trump’s $100 bill will coexist, signature-wise, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s signature. But cash continues to decline in use. If you think Trump branding is going to help with that, well, good luck to you. Here to discuss this very interesting development in the world of currency, finance, and economics is none other than our economic expert and economic historian, Professor Richard Wolff.

So first of all, Richard Wolff, welcome back to the program.

Richard Wolff: Thank you very much, Richard. Glad to be here.

Richard Eskow: Trump bucks. What do you make of it?

Richard Wolff: Well, I’m wondering whether the next step will be the disappearance of those old fuddy-duddies Washington and Franklin. Why only his signature? We should have his face right in the middle, where the portrait goes. We could have Donald Trump’s face on the bill — and we could all glower or smile, depending on our perspective, seeing him once again in our wallets.

Richard Eskow: What a nightmare. And yet I find a perverse thought coming to mind — and I thank you for suggesting this topic. At least, I suppose, one can appreciate the honesty. As far as fiat currency goes, well, it’s a fiat president: he does what he wants. And money is representative of a power structure, an elite, and special interests — which is what Donald Trump also represents. So why not have a little truth in packaging on our currency? But money, like they used to say in the college dorm rooms, it’s a construct, man, isn’t it?

Richard Wolff: In a way, it is fitting. Mr. Trump arrives at what I consider an accelerating moment of decline for the United States in the world economy, with all the upset and disorientation that implies. When a society goes through that moment — as England did, as the Romans did, as the Greeks did — why wouldn’t it be disorienting for Americans when it’s their turn for their economy to decline?

He is rewriting everything. The Constitution? Who cares? International law? Who cares? If you want to kill people in boats in the middle of the Caribbean, you just kill them. And when you’re asked about it, you do as Mr. Miller — Trump’s advisor — did: you explain that the world has always been governed by power and strength. In other words, we can kill those people because we can, and there’s no one to stop us. I can translate that plainly: there is no international law that we have to worry about.

It is remarkable when Mr. Rubio, the Secretary of State, lectures the Europeans with real emotion about how horrible it is that the Iranians are thinking of charging money for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz — and declares that this is against international law. For him to say that with a straight face requires a level of willful, blind ignorance that one needs to stop and fully appreciate.

Anyway. Mr. Trump is tariffing everybody illegally — the Supreme Court of his own country tells him it’s illegal, and he immediately imposes new tariffs so the court has to decide it all over again. He is trying desperately to stop history. And so this break with historical norms, with all the logic of what is unfolding, that is his signature — figuratively and now literally. Why not put it on the currency too? Why not break with history there as well?

You correctly note it’s been 165 years — I didn’t know that. 165 years, and we have never had such a thing. That’s exactly why he wants to do it. Other people couldn’t overthrow the regime in Venezuela; he did. Other people couldn’t overthrow Iran; he’s trying to. The message is: I am going to undo history. History has been unfair to us, and I am going to fix it.

That is a level of megalomania that comes from him constantly. He’s not bound by honesty or precedent. I loved this too, from last week: he said that Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, endorsed his Iran policy. So the press went to Blinken and asked about it. Blinken’s answer: it never happened. Trump just bloviates and hopes nobody notices — or by the time they do, he’s already produced a new headline to distract everyone.

This is all a kind of hysterical gesturing, a desperate effort to do anything and everything to give the impression that he can reverse what has been happening in recent decades. He can’t, and he won’t. And sooner or later — and I understand it’s painful to have to wait — in the great struggle between his attempt to change history and history itself, I’m betting on history. He will be blown aside.

And when people turn on him, when they finally realize they’ve been hustled for eight years or longer, their rage will turn on the person who hustled them, and it will not be pretty to watch. If you want an example of how quickly things can shift, pay attention to Marjorie Taylor Greene, because that is the scenario you’re going to see replayed.

Richard Eskow: Marjorie Taylor Greene, who all of a sudden sounds surprisingly humane and reasonable on the subject of the slaughter of people in Gaza. It turns out that humans — even American humans — don’t like genocide, and they don’t like it being committed in their name and with their resources.

I’m torn, Richard Wolff, as I listen to you. I strongly agree with you — and I do — but I’m also somewhat conflicted about this idea of a “break with history,” because in a sense, yes, these things are a break with history. But in another sense, they are also an acknowledgment of it.

The term “cognitive dissonance” was invented, as I understand it, to describe the disturbance caused in a child’s psyche when their parents tell them things are one way and they’re actually another: “Your father and I really love you and we love each other and this is a happy home” — when it isn’t. That messes up a child’s mind. Trust me, I know.

And so in a perverse way, there’s actually less cognitive dissonance when Trump says, “I’m putting my signature on this bill because I can.” A hundred dollar bill is just about power. You mentioned Anthony Blinken — now there is the biggest hypocrite to walk this earth in quite some time. Talk about cognitive dissonance: listening to him and his boss, Joe Biden, express outrage that Vladimir Putin dared defy international law by invading Ukraine — and I agree it was a violation of international law — while they sneered at and dismissed the International Criminal Court and blatantly violated both international and domestic U.S. law to send weapons of mass destruction to Israel so it could pursue its genocide. We could go on and on.

At least — do you remember that New Yorker cartoon? A wolf is on a campaign billboard saying, “I will eat you.” And a crowd of sheep is cheering: “You’ve got to give it to that guy — he tells it like it is.” That, to me, is Trump. He’s Anthony Blinken without the bullshit.

Richard Wolff: That’s right, exactly. And you’re right — the attempt to break with history is itself proof of what that history actually is. It’s Don Quixote tilting his lance at windmills. He’s not going to win. He just doesn’t get it.

But here’s another layer to this. And I’m going to get in trouble for saying it, but I’ll say it anyway.

Richard Eskow: Please — we like trouble.

Richard Wolff: That is what a large number of Americans want. They want to stop the history they can sense is happening. They voted for him in part because — long shot though it was — he at least said he was going to break with all of this. Whereas Kamala Harris, Blinken, Biden, Bush, Obama — they were obviously part of what was failing to stop history. So: get this unorthodox guy who doesn’t know anything about conventional politics, who’s rough-and-tumble and crude and ignorant, but who says, “I’m going to change everything. Look at me — I’m different from those people.” And he was, and he is, and he has been true to that. He has behaved in ways other presidents did not dare.

He is, as you put it, what those other people were, but without the Harvard and Yale panache — the veneer, the polish. And I say this in full recognition of Harvard and Yale, since I attended both myself, and tried very hard not to come away with the phoniness that the Obamas and the Bidens all represent.

I can even feel for the American people in this regard. As you put it with that cartoon, they are sheep. He is a wolf. And they are celebrating that he at least says: “I’m a wolf, and I will do what I want.” And then they try not to understand that that means they’re his next meal. That’s what the American people don’t grasp — even now, as the cost of putting gas in their car becomes out of reach, with more to come, and the inflation they were told he had under control is about to take off.

It’s just extraordinary that he still has any poll numbers at all. And now, if he’s actually going to send hundreds of thousands of troops into Iran, he’s going to be killing large numbers of Americans on top of everything else.

Richard Eskow: It really is extraordinary. But I’ll say a slight word in defense of the American electorate here. First of all, most people don’t have, or don’t devote, a great deal of time to politics and history — the stuff you and I love and care about. If the present is not very good — and you and I have talked about this many times — life right now is not so good for most people. That means you’ve got to choose between the future and the past. The past wasn’t so great either, but we tend to forget that. And Trump is offering people an idealized past. Who’s offering them a good future? Not the Democrats. To quote Hillary Clinton in 2016: “America is already great.” No, it isn’t great for people who can’t make ends meet. And it hasn’t gotten any greater since 2016 when she said it.

But the various Democratic alternatives — “let’s return to bipartisan institutions” (and parenthetically, I hate the word “bipartisan” because it institutionalizes and legitimizes the idea that there are only two legitimate political parties; I much prefer “nonpartisan”) — those institutions gave us the national security state, the trillion-dollar defense budget, austerity economics, and so on. That bipartisan consensus is what they’re asking people to go back to. When you’re offering people a lousy present and Trump is offering them an idealized past, a lot of people say, “I’ll take a shot at that. Maybe the past wasn’t so bad after all.” Does that make sense?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. And that’s very much part of the appeal of this moment. It’s also deeply frustrating, because millions of people — the demonstrations last Saturday were indicative — millions of Americans took time off to go into the streets and be part of a massive outpouring. You get a sense that they are there, but they don’t know exactly how to organize it, sustain it, or build on it. So it has the character of an expression of feeling that doesn’t know where to go with itself. That seems to me very dangerous.

I fear that the people who participate, and who don’t know how to take it to the next step, will then interpret the absence of that next step as an argument that it isn’t worth doing. Which is wrong — it is worth doing, and it does have effects. But you’re also correct that there’s no organized next step. Nobody is mobilizing, nobody is building structure.

So the irony is that all this people’s activity may end up simply meaning they vote Democratic in November — assuming we have elections — and that won’t change much, given who they’re likely to have to vote for. And then they’ll be very frustrated. And that frustration will make things worse. People don’t want to understand the dialectic: if you do no better than Biden after Mr. Trump, you allow—

Richard Eskow: —Mr. Trump to come back, or someone worse.

Richard Wolff: Exactly. And if Mr. Trump passes from the scene and what you get is another Hakeem Jeffries or Schumer — that sort of disastrous placeholder — and everything continues to deteriorate, there will be an even bigger groundswell for whoever the next Trump is. And for all the same reasons. The empire keeps declining, the Chinese keep growing faster and getting richer, watching the United States squander its capabilities while the Chinese sit there — if I were them — smiling at the spectacle of it all.

Three weeks ago, I believe I had it right: when Trump’s policies began to show that they had wildly underestimated Iranian resolve and resistance, and it became clear that oil prices were going to rise sharply — I’m told they’re now over $100 a barrel — he began to realize this was going to be a political backlash. And as he typically does when it’s brought to his attention that he’s just committed a disastrous error, he proceeded to make two or three more errors trying to fix the first one.

So what did he do? First, he removed sanctions on Russia for selling its oil anywhere in the world — sanctions that had been imposed in response to the invasion of Ukraine. I understand the logic: more Russian oil on the market offsets the price pressure. Yes, but you’re simultaneously funding Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Richard Eskow: Of course, yes.

Richard Wolff: And then two days later, he effectively did the same thing with Iran — removing sanctions on Iranian oil — which enabled Iran, the country he’s making war against, to sell its oil globally at wildly elevated prices, thereby funding its own defense against the United States.

What do you say about an empire so far in decline that the only way it can attempt to hold on is by strengthening the very forces it regards as its enemies? When you’re caught between getting hurt by rising oil prices that make the whole world your adversary, and funding the military of the people you’re at war with, you’re finished. That’s what it means.

The metaphor I’d use is this: doctors tell me that at a certain point in old age, different parts of the body begin to break down, and fixing one of them aggravates the problem of another. And at that point, it’s over. Watching us — me the taxpayer, you the taxpayer — funding Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine and simultaneously funding the Iranians defending themselves against the United States: it is so absurd that you realize we have reached that point.

Richard Eskow: Well, it certainly feels that way. He might as well sign the currency now. We may end up carrying it around in a wheelbarrow like the Weimar Germans before this is over. But that brings up another subject — since we’re talking about bills and currency. I think a lot of people have seen the term “petrodollar” in the news over the years without really understanding what it means. This connects to how the current economic world order was essentially a spoil of war for the United States after World War II. Maybe correct me if I’m wrong, but you had Bretton Woods, the idea that the world’s currencies would be linked to the dollar, and this whole architecture of the petrodollar. Now, with the war involving Iran, we’re starting to hear the term “petro-yuan.” Could you take a moment and clear up any misconceptions about that?

Richard Wolff: Sure. You’re absolutely right — the petrodollar is in the process of disappearing. This is really part of the broader decline of the dollar from its role as the world’s reserve currency, a role it held for most of the last 75 years but has progressively lost. Already less than half of the world’s reserves are held in dollars.

The petrodollar was a deal — and it should be understood the way we’d understand a gangster arrangement, because maybe that’s what it was. Right after World War II, the United States figured out that the energy of the future was petroleum. By the end of the war, it was clear that oil would be essential to industrialization everywhere in the world. And in those days, oil was coming predominantly from the Middle East. We had some in Texas, but it was already clear that wouldn’t be nearly enough.

So in the aftermath of World War II, a deal was struck. The United States and Britain took the lead, carving up the desert around Saudi Arabia into seven or eight small countries — Saudi Arabia being the primary one, sitting atop enormous oil reserves, as the entire region was. We essentially created these countries out of nothing: Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and the others.

Here was the deal: in each case, a local ruling family was told, “You can become billionaires. We will set you up as the head of a country. We’ll draw the boundaries on a map — just as European colonialists had been doing in Asia, Africa, and Latin America for the previous three centuries. Each of you will get a cut of the oil revenue. Five American companies and two European companies — the ‘Seven Sisters’ — will come and extract the oil. You can eventually participate in that, and you’ll take a nice cut off the top. A cut that will make you, overnight, not a desert family, but a sultan, an emir. You can buy châteaux in the south of France for your summer holidays. You will be among the richest people on the planet.”

So that was their end of the deal. Our end: we, the Americans, as the dominant economy and the world’s largest oil buyers, will buy your oil. We’ll pay you in dollars. But we require that you insist on payment in dollars from anyone in the world who buys oil from you. That’s the deal — you must do that if you want our business. And we’re the major buyer. Oh, and one more thing: we will station American military bases in your country to protect you — to make sure nobody disrupts this arrangement. We, the Americans, get oil at a good price; we convert it into gasoline and fertilizer and make a fortune. The big oil companies — and the politicians who made the deal, people like Kissinger and Nixon, if you want names — all benefit enormously.

And there was one final requirement made of those leaders. All the dollars flowing in — from us, from anyone else in the world who buys your oil and must pay in dollars — what are you going to do with all those dollars? You must commit to investing them back in the United States. That means buying shares in American companies — though not more than a certain amount, you can invest but not control them — and lending the rest to the U.S. government.

Americans know that when we run a budget deficit — currently over a trillion dollars a year — that happens because the government spends more than it raises in taxes. Did you ever wonder who lends the government the money to do that? Well, it turns out that one important lender — not the only one, but an important one — is precisely the Gulf states, who lend those same dollars right back to the United States government.

So we send the dollars over there; they send the oil to us; then they send the dollars back to us as loans. It is a circular gangster arrangement, paid for by the money we all spend on oil. It is a rip-off that will be studied throughout history as an extraordinary example of how an empire organized the global oil business to sustain itself. Because when the Gulf states lend money to the United States, the United States uses it to fight wars — in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, now potentially in Iran. America never fights wars with tax revenue, because if taxpayers had to directly fund the wars, they would oppose them. So wars are paid for by borrowing. And that requires lenders. And we organized those lenders through exactly this arrangement.

And by the way, it’s falling apart. Because what the Iranians are teaching the Gulf states is this: if you have an American military base in your country, it doesn’t protect you — it makes you a target. A target of whom? The Iranians answer: of us. Because the United States attacks us, we are going to attack the United States — and you’ve welcomed them in. You’d better rethink that. And no matter what they say publicly, they are all quietly rethinking it, because like Europe in a different context, they are now having to face the possibility that aligning themselves with the United States may have been betting on the wrong horse.

Richard Eskow: And where it gets interesting in terms of current events — correct me if I’m wrong — but my understanding is that Iran, in threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, is essentially saying: we won’t let your oil through unless it’s paid for in something other than dollars. If that’s correct, then what it means is that the world’s preeminent superpower could lose this extraordinarily cushy arrangement because of the concentrated military power of Iran in one region, at one chokepoint. A single bottleneck could overturn this entire 70-year system. Am I right about that?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. I’m not yet certain about oil being priced in yuan specifically, but I wouldn’t be surprised. What we do know is that the Iranians have long told the Chinese — and have apparently abided by this — that ships registered to Chinese enterprises carrying Iranian oil to China pass through the Strait of Hormuz without interruption. Iran has been a major oil supplier to China for a long time; that’s not new. And my guess is that Iran will now be more than willing to accept payment in yuan, both to further undercut the dollar and for the broader strategic reasons I’ve described.

But I should explain the larger picture: the petrodollar is becoming the petro-yuan not because of any single act of defiance, but because of something much bigger. China is now the fastest-growing, second-largest economy in the world. It will surpass the United States in total economic size by the end of this decade — we’re already in 2026, so I’m talking about the next four years. And why does that matter? Because it means that the whole world has been doing for 20 years what it will increasingly do: buying less from the United States and more from China. So the world needs fewer dollars and more yuan, because that’s where the economic action is.

This is why the dollar replaced the British pound — not through any single decision, but through a gradual shift in where the economic weight of the world lay. The Germans had hoped the world would adopt the Deutsche mark, and had they not lost World War I, it might well have happened. But they lost — twice — and that removed them from contention. The only real successor to the British Empire was the United States. After World War II, you couldn’t get goods from anywhere else anyway, which cemented it immediately. The Marshall Plan further locked it in: we gave Europe dollars on the condition that they be spent on American goods, ensuring that American companies captured all that spending. And the subsequent 75 years reproduced that dynamic through the Cold War and the structure of empire.

Another sign that the empire is passing is that we’re even having this conversation. The dollar is less and less central; the yuan is increasingly playing the role the dollar once played. It’s all very clear — except that we live in a country that desperately needs to deny all of it, to insist that these events are isolated and temporary, not part of a systemic decline. Because decline is too frightening a thought to entertain.

Richard Eskow: I would add to the decline narrative something that fascinates me: we decided to become the architects of a global financial system. But a global system — like an army that extends its supply lines too far — becomes brittle. The Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, closed by the Houthis, was our overextended supply line. The Strait of Hormuz handles two and a half to three times the volume — another overextended supply line. I think we’re going to see a world that’s increasingly rebelling against the oppressive nature of this financial system, cutting or damaging these various supply lines one by one. And that shows the empire is vulnerable not only to rival powers like China, but to its own overextension and fragility. Would you agree?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. And I’d take it one step further. For me, the fundamental issue is profit. Over the last 75 years, we allowed the maximization of corporate profits to determine the global distribution of our economy. It became more profitable to stop making automobiles in Detroit and make them in China instead. Fine — but that globalized the automobile industry in an unprecedented way. And you can multiply that across virtually every other industry.

The profit motive said: make more money over there. But no one factored in the ecological cost of shipping goods back from China across the Pacific — the toll on fisheries, on human health, on the oceans themselves. If you actually account for what it will cost to fix the environmental damage, the extra profit evaporates. We’d have been better off keeping production in Detroit. But capitalism doesn’t work that way. Capitalism calls it “efficient” if it maximizes profit. It isn’t efficient, and it never was. That’s a fetishism of capitalism we should have outgrown long ago.

If you want to understand why we built these extended, fragile supply lines — why no one accounted for their vulnerability — it’s because private capitalists never had to pay for that fragility. They didn’t have to worry about it. Now they’re learning that they should have, because far away in Iran, someone can squeeze a narrow waterway and suddenly your entire system seizes up. You were so swept away by the internal logic of capitalism that you couldn’t think outside that frame. And that is a catastrophic failure — one that is helping to bring this empire down. The systematic fetishization of capitalist calculus is doing it in.

Richard Eskow: And I would argue — perhaps in closing — that even if everyone involved had fully understood decades ago that this would be the outcome, they would have done it anyway. Because the incentive structure of capitalism operates on a quarterly and annual basis. If it’s all going to collapse in 20 or 30 years, who cares? We’ll be long gone.

Richard Wolff: Indeed — I will no longer be the CEO of this company; I’ll have moved up to run another one. It’s Louis XV all over again: après moi, le déluge. “After me, the flood.” That mentality is structurally produced by the system, isn’t it?

Richard Eskow: I’ve got my island retreat in New Zealand, so I’ll be just fine. Well, okay — in closing, I suppose you and I and our listeners should think about who else might sign American currency now that Donald Trump has opened the door. I’m thinking Clint Eastwood, maybe?

Richard Wolff: LeBron James, I think, would be interesting.

Richard Eskow: It would be a step down for LeBron. Robert De Niro? But then, if the signatures are going to be truly representative of the American system, they’d have to be less heroic figures. Lex Luthor, perhaps.

Richard Wolff: Or allow me — even though I’m not proud of it — to wear my hat as an economist for a moment. I am quite pleased to see Scott Bessent’s signature appearing on the currency. Because what he says publicly, as opposed to what I assume he privately knows — if he had the same graduate education I did, which he did — makes him a very fitting choice by Mr. Trump.

Richard Eskow: All right, we’ll leave it at that. Professor Richard Wolff, as always, a tremendous pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the program.

Richard Wolff: My pleasure too. Take care, Richard.

I spoke with India Walton and Sam Rosenthal of Roots Action about the growing “Schumer and Jeffries Must Go” movement, which reflects deep frustration among Democratic voters in the face of ineffective, out-of-touch leadership. Party leaders have failed to meaningfully oppose Trump, are defying public opinion on issues like war and economic inequality, and are beholden to wealthy donors and entrenched interests.

India and Sam argue that the Democratic Party is structurally resistant to change without outside pressure, but that organized grassroots movements can still push it in a more responsive and progressive direction. Ultimately, they see this campaign not just as a leadership challenge, but as a way to awaken voters to demand more from their representatives.

Roots Action Senior Strategist INDIA WALTON is a longtime community activist who emerged in 2021 as a powerful presence in the progressive movement after a stunning Democratic primary victory over a 16-year incumbent mayor of Buffalo.

Roots Action Political Director SAM ROSENTHAL is an organizer and researcher based in Washington, DC. He previously served as the political director at Our Revolution and in elected leadership with Central Brooklyn Democratic Socialists of America.

The petition: https://rootsaction.org/schumer-jeffries-step-aside

Quotes and transcript follow.

Selected Quotes

India

• “Strongly worded emails and tweets won’t lower gas prices or grocery prices.”

• “They don’t know what the average voter wants… because they’re not part of our political class.”

• “Our political system is being manipulated by outside forces… and we have failed to address that.”

• “Organized people can defeat organized money.”

Sam

• “The opposition party has been largely ineffective… you’re on your own.”

• “We should be a party that is anti-war… and instead we’re seeing vacillation.”

• “They’ve discovered that telling people they’re wrong about struggling is not a winning message.”

• “The party’s not going to change by itself.”

Richard

• “Is it possible for the Democratic Party to change or is it addicted to big donor money?

Transcript (edited)

Richard Eskow: There is a movement afoot to replace both Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in their respective positions of leadership in the Democratic Party. Hakeem Jeffries, of course, is the minority leader in the House of Representatives, and Chuck Schumer is the minority leader in the United States Senate. My next two guests are leaders of that movement — integral parts of it.

India Walton is a senior strategist with Roots Action. She became a presence in the progressive movement after her upset Democratic primary victory over a 16-year incumbent mayor in Buffalo, New York, back in 2021. She’s a longtime community activist and also a nurse — so when politics makes you sick, it’s good to have her around.

Sam Rosenthal: is political director for Roots Action. He’s an organizer and researcher based here in Washington, D.C. He was the political director at Our Revolution and was in elected leadership with the Central Brooklyn Democratic Socialists of America. Sam and India, welcome to the program.

India Walton: Thanks for having me, RJ. Good to be here.

Sam Rosenthal: Thanks.

Richard Eskow: It’s great to have you both. Let’s start with a jump ball — anyone can answer. How did the Schumer and Jeffries Must Go movement get rolling?

India Walton: I think it’s a common sentiment among Democrats that leadership isn’t doing anything. Strongly worded emails and tweets are not going to lower gas prices or grocery prices, get our TSA workers paid, or move people through those extremely long lines at airports. And when voters are told they must vote harder — must vote blue no matter who — while their interests aren’t being represented, I think that’s becoming genuinely frustrating for a lot of Democratic voters.

Richard Eskow: Sam, any thoughts?

Sam Rosenthal: Yes — I think it’s exactly what India said. Since Trump took the presidency again, the opposition party has been largely ineffective at carrying out actual opposition. This is a group that’s supposed to be the counterweight to what we’re seeing from the Trump administration — the persecution of working people and people of color, masked agents being sent into our communities to terrorize people. And instead of a strong, united opposition, what we’re seeing is real abdication from Democratic Party leadership. They’re effectively saying to people in this country: you’re on your own. Whatever resistance you can muster, you have to do it yourself.

That message is coming from some of the most powerful political actors in the country outside the Republican Party. We strongly feel there needs to be a change at the top — leaders who will actually challenge Trumpism rather than simply write strongly worded fundraising emails.

Richard Eskow: There’s a scene in a Marx Brothers movie where Groucho gets kidnapped by a vicious gangster and says, “I have a good mind to write a letter to the Times about him in the morning.” And later: “I’ll ring his doorbell and run.” That seems to be the Democratic opposition.

But when there is real opposition, I’d argue that Schumer and Jeffries have sometimes stood in the way. Neither of them endorsed Zohran Mamdani, who seemed to capture that energy in New York City — though Schumer did endorse him at the last minute, if I recall correctly, while Jeffries was more reluctant. Now in Maine you have another insurgent candidate channeling this mood — Graham Platner was on the show a couple of weeks ago — running against Janet Mills, who epitomizes the old guard. And Schumer, as I understand it, is actively pushing Mills to get into and stay in that race. So they’re not even passive — when they shift out of passive mode, they sometimes become part of the problem. Am I being unfair?

India Walton: I don’t think that’s unfair at all. They are obstructionist when it comes to progressives, and it’s tone deaf. They don’t know what the average voter wants — but that’s because they’re not part of our world. These are millionaires who have been in their jobs far too long and don’t share the concerns of everyday American voters. Do you think Chuck Schumer worries about the cost of a dozen eggs or property taxes? Those are not the worries of well-established political figures who essentially have lifetime tenure because there’s no real threat. And every time a challenge comes from the left, they’re quick to collude with — of all people — their supposed opponents, to squash any progressive candidate who might gain real power.

Richard Eskow: Now we have the war with Iran beginning, which makes all of these problems more acute and more urgently in need of attention. And it seems to me the only opposition we’re getting from Jeffries and Schumer is: “You didn’t let us co-sign the authorization before you started bombing” — essentially a procedural complaint. But, Sam, my understanding is that you began organizing to replace Schumer and Jeffries before the attack on Iran. Is that correct?

Sam Rosenthal: Yes. This has been happening since before the war with Iran started. But the dynamics around the war just underscore our critique. Over the summer, Chuck Schumer made a video where he was essentially taunting Donald Trump for not having attacked Iran yet — saying Trump was “chickening out,” a phrase they like to use against him, because Trump had hinted at military action and then backed down. So in Schumer’s view, that was a political stick he could wield against Trump — that he wasn’t starting enough wars.

Now we see there’s real momentum in the House for a War Powers Resolution. Ro Khanna has been leading that charge. But Democratic leadership is again trying to slow-walk it from coming to the floor, colluding with Republicans who don’t want a vote on it. The only reasonable conclusion is that the Democratic Party is scared of forcing individual members to go on the record about whether they support this war.

We’re seeing replays of what happened twenty years ago around the Iraq War — a party incapable of divorcing itself from the deeply held desire of some members for a regime-change war with Iran. That is not appropriate for an opposition party. Democrats should be anti-war, especially anti-illegal, unilateral war against a nation that had not attacked the United States and did not pose a direct threat. Instead, we’re seeing vacillation from leadership and cover given to members who are probably secretly very pleased that Donald Trump started this war.

Richard Eskow: They seem stuck in another era. The latest poll I saw showed 58% of voters against this war — close to two thirds. Yet it feels as if Schumer, Jeffries, and some other leading Democrats are playing off a post-Vietnam playlist: “Don’t look weak. Don’t try to stop a war.” Even though the American people want this war stopped. We could blame Schumer’s age since he grew up in that era — but Hakeem Jeffries is not from that generation. So how much of this do you think is psychology, and how much is legalized corruption — the money talking and nobody walking? Is it mentality, corruption, or both? India, what do you think? You saw it at street level in Buffalo.

India Walton: I saw it at street level in Buffalo. I saw it in St. Louis against Cori Bush. I saw it in New York City against Jamaal Bowman. Our political system is being manipulated by outside forces that we have failed to address — and AIPAC is chief among them. It could be a combination of Schumer’s age and Jeffries wanting to be part of the establishment apparatus because it works for him. But we have to tackle the problem of AIPAC essentially buying our elections and our elected officials.

Richard Eskow: Go ahead, Sam.

Sam Rosenthal: India is totally right. The question of support for this war pulls on an unresolved strand within the Democratic Party — its support for Israel, and particularly for the Netanyahu government’s leadership. The Democratic Party, despite the wishes of most of its voters, has been a fairly steadfast supporter of Israel even through its genocide in Gaza and its increasingly provocative actions across the Middle East — actions that amount to an overt attempt to pull the entire region into a potentially existential war it wants to wage against its neighbors.

The Democratic Party still cannot disentangle itself from the Israel-right-or-wrong lobby represented by AIPAC and DMFI. And in some cases — especially with Schumer — there is still a deeply held belief, as Schumer himself has said, that one of his primary goals as a senator is to continue aid to Israel no matter what. It’s a pervasive attitude among Democratic leadership that is fundamentally out of step with its base, out of step with young Jewish Americans, and increasingly alienating potential supporters. They seem incapable of stepping back from their ardent support for what’s happening in the Middle East. I think they’re content to let Trump do their dirty work for them.

Richard Eskow: Let’s move to a different dimension of what we’re up against — the domestic economy. Biden and then Kamala Harris ran in 2024 on how good the economy really was, essentially telling struggling working people: “You just haven’t read the top-line economic data. Let us send a Harvard economist to explain why you actually have it good — even though you’re sweating to pay your bills every month.” And now all of a sudden they’ve discovered “affordability.” God love them and their buzzwords. But where are they on that issue, really? You can’t get at affordability without taxing billionaires, regulating banks, and reining in runaway corporate profits. Have they said anything that will genuinely resonate with people — anything that says: this will make your life better, this will be fairer, you can get by?

India Walton: For a lot of the party stalwarts, affordability is just a word. Affordable for whom? What’s affordable to someone making $20,000 a year is not what’s affordable to someone making $20 million. And again, most of these folks are beholden to large corporate donors, so there’s no incentive to do what’s right for the people.

One thing the pandemic taught us is that the U.S. government can cancel student debt, can pause rent and secure housing for people at their most vulnerable, and can move toward universal health care — because all of those things actually happened, to varying degrees. People who lived through that don’t want to go back to working three jobs and never seeing their families just to make ends meet. It’s not a fair system. And I think we’re reaching a point where average people are beginning to see and reject the runaway wealth inequality in this country. The DSA has been saying this for years. Now it’s becoming undeniable.

Sam Rosenthal: First of all, party leadership has the left to thank for its newfound appreciation of affordability rhetoric. That was us — that was Zohran’s campaign for mayor of New York, that was the organized left’s laser focus on these issues. And there’s some recognition that telling people, ahead of the 2024 election, “If you think you’re struggling to get by, that’s a failure of your comprehension, not a reflection of your material reality” — was not a winning message.

They’ve discovered that telling people they’re wrong when they say they can’t afford to pay their heating bill does not win voters. But right now, Democratic Party leadership is more or less hoping that Trump crashes the economy — and he’s making a good run at it. While that may benefit them electorally, it means real misery for working people. A party that genuinely cares about people living paycheck to paycheck should not be hoping for economic disaster. We should be pushing the Democratic Party toward a proactive, positive vision for economic equality — a more redistributive system that says: we all work, we all create wealth, and we need to change how that wealth is allocated.

Instead, they seem to be sitting back, hoping things will be so economically disastrous by 2028 that voters will jump ship back to the Democrats. They might get it at the midterms this year, and they might get it in two years. But that’s just more business as usual.

What we want to see — if affordability is really the focus — is uniform buy-in across the Democratic Party for policies we’ve seen work in specific cases: universal childcare, reduced or free public transit fares, some meaningful regulation of grocery store prices so people can afford basic staples. The party is not seriously engaging with those issues at the leadership level. Some members are, of course — but not the people at the top. And that needs to change if Democrats are going to make a genuine counterclaim to what we’re seeing from the right.

Richard Eskow: I have a theory I want to run by you. It’s about 2024. The last figures I saw suggest that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden together spent more than $2 billion on the presidential race — and as we know, they lost. I think that money actually hurt her, because people like Tony West in her inner circle were constantly saying, “You can’t say this, you can’t say that.” They produced hundreds of internet ads and tested them, and the one that polled best was the toughest on corporations — “We’re not going to let corporations profit off your misery.” And the fundraising advisor said, “You can’t run that one.”

That, to me, exemplifies what’s going on. There was a Ryan Grim piece in The Intercept a few years ago about how freshman Democratic members of Congress were given a PowerPoint presentation that included setting aside two hours a day for fundraising — not $27-a-pop grassroots calls, but calls to wealthy donors. After a while, those become your people. It’s not just ambition; they literally become the faces you know. So: is it possible for the Democratic Party to change, or is it so addicted to big-donor money — whether from AIPAC, Wall Street, tech, or crypto — that real change is structurally impossible? How do you fight billions of dollars?

India Walton: Where are the good rich people? We’ve had so many progressive candidates who rejected corporate and real estate money. But how do we support those candidacies when they’re being outspent twenty to one? It’s a real uphill battle. But in the words of my uncle Senator Sanders: organized people can defeat organized money. We have to keep organizing and beating that drum.

And I’ll add: we can talk about how miserable people are going to be because of this economy, but what I’m seeing as a nurse is that people are going to die. They are cutting hospital staff, closing hospitals — we are not able to deliver the care we should because of cuts to Medicaid. And with what we’re seeing with ICE in our airports and our TSA agents — 13% of them called out of work last week — these are dire times. Not to be alarmist, but there should be a lot more urgency around building the community supports that will keep people afloat and alive while we weather this storm. Because it’s not going away anytime soon.

Richard Eskow: Sam, your thoughts?

Sam Rosenthal: India’s right — we’re in an incredibly dire time. On the question of whether party realignment is possible, the honest answer is: this is kind of where we come in. Where activists, organizers, and people agitating for change come in. The party is not going to change on its own for all the reasons you outlined, RJ. If you go to the Hill when members aren’t on call time with wealthy donors, what they’re doing is sitting in their offices waiting for lobbyists to come in. That’s it — call time and visits from well-financed lobbies whose interests are not aligned with working people.

We have to apply pressure from the outside and from the inside when we can. The Democratic Party is not an institution inherently worth preserving or enshrining — it’s a tool that is more likely to listen to our side than the Republican Party right now. We’re stuck with an entrenched two-party system, and given all the urgent issues India just highlighted, it’s incumbent on us to act as quickly and effectively as we can. I don’t love the party, and I don’t think it has any interest in reforming on its own — but I still think it’s one of the most advantageous vehicles we have to work through if we want to see real change.

Progress can feel incredibly slow, or even like it’s moving backward. But breakthroughs are possible — through mass movements, through organizing. We just have to keep at it. And sometimes keeping at it feels really, really foolish.

Richard Eskow: When people go to work within the Democratic Party for progressive causes, I always think of the biblical phrase: be in the world but not of it. Be in the party, but don’t join the hive mind. That said, let’s circle back to Schumer and Jeffries and the drive to remove them — which I wholeheartedly support. What do you think would actually happen? Democratic politicians are generally wary of going up against their leaders, because leaders can punish them — through campaign money, blocking bills from the floor, committee assignments. So first, how realistic is it that we can remove Schumer and Jeffries? And second, who might ideally replace them, or who might we realistically expect to step in?

Sam Rosenthal: Go ahead, India.

India Walton: I’m not a betting woman, so I don’t like to speculate — partly because a lot of what’s happened politically, particularly within the Democratic Party, has shocked me. I think it’s more likely we’ll see Chuck Schumer retire than see the full delegation demand he step aside en masse. We’re probably going to be stuck with Hakeem Jeffries for a while. There may be room to nudge him left on some issues, but not dramatically. He still has broad support among Democratic leadership.

Richard Eskow: Sam, your thoughts?

Sam Rosenthal: India’s right that Schumer is the more vulnerable of the two. There’s actually real movement there — Juliana Stratton, who won the primary in Illinois and is the presumptive next senator from that state, has said she would not support Schumer as leader. There’s discontent from the more progressive parts of the party and a broad sense that someone younger would be better in that role. Whether it’s via retirement or something more public and contentious, I do think he’ll be out sooner rather than later. He’s not reading the room in the party correctly anymore.

Jeffries is a more flexible figure. I think he can be pushed and pulled. He’s most interested in staying in power, and if staying in power means moving left on certain issues — supporting a ceasefire and ending arms shipments to Israel, backing a higher federal minimum wage, whatever it is — he’s potentially amenable to that kind of pressure. I don’t think he’s a friend of the left, but I think he’s more of an opportunist than an ideologue, and that might actually be the way to square the circle for progressives like us who are earnestly hoping to move the party left — to push back against Trumpism — rather than seeing it drift toward a kinder, gentler version of the Republican Party circa the 1990s.

Richard Eskow: So one purpose of the Schumer and Jeffries campaign, I’d infer from your answers, is to send a message to the party — regardless of the fate of either of them — that we are not happy with how this party is being led. Is that a fair first read?

India Walton: I would argue the message is not primarily for Democratic leadership. It’s for voters. This is an invitation to interrogate what our representatives are actually doing for us. Democratic leadership doesn’t listen to us anyway — they don’t much care what we say. But voters do. The more these conversations happen in public, the more it sends a signal to the people who are resistant to change. Who we’re really talking to are voters, activists, and organizers — people who genuinely believe things can and should change — and we’re using that as a strategy to push back against those who resist it.

Sam Rosenthal: Right — as India says, you don’t need to send a message to leadership. They already know where they stand. It’s about standing up and saying to people: you can have better than this. You don’t have to sit in dread watching what the Trump administration is doing and feeling there’s nothing you can do. You can demand better leadership. You can try to affect that. You can push for more responsive representation.

I think people have become somewhat resigned to the idea that real change isn’t possible — that you can’t have a genuine opposition party that actually opposes things, rather than one that meekly goes along with whichever way the Trump wind is blowing. A big part of this campaign is to encourage people to demand more from their political representation, and to understand that they can get it — they just have to push.

Richard Eskow: So if people want to support this action, where can they go? What can they do?

India Walton: They should definitely follow us on social media and visit rootsaction.org. Sign up for our mailing list so you’ll be informed as the campaign unfolds — and help fund it if you can. If you’ve got five or seven dollars to spare, we put that money directly into our organizing efforts.

Richard Eskow: Last question: should progressives feel discouraged, stressed, energized, ready for good things to come — or just wait and see?

India Walton: I’m encouraging people to take good care of themselves and each other. Get into mutual aid groups in your community. Nap. Stay hydrated. Because a lot of this is going to be a matter of outlasting them.

Richard Eskow: Which in my case is particularly important. Sam?

Sam Rosenthal: I think in some ways our message is winning. People are incredibly receptive to the idea that we can have a different politics — that we can do something about the affordability crisis, that we can work to end our forever wars. We just have to keep going. We have to apply the pressure. That’s why the napping and hydrating matter: this is a marathon, not a sprint. I encourage folks to join us for it. There are many different ways to contribute, and I hope people can carve out some time from their very stressful days for organizing. It feels better when you do.

Richard Eskow: It really does. Humans are social creatures — get those mirror neurons firing through real interaction with other people. And people can go to rootsaction.org to find out more. Sam Rosenthal and India Walton of Roots Action, as always, thanks for all your great work, and thanks for coming on the program.

India Walton: Thanks a bunch.

Sam Rosenthal: Thanks.

I sat down with Vijay Prashad of the Tricontinental Institute to make sense of the “unreality” of the current conflict with Iran, which feels less like a strategic operation and more like a drunken bar fight. We dug into the staggering historical amnesia of U.S. and Israeli leadership, who seem to believe they can bomb 100 million people into submission despite a decades-long track record of failing to “win” wars through sheer destruction.

From the tactical intelligence of Iran’s infrastructure strikes to the haunting possibility of millions of people with nothing left to lose, we’ve moved into dangerous territory as America’s tactical blunders collide with the end-times theology of its extremist military commanders.

Quotes and transcript below.

SELECTED QUOTES

Vijay:

• “You don’t win a war by destroying things. You win a war by subduing a people or by getting a people to believe that you are on their side.”

• “A base is not a shield, it’s a target.”

Richard:

• “It’s as if we’re all chess pieces being moved around the board by a deranged, syphilitic chess master—or puppet master.”

• “It feels like war by PowerPoint... totally divorced from reality. It’s like some app developer’s presentation to venture capitalists.”

TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited)

Richard Eskow: There are things going on in the world you may have noticed. So without any further ado, Vijay Prashad, welcome back to the program.

Vijay Prashad: Thanks. It’s great to be with you.

Richard Eskow: Great to be with you, although the circumstances are very odd. We were talking a little bit before we went on air about Iran, and it is eerie in a way that this is the chronicle of some deaths foretold. We’ve expected it for decades, yet it has an air of unreality to me, almost as if the leaders of the US and Israel are automatons working off some script. We know what Netanyahu’s motivations are, but Trump and his team can’t offer a coherent reason why they’re doing this. They had no idea what they were getting into. The Ansar Allah — the so-called Houthi rebels — cost the US economy $20 billion with their blockade. And yet it never seems to have occurred to them that the much larger force of Iran might do the same in the Strait of Hormuz.

There appears to be no reason, no cause. It’s as if we’re all chess pieces with some deranged puppet master behind all of this. I have to admit that for all my study and effort to understand the dynamics of how the world works, this seems to be in a category by itself. You get what I’m driving at?

Vijay Prashad: Well, it’s a little bit like a bar fight. You’re drunk, you don’t like somebody, you haven’t liked them for a long time, and you just go out there swinging and throw your drink at them — and nobody really knows where this ends. Do you plan to kill them? Will they kill you? What’s the exit?

Serious modern warfare requires much more than just the ability to destroy a country, and this has been proved over and over again. We can look at the record and ask a basic question: when is the last time the United States actually won a major war? Maybe you can say Grenada in 1983 — overthrowing Maurice Bishop’s government after Bishop himself had been killed. But Grenada 1983 is not comparable to Iran 2026.

The United States could not prevail in Vietnam despite enormous use of force. Before that, it could not prevail in Korea. It could not prevail in Afghanistan. In Iraq, it was able to overthrow Saddam and kill Gaddafi, but it did not prevail. It does not control Libya, does not control Iraq, does not control Afghanistan, nor the northern part of Korea. What’s the point, really?

Where is the war expert who has looked at all this and said: the United States has the capacity to destroy anything, but we can’t win a war — and those are two different things. You don’t win a war by destroying things. You win a war by subduing a people, or by convincing them that you are on their side. Nobody believed it — not the Afghans, not the Vietnamese, not the Koreans. And you can’t subdue 100 million Iranians. It’s simply not going to happen.

So when you enter a war, you need clear political objectives. The United States does not appear to have them. Anyone could tell you the Iranians are not going to surrender — they’ve made that extremely clear. Bombing them is not sufficient. They don’t feel they need to be liberated by the United States. In 1953, the US and the UK ‘liberated’ them from a heroic national figure, Mohammad Mossadegh, and imposed a horrendous shah on them from 1953 to 1979. They don’t need that kind of liberation again.

So what is the war aim? There isn’t one, and that’s the problem. Trump is stuck. He wants out. He wants negotiations and a ceasefire. But the Iranians are smarter than that. They’ve already taken a big hit, but they have a chain of command that is deep, they can absorb more losses, and they planned for this. They don’t want the war to simply end on those terms. What they want is for the United States to say: we’re sorry, we started it, we won’t do this again, we’ll leave you in peace, and we’ll roll back all the sanctions — essentially everything in place since at least 2006. They want, in other words, a grand bargain. And Trump cannot offer that because it would look like defeat. So we’re stuck. This could go on and on. The Iranians refusing a ceasefire because they know it just delays the next reckoning, and the United States desiring one but unwilling to put a grand bargain on the table. We’re stuck in a bar fight.

Richard Eskow: I’ve heard so many people say Trump will just declare victory and get out. But you can’t do that unilaterally in a war — both sides have to agree. This is such an astonishingly ahistorical effort, and I’m not talking about ancient empires. I’m talking about last year.

Just over a year ago, in response to the bombing of their embassy, Iran sent — and this is not me vouching for their government, this is just what happened — they sent 50 missiles, no more, no less. That very precise number suggests there were back-channel understandings: we’ve got to push back, we’ve got to be seen to respond, but this is measured. And what did they get for it? They got this war. So the takeaway, if you’re in the Iranian leadership, is: you can’t deal with these people. You can’t be measured with them. The only way to stop this is to fight to the bitter end. And why, if that’s right, didn’t they know? It should have been obvious.

Vijay Prashad: Yeah, that’s the thing. And let’s go back to your point that you can’t unilaterally end a war. Well, you can — but it would mean the United States pulling back completely: removing its military bases, withdrawing its ships, and ordering the Israelis to stop firing. That’s what it would actually mean to pull back. The Iranians would need to see the United States picking up its forces from Qatar, the UAE, disbanding the military bases that essentially encircle Iran, and moving the naval armada out. Then the Iranians might say: now we’ll talk. That would be a sufficient gesture.

But why should they talk while the United States retains a stranglehold on Iran by surrounding it with military bases? It’s now come out that the US used airfields in Saudi Arabia — in violation of what the Saudis themselves said two decades ago when they told the US to leave and break down its bases. If that’s true, Iran is within its rights to strike Saudi Arabia. If you give your airfields to a hostile power to attack me, you’ve entered the conflict as a belligerent. A foreign military base on your land is not a shield — it’s a target.

Iran hasn’t aggressively struck the UAE or Qatar as nations; it has struck the US military bases there because those bases have made those countries belligerents. The Emir of Qatar should have understood that hosting a US base made him a target. He presumably believed the Americans would protect him. They can’t, because other nations have developed sophisticated military technology. The Iranians are not without their own capabilities — and they haven’t yet deployed their naval fast-boat fleets, which are stored underground. The Ansar Allah you mentioned are still largely silent. The militias in Iraq have only been firing sporadically at US bases.

Once those forces fully engage — if, for instance, Israel is reckless enough to use a tactical nuclear missile on Iran — Bahrain will see an uprising unlike anything it has experienced. The Emir of Bahrain is finished. This is a country more than 75% Shia with a Sunni monarch. He barely suppressed the Arab Spring. If they destroy a holy site in Iran, Damascus will rise up. There is the great shrine of Sayyidah Zaynab on the outskirts of the city — one of the most revered sites in Shia Islam. These countries are on a hair trigger.

What Israel is doing to Lebanon is generating anger at a level rarely seen in the modern Middle East. One fifth of the Lebanese population has been made into refugees. That’s one in five people who are not angry at Hezbollah or the Lebanese government — they’re angry at Israel. You’ve created problems for yourself. Every Palestinian now harbors deep resentment. Every Lebanese person is increasingly turning against Israel. You have a Shia population across the region that harbors profound anger at both Israel and the United States. What are you doing? It’s self-defeating, because if you’re fighting a war to achieve security, you’re going to end up with less security.

Israel and the United States apparently miscalculated, or didn’t care, believing that these strikes — killing Khamenei and others — would somehow collapse the Iranian government. But you don’t attack a people for twenty years, tighten sanctions from 2006 onward, and then expect them to just be sitting there unprepared. They have built themselves around the capacity for war. And they will win this war — not militarily, necessarily, but politically.

Richard Eskow: Not in the same way, but the same end result — I think, in many ways, Palestine has won the conflict in Gaza despite the horrific slaughter, because my long-term view is that it has doomed the state of Israel in its current structure.

But in terms of Israel and the United States, sometimes I think this must be war by PowerPoint — somebody in a war room had a slide deck with a plan: kill this one, this one, and that one, and then the Kurds will split this way, you’ll have eight fractured states, and we can dominate them all. Totally divorced from reality, like a venture capital pitch from some app developer. Pure fantasy.

At what point is the feedback loop supposed to kick in — the one that tells you: this isn’t working, trim your sails? Is the feedback loop broken for these people? Or are you saying that regardless of what they realize now, they’ve set a chain of events in motion that they can’t stop?

Vijay Prashad: That’s a very good question, and genuinely difficult to answer, because both administrations — in Washington and even more so in Tel Aviv — are something of a black box. We haven’t heard from Benjamin Netanyahu for several days. There’s enormous speculation about his whereabouts. Trump has just been his typical brash self.

The United States is slightly easier to read because its governments leak so much more — though this particular administration less so than usual. The only time Netanyahu’s administration leaks is when a coalition partner is unhappy and steps in front of a microphone. During this entire period, from the genocide in Gaza to this war, the Tel Aviv government has actually been quite disciplined. We’ve heard no dissenting voices, no voices of caution — just a gung-ho attitude of ‘get it done.’ So we’re not getting any sense of pushback or reconsideration from Israel.

I don’t really know what’s happening there. I try to find out from journalists and friends, but there’s almost nothing. I don’t think they’re going to blink. They wanted to do this, and they’re going to try to see it through.

There is real pain being inflicted on Israeli society. Iranian missiles are getting through, and I think this has genuinely rattled people. Israelis are not accustomed to this. They are used to asymmetric warfare against the Palestinians — a few rockets from Gaza fired by Hamas or Islamic Jihad is nothing compared to the sophistication of these Iranian missiles. These are not Scuds, like the ones Saddam fired in 1991. These are precision instruments built by highly skilled scientists and engineers. They are disrupting the protective dome, and Israeli civilians are directly feeling the impact.

The United States, by contrast, is too far away to feel it. What’s also striking is how reckless Trump is: he is refusing to fund the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA even while the country is at war. There’s no head of the department — Kristine Ohm was fired, her deputy fired. It’s reckless, though partly it reflects a real assessment: the Iranians don’t appear to have the capacity, or perhaps simply haven’t planned, to bring the fight to the US homeland. Their hardware can’t reach the American continent. They don’t have the kind of naval power to threaten the Caribbean. And the much-hyped terrorist networks — Hezbollah cells in Brazil, Hamas operatives here and there — were largely the paranoid fantasy of the far right. If those assets existed, they would have been used by now.

The only way Americans might feel any real pain is through oil prices — but that’s not the same as an Iranian missile landing in downtown Tel Aviv. The United States has large reserves and can cushion that blow. If something comparable were happening in New York or Chicago, public opinion would shift dramatically. We don’t know whether public opinion in Israel is shifting because they’ve really locked everything down.

What we do know is that the United States has continued, for the last several days, making entreaties to Tehran asking for negotiations. The United States wants to stop this war — that’s very clear. What’s also notable is that, for the first time in these kinds of conflicts — whether Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran — the Russians have made a public move by taking Khamenei to Moscow for medical treatment. Putin has sent a message to the Trump administration. Whether that message is simply ‘we have a stake in this’ or something more, I don’t know.

It’s not as though Russia or China are going to send air support into Iran the way Russia did into Syria — at least not yet. They seem reluctant to escalate with the United States. But during the third or fourth night of the bombing, Chinese military aircraft circled Taiwan and briefly entered the airspace above Taipei. They didn’t open fire, didn’t invade, but they demonstrated that they could. That was a statement to the United States.

And remember what the Iranian foreign minister said: we are waiting for you.

Richard Eskow: Russia and China are interesting factors here. My instinct — correct me if I’m wrong — is that if either of them believed Iran could actually fall in this war, they would escalate their involvement somehow. The precedent alone, apart from oil markets and everything else, would be intolerable for them. But they seem to be in a wait-and-see mode, possibly calculating that things are going Iran’s way enough that direct intervention isn’t necessary. Do you agree, or am I off base?

Vijay Prashad: I’m somewhat disappointed that neither Russia nor China has used public diplomacy more effectively. By that I mean the diplomacy that’s visible to the world — not the back-channel conversations, which most probably are happening. China has enormous investments in Iran and in Venezuela. The United States is jeopardizing Chinese strategic interests across the board. I would imagine significant private communication is taking place.

But there is also an avenue of public diplomacy that has gone largely unused. China and Russia are both permanent members of the UN Security Council, which gives them veto power. The United States, over the past thirty years and especially since the war in Syria, has used that veto mechanism to embarrass Russia and China — putting forward resolutions it knows they’ll veto, thus making them look like the obstructionists before global opinion. But Russia and China very rarely put forward resolutions they know the United States will veto.

If I were Russia right now, I would have three resolutions already in the chamber. First, a resolution against the US aggressive action in Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro — a clear Article 2 violation of the UN Charter. Put it on the table, force the United States to veto it. Second, a resolution against the unilateral US embargo of Cuba, particularly the heightened oil embargo creating blackouts. That embargo, insofar as it threatens third parties — telling Europe, Canada, and Mexico they can’t trade with Cuba — violates Chapters 6 and 7 of the Charter, which require a Security Council resolution to authorize such measures. Put it on the table. One hundred and eighty-seven countries in the General Assembly vote to end the embargo; make the theater visible in the Security Council. Third, a resolution declaring the war of aggression against Iran a violation of the entire spirit of the UN Charter — a war crime. Force the United States to veto it.

Three vetoes in a matter of weeks. Why hasn’t Lavrov drafted these resolutions? Why hasn’t China? It would electrify global opinion. People around the world would say: yes, we want a different kind of world. The failure to do this is demoralizing.

As for your specific question — whether they would act if Iran were on the verge of collapse — I think yes. I don’t think they will allow a US victory in Iran. But right now, they may be watching and concluding that Iran is actually prevailing, both militarily and especially politically. So why get involved? It could also be that Russia called and offered an air battalion, and the Iranians said: no, we’ll do this on our own. We are not Bashar al-Assad. They are an extremely proud people.

But at what you might call n-minus-one — one minute before collapse — I believe China would intervene in some form. A US victory meaning the destruction of the Iranian state would be catastrophic for the entire international order. Nobody wants to see Iran go the way of Libya.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. Let’s talk for a moment about Iran’s relationships with the neighboring Middle Eastern countries — the ones hosting US military bases. I was intrigued by something in the recent back-and-forth: there was a strike on an Iranian desalination plant — Iran gets roughly 70% of its potable water from desalination, while some of those neighboring countries depend on it for close to 100%. Then an Iranian missile struck a desalination facility in one of those countries, did minor damage, and Iran immediately apologized, saying it was aiming for an American base.

I wondered whether that wasn’t also a message: if you allow the Americans to escalate from your territory to this level — a strike on civilian water infrastructure, which for Iran is an existential threat — be prepared to face a similar threat, because you’re even more vulnerable than we are. Am I reading too much into it?

Vijay Prashad: Why would you read anything into it? It’s perfectly clear: the United States quite badly damaged an Iranian desalination plant, and then an Iranian drone struck a facility in Bahrain that affected water delivery to perhaps twenty or thirty villages. Bahrain is a largely rural country — there’s Manama, the capital, and then it’s surrounded by small villages. This plant served a number of them.

Iran immediately apologized, but they are doing two things simultaneously, and that’s the intelligence of their diplomacy. On one side, they’ve sent a clear message: you hit our civilian infrastructure, we can hit yours. And Bahrain — you have a US base on your territory. That base is a target. There’s no shield for you.

The particular plant that was struck serves the Shia population of Bahrain, not the royal family — which adds a sectarian layer, though I don’t want to overstate it. This is not fundamentally a sectarian war, though sectarian elements are present.

They apologized because they don’t want a tit-for-tat on civilian infrastructure to continue. But the message was sent: this could become a water war. The Iranian escalation ladder is quite deliberate. They didn’t close the Strait of Hormuz after the Supreme Leader was killed. They closed it after the United States struck the oil refineries in northern Tehran. The logic is precise: you strike our oil facilities, we make oil a weapon. You strike our water plant, we can make water a weapon.

These are tactical maneuvers, not grand strategic commitments. They can be walked back. What they are saying, step by step, is: for every escalation you make, we have a corresponding option. What’s equally notable is that the Iranians have not responded in kind on civilian deaths, and this is consistent with their history.

In the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq was supplied with chemical weapons components by the United States and West Germany and used them liberally against Iranian soldiers — mustard gas along the front lines, the bombing of Halabja. The Iranian leadership responded by declaring through religious ruling that they would not reciprocate with weapons of mass destruction. That position, implicit at first and later explicit on nuclear weapons, has held.

Iran does not go after civilians even when its own civilians are killed. I’ve seen this in the Baloch border region: when separatist groups fire across into Pakistan and Pakistan responds, killing Iranian civilians, Iran does not retaliate against Pakistani civilians. They have a kind of ethics of warfare that I can’t fully explain but that is consistent and observable. They haven’t fired directly into downtown Dubai. That is simply not their way.

Richard Eskow: I wonder too whether they’re sensitive to how they’re perceived on the Middle Eastern street — whether they want to maintain popular sympathy not just among Shia populations but across the Sunni-Shia divide.

A friend of mine was recently transiting through Doha — one of the busiest airports in the world — and his 90-minute layover stretched to 15 hours. They were sent into what served as a bomb shelter, essentially the underground transit tunnel between terminals. An air-raid warning at a major international hub, filled primarily with business travelers and wealthier visitors. That’s different from striking civilian villages. It’s almost like a knock on the door — saying: we’re here, and elites are not necessarily immune. But the rural populations, the working poor — those are people they seem to regard as innocent bystanders.

Is there anything to that reading, or do you think for Iran all civilians are equally off-limits?

Vijay Prashad: The brand of Dubai and Qatar is built entirely on one promise: we are safe. No real crime, because the state deals with criminals harshly. No political freedom, but complete physical safety. Your children can walk on the street at midnight. You can bank here without interference. If you’re a wealthy person of, shall we say, flexible ethics, this is an ideal place to operate. It’s become a cliché that Indian financial criminals run operations in Mumbai from Dubai.

But that brand is now being stress-tested. Is it really that safe? It’s like asking after 9/11 which Western city is truly safe. Suddenly people in London, in New York, realized they were not as far from the wars they had tried to keep at a distance.

If there is no grand bargain with Iran, this threat is going to continue. People will start to leave. They’ll decamp to Hong Kong, Singapore — places that feel safer, at least for now. Nobody really wants to leave Dubai. Enormous salaries, comfortable lives, large staff. Why would you want to move to somewhere with heavy regulation and cold winters? The permanent expatriate class is large, and it comprises the nodes of international banking and finance — gold markets, offshore capital, all of it. These people are going to need another safe haven. It’s potentially an opportunity for smaller jurisdictions — Malta, Monaco — to absorb some of that activity.

After Nasser made Egypt inhospitable to international capital, Beirut briefly became the banker of the Middle East. Then civil war came, and it all moved to the Gulf. Now where do you go? The whole world is becoming a battlefield. Singapore may not be safe if the United States continues trying to egg China into a conflict.

I genuinely don’t understand why this international financial class is not furious. Do they think Iran needs to be punished, the government overthrown? These are childish fantasies — the idea that you can punish a nation into submission or that removing one leader makes everything fine. We’ve been down that road: remove Saddam, everything will be fine; remove Assad, everything will be fine. It doesn’t work like that.

Syria is only at halftime, by the way. I fear that continued Israeli bombardment of Lebanon is heating up a situation that will spill across the border into Syria. Lebanon cannot handle the current refugee crisis, and with UN agencies now drastically underfunded, there’s no safety net. Palestinians aren’t registered to access the Lebanese health system. Syrians aren’t registered either. When you get injured in a bombing, there’s no recourse. And there are very large Palestinian camps along the southern Lebanese coast and in Beirut itself.

This whole vision is, I think, a quixotic and deeply foolish dream. Netanyahu and Trump are drunk on their own ambition, and it isn’t going well.

Richard Eskow: Here in the United States it’s hard to get precise information on what’s happening. But from what I can see, we may be approaching Gaza-level slaughter — thousands of people in a matter of days, brutal and horrific — and in the process turning the entire region against you.

So I guess, as you said, this goes back to the beginning: drunk on power, stuck in a bar fight. I won’t ask you how you think it ends because I don’t think any of us know. But do you have any concluding thoughts? If you do know how it ends, please tell me.

Vijay Prashad: Well, the main thought is that this has been appalling. I’m editing a book written by a Palestinian journalist about being in Gaza during the genocide. He eventually gets taken to prison, and the book is in a sense his prison memoir. He calls it Those Who Survived Hell. The reason for the title is that when he was picked up, the Israeli soldier yelled at all the captured people: ‘Welcome to hell.’ And he said to himself: I survived hell.

I’ve been thinking about that phrase a great deal in relation to my friends in Iran. I have a number of close friends there, and in a real sense they are surviving hell. A couple of them wrote to say: this may be my last message to you. Of course, it’s an odd thing, because you write again the next day and say the same thing. Every message could be your last. You’re surviving hell. It’s brutal, it’s loud, it’s terrifying. Some of them have children. That’s an almost unimaginable kind of fear.

So yes, Richard, I hope they survive hell. I hope the people of Iran and the neighboring areas — Bahrain, Dubai, Qatar, the people of Israel, the people of Palestine — I hope all of them survive, because hell is where they have been taken. And it is the governments of Israel and the United States that took them there.

This was a completely unnecessary war. The Iranians were sitting with Omani intermediaries and US negotiators, and they were willing to go all the way to zero enrichment — to put that on the table. Trump lied to the people of the United States at the State of the Union when he said ‘I wish the Iranians would just say they don’t want a nuclear weapon.’ That was a lie, because two hours before he said it, Iran’s foreign minister had posted exactly that statement. Trump said, two hours later, that the Iranians won’t say it. This is precisely like the lead-up to the Iraq War: they lied, and then they launched a futile war.

This war is far more dangerous than Iraq, because Iran is four times as large, and unlike Iraq, the Iranians have built an enormous scientific and technical capacity over decades. They make their own weapons. The Iraqis had to import them. Iran has tens of thousands of drones ready to be deployed, naval assets they haven’t yet used, and hypersonic missiles they haven’t yet fired. Meanwhile, the government of North Korea has reportedly offered to provide a nuclear weapon if Iran wants one. Even now, even facing this assault, the Iranians have refused. That tells you something profound about Iran’s genuine posture on nuclear weapons.

I’ll be honest: if I were Iran, purely from a cold pragmatic standpoint — and I abhor nuclear weapons — I would test one and tell the United States to back off. That is what North Korea did in 2006, and since then the United States has been unable to threaten them militarily; it can only ask them to come to the table. If Iran tested a nuclear weapon now, they could say: you forced our hand. Now let’s talk about the grand bargain. The Saudis are reportedly seeking nuclear capability, the Jordanians are considering it — that door was opened by Israel, with American assistance. Israel got its nuclear weapon from apartheid South Africa with help from the United States. You opened the door. Iran never wanted to walk through it, but if they get there now, it changes everything.

Richard Eskow: On the subject of hell — there’s a Willie Nelson song called ‘What Can You Do to Me Now?’ The whole point of it is: I’ve suffered so much that nothing can touch me anymore. When you have millions of people who have been through hell and come out the other side saying, ‘What can you do to me now? Kill me? I’ve faced that every day for years’ — that kind of defiance may, in its own way, be as powerful as a nuclear weapon. That would be my closing thought. What’s yours?

Vijay Prashad: I don’t want to be too culturalist about this, but I think it’s important for people to understand that the Shia population comes out of a foundational tragedy — the Battle of Karbala, several hundred years ago, in which Hussein, one of the great leaders of Islam, was martyred. The Shia are, in a sense, those who were unable to defend him. And the grief of that failure runs very deep.

A friend was telling me recently that this idea keeps recurring at funerals: ‘We were not with you.’ They say it to the Supreme Leader, to Soleimani, to the others who have fallen. It is a lament of historical inability to protect those you love, repeated across centuries. This is a population that has been formed not around the experience of victory, but around the experience of loss. And that is a very particular, very heartbreaking way to encounter the world — and a very powerful one.

That eschatology meets another eschatology: the one now being articulated in certain Israeli circles, which holds that God has granted the Jewish people dominion from the Euphrates to the Nile. I don’t know if you watched the conversation between Mike Huckabee and Tucker Carlson, but Huckabee said precisely that — God’s mandate extends from Iraq to Egypt. That is an eschatology, a vision of destiny.

And then there is the Christian Zionist theology underneath much of this — the belief that the Third Temple must be built, which requires demolishing the Al-Aqsa Mosque, after which all the Jews will be killed so that the Messiah can return. These eschatologies are colliding with each other.

You and I have been talking about this entirely in pragmatic terms — bar fights, military strategy, diplomatic maneuvers. But we are also living in a world where many of the people making decisions have a completely different framework for understanding what is happening and what it means. When you enter that framework, it becomes very hard to see a path out. There are people who genuinely believe this war is going to culminate in the return of the Messiah.

Richard Eskow: And some of them are commanding US troops in the field.

Vijay Prashad: Exactly. And we are not really equipped — because of who we are and how we were raised — to enter that conversation in those terms. I made an elementary error just now in this discussion, because I don’t live inside that world. I wanted to end, not by opening up that entire subject, but simply by letting people who are listening know that we’ve only been talking about half the story. The other half — the eschatological half — you and I can’t fully enter. And when we ask, ‘How is this going to end?’ we should remember that there are people who believe it ends with the Messiah descending from heaven.

Richard Eskow: You’re absolutely right. On that rather striking note — Vijay Prashad, director of the Tricontinental Institute and so much more, thank you for your thoughts and thank you for joining me on the program.

Vijay Prashad: Thanks a lot. It’s a real pleasure.