In other words: us.

As the New York Times puts it,

“The findings … reaffirmed scientists’ understanding that temperament and disposition are shaped not by a few particular genes, but by thousands of tiny variants that can be expressed in different circumstances. The sheer scale of the project also brought new statistical power to the study of personality genetics, giving researchers a tool kit to investigate the biological mechanisms behind how we think, feel and behave.”

It’s an important study, but one that lends itself to misinterpretation. Our environment and experiences shape our personalities, too—through epigenetics, the process that (simplistically) turns these DNA “switches” on and off—and perhaps in other ways as well.

I also suspect this will lead to a new round of heated debates about topics like free will and the question of whether consciousness can ever be separated from the physical body. In the short monologue above, I concluded with a somewhat more immediate concern.

I spoke with economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research about one of the Washington Post’s many salvos against Social Security, which is one of the most successful (and rightfully popular) government programs in US history. The Post’s latest pitch is one that’s been used unsuccessfully in the past: why should rich folks get Social Security?

If you feel that the rich have too much (as I do), there’s a much simpler solution: raise their taxes. Why come up with this complicated scheme instead? Dean helps us unpack the answer.

We also spend a few minutes at the end of the conversation talking about the AI bubble, so stick around if you’re watching.

I’ve appended some selected quotes and a (lightly edited) transcript below.

Read: “The Rich Own the Media. They Want to Take Your Social Security,” by Dean Baker

Selected Quotes

Dean:

• “Cutting Social Security is not a moderate position.”

• “It’s important to understand that it really matters how debates are framed.”

• “What they really want to do is get their foot in the door so they can have big cuts to the people who are lower down, because that’s where the money is.”

• “They want to convince us there are all these seniors who are living too well.”

Richard:

• “We already have a mechanism to use when we think rich people are getting too easy a ride: progressive taxation.”

• “They talk as if the United States government was a pension plan with an army.”

• “If I get $100,000 worth of medical treatment in a year, I’m not $100,000 richer. Other people are getting the money.”

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:

[intro clip]

Richard Eskow: And we are back on The Zero Hour. As always, I’m your host, Richard RJ Eskow. And. as always, I look forward to welcoming economist Dean Baker. Dean Baker is with CEPR, the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He wrote a great piece recently about an editorial I saw in the Washington Post. They’re up to their old tricks of maligning Social Security, and of misleading the public about it.

This must feel a little like being back in the saddle again, Dean, because we’ve been talking about this for years. You’ve been writing about it even longer. First of all, welcome back to the program.

Dean Baker: Well, thanks a lot for having me on.

Richard Eskow: Oh, it’s always a pleasure. And as I explained to you before we got on, I’m going to be looking in strange places because of some technical problems here. So if you’re watching this, don’t mind my wandering gaze, I’m really paying attention. Now, this piece, this blog post, was entitled “The Rich Own the Media. They Want to Take Your Social Security.” I love the plain-spokenness of that title and I think it pretty much sums it up. So what has Jeff Bezos’s paper done to take our Social Security lately?

Dean Baker: Well, let me just point out what I was saying to you before we started. It wasn’t an idle comment. I don’t mind picking on Jeff Bezos, but it’s not him alone. It’s important for people to understand that it really matters how debates are framed. Let me give an example: if I said I wanted to kill 100 kids, everyone would rightly be appalled. They’d say, what are you talking about, why would you do that? And suppose I then point to someone else and say, well, they want to kill 200 kids, so I’m the moderate one. That’s nuts. We’d all agree that’s nuts. But that’s kind of what’s happening in the Social Security debate. People say, oh, some folks want big cuts to Social Security, we don’t want to do that, we’re the moderates. That’s exactly what’s happening here, and it’s why it’s so important not to accept their framing of the debate.

Again, I don’t know Jeff Bezos personally, and I don’t have anything against him in particular. But whoever owns the media gets to decide how the debate is framed. And the point I was making is that cutting Social Security is not a moderate position. That doesn’t mean we can never have any cuts under any circumstances, but the idea that the program is out of control or overly generous, that’s just nonsense. And when they try to make that argument, they’re being completely dishonest.

I’ll be specific. I won’t get into all the numbers, but here’s what they do: they look at what a typical person pays into Social Security versus what they get back. So they took someone who makes $50,000 a year on average over their lifetime, which is actually a bit below average, but let’s go with it, certainly not high income. And they look at what that person gets back, which is more than what they paid in. And they say, see, the program is too generous.

But what’s the average benefit? It’s a little more than $2,000 a month, so about $24,000 a year. I don’t think anyone would call $2,000 a month overly generous. Someone getting $24,000 a year is not living high on the hog. No one thinks that. So when they talk about cutting benefits, they say, well, let’s just go after the people who get over $100,000 a year in Social Security. Okay, fine, that’s more than most people get, sure, but it’s still not a fortune. And how many people actually get $100,000 a year in Social Security benefits? Virtually no one.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Dean Baker: So it’s a bait and switch. If you actually look at their source, and I happen to know the source well, you can calculate how much those higher-income people paid in taxes versus what they’re getting back in benefits. And you’d find that higher-income people actually get less in benefits than what they paid in taxes. Now, I’m not crying for those people. That’s the design of the program. That’s literally the whole point. It’s an insurance program. If you were fortunate during your lifetime, good for you, and when you retire you’ll get more than someone who was less fortunate. But relative to what you paid in, you won’t do particularly well, just like insurance. I’ve been fortunate with my health insurance. I haven’t needed many benefits, and I consider that a good thing. But if I had needed them, they’d have been there. Same idea with Social Security.

So what they do is this bait and switch. They point to the fact that people are getting paid more in benefits than they paid in, and then when it comes to deciding who to cut, they focus on the high-end people and say, they don’t need that. And you could argue that’s probably true for most of them. They don’t need it, but they paid for it. People get a lot of money in interest on bonds too. They don’t need it, but they paid for it, and none of us gets that upset about someone earning $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 a year in bond interest if they paid for it. But what they really want is to get a foot in the door so they can eventually make big cuts to the people further down the income scale, because that’s where the real money is.

Richard Eskow: I want to underscore a couple of things implied in what you said, Dean. First, let’s not individualize this around Jeff Bezos. I have no particular affection for the guy, but this has been going on for decades, as we know. Pete Peterson and others have been sponsoring these lines of argument for a long time. This is a well-practiced routine. And the idea of targeting people at, say, $100,000, that’s always the foot in the door. Once you’ve said some people shouldn’t get too much from Social Security, you’ve opened the door to lowering that threshold. Now it’s $50,000. Now it’s $25,000.

But beyond that, the entire premise is fundamentally misleading before we even get into the specific deceptions. It’s misleading because we already have a mechanism if we think rich people are getting too easy a ride in this economy, which I do: progressive taxation. You could make the same argument about public schools that a Democratic presidential candidate made about college in 2016, saying I don’t want to pay for Donald Trump’s kids to go to college. You could say the same about elementary school. But there are other ways to handle that. With schooling, it’s usually property tax: a more expensive property, a higher tax bill. There are all sorts of mechanisms. But once you start cutting benefits, even at $100,000, which is at the high end of the Social Security payment spectrum, there’s not a lot of money there. So what you’re really doing is creating a rhetorical argument for cutting benefits for a lot of other people. Am I right about that?

Dean Baker: You’re totally right. We could tax more, and we already have the revenue. I won’t get into great detail, but this whole crisis narrative, that by 2032 we won’t be able to pay full benefits, ignores the fact that we actually have the money coming in. We’re repaying bonds held by the trust fund. The money is coming into the Treasury. So this idea that we suddenly won’t have the money in 2033 or 2034 isn’t accurate. I like the idea of keeping a separate trust fund so we can have an honest argument about that, but we can’t pretend we don’t have the money. It’s there. That’s how we’re paying benefits now, and Congress would have to change the law for that to stop, but right now, we are paying full benefits.

In terms of how we think about this, your point is exactly right. A lot of people were saying in 2016 that it was a little silly to argue we shouldn’t pay for Trump’s kids to go to college, because we pay for a lot of things Trump’s kids benefit from. They use the streets. They don’t pay a toll to use the streets. Maybe we could set up barriers and charge rich people to use the streets, but that would be a foolish way to handle it. It’s much simpler to just raise their taxes. We already have the tax system in place. You just make it higher.

But the other point you were alluding to, and this can’t be emphasized enough, is that they’re lying when they say they want to cut benefits above $100,000. It’s not even the beginning of a serious proposal, for two reasons. First, there’s very little money there. Second, and I’m assuming these people aren’t stupid, you don’t even need to know economics for this, just common sense. The only way a couple has $100,000 in combined benefits is if they deferred collecting until around age 70.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Dean Baker: So imagine you’re not the stupidest person in the world, and you see that if you have over $100,000 in benefits, you lose them. What do you do? You start collecting at 69 instead.

Richard Eskow: Right, right, right.

Dean Baker: That’s exactly what would happen. And again, I’m giving these people credit for not being the stupidest people in the world. They know that. They know this proposal would get them literally nothing. So why propose it? To get a foot in the door. They’re lying from the word go.

Richard Eskow: There’s another angle here too. You’re right that I hadn’t thought about that side of it, but there are websites, and people with higher incomes have financial advisors, who fine-tune exactly when to apply for Social Security. But before we get further into the shell game here, you also mentioned something very important: that this is social insurance. It’s a form of insurance, and you can always find a case that looks regressive or unfair if you squint at it that way. Take auto insurance, which isn’t social insurance but is still insurance. A wealthier person might have a bigger claim, probably will, in an accident if they have a nicer car. That could look regressive. If I pay auto insurance premiums for 30 years and then have an accident while I’m doing fine financially, someone might ask, why is that guy getting all this money? But that’s not the point of insurance, is it? Insurance is a smoothing mechanism. Do you see what I’m getting at?

Dean Baker: Yeah, I think it’s a well-designed system, and I want to be clear I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s well-designed in the sense that if you’re a higher earner, you pay more into the program and you get a higher benefit. So it’s progressive in one direction: if you pay more in, you get more out. But as a percentage of what you paid in, you get back less. Using rough numbers, for the first roughly $12,000 of average income, you get about 90% back. For the next $40,000, you get about 33% back. And above that, say above $50,000, you get just 15% back. So the share shrinks, but the dollar amount grows because you earned more. I think that’s a very good structure. Those exact numbers could be adjusted, but the underlying principle is sound.

And the insurance point applies clearly here too. Even someone from a relatively well-off background who gets a good education could have an accident or an illness and end up unable to work much of their life, or only able to work part-time. They thought they’d be a high-paid lawyer, but it didn’t work out that way. In that case, they’ll get a relatively high benefit relative to what they paid in. That’s exactly what you’d want from a system like this. So in my view, the basic structure is very well laid out, even if the specific numbers could be revisited.

Richard Eskow: Now, further into the Washington Post editorial, they begin by saying something like, to get the federal debt under control, start with the retirement state. That phrase annoyed the hell out of me, honestly, because this is what people do when they want to seem dispassionate but are actually using loaded rhetoric, as if the United States government were just a pension plan with a very large army attached. I don’t know if you had the same reaction to that phrase, “retirement state,” but to me it’s set up in a rhetorically inflammatory and misleading way, because there are plenty of other items in the federal budget.

Dean Baker: That’s right. These are two very popular programs, so if you said outright, let’s go after Medicare and Social Security, people would rightly be furious. So they use this phrase, “the retirement state.” These programs are popular because almost everyone benefits from them, and they’re also both very efficient. I’ve done the calculations a thousand different ways, and the basic story holds: private pension systems, or private 401(k)s, cost about 40 times as much per dollar of benefits as Social Security does. To my mind, that’s a genuinely great story. Same with Medicare. It’s far more efficient than private insurers, and we have the data on that, by a factor of five, maybe ten, depending on exactly how you count it. So why you’d be looking to cut two programs that are both hugely popular and remarkably successful at delivering their intended services at very low cost, that’s absolutely crazy to me. But instead of saying Medicare and Social Security directly, they use this term “the retirement state,” which sounds almost neutral.

Richard Eskow: And just to close the loop on this sleight of hand, Dean, your basic argument is that they claim it’s unfair for a couple making $100,000 a year from Social Security to get back more than they paid in. But the group they’re pointing to doesn’t actually get back more than it paid in. Do I have that right?

Dean Baker: That’s exactly right. If they said, look, people are getting $100,000 a year and that’s unfair because they get back more than they paid in, they can’t actually say that, because by their own calculation, those people get back less than they paid in. So they have a choice. Either they say we’re troubled by people getting back more than they paid in, in which case they’re going after people getting $2,000 a month, and that looks ridiculous. Or they say $100,000 is too much, but then they can’t claim those people are getting back more than they paid in, because it isn’t true. So it’s a three-card monte. They get you to focus on the people who genuinely do get back more than they paid in, then they pivot to targeting high earners, where that claim doesn’t actually apply.

Richard Eskow: And you’ve mentioned a couple of times this $2,000 or so average Social Security income figure. I think for women it’s even lower, something like $1,800. Is that right?

Dean Baker: I don’t have the exact figure in front of me, but yes, women on average get lower payments than men. I don’t know that it’s exactly $1,800, but it’s somewhere in that ballpark.

Richard Eskow: Yeah.

Dean Baker: So again, if you’re talking about cutting that, really, is that too much money?

Richard Eskow: Right, exactly. And beyond that, to argue that a woman shouldn’t get back more than she paid in, after standing on her feet for 40 years as a factory worker or a short-order cook, you name it, that somehow she shouldn’t be able to make ends meet in retirement because it offends the sensibilities of the Washington Post editorial board... I’ll give them credit for one thing: they’re smart enough to know that’s not a very effective argument to make directly.

Dean Baker: Right, and that’s exactly why, instead of making that argument, they make a totally dishonest one instead.

Richard Eskow: Right. And then, as you point out, they pivot to talking about shifting the system toward 401(k)s. Which, first of all, involves gambling to some degree on investment performance. But it’s not just riskier, as you’ve pointed out, it’s also a lot more expensive to run, isn’t it?

Dean Baker: That’s right. The average 401(k) has administrative costs of over roughly 1 percentage point a year. Now, one thing people get confused about, and I’ll try to explain it simply: that 1% is charged annually on the stock of money you have invested. The cost of Social Security, by comparison, is about 0.4% on the flow, meaning 0.4% of my annual benefit. The reason I distinguish stock and flow is this: if I want to get, say, $30,000 a year out of my 401(k), that money has to sit in the account year after year after year. Let’s say I start contributing in my twenties and pull the money out in my late sixties or seventies. On average, that money has been sitting there for maybe 20 years. So I was paying 1% each year for 20 years to generate that benefit, which means I end up paying about 20% of what I eventually receive. For Social Security, I’m only paying 0.4%. That’s the comparison: it’s roughly 40 times as expensive. That’s a lot of money essentially going down the drain.

Richard Eskow: Right. That’s a very important point. And then when we pivot to Medicare, you make another excellent point that I think rarely gets emphasized, and it shows how much they’ve stacked the rhetorical deck with these extreme framings. You point out that yes, people on Medicare cost more on average in healthcare than younger people. That’s a known actuarial reality. But that money isn’t going to them. If I receive $100,000 worth of medical treatment in a year, which, by the way, I actually do because I have a chronic illness, I’m not $100,000 richer. Someone else is getting that $100,000. A pharmaceutical company that could manufacture a pill for 70 cents is charging $20 for it. We could go on down the line: corporate-owned doctor’s offices, surgery centers, hospitals, profits baked in at every step. I think it feeds into this “greedy geezer” myth, that seniors are just spending hundreds of thousands like it’s water. Your subheading, I believe, was something like “Big bucks to hospitals and drug companies are not benefits to workers,” which is a great point. What have I left out that’s important there?

Dean Baker: The important thing is that it could be much less. We pay more than twice as much per person as the average for other wealthy countries. If you take the average of Germany, France, and Canada, the countries we used to compare ourselves to before Trump, we pay more than twice as much per person on healthcare. If we got our costs down to that average, our lifetime Medicare payments would be very similar to what we get back in benefits. So if someone says we’re paying too much for Medicare, I’m totally on board. Let’s cut the payments to the drug companies, the medical equipment suppliers, the hospitals. Let’s do that. But that’s not what they actually want to do.

Richard Eskow: They want to—

Dean Baker: They want to deny people benefits instead. And this comes up, it’s a bit of a sidebar, but with the Trump administration, when they talk about fraud in Medicaid, they make it sound like there’s this widespread abuse, and, you know, they’ll bring up undocumented immigrants who aren’t even eligible for the program in the first place, as if people are running off with the money. But insofar as there’s fraud in Medicaid, it’s going to providers. It’s not that some immigrant is pocketing large sums. Worst case, someone got a doctor’s visit paid for that maybe shouldn’t have been covered. But if someone is getting big money out of the system, it’s not the person receiving care. It’s literally not possible for it to be them.

Richard Eskow: And of course, the entire discussion about the federal deficit heated up recently because it passed the $40 trillion mark, although I suppose the value of the dollar has changed, so I’m not sure if that’s in constant dollars or not, but whatever the case, it reached a new high with real significance. But I haven’t seen much of that conversation focus on... I’ve heard plenty of people say we can’t afford the social contract, we have to cut Social Security and Medicare, we have to cut Medicaid, we have to cut anti-poverty programs. I haven’t heard nearly as many people say we can’t afford to sustain the level of corporate profits we’re currently paying for. In Medicare specifically, I think it’s a classic example. Nobody’s saying, hey, these margins, we’re happy you’re doing well, but maybe not quite this well. I know that sounds radical, and I am somewhat radical, but I’m making a broader point here: isn’t this more of the same kind of skewed framing you’ve been describing?

Dean Baker: Yeah, it comes down to what you choose to focus on. They want us to believe that people receiving Medicare and Social Security are living too well. I don’t mind if you want to say that about a small percentage of recipients, and honestly, taxing them more would be the best way to address that. But the vast majority of people aren’t living especially well on these benefits. Yet they want us to focus on that rather than on corporate profits going through the roof, or the tax burden, or the rich getting ever richer. Elon Musk, I don’t know exactly where he stands today, but he had a trillion dollars at one point earlier this year. There’s plenty of money out there. It’s just not going to the federal government. It’s not supporting people in this country. And that’s exactly why they don’t want us focused on it. They’d rather convince us that seniors are living too well.

Richard Eskow: So, to close out this part of the conversation on the assault on seniors: the good news, to me, is that despite decades of effort from Washington Post editorial board types (and, in fairness to Jeff Bezos, the paper was pretty rough before he bought it)...

Dean Baker: Absolutely.

Richard Eskow: Yeah. So, that said, the public remains strongly behind these programs. It’s no longer the case, as it was when you and I were railing against this 12 or 15 years ago, that both parties simply assumed these programs would have to be slashed, that “moderate” position of 100 kids instead of 200. There’s been real pushback, real progress. So in that sense, I feel more hopeful than I might have 12, 13, 14 years ago. What about you?

Dean Baker: Much more hopeful. The reality is overwhelming majorities of people across the political spectrum, even Republicans, support Social Security and Medicare, often over 80%, sometimes as high as 90%, depending on when the poll is taken and exactly how the question is phrased. There’s overwhelming support for these programs. That’s why it’s so difficult to get political traction for cuts, and why they resort to this subterfuge: “We like the program, we like the program, but what about just the people getting more than $100,000?” Because they know that’s a tiny share of recipients. Honestly, if you just said, fine, let’s shake hands and agree to cut benefits for people getting more than $100,000 and then stop talking about it, they’d run out of the room, because they know there’s no real money to be saved there. But it’s a hugely popular program, so they have to keep coming up with these tricks to get a foot in the door.

Richard Eskow: And by the way, Social Security income above roughly $25,000 is already taxed, so it’s not a complete free ride even for that hypothetical couple making $100,000. But before I let you go, Dean, and I apologize because this is completely unfair, we probably need a separate conversation for this, but you’ve been writing a lot about the AI bubble. Briefly, the more I read about it, the more I worry. The picture for a while has been that the AI companies themselves are the ones taking on the risk, but now I’m seeing signs that other financial institutions are exposed too. Something about JPMorgan Chase, something about hedge funds, the SEC looking into an investor fund that nearly collapsed. Are you worried this AI bubble, if and when it bursts, could pose a broader risk to the financial system?

Dean Baker: Yeah, I’m worried it could lead to a recession. The stock market right now is worth around $75 trillion in total value. If we had normal price-to-earnings ratios, it would be worth about half that. I don’t know that it’ll fall all the way back down, but a loss of $20 or $30 trillion in market value is a very plausible scenario. That’s almost certain to trigger a recession, for two reasons: we’d see a huge fall-off in AI investment, which is massive right now, and it would hit consumption hard. A lot of people have $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 in their 401(k)s. If that gets cut in half, they’re going to pull back on spending significantly. So that’s almost certainly a recession if the bubble bursts.

I’ll give you two reasons I’m fairly confident it is a bubble. First, at the end of the day, it comes down to how much you can actually sell the AI for. Nvidia, the chipmaker, is making a lot of money right now, and they are. But they’re selling their chips to the hyperscalers, the data center operators, largely Microsoft, Alphabet, and a few other big companies. Those companies are betting they can sell the output to firms like Anthropic and OpenAI, the two biggest players. The question is whether those companies will actually become hugely profitable. Everyone involved says, oh yes, absolutely.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Dean Baker: But there’s no real evidence for that. In fact, a lot of good analysis has found that the vast majority of tasks people want AI to perform could be handled with much simpler, cheaper models. They don’t need these massive hyperscaler systems. Chinese AI models reportedly cost a tenth of what ours do.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Dean Baker: So I don’t think the big profits are actually there. The other part of the story, and it’s surprising to me it doesn’t get more attention, is that we have economic growth projections. Projections can be wrong, of course, but people in Washington generally treat the Congressional Budget Office as the authoritative source. If the AI story were true, that these companies are about to become hugely profitable, we’d expect to see a massive surge in projected productivity growth. We don’t see that.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Dean Baker: Maybe the CBO is wrong. They have been at times. But they’d have to be hugely wrong here, and these are the same people who treat CBO projections as authoritative on every other issue. Suddenly, when it comes to AI, they act like the CBO has no idea what it’s talking about. So either the CBO doesn’t know what it’s doing, in which case stop citing it as authoritative on other issues too, or it’s roughly right, and we’re not going to see the kind of economic growth surge that AI proponents are promising.

Richard Eskow: And if we don’t see that growth, the ripple effects could be significant. We’ll also be left with a lot of torn-up land around the country where ground has been broken for data centers. A friend of mine in rural Wisconsin sent me a video of himself driving past one of these mega-centers. It just went on and on. I don’t think people realize the scale of these hyperscale facilities. They’re massive, and if they go into full operation, they’ll be massive consumers of energy too.

Dean Baker: And water. That’s exactly why, in my view, the sooner this bursts, the better. It doesn’t help anyone to have it drag on for another six months, a year, two years. I don’t have a crystal ball. I was warning about the housing bubble, and it lasted way longer than I expected. I was warning about the tech bubble in the ‘90s, and that lasted a long time too. So I don’t know how long this will go or exactly what will trigger the correction, but I’ll say this: the sooner it happens, the better.

Richard Eskow: You were, by the way, in closing, one of the lone voices warning about the tech bubble back when almost no one else was saying it. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but afterward, I remember Alan Greenspan or some other policymaker saying something like, nobody I knew was saying this would be a bubble. And I thought, well, maybe you need to meet some new people. So, with that, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, thanks as always for your great work and your great insights, and thanks for coming on the program.

Dean Baker: Thanks, Richard. I really enjoyed the discussion.

Richard Eskow: Me too.

Just something to think about …

(FYI: I’m going to try to publish something every day, or close to every day, even if it’s small. I consider an experiment—and a kind of self-test.)

It was 1974. I was trying and failing to make my way in the world. I had spent every dollar I had on my first car, which threw a rod the first time I took it out onto the highway. I worked a temporary job for a week so I could buy an old Volkswagen bug that some guy in the neighborhood had built from spare parts. The paint on that car was mostly red—except for the hood, which was blue, and the right rear fender, which was a non-specific shade of green. All of it was shot through with rust.

I knew that vehicle was a risky proposition, but he only wanted fifty bucks for it and I’d only earned sixty. I needed a car for a job interview across the bay, so I bought it. I really, really needed that job.

The interviewer’s face made it clear that I wasn’t going to get it. The VW’s little engine was making a threatening sound as I made my way home down back roads, headed toward the bridge in the oncoming dusk. It began to rain, which is when I discovered that the windshield wipers didn’t work. And then Dolly Parton’s voice came through the tinny radio:

“If I should stay, I’ll only be in your way ...”

I pulled off the road and cried.

That was not my first encounter with Dolly Parton. Raised on rock and roll, I had discovered country music as a teenager in upstate New York when Merle Haggard sang “Mama Tried” on a network TV variety show. The following week, George Jones sang “A Picture of Me (Without You)”. I would sing country music for the rest of my life.

I lived for the broadcasts I could catch from WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia, late at night, when the “radio bounce” off the ionosphere was just right. Porter Wagoner and Dolly (his “girl singer,” as they were called back then) were my favorites, and that led me to her solo records.

She could write, she was smart, she was funny—and she could tear your heart out with her voice. None of the obituaries I’ve read this week have mentioned the song that first hooked me on that voice. Like many of her early songs, “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy” is about a young woman who makes the wrong choices and descends into tragedy. It’s a tale as old as the hills, as old as the songs passed down through the generations that lived and died in those hills. But she made it seem fresh. And the way she sang them! The melisma when she sang the word “mountain”—it felt like you could fit a whole dictionary in those two syllables.

Were those songs melodramatic or emotionally over-wrought? I guess you could say that, although nowadays any criticism of Dolly would be treated as heresy. But I had spent most of my then-short life shutting down my emotions. Songs like Dolly’s forced them back open.

Besides, she never played the victim for very long. Songs like “Dumb Blonde” and “Just Because a Woman” were subversively feminist, even if the coastal elites had never heard them. “This dumb blonde is nobody’s fool,” one said. “My mistakes are no worse than yours just because I’m a woman,” said the other. And “To Daddy,” with its twist ending …

By 1974 I had already seen Porter and Dolly play a country music package show in London’s Wembley Stadium and a concert in Berkeley. (I can’t remember where they played that show, but I do recall that a few members of the Grateful Dead waited on line with us to get Porter and Dolly’s autographs.)

A friend and onetime bandmate of mine texted me yesterday when the news of her death came out. “You helped me realize what a force of nature she was,” he wrote. I’ve been a Dolly Parton evangelist for a long time—one of millions, as it turns out.

People on the left are honoring Dolly today for her embrace of marginalized groups, for her warm spirit and her charitable works (including distributing books to poor schoolchildren). John Nichols reminds us that, in the words of The Nation’s headline for his piece, “Dolly was a proud union sister.”

That she was, but she was also that rarest of creatures: an American who seemed to transcend left and right in the very best of ways. Politics? Dolly practiced the politics of love. People loved her because she seemed to love them. Love was her most radical quality. It was her most Christian quality, too. Her love was made radical by the breadth of her embrace. Poor, lonely, White, Black, LGBTQ, Christian, atheist, Jew, Muslim: nobody seemed to be outside the circle.

(When Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens was detained by US immigration and denied entry in 2004, he was on his way to Nashville to record his song “Peace Train” as a duet with Dolly.)

Her radical acceptance extended to people that might have seemed to exploit her. I was struck by this exchange with interviewer Jad Abumrad, who pointed to a picture of her with Porter Wagoner. As Abumrad puts it, “Mr. Wagoner in his pimp jacket has his arm around her as if he owned her.”

“Well, it’s more complicated than that,” Dolly replied.

“... When he hired me as a singer, he was just hiring what he thought was a ripe, pretty little girl. But I was a serious writer. He didn’t know that. I was a serious entertainer. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know how many dreams I had.”

How many women have felt the proprietary embrace of a man who didn’t know “how many dreams she had”? And how rare for any human being, having been mistreated, to be so empathic in return?

It raises the question, however naïve: could a true politics of empathy change the world? We’ll probably never know. Dolly Parton may have been the last unifying force the American community will ever see. She may have been the last true American.

I hope not. Everybody loves Dolly Parton, and everybody knows how to cry. In fact, everyone who has struggled in this life knows exactly how I felt when I sat and wept in my “Car of Many Colors,” one rainy evening on a back-country California road all those long years ago.

I’ve made a Spotify playlist of some songs Dolly wrote and sang, leaning on heavily on the early country years.

I spoke this week with Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about what he calls the “mutual delusion” driving both sides of the Ukraine war. He writes, “Hardliners on both sides in the Ukraine war are pursuing a chimaera in the hope of a miracle.”

Lieven adds:

“It is hard to know what would be worse: if we are being deliberately lied to, or if these retired officers and security ‘experts’ heralding imminent victory for Ukraine actually believe this nonsense. Most probably, the political, bureaucratic, media, academic and think tank consensus in Europe has now become so monolithic and absolute that they do believe it, since nobody is saying anything different ...

“The situation on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine now resembles the stalemate on the Western Front in 1916 ...”

“There is a sort of delirium in Europe,” he told me. Please give our interview a listen. A (lightly edited) transcript is below.

Link:

“Mutual Delusion,” August 7 2026:
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/mutual-delusion

This work is only possible with reader support. Please help with a paid subscription through Substack or Patreon. Many thanks.

Transcript

[begins with intro excerpt]

Richard Eskow: Let’s start with your piece that was published about a week ago, headlined “Mutual Delusion,” which begins: “Hardliners on both sides in the Ukraine war are pursuing a chimera in the hope of a miracle.” You went on to say briefly that Moscow seems to hope Ukraine’s defenses will collapse.

First of all, is that still your summary of the situation, that there is a sort of chimerical pursuit on both sides?

Anatol Lieven: Yes, I think so. Not, of course, among sensible analysts in either Moscow or Kyiv, but undoubtedly there are highly influential hardliners, including, it seems, among the Russian generals, who do hope that somehow the situation will be miraculously transformed in their favor.

I would say that if the Russians go on and on and on slogging away, and if they’re capable of continuing to slog away, they have a better chance, not of a complete victory, which is impossible now for Russia, but of a greater victory than Ukraine does. But the Russian advance on the ground for the past three years has been agonizingly slow. Casualties have been enormous. The Ukrainians, in my view, have actually succeeded. They’ve won a great victory simply by slowing the Russians down and preserving more than 80 percent of Ukrainian territory. But unfortunately, and unfortunately encouraged by some of their Western supporters, they have been holding out for terms that Russia will never concede to.

There’s one Russian demand which I understand very well, and which every Ukrainian says to me no Ukrainian government can agree to, and that is withdrawal from the remainder of the Donbas region that Ukraine still holds. But Ukraine is also trying to, well, the Ukrainian government, at least, not, I think, a great many ordinary Ukrainians or even some more sensible members of the Ukrainian elite, the Ukrainian government is still demanding the right to join NATO, the right to have European troops on Ukrainian soil, and refusing to grant any language protections to the Russian language in Ukraine.

Basically, if those positions are maintained, just as, on the other side, if Putin’s demand for the rest of the Donbas is maintained, they rule out a compromise. So do the positions adopted not just by the Ukrainians, but by the European Union as well.

Eskow: And I think before we get into the delusions, precisely what those are, and you’ve begun to outline them, I also want to give you my impression, and you tell me where I’m right or wrong.

If I recall correctly, within the first year of this war, both the U.S. head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military officer in this country, and his equivalent in Ukraine seemed to agree that it was more or less a morass, that it was a stalemate, I believe, is the word that was used. And since then we’ve seen enormous, it seems to me, resourcefulness on the part of the Ukrainians in adapting and using drone technology and other, perhaps unexpected, strategies to resist. But still, years later, it seems to me that the assessment those two generals made, perhaps it was early 2023, is still essentially the same.

Am I wrong about that?

Lieven: No, you’re absolutely right. And the tragedy, and I would say also the profound culpability, of the Biden administration and European governments as well was that, instead of being willing to recognize that reality, they went on demanding that Russia withdraw from and hand back all the territory in Ukraine that it had conquered, not just since the start of the war, which actually, in the peace talks at the start of the war, Russia offered to do, but since 2014, including Crimea.

Well, there was no way that any Russian government could possibly agree to that. What they were basically saying was: There is going to be no peace settlement. Our goal is complete Ukrainian victory, although their own, as you say, best military experts and leaders had told them that that was exceptionally unlikely to happen.

Eskow: And there’s another dimension of this conflict that concerns me that never seems to get, I shouldn’t say never, rarely seems to get discussed in the mainstream media in the West, at least that I’ve seen.

And it’s this: There’s a lot of talk about Ukraine’s possible victory, or partial victory, or whatever. But what seems to be left out of those equations is that they’re assuming this remains a ground war, a war of inches as it is now, and disregarding the fact that Russia has the capability, as horrific as it might be, to escalate. If Russia doesn’t want to give something up and they’re struggling to win it on the battlefield, they have missiles, they have tactical nuclear weapons, they have all sorts of weapons of mass destruction.

In a sense, it almost feels as if, I’m sure this isn’t the case, but as one who’s been attacked as a so-called Putin apologist myself for suggesting a peaceful end to this war, it seems to me they have a more benevolent view of Putin’s intentions than I do. Because it seems to me that either he or his generals might, at some point, insist on escalating this war if it doesn’t go their way, in ways that would be tragic and potentially destabilizing at levels we can’t even imagine yet.

Am I being melodramatic about this?

Lieven: No, because this is what Russian hardliners have been urging Putin to do. But so far, he has always rejected that. I’ve talked to people who formerly advised Putin, and they say Putin knows perfectly well that to threaten really credibly to use nuclear weapons, in the hope that the West would back down and abandon Ukraine or force Ukraine to make a peace settlement on Russian terms, would require that if the West refused, Putin would actually use nuclear weapons.

Well, at that point, of course, not only would Russia be utterly discredited in the eyes of the entire world, including the Chinese, who have warned very strongly against this, but it would invite, indeed could almost compel, Western nuclear attacks on Russia, which would, of course, lead to universal catastrophe. Putin, I think, knows that perfectly well.

The risk is not of an intentional, deliberate use of nuclear weapons, but that there will be some kind of clash which will then lead to escalation, and both sides will be trapped into a path toward full-scale war between NATO and Russia, which neither side actually wants. That is why I always say the situation now is more like, it’s not like Europe before 1939, when Hitler was planning universal domination. Putin has no such agenda. It’s much more like the situation before 1914—

Eskow: Right.

Lieven: —in which all the states concerned thought that they were acting rationally and defending vital national interests, but the result was still catastrophe.

Now, for an example of the kind of clash that could lead to such escalation, as you know, for a year or more now, sometimes the Americans but more often the Europeans and British have been seizing ships with Russian cargoes, the so-called Russian shadow fleet. Now, this has absolutely no sanction from the United Nations. If any country were to do that to us, we would describe it as piracy, which is what not just the Russians but the Indians and the Chinese describe it as.

Well, so far Russia has not retaliated against that, of course, above all because Russia is wholly, totally outclassed at sea by NATO navies. But Putin has now threatened that if the Europeans continue to do this, Russia will start seizing European ships, not, of course, American ones, and perhaps not even British or French ones, but ships belonging to smaller European navies. That, of course, will cause a huge crisis and, on top of the war in the Gulf, a surge in maritime insurance rates.

If, of course, you then have a military intervention by European navies to stop that, then there is a chance, a really strong chance, of something which, thank God, we have managed to avoid for four and a half years, which is a direct military clash between NATO and Russia.

Eskow: And in trying to understand NATO’s position in this, and I understand that, well, first of all, NATO is essentially an artifact of the Cold War, and that it was U.S.-led for many years, it seems now that NATO is not a unitary organization by any means anymore, and that Western Europe and its members may have a slightly different agenda.

It seemed as if they had a dramatically different agenda from Donald Trump when he came into office. Joe Biden seemed to be a leading belligerent when it came to Russia and Ukraine. Trump was telling a different story about how it wasn’t America’s war and that sort of thing. Now it seems as if the leading advocates for ongoing war may be in Western Europe, and Trump is sort of going along with it. Is that your understanding?

Lieven: Pretty much. Of course, the Trump administration is completely distracted now by the war that it launched against Iran. But also, it did try pretty hard to bring the two sides to an agreement, but it could not get the Ukrainians, the Europeans, or the Russians to give up demands that were simply unacceptable to the other side.

But, of course, in addition, America is now selling weapons to the Europeans to give to the Ukrainians. America is providing absolutely critically important satellite intelligence and targeting intelligence to the Ukrainians. But this war is not now actually costing America anything, except, of course, in terms of higher international oil prices. Trump, at the moment, seems content that this war should simply trundle on as long, of course, as it doesn’t escalate in ways that threaten the United States.

It should be said, though, that the Europeans themselves are divided. Southern European countries are much less committed to Ukraine than are some of the Eastern Europeans and Scandinavians. The Scandinavians, of course, at the same time are looking over their shoulders with deep fear because of Trump’s threats to Greenland, which would, of course, if implemented, split NATO down the middle.

And then you have, within European countries, both right-wing and left-wing oppositions that are opposed to further aid to Ukraine. And we have to see, it won’t change the government in Germany, but we have to see what happens in two German, or East German, state elections next month and how successful AfD, the right-wing populist party, is.

But above all, next spring there are presidential elections in France. If Marine Le Pen and Rassemblement National win, I think there could be real French opposition to continuing aid to Ukraine at the present level. The key, the absolute vulnerability of Ukraine compared to Russia, is that, in effect, Ukraine’s entire state budget and by far the greater part of its war effort are being paid for by the European Union and Britain.

If that aid is stopped or significantly reduced, Ukraine will either have to agree to Russian terms or will be defeated. Russia, for its part, although Ukraine has done some serious economic damage, still pays for its own war effort. That gives it, in the long run, a critical potential advantage over Ukraine.

Eskow: Because it’s not dependent on the largesse of some third party.

Lieven: Exactly.

Eskow: Speaking of Western Europe and third parties, as you know, last month was Bastille Day in France, and French President Emmanuel Macron declared on that occasion that Europeans were ready to defend their continent, and I quote, obviously in translation, “with blood if necessary.” And he brought together 25 leaders to show their support for Ukraine.

I must admit, I don’t get shocked by a lot. I was shocked by the vehemence, a little bit shocked by the vehemence, of Macron’s rhetoric. And I’m not sure what precisely they think they’re defending themselves against. Are they seriously thinking that Ukraine is the first front, and then the Russians want to roll through and take Paris?

What is this about exactly? Can you help me understand?

Lieven: Well, there is a sort of delirium in Europe. You see everybody in the establishment, not just in government and in the administration and bureaucracy and the security services, but in the great majority of the media and the think tanks. Indeed, in Britain, every think tank and all the media are saying exactly the same thing. And this being so, a lot of people, including politicians, believe it because they’re not hearing anything else.

Now, of course, behind a lot of this is the belief, which is not unfounded, and which has, of course, been assiduously stoked by the armed forces themselves, that European countries have allowed their armed forces to decline to a very great extent, even to a potentially dangerous extent. And you need to spend more money on them. But, of course, money is very tight.

How do you get European publics and European parliaments and political parties to support more money for the military, even if this requires cuts in health services and social welfare? Well, you’ve got to persuade them that if you don’t, the Russian bear will come and eat their children.

Eskow: Right.

Lieven: Now, that said, if Macron meant by that that European countries would have to fight if NATO itself is attacked, well, that is what NATO is for.

Eskow: Right.

Lieven: If they are not prepared to do that, you might as well wind up NATO now. But, of course, Ukraine is not a member of NATO. If, as European hardliners are urging, he means that Europe should send troops to fight in Ukraine, that’s a totally different matter.

European publics are strongly against this in general. Most European governments have said no to it, including even the Poles and the Germans. And Le Pen’s party, Rassemblement National, has said categorically it will never send French troops to fight in Ukraine.

The British go on talking about this, but last year the former head of the British Army, General Dannatt, pointed out that the British Army is now so small that to send just one brigade to Ukraine permanently would basically mean using the entire deployable British Army, which, by the way, would mean there were no British troops left over to defend existing NATO members in the Baltic, for example, which, of course, is ridiculous.

Much of this is hot air. But it’s still dangerous, because every time a Western leader says these kinds of things, it strengthens the arguments of hardliners in Moscow—

Eskow: Right.

Lieven: —that Europe is implacably hostile to Russia, and there is no point in seeking any kind of settlement in Ukraine because the Europeans will never agree to it, and therefore the only thing to aim for is military victory.

Eskow: And speaking of NATO and the obligations of NATO countries when attacked, I think that concern for me was heightened a little bit.

We’re speaking on August 13th. On August 10th, it was reported that a Ukrainian drone attack hit the city of, I’m going to try to pronounce this right, Nizhny Komsomolsk, Russia, which is well beyond the front lines. At least 13 people were killed, according to initial reports, and 39 or 40 others wounded. They struck civilian and industrial sites. There’s also an oil refinery there. There’s talk of a child being killed.

Obviously, one fear is that, you know, a stray attack striking a school, as happened in Tehran, might escalate things dramatically. But the other is the concern that the more, and the more boldly, Ukraine attacks deep into Russian territory, killing Russian civilians as part of a NATO-backed effort, that may spark a direct response.

I think Putin may have even threatened a direct response to NATO. But doesn’t that, it strikes me as a highly risky strategy.

Lieven: Well, yes. You only have to turn it around. If the territory of the United States itself were being attacked by somebody’s missiles provided by Russia or China, and to a great extent targeted by Russia and China, well, you can imagine, of course, the United States would retaliate directly against those countries.

It would never accept for a single second that those countries were neutral or not parties to the war. Of course, Russia has not retaliated directly because the Russians are desperately anxious that NATO should not intervene directly on the side of Ukraine. But as you said, there is always the risk of some catastrophic accident that would compel Putin to respond militarily against NATO.

Now, that said, of course, you can’t blame the Ukrainians for bombarding Russia. Russia has been bombarding Ukraine for four and a half years now.

Eskow: Sure.

Lieven: But Ukraine is at war with Russia. We are not at war with Russia. And indeed, all our governments have said repeatedly that they do not want to go to war with Russia.

Well, if they’re sincere about that, there is a case for them being a great deal more careful. Because, as you said, if a Ukrainian missile goes astray and kills a couple hundred Russian schoolchildren, Putin will, I think, attack NATO targets. Not in Britain or France, but in the Baltic States, especially because the Russians believe that the Balts have been allowing Ukrainian drones to fly over their territory on the way to attack St. Petersburg.

I don’t know whether that is actually true, but what is certainly true is that, until recently, they did nothing to stop this happening.

Eskow: And Ukraine is also, since we mentioned Tehran a couple of times, has also now intercepted an Iranian vessel bound for Russia, as I understand it. Some people have said this may have been a strategy on Ukraine’s part to position itself as essentially a military ally of the United States in the Iran war.

What did you make of that action?

Lieven: Well, on the one hand, Iran has been supplying Russia, not, of course, since the American-Israeli attack on Iran, but previously they were supplying Russia with Shahed drones, for example. But it is also true that, for very understandable Ukrainian reasons, since the start of the Russian invasion the Ukrainian government has been doing everything it can to drag the U.S. and NATO into a direct confrontation with Russia.

Now, NATO has always backed away from that. And partly, of course, because Putin’s nuclear bluster has been completely, or deliberately, I would say, often misrepresented in the West. He’s not been threatening to use nuclear weapons simply for the sake of it. And indeed, I don’t believe there is any chance of Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine unless NATO troops appear there.

But the point of these nuclear threats is precisely to deter NATO from taking a direct part in the Ukraine war. But I think one thing is certain: If NATO did join the war and it looked as if Russia was facing defeat, well, that’s what Russian, you know, it’s no different from us during the Cold War.

The U.S. nuclear deterrent was there to be used if it seemed that we were being defeated on the ground by Soviet conventional forces. No different with the Russians. If they see themselves facing defeat on their own borders in Ukraine, then yes, they will use nuclear weapons.

Eskow: And maybe to wrap up, Anatol, it seems to me that, to summarize the history as I see it, and you, of course, correct me if you think I’m wrong, there was a lot of provocation of various kinds leading up to this.

I think this war could have been avoided. That said, Ukraine is the wronged party here. They were illegally invaded by Russia. That said, there are only so many ways out of it, and those appear only to be reachable through negotiation. And it doesn’t seem as if negotiation is on anyone’s agenda right now.

Perhaps it would be on Ukraine’s agenda if they understood that the West was not going to support them in an indefinite war that was mainly killing Ukrainians. Certainly a peaceful settlement in that case would be better. But it seems to me as if the only solutions are ones that are not politically acceptable among any of the involved parties at this point.

Is that accurate?

Lieven: Well, I do not know. Most of the Russians say that the demand for the whole of the Donbas is non-negotiable. Well, certainly that’s what the hardliners believe.

It has been suggested to me that if the West were to offer, and Ukraine were to offer, serious compromises on other key issues, because, of course, a lot of this is about being able to present, and this is true for Zelensky as well as Putin, the eventual settlement as a victory for Russia or for Ukraine.

If we perhaps, and I don’t guarantee it by any means, but perhaps if we were to give Putin enough things in other areas that he could declare victory, perhaps he would give up this impossible demand. On the other side, Russia will never accept that Ukraine be in NATO. This has to be explicitly ruled out in any peace settlement.

Because that was the key reason why Russia went to war. If Russia accepts that, it accepts defeat. Well, the former and most successful Ukrainian military commander, General Zaluzhnyi, who was pushed out by Zelensky and is now ambassador to London, said last week: Look, Ukraine is never going to get into NATO because Western countries will never fight for us. This is meaningless. Let us seek alternatives.

Well, he is a very influential voice. If the war continues into next year, as I fear it will, and if Russian attacks, as they are doing, do terrible damage to Ukrainian electricity, and the Ukrainian population has a very hard winter, and millions more people, of course, flee and emigrate to the West, it could be that by next spring you’ll have a situation in which the Ukrainian government will be willing to offer compromises on wider issues.

But it is essential then that the Europeans also come on board. And, of course, the United States and the U.S. Senate, because what the Russians are afraid of, and with very good reason, given what the Trump administration has done in the past, and, of course, they think Clinton as well, is that any agreement made today could be torn up by a U.S. administration after 2028.

They want a consensus between all the Western powers, and they want something signed and sealed. That will be very, very, very difficult. But, as I say, if the whole Ukrainian position does seem to be crumbling, then perhaps, perhaps it will be possible. But not, I think, this year.

It will take another dreadful winter. It will take tens of thousands more deaths on both sides.

Eskow: Well, it’s tragic that it’s come to this. But as always, Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, thanks for your excellent research and analysis, and thank you for coming on the program.

Lieven: Thank you. It was a great pleasure.

“Genocide deniers” have been social pariahs since World War II, and rightfully so. The term was first used to describe some fringe political figures on the fascist far right who claimed the Holocaust never occurred. It was a hoax, they insisted, and a slander against the German people. No one, especially no one with liberal views, would have considered joining them as they denied the reality and horror of 20^th-century genocide.

The new genocide deniers are a very different breed. They often see themselves as tolerant, open-minded, and liberal. On some issues, they often are. But their reaction to Israel’s violence against Gaza, the 21^st century’s most visible genocide, is to dismiss its true nature with the wave of a hand.

The most visible of the new genocide deniers lately has been former pop star Boy George, whose song, “We Will Dance Again,” earned wide publicity for lyrics such as, “You say genocide, I say war/When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for.”

(I confess I haven’t listened to the song, nor do I intend to. That’s not based on any moral objections, but on the widely-reported fact that the music was generated with AI. My psyche has been polluted enough by AI music, which is the esthetic equivalent of microplastics in the brain. I don’t need to hear the backing track to respond to the lyrics.)

An entire essay could be written on the words “when you’re attacked,” but anybody who still doesn’t know about the 78-year brutalization of Palestine clearly doesn’t want to know. (For many years, I didn’t know either. Some of us have had to deprogram ourselves.) What caught my eye, however, was that flat declaration—“You say genocide, I say war”—that caught my eye. He’s not calling the reports from Gaza a hoax, but that’s the signature move for the new genocide deniers. They don’t deny reality; they deny the meaning of reality.

These deniers don’t seem to believe that knowledge, research, or legal authority have any bearing on this issue. Anyone with a platform can issue a ruling and expected it to be respected.

While Boy George is the current face of the new genocide deniers, he’s far from alone. Social media is filled with self-declared experts on the subject, from random strangers to pundits with some level of online visibility. Take, for example, the ‘centrist’ blogger Noah Smith, who declared on X that “Israel hasn’t yet committed genocide.”

Noah Smith makes Boy George look like Dag Hammarskjöld. At least the Boy tries to justify his position, however ineptly. Smith apparently thinks a simple declaration typed on his keyboard should suffice. And who is Noah Smith? According to his blog, he’s a former economics professor and columnist. “Basically,” he writes, “I’m just a guy who writes about economics.”

(This serves to strengthen my longtime suspicion—based on personal experience as well as observation—that an economics background is more likely to impede critical thinking than improve it. The smart economists I know have had to deprogram themselves, too.)

What’s especially irritating about Smith’s highhandedness (yes, I’m irritated; why hide it?) is that he’s responding to a reasonable observation by Shadi Hamid, a political scientist who possesses actual expertise. Hamid had tweeted:

“It’s frustrating that a lot of otherwise smart people still don’t know what the legal definition of ‘genocide’ is. It does not mean trying to kill every single member of a group. Pro-Israel commentators keep saying things like, ‘if Israel wanted to, it could have killed every Gazan’ as if this is some sort of defense of Israel’s morality.”

Hamid is right. There isn’t room enough to list all of the official bodies, NGOs, and experts who agree with him, although I have placed a partial list at the bottom of this page. Here is Smith’s full reply:

“Israel hasn’t yet committed genocide. But they very well might, in the near future. And if and when they do, the Palestine movement won’t have any additional accusations to make; they made them all preemptively.”

To the casual reader, this may look like an attempt to be reasonable. It is not. It is an example of what online culture calls “concern trolling,” where the commenter pretends to care about others in order to belittle or dismiss them. And, as Nathan J. Robinson points out, the mention of the “Palestine movement” implies that only pro-Palestinian (or is that “pro-Hamas”?) partisans make this claim.

Some American Jews struggle when they hear the term ‘genocide’ applied to the actions of the State of Israel. This is especially likely if they, like me and many others, were raised with an idealized image of that state. The genocide charge, however well-documented, triggers pain, cognitive dissonance, and—sometimes, tragically—an unwillingness to accept the truth.

The new genocide deniers are different. Many, like Boy George, are not Jewish. What drives them is not a history of generational trauma or a partisan upbringing. They have other motives. Some of them are defending the pro-Israel right. Some are defending the Democratic Party establishment. Some are just in love with their own voices. Whatever their motives, however, they share an arrogant disregard for both the rule of law and the importance of knowledge.

They may not be the brutal extremists of old. When it comes to genocide, however, they are deniers just the same. In the end, to deny a crime is to share in its evil.

The following have affirmed that Israel has conducted genocide in Gaza (partial list):

UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry
International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)
Physicians for Human Rights Israel
Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières)
B’Tselem (Israeli human rights group)
Amnesty International
Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor
International Federation for Human Rights
Center for Constitutional Rights
Doctors Against Genocide
Mennonite Central Committee
American Friends Service Committee
United Nations Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People
European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights
Human Rights Watch
Christian Aid
Médecins du Monde
Defence for Children International
Oxfam
Melanie O’Brien, genocide scholar
Martin Shaw, genocide scholar
Omer Bartov, genocide scholar

Charges of genocide against Israel are under review by the following:

The International Criminal Court (ICC)
The International Court of Justice (ICJ)

Video: Richard Wolff and Richard Eskow.

As Professor Wolff and I discussed in this conversation, Republicans are exploiting public rage by directing it against an individual rather than a system. It’s not necessary to idealize Anthony Fauci to see what’s going on here. People are furious about a system that has exploited and sickened so many of us. By focusing that furyon Fauci, they’re drawing attention away from a greed-driven healthcare economy that gives us so little but costs us so much.

That rage made Luigi Mangione a folk hero when he was arrested for shooting an insurance executive. That’s a shocking indicator of public desperation. In a more hopeful sign, primary voters chose public health physician Abdul El-Sayed as their Senate candidate in Michigan.

As John F. Kennedy said in 1962, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Here’s hoping for a peaceful revolution that benefits all of us.

Selected quotes and a transcript are below.

This work is only possible with reader support. Please help with a paid subscription through Substack or Patreon. Thank you.

Selected Quotes

Eskow:

“Fauci represents an otherwise faceless elite that is controlling their lives.”

“For-profit health holds people hostage to an economic system that could literally take their lives at any time.”

“There are two things you can do about this sick system: You can find a scapegoat like Anthony Fauci, or you can fight for a better system.”

“If the institutional leaders of this country are determined to close off all avenues for peaceful change, they’re playing with fire.”

Wolff:

“I have all my life marveled at and felt completely horrified by the spectacle of healthcare being organized as a capitalist enterprise.”

“They argue that whatever maximizes profit maximizes the quality and the quantity of healthcare. If you believe that, the rest follows. But if you don’t believe that, the result is an abomination.”

“That’s how capitalism works. It makes everything subject to its logic, if not directly, well, then indirectly.”

“It’s the same system that produces inequality. And I think that, underneath, it’s tearing the country apart.”

Transcript (lightly edited):

Richard Eskow: I’ve been fascinated, and horrified in many ways, by the interrogation of Anthony Fauci by Republicans in the United States Senate. Fauci is, of course, the former NIH director, former health czar, and go-to person for both Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the COVID epidemic. It certainly led me to ponder a lot of things.

He’s also become the source of all sorts of demonization on the right, much of which, as others have pointed out, is self-contradictory, that he downplayed the pandemic but also didn’t do enough to protect American lives, et cetera, et cetera. But I think the underlying issues, first, the pandemic itself, and second, Dr. Fauci and people’s feelings toward him, have gone largely unnoticed or unremarked upon.

With the timeliness of the Fauci inquisition upon us, and we’re speaking on Thursday, August 6th, the Senate is considering a contempt of Congress action against him for pleading the Fifth Amendment, which is itself an extraordinary sight: a top American scientist and government official pleading the Fifth after receiving a blanket pardon from a past president.

But all that aside, I’ve given you a hint of the context in which I view these Fauci hearings. To start off, what’s yours?

Richard Wolff: Mine is kind of simple, and maybe too simple, but I’ve marveled all my life, and felt completely horrified, by the spectacle of healthcare being organized as a capitalist enterprise. In other words, undertaken by people who are both self-consciously and publicly engaged in a profit-maximizing activity. Once you make it a capitalist enterprise, it’s governed by the rules of that kind of enterprise.

And that kind of enterprise depends on generating a market for whatever it is you make, and saving money in the production of it. If you marry, as we do in America, a capitalized healthcare system with the advertising business, well, what do you get? You get exactly what we know we get. And, by the way, this does not exist in many other countries. You get direct-to-consumer advertising by the device maker, the drug maker, the practitioner, the hospital, whatever it may be. They’re all busily advertising, making money.

So the only way to believe in this system, if you’ll pardon my editorializing, is to believe the following nonsense: that whatever maximizes profit maximizes the quality and quantity of healthcare.

If you believe that, the rest follows. But if you don’t believe it, the rest is an abomination. I don’t believe it, and therefore, for me, it is absolutely an abomination. I live in New York City. My doctor is located on Park Avenue, a very ritzy area of the city. Why? Well, it turns out more doctors are concentrated along Park Avenue than anywhere else in the world. That’s not a rational distribution of healthcare, that’s the opposite: irrational.

Why? Because it’s very prestigious. They all want to be able to say, “I’m a doctor, and here’s my address on Park Avenue.” That’s worth a great deal in building up a doctor’s practice. So the doctor will spend the big bucks to have an office on the first floor of a building on Park Avenue. It’s very typical, if you walk down the avenue, it’s one doctor’s office after another.

Similarly, a drug that’s advertised on the evening news or in the pages of magazines that come to your home is going to be the drug you hear about, that you talk about, that you ask your doctor about. They’re building demand, that’s why they have an advertising budget.

And if you know anything about the economics of healthcare, I’ll give you one example. It’s a standard joke we use to explain this to economics students. We ask them to name a well-known over-the-counter medication. They do, Tylenol, or whichever one it might be. Then I show them a statistic: what does it cost to make the little pill in that jar? The answer is three cents, six cents, ridiculously low.

What does it cost to distribute it? Five cents, ten cents. What does it cost to advertise it? A dollar. And what does the final price cover? So it turns out, if you understand advertising, the healthcare industry charges enough money to pay the advertisers, and it’s the people who pay for that. This is craziness.

It means that promotion by the producer generates the profit maximization, but in direct relation to how much money you’re prepared to spend on advertising. It has nothing to do with the science of healthcare, or with any kind of healing mentality. It’s crazy.

If you go into a drugstore, one of the big chains, CVS or Walgreens or any other, you’ll see how the shelves are lined up. Whatever is advertised is at eye level, so you’ll go and pay for it. It’s so blatant that the big chains will put Tylenol on the shelf, and right next to it, the generic equivalent, the exact same medication, at a markedly lower price, under the store’s own name. Because it’s so crazy, even within capitalism, you can make a profit without all the rest of it.

And then, when you add that Americans are financially pinched, well, then they’re either going to do without medication or buy the cheaper version. And the minute you allow cheaper medication, you’re inviting a real problem with criminality in how these medications are composed, using the same materials but altering the process to save money.

I read the other day that there’s now a serious problem in the number of Americans who, in polling, say they’ve forgone a meeting with a medical practitioner in order to save money. That number has gone off the charts. And there’s your proof of what suffers as a result: medical care.

Richard Eskow: I was going to point this out, and I will now, because it’s very important to the context in which I view all this. I think, in many ways, the hostility toward Fauci as an individual, it stands for many things to me, it’s a proxy for many things.

But one of the things it’s a proxy for is the fact that Americans are in a deep state of anxiety, understandably so, about their own healthcare, for exactly the reasons you mentioned. US statistics on healthcare have always been far worse than those of any other developed country, both in terms of life expectancy and other measures. The number of people who have turned down or avoided needed medical care, as you just mentioned, has always been much higher here, and is now rising even further.

And while rank-and-file people may not necessarily want to, or be inclined to, ascribe this to corporate greed, although I think more of them do than liberals and centrists are willing to admit, I think there’s a profound anxiety, and I think Fauci has become representative, to them, of an otherwise faceless elite that’s controlling their lives.

So if they can take vengeance through their elected officials on Fauci, it brings them some sort of catharsis. And to me, this ties into the fact that drugs were unaffordable. Everybody who’s an adult now remembers, somewhere viscerally, even though we seem to have collectively forgotten it, that more than a million Americans died from COVID, and that many of those deaths were unnecessary. They didn’t have to happen.

People will remember the famous story from that time about a young teacher who, quote-unquote, “had health insurance.” I put quotes around it because I was once at a conference, health economics is one of my own areas, where someone asked, “What do you estimate is the number of people in the United States who are underinsured?” I said, “One hundred percent.” Nobody in this country has adequate insurance, if you define insurance as protection against financial catastrophe. Some people may have resources elsewhere, but the insurance itself doesn’t provide that protection.

So you have that uncertainty, that fear. And let’s be candid, the initial response to COVID under Trump, through a project I forget the name of, was better than one might have expected, I guess. But it was carried out through Abbott Laboratories and other private corporations, so it had to take their interests into consideration.

A lot of Americans may not know this, but we let an awful lot of people in India and elsewhere die in order to protect our patent rights. And people may or may not know that the NIH, which Fauci directed, is deeply embedded with drug corporations. There are studies pointing out that many of these privatized, patented drugs were developed at public expense, using public resources.

Then the NIH allows drug companies to patent them and overcharge everybody, especially Americans, for them. Even insulin, developed for diabetes: the three scientists who discovered it in the 1920s gave the patent away. They each had to take a dollar to make it legal. I think you and I talked about this once, I did the math in my head and figured that dollar would be worth about $53 today, adjusted for inflation. A little more now, but that’s roughly it. They had to structure it that way as a legal formality.

And patent gamesmanship is still being used to overcharge people for insulin, people are dying of diabetes because of it. So we have this whole context where the for-profit system you describe, extending to doctors, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, diagnostics, and so on, holds people hostage to an economic system that could literally take their lives at any time. And on some level, they must know that.

So if Dr. Fauci gets his roasting, however unfair it may be, setting that aside, there are going to be people who take satisfaction in it. Along with the Rand Pauls of the world, who hate any government intervention in human lives. Add to that the fact that public health is a collective endeavor, and we are not a collective country. And add the fact that yes, serious mistakes were made in the management of COVID, we probably should have opened schools sooner, et cetera.

What we’re seeing, I think, is a deep well of frustration erupting now, one that runs much deeper than one personality, or even one pandemic.

Richard Wolff: Yeah, and I think we shouldn’t be surprised. I agree with everything you said. This is a government, particularly under Mr. Trump, but the Democrats did it too, that likes to find scapegoats the moment its polling shows there’s an issue like the one you just described: a suspicion about the healthcare system, an anger, a resentment. That’s a message they can use. So, let’s find the appropriate scapegoat.

If American income and jobs have been under duress for the last 30 years, let’s blame poor immigrants from Central America, as if they had anything to do with that, other than wanting to do exactly what every ancestor of every native-born American came here to do. Unbelievable scapegoating. And I think that’s exactly what happened with Fauci.

To show you how insidious it is, I’ll tell you a story. When I was teaching at Yale years ago, I got to know scientists working in the medical school, at the local hospital, which is owned and operated by Yale, or in one of the university’s academic departments. They were being made to sign agreements, as a condition of their appointments, that if they discovered anything of commercial value while employed as a Yale professor, the university would be a part owner of it.

In other words, university finances have become built into this whole apparatus. That’s how capitalism works, it makes everything subject to its logic, if not directly, then indirectly.

As to your point about people avoiding care because they don’t have the money, I’m sure that was well understood when insurers, some years ago, decided to convert policies that once allowed you to visit a doctor three or four times a year at no cost. They changed it: now there’s a copay every time, $10, $20, $30. And the same thing was applied to drugs.

They must have known, because it takes only a moment’s reflection to see, that if something is free, people will take advantage of it in a way they can’t or won’t if it costs money. And even if the cost is small, what happens? The additional profit generated isn’t significant on its own. But if a significant number of people don’t go, aha, that was the point. They don’t want them to come. They don’t want them to discover they have a serious illness, because then they’ll have to pay out the claim for it.

The longer it’s postponed, the longer the premiums collect interest without having to be paid out. This is grotesque, but the logic is right there in the capital. They’re doing what a good businessman does: if you have to shell money out, you minimize it; if you’re taking money in, you maximize it. It’s disgusting.

And then to watch Mr. Fauci be, it’s like watching a poor Honduran family get grabbed by ICE, having the children yanked away from the parents, stuck in a detention center where they aren’t properly fed, housed, or clothed. It’s disgusting. This treatment of immigrants had nothing to do with solving the problems of the American working class. And yet it’s the acceptable way, under our existing system, to cope.

And if they find Fauci guilty, and do what, put him in jail? What in the world does that accomplish? Is it going to make the CDC behave any differently? Is it going to change the drug industry? It does nothing. Nothing.

Richard Eskow: Well, it will, theoretically, make people frightened to intervene on behalf of public health for fear of being held accountable for it later. On the point about financing, I think it’s worth adding some context, because health profit-seeking is really multiple economies preying on each other.

You have the drug economy jacking up prices horrifically. With the multiples you mentioned for over-the-counter medications, when you get into prescription drugs, something that might cost pennies on the dollar to manufacture might retail for $1,500 a month. The multiples get insane.

Then you have insurance companies preying on top of that, marking up prices as much as they can to the buyer, usually an employer, or, on the ACA marketplace, an individual, and chalking the difference up to loss. Inadvertently, I wrote about this at the time, the Affordable Care Act encourages that, because it allowed insurers to charge a fixed percentage over cost as profit. So why would you control costs if lowering them meant reducing profit?

So you have that dynamic, but also a pain threshold beyond which buyers simply won’t buy. You have for-profit hospitals. You have the buyout of physician practices by large corporations. Everybody is contending against everybody else. Nobody is pursuing the improvement of public health.

And to top it off, on your point about prevention and public health, there’s no money in it for insurance companies, who are supposed to be the financial intermediaries, because they operate on one-year contracts. There’s a good chance that employer or individual will sign with somebody else next year, or move to a different plan, an HMO or whatever. So why should an insurance executive put money into making sure I get all the tests I need to preserve my health? It won’t help them, it’ll help some other insurer down the line. It’s not their problem.

So you have this insane system. All of which, if you’ll permit a seemingly radical pivot here, gets me to one of two things you can do about this sick system. And we won’t even get into the kids, the distancing, and all the rage over that.

You can find a scapegoat like Anthony Fauci and cheer in the town square as they call him a witch and burn him at the stake, metaphorically speaking. Or you can fight for a better system, which gets me to this week’s primary elections.

Richard Wolff: Right.

Richard Eskow: Because a physician, a public health physician, no less, who, unlike some other victorious candidates in Michigan, doesn’t describe himself as a democratic socialist but seems closely akin to that movement, he calls himself, I was corrected on this, “a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.” Okay, whatever. But he has very left-leaning ideas by US political standards. He’s pro-Medicare for All.

He won despite a massive outpouring of funds in favor of his primary opponent. Some of that money came from pro-Israel groups, but some of it, no doubt, came from health lobbies and others. Also, in Michigan, I believe two democratic socialists won House primaries against mainstream Democrats, and a democratic socialist defeated an incumbent mayor in Ann Arbor, granted, a progressive city.

So, despite the media’s yeoman efforts to proclaim otherwise, you have this juggernaut of the left continuing to move forward, with Medicare for All as one of its key issues. I don’t know about you, but I see the Fauci roast and the victories of the left as two sides of the same coin, ideologically speaking. Am I making too much of the connection?

Richard Wolff: No, no, I think you have to make that connection. No matter what the media says, I don’t believe the shift in public opinion, away from supporting Israel and toward being more supportive of Palestinians, which is real and important in this country, would, on its own, have offset $60 million spent on the other side, plus the endorsements of Senator Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. He wouldn’t have won on that alone.

I think there are other factors. One is this: nobody could have missed the roasting of Fauci, and yet here’s a doctor running in Michigan who’s making sense about what happened and admitting the system is broken. All my doctors here in New York admit it’s a broken system. They take different positions on what ought to be done, but nobody defends it. Nobody.

Here’s a third factor: I think you’re beginning to see the MAGA coalition break apart as its different factions no longer cohere, and when they don’t, it’s around blatant issues, like the ones we saw in Michigan. For example, Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene can’t go along with the Israel line anymore. That’s done, and it will fracture the coalition.

The second and more important factor, I think: Michigan is very much a working-class state, built around Detroit, the center of our automobile industry, weakened now, but still significant. People there are reacting to the decline in working-class conditions of life. They’re angry about it, and they’re not going to vote for conventional politicians, because they rightly sense those politicians have presided over 50 years of decline for them.

They don’t want them on the Republican side either, that’s why they went for Mr. Trump. He was at least something different. Having a senator with a name like Mamdani’s is something different too. It’s like people here in New York voting for someone named Zohran Mamdani...

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: ...something they never would have done before. But it worked as a signal: “I’m not your regular politician.” For the mass of people, that’s what all the ugly, naughty racism of Mr. Trump signaled to a whole swath of the working class, finally, somebody who isn’t the usual Clinton or Bush, boringly self-repetitive.

And I think they’re winning on these grounds. The more different a candidate is, even names you’d have thought would be childishly easy to attack...

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: ...turn out to be badges of positivity for them.

Richard Eskow: So what’s the Democratic Party’s response to these victories, to the win and immense popularity of Zohran Mamdani, to the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and to the wins of these other candidates carrying an even more, let’s say, politically loaded label, socialist?

For some of them, the response is to line up behind these candidates. But from more and more of the mainstream Democrats, what we’re hearing is that “these people have no place in our party.”

Richard Wolff: Mm-hmm.

Richard Eskow: So this is setting up an internal conflict within the Democratic Party. And obviously, the Democratic Party as an institution is deeply beholden to large donors. But if I were a health insurance executive, or a pharmaceutical executive, bankrolling the Democratic Party, I’d also bear in mind another story in the news this week, which I have to approach carefully: the pretrial hearings of Luigi Mangione.

Richard Wolff: Right.

Richard Eskow: Because here you have a figure who is startlingly popular, according to the last polls I’ve seen, for allegedly committing the murder of a health insurance executive.

Richard Wolff: I’m...

Richard Eskow: It brings to mind the quote attributed to John F. Kennedy, probably written by Ted Sorensen or Schlesinger or somebody, that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. It seems to me that if the institutional leaders of this country are determined to close off all avenues for peaceful change, which you and I support, they’re playing with fire.

Richard Wolff: Yeah. And let me add, even setting aside these electoral races, the economic inequality in this country is literally off the charts. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released a graph a couple of days ago, via Axios, showing the share of total income that goes to labor relative to what goes to capital.

When you take the revenue from anything, a hamburger, a software program, part of that revenue pays wages and salaries, and the other part goes to the owners, the employer.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: And the line showing what goes to the non-supervisory worker bounces around, but it’s unmistakable, and the graph starts in 1947.

Richard Eskow: Mm-hmm.

Richard Wolff: It runs to the present, and it’s just an endless story of decline. You’re literally in a country that celebrates capitalism for making the already-richest person on Earth, Mr. Musk, even richer, and in that same two-week period, shows a decline for the working class, roughly 170 million Americans, going into the toilet. It’s the same system producing both results. And I think that’s what’s tearing this country apart underneath everything else.

Richard Eskow: I think that’s a great point, and maybe one we can revisit. I haven’t seen that graph in a while. I know that in 1968 there was a dramatic split that began and widened over the following decades, and the last I saw, the working-class line had flatlined. But now it sounds like it’s nosediving, and it’s literally life and death.

Richard Wolff: RJ, I’ll make a note, and when we’re done today, I’ll send you an email with the piece I did that has that graph in it, so you can see it.

Richard Eskow: Great. And maybe we’ll discuss it next time. So, as always, Richard Wolff, thanks for such a fascinating and engaging discussion, and thanks for coming on the program.

Richard Wolff: My pleasure. These are important conversations, and I think we do a service by exploring them and making explicit the feelings and thoughts a lot of your audience has already generated for themselves.

Richard Eskow: Well, I certainly hope so, I aspire to that.

I have a new article out in The Nation on the exploitation of GLP-1s by Trump, Big Pharma, and tech billionaires. It explains how they’re using it to create a permanent “medical caste system” of haves, have-nots, and people in between.

Excerpt:

“This medical caste system could quickly worsen economic inequality. Studies have shown that groups with certain health problems consistently earn less and have more difficulty escaping poverty. Among them are women with obesity, people with mental illness, and the physically disabled.”

Give it a read and let me know what you think.

Old habits die hard, and apparently few die harder than the mainstream media’s habit of slanting its reporting toward the political establishment. That was apparent again in the coverage of this week’s primaries—with one surprising exception.

The headline for Politico’s coverage of the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan reads, “Progressives didn’t get the big election night they wanted.” The article begins, “Progressives didn’t get the earthquake they expected. Moderates are relishing in their stronger than expected showing.”

That’s the takeaway to the once-improbable victory of a progressive Muslim against an establishment candidate in a critical swing state? (See correction below.)

Any real understanding of Tuesday’s Michigan results must begin with the flood of outside spending—$60 million, at last report, including roughly $32 million from AIPAC—against the eventual victor, Abdul El-Sayed. It’s true that El-Sayed’s opponent, Haley Stevens, performed significantly better than public polling had suggested. But that shouldn’t have been a surprise. Research by political scientist Thomas Ferguson and others has measured the effect of last-minute cash infusions in races like Donald Trump’s in 2016. They can shift votes dramatically at the eleventh hour, confounding polling expectations in the process.

The $60 million cash tsunami for Stevens isn’t even mentioned in Politico’s 950-word article, which merely says in passing that El-Sayed “quickly recast his narrow lead as a victory against the barrage of spending against him”—as if that was a whimsical notion on his part.

“The progressive wave never materialized on Tuesday night,” the outlet insists, “igniting fresh questions about the potency of the movement.” To buttress this claim, Politico writes:

“Progressive Sunrise Movement co-founder William Lawrence won his primary for Michigan’s 7th District, but largely because two more moderate candidates had split the vote. Democratic socialist Donavan McKinney is still locked in a tight race with incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar for Michigan’s 13th District. And over in Missouri, progressive Cori Bush’s comeback bid fell apart.”

McKinney won his race. So did Yousef Rabhi, a democratic socialist who ran against the incumbent mayor of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Combined with El-Sayed’s and Lawrence’s victory, that’s four wins in Michigan—wins that Politico claims will “ignite fresh questions” about the winners.

As for Cori Bush’s loss: Don’t Politico’s readers deserve to know that Bush was outspent by a 27-to-1 by an opponent who was flush with AIPAC and other outsider cash? Doesn’t that add some much-needed perspective?

New York Times political reporter Reid J. Epstein doesn’t do much better in a write-up headlined, “The left wins a nail-biter in Michigan: Here are eight takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries.” In the first “takeaway,” headlined “The left beat the establishment, but the results showed its limits,” Epstein writes:

“Dr. El-Sayed campaigned hard against the Democratic political establishment. That was enough to win, but enough voters backed Ms. Stevens to suggest that the establishment still has plenty of influence. Ms. Stevens showed strength among Black voters in Detroit and Flint and carried most of the state’s interior rural counties, aside from a few with college towns and resort communities.”

Does that result really “show the limits” of the left? This first “takeaway” makes no mention of the massive campaign spending El-Sayed had to overcome to win his race. One could just as easily—or more easily—conclude that overcoming this much cash is a sign of the left’s strength.

Epstein does mention AIPAC’s $30 million—eventually, in takeaway #3—and concedes that it suffered a serious setback. But he doesn’t mention the other $30 million in this race. More importantly, he fails to connect this lavish spending with the voting results he characterizes as a setback.

“The establishment still has plenty of influence”? It still has plenty of cash.

Ms. Stevens’ strong performance among Detroit voters undoubtedly had roots in that community’s history of ethnic division. It was buttressed, however, by a series of outside-funded ads which (falsely) implied that Barack Obama had endorsed her. Another ad emphasized her relationship with a prominent Black church leader in Detroit with a problematic history of anti-Muslim as well as anti-LGBTQ comments, which served as a not-so-subtle reminder of El-Sayed’s Muslim faith.

At least one major news outlet got it right. Surprisingly, it was Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post. Under the headline, “El-Sayed edges out establishment candidate in crucial Michigan Senate primary,” this was the Post’s lede:

“Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official who built a surging progressive movement in Michigan, overcame a massive spending disadvantage and opposition from the Democratic establishment to win Tuesday’s nationally watched Senate primary, the Associated Press projected.”

That’s all a news outlet has to do to get a story right. It’s not necessary to replace a pro-establishment bias with a bias toward the left or any other ideology. All that’s needed is context. In today’s money-driven electoral system, reporting that excludes or downplays the role of big money in politics lacks context. The Democratic Party could change that at any time, at least for its own primaries, by banning dark money and big donors from its own primaries, but it has chosen not to do so. That’s also important context for Tuesday’s results.

The billionaire-owned Post’s article also said this:

“Tuesday’s primary race spawned tensions within the Democratic Party, including over the party’s political identity, support for Israel and the role of money in politics.”

That’s undeniably accurate. Those tensions are likely to shape the party’s future for the foreseeable future.

(CORRECTION: The original article described candidate Abdul El-Sayed as a ‘democratic socialist.’ Although sometimes characterized that way, Al-Sayed does not describe himself that way. “I’m not a socialist,” he has said. “I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works.”)

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of World BEYOND War, campaign coordinator of RootsAction.org, and host of Talk World Radio. His latest book is War is Still a Lie, the third iteration of a 2010 publication (then called War is a Lie). In it, he skillfully dismantles the deceptions and misconceptions that have been used for centuries to persuade people to fight and die.

The book is an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about war and peace. Please give our conversation a listen. (Selected quotes and lightly edited transcript below.)

https://davidswanson.org

Selected Quotes

David Swanson:

“There has never been a war launched without a pile of lies, and very often those lies are literally recycled from previous wars.”

“Bravery is admirable. But heroism requires combining bravery with goodness, with some strategic improvement of the world for other people.”

“The great peace organizations, like Veterans For Peace, will tell you the way to honor veterans is to stop creating more of them.”

“There has never been a single documented case of PTSD from lack of war.”

Richard Eskow:

“If my neighbor and I disagree about the hedges, we don’t start saturation-bombing each other’s houses. Our natural instinct is to talk about it. That, and not war, is human nature.”

“When we arm another country ... if two neighbors are in a fistfight on the street and I hand one of them a machine gun, I’m morally responsible for the deaths that follow.”

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Transcript

Richard: First of all, David, welcome back to the program.

David: Great to be here. Thanks.

Richard: I think it’s an important book. It addresses so many of the questions people have about the necessity, or lack thereof, of war. But let’s start with this: I believe you first wrote the book in 2010, re-released it in 2015, and now again in 2026. So what’s changed, and what hasn’t?

Actually, let me back up. What’s the fundamental theme of the book, as you see it?

David: So I wrote this thing in 2010 called War Is a Lie, and I thought I’d update it with each war, or each year, but that didn’t turn out to be feasible. I updated it in 2015, War Is a Lie, 2nd edition. This time, a lot had gone by, a lot had changed, not just in terms of wars and politics, but in the types of lies being told, and which ones people were actually believing.

So I changed the title slightly and called it War Is Still a Lie. I explain that it’s really the third edition of War Is a Lie. I wrote a new section looking at how things have changed, and I tried to hit the highlights, that section alone grew to almost 100 pages in what’s now a book of well over 500 pages.

The idea was: in 2010, if anybody said “war,” Iraq was still the big topic, with Afghanistan a close second, and of course, as always, World War II somewhere in the background. People told me Iraq was a fluke, an exception, a violation of the norm, that wars were normally good, just, rational, fought for decent purposes, and grounded in truth and righteousness.

I knew that couldn’t be right. So I went and read, war after war after war. U.S. wars, other countries’ wars, ancient wars, recent wars, and I couldn’t find a single one that wasn’t built on a pile of lies. Including, yes, God forbid I say it, World War II.

There were recurring themes, similar lies used to start wars, to escalate them, to keep them going, and later to repaint them as “good wars” once everyone had forgotten how unpopular they actually were at the time. So I didn’t write a chronicle of this war, then that war, then the next. I wrote about the lies as themes, everything they tell us about war is a lie, and here are some of those lies. So I built chapters like “Wars Are Not Fought Against Evil,” “Wars Are Not Launched in Defense,” “Wars Are Not Waged Out of Generosity,” and so on, with examples drawn from throughout history and across the world to support each theme.

Richard: One of the things that came to mind when I was reading it was a quote from Howard Zinn, I’ll probably mangle it, where he points out that people say, “Well, the American Revolution was justified.” And he says, well, Canada got its independence from Great Britain without a revolutionary war. Or, “The Civil War was justified”, well, Great Britain ended slavery without a civil war.

One of the things I kept thinking about while reading the book, David, was the liberal audience, the kind of audience that thinks of itself as decent, humane, not warlike or bellicose. You quote an acquaintance of yours, someone I gathered was fairly liberal, saying that George W. Bush was the first president to lie us into a war, to actually tell a lie to bring us into a conflict. Which is deeply ahistorical, isn’t it?

David: Of course. There has never been a war launched without a pile of lies, and very often those lies are literally recycled from previous wars. It’s the only form of recycling the Pentagon has ever really embraced: recycling the lies. You’ve got not just the lies about the Lusitania, that no one was warned, that there was no ammunition aboard, and so on, but Franklin Roosevelt essentially copying the Lusitania story with various ships assisting Britain before the U.S. officially entered World War II, because it was such an effective, proven way to turn public opinion against Germany.

You have stories going back to World War I about German atrocities in Belgium. It’s not that Germany didn’t commit real atrocities there, every country does, in every war. But specific, fabricated stories about particular children being attacked were recycled from 19th-century wars and reused in World War I propaganda. There’s not always a lot of creativity involved. Sometimes it’s genuinely inventive; sometimes it’s crude and still works.

But there are no wars that aren’t built on lies. It’s just that sometimes the liars are really, really bad at it, or they simply don’t put in the effort. Telling everyone a war is about giant stockpiles of weapons that you’re about to discover don’t exist is spectacularly bad lying. It’s not “lying” in contrast to truth-telling, it’s just incompetent lying. I didn’t think anyone could top that until Trump came along and justified a war on Iran as necessary to reopen a strait that his own war on Iran had closed. That one was dead on arrival, and credit to the public, we largely didn’t buy it.

With Iraq and Afghanistan, Afghanistan especially, and arguably Iraq too, a majority of Americans polled were in favor at the start. It took a year and a half or so in each case before polls consistently showed a majority saying, “We never should have started this.” And I’d hoped people would catch on faster when I first wrote the book. But even then, you still had a majority saying, “Don’t end it, we never should have started it, but don’t stop now.” Because at that point you’re killing on behalf of the people already killed on your own side. It’s for the troops. The troops shall not have died in vain, unless, of course, we kill even more of them for no purpose.

That dynamic has faded somewhat now that we’re not fighting large ground wars with thousands of U.S. troops dying. It’s no longer driven by that “troop-ism.” It’s not about revenge either, a disgusting and legally baseless justification for war, but a very established and, apparently, respectable one when it can be deployed.

Richard: And effective, effective because it speaks to something primitive in the human brain. That, and the fact that we’re no longer seeing mass American casualties the way we did in Vietnam —

David: People are still dying. Just not Americans.

Richard: Right, I hope I qualified that by saying U.S. soldiers. That reminds me of a line from David Graeber, the anthropologist, who said that in a way, the ironic legacy of Abbie Hoffman and the 1960s peace movement is this: American boys, as it was framed then, before we had a gender-integrated military, aren’t fighting and dying the way they used to. We’re just killing other people now. That’s the legacy.

Which is maybe a good way to transition into something you write about in this latest, 2026 edition, that we’ve lost something you call “Iraq War syndrome.” Go back ten, eleven, twelve years, and there was a real sense that the country had been chastened, that this wasn’t a good idea, that it cost lives, hurt a lot of people, and probably shouldn’t have happened. That syndrome seems to be gone now. Was that part of why you put out a new edition?

David: Yes. I hope it’s not 100 percent gone, but it’s greatly diminished. It’s striking that both the “Vietnam syndrome” and the “Iraq syndrome” get labeled as diseases, as if a moment of clarity, where people recognize that wars are horrific crimes and decide not to repeat them, is itself a pathology.

It’s also worth noting: go back before the gender-integrated military, when for millennia wars were fought almost entirely by men. At some point we said, “Let’s add women to the mix.” We could just as easily have said, “Let’s subtract men.” And you’d have had nearly everyone, except a few unusual anthropologists, screaming that it’s human nature, it’s written in our genes, in our economics, it’s unavoidable. And yet if you look closely at any specific war, you find it was carefully engineered by people who wanted war and profited from it, and who worked hard to avoid peace. Still, people insist war is inevitable. Not a single documented case of PTSD from war deprivation, not one person on Earth suffering from a lack of war. Nearly everyone tries to avoid it. And then we’re told it’s just human nature, and we casually add women to the killing.

Why not subtract men instead? Wars keep happening, and we’re told they’re normal and inevitable, even though 96 percent of the world’s governments don’t wage war anywhere near the way ours does. But things have changed over the past twenty years. It’s true that we stopped killing “our boys.” But people generally don’t believe that. Polls have asked Americans about Iraq and Afghanistan, and a majority typically believed most of the war’s deaths were U.S. military personnel, when in reality it was 3 or 4 percent. And people actually resented Afghans and Iraqis for not being grateful for the “service” of having their countries destroyed, their land poisoned, their people killed.

That’s part of why we now hear, “All our money is going to Ukraine and Gaza, we need it here at home.” As if the money could possibly all go to just 4 percent of the population. In reality, there’s so much of it that you could transform the entire world with a fraction of it, and yet it’s not benefiting the people of Gaza, Ukraine, Iraq, or Afghanistan either.

When we try to sanitize war by hiding the “wrong” casualties, or by hiding casualties altogether, as Trump does even with these relatively small numbers, it doesn’t mean people aren’t dying. Air wars are often deadlier than ground wars, they’re just more one-sided, so it’s harder for us to see. We have to get to a point where we actually care about that. And maybe we’re getting closer, because the war on Iran is deeply unpopular.

Richard: It is. And I think access to information beyond U.S. mainstream media has helped with that, far too slowly, but it’s helped shift perceptions of what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank, as people see for themselves through social media and other sources what’s really going on.

But what strikes me is how much hasn’t changed in how we think about war. A while back, I gave a talk for which I laboriously researched the anthropological literature on whether all human societies wage war. I could have saved myself hours by just reading War Is Still a Lie, it’s all in there. War is not some essential part of human nature. In fact, I’d argue, and I think it’s implicit in your book too, that it’s actually human nature not to wage war. When my neighbor and I disagree about the hedges, we don’t start saturation-bombing each other’s houses. We talk about it. That’s human nature, resolving disputes through conversation.

But there’s this strange willing suspension of disbelief when it comes to war, especially, I’ll say it, among people who might be considered the “good,” respectable segment of society. You might expect hostility toward peace from people written off as deplorable by some politicians, but I’m talking about the people who insist that war is simply part of human nature, that we’ve exhausted every other option, that there’s no talking to “these people.” I once wrote a column about a professional medical ethicist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who argued that all pharmaceuticals should be withheld from Russian citizens because of the invasion of Ukraine, which would amount to the mass murder of cancer patients and infants. A medical ethicist arguing this. And a well-known liberal commentator, it turned out, when I looked into his background. So what’s the barrier here? Your book is obviously an attempt to break through it, and I think it does a great job, but why is there such fertile ground, even among people who’d claim to know better?

David: The good news is there’s less and less of it, 80 percent of Americans want to end the war on Iran. Maybe 70 percent falsely believe they have no power to influence government behavior, and that’s the big lie that needs to be overcome: the belief that we can’t get organized and actually change things. As for the other 20 percent who think the war on Iran is great, or beneficial to them or the world, or believe Iranians are simply evil and need to be killed, that’s a tougher case. But there’s rarely an insanity out there that doesn’t command at least 20 percent support. How perfect do we really need this to get?

I do agree that far more Homo sapiens have lived their entire lives without ever coming near a war than have come near one, it’s not even close. But I think it’s important to agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that we’re responsible for whatever we choose to do, and that we’re capable of doing almost anything. You can call mass murder “human nature,” and you can call peaceful cooperation “human nature”, but you’re never going to dissect a human being and find some discrete thing called human nature. It doesn’t exist, except as the lamest possible excuse for things people are ashamed of but want to keep doing anyway.

Then there’s the question of those of us who oppose a given war, why do we oppose it? Is it because of the illegality and mass murder, or because gas prices are up? Look at the politicians, the so-called opposition, we have an online action at RootsAction where people can email Democrats in Congress urging them not to oppose deals that might end the war on the grounds that “any deal is a bad deal.” Of course a deal to end a war is always going to look worse than never starting it. But the real question, if we’re not drunk on partisanship, is whether a bad deal that ends the war is worse than continuing it and risking escalation, or even nuclear war. And you have Democratic senators and representatives, nearly all of them, who won’t say a single word about the illegality, the mass murder, the cruelty, or the sadism of a war, they just want it “properly authorized,” or they’re upset about gas prices. That leaves me with real questions about how far we’ve actually come.

Richard: Along those lines, and I suppose it depends on whether you see the glass as half full or half empty, we see, in terms of support for the genocide in Gaza, and the incipient genocide, if it isn’t already past that point, in the West Bank, that ordinary Democrats and Americans in general are turning against these wars. Their leaders aren’t. There are structural reasons for that, and we can work to raise awareness of them. That’s the good-news piece. But we’re still, and this is one of the most delicate parts of your book, sacralizing warfighters.

You have a chapter titled “Warriors Are Not Heroes.” That’s a genuinely touchy thing to say in America, across the political spectrum. You argue that it’s possible to be brave and courageous without being a hero. Tell us about that distinction.

David: Well, obviously you can jump in front of a train, that’s very brave, but does it do the world any good? You can risk your life to murder a group of children, and that may be very brave, but it’s also evil. Heroism requires combining bravery with goodness, with some strategic improvement of the world for other people. Otherwise it’s not something you’d actually want to emulate.

If you just look at warfighting in isolation, ants are clearly braver than Homo sapiens. But from a distance, ants slaughtering each other also looks pretty absurd. Are we going to glorify the cause of one particular colony of ants? Probably not.

I saw that movie everyone’s talking about, the Odyssey adaptation.

Richard: Oh, you saw it?

David: I did. And in many ways it deglorifies war and puts veterans’ issues front and center. According to the film, the Greeks were lied into the Trojan War for economic reasons. Every warrior was coerced into fighting through threats against their families and towns. The war itself is shown as boring, wasteful, horrific, evil, and traumatizing, it destroyed the rule of law and spread fear and insecurity across the known world. Odysseus takes so long getting home because he’s recovering from moral guilt, horror, PTSD, and grief. Everywhere his troops go, there’s raping and pillaging. He encounters the dead, who ask him, “Why did you lie to me? Why did you abandon me?” The whole thing is portrayed as filthy and disgusting, except for the misplaced glorification of bravery.

And then, at the very end, what does Christopher Nolan do? He keeps the ending where Odysseus locks fifty people in a room and slaughters them out of revenge. After hours of “war is evil, war is traumatic, war is pointless,” you land on revenge as the payoff.

Richard: Revenge.

David: Why not just apply that same logic backward to the Trojan War itself? If revenge can purify locking fifty people in a room and murdering them, it can purify an entire war, as we’ve seen with Afghanistan, Syria, and so on. There’s still progress to be made.

Richard: Which brings up another sensitive point about warriors as heroes. I had three uncles who fought in World War II. One of them was engaged in hand-to-hand combat, a tough guy, a street kid from New York. Late one night, after a few drinks, his, not mine, he said something to me. He said, “Guys like me, who did what I did, we should be locked away on some island somewhere, kept away from society.” I asked why. He said, “Because we’ve killed people.” I said, “And?” He said, “And we know how easy it is.”

There’s something in that. I’m not trying to stigmatize all veterans, but glorifying them does neither them nor society any favors. They’ve been damaged, moral injury, psychic injury, psychological injury, if not physical. And glorifying them can actually box them in, making it harder for them to seek help for what’s been done to them. Does that resonate with you?

David: Completely, 100 percent. The great peace organizations, like Veterans For Peace, will tell you the way to honor veterans is to stop creating more of them. That doesn’t mean being hateful or bigoted toward existing veterans, it means we should stop pretending there’s no impact. There’s a documented rise in domestic violence among people returning from war. There’s an uptick in racist violence following U.S. wars. Mass shooters in this country are disproportionately veterans, people trained to shoot by our own government and thanked for their “service” in doing so. Statistically, almost no veterans become mass shooters; they’re a tiny fraction of the population. But they are disproportionately represented among mass shooters. If that correlation existed with redheads, or with gay people, or with Portuguese speakers, we’d have study after study on it. But because it involves people trained and thanked by the government for shooting people, it’s treated as irrelevant to even mention, offensive, even.

Richard: A lot of this is considered offensive to bring up, which is exactly why I went straight into it, because I think we need to get past the taboos around discussing war. Which brings me to my next question: why do you think these conversations are so hard? Even with people who seem entirely reasonable, I’ve been stigmatized, attacked, banned from certain spaces, simply for saying we shouldn’t escalate the Ukraine-Russia conflict, or that we shouldn’t have supported various bombing campaigns in Gaza. It’s as if it’s considered more hateful to oppose hate and murder than it is to support or rationalize it. It feels like the last real taboo in political conversation. Am I exaggerating, or getting this wrong?

David: No, this rot starts at the top. The U.S. government actively conflates peace activism with leftism, and equates opposition to genocide with the very violence it claims to oppose, rather than treating support for genocide as the offensive position. We’ve had people effectively abducted off the street for writing op-eds against a genocide. People sent to prison for decades for opposing genocide, or for opposing paramilitary violence on American streets. This isn’t a moment to worry about sounding hyperbolic, it’s genuinely over the top.

But there’s one easy thing you can say to people who insist you must support the war in Ukraine, or the war in Israel: just wait a year or two, and you and all your friends will come around to agreeing with me. Look at U.S. polling on Ukraine, it went from the most impressive propaganda success I’ve ever witnessed, in terms of sustained public support, to a majority now wanting the war over. When we used to say, “End the war, stop the weapons shipments, stop blocking negotiations,” the most common counter was, “We’re doing this for the Ukrainian people, it’s their decision, and the polling shows they want the war to continue. What business do you have saying anything, just because you happen to live on a planet that could be destroyed if this goes nuclear?”

Well, now look at the polling in Ukraine. A large majority now want negotiations and compromise over continued war, whatever the consequences. It’s true the polling once said the opposite, but wait long enough, and it changes. So why not be early? Why not get it right sooner?

Richard: Right.

David: When fewer people have died, fewer have been displaced, hostility is lower, and there’s a much better chance of reconciling and building something everyone can live with, why wait? Because you know you’ll get there eventually. You know the fever, the madness, will eventually break, and you’ll have to negotiate peace or destroy the world. So why not get there sooner?

Richard: And I want to add to that excellent point, what’s always gotten me about that “it’s up to them” argument is this: if two neighbors are in a fistfight on the street, and I hand one of them a machine gun, it doesn’t matter that “he wanted it”, I’m still morally responsible for the deaths of the other guy, his family, and the rest of the block. In a court of law, I’d be an accessory. So this argument that “it’s up to them” doesn’t hold. What they do may be up to them, but what we do is our own moral choice and our own responsibility. That’s always driven me crazy, along with the reflexive “so you like Putin? How much is he paying you?” line of attack.

But I don’t want to dwell only on the negative, David, because your book also discusses some genuinely constructive tools. Before we wrap up, I want to touch on those. One is the Kellogg-Briand Pact, right? And maybe others, some international legal mechanisms that could actually help prevent future wars?

David: There are quite a few existing laws we could actually use, both U.S. laws and international treaties the U.S. is already party to, like the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which I mention often because I wrote an entire other book about it and the activism that produced it. I like that it states, simply, that all war is illegal, full stop. The UN Charter says essentially the same thing, with a couple of very narrow exceptions that virtually no actual war ever meets. But the existence of those loopholes, which most people understand only vaguely, allows for the pretense that any given war must have somehow qualified under one of them, or that a “good” war like Afghanistan must have been properly authorized because Iraq, by contrast, was clearly bad.

Beyond the treaties, U.S. domestic law is extensive too. We can always write more laws, everyone gets excited about drafting new treaties, and it’s wonderful to create one banning nuclear weapons, even though we already have a treaty requiring the elimination of all nuclear weapons, and, most people don’t realize this, all weapons generally.

Richard: Right.

David: But every shipment of U.S. weapons to Israel violates at least a dozen existing U.S. laws.

Richard: Including the Leahy Law, presumably, the one that prohibits arming forces with a record of human rights abuses?

David: Yes, the Leahy Laws are violated by these weapons shipments and by direct U.S. participation in wars that are, in practice, foreign wars. There are even efforts underway right now in Congress to force a vote, essentially asking, “Do you support the Leahy Laws?” And if the answer is yes, then what do you make of the shipments to Israel? Meanwhile, buried in the Pentagon’s multi-trillion-dollar budget, there’s language effectively merging the U.S. and Israeli militaries in ways that may eliminate the need for future votes to give or sell Israel unlimited weapons. So there are good and bad trends happening simultaneously.

Still, I think we need the rule of law, however imperfect and biased it currently is. We need to universalize it, democratize it, and stop inviting war criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington to be applauded, while countries that actually respect the law are bound to arrest him under an outstanding warrant. We can’t do without the rule of law. But we have to be honest about how imperfect it is, and about what needs to change.

Richard: Absolutely. And people may forget that the Biden administration explicitly rejected the rule of law when it came to Israel and Gaza, and the Trump administration has disregarded it even more flagrantly. So I think it’s worth respecting an imperfect institution before we try to improve it.

One last tool I want to mention, and please add anything I’ve missed: I was fascinated by a passage on page 449 of my copy, the idea that one powerful way to ease public anxiety about disarmament, and to actually defend a country, is to train the entire population in unarmed civilian defense. When everyone refuses to cooperate, resists, and sabotages an occupier, occupation becomes essentially impossible. And you make the point that governments resist adopting this, not because it lacks a track record of success, but because training a population to resist injustice from abroad also trains them to resist injustice at home. I love this idea, honestly, I’d flip the sequence and start with resisting injustice at home. But either way, this reframes disarmament and nonviolence, which people tend to dismiss as fuzzy, abstract, “granola” thinking, as something genuinely gutsy, if you consider what Gandhi endured, what King and his followers endured, the real courage it took to face those beatings. Where does this idea come from, and how do we talk about it more?

David: Gandhi is a huge part of where these ideas originate. There’s a list at worldbeyondwar.org/list documenting successful nonviolent efforts to block invasions, overthrow coups and dictators, and prevent wars, situations where people were told, “It’s war or nothing,” and instead used mass protest, shutting down government functions, redirecting troops, and nonviolent noncooperation, and succeeded. There have certainly been failures too, but the scholarship shows that predominantly nonviolent campaigns succeed more often overall, and their successes tend to last significantly longer, on average, than victories achieved through violence.

Look at how the Baltic states nonviolently expelled the Soviet Union, that had nothing to do with NATO. Some of them understood something like the “Singing Revolution”, it sounds like a hippie fantasy, that they sang the Soviets out of their country, but they actually did it. They understood this power well enough to write laws establishing a national agency for unarmed civilian defense and to train the population accordingly. Of course, over time, it got diminished, marginalized, folded under conventional military defense. Why? Because no government really wants a population skillfully and strategically capable of resisting whatever injustice that government might impose on it. And Lithuania, like the rest of Western Europe, has since become fully invested in the NATO arms economy.

I think we need to recognize, first, that the perceived need to defend ourselves against evil invaders and occupiers is vastly overblown. If you disarm, demilitarize, build cooperation, uphold the rule of law, and work toward peace, invasion simply isn’t going to happen. Hitler isn’t coming for you tomorrow. But for people’s peace of mind, it helps to know this tool exists, that a population can be trained to be effectively unoccupiable. When everyone refuses to cooperate, refuses to obey, sabotages the occupier at every turn, you don’t need a single gun. In fact, you’re better off without them. There are dozens of documented examples of this working.

I think it’s important for people, and for international bodies like the UN, to recognize that on the rare occasions when peacekeeping has been attempted without weapons, it has succeeded far more often than the many failed, armed peacekeeping missions that don’t actually keep the peace.

Richard: And when it comes to war as an alternative, this country’s track record of actually winning wars over the past 75 years is pretty poor. So it’s not even a case where you can say, “Well, at least it works.” It doesn’t work, and it’s genuinely destructive. I love this idea. We’ve actually seen glimpses of it in the resistance to ICE in Minneapolis and other cities, the early stirrings of mutual aid, cooperation, Signal and Telegram chains tracking where enforcement is happening and what to avoid. It’s inspiring, and we’re seeing it here in the greater D.C. area too.

David: And the U.S. didn’t start losing wars after defeating the Nazis, it’s been losing wars not just since 1812, but since long before there even was a United States. There’s no such thing as “winning” a war, any more than winning a hurricane, as the late Jeannette Rankin used to say. They’ll point to Venezuela-era interventions as the exception among dozens of failures on their own terms. But even there, the damage to the rule of law and to foreign relations is real, and the blowback hasn’t even fully arrived yet. It also helped inspire the ongoing disaster in Iran, because Trump apparently believed he could pull off something similar there. So I wouldn’t put war on the scoreboard as a successful institution just yet.

Why do we accept an outbreak of “explosive diarrhea” as business as usual? Why is food contamination, a scourge we once largely conquered, making a comeback? And when a company that has poisoned the public tries to cover it up so it can keep poisoning us, why do so many of us seem to think that just the way the world works?

The latest article from Sonali Kolhatkar (Zero Hour Senior Correspondent and so much more) provides some much-needed context for the current outbreak of cyclospora infections. From deregulation to climate change, this horrific outbreak is the result of deliberate political changes.

If things don’t change, this will happen again and again. As these words are being written, in fact, the FDA says a new outbreak of cyclospora has appeared which is not connected to lettuce. Which raises the metaphorical (and literal) question, When will we decide we’ve had enough of this sh*t?

You’ll find selected quotes and a (lightly edited) transcript below.

Selected Quotes

Sonali:

• “We’re relying on market forces to keep us safe, and that’s not a public-health strategy.”

• “Food safety shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”

• “We have to be able to rely on government to keep our food safe.”

• “We need to break up food monopolies and strengthen small farms.”

Richard:

• “Nobody’s going to run for office saying ‘our party is objectively pro-explosive-diarrhea.’”

• “How is the market supposed to correct a failure when consumers don’t even know whose product they’re buying?”

• “Whenever you centralize an entire system around a handful of giant players, one failure threatens everyone.”

We need your support. Please support our work with a paid subscription through Substack or on Patreon. You can also make a one-time donation here. Many thanks.

Transcript

Richard: So you have a new piece out, and it’s about the tainted lettuce story. Give us the brief overview, if you would.

Sonali: Many of your viewers have probably heard that we’re supposed to be avoiding lettuce right now. Thousands of people—largely in the Midwest, with Michigan a major hotspot—have been affected. Something like 7,000 people have been documented as infected with cyclosporiasis, a parasitic infection in a similar class to E. coli and salmonella. It’s not as fatal as those, but it’s incredibly difficult, with symptoms that have been described as explosive diarrhea.

Nobody wants that. It’s left people debilitated. Even people who’ve recovered have been left with weakened immune systems—kind of like COVID, where getting it is terrible, and generally you recover, but some people remain affected long-term.

This is a very serious thing, and the federal government hasn’t quite been able to pin down the origin of the contaminated lettuce. But right now, all indications point to one of the four major providers of fresh-cut salad greens in the United States: Taylor Farms. Taylor says it’s still in the middle of its investigation, but that seems to be it.

There are a lot of implications around this story that I get into in my piece.

Richard: I want to talk about them. Let me start with the meta-story here. Not too long ago, as a friend or an editor reading your piece, I would have said that the phrase “nobody wants explosive diarrhea”—which appears in your piece—was unnecessary, Sonali. Normally, an editor would flag that.

But we now live in an environment, and this is a given, where we’re dismantling regulation and where greed and corporate interest are influencing our politics to such a degree that it’s made all the old logical assumptions so hazy that it actually becomes necessary to spell things out like that, doesn’t it?

Sonali: Yes. And the reason I put that in there—it’s interesting you bring that up—is that the implication of our current system is that this is just something we have to live with. We must accept that, in the interest of the free market, in the interest of letting big producers and big companies do what they need to do to feed us—and of course their goal is to make a profit—we have to pay the price for their business practices.

And if that means 7,000 people getting explosive diarrhea, so be it, right? That’s the implication behind it. But these are preventable issues. In the piece, I identify three main problems: First, we have fewer and fewer food producers, processors, and distributors, which means that when one company has problems, those problems spread throughout the country because these companies are so large. Second, we have far too few regulations, and the ones we do have are currently being dismantled. Third, we do not support or sustain small farms—in fact, we’re weakening them and making life harder for them.

Small farms are where we ought to be investing. A localized food industry is a lot more resilient than a centralized one, where a single bottleneck can cause massive disruptions in supply. So those are the three issues I identified.

They’re not rocket science. It should be something we take for granted—that government regulates our food supply and its safety. But right now it’s largely voluntary. It’s shocking that we don’t have more infections than we do.

Richard: People may also minimize the severity of this illness when they think about diarrhea in general. First of all, this form of it is exceptionally painful. And as you say, it can cause long-lasting or permanent damage. I’ve read this disease can last six weeks or more. That’s horrific.

I got something similar in India forty years ago—though I didn’t get it from the people of India or the food of India. I got it on my last day in what was then Bombay, when someone took me out for dinner at the Taj Mahal Hotel, which is, you know, the elite—

Sonali: Top hotel, yeah.

Richard: Right, a hotel originally built, I believe, for British Raj administrators. I don’t know the full history, but I can tell you from personal experience: you don’t want it. You really don’t want it. You spend your time literally thinking, “How am I going to get through the next 30 seconds?” And it affected me for years afterward.

Sonali: Yeah.

Richard: So given the severity of this—and no one’s going to run for office saying “our party is objectively pro-explosive-diarrhea”—that’s exactly why I bring it up. The policies that led to this episode, and that will almost certainly lead to more outbreaks and epidemics going forward, are treated as a given.

As we dive into the specifics, I don’t want to bring my own bias to your reporting, but it seems to me this is a massive failure—even though I think the news media is trying to tell the whole story. I won’t rap them as hard as I might on other kinds of journalism, but I still don’t think they’re conveying that this is a straightforward case of cause and effect: you do A, B, and C, and this is what happens. I don’t think the general public grasps that. Am I wrong?

Sonali: Look, we pay taxes so that the federal government can protect us. That’s the whole point of regulations—it’s why we have laws about the kinds of toys you can sell toddlers. We need federal regulators ensuring our food is safe. Currently, food safety monitoring for bacterial infections runs through a very weak system called FoodNet, run under the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only 10 out of 50 states participate. It’s already extremely weak, and it was monitoring for about eight different kinds of infections.

Almost exactly a year ago, the Trump administration made monitoring voluntary for six of those eight. So now only two are mandatory: E. coli and salmonella. Cyclospora, the infection that’s now spreading, is one of the ones FoodNet is no longer required to monitor. That’s part of why they can’t find the source of this contamination. It’s shocking—we’re relying on market forces to keep us safe, on the idea that producers won’t want to hurt their bottom line because people will stop buying lettuce, so we’ll just leave it up to them to ensure the safety of their own product.

Okay, maybe that works eventually, except you first have to wait for thousands of people to suffer before market forces correct themselves. It’s different in places like Europe, where the regulatory systems are much stronger, and we deserve those same protections. But Taylor Farms, like many big corporations, is busy using its profits to lobby the government for fewer regulations. And it turns out the CEO of Taylor Farms is a big donor to the Trump administration and Trump-adjacent super PACs, and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars directly lobbying the government to dismantle regulations.

So this is a direct outcome of actions our government has taken in favor of big corporations and against the public and public health.

Richard: I’m glad you raised that: the corruption of the process through lobbying, and the power of these monopolies, or near-monopolies, this concentration across every aspect of food production and distribution. And then there’s this mythology, which I can’t believe anyone still gives credence to, that the market will take care of it. Since I read your piece this morning, I’ve been doing a little research on Taylor Farms myself. How can the market address a product failure when you don’t even know you’re buying that product in the first place?

Sonali: Right.

Richard: What struck me most in researching Taylor Farms—and this took some digging—was tracking down all the final shelf brands of packaged lettuce that actually originate with Taylor Farms. A lot of those are marketed as, say, O Organics at Safeway. Signature Select, also Safeway. GreenWise at Publix. Simply Nature at Aldi. Some of the Trader Joe’s bagged salads. 365 by Whole Foods.

People think they’re getting something wholesome there. It strikes me that what they’re doing isn’t just subverting market forces—they’re tricking people into thinking they’re buying a healthier product when they’re really just buying the same factory-made widget anyone else might sell.

Sonali: Exactly. And what they’re also doing is giving people the false impression that there’s competition and diversity on the shelves. If you go to a big supermarket that sells ten different brands of bagged lettuce, chances are you’re only looking at products from one or two companies, repackaged under different labels. Some of these are companies directly owned by the same producers. There’s no functional reason to sell lettuce under two different labels—except to give people the illusion of choice. This kind of capitalism, in particular, is charlatanism. It plays on our sense of agency, making us feel like we’re making real choices when there isn’t a real choice at all.

So people are starting to go out of their way, because they’re realizing that bagged lettuce from the store could be dangerous. They’re seeking out small farmers at farmers markets. And when I looked into how the Trump administration has undermined small farms over just the past year, I was shocked. Trump courted small farmers to get their votes, and many of them supported him. But he has cut program after program under the guise of fighting DEI initiatives. He’s cut programs that benefit farmers broadly. He’s taken away disaster aid programs. He cut a program that matched small farmers’ produce with food banks—so that low-income people had access to fresh food, and small farmers had a stable source of income. It was a win-win that benefited two important groups, and he cut it anyway.

Over and over, small farmers are going out of business. They can’t handle competition from these giant producers. So there are fewer options left for people who want to eat lettuce. We’re told we’re supposed to eat fresh food—and the government has fully failed the American people on that front.

Richard: You want to know what else I found out about Taylor Farms along those lines, Sonali? I think you’ll find it interesting. Going back to your article—in April 2024, Taylor Farms acquired FarmWise, an agricultural robotics company specializing in precision weeding and thinning.

So, the small farmers of America are supposed to compete with this robotic, industrial-scale operation that cuts corners every way it can—including, apparently, adequately cleaning fecal matter off its lettuce, since that’s the likely source of the cyclospora outbreak. And they’re supposed to compete with that. Meanwhile, many inner cities in this country—including the one where our studio is located here in D.C.—are food deserts. People there would be desperate for healthy, farm-grown food. But they can’t get it. The Trump administration—

And one of the other things you point out in the article, which I think is important, is that most people buying those organic-sounding brands—Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and so on—don’t realize they’re helping fund Trump’s MAGA super PAC. That’s something I learned from your article.

Sonali: Yes. Imagine that: a bag of lettuce helps the profit margins of a company that directly supports MAGA Inc., a Trump-related super PAC. This is what we’ve come to. There are people struggling with joblessness, immigrant farmworkers laboring in vulnerable conditions and being scapegoated—while the billionaire owners of these farms automate jobs, dismantle the regulatory apparatus meant to keep us safe, and funnel their profits into strengthening those same systems, getting richer and richer at the expense of our public health.

Something has to give. We have to push back hard against this system. That means breaking up food monopolies. It shouldn’t be that a handful of corporations control so much of our food production and distribution. We can’t survive without food. We shouldn’t be so dependent on a system this concentrated.

I draw an analogy to the war on Iran, which exposed the fragility of a globalized energy system where the majority of oil passes through one narrow geographic chokepoint. It took just one unprovoked war to throw global oil supplies into disarray. We have similar bottlenecks in our food distribution system because of these food monopolies. It’s a weakened system. When a handful of giants control so much of what we rely on, all it takes is one of them failin, or something going wrong with one of them, to throw huge parts of our food system into disarray.

So we have to dismantle these monopolies. We have to strengthen small farms and small farmers. We have to strengthen the regulatory apparatus that tracks infections and shuts them down quickly to keep us safe. These are simple solutions, but they go against the bottom lines of massive corporations and the MAGA agenda. It’s time for us to push back.

Richard: That’s so well said, and so important. Let me try to sum it up: what you’re describing is fragility. Whenever you have a highly centralized system like this, with just a few major players, a breakdown in any one of them paralyzes the whole system. People simply aren’t buying lettuce right now. It’s undemocratic. It exacerbates inequality. It feeds political corruption. It forecloses creative solutions to real problems. It contributes to unemployment.

Frankly, reading your article, I found myself feeling a little nostalgic for those partially true, partially mythic stories of ancient honor culture. I found myself imagining a world where Bruce Taylor—a third-generation inheritor of wealth, not unlike Donald Trump, and the CEO of Taylor Farms—would have felt he had no choice but to commit ritual suicide in the face of the harm he’s caused to so many people. Instead, as you point out, news recently emerged that representatives from Taylor Farms called the White House to try to delay a recall of their lettuce. They’re trying to sell more of this product even as it’s causing a horrific disease outbreak. What kind of person does something like that?

Sonali: It’s monstrous. And the fact that they felt bold enough to directly call the White House to hold off on a recall shows just how broken the system is. The government is supposed to be the watchdog, ensuring checks and balances on a private producer whose product can harm public health. Instead, they picked up the phone and called Trump directly—which, given who Trump is, shouldn’t surprise us. He likes having that kind of power. He likes people coming to kiss the ring, so to speak, and he likes being the one who determines what happens next.

The fact that Taylor Farms felt emboldened enough to ask the White House to stop a recall shows the sheer hubris built into our system for corporate players like this. It should never have come to this.

Richard: And they’re still mincing words with the government, even though the epidemiologists have been very clear it’s their lettuce that’s the problem. They’re still pretending otherwise, that it’s erroneous.

So let’s close with your final paragraph, if that’s all right, Sonali. You write that what will help prevent future outbreaks is restoring and expanding regulatory agencies’ ability to track infectious outbreaks, and breaking up food monopolies while sustaining and strengthening small farms. Then comes a line that may make people a little queasy, but you had to write it: the question is whether the federal government will have the guts to do what it takes to protect the American people’s guts. I think we already know the answer to that one, under current circumstances, don’t we?

Sonali: Yes—they do not have the guts to protect our guts. Which means we have to have the guts to take them on. It’s important for us to understand the power dynamic at work here. The government is supposed to work for us. And I think the solutions, as I mentioned earlier, really are simple. What matters is our ability to ensure that government is actually protecting us through these regulations.

This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Every single one of us, no matter our party, should be able to trust the food on our plate. And if we don’t trust the food on our plate, we should be asking: whose job is it to make sure our food is safe? You have the uber-libertarians, the Ayn Randians, who think the best government is no government at all. What are people supposed to do—set up a home chemistry lab to test their own lettuce for bacterial infections? Is everyone supposed to become an urban homesteader, growing their own lettuce, their own protein, everything themselves? We have to be able to rely on government to keep our food safe.

And I didn’t even get into the climate impacts of all this in the piece—that was outside its scope. But the practices of big agribusiness fuel climate change. A more dispersed food system, relying on small farmers, would use far less fossil-fuel-derived fertilizer and would align much better with better climate outcomes. And as the planet warms, parasitic infections become more likely, because these parasites thrive in a warming climate. All of these issues are tied together. And the solutions all involve pushing back against corporatism, big companies, and a weakened government.

Richard: And if we don’t do something about it, the only survivors in a few years might be Taylor Farms robot workers—like WALL-E, sifting through the wreckage. I don’t think that’s the future we want.

Sonali: It’s not even the future the billionaires want. They just haven’t thought it through. Right now, the vineyards of France are burning dangerously close to Bordeaux. In the billionaires’ bunkers, there will be no Bordeaux wine, because they will have destroyed the climate that produces it. If these people think they can secure a future for their own children while continuing the practices they’re engaged in, they’ve got another thing coming. You can’t have robots build the future for you that all of us, together, could build for one another.

Richard: No Pinot Noir: that’s hitting them where it hurts.

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

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.