Current Affairs

This episode originally aired on October 22, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Carolyn Dupont, a professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University, is one of the country's leading experts on the Electoral College. She is the author of the book Distorting Democracy The Forgotten History of the Electoral College—and Why It Matters Today, which debunks defenses of the Electoral College and shows why it's harmful to democracy. She joins us today to help us better understand this peculiar system and to go through the arguments in favor of it. Prof. Dupont notes in particular that the "Electoral College" we have today bears little resemblance to the system the Founding Fathers actually set up, which means that we can't appeal to their "intent" in order to defend it. She explains how this system came into being, how it changed over the years, and how it fails at achieving its supposed purposes, like giving small states a voice.

Listeners may be interested in the Current Affairs article by Alex Skopicon the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is one possible way to neutralize the Electoral College for good.

"This system increasingly returns results that threaten to undo the expressed wishes of a majority of voters, and these “misfires” profoundly damage the body politic... From its inception, Americans have disliked the Electoral College. In recent decades this dissatisfaction has shown up in polling, but it has manifested over the life of our nation in other ways. In the earliest days of our republic, even the men who helped create the Electoral College recommended key changes. Since then, more than 700 proposals to alter or abolish it have been introduced into Congress—more than on any other topic." -Carolyn Dupont, Distorting Democracy

This episode originally aired on October 10, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Osamah Khalil of Syracuse University is the author of A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden, a vital history of the wars of the last 50 years. Prof. Khalil shows how, from the Vietnam war to the present day, American leaders (and American pop culture) conjured a "world of enemies" in which force was preferable to diplomacy. A cast of rotating villains (from Ho Chi Minh to Saddam Hussein to Hamas) are treated as existential threats to freedom and democracy, and because they are monstrous they cannot be negotiated with and can only be destroyed. Prof. Khalil joins today to discuss his work, which argues that our militaristic attitude toward the rest of the world has also come to characterize domesticpolitical discourse.

"American militarism has not been limited to foreign battlefields. Politicians and policymakers have insisted that Americans are engaged in an existential struggle against foes seen and unseen, foreign and domestic. Thus, militarism has seeped into everyday American life as the United States has not settled for defeat or victory but for war as a permanent state." -Osamah F. Khalil

Those who value this conversation will also probably want to check out The Myth of American Idealism, out now from Penguin Random House.

This episode originally aired on October 2, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Recently, New York Timescolumnist Pamela Paul made an argumentfor aggressively policing subway fare evasion. To explain why a major new crackdown is necessary, she cited "broken windows theory," which she said that progressives refuse to admit "works." She explained that allowing minor crimes "invites graver forms of crime," which is why we need to make sure laws against seemingly minor crimes are enforced. This is the core of the argument made in The Atlanticin 1982 by two political scientists, who argued that when a community allows small offenses (like broken windows) to go unpunished, soon the whole place is going to hell in a handbasket.

But the broken windows theory was a fraud. The writers of the original article did not produce evidence that it was true, and indeed there hasn't been evidence produced since to show that it's true. Joining us today is Bernard Harcourt of Columbia Law School, who wrote the first book critical of broken windows policing, The Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing(2004). At the time the book was written, "broken windows" was credited with having produced major crime reductions across the country. Today Prof. Harcourt joins to explain how this theory became so popular. One reason, he says, is that it appealed to both liberals and conservatives: liberals because policing "order" was seen as an attractive alternative to mass incarceration, conservatives because it advocated aggressively keeping unruly poor people in check. But the evidence for the theory just wasn't there, and Prof. Harcourt explains that it ended up serving as the intellectual foundation for outrages like the mass stopping and frisking of young Black men.

"The broken windows theory and order-maintenance policing continue to receive extremely favorable reviews in policy circles, academia, and the press. Ironically the continued popularity of order-maintenance policing is due, in large part, to the dramatic rise in incarceration. Broken windows policing presents itself as the only viable alternative to three- strikes and mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Order-maintenance proponents affirmatively promote youth curfews, anti-gang loitering ordinances, and order-maintenance crackdowns as milder alternatives to the theory of incapacitation and increased incarceration. ... [But] decades after its first articulation in the Atlantic Monthly, the famous broken windows theory has never been verified. Despite repeated claims that the theory has in fact been "empirically verified" , there is no reliable evidence that the broken windows theory works."

The evidentiary problems with broken windows are also discussed in Nathan's recent essay about The Atlantic.

This episode originally aired on September 26, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have recently been pushing vicious racist fake news about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, claiming they are stealing and eating people's pets and destroying the town. But why are there Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio in the first place? What role has U.S. foreign policy played in driving Haitians from Haiti? Today, we are joined by Jonathan Katz, one of the leading journalists writing about U.S. imperialism and a specialist in Haiti. Katz tells us about the history of U.S. relations with Haiti, common misconceptions about the country, and the deeper meaning of the Springfield pet-eating scare, and how it fits with longstanding racialized narratives about threatening Haitians.

The former Port-au-Prince bureau chief for the Associated Press, Katz is the author of the books The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster and Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. His newsletter can be found here.

It is not a matter of whether the United States should get involved in Haiti following the first presidential assassination there in more than a century. The United States is already deeply involved. The questions are how that involvement helped, at a minimum, to set the stage for the crisis now enveloping a nation of 11.5 million people and what to do with that reality from here on out...Ever since Haiti won its independence from France in a slave revolution that culminated in 1804, the mere idea of a republic run by self-liberated Black people has sent shivers through the white world. -Jonathan Katz, "U.S. Intervention in Haiti Would Be a Disaster—Again," Foreign Policy (2021)

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

This week The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers The World was finally released! The book, co-written by Noam Chomsky and Current Affairseditor in chief Nathan J. Robinson. Today, Nathan joins managing editor Lily Sánchez and associate editor Alex Skopic to discuss the book and introduce Prof. Chomsky's views on U.S. foreign policy, explaining why he finds Chomsky's warnings so important for our time. An article Nathan wrote further introducing the subject matter of the book can be found here.

This book is a huge deal for us here at Current Affairs, so please help us by spreading the word about it and encouraging those you know to buy it!

This book is in many ways an attempt to distill Chomsky's vision and critique of U.S. power. That major theme is that in U.S. political discourse, many of the criticisms of U.S. foreign policy share a certain premise. You can criticize U.S. foreign policy, but only within a certain spectrum. He points out that even critics of U.S. foreign policy argue that the United States makes mistakes, but it doesn't commit crimes. We have numerous examples of this in the book. Basically, when you talk about the Afghanistan War, it’s said, well, that didn't go well, but it was a well-intentioned war. In the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War, he says it was a war begun by good men for noble reasons, but it was just a tragedy. In the case of the Iraq War: we meant well, we meant to bring democracy, and it's a shame it ended up a catastrophe. And Chomsky has always argued that a lot of U.S. policy does not consist of idealistic mistakes. In fact, oftentimes, the things that are horrifying about it are either intentional results of the policy, or at least are well understood to be likely consequences of the policy that are just ignored by policymakers. —Nathan J. Robinson

This episode originally aired on September 20, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Today on Current Affairs, it's our second-ever musical episode! We're joined today by Danny Bradley, who has written many songs for Current Affairs.Today, we listen to a few of those and Danny plays us some other favorites of his live on the air, including his new tune about a manosphere-influenced "Hopeless Romantic." Danny and Nathan also discuss what makes for good musical satire, why folk music is wonderfully socialistic, and why Danny once wrote a song called "Fuck The Guardian."

A playlist of all the songs Danny has made for Current Affairsis here.

This episode originally aired on September 17, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Today on the program, Malaika Jabali returns to discuss the issues that were left out of the first presidential debate, and why Democrats should not embrace right-wing framings of issues even if they think doing so is electorally pragmatic. Malaika is the author of It's Not You, It's Capitalism. Nathan's recent piece "What Doesn't Get Said" also addresses many of these issues. This episode is also available in video form on our YouTube channel. Nathan's book "Superpredator: Bill Clinton's Use and Abuse of Black America" goes into depth about one of the most infamous periods in which Democrats decided the best way to win elections was to talk like conservatives. A recent Current Affairsarticle by Alex Skopic on Harris's Dick Cheney endorsement is here.

This episode originally aired on September 13, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Jordan Chariton of Status Coup News is a leading investigative journalist and the author of We The Poisoned: Exposing the Flint Water Crisis Cover-Up and the Poisoning of 100,000 Americans, a major expose of one of the most outrageous scandals of our time, the Flint water crisis. Chariton has spent extensive time on the ground in Flint even as the mainstream media lost interest and moved on, and he joins today to explain why every one of us should understand this story of the poisoning of a city, which was not an accident and for which there has still been no justice.

"Infuriatingly, our mainstream national media ignores most of this and peppers us nonstop with the political horserace and political tribalism (and an unhealthy dose of sensationalism and conflict). We are, of course, living through extraordinary times with seemingly endless calamities erupting domestically and internationally. It’s hard to stay focused on one city’s crisis when we’re being hit constantly with one disaster after the next... But if there is just one thing you take away from this story, I hope it is this: please, don’t forget Flint. If we allow the poisoning of our fellow man and woman to simply fade away into the ether . . . don’t be shocked when it comes to your neighborhood next." - Jordan Chariton, We The Poisoned

This episode originally aired on September 10, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Today Kat Abugazaleh of Mother Jones and Zeteo News returnsto the program to tell us what the DNC in Chicago was like. How did the Harris campaign try to court influencers and creators? How were the influencers treated differently than the press, and what responsibility does a "creator" have, given that they're not journalists but are also not formally with the campaign? How did the Harris campaign deal with the Palestine solidarity movement? Kat, who was on the ground in Chicago at the convention, tells us what political conventions are really like and how it differs from the spectacle presented on television.

"[The creators] were treated a lot better than pretty much everyone else there. We had our own designated workspace that had free drinks. It was like nine bucks to get a soda there, but in the creator workspace, we had free beer, wine....There was a giant thing on the wall that said, "Creators for Kamala Harris.... There was a lot of incentive to be a cheerleader... It was definitely way more privilege than was given to any other place covering [the convention]." - Kat Abughazaleh

This episode originally aired on September 8, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Jamie Peckis a writer, podcaster, and activist who has been involved with the "Stop Cop City" movement. Her recent presentation about the movement can be seen here. In it she explains what the "Cop City" plan in Atlanta is, how a movement to resist it came together, and the vast, alarming repression that that movement has been met with. Today, Jamie joins to tell us why the fight over Cop City in Atlanta affects all of us, and how the resistance movement successfully joined environmental activists and BLM activists, plus reformers and radicals, in a way that provides a template for good left organizing that pursues a "diversity of tactics."

Our previous interview on this topic with the ACLU's Christopher Bruce, which focused on the criminal legal case, can be found here.

This episode originally aired on September 2, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Mouin Rabbani of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs is one of the most sober-minded, thoughtful, and morally clear analysts of the Israel-Palestine conflict. You may have seen him in action on the debate he participated in a few months back on the Lex Fridman program. Today, Mouin joins to answer questions about the Israel-Palestine conflict. What is Israel's "endgame"? Does it want a war with Iran? Why does Mouin believe Israel's actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide? Is the Biden administration actually seeking a ceasefire? Note that this conversation was recorded a couple of weeks ago, so some facts have changed. Mouin's latest article "The Charade of Gaza Cease-Fire Talks," can be read here.

This episode originally aired on August 22, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Bev Stohl ran Noam Chomsky's office for over two decades. In her wonderful book Chomsky and Me(OR Books) she discusses the sometimes chaotic, never boring inside of Chomsky-world, with thousands of correspondents and visitors from around the world descending on a cramped MIT office laden with books and papers. She joins today to talk about her decades working with the most-cited living intellectual and keeping his life organized. She addresses the question so many have wondered: how did he manage to answer everyone's emails, in addition to publishing over 100 books and giving thousands of lectures?

My mind's eye lit up with images of Noam’s body hunching, hands hammering out thesis drafts, editorial letters, articles, statements of solidarity, petitions, lectures, professional correspondence, recommendation letters, arguments, and email. For decades. On countless keyboards. On manual and electric typewriters, then word processors, then progressively streamlined and ergonomically correct wireless keyboards, all the way to the smaller keys of his compact laptop, none of which cramped his fingers or hurt his wrists. His body, unlike mine, seemed to be built for endless typing. -Bev Stohl, Chomsky and Me

This episode originally aired on August 20, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

It's long been recognized that the U.S. criminal punishment system is aberrational, cruel, and broken. Our prison population is outrageously large. But how do we actually begin to dismantle the system? Premal Dharia, James Forman Jr., and Maria Hawilo have edited a vital guide to this question, showing that it's more difficult than it sounds, because so many different institutions (legislatures, courts, prosecutors' offices, police, public defense), each play a role in creating the outcome. In Dismantling Mass Incarceration,they go through each part of the system to discuss how it works, how it contributes to the problem, and paths we can take to fix it. The book features contributors from Angela Davis to our own Nathan J. Robinson, with the essay "Can Prison Abolition Ever Be Pragmatic?" Today, the editors join us to explain what's so wrong with criminal punishment, abolitionist vs. reformist approaches to thinking about it, and how we move forward.

This episode originally aired on August 15, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Gideon levy is one of Israel's leading dissident journalists. His new book The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe is perhaps the harshest condemnation of Israel's war on Gaza from any Israeli. Levy joins us to explain why he believes his fellow Israelis are brainwashed into thinking Palestinians are terroristic and inhuman, and the hideous consequences of that ideology. He also explains that the U.S. could have stopped the war, and is therefore culpable for everything that has happened to Gaza.

How dare Israelis speak about a moral difference, or the moral values of the Israeli army, when this is the outcome? How can you say the Israeli army is doing anything possible to prevent it, when you know that the majority of victims in this war—there are no questions—are innocent people? Even Israel admits it. It’s not like a Hamas claim. There’s no doubt about it. No doubt about it that in no other war were 250 journalists killed. In no other war were over 500 medical teams killed. So many figures which leave this argument so hollow. -Gideon Levy

This episode originally aired August 7, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Keir Starmer took the place of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the UK Labour Party, and recently became the UK Prime Minister after Labour resoundingly defeated the Conservatives. Does this mean that Starmer has a mandate from the British public? What does Starmer stand for, anyway? How will he govern? How did he rise so fast in British politics? How did he manage to crush the left wing of the Labour Party?

We are joined today by one of the UK's leading experts on Starmer's life and career, Oliver Eagleton, the author of The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right.Eagleton tells us everything we need to know about the UK's new prime minister.

For more, read Alex Skopic's recent Current Affairsarticle "Keir Starmer Is A Disgrace To The British Labour Party."

“Starmer has not presented a unified, consistent ideology, hence the confusion over what he ‘stands for’. But he does have a project – a vision, of sorts – and a coherent strategy to achieve it, which is yet to be analysed in detail... We must rather uncover the more durable aspects of his thought-world and assess their relevance to the present conjuncture... “What kind of politician is he? Why was he perceived by many former Corbyn supporters as the optimal candidate to take the helm, yet subsequently unable – or unwilling – to fulfil the hopes he inspired? How can we explain his success in remaking the party along with his struggle to command public confidence? To what extent does he represent a meaningful alternative to the Conservatives?" -Oliver Eagleton, The Starmer Project

This episode originally aired on August 2, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

David Livingstone Smith is one of the leading scholars of dehumanization in the world, the author of books like Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, and Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization.He joins us today to discuss how the dehumanization process works and why it's so dangerous when we start to use dehumanizing language, which we can do without noticing it. Prof. Smith warns that while the point seems obvious, many of the worst atrocities are committed by those who are fully convinced they are on the side of the good and righteous, and any of us can become a dehumanizer. We discuss examples from the treatment of Palestinians as animals to the worst historical genocides to parts of the American right treating leftists as "unhuman" enemies of civilization. Prof. Smith explains how the process works and how we can resist it.

Read Nathan's article on the Unhumansbook here. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy tells us more about the dehumanization of Palestinians here.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

In popular American stereotypes, Islam is a religion of submission, with right-wing politicians demagoguing about the supposed authoritarianism and repressiveness of Islam. But scholar Mohamed Abdouargues in Islam and Anarchismthat, in fact, there is a great deal of overlap between Islamic religious teachings and anarchist philosophy, and that by melding the two of them we can produce a philosophy that offers guidance for principled anti-authoritarian struggle. Today Prof. Abdou joins to debunk popular misunderstandings of Islam and to explain why he thinks the reconciling of anarchist and Islamic teachings offers us a new liberatory philosophy.

“Anarcha-Islām can help diasporic Muslims under Euro-American assimilation as well as Muslims in predominantly conservative societies such as Egypt to begin again the transnational radical recreation and re-imagination of their subjectivities and social justice orientations in a way that is conducive to Islām’s post-9/11’s confrontations with a Euro-American 'Age of Terror.'" - Mohamed Abdou, Islam and Anarchism

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Today on the Current Affairspodcast, we're joined by two filmmakers, one of whom will be well known to longtime podcast listeners. Pete Davis founded the Current Affairspodcast and served as its original host. Pete and his sister Rebecca Davis have made a new documentary called Join or Die, which looks at the decline of civic life in America, focusing on the work of Bowling Aloneauthor Robert Putnam. The film dives into history to show how, in days before our present epidemic of loneliness and atomization, Americans joined tons of local clubs, ranging from choirs to bowling leagues to the Elks. Putnam argues that these organizations are foundational to having a functional democracy.

In today's episode, we discuss why bowling leagues can have political importance. We also discuss the late, great Jane McAlevey, who makes a powerful appearance in the film (one of her last public appearances) to make the case that unions are exactly the kind of civic organization that is good for both its members and the society at large.

In keeping with the spirit of Join or Die, you can host your own screening of the film in your town and invite people to come watch and discuss it!

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Jeremiah Moss (pseudonym of Griffin Hansbury) is the author of two books, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Souland Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York.Jeremiah's blog Vanishing New York has documented the disappearance of precious city institutions from delis to newsstands to theaters. Jeremiah's photography has previously appeared in Current Affairs. The New York Times, in its reviewof Moss' first book, says that "He begins no thought with 'on the other hand.' For Moss there is only one hand, and it is the hand of menacing greed and self-interest." You can see why he's our kind of guy. (The Timesthought he was too hard on the rich, writing that "There is a case to be made that the enormously high price of living in New York (and Boston, and San Francisco) has had a positive ripple effect.")

Today Moss joins to explain what gives a city a soul and why he believes New York has lost a large piece of its own soul. He discusses what neoliberalism has done to culture and the effects of gentrification on beloved institutions. We discuss why "nostalgia" is actually healthy, why old, broken-down things can be good, and why people with money shouldn't be able to buy their way out of the inconvenience of living in a place with other people.

There is nothing nostalgic about fighting to preserve the economic and cultural diversity of a city. It has more to do with the present and future than it does with the past. Right now people are being evicted from their homes and businesses. Right now the city is choking on chain stores. Do we really want a future New York with nothing but Starbucks, banks, and luxury towers, where no one but the most affluent can afford to live? It's not regressive nostalgia to worry about that. It's forward-thinking anxiety. ...  I am absolutely nostalgic about the lost city—and why not? Pete Hamill called nostalgia "far and away the most powerful of all New York feelings." But those feelings don't invalidate the facts about hyper-gentrification and its part in the long history of Elites trying to strangle the wild and progressive city. Those feelings don't change the fact that New York is being systematically reconstructed to embrace a small segment of humanity and exclude the rest.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Dennis Fritz is the author of the new book Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq(OR Books),which dives into the historical record to understand the Bush administration's motivations for launching one of the most disastrous criminal wars of our era. It's well-known by now that the stated justifications (the search for weapons of mass destruction) were lies, because Bush officials misrepresented the available intelligence and misled the public about what the evidence said.

But that raises the question: Why did they launch the war? Was it a war for oil? A war to secure our position in the Middle East? A sincere attempt to fulfill the dream of spreading democracy across the world? A war to punish Saddam Hussein's defiance? Fritz, who worked in the Pentagon during these years, has written "a detailed insider account of how a Pentagon cabal strategized to manipulate intelligence, pressure the United Nations, force a Congressional authorization for the use of force through political threats, and scare the American people after 9/11 into supporting an attack on Iraq." Ben Cohen describes the book as "a gutsy tell-all story about the bald-faced lies that led us to the disastrous invasion of Iraq.” Fritz joins us today to explain how the public was convinced to support a war of aggression, giving us lessons that are vital to learn if we are to avoid being drawn into future wars.

Dennis Fritz heads the Eisenhower Media Network, an organization of ex-military officials who offer critical commentary and analysis on the military-industrial complex.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Richard Beck is a senior writer for N+1magazine and the author of the forthcoming book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life. His recent article "Bidenism Abroad" in the New Left Reviewis a vitally useful analysis of Joe Biden's record internationally. He discusses the continuities and breaks from Trump's foreign policy. He joins today to discuss what Biden and his administration have thought they were trying to do, and what they have actually done.

"American hegemony certainly lives on for now in Europe, where compliant nato allies continue to fall over one another in their rush to hollow out social services and buy American arms. And the us may be able to retain economic dominance in a relative sense even if it never manages to reverse the slowdown in global growth, so long as its own economic power weakens less than that of its rivals. But after Gaza, America can no longer credibly claim global ‘hegemony’ ... Biden’s support for Israel, motivated both by strategic considerations and what appears to be a real inability on his part to see Palestinians as fully human, flies in the face of both American and global public opinion. Europe may hold on to America’s coattails for a while yet, but in the rest of the world, continued American supremacy will be based primarily on coercion." -Richard Beck

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most influential philosophers of all time. Interestingly, thinkers on both the right and left have found inspiration in Nietzsche, and his ideas show up everywhere from the anti-democratic elitism of H.L. Mencken to the liberatory politics of the Black Panther Party. There is an ongoing debate over whether Nietzsche is best categorized as a reactionary or a champion of personal liberation. Today we are joined by Daniel Tutt, whose book How To Read Like a Parasite: Why The Left Got High on Nietzscheoffers a stinging critique of Nietzsche's core philosophical ideas, while arguing that we still ought to read and engage with them. Tutt explains why people of all political stripes have been so captivated by Nietzsche, what's valuable in his philosophy, and how we should read philosophers whose social and political visions we deplore. Warning: this episode is somewhat dense with philosophical terminology and social theory, though we try to keep it as light as we can.

“Nietzsche’s thought must be read as giving ideological support to a social order where both joyful affirmation and anarchic celebration are experienced at the same time as a cruel and brutal defense of rank order. This makes Nietzsche’s thought a Janus face which must be understood in its highs and lows. But we will argue that if Nietzsche’s reactionary thought is brushed over, ignored, or de-emphasized, then he performs a certain victory over the left that can and often does compromise any socialist or Marxist approach to changing the world. Moreover, his philosophy must be read as a comprehensive and esoteric strategy of reaction that has at its very center a political agenda. ” - Daniel Tutt

Get new episodes at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Kat Abughazaleh has watched a lot of Fox News. As an analyst for Media Matters, her job was to monitor the Fox primetime shows, producing videos documenting some of the most deranged stories to appear on the network. Somebodyhas to keep track of what's going on in the right's media ecosystem, and we're glad that Kat performs this valuable public service. Examples of her work include videos about Mike Huckabee's indoctrination program, the "right-wing Amazon", Tucker Carlson's post-Fox career,Conservapedia, and her weekly Fox roundups. We can laugh at the right's media, but its effects are alarming. Introducing Fox News to a market turns people more conservativeand many people have disturbing stories of how their relatives have had their minds poisonedby the stream of hatred and paranoia that Fox transmits into their brains. See our Current Affairs profile of Rupert Murdoch for more.

Today Kat joins to talk about how right-wing propaganda works. What is the typical story? Why is it effective? How can we fight this stuff? How is the right trying to ensure that its messages go unchallenged? Kat tells you everything you didn't know about the right's media apparatus and gives us some practical advice for how we can combat it.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Jeffrey Sachs is an economist at Columbia University and the author of the book A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism,which argues that both Democratic and Republican presidents are worsening global instability. He joins today to explain his critique of American foreign policy. First, we ask Prof. Sachs how he went from being seen as an exemplar of the U.S. intellectual establishment (the neoliberal "Dr. Shock") to one of the foremost critics of that establishment. Sachs rejects the characterization and argues that he has been consistent in applying a vision for social democracy across his career. We then turn to some of the most pressing dilemmas in the world today from the war in Ukraine to tensions with China and Prof. Sachs explains why he believes U.S. policy is worsening the prospects for global peace.

Prof. Sachs' previous appearance on the program can be listened to here.

Washington seems of a single mind these days: more funding for wars in Ukraine andGaza, more armaments for Taiwan. We slouch ever closer to Armageddon. Polls show the American peopleoverwhelmingly disapprove of U.S. foreign policy, but their opinion counts for very little. We need to shout for peace from every hilltop. The survival of our children and grandchildren depends on it. -Jeffrey Sachs

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Aaron Reichlin-Melnickis the Policy Director of the American Immigration Council and a leading expert on U.S. immigration law. He has testified before Congress several times and frequently appears as a public commentator on immigration issues including recently on the Chris Hayes podcast. He joins today to explain exactly how U.S. immigration law works at its most basic level, what makes our system so cruel and dysfunctional, and what changes to enforcement by both the Trump and Biden administrations have meant for those seeking to enter the United States.

"As legal immigration has become increasingly inaccessible, and our asylum system increasingly backlogged, people around the world are getting the message that the only realistic way they will ever be able to come to the United States is through the southern border. Yet despite this challenge, policymakers continue to focus only on the U.S.-Mexico border itself, rather than addressing the broader problems with plague both our legal immigration system and our humanitarian protection systems. Policymakers of both parties have focused the majority of their attention on finding news way to crack down at the border, rather than making the broader fixes necessary to avoid yet another failed crackdown that may temporarily reduce arrivals but fail to solve the underlying problems." - Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, testimony to Congress

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Max (just Max) is the host of Unfucking the Republic (UNFTR), one of our favorite podcasts. UNFTR publishes intensively-researched deep dives into some of the most important issues in the world. One of their most recent investigations is into Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), an insidious cartel that has wormed its way deep into the basic structure of the American healthcare system. Today Max joins to explain what PBMs are, why they're hurting small pharmacies, and what needs to happen to curtail their influence. Nathan discusses the case of a family-owned pharmacy in his own hometown, Davidson Drugs in Siesta Key, Florida, which shut down after 65 years and blamed PBMs in part for making it impossible to continue operating.

The video version of UNFTR's report is here. A written version is here. The NYT ran an article on the subject a couple of days ago as well.

"Most people probably haven’t heard of the term Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM). But in the healthcare industry, PBM has become a four letter word, unless, of course, you are one. In which case, you’re killing it right now. And you have been for about 20 years. PBMs aren’t anything new. In fact, they’ve been around since the 1960s. But over the last two decades, these administrative organizations have become so big and unwieldy that they drive hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue each year. Just how big have PBMs gotten in the past few years? Big enough that the three largest ones are all in the top 15 largest companies in the United States." - "Pharmacy Benefit Managers, The American Drug Cartel," UNFTR

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Kyla Scanlon is a leading online economics commentator and Bloombergcontributor, who regularly publishes TikTok explainers helping people understand the economy. Her new book In This Economy?is meant to help laypeople understand the economic forces around them that are so determinative in the outcomes of our lives.

Scanlon is the one who coined the term "vibecession" to describe the disjunction between certain "objective" economic indicators and people's "subjective" feelings about the economy. Some people have theorized that the public is simply being misled by negative media coverage into thinking the economy is worse than it actually is. But as she explains in this conversation, it's not so simple to disentangle the "subjective" from the "objective" in economics, and just because the "vibes" don't match the standard predictions, doesn't mean they're illegitimate or unfounded.

The year 2008 was very impactful for everyone. A lot of kids (myself included) saw their caregivers battle against uncontrollable economic forces. There were job losses, home foreclosures, a decimation of household wealth; almost no one was left unscathed (except the bankers who had caused the crisis). The younger generations were furious as they witnessed a system fail in a way they couldn’t comprehend. Economic stability, job stability, financial stability—all of those were big question marks. An image of parents holding their heads in their hands at the dining room table as they tried to figure out how to pay the mortgage is seared into the minds of many. It was a systemic failure that resulted in economic inequality and social disparities, and it didn’t seem as though the consequences were there for those who had caused it. The Golden Age of Grift had begun, and the first rug had been pulled. It was a world of fraud and deceit. Around this same time, social media started to pop up. For the first time ever, everything was broadcasted to the world, and feelings became assets that could be traded for likes and retweets. -Kyla Scanlon, "In This Economy?"

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! 

Nuclear weapons are always lurking there in the background, out in remote places where we don't have to think about them, but ready to be fired at any time. Journalist Sarah Scoles was interested to find out more about the people who maintain the system of nuclear weapons. What do they do and how do they explain it to themselves? In a very real sense, they have to spend their days preparing to commit the worst imaginable genocide, should the need arise. It's eerie and disturbing to realize how quickly an unprecedented horror could take place, and how much depends on having sane and competent world leaders.

Today Sarah joins to discuss her book Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weaponsand what she learned about nuclear war and the systems that make it a terrifyingly real possibility.

For more on this topic, see these Current Affairsarticles:

Taking World War III Seriously

Why It's So Hard to Face the Threat Posed By Nuclear Weapons

Pretending It Isn't There

Sarah's book was reviewed here in the New York Times.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Teresa Ghilarducci is an economist at the New School for Social Research and the author of Work, Retire, Repeat, which shows how the possibilities for having a comfortable and dignified retirement are slipping away.

We begin with a news storyabout a 90-year-old veteran who was pushing shopping carts in the Louisiana heat to make ends meet. Prof. Gilarducci explains how it can be that in the richest country in he world, a person that age can still be having to work. She shows how the pension system disappeared, why Social Security isn't enough, and explains how even the conceptof retirement is beginning to disappear, with many arguing that work is good for you, people should do it for longer. Prof. Ghilarducci also explains how things could be different, advocating a "Gray New Deal" to help older Americans experience the comfort and stability they deserve after decades in the labor force.

"Working longer is not the solution to bad retirement policy. In fact, working longer is causing an insidious problem, eroding both the quantity and the quality of older people’s years. Not only is retirement—which is precious time before death—slipping away, but also retirement time is becoming more unequal,, .The nation should not depend on people working longer to make up for inadequate retirement-income security. Doing so only exacerbates inequalities in wealth, health, well-being, and retirement time." - Teresa Ghilarducci

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Radley Balko is one of America's leading journalists on policing and criminal punishment. His book The Rise of the Warrior Cop is a remarkable expose of the militarization of local police forces around the country. Recently, Radley has produced several excellent essays on the authoritarian promises of Donald Trump and those in his circles.

Radley's pieces compile frightening evidence of what a 2nd Trump presidency might look like. In "Lines in the Sand," he discusses some of the possibilities like invoking the Insurrection Act, arresting or deporting critical journalists, purging the civil service of anyone who opposes him, etc. In "Trump's deportation army" he looks specifically at immigration, and what it would actually involve to fulfill Trump's stated ambition of deporting all undocumented immigrants. Whether or not this nightmare will actually come true, it iswhat Trump is pledging, and we should take Radley's warnings very seriously indeed. The scale of this threat is one reason why we at Current Affairsinsist that no leftist could want a Trump presidency, and Trump should be taken seriouslywhen he vows to build vast new deportation camps.

Radley has also recently produced a valuable three-part series (I, II, III) that responds to those on the right who excuse the killing of George Floyd.

"How we react to what Trump and Miller are promising will speak volumes about who we are and how we see ourselves. Will we see the kids — the kids they want to pry from the arms of parents and stash in an abandoned warehouse or crumbling shopping mall under armed guard — as our own kids, or as someone else’s? When they rouse parents and grandparents from their homes at gunpoint, herd them onto military planes, fly them to the border, then pen them behind barbed wire, outdoors, in 110-degree heat, will we see that as an assault on our own parents, grandparents, and ancestors, or as someone else’s problem? We can’t allow these things to happen, then later pretend we didn’t know. Because they’ve told us. There are no surprises here." — Radley Balko

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

John Ghazvinian is the leading historian of U.S.-Iranian relations, the author of the indispensable study America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present. His book shows how opportunities for positive relations between the U.S. and the Iranian people have been repeatedly squandered. From installing and propping up one of the world's most abusive dictators (the Shah) to ignoring overtures from Iranian leaders interested in reducing tensions, the opportunity to be a partner rather than an adversary to Iran has been overlooked. Unfortunately, hostility is met with hostility, and Ghazvinian does not know whether the U.S. and Iran can pull themselves out of the downward spiral of relations. Ghazvinian does not defend the current Iranian regime, and is fair in criticizing Iranian failures as well as those of the U.S., but his book presents Americans with crucial facts about their government's policies (from U.S. support for Saddam Hussein's chemical attacks on Iran to the rebuffing of Iranian attempts to cooperate) that should unsettle anyone who sees Iran simplistically as an irrational rogue state, or part of an "axis of evil."

“This myopic understanding of Iran carries over into the foreign policy arena as well. Today, every time Iran refuses to be dictated to, or attempts to protect its national interests, a chorus of U.S. congressmen, media pundits, and ideological opponents of the Islamic Republic portray it as “defiant.” Every time Iran shows flexibility or a willingness to compromise, it is accused of “stalling tactics” or “trying to divide the international community.” And anyone who tries to point out that Iran might have legitimate security concerns, or that it is behaving as a rational state actor, is smeared as an “apologist” for the Islamic Republic and is excluded from a say in decision-making. This points to a larger problem: the United States in recent years has painted itself into a corner in which the only acceptable response from Iran, ever, is complete and unconditional capitulation." - John Ghazvinian, America and Iran

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

With antiwar protests jeopardizing a Democratic president's reelection and an upcoming party convention in Chicago, 2024 has some eerie echoes of one of the world's most tumultuous years: 1968. Perhaps by revisiting that year we can better understand our own time. To see what lessons it holds, we turn today to Charles Kaiser, the author of the book 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation. Charles reminds us why the year 1968 went down in history, and we reflect on the legacy of the activists of that generation.

Charles Kaiser's latest Guardianpiece is here. Listeners may also enjoy Nathan's article "Life in Revolutionary Times: Lessons From the 1960s."

“We did experience hope in 1968: hope and ambition and amazing joy. But to millions of us, Bobby Kennedy's assassination felt like the resounding chord that ended Sgt. Pepper's: a note of stunning finality. For me, at least, I hope the memory of that trauma and all the others of 1968 will now begin to fade away, so that our dream to make a better world may once again become vivid.” - Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Jeet Heer has written two major essays about the intellectual legacy of the New Republicmagazine’s 70s-2000s heyday. The first, from 2015, excavates the magazine’s history of racism and its role in Clinton-era “welfare reform” and in pushing Charles Murrayand Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curveinto public consciousness. The second piece, published recently, looks more broadly at the career of New Republicowner Martin Peretz: his racism, his hawkish foreign policy, and his role in creating the conservative “New Democrats” of the 1990s, who abandoned FDR-era liberalism.

Jeet joins us today to tell us more about why this magazine once mattered, and the enormous effect that such a small publication and a single man have had on the politics of our time.

"[Peretz's New Republic] promoted many of the worst decisions in modern American history: the killing fields in 1980 Central America, the invasion of Iraq, the downgrading of diplomacy and preference to military solutions in foreign policy, the neoliberal economics that have fueled inequality and instability, the brutalization of the Palestinians, the revival of scientific racism, and the persistent whittling down of the welfare state." -Jeet Heer

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Jonathan Kozol is one of the leading critics of the U.S. education system, having written a series of widely acclaimed books across a 60-year career, including Savage Inequalities, The Shame of the Nation,and Letters to a Young Teacher.Today he joins to discuss his new book An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America,which sums up his argument about what is wrong with the public schools and what we can do about it.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Anne Kim's book Poverty For Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America's Poorgives a partial answer to an enduring question: how come we spend so much trying to solve poverty but poverty persists? One major reason, Kim argues, is that parasitic for-profit industries suck a lot of the money out of antipoverty programs. The privatization of government functions has meant that plenty of money that should be going to the least well-off ends up padding the pockets of the already wealthy. Kim's book helps us understand why, for example, cities can spend so much trying to combat homelessness and not seem to actually do much to alleviate it. Kim shows us how our tax dollars get siphoned away, and lays out a blueprint for how we might use government far more effectively, if we abandon the mindset that privatization means "efficiency."

"The infrastructure of poverty is big business. And as such, it is a major component of the systemic barriers low-income Americans face. No systemic understanding of poverty can be complete without a hard look at the businesses that profit from—and perpetuate—the structural disadvantages that hold back so many Americans... Self-serving private interests have hijacked the war on poverty. Failures in governance and public policy have enabled predatory industries to thrive at the expense of low-income Americans and of taxpayer dollars." -Anne Kim, Poverty For Profit

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Thomas Sowellmay be the best-selling economics writer of our time. For decades, the Hoover Institution pundit has published books and columns introducing economic concepts to a popular audience. He has been acclaimed as a genius and maverick whose insights are ignored by the academy because they discomfort progressives.

But Dr. Cahal Moran, who runs the YouTube channel Unlearning Economics, argues that Sowell's free market talking points are shallow and mistaken. Cahal recently published the first of a two-part video debunking Sowelland introducing alternative ways of thinking about economics. Since Nathan has published his own long takedown of Sowell, we thought a conversation between the two of them might be illuminating and passionate.

Cahal's co-authored book The Econocracyis here. A review in the Guardianis here. His Current Affairsarticle "The Death of Econ 101" is here. Our episode with Jonathan Aldred, a fellow critic of "Econ 101," may also be of interest.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Steven Thrasheris a professor of journalism at Northwestern University and the author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. He has also recently been present at the Columbia protests over Gaza. He joins today to discuss what he saw at the protests, before moving on to discuss his concept of the "viral underclass," tracing how inequality and disease interact, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19. An excerpt from this interview was played in our recent audio documentaryon the Gaza protests. Prof. Thrasher's LitHubessay on the protests is here.

“Viruses challenge the concept that any one of us “has” one body. As they move freely between the lungs, bloodstream, and genitals of one of us to another, they show how we is a more relevant concept than you or me...The most fundamental, largely unexamined premise we have in the United States is the belief that I am me and you are you and that each of us is the master of our own hero’s journey. What if viruses teach us that there is no “me” and no “you” at all and that we all share one collective body? And that such individualistic thinking creates not only an underclass, but alienation across lines of class?” - Steven Thrasher, The Viral Underclass

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Today we talk to David Austin Walsh, a postdoc at Yale and the author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, a new book about the history of the U.S. right wing. Walsh is particularly interest in what the boundaries are (if any) between "mainstream" conservatism and the "far right." He goes back to the time of William F. Buckley and talks about the relationship between fascist sympathizing reactionaries and the "respectable" right, and how that relationship evolved over time. He joins today to help us better understand how to think about terms like "right," "far right," and "conservative."

A Current Affairsarticle about Buckley, including his King speech, can be read here. A previous Current Affairspodcast episode devoted exclusively to Buckley is here. A book review on the John Birch Society by Nathan at The Nationis here.

"Modern conservatism emerged out of opposition to the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s, forming a right-wing popular front—a term coined by William F. Buckley Jr. in his private correspondence—with the openly racist, antisemitic, and pro-fascist far right. This coalition proved to be remarkably durable until the 1960s, when the popular front began to unravel as some conservatives proved to be unwilling to make even modest concessions to the demands of the civil rights movement and jettison explicit racism and antisemitism. These apostate conservatives would form the basis of modern white nationalism—and the boundaries between where “responsible” conservatism ended and the far right began were usually blurred... Twentieth-century American conservatism did not equal fascism, but it evolved out of a right-wing popular front that included fascist and quasi-fascist elements. This is the key to understanding how American conservatism embraced MAGAism in the twenty-first century." -David Austin Walsh

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Bestselling author Johann Hari, whose Lost Connectionsand Stolen Focushave previously been discussed on this program, returns today to discuss his new book Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs.New weight-loss drugs have proved remarkably effective, but invite a whole host of questions. First, is a society where people take drugs to lose weight a healthy place? Should we be encouraging positive body images rather than the use of drugs to shed pounds? Shouldn't we be reforming the food system to be healthier rather than trying to counteract its effects with obesity drugs? And are the drugs even safe? Johann done voluminous research on the drugs and their effects and joins today to discuss what it means to have a society where people can radically change their bodies by swallowing a pill.

We need to radically change the kind of food we are given from an early age, so the next generation doesn’t become hooked on shitty, satiety-sapping foods and they don’t feel the need to drug themselves to escape them. There are risks to the weight-loss drugs; there are no risks to becoming more like the Japanese. -Johann Hari, Magic Pill

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Who actually comprises the MAGA movement? Where do Trumpian politicians come from? How do they defeat "establishment" Republicans on the local and state level? How much is organized from above? What's the role of Steve Bannon in all this? In Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy, Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Postinvestigates the MAGA movement around the country, from Arizona to Georgia, showing how ordinary people get sucked into it and how Bannon and others are part of a long game that aims to fundamentally alter American institutions. Arnsdorf's book offers vital insights for those concerned with stopping this movement in its tracks.

“Are we gonna have some losses?” [Bannon] said. “Fuck yes. We’re going to get fucking rolled. And we may get rolled today. But that’s OK. At every defeat, there’s enough seeds of other victories that are there. People just gotta stay on it, understand that we’re winning more than we’re losing. That’s why—a revolutionary vanguard. This has happened before in human history, right? We have to take over and we have to rebuild it. Remember, it’s a Fourth Turning. ... That’s all to come. I’ve got a task and purpose. That’s for others behind me and others that are at the vanguard of taking this on and tearing it down to rebuild. It will have to be rebuilt. That’s gonna be huge. We’re not going to be rebuilding any time in the foreseeable future. We’re going to be taking things apart. They say Trump’s a divider. This is what I keep saying on the show—what’s my mantra? One side’s going to win, and one side’s going to lose. No compromise here” -Steve Bannon, quoted in Isaac Arnsdorf, Finish What We Started

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

When we think of American power, we often think of missiles, guns, and tanks. But operating in the background is an incredibly powerful weapon whose use often goes unnoticed: the dollar. In her new book Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order,Bloomberg News correspondent Saleha Mohsin explains how the dollar's power actually works. What does it mean for the dollar to be the "global reserve currency" and how does this confer power? What do sanctions do and what determines whether they succeed or fail? How do changes in the value of currency alter the relative power of countries across the world? Mohsin joins us to answer a few basic questions that are crucial for understanding the world today.

“ The seeds of its weaponization were sown in 1944 as World War II came to an end, began in earnest after September 11, 2001, and may have gone too far in 2022... If the currency falls from kingship, then the country won’t be the first superpower or empire to collapse because of fiscal mismanagement. While the dollar has changed the world, the world may now change the dollar. The biggest threat to its dominance doesn’t stem from outside its borders but from a rolling series of self-inflicted policy wounds further stoking doubts of whether the United States should remain at the center of the global financial system.” -Saleha Mohsin, Paper Soldiers

Get new episodes early atpatreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post. Her new essay collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, draws together and expands on some of her best work. It covers subjects including Marie Kondo and minimalism, the films of David Cronenberg, the novels of Sally Rooney, and the new sexual puritanism. However varied the topics, a few important themes recur, including a rejection of utilitarian minimalism and an embrace of pleasure, and a view that fulfilling "basic needs" is not enough, because our "wants" matter too. The declutterers and the puritans strip away some of what is most essential to the good life. Becca joins today to talk about her arguments, including why she thinks Sally Rooney's egalitarian Marxism rings false.

Declutterers’ books, it turns out, are every bit as insubstantial as their slender clients. All the staples are short and snappy: though they are padded with cute visualizations and printed in big, bubbly fonts, they are rarely much longer than two hundred pages, and all of them can be read (or, perhaps more aptly, gazed at) in a matter of hours. In place of full paragraphs and complete sentences, they tend to opt for sidebars, acrostics, and diagrams. Kernels of advice are surgically extracted from the usual flab of prose. Language is a vehicle for the transfer of information, never a source of pleasure in its own right. To enjoy the sound or look of a word would be to delight, illicitly, in something needless, something exorbitant. Hence the declutterer’s penchant for lists and bullet points, for sentences compressed into their cores: “You Know You Are an Obsessive Organizer When . . . ,” “12 Ways I’ve Changed Since I Said Goodbye to My Things,” “15 Tips for the Next Stage of Your Minimalist Journey.” Visually, the results are reminiscent of an iPhone, with apps sequestered into adjacent squares. Each page in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up does its best impression of a screen. —Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

We know the left is, generally speaking, anti-war and anti-imperialist. But if a left-wing government ever took power in the U.S., what would its foreign policy look like? How would it deal with, say, human rights abusing governments? Would it shun them? Sanction them? Would a leftist government send weapons to the victims of aggression? What would a left policy on Ukraine look like, for instance?

Van Jackson is a leading left foreign policy thinker. His new book Grand Strategies of the Leftaims to think through the toughest questions about what it would actually mean to have a "progressive" foreign policy. Jackson notes that because the DC think tank world is dominated by hawkish "blob" types, a lot of the most thorough research and thinking on foreign policy is done by people whose values he rejects. In this conversation, we talk about how the existing establishment sees the world, and how we can look at it differently.

"In prioritizing what it sees as the foundational sources of global insecurity, the progressive perspective portrays itself as uniquely realistic compared to its prevailing liberal internationalist alternative. It diagnoses the problems that preoccupy militaries as the surface level of deeper political dysfunctions, making mainstream grand strategy and security studies appear solution-less insofar as they deal only with national defense policy or strategy. Progressive worldmaking, in other words, directs us to reshape the very context that gives rise to traditional security problems." -Van Jackson, Grand Strategies of the Left

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Daniel Knowles is a reporter for The Economist(yes, that one). His book Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse argues that cars are a problem, and shows all the ways in which we could have more satisfying, sustainable, affordable lives with fewer cars. That's a tough sell in a car-loving country like the U.S.A., where we love our giant-ass trucks and our drive-thru daiquiri stands. Daniel is British: who is he to tell us we have to trade in our pedestrian-mashing SUVs for Chairman Mao-style bicycles?

Today, Daniel joins to make the sell for walkable communities, showing us all the ways cars cause problems, why the situation we're in wasn't inevitable, and how we can change our deadly, inefficient, climate-killing ways and have transit that better serves human needs.

“There is simply no good reason that the sustainable option—living in a decent-size apartment or rowhouse, in a neighborhood where you can walk, cycle, and use public transport to get around—ought to be so expensive, while living in an enormous detached house and using vast quantities of natural resources is the cheap option. It is only the case because of decisions made by our leaders over decades that have compounded to create a world where wasting resources is normal, and sustainable living is rare.” - Daniel Knowles, Carmageddon

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Ben Burgis is a philosopher and occasional contributor to Current Affairs, who runs the Philosophy for the People Substack and hosts Give Them An Argument. Today, Ben joins to respond to common arguments made to justify the policies of Israel and the United States in Gaza. "Israel has a right to defend itself," "Palestinian violence is the root cause of the problem," and other talking points are put to Ben, who gives logically precise but passionate defenses of the Palestinian people's rights and dignity. Ben offers a crash course in how to effectively argue the case against the war on Palestine.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ―Eugene V. Debs

"Are you willing to fight for someone you don't know as much as you're willing to fight for yourself?" —Bernie Sanders

Political philosophy is full of talk about liberty and justice. But in Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor argue that another concept is just as crucial when we consider how society ought to be ordered and what we owe one another: solidarity. A solidaristic ethic means seeing other people's fates as intertwined with your own, and being committed to fighting for the interests of those whose problems you do not necessarily share. It has underpinned the socialist project from Eugene Debs to Bernie Sanders, and as Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor show in the book, it has deep historical roots. They trace the origins of the idea of solidarity, showing how it evolved as a crucial part of left thought and practice, and argue that what we need today is a reinvigorated commitment to it. They explain what it would mean to practice it, and the demands it makes of us. Today, Leah Hunt-Hendrix joins us to give us a tour through the history and show us what solidarity means. (Ourrecent interview with co-author Astra Tayloris also worth a listen and touches on some of the same themes!)

"With the planet swiftly tipping toward climate chaos and a right-wing reaction gaining influence globally, we have no choice but to attempt to cultivate solidarity from wherever we happen to sit. Individually, the vast majority of us are locked out of the halls of power and lack wealth and influence. The only viable pathway to exerting power is to organize from the bottom up. The solidaristic, internationalist, and sustainable world order we desperately need must be built virtue by virtue, relationship by relationship, struggle by struggle, day by day. Constructing a larger Us—one large and powerful enough to overcome the myriad obstacles in our way—is a hopeful and imaginative act: curious about other people, open to change, and determined to bring new possibilities into being." — Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Jessica L. Burbank is a broadcaster and commentator who appears on The Hill's Rising, co-hosts the Funny Money podcast, and now hosts her own online news program called Weeklyish News.Jessica is also big on TikTok, where she produces remarkable short videos communicating left political and economic ideas, such as this one on the power relationship between workers and bosses orthis one on Elon Musk. Today Jessica joins to discuss how she thinks about the project of communicating ideas accessibly, using wit and operating within the limits of 21st century attention spans. 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

John Washington is a journalist withArizona Luminaria, whose new book The Case for Open Bordersrebuts common anti-immigrant argument and shows that a world in which people can freely move from one territory to another will not create a "crisis" but will in fact benefit everyone. Today he joins to discuss the bipartisan rhetoric about immigration being a disaster or crisis, and to help us understand why militarized borders cause a lot more harm than they prevent. Washington argues that fears of immigration are overblown and instead of moving toward greater "border security" we should be reforming the border to relax admissions. 

The photo above is of the Arizona-Mexico border circa 1899, when crossing from one country into another was as simple as crossing the street. See also the Current Affairsarticle "We Need To Make the Moral Case for Immigration." 

"The case for open borders must ultimately be a positive one, explaining why the freedom to move—coupled with the freedom and possibility to remain—is a necessary good, and why a world not divided into exclusive nation states with militarized borders would be more egalitarian, would promote and cultivate diversity instead of fear, and would help form a world where sustainability and justice take precedence over extraction and exploitation." —John Washington, The Case for Open Borders

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Grace Blakeley is one of the left's leading economic thinkers. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism, Blakeley explains how capitalism really works and gives a crucial primer on the modern economy. She joins today to explain why conceiving of "free markets" and "government planning" as opposites is highly misleading, because our neoliberal "market-based" economy involves many deep ties between the state and corporations. Instead of thinking of "capitalism" and "socialism" as a spectrum that runs from markets to government, Blakeley says we should focus our analysis on who owns and controls production, and who gets the benefits.

"The choice isn’t “free markets” or “planning.” Planning and markets exist alongside each other in capitalist societies—indeed, in any society. The choice is whether the planning that inevitably does take place in any complex social system is democratic or oligarchic. Do we allow a few institutions to make decisions that affect everyone else, considering only their own interests, or do we move toward a system in which everyone has the power to shape the conditions of their existence? We must stop talking about “free-market capitalism” and instead accept that capitalism is a hybrid system based on a fusion between markets and planning. Rather than seeing the world in which we live as emerging from mystical market forces beyond our control, we must realize that the world in which we live results from the conscious choices of those operating within it. When we are able to view the world in these terms, the space for conscious, democratic design of our world expands." —Grace Blakeley

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Lewis Bollard directs the farm animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy, and writes the organization'sfarm animal welfare research newsletter. In the newsletter, Bollard has argued that animal welfare is a crucial moral issue and tried to explain the dissonance between people's stated compassion for animals and their willingness to tolerate animals' mass suffering in factory farms. Bollard explains the massive amount of work it will take to reduce or eliminate factory farming, and the setbacks including the challenges plant-based meats have had. He also shows, however, that there have been striking successes that should make the issue feel less hopeless and insurmountable, and actually major improvements to animal welfare arewithin reach. Today he joins to explain why the issue is a priority, why it's so challenging to mobilize people around, what has been accomplished so far, and what couldbe accomplished with more activism and political pressure. 

"We face a mighty challenge: ending the abuse of more sentient beings than humans who have ever lived on earth. We do so with few resources: all advocacy for farmed animals globally has a combined budget smaller than the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. And yet we’ve already achieved progress for billions of sentient beings." —Lewis Bollard 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Journalist Josie Cox is the author of the new book Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality, a history of the 20th century women's movement that documents the remarkable courage of the women who gave us suffrage, abortion rights, and greater equality across many dimensions of social and economic life. Today she joins to discuss how those gains were made, but also the failures (such as the story of the Equal Rights Amendment). She also talks about how many of the striking victories for women's equality are now under serious threat of rollback. 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

The day Henry Kissinger died, Jacobinmagazine released a book, which they had completed years before, called The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger.In the book, edited by René Rojas, Bhaskar Sunkara, and Jonah Walters, a group of foreign policy experts trace Kissinger's career from continent to continent, showing the human consequences of his Machiavellian choices. But The Good Die Youngdoesn't just treat Kissinger as a uniquely malevolent figure, and shows how he fits into broader schemes of U.S. global dominance after the Second World War. Co-editor Jonah Walters joins us today to give a rundown of Kissinger's career, to explain what makes him an important figure, and to assess what his legacy will be.

"It’s small wonder that the political establishment regarded Kissinger as an asset and not an aberration. He embodied what the two ruling parties share in common: a commitment to maintaining capitalism, and the resolve to ensure favorable conditions for American investors in as much of the world as possible. A stranger to shame and inhibition, Kissinger was able to guide the American empire through a treacherous period in world history, when the United States’ rise to global domination indeed sometimes seemed on the brink of collapse." —fromThe Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger

Read a Current Affairsarticle on Kissinger by Ben Burgis here.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Hamilton Nolan is a leading labor journalist whose new book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Laboris both a study of recent labor organizing in our time anda strong case for why unions are vital to the health of the country. Hamilton goes around the country, from South Carolina to Las Vegas to New Orleans, showcasing the achievements of organized labor and revealing what is possible when working people come together to wield their "hammer" through collective action. 

He is highly critical of some of the country's largest labor unions for "fortress unionism" (protecting the gains of their existing members without organizing new ones). In today's conversation, he explains why union density has remained stubbornly low in the United States, and lays out a vision for what couldhappen once working people become conscious of the power that they can wield together. 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Marxist philosophers do not often write bestsellers, but as the New York Timeswrotein a profile of today's guest, Kohei Saito's work has unexpectedly taken Japan by storm:

"When Kohei Saito decided to write about “degrowth communism,” his editor was understandably skeptical. Communism is unpopular in Japan. Economic growth is gospel. So a book arguing that Japan should view its current condition of population decline and economic stagnation not as a crisis, but as an opportunity for Marxist reinvention, sounded like a tough sell. But sell it has. Since its release in 2020, Mr. Saito’s book “Capital in the Anthropocene” has sold more than 500,000 copies, exceeding his wildest imaginings. Mr. Saito, a philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo, appears regularly in Japanese media to discuss his ideas. ... Mr. Saito has tapped into what he describes as a growing disillusionment in Japan with capitalism’s ability to solve the problems people see around them, whether caring for the country’s growing older population, stemming rising inequality or mitigating climate change."

Prof. Saito's book has caught on in Japan because it is a powerful statement of an important and challenging set of ideas. Saito points out the ecologically and socially destructive tendencies of capitalism, and argues for an alternative way of structuring the economy and society that could leave us (and the planet) better off. He calls these ideas "degrowth communism." Today he joins us to explain what he means, to respond to myths and challenges, and clear up misconceptions. Saito's book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifestois now available in English. 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Originally aired January 29, 2024

There is an ongoing case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) brought by South Africa against Israel, which alleges that Israel's conduct in Gaza constitutes a serious breach of the Genocide Convention. The Court recently issued a preliminary ruling allowing the case to go forward and requiring Israel to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention. 

Jeremy Scahill of The Interceptjoins us today to explain the basics of the accusations being made against Israel, the Israeli government's response, and to give his evaluation of the evidence that South Africa has presented so far. Note that this interview was recorded beforethe court issued its preliminary ruling allowing the case to go further. Jeremy's analysis of the ruling can be found here. An analysis of the case in Current Affairsis available here.

During its presentation before the court, Israel made no arguments to defend its conduct in Gaza that it—and its backers in the Biden administration for that matter—has not made repeatedly in the media over the past three months as part of its propaganda campaign to justify the unjustifiable. Each day that passes, more Palestinians will die at the hands of U.S. munitions fired by Israeli forces and the already dire humanitarian situation will deteriorate further. -Jeremy Scahill 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Ingrid Robeyns is a professor at Utrecht University, where she specializes in political philosophy and ethics. She's the author of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, a new book which argues for rational limits on how much money a single person can amass. Today on the podcast, Dr. Robeyns joins to explain how the super-rich keep everyone else poor, how large concentrations of wealth damage democracy and the environment, and how "limitarian" public policies can become a reality. 

"There are many different reasons why you might endorse a limitarian worldview. There is the principled objection against inequality. Or there’s the fact that so much excess wealth is tainted. Society’s richest have appropriated an unfairly large part of the economic gains of the past century, and they need to redistribute that surplus. Or you might support limitarianism because it would do a huge amount to address existing power imbalances and protect political equality—to halt the erosion of democracy, and prevent the domination of politics by the wealthy few. Or it might be the fact that limitarianism can take us a long way toward saving our planet, given that the lifestyles, business strategies, tax avoidance or evasion, and lobbying of the super-rich have led to civilization-threatening ecological harm. A world on fire needs a lot of money to extinguish the flames, and the super-rich are holding on to money they don’t need. It makes much more sense to take the money for dousing the fire from the super-rich than from the middle classes, let alone the poor. The same point also holds for meeting other needs beyond protecting the livability of the planet, such as fighting poverty and other forms of deprivation. Collectively acknowledging that at some point enough is enough would also make the rich themselves better off. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally: no one can claim that they deserve to be a millionaire."

- Ingrid Robeyns

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Ryan Grim is the Intercept's D.C. bureau chief and the author ofThe Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution. Ryan's book chronicles the rise of the "Squad" in Congress, but also chronicles the entire recent history of left politics in the United States including the Bernie Sanders campaigns and the legislative fights under Biden. The book is a fascinating insider account of how power really works. The Squad were all elected as insurgent Democrats challenging the party establishment. But once inside the House, they encountered a familiar dilemma: do you go to war against the party leaders, and alienate them, or do you try to work with them? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself, Grim reports, had conflicting impulses, but ultimately axed staff members who pushed for a more confrontational approach. Did the more conciliatory path gain the hoped-for results? Grim joins today to discuss. 

Who is the "Squad"? Are they just a media creation or do they act as a group? What differentiates them from other progressives in the House? What is their relationship with the party leadership like? What compromises have they had to make? Has their approach worked? All of this and more is put to Ryan Grim in our conversation. 

“Her staff and many of the backers of Justice Democrats wanted to go to war against the people they saw as in the way of progress, Riffle said. They wanted a real political revolution. “The difference of what Corbin and Saikat and myself and other people in the incoming AOC camp thought was, ‘These are shitty people. And the reason that these policies are bad is that the party is being run by shitty people.’ I don’t think [the Squad] thought that,” he said. “We thought you should burn it down because the house was occupied by shitty people. They thought we should burn it down because, you know, we can build a better house with better policies.” -Ryan Grim, The Squad 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Ed Broadbent was perhaps the best-known democratic socialist in Canada. He served for 14 years as the head of the country's New Democratic Party, after beginning his career as a political theorist. Broadbent's new bookSeeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality(written in collaboration with, among others, Current Affairscontributor Luke Savage) is a tour through the last half century of Canadian politics, and for Americans it offers a fascinating window into what it looks like when a democratic socialist politician gets close enough to power to have to make serious policy decisions. Broadbent joins us today to introduce listeners to the basics of the Canadian political system and talk about what he learned over the course of his career, where he earned the respect of a wide swath of Canadians, to the point where he has been called "Canada's most iconic social democrat" and "the best prime minister we never had." We discuss how Canada built social democratic institutions, and how to have a politics critical of both state and corporate power.

[Note: Sadly it was announced the day after this interview was originally posted that Ed has passed away.]

"So, what is to be done? Are we going to sit back and watch conservative politicians capitalize on economic insecurity to erode the potential of the social democratic state and reimpose their new, hollow model of “freedom”? They see starving the state as the solution to our problems. Take away the power and money of the state, they claim, and humanity will be set free. I reject this blinkered vision. Generations of Canadians, notably after the Second World War, demonstrated that the opposite is the case. It was the establishment of social rights like health care, unemployment insurance, and national pensions that enabled millions of Canadians to feel free for the first time in their lives. Having been undermined by successive governments, the remarkable achievements of the democratic age are now at risk of full-blown collapse. Now more than ever, we require prompt and effective state action to respond to the new destabilizing threats to people’s livelihoods and preserve a sustainable life on this planet." —Ed Broadbent, Seeking Social Democracy

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Mark Chiusano of Newsdayknows George Santos better than anyone else, having covered Santos’ political career from its start to its recent ignominious end. His new book The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos documents the full rise and fall of our country’s most infamous lying legislator. Today on the podcast, Chiusano joins us to explain how it came to be that, in a country as committed to honesty and fairness as the United States, someone who lies shamelessly could make it into a position of power. The lessons of the Santos saga may tell us as much about who we are as a nation as they do about the House of Representatives’ most infamous grifter.

Transcript available here:  https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/12/the-journalist-who-most-understands-george-santos-explains-how-he-made-it-to-congress

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist who's been reporting on Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation since 2019. His work has appeared in The Nation,the Columbia Journalism Review, and the British Medical Journal. He's also the author of a new book, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire,which compiles many of his findings. Schwab argues that Bill Gates is far from the generous, kind-hearted philanthropist he's often portrayed as in the media. Instead, his reporting shows how Gates has constructed a "PR halo" around himself through his extensive donations to news outlets, many of which fail to report their financial ties to the Gates Foundation. He also criticizes the culture of secrecy that surrounds the Foundation itself, and reveals how the monopoly capitalism Gates practiced at Microsoft influences his decisions today, including his pivotal role in restricting vaccine patents that prevent poor countries from making their own life-saving medicines. Schwab's book shows how Gates has bought himself outsized influence in everything from education to agriculture, and how his influence has often been a malignant one. 

A sober analysis of Gates shows he is just as worthy of the titles of hoarder and miser as he is philanthropist and mensch. Relative to his vast wealth, Gates is giving away a tiny amount of money—that he doesn’t need and that he could never possibly spend on himself. So the question is: Instead of celebrating the million-dollar gifts his foundation donates, why aren’t we interrogating the $184 billion that Gates isn’t giving away? Why aren’t we asking: How is it that the world’s most generous philanthropist is becoming richer and richer, year over year?

-Tim Schwab

Current Affairs'own coverage of Gates can be found here and here. 

Get new episodes at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Peter Kalmus is one of the country's most visible and engaged climate scientists. He is the author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolutionand works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Kalmus has advocated civil disobedienceas a necessary means of spurring action to stop the climate catastrophe. Dr. Kalmus wrote a scathing article about the UN’s recent COP 28 climate summit, which was dominated by the fossil fuel industry. He joins today to explain why, as a climate scientist, he wants people to understand the basic fact that we have no choice but to eliminate the fossil fuel industry as soon as possible. 

"In fact, the laws of physics guarantee that it will get much too fucking hot if we keep burning fossil fuels. So, pardon my language, but I don't know what it's going to take. I'm really disappointed because I thought that at this level of heating, of obviousness, of disaster, that everyone would wake up and realize that none of our hopes and dreams will come to fruition if we don't have a habitable planet." —Peter Kalmus

A transcript of this interview is availablehere. Listeners may also be interested in our episode with Henry Shue, a moral philosopher on the obligation we have to future generations. 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Keira Havens is a science writer whose blog series "Box of Rocks" aims to identify and expose racist pseudo-science. She joins us today to explain some of the fallacious reasoning that is used to rationalize social hierarchies, and how proponents of toxic ideologies manage to cast themselves as mainstream researchers. We talk about the intellectual misdeeds of such figures as Charles Murray and Steven Pinker, and Keira shows us how to spot some of their bad arguments in the wild. 

"As profoundly boring as biological essentialism is, some people are very into it.The ones that are honest about it are easy to spot. It can be harder to identify those that cultivate a careful aura of plausible deniability and then go about building the rest of their career.By hiding their philosophy, they gain access to institutions and platforms, allowing them to pave the way for other useful idiots and convince the next generation that Science Says™ some humans are better than others. The networks manufacturing credibility for their theory of eugenics are not shallow. They run deep, across decades, built by people that devote themselves consistently and continuously to the promotion of hereditarian philosophies." —Keira Havens, Box of Rocks

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Vincent Bevins is a journalist who has written for the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere, and is the author of the acclaimed The Jakarta Method. His latest book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution(PublicAffairs) is about the mass protests that took place around the world from 2010 to 2020. The book shows how these protests were sparked, how they often went in directions their originators couldn't have predicted, and what legacies they left in countries from Brazil to Tunisia. 

The book is an invaluable source of lessons for activists; as the Current Affairsreview of the book (by Raina Lipsitz) says, "Bevins shows that we can, and must, analyze and learn from the failures of our most inspiring movements." Bevins joins us today to take us through some of this history (much of it unreported in the United States) and the most crucial takeaways for protest movements of today. 

“As I spent years traveling around the world, talking to the people that helped create the mass protests described in this book, and interviewing the experts and government officials who tried to grapple with their meaning, I would always ask what they thought had happened. But I never did so to cast blame or to establish that mistakes were made. Most people who spoke with me know very well that things can go terribly wrong regardless of intentions, and the conversations often became difficult. Many of these individuals have suffered for years trying to understand the events of the past decade. I always put my question something like this: “If you could speak to a teenager somewhere around the world right now, someone who might be fighting to change history in some kind of political struggle in their lifetime, what would you tell them? What lessons did you learn?” —Vincent Bevins 

Today we have a most unusual episode: a parody of American radio cliches, pieced together by Nathan. Using audio editing software, sound effects libraries, voice cloning technology, and "AI" music tools, he has created an absurdist soundscape satirizing media, politics, and commercialism. Filled with jingles, talk shows, news reports, and presidential speeches, it portrays the darkness lurking beneath cheery American mythology.

The "Manatee Facts Podcast" mentioned in the introduction can be heard here. Nathan's article about the remarkable power of new audio technology is here.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Philanthropy is a problem. Lots of contemporary philanthropy is either useless (Rich people funding new buildings for Harvard) or shouldn't have to happen in the first place (Nonprofits fulfilling crucial social roles that the state doesn't take care of in the age of neoliberalism). The standard left critique of philanthropy is that we should redistribute wealth and income rather than depending on the largesse of the bourgeoisie, who have far too much damned money. But Amy Schiller, in The Price of Humanity, goes beyond this critique, and argues that we can engineer a better concept of philanthropy. First, she argues that we need a social democratic welfare state, so that the meeting of basic needs is notthe domain of philanthropy (no more GoFundMes for medical care). But then we also need to go beyond a basic living wage to instead have a "giving wage," meaning we should all earn enough to be able to give some of it away. The things we support through giving should be special projects that aren'tfunded by the state but nevertheless enrich life. 

Schiller joins today to discuss her ideas for a better kind of philanthropy. She explains why she thinks the effective altruists have everything backwards and why the "roses" in "bread and roses" should not be considered optional. 

Listeners might also enjoy our conversation from last year with Prof. Linsey McGoey, author of No Such Thing As A Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy.

"The project of philanthropy is to make the earth more of a home, and to encourage inhabitants of the spaces and institutions it provides to feel at home in the world. Ours is a world for humans. It should serve all of us, not the few who can exploit the many for maximum profit. The money we use to build the common world communicates our belief in that world, and in all who inhabit it. It affirms the value of humanity beyond price."-Amy Schiller, The Price of Humanity 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! And if you like our work, please consider subscribing or donating to beautiful Current AffairsMagazine. 

Brian Merchant is the technology columnist for the Los Angeles Timesand author of the new book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.Brian's book takes us back to early 19th century England, and the birth of the "Luddite" movement. The Luddites famously smashed new machines that were expected to take away jobs in the textile industry. Brian argues that the Luddites are often misunderstood and misrepresented, and that by examining their uprising, we can better prepare ourselves to deal with the socially disruptive effects of new technology in our own time.

The Luddites, Brian shows, weren't anti-technology. In fact, they embraced new machines that helped them do their jobs better. They were against machines that destroyed workers' livelihoods and rendered their skills useless. The Luddites rejected technology when it was used to enrich capitalists at the expense of laborers. Their dispute is best understood not as being over "technology" but about who gets the benefitof new technologies and who decides what kinds of technologies will be implemented. Today, Brian joins to clear up misconceptions about the Luddites and show us what we can learn from them.

“If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are. Robots are not sentient—they do not have the capacity to be coming for or stealing or killing or threatening to take away our jobs. Management does. Consulting firms and corporate leadership do. Gig company and tech executives do...If the machinery or the robots are simply “coming,” if they just show up and relieve a helpless lot of humans of their livelihoods, then no one is to blame for this independently arising phenomenon, and little is to be done about it beyond bracing for impact. It’s not the executives, swayed by consulting firms who insist the future is in AI text generation or customer service bots; or the tech titans, who use algorithmic platforms to displace traditional workers; or the managers, who see an opportunity to improve profit margins by adopting automated kiosks that edge out cashiers; or the shipping conglomerate bosses, who decide to try to replace dockworkers with a fleet of automated trucks.” -Brian Merchant,Blood in the Machine

TheCurrent Affairsarticle "The Luddites Were Right" pairs well with this episode.

Today we have a documentary episode examining and analyzing the ongoing pro-Palestine uprisings at campuses around the country. We look at the horrifying facts on the ground in Gaza that have caused U.S. students to risk their academic careers in solidarity demonstrations. We discuss how universities have repressed the demonstrations an a manner disturbingly reminiscent of authoritarian states. We expose the myths that the protests are hateful, antisemitic, and pro-terror. And we put the demonstrations in context, looking at how prior generations of anti-war students were similarly motivated to take a stance against violence and injustice.

This episode is free to the public and unlocked, because of the subject matter's importance. But Current Affairsis funded entirely by its readers, and can't continue to produce new work without your support, so if you enjoy our work, please consider purchasing a Patreon membership, magazine subscription, or donating to our organization.

Jon Ben-Menachem's Zeteo essay is here.

Rashid Khalidi's full interview is here.

W.D. Ehrhart's full interview is here.

More from Dr. Thrasher on what he saw at Columbia is here.

The Interceptedepisode quoting Yasser Khan is here.

Full video of the quoted speech at the Columbia demonstration is here.

Further coverage of the protests can be found in the Current Affairs News Briefing.

Portions of this radio essay were adapted from the Current Affairs articles "My Date With Destiny" and "Palestine Protests are a Test of Whether This is a Free Country." Script and audio editing by Nathan J. Robinson, who is responsible for any errors.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and activist whose latest book is The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, based on her CBC Massey Lectures. Today she joins to discuss the themes of her lectures, which are build around the ideas of security and insecurity. What makes us actually "secure"? Security is a word that has right-wing connotations (surveillance cameras, security guards, etc.) But we know that there is another kind of security, the kind promised by programs like Social Security. Astra explains why she, as a longtime activist for debtors, thinks we live in an "age of insecurity" and distinguishes between the kinds of "existential" insecurities we are stuck with and the "manufactured" ones we might be able to get rid of. 

“My perspective is shaped by the years I’ve spent focused on the topic of inequality and its pernicious effects on culture and democracy both in my creative work as a filmmaker and writer and as an activist. Nearly a decade ago, I helped found the Debt Collective, the world’s first union for debtors, which has become a bastion for people who are broke and overwhelmed. Inequality is, indeed, out of control, with ten billionaire men possessing six times more wealth than the poorest three billion people on earth.6 But numbers do not capture the true nature or extent of the crisis. Insecurity, in contrast, describes how inequality is lived day after day. Where inequality can be represented by points on a graph, insecurity speaks to how those points feel, hovering in space over a tattered safety net or nothing at all. The writer Barbara Ehrenreich, in her 1989 study of the psychology of the middle class, dubbed the condition “fear of falling.” But today there’s barely any middle left, and everyone is afraid of what lies below.” -Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity 

An article Nathan wrote commenting on the book's themes is here. 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Myisha Cherry is a philosopher at UC-Riverside whose bookThe Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle(Oxford University Press) argues that reason and emotion are not, as many people assume, opposites, but our emotions are often important expressions of our reason. We get angry when we our implicit framework for how the world ought to operate is violated, and Prof. Cherry argues that it's okayand even importantto have this feeling. She shows that in the history of social movements, anger has been an important motivating factor, and argues that it can coexist with love, compassion, and thoughtfulness. 

Cherry does not advocate "mindless" rage. She says we need to be reflective, and figure out whether our anger is actually well-grounded in facts and sound morality. She distinguishes between different types of anger, some of which are healthier and more factually grounded than others. But she believes that if we embrace the right kinds of rage, they can help us "build a better world."

Anger plays the role of expressing the value of people of color and racial justice; it provides the eagerness, optimism, and self-belief needed to fight against persistent and powerful racist people and systems; and it allows the outraged to break certain racial rules as a form of intrinsic and extrinsic resistance. This helps explain how the oppressed can feel affirmed when others get angry on their behalf, how people are able to fight against powerful systems despite the risk of abuse and arrests, and why WNBA and NBA players—who used their platform to combat racism—were viewed as radical for simply expressing their feelings. —Myisha Cherry, The Case for Rage 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Malaika Jabali is Senior News and Politics Editor at Essencemagazine. She is also the only previous Current Affairscontributor whose writing for our magazine has won an award! Her exceptional piece "The Color of Economic Anxiety" won the 2019 New York Association for Black Journalists award for magazine feature. She has now published her first book, It's Not You, It's Capitalism: Why It's Time to Break Up and How To Move On.In accessible and entertaining prose (with fun illustrations by artist Kayla E.), Jabali presents an introduction to leftist economic and social analysis for the uninitiated reader. 

Uniquely, the book looks at economics through analogies from modern dating life, and shows how some of the things that keep us trapped in toxic relationships have parallels in the way we feel trapped with our dysfunctional economic system. Her book is also valuable for the way it introduce socialism by highlighting leftists of color. Instead of beginning with Marx and Debs, Malaika gives us W.E.B. DuBois, Assata Shakur, and A. Philip Randolph. 

Today Malaika joins to discuss not only the basic anti-capitalist argument made in the book, but how she's thought about presenting that argument in a novel and easy-to-read way. (Her book, incidentally, makes a fantastic holiday gift especially for young people.) We also talk about her award-winning Current Affairsessay about neglected Black voters in Milwaukee, who saw no point in supporting the Democratic Party in 2016, and whose "economic anxiety" Hillary Clinton saw little need to address.

"I broke up with capitalism around my junior year of college. Ever since, I've felt like the patient friend waiting for my bestie to see why she needs to break up with her toxic partner, too. While socialism has captured mainstream attention in the U.S. in the past decade or so, probably because of the popularity of Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America, I didn't arrive at my anti-capitalism through electoral politics. It was through studying Black history as an undergrad that I started to see how messed up our whole system really was. Reading about how slaveholders were willing to kidnap, brand, torture, and work their labor force to near-death—oh and create a system of white supremacy to maintain their profits that still thrives today—will do that to you. I also soaked in the words of Black revolutionaries who spoke out against capitalism, including my godfather Charles Barron, a former member of the Black Panther Party. "We keep fighting the symptoms," he is prone to say, "But capitalism is the disease."-Malaika Jabali, It's Not You, It's Capitalism

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Today we take a dive into the world of "corporate bullshit" with Nick Hanauer, who has become an expert on spotting and debunking it. Nick is a businessman who became known forwarning of the devastating social effects of plutocracy, and who now hosts the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast which presents sharp conversations with leading progressive economic experts. 

Nick's latest project is the book Corporate Bullsh*t,written with Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen. (Listen to Donald's appearance on the CA podcast here.) The book dives into American history to show how every time a progressive reform was proposed, the corporate PR machine spun the proposal as a job-killer, a socialist plot, the end of civilization, etc. Some of the examples collected in the book are truly galling, as Nathan explains in his review of the book here. On this episode, we look at some of the common tendencies used in corporate propaganda and why they can be persuasive to people. We also discuss how Nick came to be a public opponent of plutocracy, and we have a short digression on the fraudulence of the "MyPillow," since Nick comes from a family of immigrants who spent a century making pillows and bedding.

Over the past century and a half, on a broad range of issues including the minimum wage, workplace safety, environmental regulations, consumer protection—even on morally indisputable issues like child labor and racial segregation—the people and corporations who profited from the status quo have effectively wielded a familiar litany of groundless ‘economic’ claims and fear mongering rhetoric in their efforts to slow or quash necessary reforms. As even a cursory examination of the quotes we’ve included in this book will show, the wealthy and powerful are willing to say anything—even the worst things imaginable—to retain their wealth and power. But while there is simply no bottom to this well of shamelessness, there is a pattern. 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/currentaffairs !

Dr. Luke Messac is an emergency physician and historian whose new book is Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine(Oxford University Press). Messac also wrote the article "Why Medical Debt Forgiveness Drives Are Not Enough" for Current Affairs.Messac's book looks at the entire history of medical debt, how hospitals went from being (somewhat) charitable institutions to farming debt collection out to huge companies that make massive profits off shaking down poor people. He joins today to explain the harms that medical debt does to patients' lives (and to their relationships with their doctors), how the debt collection industry works, and why things don't have to be this way. 

"We must reckon with the bounty hunters of medicine: the debt collectors who haunt the lives of the millions of Americans who cannot pay for their medical care. Any solution that leaves intact an industry that profits off the financial captivity of the poor cannot credibly be called just. It is time to build a future without medical debt or its collectors."—Luke Messac 

Jonathan Taplinhas had a fascinating career, from being a tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band to a film producer for Martin Scorsese to running the Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California's communications school. In recent years, he has turned his attention to writing critically about the tech elite. His book Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy focused on leading monopolistic corporations. His new book, The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto, examines four leading billionaires (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen). Each of them is extremely powerful and has a vision for the future of the world. Taplin thinks those visions are bleak, antidemocratic, and dystopian. He joins us to explain how he thinks these men are destroying our culture and even trying to "end reality." Taplin's background in rock-n-roll and New Hollywood gives him a distinctive perspective on the culturaldegradation that these billionaires are contributing to, from the erosion of musicians' livelihoods through streaming services to the threat posed to quality cinema by a nonstop stream of billion-dollar AI-written superhero movies.

“There is a choice about what the future holds, and it’s not necessarily Mark Zuckerberg’s or Elon Musk’s to make. The fight that remains will be to once again assert the possibility of constructing our lives as free and autonomous persons in a natural world not destroyed by industrial pollution and not ruled by the algorithms of the tech monopolies. It will be to resist this future of pseudo-experience and fantasy exploration. That resistance will require both government regulation and the individual decisions of millions of citizens around the world about how they are going to use technology. Fortunately these four technologies of the Metaverse, crypto, transhumanism, and space travel are in their early stages of adoption...[My greatest fear is] that enchanted by the magic of the Technocrats’ “immutable money, infinite frontier, eternal life,” we will sleep through a right-wing revolution and wake up to find our democracy gone and our children being turned into Meta cyborgs. Let us wake up and resist the end of reality.” — Jonathan Taplin, The End of Reality

Read the Current Affairs critique of Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto"here. Our episode on the relationship between MySpace and music ishere. The crypto story is fleshed out in ourprevious episodewith Zeke Faux.

Zeke Faux of Bloomberg Newsis the author of a fascinating and hilarious new book about the crypto world and the collapse of the Sam Bankman-Fried empire, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.In contrast with Michael Lewis, whose recent book Going Infinitealso looks at Bankman-Fried, Faux sees the scamming and lying of the crypto world for what it is, and his book is highly conscious of the harm done to victims by the fraudulence of Bankman-Fried and others. (Faux's book begins: "'I’m not going to lie,’ Sam Bankman-Fried told me. This was a lie.") 

Today, Faux joins to answer all of the most pressing questions about SBF, FTX, crypto, and the very dumb world of "NFTs," like:

Bankman-Fried said that I was wrong. Crypto wasn’t a scam, and neither was Tether. But he wasn’t offended by my question. He said he totally understood my problem. Then he did something that didn’t strike me as strange at the time. But knowing what I know now, I can’t help but wonder if he was trying to make some kind of winking confession. Bankman-Fried cut me off, nodding, as I tried to explain more. His tone turned chipper. He said: “It’s like the narrative would be way sexier if it was like, ‘Holy shit, this is the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme,’ right?”

Right.
—Zeke Faux,Number Go Up 

Listeners may also be interested in prior episodes on crypto/NFTs/"Web3" withStephen Diehl,Molly White, andNicholas Weaver. Incidentally, Sam Bankman Fried istestifying in his criminal trial today. It's also never a bad time to reread our 2021 article "Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud." 

Nathan Thrall, the former Director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, is the author of two books on Israel and Palestine: The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestineand most recently A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, which focuses on the tribulations of a Palestinian father in the aftermath of a personal tragedy. Because his book is about Palestinians under occupation, several of Thrall's book events have been canceled since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Based in Jerusalem, Thrall joins us to explain the current state of Israeli society, and to tell us more about the reality of life for Palestinians under occupation. 

“For all the blame that was cast, no one—not the investigators, not the lawyers, not the judges—named the true origins of the calamity. No one mentioned the chronic lack of classrooms in East Jerusalem, a shortage that led parents to send their children to poorly supervised West Bank schools. No one pointed to the separation wall and the permit system that forced a kindergarten class to take a long, dangerous detour to the edge of Ramallah rather than driving to the playgrounds of Pisgat Ze’ev, a stone’s throw away. ... No one noted that the absence of emergency services on one side of the separation wall was bound to lead to tragedy. No one said that the Palestinians in the area were neglected because the Jewish state aimed to reduce their presence in greater Jerusalem, the place most coveted by Israel. For these acts, no one was held to account.” —  Nathan Thrall,A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Political scientist Jerome Slater is the author of one of the best one-volume summaries of the background of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020 (Oxford University Press). Slater argues in the book that the possibilities for a peaceful resolution to the conflict were consistently eroded by Israel’s refusal to withdraw to its legal borders and successive Israeli leaders’ staunch opposition to a Palestinian state. Slater’s exhaustively documented but accessible work also predicted that Israel’s policies toward Palestine were creating the conditions for a “disaster.” Three years later, Slater’s predictions have tragically come true. He joins to explain the background to the conflict.

“I’ve become convinced that Israel, with essentially blind US Jewish and government support, is well along the road to both a moral and security disaster.” —Jerome Slater,Mythologies Without End(2020) 

This interview is available as a transcripthere. 

Michael Mann is a sociologist who has spent his life trying to understand how power works. His latest book, On Wars, surveys the entire history of warfare between human societies to try to understand why wars happen and how they can be avoided. It is the culmination of a decade-long effort by Mann to try to comprehensively understand the origins of war. (See the New York Timesreview of Mann's book here.) Today he joins to help us better understand war. Are humans naturally warlike? Are wars rational ways to achieve political goals? Mann addresses the Steven Pinker narrative that civilization and enlightenment have brought about greater peace—in fact, he says, "civilization" has allowed us to build more efficient killing machines than ever. And he tells us what he knows on the subject that should interest all of us in the nuclear age: How do we end war? 

Note that this episode was recorded before the recent explosion of the Israel-Palestine conflict, so it is not addressed in the discussion. 

“War is the one instance where losing one’s temper may cause the death of thousands. War pays us back more swiftly for mistakes than any other human activity. Humans are not calculating machines—more’s the pity, since peace is more rational than war. If the social world did conform to rational theory, if rulers did carefully calculate the costs and benefits of war, trying hard to set emotions and ideologies aside and ignoring domestic political pressures, they would see that most wars are too risky and inferior to economic exchange, the sharing of norms and values, and diplomacy as ways of securing desired goals..War is the least rational of human projects, but humans are only erratically rational creatures...Human beings are not genetically predisposed to make war, but our human nature does matter, if indirectly. Its tripartite character, part rational, part emotional, part ideological, when set inside the institutional and cultural constraints of societies, makes war an intermittent outcome. Human nature does matter, and that is why when wars are fought, they are mostly fought for no good reason.” —Michael Mann, On Wars

Several years ago, Garrison Lovely wrote aninsider account of McKinsey & Co.for Current Affairs.At the time he published using a pseudonym, but he's now gone public with a cover story for a recent issue of The Nation, entitled "Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower," where he recounts observations of the firm's work for ICE and the Riker's Island jail. Garrison joins today to tell us what McKinsey is like on the inside: how it justifies serving odious clients, why young "idealists" are tempted to join it, and what goes wrong with the logic of "optimization." 

The right-wing National Review's odd response to Garrison's piece is here. Our previous episode on the book When McKinsey Comes to Townprovides useful context for today's episode. 

We are now living with the consequences of the world McKinsey created. Market fundamentalism is the default mode for businesses and governments the world over. Abstraction and myth insulate actors from the atrocities they help perpetuate. Businesses that resisted the pressure to rationalize every decision based on its impact on shareholder value were beaten out or eaten up by those who shed the last remnants of their humanity. With another heavyweight on the side of management, McKinsey tipped the scale even further away from labor, contributing directly to the increase in wealth inequality plaguing the world. Governments are now more similar to the private sector and more reliant on their services. The “best and the brightest” devote themselves to client service instead of public service. —Garrison Lovely, "McKinsey & Co.: Capital's Willing Executioners." 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Nick Dearden'sPharmanomicsis an essential primer on how the pharmaceutical industry works, taking a tour across the globe to explain clearly why Big Pharma's profits come at the expense of public health. Dearden, an investigative journalist and director of Global Justice Now, destroys the argument that high drug prices are necessary in order to maintain innovation. He shows how the pharmaceutical industry has pushed drugs that don't work, buried harmful side effects, experimented on the Global South, and extorted the public to line its pockets. He explains why scientific research needs to be under public, rather than private control, and offers a vision for a healthcare system that actually takes care of people's health. Dearden shows how the infamous Martin Shkreli, who became notorious for hiking drug prices, was not a mere bad apple, but following standard operating procedure in the world of "pharmanomics." 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Allison Lirish Deanis a journalist and urban planner in North Carolina. She is the author of a recent piece for the Current Affairsprint edition (andnow available online) critiquing the "Strong Towns" organization. Strong Towns is highly critical of suburban sprawl and many of its suggestions for improving our cities and towns are sensible. But Allison argues that in its disdain for "government" and its rejection of important progressive notions of fairness, Strong Towns ultimately aims up pushing an approach to planning that will maintain existing unjust inequalities. Allison's critique has implications beyond this particular organization, though. It also illuminates the different possible approaches to thinking about how to make better places, and Allison articulates a clear progressive agenda for planning. 

If, like me, you’re a progressive and distressed about the state of our cities, you will like a lot of what Strong Towns has to say. But its approach is ultimately undergirded by a right-wing ideology that does little to alter the political status quo and further naturalizes austerity and infrastructure inequality: communities get what theydeservebased on their ability to build wealth through entrepreneurship, not what theyneedfrom a system that prioritizes human rights and the delivery of universal public goods. — Allison Lirish Dean 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Philip Ewell is a professor of music theory and the author of the new book On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone(University of Michigan Press). Ewell is one of the most "controversial" music theorists in the country, having sparked a major controversy in his field by criticizing the "white racial frame" that dominates in music theory. Ewell argued that much of mainstream music theory has been build around unstated assumptions about which kinds of music are sophisticated/interesting/worthy of academic study. Today he joins to explain how the idea of white supremacy translated into normative conceptions about music, why it's a mistake to think he's trying to "cancel Bach," and how music theory can be made, in the words of his title, more welcoming for everyone, meaning that it will break free of its narrow focus on a tiny group of European composers. 

A great YouTube video by Adam Neely featuring Ewell, discussing the themes of this conversation, is here. A comprehensive Current Affairsarticle on the controversy around race and music theory is here. Nathan's article on Charles Murray, including Murray's theories about music, is here. 

The main problem I have noticed as music theory faces its racial past is in how we confront what we see in the mirror as we look at ourselves. Understanding the exclusionist nature of the field is not difficult, and it is also easy to add to the music theory mix a few composers of color and think that this represents a solution to our racial dilemma. However, as Baldwin says in the epigraph to this chapter, all we ever see in that mirror is lies, whether we acknowledge that or not. The lie we are told by music theory, the lie that awaits in the mirror to be seen by the field if it is strong enough to glance, is that the dark secrets of our past are exceptional to our field, and that, by and large, our history has been one of social justice and decency. Of course, this is largely untrue of American music theory, since this is largely untrue of the United States as a country. —Philip Ewell, On Music Theory

Gary Younge spent three decades as a reporter and columnist for The Guardian, where he became one of the publication's most incisive and widely-read contributors. His new book, Dispatches from the Diaspora, collects some of the best of Gary's reporting and commentary. It is a unique collection of snapshots from the African diaspora, from Barbados to London to Ferguson to South Africa. Gary recounts meetings with Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, Desmond Tutu, and other greats, as well as highlighting lesser-known stories like the life of Claudette Colvin. Gary recounts historic moments he witnessed and reported on, such as being in South Africa when Nelson Mandela ascended to the presidency and seeing the reaction to Barack Obama's election on Chicago's South Side. Today Gary joins to discuss some of the events and people he covers in his book, and to expand on some of his unique opinion pieces (such as his "defense of Uncle Tom" andhis case for tearing down allstatues).

“I sign off from this column at a dispiriting time, with racism, cynicism and intolerance on the rise, wages stagnant and faith that progressive change is possible declining even as resistance grows. Things look bleak. The propensity to despair is strong but should not be indulged. Sing yourself up. Imagine a world in which you might thrive, for which there is no evidence. And then fight for it.”— Gary Younge, in his final Guardiancolumn

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Originally aired 9/19/2023

Dozens of protesters in Atlanta have recently been hit with serious charges, including domestic terrorism and racketeering, stemming from protest activity over "Cop City," a proposed police training center in the forest outside the city. The Defend the Atlanta Forestmovement has been occupying parts of the forest and clashing with police and construction companies, and prosecutors have now come down hard on the protests. In Current Affairs, Nathan recently wrote that the indictment is both preposterous and terrifying. Preposterous because it criminalizes behavior that should obviously not be prosecuted (like buying a tarp, or being an anarchist). And terrifying because it will encourage prosecutors around the country to aggressively pursue dissidents. 

We are joined today by one of the leading legal experts on the case, Christopher Bruce of the Georgia ACLU. Christopher explains the background, the risks, and shows why all Americans should be deeply troubled by this outrageous prosecutorial overreach. 

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Kristen Ghodsee is Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of books like Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialismand, most recently, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life.Today she joins to explain why she believes utopian thinking, and studying the utopian experiments that people have engaged in across history, can help us figure out what life ought to be like and how to change the world for the better. From Charles Fourier to Star Trek, Ghodsee takes us on a fascinating tour of attempts to dream up and build mini-paradises. We discuss where utopias go right and where they go wrong.

The Liza Featherstone review of Ghodsee's book in Jacobinishere. The angry Wall Street Journalreview is here.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge,” said Albert Einstein in 1931. “For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” We stand on the cusp of a new age, with many of us striving toward a more positive vision of the future like the one Roddenberry once provided, where human beings find a way to build a better world for subsequent generations of humanity. Our old ideas about patrilineality and patrilocality are no longer fit for that purpose. We need new ideas, new dreams, and the courage to imagine alternative futures. Now is the moment to “think different.” If we can imagine them first in a galaxy far, far away, it’s only a matter of time before we boldly go and begin figuring out how to translate these inspired visions into our own everyday utopias. —Kristen Ghodsee

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

David Detmer is the author of the book Zinnophobia: The Battle Over History in Education, Politics, and Scholarship.David's book was published five years ago, after former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels became the president of Purdue University and immediately tried to ban Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Detmer, a Purdue professor and former student of Zinn, set out to understand the remarkable hostility ("Zinnophobia") that Howard Zinn's work has been met with, not just among Republican politicans but also among some of Zinn's historian colleagues. Were they right that People's Historyis a bad work of history?

Today, Detmer joins to discuss Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, and the criticisms that have been made of Zinn. We talk about Zinn's life and work and what made it so distinct from previous histories. Detmer explains Zinn's theory of what the role of a historian was. We discuss the backlash and go through some of the criticisms of Zinn. Detmer explains why he finds the criticisms to be so flimsy, and the way in which critics misunderstand what Zinn was doing. The fights over how American history should be taught are still ongoing, as we know, so it's a good moment to take stock of the most famous radical revisionist take on U.S. history. 

The quote at the beginning is, of course,from Good Will Hunting.Zinn's work lives on at the excellent Zinn Education Project. Highly recommended is Voices of a People's History, a companion volume to the original book that Zinn co-edited with Anthony Arnove. A 21st century sequel to Voiceswas recently released by Arnove and Haley Pessin. The original People's Historyhas also been adapted into a beautifully-illustrated graphic edition.

"Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, a perennial bestseller, offers a version of American history that differs substantially from previous accounts. Instead of the standard story, in which the wise and heroic deeds of presidents, Supreme Court justices, military and business leaders, and various other wealthy and powerful elites are celebrated, Zinn makes the case that, whenever progressive change has occurred, it has resulted from the struggles of ordinary people—those who have participated in popular movements agitating for peace, for racial and sexual equality, for improved working conditions, and for environmental protection, among other similar causes. And in opposition to the triumphalist bias of the more orthodox histories, in which the misdeeds of the powerful are either sanitized or erased altogether, Zinn shines a spotlight on official acts of enslaving Africans, slaughtering Indians, lying, breaking promises, violating treaties, trashing the Constitution, exploiting workers, bombing or massacring civilians, assassinating foreign leaders, sabotaging elections, and propping up brutal puppet dictators, among other transgressions.”

“As the continuing success of the book testifies (it was first published in 1980 and remains a bestseller 37 years later) many readers warmly welcome Zinn’s work... But the reaction of many other readers (and non-readers who know of Zinn’s book only by reputation) has been one of loathing. Such has been the typical response of political conservatives, the wealthy and powerful, many mainstream historians, and everyone else whose sense of “patriotism” engenders a commitment to the idea that our nation’s leaders, traditions, and institutions are uniquely great and moral.”

“What I found, over and over again, is that Zinn’s harsh critics...produce incompetent work—work that, while it occasionally scores an isolated minor point or two against Zinn, nonetheless can be fairly characterized, on the whole, as uncomprehending, larded with errors, and not up to the quality standards one would expect in a term paper submitted for credit by a college freshman for an introductory level course."—David Detmer

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Matthew Desmond's bestselling book Poverty, By Americaposes a straightforward question: Why is there any poverty at all in such a wealthy country as the United States? Surely we could solve the problem of poverty if we were committed to doing so. Desmond points a finger at those who profit from poverty and argues that there is no justification for our inaction. Desmond, a leading sociologist whose work has won the Pulitzer Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship, tries to understand what makes poverty so persistent and what it would take to "abolish" it forever. Today he joins to give a brief explanation of his ideas.

“Lift the floor by rebalancing our social safety net; empower the poor by reining in exploitation; and invest in broad prosperity by turning away from segregation. That’s how we end poverty in America.”—Matthew Desmond

“How many artists and poets has poverty denied us? How many diplomats and visionaries? How many political and spiritual leaders? How many nurses and engineers and scientists? Think of how many more of us would be empowered to thrive if we tore down the walls, how much more vibrant and forward-moving our country would be.”—Matthew Desmond

“Poverty will be abolished in America only when a mass movement demands it so. And today, such a movement stirs. American labor is once again on the move, growing more boisterous and feistier by the day, organizing workplaces once thought untouchable. A renewed movement for housing justice is gaining steam. In a resurgence of tenant power, renters have formed eviction blockades and chained themselves to the entrances of housing court, meeting the violence of displacement with a force of their own. The Poor People’s Campaign has elevated the voices of low-income Americans around the country, voices challenging “the lie of scarcity in the midst of abundance” and mobilizing for things like educational equity and a reinvestment in public housing.They march under different banners—workers’ unions and tenants’ unions; movements for racial justice and economic justice—but they share a commitment to ending poverty in America.”—Matthew Desmond

The piece by Matthew Yglesias that Desmond is responding to is here. A short version of the argument was published in the New York Times Magazine. Note that Desmond's audio skips briefing in the middle of a sentence toward the end, due to a faulty internet connection. 

"I’m pretty sure that some of my colleagues have signed on to my bill because they wanted me to stop talking about periods on the floor of the House." —Grace Meng

Grace Meng represents the 6th District of New York in the United States Congress. She recentlyreintroduced herMenstrual Equity for All Act, which aims to dramatically expand free access to menstrual products across the country. She joins today to discuss the problem of period poverty and what it would take to solve it. A transcript is available here. 

"When I’m talking about this issue, most people—men or women—do not necessarily prioritize this issue, and many are even surprised to learn about it." —Grace Meng

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Lorne Stockmanis the research co-director at Oil Change International, which is dedicated to exposing the harms caused by fossil fuel use and advocating for a green transition. Today Lorne joins us to rebut some common nonsense conservative talking points on climate change, to explain how a transition to 100% renewable energy can happen, and to give a clear assessment of how much progress we've made so far and how much is left to go. It's a crucial conversation for understanding where we're at in the fight against the climate catastrophe, and you may be surprised to hear that there is actually some good news. 

We discuss such topics as: 

Read Lorne's writings for Oil Change International here. A recent article Nathan wrote on the latest phase in climate denial is here. This podcast pairs well with our recent conversation with Current Affairscontributor Jag Bhalla. 

"It is abundantly clear that the production and consumption of fossil gas must decline immediately, even if methane reduction goals are met. No amount of wishful thinking about upstream emissions reduction, carbon capture and storage (CCS), gas-based “blue” hydrogen, or whatever the latest magical techno-fix the industry imagines will save it can change this fact."— Lorne Stockman

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Jag Bhalla is a contributor to Current Affairswho has also written for Scientific Americanand Big Think.His pieces for our magazine have frequently focused on debunking popular narratives about climate change and arguing that anything resembling a just future will require a fundamental change in the distribution of global wealth and consumption. Read his articles here:

Today Jag joins to explain some of the core ideas underpinning his work in Current Affairs,showing how the assumption that the Global South doesn't matter is buried in U.S. climate discourse and explaining some of the bad math that allows for the rationalization of heinous injustices. 

Climate change is not just going to be “apocalyptic,” it’s already apocalyptic. It’s just that the apocalypse is not something that happens to the entire world at once. Instead, the apocalyptic events are experienced mostly by the world’s poorest people (who, incidentally, have contributed the least to creating the problem). Who,witnessing the scale of flooding in Pakistan last year,could possibly say that the climate crisis is not “apocalyptic,” unless you regard Pakistanis as unpeople whose well-being simply doesn’t factor into the equation? 33 million people were displaced, andmillions of homes destroyed. When white Western elites publish books with titles likeIt’s Not The End of The WorldorApocalypse NeverorFalse Alarm, what they mean is “it’s not the end of the world for people like me,” “apocalyptic conditions will never be experienced by my sector of society,” and “those of us who are among the world’s richest do not need to be alarmed.” Of course, even these are false comforts—the mansions of Malibu are flammable, after all.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Alex Bronzini-Vender has contributed several articles to Current Affairs, about progressive politics in the U.S. today. In his first, "Progressives Aren’t Hurting the Democratic Party—In Fact, They’re The Only Thing Saving It," he looks at his home state of New York. Bronzini-Vender argues that, contrary to the narrative that tough-on-crime Democrats are more "electable," the most progressive Democrats are in fact scoring the most important political victories and inspiring voters. In Alex's second article, "Moderates, Not Leftists, Have Created the Crises in Democratic Cities," he looks at the right-wing narrative that "leftism" has caused crises of homelessness and disorder in American cities. 

Is the conservative storytelling on American cities the product of ignorance, malice, or both? I couldn’t tell you—but the reason it’s irresistibly appealing to conservatives of both Democratic and Republican stripes is quite clear. For Republicans, leftist-induced urban malaise is a seemingly concrete, visceral argument for their policy agendas of “backing the blue” and being “tough on crime.” And, for conservative Democrats, it allows them to ignore the fact that, for decades, they’ve held politicalpower in America’s largest cities—and have left behind only long legacies of failed policy. The present crises faced by the communities they’re responsible for are transformed, in their telling, into new and unique beasts brought about by a radical fringe, rather than outcomes decades in the making. And, most conveniently, this false narrative pins the blame for said crises upon burgeoning progressive movements, forcing them to answer for problems they bear no responsibility for. —Alex Bronzini-Vender

The article "Eric Adams' Moral Panics," mentioned by Alex, is here. The podcast with Mo Mitchell is here. The interview with Robert Peters is here. The story about Adams' fake photo is here. The thumbnail photo is an official homeless encampment that the San Francisco city government installed in front of city hall during the COVID-19 pandemic instead of giving people housing.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Today we are joined by Stephen Bright and James Kwak to discuss their new book The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts.The book is a comprehensive primer on the problems with the American criminal court system, from the power of prosecutors to the underfunding of public defenders to the biases of judges to the obstacles to getting a wrongful conviction overturned. Bryan Stevenson calls it "an urgently needed analysis of our collective failure to confront and overcome racial bias and bigotry, the abuse of power, and the multiple ways in which the death penalty's profound unfairness requires its abolition." 

The authors are leading experts on the system, and Prof. Bright has successfully argued Supreme Court cases challenging racial discrimination in jury selection. (Listeners might remember Prof. Bright from his previous appearance on the program, which specifically focused on the right to counsel.) 

“Excessive punishment is one of the most important problems facing our country today, causing misery for people subject to it and their families, wasting vast resources, and making it harder for millions of people to contribute to society...A just criminal legal system is one that considers people charged with crimes as “uniquely individual human beings” subject to “the diverse frailties of humankind,” as demanded by Justice Potter Stewart in the 1976 Supreme Court ruling that rejected laws making the death penalty mandatory. It takes into account the many factors that may make a person more likely to commit a crime—poverty, racism, neglect, abuse, witnessing violence, post-traumatic stress disorder, serious mental disorders, and so on—and the inability of prosecutors, judges, or juries to predict who that person will be in the future. A just system responds to a crime both with sanctions that fairly reflect the moral culpability of the person who committed it and with measures that help him become a positive contributor to his community. In an adversary system, justice demands that people accused of crimes be represented by skilled, zealous lawyers with the time, resources, and information necessary to fairly defend their clients, and that cases be heard by judges motivated solely by upholding the law and achieving a just outcome. And justice demands that both courts and governments actively work to redress the systemic racial discrimination that plagues the criminal legal system.” —Stephen Bright and James Kwak 

Nathan mentions Prof. Kwak's excellent bookEconomism, which debunks the misuses of economic reasoning. 

Philanthropy is a problem. Lots of contemporary philanthropy is either useless (Rich people funding new buildings for Harvard) or shouldn't have to happen in the first place (Nonprofits fulfilling crucial social roles that the state doesn't take care of in the age of neoliberalism). The standard left critique of philanthropy is that we should redistribute wealth and income rather than depending on the largesse of the bourgeoisie, who have far too much damned money. But Amy Schiller, in The Price of Humanity, goes beyond this critique, and argues that we can engineer a better concept of philanthropy. First, she argues that we need a social democratic welfare state, so that the meeting of basic needs is notthe domain of philanthropy (no more GoFundMes for medical care). But then we also need to go beyond a basic living wage to instead have a "giving wage," meaning we should all earn enough to be able to give some of it away. The things we support through giving should be special projects that aren'tfunded by the state but nevertheless enrich life. 

Schiller joins today to discuss her ideas for a better kind of philanthropy. She explains why she thinks the effective altruists have everything backwards and why the "roses" in "bread and roses" should not be considered optional. 

Listeners might also enjoy our conversation with Prof. Linsey McGoey, author of No Such Thing As A Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy.

"The project of philanthropy is to make the earth more of a home, and to encourage inhabitants of the spaces and institutions it provides to feel at home in the world. Ours is a world for humans. It should serve all of us, not the few who can exploit the many for maximum profit. The money we use to build the common world communicates our belief in that world, and in all who inhabit it. It affirms the value of humanity beyond price."-Amy Schiller, The Price of Humanity 

Thom Hartmann is America's #1 progressive radio host and the author of the "Hidden History" series of books. His latest, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, encouragingly argues that democracy is the most natural form of organization. Drawing from examples from the animal kingdom to the Iroquois confederacy to Thomas Paine, Hartmann lays out a vision of what it would mean to have an actual democracy. He counsels against pessimism, though he is conscious of the ways in which the present American system is rigged and undemocratic. Today he joins to explain what the study of history can teach us about the possibilities for our future.

"The more unequal a society becomes, the more difficult it is to maintain a functioning democracy, as we've seen in the United States in the years since the Supreme Court legalized political bribery, and as a result, Congress changed the rules of capitalism and taxation to favor the morbidly rich. While democracy may be the resting state of the human race, [its force] is like gravity: Although it's eventually irresistible, it can be defied for long periods of time. If democracy is to survive in America, it's going to require a considerable reallocation of political and financial power in the wake of the Supreme Court's disastrous decisions that have handed our nation's political system over to America's oligarchs." —Thom Hartmann

Thom's previous appearance on the program can be heardhere.

Tara Isabella Burton is a novelist and the author of the new nonfiction book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, a history of the rise of the idea of a curated self. Tara's book looks at the transition from seeing human beings as made by God to being made by our own individual wills. From Renaissance painters to the famous dandy Beau Brummell to Thomas Edison to contemporary Instagram influencers and reality television stars, Tara looks at those who have carefully manufactured the picture of themselves that they show to the rest of the world. Today she joins to discuss whether, in becoming free to "self-make," we have in fact truly been liberated, and what unseen forces shape people's ideas of the selves they ought to become.

“[T]he seemingly liberatory promise that we can create ourselves has, as often as not, been warped into an excuse to create, implicitly or explicitly, two classes of people: those who are capable of shaping their destinies (and who thereby deserve their success) and those who are not (and who deserve nothing). This classification invariably places those who do not fit the dominant physical or cultural mold—women, people of color, the poor, the disabled—in the second category.That is not to say that it would be preferable to reinstate the image of a divine creator-monarch, Thomas Aquinas’s vision of a universe where the laws of the natural world and of the social world are inextricable from one another, where the right of kings to rule is as ingrained in the functioning of our earth as the propensity of heavenly bodies to fall. But we must all ask ourselves what it means—politically, ethically, socially—to live up to Stewart Brand’s predictions that we are as gods, that the world is nothing but what we make of it, and that our choices, our desires, our wanting to be or to have, are the only things that make us human, that make usus. We must, too, ask ourselves how often our desires are stoked by those with a financial interest in making us think that we both can and should shape ourselves, whether they’re selling us self-help manuals or Snake Oil skin cream." —Tara Isabella Burton

Albrecht Dürer's Christlike self-portrait can be seenhere. Tara'sCurrent Affairsarticle "The Making of the Self-Made Man," which previewed some of the ideas discussed in the book, can be readhere. Listen to Tara's previous appearance on the podcast, discussing her bookStrange Rites,here.

Current Affairshas recently launched a new project: the Current AffairsNews Briefing, a twice-weekly digest of important (and often neglected) news stories. We're really tired of having to sift through a mountain of clickbait and ads every morning to "find the news," so we're putting together our own alternative, which relays the things that matter most in the distinctive CA style. We think fans of our magazine and podcast will enjoy it!

The News Briefing's chief researcher and writer is Stephen Prager, who joins Nathan on the podcast to discuss the question: What's wrong with the US news media? We talk about the lack of foreign coverage, the endless trivia and fluff, the failure to pay attention to things that majorly affect people's lives, and what the media's priorities ought to be. Then we discuss our own approach to trying to remedy some of this through the news briefing. 

This new project is still young, so we welcome your suggestions and tips at briefing@currentaffairs.org. What do youwish for from your news media that you don't currently get? 

Benjamin Y. Fong is the associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University and the author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge.From cigarettes to crack to opioids, Fong's book looks at how the United States became a country with a major drug habit. He talks about the role of private industry in monetizing addictive chemicals, and the hideous consequences of the war on drugs. 

For a leftist, drugs pose a certain conundrum: On the one hand, we believe in full legalization and an end to the horror of the drug war. However, we also don't take a fully libertarian "drug use as an expression of individual preference" approach, and recognize that drug use can be (1) a response to desperate conditions and (2) pushed by private actors who profit off misery. Legalization alone will surely produce more destructive industries like the cigarette industry, which profits from slowly killing its customers (and constantly addicting new ones). What, then, is the progressive approach to drug use? Quick Fixes offers a nuanced and fascinating look at the intersection of capitalism and chemical dependency. 

"Misguided and destructive as the War on Drugs has been, the key proposals of liberal drug reformism don't inspire much confidence in an alternative. Legalization has, for one, long been the principled position of the libertarian right: from Ludwig von Mises to Milton Friedman, free marketeers have loved pointing to the example of illegal drugs to prove their belief that markets solve everything. Place the drug trade in the stable hands of legal profiteers, they say, and away go the absurd profit margins, the government corruption, the distortion of local economies, the crime, the enforcement budgets, and the drug contamination... Unfortunately for their elegant argument, it's the legal drugs—cigarettes and alcohol—that are most hazardous to Americans. Letting profit-hungry corporations sell psychoactive drugs virtually assures abuses detrimental to public health... Illegal drug dealers can be dangerous sociopaths, but they are nothing compared to CEOs." —Benjamin Fong

The chapter of the book on cigarettes actually began as aCurrent Affairspiece,which can be read here.The 2018Current Affairsarticle "Death and the Drug War" may also be of interest. 

Avi Shlaim is a distinguished historian and Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University. He is one of the Israeli "New Historians" whose pathbreaking work debunked some of Israel's most cherished national myths. Now he has written a fascinating memoir, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jewthat challenges conventional understandings of Zionism, the binary categories of "Arabs"/"Jews," and the very nature of nationalism. 

Prof. Shlaim is known as a "British-Israeli" historian, but as his memoir explains, he was actually born into a cultural world that has long since vanished: the Baghdad of the "Arab Jews," whose culture and language was Arabic but whose faith was Judaism. Shlaim's memoir tries to recapture this cosmopolitan existence, where Muslims and Jews lived in relative peace side-by-side. For families like Shlaim's, the birth of the state of Israel was something of a tragedy, because it shattered their world, creating new animus between Iraqi Jews and Iraqi Muslims. Prof. Shlaim's discussion of the early days of Zionism, and the effects it had on the Jews of Baghdad, shows that Israel's claim to operate in the interest of the world's Jewish population is highly questionable. Prof. Shlaim even claimsthat he has uncovered evidence that the Zionist movement was willing to resort to violence against Jews in Baghdad in order to build the Jewish state. His memoir, despite being tragic in many ways, is ultimately hopeful, because Prof. Shlaim still believes in the possibility of a country where ethno-religious binaries break down and different peoples can live side by side in a hybrid culture. 

“Time and again we are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews. The ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis has become entrenched, supplying ammunition for rejectionists on both sides of the Arab–Israeli divide.The story of my family in Iraq – and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and cooperation between different ethnic minorities. My family’s story is a powerful reminder of once thriving Middle Eastern identities that have been discouraged and even suppressed to suit nationalist political agendas. My own story reveals the roots of my disenchantment with Zionism.” —Avi Shlaim 

Originally aired 7/23/2023. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Today we have another in our Contentious Arguments series, as Nathan clashes with Christopher Rufo, the architect of the right's "critical race theory" moral panic and a close advisor of Ron DeSantis. Rufo has lately been criticized by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for appearing to retaliate against public university professors for their political beliefs in his capacity as a trustee of New College of Florida. His new book, America's Cultural Revolution: How The Radical Left Conquered Everythingargues that 60s radicals have successfully staged a "long march through the institutions" and exhorts conservatives to stage a "counter-revolution." You can read the review that Nathan and Matt McManus wrote of that book here.

The quotation "Has the goal of the left, for a century, been the destruction of every Western institution?" is from the book's official publicity page. Nathan's essay debunking Michael Shellenberger's climate lies is here. For more on the subjects covered in today's episode, read Nathan's article "Why Critical Race Theory Should Be Taught In Schools" and Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments. 

Christopher Rufo:No, no, no, the United States was not founded on racism. I think that that is a total misunderstanding of history.

Nathan Robinson:How many Founding Fathers were Black?

Christopher Rufo:How many people in the Chinese Politburo are European? I mean, it's like the representation fact. Look, hold on...

Nathan Robinson:There's not a big class of European slaves in China. But if there was, it would be a racist state.

Christopher Rufo:That's true. But look, if you say "What was the United States founded on?" it's a very specific question, and I'll answer the question for you. The United States was founded on a vision of human nature, of natural rights, of equality and liberty.

Nathan Robinson:That excluded Black people.

This edited has been very lightly edited to fix cross-talk. (In the original, much of what was said was unintelligible because both Rufo and Robinson were talking at once.) A directionless several-minute tangent about the nature of artistic talent has also been excised. In the interest of avoiding any allegations of selective editing, that outtake can be heardhere. Otherwise, the interview is presented in its entirety.