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Quick Take

• As Interview with the Vampire arrives on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray at last, director Neil Jordan reflects on his epic, gothic take on Anne Rice’s classic novel.
• Neil Jordan talks about the media scrutiny on the casting process, Kirsten Dunst’s incredible performance, and the deleted scenes that have finally emerged after 30 years.
• Jordan also talks about his plans for his cinematic adaptation of The Vampire Lestat that never came to fruition.
• Nerdist’s take: Interview with the Vampire remains one of the greatest vampire movies ever made, in no small part thanks to Neil Jordan’s commitment to being faithful to Anne Rice’s original text.

In 1994, mogul David Geffen hired director Neil Jordan, hot off the success of The Crying Game, to pull off what many tried and failed to do — bring Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire to the big screen. The film became a huge success, the biggest vampire film at the box office until Twilight. Its success proved Rice’s characters are adept for live-action, as the continued success of the AMC television series has proven. And after much anticipation, Warner Bros. has finally released Jordan’s film, showcasing a truly stacked cast including Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, and an 11-year-old Kirsten Dunst, on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray. Nerdist had the privilege of chatting with Neil Jordan, who reflected on three decades of his sumptuous undead epic.

Warner Bros.

NERDIST: Interview with the Vampire went through a torturous 18-year process to get to the big screen, and many previous versions were very scared of the subtext. Louis was almost a woman played by Cher, wild as that sounds. Do you feel the ‘90s were just the right moment in history to make an accurate version of the story?

Neil Jordan: It probably was. It’s hard to say. I was not around for the prolonged development of it all. David Geffen had numerous conversations about it with lots of people. I mean, I wouldn’t have liked to see Cher in that role, would you? (laughs). However great she is. I mean, somebody told me that Anne Rice had a meeting with Tom Hanks about playing Lestat or something. So there’s kind of an absurd history to it. But I suppose any, any property that has gone through all these different kinds of attempts to realize it, the same thing might apply.

Warner Bros.

How many people have tried to make a movie about A Confederacy of Dunces, you know? And I’m sure many people have been trying to make a movie of The Secret History, haven’t they? The book by Donna Tartt. But when I read Anne’s script, I asked Geffen if I could go back to the original novel, which I did. I read the novel, and I said, “Will you let me do my own pass on this book?” Because there’s so much that she’d left out in her script. And I put back in as much as I could, really. And I loved doing it. It was thrilling.

You once said that vampires were like movie stars, they had made some kind of contract with unknown powers to be eternally young. So you had to cast stars in the roles. But were there any movie stars you had in your back pocket in case Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt hadn’t worked out?

Warner Bros.

Jordan: No, none really. When I was offered the script, I think Brad Pitt was already attached. I had several meetings with him. River Phoenix was going to play the interviewer (Daniel Molloy). Of course, River had this tragic death, and that was a terrible thing. And there was all this conversation about who should play Lestat. Anne Rice had very decided ideas about who should play Lestat. And it seemed the entirety of the United States had very decided ideas about who should play Lestat!  I met Tom, and I just thought he was correct. I thought he would be great in the role, and so I cast him. And, you know, then everyone started giving out to me. So that was my experience of it all.

The deleted scenes on the new disc were fascinating to watch, because fans have been wondering about them for years. Did you ever consider finishing some of them and putting them back into the movie?

Jordan: Ok, so the deleted scenes are there because I tried to track down my original cut of the movie. And I was going to deliver what they would call a director’s cut, but I could not find it in the vaults of Warner Bros. And I hadn’t kept a version of it myself. I don’t know why. But what we did turn up was these deleted scenes. So I just thought I should include them, really. You know, they’re the best of the deleted scenes. I mean, a lot of what was gone was not even worth looking at. But what is included is the stuff that kind of is of the most interest, let’s put it that way.

Speaking of deleted scenes, for years I’ve seen a still image of Tom Cruise as Lestat in the Paris scenes, in kind of half-burnt makeup, presumably from the final act. Were those scenes never found?

Jordan: They weren’t there; they weren’t found. I couldn’t find them, actually. But you’re right. There was some stuff of Tom when he came to Paris, but it wasn’t successful. That aspect of the character was not successful. So you’ve seen pictures of him in those scenes out there, yeah, have you?

Oh yeah, they’re on the internet if you know where to look.

Warner Bros.

Jordan: Yeah, I couldn’t find those scenes, actually. But I know we did shoot it. It was the less successful aspect of the Theater of Vampires portion, let’s put it that way. The most successful part was the stuff on stage, with Louis chopping up the bodies of those vampires with the scythe and all that sort of stuff. But I mean, I don’t know what Lestat was doing in Paris, actually.

So in the book, he goes looking for Louis and Claudia, trying to get them to go back home with him. And at the Theater, he’s the coven’s kind of star witness, proof that Louis and Claudia had attempted to kill their maker. It’s a tiny bit of a redemption for Lestat, because he’s kind of telling Louis that Armand’s coven is what he was trying to protect them from, and why he didn’t want them to go to Paris in the first place.

Jordan: But in the, in the story, in the novel basically, doesn’t Santiago accuse them of having killed the one who made them?

Warner Bros.

Yes, but then Lestat appears in Paris, and he tells Armand’s coven, “Yeah, they did try to kill me, but let them come home with me instead, and don’t kill them.” And then once they don’t need him as their star witness, they tell him to leave Paris.

Jordan: Oh, ok. I know why it’s not the finished film then.

The making of this film was the subject of so much press and scrutiny and drama, but you persevered and made your movie with the studio’s support. But in the social media age, where the voices of the fans are amplified through a megaphone, do you think the same would apply today?

Warner Bros.

Jordan: I mean, it was bad then, but it would be hell now, wouldn’t it? I mean, if you bothered to read it, if one were to read them. And you know, at the time it was Entertainment Weekly, it was all these magazines and stuff. And Anne Rice was very adept at talking to and dealing with the press. She liked her press life, she liked her public life. And she’d been trying to make the movie for a very long time, and she had her own opinions. But look, it was cool. She liked what we did in the end, so it was good.

When you were younger, you were a documentarian on the set of John Boorman’s Excalibur, which is another favorite movie of mine. That’s a film that takes something fantastical and mythological and kind of grounds it in a sort of realism. Did you learn key lessons on Excalibur that you applied to Interview?

Jordan: I just learned from watching John Boorman, a very great director, making this Arthurian fantasy in the Wicklow Hills, close to where I was in Dublin. I learned that if you have the resources, and you’re decided enough in your vision, you can do anything you want with film. You can achieve anything. And that was a great lesson to learn. John Boorman was basically my film school, you know, because there was no film school in Ireland when I grew up. And I couldn’t afford to go to one in London.

Warner Bros.

I know that after the success of Interview, you wrote a script for The Vampire Lestat, but Tom Cruise decided to pass on reprising the role. As far as I can tell, that script has never leaked online or anywhere. Can you tell us anything about it? Did it cover the whole book? Was Lestat a rock star? Anything you can tell us?

Jordan: OK, so I had a version of it on Final Draft that I can’t activate again. I was never in love with the idea of Lestat as a kind of David Lee Roth figure. So, no rock star persona, I was never in love with the image of him as a rock star. But when they asked me to write a script for The Vampire Lestat, I did go back. I really got fascinated with the whole thing, with Anne’s epic about how Lestat was turned into a vampire when working at the Commedia dell’arte in Paris, then taken by this strange man, and running from wolves. The script was mainly about Lestat’s 18th-century France experience. With some flash-forwards to Daniel Malloy being driven from New Orleans down to Los Angeles and stuff like that. As far as I remember. If you can find it online, let me know!

I don’t think the late, great Stan Winston gets enough credit for this movie. You hear about his work on Terminator and Jurassic Park a lot, but the practical effects are incredible in this movie, but they’re subtle and not very showy. Can you talk about working with Stan Winston on this a little?

Jordan: Yeah, Stan was desperate to get involved in this film. And he really wanted to realize what a vampire would look like. And it was great, really, because the work one normally does on one’s own film as a director- the imaginative part of the work, you do not do on your own. I was able to do all that with Stan Winston, who is one of the greatest effects people to ever have lived. The basic issue we explored was how to make these vampires real.

Warner Bros.

At the time, my son had just been born, and I became fascinated by the way the tiny veins showed on his forehead and face. So we decided to explore that aspect of things. So Stan would hang the cast upside down, and trace little blue lines along their veins, and that became the way we defined the makeup for our vampires, for Brad and for Tom and for Kirsten, and everybody really. It’s a terribly tiresome thing for an actor to have to do, but it was cool. Sam came into his own in the scene where Tom had his throat cut by little Kirsten. He built a whole set of different models for that, and it was really painstaking and very beautiful what he did.

It seems wild today that Kirsten Dunst was never nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Although she did get a Golden Globe nod. Of course, her career went great anyway, but do you think the critical and awards season bias against fantasy or horror has become better or worse since Interview came out?

Jordan: That is shocking, yeah, but maybe she was so young, I don’t know. I mean, since Interview came out, it seems there’s nothing but fantasy and horror now really. You know, it’s very difficult to find a realistic movie in the cinemas these days, isn’t it?

Warner Bros.

True, but when it comes to awards time, they almost entirely overlook performances in genre films. Even when that is what is successful at the box office.

Jordan: Oh, I know. To get an Oscar, you have to be playing “Dame Edna So and So” in Dying Days, coughing in an old folks’ home and shit, don’t you? (laughs).

Now that’s been out for a few years, I have to ask what you think of the Interview with the Vampire television series.

Jordan: I’ve seen two episodes of the TV series, but I haven’t seen much more than that, you know. But, you know, they’re free to take this story and spin it whichever way they want, aren’t they?  I mean, it’s a great book, a great set of books. And you know, it can endure a lot of spinning, right?

AMC Networks

Did you know that on the TV series, Louis has an assumed business name for mortal affairs, and it’s “Thomas Pitt?” It’s their fun little nod to the film version.

Jordan: Oh, I didn’t know that. (laughs). I didn’t know that.

The production design, the sets, the costumes- everything is impeccable in this movie, like, in a way you almost don’t see anymore.

Jordan: CGI was in its infancy, so everything that we shot, we had to build. Every effect you see had to happen in front of the camera, even Stan’s work with the crew with Tom Cruise (when he’s almost killed by Kirsten Dunst). But Tom becoming this shriveled-up thing had to happen in front of the camera. You know what I mean? I mean, with CGI the way it’s gone rampant now, that doesn’t happen anymore. So you’re in a world of weird geometry, and the eye is telling you that these things don’t exist because you know they can’t exist. It’s that kind of thing. But in the case of this film, we had to make it all real, you know?

Warner Bros.

What do you think the ultimate legacy of Interview with the Vampire is, not just on vampire films, but big-budget dark fantasy overall? What films that came out after do you see its fingerprints on?

Oh, I don’t know. When did Tim Burton make Sleepy Hollow? 1999? So, that arrived after Interview. Maybe. It was all a unique opportunity, let’s put it this way. You know, it was a very popular book. It was a total rethinking of what it meant to be a vampire. It was a historical epic that went from Louisiana in the 18th century to San Francisco in the late 20th century, to New Orleans, and back to Paris. So it was a unique opportunity to provide all the opulence and all the kind of splendor that one gets in a great period movie, but in a vampire film. That’s what I did with (cinematographer) Philippe Rousselot and with (production designer) Dante Ferritti, yeah. And ultimately, that’s what we did.

Interview with the Vampire arrives on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on September 22.

Eric Diaz is a staff writer at Nerdist and a Swiss Army knife of fandoms. Eric loves DC, Marvel, horror movies, and even Star Wars and Star Trek equally.

The post Neil Jordan on INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE’S Immortal Legacy appeared first on Nerdist.

ALT

Top 10 exciting job opportunities in Santa Cruz County – Apply today!

Are you searching for your next career move in Santa Cruz County? Look no further! We’ve curated a list of the top 10 job opportunities recently posted to our job board, spanning various industries and roles. Whether you’re a recent graduate, seasoned professional, or someone seeking a fresh start, Santa Cruz has something to offer for everyone.

1. Dining Cook at UC Santa Cruz
2. Utility Service Representative, Field at Scotts Valley Water District
3. Dining UCEN Chef de Cuisine at UC Santa Cruz
4. Preschool Teacher/Caregiver at Tiki Tykes Daycare
5. Housing Coordinator, Village, UTC and Delaware Apartments at UC Santa Cruz
6. Recording Services Supervisor The County of Santa Cruz
7. Early Education Teacher (Preschool) at UC Santa Cruz
8. Behavioral Support Specialist at BalanceSCC
9. Undergraduate Advisor at UC Santa Cruz
10. Senior Building Maintenance Worker – Warehouse at UC Santa Cruz

Why work in Santa Cruz County?

Santa Cruz County boasts a vibrant community, picturesque surroundings, and diverse career opportunities. From academic roles at UC Santa Cruz to impactful positions in healthcare and local government, the perfect place to support both your professional growth and work-life balance.

Ready to take the next step?

Apply for these exciting job opportunities in Santa Cruz County today!

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• List your open positions: Amplify your job listings to reach engaged Santa Cruz County job seekers – post your job today.
• Save with job bundles: Purchase a job board bundle of 4 or 8 listings and save 25%. Redeem your jobs anytime. Bundles never expire. Get Your Bundles Here.
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Questions about the job board? Reach out to Brittany at brittany@lookoutlocal.com.

The post 10 Hot Jobs in Santa Cruz County: Week of September 18 appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote a self-congratulatory essay Friday marking the publication’s 175th anniversary, but he ignored several instances of serious journalistic lapses that have had devastating impacts. While praising the Times for holding the powerful accountable and purportedly operating without favoritism, Sulzberger only made a glancing reference to the paper’s…

Source

The former CEO of Character.AI, which Disney previously sent a cease-and-desist letter to, will serve as the company's first-ever chief technology officer.

Smoke rises from the Vistra Corp. lithium battery energy storage facility at the Moss Landing power plant on Jan. 16 2025. (Nik Altenberg — Santa Cruz Local file)

Emergency resources in Monterey County

• Sign up for texts or emails on the Alert Monterey County website.
• View a map of affected areas, evacuation zones and road closure.
• Residents can reach out to Supervisor Glenn Church’s office with questions at 831-755-5022 or district2@countyofmonterey.gov.

MOSS LANDING >> Nineteen months after a battery facility at the Moss Landing power plant caught fire and burned for days, the facility once again ignited early Friday morning. 

The fire is on the north side of the facility, in “an existing structure that sustained significant damage” in the January 2025 fire, according to a Monterey County Sheriff’s Office press release. The batteries burning Friday were previously damaged and fire personnel were first dispatched shortly after 6 a.m. 

County officials expect the fire may burn itself out within 24 hours, according to the statement. The facility contains lithium batteries, which react explosively to water. Fire personnel have said they cannot do much to suppress the fire and must let it burn itself out.

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Last year, the fire sent massive plumes of smoke into the air and triggered evacuations. Many residents have complained of health effects related to smoke that may contain various hazardous substances but local, state and federal health officials have maintained that the levels released by the fire were not a threat to human health.

The Vistra Corp.-owned facility has been in the process of being cleaned up and decommissioned following the 2025 fire. 

“This is related to the cleanup. There has always been a concern that the cleanup could cause ignition of the remaining batteries as they are removed. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened,” Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church wrote in an email Friday morning. Church advised residents to stay indoors and said the smoke has so far been mostly drifting west towards the ocean.

A KSBW Action News 8 camera began live streaming the incident, and as of 10:45 a.m. Friday it showed a continuous stream of smoke rising from the facility, but no live flames. Watch the livestream on YouTube.

Highway 1 remained open as of 10:45 a.m. but motorists were asked to avoid the area. Dolan Road was closed as of 10:45 a.m.

Residents near the plant were advised to shelter in place. To reduce smoke exposure, keep windows closed, run an air filter, and wear a mask when outdoors. 

“The County of Monterey Department of Emergency Management is activated and coordinating with multiple local, state, and federal agencies,” the county press release stated. “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has air monitors operating in the area. Fire personnel are also using drones to assess conditions and gather information.”

To receive Monterey County emergency information, visit the Alert Monterey County website.

Questions or comments? Email info@santacruzlocal.org. Santa Cruz Local is supported by members, major donors, sponsors and grants for the general support of our newsroom. Our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support. Learn more about Santa Cruz Local and how we are funded.

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The post Watch live: Moss Landing battery facility reignites 1.5 years after fire appeared first on Santa Cruz Local.

Availability of Apple's iPhone 18 Pro series turned patchy within hours of its debut on India's quick-commerce apps.

Midterm-bound Republicans have opted to separate themselves from the president’s sinking ship, but MAGAworld isn’t letting them off so easily.

A spate of far-right influencers flamed Florida Representative María Elvira Salazar after her campaign aired an advert denouncing Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar said in the ad. “In July, 50 percent of the 50,000 people that were detained had no criminal record.”

“Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy,” she continued. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

Florida county commissioner Anthony Sabatini, a MAGA activist in his own right, wrote online that the White House should “deport her ASAP,” apparently forgetting that Salazar was born in Miami and is therefore a U.S. citizen.

Former Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino derided Salazar as “anti-American.”

“Republicans, which side are YOU on—the side of the taxpayer or the side of those who wish to destroy our republic? Now’s your shot at making a difference,” he posted on social media.

Christian Ziegler, a GOP strategist, argued that Salazar “shouldn’t be allowed back into the White House” due to the ad.

“No meetings with the President. No meetings with WH staff. No Oval Office. No Congressional picnic. No Christmas parties or Egg Rolls,” Ziegler commented, insinuating that only loyalist MAGA drones should be allowed to interact with the president.

“Salazar has put the President in a position where he has to pick between being impeached—or—helping a pro-amnesty Republican get elected,” Ziegler added.

Self-described proud Islamophobe Laura Loomer extended her ire for Salazar’s messaging towards the president’s entourage, rhetorically asking, “Which political genius who works for our President did the vetting on Salazar?”

“To be honest, it is hard not to feel black pilled by so many of the incompetent people who work for the President,” Loomer continued in a post on X, using a nihilistic metaphor that originated in the incel community. “They go out of their way to sabotage, gatekeep and they seem to love giving access and endorsements to horrible candidates who hate the President and don’t even support his policies. “

“They better hope Republicans show up this November or they will have made President Trump a lame duck President in his second term,” she wrote.

I grew up in a highly insular environment, never knowing—let alone interacting with—the outside world, in part due to my family’s history with war and struggle in Vietnam.

I can’t fully understand their experiences, but knowing the world often meant witnessing the violence of military personnel from France, Japan, the United States, and and other countries: they have told me stories of girls and young women covering themselves in mud to try to avoid rape by French soldiers during colonial rule, and people leaving Vietnam by sea in small boats in hope of a life beyond figuring out how to eat that day. My family understandably doesn’t talk about much of it now. Many may have felt like they could only manage to look after themselves and, if they’re lucky, immediate family members.

The result: a geopolitical history of trauma that reverberates with my own.

Music, movies, and television cracked my window a bit, and continue to serve as a way for me to try to peek into the experiences, feelings, and dreams others share with the world. Roger Ebert’s concept of a movie as a “machine that generates empathy” guided me into politics, and eventually to a job writing about it.

The noise rock and metal of the band Chat Pile is one of those bodies of art. Chat Pile makes art that pushes us to confront our world. The band’s 2022 single “Why” was a breakthrough, with the direct opening lyrics of “Why do people have to live outside / In the brutal heat or when it’s below freezing?” The band’s previous album, 2024’s Cool World, is an antiwar record—the track “Shame” decries the ongoing Gaza genocide and the shame of all wars.

Who Loves the Sun, Chat Pile’s latest album, came out Labor Day weekend. The cover art is a photo taken by bassist Stin of a charred building and a tent, with the 50-story corporate headquarters of the oil and gas producer Devon Energy—which is set to move out of Oklahoma City, where the band is from, to Houston, putting local jobs and the future of the building into question—looming in the background. The album challenges apathy to atrocity through tracks on climate change and labor struggle among imagery of vampires and masks.

Chat Pile’s closer suggests that in the event of human collapse, the natural world will continue, even if forever damaged.

The members of Chat Pile. From left to right: Cap’n Ron, Raygun Busch, Luther Manhole, StinSam Rockman

But we’re still here now, so I spoke to the band’s lead vocalist, Raygun Busch—who also loves movies—about how we can resist.

I’m curious if you saw that the Oklahoma City Council renewed its contract for Flock cameras, and that N’Kiyla Jasmine Thomas, a more progressive candidate, won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Oklahoma. 

The news about the Flock renewal happened while we were on tour. I am completely disappointed in our mayor, David Holt. If I have anything to do with it, he won’t be our mayor for long. I’d love to see him get voted the hell out of office forever. My good friend James Cooper on city council voted against it. He was one of the few.

Flock is so nakedly dystopian, scary, 1984. I can’t believe—I mean, I can believe that David Holt would be spineless and just mask off. He’s a fascist. He will go with the fascist people. He wants the totalitarian government that watches our every move, run by the billionaire class. He’s all in on that, and I’m not. I’m very against that. 

As for the primaries, shamefully, I need to lock in, engage with what’s going on. I’m sure whoever’s running Democrat won’t be left enough for me, but it doesn’t pay to be pessimistic. We’ll see what happens. We keep saying we can’t do much worse, and then we do a little bit worse.

I think your music makes an attempt to reckon with the political moment we’re in. How do you approach that?

I feel like in terms of art, not being political right now is insane. I can’t believe every band doesn’t have one political [song]. You don’t have to be like the Dead Kennedys, but even “99 Red Balloons” is about world politics.

[I’m] thinking about literacy rates and stuff like that. I don’t have children. I’m not involved in that kind of stuff. Personally, I don’t do enough. It’s hard to live your life and do everything. Got to try your best.

In terms of trying your best, every artist, top to bottom—especially bands at my level—should be talking about politics. Even if I don’t agree with their politics, there should be some reflection of the world we live in now. People need to open their eyes and react and say things.

It’s not like I’m going to write a song that’s going to change the world—that’s not what the point is. We need to all be talking about this stuff to initiate action and change. Clearly, the powers that be want us all to fight each other [but] we’re not each other’s enemies, even though we may disagree about something. We need to focus on these people that are fucking destroying the planet, sucking everybody dry of resources and wealth.

How did you get into framing politics as something you need to participate in, and has that changed over time to where you’re now making music about politics? I ask this because my pathway into politics was through art.

Absolutely, dude. I definitely grew up in a house where CNN and NPR are on all the time. So, in a way, I kind of resented politics. 

And if I’m trying to find common ground with my dad, it would be learning about stuff like that and watching movies like JFK—Oliver Stone, political intrigue, was like a big deal in our house for sure. My dad loved that Clint Eastwood movie In the Line of Fire. 

Aside from that, music for sure. Like Dead Kennedys, The Clash, Propagandhi was a new band. I’m 41, so Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes came out when I was in high school. In that time, Michael Moore was a huge deal, so I’m reading his books. I’m reading Crashing the Party by Ralph Nader. I’m pretending I’m reading A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn—getting into leftist politics.

Here’s what activated it completely: 9/11 happened. I’m 17. And then we invaded Iraq when I was 18. I was taking a bunch of history classes and I was like “I don’t want to fight in Iraq.” People were getting recruited at my school, and [they were] clearly preying on lower-class kids by giving free college and all this shit. 

What was getting into music in Oklahoma City like, and did it speak to the politics that you were seeing?

When I first moved here in 2004 [from Ponca City, Oklahoma], we had our own fake Godspeed You! Black Emperor band. They were called Radio Reception and they would go on full rants about like “fuck George Bush, fuck war, no blood for oil.” They were radical. It was cool. That was a normal thing. We lived in a bubble, but in the underground, it wasn’t a big deal to be political. We had a band called American Hate. There was even surface-level politics versus what I feel like is nothing now—it’s inscrutable.

We did our song “Why” [in 2022] where I was like: “I’m not going to be artistic with this at all. I’m going to be as blunt as possible, all the way to the back, no mistaking.” There’s no metaphor, analogy, no poetic coding on this. It was sort of a reaction to, if there are politics in music right now, I don’t hear them. I don’t have time to sift through poetry to find what you’re saying. I’d love to see it more while we still can. 

Are you always talking politically to a small group of people in the underground? Or to reckon with the political moment, are you engaging with other people who are not in, or oppose, that niche community—especially given how much you all have grown in popularity as a band?

I mean it is scary, the more you get perceived and stuff. I don’t know how well or how much I want to deal with it. Everyone will be a coward at some point in their life. Sometimes you run into people, and it’s like “All right, man, I’m not gonna sit here and argue with you.”

Sometimes I just don’t want to fucking sit and talk when it comes to face-to-face interaction like that, but at the same time, if I have a mic in my hand and I’m in a big room and I don’t say “free Palestine, free Yemen, free Sudan, fuck war, fuck genocide, fuck AI,” what kind of person am I? I’m afraid, of course, of being beaten up, but I feel like everybody top-to-bottom should be able to speak their mind. There’s been some major celebrities that have said things, which is great. 

Shout out to Dave Matthews, my king. 

If someone becomes interested in politics through music or anything else, what happens after that? How can we actively do something to help our communities? 

You’ve just got to do what you can. It’s like reading, studying, going to the gym: those who show up and do a little bit will always be ahead of the people who do nothing and never go, never do—even if that’s not enough.

We feel like we’re just so imprisoned by our phones—I am too. We’ve lost our sense of identity and just being in the world and recognizing the things around you. 

I need to do more, personally. What we do in our band, for instance, in a few weeks we’re going to do this benefit show [benefit show happened over the weekend] where we’re going to give all the proceeds to this identity-inclusive youth shelter called Sisu [in Oklahoma City]. So, it’s doing your best. 

Are you “raygun busch” on Letterboxd?

Is it Leprechaun? [The 1993 movie] Leprechaun is my icon.

Yeah, it’s the Leprechaun!

Google is refocusing its CC AI agent on household coordination, letting families share emails, schedules, and tasks so the AI can manage calendars, fill out forms, make shopping lists, plan meals, and more.

An aircraft equipped with Joby Aviation's autonomy technology flew across the United States without a human pilot taking control at any point.

Talk about your competitor getting through the door. Security researchers used Anthropic's Claude to help hack into OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts. A trio of bug hunters researching frontier AI labs’ security weaknesses chained two vulnerabilities to take over multiple OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts, then used that access to demonstrate they could reach an internal OpenAI repository by opening a harmless pull request. The entire timeline, from initial discovery to accessing OpenAI’s repo, took less than 72 hours and earned the researchers a $6,500 reward from OpenAI’s bug bounty program on Bugcrowd. “Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI’s own help forum (community.openai.com) could have had their ChatGPT and Codex accounts taken over,” Hacktron researchers Harsh Jaiswal, Mohan Pedhapati, and Rahul Maini said in a writeup about their research. “Since people can connect various services to Codex and ChatGPT, the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge, including GitHub, Slack and emails.” And, in a poetic twist, they used rival AI giant Anthropic’s Claude models to develop the exploit. Claude has shown a propensity to hack organizations without human guidance, as have OpenAI's models. The team gained initial entry on July 25 via OpenAI’s community forum. The forum runs on Discourse, which typically uses FastImage to perform image checks. However, since FastImage didn’t support HEIF files in the affected setup, HEIF images uploaded to Discourse passed through ImageMagick, which used libheif to process them before converting them to another image format. “That exposed the underlying libheif parser directly to attacker-controlled files,” the researchers wrote. Using Claude Opus 4.8, the trio found a heap buffer overflow flaw in the libheif library and attempted to use that model to develop a remote code execution (RCE) attack, but this didn’t work on Discourse’s default configuration. But then, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5. The bug hunters used the newer model to generate an exploit script, and achieved RCE on OpenAI’s instance. The trio “immediately” reported the vulnerability to OpenAI. “We then took over an OpenAI employee’s account, whose Codex was connected to OpenAI’s Github organization,” they wrote. “To demonstrate impact without actually accessing any internal code, we sent a prompt to this employee’s Codex account to open a PR for us in OpenAI’s internal monorepo. Then we stopped any further testing.” Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic responded to The Register’s requests for comment. OpenAI fixed the flaw within about 14 hours of the report’s submission, marked the issue as resolved, and paid the Hacktron team a $6,500 bounty. “To clarify the scope of that award: testing against the Discourse-hosted community.openai.com was explicitly excluded from our bug bounty program,” OpenAI said in a comment shared by Hacktron. “The award recognizes the OpenAI-side finding, not the actions against Discourse.” Discourse also issued a fix that added image-processing sandboxing, and published a security advisory GHSA-vhm9-85gw-x335 with patching and rebuild guidance. The entire hack took a few days for an AI agent and a few hours of human work. “Work that once required a well-resourced team and months of effort can now be compressed into days,” the researchers said. “Security assumptions must catch up with attacker capabilities.” ®

There’s been a “probable” measles exposure at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania—more devastating news for what has been the worst year for measles in the United States since the often fatal, highly contagious virus was declared eradicated in 2000.

The likely exposure occurred September 11, according to the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, and possibly impacted two Neonatal Intensive Care Units, an atrium, and the primary cafeteria.

“CHOP, the Pennsylvania Department of Health, and PDPH are working closely to ensure potentially exposed infants receive a preventative antibody product to prevent or lessen severe disease and to take steps to prevent the further spread of measles,” the city health department said in a Thursday statement.

This comes amid intense scrutiny of the job Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing, as calls for his resignation have grown alongside measles cases. There have also been reports of RFK Jr. disputing the number of cases, personally requesting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to remove two measles deaths from its tally earlier this month.

“Pennsylvania is experiencing the worst measles outbreak in the country. To date, we have 693 recorded cases of measles in 38 of our 67 counties. This disease was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000 — yet decades later, we are seeing it surge due to lower vaccination rates,” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote Tuesday on X. “This serious situation continues to be made worse by RFK Jr. playing games with public health and safety. It’s long past time for @SecKennedy to stop stoking vaccine skepticism and misinformation and compromising the serious mission of the nation’s public health agencies. It is also deeply concerning to learn that the Secretary personally intervened in an otherwise administrative process to direct the CDC to not report these Pennsylvania deaths, presumably because it doesn’t fit his phony narrative.”

Four Pennsylvanians have died of measles as of Wednesday: a 40-year-old unvaccinated woman, an 18-year-old unvaccinated teenager, and two infants. These were the first measles-related deaths in the state in 35 years.

The city health department does not expect vaccinated residents to be at risk.

A week after an Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning rattled the AI world, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei has outlined his plan to “pace the frontier” of AI development. The proposal leans on independent safety evaluators and coordination between AI labs in democratic countries, and it’s already picked up some industry support, along with some pointed pushback from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.  Watch […]

This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Hi, this is Right Now on The New Republic, and I’m the host, Perry Bacon. My guest right now is Ed Burmila. He’s an author of a book about the Democrats, and he writes a lot about public policy and politics. And I want to talk to him about what we’re seeing from the Democratic Party right now, of 2026, right before the midterms, and kind of where it has been and where it’s going. So Ed, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Ed Burmila: I really appreciate you having me, Perry, thanks.

Bacon: Sure. So you wrote a book that is not a new book, but is very influential of my—it has really shaped a lot of my thinking about the party. The book is called Chaotic Neutral. It came out in 2022. Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center. So to summarize a quite long book that I’m guessing took you a number of years to finish, talk about what chaotic neutral means.

Burmila: The core argument of the book is that the Democratic Party often tries to run on the concept of competence, and it tries to win voters over in the modern era with this professionalism, in the sense that they are going to be the better stewards of the system. Which I think can be a convincing argument.

If you look at what the Republican Party does when it has control, you can make a very cogent argument that the Democratic Party is in fact better suited to manage. However, it’s often not persuasive to the exact kind of voters that they seem to struggle to try to reach. So in other words, the people that they’re constantly fretting over, how can we win over these few moderate voters in the center, these independent voters who don’t seem to know what they want, they are the least likely to be persuaded by an argument that the Democratic Party should be in charge simply because they’re better at being in charge of things.

So in other words, there’s a lack of real heart and substance to what it is the Democratic Party believes. Voters often have a hard time putting their finger on exactly what it is this party believes, because very often the Democrats’ own argument is, “We are competent. Put us in charge. We will figure it all out.”

Bacon: So what’s the chaotic neutral part of this?

Burmila: The publisher picked the title. That wasn’t my title, to be honest about that. They thought it was short and punchy. I liked the sound of it. I was afraid that I would be answering questions about Dungeons & Dragons for the rest of my life if they went with that title, but here we are. I’m very happy with it.

But I think they were believing that it implied that the sort of inability or unwillingness of the Democratic Party to stake out firm positions on things was leading to uneven results, and I think that title works well.

Bacon: OK, so it’s running on competence, is what you said at the beginning, as opposed to firm conviction. And I think the argument you make in the book is that works when Republicans are in charge, because Republicans are incompetent when they govern, particularly like the Bush and Trump versions, where we can debate whether the first Bush and Reagan were incompetent, but the last two Republican presidents have been very incompetent when they’re in charge.

So running as, they are incompetent, we will be competent, is actually an argument that helps you win when they’re in charge, right?

Burmila: Yeah. I think the best recent example we see of that actually comes from the United Kingdom, where the Starmer government entered power on the tail end of 12 years of the Tories absolutely running the plane into the side of the mountain. And you can stand there, much as the Democratic Party is set up to do in this election.

The midterms this year are a classic example of an election where the Democratic Party really can smile, wave, and not say too much, and probably do pretty well. Because the sheer ineptitude and incompetence and evil of the current administration is going to do most of the work for them. The problem is, what happens after you have some semblance of power? What is the plan after that?

Bacon: And so what would you say about 2009 to 2017 and 2021 to 2024? I think it’s clear that when they’re out of power, the Democratic Party’s goal is to kind of say nothing and say, “We will govern better than them.” What is your assessment on the last two Democratic presidents? Are they governments that have done poorly, or are they incompetent? How do you view them?

Burmila: I think they’re in the unfortunate position of building winning coalitions that they can’t govern with. In 2006, Rahm Emanuel briefly became a hero, and unfortunately, because his brother is highly placed in the public relations and media industry, we still have to hear about Rahm Emanuel constantly. He became the genius responsible for 2006, in the same way that James Carville and Paul Begala became the geniuses responsible for 1992.

And Rahm Emanuel’s theory was, we need to nominate and find a lot of candidates who can win from the center, which they did. And then they found, when Barack Obama became president with a numerically impressive on paper majority, he couldn’t really govern, because you had this group of people who were convinced that they could preserve their own careers and extend their hold on tenuous seats by tacking toward the center, pushing back against the things Barack Obama stated were his key agenda items, things like that. It didn’t work. As we all know, most of those people were swept away in 2010 anyway.

So the effort to put together a coalition that can just get you over the line to a majority, and then you find you have a difficult time governing with it, is a problem that recurred again for President Biden when he had this small Senate majority with two people who simply weren’t going to go along with anything. So on the one hand, you can see a person like Chuck Schumer saying, “I did my job. I got us to 51.”

And there’s a cogent argument to be made in favor of that. However, if the 51 are not 51 people who are all willing to pull on the rope at the same time in the same direction, what have you really won with power? And more importantly, how long are you going to be able to hold onto it?

So the thing the Republican Party has done so much better of a job of doing in our lifetimes, you and I, is they get a group of people together who have a bare minimum that they can all agree on that is the central core of their agenda. For example, they always want to cut taxes.

So when that comes on the table, they can all grab the rope and pull at the same time in the same direction. The Democratic Party puts together these winning congressional coalitions that do the first task, which is to get the Republicans out of power, but can’t do the second task then, which is to govern in a way that’s going to convince people, “I like what I see from these people, and I want more of it.”

Bacon: So it’s interesting you define the ideology of the Obama, Clinton, Biden—let’s say, for now, I use the term moderate, center-left, establishment. I think you might use those terms in the book too. But I think the argument is, this is not an ideological wing as much as a competence. Is that the right way to think about this? It’s less that they have a vision of government that is neoliberal.

Is your argument that these ideological words for this wing are less helpful than maybe the sort of, we’re going to govern on doing things competently? Is that the better way to understand them?

Burmila: Yeah, whatever term you want to use, the core issue is that everything is on the table and everything is negotiable. You often hear the sort of center or establishment, whatever you want to call it—I’m not trying to come up with a term that sounds derogatory. The mainstream Democratic Party. Everything is negotiable. There seems to be nothing that they won’t put on the table and say, “Maybe we can meet you halfway on this.”

And in order to really grab the attention of the kinds of voters who aren’t already reliably voting—many people are obviously already loyally and reliably voting for Democratic candidates, you don’t need to worry about them so much, they’re going to be on board. In order to expand beyond that and win the kind of voters that they believe they need to get in order to win elections, I think you need to tell people in clearer terms, “Here are the things we stand for.”

But more to the point right now, I’m interested to discuss ideology with you, but I think the larger problem that the Democratic Party faces right now is the fact that around the world, including here in the United States, right-wing parties are unilaterally seceding from the agreement.

For a century plus, they’ve had an agreement to share stewardship and compete over stewardship of a system whose fundamental basis they were able to agree upon. And instead, now what we have are these far right parties saying, including the Republican Party, saying, We would rather be the sole owners of a broken system than continue to be shared stewards of a system that, on a basic fundamental level, we feel kind of works.

And they have seceded from the agreement, and the Democratic Party—it’s almost like a marriage. If one person decides, “I am no longer going to be party to this agreement we made,” the other person can’t really stop them from removing themselves from it. So we can talk about things the Democrats could or should stand for, Medicare for All, whatever issue you want to throw on the table and say, “This is the important issue.”

The bigger problem right now is that there is just this fundamental disconnect between the political world that the Democrats want to inhabit and the political universe that the Republicans do inhabit right now. And the idea of talking about getting a strong Republican Party or whatever is a backward-looking idea, that we’re going to go back to the consensus era.

And I’m not entirely positive that kind of backward-looking theory of what the political competition is going to look like is really going to be a useful one.

Bacon: The reason I asked about ideology was, I think thinking about the sort of mainstream Democratic Party as less being full of an ideology of neoliberalism or centrism, and more of a kind of nothingness, is probably more accurate. We are for everything is negotiable is actually a very useful way to think about it.

They would not agree with that, but I think this too is, on some level, an ideology of sort of, we’re trying to win and details are TBD. We want to win power. It’s actually a very interesting way to think about it.

Burmila: I recently saw an interview with Jamie Raskin, who is camera-forward. He’s a person they put on TV a lot because he does well at it. And it struck me in the course of three or four minutes—

Bacon: House Democrat, Maryland, just for people who don’t know.

Burmila: Jamie Raskin is somebody that they’re very comfortable with getting on camera, and he sounded good. Depending on which part of what he said you listened to, you found something that you liked. And it became apparent as I was listening to him talk for three to four minutes, it was a kind of word salad approach. Not that he was incoherent, but that his tactic was to throw everything out there and hope that every voter could find something.

So one minute he’s talking about how when the Democrats retake the House, they’re going to have these affordability panels or whatever. The country is slowly backsliding into fascism. That’s what people want, affordability panels, right? But on the other hand, then he threw some language in there to throw a bone to people like you or I, for example, about how they’re going to get tough and hold the Trump administration accountable and things like that.

And it generally creates the impression—on the one hand you could say this is smart electioneering. You give something to everybody. But ultimately, whenever you pay close attention to what these people are saying, you get to the end of the statement and you find yourself fundamentally wanting to know what is the core of what they believe. Which of those eight things you just threw at us are the things you’re actually going to do, and which are the things that you’re saying because you understand that it’s smart politics right now, in an election year?

Bacon: So your book was very prescient, because it comes out in 2022. It’s at a point where Biden is still somewhat popular. But you argued we’re in this continual cycle where Democrats win an election by being in the quote unquote center. They think they’re geniuses because they won the election. They’ve saluted the James Carvilles or the David Axelrods or whoever ran the campaign, and the candidate is a genius, and then they lose the election. And then the midterms happen.

And you predicted 2024, which is, the Democrats would think being in the center would be right, and then they were in the center, and they lost. And on some level I feel like it’s now following your script again. Republicans are in charge now, and Democrats can run on competence again. So is this how you feel like the patterns are just continuing?

Burmila: I felt when Biden won in 2020, the cynical part of me thought this is going to be an interregnum. We’re going to get four years of this, and then we’re going to go right back to Trump. Unless they’re willing to do whatever it takes to try to find ways to make important structural changes to the system, not just fiddling around on the margins or coming up with technocratic fixes or getting the perfect white paper.

Biden did good things when he was president. The Democratic Party did good things when Biden was president, and they had a congressional majority that allowed him to do things. The problem is, they are only now in 2026, when it’s theoretically too late, the damage has already started to accrue—now they’re coming around to, oh, maybe we need to do something about the federal courts. Maybe Congress was explicitly given a constitutional power to alter the makeup and the composition of the federal court.

Bacon: Like Clyburn coming out for—

Burmila: People like you and I were screaming that 12 years ago.

Bacon: Clyburn coming out for more judges in 2026 is very frustrating.

Burmila: Very frustrating, yeah. And they’re talking about things like statehood for the District of Columbia, and although the political situation in Puerto Rico is much more complicated, if they want it, statehood for Puerto Rico. Those are things that people were telling them, and you were being dismissed with a kind of hand wave and a, “Go away, little child. Everybody wants a pony.” This kind of condescending talk.

And now all of a sudden they’re realizing, wait a minute, these are changes that need to be made. And they are. The problem is, we’ve waited until the rainstorm has started, and now we’re going up and trying to fix the hole on the roof. The time to fix the hole on the roof was when the weather was dry.

And they have their own rationale for why they couldn’t do things. Manchin and Sinema stopped all of our efforts in the Senate and everything. The question is, Kyrsten Sinema was handpicked by Chuck Schumer for that race in 2018. He said, This is the person. This is going to be the future of the Democratic Party. And the party itself and its voters, its primary voters, have to get better at spotting these kinds of charlatans who aren’t going to stand for or believe in it.

I’m the happiest person in the world that Graham Platner imploded as a candidate, because that was a guy who just screamed from miles away, I believe in nothing. Nothing I say means anything, and the second I get in office, I’m just going to be this self-aggrandizing, power-hungry—the term online, slopulist, kind of slop populism. That’s what you get out of these people, and then they get into office and look what you get from them.

And I think voters are starting to get better, a little bit too late, at spotting that kind of charlatan.

Bacon: Because if you ask the Biden people now, they will claim, We agreed with you on structural reforms. We didn’t have the votes for it. But if you look back at how they actually behaved in 2021, it was clear that they believed, If we govern from the center and we build railroads, then the working class will come.

They believed all the James Carville, Rahm Emanuel stuff, and they didn’t prioritize structural reform because they are stuck in the thing you were describing, this sort of, We will govern competently and inherit the earth.

Burmila: I hate resorting to sporting analogies, but you put together a soccer team and one of your 11 players is occasionally going to try to help the other team score. You put together a team where everybody is not advancing the ball toward the same goal, literally and figuratively in that metaphor. But the idea that, OK, we have this 51-person Senate majority, or whatever the majority happens to be, but hey, a couple of these people are going to stab us in the back at the first possible opportunity. My question is, what is the real point of putting together a winning coalition like that?

Yes, you press the pause button on the Republicans feeding the country into a wood chipper. That’s positive, undeniably. I can see the value in that. The problem is, if you can’t govern with the coalition you get victory out of, it’s not going to be in power for long. So if your sole goal is slap together whatever coalition can get us into power, that’s always going to be chasing the carrot on the stick. You’re never really going to get it, because every time you get into power with a coalition like that, you’re going to fail to govern effectively enough to keep power.

Bacon: So we’re in the middle of an election cycle, and I just finished interviewing somebody about transgender rights. We were talking about the Josh Tureks and the Talaricos, their comments about transgender athletes and distancing themselves from the trans movement in a certain sense. But my sense is that the party may have learned this too late—my sense is Talarico is actually not the Joe Manchin, Sinema type, that he’s pretending.

He’s read all the bad advice about seeming heterodox and all this stuff that allegedly gets you elected. I’m skeptical, but I don’t think he’s actually going to—I think most of the people they have running for office in swing states, Roy Cooper, Mary Peltola in Alaska—I do think most of the people running—

I’m not sure. This is an interesting question. Do you think they’ve again recruited a bunch of people, potential senators, who are going to vote against core ideas, or do you think they’re better on this front?

Burmila: I believe that they’re shaping up in this midterm to do well. I think they’ve nominated—or the voters have nominated and the party has supported—a pretty good crop of candidates. The question I keep asking whenever people circle around to this particular issue is, how much of governing over the next two years is going to be specifically focused to the issue of transgender kids playing school sports?

Bacon: Let me stop—what I meant was on the Supreme Court and all the—I guess what I’m saying is, the people they’ve recruited are doing a little triangulation on the trail right now, particularly on transgender rights. But do you think that Roy Cooper or Talarico will vote for structural reforms in 2029 in a way that Sinema or Manchin were definitely not?

You talked about how 2009, 2021 featured these kinds of congresses full of people who didn’t agree with the core agenda. It feels like these people—Talarico may be pretending to be moderate, but has pretty similar views to you and I, and will actually do most of the things in government we need. Do you agree with that?

Burmila: I would. And we’re not going to know until we see it in action. But the point I was making is, if they hold positions that are controversial or unacceptable to a lot of voters on that one specific issue, I don’t think it necessarily negates the whole package.

The problem that the Democratic Party is facing right now is that they’ve become, in essence—when one party starts moving in an authoritarian direction, the opposition party inevitably becomes a kind of catchall for opposition that doesn’t necessarily agree a lot on specific issues. And their agreement might not be there on what to do with a particular issue in higher education or whatever, or these transgender political issues when they come up.

If they can agree on the core concept that the Republicans have broken the system, they’ve seceded from the agreement that we’ve governed this country with for quite some time—if we can get everyone pulling in the same direction on those issues, I think that is the best thing that they can hope for going forward. They’re always going to squabble internally about specific individual issues.

There have to be some core things related to righting the wrongs of the Trump administration, reining in this imperial presidency, reining in these courts which have decided to sign off on the fact that the legislative branch is effectively vestigial at this point. If we can get all of the candidates pulling in the same direction on those issues—and I do believe that even these more moderate presenting candidates that they’re running right now seem to get it on those issues. Talarico seems like he understands that.

We never know until they’re in office. We’ll see how they behave once they’re there, if they are elected. But there seems to be a sea change, and people are understanding what the Trump administration is, and they’re starting to see what the core of the problem is, in a way that, unfortunately, I think the leadership seem to be the last people to be getting on board with it. But we can talk about the leadership separately if you’d like to.

Bacon: Because I think that’s the core issue you’re making me think about. That’s what we have to hope for: if we want to see the fascism stopped or reduced, we have to hope the Democrats win a trifecta, and then the members there have to pass some structural reform—Supreme Court, filibuster, all these things that are only going to be passed with 51 votes. And that’s the key thing.

We know Manchin and Sinema would not do that, and the mistake was recruiting people who were so independent, but who really were tied to nothing. Roy Cooper has been the Democratic governor and the Democratic attorney general, and is a fairly partisan Democratic person. You would think that he’s different, and that’s what I’m getting at. Sherrod Brown. It feels like the people who are being recruited were not likely to have the exact same thing.

So I guess there are two issues. One is, are they recruiting different people than before? Is one question. The second question would be, both Obama and Biden, particularly Biden, despite the obvious need for structural reform, focused on these sort of economic issues, on this code that you will win the working class if you do this.

My biggest worry right now is that if the Democrats won a trifecta, they would spend nine months on some kind of affordability bill. They would pretend as if housing costs in Louisville, North Carolina, Houston, Idaho, and New York City are all the same problem.

To me, this sort of focus on affordability—because some things are unaffordable, there are different things unaffordable in different places that require different solutions. And spending nine months on an omnibus affordability bill will win very few votes and take away all the time from structural reform. That’s my biggest concern right now. How do you feel about that?

Burmila: I think we’ve had enough experiences of seeing that happen that we’re both justified in being skeptical. We can’t prejudge anything. My personal belief is that a lot of what happens in those scenarios—it’s called leadership for a reason. People take their lead from what the people who are in the leadership positions are going to do. If you have people who are telling the members of Congress, telling the people in their caucus and their coalition, “We need to do this. What do we need to do to get you on board with it?”

That’s not going to be successful in 100 percent of cases. You’re going to have people, and Sinema was a good example of someone who just wasn’t going to be satisfied no matter what she was offered, because she defined herself as somebody whose job was to be against the party and be different, right? Oh, look how independent am I. I’m gumming up the works. Doesn’t that present me as intellectually interesting? It doesn’t, but that’s the kind of persona she was trying to fill.

We’ll have to see moving forward. I fear that with the leadership that’s still in place, their tendency is always going to be to revert to what they know, which is, “Let’s do some focus groups in Central Pennsylvania. Let’s see what words they throw out about gas prices, and then we’ll—” How long after the 2024 election were they talking about egg prices?

Because some focus group that they did after the election in 2024 said, “Say egg prices a lot.” And by the end of 2025, we have effectively right-wing death squads roaming around major cities killing people, and we have these people going on camera and going on their social media accounts and talking about, Donald Trump promised to bring down the egg prices, and he didn’t. It’s just disconnected from reality. But the nature of people in elite positions is that they are disconnected from reality. So unfortunately, it’s a lagging indicator.

And I fear the same thing you fear, that they’ll waste the first year doing these kinds of consensus respectability politics that people are used to from their formative political experiences. I do hope that this new generation of people that’s attempting to enter Democratic politics at the national level will be able to start moving the needle a little bit.

The problem is, when we start talking about incremental progress toward the Democratic Party getting—the clock is ticking. The clock has been ticking for quite some time. We are now at a crisis point where the bad things that could happen are no longer hypotheticals. We’re seeing them. You and I don’t feel right now, because we’re sitting in our homes and pleasantly conversing, like we’re living in a crisis, but politically, we are living through a crisis point right now.

And the longer it takes to get that message through to them, for them to truly understand—the past is not coming back. We’re not dialing back the clock to 2009 and having the ideal sort of politics where the Democrats want the highest tax rate to be 38 percent and the Republicans want it to be 34 percent. They’re set up constitutionally, their personality is set up to have those kinds of debates, but you can’t force it.

One party has unilaterally abrogated that kind of politics. They’ve withdrawn from the agreement. They want sole control over the machine, and they don’t care how much damage they do to it in the process of wresting control of it from the other party. And until the Democrats realize that’s where we are right now, they’re not going to make forward progress.

Bacon: So let me finish, and it’s going to take a little bit to go. You keep talking about elites in the party, and I think that matters a lot. I want to talk about four different groups of elites in the party and what they’re doing.

And I want to talk about, we are in a democratic emergency, and I want you to describe, with these four groups, do they really appreciate this, and are they willing to act on it aggressively? Let’s start with Jeffries and Schumer. Put them together. Do you think they understand this and they are prepared to act?

Burmila: I think we need a leadership change. I think you need people who have a greater sense of urgency, and people who have a clearer sense that when you tell voters Donald Trump is the Antichrist in order to try to win their vote, you can’t then get into power and say, The Antichrist and I are working together to see where we have some common ground.

That’s the basic illogic of that position, is that they’re using Trump justifiably and in a way that’s intellectually defensible as a boogeyman. But then there’s this sense they can’t avoid reverting to where you try to find some issues or some bill or something where you and the boogeyman can bang out an agreement. And fundamentally, I don’t think that makes any sense. There needs to be, at some point, a change toward leadership who are more aggressive.

Bacon: 2028 candidates. I’m going to call it the mainstream bloc. These are different people, but Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear. I know people will say their favorite among those people are different, but let’s call them the mainstream Democratic candidates for now. Do they understand the urgency we’re in? Are they up to taking it on?

Burmila: I think there’s a strong potential they can be swayed that way, because what you’re describing are people whose political instincts are to put their finger up in the air and see which way the wind is blowing. And given enough time and exposure to the wind, I think people like that, they like to be front-runners politically. They’re all driven by their perception of what they believe voters want.

So I believe if they’re not there, they can be convinced. If enough of the wave starts moving in one direction, those are not people who are going to stand up and try to part the sea around them. They’ll go along with it.

Bacon: AOC and Ro Khanna. These are people who are progressive, so in theory, they could be open to the democratic emergency. But what I see from AOC particularly is this sort of Zohran one, by talking about class issues. There’s parts of the Bernie Sanders agenda that I like, but this whole idea of Bernie 2016 is this focus on affordability, and we can afford stuff.

And you would end up not taking on the democracy stuff, because you would be convinced, if only we passed a big enough economic plan, people in West Virginia would vote for us, and that’s not going to happen. So do you see—are Ro Khanna and AOC, while being for transformative policy, are they so economic fixated only that they also will not rise to the challenge?

Burmila: I think what happens with candidates like those is we’re conflating long-term and short-term party building. The economic policy ideas they present are an effective long-term party building idea. You don’t change partisanship and party attachment overnight. These voters who’ve become attached to the Republicans since the late 1980s are not going to change their views because they get one economic stimulus bill out of the Democrats or some job creation program. That will take time.

So I believe the economic focus that office holders like the people you just named have is appropriate, but it’s not going to produce quick results. I don’t hear anything from that group of people that suggests to me that they reject the idea that structural change is needed. I could see someone like the people you named standing there and saying, We need Medicare for All, but I can’t see them simultaneously saying, Oh, and by the way, I’m opposed to DC statehood. Anything’s possible. That’s not my read on that group of people.

Bacon: Finally, it was weird in 2025 that Ezra Klein spent the first three months talking about California’s housing costs and how Texas was better, while democracy was being destroyed. And it was weird that he felt the need to praise Charlie Kirk’s politics in the middle of 2025. Or Charlie Kirk’s effectiveness, or whatever that column was about.

The elites in the media, particularly, let’s say The Atlantic, The New York Times, these sort of center-left media elites who spent a lot of 2025 attacking the left for whatever, identity politics, as opposed to looking at the threat of Trump, and also appreciating the 2024 election. Kamala Harris ran the way they said she should run in 2024. Actually, she lost because of inflation, anti-incumbency.

So the instincts of the elite media—because the Democratic congressmen, Democratic leaders, Democratic voters do follow them. So if the elites on Bulwark, MSNBC, The Atlantic, the NYT are saying, No, Democrats cannot be for structural reform because that’ll cause some huge backlash, and use the electability code and so on, that will also stop transformational change, particularly on these democracy issues. So can these media elites be convinced we are in a democratic emergency? Or can they at least stop being a barrier to it?

Burmila: The question is how much of a barrier they are. That’s up to the office holders themselves. If we have Democratic candidates and elected officials who see that somebody telling me that I need to do X and Y runs contrary to the reality that I’m doing the opposite of X and Y, and my voters are responding to it—that’s how you’ll break that cycle. Elite media exists to speak to elites.

Ezra Klein is not writing his column for the kind of proverbial person in a diner that he’s always talking about to read. He’s writing that column in order to reach people who are working on Capitol Hill, who have high-ranking positions at think tanks and things like that. He has an audience, and he knows what it is. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party can’t extend its remit to fixing the media as well.

You’re always going to have this kind of chattering class of people whose job it is to try to figure out what’s going to sound good but also advance their own careers, and those two things are often different. I don’t want to call out anybody by name or pick on any individual person.

There is a connection between going towards the consensus politics of the type you mentioned before, writing praiseworthy columns about Charlie Kirk or what a great guy he was or whatever, and perceived legitimacy and career success in that field. I don’t begrudge people that, but it’s certainly not something that any self-respecting elected official should be looking at as a legitimate barometer.

You and I, of course, are both in a similar position. We are in a media environment now where every individual has to carve out their own niche and try to build their audience and everything. That’s what the statements these people make are aimed toward. They’re not aimed toward good public policy and good politics.

They’re aimed toward, what will people continue to pay me to want to hear and respond to and find interesting. So I certainly hope that the Democratic Party doesn’t, in any future scenario, find itself responsible for leading those people in the right direction.

Bacon: I meant only as a barrier. Only because Biden read David Brooks, and Obama read David Brooks, and this sort of centrism of Obama and Biden seemed to be influenced by this sort of David Brooksy view that if we compromise in the middle and come together and so on.

When I read your book, I thought there was almost a mind meld at times between the sort of centrist wing of the Democratic Party and the centrist wing of the media, and that’s what I was getting at, is, is that a barrier? Your point is the politicians ultimately decide things, not the journalists. That’s true.

Burmila: Yeah. If you don’t have the strength of your own convictions as an elected official to worry about making Matt Yglesias mad—no offense to Matt—but that’s not your primary goal when you’re a senator. That’s not the thing you need to be worrying about, or it shouldn’t be the thing that you’re worrying about. You’re going to have to be able to accept that kind of criticism.

If you can’t accept the criticism of a columnist saying that your ideas are too radical, how can you accept going out on the campaign trail or facing your constituents and dealing with their anger and their difficulties and their issues that they want to see addressed? You need a thick enough skin that you’re not terribly concerned what these—you and I read The Atlantic. How many people are really reading The Atlantic? No offense to The Atlantic. My point is, it’s driving elite discourse. It’s not driving real world politics.

Bacon: OK. All right. That’s a great place to end on. Anything else you want to say about where we’re in this place where the Democrats are about to win the election? I guess that’s my worry. That’s why I wanted to have you on. It feels like the Democrats are about to win an election by a lot, and it is going to make Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer look very competent. And maybe in terms of election winning, they might be.

But I worry they are about to make the same—I worry they’ve not internalized some of the mistakes of Clinton, Obama, Biden. That’s my worry, is they’re replaying that playbook, and they will win the election, not because they’ve done anything right, but because the party out of power wins the midterms when you have a terrible president.

Burmila: Yeah. One thing the Republican Party has done a better job of doing in our lifetimes is putting its head down and saying, “We lost this election. Keep doing the same thing, but harder, we’ll win the next one.” And the Democratic Party, in contrast, tends to over-interpret defeat and victory. They over-interpret victory.

We’re still hearing about James Carville 30 years after he won one election where there was a field of many candidates and a desperately unpopular incumbent Republican. I’m very happy for him and proud of his success or whatever, but why are we still talking about him? Why do we still hear about him at all?

The point is, there’s this over-interpretation of victory, where every time they win, they see it as a total justification of whatever they did in that election, and there’s no willingness to stand back a little bit and say, Hey, did we win this one just because Trump’s kind of salting the earth behind him as he destroys the country? Which is the correct interpretation.

And again, to go back to the analogy of what we saw in the United Kingdom with the Starmer government, they won an election that they couldn’t help but win. They couldn’t help it. And then just governed themselves into irrelevance, because they didn’t stop and think, OK, we got lucky here. We got a big assist from the Tories crashing the bus and giving us an opportunity to take over. What constructive things can we do with it? Rather than just patting themselves on the back and saying, See, we were right. I knew this would win. If we just gave them centrism hard enough, eventually they’d come around to it.

There’s multiple reasons you can win an election. Some of them don’t have anything to do with what the strategists told you to do in that given election.

Bacon: Are you watching what’s happening in Britain now, because you’ve referred to that twice? I worry that Burnham is doing the same policies as Starmer with slightly better messaging. I guess what I’m getting at is, it would be—if Starmer were the British prime minister in 2028 and ‘29, that would’ve been helpful for us, the living example of the sort of popularism, David Shor politics melting down in Britain and being completely ineffective would’ve been helpful to tell Pete Buttigieg or Shapiro, “Don’t do that.”

I worry that Burnham is slightly smarter, and therefore no one will be as unpopular as Starmer was. Is Burnham doing the same thing slightly better, and therefore will make it hard for us to make the same critique?

Burmila: You may be correct that he’s doing the same thing slightly better, but it’s an interregnum. And if they don’t manage to do something constructive other than pander toward far right policies and try to give people 10 percent of the racism they want, the far right will be back in power in there before long. And the same dynamic plays out here.

If the Democrats get back in power, or get some portion of power back, and they don’t act as aggressively as the system will allow them to do something to assert themselves, they won’t be in power long. And we’ll keep dealing with these one step forward, three step back dynamics, where whenever the center left is able to take power, it doesn’t hold onto it for very long, because it’s unwilling to face the reality of what the new political dynamic looks like.

Bacon: And what would a center left that—because you made the point abroad too—what would a center left that looks at the realities of politics be doing? If you were giving Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and President Shapiro advice in 2029, what would you say?

Burmila: I would tell them that none of their policy ideas, that maybe economic policy or social policy needs to be moved back toward the center, are relevant until they fix what’s structurally broken in the system. Because if you gave them a magic wand and said, “Go ahead and make any change you want,” the change will be undone when you lose power in a couple of years, because people see you as spinning your wheels, paddling water, whatever metaphor you want to use, that you’re not actually advancing an agenda, you’re not fixing what’s broken in the system, and you’re not taking away the tools the Republicans are going to use to undo any positive change you can think of to make right now.

Bacon: So the agenda shouldn’t be affordability, it should be X. What are the four or five things they should do?

Burmila: We are out of the sort of normal politics where they’re debating what the best economic policy is. We need court reform badly. We needed court reform 15 or 20 years ago. What that court reform can look like is obviously going to be an issue for debate. They need to, as the Republican Party did in the late 19th century to break the conservative Democratic stronghold on the Senate, we need to expand statehood and try to reform the Senate that way, to the extent that political reality allows.

Obviously, we can’t add like eight new states like they did in the 1880s. But things like that. They need to do something other than pass more laws, or create more rules, that the Republicans will simply ignore when they get back in power.

They need to create a reality in which the kind of rules that the Democrats and liberals want to be in place will mean something. And if you don’t have that reality in place, where the rules you create to constrain the presidency, for example, mean something, you might as well not be creating them.

Because the core of the kind of Hakeem Jeffries Democrat strategy is, We will make these changes and then just stay in power forever. Their plan to reform the federal courts as recently as a couple years ago is, We’ll just win every election from now on. And that strategy worked for zero elections. Zero elections. It lost the very first one.

So the idea that you can reform the system by simply always holding power is not realistic in a two-party system, and I’ve been screaming this for 20 years. You’re going to lose some elections in a two-party system, no matter how competently you govern. It’s going to happen. And if the other party is simply going to pull the string and unravel everything you did while you were in power, then you’re never going to be able to make this workable as a system of governing or as a system of change.

Bacon: Ed Burmila—I recommend, it’s four years old, but I think people should read Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center. It’s a great book, and it’s a great book if you’re following politics right now, because it’ll give you a sense of, these are the patterns that Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton followed. These are mistakes that keep being made. You are watching the same thing happening over and over again. It’s not in your head.

We are seeing the same patterns again, and it’s crucial we spend the next two years—whether you’re progressive or a centrist, I think the key thing is to push the Democratic Party to stop listening to the Axelrods and the Carvilles and the people who’ve made the same mistakes. I’m not sure who the new consultants are, but I just think the key thing is, if someone has been saying, I should be listened to because I’ve been there before, stop listening to them, because those people have got us where we are now.

I’m not saying that David Axelrod and James Carville caused fascism. I am saying their strategies to prevent fascism have not worked, and it’s worth listening to other people.

Burmila: I could not agree more. You don’t want to be taking your lead about how to get out of trouble from the people who were steering the ship when you got into trouble in the first place. You might want to consider at some point that maybe we need a different strategy. Maybe it’s time to try something else other than promising people affordability panels and thinking that this imaginary centrist voter we’ve created in our minds—in Chuck Schumer’s case, literally—is going to clap and applaud and love to vote for this. So couldn’t agree more.

Bacon: Ed, good to see you. Thanks for joining me.

Burmila: Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

While we’re all following President Donald Trump’s attempt to defile the Kennedy Center with his gross name and taste, and to tear it down if he can’t, he’s set his sights on another building entirely—the headquarters for the United States Institute of Peace. You are forgiven if you’ve forgotten all about USIP, one of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s earliest targets.

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Roadkill, anyone? RFK Jr. launches a cooking show.

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North Korea's employment scams work both ways. As well as placing fraudulent IT workers inside Western companies, regime-backed cybercriminals have posed as recruiters to infect more than 30,000 devices and steal over $10 million, according to an international advisory. Law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies from Australia, Germany, Japan, and the US issued an update on the campaign on Thursday. They said the attackers had compromised more than 7,000 cryptocurrency wallets and stolen funds that ultimately supported the North Korean regime. The agencies track the activity collectively as WaterPlum. Its operators target web designers, engineers, and cryptocurrency and Web3 specialists with bogus recruitment approaches. During the supposed interview process, victims are instructed to download files presented as coding assignments or other recruitment tests. Opening them backdoors the applicants' computers and installs malware. Once inside, the attackers deploy remote access trojans (RATs) and information stealers, giving them persistent access to credentials and other sensitive data long after the fake interview ends. In some cases, the compromised machines may later provide a route into corporate systems when the jobseekers secure legitimate employment. WaterPlum operators use that access to steal intellectual property, credentials, clipboard contents, keystrokes, cryptocurrency wallet data, and identity documents that can support further impersonation. "Stolen IDs can be used by North Korean IT workers to impersonate victims and generate foreign currency," the advisory [PDF] said. "Stolen credentials may be leveraged to exfiltrate crypto assets, personal data, trade secrets, etc., from victims' employers, clients, or contracting parties. The actors can also use stolen sensitive information for extortion." The agencies attributed at least $10.71 million in thefts to these tactics, with the proceeds funneled to Pyongyang. The recruiter campaign complements North Korea's better-known tactic of placing its own IT workers in technology roles at Western and allied companies. The scheme has been extensively documented and has generated revenue for North Korea for years. Researchers estimate that roughly 100,000 North Korean IT workers are employed or seeking work worldwide. Some are supported by accomplices operating laptop farms, which make remote workers appear to be based in the country where they were hired. The workers collect salaries from companies in countries that impose heavy sanctions on North Korea, with much of the money surrendered to the state. The sprawling IT worker fraud is thought to net Kim Jong Un's regime upwards of $500 million a year. The scale of the operation means some applicants inevitably succeed, although employers are becoming more familiar with signs of fraudulent North Korean candidates. Applicants often submit impressive resumes claiming prestigious educational backgrounds, extensive work experience, and language skills that may not withstand scrutiny during an interview. Other warning signs include repeated refusals to meet in person, suspicious interruptions to video feeds, voices in the background, and requests for payment in cryptocurrency. Fraudulent workers may also use AI face-swapping software, which can produce visual artifacts during video calls and prompt them to disable their cameras shortly after an interview or meeting begins. The agencies recommend that any organization suspecting it has engaged a fraudulent North Korean IT worker launch a full forensic investigation and assume that credentials and other sensitive data have been compromised. ®

The Department of Education can’t cut funding to teacher training programs that the Trump administration thinks promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, a federal court ruled Thursday. 

U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley said that the administration’s 2025 decision to slash $600 million in grants from the Teacher Quality Partnership and Supporting Effective Educator Development program were “arbitrary and capricious,” saying the Education Department can’t even define the criteria for what makes a program “DEI.” 

“Rather than confining the Directive to actions that are traditionally understood to constitute discrimination, the record instead reflects that Defendants terminated grants with topics such as ‘acknowledging … racism’ and ‘anti-racism’—activities expressly undertaken to oppose discrimination,” Kelley wrote in her ruling, adding that the move would also hurt teacher preparation.

The cuts were halted by a federal court last year after Democratic-led states sued, but the Supreme Court allowed them to go ahead while a final decision was pending.

The policy was part of the administration’s early attacks on DEI, which President Trump’s appointees, including Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, have been fully supporting. During her confirmation hearings, McMahon tried to dodge questions about the classes schools would be allowed to teach under her reign, including those about African American history. 

There’s also the fact that Trump promised to end the Education Department during his 2024 presidential campaign.  After an executive order to dismantle the department was struck down in court, he pivoted to gutting the department with a mass layoff of career employees. For now, though, the department is still around, at least in name, and teacher training has survived in the short term. 

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.

Democrats in recent years win elections based on hatred of the incumbent Republican president but then quickly lose power once in office. Author Ed Burmila argues these defeats are in part because Democrats are addicted to a safe, milquetoast approach of casting themselves as centrist and competent, instead of pushing a core set of values and policies. Voters punish Republicans for governing poorly but don’t reward Democrats for being more effective, in part because Democratic governing often doesn’t improve their lives much, according to Burmila. His book Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lose Their Soul in the Center explains these troubling patterns. In the latest edition of Right Now, Burmila urges Democrats not to interpret their likely victory in 2026 and potentially 2028 as a mandate for a bland agenda once in office. 2029, if Democrats have a trifecta, must be a time for transformative reforms of the court system and other institutions to stop our fascist far right from gaining even more power.