NHS England rapped over inaccurate Palantir patient data disclosure
The Rapid Rise of Right-Wing Militias
A photo went viral on Independence Day this year. It showed a Black woman on a Metro train in Washington, DC, surrounded by members of Patriot Front, a far-right white nationalist group. The picture, taken on America’s 250th anniversary, seemed to encapsulate not only the continuing story of race in America, but also this current moment when right-wing groups seem louder, prouder, and more public than they’ve been in decades.
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Mary McCord has been working to prosecute groups like Patriot Front for years. Following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor successfully won a consent decree that banned the rally’s lead organizer from planning future paramilitary activity in the city. Still, McCord says right-wing militias are benefiting from a friendly administration that has stretched back to Donald Trump’s earliest days campaigning for the presidency.
The president is “aligned with them, whether he believes in white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or not,” McCord says, referring to far-right groups. “That permission that he started giving back in 2016 and 2017 is just even greater permission now.”
On this week’s More To The Story, McCord sits down with host Al Letson to talk about Patriot Front’s origins, a decade of growing white nationalism in America, and the troubling direction of the US Department of Justice under the Trump administration.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
The New Red Scare Is Here—and It’s Dumber Than Ever
For more than a decade, the biggest story in America has been Donald Trump, and for good reason. A real estate conman and reality TV star somehow, despite being a racist, sexist, narcissistic, juvenile, and just plain stupid man, became president of the United States. And then he did it again—after a failed coup, no less. In the process, he fitfully but ruthlessly took over one of the country’s two major parties and remade it in his own authoritarian image. Then he set about doing the same to the country as a whole. The Republican Party is now a cult of personality, and America is a plutocratic paradise governed by the president’s whims.
That is still very much the biggest story in the country. The president is waging two destructive wars—a literal one in the Middle East, and an economic one pretty much everywhere else—while jailing political opponents, detaining and deporting hundreds of thousands of people, attempting to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections, and musing—maybe joking, maybe not—about running for an unconstitutional third term.
But for Axios founders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, that’s old news—a status quo that no longer raises alarm among the Beltway punditry. There’s a new political threat brewing in America, and it’s just as frightening as Trump: There are reds under Democratic beds. The democratic socialists have arrived, and they’re the left’s equivalent of MAGA. And the Democratic establishment may well succumb to these unhinged insurgents, just like the Republicans before them.
In the newest iteration of their “Behind the Curtain” column, which is ostensibly devoted to big trends in politics and economics, Allen and VandeHei warn about what may be in store for the Democratic Party. “Party transformations follow a predictable six-stage evolution—recoil, squint, rationalize, submit, amplify, and purge,” the wrote in Tuesday’s column. “Each stage has language you can hear long before you see it in the votes. Republicans just finished the full cycle. Democrats might be starting it.”
Sounds scary! But here’s the evidence Allen and VandeHei provide:
- “All three candidates New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed won their June 23 House primaries, defeating two incumbents: Brad Lander over Rep. Dan Goldman, Claire Valdez over Brooklyn’s borough president, and Darializa Avila Chevalier over Rep. Adriano Espaillat—the Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair, backed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
- Sit with that: A Jeffries-endorsed incumbent lost to a democratic socialist. That’s Stage 4 machinery switching on, with the primary electorate punishing the establishment side of the fight.
- It’s not just New York. In Colorado, 29-year-old democratic socialist Melat Kiros toppled 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette, who leans progressive.”
Wow, it’s not just New York City—a young democratic socialist also won in Colorado!
Four primary victories for the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives. That’s the sum of the argument here. But Allen and VandeHei nonetheless insist that Democrats are in the dreaded “Stage 3” of this entirely made-up “party transformation” scale: The Democrats are rationalizing their takeover by the socialists. “Now listen to the language: ‘It’s not socialism, it’s affordability’ is the left’s ‘It’s not the tweets, it’s the judges,’” the wrote.
It’s worth taking a moment to remember what those Trump tweets were, back in the day: Sexist attacks on news hosts Megyn Kelly and Mika Brzezinski. Racist digs at entire nations and the Obamas. Ridiculous accusations of “wiretapping” and voter fraud. And he never stopped, of course. There were threats of state violence: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Incessant lies that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Today, we’re subjected a daily deluge of braindead AI slop—and, yes, the usual racist, sexist garbage.
But we’re supposed to worry that socialism is masquerading as affordability?
One problem with this suggestion that these candidates don’t really care about affordability—that they must have an ulterior motive to, I don’t know, force everyone to be vegan?—is that they are all Democrats, and the party has been very clear about communicating its top election message this year. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—hardly a leftie—talks about affordability all the time, as does New York City’s biggest loser in those recent primaries, Hakeem Jeffries. The House minority leader over the weekend unveiled his caucus’s closing argument for the midterms, summed up thus: “Fighting for an Affordable America.”
Are these establishment Democrats rationalizing their takeover by Jacobins, or are they—like the democratic socialists in their party—simply pushing talking points that any sensible politician would, given Americans’ enduring anger over rising costs? After all, Trump won in 2024 on an affordability message, too.
There are currently two members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (elected in 2018) and Rashida Tlaib (elected in 2022). Lander is not a member of the DSA, though Valdez, Chevalier, and Kiros are. Increasing their ranks to five is a big deal, but it’s not exactly a revolution. (Interestingly, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive who may become Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate next week, said in a debate on Monday evening, “I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist who knows how capitalism works.”)
But the big problem with Allen and VandeHei’s attempt at a “conceptual scoop” isn’t that it makes a terrible case for a trend. It’s that the founders of one of the biggest political outlets in the country still don’t understand Trump. His cult of personality is so strong that it has easily withstood multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault, a longstanding and deep friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the pillaging of the federal government to benefit himself and his family, and the destruction of countless families across the country. He is sui generis.
That incontrovertible truth is rather inconvenient if you are in the business of dreaming up columns that depend on false equivalences between the country’s two major parties. For Allen and VandeHei, a handful of candidates who have found success in large cities with young demographics and who are pushing ambitious but hardly fascistic policies like Medicare for All and divestment from Israel are basically analogous to Trump and his actual fascism. That is not an insight; it’s a troll. But it does raise an important question about Axios’s leaders themselves: Are they genuinely fearful of the democratic socialists’ plans to ensure all Americans have healthcare and stop genocide, or are they just not horrified by what Trump has done to this country? Here’s what scares me: that Allen and VandeHei would say “yes” to both.
A Writer’s Refusal to Turn Her Trauma Into Material
There is what happened, and then there is the story of it, the “required repetition of the good story over and over again to friends, family, more officials.” In Dog Days, her memoir of living in the wake of a terrifying event, Emily LaBarge recounts watching people react to her story—what she calls, varyingly, “the good story, It, That Awful Thing That Happened, That Christmas, The Incident, What Your Family Went Through, The Thing, The Home Invasion, and sometimes—though rarely, as it seems too explicit, sometimes embarrassing, which victimhood, because it is helpless, often feels—The Trauma.” Some cannot believe it. Some shrug her off, don’t call her back. Some say they are traumatized by what happened to her and they themselves “will never feel safe again.”
“Some,” she writes, in disbelief, “cry!!” Some fish for details, trying to suss out whether LaBarge was raped. “Imagine,” she writes, “asking someone, casually, as if it were the ultimate salacious detail. They think it is their business, that it is information they are entitled to.” Sylvia Plath called these people “the peanut-crunching crowd” in her poem of death and resurrection, “Lady Lazarus.” In drafts of this book, LaBarge writes, she tried holding off, leaving the big story until the end—but that was “too coy”—and she tried not telling it at all, subsuming it as criticism or philosophy. In the finished version, she neither hides what happened nor accedes to demands for salacious detail.
What happened is this: In the days before Christmas in 2009, when LaBarge was in her mid-twenties, she and her family were renting a house on a “low-lying coral island in the Atlantic Ocean where the waters are cyan, turquoise, azure blue and the sand is the finest pink-flecked white.” Eight men broke in and held the family hostage for seven hours. They had been watching Mrs. Doubtfire when it happened, and the movie, absurdly, continued to play as they were lying there, until, eventually, one of the men switched it off, putting on, instead, a CD of hymns, liturgical chants, and songs for a death mass. “He doesn’t want anyone to be able to hear us,” LaBarge realizes, “when we XXX or XXXX or XXXXX or X.”
Whole pages unfold like this, details marked with X’s, lines blacked out. These gaps are a refusal to perform what Plath called “the big strip tease” for the detail-hungry gawker, but they are also the gaps in a glitching memory. “I did not hear them coming,” LaBarge writes of the men as they broke in. “Maybe I heard them coming. I did. I did not.” She remembers being hurt by a therapist who left a detailed email unread for too long and then responded with too little, but when, in the process of writing this book, she looks back at her inbox to confirm her recollection, she sees that, actually, the therapist had sent a long and loving response in less than 24 hours. She remembers the layout of the vacation home on the island, but when she looks for it later, she can’t find a house that matches.
The gaps in the story are a refusal to perform what Sylvia Plath called “the big strip tease” for the detail-hungry gawker, but they are also the gaps in a glitching memory.But certain things stick. As Fauré’s Requiem plays, while she lies on the floor with her family, it begins to sound, to LaBarge, like “a family death mass. The End.” As soon as she thinks this, she “cannot not think this.” This is a memoir about what happens after The End—what happens when you feel like you’ve died, and what happens when you go on living anyway, about how trauma repeats and reverberates. “It might change your life, you might survive, and then what?” LaBarge asks. What happens, that is, after a resurrection? LaBarge is not religious, but she is fascinated by Jesus, by his encounter with Mary Magdalene in the garden after he rises from the dead, just as she is fascinated by Plath’s nine-lived Lady Lazarus, by Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life—all stories of people who live on after death; who die, but not quite (“But I already died,” LaBarge tells a friend who warns that hard partying will kill her, “almost, I mean, almost”).
“We survive, we do,” LaBarge writes, “but The End comes again and again, comes at surprising times, unbidden and with great force, summoned by images, asides, happenstance, like an errant punctuation mark—why does this sentence have two colons?—that splits time, kaleidoscopic, in multiple directions at once.” Trauma estranges LaBarge, or me, or you, or any person from oneself; it makes grammar, syntax, and form strange. Dog Days, a fusion of memoir, criticism, psychoanalysis, and even scientific theory, makes this stuttering sensation its structuring principle, as the book changes forms and perspectives, doubles back. It is less about what happened to her than how she might tell it; about the mysterious, alchemical process of writing, the transubstantiation of living into language.
After The Incident, LaBarge recalls talking to a friend of her mother’s on the phone. The friend tells her it is “an amazing story,” that she can write about it and get rich; other writers, after all, have done that, capitalizing on the worst things that ever happened to them. “I remember thinking that’s crazy,” LaBarge writes. “No way will I ever write this story.”
And yet, of course, here it is, in our hands. “Why do some of us need to take notes, try to piece things together, want to know what it all means?” she wonders, and she wonders, too, what is the cost of all this. She quotes a Lorrie Moore story about a writer whose child has renal cancer. “Take notes,” her husband tells her. “We are going to need the money.” She takes notes, this writer, but she cannot think of what is happening—the illness, the cost of care—as a story. The story ends with a blunt demand: “There are the notes. Now where is the money?” LaBarge, taking her own notes, wants to know what the price is, what is the value, of the worst thing that ever happened to you. She is aware that “the non-fiction writer has a Faustian bargain with the page, which promises meaning if life—sometimes her own—is adequately harvested for experience.” This is what writers do; they try to transform life into “words, sentences, paragraphs, make it last forever.”
Perhaps what LaBarge recoils from, then, on that phone call, is not the writing but the story. Trauma is “a narrative problem because there is no story”—it is an absence, endlessness, a derangement of action and consequence—but at the same time, she writes, “I do not believe there is anything language cannot do.” Trauma, LaBarge suggests, is not unwritable or unreadable, “in spite of the constant emphasis on the ‘unspeakable’ aspects of trauma.” The problem is the demand to make the experience of trauma neat, narrative, acceptable. She quotes the historian Paul Fussell, who wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory that “we have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.” This is the obverse, in some ways, to the problem of the peanut-crunchers; there are things people do not, really, want to know.
LaBarge is a stunningly talented critic and a gifted close reader, a practice that becomes central to her life in the years after That Awful Thing That Happened. She seeks comfort in stories “in which it seems as though something undefinable is missing, has been lost, in which there is some shapeless hole to be filled,” but she also searches the world for portents, a way of fending off fear. The trees scold her, and birds follow her, screeching ominously. She inexplicably hears classical music on the escalator down to the tube station and thinks it is trying to tell her something. She sees people she knows on the street, spying on her, but they dissolve into unknown faces on a second look.
Dog Days lends itself to exactly this kind of paranoid reading, not only describing but enacting the magical thinking of trauma survivors. In an extended analysis of Nabakov’s short story “Signs and Symbols,” about exactly this tendency to search for meaning, she asks, “What does it mean that the mother accidentally drops three specific playing cards to the floor, the knave of hearts, the nine of spades, the ace of spades?” A handful of pages earlier, she has recounted a tarot card reading someone did for her. “The card turned up for me—was it the Page of Wands? The Two of Coins? The Fool?” These are cards that speak to change and chaos, chance and possibility, innocence and exposure. What does it mean?
La Barge writes that she reconceived this book “at least three times before starting and at least three times as it unfolds.” She tries writing it straight, she tries writing it beautifully, she tries not writing about The Thing at all. “I think,” she writes, “that if I see it plotted out correctly I will know, that gut feelings, and the container will give meaning to chaos or at least hold it in place.” It is an alluring and impossible idea, that the narrative problem of trauma can be solved, that order can be restored. She wants to know “how to accept this and move on without losing my mind or the part of me that believes in humanity, safety, hope, ha, right, trust, intimacy, connection, bodily integrity, justice, compassion. How did I ever believe in so many fake and stupid things, and how do I continue in a world of people who still do?”
This search takes the form of a search for a form; the book is a restless experiment in ways of telling, by turns hectic and languorous, echoing the dilations of time LaBarge experiences in the wake of That Christmas. She details the drafting of the Schedule of Loss—the “official title for what must be given to an insurance company or any kind of court or tribunal issues with loss compensation. Laptop, clothes, jewelry, books, dignity, mind.” She recounts her newly sleepless nights and faltering memory, her investigation into one of the hostage-takers’ whereabouts, her obsessive search for a way to make sense of a world she can no longer see in the same light. She writes digressively, essayistically, about the moon and the stars. Part of the book takes on a screenplay-like form, with lines and stage directions (“It sounds like a movie!” those she tells the good story to often say, grotesquely—and yet, LaBarge does think to herself, surveying the wrecked aftermath of the house on the unnamed island in the Atlantic, that it looks like a film). Trauma is a narrative problem because it does not have a story’s beginning-middle-end; The End goes on and on. It scrambles chronology as the book scrambles form and perspective.
Trauma is a narrative problem because it does not have a story’s beginning-middle-end; The End goes on and on.“I do not remember some things that happened in the first person,” LaBarge writes, “I only remember them in the second, third, omniscient, limited.” The book, fittingly, moves between these modes; LaBarge is sometimes Daughter, sometimes Sister, sometimes I. She breaks into second-person address toward the end of the book. “You remember a friend telling you” about someone else who was also robbed at gunpoint on the same island in the Atlantic, a startling sign that even the most singular experiences are shared. “You read books about domestic abuse, child abuse, veterans with PTSD, survivors of genocide,” she writes, “and feel guilty for identifying even vaguely with their terminologies, though you cannot find any others to learn about your own experience.” This guilt is natural, but unhelpful. “You prefer empathy to individualism.”
The movement to You reflects the distortions of traumatic memory that LaBarge describes, and it also reflects what she comes to see as the collective, interpersonal nature of trauma. While trauma feels profoundly isolating, in attempting to make sense of it, she finds herself always in association with other people, both as she searches for ways to understand her experience through the stories of others and because, when she does tell this story, it is always being told to someone else. This move into the second person, then, is an extension of her method of processing trauma through art, literature, and film. “If you”—yes, you!—“can’t see, for instance, that you’re already dead, that you died with six-year-old Hind Rajab, shot to death with 335 bullets as she waited hours in a car, surrounded by dead family members, for the paramedics to arrive,” LaBarge writes, “then you have to stay here, in the old world,” the world of linear time, of a knowable self, of a good story.
The alternative, for LaBarge, is to choose not to be “singular, individual, alone, in spite of this state so profoundly defining the experience of trauma.” Instead, one might choose to be radically connected to others, to listen to their stories and to see oneself in them. Language, LaBarge writes, “is representational but it is also relational.” It is, fundamentally, a means of communication, and the limits of what it can do are the limits of “what can be heard, what can be tolerated, what can be borne by both teller and told.” We have a duty, she seems to say, to listen and to witness, to choose not to seal ourselves off, alone. This is the path out of the old world, into the new. The End. And then what?
Can Progressive Candidates Win in Swing States? They Already Have.
Center-left Democratic officials are coalescing around the opponents of Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in primaries that will take place over the next month. That’s in part because of ideology—many centrists simply don’t agree with the progressive policy stands of Hong and El-Sayed. But some centrists say that they are backing Hong and El=Sayed’s opponents because progressive candidates like those two don’t often win in swing states. And many of Hong and El-Sayed’s supporters are also essentially buying into that historical analysis. They are deeply invested in Hong and/or El-Sayed winning the general election, suggesting those victories would be unique evidence of progressive electoral strength in swing states and would show that someone like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be elected president.
Both sides’ perspectives are ahistorical, too caught up in the current Mamdani-Sanders-AOC moment. Numerous progressives have won in swing states and districts in the past. Neither El-Sayed nor Hong would be the first progressive candidate to win in the Midwest. Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t be the first president with a left-wing background. These primaries are a real fight over which faction controls the Democratic Party today. But they shouldn’t obscure the success of progressive candidates years and even decades before anyone had ever heard of Claire Valdez or Ilhan Omar.
What makes this debate complicated is that there are not precise definitions of progressive, leftist, or other such ideological terms. And what constitutes progressive or leftist politics changes over time. Many progressive politicians were not supportive of same-sex marriage in 2002, but virtually all progressive politicians hold that stance today. So for this article, I looked at politicians who were described or self-identified as progressive or very liberal during a given campaign and their results.
Let’s go back 20 years. “An unabashed progressive takes aim at a Senate seat in Ohio,” was the tagline of a November 2005 piece in the leftist publication In These Times. The author is Chris Hayes, who went on to greater fame. The unabashed progressive is Sherrod Brown, then serving in the House. Brown is considered a traditional Democrat now. But back then, his opposition to the Iraq War and deep skepticism of NAFTA and other international trade agreements put him firmly on the Democratic left. “If a bedrock economic populist like Brown can win in a red state, it will explode the post-Clinton conventional wisdom that anything resembling ’class warfare’ is a non-starter for the Democrats,” Hayes wrote. Among those who praised Brown in Hayes’s article was Bernie Sanders, then Vermont’s congressman.
Brown ended up winning the Ohio Senate race in 2006—against a two-term incumbent—by 12 points. “I ran a very outspokenly progressive campaign, standing up for the middle class, taking on the drug companies and the oil companies … And I think that that campaign shows that you can win in moderately conservative states as progressive Democrats,” Brown told NPR in November 2006.
Two years later, a man described by another In These Times writer as an “unflinching progressive” won Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states across the Midwest. Again, today we don’t think of Barack Obama as being particularly leftist. But in 2008, being a strong opponent of the Iraq War, a critic of the death penalty, and a skeptic of the Israeli government, all positions he held in his rise in Illinois politics, were very much on the party’s left. Obama’s 2007 voting record was the most liberal of any senator, according to National Journal.
And it’s not just those two. In 2012, Tammy Baldwin, who had been a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was elected to the Senate from Wisconsin. Andy Kim won reelection in 2022 in a competitive district in New Jersey even though his opponent attacked him for being a member of the Progressive Caucus. Ruben Gallego, elected to the Senate in 2024 from Arizona, was a member of the Medicare-for-All and Progressive caucuses during his House days.
Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford University, found that from 2016 to 2024 there were 27 successful U.S. House campaigns in swing districts by candidates whose ideology was left of the average Democratic politician. Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman won Senate races in swing states even though voters perceived them as fairly progressive, says Bonica, citing the Cooperative Election Study, in which voters themselves rank candidates on a seven-point ideological scale. (Sadly, Fetterman has changed his stripes since then.)
Progressive candidates at times obviously lose, including Brown in his 2024 reelection bid. And it’s true that there are far more centrists and more moderates than progressives representing swing districts and states. But that’s in part a screening effect. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee tend to encourage centrist politicians to run in swing areas, direct donors to give money to those candidates instead of their progressive rivals, and often endorse those moderates in primaries. So the number of moderate nominees in swing areas is much larger than those who are more progressive. But moderates and progressives win at similar rates, according to Bonica’s research. What really matters is incumbency—progressive and moderate Democratic candidates tend to lose to Republicans in office but win open seats or when they are the incumbents.
“El-Sayed and Hong as a test of whether progressives can win swing states gets it backwards. They’re a rare case where the choice is actually on the menu. Whether they win will track the national environment and each state’s lean. Parties are electable, not candidates,” says Bonica.
So what’s being tested in Wisconsin and Michigan is not whether a person who has a history of progressive activism, has called themselves a progressive, or has a very progressive voting record can win in a swing state. That’s already happened. Often. Hong is trying to do something unique, in that there isn’t a record of self-identified democratic socialists winning in swing states. That could be tougher, as some polls show voters in Wisconsin and other states are very skeptical of socialism.
And Hong and El-Sayed, if they win their primaries, will be trying to win a general election after the media and their opponents have spent months casting them as very progressive and they themselves have in some ways embraced that label. That’s often not the case for successful progressive candidates. During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Obama did not run as the most unabashedly progressive candidate, instead positioning himself as the young outsider who might inspire the country. In 2012, Baldwin was unopposed in the Wisconsin Democratic Senate primary. Gallego left the CPC before his Senate run. In contrast, Hong has courted the left-wing vote among Wisconsin Democrats. El-Sayed has campaigned with Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. So it is possible that while a person with a progressive history can win, a person who fully leans into progressivism during the primary will have trouble pivoting to the general election and assuring voters that they aren’t too liberal.
On the other hand, numerous Republicans have run as full-throated conservatives during primaries and then won in swing states in the general election. That’s what Marco Rubio did in 2010 in Florida, and what Donald Trump nationally six years later. And both Hong and El-Sayed (and other progressives such as Ocasio-Cortez) these days are running more on fighting high costs and billionaires than on the broader ideology of socialism. They are winning voters who probably don’t really fully understand or support socialism’s tenets.
We don’t know if El-Sayed or Hong will even make it to the general election. But either way, their candidacies shouldn’t be considered some make-or-break moment for progressive politics in America. Progressives have already won in swing states, including in presidential elections. What we’ll learn in the next months and years is whether swing states will accept today’s version of progressivism, one led by self-described socialists (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani.) You might say no. But I was covering politics in 2004 and not many people imagined Senators Brown and Baldwin and President Obama. America’s voters often progress more quickly than we expect.
Transcript: Inside AOC’s Foreign Policy Vision
This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 28 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Jonathan Guyer. He’s the program director at the Institute for Global Affairs. He’s also been a great writer about foreign policy for a long time, most notably at The American Prospect and at Vox, and he has a new piece out about AOC that we’ll get into in a bit. But Jonathan, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Jonathan Guyer: Great to be with you, Perry.
Bacon: So the piece you wrote recently, that we’re going to talk about, is called “AOC Meets World,” and it was in Foreign Policy very recently. So give us an overall sense of what made you decide to write about AOC’s foreign policy? I think there’s obvious reasons, but what made you kind of want to write about her in terms of foreign policy context?
Guyer: I think she represents this leftward tilt of the Democratic Party, and also—I don’t want to say the failure, but the ambiguousness of the left’s foreign policy. I think the left, and a couple of the experts in the piece said this, has not always had a great strategy when it comes to foreign policy. It’s been a big question mark. And I think if you talk to people in and out of Washington, they’ll say, I don’t really know what AOC’s foreign policy is. Which is, I don’t think, entirely correct. I think she has a pretty developed worldview. She’s taken a lot of positions on Gaza, on Latin America.
But the impetus for this piece is, I think she is really dipping her toe into world affairs. She spoke at this major foreign policy conference in February, the Munich Security Conference, which is where the contenders for the next primaries go and sort of strut their stuff. Gretchen Whitmer was there, a number of other muckety-mucks.
So the idea that this was her first time there—and my reporting showed that she’d been invited before in 2020, decided not to go. She’s really associated with this DSA grassroots push to take care of her constituents in New York, focus on domestic policy.
But I think, as we’ve seen with the Democratic Party over the past decade, you can’t really separate domestic policy and foreign policy. You and I have had a lot of these conversations over the years. You can’t separate them. The way America conducts itself domestically reflects its role in the world.
So I think part of this piece was trying to figure out, how does one of the shining stars of the Democratic Party, the most popular or among the most popular possible candidates for the next presidential—how is she figuring out who she is? And it’s not like she fell out of a—what is it—a coconut tree, like Kamala said.
Bacon: Yeah, I was going to say.
Guyer: She has a very developed worldview, AOC. It’s just, she’s, I think, a really all-star politician, carefully messaging and developing strategies and talking with some very intelligent people. But obviously, there’s a lot we can get into here.
Bacon: So the thing that struck me by you saying is—we’ve had this sort of, I don’t want to say new left, but this sort of more developed progressivism, that started with Sanders’ 2016 campaign and grows from there. That has mostly been focused, I would argue, on domestic politics—Medicare for All, anti-billionaires, anti-plutocracy. I would say the first seven, eight years of that was really focused on that.
But I would argue in some ways now, the leading issue, or one of the leading issues of that, is a foreign policy issue. I would say the war in Gaza. And it’s a critique of both the Republicans, but also it’s a critique of the Biden administration and centrist Democrats. So I don’t know if the left has a foreign policy vision. It certainly has a vision on that foreign policy issue, I would say. You agree?
Guyer: I would even broaden it a little bit, in that the domestic issues that AOC is most associated with, like you say—fighting against the oligarchy, she joined this tour with Bernie Sanders. Climate, Green New Deal. Immigration. Obviously, a member of the squad who pushed back, part of that resistance in Trump 1.0. Those are actually global issues. None of those are really domestic alone.
And I think there’s been this kind of job of the great monks of Washington foreign policy to cordon off domestic and foreign policy—and this has been going on since the Cold War—and saying to the young guns like AOC and many others, Hey, leave foreign policy to us. We’re the experts. And I think what she does when she goes to Munich is she takes all of these dynamics that have been a big part of her career—as youngest member of Congress to be elected as a woman, someone who is part of that kind of Democratic contender who ousted an incumbent and represented all this—and said, Hey, fighting the oligarchy is part of foreign policy, and is part of the reason we have a Trump presidency for the second time. That’s part one.
The second part is, I think on Gaza, she’s largely been consistent. I went back—one of her first interviews, I think she wasn’t even elected yet, she had just won the primary—was on PBS, and she described a massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, and obviously setting in the structural dynamics, what’s been happening in Gaza, has been an occupation and violence for several decades. So she kind of said this and got incredible pushback, and also wasn’t really fully briefed on it. I think she had the right message, but couldn’t explain it right to a TV audience. To her credit, she was a newly minted contender, and so forth.
So part of this piece was trying to figure out, how did she go from there to now, where I think she has a pretty developed point of view on Gaza and has gotten a lot of flak from the right, a lot of flak from the left. But I’d say if you look at her messaging over time, it’s been pretty consistent.
So when she warns of famine in Gaza in 2024, when she’s put out some very strong criticism of the Biden administration or the Trump administration, or when she goes to Munich and calls what’s happening in Gaza a genocide—it’s not really part of this new left moment. It’s part of a progression over time, where she has been trying to bring in some of these principles towards US foreign policy. And I think, as we know, principles and US foreign policy don’t always mix, for worse, I would say.
Bacon: I want to separate out a little bit what the left is doing and what AOC is doing—those are related—and then come back together a little bit. So I do see Gaza as a seminal issue of left foreign policy right now. Do you agree?
Guyer: I do, yeah. And I think it’s like a new Vietnam, and a litmus test, and there’s only one right answer, I would say, for the left and for the new generation of DSA contenders who are trying to shape not just domestic policy, but foreign policy.
Bacon: And a related question—there’s a piece in The New Yorker about the Biden foreign policy. And so I think you’re also seeing this issue, but I’m curious what you make of it, is what I perceive as an effort almost to say that Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer, the architects of Joe Biden’s Gaza policy, should be disqualified from membership in Democratic leadership in the future. They shouldn’t get these big jobs in the future. That’s my sense of what’s going on.
Talk about that a little bit, in terms of what the left is trying to do about the people who were involved in Biden’s foreign policy.
Guyer: Absolutely. So I’d say this even came from Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii—I think he said something like this, and others have said that. I think a lot of the grassroots organizing groups—and there’s a whole left quotient of kind of Project 2020-whatever that’s going to shape the next presidency—are saying, We have to get rid of these advisors who enabled some of the most heinous war crimes of this century so far, that were done with US weapons and US leadership backing the Israeli government headed by Netanyahu.
And I think what we’re seeing at the same time are the Biden personnel, the senior leadership who had been involved in Middle East policy since the Obama years—secretary of State Blinken, Jake Sullivan, many of their kind of top lieutenants—and this is my analysis here—seem to be saying, This was really President Biden’s decision. We were trying to figure out the best way to manage this and work with Israel under all these constraints.
But I would say—and this isn’t uniquely AOC—but this changing US public opinion, changing views of the MAGA right, changing perspectives of Israel and the world, actually has totally changed the way that I think the next president could deal with Israel, could deal with Palestine and the Middle East. So those old constraints have fallen by the wayside, but we’re seeing many Biden alumni doing a bit of reinterpretation and saying, “We did the best with what we had,” and so forth.
It’s a really contentious moment. And if you look at who’s advising AOC, it is not these people. It is a lot of the strongest critics of the Biden administration—namely Matt Duss, who’s someone who writes sometimes for The New Republic and has been a Bernie advisor—
Bacon: Has been here on this show. Yeah.
Guyer: —and so forth. I figured. Yeah, exactly.
Bacon: And to come back to—I guess I’m going to ask you, as a person who follows foreign policy: Jake Sullivan was probably—the national security advisor is rarely the same person twice. The secretary of state is rarely the same person twice. So Tony Blinken was not likely to be secretary of state in 2029, no matter what.
So what are we really talking about here in terms of who is not going to get a job, who would’ve otherwise? Because I don’t think those two people would’ve got those jobs even if there wasn’t a Gaza policy.
Guyer: I think we’re talking about two things, Perry. One is the Biden legacy, which is really important. This was a guy who, when it came to economic populism, was trying to be the next FDR, and this Gaza tragedy threatens to upend the entire Biden legacy. So we’re going to have memoirs from the former president, from Tony Blinken, from other senior advisors coming out this fall, and they’re all going to be grappling with, what does that mean?
But spinning it forward, what we saw in the Obama years is everyone kind of moved up a notch. Blinken, Sullivan—they were all kind of deputies, and then they became the principals. And there’s a huge possibility that Mr. Sullivan could be the next secretary of state, could be a UN ambassador.
Bacon: You think still?
Guyer: Depending on who’s the—you know, if it’s a very traditional Democrat, if it’s a Gavin Newsom—
Bacon: Josh Shapiro, yeah.
Guyer: Exactly. But if we have a Jon Ossoff, or, who knows, any number of progressives—people are angling. And this is the off-season, everyone’s favorite game of not just who are going to be the next presidential contenders, but who are the advisors and who’s in good standing. When I interviewed Mr. Sullivan several years ago, before Biden even was the heir apparent, he hadn’t even chosen which candidate. He was advising Klobuchar. He was advising Biden. It was kind of different times.
So we’re still way before that consolidation, and it actually gives the Democrats a really unique moment right now, with the midterms coming up, to say, big picture, conceptually, what does this party represent foreign policy-wise? Because a year and a half from now, there’s not going to be time to deal with these nitty-gritty issues. It’s going to be a bruising fight to take the White House.
So right now, you’re seeing the biggest grand strategy questions of, should the US be a moral force for good? Should we go into some sort of more realist tack? Should we focus more on the Western Hemisphere? These are pretty big questions that don’t actually get discussed a whole lot. But I do think people like the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, with the clarity he speaks with on Gaza, has forced a discussion, among others. But there is a real foreign policy debate happening among Democrats, which is not always happening, right?
Bacon: Not at all. And so it seems to me AOC’s foreign policy—if I was just watching the speech in Munich, or the speeches in Munich, I get the idea. The idea is that the oligarchy and the authoritarianism and the democratic decline we’re seeing around the world is in part tied to economic policy around the world that is rewarding—the decline of the middle class is helping, around the world, is helping lead to oligarchy, dictatorship.
And so therefore, we need to address the economic conditions around the world if we want to address the... In other words, the democracy threat that Biden talked about a lot is also about oligarchy, and you have to fight the oligarchy to restore democracy. Is that essentially what we’re talking about here?
Guyer: Yeah. That’s a big part of what she talked about in these couple different kind of Q&A sessions. I think that message irked some on the left, that thought it was a little bit too black and white, good and bad. But on the other hand, many people thought this was a really strong message. I interviewed this former head of the Center for American Progress and Obama ambassador Patrick Gaspard, who is now advising Mamdani, and he actually said, “Look at this other moment from her time in Germany.”
She was in Berlin. She was speaking to a more centrist group at a university forum, and someone challenged her on Gaza, saying, This is a pro-Israel party platform you’re speaking with. What are you doing here? And she said, “If we don’t go together, we all fall apart. We have to unite the left, the liberals, the kind of social left.” And so that was another message that might’ve gotten lost in all of...
It’s tough to be AOC. You’re a lightning rod for every piece of racist vitriol, every misogynistic racist. Some of the criticism has very little to do with the substance. But on the substance, I thought that was another interesting foreign policy message—we don’t need a moral purity test, we need to unite to beat the Republican Party in the next election.
Bacon: So I think Biden would’ve agreed we need a big tent, and that’s the kind of—he was trying to unite people around the world. I think the point where I think it’s different is, I don’t think Biden necessarily would’ve said the cause of authoritarianism is wage stagnation, oligarchy. Or maybe he said that, but it was at the 2020 front.
I think at the beginning, he was saying the cause of authoritarianism was, like, people not respecting democracy, people like Putin, people like Trump. I think he was more individualistic and less—AOC is making—I’m not sure Biden would necessarily forcefully disagree with it, but I think AOC’s making a more class-based foreign policy point than Biden would’ve. Is that correct?
Guyer: That’s right. And she declined to do an interview with me for this profile. But I spoke with a lot of people around her, allies, advisors, and so forth, and that kind of working-class foreign policy was something people kept coming back to. And it’s something we’ve seen from other members of the squad. I think it resonates a lot. Graham Platner has now been fully disgraced, but what he represented was, is there a working-class foreign policy here?
The other thing I would add, Perry—and it’s something that is, I think, a distinction from the Biden administration—was she was drawing connections between all these different theaters of war, and saying, what the US is doing in Venezuela or Cuba, Gaza, Europe—these are all connected. We can’t separate these out when the US is using economic sanctions as a tool of first resort. That connects Iran to Venezuela.
And there’s a bigger story that she’s telling that I think Democrats have long struggled to make, because—not to dumb it down—but foreign policy is complicated. It’s hard to tell one big story. And I think the US has such an entrenched military-industrial complex, so many bases and drone strikes and all this stuff, it’s hard to imagine a world where the US is an unambiguous force for good. And I don’t think she’s actually saying that. She’s trying to narrow where there’s things that can be changed, and parallels between these different conflicts.
Bacon: So I, as someone who liked AOC and maybe is biased toward her, thought the coverage of her speech was very fixated on, did she use the right foreign policy code words on Taiwan and so on. Do you think she is someone who needs a lot of training in this area?
Or, in my view, she’s being policed by the foreign policy establishment that doesn’t agree with her and is looking to police her gaffes on the code words, because they don’t agree with her broader vision? What do you think?
Guyer: No, I agree with you.
Bacon: Could be both, by the way.
Guyer: And I’m not trying to be a cheerleader for her, as a kind of—
Bacon: I know you’re not. Yeah.
Guyer: —a reporter. I want to weigh all the different criticisms, left and right, speak with all the people around her, understand how she came out at this place. But yeah, I think there was a real emphasis on the supposed gaffes—the ums and uhs that she said in an answer were all written out in The New York Times, and I don’t remember the last time ums and uhs from other members of Congress.
I think on the substance, a lot of it was pretty mainstream—which was maybe that’s the hard thing to grapple with. But some of the experts I spoke with who work at places like MoveOn basically were like, This is a big deal. They have a Latina woman in her 30s on this stage in Munich, where it’s really largely white men who have dominated the foreign policy sphere. And she does threaten them.
But the other point I think you’re making is, she doesn’t necessarily have the traditional credentials of, let’s say, an Elissa Slotkin, who was in the CIA, or some other prominent lawmakers who work on foreign policy. But digging into her background, I found that she actually has a lot of the markers of true geopolitical intelligence.
She spent time in Niger as an undergraduate, doing homestays, understanding how US development and humanitarian assistance really works. That’s what she studied at university. She has a sense of foreign policy that is not wholly untraditional. It’s just that there is a certain cabal that kind of determines what the national security leadership ought to look like, and she hasn’t exactly fit that mold, let’s say.
Bacon: You mentioned—you interviewed Matt Duss, we mentioned him earlier. So Matt Duss was an advisor to Bernie Sanders and his campaigns. He was close to the Biden people for some period, and then broke away even before Gaza, is my impression. So talk about who is around her. They’re not necessarily the sort of people who served Clinton, Obama, Biden, but who’s around her in terms of foreign policy?
Guyer: So her chief of staff, this guy Mike Kaska, comes from Bernie’s office. So that’s one thing to note, is she’s within these kind of progressive circles. Matt, who now runs a progressive think tank in DC, has gathered experts. He’s primarily a Middle East guy, but has brought in China and other foreign policy experts to have a kind of a kitchen cabinet around AOC.
But one of the most interesting things that I dug into was her foreign trips. She’s gone on a handful of congressional delegations, and one that really stood out was a trip she did to Latin America that was done with one of the major Latin America-focused progressive think tanks. And these are guys—I keep saying guys, but obviously I’m meaning that more broadly—who focus on how economic sanctions really affect people, how they damage the lives of people in Cuba and Venezuela, and not your typical hyper-security-focused think tanks. This is much more human-centric, human-focused.
And when she went to Latin America—I spoke with a number of Latin Americanists who said she didn’t just meet with the US Chamber of Commerce or the kind of economic chieftains that members of Congress tend to meet with. She met with grassroots leaders. She met with Indigenous organizers. She met with the kind of folks doing politics that reflect how she did politics in New York and the way that she came up.
So I found that to be a kind of interesting detail, and I do think it represents the kind of—you know, spinning it forward—what AOC and a number of other representatives are trying to do, which is, at this moment in US politics, where you have an imperial presidency, she’s trying to make connections with Lula in Brazil, with progressive leaders throughout Latin America, similar to what she was doing in Germany—finding liberals and leftists who she can work with, the Green Party, social Dems, and forging these connections in a way that isn’t exactly your typical mano-a-mano, let’s say, way that members of Congress tend to interact when they go abroad.
Bacon: As I read this piece, I was reminded of something. I’ve been doing this for a long time. So I wrote a piece in late—early 2006 about a famous Democratic politician, and who he was meeting with and how he might run for president. His name is Barack Obama, obviously—a similar kind of piece to what you did, talking about who’s around him and so on. And I generally liked what President Obama did, but in office, he, I think, adhered to the blob’s points of view a lot, ultimately.
And his foreign policy—the things he talked about as a candidate, opposing the Iraq War, being different—in office, I would argue, he was a fairly standard Democrat on foreign policy. Do you think AOC is vulnerable to that same kind of thing if she became president? Ultimately, she would appoint the Jake Sullivan types and be 88 percent the same as President Shapiro or Buttigieg would be?
Guyer: I think this is maybe the core question, Perry, and I don’t totally explore it in this piece, but I have some thoughts. I think one of the things you’re identifying is the gap between President Obama’s message and his policies. I think his message was pretty remarkable—going to Cairo to give a speech and end the war on terror and the war on Islam and so forth, and hiring someone like Samantha Power, who is an expert in genocide and US failures in foreign policy, and giving all these people like Ben Rhodes the ability to shape policy.
But at the end of the day, as we saw over those eight years, the people who held the Cabinet positions, the Hillary Clintons and the Robert Gateses—and now we’re going probably way far back for some of our viewers here, but you and I know this history really well—these were really traditional, bipartisan members of the blob. And I think this is where the rubber hits the road. It’s really hard to change US foreign policy.
It’s not just the State Department or the Pentagon. It is all these entrenched institutions, and it’s trying to have a reckoning with the architecture of American military bases abroad, the way that big institutions work, and this other whole dynamic, which is the allure of power, and the allure of wanting to be respected and liked by peers of both parties, and by projecting US leadership, whatever that means, in the world.
But I think since President Obama, a lot has changed in Washington. We’ve seen the fracturing of the Republican Party and a new movement—probably most aptly represented by JD Vance, and there’s a lot of questions around it—but of a kind of a more restrained, less militaristic Republican Party. Lot of debate to have around that, of course. Not trying to cheerlead anybody. But this is kind of categorically different, that you have a President Trump who’s run on populist perspectives that basically says we need a ceasefire in Gaza, to the left of President Biden. It’s surprising.
So I think one of the main challenges that Obama faced, and that the next president will face, is having the bureaucrats, the people that can actually make government work—and not to fall into the deep state fantasy of President Trump, but you got to maintain this whole massive US bureaucracy of thousands of appointees, of entire military and intelligence and all of this, and I don’t think you can just unwind it.
So I think if AOC, or whomever the next Democratic president, wants to really change US foreign policy, you do need some insiders who can change stuff, but it can’t just be the message. The message is one part of it, but you also have to figure out the actions. And I guess that’s what a whole lot of Democrats are trying to figure out in the off-season.
Bacon: Two final questions. I guess in writing the piece, I think there’s an answer to this question, but do you consider her a likely presidential candidate?
Guyer: I do, but I’ve also heard rumors that—what if Senator Schumer doesn’t run again, that maybe that would be a better call. She is super popular. I think she represents what Gen Z wants in Democratic politics. I think the Mamdani wave here in New York puts a lot of wind in her sails, and I think she has a lot of cred to take on what Trump represents beyond Gaza and Middle East policy and Western Hemisphere policy, but on some of these core domestic policies we talked about—with wildfires burning, with immigration crackdown and all this stuff. She comes in with a lot of credibility to change the game.
But I don’t know. It’s going to be a bruising two years, and I think we’re also going to have to see—everyone always says this is going to be the midterms that’s about foreign policy. But if this midterms is indeed about foreign policy, I think we’ll get more clues on who the next Democratic nominee might look like.
Bacon: That builds my final question, which is: is this Democratic primary upcoming, is it like most of the Democratic primaries I’ve covered—the exception being 2007, when who voted for the Iraq War was a big issue? In general, it’s not been a big issue in Democratic primaries. But right now, I would argue, if you go to Michigan, El-Sayed’s opposition to the war in Gaza and Stevens’ votes is an issue. I’m not sure if it’s a huge issue, but it’s an issue. A lot of the leftist candidates are saying, We should spend money here at home and not on bombing people abroad, and I think that has become the way to talk about Gaza.
But I am curious—the Gaza war, there’s still things happening in Gaza. Obviously, the war in Iran is happening right now. And I think it’s hard to know, but do you really think, when we’re talking about the South Carolina primary in November 2027, in the months before that, are we going to be talking about foreign policy? Or are we going to be back to talking about affordability and housing? Is foreign policy going to be a big part of the mix, a small part of the mix, a medium part of the mix? What do you think?
Guyer: No, so I would argue, Perry, that it is absolutely going to be part of the mix, and for the simple reason that I filled up my car yesterday and it was $70 for a tank. And foreign policy is often in the rarefied realm of the experts and, by design, doesn’t usually involve the people.
But gas prices, supply chains—our polling with the Institute for Global Affairs shows that, I think it’s something like 78 percent of Americans are hurting economically, and they associate it with the Iran war. So every day this war that isn’t a war keeps going, people experience it.
Bacon: No, I was saying, like, in the next—hopefully the Iran war will not be happening in November 2027. So assuming the Iran war is not happening, then is there other—I assume gas prices always matter, but foreign policy beyond gas prices, will it be part of this primary process, do you think?
Guyer: So I’m from Michigan, and I think that it is a huge debate right now. You have a very robust Arab American, Muslim American community. You have a huge Jewish community that faced this heinous terrorist attack earlier this year. And it is the conversation people are having, and it’s very divisive.
I don’t have a crystal ball about what’s going to be happening two years from now, but look, we have a president who has pursued some very reckless wars. And we could say Venezuela has gone somewhat well, but it does seem like we could stumble into Venezuela 2.0, Cuba, these strikes on boats throughout the Caribbean. These are all these tipping points that could happen that just remind voters how central foreign policy is.
And again, just to bring up our polling at IGA, most Americans don’t think the Iran war has made them any safer. This is a hugely unpopular war. We don’t have boots on the ground, but we do have US troops dying. We have a new figure from the Pentagon that some six hundred US service members have been injured, and—I don’t have the number in front of me—more than a dozen have been killed. This stuff really resonates. This is not abstract.
And I think the question will be, who’s going to seize the mantle? Is it going to be Vance or Rubio, with a strong message that resonates with voters? Or will AOC or Chris Murphy or other Democrats, whether more progressive or more traditional, have a better story to tell? Because I think the Biden story of foreign policy, that we are going to build back better worldwide, is not resonating for folks. So that’s why this AOC message that I’ve been reporting on does have some interesting kernels, but we’ll see how it develops.
Bacon: Jonathan Guyer, great piece in Foreign Policy. The piece is called “AOC Meets World.” And I recommend everyone read it and check out Jonathan’s other work. Are you on Bluesky? On Twitter? Where do people find you?
Guyer: I’m on Twitter. I have a really old handle. It’s MidEastXMidWest. Probably need to update that. But yeah, I’m on Twitter, writing for all sorts of spots. And check out the Institute for Global Affairs, where we’re trying to get the pulse of how Americans view foreign policy.
Bacon: If you want to read a piece that will interest you and maybe outrage you, Jonathan wrote this great piece about Samantha Power in New York Magazine in 2024. It was a great piece.
Guyer: Oh, thanks. Yeah, 2024, I believe. So basically been trying to find the people and personalities that capture all these tensions in US foreign policy. So thanks for having me, Perry. Great to see you. It’s always great to chat with you.
Bacon: Thank you. Bye-bye.
Prediction Markets Are Winning the War Against Them
Minnesota lawmakers enacted a statewide ban on prediction market in May. The first-of-its-kind law had been scheduled to go into effect on August 1. Now, that ban is on hold after the top two prediction markets, as well as the federal agency tasking with regulating them, persuaded a federal judge to temporarily block the law on Monday.
Judge Katherine Menendez granted the preliminary injunction after concluding that Minnesota’s ban was likely pre-empted by the CFTC’s exclusive regulatory authority, a position that the agency had forcefully advanced in the lawsuit alongside the two best-known brands in the nascent industry, Kalshi and Polymarket. While Menendez noted that at least some of the contracts offered by the companies fall outside the CFTC’s jurisdiction, she opted for a broad injunction for now and emphasized that the final judgment may be different.
Monday’s ruling is not the end of the legal battles surrounding prediction markets. Other jurisdictions have had some success in regulating or restricting Kalshi, Polymarket, and similar companies. But it is a striking testament to the prediction market industry’s success in regulatory capture—and the need for more concrete restrictions from Congress.
Kalshi, for its part, took a victory lap after the ruling. “Minnesota was the first state to pass a law banning prediction markets, and a court prevented it from being enforced less than two months later,” a company spokesman told reporters yesterday. “Today’s decision makes it clear: States cannot ban things that they don’t have jurisdiction over.”
Their celebratory defiance is par for the course these days. The modern age of gambling began in 2018 after the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting on Tenth Amendment grounds. Sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel are largely regulated at the state level, following the longstanding tradition of regulating gambling as a public-health matter. More than two dozen states now allow betting on sports in some capacity.
Prediction markets also allow customers to wager money on the outcome of future events. Instead of placing a more traditional wager against a sportsbook’s odds, customers at a prediction market effectively bet against one another. In practical terms, they buy an “event contract” that predicts a binary outcome for an event—say, for example, that the Los Angeles Dodgers will win the 2026 World Series—within a certain period of time.
If the Dodgers secure a threepeat this October, the contract’s seller would pay the buyer the amount specified in the contract. If the Chicago White Sox win the Fall Classic instead, the contract’s buyer gets nothing. Contracts can be bought and sold on prediction markets, with prices fluctuating depending on the market’s perception of an event’s likelihood. In that sense, prediction markets can somewhat resemble derivatives markets for publicly traded stocks.
Prediction markets justify their existence in a number of ways. One is by claiming to offer some otherwise unobtainable insight into the future. “Our markets reflect accurate, unbiased, and real-time probabilities for the events that matter most to you,” Polymarket class on its website. “Markets seek truth.” Kalshi, for example, claims that its “inflation and federal [interest] rate forecasts have been more accurate than economists, pundits, and traditional news outlets over the past year.”
Another increasingly common justification for a prediction market’s existence is that it allows customers to “hedge” their futures on specific outcomes. “For example, if you have student debt and are worried about relief not passing, you can purchase a contract and get a payout even if it doesn’t pass,” Kalshi claims on its website. “If you’re worried about the economic fallout of the government shutting down, you can place a trade to hedge against it.” This resembles the role that derivatives often play in financial markets: allowing large funds to “hedge” their stock purchases.
For that reason, prediction markets are currently regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency that oversees the nation’s derivatives markets. The Biden-era CFTC sought use its rulemaking power to broadly forbid prediction markets from taking bets on sports-related events, but the change in administration produced a much friendlier regulatory landscape.
Michael Selig, the CFTC’s current chairman, is a Trump appointee who previously worked for crypto companies and prediction markets. He wields immense power over the regulatory process as the commission’s sole member at the moment; Trump has declined to put forward nominees for the other vacancies. The New York Times reported earlier this summer that, under Selig’s watch, the CFTC went from bringing roughly 80 enforcement cases against the crypto and prediction-market industries in the Biden era to just two as of this June.
In its latest rulemaking proposal last month, the CFTC laid out plans to allow prediction markets to offer contracts on all but a few sports-related predictions. Among the handful of proscribed contracts would be those involving player injuries and fights and ones involving officiating calls. Some critics, including the National Football League, urged the CFTC this month to substantially narrow the types of contracts that could be offered, arguing that allowing them would be against the public interest.
The CFTC rule, if adopted, would entrench vast amounts of potential income for prediction markets. Fortune magazine reported this month that Americans spent roughly $166 billion on sports betting in 2025, which was “more than the entire U.S. movie, music, book, and museum industries generated in revenue combined.” Kalshi and Polymarket have also followed the lead of sportsbooks by trying to integrate themselves into the four major North American sports leagues. MLB and the NHL have already struck bargains with them, while the NBA and the NFL have been more skeptical.
One big problem for prediction markets is that they are uniquely vulnerable to insider trading. Part of this stems from their decentralized nature. Because a sportsbook is the counterparty to any customer’s winning bet, it has a strong interest in ensuring the integrity of any game or contest on which it takes wagers. Prediction markets, on the other hand, have no inherent interest in the underlying fairness of an event because they make money through transaction fees.
The other part of the vulnerability is that prediction markets take bets on what is essentially non-public but theoretically knowable information. Nobody can know who will win this year’s World Series until it takes place and the outcome is revealed to all observers simultaneously. A prediction market bet on, say, whether OpenAI will go public this year is theoretically knowable, albeit by only a handful of people in the world.
This makes prediction markets a uniquely dangerous mechanism for corrupt self-dealing. U.S. military strikes against Iran earlier this year often saw large upticks in bets placed on specific days, possibly reflecting bets placed by people in U.S. military or political circles. Federal prosecutors brought charges against a U.S. soldier in April who allegedly used classified information about the military raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to place bets on Polymarket, leading to a $400,000 windfall. Earlier this month, NPR reported on how campaign staffers betting on their own races has become a scourge—and the somewhat limp efforts of the industry to curb this activity. The White House even had to place Gabriel Perez, the president’s longtime teleprompter operator, on unpaid leave earlier this month while it investigates more than $100,000 in prediction market bets that he made.
The CFTC’s pro-prediction market pivot also has its share of critics. Among those who spoke out against the recent proposed rule were Christopher Dodd, a former Connecticut senator who authored the 2010 financial reform law that expanded the CFTC’s regulatory authority. “At the time Congress passed Dodd-Frank, we were well aware of existing federal laws regulating gaming,” the former lawmaker explained in a formal comment in the rulemaking process. “We had no intention of amending those laws.”
A future Democratic administration may be able to remedy the problem when it retakes control of the CFTC in the future. But a more concrete solution may be needed from Congress to constrain or prohibit an inherently problematic business model. Kalshi reportedly spent more than $500,000 on lobbying in just three months earlier this year, while traditional sportsbooks and gambling associations have spent close to $1.5 million across the same period. In other words, Americans’ losing bets are being used to ensure that Americans keep betting—and losing—for years to come.
There’s a Blue-Collar Hollywood—and the Paramount Merger Will Kill It
I.
When I was a Federal Trade Commissioner, I learned that, as exciting as I thought my job was, most people don’t think about corporate consolidation. The word “merger” does not get the heart thumping. “Media merger” sounds like you’re stapling a document.
So let me try something different: If you watch CNN, if you watch John Oliver or Bill Maher or White Lotus or House of the Dragon, if you fall asleep on your couch to hours of Friends or Guy Fieri or Anthony Bourdain or Turner Classic Movies or Rick and Morty, if you’ll admit for the purposes of this essay you’re actually snoring to 90 Day Fiancé and Naked and Afraid and Sister Wives, or even if you’re waiting around for Shark Week: Your screentime will soon come under new ownership.
Or rather, it might. That wannabe owner is centimillionaire David Ellison, son of centibillionaire Larry Ellison, and he is the new CEO of Paramount Skydance. Which means that last year he bought CBS News, 60 Minutes, The Daily Show, CSI, Survivor, The Good Wife, Dexter, Star Trek, Yellowstone, Landman, BET, MTV, Showtime, the CW, South Park, and Spongebob Squarepants. He paid $8 billion for them. Now he wants to buy Warner Brothers Discovery for $110 billion—13 times what he paid for Paramount.
The problem is that David Ellison does not have that money. So, he’s borrowing it. Not him personally. No, he wants to make the new, combined company take on $79 billion in debt.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Larry Ellison allegedly informed White House officials that a Paramount takeover of Warner Brothers would result in an overhaul of reporting at CNN. In a possible preview of what’s to come, 60 Minutes has seen an exodus of senior reporters; correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi claimed she was pushed out for “refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.”
Democrats have denounced the merger. Just recently, 12 Democratic state attorneys general sued to stop the transaction and it is now on hold until as late as June of next year. Yet if you focus on the fact that it’s Democrats suing Trump-aligned Republicans, you see only half the story; the fight can look like politics as usual. When you focus on the money, however, you see a looming economic calamity.
I’m not the only one who sees it. In April, over a thousand people from across the entertainment industry wrote an open letter calling for the merger to be blocked. They also focused on the economics, warning that the deal would result in “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences.” There are now well over 5,000 signers to the letter. Yet the impact of the deal on the people who actually make film and television remains out of focus.
So, last month, alongside the Writers Guild and other groups opposed to this merger, I went on a listening tour of three cities that it would hit the hardest—Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta. At each stop, we focused little on politics, but far more on the workers “below the line”—an industry term for all the writers, actors, and blue-collar workers who never make the top billing on a movie poster.
I heard anger and despair. I saw glimmers of a broader coalition that might one day fight corporate takeovers. And I experienced Paramount’s bizarre attempts to smear us.
II.
People think “Hollywood” is rich, glamorous, and famous. It’s Oprah and Ryan Reynolds. It’s an Ozempiced executive lunching poolside with George Clooney.
The reality? “Hollywood” is the 20 people who apply to be their waiter. “Hollywood” has no pool and often, no health insurance. And for years now, “Hollywood” is not just in Hollywood, or even Los Angeles—it’s in New York and Jersey City; it’s in Atlanta and Savannah; it’s in Nashville and Baton Rouge and Kentucky and Miami.
The vast majority of people who work in film and television are not studio executives, nor are they famous actors. They are, overwhelmingly, blue-collar workers, freelancers, and small businesses. And they are in free fall.
According to the Future Film Coalition, a grassroots organization that helped organize the meetings, L.A. county has seen almost one in three of its film jobs disappear. Half the sales that used to happen at the nation’s top film festivals now do not happen. More than half of documentaries now made do not make any money. “A decade ago, the casual conversation between peers would be: What are you working on now?” said an actress at the Los Angeles town hall. “Now it’s: Are you working?”
The decline came from multiple causes, including a Covid-era collapse in productions, a race to the bottom on tax credits, and the writers’ and actors’ strikes giving studios an excuse to run those shoots abroad. The people we met understood that. But they couldn’t stop talking about the waves of layoffs that had followed waves of mergers.
Adam Conover—the only above the line actor who spoke at any of the meetings—told a dizzying story about the life and death of his investigative comedy series, Adam Ruins Everything.
He had pitched the show to Discovery, Comedy Central, TNT, TBS, and truTV, among others; truTV bought it because their new president wanted to compete with Comedy Central. “We employed about 100 people for the time we shot the show, and then countless contractors, caterers, et cetera,” Conover said. “We manufactured television for five years here in Los Angeles.” Another 100 people worked in an office building in midtown Manhattan cutting the show’s ads and setting its marketing strategy.
Then AT&T bought truTV’s parent company, Time Warner. AT&T put truTV, TNT, and TBS under one manager, who then called Adam, fired Adam, and fired every person working for the show. Then AT&T sold all those channels and merged them with Discovery, which put the channels under new management that fired the guy who fired Adam.
Now, Paramount, which bought Comedy Central, wants to buy all those channels, which would combine most of the channels that competed to buy the show in the first place.
“Hollywood is what it is,” Conover reflected, because people could “sell something into an open market, sell an idea, then employ hundreds and thousands of people underneath them—that created the media ecosystem that caused America to be a cultural power in the world, and created all the wonderful media that we love. And it’s about to die.”
Paramount, of course, had a different take. “Generally, we are very empathetic to the folks in Hollywood,” their top lawyer, Makan Delrahim, told the Los Angeles Times a few days before the town hall. “But this transaction will actually create more and better and exciting jobs.” Other mergers may kill jobs, Delrahim seemed to be saying. But David Ellison and David Zaslav—the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery—have no intention of firing people.
We held our town halls at the Lumiere Cinema in Los Angeles, the Writers Guild headquarters in New York, and the Plaza Theater in Atlanta. Each room was filled with people who had been fired by Ellison and Zaslav.
There was the writer in Los Angeles laid off by Paramount after Ellison bought it. She was late on rent. “I don’t have any prospects. My severance has run out. Unemployment is about to run out,” she said. But she insisted that she was happier now because of how poorly she had been treated since Ellison took over.
There was the writer in New York who was developing a show with Charlize Theron about a mom and her trans teen in the Texas panhandle. That writer, Jacob Tobia, was fired the moment Zaslav took over Warner Brothers and became the CEO of the company Ellison is now buying. “They didn’t even allow me to complete my contract or finish revising the pilot script before they made the decision,” Tobia said. “It was axed mid-revision. They paid me out and told me essentially to go away.”
Writing for film or TV may sound cushy. Maybe it once was. Now, an L.A. expat in New York explained, “There’s no jobs at the bottom of the rung anymore.” The entry-level position in writing—the writers’ production assistant—has been eliminated. So the people working the next rung of jobs are really working “two jobs, for $20 an hour, in Los Angeles.”
The living wage in L.A. is around $30. Local Starbucks baristas make $20.
III.
Any gauzy mirage we may have had of life in the industry was wiped away in Atlanta, where our meeting was dominated not by writers or actors but by about a dozen members of Local 479 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union that represents the technicians and craftspeople who work behind the camera or between takes.
Unlike the Writers Guild, IATSE’s national leaders have never called for the merger to be blocked. As I introduced myself, each person was careful to tell me that they were there to speak for themselves, not their union.
A tightly wound 30-something named Roger Thacher stood waiting near the popcorn station. He had a beard and wore glasses, an olive-green baseball cap, and a black, orange, and green Hawaiian shirt—his old crew’s “Friday uniform,” he was quick to note. “Otherwise I look wildly unprofessional.”
Roger gave me a sad smile. He thanked me for holding the event. He told me about his work as an assistant prop master. “That laptop behind you, that smartphone in her hand?” he said, gesturing to my colleague who was sitting at a nearby table. “I’m the guy who makes sure those have green screens. I’m the guy who tracks the amount of water in every glass that shows up in the shoot. I’m the invisible job behind the invisible job.”
But he seemed to be holding something back.
When the event began, I called on him in the audience. He stood and explained that he had joined the industry in 2017 and joined IATSE one year later. Business was booming then. “Many of us wondered how sustainable all this could be,” he said.
“Our fears were realized after the last big Disney consolidation,” he said. He had been working on a Hulu show that was shooting at a local college 10 minutes east of Atlanta. “Then, Disney finished their acquisition of Hulu—100 percent—and suddenly, our job moved across the border to Canada.”
He paused, then went on: “I used to shave my head for set to look clean for my work. My last day on a union job was the day we lost our first child to miscarriage. After a month,” he said, his voice breaking, “I noticed I was getting a little fuzzy up there. So I decided to have a little bit of fun—I’ll let it go until I work a union show again.”
Roger took off his hat. Long black hair fell over his shoulders.
“My hair is now down to the middle of my back. And I have a beautiful son at home who is 13 months old.”
He considered himself lucky; he had worked in another industry before. “I knew I would be okay,” he said. But he couldn’t say the same for his friends. “I hosted dinners for colleagues who lost 80 percent of their salary. I helped friends pack up and leave the state because they couldn’t afford their house.”
An older woman named Laurie Garner spoke a few minutes later. She stayed seated. She had worked in film and TV in Atlanta since the early ’90s, mostly in the art and prop departments. Her IMDB page lists credits from Watchmen, Atlanta, The Hunger Games, and Pitch Perfect, among dozens of others. This was a craftsperson who was recruited for the most prominent productions in Georgia.
Garner’s voice was unsteady; the right side of her face was limp. “I cannot afford health insurance because I have no work,” she said. “I haven’t worked since 2024 on Stranger Things.” That year, the Art Directors Guild suspended their job-training program, telling applicants in an email that “we cannot in good conscience encourage you to pursue our profession while so many of our members remain unemployed.”
CEOs often say they won’t do mass layoffs after a merger—they’ll just fire the underperformers. When I think about that, I think about a filmmaker named Christalyn Hampton who was in the back row of the Plaza. She wore dreads under a black Falcons hat. Her documentary about a local abortion clinic, The Devil is Busy, had just been nominated for an Academy Award.
“Even though I was recently nominated for an Oscar, it’s not like jobs are flowing in for me,” she said. “A lot of my documentaries about social justice? There’s no place for those. The mandates in a lot of these industries are true crime, cults, and celebrities.”
Paramount’s financing for the merger illustrates this dynamic. When you’re $80 billion in the hole, you don’t ask yourself: How am I going to tell an amazing story? You ask yourself: How the hell am I going to pay these guys back? And how can I absolutely guarantee that this next show will make money? You don’t take risks. You play it safe. And people like Christalyn Hampton are out of work, and her ideas about social justice won’t make it to your screen.
Towards the end of the session, a set decorator named Jamie Rosegren stood up in the front. She was the business agent for Local 479, although she too clarified that she was speaking for herself. Her union had 5,400 members; around 2,000 were in arrears because they had no work. “Now that people don’t have that work, they don’t know what to do with themselves,” she said. “We’ve seen more suicide. We’ve seen larger instances of depression among our crew.”
Atlanta was the home of Ted Turner’s media empire, which had merged with Time Warner, then AOL, then AT&T, then Discovery—each one generating another round of layoffs. The Paramount merger would be merger number five. Ethan Tussey, a Georgia State professor, told the crowd Turner properties used to employ 8,000 people in Atlanta. Now, it was less than 3,000.
IV.
Monday morning after our town hall at the Lumiere, a three-screen independent theater in Los Angeles, I drove to KCRW’s studios at Santa Monica College for an interview with Kim Masters, an institution in entertainment reporting. Masters played a clip of a CNBC interview with Ellison in which he said the deal would be “good for the creator economy” and “good for Hollywood.”
I told Masters that Ellison’s math did not work. And it doesn’t, on a couple of levels. According to Ellison, the deal will generate “$6 billion in synergies”—Wall Street’s word for the cost cuts that follow a merger, usually in the form of sweeping layoffs. Yet Ellison insisted that most of the savings would not come from layoffs. “Nobody believes that,” said NYU professor Scott Galloway. “It’s going to be difficult to cut billions in snacks.”
The bigger picture doesn’t work either. Paramount is promising to make payments on $79 billion in loans, promising to stop spending $6 billion elsewhere—while also promising to put more movies in theaters than any studio has ever done in modern history.
My children tease me with something they call “monkey math.” I, the pedant, fall for it every time. It goes like this. I’ll be driving them to school or making sure they brush their teeth, and one of them will say: “Papa, what’s two plus two?”
I grimace, lower my head, and say “four.”
“No!” they scream, overjoyed. “It’s 22!” As I start to say, “No, it’s no–,” they holler, “It’s monkey math!”
Ellison is trying to convince people two plus two is 22. Fitch has downgraded his company’s credit to junk status.
Masters and I talked about the deal for about 25 minutes, touching on its impact on labor, on Paramount’s purge at 60 Minutes, and the legal cases against the merger. Then, she seemed to get a little uncomfortable, and she asked me one last question. She had also read the L.A. Times interview where Paramount general counsel Delrahim touted “more and better and exciting jobs.”
But she had noticed a different part, where Delrahim said that our coalition was engaged in a “fear mongering” political campaign, and that “some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction really because of their own antisemitic views.”
What did I think of that? I called it what it was—a distraction, and a curious one from a man representing a company whose takeover bid was backed by $24 billion from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi.
That was a Monday. That Thursday, a frothy New York Post article cited “a source involved in the merger” who said that the coalition trying to block it was “completely driven by antisemitism and socialism.”
It’s all fun and games until you fire 6,000 people while earning $21.2 million a month.
V.
Another thing I learned at the FTC is that while a particular merger fight in a particular industry may feel existential to the people in that industry, it can be hard to get people outside of it to notice, let alone to care.
In 2023, for example, FTC staff blocked a pharmaceutical company’s effort to maintain a monopoly over treatments for Pompe disease, a horrific genetic condition that kills children before their first birthday. If you Google the case, almost all the coverage comes from the finance and pharma trade press—and the white shoe law firms litigating similar deals.
And so it caught my eye when a soybean grower and cattleman from Iowa, Lance Lillibridge, posted this message on Facebook in May:
As a farmer, watching the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. merger debate sounds awfully familiar. A handful of dominant firms get bigger, independent businesses lose leverage, and the people actually creating the product get squeezed harder and harder. Farmers have lived this story for decades through consolidation in inputs and retail. Now more industries are starting to see the same thing happen to them.
A few days after I saw the post, I interviewed him alongside Kirby Dick, an Emmy- and Polk-award winning documentarian, for the Organized Money podcast. I wanted to know—how did he make these connections?
For Lance, it was all pretty straightforward. His wife is physically disabled from multiple sclerosis, so he spends a lot of time with her watching movies and television shows. “Back when I was a kid, there was a lot of different things to watch—today it’s all about crime. It’s all about who killed who on the farm,” he said.
“We’ve got that same thing going on,” he said, about farmers. Farmers like Lance used to have a dozen different companies to buy seed from; now they have two. If there was very little seed choice, there were “no choices in where you get your fertilizer from, who’s manufacturing it … The consolidation is tremendous and crippling. The fertilizer companies are making more off an acre of land than we are right now. And that’s disgusting.”
On July 13, California Attorney General Rob Bonta stood on a hill in front of the HOLLYWOOD sign and announced a lawsuit, on behalf of himself and 11 other state attorneys general, to block the Paramount-Warner merger. The law enforcers called out Paramount’s monkey math, arguing that the takeover would mean fewer movies for higher prices, and would also lead to higher cable bills. The next day, the Writers Guild announced its own lawsuit to block the merger on the grounds that it would collapse key labor markets for their members. A third lawsuit, filed the same day by a company shareholder, alleged that the Ellisons had effectively bribed President Trump in order to secure his approval of the merger.
Soon after that, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring the company from merging for two weeks, then extended the order for two weeks; then Paramount agreed to delay merging until next June unless if the court issues a ruling before then—a stunning reversal for a company that was so confident the deal would sail through regulatory approvals.
Billionaires usually get what they want. They get the government they want, the healthcare they want, and they break the laws they want, so long as they make the right donations or crypto investments.
This case asks: Maybe not this time?
As for next time, I’m still thinking about my conversation with Lance Lillibridge—and documentarian Kirby Dick’s reaction to hearing the anger and hopelessness on independent farms across the country. I had just shared what it was like to watch fourth- or fifth-generation farmers break down in tears because their business was going bankrupt, or because they were scared that a powerful supplier would learn that they had spoken to an FTC commissioner.
Lance had just talked about how he was shielding his 20-year-old son, who was set on going into farming, from their family’s financial difficulties: “He doesn’t really have an interest to do anything else.”
Something about those scenes clicked for Kirby. “I don’t think people see this issue this way,” he said. “They see it as either a complex issue or something that’s not related to them personally.”
He chuckled and added: “When you started describing that, I sort of just leaned in like, Where can I get my camera? How can I cover that?”
Inside AOC’s Foreign Policy Vision
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.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t ruling out a 2028 presidential run. And part of running for president is communicating your vision on foreign affairs. Jonathan Guyer, a longtime journalist who is now the program director at the Institute for Global Affairs, wrote a recent piece in Foreign Policy about Ocasio-Cortez’s foreign policy ideas. In the latest edition of Right Now, Guyer discussed his reporting, where he interviewed more than two dozen people about Ocasio-Cortez’s perspectives on the world. He described her vision of a “foreign policy for the working class,” the experts she is consulting, world leaders she has met with, and countries the congresswoman has traveled to. Guyer also explained why he thinks foreign policy will be at the center of the next Democratic presidential primary. He argued that the fissure over foreign policy between the center-left and left wings of the Democratic Party, most notably on Israeli-Palestinian issues, will endure. Those who advised President Biden on foreign policy may have a hard time getting top jobs in the next Democratic presidential administration if a progressive like Ocasio-Cortez wins, Guyer predicted. One of those advising Ocasio-Cortez is Matt Duss, who has made several appearances on Right Now to discuss what a progressive foreign policy might look like in practice.
AI digs through 3,700 accounts of dreams and waking life, finds method in the madness
Trump’s Rage at Iran Takes Truly Scary Turn, and Even MAGA Is Unnerved
On Fox News, Donald Trump threatened to bomb all of Iran’s bridges and all of its power plants. Making this worse, Trump declared that his threat could leave all of Iran’s 91 million people without power. That may be the first time Trump has explicitly said this threat could apply to Iran’s entire population, which would constitute an extraordinary atrocity. Though Trump presented this as something he’d be reluctant to do, the key is he still confirmed it’s under consideration. Meanwhile, many MAGA figures are very upset about Trump’s new meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, fearing it portends an escalation: As Steve Bannon put it, this is a “disaster for America First.” MAGA doesn’t care much about Iranians, but Trump’s escalation threats do rattle them for other reasons. We talked to former State Department official Emily Horne, author of the Spin Class Substack. We discuss the humanitarian horrors Trump is actually hinting at, what MAGA pressure on Trump means, and why the logic of the trap ensnaring Trump could lead to a terrible ending. Listen to this episode here.
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