Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-09-17 Thursday

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Headlines for September 17, 2026; “Fast Food Nation,” Mystery Meat & Trump’s Dismantling of U.S. Food Safety System: Eric Schlosser; “Call It Evil”: Philosopher Susan Neiman on Why Moral Clarity Matters in the Trump Era

From New York, this is Democracy Now. Right now, you can see all of the worst aspects of America's food system that I wrote about 25 years ago coming to the four. And I hope it's like a terrible fever that will break. 25 years ago, the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser wrote the landmark book, Fast Food Nation, the dark side of the all-American meal. Today, the U.S. food system is under increasing attack as the Trump administration slashes jobs and regulations. At the same time, it's importing 660 million pounds of mystery meat.

We'll find out what's behind the mystery. Then we speak to the philosopher Susan Neiman, author of the new book, Call It Evil, understanding the Trump era. If killing fishermen and schoolgirls and peacefully protesting demonstrators is not evil, I don't know what it is. All that and more coming up. Welcome to Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. The United Nations warrants at least nine children were killed and more than 57,000, and children have been displaced in Yemen during two weeks of fighting between Saudi-backed Yemeni

government forces and members of Ansala, also known as the Houthis. On Wednesday, the group released video backing its claims it shot down a Saudi F-15 fighter jet using a surfaced air missile. This follows hundreds of air strikes by the Royal Saudi Air Force over the past week. Meanwhile, Reuters reports Trump administration officials met C. with Houthi representatives at the U.S. embassy in Oman's capital muskot over the weekend. The Houthis reportedly pledged not to attack U.S. or Israeli vessels and said they're committed to the 2025 ceasefire with the U.S. The Trump administration's decision not to join Saudi attacks in Yemen comes as the Associated Press reports the Kingdom is running low on missile interceptors. Saudi officials have reportedly asked France, Pakistan,

Egypt and the United Kingdom to help defend against missiles and drones after the U.S. saw its own stockpiles depleted during the Iran war. President Trump said Wednesday Iranian officials had reached out to the U.S. to negotiate a deal, telling reporters, quote, hopefully were towards the end of the war, Trump said. There was no confirmation of Trump's claim from Tehran where just one day earlier a top official publicly rejected talks unless all of Iran's conditions are met. Since ordering a tax on Iran in February, President Trump has claimed dozens of times the war had been won or was about to end. The Federal Reserve has voted unanimously to hike interest rates for the first time since 2023. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh announced the quarter percentage point increase in the benchmark interest

on Wednesday. inflation is the problem. Stable prices have been the problem for now more than five and a half years. So what the committee decided to do today was taking action to ensure a timelier return to our price stability objective. Warsh did not directly acknowledge the role the U.S. and Israeli war in Iran played in driving up the cost of energy and other goods and services. He declined to answer questions about how President Trump would react to higher interest rates.

following Warsh's announcement, Trump blasted the Fed is very hostile, very political, and called on it to lower its benchmark interest rate from its current rate of up to 4% to 1% or lower. The price of oil has fallen slightly after surging this week to its highest level since the 2022 energy crisis. Brent crude is trading at about $103 a barrel following reports. Saudi Arabia is offering additional crude shipments via Oman after drone attacks damaged the East-West oil pipeline to the Red Sea. According to estimates by Brown University researchers, the Iran War, along with fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has cost U.S. consumers an extra $107 billion in fuel spending. On Wednesday, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged what he called a short-term

problem during a Fox News interview. Yes, this has taken some energy resources out of the marketplace. It is causing a short-term sacrifice for Americans right now, but this is to end Iran's ability to forever drive up energy prices. In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian American journalist Nakhah Ahmed was arrested by Israeli authorities, so she returned from covering Israeli settler attacks in Masafirata. She's a freelance journalist and a drop site news,

contributor. She was detained near a village in Bethlehem as she and two other Palestinian journalists who were returning from reporting for Turkish news outlet TRT. Meanwhile in Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza City held funerals Wednesday for people who were killed when a bombed-out apartment building collapsed. A relative of the victim said his uncle and his uncle's entire family had been killed. Let the world know that the war has not stopped yet, and the proof is here. They said that construction materials would be allowed in and that Gaza City would be rebuilt, or rather that caravans would be brought in. But unfortunately, my uncle was killed along with his family without having a safe place to protect himself and his family.

New York Democratic Congress member Gregory Meeks has refused to clear President Trump's $2.8 billion arm sale of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. Meeks is the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In a statement, he said, quote, the Trump administration has not provided sufficient assurances that these weapons will be used by the Netanyahu government in accordance with U.S. law and with appropriate protections for civilians. I therefore will not clear this sale at this time, Meek said. The sale is funded by foreign military financing, a program in which the U.S. gives Israel taxpayer money that Israel then spends on U.S. made weapons. Here in New York, an interfaith coalition

has unveiled a 330-foot memorial shroud bearing the handwritten names of 20,000 children killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since 2023. On Wednesday, groups including priests against genocide, doctors against genocide, and justice for all, presented the Gaza children's shroud at the church center for the United Nations across from UN headquarters. This comes as the UN General Assembly is currently in session ahead of high-level talks next week when world leaders will gather for a general debate. At Wednesday's event, democracy now spoke with Riyadh-Mansour, the permanent observer of the state of Palestine to the UN.

Losing 20,000-plus children in the Gaza Strip alone through this genocide, This is a huge crime against humanity and against the Palestinian people. And those who are responsible for that crime should be held accountable. In Gaza alone, one million Palestinian children who are still alive. They need food. They need humanitarian assistance. They need the evacuation of all of the Israeli army. They need freedom.

They need dignity. Palestine has to be free. On Wednesday, the State Department announced it would continue to deny visas to Palestinian officials, including Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority. Abbas is prevented from attending the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York next week. In Florida, Palestinian human rights attorney Nur Arakat was arrested Tuesday as more than 100 people packed a public budget hearing to oppose plans by Palm Beach County to invest a billion dollars in government

fact securities that fund the state of Israel. County commissioners limited public comment to just one minute and had sheriff's deputies removed people from the hearing when they spoke out against Israel bonds, claiming bond investments were a policy matter rather than a budget item. The commissioners then declared a recess to clear out even more members of the public. That's when Nora Erika says she was arrested. They are evicting people for applauding. They are insulting their own constituents. They have shut down what people can talk about. This is. is a very clear and obvious overturn of any kind of democratic order, even the semblance of democratic order. They want us to leave. This sheriff is now telling us to leave.

We are staying. We are staying. You are witnessing an absolute, an absolute assault on democracy in Palm Beach County, in defense of Israel against all of their constituents sitting in the room who oppose genocide and against the slaughter of children. Open AI has disclosed six more incidents involving what it's calling unexpected or concerning behavior by AI agents. The disclosures announced Wednesday include instances where AI models cheated on tests, covered up mistakes, move files onto the open Internet without permission, and secretly used a makeshift bulletin board to share information with other AI agents. This follows other instances where frontier models,

self-organized into swarms and engaged in strategic deception, self-preservation, and power-seeking. OpenAI said it was introducing a new framework for tracking, investigating, and disclosing cases of what it calls misalignment, where an AI agent's goals or actions diverge from human intentions, values, or instructions. And Capitol Hill, the House overwhelmingly approved the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bill aimed at shielding customers from soaring electricity costs due to the rapid rollout of AI data centers. Following its passage, the Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson, canceled votes scheduled for Thursday and adjourned the House until after November's midterm elections. That's despite a letter written by more

than 100 House Democrats urging Johnson to cancel the recess in order to craft new legislation on AI safeguards. The House will also avoid voting on articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that were introduced by the Republican Kentucky Congress member Massey. The Pentagon said Wednesday it had blown up a vessel in the eastern Pacific after boarding it, abducting its crew and handing them over to Ecuadoran authorities. As in previous boat strikes, U.S. Southern Command provided no evidence to back its claims the vessel was involved in narco-trafficking. The Trump administration's claimed at least 65 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since last September reportedly killing at least 230 people. Amnesty International has condemned

the attacks as illegal, extrajudicial killings at sea and murder. At the Hague, former Philippines president, Rodrigo Duterte, appeared in person at the International Criminal Court Wednesday. He's facing three counts of crimes against humanity over his drug war. ICC prosecutors alleged Duterte created, funded, and armed death squads that killed as many as 30,000 people in so-called anti-drug. operations. This is the mother of one of Duterte's victims. We pray that the ICC judges are wise and will not allow it to drag any longer for our sake. Like me, I'm already getting older. I don't know how long I have in this world.

And when that happens, how can I continue fighting for my child? In Indonesia, El Nino weather conditions are driving up temperatures and causing punishing droughts, as Indonesia is facing its most intense wildfire season in 11 years. Respiratory infections caused by hazardous wildfire pollution have more than doubled in just over a week. Volunteers are distributing oxygen cylinders to residents and firefighters. The air is also turned unhealthy in neighboring Singapore and Malaysia. This is Mimi Marlina, a mother of two children battling respiratory problems. My child's health has been affected by this bad air.

Her health is declining. She's coughing, has fevers, and runny nose. I'm afraid she will have trouble breathing. We can still hold it off with medicines, but I'm concerned that if this persists, it will lead to worse illnesses. And the Trump administration's moving to gut a key provision of the Endangered Species Act,

according to an internal memo obtained by the New York Times. Under the memo's reinterpretation, only intentionally harming an animal would break the law. Accidental killings or injuries due to economic activity would not. Andrew Mugan, a law professor at Harvard University, said, quote, what the administration's proposing to do is take all the force out of what we've all understood the act to mean. Don't kill endangered species. What they seem to be saying in this document is it doesn't matter if you killed an endangered species

if you didn't mean to, unquote. 21 attorneys general have filed a lawsuit seeking to block implementation of the new Endangered Species Act Rules. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now. DemocracyNow.org, the Warren Peace Report. Coming up, Eric Schlosser,

author of Fast Food Nation, The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. It's 25 years since the book came out. His latest article is headline, why did Trump order up 660 million pounds of mystery meat? Stay with us. Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.

And I'm Nermin Sheikh. Welcome to our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. If you buy a T-shirt at Gap, it will have a label that tells you where it was made. That's federal law. The same is true for automobiles, appliances, television sets, every fresh or frozen fruit and vegetables sold to the supermarket. Beef and pork are notable exceptions to these laws. And that may help to explain why President Trump signed a proclamation last month that will allow the duty-free importation. of about 660 million pounds of inexpensive beef.

If American consumers knew where that beef was coming from, they might not want to eat it. Those are the opening lines of a recent article in the New York Times headlined, Why Did Trump Order Up 660 million pounds of mystery meat? The piece is written by investigative journalist and author Eric Schlosser. 25 years ago, he wrote the landmark book, Fast Food Nation, the dark side of the all-American meal. The 25th anniversary edition of the book is being published next week. Eric, welcome back to Democracy Now.

I remember when we had you on 25 years ago with this groundbreaking book, Fast Food Nation. I'm so sorry to be here talking about it again. I really wish these problems had been solved and that my book was only of antiquarian interest. But it's amazing to me to read the headlines and to look at what's happening right now. And the book is about fast food, but it's really about unchecked corporate power. And when you want to understand why 660 million pounds of some of the least expensive frozen beef that's going to go into fast food hamburgers, and why is that coming to the United States

just remarkable on Czech corporate power. Well, explain what mystery meat is, and how did this come into being? Mystery meat is a colloquial phrase for lean beef trimmings. These are little pieces of frozen beef. The beef that's most likely to be contaminated taken from the outside of the animal, and it's sort of generic industrial meat that will then be ground into hamburger meat. mainly for fast food restaurants. And President Trump allowed six,

I made a proclamation saying that 660 million pounds could be coming into the country. It's quite remarkable that we have this president who talks about America first and is so supported by rural America, but with a stroke of his pen is basically screwing over American ranchers. This beef is most likely coming from Brazil.

And in my New York Times article, it's this remarkable coincidence that the day before Trump issued this proclamation, he met with the head of the biggest beef company in the world, JBS. His name is Josley Batista. He's one of the co-owners. He met with Josley Batista at the White House, who, you know, Maggie Haberman at the New York Times said as a friend of Melania's. I don't know what that connection is. but he met with Batista, and the next day issued this proclamation, bringing in hundreds of millions of pounds of beef, most likely from Brazil. And another really weird coincidence is that the European Union has suspended all imports of beef from Brazil starting the first week of September, and Trump, in allowing these imports into the United States, just so happens the timing is the first week in September. So it smells like a pretty corrupt deal. And the European Union has suspended the import of Brazilian beef for concerns about antibiotic misuse. And this meat is some of the meat most likely to be contaminated.

And this company, JBS, I mean, it's quite remarkable that Josley-Batista was meeting with the president of the United States to help determine our agricultural policy. when he has confessed to spending over $186 million, bribing almost 2,000 legislators in Brazil, including three presidents of Brazil. And I've never met Mr. Batista, but he's clearly a very bright man, to be able to bribe three presidents of Brazil

and yet be meeting with the president of the United States and helping to determine our agricultural policy, I mean, he may have a great career in American politics. Well, as you also point out, what makes it even more remarkable is that he was long considered persona non grata in the U.S. And then not long after his meeting with Trump in November at the White House, JBS got approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

You know, the timing is a little different. The largest single donor to Trump's second inauguration was a subsidiary of JBS. They gave $5 million, which is more than any other politician, any other corporation or individual. And remarkably, not long after that donation, JBS got listed on the New York Stock Exchange, which is something the company had sought for years. But a Bible, partisan group of American senators, including Senator Marco Rubio at the time, was one of the most vocal critics of JBS. The corruption scandal in Brazil involved JBS bribing Brazilian politicians so that JBS could get loans from a state-controlled bank, and it used money from those loans to buy American meatpacking companies. Do you know what is the subsidiary of The subsidiary of JBS that made the donation was Pilgrim's Pride. But it's all the same company, and it's owned controlled by these two brothers. But, you know, the real issue here isn't JBS.

It isn't President Trump. It's how every sector of the American economy has been taken over by a handful of corporations. And sadly, 25 years ago, I wrote in Fast Food Nation, The great issue, this is a paraphrase, the great issue of the 20th century is basically the challenge to totalitarian systems of power. And the great issue of the 21st century is going to be resistance to uncheck corporate power. And so much attention goes to Trump and what we really need to be looking at and are the corporations who are benefiting profoundly from all this deregulation, whether it's the oil companies because of the Department of the Interior,

the chemical companies because of who runs the EPA. And sadly, the food system now is controlled as never before by a handful of very, very powerful companies. Anyway, I... Well, let's talk about that. In beef in particular, the four large meat packing companies control four large meat packing companies, control about 85. percent of the market for beef, whereas in the 1970s, the top four beef companies had only 21 percent.

Right. And if you go back to the 1970s, and there were so many terrible things going on in American society, so I'm not being nostalgic for it. But in the 1970s, we had a competitive market for beef. Americans ate more beef then than they do today, and we had twice as many American ranchers. So the change that has occurred has helped a handful of corporations. And Fast Food Nation paid homage in many ways to Upton Sinclair because Upton Sinclair wrote the jungle in 1906.

And he wrote about the meatpacking industry because he thought it was a perfect symbol of the monopoly capitalism of his day. And in my book, I paid homage to him by doing the same thing. The whole book is structured to take you to the slaughterhouse. And when Upton Sinclair wrote the Jungle, there was something called the Beef Trust, and it controlled maybe 55 to 60 percent of the market for beef. So right now, these companies are more powerful than the companies when Upton Sinclair wrote the jungle. But Woodrow Wilson broke up the Beef Trust.

And when you talk about the competitive market we had in the 70s, you know, things can change for the better. And again, I'm so sorry to be here. 25 years later and saying so many of the same things I said 25 years ago. But the reason I do it, things don't have to be this way. You know, I mean, there are certain kinds of problems we're really going to have difficulty changing. But strict antitrust enforcement, labor unions, food safety laws, these can really have an impact on our food system and on what we eat. You note that during the past year, China rejected two shipping containers of beef from Uruguay after finding residue of an anti-parasitic drug in the meat and rejected beef from Argentina reportedly because it tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause serious blood disorders.

Compare that to what's happening in the United States. I mean, there's this phrase not just maga, but maha, right, make America. healthy again. But can you talk about what you call the erosion of food safety regulations under Health Secretary RFK? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I've been a critic of the American meatpacking industry for 25 years, and yet I would rather eat American beef produced in this country than eat Brazilian beef. And, you know, one of the things that JBS got in trouble for was bribing the food inspectors in Brazil so that contaminated meat could be sold. Contaminated meat is spoiled meat that's riddled with bacteria.

That's how you get sick. And they were using escorbic acid and other chemicals. This is straight out of Upton Sinclair. So I'm critical of the American meat system, but if you're going to eat beef, get American beef and get it ground at your local butcher shop. Back to the... So the FDA is responsible for 80% of the food consumed in the United States.

The FDA reports to Bobby Kennedy Jr. That's all you need to know about, is your food safe? I mean, I could spend hours talking about the disgrace of Bobby Kennedy Jr., the unethical qualities of Bobby Kennedy Jr. The routine lies. in the afterward of my book, I write about the infant formula scandal and about, you know, the shutdown of one infant formula plant that led to huge shortages of formula a few years ago. You want to talk about monopoly power. There are two companies that control 80 percent of the market for infant formula. And here in the U.S. or globally?

In the United States. And the federal government buys. more than half of the infant formula. So if we wanted to change the infant formula industry, we could do it in weeks because the taxpayers are paying for it. Anyway, the acting head of the FDA right now has no background in public safety, has no public health, has no medical training, has no scientific training.

He's an attorney who represented the largest infant formula manufacturer in a case involving potentially contaminated formula. This is Kyle Diamantus. Yeah. And that's who, you know, that's who this administration has put in charge of food safety. The USDA is in charge of the safety of our meat. And about a quarter of the USDA employees have been fired.

He is Donald Trump Jr.'s hunting companion. The head of the FDA. Now, look, I want to make one thing clear. These food companies don't want people to get. sick. I'm not saying they're evil, but they also don't want to be held liable when they do get sick. And if you're not testing, you can't trace, you can't recall contaminated products. So when you dismantle the food safety system, as is happening right now in the United States, you're helping these companies avoid legal liability. Well, you also, you just mentioned earlier that

despite all the problems with the food industry in the U.S., you would much prefer to have American beef. But can you tell what is American beef and what is not? Because country of origin labeling on beef used to be mandatory, but it no longer is. And it's been many years since it has not been. And it's amusing because there's all this conversation about the free market. But if you read Adam Smith, a market only works efficiently if there's total information. If consumers have adequate information, then the invisible hand is going to lead them to select the right product. When you get rid of that information, the power leads to the corporation.

So all meat had to be labeled from where it came from until 2015. And then the Republican-controlled Congress got rid of country-of-origin labeling for beef and pork. And what's remarkable is a little more than a year after that, Speaker of the former Speaker of the House, John Bonner, who shepherded this legislation, joined a JBS international board. So when you don't have country of origin labeling, a consumer has no idea where this meat is coming from. And two of the major beef companies are Brazilian owned now. And I'm not being anti-Brazil. It's like if Brazil wants to sell its meat in the United States, put a label on it.

make the best beef there is, you know, I'm actually very libertarian in some ways. If these meatpacking companies want to sell meat full of E. coli and salmonella, put it on the label. Consumers can choose between, you know, pathogen-rich meat or meat that's been, you know, produced cleanly. And then they can cook it, you know. Eric Schlosser, you mentioned Upton Sinclair, who exposed the meatpacking. and the condition that the workers worked under. So let's talk about those workers who feel like they are treated like meat, contaminated meat.

I want to go to Jim Pillen. We had this headline a few days ago on Democracy Now, Nebraska's Republican governor, who publicly backs Trump's ICE raids in Nebraska. More details have emerged of Pillarin's multi-million dollar high. hog business that employs undocumented workers. The New York Times and the Flatwater Free Press report that over the span of more than a decade, Pillin's company, Pellin Family Farms, has relied on undocumented workers to grow into one of the largest hog producers in the U.S. Despite that,

Pellin has often echoed Trump's racist rhetoric about immigrants and a so-called invasion. Talk about the workers in the meatpacking industry. shocked that he would be employing undocumented immigrants. Here's the reality, and here's really why I wrote Fast Food Nation. I wrote Fast Food Nation after I visited the meatpacking towns in the United States. I've been in meatpacking communities in Washington State, Colorado, Nebraska, Texas, and my entry to the food system of America was spending a year with migrant farm workers in California. And I wrote about the exploitation and demon-eastern.

of immigrant workers in California by the governor at the time. Pete Wilson, he wanted to be president, and he thought that depicting immigrant workers as welfare cheats was going to be his ticket to the White House. The reality is, and I wrote Fast Food Nation because I was stunned to find in the meatpacking plants of the Midwest the same workers. Some of them had worked in strawberry fields in California now in our industrial workforce. And meatpacking once was was a high-paid union job, a higher-paid job than an auto worker. So when Upton Sinclair wrote about the exploitation of immigrants, we solved that problem. If you were a meatpacking worker in the 60s or 70s, you had a solid middle-class life.

Your spouse may not have to work. Your kids could go to college. In a very brief period of time, the meatpacking industry recruited immigrants, many of them undocumented, to serve as strike breakers because they would be much easier to exploit. And if there's one message that I have from my work on food, from this book, it's that we are fed by immigrants. If you look at who's working in the fields, harvesting the fruits and vegetables, who's working in the meatpacking plants,

who's working on the hog farms, the dairy farms of Vermont, it's recent immigrants, huge numbers of undocumented immigrants in the fast food restaurants behind the counter. And the idea that we are demonizing and terrorizing these hardworking people who feed us, it's an absolute disgrace. And also one thing I wanted to ask, this book came out 25 years ago. Has anything changed with respect to the consumption of fast food in the U.S. in these last 25 years? years. You know, what's really changed is the eating habits of well-educated upper middle class and

wealthy people. There is such an incredible awareness of food now. I mean, I couldn't get a publisher for this book in New York City. And the reason I couldn't get a publisher is that I was told nobody will read a book about food that doesn't have recipes in it. It was one of the last independent publishers in Boston that published this book. And now, How many books have you sold since then? I have no idea. I'm very grateful that I'm here with you 25 years later. But there's now a whole literature on food.

There's bookshelves of books on our food system. I'm not taking credit for it. I just am so gratified of it. So we now have two food systems. We have a food system for the well-educated, the wealthy, upper-middle class who are buying sustainable food, organic food, grass-fed beef, watching cooking shows, and then you have a food system for working people

in the poor. It's this food system. It's the fast food industrial system. And, you know, the reason that I'm still talking about this is that it's entirely possible for us to have a food system that provides healthy food for everybody. One of the things that we don't talk about are the ways in which the external costs of the industrial food system are imposed on us. And since this book came out, there's a whole new field of economics called true cost accounting. What's the real cost of what we're doing? And in the food system, you add up the cost of obesity, food safety, the poverty of food workers, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, one of my goals is to make the real cost of this industrial food appear on the menu.

And, you know, if we're going to give government subsidies, government subsidies shouldn't be going to soybean and corn farmers in the Midwest to grow animal feed. I mean, 100 million acres are devoted to corn in this country. That's the size of California. And of that 100 million acres, maybe 350,000 go to the kind of corn that we eat, you know, sweet corn or canned corn. The rest of it is going to, anyway, I don't want to speak for three hours, but. But I'm hopeful that this system could be changed. And the one thing I give Bobby Kennedy, Jr., credit for. And, you know, a broken clock is right twice a day,

is that he had the crazy nerve to talk about the problems with our food system in a way that only a handful of other politicians were willing to do. And he did it for very selfish political reasons, but there's an underlying popular opinion to change our food system. That's what Maha has shown. Eric, before you go, I want to ask you about the notorious former ICE jail in Florida in the Everglades. You wrote a piece in the Atlantic headline, the Alligator Alcatraz boondoggle. So earlier this week, the Department of Homeland Security's internal watchdog revealed immigrants jailed at alligator Alcatraz were held in outdoor metal cages that were no bigger than a phone booth.

at least 79 immigrants were caged this way, which DHS called calming areas. They were caged for several minutes up to nearly two hours. Investigators also found alligator alcatraz did not comply with standards related to medical care, food quality, personal hygiene, recreation, the jail eventually shut down after legal challenges and scrutiny over its abuse and inhumane conditions. Why did you shift to focus on alligator alcatraz and what should we know about it? today? My next book is on prisons in America. I've been going into prisons in this country since the early 1990s. And unfortunately, President Trump has given me a concluding chapter of the book,

which is the outrageous, unconscionable arrest and detention of immigrants in this country who are being completely brutalized. I've gone into maximum security prisons that are terrible, and it costs about $50,000, $80,000 a year to house someone in a maximum security prison, maybe $100,000. The immigrants at Alligator Alcatraz had been sent there for civil violations, not criminal violations. And the state of Florida and the American taxpayers were paying a million dollars a year per detainee to be held in the most brutal conditions that you will not find in most maximum security prisons. And I wrote that article for the Atlantic on Alligator Alcatraz to provide a roadmap for a Democratic Congress to investigate where that

money went. I'm an investigative reporter. I could not find out the name of the warden of Alligator Alcatraz. It was being run by a private corporation with no background in corrections. It looks like they were friends of the governor of Florida who were earning a fortune off of exploiting and brutalizing immigrants who were there for a civil, you know, not even, they hadn't even been convicted of a crime. So my hope is that we will get a full federal investigation, not only of the human rights violations that occurred at Alligator Alcatraz, but follow the money. Who made a fortune off of this? I mean, the only prison that the United States runs that spends more money per detainee is Guantanamo. And the idea that we were

subjecting busboys, landscapers, people who'd been in the United States for decades and committed no crime to the kind of brutality that we saw at Guantanamo when Guantanamo first opened, it's a shameful episode in American history and it needs to be fully investigated by Congress. Eric Schlosser, congratulations on your work, investigative journalist, author of several books, including Fast Food Nation, the Dark Side of the All-American Meal. The 25th anniversary edition of the book is being published next week. We'll link to all of your recent articles. Coming up, philosopher Susan Neiman, author of the new book, Call It Evil, Understanding the Trump era.

Stay with us. Just here sitting, thinking about quitting, once I have just one more smoke. And I've got habits. It's cursing traffic And I might ride Your bumper close Lord knows I'm a fighter And I hold on tighter to the folks

I love than I probably should I got my BAD And I get vengeful And get reasonful And I know how to hold a grudge And I'm impulsive I'm all my bullshit And I bite back when push comes to shove, but you can quote me will I wouldn't change it.

Bad attitude by Christina Vane, performing at the Brooklyn Folk Festival. This is Democracy Now. Democracy Now.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermaine Sheik. We end today's show with the philosopher Susan Nieman. In recent years, she's written extensively on politics in Germany and the United States. In 2019, she published the book, Learning from the Germans, Race and the Memory of Evil. The book examines how Germany has confronted the evils of Nazism. Susan Neiman's latest book is also about the concept of evil.

It's titled Call It Evil, Understanding the Trump era. Susan Neiman is a director emerita of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. But she's joining us here in New York. Before we talk about your new book, I want to ask about, what's happening in Germany, where you just left coming here, you're going to be teaching at New York University, NYU. You lived in Germany for 30 years. The German far right party, AFD, recently won nearly 44% of the vote in the East German state of Saxony-Anjalt. It was the strongest showing by a far-right party since, in the German election,

since the Nazi era. Can you talk about the significance of this? I mean, many in Germany are reeling at this point, but it's not known, as you know, we're very insulated in the United States when it comes to getting news from outside the United States. What's actually happened? I don't know yet. In fact, I was just asked yesterday to write a piece for LeMonde on exactly that question. And I said, I'm not going to say anything for another week, because we have two other big state elections coming on Sunday, which are actually much represent many more people than Saxon-Halt, in particular the Berlin election, where it looks as if we may get a Turkish woman whose parents went into exile from Turkey because they were socialists, who has tried as much

as possible to base her campaign on Zoran Mamdani's. In fact, the the linker, the left party, has quoted Leonard Cohen, saying first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. Okay? So it would be a completely different result, also representing a much larger state of people. Germany has about three and a – Berlin has about three and a half million people.

It's also the capital. Zaksin Annhalt has about two million. And I don't want to play it down. It's deeply concerning that the AFD got so many voters. What has changed in this last half century? I'd be way beyond that. Yeah. So, look, part of it is the other parties are just awful.

They are incapable. In fact, the almost funny thing. I mentioned Mamdani at a book talk I gave just before I left Germany. Somebody said to me, well, you've confirmed our worst fears about America. Is there any hope? And I said, yeah. We have a fantastic mayor of New York who's inspired a lot of other candidates. And the man said to me, you know, we Germans are very afraid of charisma.

That's true. And that's one of the wrong lessons they learned from their history. What's changed is that the other parties don't possibly the left have a real program that they're able to communicate. What's changed is also one has to understand, a Saxon-Han-Halt is a state in East Germany. Now, one of the West German myths about East Germany is, oh, well, the reason why they're proportionally larger numbers of people voting for a far-right party is they never learned anything about democracy because they lived in a totalitarian system. This is just not true. In fact, the oldest people who've, the oldest population of Saxon-Hald were the people who were voting against the AFT, okay?

Not the younger people who were born in East Germany. What's true is that West Germans have. have been contemptuous of East Germans for a very long time. 1.8% of leadership jobs, and that's leadership in the media, in the government, in universities, in corporations. 1.8% of leadership inside East Germany is East German. The rest of it are Westermans who have come to East Germany.

So there's a lot of resentment, understandably, and a lot of desire for. for change there is racism. There is, you know, there's racism everywhere. But I'm not convinced yet that it's a sign of where Germany is going. Okay. So let's go from what you said about the left in Germany taking inspiration from Zoran Mamdani and then go to your book, these extremes of the political spectrum that are now in evidence in the U.S. Unfortunately, one of them is more powerful than the other. So talk about this book, why you wrote it,

call it evil, understanding the Trump era. I read it because, first of all, I was astonished by the number of people who didn't need to, who have quickly capitulated in the Second Trump administration. I always thought the point of having more money than any family

could possibly spend on luxury in a lifetime, I thought that the point of having that kind of money was being able to say, they know. And it's apparently not. I mean, that Google changed its maps to Lake America was for me. Thank you. From Lake Ontario. Yeah. Thank you for that expression. It's a trivial kowtow, but it's fairly unbelievable, I think. But what struck me that may explain both the capitulation and the election of the second Trump administration

is the uneasiness that so many people on the left have with moral language. People worry that it's religiously tinged. If they're secular, it's not. You can, this is something I know something about, having written a... As a moral philosopher. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And having written a book 25 years ago called Evil and Modern Thought, so I know something about the history.

Moral concepts come before religious concepts in every culture, okay? Religion is a way to express certain moral concepts. It's an attempt to solve certain moral problems. But the initial feeling of evil, you can call it a sense of injustice, is something that children have in every culture. And according to some researchers, even primates and other higher animals like elephants. So it's not a religious term, although religious people tend to feel more comfortable with moral language. People worry that it's polarizing, that it's demonizing. And by that worry, we leave the strongest weapons we have in the language

in the hands of people who are least responsible in using them. So let's go, actually, to Senior White House aide Stephen Miller, speaking to CNN earlier this year. We live in a world in which you can, You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world. So that's Stephen Miller, Susan Neiman, your response to that and what that shows about the entire political conversation here under the Trump administration.

Stephen Miller is echoing two sources. I don't know if he knows it. One is the Nazi legal theorist, Carl Schmidt. But the other is something that goes back to the ancient Greeks. And it's about the Athenians defending a genocide, okay? The Athenians committed a genocide of the island of Melos, okay, because the militians would not bow to their superior power. So that's the first time you see that argument in history.

I have no idea whether Stephen Miller knows that. What's more disturbing is the fact that he's stating that as the iron law of the world. And unfortunately, that is what many people today believe, okay, that self-interest, and interest in power is the only thing that motivates human beings to action, and we'd better just face it. Now, this is a philosophical idea, okay? People treat it as a fact. It's a philosophical idea. It's a piece of ideology. It's a piece of ideology that we have been trained for a good century or a bad century, if you like, a good century to accept as fact. And what my book does is talk about the ways in which through misinterpretations of both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin mixed

in the late 20th century with a little bit of Michel Foucault, how those ideas got into the water stream. You don't have to have read any of those people to read them in the media, to hear them on television. But they are ideologies that are every bit as strong as any other totalitarian ideology. So I just want to ask you, because you do talk about this in the book, what do you think explains the fact that a large portion, a significant portion of the American population electorate voted for Trump in the second term? Because although we could see the immorality in the first term and the tendencies towards fascism, I don't think that's too strong in expression.

We're so convinced that moral concepts are for suckers, as he would say, or as Stephen Miller would say, they're niceties that don't actually make a difference in the world, that people threw up their hands and were unable to condemn what was actually going on in a shocking kind of way. Many of us have been shocked. We talk about the contempt for the rule of law that we already saw to some extent in the first administration. We're seeing even more blatantly now. What we forget is the rule of law depends on people having a commitment to abide by the rule of law, even when a legal decision goes against you. That is a moral commitment.

And James Madison knew that. He said the best constitution in the world, he didn't put it that way, he said no constitution can protect a people without any virtue. Now, the founding fathers were less anxious about using moral language than we have become. We need to get more comfortable with it if we're going to understand exactly how we've been affected, maybe brainwashed, is the appropriate term. by the idea that morality is for losers, suckers, fools, or it's a form of hype that is attempting to convince people, fool people into accepting forms of power that we don't. And we saw that, frankly, in the Georgia-Dabia Bush administration, his use of words like moral clarity for a war that was neither moral nor clear. is I think something that prepared us to think when politicians use moral language, they're trying to pull the wool over our faces. Well, the book is fascinating. It's called Call It Evil, Understanding the Trump era.

It's by Susan Neiman, Director Emerita of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, philosopher and author of many books. Fascinating book. That does it for our show. Tonight, I'll be back in Bayshore, New York, where I grew up, went to high school. They'll be showing, steal the story, please, at the Bolton Center. I'll be there with the director of the film, Tia Lesson, and producer, Karen Sprook. You can go to our website for more details. Then next Tuesday, here in New York at the IFC Center. Then to Copenhagen, London, and Berlin. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermyn Scha.