The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3681 - How Oligarchy Eroded US Democracy; Palestinian Doctor Clings to Life w/ Jeffrey Winters

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

Welcome back to The Majority Report On today's program: Benjamin Netanyahu appears on Fox News to express his fears of the Democrats and "woke-right" no longer supporting Israel. Jeffrey Winters, professor of political science at Northwestern University, joins Sam in a pre-taped interview about his new book; "The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy." In the Fun Half: Trump interferes with the World Cup. The president admits he called the FIFA president to get Folarin Balogun's red card suspension overturned. Doug Burgum spars with Dana Bash over his claims that the D.C. reflection pool was compromised by vandals and not by Trump's motorcade of armored vehicles that drove all over the drained pool. Abdul El-Sayed has a great answer to CNN's Casey Hunt's question about whether Israel has a right to exist. GOP gubernatorial candidate Mike Mazzei is not very convincing when trying to claim that the $70k his campaign paid Roger Stone was not in exchange for a Trump endorsement. All that and more. Join Emma for a virtual DSA event, find info To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AM Quickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: ZOCDOC: Find and book the right doctor https://Zocdoc.com/MAJORITY SUNSET LAKE CBD: Use coupon code "Left Is Best" (all one word) for 20% off of your entire order at SunsetLakeCBD.com.  Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.  

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See their site for additional terms and restrictions. And we will put a link to this down below in the video and episode descriptions. Now, time for the show. It is Monday, July 6th, 2026. My name is Emma Vigland in for Sam Cedar. And this is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Jeffrey Winters, in a prerecorded interview with one Sam Cedar,

professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of The Blind Spot, How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy. Also on the program, Mallory McMorro, drops out of the Michigan Senate primary, a month before the election, does not endorse either Abdulazayed or Haley Stevens. Hey, so is Mitch McConnell dead? I knew I'd get a little laugh out of Brian there.

Question swirl after his wife, you know, his next of kin in a legal sense, mysteriously leaves for China after his heart attack, as a supportive spouse does. Imagine if that was a Democrat. And it's kind of important because there's a special election deadline that looms here. Sure seems like Trump leaned on FIFA to reinstate U.S. soccer star Balagan ahead of tonight's World Cup match. FIFA being corrupt benefiting the U.S. for the first time in a while.

So now it's bad. Trump departs for Turkey today to meet with NATO leaders as Netanyahu. publicly pushes the U.S. to block the sale of F-35s to Turkey, because the greater Israel psychos want to take over Turkey. Turkey's a NATO ally. Speaking of Netanyahu, his government signals it will defy Israel's Supreme Court over TV regulation. Millions of Iranians took to the street over the weekend to mourn Supreme Leader Ali Hamini, not exactly the uprising the Zionists and neocons promise.

bad weather delayed Trump's July 4th speech by two hours you can imagine how happy he was about that the day was delayed too that's his metaphor yeah it's grandios that you're not comparing it to that no that's him in the reporting um in that speech he demanded congress pass his voter disenfranchising save act uh mike johnson is supposedly shoehorning it into budget reconciliation as Senate Republicans scream, please, we can't do this. Doge officially sunset,

the program as of July 4th, claiming it saved $215 billion, dubiously. By the way, they promised $2 trillion. The nearly 1 million people who bought Trump's meme coin have lost a total of $3.8 billion per Nansen analysis. That's on them. Hold. I mean, kind of.

Right. Just hold for now. By the tip. By the tip. Momdani's New York City has just hit its highest level of apartment construction since 1965. We are not tired of winning yet. We are not tired of winning yet, baby. And lastly, the Treasury Department has an internal memo warning of an AI bubble about to burst.

That sounds bad if they're acknowledging it. All this and more. on today's majority report. Jersey Tom points out Sam on vacation and Mitch McConnell in a hospital bed. Wasted no time. Sam's on vacation. He's, I guess,

technically working in his other job, which is being some Hollywood big wig. He's got his eyes on bigger things. This politics stuff. This show is a lost leader. He's trying to get Sam out there. I mean, but when you leave a power vacuum, you know what happens, right? This is when...

Crew Chef over here. This is when I can make my inroads. Hey, you guys want to go out to dinner after this? It's on me. By the way, I'll be on Left Reckoning tonight. You know, just taking my free time to... Take it over two shows at once. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just to...

It does air tomorrow. Oh, sorry. We will be recorded tonight. Also, I just want to... You're so right. I didn't mean to make such a mistake. Yeah, exactly. Sorry, I'm just a little bit distracted. He said, I don't care. It's America 250. If they can storm the beaches of D-Day on D-Day, I can deliver a speech and keep this program going. What a hero. We will be talking about a lot of that news over the weekend, the July 4 celebrations, getting delayed because of weather, which seemed to be plaguing the Trump administration in America 250.

We'll talk about the insanity of Trump leaning on FIFA here. We will also talk, I think, more about the reflecting pool because Doug Bergam is going through this incredible humiliation ritual on cable news about, you know, defending Trump's claims about the hooligans that are ripping up the reflecting pool in the dead of night. But that seems more like fun half stuff because this is a really kind of important story, just in general, talking and remembering. reminding people that, yes, still, we continue to fund Israel. We continue to fund their genocide in Gaza. We continue to fund the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. We continue to fund their ethnic cleansing campaign in Lebanon. And their torture dungeons, where they are currently holding this prominent Palestinian doctor

who appears to be in such poor health that his life is in severe danger. And we'll get to that in just a second. But as I mentioned in headlines, the knives are kind of out for Benjamin Netanyahu domestically right now in Israel. His government has rejected the Supreme Court. They made this ruling about television regulation. There's a channel there. Netanyahu doesn't like who bought it. Someone connected to opposition.

And a reminder that Israeli opposition is not anything that has, that resists. resembles the left-wing position on Palestine here in this country, for example. It's just like the same kind of guy in a different hat. It's more fascism or liberal fascism. Right. So like it's overstated in the Western press. Like the Netanyahu's on borrowed time. If he leaves power, then he will have no immunity and maybe he'll go to jail. And maybe that's the case.

It changes nothing about the apartheid, the genocide, the ethnic cleansing campaign or what we need to do in terms of cutting off offensive and defensive weapons to Israel. But, you know, the courts are going to play a role here, at least within the confines of the ethno state part of Israel as opposed to the greater Israel portions where Palestinians live as second-class citizens, but they're still controlled by the Israeli government. Netanyahu is afraid that polling is not going in the direction that he would like. You know, I think that this period of time before the 2026 midterms is a very strategic period for him to, one, drag the U.S. into this Iran war, two, continue its operations in Lebanon so that Israel

can expand to the north. And three, I guess, attempt to escalate in the West Bank so that they can do as much as they possibly can before potentially Congress is taken over by the Democrats. So he's concerned about that, but I think equally as concerned as what he's seeing in terms of, like the right wing media ecosystem moving away from Israel and the Republicans and Republican leaning independence under the age of 50, 57 Republicans ages 18 to 49 have an unfavorable view of Israel. Isn't that crazy? I mean, what's booing this are boomers in both parties, but particularly over 50 voters in the Republican Party that are holding on to support for Israel in this country. Pew had this in April.

Yeah. Apocalypse is coming. Exactly. 60% of U.S. adults now have an unfavorable view of Israel. It's over 80% for Democrats and Democratic-leaning independence. So Netanyahu knows that's gone. But he's got to maintain the support of the right-wingers here.

So listen to how he brands right-winger's under 50 in this weekend Fox News appearance. This is a sign to me of desperation. On July 4th weekend, no one's paying attention. You go on with this no-name Fox News host.

All the 18 to 49 people are like, sorry, I'm catching up on Nick Flintos. Yeah, right. Like, during the World Cup, like, he doubled it up and was on Fox and Friends this morning to appeal directly to Trump. That's an appeal to Trump. This is an appeal to other people, whoever the hell is watching this right now. So here is Netanyahu

on television over the weekend trying to tie Israeli nationalism to United States nationalism. You're touching. You're touching. You're touching. on my next question because a source close to the vice president's team told Politico that that he made reflects his view of this new political reality where, quote, the vice president sees that the ground is shifting against Israel among voters, including with younger Republicans.

He's responding accordingly with nuance instead of stridency. Do you take that as a warning that if Israel were to act alone, the Trump administration would withhold its backing? Well, first of all, it concerns me that there's that element of anti-Israel. First of all, in the Democratic Party and in the woke right, I'm concerned with that and to the extent that we can do something to mend it, obviously I'll do it. But I find that there's something to need. Can you pause it just for a quick second?

I mean, come on, bro. This is pathetic. You're trying to tell these guys that they're woke. I mean, they're watching Nick Fuentes right now. Yeah. Yeah, they hate Israel now. They're not going to be cowed by you calling them woke because they don't stand with Israel's genocide. Like, it doesn't mean that their humanism is leading the way here, but they still see the actions of Israel slaughtering children all the time.

They're not going to change course just because you call them the thing that they like to call Democrats, but continue. I mean, I'll just put this up here quick. Yeah, I'll continue. and we'll look at some other people who use the term woke right, which is interesting, Timpua. We can do something to mend it. Obviously, I'll do it. But I find that there's something unique about these attacks.

And that's something is that the people who hate Israel end up hating America. And I've seen that. You know, when they do these demonstrations, these protests against Israel, against Israel defending itself, this tiny country defending itself against these terrorist murders who commit to exterminate us. And we do what any self-respecting country would do, we defend ourselves. But when they do the protest, they burn Israeli flags, and very often right next to them, they burn American flags.

We're the same. But when those Americans who support Israel, non-Jews and Jews alike, when they do a demonstration to support Israel, they weigh. the Israeli flag and they wave the American flag. So I think there's a process taking place inside America, which you probably know, better than me, of questioning America's traditional values and going to many places that I think challenge

our, not only our alliance, but they challenge the traditional values that form the basis of each of our countries. And I hope that's not something that is going to proceed. I hope America changes direction. That's really what I hope to see. Good luck. It's, did you say Tim Poole is using that term now?

He's using it in 2020. Right, huh? 2025. What day was that? May 11th, 20205? You are working. You're doing exactly what the woke does, but try to adopting right-leaning talking points

to get allies against the faction of the left that you saw as harmful. Can you go to the, Can you go to the date on that? Just to... May 11th, 2020. Okay. Jewish Insider, April 8th, 2025.

Tim Poole met with Benjamin Netanyahu. Tim, did you hear about this thing? It's the woke right. And it's such a coincidence. It's such a coincidence. And so Mark Levine is using it, too, the biggest zini mouthpiece on Fox News. But don't say it's coordinated.

Don't say it's coordinated. I really, I'm just like, it gets stinkier and stinkier that Timpool crap. The fact that, I mean, not to put out a horrible image, but like, I know, I know, I know, I'm filling, talk about filling vacuums. But, you know, when we covered how he was taking that Russian money and pretended to be victimized by it and didn't know that it was coming from Russia. But you need different sources of foreign money if you're going to continue to. live the lifestyle that you've been accustomed to. So it's just an interesting development there. But that's an aside.

Tim Poole and they're trying to enlist these other right-wing influencers to change the minds of those same voters that he's so concerned about there. But once again, there's no amount of elite capture and Zionist capture of our media institutions or of our social media companies is going to turn back the clock for a generation of people who are under 50 years, old who also lived through the Iraq war and people forget that that was a major driver of Obama's election in 2008 and was a huge

it is still in the DNA of so many voters of disgust about our continuous involvement in the Middle East and now Israel's role in that is becoming clearer to people and their brutality of course is evident for everybody. This is a critical

time right now for Dr. Hassam Abbas Sophia. Over the weekend, there were many pleas from people in his life and members of his family. Dr. Abu Safia is one of the many heroic Palestinian doctors who have been treating patients of Israel's genocide. He, unlike some of the other international doctors who, you know, were forced and kicked out by Israel under threat, UN agencies as well, during this time period, He refused to leave. He stayed with his patience.

You may remember this clip, this, like, harrowing image here of him in late 2024. I think this was at the, like, December 27th, here we go, 2024. This is him walking through the rubble in his white coat, surrendering to an Israeli tank. And in northern Gaza, as they were waiting for him. and he was surrendering on behalf of the hospital staff where Israel had been laying siege to the staff and forced them all out at gunpoint,

these hospital workers. And since then, he's been held in an Israeli torture dungeon. Here is his son, and I will read over these captions here so people can hear it on the podcast, pleading for his release here because his lawyer met with him a few days ago and basically said that he was unrecognizable and losing consciousness.

Peace be upon you in God's mercy and blessings. I do not know perhaps this will be my last appeal and perhaps this will be the last cry. For over 550 days, I've been going out to the media to appeal to all the free people of the world and those with human consciences and all the organizations and institutions that claim to uphold human rights and human dignity. But sadly, I call on those who cannot hear. The day before yesterday, his lawyer, Nasir Ode, managed to visit my father, where he told us painful details about this visit.

My father was unable to breathe. My father wasn't able to speak. His face was disfigured and from the marks of torture and pain and the blood he endured inside the prison, especially after the last court session held in Jerusalem, the Supreme Court. And sadly, what a state of abandonment we have reached when we appealed to more than 2 billion Muslims and more than 22 Arab and Islamic countries.

You ignore the sound of my father's groaning as he cried out and pleaded with you. You deprived us even of your voices, your solidarity and your support which should have been there from the start of the detention. But sadly, your silence is a betrayal and a crime and complicity

in torturing my father and the hostages inside Israeli prisons. God is sufficient for us, best trustee against all cowards who have grown use to the scene while we are being killed. Laying blame there on some of the other governments in the area that have not

helped. So if anybody is watching this story and wants to raise the alarm on social media. That's, of course, incredibly helpful. Israel, of course, called this heroic man a Hamas operative. They've never charged him. He's been held in solitary confinement, which is torture in and of itself. He reports being beaten with a hammer.

And I remember the name of this hospital. It was a smaller hospital because, and I just remember, fact-checked this because it was an intercept article from a few days ago. one of the many victims of Israel's rape in these prisons was taken from this hospital, a man in his 40s. So, you know, we still don't know the full extent of the torture in these prisons, but we do know that they're doing this truly to doctors and heroes who are trying to save lives. There's a notion that we can talk about everything that needs talking about, and there's no need to emphasize certain things. there's a reason our press people like Jake Tapper Dana Bash talk about anti-Semitism

and for instance like Dan Goldman not getting a latte in fucking Brooklyn because when you talk about that sort of stuff you're not talking about this sort of stuff and we shouldn't be talking about that sort of stuff until this sort of stuff has dealt with absolutely a word from one of our sponsors

and then you will hear Sam's interview with Jeffrey Winter which is fascinating, and I encourage everybody to check it out. But first, I'd like to thank Zock Dock for sponsoring today's episode. ZockDocDoc is unfathomably easy. I found my dentist through Zock, and it's a dentist I still go to. I had trouble finding a dentist that I really liked, and I couldn't believe it. Zock made it really easy, one, for me to make an appointment because they have this great interface. But, two, you know, the quality of the doctor, the dentist,

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and we will put a link to this down below in the video and episode descriptions and at majority.fm. Find and book the... the right doctor at Zocdoc.com slash majority. Quick break, and when we come back, you will hear Sam's interview with Jeffrey Winters. We are back, Sam Cedar, on the Majority Report.

Joining me now, it is a pleasure to welcome to the program, Professor Jeffrey Winters, the author of The Blind Spot, how oligarchs dominate our democracy. Jeffrey is a professor of political science at Northwestern University. and the Director of the Equality and Development and Studies program at the Buffett Institute there. Professor, thanks for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you, Sam. Let's just start with, I guess, some of the basics. I mean, we've been talking about oligarchy on the program for close to two decades now, I guess, either in the context of we're living in a plutonomy now and a plutocracy, but give us your definition of an oligarchy. Well, first of all, if you've been talking about oligarchy that long, congratulations, because a lot of people have not been talking about it, except maybe to talk about Russian oligarchs, as if it's a foreign phenomenon.

It's not foreign. It is indigenously American also. So how should we understand oligarchs and oligarchy? Think of it as all of us in society are empowered in different ways. In a democracy, you have the right to vote, you have the right to assemble, the right to speak and to criticize, and so on and so on. Those are the ways in which ordinary citizens are empowered. And oligarchs are also empowered in that way, but they have a kind of power and political influence that the rest of us don't have. And that is concentrated wealth is what we call in

political science a power resource. It's a capacity. It's a capability. And they're able to take basically wealth power and convert it into political influence. And that wealth power is incredibly potent. We're talking about a very small number of people that have an outsized impact on our politics and the outcomes that we experience as a society. Now, I'm talking about oligarchs in the context of democracy, but it's actually something that goes back thousands of years. Basically, as soon as societies became pyramidal in shape, with very, very few at the top who had concentrated wealth,

and masses of people down below who did not, a sort of attention arises, and that is very wealthy people struggle with the question how to hold on to their fortunes and their money. And in a democracy, the problem they face is that as a result of just legitimate democratic policy, there's a latent threat that democracy could redistribute, for example, their wealth. or do things that will greatly constrain the level of inequality in society. And so that's what oligarchs are. Oligarchs are people who are empowered by the wealth they hold. And then oligarchy, what is it? Well, some people think that oligarchy is like a form of government.

It's not. It's actually a kind of politics. So oligarchy is the politics of wealth defense itself. And it can operate in an authoritarian regime. It can operate in a democratic government. And I want to get to this. I mean, obviously, I think the part about your book that fascinates me is that you don't necessarily argue that democracy and oligarchy are mutually exclusive.

In fact, it's the opposite is the argument we're making. But before we get to that element of your work, as we look through American history, it

would appear based upon just simply wealth inequality that we've had periods where there is less oligarchy and periods where there is more oligarchy, and the big, and I think, you know, Thomas Piquetti would probably argue that the norm is, in fact, oligarchic. And we had one period in the post-war era, which lasted for about, you know, approximately 30 years or so, known as the Great Compression, where we had much less income inequality.

But let's go back to the founding because your argument is that embedded in the Constitution and the founding is in fact a, I guess I'm not sure how you would characterize it, but is built in is an oligarchy to function alongside our democracy. And this argument I also found fascinating because I've interviewed law professors. Fiskin and Forbath years ago who wrote that the Constitution is anti-Oligarchic, but make your case on how it is. Yeah. So I think it's so important to go back to that foundational period because what you said a moment ago, which is true, is that really what we are, one of the biggest messages of the blind spot, the book, is that we really need to understand. oligarchy and democracy as a fusion, as elements that are joined together and operating in the same system. And we can't understand that fusion unless we go back to the 1780s and the constitutional

convention. And here's what's really important about that period. We know that there were the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution. And there were many problems people perceived with that constitution. Interstate commerce issues. It was considered to be a weak constitution, so on and so on. And there had been many calls to have a convention and try to fix it. The idea was actually initially to amend it, make changes, repair it, fix it, and so on. But here's the problem. time and time again, when calls were made to meet, it fizzled. No one wanted to actually meet for the convention. Why?

Well, there were a lot of reasons. One of them was that they had just thrown off a power from outside, and all these very powerful political figures at the state level were not terribly interested in creating a new structure over them. So there was a reluctance. And this went on year after year after year. But finally, in 1787, May in the summer, they gathered in Philadelphia. And what's really interesting is they not only overcame their reluctance, they ran to Philadelphia in a panic.

So what changed? Why did they suddenly feel such a sense of alarm that they gathered to? together, and by the way, not only they were given the charge to amend the Articles of Confederation, they scrapped the entire constitution that existed and decided on their own to rewrite a new one. What happened? Well, basically, we need to understand that after the war of independence, there was an economic crisis in the United States. Wars are devastating. Periods after wars tend to be pretty rough. But in the United States, the issue wasn't just that it was an economic crisis. It was also a debt crisis. And this is key because you basically had small farmers

who were the empowered mass stratum. And then you had people at the top who were political elites or creditors. And the creditors were, in particular, the oligarchs. And there had been a lot of borrowing for the war, borrowing from those creditors in the United States, borrowing from creditors and financiers in Europe as well as governments. So the question was, how was all this debt going to be repaid? And it turns out it was done through taxes. It was the government that was in debt, and taxes had to be collected at a very high rate in order to service this debt, which was then being paid to these creditors. Okay. Here's something that a lot of people forget or overlook. The very first prisons in the United States were debtors prisons. And so if you could not pay

this debt, if you could not pay these taxes when the sheriff arrived to collect them, you were thrown into debtor's prisons. And these debtors' prisons also had rapists and murderers in them. And it was men, women, and children. Children as young as two years old were in these horrific prisons. And Americans were being thrown into these prisons by the tens of thousands. Some counties had as many as 70% of small farmers had their land foreclosed on, and they were being thrown in these prisons. Okay. So here's this crisis. You have legislatures at all the state levels. And so the people were asking for relief from this debt. And they, they, they didn't want to lose their property and they didn't want to go into debtors prisons.

Half of the legislatures were dominated by small farmers. They had captured them. They, and the other half were dominated by creditors, by oligarchs. In the states that were dominated by small farmers. They got relief in this debt crisis in the form of paper money, printing money. Instead of having to pay back in gold and silver, you could pay back in what was depreciating paper. In other words, creditors were being given a haircut. The burden of the pain of the debt crisis was being borne by oligarchs. In the other half of the states, where the legislatures, especially Massachusetts, but there were others especially in New England,

where those states were dominated by the creditors, no relief. And so the farmers kept getting thrown into these debtors' prisons. And what did they do? They rose up. The most famous version of this we know is Shea's Rebellion. Yes. Yeah. And a lot of people hear about Shea's Rebellion,

but they're not clear what was that about? Why were they marching with fife and drum and into the towns? And by the way, Shea's rebellions happened by the hundreds in the New England area in particular. And what were they doing? When they got there, first of all, they did not attack the rich. They did not burn down their homes. They did not destroy their businesses. They did two things.

they did two things. The first thing they did was release prisoners from the debtors' prisons. All their friends, all their neighbors were released from the prison. Second, they blocked judges from being able to hold court, which would take more land away and throw more people into debtors' prisons. They didn't fire any shots. They simply were saying the pain were supposed. suffering as a result of this debt crisis has to stop.

Those two things, what was going on in the legislatures of the responsive states and the way that the people were responding when they got no responsiveness, that caused alarm among Madison, Hamilton, Washington, and all of the others who ran to Philadelphia. And when they got there, and we have transcripts of what they said, when they got there, although they disagreed about many things, slavery, pro-slavery, against slavery, big state, small state, and on and on, and on, they agreed that there was an excess of democracy in the United States. Those were the words they used. They called democracy licentious.

basically they were saying there is a problem of a tyranny of the majority it was the majority of poor right that's a that's a euphemism the majority in that instance that that they were the majority was what made it problematic but what they're talking about is there's a potential tyranny of the working class as it were against capital essentially exactly and so what what does this moment mean. Basically, the U.S. Constitution is born in a moment of a clash between oligarchs and democracy in this moment. It was the many against the very wealthy few. And when they debated the structure of the new government, they actually said over and over in the debates that we have the well-born and we have the rich and we have the many,

and we must structure the government in a way where it's not going to be possible, or it's going to be very hard for the many to be able to do what they were doing in the 1780s through the legislatures. And so think of it like this. The society was pyramidal in shape, but the democracy initially was flat. It was horizontal.

it was relatively highly responsive to the many. And they decided in that moment, we must make the government also pyramidal. So what did they do? They said, the only thing the people are going to be able to vote on is the House. Then they put a Senate over the House to check the House. So we normally think of checks and balances as being horizontal. legislature, executive, judicial.

And that's the concept of don't let any single power get too strong, like a king and so on. But they were actually building vertical checks and balances. So you had a house that the people could vote on. And just in case people at the house level were going to do something that was threatening to the rich, they put a Senate in place that the people did not vote on. until 1913. And even in that instance, we should say it is not representative in the way that the House of Representatives are. It is to per state, of course, has nothing to do whatsoever with population.

And the Senate becomes really, I mean, the joke is, the Senate is where good ideas go to die. But it's really, in many respects, the place where democracy, democratic ideas, go to die. And in fact, let me change that, Sam. It's at least when it was designed, it is where threats to oligarchs go to die. That was the intention. And they say it in the debates. They say, look, the way to have stability is to put the wealthy.

Hamilton, for example, said, we should put only the wealthy in the Senate and they should be there for life. his view was only then can we be sure that the kinds of threats we were seeing democracy produce against creditors in this clash, only then can we be sure that the system is going to be sustainable, that we're going to be able to sustain the wealthy versus the non-rich. So they were really thinking, by the way, after they put the Senate there, that's block number one. And then they said, in case something gets through the Senate against all odds, the president gets a veto on the legislature. And you have to have a super majority, which is very hard to do in order to overcome that. And then just in case somehow it gets all the way through the president, five people, a majority of the Supreme Court can block the entire political process below them.

and that's what happened in 1895. Because in 1894, all those levels, House, Senate, and President allowed the imposition of the first income tax in the United States. But it wasn't on everybody. There was an exemption all the way up to just one-third of one percent. So it was really an income tax on the very wealthy. and that passed. And it had been, how long did that take from 1789 all the way up to 1894? This is how effective these constraints were. But here in the progressive era, in the progressive movement, with Williams, Jennings, Brian, and others, they finally passed this because, remember, that was

the Gilded Age, that was the robber baron age, and that income tax focused on the rich, was a backlash. The following year, 1895, the Supreme Court stepped in and blocked that democratic moment. And it took 18 years, 16th Amendment to the Constitution, 1913, to reverse what the Supreme Court had done. So think about, basically, if we go back to that foundational moment, obstacles and safeguards were put in, place so that you could have, and by the way, the founders did believe in the consent of the governed. They really did. They weren't lying. They weren't bullshitting. They did believe in that, but they also believed in maintaining the pyramidal structure of society. And so they tried to come up with a fusion, a blend, so that you do have a vote. You do have civil rights and freedoms. You

can speak, you can mobilize, but oligarchs are going to be safe in the system. And there will be only rare occasional ruptures of the kind you talked about as a result of this backlash and ruptures that had occurred, war, Great Depression. It turns out oligarchs are quite weak in those crisis moments where politicians get focused not on defending oligarchs, but on defending and stabilizing the system itself. So we saw an example in 1894, 1895 of democracy making a push and the protective structures that were built into the system kicking in, almost like a circuit breaker.

Indulge me for one moment because this is slightly off point. But that first attempt at the income tax in this progressive era comes out of a post-reconstruction era where the essentially the white power structure has reasserted itself. We have been through the essentially the programs of black political leadership. and there were attempts to siphon off the nascent progressive movement, I guess, which sort of came out of the People's Party at that time, from a coalition with the black political class, as it were. By the time we get the income tax, we're so slightly past that, but not, you know, in the great scheme of things,

not that much further past it. What was the, what was it that, was it just simply the rise of the progressive movement that allowed for this tax to get through the House, the Senate, and the presidency at that point? Yeah. So it was actually quite a broad coalition that included all of those progressive forces that you mentioned, including farmers. Their issues of tariffs came into the picture as well and moving away from tariffs. And so it was a very broad base.

And by the way, you can imagine it would take quite a broad base of based on race, based on rural versus urban, south and north. It was that kind of coalition that came together. And it's also interesting in the moment that the president at the time didn't actually sign, just refuse to veto. So, yeah, and so it passes. But you're right. And we need to realize that that kind of broader coalitional politics is relatively rare. and the bias in the system institutionally is in favor of protecting oligarchs against democracy,

but the tendency also is in the politics of a place like the United States for the non-rich to divide among themselves over issues of, over the issues that divide them, rather than uniting in a universe. You refer to this sort of dichotomy throughout is like a horizontal politics and vertical politics. One might say like, you know, more another way of making that division is more like social issues versus material issues in sort of broad strokes. And let's, I mean, let's talk about the sort of like the, the, the other mechanisms. We have the structural bias towards protecting

the towards protecting capital and then ultimately oligarchs, right? I mean, because it's not just protecting the oligarchy. There's sort of like a there's another tier

that also sort of gets protected on some measure. And that's just it's capital. I mean, broadly speaking capital, the most concentrated capital has the sort of the most operational, I guess, control of the government. And, you know, we've talked for years about the Gillen's page study, which has shown that when there is a contested issue where capital and the workers are on separate sides, capital always wins.

Not every issue is broken down along those lines, but when it is, Capital always wins in Congress. By the way, Sam, that's a good way of summing up what the blind spot is, which is one of the points that Gillins and Page make, which is so good, is they say there are many instances in which the interests of Capital and the many, oligarchs and the masses, inside. And so there's no conflict there, and democracy can actually be responsive to the many, whatever the sentiments happen to be from below. But they looked specifically, more narrowly, at when they diverge, when they clash. And that study, I think it's one of the best political science papers ever written. What they show, looking at 1,770, federal level cases that when they diverge, how often do the people win? Even when they are a supermajority, the answer is never.

That is the vertical dimension. That's the vertical dimension of democracy where the obstacles are built in precisely to deliver that outcome. And yet, and the blind spot is, well, we seem to not do very, well, democracy seems not to do very well in limiting inequality or even slowing it on economic grounds. And yet it is responsive in other ways. If you struggle and if you're women or if you're racial minority or any, if you struggle in democracy, you can actually get change. It's not always, it's slow and it's not. It's not always linear. And yes, right. There are reversals. There are setbacks. But we don't see anything remotely close to that kind of responsiveness on the vertical dimension.

So if you take the United States from that colonial independence era from the start 250 years ago, and you fast forward us to today, in certain respects, the United States is dramatically more. democratic in terms of just who has the vote, who can participate, and so on. And yet, the country is dramatically more unequal than it was in the 1780s. Wealth concentration is off the charts compared to what it was. And so this presents to us a bit of a puzzle. How can it be that we can become in measurable ways, more democratic, And yet we become more unequal. It indicates something about democracy is not working.

And what we need to understand is that's not a flaw. That's a feature. It's not a bug. Right. It's built in to operate that way. It's the core argument of the blind spot. To realize that you have both democracy and oligarchy simultaneously, and that it's not an accident.

That's the way the system operates. And we are now in a situation historically where, first of all, wealth concentration globally, but in the United States as well, is higher than it has ever been in human history. And liberal democracies are among the most unequal societies ever to have existed. How can that be?

Well, you list, but you write about essentially three elements. We've covered the institutional protection or safeguards of wealth that is built into the system. I would add the addition of the filibuster in the Senate, which to the extent that it was made more

representative when we got an opportunity to directly vote for a senator. And again, just the amount of wealth that you need to run statewide in and of itself is a structural impediment to accountability to people without money, essentially. The filibuster also adds to that capacity for a blind spot because it obscures, even with the political party's actual agenda, are because they can claim that they've been thwarted because they don't have a full majority, et cetera, et cetera. You also talk about election spending, which I think is fairly obvious. I mean, we had one, we had two people provide half a billion dollars minimum. Well, we had 250 from Musk, close to 200

from Miriam Adelson. I don't know who was the third. Timothy Mellon. Timothy Mellon. And so... Those three provided a third of the 1.5 billion raised on the Republican side

for Trump. But remember, Kamala Harris raised $2 billion. 500 million more than the Republicans. She also was funded by oligarchs, but not at the same scale. So the difference is this.

The political investment, by the way, I don't use the word donor. I don't use the word mega donor. There's nothing donating about this. Right, yes, yes. This is political investment. These are political investors. They are venture capitalists in the political space, okay? On the Democratic side, the biggest political investment was 50 million.

So the Democrats have many more, actually, oligarchs contributing, but all at a smaller scale. They're not as overwhelming and prominent as $290 million by Mr. Musk, for example. So, but that, you know, we should talk for a moment about campaign finance because it's incredibly important. But we need to understand that oligarchic power and influence goes beyond this electoral process. But here's how we are structured and constrained in the electoral space. We all get to vote on election day.

We also get to vote on primaries. But starting two years before the primary is something off the political. We don't see it. And it's called the wealth primary. And that's when anyone who wants to be violated, to go forward, has to parade themselves in front of wealthy people to get money, seed money, key seed money to be able to go forward. And sometimes it's a single oligarch who will fund you,

as in the case of J.D. Vance. So that is absolutely crucial. And what's the effect on our politics? Well, think of it like this. If you want to be able to get into a state or a federal level position, you're vetted first by wealthy actors who, you know, who knows what their position is on abortion and guns and whatever. But when it comes to wealth defense issues, their interests are clear. So there is a wealth filtering, oligarch filtering process in the electoral system itself. That's just to get the room seated. Right. Then comes the expression of power once they're there, which is the lobbying effort, right? And then this is what's really crucial that a lot of people are not aware of. And I call it back in 2011, I wrote a book called oligarchy in which I introduced the concept of the wealth defense industry. Yes. And this is, this has one foot in the politics and one foot outside of politics. The, the first. The, the first.

foot in politics is to influence things like the Ways and Means Committee and the tax structure and what the tax brackets and rates are going to be. So that's a lobbying effort. That's very, very aggressive, and it's organized by this industry. But then once democracy decides by statute, what the rates are going to be, is there going to be a tax cut for the rich, whatever. After that, the wealth defense industry's job is to make sure oligarchs don't pay their bracket. Vastly below what the statute says would be paid. And so their job is this is a multi-billion dollar industry that exists for one purpose to defend the wealth of a very small segment of our society.

So when you add all that up, is it a... any surprise that, oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that they also, the wealth defense industry also works to infiltrate into government offices, key strategic offices that no one else pays attention to. So, for example, in the Treasury Department, there is an office called the Office of Tax Policy. What is that? When have you ever seen it on the news? No one knows what it is. oligarchs in the wealth defense industry know what it is. It's the office that after a law is passed regarding taxes and revenues, there's implementing regulations that have to be drawn up and so on.

This office does that work. And it determines who's exempt, who pays, who doesn't pay, and six out of the last seven directors of that office have been from the wealth defense. industry itself. I want to get to the corporate transparency app and all of that in a moment. But I would also add to this. And in many respects, the past five or six years, we've really seen a dramatic display of how our politics implicate the IRS. When Biden got back into office, I mean,

we had seen from the aughts, just in this modern era as an example, we've seen in the aughts, the IRS be precipitously defunded. And the relationship between the audits of poor, low-income, middle-class people, and the wealthy sort of evened out was one-to-one, even though we know where the money is. The money is in the wealthy. It's just that with less resources, the IRS is not at the ability. to go up against the army of people in the, what you call the wealth defense industry,

lawyers, tax lawyers, people who create, you know, tax avoidance vehicles and instruments and whatnot. During the Biden administration, in the American Rescue Act, we increased funding dramatically for the IRS. You could see almost immediately that ratio of audits between wealthy people and everyone else change. And of course, then the IRS was slowly cut back down. And we're probably, I would imagine in a year, we're going to look at this data and we're going to see that it's not there. I want to get into let's talk about tax. And then in a moment, we'll talk about a couple of other things. But this, we first saw this dramatically. At the same time, we saw the end of the era of the great compression. when we're in a sort of like there is a panic amongst Capital.

The Powell memo is written at this time by Lewis Powell, which people point to as a moment where in the wake of these emancipatory movements, in the wake of things like environmental protections, capital starts to worry that we're losing grip on things. Richard Nixon comes in appoint a chief of the IRS who then dismantles what? Yes. This is, this actually is practically a, you know, 007 thriller moment, I think, in the book, because this moment in the 1970s you've just talked about is an incredibly important moment for two reasons. One, the wealth defense industry by this point

is really catching its stride. So it's taking off by the 1970s. It originates in the 50s and 60s when the tax rates, the highest bracket, is over 90%, and the demand on the part of oligarchs for relief from this industry is immense. Okay, so on the one hand,

the wealth defense industry is firing its solid rocket boosters. But at the same moment, it was a group of special agents, agents in the intelligence division of the IRS had begun to develop capacities to be able to track and trace money of oligarchs, especially that was held offshore. So a group of agents who actually didn't know what they were getting into started to examine in the Caribbean. They were supposed to be looking for mobster money and money laundering and so on. But they happen upon a bank,

Castle Bank. And it turns out they had developed by using private investigators and they hired informants. And remember, this is an intelligence operation. They're using every method possible to tried to get secretive information. And so they pierce the wall of secrecy in the Caribbean area, especially these secrecy banks. They expose Castle Bank, and it turns out it has hundreds of some of the biggest name oligarchs hidden there. They do this through what's called the briefcase caper. I won't go into the whole story here. People should read the book. But it's an absolutely stunning story. This case is one where the capacities being built to track and trace oligarchic money, which is deliberately secretive and hidden, non-transparent, they were building

new capacities and these capacities were being adopted nationally by other special agents in other jurisdictions. All of a sudden, a mortal threat. is being presented to oligarchs. In that exact moment, Nixon appoints Donald Alexander. As commissioner of the IRS, they take him straight out of a wealth defense industry law firm. His job had been to create the tax shelters, the trusts, everything else. In fact, there was a Rolodex in Castle Bank in Nassau in the Bahamas. it had cards in the Rolodex that had Donald Alexander's law firm's name in it.

So what happens is Donald Alexander begins a campaign to destroy his own special agents and intelligence division. This was really the first shot over the bow of realizing that the IRS, if it becomes effective is the only agency in the United States that could confront oligarchs. And it was deliberately crippled. The special agents who were involved in this, who thought when they came across Castle Bank that they were going to become legends in the IRS for their incredible work and discovery, turns out the IRS turned on them, tried to indict them, tried to crush them.

That was the beginning of what you saw, what you mentioned. It has been 50 years of debilitating the capacities of the IRS. Now, let me just say one last sentence, which is a lot of citizens hate the IRS, right? It audits them. They view it as a terrible agency. They would love to see it eliminated. Here's the thing. the vast, vast majority of us are audited electronically.

Algorithms, including the poor. And they set these algorithms and not a single human auditor ever touches your taxes. Letters are popped out automatically sent off to you. So the auditing capacity, all that cost of having specialized audit, and agents, it's all about going after oligarchs and corporations, because they are the ones whose cases are complex, incredibly complex. And an algorithm can't track and trace that which it can't even see. All of us have what's called third-party reporting. Your bank, your employer, everybody else is reporting every cent you make. You are easy for the IRS. Doesn't take any kind of

capacity. And so when you got the IRS, you're not hurting the IRS's capacity to go after average citizens. You're only hurting their capacity to go after the rich. And under Biden, we had testimony early days on just what that tax gap is. We should also say from that era, let's say what that number is. It's trillions. Yeah, well, let me tell you what the number is. So, So the IRS is required by statute to calculate the difference between what its data and algorithms and so on tell it it ought to be collecting and what it does collect. And the answer is $1 trillion a year. Our defense budget, it may get increased, but our last defense budget was $900 billion.

So we're talking about a number larger than the entire defense budget. the average citizen, their capacity to cheat, is 1%. Why? Because you're completely transparent and known to the IRS. You can't cheat. It's hard. But for oligarchs, that rate of non-reporting and avoidance and so on and so on jumps to 55%. These are by the IRS's and GAO's own numbers. So what does that mean? It means at least hundreds of billions of dollars that should have been paid in taxes and the rest of us are paying routinely, hundreds of billions are not being paid and are remaining the wealth of the ultra wealthy and they're making money on that money. That explains why we're not only seeing an explosion of inequality in America, but that it is a supercharged explosion. And progressive taxation, which is democracy's way of trying to limit, to try to narrow the gap between the bottom, the middle and the top, progressive taxation is defeated by oligarchs. Briefly, what about where does, and we should say, you know, there's all sorts of politics around the idea of demonizing the IRS that we've been through.

but also during those five decades or so, we have also seen things like a new concept of antitrust. Robert Bork and the sort of Chicago School of Libertarianism introduces a new idea of antitrust that essentially wipes antitrust off the books. It's still there literally on the books. And during the Biden administration, some of that came back, but it allows for much greater concentration of wealth.

We also saw during the Reagan administration changes in taxes as calculated capital versus capital gains taxes versus wage taxes, a much greater divergence there. So that much of this stuff, once it feels like once there was a realization, like, oh, the government has the capacity to try. this money or will have it more so in the future. And now we really do. There was an attempt to sort of like make what was illegal, legal, whether it was stock buybacks, whether it was changing the payment structure for CEOs in the C-suite from, you know, into capital gains and into their stocks. And in a lowering of, the tax rates precipitously since the Kennedy era. So all of these things have contributed. Where does like in your mind antitrust, well, let's just jump ahead because I think that's

part of what exacerbates this wealth inequality. You talk about two different approaches in dealing with this. One is you call a strategic incrementalism. which may be what we tried to what we saw, you know, during the Biden years, much of that's reversed. Wasn't particularly durable, but it gives a sense of what could happen. Greater antitrust, greater IRS investigations, and at least the sense of we need to change the tax structure. You know, we have Bernie Sanders talking about, let's go back. to that every dollar, I think it would be $3 million annually. We've had people introduce, Elizabeth Warren introduced the wealth tax. And I love, within the context of the book,

you explicitly say, we do have a wealth tax now. It just hits. It hits not just the super wealthy, but everybody in the context of property taxes, it is a non-liquid asset. I mean, it's fairly liquid, but it's no less liquid than a lot of these other assets. And we make an assessment as to what its value is, and then you get taxed on it. If we could pause there for a second, that's a really important point, Sam, because we're in a moment where two things are happening at the same time. One, we have 50 years of oligarchic ascendance. So they're winning.

You've just listed a lot of wins on their part. Yep. Okay. That is momentum. They are also, thanks to Citizens United and thanks to basically these other victories, oligarchs are feeling incredibly confident. They're feeling emboldened. They feel like it's no longer necessary to operate even behind the scenes. Out in the open, what I call in your face oligarchy. And that is one part of the moment we're in. But we're also I think in the early stages of a backlash, just as we saw with the Gilded Age when the robber barons, the robber barons are the name that oligarchs were given at the time. And that era produced a different kind of consciousness, a different kind of awareness,

mobilization, coalitions, and so on. And it produced results. We are now at a moment when, for example, wealth taxes are being considered serious. in the United States. At the national level, for the ones you've mentioned, California is looking at one. The European Union is also looking at wealth taxes. They're talking about making them a global policy so that moving between countries is not an option for getting away from these taxes.

And some people have responded to the wealth tax by saying, you know, it's on American, it's not what we do, we tax. income. Well, look, when it comes to the average citizen, guess what? The number one store of wealth for the average citizen is their home. And you're right. You can't take it with you and run away, right? It's an immobile asset and it's taxed. So we are already taxing the main store of wealth for the average citizen. It's already here. It's American as apple pie to tax wealth for the non-rich. Right. And we don't just do that. It's brutal. Why? Because you're taxed on the whole value

of the house, even though you may only own 20% of it because you've got an 80% mortgage. You're paying a tax on the debt. That's no one is. is proposing a wealth tax that is anything but net worth. And yet, for the average citizen, ladies and gentlemen, you're paying taxes on massive debt. It's astonishing. And people sometimes say, oh, well, if we put a wealth tax on the very, very rich, the billionaires,

they might have to sell some shares because they're not liquid and to pay the tax. You know, and meanwhile, Granny, who has lived in her home for 50 years and has paid it off, has to pay a tax, and she's driven out of the home. What do you say about capital flight? Well, capital flight, look, first of all, it's real. And there are even parts of the wealth defense industry who they call it residential planning. All these things always have some kind of name, which is incredibly bland.

but there is a firm in the UK, for example, that has pioneered how to relocate oligarchs. But governments have responded with things like exit taxes. So, for example, you try to move 100 billion offshore, 40% tax on the move. So, sure, you can move, but as long as your assets are known, identifiable, and that, by the way, is a challenge, because the industry's job is to make it not known, not identifiable. That's where the battle is. The first battle is just to see it. The second battle is to tax it, right?

But yeah, global mobility is an issue. But also, ultimately, your home government is the one that's going to defend you. Right. And so that is all part of what would be strategic incrementalism. And then you also write about the politics of preparation, which is essentially, in part, what we're doing at this moment, which is to broaden the imagination of people and the understanding of both what exists and just how it's been mischaracterized, like the wealth tax that exists today. and also the idea of a whole host of things that we could be doing that would shrink this wealth inequality and shrink the wealth and the power of oligarchs and waiting for the proper opportunity. And that could be, you know, like you've written in the context of World War, it could be in the context of the world war.

It could be in the context of just, we just in an era, maybe in the wake of the financial crisis, maybe in the wake of what one of the most hated presidencies in the modern era might give us that opportunity. Yeah. So think of strategic incrementalism as things that are very doable right now under the politics of the ordinary. if people are focused enough and they know which policies to pursue. The Corporate Transparency Act was one that you named. The Enablers Act is another. People can go to the book and read what those are about.

The politics of preparation is different in that. We periodically experience crises and cataclysms. I mean, I'm not in favor of them, but they happen. They come. war, economic, pandemics, and so on and so on. And what crises always do is they disrupt the politics of the ordinary. Now, the question is, in which direction? Will deeper changes become possible during these ruptures

than are possible during the ordinary turning of the wheels of the system? The question is, are people who are trying to, trying to bring change, are they ready? Have they already thought through the changes? Have they debated them? Have they refined them? Have they gotten their minds around them and adjusted to the possibility? These are proposals which, if you put them forward now, are going to sound ludicrous.

People are going to laugh. They're going to say that's undoable. And so the preparation is, based on the idea, crises will come. The crisis itself is bad enough, but even worse is to be unprepared for it. Right. To have it be squandered. Let me give you an example. 2008 was a very deep economic crisis.

Progressives were not ready at all, but the wealth defense industry was. And so that entire crisis benefited all those who were already wealthy. They got bailed out while people had foreclosures on their mortgages. So that's an example of no preparation weakness. And what kinds of policies are people talking about? Well, there's a whole range of them, and I tried to give a taste of what some of those are. Let me just mention two that are pretty dramatic, that people would say, you know, how is that conceivable? Okay, first of all, the elimination of all upper chambers of legislatures.

Why are they there? They're there to block the people below them. That's their number one function. So, elimination of the Senate, people will say, that's nuts. Sure it is, until a deep crisis happens. And then it could be in play. Another one is people are talking about tinkering with the size of the Supreme Court. That Supreme Court has functioned over the course of the history as a protector of the status

quo, including the economic status quo. That's what it has mainly done. Okay? I would not increase the Supreme Court to 13. I would increase it to 45. 45 justices. Why? First of all, the opportunities for much broader representation in the court are much higher. We would have procedures for nominating and passing people into the court, but we should also have half of the court, rotating every new appointment by lottery. If you have a law degree and if you have served at least once as a judge, you are eligible to be on the Supreme Court for a 10-year period. From the presumably the circuit courts, the upper federal courts and the court of appeals. Yes. The idea is to open up.

to the people and the people's interests and voices much more power and sway. If you ask me, why did I pick 45? It could have been 13, but 45 is the size of our political science department. And it turns out we are able to take on complex issues, debate and discuss them, and come to decisions. If we were 100, that might be harder. So it's a workable number. Now, you may say, why do that? The answer is, go back to the Constitutional Convention.

That pyramid was built to block democracy. These are efforts not to attack oligarchs to strengthen representation of the many, which is not happening in the United States, especially on economic grounds. People are struggling. People are angry. and a lot of the polarization we're seeing in society, a lot of the extremism, you can't have 50 years of rising massive inequality and insecurity and not have a tear at the fabric of society. Professor Jeffrey Winters, the book is The Blind Spot, How Oligarchs Dominate, Our Democracy.

We'll put a link to that in our podcast and YouTube description and at majority.fm. Thanks so much for your time today. It's fascinating read. really appreciate you discussing it. Thanks, Sam. It's been a delight to talk to you. We are back and we are here to wrap up the free part of the majority report and head into the fun half where we will talk about the most important material story in America, the reflecting pool.

We'll also talk about FIFA. We'll also talk about probably some Trump family corruption, the Michigan Senate race, maybe a little Joe Rogan, maybe a little bit of Mom Donnie wins, all that good stuff. Matt, what's happening on Left Reckoning and with the Jacobin show? Tomorrow on Left Reckoning, Emma Vigland will be joining the show. We're talking The Sorrow of McMorrow. Is that you're going to title the episode? Oh, that's great.

So, yeah, subscribe to Left Reckoning. If you're not, it's going to be a fun show coming up tomorrow after you. I mean, she's a ginger like Annie. We really should kind of put some musical theater references in there, you know, to make it funnier. The Left Reckoning is very, very hospitable to musical. A lot of really positive feedback on that interview, by the way. People saying that's a best-of candidate, so we can put that down. Also, I just want to plug this as well.

next Tuesday the 14th, July 14th, I'm going to be a special guess at the Workers Deserved More Democratic Socialists of America program launch. It's virtual and you're going to be able to check that out

if you go to go.d.org slash wdm what's that a dash? Emma but you know, we'll also put the link to that down below. It's on my Instagram, but it's also I retweeted that.

You know, Mike Johnson has been promoting this program over the last week or so, all that good stuff. But it's being officially released on Tuesday, July 14th, and I'm going to be hosting that event virtually.

So that is the 14th at night, starting at 8.30 p.m. Eastern, 5.30 p.m. Pacific time. I would love for you guys to join. I'll be plugging that for the rest of the week. And that will be, yeah, in eight days from now. So we are going to head into the fun half.

See you there. Okay, Emma, please. Well, I just, I feel that my voice is sorely lacking in the majority report. Wait, look. Look, Sam is unpopular. I do deserve a vacation at Disney World. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome Emma to the show. It is Thursday.

I think you need to take over for Sam. Yes, please. No, no, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pause you right there. Wait, what? You can't encourage Emma to live like this. And I'll tell you why. So it's offered a twerk, sushi, and poker with the boys. That's what we call.

I just think that what you did to Tim Poole was mean. Free speech. That's not what we're about here. Look at how sad he's become now. You shouldn't even talk about it. I think you're responsible. I probably am in a certain way, but let's get to the meltdown here. Dwerp, sushi, and she.

I'm sorry, I'm losing my phone. I'm not going to mine. So it's offered a twerk. Yeah. Sushi and poker. Sushi and give a kid. I'm not trying to be a dip right now, but like, I absolutely think the U.S. should be providing me with a wife and kids. That's not what we're talking about here.

It's not a fun job. Twirl? That's a real fit. That's got that. Real fit. Willie Walker. Twerk. That's what that.

Hogger. It was so much easier when the majority report was just you. You were happy. Let's change the subject. Rangers and Nick are going right Now shut up Don't want people saying reckless things on your program That's one of the most difficult parts

About this show This is a pro-killing podcast I'm thinking maybe it's kind of We bury the hatchet Left is best Violet twir We already fun this Steam song

I Bumbler Emma Viglin Absolutely one of my favorite people Actually not just in the game Like period