WASHINGTON—In an attempt to dispel rumors of an affair during the 2024 presidential campaign, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. held a press conference Monday during which he denied ever laying eggs in Vanity Fair editor Olivia Nuzzi. “I know there has been a lot of speculation about me depositing my clutch […] The post RFK Jr. Denies Ever Laying Eggs In Olivia Nuzzi appeared first on The Onion.

_T_ _he following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 24 episode of the  _Daily Blast _  podcast. Listen to it here._ **Greg Sargent:  **This is _The Daily Blast_ from _The New Republic_ , produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. Suddenly, a bunch of media outlets seem to have figured something out. President Donald Trump is really, really unpopular. There’s long been a tendency to ascribe to Trump something akin to magical political powers, but there’s been a palpable shift in the discourse, and we think that’s highly significant. In one example, Axios, which is generally friendly to Republicans, reported that everywhere Republicans look, they see big political trouble. Axios set its “red alert” time for Trump and the GOP. In another example, a leading polling analyst called Trump’s fortunes “atrocious” and “horrific.” We think Democrats should talk up Trump’s weaknesses a lot more and push the media to tell this story more as well. So today we’re scheming about all this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, one of our favorite observers of MAGA and media foibles alike. Amanda, good to have you on, as always. **Amanda Marcotte:**  Thank you so much for having me. **Sargent:  **So let’s start by listening to the striking polling analysis from CNN’s Harry Enten. It’s a bit long, but it’s worth it. Listen to this. **H****arry Enten (voiceover):**  _I would say this is probably the worst 10-day period for the president in the polls his entire second term. The numbers are just atrocious. What are we talking about here in terms of net approval rating? Well, take a look. These are all November polls. The best one of the group puts him at 14 points underwater. That’s the Marquette University Law School poll, tied for the worst he’s ever had in that poll. Fox, 17 points underwater. Marist, 17 points underwater. The Reuters-Ipsos poll, 22 points underwater. And then taking the cake, the AP NORC poll, 26 points underwater. If you think this is bad, what is driving these horrific numbers for Donald Trump? Well, why don’t we take a look at independents? Trump’s net approval with  __independents_ _. Back in January, he was close to even. He was at minus four points. Not great, but not terrible. Look at this number: 43 points underwater with independents in the most recent average of these polls. When you are 43 points underwater with independents, you know you’re doing terribly. You can’t win with this. If this holds for next year’s midterm election, wave adios, amigos. Goodbye. See you later to that House Republican majority.  _ **Sargent:  **So that’s really something. To recap, Trump is underwater by anywhere from 14 to 26 points in all these polls. And in an average, he’s underwater by 43 points with independents. Amanda, I didn’t expect it to happen that quickly. Did you? **Marcotte:  **No, I didn’t really expect it to be this quick. I expected he would lose a lot of popularity over time; I would like to wish I was smart enough to have seen that, but I kind of think it was hard to predict because, like, has this ever happened with any president? That they fall off a cliff so fast? **Sargent:  **Part of the reason this is such a surprise to so many people, including reporters, is because there’s been this kind of built-in tendency to treat Trump as having something like magical powers. This has just been an enormous problem in the discourse, from my point of view, for a long time. It’s been almost shocking how bad the coverage has been in that regard. There’s always this tendency to treat Trump as if he has some sort of mystical grip on some sort of deeper American essence that we’re all missing. Now, I think that’s partly because, you know, coastal elites flagellate themselves and hate themselves and all that, and blame themselves for missing the Trump phenomenon. But still, it’s been really bad, hasn’t it? **Marcotte:  **Yeah. And I think this is one place where I’ve always been annoyed with the mainstream media coverage of this. I agree with you that it’s coastal elites—people who maybe have never really lived amongst the middle of the flyover country of this kind. And so they assume there’s just some kind of thing that Donald Trump has, some magic that he’s working that is invisible to them with “ordinary people.” But I’m from Texas. I grew up in rural Texas. Most of the people I grew up around are Republicans. And I just don’t think that it is like that. I think what has happened is a little bit more complicated than folks believe in the media. And I think that Donald Trump’s charisma is not nearly as strong as people assume it is. I feel—and have always felt—that one day he’s going to be embarrassing for these people, and they’re going to pretend like they were never big supporters of his. And right now it’s just like, I think they like the MAGA hat kind of even more than they like Donald Trump, per se. **Sargent:  **Well, we are seeing a shift in the media coverage, finally. _The New York Times_ had a front page piece about how Republicans are now beginning to look beyond Trump. The piece noted that Trump just lost on the Jeffrey Epstein files, lost big in fact. It also noted that Republicans just got blown out in the recent elections and that even some Republicans are starting to say that the basic laws of midterm elections are kicking in against even the almighty Donald Trump. Amanda, so the corollary of what we’ve been saying is that there’s also this tendency in the discourse to treat Trump as immune to those types of rules and structural factors of politics, like the way midterm elections work against the party in power. But even that seems to be giving way now. What do you think of that? **Marcotte:  **I wish people remembered what happened in 2018, right? Democrats had sweepingly huge election wins because not only did the rules of midterm elections apply, but Donald Trump motivates his opposition. I think we saw this pattern happen twice, where a lot of people just assumed he wasn’t going to win, so they didn’t turn out in 2016 or 2024 in the numbers that they should have. But now that he’s in office, people are freaking out and they’re mobilizing. We’re seeing this with the No Kings protests. We’re seeing a lot of reason—the people that are fighting back against ICE—we’re seeing a lot of reason for people to be like,_  Oh shit, he’s the president again, I guess I better get off the couch._ I think that’s kind of what we’re seeing here. And I will not be surprised if turnout is really high in the midterms. And that’s all before you even get into the fact that the elephant in the room is that Donald Trump is 79 years old, and he is not looking good these days. And I think that his ability to be a strongman leader of the MAGA cults kind of depends on him looking like someone who’s going to survive for the next few years. I think there’s a bet that increasingly few people are interested in taking. **Sargent:  **Well, I will tell you, as part of this kind of media turn against Trump, it’s clear that a lot of MAGA figures are now questioning Trump’s strength and his ability to hold the movement together. And that’s its own sort of death knell. The Axios piece that I referenced earlier actually cited, “rising internal MAGA drama and division,” as part of their diagnosis for saying that this is a red alert moment for Trump and the Republican Party. The Axios piece was really surprising. It cited this Fox News poll which finds that more than three-fourths of respondents view the economy negatively. And Axios, as I said earlier, said that there are signs of trouble everywhere for the GOP. Axios is pretty friendly to Republicans. They’re hardly a resistance flagship outlet at all. And so I think for the super-savvy guys at Axios to be being this blunt is a clear tell of where they think the power is flowing. **Marcotte:  **Yeah, on the issue front, I do think that the economy is really …  I mean, even Trump has been persuaded, obviously, that he should be worried about the bad economic news because he’s trying to stick to talking points. He fails. But it’s clear that whoever sat him down and said, _This affordability issue is going to hurt you,_ got through to him because he’s trying to use the word, even though, you know, “affordability” sounds as weird in his mouth as saying “please” or “thank you.” He’s just incapable of understanding that people struggle to afford things. Even though he’s been broke how many times? Because he’s rich-guy broke so he still has money to pay for whatever he wants. But it’s interesting. I’m in New York right now, and I walked by Zuccotti Park today and I just was reminded of Occupy Wall Street really vividly today and how much anger and energy it harnessed about the financial collapse and billionaires taking over and just sucking up all the wealth for themselves. And I kind of feel we’re in that moment again, another decade-plus later. **Sargent:  **Yeah, it does feel that way. I thought there was another interesting tell on some credit here to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who compiled a bunch of headlines showing that the media is turning on Trump or at least acknowledging how weak he is. One of the ones that he cited is this Politico piece, which I had missed, which is about how Democrats swept at the school board level and they called it a culture-war backlash. Now that is a real rarity to hear from the mainstream media, I think. There’s this deeply embedded flaw in the discourse on this, as well, which has been to interpret Trump and Trumpism and Trump’s victories as a sign that the culture in some very profound sense has moved to the right, has really rejected wokeness and all that now, so can you talk a little bit about that? I think we’re really seeing that that whole storyline was hype; that it was mostly nonsense. Is that too optimistic? **Marcotte:**  No, I think that’s exactly right. A couple years ago, I did some reporting in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about a school board race there, in 2023, I do believe. And what had happened was that Moms for Liberty had taken over their school board, and this group of parents had gotten together and formed their own organizing committee and were recruiting candidates to run from the left for that school board. And they swept in 2023. And then in this last election, that same county, that same school board that I reported on—the last remaining Republicans on the board lost in November. So literally this school district in Bucks County went from being all Republicans on the school board to, in the space of two years, all Democrats on the school board. All. And a lot of what was driving it when I was on the ground was a genuine belief that these people are bananas, these right-wing culture warriors are fringe characters that live in a fantasy land, and that what they consider wokeness is what normal people just consider the real world. **Sargent:  **There in Bucks County, a sheriff lost his election, just in these recent contests against a challenger who deliberately and explicitly tried to make the race into a referendum on ICE and the ICE raids. And it was a solid victory for the challenger on this issue. That is something that you would think should shock the hell out of lot of pundits. Because one of the things we have constantly heard is that Trump has this kind of deep grasp on what the public really wants on immigration, in particular. But what we’re actually seeing is that candidates can make their races about ICE and raise the salience of immigration and win. What do make of that? **Marcotte:  **I am not surprised in the slightest. So I live in Philadelphia—that’s why it was easy for me to get to Bucks. And while Pennsylvania has not been in the news a lot for the ICE situation, it’s been really bad. I can tell you that. And I think that people across the state are outraged about it because there has been a lot of immigration from Latin America to Pennsylvania, and they do all sorts of jobs like work in the food industry. They work in agriculture; there’s an Amazon packaging plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, that has a lot of immigrants working there. And these people are perceived widely as hardworking, honest neighbors, and nobody likes seeing your neighbors treated this way. It’s very distressing. And when I’m in Philly, every time anyone—like, all anyone talks about are the ICE raids. Everyone’s terrified, everyone’s scared. It’s basically the gossip on the streets: how many ICE raids people have witnessed recently. **Sargent:  **And ICE has become a real pariah agency. There’s been data that really shows that its approval or standing with the public has plunged precipitously. And there’s another dimension to this, as well, which is that the ICE stuff is just tailor-made for social media. It spreads like crazy on social because these are super-shareable videos. They’re incredibly dramatic. They have heroes and villains, and the villains are wearing masks, literally. **Marcotte:  **What’s funny is they designed these ICE raids to be filmable because in the sort of fascist mind of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and all the people behind and Kristi Noem and all the people behind this, they thought it would be a show of force that would intimidate the population of this country into being like, _They’re scary. They have masks. We have to be afraid._  They want to scare us. They like being the villains. But, you know, I’m going to get all weepy now, but goddamn it, we’re Americans. **Sargent:**  Yes, I think that’s important. Yeah, because the masked raids—especially wrapped up with the imagery of big armored vehicles on streets and, you know, kidnappings and snatchings off the street by anonymous-looking goons and stuff like that—really triggers some sort of anti-totalitarian instincts in people and just strikes them as intrinsically and powerfully anti-American in some very deep sense. And I think that’s what’s going on here as well. I’m glad you raised that point about the fascism of people like Stephen Miller, thinking that they could shock-and-awe their way to getting everyone to kind of accept this. But that whole idea has really backfired in the face in a big way. **Marcotte:** Huge, huge, because I think history will look back, and the thing that will be most striking is that while all these elite journalists and politicians and businessmen kissed the ring and bowed down and were afraid of Trump, people in their jammies and slippers—ordinary people—when they see ICE coming into their neighborhood, they confront them in the street. And the courage of ordinary people in this moment has been quite stunning, especially when you compare it to the elite in this country. **Sargent:  **You know, those elites are being a little shortsighted. Do they really think MAGA is going to be in charge forever and ever and ever? **Marcotte:  **No, in fact, I think the reason for a lot of this cowardice is exactly that. They think that Trump is not long for this world, that he will be out of power shortly either because he dies or because he’s too old really to run again. And they just think, _We’ll just kiss the ring for now and we will get through this and then things will go back to normal._ I think that’s the calculus going on. **Sargent:  **Very interesting. Well, to wrap this up: So we’ve got the media starting to admit that Trump doesn’t have a deep lock on the culture. He doesn’t have a mystical attachment or mystical connection with the American people’s real dislike of immigrants or whatever. We’re seeing some admissions in the media of that. But I think looking down the road, you can kind of see places where the media could revert to its old bad habits. Like, if Trump invades Venezuela, which looks like a big possibility, all of a sudden we could be back in a situation where we’re getting media coverage of the “popular war president,” or “Trump is very strong, and Democrats don’t dare raise any objections to what he’s doing now,” that sort of thing. How do you see this playing out? Do you think Trump continues spiraling downward kind of indefinitely, or are we going to get some unpleasant surprises where the media looks for ways to tell the story of a surprising turnaround for Trump on the economy or on his popularity? What do you think is going to happen? **Marcotte:  **I think they’re going to want that narrative maybe, but I’m going to steal Dan Pfeiffer’s observation on _Pod Save_ that lame-duck presidents in their second term, when their polls start to fall, they never recover. That’s just how it is historically and traditionally. Trump is a uniquely toxic person who can’t help but make things worse, so I think that that’s going to happen again. I think this may be—he does have a floor because of stubborn Republicans being unwilling to admit they were wrong. But even then, I think there’s going to be a point where people really realize he is over, that he is a lame duck. And I think the part where people start pretending they never voted for him, or that they were tricked into voting for him, or they find some face-saving excuse for why this has happened—to get out of having responsibility and accountability for it—I think we could be seeing that happen to Trump the way that it happened to George W. Bush in his second term. You know, by the end of Bush’s second term, I couldn’t find a Republican who said they’d vote for him. **Sargent:  **Well, Amanda Marcotte, that sounds like certainly a plausible possibility, and it would be the ultimate irony if the rule that holds in the face of the almighty Trump is that rule as well—that the lame duck who’s spiraling downwards can’t pull himself out of the spiral. Really good to talk to you, as always. **Marcotte:  **Thank you, same.

Republicans scramble as Trump’s ratings plummet, MTG resigns after a short stint in Trump enemy territory, and a US senator admonishes Israel’s detention of a Palestinian-American teen.

A detail view of the badge worn by Matthew Elliston during an ICE hiring event on Aug. 26, 2025, in Arlington, Texas. Photo: Ron Jenkins/Getty Images Federal prosecutors have filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot. There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn’t even at the protest. Daniel “Des” Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained “Antifa materials” after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there. But the boxed materials aren’t Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim “Antifa” uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas — one was titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy” — but they’re fully constitutionally protected free speech. The case demonstrates the administration’s intensifying efforts to criminalize left-wing activists after Donald Trump announced in September that he was designating “Antifa” as a “major terrorist organization” — a legal designation that doesn’t exist for domestic groups — following the killing of Charlie Kirk. Sanchez was first indicted in October on charges of “corruptly concealing a document or record” as a standalone case, but the new indictment merges his charges with those against the other defendants, likely in hopes of burying the First Amendment problems with the case against him under prosecutors’ claims about the alleged shooting. It’s an escalation of a familiar tactic. In 2023, Georgia prosecutors listed “zine” distribution as part of the conspiracy charges against 61 Stop Cop City protesters in a sprawling RICO indictment that didn’t bother to explain how each individual defendant was involved in any actual crime. I wrote back then about my concern that this wasn’t just sloppy overreach, but also a blueprint for censorship. Those fears have now been validated by Sanchez’s prosecution solely for possessing similar literature. Photos of the zines Daniel Sanchez is charged with “corruptly concealing.” Photo: U.S. District Court, Northern District of Texas There have been other warnings that cops and prosecutors think they’ve found a constitutional loophole — if you can’t punish reporting it, punish transporting it. Los Angeles journalist Maya Lau is suing the LA County Sheriff’s Department for secretly investigating her for conspiracy, theft of government property, unlawful access of a computer, burglary, and receiving stolen property. According to her attorneys, her only offense was reporting on a list of deputies with histories of misconduct for the Los Angeles Times. > If you can’t punish reporting it, punish transporting it. It’s also reminiscent of the Biden administration’s case against right-wing outlet Project Veritas for possessing and transporting Ashley Biden’s diary, which the organization bought from a Florida woman later convicted of stealing and selling it. The Constitution protects the right to publish materials stolen by others — a right that would be meaningless if they couldn’t possess the materials in the first place. Despite the collapses of the Cop City prosecution and the Lau investigation — and its own dismissal of the Project Veritas case — the Trump administration has followed those dangerous examples, characterizing lawful activism and ideologies as terrorist conspiracies (a strategy Trump allies also floated during this first term) to seize the power to prosecute pamphlet possession anytime they use the magic word “Antifa.” That’s a chilling combination for any journalist, activist, or individual who criticizes Trump. National security reporters have long dealt with the specter of prosecution under the archaic Espionage Act for merely obtaining government secrets from sources, particularly after the Biden administration extracted a guilty plea from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But the rest of the press — and everyone else, for that matter — understood that merely possessing written materials, no matter what they said, is not a crime. ## Most Read Pardoned Capitol Rioter Tried to Hush Child Sex Victim With Promise of Jan. 6 Reparation Money, Police Say Amanda Moore At 17, She Gave Up Her Son. Sixty Years Later, She Found Him on Death Row. Liliana Segura Wyden Blasts Kristi Noem for Abusing Subpoena Power to Unmask ICE Watcher Sam Biddle ## **Guilt by Literature** At what point does a literary collection or newspaper subscription become prosecutorial evidence under the Trump administration’s logic? Essentially, whenever it’s convenient. The vagueness is a feature, not a bug. When people don’t know which political materials might later be deemed evidence of criminality, the safest course is to avoid engaging with controversial ideas altogether. The slippery slope from anarchist zines to conventional journalism isn’t hypothetical, and we’re already sliding fast. Journalist Mario Guevara can tell you that from El Salvador, where he was deported in a clear case of retaliation for livestreaming a No Kings protest. So can Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, as she awaits deportation proceedings for co-writing an opinion piece critical of Israel’s wars that the administration considers evidence of support for terrorism. At least two journalists lawfully in the U.S. — Ya’akub Ira Vijandre and Sami Hamdi — were nabbed by ICE just last month. The case against Vijandre is partially based on his criticism of prosecutorial overreach in the Holy Land Five case and his liking social media posts that quote Quranic verses, raising the question of how far away we are from someone being indicted for transporting a Quran or a news article critical of the war on terror. ## Related ### “Antifa” Protesters Charged With Terrorism for Constitutionally Protected Activity Sanchez’s case is prosecutorial overreach stacked on more prosecutorial overreach. The National Lawyers Guild criticized prosecutors’ tenuous dot-connecting to justify holding 18 defendants responsible for one gunshot wound. Some defendants were also charged with supporting terrorism due to their alleged association with “Antifa.” Anarchist zines were cited as evidence against them, too. Sanchez was charged following a search that ICE proclaimed on social media turned up “literal insurrectionist propaganda” he had allegedly transported from his home to an apartment, noting that “insurrectionary anarchism is regarded as the most serious form of domestic (non-jihadi) terrorist threat.” The tweet also said that Sanchez is a green card holder granted legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The indictment claims Sanchez was transporting those materials to conceal them because they incriminated his wife. But how can possession of literature incriminate anyone, let alone someone who isn’t even accused of anything but being present when someone else allegedly fired a gun? Zines aren’t contraband; it’s not illegal to be an anarchist or read about anarchism. I don’t know why Sanchez allegedly moved the box of documents, but if it was because he (apparently correctly) feared prosecutors would try to use them against his wife, that’s a commentary on prosecutors’ lawlessness, not Sanchez’s. ## We’re independent of corporate interests — and powered by members. Join us. Become a member ## Join Our Newsletter Thank You For Joining! Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. Will you take the next step to support our independent journalism by becoming a member of The Intercept? I'm in Become a member By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. ## Join Our Newsletter ## Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. I'm in Violent rhetoric is subject to punishment only when it constitutes a “true threat” of imminent violence. Even then, the speaker is held responsible, not anyone merely in possession of their words. Government prosecutors haven’t alleged the “Antifa materials” contained any “true threats,” or any other category of speech that falls outside the protection of the First Amendment. Nor did they allege that the materials were used to plan the alleged actions of protesters on July 4 (although they did allege that the materials were “anti-government” and “anti-Trump”). > We don’t need a constitutional right to publish (or possess) only what the government likes. Even the aforementioned “Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organizing for Attack” zine, despite its hyperbolic title, reads like a think piece, not a how-to manual. It advocates for tactics like rent strikes and squatting, not shooting police officers. Critically, it has nothing to do with whether Sanchez’s wife committed crimes on July 4. Being guilty of possessing literature is a concept fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We don’t need a constitutional right to publish (or possess) only what the government likes, and the “anti-government” literature in Sanchez’s box of zines is exactly what the First Amendment protects. With history and leaders like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán as a guide, we also know it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s censorship crusade will stop with a few radical pamphlets. ## The Framers Loved Zines There’s an irony in a supposedly conservative administration treating anti-government pamphlets as evidence of criminality. Many of the publications the Constitution’s framers had in mind when they authored the First Amendment’s press freedom clause bore far more resemblance to Sanchez’s box of zines than to the output of today’s mainstream news media. Revolutionary-era America was awash in highly opinionated, politically radical literature. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” was designed to inspire revolution against the established government. Newspapers like the Boston Gazette printed inflammatory writings by Samuel Adams and others urging the colonies to prepare for war after the Coercive Acts. The Declaration of Independence itself recognized the right of the people to rise up. It did not assume the revolution of the time would be the last one. One might call it “literal insurrectionist propaganda” — and some of it was probably transported in boxes. The framers enshrined press freedom not because they imagined today’s professionally trained journalists maintaining careful neutrality. They protected it because they understood firsthand the need for journalists and writers who believed their government had become tyrannical to espouse revolution. For all their many faults, the framers were confident enough in their ideas that they were willing to let them be tested. If the government’s conduct didn’t call for radical opposition, then radical ideas wouldn’t catch on. It sure looks like the current administration doesn’t want to make that bet. Share * Copy link * Share on Facebook * Share on Bluesky * Share on X * Share on LinkedIn * Share on WhatsApp _IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT._ What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. This is not hyperbole. Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation. Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.” The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy. ## We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us? $15 $25 $50 $100 $5 $8 $10 $15 One Time Monthly Donate ## Contact the author: Seth Stern seth@freedom.press ## Related ### Are You on Trump’s List of Domestic Terrorists? There’s No Way to Know. ### Feds Say Kat Abughazaleh “Impeded” ICE Agents. That Would Put Her on the Right Side of History. ### Feds Make It a Crime to Give PPE to ICE Protesters ### Defying RICO Indictment, Faith Leaders Chain Themselves to Bulldozer to Stop Cop City ## Latest Stories ### Nydia Velázquez Hears Calls for Generational Change, Setting Up a Fight on the Left in New York Noah Hurowitz - Nov. 22 The Democratic congresswoman was an early believer in Zohran Mamdani. His win showed her it was “the right time to pass the torch.” ### AIPAC Donors Back Real Estate Tycoon Who Opposed Gaza Ceasefire for Deep-Blue Chicago Seat Akela Lacy - Nov. 22 Progressive Rep. Danny Davis rejected AIPAC cash at the end of his career. Now the Israel lobby is coming for his seat. Chilling Dissent ### The FBI Wants AI Surveillance Drones With Facial Recognition Noah Hurowitz - Nov. 21 An FBI procurement document requests information about AI surveillance on drones, raising concerns about a crackdown on free speech. Join The Conversation

_The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Riverhead Books, 336 pages, $30_ The idea of carving out territorial exceptions to, or escape zones from, the hand of the nation-state has long captured the imagination of free market enthusiasts. In the 1990s, I was involved in several organizations devoted to the idea, and I witnessed the movement's gradual shift from a pipe dream of libertarian theorists to something attracting serious interest, and investment capital, from entrepreneurs, as libertarian-oriented free ports, special economic zones, charter cities, and even floating maritime cities (sea-steads), began to look more politically possible. In 1993, my "free nation" group was meeting in a local North Carolina hotel; by 2011, I was sipping cocktails at a rather swankier "free cities" conference on the resort island of Roatán, Honduras—which, not coincidentally, today boasts its own charter city, Próspera. What looks exciting to libertarians may unsurprisingly seem less congenial to those not already sold on libertarian ideas. In _The Hidden Globe_ , the journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian turns a more skeptical eye on these developments, and on the broader trend for the conventional picture of "one land, one law, one people, and one government" to undergo "a kind of transfiguration" into "an accretion of cracks and concessions, suspensions and abstractions, carve-outs and free zones, and other places without nationality in the conventional sense." Abrahamian takes us on an engaging tour of a variety of communities that exist in, offer access to, or are entangled with this interstitial, postnational network, including Singapore, Mauritius, Shenzhen, Dubai, Svalbard, Boten, Luxembourg (an aggressive pioneer in laws pertaining to outer-space resources), Geneva (her childhood home), and the aforementioned Próspera. Although Abrahamian's understanding of libertarian ideas is somewhat superficial, her discussion is more nuanced and less hostile than the jacket copy for the book might lead one to expect; she sees potential for unjust exploitation in economic free zones, but liberatory potential as well. She also recognizes that the decoupling of jurisdiction from territory is not a new phenomenon and has not been a uniformly negative one. Where she is critical, much that she says deserves libertarian attention. The free zones that Abrahamian explores are, generally by design, places where legally questionable assets can be hidden from the eyes and hands of government. Libertarians are unlikely to lose much sleep over her dismay that tax evaders are thereby enabled to shield their wealth from legal scrutiny; but her further examples of dictators, war profiteers, and dealers in stolen art might raise more concern. Nor are interstitial zones always liberating for their inhabitants. The infamous prison at the U.S. naval base in Cuba's Guantánamo Bay is an attractive place for the American government to house refugees without asylum hearings and suspected terrorists without trials, because—or so the government maintains—neither U.S. nor Cuban law applies there. Australia has its own Guantánamo Archipelago, and Abrahamian devotes a chapter to it. This comprises, on the one hand, a string of islands under Australian jurisdiction but legally excised from Australian territory, so that asylum seekers' legal rights do not apply there, and on the other hand prisons in foreign countries to which Australia has sent unwanted migrants (a precedent that President Donald Trump is imitating today). Even refugees allowed into Australia proper for medical care have sometimes been treated via a legal fiction as though they were still back in their offshore prisons, and thus without ordinary rights. Abrahamian worries that even the more rhetorically libertarian free zones can be oppressive in practice. Many feature legal regimes stronger in "economic" rights (narrowly construed) than in civil rights, particularly for workers. Capital is regularly attracted to free zones via offers of corporate welfare and land seized through eminent domain. Countries with free zones are often economically authoritarian outside the free zone, thus pushing their desperate population into the free zone in search of jobs. Thus the profits that employers make from low wages and dangerous work conditions inside the free zone are not purely market-driven; they are subsidized by the host country's illiberalism. Investors drawn to free zones are not always freewheeling libertarians; often they support severe immigration controls. Thus the hidden globe "circumscribes the lives of the world's most disenfranchised people"; Abrahamian instances "detainees languishing in offshore prisons in the Caribbean and the Pacific, impoverished workers processing goods for export in duty-free industrial zones across the Global South, sailors and asylum seekers stuck on vessels they cannot leave for lack of papers." Those who are "unwanted abroad" but "can't stay home" often end up "in a third space: neither here nor there." In short, the interstitial network that Abrahamian describes may be liberating for those with the wealth and connections to navigate it, but for those who don't it can be a grim trap. A strong supporter of open borders, Abrahamian favors giving immigrant-friendly cities "a power traditionally reserved for federal governments," namely "the leeway to grant foreigners legal residency"—sanctuary cities with legal teeth. But she also warns that such a process, if mishandled, might result in nominal free zones that are actually "glorified prisons" where impoverished refugees can live and work but have no option to leave. It matters little to a prisoner whether the key to one's prison is held by officials within the prison or by officials in the surrounding neighborhood. The charter city movement draws inspiration from the free mercantile cities of the late Middle Ages that served as a refuge for serfs escaping the feudal system. These medieval cities inspired thinkers as diverse as the classical liberal Augustin Thierry and the anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin with visions of islands of cooperative social order emerging in a hostile sea of royal, baronial, and ecclesiastical privilege. But Abrahamian worries that a libertarian-minded charter city might turn all too easily into "a company town, governed by corporate charter, full of workers who have no say in their plight." (Naomi Kritzer's recent sci-fi novel _Liberty's Daughter_ , set on a purportedly libertarian seastead, dramatizes this possibility.) I think this is a worry that libertarians should take seriously; something calling itself a free-enterprise zone is not thereby magically prevented from morphing into just another nation-state, perhaps even an especially repressive one. Yet Abrahamian also acknowledges that such a city could instead "represent a new kind of place, with new rules for all people: a temporary, or even a permanent city of refuge." While she has serious reservations about the benefits of actually existing free zones, she agrees with their proponents that "to solve global problems in ways that help ordinary people, we need to be less hidebound to rigid notions of sovereignty, territoriality, and jurisdiction." For Abrahamian, securing this more salutary result requires a refusal to "cede this territory to rigidly ideological capitalists." As often happens when people talk about "capitalism," it is difficult to track when by "capitalism" she means a free market and when she means a regime of corporate privilege. To her credit, she recognizes the distinction, at least in principle, but the distinction often gets lost in application. Hence her tendency not to take very seriously the possibility that a consistent free market might hold the solutions to many of the problems she considers. Libertarians have, it must be admitted, an uneven record of tracking the distinction themselves. When the libertarian-minded investors that Abrahamian interviews talk blithely of importing efficient first-world economic rules into inefficient third-world economies, they seem not to have asked themselves whether those first-world economic rules already diverge from free market principles by building in systematic exploitation that might be exacerbated in a more impoverished environment. Yet the idea of zones of escape from the hand of the state is not just one that appeals to wealthy investors. We may also think of squatter settlements, "maroon" communities of escaped slaves, left-wing anarchist zones like the (formerly) semiautonomous Christiana in Copenhagen, or the late James C. Scott's example (in _The Art of Not Being Governed_) of upland Southeast Asia's "shatter zones" of refuge from the predatory states that dominate the valleys. Abrahamian does briefly discuss Scott, though she does not seem to see much of a parallel between her venture capitalists and Scott's fugitive serfs. And indeed, as she shows, the capitalists seeking out free zones are not always so innocent. (Neither are the fugitive serfs, for that matter.) But many participants in libertarian free-zone projects are very much not at the upper end of the economic spectrum, and taking them into account blurs the contrast somewhat. Libertarians can be too quick to see only the liberatory side of free zones, and Abrahamian's book should serve as a useful corrective. The problems she points to, however, stem from interstitial freedom being extended unequally to different groups. People need zones of escape, not only from the state but from purported free zones that have turned abusive, in line with the anarchist Paul Goodman's vision of "the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life." The cure for bad interstitiality, perhaps, is more interstitiality.

Grok has been reprogrammed to say Musk is better than everyone at everything, including blowjobs, piss drinking, playing quarterback, conquering Europe, etc.

_T_ _he following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 18 episode of the_ Daily Blast _podcast. Listen to ithere._ **Greg Sargent:** This is the _Daily Blast_ from _The New Republic_ , produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. A civil war has erupted inside the MAGA movement over Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi and white supremacist, and President Donald Trump just made it worse. In an interview, Trump defended Fuentes in a way that will boost his standing inside MAGA in a big way. Yet it occurs to us that this is terrible news for JD Vance. The Vice President has tried to avoid taking sides on Fuentes, but it’s now clear that Fuentes represents a big constituency inside MAGA. Vance and everyone else who’s thinking about what MAGA will look like after Trump will have to take this very seriously. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has a really good piece digging into the developing MAGA civil war about all this, so we’re talking to him about where the American right is going in the wake of it. Zack, great to have you on. **Zack Beauchamp:** Hey, Greg. Good to be talking to you again. **Sargent:** So to quickly recap, Tucker Carlson recently gave Nick Fuentes as a long, largely fawning interview. That caused some on the right to lash out at Carlson for platforming a “well-known Nazi sympathizer,” as one put it. Another called it “sick and despicable.” Trump finally broke his silence on all this. Here’s what Trump said about Tucker’s interview with Fuentes. **President Donald Trump (voiceover):**_We’ve had some great interviews with Tucker Carlson, but you can’t tell him who to interview. I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it. Get the word out. Let them. You know, people have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide. So there you have it._ **Sargent:** Trump is just fine with platforming Nick Fuentes. Your response to all that, Zack? **Beauchamp:** I don’t find this surprising at all, what Trump just said, to be clear. It’s consistent with his pattern of a very long time. You know, back as far as Charlottesville he said, _there are very fine people on both sides_. And then he told the Proud Boys to _stand back and stand by_ during the 2020 presidential election and then he went on to defend the January 6 rioters, right? Trump’s attitude towards extremism is very consistently not to condemn and to play this sort of dance around it, where he’ll never say, basically, no, or he will in the most oblique terms. And if he does try to criticize it, he’ll walk that back sometime soon in some other way. **Sargent:** So in addition to that, Zack, I want to flag something else because Trump in that exchange sort of tried to say, I don’t really know what Nick Fuentes stands for, but Axios just asked the White House if Trump condemns Fuentes’ racism and anti-Semitism, and the White House pointed Axios back to Trump’s remarks, which didn’t criticize Fuentes. So Trump and the White House can’t even claim ignorance anymore. They were given the explicit opportunity to condemn Fuentes’ racism and anti-Semitism and declined to do so. Zack, can you talk about what that means and what Fuentes really believes and who the Gropers are? **Beauchamp:** I mean, the thing about Nick Fuentes is if you actually watch his show as opposed to his more sanitized public appearances on like sort of center-right or more mainstream-right podcasts, he’s not subtle about what he thinks, right? This is a man who says that he admires and loves Hitler. He said at one point the Holocaust has never happened and made fun of it. And while at the same time, calling for the execution of “perfidious Jews,” that’s his term. This is as explicit anti-Semitism as you could imagine. This isn’t any of this coded stuff that you’ve gotten in the past. And so when the White House is refusing to condemn that, they’re not, it’s not just like refusing to condemn it, right? It’s saying it’s an acceptable part of our discourse, that this man should be somebody that Tucker Carlson can be friendly with without suffering social consequences or professional consequences, which is like how you maintain norms in a society, right? You maintain boundaries that there are consequences for engaging in particular kinds of behavior. And when you say Nick Fuentes gets a pass, you’re saying there’s no limit. I mean, we’re talking really explicit, violent eliminationist anti-Semitism. At one point, he called for Jews to be forced to convert or leave the country, right? It really is that bad. **Sargent:** Well, in your piece, you dug into how there’s a genuine fear among some on the right that Fuentes has become, I guess, too big to exile might be the way to put it. His constituency is too large at this point for him to be marginalized. And of course, some of the institutional players inside MAGA agree with that constituency anyway, to some degree or other, and want to embrace and utilize it. Can you take us inside that dimension of it? **Beauchamp:** Yeah, here’s the problem. So Fuentes has this very large following among young conservatives. There is a raging debate about how large that following is. It’s not clear. It depends on different ways you look at measuring it. There is an estimate that _only_ 30 to 40 percent of staff in D.C.—Republican staff—are followers of Fuentes. I think that’s overstated. That estimate is not scientific. It’s based on one conservative pundit who has a tendency to exaggerate things. But people who I trust have said that it’s plausible. Right. I don’t know if I’m to go so far as to say it’s likely, but it’s plausible. And so let’s say, like, that’s the upper bound. That’s a huge percentage of young Republican staffers in Washington, D.C., right? And then extrapolate that out to the broader world of young conservatives—whose survey data shows, by the way, are the single most anti-semitic group in the United States. Right. There’s a very good study on this by two professors, Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden. They’ve done this very clearly and shown that the epicenter of anti-semitism in the modern United States specifically is among young conservatives. So what does that tell us? Well, it tells us that this is a part of the constituency that many, many, many Republicans feel is the future of the party, right? And it’s where they’re going. And there’s a deep fear among more establishment-minded conservatives—even people who were once Tea Party radicals—of being left behind the way they were in 2016, where they all lined up against Trump, thought that the primary voters would reject him for being a fake conservative, thought that he would lose the general election to Clinton. And when none of those things happened, they saw themselves out cold in a MAGAfied party and had to embarrassingly grovel or else self-exile from the party. So nobody wants to do that again. And there’s a lot of fear that if they vocally condemn Fuentes or vocally try to marginalize him, that they’ll end up on the losing side of another one of these factional fights. **Sargent:** I think it’s a reasonable fear. I hate to say it. I mean, we saw all this crazy stuff come out from the young Republicans on on listservs and so forth. You wrote about JD Vance’s role in all this. Vance has his eye on the post-Trump MAGA movement and how to harness it for his own purposes. He’s gonna be the presumed nominee, I guess, but it’s not necessarily a lock. It occurs to me that Trump really, whether intentionally or not, shivved Vance in the back in a way here. So Vance has an Indian American wife. He’s gonna want a free hand to do his anti-immigrant appeals while also presenting himself as non-bigoted. Vance wants to get away with what you might call a soft or veiled white nationalism. But Fuentes actually mocks Vance and makes racist comments about his wife. He made he makes the white nationalism extremely explicit. As you said, I think Vance would have preferred it if Trump sidelined Fuentes, but Trump basically dumped Fuentes on Vance to have to deal with later. Can you untangle all that for us? **Beauchamp:** It’s hard to know what’s going on without really knowing the interior mental states of any of these people, right? I’ve got a personal theory that Trump has mostly checked out of the succession fight at this particular moment in time. There’s a lot going on with him, a lot of things to wrangle. And the question of, like, how to deal with someone like Nick Fuentes is just not at the top of his agenda. He’s just answering it the way he would any other question. I don’t know him. _I’m not involved in this,__I don’t know, Tucker’s business is Tucker’s business._ That abdication, though, does put Vance in this position because he wants to—as you say, it’s very clear—be the Republican standard bearer in 2028. He wants to create a sort of very ideological version of MAGA. I think MAGA right now is not ideological beyond a few very specific points that Trump is adamant on, because Trump himself is so protean. He’s willing to take on whatever policy agenda or ideas, except on a few core issues like trade and immigration, he feels like in the moment. Right. So that’s—that’s Trump’s role in this. But Vance is trying to turn it into a disciplined ideological cadre. But then you have to answer questions, right? Questions: if you really stand for something, what do you do about this guy who’s gaining popularity? Who hates you? Who will demean you in the grossest of possible terms—and your family. And you’re supposed to have honor, and you’re supposed to stand there and say, _look, I can be a leader_ , and you’re gonna let this guy take pot shots and be platformed by your friend, Carlson. And Vance and Carlson are friends. But Carlson pushed very hard to get Vance nominated and was reportedly instrumental in securing that role. So there’s—it’s not just that there are these—there’s these ideological goals that are locked in here. There’s a lot of personal stuff that’s wrapped in here. I suspect—again, speculation, somewhat informed speculation based on knowing some of the people involved—but [my] speculation is that Vance doesn’t want to condemn Tucker because he sees him as an essential ally going forward for the nomination. And if he goes too hard on Fuentes, that can be seen as going after Carlson. So he’s stuck. Right? I think that if Vance were left to his own devices, he probably would try to kick Fuentes out of the coalition. He has said negative things about him before, but at this point it’s like a little bit of a World War One-type situation, right? Where different alliances are being activated by virtue of different people taking actions at different times. And Vance is part of the Carlson alliance network. And now him staying silent is _de facto_ an endorsement of what Tucker is doing. And that’s where he’s stuck at this moment. And that’s bad for him. That’s not where he wants to be in a world where he’s trying to consolidate across the conservative movement core support ahead of people who are going to try to outflank him on the we-don’t-like-Nazis side, which is still popular even among some mainstream conservatives who have MAGAfied themselves. **Sargent:** So it seems very clear that Fuentes knows that he’s got Vance in a real pickle here. Let’s listen to what Fuentes said about Vance recently. **Nick Fuentes (voiceover):**_He’s getting squeezed. Because the Groypers are on the one hand saying, ‘hey, listen, fat boy, we want America First.’ You want to run for president? We want to hear you say ‘America First.’ And on the other side, he’s got his donors and they’re saying, ‘they’re horrible antisemites. You have to disavow them. You have to forcefully condemn them. Condemn Tucker, condemn the Groypers.’ Now, if Vance condemns the Groypers, We are deploying to Iowa. Raise your right hand. I swear I’m going to move to Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina. People will drive there for free and they will follow Vance around and ask him, ‘When will you put America First? Why would you condemn the young white men of America and sell out to our elites?’_ **Sargent:** So Zack, what interests me about that is the use of the phrase “America First.” Fuentes is basically saying, _you know what, fat boy_ , as he put it, _you don’t get to get away with soft peddling what America First actually means_. _You don’t get to do soft or veiled white nationalism anymore. You gotta go all the way_. And I think that that is gonna, at some point at least, maybe not as part of this round, but maybe the next round, because it’s all going to come up again, especially when 2028 rolls around—at some point, Vance is going to be cornered into saying whether he finds Fuentes’ view of what constitutes “America First” acceptable or not. **Beauchamp:** Yeah, look, I think the strategy right now from Vance—again, speculation, right, based on his public presentation—is that he’s trying to ride it out. I think he does have to at one point try to push back against Fuentes. I don’t think there’s an alternative here. He really does need to do that because of the vitriolic and personal way in which Fuentes attacks him. Plus he’s just electoral poison with those positions. But he can’t do it too aggressively now without getting roped into shooting at his own allies. And here I don’t just mean Tucker Carlson, though they’re very close. There’s also Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation—which is, you know, they wrote Project 2025. Roberts is the president, is the most… is the leading, or at least most prominent, think tank on the right. And he’s in a lot of hot water right now based on his defense of Carlson, which he has sort of walked back, but not really. You know, there was recently a leaked staff meeting at Heritage where some of his own senior scholars—very, very right-wing people—are screaming at him because there is, again, this faction of the Republican Party that’s MAGAfied but not okay with open Nazism. They’re willing to deal with the sort of veiled white nationalism of someone like Vance, not, like, straight-up eliminationist Nazism. The sort of thing that Fuentes does is a red line for them. And Vance doesn’t want to alienate those people. Roberts has alienated them people just by defending Carlson. Right? And now Roberts is in a lot of trouble. And there’s a lot going on in Heritage. In the piece that you mentioned that I did earlier, I got a Heritage insider to tell me about some of the nastier stuff that’s going on there. And it’s quite bad, right—the internal culture that’s been fostered under Roberts is the sense that I got from that source who would know. But all that being said, the point is that Vance is in a position where his own allies are at risk if he shoots at Fuentes. So my guess is he wants to take that shot but wants to do it at a better time. Not right now, because right now in doing so he’d be stabbing people who he’s close to personally and who he needs politically in the back. **Sargent:** Well, I don’t think it’s ever gonna get easy. And I thought your piece really captured the broader crossroads that MAGA is at right now or the bigger civil war that MAGA is devolving into. Let’s just go through some names. Ted Cruz recently slammed Carlson as “complicit in evil” over the Fuentes interview. Ben Shapiro called Carlson dishonest and a coward. But Zack, what happens with all those figures, the broader MAGA world, now that Trump said, what Carlson did is fine. Trump is telling these people in effect that the white nationalists and the white supremacists and the Gropers and the far-right anti-Semites do have their place in the MAGA coalition. It’s all just a big debate is the basic idea. How does MAGA process that from Trump in particular? **Beauchamp:** So look, I think that what we’re seeing, and I referenced this a little earlier, is that MAGA is kind of an empty signifier, right? Like what it stood for was a broadly populist nationalist far-right reorientation of the Republican Party around the personal figure of Donald Trump. Right? That’s it. I’ve maintained consistently throughout this and I think the evidence is bore it out that the policy commitments of MAGA are very, very loose. And it’s ideological orientation, very flexible. **Sargent:** MAGA is what Trump says it is, as Trump said. **Beauchamp:** Yeah, and he’s not wrong. I mean, there are some bounds here, and he could run into conflict from his own movement, as we’ve seen during this whole Epstein saga. But the point is that it’s not really about ideology so much as it is this kind of broad orientation against the Republican establishment, towards a certain level of extremism, and certainly towards a kind of nationalist reorientation of what the party is about—with an intense focus on immigration, culture war, and hostility to foreigners. But there’s so much room within those broad confines. And it’s included all sorts of different kinds of conservatives, people like Ben Shapiro, who were initially very appalled. Right. So was Ted Cruz. Remember how viciously Trump went after Cruz, and that Cruz himself declined to endorse Trump during the 2016 Republican National Convention and had been really holding out. Eventually, he caves and starts working the phones for Trump because he wants to stay in the Republican Party. Right. But Cruz and Shapiro are very different kinds of conservatives than Tucker Carlson is now, than J.D. Vance is now, than Kevin Roberts is now—and those are just two factions. I happen to think that Shapiro and Cruz are sort of more closely aligned, but they’re one kind of sort of nationalist, post–Tea Party but still interventionist-on-foreign-policy strain of republicanism. There’s others, right? There’s hardline libertarians who are sort of also cultural warriors. Those are the kinds that are left there. There’s Trumpy nationalists. There’s these kind of trade, economic-populist types oriented around Oren Cass and the American Compass think tank. All sorts of different broad strains of the American right. We haven’t even gotten into some of the more abstract intellectual subtypes, of which there are many. So the point is this is a movement that has tons and tons and tons of different factions. And there’s one guy holding it together to prevent this open civil war from breaking out, and it’s Trump. And the issue on which there was most likely to be pressure on this coalition was anti-Semitism and Jews and Israel. That pressure is now real. Fuentes has kind of forced the issue due to his large following. Trump doesn’t seem interested in weighing in to stop it. And I’m not even sure he could, given that he’s going to pass from the scene at this point. Maybe if it seemed like he really was going to be a dictator, he would be able to override a third-term limit—as he suggested he wants to be—he’d be able to stick the movement together. But the fact of the matter is right now that seems unlikely. And with his political fortunes in the toilet at this moment, there are some rats who are starting to flee the sinking ship, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, that indicate some real discontent. **Sargent:** So what happens in the end? JD Vance inherits a movement that is absolutely splintering after Trump, right? **Beauchamp:** Yeah, I think Vance may or may not win the Republican nomination coming forward. do think is that the movement is going to be at each other’s throats. Now maybe a hatred of liberals and whoever the Democratic nominee is in 2028 will be able to unify these people again. That’s possible, right? That is the core unifying force aside from Trump, right? And sort of this broad nationalism. The third critical prong has been shared horror, anger, and distaste at the Democratic party and sort of the broader left in the United States. Maybe that’ll work. If there’s anything that can save them from their pickle, it’s that. And it’s the power of partisanship and ideological polarization. But that’s the thing, right? That is the only thing at this point, aside from Trump turning around his political fortunes. **Sargent:** Well, you know, I said on the pod a little while ago that they thought the assassination of Charlie Kirk was going to unite the right. It really basically lasted about a week. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Zack Beauchamp’s work. He has a great book called _The Reactionary Spirit_. His writing at Vox is essential for understanding all this crazy stuff. Zack, thanks so much for coming on, man. **Beauchamp:** Thanks, Greg, man. This has been awesome. As usual, love talking to you on the show.

This story was originally published by bioGraphic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Alpine pennycress is a charming little plant. Its low-growing rosette of green leaves is topped by leggy stalks bearing clusters of pinkish-white flowers. As they develop, these flowers transform into beautiful flattened seedpods that, in the words of botanist Liz […]

### Italian workerism had a big influence on the postwar left. As one of its key thinkers, Mario Tronti had to make sense of a world where those struggles went into sharp decline. * * * Italy’s _operaismo_ tendency argued that workers’ struggles played a key role in the development of capitalism. On the one hand, labor is an integral part of capital; on the other, it is an autonomous force that opposes capital and provokes its responses. (Adriano Alecchi Mondadori via Getty Images) In 1964, Mario Tronti and a group of his comrades that included Antonio Negri founded the magazine _Classe operaia_ (“Working Class”). While this may have been a minor event amid the global turmoil of those years, it resonated with the struggles of workers in the industries of northern Italy. The journal also left a deep mark on the subsequent development of the Italian far left and the history of international Marxism. _Classe operaia_ was born as a split from _Quaderni rossi_ , a journal launched in 1961 by Marxist sociologist Raniero Panzieri, to which Tronti had also contributed. It gathered a group of activists and researchers who focused on studying the composition of the working class in Italian factories. The new project of _Classe operaia_ sought, in Tronti’s words, to move from analyzing the forms and organizations of the labor movement to engaging in “a phase of articulated intervention in the struggles” alongside workers on strike. A philosopher by training and a political practitioner by vocation**,** Tronti belonged to a generation of young Italian communists for whom the events of 1956, when Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising, came as a revelation, shaking them from their default Stalinism. Although they remained within the ranks of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), these “young Marxists in formation and restless communist militants,” as Tronti later described them, began to question the leadership of Palmiro Togliatti and the direction of the PCI. # The Living Ferment In Tronti’s view, it quickly became evident that the political limitations of Togliatti’s leadership reflected deeper theoretical and philosophical constraints, particularly the historicist ideology espoused by the party. As he put it: “They could agree with the Red Army’s invasion, precisely because they were historicists.” For Tronti, the term “historicism” referred to the ideological construct fashioned by the PCI, fusing an idealist interpretation of Antonio Gramsci’s “philosophy of praxis” with elements of Hegelianism and dialectical materialism. Serving as the foundation of the PCI’s cultural politics, historicism had transformed Marxism into a kind of national-popular ideology, shaped by a logic of compromise in which everything was mediated, interpreted, and gradually transformed, but never overturned. Throughout his intellectual journey, Tronti consistently resisted the temptations of historicism. In contrast, he found inspiration in the scientific Marxism of Galvano della Volpe, whose materialist approach decisively broke with Hegel and the idealist imprint of Italian Marxism. The young Tronti thus strove to construct a workers’ science capable of grasping and intervening in the explosive political dynamics of 1960s Italy. "Mario Tronti belonged to a generation of young Italian communists for whom the events of 1956 came as a revelation." “Great things are made by abrupt leaps,” Tronti once wrote, adding that “the discoveries that matter always break the thread of continuity.” Leaps — so dear to Lenin as a reader of Hegel’s _Science of Logic_ — were central to Tronti’s theory and praxis. The experience of _Classe operaia_ epitomized a major leap in his political and intellectual trajectory. It also played a crucial role in shaping the path of many radical activists who were educated in the school of _operaismo_. The pieces Tronti wrote for the journal in 1966 were collected in _Workers and Capital_ , a book that is considered the cornerstone of Italian workerism. Rooted in a heterodox reading of Marx, it became what Tronti would later describe as a “ _Bildungsroman_ for young antagonistic minds.” In Marx’s _Grundrisse_ , Tronti encountered the notion of living labor, which he used as the lever for his conceptual “Copernican revolution.” Instead of the commodity, which Marx took as his starting point in _Capital_ , it is workers’ labor _qua_ living labor and labor power that serves as the pivot for Tronti’s understanding of capitalist development. Because of labor, he argued, the function of the working class must be understood as double, or must be “counted twice”: both _within_ and _against_ capital. On the one hand, labor is an integral part of capital; on the other, it is an autonomous force that opposes capital and provokes its responses. Twisting Marx’s classical discourse, Tronti arrived at the conclusion that “without the working class, there is no capitalist development,” and that the struggles of workers are the living ferment of capital. In this distinctive interpretation of Marx, two of Tronti’s key intuitions emerged. First was the idea that the working class dictates the pace of the antagonism between labor and capital. Second was the recognition of workers’ insubordination and refusal of work as the driving force of the working-class struggle. # End of an Era In 1967, _Classe operaia_ ceased publication. For Tronti, the events of the following year already marked the end of an era, not in spite of, but precisely because of the international protest movement of 1968. This was a revolt against authority that he saw as being ultimately aligned with the route of capitalist progress, and that never attracted his sympathy. In retrospect, the 1960s appeared almost like a chimera in Tronti’s view: “We saw red. But it wasn’t the red of a new dawn; rather, it was the red of sunset.” While student and worker protests erupted worldwide during that period, not least in Italy, Tronti looked back at the decade to analyze the reasons for what he saw as the already accomplished defeat of the class, which he attributed in the Italian context to the lack of an organizational infrastructure. “The workerist revolutionary demand,” he would remark many years later, “could have materialized if it had found organization and political leadership not in a group of willing militants, but in a great already existing popular force.” What was lacking in his view was not the will of brave and unsubordinated rank-and-file workers — “the rude pagan race,” as Tronti dubbed them — but rather such a force. "In retrospect, the 1960s appeared almost like a chimera in Tronti’s view." At that time, Tronti needed to locate the promising intuitions of _Workers and Capital_ in a more specific time and space. Not only did these intuitions apply to a very particular phase of capitalist development in Italy — that of industrial capitalism, including the socially organized mass worker — but even within that context, their limits became apparent. As Tronti reflected in his 2009 work _Noi operaisti_ : “At a certain point, we realized . . . the working class itself could no longer sustain the struggle. It could not defeat its class adversary without equipping itself with a political armor.” Thus began Tronti’s departure from the earlier workerist framework, leading him towards a new intellectual path centered on the autonomy of the political and culminating in the 1990s in his diagnosis of the “twilight of politics” — a condition that in his view, continues to haunt our present. From the late 1960s, Tronti started reflecting on the relationship between class, party, and state. Critical of the PCI leadership from an anti-reformist perspective, he opposed at the same time the paths taken by the extra-parliamentary Italian left, which had absorbed prominent figures from the _operaismo_ milieu, including Negri. Tronti’s primary concern was for the PCI to develop a politics capable of reclaiming a hegemonic role within the workers’ and student movements while avoiding the pitfalls of reformism and ultra-left extremism. During this period, various representatives of _operaismo_ distanced themselves from Tronti, questioning his belief that the traditional organizations of the workers’ movement could still be the vehicles for class power and struggle. For his part, Tronti was skeptical of the radical turn taken by those who focused on organizing outside the party and remained convinced of the necessity of aligning with the strongest force at its peak, namely the PCI. The question of political organization was decisive and took precedence over class struggles. In his view, the party may at times deviate from the class’s intended direction precisely in order to act in its best interest, i.e., consolidating class power within the political sphere. On a Pascalian note, one might say that for Tronti the party has its reasons, of which the class itself knows nothing. # Twilight of Politics The 1970s marked a retreat from politics for Tronti, ushering in a long period of study and philosophical meditation on the classics of political realism. He engaged with the work of various thinkers, from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt and from Niccolo Machiavelli to Max Weber, while teaching moral and political philosophy at the University of Siena. At the beginning of the 1980s, Tronti was serving as a member of the PCI’s Central Committee. He saw a renewed opening for effective politics, tied to the PCI’s growing electoral strength over the previous decade as the largest communist party in any Western country. However, Tronti’s hoped-for political vision never materialized, and the PCI ultimately dissolved itself to become a conventional center-left party in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. "Tronti’s theoretical mission was to reaffirm the side of the workers, even when it disappeared from the surface of history." For Tronti, the end of communism and the disappearance of communists — “the only ones capable of really frightening capital” — inaugurated the “twilight of politics,” a true political tragedy in which our times are still fully immersed. What triumphed, in his eyes, was not capitalism alone but political democracy. It was the triumph of democracy, not merely the dynamics of an economic system, that diluted the dual antagonism of class struggle into the pluralism of mass politics — one in which the mass worker was eventually dissolved. Facing the end of politics, in those years, Tronti turned to political theology, drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Jacob Taubes, and Saint Paul in search of critical weapons to keep alive the spirit of communist transcendence and resist the swamp of anti-politics. In this phase of ideological regression, Tronti’s theoretical mission was to reaffirm the side of the workers, even when it disappeared from the surface of history, and to uphold the idea of communism as a concrete utopia. The language of political theology suited his search for the heights of transcendence in opposition to the world below, a world fully subsumed by the logic of capital and dominated by the spirit of _homo democraticus_. The viewpoint of the workers as an epistemically privileged site for comprehending capitalist reality remained central in Tronti’s philosophy as the irreversible intellectual discovery of _operaismo_ , a unique school and style of thought, as he would write in the 2000s, and a “political way of looking at the world and a human way of acting within it.” A paradoxical touch of idealism colored Tronti’s late thought, despite his professed political realism. This manifested itself most strikingly through his attempts at intervening in the ranks of the post-communist Democratic Party (PD) — a party that had long since forgotten the workers and had, in fact, abandoned their cause — when he was elected to the Italian Senate in 2013. In these years, for Tronti, it was memory rather than daily politics that could keep the communist flame alive amid the ashes. One must hurl the grand history of the twentieth century against the timeless void of the twenty-first and the paralysis of “presentism,” which dulls radical thought. Obsolescence becomes a weapon of resistance, although it can offer nothing more than a wager without guarantees. # Right to Experiment A determined effort to make sense of the historical conjuncture pushed Tronti’s thought forward in times of theoretical despair. “Extreme thought, prudent action” became the guiding motto of his final years, emphasizing the need to disentangle theory and praxis for the sake of both. Alongside the passionate invitation to “reconnect the ideal and the real of this [communist] history within a shared horizon,” Tronti’s work left behind enduring lessons for the radical left. First, a partisan epistemology that encourages us to hold firm to the partisan viewpoint and its truths. For Tronti, “knowledge is tied to struggle” and “only those who truly hate can truly know.” Secondly, a call for experimentation that connects the late Tronti with his younger incarnation, who claimed for the working class and his militant generation “a right to experiment, which is the only one truly worth claiming.” The late Tronti often reminded us that the experience of “actually existing socialism” lasted just over seventy years in total. This time frame, he insisted, amounted to a short-lived experiment, “a breath in the ‘longue durée’ of historical processes.” In his final work, _Il proprio tempo appreso col pensiero_ (2024), Tronti reflected upon the aftermath of the undisputed victory of democratic capitalism. It is the end of the end, when the fog lifts to reveal what remains of the once-glorious history of the workers’ movement, “a dead city, devastated by time.” It is precisely at this end of the end that Tronti suggests the possibility of beginning anew — a possibility that can only be cultivated through a militant mode of thought. * * *