Michael Roberts provides an overview of various topics discussed at this years AHE conference, bringing together heterodox (non-mainstream, critical of neoclassical econ) economists from a variety of backgrounds (marxist, keynesian, MMT, etc.).

The conference paper sessions were divided into various streams, one of which was entitled Imperialism and Dependency in the 21st century. I made a presentation in one of these session, called Catching up of falling behind? in which I tried to answer the question: were the poor peripheral countries of the Global South catching up and closing the gap in living standards with the rich imperialist countries of the Global North? I tried to answer that question using three different measures: per capita incomes; levels of labour productivity; and indexes of ‘human development’. On all three measures, I show that the Global South is not closing the gap, with the possible exception of China.

[...]

My main conclusion was that the countries of the Global South (6bn people) are not ‘catching up’ with the Global North (2bn people) because wealth (value) is being persistently transferred from the South to the North AND falling profitability in the Global South is reducing labour productivity growth. China may be the exception because its investment growth is less determined by profitability than in any other major Global South economy.

Conrad Herold from Hofstra University, Long Island presented an insightful summary of Marxist approaches to explaining imperialist exploitation over the last 100 years since Lenin, starting with Henryk Grossman in 1929 and then Bettelheim and Emmanuel, going onto so-called dependency theory mainly coming from Ruy Marini in South America. Conrad rejected the structuralist theories of such as Pereira that the Global South did not develop because of ‘premature industrialisation’, thus turning the Global South into commodity producers under a regime of currency exchange rates that benefited the North. In summary, Herold said, there is more work to be done on developing a robust Marxist theory of imperialist exploitation.

In that session, there was some debate about whether the transfer of profit, rent and income through international trade and capital proceeds was mainly the result of higher rates of surplus value (due to lower wages) in the Global South or mainly due to higher rates of technological superiority in the companies of the Global North. Previous Marxist theorists like Emmanuel looked to higher rates of surplus value; while Bettelheim looked to higher levels of capital composition. For me, both are relevant and in work done jointly with Guglielmo Carchedi, we found that differing rates of organic composition of capital and surplus value both contributed to the transfer of value from South to North.

[...]

That brings me to the panel session on the new book, Radical Political Economy: Principles, Perspectives and Postcapitalist Futures edited by Mona Ali and Ann Davis, to which I and many others contributed chapters.

One of the authors in that book was Ramaa Vasudevan in which she makes it clear that “financialization is not simply the expansion of finance but the generalized subordination of economic interactions and inter- relations to the abstract logic of interest- bearing capital that has fundamentally restructured the way economic activities are organized “ quoting Professor Ben Fine from 2013. According to Vasudevan, the dominance of finance is seen to have engineered “a fundamental transformation of the economy – marking an epochal shift”. My reply to that can be summed by the critiques of the financialisation hypothesis, both theoretically (Mavroudeas and Papadatos 2018) and empirically (Turan Subasat and Stavros Mavroudeas 2023).

Also in the book is a chapter by Paolo dos Santos who attended the panel that I missed. In the book, Dos Santos emphasises that political economy can only be effective in explaining the world if it rests on historical materialism. Economic analysis is a lynchpin of social and historical inquiry because it can cast light on how relations of production and distribution shape the social, political, institutional, and cultural realities that condition the nature and historical development of human groups. “Stubborn patterns of underdevelopment and differences in labor productivity, living standards, and political power across national economies, have persisted across the history of capitalist development. For radical political economy, those differences are a feature of global capitalism, not a “bug” due to the idiosyncrasies of developing economies.”

[...]

The struggle against the ideology and theories of the mainstream continues and the AHE makes an important contribution. Let me quote Ann Davis, the co-editor of Radical Political Economy book. “Radical Political Economy will make clear the political choices, while mainstream economics will claim that there are none. Whatever the outcome, proponents of both sides will defend their respective positions and seek to attract adherents to their views.”

Today in Lutris discord which I happen to lurk occasionally, I saw some lovely people were commenting in the offtopic channel about how they support Ethan Kleins lawsuit against Youtubers who criticised him, GamerGate bs, defending streamer sex pests and some other stuff. One person offhandedly mentions how they get their information from Asmongold.

If you're not very online, Asmongold is a reactionary streamer who at one point declared he thinks Palestinians should be genocided because of their "inferior culture". Ethan Klein is a somewhat well known youtuber/podcaster who has also spent the last year or so having a very public meltdown over Israel and his own fundamentally contradictory set of positions he's tried to triangulate between.

Seeing this, I made a brief comment about Asmongolds stance mentioned above and why anyone would listen to him. I got racist responses claiming "Palestinians have been kicked out of every culture they've been in" and deflecting to "Look at Egypts border".

Called out the racism and genocide apologia, the only person who was warned was me for not being civil. I replied "racism and genocide apologia is not civil", referred to the fact the Lutris logo on discord has an LGBTQ flag, and was called a nutcase and banned.

tl:dr Lutris discord moderation is OK with racism and genocide, but you're a "nutcase" if you call a spade a spade.

UPDATE: I was responded to on Mastodon and was accused of being the one making antisemtic comments. Others explained in the thread below there were some who made antisemitic comments after I was banned. I sincerely hope that's a misunderstanding, but I don't have much faith the moderator in question would be telling the truth about the events.

These people are genuinely conspiracy brained morons.

“Places like City Hall and Albany and even Washington, DC, are more responsive to the groups than to the people on the ground,” New York Rep. Ritchie Torres said at WelcomeFest, held at a downtown Washington hotel and billed as a forum to help the party find more electable candidates and messages.

Seconds after Torres’ shot at “the groups” that have become intra-Democratic shorthand for excessive left-wing influence, protesters from … the group Climate Defiance charged on stage with signs reading “GAYS AGAINST GENOCIDE” and “GENOCIDE RITCHIE,” attacking his support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

As the activists were yanked out of the room, conference organizers played Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain on the loudspeakers in the room.

The mockery was part of the point. Welcome PAC, the main organizer of the conference and one of several outfits that have emerged in recent months to try to reverse the party’s post-Obama losses, was happy to be accused of embracing a pro-growth “Abundance” agenda or attacking progressive urban policies.

“Any time someone is against something like ‘abundance,’ it means that they’re afraid of something. They’re afraid of losing power,” said Welcome PAC’s Lauren Harper Pope, a former Beto O’Rourke adviser. “If the left feels threatened by what we’re doing, then I say: ‘You’re still welcome in our coalition.’”

[...]

“If you can financially afford to go to a protest every day, you are a different person than most people in my community,” said Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, defending her vote for House GOP legislation that would require proof of citizenship from every voter.

Asked about recent polling from the progressive group Demand Progress that found pro-business “abundance” ideas faring worse than anti-corporate “populism,” WelcomeFest speakers scoffed.

“It’s what happens when you test an economic textbook for the Democratic Party against a romance novel,” said Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass. “It’s such a bad poll.”

Shadowy """groups""" who are supposedly coordinating every protest, protestors are all on payroll or rich or unemployed so therefore they don't count, activists and """groups""" are never part of or representative of even a section of the public, and all polling showing their framing and ideas being unpopular are just bad polls. This is conspiratorial thinking, 1:1 with what conservatives and Republicans have been saying for decades.

And they're repeadedly wrong on the polling they claim to love so much.

All because people got mad at the and demanded they do their jobs, demanded they actually stand up for people who are literally being picked up and deported for no reason besides not liking Trump or having an accent when they speak.

WelcomeFest’s less single-issue enemies have highlighted the Republican and pharmaceutical-industry pasts of some of the conference’s donors, arguing that it’s naive to think billionaire donors could save the Democrats.

The Revolving Door Project, which has campaigned to keep Democrats with corporate ties out of powerful positions, called the whole project a “self-serving crusade” against popular politics.

“A billionaire-funded movement to keep billionaires happy with Democrats by wielding only poll-tested language that billionaires are okay with is a sure path toward a President Vance,” said the project’s executive director, Jeff Hauser.

Dan Cohen, the strategist who conducted Demand Progress’ abundance-or-populism poll, said that the party wasn’t facing a binary choice and could incorporate some more pro-growth “abundance” ideas into a successful populist campaign.

“That kind of conflict is unhelpful because it’s just wrong,” Cohen said, calling for a broader focus on “strengthening a Democratic Party that’s trying to get its sh*t together again.”

If you’re an American, it should make you angry that the many people who knew better stayed silent about, even actively conspired to hide, the fact that Biden wasn’t actually capable of executing his responsibilities as president, handing untold amounts of power to a cabal of advisors you never voted for.

And if you’re a Democratic voter, it should make you angry that a party that spent years promising they would, at very least, stop Donald Trump (and maybe not do much more), and that their blocking his reelection justified asking for your money and demanding your votes, ended up putting Trump in the White House again, in large part by installing and then keeping in power a man they knew was unfit for office.

Questions about Biden’s ill health, and who knew what about it and when, have been reignited in recent weeks, thanks to the release of two complementary books that have added new, scandalous details to the already scandalous litany of details about Biden’s condition that erupted after his disturbing June 2024 debate performance. One is Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Fight, the third in a trilogy of Trump-era behind-the-scenes campaign accounts by the pair that dropped last month; the other, which has been dominating political coverage the past couple of weeks, is Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper’s Original Sin, an autopsy of how Biden’s condition was hidden from the public for so long.

The other reason the issue has exploded yet again — just as the former president has stepped back into the public eye, while he gets ready to release his own, self-exculpatory book — is because we’ve just found out Biden has prostate cancer, and a particularly “aggressive” one at that, which has spread to his bones. Despite his spokesperson’s insistence that this was the first anyone knew about it, speculation has swirled that there may have been an effort to hide the diagnosis while he was president, fueled by the fact that Biden is the only president going back to Bill Clinton at least not to be tested for prostate cancer, that an oncologist who served as his own COVID advisor has called this “a little strange,” and this 2022 clip features Biden casually saying he has cancer.

Whether or not you buy into this speculation, at this point it’s a legitimate line of inquiry. It’s legitimate, because as both Fight and Original Sin show, Biden’s four years as president were defined by a vast, concerted effort by both the people closest to him and a constellation of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to, generously, keep what they knew about his deteriorating health from the public.

Time and again in Original Sin, the same story is told and retold: one of Biden’s advisors, allies, old friends, or donors interacts with him face to face; they are either alarmed by his frail and confused physical appearance, by the fact that he doesn’t know who they are, or by the fact that he’s seemingly unable to speak off the cuff without serious assistance; and they proceed to say and do nothing about it, or even double down in their public insistence that he’s never been better.

[...]

It wasn’t always cowardice. The reporting by both pairs of authors establishes that the insular team of the president’s closest advisors — both longtime Biden loyalists and family members, all of whom became unhealthily enamored with the trappings of power — went to great lengths to disguise Biden’s decline. They made sure he was well made-up, had events scheduled only during certain hours, always had clear visual aids to help him walk from point A to B, was furnished with notes, teleprompters, and other assistance to help him speak, or that events where he was meant to interact with others, like cabinet meetings, were scripted in advance — though even that was not always enough.

In hindsight, many of the most cynical theories about what was going on in the Biden White House turned out to be true. Biden’s advisors closed ranks around him (“You can’t talk about this stuff. We’re backing Biden,” one alarmed Democrat was told), and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) abruptly rearranged the 2024 primary schedule, which nonsensically put South Carolina first, for the exact reason everyone said at the time: purely to put Biden in the best position of beating any challenger. And they worked to aggressively shut down any attempt to ask questions about, investigate, or expose his decline.

Thompson and Tapper report that Biden’s team enlisted a coalition of influencers, Democratic operatives, and loyalist media to publicly shame anyone looking into Biden’s condition and create a “disincentive structure” for them to do so, gave out talking points that were then dutifully used by allies, and at one point threatened to deny a Wall Street Journal reporter’s story on the matter to scare her away from going forward with it. Meanwhile, they kept Biden isolated from his colleagues, to the point that cabinet members went months without seeing him.

While Biden’s decline seems to have become markedly worse and more rapid over the course of 2023 and 2024, both books make clear, as other reporting has, that it started much earlier. Each recounts a disastrous late 2021 meeting that was meant to offer Biden a chance to persuade the Democratic caucus to pass his infrastructure bill, but saw the president instead ramble endlessly and leave the room without ever making the ask.

But Original Sin dates the start of it much earlier, with insiders noticing changes around the time his eldest son was dying in 2015. Biden’s brain “seemed to dissolve,” a senior White House official told the authors, while another insider said the death “aged him significantly.” He struggled to remember his longtime aide Mike Donilon’s name in 2019. And he was so bad in 2020 that the conversations with ordinary voters he filmed for that year’s Democratic convention required heavy, “creative” editing, with those who watched the raw footage left alarmed and convinced he couldn’t serve as president.

[...]

Common to both books is a broad, behind-the-scenes consensus within the party that Kamala Harris, the most likely person to replace Biden on the ticket, was, even with her youth and full health, nearly as much of a disaster as her addled boss. Harris’s weaknesses as a politician are well known now after being put in the harsh glare of the 2024 campaign, but the reporting gives us new details: her need to prepare for everything to the point that her staff did a mock simulation of an upcoming off-the-record dinner with socialites, according to Thompson and Tapper; or the fact that, according to Parnes and Allen, Harris wasn’t able to come up with a bold economic vision to campaign on in part because she struggled to grasp economic issues — “Wall Street jargon hit her ears like a foreign language,” they write. The party had such little confidence in her, her candidacy was repeatedly used as a potent threat to ward off efforts to roll Biden.

[...]

But maybe most important was the party’s ironically undemocratic nature, and its willingness to use that to stop a leftward shift. The true original sin of the entire, cascading crisis around Biden — his infirmity, the crisis of confidence in the party it caused, his saddling of the party with a weak successor, his final, fatal extraction from her to promise not to break from him — wasn’t really Biden’s decision to run again. It had been the Democratic establishment’s desperation to stop Bernie Sanders and his movement from taking over the party in 2020, something they could only do by saddling themselves with a man whose political abilities many of them had little faith in.

But it was worth it: Several high-profile Democrats have since come out and openly admitted they had gone with Biden only as a last-minute play to stop Sanders, and as Parnes and Allen had reported four years ago, for many of the party’s establishment centrists, “their fears of losing their party to socialism competed with their fears of Trump winning a second term.”

As the Israeli military kills two more Palestinian journalists in Gaza, a new documentary by Zeteo has uncovered critical details about Israel’s killing three years ago of the acclaimed Palestinian American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. The film, Who Killed Shireen?, identifies for the first time the Israeli soldier who allegedly shot Abu Akleh. We get response from two members of Abu Akleh’s family — her brother Anton and her niece Lina — as well as the documentary’s executive producer, Dion Nissenbaum, and Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan.

“We’ve always known that it was an Israeli soldier who killed Shireen,” says Lina Abu Akleh, who says the “entire chain of command” must be held accountable, including elected officials.

“The Biden administration and the Israeli government essentially were doing everything they could to cover up what happened that day to Shireen Abu Akleh,”

https://zeteo.com/p/who-killed-shireen-abu-akleh

In this investigative documentary, Zeteo, for the first time, identifies the Israeli soldier who killed the famous reporter – a closely guarded secret up until now, as Israel had refused to divulge his name even to top American officials, according to our sources.

The documentary also reveals a shocking Biden administration cover-up, with former US officials divulging exclusive new information and telling us that the Biden administration “failed” Shireen in order to maintain its relationship with the Israeli government.

The film features exclusive interviews not just with former US officials but also former top Israeli officials and soldiers, as well as journalists who knew Shireen personally.

https://zeteo.com/p/who-killed-shireen-abu-akleh

Democrats keep reacting normally to being told to do their fucking jobs. This guy is looking to be on the House Oversight Committee btw (the same one AOC got kicked off from, to pick a 70 year old throat cancer patient who had to resign a few months later).

Lynch, who's represented a safely blue seat in Congress since 2001, was exhorted by rallygoers at a Friday protest to stand up more forcefully to Trump. But he demurred when one attendee asked him to "commit to not voting for any Republican legislation," saying he had to consider the views of his entire district.

"I got 800,000 people that I represent, and I gotta figure out what's in their best interest, not the best interest of, you know, Sally Blue from across the street," said Lynch in a video published by MassLive. One attendee, however, interjected to say, "This is in the best interests of our country and our democracy," which set Lynch off.

"I get to decide that. I get to decide that," he responded with evident irritation. "I get to decide that. I'm elected. I get to decide that. You wanna decide that? You need to run for Congress, okay? I get to decide that."

Lynch may soon get reminded that voters, in fact, decide that. Attorney Patrick Roath, described by Politico as a "voting rights advocate and Deval Patrick alum," is weighing a bid against the congressman in next year's Democratic primary, according to an unnamed source.

Roath hasn't commented publicly, but the day after Lynch's eruption, he tweeted, "Arrogance is bad. So is entitlement."

[...]

Lynch, a former ironworker with close ties to organized labor, also brings with him a record of past social conservatism: Earlier in his career, he opposed abortion rights, though he later shifted his views (but he still called himself "pro-life" as recently as 2019.) Infamously in progressive circles, he also voted against the Affordable Care Act, though he claimed to do so from the left.

Roath, who is in his late 30s, would offer a stark generational contrast with Lynch, who turns 70 next month and has held public office since 1995. But even if Lynch avoids a primary, he's by no means the only longtime Democrat whose posture toward Trump has drawn progressive ire—anger that is reminiscent of the tea party furor that reshaped the GOP in 2010 and could fuel a wave of primary challenges next year.

Deflecting by saying you represent all constituents is pretty classic Democrat.

"You may have voted for me for specific reasons, with specific policies, identified with a specific politcal party I knowingly campaign and identify with, but now that you've elected me I represent all constituents so please stop asking me what I'm going to do about any of them."

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KArSrW4P-jw

Biden and Democrats are complicit in genocide.

New reporting from Israel's Channel 13 just further proves how little the US did to stop Israel, and how much they went out of their way to protect them. Any liberal still defending this genuinely has nothing to cling on to anymore.

Despite the disagreements, the top Biden officials professed devotion to Israel’s security, explaining that this dedication was what made attacks by Netanyahu and his supporters, who accused them of abandoning Israel, particularly stinging.

“Having the prime minister of Israel question the support of the United States after all that we did — do I think that was a right and proper thing for a friend to do? I do not,” said former national security adviser Jake Sullivan. “[However], I will always stand firm behind the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself and that the United States has a responsibility to help Israel, and I’ll do that no matter who the prime minister is, no matter what they say about me or the US or the president that I work for.”

[...]

Former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Herzog acknowledged that “political considerations” were clouding the decision-making process. He told “Hamakor” that Israeli officials held in-depth discussions regarding the so-called day-after in Gaza. But they repeatedly ended with no decisions being made.

“If they’re never going to do this, it doesn’t matter what the outcome is, Hamas is still going to control Gaza,” Goldenberg lamented. “You’re just killing and destroying for the sake of killing and destroying. But you’re not building an alternative.”

Amid the intransigence, Goldenberg said there were discussions held in Washington about having Biden give a speech that would force a reckoning in Israel about how to move forward.

The idea of the speech was for Biden to present Israelis with two paths — one that saw the government aim for a hostage deal that ends the war followed by a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, and one that continued the current trajectory of endless war and increasing international isolation — and ask the public to decide which they prefer.

The Times of Israel first revealed this ultimately shelved plan last year.

The goal was to “scramble Israeli politics and see if you can trigger elections,” Goldenberg said.

“There was a real debate about that, but at the end of the day [Biden] was uncomfortable with the idea of going out that directly against Netanyahu,” he said.

Despite all the talk liberal talk about how it's just Netanyahu we need to get rid of, Biden refused to take the option of pressuring for an election.

The death toll in Gaza had crossed 30,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, and Biden announced in early May that he was withholding a US shipment of 2,000-lb bombs for Israel due to concerns that they might be used in densely populated areas.

In mid-June, though, Israel’s Defense Ministry and the Pentagon were on the verge of an agreement that would have allowed the shipment to move forward, with Israel providing assurances that the high-payload bombs wouldn’t be used in Gaza, Dan Shapiro, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East at the time, told “Hamakor.”

Just before the deal was finalized, Netanyahu released a video accusing the US of not just withholding the single shipment of 2,000-lb bombs but of a much broader weapons freeze — something that the Biden administration adamantly denied.

The brewing agreement to release the 2,000-lb bombs subsequently fell apart.

Biden officials fumed at Netanyahu, who they felt was being ungrateful for the support that the US had been providing.

Weeks earlier, the White House had pushed a $19 billion supplemental security assistance package for Israel through Congress.

“Yes, we had a disagreement over one shipment, [but] to go out and attack us that way was particularly infuriating,” Goldenberg said.

“We missed an opportunity to solve a problem — one that we very much wanted to solve,” Shapiro said.

The holding back of one shipment of 2,000 lb bombs that some liberals clinged to as proof the US was doing something was going to be released and let into Israel anyway if Israel hadn't annoyed the US by accusing them of a weapons freeze. That was a a problem they "very much wanted to solve". Fuck you.

Facing pressure from progressives in his party, Biden signed a memo early last year requiring the State Department to draft a report certifying whether recipients of US weapons were using them according to international law and not blocking humanitarian aid from reaching civilians.

Stacy Gilberg, who served as a senior adviser in the State Department, was among those involved in compiling that report. Shortly before it was released on May 10, she and her colleagues were boxed out of the process and the final conclusions of the report were written by higher-level officials, Gilbert told “Hamakor.”

The report concluded that while Israel did not fully cooperate with efforts to ensure aid flowed into Gaza, Jerusalem’s actions did not amount to a breach of US law that would require a halt on US weapons.

“I had to read the report twice because I couldn’t believe what it said. It was just shocking in its mendacity. Everyone knows that is not true,” she said, explaining her decision to resign in protest shortly thereafter.

Straightforwardly falsifying a report to cover for Israeli war crimes.

But now out of office, and with the May 2024 framework partially implemented, the Biden officials acknowledged that there were times when Netanyahu played the role of spoiler in negotiations.

They pointed to the premier’s decision in August 2024 to launch a public campaign regarding the importance of Israel remaining in the Philadelphi Corridor border stretch between Egypt and Gaza, which Washington felt was disingenuous and designed to tank the negotiations at a critical point.

“It became clear pretty quickly that minister Gallant did not really see that as a military necessity, and he would have been willing to withdraw the IDF from the Philadelphi Corridor as part of a hostage deal that would release all hostages, so we took seriously what our main counterpart in the Israeli system said,” Shapiro said.

[...]

Goldenberg was more definitive, even though he acknowledged being in the minority. “I would get a lot of whispers from old Israeli friends [who said] all the security people are coming out and saying [Netanyahu’s] undercutting it every step of the way. I start to believe [it] when there’s so much coming out [saying] that he’s clearly a problem. Whereas some of my colleagues didn’t quite see it.”

[...]

Herzog, too, made a point of summarizing Biden’s perilous term positively.

“God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted,” the former Israeli ambassador said.

“Hamakor” anchor Raviv Drucker mused on whether that was the Biden administration’s flaw — that it was too loyal and pro-Israel to ever fully pressure Netanyahu. The Israeli premier, he posited, understood this and chose to drag his feet on making key decisions throughout the war, to buy time until Trump returned to office.

"The walls are closing in" every day in your youtube/podcast feed but it's now 2025 and Trump disappearing US citizens and arresting judges but this latest gaffe is definitely for real gonna sink him this time.

The “MeidasTouch” political podcast has rapidly become the most successful in the United States. As the Wall Street Journal writes, “downloads and views of MeidasTouch on platforms including YouTube, Spotify, and Apple, more than doubled over the past month to top 115 million.” This is more than twice what Joe Rogan had during the same period. MeidasTouch is run by three brothers: Ben, Brett, and Jordy Meiselas. Ben, a lawyer, got his start interning for Sean “Diddy” Combs at Bad Boy Records before working in the offices of Hillary Clinton and Rep. Steve Israel. He later became a business partner and attorney for Colin Kaepernick, playing a key role in the quarterback's lawsuit against the NFL. Brett is a producer and editor who previously worked at The Ellen DeGeneres Show, while Jordy was an advertising executive before joining his brothers to launch MeidasTouch.

The show offers itself as an alternative to the right-leaning “manosphere” epitomized by Rogan. According to the New York Times, its Substack has more than 500,000 subscribers, some 40,000 of whom pay at least $8 a month to get ad-free and exclusive content, meaning the project makes over $320,000 per month from Substack alone. The analytics website Social Blade concludes that their YouTube channel earns millions of dollars per year from ads. As a result of dethroning Rogan, MeidasTouch has been receiving a lot of favorable press recently. The Times reports that “they are fast becoming power brokers in Democratic politics and—party faithful hope—finally replicating the influential media ecosystem that Republicans have built over the past decade.” They are described as the “independent” “progressive media network” that is “reshaping the progressive media landscape.” They have 12 full-time employees and 30 regular contributors, including former Trump fixer Michael Cohen and former Trump associate Lev Parnas.

[...]

The world of MeidasTouch, by contrast, starts and ends with Donald Trump’s presidency. What stupid thing did Donald Trump say today? How did he embarrass himself? Who gave him a brutal rhetorical smackdown? Even though it is targeted at viewers who think Trump is dumb, the content is remarkably shallow, by which we mean that it doesn’t dive seriously into topics like health care, criminal punishment, foreign policy, and inequality. It’s the National Enquirer for Trump-haters.

MeidasTouch is also constantly offering Democratic viewers reassurance that Donald Trump is imploding. (“IT’S ALL UNRAVELING!!” “SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL!!” “FOX IS PANICKING!!!”) Indeed, Ben Meiselas himself says the channel is “providing a comforting place.” In doing so, they might be offering a false sense of security. Note that many of the podcast’s videos on Trump “implosions” and “humiliations” were published before he defeated Kamala Harris in November, such as “WOW! Trump CRUMBLES During DISASTROUS Arizona Speech” (Aug. 22, 2024, 2.1 million views) “Trump HUMILIATED in Michigan as REAL CROWD Is EXPOSED” (Aug. 31, 2024, 2.1 million views) “Trump Makes CATASTROPHIC MOVE in SUNDAY PANIC ATTACK” (Oct. 12, 2024, 2.1 million views). Today, after all this catastrophe for Trump, the right controls all three branches of government. Public opinion of the Democratic Party is still very low. Donald Trump’s presidency may yet implode, but his approval rating has not cratered so far, and the country is still basically evenly divided on him. Furthermore, Democrats cannot rely on the “Carville strategy” of simply waiting for Trump to destroy himself while doing nothing to build a popular movement.

[...]

In fact, while MeidasTouch is devoted to nonstop criticism of Trump, the categories of criticism it offers are quite narrow. MeidasTouch actively avoids major left-wing concerns. In addition to the absence of discussion on environmental issues (perhaps the most crucial way in which Trump endangers the future of the human species), they rarely cover Gaza. On the podcast, there is little on Trump’s horrific plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza and turn it into the next piece of his real estate empire, his crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech, and his threatening of universities that fail to quell Palestine protests.

The decision to avoid Palestine by Democratic-aligned media seems to be deliberate, and it goes beyond MeidasTouch. MeidasTouch is part of a broader universe of content creators that are aligned with the Democratic Party, which include Brian Tyler Cohen (4 million YouTube subscribers) and David Pakman (3 million YouTube subscribers) among others. Notably, last March, according to a source with the events, Pakman attended a private, off-the-record meeting with Kamala Harris on the day of Joe Biden's State of the Union address. During the trip, he met with Cohen, the Meiselas brothers, and dozens of other so-called “independent progressive” media figures. In an internal email, Pakman later told his staff that the content creators at the White House had talked among themselves and everyone had admitted that they deliberately avoid producing Gaza coverage in order to prevent controversy. One could argue that this is probably a big reason why these particular influencers were invited to the White House in the first place. Pakman, for his part, has previously asserted that Israel would never “waste ordnance” on Palestinian civilians and that he views Congressman Ritchie Torres, who is perhaps best known for being one of AIPAC’s top recipients of funding, as the kind of person who he would like to see lead the “progressive movement.”

These influencers consciously avoid Gaza not because they don’t have an opinion, but because they know that some of their audience won’t like what they have to say. In a way, their silence is preferable to outright pro-Israel propaganda—but the fact that their entire media strategy revolves around ignoring difficult topics speaks volumes. One might imagine that, had these media outlets been around in the 1960s, they wouldn’t have talked about the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights Movement. Even when they obsessively cover Trump, their selective focus is telling. As of this writing, neither MeidasTouch, Cohen, nor Pakman has produced a YouTube video on Trump’s attempt to deport pro-Palestine protester Mahmoud Khalil—a major escalation in the crackdown on dissent. If Trump had tried to illegally deport a pro-Ukraine protester, there’s no question that these influencers would be covering it. Their silence exposes an unwillingness to challenge the Democratic Party’s bipartisan complicity in suppressing pro-Palestinian voices.

Likewise, the existence of the left is virtually shut out on these channels. Brian Tyler Cohen, who calls himself an “independent progressive political host” (he previously worked part-time for MSNBC), has been regularly covering news and politics on YouTube since 2018. But a review of his channel shows that during the 2020 election cycle, he never once featured Bernie Sanders in a video title or thumbnail—despite posting daily content and racking up millions of views. While Cohen has eagerly platformed establishment Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Jaime Harrison, Pete Buttigieg, Adam Schiff, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden, he ignored the only independent progressive candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary. The New York Times and CNN also participated in the “Bernie blackout,” but even they couldn’t erase Sanders entirely. Yet Cohen did—until it became politically convenient for him to feature Sanders on his show in November 2022, the first time Sanders was ever even mentioned in one of his YouTube titles. For some reason, Sanders now appears on his show semi-regularly. Why would he reward this behavior rather than use his influence to elevate any of the independent outlets that have tirelessly promoted him? For a channel that claims to represent the progressive movement, it’s astonishing that Bernie Sanders was treated as a nonentity while centrists were endlessly elevated. This wasn’t an oversight. It was a deliberate editorial choice, one that reveals Cohen’s real political priorities.

According to Semafor, Brian Tyler Cohen was involved in launching Good Influence (originally known as AtAdvocacy), a digital consulting firm which says it creates “meaningful impact for causes and campaigns through our network of powerful online messengers.” Former Vice President Kamala Harris has been one of the firm’s top clients, as a search of Federal Elections Commission data shows that the Harris campaign spent more than $600,000 on “digital consulting” and “licensing fees” from Good Influence between July and November 2024. Good Influence has also received money from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and from Vote Save America, among other contributions. Good Influence's founder, Stuart Perelmuter, has publicly documented visits to the White House alongside prominent liberal influencers such as Cohen, Pakman, Luke Beasley, and Lindy Li (who has since left the Democratic Party and is now fundraising for Donald Trump). One of Good Influence’s featured influencers, Kenny Walden (who goes by the name 2RawTooReal online), has taken his loyalty to the Democratic establishment to even more grotesque extremes, hurling vile, misogynistic attacks at progressive lawmakers like Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He has also creepily taunted Bernie Sanders with images of caskets and a dead body—behavior that, far from being disavowed, has been rewarded with a visit to the Oval Office and insider status within the Democratic Party’s influencer network.

Someone who claims to be a holocaust historian btw, says they basically agree with Trumps deportations, repeatedly cannot meaningfully answer the obvious question of why would these people genuinely care about antisemitism when they're hanging with white nationalists, invokes "Trump Derangement Syndrome" when talking about deportation without due process...it just goes on.

Liberals, shut the fuck up about how Democrats are "better". These are the people within the admin who were listened to.

https://archive.is/BqZaa

Are you pleased that the Trump Administration is talking so much about antisemitism?

I’m pleased that they’re addressing it, because that’s what I did for the past three years, which was to really push the Biden Administration to seriously address it. So I am very, very pleased that it’s on their agenda.

And what do you see that agenda as being?

Well, I guess I’ve gone through a transition. Let me step back for a minute and say that from my first day in office, one of the things that I called for was for institutions—such as governments, universities, and the media—to take antisemitism seriously. I talk about antisemitism as a multi-tiered threat. One is the threat to Jews and Jewish institutions. But it’s also a threat to democracy. And I know that’s a very easy thing to throw around. People will say food insecurity is a threat to democracy. Which is true. But there’s a very direct link in terms of antisemitism. And that direct link is the fact that antisemitism is a conspiracy theory, in contrast to any other form of discrimination. Its distinctive characteristic is as a conspiracy theory.

What do you think the Trump Administration is doing to fight antisemitism and, in that sense, uphold democracy?

It’s calling universities to account. And, if you look at the first demands it made of Columbia, what’s striking about those things, like an end to encampments and masks—those were things that Columbia students have been asking for for a very long time. So I was pleased by that because they were asking the university to live up to its own standards. I’ve been told by people who are close to university presidents and administrators that many of them felt those were legitimate demands that should have been seen to earlier. So I didn’t have any gripe with those.

You are a smart person. Do you seriously believe that the Trump Administration cares about antisemitism? I’m a little confused here.

Yeah, I don’t . . . I don’t know. They haven’t spoken to me, they haven’t consulted with me. So all I can judge is by—

But Deborah, your entire career has been judging people for antisemitism, in some cases very effectively. The President hosted white supremacists for dinner. Elon Musk made what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Surely you can look into their souls here.

I have called that out.

O.K., but more broadly can you make some sort of judgment?

Yes, no, there’s been . . . there certainly has been a disturbing tendency, whether it’s whatever Elon Musk was doing with his arm, or when he appeared on video at a campaign event for the far right in Germany. There are a lot of examples. They’re disturbing and they’re bothersome.

[...]

Well, that right there makes me wonder. I’m just a little confused why people who care about antisemitism are friends with Donald Trump.

It is confusing. It is confusing, you know, but I can’t . . . In speaking to him, my sense is, with the little I know about him, which is very little, that he truly is concerned about fighting antisemitism. I also think there are many Jews, and some non-Jews, too, but many Jews who are disappointed by how universities have behaved since October 7th, and they see a strong—to use Passover terminology—a strong hand being used. Now, whether that hand is being used properly or not raises certain questions about what’s happening. To answer your question, a lot of people were relieved to see this forceful approach. I think, in many respects, it’s going too far.

You said some nice things about Secretary of State Marco Rubio. What has your reading been of him?

As a senator, he had a very strong track record on fighting antisemitism. I know there are many people, including Democrats in Florida, who appreciated his stance. What’s happening now is, I think, you know, I can’t judge, you know, but let me put it this way: I would hope that he would continue to maintain the strong stance he took while he was a senator.

You can judge him about, say, tweeting happily about people being sent to a horrific prison in El Salvador, right?

Look, there’s no reason . . . Look, when you take someone off the street who’s not supposed to be taken off the street, and you deport them, you make a mistake. I come from a tradition and a personal belief that when you make a mistake, you say, I made a mistake, and we’re gonna fix it. And that’s disturbing.

They may not care that they made a mistake. That’s the issue. Off the record and not for quotation: [Goes off record.]

Is there a reason you don’t want to say that on the record? Yeah, I don’t, because I’m still, you know . . . I don’t want to give people the chance. You know, there’s some people I know, including good friends of mine, who suffer from what the Republicans would call, what is it, “Trump Derangement Syndrome”? You know, anything he does is bad. Look, he moved the Embassy to Jerusalem. So I give him credit for that. I do give him credit for that. I’m not gonna say just because it’s the Trump Administration it’s bad.

I wasn’t asking you to say just because it was the Trump Administration that it was bad. I was just pointing out that they’re sending people without any sort of due process to a horrible prison in El Salvador.

You know, that is something that I find disturbing and I would hope that, you know, that they would, they would recognize that, because that’s not what this country is all about.

So we have all these horrific things with immigration, with DOGE dismantling the federal bureaucracy, with Trump basically destroying the Atlantic alliance. But we also have, on the other side of the ledger, moving the Embassy to Jerusalem in the first term. It shouldn’t be all black and white.

No, it’s not all black and white. It’s not all black and white. And, if you paint it only black, here’s what happens: then I have to wonder which of your criticisms are valid and which aren’t. That doesn’t mean you should go look for white when there isn’t any. But I think there are some places where, and that’s why initially I said, you know, there are some things that I applaud. But you can’t, you know, you can’t just ignore our laws. We’re a nation of laws. It wasn’t tolerance that allowed Jews to thrive here. Jews have flourished in this country because it is a nation of laws. When students feel they have no place to bring their grievances, or that when they bring their grievances, nobody cares, then you open up the door for this kind of action. So much of what’s going on could have been avoided had the universities really cared and taken antisemitism seriously.

In March, after blowing up Democrats’ unified opposition to the GOP’s government funding bill, which handed President Trump and Elon Musk expanded powers over federal spending, Chuck Schumer appeared on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes to defend his vote. In the interview, the Senate minority leader said he didn’t yet think that our democracy was at risk but made clear what his red line would be: “If Trump doesn’t obey the Supreme Court.” That, he stated, would be “different than anything else. It’s a quantum leap different, because our democracy is then—248 years of American democracy, the Magna Carta is out the window, and we will all have to take extraordinary action.”

This “quantum leap” did not take long to arrive. Last Friday, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the Trump administration to help bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. Abrego Garcia is an immigrant married to a U.S. citizen, with three U.S. citizen children, who has lived in this country for 14 years without being charged with any crimes—just an unsubstantiated claim of gang affiliation. A federal court ruled in 2019 that Abrego Garcia could not be deported to El Salvador, as he faced a risk of death there. The Trump administration brazenly violated this order in March, putting Abrego Garcia on a plane to what is effectively a concentration camp. This act was so “illegal,” in the Supreme Court’s words, that all nine justices agreed the administration must “facilitate” the release of Abrego Garcia and “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”

But Trump won’t do it. The administration argues that only El Salvador has the ability to send Abrego Garcia back. “DHS does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation,” Joseph Mazzara, acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said in a court filing on Monday. El Salvador’s president, who visited Trump on Monday, also claimed powerlessness. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” he told reporters, cruelly mischaracterizing Abrego Garcia. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” (This is all laughable given the recent repatriation of alleged rapists and MAGA diehards Andrew and Tristan Tate from Romania.)

[...]

It’s been a shameful abdication of leadership by Democratic elites. But there was still an opportunity for redemption. Schumer said that if Trump defied a Supreme Court order, then there’d be no choice but to “take extraordinary action.” Presumably he has been preparing for this possibility—not doing so would be almost inconceivable Democratic malpractice.

But when I reached out to Schumer’s office late Monday, the senator hadn’t even posted a response to the news yet. Eventually his office put out a boilerplate statement, which they emailed to me: “The law is clear, due process was grossly violated, and the Supreme Court has clearly spoken that the Trump administration must facilitate and effectuate the return of Abrego Garcia. He should be returned to the U.S. immediately. Due process and the rule of law are cornerstones of American society for citizens and noncitizens alike and not to follow that is dangerous and outrageous. A threat to one is a threat to all.” In reply, I referenced Schumer’s statement that “we will all have to take extraordinary action” if Trump defied the court, and asked if he had any additional comments about the kind of action needed right now. His office has not responded.

This failure of leadership is particularly maddening from the leader of the opposition party in the Senate, because the upper chamber remains an institution that, as Mitch McConnell demonstrated, provides incredibly powerful tools to the minority party. We know what Senate Democrats could be doing if they decided “to take extraordinary action.” Just a few weeks ago we saw just one senator, Cory Booker, grind the chamber to a standstill for over 24 hours—an impressive effort, though arbitrary and undirected. Can you imagine how much more powerful it would be if Senate Democrats came together to organize a filibuster relay team that could continuously gum up the Senate until Trump agreed to follow the Supreme Court’s order?

Elon and DOGE almost certainly siphoning what is otherwise meant to be confidential information from the NLRB, including very likely union members/organisers.

An employee who was trying to investigate had threats involving pictures of them walking their dog being posted to their door.

The DOGE employees, who are effectively led by White House adviser and billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, appeared to have their sights set on accessing the NLRB's internal systems. They've said their unit's overall mission is to review agency data for compliance with the new administration's policies and to cut costs and maximize efficiency.

But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.

Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do

[...]

NxGen is an internal system that was designed specifically for the NLRB in-house, according to several of the engineers who created the tool and who all spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation or adverse consequences for any future government work.

The engineers explained that while many of the NLRB's records are eventually made public, the NxGen case management system hosts proprietary data from corporate competitors, personal information about union members or employees voting to join a union, and witness testimony in ongoing cases. Access to that data is protected by numerous federal laws, including the Privacy Act.

Those engineers were also concerned by DOGE staffers' insistence that their activities not be logged, allowing them to probe the NLRB's systems and discover information about potential security flaws or vulnerabilities without being detected.

"If he didn't know the backstory, any [chief information security officer] worth his salt would look at network activity like this and assume it's a nation-state attack from China or Russia," said Braun, the former White House cyber official.

[...]

For cybersecurity experts, that spike in data leaving the system is a key indicator of a breach, Berulis explained.

"We are under assault right now," he remembered thinking.

When Berulis asked his IT colleagues whether they knew why the data was exfiltrated or whether anyone else had been using containers to run code on the system in recent weeks, no one knew anything about it or the other unusual activities on the network, according to his disclosure. In fact, when they looked into the spike, they found that logs that were used to monitor outbound traffic from the system were absent. Some actions taken on the network, including data exfiltration, had no attribution — except to a "deleted account," he continued. "Nobody knows who deleted the logs or how they could have gone missing," Berulis said.

The IT team met to discuss insider threats — namely, the DOGE engineers, whose activities it had little insight into or control over. "We had no idea what they did," he explained. Those conversations are reflected in his official disclosure.

They eventually launched a formal breach investigation, according to the disclosure, and prepared a request for assistance from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). However, those efforts were disrupted without an explanation, Berulis said. That was deeply troubling to Berulis, who felt he needed help to try to get to the bottom of what happened and determine what new vulnerabilities might be exploited as a result.

In the days after Berulis and his colleagues prepared a request for CISA's help investigating the breach, Berulis found a printed letter in an envelope taped to his door, which included threatening language, sensitive personal information and overhead pictures of him walking his dog, according to the cover letter attached to his official disclosure. It's unclear who sent it, but the letter made specific reference to his decision to report the breach. Law enforcement is investigating the letter.

"If the underlying disclosure wasn't concerning enough, the targeted, physical intimidation and surveillance of my client is. If this is happening to Mr. Berulis, it is likely happening to others and brings our nation more in line with authoritarian regimes than with open and free democracies," wrote Bakaj, his attorney, in a statement sent to NPR. "It is time for everyone – and Congress in particular – to acknowledge the facts and stop our democracy, freedom, and liberties from slipping away, something that will take generations to repair."

In part because of the stymied internal investigation and the attempts to silence him, Berulis decided to come forward publicly.