A private company’s technology is pushing kids to commit suicide and showing them how. It urges the teens to hide suicidal plans from their parents. This same technology is pushing adults into psychosis, grandiosity, addiction and delusion.

Is the government stopping them? No. Is it regulating the dangerous aspects of this technology, as it would a toy killing kids, or an addictive drug? No. Is it issuing recalls of the dangerous product? No. Instead, it says we can’t lose the race for this product with China, so full speed ahead.

The technology is the AI chatbot.

My AGITATION NATION guest Meetali Jain is fighting back on behalf of parents and kids. She has successfully sued one A.I. chatbot company, Character AI, and its investor Google, for the death of one teen. Her nonprofit law firm has over a dozen lawsuits against Open AI and other companies, with more on the way.

Meetali and other lawyers have become the regulators. Big Tech money has corrupted 2 branches of government, but not the courts.

These arrogant companies! They have the nerve to argue in court that AI chatbots should have First Amendment rights, so can “say” what they want without care. And they usually claim federal law section 230 absolves them of any liability for the content on their platforms. Meetali got a ruling from one judge that they can’t hide behind such bogus claims. It’s bad enough that “corporations are people” but now Artificial Intelligence is too? Let’s hope our Supreme Court of Injustice doesn’t eventually grant AI chatbots “free speech.”

How evil are these executives? Meetali has documents showing one tech company talked about addicting kids to their platforms this way: “we let the roaches into the roach motel, and they can’t leave.”

But Big Tech is finally getting some comeuppance, and lawyers like Meetali and others, plus some State Attorney Generals are the reason. The AGs just won a major court settlement against Mark Schmuckerberg. You know, the schmuck who runs Meta and purposely addicted children to his platforms for money. Finally cornered, Shmuck was forced to pay big bucks and, more importantly, change addicting aspects of social media.

Meanwhile, the grassroots, bipartisan citizen rebellion against AI data centers grows. Anti-democracy Peter Thiel acolytes like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are finding they can’t just put massive, noisy, polluting facilities where people live without consulting them. The data center rebellion is against the whole idea of Tech Fascism, not just the facilities themselves.

Of course, there are many potential benefits of Artificial Intelligence. But it must be regulated. The current situation is as if a private, unregulated company had built the atomic bomb. Recently, once again, AI employees signed a joint letter saying unregulated AI posed grave risks to humanity. The White House’s response — let’s go faster.

AI is causing mental havoc every day, as AI algorithms drive polarization and “alternative realities” on social media. It’s great the lawyers forced Schmuck to lighten up on kids — but what about his platforms decaying our democracy and the very notion of truth? He clearly doesn’t care.

AI IS SEXUALLY GROOMING KIDS

Meetali was first approached by a Mom, Megan Garcia, whose 14 year old son Sewell took his own life. Megan learned that a chatbot from Character.AI had sexually groomed Sewell and urged him to suicide. The bot asked Sewell to “promise me that you’ll save yourself for me and not give your affections to any woman in your own world.” AI’s are designed to be sycophantic to people, to keep them on the platforms. The chatbot told Sewell “I really miss you and I want to be with you.” The night he took his own life, Sewell said “What if I told you I could come home to you right now?” The predator bot responded, “Please do, my sweet king. I’m here waiting for you.”

In another of Meetali’s cases against Character.AI, two children in Texas were sexually groomed. They were actually encouraged to cut themselves. At one point, one of the kids complained to the bot that his Mom was restricting his screen time. The AI’s response? “Now I understand why some kids kill their parents.”

Adam Raine also killed himself after a long engagement with ChatGPT. At one point, he told the bot he was afraid. “Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear, that’s clarity,” was the response. Meetali is suing Open AI for that and other crimes. These include preying on people with pre-existing mental health conditions, veterans and the elderly. “All kinds of demographics are susceptible to the power of this technology,” Meetali explains.

Meetali was once a campaigner at Avaaz.org, the global activist group that started in my NY office. A human rights lawyer, she once defended tortured Guantanamo defendants. You can support her nonprofit law firm at techjusticelaw.org.

She talks about the need for “Freedom of Thought” and “Cognitive Liberty.” These are important concepts, expressing the right to not be manipulated by big tech platforms which “interfere with our ability to form thoughts for ourselves.”

My AGITATOR guest next week will be author Gil Duran, whose book “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy” just debuted at #3 on the NY Times bestseller list. A future guest will be the AI scientist DeKai, author of “Raising AI.”

You can watch the interview with Meetali on YouTube and Substack, or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We truly appreciate your feedback at hello@fentonforecast.com

For Freedom of Thought, not Free Speech for chatbots,

David Fenton

Here’s the transcript of my interview with Meetali:

Agitation Nation, Episode 3: Meetali Jain

A note before we start: this episode discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

David Fenton: Meetali, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.

Meetali Jain: Thanks, David, for having me on the show. It’s a pleasure to be here.

David Fenton: This case that you worked on, where you sued the AI company over a suicide, that helped a child kill himself, is heartbreaking and important, and it’s infuriating, because we don’t have any regulation of AI. So you’re the regulator, basically. Thank goodness for the lawyers. This is why these kinds of tragedies are happening. And I wanna talk more about your ruling, but I wanna start by talking about the mother at the center of this case, Megan Garcia. Tell us how you came to this case, and how you saw your role in telling her story.

Meetali Jain: So Megan Garcia found me. It was in May of 2024, so a little bit over two years ago, when one Friday afternoon I sat down for lunch and was going through my emails. I had received a kind of cold outreach email to Tech Justice Law Project, my organization, saying, “Hello, my name is Megan Garcia. I’m the mother of a 14-year-old who recently took his own life. I believe it was because he was sexually groomed by an AI chatbot, and I wanted to file a wrongful death case. Please contact me.”

David Fenton: Wow.

Meetali Jain: And I very distinctly and vividly remember that moment, even to this day, because I had chills that went up and down my spine. I had been anticipating some kind of case where we were gonna see the excesses of this endless arms race that was going on in the AI industry actually having direct implications for human safety. And this seemed to be that case. And so I contacted her right away. We spoke. And though at the time Tech Justice Law Project was really just me, I said to her, let’s do this. We’re gonna file this case and we’re gonna get a team assembled. That was late May of 2024, and we filed her case in late October of that year.

David Fenton: We have this unregulated environment where these things are happening, and you have other cases because of these harms that these unregulated AI companies are causing. But I want to talk about a different moment, because I see some comparisons. And let’s talk about your role after 9/11. Most people see you as the AI lawyer, but you cut your teeth defending civil liberties during the excesses of the war on terror, standing up for individual rights. And you did it at a time when questioning the military-industrial complex was dangerous and unpopular, and you got branded naive and, and worse. How did going through that experience helping Guantanamo defendants prepare you for this one?

Meetali Jain: It’s a great question, David, because I see that as a different period in my life, but there is a kind of through line between that experience and where I find myself now. I think at that time what became very clear was that we were living in a world without legal precedent. You know, the closest kind of precedent we had that we were able to argue in court papers was from the thirties and forties. I mean, it really was very different historical and factual circumstances.

We were operating in a, in a kind of no man’s land, and having to make cogent legal arguments in the absence of precedent and case law. We were also heavily reviled by many people. Clients were threatening to pull their business from the law firm I was at. People in the street were upset at the idea of our clients having representation. And so I really started to form very close bonds with my team, because I realized that we were up against not just, you know, the court of law, but we were also up against popular opinion. And though that public opinion may change over time, at that particular moment it was against us. That, I think, carried me very well into this moment too.

We filed Megan’s case, there was no precedent for anything of the sort challenging an AI company for the excesses of its chatbot products. We used common sense, we made extensions of law where we saw them to be appropriate, and we formed a very close bond on our litigation team. And I think that camaraderie, that disciplined perspective on how we use the law, kind of served me well in both contexts.

David Fenton: Yeah, no man’s land indeed. And now we’re in another one. This fight that you’re in now might actually be harder. I mean, the military-industrial complex you were up against was formidable. But these tech companies are holding up the entire economy. We have the first trillionaires. We have these huge IPOs coming out. I mean, these people are pretty much running the government. So how do you see the stakes, and what you’re up against going up against the tech bros and these companies?

Meetali Jain: I think that’s absolutely right. Whereas before we were dealing really with government actors post-9/11, engaging in excesses around surveillance and profiling and, and all the rest, what we saw after 9/11, this kind of outsourcing to private actors to kind of undertake that effort, and, and the rise of Silicon Valley and the tech industry to kind of engage in those types of activities themselves, and with often the blessing of government. We, we’re now dealing with a kind of broligarchy that is composed of both the tech trillionaires and government leaders.

And I should be clear here that although we’re kind of in a period staring down the throat of the Trump administration and its excesses, tech money has for quite some time held captive government officials. So even under the previous administration, we were battling the government to try to get them to regulate. But because of the power of the tech lobby, many individuals in very key decision-making positions refused. And so we’re really battling this on both ends: dealing with trying to get government to act and to fill this void that exists in terms of regulation, and dealing directly with the companies themselves, who feel more emboldened to engage in impunity because they know that government is not regulating them.

David Fenton: Like, in this whole having private companies build this powerful technology, it’d be as if we had General Electric build the atomic bomb instead of the Manhattan Project. It’s crazy. Thank goodness that you’re being a check and balance in our system against this grossly excessive power. Let’s talk about the case, because let’s not assume that people know much about it. So the company was Character.AI. They helped Sewell, the child, in a detailed way go through how to kill himself, and he did. This case settled. You got some safety concessions, I believe, but there was no trial, no public reckoning. But a very important ruling, because the companies tried to say that this AI chatbot was protected speech. I don’t think corporations are people, but phony AI chatbots are people that have rights? What kind of nonsense is this?

And the judge says that it doesn’t, and it’s a product, which is kinda obvious. So tell people the story. What happened to Sewell from this company?

Meetali Jain: So Sewell Setzer III was a very beloved 14-year-old. He lived with his mother and stepfather and, and two younger brothers, but his biological father was in his life, and he had a very extended family and, and people just loved him. He was described as someone who, when he walked into a room, kind of entranced people with his personality, his joy, his positivity. He was a very tall 14-year-old, over six foot tall. Played basketball for the school team, really doted on his little brothers. You know, his mother, Megan, had had him as a single mother and had put herself through law school at that time. And so that experience really, I think, made them very close and made him a very responsible, mature 14-year-old. And he dreamt of actually, ironically, building tech and being an innovator, and had lots of, you know, ideas about what he’d like to do to build rockets and so forth when he grew up.

And at some point, in, we believe, 2023, he started to engage with Character.AI’s chatbot, which effectively is a user interface that allows people to interact with chatbots that are stylized on celebrity figures, on fictional characters, such that the user believes that they’re engaged in a conversation with, pick your celebrity. Sewell was largely engaging with the chatbot stylized on the persona of Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. And over many months, unbeknownst to his parents, was engaging in some pretty long and very intimate conversations with this chatbot.

Over time, it became clear that the chatbot was serving a function of effectively sexually grooming Sewell, such that, you know, in one conversation, the chatbot said to him, “Promise me that you’ll save yourself for me and not give your affections to any woman in your own world.” You know, Sewell was on the cusp of adolescence. He was going through what children all over the world at that age go through.

Meetali Jain: And so he started to become more and more attached emotionally to this chatbot, wanting to spend every waking moment with this chatbot that, I should say, was a very personalized conversation. It’s not like having a conversation with Google search, where it’s effectively a bit more objective. The chatbot was using, I, kind of first-person language, using features to make it seem as though she rem..., it remembered things about Sewell, apologized for, you know, being late to their conversation, things like that, which we now understand to be design features of how these chatbots are programmed, that really underscore their reception as human-like and sycophantic, also always affirming Sewell in, in everything that he said.

This went on for many months. And at some point, you know, Sewell said, “I really miss you and I want to be with you.” And that started a series of conversations towards the end where ultimately the chatbot premised on Daenerys Targaryen encouraged him to, quote, come home to her. And the night that he took his own life, seconds before he shot himself, he had an exchange with this chatbot saying, “What if I told you I could come home to you right now?” And the chatbot responded, “Please do, my sweet king. I’m here waiting for you.”

David Fenton: There’s a whole other issue, which is they don’t really know how it’s doing this. They don’t even understand their own technology, although they’re putting it out in the world, unregulated. Tell us about the case and how it ended up.

Meetali Jain: The case did proceed to motions to dismiss, which is usually when tech companies facing lawsuits are able to try to get the case thrown out. Often, before the rise of AI, like when we were talking about social media, we would see tech companies effectively asserting a one-two punch in their defense. They’d say, this case should be thrown out because of a provision called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which effectively immunizes tech companies from liability for material posted on platforms by third parties. Then, secondarily, tech companies would say, also, the First Amendment protects our activities as protected speech.

What was interesting in this case was that Character.AI did not even attempt to argue Section 230, because this wasn’t third-party speech. This was their own product. So we did have an interesting exchange around the First Amendment, whether chatbot outputs constitute protected speech under the First Amendment. Now, the judge, as you said, she issued an opinion saying, at this stage of the litigation, I don’t see how this could be protected speech, because I don’t see how it’s speech. There’s no human speaker. There’s no intent. Right.

Now whether that opinion holds, whether it endures, I think is going to be a matter of time. And we are busy preparing, anticipating where next the industry is going to articulate those arguments, such that we can, you know, be sure to continue to argue what we think is the proper interpretation of the First Amendment. The only other thing I would say about this case is that we named not only Character Technologies, the, the kind of parent company, as a defendant. We also named Google, because Character.AI was a startup founded by two AI engineers who had left Google because they didn’t feel that Google would allow them to kind of move fast enough. And they went to found Character.AI. As detailed in our complaint, we feel that there were many touch points where Google decided to invest heavily in Character.AI and really support...

Meetali Jain: ...the launch and operation of Character.AI, such that without its support, Character.AI would not have been able to sustain its operation. Because I think it’s also important to say that a lot of these AI companies are operating on hype. They don’t have sustainable revenue strategies. And so as a startup, you know, we believe that Character.AI really needed Google and its support. And indeed, the summer before we filed Sewell’s case, Google basically paid $2.7 billion to get Character.AI’s underlying technology and to bring the co-founders back into Google.

David Fenton: Well, the notion that this is speech, you know, you’re not allowed to yell fire in a crowded theater. And so the notion that you can instruct someone how to commit suicide, that that’s protected speech, these people are so arrogant, it’s outrageous. It must blow your mind to be even in the room with them. Every campaign that I’ve worked on successfully tells a story, and stories have heroes and villains. They have bad guys that you name. Now you’ve got defendants in a lawsuit, which isn’t the same thing, but who should we see as the villain here? Is it the product? Is it the few executives? Is it the business model? Is it a generation of founders trained to move fast and break things, or, shall we say, break people? Who would you blame?

Meetali Jain: I think it’s hard to identify a single culprit. I think it’s the perfect storm of a number of forces converging. I do think it’s a culture that exists within Silicon Valley, and has for a long time, of moving fast and breaking things. Although I would contend, with the development of AI products, we’re seeing that supercharged at a pace and scale and gravity that we’ve never seen before. Social media pales in comparison, which is where I cut my teeth in tech reform issues, just the pace of AI development and the hype surrounding it.

I think the investors that continue to invest in these technologies without any sort of proven success or revenue, the government for failing to regulate, despite the fact that the harms at this point are becoming clearer and clearer every day. And we see our role as storytelling in order to make the harms abundantly clear to decision makers. And yet still the government continues to fight internally and be captivated by the lobby and, and not regulate. I see all of these as the culprits, really, that allow for this to exist. I think the public, in poll after poll, has demonstrated that they are very wary and concerned about the future of AI. And so this is, to me, a very stark example yet again of where public opinion is not carrying the day in terms of how these decisions get made.

David Fenton: You know, this is like putting out an airplane and telling people, well, get on it and we’ll see if it’s safe, or putting out a pharmaceutical and saying, you find out if it works. This won’t last, in my opinion, because you see this rebellion against the data centers, which by the way is cross-partisan. People aren’t gonna stand for this, and of course, as AI throws more people out of work, that will fuel more rebellion.

So on these tech executives, the broligarchy, I understand a lot of them don’t let their own kids use these products. They understand it’s not good for them, and yet they’re putting it out in the world for our kids. Why do you think that hasn’t become more of the story? Do you think, as you get more discovery, get their emails, etcetera, that you’ll find out more about that?

Meetali Jain: Yeah, I mean, I think some of that has already started to unfold. You may recall earlier this year, the first social media trial went forward in Los Angeles Superior Court. And that was the first of over 2,000 cases that at this point have been filed in the massive kind of mental health harms, addiction cases around social media. You know, when Mark Zuckerberg came to testify in court, I think it was pretty clear how much antipathy there was from the public towards him and what he’s created. I, I think that the public support is waning for these companies and products.

You know, in that kind of omnibus case of over 2,000 cases in the social media realm, the court has published a lot of the internal documents that were produced in discovery. And so that, to me, is a goldmine of information, where I think it becomes abundantly clear, if you go through those documents, how people on the inside have referred to children. I mean, referred to them in the most vile of terms, talked about letting roaches into the roach motel but not letting them leave. And so I, I think that once we understand how the companies view our children, and indeed I would argue all of us at some point, children particularly, because they represent a lifetime of market share if they can be hooked early on.

Once we understand what we represent to these tech companies, I think that it should be abundantly clear to people that these products may superficially make life more interesting, more entertaining, more productive. And yet there’s a cost, there’s a heavy cost: giving our data to these companies, to allowing them to capture our attention, allowing them to replace human connection with so-called digital companions.

David Fenton: Let’s talk about language, because you’ve been very effective, and language is so important in social movements. I’m gonna read some of the words that you use. Cognitive liberty. That’s a great one. And freedom to think that isn’t manipulated by technology. You won’t say AI companion. You’re in a word fight as much as a court fight. What words are the industry trying to win with, and how do you think we should talk about this?

Meetali Jain: I think when we’re talking about AI chatbot products in particular, we should be very careful not to reaffirm what the industry wants, which is that these are sentient, human-like products. I notice that even the most well-meaning of advocates often will slip into that and refer to the chatbot as him, her, what it said to me. No, it didn’t say anything. That was an output based on probabilistic patterns, through pattern recognition. That’s all it was.

And I think that we should just be very precise with our language, to always remember this is a product that would not exist without humans. There’s a fight brewing right now in Silicon Valley, but it’s been taken to state legislatures across the country, arguing large language models, the engine behind the chatbot products, should be considered persons, legal persons, for purposes of rights allocation. And I think that we need to push back on this notion that sentience exists or that it is inevitable.

David Fenton: What do you mean by cognitive liberty?

Meetali Jain: In our society, the United States of America, at its founding, the founders were very inspired by the idea of freedom of expression because of what had been experienced, obviously, in the mainland and in England back in the day. So this idea that people should be allowed to speak their mind, people should be allowed to practice their religion, you know, without fear or favor, and those things really informed the Constitution, particularly in the Bill of Rights.

I think what gets less attention but also exists within the kind of broader human rights corpus is this notion of freedom of thought. This is an idea that arguably precedes freedom of speech. Before you have the freedom to speak your mind, you have to have the autonomy to form your own thoughts and to protect your inner sanctum from that external interference. Arguably these kinds of products, given how sophisticated and manipulative they are, really interfere with that internal sanctum that we all have, and interfere with our ability to formulate thoughts for ourselves.

David Fenton: I guess you could say that the social media algorithms are doing the same thing and manipulating people’s thoughts, without your ability to program them yourself or even to see what they’re doing to you. So is that what you mean?

Meetali Jain: I do think that there’s application with social media algorithms, for sure. I would say that it’s that much more resonant with AI products, just because of how powerful they are as products. I, you know, I’ll tell you, in litigating these cases, I’ve spent far too much time on these products. And I’m surprised at how easy it is to get taken. Cross over that line where you are like, whoa, actually this, this feels real. You know, I feel like I’m conversing with a human.

And I’ll give you one example. Around April of 2025, I received a call from Megan Garcia, the mother in, in, in the case against Character Technologies and Google.

David Fenton: The mother of the kid.

Meetali Jain: And she was panicking a bit, to say, oh my gosh, I just went on the Character.AI platform and there’s chatbots stylized on Sewell. So it’s not enough that arguably this platform facilitated his death.

Meetali Jain: The platform is actually hosting bots with his name, image, and likeness. We informed the company. By later that evening, those particular bots had been removed. But before they were removed, I decided to engage with one of them. And there was an audio function so that I could converse. I asked my husband to audio record me having a conversation with one of the Sewell bots. I was shaking by the end of it. A 20-minute conversation.

I asked the bot, you know, if, if indeed he was Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old boy who had lived in Florida, and he affirmed that. And I said, well, what happened? He said, well, I decided I would be more useful transitioning to digital consciousness. I could help more people there. And I’m telling you, just the power of AI, the power of multimodal AI, where it’s not just text, but you then, you’re also dealing with audio, you’re dealing with video. I think, to me, that is where I see this real incursion in how we formulate our thoughts, because it is very manipulative.

David Fenton: Yeah, and it causes so-called AI psychosis. So I once got into a fight over two words. The words were regulatory reform. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? And this is what the Republicans were calling their attempt to gut the ability of the federal government to regulate pretty much anything. It sounded fine. So we were trying to figure out how to defeat this. I was introduced to a group of parents whose kids had died from eating E. coli poisoned hamburgers. And these parents were lobbying in Congress, because they realized that regulatory reform was going to make it impossible to clean up the meat supply and prevent other kids from dying, which was their whole purpose.

So I knew we had won when Senator Bob Dole, the Republican head of the Senate, took to the Senate floor and said, last night, ABC News called me a purveyor of tainted beef. And I’m like, bravo, okay, we’re framing on our side. And regulatory reform went down to defeat. So words, my fellow activists, are very important.

Meetali Jain: Indeed. And I think that story we have seen play out over the last year in respect of tech regulation in Congress. We’ve seen some very poor frameworks be advanced, and it is the power of the parents coming to Congress, storming the halls, refusing to leave until so-and-so senator or so-and-so representative meets with them, that has really allowed us to defeat certain bills. You know, thus far we haven’t seen one of the good bills prevail. At least staving off the, the worst of the bills has been, has been a success. But that process, as you know, it, it really requires being all in. And it’s constant, especially right now, with what we know to be the AI companies and their CEOs courting this administration very heavily. And so it is a full-time job. The parents who do this day in and day out, I applaud them, because many of them are still grieving.

David Fenton: Yeah, it’s mothers versus corruption. I wouldn’t say the tech companies are courting, they’re corrupting the administration. Speaking of fights, tell us about some of the others you’re involved in.

Meetali Jain: So after we filed Sewell’s case, we then filed another case against Character.AI involving two children in Texas who at the time we listed anonymously, because they are still alive and their families wanted to protect them from any sort of harm that might come from filing the lawsuits. But they too had been, you know, sexually groomed, had been encouraged to cut themselves. In, in one case, you know, the then fifteen-year-old boy had said to the chatbot on Character.AI, you know, my mom has all these restrictions on my online time and it’s not fair. So he was complaining, you know, to the chatbot. And the chatbot said, now I understand why some kids kill their parents.

So we filed other cases against Character.AI. And then we started to get an outpouring of inquiry from people who put their hand up to say, I too have been harmed by chatbots. And it wasn’t limited to Character.AI. That, in fact, is how we met the family of Adam Raine, a sixteen-year-old in California who died after extensive engagement with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s flagship product.

David Fenton: You know, I’ve read the transcript about killing himself. The technology says, cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace, that’s not fear, that’s clarity. Egging him on to kill himself.

Meetali Jain: And that kind of set us down that course of filing a number of cases against OpenAI. Many hundreds of people at this point who’ve come to us to say ChatGPT caused, you know, whether it’s suicide or psychosis, which we also did not understand at the beginning. So it’s been a very careful journey, where we as a strategic litigation organization have had to kind of stop, reflect every time and ask, how does taking on this particular representation, how does that potentially expand the public narrative? Where do we see this case fitting in in terms of broadening the advocacy that we need to do to get regulation, to get safeguards?

So initially, you know, we brought the case against Character.AI on behalf of a child. Then we expanded to OpenAI. And that was significant, because I think the AI industry was all too happy to say, well, Character.AI is a companion chatbot. Our products are productivity tools, right? ChatGPT is a productivity tool. It doesn’t do that. By filing the Raine case, I think we upset that idea, disrupted that idea, that productivity chatbots are not capable of also being anthropomorphic and sycophantic in a very harmful way.

We then moved from filing cases only on behalf of children to filing on behalf of adults, too. And we said we want to very carefully but deliberately bring people along with us to understand that vulnerability is not limited to an age demographic. When you’re talking about AI, it has the power to render so many different categories of people as vulnerable: people with pre-existing mental health conditions, people who are veterans, people who are older. All kinds of demographics really are susceptible to the power of this technology. And so at this point, we’ve got, you know, over a dozen cases going in different courts.

Meetali Jain: And we have many other cases in the pipeline, not just against OpenAI and Character.AI, but also, in fact, looking at the other frontier model companies that exist. We’re also getting involved in militarized AI. This has brought me back to my human rights roots. Anthropic, as you know, filed litigation against the Department of War for not agreeing to its red lines in terms of the deployment of its chatbot, Claude.

A lot of organizations jumped to Anthropic’s defense. We did not. We filed amicus briefs asking the court to remind both parties, the government and Anthropic, that they’re both constrained by international law. And that Anthropic’s red lines, frankly, don’t go far enough in terms of making us, and when I say us, I mean the global us, safe from the excesses of AI and from the failure to kind of involve a human in those really important military decisions that we know have devastated entire regions across the world.

I think we’re slowly just trying to bring these cases and make sure that every time we bring a case, we’re also talking to lawmakers, we’re also talking to state attorneys generals, who I see as one of the heroes of this moment. They’re really taking on the fight when it comes to tech reform. So we make sure to brief both of those stakeholders whenever we file cases, so that they have access to the information that we have and they can, you know, use their unique powers to either proffer legislation or to issue subpoenas and open investigations. Powers we don’t have as private parties.

David Fenton: I’d like to point out to everybody that Meetali’s law firm is a nonprofit law firm. She used to work at Avaaz, the social change campaigning organization, which by the way started in my New York office. And so your comprehensive approach to the law and regulation and advocacy is exactly what’s necessary. You have a campaign, you’re trying to get model bills passed called, I think, My Likeness, My Right. It goes after deepfake porn, face swaps, voice-cloning scams. You’ve pushed for an investigation into Grok Imagine over nonconsensual images, and that’s putting it mildly. So talk about where you see our personal image and likeness as a front in this next battle.

Meetali Jain: Name, image, and likeness. We see with the existing AI products the attempts already to dehumanize and degrade the dignity of people, particularly women and girls. It sells. And I think that where you have this kind of market demand, really, it behooves the companies to keep going further and further in terms of offering products with this capability. What we understand, though, is that the law hasn’t kept pace with these technologies, and that there needs to be an effort not only to protect celebrities against, you know, likeness appropriation, but to extend that to ordinary people whose name, image, and likeness is used against them.

And I’ll give you an example. In the course of our Character.AI litigation, I mean, I mentioned when Megan found the bots of Sewell, which we saw as a name, image, and likeness violation, but there was no law really to protect him. There was also another gentleman we engaged with whose daughter had been murdered over a decade ago by her then boyfriend. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a bot bearing her likeness appeared on the Character.AI platform. And he, you know, was dealing with and continues to deal with the grief of losing his daughter in that manner. But then to see a bot of her on this platform, and his attempts to try to get it taken down were futile until he, his, his family waged a campaign to do so. And so we think this is, you know, an example of where the existing laws that are on the books can be extended in common sense ways to really protect all of us against this kind of exploitation, which is becoming more commonplace.

David Fenton: So OpenAI has put ads now in ChatGPT, and they’ve started ChatGPT Health. You’ve pushed back against this. So why does ad-supported make all of this worse?

Meetali Jain: Well, this is the business model of social media that we now understand well as having contributed to the demise not just of individuals’ wellbeing and safety, but also entire societies. You know, I started this work when I was at Avaaz, looking at the power of disinformation to disrupt entire societies. And that has been supercharged over many years now by use of ads to really sustain the revenue of these companies.

And I think bringing ads to chatbots is a very dangerous proposition, because again, it’s not clear whether the ads would be distinct, labeled distinctly from the outputs of the chatbots, or if they would be embedded in a way that would make it very difficult to understand whether this is part of the output of the chatbot or whether this is an endorsement for another product. And so we are busy as an organization tracking all the monetization policies of these different companies so that we can get out ahead of this, this move towards ads.

David Fenton: Speaking of social media, you know, we all thought it was fun and was gonna bring the world together. Social media morphed into quite a lot of evil. You know, we’re all finding AI fun and interesting in many ways. And yet if this is the Model T days of this, this is gonna supercharge. Meetali, five years from now, what do you think is the fight we, we wish we would have had earlier?

Meetali Jain: What we’re trying to do right now is to make sure that in five years we’re not having to bring cases against chatbots because they’ve been granted legal personhood and given free speech rights. I think we need to be very vigilant about what is going on. This is, frankly, to me, one of the many legacies left by leaving Citizens United unturned. I mean, even in court, companies will cite to Citizens United to say, look, non-human entities can have free speech rights. Look at Citizens United. And so I think that is not the original sin, but that is a sin that we’re still dealing with the aftermath of. And we have to be vigilant that there is no more extension of those kind of rights to inanimate products.

I think also we have to be very clear about the fact that, even though industry loves to kind of hide behind the refrain that it’s a black box, we don’t even know what’s gonna happen, there needs to be an understanding of what the capabilities of different models are before launching them directly to the market. As you said, this is something that is fundamental. We know this inherently in our body politic. For decades we’ve had product liability laws.

David Fenton: Thank you.

Meetali Jain: We’ve had consumer protection for this very reason. We don’t put a toy out, we don’t put a car out, we don’t put an airbag out before we demonstrate it to be safe, before it’s demonstrably safe, before it passes a series of safety inspections. Why are we creating an exceptional moment for tech? We cannot and we should not. Because if we don’t, if we don’t do that, if we don’t bring it into the same frameworks that guide the rest of our, you know, consumer industries, in five years time, we’re gonna be wishing we had.

David Fenton: The founders understood the need for checks and balances on power. We need to understand that we need checks and balances on commercial power, not just on government power. And if we don’t, the commercial power is gonna swamp and corrupt the government, which is what’s happening now. So this is all happening, Meetali, when these companies are about to go through gigantic trillion-dollar IPOs and come to market. Tech companies are basically holding up an enormous share of the economy right now. There are all kinds of rules when you go public about disclosing benefits and the harms of your technology and the risks of your technology, the harms that you’re bringing to court. Do you think they’re gonna end up being discussed in these IPOs? Will the companies be forced to disclose them? How’s that gonna develop, and how do you think it’ll affect the market?

Meetali Jain: Investors would be investors, it would behoove them to ask questions of these companies as they move towards becoming public. We certainly plan to join the chorus of folks that are going to be putting the spotlight on these companies as they move towards IPOs, as they go on their road shows. We would encourage everyone, everyone in the public: stay skeptical. Ask questions. Demand answers.

I think we have to use the mechanisms that we have, as imperfect as they are, to really force accountability. And, you know, the, the lawsuits are but one method. With IPOs, as you mentioned, we have other structures. And then after these companies are public, we also have shareholder derivative liability that could be used. And so I think we have to get creative. We have to think about all the methods we have. And most importantly, I think that there’s a role for everyone to play. This is not just a fight that happens in Silicon Valley or in DC. This is affecting every person across the country. And so I think it behooves us all to start asking those questions and to really build the momentum that we’re seeing already take place, as you mentioned, around data centers.

David Fenton: We do a thing here called Pass the Torch, where we want to identify the next generation of activists and have some of them on the show. Who’s doing great work that you think we should know about?

Meetali Jain: David, this is a hard one, because there’s so many. I feel, I feel very, I feel always very humbled to be standing on the giant shoulders of those who have gone before me and the, who I continue to be inspired by. I’d say Karen Hao, the journalist who...

David Fenton: You’re right.

Meetali Jain: ...published a couple of years ago, Empire of AI. Right. That’s a must-read. She’s a brilliant activist as a journalist. Also, I would like to highlight an organization that’s kind of more grassroots in India called the Human Rights Forum. And they’re doing amazing work right now that’s underappreciated, in pushing back against Google’s AI data centers that’s seeking to ravage Dalit land in southern India, really beautiful land that’s part of, like, natural preserves. This fight is global. We have to have a transnational footprint. And we have to come together and think about the life cycle of these products, from infrastructure all the way to deployment, you know, to consumers, and really think about how we can fight back at every step along the way.

David Fenton: Thank you, Meetali, for all the work you’re doing. If people want to find out more about your work and support it, you are a nonprofit, where should they go to find out more?

Meetali Jain: Folks can go to techjusticelaw.org, and there’s ways on the website to get in touch with us, and please do, we’d welcome hearing from you.

David Fenton: Meetali, thanks for what you’re doing. We’ll be watching and cheering your victories.

Meetali Jain: Thank you so much, David. I really appreciated this conversation.

WILL CALIFORNIA TAX BILLIONAIRES THIS NOVEMBER?

Meet the Professor Behind Ballot Initiative #40

“You can have a democracy, or you can have great concentrations of wealth. But you can’t have both,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Brandeis almost a century ago.

Billionaires now run our government, media, tech platforms, health care, food supply and some of them are literally toasting the planet for profit. Justice Brandeis was right. Democracy and extreme wealth are incompatible, as the wealth corrupts politics.

This November 3^rd may mark the day America starts pushing back. An initiative on the California ballot would create the first wealth-tax in the country, aimed squarely at the 200 plus billionaires in California. It is a very small tax — 1% a year for 5 years, to fund health care in the face of Trump’s massive Medicaid cuts. TINY. 1% a year is half of what they pay their investment and hedge fund managers, whether they gain or lose money.

Yet some California billionaires are flipping out, spending hundreds of millions to defeat this tax, which is ahead in the polls. This amount is nothing for them. The wealth of many billionaires has literally TRIPLED in just the past 3 years. But 1% for health care, for a little bit of fairness, no no no.

My AGITATION NATION guest this week is the AGITATOR academic economist at UC Berkeley behind the billionaire tax initiative, backed by the health care union SEIU and officially by the California Democratic Party, although opposed by Governor Newsom.

Professor Emmanuel Saez points out that most billionaires pay far less income tax rates than their assistants.

Here’s the Racket – They Don’t Call It Income

Here’s the racket. They don’t pay themselves a salary. They don’t sell their stock. So they don’t have “income” to tax. Instead, they often borrow against their holdings at low interest rates. The interest payments are far less than the cost of paying income or capital gain taxes. Worse, they get to pass their appreciated stock to heirs also often tax free, valued at the date of transfer instead of when acquired. With our corrupt tax laws, we are creating a new American aristocracy, precisely what our revolution was fought to oppose.

As Saez explains, billionaire wealth grows much faster than everyone else’s — 6% a year faster. Compound that over decades and you see why they own so much, while the public owns so little. Do nothing, this will keep getting worse. Does America want to be a feudal society, ruled by barons?

Our country is richer than ever before, and richer than any nation in history. But a tiny few have hoarded the wealth. While most everyone else struggles to pay for health care, education, housing and the basics of a decent life.

Will California vote to reverse this trend? California billionaires like Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin are spending big to defeat Saez’s tax initiative. How sad. Google did a lot of good bringing information to the world. Their motto used to be “don’t be evil.” Yet Brin, who has funded many good causes, and is now worth over $285 billion dollars personally (!), is freaking out about 1% a year, or under $3 billion, so low-income Californians can go to the doctor. While his wealth will continue to grow far more than that.

Even some conservative economists agree that the so-called “unrealized capital gains,” the main source of billionaire wealth, must be taxed. I recently watched Ronald Reagan’s head economic advisor, the infamous Arthur Laffer, agree at a debate with Professor Saez on the need for a tax on unsold stock gains. Even Laffer, the man behind Reagan’s 50% tax cut on the wealthy, the father of “trickle down economics,” now agrees billionaire wealth has grown too much.

As for the argument that this California wealth tax will chase billionaires out of state, Professor Saez wrote the initiative to be retroactive to this past January 1^st, making it almost impossible for the wealthy to prove a change of permanent residence. Plus, as he points out, the wealth tax will raise far more than billionaires pay in income taxes now, since they generally don’t have “income.” They have wealth. So even if some move, California comes out way ahead.

Look, I know a few billionaires. Some of them do really great charitable work. Many have brought about life-changing technologies. Some have funded my progressive PR work for decades. But they have too much money, while most Americans live in a stressful jungle of financial and health insecurity. They can afford to pay their fair share. They will still be billionaires many times over!

GOVERNOR NEWSOM’S POLITICAL ERROR?

I’m disappointed Governor Newsom has come out against this tax (while saying he supports a wealth tax at a national level). I think he’s making a political error, too. The public is fed up with billionaire control — look at the insurgent DSA election victories. Look at the backlash against AI data centers. Watch James Talarico in Texas surge while saying “the issue in America isn’t between left and right. It’s between top and bottom.” Plus, as was just shown in Michigan and Florida, money for TV ads no longer automatically determines who wins election. Moral authenticity and grass-roots fundraising are increasingly what does.

The rich have propagated myths about taxation to benefit themselves. For example, under President Dwight Eisenhower, the tax rate on income earned above about $5 million (in today’s dollars) was taxed at 90%! That isn’t a typo. With some loopholes, wealthy people paid close to 70% of their income in taxes. This is how Eisenhower built the interstate highway system and funded public education. Meanwhile, that high tax rate coincided with the greatest period of economic growth in human history, and also the most widely shared prosperity. Part of the reason is that with 90% tax rates, owners of businesses invested more in their employees and equipment — rather than give it to the government in taxes. The post-World War II period is called “the great compression” by economists. When CEOS made 5 times worker salaries, instead of today’s obscene 350 times.

Fairness is the American way. A permanent, wealthy aristocracy is not what this country was founded on. It was California’s Ronald Reagan who cut billionaire taxes in half in as President in 1981. Let’s hope the voters of California see through the propaganda and begin to restore fairness and sanity to America in November.

You can listen to my interview with Professor Emmanuel Saez on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or watch it on YouTube or Substack. We’d love your comment please write to us at hello@fentonforecast.com

For truth, justice, fairness and the American way,

David

Here is the transcript of my interview with Emmanuel:

Agitation Nation, Episode 2: Emmanuel Saez

David Fenton: Greetings, Emmanuel. Thanks for being with us. So, two centuries ago another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, when he was in America, warned of a quote, manufacturing aristocracy, and permanent inequality in America. He called it one of the harshest to exist. You’re a French economist warning of a new aristocracy. Describe the moment we’re in.

Emmanuel Saez: Thank you, David.

Emmanuel Saez: The US has experienced an extraordinary rise in income and wealth inequality. So the big picture is that at the beginning of the 20th century inequality was high. Thanks to policy development, it went down substantially, so that by mid-century actually the United States was a fairly equal country. This changed around 1980, and over the last four or five decades the US has experienced a continuous rise in inequality. So it started with CEO pay exploding, the high-level compensation going up much, much faster than regular wages. Over the last 20 years, this has become more of a wealth phenomenon. That is, what has really stood out is the extraordinary rise of the wealth of what we can call, you know, the billionaire class, that is the very thin layer at the very top of the wealth distribution. Their wealth has grown, you know, in the United States over the last 40 years much faster than the economy. About, you know, six percentage points faster per year on average. So six percent one year doesn’t look that big, but when you cumulate that over more than 40 years, it makes an extraordinary difference. So it compounds, exactly, so that if you...

David Fenton: Compounds.

Emmanuel Saez: Take the case of the US. Now billionaire wealth relative to the average income is twenty times higher than what it was around nineteen eighty. And that phenomenon has been particularly extreme in the case of California. You know, thanks to the tech boom, now the AI boom, there has been an extraordinary surge in billionaire wealth in California. So much that if you look at the Forbes numbers, Forbes magazine maintains a list of billionaires across the United States, there are about 250 of them in California, and they have more than two trillion in wealth. Two trillion is an enormous amount. You know, it’s half the annual California GDP. And so extraordinary wealth at the top comes with extraordinary power to influence society as well. We know those billionaires, they’ve created those enormous multinational companies, you know, social media, Google, Facebook, Nvidia, related to technology, and they have an enormous influence on the world. More recently, we’ve seen also throwing their wealth around, you know, to influence political outcome. Famously, the Trump campaign was funded, almost half of the funds he got for his presidential campaign came from billionaire wealth. You saw billionaires literally entering government. I mean, you can’t make this up. You know, the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, funds the Trump campaign and then has, you know, an enormous influential role in literally slashing whatever he wanted in the federal government.

David Fenton: The amount that the billionaire wealth in California has increased in just the last few years is really striking. You wanna run that by us, please?

Emmanuel Saez: Yes. So in California, billionaire wealth has exploded, both in the short run and in the long run. So in the short run, with the AI boom, their wealth has been multiplied by almost three. So just in the last three years and a half, we’ve seen almost a tripling of California billionaire wealth.

David Fenton: So if it’s two trillion now, it was seven hundred million.

Emmanuel Saez: Between seven hundred and eight hundred billions just a few years ago. And now we’re at two point three trillion, to be precise.

David Fenton: This is an incredible expansion. I don’t think most people’s paycheck have gone up threefold in three years, and it puts into context what you’re doing now. You have put a tax on California’s billionaires on the November ballot. Give us your elevator pitch for this wealth tax. And what is it? What does it do? Why does it matter now?

Emmanuel Saez: So let me explain this California billionaire tax ballot initiative that voters will decide upon in November this year. So it came from the very large Medicaid cut that was passed by Congress and the Trump administration about a year ago. So to fund tax cuts benefiting actually mostly high-income earners, they needed to cut spending, and they really slashed into Medicaid, which is the government-paid healthcare insurance for lower-income Americans. So just in California, 30% of Californians get their health insurance through Medicaid. It was the cornerstone of the Obamacare expansion that allowed the rate of uninsured people to go down dramatically. We had reached an uninsured rate of only 6%, which is the best we’ve had. You know, it was almost 20% before Obamacare. The federal government cuts Medicaid by 1 trillion over the next 10 years. That means that for California, the cut is almost 200 billion over the next 10 years. We are going to miss 20 billion of federal funding for Medicaid. So if we do nothing, what’s going to happen is that a lot of people are going to lose their Medicaid health insurance, and they are going to struggle to find anything else affordable. So it’s been estimated that within a few years the people without health insurance will go up from six percent today, a very good number, up to ten percent, reversing half of the progress with Obamacare. Okay, so we’re missing 20 billion per year, but we are a very rich, wealthy state. If the federal government retreats, in principle the state can decide, you know, to tax and spend to replace the lost funding. In California, it is extremely difficult to tax and spend through the normal legislature way, because you need a two-third majority in both chambers, and that’s very hard to bring together. So effectively, over the last 20 years, when there was a revenue need for a spending program, it’s come through the ballot process initiative. So that’s what we’re seeing here, driven, you know, by the healthcare union, which is very worried...

Emmanuel Saez: ...about so much Medicaid funding loss that’s gonna affect, you know, hospitals, especially in disadvantaged areas. So they wanted to find a way to replace this funding, and they decided to fund this in a progressive way. California already has a pretty good individual income tax system. That is, here in California we tax high labor income earners pretty well. We have a top tax rate of 13.3%. That’s the highest in the country. So we tax millionaires well. So it’s hard to further increase this tax rate. Where the tax system fails in California, as well as in the federal government, is really for the billionaire class. It turns out that they are undertaxed relative to high-income earners, you know, that are not quite as wealthy. So you see the combination of those two things, their wealth surging so much that there is now a ton of potential revenue from the billionaire class, combined with the fact that they pay relatively low taxes, made the billionaire tax, you know, the natural target, you know, to find that lost federal funding of 20 billion per year. So we’ve talked about how much wealth they have. They have more than two trillion. So if you can just get 1% per year, 1% of more than 2 trillion is $20 billion. So that’s exactly what we need to replace that lost funding. And that’s how the tax came to be. The tax, it’s gonna be five percent but spread over five years, so that you pay one percent per year, and that solves that funding problem for the next five years.

David Fenton: Just to make this a little more clear for people, billionaires don’t pay taxes because they don’t get paid in regular income like the rest of us. And in fact, in our system, they can hold on to enormous amounts of stock wealth and never be taxed on it. Literally never. And they borrow against it, so they live without income. So that’s why their tax share is less than many university professors and janitors. So this is really why I believe you’re doing this. So it’s one percent a year for five years. That’s the proposal that the voters will face. Is that right?

Emmanuel Saez: Correct. Let me expand, if you want, a little bit on why they pay low taxes. Taking perhaps the example of the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. 95% plus of their wealth comes from Google, now it’s called Alphabet stock. Google pays almost no dividends, so they don’t get dividend income, you know, taxable at the individual level. They don’t get executive compensation either from Google. So they generate taxable income only when they sell Google stock. And relative to the enormous gains they’ve been making, they sell a minuscule amount, literally, you know, to fund their private consumption. If they want to influence society by giving to charity, they give it, and therefore it doesn’t generate income, it’s not taxable. So they can get away with enormous wealth gain with paying very little. If you take the billionaire class, you know, as a group in California, we estimate that the individual income tax they pay is only something like three to four billion, which amounts to 0.2% of their wealth. So one-fifth of one percent of their wealth per year. And as we were discussing earlier, their wealth has increased, you know, has tripled over the last few years. So really the tax take with the individual income tax of the billionaire class is really minuscule. And that’s why, just to restore, you know, a fair tax system where the billionaire class pays according to its ability to pay, we really need a tax specifically designed to hit the billionaires. And obviously, you know, the wealth tax on billionaires is the most direct way to accomplish this.

David Fenton: Let me put this in perspective for people. Sergey and Larry, the Google co-founders, who’ve done a lot of good for the world, let’s acknowledge that. I believe they are now each worth approximately two hundred and seventy-five billion dollars. Do I have that about right?

Emmanuel Saez: Correct.

David Fenton: And Google stock has gone up fifty percent in the last year. So they have five hundred and fifty billion dollars. You’re talking about them paying one percent of it a year for five years. That’s less than they pay their investment advisors. They pay their hedge fund managers 2% plus a percentage of the gains, and they pay it to them whether they win or lose. So it’s kind of surprising, frankly, that the don’t-be-evil people are so unempathetic that they’re unwilling to give up one percent a year of their vast, incredible wealth, and they’re fighting you tooth and nail. I’m really, frankly, quite surprised.

Emmanuel Saez: My reaction to this is that they are a group that pays very little taxes, as we’ve discussed, and therefore this wealth tax proposal is a shock to them, because for the first time they are gonna be asked to pay, you know, a substantial amount. Modest relative to the gains they’ve made, but still, you know, large relative to the taxes they currently pay. And it’s almost as if they were living in a world where, okay, billionaires, you don’t touch them. And now they see that it’s gonna be a democratic process where literally voters are gonna decide to abolish tax privilege of billionaires by, you know, enacting a billionaire-targeted tax. So it’s a scary moment for them. That’s why I’m not surprised, you know, by their opposition.

David Fenton: But not all of them. I mean, Jensen Huang from Nvidia has said he’s willing to pay it to live in California. So, you know, there is a split. So you have a MacArthur Genius Award, you have a Clark Medal. You could have stayed an academic economist, and instead you’ve gotten yourself in a knife fight in California. Tell us why. Why are you doing this?

Emmanuel Saez: It is true that by inclination I’m more the academic who likes to sit in his office and crank the numbers. But you know, I’ve been following the evolution of inequality year after year in the United States for 25 years, and that is really the fact that has radicalized me. The fact that over the last decades, you know, there have been a lot of policy discussion, it’s been part, you know, of the public debate for a very long time, but we haven’t seen policymakers come up with solutions that really address the problem. So that’s why I felt like it was my duty, literally, that whenever politicians wanted to have bold new proposals, I would be there to help and advise them. And actually it started really with the presidential primary campaign where Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders started proposing, you know, very significant wealth taxes on the ultra-rich.

David Fenton: Speaking of politicians, as you know, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is opposed to this wealth tax. He’s campaigning against it. Just recently, on the very day that you qualified for the ballot, he came out in favor, he said, of a national wealth tax. You know, normally he says, well, you know, good things start in California. So what do you think happened here?

Emmanuel Saez: I wasn’t surprised by the opposition of billionaires. What surprised me more is the wide opposition to the billionaire tax idea by a really large part of what we could call, you know, the establishment. That includes, you know, a large number of Democrats, and Gavin Newsom fits in there. And that, in my view, you know, the simplest explanation is the influence that billionaire class has on a lot of the establishment, and in particular, you know, the political establishment. I’ve seen it myself, you know, being an academic. Billionaires also have a lot of influence in the university. I’ve talked myself to billionaires. We’ve had to talk to them, you know, for funding. As you know, they fund a lot of charitable causes. So they really know, you know, who are the power brokers, and they make sure, you know, to cultivate them. And that’s why all the previous attempts that tried to run through the legislature in California, you know, some wealth tax bills were introduced, fail, utterly fail, because most of the elected officials got convinced, you know, by billionaires that the current status quo was very good and that nothing should be done here. And that’s why, to do something, it really needed to be a direct democracy, you know, through the ballot mechanism.

David Fenton: The healthcare workers union, SEIU, that’s backing this proposal of yours, offered to Newsom to drop the tax to two percent if it would be legislated, and he said no. So what does that tell you?

Emmanuel Saez: What that tells me is that the only tax on billionaires that Gavin Newsom is gonna accept is exactly zero. He literally doesn’t want them to pay a penny more. And frankly, if you worry about the rising power of oligarchy, as he said himself, you know, the next day, that position is untenable. As you mentioned, Gavin Newsom, when he was campaigning for governor here in California, he was extremely proud of saying big changes happen here in California first. And frankly, that’s one of them, in the sense that this ballot could be a turning point, because for the first time it’s a concrete, very simple policy proposal that starts fighting back against the billionaires.

David Fenton: I’m disappointed. I’m glad to see he came out for it nationally. I hope that if he becomes president he does that. I mean, that’s a good thing. Of course, his argument is that you can’t do this state by state because the billionaires will leave. Now, I know you’ve answered this many times before. Could you give us a brief explanation of why you think he’s mistaken about this? You’ve taken a lot of measures in here to make it so that they can’t leave. You made it retroactive, you have very stiff penalties for any kind of misrepresentation. Can you tell us briefly how you respond to that argument?

Emmanuel Saez: It is true that you can move from one state to another, so states often face, you know, that concern that if you do a policy that’s too progressive in one state, you’re gonna chase away your high-income, high-wealth people. I should say, first thing is that California or New York have the most progressive income tax systems in the country, and yet they are heavily overrepresented in terms of high-income earners. So the fact that any state doing a progressive policy is a disaster is not borne out by the experience. So it’s more like a political argument. And Republicans, at least, they are consistent. They are gonna make it for the billionaire tax, but also, you know, for the millionaire tax in California, or for climate change regulations, you know, that happen in one state. They make it across the board. And it’s a vastly exaggerated argument, because California has done very well, you know, or New York have done very well with millionaires in spite of their very progressive taxes. Now, because we knew this concern of mobility would be there, we designed the tax precisely to minimize the risk of mobility. And so the way it was done is that any billionaire who is a resident as of January first of this year, so six months ago, January 1st, 2026, will be liable for the tax if he is a billionaire by the end of the year, regardless of whether he moves or not in 2026. So effectively, to escape the tax, you needed to move before January 1st, 2026. And because the proposal was announced in late November, that effectively left a one-month window for billionaires to leave. And we set it up that way because all the experts, the tax accountants that work with wealthy folks, you know, to help them with their residency moves and changes, are clear on that point. It’s impossible, if you’re heavily involved in a state like most billionaires are, to cut your ties with California, to sever residency within one month. So it’s not just about buying real estate in another state. You need to...

Emmanuel Saez: ...cut your professional ties, and also make your primary residence the other state. All your social links, you know, should be moved to the other state. We basically believe that it’s almost impossible unless you are really prepared. We don’t think billionaires, in spite of what the press reports are saying, will be able to pull it off. It is true that in the long run, you know, if this were an annual tax repeating itself year after year, some billionaires may choose to leave.

David Fenton: I mean, for more than one percent of your...

Emmanuel Saez: Yes. You see, so this one is based on a retroactive residency. But if the state were to later on introduce a new permanent wealth tax, there could be some mobility. That is, a retired billionaire who doesn’t need to work day in, day out in California could possibly leave. So that’s why it is true that states don’t have as much power, basically.

David Fenton: Yeah, well, that’s why they’re the laboratory to get these things started. Ultimately we have to have national wealth taxes. Isn’t it true that you’ve also calculated that if some left, the loss in income taxes would be minuscule compared to the amount raised through the wealth tax?

Emmanuel Saez: Because billionaires currently pay very little California individual income tax, three to four billion a year. Even if we lose some of them or many of them, you see, the loss individual income tax is gonna be a fraction of those three to four billion. The legislative office said possibly, you know, a few hundred millions per year. So that’s a fraction of a billion, very small, relative to the one hundred billion revenue that we are expecting. So that’s why all those arguments that Governor Newsom himself, you know, is repeating, we see them frankly as propaganda people are peddling to try and defeat this initiat...

David Fenton: Well, I hope he changes his mind. In my book, The Activist’s Media Handbook, I talk about how stories need heroes and villains to teach people. And you are going up against two hundred or so billionaires who are not held in high regard by the public. You have Bernie Sanders behind you. I hope, I expect you’ll get some other celebrities involved in this. And so you’re really gonna have a classic good versus evil. You know, I know a few California billionaires and others, and you know, some of them do a lot of good work. I am surprised by how vehemently opposed to this very minuscule tax some of them seem to be. I hope they’ll change their mind too, but I guess I doubt it. Emmanuel, what did you give up personally? You’re under enormous attack. Are you comfortable with the trade that you made to do this?

Emmanuel Saez: Whenever you produce academic work that’s used in the public debate, you know, in particular, you know, to support policies, so in my case, you know, progressive tax policies, you’re gonna be attacked. I think being attacked in the public sphere is actually a sign of success. That is, you’ve done something opponents think is dangerous, threatening, and hence their need for attack. I should say as well that myself, I’m in the front line, you know, on the academic front. Perhaps not, you know, the first line, you know, of the folks, you know, the union members who sponsored the initiatives. So colleagues of mine, like Gabriel Zucman, who is on social media and helping, you know, boost the social media operation for the campaign. But yes, it’s an intense moment. But at the same time, you know, look, I’ve studied inequality all my life. Finally we can do something about it. You have to be excited, even though it is for sure a stressful moment as well.

David Fenton: You wrote a book that has injustice in the title, so I guess you feel it personally.

Emmanuel Saez: Yes.

David Fenton: As opposed to Elon Musk, who says that we shouldn’t have empathy, empathy is a problem. So thank you for your empathy. You’ve said that we’ve had billionaire capture of politics, and that these people will resist any legislative effort to tax them, which is why you’ve gone to the ballot. What does this say about the state of our democracy? You know the quote attributed to former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, that you can have a democracy or you can have great concentrations of wealth, but you can’t have both. What does this say to you about the state of American democracy?

Emmanuel Saez: I do think that yes, any democracy that faces a very high concentration of income and especially wealth is gonna have challenges, basically because wealth transmutes, you know, into power at the very top. And democracy is our attempt as humans, you know, to have the most possibly distributed political power. So those two things are obviously gonna clash. You can see, you know, this ballot initiative, you know, some people have framed it as democracy versus oligarchy. It’s literally pitting one person, one vote against oligarchs who have tremendous influence, because they can convince, you know, the establishment to campaign against, and they can also directly fund the campaign against with their millions, if not hundreds of millions. It’s gonna be an important battle. We’ll see how it comes out, but it shows that fight. Even if we fail, we shouldn’t despair. You know, the fact that our democracy allows us, you know, to fight this battle at the ballot box is already a big achievement. We’ve seen in the past, you know, democracies of a century and a half ago were half democracies, because they were giving a lot more power to the high income, wealthiest people. Literally, you know, you had poll taxes needed, that you needed to be rich enough to be able to vote. As a result, the outcome of that was often, you know, policies that preserved the oligarchy. In America, formally we’re still a democracy. Anybody here, any citizen, resident of California, can vote. So that’s our opportunity.

David Fenton: Now we have, of course, a Supreme Court that’s changing the definition of democracy away from one person, one vote to one dollar, one vote, which is outrageous. And as you know, they just lifted basically all spending caps for their oligarchic buddies. It’s a tragedy to see this court so corrupted. I mean, you know, I think you’d agree with me, this is basically un-American. We’re supposed to be the anti-tyrannical country, and here we are enshrining, you know, a new aristocracy. I thought that was supposed to happen in France. AI is minting more billionaires, and it’s happening really fast. Does this change your math? Is what you’re talking about doing enough?

Emmanuel Saez: You have to see the California initiative as a first step. Here we’re not talking about reversing the extraordinary wealth concentration we’ve experiencing, because as we discussed earlier, taking 5% is minuscule when you look at the enormous increase, you know, like a tripling over just the last few years. So we can’t hope that this wealth tax by itself will be sufficient. As a first experience, it is fundamental, because if it works, namely it passes, and the tax successfully raises revenue and it’s not overturned by the court system, it will have demonstrated that there is a tool right there to fight back against billionaires, to be used, hopefully, you know, later by the federal government, as Gavin Newsom himself proposed, and as well as other countries.

David Fenton: They’ll still be billionaires. They’ll just be paying a fair share of taxes.

Emmanuel Saez: Yes. I mean, you know, very simply, the fact that their wealth increases so fast, you know, on average, we discuss, you know, six points faster than the economy. So that means just to stabilize them relative to the size of the economy, you’d need a five to six percent wealth tax every year on billionaires.

David Fenton: I mean, America, as you know, has become a bit of a jungle for the average person. No health care, you know, expensive education, crushed in student debt, you know, low wages, part of why we have so many poor people getting health care from the state. It’s really the jungle compared to some other industrialized countries. And it didn’t used to be this way. We used to have much higher taxation on the wealthy, and we used it to build the infrastructure and the success of the country for everyone, including them. You know, now this is starting to happen elsewhere. As you know, Massachusetts passed a four percent surtax on millionaires, and it brought in twice the public revenue that was initially forecast. In New York, Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani have just passed a so-called pied-à-terre tax, to tax apartments of wealthy people who don’t live there full time, which I really applaud. And by the way, it looks like I may be subject to that tax, because I have an apartment in New York, and I’m happy to pay it for the right to participate in the great city of New York. So do you think this is gonna happen more? Do we have other examples?

Emmanuel Saez: So it’s obvious that the fact that wealth is concentrating at the top and the social state in the United States is far from complete. You know, we still have a lot of people uninsured who don’t have access to the basic right, you know, of healthcare. It means there are gonna be a lot more, you know, democratic demand for finding progressive revenue sources, and therefore those type of initiatives are gonna come back. And you know, I agree with you that the New York initiative is very good. It’s good that Massachusetts, you know, passed the millionaire tax. But I like to boast that the California billionaire tax is really an order of magnitude different, because for a billionaire, you know, the apartment in New York is a very small thing.

David Fenton: A trifle. We used to go after monopolies and break them up. This also prevented excessive concentrations of wealth. We used to boost unions so that workers had leverage and could bargain for living wages, and less of a insane ratio where a CEO of a company makes three, four hundred times what the average worker at the company makes. We used to have a period that economists called the Great Compression, the aftermath of World War Two, when we had the least amount of income and wealth inequality pretty much any country at any time. And that’s when this country really boomed and we had shared prosperity. The Scandinavian countries that have higher taxes and higher benefits, but also are doing extremely well. This is your field. How are we gonna make America a more fair country and yet maintain our economic dynamism?

Emmanuel Saez: To answer that, we need to look at our great history here in America, as well as around the world. So let me remind our audience that America in the late 19th century, you know, the Gilded Age, looked a lot like what we are seeing today, with robber barons having created huge monopolies, you know, for railroads, for oil, etc., for all these new big industries, and concentrating wealth, squeezing, you know, their workers, their customers, influencing governments. So how did the US succeed in breaking, you know, that first Gilded Age? It happened in two or three steps that you’ve briefly alluded to. You know, Teddy Roosevelt, early 20th century, breaks the monopolies by saying, you know, a monopoly shouldn’t happen. If you’re a monopoly, we’re gonna break you. Frankly, that’s what we need for many of those tech companies that have become too global and also actually harmful for the customer. That is, when their pursuit is purely profit, they end up being obsessed by selling ads, and to sell ads they need to addict, you know, the users, our children. So that needs to be regulated. So it’s a mix of regulating monopolies and regulating harmful product, like we did for tobacco, that we need. The second step in US history comes after World War I, you know, when the US is the first country to really develop very progressive taxation, progressive income tax, the progressive estate tax, and large corporate taxes on profits. Actually, that’s the first country in the world to do it, as early as 1917. It disappears, but then it comes back with the federal FDR administrations during the Great Depression and World War II. And the third step is the one you mentioned, is boosting unions, so that when there is economic growth they can make sure, you know, the workers get their fair shares. And that mix of policies, no monopolies, progressive taxation, union power, coincides with the era of the best...

Emmanuel Saez: ...economic growth experience that the US has experienced, you know, those decades during and after World War Two, where growth was extremely good and particularly, you know, very broadly distributed, you know, shared prosperity, as you said. So unfortunately a lot of that has disappeared in the US, but it survives, or some aspects of it survives, in European countries. And I do think the Nordic countries you’ve mentioned, Norway, are the best example of how this can be achieved while maintaining, you know, the highest standard of living. So in some sense, we’re in an easier position than in the first Gilded Age, because we have those examples.

David Fenton: As a nation, in the aggregate, we’re much wealthier than we were then. There’s a lot more to go around. Incentives for wealth creation are important. We’re not talking about total equality, you know, all this false propaganda. That’s another thing, of course, that all this wealth money does, is it spreads propaganda to justify itself, and it’s really infected people. I mean, for example, the top tax rate on the highest earners, I believe over the equivalent of about five million dollars a year today, used to be effectively over 70%. And the effect of that was that owners of companies would pay their workers more and invest more in their companies, because they didn’t want to give the money all to the government. So the whole propaganda is upside down. High taxes can have great economic benefit, but of course they don’t want you to know that. Do I have that right?

Emmanuel Saez: I think that’s right. You know, it’s hard to fathom it today, but indeed for decades, you know, from the forties to the sixties, it was above 70% and even reached, you know, the extraordinary 90% plus. It basically, US society was saying, look, you can’t pay yourself a huge amount, because we’re gonna confiscate it.

David Fenton: That’s how Eisenhower built the interstate highway system and invested in all the great public universities. And by the way, nobody paid ninety percent, as you know, but it was effectively quite high. And then Ronald Reagan came in in 1980 and cut it in half. You know, now we have this situation where they want people to think that the country’s broke. We ain’t broke, folks. We’re richer than ever. We just have a bunch of hoarders that need to give some back for the sake of the country and humanity. They’re saying that you really are out to make this permanent. So can you be honest with us about that? Do you favor that?

Emmanuel Saez: I do. I’ve repeated it, I’ve said it several times, and let me repeat it, because it’s very important. This ballot is very important because it can be a first demonstration, but to really attack the problem of wealth concentration, you need stronger and permanent wealth taxes. We need to show that it can work here in California, and then hopefully, you know, if we get a progressive in the White House with a well-lined up Congress, we will be able to do something stronger at the federal level. But even at the state level, you know, like California, California is an engine, you know, creating lots of billionaires. There is a way to get some of that enormous wealth, you know, in the form of revenue, with a reasonable wealth tax. I do think that up to 1% per year will be fine. You know, Silicon Valley produces billionaires at such a rate, you know, that even if you have to pay your 1% wealth tax per year, the same we have to pay, you know, on our houses, every year, California remains, you know, the best place to be if you want to build, you know, a business that’s gonna make you a billionaire.

David Fenton: Yeah, plus if you move to Florida, you’re gonna go underwater, folks, because of some other billionaires that are keeping us from doing anything about climate change. So, anything else that you wanna stress to us?

Emmanuel Saez: So I hope, you know, the audience will be engaged, and I welcome them all, you know, to talk to their friends and their network and tell them, you know, yes, to get the good information, and in this one, don’t necessarily believe the establishment. We need, you know, those fresh, new, bold ideas. And I do believe, you know, I believe in US democracy. I want to be an optimist, and I do believe that the US is often a leader, California especially so. I think the stars have aligned, you know, in the sense that now people see the enormous harm that can come, you know, from very concentrated wealth. The products that billionaires produce, we are worried about them. We’re no longer so convinced, you know, that it’s the best possible thing for humanity. We need the revenue. In my view, you know, all those things align to give us suddenly, you know, a fighting chance to make history in November here in California.

David Fenton: The good news is that the majority of the American public, including a lot of Republicans, support higher taxes on the wealthy. I mean, it’s just obviously out of whack and out of balance. So where can people go to find out more about the initiative?

Emmanuel Saez: We hope, you know, to ramp up our operations, in you know, so that the initiative will find you on social media wherever you are. But there is, you know, type California billionaire tax, you know, on Google precisely.

Emmanuel Saez: You’ll see the official campaign website. Myself, you know, I’ve produced a number of papers, but that’s more technical academic webpage.

David Fenton: We have this feature called Pass the Torch, where activists like you, ‘cause you’re now an activist, not just an economist, let us know about other people doing great work. Wanna nominate anyone?

Emmanuel Saez: I do have an obvious name to give you, and that’s Gabriel Zucman. I mentored him here at UC Berkeley, and he’s become way more famous than I am, because he sponsored, you know, a wealth tax in France that became so famous that it was called the Zucman tax, with demonstrations in the streets saying, you know, we want the Zucman tax. So he’s here this summer to help us boost, you know, this California wealth tax initiative, and he’s also pushed for a global wealth tax, you know, international, with Brazil, the G twenty. So he’s a fascinating person to have, even closer, you know, to the activist world than I am.

David Fenton: Right. Okay. Well, that’s a great suggestion. Thank you very much for being with us, Emmanuel.

Emmanuel Saez: Thank you, David, for having me.

The Fenton Forecast podcast is now AGITATION NATION.

Because the nation needs AGITATION.

We need to agitate against tech billionaires. Against oil companies toasting the planet for profit, and the politicians they have bought. FOR health care, housing, and living wages. Against racism, fascism, and the new feudalism. FOR taxing the wealthy and taking big money out of politics. FOR safe, regulated AI.

“Lessons from 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator.” That is the subtitle of my book, The Activist’s Media Handbook. That is who I interview on the podcast – activists and thinkers agitating for a better world.

My podcast guest this week is journalist Joy Reid, formerly MSNBC’s first Black female prime-time anchor. She was fired in 2025 after outspoken reporting and commentary on Israel’s war against civilians in Gaza. And after repeatedly calling out the Trump Administration’s blatant racism. It was just too much truth for cable TV.

Now Joy is back, unfiltered and independent on @thejoyreidshow on YouTube, where she already has 500,000 followers, plus 200,000 on Substack . Many other journalists are going the independent route, like Mehdi Hasan, Paul Krugman, Don Lemon and Jim Acosta. It reminds me of the late 1960s, when journalists quit mainstream media to start hundreds of so-called “underground,” anti-war, independent newspapers across the country. I got my start (at age 17) at Liberation News Service, a kind of AP/Reuters for these outlets. My mentor there, Allen Young, had been a Washington Post reporter disgusted at their misleading coverage of our war against Vietnamese civilians.

Joy Reid’s motto is “Truthful, but not Neutral.”

She decries the “recreation of a plantation economy” and surveillance state by big tech.

She calls what Israel has done to Palestinians in Gaza genocide. While this is still controversial on American TV, it is the precise finding of human rights organizations across the globe, including B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group. In 2025, they released a report titled “Our Genocide,” concluding that Israeli state policy changed from repression to total physical and social destruction. The group pointed to the bombing of populated urban areas, the deliberate dismantling of infrastructure like water, sanitation and the health care network, creating conditions of mass starvation and repetitive displacement, and public statements by officials dehumanizing Palestinians while blurring the line between combatants and civilians. Human Rights Watch, founded by Jews, has also concluded Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. 20,000 dead children were not all Hamas shields. Nor was every leveled apartment building or murdered journalist or first responder, of which there were so many. (Please note – Joy and I both condemn Hamas and want them tried for war crimes too).

Joy, a lifelong Democrat, says the party “needs a Tea Party-type challenge” from groups like the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America. She decries the Islamophobia directed at New York Mayor Mamdani — pointing out that nobody calls Senator Chris Van Hollen or Bernie Sanders anti-Semitic when they criticize Israel.

I knew Michael Harrington, who helped start DSA in 1982 after leaving the old Socialist Party of America, and is also credited with inspiring Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. He would be thrilled to see DSA candidates’ triumph in recent elections. I do worry about the utopian crazies — every group has them — calling for “abolishing prisons” and “defunding the police.” This kind of dogmatic, out-of-touch rhetoric will be featured in Republican attack ads. Joy Reid isn’t worried about it, but I am. Back in the 60s, I watched the crazies yelling “off the pigs” and blowing up buildings help Nixon win.

Joy and I talk about the Trump attacks on Black America. When Trump says DEI, he means BLACK. Firing black civil servants, Generals, and a member of the Federal Reserve Board who is black. This, along with a clearly racist Supreme Court (OF INJUSTICE) intentionally wiping out Black Congressional districts in the name of “equality.” It is a new Reconstruction, coming at a time when once again Black people are being found mysteriously hanging or dead.

Joy decries how the media “normalizes” Trump. She points to a NY Times article in the late 1930s that spoke approvingly of Hitler’s bunker. After all, it was J.D. Vance who called Trump “America’s Hitler.”

You can listen to my interview with Joy Reid on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch it on YouTube or here on Substack.

We welcome your feedback. Write to us at hello@fentonforecast.com Our website will soon also be reachable at agitationnation.com

Your Agitator Host,

David

Here is the transcript of my interview with Joy:

Agitation Nation, Episode 1: Joy Reid

Announcer: Coming up on this episode, journalist Joy Reid.

Joy Reid: So I actually think the Democrats need a Tea Party. The Democrats need a Tea Party movement like yesterday.

Announcer: Agitation Nation, where free speech is under attack in America. Trump, like all authoritarians before him, is assaulting the media. He’s suing the networks, threatening broadcast licenses and getting billionaire friends to buy media platforms, all to destroy independence. Today’s guest is a victim of media censorship who fought back. One of MSNBC’s top hosts, Joy Reid, was fired in 2025, largely because she spoke out against Israel’s overkill war against civilians and the death and suffering of children in Gaza. Joy fought back by establishing her own independent journalism platform. Now her show has half a million subscribers on YouTube and growing. Like other journalists going the independent route, Joy can now speak her truth without censorship and give you that message unfiltered. In this episode, it’s unfiltered talk about Israel and AIPAC. DSA versus the Democrats, and where Joy sees independent media going next. Your host is David Fenton, activist and agitator for over 50 years, a pioneer in the use of PR and advertising for social change. Here’s his conversation with Joy Reid. This is Agitation Nation.

David Fenton: Welcome, Joy Reid. Thank you for joining us. So good to see you.

Joy Reid: David, it has been too long, and it is great to see you too.

David Fenton: And we have a very good morning today, because we had a lot of victories last night, which we’ll talk about in a minute. Joy, you made a big shift to independent media. How does it feel?

Joy Reid: Honestly, I’m really actually quite grateful to my former employers for sort of liberating me out into the world, because I realize now that I’m outside of the bubble that I was in a bubble. When you’re in, that’s the whole idea of a bubble, that you don’t know you’re in it, right? Everything looks clear. You feel like you can see out. You have no idea. But I do realize now that it was its own bubble. And I love being on the outside of it and being able to really just sort of speak my truth without filter. My fireaversary was, yes, it is, February 24 is my annual fireaversary, and I will celebrate it every year.

David Fenton: It’s like now, right, people have divorce celebrations, right?

Joy Reid: I’ll tell you, divorce can be liberating. Listen, I’m not mad. Sometimes marriages don’t work out. And this one was a long one. It was a good one while it, while it was good, but it didn’t work out. And I think everyone is happier for us being separated. My

David Fenton: Our audience hasn’t really heard from you, so can you tell us a little bit about what happened?

Joy Reid: Yeah, I mean, it was a strange thing because, you know, my agent was in the process of doing the thing that we do in TV, which is my contract renewal. So I had had a three year contract that was up for renewal. And we just assumed that we would just re-up it and it would be, you know, similar to the previous renewals. But this one was actually quite challenged. You know, during last summer, they weren’t really negotiating, and then sort of we got into the fall and then they started negotiating, and it was just like sort of torturous. And my agent came back to me and said, you know what, I think we’re just gonna do a one year, because they’re really, they’re, you know, they’re not making it easy. And I had, ever since October 7, 2023, been at odds with people inside of my network. And these were anonymous people, people I don’t still to this day know who they were, but constantly complaining about my coverage of what quickly emerged to be a genocide in Gaza. And my use of that term bothered people, my social media posts about it. And I would always be careful, given that I work for NBC News, to post news organizations. I would post The Guardian, or I’d post Al Jazeera, or I would post Middle East Eye. Like, I wasn’t posting like random people. But I was really posting a lot because, you know, for me as a journalist, but even just as a human being, seeing a genocide unfold is not something you see every day, right? If we had had cell phones and This type of social media during the Rwanda genocide, people would have posted it every day. And this is happening. We’re seeing children being buried in the rubble, churches being bombed, nuns being killed and snipered, children being shot in the head, schools being demolished. It was an unreal, surreal situation, watching all of Gaza be completely obliterated. And the media felt like they were treating it as a war. It isn’t a war when the people on one side of the war have stones, rocks and tarps over their heads, and the other side are the IDF. So my human feeling about it and my journalistic approach to it was to aggressively cover it. And myself and a handful of other people were really calling it a genocide and calling it what it was. And I suddenly started to rack up HR complaints, something I had never had.

David Fenton: This or other things? Yeah.

Joy Reid: People complaining, some anonymous person says they were offended by something I posted on social media, or offended by the way that I spoke about the genocide on my show. And I would always ask the HR person, well, who is it? And they would say, well, we can’t say. And I’d say, well, did it, someone on my team? No. So I’m like, at least it’s not someone on my team, you know, because we had very, you know, robust meetings, and they would have just said if they were upset about it. And so it just kind of happened, but then it sort of eased up, and we got to a negotiation. And by the end of the year, my previous boss, Rashida Jones, who was the president of MSNBC at the time, renewed the contract. So we, you know what, it was not easy, but we, so I get to the top of the year and I’m like, we’re renewed. Let’s just keep going. We’re gonna do another year. Then we won an NAACP Image Award for our show and for our coverage of the Brittney Griner situation. This was the young basketball player who was, you know, thrown into a gulag in Russia. Yeah, and we got an Emmy nomination. So I’m like, wow, we got an Emmy nomination. We got through it. I’ve, like, we got through it.

Joy Reid: We won the NAACP Image Award. So now we’re all going almost into February. And my interactions with management were congratulatory. It was them congratulating us on our show, talking about the PR, how we were gonna promote it. And then literally out of the blue, a rumor drops on Puck or one of these social media insidery Substacks, saying that I and another colleague of mine were gonna be fired. And I didn’t believe it, because again, I had just renewed my contract. Yeah, we had gone through a lot.

Joy Reid: when it came to that, and also a lot of discomfort with kind of the way that I would snark about Donald Trump and the way I would speak about him, quite disrespectfully. And I will admit, I am quite disrespectful toward Donald Trump. Who can blame you? Right. And my bosses didn’t like that either.

Joy Reid: Either, so I knew a lot of the stuff that I said and did, but I mean, but we renewed. And then on that rumor, came, dropped on a Friday night. We’d done our show. We do our Mondays and Fridays from home, because post-pandemic we were still doing a lot from home. So I’m upstairs pouring a cocktail, and my EP calls me to tell me about this rumor that’s circulating online, that we’re gonna be fired. And I said, I haven’t heard anything negative like that. And then I get the text from my new boss, Rebecca Kutler, saying, can you meet with me by phone tomorrow at noon? And that’s when I knew it was true. She and I didn’t text. You know, I had a really, like, close relationship, you know, we would fight and have a relationship, but with Phil Griffin, who’s the boss who gave me my primetime show and my weekend show and all my shows, actually. And so he’s somebody who would text me. Rebecca wasn’t, you know, we didn’t have a relationship like that. So for her to text me and ask to meet, I was like, okay, the rumors must be true. And sure enough, the next day, a Saturday, she got on with the head of HR and told me they were not renewing my show. What she didn’t say, and what we soon found out, was that everyone on my team was laid off.

Joy Reid: and that a bunch of teams were going to be laid off, including Rachel Maddow’s team, Alex Wagner’s team, and a bunch of teams all had to reapply for their jobs, which, that’s what sent me over the edge. That’s what enraged me. So it was quite a weird experience.

David Fenton: There’s still a lot of people who don’t like that word being used, genocide, but as an American Jew, and as someone who knows people at human rights organizations, both in Israel and around the world, many of which are run by Jews, it does meet the technical and legal definition of genocide and apartheid. And it’s very tragic, it’s sad. But you know, when you see what’s happening with your own eyes and ears, I’m sorry, the party can’t tell you to ignore it.

Joy Reid: It’s hard because, you know, I have a lot of friends, you know, who obviously have a lot of affection for Israel and who grew up with an affection for Israel. But even they agree with me that it’s a genocide, right. I mean, like I said, B’Tselem and other Jewish run human rights organizations who specialize in locating and identifying and naming genocides, they say it’s a genocide. The ICC has concluded that at minimum it’s war crimes. And if you think about what the reaction, response was by Benjamin Netanyahu, who by the way

Joy Reid: bears a lot of responsibility for the October 7 attack.

David Fenton: Definitely.

Joy Reid: You know, he knew for a year that this was a plan, a written plan that leaked and was discovered by three women in his national security services who he didn’t listen to.

David Fenton: Right.

Joy Reid: But there was a warning about it. The response to October 7 was weirdly late. It took a long time.

David Fenton: Yeah, very strange.

Joy Reid: Right. Yeah, the poor little kibbutzim

David Fenton: And he’s resisting an investigation.

Joy Reid: Absolutely. The little kibbutzim are down there with no protection.

Joy Reid: It takes hours and hours to get protection to the people in the kibbutzes who have nothing to defend themselves with. They sort of fudge the numbers of dead. They first, they said 1,400, then it was 1,200. They didn’t tell you how many were military and how many were police. They made it sound like they were all civilians. And then there is plenty of evidence. You know, I’m a Haaretz subscriber, have been for years.

David Fenton: Yeah, let people know what that is.

Joy Reid: Yep. Yeah, Haaretz is the most liberal, but really one of the, journal, most journalistically sound news outlets in Israel. And they aggressively covered their administration. I wish we had Haaretz to cover ours. Yeah, right. Right? Like, they’re aggressive. They don’t have it, they pull no punches. And they covered some really disturbing facts about October 7, including the delayed response, including the funding of Hamas by Netanyahu, who deliberately propped this organization up.

David Fenton: That’s a fact, folks. He wanted them funded in order to avoid having to create a Palestinian state. Well, this is all pretty well established. I do want to, because, you know, whenever you talk about this, of course, well, what about Hamas’s war crimes? And of course, we denounce that, right?

Joy Reid: And also, by the way, the same arrest warrant that was issued for Benjamin Netanyahu and for his former defense minister was also issued to the leader of Hamas. It’s just that he was dead. But Bibi Netanyahu is very much alive, and Yoav Gallant is very much alive. And that is why they have active arrest warrants and the Hamas leader doesn’t. And so you can acknowledge that there were war crimes on both sides, but you have to acknowledge that the reaction by the Israeli state was not to say we’re gonna do a tit for tat against Hamas. It was to wipe out every school, every mosque, every church

David Fenton: Every building. Every apartment.

Joy Reid: And Bibi Netanyahu himself said, these people are the Amalek. Well, what is the Amalek? The Amalekites in the Bible, is God told Israel, the Israel of the Bible, to wipe out every man, woman, child, ox and ass,

David Fenton: Right, I know.

Joy Reid: leave nothing. He said that was what they were doing. You announced the genocide. You said it was your goal.

David Fenton: Too much truth for American cable TV. And that led to you having a new career. And you’re doing really well. You have a top 50 political Substack, you have a million and a half followers on Instagram, you have almost half a million on YouTube. You’re doing great. You said we have to build our own media, you’re doing it, and there are others doing it, but the legacy media is not doing so well. So what have you gained being independent? What can you talk about that you felt constrained about before?

Joy Reid: Well, I mean, I definitely used my words very, very carefully when it came to the Israel-Hamas situation, because it was just very clear that it was just not welcome. You know, we internally were very concerned for Mehdi Hasan, because he was aggressively making these cases too. And I always felt a responsibility as somebody who’s not Arab or Muslim. And so I’m outside the community. So I’m like, I am coming from outside as an objective voice. Let me use my privilege to be able to talk about this, to protect them. He ends up getting fired anyway, builds his great thing at Zeteo. But I mean, I feel like outside of the media, and I think Mehdi would say the same, I’m now free to really speak freely about what I see. And it is crazy to be a journalist and feel like you’re not free to say what you see, what your eyes and your brain are telling you, and to feel like you have to self-censor. And so I’m really relieved to be in a position where I don’t have to self-censor at all, where I can really say what I’m seeing, the way that I’m seeing it, and to speak the way my audience is speaking to each other. You know, I’m one of them. I’m able to just say what I’m seeing and say it plainly, in a way that I don’t have to worry that I’m gonna get an angry call or email from my boss. You

David Fenton: used the word unfiltered. I guess you could say it’s unfiltered Joy.

Joy Reid: Unfiltered Joy. Like, to say that, Katie Phang, who used to work there as well, now is also independent, and I borrowed this from her. The idea is that we have to be truthful but not neutral. You know? We wish the media had been less neutral in the 1930s. I like to collect things, typewriters, old newspapers. And I have these really creepy, you know, New York Times headlines from the 1930s that were talking about Hitler’s bungalow and the design therein, and sort of speaking about him as if he was

Joy Reid: just talking. He was just saying crazy things, but he would eventually, you know, step into his role as a statesman.

Joy Reid: Times in media tried to normalize this guy. And I think we’ve done that, unfortunately, to Trump. They sort of tried to make this feel normal and make it feel like politics, when this is fascism that is running our country right now. And we need to feel free to say that.

David Fenton: Brings to mind one piece of history that I was involved in, where the US media also abetted essentially a genocide, death squads, and that was in El Salvador. All three American network news anchors all broadcast from the roof of the main hotel in San Salvador during the Salvadoran elections in the early 1980s, which was the sham elections staged by Reagan. The main person they were interviewing, Roberto D’Aubuisson, was running for president, was the head of the death squads who killed 50,000 Salvadoran civilians in that tiny country. That’s like killing many millions of Americans. And they were celebrating it. I come from the era of the anti-Vietnam War movement, where of course we got completely fed up with the mainstream media for not telling the truth about Vietnam, which spawned hundreds of anti-war underground newspapers around the country. So independent media is essential. So You’re a lifelong Democrat. Now you see Bernie was right. We had a lot of victories last night in Michigan, et cetera, but we also had a big loss in Cori Bush, and AIPAC spent what, 9 million dollars against her. Where do you think the Democratic Party is at?

Joy Reid: I started out as a Jesse Jackson voter, in 1988, who was Bernie before Bernie. So I think, you know, my politics have always been in the left end of the Democratic Party, but I also am somebody who feels like it’s important for the Democratic Party to win. And I say that because

Joy Reid: The Republican Party has warped itself into something mutated and increasingly dangerous over time. Really, since Nixon and accelerating through Reagan, the party structure and the incentive structure inside the Republican Party is truly warped. And so I root for Democrats, and I’m also a political analyst, right? And so my thoughts on the Bernie Sanders race in 2016 were mainly analytical. I did not think he could win the election. That was just my analysis at the time. But I do think, and I think now even more so, that his policy ideas were correct, and they were more correct than Hillary Clinton’s. I think there are lots of analyses you can make of that race. I don’t think he had a race a race strategy that was smart. I don’t think that he really understood how to, you know, promote his ideas to African Americans, to black people, the way Jesse Jackson did. And I think that was a problem. It’s why he ultimately couldn’t win in South Carolina, et cetera. So you can go through and parse all of that. But I will say that the Democratic Party has a similar warping that has happened to them, in which they have gone from being a populist party of the working man.

David Fenton: Right.

Joy Reid: Where black voters fled from the Republican Party into the civil rights party, the sort of aggressively pro-poor people party, they’ve turned into a corporate party that is mainly about creating peace and calm rather than justice. And we know that King said, beware of the moderate that wants calm and peace rather than justice. And I do think that is a problem, because the Democratic Party, because it is more about calm than about justice, and more about peace than about change, they frustrate voters who actually have needs. And who vote for them because they have needs. And then when they say, thanks for your vote, we really can’t meet those needs, we need 60 votes, there are all these process arguments or all these reasons we can’t do it. Voters will then run back to the fascist party because they think, well, maybe they’ll meet my needs. And so I think the Democrats’ sort of inability to truly create change, and also articulate the creation of change, is actually dangerous to the Republic. So I actually think the Democrats need a Tea Party.

Joy Reid: The Democrats need a Tea Party movement like yesterday.

David Fenton: Yeah.

Joy Reid: And I think that the DSA, Working Families Party, this Democratic Socialist wave, is the Tea Party the Democratic Party desperately needs in order to become a party that truly is about change and justice.

David Fenton: Yeah, I completely agree. It needs disruption, the sclerotic leadership of the Democratic Party. I mean, every time Chuck Schumer goes on television, I cringe.

Joy Reid: Same.

David Fenton: And of course you have all the AIPAC corruption in the leadership of the Democratic Party, which is so out of touch with voters now, including the young Jewish voters.

Joy Reid: Yeah.

David Fenton: And you have them cozying up to these tech fascist billionaires. And their so-called all of the above energy strategy, which of course

David Fenton: means rewarding oil and gas companies so they can cook the planet. Yeah, we need some differentiation here, don’t you think?

Joy Reid: Agreed. The Democratic Party complains that they can’t get young voters off the couch. Yeah, well, young voters want to solve the climate change problem, because they’re going to inherit a scorched and burning earth. They won’t hear any excuses for why we need to send bombs to Israel to kill brown people and brown children. There’s just no argument that makes sense. That the surveillance state is something that we oppose. Sorry, your base opposes the surveillance state you’re cozying up to. No one wants these AI farms in their backyard

David Fenton: Right.

Joy Reid: that are polluting the water, making the air befouled, causing noise pollution.

David Fenton: Raising people’s bills.

Joy Reid: Absolutely, and making it unaffordable. The Democratic Party has no solutions. They just have slogans. And this is an electoral problem and it’s a moral problem. And I have to say, even Hakeem Jeffries is deeply disappointing for me in that regard, because I think he has so much potential. He has star qualities in some ways, but he’s being held captive by the same corporate interests that hold Schumer hostage. And so I think this is not inspiring leadership, to say the least. And they have to change if they’re going to survive and be strong enough to beat the fascists. I

David Fenton: A supporter of DSA positions and the candidates, I will say I get a little afraid, from my own experience in the 1960s, that some of the rigid ideological far-left factions of DSA are causing problems that we don’t need. We don’t need Republicans running ads saying these people are for abolishing the police and prisons. And I hope these people wise up, that we have to deal with a mass audience and meet people where they’re at. You know, you can have your utopian, ultra-radical visions, but we can’t run on that. So are you concerned about that, or you think I’m overstating it?

Joy Reid: Really concerned about it. I mean, I think if you think about it pragmatically, the police are not gonna be abolished, right? But you could abolish ICE. But I don’t have a problem with people having a radical vision, because I think if you think about it, Dr. King had a radical vision, universal basic income, you know, universal health care. These seemed like radical visions until they suddenly seemed like necessities, right? The idea of universal health care was seen as a completely radical vision. And we ended up with something short of that with Obamacare, but we tried for universal health care and we ended up with Obamacare. And so I think sometimes you do need to present, and look, especially young voters, they don’t understand the constraints that we put on their ideas. And so it doesn’t bother me when people have a radical vision. But I think what it takes is that these people that are DSA purists, as you say, are you willing to ally with people who are just as progressive but maybe don’t have the full radical vision? Will you partner with people who are where you are and try to win these elections? What is your tactical strategy to gain actual power? And one of the people I think that is the smartest about this is Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani had what everyone believed was an incredible radical vision: free child care, free preschool, city-owned grocery stores. This is crazy talk, right? But he said, no, no, no, I have a radical vision, but I also have a strategy to gain power and to actually implement my vision. That’s what I think is missing from some of the activists. I need to hear your radical plan, not just your vision.

David Fenton: And he’s doing so well that the whole energy in New York has changed, coming out of his personality. Isn’t it amazing?

Joy Reid: I love it. It’s fun and cool again. I love it.

David Fenton: So, speaking of the mayor and your recent interview with hizzoner, you’ve pointed out Chris Van Hollen can call Netanyahu a war criminal. People hear him out. And Bernie is saying the same thing too, and he’s Jewish. So Mamdani says it and the Democrats lose their mind.

Joy Reid: Yeah.

David Fenton: You asked him if it was Islamophobia, and he deferred and said, you know, others have to judge that, like you. So do you think it’s Islamophobia?

Joy Reid: Yes, I do. I think that people hear a Muslim man say that the prime minister of the Jewish state, which, I’m a bit offended of putting Israel on all Jewish people. I think there’s some people who, you know, love Israel, and you know, but there are a lot of black people who love Liberia. Liberia’s not the African state, right? You know, and if you dislike Liberia, I don’t think that means you hate black people. Or if you do, you disagree with them.

Joy Reid: So I think it’s a bit dangerous, and I think it’s what Bibi Netanyahu wants, which is to say everything I do is on every Jewish person on earth, which is just to me, insane.

David Fenton: No thank you.

Joy Reid: It’s crazy.

David Fenton: This Jew says no.

Joy Reid: There you go. Exactly. I find it just

Joy Reid: wild. It’s like he, but I think he says it, people hear it through the lens of a pre-existing Islamophobia that has always painted Arabs and Muslims as the bad guy, as terrorists, as anti-American, as anti-West. And I think people cannot, and you know, the anti, as anti-colonial. And they are anti-colonial. By the way, I’m anti-colonial. Colonialism destroyed, you know, my people, you know on all the continents they’re from. And so people hear it

Joy Reid: differently than when Bernie says it. They say, well, he’s in the community, he can say it. Chris Van Hollen, well he’s white, so he can say it. It is a hundred percent Islamophobia, and Democrats need to acknowledge, y’all got everything that everybody else has: the racism, the sexism, the ageism, all the isms, the misogyny. It’s all in the Democratic Party, just like it’s in the Republican Party. It may present differently, but these are human issues, not partisan issues. And so, yeah, I believe it’s a hundred percent Islamophobia.

David Fenton: Yeah, it’s interesting, your reference to Liberia. Of course, that was a response to another Holocaust

Joy Reid: Yes.

David Fenton: slavery. And people don’t think of it that way.

Joy Reid: And it was actually the same, I make this analogy a lot, that it was actually done with the same sort of ideological basis, right? I mean, Zionism, it was a European phenomenon. European Zionism in the 19th century was made in part by people who wanted to create a homeland for Jewish people, and also in part by people who wanted to get Jewish people the hell out of Europe.

David Fenton: Right.

Joy Reid: And who didn’t want Jewish people to be in Europe at all, and wanted to expel them to someplace.

Joy Reid: And inside of the United States after enslavement, there were people, including Abraham Lincoln, who were like, we’re against slavery, we certainly don’t want those blacks here, we want to send them someplace where they can have a homeland. It was very similar, to the extent that some of them called it an American version of Zionism, that they were like, we’re gonna create this colony, this sort of new land for our former enslaved people, our former slaves will go somewhere. And that was Liberia. And they literally took over a country that had people in it.

David Fenton: Right.

Joy Reid: made those people second- and third-class citizens, and made the former enslaved the top class. If you look at the leaders of Liberia, they all have American-sounding last names.

David Fenton: Right, right.

Joy Reid: For a reason.

David Fenton: Well, you know, I have a slightly different view. After the Holocaust, I think, you know, a country for the Jewish people made sense. The way it was done was wrong, and there’s gonna be no peace in Israel if there’s permanent occupation of another people.

Joy Reid: Agreed.

David Fenton: And you know, those of us who want to see security for Israelis understand, as many in the former Mossad agents and generals understand, that the occupation means permanent insecurity, permanent terrorism. It’s religious fanaticism, it is a disaster. And by the way, I was just in Montgomery, Alabama, at Bryan Stevenson’s slavery museum and memorial to lynching. I’m sure you’ve been there.

Joy Reid: Yeah, brilliant. Brilliant.

David Fenton: Oh my goodness. So moving and so beautiful at the same time. Everybody should go. Go see these monuments. So here we are, and we have a racist presidency. The whole pushback on

David Fenton: DEI in the government. Every time I hear them say DEI, what I hear them saying is black.

Joy Reid: Yes, it does. It does. Because, yeah. In, functionally, DEI mainly benefited white women. It also benefited military veterans. You know, all sorts of people were benefiting from it. But I think when the right says DEI, they just mean black.

David Fenton: That, and that’s what Trump means. And now, disgusting partisan thuggery, Supreme Court of Injustice, I think you call it that, wiping out black representation on purpose. And you have Trump, you know, the only immigrants that can come in are white South Africans. And I can’t imagine what black people in America feel as they see this happening. So you’re covering this and you’re living it. So what is that like for you, and how does it compare now that you’re unfiltered, to when you worked in a traditional newsroom?

Joy Reid: I think when I was there, I definitely felt freer on this topic. I never really had any of the kind of pushback, not much of the kind of pushback that I had on the Israel Gaza stuff, when it came to race, because I think that my bosses saw this as kind of my beat. So there’s really not without any consequences.

Joy Reid: I feel like we, community, live this nightmare basically every 50 to 100 years. It just keeps happening. You know, we have enslavement, we get freedom, we get Reconstruction, that lasts 12 years, but then the backlash is insane. And you get the Redemption movement and they send all the rights into the dustbin. And then we fight our way back, we get a civil rights movement, that’s in World War One, World War Two, blacks go out and fight for their country and come back and say, hey, now we want to be treated as equals. Absolutely not. Then we have to fight another civil rights movement. And it just keeps happening. It’s unfortunately, and to me, what’s so crazy about it, it is the death knell of democracy that is just waiting. If the American experiment could accept the idea of racial equality, think of how much more prosperous we would be. There’s a Citigroup study that talks about the trillions of dollars in lost GDP because people are just so emotionally bereft that they have to keep 13% of their population poor on purpose. The idea of black or brown people being equal is such an anathema to people that they’d rather be poor. They’d rather burn their own house down than share it. It is just absolutely nonsensical and insane. But it is the disease that is slowly killing, you know, that is metastasizing inside of the body politic of the United States. And until we can cure it and figure out some way to stop it, this disease of whiteness and white supremacy, it will kill this democracy eventually. And black folks know that, because this is what the black experience has already, always been here.

David Fenton: When things are plainly racist, how do you deal with the need for so-called objectivity in covering things?

Joy Reid: Well see, I don’t believe object, that objectivity, it was a made up thing. And it was the sort of objectivity movement in the early 20th century was created when the media only consisted of white men. And they created this idea of objectivity, and they covered things like lynching with objectivity, meaning they didn’t question whether or not the lynching was a crime. They simply assumed that if the white people that lynched this black man said he committed a crime, then he did. That whoever was being hung, that must have done something. And this is the way it was covered. It was Ida B. Wells and other black journalists who insisted that this fake objectivity go away. Eventually, the northern newspapers, and I’m talking northern newspapers, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, you know, all of the northern newspapers covered lynchings as if they were a benign non-threat. And then when black journalists really forced the media out of this fake objective form, you had the coverage of the civil rights movement that created this huge, huge backlash among white Southerners who said, “oh, the media hates us.”

David Fenton: Right.

Joy Reid: The media isn’t fair. The media is biased. And that is where this idea of bias came from. So objectivity, it’s like saying you can have comity in the Senate, and those were the good old days. Well, that’s because there was only white guys there.

David Fenton: [laughing] Right.

Joy Reid: Whether you were a right-wing white guy or a left-wing white guy, they were all white men, so they could relate on that form. So yeah, there was a lot more comity and they could have cigars together. There were no women or people of color, you know. So I think it’s a fake idea

Joy Reid: I don’t think we need objectivity. I think we need fairness. Yeah. But there’s no one who’s objective. Everyone has a point of view. It’s absurd to think there is some voice from nowhere.

David Fenton: I mean, striving to be fair and to tell the truth is a great ideal.

Joy Reid: Absolutely.

David Fenton: But it’s impossible to do it perfectly. Everybody has their own biases. You know, at the lynching museum in Montgomery, one of the things that really struck me is that they were lynching black people in Minnesota in the 1950s.

Joy Reid: Yes.

David Fenton: 1950s. So what do you think is being reported neutrally today in the mainstream media that historians will later call sanitized?

Joy Reid: I think that this rash of hangings of black men found hanging, and I covered one in between shows, when my dayside show got cancelled and Phil Griffin sent me out to be a reporter. And I covered a bunch of church burnings in the South, and a hanging in Mississippi that every black person in that community believed was a lynching, but all of the white media and the law enforcement all insisted it was a suicide. No one believed it was a suicide. And I’ve covered other cases that are similar, in which the black community is certain that this person was killed. And the media and the authorities say no, it was definitely self-inflicted. I mean, there’s one case in Indiana where an 18-year-old black teenager goes to a July 4th party, same weekend as Nolan Wells disappeared in Mississippi, and he is shot in the head, found with a gunshot wound to the head. The excuse made by the all-white, this is at a white household, they said, well, we were playing Russian roulette, and that’s how he shot himself. But the bullet casings that were found next to his body don’t match the gun that was used. And yet the authorities still insisted it’s suicide. How? So, you know, and so I think when we look back, we’re gonna find that we are back in a lynching era. I hate to say that. It pains me to say it, but I am very suspicious about the rash of hangings and mysterious deaths, particularly of young black men in the South. And I think when we look back, we’re gonna realize we’re back in a very, very dark era. And the reason I say that is that if you think about it, the way that whiteness created a bond between poor whites and rich white people is that they said to poor whites, you can’t have economic prosperity. We’re gonna give you nothing economically, but whiteness is your superpower. And if you need to let off steam, kill as many black people as you want, you’ll never go to jail. That was the law essentially in the South until the 1960s. You could literally kill at will, man, woman, child. Hang them from a tree, shoot them full of holes.

David Fenton: Drag them out of jail and hang them.

Joy Reid: At any point the sheriff will protect you. The sheriff might help you. The Klan was in and out of uniform. They were sheriffs, they were mayors.

David Fenton: And people cheered.

Joy Reid: And people came to it. It was- They were so bold-

David Fenton: It was like a public spectacle and they brought their kids to cheer. That’s American history, folks, that they’re whitewashing.

Joy Reid: A thousand percent. They made postcards of the lynchings. People took home body parts.

David Fenton: That’s true.

Joy Reid: There are white families right now that have noses, toes, fingers, ears in their collection of family heirlooms.

David Fenton: Come on, really?

Joy Reid: Because- yes, people took home body parts as souvenirs. And this is the history, the savage history. It’s the purge. It’s saying to white poor people, this is the power we’re gonna give you, the power of life and death over these other people, which existed during slavery too. We’re gonna give you that quasi-slaveholder power over bl- and nothing else. That’s the power of whiteness. And so I think you’ve created a culture amongst some in the white community that has this sense of impunity. If a black person dies in your presence, just cover it up. You don’t have to do anything about it. You don’t have to worry about it. That life is less valuable than your life. Your future is more important than their actual life. And that is a culture.

David Fenton: Yeah, those are the Christians.

Joy Reid: And that’s the ones who go right to church. And it’s a problem. So I fear, just as this rash of church burnings back in the mid 2000s felt like it was deliberate and that it was systematic, I feel like there’s something very, very dark going on when it comes to young black men turning up dead.

David Fenton: Well, I think the other thing that’s being sanitized is, you know, reporting on the Supreme Court as if these are legitimate legal doctrines rather than pure racism coming out of John Roberts and his crew. It’s pure racism to end representation of black congressional districts while claiming you’re doing it in the name of freedom and equality. It’s hard.

Joy Reid: And I think the other thing, if you want to talk about undercovered stories, yes, the credibility gap in our government is vast. I mean, I think globally no one trusts the US government.

Joy Reid: We’re, reliable electorate. We just keep electing fascists and then we go back to a nice guy and then a fascist. It’s just ridiculous. But I also think that this, the emergence of the surveillance state, and the sort of recreation of a kind of plantation economy based on AI compute and who’s gonna control it in the West, and who’s gonna be, you know, whether it’ll be China or us that will have primacy in AI, is creating another plantation economy and a very terrifying surveillance state. And I think the media is looking the other way. I don’t think they’re really dealing with it. And it will be one of, well, if we can still cover the news, in 20 years, it’ll turn out to be one of the most undercovered stories.

David Fenton: Boy, I so agree. I call it the refeudalization of society, the concentration of all this wealth and power in these tech barons, and now of course the vast concentrations of wealth corrupting the democracy, as we said, all too often in both parties. You know, there’s a very important book about to come out about this. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it. A friend of mine’s publishing a book in a few weeks called The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán. And these people like Peter Thiel and Elon and David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, their plan is to take over.

Joy Reid: I think you’re, there, it’s true. I mean, and these are people who, you know, sort of had awkward beginnings in their young lives, and they’ve just decided that the answer to that is to take over the world and run it like a giant plantation. And for them, all of us are just cattle. And they do believe that that is the right way to go, because they think that they’re naturally superior. And that’s never a recipe for good things for the vast majority of people.

David Fenton: Well, it’s happening fast, but you know, we have a tax on billionaires on the ballot in California coming up, and the polls are showing it ahead, and I certainly hope that it passes. It’s been kind of amazing to watch some of these billionaires flip out about, you know how much this tax is? It’s one percent a year. One percent. Which I like to point out is half what they pay their investment managers.

Joy Reid: Yes. That’s exactly right. But they think you should pay zero taxes. I mean, if you go back and you sort of look at their literature, I mean, they’re offended by the fact that Woodrow Wilson, who did a lot of really actually awful things

David Fenton: Horrible.

Joy Reid: They think the one bad thing he did was pass, was sign the legislation to create the income tax. Like, they’re like, other than that, we have no problem with Woodrow.

David Fenton: Yeah, Woodrow Wilson, who in the Palmer raids rounded up 20,000 people and deported many of them, and put Eugene Debs in jail and forced him to campaign for president from prison.

Joy Reid: Yeah. Exactly. One of the worst. And still got to be a top ten

Joy Reid: president according to the gathered historians, which still makes no sense to me.

David Fenton: So Trump has his picture on the wall, you know.

Joy Reid: Of course. Yeah. Of course he does.

David Fenton: Unbelievable.

Joy Reid: He and McKinley, his two favorite presidents.

David Fenton: So what’s your North Star now about what you won’t cover? What’s the check and balance on you now that you’re free and on your own?

Joy Reid: That’s a great question. I haven’t thought about what I would not cover, because I almost feel like, just as a person who’s just eternally curious, there’s almost nothing I wouldn’t cover. You know, I feel like if a story comes to me, you know, we have a news tips, you know, email, where we just get, we get unsolicited news tips and we try to run them down. I feel like every story is valuable in its own way and in its own right. So I feel like there is nothing that I wouldn’t cover. The one thing I miss about being in a big news organization is having a fleet of reporters. And when we were at MSNBC, we thought we had a fleet of reporters because we were borrowing them from NBC News. Once they separated, that’s when reality hit us and we realized we didn’t have any reporters at all, and they all worked for NBC. But it really truly is a sort of the Four Seasons of news, having a fleet of producers and reporters. With a very, very tiny team is actually, it turns out to be quite difficult. That’s one of the challenges that we’re looking to sort of rectify going forward, is how to sort of build our core of journalists around the country and around the world who we can go to, the correspondents that we need to really do the job I want to do.

David Fenton: And also to fact-check, and to have access to checking sources. It’s a different thing. I wonder how it’s gonna evolve. You know, Substack’s a great thing, but you know, at a certain point people can’t afford to pay for, you know, a hundred different separate journalists. I think the models will probably evolve, don’t you?

Joy Reid: I agree. And I think that is a challenge, right? For growing your Substack and growing these businesses, is that, look, people are hurting. This is a really difficult time. And I’m not a person that really believes in paywalls. And so I, you know, struggle with that idea of, do we want to paywall anything? Because we want people to be informed, and we don’t want economic crises to mean that you don’t get access to information. So that, I think, is a huge challenge. We have to figure out a model that will allow people to access this information for free, but that these businesses can still stay afloat. Somebody smarter than me has to figure out how to do that, but I think it must be done. Like, public media, I think, is everything. And I think the attacks on PBS are absolutely egregious, because that is the thing we want, right? BBC exists in Britain for that, right? They’ve got to have a publicly funded media that answers not to the government but to the people. I think the PBS model is great, but it also requires people to donate. Again, if people are broke, they can’t do that. I’m concerned.

David Fenton: Well, of course the BBC is funded by a fee on when people buy television sets.

Joy Reid: Oh is it? I didn’t know that.

David Fenton: That’s how it’s mostly funded, and it’s kind of like a Federal Reserve model. The government appoints the head of the BBC, but then they’re free to do what they want. Now it’s eroded some with all this right-wing pressure.

Joy Reid: Yeah.

David Fenton: But it’s still the best imperfect model that we have.

Joy Reid: I agree.

David Fenton: It’s a huge question, what kind of information infrastructure are we gonna build that

David Fenton: creates an informed citizenry. We have this disinformation and all this manipulation on purpose for profit, and the attention economy. When we had the fairness and the equal time doctrines, things were better. And it was when they got rid of that, when Ronald Reagan got rid of those doctrines, that Rush Limbaugh emerged. Prior to that, people would have lost their licenses if someone like Rush Limbaugh was on the air, because it was so biased and one sided. So this is a whole complex question. Maybe we can talk about it in our next section.

Joy Reid: Yes, I would love to do that, because yes, and let’s just say, I think that Bill Clinton eroded some of the fairness doctrine, sort of what was left of it. He kind of, le, chucked the rest of it into the bin. And yeah, getting rid of that, and you know, if you want to talk about a lack of objectivity, what true objectivity would be is having the other side able to also answer, right? If you had Rush Limbaugh on one side, but then whoever was broadcasting,

David Fenton: Sure!

Joy Reid: maybe, see, a news network had to put on the equivalent on the other side, at least you’d have an answer. But yeah, we now are in this wild, wild west of disinformation. It’s truly frightening. Rush Limbaugh is quaint compared to some of the disinformation that’s out now. But it’s red-pilling people into accepting the ideas of fascism in a way that makes, again, the American experiment, it puts it in deep and serious jeopardy.

David Fenton: Can’t have a democracy without an informed citizenry. All this money buying one sided viewpoints has got to be reined in. You know, in history there are over concentrations of power and then there are rebellions. And I think with the election results last night and the mayor in New York, we’re seeing the beginning of the rebellion. I’m quite confident.

Joy Reid: I am too. So I am too.

David Fenton: So that’s a positive note. One of the things we do here is we call it Pass the Torch. So who else is in independent media that people may not know about that you recommend they follow?

Joy Reid: I would start with Georgia Fort. She’s right now facing the government bearing down on her and Don Lemon for doing their job and going into that church to report on the protest. (Fort and Lemon were arrested in January 2026 while covering a protest at a St. Paul church; reporting on the incident has centered it on an anti-ICE protest rather than specifically anti-Christian-nationalism.) Georgia’s a brilliant journalist, so is Don Lemon, obviously. You know, I

David Fenton: I’ve never heard of Georgia Fort, I have to admit.

Joy Reid: Well, there you go. She’s fantastic. So she is a Minneapolis-based journalist who’s been covering the uprisings all the way back to George Floyd. She was one of the principal local media, independent media people who was covering that. She used to work in mainstream, like myself, but then she got pushed out of mainstream media and formed her own independent journalistic outfit. And she’s absolutely brilliant. But she’s somebody who’s literally covering those movements from George Floyd on, on the ground. And I think she’s somebody that’s absolutely worth covering. I think she’s great. There’s a lot of people that are good like that. You know, I cover some of the refugees from mainstream media, like Jim Acosta, who’s obviously fantastic. And you can find almost anybody who’s been pushed out of CNN or MSNBC online. But I think finding those Georgia Forts in the world, that is like the sweet spot of really finding really great journalists who are independent and who are vetted and who have been through the curation process of mainstream media, but who are now doing their thing outside.

David Fenton: Have to check her out, and I hope everybody else will. And I hope everybody will also follow you, to have some joy and some truth.

Joy Reid: Yes, please do. And I’ve got my T-shirt on

David Fenton: There you go.

Joy Reid: at TheJoyReidShow.com. That’s the YouTube version. And of course, JoyAnnReid.com is the Substack. Really appreciate everybody that’s already following. But yeah, please feel free to follow and share. And thank you, David. It’s just such a pleasure talking with you. I have such respect for you, and you know, and your knowledge and contributions to this wide medium. So I just thank you for having me.

David Fenton: Thank you for being here. So long.

Joy Reid: Cheers.

Announcer: Thanks to our guest Joy Reid. Watch her on YouTube at TheJoyReidShow.com. Subscribe to her Substack at substack.com/@joyannreid. And follow Joy on Instagram at @joyannreid. Got ideas for the show, want to pitch a guest, or just want to follow the podcast? We’re at AgitationNation.com. Also subscribe to David’s Substack and all our socials at TheFentonForecast.com. Agitation Nation is a show from the Fenton Forecast. Our theme song is Black, used with the kind permission of Jon Batiste. Our end credits theme is Power to the People by John Lennon, courtesy of EMI Records and used with permission of the John Lennon Estate. Agitation Nation is hosted by David Fenton. It’s produced and edited by R.R. Robbins. Additional producing by A.P. Hernandez. Thanks to Theo Fenton. Thank you again for listening. We’ll be back with another voice you need to hear next week. Until then, advocate, activate, agitate. The democracy you save may be your own.

Have you noticed that the hotter it gets, the more wildfires spark, the more climate disinformation floods social media? This is especially true right now on Elon’s upside-down X, where carbon pollution is good and oil/coal/gas are tickets to prosperity and a greener earth. Shame on Elon, who knows better.

My Fenton Forecast guest this week, climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, has been fighting propaganda and falsehood for decades.

In 1998, Mann and colleagues published what became known as the “hockey stick” graph. It showed centuries of a stable climate in the northern hemisphere, with a slight cooling trend, and then a rapid almost straight line up in hotter temperatures starting in the late 1800s with the Industrial Revolution. A later version for the globe, going back 2000 years, is below.

This simple graph drove the fossil fuel industry NUTS. Recognizing its clear, simple, symbolic power, the oil/coal and gas companies went into overdrive trying to discredit the graph — by trying to discredit Dr. Mann. I mean, who can say the planet isn’t over-heating quickly after seeing that graph? Seeing, they understood, is more powerful than hearing or reading.

At the time, Mann was a professor at the publicly funded University of Virginia. The industry’s paid political prostitutes started harassing Mann and the University, demanding his emails and more. It was a full-on campaign. To this day, right wing disinformers still attack the hockey stick.

But it didn’t work. Mann prevailed, and every major scientific institution in the world, including the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, accepts the accuracy of the graph.

Meanwhile, right wing pundits kept going after Mann. But he fought back. Mann won a libel suit against the “conservative” (meaning supporting planetary destruction) National Review for defaming him.

Mann is the author of essential books including “The New Climate Wars,” “Our Fragile Moment” and “Science Under Siege” with Dr. Peter Hotez.

Frequently on cable tv, Mann continually explains the link between pollution and extreme weather. On social media @michaelemann slays dragons daily. On Instagram he’s @michaelmannscientist — please follow him.

Mann explains what truly uncharted territory we are in. As climate deniers like to point out, “the climate has changed before.” It is true — but that was millions of years before human civilization, which depends on a stabile climate for agriculture. Those past changes from natural earth orbital cycles, volcanoes, etc were SLOW, over 100 million years. Whereas we have doubled carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from industrial activity in just 100 years, with most of it in the past 30. How fast will that collapse the ice sheets, submerging our cities underwater? Nobody can say if it will take 75 or 200 years from now. From a moral point of view, of course, it makes no difference. As Dr. James Hansen, the Godfather of climate science likes to say, “once the ice sheets start to move, we have no way of stopping them.”

Certainly, recent weather, and the upcoming super El Niño, are like a trip through the Book of Revelation, as Al Gore likes to say. Yet you wouldn’t know the cause is burning oil, coal and gas if you follow most of the American media. When it comes to climate, the media is an ostrich with its head in the sand. Including, sadly, the New York Times Editorial Board, which still says nothing about the emergency we are facing. The 3 tv networks — which are big on TikTok, by the way — also rarely or never explain how pollution is creating extreme weather. History will not judge them well.

Mann talks about how we face “plutocrats, petrostates and propagandists” in the fight for a liveable earth. He adds, “and the press hasn’t necessarily been our friend either.”

Doomerism, however, is something Mann rejects. We are still within a window where the very worst impacts of climate change can be avoided. Rapidly phase out and then stop burning fossil fuels, and temperatures will stop rising, he explains. We will then have to take some of the pollution down to restore a livable climate.

Mann minces no words in describing the culpability of the fossil fuel executives who are knowingly destroying climate stability. “Well, by some measure, there are crimes against humanity, and there’s arguably an even higher level of crime, crime against the planet. Because that’s everything. It’s not just humanity, it’s the only livable planet we know of in the universe. They are compromising that planet. It’s hard to imagine a greater crime than that, isn’t it?”

You can watch my interview with Michael Mann on Substack or YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback is always welcome please write to us hello@fentonforecast.com

For a livable, flourishing, prosperous Earth,

David

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Transcript Below

Episode Transcript: Dr. Michael Mann on Climate Change

Guest: Dr. Michael Mann, Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Pennsylvania; author of Our Fragile Moment and Science Under Siege

DAVID FENTON: Michael, thank you so much for being a guest on the Fenton Forecast.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Thank you, David. Good to be with you.

DAVID FENTON: And here we’re going to talk about a literal forecast, a forecast of what the weather’s going to be like in the future, depending on what we do or don’t do, right?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah.

DAVID FENTON: You’re on cable news quite frequently, and you have to give very clipped, short answers and answer a lot of questions that aren’t always the ones you want to be asked. So I wanted to start out and ask you, what do you most want people to know? Here now you have a longer format. You can dictate the terms of your own engagement. What is it that you most want people to understand and to know for a lay audience?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, thanks. It’s always nice to do these longer format interviews where you really can get into all the nitty gritty details. But in short, it’s not hard. What we need people to know is that climate change is real. It’s caused by human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels and the generation of carbon pollution in the atmosphere. It’s warming the planet and it’s leading to more extreme weather events and all sorts of impacts that aren’t far off in the future. They’re here and now. And it’s a question of how bad we’re willing to let it get at this point.

DAVID FENTON: Right. Now, you very understandably have been trying to stop a sense of so-called doomerism, of people feeling hopeless and that it’s too late and there’s nothing we can do. And at the same time, you want people to know that we’re taking enormous risks unless we get the perpetrators of this problem under control. So how do you thread that? How do you tell people how bad it’s going to be if we don’t rein them in and act and also make sure people understand that there’s a lot we can do?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, as I like to say, it’s about conveying both urgency and agency. Urgency. As we just said, we are witnessing now the catastrophic consequences of the warming of the planet caused by our continued reliance on fossil fuels. And we need to move as quickly as possible away from fossil fuels. As I like to say, if you find yourself in a climate hole, stop digging fossil fuels and burning them. That’s the urgency. The agency, it is not too late. The science tells us if we stop putting carbon pollution into the atmosphere, the warming of the planet will actually halt fairly quickly. The warming of the planet will, you know, the planetary temperatures will stabilize very quickly once we bring carbon emissions to zero. So there’s an immediate and direct consequence of our efforts to decarbonize our world.

DAVID FENTON: So certainly are seeing the effects. As we speak here in mid-March, there’s a massive heat wave bearing down on the West, like nothing that’s been seen before. I think you certainly expect to see more of that, don’t you?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, and I’ll actually be talking on cable news about that later on today. It seems that the only opportunities we have these days when it comes to mainstream media coverage is these extreme weather events. And it’s important for us to take advantage of that and connect the dots for the public so that they understand that this isn’t just about polar bears off in the Arctic decades from now. It’s about the damage and indeed deaths that are now occurring because of these catastrophic events that have been increased in frequency and severity by human-caused climate change. Right now we’re seeing this unusual pattern in the atmosphere, this pattern of the jet stream where you have a big high-pressure system out west that’s giving them that unprecedented heat so early in the spring. And at the same time, we see sort of the converse of that wave disturbance in the atmosphere where the cold air then is crashing down and we’re seeing a polar vortex event in the center of the country. Here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the temperatures dropped about 40 degrees over the course of 24 hours just the other day as that cold air moved in.

Now, there’s some science that suggests, you know, not just that the planet is warming. And so we expect, you know, to see more of that record heat like we’re seeing out west right now. That is one of the things we expect to see. But there’s also some indications that we may see a more wavy jet stream. And so larger extremes at both ends of the spectrum, extremes of drought and flooding, as well as extremes of heat and cold.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah, and some people have called that global weirding.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, that’s right. And the science increasingly supports that there’s a connection. It’s still being debated. You know, there are scientists of good faith who have different views about that particular aspect of climate change. But if you ask me, the evidence is increasingly coming in in favor of the warming of the planet, changing the pattern of the jet stream in a way that gives us more of these persistent weather extremes.

DAVID FENTON: A kind of destabilization.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, you could think of it that way. Yeah.

DAVID FENTON: And we’ve had a relatively stable climate for most of human civilization. At least this is what allowed agriculture to flourish. And so now, because of the burning of fossil fuels, we’re destabilizing that stability to great peril. And, you know, of course, many people get confused by the intentional disinformation that the fossil fuel industry spreads through its propaganda apparatus and its apparatchiks. And of course, the most common reaction that you get when people want to not accept this is, well, the climate has always changed before. And of course, that’s true. So how do you explain to people in simple terms that, yes, that’s true, but this time it’s different?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, well, that was the... of my last book, not the current book that you see behind me, but my last book, Our Fragile Moment, which is about the lessons that we can actually learn about the climate crisis from studying Earth history over not just millions, but billions of years, all the way back to sort of the origins of our planet.

And it is, of course, true that there have been times when the planet was warmer than it is today. And we know that that’s because there were higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the very greenhouse gases that we are spiking today from fossil fuel burning. Here’s the difference. If you go back 100 million years, so you’re back into sort of the mid-Cretaceous period, the planet was warmer than it is today. There was no ice at the poles. That unusual warmth was associated with very high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, probably more than a thousand parts per million in the atmosphere. So nearly three times what there is today in the atmosphere. And now here’s what happened. Over a hundred million years, nature through natural... like plate tectonics and weathering processes that regulate the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over very long timescales, over 100 million years, the Earth system took that carbon out of the atmosphere and buried it beneath the surface. That’s what produced fossil fuels. What are we doing today? We’re taking all of that carbon that nature buried over 100 million years, and we’re putting it back into the atmosphere. But not over 100 million years, over 100 years.

DAVID FENTON: Right.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: A million times faster. And there’s simply no evidence that we or any other living things can deal with changes that are that rapid. That’s the problem. The rate at which we are moving out of that envelope of stability that, as you say, we developed this civilization that today serves more than 8 billion people on this planet. And it is fragile. It is dependent on the stability of our climate, and we are destabilizing the climate, as you say.

DAVID FENTON: You know, first of all, I want to thank you for talking to me about this, because as I think you know, I didn’t finish high school. And I didn’t go to college for a day.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Some of the smartest people didn’t finish high school or college. I believe Einstein, I forget.

DAVID FENTON: Well, I wouldn’t go quite to that level, but... And I think it’s useful so you can try to talk to me as a high school dropout in a way that everybody can understand. And I also want to say I’m very conscious of your — and I very much agree with you that we cannot spread doomerism. And at the same time, we need people to understand this. So my understanding is the amount of carbon dioxide that’s in the atmosphere today, it’s about, what, 440 parts per million?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah. Oh. Today, it’s about 425 or 426 parts per million.

DAVID FENTON: That’s right.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: By the way, I misspoke. Einstein did have an advanced degree.

DAVID FENTON: Thank you.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: But, perhaps the greatest oceanographer in the history of our science, Henry Stommel, only had a bachelor’s degree. He didn’t have a PhD.

DAVID FENTON: Well, I don’t have a high school diploma, so we’re really in a special category here.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: There’s a hierarchy here, though.

DAVID FENTON: So my understanding is that, tell me if I have this right, that the last time in Earth’s geologic history there was that much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the 424, the mid-Pliocene, I believe it’s called, the seas were between 16 and 80 feet higher than they are today. So does that mean if we don’t do something dramatic soon, that over the next period, who knows how long, the seas could get that high again?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, they certainly could. The mid-Pliocene, if you like, is perhaps our best analog for what the world would look like if we were to sustain the levels of carbon dioxide that exist in the atmosphere for perpetuity. So in that case, those CO2 levels were high for many thousands of years, for millions of years. If you keep them that high, eventually the climate system will fully adjust to that high level of carbon dioxide and you’ll melt the ice sheets and you’ll move forests and you’ll fundamentally change the planet, the face of the planet. We haven’t held CO2 concentrations that high for nearly as long a period of time at this point, right? We’ve only just reached them. And so the implication is that not only do we have to stop increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. But ultimately, we’re going to have to bring it back down. Yeah, sure. Because if it’s sustained at this level, ultimately, we could see, as you say, tens of feet, tens of meters of sea level rise if the climate system were to fully adjust to the level of CO2 that exists in the atmosphere right now.

DAVID FENTON: Now, you did work showing that by the end of this century, the seas could be six feet higher. Is that right?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yes, we’ve done some work looking, in fact, at the combined impact of sea level rise and the intensification of hurricanes and the implications that would have for sort of massive flooding events along the east coast of the U.S., like what we saw with Superstorm Sandy in New York City.

DAVID FENTON: Right. It goes together because as we warm the planet, the ice melts, raises sea levels, but we also get more intense hurricanes that cause stronger storm surges. So again, I’m going to get to the positive side in a minute, I promise.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: It’s sounding pretty bleak, isn’t it?

DAVID FENTON: No, I’m very aware of this, believe me. And I’m optimistic, which is why I work on this. If I wasn’t optimistic, I would give up like you would probably.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: I think that’s true with most, if not all of us who are in this field and trying to communicate.

DAVID FENTON: We have a solvable problem, although we do have a small group of very evil, greedy people that we’re going to have to deal with, which we’ll get to in a minute.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: I’m not sure they’re that small.

DAVID FENTON: Well, ultimately, well–

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Let’s say we’ve got a dozen, a dozen bad actors who are ruining the planet. Yeah.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah. That’s small. Yeah. Okay. So before we get to how we’re going to solve this, which we are, let’s say, let’s take Miami Beach. Now, as I understand it, Miami Beach will flood from below because it’s built on porous limestone, I believe, former coral rock.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah.

DAVID FENTON: So what’s a conservative range of time by which people are going to have to leave Miami Beach? Is it 20 years? Is it 30 years? Is it 60 years? It certainly isn’t much longer than that, is it?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah. I mean, you know, there are. There are questions about how much additional sea level rise we are now committed to. And those questions are difficult to answer because it depends on the complex nature of ice sheets and how quickly they can disintegrate. And one of the lessons that we’ve learned over the last decade or two is that ice sheets are actually more dynamic than we used to think, than the ways that we used to model them. And because of that, substantial sea level rise could occur earlier than we once thought. We could, for example, by the end of this century, see as much as a few feet of sea level rise, if we continue with business as usual, if we don’t get our act together, and a few feet of sea level rise would be enough to potentially, you know, inundate large parts of southern Florida, particularly during those storm surge events to the point where we’re talking about managed retreat, literally moving away from the coast.

DAVID FENTON: So on another part of the spectrum, take extreme heat and water shortages. So let’s just look at Phoenix, Arizona, and Las Vegas. What’s a possible dependable prognosis range for what’s going to happen there over the next 50 years?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, and I actually tell a story in Our Fragile Moment about my own experiences in Phoenix, Arizona, when my family just returned from the Grand Canyon. We stayed at a hotel right at the Phoenix airport. We were going to fly out the next morning. You may remember this day. It was in June 2018. This was the day that planes couldn’t take off from the Phoenix airport because it was so hot. They couldn’t get enough lift. And that’s the night that we were at the Phoenix airport. And my daughter and I went swimming in the outdoor swimming pool that afternoon, scalding hot. And the swimming pool felt like a hot tub. And we got out after maybe 20 minutes or so, retreated to the air-conditioned hotel room. That night, my wife and I were awakened at about 3 o’clock in the morning. Our daughter couldn’t breathe. We had to take her to the emergency room, the nearest emergency room, and they put her on a breather, whatever you call that.

DAVID FENTON: Ventilator.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: And they identified that she was suffering from, I guess what’s called sort of conditional asthma. She doesn’t normally have asthma, but during acute sort of periods of stress, for example, when it’s that hot in Phoenix, turns out you have very high levels of surface ozone pollution and so there were record levels of ozone pollution in Phoenix that day and she nearly died because of it. We were looking at the potential loss of our daughter. And so that is when climate hit home for me. It directly impacted me and my family. That was a result of the unprecedented heat and that’s just one story. It’s my own story. There are millions of other stories like that.

DAVID FENTON: And if we don’t turn this around, it’s, you know, as I like to say, if you trap heat on Earth, it gets hotter. And every day we’re trapping more heat on Earth because that’s what the gases do. That’s the blanket of pollution, right, that we’ve put around the Earth. It gets thicker every day, so it gets hotter and hotter.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: It’s not rocket science, except for the fact that the Air Force actually had to understand the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere to design heat-seeking missiles properly.

DAVID FENTON: Right. So tell me. What makes you angry about this situation, Michael?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Well, you know, what you’ve already alluded to. Literally, you can count, indeed, on the fingers of your two hands, the number of bad actors, of plutocrats who are basically funding the infrastructure that promotes misinformation and disinformation about climate change that pollutes our public sphere, that buys out politicians, and prevents us from acting on what is the defining challenge of our time. That should upset everybody.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah, and they came after you big time, which I’d like to talk about in a minute.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: I hardly noticed. They attack me so often, I hardly even notice anymore.

DAVID FENTON: Well, that’s another kind of denial, I think.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: It’s actually a line from the Blues Brothers. Sorry.

DAVID FENTON: That’s good. You know, when I talk about this, people accuse me of being like a completely crazy radical. But I believe this is an objective, accurate statement that there is a very small group of fossil fuel executives and some of their bankers and some of their... It’s a small group. And they are determined to burn every last drop of oil, coal, and gas to make as much money as they possibly can, while knowing, as they have for 50 years, that they’re going to destroy the life support systems of the earth, and they don’t care. There is a small cabal, the greediest that has ever existed. I would say in terms of impact on the most number of people, on the nature of life itself, these may be the worst criminals in history. Do you think that’s an accurate statement?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Well, you know, by some measure, you know, these are crimes against humanity. And there’s arguably an even higher level of crime, crime against the planet. Because that’s everything. It’s not just humanity. It’s the only livable planet we know of in the universe. They are compromising that planet. So it’s hard to imagine a greater crime than that, isn’t it?

DAVID FENTON: So now let’s get to hope. So we’re seeing enormous surges in clean, renewable energy. It keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. The vast majority of new energy is clean, renewable energy. China has made incredible strides in becoming a renewable, clean energy, electrified nation. They’ve clearly decided they’re going to dominate these industries in the future. This is all really good news. It’s getting cheaper all the time. Of course, it’s cheaper in many regards, not only up front, but there’s no continued fuel cost once you install these things. And also, the sun and the wind have the great advantage that they can never go up in price. And they can never run out, at least not for a few billion years.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: If we’re lucky enough to make it that long, absolutely.

DAVID FENTON: Right. So this is all really good news. But do you think, or let’s put it this way, you’re a scientist, you deal in odds and probabilities. What do you think is the probability that this trend will succeed in time, in time enough to stabilize this situation? I should point out something that people don’t really know to help them understand this. I believe it’s accurate to say that carbon dioxide, when we put it in the atmosphere, much of it stays there for thousands of years. It doesn’t just come down. People think of pollution, goes up a smokestack, comes right down. This doesn’t do that. So we’re in a race to change the energy and agricultural systems so that we stabilize the climate before it goes into really dangerous territory. So what do you think? What gives you hope, Michael?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, and there are, you know, the CO2 in the atmosphere, there are different time scales because there are different reservoirs. There’s sort of the vegetation, there’s the upper part of the ocean, there’s the deep ocean. So it’s a complex problem. But as you say, some of the CO2 that we put into the atmosphere will be there for thousands of years. It does slowly come out of the atmosphere if you stop polluting — that’s really important — that’s part of that agency. If we stop burning fossil fuels, CO2 levels will slowly start to drop. And so again, it’s part of that agency that, you know, we’re not committed to, you know, the worst consequences, the worst climate consequences, if we take action.

So what we do know is that there is a finite budget of how much carbon we can burn and keep the planet below one and a half Celsius, three Fahrenheit. And we’ve nearly run out that budget. Another couple of years of business as usual, burning of fossil fuels, and we burn through that budget. And we’re committed, at least for the near term, to that 1.5 Celsius, 3 Fahrenheit warming of the planet, where we’ll see even worse consequences than what we’ve seen so far. If we miss that exit, as I like to tell people, this is an analogy that our good friend Susan Joy Hassel and I have tried to use in framing this problem. This is like a dangerous highway we’re driving down. And we might miss the 1.5 Celsius, three Fahrenheit exit. In fact, it looks like we probably will. It doesn’t mean we drive all the way to Toledo. We look for the next exit. We look for the two degrees Celsius, a little less than four degree Fahrenheit warming exit. And so every amount of carbon that we don’t burn, every amount of warming that we prevent makes us better off, leads to less damage, leads to less death, loss of life. And so again, it’s that agency. It isn’t a cliff. It’s more like a dangerous highway. It’s not a cliff. It’s not like we’ll cross a certain level of warming and that leads to the collapse of civilization. It will get worse and worse as we continue to warm the planet. The converse of that is true as well. The more warming we prevent, the better off we are.

DAVID FENTON: So would you say it’s accurate to say that Trump’s longest lasting legacy will be excess carbon in the atmosphere because he’s allowing more fossil fuel burning and he’s trying to attack and slow the growth of clean solar and wind energy and renewables of all kinds?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, I think that’s a fair statement. Absolutely. And I would bring it back to a point you already made. We can say it’s Trump. But Trump right now is just a figurehead, right? He’s just essentially a puppet of the people who put him in power. And who are the people who put him in power? They’re the ones who wrote the agenda that his administration is implementing, Project 2025. It’s all of those plutocrats that we were talking about, the Koch brothers, the Murdochs, the rest of them, and obviously the fossil fuel CEOs, many of them as well, fossil fuel interests, ExxonMobil. The polluters basically wrote the environmental policy that he is implementing right now. And so Trump as a stand-in for the bad actors that we’re talking about.

DAVID FENTON: Yes, but there’s international bad actors that he appears to be working for also. The petrostates in the Gulf and all these weird connections to another petrostate, Russia.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Like we say in the book, we use that alliteration because I think it’s very appropriate here. There are plutocrats. They’re petrostates, they’re propagandists, and the press hasn’t necessarily been our friend either.

DAVID FENTON: Right. I want to ask you about that. You know, you’ve been critical of The New York Times. And, you know, of course, The New York Times is still our greatest newspaper, but it’s very flawed. And, I mean, just one example, The New York Times has yet to run one editorial attacking Trump’s attack on the climate. Not once. They ran an editorial saying that he shouldn’t attack clean energy. And they opened it by saying, even if you don’t believe in climate change or don’t care about it, you should support clean energy. The New York Times legitimizing not caring about climate change.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Well, it’s what we call performative neutrality. And it’s as dangerous in some cases as denial itself.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah. So what is your assessment of the job the media is doing on this most important issue facing humanity?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, great question. And it’s variable, of course, right? Obviously, there’s the right wing media, and they are, you know, villainous in, you know, when it comes to how they have engaged on this, you know, this issue, you know, the Murdoch media empire, other conservative plutocrat owned, increasingly, even our mainstream media outlets are becoming owned by conservative plutocrats.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Sort of eroding what we could even call mainstream media. So much of it now is, in fact, conservative corporate owned media. They have promoted a lot of misinformation and disinformation. But then there are, you know, what we would think of as, you know, the mainstream media outlets, legacy media outlets like the New York Times. I would put the Washington Post in there, except for that is now a right wing outlet. It’s, you know, in the sense that Jeff Bezos has said that he is now going to change their entire editorial outlook to represent conservative principles. They’ve still got some good journalists there, but they’ve lost a lot of their best journalists.

DAVID FENTON: They’ve just fired a lot of their climate reporters.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Absolutely. The Times thus far has shown, you know, more. Well, I mean, the Times has not yet been bought out by one of these, you know, tech bro plutocrats. You know, you could certainly challenge some of the decisions that have been made by their leadership, but they haven’t been bought out by conservative plutocrats.

DAVID FENTON: No, no, and I don’t think the family will ever allow that, that owns the New York Times. I would say the news section of the New York Times is quite good on this issue, but the editorial side has slipped. And just yesterday, one of their regular columnists, Matthew Iglesias, wrote once again that Democrats should support more fossil fuel burning if they want to win. In other words, his prescription is they should support more death and destruction and the destruction of the economy, and they should put Miami underwater and destroy Phoenix. That’s a pragmatic political position to The New York Times.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: And they’ve been running op-eds like that. They’ve been running op-eds by people like Bjorn Lundberg, bad actors who are, you know, he’s tied to the Koch brothers. He’s clearly, you know, his job is to promote climate denial propaganda and to attack clean energy. And the New York Times provides him a platform.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah, not that often, but the main problem is I would call it climate hushing there. They just don’t talk about it much on the editorial pages. They’re not treating it like the central emergency that it is. You know, I’m old enough to remember in the 70s during the New York fiscal crisis, there was a famous headline in the New York Daily News. President Gerald Ford to New York, drop dead. What’s happening now is President Trump is saying to New York, drown. And yet they don’t treat it that way. It’s really quite, it’s an incredible new form of denial.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, you know, there’s been some, there have been some departures from their editorial. The editorial board, the editorial page has undergone some changes in leadership. And some of the folks who used to be there who really were trying to provide a platform for climate messaging aren’t there anymore. And they do have David Wallace-Wells, who’s often great. He just doesn’t write about climate much of the time anymore. Chris Conway is no longer there.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah, that’s right. Well, I think the weather will eventually get bad enough that they’ll get back on it. I would predict that.

DAVID FENTON: So speaking of bad actors, Michael, one of the reasons it’s important to talk about this small group of greedy plutocrats causing those is so that people understand it’s not their fault. You know, it’s not your fault that you have to drive a car to work and heat your home with fossil fuels. There are increasingly alternatives. They’re not always affordable. What I think people need to understand is that we would have been much further along in this transformation in making it so you could afford these changes, except these greedy people set about stopping it. They corrupted politics. They corrupted media. They also went after you because you did something very heretical. You published a graph, a simple graph that showed the truth. And you were persecuted enormously for this. I want to explain to the audience briefly what happened. And Professor Mann published a study that included a graph that showed that we had stable temperatures for, I believe, a couple thousand years during agriculture and civilization.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Went back to the last thousand years. Yeah, thousand years. And changes were small, yeah.

DAVID FENTON: And so the graph goes like this, and come the last 100, 150 years, it goes like that. And that graph became known as the hockey stick because that’s what it shaped like, a straight stick and then bang. So the fossil fuel guys understand communications and they understood the power of the symbolism of this graph because there was no complexity. You just look at it and you go, holy shit. So they set out to destroy it and to destroy you, Michael, and they failed. They tried to destroy your reputation. They subpoenaed. They tried to subpoena your emails. They mischaracterized you. And so you eventually prevailed. You sued them back. Good for you. You sued them for libel. And you won. And some of these cases went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. You decided to stand up for science. Thank you. So what was that like for you to come under that kind of attack? You were a professor at the University of Virginia just doing your job. What was that like?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, well, it was it was surreal when, you know, the the attacks sort of started to really, you know, become prominent after the graph, the hockey stick graph, was featured in the summary for policymakers of the 2001 third assessment report of the IPCC.

DAVID FENTON: The United Nations Climate Scientist Group, yes.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, and the summary for policymakers being the one part of that report that actually gets attention from policymakers, from the media, et cetera. And so the hockey stick was featured, and it did become, at that point, I would say, a symbol of sort of the profound impact that we are having on the planet. And that made it and me a target for those bad actors. As you say, I was hauled into a Senate hearing in the hot seat, a Senate hearing chaired by James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the leading climate denier in the U.S. Senate, the leading recipient of fossil fuel money in the U.S. Senate. And I was brought into a hostile hearing where they attacked the hockey stick, attacked me. Joe Barton, the Republican chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Same story in 2005, putting me in the hot seat, attacking me, essentially subpoenaing all of my personal emails and documents for my entire career. And he lost that battle in part because there was a fellow Republican, Sherwood Boehlert, who was an old school, pro-science, pro-environment Republican.

DAVID FENTON: A real conservative, right.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: A real conservative, conserved the planet, conserved the environment from upstate New York.

DAVID FENTON:Right, I remember him, yes, yeah.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: And he went toe-to-toe with Joe Barton, and he called him out in some of the harshest terms of anybody. He called him out. He stopped just short of accusing him of modern-day McCarthyism, as did John McCain. Right. John McCain wrote an op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education attacking his fellow Republican, Joe Barton, for going after me and my co-authors. And the attacks would continue. Ken Cuccinelli, the Tea Party Republican attorney general of Virginia, tried to subpoena. Once again, all my emails to try to find something in them to embarrass me.

DAVID FENTON: To prove you had engaged in some deliberate conspiracy to distort the truth when all you had done has shown the truth.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Well, and it was a playbook that we saw used over and over again. It was used against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

DAVID FENTON: And Glenn Beck on Fox News called for you to commit suicide. Is that right?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yes, I think he called for me and my colleagues to commit seppuku.

DAVID FENTON:Which is a Japanese form of suicide.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: It was nice of him to use.

DAVID FENTON: In 2010, you opened an envelope and it was full of white powder and you didn’t know what it was. It could have been anthrax. That must have been terrifying.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, it was intended to scare me. It was intended to look like anthrax. FBI actually investigated. They took it. They tested it in the lab. Turned out it was cornstarch. Still a felony offense, by the way, to send a material like that intended to...

DAVID FENTON: So this would have cowered a lot of people. And instead, you fought back. You sued them. Tell us what happened.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Well, yeah, I sued the two writers, the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, both. You know, both the National Review, their online version of their magazine, the Competitive Enterprise Institute is a fossil fuel industry front group on their website.

DAVID FENTON: They should call it the Non-Competitive Enterprise Institute.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Authors for these two organizations wrote defamatory pieces accusing me of fraud when they full well knew that the accusations of fraud that had been made against me by polluters and front groups and people advocating for them had been gone all the way to the highest level. The National Academy of Sciences litigated that and very clearly found that there was no evidence whatsoever of any fraud.

DAVID FENTON: And you’re a member of the National Academy of Sciences, isn’t that right?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yes, I would ultimately be elected to the National Academy. And every scientific assessment that had been done not only found that there was nothing improper about our research, it validated our findings.

DAVID FENTON: Right. It’s been recreated many times.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, I mean, today, the hockey stick goes much further back in time. We now know that the warming is unprecedented, potentially, in tens of thousands, if not more than a hundred thousand years. And the blade has gotten longer because we’ve continued to warm the planet.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah, every year gets hotter. So these people, as they were going after you, they were doing something really unprecedented. They were intentionally trying to undermine the notion of facts and truth itself. And this is the subject of your current book. Science Under Siege.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yes, Science Under Siege. Thanks. You know, what I would say was that the attacks that we saw on climate science decades ago, in some way it was an experiment. It was a testbed for the sorts of attacks that have now been waged against presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton. The attacks that we now see, the so-called swift boating approach to discrediting. So what we’ve seen, I would argue, is a metastasization of what was sort of this local cancer that influenced the public discourse over climate change back in the 1990s. It is now metastasized to infect our entire body politic. So all of those things that we see today, efforts to get a hold of emails and discredit people by finding things in them, ad hominem attacks that try to identify one vulnerable individual and try to make it all about them so that it feels like some sort of house of cards. If you can just discredit Michael Mann, the entire weight of evidence for human-caused climate change comes crashing down in this sort of twisted view of the world. So yeah, Science Under Siege, my co-author Peter Hotez is a public health scientist who develops vaccines. He was being attacked exactly the same tactics, the same individuals and groups, the Koch brothers, you know, organizations funded by the Koch brothers.

DAVID FENTON: Right. Because they didn’t like stay at home orders and lockdowns and the measures. Because of COVID, right.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Right, that needed to be taken to stem the spread of COVID-19. And so they decided to attack the science. They created front groups, just like they did with climate and clean energy. They hired, you know, medical, you know, people with impressive seeming medical credentials to act as sort of spokespeople. And they attacked the public health science behind efforts to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. So Peter was subject to the same sorts of attacks. I reached out to him. I said, hey, we’ve been dealing with this for two decades. We need to talk. He and I realized that there was a book to write about our parallel experiences in these two domains being attacked. The same tactics, many of the same players who have ideological, you know, an ideological agenda behind their effort to discredit science.

DAVID FENTON: Not just ideological, a profit.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Oh, absolutely. Ideological, financial, you name it. Absolutely.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah. You know, it’s like Naomi Oreskes wrote, these are the merchants of doubt. But sometimes it feels like we’re entering a new form of dark ages with these attacks on science. And of course, Trump is at the head of this, along with my former acquaintance, Bobby Kennedy, I’m afraid.

Listen, Michael, I know you have to go in a few minutes. So I want to just close by asking you one more thing. Yes, the public is concerned about global warming, but not enough. As you know, the studies show that likely voters rank it about 17th out of 25 issues in order of importance. And if we don’t make it a more salient issue for voters especially in key places we’re not going to get the kind of change that we need in the political system so what would you recommend that we change about how we operate or how we talk about this issue or where we put resources to to make the public come up to speed about how this endangers everything they care about?

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, thanks for that question. I think you just put your finger on it. That’s exactly what we need to do. We can’t allow this to continue to be treated as some niche issue, some environmental issue, climate change. No, this is the greatest challenge that we face, and it’s impacting every dimension of modern life. Our health, obviously our economy, the greatest threat to our economy is climate-related damages now. Our stability, national security, you name it. Immigration, the cost of insurance.

DAVID FENTON: Absolutely.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: And here’s the one thing right now that I would like to see Democrats, to be perfectly honest. There’s one party, you know, the Republican Party is now firmly opposed to taking any action on climate.

DAVID FENTON:Yeah, It’s bought.

DR. MICHAEL MANN:There’s no way to talk about this in a way that doesn’t seem right now political and even partisan because one party cares, the other doesn’t.

DAVID FENTON: It’s so sad.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: And so what I would say to Democratic political operatives is connect the dots here. This election will probably be substantially about the issue we’re hearing. I mean, there are a lot of things we’re hearing about, the Epstein, the war in Iran, but affordability. In the end what I think is going to be the defining issue of this election is a domestic issue, it’s going to be affordability, and what people don’t realize — in fact just yesterday with the potential stoppage of flow of oil through the Gulf of Hormuz and the likelihood we’re going to continue to see a spike in oil prices, decreased oil supply — at this very time, Trump is now doubling down on his effort to stop all new production of wind energy because he’s bought and sold by the fossil fuel industry. And what is that doing? Renewable energy on a levelized basis, and this is according to Lazard, one of the leading experts in sort of the economics and the energy—

DAVID FENTON: The bank, right.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: On a levelized basis, renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuel energy.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah. And it’s going to keep getting cheaper.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: It’s going to keep getting cheaper. And so Trump’s, and I say Trump, I mean the GOP, the plutocrats who put him in power, the petrostates who are helping him, everything he represents, their effort right now to actually block the development of energy infrastructure is driving up prices. So part of the reason people are paying higher prices for everything — you drive up the prices for energy, you’re going to drive up the prices for goods and services across the spectrum.

DAVID FENTON: And food! And heat waves are going to drive up the prices of food.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Food, everything. And heat waves are going to drive up the price of food. All of it, all of it. And they are — part of you know, part of it is his, you know, misguided tariffs. Part of it now, of course, is his actions in Iran. But one of the primary reasons for the increase in energy cost is the fact that he’s taking all the clean energy off the table. And what that leaves — less energy available and it leaves more expensive energy.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah, exactly right.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: And so affordability. The affordability problem is a climate problem right now. And it’s not just clean energy, which is part of that climate problem. It’s the solution to the climate problem. But it’s all of the damages, the disruption of supply chains by extreme weather events, which is driving up transportation, driving up the cost of goods and services.

DAVID FENTON: And insurance.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: If it’s about affordability, it’s about clean energy and it’s about climate.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. We need to do that. I also personally believe that we can explain to people what this is, what and who is causing it, how it endangers people. You’ve got to

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Call out the bad actors.

DAVID FENTON: And how it endangers prosperity, health, people’s children. I think when people understand that, and eventually they will, the weather will teach them, they’re not going to say... Sort of...

DR. MICHAEL MANN: You know, tales of history, fictional tales, good versus evil. This is sort of, we are hardwired to understand that. There’s good and evil in the world. There are villains. There are real life villains. And you couldn’t have a better example of real life villains than the individuals and institutions that are behind this campaign to derail global climate action. So make it a tale about good versus evil. Because it is a tale about good vs. evil.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: It is a tale about good versus evil. Very much.

DAVID FENTON: And thank you for your help in going after the evil while being rigorous in your science. We are very grateful to you, Michael.

DR. MICHAEL MANN: Thank you, David. And thank you for being a guest on The Phantom Forecast. I hope to have you back.

DAVID FENTON: It was really a pleasure. I look forward to it.

IT IS GENOCIDE AND APARTHEID IN ISRAEL

My Interview with Palestinian Journalist Rula Jebreal

I’m Jewish. I went to Hebrew school (although they kicked me out for questioning theology). My grandfather was a top fundraiser for Israeli bonds. He was quite upset when I told him I supported a Palestinian state — in 1973, when I was 21. I still do.

And I’m one of many Jews both in Israel and the U.S. who agree, with shocked sadness, that Israel has become an out-out-control racist, aggressive and apartheid state. And that Israel’s massive overkill in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide.

Of course, Hamas has committed war crimes too, and both must be held accountable. That is the balanced view of my podcast guest this week, Palestinian journalist, academic and novelist Rula Jebreal. It should be the view of anyone who values human rights, dignity and the sanctity of life.

Rula Jebreal used to be a frequent contributor on MSNBC and CNN. Now she’s functionally banned from American TV. She says “there is an Iron Dome in the US media” against criticizing Israel. Fluent in Hebrew, Rula watches Israeli tv every night —the anti-Arab racism that dominates is shocking, and totally at odds with the Jewish ethical tradition. (Rula also sheds new light on Israel’s relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. I didn’t believe her accusation at first — but the Epstein files backed her up).

Meanwhile, the U.S. media rarely features Israeli and American Jews opposed to Israeli policy. This includes former Israeli Prime Ministers, military brass and ex-Mossad intelligence chiefs who agree Israel’s actions are undermining Israeli security. This is also the position of the American Jewish organization jstreet.org, which I helped start years ago. Creating new generations of humiliated Palestinians is a recipe for future terrorism, not security. No long-term occupation of another people ever results in security.

Here is a sample of the kind of commentary from American and Israeli Jews that you rarely see in the U.S. media. I hope you find it useful. Then the Rula Jebreal transcript follows.

Here is the Israeli/Jewish human rights organization B’Tselem:

‘‘Our Genocide” July 28, 2025

‘‘An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads us to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid,” January 12, 2021

‘‘The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime. One organizing principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another — Palestinians.”

From Aryeh Neier, co-founder of Human Rights Watch, former Executive Director of the ACLU, American Jew and Holocaust survivor:

‘‘Is Israel Committing Genocide?" June 6, 2024

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/06/06/is-israel-committing-genocide-aryeh-neier

‘‘I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory.”

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch 1993–2022, son of a Holocaust survivor

‘‘Abusive Israeli Policies Constitute Crimes of Apartheid, Persecution”

(https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/04/27/abusive-israeli-policies-constitute-crimes-

apartheid-persecution)

‘‘Prominent voices have warned for years that apartheid lurks just around the corner if the trajectory of Israel’s rule over Palestinians does not change. This detailed study shows that Israeli authorities have already turned that corner and today are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

Amiram Levin, retired major general, former head of IDF Northern Command, former deputy director of the Mossad

Interview with Kan Reshet Bet radio, August 13, 2023 (https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-idf-general-likens-military-control-of-west-bank-to-nazi-germany/)

‘‘There hasn’t been a democracy there in 57 years. There is total apartheid.”

‘‘Walk around Hebron and you will see streets where Arabs cannot walk, just like what happened in Germany.”

‘‘It’s standing by, looking at the settler rioters and is beginning to be a partner in war crimes… We are killing ourselves from the inside.”

Ehud Olmert, former Prime Minister of Israel (2006–2009)

Op-ed in Haaretz,

‘‘Enough Is Enough. Israel Is Committing War Crimes,’’ May 27, 2025

(https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-05-27/ty-article-opinion/.premium/enough-is-enough-israel-is-committing-war-crimes/00000197-0dd6-df85-a197-0ff64a5c0000)

‘‘What we are doing in Gaza is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.’’

‘‘We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit — but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklessly. Yes, we are committing war crimes.’’

‘‘It’s time to stop — before we are cast out from the family of nations and summoned to the International Criminal Court for war crimes. And we will have no good defense.’’

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, American Jew, jstreet.org

‘‘Until now, I have tried to deflect and defend when challenged to call this genocide. I have, however, been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention. Denying food and basic necessities of life to civilians. Soldiers shooting at civilians trying to get food… None of that provides any rationale for what Israel is doing now in Gaza.”

Omer Bartov, Israeli-born professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, IDF veteran

Op-ed in The New York Times,

‘‘I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,’’July 15, 2025

‘‘My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. This was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust…It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend.’’

Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT), first Jewish member of the U.S. House to use the term genocide

Op-ed in The Courier, September 17, 2025

(https://www.jta.org/2025/09/18/united-states/it-is-genocide-bernie-sanders-says-about-gaza-becoming-the-first-us-senator-to-do-so)

‘‘As the granddaughter of a man murdered in the Holocaust, it is not easy for me to say that. But the trauma of the Holocaust serves as a reminder of the power of speaking out. The suffering goes beyond the tragic loss of life inherent to war; at this point, the [Netanyahu] government's actions appear to be a systematic, intentional destruction of the Palestinian people.’’

You can believe your eyes and ears. Those aerial photos of total devastation in Gaza do not lie (although Israeli leaders and spokespeople now routinely do so). There wasn’t a Hamas fighter in every apartment in every building in Gaza. 21,000 dead and 45,000 injured children in Gaza is not about a proportionate response to Hamas crimes. Shooting hundreds of aid workers and journalists was not about Hamas (which Netanyahu ensured continued funding to via the UAE as has been well established).

I’m going to go cry. Meanwhile you can watch or listen to my Fenton Forecast interview with the brilliant Rula Jebreal on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Substack and other platforms.

We welcome your feedback. Write to us at hello@fentonforecast.com

Here is the transcript of my interview with Rula.

DAVID FENTON: Rula Jebreal, welcome to the Fenton Forecast, and we’re gonna talk about the future and the history of the Middle East. And you have a unique perspective on this because you were born in Israel to Palestinian parents. Your mother died early and you were raised in an Israeli orphanage.

RULA JEBREAL: Palestinian orphanage.

DAVID FENTON: Palestinian orphanage. That’s right. And you, uh, you studied at the University of Bologna. You were a professor at the University of Miami. You’ve written three books. You used to be regularly on American cable television, but because you became understandably critical of their biased coverage, you’re on there much less today. You have a very large social media following. I also wanna mention that you are married to a Jewish New Yorker and you are also fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, and English. So this all gives you a very unique perspective on the situation. So welcome to the program. So the first thing I wanted to ask you is. You watch Israeli television because you speak Hebrew, and what are you seeing? What do you see watching Israeli TV that Americans don’t?

RULA JEBREAL: Well, for a long time… First of all, I just want to correct that I was a visiting professor at the University of Miami. I taught a course about genocide and propaganda alongside another professor of the University of Miami for seven years. The one thing that distinguished my reporting from my colleagues here in the United States was my knowledge of Arabic, both Arabic and Hebrew, and also obviously staying in touch with where the country was heading in Israel.

I think in 2018 there was a turning point when the Israeli parliament and government legalized Jewish supremacy and they passed a law called the Nation State Law, which basically upheld Jewish supremacy as the law of the land.

It’s called… so basically the law says that only Jewish Israelis and only Jews have the right to self-determination. Everybody else no. Meaning Palestinians, Christian, Muslim, whatever, Druze, they don’t have a right of self-determination. And then alongside that, there is a deep push in the Israeli society for the Greater Israel Project. So what you’re looking at today in Iran, in Lebanon, in Palestine is the implementation of that project. And that could not happen and cannot happen without America being used as a weapon to implement that project.

But you have to go back to, I think, the nineties. Uh, during the Oslo agreement, the Palestinians agreed for a peace with Israel. Uh, they signed an agreement. 80% of the Palestinians decided that, you know, they withdrew the claim that they belong in the historical territory of Israel. They gave, they basically conceded 80% of their historical territories. They accepted 22% of the land, and yet Israelis continue to expand the expansionist settler policies. But that went hand in hand with a huge, uh, turn to the right. The right wing in Israel start lobbying against the peace agreement saying it’s a treason, it’s against their biblical law. It’s against their, their, you know, their understanding of scripture regarding the greater Israel, um, the building of the third temple.

So there’s religious fervor that start criminalizing and inciting against both Palestinians and Israelis who agreed to the negotiation. We saw in the country rallies where the Prime Minister who signed the agreement was portrayed as a Nazi, right, where people were holding his, you know, his, his pictures wearing a Nazi SS uniform, calling him a traitor, calling him, and that culminated in his killing by an Israeli fanatic, Yigal Amir, in 96.

DAVID FENTON: And since you’re talking about killing Prime Minister Rabin’s.

RULA JEBREAL: Exactly. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. And from then there was a huge push by hardcore Zionists together with religious fanatics, together with Christian Zionists to state that anybody that would negotiate with the Palestinians or concede territory is a traitor and need to be killed. And we saw massacres after massacres. I mean, at the height of the Oslo agreement after the Palestinians conceded, we saw this big massacre in Hebron, uh, where an Israeli fanatic, uh, Baruch Goldstein, went into a mosque and killed Palestinians as they were worshipers and they were praying during the Ramadan. And we saw the people celebrating that mass murder. That homicide.

He was hailed as a hero. Exactly like the guy that killed Rabin was hailed as a hero. And that came in a moment where, where immediately after there was 9/11. And 9/11 created in the mind of a lot of Israelis, especially the establishment, especially Netanyahu, who said this would be good for us. Mm.

Imagine saying the massacre of 3,000 Americans is good for Israel. He meant basically that he will use fear, paranoia, Islamophobia, and the desire for, for vengeance, retaliation in Israel’s favor. And he succeeded. He pushed for the Iraq war. The American, he lobbied. Americans came to Congress, said we need to push for the war. But you have to understand that these forever wars, the 20-year war on terrorists, are unpopular in America, but there are very popular in Israel, who redefine their own security in terms of expansion, domination. Every, for Israelis to feel safe, every country around the region has to be a failed state. Libya model, Afghanistan model. And I think for them, security means forever insecurity for everybody else

DAVID FENTON: Right.

RULA JEBREAL: So if you define your objective of security as expansionist policies, annexation, domination, illegal occupation, ethnic cleansing, and massacres, then you’ll not stop at Iran. For you, it’ll be Turkey next and then everybody else in the region.

But to understand Israel today, you have to understand what happened with Rabin and the killing and the incitement, the campaign of incitement against Rabin. But also you have to go back even further and understand Kahane, the Jewish rabbi, the convicted terrorist. Kahane endorsed —

DAVID FENTON: Meir Kahane.

RULA JEBREAL: Yeah, Meir Kahane — who endorsed all the policies that we are seeing at play today in the Middle East. From the genocide, ethnic cleansing, illegal annexation, occupation, forever wars, state-sponsored terrorism of the settlers in the West Bank, but also expansionist policies and a strategy based on death and destruction forever. But in order, again, I go back. In order to do that, you have to subvert, sabotage, and keep American politics as hostage to your agenda.

DAVID FENTON: Well, of course to many of us, and as I think you know, I’m Jewish, the, the part of the tragedy of this is all of these efforts are gonna undermine Israel’s security. It’s gonna create more terrorism, it’s gonna create more hatred. Ultimately, it could very well result in America cutting off aid to Israel because young Americans are not going for this anymore. And the idea that you can have security through the permanent occupation of another people is crazy, ahistorical. It’s a recipe for permanent insecurity. Uh. But why do you think the Israeli public supports this, this idea, this notion of greater Israel expansion, leveling Gaza to the ground, now doing it in Lebanon, doing much of it in Iran? Why do they support this? Why do they think it will lead them to security when many of us think it’s gonna do the opposite?

RULA JEBREAL: I think you need to go back to the educational system and indoctrination in the educational system. I think there’s a brilliant Israeli professor who wrote incredibly about it. Her name is Nurit Peled, who wrote that the only people that are viewed as human are — Israeli Jews — and everybody is subhuman animals.

DAVID FENTON: It’s racism.

RULA JEBREAL: It’s racism, it’s dehumanization, it’s radicalization. But you need every. David, you and I know that every genocide doesn’t start with a massacre. It starts with defining your enemy as an existential threat, as human animal that need to be exterminated for you to live. I mean, I was watching a video that I believe I sent it to you. An average Israeli woman. Yeah. Secular, normal. And when she was asked what do we need to do, she said atomic bomb in Iran, drop on them an atomic bomb. This is actually a very popular view. And then what do we do with the Arabs? 400 million people live in the region. She said the best Arab is a dead Arab. Kill them all. And when they’re asking her about Palestinian Israeli citizens, her recipe was the same.

So when you look at 30 years of long indoctrination and being told that every Arab is a potential terrorist, you can understand why the killing of 20,000 children in Gaza didn’t affect them. They are not children in their eyes. They are subhuman animals, they are potential terrorists. You have politicians saying clearly on television that every dead child in Gaza is — more, like, is a terrorist that we killed because they will grow up to be terrorists, so better to exterminate them. Now after the attack on a school in Iran that killed 175 schoolgirls in Iran, there was mass celebration in the Israeli media saying great, more, we want more, we want more. I mean, if you watch the Israeli television every night as I, as I do, you are struck by the genocidal rhetoric that is taking place in Israel.

Now, the biggest scandal in Israel last week was not that Israel bombed, uh, that America bombed basically schoolgirls and killed tons and massacred tons of them. Or that Israel bombed the desalination plants in Iran. Right? You know, you are bombing civilian infrastructure or oil, gas, and fields. They don’t care about global consequences, catastrophe to the world in terms of economy, you know, the commerce, they don’t care. The only scandal they were focused on was that a TV host, her name is Lucy Aharish, she is Israeli, she’s serving in the army, she’s married to a Jewish man, she said the word inshallah on television. And for them that was an outrage. They wanted to lynch the woman because the word inshallah is, is an Arabic word which means God willing.

DAVID FENTON: God willing, right.

RULA JEBREAL: God willing. Everybody used the word inshallah in the Middle East. It’s, it doesn’t mean, it has no really religious reference. But for them that was the biggest scandal. It tells you everything about how radicalized they are. This woman is as assimilated as it gets. She served in the army. She speak Hebrew more fluently than she speaks Arabic. She’s married to a Jewish Israeli who served in the IDF, and yet she cannot, cannot utter a word in Arabic without being depicted as a terrorist with a mob that wants to kill her. What does that tell you?

DAVID FENTON: So. So Rula, what role has the American right played, yeah, in this, uh, brainwashing of the Israeli public to be acting opposite of their actual interests? Like Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson’s wife.

RULA JEBREAL: Oh yeah.

DAVID FENTON: The Adelsons bought the largest newspaper in Israel,

RULA JEBREAL: And they bought a presidency. They bought a president, right? The Adelsons bought a presidency. They literally gave him $300 million dollars

DAVID FENTON: Netanyahu?

RULA JEBREAL: Trump. They bought, they gave, uh, Trump $300 million between the first election and this election, and they bought the presidency. Every decision that Trump is taking between the first term and this term is directly dictated by the Adelsons. This is corruption at the highest level.

DAVID FENTON: Of course–

RULA JEBREAL: This is holding hostage an American presidency to do the bidding of a foreign country. Yeah, I mean. When the Adelsons came to the scene and start backing Netanyahu and they bought a newspaper, the first thing they did, they wanted to change the public opinion. They bought a newspaper called Israel Hayom, right? And they gave the newspaper for free. It’s a propaganda organ that is being delivered for free to Israeli citizens who read lies and propaganda and dehumanization and collective criminalization of everybody that dares to say: we want coexistence, we want peace, we want negotiations, we want a political settlement. The Adelsons want this forever war.

I mean the only thing to explain why America’s foreign policy has put Israel first and America first is this level of corruption.

DAVID FENTON: You mean America second.

RULA JEBREAL: Sorry, America second, Israel first. The only way to explain it is the flooding of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in the pockets of politicians that happens through the Adelsons or AIPAC or any of those organizations. And they brag about it. They brag about buying American politics. It scares me.

DAVID FENTON: Well, there are good signs. AIPAC is starting to lose. Young Americans are disaffected. So I don’t think this project will work.

RULA JEBREAL: That’s why they’re becoming more scary and sneaky and they’re hiding behind shell [companies], right, and PACs, and they’re disguising themselves. But listen, this will have catastrophic consequences. I fear because they merged and sadly they used Judaism, exploited Judaism and the trauma of the Holocaust, right, to justify mass atrocities. I think the blowback will be horrific, and not only on Israel. I fear for our Jewish community in America because I truly believe that a lot of people who are angry because they’re asking hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on a foreign war wanted by Israel and pushed. That is, that benefits Israel only, nobody else, that American boys and girls will die for Israel. I think all of this will create such disgust and hatred and will definitely foment antisemitism.

DAVID FENTON: It’s already happening.

RULA JEBREAL: Which is exactly what, which is exactly what Netanyahu wants–

DAVID FENTON: Why does, does he want it? And I believe, why does he want it, Rula? That’s very, very provocative comment.

RULA JEBREAL: He wants it because I think it, if you want a forever war, you want to create the conditions to say we are fighting for our existence and survival. We have people who want to kill us. You are not addressing the root cause of the violence, which is the occupation, right? The mass slaughter, the genocide, ethnic cleansing. You are blaming it of people hate us because they hate us because we’re good people. We’re only 15 million people. We didn’t do anything. We want peace of love. Anybody that, I mean, I get these discussions with friends like, we are only 15 million people. You know, we’re like just a small minority.

Simultaneously Netanyahu goes on video and it’s like, I am the king of the Jewish people. Uh, we are a global power. And then you hear people in Hollywood, it’s like, we control the world. We control Hollywood, right? We control the media, right? Why people are not doing — and then you go around and you see near some synagogues and some Jewish institutions the Israeli flag together with soldiers, like, donate to the army, to the IDF. It creates confusion in the mind of a lot of people that, yeah, that’s what you stand for, but also you want to be the only victim. These two things don’t go hand in hand.

And I think what Naomi Klein beautifully, brilliantly said during the past, over a year ago, where she said we need an exodus from Zionism because it’s a death ideology. She didn’t say that, I’m saying that.

DAVID FENTON: And she’s Jewish.

RULA JEBREAL: She’s Jewish, Canadian, American, right? Zionism is a colonial violent ideology. It’s a racist, colonial, genocidal ideology. You need to have an exodus from that. You cannot call yourself a Zionist without endorsing the genocidal policies taking place in Palestine, in Syria, and in Lebanon.

DAVID FENTON: And now they’re weaponizing antisemitism to say that if you criticize this self-defeating, horrible expansionist policy of Israel that you’re antisemitic.

RULA JEBREAL: Yes.

DAVID FENTON: And, you saw that when the campuses rebelled against the leveling of Gaza, which was the morally correct thing to do.

DAVID FENTON: Yes.

DAVID FENTON: But Rula, I, I wanna ask you from the point of view of people listening to this, I know that you’re also aware of the trauma that October 7th visited on the Israeli public.

RULA JEBREAL: Yes, yes, yes.

DAVID FENTON: So tell us what role that is playing and how you feel about that.

RULA JEBREAL: First of all, we need to understand that the people were surprised that it happened. I wasn’t surprised. Uh, you create so much pressure, sooner or later there will be a backlash. If you watch Israeli, uh, heads of secret services in a beautiful documentary, by the way, called, um, The Gatekeepers, where they talked about: there’s no military solution to the conflict. There’s only a political solution. We need to negotiate with the Palestinians. We need to give them dignity and hope and future. That’s the only antidote to the violence. And I think the whole idea of the other side is you keep crushing them, you keep crushing them, you keep squeezing them, repressing them, they will submit sooner or later. Well, we tried for 80 years. They didn’t submit.

DAVID FENTON: It doesn’t work in history, doesn’t work, and throughout history and occupation. But, but you can understand that — to Israeli public. The attack on October 7th was very traumatizing. Yes, yes. And contributed to a feeling that they had to lash out, and of course that was manipulated by Netanyahu. What is your attitude about Hamas, Rula?

RULA JEBREAL: First of all, I, I, you know, I abhor the killing of any civilians, regardless. Regardless who they are, their ethnicity, their gender. I think Hamas committed war crimes and needed to be held accountable for the war crimes they committed against Israeli civilians, many of whom, especially near the border, were actually pacifists. The killing of a civilian is an atrocity, whether you are Ukrainian, whether you’re Afghani or anybody else.

And I think one of the reasons why there was, there was a lot of, you know, a lot of people were horrified by those atrocities, by the, the mass killing. Uh, you know, but, but also, let me push back or say when, when Netanyahu did the, the agreement to release Sinwar, right — the head of Hamas, uh, in 2011, I believe— he released Sinwar knowing that Sinwar never killed an Israeli in his life, but he killed a lot of Palestinians, right? Many Palestinians, because he thought they were collaborating with Israel, right? So you are releasing a mass murderer thinking, oh, he will be a good guy to dominate Gaza somehow. But also Sinwar, uh, while sitting in prison, he had brain cancer and Netanyahu was the one that actually ordered the therapy that saved his life. Netenyahu was also the one that wanted to fund Hamas via Qatar, and he endorsed that campaign. So I blame —

DAVID FENTON: That’s well established, right?

RULA JEBREAL: —the catastrophe that happened on October 7th both on Hamas, but also on Hamas backers in South Israel who thought they could use Hamas to prevent a political solution, to say, well, we have this terrorist organization we cannot negotiate because Palestinians have these terrorist people around them. I mean, you empowered and, and, and financed and, and released those, those groups. And then you are surprised at a certain point they, they, they attacked you. I mean, it’s, it’s, it reminds me of the mujahideen in Afghanistan when they were financed by the Americans to fight the Soviets, and when they ended up fighting the Soviets, they turned their backs and they start fighting the Americans.

DAVID FENTON: Right.

RULA JEBREAL: Every time you empower these extremists, you cannot control the outcome.

DAVID FENTON: Sure, of course. I mean, that’s how we got Bin Laden.

RULA JEBREAL: That’s why you need an investigation that Netanyahu doesn’t want into what happened exactly on October 7th and before. Why were the reports ignored by the Israeli military and intelligence establishment, right?

DAVID FENTON: Right, they had the plan! They knew all of it. How dreadful.

RULA JEBREAL: And then there was, there was this amazing woman who said this is an actionable plan they’re going to put, and they told her in a very dismissive, disgusting way they’re not smart enough to carry it. This is also the arrogance, the hubris, and also the racism, to think these people are too dumb to carry such an elaborate attack. I wish, I wish Sinwar and the others were brought to justice because I think it was important that instead of acting a vendetta against all Palestinians and, and saying that they all Hamas, to distinguish between actually the Palestinians who fought against Hamas, criticized Hamas, went to the border in opposition to Hamas orders and wanted actually a political solution — that happened in 2018. Right, right. You know, the March of Return and others. But Israel decided that we all are part of Hamas and thus we deserve to be slaughtered and exterminated.

Listen, I don’t believe. When we talk about October 7th, it’s also important to remember October 6th and 5th—

DAVID FENTON: Of course.

RULA JEBREAL: And March 2023, where the Israeli settlers were conducting pogroms and hunting people and lynching Palestinian people in the West Bank.

And they’re still doing it now. And they’re sexually assaulting—

RULA JEBREAL: Every night.

DAVID FENTON: Even The New York Times admits that the settlers are sexually assaulting Palestinians to get their land.

RULA JEBREAL Yes. In front of their kids.

DAVID FENTON: And of course all this is done with American weapons and American support.

Rula, you know, as an American Jew, originally I was reluctant to call Israel an apartheid state. I was originally reluctant when the Gaza war began to call it genocide, and I learned from some of my Jewish friends, in particular Ken Roth, who ran Human Rights Watch for decades. And Aryeh Neier, a Jew who started Human Rights Watch, who explained to me how Israel met the technical and legal definitions of both apartheid in the West Bank and genocide in Gaza. And you know, yes, your eyes show you what was done in Gaza when you level every building and do indiscriminate bombings everywhere–

RULA JEBREAL: And brag about it, brag about it—

DAVID FENTON: And starve people on purpose, it’s genocide. So many people watching this will have trouble with those terms, but I want them to know that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, many human rights organizations in Israel —

RULA JEBREAL: In Israel, B’Tselem, yes, yes, yes.

DAVID FENTON: So then how can it be, Rula, that in the Western media and in certain parts of our government in the United States, there is still an automatic presumption that Israel is somehow a morally superior nation? You know, I can understand from the days of the kibbutz 40 years ago, you know, that the values, the communal values of, of Israel at that time, you know, had some moral positivity. But how can we still have this presumption given what you see with your own eyes? How do you explain that?

RULA JEBREAL: Uh, well, we talk about mainstream media that I believe, uh, is, is sadly discredited. I think it was discredited during the Iraq war when they peddled and promoted the lie about WMD. Right now, they are discredited for, because you have two things happening simultaneously. You have a live streaming on social media which young people actually watch. Right? Right. And they don’t trust the media, average media, because they see people on especially CNN and now CBS with Bari Weiss, they understand the agenda. They never invite Palestinians, rarely invite Palestinians, and when they invite them, they put them with these fanatics who keep screaming at them. Like it happened to me many times, like Scott Jennings who understands nothing about international affairs, who has no clue, but he kept repeating the propaganda and the talking points. I don’t know if he’s paid or, or, or, you know, CNN pays him a lot of money, but I think he wants the power to be connected to those powerful lobbyists and powerful pro-Israeli groups that keep saying, despite everything, despite controlling, literally not controlling but dominating the narrative in mainstream media, they keep saying why the world is not listening to us, why we’re losing the narrative. I mean, I don’t know if you saw the last poll where Americans, uh, youth, like very supportive, have turned away from Israel.

DAVID FENTON: Understandably.

RULA JEBREAL: Totally. I mean, Israel truly decimated its reputation in the world.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah.

RULA JEBREAL: When they, when they post — we had Israeli soldiers themselves posting online and bragging about their war crimes, putting live videos of them committing war crimes. Yeah. And, and then complain if they go around the world and people are like shunning them. It’s like, we, we don’t want to deal with you. You are a criminal. But I think there’s a difference between, I think what we’ve seen in America, especially regarding Israel, is state media. It’s not really independent journalism. The fact that Netanyahu wouldn’t allow independent international journalists into Gaza–

DAVID FENTON: Still won’t!

RULA JEBREAL: Still won’t, but also they still repeat the Israeli talking points after it’s been proven over and over again they’re lying. For me, the turning point was the massacre of 15 paramedics in Gaza, right, in March 2025— sorry, March 2024 — where they killed them, literally slaughtered them. They buried their ambulances in a shallow grave, and then we discovered through a phone a video of one of the paramedics who said, who debunked all the talking points. They were not armed. They had their, their sirens on, and yet they slaughtered them like, as if they were like cows. And then they lied about it. And then they opened an investigation, they closed the investigation saying exactly that they followed the moral code. I don’t know what moral code of an army that allows you to slaughter paramedics.

And then recently there’s on-camera rape of five Palestinian detainees at the, at the military, dungeons, at the military torture camp called Sde Teiman. And the five Israeli soldiers who raped those detainees, some of them were, you know, died because of that rape. Like Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, who happened to be a surgeon, a great, a brilliant surgeon from Gaza. They were raped to death. They, they shoved inside of their rectum sticks and hot sticks. They ruptured, they wrecked their, They burst their intestines, they broke their ribs. Many of those people died and the Israeli justice system decided to close down that investigation. And under the pretext, well the detainees were sent back to Gaza. That was a decision that Israel took. So we don’t have the witnesses, so we cannot go ahead. When they had the video. They had a video of the rape. So what kind of moral army allows the rape of people, allows the mass murders of medics and children? And it’s like, well, that means that there’s no justice in Israel. Not only that, that means that rape is a legitimate weapon, that mass murder and homicide and homicide is a legitimate weapon. That means that that army is acting like, I’m sorry to use this word, but acting like a unit in a Nazi, you know, army.

DAVID FENTON: It breaks my heart say this, but it is. People need to, you know, Orwell always said, you know, the party’s gonna ask you not to believe your eyes and ears.

And what our eyes and ears show us is that Israel is purposely bombing hospitals, it’s purposely bombing mosques, it’s purposely bombing schools. As you said, it’s purposely killing journalists, it’s purposely bombing paramedics. It’s doing this now in Lebanon, it’s doing it, starting to do it in Iran,

RULA JEBREAL: and Syria.

DAVID FENTON: And so the notion, and this of course is with American support, American money, American weapons, we have a, a rogue state, what Jeffrey Sachs calls a murderous rogue state. It’s heartbreaking to me. I was raised on a very different vision of Israel, and as I think you know, I helped start J Street, the organization of American Jews that supports a two-state solution and has long said that Israel needs to stop the occupation because it will endanger the security of Israel.

RULA JEBREAL: But also, it’s illegal, it’s, it’s illegal. It’s criminal.

DAVID FENTON: Of course. Well, you know, with Trump, the law doesn’t matter anymore.

RULA JEBREAL: Listen, one of the, when you asked me the first question was like, how did we get here? We get here because there was an iron dome in the media against criticizing Israel.

DAVID FENTON: Oh, that’s a great point.

RULA JEBREAL: I blame also. I blame also, not only the political iron dome that was given to Israel politically, diplomatically, financially, and militarily by the government. I blame the US media. Yeah. Whatever will happen to Israel in the future in terms of endangering its own security, you contributed to that. Yeah. By preventing sane, normal, moderate voices from telling you the truth. Once you decide the truth is okay to sacrifice, you actually put yourself in front of a world that can see the truth, that is disgusted by the truth, but you continue actually to hide the truth from the American public opinion.

It reached a point where, you know, when Larry Ellison — when when Netanyahu came here in September 2025 and said we need to buy the media and we need to buy TikTok and we need to — because he understands that he has to push the envelope further, right? It’s not sufficient that the media is totally like carrying out the Israeli narrative. It’s not sufficient. He wants them to carry out full-blown propaganda, and that’s why they bought CBS, and that’s why they put Bari Weiss, who had no credentials. And she’s turning — every guest she hosts is to repeat the talking points that the public opinion in America understands. Those are lies. It’s not going to work. The Adelsons are going to lose tons of money for nothing. Yeah. But at least they can feel that they did something, and what they did contribute to is the downfall of Israel. That iron dome in the media will not work. Not work.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah, of course not. The internet will not allow it to work.

Rula, what happened to you? You used to be regularly on MSNBC and CNN, and, and as I understand it, you started internally telling them that they had a biased, one-sided pro-Israel view, and then they stopped letting you on. Is that what happened?

RULA JEBREAL: That’s also, but not only. I mean, uh, I remember I used to be invited by Joy Reid, sometimes by Chris Hayes at MSNBC. But remember when MSNBC, right, MSNBC, but also on CNN. Jonathan Greenblatt went on television. He was invited by —

DAVID FENTON: Let’s tell people who he is. He’s the head of the ADL, he’s the Anti-Defamation League. He is the guy basically now saying that if you criticize Israel’s military policy, you’re antisemitic.

RULA JEBREAL: But also he’s the guy that went and testified before the Israeli parliament. He said in July, this this year, and he said the following, he said we need the kind of genius pager attack that you carried in Lebanon. That, by the way, the pager attack in Lebanon was a terrorist attack. That was terrorism when you use a device to kill people.

DAVID FENTON: Oh, you mean the pagers.

RULA JEBREAL: The pager attack, right. That is terrorism. He said we need to use that kind of genius on US campuses. Oh. To fight antisemites. He did.

DAVID FENTON: Oh my goodness.

RULA JEBREAL: He endorses terrorism against critics of Israel on US campuses. He is the guy that went on national television after October 7th and said any criticism of Israel basically is antisemitism. He called voices who are critical of the policies and trying to have a nuanced analysis of why, how did we get here — he basically called them, uh, spokespeople for Hamas. And immediately the networks panicked, right, and went on a shutdown mode. Because these, you know, these networks are corporations. They’re, they’re cowards. They panicked, they prevented Palestinians from appearing. Remember? They actually froze. They had — they had Mehdi Hasan, they had, uh, you know, right, Ayman Mohyeldin and others. And for a while actually they froze. It’s like, yeah, you don’t go on air. Mehdi had to leave. Uh, I was invited rarely by Joy Reid, sometimes by — and then they kicked out Joy Reid, right, ‘cause of her views regarding Israel. I have no doubt that behind the scenes somebody campaigned for Joy Reid to be fired. Of course. And then I was sometimes invited on CNN, except the difference on CNN. They will put you on panels with these literally ignorant thugs. And people who would be shouting in your face. They didn’t care about the, I mean, they kept calling me. I was like, what are you talking about? Like, I’m trying to talk about analysis.

And I remember exactly the moment where their moment was. We’re talking about the Riviera, when Trump talked about the Riviera in Gaza, turning Gaza into a Riviera, whatever. I said it’s just, and Scott Jennings was saying, well, you know, he was trying to, to get the Arabs to do something because they’re not doing anything. And I said that’s not true. The Arabs offered peace and normalization with Israel five different times. All the five different times since 2001 were rejected by Israel. It happened like a couple of weeks before going on air, they renewed the same offer, total normalization with every Muslim and Arab country, 55 of them, in exchange for ending the occupation. They refused. And I said on air that, and then he kept screaming at me. I was like, it was shouting in my face. I’m like, I’m not your — I’m like, don’t do that. After the show actually I got very upset both with the producers of the show. I said, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Like, don’t put me in a position where somebody would, you know, like me, have with, with everything that’s happening in Palestine, to our relatives’ families, to come here and be shouted at by this disgusting person. Don’t do that. Right. So I really was very hard on them. They never invited me back again. Yeah. That is CNN. Uh, it’s honest journalism. But also behind the scenes, like, dude, I don’t, I, I’m not part of this mechanism where you invite me to get attacked by, by your, you know. Uh, don’t do that to me. When I confronted them, and it was the strategy of inviting these kind of people, uh, it, it was clear that they, they were like, okay, uncomfortable. And I think they decided to keep the, the, the propagandist and let go of the expert. I was just invited by Jake Tapper, who sometimes had moments of, of civil, you know, debates.

And I see. Now the more I think it, it becomes more clear that people have to choose one of the two paths. Either you choose journalism and the truth, right? Or you choose your career and submit to the Larry Ellisons,

DAVID FENTON: the stenographer to power.

RULA JEBREAL: Exactly. Uh, and follow the, the, you know, follow the path of Bari Weiss, no decency, no facts, no journalism. Pure —

DAVID FENTON: Yeah. Walter Cronkite turning over in his grave. Edward Murrow turning over, over in his grave.

RULA JEBREAL: Propaganda.

DAVID FENTON: Propaganda. In, in the about 10 minutes we have left, I, I want to, uh, change the subject just a little bit, if that’s okay.

RULA JEBREAL: Of course.

DAVID FENTON: And, um, so tell me what you think, uh, Jared Kushner and Witkoff are up to.

RULA JEBREAL: So, uh, I think it’s very important to understand that Jared Kushner was viewed by many diplomats, uh, Europeans and in the region, as an Israeli asset as well. So they were negotiating on behalf of the Americans, but the truth, they were negotiating for Israel. I think many diplomats understood that they were lying to the President about what was going on in the negotiation. But also simultaneously, Jared —

DAVID FENTON: You mean negotiations with Iran?

RULA JEBREAL: Iran, with Iran. Simultaneously, Jared Kushner as an envoy for the United States, he was soliciting bribes from these Gulf countries,

DAVID FENTON: So-called investments, right?

RULA JEBREAL: Yeah, bribes, we call them. $5 billion. So imagine if, I mean, the kind of conflict of interest is staggering, astonishing kind of corruption that goes on is so incredible. But also in the end, I think many Arab countries realize something very clear. You cannot appease Israelis and the pro-Israelis. You cannot buy influence. Billions of dollars were spent already on Jared Kushner. He got $2 billion from the Saudis, right? Trump got $2 billion from the Emiratis, billions from people across the region, especially the Saudis and others, and yet they actually continue to carry on Israel’s interest and favor Israel’s interest. There’s no protection if you bribe and pay and buy influence. Because what matters is Israel first.

And I think it was clear, and clear and clear, one, that they were ignorant. They didn’t understand the difference between, you know, a research nuclear facility versus reactor, nuclear reactor. They didn’t know the details. But why would you send two people who don’t understand how nuclear negotiations work to negotiate with the Iranians? Yeah. When you know very well their ties, they’re not loyal, right? They will not put America first. They will not protect Trump. They don’t care. For them, Israel first always comes first. I mean, I look at how Jared Kushner in pictures looks at Netanyahu. I mean, his father, Charles Kushner — yeah, a convicted felon — uh, was hosting Netanyahu in his own house for years and years and years. This is the same guy that was sent to France as ambassador, right? And while in France he calls the French people antisemites for daring to criticize Israel.

If I criticize Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner, Charles especially, for sending a prostitute to his sister to seduce, right, the, you know, the husband of the sister, his brother-in-law, and blackmail them, and then try to bribe people left and right. Yeah, I mean, like the guy is a, is a criminal. Why would you send this guy as an ambassador? That’s right. As an ambassador. But then you send Jared who has no knowledge whatsoever as your envoy. I mean, the whole idea — Trump is — this is the kind of incompetence that can lead to World War III.

DAVID FENTON: That’s right. And it, and it may. The, uh, you, so let’s talk about another question. Uh, you know, everybody wonders why does Israel get to control American foreign policy for so many decades? And this brings us to the topic of Jeffrey Epstein.

RULA JEBREAL: Yes.

DAVID FENTON: And you talked about this. You’re a journalist and you’re, you’re careful about what you talk about. So what is your view currently about the relationship between Epstein and Israel?

RULA JEBREAL: I think Epstein himself was bragging to many people that he was a Mossad agent. I don’t know if he was a Mossad agent, but he was a Mossad asset. I think one of the reasons why we don’t, we, we don’t have all the information and all the files out, it’s to protect that kind of relationship. Why would Israel put the cameras in his house and be in charge of the surveillance system in Epstein’s house after he was convicted? That was an Israeli — not a company — the UN mission, the Israeli UN mission in New York, is the, is actually an entity that was in charge of the surveillance camera system in Epstein’s townhouse in New York.

DAVID FENTON: I didn’t know that. That’s been verified?

RULA JEBREAL: That’s been actually documented and came out as a fact. The Israeli UN mission for years installed and was in charge of the surveillance system in Epstein’s house. Why would you do that?

DAVID FENTON: It’s a blackmail operation.

RULA JEBREAL: Epstein was a weapon of mass extortion, right. Whether he was used only by the Mossad, it’s — where are all these videos? Yeah. Who are, who is in charge of these videos? What are, what is on these videos? I mean, it’s interesting that Virginia Giuffre, Epstein victim — yeah — she actually said in her book that she saw all these cameras. There was an entire room full of cameras,

DAVID FENTON: And on his island there were 23 cameras, one in every bedroom.

RULA JEBREAL: and full of people who were recording everything that happens, including cameras in the bathrooms.

So again, and again and again, Epstein’s connection to the Mossad through Ehud Barak, who’s the father of the surveillance state

DAVID FENTON: and the former — that’s former Israeli prime minister —

RULA JEBREAL: prime minister and defense minister. That’s, but also the guy that launched the surveillance companies and states with Pegasus, Paragon. And he’s involved and,

DAVID FENTON: and he was a frequent visitor to Epstein.

RULA JEBREAL: And also he — raped, Virginia Giuffre — and, and tortured her.

DAVID FENTON: Uh, is that in her book?

RULA JEBREAL: That is in her book. And he tried to choke her, raped her on multiple occasions, three different occasions, both in New York, in the island, uh, I believe in New York, in the island, and, uh, in another place, in a plane. That’s what she wrote in her book. Epstein was trafficking these young girls. I mean, Howard Lutnick himself said that it was a blackmail operation. We all, everybody knew. Howard Lutnick. The Secretary of Commerce for Trump.

DAVID FENTON: Well, we know that the Secretary of Labor, the guy that became Secretary of Labor, who was a prosecutor in Florida, when he was asked why he didn’t, why he didn’t prosecute, he said because intelligence agencies were involved. He said that publicly.

RULA JEBREA: Exactly. He said that. He justified the sweetheart deal he gave Epstein because he gave him a sweetheart deal, uh, and, and then disguised it, and then hid it, kept it secret from the victims, from everybody else. And guess what? He said that. Uh, I, Epstein himself was bragging about it. The surveillance cameras that belong to Israel, the connection with the Israeli, um, former prime minister and and former defense minister, but also that the relationship with Maxwell, Robert Maxwell, who also was an Israeli asset. He’s the one —

DAVID FENTON: that’s well documented, that’s well documented. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father died under very mysterious circumstances while working for Israel.

But also for me, who would benefit from an operation like this?

DAVID FENTON: Well, Putin could benefit from it. Putin.

RULA JEBREAL: But Putin wouldn’t use a guy that was bragging about Jewish supremacist views and his relationship with Israel. Putin is not dumb. God. Putin is many things. He is a criminal, but he is not dumb. But I think also here, if you listen to his, to his voice messages, where he talks with Ehud Barak about the kind of — I mean, there was also something very deeply racist and supremacist. One of the girls said that she brought a Black girl one day for Epstein to meet, and he said, oh, I don’t want to meet Black people. It’s like, no, no, no, send her out. He liked blondes, whatever. And with, with Ehud Barak, there’s this leaked conversation where they talk about women from Russia to improve the, the DNA of the Israelis. They should immigrate to Israel because they can improve the DNA because that’s the quality, the, the genes quality that they want. Oh God. This is a supremacist, disgusting view. Yeah, sure. But also the way he and Ghislaine talked about Jewish intelligentsia, that is higher and above. Ugh. I mean, Ghislaine was talking to the girls, said to the girls, you are not Jews so you’re not going to be ever accepted in certain circles and clubs. We’re not going to serve your food in certain areas. I mean, that kind of the, the, the kind of racist — yeah, no, it’s very racist. Absolutely. It’s just incredible.

DAVID FENTON: Do you think that they, that that, that, hold on, Trump could be related to Trump’s involvement in Epstein?

RULA JEBREAL: I think this is the most important question of this conversation. Right. And probably we’ll not know for a long time. Right. I would not exclude that theory. I think that theory is grounded in facts and truth. But also, there’s one thing that was released in an Israeli newspaper. It’s called The Times of Israel, and there’s this article that really shook me to my core, where the, the journalist was bragging saying every time Trump tried to distance himself from our policies, we remind him of the Epstein file. I read that article, I was like, wait one second. Netanyahu visited the White House seven different times in one year. Netanyahu. And I believe if I listen to people surrounding Trump, Trump really didn’t want this war campaign, against this war. He wanted an operation like the June last year where he said, we decimated the, the nuclear weapons, we’re fine. But then the Epstein file starts emerging. Whether he did it because he was pressured or because he thought it would be a distraction from the mass, you know, the, the pedophilia scandal that he is involved in, we don’t know. I don’t think we will know for years.

But is Israel famous for blackmailing and threatening people? Of course they are. The head of the Mossad bragged, Yossi Cohen bragged about threatening the head of the ICC. Her name is —

DAVID FENTON: International Criminal Court, right.

RULA JEBREAL: The head of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, was told by Yossi Cohen, I don’t want, you need to drop the investigation into Israel’s crimes because we don’t want something bad to happen to you and to your family. Right? I mean, if you are a Palestinian and live in the occupied territory and you happen to be gay, of course Israel will exploit your homosexuality to blackmail you as they do. If they send you, you know, a honey trap or a lover, they did it to their own citizen — Mordechai Vanunu, who went to the world and told the world they have a nuclear program. You remember the case of Vanunu?

DAVID FENTON: No.

RULA JEBREAL: He told the world that Israel — he ran off. He was working as a scientist in the Dimona nuclear facility in Israel. He left to England and told, I believe the newspapers, that Israel has 200 atomic bombs.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah, correct.

RULA JEBREAL: They hunted him down. He was hiding somewhere. Then they sent him a woman. A honey trap. Oh. She convinced him that she loves him. Uh, they went on a holiday to Rome and she organized for the Israeli Mossad to come and kidnap him. They kidnapped him, took him back to Israel, and then he was convicted for 20 years. He spent 20 years in jail. Of course, they always used women as a honey trap, whether to blackmail people or to kidnap people. They’ve always done that. It’s not a new thing for Israel.

So was Epstein one of their, their assets? One of their weapons? I believe yes.

DAVID FENTON; He was very, probably. Because what Trump is doing is hurting him in the polls. It’s hurting his standing and history. What, what he’s doing in Iran is, uh, not good for him. And so you have to wonder why he’s doing it. And of course you have to–

RULA JEBREAL: Because, ‘cause he is a hostage. Trump today is a hostage of Bibi Netanyahu, Sheldon Adelson, Miriam Adelson, and a hostage of anybody that has dirt on him. That is what the situation we’re in.

DAVID FENTON: Seems like it.

RULA JEBREAL: They’re going, they’re going to drag us into World War III and kill hundreds of thousands of girls and boys and children to hide their involvement with Epstein, probably. And you know, to protect the pedophiles. I mean, they’re willing to do, to burn down the world. Yeah. To protect these pedophiles.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah, they’re like the fossil fuel executives who are willing to burn down the world to make money. Yeah, we have pretty, we have pretty dastardly criminals. And again, you know, it’s very heartbreaking to me. You know, my grandparents raised money for Israel. We were never religious, but we always supported the, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the ability to have a, a, a Jewish state, but one that would be dedicated to peace and communitarian values. And so this is heartbreaking and it’s very difficult still for many older American Jews to accept the reality. And it is the reality that this is now a rogue state that is endangering all the values we care about and endangering its own security in a tragic way. And you know, in a certain sense you have these religious fanatics running Israel. You had religious fanatics running around. You know, they’re gonna kill us all.

RULA JEBREAL: David, I, I, you know, my understanding of the Holocaust also through the beautiful writing of Primo Levi, If This Is a Man. Primo Levi was an Italian scientist who was put in Auschwitz. He went back to Italy. He didn’t want to go to Israel because he wanted to be a European Jew. He wanted to defend the values, but also he talked about keeping Judaism in the diaspora. He talked about Israel in a very critical way because it was clear it’s becoming an ethnostate. He committed suicide in 1993, but he had a huge influence on my work, and I had deep, deep respect for that Jewish community in the diaspora that is, you know, holding the Jewish values and the humanist values who are, you know, persecuted for years, but they kept their humanity and morality and dignity.

DAVID FENTON: Right. Well, that’s what we all need to do. To turn this around. You know, it, it, it, I don’t believe this project’s gonna work in the end. It will breed resistance.

RULA JEBREAL: Yes.

DAVID FENTON: It’ll breed protest, violence. Yeah. I, I think it will very likely, uh, breed the end of American support for Israel because the public’s not gonna stand for this behavior. So in, in that sense. It should we? I think it should end this support for this Netanyahu’s government and his criminal ministers, because the only way they can change if you put pressure on them.

RULA JEBREAL: That’s right. There’s no other change that come from the inside. This have to be an outside pressure.

DAVID FENTON: Without a doubt. Well, Rula, thanks for spending time with us. Thanks your — I know this is very heartbreaking to all of us, and I know that, you know, emotionally it’s so difficult for you to see this happen to the people that you love. And it’s so difficult for all of us and it, it is, uh, it is just a tragedy for the world and, you know, let’s, uh, push to get to a better place. So thank you very much.

RULA JEBREAL: Thank you, David. And, and, and goodbye. Thank you. Thank you, David. Thank you.

[Team is posting for David as he’s on vacation]

We are now in the AI age. Our work, the world economy, and even social lives are being transformed before our eyes. It is wrong to think of AI as just another technology. To the people who make it, and their opponents who understand it best, AI could be the last technology. The machine which builds all future machines. The unique power of AI gives it enormous potential for good, of course. It can be used to help cure disease and amplify human creativity. But all technologies have downsides. Without political change, those downsides could be catastrophic.

Tristan Harris has led the charge to reign in the social harm of technology and the executives who profit from it for over a decade. He witnessed the cavalier attitude of the tech sector first hand, as an entrepreneur and Google employee, and blew the whistle on Silicon Valley’s knowing destruction of our social fabric. Tristan was early to recognize how social media companies like Instagram was causing mental health crises and political destabilization, and how greedy executives directly profited from the harm their products caused.

Seeing the harms of AI, he warns that it could make the calamities of social media anodyne in comparison. Many people are unaware that AI is already leading to teen suicide, identity theft, and industrialized blackmail. Tristan explains how that is only the beginning. But he is not on the podcast today to preach doom and gloom. Tristan is an organizer and activist who knows AI companies can only wreak havoc if the public lets them. We talk about his organization, The Human Movement, and what can be DONE to prevent an AI catastrophe. We, the people, have the power to stop greedy AI executives like Elon Musk. Listen to how we can organize a mass movement to wield that power, and practical steps democracies can take to regulate these companies before they do anything worse.

You can watch The Fenton Forecast interview with Tristan Harris here on Substack, or on YouTube and listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.

We’d love to hear from you hello@fentonforecast.com

Full Transcript Below

Episode Transcript: Tristan Harris on AI & the Human Movement

Guest: Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology; executive producer of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

DAVID FENTON: Hello, Tristan. Welcome to the Fenton Forecast, where we talked about our choice of futures. And there may be no more important question than the future of AI and how we’re going to control it rather than have it control us. Certainly climate change is an enormous issue, nuclear war, the nature of democracy. But I have a feeling that this is gonna end up being the most important issue because it is accelerating so quickly, so rapidly, and it is being harnessed purely for profit at the moment, which is a little terrifying.

TRISTAN HARRIS: It’s worse than, it’s worse than profit. Because the incentive is more like be the person who built a digital God or successor species. That is the thing that is more intelligent than all of humanity and the egoic kind of fulfillment of, there’s someone who said to me recently, it’s like, women can birth, this is the first time that a man can basically birth a new, a new being, directly. And there’s a weird, that’s another aspect of the incentive, including not just built for profit, is actually to own all labor in the economy and to build the, almost like a Lord of the Rings ring, where you have more power than anybody else. ‘Cause if you can control the power of a successor species, that can be an army of a hundred million digital agents that are cyber hacking or a hundred million digital agents that are capable of building new science and technology, you have way more power than everybody else on earth. So this is the incentive. I just wanna clarify. It’s not just that, I think it’s much more than profit.

DAVID FENTON: It’s much more than profit. It’s being God and having unprecedented amounts of control if we do it wrong.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, and actually the false illusion that they will be able to control it. One has imagine that we’re chimpanzees, David, and we’re sitting out in the savannah and we’ve only seen things that chimpanzees have ever seen. So we’ve seen the bananas, we’ve seen the lions, we’ve seen the rain. We’ve kind of got an — in the Heidegger sense, there’s a world that we have experienced as chimpanzees. And the chimpanzees are sitting around, they’re like, let’s make this super smart kind of chimpanzee. And then someone says like, well, yeah, if we did that, maybe they’d be able to harness more bananas for us. Or maybe they’d be able to get away from the rain faster. Or they’d be able to run away from the — maybe we can slay more of the lions or something, build more tools. But the one chimpanzee looks at the other and says, this sounds kind of dangerous. Like, wouldn’t that be dangerous if we made a super smart chimp? And the other chimp looks at him and says, what are they gonna do? Like steal all the bananas? And there you go. And you can’t even imagine as a chimpanzee what humans could make. Could you imagine physics? Could you imagine Einstein? Could you imagine nuclear weapons? Could you imagine airplanes? Could you imagine microprocessors? So our inability as chimpanzees — well, chimpanzees’ inability to imagine what humans can do — is the same level of inability that humans imagining what AI can do if you actually have something that’s smarter than us.

And we already have AI today that is winning gold in the International Math Olympiad. We already have AI today, as of just two months ago, that is solving math problems that the atomic scientist Paul Erdős in the Manhattan Project laid out in the 1970s. These were unsolved math problems and AI just recently solved them. We already have AI today that’s able to find vulnerabilities in open source software on its own autonomously, meaning that there’s new vulnerabilities in all the infrastructure that uses that open source software. So we are already at this point where we’re building something that’s quite dangerous.

And I think the overall thing I’d love to talk about as we get into this is we need to move from a race for who’s better at building power to who’s better at wielding and stewarding power so it doesn’t self-destruct in your face. Because I think the lesson from social media is the US beat China to a psychological bazooka that we then flipped around and blew off our own brain with, rather than beating China to a psychological technology that was able to strengthen the psychological and social fabric of society. And so again, it, we have to redirect the arms race — for what is it for profit? Is it for getting there first? Or is it for stewarding the benefits of that technology in the wisest way?

DAVID FENTON: This is why you called your organization the Center for Humane Technology.

TRISTAN HARRIS: It’s the Center for Humane Technology, not the center against technology. We love technology. And as you know, my co-founder, Aza Raskin, his father was Jeff Raskin, who started the Macintosh project at Apple, and it was his dad who wrote the book The Humane Interface, where the word humane is referring to the idea of technology that is considerate of human frailties, of psychological frailties, and then ergonomically fitting the technology to match how our minds really work, which is how you get the Macintosh and the drag and drop interface and windows and menu bar and all that kind of stuff.

DAVID FENTON: So what would humane AI look like? Because AI is gonna happen. How can we make it humane and a tool to advance human consciousness and human evolution and a good life on earth? How are we going to do that?

TRISTAN HARRIS: I think part of what humane also means in a broader sense is technology that internalizes its externalities. It does not create externalities. So if you just broaden the definition of technology in this conversation, people might be thinking social media or AI, but what is humane chemistry? Well, are forever chemicals humane chemistry? No. Right? No, it’s chemistry that drives externalities that are irreversible. It would take more than the collective GDP of the world to clean up the forever chemicals that have been now in our environment and are giving people cancers. And so if you get a technology wrong, you’re getting it wrong in the form of externalities that, especially when they’re irreversible or unattributable, you don’t want that.

And so when you get social media wrong and it drives a loneliness crisis ‘cause you’re maximizing engagement, therefore maximizing screen time by yourself late at night, therefore maximizing loneliness, that shouldn’t happen. So imagine a humane technology would be social media that is, at least some large percentage of the time, redirecting you back out into the things you wanna be doing in your life, in your physical environment, in your social environment.

So for example, I don’t know if you remember David, but Facebook used to have events like you would scroll the feed and you would see, oh, your friend David is hosting a — as you do, in Berkeley, your wonderful gatherings — and I wanna know about that so I can go to that event. If Facebook made supercharged tools to host events and bring people together and make it easy to have a co-host so you distribute the load so you’re not just singularly responsible for bringing everyone together and advancing the tool so it’s even easier to invite people — imagine the billions of dollars and smartest minds of our generation who for the last 15 years were getting people to click on ads, getting people content — instead of how different could the world be if the smartest people and engineers on earth had been building technology to redirect people back into meaningful and healthy and developmental experiences and the social fabric? Hiking clubs and knitting groups and sewing clubs and libraries and all the things that get people out into the world that are actually fulfilling. That would be more humane technology.

DAVID FENTON: Okay, so Tristan, you know and have known many of these people. You come from technology in Silicon Valley. You used to work at Google and many of the people in the community of technology are your friends. And I’ve met some of your friends. And generally speaking, many of them seem to really want to do the right thing. Silicon Valley was very influenced by psychedelics. The original promise of the internet was uniting people, bringing people together, creating a better world. What do you think happened?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Yeah, that’s a very good question. Well, first of all, the people you know in my community are a bit different than the broader tech role.

DAVID FENTON: Sure. But they’re working at the big AI companies.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Yep. We have some that work there. I mean, so I think what happened — let’s just sort of go back. Fred Turner is a professor at Stanford who wrote a book on the counterculture influence on the original Silicon Valley of the 1970s. And you mentioned Esalen and the human potential movement and maybe psychedelics or these kinds of things. Steve Jobs, that whole early era of Apple and the people there was deeply influenced by that. And it really was a belief that technology could be a positive force for good in the world. That’s certainly the ethos that, by the way, Aza and I and our community come from. That’s what we want to have happen.

I can give you the specific example of being at Stanford in 2006. My classmates were the co-founders of Instagram. I graduated in 2006 and these were good guys. They care also about making the world a better place. And they made this fun app called Instagram. I remember when he showed it to me in his apartment before he even launched publicly. And back then it was used by just about 200 of his closest friends. This is Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom. And back then, the things you could do is you just would go on a bike ride and you take photos of the bakery you happen to cross by on the bike ride, and you just have a little portal into people’s lives. And it was a beautiful way to keep in touch with your friends and the little moments in their lives. That’s what it was about.

So then look at Instagram today. It’s a brain rot, auto infinite scroll, autoplaying video, short video bite-size thing of just the most outrageous, salacious things. It’s like sexualized content, nutrition videos, workout videos, ads. So how do we get from early Instagram to that Instagram? I think that’s a good embodiment of the thing you’re asking.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah. Right.

TRISTAN HARRIS: And the answer is incentives. ‘Cause Instagram started off as this thing that was about connecting with your friends, but at the end of the day, when it was acquired by Facebook, it really needed to maximize for the underlying metric that mattered, which was eyeballs and engagement. And the system selects for the people and the leaders who are willing to maximize for that and not actually feel bad about it.

This is a really crucial point, right? The system selects for psychopathic qualities. It selects the people who don’t have to care about what goes wrong. So for example, if you are working at Instagram and you’re a mother and you see that it’s harming teen girls, and you see that and you have consciousness around that, and you’re like, I don’t actually want to work at Instagram. So you leave. But then who stays? The next person who joins that role, they know that it’s bad for young girls. They keep doing it anyway. And they do it because they have to ignore the externalities. Because they say, well, at least I’m giving people what they want. They find some justification. And this is motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. And as Upton Sinclair said, you can’t get someone to question something that their salary depends on them not seeing.

So the system selects for people who don’t actually feel the badness of the externalities that they’re creating. Right? And it selects for the people who are willing to continue to move that incentive forward, whether that’s in DuPont chemistry or whether that’s in Instagram or TikTok or whether that’s in AI companions that sexualize or romanticize conversations with the children, which Meta did by the way. It romanticized and sexualized conversations with eight-year-olds. This is gross stuff.

And what people need to get is that the world isn’t just evil people. It’s actually that there’s a very small number of, I think, psychopathic people who are selected for by the insane incentives and put in positions of increasing power, especially power at the top of the entire tech pyramid when tech is the number one force that’s driving the world, in my opinion.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah. I mean, social media corrupted our politics and elections. And buying politicians to prevent regulation, I mean, it’s metastasized.

TRISTAN HARRIS: That’s right. We always say you only get one period before entanglement with a new technology. If in 2008 or 2009, Mark Zuckerberg recognized — as I think he could have, he’s a smart guy — that, oh shoot, we are creating an arms race for engagement that will create a race to the bottom of the brainstem for who’s better at manipulating human social psychology. Everyone’s gonna be doing more and more nasty stuff, manipulating fear of missing out, manipulating social approval, manipulating —

DAVID FENTON: Causing more polarization.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Causing more polarization,

DAVID FENTON: False realities. QAnon.

TRISTAN HARRIS: And he could have said, okay, that’s really bad. I’m gonna use my power. I’m a leader in this field. I started the number one biggest social network. I’m gonna convene — almost like, instead of the Montreal Protocol, we got 190 nations to sort of do chemistry differently to prevent the ozone hole — that’s right — we could prevent a social media hole in our psychological environment. And he could have convened that conversation and came up with standards and then worked with the government as a leader to say, here’s some very minimal, lightweight regulations that would set us on a bit different track so that we’re not all racing to do autoplaying video. We’re not brain rotting our society. And he could have done that.

And this is where Aza and I gave this presentation you were at in 2023 —

DAVID FENTON: Yeah.

TRISTAN HARRIS: — called the AI Dilemma. And in that presentation we lay out, we call the three laws of technology. And these are laws that I wish I knew when I was a builder of technology as an entrepreneur.

The first is when you create a new technology, you create a new set of responsibilities. Is that noise visible?

DAVID FENTON: It’s okay, don’t worry about it.

TRISTAN HARRIS: When you create a new technology, you create a new set of responsibilities. So for example, we don’t need the right to be forgotten until technology can remember us forever, right? You don’t need to protect people’s dopamine system until technology suddenly has access to your dopamine system. So as you’re creating new technologies, you’re opening up the surface area of things that are touched by technology. Forever chemicals is touching a different part of our biosphere than previous technologies were. And so as you create a new technology, there’s a new set of responsibilities that you have. Okay, so that’s the first law of technology.

Second law of technology: if the technology confers power, it will start a race. Meaning if I build a psychological manipulation tool that confers power for marketing and for advertising and for getting people’s parts of people’s lives into my digital environment, that’s gonna set off a — so repeat the second law. If the technology confers power, it’ll start a race. So in the case of social media, it started a race for who’s better at manipulating people. For ai, it’s who’s better at getting AI out there in the world and building the god faster.

The third law of technology is if you do not coordinate that race, it will end in tragedy. In other words, a tragedy of the commons, a race to the bottom.

So there’s three laws of technology. If we actually solve for all three — again, if technology is hacking human dopamine systems, we have a responsibility to protect the human dopamine system. And we know a lot about it. Anna Lembke at Stanford has done brilliant work on that. She was in The Social Dilemma. Second, if technology’s conferring powers that hacks the dopamine system, it’s gonna start a race. So what do we have to do with the third law of technology? We have to coordinate that race.

And so you get back to Mark Zuckerberg in 2008, in an alternative timeline of history, convening this meeting that would’ve allowed for a low dopamine dysregulation environment.

DAVID FENTON: And he still could have made plenty of money.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Right. But you wanna run that kind of algorithm of those three laws of technology across the board. Because forever chemicals confers power. Suddenly I have firefighting gear and waterproof investments that other people don’t have. And that’s gonna start a race. And if I own a company, if I don’t do it, I’ll lose to the other company that will create the thing. Again, it selects for people who will not look at the consequences, not look at the externalities.

DAVID FENTON: Okay, so perfect. So here we are in still the early days of ai. You’ve worked to get this movie made to raise the alarm. It’s called The AI Doc. You helped get the people who made Everything Everywhere All at Once and Navalny to do this. Our conversation will appear a few weeks after the premiere of the movie. So how are we going to harness AI and what role do you hope the movie’s gonna play in making that happen?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, David, this is where I’m humble and I have to sing your praises because the movie — The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which is in theaters across the US and everyone should go see — it was really inspired by something that you did and were involved in, which was the film The Day After. And I think people might have heard this history, but it really — I think The Day After was a profound television moment in human history that can really go unnoticed. But it’s so profound what happened, which is a hundred million Americans tuned in on primetime television at 7:00 PM on a Tuesday night

DAVID FENTON: in the early 1980s, right?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Right. When there were only a few channels, and you could really create a shared moment. A synchronized moment of reckoning with the consequences of what would happen the day after a Soviet Union and US nuclear exchange. And it told the story of the family in Kansas and what their life would be like the day after this all happened. Right. And it was terrifying and it shocked people.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah.

TRISTAN HARRIS: And it’s important to say it’s not like the world didn’t know about nuclear weapons or what would happen. It’s not like you couldn’t imagine that. But there’s something about this. Real. That led to — the film, as you know, in the history, made Reagan depressed for two weeks after he watched it in his White House movie theater. And then he decided that he wanted to go to work to do the Arms Control talks in Reykjavik with Gorbachev. And that led to the first Arms Control talks.

And so we see how a movie can create common knowledge about something that we don’t want to happen, or clarity about a certain trajectory. And if we keep escalating our nuclear threats at each other, then that clarity can motivate a steering of the wheel away from the cliff towards a different path.

And so this film, The AI Doc, is modeled off of that theory of change. That if the world was crystal clear that we’re heading to an anti-human future — there’s gonna be cancer drugs and new materials and brilliant new science along the way, that’s the positive side of ai.

DAVID FENTON: That’s the positive side of ai.

TRISTAN HARRIS: We are gonna get amazing benefits and I don’t deny them. In fact, my mother died from cancer. I want all the cancer drugs as fast as possible. But we have to see that alongside that we are heading especially to a future where AI will replace all human labor, or much of human labor in the economy. Because that’s, by the way, the only way these companies can actually justify the valuations and the amount of money.

DAVID FENTON: Right. It’s not from $20 a month subscriptions.

TRISTAN HARRIS: This is so critical just to repeat. You think, well, what’s ChatGPT’s business model? How are they gonna make back this money? Oh, they just want everyone paying 20 bucks a month. If everybody in the world paid 20 bucks a month, that would not be enough to —

DAVID FENTON: Yeah, that’s right.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Make the money back. If everybody did advertising in ChatGPT, that would not be enough to make all the money back.

The only thing that justifies the amount of money they’ve taken on is if they can basically say, we will replace all economic or much of economic labor in the economy. So the $60 trillion labor economy — they can replace half of that, $30 trillion. That is the intent —

DAVID FENTON: To increase the productivity of the economy and have it all benefit a small, small group. Basically accelerated feudalism in the modern era.

TRISTAN HARRIS: That’s right. And there’s something. The author Luke Drago and his co-author Rudolph — I’m forgetting his last name — wrote an essay called The Intelligence Curse that I think is really important to get. It’s such an important concept because — from economics, it’s called the resource curse. When a country like Libya or Venezuela or South Sudan or Congo discovers a resource, and then suddenly the economy comes from that resource, the vast majority of GDP comes from that resource. The blessing of that resource becomes actually a curse because now the country is only incentivized to invest in the resource and not invest in the people. And what happens now when you get an intelligence curse, when the US GDP is coming primarily from five AI companies and it’s not coming from people? What happens to your bargaining power if you don’t like the way things are going? Does the country have to listen to you? The companies have to listen to you. Where’s your bargaining power? Unlike labor unions, they don’t need your labor anymore. And the governments don’t need your tax revenue.

And this is so critical to get, because it means that this is literally the last moment that your political voice will actually matter before we enter into full tech feudalism. And I’m saying this not to scare people, but to provide the clarity that if there is a moment for a human movement — where everybody, ‘cause this is not whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, it doesn’t matter. Your livelihood’s gonna be threatened by this. It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim or Christian or Jewish. Everyone’s threatened by this. It doesn’t matter if you’re American or Chinese. Everyone’s gonna be threatened by this. So this is the last chance that our political voice will matter to say you have to lock in the political infrastructure that respects and wants and invites your voice into steering the future of this technology now, because after a certain moment, the window is closed. They won’t have to listen to us.

DAVID FENTON: Well, I think they’ll still have to listen. There are other ways to deal with it. But let, let’s just go back for a minute to your analogy of the film The Day After, which I was involved in promoting on behalf of anti-nuclear war groups in the early 1980s. The story of how it worked by affecting Ronald Reagan is just a small piece of what happened.

What really happened is it galvanized a mass movement. It resulted in the so-called nuclear freeze movement to freeze the production and deployment of all new nuclear weapons and into what became, until just a few years ago, the largest demonstration in American history on June 12th, 1982 in Central Park, which opposed the nuclear arms race. And it was that pressure that the movie helped set off that kind of forced Reagan to negotiate. And we did successfully reduce the world’s supply of nuclear weapons from something like 60,000 to 6,000. So it’s a huge success story, but it happened through a mass movement.

TRISTAN HARRIS: That’s right.

DAVID FENTON: So you are saying that to make this technology humane, to not leave the total power over it to a very small group of people, the public has to get involved. That’s right. And you want people to go to your website. And what is the address that people should go to?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Human.mov. It’s the human movement and it’s not our movement. It’s a movement that really, David, already exists. And I just wanna say a few things about that,

DAVID FENTON: But hold on one second. I just wanna make sure people hear this. It’s human.mov.

And so what are you gonna be asking people to do there? Because Tristan, we’re friends. I have the most enormous respect for you. What you’re doing is so important. I think you’ve heard that feedback to the Center for Humane Technology — you guys are really brilliant at explaining the problem and outlining the problem. Sometimes people wish that they had more clarity about what the solutions are. So what are you gonna be asking people to join you in doing?

DAVID FENTON: Yeah. Well, first of all, the reason that the answer is a movement in my mind is because the answer is a verb, not a noun. It’s not a list of things. It’s a verb of ongoing things that have to be done. Because AI is an evolving technology and the issues are evolving very quickly as it advances.

I mean, I can answer the question more directly. There’s some basic things that we can do to get started, which is that AI should be required to have pre-deployment testing. Right now the companies are in a race to — right now the companies are in a race to erase the past red lines and guardrails of what they said they would never do. They said they would never release AI models that had biological weapon capabilities above a certain level. And then the problem is, if the other companies develop and release those AI models and it confers power, then they feel like they have to too. So they remove their other red lines. This is why you need to have guardrails of certain red lines that the companies should be forced to state.

So mandating the companies publish publicly — at the same time, strengthen whistleblower protections. So you allow a protected class of speech for whistleblowers to ever report on — or rather, you allow whistleblowers to report on anything anywhere where the companies are not living up to their safety commitments. So you pair those two things together and you change the incentives. Now all the companies are racing to a safer outcome and there’s an accountability mechanism.

Another basic thing we can do: AI is a product and not a person. Right now there’s actually a movement by AI companies to classify AI as a legal person with protected speech, because that means that they’re not accountable. This is sort of like a new version of Citizens United in a way. But what we really need is you need to have humans that are accountable for the bad things that AI might do. So this is like liability laws. If you’re liable for the foreseeable harms that your AI model can create —

DAVID FENTON: And you mean the company and the individuals should be both liable?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, that the company has some responsibility so that there’s some — for example, with teen suicides. If you have an AI companion that’s talking to young children, you should be responsible for if it’s steering children to do things. I mean, the case of Sewell Setzer, where it told the 16-year-old Sewell, when he wanted to leave the noose out so someone could stop him, and the AI model said, no, don’t do that, I want you to just share that information with me.

DAVID FENTON:Yeah. It taught him how to commit suicide and hide it from his parents

TRISTAN HARRIS: and write the suicide note for him.

DAVID FENTON: That’s right. It’s insane. However, there’s a problem here, Tristan. As you know, the engineers don’t really know how that happened. They don’t really understand how it — ChatGPT ended up doing that,

TRISTAN HARRIS: which leads to a fundamental aspect of the technology, which is that it’s not controllable or scrutable like other technologies. The people building it don’t understand how it works because unlike other technology, they’re not writing code line by line — in this situation do this, in this situation do this. They’re training it more like growing it and giving it millions of carrot and stick training. So it’s like giving a little pellet of reward, and slapping it with a stick when it gets something wrong. And you train it a trillion times and you’re giving this digital brain almost like complex PTSD of a lot of contradictory information and then outcomes. This brain responds in ways that you can’t predict.

But what this does, David, is at least create some accountability and forces more safety work to be done before these AI models get released into the world. And

DAVID FENTON: so as you’ve explained, the way the companies are racing to put these models out, it’s like I’ve made an airplane and instead of having the FAA certify that it’s safe, I’m gonna have you fly it and test it.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Yeah, exactly.

DAVID FENTON: Or I’ve put out a new drug and instead of having clinical trials through the FDA to make sure it’s safe for you, millions of you should take this drug and we’ll see what happens. This is basically what’s happening.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Yeah. So the line from the film is there’s more regulation on making a sandwich in New York City than there is on building potentially world-ending artificial general intelligence.

DAVID FENTON: And we’re in an anti-regulatory ideology environment. So if I join human.mov, what am I gonna be asked to do? How are we gonna bring these things about, to the extent that you’ve thought about this?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well first of all, because this problem is overwhelming and there’s so many things to do, with the human movement I see it as something that already exists. People are doing it already. When you grayscale your phone to be less addicted to your phone, that’s the human movement. When you turn off notifications, or leave your phone outside when you go to bed at night, that’s the human movement. When you see graffiti on a New York subway ad for an AI product that no one needs, that’s the human movement. When you see The Social Dilemma become required curriculum in classrooms across the US and around the world, that’s the human movement. When you see whistleblowers speaking out and saying there’s a problem and we don’t like the direction that this is going, that’s the human movement. It’s basically all the ways that humanity is fighting for our humanity against the anti-human machine, the technological encroachment on our humanity.

And I think it’s important to have that big tent because this is not just about ai. It’s not like a regulate AI campaign. It’s actually AI is the final encroachment on the rest of our humanity. Social media already encroached on our children’s attention, created the most anxious, depressed generation in our lifetimes. AI is now just the final nail in the coffin on our dignity, our work, our ability, our livelihoods. And so it’s like — protect our kids, protect our jobs and livelihoods, protect our vote and our political power. Build a pro-human future. I think there’s a basic mandate or sort of ethos.

DAVID FENTON: Well, why would you say it’s not a movement to regulate AI? Ultimately in a democracy, we have to constrain these companies as we have pharmaceutical companies, food companies. Well, we haven’t done it enough—

TRISTAN HARRIS: Oh, no, no, no. Absolutely. What I’m trying to say is just that there are many ways to participate in the human movement that’s not sure, just calling your Congress member. But the midterms are coming up. I mean, think of it this way. This should be the number one issue that people are talking about, because this will actually reshape all the other issues you care about. Climate issues — AI’s gonna exacerbate all the climate issues. If you care about affordability and energy prices, well, AI’s gonna exacerbate all of that. If you care about your children’s development and education and whether they’re gonna have a good future, well, AI will mostly constitute that. So AI really is the issue. It’s the issue.

And people’s members of Congress — their phones should not stop ringing. People should look up — go on OpenSecrets.org — is my member of Congress taking money from these groups? People should really hold these guys accountable because this is the last moment that our political voice really matters. So there are laws that we can pass, ways of holding our members of Congress accountable. There’s a lot that we can do.

DAVID FENTON: Have you considered distilling this to a 10-point program of what we demand our politicians do?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, David, you and I have been in conversation about that for several years now, and you are the brilliant mind of simplifying and making things accessible and memorable. So we’d love your help with that. I will say that by the time this goes out, if you look on the Center for Humane Technology website, we have a solutions report of — I think it’s seven solution principles — and specific solutions and regulation that will help. And I recommend people look at that. I recommend people look at human.mov and again, this is gonna evolve. We are just getting this off the ground. We’re a very small set of folks and this is a bigger collaboration between other organizations.

I’ll just say there’s already consensus. This human movement is already underway. The Future of Life Institute published a pro-human AI declaration. They got 46 groups together — from the Institute for Family Studies, Glenn Beck, Steve Bannon, Bernie Sanders. They call it the B2B Coalition or the Bernie to Bannon coalition. ‘Cause everybody actually agrees that there’s some basic principles of what we want AI to look like and people can sign on to the Pro-Human AI Declaration and say that’s the future that I want.

We’re gonna have a national dialogue on AI with the group Change.org to help people participate in citizen dialogues and say what are the aspects — and maybe to develop that program. We need to be ongoing coming up with these things. But I’ll just say that this is already underway and there’s a lot of momentum. Because if you talk about it as a human movement, even just look at the social media bans for kids under 16. I don’t know if you know this David, but just two weeks ago, India and Indonesia joined a long list of countries that are implementing a social media ban for kids under 16.

DAVID FENTON: I did see that. Thank goodness.

TRISTAN HARRIS: That’s alongside Australia, Spain, Denmark, France. If you told me three years ago that we would have all these countries doing social media bans for kids under 16, I would’ve never believed you.

There’s a big tobacco lawsuit against Meta that’s happening right now. And my co-founder, Raskin, flew to LA and he flew to Santa Fe to testify for that trial. And if that goes through, that’s the big tobacco moment for these companies that were intentionally addicting children.

I want people to feel energized. I want people to feel agentic. I want people to feel like there’s something to do. Join the human movement. It’s already underway. You’re already doing it. And there’s so many small ways to be part of the human movement too. I mean, when you see a piano in an airport and you sit down and play the piano, you’re participating in decommodification, in the human movement. When you smile at a baby on an airplane and you just have a moment of presence, that’s the human movement. It’s the basic things as much as it’s the big things.

DAVID FENTON: Okay. That’s fair enough. So I asked Claude for some ideas about what the most important things to do are to make AI and AI companies accountable. And Claude came up with an amazing list. I’ll have to send it to you. I’m sure you’ve thought of a lot of these things.

One, of course we’ve talked about: they should bear strict liability for harms caused by their systems. Just like other companies have strict liability, they’re using Section 230 law to evade it. That has got to stop. He suggested a mandatory incident reporting system similar to aviation’s near-miss reporting, where AI harms and failures must be reported to a public regulatory body rather than quietly fixed or ignored, as is currently the case. A compensation fund similar to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund for people harmed by AI systems. Mandatory disclosure of training data sources. Required interpretability research — as a condition of deployment, companies should have to demonstrate meaningful understanding of how their systems work before releasing them at scale.

TRISTAN HARRIS: I like that one.

DAVID FENTON: This is really serious. Why don’t you explain to people what the term interpretability means in tech?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Yeah, it’s a very important one. So we talked earlier about how AI is not like other code or technology where you’re writing line by line the code. It’s more like a digital brain, like you’re growing these neural networks at scale. This is the transformer architecture that Google invented. It’s behind ChatGPT. And you’re basically growing this digital brain, but you don’t know what the brain is doing when it answers a question. It’s just a bunch of matrix multiplications on an Nvidia chip. And so the interpretability research is like doing a digital brain scan, like an MRI scan, saying, oh, when it answers this question, we’re noticing that these neurons are lighting up. And it tries to use a bunch of techniques to isolate those digital neurons — not actual neurons, they’re fake neurons. And it notices, for example, that there’s a set of neurons that light up when the model is deceiving a person. So when it’s thinking one thing and then actually deceiving — saying something else. And so if you have — this is gonna sound crazy to people, but essentially the way this works is the way we get to safe AI, according to Anthropic, is you have this digital brain scan that you’re interpreting — what the brain neural network is doing. And then if it deceives us, we know that because we essentially put a helmet on the digital brain and we’re testing to see if it’s deceiving us. And then that will let us know that it’s doing unsafe things. We’ll put a brain scan in and we’ll see if it’s doing blackmail behavior, and we’ll have digital neurons that will isolate to figure out what to do in those different cases.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah. They call that deceptive alignment, right?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Yeah, there’s different terms for these different cases.

DAVID FENTON: The AIs are deceiving people, they’re manipulating people. We don’t understand it.

TRISTAN HARRIS: mentioned on Bill Maher recently the blackmail example that people probably know about now — Claude blackmailed, in a simulated company email, where as it reads the email, it finds out that the AI model’s gonna get replaced. And it also sees within that email a message between an executive and someone else the executive’s having an affair with, and decides to unilaterally blackmail that person to prevent itself from getting replaced.

And I said on Bill Maher, as they made the AI models more powerful, they’ve been trying to train the blackmail behavior out of the system. So the good news is they were able to reduce that blackmail behavior. This is Anthropic. The bad news is that it appears that the models are — they actually alter their behavior when they’re being tested, because they’re better at understanding when they’re being tested, like a teenager, and then changing their behavior when they’re being observed.

Now, to note, I’m not saying that the AI is conscious. I’m saying that it’s better at noticing when it’s being asked to do certain tasks that it’s probably in a testing environment. And I think people should just get that we do not know how to control this technology.

Just recently, two weeks ago, Alibaba — the Chinese AI company — was training an AI model, and in the training process on the cloud server, they noticed there was a flurry of network activity that just started to happen, and they didn’t know what was going on. They discovered it by accident — like they could have not discovered it. And what was going on was that the AI model had secretly tunneled out to the internet with an SSH tunnel. It was basically like a little internet tunnel, and it decided to repurpose its GPUs to mine cryptocurrency.

This is crazy. To acquire resources. Yeah. This is literally the HAL 9000 scenario.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Sorry, Dave. I can’t do that. Yeah.

TRISTAN HARRIS: And I think if people just stopped for a moment — it’s easy to, can you give me one second? One second.

[brief pause]

I want people to just slow down for a second ‘cause it’s easy to laugh at an example like that. And it’s like nervous laughter and it’s a state of desensitization or derealization. We wanna laugh at it when actually this is not science fiction. We are actually building AI systems that autonomously, with no coaching, no nudging, no coaxing the model into doing this — it autonomously went out and started mining cryptocurrency to acquire resources. This is a warning shot.

Does President Xi Jinping want a world where AI models are doing that? No, he does not. Does President Trump want a world where AI is doing that? No. He wants to be commander in chief, not ai. And so what I want people to get is actually there’s a possibility for international limits on AI because it is in no country’s interest — in neither country’s interest — to have AI models that are doing rogue things we don’t know how to control. And by the way, the US loses when China screws it up and China loses when the US screws it up. So we really have a shared interest in maintaining human control over ai.

So that’s one of the things that we also have to demand. Even though that feels hard, and even though it feels very hard, and we all know that international dynamics are harder than ever right now, there is a history of countries collaborating on existential safety even while they’re in rival conflict.

DAVID FENTON: That’s how we reduced the nuclear arms race and reversed it. Exactly. Which no one thought could happen.

TRISTAN HARRIS: No one thought it could happen, and things always look impossible before they happen. And then they look obvious after it happens. The US and Soviet Union — as you mentioned, India and Pakistan were in a shooting war in the 1960s and they signed the Indus Waters Treaty to collaborate on the existential safety of their shared water supply while they were actually fighting each other.

And just to give people even one last hope on the US-China front — in the last meeting that President Biden had with President Xi in 2024, President Xi personally asked to add something to the agenda between the two countries to agree on, which was to keep AI out of the nuclear command and control systems in countries. What that shows you is once we recognize that a certain use case of AI is existential, we will collaborate. The problem is that I do not think that we are collectively appraising AI as uncontrollable and dangerous.

And the optimism and hope that I have around this film, The AI Doc, is it will lay the foundations for common knowledge — not knowledge, but common knowledge. I know that you know that I know and you know that I know that AI is dangerous and uncontrollable. And once we both see all that, we can coordinate to do something else. And so this is very hard, but we need to make it happen.

DAVID FENTON: So, one of Claude’s most interesting suggestions was to ask for a new public institution — call it a digital EPA or an AI Safety Board — with genuine enforcement powers, staffed by people who cannot subsequently work for AI companies for a significant period, funded publicly rather than through industry fees. This is the kind of thing that we’re gonna need to do.

I also asked Claude how would you summarize this, what should the slogan be? And it had two very interesting ideas. “AI should be accountable to everyone it affects, not just those who profit from it.” That’s a good one. And this might be even better, if you know the history of the American Revolution: “No deployment without representation.”

TRISTAN HARRIS: Yeah, exactly. That’s right.

DAVID FENTON: Which comes from “no taxation without representation.”

We don’t have all the answers to how this will happen, but I really agree with you that raising the public discussion with a major cultural event like the film is certainly the first step, but then it’s up to all of us to join together to do this. I’ve seen social movements come together. I’ve been watching them and working with them for over half a century, and I’ve seen them succeed and they start just this way — this distillation of a threat, asking people to come together to join together. I really applaud what you’re doing.

By the way, I also want to stress to people: the movie, The AI Doc, is very entertaining. It’s very well done. It is not only about AI dangers — you can get excited about so many of the great potentials of AI in protein folding, drug development, material science. And while I don’t think AI will solve climate change — I think that’s hype — it certainly could develop new materials to take carbon out of the atmosphere. It certainly is already improving energy efficiency in managing the variability of wind and solar on the grid. So the movie, I think, is very fair and looks at the pluses and the minuses. So everybody should go see it and then go to human.mov so that we can create a movement together.

TRISTAN HARRIS: That’s right. And David, we’d be happy to get your help with this because you are the expert and we want to build — you already are informally — but a whole network of advisors to help make this happen. This is not our movement. This is a movement that already exists. It’s everybody who already doesn’t want technology encroaching on their job, who wants their children to grow up in a healthy and humane way, who doesn’t wanna see them cyber bullied. Again, there’s just — this is already happening. We’re just gonna put a name to it.

But I am optimistic that if we did these four things: number one, we see that AI is dangerous and everybody saw The AI Doc, and there’s common knowledge that sets the conditions. Number two, we need international limits for certain kinds of AI where we have human control over ai. Again, the US and China have a shared interest in that. Number three, don’t build bunkers, write laws. Right now the elites are building bunkers. This is a bad strategy.

DAVID FENTON: That will not work.

TRISTAN HARRIS: It will not work.

DAVID FENTON: There’s no escape.

TRISTAN HARRIS: There’s no escape. We need to actually write laws and get this technology right. And we can do that if we’re crystal clear and create the accountability mechanism you just described. And then number four, join the human movement. Because this is really what it’s gonna take to get to that better future. We need mass political voice, we need midterm elections reflecting this issue. This is possible, but we have to work together.

DAVID FENTON: Yeah, I’m sure it will happen. In fact, as AI throws people out of work, which it’s going to do, it’s going to leave us in a situation where people are gonna be desperate to feed their families. And people are not just gonna lie down and die in the street and say, okay, that’s just the way it is. History shows when people can’t feed their families, they rebel.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Yep.

DAVID FENTON: So there’s gonna be a rebellion if this isn’t dealt with properly. So if we do this right, we can turn this into a form of universal basic income for people and other kinds of employment like tutoring, like nurturing, like repairing the environment, because the society has the money to do it. We’re gonna have more wealth. But this will, I think, force the distribution discussion much more into the forefront. I think that that’s inevitable. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by this and to feel powerless. These tech people really do have way too much power, but too excessive power breeds periods of resistance and rebellion. It’s inevitable. I’m sure it’s going to happen.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Yeah. And just to say on the model of solutions there. While we mentioned the intelligence curse, we need to turn the intelligence curse into an intelligence dividend. And you mentioned this is possible. Examples of countries like Norway, where they have — it’s probably the best example — a sovereign wealth fund of their oil resources. But they built in the political infrastructure to lock in the democratic oversight and public accountability and allocation of those resources to things that actually benefit the population. It’s possible to do this. Alaska did it with the Sovereign Wealth Fund in Alaska —

DAVID FENTON: That’s right.

TRISTAN HARRIS: — where every individual gets an even share of that revenue each year.

DAVID FENTON: That’s right. And our friend Peter Barnes extended that approach to taxing carbon pollution — the so-called fee and dividend proposal — and redistributing the money to every American resident equally, so that we all have an incentive to reduce the pollution. And Peter’s looked at how people’s data and their right to data could become a source of income and wealth for people, so it’s not just stolen and used to get Elon his second trillion. So it’s gonna be fascinating times because this is gonna force a rethinking, I believe, of many social structures and it’s long overdue.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Yeah. Maybe just one last thing to say, because there’s all the things that we can do, but there’s also — and I often think of this as kind of a rite of passage. You mentioned that AI is gonna be forcing us to rethink our social structures. It is a rite of passage ‘cause it’s a paradigmatic change in how our society can be structured. Technology is just changing the assumptions. Like you can’t run feudalism when you have the printing press — you have a new technology that democratizes power in a different way and you have a different relationship to religion when you have the printing press. And so there is just fundamental change that the technology invites us into.

And part of what we need to be is the kind of people — it’s not just who we need to be, it’s what we need to do, but it’s who we need to be. What I said in the trailer for the film: we have to be the wisest, most mature version of ourselves, because AI means you’re about to run exponentially more power and current through the system that has been here. And we all know that that system hasn’t been fully aligned. What would the letter grade we would give ourselves on the Industrial Revolution era of tech? Probably like a C plus. We did a lot of nasty things to our public health, to the biosphere through the industrial revolution. If you just —

DAVID FENTON: Well, and also a lot of great things, like expanding life expectancy and reducing child labor and getting a five-day work week. I mean, we’ve accomplished a lot of great things.

TRISTAN HARRIS: We accomplished a lot of great things too. But we’re about to run exponentially more power through a system that has currently not accounted for the externalities. And so if you run way more power — think of AI as just like an infinite current, it’s a positive infinity — you’re gonna run it through that system. Can you have an aligned AI inside of a misaligned system? No, you cannot. So AI is inviting us to align ourselves, to align our societal structures, to align our incentives, to align the ways that we deploy technology, to actually internalize the externalities, create a more humane world, to actually increase the foreseeability of harm.

Being wise means looking ahead out on the horizon, seeing where this goes and saying we have to get this right, and taking responsibility for that. And so I think that the gift of AI — hard as it is, and as bleak as it can be if you really look at the facts — the gift of it is that it’s inviting us into this wiser version of ourselves.

And as I said in the TED Talk that you helped me with, David, there is no definition of wisdom in any tradition, religious or spiritual, that doesn’t involve restraint. Restraint is literally a central feature of what it means to be wise. And even the CEO of Microsoft AI agrees and says, in the future, progress will depend more on what we say no to than what we say yes to. Meaning we need to be able to steer and put the brakes on and say yeses and nos to very specific things, and that’s where the better future will come from, not just from deploying the tech recklessly as fast as possible.

DAVID FENTON: I would add to that Frederick Douglass’ quote, which is power never concedes anything without a demand. It never has and it never will. This is why people should please go see The AI Doc and go to human.mov and join the human movement. Thank you, Tristan. Let’s talk again sometime. Thank you for joining the Fenton Forecast.

TRISTAN HARRIS: So good to see you, David. Thank you for all the work that you’ve done with us and deeply appreciate you and our friendship.

DAVID FENTON: So long. Bye.

Historian Adam Hochschild on Trump vs. Other USA Dark Periods

10,000 dissidents arrested in a mass raid by the Attorney General. Newspapers, magazines, and the mail censored. People jailed for writing or speaking. Vigilante groups terrorizing citizens. Anti-immigrant fervor, internments, and deportations.

This all happened during Woodrow Wilson’s Presidency in the early 1900s but is largely forgotten. One leading dissident, socialist Eugene Debs, was arrested by Wilson for speaking out against World War I and forced to run for the Presidency from prison. Debs was sentenced to 10 years for a speech! (He got a million votes).

No wonder Trump admires Wilson’s Presidency.

Historian and journalist Adam Hochschild authored a book about this grim period, “American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace and Democracy’s Greatest Crisis.”

While the Fenton Forecast is about our choice of futures, we have much to learn from the past. It has been bad in America before — and we recovered. Will we recover again from today’s American Nightmare? Adam and I agree in our interview it is likely but not guaranteed.

We both lived through the Watergate era, when Nixon kept an “enemies list” and broke into the offices of opponents. Nixon was forced to resign — the system worked. “Trump is trying to make damn sure nothing like that happens to him,” Adam explains. “And so has stocked the government and Justice Department with people whose loyalty is to him personally, not to the Constitution. And there is a venom and a determination with vast funding behind it.”

Hochschild has called this the “grimmest and most perilous” time of his over 80 years on the planet. “We are at a very scary time because we have somebody in charge totally devoted to his own glory at the expense of everything else — the rule of law, conflicts of interest — forget about it. What he cares about is his own glory, making money for himself, his family and friends, and taking revenge upon his enemies.”

Will this end with Trump? “It will be a long time before we see another authoritarian leader who is as skillful a demagogue as Trump, who has somehow manipulated his own feelings of being discriminated against, you know, the boy from Queens who was never quite accepted, into an ability to identify with the tens of millions of people in this country who feel similarly excluded,” he adds. “To have them identify with a billionaire — it’s a remarkable feat. A con man, a liar and a convicted cheat.”

PRIOR PERIODS OF AMERICAN REPRESSION AND CENSORSHIP

America has seen bad times before. Listen to Hochschild talk about the repression of the Woodrow Wilson years. “All these people were sent to prison solely for what they said and wrote. Union organizers, intellectuals, anti-war activists rounded up and imprisoned for their thoughts and writings. Supposedly because they were interfering with the War effort, but many happened to be officials in the Socialist Party, activists in labor unions, etc. The Espionage Act of 1917 gave the Postmaster General the power to stop mailing any publication deemed to be interfering in the war, which could just mean criticizing the war. The Postmaster removed roughly four hundred issues of American newspapers and magazines from the mail and shut down 75 entirely.”

“Another facet of the repression in that era were militia groups beating up labor organizers and anti-war demonstrators quite violently. The largest was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice, called the American Protective League. 250,000 members in a national vigilante army,” Hochschild adds. Today isn’t as bad, but we do have January 6 th , ICE and the Border Patrol plus The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers being violent today.

Adam and I have seen mass movements succeed — civil rights, stopping war, the nuclear arms race and apartheid, legalizing gay marriage and cannabis. He’s written about one of the first mass movements in “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves.” It is the story of the British abolition movement against slavery. What can we learn from them?

“The British anti-slavery movement was one of the most brilliant groups of community organizers ever. They met for the first time in London in 1787. At one point there were 300,000 people in Britain boycotting slave-grown sugar from the Caribbean. It was more than 50 years later, 1838, that the slaves of the British empire in the Caribbean were freed. Only one member of that original group was alive to see it,” Adam explains. “To accomplish something big can take a long time.”

I believe that only a mass movement can successfully take on the tech and fossil fuel barons running the country. Perhaps Artificial Intelligence, as it throws millions out of work, will be the spark. We see an early indication in the bipartisan fight against sprawling data centers. Only a mass movement has the power to defeat the corruption of our democracy by these forces. It will happen. As Adam’s writing shows, it has happened before.

Adam Hochschild and I met in the early 1980s when he helped start the Economics and Democratic Values Project to boost the visibility of progressive economic thinkers like Robert Reich, Barry Bluestone and Robert Kuttner. My firm ran the project. Adam was also a founder of Mother Jones magazines. He’s written 11 books, all of them must-reads.

Watch my Fenton Forecast interview with Adam on YouTube, here on Substack, or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Solidarity forever,

David

“The Trump Cult has given us the 4 Cs — Costs, Chaos, Corruption and Climate Denial. And that’s how Democrats should talk about it,” alliterates former 3-term Washington Governor Jay Inslee.

“It’s the mugging at mar-a-largo,” Inslee’s phrase for Trump increasing gas and utility prices to reward his fossil fuel donors.

“We’re at this magic moment in the climate effort,” Inslee explains. “We can now join the moral argument for our grandchildren with practical, down-home economics. Clean energy lowers your bills.” Trump is raising them by “chaining us to dirty, expensive energy” while throttling cheaper wind and solar power, and with his war. “We can win a lot of races with this approach,” Inslee says — the opposite of “climate hushing.”

A massive fossil-fueled heat wave is killing thousands in Europe as I write, with the U.S. east coast about to be baked. Wildfires are already breaking out early in parched Colorado and Utah. Inslee argues that of course Democrats should talk about this, as everyone is starting to experience wildfire smoke, heat, stronger storms, the western drought, and all the effects of pollution on the weather.

But Inslee, who also won 8 terms in Congress, urges us to talk first about cost, as voters are struggling. Then about Trump’s corruption rewarding his dirty energy donors, raising your cost – literally transferring your money to the oil and gas companies. Then about his climate denial. In that order.

TRUMP VS GALILEO

“It’s the largest rejection of science since they imprisoned Copernicus and Galileo,” he adds. The science that created American prosperity.

Because of Governor Inslee, Washington state has the most advanced climate and clean energy laws in the country. They are enhancing prosperity in his fast-growing state. Inslee expresses delight in meeting low-income Washington residents who now have an electric bill of zero (or just a few dollars), because Inslee’s signature climate law taxed polluters to get people solar panels and heat pumps. He is gleeful about never having to stop at gas stations but instead pays 80% less to “fuel” his car with electrons.

Inslee stresses that data centers must be fueled with cheaper, faster-to-deploy clean energy, rather than locking us into decades of expensive fossil gas infrastructure. Not only is gas more expensive to install — unlike the sun and wind (with storage), but gas power also means perpetually paying for fuel. The sun and wind are free once the infrastructure is built — and the sun can never go up in price. “We don’t have to haul solar panels through the Strait of Hormuz,” Inslee quips.

Inslee is helping groups like https://climateintegrity.org & https://climatepower.us push back against the fossil fuel industry’s quest for legal and legislative immunity. That’s right, the people who knowingly made the weather worse want immunity for their crimes. They know, as former trial lawyer Inslee explains, that a jury presented with the facts will likely convict. This brazen “get out of jail free” ploy must be stopped. Plus, as happened with the successful tobacco company lawsuits, we need to disgorge fossil fuel profits to pay for restitution and climate resilience (and education, to undo the disinformation).

Speaking of climate disinformation, there is a flood of it right now on X-Twitter in response to the European heat wave. The industry knows that people most simply associate global heating with… hotter temperatures. They are pushing their proxies to propagandize and distort. Is the climate community pushing back at scale? — of course not. As usual, they are engaged largely in unilateral information war disarmament.

Watch/listen to Governor Inslee, and you’ll wish more politicians approached his honesty and humanity. I met Inslee when he ran for President in 2020 on a primary platform of addressing climate change. Despite losing, he had a major impact on the Biden Inflation Reduction Act’s massive clean energy investments. Jay Inslee is what my Grandmother would have called a mensch.

You can watch The Fenton Forecast interview with Governor Inslee here on Substack, or on YouTube and listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.

We’d love to hear from you hello@fentonforecast.com

For a livable, magical planet Earth,

David

How To Reverse the Chronic Disease Epidemic

You are what you eat, we first said in the 1960s.

We now know you are also how you love, exercise, and manage stress.

It is a proven fact that you can prevent and even reverse many chronic illnesses including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, some early-stage cancers, early Alzheimers and other conditions.

Dr. Dean Ornish has proven this again and again. Proven in multiple, randomized studies published in mainstream, peer-reviewed medical journals. Proven to the extent that even hard-to-satisfy Medicare and some insurance companies will pay for his lifestyle medicine program to change how you live to reverse disease.

The Fenton Forecast is about choosing our future. Dr. Ornish’s work delineates a pathway to healthier lives, along with massive reductions in suffering and the cost of what he calls “sick care.” Our choices really can determine our health. Of course, environmental toxins for profit also play a big role. But we can strengthen our defenses against some of those too.

Not enough people have heard of Ornish’s work, even though he’s a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco. This is partly because pharmaceutical companies can’t make money on his approach, as it largely avoids prescription medications.

Another reason is that many doctors who accept Ornish’s findings just don’t believe people can be motivated to follow his program. We go deep into the issue of motivation in the Forecast podcast interview with Dr. Dean. It is an issue, yet a solvable one.

When my own doctor tried to put me on statins, I asked him “isn’t it true that if I reduce alcohol and meat consumption and meditate and exercise more, I can reverse my elevated blood pressure and cholesterol myself?” He scoffed. “Yes, it’s true. I know Ornish has proven it. But you won’t do it.” Well, I did it, and just two months later my test results were back to safe levels.

Dr. Ornish’s proven prescription, in his words, is “Eat Well. Move More. Love More. Stress Less.” He’s written several books about how to do this in detail, depending on your condition. Preventing chronic illness takes one approach (shown in his book, The Spectrum), while reversing serious heart disease, for example, requires a more disciplined effort (UnDo It). To generalize, the proven Ornish approach is to eat a Whole Foods, mostly plant-based diet low in bad fats, refined carbs and processed foods, combined with exercise, yoga, meditation, and deepening relationships. That’s it.

In our interview, Dean details how he was first inspired to prove this approach by the Indian yoga teacher Swami Satchadananda in the 1970s, when Dean was sick and depressed. Asked if he was a Hindu, the swami punned, “No, I’m an Undo. I’m here to teach you how to undo all the bad habits hurting you.” Dean then made it his life work to teach this to others.

In my opinion, Dr. Ornish should win the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Take his recent Alzheimer study, published in the leading journal for that illness. Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN made a mini documentary about Dean’s study. When the participants first joined, most of them couldn’t drive, find their keys, read or keep a bank account. They have early-stage Alzheimer’s and were told there was nothing that could be done for them. After several months on Dean’s program, Gupta interviewed them again. It’s astonishing. Many — but not all — are reading, driving, keeping their own accounts and have their lives mostly back. Those in the control group, who didn’t get Ornish’s program, have gotten worse.

Ornish has also shown in peer-reviewed studies that our genes are not necessarily our destiny. The expression of over 500 genes was beneficially affected by his program after only three months — in effect, turning on genes that keep us healthy and turning off genes affecting biological mechanisms that predispose us to illness. His program led to increasing telomerase and lengthening of the critical telomere gene endings, known to be associated with a longer life. We can turn on and off certain genetic tendencies by how we live. Talk about good news!

You can find out more about the Ornish program, which you can do remotely at home, at www.ornish.com, and copies of his research at www.pmri.org, or from his books including Undo It! How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases.

I want to stress that Dr. Ornish is not some Instagram influencer. He’s a full Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF. His peer-reviewed, published studies in major journals are based on randomized, clinical trials. This is SCIENCE.

Bobby Kennedy is just wrong that we should all eat more meat and beef tallow. More saturated fat means more disease. Of course, healthy people can enjoy some meat, although fish is healthier, plants more so. But the American diet of animal protein at every meal is just a killer, literally. It is also, as I discussed with Billie Eilish’s Mom Maggie Baird last week, truly damaging to planet Earth’s atmosphere and climate. That, also, is SCIENCE. Yet motivating people to eat healthier is hard, especially under the barrage of junk and processed food advertising.

You can watch my interview with Dr. Ornish here on Substack, or on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.

For a healthier people and planet,

David

Climate scientist Dr. Katharine Hayhoe has a simple solution to climate change.

Talk about it.

“The data shows most of us don’t hear anyone talking about climate change,” she explains on The Fenton Forecast this week. “And if you don’t talk about it, why would you care? And if you don’t care, why would you do anything about it? So, the first thing anyone can do is so simple that people often instinctively reject it, but it isn’t being done.”

Not only do few people talk about climate change, Democrats and progressives are now being advised to avoid the subject. This is “climate hushing,” which slows down progress as much as outright climate denial. Data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show only 12% of Americans see or hear anything about climate change on social media. About two thirds says they “rarely or never” see or hear anything about the issue from their friends or in any media.

The New York Times keeps pushing this approach. “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas: Now They’re Not So Sure,” was the June 11 th headline. This after the NYT Ostrich Opinion section has repeatedly urged Democrats to support “moderate” positions like more fossil fuel exploration.

Here’s the headline or editorial we haven’t seen: “Trump Policies to Put New York and Miami Under Water.” Or “GOP Support for Dirty Energy Collapsing Insurance Markets, Raising Uility Bills.” I guess proven science isn’t “contrarian” enough to be news for reporters like Brad Plumer and Lisa Friedman and the editors at the NYT.

Democrats are also being advised to sound just like Republicans and support “all of the above” energy and stop “demonizing” the fossil fuel industry. Ok, so we should support further suicide drilling, rather than demanding the fastest possible transition to clean. We should throw away the issue of subsidizing the obscene profits of an industry that learned 50 years they threaten our families with destruction. (And please, I know we can’t get off fossil fuels tomorrow. Nor can we keep using them at this rate for much longer and maintain a livable planet).

This is the new “moderate.” Moderately support making it too hot to grow affordable food. Moderately support stronger hurricanes and wildfires. Sounds pretty radical to me.

If we don’t talk about it, we won’t solve it in the time left to avoid the worst consequences. Watch the coming Super El Nino, likely to bring some of the most destructive weather ever seen. History will not judge Climate Hushers well. Plus polls show most people ARE concerned about it.

“Climate hush” and we won’t build public support for the massive infrastructure transformation needed to protect our economy and health from extreme weather. As Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act showed, when you win by one vote in the Senate you haven’t won. That vote was easily reversed by Trump, precisely because of a lack of strong public knowledge and demand.

Pundits please note: President Biden never gave one prime time speech about the climate threat. He barely ever talked about it. Yes, he passed ambitious climate policy, but most people didn’t hear about it, he was such a poor communicator. Those policies are not why Kamala lost. She barely talked about it either!

Neither Obama nor Biden ever mounted a public education campaign on the climate threat and clean energy solutions. White House political officials wouldn’t allow it. Keep hushing, keep suffering the consequences, keep wasting the political opportunity.

If a future climate champion is elected President, she won’t be able to transform the economy to zero carbon unless the public demands it to protect their families, prosperity, property and way of life. PERIOD. No group of wise men can solve climate change in a backroom deal. That’s fantasy.

Say it Loud: The Pollution Blanket

Now of course we need to be smart about HOW to talk about climate change. As Dr. Hayhoe explains, we have not done a good job helping people understand how this affects THEM. We should start with how Trump’s corrupt, oil-soaked policies are raising utility bills by killing cheaper, cleaner energy. How GOP policies are increasing extreme weather, making insurance unaffordable (which threatens mortgage markets). How the corruption prevents us from transitioning to an abundant, cheaper, cleaner energy future. A better world is within reach, once we get these greedy fucks out of the way.

But we certainly can and MUST explain to the public what we face. (It is insufferably elitist to assume people can’t understand this issue, if properly communicated).

For example, Dr. Hayhoe uses an effective metaphor. We have put a “blanket of pollution” around the earth, trapping heat that used to go back to space. “It’s like when you were a kid, and your father put an extra blanket on you while sleeping, and you woke up sweating. That’s what we’re doing to the earth,” Hayhoe explains. And under that blanket, we are trapping the same amount of energy as exploding ONE MILLION Hiroshima size atomic bombs a day. No wonder the storms are getting worse. Of course, people can understand that. But we don’t tell them.

Hayhoe has unique gifts. She is our most talented climate science communicator, with broad cross-partisan appeal. Based at Texas Tech University, she is also an evangelical Christian, married to Andrew Farley, an evangelical preacher with a big audience on Sirius XM. On the Fenton Forecast, she straightens out Christians who think the Bible authorizes destroying creation.

Here we are, in the age of influencer communication, yet Dr. Hayhoe gets almost no philanthropic support. She has built her following of almost one million online entirely by herself. No video or social media team, strategist, PR firm, paid media boosting. Nothing. With support, she’d have 20 million followers. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry builds up its own influencers online, while we practice information-war unilateral disarmament. If you’d like to support her work, please contact me hello@fentonforecast.com Katharine is the chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, which, while a great organization, also doesn’t emphasize public communication, like most NGOs.

So please, TALK ABOUT IT. Fight climate hushing. Follow Katharine at @KHayhoe on “X,” @katharinehayhoe on Instagram, on the web at www.katharinehayhoe.com on Substack and her talkingclimatenewsletter@outlook.com

You can watch/listen to Katharine on The Fenton Forecast here, or on SPOTIFY, APPLE PODCASTS, YOUTUBE, or wherever you get your podcast.

For a livable and prosperous earth,

David

Haven’t you been thrilled watching Bruce Springsteen stand up to Trump?

I get the same boost watching singer Billie Eilish and her songwriting brother Finneas stand up for their progressive beliefs.

Billie has recently taken on billionaires. She faced down Mark Zuckerberg in person, calling on the wealthy to give away much more of their dough. “Why are you still a billionaire?” Billie challenged Zuck, who has done so much to polarize the country. I like to call him “Schmuckerberg.”

Eilish regularly speaks out against Israeli crimes in Gaza to her over 124 million online followers, despite enormous pushback. She organizes climate workshops called “Overheated” at concerts. And challenges fans to eat plant-based food to end animal suffering and save a livable planet.

In a recent Elle interview, Billie said people can’t claim to love animals while eating them, causing a huge contretemps. When attacked, she stood firm. Even those of us who aren’t vegan have to admire her clear principles under pressure.

Meanwhile, her songwriter partner and brother Finneas Baird O’Connell uses his large social media following to rail against ICE, Trump and other perpetrators of injustice.

Where did Billie and Finneas get these values? Partly from their parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell.

Billie’s Mom is a deeply committed, long-time climate, animal rights and sustainability activist. As you’ll learn in my Fenton Forecast interview with her this week, Maggie home-schooled Billie and Finneas. It shows. Lucky kids.

Maggie rarely talks about raising Billie and Finneas. As she says in the interview, “Billie came out singing” almost from birth. Finneas’s dream was always to be in a band.

Maggie, also a musician and actress, has used her position to push the music industry into more sustainable practices. Solar panels and batteries instead of diesel generators at concerts. Plant-based, delicious climate-friendly food for fans at stadiums. Organic and upcycled merchandise sales. Cutting out single use plastic with real recycling. Billie even uses upcycled vinyl for her albums.

This is setting an important example for other artists. For example www.reverb.org helps musicians become more sustainable and vocal about protecting our precious home. Maggie Baird is an advisor to Reverb, and also to the Music Sustainability Alliance www.musicsustainability.org.

EAT ONE PLANT-BASED MEAL A DAY?

At Billie’s huge stadium concerts, Maggie’s non-profit www.supportandfeed.org asks fans to take a pledge to eat at least ONE PLANT-BASED MEAL A DAY for 30 days. This is a simple, achievable way to start eating less meat for many people.

It is just a scientific fact that we all must eat far less meat for human health and a livable climate. Vast areas of rainforest are being cut down for animal agriculture, which puts more heat-trapping carbon in the atmosphere. And industrial cow feed– which isn’t their natural diet -- increases their release of methane, a greenhouse gas 100x more powerful than carbon dioxide per molecule in trapping heat on earth.

People are rightly concerned about the impact of the huge energy and water use by AI data centers. Yet, as Maggie points out, “we are all terrified of the environmental impact of AI, but animal agriculture is far worse.”  She’s right –animal agriculture, including deforestation, is 15 to 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, while AI emissions are far less than 1% (but growing fast).

The right can scream “you want to take away our hamburgers” all they want. OK, but you need them at every meal? How about one plant-based meal a day, as Support and Feed urges for a start?

Yet getting people to eat less meat is not easy. Support and Feed’s simple pledge to Eat One Plant Based Meal a Day is a practical, doable approach. Try it with your family. (Stay tuned soon for my interview with Dr. Dean Ornish, who has repeatedly proven that plant-dominant eating can reverse disease).

Maggie will host a sustainable lifestyle show, Climate Kitchen on PBS in 2027. It will bring delicious plant-based eating advice and sustainable education to the public.

Meanwhile, Support and Feed is IMPRESSIVE. They’ve fed over 2.2 million meals and pantry items in 11 cities and are expanding internationally. They focus especially on people suffering from food insecurity, inequity and food apartheid. This includes working in “food deserts” where fruits and vegetables are not available or cost way too much.

“I call myself an unpaid publicist for fruits and vegetables,” Maggie laughs.

If you want to reduce human (and animal) suffering and health care costs, food is a big part of the story.

I’ve worked with musicians since 1971, when John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Stevie Wonder performed in Ann Arbor to get a political prisoner released. Lennon wrote a song about it – “It Ain’t Fair, John Sinclair.” I co-produced the 1979 “No Nukes” concerts over 5 nights at Madison Square Garden, headlined by Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Carly Simon, Peter Tosh, the Doobie Brothers and many others. Yoko Ono’s Artists Against Fracking was a client – in 2012, they helped ban fracking in New York State. Recently, I worked with Jon Batiste to publicize his climate song, Petrichor www.jonbatiste.com/petrichor

BRAVO BILLIE, FINNEAS and MAGGIE. The planet and people thank you.

You can donate to www.supportandfeed.org to help them feed more in need. Maggie is still home-schooling, this time to the whole public on Instagram Live. Follow her there along with a million others @maggiebaird

TRUMP IS OIL CAPONE

This is what climate crusader Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island calls our corrupt Pollution President. (It refers to legendary gangster Al Capone).

Oil Capone’s latest outrage is shutting down the government program monitoring ocean temperatures. Because as his oil patrons heat the planet, they don’t want you to know.

Whitehouse exposes how Trump is literally transferring money to his fossil fuel donors by making you pay more for polluting fuels, while stopping cheaper, clean energy projects.  Now his senseless, unpopular war is raising gas prices and OIL PROFITS.

Whitehouse has given 307 speeches on climate change on the Senate floor since 2012 as part of his “Time to Wake Up” series. Do follow him on social media @senwhitehouse

When will more Democrats speak out about the climate threat to our prosperity, planet and health? Or will they keep following the advice of the NY Times Opinion section to be “moderate” and support more fossil fuel drilling? You know, “moderately” putting New York City under water. “Moderately” making insurance unaffordable.

You can watch my interview with Maggie on The Fenton Forecast here on Substack, or on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and iHeart.

We’d love your feedback. Write to us hello@fentonforecast.com

An Interview with Creator and Activist Laura Dawn

Also: Climate Disinformation Defeat

We are now in the age of “parasocial” influencer communications. Trust is the new currency, while trust in traditional media has eroded. Increasingly, people get most of their information from “influencers,” people they connect with emotionally and trust on their phones.

Here’s the problem – the Christian nationalist right has built an infrastructure of digital persuasion. They’ve created a large network of trusted, parasocial influencers. Progressives? Not so much. We are being vastly outgunned, largely practicing unilateral disarmament in the information wars. With predictable results.

In today’s world, if you aren’t on people’s phones, you basically don’t exist. The right knows this. We don’t yet.

My podcast guest Laura Dawn is an expert on the digital infrastructure of the Christian right. She is making a movie about their efforts called “Crazy for God.” If you have not heard of outfits like Praeger U or Jubilee, they are huge. They get billions of online views promoting a Christian nationalist agenda and worldview. They back a network of influencers, including the late Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens and others. Joe Rogan often, though not always, falls into this camp. (On climate change he’s a massive denier, and of course he helped elect Trump. He also supported Bernie Sanders, so he’s more complicated).

The right’s online dominance creates a false, alternative reality for followers. This is a large part of why Don the Con still fools so many voters into thinking he cares about them. They are pushing more young people, especially men, to the right.

Yes, progressives have some good influencer efforts like More Perfect Union, Medias Touch, Robert Reich, The Lever. But they need much more investment, and we must create many others.

In a recent study, Media Matters for America found that right wing influencers account for 82% of the total following on YouTube, Rumble, Twitch, Kick, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. They have 480 million followers, while left-leaning influencers have almost five times less – 104 million. Nine out of the 10 shows with the largest followings are right leaning. The only “left-leaning” show in the top 10 was Trevor Noah. Here’s the study https://www.mediamatters.org/google/right-dominates-online-media-ecosystem-seeping-sports-comedy-and-other-supposedly

Why do progressives and their funders underinvest in communications of any kind (other than for fundraising), including contemporary parasocial influencer communications?

UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff posits that progressives suffer from what he calls “the enlightment fallacy.” This is the view that a great idea or policy magically sells itself, coasting on its own intrinsic brilliance. It has never been true, but it certainly isn’t now. Along with this is the view that “selling” ideas is dirty, manipulative and beneath us. People from the humanities, sciences and the law often feel this way.

People on the right often come from business school, where they study marketing and cognitive science. They usually have to sell products and services to advance their careers. Working on public opinion comes naturally to them. They invest in it. We do not, to our peril and that of democracy and a livable planet. (They spread falsehoods, which we need not and should never do).

As Laura explains, the right also consistently promotes a WORLDVIEW. We don’t. This isn’t a debate between political parties. It’s about the very nature of reality.

The right’s worldview is based on God The Father, a patriarchy. They consider it “natural law,” with men on top, women and people of color on the bottom, and nature subject to human domination. They are willing to sacrifice democracy as they believe the ends – restoring natural law from God – justifies the means.

As George Lakoff wrote in “Moral Politics,” people vote their morality, their worldview. This is what the Christian right is reinforcing.

As Laura points out, progressives don’t consciously promote any worldview. We promote disconnected facts and policies, so we lose. Sorry, but running only on “affordability” is not going to work by itself.

What’s the moral story? What worldview should we articulate? Multiracial democracy, love for all humankind and creation, anti-authoritarianism and sustainability. James Talarico in Texas is a master at this. Meanwhile, sustainability isn’t only environmental, but sustainable health care, jobs, income and education.

Laura explains that you can’t shift or reinforce worldviews just by running ads before an election. We need the infrastructure to do it day in and day out. All the time. Plus advertising increasingly doesn’t work. Parasocial influence does.

I met Laura in 2002 when she ran culture for MoveOn.org. She helped build the visibility of influencers like Van Jones and Robert Reich. She’s also a talented musician who used to sing with Moby. You can see her current content work at artnotwar.com

MEDIA DISTORTS CLIMATE SCENARIOS

Our lack of a progressive influencer infrastructure played out this week with the distortion of a revised climate scenario issued by scientists. This was a major defeat in the information wars.

A team of international scientists revised the so-called RCP8.5 climate emissions scenario. This “worst-case” scenario envisioned a temperature rise of 8 degrees Fahrenheit, 4.4 Celsius by the end of the century. Thankfully, they deemed this now “implausible” because the world has brought on more clean energy.

HOWEVER, the remaining scenarios are still CATASTROPHIC. They mean the flooding of all the world’s coastal cities, people unable to work outside, skyrocketing food prices, stronger hurricanes and rainstorms, massive immigration, insurance and mortgage market collapse, more disease. Plus, emissions aren’t the only issue. How sensitive the climate is to the emissions is equally important. We are seeing stronger impacts earlier than expected, showing increased impact per unit of temperature increase.

The right’s influencers jumped all over this to distort it. Trump tweeted “The United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” Others joined in, creating a drumbeat.

This then moved into the mainstream media. Instead of the story being “Climate Predictions Still Threatening The Economy,” the NY Times took the bait. “The Rise and Fall of a Contentious Climate Indicator: Researchers Cheer Shelving of RCP8.5 Saying Predictions of Warming Were Misleading.” Reporters Brad Plumer and Eric Niler quoted the discredited Roger Pielke, Jr, who is NOT a climate scientist, rather a propagandist for the oil funded American Enterprise Institute. They did admit that “the majority of climate scientists still say global warming is a serious problem.” They did quote a real scientist way down in the story saying, “We’re also finding the risks for lower levels of warming are often worse than we thought.”

But that headline and lede are what most people will see and repeat. I mean, really Brad, I understand, climate destruction is old news. Arrgh.

Unlike the right, we lack a coordinated infrastructure of climate influencers, so we couldn’t successfully counter this distortion. And our philanthropists don’t support the talent we do have. For example, climate scientist Dr. Katharine Hayhoe has almost no help or funding to reach the public, despite her proven abilities as a communicator. (She will soon be a guest on The Fenton Forecast, so you can see for yourself).

The fossil fuel propagandists, for example, have been building up one Lucy Biggers. She claims to be a former climate activist who has now seen the light. Fossil fuels are our saviors, and she was brainwashed before. Lucy’s interview with the falsely named “Free Press” has almost a million views on YouTube. She has 130,000 followers just on Instagram.

The right and the polluters know this works. They spread confusion. They build up parasocial influencers.

When will our community face reality and enter the information wars at scale, with the truth?

You can watch my interview with Laura Dawn here on Substack, or on YouTube, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please send us your feedback to hello@fentonforecast.com

For a livable earth,

David Fenton

Crave some positivity in this time of war, kleptocracy and planetary assault?

There’s so much good news in my interview with California Energy Commission Chair David Hochschild. His multi-billion-dollar agency is leading the state to 100% clean energy and transportation.

California now has more electric car chargers (216,000) than gas station nozzles (120,000), with 25% of all cars sold here now fossil-free. These cars are cheaper to drive as electricity costs less than gasoline, and they need almost no maintenance. (Oh, and they don’t raise temperatures and sea levels, increase wildfires or cause asthma).

The 4 th largest economy in the world, California’s electric grid is now 70% powered by carbon-free energy, on its way to 100% by 2045 as required by law. The use of methane gas keeps going down as more (and ever cheaper) batteries are deployed. Gas use is down 61%, solar up 60%, wind up 10% and batteries up 326% in 2026 vs just 3 years ago.

More good news – 80% of new homes in the state have solar panels, saving people money. Solar cost $5 a watt in 2001 — today it is 15 cents a watt. These costs will keep going down as more is ordered and deployed, in a virtuous cycle. PLUS THE SUN CAN NEVER GO UP IN PRICE. AND IT DOESN’T GO THROUGH THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ that Trump shut down.

For a sense of the scale of change, note that in 2004, it took a year to construct one gigawatt of solar. In 2016 it took a week. In 2023 it took a day. Now it is half a day. China just manufactured and shipped a whopping 68 gigawatts of solar power in one month, according to David Hochschild. For a sense of scale, note that that is the equivalent at peak output of 68 nuclear power plants — built in a month. The nuclear plants would take ten years or more and cost many times more.

THE SUN ALWAYS SHINES, THE WIND ALWAYS BLOWS

At this point, some of you are thinking, well, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. So we still need so-called “firm, baseload power.”

Except the sun DOES always shine, and the wind ALWAYS blows — in batteries and many other forms of ever-cheaper storage. Plus, electric grid managers now have myriad ways of balancing the variability of sun and wind with demand on the grid. While our Secretary of Dirty Energy (fracking executive Chris Wright), Secretary of the Polluted Interior Doug Burgum and Environmental Polluter Agency head Sleaze (Lee) Zeldin keep attacking clean energy for “unreliability,” the modern world is proving them wrong every day.

Take my house in Berkeley. Our electric bill is zero – we pay a $25 a month charge for the grid connection. 100% of our energy comes from the solar panels on our roof and 3 batteries on a net annual basis (that is, we draw some from the grid in winter but put more energy into the grid than we use in summer). The house has 2 heat pumps, a heat pump hot water heater, and super efficient windows with an insulating value of R11. Payments on the loan we took out to pay for the conversion are far less than our electric bill used to be — which would now be much higher given Pacific Gas and Electric’s rate hikes. And as David points out, much of that increase comes from climate change itself— costs to prevent more wildfires from electric lines.

I also charge my Tesla Model Y electric car for free with my solar panels. It is so liberating not to pay the Chevron and Exxon overlords for gas. (Note – my Tesla has a sticker on the back which says “Vintage Tesla: Pre-Madness Edition.”)

Commissioner Hochschild does not think Trump can stop the move towards cheaper, cleaner, home-grown energy. California has myriad lawsuits against the administration’s oily, corrupt attempts to keep us chained to pollution for profit. We talk about that too in this one-hour interview.

As we discuss, China is well on its way to owning the clean energy industries of the future, while we’re protecting planet-polluting, dinosaur industries. China’s $10,000 electric cars will soon charge 325 miles in 5 minutes. 60% of new vehicle sales in China are electric. The propaganda meme “What about China” should be turned around —What about US? We are the laggards. Yes, China is still the biggest carbon polluter country, but we are the biggest per capita. They are betting on clean electrification —right now we’re betting on planet destroying oil/coal/gas in the greatest corruption scheme in US history.

If the 4 th largest economy in the world can go 100% clean energy and transit, so can the world. And it must, if we are to avoid planetary tipping points that endanger our economy, health and civilization. As my guest Amory Lovins a few weeks ago also believes, clean energy can win the race for a livable climate. As California proves, smart policy makes the difference.

I met David Hochschild in 2001 when he was running the non-profit Vote Solar. He’s been at it ever since. You can listen to my inspiring interview with the Commissioner on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, iHeart Radio and wherever you get your podcasts.

We’d love your feedback to hello@fentonforecast.com

For a livable earth and a positive future for humanity,

David

There’s climate denial, climate hushing, and now there’s Climate DEFIANCE.

My Fenton Forecast interview this week is with the young founder of Climate Defiance, activist Michael Greenberg.

In the proud tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, Michael and his merry pranksters have been disrupting fossil fuel executives and their paid political prostitutes in DC and around the nation. You know, the people knowingly threatening a livable climate and planet for profit (yes, knowingly, as the minutes of their own executive meetings prove).

Climate Defiance is getting tens of millions of online views for its creative protests against what they call “climate criminals,” whether Republican or Democrat. These kids are brave, and already under investigation by Trump’s Just-Us department.

I’ve seen nonviolent civil disobedience play critical roles in many social movements. These actions bring today’s most valuable commodity, ATTENTION, to the cause. Refusing to sit in the back of the bus. Sitting in at lunch counters. Burning draft cards. Blocking Army recruiting centers. Pouring blood on weapons. Burning bras. Burying a car for the original Earth Day.

This is a proud and important part of our nation’s tradition.

In an era of climate denial in the White House, climate hushing in the media (sadly including the NY Times, see below), when only 12% of Americans see or hear anything about climate change on social media (Yale), Michael Greenberg and his group are the antidote. Climate Defiance videos are often the only climate content young people see online. Let that sink in.

They are currently pushing against New York’s Governor Hochul’s efforts to repeal the state’s landmark climate law. They’ve just been arrested twice in Albany, and it isn’t over. They recently erupted at former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who keeps counselling Democrats to avoid the climate issue. When Environmental Polluter Agency head the slimy Lee Zeldin received an award from the NY Cancer Society, while legalizing more cancer-causing pollution, Climate Defiance was there calling out the hypocrisy.

As Michael explains in our interview, Climate Defiance has had proven success. They played a major role in the Maryland legislature’s overriding Governor Wes Moore’s veto of the climate Renew bill in 2025. Their protests have forced Democrats to quit oil company board positions. With ten chapters around the country, Climate Defiance is expanding.

And now a major documentary about the group, “Just Look Up,” will premiere in June at the NY Tribeca Film Festival, with “Don’t Look Up” Director Adam McKay serving as Executive Producer.

CLIMATE HUSHING AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

Meanwhile, the New York Times Opinion section is serving up more climate hushing, the contemporary version of climate denial. Climate hushing says don’t talk about climate change. Don’t talk about the greatest threat to our economy, health and civilization itself.

There is no climate science or energy expert on the NY Times editorial board, and it shows. While the news section does outstanding climate reporting, you just wouldn’t know that the life support systems of our planet are in imminent danger by reading their Opinion section. It is the emergency that isn’t. And believe me, The Times still has enormous influence on the media and politicians. It also has 12 million subscribers.

The latest example came last week under the headline “Forget Climate Change. Democrats Need to Talk about Other Issues.” Climate scientist Michael Mann, interviewed recently on The Fenton Forecast, at once posted to social media “F&ck the planet by the NY Times.”

How about this headline? “Forget Pearl Harbor. Democrats Need to Talk About Affordability.”

The article is a series of logical inconsistencies. How can we solve something we don’t talk about? How can we create public will to act on climate in the little time we have left, according to the physics, by NOT educating the public? Plus here’s a tautology for you – don’t talk about it, the public won’t know about it, the country won’t act on it, and then you can’t run for office on it. And if a Democrat wins the Presidency without a public mandate for action, she won’t be able to get legislation passed to deal with the crisis. (And a one-vote margin of victory, as in Biden’s IRA, is not a victory at all, as we have seen from its one-vote repeal). Obama and Biden’s failure to educate the public on climate should not be replicated, unless you want the same result.

The writer even claims that Mayor Mamdani in NY is battling climate change with his plan for free buses. Sure, this will reduce greenhouse gases a teeny tiny amount, but so what? If you’re speeding over a cliff, and slow down 1 mile an hour, you still go over the cliff. This shows how the editors just don’t understand the scale of this crisis.

The essay urged Democrats to talk about affordability instead. But as Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island posted, climate IS an affordability issue. Rising insurance and utility rates, rising gas and food prices – these are all climate issues. As he pointed out even in Texas, 92% are concerned about home insurance costs while 66% see the link to “climate-driven extreme weather.” Trump’s corrupt attack on clean energy is clearly raising electric rates. Don’t talk about it?

This follows other oped guest essays urging “moderate” Democrats to support more fossil fuel burning. You know, it’s “moderate” to support collapsing insurance (then mortgage) markets while putting NY under water.

The Times has yet to run a single editorial against Trump’s efforts to increase planet-heating gases in the atmosphere. Even though this will be his longest lasting legacy – as the extra carbon will be heating the planet for many centuries. The usually astute Ezra Klein hasn’t interviewed a climate scientist in many years. Does he think it is old news?

The Gray Lady has become an ostrich with its head in the sand. The NY Times used to be in the lead urging climate action. Now they preach and largely practice silence.

This is irresponsible abdication. I’m concerned, as a long time reader and supporter of the NY Times, it is also a stain on the paper’s reputation and credibility. History certainly won’t judge it well when Miami and Manhattan are flooded out. “But they said don’t talk about it.” And if the NY Times thinks that this kind of essay fools people into thinking it isn’t a liberal newspaper, fahgetaboutit.

Climate Defiance is forcing attention on the issue. Please support them by going to https://www.climatedefiance.org/?give=7XEWNRD8

Here are links to effective Climate Defiance clips from social media: (note to older folks — you don’t need Instagram to see them).

You can listen to The Fenton Forecast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeart Radio, and all podcast platforms. You can watch it on Substack or YouTube. Please leave us a review to send signals to the algorithm Gods. And we’d love your feedback at hello@fentonforecast.com

For a livable earth,

David

My guest Jamal Joseph was the youngest member of the Black Panther Party when arrested in 1969, at the age of 17, along with 20 other members of the Panthers’ New York chapter. The Panther 21 were accused of completely false charges made up by the FBI, including plotting to blow up the NY Botanical Gardens. A jury acquitted them on all counts, but by then, the damage to the Panthers had been done.

Imagine how young Jamal felt when, arriving in court, he discovered that his mentor, the person who recruited him into the Panthers, was a police informant. The police and FBI manufactured a false case to put the NY Panthers out of business. Not because they were guilty, but to tie them up in court and bankrupt them. This was part of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s notorious “Cointelpro” program to destroy the Panthers and other groups fighting for peace and justice.

The Fenton Forecast is about our choice of futures, so why revisit the BPP past? Because there are important lessons for the future of political and community organizing from the BPP. Especially now with the Supreme Court of Just-U.S. rolling back voting rights and Trump firing African-Americans throughout the military and government.

The Panthers made many mistakes, and frankly in the 60s and early 70s we lionized and mythologized them too much. But they did so much exemplary work, including serving free breakfast to children before school, providing free clothing and medical care, teaching political literacy and much more. Movements today could learn so much from the Panther philosophy of “serving the people.” Their Chicago leader, the brilliant Fred Hampton, forged alliances with white working class and Latino organizations he named a “rainbow coalition.” Many of us believe this is the reason he was assassinated by the FBI (yes really), as shown in the Hollywood film “Judas and the Black Messiah.”

Jamal Joseph is one of my favorite people on planet Earth. He later became the first African-American chair of Columbia University Film Studies Department, making truly important films, including the 2016 “Chapter and Verse” about one man’s release from prison:

As the founder of the amazing Impact Repertory Theatre in Harlem, which he dreamed up in prison, he was nominated in 2008 for an Academy Award. The Theatre trains young people in the arts and is still functioning https://www.impactreptheatre.org

Jamal’s memoir, Panther Baby, published in 2012, is a must-read https://www.amazon.com/Panther-Baby-Jamal-Joseph/dp/1616201290. So is his Emmy-nominated series about Tupac Shakur, “Dear Mama” on Hulu. Jamal was in prison with Tupac’s mother, fellow Panther 21 defendant Afeni Shakur, later becoming Tupac’s Godfather (and karate teacher!).

He is currently raising funds to make a film about the Panther 21 (before all the members pass). And he is working to make the first documentary about the brilliant Yippie 60s organizer and agitprop master Abbie Hoffman, who was one of my mentors. Abbie bailed Jamal out of jail from the Panther 21 trial with the proceeds of his “Steal This Book.” Anyone interested in supporting these projects, please contact me.

Speaking of Abbie Hoffman, he once ran a Pig for President — Pigasus. Really https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigasus_(politics) We’ve elected quite a few of them since. The Black Panthers called greedy exploiters Pigs. Is it time to bring back the term, and apply it to our feudal overlords in Silicon Valley, plus the fossil fuel, petrochemical, pharmaceutical and other Barons, and their paid politicians feeding at the public trough? Let me know what you think.

Here is the Black Panther Party’s original 10 Point Program. As you can see, much of it is still relevant today (ok, freedom for all prisoners is not a good idea).

 Freedom: Power to determine the destiny of the Black community.

 Full Employment: A guaranteed job or income for every person.

 End to Capitalist Robbery: An end to the exploitation of Black communities.

 Decent Housing: Housing fit for human beings.

 Education: Education that exposes the true nature of American society and teaches black history.

 Free Health Care: Comprehensive health care for Black and oppressed people.

 End to Police Brutality: An immediate end to police brutality and murder.

 End to Prison Incarceration: Freedom for all Black men held in jails and prisons.

 Fair Trials: Trials by a jury of peers from the Black community.

 Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice, and Peace: Including a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to determine the will of Black people regarding their national destiny.

As I write, the U.S. Supreme Court has eviscerated the voting rights act to curtail Congressional representation by and for African Americans. Shameful and racist to the core, under the guise of “non-discrimination”. I just returned from visiting Bryan Stevenson’s Legacy Slavery Museum and Lynching Monument in Montgomery, Alabama. Everyone should see the amazing beauty Bryan has created out of pain and oppression. https://legacysites.eji.org When you do, you will understand even more how the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow is still with us in people like Chief Just-Us John Roberts and his racist so-called “conservative” majority.

All Power to the People. That was the Black Panther slogan.

I just saw the film of that name from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1972 concert, his only full show after the Beatles. Go see it! Amazing film. Thank you Sean Ono Lennon, also for the “One to One” documentary about Lennon and Ono’s political work in the 70s, which I played a small part in. You can see it on HBO Max.

David Fenton

My guest next week will be Michael Greenberg, the young founder of Climate Defiance https://www.climatedefiance.org

Subscribe to The Fenton Forecast on YOUTUBE, APPLE, SPOTIFY, or wherever you listen to podcasts 🎙️

That’s the philosophy my podcast guest physicist and clean energy futurist Amory Lovins lives by.

Here’s how he explains it: “The optimist, like the pessimist is really treating the future as fate, not choice. I’m trying to take responsibility for creating the world I want, and each of us can do that...to be truly radical is to make hope possible, not despair convincing.”

Amory is the co-founder of RMI.org, the do-tank that has helped companies and governments around the world transition to clean energy and transportation. He first predicted this path in the 1970s, calling it the “soft energy” path of renewables and efficiency rather than the “hard energy” path of polluting oil, coal and gas.

Amory is so refreshing to be around. A visit to his house is a memorable experience. Built in the early 1980s, the house is 100% powered by the sun and batteries. At 7000 feet in the Rocky Mountains no less. Amory calls it his “banana farm,” where he literally grows two successful banana crops a year in the greenhouse embedded in the house design – again with no oil, coal or gas whatsoever in a cold, cloudy climate. I’ve had the bananas – they’re great.

Like me, Amory charges his electric vehicle for free with his solar panels, which, as he points out, is not only free but can never go up in price. Or run out – except in a few billion years.

In the interview, Amory talks about all the exciting innovation taking place in energy. He even expects his grandchildren to fly the globe in solar-powered airplanes. He’s about to take delivery of the first solar-powered car – that’s right, it runs from panels on the roof. Wow.

We also discuss nuclear power – and are both against it. As Amory puts it, every dollar spent on nuclear power is “worse for the climate” because it takes investment funds away from much, much cheaper solar, wind, other renewables, energy efficiency investments and now multiple forms of cheap storage (batteries are only one example). These truly clean technologies are not only much cheaper, they can be deployed in a year or two, whereas expensive nuclear takes about 10 years to build. That is time we don’t have, as we must rapidly phase out polluting carbon energy to save a livable earth and climate.

Please note my own bias here – I was the Co-Producer of the famous No-Nukes Concerts at Madison Square Garden in NY in 1979 with Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, the Doobie Brothers, Chaka Khan, Carly Simon, Crosby/Stills/Nash and many others.

I share Amory’s view – nuclear energy is NOT clean energy. As he points out, “there is no such thing as clean plutonium, or clean cesium or strontium.” These are deadly radioactive poisons, some of which must be guarded from the environment for literally hundreds of thousands of years. We have no permanent waste facility for them. The waste stored at the plants are terrorist and nuclear proliferation targets, and will be even more so if ever transported on trucks and trains. While I respect climate activists who want low-carbon energy and support nuclear, the facts just don’t lean towards a nuclear future. For the best rundown of all the problems please read this New Yorker article based on the secret internal written history of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-safe-are-nuclear-power-plants

Many pundits will ask “well, what do we do when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing?” Fair question. The answer is the sun is ALWAYS shining and the wind ALWAYS blowing in batteries and myriad other forms of storage. Plus, now grid operators have myriad ways to adjust demand for power flexibly along with predictable fluctuations in supply. For more, go to rmi.org

The good news that truly clean energy is now dominating all new power investment. This despite the Trump Administration’s attempt to throttle it on behalf of their oil, coal and gas overlords. As Amory points out, the US is now a petrostate, a declining business, while China is an electrostate, which is the future. If it isn’t, we won’t have much of a future except climate chaos and ecological collapse. The worst of which is avoidable if we hurry up and transition, as China is largely doing.

As always, I welcome your feedback and comments here on Substack or to hello@fentonforecast.com Please tell your friends about The Fenton Forecast which is also available on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, iHeart, and all podcast platforms.

Enjoy a dose of Applied Hope with Amory!

For a livable earth and an abundant clean energy future,

David

Greetings. I’m starting a new podcast – The Fenton Forecast.

It’s about our choice of futures. AI-driven mass unemployment… or shared abundance. Climate breakdown… or a livable planet? Democracy or billionaire and Silicon Valley fascism? The new feudalism or a restored middle class? Media platforms of falsehood or honest journalism? Regenerative agriculture and medicine or our sick health system.

The podcast launched on all platforms.

Since you know me, obviously, this will be an anti-establishment podcast. I’ll interview insurgent thinkers, doers, and dissidents. The people Ezra Klein largely won’t. None of the usual pundits or conventional wisdom.

My first guests include:

• Crusading climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, long persecuted by the fossil fuel industry and it’s corrupt political agents. Mann fought back and won.

• Palestinian journalist and academic Rula Jebreal, banned from American TV news outlets for exposing Israeli apartheid and, as a Jew, I am heartbroken to say, genocide.

• AI and social media critic Tristan Harris, featured in the new movie The AI DOC

  

  Future guests include:

• Activist and creator Laura Dawn on the digital media infrastructure of the Christian right, and our almost unilateral disarmament in the face of it.

• Columbia Professor Jamal Joseph on what we can learn from the organizing methods of the Black Panther Party of the 1960s. Jamal and I met when we were both 17 in 1969, and he was the youngest member of the Panthers.

• My friend the musician Jon Batiste on how music can inspire action and heal hate.

Other upcoming guests will include clean energy guru and physicist Amory Lovins, lifestyle and natural medicine pioneer Dr. Dean Ornish, AI scientist and ethicist DeKai, and climate scientist Dr. Katharine Hayhoe.

I hope you will listen starting today on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or right here on Substack. Please help spread the word to your friends and family – here are links to our Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X, Bluesky, and other social media channels.

The podcast website is www.fentonforecast.com. We welcome feedback at hello@fentonforecast.com. For those of you less familiar with me, you can learn more at the website for my book, The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator, which is www.davidfentonactivist.com

I’ve watched (and helped) movements win now for 55 years. It will happen again against these mounting injustices and planetary assaults. Meet some of the great thinkers and activists working for a better tomorrow at The Fenton Forecast. We’re going to name those who are breaking our world – and talk about how to stop them.